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Now in Paperback: Glenn Stout on Combining the Things You Love, Effort, and the Poem That ‘Knocked Him on his Ass’
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This episode originally aired on December 6, 2015.
Glenn Stout is a brilliant editor and writer. He's the author of Young Woman and the Sea, The Selling of the Babe, and Tiger Girl and Candy Kid.
Here, we revisit the first of his many times on the pod to talk about:
- Effort
- How none of this makes sense
- Why we continue to tell stories
- And a whole lot more!
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Social: @creativenonfictionpodcast on IG and Threads
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Transcript
Podcast Funding and Support
00:00:01
Speaker
AC and efforts before we get into this new and paperback edition, the Patreon gang credit cards were charged and $92.26 was deposited into the CNF pod coffers. Subtracting about 40% for taxes, that means the podcast earned $55 this month of disposable income to help with book research and other podcasts costs. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
00:00:30
Speaker
and allow me to thank Dale Ingram, longtime patron, but he upped his contribution from $6 a month to $10 a month. Thank you very much. And if anybody else out there would like to join in, you'll get that much deserved shout out right here, right now. And it might be a year or two years or five years or 10 till anybody tells you you're doing something good.
00:01:04
Speaker
Alright, okay.
Introduction to Brendan O'Mara's Work
00:01:06
Speaker
How's it going CNFers? Last week I was a bit of a bummer, but you know that happens. That happens. I have a Hop Valley Pineapple Stash. Hey, hey, it's CNF Pod, the creative non-fiction podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara, but then again, you knew that. Shoot. It's another paperback podcast. I like these.
00:01:32
Speaker
I still have to edit them because I try to cut them down and then it's awful painful to go listen to me from eight years ago.
Friendship and Collaboration with Glenn Stout
00:01:44
Speaker
This is my very, very first conversation with Glenn Stout. Originally episode 14 published in 2015. Oh my God. We were just kids.
00:01:58
Speaker
I'll never forget how nervous I was ahead of this one. Glenn was the series editor of Best American Sports Writing, which has since become Year's Best Sports Writing, and he's sort of pulled back from his influence in that somewhat. And it was an anthology and is an anthology that I worshipped and worship.
00:02:20
Speaker
And I desperately wanted to be in – it's not going to happen, but that's a me problem and a talent problem. I consider Glenn a pal now, and he puts me in touch with some writers who have books coming out, and a couple will be coming on the show in the ensuing months once I read their books. Glenn has counseled many a writer.
00:02:44
Speaker
He's kind of like the Rick Rubin of editing. He's the author of The Young Woman in the Sea, which is being adapted into a movie starring Daisy Ridley for Disney+.
00:02:56
Speaker
Tiger girl and the candy kid, the pats, the selling of the babe, and like a hundred others. And I'm not exaggerating. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say a hundred others. His name is on more than a hundred books. Or maybe it's one hundred books. Either way, look it up, bro.
Glenn Stout's Influence and Writing Philosophy
00:03:17
Speaker
Having trouble breathing?
00:03:18
Speaker
visit GlennStout.com and maybe hire him to help you with your floundering baseball meme. Working with Glenn is like getting a real world MFA. This episode we talk about effort. I often refer to that a lot. Came from this one, about what you can control. Why we always tell stories and intuiting the story that emerges from the research and the writing.
00:03:46
Speaker
I cut out what was no longer Jermaine and a lot of my stupid voice. You're welcome. So here's the paperback podcast with... Oh, I'm sorry. Before we get to that, I do have a parting shot at the end of this. I know. Expect that in a moment. Okay. Here's Glenn Stout, a pal, brilliant writer, brilliant editor, just a good CNFing dude.
00:04:23
Speaker
to start off asking you about was sort of the opening line to your essay in the Best American Sports Writing this year that you grew up a sick kid. And I was wondering like, how did that inform the person and the writer you became and what impact that had on your adolescence and then ultimately what you went into as an adult? Well, I mean, I kind of, I think more about it now than I ever did then. So then I was just, it was just the way things were.
00:04:50
Speaker
And I don't want to overstate it. I wasn't like, you know, a cancer victim or something like that where I was on life and death all the time. I was just sick all the time and would get sick off and would have to, you know, had breathing trouble and would have to be in bed and missed a lot of school and things like that. I think it just, you know, leads you to having somewhat of a more internal life and that leads itself to books and reading.
00:05:15
Speaker
You know, I spent a lot of time in the hospital when I was really little. And in a weird way, I kind of think some of the normal bonding that often takes place maybe didn't quite take place as strongly with me. So, you know, I found my bonds elsewhere emotionally, and that would be, you know, in the imagination or the other things.
