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Episode No. 16: Charles Bethea on Late-Night Pitching, the Anxiety of Reporting, and the Magnitude of Breakfast
143 Plays9 years ago
Charles Bethea is an Atlanta-based writer-at-large whose work has appeared in Outside Magazine, Grantland, and The New Yorker. He has even hiked the Appalachian Trail. That should give you an idea of the intense focus this guy has. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, subscribe to brendanomeara.com, and share this with a friend! Thanks for listening!
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Transcript
Host Introduction & Baseball Essay Announcement
00:00:00
Speaker
Yeah, podcast! What's shaking CNF-ers? On my end, I can announce that a baseball essay of mine will publish in June in Chautauqua's Americana issue. It's the third essay I've had extracted from my as-of-yet-unpublished book, The Sultan's of Swing, a memoir of my father in baseball. Speaking of that, I submitted it to Paper Trail Press earlier this month, so it's out there. It's out there, baby.
00:00:29
Speaker
Yo DJ, cue up the theme! There it is.
Introduction to Charles the Thay
00:00:35
Speaker
This episode is brought to you by me, you freeloading CNF-ers. I bring you episode 16, Charles the Thay, a freelance features writer whose work has appeared in a few places you may have heard of, the now defunct Grantland, Outside Magazine, and the New Yorker. Yeah, he's playing Major League Ball, folks. And you!
00:00:57
Speaker
Yes you, have a front row seat to this latest installment of hashtag CNF'd. Be warned, this was a fun one. For me at least. Let's hit it! Thanks again for carving out some time here.
Charles' Origin Story
00:01:16
Speaker
So why don't we start at the beginning for you? What is your freelance origin story?
00:01:23
Speaker
Well, let's see, I'll try not to go too far back, but in college, I was a poetry major in college, which was of course of great concern to my parents. Although my father did sort of the same thing, he majored in English and focused on poetry, but ended up being a lawyer and
00:01:42
Speaker
I think he assumed and I assumed because he just kept saying it that I would go to law school and sort of follow him in that path and we would use our appreciation of poetry to write very lyrical contracts.
00:01:58
Speaker
So that though once I once I got close to the end of college that's the appeal if there ever had been any if there ever had been any sort of started to to to disappear and My mother suggested that hey, why not apply for an internship at a magazine?
Internship & Career Beginnings
00:02:17
Speaker
You love the outdoors. I had through hiked the Appalachian Trail from from Georgia to Maine in college. So I
00:02:24
Speaker
The outdoors had always been a great interest of mine. And she said, well, why don't you combine writing in the outdoors somehow? And I said, OK, well, what does that mean? And she's one of those mothers that tends to have really good ideas. And she suggested Outside Magazine. And yeah, I went there. I had to apply twice, but I ended up going within about six months of graduating from college. This was back in 2005.
00:02:52
Speaker
10 or so years ago, and they rejected me the first time. I don't know why, but any number of good reasons, I'm sure, but I persisted and applied again. The second time I had applied, I was working a seasonal job in the middle of the woods in New Hampshire, so I only was able to come out once a week and go to the local public library. This is in Franconia, New Hampshire.
00:03:18
Speaker
and check my email and i nearly lost out in the internship the second time because it took me six days to respond to the acceptance but i got it moved out to Santa Fe, New Mexico
00:03:28
Speaker
I ended up living there for about five years, going from intern to researcher to occasional writer. And then I became an editor at a spinoff magazine that they put out for a few years called Outsides Go
Passion for Writing vs. Editing
00:03:49
Speaker
magazine. It was like a men's, affluent men's travel lifestyle magazine that was
00:03:55
Speaker
Frankly, kind of a cash grab. They really wanted to get some of the advertisers that thought outside magazine was too granola.
00:04:05
Speaker
They wrote stories, we wrote stories, published stories about golf and yachting and things of that nature in hopes that Cartier and Rolex would come on board. But I was an editor there and did okay at it but wasn't passionate about it and certainly wasn't passionate about sitting inside at a desk.
00:04:26
Speaker
even though I did have a window that had a view of some beautiful mountains, which I was able to get into a fair amount. And I just started pitching.
00:04:37
Speaker
Late at night usually occasionally during work. I guess I should admit pitching magazines that I admired and one was the New Yorker and I was naive enough to not really grasp how potentially futile it was to to send off queries to the New Yorker given that I hadn't published much even at the outside even at the magazine at which I worked
00:05:03
Speaker
But I had read The New Yorker a lot and was very familiar with the tone and the way the story is read, especially the talk of the talent section.
