Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 376: John Vaillant
1.5k Plays2 years ago
John Vaillant (@johnvaillant) is the author four books including Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (Knopf).
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Substack: Rage Against the Algorithm
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Sponsor: Liquid IV, code: cnf
Suds: Athletic Brewing, code: BRENDANO20
Recommended
Transcript
Sponsorship and Marathon Training
00:00:00
Speaker
AC and efforts this episode sponsored by liquid IV it's a better Gatorade they probably don't like it that I would even say that in the same sentence but it's true and I gotta say this delicious great way to rehydrate and fuel those endurance activities or if you just want to zhuzh up your water
00:00:17
Speaker
As some of you know, I'm training for the Unsanctioned Mackenzie Marathon. It's not going very good. And Liquid IV is in my bottle, not because of Liquid IV. It's some tasty stuff. Been a big fan of the lemon lime, non-GMO, free from gluten, dairy, and soy, so you know your burly vegan digs it. Get 20% off when you go to liquidiv.com. Use the promo code CNF at checkout. That's 20% off anything.
00:00:45
Speaker
You order when you shop better hydration today using promo code CNF at liquidiv.com. Oh, and by the way, it's an affiliate thing, so I get no money unless you buy stuff. So buy stuff. I like the sound of that. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Well, what happens in our atmosphere stays in our atmosphere.
Podcast Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:01:10
Speaker
Oh hey CNFRIDGE, it's the CNF Pod, that creative non-fiction podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Yes. It's a fitting time of year to talk about this book with this author, John Valiant.
00:01:26
Speaker
at John Valiant on Twitter, and you're spelling, Valiant, V-A-I-L-L-A-N-T. Got it? Don't ask, just do it. Fire Weather, a true story from a hotter world. It's published by Knopf. John is a journalist based out of Western Canada, and he's also the author of The Tiger, The Golden Spruce, and The Jaguars Children. Little sidebar.
00:01:55
Speaker
Just by the nature of the show, I don't have a whole lot of time to read outside of the reading I do for the show. But if I did, I'd want to read a person's body of work. You know, the way you might watch several movies to see a through line of a favorite director or a director who inspires you. At least with that, you can watch a few movies in a day if you were so motivated. To read even John's books would take you at minimum, at least for me at minimum, a full month. Minimum! Probably longer.
00:02:24
Speaker
I read pretty slow and I'm okay with that. I see some people on Instagram and it's like June 1st and they're like, book 51 of the year and I'm like, eat shit, asshole. We're all real impressed. I'm sorry, that was inappropriate. Make sure you're heading over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to sign up for the Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter. Just click the lightning bolt on my website or visit rageagainstthealgorithm.substack.com.
00:02:50
Speaker
There could be some serious bonus stuff coming down the pipe. Maybe. Probably not. But maybe. First of the month, no spam. So far as I can tell, you can't beat it.
00:03:01
Speaker
If you dig the show, consider sharing it with your networks, wherever your networks hang, so we can grow the pie and get the CNFing thing into the brains of other CNFers who need the juice. And don't we all need the juice? You can also leave a kind review on Apple Podcasts. It's a free way to support the show, so the wayward CNFer might say, shit, I'll give that a shot. And a non-free way to support the show, which makes me kinda happy.
00:03:28
Speaker
And it might make you happy too. Patreon.com slash CNFbot, you can drop a few bucks in the hat if you glean some value. Show is free, but it sure is helly and cheap. And I started doing some one-on-ones as a little bonus for people in the Patreon gang. Any tier might offer something a bit more saucy.
00:03:49
Speaker
For the upper tiers, but I did this thing I just wanted to throw a bone out there And it's not gonna be a regular thing or maybe twice yearly I guess that's regular, but I threw it out there and a chunk of patrons Maybe 25% of the whole pot aren't are getting to talk some things out with with me Sometimes that's all you need right I'm gonna close that spigot off soon So if you're in the patreon gang sign up before I shut it off and if you're not a patron
00:04:19
Speaker
patreon.com slash cnfbot
Writing Challenges and Climate Change
00:04:24
Speaker
If you're wondering where the shout out to Athletic Brewing is, it's right here. My favorite non-alcoholic beer out there. Not a paid plug, but as some of you know by now, I'm a brand ambassador and I want to celebrate this amazing product. If you go to athleticbrewing.com and use the promo code BRENDANO20 at checkout and use the referral link over in the show notes, you can get a nice little discount on your first order. I don't get any money and they are not an official sponsor of the podcast. I just get points towards swag and beer. Give it a shot. So John,
00:04:54
Speaker
You can tell he loves the work because we talk about getting into the nitty-gritty of interviewing and interviewing with some heart. He gets that from his mom, you know, and that's definitely where I get it from. My mom's superpower was making people feel comfortable talking. She's still kicking in the nursing home, about the same as ever, memory-wise, but, you know, wasting away as one does in their 80s in a wheelchair as their brain slowly turns to mashed potatoes.
00:05:22
Speaker
Well, anyway, John and I, we talk about interviewing for scene, getting into someone's skin, and how Twitter actually helped John. And fire, the Q Beavis voice from Beavis and Butt-Head. Fire, fire, fire. Yeah, it's all here, CNFers. Riff.
00:05:47
Speaker
I love that quote from David Wallace Wells. Unfortunately, exquisitely timed. Yeah, yeah, it was uncanny. Yeah, planning that seven years out took some doing. Yeah, no kidding.
00:06:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's a great I think that's a great jumping-off point just the the sheer fact of how long books of these this nature is so Deeply and intricately researched and so and then of course so well written that how you Stick with it and endure You know just the whole the entire process and not get too bogged down by it of course there are moments of beginning bogged down but when you when you're talking about a seven-year book project and
00:06:31
Speaker
You know, how do you just stay in it and stay energetic for the work? Oh, Brendan, this was
00:06:42
Speaker
I thought about that every day. And this was a really different animal. Like the other books have been pretty much three years door to door and really steady work and few breaks and just kind of plodding through it in an energetic way. And this was really different. And I think the Trump years had some impacts on that. The kind of the ominousness of
00:07:12
Speaker
and the implications of the project. What I was actually looking at is so grave that it
00:07:21
Speaker
I don't know if it slowed me down, but it really made me question what I was doing. I feel, I don't know if other writers you've interviewed have thought about this, but I feel like in a way to write almost requires a certain level of civilizational stability. You have to be able to sit quietly in a room and have some confidence that the world isn't going to burn down around you.
