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Episode 70—Erica Westly on Softball and Structure
125 Plays7 years ago
Erica Westly, this week's guest, says, “I try to picture myself telling the story to someone at the bus stop." It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast where I speak to the world’s best artists about creating works of nonfiction. Leaders in the world of narrative journalism, memoir, essay, radio, and documentary film share their tools and tricks with you so you can improve your own work. Today I’m happy to introduce you to Erica Westly, @westlyer on Twitter, a freelance journalist based out of Chicago. She’s also the author of Fastpitch: The Untold History of Softball and the Women Who Made the Game. It is published by Touchstone. We talk a lot about Erica’s career moves and pivots, how she worked through the titanic research effort she did on the book, and also how the book was kind of her last-ditch try at writing true stories. But before we get to that I want to thank the 19 folks who have left five-star ratings and reviews of the podcast. That’s incredibly generous and kind. Just last night, in a span of five minutes, I left reviews for Tim Ferriss, Chase Jarvis, Brian Koppelman, three of my favorite interviewers, on iTunes. They don’t need my help, but if I’m going to ask y’all for reviews, I better be leaving reviews too. Let’s keep adding to the total because the more we get, the more visible the podcast will be, and the more people we can reach so that we’re empowering a community of people eager to do this type of creative work, to tell true stories that connect us. Erica grew up in North Carolina, studied dance, but pivoted to sciences, and ultimate journalism, something that finally clicked for her. We pick up the conversation where she feels most engaged in the creative process.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:00:00
Speaker
You've got to understand something. I'm on this cold brew high putting together this week's episode because sometimes things don't come together until the last minute and you're hustling and you're so tired that you feel drunk. But here we are. Man. So how are you?
00:00:19
Speaker
That's right. It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, where I speak with the world's best artists about creating works of nonfiction, leaders in the world of narrative journalism, memoir, essay, radio, and documentary film. Share their tools and tricks with you so you can improve your own work. Today, I'm happy to introduce you to Erica Westley.
00:00:49
Speaker
She's a freelance journalist based out of Chicago. She's also the author of Fast Pitch, The Untold History of Softball, and The Women Who Made the Game. It's published by Touchstone.
Erica's Career and Research Journey
00:01:02
Speaker
We talk a lot about Erica's career moves and pivots, how she worked through the Titanic research effort she did on the book, and also how the book was kind of her last-ditch try at writing true stories.
00:01:16
Speaker
But before we get to that, I want to thank the 19 folks who have left five star reviews and ratings on iTunes for the podcast. That's incredibly generous and kind. Just last night in a span of five minutes, I left reviews for Tim Ferriss, Chase Jarvis, and Brian Koppelman, three of my favorite interviewers on iTunes.
00:01:37
Speaker
They don't need my help, but if I'm gonna ask y'all for reviews, I better be leaving reviews too, you know? So let's keep adding to the total because the more we get, the more visible the podcast will be and the more people we can reach so that we're empowering a community of people eager to do this type of creative work to tell true stories that connect us, you know?
00:01:58
Speaker
But back to episode 70 with Erica Wesley. She grew up in North Carolina, studied dance, but pivoted to sciences and ultimately journalism, something that finally clicked with her. We pick up the conversation where she feels most engaged in the creative process.
00:02:16
Speaker
Especially now that I do more historical research, I like digging through old newspapers and archives and just that sense of discovery when you come across a story that you had no idea existed. Certainly when I was doing the softball history research.
00:02:35
Speaker
It's like you're digging a tunnel and you just keep coming across wonderment after wonderment. I really love that process. I think the hard part is finding a stopping point and really piecing it together so that it becomes a logical project.
00:02:56
Speaker
I think if I didn't have deadlines or tangible projects to complete, it would be easy to just kind of keep digging endlessly because I do really enjoy that research process.
00:03:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's a hard line to tow because you can feel, if you just get a little more research, the story would be that much better until you realize that the more research you're doing, ultimately what you're doing is kind of just hiding from the next phase of the project.
00:03:31
Speaker
Bronwyn Dickey and Susan Arlene, they talk about when you know the research is done basically when you see yourself coming the other way. You almost are more of an expert than anyone you've spoken to because you've spoken to so many people or just gone through so many rabbit holes. So with fast pitch, how did you know you were finally done and ready to really start stitching this all together?
Focus on Women's Softball History
00:03:59
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that that holds true. I've heard John McPhee say that too, that when you start talking to people and doing interviews and you find that you're
00:04:14
Speaker
not getting any new information and I mean that didn't necessarily I think with the such a big project like the softball history, I still found myself learning and I did have to kind of cut myself off at a certain point.
00:04:29
Speaker
But my narrow focus in terms of the main characters I knew I wanted to focus on and kind of the main decades, which for me was the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, I did reach a point where I felt I had read all of the newspaper articles that I could find. And I think there's also just kind of
00:04:54
Speaker
a hard to describe feeling as a writer where you just know the story is complete or it feels complete and you sort of don't want to mess with that I think when you have that feeling where you just kind of know that everything is in line, kind of makes a complete narrative.
00:05:14
Speaker
So how did you find Bertha and Joan Joyce? How did you arrive at Fast Pitch? What came first? Did you like, you wanted to write a softball history or did you like stumble across Bertha and then realize that there was this whole can of worms to go down? So how did you come to it? I think, you know, I originally, so I grew up
00:05:40
Speaker
focused on dance, but my my father was a huge baseball fan. So baseball was always around in my in my house. And I didn't grow up with with softball at all, but sort of got into it just watching the college tournament on TV and some of the Olympics coverage as well. And I was just captivated by the windmill pitching and just the differences from baseball and
00:06:09
Speaker
the subtle differences but I thought you know it was a faster game and I mean the bases are closer together and there's also seven innings instead of nine but I mean I think obviously the big draw for me was that women played it you know and unlike baseball and so I thought it was this cool women's sport and
00:06:29
Speaker
I only knew it as a women's only sport. I hadn't realized until I started working on this book that men had played it, you know, that it had this long history as being a sport for both men and women.
