Nieman fellow Anna Griffin moderated the discussion. In keeping with this week’s Pulitzer theme, here’s the conversation, along with an excerpted transcript, edited for clarity and brevity, followed by an interactive index for the entire event. Enjoy! 

Griffin: It is a distinct pleasure to moderate this conversation with Paul Harding. Paul is an author, a teacher, a rock star. He grew up on the North Shore, graduated from U-Mass, has an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and, according to the Internet, which is never wrong, is a first cousin of figure skater Tonya Harding.

(laughter)

Griffin: Is that not – is that not –

(laughter)

Harding: No, that’s not true.

(laughter)

Griffin: He has redeemed the Harding name twice, first as a drummer with the 1990s (band) Cold Water Flat, which if you went to college in the ’90s, which a few of us in the room did, you probably heard play quite a bit on campus radio; and then as the author of a little Cinderella story of a book, “Tinkers,” which is kind of a tone poem, almost, about life in New England. It sat in a drawer for three years, was bought by a boutique publisher affiliated with NYU medical school, had a first run of 3,500 copies, and then won the Pulitzer Prize, which is the way it works for everybody.

(laughter)

Griffin: He is now finishing up on his second novel, (“Enon”), which, shockingly, did not spend time in a drawer for any length of time and will be published next spring by Random House. Paul’s gonna read a few things and then we’re gonna talk about writing, and then we’re gonna throw it open to the room for questions.

Harding: Thank you. It’s a great pleasure to be here. You know I’ve read from “Tinkers” about seven million thousand times by now, so I figured I’d read a little bit from “Tinkers” and then give you a little bit from the novel that’s gonna be coming out next spring, and then just a little two-page self-contained piece, so it’s gonna be a buffet today. And then I’ll be delighted to have a conversation.

So “Tinkers” is about a guy who was a sort of peddler; he’s the tinker of the title, and he abandons his family. “Tinkers” is set in northern Maine in the ’20s and the protagonist abandons his family when he finds out that his wife is gonna have him committed to an asylum because he has epilepsy. His epilepsy is so disruptive to the family that the best thing (his wife) can think of to do is to have him committed. So he leaves the family. So this is just a brief passage, a couple of days after he’s had a grand mal seizure.

(Harding reads.)

Harding's readings copy (see "marginalia," in index below). Photo courtesy Harding.

Griffin: “Tinkers” began as a family story and became a short story that was part of your grad school application –

Harding: Mm hmm, yeah.

Griffin: – and then was turned into the novel. Talk about the writing process, to take something that’s like family lore and turn it into a short story. What was the short story and how did you expand that into the novel?

Harding: First of all, the basic premises of “Tinkers” are all based on stories that my maternal grandfather told me and my cousins and my brother about his life growing up in northern Maine. But I wasn’t interested in family history. I wasn’t interested in autobiography. It would be difficult for me to be less interested in autobiography. I’m not interested in myself; I’m interested in the fact that I am a self. So I just started writing about these family legends. The original short story version of “Tinkers” was 15 or 16 pages long, and it had actually what, if you look at the novel, is the beginning, the middle and the end of the novel. The whole story was there. And if you’ve looked at “Tinkers” it’s pretty elliptical and nonlinear, so if you can imagine 15 pages – it was impossibly dense and impossibly elliptical and obscure.

So enough people gave me encouragement to expand it. After I left the Iowa Writers Workshop I was fortunate enough to get a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, which is a seven-month fellowship, to work on the book. So I spent seven months toiling and worrying that I was making a perfectly decent short story into a terrible novel. And so it was just a matter of expanding.

Griffin: So the original short story, it was George, Howard – it was both –

Harding: Yeah, yeah, the whole thing was there.

Griffin: Was it tiny font? How’d you get that into 16 pages?

Harding: I don’t know. I write in such a haphazard manner. It’s totally intuitive and fortuitous. It’s improvisational. It is sort of circumstantial, in a way, but in a way I write the way I used to drum. If I’m playing drums I just start to do whatever comes over the wire. Same with writing, you know? And I just kind of bop around the story. In some ways, I’m impatient – I wanted to know what the end of the story was and to move around the boundaries of it.

Griffin: You don’t outline.

Harding: No, no.

Griffin: On the Internet are scenes of you with index cards and napkins –

Harding: Catastrophe. Just absolute panic the whole time.

Griffin: You’re kind of a crazy man aren’t you?

(laughter)

Griffin: And then you tape them together, staple them together.

Harding: Yeah with “Tinkers” I literally did that. It’s funny, because I just finished the first draft of “Enon” and booked a couple of weeks at the Fine Arts Work Center, so I went back down to Provincetown and damned if I didn’t end up on the floor again with the whole novel, thinking, “How’s this gonna work? How’s this gonna come together?” And I think it did, but who knows. It’s such a strange thing. Being a fiction writer is not efficiency. I have to go through these incredible difficulties in order to fully realize the book, at least these first two. I hope that I’ll get better at it. Though it doesn’t seem to be a matter of getting better at it. It just seems to be this integral part of the process.

Griffin: How do you guard against getting so far into the story and looking up and going, “Oh, I’m trying so many different things I’m losing my reader?”

Harding: I never ever think about a reader. Ever.

Griffin: The readers love that.

(laughter)

Harding: No, no, no, no! Because on the deepest level it’s the deepest way to be solicitous of the reader. You just trust yourself that you’re writing something that you’d like to read. The problem with – this is not true for journalism or for genre-based fiction, but the worst thing you can do is try to write a novel in anticipation of people, first of all, who won’t like it. Don’t ever write your fiction for people who won’t like it. Just give yourself wholeheartedly to it and trust that the reader will like what you like. Because otherwise you don’t pay attention to the story; you pay attention to these voices behind your shoulder saying, “Oh well she didn’t have blue eyes in the first chapter.” And it’s like, a copyeditor will get that. That sort of thing. So it’s improvisational. So you just give yourself over wholeheartedly to the story. With “Tinkers” it’s 192 pages, it’s like 40,000 words. I cut 25,000 words, cut like a quarter of it.

Griffin: What did you cut?

Harding: The mother of the family, who’s gonna have her husband sent away, there’s a whole section of the book that was just all about her life before she was married, and I just couldn’t get it to work.

Griffin: How do you feel now about that?

Harding: Sad. I feel very loyal to her.

Griffin: Because one of the things that strikes me is that she’s not an overwhelmingly sympathetic character.

Harding: Yeah you know it’s funny. It’s one of these things – this is another reason why you don’t think about the reader, as it were, because the reader that you imagine – you don’t know who’s gonna look at your book. You have to trust your subject; you have to trust your characters and let them elaborate themselves, who they really are. A lot of the stuff that I wrote for this woman, Kathleen, that ended up on the cutting room floor, was trying to make her a sympathetic character, quote unquote, but for one thing if you ever met the woman on whom she’s based you’d think she’s an angel. The woman she’s based on is much worse than (Kathleen) is. You know, I had this strange experience – I was in Cape Town for a book festival and talking to a South African writer, and Kathleen was their favorite character in the book because she was like a strong African mother raising children in the township. They thought she was wonderful. So it was this sort of: Be loyal to your characters, be loyal to the story, be loyal to the subject – it possesses its own integrity.

Griffin: One of the things we talk about in journalism is that when you’re writing about something complicated you want to get simple – simple language, simple sentences. I’ve seen in interviews you talk about how because a lot of “Tinkers” is fairly abstract and it’s very sort of modernist – a lot of things happening in George and Howard’s heads – you talk about writing in concrete nouns and verbs.

Harding: When you’re writing fiction, one of the main virtues of fiction is that it be imminent. It’s about imminent things, it’s about action, it’s about things happening in this world. And one of the practical problems with “Tinkers” is that most of the book is about a guy who’s just lying on a bed like this. I realized I was going to have to find a way to embody a lot of things just to keep the book anchored in the real world, just so it wouldn’t lapse into rhetorical or theoretical language. But that specificity and precision and concrete writing is – that’s different than complexity. I do want to write with maximum complexity. I want to write books that accommodate the complexity of the human mind. I want to light up people’s brains.

Griffin: Talk about how you use language when you’re doing that, and ensure that you don’t lose your readers.

Harding: Again, I’m not thinking about the poor reader. To me, again, it’s all mutually reinforcing. To me the greatest style is precision. The way you don’t lose the reader is, you use language as precisely as possible. I taught writing a lot, and it was one of these counterintuitive things where writers would make things shorter and they would make them more simple because, “Oh, I don’t want to take up too much of the reader’s mind,” but that’s your job as a writer. You’re supposed to take up the reader’s time. So you presume somebody who wants complicated, beautiful, intricate, thoughtful, precise writing. You presume that readers are reading your book.

Griffin: As we heard in some of those excerpts you have a marvelous brain for detail and you write these lyrical paragraphs that are jam-packed with precise details. I have a friend who loves “Tinkers” who says, “This guy has more ways to describe how wind moves through the trees than a botanist.”

Harding: That’s a nice compliment.

Griffin: Are you out there writing down details as you see them? Are you walking through the woods taking notes? Or is that all just imagination at play?

Harding: I guess I kind of am. Like the landscape, the New England landscape particularly, I’ve spent tons of time up on the North Shore, just wandering around the Audubon sanctuary. I actually just bought a house that’s smack dab near the Ipswitch River Sanctuary so that I could be closer to the birch bark and the creek water with the sunlight in it. You know. Part of being a good writer, too, is just developing the muscles that have to do with being able to pay attention, and to sustain attention. The quality of attention – the closest possible attention for the longest amount of time so that when you climb down into your world you just sort of sit there very quietly and you watch and you listen and you smell and you just take down all the details. It’s imagining things as elaborately as you possibly can.

In my case, I’m interested in the people, the experience of being conscious. So I don’t write about far-flung places usually; I don’t write about remote times. I write about things that are right at my fingertips because I think of it as sort of the medium through which and into which I can precipitate the characters. So whenever I write about landscape, and if I can write about wind in 15 million different ways, it’s not because I’m writing about wind per se, it’s always because I’m writing about how a character experiences the wind. Character is always being refracted through description. What was the question?

(laughter)

Griffin: No, it’s very much like “Tinkers.” We went this way and we got there. A lot of beginning fiction instruction, like a lot of long-form narrative instruction that we talk about here, is all about scene – scenes upon scenes upon scenes.

Harding: Yeah.

Griffin: What would you say to a student who says, “So I want to write this novel, and it’s sort of this family story and I’m gonna change point of view most of the time, and I’m gonna change tense multiple times, and I’m gonna play with chronology, and I’m not gonna outline, and I’m gonna take all these pieces of paper and staple them together” – what would you –

Harding: God help you.

(laughter)

Harding: There’s all sorts of different very, very germane issues to writing, but one of them is that when you’re teaching writing, particularly fiction writing, one of the great temptations that as a teacher you have to resist, and that as a student you have to resist the influence of, is to present your process as normative. So much of grad school is: You just learn to be like your professor. You feel like there’s no independent thinking; you just inherit this datum. For example, one of my mentors was Marilyn Robinson. She has to write her books from the very first sentence of the very first chapter, and she has to write the book from start to finish, and if she screws up anywhere along the way she throws out the whole novel and starts again. And if I had taken that as the way that you have to write a novel, I’d be a plumber right now. The best writing comes from you consulting your own experience, not consulting an outside authority.

