On Writing for Visual Thinkers, with Milo Beckman

WHAT MANY WRITERS DO not realize is that writing for visual thinkers is not only possible, but completely doable. The key may be starting with visual aids and cues such as charts, sketches, illustrations and more. Here, in a gorgeous talk with writer, author and math whiz Milo Beckman, is a discussion on how to get your work on the page. Listen in and read along as we take this on together. 

Milo: Thanks so much Marion for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Marion: I’m delighted you’re here. Your bio on the Penguin Random House site states you’ve been addicted to math since a young age. You were born in Manhattan in 1995. You took math classes at Stuyvesant High School at age eight. You were captain of the New York City math team by age 13. I’ve read your stuff in The New York Times, FiveThirtyEight, Salon, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Gothamist, the Economist. You’ve worked for three tech companies, two banks, the US Senator before reaching the age of 19, when you retired to teach math in New York, China, Brazil, and to work on this book. And I love all of that and wow, right? We can all just stop right there and go, wow. And I can name some fabulous writers whose initial professions were math and science, but there are few. Perhaps, because we tell people to specialize, especially people with gifts like yours. How did you avoid that awful advice and become a writer too?

Milo: That is such a fabulous question. I actually would have to say that my first love, even before my love of math was a love of reading and writing. I sort of just took to symbols on paper from a young age, I was always obsessed with just making sense of them. And I would read things to my friends and I just loved reading and writing. And so math just became my main focus because first of all, there’s just a very clear track for it. If you’re advanced in math, they just start giving you more and more advanced math problems. And then you ended up on math team and at math camps. And there’s a clear career path there. Whereas young people who love books, they buy you more and more books, but at the end of the day, you’re just reading more and more books.

And I sort of forgot about writing for a little while. My writing all became just academic writing in school and which I really loved, but it’s a very different field. It’s a very different idea. And I convinced myself that wanting to be a writer for whatever reason was not a serious profession, or if you want it to be a writer, you have to be a journalist. You have to go through certain professional channels. And after graduating and after sort of experimenting with a number of full-time jobs that didn’t feel like they really suited me. They weren’t what I wanted to be doing.

I decided to take some time off, figure out what I was actually going to doing with my decades ahead. And I just kept coming back to writing this book and some other projects I have in my mind, but especially this book, that’s sort of been banging around in my head for a very long time and I really just wanted to get it out on paper. That’s how we got to this. I’m really excited that it’s gotten this far and yeah. It’s been really fantastic. It is hard because people want you to specialize, but I just find so much joy in learning new things. That’s really my favorite activity. That’s where I am.

Marion: Well, joy is a word that comes to mind when I think about this book, it’s full of portals to thinking about things that allow us to see and feel the metaphors in our own existence. I read it and I think better. I think deeper, I think wider, I laugh out loud. Let’s set this up for people so no one will be afraid that there is, well, math here. Math is defined by that stark dry topic that some of us got shooed away from somewhere along the line. I watched you on YouTube dream of this wonderful tree-like structure to explain math and I’ll link to it right here in the podcast. And in the transcript of the podcast, but give the listeners some sense of what we’re talking about here when we talk about math.

Milo: Sure. Yeah. I think the word math is really confusing to a lot of people. We use it to mean very different things. I think most people, when they hear the word math, they’re thinking of school math, which is the sort of standard curriculum in Western public and private schools, it’s based on this 1923 curriculum, which was based on the curriculum in British grammar schools. But it’s basically this very rigid, learn your times tables, you learn your algebra, trigonometry, geometry, stuff like that. And that stuff’s all great. And it’s useful for various purposes, but for people who consider themselves mathematicians or people who say that they love math, that’s usually not really what they mean when they say the word math. What mathematicians are talking about is more of this abstract conceptual way of thinking almost. It covers so many different topics that it’s hard to even describe what it is, but everyone has some sense of what is infinity?

