← How I Write
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- [00:00]
A
So when you're writing and you're working on a novel, what is it that you're doing to build relationships with your characters, get to know them?
- [00:14]
B
I have become probably always was meant to be a novelist of character. All of my novels have principal characters, and those are the ones who get the most attention from me. Secondary characters tend to be easy. They have a limited role. You just need a couple of things and you can make them work. And typically, their role will be defined by their dramatic function. The main characters are a whole different thing. This is an exaggeration, but it could be reduced to. I am looking for a sentence that describes a problem for the character. And ideally, when you read that sentence, you're smiling, ready to laugh. So I'm looking for a comic problem. It doesn't have to be a big problem. It doesn't have to be the nuclear launch codes have been stolen, and only you can get it back. If you're writing a certain kind of novel, that is the problem you want. But for mine, it can be really, really trivial problems. And in some ways, the smaller the problem, the funnier it is. Because if it really, really matters to the character and it's also really small, that in itself is funny. You're worried about that. But if the character really, really wants it, that's enough. Because that will then set in motion everything else. And once you have something that a character wants, you present some obstacles. That puts you into scenes with those other characters. Scenes which check the important dramatic box of having characters want different things. One character wants you to get on a plane. The other character really has no intention of getting on a plane. That's drama. Basically. I'm not talking about understanding the history of a character. I'm not talking about what they look like or where they went to school. Always. It's going for the story essence of what the character is. And the rest can be filled in as you go.
- [02:40]
A
So basically, you're trying to get a funny. That funny one sentence. But why do you use the word funny? Why is that so important?
- [02:47]
B
Because I'm fundamentally a comic novelist, I think. Not everyone gets the humor. It's remarkable. You know, in every audience there are people who don't understand that you are allowed to laugh when a character ends up with a filet of salmon in his underwear. Because they've been told, well, he's a serious novelist. I present myself as a serious novelist. I'm wearing the glasses of a serious.
- [03:19]
A
Novelist and the watch of a serious novelist.
- [03:22]
B
The watch. It's my shinola And I guess, you know, there is this, I think, unthinking prejudice that if you're serious, you can't be funny. But if you look at the great novelists and the great playwrights over the ages, the vast majority are funny, at least some of the time. I don't want to be the writer who is tremblingly serious and earnest, talking about people in terrible pain, terrible injustice, to this moral vision of serious people encountering serious things in the world. It's like, you know, I don't want to be that guy because I don't trust that guy if I read his book because it will usually say to me, that person hasn't really gotten the right distance on this. Distance is really, really critical. And one of the best indicators of distance on a main character, a protagonist, is. Is the author able to laugh at that person? I will pick a single contrast to that. You will have writers who themselves feel victimized in some way, and they'll decide to write a novel about a character who's been victimized. And if you stick close to a character who the author is convinced is a victim, a good person that bad people have done bad things to, and all the more so if the character himself or herself feels I'm a good person who bad people have done bad things to, you're in trouble on page one because you will appeal to people who feel victimized in the same way. And that's kind of the end of your appeal. The kind of books I like to read and the kind of books I try to write take a somewhat more nuanced view, view of who's good and who's bad. And in fact work from the premise that no one is all good, no one is all bad. And again, if you're laughing at the character on page three, you can just relax and say, good. I'm not going to be asked to sign on with someone's victimology. Part of the work of preparation for writing a book is a deep examination of oneself. It's a mistake young writers make. They think they know who's right and who's wrong and they think they're among the right ones. And it takes a lot of time. Time. It takes some life experience and it takes some self examination to get over that idea and open yourself up to the way things really are.
- [06:46]
A
Explain this to me. Why is it so important to investigate yourself if you're writing fictional stories that are not about you, at least on the surface?
- [06:59]
B
Well, for me, the goal is to create a character who's so completely not Me that I can pour all of myself into that person. It's easier with female characters because I'm pretty heterosexual, pretty securely defined as a male in my imagination. And so if I make a character female, then I don't have to think, well, that's me. Because it's clearly not me that's a woman. I'm a man, right? And so I can get to the point of infusing my own experience, my own subjectivity into that character more easily than if it's a man who superficially looks like me. One of the reasons you might have to stop and do some self investigation is when you are encountering high levels of shame. You feel the story wants you to go in a certain direction, but you're ashamed to go in that direction. And every time you try to go in that direction, you. The pages have been going along great and then you got into this shameful stuff and suddenly you hate the pages and they're bad and they've lost all their humor. They've become kind of like I feel bad about myself. I feel ashamed of that. And one of the reflexes then is to just kind of pile on the ugliness, pile on all of all of the. Basically to objectify the shame you're feeling writing about that and make things even more depraved than they need to be and more disgusting and more self interested than they need to be. Because you are feeling such high levels of shame and you're disliking yourself so much that it becomes. The writing becomes depressed in that way. There's no technical solution to shame levels in a writer. You have to go into the shame and figure out why am I so ashamed? That will then offer various solutions. One might be, you know what? This is just not the book where I'm going to get into that. And I know it seemed. I seemed to. I felt I needed to write about that, but I'm not going to full stop. Or you may, as I did when I was encountering high shame levels at one point in the corrections. You may do a deep dive into self analysis and flounder for six months and finally have an idea for how to make what you thought was shameful ridiculous.
