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Episode 52—How to Write an 80,000-Word Book in 42 Days with Joe Drape
137 Plays8 years ago
I'm not sure where to begin if I'm being perfectly honest. Joe Drape (@joedrape on Twitter) is a New York Times sports writer and the New York Times bestselling author of Our Boys and American Pharoah: The Untold Story of the Triple Crown Winner's Legendary Rise. He wrote the 80,000-word manuscript in six weeks without a book leave. How are you feeling about your productivity? "When you say, 'Ok, I've got six weeks to write 80,000 words,' it freaks you out," says Joe. "Sometimes 1,500 words goes to 3,000 or 6,000. Sometimes 1,500 becomes 300, and you shut your computer and go to a movie." I love it, baby. Joe is the author of these six books: American Pharoah Black Maestro Our Boys The Race for the Triple Crown In the Hornets Nest To the Swift In this episode he talks about how to write a book under tight deadline pressure, the power of reporting, and the power of listening. And thank you for listening! And if you have a moment, please leave a review on iTunes. Nine (and counting) five-star reviews! Thanks so much!
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Transcript
Introduction to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey guys, it's Brendan. Okay, so you need to tell me that for the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak with the world's best artists about how they go about creating works of nonfiction, I get to read books, essays, articles, listen to radio, watch documentaries, and then I get to talk to them about all that? That's a thing? Okay. Am I lucky or what? Lay down the rest.
00:00:31
Speaker
Yeah, baby. It's episode 52 of the aforementioned creative nonfiction podcast.
Special Episode with Joe Drake
00:00:38
Speaker
Thanks for listening. This one is a bit special because I've got New York Times sports writer, Joe Drake, the bestselling author of American Pharaoh, the untold story of the triple crown winner's legendary rise. What better guest to have on the eve of the Belmont stakes?
00:00:59
Speaker
Oh, and for those of you who don't know, the Belmont Stakes is the third race for three-year-old thoroughbred horses, deemed the Triple Crown. It starts with a race you've heard of, the Kentucky Derby, then the Preakness Stakes, and at last it ends in New York for the Belmont.
00:01:17
Speaker
I'm gonna go to the whip here and ask for those reviews. They're coming in and making a really, really nice impact. Let's keep them coming. I'm deeply thankful to all who have contributed so far. So beyond that, be sure to subscribe if you haven't already, share this with a pen pal, and let's just keep encouraging each other.
Conversation with Joe Drake on the Belmont Stakes
00:01:39
Speaker
So now here's the eternally quotable as you will find Joe Drake.
00:02:07
Speaker
the the the the the the the the the the the the the the
00:02:18
Speaker
I wanted you to maybe give us a little sense of what it was like heading to Belmont Park on that June day in 2015 with that buzz of this American Pharaoh could actually be the horse to finally get it done. Brendan, it is a trip I've made nine times, I believe, on that June Saturday when horses won two of three and the place is alive thinking, hey, we could have another triple crown.
00:02:46
Speaker
I started sitting in that press box in 98. So in 98, it had been 20 years since Affirmed had swept the triple crown. And as I kept going out there for funny side, for Affirmed, War Emblem, count them down, Smarty Jones, I was beginning to feel like, hey, this was never gonna happen, that too many things had changed. There were too many factors involved now that made it too difficult.
Experiencing the Triple Crown Races
00:03:16
Speaker
And I had definitely tempered my expectations of ever witnessing a triple crown. And for better or worse, I said to my editors, I said, man, all I want to do is see it, write the front page story, because I had edited a collection of horse race writing from the times of their 150 years back in like 2008. And in those days, in the beginning of time, I mean, horse racing was front page news
00:03:45
Speaker
every day, not just the triple crown, but the triple crowns were above the fold. Uh, you know, you had buy lines like red Smith on it, Steve, Katie, Steve, Chris. And I said, you know, I want to do that. And then I'll finish my tenure as the racing rider. So, you know, that is the way I wanted to go out to that, that day, you know, tempered expectations.
00:04:11
Speaker
But this one was a little better, and I'll get into that later. He had a little more high hopes there. When he turned for home, and he was three, four links ahead, and it was clear nobody was catching him, and just the soul-quaking cheer that went up in that place. And I've been blessed to be at a lot of sporting events as a fan and as a journalist, Super Bowls, Olympics, prize fights, championship, basketball, World Series,
00:04:41
Speaker
I've never heard a cheer that was so unified, so moving, because at that moment, everybody in the place was rooting for the same thing. And that same thing was for him to win the Belmont, sweep the triple crown. And it was sort of a selfish sort of bellow and a prayer to the gods because we were seeing greatness and we were achieving history and we were a part of it. We were there. We were seeing it.
00:05:09
Speaker
And so that is where I decided, okay, you know, I kind of alluded to that in this story, but then the next morning I wake up and I thought, you know, there's a book here and here's why there's a book is because, uh, it's a moment of achievement
Motivation Behind 'American Pharaoh'
00:05:27
Speaker
in history. We don't see often anymore in any sport or really kind of in, you know, any history, I'll keep it to sports. The only other.
00:05:35
Speaker
sporting moment I saw this unifying is when the Americans beat the Russians in hockey at Lake Placid. I mean, that was a thing that if you didn't know anything about hockey, and at the time I didn't, you were still deeply moved by it. And I think that's what American Pharaoh's triple crown did. It appealed to people who didn't know much about horse racing, but knew they had seen something achieved that was rare and that was, you know,
00:06:04
Speaker
up there that that was special. And that was the one motivation. The second was, you know, for better or worse, I've spent tens of thousands of dollars at the bedding windows and owning horses and being around horses for 40 plus years that I have a lot of what my dad used to call useless information about horse racing. I know a lot about the sport.
