Patrick Radden Keefe: How to Write Captivating Stories | How I Write

Patrick Raidenkeef is going to teach us how to write narrative nonfiction. It's something he's been doing for 20 years as a staff writer at the New Yorker, and also he's written six full-length nonfiction books. And what Patrick is known for is this style called "Write Around Reporting." So you want to focus on somebody who's wealthy or powerful, and they're just like, "No, I'm not going to talk to you. I've flat out refused." How do you still get that story done? That is Patrick's area of expertise. And he did this with his book about the Sackler family. Where they basically said, "We're going to threaten to sue you if you write this book." So then I said, "Well, what is it that you do to tell that story once you find it?" And he said, "You got to find your donkey, a donkey to pull you through the piece." I was like, "What do you mean by that?" "Well, you're about to find out." You wouldn't believe it, but how I write costs a fortune to run, and it's thanks to Mercury, but I can even do it. They're the sponsor of this episode, and a baking platform that I've been using for the past four years to run my own business. When I started, however, I expected finances to be an absolute nightmare. I got team members in four different countries. I think to think about currency exchange and taxes and expenses. And I was just dreading it. But honestly, banking has maybe been the easiest part. I can't remember running into a single problem, and it's because I've been using Mercury. I switched over from other more traditional banks, because Mercury is so well designed. It's easy to get started, it's easy to use, while also feeling totally legit and secure. And Mercury gives me all the tools to run a global company, like virtual cards, unlimited users, and the ability to customize each user's access level to exactly what they should see. And you know what, if anything goes wrong, if I have any sort of challenge, I can always talk to their support team, which is super responsive and actually helpful, which is pretty rare these days. And all that is why I can't imagine banking any other way. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-in-chirb bank, banking services provider at Choice Financial Group, and call them in a members FDIC. All right, back to the episode. All right, tell me about right around reporting. A lot of journalism is kind of predicated on the idea of access, that you want to write about somebody you need to get access to them. They have a lot of control because they can say, "I'll give you an interview," or, "I won't." And it's very often the case that if you're reading a newspaper article or magazine article, and it's about, it should be a prominent figure, a wealthy figure, and a retainer, a business leader, an athlete, access has been negotiated behind the scenes. And there are PR people, and sometimes there are lawyers, and there's all kinds of horse trading that has to happen before the actual encounter happens between the journalist and the subject. You know, it's often the case that if that person just says, "No, I don't want to play ball," then nothing happens. You shouldn't walk away. The journalist. Yeah, the journalist does. I mean, at the New Yorker, it's almost a joke. We have these ideas meetings on Tuesday afternoons where we talk about what we should put in the magazine. And every six months or so, somebody says, "Oh, we should do a big profile of Beyoncé." And everybody kind of rolls their eyes because we've asked, we've asked for years. Beyoncé doesn't need the New Yorker. You know, she wants to kind of put her story out. She'll do it through her own channels. And a lot of the time in journalism, that's kind of the end of the story. For me, that's often the beginning of the story. So if somebody doesn't want to cooperate, I'll write about them anyway. We call it a write-around because the idea is you have the person there. And if they won't talk to you, you sort of write your way around them. You know, the most famous example probably of this is there was a classic profile in Esquire, a Frank Sinatra. Yeah, Frank Sinatra has a cold. Like it's a lease. Yeah. Well, Frank Sinatra has a cold in which Frank Sinatra didn't play ball. And that's kind of a tradition that I operate in, not all the time. Anytime I start writing about somebody, I'll always make the effort to talk to them. And I always think that it's probably a good idea for them to talk to me, whether they do or not. Because you're going to write it anyway. I'm going to write it anyway. I mean, what I say to them is the train is leaving the station. Like, you know, if you can knock it on the train, but it doesn't mean that the train's not going to leave if you don't. And I wrote a big profile a couple of years ago of Larry Gagosian, the art dealer. I actually thought it would be a write-around because he talks to journalists all the time, but he very rarely has participated in this kind of big soup to nuts profile that I wanted to do. So I thought he would say no. And I was totally prepared to write the piece without any participation from him. And then he said yes. And I think it was savvy of him to do so because he realized there's only going to be so much real estate in this piece. And if I come in, I'm my own best advocate. And the more I talk, the more real estate I'll take up. Anybody who has a PR person or has a lawyer who they want to sit in on the interview, they're going to be so careful in what they tell you that, you know, so scripted, they've got their talking points. That it's often not that interesting to me. I mean, to give you an example, there was a guy named Mark Burnett who I wrote a big profile of for the New Yorker that's in my collection, Rogues. And Burnett was the reality TV producer who cast Donald Trump in the apprentice. Oh well. And he fascinating guy came over from England. He was actually an undocumented immigrant. He walked out of LAX without the proper papers. He worked as a manny in Los Angeles and then found his way into TV. And his first big success was Survivor. And then he did the apprentice. And Burnett didn't want to talk to me for the story. But he had these two ex-wives who did end up talking with me. And if given the choice between a sit-down with Mark Burnett and interviews with these two ex-wives who knew him really well, I would always go for the ex-wives. So I think in those kinds of situations, I wrote a book about the Sackler family and none of them would talk to me. Three generations of the family, none of them would talk to me. They were actively threatening to sue me the whole time I was working on the book. But I talked to, you know, former college roommates and business associates and friends and administrative assistants and yoga instructors and dormant. All these people who had all these different kind of interesting vantage points on them. And that ended up actually, I think, in a kind of strange way, creating a fuller, tourer picture than if I had been able to sit down with the people themselves who would have been really cagey if they gave me the interviews. How do you, as you're trying to paint the picture of whoever it is that you're talking about, like caricatures, you know, when you get one person to paint somebody, it's sort of famously bad, right? Like those police caricatures. Like this doesn't look like it at all. So it seems like you're trying to paint a true picture. You're not able to look at them, talk to them, all those sorts of things. What do you do in order to get to truth? And beyond truth, what is it that you're going for? Good narrative. Like what are the things? One of the things that really matters to me when I'm writing about anyone is that when I'm done with the piece of writing and people read it, people who knew the person or know the person that they say you really captured their essence, you got it right. And I should say, because it's important, that doesn't mean that the