Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Now in Paperback: Dinty W. Moore on the Gift of Feedback, Reading Like a Mechanic, and Patience
1.2k Plays1 year ago
This originally aired as Episode 49 on May 19, 2017.
“The people I know who fail as writers … lack patience, stubbornness.”
Dinty W. Moore is the founder of Brevity Magazine and the author of several books including The Story Cure: A Book Doctor's Pain-Free Guide to Finishing Your Novel or Memoir.
In this episode we talk about:
- Patience
- Voice
- Getting inspired instead of dejected by feedback
- And the power of dozens of drafts
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Sponsor: Liquid IV, promo code cnf
Social: @creativenonfictionpodcast on IG and Threads
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Host Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
It's got lost in it. It's like, man, I just changed that one word. And this paragraph is so much better. Or I just moved that sentence up two paragraphs. And the thing suddenly makes much more sense. I get excited about that. All right, AC and efforts at CNF pod, the creative nonfiction podcast, the show where I speak to badass people about telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. But then again, you knew that.
Featuring Dinty W. Moore
00:00:30
Speaker
Now in paperback, we're featuring Denty W. Moore, the beautiful mind behind brevity, and the craft book, The Story Cure, a book doctor's pain-free guide to finishing your novel or memoir.
00:00:48
Speaker
It's published by 10 Speed Press. Since this episode originally aired as episode 49 back in May of 2017, Dinty has published, to hell with it, of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante's entirely ridiculous, needlessly guilt-inducing Inferno, published by University of Nebraska Press in 2021,
00:01:11
Speaker
and the best of brevity in 2020 by Rosemetal Press. He's a frequent instructor on craft talks or rebirth your book with Allison K. Williams. Basically, if you listen to Dinty, you're gonna get better.
Podcast and Product Promotions
00:01:26
Speaker
Oh, by the way, this episode is sponsored by Liquid IV, affiliately sponsored, so, you know, buy stuff. And I gotta say, it's a delicious way to rehydrate and fuel your endurance activities, or if you just wanna zhuzh up your water. Non-GMO and free from gluten, dairy, and soy. 20% off. If you go to liquidiv.com, use the promo code CNF at checkout.
00:01:46
Speaker
20% off anything you order when you shop better. Hydration today using the Promopode. Promopode. CNF at liquidiv.com. Also, when you go to BrendanOmero.com, hey, you can read show notes to this episode and a billion others and sign up for my rage against the algorithm newsletter, a curated list. I know it's so basic.
00:02:10
Speaker
An essay by your resident crank, books, stuff to make you happy. It goes up to 11.
Newsletter and Community Engagement
00:02:18
Speaker
Literally, the list is 11 items long. But the more I think about it, the more the newsletter really needs to offer insights into getting you where you want to go. You know, I think of, like, when you're like, oh, please, you know, at the end of everybody's newsletter when they're like, please share with your friends, like, well, what?
00:02:35
Speaker
Like, what are you going to get out of sharing it with your friends? Or they're like, all right, here's a here's some links and some book recommendations. Like, that's kind of dumb. There's no reason for you to share. But if there are truly insights that that are kind of like help you get a little bit better towards getting published or building a platform that doesn't want to make you blow your brains out, I think that is like, OK,
00:03:01
Speaker
I'm more likely to stick around or even share and try to bring other people in. I'm going to workshop some ideas, okay? For next month, essay portion, just to tease it, is about why I finally deleted my Twitter account and my God with each passing day, I'm happier and happier I did. And then I'm just going to kind of wash my hands of that because, you know, I talk about that a lot. First of the month, no spam, as far as I can tell. Can't beat it.
00:03:27
Speaker
Also, maybe consider going to patreon.com slash cnfpod. Sure, I'm asking for a little bit of dough, but what you get is more than the satisfaction of helping this podcast financially. You get access to a community of other CNF and writers, and that's kind of cool. There's the collection of the dots, and then there's the connection of dots.
00:03:48
Speaker
I start a thread and then you kind of talk amongst yourselves. Like, don't lurk. You know, jump in and contribute to the conversation. Maybe exchange contact info somehow. Make a friend. Patreon.com slash cnfpod. Latest thread I started was about books on writing. And that's very fitting because today, part of this Now in Paper backup episode deals with Dinti's book, The Story Cure. A very, very, very good book on writing.
00:04:16
Speaker
Free ways to support the show always, leaving reviews on Apple Podcasts or ratings on Spotify. And one final thing, shout out to Athletic Brewing, my favorite non-alcoholic beer out there. Not a paid blog, but I'm a brand ambassador, and I just love celebrating Athletic. Go to athleticbrewing.com and use the promo code BRENDANO20 at checkout, and you get a nice little discount on your first order.
Writing Techniques and Feedback
00:04:41
Speaker
All right, so in this episode with Dinty, you're gonna get insights into how to read like a mechanic fixing a car. And not like read like a mechanic, because mechanics can read. It's a very hard and technical profession, but you know what I mean. Like getting under the hood. How to be comfortable with writing a billion drafts at least. And embracing feedback as a means to get better. Patience. So many other great insights. It's just great. And Dinty's got an amazing voice built for this medium.
