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Episode 7: Richard Gilbert
164 Plays11 years ago
Author Richard Gilbert talks about his wonderful memoir "Shepherd." We talk about the process he went through creating the book and how the best artists simply produce more work. Apologies to listeners: The audio is a bit messy in places. My goal is to get better equipment only if people are listening. So, if you listen, bear with me, better times are coming ... maybe ... I'm putting up a donations button on the website. If you think the show is worth $1, give a $1. The more I raise, the better the listening experience will be.
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Transcript
Introduction and Memoir Writing Journey
00:00:02
Speaker
Hey, Brendan O'Mara here, bringing back hashtag CNF after a long hiatus, nearly a year since we recorded an episode. I am no better person to kick things back off again with the football season right around the corner here than Richard Gilbert, who is the author of the fantastic memoir, Shepherd. I met Richard.
00:00:30
Speaker
in 2007 at the Goucher MFA Creative Nonfiction Program.
00:00:39
Speaker
he wrote a fantastic book and in our conversation we talk about the overall arc of him creating the book. It took several drafts and several iterations and I think that is really inspiring to keep going and to keep revising and it was very inspiring to see how many drafts he went through and how long it took him to get it and the belief that he had in the project to see it through from
00:01:06
Speaker
beginning to its ultimate publishable end and it is definitely a treat to read and I would certainly recommend it.
Audio Quality Apology
00:01:15
Speaker
I'm going to apologize ahead of time due to technological deficiencies on my end and a spotty internet connection. Some of the podcast sounds very choppy and robotic. It's probably only a total of one minute in the entire interview. But if it's annoying and in any way, I apologize.
00:01:37
Speaker
Hopefully over the course of time we'll be able to afford some better equipment, better recording equipment, better microphones. But right now it's very Spartan, iPhone recorder, that kind of thing. So in any case, let's get to Richard. Let's listen to him. He's got some really great insights to share. Thanks for listening.
Learning and Feedback in Journalism
00:02:04
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm a slow learner. Once I've got something, I think I've really got it.
00:02:12
Speaker
I spent 12 years in daily journalism and had some success and won some awards, but I remember that it took me, I think I was in my fourth year of journalism before I really pulled everything together and knew how to write a good Sunday news feature.
00:02:36
Speaker
That seems like a long time to me. I think some people can do it much faster. For some reason, I couldn't. So that was part of my thing was I'm a slow learner, but I'm kind of stubborn, or can be, and I didn't want to give up. It was too important to me. And there were times, the fourth
00:03:02
Speaker
iteration of the book, I produced six. And the fourth one was very transformative. I ended that up, I ended it to a really good press, and they sent it to a couple of reviewers. And both of them endorsed it, said it needed a lot of work. One person, although he endorsed it, clearly didn't like the book and hated me. And the other person, he's usually nameless, but the other guy was Bill Rorbach, this main writer.
00:03:30
Speaker
out of the academe and he lives up in Maine and he writes novels and memoirs and does workshops and he works as a book doctor. And he was one they hired to give an opinion.
00:03:45
Speaker
and he actually he said you know this this book isn't scenic and that's not traumatized enough the guy's personas not working which is why the other guy hated me i mean you know i i did come out i i did come off like an asshole i have to admit so i can't totally blame that guy still if you
00:04:05
Speaker
I don't like you either. But anyway, with Bill, it was kind of like he believed in me and my story and gave a lot of good advice. And I took all his advice, but it was partial because it was just a quickie thing. I don't know how much they paid him a few hundred bucks.
00:04:19
Speaker
He actually is a major book doctor, line by line type stuff. So I hired him then. I sent that to him and I hired him to do it. And he really helped me. For instance, I'll give you an example that's now very embarrassing to me. And it's a kind of gay an example of me being a slow learner. I had this hired hand.
00:04:43
Speaker
help me on the farm. He's a neighbor guy, a local guy, an Appalachian guy who had retired from the university as a delivery man, and he lived near the farm. And because I got injured and had some serious health problems and issues from stress, I had to hire some help. So I hired this guy, and he ended up becoming a very important
00:05:05
Speaker
in my life. In the draft that Bill saw, I corralled him all in one chapter and wrote like a standalone essay about this guy. And it actually ended up getting published that way in a journal. But for a narrative, Bill was kind of like, wait a minute, you met him here
00:05:29
Speaker
way back here and then here and then he did this and we suddenly hear about him and you dispose of him and you know whatever it was chapter seven or eight what the heck that's how you build a narrative you got we got the reader
00:05:45
Speaker
It's got to meet the guy with me." That's an example. Bill showed me really basic stuff like that that wasn't working from a narrative standpoint and kind of said, you've got to pull him through the book and you've got to pull this thread through the book.
