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Episode 424: Tommy Tomlinson on Aiming for One-Word Summations, the Blurt, and ‘Dogland’
611 Plays4 months ago
Tommy Tomlinson is a journalist and author of Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show (Avid Reader Press).
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
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Transcript
Introduction and Promotions
00:00:00
Speaker
Oh hey CNFers, you know the show takes a lot of time and part of what keeps the lights on here is if you consider hiring me to edit your work. A generous editor helps you see what you can't see. It could be something as simple as a pitch, proposal, an essay, hell even a book. If you need help cracking the code, you can email me at creativenonfictionpodcastatgmail.com and we'll start a dialogue.
00:00:26
Speaker
There's also patreon dot.com slash CNF pod for a few bucks a month. You support the show and be part of a cool community of nonfiction writers. Depending on your tier, he gets a nice face to face time with me to talk things out. Sometimes you just need to talk it out, man.
Writing Process and Creative Challenges
00:00:45
Speaker
What I do is once I've gathered a bunch of information and once I've had the the piece kind of simmering to my head for a while, I get out a legal pad and I do what I call the blurt.
00:01:01
Speaker
Oh hey, see youniz excuse my voice. I lost it a few days ago. I completely lost it. Cause I saw Metallica in Foxborough. I lost my mind and my best friend from high school who is not a Metallica fan, saw me in an altered state of consciousness and I'm not so sure he likes me
Guest Introduction: Brendan O'Mara
00:01:23
Speaker
anymore. This is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about the craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Hey.
00:01:31
Speaker
Wow. I've got Tommy Tomlinson here today, journalist and the author of Dogland, Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show.
Tommy Tomlinson's 'Dogland' and Writing Insights
00:01:45
Speaker
It's published by Avid Reader Press. And my little free library outside my house underneath the big pine tree. I saw a woman holding the copy I have of Dogland that I had put in the library.
00:01:58
Speaker
I startled her coming around the corner and I said, oh, that's a great book. And she was like, really? And I'm like, yep. And she took it with her. And I was like, yes. Now I get to put more books into it. And it is a great book where Tommy's creativity and zest for dogs and dog culture come through in this book. And at its core, it's really about connection. And that was the you know one-word summation Tommy conjured as he was writing this book, and that was kind of a true north compass for it, so to speak, capital A about. Tommy is the host of the Southbound podcast, the author of Elephant in a Room, a memoir about being overweight in America,
00:02:39
Speaker
and is written for Esquire, ESP in the magazine, and Gardening Gun among many others. He has a great substat called the Writing Shed, and he was once a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize as a colonist for the Charlotte Observer. Show notes and the parting shot to this episode are at BrendanAmerit.com, where you can also sign up for the Companion Rage against the Algorithm newsletter.
00:03:04
Speaker
I'm not really on social media these days, so the newspaper is my means of promotion, if you will. Book rex, cool. Cool links. Goes up to 11, man. Good times. First of the month, no spams. As far as I can tell, you can't beat it. Tommy was a great hang. Been a long wanting to speak with him, and this was Really just such a rich conversation about writing and reporting and dogs. And also a parting shot about Metallica and um turning my book in. Wow. Let's hit it.
Overcoming Anxiety in Journalism
00:03:39
Speaker
Riff.
00:03:49
Speaker
struggle for many of us introverted people to have to go out and then like, hawk these things in front of people, though it doesn't feel like quite like hawking, but it it kind of is. Hawker Jason. Oh, it's definitely, it's definitely hawking. And, and yeah, I mean, I think I've learned having been a journalist a long time i think i'm naturally introverted but sort of professionally extroverted where i can you know i can talk and and get a conversation going and and meet people and that sort of thing but i've it is sort of draining you know at the end of the day
00:04:27
Speaker
I'm pretty wiped out and it's not like, it's not like I'm digging ditches or anything, but I'm i'm meeting a lot of people doing a lot of stuff that's not necessarily my nature to do. And so, you know, at the end of the day, it's, it's, you know, I i need to, I need to sleep in a little bit the next morning.
00:04:46
Speaker
um'm totally I'm totally the same way. When I have more than a couple interviews in ah in a day, it's like I have no battery left at all. It's totally neat to plug me into the wall because even making phone calls, especially cold calls for me, is just always it's just not in my nature to want to do it. and i I am always filled with the sense of dread about it.
00:05:08
Speaker
And it almost never goes as bad ah when I get the person on the phone than it is in my head. But no matter what, it is it is ah anxiety inducing to have to
Creative Process and Research Methods
00:05:18
Speaker
pick up the phone. It just always will be.
00:05:20
Speaker
i wish i should yeah i was gonna say I wish I could tell you that goes away, but yeah I've been doing this a long time and I still get the cold sweats on that too. Yeah, yeah there's even a ah line in Elephant in the Room too where you're like you know you you would yourself with like ah you know a reward of some kind you know if you're making that difficult call. It's like, okay, then I can go and you know, you know and treat myself with something, but it's the it's yeah it's that nature of like, yes, sometimes we do have to like psych ourselves up somehow just to make do something that is on its surface as simple as just dialing a few phone number a few numbers.
00:05:54
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you just never know what you're going to get on the other end. And and my wife and I talk about this all the time. the It's the lack of information that drives us crazy. So until you make that call, you can only imagine what it's going to be like. And your imagination tends to go to the worst possible outcome. and so And like you said, it's almost never as bad as you imagine it might be.
00:06:23
Speaker
But until you do it, you can't know that. And so your brain kind of fills that vacuum. For sure. And I also love this ah this notion, and I love talking about this, especially with sports writers, is when we think of the great athletes that we have revered over over the years. And so often they are, of course, physically gifted. But a lot of that physical giftness is tethered to film study and they're always studying be it defenses their own technique and I love extrapolating that to to writers and how yeah we can yeah we can write in our journals and write columns and articles all we want but at some point or another you do really have to do the film study and I wonder for you like when you when you lock into a piece of writing be it your own or someone else you really admire what's the nature of your film study when you're looking to get under the hood
00:07:19
Speaker
Well, I start by just casting as wide a net as possible. And so, for example, on this dog book, I just, you know, set up a bunch of Google alerts about dogs in the Westminster dog show and that sort of thing. I tried to figure out where information might be incoming, like academic papers, things like that. I, you know, went through,
00:07:44
Speaker
Amazon and just searched for dog books and, you know, clicked on a bunch that I found and um thought that might be useful. And then I just started like, gorging on this stuff, you know, as swallowing as much as I could. And what I found out in this case is that the the amount of information out there on not just dog shows, but dogs in general is, was really overwhelming for me. And it took a long time.
