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Episode 328 [RERUN]: My #HippoCamp21 Talk — In Their Words: Lessons Learned from the Best of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast
284 Plays2 years ago
In honor of HippoCamp22, I'm re-upping my HippoCamp21 talk.
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Social: @CNFPod
Show notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Context
00:00:00
Speaker
AC and efforts Got a little got a little thing here for you. It's gonna be a rerun not just any rerun in Honor of Hippo camp taking place right now this weekend
00:00:18
Speaker
I am re-running from last year my Hippo Camp talk. Now I can't attend in person this year. I had a scheduling conflict at the time of enrollment and it just wasn't in the cards this year and I'm super bummed because it's the best conference going for my money. It's the one you go to. If you had one to go to, especially if you're one of the CNFs who listens to this podcast, Donna Tallarico has built something beautiful over there and that's what you want to attend.
00:00:48
Speaker
And so, in honor of that, I'm just re-upping my HippoCamp talk from 2021 from the backlog.
The Importance of HippoCamp
00:00:57
Speaker
Of course, you could just go to the backlog and find it, but I figure I'll just put it atop the feed. And if you're attending the conference, you can be like, oh cool, here's an extra little breakout session. And if you're not attending, you can get a little sense of what maybe could be on offer if you choose to go another time.
00:01:13
Speaker
So I just want to say, sorry, I wasn't able to book an interview this week. It just wasn't in the cards. And then I got to thinking, why not have a rerun? So here it is. This is a rerun of my 2021 Hippo Camp Talk. Please enjoy. Psst. It's your buddy, Brendan. I got something different in store for you today. Do you ever feel like this?
00:01:39
Speaker
If I go three days without writing, I feel fucked up and depressed and a little cranky. Well, you're probably a writer. Yeah, me too. So that was all the more important that I intended the in-person hippo camp. Put on by my great friend Donna Tallarico in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and her intrepid team of CNF-ers and volunteers. What an experience, man. Especially given the pandemic. Made new friends. Deepened relationships with existing friends.
00:02:08
Speaker
Turned people on to the podcast, of course. Hey, hey, hello Which bums me out because I'm obviously not doing a good enough job And if those people haven't heard of the show given that this was a 100% CNF crowd no matter oh Well, oh by the way, this is the creative nonfiction podcast the show where I speak to Badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. How's it going? I
00:02:40
Speaker
I'm in the post-conference buzz funk, which is antithetical in that I've got the buzz of having had this incredible experience, but the funk that comes with, ugh, it's over. And I'm sad, because it was among my people, you know?
00:02:58
Speaker
I don't really have that where I am. I can build that if I want, or if I have the rigor to do so, and I most likely will because we need community. But it's just sad that it's over. It's so intense, and for so short a time, that the connections you make are like speed dating on meth chased by ecstasy.
00:03:17
Speaker
Now why am I joining on like this?
Reflections on Presentation Challenges
00:03:20
Speaker
Alright. I delivered what was, what I thought, a superior upgrade of a presentation from mine last time. I think objectively it was a whole lot better than my first one in the 2019 hitbook camp. It's titled, In Their Words, Lessons Learned from the Best of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast.
00:03:37
Speaker
It was a talk that included lots of audio clips from, you know, 300 hours of interviews I've done with little riffs by me stitching it all together. I used to remote control. I could move around. I was jacked. I was feeling it. Best presentation I've ever given. I was in it, man. I was bursting. Did a whole lot of prep. So I was just, I was ready. I was in the pocket, as they like to say sometimes.
00:04:05
Speaker
That said, I couldn't tell if I was landing. Everybody had to wear masks, so I couldn't tell if people were smiling or sitting dead-faced. I think I got a few chuckles, but again, I couldn't really tell. Then by the end, only two people asked questions, which was real weird to me because most of the Hippocamp Talks have several questions and a Q&A afterwards.
00:04:26
Speaker
The in-person feedback that I got from the attendees was that they didn't feel the need to ask because the tape that I curated and the talk sort of answered questions and just gave them a lot of shit to think about. My talk wasn't one of those tactical talks or a how-to talk. It was more or less, here's a lecture with 25 of my best friends whose job is to let you know you're not alone.
00:04:56
Speaker
So when people told me there were about six who came up to me, they liked it and I was like, you think so? I couldn't tell because I was just like, fuck. I'm losing them. I wasn't looking for reassurance but I was really confused.
00:05:13
Speaker
It was also after lunch so people might have been a little sleepy. I didn't say that to undercut the great feedback that I was getting from the people who were so nice to approach me. I was genuinely concerned because that I didn't deliver for those people in that room. And traveling to a conference and paying for conference fees and buying books and buying food,
00:05:34
Speaker
It's not cheap, and you want to deliver a value that reflects well of the conference and the genre in the people and the experience. I will say this though, I gave it my all. I sure as heck didn't phone it in. Had a lot of fun delivering it, so that much I know.
Supporting Creative Communities
00:05:50
Speaker
And I told the gracious people in that room, hey Matina, hey Janine, hey Leslie, hi Dale, hi Leah, hey Karen, that I would produce my talk as an episode of this podcast. I told people who were split between attending my talk or somebody else's that I would produce it as a podcast so they didn't have to feel conflicted about missing out. So what you're about to hear is my Hippocam talk with a little more polish. Head over to BrendanOmero.com
00:06:20
Speaker
Did it get you, Watsky? A little inside joke. Brendan O'Mara dot com. Hey, hey. For show notes and to sign up for my up to 11 monthly newsletter book recommendations. Sometimes book raffles, random book raffles, but raffles nevertheless. Great blogs, articles, and writerly goodness beamed right to your inbox. First of the month, no spam. Can't beat it. Subvert the algorithm and rage against the machine. And one last matter of housekeeping before I dive into my presentation.
00:06:47
Speaker
Which I think might be a harbinger of things to come maybe as featurettes in the main feed but more likely as extra for patrons so Consider heading over to patreon.com slash CNF pot to support the growth of this little of this little thing this little shindig For as little as $2 a month to get access to the audio magazine Which for now is coming out twice a year ambitiously and you get to submit questions for consideration And I give you quite I give you credit
00:07:16
Speaker
for those questions. Tears above that get transcripts, coaching, real estate on my website, and routine shout outs like this. Hey David. The money also goes into the production of the show, upgrades, and puts money in the pockets of writers. I'm starting to dole out the money to the summer audio magazine winners, if you want to call them that. It's a few bucks. It's something.
