James Barron knows about writing stamina. He has been reporting for The New York Times for forty years and has authored two books. In all, he never stops writing. And he is here on QWERTY to talk about how to feed your curiosity, keep the writing going and have a writing life. Read along while you listen in to the remarkable conversation we had about all that and more.
Read along as you listen to this episode of QWERTY, my podcast with co-host David Leite. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes, Spotify or Stitcher. (The following transcript has been edited from the original recording).
Marion Roach Smith: David, today I get to introduce you to one of my closest friends. This is James Barron. He’s a reporter and columnist on The Metropolitan Staff of The New York Times. He and I started working at the Times together in 1977. We were copy boys. Yes, that’s right, that’s what they called us.
David: Copy boys!
Marion: Copy boys! James has gone on to have a remarkable career at the times. Among the highlights of that career is the minute-to-minute stories he wrote of the 9/11 attacks in 2001. He’s written for virtually every section of the paper. Some serious blackouts, one of which we shared together in 1977, but he’s also written a nine-part series early on in the century that followed one piano as Steinway and Sons built it, from start to finish. That became a book, Piano: The Making of a Steinway Concert Grand. He also has recently published The One-Cent Magenta: Inside the Quest to Own the Most Valuable Stamp in the World.
Marion: Welcome, James. Meet David, and let’s talk.
James: Hey, Marion. I thought we were copy people. I thought we were copy persons.
Marion: I think that’s very liberal of you. I think I was still a copy boy at that time, James.
David: Yes, that’s very woke of you, but I don’t think that was the case back then.
James: Things we didn’t know.
David: Exactly.
David: James, our listeners, as you know, are writers, and you of course, have been writing your whole life. You’re doing it on the hardest of deadlines, which, of course, is newspaper. Let’s start there and talk about writing stamina. What is it that drives you? Is it caffeine, is it curiosity, the desire for publication, getting the truth out there in the world? What gets you writing every day?
James: All of the above.
David: Okay.
Marion: Okay, so how much caffeine? Just kidding, go ahead.
James: Lately, it’s actually had to be decaf.
Marion: Oh no, I’m so sorry.
James: No, it’s better that way. No, some of it is just you want to get to the bottom of something. I guess I lean more toward the curiosity.
David: Okay.
James: Some of it is telling it as well as you can. I don’t know what of the A, B, C, or D possibilities when I checked all of the above that falls into, but a lot of it is almost re-thinking a story and seeing if there isn’t some more effective way to tell it. Language matters. I think language matters more even in this day and age, because people are reading news on their phones.
David: Yes.
James: The window is different. The experience is different. The window into the news is different, the experience of reading on a phone is different. It’s not the supermarket experience that you used to have with the newspaper, where there all of these stories. They were sort of arranged in an order that was more apparent than it is on a phone, at least to me.
David: Yes, it’s true.
Marion: Sure.
David: Can we just take a moment of Hosannah-Heysana and just say this man said, “Language matters.”
Marion: I know.
David: Oh, God. We’ve forgotten that, so many people have just forgotten that language is so important.
Marion: It is. I suspect you could ice that into a cake, David. I think I’ll needlepoint it onto something.
David: Exactly.
Marion: Someone else can tattoo it onto themselves. It does matter. The delight in language is what’s so apparent in all of your work, James.
David: Yes.
Marion: The sheer, complete and absolutely delight I have reading your stuff, and knowing that you put that word, that one word in there. I can just see you laughing out loud, or smiling, or quietly smiling to yourself as you got that word into that sentence that made me say … as we say in the newspaper world, “Golly, Martha” to someone else. It’s a Golly Martha moment when you look up from a newspaper and want to share it with someone else. I wonder about a Golly Martha moment for you. As I mentioned in your intro, you’ve written two mass market books. The most recent of which is The One-Cent Magenta: The Quest to Own the Most Valuable Stamp in the World. What was your Golly Martha moment there? What happened along the way, in reporting, in your usual life? Did you just hear about this stamp? Did you know all your life? Give us that tale, a shortened version, but also include-
James: Yes, you know me, Marion.
