How to Develop a Writer’s Eye for Detail, With Edward Schwarzschild

Writer Edward Schwarzschild is author of the brand new novel, In Security. His previous books are Responsible Men and The Family Diamond. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Believer, The Washington Post, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Journal of Criticism and elsewhere. He is currently the Director of Creative Writing and a Fellow of the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany, making him a writer who works with writers, and therefore the perfect person to ask about how to develop a writer’s eye for detail. Listen in and read along as we talk.

Ed: Oh, it’s great to be here, Marion. Thanks so much for having me.

Marion: Oh, I’m delighted. I love your work and I love this new novel, In Security. And as I said in the intro, you’ve written and published widely, and reading your new book and rereading your previous works got me thinking about what exactly you were focusing in on in each work. Let’s set this up for people a little bit, and take us back to the beginning of your writing career. I wonder what you thought you’d need to have on you. How to develop a writer’s eye for detail, for instance? What are the tools you thought you were going to have to have in your toolbox when you started out to be a writer?

Ed: That’s a great question. And it’s hard to go back that far, and think about those days. I mean, I think as a young writer, the first thing I thought I needed, from the reading I did and from the writers I got to meet, was a voice. The writers who grabbed me early on in high school or first year of college would be someone like Grace Paley, or JD Salinger, or Phillip Roth. And those voices just seemed so familiar and so intimate. I had no idea how to get something like that, but I knew that I wanted to try. How do you get a voice tool in your toolbox?

I mean, one thing that a teacher at Cornell, where I was an undergrad and where I was exposed to so much great writing, a teacher named Stephanie Vaughn would talk about just going to diners and listening and writing things down and getting voices that way. And I think that’s something that I began to think about, just the importance. I mean, it’s important as a human being to be a good listener, just to exist and to be a good spouse and a good parent and a good individual. But as a writer, listening is crucial on a whole different level. And so I guess that’s something I focused on pretty early on. I liked to go to diners and listen, it turned out.

Marion: Such great advice: Go to a diner and listen. That’s a lovely piece of advice, and smart as hell, because I think a lot of people think that writing is more mystical than I’ve ever believed it is. I grew up with journalists, so I know it’s hard chair, big caffeine, sitting still until you’re done, but I love the idea that you can acquire voice by listening. And I think a lot about the eye. So I think there’s also, how do you train the writer’s eye? And we don’t get a lot of practical advice on that. And I wonder, I kind of think you’re the person I want to discuss this with most, because even in this new book, which is part thriller, you write with such tenderness and care when covering the emotional lives of your characters. And it got me thinking again, and I’ve thought this before reading your work: how to develop a writer’s eye for detail? How you trained your eye — what are you training it on?

And I know for this book, one of the ways you trained your eye was to go train as a TSA agent. So I want to dig into that, but I wonder, I always tell writers to go do research, whether it be call up your local florist if you want to put a scene in with a specific flower, or spend time in an archive digging for things, but you wouldn’t put on a uniform. So set this up for us, please. And let’s just talk, first of all, how you came to go train as a TSA agent, and then we’ll talk about what you were looking for as you did that. So how did this come about?

Ed: No, this is great stuff, Marion. This is stuff that’s so much fun to talk about. And if I start to talk about it too much, just cut me off. But in terms of how I decided to go apply for a job to be a TSA agent, right? It wasn’t something that I woke up one day and knew that was my dream. It was that somewhere after 9/11, I became really interested in what was happening in the sort of Homeland Security world. Even the fact that we had a Homeland Security Department somewhat suddenly. And I knew I wanted to wrestle with that somehow, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know in fiction, nonfiction. I didn’t know what I was going to write. Like so many people after 9/11, you try to write something, but you can’t right away. Or if you could, it wouldn’t be appropriate somehow.

So I waited and as I was writing, eventually a character who emerged was someone who worked for the TSA, and he became, just whatever the project was, he became a central part of it. His name’s Gary Waldman. He’s a TSA agent. That was just who he was. And in order to write more and more about him, I needed to learn what he did for eight or nine hours a day, and how he’d carried that with him through the rest of his life.

So I’m not a professional researcher. I’ve written critical articles that have a lot of footnotes, and I’ve done some research in libraries, but I didn’t know quite how to handle the research for this book. I was someone for a while who would, whenever I was traveling, I would linger at the checkpoint, and try to engage TSA agents in conversation. But that didn’t elicit a lot of information. I would elect a pat down, just to have a little more time to talk to people there, but that also didn’t elicit a lot of information. I called people who I had heard were working for the TSA and tried to engage them in conversation, but they, at least the people I contacted, didn’t really want to talk about it. So I was frustrated. I had this character, he was a TSA agent, and I couldn’t write about his job in an effective way.

