journalism

A Conversation with Lisa Dale Norton

I have the great pleasure of introducing you to someone whom I've long admired. Lisa Dale Norton is an author and memoir coach who wrote the fantastic guide to writing memoir, Shimmering Images—a book I highly recommend to anyone embarking on this journey of writing personal stories.

She talks about the most important requirement for a memoir to be publishable, and also shares her heartening take on what is being born in this unusual time we're experiencing. She calls it “an opening” available to all of us to step through, provided that we recognize the opportunity.

There is something about what she says that deeply resonates based on what I'm feeling personally and noticing around me. What are you noticing? If you have a moment, I'd love to hear from you.


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Lisa Dale Norton is an author, developmental book editor, and a dynamic public speaker. She is passionate about layered writing structures in narrative nonfiction that reflect the complexity of life experience, and about the transformative power of writing a memoir. 

For many years she taught in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. Currently, Lisa works privately as a developmental editor with writers completing book manuscripts. She earned degrees from Reed College and the University of Iowa, and lives in Santa Fe.

She is the author of Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir (Griffin/St. Martin’s Press), America’s go-to guide for writing memoir, and Hawk Flies Above: Journey to the Heart of the Sandhills (Picador USA/St. Martin’s Press), a book of literary nonfiction—part memoir, part natural history writing—that won comparisons to the work of Annie Dillard. Her new book of literary nonfiction has just been completed.

Shimmering-Images
 
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KARIN GUTMAN: Where did your journey begin as a writer?

LISA DALE NORTON: I've always been a writer of some sort. When I was very little, I loved writing letters. I'm not sure where that came from, but there was this natural interest in expressing myself on the page. I wrote to everybody and anybody and my mother, I loved it so much. She even helped me find pen pals all over the place whom I would write these letters to.

So early on, I loved the written word. I remember one other story that I've never forgotten. I was in grade school, and we were writing book reports. For some reason I chose a very mundane semi-adult book. I have no idea why I chose that book. But I remember while writing the report for school, I had an absolute, clear image inside me of exactly where I was headed with what I was going to say and the point I was going to make.

I never forgot it, because I thought it was kind of cool and weird. And I think that those kinds of little experiences led me forward, always writing. It’s been what I've always done. Eventually there developed, as with most young writers, the obsession and deep desire to write a book and to be published.

We all know that as writers there becomes this moment where you really are committed to this life; for me, it was the only thing that I could see in front of me. I had to have it, it was an obsession. And so, I went off on that journey and it was a long journey, but I actually got there.

KARIN: When you eventually focused your attention on writing a book, did you know what story you wanted to tell?

LISA: I knew there were things that I cared about, and I had written vast quantities of that wandering journal-esque. I suppose in the midst of that, I was defining that which resonated on the deepest level for me. But no, I did not set out to say, "Hmm, I'm going to write a mystery novel or..." No, it wasn't like that. It was very organic. I came to it slowly. I knew what bothered me, so I knew what the problem was, although I couldn't have spoken of it that way then. And I knew what I loved and I just followed that.

KARIN: Was it personal narrative?

LISA: The first book I published was, yes.

KARIN: Was it about a certain period of your life?

LISA: It was, but it was about much more than that. This turned out to be a story set over a certain set of years and based in the Sandhills region of Nebraska—and my relationship with that place, a little cabin that's there and the family history. But it was really in large part about environmental issues of that region, and that involved not only water, but looking at soils and talking to ranchers. So it was deeply journalistic. I traveled and interviewed for many, many months. It was a weaving together of what grew to be my adult concerns about the landscape and my childhood concerns about this story that was in my heart.

I use the word heart. The Ogallala Aquifer is this huge aquifer that fills the porous soils beneath the sands of the Sandhills and is the throbbing heart of that whole region. It's drying up. That was the whole thrust of the environmental concern.

KARIN: How did you end up publishing it?

LISA: I wrote and wrote and wrote and had developed a certain set of chapters that seemed to be getting at something. I was doing the best I could at the time, but I was passionate and young. I also remember that summer getting ready and saying to myself in my young 20-something mode, “I'm going to make something happen.”

I went to a conference at which I was speaking and teaching. At that conference, I met an agent and she was interested, and having zip knowledge about how it all worked, I was thrilled and I gave her my chapters. Before the conference was over, she said, “I'd like to represent you.” This is the little magic story from the sky.

