[SPEAKER_00]: high and welcome to the working songwriter.
[SPEAKER_00]: The show where today's best songwriters come to talk shop.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host, Joe Pug.
[SPEAKER_00]: Each episode here, we host a distinguished guest and we ask them to go deep on their inspiration on their process, on the general ups and downs of making a life in music.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, whether you're a grizzled veteran, selling cameos for $50 a piece to cover the insurance on your rehearsal space, or else a scrappy upstart.
[SPEAKER_00]: rehearsing in your uncle's garage, even though he's a borderline hoarder.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is your show, because ultimately, it is what every rider seeks most, and ironclot excuse to put off.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, riding.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey everyone, it's the last Friday of June, 2026, and I thank you for joining us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I hope that you enjoy this week's episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: This week, we're thrilled to step out of our normal comfort zone by welcoming one of our country's most acclaimed young novelists.
[SPEAKER_00]: Originally from Mount Vernon, Ohio, author Stephen Markling now makes his home in Los Angeles, California.
[SPEAKER_00]: He attended an undergraduate at Miami of Ohio before being accepted into the prestigious Iowa Riders Workshop.
[SPEAKER_00]: Simon and Schuster published his
[SPEAKER_00]: The book was widely praised for its unflinching portrait of post 911 Rust Belt America.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then in 2023, he returned with the massively popular novel The Deluge, a work a fiction about climate change that the New York Times named as one of its notable books.
[SPEAKER_00]: He also works as a screenwriter in Los Angeles as a member of the writer's room for the
[SPEAKER_00]: The New York Times book review said that the deluge shows the range of its author's gifts.
[SPEAKER_00]: Polyphonic narration, silken sentences, and elaborate world-building.
[SPEAKER_00]: And none other than Stephen King said of the same book that it is simply put a modern classic.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you read it, you'll never forget it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He also named it as the favorite book he had read that year.
[SPEAKER_00]: What a thrill it is to welcome on to our show such a profoundly talented artist who falls outside our normal realm of expertise.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's a lot for songwriters to learn on this cross-discipline episode of the Working Songwriter.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stephen Markley would have a treat to have you on the Working Songwriter podcast kind of a cross-disciplineary creative podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: Today you grew up in Mount Vernon,
[SPEAKER_00]: Ohio, which I think many of your readers could be forgiven for thinking that your upbringing was a lot like a place like Newcannon in your book, Ohio, was that did you use a lot of license there or was your life growing up there pretty similar to what we might have written that book?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I don't think anything I ever write as a one to one, so certainly Newcannon was influenced by growing up in Mount Vernon, but
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, also it's, it's an imaginary place that where you need sort of the different attributes of, you know, several different Ohio towns.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, you need to like stretch out and and bring in some of the surrounding areas, some of the surrounding lore, I guess is the word.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I think every author in their first works is trying to explicate the place they're from and think about what it means to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And certainly that was part of the project of Ohio.
[SPEAKER_00]: So were you a creative kid?
[SPEAKER_00]: Was there any inkling?
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, because when you're a kid, it's like astronaut, you know, play on the Indians, firefighter's novelist really isn't on the cue card there of what you could choose from.
[SPEAKER_00]: Were there any early kind of creative inklings that this might have been the path that you'd go?
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I think I have wanted to be a novelist since I was five years old.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, yeah, it's true.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I wanted to be an NBA basketball player first, but my limitations physically and on the court sort of precluded that.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, the calves were so bad in the late 90s too, so.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we had the price dorty era, that's the promise saying it's what Jordan came in and erected.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, no, I grew up just loving to read, and you know, I've been lucky enough to get blurbed by the master himself, Stephen King.
[SPEAKER_01]: But when I was a kid, like I would read his novels, I'd stay up to like two, three in the morning, just like tearing through the shining, Gerald Gain, Pet Sanitary, just like could not get enough of that stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it leads to a twisted adult head, of course, but yeah, I was just such a reader and I always thought that what a magic trick it was to be able to wrap someone up in a story like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, well, you've kind of given me an inklin, I've been trying to get my nine year old to read like crazy, but I think I've been giving them stuff that's too dated and I'd never thought even though the subject matter is a little bit dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: I never thought about Stephen King as the the gateway drug.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now that you mentioned it, I mean, his got his stuff reads so beautifully, it's so fun and so deep at the same time, I can see how that would have worked for a kid.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, totally.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you know, like I was in the perfect pocket of like the Jurassic Park era.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, when I picked up Jurassic Park in third grade, I was just like, well, this is a masterpiece clearly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's move on to Spear and Congo and the other, you know, literary classics of Michael Crayton.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just like those simple ways into wanting to be a storyteller.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that eventually you learned there other authors who write about things other than dinosaurs and Killer cars but it would be kind of auspicious Like that really was a time when you could have like a national best seller of a book and then it would scale into culture in a Probably different way that you don't see that many books doing and in what I feel like
[SPEAKER_00]: Modern books are like kind of like therapeutic language dumps now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, you know, but I mean It's really auspicious that you would have come of age at that time because it I mean It just had to seem huge to you the way that these things would explode into culture Sure, yeah, and I mean, you know, I think
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, you know, for me, like, it's, for any, like, person trying to do a creative field in artistic field, you start out, like, trying to do these palmitations of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, uh, you know, as a kid, I was writing this series of books, it was called Tix.
