Clay Stafford talks with Cal Newport on “Building a Meaningful Career”

Cal Newport interviewed by Clay Stafford

---

I’ve followed author Cal Newport’s career for years. He’s radical, and I like that. For most of his career, he has argued against the conventional wisdom of “follow your passion,” instead arguing that passion follows mastery in the pursuit of building a meaningful career. In his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, he introduces the concept of “career capital,” the idea that rare and valuable skills are the currency for building fulfilling work. In his later books, Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and Slow Productivity, he continues that thought by providing a roadmap for focused and meaningful success in our current digital and informational distraction age. For writers, Newport’s advice is spot on: craft quality work that people value, improve relentlessly and judiciously, write better than anyone else, and avoid the social trap. His philosophy matches my own. It’s not about chasing dreams. It’s about building skills, minimizing distractions, strategically shaping your career, and causing your dreams to come to you. I got to catch up with Cal from his office at Georgetown University, where he serves as a full professor of computer science in addition to his side gig as a bestselling author. “Cal, what is the concept behind So Good They Can’t Ignore You?”

“How do people end up loving what they do for a living? The primary answer I encountered when I looked into that question was: follow your passion. So that was the dominant advice. I think it remains the dominant advice for a lot of young people. In this book, I looked at that and said that’s kind of nonsense. That’s not how people end up passionate about their work. They don’t just navel gaze and figure out, ‘This is what I’m meant to do,’ then they do that job and are happy. It’s a more complicated picture. The really short version of it is what they tend to do—people who love what they do get really good at rare and valuable things. They use the leverage that gives them to take control of their career and shape it toward things that resonate, and away from things that don’t. Over time, their sense of passion for their work increases. The passion develops over time. It’s not the pre-existing force that aims them to what they should be doing. For most people, there are multiple things they could conceivably build a passionate life about. We could lower that bar of what you choose to do, but we have to raise the bar on what you do once you choose that job, and you have to focus on getting really good at things that matter. That is the central capital on which really cool jobs are actually built. It was a contrarian book that pushed back on the idea that you should follow your passion and say passion will follow you as you craft an awesome career.”

“And it comes down to what you put the work into. For writers, that would mean writing.”

“One of the arguments I use is an economic metaphor. Think about the traits that make good jobs good. These are goods in a market. And if these traits make a job cool, those are goods in high demand. You have to have something valuable to offer in return. The marketplace of job traits doesn’t matter your passion, or how much you think it would be cool to work from home, bring your dog to the office, travel the world, or have a big salary. They don’t care. You have to have something to offer in return, so I have this economic metaphor: as you build up rare and valuable skills, that’s your career capital. That’s what you cash in for the stuff that makes great jobs great. As you get good, your ability to make your job better grows. It’s tricky. There’s a trap here. I call it the Control Trap in the book. The problem is, in a lot of fields, as you get really good at something, that’s exactly the time when you get pressures that start pushing you away from what you want in your work life and put you onto some track that makes sense for the company or a track that tries to maximize salary. It could be a track to being really unhappy. The key is being aware that there might be pressure to be great as I get good. Let’s go through this chain of promotions, and you can become a senior VP. But no, I’m going to remember this is what I want my work life to be like, and I will use that as leverage to get there. It’s this process of building skills and then cashing them in to craft the working life you want.”

“I love the idea of capital. And as I was reading your book, capital kept coming up repeatedly because you had to earn that to play that card.”

“The results you get by cashing your career capital make people love their jobs. When you see people who love their jobs and are passionate about their work, almost always, you’re going to find a story of them getting good at stuff that was valuable and then taking that out for a spin: I’m valuable now to this marketplace, so I’m going to live here. I’m going to work here. I will go to this or that type of job. They can shape what they want. Then the advice becomes, if you’re fresh out of college, what should you care about in your first couple of years? Not, ‘is this job my passion.’ That’s a trap. You won’t love your job in your first two years.”

“Things are bumpy the first few years as a writer.”

“It’s your entry-level. They’re not going to give you the exciting stuff yet. Instead, it should be, ‘How quickly can I become indispensable here? The faster I become indispensable, the faster I begin to grab the reins of what’s going on in my job, and then I can start steering it in cool directions.’”

“So how would you apply this in practical advice to writers?”

“With writers, you must think about career capital. To be successful as a writer, it must be very blunt. I need to produce writing that is valuable to an audience that matters. I need clear indicators of this. Just because I have this big idea for a novel, it doesn’t mean that anyone wants it or that my writing is very good. The cool stuff that comes in a writer’s life is in exchange for writing stuff that people want to read, so being willing to throw yourself into editing and evaluation and feedback, writers groups, and maybe ultimately an MFA program if you’re in certain types of fiction, whatever it is, and seeing this as a craft that you were developing. You know where your skill level is. You know where you want to get it, and you’re trying to push your skill level up there. I think the career capital mindset helps. It’s how I approach my writing career. I wrote my first book when I was young. I wrote my first book as an undergraduate, and I knew I was not a great writer yet. I was twenty years old. I used a pretty simple format for that book, and then I sold a second book, where I pushed myself to a more traditional book format to learn how to do that. Then, I sold a third book that would allow me to try a much more complicated idea book format. Between those two books, I began writing for magazines where I could push some of the levels of my craft that I thought needed more work. I could take on commissions. It would force me to pick up this skill or that skill and do it for editing, where I have editors looking over my shoulders. I was systematically making myself a better writer because I knew I wanted to be a sort of front-of-the-bookstore hardcover idea writer, and it took eight or nine years of training. I got better and better until my ideas were good enough, and my writing was good enough that I turned out this book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, my first major idea, a hardcover book, and it could sell. And now, my life as a writer, I had some traction there, and I could begin to lean into it.”

