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Episode 318: Greg Donahue
253 Plays3 years ago
Greg Donahue (@GregJDonahue) is a freelance journalist and the author and reporter behind the Atavist original "The Fugitive Next Door."
Social: @CNFPod
Sponsor: Athletic Greens
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Show notes/newsletters: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
when i'm rewriting a sentence for like the 20th time and wasting 30 minutes on some line that probably is going to get cut from the story anyway and then i go oh shit it's not this line it's the one that came before it
00:00:20
Speaker
Hey CNFers, this is the creative nonfiction podcast a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories I'm Brendan O'Mara. What is up?
Meet Greg Donahue: Journalist and Storyteller
00:00:32
Speaker
It's that atavistian time of the month and we have the one and
00:00:36
Speaker
and only Greg Donahue. He's no stranger to the Atavist. A few years ago he wrote a piece called Parambo. A fearless journalist wrote a seminal account of police brutality during the 1967 race riots. Then he wound up on the wrong side of the law. Try not and read more after that.
00:00:54
Speaker
In his latest piece, the fugitive next door follows the life of Howard Farley, a Nebraska man who sold drugs on the rails and later assumed a new identity and went on to live what can only be described as a pretty unique life before his past finally caught up to him.
Spoilers Alert and Subscription Encouragement
00:01:15
Speaker
Note to listeners, spoilers abound. So my suggestion is you subscribe to the Adivus magazine so you get unfettered access as opposed to that fettered access. Is that a thing, Hank? Poor Hank, he hurt his shoulder yesterday so he's gotta take it easy for a few days. Just a little tweak, I think, just a tweak.
00:01:37
Speaker
head over to magazine.adivis.com to subscribe. And no, I don't get any kickbacks, so you know my advocacy for the work that Sayward Darby and Jonah Ogles and everyone else does with the Adivis magazine is unmarred, man. Greg Donahue, what can be said? The guy's a beast. He's at GregJDonahue on Twitter, but doesn't tweet much, God bless him.
00:02:01
Speaker
Visit his website at greggjamesdonohue.com for more details about what he's up to.
Greg Donahue's Published Works and Achievements
00:02:07
Speaker
Here's a little ditty from his website. Greg Donohue is an American writer and investigative journalist. His work has appeared in publications, including New York Magazine, The Guardian, The Addivus Magazine, Vice, and Marie Claire, among others. Parambo, his 2018 story for The Addivus Magazine, was optioned as a film by anonymous content.
00:02:30
Speaker
The Minuteman, his 2019 Audible original, peaked at number two on Audible's bestseller list. He grew up in Northern New Jersey and graduated from Wesleyan University. He currently resides in New York City.
Newsletter Promotion and Writing Insights
00:02:45
Speaker
And speaking of websites, head over to brendanomare.com for show notes and to sign up for my up to 11 rage against the algorithm newsletter. Once a month, no spam, as far as I can tell you can't beat it. But before we get to Greg,
00:03:00
Speaker
Jonah Ogles, the lead editor of this piece, stopped by like Mr. McFeely with his speedy delivery as we tease out Greg's piece. It's such a good feeling to riff.
00:03:22
Speaker
the fact that he's coming back for another round. So what have you noticed about Greg and his work that just really lends itself to the kind of storytelling that you guys are so good at?
00:03:37
Speaker
Yeah, well, he has an eye for it, and that's a really nebulous statement, I realize. But there are certain writers who just sort of recognize good stories that have depth. A lot of writers are capable of recognizing, oh, that's a good story. But they don't always go through the process of finding out if there's a lot of material to work with.
00:04:06
Speaker
And, and Greg knows how to do that, you know, he's able to recognize the stories and I'd actually be curious if he spends a lot of time sort of spinning his wheels on a lot of different ideas, or if all of his ideas.
00:04:22
Speaker
come to fruition. But when he showed up with this pitch, it was clear that he had the goods, he had the story, he had the reporting. So it was fairly easy for us. And he's also just a really easy guy to work with. So it was easy for us to jump on this one.
00:04:40
Speaker
When you say an easy guy to work with, and that can parlay into what typically makes for a good writer-editor dynamic, and this is something we've talked about before, but what is it about Greg in particular that was a pretty seamless experience for you to work with?
The Writer-Editor Relationship
00:04:57
Speaker
Yeah, well, he's really responsive, which I realize the irony of an editor saying that. One who is probably annoyed writers with my lack of responsiveness at times. But he doesn't go dark on you, so that's just sort of like a basic thing. But really, I think
00:05:19
Speaker
Okay, so there's that, and then there's also the fact that Greg just writes good sentences generally. His baseline sentence is at least what he's sending to us at all. There's no sentence that's just egregiously bad. Everything is...
00:05:34
Speaker
is like fine to great. So that's another thing. But I think what really, you know, any writer who's doing those two things, I'm going to say they're pretty easy to work with. But what makes Greg especially fun is that he's demanding of the work
00:05:53
Speaker
And so, he's not like carrying ego about, you know, sections or anecdotes that he's particularly attached to. He's not even like, yeah, there's just no ego involved really. It's just, okay, what makes the piece better? And he's one of those writers that I'll send notes to, and he'll come back to me and say, I liked, you know, this thing that you did.
00:06:22
Speaker
But I'm wondering, is it enough, basically? And there aren't a ton of writers that I work with who really push on a piece like that. And it's good. It challenges me. So maybe it's not.
00:06:40
Speaker
doesn't make my life easier necessarily, but it forces me to sort of defend my own decisions and my own instincts. And in doing so, we often identify subtle weaknesses that we're able to then resolve and make a better story for it.
00:06:57
Speaker
For you as an editor, do you have any blind spots or things that you tend to miss when you're going through a piece of this nature that maybe someone like Greg pushing back on, you're like, oh, I didn't see that. Or in your discussions with Sayward, you're like, hey, you're like, oh, shoot, I didn't see that before.
00:07:19
Speaker
What might you identify them? Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a really great question. I mean, I guess if I were able to list a bunch of them, they probably wouldn't be blind spots. But, you know, there's a fair amount of that that happens and it's always a little surprising in a good way, you know. But I would say,
00:07:44
Speaker
the two things that i'm like not as good at as savored is just because i work so closely with her you know the the first is in like the beginnings of stories introductions to stories she for whatever reason she is really good at it being able to frame a story the right way and sort of like set the right parameters on a reader's expectations right away in a way that
00:08:14
Speaker
I'm not as much. I think I'm fairly capable of finding sort of a gripping beginning or a beginning that really like grabs a reader and starts with some action and then find my way back to wherever I think we need to sort of pick the story up once it's on its feet. But Sayward is someone who's able to really, multiple stories of ours,
00:08:43
Speaker
she has come in and just like changed the beginning, sometimes in a subtle way, sometimes completely redone it. And every time I'm like, oh, that's so much better. And then in this story in particular, Greg, you know, Greg was, we really pushed on the main character Howard Farley's
00:09:08
Speaker
background. We really pushed on that a lot. And Greg, by we, I mean Greg, you know, he just right up to the last round, he wasn't satisfied. He wanted readers to have this very specific idea, I guess he would probably describe it as like a truthful sense of who this guy was. And
00:09:32
Speaker
you know, I had done
Character Evolution and Storytelling Debates
00:09:33
Speaker
some cutting, I had taken some things out, I'd moved some things around, Sabre did the same thing when she read it. And, you know, so it changed in really subtle ways, you know, I'm not sure necessarily that like, the resume in readers minds changed all that much, like resume, so to speak, you know, the guy's basic like biological details, or biographical details or other,
00:09:57
Speaker
but sort of the texture of his character changed in good and interesting ways. I hope. I thought so.
00:10:08
Speaker
When I was talking to Greg, I brought up how the beginning sets up what I thought was gonna be kind of a more sinister figure. And granted, he did some unsavory things, but the way he was, it's just at the beginning, you know, the police finally catch up to him, and he was just like, it was basically like that episode of Seinfeld where Newman is like smoking a cigarette out of his door, he's like, what took you so long?
