This episode is presented by Mercury. When I started How I Write, I expected finances to be an absolute nightmare. I’ve got team members in four different countries. Things like taxes, currency exchange, expenses — I was dreading it. But here’s the crazy thing: four years in, banking has been maybe the easiest part. I honestly can’t remember running into a single problem! And that’s because I’ve been using Mercury.
I switched over from other, more traditional banks because Mercury is so well designed. It’s easy to get started and easy to use, while also feeling totally legit and secure. Mercury gives me all the tools to run a global company like virtual cards, unlimited users, and the ability to customize each user’s access level to exactly what they should see. And you know what: if anything goes wrong, their support line is super responsive (and actually thoughtful), which is really rare these days. I genuinely can’t imagine trying to run my business without Mercury.
"One great detail will do the work of 50 crappy sentences."
Wright Thompson is one of the last great magazine writers in America. He's long been a writer at ESPN, and if you love sports, you've almost definitely read his work. Maybe his profile of Tiger Woods. Or maybe the one about Michael Jordan.
Some highlights:
- "When somebody says something is overwritten, it really just means that the story is underreported."
- Profiles are about figuring out what is a central complication of somebody's life and how, on a daily basis, they go about solving it.
- "All of these stories, the few good ones I've written... I think these stories are like a prayer for empathy, to try to understand each other, to understand another human being a little bit at a time. Then slowly, thread by thread, you understand yourself."
- On writing well: "One of the things that's missing is that nobody wants to hear what I have to say, which is just reps. Zen is a butt in a seat. There's no mystery. It's just reps."
- "I wish someone had told me years ago that if you're going to be a professional writer for decades, writing is not going to be about words, but it's going to be about architecture. Only when you really understand how things fit together and move can you then actually be thinking about the words."
- "All writing is trying to say something new that is true and is both specific and universal and that helps the reader understand something they didn't understand before, preferably about themselves."
Enjoy!
Transcript
1:50 Writer’s vomit vs. writer’s block
8:33 The architecture of writing
11:30 What makes for a good story?
15:57 Bringing characters to life
21:11 “The hammer”
26:26 Writing a vivid scene
33:41 How to bring places to life
39:57 Dialogue vs. quotes
45:49 The role of secondary characters
51:44 The problem with “brainstorming”
54:33 Definitive writing lessons
1:02:13 What makes for a great ending?
David (01:50-01:54):
Why is writing so hard? Why is it so hard?
Wright (01:54-02:52):
Bad writing is so easy. Bad writing is the easiest thing in the entire world. I don’t think there’s such a thing as writer’s block, but there is writer’s vomit. I find it hard because I feel like you get in your own way. I think the process of learning how to write puts a bunch of tools in your toolbox to try to strip away the mystery and make it possible. Then you have to start unlearning all of those things because you’ve put this artifice between you and the thing you’re trying to write. All writing is trying to say something new that is true and is both specific and universal and that helps the reader understand something they didn’t understand before, preferably about themselves.
David (02:53-02:57):
When you say specific and universal, how does that show up in a piece? How do you think about that?
Wright (02:57-04:27):
Michael Jordan at 50 is trying to imagine what you do when you used to be Michael Jordan. That’s an extreme version of something that everybody deals with, which is what do you do when you start to think that your entire identity is built around something that has a shelf life, that is so rooted in an exterior understanding of you, that you almost feel like you’re starting to lose some essential part of yourself? There’s that great John Updike quote that I love: “The mask eats the face.” I think that happens to people and I think it happens to everyone. I have this realization periodically that I have two kids, and they’re the coolest, and I love them. But I’m here, and I’m not home. You are who you say you are. You are what you do. Watching somebody so extreme as Michael Jordan, who is experiencing all of this ratcheted up to 12, allows everybody to try to see pieces of themselves in other people’s struggles. Every great profile is a little bit about the writer.
David (04:28-04:28):
Hmm.
Wright (04:29-05:13):
I’m working out my own stuff and just trying to think about it. People are going to remember a couple of these stories, but that’s it. So it’s inherently dangerous for me to have so much of my own identity and self-worth wrapped up in the fact that I go write these stories and other people like them. I instinctively understand that it’s dangerous, and I need to get away from it, but I’m not going to do that. I love doing this. The happiest I am is when I’m writing, and it’s going well. Writing these stories about people is the way to try to unpack all of that.
David (05:13-05:30):
It’s funny because when I saw you, you almost felt like you were skipping when you were talking about the piece you’re working on today. You pulled out this piece of paper and then you said something interesting. You said, “When it’s going well, I’m moving every two hours.” I thought moving is sort of the antithesis of momentum and progress.
Wright (05:30-05:59):
If it’s going really well, my writing day will be like this: I have an office way out in the country, probably 10 minutes outside of Oxford, Mississippi, where I live. I take my oldest to school; her drop off is at 7:20, and then it’s 10 minutes from the school to my office. I usually stop at the Little John’s country store and get a sausage biscuit or a big cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup.
David (06:00-06:01):
That’s a very Southern thing.
Wright (06:01-06:16):
I go to my office and write till 11. Then I go to the town square in Oxford and start moving. I’ll go to Proud Larry’s. I’ll have half a Guinness. I’ll go down to the Spring Street cigar store.
David (06:16-06:18):
Oh, you’re a midday pie kind of guy.
Wright (06:18-06:35):
Yeah. I’m on this terrible diet where I’m allowed to have 12 ounces of beer a day because I’m trying not to be so aggressively fat.
David (06:35-06:35):
And Guinness is your go to.
Wright (06:35-06:35):
Yeah.
David (06:35-06:35):
You could have it whenever.
Wright (06:35-06:37):
Yeah.
David (06:37-06:38):
Have you ever had the Guinness Double Zero?
