Most of us only get one life to live. But Garrett Peck, a Washington-based historian, has had three. By day, he’s Corporate Man, working for a major telecommunications company. At nights, he’s an author. On weekends, he’s a D.C. tour guide.
Peck’s latest book, The Great War in America: World War I and Its Aftermath, explores the politics and social issues of America during the Great War. It’s a compelling read, full of drama and insights about a bygone age. Peck is an old-school historian. He does not want to overwhelm you with his theories and counterfactuals. He simply wants to recreate the past. In this age of “alternative facts,” his mission could not be more important.
I learned of Peck’s work while researching my own book on World War I. In the course of my work, I have devoured books on Woodrow Wilson, the war, America’s social conflicts during and after the war, and more. Peck’s is in the top tier.
Other books have a strong Washington focus. Titles include Prohibition in Washington, D.C.: How Dry We Weren’t (2011), The Potomac River: A History (2012), The Smithsonian Castle and The Seneca Quarry (2013), Capital Beer: A Heady History of Brewing in Washington, D.C. (2014), and Walt Whitman in Washington, D.C.: The Civil War and America’s Great Poet (2015).
His own “just the facts, ma’am” modesty aside, Peck’s work often explores the contradictions inherent in social life. The Prohibition Hangover: Alcohol in America from Demon Rum to Cult Cabernet (2009) explores the inherent contradictions of America’s brief ban on alcohol.
A native Californian, Peck serves on the board of the Woodrow Wilson House and is a member of the Association of the Oldest Inhabitants of D.C.A U.S. Army veteran, he is a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and George Washington University. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.
He can be reached at garrettpeck.com.
Charles Euchner: You are the rare writer who manages to keep a “day job” while also finding time to write ambitious books on important topics. How do you discipline yourself? When do you write? Do you have a big working outline, then work on one piece at a time?
Garrett Peck: I’m a workaholic. That’s closer to the truth than I should probably admit. I have a very busy day job at a large telecom company, and then I write nonfiction books on the side (seven books so far), which always require a tremendous amount of research. And then I’m also a part-time tour guide, which I fell into as a way of promoting my books but has taken on an enjoyable life of its own.
I’ve long told people who want to go into writing: “Don’t quit your day job.” Writing is a tough profession: it’s time consuming, the pay stinks, and you’re competing against all that free content online. Most books sell just a few thousand copies, and getting literary reviews is a challenge. A day job can provide you all kinds of benefits, like financial stability, health care, and retirement savings. And it bears reminding: there is no dignity in poverty.
Of course, my advice is completely hypocritical, as I’m quitting my day job (taking a management buyout) in March 2019. So then my avocation printed on my business card will really become true: Author. Historian. Tour Guide. (I have my mortgage paid off, so that’s how I can afford to leave Corporate America.) But seriously, folks: if you’re a writer, don’t quit your day job.
CE: Publishing is a tough racket. Book enthusiasts don’t always buy books. I know that I go to lots of book talks and don’t always buy.
GP: Whenever I give a book talk, I usually observe that about a third of an audience springs for your book. The others go home empty handed. This is a statistic that has held up since I published my first book in 2009 and hundreds of book events since. Again, you’re competing against “free,” whether that’s Wikipedia or someone checking your book out of the library. It makes it harder to earn a living as an author.
CE: Back to your advice about keeping the day job. It’s hard to keep a strong focus for a large project like a book.
GP: Having so many jobs and activities can really be distracting. That said, I’m pretty disciplined about writing. I try to get a little done every morning before the conference calls begin, and I usually dedicate Saturdays to writing, if I’m not out leading a tour. Fridays at work are usually pretty quiet, so I can a lot done then too. It’s key to schedule time when you can write – and then sit down and get to work. As Barbara Kingsolver has said, the muse has a terrible work ethic, and you’ll usually have to go on without her. Be disciplined about it. Books don’t write themselves.
CE: On top of it all, you’re a tour guide ….
GP: I love being a tour guide, by the way: you get to use your imagination to build a story and share a bit of history with like-minded people. Thus far I’ve developed about fifteen tours around the Washington, DC area (you can see them on my website, garrettpeck.com), and all of them I developed from my writing.
I daresay I get paid better as a tour guide than an author. Thus the paradox: writing a book enables me to create and lead a tour where I actually make the bulk of my living. Tour guiding also develops practical skills like leading a large group of people (“herding cats,” I call it), always knowing where the restrooms are (it’s the first question everyone asks), and using your inner diva to project your voice like an opera singer. Superstar!
CE: Most of your books are set in Washington. D.C., where you live and work. The classic advice for writers is to “write what you know.” But of course, that only goes so far. Most writers begin ignorant of their subjects–at least compared with what they need to know to produce a great book.
GP: Write what you know. I actually love that advice, as it holds true for most people. Or alternatively (as they say in sales): Sell the bananas on the cart. Only you know you, and you have a library of content and lifelong experiences inside of you.
I’m working on a book about Willa Cather and how she created Death Comes for the Archbishop. Now that was someone who wrote what she knew! Out of her dozen novels, half of them take place in frontier prairie towns. Although the town names change, every one of them was Red Cloud, Nebraska, the town she grew up in, and most of the fictional characters were actual people. She endlessly mined her childhood and her hometown.
On the other hand, your own experiences can only take you so far. You also need to do plenty of research into a topic, and commit the time to develop your ideas. As you see in sports, very few people are naturally gifted. Most successful people in sports have practiced, practiced, practiced their way to the top.
CE: How does your knowledge of D.C. shape your topics and research?