00:06:29
Speaker
I've been in breeding sheds. You know, I've seen horses fold. I've seen them trained. I've, you know, no owners. I know jockeys. I know low life gambler types. I know the world very well. And I thought, okay, this is a chance to tell a story that I think needs to be telling and to really exercise out of myself all this useless information I've accumulated over the years and to really
00:06:56
Speaker
you know, please myself and tell a story with every tool in my toolbox. And, you know, it's the one and only project ever. I'm going to be able to start with the sex scene. And that's what I did is, you know, American Pharaoh's mom and dad at the moment of conception, which, you know, in itself is a fascinating moment that I had learned over the years, you know, that this violent minute and a half mating
00:07:22
Speaker
and this dancing ritual with five guys in flak jackets and helmets and holding you know the stallions penis up and a test tube to make sure he ejaculated so you can show the insurance company all on videotape and all worth several million dollars. I mean that is something
Research and Storytelling in Writing
00:07:46
Speaker
I knew I could bring to a general audience, so that was the motivation of the book. It was a joy to write, actually, and I've written six now, and I can't say that about all of them, but this one was a joy to write. It just seemed like my moment and my time.
00:08:08
Speaker
You know, this had a built-in audience. And as anybody who's written books or done movies or documentaries, I mean, we can all pour our soul into these projects, and we do. But whether it becomes Seabiscuit or Black Maestro, which was another book of mine nobody really has heard of, is all up to the fates if it finds an audience. So that's all you can do is your best and throw it out there. And this one had a built-in audience. And I've been fortunate enough.
00:08:39
Speaker
new york times best-seller national best-sellers gone did several printings uh... that's great has it there the book is fantastic and it's it's a real it's a great in tribute to that and not that you really in service of play it's still a great piece of journalism is not like you wrote it as just like a puff piece to american ferrell but it is a great tribute to a horse that
00:09:08
Speaker
when he won he won in style and he only lost you know the one time in his three-year-old year and one time in his two-year-old year but like every especially that belmont steaks in his breeders cup classic it was just like this horse is he truly is like one for the ages and you're able to capture that so well well and i appreciate that and i remember telling my editor he said how are you going to do this book and i said you know what it's a biography of a horse as silly as that sounds
00:09:38
Speaker
But if you go look back at all the books that have worked about horses and horse racing, National Velvet, Seabiscuit, Far Lap, Secretariat, you had to keep your eyes on the horse. And the horse, yes, it's an animal. But it has in racing, especially, a life cycle and a certain evolution it has to take. And what's fascinating is if you keep that on the through line,
00:10:07
Speaker
then you figure out all the lives it's changed, all the people whose hands were on the horse who basically had their lives changed by their sometimes brief or sometimes long association with them and they were able to help me tell the story. Their story was his story and vice versa.
00:10:31
Speaker
ended up being a very good device to drive the narrative about, you know, the luck, the magic, and the talent that has to go into things like this. Yeah, and it's great that you brought up luck, too, because I feel like as talented and as brilliant as that horse was, and truly a fast horse for all time, he got real lucky throughout every race in the Triple Crown, and it was
00:10:59
Speaker
You know, whether it was the Kentucky Derby drawing outside and then, you know, avoiding traffic and then getting the rail and the preakness, but then it rains. So he gets the mud and gets hustled out. And then in the Belmont, all the speed horses scratched. So he had no pressure out front. So it was like the stars truly aligned. And then he was gifted enough to close the deal. No doubt, Brendan. And to me, the takeaway, that's why I'm not surprised where
00:11:24
Speaker
Coming up to this Belmont Stakes, I just saw Classic Empire scratch this morning with an abscess. You know, it's going to be a no-name bunch of horses. The Derby winner's not here, always dreaming. The Pregness winner's not here, cloud computing. You know, it's going to be 13 decent three-year-olds. And I think that's going to be more the rule than the exception as we go forward. You know, my biggest takeaway
00:11:53
Speaker
Just as a handicapper, a horse fan, a chronicler of horse racing news, that three things are needed. Talent.
00:12:03
Speaker
Talent and talent American Pharaoh was no secret to anybody at two years old before he had even hit the track They were talking about him at Del Mar and at Santa Anita and his workouts. He was incredibly Deficially moving machine and that goes back to when he was a four-month-old when he was on the farm in the Francis Relihan the farm manager and
00:12:26
Speaker
was out weaning,
Elements of Success in Horse Racing
00:12:28
Speaker
he was in the process of weaning from his mother. And then he was just a little Princess Emmecult, that's what they called him. And she's out on an evening run and she sees him in a field bucking and swirling and then he takes off.
00:12:40
Speaker
And she stops it, it takes her breath away. This is a woman who grew up on a farm in Ireland, seen tens of thousands of horses. And she said, I had never seen one move so beautifully and efficiently. He was perfectly engineered, Brendan. He had no turn ins, no turn outs. He was balanced, muscular. You see this throughout. You see it in, and you know, for your horse inclined people out there,
00:13:08
Speaker
go to YouTube, look up American Pharaoh and the McCathens, M-C-K-A-T-H-A-N-S, and you see his workout as a two year old when they're showcasing them. And it's only an eighth of a mile, but he quiets Mr. Zayat, his owner, and every other trainer around him.