Marion: I’ve heard the story, and I’ve known you for all these years. Also, let’s talk about what made you know there was a book there? First, let’s just talk about, when did you run into this story?
James: I went to a party. I got there early. The party was for the brother of somebody I went to college with. I didn’t know the brother, and when I got there, there weren’t that many people there. This was in one of those private clubs in New York City, that was built at a cost of a million dollars, when a million dollars was real money. So, marble floors and huge paintings, and a room the size of a basketball court. There were only four or five people there. One of them was an auctioneer I had written about before. I had written about him when he sold the Declaration of Independence. He actually sold it twice, a copy of it. James: I’d written about him when he’d sold something called The Baysonne Book, which was the first book printed in the Colonies. I guess that would be back in, what, the 16th Century? Maybe the 17th Century?
Marion: 17th Century.
James: Thank you. He once even got me into the vault at the Federal Reserve-
David: Oh, wow.
James: … because there was a gold coin that he had sold, and somehow they had gotten the Federal Reserve to store it. I guess the Fed will do that I you have something expensive, and rare, that came out of the Mint. They were going … It needed to go from the Federal Reserve uptown to the New York Historical Society, where it was going to be displayed. He called up and said, “You want to go to the vault of the Federal Reserve?” Well, of course I did.
Marion: Do I?
James: I mean, that’s sort of-
David: Gosh, Molly. I’d like to.
James: Yeah. There you go. Off we went. Here I am at the party, and he’s the only person of the five or six people in the room whom I recognized. I went over to him and essentially said, what have you done for me lately? There was always a story with him, he always had something going on even if it wasn’t quite ready to have an auction. He always had something going on. He said, “Well, I’m going to sell the world’s most expensive stamp, but there’s a problem. There’s some people in London, and they may want to dip it in benzene.” The problem with benzene is-
David: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah.
James: Dunk, poof! No more stamp.
Marion: Yeah.
James: Well, benzene has been a running gag with one of my other friends since I lived in an apartment, back when we were working at the Times together, Marion. We were convinced my landlord at the time was storing benzene in the basement, in a 55 gallon drum. We were convinced of this because the next door neighbor, who hated the landlord, said so. He thought we were all going to be blown to smithereens. The brownstone is still there, so I guess there was no benzene, or-
Marion: I guess there was none.
James: Or it was inert. I’m just trying to throw a word around that sounds like I could use it, inert.
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David: Language matters. There you go.
Marion: What was it that made you say, there’s a book here? At what point on this thought process, did it start right there, or did it start later?
James: It started there, as there’s a story here. What I said was … It started right there. It started as a story because I thought, if he’s really going to London the following week when I’m on vacation, and they insist on the benzene, I want to be there. I said, we’re going to be on vacation, but I can get from there to London. Let me know, I’ll be on the next plane.
Marion: Oh!
James: He didn’t call, but he called a couple of weeks later. He got through London without having to have any benzene. Then, he arranged to take the stamp to the National Postal Museum at the Smithsonian. In Washington. He called and said, “They’re going to examine it there, using processes and equipment similar to what was done in London.” He said, “Would you like to go?”
James: Well, there we go.
Marion: There we go, like the Federal Reserve. Now, David, you were a stamp collector as a kid, right?
David: I was a stamp collector and-
Marion: You totally relate to this story.
David: I do. I relate to it. I was fanatical about it. I knew about the One-Cent Magenta. I knew this story. As I had said, I actually tried to mimic it as a kid. I wanted to pawn it off, and make three or four hundred dollars, because I had heard how rare it was. Of course, that never happened. Now, someone else has paid $9.5 million, I believe, for the most recent sale.