“You wrote a book, Digital Minimalism, but you almost have a philosophy of minimalism across the board, right?”

“Professionally speaking, what matters is picking a small number of things and sticking with them. Do them really well. Put in the time with a scale over a long period, with systematic improvement. That’s going to open up the most interesting opportunities. I decided out of college, I’m going to write. I’m going to do computer science. And that’s all I did. After twenty years of doing that, those two things have been consolidated into one: I will write about technology, which will be my main thing. Sticking with the same thing over a long period, you will ultimately build the most career capital and open the coolest stuff if you keep getting better. I’ve always had a minimalist mindset. I’m slow to take on new projects. I’m stubbornly resilient to stick with things in directions I’ve already started. I put my head down and work. That’s always been my approach.”

“You hit those phrases I thought were important: rare and valuable.”

“If it’s not rare, then there’s no market for it. If it’s not valuable, there’s not a market for it. It’s supply and demand from Econ 101. You need to do something that not many people can do, and it has value. Then you can write your ticket. So rare and valuable. You need those two things because sometimes there are valuable skills, but many people can do them. I had this rule where I said, ‘When you’re spending a lot of time on something, ask yourself, How long would it take to train a 22-year-old to do what I’m doing right now?’ If the answer is, ‘give them an hour, and they could be doing this,’ then what you’re doing is not rare. Or, similarly, if you’re spending a lot of time on something weird, intricate, and complicated, and you’ve learned it, but no one cares, no one’s paying money for it, it’s not making any difference, then it’s not valuable. The fact is, rare doesn’t matter. It’s that both is where this starts to matter. It’s hard to do what I’m doing, and there’s an unambiguous value. That’s where you begin to get a lot of options.”

“Would this translate into writers finding their niche?”

“Rare and valuable would mean your writing is good, and there are only so many people who could do that type of writing. If you’re coming out of the gates like I’m going be a general profile writer or something like that for magazines, many people are doing that. It’s hard to be better than most people doing that. There are people who’ve been doing this for decades at all the top publications. But if you find a beat where you’re like, ‘This is using my expertise; I trained in this thing, and not a lot of people know this.’ I do technology writing for The New Yorker and have a computer science degree. That helps. I understand mathematics and technology. I’m a computer scientist who also can write ideas. That’s a rare combination, and that gives me better opportunities than if I just came to The New Yorker and said, I want to write profiles of politicians. They’d be like, ‘Get in line. We already have the world’s best profile writers here. They’ve been here for thirty years. They’re the best in the world at it.’ So, having something rare and valuable makes a big difference.”

“You are hard on social media, but probably with good reason, because I know of writers who, as part of their marketing philosophy, will spend up to—no kidding—two hours per day interacting because they’re ‘building their audience.’”

“Social media is often a trap for writers. It’s not that social media can’t be valuable to writers, but it’s not in the way they imagine. Many writers, especially early on, think that the way it works is you’re going to build this audience somehow first, and then that audience will help you sell a lot of books. It’s not how social media helps writers in the end. There are two ways where it helps. It helps other people promote your book: ‘Hey, this book is really cool.’ Other people with large social media followings can then talk about your book. Your book can spread through social media circles. That really can help. Your book can blow up on BookTok, for example. That could help a novelist. But that’s different than just, ‘I had a big audience as an author, and my audience heard about it.’ The second thing people get wrong is when authors have big social media audiences; it’s often because they first wrote a book that people loved. Why am I following this novelist’s Instagram? Because I loved her books. It’s interesting to see it. After you’ve had successful books, having a direct channel to your audience is useful. They know what’s going on. They know when new books are coming out. It’s easier to spread. But social media itself does not make books that want to be a hit into hits. Authors’ social media presences themselves, that is, don’t make non-hits into hits on their own. It makes hit writers able to talk to their audience better. It helps writers who wrote something awesome get found out by other people. Authors spend too much time on social media because it’s more concrete than writing. It feels like, ‘I know I’m making progress. I can do it. I post things. It feels productive. I see these counts grow,’ but I think it’s a misnomer that you were going to build an audience first, and then you’re going to write a book, and then that audience you already built will make that book a hit. That’s not the way it typically works.”

“Your advice would probably be to do deep work, slow productivity, and be so good that they can’t ignore you. And to do that, you will minimize those distractions in your life.”