Breakthrough with The New Yorker
00:05:13
Speaker
And after writing and submitting maybe five or six pieces that were received by the editor graciously and with some enthusiasm and positivity but not accepted, I finally sent one in back in, I think,
00:05:33
Speaker
seven or eight uh... there was about the guy who uh... live in atlanta where i'm from years happen to be a friend of a friend who had procured the email address barack obama at gmail dot com uh... before obama kinda rose to uh... become a a figure of national importance it before you became president and
00:05:58
Speaker
Uh, the story of that email address and of what it meant to have that address and who was contacting him and what they were saying to him and what that all sort of suggested about Obama was exactly the kind of story that the New Yorker, uh, loves in the talk of the town section. And they,
00:06:16
Speaker
accepted it and didn't even change it a whole lot. Within, I think, three or four months of publishing that, I bid the editor job Adia and moved back to Atlanta within
Developing Skills in Atlanta
00:06:32
Speaker
about a year I'm from Atlanta and I figured it'd be a better place to freelance from and I thought that that New Yorker story was kind of my golden ticket. Turned out it wasn't exactly a golden ticket. I still had to learn a lot about reporting and writing and still am in fact of course but it gave me the confidence to go out into the world and try to tell stories and I stuck with it and fortunately I kept my expenses low for the first
00:07:02
Speaker
I still do, of course, but early on, especially low, I had a $250 a month apartment that I shared with some friends. I just kept cracking at that nut. I had the good fortune of there being a city magazine in Atlanta.
00:07:24
Speaker
that the editor there had seen the little New Yorker piece. And on the basis, I think largely of that and a few other little things I'd written elsewhere gave me the chance to be a contributing writer at Atlanta Magazine, which was and is a much smaller publication, but still has an audience and has some reach and has some resources.
00:07:49
Speaker
And it was kind of the perfect step back for me. It allowed me to kind of hone my craft in a less public arena than, let's say, the New Yorker. I mean, I wasn't equipped to write feature stories for anybody, really, at that point. And Atlanta Magazine let me cut my teeth.
Writing vs. Reporting: A Reflection
00:08:11
Speaker
And within a few years, I was writing long five, 6,000-word pieces for them about
00:08:19
Speaker
subjects as far ranging as an assisted suicide advocacy group to sort of a swingers apartment complex to you know profiles of athletes like Evander Holyfield and
00:08:37
Speaker
It was a really lucky time for me to have that sort of education. I didn't go to journalism school. All I had up to that point was my experience at Outside Magazine as basically a fact checker and a researcher. I knew what good writing was and I think I had a good ear and a good sense for how to write sentences, but I didn't know how to report and I really needed some time to hone that skill.
00:09:06
Speaker
it's glance out who is on this podcast in the series editor for best american sports writing he had a poetry background too and he's got a like a very sensitive sort of year for language and without the traditional journalistic background either so i wonder do you think having more of just a pure language background uh... allowed you to sort of back into reporting better and like made you a better writer i feel like
00:09:34
Speaker
I feel like reporting can be learned better than the writing can, if that makes any sense. How do you think that helped you? Well, I definitely think reporting can be learned in writing. I'm dubious that it can be taught. It's sort of like music. I was a terrible trombone player. I don't think any amount of one-on-one teaching would have made me a better musician. I think you have an ear or you don't. You can either hear good sentences,
00:10:04
Speaker
and recognize them and try to replicate them, or you can't. And there's a little bit of wiggle room there, but not a lot. But with reporting, it is a learnable skill, but I think it's entirely separate from the writing skill. I don't know that just being a good writer means you can become a good reporter. I think what reporting requires is a lot different than what writing requires.
00:10:31
Speaker
You can be a great writer and not have to really interface with the world a whole lot. You can sit quietly in your room and with all your neuroses contained there and not risk going out and having them exposed.
Overcoming Introversion in Journalism
00:10:47
Speaker
But as a reporter, you've got to get out. You've got to talk to people. You have to be comfortable with that. I'm a bit of an introvert, so the writing thing came more naturally than the reporting thing.
00:11:00
Speaker
As occurred with me with a brief foray into acting when I was in high school, I found that even though I was an introvert,
00:11:09
Speaker
being an actor, being given a role on the stage and being given a role as a journalist, I didn't find myself feeling as shy because I had a reason to be talking to people. I wasn't standing there necessarily as myself. I was standing there as a professional reporter, which gave me a little bit of distance.
