In order to have a successful career in the this business…whether you’re writing, acting, directing, or producing, or whatever the case may be…
There are components that are necessary for that to come about. One is talent. You really do [need it]. You have to work hard and get educated and learn your craft and learn your business. Aside from that is personal development, patience, and perseverance, but there’s also a component that is necessary that’s the wild card…And that’s luck.
You have to have a healthy dose of luck to become successful. That’s just the way it is. You can’t prepare for it, but you can be ready for it if does come to you.
Speaking of luck, Breaking Bad was one of the greatest beneficiaries of said luck. The show had a cult following through four seasons, teetered on the brink of cancellation, yet was a masterpiece before it got barrels of attention. Here’s how Breaking Bad got lucky:
Between Seasons 4 and Season 5 it went on Netflix at the beginning of the Binge Watching Boom. This show was hyper-serialized to begin with so it leant itself to the Binge. This allowed the show to simmer and then instantly boil.
The writers delivered on what was one of the most satisfying final seasons in the history of television, this in an era that puts far too much weight and pressure on finales. RIP Lost.
“Surprise is one of the biggest weapons you have as a journalist to affect people emotionally.” — Brin-Jonathan Butler
“The juice for me with journalism is not money or recognition. My ego is tied into access.” — Brin-Jonathan Butler
Butler is one of the smartest people I’ve ever spoken with. There’s a level of thinking and depth you don’t often hear from someone who’s in their mid-30s. You expect it from, say, George Saunders, but listening to Butler speak was a treasure for me and I hope so for you.
Like Holland, Glenn Stout, and Charles Bethea, Butler never studied journalism, yet he’s one of the best at his craft. I sense a theme that some of the best at this craft aren’t journalists by trade, but people who have a keen sense for language, are widely read, and think long and hard about the work. They aim for impact, not a sound bite.
You should also listen to him on the Longform Podcast from back in 2014. Pairing that interview with mine will give you tremendous insight into Butler’s mind.
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Tennessee Williams, one of if not the most famous American playwright (please excuse me as I don’t know many playwrights), was, like many writers a struggling writer, until, of course, he was no longer.
Ed Norton, while being interviewed on The Tim Ferriss Show, spoke about Williams’ essay “The Catastrophe of Success,” which, I imagine, strikes a chord with anyone who has managed to fulfill his/her creative visions. But the overarching theme of the piece is emptiness, that “success,” as everybody else sees it, is hollow to the newly minted “successful” artist.
After the third anniversary of the Chicago opening of “The Glass Menagerie”, Williams had to face the fact that he was no longer the anonymous writer toiling away in obscurity, a writer who was likely bitter that he hadn’t reached a level of notoriety he deeply wanted. I’m imposing my feelings on him because I think it’s quite universal. One does crank away and wonder when the “big break” will come. For a select few the BB arrives and suddenly s/he must deal with an entirely new and foreign role: a successful writer.
Williams wrote in a New York Times essay in November of 1947 that:
The sort of life that I had had previous to this popular success was one that required endurance, a life of clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers to every inch of rock higher than the one caught hold of before, but it was a good life because it was the sort of life for which the human organism is created.
That climb, that struggle, as he so eloquently puts it, is the bane and the crutch, both hated and needed. The Struggle, if I may now capitalize it, keeps the artist hungry, both literally and fig.
Williams writes:
I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed. I was out on a level plateau with my arms still thrashing and my lungs still grabbing at air that no longer resisted. This was security at last.
One gets the sense that the security created a creative vertigo, a sense of imbalance that caught him off guard. It’s not supposed to be this way, is it?
He says:
I lived on room service. But in this, too, there was disenchantment. Some time between the moment when I ordered dinner over the phone and when it was rolled into my living room like a corpse on a rubber-wheeled table, I lost all interest in it. Once I ordered a sirloin steak and a chocolate sundae, but everything was so cunningly disguised on the table that I mistook the chocolate sauce for gravy and poured it over the sirloin steak.
One sympathizes, maybe, but it illustrates a key point: “success,” “arriving,” “making it,” are empty without the work. It’s the work that must continually ground the artist.