00:08:14
Speaker
for me to not be really intimidated by the idea that I was never going to know enough. I was never going to be the kind of expert who would be able just to like remember everything about this or speak with absolute authority on these subjects. I had to sort of figure out what I wanted the story to be then.
00:08:38
Speaker
And then sort of narrow my focus to the parts of the research that would be helpful for that and that but that took like probably a year or so before I did that I've got, you know, a big bookcase over here with a bunch of dog books on it magazines and all that stuff I have.
00:08:57
Speaker
files and files in pocket online with like thousands of magazine articles and academic papers and all that sort of thing. It just it was just a fire hose of information that I had to like kind of deal with for a while before I could figure out how to cull that a little bit and make it more manageable.
00:09:19
Speaker
Yeah, at what point in the in the process and the formulation of, let's say, your point of view in this story, did it did it finally kind of click into place? I had thought about what I wanted the book to be about for a while. And I had kind of various ideas about you know about happiness and yeah well i like what I like to be able to do whenever possible.
00:09:49
Speaker
is to kind of narrow the whole piece down to one word. Like, what's this what's this story really about? And in a book length, it's never going to be just about one thing, but what sort of the North Star that I'm aiming toward is I write. And in this, it took probably a year or so at least to do this, but I finally settled on the idea of connection.
00:10:15
Speaker
You know, dogs and people have built this bond, this connection over 30,000 years. What does that mean? And what is, what does each side get out of it? Then more narrowly in the dog show world,
00:10:31
Speaker
people have you know figured out dog handlers and people like that have figured out how to make this connection with show dogs in a way that is entertaining and enlightening and makes for good TV and all that kind of stuff. How does that work and what do both sides get out of that? And so that whole idea of the connection, you know, the in the show world, at least the handler and the dog are literally leashed together.
00:11:00
Speaker
you know, they're connected ah in a physical way, as well as sort of a psychological and emotional way. And so I thought exploring connection in its different forms was sort of what I wanted the big picture of the book to be about, you know, while we talk about text and subtext, you know, what's the book about? It's about you know, following a show dog through the Westminster Dog Show and exploring the history of dogs and people, that's sort of the plot. But what is it really about? It's about connection and why that's meaningful, why do we need it, and how dogs and people provide it for each other. In what ways did this exploration of of connection make you evaluate the connections in your own life?
00:11:50
Speaker
That's an excellent question. I mean, i I think toward the end of the book, I come up with sort of a limited theory of happiness. you know it's not It's not anything that's going to like ah shock the scientific world. Nobody's going to be writing academic papers about it. But I got of i had to think about you know the ah the original question I started this book with is, are show dogs happy?
00:12:14
Speaker
And I kind of came to some conclusions on that and came to some conclusions conclusions on how dogs become happy and what they get out of the human relationship and how dogs make us happy. And I, you know, I've certainly applied some of those ideas to my human relationships, you know, because sometimes I think we I know with the people close to me sometimes, the people I share a household with, a lot of the the conversations we have tend to be sort of transactional. Like, you know, when are you doing this so that I know when I can do that? And, you know, who's got to take the garbage out? Who's washing the dishes tonight? Who's cooking all that? The sort of stuff that is required to make a household go, but it's not really
00:13:05
Speaker
getting anything meaningful on a deeper level. And so you know dogs can figure out how to get to our deeper emotions. And I realized that sometimes, and by just normal conversations with the people I care about,
00:13:21
Speaker
I was doing more of the transactional stuff and less of the kind of emotional stuff. And so it led me to, I hope, start to start to form deeper relationships with the people I care about. You ah you note in the in the book, too, how whats let's say you know when a when a dog dies and we're we're forced with that or tasked with that ah that awful day, that awful decision of having to let them go, that oftentimes ah so We feel a deeper sense of sorrow for for this yeah wonderful critter that we've been able to spend, I don't know, let's say 10 years with versus say even a loved one, be it a ah parent or a sibling. like that ah The pain is almost more more ah more intense for for the for the dog than it is for a person.
Emotional Impact of Pets on Humans
00:14:15
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's a couple of reasons for that. One is that in general, our relationships with dogs are less complicated. you know Dogs never come home late at night. Dogs don't argue with you and over politics at Thanksgiving, you know all those things. And so the relationship generally has, it's not quite as gray. It's more black and white. Also, I think dogs sort of invert the natural order of things. in the sense that they're sort of, you know, children in a sense, and we don't expect our children to die before we do. um Although if you, you know, take on a pet, at least subconsciously, you know immediately that that's probably gonna happen, but you can sort of like push that thought off into the future until it actually comes about. And then I also think that often with pets,
00:15:10
Speaker
It tends to happen more suddenly and with, and with less a forethought, you know, often our, let's say our parents or people we care about have a long illness that might be diagnosed early. You have a lot of time to sort of prepare for it and think about it, you know, say what you need to say to your loved ones. You know, that's our thing with dogs. It's often.
00:15:34
Speaker
a diagnosis where they say, you know, your dog, let's say has cancer or whatever, and we can't really do anything about it. And probably the best thing would be to go ahead and put them to sleep now. And always, you know, that, that decision is sudden in a way that it's often not sudden with the humans in your life.
00:15:56
Speaker
And so that terror, that fear, that that sorrow hit you in a way, you it's like one big wave as opposed to a lot of little ones. And so it really slammed you. And so even if you love the human being more, which is almost always the case, that pet's death can hit harder. Yeah.
