Tom Junod: How to Write Unapologetically Well | How I Write

Tom Genot is famous for writing essays that have defined both people and events. He wrote a piece called The Falling Man, which is like the canonical piece for 9-11. And then later on, he wrote... the iconic piece for Fred Rogers. What's unique about this conversation is that it's both practical and deep, but it all comes to a head at the end in this climax.

We get to talk about his bookshelf, and it fast becomes one of my favorite things that's ever happened on How I Write. And you'll notice that this episode is more slowly paced than the other ones. And yeah, I could have done little things to speed it up here or there, but I didn't want to.

I wanted to give you the full Tom Janelle experience. Tell me this, when you're writing sentences, what do you feel like you're... you're going for both in the first draft the revision process is there a feel a vibe that you feel like you're working towards when i started writing falling man i sat down and I wrote, he leaves this earth like an arrow, or he departs from this earth like an arrow. And the hair stood up on my arms.

That became my guiding principle. It was like, if you can keep on doing that, if you can keep on writing sentences that make the hair stand up on your arms, then you got this. It's this tightrope that you walk between this, you know, knowledge that you have, you know, you have, you know, privileged knowledge of a subject, and yet what's written...

is not privileged knowledge of a subject. I don't know what's going to happen next in this sentence, but I'll know it when I find it, and I'll keep at it until I find it. And some of that, I mean, you can break that down. you know, to rhythm, you can break that down to word choice, you can break that down to a lot of different things. But it's never as organized or systematic like that for me. So...

Falling Man is a remarkable piece. I was telling you I was at breakfast this morning and I was I was reading the piece and the waitress comes up to me and sort of she's really sort of nervous and she says. She's sort of stuttering. And she says that that photo really means a lot to me. The photographer was my professor at photography school. And so we started talking about it.

Here's how the piece begins. You start with, in the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. It's about the falling man from the Twin Towers. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instance of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion.

He does not appear intimidated by gravity's divine suction or by what awaits him. That story was written two years after 9-11. And I wrote that story because on September 12th, 2001, two years earlier, On 9-11, I was out at our house in Shelter Island. You know, the news came in hodgepodge like it came in to everybody else. But the thing that made that day... particularly weird and particularly attached to where I was and where we were was that, you know, we didn't have a TV at the time.

i couldn't wait to get the newspapers you know so i got up early and i went to the drugstore in shelter island and got uh the times got the post got the daily news got them all still have them and you know the The Times had that astonishing headline, America Attacked. I'm, you know, getting a chill just thinking of that. I opened it up, and on page 7, there's that picture. Of the falling man. Of the falling man. There's that picture of a man. He is falling, but he looks like he's flying.

you know that that is the thing about that about that picture he seems almost in repose um and so it was always you know the contradiction of what that picture represented and how it was shot and what is, you know, what like sort of like the inner meaning of that picture seemed to be.

That just captured me right away. And, I mean, within a second, I said, I'm writing that story. Whoa. Yeah. But the thing that... The thing that sort of complicated matters, well, the two things that complicated matters. And one of them was that I just figured that, you know, somebody else was going to write that story. I'm a, you know, I'm a, I'm a magazine guy.

And I couldn't get into New York City. You know, I was out on the east end of Long Island. They weren't letting people in. I mean, Granger wanted me to come in and start writing about it right then, but I couldn't do it. I also wanted to stay with my wife, you know. So that was a complication. I just absolutely 100% figured that somebody else was going to do it. And then the other thing is that it became... Something that people, I would say the whole nation, averted its eyes from.

i mean nobody nobody wanted to talk about that picture nobody wanted to see that picture that picture ran the first day and then Like, never again. It was considered some sort of... Like a taboo type thing? Like a total, like a violation of somebody's life in their most private, vulnerable...

dying moments. You know, you're capturing a photo of someone essentially dying in the air. I mean, even though physically they were still quite alive, but I mean, they were about to meet their death within seconds.

And nobody wanted to see it. And that became, you know, the other thing that drew me in. And I think that that's if you want to talk about... my writing and what it's always meant, both to me and I think the people who, you know, who have been kind enough to read it, is that, you know, if somebody tells me I can't write about it, I want to write about it.

And if somebody says I can't say it, I really want to say it. And so there was something taboo about that, and I wanted to break that taboo. And I...

wanted to say the unsayable. And I'm, you know, I don't want to wear that out as we talk, but saying the unsayable, I think it, you know, it sort of carries on into my book. So with something like this, when you say, say the unsayable...

What is it that's going on here? Is it that that's... really interesting important photo that we need to talk about like what is the urge to say it is it just that hey you're not it's an it's a it's an interesting photo that we need to talk about and that has been completely relegated, pushed away, relegated to the margins of the conversation. But there's something else, which is that something that nobody wanted to talk about, which is that people jumped.

A lot of people jumped. Like a couple hundred people jumped. I think I saw the North Tower was like one in six people who died were jumpers. Right. So there was that. And that's the thing that people just did not want to deal with. Amazingly, the thing that I thought was going to happen didn't happen, which is that I thought that... There'd be a bunch of stories about the falling man who was not called the falling man yet. It was after the story in Esquire that he became the falling man.