Needing to see the world differently, Williams had another eye surgery (his fourth) and set out for Mexico where he would write his most famous play. He says:
“Then, as a final act of restoration, I settled for a while at Chapala to work on a play called “The Poker Night,” which later became “A Streetcar Named Desire.” It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work is not only convenient but unavoidable.
Maybe it’s part delusion, or maybe it’s part of having a rosy outlook, but one can stem this disenchantment by coming up with a plan to combat the excesses of “success.” Maybe by assuming it will happen, practices can be put in place. It’s something worth thinking about so as not pour chocolate sauce over a perfectly seared sirloin.
Williams writes:
Security is a kind of death, I think, and it can come to you in a storm of royalty checks beside a kidney-shaped pool in Beverly Hills or anywhere at all this removed from the conditions that mad you an artist, if that’s what you are or were intended to be. Ask anyone who has experienced the kind of success I am talking about—What good is it? Perhaps to get an honest answer you will have to give him a shot of truth serum but the word he will finally groan is unprintable in genteel publications.
So what now? Williams would have you stop focusing on such things saying:
William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. “In the time of your life—live!” That time is short and it doesn’t return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.
“Putting in the work is confidence building.”—Greg Hanlon
“You struggle and struggle until the end product comes close to your original expectation. It’s all about the struggle.”—Greg Hanlon
Greg Hanlon is a crime editor at People Magazine and also a freelance sports writer. His piece “Sins of the Preacher” was anthologized in the Best American Sports Writing 2015 edition. His “The Many Crimes of Mel Hall” was a notable selection.
The subject at hand is Carrie Hagen, author of We is Got Him. She and I met at grad school where she began fleshing out the story for We is Got Him. It’s her first book, but you’d think it was her third or fourth. I’ll let her do the talking.
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“There’s no downplaying that moment for me. There’s no humble bragging that. It’s a straight-up brag, a measure of pride for me.”—Joe DePaulo
“I can’t abandon it. For me, I don’t know what else I’d do.” —Joe DePaulo
Maybe my favorite part of my conversation with Joe happens toward the end where we briefly touch upon drafting one particular writer in a Fantasy League for Narrative Nonfiction. I should’ve expanded on this, but I figure it’s going to be a much longer segment in the future.
This was a fun one. We talked about writers who inspired Joe and the harsh financial realties of the freelance game. (You can hear Episode 9 guest John Scheinman shed insights into this as well.)
I’ve shortened by Bookshelf for the Apocalypse segment to five books. Good stuff here.
Here’s Joe’s SB Nation Longform archive, which includes his profile on Mike Francesa, a story that earned Joe a notable selection in the 2014 volume of Best American Sports Writing.
So let’s get to it. Enjoy!
Hey, if you get a chance subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and throw down your email here at the website. I know that’s asking a lot, but it would mean a lot to me.
Sheri Booker’s memoir Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner City Funeral Home chronicles her near-decade long experience immersed the culture of death. Everything from picking up bodies to preserving them in the inner sanctum of Wylie Funeral Home.
In it Booker learns that death knows no age and that a funeral home is every bit a part of a community as a church. She also answers the age-old question of whether bodies move on the embalming table or not.
I get to interview some pretty cool people doing this humble little podcast. In this latest episode, I speak with Harrison Scott Key about his award-winning essay The Wishbone. The Wishbone won Creative Nonfiction’s Southern Sin essay contest. It is a wildly funny essay about his father bending the rules to win a football game … a pee-wee football game … in which he recruit’s his 14-year-old son—Harrison—to suit up as the team’s integral 11th player.
In this interview we talk about comedy writing and where Key developed his comedic sensibility. Enjoy and share!
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If you thought Hashtag #CNF was just a one-and-done kind of podcast, you’ve got another thing coming. I’m at least giving this thing a shot at a sophomore slump. Suckers.
To quote Ren from Ren and Stimpy, “Hark! Hark!” I’ve got a fun one for you today, and every day, so long as you click play.
Let’s face it, it had to be since author and Barrelhouse nonfiction editor Tom McAllister joined me to talk about Bring the Noise: The Best Pop Culture Essays from Barrelhouse Magazine.