00:13:30
Speaker
because they have never seen anybody at any age run that efficiently and that fast. It really blows them away. So, you know, talent is the deal. The magic and the luck are the one and the same, a little bit. You mentioned all the lucky factors that happened during the races, but the magic, which is part of that luck, is Victor Espinoza won Bob Baffert's first choice or second choice. He was his fifth choice. Everybody Baffert wanted to get on this horse
00:14:00
Speaker
Uh, had other commitments. Gary Stevens was getting his knee replaced. Didn't want to get on him. Martin Garcia, the one who lost to him on his first race, lost with him in his first race. Didn't like him. Didn't want to get back on him. And Victor and Bob had had a falling out years ago. Uh, and it was after they had already won two thirds of the triple crown was war emblem. They just kind of went sour on each other and that happens. And.
00:14:29
Speaker
You know, two days out, he's sitting there without a rider for this horse. And he said, you know, Victor was on war emblem and did really well. And war emblem was a hard, vicious horse. So let me give him a call. And, you know, Victor's as surprised as anybody who gets it, but, you know, gets up two days later, knows it's his Derby horse and beyond and makes his immense. And without Victor, you think about the things I'm going to just compliment what you were saying.
00:14:58
Speaker
The Derby, he got a lot of heat for hitting that horse 31 times down the stretch. But he had done two things to get him ready for that moment. Three weeks before the Arkansas Derby, he had held him back and made him take dirt in his face. And before that, he had always gone to the front and just pissed on people. He knew going to the Derby that he was going to get behind horses, that he would face trouble.
00:15:27
Speaker
and he needed to get a little seasoned about it, get used to it. And as he said, he goes, I'd rather lose the second Saturday in April than the first Saturday in May. So he does that. And then he went to the well on that horse. And, you know, that was a tough derby. That was his toughest race, probably in his career. He, uh, was only a length or so ahead of the time. And that was with Victor who's not, you know, usually that strong of a rider, taking both of them out of their comfort zone.
00:15:57
Speaker
to get to get the victory yeah i think it he had american ferrell had won all his races so easily up into that point that way he almost needed the derby as a as a prep race for the next two races in the triple crown like he needed the fitness boost uh... of that you know a real like he needed to go to battle for and enter in a race finally and he was he was that talented to hold off firing squad in the monster doorman
00:16:22
Speaker
and and still you know and then came back a couple couple weeks later and he was still like oh yeah he was you know still full of himself and actually got a boost instead of being drained out of the out of the derby no absolutely and you see that happen with the really good ones you know classic empire was not is not an american pharaoh but he had a tough derby and a lot of trouble
00:16:48
Speaker
and was a little short on fitness because they were playing catch up on injuries. And you saw that tough battle in the Derby show up in the Preakness, even though he couldn't hold off cloud computing.
00:17:01
Speaker
He ran a big race. He ran a winning race. So yeah, the Derby often becomes sort of that moment of truth where you figure out who's meant for this, who fits this, who can do this. And that's what happened with Pharaoh.
00:17:18
Speaker
So now what what also impresses me the most about what you're able to do with this book was it basically it comes out 11 months after the after the he wins the Triple Crown and so you were able to craft this
00:17:33
Speaker
craft this book over the course of less than a year and get it packaged in and published in under a year's time. So I really wanted to dive into how you're able to accomplish that and pull
Writing Process of a Journalist
00:17:46
Speaker
that off. Like, like when did, when did the book research officially start for you and even the book writing? Cause I imagine some things had to go like congruently so you could meet a deadline. You know,
00:17:59
Speaker
Couple things I'm uniquely and there's anybody who a is a newspaper journalist and be especially a sports writer You've got to be fast. You've written on deadline all your life you know how to take out your internal audit system and You know when you've got 10 minutes to write the Derby story, you just got to let it rip You can't really sit there and think about it and craft that heavily
00:18:27
Speaker
So those are the fundamental tools that I bring to these things. And there's mainly all but one book I've done on quick turnarounds. Uh, so that's, uh, I have this skillset that I can do that as I tell my wife is, you know, I may not write well, but I write fast and, uh, and it does, and it does, you know, I'm free. I'm okay with that. And they're people who are.
00:18:57
Speaker
far better writers and far better reporters and some are far more tortured and some take far toward longer and that's okay too. Everybody works within their system and since this is about the creative process you know that's the first thing you got to do is figure out who you are and what works for you. I read something I'm going to digress a little bit because it kind of perfectly sets this up. Please. Dan Jenkins wrote his
00:19:25
Speaker
memoir, his latest memoir, a year or two ago. And he's a guy that I started on the Texas circuit and I got to meet a couple times. But he says in his memoir, he talks about him and Gary Smith, who's another great Sports Illustrated writer, but he figures in the deep dive. He goes and spends three months with John Chaney over at Temple.
00:19:52
Speaker
with Bobby Knights and tries to get in their head and everything. And he talks about that. And he said, you know, I'm the kind of guy who likes to get a feel for something and an impression and then just roll with it. He goes, Gary spends a lot of time with people and really gets under their skin. And I love reading it, but I just don't like doing that. And, you know, those are two schools of thought. And we both know people who are each way.
00:20:20
Speaker
You know, I would like to think that I'm in the middle of it. Uh, I do my reporting. I think all good, uh, non, what do they call it? Nonfiction narrative. What's the fancy word they call it now? Long form, whatever that bullshit is. I mean, I think it's all driven by reporting. Okay. You've got to know your stuff. All right. And then what works for you is, you know,
00:20:46
Speaker
For this book in particular, I feel like the reporting started when I first made my first bet at Axer Bend in Omaha, Nebraska in the 70s. I had a base of knowledge that I just built on over the years. So that's when it started. I went through the Triple Crown and we're all covering the Triple Crown. So I knew the players. I mean, I knew Bob Bafford for 20 years. I've known
00:21:15
Speaker
Victor for 15. I know Ahmed Zayat for 10. You know, these were not strangers to me. These are people who, for better or worse, would talk to me. And we had all had our falling ins and falling outs over the years. So, you know, I'm up to speed there. But then after it's done, that's when you got to go back and identify the Francis Rellehans who had him on the farm, the McCathons. And you do that by reading all your contemporaries, you know,
00:21:44
Speaker
competitors, whatever you want to call them. Uh, Pat 40 at Yahoo, Tim Leiden at Sports Illustrated, the Louisville guys, because none of us can be everywhere during the triple crown. We all try to go do what we think is right for the story. We got a right for tomorrow. And you know, when I went back and read all that, I was like, wow, that's an interesting slice. Did that happen? And then you go back and you re-report it.