I thought that somebody was going to identify him and that was going to be all there was to it. But that did not happen. Can I get you to read the next section? Sure. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee. almost casually his white shirt or jacket or frock is billowing free of his black pants his black high tops are still on his feet in all the other pictures the people who did what he did

who jumped, appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They're made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless, their shoes fly off as they flail and fall. They look confused as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical.

and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them, everything to the left of him. In the picture is the North Tower, everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun.

Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation. Others see something else, something discordant and therefore terrible. Freedom. There's something almost rebellious in the man's posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it, as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end.

He is by 15 seconds past 941 AM EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of 32. feet per second squared he will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour and he is upside down in the picture he is frozen in his life outside the frame he drops

and keeps dropping until he disappears there's a lot in there as i hear that that i think speaks to who you are as a writer sure i think one of the things is There's musicians who make albums and not singles. And you write paragraphs. And it's in the paragraph that I think your writing really comes alive. You know, if you re-listen to that, there's...

little moments of repetition that show up. And what I really admire about that is that that writing is a byproduct of looking, looking, looking, and more looking. And not turning away. Ooh. Tell me about that. Well, I think that's what the whole story is about. I think that that's what the whole paragraph is about. The urge to turn away is taken for granted. It's never mentioned in there.

In a lot of my writing, I think that there is something of an attack. There is, I mean, I realize he is very vulnerable. And I take, you know, liberties, large and small. And I don't mean I make shit up. I mean, I take liberties by putting in an M dash. the others who died this way dash who jumped um I mean, I sort of move from objectivity, like being like really scrupulously objective. Right, falling down at precisely this much physics, science. Yeah, almost risking offense by being objective.

to being, you know, sort of, you know, sort of grandly metaphorical. Like the birth of a new flag. Like saying that, like this is, this is... a new flag and you know and that's also the point of the story um when the reason that i was attracted to the image when i saw it on september 12 2001

was I looked at that and said, we are in a completely new place. I mean, that's the picture that said, we are in a new place. Well, as a writer, that is... something that I see show up over and over again is you look at, if I looked at The Falling Man, I would not at all have gotten to

the way that you began that piece and i think the same thing happened in the piece about the obama drone strikes right the new york times comes out with a piece about how he's the one hitting the drone missiles like pressing the buttons or whatever and you're like

Well, I was going to write that piece. Now I can't write that piece. And then you do something else that basically says, OK, we're going to switch up the style. We're going to change the approach and now have, I guess, a fresher perspective on on the same idea. The thing that attracted me to The Falling Man was the... the difference, you know, the sort of the unreconciled tension in the photo between his seeming acceptance of his fate and the fact of that he was, you know...

hurtling to his death at an insane rate. He was going 150 miles an hour, and yet he looks resigned. So there's that contradiction. And in the Obama piece, there's also a contradiction. I mean, I believe that, still believe that Obama is and was. a good man, and yet he's ordering hits. So there's that. And how can you say that other than in the most direct way?

Hey, if you like how I write and you want to support the show, there's two things that you can do. The first is think of someone who you know who loves to write and just fling them a link. Send them a link, say, hey, you got to listen to this. And then number two is if you run a company where you think you'd be a good sponsor, I'm looking for sponsors and I want to work with people who care about the craft of writing and care about craftsmanship. So if that's you.

Send me an email. Hello at Perel.com. You know, I've written a lot of bad sentences, but most of the stories that move on and actually become stories begin with good sentences. and really direct sentences. And he departs from this earth like an arrow. You're a good man. I mean, that's a direct appeal. That's a direct... proclamation of some sort. And once I wrote that, that story was, you know, all you had to do was eventually wind your way to a final sentence. that had some of the same punch.

Well, it seems like the meta principle from what you're saying is having a nose for this tension, for contradiction, for two things that don't, almost like two tectonic plates that almost rub against each other. And in that rubbing, they create an eruption. volcano or they create movement and friction and that that's actually what you're trying to look for in sense as you're thinking through what story am I going to take on.

Yeah, exactly. If a story has that sort of dimension, that dimension of ambivalence or contradiction or just like something's off here that I can't quite name, those are the things that I tend.

you know, to go after and to want to write about. That's what my book is about. You know, my parents were beautiful. They were beautiful, you know, human beings. My mother was, you know, she looked like a 40s starlet. And, you know, my dad, by his own description, was a John Garfield type.

sort of like a Hollywood heavy or a gangster, you know, but he was also, you know, he was also a singer and he was, I mean, he was gorgeous. He really was. And they, you know, and my brother and sister were... the same, you know, and we were just like this, you know, we had this house with like marble steps and everything, you know, was sort of, was beautiful, but there was something, there was something that was off and that I couldn't quite name.

