Why We Write Page 10

  Lit was the hardest of all the books I’ve written. You’re writing about your kid, your kid’s father, spiritual matters in a secular world. Everyone’s going to think you’re an idiot for becoming a Catholic. You’re talking about Jesus. No one’s going to be into it.

  A lot of reviewers seemed to like those sections. To me that was a triumph. I don’t think I converted anybody, but that wasn’t my goal. My goal was to describe what a spiritual experience feels like, to re-create the emotional experience of awe when you’re not accustomed to it.

  God helps

  Before I pursue a project, I pray about whether it’s what God wants me to do. I don’t get written instructions, but I can get a kind of yes or no answer. I’m not like Saint Paul, with God guiding my hand. That would be great, but I don’t have that. I’m doing the work just as any writer would. That’s why I feel such anxiety and dread.

  In the old days, my solution to most problems involved alcohol and firearms. I have very venal, selfish impulses. I need help behaving better than I would normally behave.

  At one point I’d been working so hard on Lit, and it was so painful, I prayed, “Am I supposed to do this, God, or should I sell my apartment and give the money back?” Obviously I got some kind of yes—from God, from inside me, who knows?

  I’m proud of myself for sticking it out and getting it done. I have a sense of pride about it, not based solely on the product, but for having withstood the process. It took a lot of persistence on my part to finish that book. They paid me a lot of money, and I got really great reviews, and I don’t have to tell that story anymore. I’m done. It’s written.

  There are times I ask God to give me the courage to write what’s true, no matter what it is. That’s no different from Hemingway saying, “I want to write one true sentence.” And yeah, people say I’m bullshitting myself about God, but I don’t care. It works.

  Publishing isn’t what it used to be

  Currently nobody really knows how to sell books. The whole system is changing, and nobody knows how to make money in this industry in any kind of reliable way.

  The industry has this blockbuster mentality that permits a shitty TV star to publish his shitty book and sell three million copies in hardcover, and then you never hear about it again. All the energy is focused on those blockbuster books because they have the most immediate, short-term return.

  People have been saying it’s the end of the novel since Hemingway. I don’t feel that dire about it. I think more people read than used to read. You have more people reading worse books, but they’re still reading books.

  I read on my iPad now, and I buy more books than ever. If I like a book I also buy it in cloth or paperback because I want to support the bookstores.

  My readers would be shocked to know…

  …how long it takes me to write these books.

  I’ll look at my students’ first drafts, but if a friend says, “I’ve written eighty pages,” and asks me to read them, I’ll say, “How many times have you written them?” Because there’s usually about one and a half pages worth saving. Most writers aren’t willing to part with their own words. Anytime anyone asks me to cut anything, I say, “Great.”

  Another oddity: if my repetitive stress injury flares up I can really be put out of commission. So I write longhand.

  Best time ever? Now.

  I just finished writing the lyrics for an album called Kin. The musician is Rodney Crowell, a guy who grew up in the same strip of the grain belt that I grew up in. Rodney’s been trying to get me to do this for years. Finally I gave in, and we had a ball. I’m very excited about that.

  Also, I just sold a TV show called Lit to HBO. This woman called me and said she wanted to do a screenplay. She said we could cowrite it, and we did. It was a great experience.

  Doing these collaborative things is really fun for me. Writing songs, writing a pilot, anything feels so much easier than writing books. You get way more money and put out way less energy. You’re trying to write better than the people who write for TV. That’s a really low bar. Plus I’m a freshman, so if I fail it’s no big deal.

  I was working so hard to get my son through college, but now he’s twenty-five and self-supporting. So I only have to teach one semester. I’ve never had this much free time in my life. I go to the gym every day. It’s like the world has just blossomed open.

  Mary Karr’s Wisdom for Writers

  The quote I had tacked to my board while I was writing Lit is from Samuel Beckett, and it’s really helpful: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail better.”

  Any idiot can publish a book. But if you want to write a good book, you’re going to have to set the bar higher than the marketplace’s. Which shouldn’t be too hard.

  Most great writers suffer and have no idea how good they are. Most bad writers are very confident. Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver, the bat girl in Yankee Stadium. That’s a more fruitful way to be.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Michael Lewis

  The willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grown-ups remains a mystery to me to this day. I was twenty-four years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall…

  —Opening lines, Prologue, The Big Short, 2010

  If you haven’t seen Michael Lewis on a TV news show (or faux news show) lately, you haven’t been watching. A graduate of Princeton and the London School of Economics, the author of several economics-related blockbusters, and a proven financial prognosticator, he’s a regular guest on the major networks as well as Bloomberg, Fox, and PBS.

  Think he sounds smart, but a bit…dry? Think again. Not for nothing does Michael Lewis live in Berkeley with his famous firecracker wife. He’s sharp, funny, warm, and irreverent, which also makes him a favored banterer with the likes of Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, and Stephen Colbert.

  Michael Lewis and Tabitha Soren work in studios connected by a meandering path that circles the wood-frame house where they’re raising their three kids. The layout of their sprawling Berkeley hillside compound says it all. Work matters, yes, but family is the center.

