Tom Junod is famous for writing essays that have defined both people and events. He wrote a piece called "The Falling Man" for Esquire, which is the canonical piece about 9/11. Later on, he wrote the iconic "Can You Say...Hero?" about Fred Rogers, also for Esquire.
What's unique about this conversation is that it's both practical and deep, but it all comes to a head at the end. In this climax, we get to talk about his bookshelf, and it fast becomes one of my favorite things that's ever happened on How I Write. Enjoy!
Transcript
0:42 The art of a sentence
2:01 The Falling Man on September 11th
7:18 “Say the unsayable”
16:10 Look for contradictions
19:40 Ellipses
28:35 Lessons from Fred Rogers
40:48 Write to improve your thinking
46:14 Tom’s favorite writing trick
50:11 What makes for a good ending?
54:57 Advice for young writers
1:02:58 “Writing is a tug of war of souls”
1:04:30 Tom’s anti-AI rant
David (00:00-00:42):
Tom Junod is famous for writing essays that have defined both people and events. He wrote “The Falling Man,” which is the canonical piece for 9/11. Then, later on, he wrote the iconic piece for Fred Rogers. What’s unique about this conversation is that it’s both practical and deep. But it all comes to a head at the end. In this climax, we get to talk about his bookshelf, and it fast becomes one of my favorite things that’s ever happened on How I Write. You’ll notice that this episode is more slowly paced than the other ones, and I could have done little things to speed it up here or there, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to give you the full Tom Junod experience.
David (00:42-00:52):
Tell me, when you’re writing sentences, what do you feel like you’re going for, both in the first draft and the revision process? Is there a feel, a vibe that you feel like you’re working towards?
Tom (00:53-01:59):
When I started writing “Falling Man,” I sat down and wrote, “He leaves this earth like an arrow,” or “He departs from this earth like an arrow.” And the hair stood up on my arms. That became my guiding principle. It was like, if you can keep on doing that, if you can keep on writing sentences that make the hair stand up on your arms, then you’ve got this. It’s this tightrope that you walk between this knowledge that you have—you have privileged knowledge of a subject—and yet what’s written is not privileged knowledge of a subject. I don’t know what’s going to happen next in this sentence, but I’ll know it when I find it, and I’ll keep at it until I find it. You can break that down to rhythm, to word choice, to a lot of different things, but it’s never as organized or systematic as that for me.
David (02:00-03:00):
“Falling Man” is a remarkable piece. I was telling you, I was at breakfast this morning and I was reading the piece, and the waitress comes up to me. She’s really sort of nervous, and she’s stuttering. She says that photo really means a lot to me; the photographer was my professor at photography school. So we started talking about it. Here’s how the piece begins: “In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow.” It’s about the falling man from the Twin Towers. “Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instance of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity’s divine suction or by what awaits him.”
Tom (03:01-06:03):
That story was written two years after 9/11. I wrote that story because on September 12, 2001—two years earlier, on 9/11—I was out at our house in Shelter Island. The news came in hodgepodge, like it came in to everybody else. The thing that made that day particularly weird and particularly attached to where I was and where we were was that we didn’t have a TV at the time, and I couldn’t wait to get the newspapers. So I got up early and went to the drugstore in Shelter Island and got the Times, got the Post, got the Daily News—got them all. I still have them. The Times had that astonishing headline: “America Attacked.” I’m getting the chill just thinking of that. I opened it up, and on page seven, there’s that picture of the falling man. There’s that picture of a man falling, but he looks like he’s flying. That is the thing about that picture. He seems almost in repose. It was always the contradiction of what that picture represented and how it was shot and what the inner meaning of that picture seemed to be that captured me right away. Within a second, I said, “I’m writing that story.” Two things complicated matters. The first was that I figured somebody else was going to write that story. I’m a magazine guy, and I couldn’t get into New York City. I was out on the East End of Long Island. They weren’t letting people in. Granger wanted me to come in and start writing about it right then, but I couldn’t do it. I also wanted to stay with my wife. So that was a complication. I absolutely 100% figured that somebody else was going to do it. The other thing is that it became something that people—I would say the whole nation—averted its eyes from. Nobody wanted to talk about that picture. Nobody wanted to see that picture. That picture ran the first day, and then never again. It was considered a taboo.
David (06:03-06:05):
A violation.
Tom (06:05-07:18):
A violation of somebody’s life in their most private, vulnerable dying moments. You’re capturing a photo of someone essentially dying in the air. Even though physically they were still quite alive, they were about to meet their death within seconds, and nobody wanted to see it. That became the other thing that drew me in. If you want to talk about my writing and what it’s always meant both to me and, I think, the people who have been kind enough to read it, it’s that if somebody tells me I can’t write about it, I want to write about it. If somebody says I can’t say it, I really want to say it. There was something taboo about that, and I wanted to break that taboo, and I wanted to say the unsayable. I don’t want to wear that out as we talk, but saying the unsayable, I think it carries on into my book.