Narrative Structure and Challenges
00:06:00
Speaker
I ended up, he didn't show me how to do this, but I ended up making an outline which was different scenes or passages
00:06:16
Speaker
me see my themes, some could be moved around because they weren't chronological necessarily or could be flashed back to. But somebody like Paul, my hired hand, whose name is Sam in the book, you know,
00:06:29
Speaker
It's really delightful for readers like in life. You're trying to give them your experience of life. So you meet this guy and he's kind of like I say to my wife, he's going to be a pest. And she goes, you're being irritable. And I'm going, I'm going, he's going to be nosy. And she's going, you're being negative, which I was. So it's a chance to portray me and my stressed out irritable self.
00:06:49
Speaker
And the sweet local guy who could be very annoying indeed, but who was a really sweet guy. And the clash, our friendship and clash became really important in the book as it was in life. So I just needed to learn things like that.
00:07:05
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What were the dark days like in the middle of writing Shepard? Oh, that fourth draft was bad. Looking back, it's really embarrassing because I had done three drafts and then Bill gave me, said, this is what you need to do, ABC. Now, I have to back up just a little bit and say this about that, Brennan.
00:07:27
Speaker
If you hire a good book doctor and your book is a mess, which mine was kind of a mess, they had a lot of good content, everything but the kitchen sink, but had these problems, as I've just explained, once you start taking the person's advice, then that draft takes on a life of its own. And at some point, advice that the person is giving you
00:07:52
Speaker
two more chapters down doesn't even apply anymore so you've got it but basically that whole draft was uh... kind of dark because uh... like i said in retrospect he gave me enough of a road map that i should have been like wow this is this is great the contents basic well there was a lot of content the thing is it grew that was part of it it was three hundred pages and i wrote five hundred
00:08:22
Speaker
under Bill's tutelage in this draft. Well, I knew I could submit a 500 page. 300 pages was what I wanted. I did get it down to 340. But I remember that the thing about that draft that was so hard was I would get up every day and I managed to budget time or work my teaching schedule so that I could do three hours a day. And the first hour, I had to lash myself every single
00:08:52
Speaker
day for a year to go to the keyboard and put in that first hour. After I put in that first hour, stuff started to come good in the second hour, and in the third hour, I was producing good stuff. And this is the one point that I would make about discipline. I think it's something that, for me at least,
Discipline, Love, and Fear in Writing
00:09:10
Speaker
isn't something you should front-load. That is, I had built my muscles at that point. I didn't use writing conversions for years.
00:09:22
Speaker
And each version took about a year. And that was the stage when I could apply discipline. I had the muscles. I was in shape. It's kind of like the difference between saying, you know what? I want to get in shape. I'm going to start jogging.
00:09:35
Speaker
And so you start jogging by saying, I'm going to see if I can run around the block. And if I can't, no big, nobody's got a big deal and the sky's not going to fall. I'll run, walk versus I've never run. I'm going to get in shape. I'm going to go out and run a fucking marathon. That's crazy. But that's what a lot of, I think writers try to do.
00:09:56
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when they're not in writing shape or in a particular kind of writing shape or a particular project shape and I think that when I think love is a much stronger idea than discipline and I did the first three versions out of love and it did take discipline with the fourth because I think I was afraid I think I was afraid I couldn't do it I should have been happy
00:10:22
Speaker
much material, but I think that first hour of resistance where I had to lash myself to get to the keyboard and then struggle for a while in the first hour, I think it was fear. And it probably varies with each writer, but I think fear is really common. Fear and confusion or confusion leads to fear. You don't know what to do, you're afraid. In retrospect, I shouldn't have been afraid at all, but for some reason I was. And that was my own demon I had to fight.
00:10:50
Speaker
that reluctance and fear to get to the keyboard or the ledger has a lot to do with the uncertainty of where the work is going to go when you're finished, too. Sometimes you feel like you're just digging a ditch to nowhere. It's one thing if you know, with a lot of these very successful writers, at least when they commit to a book, they know that the endgame, they know that it's going to find a home, if they're going to do a painting or write a book, that it's going to be prominently displayed and promoted.
00:11:18
Speaker
But for the vast majority of writers, you're putting in a lot of work that might not manifest itself into anything other than just a little badge of honor on your sleeve. Absolutely. So how did the book, it took you...
