Eric Jay Dolin Never Wants to Be Bored

Kate Carpenter 0:00
Welcome back to the Drafting the Past podcast. I'm your host Kate Carpenter, and in each episode, I interview a historian about how they research and write their books. I don't know about you, but I've always been curious about the careers of authors of popular histories, and I've wanted to know how they write so many books that are eagerly snatched up by readers. So I was delighted when Eric Jay Dolin agreed to join me on the podcast.

Eric Jay Dolin 0:25
Thanks for having me on.

Kate Carpenter 0:26
Eric is the New York Times best-selling author of 17 books. 17! His most recent book came out this summer, called The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail. His books have won awards and are frequently named best books of the year. As you'll hear, before writing history books, he worked in environmental policy and earned a Ph.D. in environmental policy and planning from MIT. I was eager to hear from Eric about how he thinks about his writing and his career as a popular historian, and he certainly had a lot to say about it, so let's get right to it. Here's my conversation with Eric Jay Dolin.

Eric Jay Dolin 1:05
When I was a kid, I wanted to be Jacques Cousteau when I grew up. I was really into marine biology. I lived on the edge of Long Island Sound, and I was a super serious shell collector, seashell collector. I mean, so serious that when I was a senior in high school, I wrote a 150-page paper on the mollusks of Long Island Sound. Two chapters, two chapters of which got published in a malacological journal. So I was really into seashells. I was really into marine biology and didn't think at all about being a writer. I wanted to be a malacologist or a marine biologist. I went off to college, and I came up against hard science and lab science, and I realized that I liked reading about science more than I liked doing it. So I shifted to environmental policy. I decided I wanted to be a professor of environmental policy, so I wanted to get a, I have an undergrad in biology and environmental policy. I have a master's in environmental management, and I have a PhD in environmental policy and public policy. But, and don't worry, I'm getting to the writing part. I was always writing on, I was always writing on the side. I was writing op-eds. I actually wrote a couple of short books on environmental topics and stuff like that. But then when I was at MIT, where I got my PhD, I decided I didn't want to be a professor anymore, and I'd spent all this time getting this degree. I almost dropped out, but I decided that okay, let me finish it. I didn't apply for a single teaching job, and the reason I didn't apply for teaching jobs is I love teaching, and I actually TAed quite a few courses, and I I taught a couple of courses completely at MIT and another university. I like teaching. I like talking to students. I like dealing with that. I didn't like the kind of writing I knew I would have to do to get tenure at a university, and I wasn't too fond of the academic politics. So anyway, I got out of MIT. I didn't apply for a single teaching job, but I had to figure out what to do. I was married, and I did environmental policy for about 11 years. I worked-- If you saw my resume, I couldn't keep a job. I mean, I worked for, I worked for the EPA. I worked for the National Transportation Safety Board. I worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I worked for the Marine National Marine Fisheries Service. I worked for the National Wildlife Federation earlier. I worked on Capitol Hill for a senator. I was all over the place, but all while I was doing all of that, I kept writing op-eds, articles, a couple of books. Actually, one of my books earlier books called "Political Waters" is about the cleanup of Boston Harbor, and that's based on my dissertation. And then in the late 1990s, I told my wife Jen. I said, "Listen, I'd like to be a writer full time." And she said, "Okay, why don't you try writing for the government first?" And I I got a job writing accident reports. I didn't really like it. Then we moved up to Massachusetts. I worked on fisheries stuff. I was always writing on the side. And she told me at one point, she said, "If you can, if you can save a year's worth of your salary, you can quit your job to try this writing thing. So it took me about seven or eight years, and then one night while we're watching House on TV, the TV show, my wife says, "You can quit your job. She had been keeping an account for me, and I I quit my job four weeks later, and I've been a writer since 2007. I'm not trained as an historian. I've taken very few history classes. Each book I write is sort of like getting a PhD-not a PhD, a master's degree-in the topic. And I spend most of my time reading about that topic, and I bounce around a lot of topics. But I naturally fell in with maritime policy for the maritime history, for the most part, because of my background and my love of the ocean, I live in Marblehead.