What is symmetry? What are dimensions? What is a structure? What is logic? What is a proof? These are all things that we have like a basic understanding of and use in our everyday life. But mathematicians have studied these things really, really carefully. And you just think in slow motion about them and try to piece it apart and figure out what’s going on under the hood. This book in particular, I wanted to cover some areas of math that people don’t really get access to unless they sort of go through this, what’s almost a hazing process of math in undergraduate and graduate school. They make you do 14 hour problems. That’s every week. If you want to understand this stuff and my conviction, my whole life of studying this stuff has been that that’s really not necessary. It is if you want to go into becoming a theorist and you want to prove new theorems and stuff, you really need to know the nitty gritty.

But if you are just a person who is, whatever, a writer or just an artist or whoever you are, and you just to have an understanding of how these things play a role in the world around us, and you want to sort of have that mathematical lens to understand these things. You can really understand the basics without too much rolling up your sleeves to actually do the computation. The main topics I talk about in this book are what are generally considered the three main areas of abstract math, which are topology, analysis and algebra. They sound very complicated, but typology is the study of shapes and spaces, and dimensions, and anything sort of resembling physical reality. Analysis is a study of the infinite and the infinite testimony small. And algebra is the study of structures and order, and just sort of relationships between objects in the most abstract sense.

And the book is filled with examples and pictures, wonderful illustrations by this artist, M. Erazo. Who I was really happy to work with on this. And so the goal is to have just a visual tour, a sort of guided tour of these topics without making you really think too hard, but just sort of opening up these doors to different areas of mathematical thinking.

Marion: Well, that’s helpful and let’s just stick with the illustrations for a second, because I think that’ll really get people to go and have a look. It’s a very big part of the book. There are 173 drawings by the name that’s used is Emulsify, right? And that’s where I’m now following on Twitter, following them on Twitter. And at what point did you realize the value of the illustration and how was that communicated to the artist? A lot of writers would like to get an illustrator for their work. I work as a memoir editor and I recently handled a graphic memoir and it was such an honor and it was such a joy and it was so completely different than what I’ve seen traditionally, even for graphic memoir.

How do you say to yourself, oh yeah, that’s a good idea? But what’s this going to do, this illustration? Is it going to heighten an add to my writing or is it going to take it in a direction that I cannot express in writing? How did you articulate that to the artist and just give us a sense of what to ask and how to pitch it to a person who’s a visual thinker. Let’s give these writers some help about making that bridge to an illustrator.

Milo: Yeah, well, for me, the illustrations were the entire point of this book. And actually when, my first draft, my first sort of full length draft, when I decided I was really doing this, it was actually only illustrations. I went down to the Blick Art Suppy and I got a 20 foot scroll and I just took a pencil to it. And I was like, what do I want to talk about? Let me just draw pictures of all these like little sort of sketchy notebook diagrams of things that I want to show people, because it is really, it’s like a show and tell. I’m taking you on a museum tour of some of my favorite areas of abstract math. And so for me, I’ve always doodled in my notebooks and that’s my favorite part of math class is getting to draw these kind of cool diagrams.

And so, I drew out, I filled this 20-foot scroll with illustrations and I was like, “Wow, this is a book.” And I need to find someone who can translate this to a really cool visual form because I don’t just want it to be my notebook scratches. I want it to be something that sort of reflects the way, this aesthetic feeling that I have when I study math. And that I think a lot of, “pure mathematicians” have when they study math, which is this weird, pure, bizarre abstract universe. It’s like this alternate reality where shapes just exist and float around in the void. And it’s kind of very trippy really. And M. Erazo who uses the handle emulsify dot  art on Instagram is this really fabulous artist, who is a friend of a friend and they’re the second person I met with to try to illustrate this book.

And I was just really blown away by their artistic style and their professionalism and how quickly they got the idea of the book, because I think a lot of people just hear the word math and they have one particular vision in mind. I think the illustrator, sorry, the publisher wanting to give me one of their in house illustrators and … They have really fabulous illustrators, but I think it would have come out a lot more sort of textbooky looking and that’s really not what I wanted. I wanted it to be almost more like a novel or something like The Phantom Tollbooth or just sort of this exploratory narrative.