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, and it was about giant mutant ticks, uh, you know, that I'd like eat nuclear waste and I'd become, uh, you know, a problem that, uh, you know, the military had to deal with.
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh,
[SPEAKER_01]: and I look back at that stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: I did so funny because you can sort of see the themes of like the books I'd write as an adult, like buried in, you know, my third grade, uh, ticks, uh, soccer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and you wouldn't know that it would be the theme of climate change because at the time what we were worried about was acid rain really into the acid rain in the 1990s So I mean, not only did you want to be a novelist from age five, but it sounds like you were even attempting it like from a very young age.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's very unusual
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I, you know, it was just the way I grew up.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm not, it's just how I played, how I had fun.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, like outwardly, I was like a very sort of normal, you know, again, loved playing basketball.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, would spend hours and hours at the local gym or gyms, like wherever I could find to play with my friends.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, you know, at night, like get into a book and get into, you know, trying to like figure out
[SPEAKER_01]: by myself how the construction of a story worked and how, you know, over time you sort of like grow this instinct for it like anything else.
[SPEAKER_00]: How much of that, did a certain amount of that just have to grow out of boredom?
[SPEAKER_00]: I kind of can't imagine, I mean, my kids don't have any devices, but like a lot of kids are just barred in devices and if you had had the iPad, I'm thinking that you're playing on that instead of trying to write ticks, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: For sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, my parents didn't let me have video games as a kid and it's all about seventh grade.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then Mario Kart came along and sort of, you know, you had to have it or, yeah, you're calling childhood social services.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: I, you know, like, I want her to a songwriter say to me that she was like so mad at like the social media era basically because it's sort of stopped her from being bored.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was how she would write songs that she'd get a tune in her head when she was bored and sort of like take it, you know, like think about it over and over again.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think like, it's so important for kids to get bored and have to resort to their imaginations to facilitate something fun happening, something interesting happening.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think like, to this day, I remain like a very imaginative person.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like when my mind wanders, it's usually into telling myself a story.
[SPEAKER_00]: really.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's like the default.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when did you decide, I mean, obviously you had this burning within you, but a lot of kids have dreams and then life gets real, man.
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you know when you went to Miami that like, that's, you were going to Miami to do that or was it more at first like, well, I'm going to get the old marketing degree here and there you go.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, I was in this weird place because sort of going to college, I'd never really set out loud, like I want to be a writer, but it was certainly what I had burning inside of me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the first big leap was, you know, my sophomore year, I took a creative writing class, and my professor at the time, this guy Stephen Bauer sort of read the first story I submitted and wrote me this letter saying, like, did you plagiarize this?
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, remarkable and and good enough to get you into a well-rated NFA program and I still have that letter somewhere But it was the first time like anybody had ever sort of looked at me and said like yeah, like you have something And I think for for any young person those Small moments are so important, you know, just those little indicators that like there's a little sort of You know But ligature that lets you get to the next step that it's so vital
[SPEAKER_01]: And so after that I was like, okay, like this, you know, this is what you want to do and then you have to figure out how to do it, which is obviously the Gulf between those two things is enormous.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I spent probably the next 20 years trying to figure that part out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but like you said, I mean, that could have been a real fork in the road there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you need.
[SPEAKER_00]: a small amount, and that doesn't sound like it was a small amount of encouragement, that's an enormous amount of encouragement to get from a professor to get accused of plagiarism in a pre-chat GPT era, I mean, you really had to go for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, he went looking for it, I'm pretty sure online, and I was like, no, no, this is just like, this is the thing I came up with in my head.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is, so you would then, obviously, you would go to probably the most prestigious MFA program
[SPEAKER_00]: writer's workshop home of carver home of all the rest and what did you have like when you got there did you find yourself able to swim immediately or we like damn man I got to get up to speed here there's a lot of stuff I got to learn yeah well I was I was coming at it from a different place and I think this was so important was I was 30 when I when I got there you know I I had sort of lived
[SPEAKER_01]: But I'd had this this time of my life of trying to be a freelance writer and failing at it and being broke and being like, oh my god, what am I doing?