00:11:36
Speaker
four drafts or so to get to that point where you had the doctor come in. But how did the book change from what you had originally imagined it? Well, it's so much because I think I did initially, it was ignorance and I suppose laziness that I did certain things like not build the narrative, not build the narrative bridges
00:12:05
Speaker
I had never done that so I was just happy that I was writing chapters and wrote a whole to my mind narrative but it was more it amounted to more like sort of linked linked essays at first and he simply showed me held up the magnifying glass to what I had done and said like right here you know you you know you bring up a guy and dispose of I mean it has no
00:12:30
Speaker
resonance because we should have met him in chapter two and so he just pointed out obvious things I mean I think that their writers tend to be kind of a bit blind as to what they've actually produced sometimes and they need somebody to hold up a mirror and say no you know you need to
00:12:56
Speaker
It's sort of like records need a producer somebody to listen and sort of Say yeah, you know your tones a little off here or do you realize? Do you want to be coming off this way right here? Because you can play this for humor or you can annoy the reader like you're doing here like it's a read as your reader. I'm really mad and
00:13:18
Speaker
at you because instead of making fun of yourself enough, you're being sort of judgmental about other people.
Feedback and Criticism
00:13:26
Speaker
Is that really what you wanted? So I think that was an element that I really needed. The other thing was in the long process of working on it, you get lots of advice as you go sometimes. And if you don't have experience, you don't remember
00:13:44
Speaker
or you don't see the value of it. And that's what's really, I mean it's really hard because almost any person that gives you advice, their advice falls into three categories, brilliant, maybe, and crazy.
00:13:58
Speaker
And so the really good people for you as a writer give you mostly brilliant and maybe stuff. And the maybe stuff, if more than one person says that, the maybe is a yes. The brilliant stuff it's obvious that you should take. What's the crazy stuff? Is it your ego saying, you jerk. You don't get it. You're just stupid. Is that your ego or is that really the
00:14:22
Speaker
You're reacting to an inadvisable and just erroneous ego eruption in your reader, in your feedback person. Giving an example, though, of something that happened to me, I bragged on myself about learning to build a narrative very late in this process, in the very last version of the book, version number six.
00:14:47
Speaker
and i'm getting ready to submit it to a press that was really interested i read sheryl straits memoir wild about her trek on the pacific crest trail and that was a very interesting book to me because she's got this strong foreground story of hiking the trail and that's analogous to many memoirists or fiction writers uh... template for that matter you have a strong foreground narrative image what she did was
00:15:16
Speaker
At about 12 places in the book, she inserted the backstory of what got her to the trail. So she had had this traumatic loss. Her mother had died. It had shattered her. She had gone off the rails, divorced her husband, became a drug abuser. She was on the trail to be reborn and clean herself up. I'm reading that, and I'm seeing how she worked in this key background. And I realized that I still had my father
00:15:45
Speaker
Corral in one chapter in the book now. He was dead before I started the farming adventure So unlike my neighbor who actually helped me with the farming adventure It seemed more logical to corral him in one spot But I saw the power of what she had done by working that same kind of background through
00:16:05
Speaker
an entire narrative dropping it in when something would remind her of her mother or what her mother's death led to and this light bulb went on and I went holy mackerel I need to do that with dad that's so lifelike when I had this particular problem with the sheep and I remembered
00:16:23
Speaker
this problem he had had as a farmer or in retirement when he started a successful nursery and it was so amazing because as soon as I saw that I remembered what a teacher at Goucher had told me Richard Todd in my first seminar at Goucher College when I was getting my MFA and I had just was talking about the book and mentioned my dad and his centrality and Richard Todd said
00:16:48
Speaker
Don't have him all in one big place. Put him throughout the book like you're walking across the pasture and you remember dad.
00:16:57
Speaker
I had completely forgotten that because I guess at the time it made no sense to me. That really I don't think was stubbornness on my part that I ignored and forgot his advice. I think it was lack of knowledge. I didn't understand the power of what he was talking about. I had to go write a book for six years and read a load of books and then the two came together and I saw it.
00:17:24
Speaker
Why do you think that is about people with a newspaper background that seem to have a way of corralling those elements into, say, one chapter?
Journalistic vs. Narrative Writing
00:17:34
Speaker
Like you, Richard Todd's saying that you didn't want your dad in one chapter, and then you put Sam slash Paul into one chapter. But novelists have such a key ear and a rhythm where they know how to pace a story. So you see when a novelist,
00:17:50
Speaker
sort of bleeds into non-fiction. They have an incredible way of pacing and dropping in characters at the right time. Why do you think that is that the journalists and newspaper people have a hard time getting a grasp on forming that story of the well-dollared character
00:18:12
Speaker
with your point, first of all. I've noticed that myself quite a bit, and I think it's a couple of things, Brendan. I think that if you went to a journalism school, as I did, although I took English courses, my basic writing courses, most of them were in journalism, and I think that writing is poorly taught to generalize in journalism schools. I think they're trying to get better because the MFA program
00:18:41
Speaker
So that's one thing. The other thing is that of course you're out there as a professional writer in a particular medium for newspapers or I was and you were when that was more of an option, although some people still are, but I think that you don't have the space and you said the way that they, the way that like a novelist
00:19:06
Speaker
uses the whole narrative arc of a book to do something. Journalists, even if you're writing a series, there's always the presumption that nobody knows anything remembers nothing and you're starting from scratch and usually you've got a small thing. It's more like writing a standalone essay. It's more like my mindset when I started which was that I'll do these discrete chunks when really my book wanted to be a narrative. I wanted
00:19:32
Speaker
it to be a narrative. I wanted it to have that power and that appeal. Nothing wrong with books of essays. But I wanted to do the narrative. But I didn't know how because I had never in journalism, my newspaper journalism didn't teach me to write a
00:19:47
Speaker
a cohesive long form narrative. And I think that newspapers, journalists who are still in journalism and practicing long form are better at that. But I think it still is a challenge when you go from doing one off pieces or even series to a book.