A lot of what I tried to do, as a teacher, was to get students to cultivate their own intellectual and aesthetic autonomy so that nobody could tell them what they were doing was right or wrong. I mean within reason – you have to edit, you have to have logic; you have to get them to be consistent with themselves. It also has to do with reading as widely and deeply as possible. Your writing can only be as good as the best stuff you’ve read. The other temptations with teaching writing – writing is tough and it’s wild and it’s feral and it’s dangerous, all these dramatic things, and the temptation is always to tame it and domesticate it so that it will be easy to teach. So you chop it all up and you’re like, “Today we’re gonna talk about character,” and “Today we’re gonna talk about point of view,” and “Here’s the third person.” And really those are just tools, you know?

Griffin: And some of (it) is knowing the rules so that you can break the rules.

Harding: Absolutely. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got, it was as I was leaving the last conference I had with Marilyn Robinson after my two years at Iowa. You know, I felt like I had the tiara, the roses – like, “Ah, now I’ve graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop.” I was leaving her office and she called out, she said, “Oh Paul, one more thing.” I said, “Yes, Marilyn.” She said, “You really should learn how to write grammatically correct English.”

(laughter)

Harding: I was like, “Grammar-schmammer.” But precisely. Because you need to know how to modulate and move around that way. Another reason that “Tinkers” does that is because it’s largely interior, you know. I’m not interested in plot. God bless plot, but I’m not interested in it. I’m interested in character, and plot emerges out of character. I’m just interested in consciousness. And so – I don’t know how far this metaphor works but you have these personal metaphors and analogies that you use to get you through your day – I think of plot as Newtonian physics. It’s mechanical. But I think of the mind, once you get into a character’s mind and it’s interior, I think of the mind as quantum. It’s supra-luminary. It just moves instantly. It’s instantaneous influence or whatever it’s called in quantum physics. Because that’s how consciousness works. So a book like “Tinkers” can be tougher to sort of catch the wave on, as it were, because it doesn’t work mechanically, it doesn’t work plot wise. But there’s a character-logical logic to it.

Griffin: I might argue – it’s your book so feel free to disagree – but the plot of “Tinkers” is pretty simple and straightforward. It’s everything else that informs the plot that’s important.

Harding: Yeah. Well, I just started with a very simple – what I find compelling are just those circumstances in which people find themselves that are actually impossible. Suddenly what you find is impossible is the case in your life. And so the very first thing I wrote in “Tinkers” – there’s a scene where Howard, the tinker, suddenly becomes conscious of the fact that instead of turning into his driveway or wherever his house is, he’s actually gone past his house. And he realizes that that means he is leaving his family. And I just remember the first day of writing it just thinking: “If he’d allowed himself to be conscious of it, (the act) would’ve been impossible, because it would just be too terrible to leave your family.” So I built that kind of double consciousness for him. And the reason I wrote about in the second book – it’s about a father losing his only child – is because that seems to me impossible. And I know people who have suffered losses like that, and I see them survive and stay beautiful, kind, generous, merciful, loving people, and I just do not know how they could do it. I don’t want to write about anything in which anything less than everything is at stake. Why bother making art?

Griffin: One more question and we’ll throw it to the crowd. Was the process on “Enon” any different from the process on “Tinkers?”

Harding: It was very fascinating because with all the stuff that happened with “Tinkers” – you know, I had this perfect record of non-publication and perfect obscurity with “Tinkers,” so I was able to work on it for 10 years. And so now I have written a novel that is a little bit more than twice as long as “Tinkers” in a little bit less than a third of the time it took to write “Tinkers.” So in that way it was interesting to see if I could compress all that work into three years. Turns out I can, but that’s why I’m ready to jump out of my socks right now, because it’s just been so intense.

And it’s been fascinating to see in retrospect what I did in “Tinkers” that was real process and what was sort of sheer ineptitude. One of the strangest things about writing the second (novel): Just because of the things that happened with “Tinkers,” the Pulitzer and stuff, I went from zero to 1,000 miles an hour in an instant, so I wrote most of “Enon” in hotel rooms and on airplanes. So that was really weird. I had to learn how to put the blinders on. Luckily, though, when “Tinkers” won the Pulitzer I had already sold “Enon” to Random House based on the first 50 pages of it. So I knew that Random House didn’t just love me for my Pulitzer. And it turns out the editor who bought “Enon” bought it without having read “Tinkers.” So that was just what I’d been holding onto: This book has its own integrity. Because “Tinkers,” first novel – everybody’s just like, “Oh, God, the second book by definition has to suck, right?” No pressure.

(laughter)

Griffin: But it doesn’t suck, right?

Harding: I hope not. Who knows. Fortunately what I’m learning, too, is that it’s not my job to like my own books. It’s my job to be like: You’ve gotta be better. But because of this worldly phenomenon that occurred with “Tinkers,” “Tinkers” exerts a huge gravitational pull, and so what I had to keep doing, whenever I was stuck with “Enon” I had to resist the temptation to drift over to “Tinkers” and use what worked and import it back into “Enon.” “Enon” had to have its own critical mass, its own center of gravity, its own integrity. Sometimes what came out on the page looked to me radically different than “Tinkers,” so I second-guessed myself. For example, people talk in “Enon.” There’s dialogue in “Enon.” And there’s quotation marks, you know? I thought, “I don’t have dialogue. I don’t use quotation marks.” But it was one of those things where you have to submit yourself to the work.

Griffin: Part of what’s unique about “Tinkers” is that so much of it feels experimental, almost like a jazz riff, and I can see that being a benefit of 10 years to work on something. Does the truncated time frame and the fact that you’re writing it for Random House change any of it? Does it put any additional pressure on you to not worry about readers?

Harding: No, the editor I’ve been working with at Random House has been absolutely wonderful. She bought the book two or three years ago – like I went and had lunch with her and we sort of convinced each other that we were right for each other, that sort of thing, sort of the editor coming a’ courtin’, and once we decided to do the book together I didn’t hear from her for three years. She just sort of left me alone. My agent would once in a while say, “How’s it going?” and I’d say, “Fine.” But she just laid off. And I presented her the book two or three weeks ago and she said, “Great. There’s maybe 10 or 15 pages of stuff I want to do.” “Enon” is written in first person, as opposed to “Tinkers,” which goes all over the place and there are just some inherent difficulties with first person, like the rest of the real world can go away when there’s just one character in mind, so it’s a little bit of – I just have to do some objective world stuff, 10 or 15 pages of that.

Griffin then opened the floor to questions. Discussed:

Associated Press, the, time stamp 01:23:29
Car chase, unlikelihood of, 00:50:29
Chamber music, pleasantness of, 01:01:15
Characters, whininess of, 00:53:51; writing from, 00:53:30
Colonial Mexico, 01:11:02
Coltrane, John, 01:01:23
Conroy, Frank, life-altering vision of, 01:09:10
Consciousness, fascination with, 00:58:05
Cutlass Ciera station wagon, 01:20:57
Delta Delta Delta sorority, 01:21:30
Drumming, as metaphor for controlling plot, 01:05:12
Duct tape, 01:20:57
Electron microscope, 1:00:10
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, influence of, 01:03:19
Flatness, handling of, 00:53:10;
Fuentes, Carlos, 01:07:25
Fundamental principle of composition, secret of, 00:54:24
Harvard Extension School, teaching background in, 00:55:53
History, grasp of, 00:58:05
Imagination, 1:00:10
Influences, 01:03:02
Iowa Writers Conference, 01:06:50
Irving, John, 01:02:52
James, Henry, influence of, 01:09:29
Jones, Elvin, sick drumming skills of, 01:05:10
Kant, 00:58:22
Kitteridge, Olive, 01:22:10
Language, blissful imperfection of, 01:20:06
Life, ideal description of, 00:57:00
Magical realism, influence of, 01:07:25
Mann, Thomas, influence of, 01:09:29
Marginalia, tendency to commit, 00:57:08
McCracken, Elizabeth, “mind-bogglingly wonderful” teaching skills of, 01:10:03
Mozart, 01:01:19
Muse, necessary rejection of, 00:56:10
Naps, dreams of, 00:57:19
Perception, writerly use of, 00:58:05
Philosophy, interest in, 00:58:17
Plot, disinterest in, 00:51:12
Potter, Harry, 01:18:32
Reading, importance of, 01:09:22
Regatta Bar, 01:05:17
Rejection, dealing with, 00:50:00; William Faulkner handling of, 00:51:27
Revision, dangers of, 01:19:18; endless application of, 01:15:20
Rituals, 00:55:31
Robinson, Marilyn, influence of, 01:07:48
“Sound and the Fury, The” stubborn creation of, 00:51:27
Stevens, Wallace, influence of, 01:03:24
Time, fluidity of, 00:58:29; obsession with, 01:04:43
Unemployment, pre-Pulitzer experience with, 01:20:48
Unsworth, Barry, influence of, 01:10:03
Wharton, Edith, influence of, 01:09:29
Woolf, Virginia, influence of, 01:09:29
Writing, difficulty of, 01:11:53; learnable nature of, 01:11:48

*The Nieman Foundation’s co-sponsor for this event, the Harvard Writers at Work lecture series, is supported by the Harvard College Writing Program, the Harvard Extension School’s master’s degree program in journalism, the Harvard Review and the Harvard College Program in General Education.

Adam Tanner: Gay Talese is an especially good choice for those seeking to study great writing. His 1966 story “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” and other stories, are credited in helping create New Journalism: deeply researched literature of fact enlivened with vivid storytelling. He has published 11 books including the 1969 book “The Kingdom and the Power,” about the history of the New York Times, where he was a reporter from 1956 to 1965. Over his career Talese has written for the Times, Esquire, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and others, and remains an active writer. He has influenced countless writers and journalists, including quite a number in the hall today.

We’ve paired him with a fine younger narrative writer who has a cult following of his own, Chris Jones, writer at large at Esquire and the new back-page columnist for ESPN The Magazine. He has won two National Magazine Awards for his long-form features and he has traveled from Toronto today to join us.

All of this has come together today in partnership with the Harvard Writers at Work lecture series. The lecture series is co-sponsored by the Harvard College Writing Program, the Harvard Review, Harvard Extension School and the Program in General Education, which brings together distinguished writers throughout the year.

Jones: Thank you very much to the Nieman Foundation for Journalism for having us today. How many of you are either writers or aspiring writers? Wow, there we go. Nonfiction? Fiction? Look at those people. They are not to be trusted.

[laughter]

Jones: We were just having coffee in the cafeteria, and Gay [was telling me he] is working on a piece for the New Yorker on Joe Girardi, the [Yankees’] manager. And I thought this might be an interesting way to talk about the process of writing and how you find stories. You spend so much time on a story. How do you know when an idea is good enough – is it good enough for a short piece, is it good enough for a long piece, is it good enough for a book?

Talese: I don’t think you know almost until the piece is published whether it’s publishable. I’ve been working on and off on this piece for six months for David Remnick of the New Yorker about, as you said, the manager of the Yankees, who by name is Joe Girardi. I think I know where I’m going, but what I do not know is how long I’ll be on the road. What I do now is what I did when I was your age or younger: I’m on the road a lot. I believe you have to be there. I don’t use the technology now any more than I did when I was a young reporter. When I went to the Times, beginning not as a reporter but as a copy boy back in 1953, a year after I got out of college at the University of Alabama, I was told by an old-time reporter who probably joined the paper in the 1920s, he said, Stay away from these telephones, stay away from these telephones, there are telephones all over the room. The telephone was the new technology, in this guy’s head. He said, You have to be there.