Over the course of months, she helped me craft these chapters and helped me put together a package, which included what I realize now is a cover letter. She went out to 50 agents and 50 editors. No one took it. And so, she came back to me with the feedback she was getting, and we looked at the feedback together. It's hard discerning what they're really saying, because everyone's very careful, but we did decide that they were saying something vaguely similar.

And so, I rewrote the entire book based on what I thought they might be saying to me. And when that product was ready, I sent it back to the agent and she went out again. I did then get two responses, one from Knopf and one from Picador St. Martin's. There was a little bit of a battle, it was all very exciting. And I went with Picador.

KARIN: Nice. Do you remember what you changed when you rewrote it?

LISA: Gosh, it's been so long. I think it was something like ‘more of me’ in it.

KARIN: You eventually became a teacher of writing and a memoir coach. Did you study writing or did teaching simply emerge from your own background as a writer?

LISA: My second degree was in journalism. So that was a form of writing. When I went to the University of Iowa to study journalism, there was no nonfiction program in the writer's workshop. They didn't exist. At that time, there were no nonfiction programs in America. It was a club. There was fiction and poetry.

KARIN: What year was this?

LISA: I was at Iowa in the eighties. If you wanted to study nonfiction writing, you basically had two tracks. You could get a degree in English and focus on the essay. But you couldn't major in that. And then, in the journalism program, there were two people who were innovative and open, and one of them was a writer and she was writing what we would have called narrative nonfiction. That was her field. I gravitated to her. Patricia Westfall was her name. She was willing to be inventive with me. So along with her and John Bennett, another member of the journalism program, I basically invented a creative thesis in the journalism program to write narrative nonfiction.

I wrote my thesis as a narrative nonfiction product. It was not what the program normally did, but I realize now I was really on the beginning of a wave of people who wanted to study that, but there was no path to study that—no official path. So I had studied writing, but in a kind of a nontraditional way.

KARIN: Were you surprised when personal narrative took hold?

LISA: No. I saw it coming.

KARIN: Do you have a sense of why memoir has emerged in the way it has?

LISA: Well, I can give you my experience of that history.

I was interested in it already, but I was approaching it with this journalistic backbone, or reportage. You had the essay voice going on, but you also had reportage, which I think is important. I think it's important also in memoir today, having something more to say than your own personal thing. So I had been reading a lot of essays and environmental essays because I was crazy about the natural world.
 
Then along came Terry Tempest Williams's book, Refuge. Terry was huge. She was doing exactly what I was already leaning toward. She wrote this very deeply personal story about her mother dying from cancer, which was very related to the land because she grew up in Utah which had been influenced by the nuclear bombs that were being tested. They were downwind and she did die. The book was all about the environment and her mother.

This happened at about exactly the same time I was moving in my own circle of expression. She deeply influenced an entire generation of women writing about a personal experience and that melding with the natural world. So there was a whole movement that happened in the early nineties of women writing about the land, and inside that were these deeply personal, feminine stories.

What then happened was those deeply feminine, personal stories began breaking away from the relationship with natural history issues and they became their own thing.

Then along came Mary Karr and she wrote The Liars Club. I remember when I read about that book and that it was coming out, I said, "That's going to be a huge hit." And indeed, it was. That then signaled women speaking and unhinged from the natural world and in some ways unhinged from really anything else, but the personal story itself. That was the beginning of where the personal story felt no need to attach itself to reportage of any other topic, and the subject itself—me, my life—became the whole thing. If you're a stylist like Mary Karr, you can get away with that. If you're not, here we are today.

KARIN: What do you mean, “If you're not, here we are today”?

LISA: What that means to me is, you have lots and lots of women writing deeply personal intimate stories about their lives, but those stories aren't necessarily attached to any other topic that can add depth for publishing and a good portion of them are not a stylist like Mary Karr. And you have a saturated memoir market, which when Mary Karr came on the scene, you did not have.

KARIN: How do you talk about publishing with a writer?

LISA: Well, I always do clarify because sometimes clients do not have that as their first goal, but I would say 95 to 99% of people say I want to get this published. Or how do I get this published? They may not have actually even written it. So that looms as this myth about what it means and will mean to be a published writer. So right away, I determine whether the writer is interested in that.

Then I have a general conversation about publishing and the various forms available for one to pursue publishing. Then I talk about the kinds of writerly necessities of a story to find a home in the big publishers. And then I let all that rest. And then we try to turn our attention back to producing the best product that that particular writer can produce without ghostwriting.

KARIN: What do you emphasize for a memoir to be publishable?

