The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 191: Ghost Writers in the Sky

Episode Date: March 16, 2021

While you will doubtless find this particular episode, chapter, or installment to be interesting, fascinating, or provocative, you will also learn something about the importance of choosing just the right word, term, or expression when attempting to write a memorable tale, story or yarn.  After that, Mike picks the enormous brain of Alex Abramovich, a ghost writer you've never heard of, who writes best-selling books for people you have.  

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Hey, guys, it's Mike Row, and this is episode number 191 of the way I heard it. This one's called Ghost Writers in the Sky. Ghost Writers in the Sky. Not to be confused with Ghost Riders in the Sky. The tune made famous by Johnny Cash, once upon a time. You know the one, right? And Old Cal Poe went right now. dark and windy day.

The original version of this was actually done by a guy named Stan Jones. Upon a ridge, he rested as he went along his way. Stan recorded it back in 1948 or early 49, I think. When all at once a mighty herd of red-eyed cows he saw. After that, Burl Ives did it. And then I think Bing Crosby did it. Lawrence Welk recorded it. Finally got its way to Johnny Cash, and that's when I heard it.

Plowing through the ragged sky and up a cloudy draw. Great tune. It has absolutely nothing to do with this podcast. However, we won't be talking about ghost writers today, but rather talking with a ghost writer, a very accomplished ghost writer. You've probably never heard of because that's how ghost writers role. Their anonymity is their stock and trade. But this one happens to be a friend of mine.

His name is Alex Abramovich. And aside from working on books for people like James Patterson and Courtney Love and Nikki Six and dozens of other famous people, I don't think I'm allowed to mention. He was also kind enough to collaborate with me a couple of years ago as I attempted to organize the book you've been listening to into a series of semi-cogent chapters. Now, to be clear, I did write every word of this book myself, including chapter 13, which you're about to hear right now. A chapter that was deliberately overwritten for reasons. I hope you'll find self-evident when you listen to it. Anyway, I invited Alex onto the podcast for a couple reasons. First of all, I missed the guy. He's been sequestered in Brooklyn for the last year. And like a lot of

New Yorkers, he is no doubt climbing the walls. But he's also a really great research. for anybody who has ever wondered what it's like to write a book. If you think maybe it's something you'd like to try, you should listen to our conversation. He provides some really terrific advice for anybody who has ever imagined what it might be like to sit down and try and put your thoughts onto a piece of paper. Invaluble advice from a ghost writer in the sky. It all starts right now. This is the way I heard it. Chapter 13.

Call it what you will. Peter stood dumbstruck in the doorway of his bathroom, searching for just the right word. Gastly came to mind, followed in no particular order by gruesome, grizzly, and graphic. There, on the bathroom floor, sitting in a puddle of his own blood, was Peter's uncle, Sir Samuel Romilly.

Moments earlier, the two men had been in the study, going over the treasure house Peter had been working on. Then Sir Samuel had risen from the couch, walked into the bathroom, picked up a straight razor, and dragged the blade across his throat. Dear God, cried Peter, as he ran to Sir Samuel's side, What have you done? The answer was self-evident.

Samuel Romilly had severed his carotid artery, along with his windpipe, heartbroken by the death of his beloved wife, which had occurred three days earlier. The poor man had entered a state of bottomless grief. Or was it something more than grief? Despair, perhaps, devastation, despondency? Call it what you will.

The mental anguish had been more than Sir Samuel had been able to bear, and Peter could only watch, as his uncle tried to scribble his final thoughts onto a piece of bloody stationary. My dear, he wrote, I wish. He couldn't find the right words. He sat there instead, staring at the blank page, bleeding all over the bathroom floor.

Moments later, he died in his nephew's arms. Peter was no longer dumbstruck. He'd moved on to traumatized, nonplussed, astonished. Gobsmacked, he did what he always did, when the chaos of an unpredictable world threatened to overwhelm him. He walked back to his study, opened his treasure house, and started writing. Two years later, sitting alone in the gloom of his parlor, Peter was once again searching for just the right word. Was he depressed? Probably. With a schizophrenic grandmother, a paranoid

mother, a bipolar sister, an overly anxious daughter, and of course a suicidal uncle, Peter knew that melancholia ran in the family. But to what do you? degree was he afflicted? Was he disheartened or merely down in the dumps? Was he disenchanted, dismayed, or demoralized? Would he succumb to the same darkness that had claimed his uncle? Call it what you will. But as Peter pondered the precise nature of his malaise, his ennui, his languor, and lugubriosity, he couldn't help but notice that the wheels on the carriages passing by his window appeared to be breaking the laws of physics. At least, that's how they looked through the slats of his partially opened shutters.

Interesting. After much observation and careful thought, he concluded that his eyes were retaining an image of the spokes for a fraction of a second after the slats and the shutters had interrupted the rotation of the wheel, thereby creating the illusion that the spokes were moving backward. Hmm, that wasn't just interesting. That was intriguing, titillating. Maybe even. Beguiling? Call it what you will.

