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Discovery and Writing Before You're Ready
1.4k Plays2 years ago
A couple crafty-type essays this week.
Substack: Rage Against the Algorithm
Social: @CNFPod
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Support: patreon.com/cnfpod
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Transcript
Introduction and Promotion
00:00:00
Speaker
Oh yeah, as we get started here, seeing efforts, a little shout out to Athletic Brewing, my favorite non-alcoholic beer out there. Not a paid plug, but I am a brand ambassador and I want to celebrate this amazing product, specifically the Free Wave, their hazy IP. It's my favorite by far. Head over to athleticbrewing.com and you can use the promo code BRENDANO20 at checkout and you get a nice little discount on your first order. Give it a shot. Give it a shot.
00:00:31
Speaker
Oh hey CNFers, it's CNFpod, that creative non-fiction podcast, a show where we typically speak to badass people about telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara, awesome, right? Who's on the podcast this week, intern Lachlan? Nobody? Yeah, he got demoted from a producer dude. He is an unpaid intern. Oh, so, okay, okay, Lachlan. You're, let me guess, you're just gonna bark at me and make me, my wife, and my other two dogs
Podcast Challenges and Reflections
00:01:00
Speaker
miserable?
00:01:01
Speaker
Okay, you do you. I'm fine, CNFers. Everything's fine. As scheduling has been something of a bear of late, I didn't have an episode in the can this week. I have an episode of the can for next week. Yeah, that happens sometimes. You're like, can you run this this week? And we're like, all right, we'll do this. It's all about you. I don't see the point of re-upping a past episode from the Deep Backlog because
00:01:29
Speaker
They're all there? You just have to scroll a bit. But really, as a podcast accumulates episodes as, you know, now we're starting to get into close to the 400 ballpark, how likely are you to surf all the way back to, say, episode 80-something or 54 with Andre De Bute III as great as that was? As a little spotty of the audio is, but still amazing. Like, how likely are you gonna go all the way back?
00:01:55
Speaker
probably unlikely. And older episodes tend to feel stale, even if
Failed Projects and New Ideas
00:02:00
Speaker
they're evergreen in content. Maybe that's just in our heads. I think it's just in our heads, but still. So I figured I'd write a short essay here, similar to my defunct Casualty of Words podcast. It never seemed to gain traction. It kind of blew me away. I was like, why isn't this, here's this two to three minute micro podcast, and it doesn't take any time to listen. It probably takes longer to download than to listen.
00:02:25
Speaker
Anyway, ended up being a waste of time. So this micro podcast here, which I flirted with doing something as like a midweek pick me up. It's a very short little crafty based essay just like on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, probably Wednesday.
00:02:40
Speaker
meant to be a little shot in the arm. From my brain to you, not an academic, just your CNF bro who loves heavy metal music, who's a working writer and podcaster, not steeped in adjunct purgatory, someone who bristles at the term lyrical and fuck me if I hear the term genre
Growing Audience and Success Stories
00:03:00
Speaker
bending and hybrid memoir again.
00:03:03
Speaker
I might just cancel the show and become the world's worst CPA. Make sure you head over to brenthedomare.com for show notes and to sign up for the Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter. It's now on Substack. Just click the lightning bolt on my website or visit rageagainstthealgorithm.substack.com. Still first of the month, no spam, can't beat it. That's how we rage.
00:03:25
Speaker
And if you dig the show, you might want to share it across your network so we can help grow the pie and get this CNFing thing into the brains of other CNFers who need the juice. I saw another podcast friend of mine tweet that in the last couple months or so, his downloads are up 50%. I'm like, fuck.
00:03:44
Speaker
Mine or not. You can also leave a kind review on Apple Podcasts, so the way we're at CNF or might say, shit, I'll give that a shot. There's also patreon.com slash CNF pod. You could drop a few bucks in the hat there if you gleaned some value from what we churn and burn here
Exploration and Discovery in Journalism
00:04:00
Speaker
at CNF pod HQ. Show is free, but it sure is LA and cheap. All right, so here's my little essay, a little two parter.
00:04:10
Speaker
Okay, it's about discovery, and that's part one, and then part two is writing before you're ready, okay? So here we go, here's the discovery part.
00:04:23
Speaker
Though I've been a non-fictionist for close to 20 years, I have a hard time calling myself a, quote, journalist, even a, quote, reporter. To me, reporters are the people who fool you, you know, Freedom of Information Act requests, who know what's a public record and what's not. They cover the cops. They wear grease-stained shirts and have been laid off by not one but two Connecticut properties.
00:04:47
Speaker
When I pitch myself to people on my innumerable anxiety-inducing cold calls, it's usually as writer, never journalist. Especially in this media climate, we're saying journalists might get you a shiner.
The Writing Process and Anecdotes
00:05:00
Speaker
So to say I'm reporting on a book.
00:05:03
Speaker
Even that's a stretch. I feel like a fraud. Reporting is for reporters. The real heroes covering school boards, city councils, and cops. There's a way cooler term, frankly, used by lawyers to call reporting discovery.
00:05:19
Speaker
You sniff out where you want to go, and you discover things along the way. You can even call yourself an explorer. And isn't that pretty rad? I've discovered dozens of potential story beats that I never knew existed, even when I wrote my proposal for the gift.
00:05:36
Speaker
It's some of the best part of this mess. There's wonder in the unknown. Like, for instance, this is something fairly innocuous, but I didn't know it until I was in the newspapers. Nearly to the day, Steve Prefontaine, in 1973, won races on the days that Secretariat won the Kentucky Derby, the Precantates, and Belmont Stakes.
00:05:57
Speaker
You know, words used to describe Big Red could very well have been said about Pree. You know, pure heart, giant chest. And here's a quote too about Secretaria, and tell me this doesn't sound like someone could be talking about Pree. He knows he is good. He has one big mass of energy, always ready and eager to run. Yes, I think he knows he's a champion.