00:07:42
Speaker
So, you're really supporting the community and the work. This show is free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap. Shop around, give it some thought. Alright, I'm real excited to do this. I really am. Here's my Hippo Camp 21 talk. It is broken up into several sections on voice, research, drafts, community, jealousy, social media, and a little enclosing section with some incredible tape.
00:08:08
Speaker
And just uh, yeah that incredible tape at the end in the coda from Andre to boost the third is I Can't wait for you to get there, but you're gonna have to you're gonna have to wait. All right. Mm-hmm Okay, so please enjoy you know the deal riff
00:08:38
Speaker
Okay, so a wee bit of background on the show. Now, many of you long-time listeners already know the show, but this is part of the talk, so bear with me. I've been doing this since 2013, and that was the time when I was freelancing, poorly, mind you, in a lonely hovel in upstate New York. I had my dogs and my health insurance providing spouse, but I was still desperately lonely.
00:09:03
Speaker
Twitter and other socials were just gaining real insidious traction, and it made me feel terrible to see all the successes my peers were having versus the crud I was wading through. I was getting bitter, resentful, and jealous. I wanted to be writing long features for big magazines, felt capable of it, but all I was doing was writing these horrible slide shows like The Winners and Losers from the Daytona 500.
00:09:31
Speaker
Not exactly the stuff of best American sports writing, the big ideal that I aspire to. Plus I was starting to hear these great conversational podcasts and I was loving those conversations, wanting to have them, but nobody was going to be inviting me. Plus what did I even have to offer?
00:09:53
Speaker
So I had to build my own stage to celebrate other people's work and talk shop in a non-pretentious, non-academic way. And in so doing, through that celebration, I became less jealous and less bitter.
00:10:09
Speaker
The show had some early fits and starts, but it's been a mainstay every week since January 2017. So I brought a few of my best friends to talk about how to do this thing we call creative non-fiction. So our first section is going to deal with voice. So with a show of hands, who is concerned with voice or finding their voice?
00:10:30
Speaker
And I've been so pleased to hear that voice is on everybody's mind here at this conference. It was very validating to know that I chose something that I think is going to really resonate with people. And you're not alone if you struggle with voice or have a hard time finding it. Take Lee Guttkind.
00:10:49
Speaker
Many of you know him as the godfather of CNF and the founder of the creative nonfiction magazine. Lee is the author of several books, most recently, My Last 8,000 Days, and here's what he had to say about voice. The less sure of yourself you are, which is not to say I'm sure of myself, and I don't necessarily mean that, the less sure of your voice and what it is you need to say, I'm much clearer about that than I used to be.
00:11:17
Speaker
And early on, you know, it's the struggle to figure out how to squeeze things out and make it sound really good and then go back and do it again and do it again and do it again. And I have a little bit more confidence now that I can move ahead and get my thousand words or whatever it is I think I want.
00:11:39
Speaker
and take a breath as I say, then maybe I'll go back and take a look at that again or maybe I'll plow forward for a little bit longer. But I also have a sense, and it's really nice to have this sense when it is time for the day to stop and when it's time for you to take up other responsibilities in your life and let what you have written that day and maybe some of the days before just kind of percolate in your head.
00:12:11
Speaker
and stew there for a while so that you're ready to explode or ready to get back into the work when you next take a look at your keyboard.
00:12:22
Speaker
What struck me in this passage is the do it again and again and again part. You know, voice isn't something that's fully formed at the start of a career. And here's Lee, someone who's been at this for decades. And voice is still something that takes again, again, again moments.
00:12:39
Speaker
And that should give every one of us hope, because it means you'll get there if you have patience and rigor. Now take Alexander Norman, who wrote the definitive biography of the Dalai Lama. He talked about the long journey to find his voice. And a journey, mind you, that is ongoing.
Finding One's Voice in Writing
00:12:59
Speaker
In a way, I suppose, as a writer, I've been, I've been 30 years trying to find a voice.
00:13:08
Speaker
And whether I do it in this book or not, I don't know, but I aspire one day to have a unique voice and to be able to tell a tale that nobody else could tell.
00:13:21
Speaker
Now here's someone who is statistically speaking, closer to death than birth. So this should inspire all of us who might be frustrated that we're still grappling with these things after maybe a few months or a few years doing this. Fact is, we arrive when we get there. No sooner, no later. So settle in for the ride, man. Buckle up. It'll be bumpy for a while. But you'll turn that dirt road of your life into the Audubon in due time.
00:13:50
Speaker
Now, staying on the topic of voice, Lily Dansiger, author of Negative Space and the editor of the anthology Burn It Down was on the show, and we talked about the danger of imitation. Now, a little mea culpa. Now, a lot of 30-year-old males – I'm no longer 30. This was a past phase.
00:14:12
Speaker
have that David Foster Wallace phase where we think we're getting real clever and we start dropping footnotes and wisecracks, yada, yada. And it's a perilous phase. I want to write an essay that just says P.S., sorry for all the footnotes.
00:14:32
Speaker
No matter, you have to copy your heroes, but at some point you do need to synthesize all those heroes, and then take your little bird beak and peck at that eggshell, and so you can open it, and then you can fly away. I'm mentioning the cycles of the books that I read at different points. In early drafts were very much me trying to be like a 20-year-old girl version of David Carr.
00:14:58
Speaker
You can tell which draft I wrote right after reading Chronology of Water, you know, but then you go back later and you're like, okay, that's me trying to try on somebody else's style. And you have to kind of synthesize and digest all the different things enough that those fingerprints aren't quite as visible, you know, and it all becomes integrated into your own style, which takes time. And I think finding, you know, we talk about voice, I think that's,
00:15:28
Speaker
that's what that means right is finding the way to sound like yourself and not sound like yourself trying to sound like somebody else finding the way to sound like yourself and not sound like yourself trying to sound like somebody else that is
00:15:42
Speaker
That rings bells for me, man. That rings bells. And that is also the mark of a new voice, your voice, if you can break through that. Now, this brings up a great point that over the life of a book, the voice of other writers and influences can seep in, something I kind of call voice creep.
