Who: David Epstein

Claim To Fame: David Epstein is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, and of the New York Times bestseller The Sports Gene, which has been translated in 18 languages. He was previously a science and investigative reporter at ProPublica, and prior to that a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, where he co-authored the story that revealed Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez had used steroids. His writing has been honored by an array of organizations, from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, to the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and has been included in the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. His story “Following the Trail of Broken Hearts,” on sudden cardiac death in athletes, was chosen as one of the top 100 stories of the last 100 years by Columbia Journalism alumni.

Where To Find David: His Website, Amazon, Twitter

Praise For David: “For reasons I cannot explain, David Epstein manages to make me thoroughly enjoy the experience of being told that everything I thought about something was wrong. I loved Range.” —Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers 

When and where do you like to write? Are you the same-thing-every-day kind of writer or can you write anytime, anywhere?

I am not naturally a creature of habit. So I’ve never had that sort of Murakami exact-same-running//writing schedule every day, even while I do both of those things a lot. That’s not to say I can’t force myself into such things, as I used to when I was a competitive runner, but it isn’t my natural inclination. When I was writing my first book in Brooklyn, it was typically happening in this sort of loft/half-upper-floor thing in our apartment. Man, that space got hot! That’s beside the point…after the book came out, people would ask me, “How did you write it?” And I wasn’t really sure, partly, I think, because I don’t have a lot of concrete habits that I can recite. I asked my wife, and she said: “You went upstairs and came down two years later.” Kind of true. The work schedule was pretty amorphous and often all the time. I think I have the capacity to work a lot, to get obsessed with a project, and to spend a lot of time working alone. So when I’ve worked on books, honestly they’re kind of happening—whether that’s thinking or writing or reading or transcribing or interview-prepping (which I do in spades) or even running—all the time that I’m awake.

I will say, though, during my first book, my (then-future) wife got a fellowship to do some reporting on schools in Japan, and twice I went and visited her at the International House in Tokyo, and I got a ton of work done in the library there. I think a temporary change of scenery was actually helpful for me. Not only because it had air conditioning, but sometimes I find I can start to feel a little oppressed by all the books and papers and notes that start accumulating around my chair, and a little break from that helps.

These days, I write in a little slanted-roof office I have in our house. It has a bunch of windows, which I like. The windows I face when writing are small and above eye level, so I have to look up to see out of them. I like that because I can look out when I want, but sitting below them I still have a writing-cave feel.

Do you have any pre-writing rituals or habits before you sit down to write?

I really don’t, honestly. When I’m deep in book mode, I pretty much consider all day every day to be work time, unless I’m exercising, and then I’m usually still thinking about it. The project becomes one long, liquid effort of time that conforms to its container (i.e. the deadline). As I joked with friends, my Game of Thrones-style house words are “When My Book is Done,” because for a while that’s how I answered all their questions.

I do think, though, that I probably will develop more ritual and habit if I write another book because now I have a kid and I’m not as inclined to do that liquid-work strategy.

I will say I tend to stand up and pace sometimes, and then sit back down when I’m writing—when I’m thinking something through. At times this would probably look sort of funny, like a painter executing a few strokes, stepping back, then a few more; I’ll type something, stand up, pace and think a little, sit back down write a few lines, and repeat. I’m not always like that, but it happens.

Lastly, I’m much more likely to feel like I’m in a writing groove late at night than early in the morning, and when I stop for the night I pretty much always jot down thoughts of where I think I’m going. Then I come back the next day and see if that still makes sense. So that’s sort of something I do before I sit down to write.

Have you ever experienced a prolonged creative rut or a spell of writer’s block? If you have, how do you get through it?

Not to the point where I just couldn’t write. I switched from a path where I was headed to be a scientist to one where I was trying to become a writer, and the first few places where I had steady work required fast work. I was the midnight-to-morning guy at the NY Daily News for a bit, and then I was the first reporter at the then-startup Inside Higher Ed, and both places required a lot of writing. Sometimes an article every day, so I think from early on I had some exposure to not having the liberty to have total writer’s block. (That’s certainly not to say that I didn’t proceed to write some poor articles!)

But I guess one benefit of nonfiction is that if you’re stuck with the writing, you can always go do more reporting and that often helps. If I’m stuck, it’s probably because whatever question logically comes next, and that I would like to address for myself and my reader, hasn’t come through in my reporting. So I need to do more reporting, if that makes sense.