00:16:22
Speaker
Yeah, 100 percent. And I know with um the two dogs that we had, and let's see, Jackie, we had to put him to sleep in 2017 and Smarty in 2018. It's like, you know you know the day is coming, and they're fine. And then suddenly, both of them, they were just kind of like good, good, good. And then all of a sudden, like off a cliff.
00:16:43
Speaker
and it was just like a wrecking ball came through and then we had to really gird ourselves and try everything we could and then eventually you know you are left with just like this is the day I have to call the vet and carry them in there and you know have that awful moment you know of mercy I guess but at the end it's still ah you know it just ripped your heart out Sure. And I think ah the other part of it is, it's your decision for that. You're deciding to do that for and to that creature. Yeah. You know, in in many cases, not all cases, you have some control over, you know, if you're sick and you tell the doctor, you know, stop giving me medicine or whatever. For many people, the
00:17:31
Speaker
method of their passing is somewhat under their control but when you have a dog you're making the decisions for it and they're innocent too you know they don't they didn't do anything to you they didn't um they didn't bring this on themselves in any way it's not like you know they're lifelong smokers or something like that you know where they might share some some blame for what's happening to them. They're innocent in a way that no human really is. And so all those things play into that, that sledgehammer feeling when you, when you have to let them go. Yeah.
00:18:08
Speaker
Yeah, when you were ah yeah when you when one of the interludes, when you when you talk about Fred, I was just like, ah this I'm like, this is gonna be you know this is gonna be great, but like I know where this ends, and I'm like, God damn it,
Narrative Techniques in 'Dogland'
00:18:21
Speaker
Tommy. And and it you know and of course it goes there, and it was ah you was definitely a point I was reading it, and you I had my my dogs around me, and it's just like as I'm reading that, I'm like i'm just like sobbing. As I'm reading this, I'm like, shit, this happens. well God damn it. yeah Yeah, well, one of the things I wanted to do in this book is take people through all the emotions, right? You know, when you have a dog, when you love a dog, there are all these moments of incredible joy. There's these like hilarious things that they do. There's these moments when you feel like they kind of see into your soul. There's the moments when they're kind of reading your mind somehow and
00:19:02
Speaker
and you're reading there's all these great moments that you have with them and then there's the end and that's very sad and painful and sorrowful but that's part of it too and so I wanted in the book to not leave any of those on the table. I wanted to walk you through all of it and so that's kind of part of why that was in there.
00:19:24
Speaker
And as you're, let's say, as you're really starting to coalesce this this focus of connection and then particularly the the relationship, or like let's say like Stryker is kind of a through line throughout the book and the dog circle. It was this incredible, ah highly decorated, up was it Samoyed? Is that how you pronounce?
00:19:47
Speaker
Samoyed is a way normal people like me, and you say it in the dog show world, they call it Samoyed because that's closer to like the original Russian pronunciation. They're particular about that sort of thing. Oh, I bet. Yeah. Well, exactly. When you take an anthropological deep dive into a subculture of this nature, it's like you got to like get those details right because I'm sure there's some some dog person out there who's like, you got this this little detail wrong. You're like, wow. yeah I'm a journalist and you know, I try to get it right. But my God, I got i gotta tell you, that's the thing guy I was, had the most anxiety with about this book was that, cause I, you know, I came in as a total novice and exited as pretty much a novice too. Like even having written a book about it, I don't know nearly as much as your typical doc show handler breeder or somebody like that. And I was really worried about getting
00:20:43
Speaker
you know, important stuff wrong. So I had two people who were involved in the dog show world pretty deeply. And one of them who's also a vet, I had them kind of be early readers on the book. And they pointed out, you know, in the dress, a lot of stuff I had not gotten right or had not understood the nuance of especially. And so that was really helpful to me.
00:21:07
Speaker
as I was going through it to to feel like somebody who really knew what they were talking about had read it and sort of vetted it. Yeah, it's, uh, for years I covered a lot of horse racing and wrote a lot of columns and even yeah had a, uh, just some other longer stuff too. And it's, um, it's a sport that has it's a really its own language. and And, and around this time, the triple crown season of Kentucky Derby Preakness in Belmont,
00:21:34
Speaker
and ah if it creeps into the main culture just for a couple days, you hear people on the radio like hosts and stuff like this last horse that won the Preakness and there's big partnership involved and someone's like this is amazing like you know people bought bought into this horse like this should be like a thing that more people can buy into horses like well this has been going that's been going on for decades and But it's one of those things where if you don't know those nuances of a really intricate subculture, if you overstep yourself in a sense, you you quickly reveal your ignorance with respect to that particular subculture.
Translating Niche Cultures
00:22:11
Speaker
Absolutely. and And yeah, every subculture has its own language, its own rules, its own etiquette, its own lore. All those things are important to know. And I wanted, it was a balance for me as I got into it and started to learn more. I didn't want to pretend I knew stuff I didn't. So I didn't want to like come in talking the talk too much because then people would assume that I knew stuff that I didn't know yet. And so I tried to be in talking to people, even once I started to know a little stuff, I wanted to talk about it in as much layman's terms as possible. So that as people told me, so if they didn't skip over something that they thought I already knew, but I wasn't clear
00:23:00
Speaker
Yeah, well, it gives a ah sense of um you know a narrative of revelation. So like as you're learning, so are we by extension. And so yeah, it allows us to go through you know biology 100 before we get to you know organic chemistry way on the other end of the spectrum. Right. And this is my favorite kind of reporting. you know I think about it a lot of times like I'm a translator. you know My job is to go into this world that people might be curious about, but really don't know a whole lot about, go in and sort of learn it like going into the jungle or something. And I emerge and I'm able to tell the story.
00:23:41
Speaker
in a way that a larger audience can understand, but also is truthful and accurate to the way that the people you know in that subculture also understand it. And so I really like doing that kind of reporting. It's it's always been my favorite kind of work.