David (06:38-06:38):
I’ve had every single kind of Guinness that’s made in seven different countries.
Wright (06:38-06:47):
It’s the non-alcoholic Guinness. It’s very, very good. You want to know the greatest feeling in the world? Have one of those for breakfast.
David (06:47-06:49):
Bridget, do we have the Guinness Double Zero? That’s how it runs.
Wright (06:49-06:52):
Let’s do it. That’s what I’m talking about.
David (06:53-06:58):
I need you to acknowledge we got the proper Guinness cups.
Wright (06:58-07:06):
If you’re not going to turn something into a fetish, what is the point of doing it at all? I feel pretty strongly that this is the way to do it.
David (07:06-07:11):
Let’s go. Yes, exactly. It’s unlike every other beer.
Wright (07:11-07:11):
That’s right.
David (07:12-07:24):
You pour like this, and then you get the proper—yes. This is also one of the great things: to watch the freshly poured Guinness turn black.
Wright (07:24-07:25):
Oh, yeah.
David (07:26-07:27):
Thank you.
Wright (07:27-07:28):
You gotta let it settle.
David (07:28-07:28):
Let’s go.
Wright (07:28-07:41):
I like the movement, and it’s just exciting when it’s going well. It’s a really great day. I’m in the middle—we were talking about this earlier—I just sat down.
David (07:41-07:43):
Yeah, I wanna see this.
Wright (07:43-07:53):
I’m writing longhand at this point. I’m in a very important part of this thing I’m writing, so I just need to.
David (07:54-07:55):
Why do you do longhand like this?
Wright (07:55-07:58):
I almost never do that.
David (07:58-08:00):
This morning, that’s what the day called for.
Wright (08:00-08:34):
That and I have a timeline that I’ve created that took a long time with documents from a bunch of different places. I wanted to sit down with that timeline that I’d written and just write it. I felt like I was going to go somewhere and sit and be quiet and do it. I feel like writing is problem-solving. I don’t want the tail wagging the dog. I don’t want to always write in this place at this time and always do this. I feel like every day is a new problem, and what is the best way I can solve it?
David (08:34-08:41):
It seems like you really value structure and the architecture of a piece as much as the words themselves.
Wright (08:41-09:17):
I wish someone had told me years ago that if you’re going to be a professional writer for decades, writing is not going to be about words, but it’s going to be about architecture. Only when you really understand how things fit together and move can you then actually be thinking about the words. I feel like I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and I feel like only very recently do I feel like maybe I sort of know what I’m doing. I’m just glad a lot of that early stuff I wrote has been scrubbed off the Internet.
David (09:17-09:19):
What are you saying, that it’s gotten easier? That your stuff has gotten better?
Wright (09:19-10:07):
No, I think it’s gotten harder because I actually understand what you’re supposed to be doing. You have a way of moving the goalpost on yourself. You work really hard to learn how to write a 7- to 8,000-word magazine story, and you do it over and over and over again. One of the things that’s missing is that nobody wants to hear what I have to say, which is just reps. Zen is a butt in a seat. There’s no mystery. It’s just reps. I wrote a bunch of 1200-word stories until I really understood what a 1200-word story could and couldn’t do. Then I wrote a bunch of 2,500-word stories, and then I worked for the Kansas City Star for five years.
David (10:07-10:07):
3,600.
Wright (10:07-10:38):
3,600 words. I went over that, I think, once. I really understood what you could do in 100 inches. Then the ESPN magazine stories seemed like they would outline it, and then I would write it, and it would be 7200-8500 words almost every time. I guess that’s just—I was thinking about stories in that length, and then they started being 12 to 15. I’m two books in, and I have two more going right now.
David (10:38-10:39):
Holy cow.
Wright (10:39-11:31):
Once you’ve seen a canvas that size, it’s hard to go back because you feel like—it’s weird to think like I’ve written 300 magazine stories as a prelude to learn how to go do something. But it was just so thrilling. Especially with “The Barn,” it was thrilling on the days when it felt like it was working. I just loved it. I loved waking up and doing it. I liked the rhythm of it. I was writing a thousand words a day, every day, no matter where I was. We’re on vacation in the mountains, we’re at the beach, and I’m getting up, I’m doing it. I also think that it’s important for my kids to see me do that. It’s a butt in a seat. There’s no mystery. It’s just get up and do it.
David (11:32-11:48):
When you’re thinking of a story—you’re dreaming something up, whether it’s a book, whether it’s a magazine feature—what are you looking for? Are you looking for a good hook? Are you looking for a good story that speaks to your soul or something like that, like a good theme? What is the thing that you’re hunting for?
Wright (11:48-12:59):
That’s really changed. I used to want things. I was looking for white whales. I was looking for the story that no one could get. What’s something that’ll be very impressive to my bosses and readers? It was very external. Now, I don’t think there’s such a thing as a good or a bad story idea. I think it’s something you’re obsessed with. It’s got to be something that I’m really, really interested in and want to spend that time on. I find it to be really—you’re doing a really personal thing in a really public way, is what it feels like to me. I love the craft of it. I love thinking about understanding how stories work, which I sometimes think I really do and sometimes I don’t. I think it was very rigid for a long time about the craft of it. I used to say, if you’re not outlining, you’re doing it wrong. Now I sort of think that telling someone there’s a right or wrong way to do it is the only way of doing it wrong, if that makes any sense.
David (12:59-13:18):
How much of this is things that you’ve learned that the way that you do things now you wish you had done at the beginning? Like, I’ve actually learned a lot and I was wrong earlier. Or how much of it is kind of training wheels? Outlines gets you to the place where you don’t have to outline. You gotta write external before you can do the internal. How do you think about that?