00:16:04
Speaker
So it's all the more important to finish whatever it is you're working on, whether that be a book or an essay, as fast as you can. Because as you're rewriting and revising, you're reading stuff too, and there's a danger that
00:16:20
Speaker
whatever you're listening or whatever you're reading is going to bleed in to the book. And just like Lily said, at certain parts of negative space, it sounded more like David Carr than Lily Danziger. So to combat that, it's finishing, I think, as fast as possible.
00:16:39
Speaker
is it will all the more sort of defend you against that voice creep. Now, voice might change over the years, but it shouldn't change in the book. There should be something uniform in the book. And the voice creep can be a real problem to iron out in your book or essay if you take too, too long. So my insufferably long memoir project has suffered from this problem of tone and voice creep from whatever I was reading, whether it was in rewrite three or rewrite 23. Yeah, it's been a decade, man.
00:17:11
Speaker
Now, Stephen Kurtz, who is a writer for the New York Times, and his essay, Fruitland, was the very first true story for a creative nonfiction, that little chat book they used to have. I hope they bring that back. It's one of my favorite things. Anyway, again, voice is something that's hard to grapple with, and imitation might be too dangerous. Now, just listen to how Stephen says dangerous. Love it, baby. I mean, there are some books that are almost
00:17:41
Speaker
dangerous in terms of being influential because you fall in love so much with the writer's voice that you want to do that. Even John Jeremiah Sullivan, that book, Pulphead, which I absolutely love. I mean, I take that book down off the shelf a lot. If I took that book down off the shelf at 24, it would have been too powerful for me. Now I know
00:18:09
Speaker
to enjoy, to take certain things out of it, like structure and other things. But there's other ways that voice comes out too. I mean, that's the other thing. Voice comes out in what you choose to write about. That's a big part of voice. Voice comes out in what you choose to say, what you don't say, how you structure a story. I wouldn't call John McPhee necessarily a hugely voicey writer.
00:18:38
Speaker
Um, or I mentioned that book, Hiroshima by John Hersey. I mean, it's not a first person piece. I don't know if he even appears in it, but you understand his, his, his point of view, his morality, where he chose, chooses to place the tension of the story. All of those things are voiced too, but they're just voice in a subtle or way that doesn't
00:19:04
Speaker
You know, like you said, it's not like the first power cord and you know immediately. And isn't that something? That voice comes through in what you choose to write about, not necessarily blasting Roman candles all over the place. And who really wants that? It's kind of like a person who drinks too much at the holiday party. You still have to see him on Monday.
00:19:27
Speaker
Now, someone who is definitively not firing bottle rockets into the night is the brilliant Laura Helenbrand. She should need little introduction, but in case she does, she's the author of Seabiscuit and Unbroken, and apparently she only writes books that become Oscar-nominated movies.
00:19:45
Speaker
And due to her chronic fatigue syndrome, which has a more scientific name that I'm blanking on, she has trouble reading physical books. So audio books have taught her the importance of voice in a very different way. It's something I did learn from doing audio books, from listening to many, many, many of them. It makes you better writer. I mean, originally, we told stories that way. We didn't have written language. We had spoken language. And I like to write books that
00:20:15
Speaker
that sound more like someone's telling a story over a campfire. That's, that's what I imagine. I imagine my audience is kind of gathered around the circle and there's a fire. And how would you tell this if you were speaking that way? And so that's, that's how I do it.
00:20:31
Speaker
Now Laura has a fluidity about her writing that is gorgeous to see in action, like a beautiful racehorse going down the stretch. There's just something majestic about it. She's a storyteller. She is, in some ways, an anti-stylist, a surrender to story. It's awesome. It's awesome stuff.
00:20:52
Speaker
And then you get somebody like Chuck Closterman, who is someone who can blow you away with his mind, profanity, pop culture references that make you wonder how he has any time to write at all given how much culture he consumes. But even still, he's learned a thing or two over the years about tamping down that style.
00:21:14
Speaker
And we often get into the trap of thinking that voice and style has to be so in your face. You have to use wacky punctuation, infinite chest style and notes and footnotes. My God, the footnotes. I use parentheses less. I use semicolons less. I use footnotes less. I think that I am more aware of of how it times
00:21:44
Speaker
The amount of voice I use can actually detract from the experience of reading. The thing I'm not as good at is I have become more like other writers. Now voice is nothing unless you have something to say. And often that something you say comes from doing research.
Research in Nonfiction Writing
00:22:15
Speaker
whether it be biography, narrative journalism, and yes, even memoir. Looking at you, research is the bedrock of any non-fiction. As a quick aside, I highly recommend the Art of Creative Research by Philip Girard. Talk about this way back on episode 38.
00:22:33
Speaker
an amazing, amazing little handbook. It just gets you all jacked up to go suit up in whatever clothes you have, like a cargo pants or a vest and your stuff in your pockets with notebooks and pencils and your voice recorder and camera. When it comes to research, it's just fun to get lost in microfiche, to interview subjects and family members. Okay, maybe not family members.
00:22:59
Speaker
to play someone else's memory off of how you remember it. And the more journalistic you are, you like to talk to more and more people and you get a better and truer and truer sense of what happens. Now some people who think that the
00:23:15
Speaker
Nuance of memory is all part of memoir, but I feel like you said if you're like I said if you're more of a like a Journal cut from the journalist fabric as I am it matters to me that someone's wearing a yellow sweater versus a red one because if you find out one is wrong It starts to call into question What else are you making up? What other liberties are you taking and there's a contract and nonfiction that I like to adhere to?
00:23:41
Speaker
Now, you know some people are more fluid with that, but I'm a little more rigid. No matter. Speaking of newspapers and the like, getting lost in microficially, get all those headlines of the day, even horoscopes, the weather, it's all ammo. And to rely wholly on memory I think robs you of the riches that digging a little deeper can provide, plus memory isn't always accurate. Now, research can be really tricky too. How do you know when you're done?
00:24:10
Speaker
How do you make sure you don't cross the event horizon and just keep on going into the rabbit hole, the black hole of research? Bronwyn Dickey, she's the author of Pitbull, Battle Over an American Icon, and she says there comes a point when you can't be paralyzed by the research and use it as a means to put off the writing. It's something I always get a little tongue-tied here, but it's a great way to productively procrastinate. So when are you done? When do you slam the brakes and put the CNF in car and park?
