← How I Write
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- [00:00]
A
I challenge you to walk through an airport without seeing one of Mitch Albom's books on the shelves. It's just not going to happen. He's everywhere. He is famous for writing the five people you meet in heaven. And then there's Tuesdays with Maury, which I think at one point was the best selling memoir of all time. He's written 14 books. He sold more than 40 million copies. He's been writing for more than 45 years. And so I said, mitch, come on the show and let's just talk about how you go about the craft. How do you build characters? How do you hook people in at the beginning? And we started with the granddaddy of them all. How do you tell a great story? Well, Mitch, I want to start with the idea of serving the story. Serving the story above everything else.
- [00:42]
B
Serving the story. Well, first of all, you have to decide whether it's in novel writing, nonfiction, or even journalism. I think, what's the one big idea that you're trying to get across and make sure that you don't ever sail too far away from that. You get lost in the weeds or there's a great anecdote you want to add or whatever. You've always got to be tethered to that. Now, it doesn't mean you can't take a deviation, doesn't mean you can't say, even in writing, let me say something about this, or let me tell you a story about this. But you're always hanging on to that cord. I liken it to sort of like those space movies where they go outside the spaceship. But you know, that cord is everything. And as long as they're tethered to the cord, it doesn't matter that they're going at a gazillion miles an hour. It doesn't matter. There's asteroids, whatever. But the minute they let go of that cord, they're never getting back. And so I think that that's the thing that I've tried to do is keep. You can call it story, you can call it theme, a lot of words for it. But I always try to remember what I'm serving in whatever piece I write. One of the ways you do that in journalism, when you write a column, for example, is your first paragraph and your last paragraph tend to work together, and so you kind of know you're sailing towards that last paragraph. With novel writing, I find that I like to know the endings of my books before I start them. I don't have to know the middles, and sometimes I Even change the beginnings. But I kind of want to know what my North Star is that I'm sailing towards. So there are different ways that you do it, but I find that. That to be really important and that readers appreciate it. Because I think the worst thing you want to hear as a writer is, I tried to read it, but I got lost. Oh, yeah, yeah, that happens.
- [02:58]
A
Yeah. And there's such impatience in people, you know, I know you got started with television, and that's kind of where that understanding of kind of catch their attention quickly. Even at the dinner table. Growing up, you know, you gotta tell the story fast. You gotta hook them quickly, you know.
- [03:15]
B
Yeah. Well, I really did learn my storytelling at the dinner table. You know, I get asked a lot. You know, when did you become a writer? Did you decide you wanted to be a writer? And I wasn't one of those people who wanted to be a writer when he was a kid. I wanted to be a cartoonist. And maybe, you know, writing comic books is an idea of writing. But then I became a musician, and that, you know, again, I always say, well, music and writing are fairly closely connected, more than people realize, but still not writing, writing. And I only became a writer in my 20s, and I'd never written anything before that. But I'd always been a good storyteller. And, you know, I was a kid at camp who they would pick to tell the ghost story, you know, oh, Mitch tells it. Yeah, tell the story. And the way that I learned that was at the dinner table. Because my family had holiday celebrations, and we had a pretty extended family, second generation. So some of my older uncles and aunts were immigrants or first generation. And I would listen to them after dinner. They would all sit around the table. All the kids would scatter. But I would sit at the table. For some reason, I was just interested in watching them tell stories. And I would notice there was a distinct difference between my aunts and my uncles. My aunts would always get caught on the details. So they do like, was it 1945? Well, no, maybe it was 46. When was. When was Manny born? Was he born in 46 or was it 45? And, you know, the uncles would get impatient. They go, so who cares?
- [04:55]
A
Get to the point, huh?
- [04:56]
B
Yeah. And then the uncles would tell the war stories, and my Uncle Eddie in particular. So there we were, see, we were coming over the hill, and it was dark, and we heard the shots. And then I turned to the guy next to me, I said, they're shooting at us. And I'm saying, that's how you, you tell a story. And somehow through osmosis, that kind of found its way into me. And I've always sort of known when I'm losing somebody and know when I have to kind of bring it back. And interestingly, working with children, which I do a lot because I operate an orphanage, holding a child's attention when you tell a story, they got no patience. Great exercise for being a writer because you see it on their eyes like when they're starting to fade and you realize, get back to it, get back to it, get back to the thing or you got to throw in a, an exciting line or you have to have some dialogue or something like that. And I find that a lot of that mentality that I have to do when I have a three year old now, you know, to kind of keep her interest is the same thing on a more mature level that I have to do as a writer.
- [05:56]
A
Yeah, I heard something recently, I'm curious to hear your take on that. The key to storytelling is to tell the slow parts fast and the fast part slow.
- [06:07]
B
Yeah, I like that. Or as my mother said to me once when she read my book, she said, I like your writing, Michie. And so she called me because you don't have any of those long pages with all the details in it that I don't ever like to read. When I read books, I said, okay. I think she was talking about the Tom Clancy like this is how a submarine works kind of thing. And you know, there'd be three straight pages of how submarine widgets fit together and all that. And that I think is the slow parts fast that you want to get through or avoid the slow parts altogether and just cut them. Interestingly, my biggest problem as a young writer, a really young writer, was that if I got criticized by editors or even in school when I was, was that I was taking too long to make my points or that they would say this is awkward is too long. Afraid the sentence is awkward. And so I became very sens to that criticism and I began to whittle at my sentences and whittle and whittle and whittle. And now I have probably gone the other way so that my books are very short and they're very terse. You know, if anything, I mean my books are literally small. You know, they're like pint sized books. If they were regular length size books, they would probably only be in the 200 page range at a 250, 20, 30 page range. And that's compensation for having taken too long on the slow parts, as you call it, when I was very young. And now I probably. If I make any mistake, I probably do it the other way. You know, I probably get through stuff too quickly.
- [07:49]
A
So tell me about Twice, as you were thinking about the ending, as you're writing the book without giving it away, how are you thinking about working towards that ending?
- [08:00]
B
Well, so for me, I pick a theme, and then I decide to create a story around it.
- [08:06]
A
And then that theme is Twice.
- [08:08]
B
Yeah. Well, no, the theme was that the grass is always greener, particularly when it comes to love. And that's what I wanted to write about. All my books. I start with a theme, and then I create the story around the theme, not the other way around. I don't start with characters. I don't start with plots. I start with a theme that I want to cover. And it's always interesting to me to read about myself when, you know, some comments or people say, oh, he wrote that book because of this, or he did that. And often they're wrong. I understand why they're wrong. But like, the five people you meet in Heaven as a perfect example is my first novel. And I guess because I wrote Tuesdays with Maury before it, a lot of people just assumed I was interested in heaven and what happens when you die and all that. And that really wasn't it at all. I wanted to write a book about people who don't think they matter and that everybody matters. It was a theme that I knew was universal. I knew I had something to say about it. I really do believe there's no such thing as a nobody. You know, that everybody touches somebody and touches somebody, and that was the theme. Heaven came into it because that was kind of a cool way to tell the story. Like, okay, let's have a guy go to heaven and meet five people from his life, and he finds out the influence that he had on them, and he didn't even know it. And therefore he finds out that his life had meaning. The theme I was trying to serve was about people who think they don't matter. And I created the story around it. And so it wasn't about heaven, and it wasn't about five people. It wasn't about war, it wasn't about anything. Those are the things that I. Those are the tools that I used to get to the theme. So with Twice, my newest book, the theme was how we always think that life would be better if we got a chance to do it over again. And we frequently think about that, whether we want to admit it or not in our relationships and even in our love relationships. You know, there was this girl in high school, you know, if I had only gone out with her more than once, or there was that fleeting moment I had with that stranger on that trip to Europe. And, you know, I know, man, you.
- [10:17]
A
Don'T know the stupid stuff I said to girls in high school. I think I'd be better if I.
- [10:20]
B
Got to go back and do it again. Well, maybe not you, but other people. So I wanted to write something that was about that theme. You know, I try to find themes that are kind of universal. So then I came up with a story about a guy who has the magical ability to do everything in his life twice. He can go back and undo something and do it again, but he has to live with the consequences of the second try. And that was critical to the story because the point that I wanted to make and the North Star that I wanted to sail towards in this book was that there's a price to pay if you don't learn a lesson from the mistakes that you make. We think the price we pay is the mistake we make, but there's also a price to pay if you don't make a mistake. And if you're allowed to keep correcting them, you don't learn what you're supposed to learn. And so that's what. The grass is always greener. You know, that's the flip side of it is, you know, if you kept trying greener grass, you'd never really learn to appreciate or how to make do with what you had. And so I created a whole story based on that, and I sailed towards that ending because I knew that my character was going to make that mistake. This guy who had the ability to do everything in his life twice, was going to make a mistake with love, and then he finds out that it doesn't work with love. That. With love, if someone loves you deeply and truly and you decide to walk away from it to try somebody else, that person can never love you again. That way they'll be in the world. You can know them, but they just won't have that feeling anymore. And I knew that he was going to make that mistake. And so that was where I sailed towards. And I had that in mind from page one.