Wright (13:18-14:14):
Well, I think that everything is a process and you’re learning. I remember I took this art—Devlin was an English professor at the University of Missouri, and he was one of, if not the world’s expert on Tennessee Williams. I took this one class that was, it was Interiority in the Work of Tennessee Williams. My mother, who you know, was an English major from Vanderbilt, I had to call her and be like, what does interiority mean? There’s a word in the title of this class I don’t know. My odds of figuring this out are slim and none. I think you have to learn that scenes without interiority are two dimensional, they’re origami, it’s not a swan. You learn a lot from people. You had my friend Tom Geno on, the goat, the man. He’s the best to ever do it for sure. He’s still learning and he’s still grinding.
David (14:14-14:16):
Break down the interiority thing for me.
Wright (14:17-15:56):
Gary Smith said one time that all a profile is is figuring out what is a central complication of somebody’s life and how on a daily basis do they go about solving it. Almost all of that is happening inside. You want the people whose lives you have been entrusted with to be as complex in their decision-making process as you are in yours. I just think that’s the whole thing: bringing to the surface people’s subterranean interior lives and then doing it where the things they’re doing, if you set it up right, become freighted with meaning. When you watch a really good friend of yours do something and every other passing stranger wouldn’t know that that was important or poignant, but you would, because you know them. Michael Jordan falling asleep to westerns if you know that he misses his father every day, and where he feels closest to his father is when he’s watching westerns. If you set that up in not a ham-fisted way, then you get to come back at the end and describe a human being doing something. Now I am only describing his exterior actions, and yet the story is so rooted in his interior life that I don’t have to explain it anymore. That’s when it feels like it’s really, really working. That doesn’t happen all the time. This job is so humbling because it’s just hard.
David (15:57-16:44):
One of the things that really stuck out to me is how you go about describing people, like in the Tiger Woods profile. It doesn’t take much, and you can just learn so much about somebody. Both his boats float a few dozen yards away. In two of the first three slips, the 155-foot yacht named Privacy, alongside the smaller, sleeker diving boat he named Solitude. So we see he’s got Privacy, he’s got Solitude. The whole thrust of the piece is that this guy is a celebrity and he’s had all of these things put into his life, but he’s this weird, strange, introverted guy who’s like, what do I do being this celebrity?
Wright (16:44-17:56):
It’s also that the thing you feel so strongly is that often the people who care for us most screw up. Tiger Woods’ father adored him. Tiger Woods’ dad gets sort of a bad rap as like a Richard Williams guy. He just wasn’t. Tiger didn’t do well in school. Tiger didn’t get to play golf. Earl Woods had a lot of flaws and was a terrible husband, but I think was a really good, involved father, at least with Tiger, not his siblings. You realize that Tiger signs and he goes up to that meeting in Nike where they come up with his marketing plan. They did what any smart person would do, which is they went and found the best practices and they pulled a playbook that had just worked very well for Michael Jordan. Nobody in that room, including the person who loved Tiger Woods the most in the world, stopped for a second to ask what happens when we take a plan that was designed for an extreme extrovert and then we just force it onto an extreme introvert. The most fundamental questions hiding in plain sight to me are some of the most interesting.
David (17:56-17:58):
And this is now the mask fighting the face.
Wright (17:58-19:18):
Well, it’s both. Dale Murphy, the old 1980s baseball player, is one of the only happy retired former athletes I’ve ever met because he went out of his way when he retired to kill the avatar that he was. The main obstacle for me enjoying the next 50 years of my life is constantly having to deal with the ghost of the person I used to be. All of these stories, the few good ones I’ve written, all the ones Seth Wickersham writes, all the ones that Tom Ginod writes, I think these stories are like a prayer for empathy, to try to understand each other, to understand another human being a little bit at a time. Then slowly, thread by thread, you understand yourself. I think it’s the job of a human being to understand. When you’re on your deathbed, you better feel like you understand yourself and see yourself clearly. If you’re still lying to yourself on your deathbed, something’s gone terribly wrong. I love doing this. I love these stories. I certainly feel sometimes caught between being a receiver and a broadcaster.
David (19:18-19:19):
What does that mean?
Wright (19:19-19:46):
The job of being a reporter is to receive information. The job of selling the things you’ve written is to be a broadcaster of information. Broadcasting is easy, and it’s intoxicating. It just takes a little bit of charisma with some arrogance. Those two urges, I feel, are often in competition for lots of people, especially celebrity athletes.
David (19:46-19:58):
You talk about broadcasting being easy and intoxicating. What then is the fruit of reporting? Because presumably it’s hard, it’s slower, but there’s some fruit that really.
Wright (19:58-20:35):
You get to see a little glimpse of the world. That’s true. We’re in the age of misinformation. One of the things Tom Ginod said that I still remember is the hardest thing in the world to do is to tell the truth despite all of the things conspiring to keep you from doing it. You asked earlier, why is writing hard? Talking is easy. Writing just a little has to be said exactly right. I also write really fast and then edit slow.
David (20:36-20:38):
So your first draft, you just race through it.
Wright (20:38-21:11):
I’m flying. Why do I do that? I don’t know. It just is how I do it. I’ve tried to slow down. I’ve tried to do all sorts of things. I have a super ADD brain, and so the thing that’s currently on fire is what gets the attention. I try to get it down and then go back. I love to cut, which is funny considering how long these things are. But I really do like the cut.
David (21:11-21:24):
Tell me about the hammer, when you’re writing a piece and how the hammer comes at the end. How do you think about making sure the piece is written in a way that when that hammer drops, it is a punch to the face?