people I'm writing about need to feel that way. And a lot of the time, they don't. And I'm perfectly comfortable with that. And in fact, I would go further and say, anytime I'm writing about anyone, even if it's something where somebody's giving me all the access in the world, even if it's a kind of generally amiable profile, I think the experience of reading it should be a little bit uncomfortable for the person that I'm writing about. And I tell people this straight up when I'm writing about them, when I'm done with this thing, it's not going to look like a photograph of you. It's going to look like a painting of you. It's going to be something that has filtered through my sensibility. It's not going to be exactly the way you see yourself. And I think any of us have had this from a bad angle, or it's an unflattering life. You sort of think, "God, do I look that way? That's not the way I see myself." I don't think of my job as being the person who is trying to capture exactly your image of yourself, as it exists. I would say that's more the job of a PR person. And so what I'm trying to do is paint a picture that feels kind of multifaceted, not like a caricature, that it's really drawing on a lot of interviews, a ton of research. And then I want that picture to be in a kind of fundamental way, both resonant with people who don't know the person, and recognizable with people who do. What's the role of place as you're trying to tell the story of a person? Like, say that you're, we're recording this in my living room. I would say that this living room says a lot about me, that I wouldn't be able to communicate. And when you're telling the story of whoever it is, how do you think of place as a character, a character, or as something that's illuminating who this person is, what they value, stuff like that? It's funny. I'm having this kind of strange experience right now because somebody's writing a profile of me. Oh, wow. And I am on the other end of this. That is weird. It's very weird. And he just asked to come to my house and interview me there. And there was a moment where I sort of am I ready to reveal that much about myself, the walking into my house and looking around, having that beyond the record. I mean, I'm not interviewing you right now, but if I were to look around your living room, it's like I could pick up any of these details and they could go in the piece. For me, I always want to sort of find the details that feel specific, not generic, that feel like they somehow reveal the whole. Tell me about specific, not generic. Well, just that there's no, if I were to describe this room and I say, you know, there's a green sofa, that's not really telling the reader anything. It's not doing anything. It's not illuminating anything about you. If I say there's an old, thectrola on the counter and that there's an old vintage TWA poster of London, it's just more granular. It's both more kind of evocative for the person who's reading it. They can see it in their minds eye and it's, I don't know exactly what it tells us, but it tells us something more concrete about you than the fact that you have a green couch. But listen, generally, I think place is usually important. I have this new book that I have London falling is a story of a 19 year old kid who died in 2019 in mysterious circumstances. He went off the balcony of a luxury building in London overlooking the Thames. After he died, his parents made this discovery, which is that he had been living a secret double life and he'd been moving around London pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch. There were three people in that apartment that night, this kid who died, Zach, and then these two older men. Part of what I do in the book is I try and tell you how those three guys got to be there that night in this kind of tragic situation. The way I do that is to reel back their family histories in London. Each of them came from a family that came to London from a different place. In one case, India and another Uganda and another Eastern Europe during the Second War and place infuses the whole book. I think in some ways, place kind of, you don't want to be too reductive. But if you want to understand these people, you have to understand the environment they grew up in, the kind of milieu that their parents and grandparents came out of. Are you scared when you write? You take on such mysterious topics, powerful people sometimes. How do you deal with fear? I guess the first thing I would say is I have a colleague Luke Mogelson who's a war correspondent and who's in a trench in Ukraine getting shelled. That's a level of courage and danger and fear that I couldn't pretend to. You're putting yourself in the line when you do that kind of work in a way that I never do. I have a wife and kids who I love and I actually trained as a lawyer before I became a writer. So I have a kind of probably a little bit of a risk aversion. Yes, I write about some dangerous people, but I try and always be careful about it and sort of thoughtful about how I approach the work and I try not to be too intimidated. It doesn't mean I haven't had a few hair-raising moments over the years, but most of my stories about hair-raising moments end up turning comical at a certain point. A lot of the time it's a situation where I kind of go in really nervous and then everything turns out okay. But listen, I mean there's a story I tell in this new book about it. There was a gangster who I interviewed for the book who just got out of prison and he asked me to come and see him and this is a pretty dangerous guy who's got a long record of doing pretty bad things to people. I went and met him at a coffee shop. I had given instructions to some people before I ended up, you know, if you don't hear back from me. So what you should do. And I showed up in this coffee shop and he, the first need to do is he shook my hand. He asked what kind of coffee I wanted and then he asked after my wife and children and he named them. And I hadn't told him their names. So yeah, I mean that, you know, that'll freak you out a little. Yeah. How do you think about the stories that you choose to tell? Because there's a kind of mystery or trying to sometimes crack a case. So how do you think about the, I mean you're not a detective, but you're kind of a journalist detective. And how do you think about the right sort of I want to be able to solve this, but I'm not sure if I can solve it. And you don't want to spend two years, I guess, and not be able to solve what's going on, right? As a child, I read a lot of mystery stories. That was my thing. Would you like all of the hearty boys I read, all of Sherlock Holmes. I loved Agatha Christie, you know, Dorothy Alcairs, on and on and on. Those are my kind of formative reading experiences or reading mysteries. My dad was like a big reader when I was growing up in the 80s of a certain kind of like paperback, like mass market paperback, crime fiction, you know, Robert Parker, Elmore Leonard, that kind of thing. I just grew up with that stuff. And I think it kind of seeped into me on some fundamental level. And so I am attracted to mysteries of one sort or another. And you know, sometimes it can be a kind of a mystery and a conventional sense of a who done it. My book, say not things kind of a who done it. It's about a murder that happens in 1972 and at the end you find out who did it, but you didn't know who did it when you started writing. I didn't. And I didn't know if I would figure it out. It was only the very end that I did figure it out. But the, but I think that there's another kind of mystery, which is just a simpler kind of mystery, which is that I think readers are pretty jaded. You know, this experience I had years ago where I was on the on the subway and I saw somebody pull it pull out the New Yorker, which I often see. But this was a week when I had a story in the magazine. And she was turning the pages. I saw her turn to my page to my article. And you know, what a feeling, right? And