And I began to find out what that was at a really young age. When I was three years old, you know, my parents' marriage almost ended because... You know, my father was having an affair with my first friend's mother. And, you know, that's not something that when you're that young that you can name.

but I do believe that it is something that you are aware of. And I was definitely aware of it. And so I think that my course as a writer... i mean i didn't i didn't you know know anything about writing um but i think that my course um as a writer was was set when i was really young somewhere i saw it was a quote

that you had said or written, talk about your father. And it was this difficult thing, this difficult thing, this difficult thing. And then at the very end, but man, I loved him. I did. And the word that was coming to mind for me was reconcile. There's this and there's this. How are these shapes going to fit together? And so I try to do that on a sentence level. I write generally long sentences that are quite balanced, I would say. And I think that there's an attempt to balance.

the two poles that I'm coming from in each sentence. You know you've written a really good sentence when those two poles sort of have their, you know, sort of tectonic rubbing against each other in one word, like in the opening of The Falling Man. In the M dash, who jumped? That's a place where conflicting forces in the sentence find their balance. Tell me about the ellipses. Well, so...

My book, I think, probably sets some sort of record for ellipses. But it's not a Tom Wolfian tick. It's a Lou Ginnotian tick. It's not Tom Wolf. It's my dad. See, my dad had this way of talking. He'd stand in front of the mirror in his bikinis. Look. Look at this body. Has anyone ever seen a body like this? That's how we talked. And so recently, I was just about to hand the book to my...

to my niece, Kim, who, you know, knew her pop-up well. And she was like, she like looked at it and she goes like, so I'm wondering, Uncle Tom, you know, if... Do you try to get in, do you say anything about the way Pop-Pop talks? And I was like, the whole book is sort of written in Pop-Pop. You know, it's written in his language. You know, my father, he was a musical speaker. He spoke with pause emphasis.

pause, emphasis. And it was part of what made him so seductive. So my father had this way of speaking, and in a lot of ways, he was a master of... of language and i believe that his you know

feel for language kind of has influenced my feel for language. And so this book, I just let it hang, you know, all hang out that way. I mean, I just, there's... i quote him in that way and i also certain i definitely write my own sentences in that way as well i would imagine it's got to be hard to write about someone so close to you

like your father, so intimate. And sometimes it's hard to look at something so intimate. And then I would imagine that the emotions that came up while writing this book were both... elation and just every single bit of it but you know I'd written about my dad three times previously

I had written about him for GQ in a story called My Father's Fashion Tips, which is exactly that. It's a profile of him through his maxims on fashion. Will you give me a few? Yeah, the turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear, is the most obvious. Always wear white to the face.

always be sure to play this what does white to the face mean meaning uh wearing wearing a white shirt so that you know you're you so that literally and whether it's a turtleneck or a shirt with a collar um so so that literally your face occupies a place on a pedestal. There is nothing like a fresh burn. You know, my father, you know, worshipped the sun, you know. He was really almost a professional tanner. When he was a handbag salesman in the city, he used to sit out on the fire hydrant.

on Fifth Avenue and between 32nd and 33rd, sit out there at lunchtime with a reflector. Just looking up at the Empire State Building? Yeah, taking it in the sun. He wouldn't look at it. He was... I don't think that my father even noticed that the Empire State Building was there. It was a few blocks away. He didn't give a shit. It was him. I mean, he was the Empire State Building.

So, but yeah, so him sitting out, sitting out in Fifth Avenue with a reflector. So, I mean, you know, I think that, you know, they, they. you know, Eskimos are supposed to have, you know, all these different words for snow, like 57 words for snow or something like that. I think I have like, you know, almost as many for like my father's tan. I think it's compared in there to steak sauce. It's compared to mahogany. It's just all, you know, it's very, very... To find...

the right word for my father's tan, which was just so dramatic. You don't have anything in this room as dark as my dad. He was like A1 steak sauce. He was like A1 steak sauce. With green eyes that were like traffic-like green eyes. It's crazy. So, I mean, all of the pictures of him are interesting, but seeing him in color close up was like an overwhelming experience, and I was completely overwhelmed from the time I sort of came into the world.

What do you think it is about the long form magazine article that you fell in love with? And I mean, you wrote, would you say, 32,000 words for ESPN? Yeah, for a story called. untold for espn yeah we're not talking about you know a six minute read on medium like hey this long form piece i mean these were no it was really long

And, you know, and even, you know, even I mean, The Falling Man is probably, I don't know, seven or eight thousand words. I say it's it's pretty it's actually pretty compact in a lot of ways, you know, but. I've definitely written some, you know, really, really long stories. I mean, I think that Lethal Presidency was 11 or 12,000 words. I mean, these were long pieces. And the question, I mean, so in answer to your question, I mean, I don't know. I don't know why, like...

long-form narrative magazine story turned out to be the thing that I could do. But I can tell you, I can tell you, though, so I was, I mean, I didn't even know it existed. When I got out of college...

You know, the first thing I did was I sold handbags for a year on the road and stuff. And, you know, I was trying to write. I was writing. I was writing at night. I was writing on my freaking business cards. I would fill up my business cards with, like, descriptions and scenes and everything else. And was this like, I want to be a writer?

kind of writing. Someday, someday that's the dream. I totally wanted to be a writer. I would sit in my hotel room and write at night. It just wasn't... It was bad. It really was not that good. It was a version of what I do now. I mean, it was like... Oh, the work was bad. The work, yeah, yeah. But the long sentences, all those things, they were all sort of present way back then.

But I didn't know that magazine pieces existed. I thought to be a writer, you either had to be a newspaper man, for which I was too slow, or a novelist. which I just didn't, to this day, I don't know if I can do that. And so I just didn't know I could do it. I didn't have the faith that I could do it. So I became a salesman. And then...

