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Patrick Radden Keefe is going to teach us how to write narrative nonfiction.
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It's something he's been doing for 20 years as a staff writer at The New Yorker.
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And also, he's written six full-length nonfiction books.
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And what Patrick is known for is the style called write-around reporting.
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Say you want to focus on somebody who's wealthy or powerful and they're just like, "No, I'm not going to talk to you. I flat-out refuse."
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How do you still get that story done?
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That is Patrick's area of expertise.
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And he did this with his book about the Sackler family where they basically said, "We're going to threaten to sue you if you write this book."
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So then I said, "Well, what is it that you do to tell that story once you find it?"
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And he said, "You got to find your donkey.
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A donkey to pull you through the piece."
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I was like, "What do you mean by that?"
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Well, you're about to find out.
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You wouldn't believe it, but How I Write costs a fortune to run.
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And it's thanks to Mercury that I can even do it.
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They're the sponsor of this episode and a banking platform that I've been using for the past 4 years to run my own business.
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When I started How I Write, I expected finances to be an absolute nightmare.
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Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Column N. A. Members FDIC. All right. Back to the episode. All right.
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Tell me about write-around reporting.
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A lot of journalism is kind of predicated on the idea of access, that you want to write about somebody, you need to get access to them.
2:21
They have a lot of control because they can say, "I'll give you an interview." or "I won't."
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And it's very often the case that um if you're reading a newspaper article or magazine article and it's about a particular prominent figure, a wealthy figure, an entertainer, a business leader, an athlete, um access has been negotiated behind the scenes and there are PR people and sometimes there are lawyers and there's all kinds of horse-trading that has to happen before the actual encounter happens between the journalist and the subject.
2:55
You know, it's often the case that if that person just says no, "I don't want to play ball." then nothing happens. You sort of walk away. The journalist.
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Yeah, the journalist does.
3:06
I mean, at The New Yorker it's it's almost a joke like, you know, we have these ideas meetings on Tuesday afternoons where we talk about what we should put in the magazine and um every 6 months or so somebody says, "Oh, we should do a big profile of Beyoncé."
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and everybody kind of rolls their eyes because we've asked, we've asked for years.
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Beyoncé doesn't need The New Yorker, you know, if she wants to kind of put her story out, she'll do it through her own channels.
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Um and a lot of the time in journalism that's kind of the end of the story.
3:32
For me, that's often the beginning of the story.
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So, if somebody doesn't want to cooperate, I'll write about them anyway.
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And we call it a write-around because the idea is you have the person there and if they won't talk to you, you sort of write your way around them.
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You know, the most famous example probably of this is there was a classic profile in Esquire uh of Frank Sinatra.
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>> Yeah, Frank Sinatra has a called Frank Sinatra has a cold, yeah.
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called Frank Sinatra has a cold in which Frank Sinatra didn't play ball.
3:57
And that's kind of a tradition that I operate in, not all the time.
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Anytime I start writing about somebody um I'll always make the effort to talk to them.
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And uh I always think that it's probably a good idea for them to talk to me, whether they do or not.
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>> Cuz you're going to write it anyway.
4:14
I'm going to write it anyway.
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I mean, what I say to them is the train is leaving the station.
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Like don't you know, if you can not get on the train, but it doesn't mean that you know, the train's not going to leave if you don't.
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And I wrote a big profile a couple of years ago of Larry Gagosian, the art dealer.
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I actually thought it would be a write-around because he talks to journalists all the time, but he very rarely has participated in this kind of big soup-to-nuts profile that I wanted to do.
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So, I thought he would say no.
4:40
And um I was totally prepared to write the piece without any participation from him. And then he said, "Yes."
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And I think it was savvy of him to do so because he realized there's only going to be so much real estate in this piece.
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And if I come in, I'm my own best advocate.
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And the more I talk, the more real estate I'll take up.
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Anybody who has a PR person um or has a lawyer who they want to sit in on the interview they're going to be so careful in what they tell you that um you know, so scripted.
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They've got their talking points.
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That it's often not that interesting to me.
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Um I mean, to give you an example, there there was a guy named Mark Burnett who I wrote a big profile of in the New Yorker that's in my collection, Rogues.
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And um Burnett was the reality TV producer who cast Donald Trump in The Apprentice. Oh, wow.
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And he fascinating guy, came over from England.
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He was actually an undocumented immigrant.
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He walked out of LAX uh without the proper papers, worked as a nanny in Los Angeles, and then found his way into TV.
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And his first big success was Survivor.
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And then he did The Apprentice.
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And Burnett didn't want to talk to me for the story.
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Uh but he had these two ex-wives who did end up talking with me.
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And if given the choice between a sit-down with Mark Burnett and interviews with these two ex-wives who knew him really well, I would always go for the ex-wives.
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So, I think in those kinds of situations, you know, I wrote a book about the Sackler family and none of them would talk to me.
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Three generations of the family, none of them would talk to me.
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They were actively threatening to sue me the whole time I was working on the book.
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But I talked to, you know, former college roommates and business associates and friends and administrative assistants and, you know, yoga instructors and doormen, all these people who had all these different kind of interesting vantage points on them.
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And that ended up actually, I think in a kind of strange way, creating a fuller, truer picture than if I'd been able to sit down with the people themselves who would have been really cagey if they gave me the interviews. Mhm.
6:44
How do you, as you're trying to paint the picture of whoever it is that you're talking about, like caricatures, you know, when you get one person to paint somebody, it's sort of famously bad, right?
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Like those police caricatures.
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Like this doesn't look like it at all.
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So, it seems like you're trying to paint a true picture.
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You're not able to look at them, talk to them, all those sorts of things.
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What do you do in order to get to truth?
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And beyond truth, what is it that you're going for? A good narrative?
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Like what are the things?
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One of the things that really matters to me when I'm writing about anyone is that um when I'm done with the piece of writing and people read it, people who knew the person or know the person, that they say you really captured their essence. You got it right.
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And I should say, cuz it's important, that doesn't mean that the people I'm writing about need to feel that way.
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And a lot of of time, they don't.
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and I'm perfectly comfortable with that.
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And in fact, I I would go further and say, anytime I'm writing about anyone, even if it's something where somebody's giving me all the access in the world, even if it's a a kind of generally amiable profile, I think the experience of reading it should be a little bit uncomfortable for the person that I'm writing about.
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A and I tell it I tell people this straight up when I'm when I'm writing about them.
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When I'm done with this thing, it's not going to look like a photograph of you.
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It's going to look like a painting of you.
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It's It's going to be something that is filtered through my sensibility.
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It's not going to be exactly the way you see yourself.
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And I think any of us have had this from a bad angle or it's an unflattering life.
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You You sort of think, "God, do I look that way?
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That's not the way I see myself."
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Um I don't think of my job as being the person who is trying to capture exactly your image of yourself as it exists.
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I would say that's more the job of a PR person.
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Um and so, what I'm trying to do is is paint a picture that feels kind of multifaceted, not like a caricature, that it's it's really drawing on um a lot of interviews, a ton of research.
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And then, I want that picture to be in a kind of fundamental way both resonant with people who don't know the person and recognizable with people who do.
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What's the role of place as you're trying to tell the story of a person?