00:24:01
Speaker
Yeah, and ah baked into that is always – when you're talking to experts, there are certain things that they take for granted because they they just they're steeped in it. And you know and there you come into it as a novice. You don't know the difference between you know this this, that, and the other. And so you have to have ah a certain measure of – of courage to just be like, you know what? Talk to me like I'm a 12-year-old. but I really don't know what's going on here. And sometimes ah in our own insecurities, yeah we don't want to sound like an idiot. But I think oh the foundation of being kind of a good reporter is like, I'm kind of an idiot here. like Just ah help me help me be less idiotic. And you are my guide to do that. Yeah, it's that whole thing about there's no such thing as a dumb question. you know yeah i i My friend,
00:24:50
Speaker
Joe Pozenanski, the sports writer who I've known for like 35 years. when he He told me a story one time about when he was a young reporter covering baseball, I think he was covering the Cincinnati Reds maybe, and somebody had shown up for like an old timers day. In my mind, it was like Ferguson Jenkins, but that may not be right. Anyway, Joe went over to him and asked the question that he really didn't know the answer to, which was basically like, what's the difference between a curve ball and a slider?
00:25:22
Speaker
And when he asked that, a lot of the old hands in the locker room, all of the media guys kind of snickered at that, right? and But the the pitcher, whoever that was, started showing him the difference, started talking about the difference in the grip and how the arm moves and all that sort of thing. And Joe noticed as he was explaining it, all the old guys were sort of nudging in closer, because they didn't really know either.
00:25:48
Speaker
And, but they pretended to know because they thought it was important that they be seen as sort of having expertise in this field. And so I've always, I learned a lot from that story and just from doing it myself that, you know, if you go into it and and you do, you say something like, pretend like I never, I don't know anything about this. Just tell me like you would tell a little kid.
00:26:15
Speaker
some people will sort of snicker at you and stare at you and and talk down to you in that moment but many people will not and they will they're excited about somebody new wanting to learn about it this thing that they know a lot about and those are the people that end up being the sources of my stories. This is why I ended up with Laura King who's the Stryker's dog handler and the the person you kind of follow through this book.
Effective Storytelling and Reporting
00:26:42
Speaker
One of the reasons she's that person in the book is that she was she didn't talk down to me and she understood what I was trying to do and helped explain that and really talk to me through how this world works in a way that a lot of other people either didn't want to or couldn't. There is all this um
00:27:03
Speaker
language and lore and stuff that you have to kind of figure out when you're in this new world. And then I think the job is to, you know, not overuse it when you're translating or if you use it to try to figure out where you have to explain it. You know, so there's a lot of like stuff in this book that I feel like I had to explain from kind of the basics of like how a dog show works. There's a little, you know, section of the front of the book that just lays that out in the very basic level to how
00:27:36
Speaker
dogs accumulate points to become champions to you know all that to how the judging works with confirmation and breed standards and all that stuff and I you know I always try to make that as brief and entertaining as possible but it's stuff you have to know to make the rest of the following stuff make sense and so you know I always kind of enjoy that task of figuring out how to condense this stuff and explain it in a way that it doesn't feel like you know homework. um And it doesn't feel like a something you have to, a bitter pill you have to swallow before you get to the good stuff. yeah This will be on the test. This will be on the test, right. And so that kind of stuff. And and a lot of that is figuring out
00:28:29
Speaker
what of it I can actually leave out, you know, and there's because there's a, there's a ton of stuff that I know now, that's not in the book, because ultimately, I decided um that the reader didn't need to know that stuff. And so that you know, the the more, the more savvy, and the better you are, and learning this stuff over time, the easier it is to figure out what to leave in and what to leave Yeah, that's always such a a hard hard decision. you know This – at least the the galley I have right through the epilogue is 224 pages. Odds are you probably had enough material to write twice this, but eventually you know you do have a way – And through experience, you're like, OK, that's cool detail, but it doesn't ultimately serve this narrative. So when you're having those conversations ah with yourself or a trusted reader, you know, ah it's just how do you ultimately make that judgment of like, I like this, but ultimately it's it's got to go on the floor. The main rule is, does this fit the story I'm trying to tell? And and does it tell me something? Does it tell the reader something new along the way?
00:29:45
Speaker
So for example, late in the book, I have a chapter where I ah have a couple of short interviews with kind of well-known people who are who had dogs, have dogs. um Scott Vampel from yeah ESPN is in there. This woman, Tracy McMillan Cottom, who's an amazing sociologist at University of North Carolina. She's in there and they both have dogs. Scott lost a dog. um They tell stories about how it's changed their lives. Well, I talked to a third person too. I talked to this guy, Joss Dawsey, who's a covers the, used to cover the Trump White House or the Washington Post, now covers national politics, that sort of thing. He had a dog that, that he adopted and came into his life and kind of changed his life too. And it's a really good story. It's a lovely story. I wrote it, you know, intending to put it in the book, but as I went through, I kind of realized that it was redundant in a way with the other stuff that I already had in there.
00:30:48
Speaker
And so even though I loved, even though I like Josh a lot, loved the way he talked about his dog, um I ended up cutting that section, which is like, I don't know, 750 words or something like that. I cut that from the book. Now, here's something that's kind of new in this world we live in. um I'm probably gonna,
00:31:11
Speaker
give that section to readers of my newsletter in the next week or two as like a, as like bonus material. So there is a way to sort of deal with some of that stuff now that there didn't used to be in the, it was harder to do in the past. So I do feel like that could be still useful down the road. But then there were a lot of other smaller things, you know, like a paragraph or two somewhere or a sentence or two even, I mean, there's probably, I've got a file of cuts that is probably runs 20 or 30,000 words in itself. That's just stuff I cut for one reason or another, either I didn't like the way I wrote it, or it, you know, match something else somewhere else, or I just decided not to go down that particular rabbit hole.
00:32:00
Speaker
And so the reason I like kind of aiming toward one word or one thought in a book is because that makes that decision to leave something in or out a little easier. Because, okay, is this about connection? And does it tell the reader something new about connection that they didn't know before they read it if it? If it doesn't meet those two requirements, then it should not be in.