00:11:32
Speaker
A little bit of, I don't know, protection maybe, whatever it was, I found that that role was something that wasn't as scary as I thought it would be and in fact was fascinating and interesting and was this way into worlds that I would have been otherwise probably to
00:11:53
Speaker
shy or introverted to venture into. So that was a really cool thing to discover about this job that I had embraced.
00:12:04
Speaker
writing it like you said yet the reporting like kind of it forces forces you to interface with the world again at what point did you realize like you know when you're in the editor's chair that you wanted to be more on the playing field instead of on the sidelines like what what was the appeal in my what did you realize like act i think that i didn't know what was required uh... to write the stories that i was reading in outside in the new yorker magazines that i admired by
00:12:33
Speaker
I just knew that the act of creating those stories, putting those words on a page was something I wanted to try to do. It seemed a lot more interesting than shuffling the words around and messing with the grammar. I'm exaggerating. An editor's job is much more complex than that, but it's really shaping stories in very important ways. But I wanted to be part of the earlier process, the beginning process.
00:13:00
Speaker
I wanted to, the dirtier, the messier, the more, yeah, just the process that leads up to the clean, crisp thing that you hold in your hand. I thought that, I am an adventurer. I'm saying some things about myself that may be seemingly contradictory. I've always been a bit shy, but I've always been adventurous as well. And I think hiking, nap, latch, and trail speaks to both of those things.
00:13:28
Speaker
Is it sort of a loner journey? But I had like there was a sense of adventure within me that wanted to To be tested and it wasn't so much in the editor's chair if that makes sense Yeah, absolutely. What do you think it was? Like it sounds like you're really grounded in the process and in the work and that's where you like find a lot of the a lot of love and sort of
00:13:53
Speaker
Yeah, what drives you like to these stories is the actual the repartorial process the process nitty-gritty It is I think I get really excited about the reporting. I get really anxious about it. I When it when I'm out there, I'm like I usually sleep a lot but I when I'm out reporting I can't sleep very well. I'm just super excited and amped up and I
00:14:19
Speaker
I'm driven by the insecurity too of can I gather all the facts necessary to put them on the page. I don't think I really relax until I've got that digital recorder full of many hours worth of interviews.
00:14:37
Speaker
in the peace and comfort of my home, of my desk, sit down and actually listen and piece it together. I think that part of it is still more natural, the solitary at-home part.
00:14:53
Speaker
But you can't do one without the other. And I think I love both parts. The reporting, though, is definitely the anxiety-producing part. And I think that's important, though. If you lost the anxiety, you're not going to really chase the story to the extent that it deserves.
00:15:12
Speaker
Yeah, that's real interesting. It's that sort of fear threshold. If you're not feeling a little bit scared by it, you're probably not going to harvest the right sort of energy out of the story if it's not pushing you to a limit that you're afraid of.
00:15:30
Speaker
Absolutely. I think it's true of life. If humans didn't have anxiety and didn't have fear, we would fall into all sorts of problems. We would be prey to all sorts of predators if predators still existed. Anxiety is an evolutionarily adapted trait
00:15:53
Speaker
Right, and I wonder where, just backing up to some things you said earlier, I wonder where that confidence and even audacity that you had early on before you even knew the repartorial heft that you would have to invest in a lot of these stories.
00:16:12
Speaker
to pursue like the gold sin, to pursue the New Yorker, which is like the Yankees of magazines. So it's I wonder like where that came from internally where you are like, alright, that's where I'm going right off the bat.
00:16:25
Speaker
a combination of audacity and naivete probably and having like gone to fancy, well the high school wasn't fancy but I went to a private school and then went to a fancy university and to be surrounded by the expectation of
00:16:43
Speaker
You were the best. And even though I didn't really believe I was the best, and in fact was quite uncertain of that, I thought, well, nonetheless, I have to pursue the things that the best pursue.
Freelancing Challenges & Side Jobs
00:16:56
Speaker
And then it was just really feeling like, what's there to lose? I mean, like a law profession is always potentially going to be there for me. If this doesn't work out, why not try something that's really fun and
00:17:14
Speaker
And the ego, I think most writers would be lying if they said that ego didn't play into it to some degree too. I wanted to see my name in the biggest marquee. I wanted to see my name in lights and my stories to have a wide audience. And it's taken me a while. The story that I told at the beginning of this podcast that was back in 2005, 2006, and only really within the last year or two am I feeling like
00:17:37
Speaker
and really challenging and interesting.
00:17:43
Speaker
My work is at that level where it's getting noticed.