00:10:35
Speaker
It's like I've been waiting for you guys. And I was like, wow, I thought this was kind of a sinister guy. But turns out, you know, over the course of the entire piece, he actually softens and becomes more likable and kind of instead of the other way around when like when you learn more about him, you're like, oh, this guy's actually kind of a decent guy just trying to live a normal life after he had his, you know, his soiree with in the drug world.
00:10:59
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that I mean, that was, look, we get a lot of a lot of pitches about like, you know, fugitives and things like that.
00:11:11
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, in this case, that's not the narrative. I guess I can say that it's not necessarily like guy on the run cops chasing him. And it's not the way that typically goes. I don't know if maybe I'm like, walking on eggshells for no reason about this. But it's hard to explain if you haven't read the story. But if you read it, you realize like this guy did something sort of remarkable.
00:11:37
Speaker
Yeah, the fact that Greg touches upon this too about it in a pre-internet era, it certainly was far easier to assume someone's identity and then coast on that for 30 some odd years like Howard was able to do.
00:11:53
Speaker
And it was kind of weird too because we were talking about how Jay Gatsby changes his identity somewhat to become a lavish bootlegger in this big lifestyle. We talk about like Don Draper assumed the identity, you know, changed his identity from Dick Whitman to Don Draper and then becomes this big ad man, you know, big lavish lifestyle. And here Howard Farley kind of goes in the opposite direction instead of trying to
00:12:18
Speaker
have a lavish lifestyle. He just kind of wants to be the guy cutting his grass in a Florida suburb. He just totally went the opposite way. He was like, I just want to normalize things and not go to the extreme. Yeah, right. It was almost like he felt like he'd been sort of a victim of opportunity in his drug dealing days. It was just sort of like,
00:12:44
Speaker
That's the era that it was. And Ben was like, oh crap, I better shape up if I don't want this to be my future. Right. We also spoke a little bit about style and he kind of identified something like he tends to not push
00:13:02
Speaker
style too far. He tries to be a bit more restrained, which in and of itself is a very skillful thing to do. But I think he feels like maybe at times he could push the style thing. And a note I made to ask you is maybe there's a time for style and a time for just sheer story.
00:13:19
Speaker
and maybe there's a time where they can overlap. So for you as an editor, do you find yourself at times telling a writer, maybe go for it a little more, or do you find yourself maybe dial it back a bit more so the story rises above?
00:13:35
Speaker
Yeah, both. I mean, you know, my first concern is story when I get a draft. Like, if that's not there, and they're, well, I'll call myself out. When I was a young writer, you know, I wanted my voice in every sentence. You know, I just wanted pure style, like... Yeah, fireworks going off. Yeah, exactly. Just like send a hot one downrange every single time. And
00:14:04
Speaker
you know, that it just doesn't work if the story isn't there. And even the people that we think of as being like incredible stylists and having these incredible voices, all that really means is that they use it judiciously and they know when to do it, you know. I mean, whoever it is, even like
00:14:26
Speaker
You know, even like Cormac McCarthy, I was rereading the border trilogy through the pandemic. And I forgot just how clean so many of his paragraphs were. And then there's one sentence that does all the stylistic work, you know, but he's still just concerned with like, presentation of information. And, you know, so there are times
00:14:52
Speaker
There are times with writers, they tend to be sort of younger ones that we'll have to say, don't worry about the voice thing right now, don't worry about style, we'll get the story in order and then we'll find, you know, half a dozen places to drop in a great line and we'll just pull people over.
00:15:11
Speaker
And then there are writers, and we've said this almost just as often, who you can tell they're just trying to not mess it up. And sometimes they need to be told like, hey, you're not messing this up. Like the story is there. Let it rip.
00:15:30
Speaker
you know, just go for it. And those types of people tend to, they don't overdo it still, you know, but they'll get just a little more oomph into the story to really make it sort of come alive and really pop.
00:15:46
Speaker
Nice, and as we get ready to hand this off to Greg, so to speak, when you were done with this piece and put the final polish on it, what were you essentially most proud of in bringing this story to light with Greg?
Themes of Redemption and Justice
00:16:04
Speaker
Not that every story has to be about something, but
00:16:11
Speaker
you know, I felt like this was a story about redemption. And, you know, I think so often, you know, we tend to be like pretty, I think we're in sort of like a little bit of a reductive moment culturally. And
00:16:27
Speaker
This story, I thought, challenged me as a reader to think about, okay, you know, this guy committed some crimes and some things that, like, we're all basically going to agree are criminal acts.
00:16:45
Speaker
and then you know and this story is about the and then you know because something because he changed he well i guess i guess the question is does he change does he deserve to be punished for those um you know what
00:17:01
Speaker
what does that mean? What is justice in this situation? What is redemption in this situation? What does a guy deserve in the end? We run plenty of stories that are just pure explosions and gunfights and just fun. But this is one that had that flavor, but also I thought,
00:17:27
Speaker
challenged the reader in interesting ways or challenged me in interesting ways.
Fugitives' Psychology and Storytelling Techniques
00:17:33
Speaker
Excellent. Well, Jonah, always a pleasure. It was always nice to get a sense of what it's like on your side of the table of these pieces. And so it's always always fun to have these conversations. So we're going to hand this over to Greg for the rest of the rest of the podcast. So thanks as always for the time, man. Thanks for having me on.
00:17:55
Speaker
Oh, I especially enjoyed that one. Let's see what's next. Who are my offspring fans out there? Smash? Okay, now it's time for Greg Donahue. Like I teased at the top of the show, Greg is a freelance journalist, and this piece deals with the fascinating psychology of someone who would become a fugitive and assume an entirely different identity.
00:18:17
Speaker
In any case, we also dig into what writerly insecurities Greg has, the importance of endings, oh my gosh endings, and a couple dynamite recommendations you won't want to miss.
00:18:32
Speaker
But first, just a quick word from a sponsor. Oh, this episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. Listen, you've probably heard of these guys and I have yet to try this product, but what I dig about them is that they're plant-based, which is important to me. Otherwise, this would be a non-starter. With one delicious scoop, you get 75. Wow.
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00:20:08
Speaker
Okay, that's it. At last, here's Greg Donahue.
The Intriguing Case of Howard Farley
00:20:15
Speaker
Just give me a sense of how you arrived at this story of Howard Farley and this stolen identity and drug trafficking on the rails. Yeah, well I first heard about it.
00:20:30
Speaker
in sort of the most banal of ways. I was just poking around the internet looking for a new story. And I think one of the things I do when that happens is go to the DOJ website and they've got their news briefs of all the indictments and PR releases about all sorts of cases that are going on. And I happen to see it. And I think at that point,
00:20:53
Speaker
It was like the day he had been indicted, but he would have been indicted still as John Doe. The original indictment, they didn't know his name still.
00:21:02
Speaker
So I thought that was sort of intriguing and I kind of put it in my back pocket and then came back to it, I don't know, sometime later and sort of looking, again, going back, revisiting those things that I had just set aside just a short time later. And by then they had figured out his name and so on and it sort of started unraveling. And I had just finished another story that came out for Audible, a much bigger piece in,
00:21:29
Speaker
February, I think, of 2021 was when that came out. And that had sort of a fugitive as well who had faked his own death and gone abroad. And it was really about intertwining stories about this other character and a journalist who tracked him down. But I had kind of fugitives on the mind, I guess. And yeah, and so I just sort of started pursuing it. And
00:21:53
Speaker
found it interesting to me about, the initial interesting thing to me about Farley's story was that he had lived for so long without being caught at 35 years. It was a really long time to be a fugitive. There are other examples, but it's rare. And also that he had done so not
00:22:14
Speaker
in some foreign countries, some kind of tropical. He was living a largely unremarkable life right under the noses of the people kind of hunting him down. And so it seemed very kind of simple, almost, and human, you know, very kind of approachable, the life that this fugitive character that you would imagine would be sort of larger than life, but it didn't feel that way.