00:20:07
Speaker
So what drew you to the genre of narrative non-fiction to begin with? Well, as far as starting in journalism and going into journalism, I wanted to work as a writer and make my living as a writer
00:20:25
Speaker
And journalism, going to journalism school and going to work for newspapers seemed a way, seemed a way for me to do that. I didn't, I couldn't see as clear a path otherwise and it appealed to my sense of confidence. I also grew up in Florida reading a lot of great newspapers. At my house we took the Miami Herald and Orlando Sentinel and Coco today.
00:20:52
Speaker
and the Wall Street Journal and I was surrounded by newspapers from a very young age and some of them had great stories and I was in a great newspaper state of Florida and so I naturally I think gravitated toward that as an expression. Was there a specific moment that clicked in your mind that you wanted to
00:21:14
Speaker
start stretching your legs and doing that narrative storytelling within the, under the umbrella of non-fiction, of the way that Richard Ben Cramer and Gay Talise did. You know, what made you want to start really spreading your wings and sort of expanding on the genre and pushing those limits.
00:21:41
Speaker
Well, I wanted to in journalism school. When I was in journalism school, it was in the wake of Watergate, first of all. So there was a big investigative emphasis. But it was also in the wake of and during the great new journalism renaissance. Now, unfortunately, there wasn't anybody at my journalism school, probably most journalism schools, who knew how to begin to teach new journalism, long form, scenic,
00:22:08
Speaker
presentation, narrative presentation with the beginning and middle and end. And so I went out into the newspaper world and gradually learned and was getting closer to
MFA and Career Transition
00:22:25
Speaker
Florida newspapers I worked at. When I took a fellowship to Ohio State to get a master's, really it was to stop and read and pause. But I met my wife and I never went back to those Florida newspapers, although I ended up at a
00:22:41
Speaker
A couple of indiana newspapers and i'm proud of the body of work i did there but they were smaller pay for one of them the one i ended up on the bloomington indiana paper was smaller and didn't lend itself to give you the time to do some things i wanted to do so i did i tended to do more investigative and uh...
00:23:01
Speaker
Sunday news features for them and I didn't get into the super depth that I wanted to but by the time I made another career change into book publishing and after being in that for about over a decade I was I was 50 I had always wanted to write books and I just one day I just said
00:23:22
Speaker
well we had an author at our press actually who got an mf a from the catcher program we were publishing her would have been her masters uh...
00:23:32
Speaker
thesis and I thought, wait a minute, this is a low residency, I can do that. I don't think that I really understood how much I had to learn actually. I think I thought though that it would clear some space and that I would pick up a credential. I had no idea how ignorant I was about narrative and how much in fact it would help me. But it really did help me a lot.
00:23:58
Speaker
Right, right. So what did you, you know, what was, you kind of touched upon it there, but what was some of that inspiration to go to earn the MFA at Goucher? And what did you take away from it?
00:24:12
Speaker
Well, I remember, I mean, you know, the two couple things came together, you know, having this author produce this book that had, you know, I saw, you know, I saw that. And I also was, I was in a very difficult job as the marketing manager of a press. And I kind of stepped, I didn't want particularly to do that job because, you know,
00:24:41
Speaker
in the wake of getting that settled down and everything. I remember I was in the office one day and the radio was on and I heard this author talking
00:24:54
Speaker
about his new book, and I just thought, you know, if I, when am I going to do this? You know, I really, I really would like to, and I had the story by that time that I wanted to tell of my farming adventure, and it didn't seem very speculative. I thought, boy, you know, that's a no-brainer, you know, people want to read that, because for one thing it had a little niche, the farm genre, which
00:25:18
Speaker
It's kind of a mix back today because farming has become alien and kind of exotic to people and they don't understand it.
