Transcript
Speaker: Shout out to HippoCamp 2018 today. The fourth annual conference is going on right now. Sounds like fun. Wish I was there instead of my little studio. As always, thanks to HippoCampus Magazine for the promotional support. HippoCampus Magazine, create, share, live. Before we get started, I'd like to dedicate this show to the riff.
Speaker: the riff giveth or something or other. Today's guest is Matthew Polly. You can find him on Twitter at Matthew E. Polly or visit his website MattPolly .com. He's the author of three books of non -fiction, most recently Bruce Lee, A Life.
Speaker: He's a graduate of Princeton University and a Rhodes Scholar. So you can say my 1050 SAT score didn't exactly level me up in this conversation. Yeah, that's right. I got it. 1050.
Speaker: You think you know Bruce Lee, but you have no idea. None. But after 500 pages about the Kung Fu Master, you come away knowing the whole story. In this episode, you'll learn about Matt's approach to writing biography, taking risks, how comedy writing and screenwriting help Matt find his voice, as well as who is his most influential writer, as he developed as a writer himself.
Speaker: But before we get to that, I'll let you know that I'm kind of hanging up my editing writing coach shingle. If you have an essay that needs development, something needs to get you over the hump, or a book manuscript that needs help, look no further. Right now, I'm paying good money, for me, to have my terrible memoir looked at, and it's a way better book.
Speaker: than it was just a few months ago. I've been working on the thing for nine years off and on, and only now does it look a little bit better than that Voldemort baby from the final Harry Potter movie. If you need similar help, email me and we'll start a dialogue. Sound like fun? Also, be sure to subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker: If you're feeling generous, ratings and reviews are super helpful. But if you merely share with a friend, that's every bit as good. I think you're going to want to hang around for the ride, people. Got some major headliners coming up. So buckle up right now, put your hands at 10 and 2 in the wheel, and listen to Matthew Polley. Where'd you grow up and what kind of kid were you? I was born in Dallas, Texas.
Speaker: moved to Topeka, Kansas when I was four. And I was this basically kind of a shy, sensitive, bookish little kid. So I guess it's appropriate that I ended up writing books because that's what I love to bury myself in when I was a child. What kind of books were you into?
Speaker: sci -fi, fantasy, comic books, anything that sort of took me out of Topeka, Kansas. I find that a lot of people who become writers oftentimes are immersed in books at a young age because that's the one place where they could get that escapism and kind of lose themselves in a
Speaker: Was there ever a point when you were younger where you were like, I love these books so much that maybe one day this is something I'd love to take up as a vocation? Yeah, I think the only thing I ever wanted to do was be a writer because I love books so much. But I grew up in Kansas and writer was not a profession that was considered an option. So I always thought I would be like a businessman or a lawyer or something like that. And it wasn't until very late that I decided
Speaker: You know what? Go for it. There are at least two people I know that could make a living at it. Maybe you could be one of them. What did your parents do? My father was a doctor and my mother was a homemaker. Was there any pressure from, say, your father to follow in those footsteps?
Speaker: Yeah, he definitely wanted me to be a doctor or some equivalent I remember when I finally you know essentially came out to him and said I want to be a writer he he just
Speaker: He took me aside and said, son, I'm really worried about you. So it was like this. I was disappointing him that I'm doing this and making him extremely anxious about my fate and future. And to be fair, he wasn't wrong. Being a writer is a scary, unstable profession, unlike being a doctor. So he had a point.
Speaker: Yeah, what gave you the courage to be able to tell him that you actually wanted to follow something that was more congruent with your drive and your goals instead of going down a sort of tried and true well -worn path of standard success, if you will?
Speaker: Uh, because I'd done something risky before and it worked out. Um, he, I went to the Shaolin temple for two years back in the nineties when China was still a scary place to go to. And, uh, he had disapproved and I had fought with him over that and, uh, it had worked out. And so my thought was, if I can survive the Shaolin temple for two years, I can make it as a writer. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker: And when you were younger, what did a successful writer look like to you? Probably Stephen King. Somebody who writes novels that get turned into big time movies and sells millions and millions of copies and is also, and this still annoys me to this day, so extremely prolific that even if one of his books doesn't do so well, the next book is out in like six months.
Speaker: Um, uh, yeah, I remember thinking Stephen King was like the, you know, what every writer was basically like not realizing he was one of a generation. Of course. Yeah. And did you over over the, as you were starting to develop that writerly muscle, did you, did your view of success change and like, how did, how did you start to define it and what would feel satisfactory to you as a, you know, as a writer going forward?
Speaker: I decided my feeling about writing is a little like a stand up comic. And this is probably because I started off as a humor writer, is that if the audience laughs, then the joke's funny.
Speaker: It doesn't matter if you think it's funny or your two friends think it's funny. What matters is the reaction of the readers. And of course, you never get 100 % one way or another, but you can get a sense from something you've written, whether or not you get a positive reaction from readers or not. And so for me to this day, I don't feel confident in a book until after the first
Speaker: couple weeks or month or two when you get to see the comments on Amazon, what people sort of tweet about, and the reviews, and then you get a sense, oh, this worked. Or you get a sense, I've had my second book kind of bombed, and you know pretty quickly when it's not working. So that's my view.
Speaker: and when you were coming up as a writer was there any person in particular who took a shine to you and just and gave you the validation and and support to say keep going that you know it was
Speaker: Probably the most important thing for me was I got a blurb from PJ O 'Rourke on my my first book and I like to joke that when I was young I wanted to be the the liberal PJ O 'Rourke like less funny and more liberal than him and
Speaker: And I succeeded. But yeah, PJ O 'Rourke was one of the people I really wanted to be like the kind of crazy gonzo travel writer who goes crazy places, does crazy things and writes really smart but funny pieces about them. And I used to, you know, go get Rolling Stone hoping that he would be in that issue. And so he was sort of my role model in my early career.
Speaker: All right, so yeah, you mentioned him. Who are some of the other other people in the nonfiction space maybe that you were reading and be like, Oh, man, like when I see that byline from him or her, it's just like, I know I'm in for a good ride. It was definitely the most important one. But I also like George Plimpton. Tom Wolf.
