How to Write Exceptionally Well — Mitch Albom

I challenge you to walk through an airport without seeing one of Mitch Albam's books on the shelves. It's just not going to happen. He's everywhere. He is famous for writing The Five People You Meet in Heaven. And then there's Tuesdays with Morrie, which at one point was the bestselling memoir of all time. He's written 14 books. He sold more than 40 million copies. He's been writing for more than 45 years. And so I said, "Mitch, come on the show and let's just talk about how you go about the craft. How do you build characters? How do you hook people in at the beginning?" And we started with the granddaddy of them all. How do you tell a great story?

>> Well, Mitch, I want to start with the idea of serving the story. Serving the story above everything else.

>> Serving the story. Well, first of all, you have to decide whether it's in novel writing, uh, non-fiction or even journalism. I think uh what's the one big idea that you're trying to get across and make sure that you don't ever sail too far away from that. You get lost in the weeds or there's a great anecdote you want to add or whatever. You've always got to be tethered to that. And it doesn't mean you can't take a deviation. It doesn't mean you can't say even in writing uh let me say something about this or you know let me tell you a story about this or that but you're always hanging on to that chord. I I liken it to sort of like those space movies where they go outside the spaceship, but you know that cord is everything. And as long as they're tethered to the cord, it doesn't matter that they're going at gazillion miles an hour. It doesn't matter if there's asteroids, whatever. But the minute they let go of that cord, they're never getting back. And so I think that that's the thing that I've tried to do um is keep you can call it story, you can call it theme, you know, a lot of words for it, but I always try to remember what I'm serving um in whatever piece I write.

One of the ways you do that in journalism when you write a column for example is your first paragraph and your last paragraph tend to work together. And so you kind of know you're sailing towards that last paragraph. You know, uh, with novel writing, I find that I like to know the endings of my books before I start them. I don't have to know the middles, and sometimes I even change the beginnings, but I kind of want to know where I'm what my north star is that I'm sailing towards.

>> Um, so there are different ways that you do it, but

>> I find that that to be really important and and that readers appreciate it. Uh, because I think the worst thing you want to hear as a writer is I tried to read it but I got lost.

>> Oh yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> That happens.

>> Yeah. And there's such impatience

>> in people, you know. I know you got started with television and that's kind of where that understanding of kind of catch their attention quickly. Even at the dinner table growing up, you know, you got to tell the story fast. You got to hook them quickly, you

>> Yeah. Well, I really did learn my storytelling at the dinner table. You know, I get asked uh a lot. You know, where when did you become a writer? How did you decide you wanted to be a writer? And I wasn't one of those people who wanted to be a writer when he was a kid. Um, I wanted to be a cartoonist. And maybe, you know, writing comic books is an idea of writing, but then I became a musician. And that, you know, again, I always say, well, music and writing are fairly closely connected, more than people realize, but still not writing writing. Um, and I only became a writer in my 20s, and I'd never written anything before that. But I'd always been a good storyteller. And there, you know, I was a kid at camp who they would pick to tell the ghost story, you know, and oh, Mitch tells it. Yeah, tell the story. And the way that I learned that was at the dinner table because my family had um uh holiday celebrations and we had a pretty extended family's second generation, you know, immigrants. So some of my some of my older uncles and aunts were immigrants or first generation. And uh, I would listen to them after dinner, you know, they would all sit around the table. All the kids would scatter, but I would sit at the table. For some reason, I was just interested in watching them tell stories. And I would notice there was a distinct difference between my aunts and my uncles. My aunts would always get caught on the details. So they do like was it 1945? Uh, well, no, maybe it was 46. When was when was Manny born? Was he born in 46 or was it 45? And and you know the uncles would get impatient. They go, "So who cares? Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. It's important."

>> Yeah. And then the uncles would tell the war stories. And my uncle Eddie in particular. So there we were. See, we were coming over the hill and it was dark and we were heard the shots and then I turned to the guy next to me. I said, "They're shooting at I'm saying that's how you tell a story. That's a story."

>> Yeah. And somehow through osmosis that kind of found its way into me. And I've always sort of known when I'm losing somebody and know when I have to kind of bring it back. And and interestingly working with children, which I do a lot because I I operate an orphanage.

Holding a child's attention when you tell a story. Great exercise for being a writer because you see it on their eyes like when they're starting to fade and you realize, get back to it. Get back to it. Get back to the thing. Or you got to throw in an exciting line or you have to have some dialogue or something like that. And I find that a lot of that mentality that I have to do when I have a three-year-old now, you know, to kind of keep her interest is the same thing on a more mature level that I have to do as a writer.

>> Yeah. I heard something recently I'm curious to hear your take on that. The key to storytelling is to is to tell the slow parts fast and the fast parts slow.

>> Yeah, I like that. Or as as my mother said to me once when she read my book, she said, "I I like your writing, Mitchie." And so she called me because you don't have any of those long pages with all the details in it that I don't ever like to read when I read books. And I said, "Okay." I think she was talking about the Tom Clancy like this is how a submarine works kind of thing. And you know, there'll be three straight pages of how submarine widgets fit together and all that. And and that I think is the uh the slow parts fast that you want to get through or avoid the slow parts altogether and just, you know, cut them.

I um, interestingly, my my biggest problem as a young writer, a really young writer was that if I if I got criticized by editors or by even in school when I was was that I was taking too long to make my points or that they would say this is awkward, this is too long a sentence, it's awkward and so I became very sensitive to that criticism.

>> Yeah. And I began to whittle at my sentences and whittle and whittle and whittle and now I have probably gone the other way. Uh, so that my books are very short and they're very, you know, if anything. I mean, my books are literally small. You know, they're they're like they're like pint-sized books. Uh, if they were regular length books, they would probably only be in the 200-page range. You know, 220, 30 page range. Um, and that's compensation for having taken too long on the slow parts as you call it when I was very young. And now I probably, if I make any mistake, I probably do it the other way. You know, I probably get through stuff too quickly.

>> So tell me about Twice as you were thinking about the ending as you're writing the book without giving it away. How are you thinking about working towards that ending?

>> Well, I So for me, I pick a theme.

>> Okay. And then I decide to create a story around it. Not the other way. The theme is the theme. Twice. Yeah. The well, no, the theme was uh that the grass is always greener, particularly when it comes to love. And I that's what I wanted to write about. I all my books I start with a theme and then I create the story around the theme. Not the other way around. I don't start with characters. I don't start with plots. I start with a theme that I want to cover. And I it's always interesting to me to read about myself when you know some comments or people say, "Oh, he he wrote that book because of this or he did that." And often they're wrong. I understand why they're wrong, but like The Five People You Meet in Heaven is a perfect example as my first novel. And and I guess cuz I wrote Tuesdays with Morrie before it, a lot of people just assumed I was interested in heaven and what happens when you die and all that. And that really wasn't it at all. I I wanted to write a book about um people who don't think they matter and that everybody matters. Um, it was a theme that I knew was universal. I knew I had something to say about it. I really do believe there's no such thing as a nobody. You know, that everybody touches somebody and touches somebody. And that was the theme. Heaven came into it because that was kind of a cool way to tell the story. Like, okay, let's have a guy go to heaven and meet five people from his life. And he finds out the influence that he had on them and he didn't even know it and therefore he finds out that his life had meaning. The the theme I was trying to serve was about people who think they don't matter. Um, and I created the story around it. And so it wasn't about heaven and it wasn't about five people and it wasn't about war. It wasn't about anything. It was those are the things that I those are the tools that I used to get to the theme.

So with Twice, my newest book, the theme was um how we always think that life would be better if we got a chance to do it over again. And we frequently think of that about that whether we want to admit it or not in our relationships and even in our love relationships. You know, there was this girl in high school. You know, if I had only gone out with her more than once, or there was that fleeting moment I had with that stranger on that trip to Europe. And you know, man, you don't know the stupid stuff I said to girls in high school. I think I'd be better if I got to go back and do it again.

>> Well, maybe not you, but other

>> people. Um, so I wanted to uh write something that was that was about that theme. You know, I try to find themes that are kind of universal. So then I came up with a story about a guy who has the magical ability to do everything in his life twice. He can go back and undo something and do it again, but he has to live with the consequences of the second try. And that was critical to the story because the point that I wanted to make and the north star that I wanted to sail towards in this book was that there's a price to pay if you don't learn a lesson from the mistakes that you make. You know, we think the price we pay is the mistake we make, but there's also a price to pay if you don't make a mistake. And you just if we're allowed to keep correcting them, um, you don't learn what you're supposed to learn. And so that's what the grass is always greener. You know, that's the flip side of it is uh, you know, if you kept trying greener grass, you'd never really learn to appreciate or how to make do with what you had. And so I created a whole story based on that. And I sailed towards that ending because I knew that my character was going to make that mistake. This guy who had the ability to do everything in his life twice was going to make a mistake with love. And and then he finds out that it doesn't work with love. That with love, if someone loves you deeply and truly and you decide to walk away from it to try somebody else, that person can never love you again that way. They'll be in the world. You can know them, but they just won't have that feeling anymore. And I knew that he was going to make that mistake. And so that was where I sailed towards. And I had that in mind from page one.