[SPEAKER_01]: And so to me getting into Iowa was mostly a relief because they were, you know, we were getting paid to teach a class of undergrads for like $13,000 a year.
[SPEAKER_01]: And to me that was like oh god like health insurance and a paycheck like this is so nice I'm so I was just so grateful for that part of it But because I'd been working at it on my own for so long when I got there It was not intimidating.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not or it wasn't that it wasn't intimidating.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was more that like I was prepared for it mentally
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and certainly like I was in a class of some small stars, uh, people were getting book contracts like the second week they showed up on campus.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and it didn't quite happen that quickly for me, but I think like what I learned in that era of failure was, you know, what a coach, the sports coach calls us stick to a witness, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like a, a sense of like you're going to have setbacks and you just have to like be the
[SPEAKER_00]: you mean creative or professional setback?
[SPEAKER_01]: Professional.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the thing about writing and literature, writing novels, is that it's not a young person's form.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I look, yeah, I look back at the stuff I was working on in my early 20s and it's I'm like, mortified by it, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's just one of those fields that requires a little more seasoning to get it to work.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, I think like Iowa came along in my life exactly the right time, and certainly people have different experiences there, not everybody has the time of their life.
[SPEAKER_01]: But for me, it was exactly the right place with exactly the right people at exactly the right moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the friends I made there and the professors I had were so instrumental just in sort of teaching me how to become a professional writer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well it's funny that you'd say it's not a young person's form because I've always noticed that with with novelists and reading their works because you can often see someone in their mid 20s whose facility with writing completely outstrips their life experience by leaps and bounds because I mean there's just a certain amount of
[SPEAKER_00]: having been around people and, you know, how you thought life works versus seeing it, IRL and experience it on the ground that sometimes people can just be so phenomenal on the page, but just so it does not ring true at all to anybody because it's not, they haven't lived enough life to know that it's not true.
[SPEAKER_01]: I couldn't agree more and it's such a strange thing because obviously you can't quite teach a life experience like you can't say, hey go do this set of things and you'll be, you'll be seasoned, you'll be ready.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I mean I was, especially I was, there were so many people there who could write the fuck out of a sentence like you were just, I was always like blown away by some of the people.
[SPEAKER_01]: some writing there, and then you'd get to the, from the sentence to the story and you wouldn't quite find anything in it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a, it was a, it was 20 pages of beautiful sentences strong together, but you were sort of off scratching your head about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that to me is always like, I don't think I'm the greatest sentence writer in the world, but certainly like what I can spin a yarn.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was what I had going in that I feel like I was really sort of could focus my energies on.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, here's what you're good at.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now how do you take that to the next level and complete like a fully realized novel that has that sort of that Stephen King yarn spinning field to it, but also is, you know, saying something big about the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is this the point when you were there or did this develop earlier?
[SPEAKER_00]: You, one of the hallmarks of your style is fragmented is not the right word.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like you will take many different perspectives of many different characters.
[SPEAKER_00]: And right like that, and it's very much you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure other people have done it as well, but I kind of recognize it as your type of writing.
[SPEAKER_00]: When did you start to,
[SPEAKER_00]: develop that voice and was it something that you always had or was that something that that you would learn through a technique?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I think it was, it was probably always a method that intrigued me, like I love that polyphonic book where you're seeing the series of events from multiple characters, perspectives, and therefore learning about it in this entirely fresh way every time you encounter it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I, you know, didn't set out to write that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't intend to.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just kind of the way that that novel developed.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then when I moved out of the day, it was that was sort of what I had in mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: So interesting about seeing a set of events from different people's perspectives.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I love the process of trying to step into another person's shoes, think about the world from their perspective.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even if it's a perspective that I disagree with or that horrifies me or that makes me uncomfortable.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, to me, that is like the sort of the...
[SPEAKER_01]: the highest bar that you can clear is getting people to go along for the ride in any character who is certainly not yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's cool to see that style and that voice development either because sometimes people, when they have, I'm thinking of, you know, you start with Ohio and then into the deluge, if you have success with something, sometimes people
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, like my son, I'm teaching him how to pitch.
[SPEAKER_00]: He loves pitching, he's getting very good at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He can throw the crap out of a forcing passport.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's his pitch, it just works for whatever even.
[SPEAKER_00]: But of course, he never wants to throw it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wants to throw all these other new things that he's learning.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he just won't throw the damn pitch that works every time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just love it when I find artists that not that they aren't trying other things, but in general they know what their foreseen fastball is and they're not afraid to throw it when you need to get an out of the end of the inning.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're up by eight, please try the splitter, please try that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just, it's a very welcoming thing to see in an artist.