Peter was definitely onto something. So once again, he reached for his treasure house, which was considerably thicker than it had been two years earlier. He began to write a detailed analysis of what he had just observed. He called it explanation of an optical deception in the appearance of the spokes of a wheel seen through vertical apertures. Not exactly the title of a bestseller, but then Peter wasn't writing one. He was just trying to make sense of the chaos in an unpredictable world.

The result? Hundreds of scholarly papers on countless natural phenomena. In this case, a detailed explanation of the defect in the human retina that came to be known as persistence of vision, a principle that explains the illusion of motion, a principle that led Peter to fabricate a prototype, a prototype with a shutter similar to the shutter that hung in Peter's parlor and an aperture similar to the window from which his shutter hung. Now, I suppose I could just say,

that's the way I heard it, and direct your attention to Tinsletown, where the name of the man most responsible for creating the motion picture camera is honored today with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I could, but I won't, because ironically, or perhaps paradoxically, or better yet, unjustly, Peter's name isn't there. Nor is it in the halls of NASA, even though Peter invented the slide rule, a mathematical breakthrough that enabled us to get a man on the moon, nor is it on the aquifers of London, even though Peter did find a way to purify England's drinking water.

Nor is it on the facades of hospitals, even though Peter was primarily responsible for the development of general anesthesia. Peter's name isn't on the cover of the Encyclopedia Britannica, though hundreds of scholarly papers he wrote on countless natural phenomena can be found therein, no fewer than 300,000 words written by Peter's, Peter, words that helped explain the chaos of an unpredictable world.

The point is, we don't remember this prodigy, this polymath, this pan-sophic for his incredible list of accomplishments. We remember him for his incredible list of words. Specifically, the list of words he compulsively compiled to combat the depression that perpetually plagued him. Words whose early assemblage began as a unique form of therapy, but whose ultimate congregation went on to become an eponymous compilation of rhetorical replacements that went on to sell no less than 40 million copies over the next two centuries. I refer, of course, to the indispensable directory of dialectical determination that was destined to dramatically increase the word count of every term paper that's ever been written, authored,

or penned, while helping millions of aspiring writers prove concluding. that alliteration almost always annoys. I'm talking about an unparalleled linguistic lineup of syntactical substitutes, a crucial compendium of etymological options, a singular source of all things synonymous, conceived in serendipity, and dedicated to the proposition that no crossword puzzle should ever go unfinished. Call it what you will.

That tome on your bookshelf wouldn't be there today but for the grief-stricken uncle who died, searching for the right words, and the melancholy nephew who never stopped collecting them. A remarkable collection that Peter Roge called his treasure house, or, if you prefer Latin, his thesaurus. A while ago now, on a flight to Baltimore, the same flight I'm on now, in fact, I stumbled across an Atlantic article about Roge. It was not what you would call complimentary. The article was written by Simon Winchester, who's worked on various documentaries for the history and discovery channels.

I've had the pleasure of narrating a few. Winchester wrote a terrific book, too, about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, the professor and the madman. I'd recommend it. In fact, I just did. But I was surprised to find that, putting it mildly, or gently, or reticently, Winchester was not a fan of Roger's thesaurus.

In Winchester's view, Rogey did more to discourage good writing than encourage it. According to the Atlantic, good writing has little to do with finding the right word and everything to do with the brave employment of the words that one already knows. Our literary powers are born, Winchester wrote, not out of banal and mediocre suggestion, not out of lexical shopping lists, but out of passion, thought, and intensity of feeling. Is Winchester right? Beats me. With or without Roche's help, I wouldn't know how to write novels.

I wouldn't know where to begin. But I do write these stories, and from time to time, I must confess my search for le Montjuice. compels me to consult the innumerable and countless, multitudinous and myriad, infinite, incalculable, and unnumbered possibilities that Rojais affords. In fact, I did when I wrote Roge's story, which begs the question, was the tale really diminished, lessened, minimized, or smallened in some way when I started to lean on that linguistic crutch? What about my captain up there in the cockpit, is he cheating me out of an honest flight by relying on the autopilot? By the same token, that I cheat on my taxes this year by relying on the sucker and support of a little

machine I call the calculator? Whatever the answers are, good on you, Simon, for protecting the integrity, the probity, and the sanctity of the writer's craft and profession. But let's hear it, too, for those who have pulled themselves up by their own intellectual bootstraps while conceding that sometimes it's okay just to ask for some help. Is it weird to love people

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writer, you're really not allowed to talk about 90% of the stuff I'd like to ask about. True? Yeah, but that leaves a juicy, 10%. So we might not plumb the depths that Oprah Winfrey, you know, plumbed last night with her subjects, but you'll get something out of me, I bet. When it came down to Oprah or you, honestly, we flipped the coin. I mean, it was that close, but in the end, we just thought for the kind of interview that we want to bring to the listeners of this podcast, there's really only one way to go. And that's AA, Alex Abramovich. It is great to see you again. Are you

