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Episode 132—Laura Hillenbrand on Research Workarounds, Reading Aloud, and Campfire Storytelling
185 Plays6 years ago
"When I experience something interesting that happens I need to compose it in words," says Laura Hillenbrand. In many ways this is the logical conclusion of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast. This is the Tony Soprano cut-to-black moment, Walter White dying beside his precious meth lab, or Gollum plummeting into the fires of Mt. Doom with the Ring of Power clutched in his hand. This interview with the one and only Laura Hillenbrand was about two years in the making and through unshakable endurance on both sides we were able to get this done and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by this in the least. For those who don’t know, Laura is the best-selling author of Seabiscuit: An American Legend and Unbroken: A WWII Story of Survival, Resilience, and Rddemption. I think best-selling is an understatement. Unbroken spent a staggering 42 weeks at No. 1 on the New York Times Best seller list. Both books were made into Oscar-nominated movies with Gary Ross directing Seabiscuit and Angelina Jolie directing Unbroken. Laura won the National Magazine Award in 2004 for her New Yorker article “A Sudden Illness,” which describes the acute onset of chronic fatigue syndrome, or CFS, that has been with her since the 1980s. If you haven’t subscribed to the show, be sure to do that wherever you get your podcasts. If you dig the show, please consider leaving an honest review over on iTunes. You can follow me and the show on Twitter @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod. Like the Facebook page, it’s just The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, and feel free to follow me on Instagram where I post cool audiograms of the shows as well as stupid drawings I do when I need to decompress. Always compressin’ over here. Head over to brendanomeara.com for show notes and to subscribe to my monthly newsletters where I share my reading recommendations for the month, articles, and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. It’s a little bite of goodness to start your month. Once a month. No spam. Can’t beat it. Thanks again to our sponsors in Goucher College’s MFA in Nonfiction and Creative Nonfiction Magazine. And, hey, happy New Year, friend. And thanks for being on this CNFin’ journey with me. Here’s to 2019.
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Transcript
Introduction to Goucher College's MFA Program
00:00:00
Speaker
The Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by Goucher College's Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction. The Goucher MFA is a two-year, low residency program. Online classes let you learn from anywhere, while on-campus residencies allow you
00:00:15
Speaker
to hone your craft with accomplishmenters who have pulled surprises and best-selling books to their names. The program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni. Which has published 140 books and counting, you'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey.
00:00:38
Speaker
visit goucher.edu forward slash nonfiction to start your journey now. Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published in Goucher's MFA program for nonfiction.
Introduction to Podcast and Guest Laura Hillenbrand
00:00:53
Speaker
Hey, how's it going, friend? I'm Brendan O'Mara, and this is my podcast, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to badass writers, filmmakers, and producers about the art and craft of telling true stories. This episode is the last one of 2018. We've averaged one episode a week for an entire year with no break, and we are finishing strong.
00:01:23
Speaker
here at CNF Pod HQ. In many ways, this is the logical conclusion of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. This is the Tony Soprano cut the black moment, Walter White dying beside his precious meth lab, or Gollum plummeting into the fires of Mount Doom with the ring of power clutched to his hand.
00:01:46
Speaker
This interview with the one and only Laura Hillenbrand was about two years in the making and through unshakable endurance on both sides. We were able to get this done and I don't think you'll be disappointed by this in the least.
00:02:02
Speaker
For those who don't know, it's hard to believe that there are people out there who don't know, but for those who don't, Laura is the best-selling author of Seabiscuit, an American legend, and Unbroken, a World War II story of survival, resilience, and redemption.
00:02:19
Speaker
I think best-selling is an understatement. I think both books have sold like six trillion copies, give or take. Unbroken spent a staggering 42 weeks at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
Challenges of Writing 'Unbroken'
00:02:34
Speaker
Both books made into Oscar-nominated movies with Gary Ross directing Seabiscuit and Angelina Jolie directing Unbroken. Laura won the National Magazine Award in 2004 for her New Yorker article, A Sudden Illness, which describes the acute onset of chronic fatigue syndrome, or CFS, that has been with her since the 1980s.
00:03:00
Speaker
I read Seabiscuit back in 2003 as I was then a budding horse racing fan and a writer of the sport. Naturally, it was a titanic influence on how I approached the writing of Six Weeks in Saratoga. I read Unbroken in two days when it had come out. I couldn't put it down. And the true irony of that book is that if it were anything but a non-fiction book, you'd say it was too unbelievable. Written as fiction, nobody would buy it.
00:03:27
Speaker
But when you realize this actually happened and you peel through the end notes and then you realize that Laura wrote the book under the worst of circumstances, it makes it all the more epic in scope. If you haven't subscribed to the show, be sure to do that wherever you get your podcasts. And if you dig the show, please consider leaving an honest review over on iTunes, like this one, left by Cricut 666.
00:03:55
Speaker
I've been binge-listening Brendan for a few weeks now at work, and I finally feel like part of a group. Okay, I know. They don't know I exist, but knowing they are feeling the same way I am is comforting. As a new writer, there is so much out there that you don't know. Brendan and his guests clarify much of the nuances of writing, publishing, and editing.
00:04:20
Speaker
Thanks for all the tips, laughs, and amazing people. Well, thank you, Cricket666, killer, killer name. And so if you leave a review, maybe similar in nature, I just might read it on the air as my way of saying thank you. And one last thing.
Creative Nonfiction Magazine Promotion
00:04:43
Speaker
And one last thing, I've been a subscriber to Creative Nonfiction the Magazine for years now, which is why I have no problem reading this.