[SPEAKER_00]: As a reader, you're happy to see that person do what they do, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: Totally.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, to me, experimentation is kind of, it's necessary to keep it fresh.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, certainly after Ohio, the only thing my editor and Simon Echuster wanted was like, another sort of rust battle to know our mystery type, type, type, book.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, hey, actually the next thing I want to write is this thousand-page near-feature climate crisis epic.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there was a lot of skepticism in that, like, that is not typically what a debut author who has some success goes out and does or should do.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's just like, that's the book I had in my head, and that's the one I had to write.
[SPEAKER_01]: And certainly the challenge of it was was so much more immense than Ohio that to me it's like this is the point this is why we do this is to find that next that next mountain to clear
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, and it keeps me like interested and fascinated by the form.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's sort of why I've like, you know, come out to Hollywood and try and try my hand at screenwriting is it's this other challenge entirely and certainly I've had my frustrations out here, but at the same time it's like, man, if I could just like get to that next level and get to that place where I'm like the person concocting the show rather than serving as sort
[SPEAKER_00]: There had to be times during the day-leash because that book I mean, it had to be an insane amount of research.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, there had to be times as you were writing it or in the middle of doing that research where you were like, damn, if I was just writing about New Canaan, I know where the IGA market is, I don't have to research that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I mean, it's a tone which in a men's book is 900 pages, there is a lot of like just technical, like brute force technical research that had to go into it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you ever second guess yourself as you were going through that process?
[SPEAKER_01]: Ah, I think there was a moment, probably two moments like, because I started out high on the day, we should at the same time, around 2010.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, you did.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so then I set aside the day, we used to finish Ohio, that was around 2015, 2016.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I didn't return to it for another two and a half years, three years.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when I picked it back up and I was like, okay, this is the next book, this is what I'm doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had 40% of it done, but obviously it's just this sprawling mess, already too long, already too complex, too involved.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there was this moment of like, all right, now I have to make this work.
[SPEAKER_01]: And sort of like a, let's reset, let's think about the novel, it's entirety, what it's going to feel like, what it's going to look like, and sort of
[SPEAKER_01]: Then there was the point where after I turned in the first draft, which was 1,500 pages, and COVID had just started, and I was trying to like start my first round of edits.
[SPEAKER_01]: My editors like we've got to cut this book by a third, and oh yeah, the world's on fire, and trying to sort of mentally focus during 2020 when everything's popping off on cutting 600 pages from this incredibly complex novel.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was like a mental hurdle to clear for sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: did probably have to on a certain level, it must feel better to have to cut 600 pages than right as another 600 more?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's how I would feel.
[SPEAKER_00]: But hopefully I'll tell you about that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And every writer has their own sort of like, you know, their own sort of devil that's chasing them the whole time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And mine has always been like, I have those writer friends where the blank page is the problem.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, just get it up and get it started.
[SPEAKER_01]: My problem is like, I run out of blank pages that are acceptable.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's more, uh,
[SPEAKER_01]: I just pumps, I pump stuff out, and then I have to sort of carve it out of that huge block of marble.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm always chiseling away.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love the idea that you should have the publisher, you're like, well, not only is it a subject that has nothing to do with my past success, but also it's 1,500 pages.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: My dad's buddies, he's to have a construction company and they're slogan, they're literal slogan on the T-shirts, was, we're slow, but we're expensive.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh.
[SPEAKER_00]: What better poet to pair Stevens' interview with than another alumnus of the I.O.
[SPEAKER_00]: writers workshop, Philip Levine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Both writers are able to conjure the industrial American Midwest with simple, clear prose that reveals truths that are much more complex.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a poem that embodies that by Levine entitled The Simple Truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: I bought a dollar and a half-sworth of small red potatoes, took them home, boiled them in their jackets, and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then I walked through the dried fields on the edge of town,
[SPEAKER_00]: In middle June, the light hung on in the dark furrows at my feet, and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds were gathering for the night.
[SPEAKER_00]: The jays and mockers squawking back and forth, the finches still darting into the dusty light.
[SPEAKER_00]: The woman who sold me the potatoes was from Poland.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was someone out of my childhood in a pink, spangled sweater and sunglasses, praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables at the roadside stand, and urging me to taste even the pale, raw, sweet corn, trucked all the way she swore from New Jersey.
[SPEAKER_00]: Eat, eat, she said, even if you don't, I'll say you did.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some things you know all your life.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are so simple and true, they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme.
[SPEAKER_00]: They must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker, the glass of water, the absence of light gathering in the shadows of picture frames.
[SPEAKER_00]: They must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: My friend Henry and I arrived at this together in 1965, before I went away, before he began to kill himself and the two of us to betray our love.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you taste what I'm saying?