I will say, though, I basically didn’t write—or wrote very little—for the first year of both of my book contracts. So when I got serious about the writing phase, I had a ton of material to start with, and writer’s block was less a problem than figuring out how to organize information, which was a huge challenge in both books. And I have gotten stuck figuring out how to structure things. I’ll mention a system I sort of have for that lower down, since another question asks about it, but when I’m stuck with structure, I’ll often try to talk through what I’m exploring with my wife and see where I get stuck talking about it, or I’ll go out running, or try to read something (fiction, particularly), that gets me in an entirely different mindset. I’ve found all of these things to be really helpful. The fiction trick was unexpected. But I’ve found if I pick up, say, some Murakami, or Marlon James, or (playwright) Martin McDonagh, or—most recently—Rachell Ingalls, for whatever reason, it just gets me in a different mindset, and I feel refreshed or more creative when I go back to the page.

Deciding on an idea to pursue writing about can be the most challenging aspect for a writer. Do you have a sense of where your best ideas come from? How do you come to the point of ‘this is something I want to write about’?

Oof, tough one. I think a lot of it is just being interested in the world around you, and not taking it for granted. I was messaging with MIT Tech Review writer Angela Chen sort of about this recently. She posted online a note about “defamiliarization,” which she cited as a common literary device used by Russian formalists. The idea is describing everyday things in unfamiliar ways. She mentioned the neat example here, which starts with “I’d like to open a new kind of grocery store.” And it made me think of this character from the old kids’ show Fraggle Rock, and the character Uncle Traveling Matt. The fraggles live underground, in a sort of rabbit-warren setup, and Uncle Traveling Matt refers to the human world as “outer space,” and he goes out to explore it and sends postcards back about what he sees. And it’s funny, because he’ll come across cars, and assume that they’re organisms and their horns constitute a language he tries to learn.

This may sound silly, but I think it’s sort of a helpful way to look at the world, not taking normal things for granted, but rather examining them and generating questions. For example, the first chapter of my first book discussed why the best baseball hitters can’t hit softball pitchers. The first time I saw that demonstrated on TV, I remember doing a quick calculation based on the speed of the pitch and distance of the pitcher, and wondering, “Hey, the transit time of the ball is longer than a lot of the pitches they see in the Major Leagues, so why the heck can’t they hit that??” And the ensuing exploration became a chapter. Honestly, my first book was very much a list of things in sports—all revolving around nature/nurture questions—that I had either seen as a spectator or experienced as a competitor that I wanted to investigate. Because I wanted to understand more.

Obviously, there’s no substitute for curiosity. But I think more than coming up with ideas—because I constantly have questions I’d like to explore—defining the playing field for what a book might investigate is a challenge. Both my books center on these questions—the balance of nature and nurture in sports; how broad or specialized to be—that can never be answered perfectly, so it’s hard to define exactly where to go. I try to make the book feel like an escalating examination of the question.

Your new book Range warns against specialization. For writers, who can tend to be very specialized, what does it mean to have range? How would you recommend capturing the benefits of range in a career where you have to specialize to a certain degree?

As I write, we all specialize to one degree or another, at some point or other. But I think you can do things as simple as read something outside your field every day. For me, as a developing reporter and writer, changing jobs a number of times early on was incredibly helpful for my development, and I started to realize that. If, especially early on, you can be on the steep part of the learning curve multiple times, you can really build a toolbox. I mean, I arrived at Sports Illustrated as a six-month temp fact-checker, probably five or six years older than some of the people who were actually hired. Pretty soon, I realized that my pretty ordinary science skills were totally extraordinary in the context of a sports magazine. Then I realized that my crime reporting experience was too, and I was able to leverage those so that I was competing on my own ground, not in zero-sum competition with other writers.

Going back a little more, when I started at the NY Daily News, all my reporting was street reporting, plus some document and court stuff. Almost no phone or internet. Then at Inside Higher Ed, an enormous amount of the reporting was via phone, and using online tools, and going to formal government hearings. So suddenly I had this real mix of reporting skills.