00:06:41
Speaker
But originally I think I wanted, I was really captivated by the college tournament. They seem to have this kind of different, there were all these chairs and this whole dugout culture that exists in college softball and there's lots of art with the eye black that they wear when it's sunny out to chill their eyes so they'll meet.
00:07:04
Speaker
different shapes and sometimes like the school letters on their faces with the eye black and different hairstyles that they would wear as a team. And so I was kind of looking actually at doing more of a Friday night lights for softball. I think that was my original idea and I didn't have any more specifics than that. But once I started looking into it more, I found myself digging more into the history because I really
00:07:32
Speaker
didn't know any of it going in, and that led to the break-ups, which was the team that Bertha and Joan both played for, and it was kind of this Connecticut dynasty.
Discovering Key Softball Stories
00:07:46
Speaker
I was fortunate in that that team still exists, obviously not exactly
00:07:52
Speaker
in the same way that it did back in the 1950s, but it still exists and they have a website and it had some photos and that was enough of a teaser for me to just keep digging in and trying to figure out who these players were and what the stories were that led to this team. And I think that led to me discovering other teams and just peeling back the layers until I realized
00:08:21
Speaker
that it was kind of the first project that I kind of felt had to be a book. And I had always wanted to write books. And that was kind of always my goal even once I started in journalism. And this was sort of the first story I'd come across where it felt like a book to me right away.
00:08:44
Speaker
It just felt like bookie, like this needed, it was just that thing. Most of the other journalists I knew who wrote books, it had come from a magazine feature that they had written.
00:08:57
Speaker
I just hadn't written any magazine articles that felt like they needed to be a book, you know, and I didn't want to force it. And so I was sort of just looking for, you know, I hadn't written about sports much at all at that point.
00:09:15
Speaker
I think just the history was so rich and I mean and when I looked I couldn't find any books about softball history written for a general audience that included all of those stories and I also wanted to tell the story of softball getting ejected from the Olympics and so it was to me there just wasn't an article a way to tie that all together in a single article.
00:09:37
Speaker
it must have been like really like heart racing in a way as you were doing research for this and then realizing that nothing of this nature had been done it must have just been
00:09:53
Speaker
like holy shit like I can't believe nothing like this has been done and I did you find yourself having to slow yourself down so you didn't miss any beats and miss any miss any of this research because like you realize that you were kind of the spearhead of a book of this nature
00:10:11
Speaker
I think most I tried to honor the stories of the characters, the women that I chose to focus on, but I did it with the idea that this is the first one and then I think with the hope that it would
00:10:27
Speaker
open it up for other people to maybe write even more focused stories. I did feel that I needed to capture the breadth of the whole softball story and its evolution as a sport. But I think going forward, there could be a lot more specific stories, maybe about just one of those teams or even more focused on just one of the players. I think I did feel sort of
00:10:52
Speaker
obligated in a way to to cover everything, because so much of it was unknown. And to me, it kind of hinged, you know, you needed the context to to understand the Olympic story and the college softball story as well. And so much of that was unknown, I thought, you know, at least this book kind of can be a foundation, maybe, and then
00:11:18
Speaker
going forward there could be more focus on some of the specific areas you know within this huge story it plays out in in a lot of ways kind of like the sport itself is the main character if you will and it's like a real almost this this tragedy it's this long this long burn this line and then finally the it's it's crowning achievement of making it to the olympics you know it took
00:11:44
Speaker
decades upon decades to get that kind of recognition and then it just within within 10 years of its inception the Olympics it was gone it was just like wow it took so long to get there got there and then got stabbed in the back I couldn't it's just like I couldn't I couldn't believe it
00:12:01
Speaker
Yeah, it's a bummer. I think a lot of at the heart, you know, it's true. I did see kind of the evolution of the sport as the main narrative. So the sport is sort of the main character. And I think if that's
00:12:21
Speaker
by that logic, then baseball is sort of this other character that's always there. And it's what kind of makes softball perplexing to this day. And it certainly influenced, it's the main reason that softball got ejected from the Olympics. But I mean, you could also say it's the main reason it was in the Olympics in the first place, because softball got added after baseball was already there. And you kind of, I think it's a hard part of softball.
00:12:49
Speaker
You can't escape its
Softball vs Baseball in the Olympics
00:12:51
Speaker
relationship with baseball and baseball is not going away. It's kind of always there and I think it's an interesting part of the sport because we don't have
00:13:04
Speaker
we don't have cricket or you know, but I mean, we don't have to I can't think of another example where you have a very similar sport, you know, existing in the same space, like there's not an alternative basketball that that exists. And it's hard to find places for both. And I think that's part of the struggle of being a softball is it's, it's a story of a sport that's in the shadow of another sport that's very similar.
00:13:30
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. When you were writing the book and researching it, what surprised you the most throughout the process?
00:13:43
Speaker
I think there was so much, I mean it was one of those really, I think again with the discovery process kind of keeping you maybe too long in the research stage sometimes. But I think the biggest thing was the company sponsored teams and just realizing how huge the amateur softball scene was and how it really was
00:14:06
Speaker
professional in what we would call now semi-pro. And just the idea, Bertha Reagan Tiki is kind of the main character, the main player I talk about in the book because she had an incredibly long athletic career.
00:14:22
Speaker
And just the fact that someone like her in the 1950s would be recruited to play for this company team and flown across the country from California to Connecticut to play on this company-sponsored softball team, I think that kind of blew my mind. There were also these stories of this brewery-sponsored team in New Orleans that
00:14:43
Speaker
kind of did the same thing recruiting players, women from all around the country starting in the 1930s to play softball and basically pay them salaries, not akin to the top professional athletes, but pretty close and also giving them jobs and relocation expenses. I think that those opportunities existed and that those teams were so competitive and so popular, it did really blow my mind.