LISA: I have come to the conclusion that one of the smartest things any memoirist can do is to broaden their story so that it is about more than just their own personal experience. I'm going to give you a simple example. You're writing about a loved one dying with cancer, and half of the story is about cancer or some research or something about science. It's not just about the traumatic journey that the narrator has gone on. It is in part about that, but it's also about this other topic. And when I find memoirists who are willing and able—because it's a different skill when they are willing and able to step up to that and actually produce market-worthy material—they have a hell of a lot better chance of making it in the door.

So that's number one on the list. I would say that 90% or more of people don't want to do that. Beyond that, I basically say, “Your writing has to be stellar, knock my socks off. Wow me,” and 90% of people can't do that. I know I'm sounding horribly jaded and there's nothing wrong with the writing that they are doing, but to get into this elite club, there are certain things that have to be done to play that game.

KARIN: What do you think about the self-publishing and hybrid publishing options that are emerging?

LISA: I think it's great and horrible. It depends on each particular case. It has certainly opened up publishing and that's wonderful. It has also segregated publishing and that's not so wonderful. It has also contributed to the whole redefinition of publishing, at least in our country. And that's sad.

KARIN: Sad because...?

LISA: I used to think of publishing as this well-intentioned marketplace of broad ideas in which many publishers really were committed—deeply, ethically and morally committed—to the dissemination of differing ideas and voices. That is not where we're at right now. I mean, the most recent upsets all rising out of George Floyd and his death point directly at the ongoing and even more deeply embedded inequities in opportunities for publishing and for voices. It's not what it was. One could argue, “Oh, in the good old days, it was just a bunch of old white guys who got published.” Maybe that's a good argument, but still it has narrowed the field and many of those voices are then sent off into the hinterlands of self-publishing, which has a long and potholed-filled journey ahead of it.

KARIN: What has happened?

LISA: Once upon a time, it didn't matter if a publishing house made money, and hence they were more free to publish books they felt were good or important, but which they knew they might lose money on. That was part of what publishing did.

And now it is not like that, or a whole heck of a lot less like that. Because the publishing houses—at least all the imprints at the big 5 in New York—are owned by conglomerates, the bottom line is just exactly what it is for any other arm of a business: It must turn a profit.

When you apply that capitalistic requirement to art, well, you have the situation we now have today, which is: Many books that once upon a time might have made it into a publishing house, will not today, and not because of their merit or worth for society, but rather simply because they will not turn a profit.

KARIN: Now during this time of Covid and George Floyd, I think we’re all experiencing a kind of disorientation. But at the same time, I’m noticing that people are moved to write the stories they haven’t yet voiced. What are you noticing?

LISA: I do think there is a great deal of disorientation that I am picking up on personally and also among colleagues and clients. And yet there's this other thing happening, which I find it very heartening and exciting. It is a place where I have always believed personally that openings come. And one's ability to take advantage of those openings in one's life depends on being aware. Do you see them? Do you recognize them as openings? Are you open to the openings? If we are closed off and tight and inflexible and frightened, we often don't see those openings and they pass us by. The universe delivers them and they dissolve into space-time if we don't grab them.

There's some kind of opening—a black hole, a space-time opening in the universe—and large quantities of people are seeing it. Maybe they're just feeling it; maybe no one can name it. There's nothing we can all call it. I'm calling it an opening. There is this opening for people to step through and what is on the other side we don't know, but what people are coming to the opening with is art and stories and ideas. They're stepping through this opening. They're walking into the unknown, and out of that will come new voices and new stories and new art forms and things we can't even imagine.

It's all very unknown and wonderful and scary. Now there's a lot of people still saying, "I don't know what to do!" And that's okay. That's where they are. But what I'm seeing are all these other people taking the door, walking through the opening and they're making art and they're writing stories and they're doing TED talks or talking to people in their community, on the street corner. They're voicing their stories. And I think there's going to be an incredible blossoming, the likes of which we cannot yet get our hands on.
 
KARIN: That is so heartening and exciting.




To learn more about Lisa Dale Norton, visit her website.

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A Conversation with Jason Cochran

I had a great time reconnecting with an old friend from college, Jason Cochran, whose book Here Lies America just dropped last week. Jason is a well-reputed travel writer whose love for history inspired him to trek across the U.S. to destinations where horrible tragedies have taken place. Whilst you may think that a dark and heavy topic, Jason's wry sense of humor and quick wit carry you on a fascinating journey through time—think Bill Bryson, but edgier! He weaves in the unraveling of his own family history along the way, too.