Eric Jay Dolin 4:48
I'm talking to you from the third floor of our house, which was built in 1753, which is right very close to the water. I spent a lot of time on the beach. I'm not a sailor, but anyway, that's how I got into writing. Just a side of all the careers I've had, of all the things I've done, of all the jobs I've had, the thing I enjoyed most about all of my jobs was the writing. So I figured, well, maybe I should try doing this full time. And I don't recommend it. Writing's a miserable job if your number one goal is to make money. If you want to be satisfied and happy, and you're you know, and you're lucky, then it's a it's a great job. And I've had a good career, and I've had great support from my wife, and I have to give her a lot of credit because I couldn't have been a full time writer without her support. And she works because I didn't want to be a starving writer. I wanted to live the life I wanted to live. So it's all worked out. That's that's the long, that's the short, long story of how I got into writing. And I will add that anybody listening who wants to be a writer, the I think the number one. There are a couple of traits that you need to have to be a good writer, at least of books. I think the most important trait. I know people are going to argue with this, but I think the most important trait is well, it's combination having drive, being a little neurotic perhaps, because it's hard to write a book. You have to have real drive, but you also have to be able to accept failure. I can't tell you how many would-be writers I've spoken to over the years who dread getting rejected. I got rejected so many times. Just get used to it. Let it roll off your back, and you know, keep going. And eventually, if you are a decent writer and you have a decent topic, you'll find a publisher, but or an agent. But that's just the beginning of it. There are hundreds of 1000s of books published every year. The number of those authors that actually make what you would consider an okay living is vanishingly small. So if you're going into writing and you want to make a good living, you want to make six figures a year consistently. You're picking the wrong career unless you're incredibly lucky because it's maybe 1% of the writers are are doing that on an annual basis or even fewer. So you have to know why you're getting into writing if you love it and that's really what you want to do. You're going to figure out a way to do it, but it's getting harder and harder to make a living because publishers are focusing more and more on people who have big platforms and a lot of followers and and celebrities and even though books are doing pretty well, what I see happening and I don't have the statistics to back this up, but I'm pretty sure it's true, is that a smaller and smaller percentage of huge best-selling books are well. They always have made the bulk of the money for the big publishers, and I just think it's being exacerbated. I think if you looked at a big publisher, and my publisher is Norton, it's an independent publisher. It's pretty big. I bet if you looked at them that let's say they published 100 books a year, I bet five books a year are making 90% of their profits, or 10 books maybe. So that still leaves room for other people to write books. But the Authors Guild, of which I'm a member, did a survey back in 2019, and if I remember correctly, you know, the average full-time writer was making 25 or 30 $1,000 a year. You can't raise a family, live a life on on that. So I'm not trying to be a downer. I'm just trying to be realistic. I can't tell you how many people ask me out to coffee and they want to be writers, and you can see the dollar signs behind their eyeballs. And I'm going to write a big book, and I'm going to be Stephen King or whatever, or David McCullough.

Eric Jay Dolin 8:13
You just need to have, like any career, you need to have a sense of perspective and reality. But I do believe. I still do believe that you're driven, and you are pretty talented, and you got some good ideas, and you've got a good support system that you can make it as a as a writer. It's just it's just tough job. It's toughest job I've ever had, but it's the best job I've ever had. But right now, it's not a good time to be asking these questions because I'm trying to come up with another idea for a book, and I keep going through ideas and keep shooting them down. I think I got an idea, but I don't know. By the end of the year, I want to be. I'm sort of like a dog without a bone. I need to be working on something. But then again, I'm 64 years old, and my wife, as I said, put aside a year's worth of my salary. The reason for that is because I read in writers' market, and sort of common sense is if I failed as a writer, I wanted to have a cushion so I could look for another job. So that amount of money that I put aside for a year's worth of my salary is still there in its own little account. I haven't touched it, but I told my wife, I'm 64. If I fall flat in my face, I am not getting another job. Sorry, I'm going to be out in the backyard mowing the lawn, taking care of the fish, doing this. So the pressure is sort of off. So I'm looking around for an idea, but that's after many years of work and and writing. And I used I used to have black hair. Now I have gray hair.

Speaker 1 9:34
It's all because of

Eric Jay Dolin 9:35
writing.

Kate Carpenter 9:36
What what draws you to a topic? I mean, how do you decide if something is going to be a good book,

Eric Jay Dolin 9:41
well, the first, the most important thing is sort of aha, that's a great topic in my my own mind. If I think it's if I think it's really exciting and interesting, then that's a good start. But then that's only the beginning. I also have to think that my or should convince my agent to some extent if you know he thinks it's a good idea. And then we have to go to a publisher. I mean, for my last nine books, I've been with the same publisher. That makes it a little easier. My proposals are not nearly as long now as they used to be when I was starting as a writer. But still, I've had I've had ideas that I thought were great shot down, and I haven't written them because I didn't want to go to another publisher. And even if I did, who knows if I'd find somebody because they need to. People need to be convinced that it's going to sell decently, not that it's going to be a huge bestseller, but that it's maybe going to have a good shot of selling 10,000 hardcover copies. That's sort of the baseline for a major publisher. But most books sell fewer than 10,000 copies. Even a lot of books published by major publishers, they they don't always get it right. It's sort of like gambling. You go into a casino and you hope for a win, and you don't always get one. So so it's sort of convincing a couple of people. But most important is me. Is this an exciting topic? Do I think a lot of readers are going to be interested in this? Does this relate to my core demographic or the people that have been reading my books in the past, so there are a whole bunch of considerations that go into it. But I will counterbalance that with there are a number of topics that I've passed on for a variety of reasons, mostly because I thought the topic was written to death, and then somebody comes along and writes a book on it, and it's a bestseller. So I don't, you don't want to trust my judgment. I'm actually. I'm being sort of serious. I've gotten to the point where I don't want to do this book or whatever. But you know what? It could be a huge bestseller, and I'm just discounting it for my own reasons. But that's all you can. That's all you can rely on is your own judgment and a sense of what the market is. But I'm just amazed at how many people? How many more books can we have on George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, the American Revolution? I mean, there are hundreds of 1000s of books written on these topics, and I'm sure people keep finding stories. And I'm not trying to diss those things because I've written about the American Revolution and the Civil War in in some of my books. But still, how much more new stuff can we find out about these famous celebrities that people love to, or politicians, people love to read book after book on them. And I'm probably the one that's wrong. I'm probably could pick. There are a number of famous people that I said, "Oh, I'd love to write a biography of that person. But there have been five biographies written in the last 30 years. Well, another writer might look at that and say, well, I'll give it my own spin. And there are tons of people out there who obviously love to read about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, you know, battles in the Civil War, World War II battles, and there's still more that haven't been plumbed or survival stories in the Arctic. I mean, like my last book, Reckon Mentor: Survival story in the Pacific Ocean, but the wreck of the Mentor, my last book, and the one before that, Left for Dead. Nobody's written a book about those except for one in the last 100 years. So those really were new topics. But other books I've written on the fur trade, on whaling, on pirates, there are dozens, scores, hundreds of books on those topics, and I still chose to go ahead with them. So you never know.