Wright (21:24-22:28):
I always want to know what the ending is. The biggest difference maybe between fiction and nonfiction is that the best fiction writers, I think, don’t know; they let the world evolve. I’m not that good. I’m not George Saunders. I wish I could do that. I like to know where I’m going because then I like to make decisions based on how to maximize the power of the ending. I know immediately when I see the ending of something. I did this Yankee Stadium thing where I knew I was going to end on the fact that Lou Gehrig’s widow died in the 80s and no one came to her funeral. That’s the ending. I don’t know what the rest of it is, but something has to lead to that. You read an ending of a piece that really… it almost feels like the air gets sucked out of the room. There’s a hollowness. It feels hollow; it feels echoey. I love that feeling.
David (22:28-22:36):
What I’m hearing from you is that a lot of what a good ending can have is it wraps up the piece, but there’s something also that opens. It’s a look into something new.
Wright (22:36-22:50):
It’s elliptical. That’s why kickers are death because don’t hammer the door shut. A story is supposed to open a door, not close it. I love elliptical endings.
David (22:50-23:28):
You know, it’s funny because you’re talking about this, and I just got this long email piece of feedback on a piece that I wrote, and I’m pretty proud of the piece. One of the things that I wanted to do, core to the piece, is I’m not trying to answer the question. I’m trying to pose a question. I’m trying to say, I’m struggling with this. I got the long email from someone; this email’s clearly caring, but I opened it, and I was sort of skimming it, and I saw that the reader is going to demand an answer to the question you raised. I just closed the email. It’s not what I’m trying to do.
Wright (23:28-24:50):
The reader gets a vote. The trick is to have a narrative arc that can lead you to a satisfying ending while also posing other ancillary underlying questions that were, in hindsight, the point of the whole thing all along. You want a story arc that can have a satisfying ending, that also leaves the unresolved stuff unresolved in a way that is authentic to our lives. The Caitlin Clark story ends with her career ending. It is about a period of time in her life, and the unresolved things are the questions posed about what’s coming for her. One of the sub-arcs in the piece is her understanding, in this flash of self-awareness, what’s coming for her and what she has to do to survive it, and the ticking clock that this has to happen. I don’t need that to… in fact, it can’t be unresolved. The question the story should answer is, how did Caitlin Clark get to be Caitlin Clark? And it should pose the question, is she going to be able to do this?
David (24:50-24:56):
Yeah, tell me about this. You just said the reader gets a vote. In what way does the reader get a vote?
Wright (24:56-25:10):
Otherwise, it’s just masturbation. I’m trying to share a human experience with another human being, and if they’re not getting it, it’s not their fault, it’s mine.
David (25:10-25:20):
Sure, but in some ways, the reader gets a vote. Does the reader get the vote in every single way? Fundamentally, if you’re driving the story…
Wright (25:20-26:26):
Well, if they put it down... I think about that all the time, about a friend who’s a playwright. He talks constantly about his understanding of the attention span of an audience in a Broadway theater. I was really shaken walking away from this conversation because he’s a very smart guy, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and is really thinking about how to meet the audience where they are. Sometimes I am not. I’m doing my thing, and if they read it, they read it. The more you learn about writing, the more you have to level up. You could hear somebody say something at a point in your career, and it doesn’t make any sense. Then you hear someone else say the same thing later, and you realize there’s some fundamental part of this that not only am I not doing right, but I don’t even know. Sometimes you hear people are losing a game they don’t know is being played. I think I’m more confident now than I’ve ever been. I was so much more cocky before.
David (26:26-26:38):
You were talking about plays. I saw Wicked the other night. We went out for drinks afterward and were talking about it. The way that we categorized the play was in scenes. “Oh, I remember that scene. Remember this scene? Remember that scene?”
Wright (26:38-26:38):
Yeah, yeah.
David (26:38-26:42):
What’s important about scenes in a story? Why do you think about stories like that?
Wright (26:42-29:02):
It’s very cinematic. There’s something beautiful about a screenplay to read—a good screenplay. Go read the screenplay of Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country. You don’t need to watch the movie; it’s all right there. It’s unbelievable. In some ways, the screenplay is better than the movie in the way that sports is better on the radio than television because your imagination gets a seat at the table. Every single section, every scene, needs to hit a different note so that it’s not repetitive. If we really want to get into the weeds, I love to think about second sections of stories. A second section is almost a verb. When it really works, it flows off of the lead in such a way that it feels inevitable and chronological, but actually, what you’re doing is expanding out this way. You’re asking the question in the second scene in a broad thematic way that the rest of the story is going to answer. I really spend a lot of time thinking about what’s the second section of a magazine story? One of the things that was really difficult for me in figuring out how to write a book is that books don’t have second sections. Scott Moyers, my book editor, said that you can’t depressurize the cabin. In a magazine story, I think you’re constantly depressurizing the cabin. What does that mean? You break the spell by jumping ahead in time. With a book, you have to push a ball downhill and then clear out all the obstacles so it rolls. I’ve struggled some with the transition from magazine stories to books because I feel like they’re actually not the same thing at all. I felt a book would be like a really long magazine story, and it’s just not.
David (29:03-29:24):
On the scenes point, when you’re mapping out the story and thinking about how this is going to be, I’m almost imagining a clothesline, and then you got little post-it notes. Okay, scene one, scene two, scene three, scene four. Maybe there’s clarity about my theme, the core, whatever. Is that something that you’re conscious of before you actually get into the writing itself?
