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Episode 385: Robert Kolker
2.2k Plays1 year ago
Robert Kolker is the best selling author of Hidden Valley Road and Lost Girls. He's on the show to talk about his Atavist piece "Dead Reckoning."
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Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Social: @CNFPod and @creativenonfictionpodcast
Sponsor: Liquid IV, promo code cnf
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Transcript
Episode Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
Oh hey CNFers, this episode is affiliate sponsored by Liquid IV again. I gotta say, it's a delicious way to rehydrate and fuel from those endurance activities. Or if you just want to zhuzh up your water, it's got a little salty tinge to it which I kind of appreciate. It's some tasty stuff. I like the lemon lime but I was really surprised by the white peach.
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00:00:48
Speaker
You order when you shop better hydration today using promo code CNF at liquidiv.com. I kinda like the sound of that. Oh, and also, this episode is also brought to you by the word trepidation, tremulous fear, alarm or agitation, perturbation. When the 3 a.m. voice comes to tell you what a lousy person you are, it fills you with trepidation.
00:01:18
Speaker
handing someone an ice cream cone, blindfolding someone, and then handing them an ice cream cone, and then not telling them what it is. That first bite of the ice cream cone is going to be a little weird for them. But if you hand it to them and say, I'm handing you an ice cream cone, then they're going to be excited. They're going to wonder what flavor is
Host and Guest Introduction
00:01:41
Speaker
Oh yes, hello CNFers at CNFpod, the creative non-fiction podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara, good for me. It's that Atavistian time of the month, okay? So some spoilers, obviously. All right, we've got Robert Kolker on the show. And not only could he pose as David Remnick's stunt double, or vice versa, let's be real,
00:02:08
Speaker
But he's the wildly brilliant journalist and writer behind the book, Hidden Valley Road. Oprah picked it, no bigs. And Obama picked it for his year-end list in 2020. Okay, now we're just showing off. He's also the author of Lost Girls, which has been turned into a film on Netflix. I mean, come on. To read his latest piece, Dead Reckoning, go to magazine.adivis.com to subscribe. No, I don't get any kickback sees.
00:02:38
Speaker
My resident CFO was like, maybe, do you get any kickbacks? I'm like, no. My recommendations are pure. This podcast is pure. But what about that liquid IV? You know what? Stop it. I'm going to stop you right there.
00:02:55
Speaker
Atavis has been doing some incredible narrative journalism, man. I mean, Jana Meisenholder and Cassidy Randall, they were honored in the 2023 volume of Year's Best Sports Writing for their Atavis pieces in the past year.
Narrative Journalism and Community Engagement
00:03:11
Speaker
That's crazy.
00:03:12
Speaker
You can hear them talk about those stories in the backlog. It has long been my goal to get into best American sports writing and then your best sports writing. They got me beat. That just gives you an idea of how badass these Adivistians are, lest you forget. If you head over to BrendanOmero.com, you can read show notes and sign up for my Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter, a curated list of how basic.
00:03:38
Speaker
An essay some books stuff to make you happy as you know it goes up to 11 like well like literally it goes 11 items long first of the month no spam so far as I can tell you still can't beat it
00:03:54
Speaker
And I started something cool for the Patreon crew. Any tier, all right? I started a thread, let's see, about two weeks ago at this point, about just what you're working on. And the latest one I did a little, just a video prompting it, about book writing being messy.
00:04:13
Speaker
And here I am, I'm stealing a term from a recent podcast I heard from Seth Godin. So if the podcast audience is about collecting dots, the Patreon crew is about connecting dots. And I'm really liking the discussions and support that's taking place over there. Like I don't jump in all the time, I sort of just hover as a referee. But there's 27 Patreons right now.
00:04:42
Speaker
about a third are chiming in, and I hope more decide to as well, or they can just be a wallflower in the conversation, but I'd encourage you to jump in. You know, you're a part of this community that's going to help support you, your work, and you can help support others as well.
00:04:58
Speaker
And if you'd like to, it's open to all tiers. Patreon.com slash CNFpod. You're supporting the podcast, but you're also connecting dots. I think some people are making some friendships over there. And that's what it's about. I like being able to connect people. I've connected listeners and guests on the show and guests and guests on the show. And now the Patreon crew is starting to maybe find out that they have more in common than they thought.
00:05:24
Speaker
But if you don't have a few bucks, free ways to support the show, you can go to Apple Podcasts and leave a kind review. Got a new one. Been a while. Got one. Five stars. Kimba, 83. My college girlfriend, her nickname was Kimba. And I doubt this is her. I wonder what she's up to these days.
00:05:47
Speaker
Always enjoy Brendan's insights. Brendan brings some truly talented writers on this podcast and asks them insightful questions. I always learn something that I can use in my own writing. He also gets great advice from his own experiences. It's definitely worth listening to the back catalog if you are a new listener. Awesome. Thanks, Kimba83.
00:06:09
Speaker
But before now, we get too excited about Bob Culker, who's here. There's still the matter of speaking with the lead editor of this piece. The lead editor of this ship, as it were, Jonah Ogles. Dead Reckoning's the name of the story. Yet another thrilling nautical disaster. There's a certain amount of kinetics to these nautical things, right? I mean, the ocean is always in motion.
00:06:35
Speaker
great juice from Jonah about how Bob had the material and the difference between a pitch that has the goods versus what he calls the Wikipedia pitch. The latter is not what you want. And a final matter of housekeeping. Shout out to Athletic Brewing.
00:06:51
Speaker
Best damn law in alcoholic beer out there. It's not a paid plug. I'm a brand ambassador and I love celebrating this amazing product. If you go to athleticbrewing.com and use the promo code BRENDANO20 at checkout, if you don't know how to spell my name, B-R-E-N-D-A-N-O number 20. Get a nice little discount on your first order. I don't get any money and they're not an official sponsor of the podcast. I just get points for like swag in beer. I pay for shipping, stuff like that. Give it a shot. I love it. I think you would too.
00:07:21
Speaker
parting shot this week kind of riffs on the rising influence of AI and
Editorial Insights with Jonah Ogles
00:07:26
Speaker
how this can push us to be the distinctive writers we need to be. So before we get to that now batting lead off it is Jonah Ogles.
00:07:46
Speaker
what are things that you find yourself most sensitive to when you're reading? Yeah, well, I mean, I think I pay a lot of attention to pace. That's sort of front of mind for me as I'm working through a piece.
00:08:11
Speaker
You know, so that's sort of like the editor part of my brain is paying attention to things like that, you know, where pacing, sourcing, attribution,
00:08:26
Speaker
sort of the logic of an argument or a situation that we're explaining. So those things are kind of happening in the editor side of my brain, but sometimes I'm not so great at engaging the reader side of my brain, especially if I'm feeling rushed or if I have a lot of, I'm really trying to just get through and edit. I think that reader brain is probably the better
00:08:51
Speaker
Brain to operate with certainly on occasion, you know, you gotta you gotta bring that in and make sure that it's just like a fun Reading experience and that side is sort of like grabbing onto different things primarily like scene, you know scene and color and dialogue and
00:09:11
Speaker
the places where I feel sort of engaged and in the moment in the story and the places where I'm not engaged or sort of losing interest or find myself distracted by questions or sort of a lack of focus. Can you ever
00:09:30
Speaker
turn the editor brain off you know when you're reading or how hard is it for you to do that yeah it does it doesn't really turn off you know you can yeah i i try i'm i'm working on a different piece right now and like i'm doing the cutting read so i'm i'm just sort of like viciously going through and and chopping words and i know that after that i will then need to do sort of a
00:09:58
Speaker
dismiss that editor's brain a little bit and try to be a reader and just make sure the piece is kind of smooth. But it doesn't turn off, even as I'm sitting here in bed at night reading a novel, it doesn't turn off. It's just sort of always
00:10:18
Speaker
it's always there and I find myself, it can sort of ruin the experience a little bit sometimes where I'm reading a book and it's an enjoyable book, but I find myself thinking, I'll read four or five pages and I'll think, I just would have cut all of this. I just would have gotten rid of it. And you got to say, shut up, Jonah, and just enjoy this thing that this writer poured their soul into.
