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Episode 510: Daniel Pollack-Pelzner’s Doesn’t Waste His Shot in Lin-Manuel Miranda Biography
305 Plays6 hours ago
"My teenage daughter looked at me. She said, 'Oh, Dad, you should put that in a folder called nobody cares.' Okay, not everything I learn will be in this book. And then the question became, 'What is Lin-Manuel learning from this story?' And if he's not learning anything from it, even if it's fun, it's got to go in the deleted scenes," says Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, author of Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist (Simon & Schuster).
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, the Notorius DPP, is charismatic as he is brilliant. Maybe some of that seasoning rubbed off on me. One can dream. He teaches English and theater at Portland State University. He received the Graves Award from the American Council of Learned Societies for outstanding teaching in the humanities. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic and the New York Times.
Wanna know how sickening Daniel is? He has a BA in history from Yale and a PhD in English from Harvard. Gross. Ew, right? Ew. You can learn more about Daniel’s disgusting intelligence and equally freaky contributions to the culture at danielpollackpelzner.com and follow him on IG at danielpollackpelzner.
This conversation was so lively and great and we talk about:
- How he pitched Lin-Manuel Miranda on being his biographer
- Being driven by curiosity
- Having to earn scenes
- The “fun of it” framing
- Balancing salt, acid, fat, and heat
- Maintaining a sense of play with the work
- What Daniel learned from Lin-Manuel
- And taking the harsh feedback from trusted readers
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
Oh, hey, this podcast is sponsored by the newsletter Pitch Club, the monthly substack, where you read cold pitches and hear the authors audio annotating their thinking behind how they sold and crafted their pitches.
00:00:12
Speaker
It could be how to pitch an agent, an editor, a feature, an essay, a source. Welcome to pitchclub.substack.com. Forever free, man. You read a little, you listen a little. You're going to learn a lot.
The Writing Struggle
00:00:25
Speaker
And so so much of my writing life... has been not writing. And I don't know if if others of you suffer this, of like, I have the project and then I am sitting there staring at the blank screen and this is the thing that I've only wanted to do and yet I can think of all of these other things that I'm doing instead.
Live Event Introduction
00:00:50
Speaker
Kicking off the live podcast cycle, our first of the year with Daniel Pollack-Pelsner, author of Lin-Manuel Miranda, The Education of an Artist. It's published by Simon & Schuster.
00:01:01
Speaker
It's recorded at Gratitude Brewing in Eugene, Oregon. Thank you, Gratitude. In partnership with the Northwest Review, a revitalized lit journal for the Pac Northwest.
00:01:14
Speaker
It's happening. We're still doing them, man.
Podcast Independence and Creator's Vision
00:01:17
Speaker
This is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I talk to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell. Been at this game since 2013. How the hell are you?
00:01:26
Speaker
Okay, but listen, though. One the many things I love about this show and its ethos is that it's 100% independent. I saw something on Instagram about a podcast that I partnered with someone else and i was just like, don't give a fuck about that.
00:01:43
Speaker
There's no media company or institutional backing to CNF Pod. I have no partnerships with publishers. Everything's a reflection of my taste. Every decision is based on serving you, the listener, and if I'm being honest, a bit of myself.
Monetization Goals
00:01:56
Speaker
The show doesn't really make any money and that's okay. It'd be cool if it made a few thousand bucks a month because that would really cut me loose to do the things in my brain folds. But one of these days, we can we can dream.
00:02:09
Speaker
But I love that the buck stops with me and me alone. I curate, I edit, I write everything. I don't outsource a second of the labor. I'm not sure why I wanted to reiterate this point, but it's something I'm proud of. That I'm not part of a network. Even if that network could put the show in front of more people. We'll get there. You know, when people find the show, they stick around.
00:02:31
Speaker
They realize I've got good shit in the
Supporting the Podcast
00:02:34
Speaker
refrigerator. Show notes of this episode and more are at brendanomero.com where you can find off-kilter blogs. If you care to support the show with dollars and cents, you can go to patreon.com slash cnfpod for a host of cool perks like the Flash 52 sessions. If you you know, you know.
Introducing Daniel Pollack-Pelsner
00:02:49
Speaker
The show's Instagram is at creative nonfictionpodcast. So Daniel Pollack Pelsner, the notorious DPP, is charismatic as he is brilliant. Maybe some of that seasoning rubbed off on me. One can dream.
00:03:02
Speaker
Man. Teaches English in theater at Portland State University. He received the Graves Award from the American Council of Learned Societies for Outstanding Teaching in the Humanities. Can I read? His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. Dude, I need some of these bylines. People think I'm a jabroni and they wouldn't be wrong. Want to know how sickening Daniel is? He has a B.A. in history from Yale and a Ph.D. in English from fucking Harvard. Gross. Like, you right? Ew.
00:03:40
Speaker
You can learn more about Daniel's disgusting intelligence and equally freaky contributions to the culture at danielpawlakpelsner.com and follow him on Instagram at danielpawlakpelsner.
Discussion on Lin-Manuel Miranda Biography
00:03:52
Speaker
This conversation was so lively and great, and we talk about how he pitched Lin-Manuel Miranda, you know, the Hamilton guy, on being his biographer. Being driven by curiosity, having to earn scenes, the fun of it framing, balancing salt, fat, acid, heat, maintaining a sense of play with the work, what Daniel learned from Lin-Manuel, and taking the harsh feedback from trusted readers in stride.
00:04:21
Speaker
It really is amazing stuff. So it's high time we cue up the montage Fuck Ice riff.
00:04:34
Speaker
go three days without writing. I feel fucked up and you know depressed. I like to write books that sound more like someone telling a story over a campfire. Then you got to keep moving on because tick-tick, you know, tick-tock. This is going to have interest somebody somewhere other than me.
00:04:57
Speaker
As I look at the all the wires behind me and everything on here, and it it is so disorganized, and this is a perfect distillation of my brain, to write books and to write anything, you have to be somewhat organized. and ah how how do you just keep things straight so you can do the work that we expect of you?
00:05:16
Speaker
ah man. ah It is indeed a challenge and a thrill when you when you get to enter somebody else's life to try to keep that life straight. And this is like last four years have been interviewing, I guess, about 150 different people and traveling from Puerto Rico to New York to Wesleyan University and other places. So I'm like, we want to talk like logistics. I had a Scrivener program on my laptop. I had A chronology of Lin-Manuel's life where everything I learned from his first kiss as a like a seventh grader at Hunter College High School to his first Tony Award would get entered into the the document. And then um every interview I did, every transcript would go in there as well. And it slowly started to accrete from a kind of giant brain crowd into a a story that I hope could put this in an order. Right. And in writing a book is is such a a marathon or even a long magazine piece. It's so much more marathon than sprint.
00:06:20
Speaker
And there is this tendency to feel like you can't get your head around it. So how do you get your head around it so that you can build yeah they you they you are building something drip by drip and eventually that bucket fills up?
00:06:35
Speaker
That's, you're absolutely right, Brendan. I hadn't anticipated this because I'd been writing magazine pieces that were like 3,000, 4,000 words. And I sort of thought like that's a unit I can kind of keep in my head. And then the publisher said 100,000 words for this book, which at the time seemed like an insurmountable, you know, pinnacle to reach. Now, I think we were probably both in this situation of turning in far too many words for the first draft. Oh, big time, yes. Scale back. But was like, I can't keep i can't keep a project of that scale in my head the way that I'm used to keeping the ah the smaller units. But that for me was actually the thing that helped make the mountain feel scalable. was like, OK, I don't know what 100,000 words is, but if I do my math right, if I divide that by 20, that's like 20 chapters of 5,000 words. I can do each of those. And so I just started thinking in those units. i mean want I'm ah i a Shakespeare professor by training. I wanted this not to be a Shakespeare professor book. I wanted this to be like a 90s YA coming of age story that happened to be true. And the organizational principle for me always was like, what is Lin-Manuel's emotional state at the beginning of this chapter? And where is he going to get at the end of the chapter? And what's he going to learn over the course of that journey? So I tried always to know, like, what's the what's the last line of this chapter gonna be? That I can hold in my head. And then try to write to that line to get us to that emotional arc. Yeah, that's such a good point to underscore. And when I was reporting the front runner, and given that Steve Prefontaine is no longer here, and today marks his 75th birthday, I was always asking his friend, like, where's his head at? Where's his head at? Where's his head at?