00:07:48
Speaker
And so it presupposes a certain base level of stability in the world. And when you look really closely at the climate file right now, even right now at this minute, you look at the fires burning, record fires in Canada. You look at record ocean temperatures off the coast of Ireland and elsewhere.
00:08:13
Speaker
We're in a moment and we've never been here before. And so I was feeling that as I was writing and really almost daily wrestling with myself, how can you rationalize sitting at a desk?
00:08:30
Speaker
opining and exploring and investigating when really you should be at the barricades. So that's, you know, that was a real quandary for me. And I think that slowed me down. There were a lot of days of just not writing. And so I think in some ways this project, maintaining energy and momentum for this project was slightly different than some other long projects that other writers may have undertaken. I've got a friend right now who's doing a
00:08:56
Speaker
a definitive biography and you know he's seven or eight years in and he's still not done and you know it's a long complicated life he's trying to cover
00:09:05
Speaker
And it's a it's a really long haul. And so then you have the deadline, you have the kind of the ticking clock of the advance running out just in terms of the finances of how nonfiction works, at least in the US and North America. So that's a factor. And then, you know, it's a it's a funny combination of tedium and anxiety.
00:09:30
Speaker
And then on top of that, you get these dopamine hits of discovery. When you find a new fact or make a new connection or get a new interview or figure out where a quote's going to drop in for maximum effect, or somebody on Twitter points you towards something amazing, which happened to me a lot. Twitter honestly was my research assistant for this book. And that was really a first. And that might be interesting to talk about at some point.
00:09:57
Speaker
It made me smarter. It made me wiser and made me seem like more people than I am. And so I'm really grateful to it. But as far as attaining that momentum over seven years, you know, you just get up and put your ass in the chair and and it's really
00:10:17
Speaker
You know that's the main job, even in spite of all your doubts. And you have made a commitment to your publisher and also to yourself. Your family is out there kind of waiting for it to be done. And so there are a few, I think, very healthy social pressures kind of keeping you honest and keeping you on task. And then there is, in this case, too, complicating it further was just the dynamism of the subject.
00:10:46
Speaker
Between 2016, when I decided I wanted to write a book about
00:10:50
Speaker
modern fire and Fort McMurray and the terrible fire that burned through that city in May of 2016, so many things happened on the climate file. So many greater and even more terrible fires broke out in other parts of the world. And so many states, provinces, and nations had the worst fire season in their respective histories post-2016.
00:11:19
Speaker
And so I'm riding along and when I was working on the tiger or working on the golden spruce, those stories stayed where you left them. You could put them down for a month and you go back to the notes, you go back to the narrative, nothing has changed. Here you look away for a week
00:11:36
Speaker
And there's some new extreme that has been or some new threshold that's been crossed or broken. There's some new climate lawsuit. There's some new information about a bank or an insurance company dropping some major petroleum project. And this was all relevant. And so really right now ongoing is this
00:12:00
Speaker
period of an incredible cataclysmic, epochal change in terms of how our civilization reckons with the powerful manifestations of climate change that are now besetting us from all sides.
00:12:16
Speaker
Yeah, there's a moment very early in the book where you when you're talking about the the the bitumen sands in Alberta and in Fort McMurray where like the and it's a very hard petroleum to refine just based on its very nature. But there is something like, you know, you know, there's like a half trillion dollar investment. I was just like, oh, my God.
00:12:39
Speaker
that here is this like a very labor intensive resource intensive way to harvest this fossil fuel whereas my goodness what could a half trillion dollars do if you were to just invest that in like the best solar or wind technology right?
00:12:53
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it goes without saying, you know, when you think of the money and energy and most valuable, the time that we have squandered really since the 1970s, when the climate writing really was already on the wall, when photovoltaics and wind power were in their infancy, but clearly viable.
00:13:17
Speaker
And, you know, we really lost almost fully two generations and was, you know, still melting tar out of subarctic sand. You know, I mean, our descendants will look back in amazement at our insanity. And it, you know, it's really hard to wrap your head around that.
00:13:38
Speaker
hydrocarbon recovery endeavor going on in northern Alberta that has been so front and center in Canada's economy and certainly Alberta's economy. And it's especially when you consider all the natural gas that is used to melt the bitumen. And natural gas is really great energy on its own. Methane aside,
00:14:02
Speaker
greenhouse gases aside, it's already ready to burn, ready to go, ready to create energy for us. And so to squander that energy on melting tar out of quartzite sand a thousand miles from the nearest market or tidewater is
00:14:21
Speaker
you know, it's really a stretch. And so to figure out the economics of that, the rationale behind that, why a G7 nation would waste its time, treasure and reputation on that is, you know, that's a big ask in and of itself.
Research and Writing Techniques
00:14:38
Speaker
And that was just kind of one aspect of this book.
00:14:41
Speaker
A moment ago, I loved what you said about the dopamine kick of occasionally finding that great little tidbit in your research just by virtue of having the ass in the chair. I can attest that just the other day, my central figure died in 1975, and my deadline is so tight that I have to write as I'm going at this point.
00:15:04
Speaker
And, you know, I had this, you know, this moment, you know, there's this high school track meet, blah, blah, blah. It's like it was had a little bit of detail, but not a whole lot. And then I read the story from 1975 when my guy died and turns out like his what would who would be his future college coach, Bill Bowerman.
00:15:24
Speaker
Was at a track meet and he had never said he was at this particular track meet when he was when Steve was a high school freshman And he in this sort of obituary piece He's like I remember seeing him at this meet and I was just like oh that's so cool like now I get to infuse this very early scene and plant him as a character and
00:15:41
Speaker
at this particular meet when this kid was on the rise before I never knew that. I'm like, oh my God, that's such a great little detail that I get to go back in time and put it there. And talking about that dopamine kick, he's like, I just had one. I was like, this is awesome. I really feel you there, Brendan. And also what you're doing is you're making a connection for everybody else. No one else probably cares enough
00:16:08
Speaker
with respect to make that connection. And yet what you're doing is creating this structure of history.
00:16:18
Speaker
And by being able to place those names and place those events in time and space and taking the care and time to do it that only an obsessive nonfictioneer will do or a historian, you're really reassembling a lost world. And it's very possible that if you hadn't done that, that connection, that link, that moment would be lost to history.
00:16:44
Speaker
And so you're really kind of performing this service for the future, I feel. We are collectively by kind of assembling and identifying these links. And it's really this web work of events and people and intersections of time and place. And I did that repeatedly.