James: Maybe we ought to make clear, the reason it went for that, the reason you could’ve pawned off your copies at three or four hundred dollars was there’s only one One-Cent Magenta.
David: Exactly.
James: As far as anybody knows, all the others … I think about 500 or so of them were printed. These were accidental rarities. It’s what happens when your ship doesn’t come in, the boat with stamps to British Guyana, then a British colony, somehow somebody didn’t put enough British, London-made stamps on the ship. When it got to British Guyana, the Postmaster must have panicked. He went to the local newspaper and got them to print these stamps, which were just provisional.
David: Right.
James: They were the closest thing to temporary, I guess, that they had in the postal world.
David: There were stamps to sell to ship the newspapers, correct?
James: That’s right.
David: Yes.
James: The one-cent ones for newspapers. There were also four-cent stamps printed at the same time. Those were for letters.
James: Even then, newspapers got a break.
Marion: So, lots of story here, right? Lots of story.
David: I have a question for you, James. Before The One-Cent Magenta, you wrote a nine-part series for the Times that chronicled the building of a Steinway piano, and that made into a book also. As you were reporting the series, were you thinking, hey, this could make a really good book? Or, were you testing material out on the public to see maybe if they would be interested in it? Did someone come along and say, hey, James, what a great idea, turn this into a book? How did-
James: David, this is another one of your questions where the answer is all of the above.
David: All of the above.
James: Do you do that with every question?
David: No. Unfortunately, you’re going to fail my multiple choice.
Marion: Well, I guess the question then, if the answer is all of the above, the question becomes something else. I know you play the piano, for instance, but I don’t know if you collected stamps. At the heart of this question is really, how much does somebody, a writer, need to know about something before you set out to write about it? A lot of writers … I talk to a lot of writers in my work, and they get stuck in the idea of mastery of a thing, and forget that one of the greatest stories in the world is the adventure tale of learning about it along the way. That’s what you’ve exquisitely done in both of these stories. I know you didn’t know how to build a Steinway. Isn’t the story about the adventure? Shouldn’t people not wait to be masters of things, maybe they can go on a tale like this? It seems like that’s what you’re telling us in your work.
James: Yeah, that is the challenge, I think. I mean, I felt I knew enough about music, and enough about pianos, that was in my comfortable zone. I had thought in high school, maybe I could go to music school. I decided I wasn’t good enough to do that. The sensibility was there, and the knowledge was there, I guess, of what you could do with a piano. Even some of the workings of it, just from watching the guys who would tune the one we had at home. I collected stamps for a couple of years, maybe between when I was 11 and 13 or something. It didn’t stay with me the way music did. So, there was a steeper learning curve, learning about stamps and the history of the postal system, which figures in this. Because stamps are part of how Britain reached to the world. In the days when the sun never set on the British empire, every one of those Colonies had stamps that came out of London. There’s also almost, if you took this a couple of steps farther than I did at the time, there’s almost the foreign policy element of stamps. So, you do being to realize how central both of things were at the points in time that mattered. The piano was basically the 18th Century’s idea of a machine. It didn’t have an engine, because they didn’t have engines in the 18th Century. Then, Steinway tweaked it in the 19th Century, and that’s basically with tweaks since then, what they’ve been making for 100 and however many years, 160 some years.
Stamps still exist, although they’re not what they were. Email has undercut that. Amazon, and the other online services that then get things to us have revived, I guess, the postal service, or at least given them weight in terms of tonnage of things to deliver, and packages to deliver. When is the last time you paid a bill and put a stamp on an envelope to pay it?
Marion: Well, I still do. I think in terms of the writing thing, what I find so intriguing about this is you didn’t wait until you knew everything about the postal system.
David: Yes, exactly.
Marion: You didn’t wait until you knew everything about pianos.
James: Because you’d never write a word.
Marion: There we go! That’s what I was waiting for you to say. Because we wouldn’t.
James: Oh, sorry. I would’ve done it sooner if I’d realized where we were going.