00:10:46
Speaker
Don't let yourself get in the way of having an enjoyable reading experience.
00:10:51
Speaker
Yeah, well, when I made the decision to become a writer way back when, 20 years ago, I was a reader up until that point, and then you start reading as a writer, or reading as an editor, and suddenly you start to see The Matrix, and it does kind of ruin reading in a way. Like, in a way it does, because you don't, because you are reading it with, oh, that's an interesting choice, like, would I have made that choice?
00:11:21
Speaker
Or in your case you're like I would have cut all this and it's you never thought like that before you were an editor or writer you just kind of sunk into it and so it it does kind of pollute it in a way. It does it does and it it makes it the same time it makes certain books or articles.
00:11:42
Speaker
that much more enjoyable, because when you find one where the storytelling sort of overwhelms that part of your brain, or at least I'm just speaking from my experience, but there are books that sometimes like, I find that I'm just reading for enjoyment. And maybe that's one reason, like I love coming back to like, John le Carre novels or Elmore Leonard novels, because I just,
00:12:11
Speaker
I'm just overwhelmed by the fun that I'm having and reading them. But even with nonfiction books or certain magazine stories that I read, sometimes it's just so well done, whether as a function of editing or writing or some great spirit moving through the person who was working on it. It's just kind of perfect. And I don't mean that,
00:12:39
Speaker
that there's no flaw in the story, that there isn't something I would do differently. But it's just so itself, like it's so its own thing doing, sort of operating under its own rules and marching forward relentlessly that you're just swept up in it. And that only happens a couple times a year, a few times a year for me. But man, it's such a rewarding experience when it happens.
00:13:07
Speaker
Now, with Bob's piece, and Bob is, as a writer and reporter, he is one of the more accomplished journalists and reporters that has come through the last few years of the ad of his pipeline. No knock on anyone else, but there is a lot that are more early career, and Bob is
00:13:25
Speaker
extremely accomplished, a lot of feathers in his cap. And for you editing someone of Bob's skill and stature, how do you approach editing and consulting with him versus someone who might be a little at the, let's say, early career part of the spectrum?
00:13:46
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question because there is something different about it. I think for me, there's an insecurity that rises up. Do I suggest any changes to him? He's like, yeah, he would know. He's been doing this forever. It's such great stuff. Exactly. Exactly.
00:14:10
Speaker
He's very successful, obviously, and very good at what he does. And so you start to question yourself and you think like, oh God, maybe I shouldn't suggest this, or you second guess your own thoughts.
00:14:25
Speaker
You got to try to not do that as much as possible. And one great thing about Bob is he never talked down to me or was dismissive in any way. He was so welcoming of suggestions and cuts and pushed back.
00:14:44
Speaker
where he needed to, but was gracious about other things that I'm sure probably irked him, but he was just great to deal with. And that's not always the case. There are other big name writers who I won't mention, but that I've worked with in my career who are really just sort of condescending as you're editing them. And I think
00:15:07
Speaker
that hurts the process and the resulting story because it has to be a conversation. If I'm having a question, I'm not the most gifted reader or editor in the world by any means, but I read a lot, I edit a lot. And so if I have a thought, there's a good chance that other readers are gonna have the same thought. And I think that the piece will be best
00:15:36
Speaker
if you can sort of dismiss that insecurity and just have an open and frank conversation about what is working and what isn't working in peace.
00:15:48
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I imagine it's similar to, say you're like a younger coach and you're like coming to inherit a very accomplished, you know, quarterback or pitcher or shortstop and it's like, you're like, should I tell them that their mechanics are a little off or, you know, they got to this point, but I don't know, I'm noticing something wrong and should I bring that up? It's very similar like that. Yeah, right, right.
00:16:17
Speaker
Well, yeah, I'm watching this, uh, the winning time HBO show about the Lakers and, um, you know, they've got the, the coach who sort of like takes over mid season and they win a championship. And then this next season is, you know, it all sort of goes to his head, you know, and he, he starts to, you know, sort of like over manage and overthink and, and let the, let the ego creep in and,
00:16:45
Speaker
And I think whether you're an editor or writer, you sort of gotta resist that, because every piece is its own thing. I'm sure, in this case, Bob wrote just a really great draft that didn't really require much from us. But I'm sure he's written bad ones, and I'm sure he will in the future. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe people reach a point where they just turn out endless, good copy.
00:17:10
Speaker
But I don't think so. I think you're trying to start from scratch every time. What's great about this particular piece too, it's like yet another piece set on the water, another kind of- Another shipwreck.
Historical Narrative and Research Strategies
00:17:26
Speaker
Another shipwreck. But there's something about them, they're so kinetic and really dramatic. What was it about this one that felt like it set it apart from other ones that you've been able to edit?
00:17:41
Speaker
Well, Bob, I mean, Bob being who he is plays a played a factor into it. You know, when he reached out, we were like, oh, yeah, we would love to we would love to work with this guy. But he really had.
00:17:54
Speaker
He had a great story. It's this great historical piece, which sometimes when you're just reporting a story based off of newspapers and people's journals and things like that, it can feel a little flat because you're not able to build out that sensory experience. But Bob clearly had the goods from the beginning with this. And that's always my first question with a historical piece.
00:18:23
Speaker
can we make readers feel like they're there for the entire piece or certainly for good chunks of it. And Bob had that. And also, this is a huge, seven destroyers wrecked off the coast of California. That's huge. If it happened today, it would just be wall-to-wall coverage for days.
00:18:48
Speaker
But, you know, this happens with the passage of time, it's been kind of forgotten or overlooked. And so it felt like we were sort of adding something to the historical record by bringing it up and publishing a story about it.
00:19:08
Speaker
And given that Bob has such a just a wealth of experience and a ton of skill and is so so good at what he does and some people who listen to this show and I imagine especially the activist interviews in particular to get to glean some insight into how to do this work and to do this work better. What is it about Bob and his approach through your interactions with him that you feel people can learn from?
00:19:36
Speaker
Yeah, well, he was, like I said earlier, he was very, very open to a collaborative editing process, which helps a lot and is not the approach that every writer takes.
00:19:56
Speaker
I think that, I hope that it helped the story along and helped it become a better piece. I mean, he also just, he had the material to work with, you know, and we get a lot of pitches from people who find a historical curiosity or they find
00:20:18
Speaker
like we we describe it as like wikipedia pitches you know where they like they have the basic facts of what happened and they're like isn't this crazy and yes the answer is often yes it's crazy you know if bob had come to us just with hey this largest peacetime disaster in us naval history there's shipwrecks there's uh you know look at the lives lost look at all this stuff like
00:20:46
Speaker
Yes, that on its face has sort of the bones of a good story, but he also had the materials to flesh it out and put muscle on the piece. And a lot of times when writers have reached out to me with a Wikipedia pitch, I'd ask for more details. I ask for their sourcing. I say, okay, this part's a little murky. How would we flesh this out?