00:05:11
Speaker
All right, so here we go. Episode rerun 49. Riff.
00:05:30
Speaker
Thank you for putting such a positive spin on it. There are people who might say I work too much. I'm a little bit too work focused. I mean, it doesn't matter priorities. I don't. I get up in the morning and my job is as writer, editor, teacher, depending on which one is. I don't spend a lot of time lingering over breakfast. I get ready to work. I almost always eat lunch at my desk.
00:05:54
Speaker
I see some of my colleagues go for long leisurely lunches, and I think, boy, that must be fun. I never quite do it. So it's really just time management and stubbornness and focus. And there has to be, of course, if you're willing to spend that much time with it, there has to be, on some level, a deep love of the language and the work as well.
The Joy of Revision
00:06:18
Speaker
So where does that come from?
00:06:21
Speaker
You know, I don't know. I mean, I guess from years and years and years of reading and writing, but unlike a lot of other writers, I look back to my childhood. We didn't have books around the house. I don't know that I was read to as a kid. I have no memory of that. My mom loved newspapers. So I did, you know, early on start reading newspapers, which is very different than
00:06:49
Speaker
novels and literary works. My mother's focus on what was in the newspaper made me want to read the newspaper. Eventually I wrote for newspapers on how I got from there to the kind of writing I do now or writing books. The focus on literary writing, I don't really know. It just seemed to be
00:07:09
Speaker
I fell in love with language somewhere along the way and thought, boy, these moving words around in a sentence, every time you move them, the sentence changed a little bit. Some people get bored by that. I was just fascinated, and I still am. I was revising for about two hours this morning, revising a 4,000-word article I'm working on.
00:07:33
Speaker
It's got lost in it. It's like, man, I just changed that one word. And this paragraph is so much better. Or I just moved that sentence up two paragraphs. And the thing suddenly makes much more sense.
00:07:44
Speaker
I get excited about that. Yeah, you allude to that in the Story Cure too, that once you're able to get the clay down and that the revision part and the shaping of all those words, you get a big charge out of that. And I think maybe a good chunk of that book is getting writers to that point so that they can enjoy that revision process, that you've done a good chunk of that first work.
00:08:12
Speaker
Now it's time to start shaping it for someone other than yourself. So what about your sort of writerly constitution really appeals to that revision process versus maybe the generative process? Good question. I hate the blank page because it's like, what are we going to put down here? How am I ever going to come up with anything coherent and interesting? One of the strengths, I thought I'm going to count this as a strength,
00:08:42
Speaker
I don't mind the fact that my early drafts and my second drafts and my third drafts and my fourth drafts are clearly lousy. When I go in and find horrible sentences and horrible paragraphs, I don't think, oh god, I hate myself. I'm a bad writer. I think, you know what? I can actually fix this. This is one of those few times in life where you get a second chance. So the idea that I have an editor coming back at me and saying, no, this isn't very good enough. You've got to work on it harder, or as I get
00:09:13
Speaker
older and more experienced as a writer to have the editor in my brain say, you know, this isn't good enough. This is just really kind of flat. You need to work on it harder. That doesn't hurt my feelings. It makes me kind of excited to get back in there and start moving words and paragraphs and sentences around again. So that's what I mean about ego is like my feelings don't get hurt. If something's not working quite yet. In fact, I expect that.
00:09:38
Speaker
when I point it out to myself or an outside reader or editor points it out to me, I don't curl up under a little ball. I go, yeah, cool. Okay, let me see what I can do. Right. And how long do you think it took you to reach that point of, it takes a certain degree of confidence to say, my worth isn't tied to these early drafts and to then be able to see it for what it is and then
Overcoming Writing Challenges
00:10:06
Speaker
and then be able to work through and revise and not have your ego attached to the, as Anne Lamont might say, the shitty first drafts. So how long did it take you to sort of develop that muscle? Another audience here is I think I had it at the beginning. I'm very insecure about many, many things. If you have three hours, I could start listing them right now. But this particular insecurity, it's like I remember
00:10:34
Speaker
from, well, the first fiction workshop I ever took. Short story writing, I brought my lovely, wonderful, what I thought was finished, delightfully funny story in, and the professor, David Bradley, just took it apart piece by piece by piece and referred to it in very unflattering, profane terms and found flaws in every sentence and inconsistencies
00:11:03
Speaker
of character on every page. And ultimately, it was a check-in and cliche of a story. And I was like, man, that is so cool. Look at what he did. He really understood, you know, what's going on there and how to fix it. And I got really excited. And I mean, he was a very formative part of my writing process. I normally wanted to fix the story that he had pointed out in a 45-minute
00:11:31
Speaker
diatribe was, you know, failing in every category. But I remember leaving, I was in Philadelphia that I remember leaving that classroom thinking, man, I want to learn to do what he does. You know, I want to learn how to, how to see that stuff in my writing and other people's writing and that led eventually, eventually not right away to me going to graduate school and trying to train myself to be able to see inside of a story. And not just say, you know, I really love that or I didn't like it so much.