00:15:13
Speaker
When you were writing the book and everything, did you realize, or did it also kind of surprise you? Did you just realize that? It was like there were a lot of overlaps to what's happening today, especially we say with college athletics, this quote unquote, this amateurism that NCAA tries to hide behind. And when it went in, in fact, it's just they're practically pros. And oftentimes they are, in some ways, getting paid.
00:15:38
Speaker
in some manner or form. But did you notice all these parallels between 1950s, 60s women's softball to even today in modern collegiate athletics? Yeah, absolutely. It's true with the Olympics as well, which of course they eventually modified it so that you could be a professional athlete and compete in the Olympics. But for a long time, that wasn't the case.
00:16:08
Speaker
And tennis was that way as well. There was this kind of old British notion that sports should be played by gentlemen amateurs. And the idea of playing for money was crass. And we eventually started having professional sports. Now, I think,
00:16:29
Speaker
you see that in the US play out certainly with college sports. And it is kind of a unique setup where we've tried to preserve these amateur sports. I personally feel that sports, you know, anything that's inherently competitive, it's hard to contain the professionalism. I think it's a natural byproduct and trying to contain it, it's a losing battle. And so I'm
00:17:00
Speaker
I think more in favor of what happens in other countries, which is where you would, if you were a star athlete, you would go straight from high school and possibly even younger than high school and have the opportunity to play sports professionally just right off the bat. And I think that's how dance works, especially ballet. That's how it works as well because you're
00:17:27
Speaker
You have a short period where you're going to be healthy, your injury is always an issue. And so, um, and I think with softball, it's an interesting story where there were always players who wanted to take it to the professional level. And there was always an active effort by.
00:17:46
Speaker
the main organization that oversaw the sport of trying to clamp down on that and kicking out players who had kind of a whiff of playing for money. But of course, there was always, similar to the college game that you see now, there was always money behind the scenes where you have these company-sponsored teams. So you have players getting paid in the form of perks and salaried positions at the company. And so it's not really, it's still professional.
00:18:17
Speaker
So at the time you started the research of the book and you realized that this was something that you wanted to take straight to the book length. Skip, you declared for the draft out of high school, you were going pro with this. Skip in college, going pro. Where did you, or where did the confidence come from?
00:18:44
Speaker
to attack this as a book without going shorter first. How did you make that approach and where did you find that confidence to do it and to pull it off, which you ultimately did?
00:18:56
Speaker
Yeah, I think just to keep going with the sports analogy is sort of my Hail Mary. I mean, I was at a point where I was dissatisfied with a lot of the magazine work I had been doing and I was struggling to do the types of articles I wanted to do. And I felt like
00:19:17
Speaker
doing a book project was sort of my last hope for getting to do the type of writing I wanted to do. I mean, I so I was kind of it kind of came from a place of desperation. And I, through happenstance met an agent, and I think in just casually talking to her not this is before I really had anything together with this softball book, but
00:19:47
Speaker
I think she was the one who really made me realize that I didn't have to have that magazine article and then a book coming from there, that I could maybe carve out my own path and just go straight to a book. I mean, she didn't actually give me that advice or say that. I just sort of, I think, read into it what I wanted to or heard what I wanted to hear.
00:20:12
Speaker
That's where I had the initial confidence. And then it was sort of just trying it and seeing if I was, I felt like I needed to see it through until, so I did, it took me a long time to find an agent and there was only one publisher who said yes in the end. But I think
00:20:34
Speaker
I did kind of put the extra effort into trying to make it work because I felt like if it didn't, I was potentially done with journalistic writing. And I wasn't sure what I was going to do. But I think it would have been a big turning point. And so I did sort of really try to work hard on the proposal and putting everything into trying to make that book project work.
00:21:02
Speaker
So let's unpack that a little bit. So you were heading into the book project, you were pretty, as you said, dissatisfied with the writing you were doing or the style or that nature of freelancing or if you were a staff writer somewhere. What did that dissatisfaction
Freelancing and Creative Challenges
00:21:21
Speaker
look like? Why were you so, for lack of a better term, upset with what you were doing and maybe just forced to do as just a way to make ends meet?
00:21:31
Speaker
Yeah, I think I had been working primarily as a freelancer for at least five years by that point.
00:21:44
Speaker
A lot of it was just making ends meet and doing. And even that, I think the pitch process can be pretty grueling. And a lot of times that's even for articles I didn't necessarily want to write in the first place, but we're just doing to make ends meet. And the idea was that I was supposed to be doing this other thing that was more satisfying on the side, but that wasn't happening or it wasn't working out. And a lot of the magazines, I think I originally
00:22:12
Speaker
I think it's perhaps inevitable as you grow as a writer, the magazine articles or the type of writing you maybe thought you wanted to do or aspired to do becomes less appealing. I started to see that a lot of the magazine features I originally thought in magazines, not that I want to trash any of these magazines, but to me,
00:22:36
Speaker
they felt formulaic and not, if they were going to be the creative expression I aspire to, then they weren't creative enough, you know, for what I wanted to do. I just, I didn't feel like even in the magazine feature sphere that I thought I had been working towards that whole time, there wasn't really an example of
00:23:01
Speaker
at that point of articles that I really wanted to do, if that makes sense. And so I think the frustration was coming from the most of the articles I was doing were just I was making a lot of compromises for some of the features I was getting to do and just wasn't happy with what I was producing as a writer and then also not making any money. You know, you're struggling financially. It's supposed to be for
00:23:28
Speaker
This other purpose, you know that you're you're doing satisfying work and then when you realize the work isn't satisfying then I think that was where I was at at that point when I I started instead of waiting to get it to do a book I decided I was just gonna try it because I kind of had nothing to lose I guess because I wasn't I
00:23:50
Speaker
succeeding at magazines either so you might as well just go for it. Yeah, I can kind of attest to that too. There were a few years ago I was doing a lot of stuff like slideshow type stuff for Bleacher Report. I did a lot of that stuff and I'm thankful for it.