00:08:09
Speaker
And interviews I've read with Vince Gilligan, the creator Breaking Bad, they were always interrogating, where's Walt's head at? Where's his head at? And I always found that to be a good guiding principle for the reporting. And I imagine ah you know for you, when you're be it a magazine profile or something as ambitious as what this biography would be, is that you are constantly trying to get into that headspace as much as you can to really reveal that interiority that allows us to sink into a story. Right.
00:08:36
Speaker
That's exactly right, yes. Because I think like we what we all want to avoid is the sort of Wikipedia entry version of our our our subjects, right? And i think it can be challenging when you're writing about somebody you know like Prefontaine, who's this world historical athlete, or Miranda, who's like created the form of musical storytelling in the 21st century, how do we make them human, struggling, frustrated, fallible, taking wrong turns along the way to their successes? And I got to do a shout out here. at This is a total surprise and delight in the audience. We have the daughter of the nurse
00:09:12
Speaker
at Hunter College High School, Elaine, who was Lin-Manuel's guide throughout high school, because he was suffering so many anxieties and senses of insecurity and neuroses over being surrounded by tremendously talented classmates who had tested into this Upper east Side magnet school, as as as you did yourself.
00:09:34
Speaker
that he was just always in there with a headache or a stomachache. And and I sort of felt like, okay, that's the Lin-Manuel I want to start writing with, the one who doesn't feel like he is singing to Barack Obama to launch his new musical, but the the kid who who whose tummy is hurting because he can't do math as fast as Arthur Lewis in his seventh grade homeroom class. And then i hope and then by the end of that chapter, i want him to go from lost to found when a teacher sees his potential and introduces him to the peers who can help him.
00:10:05
Speaker
And when it comes to writing a book, or like again, I can always bring it back to the long articles or a book or chapters, and it always helps to have some degree of practice you know around the writing, something to warm up the engine, gin up the engine, so that you can sink into the work. So like what's the practice by which you like to start a day so you can have what you deem maybe a successful day at the ledger?
00:10:27
Speaker
You know, And so so much of my writing life has been not writing. And I don't know if if others of you suffer this, of like, I have the project and then I am sitting there staring at the blank screen and this is the thing that I've only wanted to do and yet I can think of all of these other things that I'm doing instead. Yeah, the dishes, the sink is so full of dishes. I need to i need to clean these now. Right. This was the self-help guide I got in grad school was called, why do grad students prefer to clean the bathroom floor than write their dissertation?
00:11:01
Speaker
um and i was various And I was sort of dreading that with this with a book. I never thought I would write a book. It seemed like torture to have that big a that big a goal to try to finish. seemed like writing a running a marathon to me, in incomprehensible. But for me, it was like really driven with curiosity about my subject. And and i did I spent a year and a half doing nothing but research and interviews. And so then the thrill each day was like, who do I get to talk to? And some of it was people I'd heard of before. was like, wow, I get to learn from Andrew Lloyd Webber today about how to write a musical. And some of it was people that I'd never heard of. And it was like, oh my god, I'm talking to Lin-Manuel's elementary school bus driver who's going to tell me about his son who drove the bus who was an aspiring hip hop artist and would try out his material on the fourth graders sitting on this bus. And this is how Lin-Manuel learned to rap from Dwayne Baker on the ride. So that was its own thrill.
00:11:53
Speaker
I don't know if if others of you are like this. I use research to procrastinate writing. So I'd be like, oh, OK, I've interviewed all these people. I also need to talk to. How could I possibly write this book if I haven't talked to the assistant director for Lin-Manuel's 12th grade production of West Side Story? Surely, Rebecca Podolsky has invaluable information that I can't write the book without. And shout out to Rebecca, she did. um But it got to the point that my wife said, like shouldn't you just start writing something so that this deadline is not going to slip away? And then to my surprise, once I started in on the writing, started in with seventh grade Lin-Insecure,
00:12:28
Speaker
i like I had so much of a vicarious thrill about imagining myself into the the worlds that I was learning about that I was just looking forward to it every day. And it it was a type of writing that I felt I hadn't done since I was a a kid, like writing imaginary worlds. because this happened to be a real one. And I would, i would to my surprise, look forward every day of like, OK, today I'm going to get to meet Stephen Sondheim through Lin-Manuel. Or today I'm going to get to the go to the White House. Or like today, finally, musical is going to open on Broadway. And that became ah its own thrill to the point my wife said, shouldn't you just not write anything today and pay attention to the rest of our family instead?
00:13:06
Speaker
Well, theres there's an element, too, when you're doing a lot of research and yeah you start to eventually feel that deadline sitting on your chest and it's and it's no bueno. But there there comes a point where you need to start writing maybe before you're ready.
00:13:21
Speaker
And ah what was your experience with that? Just being like, oh, yeah, you know what? I can still do both simultaneously, but I better get some words down because otherwise this deadline is going to suffocate me. That is that is true. That is true. And that was ah an ominous loom on the calendar. My dad's an artist, and I always grew up with these, he had this Rembrandt poster above the guest room in our upstairs attic where I would be relegated when the grandparents would come to town. And it it was this beautiful Rembrandt drawing, and along the edges of the poster were all of these little sketches that Rembrandt had done of like minor figures in the picture. and it was just like an arm or an elbow.
00:13:58
Speaker
And I was so intrigued by that that like Rembrandt would have to just kind of warm up on the elbows before he did the whole thing. And so I tried to do little sketches of things like scenes that I knew would be part of the book just to sort of test out my material. So like there's this there's this moment when Lin-Manuel's hero, ah composer Stephen Sondheim, like one of the great musical theater composers the 20th century, shows up in Lin-Manuel's high school because his writing partner had a daughter a couple years ah below Lin-Manuel. And this is what happens when you go to school on the Upper East Side of New York in the 90s. And Stephen Sondheim comes to the drama club and tells the kids who are putting on West Side Story what it's like to write West Side Story. And so I knew this was going to be a set piece in the book. And I'd interviewed, like,
00:14:41
Speaker
12 different people who were in that room. And I knew what color Sondheim's sweater was and what chair he was sitting in. And I visited the room at the high school and seen its windowless sort of ignominy that was going to be illuminated by this this luminary presence. And so I thought, OK, if I can write that scene, then that'll be my like that'll be my elbow in the in the margin. That'll be my little test case of whether or not I had enough material. And then and then i started writing oral histories of episodes in the book, ok you know of like just just basically quotes strung together to tell the story. Because my my fear initially was, am I going to have enough material? Am I going to be able to excavate enough of things that people remember from 20, 30 years ago? So I just wanted to take all the quotes I had about the first movie that Lin-Manuel made when he was a 14-year-old eager to emulate
00:15:30
Speaker
Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, movie called Clayton's Friends that his his high school classmates were thrilled to get on IMDb and then couldn't get off IMDb afterwards. So I wrote a 20-page oral history of Clayton's Friends, because I knew nobody had written about it before. And I also wanted to give Lin-Manuel a proof of concept of what I was doing with all these interviews that he was connecting me with and and learning. And I loved doing it, and I shared it with people, and they said, OK, this is fun. Everyone who was in Clayton's friends liked it. Everyone else who wasn't was like, please don't write the book in this format. We don't know who any of these people are. And then I learned that actually the the task of writing the book was not accumulating, but was going to be winnowing down from that initial material. But for me, the oral history format and the like the little sketch in the margin was what sort of lowered the barrier to entry and let me think, OK, I can get into this world. And so much of nonfiction writing is about pitching, be it pitching editors and pitching sources. And you had to pitch Lin-Manuel, who probably had his, i mean, he could have written a memoir. He could have written some degree of collaboration for some sort of a authorized biography of that nature, ghostwritten. But you were able to curry favor enough to really biographize him through this rubric of his education and his constant knowledge.