00:24:40
Speaker
And I'm not the first writer to put it this way, I'm sure, but I think at the point in the research where I wasn't learning anything new, where, I mean, in one sense, I was always learning something new, but where you keep hearing the same things over and over again, or you, as I think Susan Orlean says, you meet yourself coming the other way. So you've interviewed all these people and then you get to a point where they say, have you talked to so-and-so and you already have.
00:25:09
Speaker
you know, so you start to encounter pieces of research or other sources that you've already talked to. And so there's not much new ground to kind of turn up or because you have been obsessively working on this thing full time for a period of years, you end up knowing more about the entire thing than a lot of people you're talking to who each have expertise in a certain piece of it.
00:25:37
Speaker
So once that happened, I realized that I just had, you know, the pain, as you say, the pain of not shipping it, the pain of not having some sense of completion, was it far outweighed the anxiety about doing it. And of course, you know, I mean, deadlines help.
00:25:59
Speaker
Ah yes, the power of a deadline. It's the tinkerer's best friend. And you know what? This is also quoting Bronwyn, who talked about perfectionism and this whole idea that you can tinker, tinker, tinker. And she says like, the world will very much keep spinning on its axis if I write a crappy story. So put a bow on it and move on to the next thing.
00:26:24
Speaker
And cut from a similar cloth is Ted Conover, who has made a career of doing lots of super immersive, maybe even stunt journalism, whether it be riding the rails with hobos, becoming a prison guard at Sing Sing, or crossing the border with coyotes. It's all research, and it's all determinative. Pardon. So often, when I'm only with somebody for a couple weeks, like at Breadloaf or something, I think
00:26:51
Speaker
We should have had this conversation a year ago before you sat down to write, because the research you do is determinative, right? It defines what you're going to be able to write in many ways. And that's not true with fiction, but with nonfiction, it absolutely is. And if we're writing about experience, there's a lot of thinking that can go into figuring out
00:27:22
Speaker
what kind of experience could be helpful and how to get it, how to have that experience. You really get a sense that the juice for many of these writers is in the discovery phase. It's where they're getting all the information together so they can load up their quiver and just take aim at targets. Good stuff.
00:27:40
Speaker
And we can pick people's brains all we want about process and advice. And I have some strong feelings about the detriment of following advice culture too much. Like if you listen to a lot of Q&A podcasts, people seem to be looking for the answer. Like everything will finally click into place.
00:28:00
Speaker
And the fact is, you sort of need to flop your way through this mess. And yeah, you can cherry pick a few helpful things here and there, but there's no better teacher than trial and error.
00:28:12
Speaker
And when you're a novice, it does help to get some guidance and maybe some reassurance that you're on a particular path. Like, am I going in the right direction? Am I rowing with or against the current? But it's when you get the sense that people are looking for a shortcut, and you get that a lot. The more questions you hear, people are looking for the
00:28:31
Speaker
A key to unlock some door. And shortcuts rob you of the riches of getting those creative blisters on the back of your heels that come from putting in the miles. So to that point, Glenn Stout, author and editor of more than a hundred books, including Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid, essentially said you need to find your own methods. You can't hide anymore in this hack culture. Hack being this four-letter word I hate. The only way through it is through it.
00:29:01
Speaker
Yeah, yes and no. I mean, I always find that no matter how much organization I do before I start writing that I rarely go many sentences before I realize I have to look up something new. All of a sudden there's an address there and I'm like, what took place at that address? You know, you can never do all the research before you start writing. That's impossible because you are always going to have questions along the way and in midstream you're going to have to go find out the answers to those things.
00:29:31
Speaker
But again, it's whatever works for the individual writer. I wouldn't try to presuppose my system onto somebody else. And, you know, the one thing I can just caution writers is, you know, if you do find something that works for you, don't feel diminished because somebody else does it a different way. And so that's it. I mean, you just have to do your thing because when you get to the writing, you're on your own, which brings us to drafting.
The Drafting Process: Challenges and Iterations
00:30:05
Speaker
Now, is there a part of the process that feels so energizing early and demoralizing in the middle, but also super energizing late? Very much like running a marathon. It's an endurance race. And I think Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, he once said that he hates writing, but he loves having written.
00:30:26
Speaker
And I'll never forget first getting into Hemingway when I was a little baby writer. This is me, this is a little baby writer. And the ease and leanness of his prose, it seemed to spill out so easily. And I had obviously heard of writing as a practice, but I didn't know what rewriting a revision was. So when I learned that he had
00:30:49
Speaker
rewritten and tinkered the end of a farewell to arms something like 39 times. I remember like oh my god okay so this is something that you develop and you forge and you tinker and rework and rework and rewrite. I naively thought it all just spilled out fully formed.
00:31:07
Speaker
Thankfully, this is so untrue. It is a lot of work. And as you'll hear from Mary Carr, the memoir writer behind the Liars Club, Cherry Lit, the art of memoir, and the poetry collection, Tropic of Squalor, she talks about just the grind over a single poem. You know, I almost always have a very specific reader in mind. It might be a very literary person, somebody I admire a lot.
00:31:36
Speaker
somebody I'm afraid is going to read it. Uh, I think I often go to like the scary, the scariest place I can go. I think there's a chance John Delillo could read this poem and then, you know, if it's terrible, I'll have to, you know, lie down on the train tracks. But, um, but, uh, yeah, it's more like the, the 60, the
00:32:00
Speaker
dress three to dress 50 or for the haters. I really do literally do like 50 drafts of a poem. Like the things that are sonnets started out being, you know, two pages single space. So I just try to hack away stuff that's really boring or really obvious or the language really. Or everybody has a sin they commit as a writer.
00:32:27
Speaker
I always want to think I'm clever, which I'm, you know, I'm not particular. I mean, there are plenty of much cleverer people than I am. But so I often find myself cutting out things where I'm trying to be glib or steer away from what was difficult. Fifty drafts.