That's wonderful. So, that kind of premise, for lack of a better word, came out of the theme before it.

>> That's right.

>> Cool. Man, you got me thinking about cool premises now. Like, you got me thinking about Flatland, 2D instead of 3D. Got me thinking about Benjamin Button.

>> Mhm.

>> Born old, dies young.

>> What makes for a good premise?

>> It depends on who you're trying to reach, I guess. I mean, for me, I want the best thing that somebody can say when they read one of my books from me isn't, "Man, that guy's an artist with the with the written word." I'm really not after that. There are there are way better artists than me. And and I'm not even sure I would know what to do with it if I if somebody said that. What I want people to say is I couldn't stop thinking about that after I finished it. It made me think about my own life. Not necessarily my characters or anything. It made me think about my own life. Then you've done something with your literature. You've you've moved people. And you know, I was very blessed early in my writing, relatively early in my writing career, kind of midway through um, to write a book called Tuesdays with Morrie. Not supposed to be any kind of big book. And it wasn't supposed to do anything other than pay medical bills for my old college professor. But for whatever reason, the things that he had to say uh resonated with the readers. And I have been blessed countless times to hear people say to me that book affected my life.

Um, it made me go out and do this. It made me reunite with a a lost loved one. It made me I I changed my job uh, you know, and because I realized my path was going differently. It helped me deal with a terminal illness. It helped me deal with my mother's terminal illness. I've seen what the written word can do in terms of making people think and change their life. And it becomes a very fulfilling thing to be able to aspire to. And ever since I've tried to write books recognizing, you know, I was never going to do another book like Tuesdays with Morrie. He was such a unique individual. But if each one of my books can make you think about one theme that Tuesdays with Morrie makes you think about a lot of themes, then I've done something. And that's what I'm after. And so when you say what makes a good theme for me, it's will people think about it after they're done reading it.

>> Yeah. With Tuesdays with Morrie, I was struck by the idea of actually removing the emotion from it. Like intuitively I'd say, ah, you tried to make that book as emotional as you possibly could. It's a deep story. It's about death. It's about grief. It's about terminal illness, man. Let's add the emotion. Let's make it heavy.

>> Yeah.

>> And actually you kind of did the opposite, huh?

>> Yeah, I did. And and that's a really astute observation because uh although the answer may not be what you think.

>> Um, I didn't have the confidence to do what you suggested that I could do. Um, when I sat down to write Tuesdays with Morrie,

>> I I remember going out and getting a bunch of books about death and that that people had written accounts of people dying, whatever. The best ones, the ones that were recommended, you know, and uh, I started reading them and I said, "I can't do this. These they're way better than me. They're

>> I mean, look at the look at the poetry that they bring to it, you know, and look at the emotion that they they in their words. What a what a turn of a phrase. And I don't even have that. And I recognized, I guess intuitively at at 37

>> as a sports writer

>> that to try to do that would have been silly.

>> It would have failed and it would have looked like exactly that, a cheap attempt to try to write flowery phrases about death when the truth was as a writer I wasn't developed enough to understand that. And as a human being, I was only beginning my journey to understand that. I mean, I had gone through his his dying and we had done that whole, you know, last class together. And I was definitely a little more developed than I had been when I first went to go see him. But I wasn't that well, I wasn't like I am now where I could write about the subject. Tuesday with Morrie would come out much differently now if I were writing it, you know, almost 30 years later

>> because I'm a lot closer to my age than now than I was my my old age.

>> So,

>> I decided I'm going to go the opposite way. I'm just going to write this as simply as possible. Just write what happened. There doesn't need to be more. He let my carry the story. If you have something to say, say it in one sentence. You know, if you've got a point of view or a take on it, say it in a one sentence or the last line of the of the chapter and then move on.

And there's a funny kind of adjunct to that. The contract for the book was a 320-page book. They give you, you know, when you sign a contract, they tell you approximately how many words or how many pages they want it to be. And it said 320 pages or something.

>> And I was typing. And so I just uh typed on a on a you know, I just triple spaced it.

>> Sounds like a school assignment.

>> That's the way I looked at it. I mean, I'd written I'd only written two books before and they were sports books and they didn't care how long they were, you know, and they were really reportage books. And so I just wrote it and I got to like 300 pages and I turned it in and they they called me about 10 days later and they said, "We have a problem." I said, "What's the problem?" They said, "Well, we page-inated this. You know, we put this into the computer system and this is like only going to be 160 pages long." And I said, "Oh, well, that's all I got. Uh, you know, I I mean, I don't want to add to it. I don't have anything. I said what I want to say." And they went off and they thought about it for a while and they said, "All right, we've decided we're going to make it a small book.

>> That way, it won't look like a comic book, you know, printed really. And that's why Tuesdays with Morrie is as small as it is. And that's why and then when Tuesdays with Morrie became this surprise success, now all my books are that size. Uh, no matter how long they are. Uh, and it was really just because I was trying to write as simply and as as as bare to the bone as I could. I once heard somebody said something good about Joan Didion's writing, who I really admired as a journalist. They said she writes so tightly it cuts the flesh. And I decided that um when I realized I could not write flowery, I decided, okay, I'm going to write tight and try to see if I can create something that's good because it just says what needs to be said. And in two of my I mean, you know, Morrie did the heavy lifting and so um that's why that book came out the way it did.

Do you feel like your first drafts are pretty tight or do you feel like it requires editing, revision?

>> Ah, I got to scrap that, take the big old red pen in order to tighten it up.

>> Well, that's evolved, too. So, with Tuesdays with Morrie, I wrote the beginning probably 20 times. And I kept turning it in and no, I'll give you another one. No, I'll give you another one. No, I'll give you another one. And finally um they said to me, "Why do you like torturing yourself over these 10 pages here?" And I said, "Well, because, you know, if they actually it wasn't even 10. It was like the first page, first two pages. And I said, "Well, if they if I don't get them on the first page, they're not going to read past it." And I remember my editor Bill Thomas said to me, "You're thinking like a sports writer writing a sports column. They're not reading a newspaper. If they pick up a book, they're going to give you a few pages. They're not going to like read the first paragraph and say, 'This is not for me.' You know, they'll have spent money on it, they'll they'll give you a little bit. Even if they're standing in a bookstore, they'll read a couple of pages." And and that was good advice because it relaxed me a little bit. I tried so hard

>> to make the first page perfect, you know? Um, and so then I I became sort of like, "Okay, I just have to get them in the first 10 pages. I don't have to get them in the first page." So, I loosened up a little bit about that. But I still write. I I self-edit all the time. I constantly. I always say by the time I'm done with my book, if you catch me right when I just finished a book, if you start me, I can probably recite it. You know, I don't even need to look at it because I have reread it that many times that I can tell you what comes next and the next sentence after the next sentence. So, I do a lot of that combing and raking before I ever let an editor see it because I I I really don't want it coming back with like, "You don't need this, you don't need this, you don't need this." It hurts.

>> It hurts to have, you know, you you're being told you're too fat,

>> you know, and and and I'd rather like

>> big old Mitch over there.

>> Yeah. I'd rather go out and work out and lose the weight before I show too long.

>> Yeah. I want to come in skinny. So uh uh I do self-edit a lot and then after I turn in a draft, I edit even more. And after the second draft, I edit more. And I am almost always taking out. And once in a blue moon, I'll throw in an additional line, but almost all, you know, the second draft, third draft, fourth draft um right until the publisher is literally pulling it out of my hands and saying, "You do understand that as of 5:00, you can't touch this anymore because it's going to the publisher, right?"

>> Just one more. Just one more edit. Just one

>> 5:02.

>> Yeah.

>> That's what I'm like.

>> You hit your deadlines.