00:12:00
Speaker
but to really like a mechanic looks into a car engine, really be able to look at the moving parts and figure out what's working and what isn't working and where the oil is leaking. So how can, because clearly this is something that can be learned. And it was something that your professor enlightened you to. So how can a novice writer, reader sort of cultivate that
00:12:30
Speaker
that degree of insight and x-ray reading, as Roy Peter Clark might call it. How can that be learned, even if you're a step above a novice, to be a better reader, which ultimately makes you a better writer? Practice. I'm not the first one to ever say this, but if I'm reading somebody else's work, even people I worship, like Joan Didion, sometimes I read for pleasure, but I've trained myself to
00:12:59
Speaker
to read, well, to read like a mechanic. It's like, okay, this is so good. That paragraph was so powerful. I stop, I go back, I look at it and say, no, why? What is it she did? You know, it's often what's left out. It's that she gave you cheat, in this case, Joan Didi, and gives you just enough that you and your own, you, the reader, are putting things together in your head and the little fireworks are going off in the back of your brain, leading you right up to it, and then letting you realize it.
00:13:29
Speaker
rather than hitting the reader over the head, telling you, over explaining, which sort of kills the moment. Yeah. So I read other people's work, masters, or I'm a professor, so I read some students who haven't quite mastered how a sentence works yet. I stop and think, why? What is broken here? Or why is this such a good sentence? What is this doing that makes me smile or stiffens my spine as I read?
00:14:00
Speaker
And eventually I learned to do that with my own work. You know, it's like, I'm not reading it. It's like, well, is it good enough? Do I like myself? You know, do I suck? Am I a writer? I'm actually, you know, kind of dispassionately thinking, okay, let's look at this paragraph. Here's what's working. Here's what's not working. What if I push this word over here? What if I just take that middle sentence out? What if I move?
00:14:24
Speaker
the last sentence to the beginning of the paragraph. It's like a puzzle or while David Bradley also, the professor I referenced earlier, also sort of talked about child play and sitting in the sandbox and just pushing sand around and making a sand castle. That kid who's doing that isn't worried about getting published someday or getting tenure someday or becoming famous someday. He's just
00:14:49
Speaker
playing with sand because it's fun and I try to get into that mood with words and sentences. Yeah, I try to talk about that a lot with people about maintaining a degree of play and fun in the process of writing because there's this stigma that you should be this tortured writer and this tortured artist. But in reality, if you're having fun and just playing with the magic of these words and the magic of the language,
00:15:17
Speaker
The fact is, it's going to be a great experience for the reader. And why? I mean, sure, there is going to be some tough subject matter to wrap your head around. It's not all going to be a frolic in the field of flowers. Really? Yeah. Imagine that. But if you, like you said, just maintaining that degree of play and that childlike view of it, it makes for a much better process and will probably unlock a deeper reservoir of your taste, if you will.
00:15:46
Speaker
Sure, I mean, I don't want to be Susie Sunshine. Like you said, there are days that are just horrible. I'm just sitting there pushing my pencil or pushing the delete key and thinking, Oh, my God, I just don't have anything here. There are lousy days like that, but you can't live there. Right. For very long. And I also agree with what you just implied, which is if you're, if you're fascinated with the subject you're writing about, if you're having fun, especially if you're trying to write something humorous, if you're
00:16:15
Speaker
you know, just engage with the process. It comes off the page, it comes off the sentences and the readers, the readers sense that. Whereas if you're slogging through, you know, deep and insecurity, you know, the reader's gonna sense that too. It's a little bit like, you know, a little bit like acting. You know, you've seen, you see an actor on the stage who's just inhabiting that character. And there's something so, so magnetic about that. You can't take your eyes off him. And you see an actor who's kind of stiff and unsure and
00:16:58
Speaker
the editor hack can like creep into the process a little too early. And I wonder how you divorce the two, especially in your generative first draft phases. So you're not editing as you're writing, you're just letting it lose having that play and then putting the editor hat on later once you have that ball of clay that you reference in the story here. So how do you navigate those two poles? I do edit a little bit in the first draft.
00:17:11
Speaker
and nervous and anticipating. And it's like, eh, it's kind of hard to watch.
00:17:28
Speaker
Actually, I think I'm just correcting typos because I don't type very well. I'm trying to make sense in a first draft. It's not just spewing or stream of consciousness, but if I type a bad sentence and it's not really that interesting, I don't even go back and delete it sometimes. I just type a new sentence hoping I just layer on all these sentences. Like many writers, if I wake up on a Thursday morning and I'm talking about the very, very first draft of something,
00:17:57
Speaker
If I wake up on a Thursday morning and type, type, write two and a half, three pages of something, you know, by the next morning, maybe a half of the page, you know, remains. And I get up, I read it, I delete all the boring stuff and there's half of a page. And then I start, you know, building up some sort of structure around that to see where it goes. And then I have a new four pages, you know, at the end of the day. And the next day I go in and I look at it and say, yeah, well, you got about a page worth of interesting material there.