Speaker: I mean by the time i was coming up to a switch to fiction but i would go back and read his old stuff so i really like the new journalist taking on fiction and making it read almost like fiction and i and i felt.
Speaker: Like my goal at that time was to be a kind of a new journalist magazine writer slash book writer. Um, and that was before the internet destroyed magazines. Uh, but, uh, that's, that's the kind of writer I'd like to be. Uh, the other thing I should mention is that initially I first thought I was going to be a screenwriter. Uh, and so Quentin Tarantino was, it was a role model back in the pulp fiction days. Um, and so the first thing I ever wrote was actually a screenplay.
Speaker: Nice. What did that teach you about structure and pacing of a narrative and teasing out scenes? I think it was extremely useful in retrospect. The first most important thing it taught me was that I didn't actually want to be a screenwriter because that's an awful field, not because screenwriting itself. It's almost like a sonnet. It's very structured.
Speaker: the business model around screenwriting and the ranking you have in the industry is what makes screenwriting, I think, awful. But it turned out to be really useful because people who read my books often say, I could see this as a movie. And that's clearly an influence of having spent a lot of time thinking about how screenplays work is that the need to construct scenes, you know, use dialogue and also have a
Speaker: Plot structure and so one of the things I look for in Nonfiction stories is kind of what's what's the arc of this? When you're vetting out your stories and looking for things that that might sort of spark your taste What is it you're looking for in a in a little blurb or something that that kind of clicks in your brain? You're like, oh there might be something more here. I mean, what does that look like for you? I
Speaker: That's a great question. I don't know if there's an answer to it. It's almost intuitive. I think with Bruce Lee, what I realized is that his death was the key to the story.
Speaker: And and everybody wanted to talk about like what a great martial artist he was and he certainly was. But what's dramatic about the story is it's a it's a young man who dies at the peak of his powers. And so when I realized we should start the story with his funeral and then go back to the beginning, that gives the whole thing a dramatic push because the audience hasn't has a sense of dread as they know where the story is going.
Speaker: Yeah, that's always something. It's almost like, kind of like, right now I would say, like, Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. Like, you're watching, you know how Breaking Bad ends and where that goes. And then you have this Better Call Saul element, this prequel thing.
Speaker: You're in that world but ultimately you know it's gonna collide with the timeline that's very fatal to a lot of these people so it's like it's like you were just saying what the this dreads like you know where it ends but you're still like rooting for them. For a different outcome even though you know the outcome. That's right the dramatic irony of it is a powerful force it can kill a prequel.
Speaker: Um, uh, I think it killed the first star wars, uh, the prequel star wars one, two, and three. Uh, so it has to be delivered, right? But yes, I think that's, that's a, and what I'm, what I felt was that's a novelistic technique. Um, but you can apply that to nonfiction and the, and the great thing is if you find the right story, reality is awfully often more interesting than fiction, um, because it's just weird and quirky.
Speaker: Yeah, like the one fight that Bruce and I am... Long Jack Man. Long Jack Man, yeah. And that fight, because it's just so wacky and bizarre that one of the rivals would just turn and run, and you just picture Bruce chasing after him. Right. It's so antithetical to what you think between two martial arts masters, but one just ends up just turning and running about facing.
Speaker: Yes, that for me and there have been so many movies about it and not a single person has a movie maker or filmmaker has done the real story because and it's been written down like people knew that at least Linda Lee's side believes this is what happened. And nobody's ever done that because it's so weird. And in a movie, it would make people laugh out loud and destroy whatever sort of
Speaker: tone they're trying to set in that movie, but in the book it works and it's hilarious. I mean, and the truth is I've been in a couple challenge fights and people do weird things because they're terrified. No matter how good a martial arts master you are, you're scared because you don't know what's going to happen. So yes, that's a perfect example. That's a totally bizarre moment in the book.
Speaker: And kind of echoing Fight Club or something, there's a line in there that I'm butchering of course, but it's kind of like a man kind of doesn't know, doesn't really know who he is until he's been in a fight. And you've been in, you've trained a lot of in the martial arts for ever since you were a kid. And I wonder what did that just teach you about rigor and discipline? And what did you learn about yourself over the course of being a decades of martial arts training?
Speaker: You know, one of the things you learn is that, uh, that I, that quote itself, I think is wrong because it reveals, it reveals a part of yourself, um, which is, uh, it, some people who are very courageous will break in a fight. Uh, and some people who are total cowards will get really strong in a fight. And that just tells you one aspect of the character. I'm sure Wong Jack man, you gave him 10 times to do the same thing over again. He only runs once.
Speaker: But what it taught me is that my experience with fighting taught me that fear brings out extreme reactions. And so one of the things that makes it interesting dramatically is that it encourages extreme behavior and that's of course interesting to see.
Speaker: And I read once that you said that you were kind of a dojo hopper growing up, going from like Aikido, Taekwondo and everything. So I wonder like what particular disciplines resonated with you the most?
Speaker: When I was younger, I was kind of a cowardly, skinny, bullied kid. And so I got into the martial arts very specifically wanting to sort of find my own courage so that I didn't have to feel afraid. And so I was most interested in styles that seemed most realistic.
Speaker: And the style I really liked the most was Chinese kickboxing when I was at the Shaolin Temple, because all the guys who did it were the tough guy fighter types. And the styles that are softer, like Tai Chi or Aikido, or the styles that are more flashy, like Wushu, didn't have as much interest for me because I really wanted to kind of gritty knock somebody's head off stuff.
Speaker: So what brings you to the Shaolin Temple in 93? The Shaolin Temple really was, I wanted to not be afraid. It was pretty much that simple. I probably had read too many comic books and I wanted to be a kind of super heroic figure.
Speaker: in my own brain. And so I thought if I went and learned Kung Fu at the Shaolin Temple, I could be like David Carradine in Kung Fu, this kind of deadly, unstoppable figure. And so that's why I went and did it. At that point, had you been familiar with a lot of Plimpton's work in that participatory journalism at that point?
