Michael Weinreb on journalism, writing, self-loathing and more

brandonsneed · Mar 27, 2012

Hey folks, Michael Weinreb ("Kings of New York" and "Bigger Than the Game" and a Grantland staffer) let me interview him for the blog. As with the other interviews I've done, I thought you all would like to hear what he has to say. He really had some tremendous insights into the craft.

Excerpt below. Link to the whole thing here: http://brandonsneed.com/home/2012/3/27/michael-weinreb-anything-can-be-interesting-and-other-goodne.html

How do you approach a story? Research then report then write? Little bit of everything along the way?

Research. Report. Travel, if necessary. Return home. Bang my head repeatedly against my desk until my cranium starts to swell. Do a little more research. Put on a Mastodon album and scream at the walls. Make another call or two. Spin in circles. Start trying to write a lead. Walk out of the room and swear at myself for ten minutes. Call my wife to kill time. Read some more clippings. Go get lunch. Check my e-mail 37 times an hour. Check Twitter every eight minutes. Get angry about something on Twitter that's entirely irrelevant to my existence. Drink tea. Go to the gym. Listen to Jim Croce and lament my existence. Call my wife again. Check Facebook. Write a lead, think it might be good, realize it's terrible, and start again. And then it's 7:30 and there's a game on, so I can quit.

How do you handle interviews? Tape-record and transcribe? Take notes? Both? Other?

I hate transcribing so much that even if I record (which is usually only in "formal" interview situations), I always take notes. And then I just go back to crucial parts of the tape to verify any long quotes I'm going to use. I need to write things down, anyway, even if it's just a thought or a feeling or a scene. Usually, those things are more important than what people are saying, anyway.

How do you go about creating your story structure? Outline? Just write then piece it together? Something else?

I have to start writing before I can outline anything. Once I get the first section down (or sometimes before), then I'll start writing little notes at the bottom of the file, ideas or thoughts for structure, and eventually you reach that point of no return where you've figured out where you're going, for better or worse. And it never quite lives up to the ideal you had at the beginning. It always evolves into something else. Dan, my editor at Grantland, is really good at calling out some of the nebulous B.S. I tend to sneak in when I'm ratcheting up my voice in the midst of some of these pieces. I have a dumb habit of occasionally using words that don't quite mean what I think they mean, but *sound* good, and so that's where an editor comes in.

Sometimes I like having a model for what I'm writing, even if it's a movie or a TV show or a novel, because it gives me this false illusion that I know what I'm doing and where I'm going with this piece and what the themes are, even when I don't. That's another thing Jay Lovinger was really good at when I was writing regularly for him--he'd say, "Go back and read Philip Roth's 'Great American Novel,'", or "This is a little like Frank Deford's Jimmy Connors profile," and then you could go back and look at that thing and figure out how it worked and how it applied to this mess you've got on your screen.
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Michael Weinreb on journalism, writing, self-loathing and more

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Michael Weinreb on journalism, writing, self-loathing and more

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