Wright (29:24-31:38):
Yeah, I have note cards pinned to the wall in my office. With The Barn, I outlined it broadly, but within that, I didn’t outline at all because I wanted to have the experience of section to section, trying to feel my way because I felt like I’m going to have a better idea in the seat of what works than whatever theory I had standing in front of my wall. I know I need to get from here to here, but I didn’t want to storyboard out how to do it. I’m working on a book now that has so many moving parts that I’m scared if I do it like that, I might just lose it. I’m really nervous because I’ve got to figure out that there are six narrative arcs that appear at the beginning to have nothing to do with each other, and then by a fourth of the way into the book, the reader on their own makes the first connection. I’ve got to make that happen, not on the page, but in the white space for this to work. One of the things I’m trying to figure out is at what point do I actually get explicit about it? I don’t honestly know the answer to that. I think it’s going to be a feel thing, but I really want to storyboard that a lot more because with The Barn, the first draft, I just wrote everything because I wasn’t sure what was load bearing. Then I went and cut all the shit that didn’t belong. The first draft of that was 280,000 words, and I cut 173,000. It ran at 107,000 words. I don’t want to ever do that again. That feels like some rookie stuff. I feel like I had a real big idea, and I didn’t have the toolbox to land it, so I did it the best I could, and it was unbelievably inefficient. I don’t ever want to do that again, so I’m trying to figure that out.
David (31:38-31:48):
Tell me about this. Why do you see in so many stories, they have a character who confronts an obstacle and is changed by it? That’s the through line of the story.
Wright (31:48-33:03):
I don’t want to get too far out there, but stories exist like gravity. A story, whether told around a campfire or in the New Yorker, follows fundamental organic rules that have existed probably before the invention of language. They’re just ways in which human beings experience the world and how you become yourself by facing obstacles and choosing how to handle them. To me, what a story is exists in the world. I think Virginia Woolf wrote about how the stories exist, and some people can see them. You’re not making them; they’re already there. You’re just seeing them. When you go find a story, it wants to be something, and stories are best when you’re translating that information as opposed to imposing your will on it. I’m not trying to get crazy metaphysical, but I do fundamentally, super concretely…
David (33:03-33:19):
I hear you saying that when you go in search of a story, something compels you, something brings you into the piece. You’re looking for the story, and what you’re looking for is almost like a path that was already there.
Wright (33:19-33:23):
I’m not trying to make the path. I’m trying to see the path that was there before I got there.
David (33:23-33:24):
Walk it.
Wright (33:24-33:24):
Yes.
David (33:25-33:25):
Yeah.
Wright (33:25-33:40):
As hippie-dippy as that sounds, that’s really how it is. You run into trouble when you try to force things. I’ve forced a lot of things. It takes a while to feel comfortable with that.
David (33:41-33:45):
Tell me about a sense of place in stories. How does place show up for you?
Wright (33:45-34:19):
I’m most interested in place. So much of who we are is informed by our relationship with home. Bruce Springsteen said in his Broadway show that you can either be a ghost to your children or an ancestor. You can either wrap your stuff around their ankles like chains and drag them down, or you can give them a leg up. Trying to understand other places is just a proxy for trying to understand my own place and make sense of my own home.
David (34:19-34:20):
Is that Mississippi?
Wright (34:20-35:28):
For me, that’s the Mississippi Delta. If I never wrote another thing in my life, I honestly feel like it would have all been worth it, because I couldn’t have written that book five years ago. I felt like everything I’d ever tried to write was practice to tackle the thing that had been sitting there waiting on me all along, which was trying to understand this weird place where I’m from that I have very mixed feelings about. I hate many things about it, but I also have a deep sense of love for it. Human beings are forever searching for home, either the home that you didn’t know as a child or something that was a paradise lost that you’re trying to return to. I love that Jason Isbell line, “I thought I was running to what I was running from.” There’s just a constant search for home.
David (35:28-35:34):
When you talk about place being important, do you feel like place is a character? Do you feel like it’s a stage? What’s the metaphor?
Wright (35:34-36:52):
New York is often called a character. I think place really matters, because it really matters to me. Everyone is interested in different things. One of the tricks of learning how to be a writer is to figure out the things that you’re interested in. For me, the greatest piece of American art ever made is “Absalom, Absalom!” It is a deep, complex, multi-generational history of one piece of dirt. In some ways, “The Barn” is just that, stolen. You can learn something by excavating the deep history of one place. Book editors say you can either go wide or deep, and there’s something beautiful about trying to do both. That was the idea, to write as deep a history as I could and excavate all the blood and the dirt. There’s a book called “The Body Remembers the Score.” The ground remembers the score, too.
David (36:52-37:15):
What do you make of the arc of Southern writing? There’s a lot of classic Southern writing that’s deep in American culture and American lore. Also, in the last five years, there’s been a rise in country music. I was in LA last week driving through Santa Monica, and the Uber driver was playing Zach Bryan. Ten years ago, that would have never happened.
Wright (37:15-37:29):
Also, I don’t know what a lot of these country music singers have to do with the South. Is Luke Bryan from the South? I have no idea. Some guys are great, like Zach, Chris Stapleton, and Eric Church.
David (37:30-37:32):
Bruce Springsteen is one of my all-time favorites.
Wright (37:32-37:35):
He got a thank you note from Bruce Springsteen.
David (37:35-37:36):
Want to hear that song?
Wright (37:36-37:39):
You shouldn’t sing in public. I’m just kidding.
David (37:40-37:41):
Well, I can’t do that.
Wright (37:41-39:56):
One of our problems in the South is that in a desire to protect the past, we privilege the past over the present. People want to talk about William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Willie Morris. They should be talking about Jesmyn Ward, Natasha Trethewey, and Kiese Lehman. There is a very vibrant Southern culture; we just sometimes seem so interested in protecting the past that we forget the beautiful thing that’s happening in front of us. Faulkner gets something essentially right about the South: it’s love and hate. It is a place where the conflict inside the hearts of every human being is played out on the landscape in an external way that almost never happens. One of the reasons Southern literature has this reputation is that it’s one of the few places in the world where the interior becomes manifestly exterior. If people go out to Sedona for energy vortexes, I think the South is one of those places where the thing cracks open and the big subterranean human ideas, the conflict in the heart of every human being, burst into actual physical action on the actual physical land. Southern writers aren’t creating these worlds. Virginia Woolf said that every now and then a genius comes along who can see it. Like in *The Sixth Sense*, what Faulkner could see was already there. One of the reasons those books resonate with people so much across generations is he is describing something that you have instinctively felt forever but had never had the vocabulary to because you couldn’t see it. I love that Virginia Woolf thing about how stories exist and some people can see them.