Jason Cochran has been a travel authority and consumer expert for 20 years, starting in 1998 when, on a two-year round-the-world backpacking trip, he created one of the first regular travel blogs. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Frommers.com and co-host with Pauline Frommer of the weekly Travel Show on WABC, broadcast out of New York City.

What would happen if you took a long road trip–but only visited the tourism attractions that opened because something really horrible had happened? In his new book Here Lies America, Jason Cochran romps through American disaster zones, battlefields, Confederate memorials, and terrorist attack sites. Along the way, he takes a look at why these places matter, why some really don’t, and what motivated the people who built the monuments. And when he pauses to seek the meaning behind the early demise of one of his own ancestors, he uncovers a tragic race-based murder plot that had been buried for a century.

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KARIN GUTMAN: Where did you get the idea for this book?

JASON COCHRAN: I'm a travel writer—I have been basically about 20 years. I was working at Entertainment Weekly and burned out on that. I went backpacking around the world for two years, and when I came back, I thought, “Okay I'm a journalist, but what kind?” Well, I became a travel writer. Arthur Frommer hired me. It became my job to go to places and then come back and tell other people how to repeat the tourist experience for the best value. My type of travel writing was never about the machismo of conquering the mountain or the adrenaline rush of jumping out of the airplane. I'm not a consumeristic traveler.

I realized pretty quickly after I started, that many of my fellow travel writers always had one aspect of travel they looked into the most—the folks always writing about food when they travel, or spas when they travel. I found myself most interested in history. I realized that I was less interested in the aspect of the active travel I did, but in the discovery of past worlds wherever I went.

I realized I was a historic person, but you need to travel to cover history because it didn't happen where you're sitting, most of it. In a way, being interested in history is like travel, it's just traveling backward through time. You still have to put yourself in a different mindset to go back to a generation that's not like yours and to try to see things the way they did, just the way you try to go to other countries and then figure out how to fit in. It's almost the same in a lot of ways mentally.

I thought it'd be fun, in a dark way, to go to all the historic sites in America—the battlefields and graveyards that tourists go to—and observe the ridiculousness of what we're doing. I imagined this would be a book of descriptions of fat kids eating ice cream cones on Arlington graves, and inappropriate souvenirs and that kind of thing. But very quickly when I began researching this, when I started in Georgia, I realized that wasn't the story.

KARIN: What happened in Georgia?

JASON: This was in Andersonville, which was an old Civil War concentration camp run by the Confederates near Americus. It's not too far from where Jimmy Carter was born and raised, and still lives. I was in Americus that night at a really old hotel from the 1800s. It was quiet and there was a young kid running the desk. He was asking what I was doing in town. I said, "I have this idea for a book, but I had a hard time today. There wasn't much." He said, "Did you notice the monuments?" I said, "How they're all clustered in one corner?" He said, "No, did you notice how Maryland's is huge, and the other states are much smaller? They didn't lose nearly as many people as the other states did."

I said, "Oh, that's interesting." Then we started to talk about the hotel, and he said, "This was built basically to house people who wanted to come to Americus to go see the concentration camp remains from the 1890s in the beginning of the century." I thought, that's interesting too because there was barely anyone there when I was there. I went back to Andersonville the next day and I looked at the monuments, and sure enough they were very disparate. I noticed, though, that the years on all of them were either at the very tail end of the 1800s or mostly in the early 1900s, which is 50 years after the Civil War.

That was the beginning of me realizing that this is really about the historic sites and who shaped them, and what they wanted you to believe when they did it.

In Georgia, also that same trip, I went up to Atlanta where I have ancestors. I'm from Atlanta originally. My people go back to the 1700s in Georgia. My great-great grandfather reputedly was buried in one of the most famous graveyards in Atlanta, one that attracts tourists. I found him in the graveyard and learned he wasn't very old when he had died. I realized that if I'm going to be fair about this whole thing, I have to look into my own family tragedy while I'm talking about all these other people's tragedies.

The book takes twin paths. While I'm going to all these various sites across the country, and I do from Hawaii to Florida, to everywhere in between, I'm also trying to figure out what happened to the person buried there in Oakland Cemetery. It was my great-great grandfather, and very quickly I find out he was a train engineer who died in a wreck. That much I knew. But when I went up to South Carolina to do a bit of research in the libraries up there--South Carolina is where the accident happened--I found out something that my family had never talked about which is yes, he died in the train wreck but it was sabotaged, and two African American teens were held for his murder and tried for it.

