Category: Writers on Writing

As John Truby says in The Anatomy of Genres, a genre is not just a familiar way of living in the world of stories. It is a system. Any system–from the biological system of the body or the internal combustion engine of a car–succeeds only when each of its component parts performs its job and contributes to the larger process in a reliable way.

(For an interview with Truby, go here. To purchase The Anatomy of Genres, go to anatomyofgenres.com. For story courses and story software, go to truby.com.)

Truby discusses 14 genres, in the following order: Horror, Action, Myth, Memoir, Coming of Age, Science Fiction, Crime, Comedy, Western, Gangster, Fantasy, Thriller, Detective, and Love Story. They move from the most primal issue (death) to the most transcendent (connection).

To develop your story, follow the complete system for your genres. Make sure to include the specific “beats” essential to that genre.

This is the second part of a two-part interview with film guru John Truby. You can read the first part here.

The sequence of genres could be arranged along Aristotle’s narrative arc, from the early basic challenge of survival to the ultimate development of the heart.

In my mind Aristotle is probably the greatest philosopher in history. Yeah, he was wrong about certain scientific things. But no philosopher contributed more important work in every major category of philosophy. He begins with metaphysics, with the process of becoming. And that’s what a story is.

My gripe with Aristotle’s Poetics is that it doesn’t give enough practical steps about how to tell a story. That’s one of the reasons I wrote The Anatomy of Story. And that’s why I wrote The Anatomy of Genres—to give writers the detailed, specific techniques they need to write a professional-level story.

We are not only a storytelling species, but also a summarizing, synthesizing, simplifying species. So one of the challenges of being a good storyteller is avoiding too many summary statements and describing specific people, places, and events in detail.

Yeah, it is. In my writing workshops, students often say, “Well, generally, this is going to happen.” But that’s not going to cut it. You need very specific actions. If you’re writing a Detective story, you’ve got to have a very specific clue that gives you a very specific reveal and then you’ve got to build on that. A great story is a series of causal links. You’ve got to be specific about what each person is doing at each moment.

Imagine how bad The Godfather would be if Mario Puzo said, “There was a big wedding in the family and a good time was had by all as Don Corleone did some business on the side.”

Exactly. And that’s the way most writers would do it. And that’s why you’ve got to be so precise in the sequence of actions you put in the story.

In any genre, there are 15 to 20 major plot beats unique to that form. They must be in that story or you’re not doing your job and the reader will be very unhappy with you. Plot is the most challenging thing for writers because they think in terms of individual moments in the story. No, it’s all about stringing together a sequence of events—which are driven by the opponent.

How do you do that?

Start with the opponent’s plan to defeat the hero. That might be the most important technique for creating a plot.

Take the Love genre. Realistically, a love story should take about 10 minutes. You’ve got two people who are attracted to each other. The rest is negotiation. But for a movie, it’s got to last at least 90 minutes. So how do you do that? Start with the opponent—and in a love story, the main opponent is the object of desire.

Back to the importance of action—lots and lots of beats. How do all these beats hang together?

Each individual beat means nothing without being part of 15 to 20 other beats. The beats in all the genres have been worked out in great detail over decades, sometimes centuries or even thousands of years. So you need to know the sequence of 15 to 20 beats for the genre you’re writing in.

But the real key is how you transcend the genres. Otherwise, you’re telling the same story that everybody else in that genre is telling. You’ve got to tell your story in a unique way.

How do you do that?

It means executing the individual beats in a way that we haven’t seen before. More importantly, it means expressing the life philosophy through the plot beats. And that’s the area where writers go wrong. The most underestimated element of storytelling is theme. Writers are terrified of theme. They’ve heard the old rule that if you want to send a message send it Western Union. So, to avoid hitting the theme on the nose they avoid theme entirely. It’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make. You need to express theme under the surface, through the structure, through the plot beats. If you’re not expressing the life philosophy of that genre, you’re getting one-tenth of the power of your story.

Genre is often described as a promise to the reader. When you pick up a Western, you can rest assured that you will get all the elements that have always made you enjoy a Western. Likewise, the character’s expression of a life philosophy is another kind of promise.

That’s the promise that most writers don’t know. They know that genre is a plot system. What they don’t know is that it’s also a theme system. The challenge is to express the theme through a complex plot.

Are there some tricks to express the theme with action? Let’s try an example. Imagine a couple of friends playing pickup basketball and one of them is overly aggressive and the other one is focused on style. And the aggressive guy beats the style guy and says, “See, that’s your problem, you were too concerned about strutting around, so you lost.” So in this case, you could build the theme into the action and dialogue.

Yeah, but the dialogue should be minimal. The theme should be expressed through the action and structure. And that brings us to another point, which is that one of the ways you transcend the genre is to mix genres. You need to combine two, three, even four genres. Each genre has 15 to 25 plot beats. When you combine that with two or three genres, you separate yourself from the rest of the crowd.

If you just mashed together three genres, that could be a mess—and disorienting. Somehow, you need to control your use of the different genre beats.

If you don’t know how to mix genres, you get story chaos. That’s why you have to choose one genre to be the primary form. That provides your structure—your hero, your main opponent, the key desire line, and so on.

Then you grab the beats from the other genres and mix them in—but only when they work with the main genre. If the minor genres come into conflict with the main genre—and many do, since they’re different approaches to handling the same problem—you stick with the plot beat of the major genre.

So your main genre is your North Star. You use the other genre beats when they strengthen the thrust of the main genre.

Exactly. And there are a lot of things that determine the main thrust of your story. But the most important one is the hero’s goal. And so whatever you can attach to that spine, to that goal, you want to use that.

Can you give an example of a great story that uses a major genre but is also supported by other genres?

In The Godfather, Mario Puzo combined Gangster with Fairy Tale and Myth. It’s actually three story forms blended together, with the structure revolving around the father and his three sons. That’s a Fairy Tale technique: the three sons. Each son has a different set of traits and characteristics. You see how each one responds and only the third one has the right combination of traits to be a successful godfather. If you were writing a typical gangster story, you’re not going to come up with The Godfather. It’s unique to Mario Puzo.

Francis Ford Coppola could not have created a movie like The Godfather without the massive level of detail in the novel. The worst writing mistakes get made—the worst cliches happen, the worst stretches of boredom happen—when you don’t have enough raw materials. You need a pile of details and moments and possibilities to create a great story.

That’s why Hollywood prefers to start with a novel, because it’s a lot easier to condense a novel and get a really dense plot in a film. When we think of The Godfather book, people think of it as just pulp fiction. No, this is a great book. This thing is brilliant. And I have learned so many lessons of storytelling from reading that book and watching that film.

You’ve got to have specific details at every level of the story. Only when you have those kind of details can you then sequence them together into an overall story, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Many writers simply do not understand the connection between the detail level and the master scheme level.