00:24:12
Speaker
It wasn't like great money, but it was something I could do from my home press box. I would be doing winners and losers from the Coca-Cola 600. I did a lot of NASCAR. I write mainly about horse racing a lot, so that's how they first approached me in 2012 or whatever to do some Triple Crown stuff. But it really... I'm like, wow.
00:24:35
Speaker
the people I admire doing the writing I admire, not a single one of them was doing a slideshow of winners and losers from day one at Wimbledon. And it's like, No, I've done tons of slideshows. I mean, yeah, and, and the infographics, I mean, a lot of times
00:24:56
Speaker
The writing takes a back seat and you're not even really writing that many words when you're young. It's interesting work, but I think after a few years, you know, if writing is your priority, I think you have to find a way to do something else.
00:25:14
Speaker
Yeah, you realize that the writing of Slideshow is its own kind of writing beast and it wasn't even, I was just writing to a form and it's not even journalism. You're like piggybacking on other people's journalism, which just annoyed me. Like it was, like I had to like use quotes in third party references and it was like, well, I'm just piggybacking on the work other people are doing. And it's just like, I want to be doing the work.
00:25:40
Speaker
I don't want to just be cutting and pasting and then hyperlinking and aggregating. I didn't get into that for that. It was an easy check with no commute. I was doing it all from home. In that sense, when you factor wear and tear on a car versus just being able to stay on your couch, it was easy but not necessarily satisfying. I can attest to where you were in that sense.
00:26:10
Speaker
Right and I think there is I mean that is the challenge of going the freelance route which so many of us are you know you kind of have to but I think in historically the staff writer positions there's more of a path for where you can grow
00:26:30
Speaker
as a writer and as a reporter. And when you're freelance, you are kind of in a position of having to figure that out on your own. And it's easy to just keep ending up in the same place and not necessarily having a path for growth because the publications you're writing for aren't going to establish that for you.
00:26:56
Speaker
Even if you are actively trying to do it yourself, it's not that easy or simple to set up.
00:27:03
Speaker
Yeah, I tried to rationalize it in a sense. Like, OK, this is a little thing. Make a little money so you can keep making your art. But even then, it just ends up taking so much of your time away that you just need to kind of, I'd rather have maybe like a day job in retail somewhere that allows me to have some steady income. And I'm lucky my wife has the health insurance and everything, so I don't have to worry about that. I'm lucky in that sense. But yeah, I might as well just have
00:27:33
Speaker
some sort of day job that doesn't take too much mental RAM and then be able to do the work that is exciting to me. Like, you know, if I were able to pursue a book of the nature that you just wrote, like, oh, that would be satisfying. And you said it was your last hope. So that was...
00:27:53
Speaker
You know what was that like knowing it maybe didn't know your next steps after that but given that it was your Hail Mary your last hope. You know what what might you have done if it didn't feel as good as it ended up feeling. You know I'm not sure I think there's always that tendency you were.
00:28:11
Speaker
I want to go in a complete different direction. Writing for me is what I want to do with my time. I think I would have gone the more literary route.
00:28:29
Speaker
I possibly would have tried to get into maybe fiction or just other types of writing. I don't know if I was completely committed. I'm committed to nonfiction writing now. I think I maybe was more open to other genres then, but I think I would have tried to find a different place for me in the writing world. Just experiment until something worked out.
00:28:53
Speaker
Yeah, I know what you mean like I've figured to like well if I'm not gonna make any money writing nonfiction and sometimes it's not fun and I get burned out like by writing fiction is kind of fun like if I'm just not gonna make any money in either one I might as well choose the fun one.
00:29:08
Speaker
Yeah, I think, you know, I had read, I know that poets, for example, like a lot of them do that exact thing you were talking about where you work at Whole Foods or, you know, a deli, and it's understood that
00:29:25
Speaker
your art isn't going to support you financially. But you so you find a job that gives you some financial stability, but gives you the time to work on your writing or on on what you want to do as an artist. I just hadn't going into journalism, I sort of mistakenly thought that that was the financially stable choice to make going into writing as a career. And I think, you know, I looked at
00:29:53
Speaker
George Orwell and Hemingway and all of these writers from the past is like, oh, you know, journalism is the stable thing. And it is perhaps compared to poetry. But I think I found myself rethinking that after freelancing for a few years and
00:30:08
Speaker
and what i what i found to with the the idea it's too bad that you know yeah menial day jobs get are like there's kinda like a stigma especially with people like us who've got to have a college in advance degrees and then have my it's too bad there is that stigma attached to day jobs because
00:30:30
Speaker
that actually puts you out in the world with people and you can overlap with them and then you can talk to them and that's how you actually, instead of being insulated in maybe an academic environment where you're just around a very similar uniform intelligence, you can be out overlapping with all kinds of different people and those are where the stories are. So it's too bad that it kind of gets shit on to have
00:30:56
Speaker
a retail job and then doing your writing even narrative non-fiction on on the side because that's where that's where you're gonna find the stories that's how my first book up published i was selling shoes and i was sitting across from someone who knew an editor and she asked me what up what else i did i told her i wrote this you know i had this book i had written on spec and a few months later like yet the book was green lighted so it's like that wouldn't have happened if i was maybe in the academic world that happened cuz i was
00:31:25
Speaker
putting running shoes on her feet. So it's, I don't know, I kind of wish it wasn't as, I don't know, frowned upon or maybe just looked down upon, you know? Yeah, I think the challenge is a lot of those jobs are, I mean, they can be physically demanding. I think as you get older, it's hard. I mean, I think like for even just me speaking personally, I think don't
00:31:52
Speaker
feel like I'm quite up for being on my feet all day. Obviously, there's plenty of people who are in positions where they do have to do that. It's hard on the body and that's a whole separate issue. I hear what you're saying.