I, and then I thought about approaching her, which you always have to be a little careful on the New York subway. You know, when you walk up and tap a stranger on the shoulder, but I was sort of edging towards her as she read through the first paragraph. And I was like reaching out to tap from the shoulder and say, how's that? You know, I wrote that. And just as I was getting close to her, she finished the first paragraph or whatever it was and like turns to the next article. It had haunts me to this day. But I think the there are little mysteries, which is not, you know, was it Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the candlestick mysteries, but just little mysteries where you're withholding some little piece of information. And there's a question in the reader's mind, which is, I'll give you an example, I wrote a story for the New Yorker years ago about Chapo Guzman, the head of the Synolo drug cartel. And I didn't know how to start the story. I knew that readers would feel kind of jaded that there were a lot of readers would feel like, oh, I know about Mexican drug cartels. In my mind's eye, I can kind of see where this thing is going. I've read a bunch of Mexican drug cartel stories. And I wanted to find a way to subvert that expectation right out of the gate. So you go to Amsterdam. So I went to Amsterdam. So in my research, I found this thing. And the funny thing is if you read the piece, it's a guy who's a minor character. He's not even a big figure in the story. But I found this guy who was an assassin for the cartel who happened to love European travel. And he had an Instagram account and he would post photos himself, you know, going on these vacations. And he went to Amsterdam at some point. And he was in Shippell Airport in Amsterdam. And there was an international rest warrant for him that was put up with Interpol. And he was arrested at the airport in Amsterdam. But for me, the idea that we, that you see that, oh, it's a story about Chapaguzman. Okay. So it's like the Sinaloa cartel and you're imagining like this, you know, the kind of Sierra in Mexico and and, you know, drugs coming across the border. And this like arid kind of parched southwestern landscape. And you start the article in your in Amsterdam in an airport, just introducing that little question in the reader's mind, which is, okay, well, how are we going to wait a second? This, how do we get back? Yeah, it's funny that you say that. So I just reviewed something for a friend and he said, how'd you feel about it? And I was like, I didn't really like it. And he said, why? And I said, I feel like you've given me a bunch of facts. But you haven't told me why I should care about the facts. And you haven't given me a string, a thread that I can kind of follow a rope that I can walk that's leading me towards the end. And without these open questions, without stakes and conflict, I was like, dude, I just don't want to read this. I had a guy. There's a friend of mine who's a very smart guy, um, finance guy. We had a funny conversation about a year ago where he said, um, he's being nice. And he said, you know, I love the New Yorker. I've subscribed to New Yorker for 30 years when I was in high school. We had to subscribe to a publication. And I subscribed to New Yorker. And it's so great. And I'm a big supporter. Now what happens is when there's a 10,000 word New Yorker article, I'll just feed it into chat GPT and ask for like a 4,000 word. summary. And I sort of died inside a little bit, but then I said to him, you're using it wrong. If that's what you're using the New Yorker for, the idea that you can suck all the nutrients, all that just the kind of information bullet points out of it, you've gone to the wrong place. Like the pleasures of the kind of thing that I do are literary pleasures. It's actually all about the storytelling. And I'd kind of hate to think that you would be able to take something that I do and like boil it, just boil it down to five bullet points or whatever it is just to kind of get the information and absorb that and keep moving. I mean, you're free to do it, obviously. But I think the point that I was trying to make to him is like, you don't go to the New Yorker for that. Just ask Chad G.P. about the, we know whatever the subject you're interested in or go to Wikipedia. I don't know. The literary aspect of what I do, I'm telling you a story and know how to tell a good story. I don't care if you are interested in the opioid crisis or the troubles in Northern Ireland or drug cartels in Mexico. The point is, I want to seduce you with this narrative. If you give me, you know, read those first few paragraphs and tell me that you're not intrigued enough to keep reading. Now, of course, there always are people who will take the off-ramp, but I'm sort of fighting for the ones who don't. Well, I want to hear more about about intros, what makes for a good intro, because even the Bourdain piece, it was kind of like the El Chapo piece where you're like, how do we open this one up differently? And you write, when the president of the United States travels outside the country, he brings his own car with him. Moments after Air Force One landed at the Hanoi Airport last May, President Barack Obama ducked into an 18-foot armor-plated limousine, a bomb shelter, masquerading as a Cadillac that was equipped with a secure link to the Pentagon, and with emergency supplies of blood and was known as the Beast. I'm just going to pause there, I'll read the rest, but only here what's going on there. Well, so Bourdain had been profiled a thousand times before I showed up, probably more so than anyone I've ever written about. He's somebody who had just been written about a huge amount. In Tony, he was very generous, so he always said yes to everybody. So he just gave thousands of interviews over the years. And so it was very high bar, both in the sense that I wanted to write something that would feel kind of definitive. And also in the sense that I knew that readers, a lot of readers would have already read a bunch of Anthony Bourdain pieces. And so there again, the challenges, well, how do you find your way in? Well, I had wanted to travel with him. I spent a year writing that piece. I had a lot of material. I had wanted from the start to travel with him. We ended up agreeing that I would go to Vietnam, and I didn't actually know until I showed up that Barack Obama was going to be there too, and that he was going to be meeting with Obama. And that was a thing where I sort of had a kind of an insight into this meeting between these two guys. I loved that detail about bringing your own car with you to Vietnam. And if you keep going, it talks about how Obama, when he experiences Vietnam, most of it he does from inside. It was Obama's first trip to Vietnam. But he had encountered this pageant mostly through a five-inch pane of bulletproof glass. He might as well watch it on TV. There you go. So to me, that's doing a lot of work that line because you're both nodding at the fact that Bourdain was the opposite. I say somewhere in the piece that his experience of culture was almost intravenous. It's like he shoot it right into my arm. He would kind of go out and he wanted to just be there on the ground in the place. Ideally, not even in a restaurant, but in people's homes. And Obama by virtue of being president can't do that. Just cannot do that. He has to see it through this glass. And of course, the thing about watching it on TV, it's like on some level, this is what Bourdain was for a lot of people. You're not actually going to go yourself to whatever the place may be. You may never make it to Mozambique, but you can sit in your couch and watch Tony go as your proxy. So that was a kind of a sideways way in. I felt like there were enough little kind of GWIS factoids about the fact that they have supplies of blood in the car and so forth. That's another thing is just sprinkling little things that people may not know. I think is helpful. You're