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Like say that you're, you know, we're recording this in my living room.
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I would say that this living room says a lot about me that I wouldn't be able to communicate.
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And when you're telling the story of whoever it is, how do you think of place as a character character or as something that's illuminating who this person is, what they value, stuff like that? It's funny.
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I'm I'm having this kind of strange experience right now cuz somebody's writing a profile of me. Oh, wow.
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>> And I I'm on the other end of this thing. >> It's very weird.
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And he just asked to come to my house and interview me there.
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And there was a moment where I sort of thought, am I ready to reveal that much about myself?
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Them walking into my house and looking around, having that beyond the record.
9:52
I mean, I'm not interviewing you right now, but if I were to look around your living room, it's like I could pick up any of these details and they could go in the piece.
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Um for me, I always want to sort of find the details that feel specific, not generic, that feel like they somehow reveal the whole.
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Tell me about specific, not generic.
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Well, just that there's no If I were to describe this room, um and I say, you know, there's a green sofa, that's not really telling the reader anything. It's not doing anything.
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It's not illuminating anything about you.
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Um if I say there's an old Victrola on the counter and that there's a an old kind of vintage TWA poster of London, that's it's just more granular, right?
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It's both more kind of evocative for the person who's reading it, they can see it in their mind's eye, and it's I don't know exactly what it tells us, but it tells us something more concrete about you than the fact that you have a green couch, right?
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Um but listen, generally I think I think place is hugely important.
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I have this new book that I have, London Falling, is a story of a 19-year-old kid who died in 2019 in mysterious circumstances.
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He went off the balcony of a luxury building in London overlooking the Thames.
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And after he died, his parents made this discovery, which is that he had been living a secret double life, and he'd been moving around London pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch.
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And there were three people in that apartment that night, this this kid who died, Zach, and then these two older men.
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And part of what I do in the book is I I try and tell you how those three guys got to be there that night in this kind of tragic situation.
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And the way I do that is to reel back their family histories in London.
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How did they Each of them came from a family that came to London from a different place.
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Um in one case uh India, in another Uganda, in another uh Eastern Europe um during the Second World War.
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And place infuses the whole book.
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And I think in some ways place kind of you know, you don't want to be too too reductive.
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But if you want to understand these people, you have to understand the environment they grew up in, the kind of milieu that their parents and grandparents came out of.
12:14
Are you uh Are you scared when you write?
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Like you take on such mysterious topics, powerful people sometimes.
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Like how do you deal with the fear?
12:27
I mean, I I guess the first thing I would say is I don't I have a colleague, Luke Mogelson, who's a war correspondent and who's you know, like in a trench in Ukraine getting shelled.
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And that's a level of courage and danger and fear that I um I couldn't pretend to.
12:46
That's a kind of um you're putting yourself on the line when you do that kind of work in a way that I never do.
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You know, I have a wife and kids who I love and I I actually trained as a lawyer before I became a writer and I um so I have a kind of probably a little bit of a risk aversion.
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Yes, I write about some dangerous people, but I try and always be um careful about it and um sort of thoughtful about how I approach the work and I try not to be too intimidated.
13:23
It doesn't mean I haven't had a few hair-raising moments over the years, but most of my stories about hair-raising moments end up turning comical at a certain point.
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A lot of the time it's a situation where I kind of go in really nervous and then everything turns out okay.
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But listen, I mean there's a story I tell in this new book about like there was a gangster who I interviewed for the book who just got out of prison and um he asked me to come and see him and this is a pretty dangerous guy who's got a long record of doing pretty bad things >> to people.
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I went and met him in a coffee shop.
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I had like given instructions to some people beforehand about, you know, if you don't hear back from me um here's what you should do.
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And um I showed up in this coffee shop and he the first thing he did was he he shook my hand.
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He asked what kind of coffee I wanted and then he asked after my wife and children and he named them. Hm.
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And I hadn't told him their names.
14:20
So yeah, I mean that, you know that'll freak you out a little. Yeah.
14:26
How do you think about the stories that you choose to tell?
14:29
Cuz there's a kind of mystery you're trying to sometimes crack a case.
14:35
So how do you think about the I mean you're not a detective but you're kind of a journalist detective and how do you think about the right sort of I want to be able to solve this but I'm not sure if I could solve it and you don't want to spend two years I guess and not be able to solve what's going on, right?
14:56
As a as a child I read a lot of mystery stories. That was my thing. Which you like?
15:02
All of the Hardy Boys, I read all of uh Sherlock Holmes.
15:05
I loved Agatha Christie, you know Dorothy L.
15:10
Sayers, uh on and on and on.
15:13
Those were my kind of formative reading experiences were reading mysteries.
15:17
Um my dad was like a big reader when I was growing up in the '80s of a certain kind of like paperback like mass market paperback crime fiction, you know, Robert Parker, Elmore Leonard, that kind of thing.
15:32
I just grew up with that stuff and it I think it kind of seeped into me on some fundamental level and so I am attracted to mysteries of one sort or another.
15:41
Um And and and you know, sometimes it can be a kind of a mystery in a conventional sense of a whodunit.
15:48
My book say nothing is kind of a whodunit.
15:50
It's about a murder that happens in 1972 and at the end you find out who did it.
15:54
But you didn't know who did it when you started writing?
15:58
>> I didn't and I didn't know if I would figure it out.
15:59
It was only at the very end that I did figure it out.
16:02
But the um but I think that there's another kind of mystery which is just um a simpler kind of mystery which is that I think readers are pretty jaded. Mhm.
16:14
You know, this experience I had years ago where I was on the um on the subway and I saw somebody pull out the New Yorker which I often see but this was a week when I had a story in the magazine and she um was turning the pages.
16:30
I saw her turn to my page, to my article and uh you know, what a feeling, right?
16:37
And I um and then I thought about approaching her which you always have to be a little careful on the New York subway, you know, when you walk up and tap a stranger on the shoulder but I was sort of edging towards her as she read through the first paragraph and I was like reaching out to tap her on the shoulder and say, you know, how's that article?
16:55
You know, I I I wrote that.
16:55
Um and just as I was getting close to her, she finished the first, you know, paragraph or whatever it was and like turns to the next article.
17:05
Uh it did haunt me to this day but but I think the um there are little mysteries which is not you know, was it Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the candlestick mysteries, but just little mysteries where you're withholding some little piece of information Mhm.
17:21
and there's a question in the reader's mind which is I'll give you an example.
17:27
I wrote a story for the New Yorker years ago about Chapo Guzmán, the head of the Sinaloa Drug Cartel, and I didn't know how to start the story.
17:35
I knew that readers would feel kind of jaded, that there were a lot of readers who would feel like, "Oh, I know about Mexican drug cartels.
17:40
In my mind's eye, I can kind of see where this thing is going.
17:46
I've read a bunch of Mexican drug cartel stories and I wanted to find a way to subvert that expectation right out of the gate. So, you go to Amsterdam. So, I went to Amsterdam.
17:55
So, in my research I I found this thing, and the funny thing is if you read the piece, it's a guy who's a minor character.
18:00
He's not even a big figure in the story, but I found this guy who was an assassin for the cartel who happened to love European travel and he had an Instagram account, and he would post photos of himself, you know, going on these vacations.