00:22:41
Speaker
Yeah, in thinking about that, when I was, to your point of living like a very normal, very human kind of life, and I was thinking of these other characters, and mainly exclusively in my head and in fiction, where they, whether it's Don Draper, assuming the identity of the fallen soldier so he could reinvent himself and he becomes like this big ad executive, and then there's of course like Great Gatsby, who,
00:23:09
Speaker
He didn't steal an identity, but he definitely forged a new identity, and again, a big lavish life, and that ultimately takes him down. But here we have Howard Farley moonlighting as this guy, Tim Brown, who had died, I don't know, as an infant or something?
00:23:31
Speaker
Yeah, and so he, you know, like you said, he was just able, he hid in plain sight and just was just an everyday person and just, and that was okay. I found it almost kind of charming in a way that that's the life he chose, you know, given where he came from.
00:23:45
Speaker
That's right. Yeah. And I think that's the right word that, um, in terms of what attracted to me to him as a, as a figure, as a character, there seemed something charming about it. Now, of course he was arrested. The reason I heard about it is because he had been arrested and was now facing trial and all this, this, you know, if you want to call it this sort of charming life had, had unraveled by the time I heard about it. And so then, then the, the other aspect was, you know, this kind of question of,
00:24:15
Speaker
Um, did he belong in prison at all after having, you know, it'd be a lot easier if he had lived, if he had sort of moved abroad and continued his alleged crimes and so on. And so, you know, you could imagine a world in which those questions didn't really come up and it would have been also probably a dramatic story, but in a different way. But in this case, I've found myself thinking, well, this is like an older guy who's lived.
00:24:40
Speaker
a very kind of easygoing, you know, non-criminal life for decades now. Who does it serve to put him in prison or to pursue him as a criminal?
00:24:55
Speaker
And so that was the other aspect which, you know, and some of that panned out and some of that made it into the story. And some of it didn't just pick up by the nature of the legal system, you know, and we can talk more at length about that. But yeah, those were the kind of two points that drew me to it, both him as a personal figure and then this kind of legal, this
00:25:17
Speaker
interesting kind of legal component that had presented itself right at the moment of his arrest because as I go into the story, he was technically no longer a fugitive.
00:25:28
Speaker
Right. And so you stumble across the idea, you know, DOJ website.
Freelancing Challenges and Source Access
00:25:34
Speaker
And so as you're starting to like, oh, like putting a pin in that, that's pretty interesting. What becomes, you know, what happens next for you as a freelancer is you're looking to then put meat on the bone of what will become a pitch that'll make this attractive to an editor and in this case the activist. Yeah.
00:25:54
Speaker
Well, I had to figure out if I could have access to Farley, which is the first step. And he's, at that point, obviously involved in a court case, which oftentimes means the answer is no, sometimes it doesn't. But more often than not, in my experience anyway, people don't want to talk or are instructed not to talk by their lawyers. I reached out to Farley's lawyers who demurred
00:26:24
Speaker
with speaking to me but through kind of conversations with them which were brief and
00:26:30
Speaker
poking around a little bit, reaching out to other people who had covered the story and so on. Pretty quickly I realized, and it's funny because it took a turn, but at first anyway, I was told that I had sort of, that yes, he would tell me his story, that his wife, who also is in the piece as well, Han, that she was open to talking as well, and that I had access and perhaps likely exclusive access to their story.
00:26:59
Speaker
that sort of pretty quickly I hit on that and so when that happened I said okay great like I can tell this this is interesting psychologically to me in terms of him as a figure and this kind of living this kind of normal life with this you know past hovering just behind him and the psychological element of that and then this legal component which I found is
00:27:21
Speaker
If I have access, I know there's a story there. So immediately I started kind of looking up other parts of the history, Nebraska, the drug trafficking stuff, seeing what I could find, what was available, what was archived, what wasn't. Obviously it's in the middle of pandemic that I'm doing this. So FOIA requests, freedom of information after requests are taking forever. I can't get documents fast enough, things like that.
00:27:49
Speaker
piecing together what I could. But yeah, once I was told I had access to Farley through a connection I reached out to, I thought for sure I have a story and started putting a pitch together. I've written for the out of this before. I wrote a story for them in 2010.
00:28:07
Speaker
18, I think it came out, maybe 2019. Is that the Parambo? Yeah, Parambo, exactly. And Sayward edited that and I had a great experience and I mean, I love the out of us in general and the work is always great. And I just thought this was a story of kind of the right length.
00:28:25
Speaker
The questions that I was asking that we just touched on, the kind of psychological stuff, the legal stuff, are a little bit more nuanced than fugitive steals the identity of a baby and hides in plain sight. I mean, that's the crux of the story, but some of those seeds that I wanted to plant along the way
00:28:47
Speaker
I thought would fit somewhere like that is where you could at least, you could at least be given the space to plant them a little bit because of the length of the story. And ideally, with access and everything else, you know, kind of dig into them a little bit deeper. Now, I will say that that access, the difficulty with reporting the story was that much of that access disappeared at a certain point. Okay. And so the turn you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I, I
00:29:17
Speaker
sort of slow rolled the reporting process while Farley was going through the courts, just kind of staying in touch as best I could, not with him directly, but with the people I had who were in touch with him, who, you know, who
00:29:32
Speaker
were confident that I would have that access. And then basically for kind of, you know, not surprising reasons, he and his wife decided that they didn't want to actually tell me their story. And, you know, I don't want to go in. I think I have an idea of why that happened. And I think it's more of a personal issue for them than it was
00:30:02
Speaker
sort of not wanting their story to be out there. It was more about kind of a very particular personal element that, you know, they weren't interested in sharing. And so there was a little bit of concern there. And so that axis kind of disappeared now.
00:30:19
Speaker
At that point, I had done a lot of research and a lot of work and the question was, can I still tell a compelling story as essentially as a right around because of the case that Farley was involved in and because of previously the case in Nebraska 30 years ago, there was a lot of people involved. It was the largest drug case in Nebraska at the time.
00:30:42
Speaker
And so I reached out to a lot of those people who are involved in knew him and friends and certainly his neighbors. Now, there's a lot of people around the story because despite him living a very small. Well, I don't want to say small, but a simple kind of life. You know, the worlds that he had moved in in these couple of different occasions were.
00:31:02
Speaker
were big. And so there was a lot of people there to talk to. And I ended up communicating with Farley via letters now that he's in prison. So yeah, so it ended up being I did get some of that access back.
00:31:19
Speaker
Now, I think part of the appeal for for some of us in nonfiction storytelling is the idea of creative constraints, too.
Creative Constraints and Storytelling Approaches
00:31:28
Speaker
I know it kind of appeals to me that there are certain lines that you can color in and you need to get creative about how you go about accessing the research. And you said, like, you know, it sort of pivoted to almost to more of a right around and like, OK, if I don't have principal access to the principal figures, how can I still tell the compelling story by going by talking to everybody in their orbit?
00:31:49
Speaker
So, you know, for you, what is, you know, maybe as you're doing some mental jujitsu, be like, okay, this is what it's turning into. This is the right around. You know, how do you lean into the fact that you need to then, okay, get more creative with how you source your information? That's a good question. You know, I had already done
00:32:13
Speaker
quite a bit of that reaching out to other people in Farley's orbit. So I already had made a lot of inroads in terms of contacts and sources around him and certainly in Nebraska in his life growing up.