“There we go. It all fits together. There is a direct link between causations in a lot of those books. I wrote So Good They Can’t Ignore You first, which says get really good at rare and valuable things. My audience says, ‘How do I do that?’ I said, well, deep work. That’s how you get really good at things. You give it complete focus. Deep Work answered the question in So Good They Can’t Ignore You. And then people said, ‘Well, why am I having such a hard time doing deep work?’ And I was like, ‘Well, partly because of distraction,’ so you must be careful about using technology. So, then you get the book Digital Minimalism. And then you get people stepping back and like, ‘Okay, but how do I harness deep work over time to build a really good career?’ You get Slow Productivity. There’s A to B to C to D. Each of these books leads to the next in a way that makes sense to me.”

“There are many distractions in life, and we go back to preplanning the day flexibly to make sure we focus on things we need to focus on.”

“That’s the key to minimalism. The term minimalism is different than minimizing. Minimizing is just less is always better. We see that in aesthetic minimalism. It’s often really minimizing. The less stuff in my house somehow makes it better. But that’s not what minimalism means. Minimalism means focusing on the things that matter, knowing what you care about, focusing on things that help that thing you care about, and being wary of things that get in the way. That’s minimalism. Digital minimalism is not saying less technology is better than more, or here’s the list of bad technologies; don’t use them. It says technology should just be serving what you care about. Figure out what matters to you. ‘I want to be a writer, I want to be there for my family, and care a lot about nature.’ Great. If this is what matters to you now, you can evaluate all technology on the question of whether it is really helping one of these things or getting in the way. And now suddenly, the two hours you spend trying to build up your TikTok audience daily, you’re like, ‘That’s not directly supporting these things I care about. I’m not going to do that. But this other thing I do directly supports this.’ I have this email group I’m on with other authors, which helps me focus and learn writing skills. It directly helps something I care about. That technology should be in my life. I see minimalism as working backward from what you care about and using that to select what gets access to your life.”

“So, let’s work backward.”

---

Empowering Writers. Creating Stories That Matter.

Clay Stafford has had an eclectic career as an author, filmmaker, actor, composer, educator, public speaker, and founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers' Conference, voted the #1 writers' conference in the U.S. by The Writer magazine. He has sold nearly four million copies of his works in over sixteen languages. As CEO of American Blackguard Entertainment, he is also the founder of Killer Nashville Magazine and the streaming educational service The Balanced Writer. Subscribe to his weekly newsletter featuring Success Points for writers and storytellers. www.ClayStafford.com

Cal Newport is a Georgetown University computer science professor specializing in distributed systems and a bestselling author of seven books, including Digital Minimalism and Deep Work. He writes for major publications, contributes to NPR, and runs the popular blog Study Hacks. He lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, with his family. https://calnewport.com/

Clay Stafford talks with Joyce Carol Oates “On Being Her Own Person”

Joyce Carol Oates interviewed by Clay Stafford

---

I first met Joyce Carol Oates when she was the John Seigenthaler Legends Award winner at the Killer Nashville International Writer’s Conference. She is a prolific writer, a modern-day legend, and a professor at NYU and Princeton, where her fortunate students learn from one of the best living writers today. When her new collection of short stories came out, Flint Kill Creek, I reached out to her to see if we could chat about the new book, writing in general, and how to prepare oneself for a career as a writer. My goal, because she is both a prolific writer and a teacher, was to see if there was some Holy Grail that writers could discover to create a successful career. Fortunately, we may have stumbled upon it. “Joyce, someone such as you who's written over a hundred books, how do you consistently generate these fresh ideas and maintain this creative energy you've got going?”

“Well, it would not interest me to write the same book again, so I wouldn't be interested in that at all.”

“I wonder if some of it also has to do with all the reading you do. It's generating new ideas coming in all the time.”

“I suppose so. That's just the way our minds are different. I guess there are some writers who tend to write the same book. Some people have fixations about things. I don't know how to assess my own self, but I'm mostly interested in how to present the story in terms of structure. Like Flint Kill Creek, the story is really based very much on the physical reality of a creek: how, in a time of heavy rainfall, it rises and becomes this rushing stream. Other times, it's sort of peaceful and beautiful, and you walk along it, yet it's possible to underestimate the power of some natural phenomenon like a creek. It's an analog with human passion. You think that things are placid and in control, but something triggers it, and suddenly there is this violent upheaval of emotion. The story is really about a young man who is so frightened of falling in love or losing control, he has to have a kind of adversarial relationship with young women. He's really afraid to fall in love because it's like losing control. So, through a series of incidents, something happens so that he doesn't have to fall in love, that the person he might love disappears from the story. But to me, the story had to be written by that creek. I like to walk myself along the towpath here in the Princeton area, the Delaware and Raritan Canal. When I was a little girl, I played a lot in Tonawanda Creek, I mean literally played along with my friends. We would go down into the creek area and wade in the water, and then it was a little faster out in the middle, so it was kind of playful, but actually a little dangerous. Then, after rainfall, the creek would get very high and sometimes really high. So it's rushing along, and it's almost unrecognizable. I like to write about the real world, and describe it, and then put people into that world.”

“You've been writing for some time. How do you keep your writing so relevant and engaging to people at all times?”