Kate Carpenter 13:06
Well, I want to ask you some practical questions about your writing process. So I am, as I'm talking to you, you are sitting in what looks like a beautiful office with lots of great art behind you. Is this where you like to do your reading and writing?

Eric Jay Dolin 13:18
Yeah, well, not all my reading. I do a lot of my reading when it's nice weather outside in our backyard or on the beach. But if I need to take notes, I'm in front of my computer, which I am now. And yes, this is my office. It's the third floor of the house, and those are paintings. I, for many years, still to a minor degree, I was a big collector as a kid. My mom was an antique dealer. I collected so many things: shells, rocks, stamps, coins, old TV guides, history books, and for a while I was collecting. Every year I'd buy a couple of miniature paintings, and that's what you see behind me. I probably have 60 of them now. Miniature paintings, miniature sculptures, because we run out of space. We have a lot of artists in our family. My mom was an antique dealer. Our house is chock full of stuff. My kids call it the museum, and it's just my it's my personality. So yeah, I'm up here. I love this place because, as I said, that our house. I don't know if I mentioned our house was built in 1753. It's pretty old. It's in very good shape. But the floorboards, if you could see them, I mean, we have 24 inch wide pine floorboards. Not all of them are 24 inches, but it's an old nails and five fireplaces. It's a wonderful place to write about history. But the thing that I love the most about this room is not this room. It's what's to my right that you can't see. This room has its own bathroom, and in that bathroom is an old clawfoot tub, and I love to take hot baths. My wife hates baths, so this is my little hideaway. And in the winter, when it's cold, I take a lot of baths. I just sit there and I read, or I watch a, I watch a documentary, or I just think I love it. And I know people are going to listen to you waste a lot of water. It's really not that much water. We save water in a lot of other ways. In fact, the local water department has often asked, "How many people do you have living in the house? Two. They say you use hardly any water, so we're still we're conserving in other areas, but not in the bathtub.

Kate Carpenter 15:15
When do you like to do your writing?

Eric Jay Dolin 15:17
Oh, it's it's very variable. There's sometimes when I write for weeks on end, seven days a week. Especially my wife does a lot of travel, so when she goes away, I tend to do a lot of writing. But there are also when I'm researching, I'm not really writing, and that can take many months for a book. You know, 789, months where I'm just reading and taking notes. But when I start writing, there are some days that go great. There are other days where I do not a lick of writing. You know, it all depends on what writers are fond of saying. You need to write every day. That's baloney. If you need to write every day to keep your writing skills up, you have a problem. If you need to write every day because it's just coming out of you so at such a rapid rate, you need to write, and that's more like fiction writers. Then fine, I'm I'm okay with that. But there are times where weeks go by, whether I'm traveling or something else is going on, or I have to do gardening out back. I'm a huge gardener, or I I just I'm just stumped for a little while. I don't know, but I would say the average, I wake up and I'm usually in front of the computer by eight in the morning, and I'll work till lunch, and then I'll have lunch, and then I'll work till four or five or six. Well, four or five usually, because my wife, one of the deals we made now that I'm a writer and she has a very hard job and works a lot of hours, is I make all the dinners. Now we often go out to eat too because I'm not the greatest cook, and I have like six dinners that I'm good at. But so I usually kick off and I cut the vegetables and I make food at around five, and she gets home at usually 630. But I have a lot of time to write during the day because she leaves work for work very early, and she travels a fair amount. So, but there's no direct. I'm not one of those people. Oh, you got to be writing by 8o'clock or 9o'clock. You got to write till five. If something's really flowing and it's really exciting, there are times, especially when my wife's away, where I can work 1213, hours and pump out 4000 good words. You know that's a lot. Then there are times when I write a paragraph, and my wife used to make fun of me. I'd come downstairs. I say, "I wrote a good sentence today. I wrote. I wrote a good paragraph today. So, and then you go back and editing. Editing's fun. I like editing too because you sort of have the basic thing, and you're like a like chiseling marble, making it hopefully making it better. But then there comes a point where I just get tired of what I'm working on, and I just want to hand it in. So I'm very good. I'm very good with deadlines. I have contracts, and they have deadlines, and I meet my deadlines, or I I hand in my books before they're due because one I get bored after if I'm working on something for too long, and two I want to get paid and I you know I don't but most you'll find that an awful lot of authors I don't know if it's most but a lot of authors blow right by their deadlines. It's very common in this business,

Kate Carpenter 18:02
what systems do you have for organizing your research and notes?

