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Episode 50—Ted Conover's Deep Dive into Immersion
146 Plays8 years ago
For the 50th episode of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, we had to go big and that's what we did. Ted Conover, author of so many books (Rolling Nowhere, Coyotes, Newjack) including his latest "Immersion: A Writer's Guide to Going Deep," joined me to talk about why he wrote the book and how he has employed those tactics for the past 40 years. "The research you do is determinative, right?" Conover says. "It defines what you're going to be able to write in many ways." Thanks for listening. Please share, subscribe, and leave a review on iTunes.
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Transcript
Celebrating Milestones
00:00:02
Speaker
Can you believe it? This is the 50th episode of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, where I speak with authors, journalists, essayists, and documentary filmmakers about creating works of nonfiction. Unbelievable. Thank you so much for your support.
00:00:20
Speaker
And an especially heartfelt thank you goes out to those of you who reviewed the podcast on iTunes. At this recording, there are six five-star reviews. What a gift! I can't tell you how excited that made me to see that start to tally up on iTunes. Like I said, what a gift. And you know what sort of rhymes with gift?
00:00:47
Speaker
All right, all right. I know I said last week I was through with the riff gags, including this past one that I came up with. I came up with two more, so you'll have to bear with me in the following weeks. But the podcast continues to gain momentum, and that's due in part to all the sharing and reviews. So please review the podcast if you have 60 seconds, and share it with all your friends who love a little nonfiction in their lives.
Ted Conover's Nonfiction Journey
00:01:16
Speaker
So this milestone episode brings you Ted Conover, whose latest book, Immersion, a writer's guide to going deep by University of Chicago Press, takes the writer and shows her how to immerse herself into the lives and subcultures of those folks around her so that she may write about it later.
00:01:36
Speaker
Conover's made a career of doing this type of deep dive, whether it's riding the rails as he did for his first book, Rolling Nowhere, crossing the Mexican border as he did in coyotes, or becoming a corrections officer as he did in New Jack to detail the lives inside our prison system. Whatever it is, he's all in. And he grew up around Denver and admired how some of the older kids went on these adventures, and some even rode the rails.
00:02:04
Speaker
It got Ted thinking, you know, what would that be like? So toward the end of his time at Amherst College, he left, and in his words, to get out of the library.
00:02:14
Speaker
All the books that you've written and articles that you've written, what triggered the need or what itch did writing immersion scratch for you? So what was the impetus behind it after doing all the work you've done to then give this wonderful handbook to people looking to employ the tactics that you've used for 40 years?
00:02:42
Speaker
So it's funny, you know, I did not start out to be a writer known for a particular approach. Immersion was a label applied to my work by somebody else who noticed a pattern in the ways I was approaching things. And I sort of was interested but not that interested in that pattern initially. I thought, you know, that's cool.
00:03:12
Speaker
I do other stuff too, and in fact, you know, I'm sure most of my work over the years has, I guess, been long-form, but only immersive occasionally or in certain ways. But then, yeah, as after I wrote my last book of journalism, The Roots of Man, which has these six immersive
00:03:42
Speaker
chapters, an editor said to me, you know, would you ever consider writing a book about this kind of work that would use your own experiences and experiences of people you admire to explain, you know, what works and what works less well,
Writing and Teaching Intertwined
00:04:02
Speaker
etc. And I saw in that a chance to, I guess, add coherence between my
00:04:11
Speaker
writing life and my teaching life because I had Approached that question in a sort of piecemeal way in different courses I've taught but I'd never thought of assembling it into a statement about how a person might do this for a range of topics and in a way that took you from the beginning and
00:04:35
Speaker
you know how you think of an idea to how you get access to how you comport yourself once you're inside to how you structure it how you report for structure and then yeah aftermath I saw the chance to sort of make sense of that in a coherent point A to point Z
00:05:03
Speaker
way and I thought, uh, that actually might be enjoyable. And, and it was, it was a really fun book to write. It also seemed like, yeah, that's actually, if I'm ever going to do a book about writing that this is it. Let's just say I felt I had the authority to do it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. At this point, I guess I, I'm,
00:05:27
Speaker
I am qualified to write this book and I will. I think what I especially loved about it was that even though you do talk about writing towards the end of it, I love that it's really like a handbook for the process of
00:05:46
Speaker
of doing the type of experiential, experimental, and reporting experience. You know, the writing comes later, but it's like, I like that it's more of a handbook to, like, get the information and then process it later. Good, no. Yeah. And thanks for noticing that. It's so funny. You know, I teach at writers' conferences. I enjoy them. It's really fun to work with pros to
00:06:17
Speaker
make it better but so often when i'm only with somebody for a couple weeks like it bread loaf or something i think. We should have had this conversation a year ago before you sat down to write because the research you do is determinative right it defines what you're gonna be able to write in many ways and that's not true with fiction but.