[SPEAKER_00]: It is onions or potatoes, a pinch of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is obvious.
[SPEAKER_00]: It stays in the back of your throat, like a truth you never uttered because the time was always wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: It stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken.
[SPEAKER_00]: Made of that dirt we call earth, that metal we call salt.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a form we have no other words for.
[SPEAKER_00]: When did the move out to L.A. and the screenwriting start to creep into this?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because in some ways, I think like Damman, you got it made, you got these two novels that have come out in the last decade that have began to work their way into the culture, like you could just move into the woods and write, but you could move up to Maine with Steven King and just write books.
[SPEAKER_00]: In Maine, like what drew you out to Los Angeles and particularly
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, the first off the dirty secret of literary writing, the literary field, is that doesn't pay very well.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, like, what's that that Oscar Wilde quote that, you know, amateur's talk about art, real artists talk about money, and that's kind of like, when you get to be a successful novelist, and I mean, I am in like, you know, probably the one percent of what people get paid for a novel now, a literary novel at least.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's just not enough to actually like make a living full time, you know, you're, it takes five years minimum to write enough, you know, like, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and so you split up that advance over enough time and you're suddenly like, you know, not breaking, you know, not sort of breaking even.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you end up teaching or in, you know, a lot of our cases, I think, for my generation, you've got to Hollywood and try to see what will happen there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and the way it happened for me was I was at Iowa and David Milch came to give a talk.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was a former graduate.
[SPEAKER_01]: David Milch did NYPD Blue Deadwood for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for,
[SPEAKER_01]: I had written this script like two years earlier and just sort of like tossed it in a drawer and forgotten about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had been in Chicago just sort of, you know, I was like, I'm going to try this form.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to get this free software and see what comes out.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that is the script I gave him and you know, so he called me into an office and I was sort of said,
[SPEAKER_01]: This is great.
[SPEAKER_01]: Would you like help getting an agent in L.A. And I, you know, my response was, yes, David, no, it's creator of N.Y.P.D.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would love your help.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to shop around David Holdon.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: And from there, you know, I sort of, you know, I got this agent at CAA Tonyettes who recently passed away, unfortunately, but
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I sort of was still nervous about it and he wrote me an email that I printed out after his death and I still have it and it just sort of says like, look, if you have a couple agencies after you should probably find a way to pay away out here and figure it out from there to that effect.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what I did, you know, I had a yard sale at Iowa and I sold off some stuff and packed up my car and drove to Los Angeles, got a roommate to come with me and sort of like,
[SPEAKER_01]: Hacked it out here for a few years until Ohio came out.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's got to be a much different writing style than the novelist thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I maybe I can draw an analog here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been writing my own records for years and in the last here.
[SPEAKER_00]: For similar reasons, if we are to talk about money, I've thought a lot more about writing for more commercial larger.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been going out to Nashville to write, and I wonder if your experience was the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd never written with other people before, and it's a much different form.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a deal where you come into a room, you have a morning writing, have a afternoon write, and you have four hours to write as long, and you're working together, and it's by hook or by crook, and everyone's moving.
[SPEAKER_00]: fast man.
[SPEAKER_00]: I believe how fast these people move.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it really kind of made my the speed is what really made my head spin at first.
[SPEAKER_00]: What did that feel like to go out and write what I'm assuming was more collaboratively at that point.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, that's something I'm still learning.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, being in a writer's room is such a different experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, you're coming from the world of novel writing, where it's just you, and you have to produce the entire piece before anybody's supposed to read it, really different.
[SPEAKER_01]: And obviously, you know,
[SPEAKER_01]: Like you develop great skills as a writer, but you also develop a certain stubbornness and a certain like clarity of vision And clarity of vision is not always helpful when you're sitting in a room with eight other people who are also smart and also have good ideas And so really adjusting to that that collaborative element has has been a learning curve for me and I you know, I still
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's one of those things where I will be learning about this for as long as I stick with it And maybe you know, I read in this book about F Scott Fitzgerald come out to Hollywood and drinking himself to death.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I want to avoid that I want to get out before that happens But it's one of those things where like oh, I get it like this is a very frustrating industry
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, I mean, it just it seems like it, but it's also very Alluring I've been on a creative streak of my own recently And I think it was kind of a spurred from being in those rooms with those guys in those gals Just to see people working At that level it's it's funny the best piece of advice.
[SPEAKER_00]: I got so far from one of those rooms.
[SPEAKER_00]: I finished one of the first rights There's an older dude in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I could tell it was very
[SPEAKER_00]: experience and I walked out.
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, you know, that was one of my first ones.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks so much for having me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was kind of the scrub.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just point black.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like, got any advice for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just starting this out, man.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, what do I need to know?