Then I read a book by Ted Conover, a great journalist, a great, immersive nonfiction writer. And I read his book called Newjack, in which he wanted to write about what it was like to become a corrections officer in New York. And he had clearance to go into the correction officer’s training school and cover that. And then the clearance was withdrawn, and he was frustrated. But what he did was he just applied for the job and he applied to go to school, and he went and did the training, and then he went and worked for a whole year at Sing Sing as a corrections officer, and wrote this incredible book called Newjack, which won, I think, the National Book Critics Circle Award when it came out, just a phenomenal book.

And I think that was my inspiration to say, “Okay, I can’t get information the traditional ways here, I’ll see about applying for a job.” And I’m from Philadelphia. My first two books were set in Philly, and I thought maybe I could go down for a summer and work at Philly International and write another Philadelphia book. But I’d been living in Albany at that point for more than a decade. And I was checking the ads at the US Gov work website, where you look for jobs. And lo and behold, there was a opening at Albany International Airport for a TSA agent. So that’s how that started. So I applied.

Marion: It’s just wonderful. One of the things that prevents a lot of writers from doing on the job reporting like that is not knowing how upfront to be with those people you’re working with. So, years ago, I joined a support group at the beginning of my research into a disease my mother had, and I was writing about, and one thing absolutely informed the other. The support group saved my life, but it also gave me astonishing copy about the level of grief for the Alzheimer’s patients. But I always felt like a spy in the support group. It was the strangest combination of need, and a spy in the house of love, kind of thing. So how about you? Did you feel like you were in there under false pretenses, or this is what we do to get what we need?

Ed: Yeah, it’s really complicated, right? I mean, even in a different way, in a way that made me almost paranoid, it’s complicated when you’re working for Homeland Security, which is an organization designed to find out things that are being kept hidden and concealed. So I cared a great deal of paranoia into the interviews and into the evaluations, then ultimately into the job. But I was fortunate in that, I think it was even the night before I was going to go in for my first day of training at the airport, the New York State Writer’s Institute was hosting David Quammen, who was actually here talking about his book, Spillover, which is an incredible book to reread around now, all about pandemics and viruses.

But I asked him as, since he’s such a great non-fiction writer, I asked him for advice. And I told him, “Look, I’m a writer. I’m really nervous about going in and doing this job.” And he said, the one piece of advice he had was, “Don’t lie.” And that really stuck. So, I mean, in the application process, I hadn’t lied. I was completely open about who I was and I used my real name. And I said where I worked, and I was lucky that the shift that I was applying for was an, I guess, “lucky” that the shift I was applying for was a 5:00 to 9:00 AM in the morning. So I knew I could do that job and then go to the university and work, but I didn’t lie about anything. And there aren’t that many Schwarzschilds in Albany. People could Google me and see that I’d written books.

And when I was on the job too, I didn’t lie about, I told people I taught at U Albany, and I said I had a young son, and I did. And I said, “Who doesn’t need a little extra money?” And education doesn’t pay that well. So everybody believed that. I mean, there was one guy at one point, one of my coworkers said, “My theory about you is either you have crippling gambling debt, or you’re writing a novel.”

Marion: Well, yeah. So you go into the job, and I mean, we’re trained, I was trained as a journalist, and we were always trained never to go in with intent. Go in curious, don’t go in with what you think you already know, or you won’t find anything out. So as you’re going into the job, were you packing a series of things you absolutely needed to know? Or were you going in cold to see what you could absorb? And this gets back to the second part of that original question, which is training that writer’s eye, how we train a writer’s eye. So are you going in saying, “I’ve got to find out these 19 things before I leave,” or were you going in to just see what the sway and the swell and the day and the stressors and all of that are, and just keeping a record of that?

Ed: That’s another great question. I mean, I aspired to go in really open, really open to the experience. I, like so many people, of course I had preconceptions. I carried a outraged and upset about the TSA. I had, in my head, I imagine, I villainized the people who were working the job, and I’d read the way the media covers the TSA. So I had that information in my head about people screwing in bathrooms and stealing laptops, and just being invasive in ways that were inhumane and unnecessary. So that’s not what I expected to see. I was open, but I had baggage, I suppose. And I was at Albany International Airport, which you know it’s not the largest airport, it’s a smaller airport. And my experience would have been completely different, I’m sure, if I had been working at O’Hare or JFK or Philly International, something like that.