00:06:16
Speaker
That was said about the racehorse, and yes, I think anyone would say that. You could say that about Prefontaine. How does that thread into the narrative? That's a topic for another essay maybe. Maybe it gets thrown on the floor, but this has been the joy of the discovery, of marrying those two things.
00:06:39
Speaker
What other beats are out there? This is why you have to, as Robert Caro's editor told him a long time ago, turn every page. The equivalent is going on newspapers.com for the most part, sifting through hundreds of articles that are repeats. But occasionally you stumble on one column from an obscure newspaper that adds that extra bit of seasoning. It's the best. And then it also makes you paranoid of what you're missing, what else you could be missing. But at some point you do have to stop. I don't know.
00:07:09
Speaker
I don't know, is there a balance? There's got to be a balance, right? You might have a cool idea and you want to convince an editor or an agent to buy your idea, but you haven't done enough discovery to reveal that there is, in fact, more there. But if you do too much, you run the risk of wasting a lot of time in the extreme likelihood that a gatekeeper will pass on it. That said, you can never really go wrong by doing too much in discovery, however you define too much.
00:07:39
Speaker
If things go well, the research leads to more discovery, more nuance, more names, and a greater sense of confidence that you can stick the landing. Which brings us to part two, right before you're ready.
00:07:54
Speaker
I sent along an agenda of sorts to my wonderfully insightful, patient, and aerobically fit book editor. At the end of this agenda email, I said this, and I quote, ideally I'm giving myself basically another eight months of stone cold reporting discovery research to load the spring, which will give me about three months to write roughly 100,000 words. 2024 is a leap year, so you know, bonus day.
00:08:20
Speaker
It's 105 days to write 100,000 words, so 952 words a day. And then if you split that in half, say a morning session, evening, afternoon session, you're like, I don't know, four, maybe 500 in the morning, 500 at night, that seems doable.
00:08:38
Speaker
Okay, I didn't know it at the time, but I think he nearly passed out when he read that. It was a bad idea. Capital fucking B. And it makes sense, and it's why I'm abandoning what I thought was a sound plan. Now with a tight deadline, of which I have, just shy of 11 months now to finish, if you wait too long, like I was going to do apparently, you run the risk of hitting narrative walls with little time to burrow under scale or chip your way through.
00:09:04
Speaker
My editor said, you're not going to know where your holes are if you don't start writing soon enough. There's always some trial and error and it's best to do it now and not three months before it's due. And you might write five pages and only one paragraph might be any good.
00:09:23
Speaker
but you'll never know or you won't have enough time to write, say, those five pages to get to that one great paragraph. If the timeline's too crunched, you don't leave yourself the opportunity to reap that benefit.
00:09:39
Speaker
He also said, by virtue of doing this show, this podcast, and talking to so many writers about approach and process and so forth, that I have a tendency to always be in planning mode. And in planning, excessive planning can feel like work, but when you're just on the hamster wheel, you're not really getting anywhere. So he just said, don't be overly precious. If you have stuff to say, say it, and the more you sit on it, you're limiting your
00:10:05
Speaker
ability to enjoy the process. And the longer you put it off, the bigger it becomes. This is all brilliant. Why you need someone like that in your corner to kind of talk some sense into you. And I was listening to an episode of the At Times Unlistenable Better Call Saul Insider podcast. I won't tell you why I think it's unlistenable at times, but maybe another time. Not now.
00:10:27
Speaker
I had just finished watching the entire final season before we canceled our Netflix. And now I'm going back to listen to some of the nitty gritty of the show. And often, Vince Gilligan, the show's co-creator and the creator of Breaking Bad, he often gets asked if he knew where certain things were going, be it from Better Call Solid Breaking Bad. Like, did he know how it was all going to end when he started? And he always says no. He's like, we had no idea.
00:10:54
Speaker
And they didn't want to have an idea. They had the benefit of a room full of talented, smart, brilliant people. And they could hammer out ideas and story beats for weeks before then writing an episode. But he said the not knowing and the subsequent discovery led to breakthroughs in the story they never could have conceived of had they boxed themselves into certain endings or structures.
00:11:18
Speaker
I say this, that even in nonfiction, and in my case biography, writing before I'm ready will reveal potholes in the road. I might be writing along and realize, oh, there's a gap here. Or hold on, wouldn't it be cool if fill-in-the-blank happened here? Like, I don't know if it did, but...
00:11:35
Speaker
Can I go find that person and then have a real surgical interview, scalpel in hand, cut right to the bone of what I might need in that scene? But you'll never know until you start. I thought by doing 100% of the research, then writing was gonna be the best course of action. But let's just say 50% of the research is done, maybe a little less. It's time to start building the book, just a little bit.
00:12:02
Speaker
I don't have to capital W write the book. Oh, I'm sorry, capital R. But maybe some of the scenes I feel very confident about, I can start noodling on those. You know, just fucking around on the guitar. How does this riff sound? Or start really mapping out what the parts and chapters will look like. And in so doing, those aforementioned potholes will surface. And it'll also allow you to be more surgical and clinical about where the research should be focused.
00:12:30
Speaker
But at least we're laying down road. Then it'll take just going back over and patching in space. It's like, okay, that spot right there needs a little more research. Oh, let me go back to that person and dig just a little deeper into that little nook. Just a 10 to 15 minute call. And by the way, say hello to your mother for me.
00:12:51
Speaker
Hey, thanks for listening to CNFers. Hope you like this little craft essay of sorts. If you dug any part of it, let me know via email or social media. Don't forget to subscribe to this little podcast that could. And remember, if you can do interviews, see ya.
00:13:22
Speaker
you