00:16:47
Speaker
prolific learning. So what did that pitch look like to get him on board to to let you write about him? It was a total cold call email with ah a shameless subject line, who tells your story, that i that I cribbed. And I was a little nervous sending it. I had i had um i'd sort of i've moved from Shakespeare to contemporary playwrights about 10 years ago.
00:17:10
Speaker
I'd seen Hamilton and been smitten by it like everybody else in 2015. And i'd I'd covered the show as it had gone around the world in London and Puerto Rico. I'd interviewed Lin-Manuel press conferences a couple of times. And the the first time I met him, I had just written a piece about the history of blackface minstrelsy in the Mary Poppins books and stories when Mary Poppins Returns came out. And so I was introduced to him. I said hi, I'm Daniel. And he said, i know who you are. ah I thought, this is not going to go well. That sounds ominous. But it turned out that what like one of my singing friends in college had been in his high school a cappella group. And in fact, they'd been arrested together at the 96th Street subway station for singing Billy Joel without a a permit, which might go I think may still be ah an offense in in New York City. So we had some friends in common. it turned out my college history professor, Joanne Freeman, who had written a book about Hamilton, was a historical advisor on Hamilton the musical. So I think those things sort of smoothed the gears a little bit. And his high school girlfriend had actually been in a play with me in college. So i think I think we had enough common points that I wasn't just the guy trying to dredge up weird cultural history for publications. And then i mean I really wanted to write a book for my students who wanted to have lives in the arts and didn't have a kind of clear pathway to follow. and
00:18:29
Speaker
He really wanted to honor his teachers, and that was something that drew me to him as a subject. like He always talked about the teachers who inspired him and helped him develop as an artist and what he could learn from his collaborators. And I thought that, for me, was a way out of either just lauding him or faulting him, was like trying to understand how did he learn to become the artist that he is. And so he said it was the teaching pitch that that made him open to it.
00:18:50
Speaker
Right, yeah, and it's so key to biography is is the framing, and how did you eventually kind of settle on that framing of this kind of this grace note of learning and education throughout the entire narrative? like just What was the light bulb moment? Like, oh, this is how we can use him as a vector to tell his story, but through through his mentors and through this yeah this addiction to taking on a skill to learn learn something new. Right. It was a dog walk. I don't know if you guys think best when you're when you're moving. For me, like that's often the ah the engine for it. So that i was I was fortunate. ah
00:19:27
Speaker
I mean... These are circumstances that I wouldn't advise replicating if you want to write a book. In my case, it was being fired from a former university position and then filing a a lawsuit against my former employer. And one of my mentors called me up and said, you have to write a book to distract yourself from litigation. yeah And at the time, I thought, oh, god, is there anything worse than litigation? To be writing a book, that would be just misery every day. But he said, it's the Shakespeare guy. He said, nobody cares about Shakespeare anymore. Write a book about this guy, Lin-Manuel Miranda. You've been stalking around the the world for the last decade. And the minute he said it, it like clicked.
00:19:59
Speaker
Like, oh, yes, i I am curious about this person. And what I'm curious about is how he learned to become an artist. Because he's always a bright and curious and talented person. but But I think most people who went to elementary school with him or even high school with him would say he was this nuclear reactor of creativity. But he was not the best singer in his cohort. He was not the best writer, the best composer, the best musician. But he had this astronomical learning curve so that he figured out how to soak it up from everybody around him and how to collaborate with everybody around him. And I thought on this on this dog walk, I was like, oh, that's what I want to write about is how he learned to become an artist. So that I hoped for my students it would sort of break away from the kind of
00:20:41
Speaker
I think, fixed mindset that a lot of us have about creativity of like either you're born with it or you're not. And like yeah he was born with a desire to do it, but without the skill set, and he acquired it. And I hope that could become you know not a blueprint, but a kind of mindset that my students could learn from too. Yeah, and ah something in the book, too, you know he was always willing to go slow to then go fast. And you can tie the tie this concept to him, but also to you, in just in your development as a writer, too. like I think a lot of us really want to just try to
00:21:12
Speaker
become the get on this rocket ship and we might be looking over our shoulders the people that seem to might have a leg up ah elsewhere but sometimes it does take the growing pains are part of the journey and then like once you take your lumps for a while then things start to accelerate and I think Lynn was a lot like that in being able to go slow to eventually get on that rocket ship so maybe just though what what about that you know struck you about his story and maybe even your own Well, you're you're right. i mean, he was a guy who was you know was writing his first musical when he was a junior in high school. So he he he was getting in there early, but he didn't suffer from the feeling that I think, but i certainly I do, and I think a lot of emerging artists do, of comparing your own work to the work of the people that you idolize, and then feeling kind of crippled by, I guess Ira Glass calls it, the taste gap. Sure. I can't, when I'm starting out, it's not going to look like this. His hero, when he was in high school was Robert Rodriguez, who part of that like 90s sort of indie filmmaking scene. And Rodriguez wrote this memoir called Rebel Without a Crew. that Manuel read in high school that said, you go to screenwriting school and they'll tell you, you write your first three screenplays, then you throw them out, because they're not going to be any good, and then write your fourth one and maybe it'll be good. And Rodriguez said, that's bullshit.
00:22:26
Speaker
Make your first screenplay with your friends on like a home camcorder for no money. but He actually went and sold his plasma for money, which I don't necessarily recommend. And you'll learn by making it. Yeah. and Miranda totally adopted that. He was like, I know I'm not gonna make Citizen Kane the first time out, but I'm goingnna make something, and that iterative process is gonna make it better. So that helped free me from the sense of like, I had to nail it the first time out, and his his high school girlfriend had shared the first draft of Lynn's first Broadway musical in the Heights, which began as a show that Le Manuel wrote as a sophomore in college, and that's sort of the lore around it. And so I read the script for the sophomore in college production, and it was delightful. And there was not a single word or song or phrase from that sophomore year
00:23:15
Speaker
production that made it eight years later into the Broadway production, except for the title phrase in Washington Heights. And so that that freed me from the sense that like masterpieces don't spring fully formed from their creators' heads. You put down what you know at the time, and then you go through the process that Lin-Man really loves of sharing it with collaborators and getting their input on what would improve. And I i tried to follow that too. Yeah, I love you bringing up the taste gap. And there's the know the famous Ira Glass meditation on that and the taste gap about like you know where your taste is and you're you know where you want to go. But yeah in between there is a lack of ability to get there. It's about the accretion of that skill to do it. yeah And there's a moment too, like Lin-Manuel wasn't inhibited by the gap between what he could create and the work of professional artists he admired. And then there was someone, a friend of his and a peer of his, Alex, said, a lot of us fall prey to the taste gap, feeling that we'd never play like some great band. A lot of us made ourselves give up, but Lynn was never like that.
00:24:14
Speaker
Yeah, that to me was like an amazing insight into his generativity. One of his collaborators in Hamilton, Renee Elise Goldsberry, who played Angelica Schuyler in the original Broadway company, said like the artist she knows are either show and tell artists, the minute they create something they just want to share it with people and then they're done with it, or they're perfectionists and they will never share it because they're always trying to fine tune it a little bit sharper. And she said, Lin-Manuel is a show and tell perfectionist.