But my experience at Albany was that, sort of the revelation for me, and it should be obvious, but for me, it was a revelation, was that the people working the job were working the job because they needed health benefits, because they wanted a job that had some stability, because they wanted a job that offered the promise of advancement. The kind of job that in a different generation, you would get at GE or at General Motors, kind of job that my father could have gotten with a corporation that would take care of you. And those jobs have gone away by and large, but in the security industry, you can find job security. And the people I met were from all walks of life. They were retirees who’d come back to work. They were people right out of college. They were people who hoped to eventually to work for the police force, or what have you. But they were all fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers and sons and daughters, just trying to get by in a tough moment, in a tough world.

Marion: Yeah. Absolutely. And you create this character, the novel specifically reveals how the structure of the TSA work informs the life of this grief-stricken protagonist. And I’m not giving anything away to say your protagonist is a widower. So there’s a couple of things there that you’ve got to do some reporting on. As you’ve just said, you’ve looking around at the job itself. So let’s take both of those. First of all, were you carrying a notebook? When you went into the bathroom, did you write stuff down in the middle of the day? Did you talk into your phone? How are you noting down what you see, especially in this high security position?

Ed: Right. I had a small notebook, but I didn’t take a lot of notes on the job because I was being watched most of the time. I wasn’t alone. You’re right. You could go into the bathroom and take a couple of notes. I could go into the bathroom and jot some things down on my phone, or if I’m walking down the concourse, I could have done things like that. But again, I was inspired by Conover and he talked about how, when he got home from working at Sing Sing, he would almost use a different entrance of his house and sort of remove his uniform, and also just scrawl down notes for an hour or two before rejoining his family. And I couldn’t. My house doesn’t have that many entrances, but I tried to approximate that and leave space for, just to get home and kind of just write everything down that you could remember. And that served me pretty well.

Marion: That’s great. I love that. I have a method when I’m using a notebook, because it just makes me think about the different entrance. When I’m interviewing somebody and I have a notebook in my hand, and it’s just the facts, I keep the notebook vertical. But when I’m writing about the emotional landscape of what I’m seeing, hearing, feeling, I turn the notebook horizontally. And only I notice it. The person I’m interviewing rarely notices it. Or if it’s something that’s going on in my head, I write that down to distinguish it from what I’m hearing from the person. So those small, just habitual things will cue your brain into what we’re doing now. Now we’re offloading what we just saw. So how about the grief? You’re not a widower, you’re a married man with a child. How to report on the kind of grief your protagonist labors under? What did you do? How did you train your eye as a writer to note what grief does to the soul?

Ed: Let me just go back for one second and say that the kind of note-taking you’re describing, it’s something that I can’t overestimate how important it was for this project to write these things down. Things that I thought I would never forget, things that I thought were so consequential that they would be just written in my mind forever, the project took years. And it was so helpful to have this giant document that I had scrawled down after work, and to be able to go back to it. I don’t think the book could have taken shape without the sort of ritual of that sort of daily note taking after the job. Just really crucial.

Marion: That’s great. I really appreciate that. So, specific to the grief, how do you train your eye to look for the details of grief, the kind that really drives this protagonist to do what he does?

Ed: Yeah. I mean, well, two things, I mean, one is unfortunate, right? It’s true. My wife is alive and well and beautiful and wonderful. And I’m so fortunate for that. But along the way of this novel, along the path of writing it, my brother, my middle brother, younger than I am, he just passed away from a sudden heart attack a few years ago. And no one really saw it coming and it really shook up the whole family in ways that just, impossible to process, or that you can only process over over time. And Gary was a widower early in the book, but it wasn’t working the same way that it worked once Arthur died and I was carrying that.

So there was sort of an internal eye, I suppose, involved in that. I was experienced something within myself. And then I was wondering, “What would Arthur/Gary gain from being in an environment like the TSA?” And the way a TSA day works on the job is you’re really just going through a rotation, a rotation that can be tedious, that can be repetitive. If you’re checking the x-ray for stuff in the bags, you don’t want to be doing that for an hour because you’ll stop seeing clearly. They want you to do a task for 15 minutes and then move to another task so that you’re awake and you’re conscious and you’re present.