And I think that’s Step One in nonfiction reporting, whether it’s book length, magazine length, newspaper length, whatever. You have to be there. You have to see the people. Even if you don’t think you’re getting that much, you’re getting a lot more than you realize.

I had an assignment about a year and a half ago to write about an opera singer, and that involved traveling, being there, going to Moscow, going with this singer to Buenos Aries and Barcelona – Marina Poplavskaya is her name. So I had this woman, very active, very young and obviously very talented, and very difficult, and Remnick said, and [New Yorker articles editor] Susan Morrison said, What is it like to be on the road? Well I’m on the road all the time, and here was a writer talking about a singer on the road. What’s good about it is you get scenes.

I always liked being on the road. I always liked being out there. Parenthetically, I do not like the tape recorder and do not use it. The reason is, it brings you indoors. It promotes the idea of question and answer, question and answer, and it makes you sometimes subject to the easy availability of the spoken word verbatim. You tend to fall prey to the charm of that and the ease of that, the little plastic spinning wheels that give you everything but give you nothing really. Because what they give you is the first thing that comes into a person’s head in response to your questions. And the Q&A also takes away, I think, the largeness of the subject; it becomes narrowly defined by the Q&A, the little plastic thing on the desk or the coffee table. It’s convenient for a publisher who wants to cut costs because if you have a Q&A, a lot is achieved in terms of getting an article done in less time.

Jones: You mean writing [a piece] as a straight Q&A.

Talese: Yeah. The publisher is worried about cost, so you can’t go on the road. And what I do and what any person of my generation – [David] Halberstam and Tom Wolfe, all those people out of the ‘60s and ‘50s as I am – we’re on the road a lot. Of course it’s expensive, and you have to find ways to get people to allow you to go on the road. Back to Girardi. I had this idea. I actually had two ideas. One was easy, one is hard. The easy one, Tony Bennett. I was on the road with him. I went to Las Vegas, I went to Denver, and I went to watch him on the road, and then I came back and wrote a scene of him recording from an album with Lady Gaga of all things. That was not hard. And she’s really nice. I’m telling you, the woman you see photographed in these extravagant outfits that she concocts somehow with the help of some bizarre designer, she is really a very simple girl next door as Hefner would put it.

[laughter]

Talese: But Girardi’s difficult. A man who’s in fear of saying something wrong.

Jones: Very stiff.

Talese: Very stiff. Controlled. I started with Girardi – really it started with the old timers’ game at Yankee Stadium in the middle of July. I went mainly to see some of my old heroes, people I remember as ball players who are my age. [Talese is 79.] But Girardi was there as the manager of the team, [a] man of 46, and as I said, very careful, polite to a fault, but not much in the way that you have an insight into who he is. What interested me, he was a ballplayer, wasn’t a great ballplayer but for 13 years had been a ballplayer, with four different teams: Chicago Cubs two times, New York Yankees, the Saint Louis Cardinals and the Colorado Rockies. Before he became a major league ball player, of course, he was a minor league player, and before that he was a college player. He graduated from Northwestern in engineering. Very few ball players are college graduates. It’s unlike football and basketball; college is not the minor league of the sport. In baseball they start usually after high school and maybe have one year of college. I thought, [Girardi] has an interesting experience because he’s educated to a degree, educated as a ball player, minor league to major league, and never was a star, and played with stars. And I love writing about people who were never stars. I mean I’ve written about stars but usually when I write about a star like Joe DiMaggio, it’s when his era [is] over.

People who teach courses in narrative nonfiction, they often will mention DiMaggio or Frank Sinatra – but that was in the era, they had already been famous or [were] now not so famous, or hoped to be famous again. People I like to write about are people who’ve had a history of ups and downs. And Girardi suited me, I thought, in that way.

But the deal is you have to hang around; the art of hanging out, is the way I phrase what I do. So I started hanging around with Joe Girardi the first time at old timers’ day. Then I started going to games. One of the perks of this profession is you get free tickets to the press box. But what’s in the press box? Fifty-five years ago I was in the press box – when I was 24, 23, 22, I was a sportswriter with the New York Times. That was my first job and I remember how we in the press box used to cover the game, and now I see a whole different world of covering the game. In fact now I see sportswriters not even looking at the game – they’re seeing the game on their laptop and their eyes are not on the field. They’re very focused. I remember when I was in the press box in the 1950s, we would not really see the game; we would see more than the game. The most impressive thing, I remember, being in the press box in the 1950s, was all the drinking that was going on in the press box – it was the era of alcoholism in journalism. You don’t see any drinking going on anymore. You don’t see any smoking. Fornication is out. Everything is out.

Jones: It’s definitely frowned on in the press box.

Talese: One game I saw, I followed the team, 12 games on the road, I remember one time I saw in the middle of the game, some relief pitcher came out of the bull pen, and as he came running out the left fielder of the Yankees, who knew him, they sort of waved. They had been teammates a couple of years before, and I thought, This familiarity, this little gesture – those little things you miss on television. The modern day [sportswriters] see the game on the screen in front of them and they push buttons and they have the histories of the players and everything they want, and they get a lot of information very quickly, but they get it from the narrow [confines] of the laptop screen. I’m off the subject already, but I do think one of the problems of journalism today and maybe the problem of the Nieman Fellows here in this room is how we are narrowing our focus and becoming indoors in terms of internalizing our reporting. The detail is what I think we’re missing. See, the idea is to see all you can see and hang around as much as you can with the people that interest you. Well how do you do that? How do you do that when sometimes people are not interested in you seeing what you want to see and what they don’t want to show?

Jones: Girardi is very difficult because he doesn’t reveal anything. He’s covered by hundreds of people every day –

Talese: He is. And he also has a director of publicity with him at all times.

Jones: – and yet you have somehow wrangled – is this a secret? Gay is going to Peoria to sit with Girardi while he visits his father, who has Alzheimer’s. So how are you the guy in that room when there’s 100 guys –

Talese: Well what it is you develop – from the time you enter into an eye-contact relationship you have to first of all make a pretty good impression, meaning, I always thought, the Italian expression bella figura, making a good impression, a good appearance. You have to sell yourself, and how you do that depends on your personality. I approached Girardi’s press agent first of all, and said I had an assignment from the New Yorker to do a profile and [that] Girardi had never been done anywhere, I don’t think, that I thought presented him as he is. What I wanted to do was answer the question How did Joe Girardi become Joe Girardi? Who is Joe Girardi? What is the inside of this man? What is it about him that made him at age 46 the manager of the Yankees? I said, Can I come to a few games? I said, I’d just like to have the privileges that a sportswriter has. I said, I won’t ask any questions of the players; I don’t want to talk to the players . The players aren’t gonna tell you anything anyway. I said at some time I’d like to talk to Joe Girardi when he has the time, but not now. So they gave me a press pass for every game I wanted to go to. After the game Girardi gave to all the reporters who covered the team about 15 minutes explaining what happened in the game, why he changed pitchers, this and that. I just sat through this. I never asked any questions, and after the game was over I went home to the hotel. Did this for about two months.

Finally when the season was over, the Yankees did not win the World Series. I asked if I could talk to him for an hour or so – he lives in a place called Purchase, about an hour or so outside Manhattan – he said, I come to Yankee Stadium once a week, I can talk to you for an hour maybe, on Mondays I usually come in. So I saw him for three Mondays in a row for one hour. I don’t take notes. I just wanted to ask him some questions. The press agent of the Yankees, who was very careful, says, We’re gonna tape it, is that okay with you? I say, Well sure, you can tape it; in fact why don’t you tape it and let me have a copy and anything he doesn’t want to have said or [wants to] say it better, it’s fine. So we had this tape recorder and I’m talking to Girardi for an hour, did that three times. And what I said, I said, I want to start with who are your parents and who are your grandparents. He didn’t know much about his grandparents. I said, Well is there anybody who knows about your grandparents? He says, I have an older brother, eight years older. I say, Okay fine, what’s his name, what’s his phone number? Lives in Chicago. Fine, I’ll look him up.

I start talking to Girardi the second time and third time about his young days in school and about the days before he went to Northwestern on a baseball scholarship. I finally said, You know, I’d like to see these places – you say you were born in Peoria and you went to Northwestern, but I’d like to see Peoria. He said, Well the only time I’m gonna see my father – he has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t know who I am but because he’s the most influential man of my life, I still like to go see him regularly, and I’m gonna do it Thanksgiving. I said, Well I can’t interfere with your Thanksgiving, but if I went out the day after Thanksgiving would you then show me where you born – the house is still there? He says, Yes it’s still there and the school is still there and he said my parents owned a little restaurant at one time and the building’s still there. I said, Great, I’d like to just see these places. He said, Well, come out to Peoria. I wanted to go out the Friday after Thanksgiving, [but] there’s only one flight and it arrives at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. It’ll be dark by then. So I have to go out on Thanksgiving. My wife wasn’t happy about that but she understands. I’ll be in Peoria Friday morning, so when he arrives, Joe Girardi, he’ll show me around.

Now why is it important? I just feel there might be something in his upbringing – particularly I’m anticipating a scene with his father, who cannot communicate with him. I might be able to find in, just being in that town and seeing places that Joe Girardi will describe, I might be able to have a scene of him driving through Peoria, 46-year-old manager of the Yankees, where he was once a sandlot player, grade school player, a man with a very active father, a father who he told me who used to be a bricklayer. I looked at Joe Girardi and said, Look at those massive arms –

Jones: Yeah he’s got giant hands.

Talese: Giant hands! And those arms. He said, I got them because I helped my father build bricks, lay bricks. So there’s a scene of brick building in the background. I love that.

Jones: That scene with the dad. Do you have an image of that, going into it?

Talese: I don’t want to anticipate too much because – sometimes when you anticipate it doesn’t happen. You just have to be there, and if it happens you see it, and if you see it, remember it. You don’t record it. I don’t take notes in front of people but I do carry shirt boards. The shirt board as you know is in the back of a shirt – I cut it up with a scissor and trim it like this, and I do write little notes on these. Never in front of the person. But I’ll go to this hospital or whatever it is, wherever Joe Girardi’s father is registered, and I might later on write something down. I might write just the order of things: I might say we went from high school to grade school and then we went to that restaurant and then we went to this old age home, whatever it is. Then I’ll go back after I’ve left Girardi, or whoever I’m with, there’s a private time when I’m back at my hotel and I’ll review the day and I’ll write it. If I have a typewriter I’ll type it out. I’ve always typed out my notes before I go to bed, every night, whatever I remember that day: the date, where I was, why I was there, what I saw, what I remember.

Granted, the direct quotes I can’t rely on my memory for that. But what I will do, if there’s something interesting I’ll return to the person the next day and say, for example, Joe, yesterday when we were talking about your father and how you remember helping him lay bricks or driving in the truck when he was listening to the Chicago Cubs and that’s how you became such a fan of Ron Santo or whatever – here’s what I heard you say, or I don’t know what you mean by this. Sometimes people enlarge upon what they said and you get a better quote than the one you missed.

I once interviewed a prizefighter, Floyd Patterson, and I asked him, What’s it like to be knocked out? What’s it really like? In comic strips you have stars over the head. He started telling me and I started writing it down. This was for the magazine Esquire. And I went over it again and again and again, and I’m writing it this time in front of him, and I said, Now Floyd, when you’re first knocked out you don’t feel anything but then you look around the room and the ring and you see people under the ropes and through the ropes – finally I had this long, long quote, and in a way it was something that was almost co-authored between us. I was writing and he became a partner. I think that’s something that is very honorable about nonfiction, where to a degree you affiliate with and you partner with the person you’re interviewing. Not that they ever have any view of what you write or editorship privileges, certainly not. However you can and should build a trusting relationship with the person, and to a point where your confidence in your relationship is so trustworthy and so open, you can actually write in front of them.