David (07:18-07:32):
So with something like this, when you say, “Say the unsayable,” what’s going on here? Is it that that’s a really interesting, important photo that we need to talk about? What is the urge to say it? Is it just that, hey, you’re not allowed?
Tom (07:32-07:55):
It’s an interesting photo that we need to talk about, and that has been completely relegated to the margins of the conversation. But there’s something else, which is that something that nobody wanted to talk about: that people jumped. A lot of people jumped. A couple hundred people jumped.
David (07:55-07:58):
I think I saw the North Tower was like one in six people.
Tom (07:58-08:36):
Died were jumpers. So there was that, and that’s the thing that people just did not want to deal with. Amazingly, the thing that I thought was going to happen didn’t, which is that I thought that there’d be a bunch of stories about the Falling Man, who was not called the Falling Man yet. It was after the story in Esquire that he became the Falling Man. But I thought that somebody was going to identify him, and that was going to be all there was to it, but that did not happen.
David (08:36-08:38):
Can I get you to read the next section?
Tom (08:38-10:54):
Sure. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt or jacket or frock is billowing free of his black pants. His black high tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did, who jumped, appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They’re made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless. Their shoes fly off as they flail and fall. They look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them. Everything to the left of him in the picture is the north tower; everything to the right, the south. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation. Others see something else, something discordant, and therefore terrible freedom. There is something almost rebellious in the man’s posture, as though, once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it, as though he were a missile, a spear bent on attaining his own end. He is, by 15 seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of 32 feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour. And he is upside down in the picture. He is frozen in his life outside the frame. He drops and keeps dropping until he disappears.
David (10:57-11:03):
There’s a lot in there that I think speaks to who you are as a writer.
Tom (11:03-11:03):
Sure.
David (11:03-11:32):
I think one of the things is there are musicians who make albums and not singles, and you write paragraphs. It’s in the paragraph that I think your writing really comes alive. There are little moments of repetition that show up. And what I really admire about that is that that writing is a byproduct of looking, looking, looking, and more looking.
Tom (11:33-11:34):
And not turning away.
David (11:34-11:36):
Tell me about that.
Tom (11:36-12:28):
Well, I think that’s what the whole story’s about. I think that’s what the whole paragraph is about. The urge to turn away is taken for granted. It’s never mentioned in there. In a lot of my writing, I think that there is something of an attack. I mean, I realize he is very vulnerable, and I take liberties large and small, and I don’t mean I make shit up. I mean, I take liberties by putting in an em dash, “the others who died this way—who jumped.” I mean, I sort of move from objectivity, like being really scrupulously objective.
David (12:28-12:31):
Right. Falling down at precisely this much. Physics, science.
Tom (12:32-13:14):
Yeah, almost risking offense by being objective to being sort of grandly metaphorical, like the birth of a new flag. Like saying that this is a new flag. And that’s also the point of the story. The reason that I was attracted to the image when I saw it on September 12, 2001, was I looked at that and said, we are in a completely new place. I mean, that’s the picture that said, we are in a new place.
David (13:16-13:57):
Well, as a writer, that is something that I see show up over and over again. If I looked at the Falling Man, I would not at all have gotten to the way that you began that piece. I think the same thing happened in the piece about the Obama drone strikes. The New York Times comes out with a piece about how he’s the one hitting the drone missiles, like pressing the buttons or whatever, and you’re like, well, I was gonna write that piece. Now I can’t write that piece. And then you do something else that basically says, okay, we’re gonna switch up the style. We’re gonna change the approach and now have a fresher perspective on the same idea.
Tom (13:57-15:02):
Right. The thing that attracted me to the Falling Man was the difference, the unreconciled tension in the photo between his seeming acceptance of his fate and the fact that he was hurtling to his death at an insane rate. He was going 150 miles an hour, and yet he looks resigned. So there’s that contradiction. In the Obama piece, there’s also a contradiction. I still believe that Obama is and was a good man, and yet he’s ordering hits. So there’s that. And how can you say that other than in the most direct way?
David (15:02-15:27):
Hey, if you like how I write and you want to support the show, there’s two things that you can do. The first is think of someone who you know who loves to write and just fling them a link. Send them a link, say, hey, you got to listen to this. And then number two is if you run a company where you think you’d be a good sponsor, I’m looking for sponsors, and I want to work with people who care about the craft of writing and care about craftsmanship. So if that’s you, send me an email.
Tom (15:27-16:09):
I’ve written a lot of bad sentences, but most of the stories that move on and actually become stories begin with good sentences and really direct sentences. “He departs from this earth like an arrow. You’re a good man.” I mean, that’s a direct appeal. That’s a direct proclamation of some sort. Once I wrote that, that story was all you had to do was eventually wind your way to a final sentence that had some of the same punch.
David (16:10-16:35):
Well, it seems like the meta principle, from what you’re saying, is having a nose for this tension, for contradiction, for two things that don’t, almost like two tectonic plates that almost rub against each other, and in that rubbing create an eruption in the volcano, or they create movement and friction. And that’s actually what you’re trying to look for and sense as you’re thinking through what story am I going to take on?