Okay? Everything good? Yeah, everything's good. I made the same decision with you as down to you or an Oprah and I went with you. I'm not even sure how to talk to you about what I went through a couple years ago putting this book together. It was nothing like I imagined. I appreciate your help on it. I would have mentioned you more in it had I had my druthers and I would have started with the crazy convoluted map that you put together that showed the connections. between the stories I had written and the possibilities that could become this book. So was that part of the plan, or were you just completely making stuff up as you went? And be honest, how difficult am I to collaborate with? Well, that's a difficult question to answer because the truth is that it was maybe the best

professional experience I've had in your pure pleasure, but there's not much of an audience for that sort of thing. You were, it's rare for, you know, usually when people work with, with a ghost writer, a book doctor, it's because they're full of ideas or they've got a long list of accomplishments, but they're not necessarily writers. And this was one of those weird situations in which, you know, I was teamed with a writer. I don't know if you knew it at the time. I think you had your suspicions that maybe you were a writer and just didn't want it to admit it to yourself. So in my experience, what ended up with us is it ended up looking much more like a writer's room than some of the collaborations I'm used to. And that was tremendous, tremendous fun. It was fun.

You know, it was fun because I don't fancy myself a writer. I love to write. And as I told you, I think on the day we met, my biggest fear in trying to write a book was to screw up my hobby. And I didn't want that to happen. but I also didn't want to mail it in and as we've discussed ad nauseum shortcuts lead to long delays you know if you're going to hire a ghost writer

logically what you ought to do is let that person write your book right talk with that person collaborate and then just go away and let that person do what they do but I couldn't do that but I still needed help no you sure you sure couldn't do that would not say out of my way for a minute but you know what

I mean we I'm glad now that some time has gone by you look back at it and conclude that by and large it was not only fun but rewarding in that way it was very much like a microcosmic version of dirty jobs

dirty jobs was hard work and for a long time I didn't realize how much fun I was having. But enough time goes by, you look back and you realize, oh, it's not what I thought it was. It's different and better and surprising. And most every decent thing I've ever worked on has a component of that to it. I want to ask you, what is more rewarding to sit down and write your own book, as you have done, bullies of friendship, terrific read, or sit down with somebody like a, I'll bleep this out if I'm not allowed to say. say it, but like a Courtney Love or a Nikki Six, or some of these other people you've worked with,

is it more gratifying to help them get their vision on the page or your own? It's a good question. I mean, it's more gratifying in some ways to work with others. It's certainly more fun and less lonely. But also, you know, it takes a lot of the pain away and it takes, you're not sitting there like you do with your own work, pouring over all of the mistakes you made and all the things you'd have done differently. I always think of John Lennon. The second guessing, dude. The second guessing, right?

I mean, it either makes you better or it destroys you. What is it most likely to do in your opinion, given those two? Well, I mean, in my limited experience of one, what it forces you to do at a certain point is learn how to let go. Otherwise, you lose your mind. and you let the thing be what it is, which depending on how you look at it, is either a broken, a broken pale version of what you hoped it would be, or something that surprises you and hopefully, you know, delights you. And one thing that I'm pretty sure I know about writing is, is that if you have the capacity to surprise yourself while you're doing it, you might be able

to surprise and delight the reader. So to a point, you want to not know where you're going and you want to leave room for as much room as possible for for happy accidents. And as long as you know that... Alex, forgive me, but that's, but I'm sorry, if you're going to hit me with that level of wisdom and insight. Yeah, too wise. Well, it's very wise. But no, no, look, I've been saying a version of that all of my life.

My favorite comedians are not the ones who try to make me laugh. They're the ones who amuse themselves, first and foremost. my favorite writers give me the sense maybe it's just imagined but it's the sense that they're writing to please themselves likewise singers

any artist if if job one is to satisfy them it makes it easier as somebody in the audience I think to go along for the ride maybe yeah I mean I would hope so but also to get to that point where you're you're riffing at light speed and delighting yourself

or doing what Eddie Van Halen could do with the guitar. I mean, what the audience isn't seeing is the, I mean, forget 10,000 hours. It's hundreds of thousands of hours of intense concentration that it takes to be able to leave all that at the side of the stage and go out there and perform. One of the things that I like about writing is that it's super performative. That's all that it is is a performance and an experience you try to give the reader. But the other side of that is you have a certain degree of control that you might not have. if you were actually physically standing on stage.

Not a certain degree of control, total control. Total control. But as you were saying, only after a point, because total control up to the limits of your own capabilities, which are not infinite, right? Of course, but in a relative world, if you're a writer, you know, you get all the credit and you get all the blame. It's you.

You know, even if you bring in help, it doesn't matter. That thing between the two covers, once you let it go, as you said earlier, it's not unlike the baseball that the pitcher releases. It's gone. It's out there. And it's going to stay out there for time immemorial. And whether you got it right or whether you didn't, whether you said what you meant or whether you fell short, it's all there forever. And that awareness, I think, for me anyway, and I bet a lot of other people, knowing that, can paralyze you or it can get you off your ass and get you busy.