00:22:12
Speaker
and talk to them and try to tease a little more out. So that was a good, you know, several month process. Then you find some more stuff on your own. You tease that out. And the way I work is I can't write as I report and write in sections and say, OK, I'm going to write here. I've gotten this much done and I'm going to write this chapter. Some people do that.
00:22:42
Speaker
writers I've really admired do that. I just don't think like that and I need everything amassed in front of me. I need to know that okay I'm cutting off the reporting now and I am sitting down to write and outline wise
00:23:01
Speaker
What I try to do is I'm not even, I'm ADD enough that I can't even outline the whole frigging book. I try to outline the first three chapters and say, okay, this is where I'm going here. These are the three things and these anecdotes and incidents go here. And then I start writing because I feel like if you get too wrapped into a outline, you miss some discovery.
00:23:31
Speaker
because sometimes you're writing and something thinks, something you think of something else and you start tapping a little more and it leads you a whole different alley. And then you go back and you say, yeah, you know, that would work here too. That would work better in fact. So then you start kind of picking what you do. So, you know, I want to have a decent mastery of the material. I want to know what I know.
00:23:57
Speaker
And when you first sit down, and again, these are all things I've read from other people and I've adopted it on my own. I'm no writing guru, but I'm like you. I'm a guy who's looked and listened and asked and had great mentors somewhere along the way. Somebody said, you're ready to write when you sit down and start typing without looking at your notes. And there's a certain truth to that. So, you know,
00:24:24
Speaker
Yes, you look at your notes at some point when you need to go back on something. But there could be days and weeks where I could keep going without my notes. And you got to be comfortable with doing that, too. So that's where I do. I get it all together to where I think I have a good hand on the material. And then I sit down and my sister, my older sister,
00:24:53
Speaker
gave me a great children's rhyme 15, 20 years ago that I tell myself, inch by inch, life's a cinch, yard by yard, life is hard. So instead of when you say, okay, I got six weeks to write 80,000 words, that freaks you out. It freaks anybody out. But if you get up and you say, okay, I'm going to do 1500 today and
00:25:19
Speaker
you go and you lay out your 1,500 and sometimes 1,500 goes to 3,000 or 6,000. Sometimes 1,500 becomes 300 and you shut your computer and go to a movie. Days happen like that. I once read that Stephen King sits down and can write 5,000 words in an hour with rock and roll music blossoms.
00:25:47
Speaker
Great, God bless them. I can't do that. But if you find what system works, so that's what's the system that works with me, is you sit down, you feel like you've mastered your material, you're a couple chapters ahead or a couple of beats in the story. And I hope we get to storytelling because I'm a huge believer that you've got to be a little bit like a novelist, a screenwriter,
00:26:17
Speaker
And you have to have beats and set pieces and a beginning, middle, and an end, and an all is lost moment and, you know, a rousing finish. I think that's just part of the hero's journey, Joseph Campbell, all that stuff. And, uh, you know, and in fact, that's my son's in sixth grade. Uh, you know, in the beginning of sort of intense English, he's parochial educated as I was.
00:26:45
Speaker
And they sent down, sent home, the English teacher is obviously very good, sent home a seven page, you know, broken down Joseph Campbell's miss in a hero's journey. And I snapped it out of his folder and I made a copy for myself because it's just a simple, you know, the totem. It just lays out. I mean, you look at Star Wars, look at the comic book movies. Those are all Joseph Campbell remade with different characters, but all the elements are there.
00:27:15
Speaker
and you know in a lot of ways a lot of stories are like that so you know i think that's a big deal so you kind of work through your uh... what's propelling you to tell the story and then i read it's another thing recently do you know who tom verducci is sports illustrated i guess definitely know the name familiar with his work for sure yet yet i don't know him but he's a baseball guy and probably do
00:27:41
Speaker
Roger Kahn of this air just a tremendous baseball and I'm not a huge fan But I'll read him because he tells me more than I know about baseball and he wrote He's got a book out right now the Cubs way about the Cubs winning the World Series and he wrote a hundred and forty thousand words in basically eight weeks and
00:28:09
Speaker
That's amazing. But somebody who's done close to that, not close, half of that, but knows how it does. But he said something that I so know the feeling. He goes, you get to the point near, for me, it's a little past halfway where you know you've got it figured out and you're really sorry it's going to end soon.
00:28:33
Speaker
And, you know, he said, he goes, I was starting to get regret and you kind of slowed down because you don't want it to end. You've hit your, your, you know, let's put it in horse, uh, racing parlance.
Engaging Readers through Storytelling
00:28:47
Speaker
You know, when those guys, when those trainers say he has a high cruising speed. Yeah.
00:28:52
Speaker
You've hit your high cruising speed. You are on the back stretch, just galloping them to death. You're in the zone. You're well within yourself. And that eventually happens when you're that. I know this is sort of a long-winded way to tell you, but that's kind of how I work. And these are the feelings I have while I'm doing it.