So I began to think, “Well, that’s actually, for someone who’s going through grief, there’s a comfort in that, at least a potential comfort.” In this world where things are unexpected and something can happen in a moment that takes something away from you forever, there’s something that can give you consolation and comfort in knowing, “Okay, I’m going to do this for 15 minutes, and then I know what the next 15 minutes is. And I know my whole day, I know what’s happening every 15 minutes.” And that’s one example of how thinking about grief and thinking about what the workers had to do, what I had to do, really helped give the novel a structure. So, I mean, why would someone keep a job at the TSA for six or seven years? In some ways, because there’s some comfort there, because it somehow soothes the individual, as odd as that might initially seem, it did make sense to me.

Marion: And it makes sense. Right in the opening of the book, we see this 15-minute aspect at work on the grief, and the grief at work on the structure of the job. And to know that it was informed, in no small part, by the death of your brother is so poignant to me, so extraordinary, and something I’m going to have to think about. Thank you, that’s so generous of you to tell us. I always think of writing as being a large process of annotation, of course. You draw on your emotional self, you draw on the things you’ve seen, tasted, smelled, loved, whatever, and you’ve got to have the faith that it’s in there and that you’re going to get it when you need it. And look what you got as you overlaid it on looking in somebody else’s hand luggage. That’s extraordinary.

Ed: Thank you Marion.

Marion: Very helpful.

Ed: I mean, we’ve been talking about listening and seeing, and there’s the great Henry James quote about the writer and the need to be an individual upon whom nothing is lost, and that’s a great quote. Sometimes people think about that as just external, right? But there’s an internal quality to that too. And that when you’re matching up what’s inevitably happened in your own personal landscape and thinking about its connection to what’s unfolding around you, that can lead to good connections.

Marion: And you got to trust them, because the idea of there being a metaphor, if you will, or a puzzle piece that snaps together, or a gel overlay, if that’s the way you think, of grief and the job, if you trust that there is, because sometimes those things appear, you say, “Really?” To yourself. “Really? Do those things have something in common?” Yes, they have. That beginning of the book makes so much sense and sets up the rest of the book. The lens that you used was that 15-minute structure and the overlay of the grief as he peers in. And then we know who he is. That’s what’s so interesting about the setup of that book, I found. So I love that you just explained that, and my heart breaks to know where you got it, but I also reward you for using it in this beautiful way.

Ed: Thank you.

Marion: So that’s just extraordinary. So when do we know that we’ve got what we need, getting back to that training the writer’s eye? And I agree with Henry James, we’re not supposed to have anything lost on us. Well much is lost on me some days. Some stuff just whizzes by, and I think he’s right, but damn. But then we have to stop and write. And here we’ve got our experience and our notes and our ambition. And when did you feel comfortable enough with the grief and the TSA and the ambition of the book to say, “Now I’m going to leave the TSA job. I’m going to write full-time.” I mean, how do you come home to the desk after you’ve trained that eye? I mean, I know it’s an ongoing process. You always have the option to look up what you don’t know, all of that, but when do you know you’ve got what you need to start writing?

Ed: Right. I mean, this is such a, for me, the TSA experiment and experience was sort of unusual in terms of my normal writing process. But for that, I had the example of Ted Conover and his year at Sing Sing. And part of me thought, “Okay, that’s the way you got to do it. You got to spend a whole year.” But it wasn’t going to work for me. My son was three, I was getting up at 3:30 in the morning and then going to a second job at 9:00 in the morning. I wasn’t going to be able to maintain it for a year, which was a real privilege, which I was aware of throughout the job, knowing that the people I was working with, I could never be like them, because they had so much riding on the job, whereas I could walk away and my life would be more or less all right.

Whereas for them, every test was super stressful, but I did the job for about two and a half, three months. And then I noticed that there was an article in The Times Union about a sort of small leafleting protest that had taken place at the airport. And I noticed it was by Casey Seiler, who is a friend of mine, who is now the editor of the Albany Times Union. And I began to think, “What would have happened if Casey had been reporting this article and he saw me as a TSA agent?” Then there’d be a real risk that, I thought I was the writer of the story. I thought, “I’m in charge here. I’m going to decide when to sort of reveal what I know, and in what terms to use the information I’ve found.”

But if someone else wrote it about me working there, “English professor found working the TSA,” then I would kind of lose a little bit of the control over my material. So in this particular case, I stopped working in part because I was exhausted, in part because I did feel like I had written pages and pages of notes that seemed like they were going to help me, but I also stopped working in part because I didn’t want to get caught. Or, I mean, caught’s the wrong word, but I didn’t want to lose control of the story. It was my story to tell, I didn’t want someone else to start telling the story first.

Marion: You didn’t want to get scooped, Ed. Come on. Yeah.