Glenn's Literary Beginnings and Inspirations
00:05:37
Speaker
This baseball obsessed kid from the time I could walk, nobody could ever really explain it. I spent so much time buried under quilts reading stacks of books with mindless television on in the background.
00:05:56
Speaker
I think, you know, as I got older, slowly I also got healthier. I really wasn't sick too much once I reached junior high and high school, not nearly as much as I was before, because I was also very vigorous. I was a big kid, always doing sports.
00:06:13
Speaker
You know, it's not like, you know, I had extended periods where I couldn't do anything, but these would be weeks and two weeks, week long, two weeks. You know, once I had mono and it was like six weeks. You know, once again, it kind of, it made, you know, adolescence a little awkward because you don't feel...
00:06:32
Speaker
totally comfortable with who you are because you in the back of your head you think there's something wrong with you you know in the back of your head you think you're probably not going to live a long time i mean all these crazy kid thought that would go through your head so yeah you know so all that informs it in a way and just led me to to spend a lot of time in books and a lot of time reading and uh... you know a lot of time imagining and uh... and when you live in the interior world i think you
00:07:00
Speaker
kind of become a little obsessed about how you express yourself. Right, and when you were 14 and that kicked in, was there a mentor or a teacher that... No, not really. I mean, you know, I've described the moment before and it was there was an assignment in eighth grade to basically cut pictures out of magazines and illustrate them with poems.
00:07:24
Speaker
And for whatever reason, my brother had an anthology at home. My brother was four years older and it was Langston Hughes. And I read this poem called Suicide's Note that goes, the calm, cool face of the river asked me for a kiss. And, you know, it's that image gazing into the water. For whatever reason, I saw that. It knocked me on my ass.
00:07:49
Speaker
I couldn't believe that something could do that. It almost makes me tear up every time I think about it, because it was that Satori moment that, you know, pitched me sort of headlong into words in one way or another. I mean, I was probably the only 14-year-old kid in rural Ohio who was reading the simple stories by Langston Hughes when they were 14 years old. But, you know, I read Hughes and then I read
00:08:16
Speaker
you know writers related to Hughes and writers related to those writers and sort of on my own from the age of 14 to 18 worked my way through 20th century American literature particularly poetry and that was kind of without instruction except for this used bookstore
00:08:37
Speaker
in Columbus, Ohio called My Back Pages where these two hippies who ran it were really indulgent and would let me roam the bookstore for hours.
00:08:49
Speaker
and it was a very big store. So I actually just contacted one of the guys recently and thanked him for that because it was such a transformative thing to be able to go somewhere where you could be surrounded by words and this like word life had some currency. What were those exchanges like with them? You know, I'd see what I was buying and like, oh, have you read this? Have you read this? You might like this.
00:09:15
Speaker
Uh, just very, very, not very aggressive, you know, just, uh, um, but they took me seriously. It wasn't, Hey kid, you know, stopping on over the books. Um, you know, so, and that was just very, very helpful at that time.
00:09:30
Speaker
was that one of the earliest times that someone was taking taking you seriously and you're reading seriously and what kind of thing so i mean i also had a wonderful teacher in high school who was the uh... she was barely older than we were
00:09:45
Speaker
And she was the journalism teacher, you know, when I was involved in the school paper. We actually called it a news magazine then. And, you know, she really liked me. She basically let me do whatever I wanted and write as much as I wanted. And, you know, there were times where, you know, I wrote almost every word in the newspaper, so it seemed at that time. And, you know, and that was just very important because
00:10:10
Speaker
You know, she paid attention to me and she let me know that she thought I was talented at what I was doing. That made a difference, you know? And then gave me opportunity to do it. I mean, to this day, the only journalism class I ever took was in high school. So that was, you know, that was all hugely important. Because, you know, even then I kind of realized what I was getting in class was relatively meaningless. You know, the teachers didn't know very much. I realized I was better read than they were in 20th century American literature.
00:10:38
Speaker
By the time I was about 16, because I'd ask them about people and they'd look at me like I was from Mars. They might be able to talk about Mark Twain, but it's pretty much stopped there. In the meantime, I'm reading Charles Olsen and Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs and just this a lot of crazy whacked out stuff and a lot of much more contemporary stuff.
00:11:04
Speaker
Why do you think you were drawn to sports as a backdrop for a lot of your writing? Well, I think that sort of happened by accident. I went through college as a creative writing major and was very heavily involved in writing poetry. After I got out of college, I was involved in the poetry scene in Boston a bit and was really into that.