00:24:42
Speaker
Like the minute he makes it, he's he's showing it and you can go on YouTube and watch him as a four year old dancing to Footloose on his bedroom. And he also embraces like the process of revision. And he was willing to throw out the central plot of his college version of In the Heights when producers gave him feedback about what could make it better. He'd throw out the first song he wrote for Hamilton's wife, Eliza Schuyler, because his own wife said, eh, not your best work. And so I thought that was amazing to both have that sort of lack of inhibition about creating your work and also that willingness to take that feedback. And I was getting it hard from my family members. I remember my dad reading an early version of the chapter about Lin-Manuel in college. He said, Daniel, your mom and I both found this very boring.
00:25:24
Speaker
He said, perhaps we're not your target audience. We don't read celebrity biography. Maybe celebrity biographies are just supposed to be boring. And was like, oh, OK. Take a beat.
00:25:34
Speaker
Say more, Dad, about what you're. And he's like, there's all this 90s hip hop, and I don't care about that at all. He's like, but then you mentioned Ira Gershwin, and I was briefly interested in that part. So I thought, okay, this is good feedback. Like, if I want readers beyond the folks who went to high school with with me and Ruby, I gotta have some on-ramps for folks who have not been listening to you know Biggie and to Green Day all of their lives. And like, that's the kind of feedback Lynn would get. It's kind of feedback I tried to internalize as well. Oh, my God. That that reminds me, like, when when my first book came out, Six Weeks in Saratoga in 2011, and I had given a completed manuscript to my father around on around Christmas 2010. On Christmas Day, he called me back, and I'm just expecting your typical Merry Christmas thing. He was just like, oh, I read your book, and I just i just found it tedious.
00:26:22
Speaker
I was like, you motherfucker. I'm like, I'm never sharing anything with you again. and I didn't. Taught him a lesson. Exactly. But there there is also a moment, too, in the book where yeah where um his ah collaborator and actor, Eileen, she says, and she's talking about on borrowed time, which is ah you know kind of a a weird concept thing that Lynn didn't bend on certain things when he got certain notes about it. But he did she did say that like all the you know all the best...
00:26:52
Speaker
mistakes he ever made were in there. And I think there's something to be said there about being fearless about about making mistakes, be it in music or writing or playwriting. It's just like you need to learn how to just be kind of fearless and then learn and ideate from there. And a lot of us, I think, block ourselves before we allow ourselves to get to do bad stuff to get to good. We just want it to be good. Yes. that is It's so true. I found that Particularly in college myself of like I have this image of what I want my writing to be But I know the minute I start writing it's not gonna be as good as that So I'm not gonna write anything so that I can tell myself that my idea is still perfect Which is a you know terrible way to create anything and Lin-Manuel had to learn just as you're saying how to get feedback he did have this weird idea for a senior thesis project, which was a sci-fi romance time travel musical in which he could redo a bad breakup with his high school girlfriend by coming back as somebody on his deathbed to undo their breakup and also have an affair with his high school girlfriend. And everybody was like, what? That's a terrible idea for the show. But he really wanted to do it, and he did it. And he says to this day, it was a disaster. And he got a pit in his stomach from remembering it.
00:28:07
Speaker
And he like he learned from that to start listening to people and to figure out that that tricky balance of like when you do trust your gut. If you tell people, I'm making a hip hop musical about Alexander Hamilton, and people say, that's a terrible idea. When do you go with it? And when are they actually saying, OK, you have a concept, but I don't under so i don't you're not You're not helping me connect with what its central premise is. And like that's useful feedback to get. And he'll always say, when he's sharing work, it's like, what's the gap between what's in my head and what you're receiving? And how do I try to shorten that gap? And so I found that too, of like, I'd write scenes that I thought were hilarious or heartbreaking. And people would say, why is this in the book? And then I'd have to say, OK, I haven't earned that scene yet. If I want it to stay in the book, I have to figure out how to back up and get people on board with it. Right. I love hearing you say that. How do you earn that scene? So how how do you earn scenes that you don't want to see on the cutting room floor? Right. Well, that's where that education frame came in hard, was like,
00:29:05
Speaker
There were so many stories that I just loved hearing and that I thought were fun and that I was thrilled that I was excavating in the research process. And I mean i remember I'd spend all day on the on the phone or on the Zoom with somebody I was talking to and then make dinner and my kids come home from school. And I i remember telling my kids, like I just found out Lin-Manuel's freshman year roommate at Wesleyan was also into making film and also into hip hop. And so they put a poster on their dorm room wall of Mary Kate and Ashley Olson from Full House and wrote Lin-Manuel above one of the twins and and and Josh above the other twin. And then at the end of the year when Lin-Manuel moved into the Latino cultural house, they ceremonially cut the poster in half and each of them took half of it.
00:29:49
Speaker
And my my teenage daughter looked at me and she said, oh, dad, you should put that in a folder called Nobody Cares. And I thought, okay. not everything I learn will be in this book.
00:30:04
Speaker
And then the question became, what is Lin-Manuel learning from this story? And if he's not learning anything from it, even if it's fun, it's gotta go in the like deleted scenes at the end. Oh, that's great. There's a moment too where I think he said, i think a part of my brain is always just trying to make the best school play. And I love this element that even as a professional, he's hearkening back to the things that brought him joy and inspiration from his development, from his adolescence. And just for a lot of us, I think we lose that sense of play. So like how have you maintained that sense of play or maybe drawn inspiration from his his sense of play to your own work? Oh, oo that's a fun question. Well, you know, something I've noticed when Lin-Manuel talks about his work, he he always says, like he's talking about something that's really difficult. How does he consolidate, you know, a 700-page Ron Chernow biography into a two-and-a-half-hour musical? And he'll always say, like,
00:30:58
Speaker
Instead of saying like the burden or the challenge or the the overwhelm of it he'll always say the fun of it was How do I try to compress 200 pages into an opening number? And I thought okay, that's a that's like a cool framing to have and maybe it's a little bit of a psychological Gimmick, but I would I would think to myself okay the this like the first half of the book I was like I got all these characters how do I get the readers interested in any of them when they're all like, there's Alex Lacamar and Alex Horowitz and Alex Sarlin and I know the difference between all of them because I've met them but they're just names on the page. How how on earth, why isn't everybody tracking these? And then it became like, okay, the fun of this chapter is I'm gonna introduce somebody new and I'm gonna give them a superpower and I'm gonna help people
00:31:41
Speaker
thrill to them. So I tried to adopt that little, you know, kind of fun of it framing and just like remember what made me fall in love with the project in the in the first place and think like, I love this work. I'm excited to dive into it. I get to share it.
00:31:54
Speaker
and um And I hope that that enthusiasm can like come across on the page. Yeah, and as a Shakespeare scholar, you know you were in in the in the prologue, you were looking to, you know, who are today's Shakespeare's? And, you know, over the decades and certainly the centuries, there have been talented playwrights that have come along, but no one has really embodied maybe that next Shakespeare. But Lin-Manuel seems to, maybe more than anybody else, embody sort of that spirit. So what do you think it is about him that is maybe makes him the sort of the inheritor to that mental to that mantle? I feel like we sort of have to wait 400 years and see if he becomes that right figure down the line. But the there's ah the um the metaphor that so many people I talked to used was Lin-Manuel is a sponge.