  Lewis’s studio, a 1920s redwood cabin complete with stone fireplace, has the cozy, closed-in feel of a bear’s lair, its blinds shut against the bright spring day. “My body clock wants to start writing at midnight and finish at four a.m.,” he explained, “but that doesn’t work with my kids’ schedules. So I have to simulate midnight in the middle of the day.”

  THE VITALS

  Birthday: October 15, 1960

  Born and raised: New Orleans, Louisiana

  Current home: Berkeley, California

  Love life: Married to Tabitha Soren since 1997

  Family life: Daughter Quinn born 1999; daughter Dixie born 2002; son, Walker, born 2006

  Schooling: BA in art history, Princeton, 1982; master’s degree in economics, London School of Economics, 1985

  Day job?: Contributing editor, Vanity Fair

  Notable notes:

  • Michael Lewis wrote his first book, Liar’s Poker, while working full-time at Salomon Brothers.

  • Lewis went to the LSE because, after graduating from Princeton, he was turned down by every Wall Street firm to which he applied.

  • Lewis takes no advances for his books. He wants to have “some skin in the game” by sharing the investment in his books with his publisher.

  (No website, Facebook page, or Twitter account. “I have enough to do.”)

  THE COLLECTED WORKS

  Nonfiction

  Liar’s Poker: Rising through the Wreckage on Wall Street, 1989

  The Money Culture, 1991

  Pacific Rift: Why Americans and Japanese Don’t Understand Each Other, 1991

  Trail Fever: Spin Doctors, Rented Strangers, Thumb Wrestlers, Toe Suckers, Grizzly Bears, and Other Creatures on the Road to t
he White House, 1997

  The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, 2000

  Next: The Future Just Happened, 2001

  Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, 2003

  Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life, 2005

  The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, 2006

  Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity, 2008

  The Real Price of Everything: Rediscovering the Six Classics of Economics, 2008

  Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, 2009

  The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, 2010

  Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, 2011

  Film Adaptations

  The Blind Side, 2009

  Moneyball, 2011

  Michael Lewis

  Why I write

  When I was at Princeton, I had this very passionate intellectual experience with my senior thesis. I loved writing it. And then I was defending it to my adviser, and he was admiring it—I still have his comments!—but he wasn’t saying anything about the quality of the writing. So I asked him, and he said, “I’ll put it this way: don’t try to make a living at it.”

  When I got out of Princeton in ’82 I was at loose ends. I loved mastering new subjects, and I didn’t know how to go on doing that. I wanted to preserve the feeling I’d had, working on my badly written thesis, but I had no idea how to make writing an occupation. Then I thought: “I want to be John McPhee.”

  McPhee taught at Princeton. I never took his class; before I wrote my thesis, I thought I wasn’t suited to writing. But he had the life I wanted. He’d go away and research a book every other year, then come back and write it. That seemed like a really good life to me.

  When you’re twenty-one and loose in the world, you’ll try anything. So I wrote a long piece about the homeless people I met at a mission where I was volunteering. And then I bought a copy of the Writer’s Market, which listed eight thousand publications, and—I don’t know what I was thinking—I sent my story to every magazine in it, including in-flight magazines. I got this bewildered letter back from the editor of the Delta magazine, saying, “We admire the effort, but pieces on the life of the underclass in America don’t usually run in our publication.”

  I kept plugging away. I wrote a lot of pieces that never got published. Then, in 1983, I applied for an internship as a science writer at the Economist. I didn’t get the job—the other two applicants were doing their PhDs in physics and biology, and I’d flunked the one science class I took in college—but the editor who interviewed me said, “You’re a fraud, but you’re a very good fraud. Go write anything you want for the magazine, except science.” They published the first words I ever got into print.

  They paid ninety bucks per piece. It cost money to write for the Economist. I didn’t know how I was ever going to make a living at writing, but I felt encouraged. Luckily, I was delusional. I didn’t know that I didn’t have much of an audience, so I kept doing it.

  Then the job on Wall Street fell into my lap, and I thought, There’s a living right there. When I took the job, I didn’t think I was going to write a book about Wall Street, but it became obvious after a year and a half that I was moving in that direction.

  Before I wrote my first book in 1989, the sum total of my earnings as a writer, over four years of freelancing, was about three thousand bucks. So it did appear to be financial suicide when I quit my job at Salomon Brothers—where I’d been working for a couple of years, and where I’d just gotten a bonus of $225,000, which they promised they’d double the following year—to take a $40,000 book advance for a book that took a year and a half to write.

  My father thought I was crazy. I was twenty-seven years old, and they were throwing all this money at me, and it was going to be an easy career. He said, “Do it another ten years, then you can be a writer.” But I looked around at the people on Wall Street who were ten years older than me, and I didn’t see anyone who could have left. You get trapped by the money. Something dies inside. It’s very hard to preserve the quality in a kid that makes him jump out of a high-paying job to go write a book. It gets squeezed out of you.