Farming Memoirs and Reader Interest
00:25:25
Speaker
They don't have contact. They don't have any link anymore with farming. On the other hand, there is a small number of people in the resurgence of farming right now. It's one of those periodic back to the land booms. And the wider society, even if people don't know anything about farming, they have started to think,
00:25:44
Speaker
I should know more, I should care more about how my food is raised. And I thought that gave me a lot of confidence going in, having that niche. As I say, it's turned out to be somewhat of a mixed bag because I'm sort of amazed how exotic farming is. Usually people had a granddad or an uncle, father, somebody very intimately connected. They had some link with actual agriculture of some sort.
00:26:13
Speaker
It's just absolutely not the case anymore. So that exotic nature of it can kind of help, but it can kind of hurt, because it's kind of like, I don't want to read a book about somebody growing things. And it's just not appealing to a lot of people.
00:26:32
Speaker
who are some of the writers in the narrative non-fiction genre that have inspired you and that you try to emulate and who just gave you some of that spark, creative spark in your current work.
00:26:46
Speaker
Boy, you know, from on the journalistic side, I really coming up and reading the writers on that side that had a big influence on me. I went through a strong Tom Wolfe period. I really liked Joan Didion's essayistic journalism. I really liked the way
00:27:08
Speaker
world and kind of be the fly on the wall. A lot of those great magazine journalists of the 60s and 70s were in our people I really admire.
00:27:21
Speaker
I did find that what I was doing with memoir was a bit different. Some of the techniques are portable, such as scene making. But really, memoir is its own thing. And in some ways, more similar to what you have to do in fiction as far as building a narrative and recreating the past.
00:27:50
Speaker
You know, some of the ones that have had a lot of influence on me are Lee Martin here in Ohio. He teaches at Ohio State, and he wrote a memoir called From Our House about growing up. Actually, he grew up on a farm with a father who was maimed in a farming accident, full of rage.
00:28:07
Speaker
His memoir about that is amazing One of my top five all-time memoirs and then he he recently came out with a book of linked essay memoirs Called such a life that are just amazing stories from his life both growing up with this father Some as an older person some just going through life and living I really really admire his work a lot and then I'm reading a lot of people that are now
00:28:37
Speaker
Although I have some journalistic instincts still, and sometimes I feel like journalistic projects are very doable, and they're also the most marketable, I also am very interested in people who just sit down and write essays out of their life, and their experiences like Denty Moore is memoir, or essay, generational memoir.
00:29:06
Speaker
design I admire very much and his cleverness and his wit and his use of self but at a sort of a modest in a sort of a low-key way I really admire because I spent so long writing about myself and my boyhood and all my adventures and issues that I am kind of sick of that and but yet to use your sensibility to use your sensibility either as a
00:29:41
Speaker
It's what poets do and that appeals to me a lot. So what do you think of a lot of the greater the prolific writers that you admire? What do you think that all of them have in common in the actionable paths they take in their work to get their work done and to get it published? I'm sure a lot of all great athletes and everything they have a certain
00:30:06
Speaker
common sub common commonalities between all of them, but then And and they manifest it in whatever way
00:30:16
Speaker
They do, but I'm sure it's kind of the same across all disciplines, and I wonder what your insights would be to that for writers. Well, I think, you know, I think that's a really big question, Brendan, and I think it's a big issue and very individual in person a lot.
Persistence in Creative Work
00:30:32
Speaker
It's an issue that I'm facing very much now as I rush around and I try to come up with, you know, another book project that I will, that I'll
00:30:42
Speaker
with and stay on and believe in as much as as I did my memoir.
00:30:48
Speaker
You know, I think that it's basically people who don't stop and who keep working and creating piles of work. So what is it that one needs to do to do that? And I think that varies according to the person. I think that, you know, some of us, there's, you know, some people, there's
00:31:22
Speaker
sand in the oyster and it's holding them back. So I think that one person
00:31:28
Speaker
you know, may need to just make sure that it gets enough exercise and the next person may need psychotherapy. So I think it's very well as to what any one person needs. But the commonality is that for some reason, the people that continue to publish keep producing because if you keep producing piles of work, two things happen. One,
00:31:55
Speaker
I'm convinced that great writing is a product of cola writing.
00:32:04
Speaker
And after I'd been writing on my book for a year and a half, maybe two years, I began to go, and I got some good shit here, and I can quarry some of this into essays and stuff. And a lot of it was, and I, I'm decked it, and I still get a lot of stuff, or decked it, don't get me wrong, but I decked a lot out of my book. It's simply because every single day I was sitting down for three hours and cranking stuff out.
00:32:34
Speaker
Basically, there were days when I would freak out and everything, but it was funny. Looking at all these years of work, it was sometimes really hard to tell what I had really had to cut out and what had been really inspired.