You know, there was just a moment when I had a shot to write a story. You know, I came out of the handbag world. I started writing for a trade magazine in Atlanta. And I got a shot. to write for a profile of like a local newspaper guy for Atlanta Magazine. And it was the weekend before my wedding. And I had to write. a magazine story over a weekend and get it in before I got married. And I sat at the table and I wrote, okay, I admit it.

I wanted to skewer him. That was the first sentence. Okay, so that's not the greatest first sentence in the world. It's not, he departs from this earth like an arrow. However, for a guy who had never written a magazine story, that was... It was pretty confident. You know, it wasn't just like who, what, where, and when. Right. And that was it. I mean, I wrote that story in a weekend. I gave it to the editor of Atlanta Magazine.

came back from my honeymoon and he called me and he was just like how did you learn to do this and he was like i was like i don't know i just i just did it and he was like You know, he's like, you have the chance to go all the way. You know, you could be Tom Wolfe. I didn't know who Tom Wolfe was. You could be Gay Talese. I didn't know who Gay Talese was. I didn't know any of it. But I just knew how to do that thing. And it's like a weird...

It's like a weird talent to have. I don't know why I have it. I really don't. When did the Fred Rogers piece come in? That came out in 1998. I had been writing, you know, for national magazines. This is in the late 80s, early 90s. Written for Sports Illustrated, written for Life magazine. And I tried to write for GQ. And... The editor resigned and became the editor of Philadelphia Magazine and killed the story. And one day, you know, the phone rang and it was David Granger.

who I didn't know. He didn't know me. He goes, but listen, I just want to tell you, I'm, you know, looking through the pile here, and I came across the story that you had written about oysters. And I just want to tell you, I think it's really good. And I was like... Great. And he was like, no, no, you misunderstand. I really, really like this story, and I think that this is like your voice is the voice that I want to, you know, sort of...

used to sort of build what I want to do with the magazine. Yeah. And then so David and I worked together, and then we just ripped off just like one story after another that were just like...

Boom, boom. You know, I mean, everything was just, I mean, writing, I mean, I wouldn't call it easy, but I mean, that's when I wrote The Abortionist, you know, a story that... had no had no errors you know there was there was not a single they didn't even change the punctuation of that story and so it was it was sort of easy and then you know um we were going to do

this hero's issue for Esquire. And there was a guy on the staff who thought it would be a really great, interesting, and sort of funny idea to have, like, the bad boy. go and profile the good guy. Right. The Presbyterian minister. The Presbyterian minister, Fred Rogers. And, you know, I went, he happened to be, like the weekend that I called him, he happened to be...

in his apartment on 56th Street and Esquire's on 55th. You know, and I walked around the block and I knocked on the door and, you know, this... Man in a Robe answers. It's like, hi, Tom. He's Fred Rogers. And he was so remarkably adept at knowing what people needed at a certain time. when he was interacting with them and giving them just that. You're saying one-on-one. And so, yeah, I'm saying one-on-one. I'm saying with every freaking human being he met.

somehow he had a sense of what that person needed from him. I saw it. I saw it with little kids. I saw it with homeless people on the street. You know, I've seen it. I just saw it with myself. Like telepathic? I don't know if I believe in telepathy, but certainly... Tapped into something deeper. Something like an emotional awareness. Wow. That was just, you know, was a superpower on his part. And so him, you know, greeting me at the door in a bathroom...

in his apartment was definitely like, I trust you. That he trusted you or you trusted him. No, he trusted me, which is what I was desperate. I didn't even know it. But I was desperate for that at the time. I was desperate to be trusted. And so, you know, I started writing about Fred. And, you know, it ended... That whole story ended, you know, as I wrote it, it ended with us praying. And I just felt, I felt something give way in me.

It's interesting because, you know, I mean, I could talk about it on a spiritual level, obviously. I'd love to go there. But I think that I guess what I'm trying to say is that at that moment... I sort of let the spiritual sort of enter my writing, I think. And this is not to say that I, you know, I mean, a lot of people are like, oh, you know...

He completely, you know, he, you know, you were like sort of converted, you know, it's not, it's not that. But I just found another dimension to work in. So I have always been like super, super. haunted and mystified and interested in the phenomenon of human evil. Like, why people do the things that we do, why we are... created with that capability. I've never understood it. I've never known it. I've seen it, plenty of it firsthand.

I've always written about it. But that's what I was writing at the time. Before I met Fred, I was sort of writing about that exclusively, I would say. About human evil. About human evil. And when I met Fred, I mean, the lesson that I learned from Fred is that, you know, it was, you know, goodness is just as much a mystery as evil is. We have no more...

reason to be good than we have to be evil, and yet we are. And it's a mystery, and I've been able to write about it in a lot of, you know, different ways. Can you tell me more about... tapping into the spiritual dimension, like what it's like to open that door or invite that in. I know it's more of an ethereal topic, but I'm...

