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Episode 305: Matt Bell
256 Plays3 years ago
Matt Bell is the author of the craft book Refuse to be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts. It's published by Soho.
Social: @CNFPod
Support: patreon.com/cnfpod
Show notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Writing Assistance
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey, what is going on? CNF-ers?
00:00:05
Speaker
If you're looking to get in shape, you hire a personal trainer. That's somebody to hold you accountable, to spot you when the weight gets heavy. Likewise, if you're riding needs a boost when it's getting a little heavy and you need that spotter, that little something, something in your corner, consider letting me help you out. If you're working on a book, an essay, query, book proposal, oh boy, one of those, and you're ready to level up, email me, Brendan at BrendanOmera.com.
00:00:33
Speaker
Hey, and we'll start a dialogue. I'd be honored and thrilled to help you get where you want to go. The day where I rode is better than a day where I didn't. It makes me feel more like myself. It makes me feel like a person. So, you know, I'm not a factory. I don't like to over focus on like the productivity end of it. But I do think that if I can, if I can stay there until something fun happens, I can stay there until something entertaining happens, stay there until I get in touch with a thought or feeling I didn't quite have my head around. I just feel better the rest of the day.
Podcast Introduction and Guest Overview
00:01:07
Speaker
Oh, this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. This non-award-nominated podcast is a... It's where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. How's it going? Matt, for whom the belt holds, is here.
00:01:34
Speaker
You know Matt Bell, right? He's primarily a novelist, but he's got a new craft book out called Refuse to be Done. How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts. It's published by Soho.
00:01:47
Speaker
But Brendan, I thought you were a non-fiction podcast, man. Like, what the fuck? Um, honestly, like, who would even ask that anyway? But listen, Matt's book here can apply to any work of non-fiction, any crafting
Matt Bell's Craft Book 'Refuse to Be Done'
00:02:02
Speaker
of a book. I would say especially memoir.
00:02:04
Speaker
It's a book of skills to work on. The more skills that we can put into our arsenal, the better we get at this morass we call writing. Plus, bending out of non-fiction I find helps my non-fiction. I know that. I know me, man. Does that mean there might be some novelists on the show in the future? Time will tell, you filthy animals.
00:02:29
Speaker
I really love this book. You come away feeling like, shit, writing a book is hard work, but it's good work. And by good work, I mean it's nourishing.
Writing Philosophy and Podcast Support
00:02:39
Speaker
That brings me to a point about writing, and I don't know why I feel like saying this, but I'm going to do it anyway. You know how people like to say, I write to make sense of the world.
00:02:48
Speaker
I spun that phrase in my head for years, like a lozenge, and I'm like, that's fucking stupid. Sorry if you subscribed to that sentiment, but writing doesn't make the world make sense. At least not for me. Maybe it's just because I'm a two-bit idiot. Did Metallica write for whom the bell tolls?
00:03:16
Speaker
to make sense of the world, hell no. You know why I write? For the most part, because not writing fucking sucks. You know, it sucks worse than not doing it. So, I don't find writing torture, I find it challenging and difficult and demoralizing, especially the more skilled you get, the harder it seems to get, which is really frustrating.
00:03:39
Speaker
But anyone who makes it out to be anything more than using words and putting them in order and using punctuation and somewhat acceptable grammar is overthinking it. Phew, wow. I usually don't go on rants at the top of the show, but that one really boiled my potato.
00:03:58
Speaker
All right, before we get to Matt, let's do a little bit of housekeeping, seeing efforts. I want to remind you to keep the conversation going. Twitter at cnfpod, that's creative nonfiction podcast on Instagram. You can also support the podcast by becoming a paid member at patreon.com. Listen, I know.
00:04:15
Speaker
Podcast is free and you're like why would I why do I shell shell out money even if it's two bucks? It's like it's definitely something most of us can afford and a lot of podcasters ask Audiences like hey, you know consider doing this and you're still like yeah, but the podcast comes out. Anyway, what am I really gaining? I understand it's hard so window shop around because there are some perks and some
00:04:40
Speaker
Things coming down the pipe special podcast you can ask guests a future Ask guests you can ask questions of future guests I put a poll out a few people take me up on that offer But it's there for the taking if you're a patron and then I would give you quite credit for that question I'm not a monster members also get transcripts which are pretty pretty pretty sweet
00:05:02
Speaker
Free ways to support the show, you can always leave kind reviews. Our ratings on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Written reviews for our little podcast that could go a long way towards validating it for the wayward CNF-er. We got a nice little flood of written reviews and I've read all the new ones so I won't read any more here.
00:05:25
Speaker
But the more they come in, the more that come in, the more I will read them and give you credit for them. Like I said, they help out immensely. And given the size of the show, the amount of ratings and the amount of written reviews of those ratings, the percentage is like astronomically high, which is so cool. And I'm so grateful for that.
00:05:48
Speaker
very seriously. Yes, yes you. I'm serious. Wipe that smile off your face.
Matt Bell's Writing Insights
00:05:57
Speaker
Matt Bell. You can find him at MDBell79 on Twitter, MattBell.com. He's the author of At Last Count. Hank, what are you...
00:06:08
Speaker
Intern, I don't trust Hank right now, he's bitter. Intern says 4,562 novels including Appleseed, Scrapper, a tree, or a person, or a wall. He is, as I like to say, wicked smart. And Matt came to play ball.
00:06:27
Speaker
It's all you can ask for with a guess, and man, he brought it. There are so many golden nuggets of writerly wisdom that will surely energize your practice. So show notes to this and a billion other episodes and my up to 11 monthly newsletter can be found at BrendanOmero.com. Once a month, no spam, can't beat it. So let's do this. Let's get into episode 305. Ready?
00:07:04
Speaker
just some kind of a light-hearted kind of fun question that I've been posing that some people have late is uh you know what is the the strangest thing that you've googled oh god
00:07:19
Speaker
It's so hard to say. I mean, I feel like, you know, I worked as a book editor, too, for a long time. And I remember working on a book by Eugene Martin that was partly about the electric chair and Xerox repair and homemade nuclear weapons and Holocaust denial. And I just had this period where I was doing all this just fact checking as I was doing it, where I was like,
00:07:43
Speaker
this is like a serial killer kind of like Google history, right? Like I'm like really doing some like dark stuff. It was pretty dark book. And you just have that like, if anyone ever just looked at this slice of my life where I got super interested in this pile of stuff for like two weeks, right? It'd be a very weird slice of my, I have no idea what my Instagram ads were like then, right? You know, just like a bizarre time.
00:08:08
Speaker
Yeah, I was listening to a long-form podcast several years ago, and there was one person similar to what you're saying. They're like, if you looked at my Google alerts, you'd see severed limbs, all sorts of cryptic, creepy, gnarly things, because that's a lead domino for some reporters out there looking for certain kinds of stories. So they're getting pings for those kind of things.