[SPEAKER_00]: And instead of giving me like some kind of mushy, you know, go get him kid.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was like, yeah, I got a very specific piece of advice.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like, great.
[SPEAKER_00]: Give it to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he was like, if you're in a room, and there's someone rolling or a group of people rolling, and you're not among that group that's totally fine, just stay the fuck out of the way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just get out of the way, and that's fine, because we all have a day where it's not us, and the worst possible thing you can do is try to muscle your way into the role that someone else is on, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, for sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I imagine though that song right, it's like, I wasn't I.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I forget who said the thing about like any technology sufficiently advanced it feels like magic But to me like that's still but like song like writing a song feels like like I don't understand how people do it It just seems like this like absolute like creative miracle whereas like with fiction writing or constructing a story let's say
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, even a great novel, like I can sort of look at the engine and the engine's all the same, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it looks the same as the engine because it's the field I've come up in and I'm, you know, I've developed the I for it, so I can at least like look and see what they're doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And to me, like being in a writer's room, why that's so different, is because it's everybody trying to build an engine together without, you know, and everybody has a different idea of what eventually will look like, and that's the part that is so, I think, sometimes, vexing, but also can be incredibly fun, and certainly I've never laughed harder than hanging out with some of these folks, just sort of bullshit, it's spitting off ideas.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's funny.
[SPEAKER_00]: The hit rate is different.
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like the hit rate is a little bit lower when I'm writing like the batting average is a lot lower, but maybe it's the way analytics are driven baseball.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lower batting averages, but man, when it is hit, a lot of home runs too.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I've seen it happen in a room with people who are really good.
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, spin up something that was so much work than the sum of its parts, so much more than what the original person's idea would have been.
[SPEAKER_01]: Totally.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it beats a real job.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll say that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh buddy, we won't have him and man, never go back yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: I got to remind myself of that sometimes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I'd say the worst part about a real job and the reason that I'll continue to hang my own shingle.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, like you were just mentioning like, all right, so let's say full-time novelist, even if you're at the very, very tippy top of what people are getting paid now, considering the time in, it's still hard way to make a living.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Same way, being kind of like an independent musician.
[SPEAKER_00]: to scratch out a living with it, and oh my god, I was about to make a wonderful point then.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, anyway, uh, I've just found that, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: I found that it's okay to think about that money and it's led me to, like, for example, it led me to this podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I thought that this would be a great way to do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now it's led me to so many different connections with friends and people over the years.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's what nobody ever tells you when you're starting out, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, you sort of get, you figure out the creative part of it if you're passionate enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: But nobody, like, sits you down and explains, like,
[SPEAKER_01]: You're going to have to know how to have health insurance at some point.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're going to have to know how to string together.
[SPEAKER_01]: And at first I was so bad at that part, like stringing together the paychecks to stay sustained.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's the real, that's another learning curve that when you're young, you don't care much about, but it turns out to be like one of the most vital elements of the creative life.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I do find like, so my wife has always been what do you call it a W9 employee.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where did they take the taxes out?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when she looks, when we got married, we started doing our taxes together.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she was like, what, what do you do for a living?
[SPEAKER_00]: But I find it's made me much more, it was a hard learning curve, like you mentioned.
[SPEAKER_00]: But now that I'm kind of on the other side of it,
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just very conscious of what everything looks like financially in the next quarter, the next two quarters, the next year, the next two years, and it actually puts me at ease a little bit because if I see something soft, money-wise, or if I see a big expense coming up, I see it really foreign advance, and I can really buffer for it, whereas if you just get in the paycheck, health insurance comes out for a month, it comes out, taxes come out, you can just kind of not think about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Listen, I was seeing this musician in LA once, and he told this story about how he wrote a song for his wife, and the whole crowd went, ah, and he goes, well, it's not that kind of song, it's called, I don't work it a bank.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was laughing so hard because I was like, that's exactly right.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is exactly what it feels like to get to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Man, yeah, so this is a funny creative thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe this happens on your end with the writing of stories as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that would be a song where like, I was in a writing mode for an album.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was writing by myself every day, very intensely, very serious song.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember I was talking to my manager at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a Saturday morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I called him up very early on a Saturday morning because I had some shit.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had to figure out for a show coming up.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he's like, man, you called me on a Saturday.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, well, dude, we don't work in a bank.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, come on, we're going to show this to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then that morning, I wrote that song in two, you know, in 10 minutes, I wrote it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought it was kind of stupid.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I started playing it at shows.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's been like the most notable song I've written in the last decade, probably.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you just never know when things, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Often it's the things that you work on that you don't expect to be anything that somehow you give creative life to because you're not expecting them to be anything.