Speaker: No, I didn't know anything about that. I'd read PJ Rourke prior to going to China, so I guess I knew it through him. But most of my influence was sort of stand -up comics, and so PJ Rourke fit into that as a humorist. I didn't really understand new journalism until much later. At what point did you realize that you had something worth writing about there, given that experience?
Speaker: Uh, I didn't realize it for a long time because there was a part of me who was embarrassed by the idea of doing something first person. And so when I initially, initially what happened was I had made a, I wanted to be a writer and I wanted to write other stuff. And I was thinking about screenwriting and a friend of mine was a book editor and he was like, you need to turn your Shaolin story into a book.
Speaker: And that was mostly because I just wouldn't shut up about my experience as a challenge. And so people kept asking me, like, did you take extensive notes? And it really wasn't that it was that the experience had seared itself onto my brain and wouldn't let go. And so I talked about it incessantly. And so in many ways,
Speaker: The first draft of my book, American Shaolin was oral. Um, I'd just been telling different parts of that story to people over the years. Uh, and I think I honed the material gauging it and like just live conversation. Um, and so it was much more of a kind of informal standup routine that I had.
Speaker: Um, and then I sat down to try to write the book. Uh, and initially I tried to write it just about the monks and leave myself out of it. And my editor said, you know, American audience needs you to be the, the narrator who takes them through this experience. Uh, and at first I found it kind of terrifying, like walking down the street naked to do a first person and kind of reveal your inner thoughts and fears.
Speaker: But you know once you once you do it often enough you become kind of a nudist so that you're You're you're you're suddenly comfortable being totally naked while everybody else is clothed And now of course the internet has come along with social media. So we're all nudists now, but But you know back then writing an air writer sorry writing a memoir felt scary to me for that reason because you were exposing parts of yourself and
Speaker: And how did you change from the person who traveled to a foreign country to the person who then came home a couple years later? What was the market change that you noticed in yourself? I think the biggest change was the level of confidence and willingness to take risk. I think what happens when you're kind of a bright kid who does well in school and then goes to an Ivy League college,
Speaker: is the entire system turns you into a bit of a risk averse tool and you're just looking for the what's the next step up the ladder. And the advantage to me of going to China was I had stepped off the ladder.
Speaker: for two years and gone to the Shaolin Temple and done something that wasn't, you know, part of an obvious path towards being, you know, a Wall Street executive or a white shoe lawyer. And having broken the pattern, then it was easier to do it again the second time. And I think for a lot of people, if you have some success, you're terrified of losing it.
Speaker: And that makes you risk averse and there's one of the great advantages in life is to totally fail at something and get back up and that allows you to think of the world in a different way. Do you have a particular favorite failure that taught you that lesson very viscerally?
Speaker: Well, my second book failed. And so that taught me a very, very visceral lesson, which is, A, don't do it twice. You don't want two books to fail in a row. But also, when you fail, you get to have a chance to examine what went wrong. And you don't, it's much harder to examine what went right with a book that does well. Because you don't really know.
Speaker: But when something goes, when something fails in a piece of writing, it keeps you up at night. And so your brain goes around and around and you learn sort of, oh, this actually worked, but in this context, it's still a failure. So you can kind of parse out what works and what didn't. Were you at Princeton before you went to China and then went back?
Speaker: I withdrew from Princeton after my junior year and I planned to only stay for like a year and then come back. And then I ended up staying a second year, which totally terrified my parents. They thought I was going to be some wandering non college graduate in Asia. And then by the end of the second year, I was like, okay, I get it. I think I've, I've gotten what I wanted out of it. And it was time to return home. And so then I,
Speaker: I returned to Princeton, finished it off, and then got a scholarship into grad school. Where did you go to grad school again? I'm sorry, I missed that.
Speaker: Oh, okay. Very nice. And hence the Rhodes Scholar chapter of your life. So that's the next chapter. So like, how did you get there and what did you take away from that? What were you studying and trying to develop over there in grad school?
Speaker: At grad school, I actually took a second BA. And so it wasn't particularly challenging. And the advantage of that is by that point, I really was dedicated to wanting to be a writer. And so I spent almost all my time working on my masterpiece screenplay that will never see the light of day. But it was my first big, you know, it was my first true love, you know, the first thing you write that,
Speaker: You love so much and you think so amazing and no one else will ever see it so that i was there for three years. And i wrote it in the first two years and then i went out to hollywood and stayed with a friend and i thought yeah i'll give it about two months so the screenplay with malibu date hot celebrity girls and.
Speaker: I very quickly realized that it's what an awful business being a screenwriter is. And also, you know, I was skipping steps in the process. And this is what I think was an important lesson for me as a writer, is that book writing and screenwriting are the high end of of the writing market. And I hadn't yet done the legwork. I hadn't worked on horse stance, as it were, often enough.
Speaker: And so I realized I should go to New York and start getting clips and write short things for publications and build up a professional reputation first. And then at some stage, you get to go and get a book contract or get a movie deal. And then I had tried to jump in front of the line, basically.
Speaker: So yeah, what would what did that start to look like as you put your boots on the ground and sort of develop some? Repartorial chops that would eventually lead to what you're able to do with your book work But what were those early growing pains like as you were trying to amass a body of work? Well part of the early growing pains as this was prior to the internet So I had to go buy a book that had enlisted all the publications in the country and
Speaker: by section. And so I looked at like the humor section and there were four publications. So the first thing I ever sold was to the door magazine, which was the country's only religious satire magazine. And it came out of Texas and it was published once a month. And I did a fake column about asks Reverend Retentive.
Speaker: Uh, and so people would ask this, you know, kind of evangelical, uh, idiot, uh, advice. And then he would give idiotic advice in return. And I, I sent them one, I wrote the piece and I sent it to them and they loved it. And they signed me up for a column and I would spend three weeks, literally like 50 hours writing, writing them for a hundred dollars an article. Um,
Speaker: But I got published and four people read it, but it didn't matter to me. I was happier than I could ever be. So that was the first thing I ever did. That's great. And how did you then start to create some momentum for yourself? What was your routine like as you're drawing up query letters and seeing where else you can try to land work and pitch stories? How did you manifest that?