What does that feel like to you? We have the advantage that we're talking about writing here rather than just sort of, you know, things. But I think that writing, you know, it... You can talk about so many things through talking about writing, which is what happens to be when we go here. You start a show that does this. Yeah, exactly. But like, for instance, when I started writing...

falling man i mean people thought like how could you do this why would you do this to these people that it was cruel that it was cruel yeah and that it was insensitive insensitive offensive I mean, all sorts of different things. And I mean, I went into that story, you know, worried about that. Is this, you know...

Is this bad boy Tom, you know, coming back? I worked with a guy named Andrew Tchaikovsky who was an Esquire researcher. He had left the magazine, but he was doing freelance, and we, you know, worked. arm-in-arm on that story. You know, it was amazing. He did as much of the research as I did. And he should get that credit. But, I mean, we were spending...

You know, every night we were like, we had lists of people who were among the dead. We had lists and we were, you know, calling these families and saying, what do you think happened to your loved one? And, I mean, I thought that people were just going to hang up the phone. And that's not what happened. What happened was that they were like...

What do you know? Can you tell us? Do you know anything about my son? Do you know anything about my husband? Do you know anything about this person who means so much to me? Do you know how they died? Because they weren't getting the truth. And so we kept on going. And so when the story came out, I mean, I try to be objective and I try to do my... whatever it is I do as a writer. But, I mean, I wrote that story with as much compassion and, for want of a better word, love.

that I could. And that story came out, you know, it threaded that needle of being sort of, you know, boundary breaking. But at the same time, you know, there's something really, really human about it. And I don't think I would have written that story that way. I don't think I could have written The Falling Man without Fred Rogers being in my life.

When you said about Fred that he had this gift of speaking to adults like children and speaking to children like adults, what do you make of that? Like he had like, you know, you see like these like insects that have like these long antennae, these long feelers, and that's what he was, but it was for human vulnerability, emotion.

I mean, he just had that. I mean, people would... You know, there was this time when I met him in Penn Station. He was being filmed. He was being filmed with Maya Lin, who had created a clock.

for the ceiling in in penn station and he had been he had come to see that and to write and to do a program about myelin but we went out into the street, like when the shooting was done, when the filming was over, we went out into the street and just all of these people just came up to him and wanted to talk to him.

Big, little, small, everybody. Yeah. And the thing that I'll always remember is just this one moment where he's sort of squatting down and this, you know, kid comes up to him and talks to him. And then another, like, I think like an adult, I think, kind of squats down to... And everybody's, like, whispering into Fred's ear. It's not like they're just, like, yakking. They're just, like, talking to him, like...

in New York City in the most personal way you could ever imagine. And he looks at me and he goes, oh, Tom, you wouldn't believe the things I hear. You know, wow. I don't want to make this a psychology session, but I mean, I think it's obvious, given the kind of father I had, the role that Fred would... would play, you know, in my life. He was sort of an alternate kind of role model to have other than this guy who had skinned the color of A1's days called Steak Sauce.

Tell me about this of this sort of the scattering of your brain so often and sort of flipping between different things. And you're like, I don't know how to think without writing. That's why I do it. Right. writing is this that's true it's like hammering the pillar into the ground i'm going to tie myself to the pillar and i'm just going to think about one thing over and over and over musicians you know back in the day you know they were always looking for the

you know, the tonic chord. And, you know, writing, I'm always looking for the tonic chord where sort of, you know... What's a tonic chord? That's where all the discordant harmonies come into, are resolved in a single... ba-boom, you know, at the end of Beethoven or whatever. Right, right, right. And so that's what I'm always sort of, you know, looking for is some sort of, you know, resolution to the stuff that gnaws at me.

You know, it wouldn't be that hard to draw a biography of me from the stories that I've written about other people. That you're embedded. or that I'm not embedded in. You know, I mean, there's a lot of stories that I wrote that were just about subjects that, you know, that haunted me.

I go from one to the other, you know. It seems like when you're writing, there's this emotional odyssey. I'm shit. I'm a genius. I'm shit. I survived. Yeah, so that, I said that. I was at a class, I think I was teaching a class in Macon, Georgia at Mercer College, and they had a narrative journalism. And somebody said, can you name the stages of writing? And I said, yeah, sure. And I was completely not prepared for this, but I said, I'm shit.

I'm a genius. I'm shit. I survived. I've never done better than that, to talk about the stages of writing for me. When you feel those I'm shit negative emotions? Yeah. How does that show up? Well, most people never see that because, you know, I'm an inveterate rewriter. I went from, you know... being completely dedicated to writing perfect first drafts and sometimes achieving that, as in The Abortionist, to...

rewriting over and over and over and over again. So I've become sort of a maniacal, almost to a fault, I would say, rewriter. And I would say almost to a fault because it makes me take longer to find what I'm looking for because I'm always sort of willing to sort of beat it up. you know, you know, explode, you know, you write, you write, you write, then you explode it. But I'm always amazed, I'm always amazed with writing how long it takes.

And what it takes to get to, like, the thing. Yeah. The thing, you know? Yes, yes. Because there's so many stories that I go out and... I have a great time. I have all this information. It's interesting. And then, you know, I write. And for whatever reason, that stuff is not in there. What happens to it? Is it some sort of block? Is it some sort of thing where you're pushing away from that final resolution? I don't know.