Jones: The best interviews are the ones where each person forgets who the other is.

Talese: Yeah.

Jones: That you’re no longer the reporter, and I’m no longer Floyd Patterson, we’re just guys talking about –

Talese: That’s true.

Jones: Is that the goal, though?

Talese: That is the goal. And as I said, every night I type up – in the case of Frank Sinatra, for example, I had 33 days on that story, 33 dates. And each day might have two or three typed pages representing the total experiences of that day for me: what I remember, what I felt, what Sinatra was doing, what he wasn’t doing. I was describing as an observer on the scene, somewhat distant but still on the scene. After I’ve amassed all this material I go over it day by day by day and I summarize everything. So I have 33 summaries of 33 sets of notes from 33 days of being on the road. With those summaries I’m also reviewing once more, and once more, and once more what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard. And out of this becomes a kind of connection between the whole 33-day experience, and I see scenes. We all see scenes. When you’re on the road there are things there that are really scenic, if you’re on the road, if you’re outdoors. Well, sometimes when you write them, when you begin to write them, those scenes take on a sharpness, a focus, a particular specificity.

Jones: You mean as a means to illustrate –

Talese: Yeah. Yeah. Even as a young reporter I would think, Why can’t I do what short-story writers do or as novelists do, which is write scenes? I was thinking scenically because the influence I had was from the great short-story writers that I read in college. When I first came to New York as a copy boy I’d never heard of The New Yorker, but when I came to New York I heard of it and I started reading. I’d read John Cheever and John O’Hara and Irwin Shaw – my favorite writer – I started reading F. Scott Fitzgerald stories, Hemingway stories, Carson McCullers stories, and I started thinking, Why can’t I write a magazine piece like a short story, without changing the names? The short story writer gave me scenes, and I thought, Why can’t I do this in a magazine article? It’s the same length, 4,000 words, 5,000 words. So I want to write short stories with real names. That’s what I want to do. So I’m already thinking, What’s the short story of Joe Girardi? Where do you begin? Well I haven’t gotten there yet, but it may well be this trip to Peoria. Maybe I have within my pile of typed notes back home in New York stuff that will be much more interesting when I review it than it was when I was actually there with it.

Jones: So in retrospect –

Talese: You see the whole picture. And what I like to do in this form of writing that we’ll call short stories with real names, I like to move back and forth in time, and if you do enough research you can go from the boyhood to a time when this guy, this Joe Girardi character, first day in the major leagues, which in this case was the Chicago Cubs, and then he was sent down the next year to the minor leagues, and the distinction between the major leagues and the minor leagues. He’s a perfect case of describing, among other things, perseverance. A sense of failure or demotion. Rising again to the major leagues, hoping you can stay there. All the stuff that all ball players but also all people in all lines of work go through. So these messages or these instances of success or demotion are very relevant to the life of anyone, including writers, who sometimes don’t get assignments or, like in the minors, rejection slips.

All my pieces do deal with the history of the upbringing of the person and how that influences the individual that’s the focus of your story. And after I’ve organized it I actually put on my little corkboard, the Styrofoam board that runs across my desk, I pin these little cards that give me a sense of direction. It’s a form of choreography. It’s step by step by step. The opening scene is this. The second scene is this. Third, fourth, fifth, all the way across. So I have that article gradually taking shape visually. It starts with digging up, excavating, then it’s organizing, then it’s doing the choreographic progress from beginning to middle to end. And then the writing, the opening scene, I rework the sentences and try to make it as clear –

Jones: You write in longhand, right?

Talese: Yeah. On yellow line pads, sometimes in pencil, then I go from yellow line pads to a typewriter. I have an old computer –

Jones: It’s like, this big, right?

Talese: Yeah it’s as big as a Volkswagen – the advantage is I can erase very easily. I’ve succumbed to the technology to that point. I don’t have to get my little crummy eraser that falls down into the typewriter and clogs up the roller. This is better.

Jones: A lot of your process seems to be designed to slow you down. The reporting is intensive, the writing it seems like you give yourself time to think, the longhand forces you to slow down. Do you think that’s important to how your stories come out?

Talese: I think it is. I think it’s necessary. Maybe every writer in this room or aspiring writer wishes we had been more productive, wishes we’d been more prolific. I say that and I’ve said that, but I don’t believe that. So you can’t believe what people say; that’s why the tape recorder’s no good.

Jones: I’m starting my career all over again.

[laughter]

Talese: No, it’s just that we work as best we can. I want to do a couple of things. One, I want to do what the old gents who shaped me up for journalism at the New York Times told me you have to do, those old guys said, You’d better get it right. Get it right. Take the time, get it right. That hammered into me and it’s been there. I’m 79 and I hear it as I did when I was 21. Secondly, after you’ve gotten it right, then how [do] you go about communicating it to the reader? That’s where creativity takes its role in nonfiction: storytelling. We didn’t have terms like “narrative nonfiction” back then or “the New Journalism” or whatever Tom Wolfe called it – it isn’t that, but it is getting [it] right and then being a storyteller. And that means you have to have characters.

When I worked on the New York Times in the old days those guys that got it right weren’t necessarily lyrical figures in the world of literature – they were boring. They got it right but they were the paper-of-record people. And if you weren’t a dazzling stylist it didn’t make a bit of difference; in fact they suspected anything that might be called a stylist in those days. I would read the Herald Tribune in my free time and see the freedom they had – it was a sinking newspaper, I think it went out of business in the mid-‘60s, but Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe and those other guys were really having a lot of fun. I wasn’t having a lot of fun at the Times because there was the pressure of the editors and the tradition of the paper to get it right, and anything that was of a style was suspect: You’re piping it, you’re faking it, you’re writing fiction. And I was accused of writing fiction. I never did write fiction, but I was accused by some people on the New York Times: the old-fashioned traditional guys that I respected but didn’t want to emulate in any way because they were so boring. But I wanted to be a reporter and a story writer like some of those great short stories that I used to read.

I go about it now as I did then, so I haven’t changed. You asked me when we had a cup of coffee, How about your physical bearing, does age, you asked something along the lines of, Does age matter? I don’t think I’ve learned anything in terms of technique; it’s as hard now as it was for me then. The only thing that would matter to me because of my age is if I couldn’t travel.

Jones: If you couldn’t be there.

Talese: If I couldn’t be there. Then I’d have to get a job teaching at the Nieman school or someplace. Will you have me?

[laughter]

Jones: The part of the writing process that no one ever seems to talk about is the release of it. At some point you let it go to your editor and then to readers. A lot of writers – don’t take offense to this but you have received criticism sometimes for your work, even work that later became beloved – obviously you work so hard on something. How do you deal with criticism? I’m thinking with the Internet, it’s a bad time for self-esteem. Like, do you sort of say to yourself, Well I wrote “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” so you can suck it? What’s your defense mechanism?

Talese: I didn’t write for The New Yorker until recent years, but I knew the writers a long time ago. One of them was A.J. Liebling. When I was a sportswriter I’d go to prizefights and I’d meet A.J. Liebling of The New Yorker and I’d meet Norman Mailer and George Plimpton – all those persons that I met [were] not at the PEN Club but at the prizefights. And Irwin Shaw, I got to know him, too. They told me they were rejected often by The New Yorker. So Irwin Shaw would be turned down, and the story would wind up in another magazine. So you have to, as a writer, even if you have a certain stature or familiarity with the people who are your editors or bosses, they may turn you down. And I’ve had that. I’ve had that. That’s one thing you have to deal with.

And of course criticism is very hard, but on the other hand particularly we in journalism are so accustomed to being critical and not at all to being criticized. I mean journalists are too thin-skinned.

I don’t have an agent for magazine pieces because there’s no money in it. So I pitch ideas, and since I used to write for Esquire a lot back in the ‘60s and ‘70s – I had an idea about three or four years ago, when the new guy went in, the guy you work for, David Granger, and I called him up and I said I wanted to know if I could do a piece that I’d written in the 1960s. In the 1960s there was this great movie star, Peter O’Toole. I was sent to London and later to Ireland to follow him around – it was a great experience because he was one of the most intelligent persons I’ve ever met in my life. The most fun I’ve ever had was interviewing Peter O’Toole. I think it was published in ’63. Then around 2003 or ’4 or ’5 O’Toole had been in some minor role – any great actor later on does character roles as his or her time as a superstar as over – and I thought I’d like to go back and do another story on Peter O’Toole.

Here’s Gay Talese 50 years later, and I had saved all my notes. I save my notes for everything – I have them on file – so I could easily go back and get my notes. And I pitched the idea to the editor of Esquire. He wasn’t interested. I thought, That shit, he should’ve given me a chance. The point is, you are never so remote from rejection. And what do you do about it? Well I didn’t do anything about it. Because what can you do? It wasn’t a great idea, but it was a pretty good idea because any serious journalist, whether you’re a magazine writer or a book writer, should know the story never ends. You can always revisit your past work – enrich it, extend it. There might be something interesting to say about that subject, that person.

I’ve revisited many subjects, even the books. I once wrote a book about the building of the Verrazano Bridge. It was published in 1964. Took me three years to do it. I was still working for the Times. Did it in my spare time. Then in 2003 someone wanted to reprint the book, some small publishing company – it wasn’t a bestseller, it was a nice little book about this bridge construction. I said, I want to go back and interview some of the people who might still be alive, those hard-hat-wearing people working at high altitudes to build bridges, swinging from the cables, all that stuff. So I go back in 2003 and there are about 25 people still alive, and a few are still working in high-altitude construction. And a few of them told me, said, After we finished that bridge in ’64 we went and built the World Trade Center. I said, Well Jesus how did you feel when the thing went down in about two hours in 2001? And one guy said, I wasn’t surprised; it was a piece of junk we built. The World Trade Center was constructed, one guy told me in so many words, like a birdcage. What they did, they wanted maximum rentable space in those two buildings, and they didn’t care about solid construction. They said, When we built the bridge those terrorists bombs could hit the bridge and bounce off like butterflies. He said, Even the construction of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, those planes wouldn’t have gone crashing through the Empire State Building, they would’ve hit it but they wouldn’t go through it and knock the thing down. So they were saying. This was interesting. So I wrote about this in this new edition.

Every story you write, you can do that. There’s a new development and sometimes a learning experience as well.

Jones: Something instructive about your work is your touch with minor characters. They’re often the best sources in your material – the wisdom of the flunky or the insight that you get from the guy who just hangs around. Sometimes when you’re writing about someone famous in particular I imagine the best stuff is from the people –

Talese: That absolutely is true, absolutely is true. They’re minor in the sense of [not] being newsworthy – you can’t put them on the cover of a magazine, but they can be – I mean I think most of my work is about minor characters. It’s not about Sinatras but all those other people around them.

Jones: Like DiMaggio’s Lefty O’Doul.

Talese: Yeah Lefty O’Doul. And my whole book on the New York Times, there’s not a major character in that whole book. No such thing as a minor character. That’s what I learned from fiction. These fiction writers are really writing about people you never heard of, that’s what the magic –

Jones: Well because they’re invented, right? They have no history.