00:21:12
Speaker
and they come back and the answer is they haven't they don't really have the materials yet you know they might know that well some of them might be in this library or you know maybe they can uh they hope to interview these people
00:21:28
Speaker
But Bob sort of had it all lined up. And that's a real difference maker. It makes editors feel confident that the story is going to take shape and not just not be sort of trying to backfill an okay story and make it just a little bit more okay.
00:21:49
Speaker
Yeah I think I'm so guilty of this but people are often they don't put enough legwork in ahead of time. Mainly I can understand because time is money and that's a it's a lot of effort to to go through at first when
00:22:08
Speaker
odds are the piece is still gonna get rejected and it's like you know you're trying to save yourself some of that rejection pain by maybe not maybe by doing the Wikipedia thing you think you're saving yourself some time but I think it's that's a shortcut to if you do some of that extra legwork
00:22:25
Speaker
If nothing else, it's going to really cement a really good pitch for maybe the next publication, and you're that much farther along in the reporting. But it's kind of a hard mental jujitsu to do to put in that extra effort up front. It is, yeah. And I'm so sympathetic to writers who don't want to waste a bunch of time putting in all that legwork before they pitch.
00:22:53
Speaker
But I think one thing that happens, or one thing I've noticed with more established writers, is they have the most important stuff. So it's not as if they're reporting 90% of the story and then showing up with this fully formed pitch.
00:23:12
Speaker
although that happens on occasion and it's great when it does, but the experienced writers are better at finding the key materials or the key sources first. Yeah, the linchpin stuff. Exactly, exactly. When writers show up and they say, I've already talked to these two most important people and I have the best documents and I know there's other stuff that I can get.
00:23:38
Speaker
we feel good about that. It's when they come and they say, hey, I have this other stuff that suggests to me that there's really crucial stuff that I can get. I just haven't gotten it yet. That's when we say like, okay, but get it first, because otherwise you go out and the materials have been lost or the court destroyed the records because they were so old or a source is
00:24:03
Speaker
you know old and and no longer able to do interviews or doesn't live in the country or something you know like and things fall apart in a thousand different ways so editors just want to see that like the the linchpin is there
00:24:17
Speaker
Oh, fantastic. Such great insights into your approach. And of course, Bob's a little behind the curtain of Bob's incredible piece and what he was able to tease out and tell this incredible story of this peacetime naval disaster off the coast of California. So Jonah, as always, great pleasure talking to you. We're going to kick this over to Bob now. Yeah, thanks for having me.
00:24:50
Speaker
Alright, a little more about Bob, okay? He's written for the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Wired, Oprah Magazine, among many others. His work is pretty wide-ranging, but he's most drawn to gripping, humane narratives.
00:25:06
Speaker
And from topics ranging from, this is Spinal Tap, as you know my newsletter goes up to 11, and the gene editing process CRISPR and on and on. It's a very wide range. You'd want to go to robertkulker.com to check out the archive of his work and to learn more about him.
00:25:28
Speaker
So it's with great pleasure that we get to hear his brilliant insights into creating this historical yard news written for The Addivists about the greatest peacetime nautical disaster in US naval history, how he also interviews people for story and information, and the robust timeline he makes to keep things organized in his early drafts. So let's get right to it. Here is Bob Coker. In books.
00:25:57
Speaker
There are certain universal truths that help you navigate, I guess maybe the choppy waters that are the individualized personality of each story. So maybe for you, what are some of those universal things that you can anchor yourself to that help you navigate stories? And I'm really leaning into navigation puns. That is nautical puns, but I mean it in terms of what do you hinge, what do you grab onto for universalities?
00:26:26
Speaker
the nautical puns are inescapable at a certain point. And once you start, it's hard to stop. And in fact, with the fact-checking and editorial staff at the Atavist, it's been quite nonstop back and forth while getting the story ship-shaped, I guess.
00:26:47
Speaker
My approach is always narrative, but it's always about something else as well. Very rarely, I suppose earlier in my career, I would do whatever people threw at me, obviously, but very rarely would I do a story that just would be, here's an amazing yarn, you're never going to believe it. It always is about something else. There's a separate issue bubbling beneath the surface. And it really comes out in the reporting. And it's anybody's guess when
00:27:15
Speaker
I get started, how much of the story will be about that underlying issue and how much will be about the yarn, the tangled tail itself, the narrative itself. Sometimes it's 80-20, sometimes it's 20-80. It really kind of is, it's a little like I come out with a very rough draft and I look at it and the editors look at it and we decide what's working and what isn't. And if it turns out that the actual twists and turns of the story are enough to really sustain it, then it's 80-20 and the other 20% is
00:27:45
Speaker
are the issues. But with this new story for the Atavist, it's been exciting because from the very start, it was clear that this was going to be a purely narrative story. And it would be up to me to try to find any sort of meaning or glean any sort of deeper understanding of human nature or anything from what had happened. This was never going to be
00:28:10
Speaker
a survey story about leadership with the Honda Point disaster as a case study. It was always going to be about the Honda Point disaster. And so that was a little intimidating and very exciting to get started on.
00:28:25
Speaker
Yeah, and given that it took place so long ago and you're living in the archives to create your scenes and your narrative, you've written recently a New York Times magazine piece about the vanishing family.
Approaches to Writing and Authenticity
00:28:43
Speaker
You know, that's very face-to-face, very in-your-face in terms of how gut-wrenching it is, and that you can build off of that. And then there's this, which is more archival-based. So for you building those scenes, what becomes the challenge for you to build those blocks?
00:29:06
Speaker
I've done archival stuff before, but certainly not a lot. And so it was definitely exciting to be doing something new to me, particularly since a lot of the face-to-face work I do with families in crisis and people going through really extreme traumatic situations, that really
00:29:23
Speaker
It's healthier for me and probably for anybody to mix it up and to have some variety and try and do other things. And so to be purely in the archives and to understand that I'm never going to have a personal interview with somebody kind of sets up a whole other game to play. And there's lots of pressure.
00:29:43
Speaker
that I would feel because it was new. I felt very intimidated. I went to the National Archives and looked at the personal papers of Edward Watson, the captain, the squadron commander at the center of this disaster. And I felt like, well, it's put up or shut up time, like either this is going to be a treasure trove with all sorts of amazing nuggets of information that are going to make this entire situation come alive, or it's going to be a bunch of postcards. And I'll be
00:30:11
Speaker
you know, up the creek, I'd be in real trouble. And and of course, it always ends up being somewhere in the middle. I find with archival work personally, that it's a lot of there are many days of kind of despair and nervousness and anxiety where you're thinking, I don't have enough, I don't have enough, I don't have this, I don't have that. And you really start to fixate on the things you don't have and the things you don't know. And then as the days go by at once here, maybe once you're out of the archives and are, you know, just sort of getting to work,
00:30:41
Speaker
something shifts and you start to appreciate the things you do have. I think, well, actually, we have the personal letters of a civilian who was actually on the boat. That's exciting. What would it be like to be a civilian on the boat? That's at the head of a squadron of ships that goes down for next to no reason. What is that like? And so you start to really appreciate what you have and really run with it. And I always find that
00:31:10
Speaker
readers understand that, particularly with historical things. They understand, well, this is what is available, so let's see how far it can take us.
