You find me charmingly stupid, right?

OK but listen though: I was reading a column about Season 3 of The Bear, a show I’ve never seen but would love to see but, you know, can’t because we’re not about to subscribe to 1,000,000,000 streaming services, or cable. We’ve elected for 0.

The writer summed up greater themes for Seasons 1, 2, and now 3. And something hit me like a haymaker, friend:

• A TV Show, done well, is a book.

• A season of a TV show is “part” of a book.

• Episodes of a season are “chapters” of a “part” within a book.

Each episode has an arc that makes it satisfying; each season has an arc fed by the micro arcs of each episode; each season feeds into the macro arc of the entire show.

I allude to some of this in the parting shot you’ll find below or listen to as part of Ep. 418, but it came into such sharp focus after reading that column.

My editor has bagged on me to ask What work is this chapter doing? What’s it about? That feeds into the “part,” which then feeds into the greater “book.” The sum total being, hopefully, a satisfying and epic journey.

Why am I such a blockhead? This is so, so, so basic.

Well-done television doesn’t adhere to a strict chronology (as my rough/first/second drafts have dreadfully been). Once TV locks into a theme, say, for an episode, if a moment lifts out of the chronology for a flashback, we become unstuck in time though not in theme.

Not every chapter has to be a cliffhanger — as in Lost or Breaking Bad for TV — the chapter stands on its own, but it has a job to feed into the greater part and that part has a greater job feeding into the grand vision of a book.

Nobody said you were subscribing for brilliance!

Too Long; Didn’t Listen: John Julius Reel on Being Open to Wonder

John: I want my subconscious mind to help me discover things. That's really our ally, when we're writing, especially when we're writing memoir. I'm sure when you sit down and write, the things that move us as writers are the things that we surprise ourselves with. And I think those come from our unconscious mind, don't you think?

Brendan: Oh, for sure. And writing, you're always in practice with it. And then the subconscious at times will creep in. And it might be because you heard the chord of a certain song and it just instantly elicits a memory. And suddenly that memory could be the seed of of a scene. And it did come from something that was plucked from your subconscious because of something external be it a movie, maybe the way an actor's face expresses a mood, and you're like, ‘Oh my God, that's the mood I felt when dad let go of the bicycle when he taught me how to ride the bike.’ You're transported there, and you're crying. Because that's the most intimate moment you've ever felt in your life.

John: One of the things I've learned recently is to listen to my subconscious, because sometimes it'll pop up. In my youth, very often, I would be afraid of the suggestions that my subconscious would give me that you've articulated it very well, a song, something, an idea will come up, maybe you go for a walk, and you've been stewing over a scene that's blocked, you go for a walk, or you take a shit. And suddenly, there's an idea that's in your head. I would silence that in the past because maybe it didn't fit exactly with what you were stewing on, because maybe you just wanted to get a particular sentence to work. And you're dwelling too much on that thing. But whatever idea popped into your head, I said, ‘Okay, let me listen to that. Let's see what that develops into.’ And maybe it allows you to drop that sentence you are hung up on. Maybe the sentence you were hung up on didn't even need to be there at all and your subconscious is giving you a clue that you have to listen to. I'm becoming a better listener to my subconscious with the years because it makes life —and I hope my writing — so much more interesting, because the things that my subconscious gives me are very often unpredictable. I didn't know they were going to be there the moment before they came. They don't figure into my outlines. They veer me away from the predictable and I think but if I trust them, they're not that far away. They can allow me to interpret the limits in a way that maybe I didn't know before. The more I listened to my subconscious, the more favors it offers me.

Brendan: I like the Pixar movie Ratatouille. And I'm thinking of Ego, the food critic, and he's hardened from a whole life of doing food criticism. But then he takes that one bite of the ratatouille and it shoots him back to his childhood of having the peasant meal, having his mom serve it to him. And that little meal broke through his veneer of his cynicism and shot him right back to a subconscious moment of his childhood. And it released a floodgate of emotion, things that he just forgot were there. And it's like, the subconscious in that way can be a guiding light.

