Why We Write (14 page)

Unhitching from the plow

For me the best time is at the end of the day, when you’ve written and forgotten. You wrote longer than you expected to. You’ve been so absorbed in it that it got late. You unhitch yourself from the plow.

I require myself to do a certain number of hours or pages each day: either six hours or a page and a half. If I’ve been working all day and I haven’t advanced because I keep writing and deleting, then I get to quit after six hours. After that I get
up and I go and meet somebody who won’t talk to me about the writing. Six hours or a page and a half, whichever comes first.

For
Lit
and
Cherry
at the end it was up to three pages a day, which took me a long time. How much I get done in a day depends on how bad off I am. With
Lit
—I know this sounds insane—I had to do it lying down, because otherwise my back went out. I could lie in bed with this contraption with my laptop on it, and not get a repetitive stress injury.

It wasn’t just lying down that made it hard

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.

I
f 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.”

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.