00:04:52
Speaker
Today's podcast is brought to you by Creative Nonfiction Magazine. For nearly 25 years, Creative Nonfiction has been fuel for nonfiction writers and storytellers, publishing a lively blend of exceptional long and short form nonfiction narratives and interviews, as well as columns that examine the craft, style, trends, and ethics of writing true stories. In short, Creative Nonfiction is true stories well told.
00:05:22
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Go get your subscribe on. I dig it. Okay, this is it folks. I hope you're as fired up as I am. Here's the unbreakable Laura Hillenbrand.
Journey to the West Coast
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What was that experience like and the moment you decided that you needed to take that leap and get out to the west coast?
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It was absolutely terrifying for me to try to do it. I knew what I was risking. I had had a lot of experiences where I had crossed my line and gotten too exhausted and it had dropped me back years and these things weren't things I recovered from. I would be bed bound and I knew potentially I could die on this trip. But I had just come to a point where
00:06:18
Speaker
I was willing to die in order to live. I was willing to take that risk for the chance of having a bigger life that for a long time I had concluded was going to be lived in a single room. I just wanted so much more than that and it was worth trying. It was hard and it was scary and it was very difficult the first week or so. I was very terrified but it got a little easier as it went along.
00:06:46
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And I made it. And now I travel. We go out in an RV and I just recently got back from a trip of traveling around the Southwest, which I've not seen before. And it's, I mean, every moment of it is a miracle for me now because I thought I would never experience these things. And just looking, you know, driving through Kansas and seeing the waving grass, the golden grass, and just raving and raving about that and just feeling so
00:07:14
Speaker
blessed to be able to see it with my own eyes. Every experience is like that now for me. It's in a really weird way. It's been a good thing that I lost so much for so long because life is so rich now.
00:07:29
Speaker
That's incredible that to so many of those miles, especially those corn miles and those wheat miles across the country that so many people drive through without giving a moment's glance, it was in a sense, probably one of the more beautiful sites you've ever seen as you were crossing the country. What else caught your eye and just strengthened you as you went across the country?
00:07:55
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There really wasn't anything that didn't strike me as beautiful. I mean, even when we would pass through sort of a rough town, it was beautiful to me because it was something new. It was a new place. I would look in each front window of a house we'd go by in some small town and imagine the life that was being lived in it. And then there were the huge grand things like going through the Badlands.
00:08:21
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which I actually never even knew what the Badlands were. Um, and I didn't know I was going there that day. My, my boyfriend said, I don't want you to look ahead on the map at where we're going. Just, just ride. And we're riding along and there's, you know, it's beautiful South Dakota and I'm loving that. And the left turn and all of a sudden we're in these gigantic striated canyons of a million different colors and, uh, you know, there are, there are coyotes running around and, uh,
00:08:51
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uh, bighorn sheep and, and just, you know, prairie dogs. And I just couldn't believe it. It was, um, all of it, the majesty of it, the, the, the grandeur of it, the size of this country, the, the breadth of experience within it, all the different lives. There is no one America. There's, there's 300 million different lives in different places. And it was quite a thing to see it through the eyes I had at the time coming out of
00:09:21
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a life of such extraordinary isolation.
00:09:25
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sensory as well as emotional deprivation.
In-Person Interviews with WWII Veteran
00:09:29
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Has this experience now that you've made it cross-country and that you've been able to travel in an RV, has that given you hope that maybe you can do some of the reporting that you've been relegated to, say, newspapers and the telephone? Have you given that consideration that you might be able to do some more observational stuff or is that something you haven't been able to cross quite yet?
00:09:55
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Well, it sounds, it's of less importance as an historian, just because, you know, when I'm writing about Santa Anita in 1932, you know, that's gone. The track's there, but that world is not there anymore. It's a different place. And so it is less important to me than it would be for someone writing on a contemporary and that sort of thing. But yeah, I mean, I've done, I just did a series of interviews with
00:10:23
Speaker
uh someone I will make the subject of an article and I got to meet him in person and spend five days with him and you know that was that was a different and and lovely thing for me to be able to actually be with this person either World War II veteran and and you know look at his face and his hands and and uh and hear his voice and experience him in that way as
00:10:45
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with the wonder of, wow, he went through this thing. I'm not sharing what it is, but he's an important guy. And now I will have the option, hopefully, with big projects to actually go to places. When I was working on Unbroken, I was very, very sick and there was just no way. For two years of it, I actually didn't even leave my house because I couldn't make it to the car. I couldn't walk that far.
00:11:14
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everything was done remotely and I would get information from in odd ways. And one thing I did is I found a gentleman who was willing to climb into a museum's B-24 and film the whole thing for me so that I could essentially walk around with him and get to know exactly what it feels like to sit in the navigator's chair or in the copilot's seat and know where all the dials are and
00:11:40
Speaker
Um, really get familiar with it that way. But I actually just a few weeks ago was up in Seattle crawling around the inside of a B 29. And, uh, you know, learning what that was like, actually experiencing what that was like first hand and also a B 17. And, uh, I never thought I'd be able to do that. That was pretty amazing.
00:12:01
Speaker
That's incredible. I read that you said for me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood, I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn't do my homework so I could write. So where did that sensibility of wanting to be a writer or even being born a writer come from for you?
00:12:25
Speaker
I don't really know. It just, it just was in me. It's in other members of my family as well. My mother was a writer. She wrote for the Syracuse Herald-Journal. She was actually one of the, was then very prestigious. The Mademoiselle Editorship, they had a contest every year of college women.
00:12:50
Speaker
all over the country. And they would choose a very small number to serve as guest editors at Madame Wiesel magazine, which was in that day, a real thinking woman's magazine. And she was one of the winners of it. And I never knew that until writing her obituary this year. And it was quite a big deal. And then she went on to write for the Washington Post. She became a psychologist later in my lifetime. But prior to my time, she was a writer. And my grandmother was an English teacher.