00:17:05
Speaker
in fire weather. And it's really thrilling to do that. You're kind of re-peopling the world in events. And this thing that might have just been a symposium, when you can actually put the people there and realize, oh my gosh, this guy was there, and she was there, and he was there. And they've kind of gathered across space and time to make this new meaning.
00:17:31
Speaker
And that is, you know, it's a kind of rarefied thrill that I think, you know, historians and nonfictioners and other types of researchers particularly enjoy, but that readers and people coming later to the story appreciate, even if it's unconscious. They just, they can just see more. You get a richer sense of detail and depth.
00:17:53
Speaker
And that's what brings the story to life. All those connections, they're almost like synapses for the story. Yeah. And then it comes, let's say, baked into it is a kind of researching insecurity, too, or an anxiety in that sometimes you're like, you can't turn every single page. You can't read it all by yourself. And what are we missing? I stumbled across some of those details. I'm like, oh my God, what else might I be missing when I run out of time?
00:18:22
Speaker
Oh, Brendan. I mean, I think that's everybody's fear in this game. And the other, the corollary terror is not asking the right question. And especially going into subjects, every subject that I research, I don't really know much about when I go into it. And I have my own basic curiosity about it, and I'll do some reading about it.
00:18:51
Speaker
If you don't know to ask the right question, each question is like a key. And when you ask it, you're opening up a new box or a new safe or some secret trove. But if you don't ask that question,
00:19:07
Speaker
Your subject may take it for granted that you know already because it's second nature to them, but it's actually really interesting. And so, you know, for example, you know, in fire, whether I had occasion to speak to bulldozer operators.
00:19:22
Speaker
And they started telling me things about how you operate a bulldozer and the way how actually sensitive it is, despite the fact that it weighs 50 tons. You can feel incredible subtleties of terrain change through your seat. And they offered that one up, but it wasn't something I would have thought to ask. And once I got that little
00:19:51
Speaker
trace of a hint of information. Then I started probing more about the sensitivities of these giant machines. And, you know, they're really quite surgical. And it's such a contradiction when you see these things grinding by, you know, along the side of a highway or something like that. It's, you know, they look like such blunt instruments, but really the people operating them are incredibly sensitized.
00:20:14
Speaker
to every twitch and bump that they encounter. And I just love that kind of thing because it enriches our understanding of something that we think we already understand. I mean, what's not to understand about a bulldozer? It pushes dirt around, but actually, they are almost like
00:20:37
Speaker
50 or 100 ton bubble bubble levels. Like you can feel exactly how crooked or off center you are with with incredible specificity. And, you know, I just never would have known that. And and yet, you know, these guys who were sitting there smoking and, you know, their boots are untied and they look, you know, kind of unkempt. They're actually really tuned in.
00:21:00
Speaker
Yeah, to that point, you write really well about almost the animalification of fire and how alive it is. And there's a really good set piece in the first third of the book or so, where you really just talk about the science of the fire, but also just how alive it is. And you really changed it in my head about my perception of it. Here I am thinking the flame is just this mirror.
00:21:24
Speaker
a ratio of heat, like a release of heat, but then it ends up being this breathing thing and it's releasing different volatile gases within certain structures and then it just feeds off that and pulls it towards it. I imagine, just like the bulldozer anecdote, you were really learning about fire in a way that you likely didn't know before.
00:21:51
Speaker
Oh, yeah, no, I really go in as a, you know, an ignoramus, you know, with some questions and and the more you you borrow into it. And then I realize, wow, I really don't understand how this works. I'm really going to have to, you know, basically apply myself with more vigor and.
00:22:10
Speaker
I'm a layperson. I'm not a science guy. I'm interested in science. I appreciate it. I appreciate it the same way I appreciate jazz music. I don't really understand what's going on, but I understand that those folks are geniuses and it would behoove me to understand it better. And I feel the same way about
00:22:30
Speaker
chemists and physicists and climate scientists and meteorologists, you know, they really have taken the time to master a really complex series of events and elements. And so be able to grasp that well enough
00:22:48
Speaker
to basically explain it back to my lay person self in a way that holds up takes a huge amount of time and effort because you're really almost having to reverse engineer it. You have to break it all down in its technical terms and then reassemble it using similes and metaphors that someone like me could understand. But
00:23:12
Speaker
that still hold up for the science. And just, I'm proud to say I just did a reading last night in Bellingham, Washington, and a chemistry teacher was there. And he came up to me afterward and he said, I just want to tell you, you know, your description of fire behavior and how it works was correct.
00:23:30
Speaker
Oh, that's great. Good for you. And he was impressed and I was really relieved because I'm way out of my comfort zone here. I'm cantilevered pretty far out on a lot of this, of the science. And I really made an effort to fact check it.
00:23:49
Speaker
and get it right, and I ran it through past fire scientists and some other experts. I do that before I let it loose in the world, but still there's that fear of some detail that is obvious to an expert that is not obvious to me, that's going to sneak through and end up in the final version, and then you're just going to have to live with it.
00:24:12
Speaker
uh and the you know the embarrassment of that and um and i just don't want to be wrong you know you want to you're serving your readers they're trusting you you know they're investing money in the book or at least time in it by reading it and you really don't want to betray that trust so you really want to have it right and so that chemistry teacher really uh you know put me at ease slept better last night
00:24:33
Speaker
That's awesome. Yeah, that's great to hear and that's sometimes the greatest compliment when you're dealing with some very nuanced and or even esoteric topics within say fire and to know that you you got it right with someone who is like deeply like steeped in the science of a thing and meanwhile we are just kind of like tourists in it and we're just trying our best to be good tour guides for the reader and
00:25:01
Speaker
And so when you stick the landing on something like that, it's like, whoo, man, that does feel good. And yeah, you do sleep better that night. Yeah. Yeah. And that's really the greatest vindication for me. I don't know how it is for you. But when, you know, like if a firefighter, you know, reads fire weather or a climate scientist read it or or an incident commander or, you know, or somebody like that.
00:25:27
Speaker
You know, that's really the highest praise because you're reflecting their reality that they're experts in accurately back to them in a form that they can respect and recognize. And that's it's really hard to do. And
00:25:45
Speaker
That's you know, that's really what I strive for. I mean I you know, it's it's really a joy To be read, you know by anybody frankly but to have somebody who is you know, a legitimate expert in the in the subject that you've decided to take on is you know, it's kind of like winning a prize for me, you know, it's really
00:26:10
Speaker
It's just a kind of ultimate validation, I guess, that really matters a lot to me. Yeah, there are so many tasty, so few tasty breadcrumbs along the way, and many opportunities and many off-ramps for you to question why you're doing this and like, damn it, should I be writing a book? You're like, God, damn it, this is the last one. There's no way I'm doing this again. But then you get those little shots, that stuff that puts fuel in your tank. You're like, OK.