18:14
And he went to Amsterdam at some point, and he was in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, and there was an international arrest warrant for him that was put out with Interpol, and he was arrested uh at the airport in Amsterdam.
18:28
But for me, the idea that we that you you see that oh, it's a it's a story about Chapo Guzmán.
18:32
Okay, so it's like the Sinaloa Cartel, and you're imagining like this you know, the kind of Sierra in Mexico, and and uh and, you know, drugs coming across the border, and this like arid kind of parched southwestern landscape.
18:48
Um and you start the article and you're in Amsterdam in an airport.
18:52
Just introducing that little question in the reader's mind, which is okay, well, how are we going to go Wait a second. How do we get back?
18:57
>> Yeah, it's funny that you say that.
18:57
So, I just reviewed something for a friend, and he said, "How'd you feel about it?"
19:03
And I was like, "I didn't really like it." And he said, "Why?"
19:07
And I said, "I feel like you've given me a bunch of facts, but you haven't told me why I should care about the facts, and you haven't given me a string, a thread that I can kind of follow, a rope that I can walk that's leading me towards the end.
19:20
And without these open questions, without stakes and conflict, I was like, "Dude, I just don't want to read this."
19:28
I had a guy, there's a friend of mine, who's a very smart guy, um finance guy.
19:32
We had a funny conversation about a year ago where he said, um He's being nice, and he said, "You know, I love The New Yorker, I subscribe to The New Yorker for 30 years.
19:44
When I was in high school, they we had to subscribe to a publication, and I subscribed to The New Yorker, and it's so great, and I'm a big supporter.
19:52
Now, what happens is when there's a 10,000 word New Yorker article, I'll just feed it into ChatGPT and ask for like a 4,000 word summary."
20:01
And um I, you know, I sort of died inside a little bit, but then I said to him, "You're using it wrong.
20:05
If that's what you're using The New Yorker for, the idea that you can like suck all the nutrients, all the just the kind of information bullet points out of it, you kind of you've gone to the wrong place.
20:16
Like the the pleasures of the kind of thing that I do are literary pleasures.
20:20
It's actually all about the storytelling, and um I'd kind of hate to think that you would be able to take something that I do and and like boil it just boil it down to five bullet points or whatever it is just to kind of get the information and absorb that and keep moving.
20:40
I mean, you're free to do it, obviously, but I think the point that I was trying to make to him is like, you don't go to The New Yorker for that.
20:46
Um just ask ChatGPT about the, you know, whatever the subject you're interested in, or go to Wikipedia, I don't know.
20:53
The literary aspect of what I do, I'm telling you a story, I know how to tell a good story.
20:59
I don't care if you are interested in the opioid crisis or the troubles in Northern Ireland or drug cartels in Mexico.
21:08
The point is I want to seduce you with this narrative.
21:12
If you give me, you know, read those first few paragraphs and tell me that you're not intrigued enough to keep reading.
21:19
Now, of course, there always are people who will take the off-ramp, but um I'm sort of fighting for the ones who don't.
21:29
Well, I want to hear more about about intros.
21:30
What makes for a good intro?
21:30
Cuz even the Bourdain piece, it was kind of like the El Chapo piece where you're like, how do we open this one up differently?
21:37
And you write "When the President of the United States travels outside the country, he brings his own car with him.
21:42
Moments after Air Force One landed at the Hanoi airport last May, President Barack Obama ducked into an 18-ft armor-plated limousine, a bomb shelter masquerading as a Cadillac that was equipped with a secure link to the Pentagon, and with emergency supplies of blood, and was known as the Beast."
21:58
I'm just going to pause there.
22:01
I'll read the rest, but I want to hear what's going on there.
22:04
Well, so Bourdain had been profiled a thousand times before I showed up, probably more so than anyone I've ever written about.
22:09
He's somebody who had just been written about a huge amount.
22:14
And Tony was very generous, so he always said yes to everybody.
22:16
So, he he just gave thousands of interviews over the years.
22:21
Um and so it was a very high bar in both in the sense that I wanted to write something that would feel kind of definitive. >> Mhm.
22:31
Um and also in the sense that I knew that readers, a lot of readers, would have already read a bunch of Anthony Bourdain pieces.
22:40
Um and so there again, the challenge is, well, how do you find your way in?
22:44
Well, I had wanted to travel with him.
22:46
I spent a year writing that piece. I had a lot of material.
22:50
I had wanted um from the start to travel with him.
22:52
We ended up agreeing that I would go to Vietnam, and I didn't actually know until I showed up that Barack Obama was going to be there, too, and that he was going to be meeting with Obama.
23:03
And that was a thing where I sort of had a I had a kind of an insight into this meeting between these two guys.
23:12
I loved that detail about bring your own car with you to be a nom.
23:15
And if you keep going, it talks about how Obama, when he experiences Vietnam, he you know, most of it he does from inside.
23:26
It was Obama's first trip to Vietnam, but he had encountered this pageant mostly through a 5-in pane of bulletproof glass.
23:33
He might as well watched it on TV. There you go.
23:37
So, to me that's that's doing a lot of work, that line, because um you know, you're you're both nodding at the fact that Bourdain was the opposite, right?
23:49
I say somewhere in the piece that he, you know, his experience of culture was almost intravenous, right?
23:54
It's like he shoot it right into my arm.
23:56
He would kind of go out and he wanted to just be there on the ground in the place.
24:01
Ideally, not even in a restaurant, but in people's homes. >> Yeah.
24:03
And um Obama, by virtue of being president, can't do that. >> just cannot do that.
24:08
He has to see it through this glass.
24:10
And of course, the thing about watching it on TV, it's like on some level, this is what Bourdain was for a lot of people, right?
24:15
Is you're you're not actually going to go yourself to um whatever the place may be.
24:21
You know, you may never make it to Mozambique.
24:23
Um but you can sit on your couch and watch Tony go, sort of as your proxy.
24:28
So, that was a kind of a like a sideways way in.
24:35
And um I felt like there were enough little kind of gee whiz factoids about the fact that they have supplies of blood in the car and so forth that I mean, that's another thing is just sprinkling little things that people may not know.
24:48
Um I think it's it's helpful.
24:51
It's just you're always sort of making down payments on on saying to people, give me your time and I will take you to places you're not expecting." Mhm.
24:59
Tell me more about the down payments.
25:03
You hear occasionally when people talk to you about some streaming series, and they'll say, "Oh, have you watched such and such a show? It's so great."
25:10
Um the thing is it doesn't really heat up until >> The first four or five episodes. >> Exactly.
25:15
Until like six episodes in or whatever.
25:18
>> season is terrible, but >> if you stick with it, the second season is great. Yeah, exactly.
25:21
>> I mean, I had to sit there for like eight hours to Yeah, that's the thing.
25:24
And then you have to into this. value proposition.
25:25
I mean, it's crazy, right?
25:26
The idea that somebody says, "Yeah, just give me like 10 hours of your life, and that's And then it'll start getting good."
25:31
And we don't, I'm afraid, with the with the printed word.
25:34
I mean, I feel this when I read some of the greats from the middle of the 20th century, people who wrote for the New Yorker.