>> Uh, well, I've learned deadlines have become really part of my bloodstream. You know, I have uh as a sports writer um, which I still do, you know, for the Detroit Free Press, even though it's it's more of like of an emeritus kind of thing now, but but back in the day when I was really uh at it, so I write for the Detroit Free Press. We're in the Eastern time zone. Uh, but Michigan, the the state that I live in, is a very very big state. And our um printing presses, some of them are way up north in the Upper Peninsula, you know, and some are up south. So, consequently, we had like some of the earliest deadlines in America for for uh uh, you know, nighttime writing because in order to get it the paper delivered, printed and taken up to some of these places, you got to turn it in because it's five, six, seven hours away. So, yeah, Mino Island and and even more north. So um, I got used to having to write for as a sports writer. Now, now think about this. Most games back then started at like 7:00 at night, you know, 7:30. And uh they would end, you know, maybe a game started at 8, they would end at 10:30. My first deadline was 8. So the game hasn't even barely started yet. I had a deadline. My second deadline was like 9:45, which maybe maybe maybe the game might just be coming to some kind of conclusion. Third one was like 11 or 11:30. The fourth one was like 1 a.m. So I was constantly writing and rewriting and rewriting. And uh there was a championship game between the Detroit Pistons and the Portland Trailblazers out on the West Coast. And they had extended the deadlines to they said, "You have to send it when the buzzer sounds. That's all you've got to press the button. That's all we can do to try to make the paper." And the game changed leads in the for the last three, four minutes. And I literally had, and this was a very common thing, I had a winning column and a losing column going at the same time. Now they were up three games to one. So if they had lost, it would have just meant it's 3-2. Not that really big a thing. You know, you got to come back and play another game. If they had won, they win the NBA championship. Big difference in tone

>> and in what's going to, you know, what you want to say or whatever. And I am literally going back and forth with every basket. Every time the Pistons take a lead or come with anybody, oh, Pistons win and then switch and switch the screen, go over, Pistons lose. This is what happens there. And

>> with 0.07 seconds left on the clock, Vinnie Johnson hit the shot that won the game. And I had to write something in that split second, some semblance of something. And then and then as as as I pressed the button, the fans jumped over my back to storm the court and everything because it just pandemonium when it was over. And and you realize as you're sending this thing off, which is this garbled jumble of running and all the rest of it, that they're not only did you just send in something that you're not particularly probably proud of, but they're going to make a poster out of it

>> uh and sell it uh, you know, uh, so that the kids everywhere will have it on their wall and and they'll look up and they'll say, "Boy, that Albom guy really can't write very well." You know, look

>> at that. So, I had to live with that those kind of deadlines and and and that was a big part of my life for many years. So, I'm quite used to deadlines. I don't miss them, you know. Uh, my book editors always like, you know, um, God, you know, you actually turn stuff in on the day that it's supposed to be turned in. I go, "Well, doesn't everybody do that?" "Oh, God, no. No. Novelists are notorious for waiting, you know, being six months late or a year late." I said, "You got the wrong guy."

Well, part of that must be is you you you're pretty regimented about your process. Three hours, get up in the morning, you know, don't wait for the inspiration to to strike. Strike so that the inspiration comes kind of guy.

>> Yeah. I I think some of that comes from a journalism background, too. And, you know, you have to write every day whether you feel like it or not, or you have to go cover that game whether you feel like it or not. You have to spin some story out of something that might not be that interesting a game. Um, so you know, I was I was well trained in that. And then I, you know, I I learned from some really good writers. Um, I play in a band of of writers.

>> Like a music band?

>> Music.

>> And everyone's a writer.

>> Yeah. Yeah. It's called the Rock Bottom Remainders. They've been around for we've been playing for 30 years already. And uh uh Stephen King and Amy Tan, Dave Barry, Scott Turow, Ridley Pearson, uh James McBride, uh Frank McCourt was in it. Uh, many many writers have come and gone through as guests, but uh that's kind of the the core. And uh, you know, I I'll talk to them sometimes about how they do it. And and we don't spend a lot of time talking about writing, to be honest with you. Mostly talk about like what chord we got wrong or but but when we do talk about writing, what I've observed is everybody kind of approaches it like a job.

There was only one guy, Greg Iles um, who's a wonderful guy, just passed away. Uh, he would like it would hit him at 2 in the morning and he'd he'd get up with, you know, from 2 o'clock in the morning till till 11 in the morning and he, you know, don't bother me, I'm I'm on a roll and that kind of thing. But pretty much everybody else was like, "Get up, go to the office, write, you know, open a vein, let it bleed, as Red Smith said, and then and then come back the next day and do it." So, uh, I learned, you know, that you have to treat it like a job. I learned that, um, you should recognize what how big your gas tank is and pretty much, you know, don't try to out outrun your gas tank. For me, as you mentioned, it's about three hours. I get about three hours of writing a day. I I I start first thing in the morning. I I deliberately don't listen. I get up and, you know, maybe I'll grab something to drink, cup of coffee or something, and then go right right down to the screen and start writing. No music, no news, no emails, no internet, nothing that could, you know, start to stain the white uh of my imagination. Um, and I just do those first three hours without taking any phone calls or without doing anything else. It starts usually like 7 o'clock or whatever and by 10 I'm done, you know, like now I could sit there and make everybody feel good about my sitting there until 5:00, but I won't get anything more. So, I've learned, you know, all right, that's about all I'm going to get. But try to leave on a positive note. Try to try to leave the room while you're in the middle of a good sentence or a good paragraph.

>> Don't stop stuck.

>> For Yeah. Force yourself to force yourself to stop in the middle of a sentence that you really want to finish.

>> Yeah.

>> And then when you wake up the next morning, you're excited to get back down and go do it. Whereas if you stop when you're stuck or you stop when things aren't going well and you get up in the morning and your first thought is, "No, that again." Yeah, I'm going to go back to that crap.

>> So, u yeah, that's a little trick that I use. But yeah, and then I do it pretty much every day, especially when I'm working on a book. Seven days a week is normal for me.

You know, we're talking about stories and many years ago, you did an interview. You're talking about a story about the Kennedy assassination and how most people covered the story in one way, but there was one guy, Briles.

>> Went to the gravedigging guy.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was uh, you know, when I talk to people about journalism and I talk to them particularly about column writing, I I always say that uh, you know, the ones that people are going to remember are often the ones that are away from the the main action.

>> Yeah.

>> And if you can somehow tell the story through that, you're going to create a memorable uh, a memorable column or piece of journalism. So, the one that you're referring to was uh was Jimmy Breslin, who at the time, I guess, was writing for the Daily News. I don't know. And when JFK was killed, now everybody in the country who had a column was writing about, you know, what it meant to America. And they were writing all these declarative sentences and paragraphs about, you know, this is the turning point in America or who are we or blah blah blah, you know, these grandiose thoughts. He went to the cemetery and found the guy who was digging the grave for John F. Kennedy. And the guy was very meticulous and he was like, "It has to be just right. This is for the president, you know," and he just talked about the small details of the sod or the hole that he was digging or whatever. And through this one guy, you captured everything that all those other people were trying to write. You captured the grief, the soul of the nation, what it meant to everybody. But you did it through a guy whose sole job it was was to prepare the hole that Kennedy's body was going to go in. And that's a great way to tell that story differently than everybody else did.

You got me thinking a lot about perspective, point of view. So one of the most embarrassing moments like if I were to look back at my life like at what point did I get feel the most shame was uh freshman year of college. So, I was uh ran the local new sports division. Uh, and so I was, you know, beginning of the football season and I'm up in the in the box and Elon, where I went to school, the home team scored a touchdown. I was like, "Yeah!" And all the reporters like, "Shh, you're not cheering in the press box."

>> I didn't know this, exactly. No cheering in the press box. And I was like, "Oh my goodness." And all this is to say that from that moment, you know, it's obvious to me that there is a kind of no cheering in the press box kind of mentality in a bunch of sports journalism. But then I think back at two sports writers that I like. I think of Bill Simmons, you know, ardent Red Sox fan. And then I think my favorite piece of sports journalism of all time is uh David Foster Wallace's Federer's religious experience where he's just talking about the art, the beauty, the wonder, the magic of watching that guy hit a tennis ball. And it's what I'm thinking about here is counterpositioning. What is the normal thing? You know, you're talking about who is the different kind of person that you focus on. But I think a lot of sports journalism recently, a lot of the growth, dare I say, has come from people saying, you know what, no, I'm a fan of this team. I'm a fan of this sport, and I'm going to let my radiant enthusiasm come through the words.

Well, the reason there's no cheering in the press box is was intended to just sort of create a working environment for journalists to to focus. It became though kind of a mantra of like almost an attitude. Uh, don't cheer for the home team. I always thought that that was silly. Uh, and I always thought that sports writers who complained about their jobs were basically committing suicide. I always, for whatever reason, I always recognized early on and never made the mistake of complaining about my job that I had a a job that everyone who was reading me wanted. You know, to them, getting to go into the uh locker room wasn't about scrums and getting stuck around a guy who you can't hear or getting cursed at by an 18-year-old or or the smell or the getting run over by camera people or all the stuff that happens in there. It was, "Wow, I get to be amongst my heroes. You get to be amongst my heroes. You know, you have a job that I want. Wow. You get to go sit in a press. You get tickets every single game. You know, you don't have to buy them. You don't have to sit out in the in the in the in the cheap seat."

>> You ever been to a champagne popping ceremony?

>> Oh my god. Yeah. Been them. I've been soaked by them. And by the way, jealous of that. It's not fun.

>> It's not fun.