It just depends on what kind of cards you were dealt and how you play them. Well, I would agree with that. And I would also say to answer your original question that when you look back on it, writing for yourself or working with other people, one of the differences there for me has been when I look at my book, the piece that I've made with that is that's the best book that I was able to write given what I had to work with and my abilities at the time. And I'm not being modest.

I just, that's what it is for better and worse. And I'm happy with it. I like that book. I hope other people like it. But it's a lot easier for me to look at your book, which I have my hands in that too, and say, that's a good book. That's a great book. I'm really happy to give that to somebody for, you know,

Christmas or Father's Day. It's easier for me to accept that and live with it, partly because it's your face on the cover and not mine. But it's easier to take pride in, in a way, if that makes sense. It makes complete sense.

One thing we can talk about if you want that's a little bit to the side of your question is I only know one other person who does what I do. Dan Pippenbring, who you've spoken with yourself, who helped Prince,

well, was going to write Prince his memoir, helped Prince write his memoir, and then three months into that process, Prince died. And Dan ended up producing a very good book that wasn't the memoir, but, you know, was the closest we'll ever come to having Prince's memoir. So Dan and I get together sometimes and talk about this very weird work that we do. And none of us came up through the ranks of ghost writers. And I'm not sure that there are such ranks. But I know that one thing people negotiate for when they, you know, when they get their agents and

lawyers in the room is for writing credit on the cover. And that's something that I've always tried to avoid. So in theory, I would give up 10% of my fees so that you would stick my name on the cover. But my sense is if you're a ghost writer, you should be a ghost who's writing. You shouldn't have your name anywhere on the cover or anywhere on the book. So with, I'm working with Nikki Six on a memoir now called the first Nikki Six of course the famous drummer? Bassist for Motley crew

Is he drum? Basist? Yeah and who formed Not as famous as I thought. Tommy. Tommy Lee is equally equally famous. But Nikki, whose birth name was Frank Ferrana, we're telling the story of the first 21 years of

Nicky's life which carries him up to him changing his name to Nicky Six. And and right before forming Motley Crew in 40 years ago now the hard as that is to believe and you know that book if all goes right will be called

the first 21 by Nikki Six and Frank Ferrana and that makes me happy because it's funny even if only a few people get the joke before they've gotten to the end of the book sure you know Courtney loves back to credit for a second

back to credit because that's too important to gloss over too and it goes right to the heart of You know, I always say in my industry that the only time people move faster in Hollywood than when they're trying to get away from the blame is when they're trying to go toward the credit. You know, I argued for years. And really, I don't see myself as a particularly self-absorbed person. I am to a degree, but it was important to me to see a created by credit on dirty jobs because it was my idea. or so I told myself.

In the end, I stole it from George Plimpton and Studs Terkel and, you know, a bunch of other guys. There are no new ideas. But in this community of ghost writers, and I know there are many, in this world where nobody's really allowed, were encouraged to take credit, who's the best? Who's the best ghost writer you know of? And can you even say who he or she is? Well, I mean, you are allowed. There are plenty of books I could pull off my shelf that will say, you know, Aretha Franklin with David Ritz.

There's a guy named David Ritz who lives in Texas, who writes every other book by a musician. And he's a good writer. I think the gold standard is Andre Agassi's memoir. The first time that I ghost wrote anything, ghost writing is a weird word for this. It wasn't quite ghost writing, but the first time that I worked on a book

that someone else had their name on it, I did a couple of books for James Patterson, who had never done a true crime before. He had done his thrillers. And those thrillers are great, but there were a couple of true crime books that I worked with, with Patterson. And I didn't know how to do it. And what I didn't know at the time was that there's really no way to do it.

You just do it like so many things. So I went and I read Andre Agassiz's memoir, which I will say is phenomenal that he co-wrote with a sports writer, whose name actually is not on the cover for related reasons to mine. And I think I might have got my idea from there where I read in the acknowledgments, Andre Agassi said, I didn't write this book. This other guy wrote the book, and he didn't want his name on it. And I thought that was classy. It's so classic. And look, the interesting sidebar, I got off the phone two weeks ago with Andre Agassi, who called regarding our foundation and wanted to get involved. And it was really interesting talking to him

in hearing you now say that a guy is competitive as him. And as you, as you know, and as you, you certainly know in that world, you and I might think we're competitive. We have an understanding of what competition means, but at that level, I don't think it's anything the average person can relate to. It's so important for an athlete at that level to give credit where it's due and to recognize it when he sees it. And so it must have been very strange for a guy like Andre to be told by somebody who's much more talented than he in that space. At that thing. Right. Leave my name off.

L MNO. It's one of my favorite names of a production company. LMNO, leave my name off. But I just think it's so interesting what you do. And also, Alex, the reason I wanted to talk to you and part of the reason I hired you was because I got the sense very early on. You are a tortured artist, and I say that with respect,

but you're also a tradesman. You, to me, you approach the craft of writing in a very similar way that my granddad approached building a house and that a lot of other trades people I know look at a job. You know, you're a workman. And I don't say that with any insult either. It's a great combination of tortured artistry and brute diligence.