00:17:47
Speaker
Yeah, and I would say like from the outside looking in people might might think that they look at sort of your your catalog of publications where you've had work published that it and you're you're pretty young guy would say what like 33 34 Uh-huh. So like that scene from the outside without knowing the backstory that you just kind of like flashed onto the scene like yeah, um, but Dude, I mean you put in 10 years of work
00:18:14
Speaker
Yeah, I put in a lot of work and I've had good breaks and I've learned how to work hard and in the right way. I am purely a freelance writer. I don't have another job job, but I still occasionally do other things for money. I Airbnb my house once in a while, I chop wood and sell it.
00:18:36
Speaker
I mean, you know, I've made it in the sense that my writing is appearing where I'd hoped it would appear, but it's still a struggle to make ends meet, but that's a separate conversation about how writing just isn't rewarded very well. Yeah, exactly, which kind of gets you to the point where, and you're already alluding to it, is that you really have to genuinely love the work and then turn that work into something that's factually artful.
00:19:05
Speaker
Yeah, and it's been really fun lately.
Perception vs. Reality of a 'Dream Job'
00:19:09
Speaker
I spent a few months ago, I spent a week in Aspen reporting a story for Outside that I was telling you about and it involved interviewing some really interesting people and it involved smoking pot and it involved hiking and doing all the things that I just really, I enjoy doing and then putting it and then creating a narrative that
00:19:33
Speaker
that's compelling and relevant to the moment that we're in right now. I can't ask for much more than that.
00:19:40
Speaker
Yeah, isn't it kind of cool? Sometimes, even though maybe the financial reward isn't always there, but when you sit back from it, from a remove of a couple months or even a couple years, and you look back on it, be like, wow, that was really cool. I was in Colorado, I was smoking pot, I was meeting cool people. From a remove, it's like, wow, that was pretty awesome.
00:20:04
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of my friends, many of whom have really interesting jobs themselves, think that I've decoded life somehow and I've figured out the key. I try not to even brag about this stuff or even talk about it that much with them frankly because it's really hard to not come across as sort of like,
00:20:25
Speaker
little bratty, you know, like I'm off to Aspen and I'm off to so and so I'm off to New Zealand and yeah, you know, it's hard to then convey All the all the work that's involved behind the glamour of the trip the seeming glamour of it But my friends do help help remind me that that it is pretty special what I've been able to to do and and I'm appreciative but it's one of those things it's like I
00:20:54
Speaker
You do it for long, you do anything for long enough and you just become sort of numb to whatever it is, good or bad. And it's nice to be reminded because I do feel a little blessed. Yeah, that's great. So what draws you to a particular story or like what must be in place for you to give a story like all of your energies?
Connection with Subjects
00:21:22
Speaker
I look for really interesting people. I look for people who are unusually open and vulnerable and have done a fair amount of introspection and are thus
00:21:40
Speaker
able to open up about whatever world they're in that I've stumbled upon. Whether it's the world of high-end cannabis entrepreneurship or in the case of a story I did about the 25-year-old CEO of Lonely Planet Guidebooks, whether it's the intricacies of the travel market or
00:22:09
Speaker
I mean, there's plenty of examples, but I look for people who...
00:22:14
Speaker
who were open and will sit down with me. So I guess I'm not chasing, there's some exceptions to this, but I don't often chase stories about people who don't want to talk. I mean a lot of, and I admire the hell out of journalists who do, and I have done some stories where I've gotten some interviews that have been
00:22:41
Speaker
pretty big coups because they were difficult to get but once you've got them you know the person the person you got her i got in this case was a uh... a convict who was the story i wrote for a magazine called many lives of all really price and it's about the former preacher uh... turned uh... bank investor turned uh... uh... man who faked his own death and disappeared for a year and a half and when he reappeared
00:23:11
Speaker
everyone wanted that story because he had built his investors in this bank deal to the tune of about $30 million and everyone wanted to know where the hell he'd been and what he'd done with the money and it was a huge story waiting there and this guy happened to be in a jail in Georgia and I wrote him a letter and he responded to it and
00:23:38
Speaker
And so that, you know, that's an example of going after somebody who does want to talk, but you have to prove you're the right person to talk to. Um, that's, that's a skill that, um, I think my, my interest has benefited me there.
Building Trust with Subjects
00:24:01
Speaker
Um, I think a lot of journalists can come across.
00:24:08
Speaker
Oh, Charles, I think you're dropping out a little bit. Can you still hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. Oh, there you go. You're back. What's the last word you heard? I think you were just talking about writing to this guy, and you said a lot of journalists.