>> Champagne burns. Yeah. And it's not fun. And uh I've had champagne dumped on me and I've had a bucket of ice dumped on me uh by an angry pitcher. So I've been at both ends of that spectrum. And uh, but I know not to complain about the position because it is a fantasy for a lot of people. And you know, no cheering in the press box shouldn't mean no enthusiasm for the home team. You know, uh being dispassionate about sports doesn't make sense because why are you even playing them unless there's passion? It's just a game otherwise. You know, if it doesn't mean something, you know, you aren't invested in it or, you know, means something to you to root for your home team or whatever, then who cares? It's it's it's a ball getting kicked around from place to place or being hit with a bat. So, I I always knew that the passion belonged there and and uh I never worried about being a homer or anything like that. I I just, you know, I tried to write what was honest, but if it was honest that everyone in town was excited about it, you know, then that's what you wrote. And I was very blessed that I worked in Detroit. And Detroit is not a cynical place like New York or Philadelphia or Boston.

>> Burns with passion that place.

>> Yeah. It's a great sports town and they love their team. They don't mind loving their teams and they're not going to boost Santa Claus like they do in Philadelphia, you know, or uh, you know, and and and you don't make your mark, you know, like the well-known sports journalists in the history of Detroit didn't cut their teeth by being mean to the teams. They cut their teeth actually by by kind of leading the cheers for the team. So, I was lucky I worked in a town like that and and still do and and and and I much prefer it. Um, it's hard to be cynical all the time. It's hard to be angry all the time. It takes a lot of energy to to to find the ugliness in what you're watching. Um, I'd much rather find the beauty and the joy and and uh and when when it was good for, you know, our city was down for so long. So much of my career, Detroit has been in the crapper, you know, and so sports for us was was, you know, a chance to have some happy moments and and once in a while to get some national respect, you know, so I've always been a little defensive about Detroit and and and happy to lead, you know, kind of the cheers when we had something to cheer about, you know, when the Red Wings were winning and when the Pistons were winning and

>> now the Lions, baby. Now the Lions.

>> Yeah.

>> Now the Lions.

>> Yeah.

>> Here they come.

>> Yeah.

>> Tell me this. How do you think about characters? You're developing a character. What are the things that you're focused on?

>> Well, um, I think the answer to that is first you need to specify are you talking about the main character? You talking about ancillary characters. So my main character has to go through some kind of transformation or it's not interesting. Um, there has to be a difference in him at the beginning uh versus the end or her or whoever it is. Uh, so then it's like, well, okay, where are we going to start and where are we going to get to? So, in The Five People You Meet in Heaven, I started with a guy who's an 83-year-old maintenance worker at an amusement park who thinks he's done nothing with his life and he's a nobody and he's never been anywhere and he's just waiting to die. And he does die that day trying to save a little girl from an accident and from a falling cart that was about to crush her. And he goes to push her out of the way. Um, and he feels her little hands in his hands and then everything goes black. And he wakes up in heaven and he finds out that the first stage of heaven is you meet five people from your life. Some of whom you might know well, some of whom might be total strangers, but each one tells you about something that you did that changed them forever or changed you forever. So now I know, okay, I got them at the beginning. I spent a lot of time in the first chapter just setting up little lonely moments. He he he pulls a string out of a out of a fishing hole that they have and cutting the bottom of the boardwalk and there's nothing on it and he says there's never anything on it, you know. He goes outside and falls asleep with the sound of seagulls going overhead, you know. Um, kind of a lonely sort of moment. He he hears a song that he his wife used to dance to and he remembers her and now he's and then he wakes up and he realizes he has a doctor's appointment and he has shingles and so all these little things that just kind of set the tone that he's alone, that he's sad, that he feels like he's a nobody. And so now I've established where I want to begin him. And in my mind, I kind of know where I want to end him. And then it's a question. The process is how do I change him along the way to get him to where I want him to be. Same thing with Twice, by the way, with the new book is the same kind of thing. Same character, you know, starts a certain way. Um, in that case, and I've done this once or twice before, in Twice, the new book, it begins with him. He's already older and he's been arrested.

>> And uh he's been arrested for allegedly cheating at a roulette wheel in a casino in the Bahamas and winning three straight numbers with the exact number, which is impossible. I mean, the odds are infinitesimal, you know, crazy. Uh, and and uh a cop is interrogating him, a detective, about how'd you do it? Come on. How'd you do it? How'd you do it? And I didn't do anything, you know. Come on. How'd you do it? It's I didn't do anything. You know what's your story? What's your story? And so finally he, you know, under pressure from him, he takes out this notebook that he has written for somebody else to be read upon his death. And he's and you realize he's dying. And uh he gives it to the cop. He says, "If you really want to know, you can read this out loud, you know," and they go through it together. And so with him, I've already established him at the end and now you're going to read from the beginning how he changed and got there. So there's a lot of angles from which you can do this. You can either start with the person a certain way and you put the idea in the reader's mind. How did he get that way? How did he become that? You know, and now you show the contrast from the beginning all the way in. Or you start with, you know, a a very innocent kind of person and you uh like in Frankie Presto, one of the magic strings of Frankie Presto is about his magical guitar player that starts when he's a little boy, an infant and literally goes linearly all the way to the end and you watch him change along the way. So there's lots of starting points, but it's it's a transformation for me. Your characters have to transform. It's not interesting if they don't. Nobody wants to read two, 300 pages about the same person who's the same way as they were in chapter one as they are at the end. No matter how interesting they are.

May be, it gets repetitive, you know, so you have to change.

"How much do you feel like I'm writing for Mitch versus I'm writing for a reader?"

"Uh 98% writing for readers."

"Is that right?"

"Yeah."

"So, how does that manifest itself?"

Um, I don't worry about what interests me, you know, per se. Uh, oh, I like this topic or this area or I want to write. Uh, like I like oldies music, okay? Like if you ask me what's a passion of mine, I like 50s doo-op rock and roll. I was in a band years ago that played it. I love listening to it. I listen to it almost every day. What I'm not writing a book about doo-op music because I don't really see a great way to make that interesting to a large number of readers. First of all, music's very difficult. I wrote one music book um which I threw myself into because music is a passion of mine. But it's tough because the beauty, the real beauty of music is oral. Aural. Not it's not it's hard to write down and no matter what words you use and you know how many if you want want to write like Tom Wolf with a lot of italics and data data data data ta and rat data data and try to write the beat out it doesn't matter it's really hard to get it across so that's a passion of mine but I'm not going to write it you know um I think about things that people want to you know want to explore in themselves and then I say, "Okay, are are these things that I have something to say about or I have some knowledge about or I'm curious about myself and those themes that I told you about?" When we when those overlap, when one that I'm curious about or I've learned something about overlaps with something that I think readers will be curious about, too, that makes the list. What doesn't make the list is just because I'm interested in it. Um, and uh, maybe I, you know, and maybe people have think that that's wrong and you should write what you love and you, but it's a business, you know. I mean, you are, you're putting out books and you're trying to get people to go read books and it takes you a year or two of your life to do it. Um, you know, I don't know. I guess I'm just used to writing for an audience. The newspaper business is an audience. The movie business is an audience. You know, the play, you write a play, you're literally writing it for an audience. You know, I remember that line in I think it was Tootsie with Bill Murray and he's a player goes, "I want to write a play that nobody comes to see." You know, it's like, okay, you know, yeah, all right, that would be great. You know, if people come and see it, then it's then it's trash. It's failed.

"All right. Well, that's why it was a funny line in a movie, but it's not a way to run your career."

"Yeah."

So, what is the process of coming up with a a theme, a premise, a book idea? What does that look like?

Uh well I you know when I get an idea for a book or a concept I I write it down or I send myself an email actually like because I'm frequently in places where I I tried to you know write an write it on a piece of paper and then I just lose the pieces of paper you know I once had like a little a whole bag of just little pieces of yellow paper that I scrunched up or stuff notes you write to yourself at night you know when you wake up and you get an idea. Um, now I because of email and phones and everything, I just email myself and I tag the the, you know, the what's the line, the subject line, book idea. And so then when I search every couple of months, I just go search my book ideas, I pull pull them and I print them and I put them into a file. So now I have a file that's, you know, inches thick with sometimes it's a a whole theme, a story, sometimes it's a line, sometimes it's a title, sometimes it's like this would make a great first line for a book, you know. Um, and uh and and I just collect them in those files and then when time comes to write another book like I'm at now, you know, like I have a new book coming out, it's time to start thinking about what I want to do next. I'll go and just leaf through that file and, you know, I'll find something. You know, I'm I'm blessed not to ever suffer from writer's block. That's never been a thing for me. Um maybe you're not allowed to, you know, when you're under deadline all the time. You know, you know, it's that famous famous um story about uh I think it was Dick Young here in New York about it was a it was a World Series Don Larson's Perfect Game.