00:32:31
Speaker
But in terms of the, I guess I didn't see it so much as a, or I tried not to see it so much as a creative constraint. It's just a different way of telling the story. I mean, the Parembo story, for example, which is 15,000 words, give or takes twice the size of this one. You know, Parembo is dead. And in a number of other stories I've written, the principal characters are dead. And so, you know, in a very,
00:32:59
Speaker
roundabout way, those are right arounds as well. I mean, it's not exactly how you, it's not exactly what we mean when we say a right around, but that's effectively true. And there's a million ways to tell that story. And so Farley, I tried continuously to get that access and to kind of open up that door, but
00:33:22
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't see it as a constraint so much as just it forced me to, from the outset, from the beginning of writing it, to think about just a different perspective in terms of where I was going to place sort of myself outside the story and give it the arc and kind of, you know, and this one had a very natural arc, but yeah, it wasn't,
00:33:50
Speaker
It happened early on enough that it didn't force me to change too much at the beginning. I kind of knew what I was going into when I started writing that this is how I would have to do it if he never sort of turned up as a source himself. Yeah, and you just said that the story lended itself. It kind of had a natural arc to you. And so at what point did you realize that this story had a structure to you that just felt like, oh, this is logical?
00:34:18
Speaker
Well, it's very, yeah, it was very chronological, which is I think usually the best way. That's my people disagree with that, I think. But for me, it's always sort of the safest bet. It's the cleanest way of telling a story. Right. I agree. I lean on it.
00:34:35
Speaker
It may not be the most wildly creative way there are. Dynamic. Maybe that speaks also to self-confidence or something. For me, in the deftest of hands, you can move time around all over the place and it can be incredibly compelling.
00:34:58
Speaker
Um, I don't go into it thinking that way. My first thought always with a story when I'm, when I'm sort of sketching out what, you know, how I might structure it. Um, I lean right into the chronology is sort of the first thing I do is create that timeline. And more often than not, just creating a list of the timeline of, um,
00:35:19
Speaker
you know, of the facts of the story, then a narrative kind of starts to present itself a little bit of an arc if you have, if there's enough meat there to tell a story in the first place, oftentimes the timeline sets you up for that, I think. And that was true in this case. I mean, we had this great moment of the arrest
Structure and Complexity of Farley's Story
00:35:40
Speaker
which I knew I wanted to open with and has Farley with a different identity, you know, under his alias, living what is ostensibly a normal life. And then this sort of cliffhanger moment of the arrest. And from there, stepping back and telling it chronologically, I thought was
00:36:00
Speaker
the most natural. Yeah, that's often true, I think, in a lot of stories. And when I've gotten myself in trouble is when I've tried to sort of manipulate that too much. There's obviously, you have to jump around a little bit, depending, and especially with a legal case where there's something happening currently.
00:36:20
Speaker
that may affect the way you tell us what happened in the past. You have to sort of make decisions there about compressing time or opening up a little bit. But yeah, I always knew it would be sort of a character study in that respect.
00:36:37
Speaker
uh, this guy's life and, you know, sort of the classic refrain, right? About like one through 10 or something. And then, you know, you started seven and then tell it from one through 10, you know, it was kind of that kind of, you know, framework was how I, how I went into it and, and basically how it ended up.
00:37:01
Speaker
Yeah, and the way you opened it, too, I got a sense, and this, I think, goes towards you being not dynamic, but there was a deafness and kind of a sleight of hand, because it opens in a way where I'm like, oh, this seems kind of sinister. Like, here he is, like, I've been waiting for you guys. What took you so long?
00:37:24
Speaker
But then as you go back through his life, you know, it does, as we were talking about earlier, you know, he did just kind of lead a very sort of normal, charmed life. He wasn't very sinister or evil here, like this sort of sociopath hiding in plain sight. He was just like this guy, which you reveal out over time. So was that on the forefront of your mind to kind of tease out that this might be something different? And then by the end you're like, oh, he's not evil.
00:37:52
Speaker
Yeah, well, I'm glad that it reads that way, but I won't pretend that that's actually how I went into it. As I researched the story, I went into it, of course, thinking, okay, this guy is like this joke in the story about the Pablo Escobar of
00:38:12
Speaker
of Omaha or of Lincoln, of Nebraska. And as I researched it more, because he was involved in this case was massive, largest case at the time. He was charged with an 848, which is the continuing criminal enterprise is a massive, it basically means you're a massive drug trafficker. They don't charge you with that unless you are alleged to be a
00:38:36
Speaker
extremely large scale. They don't toss those around lightly as a charge. And he was charged with that. And so I thought, OK, this guy's huge. This is going to be some while. And as I researched it more and talked to the people in Nebraska and went back and looked at those indictments in those cases, you realize maybe that wasn't the case. He was guilty of crimes, undoubtedly. But it wasn't quite the sprawling organization that prosecutors and
00:39:04
Speaker
officials made it out to me. A Gustavu Fring, Breaking Bad kind of thing. Yeah, exactly right. It wasn't that by any means. It was expansive in its own way in terms of crossing state lines and things like that. But he wasn't a sinister figure in that respect.
00:39:21
Speaker
He was selling drugs, which is not a good, I don't see that as a good, as a sort of a capital G, it's not a good thing. But he wasn't sinister either. There's a difference there. And in terms of writing it, I think what I wanted to do was
00:39:41
Speaker
was have the reader kind of, each step of the equation is a little bit of a step back almost in terms of how you feel about him. And so I'm glad that worked, although I didn't write it with the word kind of sinister in mind or darkness in mind.
00:40:00
Speaker
That's what happened when he was arrested. He had this grin on his face that I know it sounds, it has kind of a sinister image to it, but he just was sort of like, well, you finally got me. It was almost like a chuckle. I can't believe it after all this time. But what I wanted to do as we went through it is set him up to be the character, the figure that the prosecutors
00:40:29
Speaker
in the case in Nebraska in the 80s, like that they were imagining him to be or accusing him of being, and then slowly walk it back until by the end, you know, when he's in court, he's almost a sympathetic character, despite what he did in his past and how you see someone selling cocaine in large amounts, you know, like, and I think that's kind of the tension
00:40:55
Speaker
for me, I found him to be very sympathetic person and character. And I, you know, there's a way you have to sort of walk a fine line, right? As a reporter, as a journalist to not sort of get attached. But I did find that found him sympathetic. And so that other question about the
00:41:16
Speaker
you know, the nature of rehabilitation versus punishment. And does this person belong in prison after leading a law abiding life for this, you know, have they sort of done their time just by being law abiding in the years in between, you know, their fugitive years, that kind of thing. That kind of question to me was like,
00:41:39
Speaker
as we walk back, you know, okay, he's this massive drug dealer, and then it's like, well, but the case wasn't that strong, and they didn't indict him on that much, and they were gonna put him in jail for life, for what amounted, in the end, to be a small amount of cocaine, comparatively, and so on, and then he lived a normal, and then he turned out he was actually a good guy in his normal life. And all these resources were used, and then we see him, you know, to capture him finally, and then we see him as an older man, and he's,
00:42:05
Speaker
surrounded by his neighbors and family who adore him, by all accounts. Yeah, he got warmer and warmer as it went on. And even to the point where the daughter that he had in Nebraska, who he effectively abandoned,
00:42:24
Speaker
Even in the end, she is like, I haven't seen him in 40 years. I want to have a relationship with him. And that even speaks to, wow, this is a warm character that his estranged daughter actually wants a relationship after having been abandoned 40 years prior. Yeah, that's exactly right. And the judge noted that in his
00:42:43
Speaker
in his statements, and I mentioned it briefly, but in different statements he went on even in depth about that, just how amazing, how you never see that in a courtroom. This is a judge. He's been there a long time and he was basically like, this is not the kind of thing you see very often with a fugitive who skipped town and left his family behind and so on. And yeah, so that opening
00:43:07
Speaker
I did want to leave, of course, it's sort of a natural cliffhanger. And it seems very easy in terms of like, well, that's a great place to start. You've got a built-in kind of, you know, but who was he or what, you know, but what was the crime really that they're catching him for and all this. And then, yeah, that kind of warming is the right word, sort of walking back the sinisterness, the danger or something until we realize that it's more complicated than that.
00:43:35
Speaker
You mentioned it a moment ago about not necessarily getting tutu attached to your source, in this case Farley. How have you, over the years, navigated that over the course of these long-form features where you do effectively become very friendly with central figures if they're not too unsavory? It's a tough road to navigate, so I wonder how you do that.