[SPEAKER_01]: First sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I think that's why, like my next book is a collection of short stories and that's why I wanted to do that so I could regain a little more spontaneity because with a novel you really have to like, you know, you're just planning for a decade.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that's, it takes such an enormous amount of,
[SPEAKER_01]: sort of like really regimented, you know, figuring out of the actual plot and how it's all going to work together.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I really wanted to regain a little of that spontaneity and so some of the stories in the novel are just like, well, here's a really crazy idea that I'm going to pump out in like a week.
[SPEAKER_01]: And well, yep, that's crazy, but it's, it's, we'll stick it in there and see how people react.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, sometimes we'll use the phrase in songwriting of just driving the bus into the wall of like let's not play too much and we'll just drive the bus.
[SPEAKER_00]: It strikes me that it's literally impossible to write a novel by driving the bus into the wall.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it could not exist without an underlying structure beforehand, almost.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you know, I'm sure people have tried, I'm sure there's, you know, some, you know, stream of consciousness, an 100 page, 50,000 word novel that exists out there, but the promise is that like that form starts to, it just starts to feel so sloppy, you're, you're not sure what you're reading at some point.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: you need the structure, you need that sense of, I just want to talk when I used to teach, I tell my students, this is still the same form as when caveman setter on the campfire and said once upon a time, I've got a story to tell you, et cetera, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like you want people leaning in and you want them to get to the conclusion and have that sensation of like, oh man, that journey was worth it.
[SPEAKER_01]: everything that came before was leading to that moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you can't create that feeling, it can sometimes feel, you know, very, I like a big let down, I guess.
[SPEAKER_00]: Totally, you know what's been really helpful for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I noticed three or four years ago, like if we're having a party at my house, kids are playing in the basement, other, you know, the adults are upstairs, having adult beverages.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if I'm gonna tell a story at a party, whether it's about something my kid did at baseball practice or whether it was something that happened to me on the road, I just naturally tell in conversation, I'll tell a story in a way, like you're just talking about right then, which has like kind of a hook at the start that gets you kind of interested.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then has some sort of pay off at the end that we can all feel like gumming towards.
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, you don't succeed at that every story you tell me, but I've been bringing that to my work, my creative work, so much more of like, if I was at a party, I'm writing a song here, but if I was at a party right now, and I wanted to tell people what happened in the song, how would I do it?
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely, and sometimes I'll be in conversation.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is like a clear demonstration of what it says to your path.
[SPEAKER_01]: I am But I'll be in a conversation at a party listening to someone's story and I'll be like all right You got to cut that you got to cut that you've got to get to this end that little hope That's what you want to get people to not I won't say that out loud, but it'll be running through my head Oh, dude people this is
[SPEAKER_01]: I've never been invited to your party now.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's more shaggy dog stories than it's not.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly, that's for sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what do you want to get literature degrees?
[SPEAKER_00]: What does your day-to-day then look like?
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you like nine to five in a writer's room?
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of the time for the quote unquote day job of writing for TV and then you're doing the novel stuff on the side, or you buy for caving your days?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it seasons of writing for TV?
[SPEAKER_00]: What does your creative day look like usually?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, now that is, you know, we do 20 weeks in the writer's room.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's like a nice amount of time to sort of have fun with your friends.
[SPEAKER_01]: Get a bunch of ideas out, hopefully write something cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in that case, I'll get up early and sort of do my novel writing.
[SPEAKER_01]: My literary writing in the morning.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, but I've been off for the summer, which is, you know, magnificent, and it's really like, I feel like I've almost like, you know, robbed a bank in terms of, uh, I am living exactly the life I've always wanted, which is, I get up, I drink my coffee, I write for, you know, two hours, three hours, uh, I go to the gym, I read books all the rest of the afternoon, it's wonderful.
[SPEAKER_00]: I really like that you mentioned two to three hours here because I've found after extensive research in other ways of doing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like that time in the morning, a little bit of breakfast, not too much breakfast.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just got to get that caffeine and you don't eat too much.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those two are three hours right then.
[SPEAKER_00]: for me is the whole ballgame.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I can work in the afternoon, I can't, sometimes I have to, but the level of diminishing returns at that point is breathtaking.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm working at like 15% capacity in the afternoon.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I get a workout in, even if I get an app in, does it fucking matter?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not what the morning was.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's, I think, I even read social science.
[SPEAKER_01]: Research about this once where it's like, because you haven't made any decisions yet in the morning, you haven't been confronted with the world, you haven't been confronted with life.