00:18:26
Speaker
And even that's not that interesting. I mean, there's so many different metaphors. It's sort of a process of carving away or building up the clay until it starts to look like an elephant or starts to look like whatever it is you think you're trying to make. It's like if it's really early on and it's not quite making sense yet. I have a voice in my head that I've cultivated that says, just hang in there, dinty.
00:18:50
Speaker
Just keep working at this. One of these days, you're going to come in and look at it and go, oh, wait, wait. Now I see what it's about. I also know that 2030 drafts in, or certainly if I'm on deadline of some sort, there's a point at which I have to put on my editor's hat and say, stop playing around here. Figure out what it is you're talking about.
00:19:11
Speaker
And I also my, my, I think my students hate me. I'm not sure. But I think they do. They hate me for this. I have my mean New York editor hat. You know, I use it on them. But I also use it on myself. It's like, okay, I'm mailing this off. Or nowadays emailing this off in three days. I put that mean, mean New York editor hat on and just say, Come on, come on. Is that a good opening? Are you just kind of
00:19:37
Speaker
fell in love with it, but it's not really working. Come on. Come on. Is that the best analogy you can make here? Wait a minute. Look at all those flat verbs. I'm aware of where I am in the process and sort of take on different inner voices on myself, on my own work, because I'm working my way up the hill.
00:19:57
Speaker
And at the beginning of the story here, you spend a lot of time and valuable time right at the start talking about the heart story and maybe what Tom French might call like the engine.
Discovering the Core of Your Story
00:20:09
Speaker
And how important is that to try to flesh that out as early as possible, but also because sometimes it takes maybe
00:20:20
Speaker
hundred pages, maybe more to really get to the heart of it, to maybe, to not get stumped by the idea of, I haven't found my heart yet, but I still have to keep going. The heart story is simply, what is this really, really about? You know, in fiction, a guy moves to Indianapolis and something happens and something else happens and then, you know, he's in danger. That's the plot. But what's it really about? You know, which is often something like regret or something like deep insecurity, something about, you know, working out.
00:20:51
Speaker
a problem from the past. That's what heart story is. I do a better job in the book, I hope, than I did just then. It's a real gift if you sit down to write something fiction or non-fiction, memoir or novel, short story or essay. It's a real gift if you sit down and you know what it is that's driving you. I often don't. I often, as I've said earlier in this interview, I'm just fiddling around trying to find that nugget.
00:21:18
Speaker
you know, that nugget of something that's got the power in it, or the part of the story that sends, it's got the electrical vibration running, running beneath it. It's again, you know, I'm gonna turn the question around a little bit and say, the people I know who fail as writers, you know, students who they can write a sentence, they're smart, they have a great vocabulary, but they're not just never gonna make it as a writer, because they lack patience, or they lack
00:21:47
Speaker
stubbornness. It's like I write something. Well, this is it. This is how good it is. And that's, you know, what do you think? Whether it's a matter of not knowing what the heart of your story is and what your heart story is right away, or whether it's a matter of having to revise your sentences and paragraphs 47 times, which I have to before I'm satisfied with them. You have to be you have to be patient. You can't just expect
00:22:17
Speaker
it all to come out or to know it all or to see it all. When you sit down to write, you don't wake up in the morning and think, boy, I'm going to write a 10-page short story and I know everything about it. First of all, it's boring because you need to be open to discovering something as you write, but it just doesn't happen that way. Whatever it is that isn't quite working in your draft today, whether it's a draft of an essay,
00:22:43
Speaker
a draft of a book length memoir, a draft of a novel, whatever it is that isn't working. You have to be patient. You have to kind of keep working despite the working on other parts of the book, despite the fact that you haven't quite figured out what the heart of the book is yet. And you have to be patient and trust that you're going to get there eventually.
00:23:03
Speaker
So what do you think is the biggest problem you see when you've got your book doctor hat on, when you're trying to diagnose somebody's writing in whatever stage of the process they're in? What things do you typically see among people trying to bring something that's of publishable quality? Attachment holding on, holding on to ideas, scenes, characters,
00:23:31
Speaker
It's hard to let go. It's hard to say, boy, I worked on this, this part of this book for three weeks. And guess what? Boom. All I learned in those three weeks is that the character doesn't actually go there. It's a memoir, you know, I worked on this, this scene from my childhood for three weeks trying to bring it to life. And then, you know, all I realized was boom, the scene from my childhood doesn't really actually belong in this book.
00:23:58
Speaker
the, you know, the manuscripts that are brought to me short or long, the biggest problem I find, you know, to be very general is there's a lot of material in there. It might be well written, but it's not taking the reader anywhere. It's either off subject, you know, subject sounds a little too directive when you're talking about literary writing, but it's, it is not in the, it's either is not in the universe of the story. It doesn't fit organically with the story.