Eric Jay Dolin 18:05
Basically, what I do is on Microsoft Word on my computer, I just have different files for each chapter. I know roughly, I know the outline of my book, the chapters, and I have different. So I'll say chapter one, and I just dump, I cut and paste information I find on the internet. I scan books and documents, and I cut and paste them PDF documents or images. I just put them in these files in order, and then when I the file gets too big, I do chapter one, part two, chapter one, part three, chapter one, part four, and sometimes I end up with seven or eight different files, each with 100 megabytes of information in a word document, which is a lot. A lot of them are pictures, though. So I have all the information in the chapters, and then I read through all that information. I add to it, and I start to collate, and I pull from that when I'm writing the chapters. Okay, I remember I'm writing about X. Oh, I remember reading about X. It's in chapter one, file four. I go find it, and I do a search. See, when I put pictures in the files, you can't search a picture, so I always put a little one-sentence description of what's in that picture, so I can do a search through a 150-page document to find oh quote you know xenon's quote or whatever I don't know whatever. So that's that's mainly what I do. I I read a lot. I take photocopies I scan. I take pictures. I write down notes. I have links if it's online, and I try to organize it based on the outline of the book. And then I just start plowing through and writing the book. And invariably, I have to find more new information. I get new documents. I add them. In fact, one of the things I'm going to do when I get off the phone is my computer, despite the fact I have this computer with a lot of memory. I am butting up against the memory, the the disk, the RAM, or whatever-not the RAM, the just the memory on the computer. So I'm going to go through some of my older books, and I have files. For example, I download PDFs of books from the internet, from Google. Books or other play those take up a lot of space. So for some of my older books that I wrote 1015, years ago, I might have gigabytes worth of information. I don't know that are just 300 books that I downloaded in newspaper articles. Well, at this point, I don't need them again. I'm not going to write about that again, and I can always gather the information again. So I have to go through and clean up my computer because it's starting to go slower, and it's a very old computer. I mean, it's 2019, I think, which is getting old. My laptop's old, so I need to think about in the next year because I'm starting. I can't get updates anymore because my computer's not advanced enough, so things are slowing down. But that's appropriate because I'm slowing down too. So you know, maybe maybe I will slow down at the same rate as my computer, and then we'll both turn the off switch, and that'll be it.

Kate Carpenter 20:49
Where where in your research process do you start writing? I

Eric Jay Dolin 20:53
basically start writing when mentally I feel I have enough information to write to tell the story I want to tell. There's no hard and fast time. It's not a sudden eureka moment. It's just okay. I've taken enough notes on this. I've read enough books, enough articles. It's time to write. And sometimes I make a mistake, and I have to go back and do a lot more research. But most of the time, I just start writing, and I still do research while I'm writing because new things come up. I mean, part of the process of writing is when you start to put it down on the page. You understand. You find new connections. You find new information. You you say, "Oh, I didn't think about it that way, and or or or you write a quote from this person and you say, "That's interesting. They mentioned this in the quote. What really is that? And did they say anything else about that? Or did somebody else, a contemporary, say something about that? So you sort of build up the story as you go. So it's not as if research and writing are totally compartmentalized. I do a heavy bout of research for probably six months, where I'm not writing at all, just gathering information. In a sense, that's the easiest time because with all my education and background, especially my PhD, I'm very good at gathering information. It's not-I don't have to memorize all of it. I just have to know that I have it and that I can look at it later. So it's kind of fun. I go to libraries. I do random searches online. It's like you know, bouncing around. It's sort of a fun time, but then once I have all the information that I think I need, I start writing the book. But then, while writing it, I realize I need more information, and I go back to libraries, I go back places, and I, you know, I'm still finding new information at the end of the writing process because you know, new new connections pop up in my head.

Kate Carpenter 22:39
I'm curious. You you kind of mentioned chapter outlines earlier. How do you think about narrative structure, and and maybe you can use like the structure of the wreck of the mentor as an example?

Eric Jay Dolin 22:49
Well, it's kind of easy when you're writing nonfiction. Not easy. I I tend to be chronological, but what you'll see in most of my books, they have a loopback mechanism. The introduction will be an exciting, dramatic story from somewhere in the book, usually not the beginning of the book, and then I okay. I've just told you this exciting story. Now I have to loop back to give you the history. And occasionally within the book, I have loopbacks, but they're very clearly demarcated. But for the most part, my books are chronological. I'm telling a story, so you usually tell a story in chronological order. So that that does a that does a great amount of the work in organizing the material. It's not just a free form. You know, I'm telling a story. It's hard to tell a story if I suddenly introduce a character that I haven't talked about before, and then they disappear for six chapters, and then they they come back. So you need to the the narrative arc of the story is sort of built into the tale you're telling, but that's still you still require there's still work that you have to do. The biggest thing that a writer has to do, I think, of history, unless you have a topic that has almost no background, which Wreck of the Mentor had less background than a lot of my other books, but still had a lot, you know, contemporary documents, but for the most part, almost any topic you find in history, you're going to have more information out there than you could possibly include. So one of the biggest skills that a writer needs is knowing what to cut, knowing what not to use, knowing when enough is enough, and not letting better be the enemy of good enough. Any one of my books I could have worked 10 years on. I get bored, so 18 months, 20 months. I write a book, and then I think about it, and then I have another contract, and I write another book. So I'm not a professor, you know. I'm not focusing on one little area for my entire career, and I'm digging deeper and deeper. But I'm not again. I'm not dissing books that take longer, I know there are some great narrative nonfiction books, history that are very easy to read, are are wonderful, and I know the authors spent 567, years writing them. It just that's not how I'm built, unless it was the most amazing topic that required that amount of effort. I literally could not see. Working on a book for seven years. The only exception to that, or even five years, the only exception is if I was famous enough or the idea was good enough, where there was a big auction and I got a million dollar advance, then I could support myself for five years. But that rarely happens, even for well known authors. You have seven. I once sat next to an author. I won't mention his name. He's dead now, but I still don't want to mention his name. Huge best-selling author, won a Pulitzer Prize, won a National Book Award, historian, and the book that he-I was sitting next to him. He was hawking his book, and I was hawking one of my earlier books. This is a long time ago, before I was a full-time writer, and I was so in awe of him because I-I knew his name, and he was famous. He was a famous author. He worked on this book for seven years, and I was asking him questions. First, I said, "Oh, it must be great being so famous and winning all these awards. You can write whatever you want. He laughed at me. He goes, "You got to be kidding. He wanted to write a book about Greenland, and his off his publisher said, "No, no. And finally, he pushed them so much. They said, "Okay, you write a book about Greenland. We'll give you a $30,000 advance. So he never wrote the book on Greenland, and he also said to me, he wrote in my book to Eric, a fellow writer with deepest sympathies, because because I was asking him questions. I was so naive. I was probably 35 years old, 40 years old, a long time ago, and I was so naive.