always sort of making down payments on saying to people, give me your time and I will take you to places you're not expecting. Tell me more about the down payments. You hear occasionally when people talk to you about some streaming series and they'll say, oh, have you watched "Sus and Such" a show? It's so great. The thing is it doesn't really heat up until. First four, five, exactly. Until like six episodes in or whatever. The first season is terrible. But then the second, the third, the second, the third. You're just going to have to wait like eight hours to find the value proposition. I mean, it's crazy. The idea that somebody says, yeah, just give me like 10 hours of your life and then it'll start getting good. And we don't. I'm afraid with the printed word. I mean, I feel this one. I read some of the grates from the middle of the 20th century. People are over the New Yorker. You know, you'll pick up an incredible book or an incredible New York article and there's two pages about the landscape before anything happens at all. And that is, I think, just not an option today. At least for me, it is not an option. Attention spans are not what they used to be. And I know that there are writers out there who are kind of purests who say, no, I'm going to do it because this is the way to do it. And if I lose the vast majority of my audience, then so be it. Kind of audience be damned. And that's just not my. That's sort of not my approach. I'm writing things for people to read them. I insist that if I ever write a biography, I'm not going to have the first 150 pages just be childhood. Yeah, because the thing is actually now the way I read a biography, I'll tell you what it is. It's like a choose your own adventure experience. I jumped to about maybe when they're 20, they get started with their thing. I'll go through that. And then once I have learned a little bit about them, then I'll jump back to the childhood later on. And just tries to be nuts. Like I don't want to pick up Titan, read about John D. Ralefellar's tie when he's 11 years old. That's only interesting once I understood how he took over the oil industry. And then the tie comes back later, same piece of information, exact same sentence goes from black and white to color. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I tend not to be a huge fan of and then and then and then as a structural device. I like things that sort of hop all over the place, honestly. I don't tend to go in for, I mean, I'm pretty obsessive about structure and about these questions of when you dole out which bits of information, but I'm sort of stubbornly nonlinear in the way I present things and and that in part grows out of the fact that as a reader, I like it if you kind of keep me guessing a little bit. I know he's brought avenues or crowded with honking car, storefront vendor street peddlers and some five million scooters and motorbikes, which rush in and out of the intersections like flood waters. What are you trying to do there? A lot of the time in in my writing, I'm trying to do these little setups that I want to pay off later. And I don't want you to feel like it's a setup, but there's a moment much later in that piece where where where Dane the crew had rented him a Vespa and he was doing a shoot and I was just kind of hanging out and sort of hoping for as you are when you know as a journalist a lot of time you're just there with your notebook kind of waiting for something to happen and he finished the shoot and he came over and he said, "Hey, do you want to go for a ride?" And he got on the Vespa, I got on the back and we sort of scooted out into traffic and he loved nothing more than being on a scooter or motorbike in anway. It's a very specific kind of feeling and I wanted to set that up in advance, the idea that you know the thing about the flood waters that you've got this these kind of great like rushing currents of people and you sort of join the current and you're there and you're sort of part of this like organism you just sort of feel like you're out there and you're mixing it up and he loved that that was kind of a magic sensation for him and then it's kind of an important moment in the piece towards the end of the piece because you get the sense of his freedom and then for me on a personal level it was a you know it's something I still think about because I realized later that night as I kind of lay my head on the pillow in the hotel that he had given me that scene like Tony was a writer and he was a very generous guy and I think he knew I needed a scene and so he I think he he included that if he said like you know, "Hey kid, you want to go for a ride on this Vespa in that - That way, that we just jump off the page. - Yeah, the vest. but I read it one in Tulum and it's just, there's something about the wind in your hair, but then also I remember someone showed me a scene of traffic in Hanoi that they had taken from like the balcony of a second, third floor restaurant, couldn't believe just the crisscross, the beeps, the vestibus, looks like nothing. Well, I mean, this is the thing is in the experience, I described this in the piece, but I thought I might die. Like it, you know, it's, and Tony was not a, you know, not what you would call a careful conservative driver, but it's great. - Wait, so tell me more about structure. So as you're thinking about structure, because you do that really kind of early on in the process. So like what are the different layers of like this is important when I'm thinking about structure, talked about opening up. Mysteries early on, you're gonna answer later on, establishing certain things, maybe at the intro, that you're gonna get to later, like what's going through your mind there? - I mean, I think a lot about structure, I think probably I think about it more, maybe then some other people who do the kind of writing I do. - And you value it so much why? - Because, you know, it's non-fiction writing, right? I'm not able to invent anything. So I, anytime I sit down to write, it's like I have a deck of cards. It's the universe of things that can happen is limited by, you know, objective reality, and what I was able to bring home. Like what quotes do I have? What statistics do I have? What anecdotes do I have? What scenes can I create? Then the question becomes, you know, to me the real artistry is sort of, how do you deal out those cards? When do you introduce which characters? When do you have your big reversals? If there's some revelation, when are you gonna drop that on people? I would report a report and report and report and I was like gathering a big compost heap of material. And then at the very end, when I was kind of done, I felt like I had done it. I would sit down and think, all right, how do I structure this? And over the years, what has started to happen is that I'm thinking about structure earlier and earlier. So as I go now in the reporting process, I'm thinking, what's the beginning of my story? What's the end? What are the big moments? And at a certain point, while I'm still reporting, I'll just on the back of an envelope, I'll have like eight or nine beats. Just what feel a big kind of narrative moments for me? Just bullet points, just boom, boom, boom, boom. I think this is where we start. I think this is where I wanna end. How do we fill in here? This thing here, I wanna, I wanna, I want you to think one thing up to this point, halfway through and then I wanna switch you around suddenly like that. That's you thinking like the reader rather than the writer. Yeah. The useful thing about that is actually that it limits my research on the other side of that because once I've done that exercise, one of the questions is who are my characters? And so, you know, I'm working on a piece of writing right now, which I don't wanna say too much about, but a piece for the New Yorker. And then you start out in the universe of possible characters is 50 people, right? And I ultimately want it to be about five people who