Lawrence Wright: How I Write
by
Noah Charney
May 22, 2013 4:45 AM EDT
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who took on the Church of Scientology in his most recent book, Going Clear, talks about the latest threats from the organization, the wild story of how he got hired by The New Yorker, and the special writing desk that he built himself.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/22/lawrence-wright-how-i-write.html
Where do you live and why?
I live in Austin, Texas. I came in 1980 to work for
Texas Monthly,
but I only lasted on the staff for six months. I just never left.
Austin has a kind of specific gravity that’s hard to escape once you’re
here. It has a congenial, collaborative arts community. I think that’s
why I’m still here.
Describe your morning routine.
I
wake early. I like the fact that the house is quiet then. I make my
coffee and read the paper. I don’t like to exercise in the morning. I
want as calm an entry into the workday as possible. After breakfast I’ll
get rid of the emails that have come in. My productive time is in the
afternoon, so I’ll often do research, filling out note cards in the
morning, in order to get a head of steam up in the afternoon.
Your day job is as a journalist. How many feature articles will you write in any given year?
It’s
really hard to estimate, because I write a number of different things:
books, movies, plays, and articles. Depending on the mix, I might write
several articles in a year, or one big one, like the
Scientology article published in
The New Yorker two years ago [the basis for
Going Clear], which took an entire year to accomplish. Not all my articles are as intricate and involved as that one.
Is The New Yorker pretty
flexible in terms of how much you write? I know some magazines
contractually oblige their staff writers to produce six features a year,
for example.
If you’re on a contract at The New Yorker, the contract specifies the number
of words you will publish in the magazine per year. I get paid by the
word, like most writers. That’s one reason why the Scientology article
was 25,000 words long! As far as time goes, they don’t care how long it
takes you, because they’re not paying by time. They care about the words
that are milled and poured into the magazine, whether in one or six
articles.
How did you become a staff writer for them?
My first foray toward the magazine was when I returned from living in Egypt for two years, in 1971. I decided I would be a New Yorker
writer, so I wrote up a “Letter From Cairo” while living out in a cabin
in East Texas. There was one of those mailboxes with a red flag on it. I
went out, put the article in the mailbox, and raised the flag for the
postman. I swear, it was rejected overnight. Somehow it went all the way
from my cabin in Texas to [then–editor in chief] William Shawn and back
again with a rejection card in one night. I realized my plan might take
longer than anticipated. I spent a long time climbing the ladder of
magazine journalism. Many magazines I wrote for have gone out of
business. It was a challenging profession. When I finally came to Texas
to work for Texas Monthly, that was the most stable relationship of my career at the time. I then worked for Rolling Stone.
The actual way I was hired by
The New Yorker:
I was asked in 1992, when Ross Perot was running for president. I got a
call—I was just getting out of the shower, I remember vividly—I woman
was on the line and said, “Lawrence Wright? Hold the phone for Sir
Harold Evans.” I thought, “Harry Evans, he’s made a reputation for
paying too much money to people just like me!” He was head of Random
House at the time. I said, “I’m just shaving, I’ll be right there.” So I
looked at the mirror, fortified my resolve, and picked up the phone.
Harry says, “Finished your ablutions, old boy.” He had the idea of
contracting me to write a quick Ross Perot paperback. He said, “I’ve
already ordered the paper for 450,000 books.” Would I be interested? I
could be interested. “But it has to be done in five weeks.” That seemed
sporting, so I agreed.
I’d already been asked by The New York Times Magazine to
write a piece on Perot, and I had to turn them down. So I said, “Could I
spin it off for the magazine?” They said sure. So I went off to
Texarkana to cover Perot’s childhood. I realize after two of the five
allotted weeks, I hadn’t heard from Harry or anyone. Turned out that
Perot had scratched my name off the list [of potential biographers]. So I
was writing it just for the Times. I was pretty angry. I turned
in the piece, a long piece—it was probably 23,000 words. It had been
assigned at 6,000. I said, “I’m going to need the whole magazine.” It
caused a real furor. Just at that moment, I got a call from Tina Brown’s
assistant. Tina was head of Vanity Fair then. The assistant said, “We hear you’ve just written a piece for The New York Times Magazine.
We hear that it’s really good, but really long. We’ll publish the whole
thing, and we’ll pay you twice as much. Are you interested?” I said,
“Of course I’m interested,” but I wasn’t going to do that. But I used
that to negotiate with the Times Magazine and they published the whole thing. Right after that Tina Brown got hired by The New Yorker and she contracted me to write another Ross Perot piece. So that was my first New Yorker article. At that time, I was offered a contract by Rolling Stone. I mentioned that to my editor at New Yorker,
and she said, “Oh, we can’t have that.” So suddenly they offered me a
contract. It was a dream. In retrospect, I’m awfully glad that I didn’t
write that quicky Perot paperback. They wound up destroying more than
400,000 books, when he dropped out of the race.