Movies do something that no other art form can do, which is they get us out of the utter wordiness of life. We have the tendency anyway to overly simplify things. Images get us to be in the moment.

Images are obviously central to modern storytelling. But one of my bugaboos is the idea that that film is a visual medium. Yeah, it is. We see a screen with images. But that’s not what people respond to. Film is a story medium. This is why I find the idea of the auteur theory one of the dumbest things ever. No, film is created by the writer. It’s the writer creating the character, the plot, the structure, the theme, the symbols, the dialogue, all the stuff that the audience is responding to.

If film was just a visual medium, we should say that silent film is the greatest film we’ve ever seen. But there’s a real advantage to talk. That’s why talkies got to be so popular so fast. People also say, well, you got to express ideas visually. Yeah, well, that’s true of any story: “show don’t tell.”

Look at Casablanca. If we were judging it based on the visuals, we would say that thing’s terrible. But it has probably the greatest dialogue in the history of film. When people say a picture is worth a thousand words, I always say a word is worth a thousand pictures. Words are what give you texture. Words are how we know that that person is a unique from everyone else.

Truman Capote once said that “all literature is gossip.” People are whispering about somebody else, often in a very judgmental and a prurient way, in secret. In that sense, the best stories feel like eavesdropping. You weren’t supposed to see Don Corleone in that room—that’s a private thing and you weren’t invited. You often say that stories are portals into different worlds, where you have no business being.

Right, the portal gets us past the public facade. Stories are about the private, where people have the most painful moments and experiences with each other. This is something we don’t talk about in public because it’s often painful and embarrassing. But that’s what stories allow us to do.

We all have secrets. Because they’re secrets, we don’t want anybody else to know what they are. But stories can get at them. If stories were only about what people do in public, they would really be boring. So in a way, the best way to think of stories is they capture the things that nobody else wants to let you see.

Given the importance of the detective story, is there an ideal detective?

The model for the detective, and the most brilliant of all detectives, is of course Sherlock Holmes. He is one of the most influential, if not the most influential, character in modern storytelling.

But there’s no way I’m going to be able to meet somebody for the first time and know that he was in Afghanistan and that he’s a doctor, et cetera. So in terms of the detective’s fact-finding mission, is there another one? I was I was going to say Woodward and Bernstein …

Sherlock Holmes works from the ground up. It’s not just that he’s a genius. It’s his observations that help to solve the case.

Observations about the dog that didn’t bark in the night.

Right. Sherlock Holmes is the master of starting with the facts, starting with the clues, with the specific physical evidence, and then slowly but surely generating a larger theory, a larger story of what truly happened. And that is the methodology. We need to use methodology to get away from these divisive ideologies. Too many are so trapped by their own ideology, they can’t see basic facts.

And looking is a very hard thing to do. Most of what I see, I’m actually constructing in my brain, based on my experiences and my predictions.

Absolutely right. One of the things that was so fun about writing the detective chapter was to look at all the things that prevent us from being able to see ourselves because of the ideology that we’ve created since childhood. Our stories allow us to see only certain things. Humans are pattern-making animals. But it amazes me how often the pattern people put together is complete nonsense.

This is the first part of a two-part interview with film guru John Truby. You can read the second part here.

The idea of genre can be a touchy topic among writers.

“Don’t classify me, read me,” Carlos Fuentes groused. “I’m a writer, not a genre.”

Genre refers to a type of story–the kinds of characters, problems, places, and conflict you can expect to encounter. People look for different things in stories–and when they don’t find it, they get angry. In that sense (like a brand in business), a genre is a promise. When you buy a detective story, you expect to see a smart loner systematically figure out who had the motive, means, and opportunity to commit a crime–confronted by a cunning opponent who matches him at every turn, until the very end.

But as John Truby says in his brilliant new book, The Anatomy of Genres, a genre is not just a familiar way of living in the world of stories. It is a system. Any system–from the biological system of the body or the internal combustion engine of a car–succeeds only when each of its component parts performs its job and contributes to the larger process in a reliable way.

(To purchase The Anatomy of Genres, go to anatomyofgenres.com. For story courses and story software, go to truby.com.)

Truby lists 14 genres, in the following order: Horror, Action, Myth, Memoir, Coming of Age, Science Fiction, Crime, Comedy, Western, Gangster, Fantasy, Thriller, Detective, and Love Story. They move from the most primal issue (death) to the most transcendent (connection).

Truby offers two essential rules for genre writing:

• Each story must use 15 to 20 specific beats, or plot events, that fit its genre. When they’re missing, the reader senses a kind of void. Storytellers who think they can reinvent narrative–who resist the conventions of genre–are in for a rude awakening. You need to deliver what people expect when they pick a story. (For an overview of the beats in all genres, go here.)
• Every story needs to transcend its genre by offering something unpredictable and by using two or three other genres in supporting roles. A Sci Fi story can have elements of the Myth and Love Story genres, for example. Why the need for multiple genres? Modern people are surrounded by stories and get bored with overly familiar genre techniques. They need something extra to spritz the experience.

Truby’s work is primarily a guide for storytellers. But it is also a rumination of the role of stories in human life. Stories are not just accounts of people (or other creatures) doing things in an entertaining and meaningful way. Stories don’t just help us to “make sense” of life; they are not, as Joan Didion once said, “the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images” we experience in life. Stories are not just about life; they are life. We could no more “separate” ourselves from the stories we tell and consume than we could separate the heart or the lungs from the body.

Why does that matter? Because the truest stories don’t just follow genre conventions. They tap something ineffable about human experience. That, ironically, is why the conventions matter so much. When we get them right, we are now free to discover the truths that lie deep in our minds and hearts and to somehow get them onto paper. Rules don’t restrict creativity but enable it.

To explore these issues, I talked with John Truby about his new book. An edited transcript of our talk follows.

How did The Anatomy of Genres come about?

I have taught writers for over 30 years. At times, when I talk with writers about what I do, they say, “I know all about story because I use the three-act structure or The Hero’s Journey or Save the Cat and they think that’s all they need. These approaches are fine for beginners, but they have very few practical story techniques—and almost nothing that can tell you how to write at the professional level. We’re talking about being in the top 1 percent of writers.

For me, genres are the highest form of knowledge because they tell us how the human mind works.

When I wrote my first book, The Anatomy of Story, my goal was to include all the professional story techniques a writer would need to write a bestselling novel or a hit screenplay. But the one subject it does not cover, which is the key to writing a hit film or novel, is how to write the different genres that make up 99 percent of popular storytelling today.

What about genres that makes them so important?

The answer is expressed in the subtitle: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works. We typically say that humans tell stories, but I believe it’s much deeper than that. Humans are stories. From birth, our mind creates our first story, and it’s the story of me. And from then on, everything I see and understand is a form of story.