  I took a dumb risk, and I never paid a price for that. Instantly I had a book that sold a million copies. Since then it hasn’t been a very difficult living at all, but that was fluky.

  There’s no simple explanation for why I write. It changes over time. There’s no hole inside me to fill or anything like that, but once I started doing it, I couldn’t imagine wanting to do anything else for a living. I noticed very quickly that writing was the only way for me to lose track of the time. That’s not as true anymore as it was when I started, but it still happens, and it’s incredible when it does.

  It changed, and it changes

  The change has less to do with what’s inside me than the structure of my life. It’s amazing how few demands I had on myself when I was twenty-three years old, and how many I have now. It’s just extraordinary. Only by ignoring the vast majority of requests for my time do I have any kind of life at all.

  When I was writing my first book, I was going from eleven at night till seven in the morning. I was very happy waking up at two in the afternoon. My body clock would naturally like to start writing around nine at night and finish at four in the morning, but I have a wife and kids and endless commitments. Which is good; I like ’em. I want ’em, and there’s a price. I make breakfast. I take the kids to school. My natural writing schedule doesn’t work with my family’s schedule. I actually do better when I have pressure, some mental deadline.

  What disturbs me is that the act of writing is associated with work, rather than pleasure. In the beginning it was associated only with pure pleasure. Now it’s a mixture.

  The reasons I write change over time. In the beginning, it was that sense of losing time. Now it’s changed, because I have a sense of an audience. I have the sense that I can biff the world a bit. I don’t know that I have control of the direction of the pinball, but I can exert a force.

  That power is a mixed blessing. It’s good to have something to get you into the chair. I’m not sure it’s great for the writing to think of yourself as important while you’re doing it. I don’t quite think that way. But I can’t deny that I’m aware of the effects my writing will have. It will be read. It will cause some stir.

  And money changes it. When I started, I was paid nothing for what I wrote. Now I’m paid vast sums for the worst crap. That’s a reason to write now that I didn’t have before. Someone will call me up and ask me to write three hundred words. I dash off something in the morning, and I get paid a hundred times what I used to be paid for a piece I’d spend weeks on.

  Once you have a career, and once you have an audience, once you have paying customers, the motives for doing it just change.

  The other thing that changes is that the threshold that gets me interested in writing about something is higher. When I started, there was nothing I’d have deemed not worth my time as a writer. Now I’m getting choosier and choosier. I’m able to turn things down. And I’m older, so there’s less unexplored territory all the time.

  Writing makes me sweat

  Two things happen to me physiologically when I write that are maybe a little weird. My palms sweat, so my keyboard gets totally wet. Also, my wife says I cackle.

  Apparently while I’m writing, I’m laughing hysterically and sometimes talking to myself. Once I was revising a screenplay and Tabitha was in the next room and she said I was actually performing the lines of dialogue, and I wasn’t aware of that.

  I used to get the total immersion feeling by writing at midnight. The day is not structured to write, and so I unplug the phones. I pull down the blinds. I put my headset on and play the same soundtrack of twenty songs over and over and I don’t hear them. It shuts everything else out. So I don’t hear myself as I’m writing and laughing and talking to myself. I’m not even aware I’m making noise. I’m having a physical reaction to a very engaging experience. It is not a detached proc
ess.

  When I’m working on a book, I’m in a very agitated mental state. My sleep is disrupted. I only dream about the project. My sex drive goes up. My need for exercise, and the catharsis I get from exercise, is greater. When I’m in the middle of a project, whether I’m doing Bikram yoga or hiking up the hill or working out at the gym, I carry a blank pad and a pen. I’ll take eight hundred little notes right in the middle of a posture. It drives my yoga instructor crazy.

  Even if I’m trying not to think about it, I think about it. I get into an agitated mental state. So I can’t do it all the time. You read these biographies of novelists, like John Updike, who get up early every single morning and write six hundred words. That’s just not me. It would kill me to do that.

  I’m mentally absent for months at a time. The social cost to my wife and kids is very high. Luckily, I’m a binge writer. I take a lot of time off between books, which is why I still have a family.

  I get told all the time that I make writing a book look easy. I think my readers would be surprised to know just how agonizing it is, how sweat-intensive, how messy, how many drafts I write, how much doubt I have about the quality of prose. It might deter them from wanting to be writers.

  Binge. Rest. Repeat.

  Those piles on the windowsill? Each one is a project, a gathering storm. Right now those piles represent two magazine pieces, a screenplay, and three books. That may be the next five years of my life. Something could jump in and assert itself into those piles, but they’re all real projects.

  At any given time I usually have eight new ideas. But when the book is done, do I want to go do one of those ideas? No. So the eight ideas get pushed into one of those piles. I need time between projects. It’s like a tank filling up. I can’t just go from one to the other.

  There’s some cheating. Some books are just collections of magazine pieces, that kind of thing. It’s never that I have writer’s block; it’s more that I lack the energy for the project, because the energy required is so great. And I know that the social cost to the family is pretty high. I’m here, but I’m mentally not here. I check out and check in.