Walk us through writing a feature for The New Yorker. You have an idea for an article, and what are the steps on its route to publication?
It’s
back and forth with your editor. I propose most articles that I write,
but sometimes they come to me, and I’m always eager to get a good idea
from an editor. I have a niche at the magazine that’s difficult for me
to break out of. I’m not allowed to write brief things, book reviews.
David Remnick wants me out there doing big stories, which I like doing,
but there are times I’d like to do smaller pieces. The kinds of stories
that I like to do, to satisfy me, I want to have a world to write about,
one that most readers don’t know about, and a character who can take
you into that world. That’s the character I call “the donkey.” The
donkey can carry a lot of weight. All this information you want to shove
down the reader’s throat, the donkey can carry that if the reader cares
about that figure. It makes a reader willing to swallow what you have
to administer.
You’ve
made a career out of infiltrating sinister organizations, from al Qaeda
to Scientology. In the course of your research, have you ever feared
for your personal safety?
Ha!
No, I try to make a habit of not thinking about those things. Normally
your fears are overblown. And if you become too preoccupied with those
concerns, you become paralyzed and don’t do your work. I don’t cover
wars. I try to be judicious about what I’m involved in. On the other
hand, I work alone. If I’m writing about al Qaeda in Pakistan or
Afghanistan, I’m alone and I feel exposed. I do take routine
precautions. When I lived in Saudi Arabia after 9/11, it was suggested
that I live in a Western housing compound. I didn’t want to do that, so I
was living in a middle-class Saudi neighborhood, with a car and a job
mentoring young reporters at the
Saudi Gazette in Osama bin
Laden’s hometown. I varied my routine, changed cars occasionally. It
turned out that the al Qaeda attacks that came shortly after I left the
country targeted the Western housing complex, not the Saudi flats I
lived in.
You
practice a sort of reporting…I don’t want to say it’s dying out, but
it’s the sort of role that I think of with past foreign correspondents,
reporters who are out in the field, who get their hands dirty, who put
themselves at risk. Who are some other reporters in that mold, past or
contemporary, whose work you admire?
There
are a lot of reporters who I feel are a lot more courageous and
fool-hardy than I am. Maybe at the top I’d put Dexter Filkins. He’s an
extraordinary man, in terms of his nerve and ability to get into
dangerous situations and tell the story cogently. He’s bringing back
real human stories. I admire that. The rock-bottom foundation on which
my tradition stands is George Orwell. It’s not that he was doing this
sort of reporting, but I’ve found that the sound of his voice, firm and
sensible, courageous to the point of being implacable, that became
something I aspired to achieve. That sense of authority. A.J. Liebling, I
was nuts about.
The Earl of Louisiana was one of those books that determined I was going to be a journalist, because it sounded such fun.
Describe your routine when conceiving of a book and its plot, before the writing begins. Do you like to map out your books ahead of time, or just let it flow?
I
have a pretty good idea of where my book is going when I start writing.
I’m very old-fashioned, in the sense that I use note cards to contain
all the material that I’ve researched. I go through hundreds of books
and thousands of articles. I interview, in the case of
The Looming Tower,
over 600 people. My process is that I collect all this material, then I
sit down and go through it and put down the things that are pertinent
and interesting to me, on note cards. You have to classify those note
cards. That in itself is a form of outlining. You’ve already taken this
massive amount of material and cut it down into bite-sized pieces. In
The Looming Tower,
I’ll know that I’m going to write about Osama bin Laden, and therefore
I’ll need to write about his personal life, so I’ll have his different
wives, each with a section of note cards, for example. Every instance in
which his first wife is mentioned, then, I’d create a card. Might come
from an interview, a book, an article in an Arabic newspaper. All the
source material would be piled into one section under her name. In the
case of Scientology, I knew I’d write about David Miscavage, the current
head of the church, and a big issue is the physical abuse that’s been
reported that he’s committed against executives in the organization. So
whenever anyone talked about that, I would create a card about that and
file it under “David Miscavage-Abuse.” That section becomes very thick.
When it comes time to write about his proclivity toward violence, I have
all of these testimonies, filed in the same place. I can double-check
sources. All of it is right there in my hands.
Any idea how many note cards went into any one of your books?
I
used to have an estimate. I use 4x6 cards, and the boxes themselves are
14 inches deep. Let me look now for you. It looks like 14 inches. I
think I had 14 boxes of al Qaeda material [for The Looming Tower].
There are about 100 cards per inch. Let me see, hang on, how many cards
are in here? So if we have 14 inches, times 14, then you have how many
cards?
I’ll use a calculator later. A “shitload” of cards I think is the scientific number.
I’m
sorry I’m so verbose! I’ve been preaching this method like an
evangelist for years, and I don’t think a single person has taken me up
on it. I don’t expect them to any longer, but it works. It’s schematic,
laborious, but it is very useful. The other thing I’d like to say about
my technique is that there are two things I keep foremost in my mind.