00:32:38
Speaker
like He just soaks up everything that he encounters. And so in in there are a lot of chapters about him writing these songs in his shows, and like he's drawing on... Sure, he's drawing on Jay-Z and he's drawing on Sondheim and he's also drawing on Dr. Seuss to figure out how to use a like a funny rhyming rhythm to avoid the stress on the on the ultimate syllable of the line. Or he's drawing on a will-I-am setting of an Obama speech. Or he's drawing on um ah you know a story that a castmate has told him or he's drawing on the memory of losing a childhood friend in preschool. And Shakespeare too, you can just see like everything in his world is material for him to use. And Lin-Manuel told me but the first time we met that his mom, who's child psychologist, had given him this framing for his work, which was that he you was this sensitive kid, very overwhelmed by emotions. He would cry at that unhoused person in the street, cry at the chord changes in Bridge Over Troubled Water and say, turn it off, it's too sad. And his mom His mom would say, like whatever you're feeling is okay to feel, and you want to be a writer, like remember these feelings. It's all grist for the mill.
00:33:46
Speaker
Everything you use is material for your work. And so as a result, I think he's created a work that's capacious enough that so many Americans and folks around the world can see parts of themselves reflected in the work the way people often can within the prism of Shakespeare too. He suggested we call this book Grist for the Mill. um I didn't buy it, but but I think there might be something in that that sponginess or that milling ability to to sort of have the whole world reflected through you.
00:34:12
Speaker
like A great Easter egg in the book is that when he even when he was in maybe middle school or high school, he was drawn to the Hamilton-Burr duel. That must have just lit your brain up. like How is this Easter egg here in his origin story, the fact that that was what would propel him into cataclysmic world domination? Right. I'm sure you sure you found this with Priya as well. like We get these sort of rosebud moments that seem like touchdowns. This is such a canonical story for those of you care about Lin-Manuel that he's like on vacation from his first musical in the Heights, picks up a copy of Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton, and reads it on vacation with his wife in Mexico. And before he's finished the first chapter, he started hearing hip hop stories in his head. and That's all true, but it was like, it wasn't an accidental pickup of this book. And it turned out when he was in 10th grade, American history project, his teacher said, you can write about anything that we've studied. And for Lin-Manuel, it was always like, if he could do a creative project instead of write an essay or take an exam, That's what he was leaping out to. The only time he got above a C in math class was when his teacher let him rewrite the lyrics to Billy Joel's For the Longest Time as For the Law of Signs and invite his jazz chorus buddies in to perform it. And then they went on to the subway station with less warm reception. So for the history project, he's like, I want to do i want to make a movie
00:35:32
Speaker
And he had been, he this I also just sort of didn't realize until I started researching it. He had been obsessed since he was in preschool with people who died before they could live out their promise. And his his best friend in preschool, this girl named Allie, called his girlfriend. They would hold hands. They'd give each other a kiss when they'd see each other each day. And one day he wakes up and his mom is in tears and tells him that Allie has drowned in her parents' backyard. And it feels like his whole the world has turned gray.
00:36:01
Speaker
And people would ask him, like, do you have a girlfriend? he wouldd say, my girlfriend died. And then he got to high school, and his first girlfriend there was hit by a car. And he started to develop this terrible fear that anybody he loved was going to die or come to harm, and that maybe this would happen to him too, especially when he became obsessed with Rent, the musical in the 90s, and learned that Jonathan Larson, its composer, had died the night before the show opened, and he worried if this would happen to him. So he learned that there was a founding father who not only who had been killed in a duel, but who had lost his own child in a duel on the very spot where he would later face Aaron Burr. And he was fascinated by this figure. And so for his 10th grade American history project, he decided he would make a movie about the Burr-Hamilton duel.
00:36:51
Speaker
And his girlfriend from high school, Meredith Somerville, had amazingly saved the script that he wrote. for this duel and shared it with me. And it's all about Hamilton feeling tremendous guilt about having lost his child and sent his child into a duel and resolving then to throw away his shot with Burr so that he didn't take another person's life. So I'm reading this I'm like, oh my God, this is like the,
00:37:15
Speaker
heart-rending psychology of and of a deaf-obsessed adolescent writ out on the page. he They couldn't make the movie because somebody jumped out and stole their video camera as they were walking to shoot it. So he turned in the screenplay, and and according to his memory, Mr. Steinfink gave him a B minus.
00:37:32
Speaker
Said this is a simplistic psychological explanation for a complex historical moment. Oh, my God. And so years later when he was writing the musical Hamilton and his dramaturg, his producer, kept saying like, you gotta explain why Hamilton throws away a shot when he spent the whole musical saying I'm not throwing away my shot. And then all he could have in his mind was B minus, B minus over and over again.
00:37:55
Speaker
Didn't want to provide an explanation. But i was I loved these moments where I felt like we could see a connection between the the young emerging artist and the the global figure he became. yeah and about halfway through the book where he does go on that vacation, he's laying in a hammock and he's reading Chernow's biography on Hamilton. Here it is. like Here's like that that springboard moment. Does he still have that original copy and all marked up and everything? And have you seen it?
00:38:24
Speaker
He gave it to the rapper Nas. Really? Yes. Nas was big influence on Lin-Manuel, guy you know who writes about his own neighborhood, Queens in Nas' case, Illmatic, in a way that dramatizes it makes everybody able to connect with it. Nas, big influence on Sonny's raps in In the Heights, and came to Hamilton and and was a fan. And then they ended up collaborating. Nas the executive producer of Lin-Manuel's latest project concept album, based on the the movie The Warriors. And Lin-Manuel gave gave his his precious copy to na So it's framed in Nas' house. Oh my gosh. And that is a level of entry to the Mirandaverse that I have not yet been granted.
00:39:04
Speaker
ah Yeah, that that to me, like I think I wrote there, I'm like, oh my God, did did Daniel get to look at the book? And like see his see the margin, like see the brain at work as he's annotating it. Like, oh, here's a song. my God.
00:39:18
Speaker
Yes, that would be amazing. Well, because Chernow, he's just like, when he was listening to one of the the first songs that he made he wrote for Eliza, it was just like, you condensed the the first 30, 40 pages into two to three minute song. And he was just like totally tickled by that. Yes. Well, you know, the relics that were amazing, and this is like, i suppose the difference between writing about Shakespeare, like, what do you have? You've got some, you've got his will, you've got some legal documents, you've got the scripts of the plays.
00:39:44
Speaker
With Lin-Manuel, what you have are the mixtapes. He spends most of his adolescence and even into his adult life, like, making mixes for the people that he loves. And high school girlfriend would share me the mixtapes where he would, like, slip, you know, in between a Les Mis song and a Farside rap, like,
00:40:01
Speaker
ah you know hold me, kiss me, thrill me, these sort of like subliminal messages that he was sending to the recipients. they Those became, like I felt like, my my reading my reading quizzes for myself. is like People just started, who went to high school and college with him, sending me the table of contents of the mixtapes that they got from Lin-Manuel. And my check would be like, okay, do I recognize each of these songs, and can I explain what they're doing on this mixtape? And if I can, then I feel like I know where his brain is at this moment in the in this story.
