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Episode 292: Chip Scanlan says, 'A Writer is Someone Who Writes. Period.'
227 Plays3 years ago
Chip Scanlan (@chipscanlan) is the author of Writers on Writing. He's a teacher, writer, journalist, novelist, etc. A great dude, too.
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Sponsor: West Virg. Wesleyan College's MFA in Creative Writing
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Transcript
Episode Dedication and Announcements
00:00:00
Speaker
This episode is dedicated to David humane a tier 3 patron Over at patreon.com slash CNF pod Thank you. Thank you And hey before we dive in to the interview just to remind you that new deadline that extended deadline for Issue three of the audio magazine is coming up
00:00:23
Speaker
December 31st the final day of the year theme is heroes essays no more than 2,000 words bear in mind It's an audio essay you submit a written one But pay attention to the words roll out of your mouth because if it is accepted that's when we worry about the audio so just email a word doc or a Google document and
00:00:47
Speaker
Email submissions to with heroes in the subject line to creative nonfiction podcast at gmail.com Typing that correctly is a test
Defining a Writer
00:00:56
Speaker
unto itself. Hey, I kind of pay writers too. I don't kind I do Okay, good dig, you know a writer is someone who writes period. That's what I tell everybody I work with You know writer is not a bestseller You know is not a writer is not someone who's post a writer is someone who writes period
Podcast and Guest Introduction
00:01:20
Speaker
Well, this is a creative non-fiction podcast. It's a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. How's it going? Chip Scanlon is here to talk about his new book, Writers on Writing, for question 55 writers, hundreds of writing insights, and 111 journal writing prompts.
00:01:43
Speaker
In it you'll find insights from the likes of Susan Orlean, Bronwyn Dickey, Matt Tullis, Kim H. Cross, Tommy Tomlinson, David Finkel. Shoot, I'm in the collection, if you believe that. Exactly, I, yeah, my eyebrows would have gone up too.
00:02:02
Speaker
And this is a non-fiction podcast, so you know I'm telling the truth. Hey, I'm honored to be part of this goon squad of writers and editors. It's a trip. This collection that Chip put together is a trip. Chip has spent a large part of his career as a reporter, writing narrative features for the Providence Journal and among other places.
Learning from Other Writers
00:02:28
Speaker
He's a writing coach, editor, writer,
00:02:30
Speaker
teacher whose work frequently appears on pointer dot org and even storyboard he puts out a great newsletter every couple weeks of the craft lessons in his famous for question exercise that he poses to writers it which is the very bedrock
00:02:47
Speaker
this new book what is the most important lesson you've learned as a writer what has been the biggest surprise of your writing life if you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer what would it be and what's the best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you that's it those four questions over and over again to all those writers 55 wildly different responses this is my recommendation okay just take it from me
00:03:15
Speaker
Read the book once, cover to cover. Don't worry about the journal prompts yet. Then, at the start of the new year, reread one interview per week and then do the journal prompts that week. So you really get to sit with one per week. More than one if you really average it out. But let's just say one a week to keep things simple.
00:03:37
Speaker
That's what you do. That's what I'm assigning. Roy Peter Clark, two-time guest of this podcast, called this book basically like one of the best writers conferences you'll ever go to and name another conference where you'll spend ten dollars and get all this kind of wisdom. It's like the greatest writing panel you'll ever go to.
Sponsorship and Promotions
00:03:57
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. That's what I thought.
00:04:01
Speaker
Sport for the Creative Nonfiction Park is brought to you by West Virginia Wesleyan College's low-res, MFA in creative writing. Now in its 10th year, this affordable program boasts a low student-to-faculty ratio and a strong sense of community. CNF faculty include Brandon Billings-Noble, Jeremy Jones, and Sarah Einstein. There's also fiction and poetry tracks with recent faculty there, including Ashley Bryant-Filts and Jacinta Townsend, as well as Diane Gilliam and Savannah Sipple. No matter your discipline, man,
00:04:30
Speaker
If you're looking to up your craft or learn a new one, consider West Virginia Wesleyan right in the heart of Appalachia. Visit MFA.wvwc.edu for more information and dates of enrollment. Hey, and if you head over to BrendanOmero.com, hey, hey, you'll find show notes to this interview and several others. I mean, by several, I mean all the others, and by several, I mean close to 300 at this point. Oh boy.
00:05:01
Speaker
and you can also sign up for my up to 11 monthly newsletter recommendations raffles exclusive happy hour first of the month no spam as far as i can tell you can't beat it and you can always keep the conversation going on twitter at cnfpod instagram at creative non-fiction podcast
00:05:18
Speaker
If you have a moment, consider leaving a written review on Apple Podcasts. We've stalled out a little bit. Listen, a podcast like mine, a little podcast I could, it feeds off the kindness of reviews. I have no name recognition, you know that. I mean, my name is cool as fuck, but people are like, Brendan, who?
00:05:42
Speaker
If they see a giant pile of written reviews, the way we're at CNF will be like, I gotta give this a try. I mean, jeez. And if you do, I'll read it on the air. I'm not a monster. And Patreon is how we subsidize this enterprise and keep the lights on at CNF Pod HQ. I can technically record podcasts in the dark, but come on. It's how we pay writers for their work in the audio magazine. Members get to ask questions of guests, and I give you credit for that. Like I said, I'm not a monster.
00:06:11
Speaker
There are transcripts, coaching, and the knowledge that you are helping this community.
Chip Scanlon's Writing Journey
00:06:17
Speaker
Okay. One more sponsor. Okay. All right. The show is brought to you by the world. Palsy Walsy, slang, friendly, or appearing to be friendly in an intimate or hearty way. The police kept their eye on him because he was trying to get Palsy Walsy with the night watchman. Thank you, Palsy Walsy.
00:06:39
Speaker
Stay tuned for a parting shot at the end of the show, but in the meantime, please enjoy this conversation with Chip Scanlon-Riff. I wonder, when was the first time, Chip, that you tried something for the first time?
00:07:10
Speaker
I think it was writing. Believe it or not, when I was in kindergarten, my mother told me this story. She was a really faithful Catholic and she raised this Catholic and said to me one day, you know, chipper, which is what they all call me. If you say nine Hail Marys on Tuesday, the Blessed Mother will give you anything you want.
00:07:36
Speaker
And she said, what would you like? And I said, a mechanical pencil. And, you know, I really feel kind of like a writer was born because I wasn't planning to be an architect. That's incredible that I always love when people they connect and lock into writing at such a young age. And it's just like kind of the only thing they ever wanted to do. Was that the case with you ever since you got that mechanical pencil in your hand?