Tom (16:36-18:26):
If a story has that dimension of ambivalence or contradiction, if something’s off that I can’t quite name, those are the things that I tend to go after and want to write about. That’s what my book is about. My parents were beautiful human beings. My mother looked like a ‘40s starlet, and my dad, by his own description, was a John Garfield type. He looked sort of like a Hollywood heavy or a gangster, but he was also a singer. He was gorgeous. My brother and sister were the same, and we had this house with marble steps. Everything was beautiful, but there was something off that I couldn’t quite name, and I began to find out what that was at a really young age. When I was three years old, my parents’ marriage almost ended because my father was having an affair with my first friend’s mother. That’s not something that you can name when you’re that young, but I do believe that it is something that you are aware of, and I was definitely aware of it. I think my course as a writer was set when I was really young.
David (18:27-18:58):
Somewhere I saw a quote that you had said or written, talking about your father, “This difficult thing, this difficult thing, this difficult thing. But man, I loved him.” The word that was coming to mind for me was reconcile. There’s this, and there’s this. How are these shapes going to fit together? That’s what I try to do.
Tom (18:58-19:39):
That’s what I try to do on a sentence level. I write generally long sentences that are quite balanced, and I think that there’s an attempt to balance the two poles that I’m coming from in each sentence. You’ve written a really good sentence when those two poles sort of have their tectonic rubbing against each other in one word. Like in the opening of *Falling Man*, “in the EM dash who jumped.” That’s a place where conflicting forces in the sentence find their balance.
David (19:40-19:41):
Tell me about the ellipses.
Tom (19:42-21:36):
My book probably sets some sort of record for ellipses, but it’s not a Tom Wolfian tick. It’s a Loujanodian tick. It’s not Tom Wolfe, it’s my dad. My dad had this way of talking: “Stand in front of the mirror in his bikinis. Look, look at this body. Has anyone ever seen a body like this?” That’s how he talked. Recently, I was just about to hand the book to my niece Kim, who knew her pop pop well. She looked at it and goes, “So I’m wondering, Uncle Tom, do you say anything about the way Pop Pop talks?” And I was like, “The whole book is sort of written in Pop Pop. It’s written in his language.” My father was a musical speaker. He spoke with pause, emphasis, pause, emphasis, and it was part of what made him so seductive. My father had this way of speaking, and in a lot of ways, he was a master of language. I believe that his feel for language has influenced my feel for language. In this book, I just let it all hang out that way. I quote him in that way, and I definitely write my own sentences in that way as well.
David (21:36-22:00):
It’s gotta be hard to write about someone so close to you, like your father. It’s so intimate, and sometimes it’s hard to look at something so intimate. I would imagine that the emotions that came up while writing this book were both elation and difficult.
Tom (22:00-22:28):
Yeah, every single bit of it. But I’d written about my dad three times previously. I had written about him for *GQ* in a story called “My Father’s Fashion Tips,” which is exactly that. It’s a profile of him through his maxims on fashion.
David (22:28-22:30):
Will you give me a few?
Tom (22:30-23:13):
The turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear is the most obvious. Always wear white to the face. Always be sure to play.
David (22:28-22:30):
What does white to the face mean?
Tom (23:13-24:14):
Meaning wearing a white shirt so that literally your face occupies a place on a pedestal, whether it’s a turtleneck or a shirt with a collar. There is nothing like a fresh burn. My father worshiped the sun. I mean, he was really almost a professional tanner. When he was a handbag salesman in the city, he used to sit out on the fire hydrant on Fifth Avenue between 32nd and 33rd. Sit out there at lunchtime with a reflector, just looking up at...
David (23:13-23:13):
The Empire State Building.
Tom (23:13-24:14):
Yeah, taking in the sun. He wouldn’t look at it. I don’t think that my father even noticed that the Empire State Building was there. It was a few blocks away. He didn’t give a shit. It was him. I mean, he *was* the Empire State Building. Him sitting out on Fifth Avenue with a reflector. Eskimos are supposed to have all these different words for snow, like 57 words for snow or something like that. I think I have almost as many for my father’s tan. I think it’s compared in there. It’s a steak sauce. It’s compared to mahogany. It just all. You know, to find the right word for my father’s tan, which was so dramatic. You don’t have anything in this room as dark as my dad.
David (24:17-24:18):
He was like a one steak sauce.
Tom (24:18-24:40):
He was like a one steak sauce with green eyes that were like traffic light green eyes. It’s crazy. All of the pictures of him are interesting, but seeing him in color close up was an overwhelming experience. I was completely overwhelmed from the time I sort of came into the world.
David (24:40-24:49):
What do you think it is about the long form magazine article that you fell in love with? I mean, you wrote, would you say, 32,000 words for ESPN.
Tom (24:49-24:53):
Yeah, for a story called “Untold” for ESPN.
David (24:53-24:59):
Yeah. We’re not talking about a six minute read on medium. Like, hey, this long form piece, I mean, these were.