00:31:19
Speaker
you know when you're living in the past like that and there's no one living to talk about it can be hard to you know really and you and you obviously you can't be there so you can't take in a lot of those sensory details so sometimes it can feel on the whole flat but as you as you uncovered in this piece there are certain things like the metal scraping along the hall like
00:31:41
Speaker
Oh, sorry, everyone. I need to jump in and interject. It's not the metal scraping along the hall, you idiot. It was this moment of the rock scraping across the metal of the hall. And it was just such a really visceral description that Bob was able to convey out of the archival record. You know, you could really feel and hear that. I arrive at those little physical details very late in the game. I don't feel like I'm
00:32:12
Speaker
I mean, I don't know exactly how David Grand works, but I imagine that he's very interested in those physical details from a very early moment. Whereas my approach, because I guess I do so much interviewing in my career, is primarily psychological. And so only later as I'm writing it do I think, wow, to understand what's happening here, I really need to recreate this in a physical way as well. It's just a difference between what comes
00:32:41
Speaker
naturally to me first. But then I'm excited once I do arrive at it because I feel like each one is invested in with a lot of meaning. I find as long as I use these details sparingly and they really are worth it, then they are really quite meaningful as opposed to just doing a fire hose of physical material that makes it feel like it's a creative writing exercise where I'm just sort of imagining what it's like to be on that boat. So I feel like less is more in that regard.
00:33:10
Speaker
And when you're in the archives and you come across a letter and some of the things that I'm currently doing, I've come across various letters. There's just a pulse that I feel. I'm like, oh, this came from the typewriter of one of the central figures, or this came right out of the pen.
00:33:32
Speaker
in the hand of one of the central figures and it just feels different it feels there's a pulse there that i just i'm addicted to and i can find it and for you maybe can you describe you know what it's like when you find something that is just so so precious you're like oh i can't wait to deploy this it's it's really exciting because um
00:33:53
Speaker
but the rhythms of speech are in there too when they are personal letters. These aren't written for posterity. They're written, it's a brother's letter to a sister or a son's letter to a father or a father to a son. And so lots of dashes and ellipses and lots of grammatical snafus, they're trying to get across thoughts and feelings in a fast but authentic way. And they're very, very different from public statements that people are making at the exact time.
00:34:21
Speaker
with Edward Watson, the man at the center of this disaster, he is saying things to the media one day and then he's writing his father or his sister and saying different things or saying them in a different tone. It's all about how they want to present themselves to the people they love, whether they're being vulnerable or whether they're trying to have a stiff upper lip, there's personality there and you can learn about them.
00:34:44
Speaker
And you brought it up a moment ago about doing some stories that are very emotionally taxing and then having something of this nature where it's like, okay, I'm not gonna have to interview someone with probing very personal, oftentimes just picking at those scar questions, picking at the scab questions.
00:35:04
Speaker
So, for you, do you try to work in these kind of palate cleanser pieces, things that might be a little less emotionally taxing just over the course of the arc of your year of the things you're reporting on? I've written two books. The first book is Lot's Girls, which is about the Gilgo Beach murder investigation, which just had a big break this year. It's been a busy time revisiting that case. But the book I wrote was really about the lives of the women.
00:35:31
Speaker
It was about their families, it was about their struggles and I was interviewing families who were in the middle of the worst moments of their lives and there was a media spotlight on them because of a murder investigation and nobody understood their lost loved ones and they were never coming back and it didn't seem like the murderer would ever be found. It was like talking to somebody who was going through the worst possible moment of their life and then talking to four more people just like them with four different
00:36:00
Speaker
other victims in the case. And it was a lot. And at the end of it, once the second draft was done, I had some downtime. And I remember turning to my wife and saying, could we watch Love Actually tonight? And she gave me a little look like you would never want to watch Love Actually. And I was like, I just need to watch some people fall in love at the moment. I can't do anything else. So it does take a little bit of a toll, certainly.
00:36:29
Speaker
It pales in comparison with any of the experiences of the people I'm writing about, but it's not nothing and you need to have some balance. For my next book, I wrote about a family afflicted by schizophrenia and I was determined not to white knuckle it. I was determined to have work-life balance.
00:36:50
Speaker
As a family, we got a dog. I became a dog owner and I loved that. And I never cook, but I learned to cook and started making a few meals every week for the family. So I had things to definitely break up the day and not just be sitting in a pressure cooker. So for the emotional, the demanding stuff, it was important for me to learn some lessons about how to work. But I wouldn't necessarily call the story of Honda Point a non-emotional story.
00:37:19
Speaker
I think I gravitate toward these difficult moments that sort of bring out elements of human nature. And certainly this military disaster did that for not just for Edward Watson, but for other people. Lots of finger pointing, lots of Monday morning quarterbacking. The media gets involved and turns people into heroes and then turns those heroes back into villains. It's all very rich emotional material to me. And I wanted to try to
00:37:48
Speaker
make it feel like it was happening today and not like it was some sort of history event from a high school textbook. Right. So what did this, when you were reporting out the story and writing it, what did you find in it that felt relevant to today and felt reflective of what's maybe our current moment? That's a very good question. I first learned about this disaster from a friend of mine who played
00:38:18
Speaker
poker with friends on Zoom. We were having lunch and he said, I play poker with my friends over Zoom. It was like a year and a half ago. And two of the guys who were in my poker group started talking about the worst peacetime disaster to happen to the US Navy ever in history, that they lost more ships in 10 minutes than in all of World War I.
00:38:39
Speaker
and that it led to the biggest court martial in Navy history and that nobody talks about it. And I was curious and he said, maybe you want to look into it. And I went on, of course, Wikipedia and did some Googling and whatnot. And what I learned was very interesting. But what really got me going with it was this moment
00:38:59
Speaker
as the Court of Inquiry is beginning, as the Navy is starting an official inquiry into the disaster, where before it really gets rolling, the man at the center of it all, the squadron commander, stands up and he says to the media and to the court and to everyone in the world, I did it, blame me, it's my fault. And this is the answer to the question you asked. This is the moment that I locked in on emotionally that felt
00:39:27
Speaker
in a way, so alive to today, but also so different from today. I thought this would never happen today. I thought if this were today, whoever would be at the center of something like this would have hired a crisis PR firm or lawyered up immediately or issued very, very canned, very, very prepared statements that would try to muddy the waters a little bit and say, well, it's everybody's fault. There were a lot of problems that night. Who's to say who's to blame?
00:39:57
Speaker
And so I thought what was different between then and now and what was the same between then and now and what's going through the mind of someone like that who decides to take the blame. Is it just a story of honor? Is it just a story of doing the right thing or is it more complicated than that? I thought that this could be an amazing disaster story and an amazing courtroom drama. And then that was the moment where I thought this could be an amazing psychological story about what it means to do the right thing and what happens once you do.
00:40:25
Speaker
I wanted to learn everything I could about the man, about Edward Watson, and about why he might have done it this way, and about what happened to him after he did. And I was not disappointed. I was constantly surprised the more I learned both the reasons why he did it, the very complicated moral calculus he made by taking the blame, how
00:40:49
Speaker
yes, that wasn't the honorable thing to do, but it also was strangely an act of self preservation. Suddenly, it became a very morally complex story. It made me think of this is a real reach, but it made me think of things like stories like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where there's a legend of somebody being so amazing, and then the reality is far more grim and far more, you know, far less honorable.