00:08:05
Speaker
Well, probably when I was about 12 is when I began seriously trying to write, but I never really wanted to be anything else. I mean, I wasn't one of these people who said, you know, what do you want to be when you grow up ship a writer? It was it was all I thought of. And when I went to high school, I wrote short stories.
00:08:22
Speaker
bad ones. When I went to college, I wrote short stories, mediocre ones. And then after college, I went into the Peace Corps and wrote short stories, tortured ones. And then when I came out, I had no money, no job, and no place to live. And so I stumbled. I became an accidental journalist. I grew up wanting to be a fiction writer. When I was 12, I read the
00:08:52
Speaker
the novel by Young Blood Hawk. It was about a poor kid from a Kentucky town. He grew up to be rich and famous. It was basically modeled on Thomas Wolfe. I read this when I was 12 and it was one of those books where you read the book and you stay up all night sleep, sneak reading.
00:09:20
Speaker
Yeah, you know, under the covers with a flashlight. And so I decided that I wanted to be it was it was by Herman Woke, who's the writer, and I decided I wanted to be a rich, famous novelist. The problem was I didn't know how to be a rich, famous novelist. I knew one thing when I read this book, it was about 700 pages. I thought this man is a genius. He's a magician. I was screwed because I was neither.
00:09:50
Speaker
And so, you know, I basically that that really propelled me from the age of 12 on. I had forgotten about that. I mean, I've written about it, but I forgot when there was such a good question you asked because it was really at the age of 12 and I read that novel and I decided I wanted the right I wanted the right stories that would keep people awake all night. Right. With a flashlight.
00:10:12
Speaker
Oh, that's awesome. And as you, I can relate to wanting to be a fiction writer and then you kind of get, well, you start to think of like, how can you actually perhaps make a living doing the thing? Or maybe you just kind of get blindsided by the possibilities of using the tools of the fiction writer overlaid over the verifiably true landscape of nonfiction. And then you realize that, oh my God, this thing I'm reading that reads like fiction
00:10:40
Speaker
It actually happened, you know, in the hands of the right trained journalist, let's say a John McPhee or Tracy Kidder or something of that nature. And then you're like, oh my God, like this just seems to be, it just really cracked with me and really popped in my brain in a way that fiction wasn't. As much as I love fiction, just getting that little bit of a taste, it really lit me up. I don't know if that was the experience you had as you were starting as a budding journalist in newspapers.
00:11:08
Speaker
Well, very much so. I tried to get a job on a paper called The Milford Citizen in Connecticut. It was so bad, Brendan. It was known as The Citizen. And it was 6,000 circulation daily. And the city editor would have nothing to do with me. He told my friend who worked for the competition that he doesn't have a journalism degree. He doesn't have an eclipse. So he said, well, give him a try. And they gave me a four paragraph obit.
00:11:36
Speaker
And they told me later they expected I would call the funeral home and hand in six crafts. But it was about a man who was found dead in the Sinai desert from Milford, Connecticut. And my reaction was, how does a guy from Milford, Connecticut end up dead in the Sinai desert? Well, the result was death in the desert.
00:11:57
Speaker
which was not only on the front page of the Sunday Milford Citizen, it was the entire front page of the Milford Citizen. And it was narrative. And I thought to myself, this is amazing. I can write, I can use fictional tools and tell true stories. And so I was hooked.
00:12:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. In reading some of Roy Peter Clark's work where he cites you frequently, especially in writing tools, he wrote for a story you wrote about a woman or a family whose daughter went missing, but they left the light on for him, put the tape there. And Roy wrote, Scanlon saw the taped-over switch and asked about it. His curiosity, not his imagination, captured that great detail.
00:12:48
Speaker
So maybe you can speak to that in terms of the fiction roots that you had, but then of course turning your eye to the the repertorial and capturing things and filling up a notebook.
00:12:58
Speaker
You know, Brendan, I don't think I was thinking that way. I mean, I vividly remember that. I was working for the St. Peter'sburg Times, and Ted Bundy was about to be executed. And my editor came and said, we've got to do something. So I read all the clips, and I said, well, everything is about Florida, but I mean, there are all these deaths out west. You know, Utah, Washington State, why don't I go there?
Influences and Journalism Philosophy
00:13:20
Speaker
So I ended up in Utah, and I'm getting ready to leave. And I just...
00:13:26
Speaker
I know, I guess I did see, but I noticed that there was this piece of masking tape over the light switch. And it surprised me. Who puts tape over a hall light? And I asked the mother and she said, we always kept the light on.
00:13:44
Speaker
and it had been on for 12 years. I don't know if I was thinking like a fiction writer. I really feel like I was thinking like a non-fiction narrative writer who was looking for what Tom Wolfe called status details in this incredible anthology and that introduction where he introduces the literary techniques that he said, you know, we're not doing anything new.
00:14:09
Speaker
This is what the 19th century, this is what Balzac was doing. This is what Dickens was doing. We're just using scene by scene construction. We're using dialogue. We're using interior monologue and we're using status details. You know, details that tell you something about a person and their status and how they want to be viewed and how they view themselves. And so I guess I was drawn to those always.
00:14:31
Speaker
There's another great little passage that Roy writes in Writing Tools where he describes you as a helper who keeps me going. For years, my teaching partner Chip Scanlon has played this role for me, especially when I'm working on a long project. Chip has a rare quality as a colleague. He's capable of withholding negative judgments. And he says to me over and over again, keep going, keep writing. We'll talk about that later.
00:14:57
Speaker
I think that's probably because that's what I want to be told. Yeah, how important is it to have that kind of person in your corner, to say to keep going because we can and we need to build up the structure here before we can whittle it.
00:15:12
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, if you don't have copy, you don't have anything to revise. So if you throw cold water on somebody, they're not going to get anywhere. They're just going to stop. And I've had people who've stopped me dead in my tracks. A reporter at the Bridgeport Post, Milford Bureau, when I was working at that little paper,
00:15:35
Speaker
He basically told me my paper stunk and my story stunk. And man, that crippled me for that crippled me for a while. It doesn't take much for a really negative person to bring a writer down. You know, that's why I was always looking and hoping for writers, I mean, for editors rather, who would, you know, make me feel that I wanted to keep going, you know, who actually, you know, who actually had greater ideas. I can I detour for a second? Oh, of course.
00:16:04
Speaker
Well, I once did a story about a seven-year-old blind boy in Rhode Island. So I went to school with him. I went to the Y with him. I hung out with his family. And I wrote this story. I wrote the draft. And my editor, Joel Rawson, says, have you spent an entire day with this kid? And I start stammering. Well, I went to the Y with him. I stood hung out with him. I went to school. No, no, no. Have you spent an entire day with him?