But you feel that the thing is there, but you can't express it. And yet you don't. But a lot of times I don't even know that it's there. One of the last stories I did for Esquire. was a story about a young woman who ran out of Walmart shoplifting in Marietta, Georgia, close to where I live. And... She runs out. The security people chase her. They don't catch her. She just runs and runs. And she's never seen again. And so that's the last story I wrote for.

Esquire. And, you know, I did a version of it that I thought was not great, but okay. Handed it to David Granger and, you know, David... Grainger gave me the last bit of Grainger-esque or Graingerism advice that I could get, which was, he read the piece and he was like... So when you first told me about this story, you told me that everybody who sort of comes in contact with it, everybody who hears about this story becomes obsessed with it. It's spooky.

He was like, why is that? And I said, I guess because it's a mystery. And he hands the draft back to me and he goes, write that. And I did. And it's just, I don't know why the original draft didn't have all the good stuff in it. And so I think that's one of the tests of writing, whether you're writing a book or whether you're writing a magazine story.

Did you get the good stuff in? It's so easy for some reason not to get the good stuff in or to leave it out. I don't know why. So when I wrote my book, I wrote, I think the first... abandoned draft of it was 230,000 words. And I knew that I had to abandon it. because i had yet i had written nearly quarter of a million words and i had yet to introduce many of the main characters i mean that's a really bad sign when you're writing and you haven't

brought in the people who make the thing work. I don't even know what that draft was like anymore. It's gone. It's, you know, frittered in the wind. But I had to find a way.

to get at what made me sit down and be interested in the story in the first place. Yeah, we have this right now because we're working on a series. We're making a... a series about culture and we've just finished six episodes and you know we probably have i don't know we probably have 40 000 words yeah and we're super excited about it we think there's a lot of really good stuff there and yet

For all the individual episodes and even the series itself, if we were to ask ourselves, what is it about? We're still not quite sure. And we know it's there. We know that the thing that it's about is there. And sometimes it's a question of.

kind of getting rid of all the fluff and like it was kind of lying at like a needle in a haystack the entire time. And sometimes it's kind of this emergent property of, oh, I didn't realize that it was about that. Well, have you tried the this is a story about sentences? What do you mean, this is a story about this? Have you written a whole paragraph that begins with, every sentence begins with, this is a story about. And you just do it over and over and over. Yeah.

Do that. I've never thought of that. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's about, this is a story about joy. It's about the feeling one gets when this. It's about this. It's about that. It's about that. I have written a bunch. of stories where that has saved me. A bunch of stories, including, like, one of the ones that won the National Magazine Award back in the 90s, The Rapist Says He's Sorry. This is the story about...

It's about this. It's about that. And, you know, and it feels like it feels a little bit writing 101. It feels childish. It feels childish. It feels like it feels corny. It feels like, you know, Tom sends me to second grade, you know. But it works. I'm telling you it works. You do anything else like that? Oh, I do everything. I have every single sort of, you know, my book is divided into three books. It's divided book one, book two, and book three.

I wrote all of book three in the second person. Huh. And then before I handed it in, edited that out, changed it back to first person. Book 1. In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man. Book 2. Now that I've reached that age, I try to do all those things the best I can. Book 3.

No matter how I try, I find my way to the same old jam. Do you know where those words come from? No. Okay, that's from the title and all the titles of the subsequent books inside the book are from the... first song of the first Led Zeppelin album. That's how it begins. In the days of my youth, I was told what it means. Anyway, so that's... But I wrote book three in second person. I write, I mean, I've done so many different things. I sometimes write all in caps. I sometimes curse a lot.

I sometimes do question and answers. I've done so many different things and so many tricks to try to get to what I'm trying to write about.

You seem free to me as a writer in a very deep way. I free myself as a writer. How do you do that? All those crazy... So give me more of them. This is about, this is about. Have you ever tried to write something just in second person? It's the best, it's the easiest way to write. It cuts out so much extraneous stuff. I don't even know why, it just does. Just curse your ass off and just take all the motherfuckers out after you're done. Anything to get you going, anything to push you past.

your point of resistance it's like when i think of writing that sucks the two words that come to mind are boring and timid and it's boring because it's timid right and so there's something that you're doing that gets you out of timid and fear. And you have a fearlessness about you as a writer, both in terms of the subjects that you choose and in terms of how you go about those subjects that I'm kind of desperate to tease out here.

I think that one of the best things that you can do is challenge yourself via the sentence. Be brutally honest. Be brutally, brutally honest and try to say the thing that you're not supposed to say and then build. build the story out of that. You challenge yourself with that, and then you let the rest of the work sort of live up to that, live up to that challenge. I mean, you don't...

I used to think that you have to, like, if you didn't offend somebody, you know, you were doing it wrong. And I don't believe that anymore. But I think that, you know, to be as brutally honest as you can... not just for the story, but for yourself as a writer, it will, you can't write timid that way. If you write something sort of that you shouldn't write.

or people tell you that you shouldn't write it, it changes everything else. You don't have to keep it. But that's a challenge to yourself. It's a challenge to yourself, yeah. Yeah, it's the timid thing. You got the anti-timid sauce. That had the A1 skin. You got the anti-timid sauce. But that was there for some reason from the beginning. Okay, I admit it. I wanted to skewer him. For some reason, that was there. And so that's confrontational right there. It's confrontational of...

it was confrontational of myself, and it was confrontational of the guy. I mean, the thing that's cool about that sentence, okay, I admit it, I want to skewer him. Boom. Instantly, we're connected to you as a writer. OK, there is a human being here. We're with it. We're with you. All right. Second thing is, yeah, this is the God honest truth, instant conveying of trust. And the third thing is, I mean, skewer is a hell of a word.