Marion: If it wasn’t for your exquisite love of language, you would have said it shorter, I know.
James: That might be … That might also be where writing for a newspaper for so long comes in. You always have to cut off, and start writing.
David: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
James: You can only write what you know, you have to get as much together in the time you have. I was certainly not going to know as much as the Keeper of the Royal Collection at the Palace in London.
Marion: Yeah, yeah.
James: I can tell you about going to meet him.
Marion: Yeah.
James: And how he turned out to be a St. Louis Cardinals fan.
Marion: Well, there you go. Something to talk about.
David: What’s interesting, James, is what you’re saying is that you learned enough to be able to write about topic, just what you needed in order to move forward with the stories. Of course, your stories, they cover everything from reporting on the World Trade Center, from music, from terrorism. What is the quality that you consider to be utmost importance for a writer to have?
James: There’s going to another one of these long silences here.
David: Okay.
James: I noticed that was not a multiple choice question.
David: No, I crossed out my multiple choices. I’m just giving you one question.
James: I guess this gets back to what we were saying earlier. You have to have something. The curiosity, or the ability to absorb things, and synthesize facts and impressions, and make them fit together in a way that is true to the picture.
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
James: It’s almost like if you’re taking a snapshot of something with a camera, how do you then describe it so that it’s as close to what you’re seeing?
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David: Right.
James: If you read it, will the person reading behind you, will your reader or your editor, see the same things that you think are important?
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative), that’s lovely. You know, I watched … When you and I were copy boys together, you and I watched and marveled at the guys who sat in the front row of what was once a massive newsroom at The New York Times. I think there were 460 people sitting in the room that you and I worked in.
David: Wow.
Marion: Typing, typing, all of them typing. Some of them screaming, many of them smoking. Those of us who were copy boys, running around. The thing that always caught my eye were the two guys in the front, the rewrite guys. They were taking phone calls from kids like us, other reporters, people all over the city, who were their eyes and ears on the street when there was a disaster.
Marion: James, the other day, you covered the helicopter crash in New York City.
David: That’s right, yes.
Marion: On top of a building. I made the assumption that you weren’t on the street, but that someone else was on the street. I could be wrong, maybe you ran out. We’ve all done that, run out to the street with a notebook.
James: No, but here’s something.
Marion: Yeah.
James: At the risk of totally preempting the question. I had gone out about an hour before that because my wife and I were supposed to go to a party that night, and I had bought a new blazer to wear. It was not going to be ready until that day. I went out at lunch time to pick it up. I remember walking along, about four or five blocks from where the helicopter went into the building later, looking up and thinking, I’m glad I’m not flying today.
Marion: Oh.
David: Wow.
James: You’re not going to get out of LaGuardia, because this is just too thick. I couldn’t see the tops of the buildings. I was on the phone at some point, to a source type, and somehow we were talking about what a lousy, murky day it was. I said much the same thing. You know, I was out and hour ago, and would hate to be stuck at the airport. 15 minutes after that is about when we got word of the helicopter. That person sent me an email saying something like, what just happened? Are you psychic or something? She didn’t say it quite like that.
Marion: Not psychic, but just a news person. Let’s talk about that crash-
James: Even that gave me the moment to bring in the weather, and how bad the day was.
Marion: Right.
James: Some of it is just, in effect, being yourself, being me, and bringing to it what you’ve already observed.
Marion: Got it.
David: Using this as an example, did you then rush down to the site and start interviewing people?
James: No. In the-
David: How did you-
James: The Internet world is different from the world Marion and I knew in that everything has to be written even faster. They sent things. Instead of calling now, they use their phones to email or to do it in Slack. So that I could read from that, and that’s pretty much how we began putting it together to get it up on the web fast enough. Then, it’s like building a house. In a way, this is what I learned on 9/11, writing the stories about the 9/11 attacks for NYTimes.com. Those were the first stories written, in real time, that NYTimes.com had ever run. Everything else at that time was, essentially, the story written for the six o’clock deadline, or the 6:30 deadline for the next day’s paper. At about seven o’clock, they went up online.