00:16:31
Speaker
Have you been there from the moment he got up until the moment he went to sleep? And I said, well, no. And he said, well, go do it. And what a fantastic editor. I've already devoted all this time. And he's telling me, rip up what you got and go re-report it. And the story began with the shower waking the kid up.
00:16:54
Speaker
And you know, blind children, they have this habit called eye rubbing. They're all constantly rubbing their eyes. They don't know why, but it's a habit. And the last thing that happens in the story is the mother, who has already said she is not gonna raise her child like a blind kid selling pencils on the corner, puts him to bed and steps out the door, says, good night, Jed. And before she closes the door, the last thing she says is, put your hand down.
00:17:24
Speaker
It was a great kicker. Yeah. You talk about the being surrounding yourself with people that kind of essentially put fuel in your tank tell you to keep going, whether it be writers or editors. What's been your experience with, you know, dealing with the people that that are drains that are hard that don't put fuel in your tank that sometimes lead you to question why you're even in this line of work in the first place and had you power through that? I quit.
00:17:54
Speaker
When was this? When I was at St. Peter's with Times, I had this fantastic editor, Neville Green, and he was Tom French's editor, has edited all of Tom's, edited all of Tom's serial narratives, and I was just beginning to do serial narratives, and he got promoted, and I got put, I'm not gonna name any names, but I got put in the hands of what I was, so I was together from hell. Now any part of it was we were just oil and water, we were just different, but eventually I left. I left.
00:18:23
Speaker
And I think that's the only thing I could do. Yeah, was it a case of this editor was kind of a blocked writer or was it just a nasty part? Well, the editor was a fiction writer. They were very cynical. And I'm not, probably to a fault.
00:18:45
Speaker
And so the questions she was asking of my story were questions that I hadn't been asking. Now, maybe I should have been asking them, but the way she was asking them just
00:18:57
Speaker
really brought me down to the extent that I wasn't even going into the office. I was writing this story from home. I was trying to file it while she was on vacation so she couldn't touch it. It was a really unhappy period.
Career and Community Reflections
00:19:11
Speaker
And so, you know, I really feel bad because I left there. I didn't get the chance to work with Mike Wilson, you know, who's one of the most amazing editors there is out there.
00:19:22
Speaker
Who was you know the Floridian editor, and I didn't get the chance to keep working with Tom French or Ann Hall But I just had to go. Would you identify that as perhaps a nadir of your writing life?
00:19:36
Speaker
Oh, let's see, Brendan. I've had several Nadir. Let's see. I've thought about that. No, the Nadir of my writing life was when I showed up, long story short, had a romantic involvement that ended and ended up with me with no job, no house, and no girlfriend. And I ended up with the Delaware State News in Dover, Delaware.
00:20:07
Speaker
And you know how you write a cover letter and you drop the name of the paper like 20 times? I'm flying to the Delaware State News. I think the Delaware State News. I think your coverage of the Delaware State News. Walk into the city, the city editor's office and he says, you know, you spelled Delaware wrong. And then he says, but you spelled my name right. Nobody does. You're hired. And.
00:20:32
Speaker
A year later, I was part of a revolt that drove him from the newsroom. Now, that was the nadir of my professional career, but it was the apex of my personal life because I met my wife there. Excellent. Yeah. So how do you end up at Pointer? Oh, wow. Don Murray, Donald M. Murray, writing coach, he was the first newspaper writing coach at the Boston Globe.
00:20:58
Speaker
And he probably was the first newspaper writing coach in the 70s. He was invited by Roy to a seminar at Poynter. And at that same seminar was a Providence Journal colleague named Carol McCabe. And she came back raving about Don Murray and how he had to get Don Murray to the Providence Journal as our writing coach.
00:21:21
Speaker
then Roy invites me to be, well, he accepts my application to be part of a seminar.
00:21:32
Speaker
So I went to a seminar for the first time. And then over a period of years, I was invited back as visiting faculty. And then the last thing that happened was, I was working at the Knight River, Knight River Newspapers Washington Bureau when I got a call from the dean, Karen Dunlap. And she asked me, she asked me to review all the volumes of the best newspaper writing, which was the annual compilation of American Society of Newspaper Editors winners.
00:21:58
Speaker
And she said, I just wanted you to take a look at the books and see what we can prove. And, you know, it was a great little, you know, it was a great little freelance assignment. And then a few months later, I get a call from her and she says, Chip, how would you like to come to Pointer 4? And I'm finishing the sentence a week in February. And it says, she says, for five months to fill in for someone.
00:22:22
Speaker
And actually to fill in for, not to fill in, but to work with Don Fry, who was, you know, the writing coach who just died the other last week, I believe. Yeah. So I got there and Don had left and I realized, oh my God, I have a chance to get on the faculty here.
00:22:42
Speaker
And I had this great colleague at the Providence Journal, Mark Patinkin, who said, look, take Ted Turner's, follow Ted Turner's advice. Put your head down and work your head off.
00:22:52
Speaker
And that's what I did. I put out the best newspaper writing volume myself that year. I taught the six-week summer program by myself that year. I taught seminars. And at the end of the five months, I got the job as director of writing programs. So it was incredible luck. And the thing is, what was great about it was I had always loved Pointer. You know how in newspapers you're in a meeting, you think, well, I better not say that.
00:23:20
Speaker
Now, that might not go over too well. At Pointer, you could say anything. The seminar was a safe space. So it was the place I wanted to be, even though I was giving up newspaper reporting. I'd done it for 22 years. Part of me would have liked to this day to be still doing it, but I'm glad I went there. I learned to be a teacher. I learned to be a coach. I got to work with great people and great students.
00:23:50
Speaker
and college students. I met a lot of people. I met a lot of the people who were in this book of mine. I made contacts there that exist to this day, which ping pong back and forth. What did that show you and teach you, even after having been in newspapers for 20 plus years, about the meaning and the importance of community?
00:24:12
Speaker
Well, gosh, that's another good question. There was always a community in a newsroom. A newsroom was a community, depending on how dysfunctional it was. It could be anything from a dysfunctional family to a real family. But at Poynter, the faculty was a community. What we call the seminarians were a community. These were newspaper writers and editors and broadcast journalists and later online journalists who would come for just five days.
00:24:42
Speaker
And within those five days, they were together all day long. They were in the seminar room. They would go out to eat every night. We would have a party Thursday nights. I always had everybody write a personal essay, which was an incredibly bonding experience.
00:24:59
Speaker
We read them on Friday mornings. I brought tissues and Hershey Kisses just to get us through the readings. Within five days, these bonds between people that I know exist between people who have been there to this day.