00:24:23
Speaker
Oh yeah, well, a lot of journalists I think can come across as sort of brash and pervasive and sort of transparently going after a big story for their own benefit.
00:24:40
Speaker
I think I've been able to sincerely convey to, and this is a skill I think I've developed, the ability to sincerely convey to a subject that a lot of people may want to talk to, that I'm somebody who will listen, somebody who's interested in giving a story, do respect and time and effort, and that
00:25:04
Speaker
I'm not some grizzled old guy who's just going to churn something out, but I'm going to take the care with this story that particularly a young journalist would, somebody who's trying to make his name telling good, important stories.
Ethics in Storytelling
00:25:21
Speaker
In the case of Aubrey Lee Price,
00:25:24
Speaker
I think my being young helped a lot. So I guess that's to say that if you have listeners out there who are younger journalists, don't fear your youth can be used to advantage. Yeah, I think it's important and you just hit on it that if you're going to tell longer stories, you have to almost go into it with kind of like a partnership in a way. You want to make sure that person doesn't feel like they're just being used.
00:25:52
Speaker
Right. You know, it's like you almost have to kind of have to dance with them a little bit. And probably some hardcore, grizzled reporters will be like, oh, no, you can't. You got to be objective and keep them at arm's legs. But at the same time, you almost have to like treat it almost like a friendship. Otherwise, they're just going to give you cold canned answers and then you don't reach anything deeper.
00:26:13
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, that's crucial to go into it as a human being as opposed to a transactional sort of relationship. But you got to make sure that you don't trade sort of the appearance of friendship for inside intimate information. I mean, if you're going to be friendly, you need to also be clear about with your subject about what you're doing and not give off the wrong impression so that they'll end up feeling used.
00:26:43
Speaker
Yeah. So like the, you can be friendly, but the notebook's gotta be out and the recorder's gotta be out. These signifiers that you're on the clock. Exactly. You need to be transparent about your intentions, but you can still, I think inject that with some real humanity and some vulnerability of your own. Um, before I convinced Aubrey Lee price to let me tell a story, um, I told him some, some things about myself, some of them fairly private things about, about my life and my upbringing that I felt would
00:27:14
Speaker
help show him my humanity and the fact that I was willing to be open with him if he'd be open with me. Right. Yeah. If it comes from a place of authenticity, then you can really have a dialogue and reach that level of depth that's going to separate your story of him from the dozens of others I'm sure that were written. Right. Correct.
00:27:34
Speaker
So my friend Maggie Meset, she's a reporter, PhD candidate, and author of The Rainy Season, she likens narrative non-fiction a lot to putting documentaries on paper, which I kind of like.
Documentary Involvement: 'Fair Chase'
00:27:48
Speaker
And you were a producer of Fair Chase, a really cool documentary that I just told you that I watched this morning.
00:27:54
Speaker
And that stemmed, I take it, from the 2011 article you wrote, also Fair Chase for Outside. Is that where that stemmed from? So why don't you describe what the story and the documentary are about? Because people should check it out for sure. It's a really good watch.
00:28:11
Speaker
Appreciate that. Well, it came out of living in New Mexico and knowing a handful of professional marathon runners, one of whom had read a book called Born to Run that many of you may be familiar with. And it's now, I think, being made into a film. But in this book by Christopher McDougall, which seeks to better understand the origins of running and why humans run,
00:28:39
Speaker
Um, there's a chapter that introduces a theory that was first put forward by a Harvard professor named Daniel Lieberman. And the theory is called persistence hunting. And it says that, uh, before humans had weapons like, uh, bow and arrow and knives and such to kill, uh, prey for food, we actually ran down the animals, um, because the, the archeological record shows that, uh,
00:29:07
Speaker
these tools that we now use and take for granted for going after animals didn't exist until relatively late in Homo sapiens evolution. So the question was, how did we get food before that? And the answer, according to Lieberman and others, was running. So a few of the runners that I knew, and again, these were very accomplished runners,
00:29:34
Speaker
that numbered ultimately eight to 10 in New Mexico decided they would test the theory, not in exactly a scientific way, but in an adventurous way that would lead itself to some good storytelling, both by me and by them for the rest of their lives probably. And they decided to try to run down a pronghorn antelope, which is the second fastest land animal behind the cheetah. I can run almost 60 miles an hour
00:30:03
Speaker
and it happens to live in eastern New Mexico, not far from where we live. So these guys went out with a little more than running shoes.