So, the story goes that Dick Young was uh a sports writer for the New York Post and they he was sitting there and the guy next to him after Don Larson finished his perfect game, he he froze and he couldn't come up with anything and he was like, "Oh my god, I don't have anything. It's deadline. I don't have anything." And and Dick Young, this is the legend, got so frustrated that he was interrupting him that he grabbed his typewriter and wrote the imperfect man through the perfect game. because I guess Larson had some issues or whatever and he gave him his thing back said n start you know and and and and that became a famous first line of this guy's story. Um I can't I don't have that luxury and I will run out of years on this earth long before I run out of the that file of story ideas. There was a fun idea that I saw around you frame the same thing in two different ways. And one has the spice of life, a little spark of action and flavor. And the other one will be dull. And it was like, all right, this second baseman's batting 333. You'd say it like that. Or you could say one in three times when this guy walks up to the plate,

"something good happens."

"That's what I always said. Yeah."

"I love that. that is just completely"

"it's like the story philosophy showing up in the smallest place. It's like fractal or something."

"Yeah. Well, I I I said that I don't know if you're quoting me or"

"I am. I am quoting you. Yeah."

"So, I I I remember I gave a talk about, you know, how you write about sports and and I always said that I wanted to write for, you know, the diehard sports fan is going to read you no matter what. He may hate you. He'll still read you because he's going to read everything. But I wanted to write for that grandmother in North Carolina who'd never seen a Detroit game or whatever and still could read my column and get it, you know. And most of most importantly, first of all, that meant picking a theme that the person could identify with. So write about humanity, write about, you know, write about overcoming loss or overcoming strife or whatever it is. and and and and but a but a subset of that was don't get lost in the weeds about statistics and things like that which a lot of sports writers especially now with whal and all this ridiculous analytic overanalyzing things it's like reading a spreadsheet you know and you're you know the 333 whip and this and so yeah I said for example if a guy hits 333 don't come say that say one out every three times he comes to the plate something good happens and And that's how that's how everybody can relate to it, you know. But even more importantly than the factual stuff, find the thematic stuff that everybody can relate to. And I'll give you a a perfect example. I don't know, stop me if you've heard me tell this story before, but um sometimes that means that you have to go against the grain of your business.

"so I was in the I want to say it was Barcelona at the Olympics and Carl Lewis was going to run in a 100 meter final. It was a Saturday and um everybody was going to watch his race including me. So I went there early because I knew that it was going to be really crowded and those stadiums get packed at the Olympics and I wanted to get a good seat cuz the 100 meters short race. So I'm sitting there. I got there like three in the afternoon or whatever and I'm just sitting there waiting five hours and meanwhile they're running some heats.

"Mhm."

"So, one of the heats was like a 400 meter heat and you know those are just countless parade of athletes coming out and running a heat and another heat and another heat and I'm kind of leaning like this watching and the gun goes off race and about a halfway around the track this one runner pulls up hamstring you know and goes down to the track. Okay, happens all the time you know especially if you cover track and field. So everyone else keeps running and they finish the race and this guy is in his lane and you can see he's suffering and he gets up and he falls kind of back down. He gets man he really tore something. Then suddenly out of the blue a guy kind of a heavy set guy comes running out of the stands and onto the field. Now remember this is pre 9/11 so you know security isn't what it was afterwards. and he runs onto the track and he gets behind this guy and he lifts him up."

"Oh wow."

"And he starts walking him in the lane around the track and he and at some point when they come around the final curve he actually has him up on his feet. So his feet are behind him and each step that he's taking he's kind of walking cuz they're staying within the lane because if you go outside the lane de disqualified so there's not room for him to kind of put his legs or wherever. So they got to get both their legs lined up. So he's literally carrying him. Of course, now he's starting to come around the curve. Everyone in the stadium's like, "Yeah, yeah." Like this, you know, coming and cheering. And by the time he gets across the track, everybody gets a big round of applause for me. You know, let's say the winner won in 50 seconds or 49 seconds. He came around in like two and a half minutes, you know, something like this."

"So I go running downstairs. Now, there are only a handful of journalists there. I go running downstairs and try to find this guy and um I see the guy who went in the stand, ran out of the stands and me and a handful of other reporters race up to him and and I said, "Who are you? What what you know, why'd you do that?" He said, "I'm his father."

"Oh, wow."

"And I said, "Well, why did you run out of the stands?" He goes, "Well, I know how hard he trained. He's trained his whole life for this. And I knew that if he didn't cross the finish line, he wouldn't be recorded as having participated in the Olympics. You know, he just his name might not be in the books. And so I I knew he just had to finish. And I started asking questions about, you know, his background. He said, "Well, I taught him how to run." And when he was a little I said, "Why'd you put him on your feet?" He said, "Well, when he was a little boy, I taught him how to run. That's how I taught him. I put his feet on my feet." choking up when I'm telling the story. I put his feet on my feet and that's how I taught him how to run. And so I remembered that. So that's what we did,

"man."

"So I came back upstairs and I called my newspaper and I said, "I'm not writing the Scar Lewis thing. I got a better story." They go, "What do you mean Scar Lewis?" I said, "Trust me, this is a better story." And at the time, nobody had seen it. Now everybody tells this story and they all act like they were there but I was there and there weren't 10 million reporters there. Um, and I wrote that story instead or in addition to and um that column became one of the best known columns that I've written and it was about a guy who I'd never heard of before. Derek Redmond is his name but I never heard of him. He was British. Never heard of the father. Nobody in America cared about this guy. Nobody knew the race or anything, but everybody could relate to that story because a father with his son not wanting to see his son have his heart broken, you know, and so he he's they are that is every father and every son and every child repeated over again. And if you can find that, that's gold, you know, that's a column that you want to write no matter what else is out there."

How do you think about when you're telling a story, writing a story, what happens next? How do you think about that problem?

Um, some of it is pacing. Some of it you think almost like a movie. Have I had a lot of action? Do I need a counter action? uh when I wrote the book uh The Little Liar, which was set during the Holocaust and there was a lot of stuff in the first third of the book about, you know, the the the war years and and this was set in Greece and when the Nazis invaded and uh you know, the the the Jews were put into the ghetto and then the trains and there was a lot of very very big themat atic uh uh life and death kind of stuff. And I remember talking with my editor about, you know, she goes it, she said, "I wouldn't change any of it, but it's just so much like you just the reader feels overwhelmed by all these terrible acts, things that are happening." And I said, "Yeah, you're right." you know, and so I went back in and I inserted a little scene about the grandfather taking uh the kids uh up to a tower in Thessalonica uh on a special like field trip day for a birthday and it was thing called the White Tower. and and uh and they get to the top and um the and all the kids are having this great time cuz they got to go in and they got to go all the way to the top of the tower and the grandfather explains to them that it used to be called the red tower and that it used to be a prison and uh it was called the red tower because they used to throw people off the roof of it and they would die and the red from the blood you know and that and a kid says well how did had become the White Tower. And he says, "Well, there was a man who was imprisoned." And um the it was the the the tower itself was so dirty from all these killings and all the rest of it that the town wanted it painted, but nobody wanted to paint the because it's too tough a job because it was this massive huge tower and nobody wanted to do it. And this prisoner offered to do it by himself if they would set him free. Um, and because he had been in prison for like a crime of passion or something with his wife or something and so they let him do it and he painted the whole tower by himself. Uh, and they set him free. And, uh, the grandfather says to the his grandson, you know, what do you learn from that? And he said, what? He said, a man to be give to be forgiven will do anything. and and uh it was this quiet kind of sweet sort of moment that the insertion of it amidst these other things was what made it work. If I had put it someplace else, it would have been out of place or unnecessary or would have been a deviation. But because we needed to take a breath, it worked and it ended up serving purpose for the story much much later on. So sometimes what you're doing is you're you're like monitoring the heart of your reader. Is is their heartbeat getting too fast? Is it starting now? Instead of being a healthy run, this is now turning into a scary experience where like, oh my god, I need to stop. What? So bring it down a little bit, you know, take the hill out of the out of the marathon that we were talking about earlier, you know, flatten it flatten it out a little bit. So, a lot of it is pace and you have to have just have a feel for that as a storyteller. Um, and then a lot of it is crescendo. You know, nobody wants to peak too soon. Nobody wants to peak too too too late. You know, you don't want to save everything good for the last chapter of the book. Um, I learn a lot from movie making because I do write movies and it's quite a different um experience. Bill Goldman's book about adventures in the screen trade, he explains that the more action happens in the last seven minutes of a movie than than often happens in the first hour and a half of it. And yet as the viewer, you accept that because somehow we've come to expect our movies to sort of have these big wrap-ups. You know, if you actually measure it, it's like seven minutes. and 7 minutes, you know, the love story wraps up, the murder wraps up, the case wraps up, all this stuff and nobody objects to it because somehow you're ready for it, you know, that's the experience of the movie goer. Well, you have to also understand the experience of a reader, you know, and when do they want some relief? When do they want some humor? When do they want when do when do they want when do you break a chapter? That's a big thing. or how do you hang? You know, I'm I I work a lot at I don't know if I'm good or not, but I work a lot at stopping the story at a particular point and leaving it putting a pin in it and coming back over here and having people go, I want to get back to that, you know, well, you're going to have to wait a second, you know, going to have to wait. It's like my uncle's at the dinner table. There he was. We're over at the hill and we were, you know, but but first over here they were doing this. So, you know, you if if you're good, you know, you you can keep them up bouncing up in the air over here and you can do something over here as well.