00:25:16
Speaker
Yeah, and given that you've spent so much time in newsrooms and then as a teacher getting a chance to spend more time with reporters and non-fiction writers who deeply love the craft of journalism and newspapering in particular,
00:25:34
Speaker
Or how do you feel about an industry, especially in newspapers, that over the last 20ish years, it just, it has done almost nothing but stab, stab you in the heart, especially when you've spent so much time in it and know the utility of the craft of journalism and great nonfiction storytelling. Well, I, Brendan, I have to say, first of all, that I lucked out because I got out before I got stabbed. Yeah. I left in 1994.
00:26:04
Speaker
And I feel heartsick about all the people who lost their jobs, lost their
00:26:12
Speaker
lost their houses, lost everything. Because of short-sighted decisions, because of failure to recognize what journalism represents in a democracy. I don't think it's overstating it to call it a national tragedy. Not when you look at the news deserts across this country. People are not getting informed. Corruption is not being exposed. It's just a terrible thing.
00:26:41
Speaker
When you started your coaching and then working with writers over the last several years, what has changed about maybe your approach and your coaching, and what are some of the commonalities that you notice among people looking to improve their writing?
00:27:00
Speaker
Well, I was really fortunate to have my friend Don Murray, who was 25 years, my senior, become my mentor and best friend. And he really taught me everything there was to know about coaching. You know, he's the one who taught me the first thing you say in a conversation as a coach is how can I help? The second is you listen more than you talk. You look for what works.
00:27:26
Speaker
And what needs work. And he used to say, and remember I said what needs work, not what doesn't work. Because the difference between needs and doesn't is the difference between hope and despair.
00:27:36
Speaker
yet roly wrote in a murder your dog darlings about donna that it is process a process approach transform the way i thought and wrote it represents the single most important element of my education as a writer and subsequently as a teacher an influence so powerful it transformed me into a disciple dedicated to spreading his word is often as far as possible and it sounds like you have a similar connection with uh... don's influence uh...
00:28:05
Speaker
He took the words out of my mouth. I mean, that's exactly the way I feel. When he died, the appreciation I wrote was, I know what it's like to be a disciple. And I don't mean that in a sacrilegious way, but I've been a follower of this man for 25 years. And he was the single most important, he was the single most important element of my education as a writer, because he taught me
00:28:33
Speaker
The first day he showed up in the Providence Journal as our writing coach, we gathered in the publisher's conference room, you know, those conference rooms that have the, you know, gleaming tables, the gleaming oval table that stretches forever. And he stands up and he says, writing may be magical, but it's not magic. It's a rational process, a series of decisions and steps that every writer makes and takes, no matter what the length, no matter what the genre, whatever the deadline.
00:29:03
Speaker
And I mean, you know, I might've been standing before the burning bush because all of a sudden, you know, there I was a 12 year old kid who said, wait a minute, I don't have to be a magician. I don't have to be a genius. I just have to follow this process. You know, I just have to get the idea and then focus it and then report the story and then organize the information and draft it and revise it. I had never gone through that before.
00:29:29
Speaker
I basically flung myself blindly into a story. And in the course of the writing that you do, so often when we talk about writing, we talk about setting up routines or doing the research and the organizing of it. But we rarely talk about the thinking that goes into a piece, short or long. So for you,
00:29:56
Speaker
What is the thinking part of the process like? Well, you know, I don't know if I was reading something I wrote or I was writing it, but I always used to say that I overreported. And then I realized I underthought. And for me, a really important moment was when David of Andrealy of The Washington Post was a finalist for one of those American Society newspaper writing awards.
00:30:24
Speaker
American Society of Newspaper at other awards for his coverage of Nixon's funeral. And when we had a finalist, we couldn't interview them because we didn't have space, but I started saying, let's have a thing called lessons learned. And I would just ask them, could you write a brief essay on the lessons he learned? You learned.
00:30:41
Speaker
And so he's talking about this thing and he says, you know, sometimes you just have to sit back and tell a story and you just have to ask yourself, you know, what does it mean? What happened? Who said what? Who did what? And why does it matter? What does it say about life, about the times, about the worlds we live in?
00:31:01
Speaker
And I thought, oh my God. And that really became something that became a huge part of my teaching, became a huge part of my thinking. I tell people now, if you want to find the theme of your story, you can find that in 85 seconds. If you're willing to free write, if you're willing to just blast your fingers on the keys, not worry if it's any good, and just answer those questions. And I would in seminars, and when I was coaching in newsrooms,
00:31:27
Speaker
I would lead people through these exercises and I would say, okay, here's the first question. I'll give you 15 seconds. Go. Here's the second second and I'll give you 15 seconds. Next one, 15 seconds. Now, the third one is such a great question. What does it say about the life, about the world, about life, about the world, about the times we live in? I said, it's such a good question. I'm going to give you more time. You get 20 seconds. Then I get to the last question.
00:31:54
Speaker
It wasn't Von Draley's, but it was one that I really cared about. What is your story really about? And that was a question I learned from Joel Ross. He's kept hammering away. What's it really about?
00:32:05
Speaker
you know, you know, with that blanket. I said, well, it's about a blind kid trying to, you know, act like me. He said, no, no, it's about parents experiencing the worst nightmare of their lives.
Insights from Renowned Writers
00:32:16
Speaker
You know, you have a baby and you expect this baby, you dream of this baby being perfect and all of a sudden you have a baby that's blind. That's what it's about, Chip. Get back to your computer. So, you know, and I would say to them, and you have five seconds.
00:32:33
Speaker
and answer that question, what is it really about in one word? And if people would say blind kid, I said, no, no. What is it about universally? What is it about emotionally? Because that's how you connect with people.
00:32:50
Speaker
themes are universal. They are, as the definition says, meaning in a word. And if you can nail that, you know, if you can nail it, desperation, corruption, in the sense it travels all the way back through your reporting, through your organizing, everything has to buttress that theme.
00:33:10
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of, it's like what Rosalind Bentley said in your new book where she says, you know, boil your story down to a sentence. If you can't do that, your story is likely to ramble and lose its theme. If possible, boil the story down to a word, write the sentence or word on a post-it note and keep it visible until you're done with the story.
00:33:30
Speaker
Yeah, I was really happy when the pointer is to publish a story of mine about this self-publisher's journey I went on because I chose Rosalind's interview as an excerpt. So I was really happy that she got the exposure because her interview, well, you know, I was hoping you wouldn't ask me if I had a favorite interview. I kept thinking, please don't ask me that because I think I'll say, it would be like asking me who's my favorite child.
00:33:56
Speaker
Right. I mean, I was going to ask not your favorite interview, but maybe which of the the main four questions that you pose to 55 plus writers and editors is just like who really connected with you the most? Oh, God, that's a good one. You know, Lane de Gregory's idea of taking side trips, learning to shut up and letting unanswered questions lead you on side trips.