00:11:29
Speaker
You know, you're always told to kind of combine the things you like. Sort of on a lark, sort of for fun, I think it was like 1982 or 1983, I decided that on opening day, I would combine two things I liked, poetry and baseball. And I would go outside the Green Monster at Fenway Park on opening day, starting about nine o'clock in the morning, the game started I think at one, and I would read baseball poetry.
00:11:56
Speaker
And so I got an old baseball uniform and a friend loaned me a little pig nose battery operated amplifier. And I went out there with a binder full of poems and I read baseball poetry in uniform while drinking a massive two liter bottle of Bloody Marys. I sent out press releases ahead of time.
00:12:18
Speaker
And oddly enough, people profiled me, people interviewed me, and nobody hit me. I got cheered some, I got cheered some, but the response was actually pretty positive. And I ended up doing that for nine years. And a couple of times, friends of mine joined me. I ended up on TV a lot, I ended up on radio a lot. I also ended up meeting people there. I mean, I met Bill Littlefield of NPR's Only a Game.
00:12:48
Speaker
right when he was getting started because he did a story on me. I met the late George Kimball, sports writer for the Boston Herald that way. I met some friends that way. It was kind of a nutty kid crazy thing to do, but you know, it was the two things, combining two things. And I thought, well, maybe there's something to this.
00:13:09
Speaker
And it wasn't long after that, a couple years after I started doing that, that I kind of stumbled onto this intriguing sports story about why the Boston Red Sox manager killed himself in 1907.
Journey into Sports Writing
00:13:21
Speaker
I thought it was interesting. I worked at the Boston Public Library at the time. I could research the story in the old microfilm newspapers, because we had them all, and at that time there were eight or ten, you know, daily newspapers in Boston. And I kind of sort of figured out what happened.
00:13:38
Speaker
I thought it was a great story. What do I do with this? Well, I'll write a story about it. I'll try to sell it. How do you do that? I looked at a book that said how to be a freelance writer, okay. Just how you write a pitch letter, okay. I'll send it off to two places. You know, the Boston Globe Sunday magazine sent me a mimeographed rejection letter. I always tell people it was mimeographed because that places it in time, because mimeographs are artifacts now of an earlier age.
00:14:06
Speaker
Boston magazine the editor asked me to come see him and I've written about it a number of times that I went in and I talked to him for an hour and he Decided to take the story on spec and as I was leaving his office He said you can write can't you because I had no clips and I said I could about a week later after staying up, you know, I'm still working full-time staying up nights and I
00:14:27
Speaker
and going in early and doing more research and then writing it out longhand four or five times. I went into the library, used the IBM Correctable Selectric typewriter because I'm not a touch typist, I'm still not. I just use a couple of fingers. I typed it up, I turned it in, they bought it, and he said, what do you want to do next? And I've never been without an assignment. I realized then that this was kind of, it was a lane I enjoyed.
00:14:54
Speaker
kind of sports history and the kind of research I was doing, not many people were doing it. And I was able to kind of duplicate that story, that process, over and over and over and over again. And to a degree, I still do. Because a lot of people don't want to put in the hours of research that this kind of historical work needs.
00:15:22
Speaker
I enjoy it, so it doesn't bother me. But, you know, sometimes you sit in front of a microfilm machine for two weeks. I enjoy that.
00:15:29
Speaker
Yeah, and I think there's also a fear that you can do a lot of research, maybe weeks and months of research, maybe more accurately as weeks, and come away with nothing. So you feel like you've wasted a lot of time too. And maybe people don't, there's such an urgency to try to get your work out there and get your work published that you almost don't, that people don't want to like put in that initial pre-reporting, pre-research with
00:15:54
Speaker
I just didn't know any better. I only knew one way to do it. There's hardly anything that I ever did much research on that never turned into anything. I think I basically sold everything I ever wrote. And I didn't realize that that was a difficult thing. Had I known what I know now about this whole business, I was like, why would I have even tried?
00:16:19
Speaker
And I tell that to people all the time now, nothing about doing this makes any logical sense.
The Craft of Writing: Patience and Effort
00:16:25
Speaker
It doesn't. It didn't then, it doesn't now. Nevertheless, people continue to do it. Because when people say, should I try this? Should I go freelance? Should I do this? That's why I tell them. It doesn't make any sense. If you stop and think about it, it doesn't make any sense. But people do it all the time.
00:16:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think what you touched upon earlier too is when you were pitching your first couple assignments is that you had this full-time day job. And I think that's really important to note that it's not uncommon for people to have that. I get a little frustrated sometimes when I hear from younger writers who are 24, 25 who are frustrated that they haven't been
00:17:10
Speaker
don't have a full-time job doing this, that they're not pulling down $100,000 writing for somebody. I didn't write that first story until I was 27 years old. I was out of college five years. And I get people who are frustrated, who are 25, 26, and already have an arm's length worth of clips. And I try to tell them, you are so far ahead of me, it's unimaginable.