- [12:21]
A
That's wonderful. So that kind of premise, for lack of a better word, came out of the theme before it.
- [12:27]
B
That's right.
- [12:28]
A
Cool, man. You got me thinking about cool premises now. Like, you got me thinking about Flatland 2D instead of 3D. Got me thinking about Benjamin Button, Born old, dies young. What makes for a good premise?
- [12:42]
B
It depends on who you're trying to reach, I guess. I mean, for me, I want the best thing that somebody can say when they read one of my books from me isn't, man, that guy's an artist with the written word. I'm really not after that. There are way better artists than me, and I'm not even sure I would know what to do with it if I. If somebody said that. What I want people to say is I couldn't stop thinking about that after I finished it. It made me think about my own life, not necessarily my characters or anything. It made me think about my own life. Then you've done something with your literature. You've moved people. And, you know, I was very blessed early in my writing, relatively early in my writing career, kind of midway through, to write a book called Tuesdays With Maury that was not supposed to be any kind of big book, and it wasn't supposed to do anything other than pay medical bills for my old college professor. But for whatever reason, the things that he had to say resonated with the readers. And I have been blessed countless times to hear people say to me, that book affected my life. It made me go out and do this. It made me reunite with a lost loved one. It made me. I changed my job, you know, because I realized my path was going differently. It helped me deal with a terminal illness. It helped me deal with my mother's terminal illness. I've seen what the written word can do in terms of making people think and change their life, and it becomes a very fulfilling thing to be able to aspire to. And ever since, I've tried to write books, recognizing I was never going to do another book like Tuesdays With Maury. He was such a unique individual. But if each one of my books can make you think about one theme, the way that Tuesdays with Maury makes you think about a lot of themes, then I've done something and that's what I'm after. And so when you say what makes a good theme, for me, it's will people think about it after they're done reading?
- [14:55]
A
Yeah. With Tuesdays with Maury, I was struck by the idea of actually removing the emotion from it. Like, intuitively, I'd say, ah, you tried to make that book as emotional as you possibly could. It's a deep story. It's about death, it's about grief, it's about terminal illness, man. Let's add the emotion. Let's make it heavy.
- [15:15]
B
Yeah.
- [15:15]
A
And actually you kind of did the opposite, huh?
- [15:18]
B
Yeah, I did. And that's a really astute observation because although the answer may not be what you think, I didn't have the confidence to do what you suggested that I could do. When I sat down to write Tuesdays with Maury, I remember going out and getting a bunch of books about death that people had written, accounts of people dying, whatever, the best ones, the ones that were recommended, you know, and I started reading them and I said, I can't do this. They're way better than me. They're. I mean, look at the. Look at the poetry that they bring to it, you know, and look at the emotion that they. In their words. What a turn of a phrase. And I don't even have that. And I recognized, I guess intuitively at 37, as a sports writer that to try to do that would have been silly, it would have failed, and it would have looked like exactly that. A cheap attempt to try to write flowery phrases about death. When the truth was, as a writer, I wasn't developed enough to understand that. And as a human being, I was only beginning my journey to understand that. I mean, I had gone through his dying and we had done that whole last class together, and I was definitely a little more developed than I had been when I first went to go see him. But I wasn't like I am now, where I could write about the subject. Tuesday Memorial would come out much differently now if I were writing it almost 30 years later, because I'm a lot closer to Maury's age than now than I was my old age. So I decided I'm going to go the opposite way. I'm just going to write this as simply as possible. Just write what happened. There doesn't need to be more. Let Maury carry the story. If you have something to say, say it in one sentence. You know, if you've got a point of view or a take on it, say it in this one sentence or the last line of the, of the chapter and then move on. And there's a funny kind of adjunct to that. The contract for the book was a 320 page book they give. You know, when you sign a contract, they tell you approximately how many words or how many pages they want it to be. And it said 320 pages or something. And I was typing and so I just typed on a. On a. You know, I just triple spaced it.
- [17:53]
A
Sounds like a school assignment.
- [17:55]
B
That's the way I looked at it.
- [17:56]
A
I mean.
- [17:56]
B
I mean, I'd only Written two books before, and they were sports books, and they didn't care how long they were, you know, and they were really reportage books. And so I just wrote it, and I got to, like, 300 pages. And I turned it in, and they. They called me about 10 days later, and they said, we have a problem. I said, what's the problem? They said, well, we paginated this, you know, we put this into the computer system, and this is, like, only going to be 160 pages long. And I said, oh, well, that's all I got, you know, I mean, I don't want to add to it. I don't have anything. I said what I want to say. And they went off and they thought about it for a while, and they said, all right, we've decided we're going to make it a small book. That way it won't look like a comic book, you know, printed, really. And that's why Tuesdays With Maury is as small as it is. And that's why. And then when Tuesdays with Maury became the surprise success, now all my books are that size, no matter how long they are. And it was really just because I was trying to write as simply and as bare to the bone as I could. I once heard somebody said something good about Joan Didion's writing, who I really admired as a journalist. They said, she writes so tightly, it cuts the flesh. And I decided that when I realized I could not write flowery, I decided, okay, I'm going to write tight and try to see if I can create something that's good because it just says what needs to be said and intuitive. With Morey, I mean, Maury did the heavy lifting, and so that's why that book came out the way it did.
- [19:37]
A
Do you feel like your first drafts are pretty tight, or do you feel like it requires editing, revision? I gotta scrap that. Take the big old red pen in order to tighten it up.
- [19:49]
B
Well, that's evolved, too. So with Tuesdays With Maury, I wrote the beginning probably 20 times. And I kept turning in and like, no, I'll give you another one. No, I'll give you another one. No, I'll give you another one. And finally they said to me, why do you. Why are you, like, torturing yourself over these 10 pages here? And I said, well, because, you know, if they actually. It wasn't even 10, it was like the first page, first two pages. And I said, well, if I don't get them on the first page, they're not going to read past it. And I remember my editor, Bill Thomas, said to me, you're thinking like a sports writer writing a sports column. They're not reading a newspaper. If they pick up a book, they're going to give you a few pages. They're not going to like read the first paragraph and say, this is not for me. You know, they'll have spent money on it. They'll, they'll give you a little bit. Even if they're standing in a bookstore, they'll read a couple of pages. And, and that was good advice because it relaxed me a little bit. I tried so hard to make the first page perfect, you know, and so then I, I became sort of like, okay, I just have to get them in the first 10 pages. I don't have to get them in the first page. So I loosened up a little bit about that. But I still write. I self edit all the time. I constantly, I always say, by the time I'm done with my book, if you catch me right when I just finished a book, if you start me, I can probably recite it. You know, I don't even need to look at it because I have reread it that many times that I can tell you what comes next and the next sentence after the next and next sentence. So I do a lot of that combing and raking before I ever let an editor see it because I really don't want it coming back with like, you don't need this, you don't need this, you don't need this.
- [21:40]
A
It hurts.
- [21:41]
B
It hurts to have, you know, you're being told you're too fat, you know, and I'd rather like big old Mitch over there. Yeah, I'd rather go out and work out and lose the weight before I show up. I think it's too long. Yeah, I want to come in skinny. So I do self edit a lot. And then after I turn in a draft, I edit even more. And after the second draft, I edit more. And I am almost always taking out. And once in a blue moon, I'll throw in an additional line. But almost all, you know, the second draft, third draft, fourth draft. Right. Until the publisher is literally pulling it out of my hands and saying, you do understand that as of 5 o', clock, you can't touch this anymore because it's going to the publisher. Right? Just one more. Just one more edit.
- [22:32]
A
502.
- [22:32]
B
Yeah, that's what I'm like.
- [22:35]
A
You hit your deadlines.