No one in my family had never known this. We had just known about the death. No one ever talked about this murder thing. So the book becomes an exploration of my own family's path and some questioning of how we got to where we are, and why this story fell out of the story, and finding out what other things fell out of the stories at these other sites as well.

KARIN: I love the concept. It sounds like you discovered the personal aspect of the book organically…

JASON: It happened purely by accident. I think even for the first month or so, I wasn't quite connecting the two. I was like, "Oh, I can research my family while I'm out and about." But when I found the clips on microfiche at a local library, that these young men had been held and arraigned for murder, I was furious. I was really pissed off that no one in my family had told me this.

This family that allegedly venerated our ancestor never happened to mention maybe the most salient part of the story of his death. I started to connect my anger with what I was discovering about these sites, how these major aspects of American history had been bent and twisted so they would be more pleasing mythology.

KARIN: Did you ever find out why the boys killed him?

JASON: It's part of the climax of the book, when you finally find out what their story was. There are still some questions. I don't want to give it away obviously, but you do find out the result of the trial.

KARIN: The book sounds more like a narrative than it does a travel guide…

JASON: Right, it's definitely not a guide. There are no websites, phone numbers, opening hours, or admission prices.

There's a rough narrative. As you move along, as I structure it, the uses of these sites become more tactical by political groups, people who want to venerate people or venerate themselves until we get to present day, which I think it's too early for us to really have a clear picture of why we tell our stories the way we tell our stories now. We need for someone else to look at us through the distance of time. But I do talk about what I'm seeing us do that other generations didn't do when they re-told their stories and how they theatrically presented their own worst moments of mortality.

It's not a gruesome book. I tried to keep it very light. I have a sort of self-effacing, wry voice, I'm told. I'm told that I sound like a guy named Bill Bryson, who's an American writer who works in England. I have my very strong feelings about what all this means to the mythology of my country, but it's not a political book.

KARIN: What does your writing practice look like? Do you dedicate a certain period of time to writing every day? Or does it depend on the ebbs and flows on what you're working on?

JASON: I have to fit my writing in alongside my full-time job. My full-time job is also writing, which can be difficult because if you spend all day writing, you don't necessarily want to spend another five hours in front of your computer at night writing. I try to balance that. It's very much when either inspiration or guilt hits me hard enough that I get in front of the monitor. I'm very much one of these writers who has required periods of gestation. That's what Stephen Sondheim called it. He gets the information he needs, he gets the character in the situation, and then he goes away to think about it, and then he comes back and somewhere there it is. That's what I need. I need to not think about it for a while.

For me, sitting in front of a computer for three set hours every single day is not always the best course for me, because I've written a lot of useless things that way, that I've just had to do over again. I mean, I always do it over again anyway, but I find that I'm much better if I walk away from the thing and then I just reach an emotional point where I just have to get back there and get it down.

KARIN: Tell us about your full-time job with Frommer’s… Are you going to an office?

JASON: As far as my work for Frommer's goes, I run the website editorially. I do the assigning and the editing of everyone else. I write two of their books every single year, so my springs are shot because I go to London for a month and a half or two months, and I also do Orlando. I'm there for less than that. Every single spring and early summer I write those books so they're out in December.

KARIN: I see, so you're basically updating your book every year.

JASON: Right, it's all mine. No one else works on it, so everything in it is my keystroke and I can decide what to change every single year. But it's an evolving thing every year because the world evolves.

The nice thing about Frommer's is they've changed as well with publishing. They don't have a bricks and mortar. It's a piece of overhead they don't need, especially with a travel company, with so many people always on the road. Each of us works independently, but of course with computers and everything, we're always “getting together.” I've always been at home, which is terrific. I don't work on my book during the day. I don't take time away from my day job, because I find it too hard to shift gears. The book thing is one set of muscles and one set of emotions, and the day job is much more technical and it's just an old skill. I try not to mix those. I just write at night or on weekends with my book.

I do, interestingly, tend to work in different spots. I work at my standup desk for my book writing, and I go anywhere else basically for work.

When it came to editing my book, I did most all of that out of the house. I worked a lot on this book at Mousso & Frank at the bar. I was the guy at the end of the bar with a stack of papers. I did it at Disneyland, too, believe it or not. There's a bar in the Lagoon at California Adventure, and I would bring my stacks of papers, and edit and cut. Both places had the same question, "Are you a teacher?"

KARIN: Grading papers?

JASON: Yep, that's what they thought. I told them, "No, I'm writing a book."