You're a diligent man and you're a diligent writer. And I just think that a lot of people don't think of writing in terms of a craft or a trade. They see it as a talent. And if you have any thoughts on that, this would be a perfect moment to share them. Talent doesn't hurt. I mean, maybe until it does, it only takes you so far. And then, you know, you need other stuff. I'm not sure how talented or creative I am.

I think I have a natural advantage in that my father as an engineer and my mother was a musician. and to a certain extent I have those things mixed up in me so I can play scales and make things sound pretty and I'm also very interested in making sure that whatever I make is structurally sound

and a weight-bearing structure so I'm always stress testing my sentences and my paragraphs and my chapters and are the is every word carrying its own weight in this sentence

but I mean I'm flattered by the craftsman comparison And I think if what I do is build good tables and good chairs, there's nothing more that I want. And if anything, my ideal for those tables and chairs is going to be shaker furniture where it doesn't have and doesn't need too much ornamentation. You know, it just – it's right. It is the thing that it does. You said something earlier. You said a couple of quasi-memorable things.

And I actually jotted this one down because I thought it was terrific. And it goes to the tradesman beat. You said, Mike, when you're writing these stories, I can't tell you how to do it, but you'll know it when you do it. Because when you write the last sentence, you'll hear something in your mind go, but you didn't flick your fingers. You said, SNIC. S-N-I-C-K. It'll, like the sound a box makes that's perfectly made when you close it, it doesn't go clap, It doesn't go thud. It doesn't go funk.

It goes snick. And when the last sentence of a story does that, it means you somehow landed the plane. And that made perfect sense to my brain. And I've been listening for that sound ever since. Yeah, I haven't heard it much. To be perfectly honest, I must have stolen that from Yeats, who said he spoke about the click of a sentence snapping shut like a well-made box. Right. And that's, that's, that, I always remember that.

And I always remember the only piece of writing advice that I ever got that I held on to and remembered was my friend many years ago. My friend Alex Ross, the, the music critic, had also been reading Yeats. And he had been reading Yeats' essays. And he said, look, here's a really interesting thing. You'll read two pages of Yeats and he doesn't use a single adjective. And then on the third page, he'll use one or maybe he'll use two, and they go off like a bomb because you've been so starved for them. And you didn't know you were missing them until you stumbled across them.

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Use code Mike. Get 20% off your order at American-giant.com slash Mike. American Giant, American Made. American Giant American Made. You know, my favorite moment with Yates, believe it or not, happened in dirty jobs. I was sexing chickens with some Asian chicken sexers up in Iowa, and they didn't speak a lot of good English, but we had these coffee cans in front of us, and we were squeezing the poop out of these little chicks, you know, and the air was

full of dander and twittering and ambiguity, very much like a German porno, you know. And just when it couldn't get any weirder, I looked at this 90-year-old Asian man who probably couldn't understand what I was saying. And I quoted a line from Crazy Jane talks to the bishop, which says, a woman can be proud and stiff, went on love intent, but love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement. For nothing can be whole or soul that has not been rent. And again, that's me trying to amuse myself and pass the time while sexing chickens somewhere in the heartland. looking back at it years later when it aired in the middle of the night was a moment of extraordinary pride because it all it went snick all of a sudden between a language I didn't quite understand

the dander in the air the tittering of the baby chicks the coffee can filled with their excrement and yates the world started to make a little bit more sense is that beautiful things come to come together like that. That reminds me of something Larry Flint, the late lamented Larry Flint, the publisher of Hustler who just died. He grew up on a farm. You know what he said about growing up on a farm? Tell me. He said, anyone who grows up on a farm and tells you they've never had sex with a chicken is lying. You know, I'm pretty sure a few years earlier, Dr. Seuss wrote something similar in that unforgettable pop-up. Fair or foul.

Maybe. My adventures down on the far. Maybe there's a pop-up book in our future as well. You know what? I would do a pop-up. I would absolutely do a pop-up with you. I think we're going to live to see the return of the project. Can you imagine the opening up a coffee table book and the Mighty Matt pops up or the Verrazano?

Right. The bridge. How about a pop-up book of bridges? Wouldn't that be amazing? It'd be unbelievable. Now, it would be thick, but every time you turn a page, a miniature bridge appears, and under it is either an epic poem about engineering or building, or just some straight up biographical information about the construction of the structure. That would be amazing. That would be amazing. But bridges are sort of a through theme in your book, aren't they? We've got the Mighty Mac. We have the Brooklyn Bridge. The Golden Gates in there as well. the Golden Gates in there as well.

I'm, I can see, looking at my window right now, I can see the Brooklyn Bridge. And if I turn that way, I see a wall, but behind the wall is the Verrazano. You know, there's a, there's a podcast. It's not in the book. I don't know if you read it or not, but the writing of bridge over troubled water.