00:08:32
Speaker
to then pursue those stories so yeah it's a very like a grim story search and a grim way of finding narrative out there i can't imagine being on the the severed limb beat that feels like uh like trying to get to that faster than anybody else feels like i mean i know that's sort of like journalism at a certain level but like it does seem like a tough racket to want to have alerts about
00:08:54
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, it was cool. I read this morning to your your essay about Creed and my own prison, which was really, really fun. And like, you're just a little bit older than I am. You're about a year older than I am. And so a lot of our pop culture and grunge aesthetic really overlaps in the 90s. And it was really cool to read that. And especially here, just to hear you like sort of
00:09:19
Speaker
And.
00:09:35
Speaker
Yeah, and, you know, in that piece, too, it got me thinking, too, because I know I was in eighth grade when Cobain died by suicide. You probably were a freshman in high school, I imagine, like, 94. Yeah. What is... I can point to that as probably the first sort of very formative celebrity death that I ever encountered. I wonder about you. Like, what's the biggest celebrity death that you remember most from your formative years?
00:10:04
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, that makes sense to me too. That does seem like, um, outsized, right? Like I sort of remember like, uh, and I would do like a small high school and I don't know that everybody was like, you know, uh, like super, super into that kind of music from rural Michigan, although it was, was on the radio, right? But, um, but I can remember people like, like weeping on the bus, right? Like that kid who had like the Rolling Stone issue that came out after he passed away and just like,
00:10:28
Speaker
Holding on to the boss night, you know, I mean it and I I yeah, I don't think I'd really seen that from my peers before, right? I don't know when Princess Diana died but in that like vague life stage I think that was the other thing I remember which had very little resonance for me in I just wasn't that aware of that kind of thing But I remember it being like a big deal, you know, like I sort of yeah of a sort of an early shared experience where I rehab that like a lot of people are having the same experience kind of thing and
00:10:54
Speaker
Absolutely. Now, I understand that early in your writing career, at least when you were really trying to get some traction, you were also writing around being a restaurant manager. So talk a little bit about that and the fire that was burning inside you to write amidst having a day job that takes a lot of your bandwidth and your energy away.
00:11:19
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I was sort of a serial undergrad dropout. So I went to three universities and graduated when I was 26. And so mostly I waited tables and bartended and eventually managed restaurants for about 10 years.
00:11:34
Speaker
until I started grad school. And I don't know, I mean, I liked doing that too. I was pretty good at it, you know, like I think in some ways my ability to banter like this kind of developed there, so that's good. I was a little more, you know, interior. But yeah, I was always reading a lot. I was always writing from probably through the whole time, from my early 20s especially. And right before I went to grad school, I really started trying to develop that, like,
00:12:02
Speaker
uh, steady writing habit. You know, I initially started out trying to write five days a week, two hours a day, and I would put it on the calendar, you know, get my restaurant manager's schedule for a month, right? And I'd put on it like my writing schedule as well so that it felt like it was part of my job in that way too. I feel like that was actually pretty essential. Like I learned maybe more in the first year of just
00:12:21
Speaker
writing regularly than I did from a lot of classes I took, right? It's sort of like you just if you write all the time you get past your stuff and into like the next thing that you're trying to do and it felt like I progressed very quickly in that phrase. Yeah and you took the word learn right out of my right plucked it right out of my brain. What did you and during that time what did you learn about yourself and what it takes to have that kind of rigor to create this kind of work?
00:12:48
Speaker
Well, you know, I think some of it, it's always hard to remember, right? It's starting to be a long time ago. But I think some of it was, I was writing a novel at the time that I did write a draft of that, you know, is not very good and no one ever really saw.
00:13:02
Speaker
even just learning that like the way the words will pile up if you just consistently make in that way, right, you know, sort of, you can get a lot done in 10 hours a week, you know, being able to see that. And I also think when you write consistently, you get past your defaults pretty fast, you get past your the idea of like only writing when you have inspiration or only writing when you have a clear idea.
Personal Fulfillment and Writing Discipline
00:13:24
Speaker
If you write 10, 15 hours a week, you will run out of ideas and then you will have to write anyway. And then you learn like stuff comes, stuff's there. Like if you just sort of, if you continue to sort of work, um, that happens this morning, I sat down and work in my novel was stuck somewhere. And it was like, I'm just going to start over in a different part of the book and wrote all this stuff. I had no idea existed, right? And it was like, just by being willing to sit in the chair for my two hours and like, you know, touch the keys you get in these interesting places. And I feel like that lesson,
00:13:51
Speaker
continues to pay off immensely, like the sort of willingness to be there for it means the muse comes, you know? I think Seth Godin has written about how like you don't wait for like you write yourself into flow. You don't wait for flow to happen in order to then start writing. So it's just a matter of
00:14:08
Speaker
sitting down there and you don't have writer's block you just start typing and then eventually you know eventually things will start to come to you that you would not have even thought of before you just alluded to it like just through the process of it's like oh wow that where did that come from but you wouldn't have got there if you didn't just have sort of that discipline to just sit down and write a bunch of bad words and eventually you know good stuff has to come out of it eventually yeah I think yeah I mean for me
00:14:36
Speaker
You know, one of the reasons to do it is, of course, to get books done. But one of the other reasons is just like a day where I, a day where I wrote is better than a day where I didn't. It makes me feel more like myself and makes me feel like a person. So, you know, I'm not a factory. I don't like to over focus on like the productivity end of it. But I do think that if I can, if I can stay there until something fun happens, I can stay there until something entertaining happens, stay there until I get in touch with a thought or feeling I didn't quite have my head around.
00:15:02
Speaker
I just feel better the rest of the day. I got my writing today right at the end of my session. I really needed to get out the door to do something and I left 15 minutes late because I finally got into the thing and I was so glad I stayed with it until I got there to be doing this. Not having had that would be harder.
00:15:21
Speaker
to that point of how it just feels nourishing to do that work. The last few days, too, I'm working on just a sample chapter that I'm hoping will be about 15 pages, in the neighborhood of 3,000 words, maybe a little longer, a little shorter.
00:15:37
Speaker
uh for a book proposal and the last few days like the you know i had done like 500 and yesterday was about 600 words and i'm and it just when i was done with that i'm like holy shit that felt that was great i know it's like kind of garbage needs a lot of rewriting and revising but like that felt awesome like that was cool it's like so energizing
00:15:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. I mean, yeah, if I have to go a couple of days where I don't get to write, the lack of that, I also feel. I just feel like a little, I don't know, yeah, energizing is a good word. Like I feel a little thinner. I always think of it like my thoughts feel thinner. You know, I just don't feel as sort of like awake. Same if I'm not reading well, right? If I'm reading books that I'm not enjoying or I'm not reading, I just, I don't know. I think reading and writing almost feel like they make me a person. Like I feel like a little narrow without them. Like there's not enough,
00:16:25
Speaker
bandwidth in my sort of, I don't know, like default brain and heart without sort of an influx and output of art.