Genres are different types of stories. Therefore, each genre gives us a different portal into how the world works and a different recipe for how to live successfully. For example, Horror says we live our best life when we confront our death and make amends for our sins. Fantasy says we succeed by making life itself a work of art. Each of the 14 major genres has a different approach to how to live.

If you want to be a successful storyteller, you have to express the deeper life philosophy through the plot of that genre. And frankly, most writers don’t do that.

Is it safe to say that the fundamental human problem is that we’re all going to die? Do the genres simply have a different answer to that question?

Absolutely. Horror is the first genre I explore because it deals with that question directly. It’s about how do you face your own inevitable demise. That’s something that nobody wants to face. In fact, nobody really believes it’s going to happen to them. All genres are about how to live a good life in this limited time that we have. Each genre gives a different recipe for how to do that: You will live a fulfilling life if you do X.

The genres each look at different aspects of life. Together, they add up to a comprehensive approach to understanding life.

All 14 genres not only have a very powerful and valid life philosophy; all of them are necessary for a fully rich life.

If you sequence the genres in a certain way, you get a kind of ladder of enlightenment. That’s why I start with Horror and Action at the base level and then move all the way up to the highest levels, which are Fantasy, Detective, and Love.

You could make a parallel with genres and archetypes. Archetypes show the different kinds of people in the world—and they reflect the tendencies that we all have within our own selves.

That’s absolutely right. But genres are much bigger than archetypes in terms of what they pull together into one system. The power of genres comes from the fact that they are based on the major activities of life. For example, Crime is about morality. The Gangster story is about business and politics. Memoir is about creating the self. Fantasy is about the art of living. Love is about how to live a happy life. The question is, how will we do that?

Tolstoy asked: “How, then, shall we live?” Each genre answers that question in a different way.

Exactly. And, you know, it is part of how I wrote each genre chapter. At the beginning of each chapter, I talk about each genre’s mind/action view. By that I mean, each genre expresses a unique way of thinking about the world, and each one shows how to have success, and that is the genre’s theme. Each genre combines the action side and the mind side. That makes it all-encompassing in terms of how to live.

So what are these genres about more specifically?

Horror is really about religion. Action is about success. Myth covers the life process. Memoir and Coming of Age are about creating the self. Science Fiction is about science, society, and culture—that’s why it has the biggest scope of all the genres. Crime is about morality and justice. Comedy is about manners and morals. The Western is about the rise and fall of civilization. Gangster is about the corruption of business and politics. Fantasy is the art of living. Detective and Thriller are about the mind and truth. And Love is about the art of happiness.

You don’t get any deeper or more expansive than that. And when you put all those together, you cover everything human beings do.

What makes a story unique, within the boundaries of a genre?

It means executing the individual beats in a way that we haven’t seen before. More importantly, it means expressing the life philosophy through the plot beats. And that’s the area where writers go wrong. The most underestimated element of storytelling is theme. Writers are terrified of theme. They’ve heard the old rule that if you want to send a message send it Western Union. So, to avoid hitting the theme on the nose they avoid theme entirely. It’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make. You need to express theme under the surface, through the structure, through the plot beats. If you’re not expressing the life philosophy of that genre, you’re getting one-tenth of the power of your story.

Do you have any favorite genres?

I love all these genres. In writing this book, I gained tremendous love and respect for the genres that I didn’t really care about. Each genre gives you this portal to different activities of life. But even though I love all the genres, the ones that I love the most are the Western and the gangster.

The Western is about the rise of the American Dream and Gangster is about the corruption of the American Dream. The Western is completely inaccurate historically, but it’s not about real history. It’s the American Creation Myth. The Gangster is the best expression of how the real world works now because it focuses on the corruption of business and politics.

The Gangster form is the closest genre to the Great American Novel, which explores how America has failed to meet the ideals expressed in its creation documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Great Gatsby is a transcendent Gangster story. Mad Men is basically a modern-day Great Gatsby. Both main characters create a new identity from a lie. They both express the basic American ethic that you can be whoever you want to be.

Mad Men, by the way, is one of the five best TV dramas ever made—just a massive work of art, one of the great American epics ever written.

Mad Men’s first episode tells you everything you’re going to experience in the show. Matthew Weiner knew where he was going to go. He knew the final scene of the series the whole time.

That’s one of the keys to writing a transcendent work in TV—having a sense of the overall track of the main character’s development from the very beginning. Breaking Bad was the same way.

So your two favorite genres are the Western and Gangster. They both explore the American Dream. If you were French, would they still be your favorite genres?

I grew up with the Western, which expressed that whole conception of the American ethic, which is incredibly positive and empowering. When I was a teenager, I encountered the four great anti-Westerns: The Wild Bunch, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Once Upon a Time in the West. They are the Gangster versions of the Western. They are about the fall of the American Dream.

Seeing these films was a major turning point in terms of my understanding of the potential, the philosophical power, you could have from a Hollywood feature film.

So, shifting focus, I was wondering if you ever feel “storied out.”

It’s just the opposite. When I watch a movie, I am absolutely entranced—unless the writer screws up. That’s what breaks my suspension of disbelief. And then you’re out of the story. But when I see great storytelling, it’s a totally enriching experience. I’m fascinated by the techniques the writer used to get those effects and how they applied the technique to their particular story problem. And then how that illuminates the way life works and how the human mind tries to make its way within it.

I sometimes liken it to sports. Let’s say you watch football. If you don’t know much about football, it just looks like a mass of bodies jammed together, and they just do that up and down the field. That’s boring. But if you know what’s happening, you are literally able to see the details as they happen. You can see, oh, that right guard is pulling, the defensive end did a trick maneuver to get to the quarterback, et cetera. You get into what’s happening structurally, under the surface.

This is why my approach to story has always been about structure. What’s most fascinating is there’s the surface of what’s happening and there’s the deep structure of what’s really happening and why. It’s getting to the deep causes that I find absolutely fascinating. And the reasons for it happening are often very different than we really think.

Can I ask about our current political situation? We have all these performance artists running around, lying, avoiding issues, breaking the law. It’s really the Gangster stage of our development. And a lot of what these gangsters and liars are doing is creating fake stories. So the key thing about being able to put on your story analysis hat is that you’re able to see through that.

With the rise of information technology, the ability to divide image from reality has never been greater—which means the ability to lie has never been greater.

So how do you deal with it? What genre can help us to separate truth from lies?

To me it’s the Detective story. It’s about asking questions, looking at evidence and using methodology. We can never get the whole truth. But you can get to some degree of truth that is not a complete fabrication. And that’s why the detective form is so valuable. I consider it the most important modern genre. Few of us are action heroes. But we can all learn how to look for the truth. The detective story tells us how. Science itself is a detective story.

Robert Caro, the great biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, once said something to the effect of, “I don’t know what truth is but I do know what facts are. And facts can add up to some amazing insights.”