David (39:57-40:11):
Tell me about quotes. You’re good at them. You’ve probably said seven or eight today, but also, I just couldn’t believe how good some of the quotes were in your pieces. They’re just these little stretches of dialogue.
Wright (40:11-40:22):
I love dialogue as opposed to quotes. I think long runs of dialogue are magic, and I think they actually speed the piece up.
David (40:22-40:24):
Okay, this was good. This is about Jordan.
Wright (40:24-40:24):
Yeah.
David (40:24-40:44):
In case anyone in the inner circle forgets who’s in charge, they only have to recall the code names given to them by the private security team assigned to overseas trips. Este is Venom. George is Butler. Yvette is Harmony. Jordan is called Yahweh, a Hebrew word for God. That is crazy.
Wright (40:44-41:17):
And it’s not a compliment. That’s wild. The details of the whole thing... we’re talking about writing, but really what we need to be talking about is reporting. You cannot write your way out of a hole in reporting. When somebody says something is purple, something is overwritten, “overwritten” really just means underreported.
David (41:17-41:18):
Were you saying that it’s hollow?
Wright (41:19-41:50):
You’re just using words, and it’s not saying anything. Every time I feel like I can write myself out of— I can write around a hole in my knowledge—it’s just bad. You read it and you’re just like, oh my God. The details matter. ESPN just had this great story by a writer named Baxter Holmes, and it was about Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan and the genesis of Black Mamba.
David (41:50-41:51):
Oh, cool.
Wright (41:51-43:05):
It’s an incredible story. A lot of people had sort of heard those whispers that this was a thing, but Baxter went out and found people to tell him on the record with details. You could give Jonathan Franzen 10 years to just say stuff about this, but Baxter went and got it. So much of writing, especially nonfiction writing, is actually just reporting. That’s still my favorite. You asked about moments of joy. My favorite is when you find something. I have a timeline. I’m trying to account for about a 10-month period in the life of this person who may or may not be a spy. To make the timeline, it’s like 10 or 12 different documents and six archives. The ability to pull all these pieces and then write one piece of paper that has a very simple outline—”On February 4, 1941, he was...” “On March 6...”—the joy of that. I don’t know if that’s writing or not, but that’s the real joy.
David (43:05-43:13):
Yeah, I’m imagining you’re sitting there. It’s almost like a collage, taking all these little things, bringing them together. Oh, okay, cool. That’s great work.
Wright (43:13-43:38):
The feeling of satisfaction when I held up that one piece of paper was one of the greatest feelings I’ve had in a really long time, and that was three days ago. A great detail will do the work of 50 shitty sentences. Every time I’m stuck, it’s just that I haven’t reported enough or that I believe my own hype and think I can just write my way out of this, and you can’t.
David (43:38-43:44):
I’m sorry if this is a stupid question, but what does “reported” mean? Is it reading, is it talking to people, interviewing?
Wright (43:44-44:13):
It’s all of it. It’s interviewing people. I was just in an archive in Biarritz, Switzerland, that took me a year and three or four months to get them to open. It was closed. Biarritz, France, sorry. I have 1600 pages of documents in French. I have no idea what this shit says. I was just taking pictures. Now it’s all sitting there, and I’m going to literally have to translate them one at a time, or the Internet is going to translate, right?
David (44:13-44:14):
Yeah.
Wright (44:14-44:49):
Someone’s like, “Do you speak French?” And I’m like, “Well, I do now, thanks to the Internet.” So that’s going to take me, if it takes me ten minutes a page to think about it and take enough time to sort, ten minutes a page is six pages an hour, which is 60 pages a day, which is 300 pages a week. That’s five and a half weeks to get through all this stuff, but I have no idea what’s going to be in there. The joy of that...
David (44:49-44:51):
Describe the joy.
Wright (44:51-45:49):
It’s like a treasure hunt. I have no idea what’s on each page. I’ve done a couple of them, and there have been huge, at least what for me in the story are bombshells. Reporting as interviews, reporting as archives—I love archives. Just hanging out and grinding on archives, I love that. Reporting is mystified. I think reporting is trying to figure out what you want to know, then trying to figure out who in the world would know that information, and then trying to figure out how to get that person to tell you or how to get access to the place that has the answer. It just feels like problem-solving to me. The real job to me is the dig. The writing is the fun part later. They’re both fun, they’re just very, very different.
David (45:49-46:01):
Can you tell me more about secondary characters? The roles they play? Fathers, friends, people in the lives of the characters you’re writing about.
Wright (46:01-46:42):
If we were going to write about Guy, ten different people who know Guy from ten different places in his life will have ten different versions of him. I don’t think my job is to sort those out. My job is to present a fractal image of a complicated human being who sits somewhere at the intersection of all of these other people’s impressions of them. I think we all have a story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and then there’s a story that other people who don’t know us tell about us. The truth lives somewhere at the intersection of those things.
David (46:44-46:57):
Tell me about driving questions, posing a question at the beginning, and how a question propels you through the reporting, through the writing, and the reader through the process of experiencing what you’ve made.
Wright (46:57-48:03):
One of the things you get better at the more you do it is not being so ham-fisted with posing the question literally in the piece. I always have some questions I need to answer. I’m writing about Steve Kerr right now, and the question I want to answer is, what is the work of the rest of his life going to be when basketball is finished? What happens on the first day of the rest of his life? The meat of that story exists in the undefined period after the actual story ends. I don’t think I’m ever going to say that explicitly, but hopefully, when you read the piece, it’ll vibrate with that. I did a Joe Montana profile a couple of years ago that I really liked because I felt like you were watching him struggle with what to do when Tom was diminishing your most valuable asset, which was the way people remembered you. I don’t think I ever said that, but that’s what it was about to me.