25:42
You know, you you'll pick up an incredible book or an incredible New Yorker article, and there's two pages about the landscape before anything happens at all.
25:48
And that is, I think, just not an option today.
25:51
At least for me, it is not an option.
25:53
Attention spans are not what they used to be, and I I know that there are writers out there who are kind of purists who say, "No, I'm going to do it because this is the way to do it, and if I lose the vast majority of my audience, then so be it."
26:08
Kind of audience be damned, and that's that's just not my that's sort of not my approach.
26:12
I'm writing things for people to read them.
26:15
>> I insist that if I ever write a biography, I'm not going to have the first 150 pages just be childhood. >> Yeah, I got it.
26:23
Because the thing is, actually now the way I read a biography, I'll tell you what it is.
26:28
It's like a choose-your-own-adventure experience.
26:29
I jump to about maybe when they're 20, they get started with their thing.
26:34
I'll go through that, and then once I have learned a little bit about them, then I'll jump back to the childhood later on. And just drives me nuts.
26:43
Like, I don't want to pick up Titan, read about John D.
26:47
Rockefeller's tie when he's 11 years old.
26:50
That's only interesting once I understood >> the how he took over the oil industry.
26:57
And then the tie comes back later, same piece of information, exact same sentence, goes from black and white to color. Yeah. Boom.
27:06
Yeah, I I think that's right.
27:06
I mean, I tend not to be a huge fan of and then and then and then as a structural device.
27:14
Um the um I like things that sort of hop all over the place, honestly.
27:20
Um I don't I don't tend to go in for I mean, I'm pretty obsessive about structure and about these questions of when you dole out which bits of information, but I um I'm sort of stubbornly non-linear uh in the way I present things and um and that in part grows out of the fact that as a reader, I like it if you're kind of keeping me guessing a little bit.
27:46
Hanoi's broad avenues are crowded with honking cars, storefront vendors, street peddlers, and some 5 million scooters and motorbikes, which rush in and out of the intersections like floodwaters.
27:55
What are you trying to do there?
27:59
A lot of the time in in my writing, I'm trying to do these little setups that I want to pay off later.
28:04
And I don't want you to feel like it's a setup, but there's a moment much later in that piece where um where where Dane um the the crew had rented him a Vespa and he was doing a shoot and um I was just kind of hanging out and sort of hoping for, as you are when, you know, as a journalist, a lot of time you're just there with your notebook, kind of waiting for something to happen.
28:36
And um he finished the shoot, he came over and he said, "Hey, do you want to go for a ride?" Hm.
28:40
And he got on the Vespa, I got on the back, and we sort of scooted out traffic and he loved nothing more than being on a scooter or motorbike in Hanoi.
28:53
It's a very specific kind of feeling.
28:56
Um and I wanted to set that up in advance.
29:00
The idea that, you know, I think about the floodwaters that you've got this these kind of great like rushing currents of people and you sort of join the current and you're there and you're sort of part of this like organism.
29:13
You just sort of feel like you're out there and you're mixing it up. Um and he loved that.
29:16
That was kind of a magic sensation for him and then it's kind of an important moment in the piece towards the end of the piece because you get the sense of his freedom.
29:28
And then for me on a personal level it was a, you know, it's something I still think about because I I realized later that night as I kind of lay my head on the pillow in the hotel that he had given me that scene.
29:39
Like Tony was a writer and he was um a very generous guy and I think he knew I needed a scene. Wow.
29:48
>> And so he I think he he intuited that if he said like, you know, Hey kid, you want to go for a ride on my You want to go for a ride on this Vespa in Hanoi?
29:54
Um that uh that that would just jump off the page. Yeah, the Vespa.
29:58
I rode on one in Tulum and it's just there's something about the wind in your hair but then also I remember someone showed me a scene of traffic in Hanoi that they had taken from like the balcony of a second, third floor restaurant.
30:11
I couldn't believe just the crisscross, the beeps, the Vespas.
30:15
>> It looks like nothing.
30:16
>> this is the thing is in the experience.
30:17
I describe this in the piece but I, you know, I thought I might die.
30:18
Like you know, it's it's um and Tony was not a uh you know, not what you would call a a careful conservative dri- driver. Um but uh it was great.
30:28
Wait, so tell me more about structure.
30:30
So what's your thinking about structure?
30:35
Because you do that really kind of early on in the process.
30:38
So like what are the different layers of like this is important when I'm thinking about structure.
30:43
You talked about opening up mysteries early on that you're going to answer later on, establishing certain things maybe at the intro that you're going to get to later.
30:51
Like what's going through your mind there?
30:54
Yeah, I mean I think a lot about structure.
30:55
I think probably I think about it more maybe than um than some other people who do the kind of writing I do.
31:02
And you value it so much, why?
31:05
Because you know, it's non-fiction writing, right?
31:07
I'm not able to invent anything.
31:09
So I I anytime I sit down to write, it's like I have a deck of cards.
31:13
It's the universe of things that can happen is limited by, you know, objective reality and what I was able to bring home.
31:23
Like what quotes do I have?
31:23
What statistics do I have?
31:24
What anecdotes do I have?
31:26
What scenes can I create?
31:28
Then the question becomes, you know, to me the real artistry is sort of how do you deal out those cards?
31:33
When do you introduce which characters?
31:35
When do you have your big reversals?
31:36
If there's some revelation, when are you going to drop that on people?
31:44
I would report and report and report and report and report and I it was like gathering a big compost heap of material.
31:51
And at the very end when I was kind of done and I felt like all right, I've done it.
31:56
I would sit down and think all right, how do I structure this?
31:59
And over the years what has started to happen is that I'm thinking about structure earlier and earlier.
32:04
So as I go now in the reporting process, I'm thinking what's the beginning of my story? What's the end?
32:10
What are the big moments?
32:12
And at a certain point while I'm still reporting, I'll just on the back of an envelope, I'll have like eight or nine beats.
32:18
Just what feel like big kind of narrative moments for me. Just bullet points.
32:24
Just boom boom boom boom.
32:25
I think this is where we start.
32:27
I think this is where I want to end. How do we fill in here?
32:30
This thing here I want to I want to I want you to think one thing up to this point halfway through and then I want to switch you around suddenly like that.
32:36
>> That's you thinking like the reader rather than the writer. >> Yeah.
32:38
The useful thing about that is actually that it limits my research on the other side of that because once I've done that exercise, one of the questions is who are my characters?
32:47
And so, you know, I'm working on a piece of writing right now which I don't want to say too much about, but a but a piece for the New Yorker and and you start out in the universe of possible characters is 50 people, right?
33:00
And I ultimately want it to be about five people who we're going to service in a really significant way.
33:06
Um and the the utility of doing that exercise of just the kind of beats on the back of an envelope is that I can be a little ruthless on the other side of that with you know, I encounter some fascinating person.
33:21
I mean, I literally had this this morning.
33:22
I was working and I in my research I encountered this person who seemed like a great character, but I'm already at a point in this project where I have the discipline to say, nope, interesting guy, doesn't fit here.
33:34
You know, there's a kind of what to me is sort of an amateurish mistake that I used to make where you think that just because somebody's interesting, you should shoehorn them in even if they don't necessarily fit in this story.