KARIN: You graduated from Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, trained as a journalist. I'm curious what your experience has been as a journalist? Obviously, publishing is changing, but journalism is changing too.

JASON: My Medill training in a way did form this book, in that at Medill, you're always told to find primary sources, not secondhand sources for any historic or current fact that you have. I think my always asking that question, trying to find, “Has this been filtered before it got to me?” helped me interpret a lot of these sites I was going to, because I was always looking for the most essential, most basic, most primary truth. I think it has likely informed my entire world view. It's being very critical with my thinking.

Also, there's a joke... My last line in the whole in the afterward is, “This book was made without Wikipedia,” because I very much wanted to find either primary sources or a newspaper account, something that goes back to the source of things rather than from an interpretation of the source of things.

Ever since the day the Huffington Post was big, far too many journalists do what I used to call “clip jobs.” They just collect all this information from all these different places they've found, and they present what they think the story is, or what they interpreted the story to be. I think that a lot of these journalists and outfits today like BuzzFeed, and most of their departments, encourage that kind of behavior because they set minimum posts you have to do every day, minimum clicks you need to get to get paid. When you start thinking that way, obviously you're starting to skew things in order to pay for yourself and speed things up as well.

KARIN: Do you feel like being a journalist today is a viable path, given that there is more “clip job” reporting and less on-the-ground reporting?

JASON: I'm not sure if it's an entirely viable path. There are very few places that I would say still honor wholeheartedly that kind of quality. You're more likely, especially if you're a millennial, to wind up at one of these post mill places where really they're hiring you for your judgment rather than your journalistic ability which are not the same thing.

Now I have to go back and think, was it ever viable? I think in the 1800s almost every journalist was a yellow one, and to sell papers, that was always the name of the game. In a way, we just had an anomalous heyday of lawyer-like standards for journalists, which maybe was never realistic given greed, and corruption, and economic pressures of the world. Maybe we just had a luxury of trying to be as unbiased as possible, because economic circumstances favored us briefly. I also think there's no such things as journalism without bias. I think it doesn't exist.

For example, if you choose to cover a story you already have exhibited a bias by choosing that and not the other thing. I go into it in my book. I ask the question, “Why do we go to all these historic sites?” When all these are forgotten, and maybe more people were killed at those.” So there's a bias to why we record certain things. There's a bias in journalism—do you give it the first story or the third story, the front page or the 10th page? That's a bias. How long is the story? So it's impossible to have journalism without bias. My book, it's very much saying… ultimately, it's impossible to have history without bias. There's no such thing as a fact in history. Physics has facts. Particle physics, the way things move—laws, rules. There are no hard and fast facts on how you interpret how something went down. It's always a bias.

KARIN: Right, even if you have first person testimonials…

JASON: Yes, that's part of it. Even the sources might be wrong, or skewed. Secondly, there's so much that went unrecorded that you may not even know about, because that's history—things just don't get recorded and they don’t get down to you. You can get four dots of the picture and expect to come up with something much more complex out of those four dots; and it's ridiculous, because you're never going to know the truth.

Ultimately, that's what I realized about my own personal experience with my family in the book. I'm never going to know the truth. The truth, as I imagine it might be, isn't very pleasant. But I'm never going to know really what happened. I go to Stone Mountain in Georgia, which was the KKK ritual spot. My great-great grandfather’s son became a photographer for the newspaper. On the side, he would shoot KKK meetings for them. The debate is, was he or wasn't he? We'll never know. That's not the kind of thing people write down.

KARIN: I know you had to travel quite a bit to write this book, right?

JASON: Yeah, I went to more than 70 places.

KARIN: What’s the secret to carving out time for your passion project—the thing that you want to do, the thing that wants to be birthed—while maintaining your job and life?

JASON: My circumstance is that I am a travel writer. I happen to have very generous bosses, who will let me go places. We don't have a bricks and mortar. They don't expect me to be there all the time. So if I'm working one day from South Dakota, they're okay with it. I would tag it on to other trips I was taking, for work often, so I slipped things in when I could. Sometimes it's vacation time, sometimes it was business trips, sometimes it was working while I was traveling.

Which is one of the reasons it took years, because I had so many places to get to. I went to a lot more places that I had to cut from the book too, maybe another 40%, because the lessons I was learning at the places were repeated things that I had already learned at other places that I had decided to include.

KARIN: How long did you work on it?

JASON: About eight or nine years, off and on. A lot of off, but with the on, it was pretty intense.

