Writing books is messy.

I know I’ve riffed on this before, but it bears repeating: writing anything is messy business. To quote perhaps my favorite writer of all time, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, “When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”

I can’t tell you how many files of my book I have that are either “working files” or “clean files” or “scrap files” or “wormholes to parallel dimensions,” and I’m not even entirely sure which one I’m working in half the time (that’s not true). Did I forget to save it? Did I email it to myself as a backup? Did I put it into Dropbox? My blood pressure is near stroke levels? All my underwear has holes in them? WTF, dude?!

It was after we recorded, but in a recent conversation I had with the journalist Rhana Natour, we had “a moment” over how messy writing is. I said, “Writing is so messy,” and she’s like, “It’s SO messy!” She wrote into her drafts to her editor acknowledging how messy things were getting. Drafting is like finger painting, man.

My compost file for the Prefontaine book is flush with 50,000 words of … stuff? Shit? Nonsensical drivel? Useable stuff? Fool’s gold? Stuff I will forget is there that should be in the book but won’t because I’m too disorganized? Thing is, I don’t know how to make it any less messy. Part of the process is surrendering to it.

But once you can practically recite your manuscript from memory because you’ve read it so many times that you think nobody in their right mind will ever like what you’ve written, you can skim your compost file, come across a gem, and know exactly where to inject it.

Or, maybe not.

Maybe let it die.

You know how happy your blueberry bush is when you prune a limb? To keep mixing metaphors, the last thing you want is your book to be a three-hour a movie. Rarely does a three-hour movie need to be that long. Often, you’re like, “That could’ve been two hours and been way better.”

So maybe trust the cuts. They make for good deleted-scene commentary.

This week we have the brilliant Darcy Frey as we celebrate the 30th anniversary of The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams, newly released on audio by Spiegel & Grau.

TL;DL: Car as Confession Booth

Brendan: You're spending hours upon hours in and around the neighborhoods with the kids and gyms and classrooms. What's your primary means of documenting all the information, be it in classrooms, in meetings, or even in the car as you're driving them around to try to document everything?

Darcy: Yeah, that's funny. My little Toyota hatchback was like the confession booth. So we would just drive around endlessly. Partly I would drive them to games and practices. And sometimes they would just want to go for a lift or go over to another neighborhood where one of the players’ brothers had a barber shop and so forth. But something happens with kids of all ages, you get in the car, and it's moving, and you just start talking, everybody starts talking. So it's just a wonderful kind of reporting tool. Everybody would be relaxed and talking.

So that happened. But of course, there's a hitch there, which is how do you record it all? Early on, when I started doing narrative journalism, I made a decision not to use a tape recorder. You do get the accuracy of a verbatim recording if you use a handheld tape recorder, but you have to transcribe everything. So it doubles your research time. Every hour in the field is another hour or more that you have to spend listening to it. But more importantly, when I did use a tape recorder, I listened less acutely than I did when I was simply taking notes.

Because if you're taking notes, and you don't get it down, because you're not listening, you're not paying sufficient attention; it's gone forever; you have no backup. And that was useful to me. And, sort of paradoxically, though, I was bent over my notebook all the time, because I was listening so carefully, actually interacted with the kids more naturally, and certainly with more attention to what they were saying.

But when we were in the car, it was crazy. I had a steno pad that I kept on my knee. And then when I'd hit a red light, I would just write as fast as I could, whatever it was that we had said in the intervening four or five blocks, then I put it down, put the car in gear and moved forward. But then as soon as I got out of the car, I would look back over those notes, I would see all the phrases that I'd quickly written down, then I just fill it out with the dialog. That was my sort of my MO.

It's always most important to get what people say down first, that's sort of the first level of reporting, but I knew that when I was going to be writing the book, however many months later, I was going to need much more than just what was said, I was going to need gesture and mood and what the weather was like, how hot was it, what were the facial expressions and things like that. So, first line of reporting, I always went to getting down as accurately as I could what was said. And then as soon as I got that down, I would fill in the margins, with absolutely every detail that I could vacuum up and get into my notebooks knowing that a month down the road when I was trying to recreate these moments in dramatized scenes, I was going to need dialogue. But I was going to need a lot more to make it seem, alive to the reader.

Brendan: Would it be one of the one of those deals like at the end of the day, you would go and clean up your notebooks and try to spackle in the holes of what was legible versus illegible. And then you're just making sure that come time to access this stuff. You're not like, ‘Man, I have no idea what I wrote down here’?

Darcy: Yes, exactly. So as soon as my reporting was done, I would go home and I would never permit myself to do anything, make dinner, nothing, until I'd sat down with the notebooks. And I reread what I just written for exactly that reason, so that I wouldn't look at it three months later and have no idea. So I would go through, I'd spackle in the holes, as you said, and then I would put in all that sort of remembered detail about what was going on. If we were walking down the street, what did it feel like, what the neighborhood felt like, stuff like that. I did a piece, actually the first reporting piece that I did for Dick [Todd] at New England Monthly, I attended an event and it went very late at night and I went to sleep and the next morning I tried to download my short term memory of what had happened and half of it was gone. And then I realized you can never permit yourself to sleep until you purge your mind of all those details, get them into a notebook. And then you can make dinner, take a shower, go to sleep, but you got to get it done first.

Coda

Gonna plant a wee seed here: We are less than a year from publication of my Steve Prefontaine biography. Title TK. (Likely going to be The Front Runner or The Last Amateur) Pre-orders are the name of the game, so I just want you thinking about it. It’s NOT AVAILABLE for pre-order just yet. Again, just getting you thinking about it. Dead in the water without pre-orders, friend.

Also, for face-to-face time and to support the podcast, you can window shop at patreon.com/cnfpod.

And if you leave a review on Apple Podcasts, take a screenshot, send it to [email protected] and I’ll coach up a piece of your writing of up to 2,000 words.

Rage,

Brendan