00:06:44
Speaker
But with nonfiction, it absolutely is. And if we're writing about experience, there's a lot of thinking that can go into figuring out what kind of experience could be helpful and how to get it, how to have that experience. And so yeah, that, to me, was the part that other books hadn't attended to, was the reporting piece and the
00:07:14
Speaker
access part and the taking notes. It's so basic, it almost seems like people think I'm going to be telling them about my shorthand or something, but in fact it's this deeply important part of producing good long-form nonfiction. So yeah, I felt there was a gap there too.
Early Inspirations and Anthropology
00:07:40
Speaker
And so as you get to Amherst and then you're contemplating riding the rails, not necessarily as you write an immersion, you didn't necessarily know what it meant to write a book. You didn't even know if you could, but it was an experience you wanted to have nonetheless.
00:08:03
Speaker
Sort of like take us to that to that moment leading up to when you are thinking about taking that on as a project and you know what were you thinking as you're looking to take that that leap into something so sort of really audacious and fun and adventurous. Sure I think one thing I was thinking is how could I.
00:08:26
Speaker
write a thesis and get out of the library because we were not encouraged to do our own field work as undergrads. In fact, they said it basically wasn't allowed. And yet I thought, well, that's the gist of anthropology. It's this idea that you can learn not just by interviewing people, which I knew about from having worked as a reporter.
00:08:52
Speaker
for my school papers and for some suburban papers outside Denver. But being able to live with somebody and participate in their lives could take this to the next level. And I thought that was something profoundly interesting about anthropology that journalists could learn from and that I could see
00:09:17
Speaker
uh non-fiction writers i admired trying like um you know tom wolfe with uh the right stuff which is just a really entertaining ethnography of of fighter pilots in a way you know in in high school we had all read truman capote and that idea of just getting inside the minds not just of important people with titles who you talk to as a journalist but
00:09:45
Speaker
murderers. I mean, somebody like that, it's okay to get to know them and try to explain what's in their heads. That was a mind bending idea for me. And no one was saying anthropology could help you with this, but it just seemed kind of clear that maybe it could. So yeah, on the one hand, I was interested in an adventure.
00:10:13
Speaker
such as riding the rails might be and in staying out of the library. But on the other hand, I thought, you know, this is a legit subject. You could do participant observation by riding the rails. You could attempt an ethnography of people who live like this and you could do it at age 21, which I was for almost no money and get
00:10:42
Speaker
hopefully credit for it. So that was kind of my starting point. As you mentioned, I wasn't thinking in terms of a book then because I didn't know people who wrote books. They weren't in my circle. I'd met professors who had and a couple of speakers to college who seemed to be making a living that way, but it was, you know, I hadn't
00:11:11
Speaker
started aiming that high yet and so it wasn't until afterward when I'd had the experience I'd written my thesis and along the way I wrote an article for a student magazine I was involved with about one morning with one hobo and that got published and then it got a lot of attention and that that's when I thought wow people are interested in this maybe this is my moment maybe I should see if I can interest a publisher in it as well
00:11:41
Speaker
That's great and it's so sort of elucidating that you said that you use the word moment because that's kind of like my follow up to that was like was this the moment that essentially changed the trajectory of your life? Definitely it was because in fact as I prepared to graduate from college I had lined up a summer job with a newspaper called the Indianapolis Star
00:12:11
Speaker
which was basically the only one I could get that I was aware of. And I was expected there in June, but in May, the Associated Press noticed my article about the one morning with the one hobo, which had been reprinted in the college magazine. And the publicity that that generated just made me think, gosh,
00:12:41
Speaker
Maybe I should devote my energy to seeing if I can get a contract for a book instead of moving to Indianapolis. And I thought either I am shooting my career in the foot in the most spectacular way right now, or I'm making a decision that might work out.
00:13:08
Speaker
At the end of the day, all I knew is I'd feel bad if I never tried, right? If I didn't see if I could publish a first-person account of this. And one thing led to another. And I did. I got a contract. I found an agent who'd grown up in Burlington, Iowa, where the Burlington Railroad began. Things just seemed to fall into place. So yes.
00:13:37
Speaker
That was the beginning, and part of it was luck. Part of it was luck that I made. I often think, what if I'd been a little more cautious? I probably would have missed out.
00:13:52
Speaker
I can't tell you what I'd be doing today. I hate to think about it.
00:14:12
Speaker
inkling to just get outside it like you say like you know what a ruminate too much about what could have been but that was like a defining a defining moment just to say just to think outside of the library if you will I know I like the way you put it as though it's something admirable to me it showed some sort of weakness of character that I had
00:14:35
Speaker
You know trouble concentrating in the library that long I thought if I were a real student I you know I could handle this but yeah I was definitely seeking.
00:14:48
Speaker
alternatives to formal education, no question. So what was the appeal to doing this type of research and reporting that is more congruent, as you said, with ethnographies and anthropology versus like straight-up journalism, even though this immersive type of stuff really has a ton of overlap?