00:30:12
Speaker
and a sense of adventure and frankly not enough hunting skills but that's sort of something that I won't talk too much about because I don't want to spoil the story. They tried to chase down a pronghorn and they did this twice, once for a story I wrote for Outside and then again a year and a half or two years later for a documentary film that ended up being called Fair Chase.
00:30:36
Speaker
And it was both to write about and to film extremely challenging because you're writing and filming about very fast humans chasing much faster animals. And there's not really a way to be there, you know, right behind any of the action as it happens at all.
00:30:57
Speaker
It all had to come, at least in the written version of the story, it had to come from retelling and mapping out. But it was a cool adventure story that I think got into a very important question about us. I don't know if you run, but getting into this story, I started feeling this
00:31:20
Speaker
this deep sort of primal connection to to using my body that i hadn't before and i think it just came from the realization that we have bodies for a reason yeah we're certainly not meant to sit down all day yeah what i was particularly drawn to it it
00:31:38
Speaker
It was like this camaraderie and this brotherhood among these runners, but this cool connection to nature. It does make you just want to lace up the shoes and just head out there and just go until you can't go anymore. It kind of connects to some primal need to get out there and move. Yes, absolutely. And I can connect that to my...
Daily Writing Routine
00:32:02
Speaker
My daily routine as a writer, if you want to get into that, I can't sit still. I don't have ADD. I'm pretty good at focusing, but something feels wrong with sitting in place, especially on a beautiful day. I really work in bursts of 30 to 90 minutes, and then I take frequent breaks. I begin the day as well with a few hours of exercise. This morning I was up at six.
00:32:30
Speaker
working out with a buddy, a photographer who's going with me to the Canadian Rockies next month for a Wall Street Journal travel story. I do a few of those a year, which is fun and satisfies the desire to travel. But we're training to do a ski touring, hut to hut ski touring trip. But after that, I come home and I spend a good bit of time eating. I'm a guy with high metabolism and I
00:32:55
Speaker
I make bacon and biscuits as many mornings as I have time to and cereal and grapefruit juice and all kinds of stuff. And in fact, when I was thinking about what we were going to talk about in quotes that I liked, I was recalling a Hunter Thompson quote about breakfast. I don't know if you're familiar with the film Breakfast with Hunter. No, I'm not. I'm going to have to check that out.
00:33:17
Speaker
It's good. And will you indulge me if I read this quote? Please, please go. Go right ahead. All right. It's pretty funny. So here it is. You can imagine. I'm not going to do the Hunter Thompson voice, but just imagine it.
00:33:33
Speaker
Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with lunch and dinner. I like to eat breakfast alone and almost never before noon. Anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every 24 hours, and mine is breakfast.
00:33:52
Speaker
In Hong Kong, Dallas, or at home, and regardless of whether or not I've been to bed, breakfast is a personal ritual that can be properly observed only alone and in the spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive. Four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chilies, a Spanish omelet or eggs benedict, a quart of milk,
00:34:20
Speaker
a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert. Right, and there should be two or three newspapers, all mail-in messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next 24 hours, and at least one source of good music, all of which should be dealt with outside in the warmth of a hot sun and preferably stone naked.
00:34:49
Speaker
That's amazing. That's a little inspiration for me every morning when I'm chopping up my fruit for my cereal. That's incredible. What does that first hour of your day typically look like? When do you typically wake up and start hitting up your favorite meal of the day and then get it to work?
Improvisational Workday
00:35:10
Speaker
As I said lately, I've been getting up around 6 o'clock to exercise for a few hours.
00:35:16
Speaker
But it really, it can swing anywhere from six to eight. But after getting up, I spent some time with the food factor, as Hunter would call it, and I put on a little music. Often I like turning on some Dylan or some Kendrick Lamar, somebody that's really good with words, that kind of gets my mind thinking about sentences.
00:35:41
Speaker
and metaphors and things of that nature. And then I'll sit down at the desk and...
00:35:48
Speaker
scan a little bit of news, not too much to be too depressed. And then it's just sort of improvisational from there, honestly. I'm a very disciplined person in terms of how much time I spend working or trying to work, but I don't try to pretend that I can fathom how a day is going to unfold. And it's going to depend on who decides to email me or email me back.
00:36:15
Speaker
It's going to depend on what sort of inspiration I may have, idea-wise. I just feel like inspirations and happenstance are too big a part of how my days unfold to try to sort of set them up systematically. At any given point, how many stories do you have in the hopper?