And it is something that everybody is responsible for. I don’t think people take nearly as much responsibility for it as they should. If we don’t do it, the larger system is going to collapse.

If we don’t take control of the detective narrative, if we don’t play our parts, so to speak, then you’re going to let the bad guys write their own horror stories, gangster stories, action stories and myths.

With the possible exception of the Love story, there’s no story form more important to our success, not to mention survival, than the Detective story.

We all have stories of our own lives and those stories are usually wrong. So the key, whether you’re a storyteller or reader or just a person trying to lead a decent life, is developing the ability to reject the stories that don’t actually pan out.

That’s what the Memoir genre does. In a memoir, you look back and see the story you created for yourself to help you survive. But those stories were full of errors. You created them when you were young. Or you were given them and you bought into it because it came from dad. So the great question of memoir is: How do you create a new story that allows you to have a better life in the future?

This is the first part of a two-part interview with film guru John Truby. You can read the second part here.

This is the second part of a two-part interview with the longtime columnist, author, and podcaster Tommy Tomlinson. You can find Part 1 here.

You’ve devoted your whole life to being a writer. It shapes everything you do. How and why did you become a writer? Who were your greatest influences?

I come from a family of storytellers. At family reunions, as a little kid, I got to run around and listen to the conversations of adults. My parents grew up in that oral culture, where part of your value was, could you sit on the porch and tell a great story? I absorbed all that as a kid.

I was a devoted reader because my parents were devoted readers. They were not educated people but they were readers. My dad’s favorite two books were the Bible and the Bass Pro Shop Catalogue. My mom, to the day she died, was a devoted reader of romance novels. So there were always books. I went to a library where we read all the Hardy Boys books, the Nancy Drew books, and lots of stuff.

One of the sacred times in our household was when the afternoon paper came at around 3:30. My job was to go and divide the sections up between my mom, my dad, and myself. From the time I was little I had this notion that storytelling was important and the news mattered.

I always wrote poems and short stories and all kinds of terrible stuff during high school and college but I still didn’t know what I wanted to do until my junior year when I went to an open trial for my college newspaper, The Red & Black, at the University of Georgia. I did a couple stories and I immediately knew that’s what I wanted to do the rest of my life.

Where did that satisfaction come from? I’m guessing 90 percent from being able to express yourself and maybe 10 percent the thrill of recognition and the byline.

It might have been more than 10 percent. I remember my friends would clip out stories I wrote and put them on my door or someone in my class would say, “Is this you?” and it was a thrill. It’s still a thrill.

There’s stuff that reporters do because it’s their job, and there’s stuff that writers do because it matters to them. What was your experience?

The big transition for me was when I realized I cared nothing about institutions and I cared about people. I covered city hall and the state legislature and cops and courts. When I started writing about people and their stories, that’s when I got engaged.

Every person I write about, I learned about myself in the process. Every time I went deep with someone else, I hoped it would show a little piece of our commonality. That’s been the big theme of what I’ve tried to do over the last 20 years. At our core, we’re more alike that we are different.

Do you remember a moment when you were bound to be a people writer and not an issues writer?

I did a story for the Observer about a group of autistic kids going through music therapy. They respond to music in ways they can’t respond to spoken language. The loved the experience of reporting that story.

I was becoming invisible in ways that led to more meaningful stuff. The therapy class was at a local college—and the teachers were 19, 20, 21 years old, all young women. They would get together and discuss their students. I went to these meetings for months every day and one of those meetings one of the women asked another if their periods had changed. Yeah, they had. I’m sitting there realizing I’m just a fly on the wall.

Do you have tips for writers? What are some tricks you’ve learned along the way?

I came up with 15 tips for my class at Wake Forest. Be a human being. Don’t be a reaper of information. Don’t interrogate the people you’re talking to—have conversations. Tell the story you need to tell while being as gracious as possible. Tell the story as if you’re talking to someone across the table rather than just giving information.

Be as simple and clear as possible. Remember that every story has two tracks—the plot and the subtext, what it means. The subtext has to come together in a powerful, emotional way by the end.

Also: Endings are always more important than beginnings. If you just get started and come to a powerful ending, that’s better than having a great hook and then the story peters out. Sometimes I could write a great hook and move that to the end.

Your writing reminds me of my favorite columnists, like Mike Royko. When I get to the end of a great column, l want to say, “Aren’t you going to keep going?” What I love about your book is that you do keep going.

A column needs to make an emotional point, in an engaging way that’s accessible to anybody. I wanted to do something different than everything else in the paper. Rather than presenting a dossier of information, I want it to feel like we’re sitting together on the front porch and I’m telling you what happened.

Bob Greene talks about hanging out with City Hall reporters in Chicago. They would have a drink and talk about what they had written for the next day. Then someone would say, “What really happened?” Bob Greene said he wanted to write about that stuff. That’s also what I wanted to write about. What’s the humanity behind the story? That requires building to an emotional point.

Everyone gives the advice to be as simple and clear as possible. But that’s a goal, not a technique.

Anything that feels like writing, cut it out. If you have a beautiful piece of writing but it’s not contributing to the story, take it out.

Also, if you’re stuck, just tell the story. Sit down and turn on the voice recorder and just tell the story. When you do that, all the writing BS gets that in the way, you will get rid of it. You might stumble and get stuff out of order, but that’s easy to fix.

When all else fails, fall back on the ultimately plotter—just give a straight chronology. I tell my students to structure their writing like this: First, … Then, … Then, … Then, … Finally, … That gets people out of being too self-conscious of being writers. Then you can adjust it to make it sparkle.

That’s really meaningful. The more you can write without feeling like a writer, the better you are. For tens of thousands of years, we didn’t write, we just told stories. That’s what’s in our DNA. It’s all based on that chronology and then putting pieces where they can be more powerful. So when in doubt, write it out; after you get it down, then you can play with it.

By the way, keep what you don’t use. You never know what you might use later. So don’t throw it away. And be proud of doing it. But always remember that your service to the reader is telling a story.

When you’re writing a book, some people say it’s just a bunch of little things that are stitched together. But actually, that’s not quite right. All of these pieces have to make a much larger whole thing.

When I was writing this memoir, I was always conscious of what it was building toward. Each scene stands for itself but it also has to carry some meaning that will pay off at the end. Does this scene matter for what I want the book to ultimately say? The whole scaffolding of a book is a lot bigger.

Did you have a sense of the whole thing at the beginning or did the arc of the story change?

When I started I didn’t know where I was going to end up. Part of the process was going through this deep thinking. I hadn’t done that before. I knew I was building a deeper understanding of myself. I knew I wanted to set up that idea but I didn’t know what it would be.

What authors influenced you when writing this book?

I loved to read Nora Ephron, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe and more contemporary people like Tom Junot.