Talese: So if you get to know your characters well and introduce them with your writing well enough that the reader will identify with them, or at least have a sense of them through your skill as a writer and a reporter, you’ve achieved much of what a fiction writer does. You’re not creating or imagining anything but you’re getting so deep into the personality of the people you’re writing about that they take on the fictional characteristics, meaning they seem like the work of the imagination of the writer. If you’re a fair-minded journalist, [this] should not be part of anything except your efforts as a researcher and your skill with being descriptive without distorting anything.

[Jones opens it up to questions.]

Q: Can you talk about establishing a level of trust with the people you cover? How do you handle the issue when you have material you know the person will not like?

Talese: If I learn things that might well be embarrassing … I discuss it.

Jones: You mean with the subject.

Talese: Yeah. When I spend so much time with people and this develops into a kind of friendship and they allow me to meet their family or go to their home or in this case go to Peoria with Girardi in mind, and if I learn from them that something in my judgment will bring discredit upon them – while I’m never writing with the endorsement of the people; I keep myself separate but I also know I’m not a separate person in the sense that I have a conscience about other people – I will tell them: This is what I heard. I’ll tell them, It might bring a lot of misunderstanding. So the question is, Did I understand you properly? And do you understand that if we use this there might be people who’ll want you to quit your job or will drive you out of office? I find that is a very good practice. Do I lose wonderful stuff? I don’t think I lose that much stuff. Because you know what you can do often? You can find another way of writing the same thing. And sometimes how well it’s written – whatever it is, however delicate, however potentially offensive it might be, if it’s written carefully, gracefully, that makes it clear without being bombastic, you can get away with it.

I’ll give you one example. When I was interviewing some of the New York Times people for the book “The Kingdom and the Power,” I remember I had an interview with an elderly man who used to be the publisher. His name was Arthur Hays Sulzberger. He is the grandfather of the guy that’s publisher now. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who was the publisher when I worked there, had a notorious reputation for being a womanizer. He was married to the boss’ daughter, Iphigene Ochs, who was the daughter of Adolf Ochs, who died in 1935 and left this daughter as the only heir, and she married Arthur Hays Sulzburger, who became the successor to the publisher of the New York Times. And even though he married well and owed his position to that marriage he also had one affair after another, and one was with a famous movie actress, Carole Lombard. Everybody knew it in the office. Well I’m interviewing him about a year before his death. He was in his home. His wife Iphigene wasn’t there, but there was a good-looking nurse that was catering to Mr. Sulzberger. Mr. Sulzberger was in a wheelchair and he had on this very wonderful silk robe, and he’s a handsome guy, looked like Fredric March, if you remember, the stylistic classic matinee idol grown older. And I’m talking to Mr. Sulzberger about the history of the paper and the nurse comes in with a pill. She carries this little tray and she gives him a glass of water and she’s got on a nice starched uniform, with beautiful – nice body, good hair, she’s slender, and young – and as he took the pill he’s looking at her all the way. I thought, That guy doesn’t give up. And I wanted to write that scene. The way I described it was, He had an eye for an ankle. That’s all you have to know. That’s all you need. So underwriting is always a good course to take if you want to do something like that, rather than insult an old letch, which he was.

Q: You mentioned earlier about Esquire in the ‘60s and the ‘70s. I’m curious about what you think of the evolution of Esquire.

Talese: I would like [Chris] to deal with that – I don’t mind talking about it, but I’m an outsider and I wouldn’t know – if you’re sincerely interested in the right answer, this is the better resource than me. What I think happened to magazines – much of society has become just smitten with celebrity, overwhelmingly obsessed with fame and celebrity. At newsstands you see lines of magazines and more than half of them have pictures of people you recognize because they’re all movie stars. So I think it must be very difficult for young people such as those here to write for magazines unless you’re writing about celebrity. I wouldn’t want to really write about these movie stars all the time, although some of them are probably interesting. My one experience was with Peter O’Toole but he was so special in terms of being intelligent, so it was a pleasure, dealing with him. I don’t know. Tell us if there’s any difference.

Jones: No, it’s hard. I wrote a story about Roger Ebert, which I worked really hard on, and we had a very dramatic portrait of Roger – he’d had cancer – I pushed really hard for [the portrait of his face] to be the cover. The hard truth is, if there isn’t a celebrity on the cover no one buys it. And that is just a fact of the business. But you do [celebrity profiles] so that you can do the 8,000-word piece on Roger Ebert. It’s like donuts and broccoli: You put the donuts at the front and the broccoli at the back, and the stuff that you’re really proud of is the stuff that’s at the back of the book. It’s a weird dance. Like Gay’s saying – if you put some of those great covers from the ‘60s, like the black Vietnam war cover or the Andy Warhol –

Talese: Yeah.

Jones: – or Muhammad Ali with arrows, no one’s picking up that magazine. It’s gotta have Lady Gaga on it.

Q: Good short stories with true names involve a lot of investment, and I wonder how you deal with that investment…

Talese: I just become not obsessed with it but very committed to doing all the research at whatever expense of time and travel. And sometimes it’s not worth it. I had an experience where I went to China once to write about a woman who was a soccer player, and I spent six months, and I couldn’t sell it to anybody. I tried sell it to Sports Illustrated because I knew the editor; I knew the owner. I couldn’t sell that story anywhere. I did put it in a book of mine. One thing about books, sometimes you can dump into a book that you couldn’t publish in a magazine. I wrote about that in “A Writer’s Life.”

Sometimes you can’t ever know what is worth what. In one way, years later [an unpublished story] will work out in a different way. I don’t think you’re ever wasting your time when you think you’re wasting your time. In one way I can say I waste a lot of time; it’s part of my occupation; I’m an occupational time waster because so much of what you do doesn’t immediately measure up. There’s a terrible expression: the bottom line. There’s no such thing. First of all you have to have belief that what you’re doing is important. And I thought that when I was a cub reporter. I really thought what I was doing was important. I thought, I am a reporter. And I worked for a very important institution, the New York Times. I’d be interviewing these people and some of them were powerful and famous and rich, and I never felt that what I was doing was inferior to what they were doing – in fact I felt what I was doing was superior because I thought, What I’m doing is trying to get the truth, and I’m talking to a bunch of liars. I mean these people are in professions that tolerate lies much more than journalism does. I’ve said this a dozen times but the pleasure and the honor and respect for the profession of journalism that I always had as a kid and have now even more so is because I was in the only occupation that tried not to lie. If you lie, you get kicked out. And the people who kick you out are your colleagues; it’s not somebody on high. You lie on any newspaper, I don’t care if it’s a great newspaper or a struggling newspaper, you’re probably gonna be thrown out. In the case of the Times when they had the super-liar Jayson Blair five or six years ago, not only does he get thrown out but they [also] threw out the top editors, both of them, and boy if that doesn’t bring pride to a journalist nothing will.

Jones: In journalism school you’re sometimes taught that objectivity is the goal. It’s horsecrap, because when you do the kind of work that Gay does or that I try to do, and you spend weeks or months with someone you’re going to form an opinion. What counts, I think, and I think Gay will agree with me, is not objectivity, it’s truth.

Talese: It’s truth.

Q: I was wondering how you go about determining the structure or organization of a piece, or if you wait till you start writing.

Talese: Sometimes it comes to you right away. For example, I mentioned the opera singer. When I went to Moscow in September of 2010, I think it was, when I went there I was going to see this opera singer so she could show me around her hometown. I had never been to Moscow. The news on the front page of all the newspapers at that particular time was that Moscow and much of Russia was not only experiencing a heat wave but there were [also] a lot of forest fires, and smog all through the city. The day before I was supposed to get on this plane to Moscow from New York the opera singer called and left a message and said, Don’t come, my throat hurts, I’m gonna get out of this town. I didn’t listen; I just went anyway. I wanted to go. When I got there, the plane was landing and I could smell from the altitude, I could smell the smoke. I landed and I had a cab drive me to the hotel, and I made a phone call telling her I’d arrived. She said, I’m sorry you came.

The next day she did come to the hotel and said, I have to get out of here because I’m suffering so much and I collapsed last night – so she started complaining and said she collapsed. And I thought, This is the story. Here it is, the opera singer who is choked by the smog and collapsed. I asked her to describe it and not only describe it, I said, Can I go to your house? So she took me to her mother’s apartment, and I had her go through the whole scene. And she said the night before she’d fallen on the floor and her mother tried to help her and there was no ice because the electricity had gone out in the apartment, and she said she had a chilled bottle of white wine that was still cool. And she said she put this chilled bottle of wine under her neck, and I thought, This is the opening scene, and it was the opening scene.

In the case of the opera singer it’s recreated, but I was at the place where she collapsed, in a bedroom in the central part of Moscow. In the Sinatra case he’s got a cold and is feeling bad and there’s a scene in the pool room where he’s in a confrontation. So getting the idea of how to begin – I’m sure [Chris] could give examples as well, but you’re just there. You have to see it. And you have to think in terms of scenes. It’s just like a film director – when you go to a movie there’s an opening scene and a second scene and a third scene. I once met Francis Coppola when he was doing a film called “Tucker,” about the maker of automobiles. I met Francis Coppola largely through my wife’s familiarity with his wife, Eleanor Coppola, and when I was in California we were guests at Coppola’s house and he was making “Tucker,” and he showed me how he was making this film, with 3-by-5 cards going across his big bulletin boards. And that’s the way I write magazine pieces. But these scenes are something that you have to recognize, as I recognized the pool scene with Sinatra or the collapsed opera singer in Moscow. Those must sometimes be researched – you have to do some work describing the place, describing the situation, asking for a recollection of what was said if you didn’t hear it yourself. I heard it in the case of Sinatra but in the case of Marina Poplavskaya I didn’t hear anything she said. She said she told her mother such and such and her mother said such and such, and she picked up the phone and called her boyfriend. I got it from Maria herself, and I went over it again and again.

Q: On the same note, you don’t outline.

Talese: Is he talking to you?

Jones: He’s talking to me.

Talese: Go ahead.

Jones: Do you want to have a fight?

[laughter]

Talese: No, tell us how you do it. The question is, How do you outline? And you don’t outline. How come?

Jones: In the 70th anniversary of Esquire “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” was named the best story that was in the magazine, ever. Esquire published a little booklet that included the story and also included pictures of your shirt boards with your outline, and if you haven’t seen Gay’s outlines they’re like maps to Narnia – there’s arrows and lists and diagrams. And I remember looking at that and thinking, I’m doing it wrong. Because I don’t outline. I use my memory as my edit. If I remember it then it’s an important scene. And if I remember the details of that scene that’s what counts. I don’t think there’s any one way to do this. I hope there isn’t, because if so one of us is wrong. [But] it can be both ways, [right]?

Talese: It can be.

Jones: It’s whatever process works for you. I just have to ask, when was the first time you wrote on a shirt board?

Talese: When I was a reporter at the New York Times – shirt boards have been around longer than I have, people throw them away – they’re trash in most people’s estimation. When I first started there were no tape recorders and reporters carried rolled up copy paper, and I found the copy papers too floppy. And there were also notepads, but the notepads I didn’t like because they had wire and it would always get caught on the inside of my jacket. So shirt boards were perfect because it slips right out and they’re smaller than a pad, and no little wire to catch. Here [removes shirt boards from breast pocket of suit] I have enough for a magazine piece, at least for one day’s work.