Experiential Learning in Writing
00:15:11
Speaker
There is a ton of overlap, but what they have in common and what
00:15:16
Speaker
was the appeal, I think, is this idea of learning from experience. You know, there's a little vogue in this in the 60s and 70s. When I was growing up, professors would send their students out to, you know, a little town with $20 and see if they could
00:15:43
Speaker
You know get by for 24 hours somehow could they could they make it could you learn? by doing and I guess I I like the idea of experiential education, I think I've benefited hugely from formal education from books and from lectures by smart people, but I think I've probably benefited equally by
00:16:12
Speaker
getting outside the academy and into the worlds of people who would not be so comfortable there, whether it's railroad tramps or immigrants or prison officers, right? They have coherent cultures that are just sort of incompatible with the politeness of higher education. But, you know, I thought
00:16:39
Speaker
They had things to teach me as well, and I thought that in gaining an experience of living with them, I could not only learn something that I could write about, but it would be so cool. It would be just such a great thing to have done. I think it's partly this idea of what
00:17:08
Speaker
What's a worthwhile experience? What do you seek out for fun? Is it riding a motorcycle? Is it visiting Paris? For me, it was this kind of travel, which I think of as a kind of foreign travel. It's definitely travel outside my comfort zone and into a place that's unknown
00:17:36
Speaker
most people like me, but on the other hand, if you've grown up with the privileges of education and a family that's helped get you on your way, then maybe you ought to take some chances and poke your head into places that you don't normally, or you normally wouldn't go.
00:18:05
Speaker
Yeah, to me that's just been its own reward, even though sometimes it's unpleasant. This whole idea of gaining experience, or experience that doubles as research, is to me just really cool.
00:18:23
Speaker
It also puts you almost like on their team as well, because as you experience it, you in essence become initiated. And then in that sense, you're able to gain an even greater sense of trust that, oh yeah, he's kind of one of us now. And you always have to be mindful of that distance that ultimately you're gonna be writing about these people. And with the notebook out or recorder out,
00:18:50
Speaker
that's your signal to them. Be like, listen, let's not mistake roles here, but by experiencing this stuff, like you are proving to them that you are of them and then you kind of gain their respect and as a result, you can write about them more honestly with greater empathy and sort of just garner a greater sense of camaraderie that you can translate to the page better.
00:19:15
Speaker
So that is all true. That is, um, one of the benefits of us, you know, immersive style of reporting that I like to do is that you can't spend a lot of time. Most of us can't spend a lot of time with a group of people without sort of starting to like them or, or to sympathize with them. And,
00:19:41
Speaker
It's a problem with traditional reporting insofar as it's harder to be objective if you are a prison officer and you endure what prison officers do. Some people are going to say, well, you're biased. You have this partiality. I think that the trick is you have to see
00:20:08
Speaker
that team spirit as a tool for learning about people, right? You wanna know what makes that team work? How does that team think? How does the world look to them? Who are their friends? Who are their enemies? And to really get that, you kinda have to be on the team for a while, even if it's with this idea that, okay, after three months or six months or a year, I'm gonna go back to my life off the team and write about
00:20:38
Speaker
that experience. So, you know, you have to be mindful of where you stand. And I remember the day that I came home and told my wife about working at Sing Sing, and I was saying, yeah, we had to do this. We had to do that. We had to put the cells on lockdown. And she said, so by weed,
00:21:04
Speaker
Who do you mean exactly? And I said, we, the CEOs. And it made me realize that I was now on the team, even though at the end of the day, I'd sit down and I'd take notes about what had happened. And that's, I think, a really good way to keep your perspective and sense of fairness and remember that you're coming at this from the outside in a certain way
00:21:32
Speaker
And so you need to write it down. And I just think writing it down, I think taking notes is so helpful, not just for remembering, but for keeping your identity straight. Keeping a grip on who you are and why you're doing this and yeah, becoming sympathetic without going native.
00:22:12
Speaker
I never thought of it as a way to keep your compass calibrated right, to maintain your identity as a reporter on some level. That's really interesting that it does make sure it realigns and keeps your journalist guitar in tune. Yeah, exactly. After all, when you take notes, you're writing to yourself, right? These are notes
00:22:21
Speaker
that's a that's a great
00:22:40
Speaker
for yourself and so who is that person? It's funny, the great challenge of writing my first book Rolling Nowhere was knowing who I was writing it to. I'd always written for an editor at a newspaper or for a professor at a college and you know
00:23:05
Speaker
who those people are and what they want, but when it comes to writing a book, like who is this for exactly? And I remember my very first editor at the Viking Press said, you know, picture a really good friend who you haven't seen in a long time, who wants to know exactly what you've been through for the last months.