00:44:01
Speaker
Yeah, I've been lucky that most of the people who I have spent the most time with in terms of sources for stories are not particularly unsavory. So it makes it easier. Yeah, I think that, you know, you have to be careful. There's a professionalism that is necessary to do the work objectively. And I think
00:44:30
Speaker
But I think it's okay to sort of develop some kind of a relationship with, you know, and I certainly have with the people, a couple of the people I've worked with as sources are, you know, I don't know if they're friends, but we stay in touch every once in a while. I get calls, a lot of them are older in this case, you know, these are people who are involved, court cases in the 80s, you know, they're a bit older now. And I think it's interesting for them
00:44:55
Speaker
to relive these moments. Same was true with the Parembo case. He passed away years ago, but his wife is still alive and spoke to her not long ago. She just called me to check in about my kid. Oh, that's great. Yeah. And I think it's fine. I think as long as you can walk the narrow path between remaining objective
00:45:23
Speaker
developing this kind of endearing relationships with people is okay. It hasn't been too much of an issue with me. I think it's very different if you're talking about reporting breaking news or
00:45:37
Speaker
when you're doing stories that involve violent crimes, things like that. It's kind of a different world in terms of the relationships that you're forced to navigate because
00:45:56
Speaker
The relationships with victims, the relationships with alleged perpetrators or perpetrators, you know, it can get very confusing and complicated quickly, I think, for people. It hasn't been too much of an issue for me. I did a story recently in the fall in New York magazine that
00:46:15
Speaker
involved murders and was very violent crimes and was much more contemporary. And there was a little bit of that where I had to sort of step back and say, okay, but I'm not here to advocate necessarily for your cause. I'm here to tell this story. And you kind of have to walk that line and just be upfront with people, I think is the most important thing in those situations for me and just tell them
00:46:41
Speaker
don't make any promises that you can't keep as a writer. I think it's really important. But if you are also coming at something from a particular angle, and this is the story I want to tell, this is where the reporting has taken me, you can be honest about that as well. And if it happens to align with what someone else wants, it's okay to express that, I think. I mean, they're going to see it anyway. They're going to recognize that anyway.
00:47:06
Speaker
But yeah, making promises you can't keep is a very dangerous game. And especially with crime reporting, you have to sort of step back, I think, and be mindful about whatever the relationship is that is occurring.
00:47:22
Speaker
Yeah, and a little while ago you were talking about the story, how attracted you were to also the psychological element of
Psychological Challenges of a Fugitive Life
00:47:32
Speaker
it. And there's a moment too, it's the start of part three, where you write, any fugitive worth their salt will tell you that disappearing is more of a psychological act than a physical one.
00:47:42
Speaker
Anybody can skip town. What's harder is cutting ties to one's past, adopting a new identity and remembering to stick to it, exercising the people, traditions and routines once held dear, and cauterizing the emotional wounds left behind. It's a commitment few people are able to endure and Farley made it look easy. So what was the kind of that appeal there to you to kind of dig into that psychology? Yeah, I mean that's
00:48:11
Speaker
Well, I tried to express it right there. I couldn't imagine it. And like I said, I've reported on a couple of other fugitives, just randomly, totally unrelated stories. And they've all told me that that is the hardest part.
00:48:29
Speaker
It's a little different now. It's pretty hard to be a fugitive now in the post 9-11 world, right? It's very hard to be a fugitive. Everything is documented. Everything is online. There's paper trails for everything. Back in the 80s, when Farley was making his escape, it wasn't that hard to get the documents. The physical side of it was really about leaving town. And if you could be committed
00:48:54
Speaker
to using a different identity, not contacting, you know, the US Marshals I spoke to told me that in large part, finding fugitives, you know, is comes down to them reaching out to family members or family members reaching out to them or friends reaching out. It's just people trying to reconnect with their previous life. And that's how you get busted. And yeah, and so that
00:49:22
Speaker
You know, it's changed a little bit, but back in the day, that was the only thing stopping you. And yet, almost nobody did what Farley does. No one can do it, can keep it going for 35 years. And I think there's something to that. There's a sort of fortitude. I mean, I'm not, I don't think it's necessarily a good thing. And look what it did to his family and the people you leave behind who are, you know, and the guilt that Farley suffered from and other people.
00:49:51
Speaker
there is a sort of, it's impressive in, you know, not necessarily in a good way, but it's impressive psychologically to do that to me, I find it to be something I mean, I couldn't do it, you know, I couldn't imagine doing. Yeah. And so in Farley's case, that was a large part of it was sort of, he made it look easy in the sense that when he decided to, to split, you know, he never looked back. And
00:50:22
Speaker
I wanted to understand how that might be possible. Now, when I communicated with him via letter, even now, even today, these many years later, he basically said that it wasn't that hard.
00:50:38
Speaker
It just wasn't that hard for him. I think he felt very guilty about the family he had left, but it was necessary. It was that, it was live with that guilt or spend the better part of the rest of his life in prison. And when that was the question, when that was the calculation, all of a sudden it just wasn't that hard. And I found that surprising. I thought I was going to get kind of maybe a more tortured response from him about this.
00:51:06
Speaker
And maybe if we if we if we spoke, you know, this was in a letter that he penned from prison. So he was somewhat succinct. But yeah, it was it was kind of and it remains kind of surprising to me at at how at how he didn't find it that difficult. Physical letters where you guys were writing back and forth. That's right. Yeah.
00:51:29
Speaker
Oh, that's awesome. In an age where we're just so digitally tethered and things are so instant, it must have been like, you know, pop off this letter and you're like, God damn it, I got to wait for however long. How long were you going between letters? Well, that's the thing. You have to pop it in the mailbox and then you don't know if it even got there. You don't know if they've read it and you don't know if they're going to write you back.
00:51:56
Speaker
Or in other cases where I've written to people in prison, it's like the sort of requisite amount of time that I would expect to hear something back is nothing. And then two weeks later, I get the letter still sealed, returned to sender. Either they didn't accept it or the prison rejected it, which is what happened in this case a bunch of times. The Bureau of Prisons
00:52:16
Speaker
I sent one letter on, of course I called ahead, are there any requirements? And they said, oh no, you can send it this way, normal envelope, whatever, everything's fine. But I had sent it on yellow legal paper.
00:52:29
Speaker
instead of white legal paper, so they rejected it, which I didn't realize was an issue, but is, or can be, depending on how detailed the warden, you know, wants to be. And another one I sent in a, I sent him a previous piece that I had written just to say, look, this is like who I am. I want to tell this story. Here's something else I've written. You get an idea for what I do.
00:52:57
Speaker
And I put that in a, you know, an eight and a half by 11, a Manila envelope. And they rejected that and sent it back. Although curiously, the story itself was gone. So they had taken out the story and given it to him with no letter.
00:53:11
Speaker
attached. So one day he opened up his mail and it was just a random story from some random guy. And then weeks later, once I got that back in the mail and then wrote him again, weeks later, he gets the letter that says, oh, hey, that was me. That was something I'd written. Here's, here's what I'm trying to do. Here's, you know, I'm trying to tell your story and so on.
00:53:31
Speaker
But yeah, it took weeks, weeks in between the correspondences and you have to be very, I've done this before with people and it's always been very effective and I think handwriting helps. Handwriting the letters really helps. People in jail, I think by and large, are looking for connection and many of them wanna tell their stories and it's not as sort of difficult as it sounds to get somebody to write back. I've had a lot of luck with it.
00:54:01
Speaker
And I love the final paragraph that you wrote in the story about Farley fishing and basically it's just a symbol of what his life was and is.
00:54:21
Speaker
At what point in your reporting, in your interviewing, did this little anecdote that is so symbolic of his life, when did that hit you?