- [22:37]
B
Well, I've learned deadlines have become really part of my bloodstream. You know, I Have as a sports writer, which I still do, you know, for the Detroit Free Press, even though it's more of like of an emeritus kind of thing now. But, but back in the day when I was really at it. So I write for the Detroit Free Press. We're in the Eastern time zone. But Michigan, the state that I live in, is a very, very big state. And our printing presses, some of them are way up north in the Upper Peninsula and some are south. So consequently, we had some of the earliest deadlines in America for, for nighttime writing. Because in order to get the paper delivered, printed, and taken up to some of these places, you've got to turn it into Mackinac island, because it's five, six, seven hours away. So, yeah, Mackinac island and even more north. So I got used to having to write for as a sports writer. Now. Now think about this. Most games back then started at like 7 o' clock at night, 7:30. And they would end, you know, maybe game started at 8 and it would end at 10:30. My first deadline was 8, so the game hasn't even barely started yet. I had a deadline. My second deadline was like 9:45, which maybe, maybe, maybe the game might just be coming to some conclusion. Third one was like 11 or 11:30. The fourth one was like 1am So I was constantly writing and rewriting and rewriting. And there was a championship game between the Detroit Pistons and the Portland Trailblazers out in the West Coast. And they had extended the deadlines to. They said you have to send it when the buzzer sounds. That's all you've got to press the button. That's all we can do to try to make the paper. And the game changed leads in the. For the last three, four minutes. And I literally had. And this was a very common thing. I had a winning column and a losing column going at the same time. Now they were up three games to one. So if they had lost, it would have just meant it's 3, 2. Not that really big a thing. You know, you got to come back and play another game. If they had won, they win the NBA Championship, big difference in tone. And then what's going to, you know, what you want to say, whatever. And I am literally going back and forth with every basket. Every time the Pistons take a lead or come with anybody, Pistons win and then, and then switch and switch the screen, go over. Pistons lose. This is what happens. And with 0.07 seconds left on the clock, Vinnie Johnson hit the shot that won the game. And I had to Write something in that little split seconds, some semblance of something. And then as I press the button, the fans jumped over my back to storm the court and everything, because it's just pandemonium. When it was over and you realize as you're sending this thing off, which is this garbled jumble of running and all the rest of it, that they're. Not only did you just send in something that you're not particularly probably proud of, but they're going to make a poster out of it and sell it so that kids everywhere will have. Have it on their wall and they'll look up and they'll say, boy, that album guy really can't write very well. Look at that. So I had to live with those kind of deadlines, and that was a big part of my life for many years. So I'm quite used to deadlines. I don't miss them. My book editor's always like, God, you actually turn stuff in on the day that it's supposed to be turned in. I go, well, doesn't everybody do that? Oh, God, no. Novelists are notorious for waiting. Being six months late or a year late. I said, you got the wrong guy.
- [26:38]
A
Well, part of that must be. Is you're pretty regimented about your process. Three hours, get up in the morning, don't wait for the inspiration to strike so that the inspiration comes kind of. Guy.
- [26:50]
B
Yeah, I think some of that comes from a journalism background, too. And you have to write every day, whether you feel like it or not, or you have to go cover that game whether you feel like it or not. You have to spin some story out of something, something that might not be that interesting a game. So, you know, I was well trained in that. And then I, you know, I learned from some really good writers. I play in a band of writers.
- [27:18]
A
Like a music band?
- [27:19]
B
Yeah, music band.
- [27:19]
A
And everyone's a writer.
- [27:20]
B
Yeah, yeah. It's called the Rock Bottom Remainders. They've been around for. We've been playing for 30 years already, and Stephen King and Amy Tan, Dave Barry, Scott Turow, Ridley Pearson, James McBride, Frank McCourt was in it. Many, many writers have come and gone through as guests, but that's kind of the core. And, you know, I'll talk to them sometimes about how they do it. And we don't spend a lot of time talking about writing, to be honest with you. Mostly talk about, like, what chord we got wrong or. But when we do talk about writing, what I've observed is everybody kind of approaches it like a job. There was only one guy. Greg Isles, who's a wonderful guy, just passed away. He would like, it would hit him at two in the morning and he'd get up with, you know, from 2 o' clock in the morning till 11 in the morning and he'd, you know, don't bother me, I'm on a roll, and that kind of thing. But pretty much everybody else was like, get up, go to the office, open a vein, let it bleed, as Red Smith said, and then come back the next day and do it. So I learned that you have to treat it like a job. I learned that you should recognize how big your gas tank is and pretty much don't try to outrun your gas tank. For me, as you mentioned, it's about three hours. I get about three hours of writing a day. I start first thing in the morning. I deliberately don't listen. I get up and maybe I'll grab something to drink, cup of coffee or something, and then go right down to the screen and start writing. No music, no news, no emails, no Internet, nothing that could start to stain the, the weight of my imagination. And I just do those first three hours without taking any phone calls or out doing anything else. It starts usually like 7 o' clock or whatever. And by 10 I'm done. You know, like now I could sit there and make every, everybody feel good about my sitting there until 5 o', clock, but I won't get anything more. So I've learned, you know, all right, that's about all I'm going to get. But try to leave on a positive note. Try to leave the room while you're in the middle of a good sentence or a good paragraph.
- [29:49]
A
Don't stop. Stuck.
- [29:51]
B
Yeah. Force yourself to stop in the middle of a sentence that you really want to finish. And then when you wake up the next morning, you're excited to get back down and go do it. Whereas if you stop when you're stuck, or you stop when things aren't going well, you get up in the morning and your first thought is that again, I'm going back to that crap. So, yeah, that's a little trick that I use. But yeah, and then I do it pretty much every day, especially when I'm working on a book. Seven days a week is normal for me.
- [30:24]
A
You know, we're talking about stories. And many years ago you did an interview. You're talking about a story about the Kennedy assassination and how most people covered the story in one way. But there was one guy, Jean May Breslin went to the grave digging Guy.
- [30:40]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was. You know, when I talk to people about journalism and I talk to them particularly about column writing, I always say that, you know, the ones that people are going to remember are often the ones that are away from the main action. And if you can somehow tell the story through that, you're going to create a memorable. A memorable column or piece of journalism. So the one that you're referring to was Jimmy Breslin, who at the time, I guess, was writing for the Daily News. I don't know. And when JFK was killed, now everybody in the country who had a column was writing about what it meant to America, and they were writing all these declarative sentences and paragraphs about this is a turning point in America or who are we? Or blah, blah, blah, these grandiose thoughts. He went to the cemetery and found the guy who was digging the grave for John F. Kennedy. And the guy was very meticulous. And he was like, it has to be just right. This is for the President, you know, and he just talked about the small details of the sod or the hole that he was digging or whatever. And through this one guy, you captured everything that all those other people were trying to write. You captured the grief, the soul of the nation, what it meant to everybody. But you did it through a guy whose sole job it was, was to prepare the hole that Kennedy's body was going to go in. And that's a great way to tell that story differently than everybody else did.
- [32:16]
A
You got me thinking a lot about perspective, point of view. So one of the most embarrassing moments, like, if I were to look back at my life, like, at what point did I feel the most shame was freshman year of college. So I was. Ran the local news sports division. And so it was, you know, beginning of the football season, and I'm up in the. In the box, and Elon, where I went to school, the home team scored a touchdown. I was like, yeah. And all the reporters like, shh.
- [32:51]
B
Yeah, shh. You're not cheering in the press box.
- [32:53]
A
I didn't know this exactly. No cheering in the press box. And I was like, oh, my goodness. And all this is to say that from that moment, it's obvious to me that there is a kind of no cheering in the press box kind of mentality in a bunch of sports journalism. But then I think back at two sports writers that I like. I think of Bill Simmons, Arnold Red Sox fan. And then I think my favorite piece of sports journalism of all time is David Foster Wallace, Federer's religious Experience where he's just talking about the art, the beauty, the wonder, the magic of watching that guy hit a tennis ball. And it's what I'm thinking about here is counter positioning. What is the normal thing, you know, you're talking about who is the different kind of person that you focus on? But I think a lot of sports journalism recently, a lot of the growth there, I say, has come from people saying, you know what? No, I'm a fan of this team, I'm a fan of this sport, and I'm going to let my radiant enthusiasm come through the words.
- [33:55]
B
Well, the reason there's no cheering in the press box is, was intended to just sort of create a working environment for journalists to focus. It became though, kind of a mantra of like almost an attitude. Don't cheer for the home team. I always thought the that was silly and I always thought that sportswriters who complained about their jobs were basically committing suicide. I always, for whatever reason, I always recognized early on and never made the mistake of complaining about my job, that I had a job that everyone who was reading me wanted. To them getting to go into the locker room wasn't about scrums and getting stuck around a guy who you can't hear or getting cursed at by an 18 year old or the smell or getting run over by camera people or all the stuff that happens in there. It was, wow, I get to be amongst my heroes. You get to be amongst my heroes. You know, you have a job that I want. Wow. You get to go sit in a press play, you get tickets to every single game. You know, you don't have to buy them, you don't have to sit out in the cheap seat.
- [35:08]
A
You ever been to a champagne popping ceremony?
- [35:10]
B
Oh my God, yeah. Been him. I've been soaked by him. And by the way, it's not fun.
- [35:15]
A
It's not fun.
- [35:16]
B
Champagne burns. Yeah, it's not fun. And I've had champagne dumped on me and I've had a bucket of ice dumped on me by an angry pitcher. So I've been at both ends of that spectrum. But I know not to complain about the position because it is a fantasy for a lot of people. And no cheering, the press box shouldn't mean no enthusiasm for the home team. You know, being dispassionate about sports doesn't make sense because why are you even playing them? Unless there's passion, it's just a game. Otherwise, you know, if it doesn't mean something, you know, you aren't invested in it or you know, means Something to you to root for your home team or whatever, then who cares? It's a ball getting kicked around from place to place or being hit with a bat. So I always knew that the passion belonged there. And I never worried about being a homer or anything like that. I just, you know, I tried to write what was honest, but if it was honest that everyone in town was excited about it, you know, then that's what you wrote. And I was very blessed that I worked in Detroit. And Detroit is not a cynical place like New York or Philadelphia or Boston.