Ed: That’s right. I guess that’s right. I mean, I’m a fiction writer, so I don’t think in those terms, but yes, of course.

Marion: Yeah. Well this is the way writers think. And so, that’s a great lead in to my next question, which is another kind of eye, which is, how do we recognize what to put out first? I saw that you wrote a really lovely postcard in Poets and Writers about being a TSA agent. You were serialized in the, again, the Albany, New York Newspaper, the Times Union. So just talk a bit about choosing what to say in the run-up to a book coming out and how to slide out just enough so that the readers still buy the book. How did you make those choices?

Ed: That’s a great question, and there’s so much pressure on writers to also market their work and no one else is going to do it for you. No one else is going to write the pieces about your book, really, that only you can write. So I try to do the best I can. I wrote a long kind of nonfiction piece that wound up also getting reprinted in the Times Union. But a couple of years before that, it was picked up by The Guardian. I hope that that would be a piece that would announce, “Here I am, I’m a college professor, I’m working on this book, but here’s a non-fiction piece about what it was like to work for the TSA.” It got liked, it got sent around, it got circulated. And I was really proud of that piece, but it wasn’t the kind of piece where agents started to call me up, which I guess is part of what I had hoped.

So, I was strategizing as best I could. I placed it in an amazing venue, but it still didn’t generate exactly what I wanted, but it generated enough. And then I could use that to help promote the book when it came out. But I don’t know the answer because I don’t know the answer to the question of how best to place these things and how best to get them out. All I can control is writing them and trying to get them out and trying to use those media to generate some publicity for the book, in terms of the danger of saying too much and making sure people buy the book, not feeling they got the content for free somewhere else. I don’t know.

The Times Union was great about serializing a few chapters from the book. And I loved the sort of old time feel of that. “Hey, we’re going to have a serial kind of work of fiction in a daily newspaper.” I just thought that was great. So as far as I was concerned, if they want to do the whole book that way, that would have been fun, but I think it would have hurt sales. So I was glad we agreed on, “Okay, we’ll do a few chapters, and that will hopefully entice people to buy the book.” And I loved that experience.

Marion: That’s great. That’s great. Very Dickensian, the serialization. Yes. I love that, very Charles Dickens along the way. So as we wrap it up, just continuing with this theme a bit about the writer’s eye, just where are you going to turn your eye next? I mean, what interests you now? You’ve got to write more. I know that. I know you’re not going to stop working, but have you got a sense of where you’re going to look next for your work?

Ed: Absolutely. This book took a long time. And so part of that meant that I’ve had time to think of other projects that I’m interested in, and some of those projects are well underway. One of them connects directly to In Security. I’ve been working in a collaborative way with a photographer in kind of the tradition of Studs Terkel, or James Agee and Walker Evans, to do a nonfiction documentary project about the department of Homeland Security, about the people who work these jobs. My interest in Gary, my experience working the job, made me interested in getting down the stories of others who do the job and why do they do it and what it’s like, not just at the TSA, but at all levels of the Department of Homeland Security.

And I’m fortunate to teach at the University at Albany. It’s happened that the university is the home of the first college in the nation to have a college of cybersecurity, emergency preparedness, and Homeland Security. And I’ve collaborated with people there and that’s given us great access to people who work these jobs. We’re not interested in getting classified information, but we’ve been doing interviews and taking portraits of people who work the job, and they tell us what it’s like to raise a family and to be a part of the security industry. So that’s one project. It’s meant to be like that Studs Terkel book, Working, from 1972, but just focused on Homeland Security, because it’s such a huge part of our culture now. And then I’m working on a novel, which is very different from that. I’m happy to talk about that if you’d like.

Marion: Well, what we’ll do is we’ll have you back when you publish that one.

Ed: Yes. That makes more sense. I can keep it secret a little bit longer.

Marion: I love that. That’s it. Well, now that you’re in security, your know how to keep a good secret. Well, thank you, Ed. This was a gorgeous talk, and I’m very touched by it. So thanks a million, and we’ll see you again soon, okay?

Ed: Thank you so much, Marion. It’s such a pleasure to be here.

Marion: You’re welcome. In Security is the new novel from author Ed Schwarzschild. Get it wherever books are sold. See more on Ed and all his writing at edwardschwarzschild dot com. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to Qwerty. Subscribe wherever podcasts are available. Qwerty is produced by Overit Studios in Albany New York. Reach them at Overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont, our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach dot com and take a class with me. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to Qwerty and listen wherever you go.