KARIN: How do you feel, now that it’s out in the world?

JASON: I'm very proud to have it in my hands, and kind of never thought it would even happen because there were so many setbacks and roadblocks. Structurally, it was difficult to arrive at what we finally arrived at. I feel proud and grateful. I have yet to hear much feedback from people, because it's just out.

I have an uncle in his 90s that's an old school Southerner, who loved it, but says that there are some people who are going to get really mad at me because of some of the things I say about the South. “So, be careful.” Yeah, that's fine. You know, I've always been a little bit marginal. This book is about disillusionment, especially when it comes to my nationality in a lot of ways. I'm sort of prepared to be further disillusioned by the reception of it. When I wrote this, I really only cared about it being read and respected by people I respect and like. I'm not doing it for fame or fortune. I want like minds to dig it.

Buy the book!

To learn more about Jason Cochran, visit his
website.

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A Conversation with Adam Skolnick

Have you ever wanted to write someone's life story, perhaps one other than your own? The interview this month with my dear friend Adam Skolnick offers some great insight into the creative process behind his first narrative non-fiction book.

An experienced journalist, Adam was covering an international freediving competition in the Bahamas when the unthinkable happened. Renowned freediver Nicholas Mevoli died tragically during the competition just 10 feet away; and after covering the story for the New York Times, Adam couldn't shake the experience. Now three years later his book One Breath (Crown Archetype, January 2016) has hit the shelves. Through the portrait of this young man, Adam explores the fascinating sport of freediving and the desire of these unique athletes to push human limits.


Adam Skolnick has written for the New York Times, Playboy, Outside, ESPN.com, BBC.com, Salon.com, Men's Health, Wired, and Travel + Leisure, among others. He has visited 45 countries and authored or coauthored over 25 Lonely Planet guidebooks. His coverage of Nicholas Mevoli's death at Vertical Blue earned two APSE awards. From that emerged his narrative non-fiction book, One Breath -- a gripping and powerful exploration of the strange and fascinating sport of freediving, and of the tragic, untimely death of America's greatest freediver.

Skolnick shows sharp reportorial instincts in this multilayered narrative...This is a page-turning book... but it’s also about the competitors drawn to the sport, the ones for whom ‘freediving is both an athletic quest to push the limits of the body and mind, and a spiritual experience.’ A worthy addition to the growing body of literature on adventures that test the limits of nature and mankind.
— Kirkus Reviews
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Karin: When you wrote the book proposal, what did you find to be the biggest challenge?

Adam: Well, I think I had this book right away; it was going to be an Into the Wild story. And then I turned it into my agent. My agent didn't want to pin it all onto Nick. He thought maybe a more generic freediving book would be better. Easy to sell or easier to execute. He didn't want to over-promise, under-deliver type thing. I didn't agree with him, but I just thought, I actually have no idea how this world works. He does; I have to trust him. So I followed his lead.

Meanwhile, I'm just finishing up this Lonely Planet L.A. manuscript. I'm in the desert locked away in hiding; Coachella is going off all around me. A friend of mine happened to be in the desert - said there's an extra wristband if you want to come. I go out and end up falling into this Asian drug crew and having really speedy ecstasy. After an hour and half night's sleep, wide awake, I get a message from my agent saying Crown wants to talk to you about your book, can you talk to them? And I'm like, can I talk to them tomorrow? I'm not really in the condition... And of course I thought I'd blown it, like that's it, this is your chance and you're a druggy loser.

So the next day I get on the phone with him and he's saying, “I really like this world but what's the through-line, what's the narrative?” And so I say, “¥ou know, I was always going to write it this other way to be honest. Whoever was going to buy this book, I was always going to talk to them before I started writing; that this is the way it should be done.” He said, “I need three pages to give to people, we're still far from any deal.” So basically I had a day or two to come up with the three-page hook that pitched the narrative.

I know it was a process to get Nick's family to “buy in” so to speak. How did you get them to get behind you and this book - the telling of their son's story? 

My approach was, no matter what they say, I am going to get them to be a part of this. I didn't put too much pressure on that first meeting. I'm pretty organic. I think I blocked out four days to be in Tallahassee, maybe three days. And so that day, on my way there, I just realized I would tell his mom the story of how I came to be the witness to her son's death.

She opened the door, and right away she spun out, like, “Okay, what are you doing here, Adam? What do you want, why are you here, what's going on?” Like right away, I haven't even walked into the house. I said, “Okay, well, can we sit down and can I just tell you how I ended up being there that day?” And I told her the whole story and my own heartbreak. And before I was even done, she was talking. People want to talk.