- [09:39]
A
Is that that separation that you're talking.
- [09:40]
B
About exactly when once you start laughing, once you can laugh, he can still be feeling shame himself. But if you are liberated from shame, then you can see it objectively. It's a tragic distance. It's a comic distance. It is some kind of distance where you can. Where you are no longer personally implicated in that character. You see all. You see what's wrong with them, you feel for them, and you may be amused by them. That kind of almost celestial distance from the character is what you're. You're looking for. And it's hard because the job is to try to put as much of your own self and much of your own subjectivity as you can into all of these characters, which means that there's a constant kind of psychological process whereby you are coming to terms with parts of yourself that have been unearthed by the process of trying to write the damn novel.
- [10:41]
A
Okay, let me show you this new tool that I've been using to write called Sublime. And they're the sponsor of this episode. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how I use Sublime to write this post on X, which got almost a million impressions. So it started off with the basic note taking stuff. I was just throwing notes in, but it's the stuff that came after that was really unique. That's what makes Sublime special. You'll see here that I had this mind map and that allowed me to begin to see kind of connections that weren't even there. And I was blown away by this. And then it didn't just end there. Sublime has the save1discover100 feature where you can just put in a piece of information and all of a sudden it just starts recommending things. It's like having a research assistant that actually has good taste and these are put in there by actual human beings. And so now I had the mind map, I had all the related ideas, and I really started to think about how am I actually going to structure this piece? And Sublime helped me see parts of my structure that I didn't even realize were there to see how ideas were actually connected. See, Sublime is built by people who care about creativity and beauty and not just productivity and efficiency. And you can feel that as you use the app. So if you want to use Sublime in your own writing, well, you can go to Sublime app and use the promo code Purell, and they'll give you 20% off. All right, let's get to the episode. How do you think about the difference between. Do you know what trauma dumping is?
- [12:04]
B
I can guess.
- [12:05]
A
You know, it's basically saying, okay, these are all the difficult things that are happening in my life. I'm just going to pour it all out on the page. How do you think about the difference between that and what it is that I hear you saying, which is you're going to do this investigation, you're going to unearth things. Those things will then make it into the novel. How do you think about the difference between those?
- [12:24]
B
If you're experiencing various kinds of trauma or suffering from various. The aftermath of various kinds of trauma, and you dump that out there. People who have been in that position, who are in that position may feel comforted by it. They may feel like I've got company. Yeah. But the basic mode of that is it's very much focused on the self and it's very. And it tends to have a flavor of complaint and an implication of some injustice that I should. I important. I should be feeling so bad. And to have had these terrible things happen to me, all of that is really incompatible with forging the kind of bond I want to forge with the reader. Where there's me, there's the reader, and then there are these characters we're going to meet on the ground of those characters. But I want you to know my loyalties are actually just as much to you reader, probably more than they are with the characters. I was reading this Hallie Butler novel a year ago. It's the best novel I read last year. Best new novel I read last year. It's called Banal Nightmare. It's also one of the funniest novels maybe I've ever read. And it's full of people who feel so sorry for themselves and are so angry and so full of complaint and everything's going shittily for them. And part of the genius of the book is, well, it's not just one. There are like eight of them. And each one of them is convinced of the unique terribleness of the situation they're in. But it's a joy for the reader because I'm not thinking, oh, well, the author is just like dumping this on me. No, I've got a whole smorgasbord of suffering to choose from and to laugh at. Because one person venting like that, complaining like that, suffering like that, well, that's a tragedy. But eight of them, that's a comedy. And I just felt so grateful to Butler, and so I just relaxed so quickly as soon as I started. Started laughing. It's like, this is going to be fun. And that, of course, is what the point of writing and reading novels is.
- [14:50]
A
Well, it's funny because we're talking, making jokes about, oh, serious, serious Mr. Franzen over there. But then on the other side, you talk about writing being fun and pleasurable and all of that. And that's sort of your overt and explicit goal in the books that you work on.
- [15:07]
B
So I've had a lot of time to think about how to justify writing novels, what the point might be. Of course, when I was young, I thought it was to change the world, to expose injustice, to help people look more critically at social structures. And then there was sort of a middle period where I thought it was, well, you know, we're all existentially lonely. And I have found that when I'm reading a book, I feel connected with another consciousness in a way I don't feel like, even with my best friends, I don't feel as intimately connected as I do with, you know, the author of a book that was written 100 years ago who's long dead. There's still something to that. I mean, I'm not going to take. I'm really not going to take away from either concept, the sort of socially useful concept, or the existential loneliness novel as the best ever art form for the connection of one consciousness with another, which I do think it is. There is none superior. But in the old age, it really doesn't. The only thing that makes sense is I write for pleasure and I write to provide pleasure. And that paradoxically, 40 years after, my young political self was looking for a political justification for spending all day making up stories about characters telling lies. As my mother put it, I'm lying. I'm a professional liar. I know, like seven days a week, there I am writing down things that never happened before.
- [16:56]
A
A young boy, he had so much potential, he became a professional liar.