00:32:48
Speaker
Now, sure, it's a poem, and it's leaner and shorter than a book, but it's still a lot of reworking, going over and over and over again. But what about a book? A lot of us are here to write books. We aspire to write books and to write many of them. John McPhee wrote a book called Draft Number Four, and so that's when he feels he's done the job, getting to that point. He's my hero, and the reason I got into writing narrative journalism, the survival of the bark canoe,
00:33:19
Speaker
That is the origin story book of how I got into this. So you can look it up if you want. It's a short little book, it's amazing. But even for drafts seems skimpy. I can tell you from experiences more than the teens and 20s of drafts, rewrites, repasses, and several hundred beers.
00:33:39
Speaker
Now, Dinty Moore, he of The Story Cure and the founder of Brevity magazine online, he normalized for me the idea of not just a few drafts, but doing dozens of drafts. I do edit a little bit in the first draft. Actually, I think I'm just correcting typos because I don't type very well. I'm trying to make sense in a first draft. It's not just spewing or stream of consciousness, but
00:34:07
Speaker
You know, if I type a bad sentence and it's not really that interesting, I don't even go back and delete it sometimes. I just type a new sentence hoping, you know, I just layer on all these sentences. And like many writers, if I wake up on a Thursday morning and, you know, I'm talking about the very, very first draft of something, if I wake up on a Thursday morning and type, type, write two and a half, three pages of something, you know, by the next morning, maybe a half of the page, you know, remains.
00:34:37
Speaker
I have a voice in my head that I've cultivated that says, just hang in there, Dinty. Just keep working at this. One of these days, you're going to come in and look at it and go, oh, wait, wait. Now I see what it's about. I also know that 2030 drafts in, or certainly if I'm on deadline of some sort, there's a point at which I have to put on my editor's hat and say, stop playing around here. Figure out what it is you're talking about.
00:35:04
Speaker
Oh, when Dinty told me that, it took 20 or 30 drafts. I remember being like, oh my God, thank you so much. What a valuable insight to have for writers who think even a couple rewrites should be good enough. And then there's the slog element of drafting an essay or a book. It's work, make no mistake.
00:35:25
Speaker
We need to really normalize the slog. So I love what Elizabeth Rush has to say. She's the author of Rising, Dispatches from the American Seashore. And that book, of course, was a Pulitzer finalist. And here what Elizabeth has to say. It's brilliant. I'm mentioning this because I think it's sort of funny. It's like a lot of my students
00:35:51
Speaker
think that writers are like geniuses and struck by the hand of God who infuses what they do with a kind of like miraculous quality. And I tell them like, I'm just a mule. Like I just show up every day and climb very, very slowly up that mountain. Like I'm not particularly gifted. I just spend a lot of time at it.
00:36:15
Speaker
I don't think we can discount how long it takes. Also, it's great to hear so many people we find hyper-skilled and even gifted slog through the work. It might seem self-evident, but when we read these things that are these diamonds in our hands, we never know the coal from which these diamonds were forged. We all start with coal, man.
00:36:40
Speaker
And really the only way you get a glimpse into that furnace is through community. So let's talk a little bit about community.
Building a Writer's Community
00:36:56
Speaker
And this is why we're all here. Writing as an act of isolation does not breed creativity. Even if it did, you'd just be a dick if you expect people to buy and promote your work without doing your fair share of contribution. I often think of filmmakers and musicians who talk up the work of their peers.
00:37:16
Speaker
And there's no jealousy. They just think it's cool AF that someone is making this film or putting together that record. They see it as a way like, oh, that person did it that way. Okay, so through my taste and my talent and my hard work, I can do that. They unlock something for me. Writers seem to be often a little more sneering.
00:37:39
Speaker
And I don't know what that's about. Maybe it has to do with this being more of a solitary pursuit. I think illustrators will like this too. So maybe the antidote is to be celebratory and certainly maybe more collaborative. Now Chase Jarvis, he's a photographer, he's a founder of CreativeLive and the author of Creative Calling.
00:37:58
Speaker
He talks about the other 50% of doing creative work. The first half is mastering your craft. As a photographer, you need to know what F7 is. You need to know your shutter speeds. As writers, we have to have a solid grasp of grammar and sentences and all that constructive stuff that has to just be second nature and spell out. The second half is creating and engaging in community. What all of you are doing by being here. The celebration of true storytelling.
00:38:28
Speaker
simple. It's brutally simple and yet incredibly powerful, especially when you realize that nothing is done in a vacuum. Every individual athlete, any entrepreneur, any even a family, right? A family is multiple people and we need one another in order to grow and support. But there's also the community that you build around your world.
00:38:53
Speaker
And what this does not mean is that you have to have a million followers on some social platform in order to be an influencer. That is horseshit. That has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Nothing in life happens without other humans. So let's start paying attention to what it is, what it's like to be a part of a dynamic community. And there are many. You don't have to participate in just one. I
00:39:18
Speaker
talk about it as the other 50%, 50% of it involves other people and community. So what we're told is that if you're really good at your fill in the blank, you're going to be successful. And then if you actually do that thing, then you're, you know, you, you, you realize pretty quickly, Oh, I have to do that thing and promote that thing. And then you think, okay, that's the whole pie. But then you realize that if you're promoting it and you haven't cultivated any community, whatever it is, you're promoting your knives or,
00:39:48
Speaker
the vision that you have for an active role in saving plastic from going in the oceans. If you just do that without a community, then
00:39:57
Speaker
You don't really cultivate the impact. I have a rule of thumb, more or less, that you should share nine pieces of other people's work to one piece of your own. There's no science to this, but it feels right for me. You want to be an energy giver, certainly not a taker. And there are innumerable people out there who only promote their own work and do little to celebrate the work of others, blah, blah, blah.
00:40:22
Speaker
This is bad baseball in my opinion. I don't want to hang out with that person and I doubt you do too. You would want to hang out with Rebecca Fish Ewen. She's the author of By the Forces of Gravity and Doodling for Writers by the Hippocampus Books imprint. And she's got the right idea. This idea of the improv mentality.
00:40:46
Speaker
You know, you don't go to a conference because you want to find an agent and get your thing published. It's not all about you and your book. It's about building a community and being a part of that community. And if you open yourself up, and this is exactly the kind of stuff Luna used to tell me all the time about, you know, karma and good vibes and all of this stuff that if you, you know, it's like improv, you know, if you just always walk in and say, yes.