33:47
And so, I'll create that and then I sort of slowly populate it.
33:50
Basically, my research then starts kind of filling in beneath those beats and um what that means in practice is when I sit down to write, I actually have the whole road map in front of me.
34:05
So, here's what surprised me about that.
34:07
That implies that before you even begin the research, there's like some level of knowledge that you're doing.
34:13
So, it seems like you're kind of understanding the story, structuring it, and then really diving into the research phase, and then the writing is like a small sliver at the end. Is that right? >> Yeah, exactly.
34:23
I don't um I know it's different for everybody.
34:25
For me, it's 90% research.
34:28
And then at the the end at the very end, I write and I write fast and I'm in kind of a fugue state.
34:35
There's a period of time when I'm not doing anything else.
34:39
I'm just writing and I dream about the, you know, when it's going really well, it's like I have I'm dreaming about it and I wake up in the the night and write myself little notes.
34:51
How do you think about statistics?
34:52
What statistics are able to do, what they're not able to do, when you can really use them to their full effect, and then the ways that they're overused in writing?
35:01
Yeah, I I Listen, I mean, I think that some people have a Some people are more numerate than I am.
35:08
Some people have a more kind of statistically inclined mind than I do.
35:10
I think um I try and use statistics in a really limited way.
35:15
They're there to illustrate something, particularly if they're really dramatic.
35:20
If you'll bear with If you'll bear with me, I I think of um the kind of writing that I do, I think a lot of the time about the texture of different things, almost the way a sort of an artist who's like a mixed media artist is kind of pulling in different types of things and I want some degree of textural variation.
35:44
Um Again, this is something I've noticed about myself as a reader, but it's if I'm reading something and it's um one dense, long expositional paragraph after another, I find it exhausting.
35:59
It feels like quicksand for me.
36:01
Um the same would be true if it's just a lot of statistics that you're throwing at me um in a way that doesn't feel particularly selective.
36:09
Um This is going to sound like a very rudimentary thing, but I If you read any of my pieces, you won't go too far before there's a quote of some sort.
36:18
I think the quotes kind of air out a story.
36:23
They Again, it's you know, on the level of the kind of texture of the thing.
36:27
Um and but I also, you know, don't have pages and pages and pages of dialogue, right?
36:31
I feel as though you I'm always trying to kind of mix that up.
36:32
And um to me it's that sort of weave of these different, you know, you have statistics, you've got exposition, you've got quotes, you've got scenes.
36:44
And I always want to have um a kind of degree of variety there.
36:46
Um because again, as a reader, I've just noticed with myself that that when I have that I feel as though I just kind of collide through a book without much of a sense of friction.
37:02
Whereas um if you throw a huge amount of numbers at me, there's a kind of cognitive load problem that I have.
37:12
Yeah, the statistic that comes to mind when I think of your work is that, and you can help me out with it, was that was it OxyContin or was it just overdoses killed more Americans than all the wars since World War combined?
37:25
Like that is such a more powerful frame of it than, and I'm going to make this number up, 133,000 people died.
37:36
It can sometimes feel almost crude when you get those types of analogies where it's like somebody's talking about, I don't know what, some you know, a stack of paper as tall as the Empire State Building, right?
37:44
Like you can kind of you can come up with these um these sort of units of measurement that people can see in their minds.
37:50
Um but the um But I think there's something to that.
37:56
I mean, I was thinking about this I was thinking about this yesterday, the cuz I was writing in this in this piece that I'm doing about um this much I can tell you.
38:03
If you have a tractor-trailer truck, an 18-wheeler, and it's driving on the highway um 65 mph, and the vehicle is fully loaded, and it weighs 70,000 lb, um and you're the driver, and you hit the brakes, it takes 200 yd before you actually come to a full stop.
38:26
Um so I can say 200 yards or I can say two football fields. >> Right.
38:29
And for whatever reason, two football fields works better.
38:31
I yesterday I had the experience of I was writing a paragraph and I said 200 yards and delete. Two football fields.
38:40
What has screenwriting taught you about getting in a into a scene, getting out of a scene, how scenes are juxtaposed together, how they work together, separately?
38:47
Yeah, I mean I've done I've done a lot of screenwriting over the years.
38:50
Uh nothing you would have seen cuz none of it's been made, but I'm kind of the I'm I'm the sort of proverbial um well-compensated uh Hollywood screenwriter who writes scripts that don't get made.
39:01
Um and I learned a lot about structure from screenwriting and I think particularly about um kind of distillation, the concentration of a scene where maybe you watch a movie or a television show.
39:15
Generally speaking, a page of screenwriting um you know, um it is is roughly a minute of screen time and in a way that I think a lot of people don't necessarily think about.
39:25
When you're watching a TV show or a movie, if you watch a scene and it's 4 minutes long, that's a really long scene. So that's four pages. It's nothing.
39:32
I mean you write a four-page scene in no time.
39:38
Um and that that kind of brevity, the sort of haiku clarity of screenwriting where, you know, as the old saying goes, you want to get into the scene at the last possible minute and you want to get out of it at the first possible minute so that it has this kind of nice um concentrated feeling and nonfiction is different.
40:01
I have more, you know, there are scenes that I write that are in a court hearing or um I don't know what, something with like a long amount of, you know, a lot of dialogue, something where I'm where they do go on for pages and pages, but even that, what's happening is I'm taking a lot of the time a 300 page transcript and I'm thinking how do I boil this down to five pages in a book.
40:22
Um So yeah, I think about that a lot and then the other thing is just sort of juxtaposition of scenes where you get out of a scene at a point where people actually want to know want to know where it's going. You cut away.
40:37
And a lot of the time what I'll do is I'll cut away and then I'll tell you some information that I need you to know because um I'm confident at that point if you want to know what was going on with that other thing that you're going to keep moving with me and I can give you the exposition that I want.
40:52
And then eventually we'll pick up that other story down the line.
40:57
How do you feel that writing the long-form piece, 8,000 words, 10,000 words, is different from writing a book?
41:04
Because one of the things that I was thinking about as you were saying that I was thinking of you sort of like you're almost like this architect, right?
41:08
You meet these architects, they're like, you're going to come to my building, you're going to feel this, you're going to feel that, you're going to walk around this corner, and I'm going to basically like wrap my hands around you and I get to dictate your emotional experience.
41:20
So they have this sort of like almost like a messiah complex or something.
41:26
And then I was thinking about books and articles and I was like, okay, a book is something that I kind of dip into, dip out of, dip into, dip out of.
41:32
Like it's something that's sort of longitudinal, kind of goes over one, two, three weeks that I read a book.
41:38
Long-form piece is like Saturday, Sunday morning. Get my cup of coffee.
41:41
All right, but it is one experience.
41:43
And a long-form piece, all this to say is it's shorter, but somehow it's almost more like an architect where you curate somebody's whole experience from start to finish.
41:54
I I definitely have a bit of that complex and I think in kind of explicitly architectural terms about the writing that I do.
42:00
So I'm I will cop to that.
42:02
I'm usually not trying to kind of dictate your emotional reaction.