- [16:59]
B
I'm a professional liar. Exactly. But there is a sort of, at this point, to make a claim that something being fun is justification enough, takes on. Especially if you're. You're in politically fraught times and everyone is demanding that you take a stand and is and is, you know, you're either with us or against us. Well, no, I'm just over here trying to give pleasure. That takes on a weird political valence. And I think it's a useful valence. It's useful to be reminded. And once you get all those other ideas out of your head, then the task when you're trying to write a novel is, how can I make this really fun? There are two damning things I'll say when I'm working on something and it's not working. One is, I don't see the humor in it. The other is, this isn't fun enough. And fun, you know, I define fun rather broadly. Even now I have fun using words that you don't encounter very much. Or writing sentences whose structures are a little unfamiliar. I have fun deploying those words. I have fun developing those interestingly structured sentences. And, and that's within a larger context of telling a fun stories about characters you care about. But for some readers, I know they're going to really enjoy learning that word or they're going to appreciate, oh, that's a kind of a cool thing they're doing. That writer is doing with how he's exploiting the ability in English to put an adjective after the noun. It's modifying. So you can say he had different capabilities, but you can also, he had capabilities different from his brothers. But I kind of, I felt like we had not here was a less utilized and therefore extremely pleasurable to use way of putting a sentence together.
- [19:13]
A
It's funny to hear you use the words fun and pleasure. And the one word that I would add based on what you're saying is play. And then also think about that, what you're saying here. But then also it seems like writing these books has been grueling for you at times. So how do you square those things?
- [19:33]
B
So many metaphors are available. You have a desperate desire for such and such person and you're rejected or rejected and rejected. There's a bird I really, really want to see. I'm in a new place. There are some specific birds I would like to see here. And yeah, it's going to be like a four hour walk in very humid forest before I get to see it. And even then there's going to be some bushwhacking and I'm going to get stuck with things and bitten by insects. And yet it's not something I would go out and do unless I had a goal. But by the time if you actually then see the bird you're looking for, the whole thing becomes fun and was like, yeah, yeah. Oh my God. We were out on that trail for hours. We'd given up. You know, it didn't. So it said great story, but it also, it's like all the suffering was kind of meaningless. You were suffering at the time, but you're not. You're. You're no longer suffering. And so it was kind of unreal in a way. And it gets subsumed into the larger pleasure of the pursuit, the capture and the telling of the story.
- [20:43]
A
The biggest lie that writers will tell themselves is, ah, I'll remember that later. No, I mean, there's so many times when I'm listening to a podcast, I want to save something and I just never end up saving it because Typing it into the phone is just too much work, you know? Well, I found a great solution to that problem. It's called Podcast PodcastMagic, and they're the sponsor of this episode. So what you do, super easy. Say you're listening on Apple or on Spotify. If you find a bit in this conversation that you really like, just take a screenshot of it and then email it to podcastmagicublime app. If you email it, like, a minute later, you'll get an email back with the transcript, the context, all the information that you need, and then that way you don't need to write down all the information. So if you find something in the conversation that you really like, well, check out Podcast Magic. All right, let's get to the interview. When you were talking earlier about writing in different people's characters, say that you're writing from the character of a teenage girl. How do you add texture to that character that would be so far away from you? Like, what do you. Do you read books from the voice of teenage girls? You watch movies? Like, what are you trying to do? Or do you just have this bank of experiences from your life that now you can draw from and pull from?
- [22:01]
B
At this point in my life, I would not attempt to write certainly from the perspective of a teenager of any gender identification, because I feel as if the world teenagers live in is so distant from the one I inhabit.
- [22:22]
A
Yeah, distant from the one I inhabit.
- [22:25]
B
I'm 30. Exactly. So I wouldn't do it. Yeah. Again, it's. And here's another thing to keep in mind. You don't need that many details.
- [22:35]
A
Explain that even.
- [22:38]
B
Even a long book is only, whatever, 500 pages, and there's probably a total of less than one page devoted to describing the weather in that book. And yet you feel kind of, well, approach surprised, because that's going to be 20 different points at which the weather was described. The reader will finish the book having said, wow. And he's so good at describing the weather. I felt like I was in. I knew what the weather was like in each of those scenes because all it takes, really, is one sentence. And for a minor character, a minor character might be a total of six pages in a novel. And, you know, two sentences are really all you need to establish what you need. For a minor character, it doesn't. It really doesn't take much. They have to be the right things, of course. And you might. You might write down 50 things and then whittle it down to the two that really work. My advice for less experienced Writers is to really, really work on the pages. Look at every sentence. You have to ask the question, do I need this? And then you look at the sentence itself. Is there a way to say this in fewer words? Because when you're starting out, that's your. Your you are trying. You're learning to write what you're picturing. And what you're picturing is walking across the room, turning the doorknob, opening the door. People send me a lot of stuff and I probably agree to look at more things than I should from even for strangers. I have a novel. Oh Jesus. But every once in a while I will look at that work and invariably I know in one page whether it's any good one page. People use cliches. White as a sheet. Yeah. Quiet as a mouse. In my opinion, you get at most one cliche per book. People send me a galley of a book that's coming out. I read along until I get to the second cliche and I say thank you. And there are some award winning literary writers whose books I have come to the third cliche in three pages on. And thank you.
- [25:16]
A
Why are cliches such a. Such a sin? For lack of a better word?
- [25:21]
B
They tell me this is not an attentive writer. Aren't you aware that that's a cliche? Like did it not occur to you to stop and take 20 minutes to find a better phrasing than that? It bespeaks laziness and laziness there tells me there's probably laziness.