00:24:28
Speaker
even if it's true or it's repetitive. It's telling the reader, showing the reader, illustrating for the reader, beautifully, something that the reader already knows. And the story's got to move on. You've got to take us someplace else.
The 'Invisible Magnetic River' Metaphor
00:24:43
Speaker
And sort of piggybacking on that and also the heart story is this invisible magnetic river that you write about, which is this great metaphor of how to pull people along for the story however long or broad it may be. And I was wondering if maybe you could talk a little bit about that and how you came to that metaphor. Yeah, it started with teaching because my students would come in and they learned this as I did.
00:25:12
Speaker
from their high school English teachers. They came in and said, we're talking about a workshop now where the students are writing their own stories. In this case, it was a fiction workshop. And I'd say, well, what is the theme of this? And I'd be scratching my head thinking, and I'd probably use that term too. In fact, I did in my early teaching. But I started scratching my head thinking, theme. Doesn't theme apply to dead white European authors
00:25:38
Speaker
you know, from the 17th century isn't a theme, you know, what Melville did with Moby Dick. That's an awfully big thing to be talking about in a sophomore college creative writing class. You know, these guys just need to learn to write a story, not a deep theme. So I just kind of walked away from that term. And that sort of morphed my students, you know, have their own liners. Like, what does this story mean? Or what do you often hear this in poetry? Class, excuse me. What does this poem mean?
00:26:09
Speaker
It's it was just a riddle to be solved or as if the reader was a code breaker. That's very dissatisfied with that. Well, story doesn't mean a story takes you someplace and it's alive. And you feel that person's life. It doesn't mean something if you feel something as a reader. So I struggled around and I came up with my own metaphor, which is, you know, the invisible magnetic river. That's that's what holds the story together. That's one as you know, that's what all the parts
00:26:38
Speaker
of a story, fiction or nonfiction, have to attach to this invisible magnetic river somehow, not a theme and not a meaning, and that's certainly not a moral, which is, you know, only useful in religion class, but an invisible magnetic river of emotion. You don't want, as I said earlier, you don't want to hit the reader over the head with it. You don't want to say, this is what my story means, because that's as dull for the reader.
00:27:06
Speaker
It's magnetic because it's all the various moving parts of your fiction or nonfiction narrative should be leaning towards that are being pulled magnetically pulled toward it. Otherwise it doesn't belong there. That scene or that character or that.
00:27:22
Speaker
image or that moment that you're recounting on the page, it isn't pulling, you know, if it isn't in a magnetic pull relationship with this underground river of emotion, then it doesn't belong in the book, or it doesn't belong in the story, or it doesn't belong in the essay. That's the magnetic part of it. So invisible, magnetic, and then river. And the thing I like about the river metaphor is, you know, rivers are very strong. Rivers are pulling forward, you know, just with great power.
00:27:51
Speaker
They have these currents that just, but they don't go in a straight line. Rivers move, they meander, they slow down at certain places because it widens, they speed up at certain places because you hit the rapids. So in terms of storytelling, I want the story always to be moving forward, but it's not like you're on a train and every single track is absolutely
00:28:18
Speaker
straight locked in from beginning to end. I like the meandering sets of a river. When I'm on a river, you know, I'm actually on a river and a canoe. I like the meandering sense of a river. Well, I like it in stories that I read as well.
Engaging the Reader
00:28:34
Speaker
As long as it's moving forward, the river doesn't ever stop and just
00:29:00
Speaker
Uh, it has to connect on a different, different level. And, um, you know, it's, because it's not, if it's done well, Cheryl Strayed's story is, it's not hers anymore. It, the reader overlays their experience. So like with, as a, as a writer, how do you think you can balance the writing of a story for yourself and then ultimately have a re an end product where the reader is in mind too? Cause there's kind of that balancing act.
00:29:01
Speaker
go sideways for no good reason. It's always moving forward.
00:29:31
Speaker
I'm very reader focused. I'm very much aware at every stage, even though at beginning stages, early drafts, I'm writing bad sentences and giving myself permission to write bad sentences and writing paragraphs go nowhere and giving myself permission to do that because that's part of the exploring process, trying to find what this is really about or where the words are that are going to bring this to life.
00:29:58
Speaker
But even at that stage, I'm aware that, you know, this is gonna have to interest somebody somewhere other than me, just because, you know, I write a lot of memoir, a lot of nonfiction, just because it happened to me, which inherently makes it interesting to me because it's my life, doesn't mean anybody else is gonna be interested. So I'm very hyper aware of the audience. As soon as I get into the middle drafts and as I'm moving towards, you know, this thing's gonna be done in a few weeks. If I just, you know, keep working on it, I get really aware
00:30:26
Speaker
If there is an audience, somebody's going to have to read this. How am I going to keep that audience awake? What possible value is Brendan going to get by spending a half an hour of his time reading this? It's a conscious process. Because more and more conscious, the further along I am, the closer I feel like I am to the finish line. But I mean, I read it out loud to myself and think, OK, where is Brendan? Or where is my imaginary reader?