Tom (24:59-25:59):
No, it was really long. “Falling Man” is probably seven or eight thousand words. I say it’s actually pretty compact in a lot of ways, but I’ve definitely written some really long stories. “Lethal Presidency” was 11 or 12,000 words. The question is, I don’t know why long-form narrative magazine stories turned out to be the thing that I could do, but I can tell you this. I didn’t even know it existed when I got out of college. The first thing I did was sell handbags for a year on the road. I was trying to write at night. I was writing on my business cards. I would fill them up with descriptions and scenes and everything else.
David (25:59-26:02):
I want to be a writer someday.
Tom (26:02-27:55):
I totally wanted to be a writer. I’d sit in my hotel room and write at night, and it just wasn’t good. It really was not that good. It was a version of what I do now, but the work was bad. The long sentences, all those things, they were all present way back then. I didn’t know magazine pieces existed. I thought to be a writer, you either had to be a newspaper man, for which I was too slow, or a novelist, which I just don’t know if I can do to this day. I just didn’t know I could do it. I didn’t have the faith that I could do it. So I became a salesman. Then there was just a moment when I had a shot to write a story. I came out of the handbag world. I started writing for trade magazines in Atlanta, and I got a shot to write a profile of a local newspaper guy for Atlanta magazine. It was the weekend before my wedding, and I had to write a magazine story over a weekend and get it in before I got married. I sat at the table and wrote, “Okay, I admit it. I wanted to skewer him.” That was the first sentence. It’s not the greatest first sentence in the world. It’s not, “He departs from this earth like an arrow.” However, for a guy who had never written a magazine story, that was pretty confident. It wasn’t just who, what, where, and when.
David (27:55-27:55):
Right.
Tom (27:55-28:34):
That was it. I wrote that story in a weekend. I gave it to the editor of Atlanta magazine. I came back from my honeymoon, and he called me in, and he was just like, “How did you learn to do this?” I was like, “I don’t know. I just did it.” And he said, “You have the chance to go all the way. You could be Tom Wolfe.” I didn’t know who Tom Wolfe was. “You could be Gay Talese.” I didn’t know who Gay Talese was. I didn’t know any of it, but I just knew how to do that thing. It’s a weird talent to have. I don’t know why I have it. I really don’t.
David (28:35-28:37):
When did the Fred Rogers piece come in?
Tom (28:37-29:44):
That came out in 1998. I had been writing for national magazines in the late 80s, early 90s. I’d written for Sports Illustrated, written for Life magazine. I tried to write for GQ, and the editor resigned and became the editor of Philadelphia magazine and killed the story. One day, the phone rang, and it was David Granger, who I didn’t know, and he didn’t know me. He said, “Listen, I just want to tell you, I’m looking through the pile here, and I came across the story that you had written about oysters. I think it’s really good.” I was like, “Great.” He said, “No, no, you misunderstand. I really, really like this story. I think that your voice is the voice that I want to use to build what I want to do at the magazine.”
David (29:44-29:45):
Yeah.
Tom (29:45-30:37):
David and I worked together, and we just ripped off one story after another. Everything was writing. I wouldn’t call it easy, but that’s when I wrote “The Abortionist,” a story that had no errors. There was not a single error. They didn’t even change the punctuation of that story. Then we were going to do this heroes issue for Esquire, and there was a guy on the staff who thought it would be a great, interesting, and funny idea to have the bad boy go and profile the good guy.
David (30:37-30:39):
The Presbyterian minister.
Tom (30:39-31:18):
The Presbyterian minister, Fred Rogers. The weekend that I called him, he happened to be in his apartment on 56th Street, and Esquire was on 55th. I walked around the block and knocked on the door, and this man in a robe answers. He said, “Hi, Tom.” He’s Fred Rogers. He was so remarkably adept at knowing what people needed at a certain time when he was interacting with them and giving them just that.
David (31:19-31:20):
You’re saying one on one.
Tom (31:20-31:58):
Yes, I’m saying one on one. I’m saying with every human being he met, somehow he had a sense of what that person needed from him. I saw it with little kids. I saw it with homeless people on the street. I saw it with myself, like telepathic. I don’t know if I believe in telepathy, but he certainly tapped into something deeper, something like an emotional awareness that was just a superpower on his part. Him greeting me at the door in a bathrobe in his apartment was definitely like, “I trust you.”
David (32:00-32:02):
That he trusted you, or you trusted him?
Tom (32:02-34:10):
No, he trusted me, which is what I was desperate for at the time. I didn’t even know it, but I was desperate to be trusted. So I started writing about Fred, and that whole story ended as I wrote it. It ended with us praying, and I just felt something give way in me. It’s interesting because I could talk about it on a spiritual level, but I think that at that moment, I sort of let the spiritual enter my writing. This is not to say that I was converted, but I just found another dimension to work in. I have always been super haunted and mystified and interested in the phenomenon of human evil, like why people do the things that we do, why we are created with that capability. I’ve never understood it. I’ve seen plenty of it firsthand, and I’ve always written about it. Before I met Fred, I was writing about human evil almost exclusively. The lesson that I learned from Fred is that goodness is just as much a mystery as evil is. We have no more reason to be good than we have to be evil, and yet we are. It’s a mystery, and I’ve been able to write about it in a lot of different ways.