00:16:34
Speaker
Yeah, and you write in the book, too, about reading alongside the writing. And now you kind of know how some people don't like to necessarily read their influences while they're generating pages. And I think there's something like a threat of voice creep is what I, like maybe if you're reading someone else, you're like, okay, they're going to be a little too forward in your writing.
00:16:56
Speaker
but you took the opposite stance, like you need those influences with you when you're generating pages. So how do you put a firewall between at least the voice of those influences with your voice as you're generating pages?
00:17:08
Speaker
I mean, I think I don't. So maybe that's part of it. But I, you know, I think, um, I mean, some of it is, uh, like the people who seem the most unique to me as writers, I think with those of them, I had the luck to get to know part of their uniqueness comes from like the breadth of their influence. They're just influenced by so many people that you can't single it out, you know, and that feels so that's part of it, right? To always have stuff coming in means that it's going to sort of work out.
00:17:34
Speaker
I do think also like the only time I'd really be worried about voice group if I planned on doing no revision because I just think like especially in a novel like over the course of a couple years like
00:17:45
Speaker
You're going to layer so much other stuff on it. You're going to rewrite things so many times. Things either become yours or you have to get rid of them. But I don't think reading Cormac McCarthy on one day of my novel is going to mean this chapter is always going to sound like Cormac McCarthy. That just doesn't seem true to me, to my experience. So voice creep over a day or two is not even, even if I was worried about it, I don't think it's a real issue over the course of rewriting a novel.
00:18:13
Speaker
As you were sitting down and you had this idea to write a book on writing, what were some of the influences just from a craft book point of view that influenced you and gave you the grist for the mill to want to pursue this on your own?
00:18:29
Speaker
Yeah, I read a lot of craft books. I really like craft books. When I first started teaching writing, you find your own limitations pretty quickly as a person who could explain things or have examples. And I felt like I'd always read them. And then when I started teaching, I've read a lot more of them. And there are some I really like, you know, that I think stylistically, maybe some of that. There's two by Tin House, the Writers Notebook 1 and 2. There are some examples drawn from in my book as well.
00:18:57
Speaker
that are really collections of lectures that were given at the Tin House Writers Workshop. And so they're very conversational, right? And they're very practical. And I think that that mode makes a lot of sense to me. It's less textbook-y, right? I think Benjamin Dreyer's, Dreyer's English is a fantastically built, welcoming, sort of warm book about grammar really in style. And I definitely looked at that as I was writing and thinking about how it was structured, probably because that book is structured in sort of
00:19:25
Speaker
has different parts for different things. And I thought it worked really well. But you feel like you're hanging out with Ben when you're reading it. You feel like you're with him in his warmth. And I think if you can try to make an on-page version of the person you are in the classroom, that seems to make a lot of sense. Better than pretending to be something else, right? So trying to have it in that mode seems important to me.
00:19:46
Speaker
Yeah, hopefully it's like a smarter version of the person I am in school, right? Yeah, the more polished version of yourself, the hologram version that you can just put up there and it's like, okay, that's it. What was the challenge for you to kind of carve out your own space amidst the craft bookshelf, if you will?
00:20:13
Speaker
It's funny because, of course, when you do the book proposal part, you want to talk to your agent about it. You have to do a little of that. Here's why it's different than everybody else. But I think the reason this book grew out of a craft talk that I used to give quite regularly that itself grew out of my own needs. If there had been a book like this about how to revise novels, I wouldn't have had to write one. So the development of this material really came out of feeling like there wasn't
00:20:41
Speaker
like a comprehensive, like very practical book about revision. Interestingly, in the last like month or two, I think a couple other like books on revision have come out. So maybe there was like a whole that other people are feeling. Peter Ho Davies just had one come out in the art of series from Grey Wolf, which I've only had a chance to dip into, but I really like very different approach. But like Peter Davies is great. It's really smart.
00:21:03
Speaker
Um, so it's good that there are sort of things around that, but I really did feel like revision is something that we were sort of taught that we needed to do, but we're not taught how to do for the most part. And so hopefully this is the result of me teaching myself how to do it and how to do it, you know, kind of throughout the whole process. And then that will be useful to other people as well.
00:21:25
Speaker
And Alison K. Williams came out with a great book on editing a few months ago called Seven Drafts and Subtitle of Source. And yours hinges on three drafts primarily. So how do you delineate when a draft is done? And then there's always kind of the little sub-draft within the draft. But how did you arrive at that?
00:21:50
Speaker
In particular, yeah. And you know, as you know, reading the book, the three drafts is really like three stages, right? And just, you know, for cover pithiness reasons, drafts is the right word. But, but I do think, you know, the three that I sort of focus on the book, which are, you know, sort of like the generative
00:22:06
Speaker
draft of like a first exploratory draft, a sort of narrative revision draft, refocus on plot, and then this sort of polishing revision of the third. Do you feel like the three big phases of work for me? Like, you know, but, you know, my novel, Appleseed, I think the last draft is number, number draft nine in my files, right? You know, so like, it's squishy, right? But these might be the three drafts before you send it to an agent or an editor or like your, you know, it's sort of like the three drafts that get me as far as I can go on my own.
00:22:35
Speaker
which might be where that metric actually is. How do you know what a draft is done? You know, I think one way to think about it, I think inside this book, the way to think of it is like, this is like the farthest you can go with the process you're doing here. Like another process is needed for like this next draft. I think there's also a version of drafting that is like,
00:22:56
Speaker
a new draft is like a new time you would show it to somebody else. And there is that kind of draft to you. There's like the, at the end of these three drafts for me is when I send it to my agent and then there's maybe like an agent draft. And then there's the draft you do with your editor, the draft you do with your copy editor and the draft page proof draft. And like there, you know, I do think there can be a, like when it goes to a new person and you complete that process with them, that's one way of thinking about drafts as well.
00:23:22
Speaker
And when I was reading the book too, I just got a sense of the titanic amount of attention that you pour into one particular book and how challenging it must be over time to try to come at your own work with fresh eyes somehow, given the attention that you advocate for to give to each phase of that process.
Drafting and Creativity in Writing
00:23:45
Speaker
So how have you come to
00:23:47
Speaker
the page with fresher eyes as each iteration of your book is manifesting. You know, some of it is just putting other things between the drafts, right, you know, that you're writing other things, you have other things to work on. So you do get these breaks from it. You know, there have been phases where I do not have other books coming out. But you know, like the book I'm writing now, I started when Appleseed was on
00:24:10
Speaker
submission and so I went through that whole editorial process while also writing this novel I'm working now. I finished Refuse to be Done during that process and so you're kind of bouncing back and forth between projects sometimes gives you fresh eyes by itself. It creates other challenges like what was I doing when I stopped? But you know, I do think some of it in the novel specifically weirdly is that it's very, very hard to hold the whole novel in your head.