You know, that's twist the knife and fricking get after someone. And like you're saying, that begins with something that you're not supposed to say that. And it's not you're not supposed to say that like you're revealing some sort of politically incorrect truth. It's actually something much more ordinary and dare I say more profound than that, which is an emotion, a sense that you're having about whatever the subject is that you're not supposed to have. But that is.

real and it's true that becomes the intro and all of a sudden the frame has shifted and we're along for the roller coaster yeah and i didn't skewer him i wanted to but i didn't i liked him right this was about who There's a guy named Ron Hudspeth, and he was the nightlife columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It was called, at the time, it was called Three Dot Journalism, where, you know, seen at a certain restaurant, you know.

He just kind of dot, dot, dot. He would write whole columns where just sort of disparate things were connected by ellipses. What matters with endings? I really want my stories to be written.

Like, you know, when we were at, when I was at Esquire, we deemed it a failure if we ended a story on a quote. You know. I don't feel that way exactly anymore. I've sort of gotten beyond that, I think. And I've definitely, at ESPN, definitely ended a story or two on a quote. Yeah. But I'm definitely a right to the last sentence kind of person. But like, but like what's an, what's an ending? I don't, so I know what a beginning is. I know.

That's a story. You write a sentence that enables you to write the story. I'm not looking to draw in a reader. I am looking to set some sort of bar for myself. I write a first sentence that enables me to go on. And so I guess the converse of that is that I end it. I write the last sentence that it enables me to stop.

were invited to columbia or something and you know you go to a writing class and they're saying hey tom you know we want to do what you've done what do you tell them is the most the most important things to know as aspiring writers? Do you focus on The grammar and the mechanics. Do you focus on, hey, you got to do great research. You focus on, you know, if you can find the right story, that story will tell itself. Do you focus on, hey, you got to develop your own voice, your own style.

I try to do the things that enable me to tell the truth. That's really what I'm looking to do. Everything else, all my tricks to sort of get beyond blocks. all of my completely improvisatory structures, all of those things I think are just... there to enable me to sort of get at some sort of thing that I was trying to say all along. You know, are you able to write a story that allows you to say the thing? You know, we talk about that.

It's interesting. So Susan Orlean, in her really, really beautiful book, Joyride, says there are basically two kinds of riders. There is the rider who... has a story that they want to tell and that there's the writer who feel that other people tell them the stories and they communicate that to the reader. And Susan...

plants herself firmly in the latter category. I really think I'm like sort of like stranded, stranded between both. I mean, I think that there is something in stories that I want to say. But I don't I don't know what that story I don't know what that is like I didn't know like when I saw the picture of of The falling man when I saw the picture of the person I think is is Jonathan Briley, you know hurtling through the sky

I didn't have an idea of how I wanted that story to be or how I wanted it to end. I just knew that there was something that I wanted to get at with it. And it sort of puts me between Susan's two categories a little bit. I don't have like an ideological axe to grind, political axe to grind. I don't think I have any of that. But I definitely, there's something I want to say and I'll know it when I see it.

I'm sorry if this is a very elementary question, and I word it's a stupid question, but why is it important to tell the truth? Why is that the core thing, the driving force? Well, so I grew up in a family of secrets. And when you grow up in a family of secrets, and when your father is keeping a huge secret... from you and the rest of your family. Not so much the world. I mean, the world pretty much knew who my dad was, but we sure didn't. And...

You know, from the time I was a little kid, I knew without being told not to speak about these things. I don't know how old I was, but... There's a time when I was with my dad, and he was like, son, do you want to go and get a hot fudge sundae? i was like yeah dad i'd love to get a hot fudge sunday i mean it was five maybe seven max yeah i would love to get a hot fudge a little kid it was a little kid you know

Okay, we'll go and get a hot fudge sundae. Get dressed up, I'll take you for a hot fudge sundae. Some nice chocolate sauce. Chocolate, you know. I'm going to go to Act 4. We were going to go to a place in Southampton called Act 4. And we're headed there. And on the way, my father stops to visit a woman who had a house in Shinnecock Hills. and i was you know asked to to wait outside the door was locked and i couldn't i there i had in the in the book

I leave a comic because I was a total comic book nut at the time. I left a comic book inside, tried to get back inside, and the door was locked. Well, did I know what exactly had happened? No. Did I know that whatever it is that it happened, I was not supposed to talk about? 100%. and then you know my father came out because he was visiting a woman and so he and he came out you know with the woman and you know they both sort of made a fuss over me and i was i knew i couldn't tell my mom about it

And we go off to act four and we have the hot fudge sundae and the day ends as it's supposed to. But something happened in there that wasn't supposed to. And I couldn't talk about it. I never talked about it until I wrote my book. I think that when you have that kind of background and that sort of upbringing, the question of secrets and truth, it's a huge question for me. And I think that if you look at...

a lot of my writing, there's that. There's a secret. There's something that's not supposed to be said that I try to say. Did comic books influence your writing? Oh, yeah. At all? For sure.