00:34:26
Speaker
that really stuck with me. You know, Susan Eggers talking about the details. But John Branch, John Branch in talking about, you know, just so forcefully, look, you have to believe in what you do. You have to believe in what you write. If you don't believe it, nobody else is gonna. And when it comes to editors, you know, I love what Jen Winburn said. Basically, you know, my job is to do no harm.
00:34:52
Speaker
That's the most important lesson I've learned as an editor. Then you've got David Finkel. David Finkel, a MacArthur genius fellow saying he can't come up with a metaphor.
00:35:08
Speaker
journalists kind of refused. If you go through the collection and writers are writing, you'll see essentially journalists refusing to come up with similes. Yeah, I know. Forgive me, with metaphors. They're not comfortable with poetic license, they're with poetic language. So a lot of them couldn't come up with metaphors, but they could come up with similes. David said he couldn't come up with a simile or metaphor, but he said, I guess what it boils down to is making peace with your weaknesses.
00:35:35
Speaker
And I thought, I mean, here's a man who has done incredible things as a journalist, as a narrative writer, and to think that he's conscious of his weaknesses.
00:35:51
Speaker
You know, I liked, you know, there are journals in the book, but there are fiction writers too. And I really wanted more than reporters. I wanted the range of voices. So there are poets and there's a documentary filmmaker, you know, Becky Blanton's in there. And she was in there before, you know, we ever got to work together.
Self-Publishing Journey
00:36:12
Speaker
She's a ghost writer. She does a lot of good things to say about the process.
00:36:16
Speaker
But Nancy Ludmour, who is this, I think, brilliant short story writer, who has just begun, I'm happy to see this, you know, it's going to write a novel. You know, she basically says, there's no magic to it. It's only hard work. Yeah. And what John Franklin might call as a side effect of it would be like getting writer's ass. Yes. Yeah. Only John would say that. Yeah.
00:36:43
Speaker
I actually, one of the advantages of self publishing a book is you get to do some kind of weird things. I don't think I've ever seen a book with a dog in it.
00:36:52
Speaker
as part of the dedication. But my dog, Leo, who's a one-eyed miniature schnauzer, who recently lost an eye to glaucoma, he's in the book because I say, he makes me take him out six times a week, six times a week. Oh, I wish. He makes me take him out six times a day. It's like if writing is the act of applying the posterior to a chair, then Leo understood the value of regular restorative walks.
00:37:24
Speaker
That's one of the cool things. I can't imagine Random House would say, yeah, sure, you can put your dog in there, pal. Yeah, no kidding. Well, speaking of dog, one of the great pieces of advice from Finkel, and he says it so brilliantly, and it gets to the real heart of what reporting and writing is about, he says if reporting is always getting the name of the dog, writing is knowing when not to use the name of the dog. I love that. That one really was like fireworks in my head.
00:37:51
Speaker
I agree, I agree. I mean, that one you could just stare at and just roll over in your head just for a long time.
00:37:58
Speaker
And I also love what Sean Tanner said too by quoting Thelonious Monk that a genius is the one most like himself. And that just gets to the heart of making peace with yourself with your voice and developing your voice and that identity that you need and that belief in yourself to know that the only way I can tell this story is only my way and I gotta be okay with that. I just love the sentiment of that.
00:38:28
Speaker
Yeah, you might almost call this book an Irish American book because I've got three Irish writers in there and it was by complete happenstance. I connected with Sean Tanner because he stumbled upon my Twitter feed and I read this short story road and I just thought it was fantastic. The way I get these interviews is whenever I see somebody who I admire, I cold call them.
00:38:57
Speaker
I sent him an interview request. Could you answer four questions about your writing life? And I've yet to be turned down. It's pretty awesome. And he led me to two others. And Lois Kapila, who's the co-founder of a reader-funded independent newspaper in Dublin, she was just going yesterday to, she's in the book, and she's the one who says horrible messy drafts. That's what she's learned, the most important lesson.
00:39:25
Speaker
for her is that you can have horrible message you ask. She was just going for Irish citizenship. So I mean, let me tell you, I got four Irish Irish people in the book. The rest are American.
00:39:36
Speaker
I love that reading about John Branch's personal story in here too, how he, up until he was 29, he was day job working as a manager at Costco. And I think hearing something like that makes some of the late bloomers among us and the people who are not 100% sustained by the writing they love to do feel not as alone. I just love that he was able to, he had the candor and the sort of courage to share that.
00:40:04
Speaker
A lot of people don't share that stuff. It's the stuff we don't tweet about.
00:40:17
Speaker
and write three books that everybody should buy for his Christmas presents. I mean, he's like the Kurt Warner of of writing. I know. And he's an incredibly generous man. I've never asked him for anything that he hasn't, you know, immediately helped me with, whether it's, you know, how he he snuck Snowfall in The New York Times without a nutcraft. And that was his goal, to write a 10,000 word story without a nutcraft.
00:40:45
Speaker
And given that this was, you know, you wrote in your pointer essay that just came out about self-publishing that for your last few books, you were dissatisfied with the marketing and promotion of the last few books you did. And maybe you can take us to that that kernel of what made that where that dissatisfaction stem from, which ultimately sprung board you into wanting to self-publish this one.
00:41:11
Speaker
Well, when I was a pointer, I got approached by Harcourt Brace. Don Murray recommended me to write a college journalism textbook. I should have said no immediately. I didn't want to be a textbook writer. I wanted to be a novelist. I wanted to be an essayist. And stupidly, I said yes the way I say yes to too many things. And I spent hundreds of hours
00:41:36
Speaker
And just as it was published, hardcore brace basically went out of business. And so there I was without a publisher. I mean, I made lemonade out of lemons by writing a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education called Little Orphan Author. And then I get picked up by Oxford University Press, which sounds great, right? Well, first of all, so when you lose your publisher, you don't get much promotion, right?
00:41:59
Speaker
Right. And then I get picked up by picked up by Oxford University Press. You know, it's like I'm telling my mother, you know, mom, it's Oxford University Press in London. And it wasn't just the promotion. It was an editing problem. My first book they felt was too big. I mean, I had deliberately said I'm putting everything I know and should know about journalism in this book. And so it was big.
00:42:27
Speaker
And the development editor said, you know, chip is too big. It's just too big. So they gave me this editor who basically had, you know, I didn't like the idea at first, but she wanted it in bite-sized chunks.
00:42:41
Speaker
You know, I thought they were, you know, USA Today-izing the book, but in retrospect, it was great. And at the five-yard line, she calls us. I mean, literally, Brendan, we're at the five-yard line. She's ready to submit the manuscript. She calls us and says, I'm leaving for a new job. Cool.