00:24:34
Speaker
You know my last novel was the final version of it in print is like five hundred pages the one I'm working now is right now longer than that. I don't remember.
00:24:44
Speaker
tons of it, right? So you sort of, you can go back, I can go to a different part of the book with fresh eyes because I haven't seen it in six months, you know? So even inside the book, there's a lot of like taking a break from things coming back to things. So it can be pretty fresh. I think the other thing is really what I advocate for in like the third draft part of the book is like these kind of like layered approaches to revision that rather than trying to be like make the whole book good,
00:25:10
Speaker
which feels daunting and kind of a grind. It's like, I'm just gonna do a pastor work in the dialogue. I'm just gonna do a pastor work on chapter openings or something. And that kind of breaks things out of their expected order in certain ways, or it allows you to see things divorced from their context that can make it feel newer. And I think that's a way of like staying enthusiastic as you go. But yeah, I mean, there's always gonna be low parts writing a book. I mean, I think it's just doing anything for a couple of years will sometimes be boring, you know?
00:25:39
Speaker
Yeah, oh, yeah, and you know those messy middles of the draft like right when you've passed the honeymoon period of how Excited you are about the thing and then you're in that trough of oh, man. Is this just garbage or am I? It most likely is But are you just is like the energy of the honeymoon period has it just waned and I just have to endure or is it really bad and
00:26:05
Speaker
So it's like, you know, how have you managed to garner momentum in that middle part to push through and to get to the shoreline? Yeah, I mean, I think there's certainly something to be said just for not quitting. You know, I think the difference between having 90% of a draft and 100% of a draft is like the whole game, right? Like if you have a whole draft of a book, you have something to work with. And when you have part of one, you don't.
00:26:35
Speaker
uh, especially people writing their first book, you know, like if you can get all the way to the end, no matter what it is, you, you, you're in like a completely different place as a writer forever for having finished that first manuscript. So I think there's some push just to do that. I also think that, uh, I've learned over the years that the parts where you feel bored or distant from it are not even a sign that you're writing poorly. Like, uh, when I was writing my first novel, there was a month
00:26:59
Speaker
It took me like a year to write the first draft. And like say month six, month seven, I was like, I'm so bored. Is this good? What am I doing? But I just kept writing my, you know, couple hours a day. And I thought when this is all done, I'm going to look back at this part. It's going to be so bad. I'm going to do so much work here. And then when it was, when it was over and I reread the draft, I couldn't even really identify where that part was, right? It was more or less as good and as bad as the rest of the book.
00:27:25
Speaker
your own evaluation of your workday is not usually a good sign of how good of a job you had, right? Or how good job you did, yeah. Yeah, it's so hard to, especially when you're in that middle part, to then maybe not be seduced by a shiny new thing. Like when it's starting to get hard, you're like, oh, I have this other idea. There is something to be said for another sandbox, maybe just to unplug and maybe play somewhere else.
00:27:54
Speaker
But then it's a thing entirely different to then, okay, am I just trying to avoid this, or should I just push through? There's so much value in finishing something, and so few people, I think, like you were saying, so few people finish things.
00:28:12
Speaker
Even if it's not published, even if it doesn't see the light of day, I think there's just so much value and lessons learned from just learning to finish, and then worry about externalities after that. But my goodness, the lesson that comes from finishing is so important.
00:28:29
Speaker
wrote two novels before my first novel, one of which I never showed anybody, one I wrote with like a writing group, and they saw lots of it, probably not all of it, and neither of them I really tried to do anything with. I sort of knew they were practice novels to some extent, although I took them really seriously when I was doing them, right? But I sort of knew they weren't
00:28:48
Speaker
Um, they weren't the real thing, but I think having that experience of having written that much meant that when it was time to write the real first novel in that middle part, it was just, I mean, I knew I could type a hundred thousand words. Like that wasn't the issue. Right. And so I don't think I felt that that same, I wasn't daunted just by the task of like making that much stuff. You know, I'm teaching a novel writing class right now.
00:29:11
Speaker
Uh, where I make students start from, from zero, they all start from scratch and they write together and they have to write so much a week. And you know, the idea is that they'll go through the stages of novel drafting kind of as a group and hit the same walls and the same excitements. But really by the time they hit like 50 pages, you know, these are MFA students, most of them have never.
00:29:29
Speaker
had something that's 50 pages long before. When they get to a hundred, it's just all uncharted territory. And it can be really exciting and it can be really daunting. But I think for me, it's more exciting than it's not. There is that time, every time you get into that hard middle is still like, well, I'm in, I'm committed. I'm in the mess. And it's kind of a, I don't know, if you can live with the uncertainty, it can be a joy.
00:29:55
Speaker
I think an important point to underscore – and this came – I was first – this first came to me when I was doing my MFA a while ago, and I was shopping around this book of narrative nonfiction.
Unpublished Work and Enjoyment in Writing
00:30:07
Speaker
It just – it wasn't getting any nibbles.
00:30:10
Speaker
And I was just like hitting my head up against a wall. And a mentor of mine said, he's like, well, Brendan, sometimes we write books and they don't get published. It's just the way it is. And sometimes when you've spent years on something and you've worked that hard on it, it can be very hard pill to swallow to just be like, you know, it might not be published, but at least, you know, you had the experience of writing the book and you are, it wasn't wasted. The work wasn't wasted.
00:30:36
Speaker
I wonder if you've run into that with your own work and maybe with your students where you have to say, like, listen, you might finish a book and it might not be published and that sucks, but you're still a book better for your next book. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I have been lucky that the novels I have tried to sell I have sold, which is a good thing.
00:31:02
Speaker
I have a lot of, like, 100, 150-page novel starts that didn't turn out. You know, between In the House and Scrapper, I wrote two, like, starts like that. Between Scrapper and Appleseed, I wrote four. I assume now I have to write, like, eight before I get to the next real novel. You know, and some of those were just things that I, they just, they didn't have the legs to be a novel, right? They were never going to be ones. At least one I flinched from in a, like,
00:31:28
Speaker
Is this the right book for me to be writing, which is, I just feel sad about it. I've lost it for no reason except my own insecurity. I lost one book because I, as I did the research and was writing, I just realized I was out of my cultural depth that it was like something that I shouldn't write. And, uh, but that one, especially like I learned so much writing that book and like I did like,
00:31:49
Speaker
thinking and feeling that was really important to me like as a person and in my approach to the world. And I think if I hadn't written that half a novel that never became a thing that I spent like a year on, right? I'd be a different person right now. And I don't know, I feel that was a valuable experience, even if it was a waste of time in like another metric, right? But it was no way a waste of time.