00:17:39
Speaker
So there's something to be said for patients. And I never had a full-time job doing this until the last couple of years. That was never something I really thought of. And I have been extraordinarily lucky. There's no question about that. But the other thing, you can only control one thing. And that's your effort.
00:18:07
Speaker
You know, I did work really hard. I have worked really hard. Sometimes people hear that and they go, Oh God, here we go. It's the old, you know, pull your old full foot by your bootstraps, bullshit. But it's like, there's one thing you can control and that's your effort. You can't control anything else. Anything else. So yeah, no control what you control, what you can. And you know, if the work itself to a point isn't the reward, you shouldn't be doing it anyway. You need somebody to hand you
00:18:37
Speaker
a check to make sure you... I mean, you know, when I say I didn't publish anything until 27, I didn't mean that I didn't write between the ages of 21 and 27. I wrote all the time. I wasn't writing prose, necessarily, but I was writing. No one was handing me a check.
00:18:56
Speaker
But no one was telling me to do it. I had a group that would get together in my apartment once every couple of weeks, usually like a Wednesday night. And our only rule was you had to bring something to read, and it was better if you wrote it. And we would sit around and read stuff out aloud, mostly what we'd written ourselves. If not, we could bring something interesting that you wanted others to know about. And we'd do that, and we'd start drinking beer and start talking.
00:19:24
Speaker
And that gave us an impetus to continue to write at a time when you're just out of school where you don't have an assignment anymore. Nobody's given you a check to do this, but if this is what you want to do, you find a reason to do it. And that was the reason to do it, because you didn't want to stand up there with your pants down around your ankles with nothing to read from your friends.
00:19:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's like you said, the horizon is, you can never catch the horizon. So you have to be grounded in the work. If you get a piece published in the New Yorker or anything, it's not really gonna necessarily change anything, because you're just gonna keep riding on. So unless you're grounded in the process of the work and love process, then you're always gonna be miserable. It's just because there's- Yeah, exactly.
00:20:21
Speaker
and after something that's unattainable. Not everything I've done has been as successful as I've wanted it to be. Not everything has sold as much or made as much money or made as much an impact, but you can't control that. You can only control what you do. In a lot of ways, things that haven't done very well have been satisfactory to me.
00:20:51
Speaker
I mean, some of the things that I'm most happy with ever having written are things that have never been published. But this is what I do, and this is how I...
00:21:06
Speaker
You know, how I define myself in this world. It's through words and doing things with words. That's
Seeking Unique Stories
00:21:14
Speaker
it. I write. You know, and that entails a lot of things. That entails writing books. That entails, you know, writing articles. That entails editing. That entails, you know, poems. You know, I write every day. And not like a, I'm not like a metronome and I don't follow a schedule. But, you know, this is what I do.
00:21:36
Speaker
So what needs to be in place for you to pursue a story, or what's your green light for you to, you see something, and you're like, okay, this is something I can really lean into and pursue with all your energy. Well, you know, are you talking about something that's for my own writing? Yeah, yeah, for your own writing. Well, it's something I don't know anything about. I mean, that's the, that's the,
00:22:04
Speaker
safest and simplest answer, or there's something I thought I knew about, and now I realize that it's not true. I think it's not true. So what really happened? I mean, it's those two things. I know nothing about this, so I'm going to find out about it, or what I know about this is wrong, and I want to find out the truth.
00:22:25
Speaker
That's basically been, I would say, probably a guiding force behind just about everything I've written, whether it's, you know, the baseball titles I've done, you know, Red Sox Hence Century, which exploded a lot of myths about the Red Sox and was basically the first book to get into, to take race seriously with the Red Sox and to explore many of their myths to
00:22:51
Speaker
You know, the oral history I did with the construction workers at Ground Zero, which, you know, if you still ask most people today, they think that that was primarily done by police and firemen.
00:23:07
Speaker
You know, it wasn't. The construction workers were there every day for nine months. Ninety-five percent of the police and firemen worked a two or three week rotation and were gone and never came back. You know, the construction workers bore the brunt of that. And then like the Gertrude Ederly book, you know, I stumbled across, why didn't I know, why hadn't I heard about her? Why hadn't I heard that in 1926 this 19-year-old woman
00:23:35
Speaker
became the fifth person to swim the English Channel and she broke the existing men's record by two hours. Why didn't I know that? I knew about Jackie Robinson. I knew about all these other pioneers, but I'd never heard about her. So I want to find out, start poking around and you start talking to people. If there's people to talk to, you start reading everything you can about it and you start constructing
00:24:04
Speaker
the narrative that previously did not exist.