00:30:55
Speaker
getting bored here. What's on this page that makes him want to read the next page? What is my reader learning here? And even more importantly, what is my reader becoming curious about here so that when she gets four or five pages further in and she starts to get the answer to her questions, there's that pleasurable moment of what a lot of writing does, which raises questions in the reader's mind.
00:31:22
Speaker
And then slowly begins to answer them or bring the reader towards an answer. So it's, it's, um, um, I'm struggling to, but it's almost like conducting an orchestra. Um, and I, when I get at that stage, it's like, I'm, I'm really thinking about what the experience is for the reader at, at each paragraph and where the, where I'm going to lose the reader out of pure boredom or confusion or the reader just doesn't care. So what?
00:31:52
Speaker
And how do I make that not happen? How do I give the reader? And there's various ways to do this. It could be simply suspense. It could be just a fascinating character or the world you're bringing to life on the page is alive enough that the reader's enjoying being there. Sometimes it's simply the pleasure of language, the way something is told is not just one way to keep the reader on the page. If there was, we'd all write murder mysteries.
00:32:21
Speaker
but there's got to be something and I'm very audience aware and hyper audience aware as I get near what I think is the final two or three drafts of something.
00:32:32
Speaker
in uh...
From Planning to Writing
00:32:33
Speaker
in the book you also right uh... is serve elude to house some a lot a lot of your students they have this that there's a a phase in their process where all they're doing is like talking about this book that they have in in their head so but they've got this perfect vision in their head but then ultimately got to sit down and get real acquainted with how ugly the process is and uh... so literally how do you get those people from the talk about phase
00:33:02
Speaker
to putting them in the chair and getting them to sort of divorce the perfect vision in their head and get some work done and get the work done. How do you get there? I don't always. I mean, that's, I can't do it for them. I mean, I talked to them about it. I think there's a lot of power in writers like you and me and other writers much more accomplished, you know, just saying to younger writers, guess what?
00:33:32
Speaker
It's a slog. It's hard. Guess what? This isn't my first draft. This is my 43rd draft. It's very deliberately constructed to sound fresh as if it were a first draft, but it doesn't happen that way. There's a little bit of psychological coaching or just being a friend to younger writers. The younger writers could be older than me, but by younger, I mean newer to the process.
00:34:00
Speaker
You know, a certain amount of it is just saying, guess what? You know, all those insecurities you have, Stephen King has them too. I have them too. Joan Didion has them. You know what, all those deep concerns you have that you might fail? Yeah, you might. But so what? And you put away and you start another project, helping people work through the bad inner voices, the insecurities, the fear of failure. And, and
00:34:30
Speaker
giving them permission or encouraging them to give themselves permission to not be a genius. You know, if I'm gonna write writers who sit down and they write something and they look at it and go, well, I'm not a genius. So I guess I won't ever do this again. I mean, I'm not a genius. I'm a guy who works real hard at my writing and I've been lucky to have some editors who publish what I write. So that's,
00:34:58
Speaker
How do I get people to stop talking about their writing and actually do it? I think it's getting them over that initial hump. And then some of them do it, and I'm amazed. You know, what they show me a week later, or I run into them at a conference five years later, and man, they've really taught themselves to become much more powerful and dedicated writers than they were when I first met them. And then sometimes, you know, people sit down and get started and say, this is too hard, and they stop.
00:35:28
Speaker
And I can't fix that for them. Maybe they were meant to do something else. That's fine, by the way. You don't have to be a writer. If you try to write something and then you give up halfway through, that doesn't make you a failure as a human being. It might mean you're a failure as a writer, but it might just mean you're a failure on that particular project. And you're going to find another project six months later. But it doesn't make you a failure as a human being. It's just writing.
00:35:55
Speaker
It's not your self-worth that's on the line here. A lot of people think it is, especially if they're writing personal stories, if they're writing a novel that's very much based on their family or their life or their marriage, or they're writing a memoir that by definition is very much very personal and based on their own experience. They do sometimes feel like their whole purpose as a human being on this planet is online, on the line. It's not. You're trying to write a book and a book's really hard.
00:36:26
Speaker
all we're going to determine at the end of a year is whether you're able to write a good first draft of
Embracing Multiple Drafts
00:36:32
Speaker
that book. We're not going to determine whether you're a successful human being or not. Be good to your family. That defines a successful human being. Right. I think you made just an important note in that. You're like, oh, I might be on draft 43.
00:36:50
Speaker
I think that in itself is very enlightening to someone who thinks that it has to be good even after two or three passes. Rarely ever hear anyone talk about double-digit drafts or double-digit pass-throughs of something. And I know that's the things I've written. I'm in the several dozens of
00:37:12
Speaker
Rereads all through beginning to end trying to move this that the other prune big limbs small limbs this that and the other so like the year Yeah, they hear you say like yeah, it's 40 40 drafts like that's not uncommon. That's how you work I think that I think that in terms will maybe Lighten the bear or like sort of make the barrier to go through those drafts more more porous for for people to work through it That's helpful to me. It's kind of repeating some of what I said earlier, maybe
00:37:42
Speaker
If I'm on my fourth draft of a 20-page essay, although I wouldn't have 20 pages by my fourth draft, I'm still struggling with the first five pages maybe. And when I look at it and I go, God, this is some really obvious ideas in here expressed in really flat sentences. And this is no there there. I don't panic.