Speaker: Um, I think the most important thing I ended up doing was, uh, I went to this, uh, journalism program. It was at Harvard then it's now at Columbia, uh, basically because I wanted to go to New York. And the way I thought about it was if you want to learn kung fu, you go to the Shaolin temple. And if you want to be in media, you go to New York city or LA. Uh, and so I went to this publishing program and I met a lot of other people who were also wanted to get into the business.
Speaker: And so I just lived in New York and friends of those friends and other friends, uh, you would talk to them and that's where most of the job offers came after sort of my initial, I initially got going. So for example, I had a friend who worked at publishers weekly, um, and she would get me book reviews. Um, I never would have tried to write book reviews without knowing someone. Uh, and so, um,
Speaker: I don't know if this is a different writers have different approaches, but I sort of approached it as a, you know, an inside game that you work in the industry and that's how you get ahead. When you're doing doing your research in and everything is trying to formulate your story and kind of all that information gathering up at what? How do you go about organizing your notes and your work so then you can access it best so you can then get the writing done?
Speaker: I'm really bad about that. I mean, there's a lot of people are much more organized than I am. I, I, I basically take notes on note cards, like Oxford note cards. And so if I have an idea, when I was younger, like if I had a joke or an idea, I, I would write it down on a note card and then I would have these stacks of them. And then I'd kind of page through them and, and get an idea going.
Speaker: For Bruce Lee, because it was such a huge biography, I had to take a different approach. Basically, I created a single Word document that contained every note I had in chronological order. It turned out to be like 2 ,000 pages and over a million words. That was really massive. But in the old days, I used note cards.
Speaker: And this is not a very good method for most writers, but I I felt like memory was a very good editor. If you go, for example, since I was doing participatory stuff, my feeling was if I couldn't remember it, the reader wouldn't be interested in it anyway. So.
Speaker: I would I would sort of jot down things that happened, but I would I would mostly rely on things that like struck in my memory And then I would go and sit around with friends and retell stories and see which stories work with them So again, I approached it more like a stand -up comic in my early years and now that I'm writing kind of longer things I have to be more disciplined about note -taking. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly
Speaker: the comedian approach, like just what you said, like you're kind of, it's like when all these comedians are working on an hour and they go to the comedy store and they're gonna do a little 20 minute set and they're just kind of feeling it out. Like, okay, the audience kind of, they really dug this one, so let's make a note and keep that and keep building on that. So that's kind of like a really great way to sort of crowdsource what's gonna work in a sense.
Speaker: Yeah. And I think that's important for writers because a lot of writers, you write it and you spend all this time alone and then you give it to the one person you totally love and trust who's most likely not going to want to hurt your feelings. That's not a big enough audience. Yet, even if they're going to tell you the truth, it's only a subset of one.
Speaker: Um, so that I, I, that's the problem with writing is that it's, uh, you need to get at least 10 people to read your stuff. So you can get a sense of like, uh, this has got a 70 % approval rating, rotten, rotten tomato it. And when you're conducting interviews, are you using a voice recorder or do you just straight use not note taking? Uh, in the old days, I just use note taking, um,
Speaker: Because I was in kind of more live situations and it didn't it would have destroyed the experience for example my second book Tapped out I spent six months at a gymnasium and so There's no way to record six months of time unless I guess you're the NSA so so
Speaker: I I would basically just go there and most days nothing interesting happened but every once in a while somebody would say something interesting and then I'd run home and write it in a notebook and You know, that's I think the most ideal for getting the way life really lives because there's few things that make people pucker up more than like putting a tape recorder in front of them right and pulling out and pulling out a notebook and
Speaker: When I did Bruce Lee, there was no choice because there's no way that I had to interview. I interviewed over a hundred people. You can't spend six months with each one of them waiting for them to tell you the nugget of truth that you've been waiting for. So in that for that type of book.
Speaker: I did yeah I would I would just go there and put the tape recorder down and the thing I would say to people I was interviewing is you want me to tape record this like you don't realize this but your fear isn't that you're gonna say something wrong it's that my memory won't be right.
Speaker: And I won't get what you exactly said word for word. It's much better that there's an accurate portrayal of something that you're uncomfortable that you said than me and my brain trying to recreate what you what I think you said, you know, six months or a year later when I'm trying to write it down. And do you transcribe yourself or do you sort of employ a service to do that? I when the old days I used to transcribe it myself and then I realized that that
Speaker: it's so such an awful process that that it would mean I would try to do less interviews just because I knew it was going to be so terrible. So there's so there's a there's a place on the internet that you pay them like a buck a minute or something like that. And they finish it in a week. And that's, you know, once I realized that I was, you know, it's like,
Speaker: When you're young and you would go stay in budget motels or hostels, and then you get to a certain age and you're like, if I can't afford to stay in a decent hotel, I'm just not going to go travel to that place.
Speaker: That's my feeling now. I'm at the age where if I can't afford to pay somebody a buck a minute to transcribe it, I don't want to interview you. That's brilliant. And when you're starting to organize your notes and your note cards, are you outlining or using cork boards or anything of that nature to start seeing where the narrative blocks are? No. For Bruce Lee, I did that afterwards.
Speaker: So I put all the notes in and kind of slam them randomly into a section. And then when I got to a chapter, say Bruce Lee's teenage years, I knew that was going to be basically one chapter. I went and took all the notes from the master document, which is like 2000 pages long. And I got to say 60 pages of notes that just covered his teenage years.
Speaker: And then I cut and paste that into a different word document and read through it and reading the various quotes from different people and different books, then I started to develop what the outline was. So I got a sense like, oh, we should do martial arts here, cha -cha dancing there, girl dating, and then I worked the outline. But I really
Speaker: for me at least feel it's important to let the writing determine the outline rather than the other way around. I have a lot of friends who are very rigid about the outline first, but I often feel that the writing will tell you where you should go. So the outline to me is just a very loose guide.
Speaker: And when you're in the throes of writing a book of this nature, you know, it's a, yeah, it's a massive book, a massive undertaking. How did you stay sort of motivated throughout even as you were starting to get into like the middle of the draft where it's just, you're too far away to turn home and you're so far away from the finish line that you just kind of feel lost in the material. So how did you kind of keep going once you were in the ugly middles? Video games. Nice.