David (34:10-34:28):
Can you tell me more about tapping into the spiritual dimension? What’s it like to open that door or invite that in? What does that feel like to you?
Tom (34:29-34:46):
We have the advantage that we’re talking about writing here rather than just things. You can talk about so many things through talking about writing, which is what happens when we start a show that does this.
David (34:46-34:47):
Yeah, exactly.
Tom (34:47-35:02):
When I started writing Falling Man, people thought, how could you do this? Why would you do this to these people? That it was cruel.
David (35:02-35:02):
Yeah.
Tom (35:02-37:16):
It was insensitive, offensive—all sorts of different things. I went into that story worried about that. I worked with a guy named Andrew Tchaikowski, who was an Esquire researcher who had left the magazine but was freelancing. We worked arm in arm on that story. He did as much of the research as I did, and he should get that credit. We were spending every night with lists of people who were among the dead. We were calling these families and saying, what do you think happened to your loved one? I thought that people were just going to hang up the phone, but they were like, what do you know? Can you tell us? Do you know anything about my son? Do you know anything about my husband? Do you know anything about this person who means so much to me? Do you know how they died? Because they weren’t getting the truth. So we kept on going. When the story came out, I tried to be objective, but I wrote that story with as much compassion and love as I could. That story threaded the needle of being boundary-breaking, but at the same time, there’s something really human about it. I don’t think I would have written that story that way. I don’t think I could have written Falling Man without Fred Rogers being in my life.
David (37:16-37:29):
When you said about Fred that he had this gift of speaking to adults like children and speaking to children like adults, what do you make of that?
Tom (37:30-39:14):
He had these long feelers for human vulnerability and emotion. People would just come up to him and want to talk to him. I remember this one moment where he was squatting down, and this kid came up to him and talked to him. Then another adult squatted down, and everybody was whispering in Fred’s ear. They were talking to him in New York City in the most personal way you could ever imagine. He looked at me and he goes, oh, Tom, you wouldn’t believe the things I hear. I don’t want to make this a psychology session, but it’s obvious, given the kind of father I had, the role that Fred would play in my life.
David (39:14-39:14):
Right.
Tom (39:14-39:22):
He was an alternate kind of role model to have, other than this guy who had skin the color of A1 steak sauce.
David (39:23-39:34):
Tell me about this scattering of your brain and flipping between different things, and you’re like, I don’t know how to think without writing.
Tom (39:34-39:35):
That’s right.
David (39:35-39:36):
Writing is this.
Tom (39:36-39:36):
That’s true.
David (39:36-39:43):
It’s like hammering the pillar into the ground. I’m going to tie myself to the pillar, and I’m just going to think about one thing over and over.
Tom (39:43-40:07):
Musicians back in the day were always looking for the tonic chord. In writing, I’m always looking for the tonic chord. What’s a tonic chord? That’s where all the discordant harmonies are resolved.
David (40:07-40:08):
Right, right, right.
Tom (40:09-40:48):
I’m always looking for some resolution to the stuff that gnaws at me. It wouldn’t be hard to draw a biography of me from the stories that I’ve written about other people, whether I’m embedded in them or not. There are just a lot of stories I wrote that were about subjects that haunted me, and I go from one to the other.
David (40:48-40:57):
It seems like when you’re writing, there’s this emotional odyssey: I’m shit, I’m a genius, I’m shit, I survived.
Tom (40:57-41:37):
Yeah, I said that when I was teaching a narrative journalism class at Mercer College in Macon, Georgia. Someone asked me to name the stages of writing. I wasn’t prepared for this, but I said, “I’m shit, I’m a genius, I’m shit, I survived.” I’ve never done better than that to talk about the stages of writing.
David (41:37-41:40):
For me, when you feel those “I’m shit” negative emotions...
Tom (41:41-41:41):
Yeah.
David (41:41-41:43):
How does that show up?
Tom (41:44-43:25):
Most people never see that because I’m an inveterate rewriter. I went from being completely dedicated to writing perfect first drafts—and sometimes achieving that, as in “The Abortionist”—to rewriting over and over again. So I’ve become almost maniacal to a fault as a rewriter. I’d say almost to a fault because it takes me longer to find what I’m looking for. I’m always willing to beat it up, explode it. You write, you write, you write, then you explode it. I’m always amazed by how long writing takes and what it takes to get to the thing. There are so many stories that I go out on, and I have a great time, I have all this information, it’s interesting. Then I write, and for whatever reason, that stuff is not in there. What happens to it? Is it some sort of block? Is it something where you’re pushing away from that final resolution? I don’t know.
David (43:26-43:30):
But you feel that the thing is there, but you can’t express it?