00:38:07
Speaker
It's like, yeah, that's kind of what these early drafts are like. And I know I have another 30 drafts before I'm going to get it in any sort of a shape to show an editor. It's a glass half full, glass half empty. Oh my god, 40 drafts. That's so much work. I'm so discouraged. How could I ever do 40 drafts of anything? Well, flip that upside down. It was like, man, it doesn't matter if my fourth draft sucks. I got 35 more drafts. I did the math wrong.
00:38:36
Speaker
right there. But you know, dozens of more drafts to write. I know I'm going to get it right. I know I'm going to find something interesting tomorrow. I know if I just push it this by Friday, I'm gonna have pages of interesting material. It's okay if it's not working right now. That's the kind of freedom that goes with
00:38:55
Speaker
being a bull of a reviser.
00:39:11
Speaker
I get to do more. You just unlocked more possibilities. I get to write more drafts. It's a great way to spin it. You didn't tie your value to that feedback. It was the work and he was actually trying to just make you a better worker. I like to use the tennis metaphor sometimes. I don't know if you play tennis, but let's pretend you don't. If I took you out to the tennis court and handed you a racket and started
00:39:39
Speaker
lobbing balls towards your very easy soft balls that were right, you know, right where they needed to be. It's still kind of swat at them and miss most of them and hit the ones that you do hit into the net. And some people give up, I guess, I don't like tennis, you know, but if you had at least any interest in tennis, you'd go back the next day and try again. And eventually you'd like hit two balls back across the net and go, Oh, oh, oh, I get it.
00:40:09
Speaker
to the Wimbledon, but after like a couple of months of hitting tennis balls three times a week, you suddenly like hitting tennis balls. And then if you're hungry for it, you say, okay, how do I get to hit tennis balls really well? You know, that's kind of the process of becoming a better writer. You aren't born. I mean, it would be a shame if the first short story I ever wrote and took into David Bradley's workshop at Temple University in Philadelphia, you know, if that was like proof of what I was capable of.
00:40:37
Speaker
Well, it wasn't proof of what I was capable of. It actually was really minuscule, early flawed amateur work. And David Bradley showed me that, you know, just come out here and let me show you how to hold the racket and let me show you, you know, where to put your feet and you can actually improve your own tennis stroke.
Finding Your Authentic Voice
00:40:59
Speaker
to where you're actually going to hit some tennis balls. And your own tennis stroke, whether that be a two-handed backhand or backhand slice or heavy topspin, that in and of itself is like sort of tennis metaphor for voice.
00:41:17
Speaker
You talk a lot about voice, too, as like the heart story in the beginning and then towards the middle. It's like, all right, this tricky thing that's voice and how to cultivate it is sort of a question that's always on the forefront of a lot of writers and teachers, I'm sure. So maybe how did you develop your voice and how can people
00:41:37
Speaker
practice those tennis strokes to get to a point where it's it's no longer copying and piecemeal but it is something that is holy sort of original to the person. Right, well first of all, a voice doesn't have to be wholly original to the person. I mean, we do sound alike. Some tennis players, you watch them and say, you know, man, that Andre Agassi, his game is so different than anybody else's game, but you watch a lot of tennis players and
00:42:06
Speaker
They look like they're doing some of the same things. Especially true for golf. Yeah. My goodness. Yes. They're like robots to the guys at the top of their game and the ladies. Let's get off sports for a minute. Voice. Voice is really hard to talk about and teach. And I want to be one of those teachers who says, well, you know, you'll know it when you see it.
00:42:33
Speaker
That's a very unsatisfying answer. I'll begin by talking about myself while I panic in the background trying to think if I can say something smart about how I teach this to other people. I acquired my own voice by sort of returning to it. Like many, many writers, when I started writing serious work, you know, with a serious tone, I didn't sound like myself. I kept trying to sound like somebody else. I tried to sound more authoritative than I am. I tried to sound more
00:43:03
Speaker
more learned than I am. I tried to sound more literary than I am. And eventually I just sort of said, yeah, you know, Dinty, you know, you've got a way of telling stories when you're talking to your friends. Maybe that's the way you should tell stories when you're talking to the page. It's a little bit of a conceit, you obviously. When I'm talking to my friends, I'm interrupting myself and humming and awwing and rambling around in a way that's
00:43:28
Speaker
My friends just stick around because they're my friends or because I'm buying the beer. And when I'm writing on the page, I need to be aware of cleaning it up and making it flow, aware of the rhythm, or where am I constricting the river and where am I widening the river? But still, it's kind of telling a story, fiction and nonfiction again. I don't think, I mean, there are differences between fiction and nonfiction, God knows, but this idea of voice, there's not a big difference there.