Eric Jay Dolin 26:22
I said, "Boy, it must be wonderful living your life, and you're famous, and you make a lot of money. And that's when he pointed out. He goes, "No, my last book took seven years. Yeah, I got about a million dollars advance. This is a long time ago, but seven doesn't last that well over seven years. And I have an apartment in New York City, and I like the nice life. And he goes, "It's really tough, and I have to pay my own health insurance. So he didn't paint a very good picture of being a writer. So you know, when I pick a topic, it's something I got to be excited about. Hopefully, I can write in less fewer than two years, and then move on to something else. And you know, it's it's it's not it's not a it's not science. It's an art. It's sort of figuring out what you're interested in? I know I know tons of stories of writers who had a topic that they thought was a slam dunk, and their publishers thought it was going to be a huge hit. In fact, they printed 75,000 advance copies, and it's a total flop. And they took a huge bath. And I know other books that the publisher and the writer had no big hopes, didn't think it was going to do that well, but thought it was going to do okay. All of a sudden, some celebrity mentions it or gets a front page New York Times review, which isn't as important as anymore. It used to be huge. You got a front page New York Times review. Your book was going through the roof. I know of a specific book, and again, I'm not going to mention it. Within the last eight months, it got a glowing front page New York Times review, and I happen to know the publisher. They sold 40 copies of that book in the next week. 40. So I guess the point I'm making is that you, it's it's really a gambit. It's like walking into a casino. You never know, but it doesn't mean you know nothing. I mean, publishers are smart, agents are smart, writers are hopefully smart, and you can pick books that you know on average do okay. But those big blockbuster books, half the time people are surprised. It's kind of wacky. It's such a wacky career. To it's a great career. It's best thing I've ever done. But it's just it's not like you're an accountant. You get a job in an accounting firm. You're a lawyer. You get become a lawyer. You work the federal government. There's a career track that you're going on. It's sort of like being a podcaster. Very few podcasters I get interviewed by do it full time because making a living as a podcaster is probably harder than making a living as a writer. But it's the same concept. Any creative endeavor that doesn't have a clear career track line. It's just creative work. It's hard to to make a living. I'm not trying to harp on the money part of it, but you know people need to live. This is not a we don't have guaranteed income yet. AI hasn't caused us to have guaranteed income, which I don't think is going to happen. So people have to live, and I got two kids that had to go to college, and you know like to do things, and so you have to think about that. But again, I I will add that writing is no better or worse than any other job. People have a very exalted view of writers. They do because I meet people all the time. They get, oh, you're a writer. That must be so great. You know, people do surveys of what you could. What would you want to do if you could do anything? Writer is often at the top of the list, just like professor. People think professors are you get your summers off. You get this. Any job, being a plumber, being an arborist, being a journalist, being a newspaper, they're all hard. Being a writer is hard, and it's no better or worse. It has no more value or less value than any other job. I really believe that, and that's part of the reason why I don't go to a lot of book festivals.

Eric Jay Dolin 29:45
I have to say that I've been invited to a number of them. I like other writers. I have some writer friends, but a lot of writers are just so full of themselves. I can't stand it. There you go. That's my little secret. I just I I. Just I'm more of a regular guy that got into writing. I don't view writing as this. Oh, it's so important. You know, you're so special when you're a writer. I think fewer nonfiction people feel that than the few fiction people I've met. Who knows? Maybe I'm all washed up. You know, maybe maybe I'm totally wrong, and it's just me and it's how I perceive people. But again, I can't tell you how many people. And you must have come across this. I meet so many people that find out I'm a writer, and they either instantly tell me that they have a book they want to write, or that must be amazing, or it's it's so special. Just the other day, somebody you know said, "Oh, writer, that's such a that's such an amazing career! You're so lucky. Yeah, I am lucky to be a writer. But again, I'm no better or worse than the plumber that comes does unclogs my toilet. In fact, he's more useful. I have a PhD, and my wife says you have a PhD, but you don't help anybody, which is true. Maybe I help people through books. I like to think that my books, you know, give some enjoyment to people and help them learn a little bit about history. So I don't think I'm totally useless, but

Kate Carpenter 31:08
well, I want to talk about your books a little bit because you know one of the things I find so engaging about your books is that you know they're really they're built, of course, from archival sources like all history and nonfiction. But in your books, those sources sort of fade in the background. They're there, of course, in the notes, but you know you're not constantly quoting from them or referencing to them. You're sort of just telling the story. How do you think about translating sources to your own voice into scenes?

