How to Write From Who You Really Are, with Richard Zacks

KNOWING WHO WE REALLY ARE is enough of a challenge for most of us, but pursuing who we really are and writing from there is a goal that few writers attempt. Instead, we try to be what the market demands, or what our parents would be proud of, or some combination of things that cater more to outside forces than what’s inside ourselves. Not so, with author, Richard Zacks, whose many books reflect his long-abiding interest in sex, sin and pretty much all things vice. Richard has made a highly-successful career out of writing from who he really is and he is here to give you some tips on how to bring more of yourself into your writing life. Listen in, and read along, as he tells us how to write from who you really are.

My guest today is author Richard Zacks. Richard is a journalist, a former syndicated newspaper columnist, as well as the author of numerous pieces for the Atlantic, Sports Illustrated and the like. He’s the bestselling author of books ranging across the breadth of his interests, including sex, vice, and the time of Teddy Roosevelt, pirates and a particular time in the life of Mark Twain, and more. Please meet my friend, Richard Zacks.

Marion: Hey Richard.

Richard: Hi Marion.

Marion: How are you today?

Richard: Just fine.

Marion: Good. Well, we’ve known each other a long time and you’ve always been one of my favorite reads. I particularly remember when The New York Times, commenting on your first book, History Laid Bare, wrote that you, “Specialize in the raunchy and perverse.” And I laughed like hell. And in these interviews I always try to ask writers about their areas of expertise and for my money, your area of expertise is knowing how to be you while writing. So if the raunchy and perverse lights you up making you the single writer with whom I want to have this conversation, let’s talk about that. How do you say yes to being yourself in your work?

Richard: Well, I loved that comment from The Times, so I was absolutely thrilled. I think they meant it a little snarky and I took it as the ultimate compliment. I went to an all-boys school growing up. I had an excessive interest in sex and my first book… I was also a little scared to write historical narrative in the beginning. I was hugely scared. I was terrified. So I kind of dip my toe in the water of writing books by doing a sex anthology, and I can’t think of a better way of doing it. It was fun.

I had to write the bridges. That was a challenge. But that was about the only writing I had to do.

Marion: So you took on all of sex as opposed to just taking one titillating piece of it. That makes sense.

Richard: Well, we found a lot of… I mean I found a lot of unusual… The rules in a monastery when sleeping three to a bed, always have the old man sleep in the middle. Or how much penance you have to do if you accidentally sleep with your sister-in-law in the dark. I mean, these are authentic things. Burchard of Worms. I didn’t make anything up in that book.

Marion: Well, we should say that the full title is History Laid Bare: Love, Sex, and Perversity from the Ancient Etruscans to Warren G. Harding. So it was rather a sweeping sense of what we were going to get. It begs the question of why we stopped at Warren G. Harding, but we’ll get there.

Richard: I’ve always been afraid of the most recent, to be honest with you. I still haven’t made it past 1950. I mean, I envy your memoir ability because I’m so tempted to do that and I never let myself touch the present.

Marion: Oh, now that’s interesting. So it wouldn’t seem with the books that you’ve written that you’re afraid of anything. But what’s you’re saying is that recent stuff just doesn’t light you up.

Richard: It’s not that it doesn’t light me up. I think I’m going to be totally candid here. People can say you’re wrong. You’ve made a mistake because it’s from their own life. If you’re describing a Martin Luther King march and you get it wrong, there were people who are there who can correct you, but writing more about… To be totally honest, writing more about Captain Kidd, there are no survivors. I’m pretty safe there. And I think that was a little part of my method really.

Marion: Yeah, that’s fascinating. So let’s talk about this whole idea of your books reflecting who you are a little bit more. Because I think of the young writer listening to this who’s trying to be honest, who’s trying to feel his way to giving himself the kind of permission you gave yourself to be on the page and you just said, “Okay, so I can’t really deal with the recent history. I don’t want to have that reverb from people saying that’s not the way it happened. Christmas 1975 was the worst day of my life. And you say it’s so best day of yours.” So you don’t want to deal with that. But what advice would you give to a young writer who says, “I’m a little bit quirky,” “I’m a little bit odd,” or, “I love the perverse,” or, “I really like vice, but how do I inhabit that in my work?”

Richard: All I can tell you is I didn’t really feel like I had a choice. This is what interested me, and to do a book… I mean, I’m sure your other guests have said it’s a long process and you have to care. You have to be excited. And to be honest, the tracking down obscure sex, I mean, I found some very strange things was just so Hittite phalluses. But all authentic. It was just a lot of fun and it worked for me.