[SPEAKER_01]: Your brain is just like, you know, tuned in.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, it's, it's ready to make all the, whatever the sign apps is, connect.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, so I'm always like a little bummed out if I miss a morning session.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so even if it's just for an hour, like honestly, I still get some of my best work done in that first hour, like when I get up, drink coffee and just go.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, man, that first hour is it?
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess that's why people used to do infatemines all the time, because you could probably add that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think so.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you mentioned the novella that you're working on right now is there anything else in the pipeline?
[SPEAKER_00]: You'd like to talk to people about that you're working on and excited about.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I have after that another novel coming, which is the glory of, you know, sort of getting the two book deals, you know, you have your life planned out.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm sort of simultaneously working on that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm out, you know, we have another season of Paradise.
[SPEAKER_01]: We start the writer from September, the new season season two comes out in February, January, February I believe.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, and then I'm just sort of writing some other, you know, scripts and TV ideas and film ideas.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are they making Ohio into a series or a movie?
[SPEAKER_00]: Did I read then?
[SPEAKER_01]: No, it remains on the internet.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, floating around out there.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that, you know, that it sort of went through development at HBO, didn't get over the hump, and then in there being a bunch of horge of material a few years back.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it remains a possibility, but, you know, we'll have to find a way to get it restarted.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Paradise, she continues going to start in February and the writer's room doesn't start til next week.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what I'm talking about.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the season three writers room.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, so that's already in the kit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, because I was going to be very confused.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been filmed.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's ready to go.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's going to be interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was about to say it wasn't quite south park level of speed with the right you've right about them before right the way they do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, dude, absolute pleasure to have you on this show.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for coming on and yeah, such an honor.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, and I can't let you leave.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, first of all, I have to say like we were in Chicago at the same time and I know you get people coming on.
[SPEAKER_01]: You started your own podcast, so all of us would come on and praise you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nation of heat was one of those albums, what I had heard about it, like it's sort of reputation preceded it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I listened to it, because I was like whatever, I'm sure it's fine.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was one of the, you know, most important albums I listened to in the 21st century.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in many ways, it was the soundtrack.
[SPEAKER_01]: uh... when i was writing a high on the day was a starting out around two thousand ten on both those books uh... and certainly like little scraps of it uh... you know appear in those novel appears but i did not miss that foundation man i thank you and uh...
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that record.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know what I was doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will be blunt in I consider that to be my best record still.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been trying to beat it for years.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I've gotten pretty close, but there's just something about, I don't know, it's particularly with songwriters in their first album, man.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, if you come at that first album hard,
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what it is, but it's hard to get back to that place.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm like really at peace with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just love that record.
[SPEAKER_00]: I still play all the songs live.
[SPEAKER_00]: I consider to be a huge gift.
[SPEAKER_00]: The royalties that I still make off that record are they have allowed me to continue as an artist.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like I was considered like a divine gift to allow me to continue to work.
[SPEAKER_00]: So thank you, and I have love for that record, too, man.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and certainly the subsequent stuff, I don't want to shortchange that, but it's just like sort of your first experience with the musician where you're like, oh, the fuck is Joe Puck?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, what kind of name is that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Who is this person?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, where's he?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it's different with music like that, man.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have artists that I love.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll like a debut album that I've loved in like the last 15 years would be Father John Misty's Fear Fire.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that record so much,
[SPEAKER_00]: I listen to it all the time and then I weirdly have not gone to listen to any of his stuff And I don't know what that is.
[SPEAKER_00]: I it's not like I fell in love with it so much of them are afraid.
[SPEAKER_00]: I like something else it's You know as listeners we Sometimes you just kind of decide with an artist now I would go watch a father John Misty concert and I have several times But there's just something about it with music where
[SPEAKER_00]: we kind of jellously guard that first gateway into it as listeners.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: A hundred percent.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, and also you're still in that realm of like when I meet somebody else who's a Joe Pug fan, we go off to the corner of the party and talk about it for, you know, half an hour.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's nice.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's nice to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is why with the baseball caps, I saw it's just a bird without the name so that people can, it's kind of like a secret hand shake for everyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, we'll do thank you so much for being on the show.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now thank you so much for having me, I really appreciate it.
[SPEAKER_00]: This week's show was brought to you by Banzergul.
[SPEAKER_00]: Built by musicians and four musicians, Banzergul is an all in one platform to build a beautiful website for your music.
[SPEAKER_00]: Use promo code TWS, the initials of our podcast, TWS to get 15% off the first year of any new subscription.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stephen Markley's books published by Simon and Schuster can be found at your favorite local bookstore.
[SPEAKER_00]: If before we meet again, you sit down to write, please remember, an expensive drug habit is not a song, a compelling Instagram account is not a song, and most importantly, reverb is not a song.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let all that take care of itself and for you just keep your eye on this song.