00:26:40
Speaker
you know that you know that's part of the reason why I do this and then usually drawn in then you're like Pacino and Godfather 3 it's like um um it pulls me back in yeah
00:26:50
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's a very seductive medium, you know, for those of us who have the bug. And it's, I mean, I guess, you know, in a way, it's that when I think about what I write, I'm thinking about, well, you know, I paint what I see, you know, and these are the things happening in the world that compel me. But I think of, you know, a landscape painter kind of setting up outside
00:27:16
Speaker
And how did you choose that horizon? How did you choose that time of day, that particular situation? And why do you want to then go out and basically recreate it? You know, I think about that a lot in terms of creation with a capital C and in terms of just the world as it is, warts and all. And, you know, as a nonfiction writer,
00:27:39
Speaker
you're trying to recreate that. So you are trying to paint what you see and yet what's there already is perfect because it is. Like it exists. So regardless of how you feel about it, it's its own kind of perfection because it is manifesting on earth at this particular moment. And so as a writer, as a renderer,
00:28:05
Speaker
I see our role as trying to rise to the level of creation, which is kind of the most audacious task. It's kind of like, son, your arm's too short to box with God. And that's, as a writer, trying to render something that already is at a level of detail that you could never match. The audacity of trying to do that in a way the foolhardiness of it or the vanity of it
00:28:34
Speaker
is something that strikes me on a regular basis. And yet it's totally compelling.
Interviewing and Empathy in Storytelling
00:28:40
Speaker
It's really like it's this irresistible challenge.
00:28:45
Speaker
I love what you say about painting what you see and so much of the challenge of narrative nonfiction is at times painting what you can't see. So what was the challenge for you when you weren't on the scene to still create vivid cinematic scenes despite you not being there to witness it?
00:29:07
Speaker
That's a really good point. When I wrote the proposal for this book back in 2016, the fire had broken out and it had burned through this city of 90,000 people.
00:29:23
Speaker
and caused historic damage. But I wasn't there. I was in another country, actually, at the time. And so as I wrote it and recreated some of the scenes, some of the moments, and one of my editors was reading the proposal, she thought that I'd been there. She said, oh, so you went up to Fort McMurray. And I said, no, I actually haven't been there yet. And through, I mean,
00:29:50
Speaker
YouTube is really a boon in terms of being able to see what you missed. But also, you don't have the smells, you don't have the visceral experience of being in it. And so to create that, to kind of make that what I would call an empathic leap into the scene.
00:30:10
Speaker
That requires this extra level of being able to kind of transpose your senses into that place and draw on everything that you know about fire, about the subarctic, about
00:30:28
Speaker
a suburban street about a melted car. And you may not have experienced those precise things, but you have to kind of draw on a lifetime of experience. And I've traveled a lot. I've done a lot of things, been a lot of places. And so I'm able to kind of patchwork together
00:30:48
Speaker
these sensory memories in a way that basically create a simulacrum of authenticity in that moment, even though I wasn't there. And so, you know, I take the
00:31:02
Speaker
the street name and the name of the town and the date from the records that exist. And then after that, you're kind of layering up the paint, if you will, over the canvas to get that sense of depth and authenticity of experience so that then the reader coming along, you've situated them in place and time. And then on top of that, you're giving them this sensory experience. And that's where,
00:31:32
Speaker
You know, the English language is, you know, maybe unparalleled in terms of its versatility and energy and ability to convey nuances of sensation. It's really, really fantastic. I feel honestly incredibly lucky to be a native English speaker for that reason, because I feel like there's this just infinite colors at my fingertips, going back to the painting analogy.
00:32:00
Speaker
that you can kind of subtly and not so subtly shade the scene and really give it a kind of three-dimensional extra sensory pop.
00:32:10
Speaker
Yeah, in interviewing people for those sensory details, it can be just really awkward to ask those questions. And I know when I do it, it's where I'm like, all right, I know this is hard. I know it was a long time ago. But do you know the weather? Do you remember the smells? If I was running right behind you, what would I be seeing? And it's like, it feels weird. And you can feel them just kind of went like,
00:32:38
Speaker
I don't know. It was so long ago, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I think we got to get over that. I wonder for you just like how have you learned to just maybe get over that awkwardness because in service of the story and those details, it ultimately makes for just a far better book.
00:32:55
Speaker
Yeah, it absolutely does. It absolutely does. And the most kind of egregious, extreme version of that for me was interviewing Yuri Trush for the tiger. And so he was the Russian warden charged with hunting this man eating tiger down. And it was a really desperate, you know, it was kind of the this kind of ultimate game of literally cat and mouse except cat and man. And the
00:33:21
Speaker
the ending was by no means a foregone conclusion about, you know, who would prevail. And I really, I interrogated that poor man. And I had a Russian translator with me. And because he was a warden, because he was a law man, he respected my basically obsession with detail. And so I was asking him what kind of socks he wore, you know, what type of boots he wore, you know, were they lace up, you know, were they Velcro, what were they made out of?
00:33:52
Speaker
a lot about his firearms, about his clothes, about his vehicle, about the quality of the snow. And I literally went back to him every day for a week. So hours and hours each day. And we just kind of wore each other out. And to his credit, he stayed with it. But I think when people understand your motives, that you are really trying to get it right,
00:34:18
Speaker
What you're basically doing is showing respect for their reality and for their experience. And so I think a lot of people respond positively to that. Once they trust you, it's like, wow, this guy really cares as much as I do. Maybe he even cares more than I do.
00:34:35
Speaker
And that's kind of wonderful to have that kind of attention beamed on you because most people really don't care what you think or what you say or what you did or what happened to you that day. And so to have somebody like us come in.
00:34:49
Speaker
with a genuine intelligent interest and not a parasitic manipulative interest. And there's a whole ethical piece to being a reporter and an interviewer that we can get into because there is this kind of mercenary aspect to it. And at the same time, when you're in that experience together, my mother told me that,
00:35:16
Speaker
you know, the definition of charm is the ability to get people to talk about themselves. And so, you know, that's something that I learned from my mother and I'm good at it. And, you know, by kind of leaning in and showing an intelligent interest and knowing just enough about the topic that you can ask a question that almost sounds like, oh, wow, you've done this too. And then you're sort of in the club then, and then they might give you kind of an extra layer of detail that you didn't know about.