00:41:16
Speaker
that good things will happen. And that is precisely what happened. It was after that conference I started making zines and getting more involved with the zine community in Phoenix and just trying to be a contribution to the literary community rather than being me alone in my room writing my book and wondering why nobody appreciates it.
00:41:43
Speaker
And Jane Friedman, she's the author of the business of being a writer, publishing maven, knows the ins and outs of the business better than anyone out there. She talks about this notion of literary citizenship. And for people who are grossed out by the term networking, I think this is a great way of reframing it. But literary citizenship feels doable. And it feels like, oh, by supporting other writers,
00:42:09
Speaker
I'm going to ultimately be supporting the community of writing and publishing that will then eventually benefit me in the end. Like you start to see this as an organism and as something that you're giving into and getting something back. There's so many ways that works. And often I think literary citizenship is referred to in terms of like going out to book signings or readings or events or
00:42:36
Speaker
somehow connecting in person, but I think of course the same activities can happen in online spaces and it's most powerful when there's some overlap there so that each is kind of pushing the other forward. And it has to come from a genuine place, right? Like you can't do it because you think the karma boomerang will grant you good fortune because you've done the math on promoting other people's work.
00:42:59
Speaker
That also means you have to be okay with promoting other people's work and getting nothing in return. Community isn't transactional. Nobody is keeping score.
00:43:10
Speaker
So you do your thing and maybe you'll win a Pulitzer Prize like the great poet Jericho Brown. Well, I'm always running my own race. One of the things that I learned a long time ago is, you know, you can be inspired by people and you can encourage people. You can have role models and you can work to help others, but you can't be in a position where you are. It is of no use to you.
00:43:36
Speaker
to ever be out here trying to compare yourself to other people. When you compare yourself to other people, you put yourself in a position where you're competing with them. You can't compete with other people because we each have a gift to give, and my gift is not going to be like
00:43:52
Speaker
anybody else's. You know, obviously there are days where you feel discouraged, you feel disappointed. You have days that are particularly bad writing days or days where you don't really understand what's going to come next. But you know, those are days like anybody would have any time. And that's why friendship is so important. That's why poetry written before my time is so important because that helps to bring me back. That helps to inspire me.
00:44:19
Speaker
And I have some good people that I work with. When I'm writing, when I'm coming close to the end of a book, I'll send the book to very close friends and they'll read it and they'll tell me I'm on the marker. They'll tell me I'm totally losing my mind and writing bad poems. And I'm glad to have people who are that honest. This is, in many ways, this is very isolating, a job to have. It's you in a room.
00:44:47
Speaker
with some books and some paper, you know what I mean? But in other ways, it's made of the greatest community. I think the poets are the best community on this earth. I really do. I believe in the poets. And I believe in the poets in this nation today more than I've ever believed in anything. I really do. And it's such a nice sentiment, isn't it? To believe in poets, to believe in writers, and to believe in each other.
00:45:16
Speaker
and to slay the toxic demons of envy and jealousy that plague us and keep us from our best work.
Jealousy as Creative Motivation
00:45:23
Speaker
So speaking of jealousy...
00:45:34
Speaker
Yeah. This was the primordial soup from which I started this silly little podcast. And it's a feeling that eats at all of us to one degree or another. Now you might know Debbie Millman as the incredible interviewer behind Design Matters. She's in my top five interviewers, top two if I'm being honest. And when we spoke, she talked about patience and namely being patient with yourself.
00:45:59
Speaker
So I think the older you get, the more patient with yourself you get about comparing. But I also see when I do have those pangs of jealousy, which I do still, I see it as something that I wish for myself. You know, I'm not wishing that that other person didn't have it. I just wish that I could have that ease or that success or that whatever.
00:46:22
Speaker
And so it becomes a little bit easier to bear. And then, you know, it challenges me to then try to make that thing that I wish that I was making or to do that thing that I wish that I could do too. And so I try on my best days to use it as motivation to actually make something or do something that I hadn't already
00:46:47
Speaker
I know when I feel petty or envious or jealous, which is still quite often, though far less. It's more of a thing like in meditation, if you have a feeling you kind of note it and then you let it go away. It's a whole lot like that.
00:47:03
Speaker
it's like
00:47:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's a feeling that's there, but it takes away from her creative powers, and her creative powers are something to behold. I've come around to this idea, too. I just don't have the bandwidth to give a shit about what others have and what I don't have. Elena feels similar.
00:47:41
Speaker
I guess another thing is that jealousy and envy is really time consuming. And I don't have time. I'm spending too much time beating myself up for my own imperfections. I don't have time to be envious of other people's achievements. I got work to do. And that's another thing that helps me focus is there's just too much that I want to get done.
00:48:08
Speaker
to spend too much time. It's okay to feel that way and let yourself sort of have a couple of feelings, but then you got to keep moving on because tick tick, you know, tick tock.
00:48:16
Speaker
That's right, and that's the clock ticks. Yeah, you do sometimes start to envy your peers. Yes, but now it's people 10, 20 years younger than you, doing more, getting more exposure, better bylines, better book deals, reviews in the New York Times, starred Kirkus reviews, winning awards you want. It never ends. And you're like, what did I do wrong? And the thing is you didn't do anything wrong. You can't compare your messy insights to the blow dried outsides of Instagrammers.
00:48:46
Speaker
I've said many times that jealousy and envy is a fuel that doesn't burn clean. And Lidia Jugnovich, the badass behind the chronology of water, among other books, has a valuable lesson that gets you out of your own head. I don't think of things like, oh, I wish I was as pretty as so-and-so, or as famous a writer as so-and-so, or I wish that would happen to me. I think things like, are you doing a kind of work?
00:49:15
Speaker
that is useful to someone besides yourself, don't be a dick. That's how my hardwiring goes. So it's like my energy doesn't even go that direction. I mean, I see things I love, and they're amazing to me. And it's amazing to me that any of us survive. It's amazing to me that more people don't give up. And so I'm so on a different
00:49:45
Speaker
radar that things like jealousy, maybe it sounds like I'm lying, but it's like I just, there's too much work to do.
00:49:56
Speaker
I want to love the people I love the best way I can. And so that would subtract energy from what I want to do. So I just don't do it. And the thing that foments this talk successful of bullshit, it's
Social Media's Impact on Creativity
00:50:12
Speaker
social media. We've already mentioned it once and we're going to dive just a little dive into social media.