But on the other hand, I would say my whole career has been an arc from that point forward. The next book was, I’m not a glorified anthology. It was a bunch of thousand word takes, which having been a columnist for a while, I felt comfortable in in thousand word, 1500 word. And I still was scared of doing narrative, and I still wanted to astound people with unusual and provocative and subversive. So I look back and I love what your theme of the talk is just I have been moving forward along a sort of a continuum with my personality. Definitely.

Marion: Well, let’s take a bigger breath in then. I know that you attended some of America’s most elite schools, including the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Before that, the University of Michigan, you majored in Classical Greek. You’d studied Arabic, Italian, French. So give me the scene, so the young writer can feel it, of you’re telling your parents, for instance, who were alive when you published your first book, telling the people in your life that what you’re going to publish is love, sex, and perversity from the ancient Etruscans to Warren G. Harding. How do you break it to the people who love you?

Richard: It was pretty wild actually because there I was, I had a column in the New York Daily News, which then was I think the largest circulation paper in America. I wrote about entertainment, which is something I definitely didn’t want to keep doing for the rest of my life. And I squeezed out the time to write this book and I come home. I’m pretty proud, and the book’s not out yet, but I have to tell them about it. And I tell my mother and she has a completely blank look on her face. And then she says, “How did the Jews come off?” And I go, “The Jews? Well I guess, let me think. They’re persecuted. Yeah, there’s persecution during the Renaissance against the Jews. And I have that. There was a sexual crime committed.” She goes, “Persecuted, fine. Okay.” And that was literally, I think, the only feedback. And my dad said “How many copies did it sell?” which I think it sold like 40,000 or something, which I was thrilled about. But he had no frame of reference to that. So that was about it.

Marion: So your parents took it nicely and you moved on and History Laid Bare was followed by An Underground Education: The Unauthorized and Outrageous Supplement to Everything You Thought You Knew About Art, Sex, Business, Crime, Science, Medicine, And Other Fields. So you started out to write these books with this interest of yours, but did you ever understand from the beginning the giant sweep you were going to have to take, and the research that would be involved to get there?

Richard: That also is kind of ridiculous. So, of course not. I was an idiot. I was younger. But on the other hand, I was pitching some book ideas and this editor, Bill Thomas, said, “Let’s meet at O’Flaherty’s Bar,” which is near Times Square, back in the day. And it had a pool table and Bill was going to clean my clock in pool because he’s much better than me. And he literally slapped a post-it down on the bar that said, actually at that point it said, “Underground History: Everything You Don’t Know.” There was that book about sex, Everything You Don’t Know About Sex. So he wanted me to do it for history as a kind of… Because he knew I had studied Greek and Italian and had a Horace Mann education and all the rest of it.

But no, I had no clue. I was so excited that a legitimate editor was actually pitching a book to me. I mean, thank God he said that and not something else. I’m sure would have said yes to pretty much anything. And it was so unbelievably hard. It was probably, I don’t know. No, everything’s hard. I mean, you’ve probably been… Your other guests have mentioned it. Writing is hard, but to research and kind of stump the experts in most major areas of human knowledge. I mean, it was ridiculous. I just went to the library. I’d pick up every Catherine the Great book, look in the footnotes, try to get to primary source. Napoleon erotica, tried to get back to primary source. Edison’s electric chair, try to get to primary source just. But I love doing it. And to speak to the young writer, it was in my comfort zone of 1000 to 1500 word pieces that I felt I could handle. I wasn’t ready for a big, long narrative sweep yet. I hadn’t reached that point.

Marion: But you seem to be comfortable with the big narrative sweep as you move through your career, leading you in the next natural place to go as in this sort of continuum of vice and sex to, well, pirates and of course, your book Pirate Hunter. Yeah. I mean, wait for it: Pirates! and your book, Pirate Hunter sold more than 175,000 copies and Time Magazine chose it among the best five nonfiction books of its year. I remember the pirate flag flying at your house and pirate themed Halloween costumes. You’ve ultimately written two books on pirates and contributed to films on the topic. I think it would be pretty easy to stay in that brand forever. How do you break the spell on something like that? I mean, how do you say, “That’s all the pirates I’m doing. Thank you.”