GP: I’ve lived here since 1994. I know and love a lot of the history – there’s always something new to uncover – but that’s just the starting point. Any nonfiction research project is going to require me to dive into the archives on a treasure hunt. It’s a fun experience. When you go down the rabbit hole of research, like Alice in Wonderland, you have no idea where you are going to come out. And that’s part of the adventure. It’s kind of a solitary activity, but it comes with many rewards, like the time I was going through C&O Canal Company records in the National Archives and randomly found a signed letter by Francis Scott Key, the Georgetown lawyer who wrote our national anthem. That was kind of cool.
CE: How would you describe your process of putting together big projects? Books require major investments of time and energy. Because of their large scale, they can get out of control. How do you manage it all?
GP: Imagine a book is like a giant dump truck that drops off a million bricks, whose driver tells you, “Here’s your house! Now go build it.” You have to start somewhere: a foundation.
I tend to research and write at the same time. That is, as I go through one source, I type up my notes and capture important ideas and quotes and put them into my draft manuscript. Pretty soon the content starts suggesting an outline for how to organize the material, and thus are born chapters and subsections. That tends to just flow naturally. (Look! I just split an infinitive. Sí, se puede! Yes, we can!)
When writing a big, big topic–like The Great War in America, which took me about four years to research and publish–you will collect far, far more material than you can actually use. So that’s where you have to be like Medea and kill your children. I make it easier on myself by asking: Does this material help answer the question I asked in the beginning, my thesis? If the answer is no, then it’s gotta go.
But don’t just delete the material: rather, cut-and-paste it into a new document. I call mine “Deleted Content,” and it’s there for you should you need to reference it. And that way you needn’t feel bad about removing something you worked hard on. You may get to use it for another project someday.
CE: Nonfiction writers have an advantage and a disadvantage: They can’t make things up. That forces us to do deep research, in order to piggyback off other people’s experiences and knowledge. The disadvantage is that when we run into a topic without any real records, we cannot make stuff up. We have to find clever ways to fill the gaps. What are your thoughts and approaches to these issues?
GP: Oooh, this is a bit of a philosophical question. I’m very much about the facts, which are even more important in this post-truth era. Cold, hard, provable facts. Yes, the truth can be discerned, and the facts are almost always out there. I have zero tolerance toward revisionism: making up a new story to suit your convenience. The current occupant of the White House loves doing this. Sorry to get political, but it’s true. He’s a fabulist and a chronic liar. And his lies are easy to fact-check.
But what happens if you have a few missing pieces of the puzzle? I think in that case that is okay to speculate the possible outcomes with your readers – as long as you make it crystal clear that you are speculating. You can come to reasonable conclusions about what directions the facts point toward, while also acknowledging that alternatives may exist.
As I said, though, don’t get into revisionism. That’s where you get to make up a whole new outcome that the facts don’t support. For example, many in the South think that the Confederacy might have won the Civil War if Stonewall Jackson had lived. That’s pure unsubstantiated conjecture (Jackson died in 1863 after the Battle of Chancellorsville, two years before the war ended). And could one general have made all that much of a difference? I kind of doubt it. The space-time continuum only goes in one direction, and you don’t get do-overs. So repeat after me: No historical revisionism. The facts must always trump lore, mythology, and speculation. Facts, not fictions.
CE: Have you always been a history buff? What history writers have inspired you? Do you model yourself off any great history authors? Or maybe even some fiction writers? If so, how? How would you describe your aspirations as a storyteller, explainer, and stylist?
GP: History has inspired me ever since I was a kid. In the summer before the fourth grade, my family took a driving vacation across the country from Sacramento to visit relatives in Minnesota. We stopped along the way at many historical sites, and was struck by their meaning, even at such a young age. Seeing a site is different than just reading about it in a book.
As a kid, I was blown away by Mount Rushmore and the four presidents’ faces carved there. But as an adult, I look at Mount Rushmore more skeptically and think, We blew up part of a mountain to build giant god-like statues of our favorite presidents?! Isn’t that idolatry? The Black Hills are holy to the Sioux Indians, and yet we went and turned it into a tourist trap. Your perspective changes as you get older and you realize the impact our actions have on other people. Such is the gift of self-reflection.
CE: Tell me something about your ambitions, style, and inspirations as a writer.
GP: My ambitions are to spend the rest of my days writing history books and leading tours, things I can concentrate on full time now that I’m leaving Corporate America. I’ll likely never be J. K. Rowling or Jonathan Franzen, or constantly have guest appearances on CNN like presidential historian Michael Beschloss. And that’s okay. But I can be successful in a small way if I can put food on the table, cover the basics (“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden), and find time to keep pursuing an avocation I just adore.
CE: Do you model yourself off any great history authors? Or maybe even some fiction writers? If so, how? How would you describe your aspirations as a storyteller, explainer, and stylist?
It’s funny, but I’ve never really studied the writing styles of different authors, nor compared them to my own. I have my own style, which is refined in part on where I got my professional start: writing magazine articles. Breezy, somewhat informal, yet informative.
I certainly have my favorite authors, largely because of their craft in telling stories. And trust me: whether you’re teaching a class, writing a book, or leading a tour, it is all storytelling. I’ve long appreciated James McPherson, the dean of Civil War historians, as well as historian David McCullough and his detailed histories and analysis.
From the fiction side of the house, I love how sparse Willa Cather and Ernest Hemingway constructed their stories and even their sentences. They were so straightforward and to the point. Or how F. Scott Fitzgerald could stretch a metaphor into something beautiful and heartbreaking. I read Fitzgerald and think, if I could only write like him! But I’m not Fitzgerald. I’m me.