00:13:20
Speaker
So these things, I think a lot of us are born with certain proclivities that are just kind of there. You know, there are people you meet at six years old, they're already incredible athletes. You know, they just, there's something about their wiring that works that way. And for me, the wiring is toward writing and it just, it doesn't, it doesn't go away. No matter what happens to me in my life, it's always there. And I need.
00:13:44
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when I experienced something interesting, I need to compose it into something in words. It's just part of the way I'm wired.
00:13:54
Speaker
When you were younger too, you've said that it wasn't a terribly happy family to be around. So oftentimes you would be out at the farm with horses out in the woods looking for arrowheads or Civil War bullets. A lot of contemplative time, I imagine. And being of the writer's sensibility and writer's taste, what were those moments like for you being outside in nature by yourself and thinking?
00:14:24
Speaker
I talk a lot with my next older sister, Susan, about this because she and I were the closest in, she's the closest to me in age. And we used to go out and do all that wandering and we would separate sometimes and do things. And for me, as well as for her, it was a way to broaden the imagination because you would automatically be seen in fantasies and stories you would make up for yourself. I used to, there was a
00:14:54
Speaker
ancient trail. I mean, maybe it's thousands of years old through this wood that is over our main pasture up there. And I used to walk that trail and look down at the valley below and imagine that I was a union soldier looking down at Confederate soldiers or that I was a Native American and there were cowboys down below. And I would write a whole story in my head about it as I went along. And everything was like that. It was
00:15:22
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It's something that my sister and I will met now in terms of the lives of children today because they are so scheduled. They are so regimented within a certain scaffolding of their lives that they don't get that time that she and I had to just wander and let your imagination go. And I treasure those memories and the fact that I had that privilege to do that. And she's the same way about it.
00:15:48
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She's a very creative person and we both credit being able to do that and having that environment in which to do it. At what point did you realize that, of course, you're crafting fictitious stories in your head at that time. At what point did you realize that you were gravitating towards telling true stories and being historical journalism, narrative journalism of that ilk?
00:16:14
Speaker
I think probably I was always thinking about that. There's just no real venue for that. When you're a kid, you're doing more fictional things. But I used to read American Heritage magazine as a girl. My father got it. And I think there was a little bit of trying to please my father to win my father and get his attention because he went to this farm, which is a very, very important place in my life.
00:16:42
Speaker
He was a lobbyist. He was a very, very hard worker. He would go up there on the weekend. He would just unwind. And he would read history. That was all he did. I really don't remember him doing anything else up there. And I knew it pleased him that I read history. So that's what I would do. He was interested in the Civil War. So that's what I became most interested in. And of course, we were living, it effectively is on the Antietam battlefield.
00:17:07
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In a house that was used as a hospital during the war during that battle and so the history was all around me and it was it was real it's three dimensional these were the these were the you know
00:17:21
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and grasp the doorknob on the house and think, did Abraham Lincoln touch this? Did he come visit this house when he visited the battlefield? You know, things like that.
Preference for Historical Nonfiction
00:17:29
Speaker
So I gravitated toward that, and I enjoyed it. I loved history. I loved how it would inform the present, how you would see the whole world differently when you knew what had happened in it before you were there. And so it was kind of an easy thing. There was no hard decision to make about that. I don't know that I'm cut out to right fiction, and maybe someday I'll try.
00:17:51
Speaker
I do love dealing with the real and what you learn about real people by looking at the lives of real people and what they go through. It has changed my way of viewing the world in a dramatic way.
00:18:04
Speaker
Yeah, you once said that I think if I had been writing fiction where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite. I might have frozen. So it was it a matter of like the boundaries of true storytelling at least gave you that wireframe within to work? Yeah, I do. To use the word scaffolding again, I do love the scaffolding of history where you have
00:18:33
Speaker
all of these facts about someone and you have a narrative arc and then you go into that and you research and research and research and everything I write is I don't embellish stories in any way. Everything I write is something I've gotten from if I can get a corroborated source but definitely a source and I would follow, I follow every tangent and try to get chase down every detail I can get
00:19:02
Speaker
So that I can make it read like fiction, but have it not be fiction and make, put the readers there with the person by making them as vivid as possible. And I really love being able to count on the facts in there. There's a lot of creativity that goes into writing nonfiction.
00:19:21
Speaker
Um, because you need to make a lot of choices in terms of where you start, how you tell a story, what you include because it's relevant and what you don't include. Cause it's not, um, there's a, there's a lot of, of choosing to be done. And I, that's enough for me. I don't need to make up a whole story from scratch and have to have to choose every single thing. I do think it would be too, too many actions for me, at least right now, but someday I probably will try it to see cause I did.
00:19:52
Speaker
do that a whole lot when I was young. I would write a lot of short stories when I was growing up. And as you were growing up and having that reader-writer taste, who were you reading at that time that inspired you and emboldened you to want to pick up the pen and sort of carry on that mantle? Huh. I had a funny childhood. I had an odd childhood. My family was an unhappy one and things were kind of
00:20:22
Speaker
falling apart a bit. And there wasn't a lot of childhood kind of things. I didn't read children's books. I didn't watch children's TV, things like that. I tended to read whatever was around. In terms of other writers, the first person I remember would be Laura Ingalls Wilder. I very much loved her books and wanted to write like her and wanted to recreate a world the way she did. She was probably the first really influential person as I got older, as I got to
00:20:52
Speaker
high school and beyond there, I discovered Tolstoy. I discovered Hemingway, who was very important to me. I actually just went to visit his grave. Yeah, that was wonderful and beautiful. And Edith Wharton and Jane Austen and Fitzgerald. Those were the big ones and remain the big ones for me. Those are the authors I keep going back to because
00:21:19
Speaker
When I read a book by them, I fall into the rhythm of their language. And for me, language is musical. It's not about grammatical rules and things like that. It's about a certain music that comes out of it, a balance that's almost mathematical. And they have such gorgeous rhythm. They know exactly what they're doing. They write these perfect sentences and perfect paragraphs. And so I read them, and I'm a better writer
Influence of Audiobooks on Writing
00:21:47
Speaker
for it.