James: During the day, there was an AP story as a placeholder.
Marion: I wanted to talk about that for a second. I think for other writers, this is the lesson I was talking about. Watching with wonder those rewrite guys. You’re taking in information from a variety of sources, on deadline, very quickly, and you’re synthesizing it into one story that is going right out. In the old days, it was going onto the front page, in a few hours. Now it’s going right out, and you’ve got to get it right, and you’ve got to get it right the first time. I just want to talk about, for writing skills, the ability to stay calm and use discernment at the same time. Just that ability to look at information, and make the choices about what goes in and what doesn’t. There’s got to be a lot of chaos going on around you, with things coming in. How do you synthesize in a way … is it the training of knowing what a New York Times story looks and feels like? Is it some innate sense of what’s the best thing to lead with? How does that process work?
James: It’s hard to explain, Marion. Partly because I’ve done it so long, it almost is innate at this point. I liked it when you used the word discernment, because I think that’s an important part of what’s going on.
Marion: Yes.
James: You know, inherently, what you need to know to describe a situation. To describe a helicopter that, apparently, was trying to land on top of a building because he couldn’t get back to the heliport. You know what you need to describe when it’s, maybe, the biggest story of our lifetime, when planes go into the World Trade Center, and it turns out into the Pentagon, and into the field in Pennsylvania. It’s like building a house. You start with what you know, then you can add a little room here, or an addition there as more material becomes available. That’s how … Or, in other words, as more material becomes available, that’s a not very good way of saying as you learn more. As you learn enough to be confident in what you’re saying.
Marion: Yes.
James: That goes beyond what you put up in the beginning. I guess, for newspaper people, that’s how the world of the web has changed. It’s almost like in the old days of afternoon newspapers, where they would write different versions every hour, or every 90 minutes. I think that’s about the best I can do on that answer. There’s a process, I don’t know how to explain it. I’m not sure if you came and watched, it would make any more sense than when we were young and watching the people who did it then. How did they know which … In those days, they would read clips. Literally stories from past issues of the paper that were filed by topic, so they’d been cut out. They were little clippings, filed by topic. You could ask for the topic folder. If you asked for helicopter crash, there’d be a folder of all the helicopter crashes in New York in a certain period. How did you know what to read from that? Sometimes you just have to be fast, and pay attention.
Marion: Yeah.
David: So, James with your vast knowledge of what you’ve done, and also your exquisite skills that you’ve honed over the years working in the newspaper environment, I’m curious. As a writer, if you had for a novel and you sat down. How different would that experience be? In your mind, of course, we’re just tossing this out here. I’m just curious, do you think that kind of mind, and the way your work can be turned toward novel?
James: I don’t know. I’ve got a great opening scene in my head, but I can’t figure where it’s going to go.
Marion: Well, you just need to have somebody call you in and give you some facts, James, and you’ll start typing.
James: Oh, good.
Marion: Yeah.
James: Oh, good.
Marion: We’ll do that for you, if you like. If you send us the opening scene, we’ll pretend we’re reporters on the street and send you your next-
David: Then you can tell us what goes on.
Marion: Right. I love that idea.
James: Well, we solved that problem.
Marion: Phew! Well, how about we just ask you, what’s your next thing you hope to working on? Obviously, any minute, your phone could go off and you could be called to duty. Are you thinking about another book?
James: I am. I haven’t got anything definite yet, but I’m thinking.
Marion: Oh, good. Well, thank you so much. This has just been a joy. The book is The One-Cent Magenta: Inside the Quest to Own the Most Valuable Stamp in the World. The author is James Barron, found every day in the pages of The New York Times. Don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY, and listen to us wherever you go.
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