Richard: Well, it was strange stumbling on that story. First, I just want to slide back a little. I mean, again, I didn’t realize. Pirates of the Caribbean hadn’t come out yet, so pirates weren’t quite tarred with the silliness that they have now. There wasn’t all supernatural creatures. I mean, I love Johnny Depp. I absolutely love him, and he helped my book sales. But it the whole series of Pirates of the Caribbean has gone to a pretty ridiculous place. So that hadn’t happened yet. So this still, it was pirates, and it’s an adolescent fantasy, and you could argue that I really have never grown up that much. And my wife says that my first book was 99% sex. My second book was 50% sex. My third book was 20% sex. I mean, I’ve been trying to sort of tamp it down a little bit. Maybe age has helped with that.

But the pirates, I just stumbled onto a story and it happened to be pirates. I got so incredibly lucky. When I first started researching it, it was just Captain Kidd who I knew that he had been labeled one of the most notorious pirates of all time. And it turned out that he was a privateer operating out of New York who got the job to chase pirates, to attack pirates and bring back the wealth of the Indies to these four super powerful backers in London. And his career intersected with a guy named Robert Culliford. And it turned out that I had, I just couldn’t have asked for a better plot. The two men had sailed together earlier in their career and Kidd goes on to be a pirate hunter. And Culliford goes on to be the most notorious pirate of his age. And the two of them literally have a confrontation off the Island of Madagascar where Kidd orders his men to attack. And I’m not going to tell you what happens because I hope people read the book. But I couldn’t have asked for… And then Culliford winds up testifying against Kidd. It’s just I got so lucky and, and it really wasn’t about pirates. It was about having a great story to work with. Took a long time to figure out the story though.

Marion: Sure. So you had to be pretty flexible. You go in there thinking that Captain Kidd is a pirate. You find out that everything you know is wrong.

Richard: Everything wrong.

Marion: And that’s one of the great lessons I think to the young writer is to not go in with intent, is to go in with the curious. And if anybody goes in with wonder and curiosity, it’s you, Richard. And so how do you maintain that?

Richard: I’d love to share the method to tell you the truth because it’s taken a long time.

Marion: I’d love to hear it. What is it?

Richard: I went in on that book and I just did research after… I literally spent a year piling up photocopies and taking notes and reading books and putting Post-its. And I had amassed two entire file drawers full of information, and I couldn’t see my story. I just knew that I could start with Captain Kidd was born like every biographer, and I refused. I wanted a dramatic story. So I really was kind of despairing to be honest. I thought, I’m not cut out to be a writer. I think I’m going to have to do so… Or not this type of writer. And literally my joke to myself was, you’re going to have to be a janitor in Phoenix. If you do not pull off this book, your shame will be so great, with all due respect to janitors in Phoenix, you got to go to Phoenix and be a janitor.

So anyhow, I was so distraught that I just to do something to feel like I was progressing. I took every scrap of information in those file drawers and turned them into a massive chronology, a huge timeline. Literally that said like August 17th, 1691, August 23rd, and every shard, every scrap of information that I found that that could be identified by date, I put in and then I put bracketed the source so that I know how to get to it really quickly if I needed it. And suddenly I had a 400 page single, not suddenly. Not suddenly at all. I had a 400 page single space timeline and then I started putting bold face on the more important events. And all of a sudden I realized, I really didn’t even know Robert Culliford existed.

I saw this man who had been on the first ship with Kidd who had been a wannabe pirate captain, and then who wound up so important towards the end, I started to see the way that I could make it a double weave. And I did. I did Culliford chapters and Kidd chapters until they explode in various scenes towards the end. And I would never have seen it if I hadn’t done that massive chronology, which I recommend to anyone who writes nonfiction narrative. Do the big chronology, reread it, put some bolds in there, and then look for a plot. Don’t fudge a single detail, but look for a plot.

Marion: Oh, that’s gorgeous. And what an extraordinary gift to give to people. I just love that. So that’s the not the… I don’t want to just to reduce it to being practical, but that is very practical to make yourself a timeline.

Richard: Yeah, research a ton first. You don’t want to make that timeline… You can make it as you go along, but you’ve got to do a ton of research. You have to otherwise it’s just going to be thin and it’ll probably resemble other people. And I also recommend, this is so time consuming, but only primary source material if possible. Please don’t use the… Wikipedia can be fine at times, but the the same mistakes are repeated over and over. For instance, I corrected Captain Kidd’s birth date. I mean it wasn’t that big a deal, but it changed the arc of my story a little bit because 1645 makes him nine years older. By having him at 46 is a different age to a lot of males than 56 or 55. Just things like that. It’s just go to the primary sources.