00:21:47
Speaker
because it's just influential even without you thinking about it, it's influential.
00:21:52
Speaker
And because so much of your illness makes it very challenging for you to read, at least it did, and I don't know if that's still the case, but not being able to really focus because of that vertiginous feel, yeah, that dizziness. You also listen to a ton of audiobook. So that, you know, you're writing, it lands on the ear very well. So how influential has listening to audiobooks
00:22:21
Speaker
that lent that sort of musicality to your own prose? That's a really good question and I think it has been very important. It was something I did out of necessity because I have vertigo and people often think of that term as meaning they get busy with heights and things like that. That's not what I mean by vertigo. I mean that the
00:22:44
Speaker
that everything around me appears to be moving all the time. And I have a sensation of moving all the time. And one of the hardest things for me to do is to read, which is the cruelest punishment in the world for a writer. But just looking at a page, I couldn't for many years put my head down at all. So if I did try to read, I could only read short passages and with my head up. Also, CFS carries a lot of cognitive
00:23:13
Speaker
problems that make reading difficult. I know a lot of people with this disease who can't read at all ever because it has cognitive problems that move words around the page and make focusing very difficult. So that is a challenge. I can read much better on a screen than I can in a printed book. I haven't read a printed book in many years because it's too difficult. And what I did was
00:23:39
Speaker
I signed up for the Library of Congress's Talking Book Program, which is for the blind and visually handicapped. And you can get anything. They record everything there, and they have really good readers. I've read hundreds of books that way, and I continue to read the audio books. And you learn something. When you listen to books that way, by a good reader, you start to hear that music of the language, and you can,
00:24:07
Speaker
sort out good writers from that. Whenever I read, I think about why do I like this passage and why don't I like this passage so that I can figure out how someone's writing well or not writing well. And a lot of it does come down to that, the rhythm and the tempo and just the shape of a paragraph or a sentence. And one of the things I started to do when I was writing Shee Biscuit, I had just rewatched
00:24:36
Speaker
Ken Burns' documentary on the Civil War. And the narration of that, which I believe was done by John Chancellor, is masterful. And I began to, in my head, think my words in my brain in his voice. How would this sound? And then I began to seek them out loud. And now whenever I write something, I say the whole thing out loud. And I can often catch things I can't catch when I read it.
00:25:06
Speaker
of how a sentence isn't working. It's too long. It's too convoluted. When you have to speak something aloud, you have to do it much more simply and with much more clarity than often writing will make you do it. You miss that when you write it down. So I just, everything I write now, I speak out loud to myself and often inside my head as John Chancellor. And it works really well. And I actually highly recommend that people
00:25:36
Speaker
The Civil War series is absolutely fantastic, but it's especially well-narrated and it's written very, very cleanly and with brief simple sentences that convey facts very well. It's something I did learn from doing audiobooks, from listening to many, many, many of them. It makes you better writer. I mean, originally, we told stories that way. We didn't have written language. We had spoken language.
00:26:06
Speaker
I like to write books that sound more like someone's telling a story over a campfire. That's what I imagine. I imagine my audience is kind of gathered around the circle and there's a fire. And how would you tell this if you were speaking that way? And so that's how I do it.
00:26:26
Speaker
In the Great Will Hilton profile of you from a few years ago, he expostulates that you're of a generation of historical narrative nonfiction writers that has eschewed pyrotechnics in voice for a more straightforward, you'll find a great story and tell it straight.
Narrative Style and Reader Experience
00:26:46
Speaker
And I wonder how did you come to that, come to that style of writing versus trying to be someone who's very pros for like a David Foster Wallace or Tom Wolf or Norman Mailer. Like how did you arrive at your particular style of telling it straight and wonderfully?
00:27:03
Speaker
Thank you. It's very nice for you to say, and Will Hilton did do a lovely job with that piece, and he thought more about my writing style than I've actually ever thought about it. It just sort of is for me. It just is the way I tell a story. As an historian, I want to disappear from it. I want to not be a presence in the narrative so that people are getting the story
00:27:32
Speaker
in the manner they would get it, if they were standing there watching it happen. I don't want to get in the way. And I don't want to intrude. I think it becomes much more immediate for the reader if you just have the facts there and you don't have the writer standing there waving at you saying, look at me, look at me. So I think it's best, at least to my ear, to write with clarity and
00:28:00
Speaker
And as almost an invisible person in it, so that it feels as if the facts are just happening in front of the reader. And there's no one in between the reader and the story. For me, that's when people write well, they're writing that way so that I'm there. You know, I'm watching whatever it is that's happening.
00:28:23
Speaker
And then I can feel like I didn't just read this book. I was, I was experiencing this story. So that's, that's what I go for. I didn't, I never made really a conscious choice to do that. It just feels right. And I try to be that way also when I do interviews, um, with people is, is being nonjudgmental and to be as, as a recessive a presence as possible so that people aren't altering what they say, because I'm a certain kind of personality.
00:28:50
Speaker
And just sort of be, look, I'll listen to you whatever you have to say. I'm going to ask you the questions that seem like they have obvious answers because so often you're surprised that the things you assume are true might not be. And that's how I go about it.