"Yeah. I had the image of a color wheel as you were saying that"

"color wheel. Yeah."

"Sort of riding sort of in different colors and but you know, I've been on blue for a long time. I'm kind of getting into that deep blue. It's a little much. Now, I'm going to flip over to orange. Orange is the contrast to blue. The blue amplifies the orange. The orange amplifies the blue. And then we can kind of keep working our way around the color wheel."

"Right. Very much. That's exactly it. And then it becomes three-dimensional if you want to work about time. So if you're telling if you're telling multiple stories as I do in Twice, for example, you've got to end one chapter with a suggestion uh that we're going to go to some other time, but it's going to make sense that this comes now. you know, he looked at the, you know, tombstone and it made him think of of his of his mother or he just looked at the tombstone and he was overwhelmed with the memory. Stop. Next chapter, you know, now he's with his mother when he was a kid or something like that. So, there's some sort of tie between where you left off in that scene and and why you're beginning in the next one, you know. And every every book's different. I mean, there are the books that are told in multiple voices. That's a that's a challenge, you know, uh when do you go from one to the to the next? When do you return? How long has it been since we've heard from that last person? Do we come back? There's ones that are told in two different centuries, you know, so when do you tell one in this century and when do you go back? You know, there's there's ones that are that are told backwards, you know, like uh Memento, that movie, you know, which kind of worked its way backwards. That's a challenge, you know, and you have to tell that a certain way. So, it all depends on the structure that you've chosen. But all of it in my mind is about rhythm. And this is why I think I've been blessed as I didn't realize as a writer, but to have been a musician, I have an innate sense of rhythm in my speaking, in my writing, in my in my, you know, my music writing and all that. and and you sort of know when you're on a roll and when things are going and when you're not. My wife made this observation many years ago and she's very astute. She said, you know, when you write, sometimes she would sit in my office. She said, "When you write, you rock back and forth, but sometimes you stop. What's going on when you stop?" And I I thought about it. I said, "It's not working when I stop." And when I'm doing this, it's working. And so I can read a paragraph that I'm working on or I can write it or and it's like D. Okay, good. But all of a sudden, if it's dut what I you know, what do I have to do here? Stop. Okay, I got to fix something. It's not Hold up, everybody. Stop. Stop the ride. We're going to hammer a few things in here. Okay, let's go back. D dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot. And that's how I when I told you I reread and I reread. A lot of it is just for rhythm. And uh I one of the highest compliments I've I've ever gotten on my uh you know in my newspaper life was when people say you know when I read your column like I start and I'm at the end already you know like it just and so many other ones I read and then I have to stop and I have to go back and read the paragraph again because I lost something whatever but I don't know what it is about yours but I start at the beginning and I kind of just get right to the end and I know what it is. It's rhythm. You know, it's you write with a rhythm that doesn't disturb the reader kind of their sense of rhythm as they're as they're reading it and they just can kind of keep going. The sentences make sense. They flow into one another. The ideas flow into one another. Even the cadence of the of the actual sentence itself flows into it and you can get to the bottom. You know, you get to the end of the song. And writing is like that, too.

"What I like about rhythm as an idea is that it's pre-intellectual. You know, if I'm at a bar or I'm at a coffee shop and there's a song that I like, my body knows that I like it before my mind does. My body's kind of moving and grooving and shaking. Yeah."

"And then like I'll even feel my foot tapping,"

"right?"

"And then, oh, what is this? Oh, oh, I actually like this song. All right, what's going on? And okay, let's go listen to the words. And that's what I like about music is that there's a whole sequencing with falling in love with the song that goes from the body, the intuitive self to the mind and the sort of explicit part of the music."

"That's why in American Bandstand, that was always the first thing that they always said when they rated the records. I like the beat."

"And uh that's why Paul Simon uh when he was interviewed and I consider him one of the great songwriters of our of our time, maybe the best. Um he said he writes he he starts with the rhythm and Paul Simon is one of the most poetic songwriters we have, but he starts with the percussion and the rhythm of it and writes to it. And that's why I think so many of his uh you know, his um compositions are so beautiful because they're a meshing of of the rhythmic with the lyrical. He'll repeat a line just because it's it's uh it works with the rhythm. There's no real reason to repeat it, but he he he it'll work with the rhythm. Uh, and yeah, it's hard to explain, you know, without playing it for you, but um um uh right or wrong. Oh, right or wrong. It never helped us get along. You say you care for me, but there's no tenderness beneath your honesty. Whoop whoop whoop. You know, there there that's a beautiful little uh meshing of words and rhythm. You don't even realize it, but if you break it down, why did he repeat? He said right or wrong. And he said it twice and it's right or wrong, right or wrong. Oo, it never helped us get along. You know, that's not really the same pattern as this, but it has a certain beat to it. And uh I mean, he can do that, you know, a thousand times in in a thousand songs. And um that's real artistry and it makes it look simple, but it's not simple. There's nothing,"

"you know, you got me thinking about music and comedy are both very similar."

"Yeah, they look easy."

"If that if it works, it works. We don't need to explain why it works. In music, if they're tapping their feet and if comedy, you're getting the laugh. It works. Don't mess with it. It doesn't need to fit into some tidy little framework that Miss Whatever taught you in fourth grade or that you'll read in the formal writing book of whatever. If it works, just stick with it."

"That's right. And you can't even explain why it works."

"Yeah."

"But it works. And everybody goes, "It works.""

"Yeah. I had a teacher in high school that we did this sort of one week thing called intercession where we'd take a break from the semester. We just do one class for one week and it was a hip-hop class. And the teacher, cool guy, had an unreal style, but he he uh spoke with a stutter. Really bad stutter. But I'll never forget, if you gave him a good beat, he could freestyle like no one's business. And I was like, "What? The guy who speaks with the stutter is also the best freestyler I'd ever met." It was strange, but it was like the beat. Something liberated him. Yeah. Something liberated him. It like took hold of him. It was like the the opposite of having a demon inside of you. It was like, "Here we go." Well, and I think writers, songwriters, writers, they search for that and when they hit it, they've struck gold, you know, and uh you have a you have a magical sentence or paragraph, that last paragraph of a river runs through it where he says in the end, you know, all things in the world come into one and a river runs through it. There are stones beneath the river and the the stones are stories and sometimes the stories are their own. I am haunted by waters that I mean I don't know why that works why that's so beautiful but it's such a and it's not even you know I mean the story is about a a pastor and two brothers and one of them who dies and all the rest but but in the end that's just you know all things come into one and and a river runs through it. Something beautiful about it. I don't know. But you can't read that and not say, "Wow, this that's just poetry." Um, but I couldn't tell you how he came up with it. Norman Maclean, I I don't know. And he probably couldn't have either. You know, it just happened."

When you wrote your book about faith, was there anything you picked up from religious writing that you admired seeped into your own work?

Yeah, I that's an interesting question. I think when you write about faith in particular when you write about God um if you write from an honest place then there has to be a certain humility in your writing because you should be humble in the face of God and in the face of creation. And when you are humble, I find for me anyhow, I think that's when your writing becomes most beautiful. And because you're able not to think about ego or yourself or whatever, you're you're kind of caught up in the majesty of life. One of my favorite books is Gilead by Marilyn Robinson. And it's the story of a pastor writing a letter to his very young son as he's about to die, the older pastor, and and trying to just sort of tell him why he lived and and what meant things to him. And and there's so much of it is is cuz he's a pastor and he's he's so much of it is is humility in in the face of God. And the writing is just exquisite and beautiful. And at one point he writes about um walking through the woods and and seeing um seeing some young people playing with water or a hose and and and the drops are coming off of the trees and landing on them and they're giggling. And um he just describes it so beautifully and then he says, "Oh, oh this world. Oh this world, oh this oh the beauty of this world or you know and it comes from such a it's such a was just a simple little observation of people enjoying themselves and laughing, but you can tell he's dying and he's going to miss these things from the world." And it's some kind of sentence like oh oh the beauty of this world. or this world and and it's when you are humble like that and when you are admiring God's work I believe your words take on a a beauty that that it's hard to create when you're just thinking about how can I the writer write something really beautiful and that's why some of the most beautiful writing in the world is in the Psalms and you know and and and and what were the Psalms you know they were mostly David, you know, trying to ask for, you know, help from God. Many of them are pleas for for help, you know, and and against his enemies or living or whatever, but some are some are just extolling the beauty of God or the beauty of the world or whatever. But look at some of that writing. I mean, this stuff was being, you know, scratched on stone and it still holds up and and is beautiful. So, yeah. Yeah, I mean I've not really been asked that before, but I think when you write about um religious themes in a in a particular fashion, not in a dispassionate, you know, analytical one, but when you really are bringing God or or faith into your work, if you're doing it correctly, that humility opens up your ability to look at things in a in a marveling way.