Symbolic Endings and Story Impact
00:54:30
Speaker
And you're like, oh, that's got to be the ending. Yeah, that's a great question. I was so happy when that happened. So perfect. It was so perfect. When I stumbled at that. I had sort of a different ending in mind, which I
00:54:43
Speaker
I mean it's just a few paragraphs earlier basically is where I was going to cut it and and it wasn't perfect I knew I wanted to I needed to add more something but I was like okay basically we'll end it on this and then I interviewed so it was maybe.
00:54:58
Speaker
two-thirds of the way through or three-quarters of the way through the reporting, I spoke to one of Farley's friends, Pat, who told me that anecdote. And he appears earlier in the story as well, just briefly.
00:55:13
Speaker
And the second he told it to me, as he was telling it, and this has never happened before, it's usually much more, I have an odd, I try and flesh the stories out, I said before I do the timelines, the arc oftentimes will sort of present itself when I think of it that way. But I never have an ending when I'm writing. And to great regret, I wish it wasn't this way, it makes it harder, I think. But I never really have one in mind.
00:55:43
Speaker
I usually just kind of write to the end of the story and hope that something clicks and then I see it as I'm going. And in this case, as soon as he was talking, as he was telling it, halfway through the story, I just was like, oh, well.
00:55:58
Speaker
Great. Perfect. I've got the ending. This is it. And I haven't ended, I don't think, a story on an anecdote the way that I did this one before. I'm not sure maybe I have, but not a longer piece like this. And so it was a little bit unusual for me to say, okay, how can I now, how can I sort of tag this
00:56:18
Speaker
anecdote, which happens, you know, separate from the timeline, essentially. How can I sort of tag this on the end? And I had to work a little bit to craft that transition. But yeah, as soon as he was telling me that story on the phone, it was like the light bulbs going off.
00:56:34
Speaker
About like perfect, you know, and I sort of saw the whole Bookended aspect of it. So very very lucky. I was like and I told him that he's an old. Yeah, that's it was an editor and newspaper reporter He's retired now, but You know when when he was hanging out with Farley and stuff like that he was and I told him as I said it I was like well this you know You just handed me sort of gift wrapped me the ending I think and he said, you know like I can see what you mean like he he understood how it
00:57:04
Speaker
encapsulated a bit of the bigger story, you know? Yeah.
00:57:10
Speaker
Yeah it really underscores how important endings are and how they just that hammer comes down you're like oof and you just kind of like sit back sit back in your chair like damn that was good and maybe we can speak to that more and how important endings are for you and I'll just speak personally how I like to if at all possible I like getting that ending I like it to
00:57:38
Speaker
Reveal itself early as almost like a lighthouse in the distance like oh, okay now I know what I'm swimming towards and that way all the words then start to sort of inform that ending and You know, it's nice when it happens early, but sometimes it like you said it happens very late So like it just for you how just how important are endings and the emphasis you put on them? it's huge I think that you know, I I
00:58:07
Speaker
you know, grew up playing music. I went to school for music and that's, you know, before I started writing, that's what I did. And it always kind of struck me that it's like this sort of the old line about, you know, it's like the
00:58:23
Speaker
the last note or the big finish or something in a song is really what matters. If you nail that, what came before it, you can fake your way through a little bit. And I think that's...
00:58:40
Speaker
somewhat true, the problem in asking someone to read a 9,000 word or 20,000 word piece, as sometimes in the adivus, it's like you have to keep their attention the whole time. So you can't kind of fake it or gloss over things in the middle, but regardless of how you structure it, you know, in the way that you might in a three minute song, but how you structure it, if you can get to that ending. And I think you're right. If people kind of see the ending coming,
00:59:08
Speaker
then they're more willing, they're already on that track. They're already careening down the railroad track with you if you can plant that seed earlier on in the story. Now, when that comes to me, the best case scenario is that you plant that seed and people go with you and then there's a little bit of a twist of an ending where it isn't quite what anyone expected.
00:59:32
Speaker
sometimes you get lucky and that's how the story plays out but I find it very difficult to know what the ending is going to be ahead of time and it's and I think it's hugely important.
00:59:43
Speaker
So sometimes it's a struggle. I think a lot of times what I end up doing is writing the story. And when I say writing the story, I mean literally like kind of the narrative, the facts of what happened.
01:00:04
Speaker
I get to the end, if I'm following a chronology, it's wherever the story has sort of finds its natural conclusion. And then that's your opportunity to tie all the different kind of bows together that you may have loosened a little bit as you went.
01:00:25
Speaker
I don't like heavy-handed endings either, where everything wraps up in a little bow. I mean, sometimes it's nice and it ends with a, you know, it can give you a little bit of that gut punch, but it has to be subtle, I think, to me, and nuanced how you, you know, and so ending it with a question that is more informative and instructive than it is inconclusive, you know, things like that are really, really powerful ways of doing it, but
01:00:55
Speaker
always been a struggle is the short answer. I think I got lucky with this one because I really like that anecdote and I knew right away that I wanted to end it there. Previous stories have not come as a flash of realization.
01:01:16
Speaker
One of my favorite endings is one of David Foster Wallace's tennis essays on Michael Joyce, who was like the 100th best tennis player at the time. It was like early to mid-90s. Have you read that one? Yeah, a long time ago. I don't remember the ending.
01:01:32
Speaker
I know the essay can be found in the collection, a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again. And get this, this is the most David Foster Wallace Cian title for an essay. It's called Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a paradigm of certain stuff about choice, freedom, limitation, joy, grotesquely, and human completeness.
01:02:00
Speaker
It originally ran in Esquire in 1995 under the headline, The String Theory. David Foster Wallace's tennis essays are by far my favorite, but that's neither here nor there. But it's just great stuff, one of my favorite endings of all time in an essay. Anyway, back to Greg.
01:02:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's one of my favorite things and here he is like 100th best player in the world which is incredibly good player and just the odds are so stacked against those players because they often have to play into these tournaments and then their reward for that is that they get to not only play against well rested players, they get to play against the best well rested players in the world being your Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras of the time. So they have like no way to really crack in.
01:02:45
Speaker
Um, so anyway, as he brings that essay down for a landing, he's just like, you know, talking about basically the struggles that he had, that he has ahead of him as good as he is. And then the final, the final graph, the final ending is just three words and it's just like, wish him well.
01:03:00
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. And it's just so perfect. It's just like, you know, he's fucked. Like, he's just... Well, you know, it's funny. I got some, like, writing advice earlier on. And it was basically, and it was like, end everything. Always focus on the ending.
01:03:23
Speaker
And it was not just the ending of the story, though, is the ending of paragraphs. It was the ending of sentences. And so that put the best stuff at the end of the sentence. And then if you can put the best stuff at the end of a sort of a section that as it leads to, you know, and of course, you're going to have kind of ups and downs and spikes and troughs along the way in terms of to keep a story compelling. But
01:03:51
Speaker
but you know end at the end of a section or the end of a paragraph with the goods you know and then the end of the piece as well like give it to them and I think and it's funny because something like wish them well sound wish and well sounds so like
01:04:06
Speaker
Yeah, you know, simple or kind of, and especially the way David Foster Wallace writes, it's like, you know, it's sort of, you know, in contrast to how I think in a lot of ways you would expect maybe some long, you know, incredibly erudite. Super bombastic. Yes, yes. And but isn't that like the goods kind of, right? If that's what the whole story is really about,
01:04:35
Speaker
Uh, then he put the best part at the end, which is just like this whole thing that you've been reading is, is about, is about this, this guy who's got no chance. And it, you know, and it could be anything. And so it's like that sympathetic kind of like, well, you know, wish him well. I think that's great.
01:04:50
Speaker
bear with me as I preface this question.
Writing Insecurities and Career Aspirations
01:04:53
Speaker
So when I was growing up, I was always like real, I had like real crooked teeth and never had braces. So I was always like very insecure about my teeth. So I never smiled, like showing my teeth.