00:29:07
Speaker
in the process of your interviewing, which predominantly is over the phone, how have you grown comfortable with an element of silence and not feeling in that dead time with verbal static because that can sometimes feel uncomfortable? I imagine
00:29:30
Speaker
asking somebody a question and then they might take a while to think and it takes a while to get comfortable in that silence. So I wonder how maybe you have grown comfortable in that tension to coax out the right story, those details that allow us to so vividly live it in what you ultimately write.
00:29:51
Speaker
It's just an interesting question. I don't know that I've encountered too many people that have really stopped. I mean, there's some people who want to think about what they're going to say, and they're very careful. And I like to give the interviewee as much space as possible in part because their mind's going, and they may think of something that is not
00:30:14
Speaker
that I haven't directly asked, but they realized, well, this should be part of the story. And the best stuff you get in interviews, this is stuff that you didn't think about asking beforehand, because you didn't know anything about it. I had, when I was writing See This Get, I was interviewing this ancient horse trainer, a risk phone. He's sitting over a bowl of soup that got completely
00:30:39
Speaker
And I'm asking him questions about Jesus. He was his trainer and things like that. And he's telling me about 1928. And then he just says in passing, that was the year the mountain of manure was hit by a flood down in Mexico. And it
00:30:57
Speaker
it crashed into the grandstand and knocked it down and it washed up the barns and he's like, well, that's neither here nor there. And he goes on talking about what I asked him and I'm like, wait a minute, back up. And so we tell him the story about this note. It rained like 11 and a half inches in one night and this flash flood came and they had a gigantic maneuver behind the
00:31:27
Speaker
barns at this track in Mexico and this flash flood hit it and the whole mountain of manure moved and it was 20 feet high or something.
00:31:39
Speaker
And he had knocked down the grandstand and the barn and the rooms ran through and opened all the doors and shoot the horses out. And the horses all ran into the hills. This is in Tijuana. And for quite a long time afterward, the very impoverished locals in Tijuana were riding around on million dollar race horses that they caught. And so he told me the whole story and he was like, you know, no one's ever asked me about that. I haven't thought about that since
00:32:07
Speaker
since way back then, and he was a young guy there at the time. So I called all of my sources who had been at Tijuana around that time. Like, do you remember a time when there was blood and a mountain of manure hit the grandstand? They were like, oh, yeah, I was there. And so I got several of these old guys to tell me more details about the story. And then I looked up weather records and things like that. And it turned into this whole big thing.
00:32:32
Speaker
because this ancient gentleman had paused and just muttered something about this. And, you know, I kind of let him talk. And that's the beauty about these interviews is the stuff you don't expect. And you do need to give them space to tell those things. And there's another thing, too. When I was doing Unbroken, I was talking to a lot of former prisoners of war and a lot of veterans.
00:32:59
Speaker
most of these people were very badly traumatized by what they had been through. There were a lot of moments when I'm asking quite difficult questions that I feel terrible asking, except all of these people very much wanted the stories told. They made that very clear, like their kids had never asked or were afraid to ask and they wanted it remembered. But they would need time sometimes to get through telling these things. And so I would just kind of sit back and try to make them feel comfortable and
00:33:29
Speaker
try to let them know that I was sympathetic and I would not trivialize what they said. I wouldn't turn it into a dramatic movie scene or something. I just wanted to listen and it ended up being kind of therapeutic for them in the end. You do have to adjust to everybody you talk to and be cognizant of their mood and how hard or
00:33:50
Speaker
it is to talk about something or whether they may have other treasured stories that he's never heard, like the mountain of manure in Tijuana. Has being in this line of work made you a better listener? Yeah, yeah.
Impact of Interviewing on Listening Skills
00:34:10
Speaker
It makes everybody really interesting to me because the more I do it, the more I learn how interesting people are and how everybody has stories.
00:34:20
Speaker
Everybody has history and you could be talking to someone, you needed a gas station or something and discover a whole really fascinating part of their life. And every time I do this, the more I work in this field, the more I come to be, I think about things in a much less black and white way now because
00:34:48
Speaker
I now see all of the realms of possibility of people's lives and how those things can change them, how they can influence their behavior, how we can't stand on the outside and say that's a crazy thing he did or that's a bad thing he did because so often there's a story there that influences who someone has become. It's maybe much, much more compassionate and much slower to judge anyone.
00:35:18
Speaker
And I'm very grateful for that. Having exposure to so many different kinds of people who have lived extraordinary lives has really helped me, I think, become a better citizen among these people. And when you're in the throes of the research or the writing, how do you
00:35:39
Speaker
organize your notes and your research so you can have greater access to it, and then push through sometimes the ugly middles of drafts, which I like to call, you know, the honeymoon period of a book is over, but you're still far away from the shore. How do you navigate those waters? Yeah, that's probably different with every writer. For me, I begin with a formal outline.
00:36:05
Speaker
Um, this just like they touch in school, you know, I make an outline of how the story, the story seems like it should be structured. And then I will just go point by point, you know, the first thing I will try to fill out that part and then move on to the next. And when I get stuck, when I have it down yet, or, or I don't have the right way to approach it.
00:36:29
Speaker
I will go on to something else. I make end runs around things. And so I don't write them sequentially generally, although the last thing is usually the last part of the book. Those last sentences are so very important. And also the first sentences, I will go over those again and again. But I do tend to kind of circle around those treacherous areas and, you know,
00:36:57
Speaker
I try to tell myself when I get stuck and everybody does that it's there, that it's already in me. I just need to wait for it to come back out. And that's what I do. And I used to go pour water in my bathtub and just sit on the tub with my feet in the tub and just brainstorm and just keep telling myself, it's there, it's there. All you have to do is wait. It's going to bubble up.