"And when you marvel at something, you use a different language"

"than you know, you know what I mean?"

"Yeah. I mean, it's marvel. It's mystery. It's awe."

"And what I love about those is they're stretching. They kind of like reach right at the horizon of what we can sense and feel. There's an understanding that there's something beyond that horizon, something that we're grasping towards. You know, you think of the Sistine Chapel, the reaching the two fingertips are almost hitting each other and there's that gap and you're trying to reach out almost dislocating your shoulder, but the abyss, the frontier is kind of infinite and it's beyond you. It's in a different paradigm and it's like the quest for that."

"You're right. When it's humble, it's not coming from you. It's coming from something. You're being pulled. you find words, phrases, music within yourself that you didn't you're kind of unsure of where it came from."

"100%. I wrote a uh book called Have a Little Faith, which was uh about about a rabbi and a pa and a pastor, inner city pastor. And the rabbi uh had asked me to do his eulogy for him. And when he finally died, I had gone to visit him a bunch of times to try to learn about him so that I could do his eulogy. And um in his office he had a bunch of files. It was a messy, messy, sloppy thing of an office, but he had all these files all around. And up on the top shelf when I would go and sit down, I always looked up and there was a file called God. Just just said God, you know, along with, you know, Genesis and Moses and all, but then God and and I would look at that and I go, "What is in that thing?" You know, like what's in the file on God? And did you ever find out?"

"Yes. Uh I wrote about it in the book after he died. I went back to his office and I took the file off the shelf and uh I you know when I held it for a minute I I flashed back on that Indiana Jones movie you know when they have the arc you know and I thought if I open this like some sand's going to come up and flow in my face and the glory of God is my my skin's going to melt off or whatever and uh I uh I opened it and it was just all these notes and Xerox pages and little passages uh about God that the rabbi had assembled over the years with little things underlined and questions about what about this that and you know at first I was like that's it you know and then I realized well that's perfect because what is God if not a series of questions and and and the answers that we believe that we either are hearing or we one day will here, you know, and and it's the journey. It's not the answer. He did an amazing thing when he died. He had recorded a tape unbeknownst to anybody. And um when he died, his grandson, he had left it for his grandson. and his grandson at the funeral service um went up to the pulpit and put this cassette tape into a player on a speaker and pressed play and his voice came out and he spoke to the congregation, the rabbi's voice and he said, "My friends, if you are hearing this tape, that means I'm dead and gone and uh please don't feel sorry for me, you No. Uh, but I I I want to say one last thing before I go. I've had uh two questions that have been asked of me over the course of my life as a rabbi more than any others. The first is, do I believe in God? My answer is yes. The second is what happens when we die? The good news is by the time you hear this, I'll know. The bad news is now that I know, I can't tell you. You're going to have to find out for yourself. Uh and and uh I just thought that that was that was so perfect because that is what faith is. You know, you don't know. if you knew there'd be no reason for faith. You know, it's it's the journey to get there. And when you finally do know, you're going to it's going to be at a point where you're not going to be able to tell everybody else. And so, um I do think when you can put yourself into that frame of mind and you can write in that area, um you different words come out. And I have explored the idea of of doing a book uh about a biblical character. If I could find one that hasn't been so overdone and set it in that thing, but then then write about some part of them. I thought about Job maybe or something, but write about a part of them that wasn't in the you know, you use the historical context of it, but outside of that, then you create your own story for that person. um only because of that time and that era and that belief and I I think it would allow me to operate in like I'd be playing with toys that I don't get to play with all the time and uh and I do think it's a healthy exercise to be humbled and to learn how to write with humility. So that may be one of the things in the books in the future.

"Yeah. as you were talking about, you know, going back 10 minutes ago, we were talking about words that kind of don't make sense. And I was thinking about the classic Detroit song, one of them. Midnight Train, just a city girl, born and raised, and then everyone go, "South Detroit."

"Yeah. You know, there's no South Detroit. I've seen her in a smoking room with the smell of wine and cheap perfume. I don't know. That's what's fun about certain kinds of language is they pull you in. They reel you in like you're a fish on bait, but you kind of never really figure out what they mean. Why are you saying that? Why does that work? But something about it's kind of like an abstract painting. Something about the way that the words are combined, the way that they're together on the page."

"Huh, I like that. I want to keep exploring that. I want to memorize that. We have a a good laugh at everybody who comes in and sings that song. Um, and in fact, they play it in the uh they play it in the Red Wings games. Uh, just a small town boy born and raised in South Detroit. Everybody South Detroit. And just so that people who are listening to your show know this, Detroit is the only city in America where Canada is south of us. And so you take a bridge or a tunnel down south to go to Canada. So South Detroit would be Canada. And uh"

"Oh, I didn't know that."

"Yeah. And so there is no South Detroit. And uh and and and we get a good laugh out of that. But as you say, it's an iconic song, so everybody sings it. You know,"

What makes for good songwriting? I think uh like you said it there has to be a stick with itness to it that almost always comes from something rhythmic uh first and foremost. Um because it's hard to remember a song or stay with a song that doesn't have something you can tap your foot to. Even if it's a slow tap, you want to tap your foot. Then it has to have a a hook of some kind that just stays with you and won't let you go. Um, and then, you know, then the lyrics uh have to be again ones that come back to you or that you stay with. You know, poetry and songwriting, it can make a song beautiful but not popular. you know, it's really hard to have, you know, deep deep words uh uh that are really difficult and and and and still haven't be popular. I mean, Bob Dylan did it in some songs, you know, blowing everybody knows blowing in the wind, but they know blowing in the wind because you say over and over again, the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. The answer is blowing in the wind. That's very much a folk song. When you take the words to hurricane, you know the story about Ruben Carter, you know, almost nobody can remember this. It just goes on and on and on and on and on forever. So everyone goes, "Yeah, it's a brilliant song." Well, te tell me two lines from it. I can't tell you. I don't remember the two lines. It's a brilliant song. So So you know there's the kind of what makes a good song the answer by a rock critic. And then there's what makes a good song the answer by a music fan. And the answers by a music fan is generally going to be that they can sing it easily. they can remember it after the first time that they heard it. It's catchy, you know, and it somehow speaks to them. The answer by a rock critic could be any one of a number of other things, you know, but uh that's the difference between critics and and fans, I guess.

"Well, I know love is a theme in your book. Why did you pursue that?"

"Well, it's it's it's the theme in the book and"

"it's kind of the theme in life."

"Yeah, it is. And um I've written love stories within my stories before. Um almost every one of my books really has had, you know, main characters who have had a love of their lives. But this is the first book that I've written that love is the theme of the book. And you know, I mentioned to you before that, you know, I try to do themes first. and and and and the theme of this, you know, was the idea that the grass is always greener, you know, or our regrets, but really I wanted to do it with love. I wanted to do it about the grass always being greener when it comes to love or our thoughts about I could have done better in love or maybe this wasn't the perfect person for me or, you know, maybe I I cuz we do do that whether we want to admit that or not. We do. You know, it's lovely to say, "I'm with the love of my life and the perfect person for my life." And I'm sure that that's true in in the cases where people are very earnest about it. But you can also be with the love of your life and have forged a great relationship, but also somewhere along the line have asked yourself, "What would have happened if I didn't get with this person?" Or, "What would happen if this person died?" You know, or what would happen if this person decided they didn't want to be with me anymore? or what would happen if I just changed my mind or what would happen if someone else came along? Whatever. We do the these these things. We watch other people's relationships and we think, is that one better than what I have? You know, are they more in love than I am? Are they getting more love than I'm getting? And and and it just occurs to me that that one of the biggest second guings in our lives is our love life. You know, uh that and probably our career life. you know, we I could have done this, I should have done that, I should have been a, you know, I should have been a baseball player, I should have and and so I wanted to really explore the idea of love. And I think I've reached an age where I can do it now with some perspective. I think if I had tried to do write this book when I was in my 30s or 40s, I I I wouldn't have gone through enough of life to understand the difference between passion and love or between crushes and love, lust and love. lust and love. And so, um, everybody wants to talk about the combustible part of love, like the flame. If you think of love as a flame, everybody wants to talk about how it gets lit, you know? Oh, this came together and this came together and we had flames, you know, everybody loves the meat cute and the how how love gets started, right? How'd you meet?