David (48:04-48:06):
Do you care how well your pieces do?
Wright (48:06-48:07):
No.
David (48:07-48:07):
No.
Wright (48:07-48:09):
I probably shouldn’t admit that, but I just don’t.
David (48:10-48:10):
So what does that mean?
Wright (48:10-48:50):
Here’s why. I’ve had pieces that we thought were going to kill that didn’t. I wrote this story that I loved, one of the best things I think I’ve ever written about Archie Manning, that no one read. Then I did a story during the World Series about a rapper from Houston named Cal Wayne, where I just went out with him one night in Houston, wrote about it, and it melted the Internet. You don’t know. Every time I hear somebody in an analytical position trying to tell me what they think the data says about what audiences want, I always think, “Post hoc ergo propter hoc.”
David (48:50-48:51):
What does that mean?
Wright (48:51-48:57):
It’s Latin for the logical fallacy of “after, therefore, because of.”
David (48:57-48:58):
Okay.
Wright (48:58-49:46):
I fundamentally think we have no idea what people want to read and why. I don’t really care how they do. I want them to do well because I want my bosses to feel like they got a win. I really like all my bosses. The best part of the way ESPN works is you have senior vice presidents over silos. This is the best one of those we’ve ever had. His name’s Chris Buckle, and he’s just a relentless investigative journalist, and he’s really great. I care about the traffic to the degree that he cares about the traffic, just because I like him and respect him and want him to feel like he’s getting wins, but basically, no, I don’t care.
David (49:46-49:58):
As you think about improving at the craft, what is it that you look at? Is it an internal sense of always pursuing? Is it reading other writers?
Wright (49:59-51:43):
I think there are phases as a writer. Someone smarter than me could probably go read these stories and group them together. I wrote a second Michael Jordan story that I love, called “A History of Flight,” and I feel like there was a phase that started there that ended with “The Barn.” I feel like everything I did from that Jordan story to that book was of a piece. Now I feel like I’m still doing this and also trying to find something new. I’m a big believer in the essentialness of reinvention. I don’t want to just write the same story over and over again. I hadn’t written a profile of a current modern athlete for a long time until I did Caitlin Clark. I almost did that because I wanted to do one of those again; I felt like I was missing that. I think you have phases, and if you’re still doing the thing now exactly like you did 20 years ago, that’s not interesting at all. Some people are probably intentional about that. I feel like I’m just stumbling along, and the patterns emerge to other people later. Jay Lovinger used to always warn me about repetition of effect. I’d get into things I’m obsessed with, and then I’ll just keep going back and back. I feel like you could go read all these stories in order, and they would reveal more than I’m comfortable with about what was happening in my own life at the moment they were happening.
David (51:44-51:48):
What’s your beef with brainstorming sessions, people coming in on Monday morning?
Wright (51:48-52:43):
I just think it’s ridiculous, the idea that we’re going to do something in an office. This is deeply personal stuff. I have a lot of collaborative experience. I make a couple of TV shows, and I’ve made some documentaries, and those are as collaborative as writing is; it’s you in a foxhole with you and your editor. I want to go make things with my friends, and I want it to feel like it is flowing out of that, and nothing kills that faster than someone trying to play office. I want to go have dinner and sit around and talk. If I were to charge ESPN, I would have a rule that no meetings can have chairs, and every meeting longer than 15 minutes has to have tacos or something.
David (52:43-53:01):
It’s funny that you say that, because I’m working on a film series right now, and we’re in the process of writing it. So many good ideas come in through the iMessage group chat, and so many of the best lines are just somebody saying, “Hey, I was here.” And then I’m like, “Okay, you got to put that in. You got to put that in the meeting itself.”
Wright (53:01-53:40):
The structure of the meeting is a mask. The whole artifice of the thing is standing between you and your stated goal because everybody’s in there. You want to look good in front of your boss. In most brainstorming sessions, the goal for the individuals is to look good, not to make the thing good. When you’re thinking less and you’re just firing off text messages, I do a lot of those essays that air—sense-of-place essays that air to a broadcast of sporting events, college football, the Masters, and a bunch of stuff like that.
David (53:40-53:41):
A Tom Rinaldi type.
Wright (53:41-53:46):
Yeah, so I do a lot of those. Exactly.
David (53:46-53:47):
He is good.
Wright (53:47-54:33):
Oh, I love Tom. He’s also the nicest guy in the world, and that’s real. We used to do all the Open Championship, so we would go over there and spend weeks doing all this stuff. The best one that ever aired was written by our cameraman, Kalon Shounce, who—we were just freezing in Scotland, standing there, and he’s shooting one of those really hairy cows. He just turns and goes, “Hi, Scotland, where the cows wear coats.” We were like, “That’s on television.” The accidental thing, done in a sense of collaborative fun and joy, is always better than something on your calendar or, God forbid, a Zoom meeting. So, I hate those things.
David (54:33-54:37):
What would you call that kind of writing, those short TV pieces?
Wright (54:38-54:41):
It’s interesting because writing for TV is so different than writing writing.
David (54:41-54:51):
Tell me. That’s what I want to do. I want to go writing for TV, writing documentaries, writing books, writing articles, and just get. What is the core lesson from those four?