00:24:08
Speaker
Specifically with Young Woman in the Sea, how surprised were you that nothing extensive had been, or nothing to the point that was satisfactory to you as a reader, was done on her and allowed you to go? You know, she's kind of a seminal figure. I mean, you can make women's sports before her and afterwards, and basically before her there isn't any.
00:24:35
Speaker
And after her is a flood. She hadn't been written about. And when I first kind of stumbled over her, she was still alive.
00:24:44
Speaker
uh... she was well up into her nineties but she was still alive at may have had a part of to do with it why no one had written about her uh... i don't know she'd stayed out to put a very private life and stayed out of the limelight people just worked looking backwards very closely uh... you know so i really don't know now of course if i decided to book to other people did too yeah uh... which is always you know you know it's right into that too but uh... you know i just
00:25:14
Speaker
went ahead regardless. You know, I love how you started that book too with that sort of gripping scene of just, you know, these people who can't swim. One of the reasons why that story had never been told is because it's kind of, you had to know a lot just to even tell it. And one of the things you had to know was that basically before the turn of the century is that
00:25:42
Speaker
People in the West did not swim. Very few people knew how to swim. A staggering few number. I mean, if you look at any picture of people on the beach at the turn of the century, the beaches are black with people and there'll be like 10 people in the water. No one knew how to swim.
00:26:03
Speaker
and part of it was cultural and part of it was moral, particularly with women, and women in particular didn't swim. So I felt the reader needed a lot of education just to realize how amazing this was and put it in the context of the era of when people were arguing that women couldn't run more than 200 yards, that you're a woman, you weren't even supposed to sweat.
00:26:32
Speaker
And here's this partially deaf 19-year-old, and she swims across the English Channel. Kind of amazing.
Personal Writing Routine and Methods
00:26:40
Speaker
Yeah. So what's your approach to the research and the writing? Once you're into the story, what does your day kind of look like as you go forward with a project? Well, I mean, if you have to go somewhere to do research, that's a different thing. Like if I have to go into
00:27:00
Speaker
Boston to use the library of library or New York or somewhere else. You go to these places and you go into the library or wherever where the research materials are and you go in at 9 a.m. and you come out at 5 and you do that because you have to make use of that time. In general, now if I'm working on a book, what I like to do is to do, I like to work first thing in the morning for one and I like to put in several hours
00:27:30
Speaker
and then take somewhat of a break and then every time I go back to the material I always go a couple of pages, maybe 500 words back to what I just written and I revise forward and that puts me back into the flow and then I continue to write. You know, myself, my pace, I think it's important that every writer learns how they work.
00:27:52
Speaker
It's useful to hear how other people work, but just because one person is so disciplined that they write 1,500 words by 549 every morning, and you don't do that, doesn't mean that you're not a writer. Neither does it mean if you don't stay up all night and write on your bed that you're not a writer or sit in a coffee shop like that, you find what works for you. And I found what worked for me, and for me it's like, hey, I can get 2,000 good words out of day. I can do more, and I have,
00:28:22
Speaker
But they're not going to be good ones. And in the long run, I'm going to have to go back and spend just as much time to get to the end. If I write 8,000 words in one day, that's going to take me three or four days to fix. If I do about 2,000 a day, that works. So you just put your head down.
00:28:44
Speaker
You organize your notes in the way that you're comfortable with. I mean, you know, Wright Thompson has these elaborately organized binders. That's great for Wright Thompson. I got piles of stuff stacked all over the place. That's really efficient for Wright. My way is really efficient for me. It doesn't mean his is better. It doesn't mean mine's better. Find what works for you.
Evolving Narratives in Stories
00:29:12
Speaker
and then don't get hung up on how other people do things. Certainly if you find somebody does something that's useful for you and got that method, steal that idea, sure. Find what works for you and then just go forward with it. For me, it's like you organize things sort of in order by time and you try to tell that story. Absolutely. Try to find the story in the mass of stories you have. Every story is made up of a lot of little stories.
00:29:41
Speaker
Yeah, and then it's just a matter of linking them and then voila, you have narrative. Well, linking them are sometimes seen the larger story in those little stories. The larger story often isn't in the little stories. Accumulatively, it might be in the little stories. How do you decide which of those little stories might... isolated doesn't feel like it belongs, but in the grand picture, it makes sense. For me, there's a...