00:23:35
Speaker
and likes you so much, they're going to listen to it. And you're going to tell this person the truth, right? You're going to explain not just what happened, but how it mattered to you. And maybe this will be after dinner and a couple glasses of wine or a beer. And that's great advice and help me
00:23:59
Speaker
get through my first big writer's block, which came from not knowing who I was talking to. But I've never really thought about it this way. But yeah, when you take your own notes about a project, that audience is you the writer, if that makes sense. It's like these are notes to the person who's going to be writing about this.
00:24:27
Speaker
And so you keep that identity alive. It's the identity of me wearing not my gray prison uniform with all my keys hanging on my belt and my baton and my baseball cap that says corrections, but it's me and my jeans and my sweatshirt sitting at home in front of my computer with a soft drink or a coffee or something. And it's, I'm in my world and I'm writing to that.
00:24:56
Speaker
future self is going to put all this hopefully into a book. So yeah, the note-taking is a big deal. And you write an immersion about the observer-participant spectrum.
Pursuing and Ending Projects
00:25:10
Speaker
And the nature of the work is it can take months or years, but you never quite know how long. And I wonder, what's your barometer for that? Do you find that you
00:25:26
Speaker
You end the project when you become too close to the participant or you know in the case of say like new Jack you just wanted to like work for a year and you kind of set those parameters or something so I don't know like how do you gauge how long a project might be along that spectrum. So I think.
00:25:49
Speaker
I do it by trying to imagine this experience on paper. And if the experience is the raw material, do I have enough to create a finished product? And it's funny, when I set out to ride the rails, you know, I basically just thought, okay, if I spent four months doing this, I will have
00:26:14
Speaker
had a bunch of experiences and I could probably visit most of these states and I could get home by Christmas, so I'll just aim to do it that long. But I wasn't consciously preparing to write a book. I ended up writing a college thesis, which is something very different, and I hadn't done that before either.
00:26:40
Speaker
But ever since then, I've understood there's a correspondence between the research and what you're going to write. And you kind of have to say to yourself, OK, where if this is going to be as a narrative as all my books are, where are we in the story? What has happened to me so far? What have I learned? Who are my main?
00:27:09
Speaker
characters and how well do I know them and I remember telling my agent about three months into into working at Sing Sing I said well, I think I Think I'm getting close. I think Yeah, I could I could see maybe maybe three or four more weeks another month and then I think I can quit and she said oh really I
00:27:37
Speaker
Because it was a terrible job. I couldn't wait to be done. And she said, OK, so we know where your book begins. And who do we meet along the way? And I told her. And she said, and how well do we get to know them? I said, well, not that well. But I said, I'm the main character. That's what matters. And she said, uh-huh. And the book ends when?
00:28:02
Speaker
And I said, well, when I quit, obviously, with this stupid bravado. And she just looked at me like, seriously? And I knew that I had to stay. And we had a couple more of those conversations where she basically helped me see that I didn't have all the pieces, which these pieces you can only gain through
00:28:31
Speaker
through time, you only get to know somebody at work after weeks or months, right? And, um, and to get to know an institution as big as that prison takes months. It really does. So as I, as the months went by, I tried to structure the book, I hope to write.
00:28:57
Speaker
And I could see where it began, and I could see that this could be the middle, and that day I got punched and started feeling differently about prisoners, like really disliking some of them who I didn't even know. You know, I thought that's an important moment in my experience where
00:29:21
Speaker
the roughness got the better of me and I said that's going to be important in the book and maybe that'll be around a midway point as I wrestle with keeping my cool and my perspective. And then, yeah, it was my agent who suggested maybe Christmas or New Year's will provide a sense of
00:29:43
Speaker
closure and that was really smart. And once I had those under my belt and I'd seen what happens on New Year's Eve and realized that's a big deal in prison where everyone's counting the days and here you are at the end of a year, I thought, okay, now I'm getting close to the end. So the process for me involves basically filling in
00:30:11
Speaker
In my mind, the chapters of a book I have yet to write. Do I have all the pieces yet? Can I go back to my study or do I need to stay out here in the field a while longer?
00:30:27
Speaker
You also write that when you were going through the experiences that would eventually become Rolling Nowhere, you sort of stumble upon what it's possibly like to be like a Mexican immigrant.
00:30:44
Speaker
Coming coming across and which ultimately sort of was the the tinder that led to coyotes and I wonder if you can maybe speak to this idea of like receptivity and always like keeping your antenna tuned to potential stories down down the road cuz that
00:31:01
Speaker
You know, whenever you stumbled upon that during your experiences riding the rails ultimately turned into a second book and you saw like a congruence between the hobos and the Mexican immigrants and so forth. So I wonder like how important is that level of receptivity that, you know, stowing that away for possibly a future book or a future magazine article?