- [25:39]
A
Is it like the laziness of borrowed language?
- [25:42]
B
Laziness of borrowed language. But you can also have borrowed feelings, borrowed ideas, borrowed situations. Cliche doesn't is not simply these obvious little stupid similes, but also sentiment can be cliched or unearned. Situations like I've seen this situation before and that everyone has seen the situation before. It's a cliche. The situation.
- [26:10]
A
Don't want to meet the mother in.
- [26:12]
B
Law you can make. I mean, there is no such thing as a story that hasn't been told. So there are continue to this very day to be great books written where people go to meet their mother in law. It might still be true. This might be an impossible mother in law. But you cannot refer to it as a thing without essentially participating in a cliche. Avoid it.
- [26:40]
A
When you talk about novels needing to be an experience, you want to create an experience for the reader. What is it that you're getting at there?
- [26:50]
B
A lot of experimental fiction delights in breaking the fourth wall in referring to text, referring to the artificiality of the text, introducing the author, commenting on the. All of this stuff, which basically, to my mind, takes you out of the experience. It becomes a different kind of experience. So experience is close to this notion of the kind of vivid dream. And I think it's a worthy goal for a writer to not want to get in the way of that. You asked about cliche earlier. One of the reasons to avoid cliches is it takes you out of the vivid dream you're having in following these characters along. Suddenly become aware. Cliche. And. And you're saying, really? He turned white as a sheet. So what you are trying to do is get people into that vivid dream as expeditiously as possible to establish your trustworthiness as a writer. You can trust me. I'm not going to play any games with you, and I'm not going to distract you with my technical insufficiency. You can trust me. And I'm not going to take it too seriously. We're all in this together. We're laughing sometimes, we're crying sometimes, whatever. And then stay in that dream and that becomes the experience. And that can become, in the right hands, in the hands of a skillful novelist, it can become something, an experience you don't want to have end. You want to stay in that experience. You know, honey, it's time to turn out the light. Five more pages. Five more pages. That's what you want. It's like, I'm having an experience. Don't interrupt me.
- [28:44]
A
Humans are very good at retaining the essence of characters, but we don't have the complete picture of who a character is. Is that the right way to think about it?
- [28:53]
B
And it's why you don't need as much as you may think you need. Because we are very eager, our brains are very eager to form complete holes from little bits of information. And you could describe the writer as trying to facilitate an imaginative process in the reader. It is. It is a very active form of entertainment in that regard.
- [29:16]
A
How do you feel like your noticing of the world has changed through the process of doing this craft?
- [29:23]
B
I'm not one of those writers who walks around with a moleskine in my back.
- [29:28]
A
That's kind of what I was getting at.
- [29:29]
B
Do you do that? Like going down to the cafe? Interesting character. That weird guy at Starbucks? Yeah, I know, right? Never been that. I used to. I mean, when I was really young, when I was 20, I would beat myself up. Like, it seems like writers are supposed to be interested in absolutely everything, and they're supposed to be on the street observing and writing things down and going, you know, and it's like, nah, it's never me. I think what I was good at, I was, I was good at reading people. Always. I was, from my position in my family, I kind of, I was a very late coming child, much older brothers, much older parents. And I learned how to read what was happening between these characters really early on. And I trust my instincts about people and I'll come home. My spouse equivalent. Kathy and I will have spent an evening out and she's a writer too, and she'll know what I'm talking about. I'll say, did it seem that she really didn't want to talk about that one thing? And Kathy will say, yeah, I wondered about that. It's like it's just you, you notice that and it's, I mean, it's something, you don't have to be a writer to notice things like that. But I think I'm particularly attuned to that kind of thing. Yeah. And I'm trying to tell a story and I was like, well, why wouldn't that have been? And then we might try to work it out. And that's, you know, that's a lot of what writing is, trying to work out what might have been going on with that person. And I think even as a kid it was the more closely you observe and the better you can tell the story of what you observe, the more chances you have of making someone laugh at the story you're telling. So there was, I think even as a kid I wanted one of the highest goods was getting a laugh. Not in a stand up way, but just from. Observing something and framing it in such a way that it reads is really hilarious. Yeah.
- [31:32]
A
Well, Tom Stoppard has a line. He says laughter is the sound of comprehension. And what I take from that is that there's a, there's a truth in a laugh. You can't, you can't fake getting a bunch of people to laugh. It's got to hit at something core that is actually pre intellectual.
- [31:49]
B
Absolutely. And that's particularly the case when you're doing a public event. It's like, if I'm not getting the laughs, I'm in trouble. I almost panic. The worst event I ever did, it was in Brazil and I was getting laughs from the same 15 people in the audience. They were the ones who were not wearing their translation headsets. They were listening to English and they were laughing. And that's exactly right. I mean, basically, even though they Were they must have been getting some Portuguese translation of what they were saying. They were not comprehending, as Stoppard would say.
- [32:25]
A
I think it was Kafka or Proust who would sit at the keyboard and they would laugh so loud they keep the neighbors alive. Do you do that? Like, do you find yourself laughing as you're writing, or is it a more kind of quiet, private, internal experience?