00:32:11
Speaker
It was a big rethinking journalism as even being an artistic form of writing or that it could be it did kind of make me to see the field in a different way because I think I went into it maybe with some entitlement thinking that that
00:32:28
Speaker
Writing deserves to earn an income, but I think when you really think about the type of work, especially if you're talking about doing satisfying writing that's not just about delivering information to the public in the easiest way possible,
00:32:44
Speaker
And by easy, I mean easy to digest, you know, where clarity and just having the information there, the most important information, you know, that the public wants or needs, you know, with that as your basic purpose. If you want as a writer to do that, but in a more artistic way or something that's kind of more personal to you, I think you do have to rethink
00:33:08
Speaker
the financial component and how, yeah, I don't know. I think that does put you more in the category of an artistic writer who, I mean, you can say that society could ascribe a certain value to that type of writing and want to support it as an art. But I think it's also sort of a personal choice, you know, that you're making of its
00:33:29
Speaker
especially I think in the US just because of the way things are set up, the burden is kind of on you to try to figure out how to make the money part of it work. So where are you turning these days for the writing that gets you jacked up and the writing that you want to pursue and keep doing?
00:33:48
Speaker
I do find myself turning to literary journals more and more and I wish that there were more that
00:34:00
Speaker
that allowed for all different types of nonfiction, because so many of them tend to be fiction and poetry first. And then the nonfiction is so often personal essays and not kind of more than that, because I think, you know, and certainly the writing I want to do, I think is inherently journalistic or journalism influenced just because that's my background. And I do think I really like
00:34:26
Speaker
books as a vehicle for nonfiction writing, especially journalism writing. And so I think going forward, I would like to primarily work on books, because I think it's a place where you're not limited to what the publication, what a magazine is doing or focused on. It gives you just, I think, more freedom to write a standalone piece
00:34:56
Speaker
and not have it have to fit in with the ethos of a certain magazine or newspaper. Right. So when you're in writer mode, what does your day typically look like? When do you wake up and what is the nature of your routine so you start warming up the engine and then you're ready to get going?
00:35:18
Speaker
Yeah, I have recently had to kind of admit to myself that I do my best work in the morning, but I'm not really a morning person. That's tough. I mean, yeah, there's there's coffee involved. And I usually I kind of have to just force myself to to get working right away because I don't want to.
00:35:44
Speaker
I think I get those productive hours in the morning and then I also, I will try to get the writing in the morning and then maybe shift to research or doing phone interviews and other types of things in the afternoon. And I think certainly when you're really intense and having to work morning, noon and night on something is kind of
00:36:12
Speaker
I've had to get into the habit more I think of.
00:36:15
Speaker
which I think all writers have to do in forcing yourself to write even when you don't feel inspired or aren't completely sure of what you're trying to say. I think there's just that notion of having to put words on the page and to keep going. And I think I also use Hemingway's advice of always kind of having the idea
00:36:43
Speaker
What you want to do then for the next day saving a little piece so that you don't have to start from scratch yeah, so you kind of know going in you know a starting point of what you want to work on you already have an kind of an idea of where you're going and using that as kind of the starting point and trying to go from there and
00:37:03
Speaker
Given that you like to hit the ground running in the morning, do you have a particular evening or nighttime routine that sets the table so you can just get to your desk and just hit it? Yeah, I think my general routine is to, again,
00:37:25
Speaker
leave when I step away from my desk in the evening to know what I'm gonna start with the next day and I think that kind of gives me permission to turn off my mind for the rest of the night by kind of figuring out what I'm gonna start with the next day I think gives me a chance to unwind after that so that I'm not kind of trying to think of things throughout the night.
00:37:53
Speaker
In the process of editing or writing or even research, what part of that process do you struggle with or do you find that you are in constant need of improvement? No one gets 100% mastery, but what do you feel like is a limiter for you that you feel like you have to give more attention to other, maybe some other facets of the craft?
00:38:18
Speaker
I think the writing, a lot of it for me is I struggle. Again, I think like a lot of people do with perfectionism and trying to have things work out immediately and not having the patience to just write, you know, your crappy first draft and then understand that even if you put a lot of thought into it, it's still probably going to be crappy at first to just have the patience with the editing process.
00:38:46
Speaker
and to kind of be willing to make those mistakes early on in kind of having faith that it'll improve over time. I think my tendency is to want things to work or kind of the fear that if it doesn't work out immediately, it isn't
Overcoming Self-Doubt in Storytelling
00:39:03
Speaker
going to work out. And I think that's probably my main struggle is to have the confidence to write something that's
00:39:10
Speaker
not at all good at first and have faith that it will improve. It can be salvageable. Yeah, how do you mitigate the feelings of self-hatred early in the draft and then late in the draft?
00:39:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's hard. I just kind of learned to live with the self-loathing, I think. And I think the other thing, I mean, one thing that's nice and I think the reason I stick with nonfiction is that to me, I have these stories to tell that are sort of higher purpose or, you know, I sort of I have.
00:39:51
Speaker
there's something besides just my voice as a writer that I'm trying to get out there. There are these people's stories that I want to exist and other people to know about and read about and I think that keeps me going through that self-hatred process.
00:40:10
Speaker
I just finished, I turned in a multi-part feature, a long feature, and just the total and utter just hatred of myself throughout the whole process. I got a little better towards the end, but even when I filed, I'm like, you're the worst who's ever lived.