00:41:15
Speaker
And I didn't think that Edward Watson was a villain necessarily disguised as a hero. I just felt like he was a far more complicated figure than the news stories of the time depicted in us. And so I wanted to get to the bottom of him. And so I learned about his family and sure enough, his father has this amazing story. And this is where I
00:41:37
Speaker
start to shake my head and think, well, there I go again, writing about family relationships and family dynamics and fathers and sons. It doesn't matter that all these ships went down and it doesn't matter that there was a crazy legal disaster after the Navy disaster. I'm going to be talking about the father and the son. And so I did a deep dive into their relationship as well.
00:41:58
Speaker
Yeah, and what struck me about that relationship was how, I don't know, the father didn't condemn the kid, or unless he kind of stood by him, stood by his decision, and everything was actually kind of proud of him in the end for kind of just manning up, I guess. Whereas, you could see another way, or it's just like, you've sullied my name, and now,
00:42:27
Speaker
You know, get on with your life and never speak of me again. It did seem like, you know, honor won the day. This is a blue blood family. His dad is a huge Civil War hero at the very start.
00:42:43
Speaker
of his military career, the father was in the Civil War as an underling in one of the most famous battles in Navy history, the one where the captain of the ship says, Dan, the torpedo is supposed to be the head. And it makes his career and he goes on to become an admiral. And this is his oldest son. Edward Watson is the first born and he goes to the Naval Academy and he does everything right. He marries well. He gets posted on ship after ship after ship, but he never really experiences a huge battle
00:43:12
Speaker
a huge moment of heroism the way that his father did and then along comes this opportunity to run a squadron of destroyers after World War I and another opportunity to distinguish himself and he starts making some decisions and I argue in this piece that a lot of his decisions are informed by the same sort of daring approach that his father would have done and that
00:43:39
Speaker
Admiral Farragut who said damn the torpedoes would have done. That he is a product of a certain Navy culture that did not serve him well that night on the coast of California and that led to disaster. It's a complicated case that I make but in their interactions afterward you see the father and the son doing this very
00:44:03
Speaker
strange dance around one another. The father sends a couple of personal notes. Watson sends some notes to some of his siblings saying, I hope I made father proud. And of course, in his public statements, Edward Watson keeps saying things like, saying he had such steadfast devotion to the Navy, just as his father did.
00:44:26
Speaker
So there are all sorts of conversations happening between the father and the son in this very fraught moment that ask the question of, will he do the right thing now? Will he go down with the ship? Will he take the blame? But that's not all. Once he takes the blame, the most surprising thing happens. He goes from being a goat to a hero. The media starts to hail Watson as a model of Navy manliness.
00:44:55
Speaker
He almost becomes a folk hero after the disaster because he takes the blame. And then that's not what happens. That's not all that happens. Then the next thing that happens is even more surprising because once the court of inquiry finishes its work and the court marshals happen, the outcome then changes the way people perceive Watson all over again.
00:45:17
Speaker
And so this is the contemporary part of the story.
Perceptions and Technology in Storytelling
00:45:20
Speaker
This is the part where I think it's very much like today where the media perception or public perception of someone is wonderful one day, horrible the next, and then wonderful again. And it can change on a dime. And yet Watson is still the same person all the way through. So I wanted to explore that as well.
00:45:39
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of like if there's some sort of disaster going on and you go on Twitter and be like, hey, do we hate or like this guy today? I don't know. Let's take the pulse of the, okay, yeah, oh, no, we hate him now. Okay, let's, I can't come up with a concrete example, but I feel like that's pretty prescient. It happens almost on a daily basis. Like, okay, this person's a villain now. Okay, now we villainize.
00:46:06
Speaker
Absolutely. Almost daily. The one that sticks in my head is Richard Jewell from the Atlanta Valley, the Olympics, where he's this good Samaritan and this amazing hero one day. And then the next day, suddenly, everybody thinks that maybe he's some sort of saboteur with white knight syndrome who actually caused the problem. So that's a real 180, where suddenly he goes from hero to villain. And then it turns out that that's completely false. And so back he goes again.
00:46:35
Speaker
And another undercurrent of the story that's pretty fascinating too, which I think is kind of prescient to today, is there's kind of an analog versus tech angle to this too with the new ways of navigating the seas and how distrustful the sailors were of the compass readings of the shoot at RD, something I'm blinking on it at the moment.
00:47:01
Speaker
Oh, RDF, radio directions. Yeah. So there was some distrust of that when they lost sight and they want to, say, use dead reckoning. Their instincts are telling them they're farther than they actually are. Then they kind of retool the reading of the of the RDF and it leads to disaster. So there's kind of this distrust of tech angle, which I think kind of echoes today as well. Absolutely. A lot of the people
00:47:29
Speaker
responsible for navigation, don't trust the new technology. This is an intense period of transition for the Navy where they're going from decades of the captains and navigators of the ship having 100% authority and where they go and what they do to an era of radio where they can get orders instantaneously from other ships and from central headquarters. This is a
00:47:55
Speaker
This undermines the authority of the captain. The whole dam, the torpedoes ethos is being threatened by this. And there's even a culture that they named back then of following the leader. You're supposed to follow the ship at the front of the squadron. But if everybody can do their own navigation, and if you can hear from headquarters and continuously what to do, then what sort of authority does the captain do? What's the captain for anyway? And so here they are in a tricky situation on the California coast.
00:48:24
Speaker
The weather's terrible, the visibility is zero. And this new gadget, this new radio direction finding technology that they are using to try to ascertain their position puts them in a place where they believe they can't possibly be. They don't believe it and they don't trust it. And they have decades of Navy culture with dead reckoning, which is the way of calculating your position, the low tech way, the low fi way,
00:48:53
Speaker
just by thinking about your speed and your position in the stars and your position based on landmark. And they decide that it has to be wrong. And they make a decision, a fatal decision based on that reasoning. So yes, distrust of technology wants to being a big piece of this. And to talk about deep dives and archival research, you could really go to town with RDF because essentially what it is, is it's the parent of radar.
00:49:23
Speaker
And it's sort of the grandparent of the technology that was used in World War II with ships to be able to actually detect other ships and target them and find submarines underwater. So eventually the technology becomes indispensable. But at that particular moment, it is new and it is freaking people out.
00:49:45
Speaker
Yeah, there's a moment in the story too where one of the navigators had suggested that they maybe slow down and take stock of what might be underneath them, but it was going to slow them down and they weren't going to get to San Diego as fast as they wanted, which kind of leads into this notion of
00:50:07
Speaker
of hubris to of you know pushing it is it really echoes the by this predated that we're right around Titanic time I before the Titanic I believe we're after no after geez I'm blanking on my timeline here but it's kind of like let's go let's go faster at the at the expense of safety and you see what happens
00:50:31
Speaker
Okay, clearly I'm confused on the timeline of matters, so let's dive in and fact check my bumbling and stumbling around the various dates. The Titanic went down in April 1912, and Bob's story takes place roughly September 8th, 1923, so 11 years later, okay?