00:40:29
Speaker
And I think what what really struck me about the book as well is that everyone knows him as the the figure of Hamilton, the creator of Hamilton. And I was reading just thinking, like is Hamilton going to hijack the entire story? And the fact is, it doesn't. it It comes in roughly halfway through, and then it takes a significant chunk of the second half of the book. But like how are cognizant were you of the balance, because most people are going to be reading this expecting ah basically a Hamilton treatise, but you give you give it the the entire treatment of his entire life, and Hamilton being a significant part is not the entire part. That's true. Yes. I hadn i mean i was thrilled, of course, to find out about the stuff I didn't know yeah beforehand. The 90s grunge jukebox musical that he wrote when he was in college. Yeah, Basket Case, right Exactly, right. or Nightmare in D major the musical about the ghost of a fetal pig who comes back to haunt the kid who cut him up in AP biology class And I remember that this that first chapter I wrote about seventh grade I i was so thrilled with it because I was like I have learned I know everybody who's in his homeroom I know everything he wrote that year and my my agent read it and she said okay the good thing is you're writing
00:41:39
Speaker
I like, you're doing something. But are they all, are all the chapters gonna be like this? And i was like, well, what's the problem? I've i've learned it. But she's like, we gotta get to Hamilton, right? And if this is a whole chapter on seventh grade, then we're gonna be, you know, volume three by the time we get to the stuff we we care about. And I remember my editor, when I sent in the the first draft, it was 200,000 words saying to me, Lin-Manuel Miranda is not Lyndon Baines Johnson. He does not get six-volume treatment yet. But I wanted to show how all all of the material from the beginning
00:42:15
Speaker
informed the work of somebody who is continually learning at each point of their life. It's earning it, too. That's the goal. want to earn, he needs to earn it in the book, and that's what we're experiencing, is that like he's earned this moment to get on that rocket ship we were talking about. I hope so. And then then the question my editor would ask was, like is the book going end with Hamilton? For for me part of the the argument of the book is this is a guy who continues to learn and who wants to expand his like Swiss army knife of tools at each point. And so really, as Hamilton is actually the springboard for the next phase of his career. he doesn't have to worry about money. He can do whatever he wants. And what he wants to learn how to do is to be a filmmaker. And that's what he sets out to do in the the second part of his life and and write music for Disney films that he grew up looking at. And my early readers were are you writing about Disney? That doesn't matter. Some readers might feel that way, but they these were mostly
00:43:06
Speaker
I think 75-year-olds, and I think most people who had, you know, was around kids during the pandemic and our our blood type is now basically Disney Plus as a result, knows that we don't talk about Bruno as the gateway for many people to Lin-Manuel. So I was glad to be able to show him continuing to to learn, too. Right. there's There's a moment late in the book as Steven Levinson asked, like, what drives you to keep going after Hamilton? Going after Hamilton. Hamilton, frankly, and Lin's just like, because I know some someday I'm gonna die. and like There it is, like even with this success that none of us are gonna touch, quite frankly, he's still driven by this by the tick by the ticking clock.
00:43:45
Speaker
Yeah, that I have to admit was was alien to me. And maybe maybe some of you feel this ticking clock more consciously than I do. i I don't sort of spend each day thinking I have to maximize every moment because I don't know when I'm gonna die. But that was tremendously palpable for Lin-Manuel. And it was, even his mother had grown up with it as well. She'd gotten diagnosed with cancer when she was 19 and told she that either the treatment would work or she had two years to live. And this was sort of a mode in which I think their whole family kind of operated as, and not not in an inhibiting way, but in a motivating way of like, your time is precious. What are you going to do with it? And so i i didn't want to, you know, I hope it's not a sort of reductive psychological reading, but it certainly seems like it was a driven part of his
00:44:31
Speaker
Steven Levinson, who is the script writer on Lin-Manuel's first directorial project, Tick, Tick, Boom, about Jonathan Larson, the guy who died before he could see his work into the world, told me that line. I was like, oh, my God, that's what we're... Yeah, you're just hearing it echo throughout. Like, yeah, this is some deeply embedded psychology. Like, he is driven by, like, I just need to make my mark, you know take my shot over and over and over again, because eventually it's going to be taken away from me, whether I like it or not. it's the only preconceived thing in his life. is like It's like, it's going to be taken away from me at one point or another. I'm going to make the most of it. Right. And then that was the challenge of like, how do you write about somebody who whose life hasn't come to a complete end? Like you you begin beautifully with Prefontaine's funeral, and that's like a perfect entry point into how he lives. I had to figure out that, that you know, when I interviewed Ron Chernow, his first question to me was, where are you going to end the book?
00:45:17
Speaker
Like, how's it going to how's it going to land? And initially I had thought, okay, the arc is Lin-Manuel is a student. He's learning from all these people, and the end is he's going to become a teacher.
00:45:28
Speaker
And i I had this scene, he he went through, he was like a formal mentor sponsored by Rolex for a young filmmaker. And he invited me to an occasion where he was going to present her work at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. And she had made this film about people's memories of songs from their childhood, documentary. It included Lin-Manuel. And on this film, he sings the songs that his mother, the child psychologist, used to soothe him from his childhood. And then the filmmaker had like everything dissolve into stars. And I thought, oh, well, that's the end, right? he's He's going to become the teacher. His student will return us to his mother in childhood. And the last word of the book is going to be stars, which is going to resonate with all this, all the thing. And I wrote it. And I was so thrilled. I thought it was so like clever and resonant. And everybody hated it.
00:46:15
Speaker
People who had disagreed about everything else in my book, the one thing they all agreed about was it was a terrible ending for the book. They're like, who is this young filmmaker? We've never met him before. And why are you killing off Lin-Manuel? You're like turning him into an apotheosis in the heavens. And i thought back to i thought back to Mrs. Dalloway, the Virginia Woolf novel, where somebody else dies so that Mrs. Dalloway doesn't die at the end of the book but can be sort of reborn. And i was like, oh, that's what we need to have happen. So...
00:46:45
Speaker
somebody else dies at the end of the book. And that springs Lin-Manuel into renewed action. And then he released, well, I was just during the course of writing this book, he released a new album whose first and last line is, this is the sound of something being born. And I thought, okay, you've given me you've given me something other than death. You've given me a rebirth. That's where we're going to go.
00:47:06
Speaker
Right, and when you're when you're talking about um and building the scenes around the making of Tick, Tick, Boom about about john John Larson, Jonathan Larson. Jonathan Larson, yeah. and ah there even ah Jonathan Larson's sister, what she appreciated about that was they didn't make it into Saint Jonathan and like showed some and unflattering moments. And I wonder just for you in terms of Lin-Manuel, what was the challenge of finding the unflattering things so it didn't feel like hagiography? Right. Absolutely. this I love this line, Jonathan Larson's sister says, what she liked about the film is that it wasn't St. Johnny. And when I saw Tick, Tick, Boom, i don't know some of you have seen it's on Netflix, this is, I think, delightful wonderful illumination of an artist making work that nobody's going to see and trying to figure out how to keep going for it. And I wrote to Lynn and said, I want to do for you what you did for Jonathan Larson and show him in all of his complexity, loving and learning and screwing up on the way to making work.
00:48:04
Speaker
And I think that required him to be pretty vulnerable. And he's he's like hes he's a fairly uninhibited guy. He's willing to talk about stuff. But he talked about failures in a way that I'd never heard from him before and moments of of conflict and betrayal and shame. And and for me, it was not trying it's not trying to you have a gotcha kind of thing. but I feel like these are the this is part of the education of an artist. What do you do, for instance, If your mom has told you it's all grist for the mill, everything that you experience can become your art, and then your girlfriend doesn't want her private life to become part of your art and feels like she's been put on display. That's part of your education. Or what do you do if you've learned from your high school mentors that the way to get everybody involved in a production is to make it the most fun thing possible? and you're going to lead with enthusiasm and do extra shows and everybody has to learn the Mambo for West Side Story, you're going to call it National Mambo Week and bring in snacks and do fun warm-ups to get everybody on board. And then Hamilton opens and all of a sudden there's a discrepancy between the money the producers are making for the show and the money that the mostly black and brown artists who have been part of its development are making for the show and being fun is not sufficient to deal with that structural inequality. So those those for me those were tough moments to talk about but with with him, but but I tried to pitch him that like this is part of an education, and in fact, I i find, maybe I don't know if you find this too, that when you're reading about an artist you admire, what's most inspiring is actually not their highs, because you know about those already, It's how they deal with the lows, how they deal with the moments.
00:49:39
Speaker
Lin-Manuel described to me when he'd done this crazy sci-fi time travel senior thesis show, and it flopped. And then the other kid who was the star senior thesis student at Wesleyan did it like the most gorgeous show that anybody had ever seen. And Lin-Manuel told me he broke down in tears in his car coming out of that show and felt like he was Aaron Burr. watching Alexander Hamilton do everything that he wanted to do but couldn't accomplish himself. I felt like those are the moments we need to have to be able to realize that we are not alone in our our feelings of insecurity or inadequacy or going through those lulls as well. Oh, for sure. What what did you find was the most, though maybe the thing that made him squirm the most, to the hardest conversations you had to have with him? Puerto Rico.