00:32:11
Speaker
Right and you write to the you know what whatever keeps you writing that's the number one rule of the first draft so you know how it's such a such a simple declarative thing to say but it's like it's uh it's it's very hard to do so what keeps you writing during that first draft when uh when that's what you need to do is just just keep going.
00:32:31
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think I focus a lot on my own enjoyment in that. Like, what do I want to be doing? What I want to be writing? I don't worry a lot about whether the pieces are going to make sense or if they're built right.
00:32:43
Speaker
At that stage, I mean, I'm always trying to write the best I can but like that could mean a lot of different things in any given day, you know, I think days right where I amuse myself or I put something weird in a book that makes you go like ah, like who you know who came up with that, you know, that sort of feeling of sort of surprise that you had something in you that that is really great certainly
00:33:04
Speaker
Uh, a day where someone with some language are really excited about can, can power you for a long time. I think, you know, it's usually a good sign when I'm out like for a run the next day and I'm still like in the book and I'm still feeling it. And I can sort of feel that my brain's working on something. I have, I have an idea. I feel really close to it, but I don't know. I think there's lots of ways to stay excited about it. I think really one of my favorite, I don't even know if it's a trick, like one of the things I find sustaining.
00:33:29
Speaker
is that there's often, even in an early draft, which is a mess and incomplete, there'll be like some part of it that's like, feels like how I want the final book to feel. Or I'm like, if a whole book felt like that, I'd be really excited. I can remember in Scrapper, there was like a one paragraph scene where the two main characters were like playing old arcade games in a bar in downtown Detroit and just day drinking, right? And I was like,
00:33:54
Speaker
oh, the way this scene feels, when the book all feels like this, I'll be done. And I would just go and read that when I didn't know what I was doing. And it was just sort of like a touchstone of you're capable of doing this thing. And if you just keep trying, you will make more things that feel like this.
00:34:13
Speaker
Oh, that's great. To find that kind of, that's the tonality you're going for. And it's so almost ethereal. Like it's a guitar coming into tune. Like you can't really put your finger on it. It's just one of those things where like, oh, that was one more, one more crank. And the string, you're like, oh, okay. That's what it sounds like. My God, that sounds pretty good. Now we just need to keep the tuner there and keep going with that.
00:34:39
Speaker
I think that's right. It really is like a tuning fork paragraph, right? Like it's like a place you can go back to like find your, your sort of bearings. And it's almost always like inconsequential for me. It's not load bearing. It's not a plot point, right? It's just like something about the language and the, and the way character interacting or the way the setting, you know, the, I mean, it's really like a thing of tone or, or, or, um, uh, vibe in a certain way, right? Like if, like, if I can make it so it feels like this, this is the kind of book I would want to spend time with, you know?
00:35:07
Speaker
Oh, for sure. And I love the quote, one of the several quotes that you cite from Jane Smiley in, you know, she wrote, like, I believe that you either love the work or, looks like I typed it wrong, but you love the, life is a lot easier if you love the work, essentially. And, you know, you wrote, too, like, I hope if you got to this point in the book, like, you realize that I love the work.
00:35:28
Speaker
And I think that's so important to underscore because that's the thing you can control. So how did you come to just really learn to love the work and divorce that from those things you can't control?
00:35:42
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, sometimes I'm better at than others, right? I mean, like, as we all are, of course, because you do want, you do want the rewards too, obviously, everyone does. So it's hard not to do that. But I, I think one of the things I think about a lot is that 90% of the like, sort of refusal of your work or rejection of work or censorship of your work,
00:36:04
Speaker
probably happens at your own desk. Most of being told no is something people do before they get to an editor or an agent or a reviewer or a readership. We don't do things we want to do. I think a lot about so much of the process is for me and so much process is something only I experience that I should make it something that is enjoyable for me and fun for me and the other stuff
00:36:29
Speaker
work out. I also say like I think that's mostly been true like the books I wrote because the way I wanted them to write or for my own reasons have turned out to be the things other people want right or you're surprised to be like there are other people who are interested in this this you know weird way you see the world or connect with you the things about you that are the most unique. It's a paradox to me that the universal is in the specific.
00:36:53
Speaker
You know that you're sort of like the more deeply singular you go into your own thoughts and feelings and perceptions that easier it is for other people to sort of connect to them. Maybe not everyone but for like some people trying to aim to be acceptable as if almost always fails actually, you know.
00:37:11
Speaker
Oh, for sure. And I think that's especially true for memoir when, you know, and especially when you're lobbying, let's say, you know, a parent or something that you're writing about and like there feel a little raw and naked by something you might be sharing.
00:37:30
Speaker
And I've had this personal experience with that, and I have told my father about that, about being very specific. He just kind of took umbrage with a lot of things that I was writing, true as they were, or are. But I was just like, Dad, if a reader is picking this up, what will happen if I've done my job well enough?
00:37:51
Speaker
you and I are gonna be, we're gonna kind of dissolve into the background. And then the reader is gonna kind of overlay their experience over us. And we're just gonna be the mules carrying them through their own psychic experience. And I think that kind of gets to what you're saying. Like the more specific you can be, as raw as that feels to the critical people involved means that the reader can then transport themselves along with you.
00:38:14
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. You know, and I would say this does happen more reading nonfiction for me than it does reading fiction, but I sometimes see that place where someone's like got the like details of a scene or an experience down in this precise, unique sort of singular way, and then they lead to the like acceptable common interpretation of those events or something, right?
00:38:37
Speaker
And it's like, oh, there's a last second unwillingness to claim the thing you actually felt and you go to this thing that you know will be okay to say or palatable to say. And I'm always disappointed, obviously, when that happens. But I get why that happens. But it's interesting when someone has gathered the scene or the material
00:39:00
Speaker
in this like really raw way and then kind of papers over it with a more acceptable, or what you believe will be a more acceptable interpretation of it that ends up feeling kind of false that I wish they had stayed with the less friendly thing.
00:39:15
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And then there are other times too where sometimes you'll have that really, really true scene that rings true and then this could probably happen in fiction as well, but sometimes there's a tendency as a narrator to come in and kind of undercut and cut you off at the knees with a joke or just to take the reader out of it, whereas it takes a lot of restraint, but sometimes you just gotta let the scene do the heavy lifting and get out of the way.
00:39:40
Speaker
Maybe in the early drafts you can kind of explain things, but at the end you'll be like, you know what? I really gotta trust the reader here, even though I want to explain myself, I just gotta let the scene stay and let it talk.
00:39:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's, I mean, I think the way you said about the drafts is really part of it too. Like the explanation in an early draft is partly you explaining to yourself and you do have to do that work to a writer. So we think by writing and then the confusion is like these sentences, you worked really hard on explaining it. Do not have to stay in the book and it's hard to get rid of. I really see students do that novel drafting. They're just figuring out the world. So they're explaining. And so the, the, their logic's in the way of me as a reader, but it's totally okay in a first draft. And so it's, it's one of those like,
00:40:21
Speaker
I flag it, but I don't tell them to stop doing it, right? Because they do need to do it. My novels are full of explanations to myself in early drafts and hopefully very few of them in a final, because you want to make room for that reader's experience to set.