Tom (43:30-46:14):
A lot of times, I don’t even know that it’s there. One of the last stories I did for Esquire was about a young woman who ran out of a Walmart shoplifting in Marietta, Georgia, close to where I live. The security people chase her, but they don’t catch her. She just runs and runs, and she’s never seen again. I did a version of it that I thought was okay, but not great, and handed it to David Granger. He gave me the last bit of Granger-esque advice I could get. He read the piece and said, “When you first told me about this story, you told me that everyone who comes in contact with it, everyone who hears about this story, becomes obsessed with it. It’s spooky. Why is that?” I said, “I guess because it’s a mystery.” He handed the draft back to me and said, “Write that.” And I did. I don’t know why the original draft didn’t have all the good stuff in it. I think that’s one of the tests of writing, whether you’re writing a book or a magazine story: Did you get the good stuff in? It’s so easy for some reason not to get the good stuff in or to leave it out. When I wrote my book, the first abandoned draft was 230,000 words. I knew I had to abandon it because I had written nearly a quarter of a million words and I had yet to introduce many of the main characters. That’s a really bad sign when you’re writing and you haven’t brought in the people who make the thing work. I don’t even know what that draft was like anymore. It’s gone, it’s frittered in the wind. I had to find a way to get at what made me sit down and be interested in the story in the first place.
David (46:14-46:26):
We have this right now because we’re working on a series about culture. We’ve just finished six episodes, and we probably have 40,000 words.
Tom (46:26-46:26):
Yeah.
David (46:27-46:58):
We’re super excited about it. We think there’s a lot of really good stuff there. And yet, for all the individual episodes and even the series itself, if we were to ask ourselves, “What is it about?” we’re still not quite sure. We know it’s there. We know that the thing that it’s about is there. Sometimes it’s a question of getting rid of all the fluff. It was lying like a needle in a haystack the entire time. Sometimes it’s this emergent property of, “Oh, I didn’t realize that it was about that.”
Tom (46:58-47:01):
Well, have you tried “This is a story about...” sentences?
David (47:03-47:06):
What do you mean? “This is a story about...” sentences?
Tom (47:06-47:12):
Have you written a whole paragraph where every sentence begins with, “This is a story about...”?
David (47:12-47:15):
And you just do it over and over and over?
Tom (47:15-47:16):
Yeah, do that.
David (47:16-47:17):
I’ve never thought of that.
Tom (47:17-47:49):
This is a story about joy. It’s about the feeling one gets when... It’s about this, it’s about that, it’s about that. I’ve written a bunch of stories where that has saved me, including one that won the National Magazine Award back in the ‘90s, “The Rapist Says He’s Sorry.” “This is a story about...” It’s about this, it’s about that. It feels a little bit like Writing 101.
David (47:49-47:50):
It feels childish.
Tom (47:50-48:00):
It feels childish, it feels corny. It feels like you’re sending me to second grade, but it works. I’m telling you, it works.
David (48:00-48:01):
You do anything else like that?
Tom (48:02-48:25):
I do everything. My book is divided into three books: Book One, Book Two, and Book Three. I wrote all of Book Three in the second person, and then before I handed it in, I edited that out and changed it back to the first person.
David (48:26-48:39):
Book One: In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man. Book Two: Now that I’ve reached that age, I try to do all those things the best I can. Book Three: No matter how I try, I find my way to the same old jam.
Tom (48:39-49:29):
Do you know where those words come from? That’s from the title, and all the titles of the subsequent books inside the book are from the first song of the first Led Zeppelin album. That’s how it begins: “In the days of my youth, I was told what it means.” I wrote book three in second person. I mean, I’ve done so many different things. I sometimes write all in caps. I sometimes curse a lot. I sometimes do question and answers. I’ve done so many different things and so many tricks to try to get to what I’m trying to write about.
David (49:31-49:35):
You seem free to me as a writer in a very deep way.
Tom (49:35-49:37):
I free myself as a writer.
David (49:37-49:38):
How do you do that?
Tom (49:38-49:40):
All those crazy methods.
David (49:40-49:43):
So give me more of them.
Tom (49:43-50:10):
Have you ever tried to write something just in second person? It’s the easiest way to write. It cuts out so much extraneous stuff. I don’t even know why, but it just does. Just curse your ass off and take all the expletives out after you’re done. Anything to get you going, anything to push you past your point of resistance.
David (50:11-50:36):
It’s like when I think of writing that sucks, the two words that come to mind are boring and timid. It’s boring because it’s timid, right? And so there’s something that you’re doing that gets you out of timid and fear. You have a fearlessness about you as a writer, both in terms of the subjects that you choose and in terms of how you go about those subjects that I’m kind of desperate to tease out here.
Tom (50:36-51:52):
I think one of the best things you can do is challenge yourself via the sentence. Be brutally honest. Try to say the thing that you’re not supposed to say, and then build the story out of that. Challenge yourself with that, and then let the rest of the work sort of live up to that. I used to think that if you didn’t offend somebody, you were doing it wrong, but I don’t believe that anymore. To be as brutally honest as you can, not just for the story, but for yourself as a writer, you can’t write timid that way. If you write something that you shouldn’t write, or people tell you that you shouldn’t write, it changes everything else. You don’t have to keep it.