Balancing Multiple Stories
00:36:36
Speaker
Or do you just work on one at a time? Well, in the last six months, I've started contributing a sports piece every two to three weeks to the New Yorker's online sports blog called The Sporting Scene. Those have been great, by the way. Thank you very much. I'm always trying to kick around one or two of those, getting some of those moving. So there's always at least one of those in my mind.
00:37:05
Speaker
And then a feature probably, if I'm so lucky, has been assigned that I can be kind of working through any of the various stages of planning, reporting, researching, and writing.
00:37:22
Speaker
So not too many stories, maybe one or two at a time. I'm a decent multitasker, but I do also tend to get overwhelmed quite easily, even still with writing. So I like to limit the number of things I'm doing at once to maybe two or three if possible. And speaking of books, what book or books have you given to friends or anyone else the most?
00:37:50
Speaker
I was thinking about that. Books that I love and have given at least once would include All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
00:38:04
Speaker
Um, which is the, the sort of quasi retelling of the Huey long story, the politician from Louisiana. Um, this were the populist who frankly, a lot of comparisons have been made lately between him and Donald Trump, um, in terms of the way that he tried to appeal to people. Uh, and I.
00:38:27
Speaker
If there's time, I have a quote from that book, which I'll read. Um, but I've also given East of Eden. That's one of my very favorite long novels. Um, I like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard a lot. Uh, Gatsby by Fitzgerald is one of the few books that I've myself have reread, um, a few times.
00:38:50
Speaker
I read that, I reread that book every year. It's just incredible. Yeah. And that actually, there's a connection between that and the next one. I was going to say the proud highway by Hunter Thompson, which is a collection of his letters that he wrote mostly when he was a younger, a young man and an aspiring writer. And in that book,
00:39:10
Speaker
He talks about when he was young and unknown and poor and scraping away at his craft, he spent time in a cabin in the woods with a typewriter, just rewriting word for word Gatsby. And I forget which of Hemingway's works, but he literally was just typing out these novels.
00:39:37
Speaker
so that he could get some of their DNA in him and sort of internalize some of the rhythms of the way that the great writers wrote, which I thought was an incredible, I haven't done it, but I thought was an incredible idea. And also it kind of explodes the notion that
00:39:56
Speaker
Hunter Thompson just ate drugs and great writing. To put it well, great or not so great, depending on your view of him, just sort of poured out of him. He was very much a man who made himself a writer through hard work and that's the only way to do it.
00:40:16
Speaker
I've rewritten one opening. I like trying to get the sort of the rhythm of these like beautiful sentences. I've done it once for Truman Capote's in Cold Blood, that opening passage that describes Holcomb. And it is like a weird feeling of writing, just copying that stuff word for word. It's amazing. Like you almost feel like you're taking a pill for a superpower. It's weird.
00:40:44
Speaker
It's really cool. I really recommend it because if anything just like like Thompson was doing it just it kind of just gets you into a and this might appeal to even those days when you were when you were acting and and stuff like it puts you into a different role like it puts you into another stratosphere and you're connecting on a different level that you otherwise never would it like you're almost like imitating you're not just reading and taking it in passively you're actually like partaking in them
00:41:11
Speaker
It's like having a great Dylan record blasting really loudly and you're kind of singing back up a little bit to it. But then the illusion is pierced when you hit stop or you turn the music off and you hear your own voice and you're like, wow, I'm not quite Dylan yet. But it is useful, I think, to get the rhythms of great artists in your head.
00:41:38
Speaker
And I don't think there should be concern about, especially with young writers, about that somehow interfering with the development of their own voice. I think your own voice is going to be your own voice, no matter who you read and who you write and whose passages you replicate. If you spend enough time writing enough of your own stuff, your own voice is going to emerge. You can't be Hunter Thompson anyway. You can't be Truman Capote.
00:42:07
Speaker
exactly about but by like imitating them you start to your own voice will sort of bubble up out of all your influences and i think you know you can kind of read that elsewhere a lot of people say that but it's really true like you have to just go out there and sort of pretend plate beep you know play pretend play a role but in in that acting you know your own style is gonna bubble through and you know and if you have some talent then you know and talent and endurance
00:42:35
Speaker
you will sort of persevere and start to rise above, but sometimes it takes longer than others, but I think it's a great exercise in finding who you are on the page. Absolutely. I'll mention two or three books I'm also, I also have my eyes on or in right now that I'm
Current Reading Interests
00:42:53
Speaker
enjoying. Cool. And then probably have like five more minutes or so before I gotta run. Sure, sure.