I really admired David Carr’s memoir and Mary Carr’s three books. There there were three memoirs that dealt directly with being overweight—Roxanne Gay’s Hunger, Libby West’s Shrill, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy.

Was there a book on another topic that you used as a model?

There’s a book by James McManus, Positive Fifth Street, about the World Series of Poker, and it’s also about murder in Las Vegas. The poker part took me into a world that I didn’t know about and he was my tour guide into that world. I wanted to be a tour guide into the world of being overweight. A lot of people literally cannot fathom how somebody can get so fat. I wanted to describe that as clearly as I could so people would get it. That’s what makes books great—they take you into a world you’ve never been and make it part of you…

This is the first part of a two-part interview with the longtime columnist, author, and podcaster Tommy Tomlinson. You can find Part 2 here.

The challenge of philosophy, the ancient thinkers said, is to “know thyself.” But as he turned 50 in 2015, Tommy Tomlinson struggled with a different, more difficult question: How did I get this way?

Happily married and surrounded by friends, he struggled silently with the problem now pandemic in America. He was obese—morbidly obese, in fact—and in danger of keeling over from a heart attack at any time.

On the day of setting resolutions, New Year’s Eve of 2014, Tomlinson weighed 460 pounds. People rarely talked about it, but his obesity spoiled every aspect of his life. He was a success as a journalist, a popular columnist for the Charlotte Observer who also wrote for national publications like ESPN the Magazine. Despite his success, he had to think about his weight wherever he went. Before meeting people for a meal, he had to scope out the restaurant ahead of time. He had to think about the ordeal of climbing stairs. He had to strategize every element of his otherwise satisfying life. Life was one compensation after another.

Like tens of millions of other Americans, Tomlinson had tried lots of diets and tried to burn calories on the street or in the gym. But if he dropped 10 pounds, he gained them all back—sometimes more.

When he told his literary agent about scoping out the restaurant where they met, the agent knew Tomlinson had to tell his story. The result is the tragicomedy of a memoir, The Elephant in the Room. That book is not just Tomlinson’s story. It’s his answer to the great question: How did I get this way?

It’s complicated. The child of working class Georgians, Tomlinson grew up in a culture defined by family reunions, snacking during commutes, college parties, and drive-thru windows—and by barbeque, fried chicken, burgers, cakes, chips, beers, and deep-fried everything. Food was everywhere, a constant delight but also numbing, a matter of compulsion as much as desire.

It’s a story of triumph but also, sometimes, failure. This battle is not won easily. So how’s Tommy Tomlinson doing now? Not bad, he says: “I’m doing fine on weight … lost about 100 pounds, hurt my back, gained a little back, but am headed back down the scale again.”

The Elephant in the Room, recently reissued in paperback, has earned raves. Curtis Sittenfeld says it’s “warm and funny and honest and painful and poignant.” The New York Times praised Tomlinson’s “clean and witty and punchy sentences, his smarts and his middle-class sensibility.” Kirkus Reviews says: “He doesn’t hold back in his comments about his needs and wants and interjects enough humor to offset the more serious parts of the narrative and keep the pages turning.”

I am as impressed by Tommy Tomlinson’s writing soigne as by his bravery in confronting such a hard question. So I decided to seek him out. An edited transcript of our conversation:

You’ve gotten an amazing response for this book. How does it feel? Emotionally, it’s a risky book. You’re jumping off a cliff.

I’ve been incredibly grateful for all the response from writers I admire and strangers as well. I’ve probably gotten a couple thousands emails and just recently I got a five-page handwritten letter from Austria. What was especially gratifying about that letter is that this guy was not dealing with weight issues. He had other issues like depression and he saw parallels. That’s exactly what I was hoping for, that people would see themselves in the story.

That’s the definition of good writing. The more specific you get, the more universal. Only when people see and feel something do they have empathy for that other person.

I heard a podcast interview with the songwriter Mary Gautier. She has done cowriting with veterans and spouses of veterans. How did she get them to tell their stories? She said there’s the generic story, there’s the personal story, and below that there’s the deeply personal story. The deeply personal story is universal.

The details of the story might not be universal, but the subtext can relate to anybody. And that’s what I was shooting for.

What gets at the deepest level? Is it just going into increasing discomfort? I like to think of writing as pointillism, so is it adding more dots? What is the difference between going deep and going really deep?

Sure, making yourself uncomfortable helps. But to me it’s the details that matter. I thought about which details would illustrate the points I want to make, which ones provide a subtext and a larger meaning. The right details make it powerful.

That’s the sorting that I did. I started with a lot of stories I could have told. Then I narrowed it to the ones that carried the most symbolic or metaphorical weight.

Why did you write this book? I’m sure it involved a lot of pros and cons. What if people read it the wrong way? Do you want to expose yourself? What it it lands like a thud? So what was your process for deciding to write this book?

You’re describing my thoughts pretty closely. The topic came to me in 2011. I met my agent in New York and he asked the usual question: “What are you thinking about lately?” I told him that I had Googled the interior of that restaurant the night before to make sure there was a comfortable place to sit. I made sure I got there early and scanned the place like a gangster and figured out what would be the safest place to sit. I lived my whole life that way, like an obstacle course.

I had a wife I loved and people who cared for me but I was miserable a lot of the time because I could not solve this one puzzle. He said: “Well, dude that’s the book.” I knew right away he was right but I was afraid of it, what I would have to reveal about myself and how it would affect the people I cared about.

Years later [in 2014] I was working for ESPN the Magazine and started working on a story about Jared Lorenzen, the biggest quarterback anyone had ever seen. He played in the NFL for a while, now he was playing minor league football in Lexington, Kentucky, and he was 400 pounds. I went to Kentucky and we talked about all the things that had been in my head and weighed on me all these years. It was really cathartic for me. As I finished that story, I realized I could see a way to doing mine.

When people do memoirs, the writing process is a process of discovery. Only when they put their fingers on the keyboard did they realize that they thought this or remembered that.

When I started, I didn’t have much of a clue about why I got so big in the first place. What about my early life contributed? As I worked on the book, I saw connections and started to have feelings and insights that I had not had before. It caused me to be self-reflective in a way that I hadn’t been before. I had been reflective about other people’s lives, but I failed to hold myself to the same standard.

We all have issues about weight or drinking or the way we were raised or relationships. We tend to deal with it in a fleeting way. But writing a book, you have to go deep.

After the book was done, someone asked about my writing routine. My wife said, “I could tell your writing routine: You would get up, have breakfast, write for three or four hours, come out of the office, and sleep for two hours. You were so emotionally drained.” It was true. It was exhausting to dig into that stuff in a deep way and confront things I had only done in a fleeting, shallow way before.

What people did you interview to fill in the blanks of the story?