00:29:14
Speaker
uh... that's great it's great way of putting a night and i was quickly doing the math for you know you gave you yet eighty thousand words in six weeks and i was like to but what about a little over twenty two hundred words like if you engineer it backwards and you're like okay that two thousand you know that's a long featured a you could say maybe even like a thousand words in the morning thousand the afternoon you know when you break it down the inch by inch you were saying
00:29:40
Speaker
it doesn't seem quite as daunting. And it's just as long as you stick to your schedule and stick to your beats, find that cruising speed. Yeah, people like you and Verducci and other folks can really tackle what looks like a monumental project in a very short amount of time. Well, you know, here I'll tell you, I'll speak for me.
00:30:02
Speaker
that's amazing
00:30:32
Speaker
And again, people do things differently. There's no, and I know you've done 50 of these, talk to all kinds of people.
00:30:40
Speaker
I hope the through line is there's no right or wrong way to do any of this stuff. It's just your way. Of course. And you've got to be comfortable doing it your way. Yeah, and that's what's great about talking with a wide swath of people is that for anyone listening and interested, they can maybe cherry pick from this person, this person, and build your own routine and be like, oh, that's what Joe said about digesting
00:31:09
Speaker
that digesting the the monumental work in a short amount of time like that's great like it broke it down into manageable pieces and then you know this other parlay look let's talk a little bit storytelling in scene building in maybe when when you do you know you have enough research to then they'll build those narrative blocks of scene
00:31:28
Speaker
that propel you through, through this book and so forth. So exactly. That's cherry picking that thing. But let's, let's talk a little bit about storytelling. Cause that's really, that's ultimately why people will pick up an American Pharaoh who might not be like a horse racing person and like want to follow it through to the very end. Well, you know, it's in anything. It's in all news, news stories, features, magazines, long forms, whatever you want to call them.
00:31:58
Speaker
You know, especially this is something the times has taught me or been at the times has taught me is, okay, nobody picks up the New York times for sports. I'm, I'm okay with that. I get that, but we need to invite them in when they're looking for Trump news or economics or foreign, you try to a come up with a story that's going to intrigue them enough to go past the headline.
00:32:26
Speaker
Be pull them in with a lead that's going to say, huh, and then hopefully keep them with you. And you do that by storytelling. And, you know, that's what I've learned to work with is I am not at Sports Illustrated where sports heads are going to come read just because it's Sports Illustrated. So, you know, with American Pharaoh, the storytelling and I talked, talked about set pieces. I started with the sex scene because
00:32:54
Speaker
It encompassed, first it gave a look at a world nobody really ever sees, you know, how this happens. I mean, besides the true genesis of the story, this is what happens in the actual act. This is the money at stake. So you've got sex, money, and rock and roll right there. But you know what, basically you brought people into a behind the scenes thing that matters, that makes a lot of money.
00:33:24
Speaker
So you don't have to be a horse fan there. You just have to be curious about, Hey, you know, how do horses make and how do they get to this point? How much money is involved? So, you know, you, you got to start, you know, it's the old thing and it's what you said in the last sequence, everybody cherry picks something. And I urge you and anybody else out there, look up Elmore Leonard's rules of writing.
00:33:53
Speaker
And it was, I think the magazine, Times Magazine, ran it. It's maybe 1,500 words. It's like 15 rules. And the first one is leave all the boring stuff out. And it's really succinct. And it's really about showing, not telling. And to do that, you have to move. You do have to be a screenwriter, in a sense. And that's another form I mess around with.
00:34:19
Speaker
sold a couple and I'm trying to do more of. You got to pull people through with scenes and visuals and put them in the room or in the barn or out in the field or at the racetrack and it's basic the show don't tell and you know Elmore does it far more entertainingly than I do but it's really an essential piece of writing to look up and keep on because it really breaks down
00:34:48
Speaker
what this is all about. And he says it in his funny way. So, you know, the storytelling, you got to follow your manuscript there. There's a guy I know who is a producer friend of mine. He did my left foot, among other things, one a Tony, one a Oscar. And I was messing around with the play once and he's done a bunch of Broadway plays, an Irish fellow named Noel Pearson.
00:35:15
Speaker
And I said, you know, what's the secret of writing a plane? He goes, you have to have a good ending. And sometimes advice is that simple. And you do have to think about not overthinking anything. You know, it's like telling a story, like you would be telling your kid at night or around the campfire when you were a kid, or, you know, standing up in front of 2000 people in the speaking engagement, storytelling, I think trumps
00:35:45
Speaker
all other forms or all other parts of the equation. There's beautiful eloquent writers. There's wonderful thinkers. And these are all parts of it. And there's great sentence architects. But unless you've got a story people want to stay with, none of those components really matter.
00:36:10
Speaker
Did you ever, getting back to the writing when you were feverishly writing thousands of words a day, what was, and what you alluded to with Verducci having to slow down, did you reach a point towards the end of the writing where you had to step back and slow down and savor it because it was in fact coming to an end?
Advice for Aspiring Authors
00:36:34
Speaker
Oh yeah, absolutely there is.
00:36:38
Speaker
You know, that's, that's the perfect writing project. You want that. When people come to me who friends are working on or thinking about writing their book, usually first time books and you know, ask for advice. And I say, you know, the first thing is you better really love your subject and be passionate about it because otherwise it's work and you know, books written for money or on a whim read like books written for money or on a whim. Right.