00:51:03
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's there's definite hubris here and there there is a problem they they have which is that they feel as if they're in a race against time they're trying to distinguish themselves by by going a certain speed down the coast and anything they could do to
00:51:20
Speaker
really triple check their position, their navigation, would involve slowing down. They would have to slow down to take death soundings with a fathometer. They would have to slow down to do any number of other things to try to figure out exactly where they were, and they just won't do it, probably because they think, well,
00:51:42
Speaker
We've done this many times before. We know where we are. This is the California coast. We're not in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. How hard can this be? I think that they're lulled into a false sense of security by routine. And they are, at least Watson is, determined not to show any, not to waver, because that's not what a captain does.
Challenges of Long Narratives and Structure
00:52:06
Speaker
At last, check, let's see, I did a word check on the story, and it was something around 13,000 words, give or take. And that's a big chunk of words, and the trouble with long stories like this, and you have plenty of experience with this, is the matter of pacing and making sure that we're gonna, instead of in a digital age, I guess we keep scrolling versus turning the page.
00:52:32
Speaker
So for you, when you're writing a story of this nature, how attuned to you are to the pacing and making sure that you're laying down things that keep people wanting more? I am concerned that people will stop reading if there are no emotional stakes. And so in this piece in particular, you can see I'm spending a lot of time up front sort of setting
00:52:55
Speaker
setting up three different people. There's Edward Watson, the commander, and then there's a captain on another ship, and then there's his mysterious civilian guest. It's almost like a disaster movie where you introduce characters who are getting on board of the ship, and then you know that we're going to come back to those characters all through and see what happens to them at different moments of jeopardy.
00:53:19
Speaker
I felt like this would be a familiar structure that readers would get it. They'd be like, oh, I see, we're going to meet three people and then we're going to follow them through. But there is a certain amount of worry that I'm taking forever to get to.
00:53:31
Speaker
the crash, right? And so I am worried about rhythm. There's a lot of trial and error. And there's a lot of work with the wonderful editors at the out of us who were talking about ways to make sure that people don't have to wait too long for these ships to actually leave dock and get into trouble. It can all be prelude. And so you really have to fine tune it all the way through. We were making cuts to the first section even last week. So it is not a
00:54:02
Speaker
For me, it's never a situation where I just sit and write my little story and hand it to the editor and they say, fine, and run it. I mean, there are a lot of changes that happen, a lot of changes.
00:54:11
Speaker
And so when you're sitting down to write something of this nature, it's a lot of research, a lot of probably either documents you print out or documents that you have accessible to you via searchable on, however you choose to save it, be it Dropbox or Google Drive, whatever. So when you're sitting down to write, how are you ensuring that you have everything at your disposal
00:54:37
Speaker
So you can maybe seamlessly try to get into the pocket and have a good day at the ledger. It is a bit of a slog at first, but it starts chronologically. It starts with time lining. And by I don't mean just names and dates, I mean like a very ridiculously detailed timeline with lots of notes, lots of transcripts, lots of links to PDFs and things like that to try to get as much detail in a chronological way as possible.
00:55:08
Speaker
And then I kind of look at that enormously long unwieldy timeline document at some point and I start to break it up into chunks and I think, well,
00:55:17
Speaker
I can't tell the story of all seven ships that go down. I'm going to have to focus on the first ship. And then if I end up focusing on the captain of the SS Young, which was the third ship in line, then I'll have to pull some seams out about that ship. And where does that happen in the chronology? And then you start to make decisions that then by necessity lead to other decisions. And I tend to block it out that way with
00:55:45
Speaker
I mean, I've never used this phrase before, but I've only read about it, but with like story beats or with like acts in a play or scenes. And again, that gets fine-tuned and changed all the time. It just, the point of every step in a big project like this for me is to get you to the next step. If it's good enough to get you to the next step, then you're in good shape. And then you just keep making it better and better and better. I think once,
00:56:13
Speaker
I had a lot more comfort once I figured out the first section. You see the first section kind of tells a lot of the story and gives you a lot of the background in a very, very quick and breezy way to try to frame the whole thing and make it clear that something is going to happen and why and what the story is going to be about. And once I had that, I felt like, well,
00:56:36
Speaker
Great, now I can, now I have the freedom to go chronologically and bob and weave out of different storylines and find the right balance in revision.
00:56:45
Speaker
Yeah, I think John McPhee, he obsesses over the lead or just the opening section of any long piece and he sees that something is a flashlight that kind of illuminates the rest of the path. I think Susan Orlean also, she obsesses over it. She can't proceed until she's got a decent lead there and then it kind of spills out from there.
00:57:07
Speaker
Other people might be like, you know what, I can't figure out the lead. I got this island over here. I know I can write. I'm going to go write that one and I'll get to the lead later. You know, for you, it strikes me as like you like to get the first thing set up and then, you know, gravity takes over from there. Yeah, because you you start to in the writing of the lead, you start to understand
00:57:29
Speaker
which exactly pleats you're going to be spinning through the rest of the piece. You may not have figured that out until you write the lead. But the process of writing the first section is the process of figuring out the most important elements of the rest of the piece, maybe not exactly where they go or how they interact with one another, but what they're going to be and what you're going to emphasize. It's about setting the stakes and setting the priorities. The people you mentioned, Susan Erlene and John McPhee, they have brilliant leads.
00:57:58
Speaker
that because you've read their leads, you suddenly can read the rest of their pieces with a lot less anxiety, a lot more pleasure, a lot more speed, because you know what you're looking for. They've told you what to look for. They've said it. They've set it all up for you. Imagine handing someone an ice cream cone, blindfolding someone and then handing them an ice cream cone and then not telling them what it is.
00:58:23
Speaker
that first bite of the ice cream cone is going to be a little weird for them. But if you hand it to them and say, I'm handing you an ice cream cone, then they're going to be excited. They're going to wonder what flavor ice cream cone is going to be. So that's the first section. I can't believe I just made an ice cream cone.
00:58:44
Speaker
There it is. Yeah, and there's obviously there's the reporting, the research, the writing and the rewriting and the rewriting and the rewriting of a thing. And that's its own bear. But how much time do you sometimes just sit there and think about it and think things through? I had an opportunity last fall where I had a couple of days away from everything.
00:59:13
Speaker
And that helped me with the lead. I was able to actually sort of sit and really think nonstop for a day or two to try to really crack it. And then after that, I can work in stages. I don't have to sit and go off to eight week writers retreat or anything like that. But yeah, to sort of crack the general notion of how the story will run, that's not something that I can do in a breezy way in between lunch and coffee and getting on the phone.
00:59:43
Speaker
I need a certain amount of time to really get in there. And then with this particular article, because it's historical, it's not just all the primary documents that I found at the archives. There were four or five different
00:59:58
Speaker
books written about this disaster, only one of them was written by someone who was a professional writer. And that one had, even that one had sort of dialogue and other things that weren't exactly
01:00:16
Speaker
the rest of them were all more amateurish efforts to try to recreate different perspectives on the disaster. But in their ways, each of these books was valuable. So I had to spend a lot of time going carefully through all of those books. And there are a lot of, of course, papers and articles written about this disaster over the years, sort of plundering them all, trying to see what's useful or what isn't useful.
01:00:39
Speaker
And then there are the conspiracy theories. I suddenly had an appreciation for people who had to write about, I don't know, the Kennedy assassination or something, because there are anonymous people online who are talking about all sorts of things they're certain happened to cause this disaster that, in fact, there is no proof for. But you sort of have to go through all of that and read all of that just to see if there's any meat on the bone there that you can use and try to get to the bottom of it.