Speaker: Um, yeah, no, for P it took seven years to write. Uh, it could have taken five because there was about a year and a half of just, uh, I don't know why I'm doing this feeling. Um, this sucks. Uh, and I just, it's compared to like a marathon runner. There's a point where your side hurts and you don't want to keep going. And about three or four years in, I was like, yeah, Bruce, he's boring.
Speaker: Um, and he's not, but it's just because I'd done nothing else for three or four years. And if you, even if you eat the best cake, eventually you get sick of it. If it's meal after meal. Um, and so, uh, for me, I, I ended up just having to work through that emotion and let it play out. Uh, and eventually I regained my excitement for the subject matter. Uh, but there were.
Speaker: There were months where I didn't put a word down on paper and my wife would come in and just look at me and kind of walk out of the room. I don't want to have to deal with you today, son. I know this is like week eight of you not writing anything.
Speaker: I have very good friends who every morning get up and do their 600 words, and I really hate those people. They're really awful, and they always tell you, oh yeah, I do 400 words a day, and then I go out and do Pilates.
Speaker: Um, so I just can't, I can't do that. I, it's all passion for me. So when the passion rolls and I'm excited, then the words roll. And when it, when it wanes, then I'm, I'm, you know, deadlocked for a while and I just have to wait until that ends.
Speaker: Yeah, I've heard conversations with Cheryl Strayed where she likens herself. She's a 100 % binge writer and does not apologize for it. She will just like hole up in a hotel room over a weekend and just do her massive undertaking over the course of two or three days instead of doing the four or 600 every single day for a year. So it sounds like you're more along the lines of following your energy and also kind of just binge writing when you have the momentum at your back.
Speaker: Yeah, that's exactly right. And I'm totally that type. And I joke about it because it would be nice as a human being to be a consistent type. But we all we all figure out the one good thing about being doing something long enough.
Speaker: Is you figure out what works for you and nobody there's no single method you eventually figure it out and so when I got depressed I went and played fallout for a month and it helped like I played fallout three or four and Probably both in the time that it took seven years, right? and and then when I it kind of cleared my brain out and
Speaker: Uh, and then I was ready to go at it again. But when you're doing it and you know, the advanced money's run out, you do feel pretty close to being unemployed and like a bum. So that that's the struggle. I think a lot of people like the, if I do 300 words a day thing, because it makes them feel like they're a member, a productive member of society.
Speaker: And I think one of the things that's important for writers to accept is that we're not, we're not, we're not productive members of society and the attempt to feel like we are often drives us crazier than if we just accepted that fact. Yeah, that's great. I love that you have a way of, that's a way that you choose to unplug from something that says as big as this story was, you know, whether it be video games, some people employ
Speaker: long walks or we'll just find another artistic media or something else to unplug from. So you mentioned video games. Is there anything else that you like to employ to just get out of your own head, step away from the stories? You can approach it with some freshness? Video games and bad TV.
Speaker: And so that's one of the other weird things about being a writer is people are always like, what books do you like to read? And you're like, none. Because when you're reading somebody else's book, you're thinking about your own sentences and what you can adopt and whatever. And so I like any form of media that doesn't that isn't exactly mine. The other thing I will say this, though,
Speaker: Uh, I love magazine still, um, and I like, I like articles that are about sort of four to 5 ,000 words long. I think anything under a thousand is, you know, just basically giving you facts. Um, and they're no longer as many as there used to be, but long form journalism, 5 ,000 words is some of the best writing in this country because they were edited so rigorously.
Speaker: And one of the things people don't realize is that most books aren't edited very rigidly. The publishers don't have enough money to pay editors to really go after stuff. And that's why you'll read so many books that you're like, oh, this is a great first chapter, second chapter. Whoa. Oh, they're just repeating ourselves, aren't they? Oh, man. Nobody looked at chapter eight, did they?
Speaker: Um, and so, uh, uh, one of the things I looked for when I was looking for an editor for Bruce Lee was somebody who'd come from the magazine business because that, that really taught people how to edit harshly. So if I read anything, it's actually magazines, the New Yorker, New York magazine or websites like the daily beast or things like that. Um, and I watch bad TV and I play video games.
Speaker: Nice, nice. I love it. You wrote in the in the afterward of Bruce Lee to that as a, you know, when I began this project as a rookie biographer, Alex Ben Block, the author of The Legend of Bruce Lee kindly gave me a few pointers.
Speaker: And what was that as a rookie biographer not knowing how to maybe approach it? And then you've got the mythos of Bruce Lee. So you've got like a double whammy there, like pressure. So what did Alex tell you and coach you along the process of writing this book?
Speaker: Uh, he didn't say a lot. I mean, the biggest thing, uh, for me was he, he was one of the first people I called up and he was willing to do the interview. So, um, that just gave me a bit of confidence boost. Um, but really, um, what he did that I thought was useful is he just, he said, here are the people you need to talk to. And, and it reminded me that, uh, each form has its own rule.
Speaker: Just go do the work. There are a bunch of people to talk to and just do it. And I realized afterwards that biography is kind of the coal mining of literature. You really just have to go into the mind and dig and dig and you get a certain amount of coal every day. And every once in a while you find a gem. And it's different from when I was doing memoir. It's about finding an interesting experience and then telling it in an entertaining way.
Speaker: And so the telling it in the entertaining way is actually where the art is in biography the most important part of it is the thoroughness of the research.
Speaker: And then secondarily, it's turning that research into a readable story. But it's a grind. And there was somebody else who was working on a biography, and he was also teaching classes and doing lectures. And I was like, dude, you're never going to finish it because it actually just requires this relentlessness and obsessiveness.
Speaker: and it differs from other forms of writing where you can get by on cleverness. What did your days look like as you were going from interview to interview? When were you getting up in the morning and then just what was the shape of your days as you were doing the research for this book?