00:37:07
Speaker
You know, you got to stay with it. It's a marathon, not a sprint. A lot of thought, a lot of time goes into it. You know, basically with no real guaranteed payoff, I mean, you get an advance, could be a little, could be a lot, but that's basically all you need to count, all you can really count on is your advance money. You know, James Patterson, John Gresham,
00:37:34
Speaker
those guys make royalties out the wazoo, but the rest of us don't. When you get to that point where, and it's not just, it's not, you don't want to slow down the saver. You're just thinking, wow, you know, I've got it now. I'm sorry. It becomes easy. And that's the greatest moment when you're, 1,500 becomes 4,000 passages in a half a day. And you're like, you know, I'm clicking on all cylinders.
00:38:04
Speaker
You know, when I write, it's interesting, when you write news stories too, especially more complicated enterprise things, I spend, and the same is with book, I spend 70% of my time on the first 500 words than I do, and the rest is for the next 1500, because you have to have it set up correctly. You have to have it already
00:38:33
Speaker
to draw it in and then it starts clicking in place like Legos on that and when I go back and when I do books the most like When I go back on drafts most my lifting goes on the first two or three chapters because You're so tight. I am a newspaper guy. So I'm used to packing it all in in You know very telegraph compact ways
00:39:03
Speaker
So it takes me a couple of weeks to unpack my language, to realize that I have a lot of time and a lot of space to tell the story more completely and more slowly. And, you know, that's just shaking off muscles. It's like a sprinter having to run the two mile. It's going to take you a little bit to figure it out. And, you know, so that's, that's things you kind of work your way through.
00:39:33
Speaker
Right, and you had mentioned Dan Jenkins as a book writer and even with newspapers and magazines growing up as a formative influence. So what were some other formative books and writers as you were coming up and earning your stripes that influenced your style and made you want to keep doing what you were doing? I was a kid who loved to read
00:40:01
Speaker
to the point where I'd go to bed with a flashlight, pull the head over my covers and sit there and read. And I read anything and everything. The newspaper, the sports section especially, I lived in Kansas City. There's a morning and afternoon edition. I read the Chip Hilton books. I read the Hardy Boy books. I had older brothers and they started handing down
00:40:27
Speaker
more challenging material. The two that I remember, the two first adult books I remember, one was sports, which was ball four, which was Jim Bountin, the pitcher on basically locker room high jinks. I mean, it was scandalous at the time. Now it would be very tame. And then my older brother gave me a book by Thomas McGuain called 92 in the shade. And it's about a fishing guide down in Florida and a young guy.
00:40:58
Speaker
It's a beautifully, elegiac, written book. And Thomas McWane's a guy I've devoured all his books since. And Thomas McWane lent me to Jim Harrison, who recently died, who for my money is the best American novelist I've read in my lifetime. He has written poems, he cooked, he had Disgusto for life.
00:41:25
Speaker
He wrote novellas, which are tremendous legends of the fall. The movie's based on that. I wanted his novellas and he's a must read there because he's very earthy and he's a great storyteller. The two things that kind of got me that I didn't know at the time that got me going into this deal is one summer when I was 13 or 14, I don't know what I did, but I got in trouble. And instead of grounding me for the summer, my mother said, you know what?
00:41:55
Speaker
here's your grounding, you're gonna read the great books this summer. And you know, I'm dating myself at that time, the great books was this little collection, you know, in a hard sleeve, they collected a paperbacks and it was Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, the Jungle Book, Treasure Island, La Morte de Arthur.
00:42:14
Speaker
you know, the classics. And I read them through the summer and just loved them. I thought it was just great storytelling. It put me in a world to be what kids are finding in those Hunger Games books now and that kind of thing. And so that kind of confirmed that I could read, that I enjoyed it. And then when I went to high school, I went to a Jesuit, all boys Jesuit, and I had two guys, Father Dave Bishop, who when we were sophomores,
00:42:44
Speaker
put the list of the 500 most underused words, according to New York Times Magazine, up on the board. And every day we had a quiz on 20 of them. And it expanded our vocabulary and kind of got me interested in words. And then my senior year, I had a teacher named Jim Hyman, who made us read Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare, you know, basically the classics again.
00:43:13
Speaker
And he was a wonderful teacher. So the emphasis was always on storytelling. What, what were they trying to do? What was the night's tale about? And so reading and writing just kind of became something I loved doing without thinking about. I mean, I didn't think I was going to be a writer. It just, most people were freaked out by papers. I was okay with them. I could write a paper. It didn't bother me. And, uh,
00:43:41
Speaker
I went to college at SMU in Dallas, Texas and was an English major with a emphasis in creative writing. And I had a very good professor there named Marshall Terry, who has a great backstory. He went to Kenyon College and was in the same class with E.L. Doctorow and Paul Newman. So he's like the third most famous guy and had written novels, really well received novels.
00:44:10
Speaker
and really a nice gentle guy and was really a great teacher. And he basically gently nudged me without saying, there's no way you're gonna be a novelist. He said, you have a great eye for things and you can tell a story. If I were you, I would think about nonfiction, narrative nonfiction. And that was the nudge my way.
00:44:40
Speaker
I didn't really know what that meant or how I was going to do it. And all of a sudden I've graduated from college and I needed a job and I'm a worthless English major, more or less. And, you know, another older brother of mine had worked at the Kansas City Star and then gone on into the business of journalism. He said, you know, you ought to apply to newspapers. So first I came up to New York and freelance for a year.