00:32:52
Speaker
together. However, having said that, you know, there are little resonant glimmering things that you don't see, but I think you'll only see them if you're consistently working at producing stuff. The other thing is, let's say somebody just isn't very good or is writing as problems. If he just keeps, if he produces a manuscript and maybe produces another one, he just keeps producing work. It's something that he can work with and that others
00:33:24
Speaker
of got to have you just have to have the work and it sounds stupid but you just have to have that pile of work and if you have that pile yeah whatever it takes for you personally to keep working and I don't
00:33:39
Speaker
Personally see that as a one-size-fits-all thing some one writer can say You lazy son of a bitch you you need to go tie yourself literally to your Chair every day and not get up until you've produced 500 words or a page or three
00:34:00
Speaker
pages and another person may work totally differently but you know the old saying if you produce a page only a page a day that's 365 pages at the end of the year yep so really
00:34:15
Speaker
It's not quitting, but there's many reasons why people struggle and quit. All of this, I'm very mindful in the wake of Robin Williams' death, which hit me really hard as to Philip Seymour Hoffman's death from an overdose. You look at these very successful, creative people and you say,
00:34:35
Speaker
What happened was it the work that made them kill themselves? I ended up deciding no these were people that had Fragilities, but that the work is what kept them alive for so long So I think it's what I think the work. That's why I say love is that's an Annie Dillard idea that love is stronger than discipline I think that it's very important to
00:35:01
Speaker
Love it and to cultivate a love for the work because if it's just discipline, I'm gonna cut this out I'm gonna grip my teeth by God and I'm gonna do it. I think that that sets up within you within the writer something that's antithetical to creation ultimately, I think that That discipline Is an element
00:35:28
Speaker
But it shouldn't be front loaded. I think that what should be cultivated and nurtured is somehow the love for the work. And sometimes that may mean saying I'm taking three months off and I'm just I'm instead of being in the fetal position for three months.
00:35:46
Speaker
going to read and love stuff. In fact, that's what I did after I got Bill Roebuck's report that was so extensive about my book and I realized the magnitude of what I had done and the magnitude of what I hadn't yet done and I freaked out and I didn't do anything for three months but I read like a fiend and I thought and then I hit it again. So I think what
00:36:15
Speaker
you know whatever a writer needs to do whether it's journaling morning mind dump journaling or uh... low stakes props whatever somebody needs to do you gotta figure that out sort of for for yourself as to what works for you and do it because one you know one person may you know get up every day and share right three pages by hand
00:36:41
Speaker
and be fed by that and go and then you know type out a page or two or three of things on a project or maybe the journal itself that somebody is doing is something that he or she minds for a project but i think that it's real difficult to say this is the path i think whatever
00:37:02
Speaker
That the path is simply that writing builds writing and writing leads to more writing. So you have to figure out for you. I'll also tell you another thing, Brendan. I took a lot of online classes. When I was working, I got lonely. I was itching. I was trying to tell undergraduates all these great things about writing. I was discovering. But I wanted to share my work. I didn't have a writing group that lasted for very long.
00:37:28
Speaker
Post MFA, I enrolled in a series of writing courses at Stanford. Stanford's online courses are really good and writers.com are good and less expensive than Stanford's. That helped to give me a community and to share work and to keep me going. I had tons of stuff to
00:37:50
Speaker
I never really had to write anything for class because I had so much stuff, which was a wonderful feeling because no matter what the assignment was the professor gave, I could submit something that I had written in the last X many years that I was struggling with on this book. So there wasn't a lot of pressure, but there was, it stimulated me. It made me feel like I was
00:38:13
Speaker
You know, really doing something and not just deluding myself. What are some of your morning rituals like, your writing rituals, like before you get going in the morning just to sort of limber up and get ready for whatever creative endeavor you're attacking?
00:38:32
Speaker
Well, I am a morning rider and what I actually do is I don't have too many. It's more like avoiding things in the morning, like a riding morning.
00:38:50
Speaker
mind going or polluted with anybody else's ideas or words or controversies or issues no none of that online news or anything mighty breakfast first and first in the radio news will be on but nothing that draws me into social media for me it's more a matter of okay eat a quick breakfast and get my
00:39:14
Speaker
get my writing for the day done. That's basically, for me, that's basically it. That's how important. So to what degree do you organize or outline any long piece of writing ahead of time?
Reverse Outlining and Memoir Structuring
00:39:33
Speaker
Well, you know, I just plunged in basically to my book.