Speaker: Um, so I spent about six months in Hong Kong, uh, and that I hired an assistant to help me with it. Uh, because I speak Mandarin, the Northern dialect, but not Cantonese, the Southern dialect. Uh, and so, you know, in Hong Kong, they speak kind of broken English and, but mostly Cantonese. Uh, and you know, every day was like basically getting up and talking to her and seeing like, who, who have we lined up?
Speaker: and strategizing, oh, if we talk to so -and -so, we can get to so -and -so. And so the research felt a lot more like a hustle with this book, because it was also the first book I've written about somebody who was famous. And what's interesting about that is the best people to interview are people who have never been interviewed before.
Speaker: because they're happy to talk to you. You find somebody on the street and you say, hey, I'd like to interview you about such and such. They're excited. This makes their day. They're going to tell their family, I got interviewed by a journalist. And they have no guile because they've never done it before. So they're most likely going to tell you the truth. When you deal with celebrities or people who are close to celebrities who've been interviewed a lot of times, they're either resistant or they're jaded.
Speaker: Or they've got their story down, which makes them less interesting to interview, frankly. But you have to do it because that's, you know, that the brother of Bruce Lee is the brother of Bruce Lee. You can't skip him just because he's done 100 interviews before. Yeah. Who were some of the, you know, that quote unquote, like regular people you were able to track down that gave you some of that, you know, that really that good, the good coal is from the from the mine.
Speaker: Yeah, the gems that felt great to me were what I tried to do was get to the people who had written books about Bruce first and then use them to get to the people who were close to Bruce. And when I went to Hong Kong, Bruce went to La Salle, which was an elite parochial school.
Speaker: So I called up LaSalle and said, I want to do a book about Bruce. Do you know anybody there who has any information? And they gave me to the guy who wrote the history book about the college, the high school.
Speaker: And he never had anybody from America come want to talk to him about Bruce Lee. So he was super excited. And it turned out he was doing interviews about Bruce Lee for the next newsletter about LaSalle. And so he had arranged interviews with Bruce's classmates. And I just went along with him.
Speaker: Uh, and Bruce's classmates had never been interviewed about Bruce. Um, and that was just gold because they had, you know, Bruce was kind of a, as you know, having read the book, kind of a punkish pain in the butt kid, he was, he was a troublemaker. He was the guy in the back of the class throwing spit balls, shooting spit balls at everybody.
Speaker: And so they had this really ambivalent feeling about this guy who they remember being a bit of a terror, who turns out to be the most famous Asian American to ever live and everybody idolizes. So they're like, basically all I had to do was show, I didn't care that they didn't have to tell me the glossy version. I was, you know, I didn't care. Tell me it was a jerk, that's fine. I'm gonna write it down. You were there, I wasn't. I'm not judging, prejudging what you have to say.
Speaker: And once they realized they could tell me whatever they felt like, they just kind of held forth. And so that was great because I feel like Bruce's childhood has never been adequately covered. And part of that is people just didn't do the work to track down his classmates.
Speaker: Yeah, I think people just want to lean into this almost like zen master ideal of who Bruce was and that's something that immediately guided I just knew what you saw on posters and mouse pads or whatever and and so reading your book was like wow this guy's a whole lot warts and all is
Speaker: It's so much different than I had known because you hear the quotes, the be like water, the don't be is go to simplicity and it's very minimalistic in a sense. In so many ways, he was at times a jerk, very materialistic and almost outwardly driven and prideful. So it's almost like you were able to expose a lot of these great things that make him a more well -rounded person.
Speaker: Yeah, that was the goal. I mean, the goal is to be honest. Um, and that, the, the one thing I try to remember as a writer is the person you owe the most is the reader who spent 23 bucks and 10 hours of their life with your subject. And I think that that's something that particularly journalists forget, um, is they get to attach to their subjects or the, or their sources.
Speaker: And they worry, oh, if I say this, my source is going to get angry. And so I don't, I won't ever get to talk to them again. Right. In this kind of access journalism. Um, and I think the important thing is the reader who spent the money and it's going to spend the time you owe them the truth. Uh, and so that was my approach with Bruce. And what I found out is that, uh, he's like everybody else. He was preaching the things he needed to practice.
Speaker: He knew he was a hot -tempered guy, and that's why water was important to him, because he was trying to modify his own behavior. Yeah, of course. And over the course of your research and your interviews, you had your vision as a 12 -year -old kid watching Enter the Dragon in your basement, probably wearing the VCR tape thin. Yeah.
Speaker: So you obviously had a preconceived idea of who he was before you started your own martial arts training and then of course writing the book. So what surprised you most about Bruce Lee's life as you got deep into the research? What I realized is that because his fame was entirely posthumous, people worked backwards in telling his story.
Speaker: which is to say, they went, they saw Enter the Dragon, they thought Bruce was amazing. And then they saw the next three movies, Fist of Fury, Big Boss and Way of the Dragon. And then they stopped. And so you will still read articles where they say, Bruce Lee's fame was based on four movies or he only made four movies in his life. And what I realized
Speaker: that amazed me was sitting in the Hong Kong Film Archives watching the 20 films he had made as a child actor. That taught me that Bruce Lee was an actor first, and then became a martial artist, and then merged those two passions. But when I thought of him as an actor,
Speaker: All of the quirky things you mentioned, like the materialism, the womanizing, the bit of the drug use, that all made sense because as an actor in Hollywood in the 60s, that was just part of the culture.
Speaker: The problem was people started with him as the Zen master guru and enter the dragon and then they went backwards and anything that didn't fit that archetype, they deleted out of the story. And if you start with him as an actor, then actually his behavior makes perfect sense.
Speaker: And it's not too extreme as perfectly sort of moderate for the time and the place and then his it fits in an actor becomes obsessed with some activity and becomes a genius at it.
Speaker: Yeah, he – what surprised me also was that he – his fame was posthumous that he didn't get to – he had this vision of himself of being Steve McQueen and he never got to live it out.
Speaker: He died tragically, but I didn't know that he didn't get to at least reap the benefits of the hard -won fame. It's just one of those things that makes the arc of his life that much more tragic because he didn't get to see it out.