And so I was really happy with what M was doing and the process ended up being really fun where basically I would write a chapter, I would sort of go back and forth between doing the illustration, doing these like sketchy illustrations and writing the actual words. And then I would send them like a scan of whatever the 11 illustrations we needed to do for this chapter. They would mock them up in their style and we would sort of back and forth like this. And honestly it took more time to do the illustrations probably than the writing all told. But we ended up with what is like, I think a really fascinating almost 200 illustrations here. I want to do a gallery of it or something. I was really, really excited about the illustrations. It is my favorite part.

Marion: I mean, they’re right on brand also for the way. Apparently you think, I mean, you make the point in the book that, and in writing that I’ve read of viewers that we’re visual, we use these visual analogies to help us understand abstract ideas. And so what you’re talking about, you say you retranslate real life problems into typology. Let’s define typology because within there I found a really interesting for me, way to think more about how I write and how others can write too. First to define typology and then let’s toss this around for a minute.

Milo: Yeah. Topology broadly speaking is the study of shapes, dimension, spaces. The main focus of it is in current study is just trying to basically find all the shapes in existence. Each chapter I start with kind of a leading question that takes us down the rabbit hole. And the question for this one is how many shapes are there? And that’s just a question I love using to start, whether I’m doing this as a class or whoever I’m talking to, it’s just a fun question. How many shapes are there? Because you can immediately jump in and be like, oh, circle, square, triangle, star. And you quickly run into these follow up questions of, okay, what are we counting as a shape? Or when are we counting two things as the same shape or as a different shape? And this leads you down a path towards starting to think about what are dimensions? What is a two dimensional object versus a three dimensional object?

And you get very quickly into what feels super abstract. You’re talking about like four dimensional manifolds and just these weird twisty, abstract shapes. And on one hand, it’s just like a fun game. Like we’re trying to catch them all. We’re trying to find all these shapes, but on the other hand, it ends up being one of the most useful and applicable areas of math in existence, which I think surprises a lot of people. But the connection that I like to use is about dimensions. And yet what you’re talking about, these visual analogies and how we’re constantly making these visual analogies. We say that rents go up and prices up and down. We talk about politics on a left-right scale. You often put personality tests, put you on like a grid, whether it’s two dimensions of personality, three, four dimensions of personality, there are all of these things we’re constantly encountering where you sort of imagine a conceptual space with however many dimensions.

And you imagine where you are politically as a point in this one dimensional or two dimensional space. And so it’s sort of taking that concept, that basic idea of what is this conceptual space we’re dealing with and talking about it in the abstract, thinking about what are all the possible shapes and spaces we could be talking about.

Marion: And in there, I just find an absolute wonderful barnyard of metaphor for when we write. I mean, it’s all about questions of dimensionality, isn’t it? Dimensionality. It’s-

Milo: Dimensionality.

Marion: I would argue that questions of dimensionality should be raised in all good pieces of writing. At least the ones that I like to read. And when we think about take the topic of inheritance and do you have the right to say, I don’t want to take possession of that aspect of my inheritance. I don’t want to have the violence that travels in my family, or I don’t want to accept the dimension of alcoholism in my family. And in the subject of memoir, I get into these conversations all the time with writers. Can you write a piece that’s about inheritance and where you map out what pieces you accept of your inheritance and what pieces you just want to leave behind.

I find that non-fiction really lends itself. I mean, you gave me so much to think about in reading this book about nonfiction, because all of nonfiction is an argument and some of the greatest living writers of our time use visual plans with which to plot their writing. I’m really kind of talking about two things here. First, the idea that you can take the idea of inheritance apart and look at the contiguous pieces of it, and then that you can plot it out. First let’s just talk about the theoretical here, the idea that you can look across the dimensions of your topic, let’s say inheritance, does that make sense to you? Do you see where I’m going with this?