00:40:29
Speaker
And it was just like into this moment I'm waiting for feedback from my editor who's never too happy to edit my stuff anyway because he's really busy and I'm just waiting for the more and more days that are passing I'm picturing the more and more work he's having to do on it and I'm just I can't I'm just like waiting and just like dreading his feedback because it's gonna be like this is more work than I wanted to do and
00:40:56
Speaker
Yeah. It's just going to be a gut punch whenever I get that email back from him. Yeah, I can relay it.
00:41:08
Speaker
push through the middle of drafts when you're past the honeymoon phase of writing where pages one through 20 feel awful good, but pages like 110 through 130 are just like, ooh, this is gonna take longer than I thought. How do you get through that part?
00:41:26
Speaker
I think number one, just forcing myself to persevere, you know, even if it feels horrible and I don't want to. But I think rereading, you know, I usually always reread what I've already what's already there. Another Hemingway tactic. Right. Yeah. And and try to
00:41:55
Speaker
Yeah, just you trying to find that spark, you know, it's something that I think keeps you going and where you have maybe it's not a full aha moment, but you know, you fix it a little bit something that it feels a little better. And through that process, I think, you know, you just hope that that's enough to, to get you forward to the next stage. I mean, and I do struggle, especially with something like a book length project, I always
00:42:24
Speaker
And I have this as a reader where a lot of times the books can be front loaded. So all the good stuff starts off great and it seems amazing. And I think working on a project like that as a writer, there's the worry of it dropping off and it having all of your good stuff at the beginning and then it falling apart in the middle. I think that fear of that
00:42:51
Speaker
I think it's maybe inevitable anyway, but trying to minimize that I think can give you motivation to work on the middle and the end a little harder.
00:43:02
Speaker
Yeah, well, John McPhee's new book, he's been harping on structure for forever. Yeah, that's the thing. It's like structure, structure, structure. He can't go anywhere until he's drawn a cool diagram. Not that the cool diagram's the end goal, but he comes up with a diagram that ultimately propels him through the draft.
Storytelling Structure Techniques
00:43:22
Speaker
Have you read his new book yet?
00:43:25
Speaker
No, I haven't read about it, but I haven't gotten it yet. It's as good as you would imagine. But yeah, it's all about structure. And that very point is you can't make anything up in this line of work, but you can shape it in such a way so that you can, like Roy Peter Clark says, put gold coins along the trail. So you're pulling people along.
00:43:50
Speaker
How much are you thinking about structure before you even write your lead or your first chapter? I think you have to find also what works for you. And I think I kind of came to a point where I realized the McPhee approach doesn't completely work for me. I mean, I think he's amazing.
00:44:14
Speaker
And but I think you have to realize, you know, maybe your mind works differently. And I think I always try as much as I appreciate, you know, the amazing things that he's able to do with structuring a narrative, you know, an innovative. I think sometimes I go back to just trying to do service to the content and I try to picture myself just telling the story to someone at the bus stop or, you know, whatever. And
00:44:45
Speaker
I try to go back to kind of that basic storytelling sometimes. And the chronological structure, you know, I think it depends on the story, you know, and what the content is. And you maybe as kind of like a potter where you're just messing around with the clay and seeing what works best for that specific.
00:45:07
Speaker
material. I think sometimes maybe you have to just admit that, you know, a straight, sometimes a straight chronological narrative is, is what works best or, or sometimes, you know, something, I think you have to kind of sometimes do the thing where you're seeing where the material pulls you and, and then trying to make it work from there.
00:45:33
Speaker
Every person I think, some people go the McPhee model and it totally clicks for them and they're really into that. But I also think there's hope for people like me where it doesn't work as well and you try to find something else.
00:45:53
Speaker
Yeah, I'm kind of like, not that I've ever articulated it like this before, but I'm kind of like just an energy guy. Like when I plot things out, like I feel where I get more excited. And as long as I have like those peaks, like if I'm able to graph it as like, all right, this feels like there should be a peak here. And like it just kind of just plods along like that. I'm also a big,
00:46:19
Speaker
Uh, you know, like the writers are Breaking Bad, how they break out stories on cork boards. Have you seen how they do that? Well, Vince Gilligan in history, he took it from the showrunner of X-Files, whose name I'm blanking. But when Gilligan, you know, started Breaking Bad, when they break stories, here you go, like this, you know, this genius show, and I don't know if it's your thing, but I loved it.
00:46:44
Speaker
But they've got eight really brilliant writers in a room for a month on end you know doing story beats together eight hours ten hours a day thinking of these things and then when they have that. That you know a good little scene they put on an index card and tack it on the board in a four act structure a teaser and four acts.
00:47:04
Speaker
which are just, you know, threaded around ads, of course. But it was just like that's the, that structure really appealed to me is just like when you're putting those index cards up there, those are the coins that are, those are narrative blocks. And so that really helps visualize, but also it's an energy thing too, you know.
00:47:27
Speaker
pulling people along. So that appeals to me. And you can see it in a flash. You've got your corkboard on the wall. Be like, all right, there we go. That's how we're progressing here. And so along those lines, something with fast pitch and everything, which had so much research, how did you organize all that research so you didn't get bogged down in all the material you had, and then you were able to easily access it to write the book?
00:47:57
Speaker
It was a somewhat disjointed process, but I did know that I was, I think also because I was researching and writing at the same time and so even just
00:48:12
Speaker
I had a lot of bookmarks, I had a lot of digital files. But I do still struggle with when you're doing that research of how to label it, because you think it's going with one group of things, but you don't necessarily know. And as the project takes shape, it might actually, I think, at first I was grouping things by topic, but when you have, I think eventually it turned into more of a chapter outline.
00:48:42
Speaker
I don't have a perfect system by any means. And I think another challenge is that working on article length pieces, I often relied on my memory and it's one of my strengths with research is that my memory is pretty strong. So I often wouldn't, you know, I would know where things were. But when you start dealing with a much larger project, memory isn't going to cut it. And even if I would often
00:49:10
Speaker
fall into a trap where I thought I remembered where something was and I was totally wrong and I spent an hour looking for it. It's horrible when you're pressed for time to be in that situation. I think it's something I'm still always trying to figure out. I do have a new, I started using this service called Dego.