"Yeah. How'd you meet? How did you when did you first, you know, when was your first kiss? When did you first sleep with each other? you know, they were the one,"

"right? But nobody talks about the down the road part of love. And nobody talks about how you take that flame and and blow on the embers of it and and get it to go. But but that that's so much more the story of love than the combustibility of it. Because a flame, a flame by itself can go out, can be extinguished if you pour water on it or you go like that to it. It can blow up and burn your house down. You know, it all depends on what you do with that flame. And so the nurturing of that flame after the combustibility, what it takes to keep it going and let it be a warm fire that you, you know, will take care of you for the rest of"

Your life. That's something that we don't explore a lot. And and I wanted I've had that with my wife and I've been very blessed to have have a wonderful wife. It's not like every day is, you know, sugar and roses and we never have a disagreement or anything like that. But I I have been blessed to know what true love is. You know, I know I've never doubted my wife's love for me. And I've realized as as years have passed that that is not something that everybody gets to experience. And people are suspicious of their wives. They're doubtful of their wives. They wonder. I've had people say to me, "I'm not sure my wife likes me." And I'm like, "God, what a thing to have to, you know, think about."

And so, I really wanted to explore the questions we ask ourselves about love. And Alfie and Gianna are the two protagonists of this story and they meet when they're children in Africa and uh they have like a little 8-year-old puppy love thing and then they don't see each other again until college uh and they when they accidentally are are are brought back together and Alfie is just smitten by her but she's kind of she's just too cool for him and and and and uh he he goes after like a puppy dog and and and finally finally, you know, professes his love for her and and you find out that she kind of was waiting for him all along. And it's really a nice they come together great. You're kind of rooting for them and and they and they have this early great existence in in this city in New York and you know in like I I did when I first moved here um and and you know they don't have any money but they're happy and all those kinds of things. And then time passes and things take their toll. And of course he has the magic power to go and do things over again which he's never told her. So he has this secret >> and uh at one point he tries to tell her and he says, you know, I can do that. I can go back and change things. She goes, oh, really? You know, well, uh, that's interesting to know. And he goes, well, what would what would you do, you know, if you could go back and change anything? He wants to sort of engage her. And she thinks for a second, she says, "Nothing." And he says, "What do you mean nothing?" He says, "Because she says,"I don't know how this tapestry is going to play out. I don't know the everything must be happening for some reason and and I don't want to change it because that would change who I am." And it's such a perfect little answer that it makes him kind of almost ashamed that he brought it up and he never brings it up again.

But sure enough, as the years pass, something happens and he starts to get a wandering eye and he's tempted and then a fight occurs and in a in a climactic, angry, drunken moment, he decides he's going to try something else, you know, and that's when he realizes and finds out that this power that he has doesn't work with love. And so once you turn your back on a true love in this world that he is with his magic, that person can never love you again. And he discovers this world where this woman who he always loved and whatever is in it, but the feeling is gone. And what happens after that? And and and that is what that taking care of the flame thing that I'm talking about. Like, you know, if you let it get to a point where it extinguishes, it doesn't come back. And so the book becomes this treatise about, you know, when you have love and you don't appreciate it, when you don't have it and you want it back, all those things that go on with love and what what does he do? Of course, the book becomes this whole thing about what does he do now that he's like timeraveled out of out of the best relationship of his life.

It was a really interesting uh thing and I got to read it to my wife. Um she has never actually read I don't think a book of mine u the way that you or I would read a book because I read them to her towards the end of the writing. You know, it's one of the last things I do before I turn it in. Um I say, "Are you ready to hear it?" She says, "Okay." You know, we have to find big chunks of time. Uh, and we go down to my office usually and I sit in the chair and she sits around the corner so that I don't see her face. >> Oh, wow. >> Cuz I don't want to look over and see her go. >> Yeah. [laughter] What? What? Nothing. Nothing. >> No, you made a face. What? No, I didn't make a face. I had something in my eye. You know, you know what? You know what? So, so I can't see her when I read. And it's a very instructive time because you know when you're reading a book out loud for the first time, you're hearing it in a different way also. And um once in a while I'll hear she'll go I say, "Was that a good or a good?" Yeah. No, it was good. It was good. And this one, um, I read to her, uh, and when I finally got to the end and the last page, and I will say that the end of this book is very jarring and and it it's everything comes together on the last two pages. So, please, if you're listening to this, don't go to the last two pages of the book to just see, I'll just go and then I'll read from the beginning. You'll ruin it. You'll destroy it. You've got to leave it alone and wait and see what happens.

But when I read that to her, um, and then I looked up when I said the last line, uh, she, you know, leaned forward, she, oh, and she gave me a big kiss and and, uh, you know, a hug and, uh, that meant a lot to me because, you know, I sort of wrote it for her and I dedicated the book for her. Um, because I haven't always appreciated the love that she has constantly provided for me no matter what. And I don't think guys especially sometimes don't realize the comfort that we have in knowing that our wives love us through thick and thin. And we pay more attention to little blurbs, blips, you know, that that happen along the way that, you know, oh, this got upset over this or disagreed over that. But that layer of just true love that you know is the bed that you get to lie in every night. It's easy to take that for granted and when it's gone, it's really gone, you know, uh and that's really hard to replace. So, you know, it's what I wanted to say about love and I I haven't been mature enough to do it until probably now if I am. And so, uh yeah, it's something different for me.

But >> you made me think of two stories. One is a very sweet one. Another one's a little more difficult. But when I was in Texas, I'd always go to Chick-fil-A on Saturdays with a mentor of mine. And every single Sunday at 11:30, there was an old couple that would come in. And the wife could barely >> I thought they weren't open on Sundays. >> Oh, sorry. On Saturdays, somebody's going to point out it couldn't have been a Sunday. >> Totally. We would have gotten you know what Cunningham's law is. I think it is Cunningham's law. The best way to get an answer on the internet is to be wrong about something and then everyone you get all the keyboard warriors. Okay. So, Saturday, Saturday, we always do it >> and uh 11:30 they walk in. It's this old guy can kind of barely walk with this frail >> frail woman and they always sit down in the same booth and he goes and he gets her a vanilla ice cream and he gives it to her and it's just like clockwork. Me and Brian, we always go together. We're like, "Man, I can't wait to see them." So that's a sweet one. And you know it's old person's love. You know I think of when we think of love you know even in relationships have been it's like hey let's go watch the notebook. You know it's never culturally it's never the old people's love. That's not what we focus on. It's always falling in love the rain. I love you so much right the you know the kiss with the dramatic music and the spinning camera angle.

But then last week I played golf with the guy who's probably 62, 63. And we probably spent an hour talking about just gotten divorced and what it was like to find out that his wife had had an affair and was cheating on him with, you know, the football coach of their kids high school. And it was so painful. You know, talk about just when love leaves and you lose it. I mean, I think they got divorced 10 to 12 years ago, and you could just feel in every single word the despair, the sense of loss, the agony that still keeps them up at night. And to just watch those two little moments, you know, >> play out. >> Yeah. >> Um there's a real gravity.

>> Yeah. It's it's interesting that you say that because I've been asked many times about loss and you know because I guess Tuesdays with my you know obviously deals with that theme so many times and then so many of the other things that I've written about or about loss or dying. I wrote a book about our little girl who died from a brain tumor. And so a lot of books that I've written about have been about loss but they've been about loss of life. And this is the first one that I've really written which is about loss of love. And you're right, you know, loss of life is a pain that you carry with you. You know, that you can do nothing about. And but you're in two different worlds. You know, the person that you yearn for and miss is someplace. And what what is hurting you is that they're not there anymore physically. you know, like you can't go see them, you can't go talk to them. A loss of love, the person can still be in the world, can still be right there. And that's what happens with Alfie. You know, this Gianna, she's still there and she still knows him and they were friend, they have the history and everything, but she just doesn't feel the same way. and she doesn't remember a time that she ever did because he went back in time and undid everything. And so he's looking at this woman who he felt so strongly and she once felt so strongly about him and now it's gone and she's still here and she's right in front of him. So it's not he's not going to a tombstone. He's not going to a cemetery. He's not, you know, looking at the sky and I wish you were here. She is there. What he's saying is, I wish you felt about me the way that you used to feel about me. And that's a whole different sense of loss. And it was a chance for me to explore that, you know, that it's a Barry Manalo sang the song, but it was a David Pomeran song who was a beautiful songwriter uh called Trying to Get the Feeling Again. And it's I've been up, down, everywhere I possibly can like a blood hound trying to get the feeling again. He's trying to find this emotion that he once felt for someone, but it's gone. And that's a that's a yearning, you know, that everybody can relate to. So, I'm hoping that, you know, people who read twice, that's what they'll sort of find to. And it occurs to me as you're talking, I could see how it's I've written about loss again, but it's not somebody dying. It's it's a flame going out, you know.

Yeah. You are welcome on this show anytime. [laughter] >> I I think you got to give me 10 more years to come up with new stories because I think I told you everyone I have. >> Next time we're doing three hours. >> Three hours. Okay. >> Three hours. >> All right. All right. Well, I appreciate it. Thank you. That was a good question. Yeah.