- [32:38]
B
I think I laugh every once in a while. You know, it's not a good look to laugh at your own material. Well, you're sitting in a room. There's no one else here. Yeah, I've occasionally cried over my own sad material. Probably mostly smiling at what I'm writing. Yeah. And really smiling with the pleasure of knowing it's funny more than smiling at it. It's like, that is a good line that'll get a laugh.
- [33:12]
A
Man, most of the Internet just screams at you. There's all of these notifications and things that are trying to hijack your attention. It's like being in a ch e cheese with the kids screaming, the parents yelling. The skeeball machine is making all sorts of weird noises. How do you write in an environment like that? Well, luckily, there's an app called Ulysses, and they said, we are going to create a calm and peaceful place for you to write. It's like a quiet little cabin for your brain. A place where you're not going to be distracted by the ui, the UX and all the design. They deal with the complexity of big writing projects so that you don't have to. So that you can just focus on the writing. Now you're going to have to go somewhere else for your Chuck E. Cheese coupon. But Ulysses did say, hey, I think how right listeners are going to love our product. We're going to give anyone 50% off of the first year of an annual subscription, half off just for you guys. So if that's what you're going for, go to Eulis app Howirite. All right, back to the episode. How much of the process of writing these books is a process of unfolding versus planning?
- [34:23]
B
This is by no means the first time I've said this, but I think a book that was too fully planned is likely to read like a book that was too fully planned.
- [34:37]
A
Like sterile.
- [34:39]
B
Yeah. Not exciting. It's really, really subtle stuff. But I can tell there are several British novelists, but also some American novelists. You can really feel God. This was written from an outline. It's perfect. But it's also written from an outline. And that is the last impression you want to give, and if you can outline it, then my feeling is, what's the point in writing it, if that makes any sense? I could get a machine to do that. Literally, nowadays, I could get a machine to do that. There's just no fun in slavishly following an outline. Nevertheless, you have to have some idea of where you're going. And the best case is when you, you know, I've got to get there, but I have no idea how I'm going to get there. So it's the adventure of trying to make an unlikely sequence of events seem inevitable.
- [35:43]
A
The word organic is coming to mind for me that maybe there's something organic and the truth in that organic nature of something that isn't outlined, where you're kind of rolling with the story. Oh, wow. All these surprises, like, if there's a surprise for the writer, there will be a surprise for the reader kind of organic, you know.
- [36:04]
B
Yeah, I'm not a. I do not belong to the school of the writers take over and tell me what to do. The writers surprise the characters take over and tell me what to do. The characters surprise me. That's not. I don't let my characters push me around. I push them around. I am their boss. They do what I say. Nevertheless, if something isn't working, you have to be open to the possibility that what you thought the character was going to do is not really going to be available because it bores you to try to do it, or because the more you think about it, the less likely it seems that the character would do that. And so you are forced to think about other possibilities. And that's why you need to be attentive to your sentences. Because sometimes when something. When a paragraph is like, well, that's all messed up. What's wrong with that? And you just, like, you know, bear down on the paragraph and you realize, oh, well, there's this whole other thing that I could be doing. Instead, it's a matter of, as Flannery o' Connor said, of doing whatever you can get away with.
- [37:07]
A
What does that mean?
- [37:11]
B
Well, the full quote is, the writer does whatever he can get away with, and nobody ever got away with much.
- [37:17]
A
Oh, that completely changes the quote, which.
- [37:21]
B
Is to say you're always pushing yourself, like, how can I make this more extreme? How can I make this more original? How can I sell something even more unlikely? Well, as Flannery said, nobody ever got away with much. But in that quote is, you always should be pushing it. And four times out of five, you say, that would never work. No, that's not going to work. But one out of five times it's like, whoa. Wow. Whoa. That would be cool.
- [37:49]
A
Well, tell me about this word extreme, because we were talking earlier about the stories that you pick, they don't always need to be. Nuclear weapon is gonna go off in 34 seconds. We need Jack Bauer to save the day here. It can sometimes be much more mundane, but then the stakes are big or there's a sense of desire that the character has. And now you're using the word extreme. So talk to me about that word and why it's so important.
- [38:19]
B
I am a middle class novelist who mostly writes about middle class characters. And middle class people tend to lead pretty well regulated lives. I do have a taste for characters who are mentally unwell in some way or another, whether merely obsessive or full on psychotic in a few cases. And because that's a way to. Within this well ordered bourgeois world, which is for better or worse, the world I have to work with. It is a way to find more extreme emotional states and also get a more vivid kind of writing. Because if you hook into somebody who's like literally going crazy, like in Crossroads, you can suddenly do all this fun stuff. You're no longer doing this well controlled storyteller. You can, like, it's just, it can. It becomes much more brittle and bright and fragmented and extreme. But it's in the context of this ridiculous tiny little thing. You know, it's a middle class suburb and this is a typical problem people have. They're attracted to, they shouldn't be attracted to. And so there's nothing extreme, nothing outside the course of normal life in that it's how you approach it. How can I not let this resolve quickly? How can I drive it to ever more unbearable lengths?
- [40:00]
A
Well, one of the things that I'm intuiting here is that a lot of human life is kind of. It's boring, it's boring, it's familiar and it's cookie cutter familiar. People can kind of hide their psyche. But then if there's something really extreme going on, like to run with that analogy of man, I really want to sleep with the girl next door, or whatever it is. It's been four or five months, this isn't working. And now my sex drive is just killing me, you know, And I really want that to happen. Now you're gonna. The mask can no longer be there. Whatever was holding that back, whatever dam there was, the water's just going to shatter through it and something will be revealed. Is that right?