00:35:44
Speaker
And so slowly, slowly you can kind of recreate the scene in incredible detail. And, you know, you can see that effort in the tiger and you can see, you know, the patience of Yuri Trush, you know, sitting with me day after day, working through moment by moment, move by move, you know, this desperate hunt.
00:36:05
Speaker
And, you know, the same, you know, with a running with a foot race, you know, or a boxing match, you know, you want that that level of detail that literally blow by blow kind of.
00:36:18
Speaker
granularity and that, you know, we'll all go there, you know, as readers, as watchers, as fellow investigators and enjoyers of the human experience. You know, we want that level of detail because we know what it feels like, too. You know, we can put ourselves there. And that's a real gift, I think, to the reader to be able to kind of step into this other skin and inhabit it.
00:36:44
Speaker
in a really vivid way. And there's just no other way to get that. Yeah, the step into the skin. I love hearing you say that because one of my favorite things because I'm talking to a lot of elite athletes and I preface the thing by saying like this might sound a little weird, but like when things were going good, when your body was just in its prime and you were having a prime day, like what did that feel like?
00:37:13
Speaker
you know, where you're running down to the long jump pit, you know. And as this one woman, Fran Worthen, she was a very, very, very good long jumper. She was like, ah, you know, she almost was like, rolled her head back. She was just like, it was like, I was flying. It was great. And to hear them articulate when their bodies were just so primed. How does the discus feel when it comes off your lead finger, when you've just spun three times and you know, like, that thing is going for a world record.
00:37:42
Speaker
What is that like? I'm never gonna experience that. What was that like? And you can see them really come alive even on the phone when you're not even looking them in the eye. You can just you feel the energy of like, wow, this person is really trying to get to the heart of my craft.
00:37:57
Speaker
Oh, Brendan, I can I can just feel my own, you know, interest, you know, just because already you're describing things that I had never really thought about and certainly have never experienced. And and yet to you know, we want to know what the extremes of the human experience are and you know, you know, the lows and the highs and to be an elite athlete, you know, in her prime.
00:38:22
Speaker
with this kind of almost supernatural power where you're harnessing the momentum of the object with your own body, with your own skeleton, with the temperature of the air and the density of the air that day and all getting it in sync for maximum effect. Only
00:38:44
Speaker
a kind of a genius can do that. I'm thinking of these kind of like a transcendent jazz solo or something like that. When someone is so fully in the zone that it's angelic and a normal person cannot do that. In fact, you as an elite athlete may not even be able to reproduce that. So there was some synchrony in that moment that was perfect.
00:39:13
Speaker
And how amazing to be a human being and experience it, and how amazing to be a writer and have really the privilege and opportunity to convey that experience for the rest of us who are slumping around in our sweatpants and slides.
00:39:32
Speaker
But that gets to the point of and it's very fitting a very fitting metaphor so to speak about About interviewing and stuff and and seeing it as it's sort of a renewable energy instead of an extraction industry and and by you know, and it can be viewed, you know with the ethical part that you were alluding to a moment ago and
00:39:52
Speaker
how interviewing can, you could treat it like scorched earth, just burrow down, take all the oil and move out of boomtown, or you can really invest in being truly, truly enamored by their craft while still extracting information, but it is a more nourishing way of utilizing the time and the privilege it is to speak to that person.
00:40:18
Speaker
Brendan, I really think that's a good point. And because I do think an interview well done elevates everybody. And the interviewer gets what they want. They get this material and this detail. But I think the older I get, the more I realize that pretty much 90% of what human beings want out of life is to be seen and heard.
00:40:44
Speaker
It's really simple. And a good interview, the subject really feels seen and heard. You're really there attending to every detail and validating this intense experience they had. And I went through this a lot with
00:41:02
Speaker
You know, in Fort McMurray, you know, you're basically interviewing people about the worst, scariest, most devastating day of their lives. You know, they saw their house burned down or they, you know, trying to escape this fire that, you know, they literally don't know if they're going to live through it, you know, when the kids are in the backseat. You know, so, you know, it's a terrible thing to put a human being through.
00:41:23
Speaker
And then to put them through it again by saying, so tell me about it. And, you know, there, you know, I saw a lot of grown men cry in Fort McMurray and that's a tough town. You know, that's a that's a hard working, you know, petroleum town. And, you know, that fire wounded a lot of people. And so to talk about it and create a space that's safe enough and trustworthy enough for them to kind of go through this trauma
00:41:49
Speaker
and feel some of it in a fulsome emotional way, in a way that they don't have to guard against or have to be strong for their kids. They can just know, you know, I'm really
00:42:03
Speaker
Weeping right now and uh, and it's that can be I think a really healthy release For the person who experienced it and and it's a really you know in that sense I feel like and I don't think i'm kidding myself here. I feel like you can really almost be doing a service It's almost beyond just an interview. You know, you're really it's almost uh
00:42:25
Speaker
a potentially therapeutic kind of intervention where you're creating a safe place to release some of the tension from that event. And I really experienced that a lot. And as I went back and checked back in with people upon publication of the book saying, look, you remember that interview we did?
00:42:45
Speaker
five years ago, well, it's actually getting published now. And I just wanted to check in with you about that. Are you still good with that and all this? And they had really good memories of our conversations and kind of wanted to fill in the gaps and relive some of the things and talk about where they were now. And so it really, that ended up, I think, being a positive for them. And that really was reassuring to me and made me feel better about essentially invading their
Fire Dynamics and Environmental Insights
00:43:12
Speaker
privacy.
00:43:12
Speaker
It really gets to the point where I think a lot of reporters and journalists can have are seen potentially as like vultures of just trying to like rake up all this information just for their own personal gain in their stories and to hear you go back to those people and be like, hey, this is going to come to light. We had this raw conversation, a long conversation, very detailed several years ago, but now it's coming back.
00:43:37
Speaker
And so the fact that you're showing that degree of understanding and empathy and with them, I think that just goes to, you know, you as a person, but also is a really like, maybe like, like a really like a tender hearted nonfiction storyteller, where it's just like, you're not just this well of information for my own gain, like you're a person, and I want to honor your stories. And it's really cool to hear you say that.
00:44:01
Speaker
There's been a lot of talk about empathy, I think, over the past few years and in the context of journalism and reportage. But we are sentient connectors. And the more open we are to the feelings, the needs, the experience of others, the richer it makes our lives, but also the more connected we feel.