McAllister is the author of Bury Me in My Jersey: A Memoir of My Father, Football, and Philly. He is also a professor of creative writing at Temple University and, most recently, is the editor of Bring the Noise. As McAllister riffs in his hilarious introduction, BTN is a treatise “on the the stupid things we love”. Yes, there’s the stupid things we love, but BTN shows how beautiful these stupid things are when in the hands of seventeen artful storytellers whose personal stories elevate popular culture to the adult table.
In it you’ll find professional wrestling, roller derby, Barry Bonds, stalking Aaron Grenier, and the “never-ending reality of The Hills” and, in true Barrelhouse style, the Patrick Swayze question.
I allowed myself one book purchase at AWP Boston. This was it. Best $15 I spent all weekend.
I recently finished “The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving”, a novel by New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Evison. It’s the best book I’ve read all year. The book is wildly funny and punishingly sad.
It’s a first-person narrative told by Ben Benjamin, a former stay-at-home dad who takes a course in caregiving. The workforce has passed him by and this is his way of rebuilding himself. He works for the sexually frustrated and tyrannical 19-year-old Trev, who is disabled by MD. Trev’s world is small, limited by his physical body. Ben is disabled in another way. The two are an unlikely pair. They need each other and they hit the road in their van for adventure, for deliverance.
I reached out to Evison on Facebook, asking him if he’d answer some questions. He said he’s on the road a lot, but if I emailed him he’d answer them as timely as he could. I emailed him some questions. He answered them in about an hour. Yeah, he’s that kind of guy. Few authors would do that.
As fate should have it, I went to Maryland this past weekend and he was a featured author at the Baltimore Book Fest. He’s approachable and has earned his lot. He said at the festival, “I succeeded by failing.”
Blogger Celeste Sollod interviewing Jonathan Evison at the Baltimore Book Fest. Evison wrote eight unpublished novels before “All About Lulu” came out in 2008. “I succeeded by failing,” he said.
BO: You’re last novel “West of Here” is big in body and scope, “RFC” is tighter and narrower in its focus, what was the motivation for the change in tactical story telling? “RFC” is deeply personal for you.
JE: Every novel I try to challenge myself in some new way. With “West of Here”, those challenges were formal and structural. With The Revised Fundamentals, the challenges were emotional. I had to dig up a lot of old bones and strew them about, plum a lot of emotional depths, etc. In the end, it was nothing less than cathartic.
BO: Ben is broken. How did you come to nursing/caregiving for Ben to rebuild himself?
JE: My life was in the shit-can ten years ago. My first wife left me for a surfing Buddhist, I was working at an ice cream stand, and I was sitting on eight unpublished books. There were a couple of years that were just a blur. I took a night course in caregiving, which really helped turn my life around. Caring for others while I was barely able to care for myself, built me back up into something resembling a human being.
BO: Trev’s orbit is small, to expand it without risk, he watches the Weather Channel and puts pins on a map, how important was it for him to break free? Did you need a physically limited person for Ben to feel needed again?
JE: Man, I did everything within my power NOT to write a road novel—I was really resistant to the idea. You can feel me trying to subvert the road novel for the first hundred pages. Finally, I just had to give in. The characters made me. They needed the road to deliver them. I’d say Trev and Ben are equally limited. While Trev is physically disabled, Ben is emotionally and spiritually bereft. Also, I think they care for each other equally. Ben needs Trev every bit as Trev needs Ben. Wait, did I answer the question?
BO: How did you approach the writing? Ben has a crushingly sad history and that is carefully parsed out. How did you approach that strategy instead of just dumping it on the reader?
JE: I wanted Ben to earn the reader’s respect. I didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for any of my characters, not right from the get-go. I wanted to show them warts and all. Structurally, I always visualized this novel as an artichoke, where the reader peels back the layers of armor to get to the heart of the thing. Handling this just about any other way risked being mawkish, I think.
BO: How did you go about assembling this ensemble for the road trip?
JE: I think my unconscious mind did most of the heavy lifting. The cast just seemed to appear inevitably along the way. Each new character naturally addressed one of somebody else’s needs—usually Ben’s or Trev’s.
BO: Many—if not all—of the characters are in limbo, hinged to a heavy past, but trudging through the muck to move forward, talk about that commonality.