00:30:10
Speaker
There's just an organic feel to it. I mean, you know, when you do a book proposal, you have to write an outline. And I do one. And generally I never look at it again. I have a rough idea of what I want to do. And even if I do have an outline, if it's more than two pages, I've like, I've really been trying to impress somebody because, you know, it's just, it doesn't mean anything to me. But once the material starts coming together, I, you know,
00:30:37
Speaker
I was talking to somebody about this earlier this morning. I can't think stories out in advance until I start putting it together on the page. That's the time when for me, and other people might be different, connections start being made. Start seeing what resonates. You start seeing what speaks to itself in the story. You start seeing
00:30:58
Speaker
a narrative come out. It might not be the exact one you thought that was there, and that's fine. I think there's a lot to be said for making sure that you allow creative, organic discovery and evolution to take place, rather than trying to be this controlling dictator who's going to force a story to a place where it doesn't want to go. I talk to writers about that a lot. Oh, you always write what is. You don't write what you want.
00:31:24
Speaker
Okay? A lot of people get in trouble trying to write what they want, rather than writing what is. I never have an issue with a writer who, uh, the story changes. And they say, you know, I thought it was going to be this, but when I got there, it's this. Is that okay? I'm like, that's, that's absolutely okay. The last thing I want is a story that you're making into something that it's not. So, I mean, and that's kind of a feel thing from just practice is you, you, you've,
00:31:51
Speaker
You've had that happen with stories and you just start to detect the narrative, the important narrative. So what brings you back or what inspires you as an editor and a writer? Boy, you know, I mean, I keep it simple. The goal of anything you write, the goal of anything you read is you want to read it again. You don't want it to be just
00:32:19
Speaker
You don't want it to be just something pleasant that goes by. Yep. You want it to be something that makes you lose yourself in it and read it again. That's the stuff. You know, people say, how can you keep doing the sports writing book? My God, you have to look at all this stuff. How can you keep on doing it? Because every month or every couple of weeks, a story makes me go, whoa,
00:32:46
Speaker
And, you know, and I forget how much time I've just spent reading it might have been 10 minutes, it might have been 20 minutes, I mean, because the best, the best work takes you completely, you know, you lose yourself in time with it's timeless. I mean, I'll never forget there's a
00:33:07
Speaker
The poem by Theodore Rutke, who's one of my favorite poets, and for whatever reason, I had heard that poem read first before I ever saw it on the page. And I'll never forget when I saw it on the page, just being stunned that it was like eight lines long. Read aloud.
00:33:31
Speaker
It was, you know, it was timeless. I had no idea how long this poem was, because it took me someplace. It spit me out a different person. And then I see it's just these, you know, eight or nine simple lines. And like, you're kidding me? You know, but that's the power. You know, that's what I, it takes you out of this experience and brings you to this other experience, this other reality. You know, words do change things.
00:33:59
Speaker
Not much else really does. Right. I wonder where, and you're kind of alluding to it right now, but I wonder where your optimism lies with narrative and with this really unpredictable media landscape. No matter what happens, people are going to write. This is an impulse that is built in us from the start. We tell stories.
00:34:30
Speaker
That's how we connect with each other. We tell stories. That's as old as the human experience. So just because those stories aren't being monetized right now in ways that are particularly easy for people to participate in doesn't affect the fact that we tell stories. At one point or another, you know, there will be forums for those stories.
00:34:59
Speaker
Now maybe it's going to be Armageddon and we're all going to be sitting around the fire in the tin can in the backyard of some apocalyptic nightmare. We're going to be telling stories. Or it might be in some brand new media that's all flashy and shiny that makes us wealthy. We're going to be telling stories.
Enduring Nature of Storytelling
00:35:19
Speaker
You cannot go through this world.
00:35:22
Speaker
You can't. I mean, somebody earlier this week told me like, oh, you need to write a memoir. I was like, no, no, no, no, no. I don't need that kind of introspection personally. If you write a memoir, then the story's over. You can't change it then.
00:35:40
Speaker
I can tell you the same story ten times. I can make it better every time. That's what editing is. Editing is you're just telling the same story over and over, making it better. When you finally publish it, it's kind of disappointing. Because damn, now it's this. And you always start out thinking, you want it to be the greatest thing this person's ever written. You want it to be the best thing you've ever worked on. You want it to be the best thing about the subject.
00:36:09
Speaker
And then it's, you know, at a certain point you realize, you know, 99.9% of the time, it's not gonna be that. Well, okay, well you still have to make it as best as you can. But, you know, you have to remain aspirational. You know, I ask all my writers, I want this to be the best story you've ever done. Let's start with that.
00:36:33
Speaker
Yeah, and why not start there? Why not be ambitious? You're not going to start with that. I mean, what do you want to do? Well, I want this to be, you know, the 60% best story I've ever done. You know, screw that. I mean, and I understand we're not going to make it all the time, but you know, God damn it, every once in a while we do. And then it's like, oh, once you've done something great, one, you want to do better. And you can see, even in this thing that everybody's telling you is great, that, oh, I could have done this. I could have done this. I could have done this.