Q: I’m a Nieman fellow, and a number of us in [Williams’ Narrative Writing] class [at the Nieman Foundation] – and I should say I’m a news reporter, so narrative is quite strange to me – we had a big discussion about the very ending of “Frank Sinatra” where you describe Sinatra stopping at a red light and he sees a girl in the sidewalk, and their eyes meet. We wondered how you did that because the whole story is about you looking at him from afar because he didn’t actually agree to be interviewed. So were you in the car with him or were you standing on the sidewalk or did you make it up?

Talese: No, I talked to the woman and she described what she saw. The piece on Joe DiMaggio was the same sort of thing – he looks through a window and sees a blonde outside a fisherman’s wharf. Well I did see that blonde. It was near the restaurant that DiMaggio at that time owned. He’s looking out the window and I saw him and I saw her, and I recreated that. It’s not hard to do.

Q: I was wondering how you decide how much of yourself to put into a story.

Talese: Sometimes I feel you have to put first person because you have to explain – sometimes you’re the only witness to what you’re writing about. The opera singer, I use first person in explaining to the reader how, since I was trying to write about an opera singer on the road and how difficult it is sometimes to get from place to place, going from opera to opera, having to book her own flight and pick up her luggage and get a taxi cab to go here and there, just the general process of being both a performer and a traveler, I felt I had to write about my experience because I was with her, and I was witnessing her growing angry at what was going on around her. She’s not a volatile person but a person who doesn’t suppress her disappointment, if not her anger; she can let you know if things aren’t going well. I had to say what I saw. I remember one time she was so angry at this hotel management that she decided to change hotels, and when the porter wouldn’t take her luggage on a trolley across the street she took the trolley and pushed that damn thing herself across the large boulevard, over the little train tracks. I watched that. I write about that. Other times I think you get in the way. The reader doesn’t want to read about you unless you’re central to the story.

Jones: You also use third person though, right? In DiMaggio you used “the man.”

Talese: That’s right! That’s interesting. DiMaggio threw me out of the restaurant. And I didn’t write “me” because if I had written in first person in the beginning of that article I’d almost be stuck with myself and then I had little [role] to play in that article except in the beginning. What the beginning was about, I had shown up uninvited at the DiMaggio restaurant. I thought I had his okay to talk to him. I wrote to him and I thought he said, Come out. And we had him being offended that I showed up without getting final clearance from him. He wanted me to leave, and I did leave, but I just said “some man from New York” [was asked to leave]. I wanted to be a diminished person. I wanted the eye of the reader, the camera, to be always on him. And I leave, as I’d been told I should. So I left. I go back to the parking lot. I had a rented car. I was going to go back to my hotel and think about what to do, because I’d lost the story. Then I was surprised that a car comes up and stops and the window goes down, and this man that turns out to be Joe DiMaggio, who’d just thrown me out, says, Do you have a car? I said yes. He says, Oh. I would’ve given you a ride. And he drives off. What a stupid comment, Oh yes I have a car; I should’ve said, No I don’t have a car. But that was the end of it. Sometimes the voice that you establish in a piece – and every piece has a voice, every writer has a voice, I have a voice – but sometimes it’s a bit muted and sometimes it’s a little bit bold and – it’s your choice what kind of color you use, what kind of shading you use. What about you?

Jones: I try not to be in stories. I once wrote a story about my dad and tried not to be in it, which is not possible. But I don’t like it as a – Granger sent us an email a couple months ago saying first person was killing narrative and he wanted us not to be in stories anymore. Because it was kind of default – I don’t know if it’s the blogging age or, especially with celebrity stories you think, Well the celebrity’s not interesting so let’s talk about me.

Q: Besides Chris, what other journalists do you get excited reading?

Talese: There’s a wonderful person named Jon Lee Anderson, he writes wonderfully for The New Yorker about foreign affairs.

Q: Are there any mistakes or inaccuracies in your stories that you’d be willing to admit to?

Talese: Let me think. You know, I’ve been lucky. If I made a mistake I caught it in time, or someone caught it for me. When I was working at the New York Times I just lived in fear of making a mistake because there would be a correction. I never had that dubious distinction of being mentioned in the correction column. As I told you, when I first joined the paper those old guys who were my high priests of journalism said, You’ve got to get it right. So what that meant, I was always worried I would get it wrong. I didn’t want to be in a correction column. Sometimes running scared is not a bad thing.

Q: How do you write about someone you just don’t like?

Talese: If you don’t like them or more important if you don’t respect them I don’t write about them. I remember one time I spent a year and a half with a person, Lee Iacocca. He had been fired by Ford and taken on by Chrysler, and was bringing that motor company back from almost bankruptcy – there was a lot of government bailouts back in the 1980s – and I hung out with him from 1981 to 1982. And you know, I just didn’t feel that I wanted after all that time I spent and all the money I spent on travel, I didn’t feel that I could do that job. Because I didn’t feel I could identify with him. I had written about notorious people I respected – I’d hung out with the mafia, killers – and I’d written about all these pornographers in “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” and I respected them on their own terms, and here’s a distinguished man of the business world, the automobile business, and it wasn’t that I disliked him – I admired him – but I felt the story wasn’t something I could get my heart into. And I just dropped out. He went on to write his own book and he made a fortune. Maybe as [Chris] said, maybe I like minor characters better. [Iacocca] was a very compelling and driven and successful person but for some reason there’s something about that character and that situation that I could not identify with.

Jones: If you don’t care about it, you’re not gonna do your best.

Talese: That’s right.

Jones: You have to put so much into it.

Talese: And so you do. It’s so hard.

Jones: You can’t fake heart. It’s either there or it’s not.

Talese: That’s right. That’s right.

Q: You have these extensive files – can you talk about this need that you have to [document] your life and stories?

Talese: The lady refers to how I document the notes from articles and books and all that stuff I saved. I not only save it but I’ve organized it in chronological order from 1945 through 2011, and, if I should live another year, 2012. When I say save, I mean I save everything. I save letters from everybody. I save rejection slips. My wife and I have been married 52 years and I have almost every note she’s every written – it might be Why didn’t you take out the dog earlier? He pooped all over the rug. And I date it, and I know the name of the dog, and I file it. I have a basement, what used to be an old wine cellar, and I have dozens and dozens and dozens of filing cabinets, and it’s all in order, day by day, month by month, year by year, and the years are big signs telling you what year you’re in. About four or five years ago I thought, There is a story. [People often ask],What’s your next book?, and sometimes I know and sometimes I don’t know, and sometimes I start a book like the Chrysler story and I don’t finish it, and now I’m working, and have for the last two or three years, on a book on a 50-year marriage, my own. I was married in 1959. And I have a written record of that. For example when my wife, [Nan], writes a letter of complaint – it might be the dog or something else or You were just awful last night to me and maybe we should stop going out – I not only save that but I answer that letter to myself. I write: This letter was written after we went out to Elaine’s restaurant and one of Nan’s authors was there and Nan will say, How could you have been so disrespectful, and I’ll say, I’m sick and tired of being the husband of this editor. I’m writing to myself but I’m giving background to the letter, and in my mind I’m thinking there’s history in minor characters, and I’m one of them, and my wife’s another one. And I’ve done this all my life. And so now I’m thinking, For half a century these two people have lived in the same building in the middle of Manhattan, and it’s a story. It’s a story of a building, number one, and it’s been the same building from 1959 to 2011, so far. And within this are two people, and these two people have an interaction, have an exchange of letters and exchange of ideas and an exchange of venom, at times, and fury, and yet they remain under the same roof, officially married and technically married and personally married and not always happy about it. This is the story of a marriage.

And it’s not only the story of those two people in that building, wife and husband, but also the people who’ve come in and out of that building, guests who’ve stayed sometimes. For example, much of the time we didn’t have enough money, so much of the time since we had this building that I rented floors in and later became an owner of – in 1972 I bought this building because I had a couple of dollars left over from the bestseller on the New York Times, and I bought the building. But prior to that I rented apartments. One time I rented for two years to William Styron. I had three apartments and I could only afford two, and I sublet to Styron. He’s dead now, you know, but in those days his wife and children lived in Roxbury, Connecticut, but he liked to get away for a couple of days and have a pied-à-terre. My wife worked at Random House, and Styron worked at Random House, and thus we rented the apartment. During that two-year period he was writing “Confessions of Nat Turner,” and at night he would come down and read to us, Nan and myself, and our children were still at the time in the house then. We’d have dinner and sometimes we’d go out. Sometimes [Styron] would give the key to other people. One time he gave the key to the separated wife of Philip Roth, and she had a cat. My dear friend David Halberstam, with whom I had a falling out for 10 years and then we got back to being great friends again, he’s a character. So this building is like a stage, like a theater. Walk-ons, walk-offs, periods, and the Vietnam war, protesting in New York – I remember Halberstam and my wife Nan and myself and our daughter Pamela would be marching on Fifth Avenue in the parade against the war, and I remember Halberstam was still on the Times – he’d yet to win the Pulitzer – I remember he took off his press card when he was in the parade, because he shouldn’t have been. A lot of other people could be in this. So what is it? It’s a chronology, it’s a chronicle, it’s a nonfiction novel, it’s a story. About a building and a marriage.

Jones: I don’t like to judge people, but your file system is strange I think.

[laughter]

Talese: It is strange! But you know what it is? You have a sense of yourself and you have a sense of being someone looking at yourself. And I can’t quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, but I think he said something to the degree that as a writer he had a sense of where he was and a sense of seeing himself from afar, and seeing himself where he was, this kind of prismatic sense of self: you turn and get different lights, different angles. Maybe sometimes it helps, being a foreigner in a way. My father was a foreigner from Italy, and I was always feeling that I was a half of a foreigner because when I was born World War II was going on and Italy was the enemy. I always felt as if I was divided as a person, and that was the perfect attitude to have as a journalist because you had a sense of being something different than what you were, you weren’t sure who you were. And sometimes through the characters you write or the people you interview you’re always looking for, How am I different from that person? Am I different? There’s always that curiosity being indulged because the curiosity is propelled by being an outsider. If you’re an outsider you’re the perfect journalist. You can’t be an insider. You have to really be an outsider, should be an outsider.

*Thanks to The New Yorker’s Nancy Franklin for her clever caption to a photo of Talese’s visit to Harvard.

For more, see our post of Chris Jones’ talk with this year’s Nieman fellows.

Photo of Gay Talese and Chris Jones by Jonathan Seitz.

Frey: You told me some of the figures of how many notebooks you had for “Among Schoolchildren.”

Kidder: For “Among Schoolchildren” I had 150 steno books filled. And I don’t know how many typed pages that would have been. A lot of pages – enough that I used to think, sort of like IBM, when they were sued by the government, they delivered three semi trailer trucks full of documents. You could hide the evidence for about 20 murders in there and never have it discovered.

Tracy Kidder

In those days, the computer was still a pretty new thing, and I made these elaborate indices – I usually had the help of somebody. And it was arduous, and they didn’t work very well, because I could never find the things I wanted. But going through that process, I’d start to get those notes into my head.

Lately, starting with “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” I’d just type all the notes into the computer. I’d just bite the bullet and spend a month or two months, I think it was in that case. Because then I’d do them chronologically, and then I really can find things much more easily, because of the wonderful “find” function – as long as my spelling holds up, you know, that can be an issue.