“I don't know how I would answer that. I guess I'm just living in my own time. My most recent novel is called Butcher, and I wrote it a couple of years ago, and yet now it's so timely because women's reproductive rights have been really under attack and have been pushed back in many states, and it seems that women don't have the rights that we had only a decade ago, and things are kind of going backwards. So, my novel Butcher is set in the 19th century, and a lot of the ideas about women and women's bodies almost seem to be making like a nightmare comeback today. I was just in Milan. I was interviewed a lot about Butcher, and earlier in the year I was in Paris, and I was interviewed about Butcher, because the translations are coming out, and the interviewers were making that connection. They said, ‘Well, your novel is very timely. Was this deliberate?’ And I'm not sure if it was exactly deliberate, because I couldn't foretell the future, but it has this kind of painful timeliness now.”

“How do you balance your writing with all this marketing? Public appearances? Zoom meetings with me? How do you get all of it done? How does Joyce Carol Oates get all of it done?”

“Oh, I have a lot of quiet time. It's nice to talk to you, but as I said, I was reading like at 7 o'clock in the morning, I was completely immersed in a novel, then I was working on my own things, and then talking with you from three to four, that's a pleasure. It's like a little interlude. I don't travel that much. I just mentioned Milan and Paris because I was there. But most of the time I'm really home. I don't any longer have a husband. My husband passed away, so the house is very quiet. I have two kitties, and my life is kind of easy. Really, it's a lonely life, but in some ways it's easy.”

“Do you ever think at all—at the level you're at—about any kind of expanded readership or anything? Or do you just write and throw it out there?”

“I wouldn't really be thinking about that. That's a little late in my career. I mean, I try to write a bestseller.”

“And you have.”

“My next novel, which is coming out in June, is a whodunnit.”

“What's the title?”

“Fox, a person is named Fox. That's the first novel I've ever written that has that kind of plot. A body's found, there’s an investigation, we have back flash and backstory, people are interviewed. You follow about six or seven people, and one of them is actually the murderer, and you find out at the end who the murderer is. The last chapter reveals it. It's sort of like a classic structure of a whodunnit, and I've never done that before. I didn't do it for any particular reason. I think it was because I hadn't done it before, so I could experiment, and it was so much fun.”

“That's one of the things readers love about your work, is you experiment a lot.”

“That was a lot of fun, because I do read mysteries, and yet I never wrote an actual mystery before.”

“Authors sometimes get the advice—which you're totally the exception to—of pick one thing, stay with it, don’t veer from that because you can't build a brand if you don't stick with that one thing. Yet you write plays, nonfiction, poetry, short stories, novels, and you write in all sorts of genres. What advice or response do you give to that? Because I get that ‘stick with one thing’ all the time from media experts at Killer Nashville. You're the exception. You don't do that.”

“No, but I'm just my own person. I think if you want to have a serious career, like as a mystery detective writer, you probably should establish one character and develop that character. One detective, let's say, set in a certain region of America so that there's a good deal of local color. I think that's a good pattern to choose one person as a detective, investigator, or coroner and sort of stay with that person. I think most people, as it turns out, just don't have that much energy. They're not going to write in fifteen different modes. They're going to write in one. So that's sort of tried and true. I mean, you know Ellery Queen and Earl Stanley Gardner and Michael Connolly. Michael Connolly, with Hieronymus Bosch novels, is very successful, and they're excellent novels. He's a very good writer. He's made a wonderful career out of staying pretty close to home.”

“Is there any parting advice you would give to writers who are reading here?”

“I think the most practical advice, maybe, is to take a writing course with somebody whom you respect. That way you get some instant feedback on your writing, and I see it all the time. The students are so grateful for ideas. I have a young woman at Rutgers, she got criticism from the class, and she came back with a revision that was stunning to me. I just read it yesterday. Her revision is so good, I think my jaw dropped. She got ideas from five or six different people, including me. I gave her a lot of ideas. She just completely revised something and added pages and pages, and I was really amazed. I mean, what can I say? That wouldn't have happened without that workshop. She knows that. You have to be able to revise. You have to be able to sit there and listen to what people are saying, and take some notes, and then go home and actually work. She is a journalism major as well as something else. So I think she's got a real career sense. She’s gonna work. Other people may be waiting for inspiration or something special, but she's got the work ethic. And that's important.”

---

Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference and the online streaming creative learning platform The Balanced Writer. Subscribe to his weekly writing tips at https://claystafford.com/

Joyce Carol Oates has published nearly 100 books, including 58 novels, many plays, novellas, volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water, What I Lived For, and Blonde were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize; she won the National Book Award for her novel them. https://celestialtimepiece.com/

Clay Stafford talks with Heather Graham on “The Business of Writing”

Heather Graham interviewed by Clay Stafford

---

Author Heather Graham is incredible in many ways: her prolific and stellar writing style and habits, her support and encouragement of other authors, and her inspiration and support of many beyond the writing field. I know of few authors who view writing and attention to their readers, as does Heather Graham. It was a pleasure catching up with Heather when she was in New York City during one of her busy tour schedules. Since she is so prolific, I thought I’d ask her about business, a subject that many writers view through a fog. “So, Heather, let’s jump right in and ask, what’s the biggest financial mistake you see new writers making early in their careers, and how can they avoid that?”