00:44:25
Speaker
And when I'm talking to someone, I just sort of intuitively feel my heart going out to them. It's not a conscious thing. It's not like, well, this is how I was taught to have a bedside manner. And it's more just who I am naturally kind of operating in a structured way in the form of an interview. But I think it really is an asset to be
00:44:51
Speaker
emotionally open and available and have access to your own emotions. And, you know, honestly, you know, Brendan, as I was writing this book and I would go back through some of these interviews, I would really just start tearing up as I was getting into some of these intense parts because I was thinking, my God, these people, they went through that, you know, and and it was really hard to imagine them suffering like that. And then also just my relief that they survived.
00:45:20
Speaker
you know, like, my God, they're still they're still around, you know, they get to be with their kids and they get to rebuild and they get another crack, you know, at life, you know, that was so nearly taken from them. And not all of them made it, you know, there's some there's, you know, we lost some people, you know, in that book, but it's, you know, there's a real relief and kind of vicarious happiness that they
00:45:44
Speaker
that they gutted it out and made it through intact. So that's, you know, it feels like a, you know, a victory kind of for the human race. Yeah. Yeah. And up the Mackenzie River here, you know, east of Eugene in 2020 in September over Labor Day, there was the holiday farm fires, giant fire. It laid siege to a lot of, a lot of houses and a giant tree, a tree farm just went up and you probably heard of it.
00:46:13
Speaker
And it gets to the idea of wooey, the wildland-urban interface and all these houses going down. And a lot of people want to rebuild up in that area, but this is the risk you run when you build into a fire ecology.
00:46:31
Speaker
And it was really illuminating to read what you were writing about Wooies and the fact that you're almost asking for this to happen to a community if you build into these ecologies like this. Well, it's almost like having a deer farm in mountain lion country. Yeah.
00:46:55
Speaker
They're going to eventually jump the fence or find a way in and kill your deer. And we've grown up in a really unusual time in history when never besides this past century have we had such an illusion of control over nature.
00:47:11
Speaker
And there's so much of it we've been able to, quote unquote, manage, including fire suppression, which really achieved incredible heights after World War II, as I'm sure you know. And we're kind of paying the price for that by stifling fire, by stifling these natural impulses and these natural purges that forests require, especially in the West.
00:47:35
Speaker
We're really creating a hazard for the future, and it's not the sole cause, but one of the reasons 21st century fire, as I call it, burns as intensely as it does is because there's this incredible fuel buildup.
00:47:51
Speaker
And when that goes, it goes off with an intensity that a normal, quote unquote, healthy fire on a landscape that had been burned over regularly wouldn't achieve. And so we've really created this problem for ourselves and
00:48:11
Speaker
hand in hand with that elevated fire suppression ability has been this idea that, well, we can live anywhere and we'll be safe. And people stopped living in the forest in the 19th century, really, partly because they got burned out so often. And if you look at many settlements around Europe and traditional settlements in the East Coast of the US, historically, they were
00:48:39
Speaker
broad fields all the way around the community and some of that was for ease of pasturage and planting but also it made an incredible natural fire break and so the forest could burn all it wanted to but when you've got you know hundreds of acres of fields all the way around your village you know you'll be protected and they learned that the hard way and Stephen Pine you know really the
00:49:05
Speaker
the Eminence Grease of American and really global fire and an amazing writer and historian. He writes about that really eloquently, describing watching these communities burn, these wooey communities burn down. He said it's like watching polio or cholera come back. We already figured out how to vaccinate for it, how to cure it.
00:49:29
Speaker
And it's like we forgot the lesson. And as people moved into the wooey, as they really started to do, you know, combining with the explosion of suburbia and then this more recent desire to live close to nature and have, you know, running trails out the back door and a cul-de-sac out front,
00:49:47
Speaker
Um, we really forgot that no actually forests, especially in the west are extraordinarily flammable and and and this is a part of their normal life cycle And now you've put this permanent and really quite volatile structure That's worth a lot of money And takes a lot to ensure right in the middle of it and and so you're really kind of asking for it and now I think with these the elevated temperatures due to climate change and the drying that that
00:50:14
Speaker
goes hand in hand with elevated temperatures, we've now ratcheted up the flammability of those WUI communities in a way that really wasn't the case, say, in 1990. You brought up World War II a moment ago also about fire suppression and stuff of that nature. And there's a moment in the book where you're looking to a fire expert to kind of describe
00:50:43
Speaker
what was going on with Fort McMurray, and he brought up the Hamburg firestorm and the firebombing of Hamburg by the Allies over in Germany in World War II. And I was hoping maybe you could speak to that and the hunt you went on to try to draw that corollary, which you know you did so well.
00:51:01
Speaker
Well, it was such a surprise. I mean, there was so much about, I mean, this again is one of, joy is kind of the wrong word in this context, but one of just the really surprising and energizing aspects of being a researcher and a reporter. And the discovery of it, right? The discovery of things that you literally cannot imagine. And one of those was, as I spoke to firefighters, you know, one of them casually said, yeah, it took about five minutes for these houses to burn down.
00:51:31
Speaker
And I'm, you know, did I hear you right? You know, this is a two-story house, you know, that up in Fort McMurray, they run about, you know, between $500,000 and $800,000 apiece up there.
00:51:43
Speaker
These are brand new homes, state of the art. It's a very, very wealthy community. And in 2016, when I was first researching up there, the median household income was $200,000 a year, a very, very wealthy petroleum town. And so the houses reflect that. And these houses were burning down in five minutes. And it just didn't sound physically possible. And I kind of pushed back on this firefighter and he said, yeah, I know it sounds impossible, but that's what was happening.
00:52:11
Speaker
And so I said, OK, you know, I'll take that with a grain of salt. And then I interviewed some other firefighters who were in different parts of the city, in different neighborhoods that also burnt to the ground. And they said, yeah, that was about five minutes. And so
00:52:27
Speaker
I'm trying to wrap my head around this because a house weighs about 50 tons. It's full of a lot of stuff. And just think of how long it takes to burn a two by four. You don't burn a two by four in five minutes. It takes half an hour to burn a two by four, even under the best circumstances. So what is going on there? So I wrote to Vito Bobrowski, I was looking at
00:52:50
Speaker
know, googling around for, you know, house flammability and domestic fire and came across this guy, Vito Bobrowskas, who's based in Seattle. And he's kind of the go-to guy for structure and household goods flammability. And he's, you know, written a couple hundred articles and some really big books, textbooks and things like that. So I wrote to him
00:53:15
Speaker
And I said, you know, these houses were burning down in five minutes. And he was aware of the Fort McMurray fire and said, you know, how is this physically possible? What's going on to make them volatize that quickly? So imagine throwing a milk carton into a bonfire. That's how the houses were going up. And he wrote back, you know, really surprisingly quickly. And he said, yeah, that's a tough one. But the Hamburg firestorm is a good place to start. And the idea of
00:53:46
Speaker
an intentionally set urban fire that was initiated by hundreds of allied fighter bombers, dropping literally thousands upon thousands of tons of thermite incendiary bombs onto the homes of the workers of Hamburg, Germany in the summer of 1943.