David (51:52-51:54):
But that’s a challenge to yourself.
Tom (51:54-51:55):
It’s a challenge to yourself.
David (51:56-52:03):
Yeah, it’s the timid thing. You got the anti-timid sauce. Dad had the A1 skin. You got the anti-timid.
Tom (52:03-52:22):
That was there for some reason from the beginning. Okay, I admit it. I wanted to skewer him for some reason. That was there. It was confrontational of myself, and it was confrontational of the guy.
David (52:22-53:12):
The thing that’s cool about that sentence, “Okay, I admit it, I wanted to skewer him,” is that instantly we’re connected to you as a writer. Okay, there was a human being here. We’re with you. All right, second thing is, yeah, this is the God honest truth, instantly conveying trust. The third thing is, skewer’s a hell of a word. You know, that’s twist the knife and get after someone. You’re saying that begins with something that you’re not supposed to say. It’s not that you’re revealing some sort of politically incorrect truth. It’s actually something much more ordinary, dare I say, more profound than that, which is an emotion, a sense that you’re having about whatever the subject is that you’re not supposed to have, but that it’s real and it’s true. That becomes the intro, and all of a sudden the frame has shifted, and we’re along for the rollercoaster.
Tom (53:13-53:17):
Yeah, and I didn’t skewer him. I wanted to, but I didn’t. I liked him.
David (53:18-53:19):
This was about who?
Tom (53:19-53:43):
There was a guy named Ron Hudspeth, and he was the nightlife columnist for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. At the time, it was called three-dot journalism, where at a certain restaurant, playing at it, just kind of dot, dot, dot. He would write whole columns where just sort of disparate things were connected by ellipses.
David (53:44-53:45):
What matters with endings?
Tom (53:45-54:56):
I really want my stories to be written. When I was at Esquire, we deemed it a failure if we ended a story on a quote. I don’t feel that way exactly anymore. I’ve gotten beyond that, I think. I’ve definitely, at ESPN, ended a story or two on a quote. I’m definitely a right to the last sentence kind of person. What’s an ending? I know what a beginning is. I know that’s a story. You write a sentence that enables you to write the story. I’m not looking to draw in a reader. I am looking to set some sort of bar for myself. I write a first sentence that enables me to go on, and I guess the converse of that is that I write the last sentence that enables me to stop.
David (54:57-55:30):
If you were invited to Columbia or something, and you go to a writing class and they’re saying, “Hey, Tom, we want to do what you’ve done,” what do you tell them are the most important things to know as aspiring writers? Do you focus on the grammar and the mechanics? Do you focus on, “Hey, you got to do great research?” Do you focus on, “If you can find the right story, that story will tell itself?” Do you focus on, “Hey, you got to develop your own voice, your own style?”
Tom (55:31-57:41):
I try to do the things that enable me to tell the truth. That’s really what I’m looking to do. Everything else—all my tricks to get beyond blocks, all of my completely improvisatory structures—I think are just there to enable me to get at some sort of thing that I was trying to say all along. Are you able to write a story that allows you to say the thing we talk about, that it’s interesting? So Susan Orlean, in her really beautiful book *Joyride*, says there are basically two kinds of writers. There is the writer who has a story that they want to tell, and there’s the writer who feels that they need other people to tell them the stories, and they communicate that to the reader. Susan plants herself firmly in the latter category. I really think I’m stranded between both. I think that there is something in stories that I want to say, but I don’t know what that story is. When I saw the picture of the falling man, when I saw the picture of the person I think is Jonathan Briley hurtling through the sky, I didn’t have an idea of how I wanted that story to be or how I wanted it to end. I just knew that there was something that I wanted to get at with it. It sort of puts me between Susan’s two categories a little bit. I don’t have an ideological axe to grind, a political axe to grind. I don’t think I have any of that, but there’s definitely something I want to say, and I’ll know it when I see it.
David (57:42-57:54):
I’m sorry if this is a very elementary question, but why is it important to tell the truth? Why is that the core, the driving force?
Tom (57:55-60:59):
I grew up in a family of secrets, and when you grow up in a family of secrets and when your father is keeping a huge secret from you and the rest of your family—not so much the world. The world pretty much knew who my dad was, but we sure didn’t. From the time I was a little kid, I knew, without being told not to speak about these things. There’s a time when I was with my dad and he was like, “Son, do you want to go get a hot fudge sundae?” I was like, “Yeah, Dad, I’d love to get a hot fudge Sunday.” I would love to get hot fudge Sunday. Get dressed up. “I’ll take you for a hot fudge sundae.” We were gonna go to a place called Act Four in Southampton. On the way, my father stops to visit a woman who had a house in Shinnecock Hills, and I was asked to wait outside. The door was locked, and I left a comic book inside. I tried to get back inside, but the door was locked. Did I know exactly what had happened? No. Did I know that whatever it is that had happened, I was not supposed to talk about? 100%. Then my father came out with the woman, and they both made a fuss over me. I knew I couldn’t tell my mom about it. We go off to Act Four and we have the hot fudge Sunday, and the day ends as it’s supposed to, but something happened in there that wasn’t supposed to, and I couldn’t talk about it. I never talked about it until I wrote my book. I think that when you have that kind of background and that sort of upbringing, the question of secrets and truth is a huge question for me. I think that if you look at a lot of my writing, there’s a secret—something that’s not supposed to be said—that I try to say.