00:45:07
Speaker
and applying at newspapers every week and I convinced there's resumes of mine still in post office boxes at the smallest papers in America who had just never answered me. You know, you just sent them there. I did get an interview at the Dallas Morning News one day and I flew down there and the guy who was supposed to see me had broke his tooth at lunch and I'm sitting in his office and I heard his secretary go out
00:45:36
Speaker
and catch the executive editor and said, you know, this guy was supposed to see Ralph. Let's find somebody to give him 10 minutes and to move them on. And, you know, I hear this. I've been rejected widely everywhere. And so they send the city editor in a guy named Stu Wilk. And, you know, Stu says quite rightly,
00:45:59
Speaker
We don't really hire anybody unless they have two to five years experience at a metro daily of 200,000 or more and I'm sorry, and I said look this in rocket scientists. I was pissed and I was a little lippy I was like you know I've written all my life. This isn't hard. You're making a mistake all I needs a shot Thanks great still move me on out and
00:46:27
Speaker
I'm heading to the airport the next morning and he calls at about 7.30 and he says, look, I liked your fire. Here's what I'll do. I'll give you a job for six bucks an hour, no benefits. After eight months, you're either, we're either hiring you here full time or you have a stack of clips to take somewhere else. And I jumped at it and I started at night cops six to 2.30 in the morning, listening to scanners going out on
00:46:56
Speaker
murders and stuff and then worked my way through the Metro desk four to one in the morning one to ten ten to seven and you know basically crawled and then walked before I was ever really allowed to run and I think you know I came up very much the old-school way that you started in the cop shop and you did
00:47:22
Speaker
Plano school board meetings and you did the bus routes and you did weather stories You got the fundamentals first. So that's that's kind of what led Me to writing professionally it Evolved into a job as a national correspondent at the Atlanta Constitution, which was a great gig I lived in North Carolina and had from Florida to New York and
00:47:52
Speaker
Uh, and really what kind of got me to the times and transformed me to sports was I was 1988 to Charlotte Hornets were their first year in the NBA. Uh, I like everybody had read another formidable book in sports, the breaks of the game by David Halberstam, which tracked, uh, the Bill Walton Portland Trailblazers championship season.
00:48:18
Speaker
And it was, you know, the, the template was there. You follow a team, you examine the personalities. You've got your built in beginning, middle and end. I was down there. The Hornets were just starting. They were an awful expansion team, but this was a new South city. And, you know, I saw a Halberstamian type opportunity somehow sold a proposal.
00:48:46
Speaker
uh, wrote an absolutely awful book. Uh, you know, I remember the first time trying to do it fast. I remember it was due in September and it like July 1st, I had seven double stage space pages and had no idea what to do. And fortunately again, my older brothers had some experience and they came down and talked me through an outline and kept me on a schedule.
00:49:15
Speaker
And it is what it is. It's on remainder bins everywhere right now. But what that did was right after that Atlanta got to 96 Olympics and the paper said we need somebody who's familiar in sports but has a news background to be our lead Olympic rider. And so I moved to Atlanta and became that guy and that guy
00:49:44
Speaker
was able to go to South Africa for six months to write a series, was able to go to the declining Soviet Union, was allowed to go all over the world to do these kinds of stories. And, you know, that caught the times notice.
00:50:01
Speaker
I'm especially impressed by the early hustle and belief that you had in yourself in the face of trying to get that first job. Do you find that a lot of people just don't have that muscle or don't have that spine and willing to do that kind of work?
00:50:21
Speaker
you know, maybe eventually 15, 20 years down the road, get to a high profile high profile market.
Perseverance in Journalism
00:50:28
Speaker
Like, do you, do you feel people are lacking in that, that degree of hustle these days? You know, that's a nuanced, I'm going to try to be nuanced on that answer. Okay. When young people call and say, you know, what can I do?
00:50:43
Speaker
And the first thing I say is you've got to stay in people's face. I mean, you and I have been trying to do this podcast for a bunch of times. Okay. And I've wanted to do it, but then things stack up, you know, things happen. And unless you keeps coming back and saying, let's do it, I'm not going to do it. And it's not because I'm dissing you or the podcast. It just, you go to the bottom of my inbox and I forget about it. All right. And that's, that's what I tell.
00:51:13
Speaker
young people. I was like, you know, it's not enough to just send clips and a resume. You got to stay on people. You got to make them feel bad. You got to, you got to stay in their face. Now that's a hard thing to do. You got to be willing to, you know, eat rejection morning, noon and night. You got to realize that, you know, that's one way to look at it. The way I look at it is
00:51:37
Speaker
all they can say is no. And you know, I've heard no enough in a bunch of different contexts that it's okay. It's a word. It means you're not, it's not going to be easy. You're onto the next thing. That's fine. So there's one of it. The second part is I do see it. And especially in New York that young people, younger people, and I guess they call them millennials. I don't know. I read the same trend story as everybody else does, but I see,
00:52:07
Speaker
a sort of entitlement where they won't go back to the provinces and be night cops, that they should be writing for the New York Times now and they shouldn't really just be doing Metro, they should be writing essays about it, about what's going on in the world. It's sort of an overblown sense of themselves and
00:52:32
Speaker
Most of these people are very bright and will get to the jobs that they want. But I think there's been a reluctance to go through the fundamentals, to take the shit jobs and work your way up. And when they, what may look like shit jobs, show you the basics of our craft. And, you know, the basic of our craft is going out, finding new stuff and accurately
00:53:02
Speaker
portraying it and if you have a beat you learn to work people you learn to work what a story is and sources and you know something that somebody looks at and thinks is inconsequential you have a different view of because you've talked to three or four different people and you can build that out and you know that that's what uh I guess that's my pet peeve in journalism right now is that you know
00:53:31
Speaker
People want to call themselves investigative reporters. And there are some real ones out there. But in this day and age, I don't think you can just sit there and say, I want to investigate this and do anything meaningful. I think the greatest news breaking stuff, go back and look at Watergate, you know, look back at we've got this wonderful woman who's on ISIS right now, Rupini Kalamani.