John: Totally, because it's also like what you said before about maybe you see the face in a film. And it reminds you of a moment with your dad, and suddenly you're weeping. So it's like the emotional blockages, they block our creative mind. So suddenly, even if the slightest emotional change, well, that might just give you the tone that's going to lead you to a sentence that's going to solve a particular creative pickle or move you on to another, and there'll be a building of momentum. And so I think those emotional changes, as you say, from that Pixar film, yes, in that moment, he goes from this bitter critic to being this boy open to wonder. And that is something that I want my subconscious to give me, too. I want to be open to wonder all the time.

Parting Shot from Episode 418: One Book Better

By the time you hear this I will have perhaps my last stab, my last chunk of major edits before we have to ferry this fucker along the assembly line.

The past couple weeks, mildly interrupted by a visit from my in-laws, have been largely focused on Part I of the book. The two likely titles are either The Front Runner or The Last Amateur. It’ll likely be the former, but that latter is smarter and will take some massaging to draw out that greater theme. 

At times, well, most times, I get the sense that my very astute editor is thinking: Why can’t you grasp this simple concept of shaping and interpretation? The chapters need to be more than just mere chronology. And he’s correct. And here’s why: My rough draft, I truly didn’t have a vision, or a point of view. I merely wrote through the guy’s life, which is interesting unto itself, but it had no authorial interpretation as to why this matters. I was skating over the surface. As a result, my zero draft was 160,000 words that could only be classified as a narrative timeline. My first draft was a 55-chapter, 120,000-word timeline. My second draft was something like an 18-chapter, 119,000-word timeline, but now we’re starting to distill things. Now we’re really interrogating things that should have been interrogated a long, long time ago.

WHAT is this chapter saying? What work is it doing? And what we’re/I’m finding is that things can now get plucked out of chronology and placed where it’s more thematically germane. 

My first couple drafts had a lot of races and a lot of ancillary characters. I still have too many races, but we’re working on that. What are they saying about Steve Prefontaine, and what are they adding to the story? They need to matter otherwise the reader will just skim them. One race I had described in great detail is now two sentences because it lost the audition for another that needed more stage time. There is, however, a moment from that race that I cut where Steve blew off one of his rivals in a cold, condescending, dickhead way, and as much as I love it in the chronology, it’ll stay, but it’s going somewhere else as a callback to place like with like. 

OK, so what’s the goddam point, BO? The point is, to get good at writing books, we need book practice. And the problem with book practice is you might write a book and it doesn’t get published. This biography will (I think, I hope) still be published, but the truth is, to get better at writing books, you have to write books. And the problem is that writing books takes a lot of time. And many of us will write a book and because we put all that time and effort into it we feel we are owed something for our efforts: a book deal, publication. 

This biography process has taught me just how bad I am at writing books and I’ve been a writer for twenty years (and twenty more, if my escalating blood pressure will allow it). This book is the fourth one I’ve written. My first was unpublished (though I tried, my God, did I try, before a mentor told me “Sometimes we write books and they don’t get published.” That’s the great takeaway from earning an MFA right there). My second, Six Weeks in Saratoga, did get published. My third book, my baseball memoir, The Tools of Ignorance, is in the drawer, unpublished, and likely will remain so. And so we come to my fourth book that if it hadn’t been for a dynamite pre-sale off of a book proposal would likely not be published either. 

All of this is to say writing books is very hard no matter how skilled a writer you are. Thanks to my guidance from Glenn Stout early, and my book editor Matt Harper late, I am monumentally better equipped to crack the code on the next. I sure hope I crack the code on this one because it’s too damn good of a subject to mess up. This book HAS to be great. Has to be.

I guess if you want to get better at symphonies, or murals, or sculptures, you have to do the long, hard, seemingly wasteful work of failing before you ever get good at something BIG. I consider book writing big and it hurts when you can’t get your book published and maybe there are obvious reasons why (It’s simply not good). Or other less obvious reasons, the taste of the agent/publisher doesn’t align.

Our best shot at publishing books — like essays, short stories, flash essays, features, and profiles — is to do a LOT of them. There’s no wisdom on offer here other than merely keep plugging so long as you love it. If a book isn’t landing, write the next one because you’re one book better than before. And that’s all you can control, is getting one book better. 

Coda

Gonna plant a wee seed here: We are less than a year from publication of my Steve Prefontaine biography. Title TK. (We’re changing it from The Gift to possibly 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 avaiable 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