Phil Hoad (@phload) is a journalist based in the south of France and his latest piece is featured in The Atavist. It’s titled “Cat and Mouse.”
It tells the story of two animal rights activists and their drive to find who they think is a serial killer of cats, rabbits, and foxes, but mainly cats.
In this bonus episode, I speak with lead editor Jonah Ogles (@jonahogles) about Phil’s pitch, what makes certain pitches have legs while others don’t, and the importance of figuring out how to end things. It’s much like when I spoke with Atavist editor-in-chief Seyward Darby.
This isn’t a tip on writing, but then again maybe it is.
I won’t bore you with what you likely know, but social media as we know it: Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and others are doing way more harm than good. The details of which I can’t and won’t get into here.
My real quandary is how do we get notices and broadcast our work if we’re in the digital sphere. After all, I make podcasts and blog, so how can I get the word out if I’m not findable in the context of social media?
Jackie MacMullan, the legendary basketball writer, is on the podcast to talk about judging what we know to be the final installment of The Best American Sports Writing.
Watching “Chopped” several years ago, I remember one young chef talk about his time coming up in the kitchen. He obviously had skill. He was on Chopped.
But I suspect like most prestigious schools and the entitlement that comes with having graduated with what amounts to a worthless piece of paper, there’s a tendency even in the chef ranks to think you’re above a certain task.
Not this guy. I wish I knew his name.
In one of his testimonials, and I’m paraphrasing, he said, “If there was a pile of onions I had to chop, I was going to be the best damn chopper of onions.”
Man, I loved that sentiment. He wasn’t “above” cutting onions. How many thousands of onions had he chopped to that point? This was a job the dishwasher could do in a pinch. Here’s a trained chef being put on onion duty and he embraced it. The mundanity of chopping hundreds of onions in a shift, hunched over a pile, trying to make them as uniform slices and dices as possible, no doubt eyes burning the entire time.
In our work, no matter our experience, our privilege, our education, how can we embrace chopping onions? How can we get lost in the most banal of tasks that have overreaching implications?
He wasn’t really chopping onions. He was become more skilled with his knife. In the meditative trance of cutting onions, he was writing recipes. He was dreaming. He was developing rigor.
Again, he wasn’t really chopping onions. Not the winners, not the people seeking to make change, anyway.
There’s a certain artistic suicide and artistic murder that takes place when you reach a certain level.
My case study is Metallica, my favorite band, my home team, as I like to say.
Their first four records were very heavy, thrash, genre-defining. They could have ridden that wave for their entire careers and done OK for themselves.
Instead, for their fifth album, they pivot by writing shorter songs, cleaner-sounding songs, still heavy, but you wouldn’t necessarily call them heavy metal anymore.
They committed a kind of artistic suicide in order to live. It was more of a murder suicide, because they knew they’d be killing off much of the audience it took them ten years to build, too.
On Rob Harvilla’s podcast about the songs of the 90s that define us, he had a conversation with the chef David Chang about The Black Album. Here’s a long quote from Chang:
I love growth in artistry. I love the fact that they were able to kill themselves in order to reach a new audience. They knew if they wanted to reach a different level, to push themselves out of their comfort zone. The hardest thing for them to do wasn’t to be more hard core and play it faster. It was how do I make someone that hates heavy metal, love heavy metal. That to me was a wildly difficult challenge and I admire that tremendously. I love when anybody tries to shoot for the moon and it could have really been just terrible. It wasn’t. I love that when you can grow and do something different and I don’t know if they get enough credit for doing that. The Black Album to me is what I always explain to someone who’s becoming a chef for the first time and they’re like getting out of the just trying to be cool phase.
The hard thing isn’t to make five people happy. The hard thing is how do you make as many people as possible simultaneously.
60 Songs That Explain the 90s
And that’s the balance. How much to you scratch your own itch vs. creating art with the empathy of an end user, a listener, a reader in mind?
Again, David Chang says:
The hardest thing is to kill yourself, metaphorically speaking as an artist and you don’t have to, but that’s part of the word I resonate with, how do you tell new stories, when you don’t it hurts like hell. I think we should celebrate more things like the Black Album. I hope we have more of them.
Ibid
What Metallica did was they played to edges at first, way out on the fringe. They went super narrow, and it was only then that they could reel in a bit and become more generalists. It can never be the other way around where you try to appease the masses then get granular. The key to growing any audience is by going way out there, building trust, building true fans because you see them out on the edge, too.
“The times that I write best, the times that I’m able to write a lot are the times that I’ve got a fire under me. And that is what happens with a deadline. That is what happens when it’s 10 p.m. and you’ve written like, 150 words that day,” Claire says on the podcast.
Damon’s all over the place. He’s talkin’ TED, he’s coaching, he’s almost written thirty books, he’s the primary caretaker of his two young boys, all of that and he’s one of the most generous people I’ve ever met. I think you’ll agree.
In a recent conversation I had with the writer, coach, and entrepreneur Damon Brown, we talked about how the muse doesn’t exist. That there’s no substitute for putting the butt in the chair and doing the work.
This is true.
But the muse can exist, but we mustn’t wait for it.
If it shows at all, it’ll be because we were at the right place at the right time doing the work, like a bolt of lightning.
In a sense, we need to anticipate the storm and plant our work station under the tallest tree so that, should the muse strike from the clouds (or does lightning strike up from the ground?), we are there. We are always there because the work is the reward. We write to find the muse. We don’t wait for the muse in order to write.
Also, if there’s a storm, please don’t sit under the tallest tree. This is merely a metaphor.