Scenes and characters. Since I write for movies and plays, dramatic
writing as well, I’ve come to appreciate the importance of scenes and
characters in a way I might not have, were I writing only nonfiction. If
you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally
invested in those people. IT becomes important to fill out the details
of those characters, so they become fully rounded. So you use novelistic
techniques in reporting. If you interview, them you can ask what they
said, thought, felt. Get into their minds. And the scenes. They add
sweep and pace to the narrative. An example is in The Looming Tower.
My four donkeys, the main characters, are John O’Neill, head of the FBI
Counter-Terrorism Force in New York; Osama bin Laden; Ayman
al-Zawahiri; and Prince Turki al-Faisal, head of Saudi Intelligence, who
was working with bin Laden in Afghanistan. There was an attack on the
Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, a traumatic moment in Saudi history. It’s
where Prince Turki steps onto the stage in my book. He flies in from
Morocco, rushes to the mosque, and runs toward this door where the other
Intelligence people are gathered. And a shot rang out, shattering the
glass of the door.
As a writer, you pray for those moments when a shot rings out. Here is my character, entering the stage, the scene is about
to unfold, but it’s a perfect moment to pause and fill in this
information about the bargain between the royal family, religious
fundamentalists, and the bin Laden family. So you know the reader is
desperate to find out what happened after the shot rang out. Painting
the scene, reporting the scene, is just as important as reporting the
facts, in terms of building a narrative.
A friend of mine, Kurt Ludtke, who was editor of the Detroit Free Press before becoming a screenwriter—he wrote Out of Africa—he
used to tell me about “the rubber-band theory.” That is, if you pose a
question, such as “What happened next?” you don’t answer it right away.
You stretch it out. The longer you stretch it, the more tension you
build before you resolve the question, the more excited the reader
becomes. The whole process of making a book into a page-turner is all
about the rubber bands placed inside the text.
Is there anything distinctive or unusual about your work space?
Well,
I have a wonderful office that I’ve built in my house. David Remnick
came to dinner one night and he called it “Writer Porn.” It’s something
I’ve made especially for writing, and a desk I designed especially for
writing. I have a white board, where I sketch outlines of projects. The
most distinctive thing is my writer’s desk, which I had built about 30
years ago. It’s a bit Star Trek-y. It has wings curved around
so I can have my manuscripts left and right, facing me. It’s a wonderful
design for a writer and I’ve never seen it replicated. I have a doll
that used to belong to my daughter, named Nephew. When she grew into her
Barbie era, she gave Nephew to me. She was kind of like Scheherazade,
telling Nephew stories, and I got so captivated that she said that I’m
the only one who loves him now and I should have him.
Now, after Going Clear has come out, has your opinion of Scientology changed?
I
have certainly been touched by the damage that organization has
inflicted on so many families by its policy of disconnection; and I’m
also very disturbed by the exploitation of children who are recruited
into the church’s clergy at alarmingly young ages, forced to surrender
their education and work round the clock for negligible wages.
I use note cards to contain all the material that I’ve researched.
How did you get the people who fled to the church to open up to you?
It’s
a matter of building trust. You talk to as many people as you can—what I
call horizontal reporting. Gradually, the word gets out that you’re
becoming encyclopedic and people don’t want to have their stories left
out. Then you will always find some sources who are more candid, more
insightful, and more connected than others. Those sources you go back to
again and again and again—what I call vertical reporting. Using those
two axes, you gain a broad view but also one that has depth.
Is there any update on the lawsuit threats from the church?
They have remained just that—threats.
How did The New Yorker and your publisher prepare for the inevitable lawsuit threats from Scientology following the article and your book?
I was fortunate to have two such stalwart partners as The New Yorker
and Knopf watching my back. Of course we had extensive legal vetting in
both cases, but ultimately the book has to make the case for itself on
the basis of careful reporting and extensive fact-checking. I love my
checkers.
What is the status of Going Clear in Canada and the U.K.?
In
Canada, it’s up to Knopf to decide whether to distribute, and I hope
they will soon. My U.K. publisher dropped the book after receiving a
legal threat from the church through a famous libel-law firm in London.
Since then, Parliament has revised Britain’s awful libel laws. I went to
London and spoke to members of the House of Lords while they were
considering the new legislation. I’m hopeful that, with the
public-interest section of the new defamation bill, that Going Clear will soon have a U.K. edition.
What is your favorite snack?
I
love apples. I actually do eat an apple a day. At the end of the day, I
like to exercise, then play the piano until dinner is ready.
What would you like carved onto your tombstone?
I’m
trying to avoid any kind of mortality. At one point two friends and I
created “The Immortality Working Group.” We’re in full-fledged denial of
death, although one of us has passed on since then. I have, so far, not
carved my tombstone.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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Noah Charney's most recent book is
Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece. He is the author of a new eBook single,
The Wine Forger’s Handbook, and a new App called
Museum Time, which features his guided tours of the best museums of Spain.
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