JE: Well, first, flawed as they are, they’re all doing the best they can to manage what they’ve got. Critics have called my characters losers, but they’re not. They’re not quitters. They’re not pessimists. They wanna believe things will get better, and so they grope their way through, often failing miserably along the way, but always meaning well. They want to re-invent themselves, they want to find hope, they want to be decent people.
BO: Now, either you had a blast on Urban Dictionary.com, or you’re incredibly depraved—or both—which is it? Ha!
JE: All of the above! I’m pretty sure I made up a few of those sex acts.
BO: How did you strike a tonal balance between humor and somber in the book?
JE: Necessity. I don’t think I could write about irredeemable loss without a lot of comic relief. Tragedy and comedy are all tangled up in my mind, always have been. So striking this tonal balance came very naturally to me. I grew up around gallows humor. Some of the most tragic events in my life have been tinged by humor. Like finding my grandmother dead, with Tums antacids bubbling out of her mouth, and discovering a TV dinner at her bedside, and seeing she only ate the cherry pie, and left the rest. Now, that’s not funny, but c’mon, it is, right?
BO: One of my favorite turns of phrase comes toward the end when talking about, of all things, Mr. Baxter the fish, “I’m guessing he’s bat-shit crazy from turning circles in that murky little bowl his whole life, and that he doesn’t care anymore whether he lives or dies. Then a few pages later when he’s expelled from his bowl, “Mr. Baxter, who I’ve sorely misjudged, is flopping furiously for life on the nearby throw rug …” How did you come to these hysterical places in the book?
JE: Again, my poor bumbling characters led me to them, more often than not. In the case of Mr. Baxter, his life is a perfect reflection of Ben’s own circumstances—stuck, dissolute, depressed. Ben empathizes with him.
BO: The men in your books—Ethan Thornburgh (West of Here), Ben, Bob, etc.—feel shrouded in inadequacy, have something to prove, where does that come from?
JE: I love the theme of masculinity in crisis. Hell, I was raised by bodybuilders, how could I not? As much as I imagine it sometimes sucks being a woman in a world that is all-too-often tailored to the masculine sensibility, it’s anything but easy being a dad in our culture, and living up to the various expectations foist upon us by ourselves, and by women, and by our children. I’m just fascinated by the nuances.
BO: On your epitaph you write, ‘… Mostly, he lasted.’ The same can be said for Ben, right?
JE: And the same can be said for your beloved Red Sox.
BO: Changing gears, give me as sense of the work you put in to illustrate the difference between BEING a writer and those who crave to occupy the writer’s space (Every book signing I’ve done, I get a couple of people ‘writing their books’ but they never do, partly because they don’t realize that it’s WORK)?
JE: Oh, I work my ass off. I get up at four in the morning to write. Do you think I wanna be up at that hour? Hell no. That said, it doesn’t feel like work to me, because rather than draining my stores of energy, it begets more energy. The work makes me a more expansive person—a better husband, a better dad, a better friend. It’s pretty sill to want to occupy the writer’s space, because by and large, it is an exercise in humiliation. The work is where it’s at.
BO: For writers, what has been you experience in promoting your work Is there anything that’s a waste of time and/or money? What should a writer do YESTERDAY that he or she isn’t doing today?
JE: Don’t think of it as promoting, for one. I think of it as an extension of the work. Me, the artist, reaching out, trying to connect with readers. It’s always better to start a dialogue, rather than just blow your own horn. Nobody will listen. You have to engage your readership, not recruit them.
BO: What types of rejection have you faced?
JE: Easily 400 form rejections. Not to mention all manner of other rejections in life. Failure makes me stronger.
BO: Can a great writer be made, or, like a gifted singer, is greatness handed out to the few, like Pavarotti? Can it be earned?
JE: Beats me. I guess I think, like Kierkegaard, that the artist herself should be the first work of art. If you can make yourself into a good, kind, empathetic, observant person who cares deeply about the human condition, and you entertain an endless curiosity, well, then you can probably learn to string some sentences together.
BO: How do you spend your non-writing time?
JE: Drinking and chasing my kid, in no particular order. I walk in the woods a lot, play scrabble with my wife, play a lot of ping pong with my nephew.
BO: How much do you THINK about the act of writing?