I don’t know that there’s anything to replace it. You could, I suppose, have someone else do this for you. In the case of my last book, there were written notes, but Deo didn’t want me taking notes openly, particularly in Rwanda and Burundi, so I had to use a recording device, and then I transcribed all that later. But every night, every time I was in a place I was alone, I would write out notes. I don’t like that as much, but in all cases, beginning to get those notes into my head seems really crucial. You get good at your book after a while. And it is amazing. I can get into the car meaning to go to the grocery store, I actually do that once in a while, and halfway there, I forget where I was going. But while I’m working on a book, I can remember enormous amounts of stuff, dialogue and so on. I don’t know why that is, but I can. I used to.

Frey: At some point, though, you have the chronology of the story that you’re telling, and as you were mentioning before, you also have the linear progression of the way in which you receive the information as a reporter. And that’s in your notebooks, and I’m assuming those are numbered –

Kidder: Yeah.

Frey: One through 178, but there’s a process I would think, because all of your books have a different structure, and you tell stories in many different ways, that while sifting through your notes, a kind of architecture for your stories begins to emerge, some sort of process in which you’re metabolizing this information and something other than chronology or other than the order in which you receive it starts to announce itself as a possible way of telling the story.

Kidder: I wish it were so. For me, it’s very important to find out what the actual chronology is, the absolute chronology of the story. As my editor, Dick Todd, likes to say it’s surprising how often writers that he’s worked with don’t actually know the chronology. He believes, we have a rule, he and I, which is if you’re going to break chronology, you have to have a good reason for doing it. …

But to go back to this step-by-step thing. With one exception, I’m very impatient. I get my notes all done, I sit down, and I write up the merest outline. It really just usually says, “Elements.” But I make up a kind of outline, and then I just start writing. I try to write really fast, and I write often at inordinate length. Dick Todd reminded me that the first draft of “Among Schoolchildren” was about 1,500 pages, and not only that, it started out in a kind of distant third person, then it was written in the first person, then it was written – I forget the other way it ended. The last hundreds of pages ended in something like the form of a play, but it didn’t matter. In part, I think it is sort of true that I write as fast as I can to prevent remorse for having written badly.

I did hear – my beloved editor didn’t say this to my face, but someone said to me, “Todd was talking about you the other day at the University of Massachusetts, and he said, ‘Kidder’s great gift is that he’s not afraid of writing badly.’ ”

I didn’t know what to think about that, but for me, writing is a form of thinking, maybe the only kind of thinking I’m capable of. And often, because I have to be lonely and alone to write, I need a room where I can close the door and no one can see me. But at the same time, I get lonely and sorry for myself, and this guy is so long-suffering, but I give him big chunks of rough draft, and he’ll say – he always says, “It’s fine. Keep going.”

He’ll wait a week or something, but I’ve become pretty sure that he doesn’t actually read them anymore. The reason is because when the time comes to start putting this into something a little more palatable, you wonder what he thought was fine. But for me, and again, nobody does things the same way or ought to, and it doesn’t really matter. What really matters is what comes out at the end. I love to rewrite. I think it’s one of the great gifts that is given to a writer, to be able to rewrite, to take back what you’ve written and write it better before anyone else has to see it, except, in my case, for Dick Todd.

So I don’t think I’ve written a book that didn’t have at least 10 drafts. They are successive approximations, like that foolish game golf that I once tried to learn to play, where you get closer and closer to the hole. So there might be a sentence that survives from the rough draft, or maybe a little more or maybe nothing, but each draft there’s more that survives, and at some point some big problem identifies itself. That’s another matter. …

Darcy Frey

Frey: One of the interesting things about the structure [of “Strength in What Remains”] is not only does it break up time, but each element of the story kind of has its own form of tension, so we have Deo in Burundi, and the reader is asking him- or herself, “What happened to this young man?”And then we have Deo in New York trying to survive, and the question the reader has is “What’s going to happen to this young man?” With you introducing yourself in the prologue and then going away for a long stretch, there’s a sort of implicit question or tension – “When will the narrator come back, and how does he know all of this?” – which is sort of the second half of the book.

It’s kind of a risky or unusual thing to do to tell a story in a semi-omniscient or third-person voice and then break that strategy halfway through, and in the second half, peel back the curtain and really show the Wizard of Oz, the writer at work, and show the choices you’re actually making. How difficult was it to make that decision?

Kidder: I resisted it to some degree. In theory I don’t like the sound of that all. That doesn’t sound risky, it’s sounds stupid. But I think when I’m working on a book, after a while, I just want something that works. And one is aware that there might be for all practical purposes an infinite number of ways to structure a book, but you’re not going to have lived long enough to find them all. Although I do an awful lot of writing by experiment, this seemed to work, and then it began to suggest something else.

Usually, all the justifications for doing what I’ve done come after everything is done and the book is in print, but in this case, I remember saying, or thinking, “So, we have the first part of the story: We get these memories, these harsh and wild memories. So we hear about what had happened with this guy from his memories, and in the second part we see him in the throes of those memories.” And it seemed to work – I hope it did. I’m sure it didn’t work for everyone.

Frey: It reminded me – it’s done rarely, because it’s so hard to pull off – it reminded me a little of Joseph Mitchell’s wonderful book “Joe Gould’s Secret,” where he tells the story of his character, and then he tells the story of how he told the story of his character and how he did the reporting, but makes it not an act of self-aggrandizement on the part of the writer. It’s intrinsic to the portrait he’s drawing of Joe Gould.

Kidder: I was not trying to be self-revelatory. I mean, that was not the point of it. Should we go on with this, or talk about “Mountains Beyond Mountains” and point of view there?

Frey: Sure.

Kidder: Point of view is crucial. I forget what Henry James said about it, but he basically said it’s the most important thing. It does affect every other piece of a book, and indeed, these wonderful terms we use to talk about narrative are wonderful precisely because they allow strangers to talk about a piece of writing and understand each other, but I don’t think about them while I’m writing, God knows. It’s a little like dissecting the muscles of a back, you can cut away and learn quite a bit about those muscles, but once you’ve done that, they no longer function as muscles. So I don’t think about those things, but I think point of view is a crucial term.

But what often happens when we’re working together – I was about five drafts into “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” and my editor, Todd, said, “There’s a problem here. It’s called the problem of goodness.” I knew, “OK, here we are. He’s speaking in koans again.” I kind of understood what he meant, because I had written a profile of Paul Farmer for the New Yorker before I launched into this book. And one particularly nasty letter had come to the editor full of venom for Farmer, and also I had at least one woman friend, maybe a couple who told me – I remember the line one of them said was, “He sounds like a great guy, but I wouldn’t want to be married to him.” I started thinking, “Well, I wasn’t aware he had proposed,” but then I realized I was feeling defensive, and I had to admit there was probably a problem with tone in this book.

Where a problem surfaces, these things are related. Everything is tied together. Tone as I understand it is the attitude of the author, not necessarily the narrator, to the events and the characters in a story, the perceived attitude. The worst thing that can happen to a writer, I think, is for a reader to think that he or she has discovered something about the characters or the events, or both, that the author hasn’t understood. So, what Todd was actually saying to me, I think, was, “There is a problem of tone here.” It was a funny kind of problem, this problem of goodness, as he called it, because it was several problems, really. I had structural problems in that book, and so on, but I guess the two big problems would have been believability and palatability.

You have a character like this guy, and how do you make the reader know he’s for real? And then, if you can get past that, how do you make your reader – we all tend to push away evidence of a virtuousness that exceeds our own, and that is certainly the case with Paul Farmer. This is a guy who keeps nothing for himself. It’s psychological discomfort that we were really talking about, that you’re almost certain to feel in the presence of someone so gifted and so self-sacrificing and so passionate about a cause. So what we needed and finally decided was – we didn’t say it this way, I just started writing it – acknowledgement of that fact. And that led to the idea that there would be a little sub-narrative told in the first person of my own struggle with Paul’s outsized virtue.

If I did this right, I’d be saying to a reader, in effect, at various times, “Look, I know this guy is beginning to make you feel uncomfortable. He’s making me feel uncomfortable, too.” [I'd] be an everyman taking you along on this journey: “Here’s what I think about my discomfort and its causes.” We looked for places to do this, both openly and in veiled ways. The hope was that in the end, I could free the reader from the kind of irritating self-reflection and so on that I experienced myself, and then you could see him clearly and in the round.

Of course, I tried to deal with some other things, too. Any less than fully virtuous that thing he’d ever done was precious to me. I have to tell you a funny little story: When I was doing my profile for the New Yorker, I was assigned one of their estimable fact-checkers. I love these guys, by the way, because private embarrassment is always better than public embarrassment. I gave her everything I had: all the phone numbers and all the people I talked to. After a couple weeks, I spoke with her on the phone and asked her how her research was going, and she said, “Everybody loves him,” and I thought she sounded a little disappointed, and so that made me feel a little better.

[For more, read part 1 of this conversation, in which Frey asks Kidder to define their art, and Kidder talks about how he finds subjects for his stories.]

Frey: We have all these different terms: The poster says “literary nonfiction.” “Narrative nonfiction.” My workshop is called “creative nonfiction.” Sometimes these classes are called “the literature of fact.” So, I wanted to start out with some definitions about the kind of work that you do.

I ran across a funny quote from John McPhee, the high priest of this genre, in an interview that he gave to the Paris Review a couple months ago, when he was asked what this kind of work is, and he said, “Nonfiction – what the hell? That just says this is nongrapefruit we’re having this morning. That doesn’t mean anything. You’ve had nongrapefruit for breakfast. Think how much you know about that breakfast.”

That’s a negative or a nondefinition of the genre. Maybe we can start by trying to craft a positive definition of it. So my first question to you is, how do you define the kind of writing you do, and how does it differ from both traditional journalism and traditional nonfiction writing?

Kidder: I’m confused by the terms, of course. When I first started thinking about writing nonfiction, the term that was current then was “the new journalism,” which was also inaccurate, because it wasn’t exactly new. I worry about the term “creative nonfiction.” One of the nice things about his kind of writing… when I was first trying my hand at it in the early 1970s was that it didn’t really have a proper name. It wasn’t part of the academy; no one was teaching courses in it. In a way it was kind of nice, because you could sort of make it up as you went along. There was a wildness to it, or at least you could flatter yourself into thinking that.

They all worry me, but literary journalism worries me only because it takes a long time to know for sure what really deserves to be called literature. So it sounds a little pretentious, or at best premature, to slap that term on it. But what I think all these terms are trying to suggest is that the literature of fact, or factual writing, nonfiction, that there can be more to it. To signify a kind of nonfiction writing in which not only the information but the writing is important.

For me the essence of it is really storytelling, and of course, the techniques of storytelling never belonged exclusively to fiction. Surely there is no single means of understanding the world. I have great respect for people who write theoretically. I’ve learned a great deal from them; I steal from them all the time. But maybe because of my deficiency, which is that the moment I start to generalize, all I can think of are the exceptions — and maybe through early training, all the Dickens my mother used to read to me, I understand the world best through stories. So this is just one little piece of writing. I think they’re all invaluable to us, all the forms of nonfiction. I’m not sure that you really want to define them any more narrowly than that. Is that all right?

Frey: That’s fine with me. It’s funny, because the highest praise now for works of nonfiction is to have someone on the back of your book blurb you and say, “Reads like a novel,” which is this nondefinition, although it does give a sense that certain elements of fiction – a dramatic scene-by-scene construction of a story, a sort of breadth of thought and feeling and an attention, as you said, to language and authorial voice — [are] being welcomed into the world of nonfiction.