00:40:37
Speaker
And one thing I love about the book refuse to be done is how you balance your own experience with citing dozens of other authors and their approach to it, which really makes your process stand out and very well could have written something, and it wouldn't have been as good if you were just like, this is how I do it.
Balancing Perspectives and Community in Writing
00:40:59
Speaker
And you pulled in all those other voices. So what was the challenge for you and the balance of striking the balance between your process and also the process of all these other writers that we deeply admire?
00:41:12
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think there was some adjustment of that balance as it went on. And I think, you know, one of this is probably teaching, you know, you talk about your own process inevitably and your own ideas, but it never hurts to have an expert to rely on, right? I think sometimes being able to sort of give the idea in someone else's language is useful.
00:41:34
Speaker
I think it helps make the book to me even as the writer feel more conversational and more collaborative that it's not just, you know, that it's sort of like we're all in this together. We're all doing this thing. It feels like part of it. And I think some of it's just being honest, right? Like, I mean, very few of my ideas about writing are like generated from scratch to the page, right? You know, like they're hopefully I'm adding my own things and I'm bringing my own experiences. But of course, you know, a lot of what I know I learned
00:42:02
Speaker
from other people directly or from reading and writing them. You know, I think I think that changed in revising this book on revision was maybe the proportion of examples from my own process went up a little bit. And I think in the end, I'm really glad for that to have some of those like, this is what happened to me while I was writing this book. This is how I did this while writing this book. Not because I expect the reader to have read all those, but sometimes it's just,
00:42:28
Speaker
it's nice to take it out of the abstract, you know, and to sort of ground it in the experience of the person who's sharing, even if that's me, yeah. Yeah, and as you alluded to, like, you know, bringing all these other voices, it means kind of like we're all in this together, and that gets at the heart of how important it is to have community in this, and whether it's, you know, with your students and your classes, and you're getting them to write their own books, but writing together, writing in community,
00:42:56
Speaker
you know whether it's your great newsletter that you put out every every month or so like it's in service of a community so you know for you as a writer and an artist how important is it for you to be you know a contributing member of you know of a community at large that kind of gets you out of your own head
00:43:13
Speaker
Yeah, the getting your own head is a real part of it, right? I mean, that's definitely, for sure, part of the joy and the need. You know, I started writing seriously in my early 20s when I was dropped out of college and living in my parents' basement in rural Michigan, and it was not a writer-rich environment. You know, my first communities were online and then, you know, university and other places.
00:43:38
Speaker
I mean, I just wouldn't be here if I hadn't had those communities of people to talk to and to write with and to think with. And I know how important that is. And I think before there was any reason to read me, you know, like why would anyone, I didn't have books, I didn't have stories published, I didn't have things to sort of talk about in that way. And so I wrote about other people's books and I blogged about other people's books. And I, you know, and I think that sort of
00:44:02
Speaker
writing toward other people or about other people or for other people was a way of participating in the community that wasn't about me. And I think that's always felt very sustaining. The hardest part of being a community is that like, look at me, pay attention to me part, like that's a drag, you know, you might have to do it. It may be contractually obligated to do it, but it's not actually the part that's not enjoyable. But the part where you're bringing attention to other good people or supporting other good people or making
00:44:26
Speaker
opportunity for them, that's life-giving and feels really great. And so, I don't know, I find that very sustaining. Even when my work is going badly, the work I do for other people usually is going pretty well, and that feels exciting. Yeah, and sometimes, and by sometimes I almost mean most of the time, it can be hard to, you can start to get competitive and sometimes jealous, especially in this era of like social media and all this, you start seeing other, you know, very airbrushed versions of people's
00:44:55
Speaker
work and their successes, and you're like, fuck, you're measuring that up against, you know, when you're in that trough, that messy middle, you're like, god damn it, this sucks. And they're crushing, and then you start feeling like garbage, and it's just this never-ending downward spiral. So I wonder, for you, how have you handled those jealousy and those toxic feelings that creep in, and just process that and turn it into something more positive?
00:45:23
Speaker
Yes, all of that. Comparison is like the thief of joy, right? It's the absolute worst thing. I actually think 90% of writer's block is comparison. You just imagine other people are doing this better or easier or whatever. They're writing the right kind of book, you're writing the wrong kind of book, etc.
00:45:42
Speaker
But I think there's one practical thing, which is I try, if I'm feeling jealous, to stop and turn that into actual joy for the person. I joked with a friend that I will never see one of those publishers' marketplace screenshots on Twitter and not like it and share it. I'm just like, no matter what. Person X got $2 million advance. It's like, good for you.
00:46:08
Speaker
Good. And I am happy for you, right? Because it's not a zero-sum game. And I think one way to discharge your envy is to actually be happy for other people when they succeed. So that is part of it. And I think the other thing is sort of knowing that a lot of that doesn't really have to do with us. It doesn't have to do with the quality of the work that
00:46:29
Speaker
You know, a lot of the things that happen when the book's published make you feel sort of anxious or crazy, but the writing of the book does not. And so just like kind of keeping those things in their own spheres is good. I also spend a lot of time with other really smart other writers just by probably by teaching MFA students. And I have gotten a really good sort of firsthand look at many students who I think are probably more raw talent than I have deal with being surrounded by other people of equal raw talent and then watching them
00:46:59
Speaker
be hurt by their imposter syndrome or hurt by comparing this to other people. And it's always easier to see what not to do in other people. And sometimes, you know, watching that and helping them with that has given me more clarity about my own, which is not to say that I have not made myself insane.
00:47:16
Speaker
with sort of jealousy or envy or comparison or whatever. But I think I'm much, much better at it than I was in the past, partly by recognizing when it's happening and that I could choose not to have it happen. Yeah. It hit me hard in my early 30s, which would have been the early 2010s right around there.
00:47:39
Speaker
That's when social media was just starting to really seep into the bloodstream. And I was just really frustrated with where I was at. It just wasn't where I wanted to go. I was being like, all the people I admired seemed to be on this meteoric rise. And I still had these menial day jobs that just weren't putting me in the right place. And I was just like,
00:48:02
Speaker
God damn it, how did they get there? And I'm here. I know for sure that the people that I respect and revere, they weren't tying people's running shoes and fitting them for running shoes as I was. And it was just like, I wasted so much energy and bandwidth worrying about that instead of just like meticulously getting better at the work. And I just, I sometimes wish I could have those years back, but here we are. But you live and learn with that. It's just such an energy that does not burn clean.