we're gonna service in a really significant way. And the utility of doing that exercise of just the kind of beats on the back of an envelope is that I can be a little ruthless on the other side of that with, you know, I encounter some fascinating person. I mean, I literally had this this morning, I was working and I in my research, I encountered this person who seemed like a great character. But I'm already at a point in this project where I have the discipline to say, "Now, interesting guy doesn't fit here." You know, there's a kind of what to me is sort of an amateurish in the state that I used to make where you think that just because somebody's interesting, you should shoehorn them in, even if they don't necessarily fit in this story. And so I'll create that and then I sort of slowly populate it basically my research then starts kind of filling in beneath those beats and what that means in practice is when I sit down to write, I actually have the whole roadmap in front of me. So here's what surprised me about that. That implies that before you even begin the research, there's like some level of knowledge that you're doing. So it seems like you're kind of understanding a story, structuring it and then really diving to the research phase. And then the writing is like a small sliver at the end. Is that right? - Yeah, exactly. I don't, I know it's different for everybody. For me, it's 90% research. And then at the end, at the very end, I write, and I write fast and I'm in kind of a fugue state. There's a period of time when I'm not doing anything else, I'm just writing and I dream about the, you know, when it's going really well, it's like I have, I'm dreaming about it and I wake up the moment the night and write myself little notes. - How do you think about statistics? What statistics are able to do, what they're not able to do, when you can really use them to their full effect and then the ways that they're overused and writing? - Yeah, I, listen, I mean, I think that some people have, some people are more numerous than I am, some people have a more kind of statistically inclined mind than I do. I think I try and use statistics in a really limited way. They're there to illustrate something, particularly if they're really dramatic, if you bear with me. I, I think of the kind of writing that I do, I think a lot of the time, I'm at the texture of different things, almost the way a sort of an artist, who's like a mixed media artist, is kind of pulling in different types of things and I want some degree of textural variation. Again, this is something I've noticed about myself as a reader, but it's, if I'm reading something and it's one dense, long, expositional paragraph after another, I find it exhausting. It feels like quicksand for me. The same would be true if it's just a lot of statistics that you're throwing at me in a way that doesn't feel particularly selective. This is gonna sound like a very rudimentary thing, but if you read any of my pieces, you won't go too far before there's a quote of some sort. I think the quotes kind of aerate a story. Again, it's, you know, on the level of the kind of texture of the thing. But I also, you know, don't have pages and pages of dialogue, right? I feel as though you, I'm always trying to kind of mix that up and to me, it's that sort of weave of these different, you know, you have statistics, you've got exposition, you've got quotes, you've got scenes, and I always wanna have a kind of degree of variety there. Because again, as a reader, I've just noticed with myself that when I have that, I feel as though I just kind of glide through a book without much of a sense of friction, whereas if you throw a huge amount of numbers at me, there's a kind of cognitive load problem that I have. - Yeah, the statistic that comes to mind when I think of your work is that, and you can help me out with it, was that was it oxy cotton or was it just overdoses, killed more Americans than all the war since World War II combined? Like that is such a more powerful frame of it than, and I'm gonna make this number up, 133,000 people died. - It can sometimes feel almost crude when you get those types of analogies, where it's like somebody's talking about, I don't know what, some, you know, a stack of papers tall as the Empire State Building, right? Like you can kind of, you can come up with these, these sort of units of measurement that people can see in their minds. - Sure. - But the, but I think there's something to that. I mean, I was thinking about this yesterday, because I was writing in this piece that I'm doing about, this much I can tell you. If you have a tractor trailer, truck, an 18 wheeler, and it's driving on the highway, 65 miles an hour, and the vehicle is fully loaded and it weighs 70,000 pounds, and you're the driver, and you hit the brakes. It takes 200 yards before you actually come to a full stop. So I can say 200 yards, or I can say two football fields. - Right. - And for whatever reason, two football fields were better. Yesterday I had the experience of, I was writing a paragraph and I said 200 yards, and delete two football fields. - What a screenwriting taught you about getting into a scene, getting out of a scene, how scenes are, juxtaposed together, how they work together separately. - Yeah, I mean, I've done, I've done a lot of screenwriting over the years, nothing you would have seen, 'cause none of it's been made, but I'm kind of the, I'm the sort of proverbial, well compensated Hollywood screenwriter who writes scripts that don't get made. And I learned a lot about structure from screenwriting, and I think particularly about kind of distillation, the concentration of a scene where, maybe watch a movie or a television show, generally speaking, a page of screenwriting, is roughly a minute of screen time. And in a way that I think a lot of people don't necessarily think about when you're watching a TV show or a movie, if you watch a scene in its four minutes long, that's a really long scene. So that's four pages, it's nothing. You write a four-page scene in no time. And that kind of brevity, the sort of high-coo clarity of screenwriting where as the old saying goes, you wanna get into the scene at the last possible minute, and you wanna get out of it at the first possible minute, so that it has this kind of nice, concentrated feeling. And nonfiction is different. I have more, you know, there are scenes that I write that are in a court hearing or I don't know what something with like a long amount of, you know, a lot of dialogue, something where they do go on for pages of pages. But even that what's happening is I'm taking a lot of time, a 300 page transcript and I'm thinking how do I boil this down to five pages in a book? So yeah, I think about a lot of the other thing is juxtaposition of scenes where you get out of a scene at a point where people actually want to know where it's going, you cut away. And all I have to do is I'll cut away and then I'll tell you some information that I need you to know because I'm confident at that point. If you want to know what was going on with that other thing that you're going to keep moving with me and I can give you the exposition that I want and then eventually we will pick up that other story down the line. How do you feel that writing the long form piece, 8,000 words, 10,000 words is different from writing a book? Because one of the things that I was thinking about is you were saying that I was thinking of you sort of like, you're almost like this architect, right? You meet these architects, they're like, you're going to come into my building, you're going to feel this, you're going to feel that, you're going to walk around this corner. And I'm going to basically like wrap my hands around you and I get to dictate your emotional experience. So they have this sort of like almost like a Messiah complex or something. And then I was thinking about books and articles and I was like, okay, a book is something that I kind of dip into, dip out