Marion: Well, that’s accuracy in all things. And I’m going to ask you about the juice behind that in a minute in the terms of the writing, but let’s just stick with the research then for a second. Because you live in Manhattan and the city of great libraries and research portals. The New York City Public Library system alone is a wonder and a gift beyond rubies. I live in Upstate New York, home to the New York State Archives where every imaginable map and photo is available. They’ve got a collection there of suitcases, for instance, from women who were committed to institutions by their families for bad behavior and housed for the rest of their lives. All their suitcases are there, right? So wondrous items awaiting researchers.

So what less-than-obvious places could you just name off the top of your head to go do research that you can recommend? There are stories waiting for every nonfiction writer in these places. I always send people to the archives and say, “Do you know what the Dutch history they have there is that no one’s ever written about?” What about you? Like what places would you recommend sending young writers to go find some stories?

Richard: I’d like to say that it was as important as it used to be, but it is unbelievable now what Google Books and Google Scholar have done. I know maybe that’s not the answer you especially wanted, but I find it almost depressing. I used to have to work so hard and go to the Lilly Library at Indiana University, go to all these various strange places to get a scrap of information. And wherever the budgets allow, like John Jay has put all these criminal trials from the late 1800s, I think 170 of them now. If you know where to look inside the John Jay archives online, 170 of the 400 are now the full trial transcript is available. It used to be-

Marion: Pirate trials you mean or the-

Richard: No, of criminal trials, NYPD. I’m just saying.

Marion: Oh, NYPD trials. I see. Oh great.

Richard: I’m just saying 1890s, for instance, at John Jay online, which it doesn’t pop up the first New York City trial transcripts I think it’s called. And then the things that I used, my breakthrough happened actually at the public record office in London, which they also call the National Archives there. And I was looking at… Oh God, just pulling all these different files from my time period, just almost on a wild goose chase. And I stumbled on a diary of a man who had been held prisoner on Captain Culliford’s ship for a year. I mean you talk about, I changed the whole book. I now knew exactly where he had sailed, and he once took china and put it in a cannon to try and shred the sails of a ship he was attacking. Just blast them with plates and dishes and cups. I mean you can’t make that stuff up. He had a doctor named John Death. I mean, just great stuff.

But back to your question, yes, the Municipal Archives in New York are amazing. And they’re not the easiest place to use sometimes, which I think is… I like things being a little hard. But on the other hand now, if you know how to frame your search and you put quotation marks around it and you go into the more obscure areas, you can get so many… I just used a magazine the other day from 1842 because I’m researching this a possible next book idea. I just got it immediately. That’s a seven page article on a mutiny that I was crazy. So anyhow-

Marion: Well, I defend the internet to people all the time in terms of that. I mean, for years I was a Charles Darwin fanatic and you had to go all the way to England. You had to make an appointment six months in advance if you wanted to read any of the 20,000 letters that he received from people all over the world as he was thinking about the book that would eventually change the world, On Origin of Species. Now you can see them in their original online right now. That’s astonishing.

Richard: Mark Twain’s, almost his complete letters, close to it are available through the Mark Twain Papers, which I got really lucky. Thank God their budget hadn’t quite reached the notebooks of 18… I just did a Twain book and the notebooks of 1893 forward to night of his death in 1910 haven’t been put online, haven’t been transcribed. So that was a such a blessing for me. So in a way I’m in competition with the internet because it makes it so easy that a lot of people do, to be honest, fairly mediocre books on great subjects. And that’s a little depressing, but that’s fair. The world’s, it’s wide open. It’s fair.

Marion: It’s fair. Well, we’ll get to the Twain book in a minute, but I wanted to ask you that question about the juice, about the writing. I used to work at The New York Times. We used to pretty much divide the room into those people who were good reporters and those people who were good writers, and there weren’t that many of people who were both. And it was really a distinction. And you do both really, really well. I read in an interview with you from your early days that in a list of books you would include if you worked in a bookstore that you would include early Truman Capote. And that just delighted me because only yesterday I used those very words in a recommendation to a writing student of mine. So reading early and reading the work of people whose work can inspire you. Can you talk to me a little bit of, do you remember why you listed early Capote, what it was about his work that so inspired you?