Milo: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And people do talk about, I mean, whether you’re talking about a monetary inheritance or genetic inheritance are all things that people really do model scientifically with these concepts of dimensionality. If you’re talking about, let’s say like what personality traits I would inherit from my parents. You can look at each of these personality traits as an independent dimension. And it’s like, okay, to what extent am I replicating that personality trait in my parent? And yeah, you can definitely look at it like that. Yeah. And honestly, I have to say, I get like a little bit of glee in my head from just hearing non-math people talk about dimensionality, and this is exactly what I wanted. Is just getting these ideas that just frame my thinking for so much. And I just want people to be able to see that lens too.

Marion: Well, I think it’s a gift. I think that the idea that you can think about epigenetics, the whole idea of what gets passed along in the emotional spectrum and what you can and cannot take delivery on as being a dimensional aspect, may be helpful to those people who find that to be, oh, that’s so soft science. I’m not really comfortable with it. Well, actually it’s math. There’s this permission that we’re giving to all my engineer writers who always just have the worst time with memoir, they want to write it, but they think it’s too soft. Well, here’s the math issue with … There’s that. And then let’s go to the practical, which is writers that I’ve talked about a lot in my own writing, Gay Talese for instance, when he comes home from the shirt laundry, his shirts are folded around a shirt cardboard.

He uses those shirt cardboards to map out his pieces of writing they’re famous. The Paris Review has run replications of them. It’s amazing. And the great John McPhee does these astonishing diagrams of his pieces. We’ve seen them in the New Yorker, in The Paris Review. Let’s help these writers envision an essay or a book argument. I do this, I put a graphic up on my wall for everything I write, that sketches out my argument, and that breaks that argument into beads. And this is because I believe that all writing is math, that the scenes you use are like beads on an abacus that add up to that argument. How about you let’s help these listeners with thinking about the dimensionality piece of this, but thinking about how you would put it up on your wall, can you see a sketch of an argument? Does that make sense to you? And can you just give us some help or encourage?

Milo: Oh, definitely. Well, I’m sitting at my desk right now, looking at my bulletin board filled of visual maps of things that I either have written or want to write or just maps of my apartment and what I’m supposed to do this week. And things like that. I’m a very visual thinker and I need sort of a physical visualization of whatever I’m working on to sort of stay grounded. I get distracted very easily. For this book, for me, once I had the tree, because it started as the tree that you see in the table of contents, and I knew what broad topics I wanted to cover. Then, as I said, I sketched it out in this long 20-foot illustrations making a rough roadmap of what I wanted to do. And then it ended up being a series of post-its.

I had a post-it for each chapter with little scribblings on it, and I had them arranged on my bulletin board and I had to rearrange them a few times, but I always do need to see this, a visual version of it otherwise I get hopelessly lost. The same is true, just in my notes. Whenever I have an idea, I’ll just throw in like a little mnemonic device, but it really doesn’t help me that much until I can get like a piece of paper and a pencil on it. And that’s when I’ll see it. And I’ll be like, this is the feeling that I’m going for. This is the structure that I’m going for. As long as I can capture this in some form in the English language, then I’m doing what I want to do.

Marion: Fabulous. And so in this, you invite us to think about how concepts of shape and dimension, and infinity, and things that are infinitesimal and all of this fit together. To me again, it’s a very joyous approach to the world. And I wonder when you had this idea for this book, how in the world did you pitch it? And what responses did you get? We touched on a little bit before, but did you take your maps with you? Did you draw something on a page for them? This communication of this kind of joy and this subject matter is hard to explain to people unless you jot something down for them. So how did you pitch this book?

Milo: That’s a really good question to get into the mechanics of it. My proposal was filled with illustrations too. I wanted that to come through. I did not yet have my illustrators, so they were just sort of my very rough free hand scans, but it was clear to anyone reading the proposal that this was a visual book. And actually, I think the original proposal I submitted had a subtitle, like a tourist guide or something, taught he was a guided tour. But it was clear that the ID here is just like, I’m walking you around the museum showing you look over here. This is E2 cubed. Look over here, this is a cellular automata. And they were really fascinated by it because there is just a built in department in most publishing houses, non-fiction publishing houses, dedicated to math and science, and there tend to be sort of an overflow of science books and not that many math books and the math books that do come in are often about numbers.