00:54:11
Speaker
I just never would have occurred to me to use that example as a way to understand what happened in Fort McMurray. And I started reading about that firestorm, which was intentionally set, you know, so to the point that allies, Americans
00:54:30
Speaker
hired German architects to recreate exactly German workers' houses in the Hammerbrook neighborhood of Hamburg. And they built these in Utah on a bombing range, and they bombed them over and over again to figure out what was the right combination of thermite
00:54:52
Speaker
to get these things to really go up and they they were intentionally trying to start a firestorm and they succeeded they did it on a really hot day uh after a period of of minimal rain and The firestorm of of homburg, you know is legendary and and it created you know cyclonic winds and you know human beings were sucked into it and the streets melted and
00:55:16
Speaker
fire trucks burst into flame, you know, hundreds of meters from open fire just because of the radiant heat. It was absolutely apocalyptic and totally man-made. And so as I was trying to wrap my head around the horror of that and then think about Fort McMurray, which was, you know, it was another working town, but it was a wildfire that came into the city. So what's the similarity? And then I started realizing
00:55:45
Speaker
Well, actually, a black spruce tree heated to a thousand degrees is a lot like a fire bomb. These are very flammable trees that are actually designed to burn the boreal forest system in northern Canada, all the way around the northern hemisphere, is a fire-dependent system that regenerates itself through periodic fire. So black spruce is one of those keystone species that
00:56:12
Speaker
initiate your response to fire with great exuberance. So firefighters literally call it gas on a stick. So imagine drought conditions around the city of Fort McMurray. Imagine a relative humidity of 11%, which is comparable to Death Valley, which is 2000 miles south of Fort McMurray. Imagine temperatures of 90 degrees, which is almost 30 degrees above normal for that time, that period in May and the sub sub Arctic.
00:56:41
Speaker
And then in introducing a wildfire to those conditions, you get these explosive circumstances that when they come into a modern neighborhood,
00:56:53
Speaker
we discover that the modern house is actually filled with petroleum products. So in a way, between the black spruce and the petroleum-infused houses, vinyl siding, tar shingles, all the laminates and glues that go into plywood and flooring, and then think of all the polyurethane and the synthetic stuffing in the upholstery, all that stuff volatizes
00:57:19
Speaker
certainly at 1000 degrees, and it doesn't catch on fire, it explodes into flame simultaneously. So in a sense,
00:57:29
Speaker
the city firebombed itself between the black spruce trees and the heavy petroleum content in every home. It was perfectly designed to explode into flame. And that's not what we think about when we think about building a house, moving into a house, raising our children in a house. We don't think about them as
00:57:53
Speaker
potential fire bombs, but you get them hot enough. And that's what 21st century fire is capable of doing. It totally changes the nature of what your shelter is. And it's really a mind bender. You know, I had to spend a lot of time with that just to think of, you know, what a home can become under extreme circumstances.
00:58:18
Speaker
In the same way that someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, I wonder for you, now that you know so much about fire, how has just the nature of our world and just what you know about fire, how do you now see the world around you? How has your view of the world around you changed based on what you know about fire behavior and fire weather?
00:58:45
Speaker
The world is a much more volatile place now through my lens. And I look at where I live here in Vancouver. I live in a very thickly settled neighborhood of 100-year-old wooden houses. They're basically great big boxes of kindling.
00:59:01
Speaker
And if we had another heat dome like we did in 2021, we were pushing 100 degrees here, which is insane for Vancouver, British Columbia. You had a stiff wind and some kind of fire accident. You could lose the whole west side of the city. And I'd never really thought about that before, but cities have, wooden cities have burnt down in the past and with the extreme heat that is now much more common,
00:59:31
Speaker
Fire likes that and fire is energized by that. And so that is a real concern to me. And then the other piece of this is going back to the petroleum industry. The petroleum industry is a fire industry. The only reason we're interested in fossil fuels, whether it's coal or natural gas or bitumen or oil, is because it burns.
00:59:58
Speaker
And so we know we talk about the energy industry or the oil and gas industry, but what we're really talking about is a fire industry. And we are surrounded every day by thousands of fires, whether it's in the cars around us, in our pilot lights, in our stove, in our water heaters. Fire is part and parcel of our civilization. But with every one of those fires comes emissions.
01:00:28
Speaker
And when you multiply that times billions, which is what we're dealing with now, you're really going to impact the container that is our atmosphere. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Well, what happens in our atmosphere stays in our atmosphere. And what's happening in our atmosphere right now is that vast quantities of CO2 and methane are being emitted into it.
01:00:55
Speaker
and creating the conditions for a much warmer climate and a much more combustible climate. And so we're living in a more fire-prone world now. And so that's something I think about every day.
01:01:12
Speaker
damn well the the books in incredible john i really i really ate it up i loved it just learned a lot and then just was also just amazed at your capacity to to build scenes to which i think was a master class in that which is a you know a ton of fun to read and also just as someone who admires that kind of thing i was like wow this is a
01:01:31
Speaker
This is handled well and in the hands of someone who is truly skilled So as we bring this conversation down for a landing I always like to ask a guest for a recommendation of some kind and that's just anything you could be excited about these days So I'd post that to you John like what are you excited about and what might you recommend for the listeners out there?
01:01:49
Speaker
Oh, boy. Well, thank you, Brendan, you know, for for your really kind words and just for your time and interest. I really appreciate it. It's really fun to talk about this and with a fellow practitioner. So I really appreciate that. And as far as, you know, I think Timothy Egan is a guy I have a lot of time for and who I really admire and just, you know, a fantastic American nonfiction year and historian.