- [36:29]
A
Burns with passion, that place.
- [36:31]
B
Yeah, it's a great sports town and they love their team. They don't mind loving their team. And they're not going to boost Santa Claus like they do in Philadelphia, you know, or, you know, and you don't make your mark, you know, like the well known sports journalists in the history of Detroit didn't cut their teeth by being mean to the teams. They cut their teeth actually by kind of leading the cheers for the team. So I was lucky. I worked in a town like that and still do, and I much prefer it. It's hard to be cynical all the time. It's hard to be angry all the time. It takes a lot of energy to find the ugliness in what you're watching. I'd much rather find the beauty and the joy. And when it was good for, you know, our city was down. For so long, so much of my career, Detroit has been in the crapper, you know, and so sports for us was, was, you know, a chance to have some happy moments and once in a while to get some national respect, you know. So I've always been a little defensive about Detroit and happy to lead, you know, kind of the cheers when we had something to cheer about, you know, when the Red Wings were winning and when the Pistons were winning.
- [37:49]
A
And now the Lions, baby.
- [37:51]
B
Now the Lions. Now the Lions.
- [37:54]
A
Here they come.
- [37:54]
B
Yeah.
- [37:55]
A
Tell me this. How do you think about characters? You're developing a character. What are the things that you're focused on?
- [38:04]
B
Well, I think the answer to that is first you need to specify, are you talking about the main character? Yeah, ancillary characters. So my main character has to go through some kind of transformation or it's not interesting. There has to be a difference in him at the beginning versus the end, or her or whoever it is. So then it's like, well, okay, where are we going to start and where are we going to get to? So in the five people you meet in heaven, I started with a guy who's an 83 year old maintenance worker at an amusement park who thinks he's done nothing with his life and he's a nobody and he's never been anywhere and he's just waiting to die. And he does die that day, trying to save a little girl from an accident and from a falling cart that was about to crush her. And he goes to push her out of the way and he feels her little hands in his hands. And then everything goes black. And he wakes up in heaven and he finds out that the first stage of heaven is you meet five people from your life, some of whom you might know well, some of whom might be total strangers, but each one tells you about something that you did that changed them forever or changed you forever. So now I know. Okay, I got him at the beginning. I spent a lot of time in the first chapter just setting up little lonely moments. He pulls a string out of a fishing hole that they have and cut in the bottom of the boardwalk and there's nothing on it. And he says there's never anything on it. You know, he goes outside and falls asleep with the sound of seagulls going overhead, you know, kind of a lonely sort of moment. He. He hears a song that his wife used to dance to and he remembers her. And now he's. And then he wakes up and he realizes he has a doctor's appointment and he has shingles and so all these little things that just kind of set the tone. That he's alone, that he's sad, that he feels like he's a nobody. And so now I've established where I want to begin him. And in my mind, I kind of know where I want to end him. And then it's a question. The process is, how do I change him along the way to get him to where I want him to be? Same thing with Twice, by the way, with the new book, it's the same kind of thing. Same character, starts a certain way. In that case, and I've done this once or twice before in Twice the new book, it begins with him. He's already older and he's been arrested and he's been arrested for allegedly cheating at a roulette wheel in a casino in the Bahamas and winning three straight numbers with the exact number, which is impossible. I mean, the odds are infinitesimal. You know, crazy. And a cop is interrogating him, a detective about how'd you do it? Come on, how'd you do it? How'd you do it? And I didn't do anything, you know, Come on, how'd you do it? I didn't do anything. You know, what's your story? What's your story? And so finally, he, you know, under pressure from him, he takes out this notebook that he has written for somebody else to be read upon his death. And he's. And you realize he's dying, and he gives it to the copy. He says, if you really want to know, you can read this out loud, you know, and they go through it together. And so with him, I've already established him at the end. And now you're going to read from the beginning how he changed and got there. So there's a lot of angles from which you can do this. You can either start with the person a certain way and you put the idea in the reader's mind, how did he get that way? How did he become that? You know? And now you show the contrast from the beginning all the way in. Or you start with, you know, a very innocent kind of person and you like in Frankie Presto. The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto is about his magical guitar player that starts when he's a little boy, an infant, and literally goes linearly all the way to the end. And you watch him change along the way. So there's lots of starting points, but it's a transformation for me. Your characters have to transform. It's not interesting if they don't. Nobody wants to read 2, 300 pages about the same person who's the same way as they were in chapter one as they are at the end, no matter how interesting they may be. It gets repetitive. So you have to change.
- [42:40]
A
How much do you feel like I'm Writing for Mitch versus I'm writing for a reader?
- [42:45]
B
98% writing for readers.
- [42:47]
A
Is that right?
- [42:48]
B
Yeah.
- [42:48]
A
So how does that manifest itself?
- [42:51]
B
I don't worry about what interests me, you know, per se. Oh, I like this topic or this area or I want to write like, I like oldies music. Okay. Like, if you ask me what's a passion of mine, I like 50s doo wop rock and roll. I was in a band years ago that played it. I love listening to it. I listened to it almost every day. I'm not writing a book about doo wop music because I don't really see a great way to make that interesting to a large number of readers. First of all, music's very difficult. I wrote one music book, which I threw myself into because music's a passion of mine. But it's tough because the beauty, the real beauty of music is oral, A U R A L. It's not. It's hard to write down. And no matter what words you use and you know, how many, if you want to write like Tom Wolf with a lot of italics and rat that. That and try to write the beat out, it doesn't matter. It's really hard to get it across. So that's a passion of mine, but I'm not going to write it. You know, I think about things that people want to want to explore in themselves, and then I say, okay, are these things that I have something to say about or I have some knowledge about, or I'm curious about myself and those themes that I told you about, when those overlap, when one that I'm curious about or I've learned something about overlaps with something that I think readers will be curious about too, that makes the list. What doesn't make the list is just because I'm interested in it. And maybe I, you know, maybe people have. Think that that's wrong and you should write what you love. And you. But it's a business, you know, I mean, you are. You're putting out books and you're trying to get people to go read books, and it takes you a year or two of your life to do it. You know, I don't know. I guess I'm just used to writing for an audience. The newspaper business is an audience. The movie business is an audience. You know, the play. You write a play, you're literally writing it for an audience. You know, I remember that line in. I think it was Tootsie Bill Murray, and he's a playwright, he goes, I want to write a play that nobody comes to see. You know, it's like, okay, you know. Yeah, all right, that would be great. You know, if people come and see it, then it's. Then it's trash. It's failed. All right, well, that's why it was a funny line in a movie. But it's not a way to run your career.
- [45:23]
A
Yeah. So what is the process of coming up with a theme, a premise, a book idea? What does that look like?
- [45:33]
B
Well, I, you know, when I get an idea for a book or a concept, I write it down or I send myself an email, actually, like, because I'm frequently in places where I tried to, you know, write it on a piece of paper and then I just lose the pieces of paper. You know, I once had like a little. A whole bag of. Just little pieces of yellow paper that I scrunched up or stuff notes you write to yourself at night, you know, when you Wake up and you get an idea. Now, I. Because of email and phones and everything, I just email myself and I tag. What's the line? The subject line? Book idea. And so then when I search, every couple of months, I just go search my book ideas. I pull them and I print them, and I put them into a file. So now I have a file that's inches thick with. Sometimes it's a whole theme, a story, sometimes it's a line, sometimes it's a title. Sometimes it's like, this would make a great first line for a book, you know, And I just collect them in those files. And then when time comes to write another book, like I'm at now, you know, like I have a new book coming out, it's time to start thinking about what I want to do next. I'll go and just leaf through that file, and, you know, I'll find something. You know, I'm blessed not to ever suffer from writer's block. That's never been a thing for me. Maybe you're not allowed to, you know, when you're under deadline all the time. No, you're not. You know, it's that famous, famous story about. I think it was Dick Young here in New York about what it was. It was a World Series, Don Larson's perfect game, okay? The story goes that Dick Young was a sports writer for the New York Post. And they. He was sitting there, and the guy next to him, after Don Larson finished his perfect game, he froze, and he couldn't come up with anything. And he was like, oh, my God, I don't have anything. It's deadline. I don't have anything. And Dick Young, this is the legend, got so frustrated that he was interrupting him that he grabbed his typewriter and wrote the imperfect man through the perfect game. Because I guess Larson had some issues or whatever, and he gave him his thing back, said there, start, you know, and that became a famous first line of this guy's story. I can't. I don't have that luxury. And I will run out of years on this earth long before I run out of the. That file of story ideas.