00:32:28
Speaker
Do you keep a post-it note or something of that nature as ah as a North Star or a compass to so you are on that true line? I had that connect word connection on a post-it note, but you know it was easy enough to remember. I mean, it's not like I'm trying to remember ah you know like a quote or something that um I'm working from. um So that was you know on my desk, literally, but also on my mind the whole time. And um and sometimes you know you forget. And i would I would write for a day
00:33:07
Speaker
I know I look up at the end and I'd written, you know, a thousand or 1500 words or whatever. And it was just, it didn't fit because I had wandered off down a ah side path that might've been good writing, might've been interesting information, but it didn't really fit what I was trying to do. And so that went into, you know, the trash bin.
00:33:36
Speaker
You you s saying you know good writing and you know even recognizing that and you in yourself, which ah ah in and of itself for many writers is might might be hard to admit or even give ourselves credit for when something really has some snap-crackle and pop to it.
00:33:52
Speaker
So when you when you're in the throes of something and it's just it's it's kind of feeling good and you you read something and you're like wow I really like that. you know what what is ah What is it about you know you and your style that you're like oh I like the sound of that. This is this sounds like me and true to my voice.
00:34:11
Speaker
The bigger picture for like my whole career, what i what i think of what I think of when I try to write is I want to write about big ideas in very simple language.
00:34:26
Speaker
um That comes from um my background. My mom and dad were not very educated people. They were cotton pickers, sharecroppers down in South Georgia. They both had to quit school and elementary school, ah but they were voracious readers, very intelligent people, but they didn't have like the facility of language that you know a college graduate would And so, but they were also understood and lived big emotional lives. Like they went through the same big emotional beats that any human being does. And so they understood the emotional stuff. They just didn't have like Shakespeare's language to express it in. And so I wanted to reach people like that with my writing. And so I always think if I can write about
00:35:19
Speaker
big, important issues, emotional beats, and do it in a way that anybody who picks up the book or the magazine piece could understand it. That's when I'm at my best.
00:35:32
Speaker
And so when I write a passage that hits the mark there and I feel like anybody could pick it up and read it, but it still hits hard in some way to to any of those people. That's when I feel like I'm doing really well. When I, when I tend to not do well is when I get a little too enamored of my own vocabulary.
00:35:55
Speaker
you know, and I start to write stuff that's a little too compound complex or too many big words or, you know, try basically trying to show off a little bit. I think the more I show off, the less effective I am as a writer.
00:36:13
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And some I totally agree. And it's um and it's sometimes we we grow up with the the writers that we admire be a novelist or short story writers or great columnists or great feature writers. You know there are those flourishes that in those pyrotechnics that really make us lean in to those pages. And we're like I kind of want to do that too. ah But but when you do at times el of I just in general you just elevate too much try too hard it comes across is it just comes across flat stale and it and just like like you say it doesn't feel like it's you and you're trying too hard and that's ultimately what you kind of don't want to do you want it to feel easy for the reader and
00:36:57
Speaker
I can put it on a tuxedo. I've worn a tuxedo a few times in my life. um It is ill-fitting on me. um And I got to feel the same way about my writing. I can write a pretty fancy paragraph if you made me do it at gunpoint. um I could write something that feels literary.
00:37:18
Speaker
you know, in that sense. And sometimes I do not thinking about it. And I go back and look at it and go, you know, that's not very good. It's that Elmore Leonard rule, right? If it feels like writing, take it out. um I do feel in a sense that that's ah the case for me, not for everybody, obviously, but for me, that if it feels too fancy, if it feels too much like I'm trying too hard, that it's probably not landing on the reader very well because it's like a movie where there's so many special effects that you start thinking about the special effects rather than like what's going on in the movie. yeah You tend to lose track of like who the good guys and bad guys are and why it matters because so much cool stuff is blowing up and I don't want that. I want people to come away with
00:38:14
Speaker
having really felt something meaningful from the story I write and whether they remember some particular sentence I wrote, no longer matters to me at all. If afforded the time, do you find that a writing issue is often the result of a reporting issue at its ah at its root?
00:38:36
Speaker
almost always, you know, John Franklin, who was one of the, the guys I sort of looked at as a mentor. I didn't know him, but at his, his work, he had a book called writing for story that I remember.
00:38:49
Speaker
I devoured when I was first starting out all of this. There was a quote that the writing coach of my first newspaper used to pass around from John that said, meaning comes from reporting. The answer to most of the existential questions in journalism is pick up the phone.
00:39:07
Speaker
And that is, I found to be true in my work, certainly when I was a daily columnist and didn't have time, a lot of times I would go back and look at my stuff and the fanciest writing I did was when I knew I had to write around something.
00:39:24
Speaker
I didn't have the information that I needed and I didn't have time to get it. So I made like a really pretty paragraph, hopefully to distract you from the fact that I didn't really have the goods. And I think that's still true for me, you know, I will you know, look back at stuff I've kind of overwritten in a way, and it's because I don't know something that I need to know. And I either try to go find it out, or if I can't find it out, I skip it or, you know, get around it the best I can. But I don't try to like, patch over it with fancy writing as much anymore. Yeah, and in the process, be it reporting or writing, which one appeals most to you and makes you feel the most alive or engaged?
00:40:12
Speaker
there I think there's a point in the reporting for me. There's several stages at which my natural anxiety about the project gets lessens a little bit. And the big one for me is when I feel like I've done enough reporting that if I had to go write the book tomorrow, I could.
00:40:38
Speaker
you know And that sometimes for me is a matter of weeks, sometimes is a matter of months. This book it was probably at least a year, maybe a year and a half into the reporting, where I felt like I got to the point where you know if if the world stopped tomorrow and my editor called me and said, you have to write this book in two weeks, you you don't have there's no more time for reporting, just go do it. I felt like I could produce something worthwhile.