Eric Jay Dolin 31:34
Yeah, well, if you look at my earlier books, they had a lot more quotes, and one of the complaints of one of my early editors was say it in your words, not their words, unless their words are so amazing you have to include them. So it's sort of been beaten into me, and I think that's right. I think that people want to read more of your words. It's smoother, but good quotes are excellent. I love quotes. I still use a lot of them. My attitude again is that the reader is trusting me to synthesize or extrapolate or extract or rewrite or paraphrase the quotes and tell the story accurately? I'm not writing an academic book with 1000 footnotes and blocking up. One of the things is a lot of books like mine they don't have the footnotes in the the numbers aren't in the page. You just have it by page number, and that's to make it less imposing. I mean, some of my books have won academic awards because I think they're deeply researched. But it's not a PhD dissertation, and I don't want to be-I don't want it to be dry as dirt. And I want people to read it. And I think a lot of people get intimidated if there are too many footnotes, too many endnotes, too many numbers in there, and use too many big words unnecessarily. I just think a simple tale told in a straightforward way that also has a lot of information in it. Because I think one of the things a lot of people say about my books is they learned a lot, and that's because I want to learn a lot while I'm writing them. And there's a lot of information back in there. Some people love it, some people hate it. You can look at any one of my books and all the comments on Amazon or other other places. And some people rave about it. Give it five stars. This is amazing. It's so easy to read. I learned so much. It was effortless. I couldn't put it down. And then the same book, you can have somebody say, "This is this is horrible. It's very slow. He keeps repeating himself. Like somebody made a comment the other day on one of my older one of my books, and I really thought about. I try not to look at comments too much because you know, hey, everybody's got an opinion now. But this guy, he was online and he was videotaping. He gave my book, my pirate book, three stars, and his complaint was too much information, and he repeated himself a lot. I wrote the book and I thought about it, and I almost responded to him, but I decided not to. I didn't repeat myself anywhere in the book. They're totally different stories. Each each chapter is a different pirate or whatever. I really didn't repeat myself. I know what's in the book, but people see what they want to see, and they have their own chips on their shoulder. So another piece of advice to writers who are listening to this: don't spend too much time reading your reviews, whether they're professional reviews or the run-of-the-mill reviews by average readers, unless you know read the good ones makes you feel good. And I've been fortunate; I've written a lot of books. I really have never gotten a pan review. I've gotten some reviews that aren't stellar, they're good. But I've been really fortunate with professional reviewers. I've gotten a lot of good reviews. My books have been picked on a lot of best of books, and I think people generally who read my books like my books. The problem is billions of people haven't read my books.

Kate Carpenter 34:37
Well, that is a problem,

Eric Jay Dolin 34:39
and there are so many books written. It just-it's a flood. I don't know how people keep up. I don't know. I always ask bookstore owners, "How do you pick books? There are so many books, wonderful books. Every week, there are hundreds of books coming out from major publishers and big presses, and they're all good, I'm sure. How do. You pick as a reader too. It is it is wild. It puts it in perspective. You know, I guess if somebody I've never sold millions of copies of a book. I imagine if you sell millions of copies, boy, you think you're really finding a good audience. That must must be a different feeling. But even me, an average you know writer, a upper mid list writer that occasionally has a bestseller. Lots of people read my books, books the libraries. Lots of people check them out. I know for the wreck of the Mentor, somebody just wrote to me in this one big library, New York Public Library, a while ago. They had like they have 40 copies or something of my of the book, and and there's a wait list. It's very nice to hear that, but you really have to put yourself in perspective. There's so many good books, and I absolutely do not believe that the books that are the best sellers that it's natural selection, and they are the ones that deserve it necessarily. There are probably 100 other books that don't get much attention or more that are just as good by any metric you want to pick, but for whatever reason they didn't have the right review. They didn't. It's not quite the right topic. They didn't have the right promotion. I don't. I don't know. But there are 1000s of books that come out every year in history that are wonderful, but only a small number of them do well, and any writer that tells you that they they don't want their book to sell well is BSing you or has a huge trust fund and doesn't care. And there are writers like that. Let me tell you. So anyway, you need to know what you're getting into. But if you want to be a writer and you're meant to be a writer, quote unquote, not that I believe there's fate involved. You'll be a writer. You'll figure out a way to do it. I know writers that you know a lot of writers have a regular job and they write on the side and they write wonderful books and wonderful articles, but they never quite succeed enough in their writing to quit their job, and that's fine. In fact, I bet most history books are written by people who aren't full-time writers. There aren't a huge number of full-time writers who actually make a decent living. I'm not talking about a great living, just a decent, consistent living. An awful lot of writers of history are professors. They have nice jobs. They have grad students that can help them do research, and they can write in the summer or after work. You know, a lot of people have asked me, "Why don't you teach? I've been asked to teach at universities writing courses. I just not my interest, and I don't need to financially. So I I never have taken. In fact, I told one person they wanted me to go to this writers retreat and give a course on writing nonfiction. I said, what do I have to tell them? Obviously, I'm talking a lot. I have a lot to tell you, but it's more anecdotal stories. I'm not sure I'd be a good teacher on how to write nonfiction. Like for example, one thing I don't believe in. I don't think writer's block is a real thing. I think if you have writer's block, you don't want to write. If that's stuck and you think what you write is so important and needs to be so perfect that you're blocked, then you shouldn't be a writer, because you know, first of all, perfection is an elusive goal. Second of all, you can always edit. You know, write craft, write 100 pages of drivel. Go back; it becomes a little better, comes a little better, and a little better. So,

Kate Carpenter 38:12
well, I wanna I wanna ask you another craft question because I feel like one one kind of tricky thing about writing narrative nonfiction is knowing when to really like stay in a scene and describe it and go into detail and when you sort of summarize and move the story forward, how do you find that balance? Do you just feel it out, or do you have methods?