- [47:59]
A
There was a fun idea that I saw around. You frame the same thing in two different ways, and one has the spice of life, a little spark of action and flavor, and the other one will be dull. And it was like, all right, this second baseman's batting.333. You'd say it like that. Or you could say one in three times. When this guy walks up to the plate, something good happens.
- [48:23]
B
That's what I always said.
- [48:24]
A
I love that. That is just completely. It's like the story philosophy, showing up in the smallest place. It's like fractal or something.
- [48:33]
B
Yeah, well, I said that. I don't know if you're quoting me or.
- [48:39]
A
I am.
- [48:39]
B
I am quoting you.
- [48:40]
A
Yeah.
- [48:40]
B
So I remember I gave a talk about, you know, how you write about sports and I always said that I wanted to write for, you know, the die hard sports fan is going to read you no matter what. They may hate you, he'll still read you because he's going to read everything. But I wanted to write for that grandmother in North Carolina who'd never seen a Detroit game or whatever and still could read my column and get it, you know, and, and most importantly, first of all, that meant picking a theme that the person could identify with. So write about humanity, write about overcoming loss or overcoming strife or whatever it is. But a subset of that was don't get lost in the weeds about statistics and things like that, which a lot of sports writers, especially now with WHP analytics, analytics and all this ridiculous analytic overanalyzing things. It's like reading a spreadsheet, you know, and you're 3:33 whip and this and or so. Yeah, I said, for example, If a guy hits 333, don't come say that. Say one out of every three times he comes to the plate, something good happens. And that's how everybody can relate to it, you know. But even more importantly than the factual stuff, find the thematic stuff that everybody can relate to and I'll give you a perfect example. I don't know, stop me if you've heard me tell this story before. But sometimes that means that you have to go against the grain of your business. So I was in the. I want to say it was Barcelona at the Olympics and Carl Lewis was going to run in 100 meter final. It was a Saturday and everybody was going to watch his race, including me. So I went there early because I knew that it was going to be really crowded and no stadiums get packed at the Olympics when I wanted to get a good seat because 100 meters short race. So I'm sitting there, I got there like three in the afternoon or whatever and I'm just sitting there waiting five hours and meanwhile they're running some heats. So one of the heats was like a 400 meter heat and. And you know those are just countless parade of athletes coming out and running a heat and another heat and another heat. And I'm kind of leaning like this watching and the gun goes off. Race running about halfway around the track, this one runner pulls up hamstring, you know, and goes down to the track. Okay. Happens all the time, you know, especially if you cover track and field. So everyone else keeps running and they finish the race. And this guy is in his lane, and you can see he's suffering. And he gets up and he finds. Falls kind of back down and gets. He said, man, he really tore something. Then suddenly, out of the blue, a guy, kind of a heavyset guy comes running out of the stands and onto the field. Now, remember, this is pre 9 11, so, you know, security isn't what it was afterwards. And he runs onto the track and he gets behind this guy and he lifts him up.
- [51:51]
A
Oh, wow.
- [51:52]
B
And he starts walking him in the lane around the track, and he. And at some point, when they come around the final curve, he actually has him up on his feet, so his feet are behind him, and each step that he's taking, he's kind of walking because they're staying within the lane. Because if you go outside the lane, DQ disqualified. So there's not room for him to kind of put his legs or wherever. So they got to get both their legs lined up. So he's literally carrying him. Of course, now he's starting to come around the curve. Everyone in the stadium's like, yeah, yeah, like this, you know, and cheering him. By the time he gets across the track, everybody gets a big round of applause for me. Let's say the winner won in 50 seconds or 49 seconds. He came around in like two and a half minutes, you know, something like that. So I go running downstairs. Now, there are only a handful of journalists there. I go running downstairs and try to find this guy. And I see the guy who went in the stand, ran out of the stands, and me and a handful of other reporters race up to him. And I said, who are you? Why did you do that? He said, I'm his father. And I said, well, why did you run out of stands? He goes, well, I know how hard he trained. He's trained his whole life for this. And I knew that if he didn't cross the finish line, he wouldn't be recorded as having participated in the Olympics. His name might not be in the books. And so I knew he just had to finish. And I started asking him questions about, you know, his background. He said, well, I taught him how to run. And when he was a little, I said, why'd you put him on your feet? He said, well, when he was a little Boy, I taught him how to run. That's how I taught him. I put his feet on my feet. I'm choking up when I'm telling the story. I put his feet on my feet, and that's how I taught him how to run. And so I remembered that. So that's what we did. So I came back upstairs and I called my newspaper and I said, I'm not writing this Carl Lewis thing. I got a better story. They go, what do you mean, it's Carl Lewis? I said, trust me, this is a better story. And at the time, nobody had seen it. Now everybody tells this story, and they all act like they were there. But I was there, and there weren't 10 million reporters there. And I wrote that story instead, or in addition to. And that column became one of the best known columns that I've written. And it was about a guy who I'd never heard of before. Derek Redmond is his name. But I never heard of him. He was British. Never heard of the father. Nobody in America cared about this guy. Nobody knew the race or anything, but everybody could relate to that story because the father, with his son, not wanting to see his son have his heart broken, you know, and so he's. They are. That is every father and every son and every child repeated over again. And if you can find that, that's gold, you know, that's a column that you want to write no matter what else is out there.
- [54:48]
A
How do you think about when you're telling a story, writing a story, what happens next? How do you think about that problem?
- [54:57]
B
Some of it is pacing. Some of it you think almost like a movie. Have I had a lot of action? Do I need a counteraction? When I wrote the book the Little Liar, which was set during the Holocaust, and there was a lot of stuff in the first third of the book about the war years, and it was set in Greece, and when the Nazis invaded and, you know, the Jews were put into the ghetto and then the trains. And there was a lot of very, very big thematic life and death kind of stuff. And I remember talking with my editor about, you know, she said, I wouldn't change any of it, but it's just so much like you just. The reader feels overwhelmed by all these terrible acts, things that are happening. And I said, yeah, you're right, you know. And so I went back in and I inserted a little scene about the grandfather taking the kids up to a tower in Thessalonica on a special, like, field trip day for a birthday. And it was thing called the White Tower. And they get to the top, and all the kids are having this great time because they got to go in and they got to go all the way to the top of the tower. And the grandfather explains to them that it used to be called the Red Tower and that it used to be a prison, and it was called the Red Tower because they used to throw people off the roof of it, and they would die into the red from the blood, you know, and that. And the kid says, well, how did it become the White Tower? And he says, well, there was a man who was imprisoned, and it was. The tower itself was so dirty from all these killings and all the rest of it that the town wanted it painted, but nobody wanted to paint because it was too tough a job, because it was this massive, huge tower, and nobody wanted to do it. And this prisoner offered to do it by himself if they would set him free. And because he had been imprisoned for, like, a crime of passion or something with his wife or something, and so they let him do it, and he painted the whole tower by himself, and they set him free. And the grandfather says to his grandson, you know, what do you learn from that? And he said, what is it? A man, to be forgiven, will do anything. And it was this quiet, kind of sweet sort of moment that the insertion of it amidst these other things was what made it work. If I had put it someplace else, it would have been out of place or unnecessary or would have been a deviation. But because we needed to take a breath, it worked, and it ended up serving purpose for the story much, much later on. So sometimes what you're doing is you're, like, monitoring the heart of your reader. Is their heartbeat getting too fast? Is it starting now? Instead of being a healthy run, this is now turning into a scary experience where, like, oh, my God, I need to stop. So bring it down a little bit. You know, take the hill out of the. Out of the marathon that we were talking about earlier. You know, flatten it out a little bit. So a lot of it is pace, and you have to have just a feel for that as a storyteller. And then a lot of it is crescendo. You know, nobody wants to peak too soon, nobody wants to peak too late. You know, you don't want to save everything good for the last chapter of the book. I learn a lot from movie making because I do write movies, and it's quite a different experience. Bill Goldman's book about adventures in screen trade, he explains that the more action happens in the last Seven minutes of a movie than often happens in the first hour and a half of it. And yet as the viewer, you accept that because somehow we've come to expect our movies to sort of have these big wrap ups. If you actually measured, it's like seven minutes and seven minutes. The love story wraps up the murder, wraps up the case, wraps up all this stuff and nobody objects to it because somehow you're ready for it. You know, that's the experience of the moviegoer. Well, you have to also understand the experience of a reader, you know, and when do they want some relief? When do they want some humor? When do they want. When do you break a chapter? That's a big thing. Or how do you hang? You know, I work a lot at. I don't know if I'm good or not, but I work a lot at stopping the story at a particular point and leaving, putting a pin in it and coming back over here and having people go, I want to get back to that. You know, you're going to have to wait a second. Going to have to wait. It's like my uncle's at the dinner table. There he was. We were over at a hill and we were, you know, but first over here they were doing this. So, you know, if you're good, you know, you can keep them bouncing up in the air over here and you can do something over here as well.
- [60:20]
A
Yeah, I have the image of a color wheel, as you were saying, that color wheel.