00:41:06
Speaker
um And that's always a huge load off my shoulders because in the beginning I'm just trying to learn, figure stuff out, make connections between things, put a shape to it all, all those sorts of things. And that often, you know, it takes a long time to come together for me. And sometimes it doesn't really come together until I actually get pretty deep into the writing and that's really like sweat inducing for me when I'm writing I've written a lot and I still don't really know what I'm talking about and often that does mean going back and and doing some more reporting and making more sense of it but that's I think
00:41:48
Speaker
The reporting part is more satisfying to me in that sense because it's the thing that eases my anxiety the most when I know I've got the goods, so to speak. The writing part, the pleasures are there, but they're a little smaller. They're like, oh, that passage is pretty nice. Or, oh, I feel like, you know, for me, the the big part of the writing is when I get to the,
00:42:17
Speaker
really emotional points, the the beats that I really wanna land on pretty hard, I wanna make sure I tell those ah really well in a way that kind of extracts the emotion from it that I want the reader to get out of it. And that's important too, and it's meaningful to me, but it's not quite the same level of relief I have when I get enough reporting done.
00:42:44
Speaker
Do you find that you have to or you've had to learn how to get comfortable with writing before you were quote unquote ready? That way you're revealing potholes in the road as you're laying down road. You're like, okay, this is a place where I might have to go back for some reporting and so forth.
00:43:03
Speaker
Yeah. And I think I learned that just running for the newspaper because you're always on a tight deadline and you know, you're always having to like, you know, you don't have time to like wait and do all your reporting and then write, you know, I was doing for a while there for the observer. I was doing like four columns a week. And so I'd have to go out and make a couple of calls. I will come back and start writing and have calls out or, you know, need to look up something and then go back and you know, add stuff or or change what I already written, cause I had new information. And so that was, it was constantly, it was never just like a shift from one to the other. It was always sort of both at once. And that's always been the case, even as I'd started longer pieces, you know, I will, if I think of something to write, I go ahead and write it. You know, whether it's going to be right at the beginning of the book or something that may end up in,
00:44:02
Speaker
you know, eight chapters down or whatever, I go ahead and write it and just stash it somewhere and then come back to it. And when I come back to it, it may be that I don't need it anymore or it may be that it fits better somewhere else. But I've already started it. And that's sort of in my subconscious as I go through the piece. I know that's out there for me to try to maybe connect other things to as well.
00:44:29
Speaker
And so it's always all kind of mixed together for me. And I can't, you know, I can't afford to wait till I'm done with the reporting because the reporting, I mean, for me, goes up almost to the very end. yeah I mean, I was still looking stuff up, you know, two days before I had to turn the manuscript in. And so, you know, and there's a scene in the book that I had to go back after I thought the main reporting of the book was finished.
00:44:58
Speaker
And I had to go back and like drive up to Michigan and spend a couple of days up there for a scene that probably lasted 10 or 15 minutes. But I had, you know, once I realized it was happening, I knew I had to have in the book and I was well on the way to like what I thought of as being done by then. And that sort of rearranged a lot of things in the book. And so if I had waited I would have been really screwed because I wouldn't have all the other stuff I wouldn't have written yet. Are you much of an outliner or a planner when it comes to, you know, writing long pieces and especially book length stuff?
Organizing Thoughts for Writing
00:45:39
Speaker
I am absolutely terrible at it. It's my worst. It's my worst, uh, the worst part of doing this for me, the part I've always found the hardest and the part that I'm, I have never acquired good habits at. So here, I'll tell you what I'll but i do with a kind caveat that nobody else should do this. Um,
00:46:03
Speaker
What I do is once I've gathered a bunch of information and once I've had the the piece kind of simmering in my head for a while, I get out a legal pad and I do what I call the blurt, which is I just start writing down everything that's in my head. And it could be like two words like Stryker's coat, or it could be a quote that I remember. It doesn't have to be accurate at them at this moment or a little scene or something like that. And I just write and write and write.
00:46:33
Speaker
on this legal pad until I've like exhausted my brain. And so I can't think of anything else that um that is in my head about this piece that I'm doing. And at a book length thing, I might fill up a whole legal pad or maybe a legal pad and a half, hundreds and hundreds of little items. And so then I go back and I read through those items And I start seeing ones that sort of fit together. Like this is about judging dog shows, for example. Oh, and this little bit has to do with judging dog shows and this little bit. And so I start to, I got a fresh legal pad and I start to rewrite this whole thing, but grouping things together.
00:47:22
Speaker
And so you know if I'm lucky, when I get to the end, I might have eight or 10 or 12 sort of large groups oh that these things kind of fit in. And those basically become the chapters of the book. And then I'll subdivide those groups into smaller groups, and those becomes become the sections of the chapters and that sort of thing. And I'll always go back and like,
00:47:49
Speaker
relook at stuff I've saved or, you know, you know, relook reread passages and books and that sort of thing. Because I don't count on my brain to remember everything, but I do count on my brain to remember sort of the major parts of the story. And then I supplement that with kind of re-researching stuff. And I found for me that this works as a way to sort of organized stuff in my head and then on ah on paper in a way that sort of tends to break down into a structure. Now that's worked for me so far. um i Like I said, I don't recommend it as as a way to work for other people. It may just fit how my brain works well, but that's kind of the way I do it.
00:48:41
Speaker
Yeah, and the thing about keeping things in your head in a way is that it's kind of self-pruning. You're like, if it's if it's good enough to stick in my head, then that's probably what should be in the book and versus throwing everything in there and then trying to prune out. You're like, you know what? If I'm remembering it, it's that that means that means more than throwing it all in and then trying to cut it out.
00:49:09
Speaker
That's probably true. Although I have to say, as I've gotten older, I have to pay attention to how well my memory is actually working. Yeah. And because I know there will come a point in which, you know, my brain won't function as well as as it has. And I won't be able to count on that. And I'll probably, at some point, maybe as soon as whatever the next big thing is, I'll probably have to come up with a better method to deal with this and I have friends who have like very super detailed you know methods of organizing and structuring their their work and one thing one thing I hope to do before I tackle whatever the next big thing is is to learn some tips and tricks from them so that I don't get myself in this pickle the next time.