Spotting Story Potential
00:31:25
Speaker
Yeah, well, I guess it's important. I mean, it certainly mattered to me that
00:31:31
Speaker
that I started meeting these Mexican guys on freight trains, which wasn't the picture I'd had in my mind when I started out. I was thinking more about the grizzled hobos from the Depression era. Instead, there's guys my age from Mexico who, to my surprise, can understand my Denver Public School Spanish.
00:32:00
Speaker
and we're both on our own and so we can hang out. I mean, that was a revelation, and it probably took me longer than it should have to realize these are the true modern-day American hobos. I guess that's important. I guess that's how a lot of writers come upon their subjects is by having some part of their brain open
00:32:29
Speaker
to new ideas and open to people who say things like, you really ought to meet my friend X who does Y, or did you ever think of writing about Z? Or, you know, I just think the genesis of ideas is mysterious and occasionally my ideas come from somebody who's making a suggestion but
00:33:00
Speaker
I think my best idea is, yeah, probably just come when a switch gets flicked in my mind and I think, oh, that's kind of cool. And yeah, I could get that story. I could do that. And if I wrote about a year of travel with Mexican immigrants, you know, I bet I could get that published.
00:33:25
Speaker
So it's absolutely essential and it's absolutely mysterious. If I could take a pill every morning that would guarantee I'm gonna notice interesting stories that are suggested by the evening news or by my daughters looking at on Facebook or whatever, I would buy a year's supply.
00:33:53
Speaker
i think your your taste as a reader and a writer just is sort of like a natural sort of uh... inoculation to like these these ideas like you can see like if you see a little hundred word blur be like oh yeah like you can't you can almost plot out like there's more there's like there's arc there if you were given the gift of time and uh... yeah it's basically the gift of time in your own curiosity be like oh yeah that little
00:34:22
Speaker
They that little piece of police blotter there there's more there and that could be a real interesting story right and I think yeah, you just kind of have to have faith in your instincts that You know you're interested For a good reason or you know is there's a lot out there that interests us I mean
00:34:48
Speaker
You know, it's the cat video lobe of the brain that we have to keep under control and put in its proper place while we also pay attention to other things, right? I mean, channeling and sort of tending to one's own impulses, one's own curiosity can be a
00:35:17
Speaker
a big job and then you need a council of advisors, right? You need somebody to say, I think that's been done or that doesn't sound like you. Yeah, that's such an interesting and mysterious
00:35:35
Speaker
subject to me. Yeah. And when you were attending a party in New York City, you crossed paths with David Remnick, and he said to you, like, oh yeah, that's the writer who makes his living sleeping on the ground. I was wondering, like, how did you take that? What was the context of that, and how did you take that? It's funny. A, I was
00:36:02
Speaker
delighted to be recognized. You know, for my first two books, which had involved a lot of sleeping on the ground, but B, I was mortified because can you really sleep on the ground for your whole career? And oddly, it made me think of that long running TV show Gilligan's Island, which has had, you know, this cast of
00:36:29
Speaker
characters who I watched for years on TV and who I think in not only my mind but everybody's were forever identified with this sort of light comedy and you know that's Gilligan, that's Ginger and you get typecast and if you're too closely identified with one
00:36:57
Speaker
thing, I think it's a problem. So yeah, I think that was a factor in me choosing to write about Aspen for my third book to see if this technique of participant observation could be used with people wealthier than me as well as less wealthy. So it definitely had an effect.
00:37:21
Speaker
Yeah, and do you think there's a point or maybe there's just a way that you can recalibrate it, if you will? Is there an expiration date to this type of reporting or just maybe a certain subgenre of it? I imagine you right now, the idea of riding the rails and sleeping on the floor and sleeping on the ground and crossing the Mexican border is abhorrent. But when you were 25, it was like, yeah, so I'm going to do this.
00:37:49
Speaker
Yeah, so it's yeah. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. It's not abhorrent. It's um It's like it still seems kind of cool and But I'm yeah, I know that you know, I'm in my late 50s now and I could still ride the rails and in fact I
00:38:12
Speaker
A couple of summers ago, I did with my son. Oh, let's write that piece for outside. Yeah, he was curious about it, and it was a way for me to get back out there, but I think really the, you know, I've thought about this. Some things would probably be harder for me to do now.
00:38:39
Speaker
there's a chapter of my book about roads, uh, the roots of man, which is set in, um, in Kashmir in Northern India in Ladakh, where I walked on a frozen river for three days with these teenagers who are getting out of their isolated Valley to attend school on the outside. And I was thinking, well, at a certain point, um,
00:39:06
Speaker
What is the expiration date? How long could I keep doing this? And I think as long as you're in decent shape, yeah, you can keep going. But it does feel a little riskier to do certain things now. And also, once you have a family, once you have kids,
00:39:34
Speaker
it seems a little selfish to be transported across the Rio Grande by members of a Mexican gang than it did before you had a family. So yeah, both, I guess, physical fitness and your ties to people close to you affect your ability to do this. But I would
00:40:04
Speaker
A couple of my ideas for future projects are sort of like the early projects and I would do them if the various pieces can come together.