42:04
I I like to leave a little bit of give and and the the that I'm a I'm drawn to um a lot of the time are actually kind of ambiguous or they'll divide people and I like that.
42:16
I like that people will sometimes read the same book or the same article and come out feeling very differently about um some of the characters.
42:25
It's interesting the differences in the form.
42:28
I had a really fascinating conversation with a friend who's an editor in uh newspaper editor in London the other day cuz he had read my new book.
42:39
And there's a moment in the book, kind of terrifying moment, where this teenage kid, Zach Butler, is alone with his mother in their apartment and they have a fight and he's about 16, 17 years old and suddenly his hands are around her throat and he kind of throttles his mother just for a moment and he stops and then he goes into therapy and they kind of move on.
43:00
And uh this book started as a New Yorker article, which was I don't know, probably 14,000 word article in the New Yorker and my editor friend was saying, he's talking about the differences between articles and books and he said,
43:11
"You know what's so interesting is in the article when that moment happens, that throttling, it's like this bell that you rung and it's and you can't unring it after it's happened and it just you're sort of vibrating with that horrifying moment." I feel like I'm
43:23
I feel like I'm doing that right now.
43:25
Yeah, that's in the context of the article and he said, "When the same thing happens in the book the book there's sort of more there's just you're able to kind of digest, you're able to sort of metabolize it over a longer process, you know, you're well into the book.
43:38
You've read much more, you know these characters and it's not that it's not um an arresting moment, but it's not sort of it's not kind of the emotionally defining moment um because you're just working on a bigger canvas.
43:54
There's a specific detail that's in the book.
43:58
It's not in the article that I think in the article would have been it's very shocking and it comes late in the book and if I'd put it in the article, it would have colored everything.
44:12
And so it sort of works in the book. You can do it.
44:14
200 pages in, you can say, "And now I'm going to tell you this thing, and I want you to understand it in context.
44:19
Let's look at it in a way that if you did it in an article, it's just it would be it would kind of color everything.
44:25
So I do think that they're kind of different.
44:29
You could You have to be sort of mindful of the different scales.
44:33
How are conclusions different between books and articles?
44:38
I don't know that they're that different.
44:39
I mean, I think that the To go back to your earlier question, I think that when you're when you're telling a story that's a mystery, you need to be very mindful of how the reader's going to feel at the end of the article or the end of the book about the fact that they've just given you, you know, in the case of an article, 45 minutes of their life. >> Yep.
45:03
In the case of a book, 14, 15 hours potentially if they're, you know, being honest.
45:06
And I think a lot about that, about how do you situate the revelations.
45:14
You don't want to over-promise.
45:14
You don't want people to feel a sense of buyer's remorse.
45:18
Um so in that respect, the the conclusions are different, but otherwise, I mean, I think the I'm always looking for some sort of epiphany, some kind of emotional epiphany, if there is one.
45:26
Um And then the thing that I'm that I'm I think getting better at is embracing ambiguity, kind of recognizing that there that life is really ambiguous, and I'm not going to you, and uh kind of wrap everything up with a neat bow, even if it would be satisfying in a narrative way. Mhm.
45:44
So it's kind of thinking about how to how to let you experience that ambiguity without it feeling like a letdown. Tell me more about that.
45:52
It seems like that's been a in your eyes, I can see you've been thinking about that for many years. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
45:57
I mean, I think it's hard because I don't you know, in the case of my book, Say Nothing, where it's about this murder and then at the end I kind of figure out who the murderer was.
46:08
Say Nothing, in narrative terms, it's like it ends with this very satisfying click because I identify this person.
46:18
You get to the end of the book.
46:18
I mean, it's devastating because it's about a real woman who was killed and her you know, her her children at the time, but her her children are now grown up with children of their own, but they they live with that um that trauma.
46:32
But in narrative terms, it's very satisfying.
46:34
Most of life isn't that way.
46:36
Most of writing isn't that way.
46:38
You know, as a writer, I've had to I actually, you know, when I started writing this book, London Falling, I met the family who lost their son and one of the first things I told them was just cuz I I cracked the case in that other book, doesn't mean I'm going to crack it here and you can't go into this assuming I will.
46:55
So, I think about those questions of ambiguity all the time and um I think if you do it in a kind of artful, thoughtful way, readers actually appreciate it.
47:05
I think what people don't want is for you to take something that's ambiguous and just kind of clean it up around the edges for the sake of narrative coherence. >> Mhm. Yeah.
47:17
Few times you've mentioned the word tradition, working inside of a tradition.
47:21
And it's funny, I meet some writers who are like they reject genre.
47:26
I'm not working inside of a genre, but tradition implies that you respect the genre.
47:30
Why do you think like that?
47:35
Um nobody knows where to shelf my books in a bookstore, right?
47:37
Um they're not they're not really true crime in a narrow sense.
47:42
You could certainly shelf them there and I think they have satisfactions for people who read true crime, but um but I don't really think of them as true crime per se.
47:50
They're not really history books either.
47:52
They're not really current events books. They're not novels.
47:54
So, the notion of narrative non-fiction as a kind of rubric, which is to say a non-fiction book, totally true story, but in your hand it feels a little like a novel, and it'll read a little like a novel in the sense that there's subtle characterization, there's themes that get carried all the way through, there's scenes, there's suspense, there's drama.
48:17
I want reading my books to feel like an emotional experience, not just an intellectual or an analytical one.
48:23
But listen, I mean I I I think there is a tradition.
48:27
It's one that I have a slightly ambivalent relationship to because to take, you know, a lot of people would point to In Cold Blood by Truman Capote as the book that sort of gave birth to the tradition, but the truth is there's a lot of stuff in that book that's not true.
48:39
You know, Capote described it as a non-fiction novel, and it's an incredible masterpiece, and I I revisit it every few years, and I've learned an enormous amount from it. But he made stuff up.
48:53
You know, he invented quotes, he invented scenes, he broke rules that I would never ever break.
48:57
And so, I think the tradition evolves.
49:00
I think of myself as answering to a a stricter standard than Capote and some of the other 20th century writers who did this kind of work um did.
49:12
And part of the reason I have all the endnotes at the end of my book is that most people don't read them, but you know, if I'm talking about two people who are dead, who I didn't interview, and I tell you they had a fantastic sex life, there are some readers who they read that and they say, "Hang on a second.
49:28
You know, like how how do you know?"
49:29
And they can go to the end and find out how I know, you know?
49:34
I want to talk about Arthur Sackler and how he thought about marketing.
49:37
You describe him as a kind of Don Draper of the pharmaceutical industry.
49:42
And I want to hear about how he went about it, like how he thought about communication, how he thought about getting an idea out there, there's to sort of the propaganda of what he was doing.
49:55
Yeah, I mean, Arthur was an amazing guy, kind of protean, uh charismatic, really brilliant guy who grew up in Brooklyn uh at the turn of the last century, and um his parents were immigrants.
50:11
He was the oldest of three boys.
50:13
Went to a big public high school.
50:13
He was really smart, and he ended up going to medical school and paying his way through medical school working as an advertising copywriter.
50:22
And he'd always been interested in journalism and writing and art, and um he went into psychiatry, he was interested in medical research.