00:50:19
Speaker
So Lin-Manuel grew up visiting his grandparents in Puerto Rico every summer, longing to feel at home in the island his parents had come from, but always feeling out of place because he spoke Spanish with a New Yorican accent, couldn't play with the other kids, would just sort of make movies alone with his grandparents' friends. And then he thought that bringing Hamilton to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria would be a way to have the sort of homecoming that he'd never experienced as a child and and that he actually had experience with In the Heights on a touring production. um He was just bringing the show there to raise money to help the island recover after the hurricane, but it became bound up in a really complex nexus of colonial economic difficulty. And Lin-Manuel had sort of put himself out on a limb at his dad's recommendation to back a financial oversight plan for Puerto Rico. that gave the federal US government control over the Puerto Rico's economy, led to horrible austerity measures, cuts in education on the island, and when he announced that he was gonna bring
00:51:22
Speaker
Hamilton to to Puerto Rico, a group of students at the university where his dad graduated, showed up with signs saying in Spanish, Lin-Manuel, our lives are not your theater. And he he he told me still felt a pit in his stomach as he was describing these these moments where i I think genuinely he was trying to do what he felt to be the right thing, but was part of a far more complex narrative than he understood at the time, and was putting on a musical that was about the history of federal control over state debt that was, um he now acknowledges, a tricky thing about raising money for it. So I i remember being at the press conference in San Juan where he was getting peppered the way a politician would with questions about, did he support this oversight board? What did he think about Trump's response to Hurricane Maria? And he starts in Spanish, and then he reverts to English, and he finally says, I'm just a little kid who wants you to be proud of what I made. And that is that's a tricky position to be in. But I thought, again, that's part of your education as an artist. What happens when you become artist as citizen, artist as leader, and you have to have a megaphone that's bigger than than what you anticipated.
00:52:27
Speaker
Very nice. Now, before we bring this plane down for a landing, I'd love to, if there's anybody in the audience who would love to ask Daniel a question, um yeah, just raise your hand and I'll repeat it into the mic and have Daniel answer it.
00:52:40
Speaker
So yeah, pre-Hamilton ah profile and then, yeah, post-Hamilton, guess. It's great it's a great question. he So pre-Hamilton, I would say Lin-Manuel was the toast of Broadway. His his first musical in the Heights opened when he was 28, won the Tony Award for Best Musical, and he he stopped having to be a substitute teacher, stopped having to dance at bar mitzvahs to cover his rent, and could now be a full-time writer, and got ushered into the pantheon of writers that he had always dreamed of. So Stephen Sondheim was asking him to translate lyrics from West Side Story into Spanish for a revival. And Stephen Schwartz, composer of Wicked, was asking him to write new songs for a revival of his show. So that that that was a thrill to him. But beyond the eight blocks of Times Square, he could walk and and not too many people knew who he was. And in fact, film adaptations of In the Heights got stalled out for a decade because the studios didn't think he was a bankable enough face to invest the amount of money and they would need to turn it into a production. Then, when Hamilton hits, and like, it's it' sort of hard to remember that 2015 moment when, like, everybody across the political spectrum is going to see it. Dick and Lynn Cheney are going to see it. George Bush is going to see it, as well as, you know, the Clintons and the Obamas and Steven Spielberg and Oprah and Nas and every other celebrity under the sun.
00:54:02
Speaker
And um everybody everybody i talked to, you know, who knew Lynn as a kid said he was still the same guy afterward. And part of it was that he had a newborn, His first, his and his wife, Vanessa's first child was born two months before Hamilton went into rehearsals. And so um his wife, Vanessa is amazing scientist and lawyer who, as far as I can tell, totally loves her husband and is totally unimpressed with the world in which he operates. And so he would say like, my God, today I met Jay-Z and we talked about like, you know, flow and rap. And she would say, and I care why? Because we need milk for our kid and we need diapers at home. And so I think that sort of helped keep him grounded during that time, even as he was sort of flying in a higher echelon. And most of his, like, the people that he's tight with are still the people that he was making Clayton's friends with when he was, 16-year-old in high school. That's still his circle. And like you walk through Washington Heights with him, like people just sort of wave. They're like, that's our guy. you know Elsewhere, everybody's mobbing him for autographs. But I think that helps him stay connected to the person that he was before. And people were sort of suspicious, I think, sometimes when when they read this book. It's like, I think he's a pretty nice guy. like
00:55:14
Speaker
people People don't have critical things to say about him. you might You like his work or you don't. You might find him a little extra in a sort of theater kid way, but like there are not skeletons in his closet. But to me, that actually became one of the lessons of the book, is that we were we're sort of, I think, often...
00:55:29
Speaker
internalized to think great work comes out of people who are not well socialized and who are like living in agony in a garret and then come out and wreak havoc on their collaborators and are jerks, but that's the price we pay for greatness.
00:55:42
Speaker
And Lin-Manuel and his collaborators really set out to show that you could make great work and you can make great work about toxicity and conflict and violence without inflicting it on any of your collaborators. And and that seems to be the mode in which he operates.
00:55:56
Speaker
Awesome. Any others? got one.
00:56:02
Speaker
And anything that you learned along the way, Daniel, that surprised you? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I didn't know about all of these shows that Lin-Manuel wrote before Hamilton. Like, Hamilton was the eighth musical he had written by the time it opened on Broadway. And that helped for me sort of demystify the the notion that, like, you start with the meteoric work of art. like you have to write Seven Minutes in Heaven, the musical about your first unchaperoned high school party, and you have to write On Borrowed Time, the time travel musical, and you have to write Bring It On, the cheerleader musical, before you can get to the the glory of of the Hamilton work. And and I also hadn't realized
00:56:44
Speaker
like how emotional the writing process is for Lin-Manuel. Maybe it's because I grew up as sort of trained as an academic and it was a kind of more intellectual than emotional exercise. But Lin-Manuel's wife, Vanessa, says she cannot write in the same room as Lin-Manuel because he writes as an actor.
00:57:00
Speaker
And he's inhabiting the lives of his characters. So if it's a funny scene, he is cracking up. And if it's Eliza's epilogue at the end of Hamilton, he is like ugly crying through boxes of tissues. And when I first heard that, I thought, oh my God, this is why I didn't hang out with theater kids and in high school.
00:57:21
Speaker
That level of emotional disinhibition is alien to me. And then it actually became a kind of gift of the writing process for me. Like, and this seems sentimental to say, but I felt like there were lines in this book that ah that other people said about Lynn. And when I got to them, I was like, I was cracking up hearing them on the page and then there were moments with his grandfather and with with with a certain performance for Obama where like I had tears in my eyes as I was writing, which I had never had before. And so I felt like he he sort of had opened up my um emotional level and I came to think of it
00:57:55
Speaker
as the like salt, fat, acid, heat approach to writing. i don't know if something that you adopt as well, but you know, cribbing off of Samin Nosrat, like you got, I feel like salt is the details. Like you need some to have flavor, too much is gonna overwhelm. and So I'd have to like keep a hand on the salt shaker. Fat is like the layers of context.
00:58:14
Speaker
You need some, you need to zoom out sometimes, but too much is gonna, you know, enrobe your story in too many layers. The acid is the humor. Whenever things are getting too mushy, you need a zinger from a collaborator. And then the heat is like the emotional stakes. What's going to keep this from just Lin's writing another song so we understand like where he is and why his whole life depends on writing this ah this song. And I had not been playing with like the acid and the heat before I started writing this. It was all salt and fat. And so I felt like learning about his process helped helped sort of open up the like emotional register of my writing too.