00:40:20
Speaker
And I know Sebastian Younger has spoken about, I think he's kind of done doing the war reporting, going into war zones. I've heard him say that on podcasts. That's kind of the idea. I think war correspondents and foreign correspondents who have been
00:40:37
Speaker
really in the thick of things. At some point, it's time to step away from this.
War Reporting and Its Challenges
00:40:45
Speaker
You cite his work and his little passage on PTSD and immersion as well, and he's spoken in some of your classes. So I wonder, have you guys gone back and forth talking about this very subject? Yeah, it's funny we have. I admire him.
00:41:07
Speaker
tremendously and I admire writers who will put themselves out there with soldiers and report from the front. My wife and I made a bargain early in our relationship that she could handle most things but
00:41:35
Speaker
Did I think I could avoid doing that kind of reporting? And after a couple of false starts, I figured out that I could. It was hard to say no a couple of times, but I did. But I do think Sebastian is done with war reporting and, you know, his
00:42:02
Speaker
close collaborator, Tim Hetherington, who he did Restrepo and other projects with, was killed in Libya, as you know. And I think at a certain point you decide, this is taking a toll on me, and I've also maybe cheated death enough that if I kept doing it,
00:42:29
Speaker
I could expect not to at some point. So yes, you see people ease out of it and become interested in a life that does not involve so much risk or fear. Chris Hedges, also a former war reporter, has written a lot about the effects of
00:42:58
Speaker
of that kind of research. But Sebastian has really, I think, done more than anybody else to talk about how trauma can mess up a war correspondent as well. And I admire him for that. I think, you know, right, we have to take care of ourselves as writers and
00:43:27
Speaker
And some of the things you see aren't easy, and some of those things don't leave your mind as quickly as you'd like, if at all, and you have to pay attention to that.
00:43:39
Speaker
And you cite a bunch, just dozens upon dozens of brilliant writers in your book, Susan Orlean, Younger, Adrienne Nicole LeBlanc, Tracy Kidder, Maddie Blaise. And over the course of your career, what have you learned from these practitioners and other practitioners about the craft of this type of immersion reporting and the writing that comes out of it?
Learning from Other Writers
00:44:07
Speaker
Wow, what have I learned? I guess I've learned, you know, I've tried to take lessons from people as, you know, wherever I can. From Susan Orlean, you remember that writing doesn't have to be about war, to be good, to be meaningful,
00:44:36
Speaker
to transport a reader. I mean, she more than almost any of the writers I talk about in my book is a writer who when you come across her work, you know it's her. If you'd forgotten to pay attention to the byline, I think, and you were perceptive, you'd figure it out within a few paragraphs. This is Susan Orlean.
00:44:58
Speaker
And that's such an important lesson for nonfiction writers that we can have a style too and that it's consists of how we look at things and obviously in our language but also in our choice of topics. That things can be funny, things can be delightful and we should pay attention, right?
00:45:28
Speaker
Gosh, I'm reading a new book that isn't out yet about a writer who spent a year in a classroom for recent immigrants, most of them refugees in Denver. Her name's Helen Thorpe. And I keep getting reminded of Tracy Kidder's book, Among School Children, which has the same basic idea. He spent a year in this classroom.
00:45:59
Speaker
But they're doing it in such different ways. And, you know, Kidder has been hugely influential to me. He's such a master of long form narrative. And, you know, I've tried to channel and soak up
00:46:27
Speaker
the way I imagine him doing his reporting sometimes, the care with which he comes to characterize people important to him, whether it's Dr. Paul Farmer in Haiti and Mountains Beyond Mountains or the doctor from
00:46:48
Speaker
Burundi Who he writes about in that amazing book whose name is escaping me right now the reason I Quote those people in immersion as each of them have left me with Lessons that I think made me a better writer or could make me a better writer if I could Attend to them properly and
00:47:15
Speaker
and hopefully might help other people wanting to do this too. I kind of think we're all in a kind of conversation with each other when we write our books and I mean that's what it's all about.
00:47:30
Speaker
I think what's especially great about Orlean and Kidder is that they, especially with Kidder's early work, they kind of dispels the myth that immersion writing has to be like this almost foreign deep dive into war or crossing the Mexican border. It can be something that you can do immersion reporting in your backyard. Right, exactly.
00:48:00
Speaker
No, that's a really good point. And yeah, Catherine Boo as well. I guess she's probably best known now for Behind the Beautiful Forever is about India, but built her reputation on very local topics familiar to all kinds of Americans. And yeah, I got started with subjects that
00:48:29
Speaker
cost me very little and that I, you know, often I found that working a job, you know, whether it's driving a taxi in Aspen or working corrections in New York is itself an interesting thing to write about, but it also pays you while you're doing it, which is an important factor for a lot of us.