00:37:22
Speaker
And it does, it never lets me down. At least from my point of view in terms of feeling like, okay, I've got that the way I want it. The best way I can do it. And so that's how I work. It's not that linear a process other than I'm stuck on that outline. I really think the outline is a great way to work because then you have something down on that paper. You have sort of a map ahead of you and you can go ahead from there and it changes, you know, as you go and you realize
00:37:51
Speaker
I want to take this middle part of the story and put it first as a teaser to the rest of it or something like that, but the outline's good. And I read that you turned in the, your first, we'll just put air quotes around first, your first draft to Seabiscuit to your editor, Jonathan Karp in 17 months.
00:38:12
Speaker
Is that true? And if it is, how the hell did you do that? You pull that off. Well, I don't remember if that's true or not, but, um, it sounds about right. Um, I had a two year contract with them, so it sounds about right. But that's, that's how long it would be. But I had been working on the story several years before I got the book deal. Um, my book proposal was a massive thing. It was probably 50 pages and they had many years of, uh,
00:38:41
Speaker
Uh, work I'd already done on it and I'd done dozens of interviews. And, uh, so it was, a lot of it was already there. Um, that, that project started with a magazine. Well, I tried to write on spec and, and, uh, I, I wrote it. I just thought, Oh, it'd be interesting to do something on Seabiscuit after all these years. He was a horse. I'd always, uh, I kind of grown up with him because of this book, Come on Seabiscuit, but I bought it a fair.
00:39:10
Speaker
when I was a little girl and I just read it and read it and read it and I'd always know his story. So I did a story on it and I sent it to a racing publication and the editor said, I really like this, but it's not time. We don't really have a place for this. And they rejected me and I was crushed. I felt terrible. And then I just thought, why do I keep going with this? There was some interesting things here. And I, I kept working and it,
00:39:36
Speaker
I started stumbling on a much bigger story than I realized was there, which was sort of all the people around the horse, which is really what the book is about. I mean, the horse is a big character in it, but the people around him were so interesting and the thing that clicked for me was that
00:39:55
Speaker
This was the story of the Depression, ripped small. The collection of people. You had a frontier cowboy who slept on his saddle at night and the Native Americans called him the Lone Plainsman. He was part of an old America, an old West that was dying and would have its final death throes in the Depression. And then you had a one-eyed,
00:40:24
Speaker
a prize fighter, failed prize fighter who was becoming a jockey. His family had abandoned him. And then you had this automobile magnate, Mr. Future, a guy who had started out with two dimes and a penny in his pocket and had helped found the automotive industry. And he was the man with all the urgency of the coming future. In the depression, all of those types of people ended up kind of washing together in odd places because of all the upheaval.
00:40:54
Speaker
these three people you would never think would meet intersect around a horse. And at Detroit, that's where they met. And you kind of had the depression writ small in this story. And I realized I can tell the story of the depression with the story of this horse. And so that's when it became much bigger. And I remember kind of looking up and saying out loud, could this be a book?
00:41:16
Speaker
And then I got going. Then I really got going. Where do you feel most engaged in the process and most alive in the process? I love the interviews. I toyed for quite a while with doing this story, a World War II story, and I have just decided not to do it because there are so few people who remember it who are still around. I think the time of doing first-person narrative kind of World War II stories
00:41:46
Speaker
is gone because there's just not enough people. And I love, love, love doing the interviews. I love exploring these people and getting to know them and hearing their stories firsthand. It's a privilege. It's such a privilege to be a writer and to be able to meet these people. And I love exploring their memories with them and
00:42:07
Speaker
finding out all of these things I otherwise would not have found. There's a lot of material that's available in archives and things like that, but they often will hit a dead end with them. With a person, you often don't hit a dead end for a long time because they know people and they have a lot of different stories and you can really explore them. So I love that part of it. The writing is alternately
00:42:35
Speaker
really a pleasure and a total agony and you know everyone says that. I'm sure it's like that for you too. Everybody who writes knows that agony of writing it. I can't remember who it was who said it's like being an armless, legless man with a crayon clutched in his teeth. I think it's Caravonnegan. Yes, that's who it was. Yeah, it's just a very, very hard process sometimes and because it's
00:43:04
Speaker
You're trying to do a very big thing in right, but you're not actually moving. It's all going on inside your head. It's really frustrating. And, you know, there's a lot of times where I get up and I've got to go, I got to leave it, you know, because it's just not going anywhere. But, um, and I, I really enjoy once I have something down and begin to edit it. I think that's when I'm having the most time is when I've, I, I feel a sense of safety. Okay. Something's on the page.
00:43:32
Speaker
And now I can play with it. And I'm, I'm a huge editor of myself. I will change a sentence 10,000 times until it feels exactly right. And that's why it took me seven years to write Unbroken. And a lot of that was, there were about a hundred different people interviewed and Louis Zamparini by himself was probably 75 interviews, many of which were three hours long.
00:43:57
Speaker
There was a lot of people and then a whole lot of sources. There was just an enormous amount of research, but there was an enormous amount of writing and then editing myself. And my first draft was gigantic. And then it's the paring down, paring down, figuring out what I have to tell and what I don't.
00:44:15
Speaker
But I do like it. I like the whole process. I'm a very happy person when I'm writing a book.
Flexible Writing Routine
00:44:22
Speaker
And how when you're in the throes of a process of that nature, what is your typical daily routine around the writing? What rituals do you have in place that kind of primes the pump and gets you checked in with yourself so you can attack the work with the kind of rigor that you talk about?