Speaker: Yeah, I thought it was almost like John Henry, like he beat the steam machine with the last stroke of his hammer and then dies. And so I think one of the compelling things about the story itself is it almost feels like there are several morals you can take from it, but somebody who dedicates themselves to this, you know,
Speaker: extreme ambition, the idea that as an Asian actor, you could become bigger than the most famous white box office star in the world. And to actually achieve that, but only the moment after you die. And that, that feels like a, you know, that feels sort of mythic. And that's, I think one of the reasons why Bruce's story has such sort of resonance.
Speaker: And also why, ultimately, you can't tell a story without telling his death as well, because that's intimately tied to his legend. If he had lived to be 80, he'd still be famous, but it'd be a totally different story arc. And so that's why the death was so important to get down.
Speaker: Yeah, and that was a very, the machinations and how you were able to tell that was a really gripping part of the book. I think I first came across that actually was the excerpt on The Ringer and it was probably early June or maybe late May. When I read that, I'm like, oh, I got to get my hands on this book because this is something I'd never heard. And the way you were able to craft that scene of how
Speaker: trying to cover it up, move his body, this, that and the other and to try to make it not look as salacious as it was because the Hong Kong press would have just feasted on it, which of course they did anyway. What was it like for you to build that scene and get that tight and right?
Speaker: That was one of the hardest parts of the book to write. I could have shaved a year off of this book if somebody had done this before and I just could have synthesized what someone else said.
Speaker: The problem was everybody involved in the cover up is still semi involved in the cover up. So, you know, I went and talked to Betty Ting Pei to Raymond Chow and to Linda Lee and their current versions of stories still have holes in them. And in particular, when I talked to Raymond Chow, I realized
Speaker: Oh, he's not going to break and tell me what I'm pretty sure the truth is. He's going to stick with the version that he had been telling for the last 35 years. But even though that happened, he still revealed details that were crucial in understanding the final day. For example, that Bruce had been performing scenes from Game of Death and that had made him feel dizzy. That had never been reported before. And that gave me a kind of insight into what might have caused Bruce's death.
Speaker: But but you're right writing that last thing was difficult because it was the only area of the book where i had to as an author say you know what this is what they're saying but. I'm pretty sure they're not telling the truth or it's wrong and so i'm gonna have to speculate a little bit but it's.
Speaker: look at the footnotes and I'll let you know why I'm doing that and what the theory is. But it required a little more educated guessing than others because it was the one area where the principles involved were being dishonest. It also helped though that I had a couple sources who were close to it who could kind of guide me as well.
Speaker: And I have heard you say, and also you wrote it in the afterward that the genesis of this biography kind of stemmed from your own anger that nothing of this nature had been written about Bruce Lee. And I was wondering if maybe you could speak to that, because it's a really good point that you talk about, about how and perhaps why nothing of this nature has been written about him 45 years after his death.
Speaker: Yeah, I think there's two big reasons. The lesser reason is because Kung Fu itself is not considered highbrow. The martial arts, despite the fact that they're a universal phenomenon, and there's over 20 million Americans who study them.
Speaker: is not considered highbrow culture. And I joke that if Bruce Lee had been a painter or a violinist, and 20 million people had taken up violin because of him, he would have had 500 biographies, but because he was a Kung Fu star, he only gets one. And then I think the second reason, the second reason pretty obvious is that he's not white. But I think it's even more complicated than that. He's also not black.
Speaker: And I believe sort of American culture deals with race and this basic binary. And so the result is any white guy who does anything gets a biography. And any black person who white people know gets a biography. But Asians get ignored. And so even if you tried to think in your brain of, you know, name these three famous Asians, you'd probably go Bruce Lee, Chairman Mao, and then you'd struggle for the third name.
Speaker: So Asian Americans haven't had the sort of exposure in Western media that the other ethnic groups have or racial groups, and also they just aren't treated as worthy of that much attention. And so Bruce Lee's really, when I picked him out, I realized, you know, after you've written about Bruce Lee, you're done because there's not a second person.
Speaker: you could write about. So I think that – I hope that changes, but it's remarkable that 45 years after Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee remains pretty much the only super famous Asian American in the world. When you took up this project, how did you lobby the principles involved, namely the estate and the family to let you tell the story?
Speaker: I had heard that the from various sources that the state wasn't super excited about biographer and biographies about Bruce Lee. And that's not unusual. Most estates are uncomfortable with biographies because, you know, they're in the business of controlling the image of the dead celebrity who generates the income.
Speaker: And also, they're often run by family members who have an emotional connection. So what I did was I basically got the book deal first, and then I got a magazine article attached to it. At that point, the New York Times Magazine had agreed to do a piece on the 40th anniversary of Enter the Dragon.
Speaker: So I approached them with that saying I'm gonna write this piece for the New York Times and also probably do a biography and so because it was a fait accompli they they agreed to talk to me, but they Shannon Lee who runs the estate was clearly Not super comfortable with the idea that it would be an independent biography
Speaker: And is that so what then becomes the difference? I'm a little confused of what it means like a like a thought. What is it authoritative? Authorized. Authorized or non -authorized biographies and I take it like this was as extensive as it is and the amount of people that you talked to that were so close to Bruce like is this considered a non -authorized biography?
Speaker: Well, yeah, so I authorize is very specific. It means you went to the estate itself and got their approval. And and then it varies. But basically you have to give up some editorial control. Right. So it could mean that they they had final approval, which means they said, you know, I don't want you putting the thing about the mistress. You have to cut that out and you would.
Speaker: Usually it's more subtle than that it usually the state does something like will agree to let you are archives of photos will let you look at letters and then you know will be involved in the final product but.
Speaker: You know writers know where their bread is buttered and if you agree to an authorized thing you're just gonna pull your punches a little bit that's just enough that's inevitable so it's it's. It's what we call access journalism which is the people who get to talk to the president. Are all on fox news. And the people talk to obama were on msnbc.
Speaker: You go in an estate once a biographer who's going to write nice things about the guy. And so inevitably, with somebody famous enough, you'll have an authorized biography and then you'll have usually one sort of bitter, nasty tell all. And then hopefully you get one book and this is what I was aiming for, which feels like a balance between the two.