of dip into dip out of like it's something that's sort of longitudinal kind of goes over one, two, three weeks that I read a book. Long form piece is like Saturday, Sunday morning, get my cup of coffee, all right, but it is one experience. And a long form piece, all is to say, is it shorter? But somehow it's almost more like an architect where you curate somebody's whole experience from start to finish. I definitely have a bit of that complex and I think in kind of explicitly architectural terms about the writing that I do. So I will copy that. I'm usually not trying to kind of dictate your emotional reaction. I like to leave a little bit of give and the stories that I'm drawn to. A lot of the time are actually kind of ambiguous or they'll divide people and I like that. I like that people will sometimes read the same book or the same article and come out feeling very differently about some of the characters. It's interesting the differences in the form. I had a really fascinating conversation with a friend who's an editor in a newspaper editor in London the other day because he had read my new book. And there's a moment in the book, kind of terrifying moment where this teenage kid, Zach Brepler, is alone with his mother in their apartment and they have a fight and he's about 16, 17 years old and suddenly his hands are around her throat. And he kind of throttles his mother just for a moment and he stops and then he goes into therapy and they kind of move on. And this book started as a New Yorker article, which was probably 14,000 word article in the New Yorker. And my editor friend was saying he's talking about the differences between articles and books. And you know what's so interesting is in the article when that moment happens that throttling, it's like this bell that you run and you can't unring it after it's happened and it just you're sort of vibrating with that horrifying moment. I feel like I'm doing that right now. And that's in the context of the article and he said when the same thing happens in the book, the book there's sort of more there's just you're able to kind of digest you're able to sort of metabolize it over a longer process, you know, you're well into the book you've read much more you know these characters. And it's not that it's not an arresting moment, but it's not sort of it's not kind of the emotionally defining moment because you're just working on a bigger canvas. There's a specific detail that's in the book. It's not in the article that I think in the article would have been it's very shocking and it comes late in the book. And if I put it in the article, it would have colored everything and sort of works in the book, you can do it 200 pages in you can say and now I'm going to tell you this thing and I want you to understand it in context. Let's look at it in a way that if you did an article, it's just it would be it would kind of color everything. So I do think that they're kind of different you could you have to be sort of mindful of the different scales. How are conclusions different between books and articles. I don't know that they're that different. I mean, I think that the to go back to your earlier question. I think that when you're when you're telling a story that's a mystery, you need to be very mindful of how the reader is going to feel. At the end of the article or the end of the book about the fact that they've just given you, you know, the case of an article 45 minutes of their life. Yep. The case of a book 14 15 hours, potentially, if they're, you know, being honest. And I think a lot about that about how do you situate the revelations. You don't want to over promise. You don't want people to feel a sense of buyers or more. So in that respect, the conclusions are different. But otherwise, I mean, I think the I'm always looking for some sort of epiphany, some kind of emotional epiphany if there is one. And then the thing that I'm that I'm I think getting better at is embracing ambiguity, kind of recognizing that their life is really ambiguous. And I'm not going to bullshit you and kind of wrap everything up with the NEPO, even if it would be satisfying in a narrative way. So it's kind of thinking about how to how to let you experience that ambiguity without it feeling like a let down. Tell me more about that. It seems like that's been in your eyes. I could see you been thinking about that for many years. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's hard because I don't, you know, in the case of my book say nothing, where it's about this murder. And then at the end, I kind of figured out who the murderer was say nothing in narrative terms. It's like it ends with this very satisfying click because I identify this person. Do you get to the end of the book? I mean, it's devastating because it's about a real woman who was killed in her. You know, her children at the time, but her children are now crying out with children of their own, but they live with that trauma. But in narrative terms, very satisfying. Most of life isn't that way. Most of writing isn't that way. You know, as a writer, I've had to, I actually, you know, when I started writing this book when falling, I met the family who lost their son. And one of the first things I told them was just because I cracked the case in that other book doesn't mean I'm going to crack it here. And you can't go into this assuming I will. So I think about those questions of ambiguity all the time. And I think if you do it in a kind of artful, thoughtful way, readers actually appreciate it. I think what people don't want is for you to take something that's ambiguous and just kind of clean it up around the edges for the sake of narrative coherence. Two. A few times you've mentioned the word tradition working inside of a tradition. And it's funny. I meet some writers who are like, they reject genre. I'm not working inside of a genre. But tradition implies that you respect the genre. Why do you think like that? Nobody knows where to shelve my books in a bookstore. They're not really true crime in a narrow sense. You could certainly shelve them there. And I think they have satisfaction for people who read true crime. But I don't really think of them as true crime per se. They're not really history books either. They're not really current events books. They're not novels. So the notion of narrative nonfiction as a kind of rubric, which is to say a nonfiction book totally true story. But in your hand, it feels a little like a novel and it'll read a little like a novel in the sense that there's subtle characterization. There's themes that get carried all the way through. There's scenes. There's suspense. There's drama. I want reading my books to feel like an emotional experience. Not just an intellectual or an analytical one. But listen, I mean, I think there is a tradition. It's one that I have a slightly ambivalent relationship to because to take a lot of people would point to in-call blood by term and Capote is the book that sort of gave birth to the tradition. But the truth is there's a bunch of stuff in that book that's not true. Capote described it as a nonfiction novel and it's an incredible masterpiece. And I revisit it every few years and have learned an enormous amount from it. But he made stuff up. He invented quotes, he invented scenes. He broke rules that I would never, ever break. And so I think the tradition evolves. I think of myself as answering to a a stricter standard than Capote and some of the other 20th century writers who did this kind of work did. And part of the reason I have all the end notes of the end of my book is that most people don't read them. But if I'm talking about two people who are dead who I didn't interview and I tell you they had a fantastic sex life. There are some readers who they read that and they say, hang on a second. How do you know? And they can go to the end and find out how I know. I want to talk about Arthur Sackler and how he thought about marketing. You describe him as a kind of