Richard: Well, I thought he was just so incredibly visual. I remember The Dogs Bark and the pie on the window sill, and then of course In Cold Blood, which is now we all sort of realize is slightly fictionalized. But God, I actually find myself reading much more fiction than I do nonfiction because nonfiction often makes me so angry that it’s so flat, and people are so proud that they found all these obscure details and they can’t resist putting them in. Well, that doesn’t make for a good story. Or they just write it from birth to death with no sense of trying to find more of a storyline. I mean the good writers obviously don’t do that, but I find picking up so many nonfiction books that all I do is skim them for their sources.

Marion: Yeah, I find that reading fiction… I’m always telling people to read fiction when they write memoir. I agree with you on early Capote.

Richard: Single source. Look, you know much more about memoir than I do. But the idea of a single source, it shouldn’t be single source. Put it that way because we all, I know I do, we sort of blend in fudge. But that’s what’s interesting. There is no truth. There’s just well- sourced. It’s just well-sourced. There you go.

Marion: My own sister tells me things all the time. She says, “That never happened.” And I always say, “You’re right, Margaret. That’s not the way it happened to you. That’s the way it happened to me.” But that admits that single source. It’s just absolutely positively single source.

Richard: It’s perception.

Marion: So getting back to your… Yeah, it is perception. It is absolutely perception. And getting back to the wonderful train of your books. We have there this decision you made to drill into somebody that we know a lot about, Teddy Roosevelt. And you drilled into a particularly curious aspect of him, which I found fascinating. The title is Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York. And while your inclination toward vice kind of answers the question of why, and what interested you in that, but what was it that you had heard or read about Roosevelt that set you on that particular course?

Richard: Well, I have to tell you that you brought up the pirate issue before that it would have been an obvious career paths to just written 10 pirate books. I actually after the more of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies came out and I got teased. I’m super-proud of my books. I will not trade a single word in there, but there’s no pirate scholarship, let’s put it that way. There’s a certain lack of respect. You get a lot of “Arghs.” You have to be ready to tolerate “Arghs” if you write about pirates.

Marion: Argh.

Richard: Man, I mean, I spent four years of my life writing Pirate Hunter and I am so incredibly proud of it. And then somebody meets me at a party, someone else says, “Oh, he wrote Pirate Hunter.” And the next person always says, “Argh” or they cover an eye with an eye patch.

Marion: I’m sorry.

Richard: It’s okay. But so part of it was I wanted to try getting a little bit away from pirates. And I always knew that Roosevelt had been police Commissioner. I knew the one book on it was pretty mediocre in my opinion. And I was absolutely thrilled to get to do… And then once I started it, as you said to your writers, you have to be open minded. I didn’t know that it would turn out to be a battle over sort of the purity versus vice in New York City and I didn’t have to force it into that template. That’s what happened. I mean, Roosevelt was so for purity and this guy, Big Bill Devery, the police chief was just a Tammany guy, “Get along, look the other way. Let them gamble, let them go to prostitutes,” guy. And that’s the way I saw the book. So that’s the way I wrote the book.

We buffed up Roosevelt and put every little the background. If I had to do it over, I don’t know. But anyhow, that’s how we handled it. And it was great to do a new time period. And that led to this Hollywood consulting, being a historical consultant for a major TV, which was just a nice change of pace in life to be in a room with John Sayles and these other people as they try and write a script.

Marion: And what’s the script for?

Richard: It was The Alienist. The Caleb Carr book was being adapted, and they wanted to find a historical consultant. And my Island of Vice was that exact time period. So I got hired by Paramount to be the historical consultant, which I had never done anything like that before. So it’s really interesting. Historical consultant is certainly the low man in the room. Let me tell you. I had no idea.

Marion: Wow. Well, I think of you as vice consultant, Richard, really. So, I think as that as the top dog.

Richard: I’m very proud to say, and I think I’m allowed to say this. So you do get a handful of things that actually make it on screen. And one of the things that I actually got in was the location of the public baths for the predator to be searching for a victim and and then the murder scene there with blood slick floor. And I was really proud because where would a man obsessed with young teenage boys or prepubescent, pubescent boys, where would he go? Well I found out, talking about historical details, that young men, 16 and under, were allowed to swim naked in the public pools and public baths in New York City. I mean, what a detail for someone who’s a predator, and that’s an authentic detail and it really worked into the story. So anyhow-

Marion: Oh, well, detail is certainly at the heart of everything that you write. And I was just delighted when I read for your 2017 book Chasing the Last Laugh: How Mark Twain Escaped Debt and Disgrace Around-the-World Comedy Tour that you had been given access to a trove of unpublished notebooks and materials. So is that the big gift? Is that the best thing that happens in this kind of research when somebody says, “We trust your work so much so that we want to give you access to this stuff,” or am I over-blowing that? I mean, it feels like it would be like the ultimate crown. We think you’re so good, we’re going to let you look at this. Oh my God, that’s fabulous.