00:39:40
Speaker
useful going in. In the fullness of time, I did all of that. I did everything you can possibly do because I produced so many versions. So by the end of it, I had this thing that was really useful, which I would do again from the start because it proved so useful, which was to make an outline of what I had written basically
00:40:07
Speaker
as I went. To me, the most useful planning is reverse outlining or outlining after the fact. It's not, it hasn't been going in with a plan, but it's more like, hey, okay, I wrote this 20-page chapter, I wrote this, I have this essay adapted or a 15, 20-page essay, let's outline it and see what's there and see what it needs.
00:40:37
Speaker
I don't mean to poo-poo planning, but I have come to believe much more in discovery. I know that there are writers that plan extensively, and that really works for them. And I think for a memoir, I think it can help too.
00:40:58
Speaker
sort of have an idea of, okay, this is a fairly traditional memoir, which mine is in many ways. Does it fall into three acts? Is there a three act structure here? Where will be my big turning points? And think about that going in and you know, scribble some things down, make a little line even.
00:41:21
Speaker
And also, I think the time for memoirs is very important. And you can put it as you go, because you'll remember other things. But the most useful thing was this outline I did as I went. And then you could see at a glance, it's a Word document. And it's just like, OK, chapter, or it could be essay. And I would do a
00:41:41
Speaker
a dash and write a scene of me going to the feed store and meeting so and so. And then the next line would be dash and it would be a new scene whenever that first scene changed. Often they were at
00:42:05
Speaker
change if a scene goes on long enough you've either got to put the new beat in there or just thicken up that description so that at a glance you can see everything that's in each chapter or each section each each part of an essay and I also color ended up color coding them and some people use a whiteboard for this or the old-fashioned way index cards I used a word document and I could print it out and look at it
00:42:33
Speaker
and say, okay, how many times have I mentioned, because it's important to have this in there in my book, it was important to mention that I have allergies. I didn't make a real big deal about it in the book, but it went to the persona I was trying to develop or the self I was trying to show that I was a guy that had grown up in a suburban beach town
00:42:59
Speaker
And, you know, I wore button down shirts and I had glasses and I was bald and I wasn't very heavily muscled guy and to top it all off, I suffered from ragweed. You know, so it's kind of like this is the guy who's not your, maybe your image of a farmer, but he's in there struggling and trying. So I would want to know, you know, how many times did I end up mentioning
00:43:26
Speaker
that my allergies were bothering me and where did I do that? And so I would, with having that outline after the fact, I could see where I had done it and maybe where I should do it or maybe there were two mentions really close to each other and I wanted the reader to kind of remember that or remember that I had chewed my fingernails to stumps again. That was another thing I wanted to show that I was really anxious
00:43:54
Speaker
actually demanding and that one of the things I'd do is I'd be driving to work and I'd be chewing my fingernails off so I want to know you know how many times did I mention that to remind the reader about that so the reader remembered it but not to beat it to death because it didn't need to be so those kinds of things that kind of outlining was real helpful to me but that kind of thing I don't know how you'd plan that in advance Brendan there are so many things
00:44:21
Speaker
that have to be working, how would I, I mean, that's so, I granted, that's low level. That's why my allergies and my fingernail biting. I mean, come on, I'm not gonna outline that in advance. You've gotta see where it naturally comes up and then see where it might be better used or enhanced. On the other hand, the three big sections of my story are finally buying a farm after a painful search
00:44:48
Speaker
and then getting hurt seriously on the farm, and then selling a magical piece of land. So those were the three big acts. However, my book actually has four sections, and I did that because the long middle section. Okay, so the first act ends, and then there's this big fat middle section of rising action to the big
00:45:15
Speaker
climax of my getting hurt on the farm. But that was a very long section because within that there's not only
00:45:24
Speaker
am I getting hurt, but there's two major sheep issues are going on, a genetic flaw in the flock that resulted in birthing problems and a horrible medieval disgusting disease that surfaced in another part of the flock and what happened to me and what happened to the land. So I looked at that and I thought, that big long middle section, instead of calling it one act, I want to give readers
00:45:57
Speaker
There was a natural resting place in it. So the structure of the book became, first act we managed to get a farm, second act we get sheep, third act I get hurt, fourth act
00:46:13
Speaker
resolve the story, sell the land, resolve the story, resolve some of my issues. The funny thing about that is actually taking a Stanford course in memoir and struggling with that idea of putting in another act to sort of emphasize the
00:46:33
Speaker
the different phases to emphasize, you know, we finally got sheep and we're really involved in farming. It took a long buildup to have our first lambing.
Trusting Instincts in Narrative Structure
00:46:42
Speaker
And I had this teacher that it was a really, she's a really good writer and teacher at Stanford. She was very offended by my idea. She said, you, you can't just throw in and act like that. It's got to be organic.