I sent questionnaires to 30 people, saying, “When you think about me, what do you think about? Do you think about my weight? When I’m not around and my name comes up, what do people say?” I discovered that my friends were really worried about me. They asked, “Is there something we can do” and “What’s going to happen when he’s not around?”

I did deeper interviews with my wife and my mom—long sit-down interviews that we recorded. Those thoughts informed everything. We had never just sat down and talked about this stuff in that way. They were uncomfortable conversations. If I published nothing, they would still be useful to me. And I thought they would be useful for other people trying to understand their own issues.

It’s almost like arranging your own intervention. And it’s a way of coming together with friends and family in a new way.

I never thought about it being an intervention, but that’s actually pretty accurate. My friends said we want to get you help but didn’t know how to do it. It was a wakeup call for me and a new insight about how they saw me from the outside.

Was there anything that totally blew you away—something you never thought about before?

My mom told me she and my dad would lie in my bed and try to figure out how to deal with me and my weight. Should they yell? Take me to doctors? Get me out of the house more? Intellectually I knew they had to have had these conversations. Just the image of them lying there sleepless—that hit me really hard. Seeing that movie in my mind was devastating.

For the reader, that’s something that brings empathy because they can imagine—and they’ve been part of—conversations just like that.

Edwin Wong might be the most unusual literary critic and theater mogul you ever know. And he might be one of the most creative, too.

His new book, The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy, offers an update on (arguably) the most important form of literature. According to Wong, tragedy poses the same kinds of high-stakes risks you might find on Wall Street, in SEALs teams, and in nuclear brinkmanship. The hero confronts a massive problem and has to make a calculated guess about what to do. Since the hero is larger than life, full of energy and ego, he often takes the biggest gamble of all.

Classic dramatic theory focuses on hamartia, the hero’s tragic error or flaw. But to Wong, the problem is not that he made a tragic mistake–although that could be the case too–but that he played the odds and lost.

Inspired by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness, Wong is fascinated by the low-risk/high-consequence decisions that can throw the world off its axis. The hero makes perfectly reasonable decisions that backfire. To Wong, that’s the stuff of tragedy.

Consider Macbeth. Under classic theory, Macbeth’s tragic flaw is powerlust and ego, not to mention his inability to resist his wife’s dastardly scheme. But for Wong, risk provides the fulcrum for the tragedy. Macbeth could have pulled off his scheme, if only …

Risk creates excitement, a glimpse into characters’ throbbing minds and souls, not to mention suspense about the outcome. Of course, tragedy is a different genre than thrillers. But the best literature turns on Wong’s notion of risk. Do you want to call Julius Caesar a history, A Confederacy of Dunces and Huckleberry Finn comedies, and The Power Broker a political biography? Fine, but they’re also tragedies. Wong’s risk theory has lots to offer all these genres. Tragedy simply ups the ante.

Wong’s approach offers insights for the long tradition of tragedy but is especially pertinent to the modern condition. For most of history, the consequences of decisions were for the most part local. Today, even minor decisions can have global repercussions. Also, we live in the age of science, where calculation of odds has become commonplace. many bemoan that this calculation takes the heart and soul out of life. The Age of the Algorithm can, in fact, suck the agency out of even the most strong-willed people. All the more reason for Wong’s brilliant thesis.

If you think Wong is steeped in the data-driven theories of econometric analysis, think again. He is steeped in the classics, for which he earned an M.A. at Brown. His touchstones are Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare, along with contemporary writers like Arthur Miller and Richard Jessup.

Wong, 44, who lives in Victoria, B.C., is a plumber by trade. When he first wrote his masterwork, academic publishers told him to try theater presses; theater presses told him to try academic presses. After a year of to-and-fro, he self-published it. Concerned that the book would get no attention, he teamed with the Langham Court Theater in Victoria to start an international competition for writing a risk tragedy. In its first year, it has already become the world’s biggest theater competition. The first winner is the New York playwright Gabriel Jason Dean for In Bloom, the tale of a journalist who uncovers a sex ring but, by taking certain risks, upends countless lives.

I talked with Edwin by email and phone. He can be reached at melpomeneswork.com. You can get his book on Amazon.

You begin with a bold claim–that tragedy has lost its place in modern literature and storytelling. It is, you say, a “tired art.”

While tragedies are still being written, writers don’t call them tragedies. They can be histories. They can be drama. They can be biography. But not tragedy. Tragedy seems to be a dirty word. Maybe it’s because it’s associated with kings, queens, and other one-percenters who have lost the crowd. Maybe it has a mystique with pity, fear, catharsis, harmatia, hubris, and other concepts that seem distant, out of touch with today’s audiences. I think, however, that people get the idea of risk. Rebranding tragedy as a theatre of risk, a place where risk goes awry might be able to bring the term tragedy back. Maybe it’s not the art of tragedy that’s tired, but the term tragedy.

You argue that all great tragic acts are risks–gambles, willful acts to change circumstances, calculated to upset the order of things. Why is that? What makes a tragic character so prone to throwing the dice rather than working through problems? Is it a matter of character or circumstance?

Both character and circumstance motivate characters to take on risk. Caesar in Shakespeare’s play takes on risk by going to the Forum despite all the ill omens, dreams, and warnings telling him to stay home. But because he is Caesar, he’s as constant as the North Star, so once he makes a choice, he has to stick to it. Brutus, however, takes on risk because of circumstance. He comes from a family of tyrant slayers and he’s afraid Caesar will declare himself a king. Time is running out, the clock is ticking, he must act quickly … [The leading characters] take great and decisive action rather than deal with things in a more tempered way: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune …”

You note that “the thrill of gambling drives tragic heroes to hazard higher enterprise.” So is it all about playing with fire? Is a great gamble necessary to truly understand the stakes of a challenge? Is this existential moment the only thing that can awaken us—and reveal the deeply hidden dangers and horrors of life? 

Tragic heroes have an appetite for life, to want it all and to want it now. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine has to conquer the world, one kingdom is not enough. His Faust is similar. It’s not enough to digest all of theology, law, medicine, and science. He has to have the entire cosmos. If you could ask Oedipus or Tamburlaine or Faust, they would say they take high-risk gambles to experience all that life offers. They think they can overcome any hidden dangers and horrors. They believe in their supreme capacities. They have the “best-laid plans of mice and men.”

By going all-in, they expose themselves to too much risk. And the unexpected catches them off guard. Then they lose all. But they’re not thinking they will lose all. It’s like that poker game between the Cincinnati Kid and Lancey “The Man” Howard in Jessup’s novel. The Kid goes all-in on the last hand. He should win. But the unexpected happens. Lancey beats him. When The Kid asks Lancey how he did it, all Lancey says is: “I made the wrong move at the right time.” Appetite is the word I associate with tragic heroes. It’s the desire to experience all of life to the fullest for the thrill of it all.