00:43:00
Speaker
So I got a new editor who was a lovely man. I mean, I loved working with it, but the first thing he said was, Chip, this manuscript is too short. Have you got anything else? I said, yeah, I got everything for my first edition. So all of it went back in. Not all of it, but a lot of it. And then, you know, nothing really happened with the promotion.
00:43:21
Speaker
You know, then my wife Kathy and I, my wife Catherine Fair and I, we wrote two serial newspaper novels when I was a pointer. They went around the country. They went to Australia, Canada. They were Christmas themed. And one of them became a little book. It was put out by Universal Press Syndicate, you know, Dunesbury's publisher. And talking about bad luck, the publicist had just come over from the Kansas City Star as the business
00:43:51
Speaker
editor. I don't think she had a clue. They gave us a questionnaire, you know, who should we contact, who the people. You know, I had a lot of great contacts. Rick Bragg had already given me a, you know, a kill for a blurb. I'm listing all these names. They never contacted any of them.
00:44:11
Speaker
And then this is a Christmas themed book. We go to Barnes and Noble, it's in the spirituality section. So it was at that point I said, you know, this is...
00:44:22
Speaker
This is unhappy. This is not working. I'm not making any money from this. I'm killing myself doing this. I honestly hadn't thought about self-publishing, except my brother, Jeff, who proofreads my newsletter every week, kept saying over the last several months, Chip, you ought to put the interviews in a collection. Why don't you put them in a collection? And I would say, yeah, I'm too tired. But I finally said, yeah, that's a good idea. And then I thought, you know,
00:44:52
Speaker
It's kind of a niche book. I thought it's going to be hard to find somebody interested in it. I don't think an agent is going to be interested in it. And frankly, as they said in that piece, I really didn't feel like going to the trouble. I'd been through the trouble.
00:45:11
Speaker
I'd been through the trouble of trying to find an agent. I'd been through the trouble of having an agent trying to sell a book of mine and fail, you know. And so, you know, just the convergence of Becky Blanton coming into my life and her being a self-publisher, you know, just developed into me coming to the realization that I should publish the damn thing myself.
00:45:36
Speaker
Now what are some of the challenges that a writer might face who might be on the fence about whether self-publishing or not in trying to get that credibility and traction, let's say, at bookstores or newspapers, often both of them will often discredit a thing that is self-published or independently published? Yeah.
00:46:01
Speaker
I mean, I don't expect The New York Times to review my book. I don't expect any newspapers to review it. But I'm on Goodreads. I just got on Goodreads. You know, I'm probably getting a lot more traction. If I'm lucky, I'm getting a lot more traction on Goodreads than I am in terms of reaching buyers. But yeah, if you self publish, you are going to give up some things.
00:46:26
Speaker
Your chances are you're not going to be in a bookstore unless unless you're famous and you can go in and say, you know, I've written this biography of myself and I'm, you know, whoever Donald Trump
00:46:40
Speaker
And would you like to sell it? And they're not going to say, well, who published it? They're going to say, oh, of course, Mr. President. But this is where Becky comes in. And this is where her expertise self-publishing comes in. Because when we went through the process of uploading these books, she went through the contract with me. And she said, look, Chip, you can get 60%
00:47:07
Speaker
royalties on this book. Or you can get 40% and pick expanded distribution. And it will give you less money in the short term, but expanded distribution means that Amazon will distribute it worldwide and they will distribute it to booksellers and libraries. Now it's up to them to decide whether they want it, but at least it's being offered to them.
00:47:32
Speaker
You know, if you pick the 60%, you know, you got more money in your pocket, but basically, you know, you don't have a prayer of getting in a bookstore. And you probably don't have a prayer of getting in a library. It's really, it's really tricky. I mean, Amazon has done a terrific thing giving writers and publishers the chance to do this kind of publishing.
00:47:56
Speaker
Man, they've got everything buttoned up. If you're not careful, for example, the ISBN number that's the universal recognition for books, they offer you a free ISBN number. But if you take it, then all of a sudden you limit your distribution.
00:48:17
Speaker
So Becky says, you don't take that chip. You go and you pay $2.95 for 10 ISBN members from Bokers. Then it's your book and you can do whatever you want with it. One of the reasons that I wrote the piece, to be honest, of course, I wanted to write the piece to promote my book. But beyond that, I really wanted to tell people,
00:48:42
Speaker
about the journey that I took because I thought that I know there are a lot of people who are interested in self-publishing.
00:48:51
Speaker
I know there are a lot of writers who have books in their drawer and that they've never, you know, I have a friend who, you know, wrote a novel and shopped it around and never got anywhere with it. And I kind of hope, you know, maybe he saw this piece and, you know, might decide to self publish it. I mean, if anything, it means, you know, at the very least, you get to hold the book in your hands. You know, a book that you dreamed of.
00:49:20
Speaker
You know, it really depends on what your expectations are. I mean, Madeline Darcy, who's one of the Irish writers, a fiction writer, she says, I always have low expectations, which I know is great, great counsel. You know, she doesn't expect to be a best seller. She doesn't expect to be a prize winner. I don't know what her sales are like, but she wins lots of prizes.
00:49:42
Speaker
And so if you have low expectations, you can't lose with self-publishing. If you have high expectations, Becky just finished working on a book with this former cop who was on the verge of killing himself.
00:49:59
Speaker
and basically wrote, it's called The Journey to Midnight. And it's about his journey from about, he's just about to swallow his gun to saving himself.
Advice and Writing Identity
00:50:12
Speaker
And it's an Amazon number one best seller. To be an Amazon number one best seller, you have to sell between 1,000 and 3,500 copies in 24 hours. Wow. Yeah, exactly.
00:50:25
Speaker
I can't believe that. That's incredible. I wonder how you know what kind of how they before they hit publish and made it public like what kind how they were able to stack the deck in their favor like the kind of platform that was in place and the fact that when they hit send it was going to people were going to be ready to buy it.
00:50:45
Speaker
Well, he had a lot of pre-orders. Okay. I mean, this guy, he's a speaker, he's a trainer, so he had a huge following. That's a big part of it, having a following, I think. Yeah.
00:50:57
Speaker
And with some of the advice in the book that you were able to curate, what was some of the advice that you read from the answers to those questions that you're like, man, I wish I heard this when I was 25 or 30 or 35.
00:51:16
Speaker
I think I wish I knew that you could be a Costco manager until you were 29 and then go on to win a Pulitzer. I think I wish I had heard from Patrick Holloway, you know, the Irish poet, you know, just keep sending things out. Just keep sending things out because there's a tendency, you know, there was a tendency for me where I'd send things out a couple of times and then I'd give up.