And Simon was in his apartment, not far from where you are. And Garfunkel had left in there looking, you know, he's looking out the window. at the bridge and basically sitting there on his bed with his guitar, plucking it out. The etymology of a song. By the way, how's your music book coming?

And hasn't it been 20 years since you started? And what is it going to take for you to complete that, Ahab? It's been 20 years since I started just about. That book has been, I'm on my third publisher because the editor has kept on making his way in the world. Sean, my long-suffering editor, Sean McDonald. And he's taken me along, drag me along, like a wet dog to every one of these publishers. And it actually, maybe you can speak to this as somebody with a musical background. But I've found all sorts of reasons to be stuck on this book over the years.

And part of what it comes down to is my same friend, Alex, the music critic, he and I taught a class together many years ago, over a decade ago now. And we are sitting with a room full of students, and they were paying much more attention to Alex, who's much more accomplished than I am. And at some point, they looked at him and said, can you do what you do if you don't have a solid grounding in music theory? and Alex, knowing full well that I don't have a grounding in music theory, solid or otherwise, said no, no, I don't think so. Couldn't. Can't be done.

I actually brought this up last year with Alex, and he asked me the same question you're asking, how's the book going? And the short answer is I've spent the past three years taking lessons and studying music theory and scribbling all sorts of things. on musical manuscript paper. And I feel like I'm finally getting there. And even though most of the people I'm writing about proudly didn't know theory and couldn't read music themselves, it helps me to have a solid technical understanding of what's happening in this Jimmy Hendrick song

or this Beatle song or whatever else. Are you still studying guitar, by the way? Are you still playing? I'm studying guitar. I'm still playing my... music teacher Chris Christopher White is a guitarist but he was a composition major when he went to school so I sort of have the best of both worlds I'm studying theory and I'm studying guitar anyway when I told Alex this story I said well I've been studying theory because you set this thing 10 years ago schmuck

and Alex left to be and he said well I only met that for classical music I didn't mean it for the well here's your problem and you here's your problem you care deeply about writing and you care deeply about music. So now you care deeply about two things. And because you're a tradesman, you feel the pressure not to churn out something that, as you said earlier, was as good as it could be for the time. For whatever reason, that's not working now. You've moved the goalpost. You've raised the bar. This book you've been working on for 20 years about music has to be great. And because you become better with every passing month, you know that when you finish, you will have delivered a product that's ultimately inferior to the person and the ability you will ultimately have.

And so, therefore, you've paralyzed yourself. Next question. Yeah, thanks for the vote of confidence. No, that's about where I've landed, but I still bash my head against it. I think this year I'm going to take six months and work on nothing but that book. And we'll see what happens. But I don't know if you had this experience when we were working on your book, but sometimes you get really stuck and you just think you can't go on and you can't think of anything. So you come up with a way to trick yourself.

And I'm coming up with, I keep trying to come up with ways to trick myself because my horizon line will always outstrip my abilities to get there. And I've made my piece with that. How do you do it? What's the trick? Well, with that book, I don't know because I haven't solved it. Yeah. Well, I'm just thinking, like for me, there are times when I'm desperately trying to remember something. Not a tangible thing, not necessarily a date or a person's name or anything that specific,

but an idea that I had, a notion, right? And when you can't get your hands around the notion and you knew it was a good notion, you know, it's a hinge, right, that's going to either hold a chapter together or it's important. And it's out of your reach. I find that trying specifically to focus on that is the absolute worst thing I can do. The only way notions that getaway ever come back is when you kind of creep around the edge and try and remember a thing that might have been happening contemporaneously when you had the idea or a person that might have been with you.

And you just have to get close to it. And then your brain will either find it for you or it won't. but there are a lot of tricks out there. I don't know many. I know a couple, but I'm sure you must have Forrest Gumped your way. Like, for instance, if you were to pick up that guitar behind you right now

and play a little bit as we talk, would it enhance or detract from our conversation? Do you find that when you're doing two things at once, each one becomes less efficient, or do they both become better? well one thing that's nice about guitar and it's sort of my meditation is that I'm really only doing one thing when I play guitar when you're writing you sort of are doing 10 things at once so it's hard to you know I like jumping between two writing projects you get stuck on one you jump tracks and work on the other but um I guess my version of coming at a thing from the side maybe a metaphor that that may or may not be useful is uh is you know shooting and target practice this just shooting at a target with a rifle is you can aim it, but if you're still tense when you pull the trigger,

you're going to go wide of the mark. What you have to do is aim, breathe, go slack to a certain extent, and then fire. All the prep work that goes into the aiming will inform your shot, but it's also the relaxation that will guide the bullet. And in writing, I also feel like there's all this tension that goes into it. But if that tension translates into what you're writing directly,

it'll come out stilted and stillborn. So you have to find a way to relax to trick yourself into being loose, staying loose. So it's a little bit like James Brown. You've got to be totally loose and totally tight at all times. Right. So much of it is a dichotomy. It's like when you talk about technique,

especially if you're a performer. a singer. You know, technique is everything. Technique is a thing you have to fall back on. And if you own your technique, like Nikki Six, then you can forget it. And when you forget it, well, that's when the people in the audience become comfortable. Because nobody wants to see your technique. They want to see your artistry, I think. And look, in my little weird world, that was certainly the case with dirty jobs and everything I've ever worked on. Nobody wants to see a host working too hard to host. Nobody wants to see an actor acting.