01:01:07
Speaker
Yeah, there's the whole Bob Gottlieb thing of turning every page. But at some point, you need to stop turning pages. Otherwise, you're never going to finish. I just saw it. I just saw it the other night. My daughter's in college, and she's reading The Power Broker, and so the two of us decided to watch it together. Kara's interesting, right? Because he's so maximalist.
01:01:33
Speaker
He doesn't just want to turn every page. He also would rather write more than less about almost any given subject. So the idea of making a cut is really tough for him. And so the question for him about what priorities to make with his work, he doesn't have to make those choices quite often because everything is important. He's decided everything is important. And that's something somebody says about him in the documentary. They say to him a semicolon is as important as the entire first chapter.
01:02:03
Speaker
And so you feel that when you're reading his work, you're feeling that he just invests every single moment with meaning. And it's amazing. It's one of a kind. It is hard to imitate because just as it's sometimes hard, it would be hard to imitate John McPhee because the length they have and the mandate they have is different from what quite often we have these days.
01:02:33
Speaker
When I was talking to Pete Croato, who wrote the book from Hang Time to Primetime about the NBA, he's a freelance writer.
Interview Techniques and Story Enhancements
01:02:42
Speaker
We were talking about reporting and interviewing, and sometimes the valorization of over-reporting, which was brought up by Wu Dan Yan, who came on the show a few weeks ago. And we were talking about, it's great if you can talk to just
01:03:00
Speaker
hundreds of people for something, but sometimes you don't have enough time. And then he brought up that there was a Washington Post sports writer, probably in the 80s, who seemed to get the greatest quotes, but he didn't interview very long. It was very efficient. This person turned out to be David Remnick.
01:03:23
Speaker
And so I wonder for you over the year, how maybe you have gotten maybe more efficient with your interviewing, just maybe to get the most out of an interview, the greatest detail without also
01:03:38
Speaker
you know, I hesitate to use wasting time. But sometimes when you're on a tight deadline, it's like if you're not getting the most efficient use out of your time with somebody, if you have an hour or less, you could be wasting time. So for you, have you found a good way of streamlining interviewing? So you are getting the getting the gold without, you know, spending five hours with somebody? I think REMNX an excellent example here is that here's a
01:04:04
Speaker
quite obviously super high IQ individual who can sort of see around corners as he's talking and sort of has, he kind of has the story half in mind it seems as he's working on whatever he's working on. As an amazing editor and an amazing writer, he kind of knows the widget that he's making as he's making it. And also, you know, he was not always writing for The New Yorker. He was, you know,
01:04:31
Speaker
a bureau chief for a newspaper. So he knows about deadlines, he knows about fast turnaround, he knows about seeing the hole that he has to fill in two hours and then filling it in one hour 59 minutes. So he has a set of muscles. In my career, I've had the privilege of working at New York Magazine for 17 years and that is not the same, but it is
01:04:57
Speaker
it is a place with deadlines, it is a place where you have a hole to fill, and it is a place where you kind of understand that you have to get this done, you have to finish and not be quite so precious about the work you're doing. And so it does behoove you at a place like that to have a set of muscles to understand when you're interviewing someone
01:05:17
Speaker
we are not just chit chatting. You know, I am trying to get understand something in an efficient amount of time. And so my questions better be pretty on point. I had a very interesting early experience at New York magazine, where a couple cubbies away from me was a writer who was writing a story about something that was happening at the Hamptons party. And she was on the phone with them. And she was really insistent asking the most
01:05:45
Speaker
specific details she could, physical details like what we were talking about earlier in the podcast.
01:05:50
Speaker
Like what sort of flowers were in the flower arrangements? What color were the tablecloths? Were the napkins paper napkins or cloth napkins? What music was playing? How many people were in the band? Like really, really pointed questions. And she was not asking them like she was the person's pal. She was asking them like, I need this. Let's get down to business. And my takeaway from this was that sometimes an interview
01:06:16
Speaker
is a very touchy feely and very emotional thing, but other times it is as different from a regular conversation between pals as it could possibly be, and that it's okay. It's okay sometimes for the experience to be synthetic. It's a stupid thing to say but you're not necessarily there to make friends. You're there to have a meaningful interaction that produces the best story possible.
01:06:42
Speaker
And so you don't want to be a jerk, but you also don't have to take every single source out to lunch. You also don't have to move to their hometown and get to know everything about them the way that Caro did with Lyndon Johnson. If you were writing five books about the person, then yeah, move to their hometown. But if you're on deadline, you have a job to do.
01:07:05
Speaker
you know you're gonna be interviewing someone. There's an interesting, well, there's a calculus between how much prep you do ahead of time which can maybe paint you into a corner and maybe you don't listen as well, that's one argument. And then the other way is like, this is more of a conversation, I'm gonna see where it goes and interview based on the information that comes out.
01:07:31
Speaker
And so where are you on the continuum of doing a lot of prep versus, let's say, no prep depending on who you're talking to? Quite often the subjects I'm writing about are not famous people who've been written about before or been interviewed before.
01:07:48
Speaker
So it's different in my instance. But if you have 20 minutes with a movie star at a junket where you're having lunch and they're at a hotel room and you get 20 minutes in the room to sit across with them as they're eating a salad and you have to ask them questions, you're really better prepared. Otherwise, you're just sitting there trying to
01:08:09
Speaker
talk about the experience of seeing them in the hotel room, which is a crap shoot because that can be very boring. So you really better have good questions and really have it have read up everything. There's a wonderful article that my old colleague and friend Steve Roderick just wrote about Michael Mann on the cover of Variety. And he talked about this. He talked about how
01:08:30
Speaker
you know, there's a lot of pressure not to not to look like an idiot in front of Michael Mann because he's a pretty demanding person. So he took eight days and watched all his movies and read his book and did everything he possibly could to prepare for it. But for me, let's say there was a story I did more than 10 years ago where I was trying to get an interview with this person who is in a certain in a certain amount of jeopardy for months and months and months. And finally, she said, OK, meet me at my lawyer's office in Atlanta and you have two hours.
01:09:00
Speaker
So I get on the plane and I fly to Atlanta and I get the rental car and I drive across town and I sit down with her and I've got two hours in a conference room with the lawyer sitting there, half paying attention. And it's my job to sort of get the woman's life story and help understand her better. And so what I said to her was,
01:09:21
Speaker
and other interviewers do this too, I've learned later. I said, let's play a game with a rule and the rule is we won't jump around in time. And we'll start this conversation with the day you were born. And I promise to move quickly through the boring parts and get to the parts that are important for us to talk about. But if at any point you ever say to me,
01:09:43
Speaker
I didn't know it then, but I learned later or something like that. I'll make the little timeout sign and be like, no, no, no, no. Let's stay in time, stay in time so that I learn things as you start to learn them. And that that winds up being narrative, right? It's a certain type of narrative. But two amazing things happened over those two hours. The first is that she got super comfortable and started to have a lot more confidence
01:10:10
Speaker
that I was going to be able to write a story that was going to be true because she felt like I was making an honest effort to really understand her. This was less of an inquisition and more of me encouraging her to tell her story. And then secondly, I started asking way, way better questions because once I had a feel for the chronology, I was able to ask things I never would have asked before. I'm making this up, but it would be something like,
01:10:36
Speaker
Wait a minute, wait a minute. Do you mean to tell me that you learned you were pregnant two weeks before you graduated high school? I didn't know this. I thought that you had the baby afterward, but that you had learned it. I didn't understand the timing of that. And then I drilled out into it and I say, okay, so you learned you're pregnant and you have to tell your mother about it. What was that like? And then suddenly the questions get more important and more interesting.