dawn draper of the pharmaceutical industry. And I want to hear about how he went about it. Like how he thought about communication, how he thought about getting an idea out there, Darcy had the sort of the propaganda of what he was doing. Yeah, I mean Arthur was an amazing guy, kind of protean character. really brilliant guy who grew up in Brooklyn, the turn of the last century, and his parents were immigrants. He was the oldest of three boys. Went to a big public high school. He was really smart, and he ended up going to medical school and paying his way through medical school, working as an advertising copywriter. And he'd always been interested in journalism and writing and art and he wanted a psychiatry who was interested in medical research. But at the same time, he was always working in medical advertising. And he came of age in this kind of very specific moment after the Second World War when you had the birth of branded drugs. Really the birth of big farmers, where you know it. And one of the big challenges was how do you sell these drugs to consumers so that they'll know what's out there? And one of Arthur's big revelations was he realized it's actually not the consumer he needs to sell to. It's the doctor. It's the doctor who describes. And he was a doctor himself and he came up with these very elegant ways of persuading doctors that each new drug, the Pfizer or whatever the company was, Roche put out what's going to be a wonder drug and would be amazing. They should prescribe it to their patients. He did this in ways that I think we're somewhat quite crooked. He often I think told lies about the upsides of these drugs and also about the potential side effects and downsides. And the lack of downsides. Ha. And he made his first great fortune because he was the guy who designed the marketing campaign for Valium. So long before Oxycontin came along, Arthur Sackler became very, very rich as the sort of architect of the big push. This isn't really the 1960s and 70s for tranquilizers, what they call the minor tranquilizers. Tranquilizers. Yeah. So Valium and Librium was an earlier drug that he was also involved in. And yeah, fascinating guy. I mean, I think somebody who he was interested because he died before the introduction of Oxycontin. So Arthur's widow and his children would tell you, you know, he had nothing. He was pure as the driven snow, yet nothing to do with Oxycontin. He was dead before it was ever released. But his brothers were the ones who were really responsible for Oxycontin. And they were when they sold Oxycontin and the 90s were sort of using a playbook that Arthur had invented. Sure. This really stuck out to me as a lesson from your book. It is a particular hallmark of the American economy that you can produce a dangerous product and effectively offload any legal liability for whatever destruction that product may cause by pointing to the individual responsibility of the consumer. It's funny. I mean, one of the things that I realize in many states in America, the thing that always kind of just throws me off is all the legal ads on the billboards. And then the thing that always sort of makes me scratch my head whenever I watch TV is all the pharma ads. And it seems like there's some strange things that the American economy as they interact with pharma. Yeah. I mean, I don't think it's exclusive to pharma. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. There are a range of products that this is true of. It's funny because to some extent, I think it's true of social media now. I think we're kind of waking up now to the fact that social media has been pretty bad for our kids. And it's going to be really hard to hold those companies accountable because there's a sense that the parents and the children should have individual responsibility and know that if TikTok is giving you body dysmorphia, that's your problem. You know, that don't use it. Yeah, that's like a matter of your poor moral character. It's not, we certainly shouldn't hold TikTok responsible for that. So I think that's a kind of old idea in American life. And you're right about the ads. I mean, it's Oprah did an interview with Prince Harry and Megan his wife. And it was, I guess it was shown on USTV, but all my English friends were watching it live. And they were watching it. And during the commercial breaks, it was all the ads that were also used to in America, where it's like direct to consumer advertising for like crazy pharmaceuticals you've never heard of. And there's the guy who speaks really quickly and tells you what the side effects and all that kind of thing. And my English friends who were watching this live and don't get exposed to this stuff were saying, what is this? Like what a dystopia they let you watch this stuff and it's like, you know, absolutely. This is kind of the wallpaper of American life. Tell me about Daniel Zalaskin. What a days you learned from him. So Daniel's my, he's the features director at the New Yorker. So you're right. A feature piece. That's what's called feature pieces. And feature pieces are what eight, 10, 12 months. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just long, you know, sometimes they come together more quickly, but they they're the longer articles. You know, there's always two or three of them in each issue. And they take me some, you know, sometimes again, sometimes maybe three months, but often a year or more. A wonderful editor named John Bennett, who died recently. It was a long time New York editor and one of his, he had a saying, which was, you know, the writer is like a guy in the hospital. He was walking down the hallway in the hospital. He's got one of those hospital Johnny's that doesn't close in the back. And the editor is the person walking right behind him. So nobody can see his ass. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. But I think that that's the editor's kind of the pressure tells you that your fly is down. They do. Yeah. And they and they protect you from yourself, you know, and I think there's truth to that. But to me, that's that's only the half of it. I mean, with Daniel, he's, um, he's always there at the inception of ideas. Some of my pieces are his ideas. He's the first person I talk to if something new comes along. He's got a very intuitive grasp of story of what makes a good story, um, what would be needed over 20 years working with him. I've kind of internalized a lot of his, his thinking. And so there are, you know, when I turn in a first draft to him, it's not even really a first draft because I've already edited it in my mind anticipating the kinds of things he would say. What do you think he understands about what makes for a good story? I mean, I'll tell you the first time I encountered was my very first piece for him was a piece called The Snakehead that became my second book. This is about the Chinese woman? Yeah, exactly. In Chinatown came out in 2006. And I remember still some of the things he told me, but he sister Ping was the name of the woman that was about. And after I turned to my first draft, he said, I want to hear her voice more. I need to hear her voice. You know, it's all about this woman, which is not speaking very much now. She wasn't talking to me at the time, but I was able to find testimony should given. I was able to interview other people and say, well, when you saw her that day, did she say anything that you remember? Was there anything that resonated with you? And the people would say, oh, she said X and then suddenly I have her in quotes and I have a sense of her voice. There were, um, there were a bunch of FBI agents in that piece. And Daniel said, you know, there's only so many FBI agents that people are able to keep track of in their heads. You have to call the herd here. If I'm reading something that somebody's written, whether it's a book or an article and in the first thousand words, you introduce me to eight different characters. You're doing it wrong. I call it context load. You have to do work in order to load context and somebody's mind. And once you've done that work, now it's going to work for you. But then whenever you make people load up new context, it's a lot of RAM in the reader. Yeah. And I'm always thinking, how do I just reduce context load? And what I've generally found is it just means introducing fewer things and doing it better. And then once I've done it, I can kind of work with it's like the gravity of the context is now working in my favor. Where's it so frustrating? Where it's like, now we're introducing new scene, new place, new person. And it kind of gets very tedious. Giving people time to sit with new information and new characters so that they take those people on board. And so I'm being very thoughtful about when I introduce you to each new person. And so the idea is I hope you've kind of, you've sort of gotten a grasp of who's who in the zoo before I'm suddenly introducing you to a new character. So with the FBI agents, what you started with like five, six of them and then you reduced it. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about that. Well, I mean, it was just literally a situation of there are places where you don't need to tell me everybody's name. You can say another agent, you know, one of agent McMurray's colleagues did this that and the other. Who are you going to focus on? And I think that that idea of not all of your characters are created equal or need to be that you can kind of favor some. And the more it is a kind of panorama and what you're just constantly telling me about new people. I mean, you said something earlier about being able to follow certain things through. I have a wonderful colleague. Lawrence Wright is one of the great nonfiction writers, also a novelist, also a screenwriter. And Larry Wright talks about when he's when he's writing, he likes to find a donkey. And a donkey is his character who's going to pull the reader through all this material. And so he's always kind of looking for, you know, who's my donkey. It doesn't need to be one donkey necessarily, but you need those people who the reader can kind of they can sort of capture the imagination of the reader and the reader can then follow them. And the amazing thing is if you have your donkey, you can tell a really complicated story as long as the reader feels as though they're sort of following that person through. Yeah, Lee Chao called it propulsion. The reader needs to be propelled through the piece. Yeah. Yeah. So when you were talking about her voice, you said what she said, but voice encompasses more than that. So how did you bring her to life through the voice? On a very rudimentary level, it's just, I want things I can put in quotes so that you know what she sounds like. So in her case, she was very gruff and she. She, great word, gruff. She just took a very utilitarian approach to life. She was not someone who was ever going to speak in a floraid way or really say anything unnecessary. She was kind of barking orders. I mean, this is a woman who when I finally contacted her and jail and asked for an interview, she sent a message pack, which was, what's in it for me? You know, that was sister Pam. And yeah, it's just, you know, whereas there are other people who. I'm going to give you an example. There's a piece I wrote years ago about Carl Icon, kind of a billionaire, corporate writer guy. And I was reading how his interview is he'd done. And I noticed there was one interview where he was telling some story and he said that the risk of being a modest and then he told the story. And then I found some other interviewer who was telling a different story and he said that the risk of being a modest and then he said the thing. And the piece, I didn't put, I didn't hang a flag on it, but I quoted both of those. The second time in the first section of the piece when you read him saying at the risk of being a modest, you know who this guy is. You know, I mean, anybody who that's his verbal tick, you're going to develop a sense of the kind of person you're dealing with. Yeah. So let's close here. Tell me about like, what is your any given Wednesday like? How have you structured your life over the years in order to get writing done and matching that with just all the other demands of life? Uh, I mean, it's hard. I don't, I think, I think of it in terms of energy that's like outward energy and kind of inward energy. And I live outside New York City. I live in the suburbs, a very kind of quiet, um, pretty monastic life with my family. And two, usually two days a week, I come into the city and I'm meeting with people all day. I come in, you know, today's a good example. I got in this morning and I'll, I'm going to be going, going, going, going, going. I've got a lunch. I got afternoon stuff. I've got, you know, any evening thing I'm going to and I'll get home late tonight. You mentioned your route this morning too. I did. Yeah. But the, but what I try my kind of life hack, which works pretty well is I have a couple days a week when I'm usually not writing. I'm actually just engaging in the world. And then the rest of the time I need kind of quiet, unbroken stillness. It takes some work, but I need to sort of preserve a sort of kind of silence in order to just keep an article or book in my head and do the kind of thinking that I like to do. I used to be that my life was structured a little differently and I was, you know, out four nights a week or whatever it was. I, at this point I found that that's pretty, it's actually fairly destructive to my ability to, um, to do the work that I need to do. So I try and kind of contain, um, all that external energy in a couple days a week and then the rest of the time. It's pretty quiet. Last question. If I invited you back to Alma Mater, I'm like, Hey, can you spend a semester teaching people how to do what it is that you do? These are the key things you need to learn. If you're trying to think about it. I mean, I, I think, you know, I said something earlier about how I try and have my reader brand and my writer brand being conversation. I'm forever amazed by the degree to which a lot of people who either write or aspire to write, um, don't do that. That they, they treat these two activities as kind of separate. Um, I mean, the example I was thinking of is I'll have somebody who'll send me a pitch that they want to send to the New Yorker. Can I look at the pitch? And I'll open the email and it's like 5,000 words. And what I'll usually do is come back to that person and say, Do you get email? Hmm. When you open your email and it looks like this, you run, do you, do you get excited? You know, do you think, Oh, great. I'm going to carve out the next hour to figure out what the hell is person is saying. You know, you're, you're pitching an editor who gets 100 emails a day with different ideas for things. You got to do it in three tight paragraphs. You have to actually leave them wanting more. You have to do it in such a brief way that they're going to come back to you and say, I demand to know more about this. But that's such an elementary thing, right? Where somebody sits down and they're trying to put their best foot forward to smart person. They may have a great story to tell, but it's like when they sit down to write the email, they completely forget about what their whole lived experiences of reading email. And I think the same is true for articles, the same is true for books. And so for me, it would be very heavily kind of intensively looking at pieces of writing that really work for you and sing and make you feel absorbed and engaged and inspired. And then being very analytical and saying, Why? Make it apart like you would a magic trick or a Swiss watch. What is it that they're doing here? What is the machinery? And then just steal, steal, steal. Find the things that they're doing and figure out how to adopt those techniques and make them your own. Brock on. Thanks for coming on the show. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.