50:33
But at the same time, he was always working in medical advertising, and he came of age in this kind of very specific moment after the Second World War, when you had the birth of like branded drugs, really the birth of Big Pharma as we know it.
50:44
And one of the big challenges was how do you sell these drugs to consumers so that they'll know what's out there.
50:50
And one of Arthur's big revelations was he realized it's actually not the consumer who you need to sell to, it's the doctor.
50:55
It's the doctor who prescribes.
50:56
And he was a doctor himself, and he came up with these very elegant ways of persuading doctors um that each, you know, new drug that Pfizer or whatever the company was, Roche, put out um was going to be a wonder drug and would be amazing, they could should prescribe it to their patients.
51:15
He did this in ways that I think were sometimes quite crooked.
51:18
Uh he often, I think, told lies about the upsides of these drugs and also about the potential side effects and downsides.
51:26
>> And the lack of downsides, huh?
51:26
And he um made his first great fortune because he was the guy who designed the marketing campaign for Valium.
51:36
So, long before OxyContin came along, uh Arthur Sackler became very, very rich um as the sort of architect of uh the big push.
51:44
This is in really the 1960s and 70s for tranquilizers, what they call the minor tranquilizers. Tranquilizers. >> Yeah, okay.
51:55
So, Valium and Librium was an earlier drug that he was also involved in.
51:58
And yeah, fascinating guy.
52:00
I mean, I think somebody who he was interesting cuz he died before the introduction of OxyContin.
52:05
So, Arthur's widow and his children would tell you, you know, he had nothing.
52:10
He was pure as the driven snow.
52:11
He had nothing to do with OxyContin.
52:13
He was dead before it was ever released.
52:15
But, his brothers were the ones who were really responsible for OxyContin and they were when they sold OxyContin in the '90s were sort of using a playbook that Arthur had invented. >> Sure.
52:28
This really stuck out to me as a lesson from your book.
52:32
It is a particular hallmark of the American economy that you can produce a dangerous product and effectively offload any legal liability for whatever destruction that product may cause by pointing to the individual responsibility of the consumer. That's funny.
52:45
I mean, one of the things that I realize in many states in America, the thing that always kind of just throws me off is all the legal ads on the billboards.
52:59
And then the thing that always sort of makes me scratch my head whenever I watch TV is all the pharma ads.
53:06
And uh seems like there's some strange things with the American economy as they interact with pharma.
53:13
Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's exclusive to pharma, you know.
53:17
Um guns don't kill people, people kill people, you know.
53:19
Um there are a range of products that this is true of.
53:23
Um It's funny cuz to some extent I think it's true of social media now, right?
53:28
I think we're kind of waking up now to the fact that social media has been pretty bad for our kids.
53:35
And um it's going to be really hard to hold those companies accountable because there's a sense that you know, the parents and the children should have individual responsibility and know that if TikTok is giving you body dysmorphia, that's your problem, you know, >> Don't use it.
53:51
Yeah, that's like a matter of your poor moral character.
53:52
It's not We certainly shouldn't hold TikTok uh responsible for that.
53:56
Um so, I think that's a kind of old idea in American life and you're right about the ads.
54:01
I mean, it's um Oprah did an interview with um Prince Harry and Meghan, his wife.
54:13
And it was I guess she It was shown on US TV, but all my English friends were watching it live.
54:22
And they were watching it and during the commercial breaks, it was all the ads that we're all so used to in America where it's like direct to consumer advertising for like crazy pharmaceuticals you've never heard of and there's the guy who speaks really quickly and tells you what the side effects and all that kind of thing.
54:36
Um and uh my English friends who were watching this live and don't get exposed to this stuff were saying, "What is this? Like what a dystopia.
54:46
They let you watch this stuff?"
54:49
And I was like, "You know, absolutely.
54:50
This is kind of the wallpaper of uh American life."
54:54
Tell me about Daniel Zalewski and what are the days you learn from him?
54:57
So, Daniel's my He's the features director at The New Yorker.
55:01
So, you write a feature piece. That's what it's called. >> pieces, yeah.
55:03
And feature pieces are what? 8, 10, 12 months?
55:06
>> Yeah, uh yeah, I mean, it's just long, you know, sometimes they come together more quickly, but they They're the longer articles, you know, there's always two or three of them in each issue.
55:14
Um and they take me some you know, sometimes again, sometimes maybe three months, but often a year or more.
55:22
A wonderful editor named John Bennett who died recently who was a long-time New Yorker editor and one of his um he had a saying uh which was, you know, the writer is like a guy in the hospital who's walking down the hallway in the hospital.
55:37
He's got one of those hospital johnnies that doesn't close in the back.
55:42
And the editor is the person walking right behind him so nobody can see his ass.
55:47
And um I think there's a lot of truth to that, but I think that that's >> The editor is kind of a person who tells you that your fly is down. >> They do.
55:55
Yeah, and they and they protect you from yourself, you know, and um I think there's truth to that, but to me that's that's only the half of it.
56:00
I mean, with Daniel he's um he's always there at the inception of ideas.
56:06
Some of my pieces are his ideas.
56:08
He's the first person I talk to if something new comes along.
56:09
He's got a very intuitive grasp of story, of what makes a good story, um what would be needed.
56:16
Over 20 years working with him I've kind of internalized a lot of his his thinking and so there are you know, when I turn in a first draft to him it's not even really a first draft cuz I've already edited it in my mind anticipating the kinds of things he would say.
56:32
What do you think he understands about what makes for a good story?
56:37
I mean, I'll tell you the first time I encountered it was my very first piece for him was a piece called The Snakehead that became my second book.
56:42
>> This about the Chinese woman? >> Yeah, exactly. In Chinatown. Came out in 2006.
56:44
And I remember still some of the things he told me, but he Sister Ping was the name of the woman that was about.
56:50
And after I turned in my first draft he said, "I want to hear her voice more.
56:53
I need to hear her voice.
56:53
You know, it's all about this woman, but she's not speaking very much.
56:56
Now, she wasn't talking to me at the time, but I was able to find testimony she'd given.
57:02
I was able to interview other people and say, "Well, when you saw her that day, did she say anything that you remember?
57:06
Was there anything that resonated with you?"
57:10
And then people would say, "Yeah, she said X."
57:10
And then suddenly I have her in quotes and I have a sense of her voice.
57:14
There were um there were a bunch of FBI agents in that piece.
57:20
And Daniel said, "You know, there's only so many FBI agents that people are going to keep track of in their heads.
57:23
You have to cull the herd here."
57:29
If I'm reading something that somebody's written, whether it's a book or an article, and in the first thousand words you introduce me to eight different characters.
57:37
>> You're doing it wrong. I call it context load.
57:38
You have to do work in order to load context in somebody's mind.
57:42
And once you've done that work, now it's going to work for you.
57:48
But then whenever you make people load up new context, it's a lot of RAM in the reader. Yeah.
57:53
And I'm always thinking, how do I just reduce context load?
57:55
And what I've generally found is it just means introducing fewer things and doing it better.
58:01
And then once I've done it, I can kind of work with it's like the gravity of the context is now working in my favor.
58:07
Whereas it's so frustrating where it's like, now we're introducing new scene, new place, new person, and it's kind of gets very tedious.