Nobody wants to see a singer composing. You know, it's hard to articulate it. But it's like you have to forget the technique, but not until you've mastered it. And so, I mean, what is your advice? There are people listening to this right now who think they can write. Some are wondering if they can write. Some are certain they can, some are sure they can't. How do you actually find out if you've got that thing?

Well, I mean, something I tell my students, or I guess when people ask me, is it is a lot like show business in that where it's a lot like stand-up, where the most surefire way to find out is to try it out in front of other people. and you know if you're lucky at first you'll bomb and people will be honest about it and the way that you learn is by failing in public and and being so embarrassed about it that you work hard enough harder than you thought was capable so that maybe you don't bomb as badly the next time and you build and you build and and you build from there but I find that a mistake many people make is that they feel they feel that writing has to be elevated somehow or arch in a way that it doesn't have to be. I mean, plain words put in plain order, we'll do the job just fine. It doesn't have to look like writing.

Who was the best at that? Who took plain words and put him in a plain order? Oh, God. I mean, I think Hemingway, maybe. Sure, I mean, but going back to Mark Twain, I would say maybe. Mark Twain was wonderful at it. Hemingway depending

on when you catch him sometimes he became matter to sort of the older he caught and the more he drank I think you can feel he starts writing you know not in a good way I mean gosh when I was

you know starting out there was the whole school of what was called American minimalism and that was you know Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolf and people very influenced by Hemingway and people who wrote these very bare stripped down sentences but when I look at those sentences now, even those sentences look to

written for me. I don't think there's any one formula to it that says you have to strip your writing of all adjectives or you have to keep your sentences short or there's a famous there's that book, The Elements of Style by Strunken White that a lot of writers

strunk and white, sure. Start out with and you know, that book is full of advice that I've sort of tossed out the window. Starting with the most famous piece of advice in that book is, you know, omit needless words. I'm sure you've read that at some point But I don't believe in omitting needless words

Some of the writers that I love the most Like Henry James have all sorts of words in there And in fact when you look at the sentence Falkner When you look at the sentence Omit Needless Words Well you can omit needless and just omit words And that works even better

So you know you can You don't need words either Yeah you don't need any of that stuff Just omit omit omit Omit just omit Just omit So I mean I think that the real answer is is right in the way that's natural to your voice and natural to your rhythms.

And the trick, I think, is when you're writing, and you can be writing in a loud cafe or in a quiet room, but in a sense, everything has to be very quiet inside yourself so that you can forget the world outside and forget the world inside. And again, just listen to what the words coming on the page are. telling you. And sometimes just the sound of the sentence will carry you along. And if you're writing the sound of the sentence, you know you're onto something. So I have a friend named Sam Lipsite who has a book that starts, it's a book composed in the form of alumni notes to his high school newsletter. And the first sentence of that book is, it's confession time, catamounts. And I think that's a great opening sentence. And I'm a big believer in the fact that the right opening sentence

will somehow contain the rest of the book. But it's also a really interesting sentence because, you know, why is it catamounts? Why isn't it? My high school team was the Trojans. You know, someone else had some other high school team. But he had the cat amounts. But why is it catamounts? It's catamounts because it's confession time, right?

Right. Confession time. Catamounts. You've got a little bit of alliteration, a nice syllabic juxtaposition, right? Yeah, but it's confession time. Catamounts. Right? That's good. It's good. And that's all it needs. It doesn't need anymore. And then you listen to the sound of that and you come up with a sentence that's not like that sentence. And then you come up with another sentence that's not like that sentence. And before you knew it, you've built something. I always think of Dick Cavett, who wrote an amazing memoir and I don't think he used the ghost writer. And he has a riff somewhere in that memoir that I'm going to misremember because I read it 20 years ago. But he has an extended riff about comedy writing and just being on stage. and he says, 12 chickens is funnier than 13 chickens.

And he explains it for two pages. Why is 12 chickens funnier than 13 chickens? Why are chickens even funny? No one knows. He doesn't have an answer. It just is because 12 is funnier than 13. By the way. Couldn't every single thing that's currently wrong with late night television be fixed by putting Dick Cavett reruns on?

Yeah. Have you watched those DVDs that came out about a decade ago? Oh, sure. Oh, my God. Oh, I think Dick Cavett, there were moments of pure brilliance, many in that show. Now, it was of another time, and people listening ought to go back and just for grins, hop on YouTube and watch some of the great interviews that he did. This was not a man who was afraid of silence. He would sit there with his guests.

And there were holes that you could drive a truck through. And he waited. He always waited. And just a very different style of interviewing. But the patience and the pacing and the weirdness and the quirkiness and the randomness and the surprising fun that came out of that show is just, it's gone. It's gone from late night. And he's one of the most underrated interviewers, I think, to do what I do anyway.