01:11:01
Speaker
And it was exhilarating. And she was smiling, too. She was like, oh, good. You're going to ask good questions, not bad questions. And it helped a lot. And I feel as if the finished product of that story does not feel like it was just two hours of a conversation, that it was something a little deeper than that.
01:11:19
Speaker
When it comes to the writing, I highlighted one sentence of your Adivis piece that I just, it really just stuck out to me. It's just very evocative, but also alliterative in a sense. The C was a thick stew with a five inch layer of congealing slick on the surface, making swimming near impossible. And then there's a page break.
01:11:43
Speaker
And I love the alliteration in that sentence. It feels slippery itself. And just for you, is that something that you're thinking about on a sentence level? Or does it just riff out of you? I think that all comes later. Yeah. I think a lot of other writers are way better at the sentence level than I am. But so I end up polishing and trying to make a moment pop a little better by doing something a little more evocative.
01:12:12
Speaker
that that particular sentence arose out of a real need, because there was a very particular situation happening on the shore. It wasn't just that it was dark, and the boat said no electricity and that they were sinking. And it wasn't just that the waves were crashing. And it wasn't just that there were sharp rocks below the surface, because it was a rocky shoreline. And it wasn't just that there was a tall cliff along the shore, so people couldn't really get to them and help them right away. It wasn't that at all. It was that
01:12:41
Speaker
their oil tanks had been punctured and they were gushing out oil. And so if they went into the water, they might not be able to swim. And so I had to sort of very, very quickly point to what the experience would like to be, to be splashing around in the water, in the dark, in the waves at night, where the water is not just ocean water and there aren't just boulders beneath you, but there's like five inches of oil covering over the top of the surface.
01:13:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's an amazing sentence. And it's just fun to read out loud, too. I'm glad to hear that. Well, I want to be mindful of
Recommended Readings and Conclusion
01:13:21
Speaker
your time. And as I bring these podcasts down for a landing, I always love asking the guests for a recommendation of some kind and just anything you can be excited about that you want to share with the listeners. So I'd extend that to you. What would you recommend for the listeners out there? The thing I'm
01:13:39
Speaker
recommending to everyone right now is the September cover story of the Atlantic by Jennifer Senior. It's called the ones we sent away and it's, she's a great friend of mine and an old colleague, but also an amazing reporter, but in this case she turns the lens on herself.
01:13:56
Speaker
and on her own family, on her mother and on her aunt, who was a person who she only recently had learned existed because she had been institutionalized for years. It's an amazing narrative, but it's also an amazing family story and an amazing memoir and an amazing portrait of her mother as well, and the caregivers who took care of her aunt over the years. And there's even a little expose in the middle of Willowbrook,
01:14:26
Speaker
you know, institution that was supposed to care for her for many years that turned out to be so awful. So it's, it's my favorite kind of long story, which is that it's not just one thing, it's four or five or even six different things. All right. Well, fantastic. That's great. I've heard great things about that story. So I'm definitely going to bookmark it and read that later. So I just got to say thank you so much for coming on the show, talking, talking some shop here about this incredible out of his piece. And yeah, this was wonderful. So thank you for making the time.
01:14:56
Speaker
Thank you, Brendan. It was great talking to you.
01:15:02
Speaker
Oh, alas, we have come to the end. Thanks to Bob and Jonah. Always fun to get your Atavist on. Magazine.atavist.com to subscribe. It's like 25 bucks a year when you get access to all the archives. And no, I don't get any kickbacksies. I think 25 bucks well spent. I know it's like everyone is telling you to subscribe to something. There's probably like 500 sub stacks you're subscribed to, and every single one is like,
01:15:31
Speaker
upgrade the paid and you're like what I got this subscription here and this one and I'm uh I'm uh I'm in the patreon crew at cnfpod and like where does it end
01:15:45
Speaker
But it's 25 bucks well spent. There's been a lot of hullabaloo about AI. It's already proving disruptive, and it will be especially so for writers. It's only going to get more so. The Columbus Dispatch, I believe, a fucking ganette property. So I know a job's a job, and you need a job. I work for one, and it's awful. It is a terrible place to work.
01:16:04
Speaker
They quote-unquote covered a high school game. The byline was AI. Like that's depressing. A lot of fairly basic writing will be continually outsourced to robots. We can cry when our beers are bad at the way wedding photographers cried about people taking photos themselves or travel agents cried when kayak and Expedia came along or hotel companies when Airbnb arrived. And by the way, kind of like fuck Airbnb as well. Way expensive and I'm tired of them.
01:16:34
Speaker
Yeah. Fire and shots. This is the time to double down on what makes you weird. And I don't necessarily mean like Gonzo or Animal from the Muppets or Pee Wee Herman, R.I.P. But if A.I. will be the average voice, the get it done voice, then you must run as fast as you can in the opposite direction with a fearlessness parallel only by Tom Cruise, hurtling himself off a cliff.
01:17:04
Speaker
Whatever writing jives with you, you need to start turning your shit up to 11. AI is at like an 8 or a 9. You need to make sure that only one person and no robots can do you. That can be style, but that can also be generosity, humanness. Be remarkable and fearless.
01:17:28
Speaker
It's helping with my writing of this God-forsaken biography that I'm writing. Some of you know I'm working on. Some of you probably don't know, but hey, now you do. As I'm writing a sentence, I'm asking myself these days, could AI write this? If so, I find a way to put my seasoning on the sentence, my pacing, word choice, my tuning.
01:17:51
Speaker
This isn't to say writing obnoxiously or disrespectfully of the subject, but there's a reason why some of us are drawn to, let's just use movies, say the films of Wes Anderson or David Fincher, Greta Gerwig, Christopher Nolan, Amy Poehler, Michelle McLaren, Vince Gilligan or Spike Lee. There's non-replicable point of views through which any great artist metabolizes their subject.
01:18:18
Speaker
Of course, I'm leaving off billions of others. Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay, you name it. I'm not familiar with AI. I don't study it. I don't obsess over it. I'm neither excited by it nor do I fear it yet.
01:18:36
Speaker
but it's here to stay. The way the internet is, the way streaming is, and we can cling into the old power structures, but it's gonna be the next big disruptor. And I never thought that anything would come along that might be more disruptive than the internet, but AI is probably that thing. And who knows what's gonna happen afterwards, I'll be dead by then. So think of it in terms of how it can push you into greater discomfort.
01:19:02
Speaker
to be the writer you were at your core when you were 15 years old and nobody told you it had to sound like this to be literary. I fell into that trap in the MFA program like this is how you sound artful and not just a writing a gamer for the newspaper.
01:19:21
Speaker
So in any case, there was a part of you when you were a preteen, a teen even younger than that, when you liked to write and you were just like, you had no predispositions. You just did what felt good. You imitated the thing that made you the most happy and you had fun with it. So yes.
01:19:41
Speaker
If I can't tell whether you or AI wrote it, we have a problem. So stay wild, see you in efforts. And if you can't do interview, see ya.
01:20:11
Speaker
you