Episode 490: Seeing the Fish and the Tank with Jeff Chang – Home of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

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“When I got back to [writing], it was like an athlete or a martial artist coming back to the practice, and the endorphins start running back. And you remember the joy that you had in it, also the struggles of it, but you’re back in it, and then I couldn’t be stopped.” — Jeff Chang, author of Water, Mirror, Echo.

Today we have Jeff Chang (@zentronix), and what a great conversation this was. He’s the author of the beefy biography Water, Mirror, Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America. It’s published by Mariner Books, so we share a publisher here. Pretty cool.

He’s also the author of Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, which was the winner of the American Book Award. Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America, and We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation. That gives you a little taste.

So a little more on Jeff … he’s a writer, host, and cultureal organizer known for his work in culture, politics, the arts, and music. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, and the Believer, among many others. He has a great Substack at zentronix.substack.com and you can follow him on Instagram @zentronix. You can learn more about Jeff at jeffchang.net, Parting shot on gate keeping

CNFin’ Snippets

“The book was signed many, many years ago, so long ago that I don’t even want to go back and look at the contract, because I had, I was working for another publisher. I had books due to another publisher. I literally had, like, three books that were due to this other publisher before I could begin work on this one. And then life intervened, and the world intervened, the George Floyd protests jumped off, and the pandemic jumped off, and all kinds of stuff happening to our communities, our Asian and Pacific Islander communities, jumped off. And I wasn’t able to get to the book until the last three years. But what I was able to extricate from myself from a nine to five, and then get back to the the regular pace of writing.”

“For about 13 years or so, I was stealing writing time. I was working full time jobs, and I would work at four in the morning. I’d get up every morning, maybe like a runner or a martial artist for that matter, and literally write for two hours every morning. And you get good stuff some days, and some days you’re like, you don’t want to leave. And then some days you’re just like, just staring at the screen. But that discipline, like you said, right? That thing of like this, is part of my routine. ‘I get up and eat breakfast, I get up and eat breakfast and write, and I get in the car and drive.'”

“There were years, literally, where I wasn’t able to pick the book back up. When I got back to it, it was like, again, maybe, like an like an athlete or a martial artist coming back to the practice, and the endorphins start running back. And you remember the joy that you had in it, also the struggles of it, but you’re, you’re back in it, and then I couldn’t be stopped.”

“I can definitely say that it took me a very long time to find my writing voice, maybe because I was stealing time, or that kind of thing. And also just because at the beginning you don’t know what you don’t know, and then once you start knowing what you don’t know, then you feel like you have a big hill to climb, but again, it’s a step at a time, and it’s one of those hills that you never reach the top of, which is okay.”

“Writer’s block, a lot of times is just that fear of being able to put the word on the page because it might sound silly or it doesn’t meet your standards, high, exacting standards you’ve had. And I’ve had books where I haven’t been able to write for months, and I’ve had to learn that it’s it’s not about that. It’s about the showing up, and it’s about the coming back.”

“The way that I like to write, which is sort of the way I describe it, is sort of seeing the fish and the tank. There’s a sort of famous psychological experiment that was done in which people were asked to look at a fish tank and to describe what they saw. And one group described the fish and all the color and the scales and how the fish are moving and that kind of stuff. And the other group, it broke very cleanly into these two groups. The other group was looking not just at the fish, but at the tank, and the rocks that were in there and the seaweed that they might have planted in, and, oh, this, there’s some fish flakes that are left there that they didn’t eat or whatever. And I’ve always been the latter. I’ve been that kind of person.”

Jeff’s Rec

Get back to the writing life

Parting Shot: On Gatekeeping

Listen, I’m not one to begrudge anybody making a buck, especially writers, and especially freelance journalists but I find so much of the paywalling of stuff from writers looking to dish that great advice alarmingly dismaying. This gets into gatekeeping vs. getting paid maybe what you deserve for a service.

Let’s take a little bit of a detour. I have a niece who plays college soccer now. She’s a fine little player. Growing up, she was soccer-obsessed, skilled, and quick. She works hard at it and I believe it’s paid off to some extent. But here’s the thing: She benefited from a stay-at-home mother who could drive her all over the mid-Atlantic to showcases, and tournaments, and club teams, all the extracurricular playing time and coaching that is the purview of the privileged. She comes from money. A few summers ago, she was on a travel team that got play in Sweden. This was not cheap. I think you see where I’m going with this.

How many talented, worthy, hard-working athletes on merit alone are or were every bit as good as my niece, but because they might come from, say, a dual-income home of overworked parents they can’t join these club teams, they can’t be driven all over the state, or the region, let alone afford to travel abroad for what was essentially a glorified showcase.

We’re seeing it in baseball, too. It’s very pay-to-play so the people who make aren’t necessarily the best, but the ones with the most resources to manifest their talents. Imagine if all the talent got to benefit from this attention.

And so I see it in the writing world, too. How many brilliant voices are going unheard, or uncultivated because they can’t afford a residency, or a workshop, certainly an MFA, these status symbols that help give its alums a leg up perhaps. And some people might argue that if you have skin in the game you take it more seriously. Maybe.

But when I see on Substack a lot of, let’s say the “writer guru types” paywalling their best counsel, I often bristle. Why not give that away? Their platforms are robust enough that they can leverage that to get money from deep–pocketed publishers, or their university gigs, or whatever. There are ways you can still get paid without nickel-and-diming your audience, the most privileged of your audience.

Some of you might say, “Well, BO, don’t you have Patreon? How is that any different?” To that I’d say, yeah, it’s more of a tip jar. None of my content is paywalled, and I do offer actual face-to-face time with the three upper tiers, which is an incredible bonus. As many of the patrons know, I often go above and beyond their tiers, and most are just happy to contribute a few bucks. Very few take me up on my offers.

And I think of Pitch Club and how I’ll never paywall it, though I may accept pledges, again, more of a tip-jar deal. I don’t want someone — perhaps an upstart freelancer, or a freelancer with very little disposable income, or an under-privileged freelancer — getting priced out of a learning experience that might actually help them make a go of it.

But Pitch Club takes a lot of time and if I put up a paywall, shouldn’t I try to get what I’m worth? THAT’s the central tension of doing this kind of work. Much of the work we do is for free. It’s to get us attention that we can leverage into paying gigs, speaking gigs, writing gigs, maybe teaching gigs. At what point are we bleeding ourselves dry in service of a greater writing community? Shouldn’t we get ours?

And this becomes a personal decision that you shouldn’t take lightly. For me, in my life, at this current moment of relative matrimonial harmony, I’m OK not paywalling my newsletters or podcast. If I can get 10,000 email subs, I can get just about any publisher to get me a book contract for my lane, which is primarily biography, and sports biography at that. That, to me, is currency. So by you trusting me with your email, my attractiveness to publishers grows and I get paid. Also, if I’m giving away 99% of my shit for free, I also expect every five years or so that you will buy my books, multiple copies for you and friends. I think THAT’s fair.

This line of work shouldn’t only be the playing field for the privileged. It shouldn’t be pay to play, pay to learn, pay to write. It kinda pains me to think of all the languishing talent out there, be it athletic or artistic, who just need some help, someone to turn the light on, someone to light the path a bit, not to spoonfeed, but to say, Hey, this is the way. You still have to work at it, you still have to earn it, but the playing field needs to be leveled and doors shouldn’t have deadbolts.