00:43:57
Speaker
telling the story the way you would tell a story to a really good friend, emphasizing and spending time on the things that really matter to you, using the expressions that you used or heard people use in that small town in Indiana where you grew up, not trying to sound like you went to Harvard unless you went to Harvard. That, to me, my own voice sort of came when I got comfortable enough with being myself on the page.
00:44:25
Speaker
being a version of myself on the page. I know I'm more articulate on the page than I am in person because I revise those sentences. I've had so much repetition in this interview so far. If it was going to be published, I'd go back and take the repetition out because that's what you have the privilege and opportunity to do in writing. But just relax and be yourself and
00:44:56
Speaker
use the phrasing that makes sense to you and you don't want to use language so obscure that you lose the reader, but actually a little bit of the weirdness of your central Indiana small town way of speaking gives flavor to your writing and then the reader enjoys that.
The Story Cure: Audience and Teaching
00:45:18
Speaker
How to push other people towards their voice.
00:45:21
Speaker
is again, kind of pointing maybe just pointing a finger at where where the where the writing stiffens. And pointing a finger at no, no, no, no, right here. Look, see what you did right there. That's actually very alive on the page. Can you do more of that? You tell a joke on page five, why did it take five pages for you to lighten up and tell a joke or, or you know, you're being very vulnerable on page five. Let's say it's not a funny piece. You feel really human and you're expressing
00:45:49
Speaker
You're expressing your own doubt on page five. Why did it take you five pages to get there? Let's start in that place. And with the story cure, what itch was that scratching that you were like, all right, I want to package this as a way to be the book doctor and diagnose a lot of these problems and pros to ultimately make someone a better novelist or memoirist? I'm a college professor. I teach and have for many years taught
00:46:19
Speaker
both fiction and nonfiction writing to college kids. And I've written a craft book or two that, you know, is kind of aimed at that audience. Like, here's what a scene is. Here's what an image is. Here's what a metaphor is. You know, these sort of things. But I also, over the summer, more and more, I've been lucky enough to get invited. I teach at the Kenyon Review Summer Writers Workshop. It's a week-long workshop every summer. And the students
00:46:46
Speaker
tend to be in their 30s, 40s, 50s. They're accomplished people, not college kids. But they want to be writers. They have projects they're working on. Kenyans is one of them. I've done it in different places up in Vermont. I've done it down in Georgia, different summer conferences. And then audiences are very different. They're not naive. They probably took creative writing classes in college, though now they're scientists or lawyers or
00:47:16
Speaker
doctors or small business people or you know, whatever they're doing in their lives, they know the basics, but they don't quite know how to sustain those basics for a longer project. So these people will come to me with three chapters of their memoir, and like, I don't know how to get to chapter four, or they'll come to me with a completely written first draft of their memoir or novel and say, you know,
00:47:43
Speaker
I know some stuff is working here and I know some stuff isn't working here and I showed it to a few agents and they went, what do I do now? So I kind of took the years of the many years, many summers of teaching in these various workshops where people were in the middle of book projects, but didn't quite know how to get from where they were to the next major step of the process.
00:48:11
Speaker
And I thought, well, I'll collect all of that for a different audience. And that's kind of the audience for this book, I hope, is people who understand, they're readers. They understand what the basics of a story are. They may have taken some writing workshops two years ago or 22 years ago. So they kind of know what dialogue is, and they know all the basics that we teach at a sophomore-level creative writing class. But they don't know how to write a book.
00:48:42
Speaker
They don't know how to tackle a project that's going to excite them and break their heart again and again and again, you know, over the course of two years. And I thought, well, I'm going to try to get that information that I've been sharing in the classroom and sharing one on one, working with people, trying to get that into a book form.
00:49:03
Speaker
I think the book has so much value for the novice looking to start or someone who's more seasoned who just needs to get across the goal line. And I noticed that a lot of the tabs I put in here, the several dozen, it's like, oh yeah, I know I can apply that to this thing I've got in the drawer and this might get it over the goal line. And so it's got everything for no matter how long you've been doing it or how little you've been doing it.
Conclusion and Future Episodes
00:49:33
Speaker
If you weren't three time zones away from me right now, I'd come over and give you a hug. It was a very nice praise. Well, fantastic. Well, virtual hugs from the West Coast. So, but Denty, I'll let you get out of here, right? Thank you so much for carving out an hour of your morning. This was a lot of fun for me, and people are going to get a lot out of this, I think. Thank you, Brendan.
00:49:57
Speaker
Thanks C&F for listening to this paperback edition of the pod. You can subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And follow the show at Creative Nonfiction Podcasts on threads and Instagram. It's the only social media footprint for the show.
00:50:12
Speaker
No parting shot. Paperback editions are void of parting shots, at least for now, at least for this week. I should have a new episode next week, so stay tuned. And in the meantime, stay wild. And if you can't do, interview safe.
00:50:41
Speaker
you