01:05:07
Speaker
And I wonder with, and this doesn't mean, it's not gonna be a physical thing, it's gonna be with your writing. If you look in the mirror, what insecurities do you have in the writer mirror when you look at it and be like, ah, that's just something that I have to hang up on. I have a hard time getting over that and I really have to work to get over that and deal with it. What's something that is a writer insecurity when you look in your writer mirror?
01:05:36
Speaker
I think like most, like many writers, I know I suffer from very
01:05:44
Speaker
a chronic case of impostor syndrome, which is broad and overarching. But in terms of my more micro level, I think it's that I struggle with, I really like stories that are
01:06:09
Speaker
um concise and direct and kind of move quickly and they try and hook the reader and then you just like don't let them go and it's very difficult to do with long stories it's it's I don't want to say easier to do with short shorter stories because it can almost be more difficult in a way to to keep everything with that kind of brevity and and and concision but at the same time I wish that I could I'm always trying to do that and I think at the expense of style
01:06:39
Speaker
which I wish I had more style is the answer to your question in terms of my writing. I wish I read some people who have both, who tell these really tight stories and sometimes very complicated stuff. It's not to say that they're simple stories, but I'll just read something and then there's also these flourishes where it's
01:07:07
Speaker
Yeah. Where there's, you can just tell like, oh, they kind of let it go a little bit right there and it's just long enough and it, you know, and I'm, and I'm, I'm always jealous of that because I don't, I find myself struggling to do that. I don't do it very often. When I do, I often edit it right out, you know, when I'm reading it later and I don't have a lot of confidence when I do put in that kind of flourish. More literary is what I mean when I, when I say that something and not purple, but, you know, something really kind of,
01:07:36
Speaker
the perfect metaphor or anecdote and it just goes just long enough and I always end up cutting all that stuff and I wish I had a little more confidence to kind of leave it in and I don't know, let an editor cut it out, I guess, but maybe see, maybe it would stay in. I don't know. Maybe it is compelling and I don't have faith in myself to risk it.
01:07:59
Speaker
Yeah, it's almost like you need to have like a couple of those Al Pacino takes where it's just like it goes to his director. He's like, just let me take it. Let me go there. Yeah. And then he just goes way over there. But then he reels it back in and it's genius. But it's like you got to like cast that reel, you know, 100 yards out when you pull it back in like, oh, 25 yards away from the rod. It's like, oh, that's that's that's good. It's got style and substance. Right. Right. Yeah.
01:08:25
Speaker
I think for me, it's kind of trusting. Maybe the goal is to trust the editor, is to just leave it in and let them cut. I've gotten in the habit of when I write pieces, I don't do a lot of editing as I'm writing. I try not to. I try to do none. That's not possible for me, but I try to do as little as possible when I'm first drafting something out. And then when I kind of put on the editor hat, I find myself cutting
01:08:53
Speaker
a lot of stuff that ends up back in the story. What'll happen is I'll try and cut it down to get that concision and that tightness that I always want and that I think adds drama, if it's done well. And then I send something off to the other and they go, well, I've got a question here. There's a little hole here. You didn't quite flesh this part out. And I realized, well, I had all that written. I cut all that stuff out because I didn't think it was,
01:09:20
Speaker
adding to it, but I realized now what I did was cut too many holes out. And so a lot of it, not all of it, maybe whatever it is, 10% or 30% if you're lucky or something ends up coming back into the story. And so maybe if I was more willing to put that stuff in in the first place and just have a little faith that it might end up living in there, I don't know.
01:09:44
Speaker
And I remember what I was going to say earlier about about like endings ending sentences ending paragraphs ending chapters it's just like what what this little thing it's like the tiny little arc so these macaroni arcs it's just like okay here's a little here's maybe like a section break but here's like
01:10:01
Speaker
a chapter arc. Okay, here's like a part arc. Here's the book arc. And then if it's a series, here's the series arc. It's like, oh my God. It's like you start, all these endings and the way to make them really pop starts to compound. And it can be, it's very important, but also it can be real overwhelming if you start thinking of like, oh, here's the end of Harry Potter's first book. And then how like the arcs just start, it's like, oh boy, you really got to tie this all together. It's such a challenge.
01:10:30
Speaker
I think maybe at a certain part, it starts happening naturally, right? When you stack them, even I think, you know, I've never written kind of anything that long or kind of serialized in that way, but I have gone back. I did a story for Audible. I mentioned it earlier, it came out.
01:10:55
Speaker
It came out last February. This is an eight-part series that I did for them. It's not a podcast, a sort of audio book, but an eight-part series. I found going back and listening to it, I had never written anything that long. It was really great experience, very much a challenge.
01:11:18
Speaker
But I found going back listening to it that there were, just what you're saying, kind of little stacked things that I didn't plan on. And you see them later. And I think that's just the product. You hope the reader sees them. Maybe some do, some don't. But you find out later that some of those endings, some of those miniature arcs,
01:11:42
Speaker
end up forming, you know, your brain is kind of making, wants to make those connections and piece the story together, I think. Just as a reader, I find myself doing that. And I wonder now, in stuff that I've read, looking back, I wonder, oh, did the writer, was that so genius that they kind of intended this? Or is this just
01:12:03
Speaker
how when you're sort of effective at the craft, does it end up happening itself sometimes, you know, and kind of getting lucky. But anyway, yeah, I know what you mean. To see them broken down like that, those kind of layers of miniature arts to bigger ones, to slightly bigger, to the chapter, to the book, it can seem overwhelming, certainly.
01:12:21
Speaker
What is, at this point in your career, you've got all these great stories that you've written for lots of other publications, Adivis included, and what's your relationship to ambition and where you see yourself going, things you still want to accomplish, and where the juice is?
01:12:43
Speaker
Well, it's a tough racket. Being a journalist, a freelance journalist, being any kind of journalist, certainly a freelance journalist, as you know, it's a tough racket. The numbers can be grim. I don't mean to be a naysayer, but that's kind of the reality of the situation. So for me, I think that
01:13:10
Speaker
Despite that, I think it's okay to be ambitious. I am. I'm happy to say that I am ambitious about what might be possible.
01:13:19
Speaker
And I think people should, I don't think, you know, sort of in a creative kind of field, sometimes maybe there's a hesitancy. I know I certainly have been, and this is me trying to talk my way past it. I think we should, we as writers, creative people in all fields should be sort of happy to say that we're ambitious about stuff. I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. Financially, as well as professionally and everything else, you know, I mean, that's a part of the deal. I would like to,
01:13:50
Speaker
I've had a couple of things optioned at this point for film and TV. And that's a really interesting world. Certainly it's haven't written dialogue, you know, in that kind of a way. And I haven't scripted things out. I've done a little bit sort of toying around with things, but never seriously, never in a professional capacity, but it's an intriguing possibility to me.
01:14:12
Speaker
Right now, I have my eyes on a book, writing a book. I'm having a kid any day now, a new kid any day now, which we talked about before this. And so it might be the right time to write a book. But I think, yeah, the general point is that
01:14:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's okay to be ambitious. I have a lot of insecurities about it. And so for me, it's probably in film and television world, which I think is what a lot of journalists do. It's one way of making a living, you know, trying to access that, whether it's through film options, whether it's through doing screenwriting or whatever. I mean, it's a, you know,
01:14:56
Speaker
It's one of the venues that pays pretty well still. Writing for magazines is great and it's been great for me and I've had a lot of luck doing it in recent years anyway.
01:15:10
Speaker
It's been a challenge. You know, it still is a challenge. I mean, you know, it's not like every pitch goes out with like fingers crossed and, and the desperate like weight of who's going to, you know, of anybody. And a lot of people, it's still cold emailing and stuff like that. And so it's, it's challenging. It's a challenging world. I have a pretty thick skin, but yeah, I think, I think, uh,
01:15:30
Speaker
I think to answer your question in a very long-winded way, I would say that more scripted kind of stuff is an interesting element. I'd like to learn how to write dialogue and practice and things like that. It's not something I get to do very often in nonfiction.