00:37:02
Speaker
And all of a sudden, your end goal is at a different place than it was. You might have just been trying to get another contract. Now you're trying to do something else. And the contract nights, I'm not diminishing how difficult it is to make a living in this business. I did it for 22 years without a job. And I know how hard it is.
00:37:27
Speaker
And it's not like, believe me, the best American sports writing does not pay a living wage, doesn't pay a minimum wage. That is not something you live off of, believe me. So you have to do all sorts of other things and cobble it together. I know it's hard, okay? But as I said before, you can control how hard you work and you can try to do, tell the best story you can.
00:37:55
Speaker
And you can look at the work at the end and then say, okay, now let's see, you know, if the world will meet me with this. I mean, I had an early writing teacher, Robert Kelly at Bard College, a poetry teacher there. He told us all not to worry about publishing anything. He says, well, you share it with people. He says, if it's good enough, it will end up published. Just, you know, you're not writing it and sticking it in a drawer. Yeah.
00:38:21
Speaker
but to share it with your friends. That's how I did. And he also told us, he says, you know, he says, you're probably not going to write anything worthwhile until you're 30. He says, but he says, by the time you're 30, he says, if you're still writing, he says, you're a writer. You know, he says your next 10 years from 20 to 30 is going to determine whether you're a writer or not, because you're going to have to learn to do this on your own outside of a structure of school where you're getting, you know, constant feedback
Dedication and Realities of a Writing Career
00:38:47
Speaker
and support. Your friends are patting you on the back and all this stuff.
00:38:50
Speaker
You know, you move into the work part of it, where you're there by yourself, you're asking the chair, doing it. And you do it one day, and then you do it the next day. And then you do it the next day. And it might be a year, or two years, or five years, or 10, until anybody tells you you're doing something good. Well, where was it supposed to be easy?
00:39:20
Speaker
And I'm not trying to overstate it. I'm not trying to come off like I'm this Nobel Prize winner or anything. I'm a ham and egger guy, man. I'm a triple A outfielder. But you play.
00:39:44
Speaker
You go out there, you do it. You know, I did a lot of construction work when I was young, okay? I got through college, so I poured a lot of concrete. And I tell people I learned as much about writing from that as from anything else.
00:40:00
Speaker
Writing a book is hard. Writing a book is complicated. So is building an 800,000 square foot warehouse. You got to put a lot of work into that. It takes a long time. But you do things incrementally. And goddamn, after a year, there's this building. Goddamn, after a year, there's this book. And you get up with the sun.
00:40:27
Speaker
And you go out there every day. I mean, it's ridiculously simple in some ways. And I try to make the point that there is nothing really special about this. People go to work every day doing all sorts of things. This is not so precious.
00:40:52
Speaker
It's nice to think that, and I think we all have at some point, and we like to think with the tortured artists and all that stuff. One of the most poignant things I've ever read was a quote from Rambo, who gave up writing at age 20.
00:41:12
Speaker
And he said something like, nobody's serious at 17, because he was, nobody else was. And then, you know, it's easy to feel that way, and it's easy to feel shut off. And it's easy for people to say, well, Glenn, that's easy for you to say, you can piss that and the other thing. But, you know, it's not, believe me, there's a lot of staring at the abyss, you don't know what's next. And, you know,
00:41:37
Speaker
If you're Stephen King or somebody, you got enough money, you don't have to worry about it. But for the rest of us, you know, there's always the anxiety of what comes next. And it's really no different. Scary or a little now, because I actually do know how hard it is.
00:41:57
Speaker
That was admittedly a strange going that far back in the archives, let me tell you. I believe that was recorded in 2050 and I am correct in that because I did fact check it. So we're talking like eight years ago. I was 35 and so, so desperate and frustrated. So very desperate. All right. Parting shot since I've been hanging out
00:42:27
Speaker
on threads a bit more. It's the only social media footprint for the podcast, Instagram as well, but yeah. They're like kissing cousins, those two. I'm struck by the desperation of others, let's say. It's the NaNoWriMo crowd, let's say. I'm not sure why they're popping up in my feed, but whatever. You know, I'm not exactly a NaNoWriMo guy.