00:51:40
Speaker
You know, one of the things that really struck home with me was what you said about running your own race. Because, you know, I was running other people's races. You know, comparison is a thief of joy. And man, I was stealing from myself by comparing myself. You know, how old was that writer? How much younger is that writer than me? Oh my God, did that guy go to Harvard? Where did she go to school? How come she's a bestseller? How come I'm not?
00:52:08
Speaker
you know, the stuff that you talked about driving you, you know, that can drive you crazy. Yeah. But that if you if you, you know, can commit yourself to, hey, look, it's your race. Run it. I love what Anne Faderman said about being a stonewall builder. Mm hmm. You know, she's this remarkable essayist. And, you know, she said, you know, in a sense, she was I think what got to me most of all about so many of the people is the modesty.
00:52:38
Speaker
that's embodied in their comments. I don't know if you felt that or not. Oh, for sure. What I heard echoes so many times was no matter how accomplished that we objectively feel so many of them are, they're like the more and more that we, the more repetition we get under our belt, the harder and harder this gets. And I heard that over and over again. And there is a humility before the work that everyone just surrenders themselves to. And it was really refreshing to hear that over and over again.
00:53:07
Speaker
Yeah, when you hear Dan Barry, who regularly turns out these remarkable pieces of narrative nonfiction, say, it gets harder, you know, the phrase making, you know, the word choice, the organization. And, you know, it's harder than it was when I was a newspaper reporter. And you think, Dan, what are you talking about? How can that be? And I think there's so much in the book that gives writers hope.
00:53:36
Speaker
I think the modesty gives people hope. When I came up with the questions, I knew I was going to do an interview thing, but I knew I didn't want to do a Paris review thing. I didn't have room in a blog or newsletter, but I've always wanted to know. Don taught me this. Don Maurice, he would say, look, ask him, what are the lessons they learned? What are the surprises? What do they need to learn next?
00:54:03
Speaker
And so for me, it was just adding, and what's the best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you? And you could actually take those and tattoo a lot of them. At what point did it occur to you to add the journal prompt as something for people to meditate on after they consume one particular interview? Well, when I did the best newspaper writing series,
00:54:29
Speaker
That was one of the things I believe I added when I read through the volumes. It just seemed there had to be something. Roy does it. Roy does it in his books. All of his books have exercises.
00:54:43
Speaker
Um, and I just think it's important for, you know, in a way to give people something to chew over, you know, to, to not just read, but to engage with the material. And, um, I think it was just, you know, kind of osmosis and, um, and also I love getting people to write. I wanted people to write.
00:55:04
Speaker
That's why, you know, the second volume is going to be called Writers on Writing, Writers on Writing the Journal, because I want people to have three to four blank pages and fill them with, you know, you know, because, you know, a writer is someone who writes, period. That's what I tell everybody I work with, you know, a writer is not a bestseller, you know, a writer is not someone who's post, a writer is someone who writes, period.
Future Writing Projects
00:55:32
Speaker
Yeah, there are so many people who want to, and I'm borrowing this term from other people, that they want to be the noun without doing the verb. So they want to be a writer without doing any writing. And they want to be a painter without doing the painting. They want to be able to say they're the thing without actually sitting with it and loving the work itself.
00:55:51
Speaker
So it's great that you're really encouraging them, people, to not just passively graze over the interviews, which are easy to digest in many cases, but you're actually, instead of skimming over it, you're asking us to then put on the scuba gear and get deep into it. Exactly, exactly. You nailed it.
00:56:15
Speaker
And you write in your introduction, too, that you say, my conversations with writers have made me a better teacher and writing coach and a better writer. Despite my successes, I hope my best writing is ahead of me. And someone who's been at this for decades. So I love hearing you say that you still think that after having done this for so long that your best writing, your best work is ahead of you. So that's just a wonderful sentiment to hear that we're always developing.
00:56:45
Speaker
Oh, you know, Brandon, if I didn't feel that, I would give up. Right. If, you know, if I didn't feel like I could write a great story, you know, I mean, I made the misfortune to write a story right at the beginning of the pandemic about a brother visiting his comatose daughter. It's in the second person and he's talking to her and just basically riffing, just trying to talk because they've told her talking helps.
00:57:16
Speaker
So he's talking and talking and talking and talking. And then all of a sudden, COVID hits. Nobody's in a hospital talking to anybody. So that is one of those. I've had many who've passed its sell by date, I think as the Brits say. I want to write better. I would like to write a lot of great things.
00:57:39
Speaker
I think keeping your eyes sort of forward on your own horizon like that, it definitely keeps you from turning your head and looking back behind you at mistakes or regrets, and certainly looking over your shoulder as we were already saying, comparing yourself to other people. And if you believe that your best writing is ahead of you, you're independent of whoever's around you.
00:58:01
Speaker
It just, it keeps you, it keeps you on the right track and there's no, there are no shortage of things that want to derail you in this game. So it does keep your eyes going forward. It does. It does. And you know, um, I, I used to be plagued by regrets until I read somebody once said, you know, stop saying if only say next time. And that's been a big help remembering that.
00:58:28
Speaker
And given that you see that the best writing's ahead of you, what are the things that you're champing at the bit to get to once you're back to writing the things that you've made a name for of yourself? Well, I'm going to do a third book. The newsletter every week has something called Craft Lessons.
00:58:53
Speaker
And I'm going to put maybe the 25 best into a book. Nice. And, um, but then, um, I've been working for a while on a memoir of, uh, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in 1971, 72 in French West Africa. I was a callow hapless Peace Corps volunteer. I was not the kind of Peace Corps volunteer they put on the brochures. I was, I was in the middle of nowhere. I was in the village.
00:59:21
Speaker
The closest American was 200 kilometers away. The villagers were not friendly. The French colonialists were not friendly. I had one friend there and I was just, I was so lonely. I was so miserable and I was struggling as a teacher. I'd been given about, let's see.
00:59:46
Speaker
two months training as a teacher of English as a foreign language. So I started with, you know, real enthusiasm, but then I started floundering. I had 54 kids in my class. Wow. And, um, so I've been struggling to write this because it's the book I want to write. It's a book I feel like I need to write. You know, it's, it's been, it's been part of my life for a long time and I need to get it. I need to get it out.
01:00:12
Speaker
I mean, like a lot of memoirs, it's a story of shame. So I need to exculpate that shame and get it out. And I've got this journal. I kept a journal. It's about 300 pages. And I've been dictating it using voice typing in Google Docs. So I've got about 200 pages of it dictated already. And that's a lot of raw material. And I've been trying to find people I serve with.