00:43:00
Speaker
But one is, two of them are very different books. One is a biography of the Mormon founder prophet Joseph Smith by Fawn Brody, and this was written
00:43:12
Speaker
years ago, maybe four or five decades ago, but it's an incredible riveting account of the founding of religion, which it's told a bit academically, but it's just incredibly researched. Just mind boggling what this woman was able to do, given that her sources were
00:43:35
Speaker
very, very difficult to engage, being that she was an outsider of Mormon Church. And then the other book is a book called Snowblind by a writer I hadn't heard of before named Robert Sabag, or Sabig, S-A-B-B-A-G. And he was a longtime newspaper writer.
00:43:58
Speaker
who I guess stumbled upon a guy who rose to becoming a cocaine kingpin in the heyday of that drug.
00:44:18
Speaker
The story itself is just is unbelievable and fast, but this guy writes it's sort of gonzo ish, but it's it's also I would say it's sort of if hunter thompson Had like an editor from the new yorker magazine. It's it's pop. It's polished. It's precise but it's also zany and wild and
00:44:40
Speaker
It's an incredible feat. I mean, he writes, stylistically, it's written the way that you'd want a book about drugs to be written for an intellectual audience. It's really something. I'm only a third of the way through, but I'm loving that book. And then the other one that I'm always sort of picking up and putting down is Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel.
Admiration for Storytelling Techniques
00:45:04
Speaker
He's one of those classic old New Yorker writers who's been deceased for quite a while.
00:45:11
Speaker
Yeah, Joe Gould's secret out of that book is like one thing. I couldn't put it down when I first read it. Absolutely. Love that. And one of the takeaways from him that I can articulate is that
00:45:28
Speaker
Let your subjects speak. I love the long quotes that he allows. There'll be pages long sometimes. He's clearly gotten to know his subjects well enough.
00:45:42
Speaker
that they've been sort of disarmed and they just speak to him in ways that are more interesting and expose things about themselves better than he or you or I could do in our own words. I think it's really important to let people talk in stories. I know there are writers who disagree with that, some great writers. You'll read stories in Esquire magazine by
00:46:09
Speaker
uh... chris jones and tom jenode and those guys in uh... i don't think they've read all their work but i i'm pretty sure that they tend to try to avoid lots of quoting and anything other really great narrative storytellers so they're able to to get away with that but i don't think there's anything wrong there's anything less artistic uh... or real about letting a subject talk it now the art is in discovering
00:46:36
Speaker
what to include. And I don't have any quick, magical thoughts on that. You just have to spend a lot of time with the material and the subject, and it should be hopefully self-evident to you. What's the most important? But I love hearing people talk in their own words, and Joseph Mitchell does that well. Fantastic. And before I let you go, because I know you've got to run, where can people find you on the internet?
Find Charles Online
00:47:04
Speaker
Thanks for asking. Twitter is just my name, at Charles Bethea, that's spelled B-E-T-H-E-A. Instagram, also Charles Bethea. I occasionally put some photos up from the interesting places that I'm able to travel while writing. And then I have a website, which is, you guessed it, charlesbethea.com.
00:47:28
Speaker
And I think those are the most important places. You can also go to the websites of the magazines I'm contributing to, The New Yorker and Outside Magazine, and they'll have some of my collected stuff there. And hopefully it'll keep accumulating.
00:47:45
Speaker
I'll get rich. Fantastic. Well, it seems like you're very much well on the way to that. So keep up the great work, man. Whatever form of storytelling you adopt, documentaries or the documentaries on paper, just keep doing what you're doing.
Encouragement for Podcast Support
00:48:02
Speaker
It's a lot of fun to read and just keep on doing what you do.
00:48:07
Speaker
thanks man i really appreciate you as well uh... and uh... yeah i hope you're part of this podcast grows i think you this has been a fun conversation to have and it's it's beneficial for readers and writers to have these more so good luck fantastic well thanks very much it means a lot and i continued success and i will be in touch thanks brennan see ya that does it for you yet another episode of hashtag cnf thank you very much for listening one last call to action give the episode of subscribe
00:48:35
Speaker
or even better yet, a great endorsement is to share it with a friend. Also, head over to BrendanOmera.com, subscribe to the email newsletter. It only comes out if I publish something, and if I publish something, it comes out Tuesday mornings. That is it. Beyond that, on Twitter, Matt Brendan Omera, email Brendan at BrendanOmera.com. Love to hear from you. Office hours are always open. So that's about it. Thanks again, and stay tuned for another episode of Hashtag CNF, coming soon.
00:49:05
Speaker
Thanks, bye.