58:15
Giving people time to sit with new information and new characters so that they take those people on board.
58:22
And so I'm being very thoughtful about when I introduce you to each new person.
58:27
And so the idea is I hope you've kind of you sort of gotten a grasp of who's who in the zoo before I'm suddenly introducing you to a whole new character.
58:38
So with the FBI agents, what you started with like five, six of them, and then I cut that. Yeah.
58:44
Yeah, tell me about that.
58:44
Well, I mean it was just literally a situation of there are places where you don't need to tell me everybody's name.
58:48
You can say another agent, you know, one of Agent McMurray's colleagues did this, that, and the other.
58:54
Who are you going to focus on?
58:55
And um I think that that idea of um not all of your characters are created equal or need to be, that you you can kind of favor some um and the more it is a kind of panorama in which you're just constantly telling me about new people.
59:15
I mean, you said something earlier about being able to follow certain things through.
59:17
I have a um wonderful colleague, Lawrence Wright, who's one of the great non-fiction writers, also a novelist, also a screenwriter.
59:25
And um Larry Wright talks about, um, when he's when he's writing he likes to find a a uh a donkey. Hm.
59:33
And, a donkey is his character who's going to pull the reader through all this material.
59:38
And so, he's always kind of looking for, you know, who's my donkey.
59:43
>> Doesn't need to be one donkey necessarily, but you need those people who the reader can kind of, um, they could sort of capture the imagination of the reader and the reader can then follow them.
59:52
And the amazing thing is, if you have your donkey, you can tell a really complicated story as long as the reader feels as though they're sort of following that person through.
1:00:02
>> Yeah, Lee Child called it propulsion.
1:00:04
The the the the reader needs to be propelled through the piece. >> Yeah. Yeah.
1:00:08
So, when you were talking about her voice, you said, "What she said."
1:00:11
But, voice encompasses more than than than that.
1:00:14
So, how did you bring her to life through through the voice?
1:00:20
What on a very rudimentary level, it's just I want things I can put in quotes so that you know what she sounds like.
1:00:25
So, in her case, she was very gruff and she, >> Great word. Gruff.
1:00:29
she she would just took a kind of very utilitarian approach to life.
1:00:33
Uh, she was not someone who was ever going to, you know, speak in a florid way or really say anything unnecessary.
1:00:40
She was kind of barking orders.
1:00:43
Um, I mean, this is a woman who when I finally contacted her in jail and asked for an interview, she sent a message back which was, "What's in it for me?"
1:00:53
You know, that was Sister Pat.
1:00:53
Um, and, uh, yeah, it's just, you know, where where as there are other people who, uh, I'm going to give an example.
1:01:01
There's a piece I wrote years ago about Carl Icahn.
1:01:07
Kind of a billionaire corporate raider guy.
1:01:09
And, um, I was reading all these interviews he'd done and I noticed there was one interview where he was telling some story and he said, "At the risk of being immodest."
1:01:16
And then he told the story.
1:01:18
And then I found some other interview where he was telling a different story and he said, "At the risk of being immodest."
1:01:21
And then he said the thing.
1:01:24
And in the piece I didn't put a I didn't hang a flag on it, but I quoted both of those.
1:01:28
The second time in the first section of the piece when you read him saying, "At the risk of being immodest."
1:01:33
You know who this guy is.
1:01:35
You know, I mean, anybody who that's his verbal tick, you're going to develop a sense of the kind of person you're dealing with. Yeah. So, let's close here.
1:01:43
Tell me about like what is your any given Wednesday like?
1:01:45
How have you structured your life over the years in order to get writing done and matching that with just all the other demands of life? Uh I mean, it's hard.
1:01:57
I don't I I think I think of it in terms of energy that's like outward energy and kind of inward energy, and um I live uh outside New York City.
1:02:07
I live in the suburbs a very kind of quiet um pretty monastic life with my family.
1:02:12
And two usually two days a week I come into the city, and I'm meeting with people all day.
1:02:20
I come in, you know, today's a good example.
1:02:22
I got in this morning, and I'll I'm going to be going going going going going. I've got a lunch. I got afternoon stuff.
1:02:28
I've got, you know, an evening thing I'm going to, and I'll get home late tonight.
1:02:32
>> You mentioned you wrote this morning, too. I did. Yeah, yeah.
1:02:33
But the But what I try my kind of life hack, which works pretty well, is I have a couple days a week when I'm usually not writing.
1:02:41
I'm actually just engaging with the world, and then um the rest of the time I need kind of quiet unbroken stillness.
1:02:50
It takes some work, but I need to sort of preserve um a cer- kind of silence in order to just keep an article or a book in my head and uh do the kind of thinking that I like to do.
1:03:08
I It used to be that my life was structured a little differently, and I was, you know, I was out four nights a week or whatever it was, and um I at this point I found that that's pretty it's it's actually fairly destructive to my ability to um, to do the work that I need to do.
1:03:22
So, I try and kind of contain um, all that external energy in a couple days a week and then the rest of the time it's pretty quiet.
1:03:34
Last question, if I invited you back to our alma mater and like, "Hey, can you spend a semester teaching people how to do what it is that you do?
1:03:43
These are the key things you need to learn.
1:03:44
Here's how you think about it."
1:03:47
I mean, I I think you know, I said something earlier about how I try and have my reader brain and my writer brain be in conversation.
1:03:52
I I'm forever amazed by the degree to which a lot of people who either write or aspire to write um, don't do that.
1:03:59
That they they treat these two activities as kind of separate.
1:04:06
Um, I mean, the example I always think of is I'll have somebody will send me a pitch that they want to send to the New Yorker. Can I look at the pitch?
1:04:16
And I'll open the email and it's like 5,000 words.
1:04:21
And what I'll usually do is come back to that person and say, "Do you get email?
1:04:26
When you open your email and it looks like this?" You run.
1:04:29
Do you Do you get excited?
1:04:29
You know, do you think, "Oh great, I'm going to carve out the next hour to figure out what the hell this person is saying?"
1:04:36
Um, you know, your your your pitching an editor who gets a hundred emails a day with different ideas for things.
1:04:44
You got to do it in three tight paragraphs.
1:04:45
You have to actually leave them wanting more.
1:04:47
You have to do it in such a brief way that they're going to come back to you and say, "I demand to know more about this."
1:04:55
But that's like such an elementary thing, right?
1:04:56
Where somebody sits down and they're trying to put their best foot forward. They're a smart person.
1:05:00
They may have a great story to tell.
1:05:02
But it's like when they sit down to write the email, they completely forget about what their whole lived experience is of reading email.
1:05:07
And I think the same is true for articles, the same is true for books.
1:05:10
And so, me it would be very heavily kind of intensively looking at pieces of writing that really work for you and sing and and make you feel absorbed and engaged and inspired and then being very analytical and saying, "Why?"
1:05:25
Take it apart like you would a magic trick or, you know, a Swiss watch.
1:05:30
What is it that they're doing here? What is the machinery?
1:05:34
And then just steal, steal, steal, you know?
1:05:36
Find the things that they're doing and and figure out how to adopt those techniques and make them your own. Rock on.
1:05:43
Thanks for coming on the show. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.