00:50:00
Speaker
Yeah, you should ah talk to our mutual friend and acquaintance, Kim Cross. She is ah quite good at that. she was She was the first person I thought of. She's unbelievable. Yeah. And yeah, and she ends up, ah you know, in the acknowledgments, she along with, you know, Bronwyn and among others were some trusted ah readers of yours. And ah at what point do you feel confident sharing a work in progress to get notes? Well,
00:50:28
Speaker
For me, it's like when I have not the very first draft done, but ah ah you know a draft with some polish on it. and so you know it's kind of As I send it out to the editor you know who wants to see like an early version, I'll also send it to these early readers.
00:50:49
Speaker
And, you know, yeah I think it's very important to choose those people carefully because you want people who are fans of yours who want your work to succeed, but you don't want people who are just going to tell you that everything's great. You know, I have I have very good writer for friends.
00:51:08
Speaker
who I don't trust to be readers because they won't tell me what's wrong. you know they'll just they're They're great cheerleaders. They're just not great editors in that sense. So I remember for my first book,
00:51:25
Speaker
I sent it out to several people and and one of them was my friend Rosita Boland, who's a great writer in Ireland. And um she sent back the manuscript it it and marked it up. She had it on, marked it up on paper.
00:51:41
Speaker
And there would be one paragraph that she would like, brilliant and brilliant. And the next paragraph she'd mark through and it would say, rubbish. you know And that that's the kind of person you want. You want somebody to tell you when something's brilliant and when it's rubbish. And so for this book, I chose two or three people like Kim and Joe Posnanski and folks like that who I thought would tell me those things.
00:52:06
Speaker
I chose Bronwyn for those reasons and also because she had written a book about dogs, Pit Bull, which was an amazing book. And then the other people I chose, as I said before, people who are familiar with the dog world and would know whether I was talking out of my hat when I was talking about this stuff. And so was ah it was a really good group and I got ah a wide range of comments that were immensely helpful.
00:52:35
Speaker
something that I ah love, just kind of a nerdy reporter type question. I'm a notebook pencil junkie and I love, you know, if I could crack open a writer's backpacks when they're on reporting trips, I'd be like, I just want to rip it all out and throw it on the floor and see what's in there. ah Like, so for you, what are some like indispensable favorite tools of yours that make you feel, you know, ready to go on a reporting trip or or whatever?
00:53:02
Speaker
Um, I'm pretty simple, but the stuff I like, I really like. So these reporters notebooks made by, as a company called portage, I think they're the ones that are often standard in.
00:53:18
Speaker
ah newspaper newsrooms everywhere I've worked. They've used the same brand and you can buy them through the company or through Amazon or whatever. They're the sort of ones that fold over the top vertically. um They fit well in my back pocket. I use them all the time. I don't buy any other kind that's the only kind I've ever bought. I think it's weird how you learn why stuff works for you and why it doesn't. Those portage ones, when you fold, when you like turn the page, it doesn't get hung on the little wire spiral. Like I bought so many notebooks, where they get hung up. And I have to like, kind of by hand, like pull the paper through and they tear off the portage ones don't work that way. They're beautiful. For the end of the day, or I
00:54:05
Speaker
like a notebook that I just carry around with me every day even if I'm not on a reporting trip I carry around a moleskin like a pocket notebook I'm kind of picky about those too I like the soft cover ones because I put them in my pocket and I like the lined ones and so I always you know I buy them like a dozen at a time and there it's what I use as my day-to-day just carrying around making lists in a book but I also use the same notebook to keep a journal every day so at the end of the day when I'm on a reporting trip I'll sort of summarize what I did in that notebook I find that when I do it
00:54:45
Speaker
analog, long hand, I remember it a lot better than if I do it in a computer somewhere. Pens, I used to be, it used to be just like whatever pen was at the hotel I was staying at. I've gotten a little more, I don't really have a go-to day-to-day pen, but I will tell you, now that I have a couple of books out, I i i had tried out a bunch of pens to sign books with, and I found a pen I really like. It's called the Pentel Sign Pen.
00:55:15
Speaker
is sort of a slim kind of fine point felt tip in. I felt that Sharpies tended to bleed through the page too much. And so this is like a nice felt tip, gives a really good line and it helps me, you know, on the times when I get lucky and I have to sign a lot of books, um it doesn't wear out my hand and it it always looks good.
00:55:36
Speaker
And so I have that stuff. you know I tape stuff through my phone. I have ah an app called, I think it's called Tape Up. Wait a second, let me make sure I got this right. um It's called The HT recorder, that's the app I use to tape calls on my phone. and um It's, it organizes them into files pretty easily and I can transfer them to my laptop pretty easily with that. It seems to work for me better than like just the voice memo thing. There are different settings on it for different kinds of rooms, um that sort of thing. And um one thing I do is, I guess I'm still a little old school on this
00:56:21
Speaker
I actually pay to have stuff transcribed by humans. um I don't use Otter or any of those sort of transcription services because I tend to find it takes me just as much time to correct those as it does to have somebody do it right the first time. And so I've learned that my time is valuable enough.
00:56:44
Speaker
then if I pay somebody to do it, it actually saves me money and time in the long run. So there's a service, I think it goes out in Colorado somewhere. When I do stuff, I send it off to be transcribed and it's you know a tax write off and I found it to be more efficient than doing it the other way.
00:57:03
Speaker
Oh, that's amazing. Well, you're saying a lot of ah recommending a lot of really cool tools about le about what you use. And as I like to bring these conversations down for a landing, I always love asking, I guess, for a recommendation of some kind for the listeners out there. And that could just be anything you're excited about. ah And so I'd just extend that to you, Tommy. ah you know what What would you recommend for the listeners out there?
Recommended Media and Podcast Wrap-up
00:57:26
Speaker
there's There's two, I guess, works of art that i have come out this year that I really have dove into and have meant a lot to me. And I've sort of it stay in my head long after I've, you know, parted with them. One is a record, Casey Muscarese. It's called The Deeper Well.