00:50:28
Speaker
Now there are ways to leverage social media and there are ways that it leverages you, make no mistake.
00:50:35
Speaker
But how do we get our work out in front of people without social media? I think of this a lot. Social media really didn't take root among us creative types until, I don't know, 2009, 2011 in that ballpark. So for the vast majority of our lives, we didn't have or need Twitter or Instagram. We've largely been hoodwinked into thinking we need it.
00:50:59
Speaker
And Cal Newport, who I'm not featuring here and someone I haven't had the chance of interviewing yet, he famously has no social media presence and manages to sell truckloads of books. Well, how does he do that? Well, one of his books is So Good They Can't Ignore You. And he also wrote Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, A World Without Email.
00:51:19
Speaker
He writes books that can't be ignored. And he publishes articles in prominent publications that drive traffic back to his permission asset at his website, which is his newsletter. And that is 100 times more valuable than Twitter, maybe even more. Like, give me 20 newsletter subscribers over 2,000 Twitter followers any day of the week. But that's a discussion for another day and another talk, I think.
00:51:46
Speaker
So, all that said, Annika Fajardo, author of the memoir, Magical Thinking for Nonbelievers, sees some inherent value with social media. Oh, social media is so hard on writers. It's, you know, you're chained to your computer, and so you've got access to all that all the time. And so I definitely struggle with that. I had my, my daughter has my Facebook password, so I can only get into Facebook when she allows me to.
00:52:12
Speaker
I do spend a lot of time on Twitter. I like Twitter better than Facebook, but because of the writing or community aspect on Twitter, I really have to watch myself and how much time I spend on social media. That's one of the reasons I like to go on retreats at my cabin because I can turn off the Wi-Fi and just be with the written word.
00:52:34
Speaker
I think you can make an appointment with yourself and be intentional about social media. Like that's the very essence of minimalism. It's not getting rid of stuff. It's actually just being intentional. And so as Cal Newport has written in digital minimalism, it is being intentional. Social media wants to rob you of your intention or your attention. I'm sorry.
00:52:58
Speaker
So set a timer and pick a time to go use it, to talk to friends, to share their work, and to share yours. If you treat it like that old school appointment television viewing, like Seinfeld, who's Thursday night at 9 p.m., you leverage it versus it leveraging you. And it's something you can look forward to, something you can plan for, and when you go there with that degree of rigor and organization,
00:53:23
Speaker
Like I said, you can leverage it. And in the Austin Kleon vein, like showing your work, this can be helpful, showing how messy it is. It's all the more that you have to be real careful that you don't fall into these performative habits that take away from the work. But Sonya Huber, she's got a great way of reframing social media to kind of show some of the ugly sides of it, kind of demystify the process of writing a book.
00:53:49
Speaker
Oh, definitely. I mean, in a book is not, it's weird. Like a book is just an object and it's like needlepoint, right? Like all the mess is hidden behind it. And so there's no representation of like the long tentacles and roots this thing has, you know? It'd be awesome. Like, yeah. Like, can you imagine a book?
00:54:09
Speaker
but having behind it all, like, this representation of all the evil that it took to get to this nice rectangular thing. Yeah, and one of the most quotable shows in the run of the podcast is episode 54 with Andre Debuts III. He has no social media. He has no smartphone. At least he didn't in 2017 when we last spoke. He's a craftsman. He brings his lunch pail to work and he just gets after it.
00:54:35
Speaker
three days without writing, I feel fucked up and depressed and a little cranky. Well, you're probably a writer. But when you talk about tenacity, I do think that something has come into the culture that
00:54:49
Speaker
I think is kind of ominous. Now, I'm a bit of a broken record on this, forgive me. I hate the digital world. I don't hate the podcast. I don't hate Google. I don't hate the internet. I hate the handheld device. I detest the iPhone. I detest that human beings are walking around staring at gadgets in their hands instead of looking at each other's eyes.
00:55:11
Speaker
Checking out the sunset on the side of that dumpster in that Brooklyn alley that you know Your cab just drove by but guess what you missed it because you're looking at social media social media Facebook, I'm not putting them down. I'm sure there's value to them. I've had nothing to do with any of it It's not cuz I'm a snob I don't it seems like a time killer when you could be reading a book or talking to a loved one. I've never texted I'm never gonna text. Here's my point
00:55:36
Speaker
When you talk, one thing that I've seen polluting the writer's life, especially young writers, the first 10 or so years of doing it, is, you know, Facebook has made everyone the curator of the Museum of Me. Everybody seems to be taking selfies and posting them and taking little movies of themselves. What's happened is, and of course this is not an original thought, but I don't think it's helpful for the writer.
Isolation Despite Success
00:55:59
Speaker
It's made us even more self-involved and narcissistic than people tend to be. It's made us more neurotic. And I'll tell you, that is the opposite energy the writer needs. You know, what is that great line? I'm going to butcher it from Planet Real Connor, but something like, no art is sunk in the self. The one about the self needs to be self-forgetful in order to see the thing being seen and the thing being made. So if you want tenacity, get the fuck
00:56:29
Speaker
And I know that was early in the podcast run, but I always return to Andre's insights and his approach because there's no secret to this mess. None at all. You do the work and you free your mind from distractions. You realize that everybody you just heard from, they are not special. Not a single one of them are any different than you. They aren't anointed. And like I said, they aren't any different.
00:56:54
Speaker
I will posit the only difference between them and maybe you is that they had the courage, the perseverance and tenacity to sit alone with the bad work long enough and make bad work over and over again for the sheer love of the work. And after a while, good work has no choice but to sprout from that dirt. So I'm going to leave you with one more anecdote from Andre that may be potentially life changing. And I know it was for me when I heard it the first time.
00:57:22
Speaker
The novel that put me on the map, House of Sand and Fog, I wrote in a park car in a graveyard, not far from my house, because we had three little kids in a tiny apartment. I wasn't going to tell them to be quiet so daddy could write. So I wrote my car.
00:57:36
Speaker
During those years I was working, uh, teaching at four or five campuses and as an adjunct writing professor in Boston, I was also remodeling houses as a carpenter where I made more income. I was a sole provider financially and I had no time. I had such good excuses to never get any writing done. I was also getting four or five hours sleep at night, but still I would pull up in that graveyard and you know, five in the morning, you know, engine running coffee in my hand, no sleep. And I would write a paragraph.