Could you have made this thesis before the rise of rational choice and game theory? How much do these insights lend to your thinking about tragedy? Or is it deeper than that–that in a nuclear and global age, countless acts can result in catastrophe? Is risk theory an apocalyptic theory?

Countless acts can result in catastrophe. I like to say that yesterday’s local risks are today’s global risks. One example would be the Irish Potato Famine in the 1800s. To increase yields, farmers went to a monoculture and planted one variety of potato. Unfortunately, that breed was susceptible to a certain fungus, which devastated yields for almost a decade. It was catastrophic, but local. Today, with GMOs, there is a tendency to plant superior yielding monocultures globally. What if these modified crops have a secret, hidden Achilles’ heel that we don’t know about? Now the ramifications will be global. It’s the same with war. With the threat of a nuclear conflict, war has global consequences. This isn’t like Athens and Sparta duking it out on the Peloponnese two-thousand years ago.

I’m fascinated by gambling and, in particular, stock market bubbles: Dutch tulip mania in Newton’s time, the South Sea Bubble, the Great Depression. In all these cases, a real opportunity arose. For example, the New World was opening up to trade when the South Sea Bubble started inflating. Then people start piling in. Next, people start going all-in. And that’s when the trouble starts. When you go all-in, you expose yourself to all sorts of unpredictable risks. That’s what I see tragic protagonists doing: Going all-in. That’s when the trouble starts.

It’s fascinating to look at the protagonist’s actions through rational choice and game theory. For too long people have been looking at the protagonist’s actions as an error for which they pay a comeuppance. What if the protagonist has made a good, solid bet that another rational agent, should they have been in the protagonist’s position, would have also made? It’s only the unexpected low-probability, high-consequence event that throw things awry. This way, tragedy is more a lesson in risk management than a lesson in ethics. More things can happen than what we think will happen!

The risk theater follows Aristotle’s narrative arc, but with different emphasis — from temptation (Act I) to wager (Act II) to casting the die (Act III). In this sense, the “resolution” seems to have more to do with upsetting the universe than setting it right. Is that a fair statement?

Absolutely, heroes upset and test the limits of what’s possible. In Aristotle, drama’s end goal is to elicit pity and fear. We identify with the hero. The hero could be us. So we feel pity and fear (since the hero could be us). When the hero falls, we’re purged or cleansed of these emotions.

In risk theatre, the telos is to elicit anticipation and apprehension. We experience anticipation because we are expecting some kind of gambling act. We say to ourselves, What human value will the protagonist wager? And then, when the gambling act is revealed, we feel apprehension because we know that the unexpected event is coming. What will happen?

Might we restate the risk theory like this: We live in an age in which we cannot solve problems, only push them along and reveal new aspects of the problem; therefore, characters (and their storytellers) desperately reach for the “Hail Mary” of risky moves? In other words, risk theater shows the essential unsolvability of problems.

The characters, I think, do believe they can solve problems. They don’t foresee, of course, the unexpected low-probability, high-consequence event coming out of left field though. But yes, since the characters often lose all, I could see how the audience could walk away from risk theatre pondering the unsolvability of problems. How can the problem be solvable when you can’t see the unintended consequences? I hadn’t thought of this but, yes, I see how people could see it this way.

What is for you, the most telling moment of tragedy? Is it that moment of calculation, resolve, vacillation, when the hero either hedges his bets or throws caution to the winds?

The moment of tragedy that gives me the shivers is when a character “gets it,” understands that their best-laid plans have [produced terrible consequences] because of an exceedingly low-probability, but high-consequence event. In Macbeth, it’s when Macduff tells Macbeth that he was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped.” In Death of a Salesman, it’s when it suddenly dawns on Loman that his insurance policy makes him worth more dead than alive. In Mourning Becomes Electra, it’s when Lavinia realizes (to her horror) she’s become her mother and Orin realizes he’s become his father. In this moment, each character realizes the power of chance and blind luck over their intentions, motives, and strategies. The smallness of human intention in the face of the vastness of the random element…

As Aristotle noted, resolutions of great dramas have two qualities: they are surpising but at the same time feel inevitable. Is this a reflection of Littlewood’s Law, namely, that we can expect to see one-in-a-million occurrences about once a month? That our life is filled with “storms of the century,” and it’s the dramatists’s job to point them out and make (some) sense of them?

Exactly! To me, tragedy dramatizes not the event that happens 99 times out of 100, but the event the happens 1 out of 100 times. I think the tragic playwright’s job is to dramatize risk to get people to think about risk. Then it’s the audience’s job to think about risk, to ponder and wonder: “What happens when more things that I thought could happen happen?” By showing the triumph of the one-in-a-million events, tragedy offers a lesson in risk management. It may only happen one time out of a million, but man, when it happens that one time, it sure has far-reaching consequences! And yes, absolutely, I think we should be thinking about risk and “storms of the century” because, like you say, Littlewood’s Law says, they actually happen once a month.

One of my favorite plays is Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes. It’s the only play in the canon where you can statistically prove the odds of what happened and what did not happen. Civil war. Seven attacking captains (one of whom is Eteocles). Seven defending captains (one of whom is his brother Polyneices). The city has seven gates. What are the odds that the brothers will be assigned to the seventh gate? The odds are unlikely, about 2 percent or one out of 49. What are the odds that the brothers are assigned to the other gates? In 48 out of 49 times, the brothers don’t go to the final gate and kill themselves and spread pollution. But that’s not what Aeschylus dramatizes. He dramatizes the one-out-of-49 outcome, the least likely outcome. Of course, the audience knows what’s going to happen at the beginning of the play. But Aeschylus suppresses this outcome with all his tools as a dramatist. When it does happen, the audience is “surprised.”

You make a distinction between open and closed systems and forward- and backward-looking stories. Do you know Jim Carse’s work Finite and Infinite Games? Might the problem be encapsulated like this: Tragedies involve characters who don’t understand or appreciate the importance of “keeping the game going”?

Most characters are going for something temporal, or finite: wealth, status, power, glory, the opportunity for revenge. Some characters, are part of something bigger. Take Orestes in Aeschylus’s The Oresteia. He seems to be part of an infinite game. His actions transform the crude “eye for an eye” retributive justice of the heroic age into the enlightened “trial by jury” system of the archaic and classical ages. But of course, Orestes isn’t aware of this. He just wants to save his own skin and for the Furies to stop chasing him!

You could write a tragedy where the hero thinks that he is in a finite game, but loses all because he is actually in an infinite game. Or vice-verse. This would be very interesting to see.

Isn’t risk theater, ultimately, about characters with different ideas about what is the “price to be paid” for their actions—and different concerns about who pays those process?