“I am horrible with finances, so I don't know if I'm the one to ask.”

I laugh aloud. “Okay, with that build-up, you crack me up. Can you speak from experience, then?”

“People come at writing from so many different venues. Some are keeping day jobs and writing on the side. They have their day job, so they don't have to worry about finances too much. And, of course, publishing is ever-changing. But always ensure you have your next project ready to go, and then don't be as bad with money as I am. I don't know what to say because you never know. Do you want to go traditional? Are you going to get a multi-book contract? Are they buying a one-off project? Are you collaborating with Amazon? It depends so much on what you're doing. One of the main things you must learn—that I'm still working on—is that when you're on contract, you'll get so much and then so much later on publication. And then the problem is, of course, it's never guaranteed income. You have to learn to watch the future more than anything else.”

“There are writers I speak with who have things they want to write, but frankly, we know that some of those are not commercial. How do you balance your creative freedom with what the market wants?”

“That's one thing I tell people to be careful about. If you are putting up on Amazon, you can be fast. You can catch the trend. But if you're writing for one of the traditional publishers or a small press, it's usually going to be a year before your work comes out. You want to be careful about writing to trends because that trend could be gone by the time something comes out. My thought is, if it's something you love, do it. Otherwise, be careful. You always have to write what you love. What makes you happy, too, because your excitement comes out on the page.”

“What are some of the common pitfalls that you might see that writers don't think about and should have been aware of, even with representation—things that could lead to mistakes?”

“First of all, you need to do your homework. Doing your research for beginning writers is one of the most important things you can do. Find out what agents enjoy what you're doing. Find out what houses are buying what you're doing. I think that's one of the best things. Somebody just spoke at World Fantasy who is an editor, but her husband is an agent. He has out there that he does not handle young adult, and he'll get a million young adult things anyway. The most important thing, I think, is to be savvy about what's going on. I didn't know any agents or editors when I started, but I can't recommend groups and conventions enough because you meet others. You're always going to hear more stories. You're going to hear what's happened. You're going to be introduced to editors and agents, and you're going to hear from friends, ‘Oh, my gosh, yes, that's exactly what they're looking for.’ Because I have covered my bases, I belong to HWA, MWA, International Thrillers, and RWA, and I have never met such a nice group of people. It's like nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine out of a thousand are great, and everybody shares. The good majority are supportive.”

“Because time is finite and money is finite, for a beginning author, where should authors focus their promotional and marketing strategies? And where should they not because they should be writing instead of doing that?”

“I'll tell you something I'm not very good at, but I have learned that TikTok and BookTok are some of the biggest ways you can do things now. Social media is free. When you're on a budget, using social media is great. I have been traditionally published for a long time, and they have publicity departments and marketing departments. More so today, even in the traditional houses, they want you to do a lot of your own promotions. I think for many of us, it is hard because the concentration is more on what I'm writing. It's a good thing to try to get out there and learn. And I am still working on this: learning how to be good on social media.”

“And technology changes.”

“Yes. Constantly.”

“New opportunities open up.”

“Yeah, that's just it. You have to be ready for change.”

“What are some red flags to look out for when you're getting an agent or signing a contract with a publisher?”

“Again, I've been lucky. I didn't start out with an agent and really had no idea what I was doing, but I sold a short horror story to Twilight Zone, and then Dell opened a category line, and I sold to Dell. But they were contemporary, and I had always wanted to write historical novels, and I had a couple in a drawer. I always remember when I sold because I stopped working with my third child and had my first contract with my fourth child. There’s just that year and a half, or whatever was in there, but when I had the historicals, and nobody wanted to see them, there was a woman in the romance community who had a magazine called Romantic Times, and she came to Florida with one of her early magazines. It had an ad that said Liza Dawson at Pinnacle Books was looking for historical novels, and I'm like, ‘Let me try. Let me try, please.’ They did buy the historical, but at the time, everybody was very proprietary about names, so Shannon Drake came into it. I was doing historicals under Shannon Drake, but the vampire series wound up coming under that name, too. It just depends on what you're doing. There are two lines of thought. One is that you need to brand yourself. You need to be mystery, paranormal mystery, sci-fi. You need to brand yourself as something. That’s one idea that can be very good, but I also loved reading everything. There are many, many different things that I have always wanted to write. I have been lucky; I have done it. Whether it was a smart thing or not, I don't know. I can very gratefully say that I have kept a career, and I have been able to do a lot of the things I've wanted to do.”

“When the boilerplate comes, it says they want all rights for everything. What rights should a writer retain?”

“When this whole thing happened where I was selling to a second company, that's when I got an agent. And again, we're looking at the same thing. Study what the agents are handling, what they're doing, and who they have. When we’ve done negotiations, I've usually been asked to leave because I am not a good negotiator. You need to listen to your agent and the agent's advice. Now the agent, a lot of the time is going to know, ‘No, no, no, we have to keep the film rights. They never do anything with them,’ or ‘No, let them have them because they just might use it.’ An agent is going to know these things better because they do it on a daily basis. And then the other thing is, your agent gets you paid. Instead of you having to use your editorial time talking to somebody saying like, ‘Could you please send that check?’ the agent will do that for you.”