Wright (54:51-55:53):
Writing for TV is “tell, don’t show,” because the camera is showing. The best writing for documentaries is no writing at all, because if you’re writing, you failed. It’s best when it’s just sound. Every time I’m doing a voiceover in a documentary, it’s because I couldn’t figure out how to do it without one. When you’re writing for a documentary, you’re writing what we call “skinny tracks,” which are just connections between here and there. You have to do this really sparingly, but you’re trying to inject subterranean ideas into the thing, almost like putting some top spin on it, or some English on a pool ball. If I have some sort of global idea about how these things are connecting or what they’re suggesting about the human experience, it’s a very light touch, but in a track, you can do that, and it sort of amplifies writing.
David (55:53-55:55):
Well, let’s do books and articles.
Wright (55:55-56:36):
An article, like a magazine story, is about one thing, and it has to feel like a dispatch. It’s a letter from a time and a place. It’s true right now. This is a letter from someone’s life on this time and this place, planet Earth, and it’s a document. I feel like a book is trying to create the universe. An article or magazine story is trying to capture a universe, and a book is trying to make one. Those feel very different to me. It’s taken me a long time to get there.
David (56:37-56:38):
Break down that difference.
Wright (56:38-57:55):
At the core of the book, the reason I think it works, is because I found this map that shows the railroads coming into Mississippi around 1900. Manifest destiny is such an important idea to the American identity. I love Greg Grandin’s book, “The End of the Myth,” that when we lose the desire and the ability to explore and to move, we’ve lost something essential about our national soul. So this idea that one of, if not the last place in the lower 48 that was settled, wasn’t Tombstone, it wasn’t out west, that it was in the Mississippi Delta, and actually directly underneath the barn where Mattel was killed suggests something tectonic about an enormous misunderstanding of something fundamental not just to American history, which is about the past, but to American identity, which is about the present. The entire book is a thought experiment. What if everything we think about ourselves is wrong? That’s not what a magazine story would be. It’s interesting. I had a great editor at The Atlantic. The first draft of that story tried to do that.
David (57:57-57:58):
Tried to do what?
Wright (57:58-58:01):
Tried to hold that whole world.
David (58:01-58:02):
Got it.
Wright (58:02-58:23):
I think her name’s Denise Wills from The Atlantic, and she’s a great editor. I think she would tell you if she was sitting here that I was trying to juggle, and the balls were falling. If a book is rhythmic juggling, a magazine story is, I’m going to pick this thing up, and I’m going to throw it as hard as I can at that target on that wall.
David (58:24-58:25):
How about a profile?
Wright (58:26-59:44):
What is the central complication of someone’s life, and how on a daily basis do they go about answering it? That’s the core thing. Oh, that’s football. That’s all it is. It’s like I’m doing the Steve Kerr thing. He has four values on the wall of his office that he wants the players in his building to experience every day: joy, empathy, competitiveness, and mindfulness. I feel like those are four pretty good things if you want to be a professional magazine writer. Those are four things to have on your wall, and every time out, are you being competitive? You better be. Is there joy? Are you having joy in the discovery, even if the topic is hard? You have to have empathy. You’ve got to love your fellow human being, or you can’t really do this. And then mindfulness; you have to be present. My dad used to say, the hardest thing in the world is to keep your mind and body in the same place. I still struggle with that.
David (59:44-59:45):
Can I show you this?
Wright (59:45-59:45):
Yeah.
David (59:46-59:50):
You’ve seen this clip. Steve Kerr encouraging Steph Curry.
C (59:50-60:06):
Here’s what I’m going to show you. That’s your shooting totals. That’s your plus minus. It’s not always tied together. You’re doing great stuff out there. The tempo is so different when you’re out there. Everything you generate for us is so positive. It shows up here.
David (60:06-60:07):
Here.
C (60:07-60:11):
Not always there, but it always shows up here. You’re doing great. Carry on, my son.
David (60:12-60:44):
I think it really speaks to those four things. Steph’s struggling out there, and he basically pulls together some data, and he says, I know that you feel like you’re struggling. I see it in your body language. But there’s a difference when you’re out there, and I’m trying to show you that. And then he says something like, you’re doing well, my son. It’s that competitive. It’s that joy. It’s that empathy. He has that empathy for Steph right there. It’s like 20 seconds, but that really warms my heart every time I see it because it’s the epitome of good coaching.
Wright (60:44-62:10):
Those things are applicable. One of the things I love about sports is that we live in the age of post-truth and spin and brand ball. Don’t lie. You are what you do when the lights come on. That is true whether you are Steph Curry or you writing what you’re writing. We all have grand ideas about who we would like to be, and we have ideas about who we think we are and how we wish we were seen. But all you are is who you are when the lights come on. There’s nowhere to hide; there are no lies. I’ve flirted over the years with going and writing a non-sports magazine, and I just found that was just ego and vanity. I felt like I should want to do it. I felt like that was a next step. It was a response sometimes, maybe to boredom. But what a gift to get to write about sports. Everything we want to know about the best and worst of human beings and what we are capable of is visible on the field.
David (62:13-62:19):
Last question. Let’s end by talking about endings. We talked a little bit about hammers before. What else makes for a good ending?
Wright (62:20-63:34):
A resolution shadowed by something unknown. Honestly, you don’t want to belabor it, but you also don’t want to abandon it. It’s like when a story becomes spaghetti, a mess of wet noodles going nowhere. I often think it’s what we were just talking about: you’ve lost the ability to see your own story. You saw it, then you lost it, and couldn’t land it. I had a story about three generations of Ted Williams’ family. I spent an incredible amount of time with Ted’s daughter. She let me into his filing cabinets and diaries. It was crazy. I wrote that over and over, and my editor, Paul, and I went back and forth because I just couldn’t see it. I could see it and then I couldn’t see it. When you don’t know what your ending is, you struggle to see it. If you can see the ending, you’re just following a map.
David (63:35-63:36):
Rock on.
Wright (63:36-63:39):
All right, man. Thank you. I hope that was all right and I didn’t waste everybody’s time.
David (63:40-63:41):
Got Guinness.