00:57:47
Speaker
I think I'm not sure what it sounds like to me is sort of a song cycle of exiting one relationship and entering another. It it gives kind of a Fleetwood Mac vibe to me, um but not quite as complex. it's It does what I try to do in my writing, which is tell pretty powerful story and pretty simple language.
00:58:10
Speaker
um And I find that I keep coming back to those songs and they they keep revealing themselves to me in new layers. A book that i've just hit me like a sledgehammer is by a Canadian author named Amy Lynn, and it's called Hereafter. It's two words. It's a memoir. So Amy's husband,
00:58:36
Speaker
uh, was running, uh, like a foot race, like a, you know, half marathon or something one day and died suddenly out of nowhere. And Amy's left as a young widow and I think around 30 or thereabouts. And this book is a series of short sort of postcards from the abyss of grief. Uh, it's ah like 150 short chapters. Most of them are like half a page.
00:59:07
Speaker
Some of them are maybe the longest ones might be two or three pages. Just what it's like to have this whole life you saw in front of you suddenly get snatched away and to not be able to get over it. And um ah she writes with such amazing power and tenderness and feeling. And I, you know, the, I'm sitting here looking at the book. Now it's on my desk and wanting to pick it up again and read about it again, even though the subject is so hard, she tackles it with a, with a fearlessness that I really admire. And, um, that book has, has stayed with me more than anything else I've read this year.
00:59:53
Speaker
Amazing. well Well, Tommy, this is wonderful to get to talk some shop with you and to unpack Dogland a bit, which was just such a, you know, fun, a deep dive into that subculture. And, our you know, we're just riveting and heartbreaking and happy and and really gets to the core of what you're after with the connection. So I just want to, you know, thanks for coming on the show to talk shop and thank you so much for the work. Oh, man, this was such a pleasure. They're great questions and I love to talk about this.
01:00:22
Speaker
Oh, man, thanks to Tommy. Yes. You see it, Evers, for listening and being my why for making this podcast. If you dig it, subscribe, recommend it. The show is only, i well let's just say this, the show's been going for close to 12 years, and it's only grown, and it's only as popular as it it as it is, because there's no media company behind this, I'm totally independent. It's only popular if it has indeed any degree of popularity, because it is passed hand to hand. People are like, oh here's this really cool cool show. and
01:00:58
Speaker
The host is insufferable at times, but my gosh, he has really great guests on his show and that says something Anyway as I type up this parting shot it is the day I've submitted a very late stage draft of the prefontaine book Which we have I think settled on a title here you go breaking news The front-runner Steve prefontaine and the dawn of the modern athlete a befitting title for this dude is We're right around 108,000 words, which if you've been following the arc of this conversation, it means I've cut more than 52,000 words from the rough draft or the zero draft, depending on what you want to call it. I cut a short book out of my book. I'm liking the arc of it. I like how each part feels distinct and that it builds and it builds and it builds.
01:01:52
Speaker
My wife read a late stage draft of this, you know, with particular attention to transitions and stuff of that nature, confusion, you know. And she's a battle axe when it comes to editing. ah She rarely has anything nice to say about anything I write or do. um And when she was about to finish reading it, she was sad because she forgot for a moment that Prefontaine was going to die.
01:02:19
Speaker
And he had really come to life. And when she finished, she said, like, Brendan, you have something potentially great here. And she doesn't just toss around words like that, which is kind of weird to hear coming out of her mouth. But it was pretty nice for her to even say that. And of course, it's going to need some work, more work. It always does. Some extra polish. But through the absolute brilliance of my editor, the book has a really nice shape to it.
01:02:44
Speaker
I won the lottery with him. I really did. you know Some people I've confided in can't believe the attention to detail, the editorial letter, the counsel I've received from my editor over the last year and a half. Sometimes I see a fiery anger in their eyes, almost like, how the fuck did you win the lottery? Beats me, but this whole process has been a string of winning lottery tickets.
01:03:10
Speaker
Yeah, Kim Kross, good pal of the show. Thought I should have an agent at one point. She put me in touch with Susan, who would be eventually take me on. And I happen to be saving string on a pre-fontaine project, because we were a few years out of the 50th anniversary, and she's like, oh, I could sell that on proposal.
01:03:28
Speaker
You know, worked on that for a year, sold it with about a 14-month runway to an editor who's a running junkie, ah but he also happens to be one of the most astute and brilliant minds in the country when it comes to developmentally editing books and just having that the eye for it, an eye for the shape of it.
01:03:48
Speaker
And then here's Lilo B.O. pecking at his keyboard. Things like me write good. And then everyone's like, good god, can we still get David Maranis to write this? Metallica.
01:04:00
Speaker
They played two of my favorite songs. I only saw the Friday night set. The song, i one I had never heard before live, and one I've heard a million times live, but it never gets old. And so the Orion instrumental song, amazing. I took a little video, and during the video, I was a like, rawr, as I deleted it. And i Master of Puppets, and I was like, yes, master, master.
01:04:27
Speaker
basically blew out my vocal cords, as you can tell, and I hurt my neck from headbanging so much. Seriously, my neck was fucked for like three days after the show, and I've only now started to get my voice back, if you can even call it that. Do I sound cool? do i sound do i Does it sound zone nice?
01:04:49
Speaker
a
01:04:52
Speaker
Does it make you feel things? Great time being back east with people I haven't seen in years. So naturally, go back east, gotta go to Dunkin' Donuts. Dunkin' now, but nah, it's always Dunkin' Donuts to me. I go in, wait for my coffee, guy comes in, gets his coffee, and he goes like, thanks Roger, gotta go outside now and show these guys a video of me gettin' tasered. This guy was like 48 years old. Next, I go over to the Packie.
01:05:21
Speaker
That's what we call a package store, it's the Packey. Buy some beer, and a box had a tear in it. Guy at the register, waiting for his girlfriend, was like, whoa, you got a hole in the box? I'm like, shit. And then he said, I'd hate for you to lose a beer. I'm like, yes, this is home. That accent is home right out of central casting. So with that said, stay wild, C&Fers, and if you can't do, interview.
01:05:48
Speaker
o
01:06:09
Speaker
you