00:42:56
Speaker
One day I don't I don't hate or begrudge. I'm not one of those writers who's just like you guys aren't real writers And what you see are some people clamoring to show their works in progress, and I'm like hold the fuck on this is pointless on a number of levels because What you're looking for isn't feedback, but reassurance
00:43:24
Speaker
and as Seth Godin has said, on this podcast, this one, reassurance is futile. Also, as I post podcast related stuff, I see the same people constantly threading and I'm like, holy shit, stop talking about writing and just go write. I see the same goddamn cycle that I was enveloped in 10 years ago, maybe more, desperate, bitter,
00:43:53
Speaker
trying to gain a following when in reality I had no writing worth following. I might argue that I still don't, but at least I've scaled back on the social media aspect of it. Many writers get this backwards, like, so ass backwards. They want to develop a following through social media to then dump their content onto you like slime in thinking that a social media following equates to a sellable platform.
00:44:22
Speaker
And what you inadvertently do is call attention to just how shitty a writer you are. Trust me, speaking from experience, what you need to do is write and publish, write and publish, write and publish. Just keep fucking doing that. And that's how you build an audience of people who actually want to read you. Then your social media grows if you want it to. Even if you don't want it to, as a result, it's just going to happen.
00:44:47
Speaker
because you're doing work, doing publishable work, doing good work, but so many writers want to build up. What I hope you're now realizing is a meaningless follower count and wasting your time and energy on what should be spent on being a better writer, researcher, editor, reader, whatever.
Reflections on Consistent Effort and Skill Development
00:45:06
Speaker
It annoys me so much because
00:45:09
Speaker
I see myself in them and I deeply hate myself. The thing is, there's no universal playbook. Beats the shit out of me how this happened, but I got a double take look of a book deal because I started a podcast 10 fucking years ago. A friend put me in touch with an agent looking to build her book.
00:45:34
Speaker
And I happen to be locked into a major sports figure of the 20th century who doesn't have a quote-unquote definitive biography on him. Shoot, there's no playbook for that. And shit if I'll ever get another book deal after this, it's out of my control. I can't bestow advice or appease anyone who reeks of the same desperation I long experienced.
00:46:03
Speaker
There's only this, man. Just show up. Write a blog every day. Publish a podcast every week. Do it not for fame or platform, but out of service or love. Like, will it work? Well, you'll start to get better. It won't happen overnight, that's for damn sure. It'll happen gradually.
00:46:24
Speaker
You know how a Polaroid picture slowly develops? It's kind of like that. It's not blank then, boom, developed like a digital image. The picture just emerges slowly. Don't shake it. A friend of a buddy of mine in high school worked for Polaroid and he's like, that doesn't do anything.
00:46:46
Speaker
So it just emerges, and then you're like, oh, oh, there it is. Developing skills as a writer and editor or an interviewer is so slow. It is so gradual. It's glacial. I'm gonna mix metaphors. That's a good name for another podcast, a mixed metaphors podcast. It's like glacial retreat. It's just like you take these snapshots over the years, like, holy shit, you used to be there, and now it's way up there, and it's kinda toasty in here.
00:47:14
Speaker
It's so slow but you don't realize it and then you look behind you and you look at all the wreckage and you're like, whoa! Look at that! It's like what Glenn said in this episode that I hope you listened to all the way through. All you can control is your effort. There's no pressure cooker for this shit. There's no way to expedite but there sure as fuck are ways to slow yourself down.
00:47:40
Speaker
Speaking from experience, comparing yourself to others. Excessive social media use. Or not even use, but just like scrolling and you're like, and you just allow shit to get into your bloodstream, posting about writing instead of writing. Convincing yourself you're cultivating a community online when you're just wasting time.
00:48:02
Speaker
And at the end of the day, it's eating a bag of potato chips, man. It's another day lost, another day you'll never get back, and you feel bloated and shitty. I mean, when I see people post this stuff on Instagram or threads, it shouldn't bother me, but I let it bother me. It bothers me because of the shame I feel for my former self. All that wasted time and effort on the wrong things.
00:48:30
Speaker
I wish I had someone to tell me how much research goes into even the most basic of pitches. How much research you really should be doing ahead of a book proposal. How to write a good pitch or how to find editors and how to do mercenary work that affords the luxury of doing the narrative work you want to post on social media. Or that social media is going to make you feel so bad about who you are and where you are that you'll likely waste years of your life worrying about the wrong bullshit.
00:49:00
Speaker
Reassurance is futile, saying that again. We can control our effort, just like Glenn said, and we can surround ourselves with real people who will give us hard truths to make us better, and we will finish the essay or the book. Toast to its completion, celebrate that, please. And then while the embers are still burning down on the filter, light the next cigarette and keep going, man.
00:49:27
Speaker
Fuck, I didn't, I didn't see much of this coming when I started this parting shot, but I'm kinda glad I got it off my chest. So stay wild, see ya at Effers. And if you can't do, interview. See ya.
00:50:01
Speaker
you