00:49:38
Speaker
D-I-I-G-O and I think they have different, you know, there's a free version and I think I do the version where you pay a fee each year. It's a really awesome bookmarking service that it works for me because it's just a place where especially when you have all different types of material of sometimes links, you know, to a website and sometimes a PDF and
00:50:03
Speaker
Or photos and it's just a great place and you can you can tag it and then search for those words a really simple way so if the label isn't as important the label I come up with because I can I can search for You know if I had a thing where Humphrey Bogart was mentioned, you know I can just look for Humphrey Bogart and it will pull up this article because I'll vaguely remember there's something about Humphrey Bogart that I wanted to reference that I had found in some newspaper clipping from
00:50:33
Speaker
months before and that I've found helpful but it is tricky and I think it's something where I think you know in this nonfiction work where you're wearing different hats and so sometimes you're wearing the journalist hat but sometimes you find yourself wearing the historian hat and that can be kind of unfamiliar because you don't necessarily have the training for that or the librarian hat you know and
00:50:58
Speaker
I do think also just trying to get professional help from either academics or librarians, you know, and getting advice on how to keep that stuff sorted and also just how to do the research in the first place.
00:51:12
Speaker
How do you define your own rigor and tenacity and hard work in this line of work? Given that you have an athletic background with dance and everything and I consider dance some of the most gruelingly athletic
00:51:30
Speaker
art forms that there are and in having come from athletic background myself it's like I know what a thousand swings on my team the basement feels like and I know that that's hard work that you do every day to become a good header. How do you define it with your writing and what is your your metric for a day of hard work or a month and then a year so forth.
00:51:52
Speaker
I do appreciate especially I don't feel like I'm the most disciplined writer and I'm often lazy and a lot of it is just forcing myself to work and sometimes maybe you aren't as productive and you don't
00:52:12
Speaker
have as full a day as as others, but I think for me, it's just the consistency of persevering and keep, you know, to keep working on it on a daily basis. And I mean, honestly, I do have to worry sometimes about about burning out. And I think you don't want to push too hard because then
00:52:35
Speaker
You need to find that balance where you still have the energy and interest and ability to keep going day after day.
00:52:48
Speaker
yet so i was talking to peter brown hoffmeister about this a couple weeks ago he's episode sixty eight and i'm he does you know his thing is pretty much at least five hundred words a day you know some days it's going to be maybe three thousand but uh... it tried tries to at least two five hundred and i think it's a it's you can almost view it as like yet to put it in physical terms again like how do you
00:53:12
Speaker
How do you train without getting too sore? If you have a lot of muscle soreness, you want to maybe go a little easy the next day. So it's kind of like, how do you ride those energy levels? If you have the material drawn, you've done your research, so you have the raw material. It's like, well, should today be a 500-word day, or should I really just hammer 6,000?
00:53:33
Speaker
and just go for it. So it's like I wonder, do you tend to have those kind of peaks and valleys or do you try to keep it, say like 500 a day for every day or just, you know what, today I'm feeling hella good. So I'm just going for 10,000 or something. Yeah, I think it depends. I mean, sometimes I think I tend to, I've done the, I think setting a word count, you know, like 500 words, I think that sounds
00:54:03
Speaker
good and I have done that in the past and I think I also sometimes am just focused on kind of a more general deadline and I try to be realistic but also kind of push myself, you know, and saying like I need this done by the end of the month.
00:54:20
Speaker
And just kind of knowing that some days I'm going to push harder, but I think it's where that long-term goal, in a way, structures the days of just knowing you need a certain amount done.
00:54:39
Speaker
by by the end of the end of the month or, you know, just sometimes even if it's just an arbitrary deadline, I think, you know, maybe it's coming from the journalism background where I got used to writing on deadline. But I think that that helps that helps me kind of budget budget my time going each day.
00:55:00
Speaker
What are some book art books that you find yourself rereading time and again? Influential books that are kind of like a North Star for you.
00:55:09
Speaker
Yeah, well, we've already talked about Hemingway a bit, but I think Immovable Feast is is one of those books. I mean, it's pleasurable to read. And I think it's one where I don't know, even though I've reread it multiple times, it's one where I'm still always discovering little tidbits. And, you know, I don't know it by heart yet. So it's still something that I enjoy rereading. It's so good. I love that. Such a good book.
00:55:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of got, I mean, if you like food, it's got food and travel, but also, you know, a lot about just writing and Paris, which I've never even been to Paris. It's just fun to kind of transport yourself into that world.
00:55:57
Speaker
I think, you know, from a more practical standpoint, in terms of the type of writing I aspire to do, Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth from Other Suns, or Of Other Suns. Either way, it's just a wonderful, you know, example of a history book that is told through characters, covers multiple decades, and it's, again, structurally, she's
00:56:26
Speaker
moving back and forth through time and that was something It's something that I always kind of find myself wanting to do with history because I'm you know, I found myself doing with the softball book as nor knew that I wanted to do with the softball book as well to talk about the present day and historical work and then also have these compelling narratives going on all the while and
00:56:53
Speaker
And then another, and I also read a lot of fiction still, and I think the author's name is Jenny Awful, but the book's
00:57:04
Speaker
kind of a novella called the Department of Speculation. And it's only about 100 pages, but it's just this really well-told story. It's kind of atmospheric, and it's got all this stuff about Carl Sagan in it. Because she's also the character, she's a writer. She also teaches, I think, in an MFA program. But to make money, she's ghostwriting this rich guy's book about
00:57:33
Speaker
the history of space exploration or, you know, it's kind of, it's kind of this like ridiculous project. And the guy is, you know, it's just it's a really beautiful book. And it's, it's one of those books that's densely packed, but but short and really easy to just read over and over again. And I think
00:57:54
Speaker
just for general inspiration, a book like that helps me a lot of trying to push myself and not just do kind of the complacent formulaic thing with writing. Even explanatory writing, I think there's room for artistry in there, even if you're just trying to make something clear and just deliver information to someone.