They were everything. I loved comic books, man. Yeah. And I started reading them really, really young. I think I was three when I first started reading comic books. And, you know, they weren't... like i always looked at like kids books i always thought they were baby books because like you know to me the real action was in was in comic books because comic books you know there was always a a transformation of sorts

Everybody had a, well, Superman, Clark Kent had a secret. The secret's that he's Superman. Bruce Wayne had a secret. The secret, you know. was that he was Batman, and what was he trying to do? He was trying to make something right that happened wrong, which was that his parents were killed right in front of him. And so he had to live with that. And in this other world that he would transform into, he could make things right.

So it was like the narrative arc, the stories that were in comic books. Like when I asked you that, I thought you were going to say something about the visuals, the characters, the drama, whatever. No, you're like, it's about the transformation, the story and the redemption was the word that came to mind. Matt Murdock becomes Daredevil. Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man because he lets the hood...

go, that he has spider powers, but he lets this hood get away because he just basically doesn't give a shit. And that hood goes and kills his uncle, Uncle Ben. And then he lives the rest of his life, you know, between these two poles as Peter Parker and as Spider-Man. And that was just like, from the very beginning, that was just really fascinating for me. I thought this sentence really... caught my attention writing is a tug of war of souls in 2013

there's this piece where you talk about how modern science has proven that we don't have souls. But then right after that, you say, but as narrative nonfiction writers, what we do is honor the soul. And I mean, we've been talking about... contradiction and tension and the reconciliation. And I think that's a, that's one that speaks to the core of your work of like the objective thing is saying this, but like when I read your stuff, I'm like, this man is speaking to the soul is speaking to the.

beyond rational parts of reality. And we were talking about the spiritual door that opens. Like you feel those things when you read your work. The thing that's interesting about hearing that now in 2025. is that, you know, you can't quite free those words from the horrible shadow of AI. To me, the idea that, you know... ai can can write is sort of founded on the notion that there is no soul to me you write

with something of a soul. And the fact that science says there is no soul and that the idea of the soul really doesn't make a lot of sense. inner tom or inner david you know it's kind of it's kind of kind of odd um but i can i can tell you so in in shelter island

You know, there's a shed out in the backyard. This at your house out there. Yeah. And what's one of the reasons that we bought the house is that there's a shed where the guy, the previous owner, used to have his business and do his business. And... That shed was a dump for a really, really long time. You know, people used to come to the house, oh, I can't wait to see your writer's shed. And then they'd kind of look at it and go, oh.

Let's go back to the house. It was kind of... Get a little thirsty. Drink water. But we finally got it fixed a little while ago. One of the things that I had, I had these rows of bookshelves installed in the wall. And, you know, you can fit a lot of books in there. And I had a lot of books. And so the big question I had to decide was, like, how am I going to organize the books? Alphabetical?

Type? I don't know. I had this, like, idea, like, I was going to do it chronologically. Like, the books were going to be in there chronologically. And so it begins with the Bible and ends with Finnegan's Wake, you know. That's cool. Yeah. Or maybe even pre, maybe even pre-Bible. You know, there's like some stone. The Epic of Gilgamesh. Yeah, exactly. How did you know? Yeah, but yeah, exactly. And...

And the really interesting thing about doing that is that the organization of those books tells its own story. And the story is of humanity. Everything it does is wrong, essentially. I mean, we fuck up again and again and again. Any piece of technology that we develop, we either got from or put to use in war. Any sort of religion that we talk about is, you know, is A, wrong, and B, a tool of tyranny. I mean, we fuck up again and again and again. And yet, for every fuck up...

There is a writer, somebody, who is grappling with the fuck up and bearing witness to the pain. and the suffering, and the joy, and the hope, and the whole freaking shit show. And you see it. I can tell you the whole story. I mean, like, modernism comes from World War I. beat America. Jack Kerouac comes out of World War II. Don fucking DeLillo comes out of Vietnam and, you know, the...

the rise of the technology state from that. You can just see, like, you know, writers are there to address this flow of history. And I would say that it's like the only thing, maybe. that humanity has ever really done right is bear witness to its own thing. And, you know, I, you know. I think anybody who writes, I'm not going to say, oh, I'm bearing witness. I don't want to be pretentious. But I think that anybody who is writing seriously from the heart is bearing witness to this.

onward stampane of this blind genius being that is humanity, you know, and that's the soul, is the part of us that... is willing to and in fact needs to bear witness to the truth, to ourselves, to God, all of it. That's the Saul. And you see it, you see the soul do its work over the course of human history. And I think what I'm winding up into is like a long anti-AI speech, because like, why the fuck?

Would we ever want to give that up? It's like the one thing that we can do. And the one thing that we're, you know, we've been given that gift. You know, we're... We're driven out of Eden, man. And yet the soul is there at some sort of level to give meaning to this. seemingly meaningless current of atrocity. And yet we can do this. And that's what it's all about, Charlie Brown. That was a great conversation. Wow.