You’ll have a book about pi or you have a book about zero or you’ll have a book about one particular mathematician. And so they loved the title, obviously Math Without Numbers. They thought that was a nice grab. And they just liked, I think, that I was very excited about it. I think they were buying sort of my energy that I was bringing to it as much as the proposal itself. And yes, of course I did bring the prop of my scroll. You got to bring something just to wow them and make them remember you because you know how many people are coming in with proposals, but not many people are coming in with a rolled up scroll.

Marion: Yeah, that’s true. That’s very funny. My mother gave me that advice years ago — she was a journalist and she always said to me, whenever you go on an interview, bring a prop. And it’s an interesting piece of advice. But I think when we’re going in to propose something to someone, your enthusiasm was there and you brought your own drawings, this is the kind of thing a publisher wants to see. And I can’t encourage people enough to remember that you’ve got to try it, try it. Let’s just try it. Let’s try this pitch. And who knows? So wonderful. Let’s also talk, you have a platform that kind of defies the usual descriptions. You’re the first writer I’ve interviewed whose platform as defined by the way you’re known in the world, includes writing and designing crossword puzzles for The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Okay, cool. And we’ll talk about that a little bit, but you have a subscription series on YouTube in which you explore this whole idea of math without numbers. You write for Lit Hub, we’ve talked about some of the other places you’ve written on. You’re on Twitter. When you’re creating a platform and maintaining this platform. How do you discern between the myriad choices of online exposure? How did you make the choice to be on this one and not on that one? And what’s your conscious thinking about how we find you and how broad that platform has to be?

Milo: Oh God, this question I might have a hard time with. I’m pretty bad at the internet for someone my age, I guess I’ll say I’ll add that clock qualifier. Because I do think I’m better at the internet than a lot of people who are professional writers these days, just purely because of age, because I grew up with the internet. But I am very averse to social media. I basically quit all social media in like 2017 or around there because it was just stressing me out. There wasn’t really a statement to it. It was just like, not for me. And I found that so liberating, just being able to sort of interact with people in the ways that we wanted to. It actually, when this book started coming out or when it came time to start publicizing this book, I was kind of in panic mode and I was like, oh, darn, what social media do I want to promote this on?

And my feeling is I want people who are interested in my work to have a way to access it. For me that’s Twitter is the easiest thing. I don’t update it very often. I just sort of post any time I have a piece of writing come out or a review comes out that I liked or an interview or something like that. But I’m not someone who just goes on Twitter, talking about my thoughts and feelings that much. Not because, I mean, I read plenty of people on Twitter who do, do that, but that’s just not where my ideas fit the best. I really liked the format of a book just because you sort of get to hold court for 200 pages. And that’s really exciting to me. I feel like everyone’s attention span is so short these days, including my own. And when you read something online, you can have the most fabulous article of all time, but you’re still in this basic structure of sort of scrolling through this feed and then taking a momentary detour to read this article, get what you clicked for and then go back.

And I tried for several years to fit into that structure. And sort of I was writing for FiveThirtyEight, especially was a platform that I really liked because they gave me more freedom to do my own research and report on it and sort of be thoughtful and interview people. I got to interview so many interesting people through that gig. But at the end of the day they package it, and this is no shade to FiveThirtyEight specifically. I think it’s really structural here. They have to package it at the end of the day as a headline and a picture. And most people like a substantial percentage of people will basically just read the headline, the picture in the first paragraph and a half. You can get some things across that way. And if you’re really just going for reach in terms of numbers, that is a great way to get your name out.