00:58:48
Speaker
I always love asking the guests for a recommendation of some kind for the listeners. That's just like anything you're finding fun or happy out there. And so what would you recommend for the listeners out there? Just ah something that's bringing you some joy that you'd like. Well, so i mean there's there's ah there's one one name in the title of this book, but this book is really a love letter to all of Lin-Manuel's collaborators and like the amazing other artists that he works with in order to execute what's in his brain and and bring it to life. And so one of them is is some the the author that Ruby mentioned in the intro, Amazing playwright Chiara Alegria-Hudis who wrote the script for in the heights won a Pulitzer Prize for her own plays water by the spoonful just a knockout writer and she's just written her first novel the white hot which is a searing short novel about ah ah a Mother who has left her daughter 10 years ago and is now writing a letter to her daughter to explain why She had to do that for her own survival. And if you can read The White Hot or listen to Daphne Rubin Vega narrating the audio book of The White Hot, you will never forget it. So that's that's my recommendation. Oh, fantastic. Well, this book is an amazing read. I implore you to get it and have it signed by Daniel. But Daniel, thank you so much for carving out time to come down to Eugene for a live recording of the podcast. The book's amazing, and you were amazing on stage today. So just thank you for the time. It's an honor, Brendan. Thanks so much for this conversation.
01:00:09
Speaker
Daniel, everybody.
01:00:20
Speaker
Awesome. That was great. And look how timely I was to get the live podcast out just a week after its recording. What a guy. What a worker.
01:00:30
Speaker
Yeah, he he's a worker, man. How great was DPP? Very nice for him to come down from Portland. That hellscape of anarchy and corruption and people protesting in frog costumes. What a nightmare.
01:00:44
Speaker
Be sure you check out Pitch Club, the forever free monthly sub-stacky newsletter thingy at Welcome to Sub-Stack. Why do I do that? I am... I do that all the time. Welcome to pitchclub.substack.com, idiot.
01:00:59
Speaker
And as always, visit brendanomero.com for updates, newsletter, embed forms, Patreon, et etc. with The show's Instagram, as you know, at Creative Nonfiction Podcast. And blueski or whatever. I'm at my most optimistic Q-Laf track.
01:01:16
Speaker
Before the sun rises. Mainly because I haven't eaten yet, which means I haven't given myself a chance to overeat and graze and snack and shame myself for not reaching my physical goals.
01:01:28
Speaker
I haven't been on my phone yet and thus haven't scrolled myself into psychosis. yeah While I was walking Laughlin, whose butt issues are flaring back up, ah he might have a cancerous mass, but I don't want to jump to conclusions he might need surgery. The dog that keeps on taking.
01:01:43
Speaker
Anyway, I always try and give myself a pep talk to have a good day. What would feel like a satisfying day? That when it's 7 or 8 p.m. and you look back and you say, B.O., you did all right. You did okay.
01:01:59
Speaker
I'm here to tell you that 7 out of 7 days I typically feel like shit at the end of the day because it never feels like I've made any progress or forward motion at all. You know most days feel like a 3 and out with nary a first down.
01:02:14
Speaker
Run, run, pass, punt. And it hit me why this is. Why I feel this way every single goddamn day.
01:02:25
Speaker
I don't even know what a successful day looks like. I have no definition that makes me feel like progress was ever made. yeah As a freelancer type, it can feel or be hard to quantify what a good day is.
01:02:37
Speaker
you know Let's say you have a boss at ah at a job, at a typical 9-to-5, and you have tasks like stocking produce. There's a clear sense of accomplishment. I stacked these 10 boxes of apples, broke down the boxes, and put them in the cardboard smashing machines.
01:02:55
Speaker
yeah Without metrics or benchmarks, it feels very much like bobbing and drifting in the ocean current. you know Maybe that current whisks you into a satisfying place, or just as often, maybe more so, the current carries you to false harbors or out into the boundless black sea.
01:03:13
Speaker
I've long sought the definition of a good day and haven't come up with anything truly satisfactory. During book research, placing, say, 10 voicemails and having 2-3 phone interviews and cataloging 30-50 articles was part of a good, good day.
01:03:28
Speaker
especially the calls, because that's not passive research. That is something that I am uniquely mining from a source that isn't readily available to anybody with a newspapers.com account or a library card.
01:03:43
Speaker
I also prefer days when I can get, let's say, 50 pages of book reading done for the podcast, and that's roughly two hours of reading time for me. I'm pretty slow in general, but I'm also metabolizing the book differently than your average reader. I'm very active with the text. I engaged with it.
01:03:58
Speaker
Taking my red pencil and underlining and circling things. Writing things in the margin and having a conversation with the writer. I like being in dialogue with it. and It's disconcerting when I'm just trying to have a nice conversation with the book. And the book is like, fuck you, Brandon, fuck you. A perfect week of podcast workflow is I edit on Monday, clean the transcript on Tuesday, write my scripts on Wednesday, track the tape, create social media assets, and schedule publication on Thursday, publish and promote on Fridays.
01:04:29
Speaker
I'm not very good at promoting the backlog, but in totality, it's quite a lot of work, and 95% of my work is free labor, with the hopes that it builds enough authority and goodwill and platform that it leads to people and publishers with deep pockets to give me money.
01:04:44
Speaker
Give me that money. Then there's exercise, which so often gets sidelined, but is important, I think we'd all know. if for nothing else, it's more important for probably for the brain than the body.
01:04:56
Speaker
Sweat's important. Lifting the weights is important. yeah What you're seeing here is maybe the beginning of a crystallization of maybe what defines a good day for me, perhaps. But we're also getting bombarded by fascists. We're dealing with the murder of U.S. citizens and let us not forget the non-white slain, okay? Reading and hearing this news and of course bending our algorithms so all we see is this bullshit.
01:05:20
Speaker
Sometimes a good day is just getting out of bed and making coffee or tea and somehow managing to punch the clock. A good day might be pulling your hair back in a ponytail and getting your kid on the school bus. A good day might be brushing your teeth for the first time in days or boiling a pot of water for pasta and not forgetting about it.
01:05:37
Speaker
These are bad times to have good days. And a lifetime of needing to show our worth through productivity and other metrics of optimization and hustle porn and capitalism and watching the day-to-day grift and slaughter is enough to fry our neurons into paralysis.
01:05:55
Speaker
And it could be that finding a way to define a good day is a way to seize just a little bit of control from systems, just to have some agency. Let's say I surrender to the bullshit currents and I'm swamped by the merciless waves seeking to capsize my boat. The end of the day so often feels like a failure and a loss and no way to honor those who suffer far greater ills than me.
01:06:18
Speaker
Structure helps. Time blocking is nothing new. Setting timers is nothing new. Honestly, what we don't need is a productivity time management system. We probably need to take the long view as much as possible. Stop hustling so much.
01:06:31
Speaker
I have no good answer, and that's really my answer to the conundrum. Honestly, the best thing we can do is have strong boundaries around our phones, better phone fundamentals, which is a concept new to our times.
01:06:45
Speaker
It could be as simple as and difficult as finding an analog replacement to as many apps as possible so we can break the tether. I hate that the phone is also the podcast player and the record player because all the usual temptations are right beside the things that actually bring us nourishment.
01:07:08
Speaker
They're just a tap away. Before you know, you've wasted 90 seconds or three minutes over and over and over again. And again, I have no good answers, but it's all this shit that contributes to my great scent of sloth and waste come sundown.
01:07:23
Speaker
It's a constant process of refinement and reflection. And in so doing, i slash we might find some satisfaction when it's sack time. So stay wild, CNFers. Fuck ice. And if you can't do interviews, see ya.
01:07:56
Speaker
Thank you.