- [60:24]
B
Yeah.
- [60:24]
A
Sort of riding. He's sort of in different colors. But you know, I've been on blue for a long time. I'm kind of getting into that deep blue. It's a little much. Now I'm going to flip over to orange. Orange is the contrast to blue. The blue amplifies the orange, the orange amplifies the blue. And then we can kind of keep working our way around the color wheel.
- [60:42]
B
Right? Very much. That's exactly it. And then it becomes three dimensional. If you want to work. About time. So if you're telling, if you're telling multiple stories, as I do in twice, for example, you've got to end one chapter with a suggestion that we're going to go to some other time, but it's going to make sense that this comes now. You know, he looked at the, you know, tombstone and it made him think of his mother or he just looked at the tombstone and he was overwhelmed with the memory.
- [61:17]
A
Stop.
- [61:18]
B
Next chapter. You know, now he's with his mother when he was a kid or something like that. So there's some sort of tie between where you left off in that scene and why you're beginning in the next one, you know, and every. Every book's different. I mean, there are the books that are told in multiple voices. That's a. That's a challenge. You know, when do you go from one to the. To the next? When do you return? How long has it been since we've heard from that last person? Do we come back? There's ones that are told in two different centuries, you know, so when do you tell one in this century and when do you go back? You know, there's ones that are told backwards, like Memento, that movie, which kind of worked its way backwards. That's a challenge. And you have to tell that a certain way. So it all depends on the structure that you've chosen. But all of it, in my mind, is about rhythm. And this is why I think I've been blessed, as I didn't realize as a writer, but to have been a musician. I have an innate sense of rhythm in my speaking, in my writing, in my, you know, my music writing and all that. And you sort of know when you're on a roll and when things are going and when you're not. My wife made this observation many years ago, and she's very astute. She said, you know, when you write, sometimes she would sit in my office. She said, when you write, you rock back and forth, but sometimes you stop. What's going on when you stop? And I thought about it. I said, it's not working when I stop, and when I'm doing this, it's working. And so I can read a paragraph that I'm working on, or I can write it, and it's like, okay, good. But all of a sudden, if it's da, da, da, da, da. What? What? You know, what do I have to do here? Stop, Okay? I got to fix something. It's not. Hold up, everybody stop. Stop the ride. We're going to hammer a few things in here. Okay, let's go back. And that's how I. When I told you I reread and I reread. A lot of it is just for rhythm. And one of the highest compliments I've ever gotten on my, you know, in my newspaper life was when people say, you know, when I read your column, like, I start and I'm at the end already, you know, like, it just. And so many other ones I read. And then I have to stop and I have to go back and read the paragraph again because I lost Something, whatever. But I don't know what it is about yours. But I start at the beginning, and I kind of just get right to the end. And I know what it is. It's rhythm. You know, you write with a rhythm that doesn't disturb the readers kind of their sense of rhythm as they're. As they're reading it. And they just can kind of keep going. The sentences make sense. They flow into one another. The ideas flow into one another. Even the cadence of the. Of the actual sentence itself flows into it. And you can get to the bottom. You know, you get to the end of the song, and writing is like that too.
- [64:30]
A
What I like about rhythm as an idea is that it's pre intellectual. You know, if I'm at a bar or I'm at a coffee shop and there's a song that I like, my body knows that I like it before my mind does. My body's kind of moving and grooving and shaking. And then, like, I'll even feel my foot tapping, right? And then.
- [64:49]
B
Oh, and then you'll go, what is this?
- [64:51]
A
Oh, oh, I actually like this song. All right, what's going on? And, okay, let's go listen to the words. And that's what I like about music, is that there's a whole sequencing with falling in love with the song that goes from the body, the intuitive self, to the mind, and the sort of explicit part of the music.
- [65:08]
B
That's why an American Bandstand. That was always the first thing that they always said when they rated the records. I liked the beat. And that's why Paul Simon, when he was interviewed, and I consider him one of the great songwriters of our. Of our time, maybe the best. He said, he writes, he. He starts with the rhythm. And Paul Simon is one of the most poetic songwriters we have, but he starts with the percussion and the rhythm of it and writes to it. And that's why I think so many of his. You know, his compositions are so beautiful because they're a meshing of the rhythmic with the lyrical. He'll repeat a line just because it works with the rhythm. There's no real reason to repeat it, but he'll work with the rhythm. And it's hard to explain without playing it for you, but right or wrong, oh, right or wrong. It never helped us get along. You say you care for me but there's no tenderness beneath your honesty. Whoop, whoop, whoop. You know, that's a beautiful little meshing of words and rhythm. You don't even realize it, but if you Break it down. Why did he repeat? He said right or wrong, and he said it twice, and it's right or wrong. Right or wrong.
- [66:40]
A
Ooh.
- [66:41]
B
It never helped us get along. You know, that's not really the same pattern as this, but it has a certain beat to it. And I mean, he can do that, you know, a thousand times in a thousand songs. And that's real artistry. And it makes it look simple, but it's not simple.
- [66:57]
A
You know, you got me thinking about music and comedy are both very similar.
- [67:03]
B
Yeah, they look that.
- [67:04]
A
If it works, it works. We don't need to explain why it works in music. If they're tapping their feet with comedy, you're getting the laugh. It works. Don't mess with it. It doesn't need to fit into some tidy little framework that Ms. Whatever taught you in fourth grade or that you'll read in the formal writing book of whatever. If it works, just stick with it.
- [67:22]
B
That's right. And you can't even explain why it works. Yeah, but it works. And everybody goes, it works. Yeah.
- [67:29]
A
I had a teacher in high school that we did this sort of one week thing called intercession where we'd take a break from the semester. We just do one class for one week. And it was a hip hop class. And the teacher, cool guy, had an unreal style, but he spoke with a stutter, really bad stutter. But I'll never forget, if you gave him a good beat, he could freestyle like no one's business. And I was like, what? The guy who speaks with the stutter is also the best freestyler I'd ever met. It was strange, but it was like the beat.
- [68:07]
B
Something liberated him.
- [68:08]
A
Yeah, something liberated him. It, like, took hold of him. It was like the. The opposite of having a demon inside of you. It was like, here we go.
- [68:16]
B
Well, and I think writers, songwriters, writers, they search for that, and when they hit it, they've struck gold, you know, and you have a. You have a magical sentence or paragraph, that last paragraph of A river runs through it where he says, in the end, you know, all things in the world come into one and a river runs through it. There are stones beneath the river, and the stones are stories. And sometimes the stories of their own. I am haunted by waters. I mean, I don't know why that works, why that's so beautiful, but it's such a. And it's not even, you know, I mean, the story is about a pastor and two brothers and one of them who dies and all the rest, but in the end, that's just, you know, all things come into one and a river runs through it. Something beautiful about it, I don't know. But you can't read that and not say, wow, that's just poetry. But I couldn't tell you how he came up with it. Norman Maclean, I don't know. And he probably couldn't have either. You know, it just happened.
- [69:23]
A
When you wrote your book about faith, was there anything you picked up from religious writing that you admired seeped into your own work?
- [69:32]
B
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think when you write about faith in particular, when you write about God, if you write from an honest place, then there has to be a certain humility in your writing because you should be humble in the face of God and in the face of creation. And when you are humble, I find, for me, anyhow, I think that's when your writing becomes most beautiful. And because you're able not to think about ego or yourself or whatever, you're kind of caught up in the majesty of life. One of my favorite books is Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. And. And it's the story of a pastor writing a letter to his very young son as he's about to die, the older pastor, and trying to just sort of tell him why he lived and what meant things to him. And there's so much of it is because he's a pastor, and so much of it is humility in the face of God. And the writing is just exquisite and beautiful. And at one point he writes about walking through the woods and seeing some young people playing with water or a hose, and the drops are coming off of the trees and landing on them and they're giggling. And he just describes it so beautifully. And then he says, oh, oh, this world. Oh, this world. Oh, this. Oh, the beauty of this world. Or, you know, and it comes from such a. It's such a simple little observation of people enjoying themselves and laughing. But you can tell he's dying and he's going to miss these things from the world. And it's some kind of sentence like, oh, oh, the beauty of this world. Oh, this world. And it's when you are humble like that and when you are admiring God's work, I believe your words take on a beauty that it's hard to create when you're just thinking about, how can I, the writer, write something really beautiful? And that's why some of the most beautiful writing in the world is in the Psalms. And, you know. And what were the psalms? You know, they were mostly David, you know, trying to Ask for, you know, help from God. Many of them are pleas for help, you know, against his enemies or living or whatever. But some are just extolling the beauty of God or the beauty of the world or whatever. But look at some of that writing. I mean, this stuff was being scratched on stone, and it still holds up and is beautiful. So, yeah, I mean, I've not really been asked that before, but I think when you write about religious themes in a particular fashion, not in a dispassionate, analytical one, but when you really are bringing God or faith into your work, if you're doing it correctly, that humility opens up your ability to look at things in a marveling way. And when you marvel at something, you use a different language than, you know. You know what I mean? Yeah.