It’s a great way to get these basic ideas out. But I want people to be able to hold these thoughts in their hands and leave it on their bedside table, on their coffee table and come back to it and be like, what was that idea again? And flip back to the puzzle and just stare at it and think about it for a while. For me, that’s much easier to do in the physical format than it is online. That’s kind of where I am. If people are interested, they can follow me on Twitter. I have no promises about what I will or won’t put out.

Marion: Well, I think it’s great advice. I think the idea of choosing is really important. You make the good point that so many writers, certainly writers in my generation are terrible at social media, but you can’t be all over it all the time and still have a life. I appreciate the candor. I would be really remiss if I didn’t ask you about the crossword puzzles. Are they a sport, pastime, profession? It’s a joy, really love doing them. But how and where do they fit into this writing life?

Milo: Oh, well. It is a form of writing. You just have to right left to right and top to bottom, when you’re doing the crossword puzzle, it’s a little bit more constrained. I just really love crossword puzzles. I mean, all this stuff is hard to say, is this a passion? Is this a career? Is this just a joyful pastime? Originally when I was doing writing and doing crosswords, I was in school. And so I was thinking of it all as kind of procrastination, which has now somehow become my main source of incomes, which is I feel very fortunate about. But crossword puzzles, what I really love about them is it is very creative and people who are very into crossword puzzles do recognize the art form of constructing a crossword puzzle and trying to get interesting new, fresh words in and trying to have clever witty clues that also twist your understanding of what a word means.

There’s a lot of creativity there, but it is also an extremely constrained form. There are so many rules. And for me, I forget the exact phrase is, but it’s like constraints beget creativity, or something like that. I’ve always felt when you have a very rigid set of rules to work within. But then other than that, it’s kind of just like this abstract open canvas. It’s really fun. There’s a lot you can do with it. And most of the puzzles that I submit these days, because I’m less of a avid solver than I used to be. I basically only submit puzzles now when I have like a new, clever idea for it. My most recent puzzle for The New York Times, which was the January 1st, 2021 puzzle, I stuck some numbers into the puzzle. So you have the answers like spoiler alert, you have the answer like Forever 21, and you have to write that in as forever.

And then the numerals two and one, and then that’s crossing like Catch-22 and whatever. And then the numbers spell out 2021. That’s the idea is just you have this new idea and it’s like, okay, can I actually carry this out to fruition? And I honestly feel like it’s a very similar thing for writing a book. Obviously it’s consumed in a pretty different way, but this concept of, okay, I’m going to make a really short 200 page math book that doesn’t have any numbers has illustrations on every page and covers all of the topics of a sort of undergraduate math sequence at a middle school level. That’s an extremely heavily constrained book. And when I pitched that in the proposal, they were like, wow, if you can do this, then you’ve checked all these boxes. And so then it’s like within those constraints, what can I do? How can I let my voice shine? How can I sort of be creative within those boundaries?

Marion: It’s lovely…

Milo: Sorry. Well, I was just going to say, I think partially it’s because I am a young writer. I am pretty new to this game. I don’t know if I even … I think the constraints helped me a lot. I think having those rules in place helped me a lot. I did crossword puzzles before I did this more free form, regular writing. And I part of me is like scared if don’t have constraints. I don’t know what all right anymore. I need to have these rules to just keep me moving.

Marion: That’s great. That’s very funny. Well, writers do need rules. This is what genres are for. This is what they’re about. And then we’re supposed to knock our elbows against the edges of that. But just to get back to your writing, you write wonderfully, and it’s not that you write wonderfully for a math guy. You write wonderfully for us. And the charm to me appears in your unending curiosity and ability to take us along on that, I felt like I was on a magic carpet. I felt like I was finally integrating what I did know about math. I felt like I was having confirmed for me so many times when I’ve said to people I work with writing is just math. These kinds of things have to add up and I suspect you could write well over our heads about math or many other topics. How did you, and when did you decide to shoot from this voice of yours? And I want to talk just a little bit as we wrap this up about that voice and how you dismayed that decision to write from here?