00:48:52
Speaker
A real interesting point you make in the book has to do with research, and you said there's a point, too, and I guess it helps focus.
Research and Flexibility
00:49:04
Speaker
Focusing the research, and in turn helps focus the writing later. You call it steering your research.
00:49:12
Speaker
How important is that? There's got to be a spectrum there, because if you steer the research too much, you're not being receptive to other things that might crop up. So how do you navigate those two poles between steering the research and then being open to anything that happens? Yeah, it's funny. It's connected to the question of how much do you research your topic, say you're going to another
00:49:40
Speaker
Country or another city how much of an expert you have to be on that place before you go there and I think you need You need to do some basic research. So you've got the basic touchstones, you know Important history, you know important books and other media musicians, you know, you know what's happening politically, but you don't want to overdo it and
00:50:06
Speaker
Because, yeah, you have to stay open to surprise and to the unexpected. So, you know, I guess I look for some kind of middle ground where I'm receptive to what I find, but I also am not going in blind and just waiting to see what happens. There's questions I want to ask. And you also find
00:50:36
Speaker
Well, here's an example. You know, my first piece for The New Yorker was about a journey from Mombasa, Kenya into Central Africa to write about long distance truck drivers and aides, which was spreading among men and women in Africa before it was understood very well in the United States how that could happen. How do women?
00:51:06
Speaker
get infected and in fact, yeah, how do straight guys get infected? And a couple of friends of mine from college had become ill with the disease and I wanted to write something about it. And so I pursued this story about travel with these drivers who are away from home for weeks at a time and
00:51:31
Speaker
Yes, they hook up with waitresses and women serving them drinks at little lodgings along the way. But it was really hard for me to talk to those women who were clearly a big part of the story because the truck drivers were the only translators I had.
00:52:00
Speaker
And so when I went back to Kenya and revisited one of those drivers for my book about roads, I purposefully thought I want to flesh out, poor choice of words, I want to explore this other part of the story, right? Because I've been hanging out with men, it's important to,
00:52:26
Speaker
to see the other side of things and found a way to do that in Nairobi, which turned out to be really affecting because it took me so long to understand that even though these women were infected, most of them still doing sex work because their children depended on them for it.
00:52:55
Speaker
that which is such a revelation and such a dilemma and they acted like I would have some good advice for them which I Really struggled with and so yeah you you also go in thinking how can I compensate for some bias I might bring to this say by being a man and
00:53:19
Speaker
or any of the other parts of my identity that might keep me from thinking about other people's situations. So that's another thing I do think about.
00:53:30
Speaker
So once you've done most or all of your research and you're getting ready to organize your notes and get down to the writing of it, what's your approach to writing and your routine once you're looking to start to mold and craft a narrative? How do you operate morning routine to win the day so you can start? So yeah, I'll just leave it at that.
Crafting a Successful Writing Day
00:54:00
Speaker
I like that idea. Win the day. Um, I like that because we all know how bad it feels when we've lost the day, right? Um, usually arrives with a beer around six or 7 PM and surrender. Um, but, uh, I, I take some time. Um, I don't think it's, if you can possibly,
00:54:27
Speaker
not start writing right away. I think that's a good thing. Just let the pieces settle in your brain a little bit. And then I read back over all my notes. I see if there's any more reporting I need to do. Another book I need to read or somebody I forgot to talk to. And then I just try to think, okay, do I have a story? Where should I begin? What'll be the high points? I do the kind of outline where, you know,
00:54:56
Speaker
I try to put things in order and I try to make a little notation for everything that really has to be in there. Like that conversation with the sex workers in Nairobi has to be in there. And my conversation with the truck driver about illness has to be in there. So there's stuff that you just know.
00:55:18
Speaker
Really important and you have to use so I try to order it and I try to think okay If I if I'm gonna talk about all these things and I've got X number of words How much time can I spend on each of them? So you just try to get it's like planting a garden or something you're I'm up here in New Hampshire right now and I was actually talking to a neighbor yesterday who was planting her garden and
00:55:44
Speaker
She had strings laid out in these very straight rows. She had seedlings. She had planted months before. I mean, it's not like she just got out there and said, today I plant my garden. In fact, she'd clearly been working on it for weeks. And I think the best kind of writing will have the same kind of preparation. It's not like you sit down and, OK, today I write.