Eric Jay Dolin 38:29
I don't have any methods. I mean, real literally, it's I'll be writing a scene and it goes on or part of the story, and I say, you know, this is too long. There's too much information here. I'm getting bored. The writer's not getting the writer's. Reader's going to get lost. So it's just a gut feeling. But they're they're definitely. I have no method other than writing and knowing. It's like everybody uses this quote, and it's sort of silly because it's so old. The Supreme Court said they couldn't define pornography, but they know it when they see it. But it's it's the same with writing a chapter of a book. I sort of know when it ends, and and then I write a cliffhanger, hopefully something that makes people want to go to the next chapter. You sort of know when you've spent enough time. You know, you're if you're writing about people in a boat out on the ocean for 14 days, you write about those 14 days, but you don't want to turn each day into free pages of anguish. You want to get through the story with some high points, and at some level, there's a balance between having the story go fast and being exciting, and bogging down the story. And the worst thing you, the thing you want to avoid, is have a story that's been going fast all of a sudden, slow down a lot because you might lose your readers, and that's why that's why writers spend so much time writing their introductions at the beginning of the book, because if you don't catch them in the beginning of the book, they're not going to keep writing. Some people reading, some people do. My wife will often give a book a lot. She reads a lot, a lot of fiction, and she'll often give a book a lot of rope before giving up on it. But you know, I don't when I when I pick up a nonfiction book, and I don't read a lot of modern nonfiction books because since I don't have a history background, each book is like getting a master's degree, and most of my reading relates to what I'm writing. So I don't have as much time to write current to read current bestsellers or current books. So I'm not very good at answering the question, "What book are you reading now? Because it's likely to have been written in 1890. But it's really important. I think I've done a good job with my books. Obviously, not a good enough job to get more and more readers. But I think all my books start out. Their introductions are very dramatic, very exciting. In part because it gets me excited about the story. I mean, I I pick up a lot of books that all the reviewers say are great, and they may sell a lot. And I start reading them, and I go, "This is dry. This is this is. I have to work to read this. How come so many people think it's so great, but you know, I'm luckily I'm not a reviewer.

Kate Carpenter 41:04
Are there people that you, whose writing you admire, that you look to as inspiration? They don't have to be recent.

Eric Jay Dolin 41:09
Yeah, Samuel Eliot Morison. I happen to have won the Samuel Eliot Morison Book Award. That's not why, but Samuel Eliot Morison, even though some of his writing is considered controversial today, especially about Christopher Columbus, given the reevaluation of Christopher Columbus, but Samuel Morison, he was a wonderful writer. Especially, he wrote this book that was really I really enjoyed, and I used in a couple of my books. is It's Maritime History of New England, I think it's called, or something of New England. It's a short book. He had a wonderful way with phrases. He was a deep academic, he wrote like a fiend. I don't know how he wrote so many books. He's like Winston Churchill. I mean, he wrote dozens and dozens of huge books. But he's a wonderful writer. He writes books that have a lot of information, a lot of historical accuracy, but in a breezy way that makes you want to keep reading. So I like him. I like Erik Larson. I've only read two or three of his books. Mainly, the reason I like him is because of one of his earlier books, Isaac's Storm about the Galveston Hurricane. I wrote a book on hurricanes, and I used that as a source. And I really got to appreciate he's a very good writer, and he really knows how to tell a story and keep the reader interested. James Truslow Adams, he he won a Pulitzer Prize like in 1938. He wrote a book called The Founding of New England, which is was very important to me when I read it. It was really fun to read. Who are some other readers, writers? I don't know. I don't read. I I don't read so many. I listen to a lot of books, and that's different than reading it. I don't know. A lot of the books behind me that you see, you really can't see them. They're behind my head. Almost all those books in that bookshelf are books I blurb. So by definition, I liked a lot of those books because I I haven't blurbed a lot of books I've been asked to. Because if I don't like a book, I'm not going to blurb. And there are some writers who write blurbs for books and basically don't read the book. I've been told that by other writers. I'm not making that up. I would never blurb a book that I haven't written, read, and I would never blurb a book that I didn't like. And I've actually had a couple of authors who've asked, and not that I don't get a huge number of requests. Huge best-selling authors get must get dozens of requests a week. So I don't really have any others. Not horrible, David McCullough. Okay, David McCullough. I've read a number of his books. I like them, Theodore Roosevelt. I read a couple of his old books; they were fun. He's really, he's really, he's got a way with writing. What a writer! I mean, he wrote so much, and he was president of the United States. And just these people are at a different level. These people write all that stuff, especially Winston Churchill. Man, was he! I love his story. I love him as a character, celebrity, a politician, and he's very important in world history. And I wish we had more Winston Churchills, but we don't. But he he was a good writer at one point. He was the highest paid freelance journalist in the world. Part of that's because he was famous, but some of that was before before he became prime minister. He's just an interesting guy. I don't know. That's enough names. I I'm really bad on that because I know there are other nonfiction writers who make a point of reading a lot of other current books. I just don't.

Kate Carpenter 44:09
Besides editors, are there people you turn to for feedback on your work?