“Let's go back a minute. You talked about social media. What kind of mistakes do you see writers making on social media? I can think of a few, but what are your thoughts?”

“I'll tell you what gets me, and this is purely as a reader, and I will be a reader till the day I die. I love books. I want people to read, too. As a reader, though, when I'm on social media, don't, don't, don't put out there, ‘Oh, you've got to read…’ or ‘This is the best book ever,’ because to me that means no. It's going to be my decision as a reader whether it's the best book ever. Just say, ‘I hope you'll enjoy this,’ or ‘This is about…’ or ‘I'm very excited about…’ or whatever. You don't want to say, ‘Gee! This may be pure crap, but buy it anyway.’ You can tell people what something is about, why you're excited about it, and you hope they'll enjoy it. But this is more my opinion as a reader than as a writer. Don't tell me, ‘It's the best thing ever. You're going to love it.’ Let me make that decision.”

“You talked about conferences and networking. What are some common mistakes that writers make when it comes to their professional development? Where are they lacking? What do you see value in?”

“Again, I think conferences and conventions are some of the most important things you can do. It helps if you want to volunteer and help get people going. That way, you meet more people, and you can interact more with those running the conferences, who have probably been around for a while and have some good advice. One of the worst things you can do is spend a lot of time whining or complaining about things that can't be helped. Things do happen sometimes. Books don't arrive, or the seller didn't come through. Don't make life miserable for other people. I'm not saying you shouldn't fix something if you can, but sometimes things can't be fixed, and then you have to let it go. And there are different types of conventions. You have Thriller Writers, Bouchercon, Killer Nashville. You have the Bram Stoker Awards, which are relatively big. We have something down in Florida called Sleuthfest. I love Sleuthfest, and it's very easy. It's good to get involved. It's an investment in your future. I know I was looking for money to pay the Chinese restaurant when I first started out, so sometimes you just don't have it when you're beginning your career. And that's why you try to do the things that are closest to you. Just become involved with a group that maybe meets at a library. Anything like that. There are online groups these days. The very best perk we get out of it is our communities.”

“What advice would you give people? Maybe, ‘I wish I had known this when I started out…’”

“I wish I had known what an amazing community the writing community was and to get involved, and therefore, I would have learned so many things I didn't know. I have two lines of advice. One, sit down and do it. Be dedicated to yourself. Be dedicated to your craft. And then, get involved. Find like-minded people because they will be wonderfully helpful and encouraging.”

---

Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Heather Graham is the NYT and USA Today bestselling author of over two hundred novels, including suspense, paranormal, historical, and mainstream Christmas fare. She is also the CEO of Slush Pile Productions, a recording company and production house for various charity events. Look her up at https://www.theoriginalheathergraham.com/.

Clay Stafford Interviews… Sara Paretsky: “Making A Difference”

Sara Paretsky interviewed by Clay Stafford

---

Don Henley sang about wanting to get “to the heart of the matter.” In this interview, I did. Sara Paretsky is a legend in detective fiction but also a champion for the rights of those who don’t have a voice. I spoke with her and found her as compassionate and passionate as my impressions of her were before we met. What struck me the most before the interview was her concern for others. How people incorporate that concern to make the world truly a better place without the preachiness that sometimes comes from pedantic writing is what I sought to investigate with her.

“Sara, it's not difficult to read your work and see where you might stand on things. Do you think it is necessary or even an obligation for writers to include social issues in their work?”

“I think writers should write what is in them to write. I don't sit down wanting to tackle social issues.”

“They’re there, though, so they just come out?”

“It's just they inform my experience and how I think. And it's not even what I most want to read. I most want to read someone who writes a perfect English sentence with an exciting story. That's what I care about. You read things you're in the mood to read, which changes at different points in your life. When I was about ten, my parents gave me Mark Twain's recollections of Joan of Arc to read. My parents felt that I had too intense a personality and that I was always going to suffer in life unless I dialed it back. They wanted me to see the fate that awaited too fierce girls. They get burned at the stake. So, I read this book, and it did not make me wish to dial back my intensity. It made me wish I could have a vision worth being burned at the stake for. That is just my personality, and that's why these issues keep cropping up in my books.”

“I don't know if it's even true, but one of my favorite Joan of Arc stories is that she went to those in charge and wanted the army to go, and they said, ‘They won't follow you. You're a woman,’ and she said, ‘Well, I won't know because I won't be looking back.’”

“Oh, God! I love it!”

“I think that's incredible. And, of course, they still burned her at the stake. That was a fantastic way of looking at that vision, which sounds like what you were talking about.”

“I’ve got hearing aids, and I keep hoping to get messages. I hope St. Catherine and St. Michael will start telling me what to do.”

“Some people are putting tin foil over their heads to stop the messages from coming in. You're hoping they will arrive.”

“You heard it here first when you want to come see me in the locked ward.”

“You said you wanted to write your first book, if I've got this right, to change the way women are portrayed in detective literature, and the gamut of portrayal at the time ran from sex objects to victims of formidable forces, women who must be judged because of their moral bankruptcy, or those who needed to be rescued by Harrison Ford. Do you feel you achieved that regarding how women are portrayed today?”