- [40:42]
B
Yeah.
- [40:42]
A
Okay.
- [40:43]
B
I mean, even before digital technology, most people led lives of quiet desperation, to quote Thoreau. And that was a. That was a. That was an age that was really well suited to the short story because, like, a person might have a whole life of quiet desperation, and there would be this one moment when things could have been different. And the story writer will say, well, take that little moment, please, and I'll make a story out of it.
- [41:17]
A
Sure.
- [41:19]
B
And the great ones can do that again and again and again. And it's just a little moment of a no account person's life. And yet for them, that was the most important person moment in their life. And you have. You have left the reader feeling like you know everything you need to know about that character in the space of 20 pages. And you know what the rest of their life is going to look like, because that was the moment things could have gone one way or another. But now we have digital technology and you're basically, you can be completely distracted 100% of your waking hours.
- [41:52]
A
Some of us are, Some of us are.
- [41:54]
B
And some of us, Some, others of us go to great lengths to avoid spending our lives that way. One of the things that increased my interest in writing about families is that even if your life is almost 100% mediated, you cannot avoid a certain amount of real time, real interaction with people in your family.
- [42:20]
A
Those are high stakes.
- [42:22]
B
No matter who you are, they're high stakes. And everyone, pretty much you can count on every reader having some experience of family, even if it wasn't a biological family, even if they had a very irregular childhood. Everyone knows what it's like to be in a fraternal or filial or parental relationship with someone. Although people can and do write interesting work about people whose entire lives are spent online, I'm not the person who can do that. And I think it's a rather limited array of options you have for that because it's essentially virtual and it's not. Well, maybe it's just a matter of taste. My job, not spending so much time online, is to try to put characters in precisely the kind of situation that they have dedicated their lives to avoiding.
- [43:29]
A
What allowed you to be so early to seeing the problems that were going to merge with technology? It seems like you were 15 and 20 years ahead on that. You were writing about this in the 90s.
- [43:46]
B
That is a good question, and no one has asked me that. So thank you. I appreciate it for the implicit compliment. So I don't have to sit here and say, I told you so, and you know what, I was talking about this stuff years ago, which is a very unattractive position for a writer.
- [44:04]
A
I was right about was these problems right now.
- [44:07]
B
Yeah, exactly. So I think I was well positioned for a couple of reasons. I was very political back then and I had a deep distrust and nameable and often named distrust of consumer capitalism and the large corporate interests that profited from it. I also was in a field that was, I mean, pretty early on, felt threatened by the digital world, which was what? Writing fiction.
- [44:45]
A
Oh, okay, Shocker.
- [44:49]
B
Well, and books generally. Yeah. So the specter already in the 90s was no one will read anymore. We could survive one screen, we could survive two screens, but the third screen, which was the computer screen, which came to be synonymous with the smartphone screen, reading, survived movies, survived tv, but it's not going to survive the third screen. We were wrong about that, as it turned out. But. But it did incline me to look critically at the promises. But frankly, I don't even feel like I can take credit for pointing out the ridiculousness of we're making the world a better place. And once we can screen each other's minds on the Internet, there will be no more war and there'll be more. You know, it's like people were literally saying this. They were saying this will be, this will usher in an unprecedented era of prosperity, equality, democracy will flourish because everyone will be able to have their voice heard. They were just, it was just like so patently idiotically wrong. And because of my deep, deep suspicion of large corporations with a consumerist model, it was not hard to make the connection between, to essentially say, this is not just stupid, this is evil shilling for something with monopolistic designs and it's profoundly anti humanist. So it was like the combination of the just total flagrant stupidity of it all with the sense that people were lying for a reason. And it was not a very pretty reason. And that then was succeeded by the whole making the world a better place era. It also helped that I had had this early involvement with the Viennese satirist, Carl Krauss.
- [46:51]
A
Yeah, tell me about him.
- [46:54]
B
I was accidentally a German major because I thought I needed it to be a scientist, but I wasn't a scientist, so whatever. And among the writers who I got to know well as a German literature major was this guy, Carl Krauss, a Vietnamese satirist who lived at the first, was active in the first third of the 20th century and he had a very fervent following. And he was this absolutely hardcore acid etched Satirist, acid edged. He was known as the great hater. Okay. And he could, he. And he was very smart and he was very funny, and he could just reduce any object of his satire to mincemeat. He was so good. And of course, this very angry and rather bright young man, I thought, well, he was kind of a hero to me. He's like, yeah, yeah. And his big thing was that there is an evil troika of powers, basically media, money and technology. And he had an extremely sophisticated critique of all of that. And he was, for example, looking at the role of Viennese newspapers in promoting war interests, in prolonging the First World War. And he was ruthlessly exposing the phony language, all of the. Just the lies, basically, these kind of beautiful lies that were being told to the public in order to support the profiteering war effort and to prolong a moribund empire and so forth. Anyway, it was all really preparation for what was coming in the 90s, which was this malign confluence of big money, big tech and big media. And. And so I was, I was kind of ready for it. He was writing about Viennese newspapers, but what he, what he was saying applies totally to Facebook. Yeah, it already applied to aol in the 90s. You could see it.