- [73:17]
A
I mean, it's marvel, it's mystery, it's awe. And what I love about those is they're stretching. They kind of like reach right at the horizon of what we can sense and feel. There's an understanding that there's something beyond that horizon and something that we're grasping towards. You know, you think of the Sistine Chapel, the reaching. The two fingertips are almost hitting each other, and there's that gap, and you're trying to reach out, almost dislocating your shoulder.
- [73:41]
B
Right.
- [73:41]
A
But the abyss, the frontier, is kind of infinite, and it's beyond you. It's in a different paradigm. And it's like the quest for that. You're right. When it's humble, it's not coming from you. It's coming from something. You're being pulled. You find words, phrases, music within yourself that you didn't. You're kind of unsure of where it came from, 100%.
- [74:03]
B
I wrote a book called have a Little Faith, which is about a rabbi and a pastor, inner city pastor. And the rabbi had asked me to do his eulogy for him. And when he finally died, I had gone to visit him a bunch of times to try to learn about him so that I could do his eulogy. And in his office, he had a bunch of files. It was a messy, messy, sloppy thing of an office. But he had all these files all around and up on the top shelf. When I would go and sit down, I always looked up and there was a file called God. Just said God, you know, along with, you know, Genesis and Moses and all. But then God. And I would look at that and I go, what is in that thing? You know, what's in the file on God?
- [74:47]
A
Did you ever find out?
- [74:48]
B
Yes, I wrote about it in the Book. After he died, I went back to his office and I took the file off the shelf, and I, you know, when I held it for a minute, I flashed back on that Indiana Jones movie, you know, when they have the ark, you know, And I thought, if I open this, like, some sand's gonna come up and blow in my face. The glory of God is revealing to me. My skin's gonna melt off or whatever. And I. I opened it, and it was just all these notes and Xerox pages and little passages about God that the rabbi had assembled over the years with little things underline and questions about, well, what about this, that? And, you know, at first I was like, that's it. You know, and then I realized, well, that's perfect, because what is God if not a series of questions? And the answer is that we believe that we either are hearing or we one day will hear, you know, and it's the journey. It's not the answer. He did an amazing thing when he died. He had recorded a tape, unbeknownst to anybody. And when he died, his grandson, he had left it for his grandson. And his grandson at the funeral service, went up to the pulpit and put this cassette tape into a player on a speaker and pressed play. And his voice came out, and he spoke to the congregation, the rabbi's voice, and he said, my friends, if you are hearing this tape, that means I'm dead and gone. And please don't feel sorry for me, you know, But I want to say one last thing before I go. I've had two questions that have been asked of me over the course of my life as a rabbi, more than any others. The first is, do I believe in God? My answer is yes. The second is, what happens when we die? The good news is, by the time you hear this, I'll know. The bad news is, now that I know I can't tell you, you're gonna have to find out for yourself. And I just thought that that was so perfect, because that is what faith is, you know, you don't know. If you knew, there'd be no reason for faith, you know, it's the journey to get there. And when you finally do know, it's going to be at a point where you're not going to be able to tell everybody else. And so I do think when you can put yourself into that frame of mind and you can write in that area, you, different words come out different. And I have explored the idea of doing a book about a biblical character. If I could find one that hasn't been so overdone and set it in that thing. But then write about some part of them. I thought about job maybe or something. But write about a part of them that wasn't in the. You know, you use the historical context of it, but outside of that, then you create your own story for that person. Only because of that time and that era and that belief, I think it would allow me to operate in, like, I'd be playing with toys that I don't get to play with all the time. And I do think it's a healthy exercise to be humbled and to learn how to write with humility. So that may be one of the things in the books in the future. Yeah.
- [78:43]
A
As you were talking about, you know, going back 10 minutes ago, we were talking about words that kind of don't make sense. And I was thinking about the classic Detroit song one from Midnight Train. Just a city girl born and raised. And then everyone goes south Detroit.
- [78:58]
B
Yeah. You know, South Detroit scene.
- [79:00]
A
Her in a smoking room with the smell of wine and cheap perfume. I don't know. That's what's fun about certain kinds of language is they pull you and they reel you in like you're a fish on bait, but you kind of never really figure out what they mean. Why are you saying that? Why does that work? But something about kind of like an abstract painting, Something about the way that the words are combined, the way that they're together on the page. Huh. I like that. I want to keep exploring that. I want to memorize that.
- [79:33]
B
We have a good laugh at everybody who comes in and sings that song. And in fact, they play it in the Red Wings games. Just a small town boy born and raised in south Detroit. Everybody screams South Detroit. And just so that people who are listening to your show know this, Detroit is the only city in America where Canada is south of us. And so you take a bridge or a tunnel down south to go to Canada. So South Detroit would be Canada.
- [80:07]
A
Oh, I didn't know that.
- [80:08]
B
Yeah. And so there is no South Detroit. And we get a good laugh out of that. But as you say, it's an iconic song, so everybody sings it.
- [80:18]
A
You know what makes for good songwriting?
- [80:23]
B
I think, like you said, there has to be a stick with it ness to it. That almost always comes from something rhythmic, first and foremost, because it's hard to remember a song or stay with a song that doesn't have something you can tap your foot to. Even if it's a slow tap, you want to tap your foot, then it has to Have a hook of some kind that just stays with you and won't let you go. And then, you know, then the lyrics have to be again. Ones that come back to you or that you stay with. Your poetry and songwriting can make a song beautiful but not popular. You know, it's really hard to have deep, deep words that are really difficult and still haven't be popular. I mean, Bob Dylan did it in some songs, you know, blowing. Everybody knows Blowing in the Wind. But they know Blowing in the Wind because you say over and over again, the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. The answer is Blowing in the Wind. That's very much a folk song. When you take the words to Hurricane. You know, the story about Reuben Carter. You know, almost nobody can remember this. It just goes on and on and on and on and on forever. So everyone goes, yeah, it's a brilliant song. Well, tell me two lines from it. I can't tell you. I don't remember the two lines. It's a brilliant song. So, you know, there's the kind of what makes a good song? The answer by a rock critic. And then there's what makes a good song? The answer by a music fan. And the answers by a music fan is generally going to be that they can sing it easily. They can remember it after the first time that they heard it. It's catchy, you know, and it somehow speaks to them. The answer by a rock critic could be any one of a number of other things, you know, but that's the difference between critics and fans, I guess.
- [82:23]
A
Well, I know love is a theme in your book. Why'd you pursue that?
- [82:28]
B
Well, it's the theme in the book.
- [82:34]
A
It's kind of the theme in life.
- [82:35]
B
Yeah, it is. And I've written love stories within my stories before. Almost every one of my books really has had main characters who have had a love of their lives. But this is the first book that I've written that love is the theme of the book. And I mentioned to you before that I try to do themes first. And the theme of this is the idea that the grass is always greener or our regrets. But really I wanted to do it with love. I wanted to do it about the grass always being greener when it comes to love. Or our thoughts about, I could have done better in love. Or maybe this wasn't the perfect person for me. Or, you know, maybe I. Because we do do that, whether we want to admit that or not. We do. You know, it's lovely to say, I'm with the love of my life and the perfect person for my life. And I'm sure that that's true in the cases where people are very earnest about it. But you can also be with the love of your life and have forged a great relationship, but also somewhere along the line, have asked yourself, what would have happened if I didn't get with this person? Or what would happen if this person died, you know, or what would happen if this person decided they didn't want to be with me anymore? Or what would happen if I just changed my mind? Or what would happen if someone else came along? Whatever. We do these things, we watch other people's relationships and we think, is that one better than what I have? You know, are they more in love than I am? Or they're getting more love than I'm getting? And it just occurs to me that one of the biggest second guessings in our lives is our love life, you know, that and probably our career life. You know, I could have done this, I should have done that. I should have been a, you know, I should have been a baseball player. And so I wanted to really explore the idea of love. And I think I've reached an age where I can do it now with some perspective. I think if I had tried to do write this book when I was in my 30s or 40s, I wouldn't have gone through enough of life to understand the difference between passion and love, or between crushes and love, lust and love. Lust and love. And so everybody wants to talk about the combustible part of love, like the flame. If you think of love as a flame, everybody wants to talk about how it gets lit, you know, oh, this came together and this came together and we had flames. You know, everybody loves the combustible part of life. Everyone loves the meet cute and how love gets started.
- [85:15]
A
How'd you meet?
- [85:16]
B
Yeah, how'd you meet? When did you first, you know, when was your first kiss? When did you first sleep with each other?
- [85:20]
A
When did you know they were the one?