Kidder: When someone says “reads like a novel,” what you want to know as the author who’s presumably being praised is, which novel? One of the things that Tom Wolfe said, I think his main point was that a lot of modern fiction had abandoned the old role of fiction, the former role, the role that people like Thackeray, Dickens and Balzac and all those people played, which was the role of social commentary, and that this had almost by default fallen into the hands of journalists. I think there’s some truth to that.

Frey: And if we could go off on a huge tangent here about issues of authenticity and accuracy, because when you read “reads like a novel,” you want to know, yes, what novel, but you also want to know if it’s true. One of the things that’s attractive as a practitioner of this kind of writing is that you do take some of the aesthetic elements of fiction, but they are married to the factual authority of journalism, and thereby the genre gains something from that kind of marriage.

Kidder: Yeah, quoting McPhee again, no one makes rules for everybody, but I certainly have my own rules, which is if I call it nonfiction, I can’t make up characters, I can’t make up dialogue, I don’t make up facts. That doesn’t mean you have to tell your stories in the order in which they happen. Or, as the editor whom we have shared across the years likes to say, the worst sin is to tell the stories in the order in which you found them out, which is tempting sometimes.

Frey: Which is I think one of the reasons why, as we were talking before, you open a travel magazine, and every travel narrative begins, “As my plane broke through the ceiling of clouds on the way to X airport,” and then the narrative continues in the order in which the travel writer received the information.

In terms of the stories that you’ve told in your books: You’ve written about public education, you’ve written about carpenters and homebuilders and architects building a home, a nursing home, a doctor in Haiti, a young medical student in Burundi. Subject-wise, you range all over the map. How do your book ideas come to you, or how do you go out into the world looking for them?

Kidder: I don’t have an effective procedure for this. I wish I did. I have no right to complain about anything. I’ve had a wonderful run of luck as a writer. And incidentally, anyone who writes for a living and doesn’t admit to being very lucky is almost certainly insane. But the one thing I do find difficult – and I must say my family has found it even more difficult – is trying to find the next thing to write about. I haven’t done it the same way twice, it seems to me. The idea for “The Soul of a New Machine” came to me from my editor, Richard Todd. The next book was my own idea, to write about the building of a house. And then my editor’s wife suggested that I write about an elementary school teacher – she was one at the time.

What were the other ones? I was looking around for another book and wandered into a nursing home and met these two old guys who interested me. Who else? I wrote a book that’s largely about a small town cop. I met him at the gym. He’s this bald, very loud fellow, very friendly, and at a certain point, he said, “You don’t remember me, do you?” I said, “No.” He said, “I arrested you five years ago.” And then I did remember him, but he had hair back then and now he had none at all.

The reason I remembered him was because he had stopped my wife for speeding later that day, but he didn’t give her a ticket. And then I discovered the reason he didn’t give her a ticket was he really hated to give women tickets because he really sincerely hated to see women cry. Although there were refinements to this, because if a woman was already crying by the time he got to her window, he figured, “Well, she’s already upset, I might as well write her up.” This guy was hilarious, but at a certain point he said to me, “Come out and ride around with me. I’ll show you a town you never thought existed.” This was the very peaceful, very prosperous looking town of Northhampton.

I ran into Paul Farmer completely by accident in Haiti when I was down there doing a story for The New Yorker about American soldiers, and I met Deogratias, my latest victim, on a visit to Paul Farmer. …

Frey: In all your books, though the reader gets the sense that you were able to get enormous reportorial access to your subjects, whether it was a team of computer engineers or Chris Zajac, the teacher in “Among Schoolchildren,” or Paul Farmer of Partners in Health. Do you make it very apparent at the beginning of your projects just how much time you want with your subjects and how ever-present you’re going to be for the next year or two in their lives?

Kidder: I hope – I think – I know I’ve gotten better at this. Maybe I should go back to “I think” I have, but I do try to warn the prospective subject about the things that could happen based on things that have happened in the past. I do explain that this is likely to be a pretty large invasion of privacy. And I do this in part because I now know quite well how much better it is for someone to say, “No, I’d rather not do that” when there’s nothing invested on either side and there’s likely to be no hard feelings, than a year down the road when it might be much more painful – it would be much more painful to have to abandon the project. I have thought of it sometimes as reading people their Miranda warning: “Anything you say may be used against you in my book.”

We used to ask people to sign releases. These releases were a joke. I don’t know any court in the country where they would have stood up, because they essentially said that I can say anything I want about you, including any bad things, and in return I’ll give you a free copy of the book in which I do it.

I don’t do that anymore, but I do try – I really do try as hard as I can to scare people off. Some subjects are sophisticated, and others are not at the beginning.

Frey: One of the things that struck me so much about “Among Schoolchildren” when I read it was the density of detail in this book. So this is an account – a largely chronological account of one year in the life of a single fifth-grade classroom. The teacher, Chris Zajac, and 25 or so 10-year-old students.

Kidder: I think it was 18.

Frey: Eighteen – starting from September and going through to June. I remember I read one passage and I went back to look at it, and wanted to read it out loud, because when I encountered it for the first time as a young reporter/writer, I tried to put myself in your shoes, in the shoes of the reporter, and tried to imagine what you must have done to get this level of factual detail in order to then write this passage. So this is just a quick passage about a young boy named Clarence, who ends up being one of the two or three main student protagonists in the book, and Chris is the teacher. Tracy writes,

Clarence was a small, lithe, brown-skinned boy with large eyes and deep dimples. Chris watched his journeys to the pencil sharpener. They were frequent. Clarence took the longest possible route around the room, walking heel to toe and brushing the back of one leg with the shin of the other at every step – a cheerful little dance across the blue carpet, around the perimeter of desks and along the back wall, passing under the American flag, which didn’t quite brush his head. Reaching the sharpener, Clarence would turn his pencil into a stunt plane, which did several loop-the-loops before plunging into the hole.

It’s just such a wonderfully vivid and visual description. I imagine you probably saw Clarence do that a thousand times in the course of the year, but at some point you saw it the first time you put it in your notebook, or you trained yourself to gather that kind of level of quotidian detail knowing that a year, two years from then, when you were sitting down to write, you were going to need that kind of texture in order to write a fully realized scene.

Kidder: I just remembered something. I often put these things behind me and forget. I spent 178 days in the classroom. There’s 180 days by law of school in Massachusetts. I missed two days – one I played hooky, and the other I was sick. A lot of the time I had a desk, right near the teacher’s. I think after a while, the kids just thought of me as a big fifth-grader. I realized somewhere along the line that the great danger to a writer, a journalist, whatever I was – a reporter – in that situation was generalization. You could summarize a day in a page or two of notes, perhaps, but without the details, it wouldn’t have much importance.

That’s one of the reasons my attempts to read widely on the history of education were sort of – why that seemed such an arduous thing to do. That is all institutional history. The actual history is unknowable, because it’s taken place in these virtually hermetically sealed classrooms for centuries now, or certainly since the 19th century. So I tried to write down everything that I saw. You know, this little community was pretty complicated. Children that age get up to a lot of different things. It was fortunate that I did that, though. I do remember a very important thing that happened in the course of this year that I didn’t realize was unfolding, but when I went back to my notes, I had what I needed. I hadn’t understood what they meant at the time. I just think that’s part of the job. It varies from time to time. Maybe I could talk a little about taking notes.

When I was much younger, I think I was inclined to write notes about what I was thinking or feeling, and I don’t bother with that very often now, although I don’t turn away from anything in note-taking. No one else has to read it, I just write everything down, but what I’m mostly looking for are what people say, what I hear, what I smell, what I feel tactilely. Concrete information seems of the utmost importance, and not the self-reflective stuff, which is – if you have this really terrifically detailed record of, say, a year in the life of a classroom, or something even more complicated, you also have really powerful memory stimuli. You will remember how you felt, and you can always make some notes about that later on in the day. I always go over my notes whenever I can after a day of note-taking.

Frey: Is there a difference between the many kinds of stretches of narrative in your books? One distinction I think is, in some of your books, “Among Schoolchildren, “House” and “The Soul of a New Machine,” you were there and present for the things that you’re describing, the proverbial fly on the wall. In the later books, the last two books, “Mountains Beyond Mountains” and “Strength in What Remains,” there are long stretches in which you need to recreate a subject’s past history. I’m wondering if the reporting project is different when it’s unfolding before your eyes and when you’re hearing someone tell something about their history from five, 10 years ago that you then have to render in scene?

Kidder: I think everything I’ve written has required some recreation of something, but you’re right, some more than others, particularly my last book. I don’t know – yeah, you have to do it in a different way. I guess it was most problematic – if you’re thinking about Paul Farmer’s past, well, I was able to go talk to his mother, all of his siblings. I searched for some old girlfriends and friends, and so on. I also had the wonderful Ophelia Dahl to fill me in. So I had a really wide range.

My last guy, Deogratias … in a way the constraints of that reporting drove the way I wrote that book, to a larger degree than most others. The reason for that is that a lot of what he told me, the most significant things, couldn’t be verified. I could check dates and certain things that were simply facts, but there was no one to talk to. For instance, there’s one moment in his life where he was saved at the border of Burundi and Rwanda border by a woman whose name he never knew. I mean, there was no way in the world I was ever going to find her. but dragging that story out of him – which I’m afraid would be a pretty accurate description of what I did – was arduous, but it was really pretty much his story… In addition to that, I went back to all the stations of his life, both in New York and in Burundi and Rwanda, and I was able to verify everything in New York through the people who had helped him and had taken him in.

Frey: One of the fascinating things about the structure of “Strength in What Remains” is that the second half of the book in a way is an explanation for the way the first half of the book is reported and written. We can talk about that in a moment when we talk about structure, but there are long stretches in “Strength in What Remains” – I’m thinking of the long narrative stretch where Deo is fleeing the civil war in Burundi and finding his way to the Burundi airport and getting on a plane to New York and another stretch where he’s living essentially homeless in Central Park and other places in New York.

There is a moment-by-moment quality to those stretches of writing. We see the park bench that he sleeps under, the actual statue in Central Park that had an effect on him. You are liberal in terms of giving the reader a window into his internal thinking, and I’m just sort of curious what kind of reporting it takes to be able to with confidence assume the internal thoughts of your characters.

Kidder: Well, in that case, because I was going to acknowledge it, as you say, in the second part, ultimately I felt justified in doing that. … I just told that story as he told it to me, although he told it to me in many, many different pieces, my words, but I hope an accurate rendition of the story as he told it to me. Of course when he told me that story, most of what he told me, the most recent stuff he was telling me was 12 years old, a lot was that far back and some was even farther back.

So of course it suffered from the usual additions and deletions of memory, I’m sure – I just don’t know which ones. I came to feel that none were deliberate. There’s a great writer named A.J. Liebling, whom some of you may have read, who used write for the New Yorker. He’s not read enough nowadays, in my opinion. A very funny writer, and he liked to write about small-time con men, and one of his favorite characters was named Colonel Stingo, who called himself “the Honest Rainmaker.” At the end of one of those stories – I may have the words wrong, but I think the sentiment I’m pretty sure of – he had been checking out one of Stingo’s preposterous stories and at the end, he said, “So the story was, in its entrails, true, which is what counts.”

And I felt that way about the first half of that book. Proof is a funny thing, but going back with Deo to these stations of his life, particularly in Burundi and Rwanda, I became absolutely satisfied that this story was in its entrails true. It was kind of a nightmarish journey, not so much for me as for him.

[For more, read part 2 of the conversation between Kidder and Frey, in which Kidder discusses structure, point of view and why he came to embrace writing badly.]