Speaker: It's going to tell you some of the the warts, but it's also going to tell you why this person's impressive. And that's what I was going for. It's an independent, but you lose some access. So the estate didn't grant me the rights to use any of their photos. And there were parts of their archives I had to access other ways. And so it took more time and money to do it this way.
Speaker: And given the amount of time that you spent on the book and really immersed in Bruce's life, when it was all said and done, did you get a sense of like, I kind of like miss this guy, or were you like ready to kick him out the door? Well, that happened like year three, where I was like, don't call around here no more, Brucey.
Speaker: Um, but no, I mean, what happens? I got excited again and is the, is the day of like publication approached. I was at peak excitement. Uh, and then getting a chance to talk to you and to other people about Bruce is awesome. This is, as I say, writing is so awful to do. Like it's so torturous that talking about it is by far the most fun. Um, and so I, I'm still like still into Bruce.
Speaker: And I haven't quite had to do the breakup where I'm gonna tell him I'm seeing other people And that's that's gonna be hard Because he is it's a sink like they're not Bruce Lee is the most famous. I'm a martial arts writer That's how I've made my career and he's the most famous martial artist ever live and so once you write about Bruce Everything's a little downhill after that
Speaker: What inspiration did you draw from him taking such a deep dive into his life and how maybe has he made you better at what you do? Well, one inspiration I'm not sure this is a good one is Bruce didn't take any shit.
Speaker: That was his defining quality. And it's so interesting because Asian Americans and Western culture for centuries or at least decades have been portrayed as a bowheaded, stone faced, inscrutable, just enduring an unbelievable suffering without complaint. And Bruce Lee was the exact opposite. You know, he was like, you insulted me, I'm going to punch you in the face. And so
Speaker: Uh, he made me a little more pugnacious. I, I, there's sometimes I have to calm down. Cause I'm like, you know, if I punch the, uh, the principal of my son's school, it's not gonna hit. Well, but I'm sitting there thinking Bruce wouldn't take this shit. Um, so I'm not sure that's good, but he definitely gave me a little bit of that. I think the most sort of the moral of the story of Bruce Lee is.
Speaker: He never gave up. The only reason he's the first Asian -American male actor to star in a Hollywood movie is because despite all his friends telling me it was impossible, despite the fact that basically it was impossible, it was a racist system that had zero interest in making a Chinese actor a Hollywood star, he never gave up. And the moral of the story is the impossible is possible sometimes if you're willing to pay the ultimate price.
Speaker: And so Bruce paid the ultimate price to achieve his ambition. Yeah. And it was like he almost would always put – he seemed to be a guy who needed like an enemy to face, whether that was some screenwriters. He needed an other to go up against and butt heads against.
Speaker: He was a fighter from day one really, so in a sense was. He put that obstacle in his way and that's whether it's McQueen's fame. He was like, I'm going to beat him and everything, this, that, and the other. He always seemed to put that in his way and that just drove him maniacally and also drove him to the edge of his life really.
Speaker: Yeah, that's very insightful. The way I thought about it is he personalized conflict. But you're right, he turned everything into a street fight. And so even though he really liked McQueen and they were good friends, the fact that McQueen was more famous than him meant that this was a fight to see who could be more famous. And McQueen recognized it because he was a bit of the same guy. McQueen had done that with Paul Newman.
Speaker: And so, you know, who was better at martial arts? Everything was a competition. And that's how he pushed himself. And that was part of what sort of drove this incredible ambition. Because you would think most people would think to themselves, I'm Steve McQueen's trainer. I'm a first generation Chinese guy. No one knows what Kung Fu is. It's the 1960s.
Speaker: Korea was just 10, like 15 years ago. He's paying me $800 an hour. I've made it, right? Only Bruce Lee would be paid $800 an hour to teach Steve McQueen and think, this sucks. I need to be more famous than Steve McQueen.
Speaker: Um, and that's just, that's unique to him. I would, I mean, I, if I got $800 an hour to teach Steve McQueen, I would be done the rest of the time I'd be drinking my ties. But Bruce Lee, you had that kind of incredible ambition and drive and you're right. He did it by thinking of it, thinking of everything as a fight. Yeah.
Speaker: Well, Matthew, I want to be mindful of your time. This is so great to get to talk to you about your journey, your process of writing, your approach to the book. And of course, talking a little bit about Bruce Lee here. The biography, it's incredible, extensive. The research you did and the way you were able to craft it comes through as just a really masterful biography. And I just want to thank you for the work.
Speaker: Where can people get more familiar with the book and also find you online so they can get more familiar with your work in the book? If people want to find out more about me they can go to my website www .mattpoly .com I'm also on Twitter at Matthew E. Polly and you can look me up on Facebook Matthew Polly and you can email me at my website or reach out to me on Twitter and
Speaker: I love hearing from people who've read the book and enjoyed it. If you hated the book, you don't have to email me. But if you loved it, definitely want to hear from you. So yeah, that's how they can get to me. And the book's available everywhere. So run out and get a copy if you're interested. Cool. Well, thank you so much, Matt, for taking the time to come on the show and talk about the book. So thanks for the work, and we'll be in touch for sure. Appreciate it, Brendan. Thanks so much for having me on. You got it. Take care.
Speaker: Thanks always to HIPPA Camp for the promotional support, and thanks to you for listening. You know what's funny? I actually forgot to tell you the name of the podcast at the top of the show. This is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to narrative journalists, essayists, doc filmmakers, podcasters, radio producers,
Speaker: memoirists about the art and craft of telling true stories. But now you know. Be sure to head over to BrendanOemHera .com to sign up for the monthly newsletter. It's real short, just a few book recommendations and podcast news. Once a month, no spam.
Speaker: Can't beat that. Or if you can. Well, no, no you can't. You cannot beat it. I hang out on Twitter at Brendan O 'Mara and at cnfpod. Feel free to go like the Facebook page. I send out cool audiograms and quote cards on Instagram, so if you're feeling all kinds of froggy there, go for it. Brendan O 'Mara there. You know, what is. That's gonna do it. I'm gonna go watch a Henry Rollins talk and try to get some motivation up in my brain. See ya!