- [85:22]
B
Right. But nobody talks about the down the road part of love. And nobody talks about how you take that flame and blow on the embers of it and get it to go. But that's so much more the story of love than the combustibility of it. Because a flame, the flame by itself can go out, can be extinguished if you pour water on it or you go like that to it, it can blow up and burn your house down. You know, it all depends on what you do with that flame. And so the nurturing of that flame after the combustibility, what it takes to keep it going and let it be a warm fire that will take care of you for the rest of your life. That's something that we don't explore a lot. And I've had that with my wife and I've been very blessed to have a wonderful wife. It's not like every day is sugar and roses and we never have a disagreement or anything like that. But I, I have been blessed to know what true love is. You know, I know I've never doubted my wife's love for me. And I've realized this as the years have passed, that that is not something that everybody gets to experience. And people are suspicious of their wives, they're doubtful of their wives, they wonder. I've had people say to me, I'm not sure my wife likes me. And I'm like, God, what a thing to have to, you know, think about. And so I really wanted to explore the questions we ask ourselves about love. And Alfie and Gianna are the two protagonists of this story. And they meet when they're children in Africa and they have like a little 8 year old puppy love thing and then they don't see each other again until college and when they accidentally are brought back together and Alfie is just smitten by her, but she's kind of, she's just too cool for him and he goes after her like a puppy dog and finally, finally, you know, professes his love for her and you find out that she kind of was waiting for him all along. And it's really a nice. They come together great and you're kind of rooting for them and, and they have this early great existence in this city in New York and you know, like I did when I first moved here and you know, they don't have any money, but they're happy and all those kinds of things. And then time passes and things take their toll. And of course he has the magic power to go and do things over again, which he's never told her. So he has this secret and at one point he tries to tell her and he says, you know, I can do that, I can go back and change things. She goes, oh really? You know, well, that's interesting to know. And he goes, well, what would you do, you know, if you could go back and change anything? He wants to sort of engage her. And she thinks for a second, she says nothing. And he said, what do you mean nothing? He says, because she says, I don't know how this tapestry is going to play out. I don't know. Everything must be happening for some reason, and. And I don't want to change it, because that would change who I am. And it's such a perfect little answer that it makes him kind of almost ashamed that he brought it up and he never brings it up again. But sure enough, as the years pass, something happens. And he starts to get a wandering eye, and he's tempted, and then a fight occurs. And in a climactic, angry, drunken moment, he decides he's going to try something else, you know, and that's when he realizes and finds out that this power that he has doesn't work with love. And so once you turn your back on a true love in this world that he is with his magic, that person can never love you again. And he discovers this world where this woman who he always loved and whatever is in it, but the feeling is gone. And what happens after that? And that is that taking care of the flame thing that I'm talking about. Like, you know, if you let it get to a point where it extinguishes, it doesn't come back. And so the book becomes this treatise about, you know, when you have love and you don't appreciate it, when you don't have it and you want it back, all those things that go on with love. And what does he do? Because the book becomes this whole thing about, what does he do now that he's, like, time traveled out of the best relationship of his life. It was a really interesting thing. And I got to read it to my wife. She has never actually read, I don't think, a book of mine the way that you or I would read a book, because I read them to her towards the end of the writing. You know, it's one of the last things I do before I turn it in. I say, are you ready to hear it? She says, okay. You know, we have to find big chunks of time. And we go down to my office usually, and I sit in the chair, and she sits around the corner so that you don't see her face.
- [90:42]
A
Oh, wow.
- [90:43]
B
Because I don't want to look over and see her go, yeah. What? What? Nothing. Nothing. No, you made a face. What? No, I didn't make a face. I had something in my eye. You know. You know what? You know what? So. So I can't see her when I read. And it's a very instructive time because, you know, when you're reading a book out loud for the first time, you're hearing it in a different way also. And once In a while, I'll hear it. She'll go, mm. I say, is that a good mmm or a good. Yeah, no, it was good. It was good. And this one I read to her, and when I finally got to the end, in the last page. And I will say that the end of this book is very jarring, and everything comes together on the last two pages. So, please, if you're listening to this, don't go to the last two pages of the book to just see. I'll just go, and then I'll read from the beginning. You'll ruin it. You'll destroy it. You've got to leave it alone and wait and see what. What happens. But when I read that to her, and then I looked up when I said the last line, she, you know, leaned forward. She oh. And she gave me a big kiss and, you know, hug. And that meant a lot to me because, you know, I sort of wrote it for her and I dedicated the book for her because I haven't always appreciated the love that she has constantly provided for me, no matter what. And I don't think guys, especially sometimes, don't realize the comfort that we have in knowing that our wives love us through thick and thin. And we pay more attention to little blurbs, blips, you know, that. That happen along the way. That, you know, oh, this got upset over this, or disagreed over that. But that layer of just true love, that is the bed that you get to lie in every night, it's easy to take that for granted. And when it's gone, it's really gone. And that's really hard to replace. So it's what I wanted to say about love. And I haven't been mature enough to do it until probably now, if I am. And so, yeah, that's something different for me.
- [92:55]
A
But you made me think two stories. One is a very sweet one. Another one's a little more difficult. But when I was in Texas, I'd always go to Chick Fil a on Saturdays with a mentor of mine. And every Single Sunday at 11:30, there's an old couple that would come in, and the wife could barely.
- [93:14]
B
I thought they weren't open on Sundays.
- [93:16]
A
Oh, sorry. On Saturday.
- [93:17]
B
Yeah. Somebody's going to point out it couldn't have been a Sunday. Totally.
- [93:22]
A
We would have gotten. You know, Cunningham's Law is. I think it is Cunningham's Law. The best way to get an answer on the Internet is to be wrong about something. And then everyone. You get all the keyboard warriors. Okay, so Saturday, Saturday. We always do it and 11:30, they walk in, it's this old guy, can kind of barely walk with this frail, frail woman. And they always sit down in the same booth. And he goes and he gets her a vanilla ice cream and he gives it to her. And it's just like clockwork. Me and Brian, we always go together. We're like, man, I can't wait to see them. So that's a sweet one. And, you know, it's old person's love. You know, I think of when we think of love, you know, even in relationships have been, it's like, hey, let's go watch the Notebook. You know, it's never culturally, it's never the old people's love.
- [94:06]
B
Right.
- [94:07]
A
That's not what we focus on. It's always Ryan Josling, falling in love, combustion, the rain. I love you so much. Right? You know, the kiss with the dramatic music and the spinning camera angle. But then last week, I played golf with the guy who's probably 62, 63, and we probably spent an hour talking about he'd just gotten divorced and what it was like to find out that his wife had had an affair and was cheating on him with the football coach of their kids high school. And it was so painful. Talk about just when love leaves and you lose it. I mean, I think they got divorced 10 to 12 years ago, and you could just feel in every single word the despair, the sense of loss, the agony that still keeps them up at night. And to just watch those two little moments, you know, play out. Yeah, there's a real gravity.
- [95:00]
B
Yeah. It's interesting that you say that because I've been asked many times about loss and, you know, because I guess Tuesdays with Maury, you know, obviously deals with that theme so many times, and then so many of the other things that I've written about are about loss or dying. I wrote a book about our little girl who died from a brain tumor. And so a lot of books that I've written about have been about loss, but they've been about loss of life. And this is the first one that I've really written which is about loss of love. And you're right, you know, loss of life is a pain that you carry with you that you can do nothing about. But you're in two different worlds. The person that you yearn for and miss is someplace. And what is hurting you is that they're not there anymore physically. You can't go see them, you can't go talk to them. A loss of love, the person can still be in the world can still be right there. And that's what happens with Alfie. You know, this Gianna. She's still there, and she still knows him, and they were friends. They have the history, and. But she just doesn't feel the same way. And she doesn't remember a time that she ever did because he went back in time and undid everything. And so he's looking at this woman who he felt so strongly, and she once felt so strongly about him, and now it's gone and she's still here, and she's right in front of him. So it's not. He's not going to a tombstone. He's not going to a cemetery. He's not, you know, looking at the sky and I wish you were here. She is there. What he's saying is, I wish you felt about me the way that you used to feel about me. And that's a whole different sense of loss. And it was a chance for me to explore that. You know, that it's a. Barry Manilow sang the song, but it was a David Pomerantz song. Who was a beautiful songwriter called Trying to Get the Feeling Again. And I've been up, down, everywhere I possibly can Like a bloodhound Trying to get the feeling again. He's trying to find this emotion that he once felt for someone, but it's gone. And that's a yearning, you know, that everybody can relate to. So I'm hoping that, you know, people who read twice, that's what they'll sort of find, too. And if occurs to me as you're talking, I could see how it's. I've written about loss again, but it's not somebody dying. It's. It's a flame going out, you know? Yeah.
- [97:39]
A
You are welcome on this show anytime.
- [97:42]
B
I think you got to give me 10 more years to come up with new stories, because I think I told you every one I have.
- [97:47]
A
Next time, we're doing three hours.
- [97:49]
B
Three hours. Three hours. All right. All right. Well, I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for the good question.
- [97:53]
A
Yeah.