And also, I think, a great, actually, physical comedian. And if you've seen him do some of those, he does an amazing monologue where they've just gotten a tape recording machine that lets them run a segment backwards. And he does a segment involving spinning plates and all sorts of acrobatic stuff. And he actually does it. And he does it backwards live so that when they flip it, he's doing it forwards. And, you know, the guy was a pommel horse champion. Yeah, right. Like, of course he's a gymnast.

Of course he's a gymnast. Right. Why wouldn't he be? Have you seen his interview with Lester Maddox by any chance? No, but Randy Newman, I should watch it because that's the interview that Randy Newman wrote about in his song Rednecks. That's right. Right? That's right.

Did you hear that on Gladwell's podcast by any chance? No, I think I just know that. Listen to you. Look, study show, nobody gives a crap about anything said much after 45. minutes. So in the spirit of landing the plane, I want to ask you one more thing I did hear on Gladwell's podcast. And I thought of it not long after we met, and you just reminded me of it. The question is, are you a Picasso or a Cézon? And the framing of the question goes to Gladwell's thesis that everybody is one or the other artistically. And he, he,

writes about Leonard Cohen writing the big one, Hallelujah, right? The version you know is about the 500th version. He literally wrote roughly 500 versions of Hallelujah before he settled on that one.

This, Gladwell says, is exactly what Cézahn did. Cézon, obviously, a brilliant painter who never, ever finished a single painting ever. He just simply never stopped working on it. Undeniably great work, but his process forbade him from finishing. Picasso, on the other hand,

undeniably great transformative work. Picasso worked very quickly, and when he was done, he was done. He sold it, and he moved on. He never went back. He never messed with it. Two great artists, each with completely opposite approaches to their requisite great. greatness. Are you Picasso or Cézanne? All right, let me, I'll give you two answers to that. Of course you will, because everything's a multiple choice with you. You just can't answer a straight question. All right, the right answer to, but on the other hand, the right answer to an either-or question is yes. So it's, the truth lies between those two things.

As long as it's not an essay answer, I'm good. No, it'll be short. I don't know if, I don't know if Malcolm went into this or not, but you know, without Monet or Monet, you would still get a Picasso, but without Cizan, you don't get a Picasso, without Cizan breaking the campus into geometrical frames, right? Correct. I mean, I would say, well, I am nothing like Cézahn and I am nothing like Picasso, but given my druthers, my wiring, I'm probably a little, I would want to be more like Picasso and I ended up failing to be more like Cézan. The either word that I always think of along the same line,

is Isaiah Berlin made a distinction between hedgehogs and foxes. Do you know about this one? No. He has an essay about Russian novelists, and he says, and he's riffing on an old Greek fragment of poetry and all the Greek fragment says is the hedgehog, the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing. Well, there you go. Are you a generalist or a specialist?

Are you Picasso or you say that? So Berlin says that Dostoevsky was a hedgehog who thought he was a fox, and Tolstoy was a fox who thought he was a hedgehog. So I always think of that and think about the ways we trick ourselves into answering these questions for ourselves. Let me ask it in a slightly different way, and this will be my last query. You walk into a Barnes & Noble. In my example, I assume they still exist. In real life, I have no idea.

But there you are, and you go to the shelf, and you find your book, your terrific book, bullies a friendship. And you pull it down and you start leafing through it and you read a paragraph or two. Is your first thought, I'd love another stab at that. Why did I do it that way? Or is it, okay, that's as good as it could have been at the time. All is right with the world. Yeah, I didn't write that book someone else. Somebody who looked like me and, you know, might have waited a few people.

Slesa wrote that book. Good luck to him. I wonder what happened to that guy. He's being interviewed on a podcast called The Way I heard it. That's what happened. Not by Oprah. Hey, man, pick up one of those guitars for me and play a little outro music. Well, I thank everybody for listening and remind them that my book in its audio version

can, in fact, be picked up wherever you listen to audio books. It's called The Way I Heard. it. And it exists in part because my friend Alex spent a few boozy evenings with me saying, hey, what about this instead of that? What about that instead of this? Those are the questions a good collaborator will pose. And as I thank him for coming by once again, I will remind you that life is short and weird. And sometimes the only way to figure stuff out is to come at it from an odd angle. Whether you're Picasso or Cézanne, or whether the soundtrack in your mind is a guitar or a harmonica. There are many soundtracks out there, my friends, but there's only one Alex

Abramovich. Good to see you, weirdo. Good to see you, Mike. See you soon. Thank you. Adios. The ocean moves us, whether that's surfing a wave or taken in an inspiring view. The ocean feeds us. Sustainable seafood practices bring the ocean's bounty to our plates. The ocean teaches us how our everyday choices, big and small, make an impact. The ocean delights us as playful otters restore coastal kelp forests. The ocean connects us. Find your connection at Monterey Bay Aquarium.org slash connects. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters.

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