- [49:23]
A
So what do you think that we're missing about the nature of the good life? I mean, the very cynical take is none of these people believe it. It's just good for making money. So they come out with that narrative and they beat their hands on the table till everybody starts believing it, almost in a propagandist way. And then there's another way to say it, which is that's a very materialist worldview or something. And actually they're just completely missing the point about what it means to have a life well lived.
- [49:55]
B
In the same way that I'm glad that people are talking a little less about solving the problem of climate change. I'm glad that people like Mark Zuckerberg are talking less about what a wonderful thing they're doing for the world. Because what really bugged me even in the 90s was not the evil corporations. I mean, no friend of mine, but still, it was the lies. It was the ludicrous lies. And all I've ever really wanted is for people to be more honest to some extent, like Al Gore, when he was pushing for what was then called the Infobahn, pushing to have. For Internet service to every household in America and so forth, I think he was a little bit more honest about the fact that this is A really good way to transfer goods, to convey goods and services. This is really good for the economy. This is in line with a neoliberal concept of an efficient economy. There's a lot of truth in that. It's a great way to buy plane tickets and great way to get stuff delivered to your door overnight and so forth. Ebay and ebay. I do like eBay myself.
- [51:22]
A
EBay rocks.
- [51:23]
B
EBay rocks.
- [51:24]
A
EBay rock 30 years ago, still rocks now.
- [51:27]
B
I'm a fan of ebay. I would, you know, I'm a fan of Wikipedia, but there are lots of things online that I'm a fan of. And people like in Washington and Wall street saw this is actually very good. This has to happen. It's inevitable. And let's try to regulate it. And of course, if you're on Wall street, let's try to profit from it. And there was a. Basically a honest talk about what the Internet was. It's for making money. If there have been more honest talk like that, we might not have gotten all the power concentrated in five companies. Exactly. I mean, I credit Silicon Valley, the TV show, in significant part for laughing, making the world a better place out of existence. People were still literally saying that in college commencement speeches and all that, you know, up until just around the time of the second season of Silicon Valley, people don't say that anymore. And Zuckerberg doesn't even try to pretend to be a good guy. Musk doesn't even try to pretend to be a good guy. These are, these are basically.
- [52:37]
A
They're bad actors in writing. What do you make of the trope of the fiction writer who doesn't have their life together? Everything's in shambles, but it makes for great art versus the Gustav Flaubert quote. You must be regular and orderly in your life so you can be violent and original in your work.
- [52:58]
B
Yeah, I'm a little bit more of the latter camp. There are different, all different kinds of writers. I mean, there's Hemingway, he, if you'd made him stay home, he said, here you are, Oak park, got a job like at the post office, like Faulkner did, and maybe you can join the country club. He would have had nothing to write about. Whereas Faulkner, I'm going to go get myself some experience. I'm going to be a flaneur in New Orleans. That stuff's crap. He went home, stayed home, and became by far the better writer. But nonetheless, Hemingway, not inconsiderable. There he is out in the world. He needed to have experiences. So if somebody needs to, like, blow up their life, destroy their safe and happy life. I'm not going to argue that with that. It can work. I. I think more good work has been done by people who stay at home. I'm not, I'm not a Burroughs fan. I'm not particularly a Bukowski fan. I'm definitely not a Kerouac fan. I'm naming all male writers for some reason. But when you think of people deliberately destroying their lives, so many more, so many more, so many more dudes come to mind. It's like women have people, they need to. Like the dudes. Yeah, they. So, yeah, we're sitting in my office, which is normally dark. This is the brightest it has ever been and probably ever will be and is very quiet. And that's how I like to work.
- [54:50]
A
Well, you've done some crazy experimentation, huh? So you've had the earplugs with noise canceling, headphones over them and pink noise. You've tried writing with. What is it, an eye mask?
- [55:01]
B
Oh, well, yeah, there was a little period when I was quitting cigarettes. I was so freaking out and distracted. I even just like seeing anything was distracting. So I blindfolded myself. That was perhaps talked about more than it was actually done.
- [55:23]
A
Okay, okay.
- [55:24]
B
But no, I still write with earplugs. I spend most of my existence in earplugs.
- [55:33]
A
Oh, really?
- [55:33]
B
Well, you know, like six hours in the morning and then another eight hours at night.
- [55:39]
A
Oh, eight hours of sleep.
- [55:40]
B
Yeah, yeah. Sleep with earplugs. I work in earplugs.
- [55:44]
A
What's your average Tuesday like?
- [55:47]
B
Average Tuesday? Well, there are two kinds. There's the average Tuesday when I'm actually working, and then I will be up early. I'll be up at 6:30, sometimes earlier. It's really nice to walk into the office when it's still almost dark outside. Then lately, when I've been working, I will spend an hour avoiding everything. Then I'll spend four hours rewriting 200 words from the day before and then in a burst in the last 20 minutes, write another page and then walk away. It's not a very efficient way of working. I used to write five pages in a day. Sometimes I would write eight pages in a day. I don't do that anymore. I'm lucky to get one page out and it's usually at the end. And it's usually after having brought the previous day's work up to such a polish that I feel like, oh, yeah, okay, yeah, I'm a writer. And then I've just sat with it. And also. But Also, I've brought the page up to the point where it's. You could publish that page. It's pretty. It's convincingly finished, and so I don't have to, you know, I can then write another page knowing, well, something really solid. There's a. There's a, you know, iron bridge up to that point, and yes, then there's nothing. But I kind of know what direction the bridge is pointing, and I. There's some girders sticking out, and I can just add on to it a little bit. So that's what a writing day is like.