“Oh, I think not. What I think changed is that the roles for women became much more diverse, reflecting how society was changing. When Sue Grafton and I started, we were on the crest of a wave of the world looking at women differently. Lillian O'Donnell was in a previous generation of women writers, and she had a woman who was a New York City transit police officer solving crimes. But she was writing at a time when people weren't ready to see women taking on these more public roles. I published my first book the year Chicago let women be regular police officers instead of just matrons at the Women's Lockup and the Juvie Lockup. People don't remember this, but there were not exactly riots, but wives of patrol officers were storming the precincts, demanding that women not be allowed in patrol cars with their husbands because they knew that either they would seduce their husbands, or they weren't strong enough to provide backup for their husbands. We don't remember that struggle because we take it for granted now. But I was publishing my first book when all those items were in the stew. Can women do this? Should women do this? And now, there's still a lot of pushback, but nobody questions whether a woman should be in the operating room, or on the Supreme Court, or doing these kinds of things. So, in that way, I was part of a change, for what I think is a change for good. At the same time, I can't speak to why, but I feel like there's a lot of contemporary crime fiction where people are almost in a one-downmanship struggle to use the most graphic, grotesque violence. I know it's unfair to pick on the dead rather than on the living: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I'm, of course, honored that Stieg Larsson considered me an influence on him. Still, every detail of the sexual assault and abuse committed on Lisbeth Salander is described in exquisite detail. Then, when she seeks revenge, all of that is described in exquisite detail. The use of violence has become almost pornographic. But also, you know, V.I. and Kinsey Millhone became detectives out of a sense of possibility, joy, and problem-solving. But there's a tremendous amount of victimization of women, and it's acceptable for them to take an active role in fighting back against being victims. But we're not seeing a lot of women going into this work just because they want to. There is always a reason, and it must be a victim reason, in way too much fiction as I'm reading it, and I find that depressing and disturbing.”

“But when you started writing, and tell me if I'm misquoting you, you said you wanted to change the narrative about women in fiction.”

“Right.”

“I noted you didn't say detective fiction, but you said, ‘I want to change the narrative about women in fiction,’ and some would say you did achieve that.”

“I think that does me more honor than I deserve. I was one of the voices that helped make that happen, and I think we did.”

“This is a difficult question and something I always tell my children. I was like, ‘Okay, to argue a point, you must be able to argue both sides equally well. And then you know the issues.’”

“Great advice. I wonder if I could do that?”

“It's worked well for the kids. But this is a difficult question for those with strong opinions. At this moment, we humans seem to be a bit divided. How do you feel about authors taking social stands on issues with the opposite allegiance to where you or I might stand?”

“I think they should be boiled and oiled and have their carcass– No.”

“I don't think that's true. I don't think you believe that at all.”

“I don’t believe it. I'm wading into controversial waters here, but I'm a Jew. Since October seventh, I feel like my brain has been split, not just in half, but maybe in six or seven pieces because I'm totally against the violence against Palestinians in Gaza. I'm totally against the relief and joy that some Americans expressed watching live streaming of Israeli women being raped and mutilated. I'm totally for some things and totally against some things, and there are like maybe eight different ways you could segment yourself on Israel, Hamas, Palestine, Gaza, West Bank Settlers, and U.S. policy. That's an issue where everyone has a strong opinion, except for someone like me, who is fragmented in the middle. And so, I'm listening to all of these, and I think writers who want to hold forth on this are bolder and braver than I am, but it also is an opportunity for me to get exposed to many different viewpoints. And in that sense, yeah. Great, everyone who feels they know enough to speak about it, or even if they don't know enough, is speaking about it. I know that I would not be a person who could write an empathic, believable story about someone who was opposed to women's access to reproductive health. But if that's where your head is, you should write it, and maybe you can create a sympathetic character that would help me understand why you have those views that are so repugnant to me.”

“Regardless of the perspective of one, literature is a powerful sword, as we know, and people read things and, maybe like your parents were talking about with your Joan of Arc, it's going to subdue you a bit. But no, it made you blossom. And so, you never know which way literature will lead you to look at something and then go, ‘Wait, let me think about this a little more.’ I think differing opinions do tend to do that.”

“Yes, and if you have one monolithic opinion, you are doomed. You need to hear many voices of a story. It's only tangentially connected to this, but Enrico Fermi, the giant physicist of the 20th century, was the person who brought my husband to the University of Chicago. My husband was quite a bit older than me, and he died five years ago, and I still miss him every day. But that's beside the point. When Fermi was dying, he died of esophageal cancer around 1955. A young intern came into his hospital room and tried to talk to him cheerfully about his prospects and the future. And Fermi said, ‘I'm dying, and what you need to learn as a young doctor is how to talk to people about the fact that they're dying.’ This is all in this doctor's memoir. This doctor published this six or seven years ago, at the end of his career, and he had asked Fermi how he could have such a stoical outlook. Fermi was reading Tolstoy's short stories, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and other stories, and Fermi said, ‘You go home and read “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” and you will learn how to talk to your patients about death and dying.’ The doctor said, ‘Yes, I went and did that, and it was the most important part of my medical education.’”