Richard: Yeah, it’s absolutely wonderful. The biggest break I got was that they hadn’t gotten to putting those all into book form. They hadn’t gotten them online yet. I don’t want to over blow it. I think they would have said yes to other people. But it is so unbelievably wonderful in this day and age of the internet serving up everything imaginable to have something that’s not online. And that was Mark Twain wrote lines that didn’t make it into some of his books. Like he wrote these aphorisms that he said, “If Jesus came back today, one thing he would not be as a Christian.” I mean, what a damning, powerful line that he thought he couldn’t publish. He said, “Debt makes a coward of a man.” And it was too close to home because he was going through so much debt, and he knew it was true about himself. He was doing things he would prefer not to have done, career-wise, perhaps. And I mean, just to get to read those and share them with people. It’s great.

Marion: Well, you get a glimpse that other people haven’t gotten. I remember years ago I was writing a book on red hair and I called the Amherst College Library because I heard they had a lock of Emily Dickinson’s hair. And I’d heard that it was bright red. And for me, that changed everything. We think of Emily as this sort of washed out, pale person in a white dress who never left home. Well, I called up the library. They said, “No one ever asks to see this lock of hair. Please come over.” And they got it out just for me. And it is the brightest damn lock of red hair you ever did see. And I was thrilled and changed by it, but I also was very humbled and delighted that they got it out for me. That was kind of them. But I love this, and I love those moments as a writer when somebody says, “Yes, because we know that you’re going to do the right thing with us.”

Richard: I was once at the library, I think it was in Indiana University, and I was looking at some random Victor Hugo papers trying to find, I think, for my original sex book. But they accidentally had one of his cards. It said “Victor Hugo” just in plain printed script on one side. And then, on the other side, it said in handwritten, “Buvons du champagne” (Let’s have some champagne). And I thought he just slipped this to some beautiful woman or he slipped it to a friend. But I mean in his own handwriting, “Let’s just drink some champagne.” Buvons du champagne. So that was a where Victor Hugo came alive. That was so, so fun.

Marion: People come alive in the stuff that they didn’t publish, maybe more so than in the stuff they did. And again, I had never seen this lock of hair. You’ve never seen that expression. Yeah. Well you’ve published a really impressive number of books. You’ve been a bestseller, you’ve published with some of the best houses there are. But choosing a book to which to dedicate, as you said before, four years, still feels to a lot of young writers like something of a mystical process. Knowing what the public might like to read three years from now or four years from now or six years from now, and then knuckling down to do all that research. So some writers seem to have their fingers on the pulse. They act like those dogs who can predict earthquakes. And I always am interested to know from writers, do you think it’s a mystical experience or are you just writing the book you want to read?

Richard: That’s a great question. I think earlier in my career I completely wrote the book I wanted to read. And now, you get to a certain age and you think, “Well, I don’t know how many more books I’m going to write. So, maybe I should think a little bit about trying to reach the widest possible audience or maybe…” It’s not like I desperately need the money, but you love to have the readers. You just want more readers.

So it’s such a good question. And frankly I do. There are some ideas that I do reject because I think, “Wow, that’s going to sell 6,000 copies, and I’m going to spend three years of my life. So let’s not do that one.” And then you can really get yourself into quicksand trying to…. I want looking for the right book idea, I want something where I get to travel. I want it to have movie potential. I want it to really be a subject I want to do. I want it to have stuff that’s not on Google. I want it to have a little bit of a naughty side. I mean, it’s just so many trying to check all those boxes. It’s crazy.

Marion: Well, that’s gorgeous. “I want it a little bit on the naughty side.” Yeah, that sounds like my friend, Richard. Well, thank you. Thank you, Richard. Thank you so much. This was just an absolute joy. And that’s Richard Zacks. His many books are available wherever books are sold. I’m Marion Roach Smith and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more in the art and work of writing? Visit MarionRoach.com and take a class with me. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to it wherever you go.