00:56:15
Speaker
you've been getting ready to write for a long time and now you finally have cleared the decks and you're gonna write, which to me means doing some every day as consistently as you can until it's done. So I look for a block of time that doesn't have a week of obligation in the middle of it
00:56:43
Speaker
Right or some medical thing. I don't want to have that happen here I want to be able to concentrate on what I'm doing You need to kind of clear the decks for as long as it will take if you have that Luxury, you know if you're a person who works another job as well, then you have to say okay I'm gonna work on this the next four weekends I just you have to set out that the time so that that so that your brain knows that
00:57:13
Speaker
That's what you're going to do then and that to me is the key. So like when I go to bed the night before a day of writing. It's somewhere in my mind. Some part of my brain is getting ready. To write the next day and I'm not so it's not like I'm planning sentences or an outline in my mind. It's just maybe I just don't. I just think your mind
00:57:43
Speaker
helps you if you prepare in a conscious way. It will help you unconsciously get ready. And in the old days, I really didn't start writing until after lunch. My first three books were all written in afternoons. But as I've gotten older, I've started writing earlier in the day.
00:58:08
Speaker
But when I say a good day of writing, I don't write all day and I don't know anybody who does. If you have two or three concentrated hours of writing, and by concentrated hours I mean hours punctuated by standing up, by stretching, by pouring another cup of coffee, by maybe answering that text or email, but not more than one.
00:58:35
Speaker
and then back to it and then maybe if you're really energetic, coming back to it in the afternoon, that's a day of writing for me. I used to start by reviewing everything I'd written the day before and making sure it was still good and somewhere along the way I stopped doing that, I pick up where I left off, I try to leave off
00:59:03
Speaker
at a place where I'm not stuck, but rather I've got momentum, right? So I haven't quite finished writing that scene, but I know where I'm going and I'm actually kind of looking forward to it and that kind of helps you get off to a running start. If I'm having trouble just putting words together, I might write an email to a friend just to get the wheels turning.
00:59:31
Speaker
Yeah, I think Hemingway used to just sometimes stop right in the middle of the sentence, leaving a little in the well, so you pick up the extent. Yeah, I love that. I think that makes a lot of sense. I think that's a cool idea. So, anyway.
00:59:46
Speaker
Yeah, how do you deal with those ugly middles in a draft when the early momentum and that early honeymoon period of the book has subsided and you got a slog? How do you deal with that? Because that's an ugly part for anyone, whether it's writing essays or something book length. It's just sometimes it's a grind and it's not fun anymore. And it's like, ugh.
01:00:16
Speaker
How do you approach that? We've all been there and sometimes we've been sent there by our editor or our agent or someone who says you need to make this better and it can be excruciating. God, how do I deal with it? I don't know. How do any of us deal with torture and hardship? You try to approach it methodically.
01:00:46
Speaker
Could I just do this for an hour today? An hour a day for the next two weeks and get through it and reward myself at night by seeing a movie or you know doing something fun. I don't have a magic formula for getting through those hard parts other than to acknowledge we all have them and even
01:01:13
Speaker
Yeah, the most prolific writer who is consistently celebrated is going to run into a morass now and then where she just has to, you know, where she's going to hate her life until that's done. And then, um, and then hopefully, uh, you know, an end, an end will approach. But you know, the bigger, the bigger thing is,
01:01:41
Speaker
is to avoid a situation like that that's too massive, right? Like getting involved in a book that's just going to have a lot of awful brush to hack your way through. I think you have to, you know, anything you
01:02:08
Speaker
Truly dread that should be a sign that this is this is maybe not where you want to spend weeks and Hopefully the this middle part you're talking about can be addressed in You know before it Before it drives us to depression or something. Yeah
Staying Motivated After Decades
01:02:32
Speaker
You've been doing this kind of work for 40 years, which when you say it out loud, it's like holy crap. What motivates you at this point after doing this for so long? What motivates and what keeps driving you? Oh man, what makes any of us want to meet an interesting new person? I guess there's some of us who are done meeting new people, but not me.
01:03:00
Speaker
I also think of it as my continuing education in the world. It's a continuing process of discovery and figuring things out and also maybe of shining a light onto places that I think could use it.
01:03:30
Speaker
part of the writer's job as well and and lord knows um there's plenty of those and uh i see no reason to uh you know i still want to get up every day and for me getting up in the morning involves thinking about what i'm going to write about or or um research it's just kind of what i do and who i am in the world so um
01:04:01
Speaker
So yeah, I hope to have a few more books before I'm done. Fantastic. And I deeply look forward to reading more of your work. And I know you've got some projects in the hopper, so I can't wait to find out what those are down the road. Well, I appreciate you attending.
01:04:23
Speaker
closely to immersion. And it's really, really fun to talk to you about this. Oh, fantastic. Well, thanks again. Thanks again, Ted, for carving out this time. And it's been a pleasure. Immersion is just, you know, it's so good and all your past work are just perfect illustrations of the tactics that you wrote about here. So thanks for that. And we'll be in touch down the road. Thanks, friend, and look forward to it. You got it. Take care. Yep. Bye. So long.
01:04:54
Speaker
This week's program was produced by yours truly, Brendan O'Mara. Thanks very much for listening. Subscribe, share, review. And if I could leave you with one piece of advice this week, it would be this. It's the cat video lobe of the brain that we have to keep under control and put in its proper place. Perfect. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.