01:00:40
Speaker
you know, unfortunately, you know, we're at the age where I find somebody, oh, Phil, yeah, Phil, oh, he died two months ago. So, I just got to dig inside myself for it. And then, you know, there's a novel, there's a novel I've, you know, had, it's been part of me for years and years, and I tried to write it and failed.
01:01:05
Speaker
I think it could be a script. I have dreams. Some of them are impossible dreams. That would be a great miniseries work.
01:01:14
Speaker
Well, it's all writing. It's, you know, the novels or a screenplay or whatever. It all kind of gets put into a slurry and it helps you, it helps inform things. And I think it's just good practice for, you know, if you're working on screenplays, like you are working in dialogue and scene and what story does not benefit from getting better at dialogue and scene. So it all helps and feeds off each other.
01:01:40
Speaker
Yeah, and also, you know, there's that old saying, you know, those who can't do teach. Well, I've always felt that, you know, I cannot coach writers without being a writer. You know, I just I just can't, you know, say, well, you know, back at the Providence Journal, although I do say back at the Providence Journal, but I also talk about this stuff I'm doing now. And
01:02:02
Speaker
But I just learned so much from the people I coach. One of the things I do with writers when they ask to work with me, I say, look, I tell you what, if you give me a draft, I'll give you a movie of my reading. And it's something I learned from a writing teacher named Peter Elbow, who said, writers don't want to be told what to do. They want to be told what you think.
01:02:26
Speaker
And so what I do when I read a draft is I start reading and every time something occurs to me, I hit all caps and I start typing. And I'll say things like, wow, great lead. You've really got me hooked. And then three gaps later, I'm lost. Where are we? What happened?
01:02:42
Speaker
And this seems kind of out of order. I don't tell them, move this thing around, cut this, do this. I like to say my method is descriptive rather than prescriptive. So it's just so fantastic when you do that with a writer and you give them control of the story, which of course is what they deserve.
01:03:08
Speaker
And then they turn around and they come back with this amazing stuff. And it's what Mark Lacy said in the book, how he learned to edit with his voice, not his fingers.
01:03:22
Speaker
And the first time he had a conversation with a reporter when he was the national editor, and he just told him what he thought the story should do. And a short while later, this thing comes back in, and it's fantastic. And he didn't touch it. It was a revelation to him. My hope is that
01:03:45
Speaker
You know, my hope is obviously writers read this, but I hope editors will read it. I hope they'll learn from the writers, but I hope they'll learn from the editors too, because there are some terrific ones,
Conclusion and Reflections
01:03:57
Speaker
you know? I mean, Maria Carrillo, you know, the Tampa Bay Times, who says one of her writers, she said, I couldn't come up, she's another one. I couldn't come up with a metaphor. So I asked my reporters for one. And one of them said, well, you're kind of like a benevolent machete.
01:04:15
Speaker
Well, well, Jim, I want to be mindful of your time, of course. Um, so where can people, you know, find you online and, and find the book so they can go pick it up? Well, all you have to do is go, um, to Amazon and type in writers on writing inside the lives of 55 distinguished writers and editors. You can go to my website, the writers on writing book.com.
01:04:44
Speaker
I'm on Twitter at Chip Scanlon. I'm on Facebook at Chip Scanlon and I'm following Becky's lead. She's the best publicist I could have ever had. She's the one who's teaching me, look, get the word about this. It's like what I did today with, or yesterday rather, quoting a snippet from your interview.
01:05:11
Speaker
and, you know, link into the podcast or linking to you and, you know, link into the book, you know, so, you know, look for me on Twitter, look for me on Facebook. And please look for me on Goodreads if you buy the book and you want to leave a review, that would be awesome on Amazon, too. You know, that's such a big part because let's face it, Pamela Paul and The New York Times, I don't expect to call from her.
01:05:35
Speaker
Oh, man. Well, well, Jim, I'm so glad we were able to finally get on the mics and talk shop. And the book is such a great service to writers and editors. And it's well put fuel in a lot of tank for a lot of fuel in everybody's tank. So I got to thank you for putting it all together. And yeah, like I said, it's just a great piece of service for the community. So thanks for the work and thanks for all you do.
01:05:59
Speaker
Thank you, Brandon. This has been a tremendous pleasure. I really appreciate your close reading. I really appreciate your answering the four questions. I couldn't have this book without people like you doing it. And thanks for doing this podcast. You bring information and hope and inspiration to a lot of people with this. And I applaud you for it. And I really appreciate your having me on as a guest.
01:06:29
Speaker
Okay, here's your acknowledgement section. Thanks to Chip. Thanks to West Virginia Wesleyan College's MFA in creative writing. And the word palsy-walsy. Couldn't have done it without you, palsy. You know, that creep down the hall. Am I right? How great was that? That was fun. Had a great time with Chip. He's been in touch with me over the last year or so as we riff on what it means to be a writer and live the writer's life.
01:06:58
Speaker
That's how you get beyond the pretension of saying you're living the writer's life. End of the year is coming. Two more podcasts in 2021? Good lord.
01:07:14
Speaker
I don't know where the time went. Did I hit any New Year's resolutions? I don't think so. I don't even know what they were. That helps. I think one was grow the podcast, and technically it did grow, but what does that even mean, man? Grow the podcast. That's not concrete. Like next year, let's say this, 100,000 total downloads.
01:07:39
Speaker
Boom, there you go. That'll likely mean maybe buying some ad space, getting on more podcasts as a guess, and maybe doing some similar adovistin-style partnerships that we did this year, where I drive my little podcast ice cream truck to the other suitors and be like, you got writers, I got a podcast, wanna get a drink? Podcasts make strange bedfels, am I right? Palsy-walsy.
01:08:06
Speaker
How can you accomplish your goals if you don't even make them concrete? I'd like to submit maybe 50 things this year, so that average once a week, get to 100,000 downloads, and maybe deadlift 500 pounds by the end of the year. When I was in high school, I printed out the goals I wanted for my senior year baseball season.
01:08:31
Speaker
very outcome-driven with certain things out of my control boat, whatever. Thing is, they were pretty outrageous, outlandish goals like, you know, League MVP and all scholastic teams for the Standard Times, Brockton Enterprise, and Boston Globe. And I accomplished just about everything, believe it or not, except the Boston Globe where I felt one vote shy of making that team.
01:08:51
Speaker
Sounds stupid, but if you print out your goals and like force yourself to look at them every day then maybe you have a better chance at Landing a book deal or publishing an essay in that place or getting an agent. I don't know That's what I'm going to do because I'm tired of living in this cesspool of disappointment and self-loathing Tired of it man too old for it. It's time to manifest man manifest
01:09:19
Speaker
Yeah, you know what that means. Stay wild, seeing efforts. And if you can't do, interview. See ya.
01:09:45
Speaker
you