David (61:00-61:02):
Did comic books influence your writing?
Tom (61:02-61:07):
Oh, yeah, for sure. They were everything. I love comic books.
David (61:07-61:08):
Yeah, I can.
Tom (61:08-61:08):
Yeah.
David (61:08-61:09):
I mean, I.
Tom (61:09-62:02):
I started reading them really young. I think I was three when I first started reading comic books. I always looked at kids’ books and thought they were baby books because the real action was in comic books. In comic books, there was always a transformation of sorts. Everybody had, well, Superman, Clark Kent had a secret—the secret that he’s Superman. Bruce Wayne had a secret—the secret that he was Batman. What was he trying to do? He was trying to make something right that happened wrong, which was that his parents were killed right in front of him, and he had to live with that. In this other world that he would transform into, he could make things right.
David (62:02-62:17):
So it was like the narrative arc, the stories that were in comic books. When I asked you that, I thought you were gonna say something about the visuals, the characters, the drama, whatever. No, you’re like, it’s about the transformation, the story, and the redemption was the word that came to mind.
Tom (62:17-62:58):
Yeah, Matt Murdock becomes Daredevil. Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man because he lets the hood go. He has spider powers, but he lets this hood get away because he basically doesn’t give a shit, and that hood goes and kills his uncle, Uncle Ben. Then he lives the rest of his life between these two poles as Peter Parker and as Spider-Man, and from the very beginning, that was just really fascinating for me.
David (62:58-63:43):
This sentence really caught my attention: “Writing is a tug of war of souls.” In 2013, there’s this piece where you talk about how modern science has proven that we don’t have souls. But then right after that, you say, “But as narrative nonfiction writers, what we do is honor the soul.” We’ve been talking about contradiction and tension and the reconciliation, and I think that’s one that speaks to the core of your work. The objective thing is saying this, but when I read your stuff, I’m like, this man is speaking to the soul, is speaking to the beyond-rational parts of reality. We’re talking about the spiritual door that opens. You feel those things when you read your work.
Tom (63:44-64:39):
The interesting thing about hearing that now in 2025 is that you can’t quite free those words from the horrible shadow of AI. To me, the idea that AI can write is founded on the notion that there is no soul. To me, you write with something of a soul. The fact that science says there is no soul and that the idea of the soul really doesn’t make a lot of sense, like this inner Tom or inner David, is kind of odd. But I can tell you, in Shelter Island, I have a shed out in the backyard.
David (64:39-64:40):
This at your house out there?
Tom (64:40-65:07):
Yeah. One of the reasons that we bought the house is that there’s a shed where the previous owner used to have his business. That shed was a dump for a long time. People used to come to the house and say, “Oh, I can’t wait to see your writer’s shed,” and then they’d look at it and say, “Let’s go back to the house.”
David (65:07-65:08):
Drink water.
Tom (65:09-65:56):
We finally got it fixed a little while ago, and I had these rows of bookshelves installed in the wall. You can fit a lot of books in there, and I had a lot of books. So the big question I had to decide was how am I going to organize the books? Alphabetical type? I don’t know. I had this idea that I was going to do it chronologically, like the books were going to be in there chronologically, beginning with the Bible and ending with Finnegan’s Wake.
David (65:56-65:57):
An epic of Gilgamesh.
Tom (65:57-69:25):
Yeah, exactly. The really interesting thing about doing that is that the organization of those books tells its own story, the story of humanity. Everything it does is wrong. We screw up everything again and again. Any piece of technology that we develop, we either got from or put to use in war. Any sort of religion that we talk about is wrong and a tool of tyranny. We screw up again and again, and yet, for every screw up, there is a writer, someone who’s grappling with the screw up and bearing witness to the pain, the suffering, the joy, the hope, the whole freaking shit show. I can tell you the whole story. Modernism comes from World War I. Beat America, Jack Kerouac, comes out of World War II. Don DeLillo comes out of Vietnam and the rise of the technology state. Writers are there to address this flow of history. It’s like the only thing humanity has ever really done right is bear witness to its own thing. I think anybody who is writing seriously from the heart is bearing witness to this onward stamping of this blind genius being that is humanity. The soul is the part of us that is willing to and needs to bear witness to the truth, to ourselves, to God, all of it. That’s the soul. You see the soul do its work over the course of human history. I’m winding up into a long anti AI speech. Why would we ever want to give that up? It’s the one thing that we can do, the one thing that we’ve been given that gift. We’re driven out of Eden. The soul is there at some level to give meaning to this seemingly meaningless current of atrocity, and yet we can do this. That’s what it’s all about.
David (69:25-69:25):
Wow.