00:48:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. And of course, totally understandable, right? Like there's no like, you know, it was wrong to feel that way. Yeah, I graduated from my MFA in 2010. And a couple years ago, at an AWP, I had a lunch with maybe like 10 people I went to school with who were the year, my year, the year before me, year after one of our professors. And it was the first time since we'd graduated where like, everybody had a couple books out or a book out, everybody had a job they more or less liked.
00:49:02
Speaker
could just feel how much calmer we were with each other, even, you know, like, it was sort of like, we all got the thing we were trying to get, you know, like, it's good, we can be calm. And it was different than the energy was five years ago, when the gaps were bigger between people. And it was different than it was in grad school, when we were like, real hungry and wondering what people were gonna do, you know, and it did feel like we could just like, be peers again, because like, it sort of worked out.
00:49:27
Speaker
And it's sort of sad that that ever wasn't the case, but there was a different energy to it that I've thought about a lot over the years. In those early years when you were in your parents' basement, how did you process that time to think beyond that and not get too weighed down by that?
Rewriting vs Revising for Improvement
00:49:51
Speaker
I mean, in some ways it's that I wasn't like I was aiming to be here then exactly, right? You know, I was just sort of, I think it was in some ways a little more in the moment, right? I was doing what I wanted to be doing. I was reading and writing a lot and partying a lot and working hard, but like I was good at what I did and I wasn't doing that. Didn't necessarily love living in my parents' basement, but you know, so it goes.
00:50:12
Speaker
and they didn't love me living there, and so it goes well. But it was okay, and it wasn't like a long phase. There was a point, and I think this has continued to serve me as well. It serves me very well in academia, I think, where to make myself feel sort of okay about having dropped out of school and doing this job is I just thought,
00:50:32
Speaker
Everybody, everybody has a job. It doesn't really matter what your job is. I always use two examples. They're not very good examples. I'm like, you could be the Pope or like a garbage collector. And like, either way, it's just like, you're a person with a job. And I'm like, I also am just a person with a job. I would just treat everyone well. And I would expect them to treat me well. And, and that serves you at a lot of different stages of life, you know, and, and
00:50:53
Speaker
I try not to spend a lot of time thinking about the way people are positioned above or below me or whatever those things mean. In the classroom, I try to treat my students as fellow writers. We're all writers. The other stuff is sort of separate from that. And I think that thinking has done a lot of good in my life. You don't have to be intimidated by people because they have something you don't. And you certainly are not better than people because you have something they don't.
00:51:21
Speaker
And I think that if you can hold that in your heart, you do a little better, which is, again, does not mean it doesn't get messy from time to time. But as an ideal, as a goal, it's done a lot for me. There's a part of the book, too, you say, you know, when in doubt, rewrite instead of revise. So how do you know what the difference is between those two?
00:51:44
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think maybe 90% of it's rewriting and a little bit of it's revising. Mostly, it's like a thing that's not made well is really hard to tinker into being a good thing. And I think that's what I thought it was when I was first starting out. I read a bad story, and then I would try to move the commas until it was a good story, which was not going to happen. That was not the problem with it.
00:52:06
Speaker
And I do think some of the frustration of a bad piece of writing can be undone by making it, again, you care about this thing, you love this thing you're trying to write, but it's turned out badly. Trying it again with the increased knowledge that you got from that try seems like a really smart way to proceed to me. You know, the first draft of something is something you wrote partly trying to figure out what it was and what it wanted to be and what the voice it was and what the opportunities in it were. And rewriting with all that knowledge
00:52:35
Speaker
It tends to be really great. For me, the real big leap in my own novel writing process is when some of my necessity figured out that I should rewrite second drafts completely. And the gain from that was so big. The second draft of In the House is so much better than the first draft that I wrote.
00:52:55
Speaker
that I thought, well, I'm going to do this for everything I ever write. Maybe one day I'll get one of those gift novels where you're just like, as it lay dying, get it and write it in six weeks while you're busy doing something else, and you're just like, cool, probably should get a Nobel Prize for that. But I don't know. That has not been my experience. And so rewriting is partly the process because it pays off so well. If I didn't have to do it, probably I wouldn't. But I don't know that I would
00:53:22
Speaker
Trust something I didn't rewrite at this point because the the leap is so big In that sort of second version, especially
00:53:31
Speaker
Yeah, I had inadvertently stumbled across just through my own experience of retyping an entire draft. And it was mainly because I was doing this memoir thing, and it was like, I think I might have to novelize it. But as I was retyping it, because I'm like, all right, let's just novelize it from, I had the split screen thing, the thing that you write about. The thing is, I almost didn't change any of the main story block elements, so it basically stayed a memoir.
00:54:00
Speaker
but I did retype the whole thing and I was just like wow what a great exercise laborious as hell but a great exercise Allison writes about it and you write about it too like maybe you can just speak to that experience daunting as it is but how valuable it can be
00:54:14
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think the, the real value in it is that, um, that it does force you to consider everything you've already done in this, like really, I mean, somebody's just mechanical laborious way. Like you might copy and paste a bad sentence or a bad paragraph. You might let it sort of ride and hope no one notices, but you will get tired of retyping your bad scenes. Like, you know what I mean? Like you're like, I'm going to make these better or I'm going to quit. Um, because it's miserable to retype bad pros.
00:54:41
Speaker
I also think like every novel, the distance between the two is bigger. Like, you know, as writing Appleseed, there was a point where I just stopped being able to use anything from the first draft. It had diverged too much. And that happened, the novel right now, I'm in that sort of second draft phase.
00:54:57
Speaker
And it also just like, it just becomes another book and that prose kind of falls away. I was feeling as I'm doing this, you guys have seen in my hands, your listeners won't be able to see, but thinking about like the booster rockets coming off a space shuttle or something. You just feel that like payload go away. And I can, I can really, I don't need that anymore. I'm in space. It's good.
00:55:16
Speaker
And I really feel that difference. So so I think you know again, it's sort of the experience has been really good it's interesting that I know a lot of people who do it and who sort of live and die by it and People who've never tried it feel really resistant to it and I feel like that makes sense But I feel like anything's worth the try none of this stuff is like the only way to do it like I think you have nothing to lose either so something's not good enough and
00:55:39
Speaker
Why not try doing it again? Like, I mean, it's, there seems that there's no other than time, but you have a lot of time. And so, uh, yeah, I don't know. I think it's worth doing. I also really do think that there is like the brain you have when you're rewriting it is a different brain than you had when you wrote it. And so it sees different things and notices different things and brings new things to the table. You know, if you're anyone who's writing a book right now, who started it in 2019.
00:56:04
Speaker
started a book pre-pandemic in the Trump era and is revising it during the 2020 election and the pandemic and is now rewriting still into this period of time. The novel I'm working on right now, I accidentally started the second draft rewrite of it on January 6th, which turned out to be a weird day. And I hit like a big word milestone today as the Ukraine invasion started and was like, you just see these like a different person
00:56:33
Speaker
like history is unfolding around you, your life is unfolding around you, and the person who's thinking through the problems of the draft of any particular day is not the same as the person who wrote that thing you're rewriting. It actually turns out to be hugely advantageous for the work, I think.