01:02:18
Speaker
And if you haven't read The Worst Hard Time or seen the documentary film of that name that he made with Ken Burns, I really urge you to watch it or read it because it captures in microcosm an environmental breakdown, a climate breakdown totally driven by capitalism and short-sighted greed with a clarity and succinctness and vividness
01:02:48
Speaker
that you know is again speaking of master classes and masters it just really is a beautiful example and you know if I was in charge of education I would have you know every 11th grader
01:03:04
Speaker
on the continent read that book or watch that documentary. And another one like that for me that really, I think, honestly sort of set me on the path that I'm on now is David McCulloch's early work, The Johnstown Flood, about the famous
01:03:21
Speaker
uh flood that that washed away that pennsylvania town i think in 1889 you know it was really the worst disaster on american soil you know and that it that record stood i think it may still stand you know a couple of thousand people died in terms of that uh i think it was not until maybe the um
01:03:39
Speaker
Uh, the galveston flood, uh, you know was that number surpassed but the way he Describes all the contributing factors, you know, it was a completely man-made environmental disaster that was completely avoidable and he just you know without Wagging fingers or being judgmental. He just kind of lays out the conditions and lays out the human foibles that led to this catastrophe and
01:04:07
Speaker
I just find that so interesting and you know both those books are kind of parables for our current situation around climate and petroleum and just the conflict between the limits of the natural world and our own appetites and what
01:04:25
Speaker
we are being persuaded to buy and how much we're being persuaded to use every day.
Closing Thoughts and Writing Advice
01:04:31
Speaker
And so I just feel like those are really timely and kind of eternal evergreen books and stories that continue to resonate for me. Oh, that's awesome. Well, John, thanks so much for the work you've done in this incredible book. And again, thanks for covering out time to come on the podcast. I really appreciate it. Oh, my pleasure, Brendan. Power to you, and I'll be listening.
01:04:57
Speaker
noise thanks to John he's at John Valiant on Twitter remember it's pronounced valiant but it's spelled not like valiant V-A-I-L-L-A-N-T he's at johnvaliant.com but it's a website under construction so just go to Twitter okay and name of the book again is fire weather a true story from a hotter world
01:05:22
Speaker
Don't forget they're raging against the algorithm with me over at Substack. I've pulled away from Twitter. Way the fuck back from Twitter. I logged out. The Coward's Twitter deletion. I hang on to it because I'm a cowardly invertebrate. Which is another way of saying I'm a coward. But also sometimes Twitter comes in handy to find people. That's what I tell myself.
01:05:44
Speaker
been enjoying being logged out of Twitter and playing with notes over on Substack. To me it feels like what Twitter used to be around 2009-2010, and it's such a writer-reader-centric ecosystem, naturally, and so it just feels more wholesome, if something like that can feel wholesome. So the writing and the research... Oh, I should say.
01:06:09
Speaker
The writing and the research are rowing in the same boat together. The research is in the bow, saying, I'm king of the world, and writing is in the back, shoveling fucking coal into the furnace saying, fuck you. Now I have to make sense of all your bullshit, motherfucker.
01:06:28
Speaker
And the research has a telescope saying, like, look over there. What beautiful land. And the writing in the back is planting a mutiny. He's like, keep talking, you bitch. To quote Kurt Vonnegut, my hero, he said, when I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
01:06:46
Speaker
My god, an adult crayon at best. I had a double goose egg this past weekend, writing-wise, which meant I needed to... So, you know, for those who are unfamiliar with the goose egg term, numerical terms, it's a zero and a...
01:07:02
Speaker
I had a back-to-back zero day Saturday Sunday just wasn't motivated. I usually can blame that I'm being hungover but it wasn't even that. So I knew that starting the week I needed back-to-back 500 word days to get my average back up to 285 per day. You know that's not a scenario you want to repeat very often.
01:07:20
Speaker
seeing that daily average drop is terrifying. I was at 278, so not on pace exactly. Then I had my first zero day and it dropped to 264 average. And then another zero on Sunday dropped it to 251. And now we're starting to panic. Now things are getting weird.
01:07:41
Speaker
And that's when I needed to string back-to-back five hondos. I was like, what happens if I do 500 Monday, 500 Tuesday? Okay, that gets me back on track. So I did 534 on Monday, got the average back up to 264, 447 the next day, averaged up to 272. Shit.
01:07:59
Speaker
and then 659 on Wednesday and the average is back up to 288 in back on pace as of yet today at this recording I have done zero and I'm not hopeful about a 285 word day so if I type in zero type type type type type that drops the average down to 277 okay it's just eight words shy of average not bad at least I
01:08:25
Speaker
At least it's not going to crater the process. I have a leak in one of my gutters and during the rainy season I let it drip and I place a protein canister. Sure enough, after a few solid days of Oregon rain in the month of let's say, I don't know, February, the can fills up and I can water plants with it.
01:08:49
Speaker
For my temperament and my relative privilege, the drip-by-drip way of writing really works for me. For now, I can afford to do that with the time I have and the leash I've been granted.
01:09:01
Speaker
You know, for others, binge writing and turning this spigot on full blast is their practice, and that's fine. You know, there's no one way to do it, which is why I bristle at, quote, like, advice in podcasts, because the case study is always what worked for that person. You know, if you just have, like, a passing curiosity about how people work, you know, fine. That's great. Frankly, the best person to ask for advice is a past version of yourself. You know, trial and error, scientific methods, see what works, and more importantly,
01:09:29
Speaker
You know, what's repeatable? Because that's the only way you'll finish anything. There's an epidemic of unfinished projects. But it's tricky because sometimes hearing about a writer's approach might give you a spark. Like, oh, maybe I'll try that. I like to say, like, add to cart. You know, you just throw that in the cart and free two-day shipping and you can apply whatever you want.
01:09:54
Speaker
But really what it boils down to, and this is more or less a quote from Austin Kleon, you know, people want to be writers, but they don't want to write. You know, fall in love with writing and then you'll become a writer. This is what he really says. Forget the noun, do the verb. You know, Kleon writes in the book, keep going. It's the whole Stephen King pencil trope, like using, you know, if you went up to Stephen King, what pencil do you use? Thinking that that's going to channel the energy.
01:10:20
Speaker
Using the same pencil as king is not going to make you king. So stop looking for a shortcut or a hack or a wormhole to get you to the other side of Saturn. Experiment. Play. Maybe hire a coach. Wink, wink. Listening to others talk about creativity is fine. I do it. I love it. You do it. You love it, presumably. But it's no substitute for confronting the fucking dungeon boss on your own and realizing you had all the power you ever needed in the first place.
01:10:50
Speaker
Use the force, Luke. Stay wild, CNFers. If you can't do, interview. See ya.