Yes, absolutely! Because characters have different ideas about what they are willing to ante up to achieve their desires, tragedy is a valuing mechanism for human values. How much is the soul worth? To Faust, it’s worth 24 years of world domination. How much is compassion or “the milk of human kindness” worth? To Macbeth, one Scotch crown. And yes, different people can pay the price as well. So in Ibsen’s Master Builder, Solness pays the price by giving up happiness, but also all those around him must give up their happiness as well. I think one of the fascinating things about risk theatre for audiences is to see what characters are willing to pay, and for what end.

So how does Pixar find its pixie dust? Magic? Inspiration? The Law of Attraction? Um, nope.

It’s hard, grinding work, with the insistence on getting all the big things — and all the little things — right. The process can hurt some precious feelings along the way. But it works.

The storyboard artist Emma Coats has revealed the 22 rules of storytelling that produced hits like Inside Out, Onward, The Incredibles, and more.

We can assume, given its raft of megahits, that the Pixar people know how to translate these narrative tricks into screen gold.

Work on one of these principles at a time. Don’t try to do too much. Follow the 1 Percent Rule. If you can make your work 1 percent netter every day, you dan do anything.

Laura Zigman paid her dues before hitting the literary jackpot. Early in her career, she was a publicist for a number of major presses, including Times Books, Vintage Books, and Alfred A. Knopf. As she did her day job, she labored on her first novel, Animal Husbandry (1998), a comedy of errors about the mating habits of thirtysomethings. The book became the hit movie Someone Like You (2001).

Her 2006 novel Piece of Work tells the story of a young mother forced to return to her job as a publicist for a celebrity when her husband loses his job. Her (2007) explores the challenges of having a mate who’s still friends with an ex. Dating Big Bird (2012) takes on the struggles of a wannabe breeder who’s mate is a brooder.

Since then Zigman had ghosted books for Texas feminist and gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis (Forgetting to Be Afraid) and pop icon Eddie Izzard (Believe Me). In an interview with The New York Times, Bill Gates freccomended the Izzard book. Laura, meet Bill …

Charlie Euchner: You started, professionally, as a publicist and editor at some major publishing houses, including Times Books, Vintage Books, Knopf. What “tricks of the trade” did you learn, for storytelling and the mechanics of writing, during this period?

Laura Zigman: I learned a lot during that time. Mostly how much time and effort goes into writing a book — even one that doesn’t end up getting good reviews or selling well — and how committed and passionate you must, therefore, be to what you are writing. Publishing then, and especially now, can be a deeply heartbreaking process, and you just have to do it anyway. Writing, revising, metabolizing criticism from readers along the way and keeping the faith that your story will resonate with readers — those are essentials. As is the idea that even when surrounded by masters (which I was when I worked at Knopf), there’s always room for you, and for another story. There is always room for more.

CE: One of the greatest challenges for writers with a “day job” is getting the discipline to work on your project whenever you can. When did you start Animal Husbandry? How did you discipline yourself to write it? How developed was the idea when you started writing?

LZ: That’s always a huge challenge, isn’t it? — finding time to sit and write, and finding the time and space to think. I have always had trouble with both but somehow finding time to clear my head enough to think is that hardest part lately. Back then, because my job was so demanding, I never seemed able to do that writing-before-or-after-work thing — I was exhausted and my mind was too cluttered with all the noise and stress of the day — so I ended up writing once or twice a year, in spurts. I’d take my vacation time and go somewhere to write, or take a staycation in my apartment and write. Writing once or twice a year probably wasn’t the best way to write a novel since every time I sat down to it, so much time has passed that often times my thoughts had changed, too — but it was the only way I could do it so that’s how I did it.

People always want rules for writing and one of my rules is that there are no rules and you just have to make up your own as you go along to get it done. Years later, when I was writing my second novel, and my third, and then my fourth, I had quit my day job and was therefore more able to work on a regular schedule: in between my young son’s naps, or his preschool and elementary school schedule. Fear of not making mortgage payments was also a great motivator….

CE: How do you think about structuring a story — whether it’s a novel or a memoir or even just an essay? Do you start with Aristotle’s narrative arc — or is that something that’s automatic? John McPhee has a process where he writes down all his scenes on 3×5 cards and puts them on a wall and starts moving them around to create a structure. How do you arrange the pieces of your stories?

LZ: As someone who’s always written semi-autobiographical fiction, I often have a sense of the story’s structure because the story I’m telling has, in some way, already happened. It changes when I start to transform it into a new fictional story, of course, and that’s when I think roughly in terms of a three-act structure: What situation the character is in at the beginning of the story; what propels her forward and into more of an abyss; what ultimately allows her to find her way out of it.

That said, I haven’t written a novel since 2006 and the one I’m working on now — well, I have zero structure and no idea what is happening. It’s like writing completely blindly and I can’t say I’m enjoying it!

But I’m trying to have faith in what E.L. Doctorow once said: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” I’m trying to have faith that I can find my way all the way to the end without being able to see more than a word or a line or a paragraph ahead of me.

CE: When Animal Husbandry was adapted to the movie Something About You…, what did you learn about the craft and structure of storytelling? The hardest lesson for many writers is seeing their story turned into something else by screenwriters and directors. That’s life, right? I’m just wondering if seeing this adaptation taught you some storytelling secrets that you were able to use in subsequent writing projects.

LZ: Honestly, I didn’t care what they did to the film adaption of Animal Husbandry because I was so generously compensated! And because I believe that the two products — a novel and a film — are two very different things and that sometimes a film adaptation is better if it deviates somewhat from the novel it’s based on. I was very open to the fact that they were going to make changes to the third act (something about the third act caused them a great deal of trouble but I never quite understood what that was!) and other things along the way. That said, there were certain things I thought they did really well, and other changes they made that I didn’t like at all.

CE: In recent years you have ghosted memoirs for Wendy Davis (who gained national attention with her battle for abortion rights in Texas and later ran for governor) and Eddie Izzard (comedian, actor, writer, and trans activist). What approach do you take to embodying someone else’s voice? When do you realize you know them enough to tell their story in their words?

LZ: I got into ghostwriting almost by accident — I was trying to find a way to earn a living during a decade that had sucked the life out of me emotionally and physically (lots of sickness and death of loved ones and stress). After a few self-help books, I was given the opportunity to work with Wendy Davis, and then Eddie Izzard, and both times I was incredibly moved by who they were as people and what they’d accomplished despite very difficult childhoods. It felt like a privilege to help them tell their stories.

When someone hires you to do this, they put an enormous amount of trust in your ability to be sensitive to what they’ve been through and to accurately translate it onto the page. This takes hours and hours of asking questions and really listening to their answers, of finding the thread of their story, recurring images and symbols that you can carry all the way through. At some point, you start to absorb the cadences and rhythms of their language, as well as the details of their experience, but the challenge remains: to tell their story as if they themselves are telling it. Ghostwriting isn’t writing about someone.

It isn’t telling someone’s story the way you think it should be told. It’s telling someone’s story the way they want it told, the way they’d tell it if they could write it themselves.