00:56:48
Speaker
Yeah, and you write, too, about how novels can be sometimes weighed down by a lot of backstory. And this is especially true for nonfiction, too, when you're profiling people. You do a lot of this reporting and interviewing, and you're like, yeah, I got to throw in all this backstory. But you always have to be asking yourself, is this in service of forward propulsion? So how have you, over the years, when you feel like something is weighed down by too much of that backstory,
00:57:17
Speaker
start to parse some of that out and, you know, put the put the manuscript on a treadmill as it were. Yeah, I would say that I try to cut
00:57:27
Speaker
Absolutely as much backstory as I can. I'm pretty backstory adverse most of the time in fiction, especially like flashbacks and scene, which I think just creates so much narrative drag that they're hard to justify most of the time. But I do write a lot of backstory. And I think it's kind of like the explanation thing earlier. You're trying to get to know the character. You're trying to get to know the setting. You're trying to get to know things that happened in the past. So in the best way for if you're a writer who thinks by writing like I am, you write stuff.
00:57:57
Speaker
Just today I was working on, I had a lot of fun writing a backstory scene for something that happens like 300 years before like the timeline novel. There is no way these scenes are going to be in the story. Like I'm inventing new characters so I can see this part of the history through them. And I'm like, no way, no way this is part of the book, but it's part of the writing of the book. And it will be an invisible part of the experience of the book. But believing that it needs to be there,
00:58:23
Speaker
is probably a mistake. And even as I'm writing it, I sort of know that like I'm, I'm, I'm exploring the novel and the world of the novel, but that's different than everything I write has to go in the book. So the backstory of right can be super important. And it's just the iceberg theory really, right? You're writing the iceberg and later you throw away the iceberg, which we shouldn't do in real life, but in writing is good, you know, more icebergs in real life, less on the page.
00:58:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's like when actors, they develop backstory for their character that's not in the script. And it helps them access, it helps animate the actual things that's on camera, even though we never know. But having that pulse of the backstory helps inform that work, though the viewer never sees it. It's kind of the same principle.
00:59:14
Speaker
I really feel that with world building information sometimes in the kind of speculative work I do, and you're figuring something out of the world and you do all this writing about it, and you can see it's like these 10 pages of exhibition cannot be in the novel. And then you go write a scene in which a character is clearly just acting as if they know all that, or they're drawing on it in dialogue, and you're like, oh, this person now lives in a world in which people know all that, and I'll just go,
00:59:42
Speaker
cut it all out. It's like wonderful. But I had to write it to get to that place where characters could act from the knowledge of it. And it is really amazing to feel that. Like this is a person who knows that thing. I spent all those pages
00:59:55
Speaker
dreaming up and now they no longer have to be in the actual book because they're in this character's like embodied experience inside the novel. The novel's gone to become immersive instead of expositional. And I think like that turn is really a delight and it is hard to force. But when it happens, it sort of means that that that exposition or that backstory is like sunk down to your level of like consciousness creation for characters. It's pretty cool.
01:00:22
Speaker
Oh, I love that. That's great. Well, Matt, I want to be mindful of your time. This was wonderful to speak to you. I so greatly admire this book you've written, and it's making me really excited to get into the library of novels you've written so far. So I just want to thank you so much for hopping on the show, talking some shop, and I wish you the best of luck with this book. It's a wonderful book. Thank you so much, Brendan. I appreciate it. Have a great day.
01:00:56
Speaker
Alas, we've come to the end. Hey, Matt Bell, thank you. Thank you for coming on this podcast. Thanks for making it a smarter place to hang. The name of the book, again, is Refuse to be Done. How to Write a... How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts. It's published by Soho. Subscribe to the show so you don't even have to think about it. Automate that shit. We're everywhere, man, seeing efforts.
01:01:23
Speaker
the world around the World Wide Web. If you have a moment, leave a kind review. Apple Podcast is the best place to leave a review, but you can leave ratings on Spotify as well. I'm not even sure why I keep recording these parting shots. I think somewhere close to 0% listen to this far in any podcast, which is very demoralizing and dispiriting.
01:01:44
Speaker
The few analytics that I have are not promising, but I do it anyway. I guess I need to do it for myself if nobody else talking into this microphone, looking at a monitor, staring at the wall.
01:02:01
Speaker
It's a little pot of gold. At the end of the CNF and rainbow, we adopted a new dog. That's the intern I was referring to at the top of the show who grossly overestimated the amount of books Matt wrote. But it's close, but she was off by a few thousand.
01:02:18
Speaker
Anyway, her name is Kevin. She's a German Shepherd mix. They say she's about 10 years old. If she is, in fact, 10, she's pretty damn spry for 10. She's very sweet. She's like a little deer. She's got a very doe-like face, very narrow face. Yeah, she's adorable. Yes and no, of course she's going to have antlers come Christmas time. At first, Hank was like, this is bullshit. I had to reassure him that he's still the executive producer of the podcast and that Kevin is an intern for now.
01:02:47
Speaker
She gets us mud water for the king. Yes, I'm trying out mud water. It's got more in common with tea than coffee. It's got 1 7th the caffeine of coffee. And it's more like a chai tea in a way. Got some mushroom stuff in there too.
01:03:06
Speaker
It's okay. I'm not crazy about the flavor, but I'm going to tinker with some ways to make it a little more tasty. It takes some getting used to. Trying to cut down on things that are making my level of anxiety, which is by no means crippling, not as bad as some in the world, but probably
01:03:25
Speaker
more heightened than the average dog than the average bear and I'm doing a few things that I think heavily contributed to the heavy anxiety which is right now this is what I'm doing to mitigate it which is not drinking alcohol
01:03:41
Speaker
still meditating a lot, time blocking my planner and stuff so I don't contact shift like crazy and I stay on point, take some decision fatigue out of the routine, and cutting back on caffeine is kind of the other thing. Not to mention keeping up with the exercise you routinely do and then trying to get a good solid, some solid sack time.
01:04:05
Speaker
I tell ya, there's nothing better than waking up on a Saturday or Sunday without a hangover, or beer breath, or... Oh, isn't it nice that we didn't just spend $100 at the breweries this weekend?
01:04:17
Speaker
Yeah, the good stuff is pretty spendy. And then you have a few of those and then you're like, yeah, those tater tots seem good. And then you eat those and you're like, wow, hummus plate sounds pretty cool too. And then before you know it, you're going out of there with a growler and you drink that at home while you're watching School of Chocolate. And then before you know it, you're feeling like crap. And I just don't want to feel like crap anymore. All this is to say that we got a new dog.
01:04:47
Speaker
We good? Okay, stay wild seeing efforts. And you know what I say, if you can't do interviews. See ya.