- [57:27]
A
So if you're on page 267 of a novel. Oh, it sounds like the first 266 pages are pretty dialed in.
- [57:36]
B
Yeah.
- [57:37]
A
And then how far forward are you looking? Is it like a foggy California morning where you can only see 50ft ahead of you and, oh, my goodness, I got to drive slowly or you kind of have a sense of the terrain.
- [57:52]
B
I have some sense of where I'm going. I just feel it's going to be interesting to see how I'm going to get there. The point is just to keep making pages that. Where I'm proud of every sentence and someone's going to have a good time reading it and is not even going to notice those sentences because they're having a good time one at a time. Finding that sentence and the sentence in each case might take six months to find. But once I get it, I got it. I got the. I got the tone. The tone is really, really, really important.
- [58:30]
A
Tell me about tone.
- [58:32]
B
Tone. Well, you know, it's like, is it ironic? Is it comic? Is it this?
- [58:36]
A
The tone of the book or the.
- [58:36]
B
Tone of the character? Yeah, tone of the book. Tone of the book, but also tone of the character. Are you hearing it in the sentences, or does. Do the sentences read straight and serious and earnest and. Or is there a little spin to it? Is it. Might you be invited to laugh here?
- [58:55]
A
You know, I took a hip hop class in high school.
- [58:57]
B
Yeah.
- [58:58]
A
And there were a few guys who would freestyle, really good freestylers. And you would watch them just fumble and fumble and fumble, like they're just kind of doing a crappy job. And you're like, I thought you're supposed to be good. And all of a sudden they'd find a. A hook or a beat.
- [59:14]
B
Yeah.
- [59:15]
A
And they would just take off like an F18. And it was just one little unlock. And it's a curious thing about the mind that sometimes it. It takes something very small to enlighten to ignite something very large.
- [59:30]
B
Yeah. And I, and I would say it's above all, tone.
- [59:34]
A
Above all, it's tone.
- [59:35]
B
Yeah, it's, it's. You're looking for the tone.
- [59:38]
A
Okay, well, let's finish here. Let's talk about birds. You love birds and they have become a real fascination for you. And I do not have the first clue about birds. And so I'm, I'm just coming here saying, hey, open my eyes to the beauty and wonders of birds.
- [59:59]
B
Well, really the best way to do that is to go out and look at birds. I'm on record as saying merely describing the beauty of nature will not get the job done. Because I find that kind of writing personally almost always tedious, boring. It better have interesting facts or interesting people. The bird I prize, among all others, is considered by many, especially by serious birdwatchers, to be one of the ugliest birds in America. Drab, boring, dull, gray, brown, medium sized bird. And I think it is the most beautiful bird in the world. Its name is the California toey. If you think that is an ugly bird, it is because you have not looked. They're kind of friendly. They're not, they're not too shy. They'll skitter away. They're all, they're always, they're always on the ground. Occasionally they'll sing from a tree, but they're almost always on the ground or near the ground. And you know, you step outside, they'll kind of melt away a little bit, but they won't disappear entirely. Here's the thing. If you see one, wait, you won't have to wait long because there'll be another one within 20ft. Only one. They mate for life. They mate for life. And those couples, if they're 30ft apart, they feel a little uncomfortable. They, they like to be close to each other all times and all day long, if you follow them around, you hear one go tick. The other one will say tick. Just saying, you there? Yeah, I'm here. You there? I'm here. They do that all day long, except when they're actually getting ready to breed. Which point they hop up in a tree and they sing duets. And you know, a Scarlet McCaw, people will think, well, there is a beautiful bird. Oh my God. Have you ever heard of scarlet macaw? Makes you want to cover your ears. Oh my God, it's, it's so loud. And so is like some animal being slaughtered next door. It's terrible.
- [62:28]
A
Murder row.
- [62:29]
B
Yeah. And you know, they're, they're lovely, but it's sort of like, really, you know, are we six year olds where you take the red crayon and the yellow crayon and the blue crayon and that's beauty. It's like, come on. No, look carefully at a towie and oh, what a shape. Like, I can see one a quarter mile away, just fly across the road. I know it immediately. It's got a very distinctive shape. They are a big sparrow. Big, like this big, this big sparrow. And they spend their days scratching around. They like to hop back and forth, stirring things up in the leaves on the ground. And I could go on, but basically I have a natural taste for that kind of beauty. I don't want to read the story about the lost nuclear launch codes. I'd rather read a story about some fucked up person going through something in some Midwestern city or something. And there are some, you know, brilliant genre writers, but generally I, I like a more subtle kind of beauty. And the more you look at the birds around you, the more you see these, these beauties of behavior, beauties of subtle plumage. If you get good binoculars and look careful, there's no bird that isn't amazing when you look carefully at it. And it's nature there every day outside your window saying, hey, we're still here, we're still here. And that feels good too.
- [64:22]
A
Jonathan Franzen, thank you very much.