00:44:41
Speaker
I'm not very regimented in that way. It's kind of whatever I feel at a particular moment. I can remember a lot of days would see this yet where I would wake up and the writing would just be starting in my head. I would just have some thingy in my head like, oh, this is the way I can write it. And I would just jump out of bed and go straight to my computer and sometimes
00:45:03
Speaker
dusk would be falling and I would realize I'm still in a dress because I've been working all day. I completely lose my sense of time when I'm writing. I go so far deep that it's just me and the words and the story and nothing else. And so I very often lose track of huge amounts of time when I do it. But it's just kind of what I feel on a particular day. And with me with the first two books,
00:45:30
Speaker
My health was such a huge thing that I had to work around that and it would be whatever my body would grant me that day. And some days I was strong enough to do interviews, some days I wasn't. I always could write. When I had very bad vertigo, I would just lie in bed with my eyes closed and a pad and would just write without actually looking at what I was writing. The words would be going.
00:45:58
Speaker
But I would open my eyes and I would have written all over my own writing because I wasn't looking at the page. But it was there. I wouldn't be getting it down. There was a lot of kind of work around what was happening in my body at the time, which was pretty disastrous during Unbroken. I was quite, quite sick. But so I don't, I don't have a schedule. And it just, sometimes I'll just be like,
00:46:23
Speaker
I got to go right now because I got to write. I would just be forming things and I walk around with my cell phone and there's a note section and I'll just have an observation and it's got to go down there right now and I just read it out. I say it out loud into the phone and then it's there and I'm caught up because these things do go away. If you don't, you go get some.
00:46:45
Speaker
Yeah. And with your illness, is it a lower hurdle to jump over these days? Or can it still be every bit as bad as it was during Seabiscuit and Unbroken? I am a whole lot better. That's great. I have really made great, great progress. Moving to Oregon was a great thing for me to do. I was stuck in Washington DC when I left college other than two years in Chicago.
00:47:12
Speaker
uh, all the way until 2015. So that's, uh, 1987 to 2015. And it, Washington, I love Washington. It is a really, really beautiful, wonderful, interesting city, but it has horrendous heat and humidity. It's one of the most humid places in the United States. And that was, he eats really hard on me. Um, and I would just be stuck indoors basically from May to September because I can't, I can't handle it. And out here.
00:47:42
Speaker
There's almost no humidity in Oregon and the weather is extraordinarily good. It's really nice and I'm surrounded by beauty. I'm surrounded by natural beauty and I didn't have that in DC. I'd be looking out at a dumpster or something and here I'm looking at two mountains.
00:48:02
Speaker
and just have a lot of open space in a simpler environment, which with CFS, you need less busyness, especially with vertigo. I crowd the people around, not a lot of noise. You need kind of openness and space to make your brain work best. And out here, I'm rural or largely so. And there's a lot of, I can look 60 miles away at a mountain.
00:48:31
Speaker
or 30 miles away at a mountain. And when I was living in DC, I was living in Georgetown and I could look across the street. And that was as far as I could look. And it does bring peace to my brain. And I've been working with a physical therapist out here and I'm just much stronger. I look like an athlete now. And I can just do much, much more than I could. It's still a presence in my life. I still go through bad times with vertigo.
00:48:59
Speaker
My stamina is not great. My strength is as good as an athlete's but my stamina isn't great just because of the way the disease works. Oh man, that's such good news to hear. I didn't think this ever would happen and I now think I will get all the way back one way or another. So I'm fighting for that. I get better every month. I'm definitely still not well and there's things I still have to pay attention to like heat.
00:49:26
Speaker
I can't be in a hot restaurant or something like that. I, I, that becomes quickly dangerous for me. I know there's a line there. Um, and I, I'm not, I'm not normal, but I'm, I'm so much better and you could spend a day with me and not know that I'm sick. Um, but, but there are definitely times when I'm, I'm really feeling quite bad, but it's a lot better than always, always feeling like, you know, I got to take through the next 10 minutes to try to survive.
00:49:54
Speaker
If you have the time, I have two more questions for you, if that's okay. Sure. All right. So one's riding and one's horse related. So what is the kind of sound in your brain that goes off when you know you've got your teeth latched into a good story? What has to be in place for you? And then you all of a sudden know like, oh, here we go. There's momentum. There's something here. I'm diving in. Yeah.
00:50:22
Speaker
I've gone through that question a lot because I've been looking for the right story to tell as the next story. And after Louis Vamperini and Key Biscayne, it's a pretty tough act to follow. Those were incredible lives. And I want a narrative arc. I get proposals all the time from people who say, you really should write about this. And it'll be someone's interesting life where they've had a lot of different interesting experiences, but it's not an arc. It's not a story.
00:50:52
Speaker
And I want a story. And I got it with the first two books. And so that's one of the principal things. It has to be somebody that I can live with, that I can fall in love with the subject. I don't think I could write a book about a horrible person that did did evil things and things like that. I don't want to live with that. I want to live with something inspiring.
00:51:22
Speaker
and just rich and interesting in that way. And it has to have a lot of source material because I don't want to be trapped with so few sources on something that I have to write something one dimensional. I love that, for instance, when I was telling the story of the match race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral that I found. All these people who'd been there at the race
00:51:50
Speaker
And there were all different kinds of places. There was one guy who stood on a steeplechase fence during the race, which actually collapsed in the middle of the race. And then he ran across the infield to watch the horses and another guy who sat in the rafters. And I had points of view all over the place from living sources, plus a lot of people who wrote things down, journalists and diarists and things like that. And when you have that much, all of a sudden,
00:52:19
Speaker
You can choose the perspective from which you tell the story. You know, you can tell it from what it looked like in the infield, or you can tell it what it looked like from up in the rafters. And you have all this richness to it, so you get the totality of the experience. And that's something I want in this story I just decided not to write about. That was a difficulty with it. The people involved are almost all dead.