00:46:55
Speaker
And I'm like, yeah, but you know, Rachel, paragraphing is kind of arbitrary. That's a form of act structuring. I'm not doing it for an arbitrary reason, though. I'm doing it because I want to give the reader another resting point and another emphasis point. She was very offended. She never agreed. And I went against her advice. But it's a funny thing. If you look at my book, you'll say, hmm, that's interesting, a four act
00:47:24
Speaker
Memoir very balanced each act about the same length, but it's in truth. I consider it a classic three act Structure it's more like act one to a to be act three exactly ways So here isn't a few rapid-fire things that I want to be respectful of your time If you had to give your 20 year old self advice What would it be?
Advice to Younger Self and Inspirational Books
00:47:53
Speaker
Don't be so afraid and worried about your dream. Pursue it. Read and write and pursue it. And what are some of the books that you reread and return to again and again? One is a novel I love by Virginia Woolf called To the Lighthouse. It's a great modernist matter.
00:48:18
Speaker
a beautiful book. I return sometimes to, or Ernest Hemingway was a big influence on me when I was a teenager and I think I really learned, one thing that's not often said about him is that he not only wrote great sentences but he was a great lyric, he was a great lyric writer and I think that he had a very
00:48:49
Speaker
landscapes, and I really respond to that. I reread Lee Martin's memoirs and memoir essays, as I said. I think he's a master. To me, he does something that's deceptively easy-looking but very hard, which is to recreate the past, have a strong narrative
00:49:13
Speaker
giving the reader an experience of what it was like to do something and yet within it work in
00:49:21
Speaker
little bits of reflection from his current self looking back. I'm obsessed with that because I find it difficult and I'm so impressed with the way he does it and it is held up as a model so I really like to reread his memoir so on the memoir side I really like to read Lee Martin's stuff again and again.
00:49:44
Speaker
What are some of the books that you might give as gifts or the book or two that you've given as a gift the most?
00:49:57
Speaker
That's an interesting question. I would say, depends on the writer, if it's memoir, I would suggest that a person read Lee Martin's From Our House to learn how a memoir can be constructed very gracefully with narrative movement, yet also contain reflection. I think that
00:50:22
Speaker
That's funny, I mean that's a book I've read now four times and I think that it's so important for me to keep reading it because he has such a deft touch with narrative movement yet also reflective. The Great Gatsby is a book that I reread a lot because I think that his language, I mean nobody uses semicolons and dashes
00:50:51
Speaker
The Great Gatsby is the great American novel and I reread it. So those are two that I continue to go back to. What are you currently working on these days in terms of a book project or something maybe just short of a book project?
Exploring Linked Essays
00:51:15
Speaker
Yeah, at this point it's just short of a book project, but I'm working on some essays. I'm trying to decide how and whether they're talking to each other and if they could be melded into more than just standalone essays.
00:51:35
Speaker
in the Pat Boone Fan Club, in the way that Patricia Handpole did in a book I just read and liked a lot called Blue Arabesque, A Search for the Sublime, which is about her love of art and literature and her lifelong consumption of art and literature. And she identified some commonalities in that love, which she then explores.
00:52:03
Speaker
And it has a kind of a loose narrative moving through time with her in various places. So I just finished a book by Judith Kitchen called Distance and Direction, which are lyric essays. And hers were not quite as linked as the other two, but there were certain recurring motifs and themes. So I'm reading things that are much more like distance
00:52:36
Speaker
anything I normally read or write and I got on to some of these books as a consequence of going to the Kenyan Writers Workshop this past summer and I produced a couple of essays, rough essays at the conference that
00:52:53
Speaker
are things i'm still working on so i would say right now it's uh... try i don't know what it's leading to it and that's it and that's a hard thing you know you you mentioned how how writers continue to produce and i think that uh... in my case it's important to realize that even though i may not know what i'm doing or what something might lead to that i hope to keep working so that i will discover something because i think
00:53:22
Speaker
It's real easy and it's real natural to just say, I'm just going to stop for a while because I don't know what I'm doing and I'm going to wait for a project or think up a project. But I think in the meantime, I should be producing something and these essays loosely linked by the very broad theme of emotion are what I've been working on.
00:53:46
Speaker
I think that's a perfect place to cap off our conversation here.
Conclusion and Book Promotion
00:53:50
Speaker
For anyone who's going to be listening to this podcast, hopefully it's more than five or six people. Richard's memoir, a wonderful memoir, is named Shepherd. It's about farming fatherhood and just a wonderful experience reading. Like I said, in a short review I did of it, I dog-eared
00:54:12
Speaker
I had more dog ears on the memoir than at a vet clinic or whatever it was I said. I can't even remember at this point. But neither case. Richard, you did a wonderful job with the book and I can't wait for the other stuff that you've got coming down the pipeline. Thank you, Brendan, and thank you for this interview. Cool. Very nice.