00:58:04
Speaker
You know, I write for like 17 minutes. I go to the job, whether it's carpentry, teaching to both on the way back, I go to graveyard again, I write another 17, 18 minutes. And I did that for three years. And after three years, I had 22 notebooks filled at the beginning, middle and end. So at the height of my young, struggling family life, I was able to write, you know, an entire novel. And I think anyone can do it. You don't need,
00:58:33
Speaker
For 17 minutes, he'd write as much as he could, every day. That unbroken chain of 17 minutes became the House of Sand and Fog, a book that was an Oprah selection, it was made into a movie, and by all accounts ensured that Andre would never have to work a day in construction again unless he wanted to.
00:58:53
Speaker
There are hundreds of hours of insights on this podcast, and you can get lost listening to mine, or anyone else's for that matter, thinking you're gonna find that one missing piece, and you might find that missing piece, that one extra bit of motivation, that one extra bit of insight, and be set, and then you're perfect. Fact is, everyone is figuring out this game one blind leap at a time, and there's only one thing you can control, and I'm quoting my good friend Glenn Stout on this, the only thing you can control is your effort.
00:59:23
Speaker
So sometimes in this game you're the bear and sometimes you're the salmon. So carve out time to find the inspiration to put the good fuel in your tank. Don't get lost, get hungry, get motivated. Go find your 17 minutes. You might not be featured by Oprah, but I guarantee you'll make something special. Stay wild, CNFers.
00:59:57
Speaker
Hey, thanks for listening. And if you want show notes to this and other episodes, head over to BrendaTheMera.com and to sign up for my up to 11 newsletter. It's how to subvert the algorithm man rage against the machine. And thanks to WVWC MFA and creative writing for the support and a final shout out for now to HippoCamp and HippoCampus magazine.
01:00:23
Speaker
So I was thinking why I was so titanically bummed when I left Hippocamp this year. After a closing ceremony, for want of a better term, I was one of the last to completely file out. So there was this mass exodus that made it feel like it was all a mirage.
01:00:40
Speaker
But there was something else, and I had a hard time putting my finger on it until about two days after the conference, and it was this. For me, personally, Hippocamp is the only place where I feel like I matter, or I feel like a somebody. This isn't like I'm Rotten Burgundy, like I'm kind of a big deal. It's not like that. Trust me, it's not like that. But in this community, at Hippocamp,
01:01:08
Speaker
Yeah, I feel and felt seen. I felt like I belonged. You know, at home, sure, my dog loves me and I think my wife does, but even for her, I'm a huge source of stress as I don't exactly pull in what you would call a, quote, livable, unquote, wage. My CV doesn't exactly scream, hit your wagon to this guy. You know, she shoulders all the pressure of the health insurance, the bread winning by a country mile.
01:01:33
Speaker
hates her job, hates the gilded cage we built for ourselves, and I'm part of that stress." She has food sensitivities that can't be diagnosed to which she poked her head into the studio as I was writing the script at this moment. And she said, you can be allergic to people. I Googled it. I suggested she get an Airbnb for a couple weeks, but she was uninterested. Anyway,
01:01:56
Speaker
But at Hippo Camp, it reminded me of when I was in high school and I was good at ball and by all accounts of somebody. Yes, I fully acknowledge I peaked in high school. And we're not talking Kilimanjaro peaks here, but a peak nevertheless.
01:02:09
Speaker
You know, you'd wear your jersey or people would go to your games because they wanted to see you and you played the game for you, but you also played for some manner of prestige and some small sense you mattered. And for someone from a busted up and broken home, you sought family and love wherever you could find it. And for me, it was out on those ball fields.
01:02:32
Speaker
And I suppose at a conference like Hippocamp in person, giving the presentation you just heard, feeling that connection, knowing that I in some small way helped a few people put fuel in the tank for some people, maybe even helped crack the code for some people. I got that rare, rare, rare, rare feeling of mattering.
01:02:54
Speaker
You know, so much fun to be around Donna Tallarico and Kevin Beerman and Louise and Damon Brown and making people laugh and having them make me laugh and hearing how everyone wants to tell their story and the desperation of wanting to be seen. It could also be the manifestation of pandemic induced isolation. And I know I've got it good. Let me just say that I don't want to sound whiny or that I'm complaining about my impossible privilege and good fortune in life.
Post-HippoCamp Reflections
01:03:22
Speaker
But right here in front of my mic, my little studio, I'm back to that feeling of isolation. I had escaped for three fleeting days and I'm going to sit in that sadness for a while knowing it will pass and that my energies will be better directed toward projects that are of greater service to the CNF-ers and the CNFing community.
01:03:42
Speaker
because this little podcast does land on ears. It's not made in a vacuum. It's not made for me, but it is made in silence. It's made by one person sitting alone in the studio day in, day out, beaming it out into the void. Intellectually, I know people are listening, but when you call out and hear nothing, you wonder if you're actually making that connection, if it's at all worth it, if it's worth it at all.
01:04:08
Speaker
One of my favorite lines in Shawshank Redemption is when Red is talking about Andy after Andy made his prison break. And Red narrates, I guess I just miss my friend. And I think that's it. So many people I know in life have moved on from me in one form or another, or maybe my transient nature means that they think I've moved on from them.
01:04:29
Speaker
Lots of friends have kids, and that puts a squirming wedge between those who elect not to. I've joked that each time a kid is born, a friendship dies. And it's always proven to be true in my life. There's geography, of course, and an unmistakable expanse of mountains and cornfields between my ocean and theirs. People's lives very much move on when you're not around, and yet they always, always, always expect you to pick up the phone.
01:04:55
Speaker
So maybe it's that, that when Hippocamp is done, I leave still feeling trapped in my own little bubble while everyone else has escaped. You know, crawling through a mile of shit and coming out clean the other end, the quote read again. And memories bandied about between each other, among each other. And so in the end, right here on this mic, I can say with all earnestness, and maybe too much earnestness, I guess I just miss my friends.
01:05:24
Speaker
Stay wild, seeing efforts. And if you can't do, interview. See ya.