01:15:46
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Tapping into the more imaginative elements of creative writing is, I think, very hard for nonfiction writers, especially journalists, because we just lean on whether it be transcripts, people recalling dialogue. So it takes the pressure off. Like, if this dialogue sounds kind of flat, well, that's not on me. It's what they said. And because it's flat and because it's, you know, in theory, verifiably true, it's like, well, that's what happened.
01:16:12
Speaker
And this is great that I actually have some dialogue to put some white space on this page. And that's the nature of this. And you don't have to make it sound like a Quentin Tarantino film where the dialogue is just, oh my god, this is pyrotechnic stuff. It's like, all right, there's no pressure there. Yeah, but it's a little bit of a crutch, too. Or it can be, to your point.
01:16:34
Speaker
that pressure is off. And so you can sort of say, well, it's not my, you know, now I think, yeah, I mean, I think there's a, there's an element there of, of the craft, because even, even kind of more dead dialogue
01:16:52
Speaker
if it's put in the right place and crafted in the right section can come alive a little bit in a nonfiction story. You have to do what you can with what you've got. But yeah, it's a challenge that I haven't, but you know, fictionalizing stuff or going into screenwriting stuff like that would be something that, it would be a challenge I've never, you know,
01:17:13
Speaker
touched on and it's interesting to me. I think probably really hard in a whole different set of skills.
01:17:24
Speaker
Well, as I always like to end these conversations, and forgive me if I didn't preface, I think I did. I like to end these conversations by asking a recommendation for the listeners, and I hope I did. If I didn't, I'd catch you flat-footed. Feel free to take a moment. But I always like to ask the guests for a recommendation for
Recommendations and Inspirations
01:17:42
Speaker
the listeners. It can be anything, professional or personal. It can be
01:17:46
Speaker
You know, brand of coffee, a pair of socks, or a kind of notebook or a pencil you really like. So I'd extend that to you, Greg. You know, what might you recommend for the listeners out there? Yeah, and no worries. You did mention this. Yes, I forget. I forget so often it's embarrassing. No, I would be very, I'd be like sweating right now if I hadn't had any time to think.
01:18:13
Speaker
No, I thought about it and I kind of thought of a professional one and then a very sort of more off-the-cuff personal one. But the professional thing, and this is something that I've recommended to other people, you know, the odd student or whatever who's called me and reached out and said, you know, they're interested in chatting or whatever.
01:18:34
Speaker
doesn't happen often, but when it has, I always say the same thing, which is just to, you can Google it, it'll come up. But Steve Padilla, you probably know, you may have heard of this, but Steve Padilla is an editor at the LA Times.
01:18:49
Speaker
I don't know him, I have no connection to him, except that he did these writing workshops, kind of speeches, kind of forums, I guess, a couple decades ago now, and he's recreated them over the years. But if you just Google Steve Padilla, P-A-D-I-L-L-A, I think,
01:19:08
Speaker
and like writing workshop, it comes up, comes up in the form of tweets. It comes up as, you know, you can find the podcast of this talk he gave, but it's his sort of rules for writing nonfiction. And he's been, you know, he's been a mentor at the LA Times for a long time. I'm not sure how long, but he's very experienced. And the rule, these rules have totally changed my life in terms of writing.
01:19:31
Speaker
Um, the number one, one for me, and this is what I'll say. This is my recommendation is this, this singular advice, but you should look up the whole thing. The singular advice that really hit home for me from this speech was, or from this talk he gave was, um, if you're having, I'm paraphrasing, but if you're having trouble writing a sentence, if you keep getting jammed up on a particular sentence, it's not that sentence. That's the problem. It's the one that came before it. Oh, wow.
01:20:01
Speaker
And I have, I'm looking at it right now, just taped to the wall next to my computer. What is it, 10 of them, eight of them, of these rules. And that one is bolded right in the middle. And I find myself looking at it all the time when I'm rewriting a sentence for like the 20th time and wasting 30 minutes
01:20:23
Speaker
on some line that probably is going to get cut from the story anyway. And then I go, oh shit, it's not this line. It's the one that came before it. And immediately I can go right through that section and it like unlocks it. Yeah. That's my, that's my, uh, that's my recommendation is go check out this stuff, but also look at the line before when you're having trouble with.
01:20:49
Speaker
It's amazing. It's like expecting a certain string of dominoes to fall without a domino before like why aren't you falling? It's like oh that that guy I gotta I gotta knock it over with another one That's the right analogy it really that that whole that whole kind of talk and some of its stuff you've heard some of it isn't Actually now that I'm looking at this list next to me the thing about putting important stuff at the end Came from that from that talk And yeah, I found it
01:21:20
Speaker
I don't know, two years ago, three years ago, just online as some kind of, in some podcasts, they were kind of replaying, re kind of airing this talk he gave, I think, at a paper in Chicago years ago.
01:21:36
Speaker
it was like, you know, it was like the heavens opening because there's all these problems that I have all these issues that I have with the fact that writer's block is not a to me, this has worked for me was writer's block is not a writing issue. It's a reporting problem. Yeah, things like that. Like, it just
01:21:56
Speaker
Yeah, highly recommended. That's amazing. Nice. And did you have a like a more personal one? Well, the sort of like more, you know, whatever. I just finished watching The Night Manager, which is a
01:22:13
Speaker
mini-series. It's on Amazon right now, but it's based on John le Carré books and It's just great. I thought it was great. I needed some serious escapism and yeah, it's got just enough kind of political stuff going on and just enough intrigue and John le Carré is amazing and I think he if you want talk about
01:22:33
Speaker
crafting drama and and kind of I mean it's fictionalized but I think he's probably a great teacher even for non-fiction writers. I find myself going back and looking at his stuff a lot and just kind of but they made this miniseries which was like total escapism and I thought was really well made. So it might be fun to watch.
01:22:55
Speaker
Well, for sure. It's great to find inspiration in things that are outside of your core craft. And as a musician, I'm sure you draw certain things from music and all that. So amazing stuff. Well, Greg, the piece for Adivis was incredible. And this was an awesome talk about that as well as just digging into the craft and the nuance of writing and reporting, these kind of things. So this was a great thrill to unpack it with you. So thank you so much for the time. Thanks for having me. It's my pleasure.
01:23:28
Speaker
And so we've come to the end. You still here? You still around? Various analytics, I see, show that next to nobody makes it this far, excepting Kelsey Timmerman. It is depressing to see the drop-off, to say the least, even after like 10 minutes. Anyway, for those who are here, thanks for listening. I make the show for you. You know I do.
01:23:48
Speaker
Be sure you consider subscribing to The Adivus to support incredible journalism, the kind of storytelling, man, the kind of I really want to do. My god, I'm almost 42. The kind I want to do? Geez, better get on that. Gonna die.
01:24:04
Speaker
Anyway, they're doing amazing journalism. Go subscribe magazine.adivist.com. You can always keep the conversation going at cnfpod on Twitter and at Creative Nonfiction Podcasts on Instagram. Instagram? Hank. Instagram. Geez. Subscribe wherever you podcast and consider leaving a kind review on Apple Podcasts so the wayward CNF'ers sailing the choppy waters of the podcast ocean might find our little podcast that could and find refuge.
01:24:34
Speaker
some of you know that i tend to give a parting shot right here but for the life of me i don't really have one today i did get some significant notes back on my book proposal uh from from my agent boy i've got i've got some work to do is humbling but i think encouraging i think yeah on the whole encouraging
01:24:54
Speaker
Yeah, it's the worst when you think you might be like in the red zone of a project. But it turns out, unbeknownst to you, you took a 20 yard sack and now it's fourth and 28. You're out of field goal range. And if you don't convert, it's game over, man. Game over. I think I can do it, man. I think I can do it. Hank is shaking his head, but what does he know?
01:25:21
Speaker
What do you know? Something of a parting shot. What a world. It came out of nowhere. Stay wild, CNFers. And remember, if you can't do, interview. See ya.