“Literature is powerful. So why did you lead the charge – and I think I know this, but I'm asking – why did you lead the charge to create Sisters in Crime. How did that come about?”

“In March of 1986, Hunter College convened what I think was the first-ever conference on women in the mystery field: writers, readers, publishers, editors. I had published two books, and they asked me to speak, which was exciting. I was on panels with people I'd been reading for a long time, including Dorothy Salisbury Davis, who became a close friend. Because I lacked impulse control, I made some strong statements. These generated a lot of discussion, and I started hearing from other women around the country. Sue Grafton and I were fat, dumb, and happy. We published our books. We got a lot of great reviews. We didn't understand the industry, or I didn't. Maybe Sue did. She was smarter than me in many ways. But women who were being asked questions like, ‘What do you do when your kitty cat gets on your keyboard,’ or ‘Isn't it nice that you have a hobby so that you're not bothering your husband when he comes home from a hard day's work?’ You know, just lots of ugly stuff. The great civil rights lawyer, Flo Kennedy, said, ‘Don't agonize, organize.’ So, at the Bouchercon in Baltimore in October of 1986, I sent letters to everyone I had heard from and the women I knew, twenty-six people, to see if women wanted to get together to form an advocacy organization. I said, ‘If you do, we’ll work; if you don't, we'll shut up and stop crying about it.’ Everybody was on board with it, and our first project was our book review monitoring project because Sue and I were getting all these reviews. Most women were not getting reviewed at all. Sue and I were getting reviewed because we were doing something that was being perceived as male. We had privatized. We were doing something in that Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, John MacDonald tradition. And so, we connected with male readers and reviewers. But women who are doing things outside that: cops, so-called cozies, domestic crime. They were not getting reviewed. Our first project was to get numbers on that. Because if you're not getting reviewed, libraries will not buy you. And they were, in those days, the biggest buyer of midlist books. And bookstores don't know you exist. So, with the help of Jim Wang at the Jude Review, we got a list of 1,100 crime thriller mystery books published in 1986 and then worked hard. We looked at two hundred newspapers and magazines and looked at the reviews, and we found that a book by a man was seven times more likely to be reviewed than a book by a woman. We figured, ‘God. Maybe men write twice as well as we do, but not seven times as well.’ So, we started just going to bookstores and libraries. Sharon McCrumb, Carolyn Hart, and Linda Grant, I think it was, put together books in print by women writers. We didn't want to go headlong against the industry because we needed the industry. We wanted to educate people. Sisters grew out of that and has been essential as a place of support. Of course, some men belong, and it's been a template. Writers of Color—I don't have the exact name right—are advocating, so you're starting to see many more mysteries by writers of color than you would have seen ten years ago. This advocacy makes a difference, and it makes a difference not by being confrontational but by being educational and showing publishers, booksellers, and so on that there's a market for these characters. People want to read about them. We were going back to your previous question about regional characters. Now, we're down at the grassroots of where stories come from. And we see that a story speaks to people regardless of race, creed, or place of national origin. Some days, I feel so much despair I can hardly get out of bed, but when I think of the possibility that readers and writers have of exploring so many different voices and places, it's like, yeah, this is a brave new world.”

“What advice do you have for writers of today?”

“If you're writing for the market, you may hit it lucky, but the market is such a fickle place that by the time you finish your book, it will be interested in something else. You write what's in you to say and do it the best way you can. One thing I don't have that I wish I had in my own life is that I don't have a reading group, and I don't have a first reader now that my husband is gone. I have not found the right person, or maybe I haven't even looked. But you need a sounding board, even if it's just one person. Your head is an echo chamber, so get feedback but also stay true to your voice and vision. Balance the two. It's like you were saying, can you have a sympathetic voice opposite your position? You may love your prose so much that you don't want to alter one word. There's one important writer you're not allowed to edit today, and I'm like, ‘Oh, sweetheart, I'd read you more often if you'd let someone cut about 30% of that deathless prose.’”

“You've been called ‘the definition of perfection’ by the Washington Post.”

“Yeah, right.”

“And ‘a legend’ by people such as Harlan Coben, and for your work ‘the best on the beat’ by the Chicago Tribune and others, and the list goes on and on and on. How does that make you feel? How does it feel to be labeled as ‘perfection’?”

“That's an impossible bar to reach and go over.”

“But you have that reputation.”

“Yeah, well, you know…”

“And you've bumbled well into it, right? Let me ask you this. Other people think of you as a legend for numerous reasons. Whether it's Sisters in Crime, your advocacy in your personal life, your writing, or the influence your writing has had, what would Sarah Paretsky like to be remembered for?”

“I'd like to be remembered for telling stories that cheered people up.”

“That's a wonderful thing.”

---

Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Sara Paretsky revolutionized the mystery world with her gritty detective V.I. Warshawski in Indemnity Only, followed by twenty V.I. novels, her memoir, two stand-alone novels, and short stories. She created Sisters in Crime, earning Ms. Magazine’s Woman of the Year. She received the British Crime Writers’ Cartier Diamond Dagger and Gold Dagger. https://saraparetsky.com/