00:54:01
Speaker
They know their subject. All these projects go from the bottom up. They bubble up. It's because they know things other people don't know, and they're passionate about it, and they can tell it. And they can bring it out. They can pull it out from a piece of ephemera or a piece of obscure knowledge and build out a story and a narrative around it. And I don't see the willingness for people to do the spade work first.
00:54:29
Speaker
It's kind of like what you were saying about the American Pharaoh book was really like a book forty years in the writing. You know, you're able to pull on that well of just going back to your Midwest roots and having this deep wealth of horse knowledge and it manifests itself in a book that comes out, you know, in 2015. Absolutely. And, you know, I mean, now it's easier for me to do. I mean, I've shifted in the last year or two to
00:54:58
Speaker
different things as far as news-wise, from sexual assaults on campus to the, I guess, the flim-flam-ness of daily fantasy. And, you know, I didn't have 40 years on either one of those, but I had 30 years of being a reporter who knows how to unearth information and knows how to talk to people. That's the other thing I tell young people is, man, this business is all about listening.
00:55:28
Speaker
And if you can talk to people and if you can get them to tell their story, and I'm going to, this is a staple story of mine, but it was one of the most informative things ever. When I'm a cub reporter in Dallas, I had to work Sundays and mother's day, I don't know, it must've been late eighties, mid eighties, uh, two 16 year old twin girls die in a car wreck.
00:55:58
Speaker
early that morning. And the weekend editor goes to me, uh, drape, go out, talk to the family and we need pictures of them. And I think, wow. And I'm petrified. I drive out to Mesquite, Texas, just praying they're not home. Cause I don't even know what to say or how to ask about it. And you know, I get there, there's tons of cars there. I know they're home.
00:56:26
Speaker
I knock on the door, you know, I'm Joe Drape from the Dallas Morning News. I'm sorry for your loss, but I'd like to talk to you about your daughters. And this mother and father who just had the most devastating thing happen to him, pulled me in, sat me down at the kitchen table. People were bringing me food and they just talked about these two girls because they wanted their story told. And, you know, in the, in the most terrible circumstance,
00:56:56
Speaker
it was important for them to do it. And you sit there and you listen. And then, you know, my epiphany was everybody has a story to tell and wants to tell it. And what you have to do is get it out of them. And some people are very forthcoming. Some people you need to play games with. Most people, you just need to sit and listen. And you get the material out because everybody has a story to tell.
00:57:26
Speaker
And when you're, you know, you've got, you're sort of on the coattails of this, of this latest book, you know, all the great work you do, like what, what excites you and what brings you back to the page and what might you be like working on now that's got you excited in the way that maybe American Pharaoh excited you and you're, you just can't wait to get, get it down on paper.
Future Projects and Excitement
00:57:48
Speaker
You know, I've got a couple, I got another book that I'm working on that is not going to be a quick turnaround.
00:57:55
Speaker
and it's about how you become a saint in the Catholic Church. And it's a massive left turn and it's far more of a whodunit than, you know, I'm giving it credit for. It's not a how-to, it's just sort of the behind-the-scenes machinations and how it works in Rome, how it works when you decide here that you think this man or woman is holy and, you know, it's not as
00:58:24
Speaker
It's a lot like running an election. You gotta go spend a lot of money, dig up a lot of stuff and prove at various levels that something's happening. So that's fun reporting lives. I've taken the Black Maestro, which is a book of mine about Jimmy Wakefield, the last black jockey to win the Kentucky Derby. And he did it in 02 and 03. And that was the most boring thing he did in his life. He went to Russia.
00:58:55
Speaker
You know, Hitler took over his farm in France. He's just this kind of like force-gump character. And I've turned that into a pilot in a hopefully limited series drama, like one of those 12-part things that's out there shopping around right now. You know, I just like to keep busy, Brendan. I mean, I like doing things and, you know, getting out of my comfort zone
00:59:23
Speaker
and trying to learn, I'm messed with basically every form of the written word. I've been miserable in some, better in others, and I still want to keep trying it. That's great. It seems like what keeps pulling you back is just this, it's the boy under the sheet with the flashlight. You're just drawn by story and narrative.
00:59:51
Speaker
That's true. And there's also I mean, what else? I've done this a long time. What else am I going to do? It's too late. It is too late for me to invent an app. OK, you know, and the one thing I do regret and I think you will appreciate this. Growing up in Kansas City, I had no idea what Wall Street was. And now living up here and realizing Wall Street's just like going to the racetrack.
01:00:21
Speaker
that it's gambling. I wish I would have had that indoctrination earlier, because I think it would have been fun. Very nice. Well, Joe, thank you so much for carving out some time of your morning here. I know it's coming up on post-draw time, so you've got to go head over and do that. But thanks again for doing this, and I can't wait to talk to you again in the future.
01:00:47
Speaker
Brennan, and good luck with all your endeavors. You've written a good book. Just keep moving. Thanks a lot. That means a lot. And definitely, we'll be in touch and have a great Belmont Stakes Day. All right. You too, my
Episode Conclusion and Farewell
01:00:59
Speaker
friend. All right. Later, Joe. All right. Big thanks to Joe Gray for coming by Creative Nonfiction Podcast headquarters. I love it, baby.
01:01:16
Speaker
I hope you do too. Now this episode, like all others, was hosted and produced by me, Brendan O'Mara. Feel free to ping me on Twitter, at Brendan O'Mara, and subscribe to my monthly reading list newsletter at my website, you guessed it, BrendanO'Mara.com. Lastly, I've always wanted to start a band.
01:01:39
Speaker
We should totally start a band. Well, man, let's rock and roll this. All right. Till next week, when we resume our interviews from the world of creative nonfiction, thanks for listening.