00:58:21
Speaker
What other artistic media do you like to consume aside from books or magazine articles to help inform your writing? I love music. I love going to art exhibits. I think my tastes skew toward modern.
00:58:39
Speaker
I really love modern art, I really love jazz, but I kind of listen to all varieties of music. I love watching movies and TV too. I think what you were saying about Breaking Bad, it makes a lot of sense to use, even if sometimes
00:58:59
Speaker
film and TV storytelling can be formulaic. There are a lot of examples where it's not and you can really draw inspiration from that and kind of how you keep the audience engaged and especially if you're talking about a long running story that is occurring over several seasons of a TV show.
00:59:20
Speaker
that idea of a uh... had he had a flatter who's managing editor created on fiction magazine uh... she says like just because something is structured or outlined doesn't necessarily make it any less artful like sometimes crook making those i having outlined are plotting things out uh... actually putting those
00:59:40
Speaker
I think I am
00:59:58
Speaker
fan of outlining and kind of getting more detailed as you go. But I think the outline itself can often kind of show you the path that makes sense for your story structurally. So I think a lot of times it makes sense to just plot it out and you can often discover little nuances that you hadn't thought about before doing that.
01:00:28
Speaker
And with respect to freelancing in this kind of long-form journalism, what do you know now that you wish you knew maybe five or ten years ago that could have maybe set you up a little bit better to absorb some of the blows and punches that come your way?
01:00:49
Speaker
I think I would wish that I knew more, I think, about the literary magazines because I wasn't really even looking at that originally. And then when I started to, I had no idea how to make that work with my background.
01:01:14
Speaker
If I had maybe started reading those types of publications early on, I would have kind of helped me work in or see the types of creative nonfiction writing that existed. Because I think even now, the way that the fields are taught are very separate. And there's this idea that journalism is one thing and creative nonfiction is this other thing.
01:01:39
Speaker
And i think it's too bad that there's not not more overlap because i think there's a lot of people who you can benefit from both and i think i didn't necessarily realize all the options that were there at first and was sort of committed to this more traditional journalism path because of that.
01:01:59
Speaker
How have you dealt with feelings of jealousy or competition among peers? And I know like me personally, I know it's hard to keep my eyes on my own train tracks. There is a tendency to look and say like, oh man, why are they there when
01:02:18
Speaker
their ten years younger than i am what did i do wrong that like that have you ever run into that those are the yeah and i think especially when i lived in new york it can really be on
01:02:31
Speaker
It can really be a powerful force in a negative way. And I think there's just recognizing that there's no benefit from it. I mean, to me, I mean, maybe for some people, I'm not really that competitive by nature. And so for me, it's just a negative distraction that
01:02:49
Speaker
I need to try to focus on myself and I think leaving New York for me did help with that as well because it wasn't suffocating in the way that it can be in New York where it just feels like
01:03:05
Speaker
you're surrounded by it and all the people are there and going to, you know, special book launch things that you're not invited to or know about and it can feel really clickish. And I think for me getting out of the city and I went from New York to Tucson, Arizona and it was vastly different.
01:03:30
Speaker
And I think that helped me to kind of center and focus on myself and not get, because it can really be toxic to get pulled into that. And ultimately, you don't want to waste time.
01:03:45
Speaker
with that because it's already hard enough as it is to get the work going. Oh yeah, it is poison. Is that where you start geographically? Is that where you started the research for FastPitch when you were in Arizona? No, but I started in New York, but Arizona was where I really started my relationship with the publisher and had the tangible book project.
Erica's Upcoming Book on Swimming History
01:04:10
Speaker
So that's where I was really able to just be working on the book full time.
01:04:15
Speaker
What still excites you and what's next for you as you've put this project to bed, of course, and now you're moving forward? What's getting you up in the morning right now?
01:04:30
Speaker
a project that's about the history of swimming and instruction and drowning prevention. And I'm hoping that that will be my next book project. So I've, I had a fellowship that I was able to do at the University of Michigan last year. And that gave me the opportunity to kind of do a lot of the research and sort of
01:04:57
Speaker
have an idea of what the project might look like and exploring different avenues that I maybe wouldn't have allowed myself to explore if I was on a tight deadline. So that was a really unique and wonderful opportunity for me to just kind of go and explore in a really abstract way. And now I'm sort of trying to fine tune it and hopefully get the next book project out of it.
01:05:26
Speaker
Fantastic. Do you have a publisher or an agent lined up for it yet? Or are you still fine tuning that? Yeah. I'm working on the outline now and trying to still just have fine tuning exactly what I want to do with it. Because I think, as you know, I think it's hard to
01:05:55
Speaker
sell people on a vague idea when you don't know quite what it is, then I think that makes people nervous. Yeah, so we'll see. I think I do definitely hope to stay with books going forward. I just think that's the best fit for me and for what I want to do as a writer.
01:06:20
Speaker
Okay, that's a wrap. Put a bow around episode 70. Thank you to Erica Wesley at WesleyER on Twitter. Share this episode with a fellow CNFer and leave a nice review if you're feeling a froggy on iTunes. Did you know that I also have a monthly newsletter at BrendanOmero.com? Well, I do.
01:06:45
Speaker
Join the growing list of people who get my monthly reading recommendations, as well as what you might have missed in the world of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. Four books, once a month, no spam ever. Dig it? Good. So say hi on Twitter. I'm at Brendan O'Mara. So until next time, thanks for listening.