Milo: Yeah. First of all, thank you so much for those kind words. It really is so fabulous to hear this book talked about it in this way. I really appreciate it. The decision to write in this voice was, I don’t know if it was a decision. It was definitely a process. I feel like this is my voice. I tried to write the way that I talk, the way that I would talk to my friends. And I honestly ran into some trouble with that. When I sent him the first version of the manuscript, which ended up being pretty close to the final published version, they sent me back the first round of edits they had tried to change every instance of the word, like to such as or something like that. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is just how I talk. It’s not a mistake. I used the word like a lot. But it is a process, because again, you go through this academic schooling and you’re taught that this is the particular way to write. You have your style guides, you have your who’s and whom’s.

And when I was writing for FiveThirtyEight, it’s a pretty academic voice. And then there’s also, the classic journalist voice where you’re supposed to be neutral. You’re supposed to be this professional sounding adult. And one of the first things, a piece of advice that I got from an author, someone I called when I was in the process of trying to pitch this book, just for advice he was like, “You need to figure out what your voice is. You need to spend some time writing to figure out what your voice is.” And that was just, it seems like very simple advice, but I had spent so long writing trying to pretend to be someone else or trying to fit into a particular voice or mold, or meet a particular audience that it was really important to hear that.

And I ended up just, I started doing a lot of writing just for myself, on the Notes app, on my phone, just in little texts edit or Word docs on my computer. Just what am I thinking about right now? I’m going to write it down. I’m going to try to explain it. And also, I will say that my side job as a tutor and teacher is really helpful for this, especially when it comes to math. Mostly I teach kids who are middle school and early high school. It’s my favorite age to teach because you’re really old enough that you can sort of comprehend pretty much anything. You really do have like an adult level comprehension, but you’re so young that you A, haven’t experienced a lot of stuff. So it’s fresh and new, but also more importantly, especially when it comes to math is you haven’t been told that you don’t like something or told that something’s not for you.

I always find that when you’re working with like a seventh or eighth grader on math, you don’t encounter actually the same difficulties that you do. If you’re talking to a full grown adult about math, because people are just really used to being like, oh, I had this one evil math teacher who told me I was stupid. I don’t want to touch math with a 10 foot pole with an X foot pole. But I tried to write this book in the same way that I talked to my students, or I talked to my friends, which is just sort of a conversational … I actually genuinely am interested in telling you about dimensions. If you want to sit down and listen to me, let’s talk about it. And I think that’s fine. I also do hope to someday maybe do some academic writing and get stuff published in journals.

But to be honest, having read both kinds of writing, what I think is sometimes dismissively called lay level writing, but just human writing, writing for the way that people normally talk to each other is way more fun and rewarding for me, because you just get to take these same ideas, but then filter them out into yeah, which just feels like a more natural flowing conversation. And actually, at one point in the book, it literally breaks down into a dialogue where basically I was talking about like logic and inference and all these things and just hearing all these voices in my head of past students and friends who always been like, wait, but what about this? Wait, but what about that? Are you sure this is true? Are you sure that’s true. And I was like, I actually can’t even do this in paragraph form anymore. I need this to be a dialogue. And my editor at first was like, oh, everyone wants to do a dialogue. Please avoid it if you possibly can. And I ended up having to do it. There was no other way around it.

Marion: Well, there you go. Well, anything you want to write, we’ll be glad to read. Thank you Milo so much for coming along and good luck with the book. It’s a joy and an absolute pleasure to talk with you.

Milo: Thanks so much, Marion. And I really appreciate this interview. Thanks so much.

Marion: You’re absolutely welcome. That was Milo Beckman. His Math Without Numbers is just out from Penguin Random House. See what he does at milo beckman dot com. You can see him in action by subscribing to his weekly updates on his YouTube channel. And you can do the crossword puzzles he’s designed and built at the Wall Street Journal and at The New York Times. I’m Marion, 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 overt studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lauren Bailey. Like more on the art and work of writing. Visit marion roach dot com and take a class with me. And thanks for listening.

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