Eric Jay Dolin 44:13
Yeah, my wife. She's my first reader. She used to call herself the comma-kaze because I was very bad with commas. I'd put commas all over the place, and she'd have to take them out. I'd gotten better, so my wife reads it. My kids, my daughter, she's a literary agent. If she want, she has time to read it. I ask her to read it, but she's very busy. My editors, a couple of friends I have, some that are historians, some that aren't. I asked to read it. My mother-in-law, before she unfortunately she died a week ago, but she was great. She was a great reader. She was a big booster of my work. So that's it. You know, not a huge store, not a huge number of people. My editors, there are multiple editors. I give it to my main editor, then it goes to a copy editor, then it goes to a line editor, and they're fact checkers. I've had one book. It had to go to. A lawyer, because there were some concerns about libel, so I had to rewrite something. You know, so I've experienced that too.

Kate Carpenter 45:07
You've given us a lot of great advice, both about writing and about the writing life. What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?

Eric Jay Dolin 45:14
It was probably it wasn't it wasn't actually for writing, but it relates to writing, and I've already mentioned it. When I was getting my PhD, I was thinking of quitting, and my wife at the time said, "Okay, you can quit, but you can never mention it again. And I wasn't man enough to uphold that. I knew I would complain the rest of my life. Also, I paid for my master's and PhD, and my parents didn't help me, so I had a lot of skin in the game. In fact, when my wife married me afterwards, she would introduce me to her friends. This is my husband, debt, because I had $42,000 in loan debt, and this is a long time ago. So that was a lot of money. It's probably 80,000, like 80,000 or 100,000 today. So, my PhD advisor, who I will always love because he helped me get through the program and gave me good advice. He used to say to me all the time, "Eric, better cannot be the enemy of good enough. And I've said that before. That advice is very good because you're never going to achieve perfection. You always can work on any issue, any writing project longer, but you've got to have a sense of when it's a good enough book, I could go back every book I've written. I could go back and fix it up and re-edit it and make it look a little different because I've become a better writer or I have new information or I made a mistake. But it's over. The book's out there. It's over. And you know, if it's a major mistake, you can correct it if it gets reprinted. But so don't let better be the enemy of good enough. And my professor didn't come up with that idea. I think it goes back to Voltaire or whoever whoever said it. So that's that's good advice. Also, this is not advice I've been given, but it sort of right you know rips through all of my comments so far. I'm a big believer in humility. My friend, people know me. It's very funny. I very rarely talk about my writing. People ask me questions; I'll answer them. Like today, I'm very voluble, but I, you know, I sort of keep it to myself. I'm sort of an introvert naturally, but I really think it's important to be humble in whatever career you're in. Let other people sing your praises. That's fine, but don't believe your own propaganda either. You know, I know I'm a good writer. I know I write good books, but I also know that I'm one of 1000s of good writers, and that doesn't make me less special or more special. It just means I'm part of a career, you know, and I'm doing this. And so, in the end, as a writer, if you don't enjoy what you're doing, if you're doing it for other people or to get adulation, you're in the wrong business. Because first of all, it's hard to get adulation all the time. There are dozens of writers, hundreds of writers, who had a huge best-selling book and never wrote another book that sold nearly as well. But that's a very common story of writers who have a huge bestseller and become famous, and they never write another big book. I know of a writer who won a-I won't say which award because it would narrow it down-won a huge award, sold a huge amount of copies, and his next three books, each one did worse than the last. And he went from being with the major, one of the biggest publishers, to smaller publisher and smaller publisher. And I know it rips them apart. You know, because when you're on the top of the mountain, nobody likes to be on the bottom again. So in some ways, if you if you have a career trajectory, it'd be much nicer to do well, well, well, well, well, and then have a great success towards the end. So that's what I'm waiting for. I've done all my books have done well. Some have done very well, but I've never had a blockbuster bestseller. I've hit the New York Times bestseller list, other bestseller lists, but I've never had a blockbuster. I'm not a. I'm not a. Good Morning America is not calling to interview me.

Eric Jay Dolin 48:50
I used to have daydreams of John Stewart or Colbert wanting to interview me about my books, but I'm not at that level, and I know that. But boy, would it be nice! Now I'm 64. I have a few more books in me. I'd love it, and I'd know how to handle it a lot better if I suddenly had a book that became everybody was talking about. I think it'd be a fun ride. I'm not expecting it at all, but wouldn't that be fun? I much rather have that trajectory, or I'm happy with my trajectory, which is unusual. Is unusual in writing. Ask ask editors. I've talked to editors and other people in publishing. It's kind of unusual to have 9, 10 books in a row, all of which have done well, have made the publisher happy, some of which have done very well, and none have tanked. That's that's a pretty good writing career, I think.

Kate Carpenter 49:36
Absolutely. Well, that feels like a pretty good note to end it on, Eric Dolin, thanks so much for joining me on Drafting the Past. Thanks for being willing to talk about your writing process.

Eric Jay Dolin 49:45
Sure, thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Kate Carpenter 49:47
Thanks again to Eric Jay Dolin for joining me on the Drafting the Past podcast, and thanks to you for listening to our conversation. Find links to Eric's newest book, The Wreck of the Mentor, along with the other books mentioned in this episode. In the show notes, if you'd like to support the show and not miss out on all of the other great stuff we're cooking up, be sure to subscribe to the newsletter at draftingthepast.com. You can subscribe for free, or you can become a paying subscriber and get more perks, including ad-free podcast episodes. Until next time, remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.