00:52:44
Speaker
And there, there isn't a lot of new material and, and complicated material that will enable me to make it vivid as possible. So that, you know, when I, when I told about where I'm walking on the track, I can tell you the color of his blanket and the way it was moving over his body. Cause somebody wrote that down or someone said it into a radio. And that's, that's maybe the most important thing to me that I want.
00:53:13
Speaker
to take the rear and myself to that moment. I don't want it to be, you know, well, they say this happened. I want it to be, well, I'm standing here by the rail and see this kid just went by and he looks like he's not going to run a good race. He looks sleepy. And you feel it, you hear him breathe. You hear what George Wolff says. That's what I want.
Adopting a Horse Named Pants
00:53:37
Speaker
And speaking of horses, I believe, I read, I don't know if it's still the case, but it looks like you've had All About Brown, a son of Big Brown is in your care. Tell me a little bit about All About Brown and what that's been like for you. It's All Around Brown. All Around Brown. That was an interesting story. I was invited to go to the Brutus Cop in 2016 to speak.
00:54:05
Speaker
And I'd never been to a Breeders' Cup. And I was thrilled and we could drive down there from Oregon to Southern California. And after the races, the one thing I hadn't done in going to Santa Anita, my, my cathedral, you know, this place I had written about for years and had never been to. So one thing I hadn't seen was see this good stall. And see this good stall is as it was.
00:54:32
Speaker
Back then it was they tore down the wall between his stall and the stall next to it so that he could have his pony live with him There was such good friends. It was a big old horse named pumpkin Giant stall and they've left it as it was so there is this giant stall in barn 38 on the back stretch and I wanted to see it and
00:54:56
Speaker
And I was with Chris McCarron and, and jockey, and he said, I can get you, I can get you back there the morning after the British cup was over. So, so he got us in and we went back there and I looked at the stall for about two seconds before the horse in it stuck his head out and was just all over me with affection. He was the sweetest horse, also stunningly gorgeous.
00:55:20
Speaker
But just, um, he was lonely and he'd lay his head in my arms. He nibbled on my neck and Chris is making this noise, like, don't let him do that. And I'm like, I have this feeling he's not going to bite me. And he didn't, he was affectionate. I tried to leave. He, he, he got all sad and were sort of beckoning back. So I went back. I couldn't get him out of my head and we looked at his name and it said all around Brown, it was Mike pipey's barn.
00:55:45
Speaker
And so I contacted Mike and I just felt connected to the horse. I couldn't stop thinking about him. And I contacted him and I wasn't thinking about taking the horse myself. I just wanted to make sure this horse found a good home at the end of his career. And I've done that a lot. I've bought a lot of horses away from slaughter buyers. I've done a lot of horse rescue and horse placement and things like that in my life.
00:56:11
Speaker
Um, so I just told him that I said, I just want to make sure, you know, if you get it, if you get stuck, I can probably help you find a home for him. So he calls me back several months later and says, we retired him this morning. Do you want him? And I haven't even seen this horse outside the stall. I knew nothing about this horse, but sometimes you have that feeling in your gut of this is meant to be. And Mike actually said to me.
00:56:38
Speaker
This is the horse will change your life. Mike loved this horse. Everyone did. He was a sweetheart. And so I just said, yes. I'm thinking like, I don't know what I'm doing here. I hadn't owned a horse since 1984. And I'd been a very serious rider, but that was a lifetime ago. And I, we shipped him up here and he is, he's the most wonderful creature he's
00:57:04
Speaker
stunningly beautiful and very, very smart, uncannily smart, and we are retraining him. And he loves being trained. He's bomb proof. He's sweet. Everyone's in love with him. He's adjusted really well to Oregon. He loves his life. I have him out with some retired race horses and he just lives in a herd.
00:57:28
Speaker
It's just completely at peace. It's been a wonderful thing. I renamed him Pants. For no apparent reason, really. It just sort of came to me. We thought it was flying. He's a very whimsical horse. It's fun. It was through See This Gift that I found him because he lived in See This Gift style. He's just a blessing to me. I just love this horse so much. It was like he was meant to be in my life. That's wonderful.
00:57:57
Speaker
Well, Laura, you've been incredibly generous with your time today. And thank you so much for carving out an hour of your day to talk shop with me and everything. This is quite a thrill. I've just been such a great admirer of your work for so long. And to be able to talk shop with you is a thrill and an honor. So thank you so much. Well, thank you. It's been a real pleasure for me. And I'm really honored to be on your show. Thanks so much. You got it, Laura. We'll be in touch.
00:58:24
Speaker
Doesn't get better than that, does it? It doesn't, so don't even try. I'm speechless. I'm without speech, Jerry. Thanks to Laura for coming on the show. You can follow her on Facebook and go buy her books. They are re-readable, and they are master lessons in research, writing, and pacing.
00:58:47
Speaker
You can follow me and the show on Twitter at Brendan O'Mara and at CNF Pod, like the Facebook page. It's just the creative nonfiction podcast. And feel free to follow me on Instagram where I post cool audio grams of the shows as well as stupid drawings I do when I need to decompress. Always compressing over here. Head over to Brendan O'Mara.com for show notes and to subscribe to my monthly newsletter where I share my reading recommendations for the month, articles,
00:59:17
Speaker
and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. It's a simple little bite of goodness to start your month. Once a month, no spam. Can't beat it.
00:59:30
Speaker
Thanks again to our sponsors and Goucher Colleges, MFA Nonfiction, and Creative Nonfiction Magazine. And hey, happy new year, friend. Thanks for being on this CNFing journey with me. It was a hell of a 2018. So let's just keep it going. Let's keep doing this thing that we do that drives us mad. Here's to 2019. And remember, if you can do interview, see ya.