When tragedy happens in your life - we're all grown ups, we've all had our share of bullshit - my experience of it is, at first everybody's there for you and wants to hear, and then pretty quickly three months later, they'll listen to you but pretty quickly their eyes will glaze over. It's not that they don't give a shit, it's that they don't have the capacity to give a shit anymore. And I was the type of person that, whenever you want to talk about this horrible thing that happened, I'm happy to talk about it. So in reality I filled a number of roles over the course of this thing for the family. I was kind of a surrogate nephew, I was a brother. I wouldn't go so far to say I was a surrogate son, but whenever anyone wanted to talk to me they knew they could. That, I think, has value for the family.

You know what I'm good at is 'access', that's really probably the thing I'm best at. It's never been a problem for me. I don't have any sort of plan or how I go about it. It's really pretty organic. I think anybody can be good at it. If you're interested and you're genuine, people want to talk about their stories. 

You said you had 10 weeks to write the first draft. Did you have a structure or writing ritual that you followed to meet that deadline?

My ritual is just, you gotta write 3,000 words a day if you're trying to meet a deadline like that. If you think about it, my goal was a 100,000-word manuscript, because that's about a 300-page book. So if you think about 3,000 words a day, that's a little over a month and you're done with a draft.

That might sound like a lot, but just think about that for a second. If you write 1,500 words a day, which all of you can do, that's two months.

And the reason I got to the 3,000 word number is from Lonely Planet manuscripts having very tight deadlines and having to produce them really quickly. At the time of my first one, I was still writing magazine stories every once in a while and didn't have to have that same attention span expansion. And a colleague told me, “You can do this, just do 3,000 words a day.” After a while, you do build up to that. It's a vibration, it just tunes up. At first it might be hard, you just keep doing it.

How you get there is an extremely detailed outline. I did a full outline with the editor, kind of mapped it out. I had each chapter outlined. Then when I got to that chapter I outlined it even further. I would break it down, what I wanted to say in that chapter. I'd funnel in all the information that was in my massive notes. I'd pop it in my outline.

The point I'm trying to say is, 3,000 words is only a lot if you don't know what you're going to say. That's when it becomes really hard. If you find yourself staring at the computer not knowing what to write, it means you don't know what you want to say. It doesn't mean you're blocked.

So if you can take that big mass white page and put it down to small little bricks, and just fill those spaces, it's much easier. Much easier. And then everything becomes demystified. 3,000 words a day, or make it a 1,000 words, or if you have a day job, 500 words. Even 500 words a day, in six months you're gonna have a book. That's not that much time.

What was the editing process like?

So then I wrote the whole thing. 430 pages is the first draft.  And I've got a week until I gotta turn it in. I was so happy to have finished the first draft and then I start reading it the next morning, and I think oh f**ck this is horrible. It's a failure.

But luckily I had a good friend come help me edit it. I had a week to go. So I start going through my first 50 pages and make my changes - and hand over those newly edited 50 to him. And he goes through those 50 and makes his notes. When he's done we get together and go over his edits. So pretty soon, almost immediately day one, we have three versions of this manuscript happening. We have the original raw one. We have the one I fixed. And we have the one he's fixing.

And that process gave us a great global view of things, because one of the biggest issues when you're doing what I was doing is, where am I repeating myself? - especially with physiology of freediving and the history of some of these athletes and all that. That's the best way to clean out stuff. But then also overall it just kind of distilled it.

By the time that first pass was done, in just a couple of days before moving on to the second pass, we found it. It was just right there.

I would never have predicted that, it was totally organic. And now I don't think I'll ever do another book any other way.

Where do you write?

For me at this point I travel so much, I can do it anywhere. I generally work better in the daytime. But if I want to swim, I still need to be in the water, so at one point I would be in the backseat of my friend's car on the way to the beach. I had rented a room from a friend in Hollywood for all this time. It's an hour each way to the beach, so I'd be in the backseat writing with the headphones, and on the way back with the headphones. At this point I'm an experienced reporter so I'm on the road a lot. It doesn't matter.

I think the sooner you can get out of the “precious environment” type of stuff that is totally natural to someone who is just getting into it as a real habit or a real lifestyle.... The sooner you can get out of that sanctimonious stuff, sanctifying the writing process, I think the more natural it becomes. That's my own personal take. It's not super sacred, it's just a practice.

 

To learn more about Adam Skolnick, visit adamskolnick.com

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