At SI, I learned how to report for the depth of magazine articles and how to structure longer pieces, and use things like line breaks to separate sections. I don’t know if I’d ever used one before, and I use them a lot in my books. And I started doing investigative work. And when I felt my learning curve was leveling off, I was a staff writer by that point, and I actually applied for an internship at the then-new ProPublica. The internship coordinator called me and asked if I understood what I was applying for. I did, and I got it. And I pitched it to SI as professional development, since we needed more investigative skills. So I hoped my job would be there when I got back. And, as it happened, I had a co-written SI cover story out—an investigation of the dietary supplement industry—right when I reported to ProPublica as an intern and started scanning lobbying disclosure documents and stuff like that for other reporters. So I went from an office with a big window over 6^th Avenue, to doing basic things, and it was phenomenal. Soon, they encouraged me to do some reporting and writing.

I ended up getting into an interesting project there that, again, required a very different kind of reporting than I was used to. I went back to SI (they did let me come back to my job) with new tools, and then as soon as The Sports Gene came out I disembarked for ProPublica full time. It was weird, because just as I was publicly being identified as the sports science guy, I was off to report about healthcare and drug cartels, not sports. That was not the best transition timing, but the transition itself definitely diversified my skills.

I one fafillion percent understand why writers don’t do a lot of job swerving if they have something stable, but I also think there are huge benefits to getting out of one’s rut of competence. Once we become competent in a certain activity, we tend to just keep doing the same thing, even when that ceases to be the road to improvement. It’s like lifting the same weights the same number of times every day. You might not get worse, but you also won’t get much better.

I think one nice thing for writers is that there is a lot of opportunities to take on projects that stretch your comfort zone or have you learning in a new area. Just keep an eye on continually broadening your toolbox, with what you read and write. In order to force myself to do this, I now keep what I call my “book of small experiments,” where I put down a hypothesis or question about something I’d like to learn or try, and force myself to investigate it and report back. This lead to me taking a beginner’s online fiction-writing class in the middle of writing Range. It included an exercise where we had to write a short story with no dialogue. For whatever reason, that flicked a switch in my head that made me realize I was using quotes in my manuscript when I didn’t understand something deeply enough. I went back through the entire manuscript to that point and examined what I needed to understand better so that I could explain it more clearly in narrative writing.

All of your work is incredibly researched. Can you talk about that process and your method for organizing material you may want to use in future writing?

Well, for the first year of both books, I tried to read 10 journal articles a day every day. And most days I made it. Early on, I don’t need to pore over the methods sections in detail, but I can get a sense of what’s out there, and which researchers keep appearing in certain areas. I also pay a scientist to basically take my call and talk with me about studies whenever I want. He’s a friend and would do it for fun and for free, but I take a lot of his time so I try to be fair about it. He’s also really rigorous about study methodologies, and, while I’ve taken statistics, he’s really excellent with statistics, and doing analysis every day. I learn a ton from talking through studies with him, and it refreshes my statistics and teaches me new statistics. Often, the conclusion is that a study’s methodology is really poor and I should stay away from it, and that’s good to know. And I start to be able to spot poor methodologies, and in both books, there have been sections where I actually ended up writing about and critiquing certain study methodologies. I didn’t set out to do that, it came out of these conversations during research. So that’s one unusual thing I do.

Another very specific thing I’ve done for both books is create what I’ve called a “master thought list.” Just a document where I put down thoughts, quotes, questions, interesting tidbits from studies, and citations or links to interesting articles. And I sort of start organizing these into groups that address a common aspect of my core question. And as a group grows, I give it a “tag,” which is just a title, but I also jot a bunch of words that I think I might search if I wanted to get back to that idea cluster. And eventually, I move some of the tagged groups that are more alike toward one another, and it can become almost a bit like a rough storyboard. For Range, it ended up being like 60,000 words long, so it can get a little unwieldy, but I find that to be a useful process, and also it gives me this nice searchable space for ideas I’ve had and research I’ve done.

What does a successful writing day mean for you? And how do you finish out a day of writing? Do you have a process, or is it just that you know you’ve hit a natural stopping point?

Geez, I’m feeling like the lamest writing-routines writer, because basically my experience has been that the projects swallow up my brain and life and I kind of take it and adjust as I go rather than having set patterns. I do think, though, that there’s a reason why it was six years for me between books (after I was told sternly not to let it be more than five). It takes a lot of endurance to work that way.

I guess I do sort of have an end-of-writing-day habit, though. I mentioned above that I have this sort of storyboard of ideas that comprises my first skeleton outline. I think of myself as having a sort of “living outline” that I will often update at the end of a writing day. Let me explain that a little more: I once had an experience of film editing, and it had a massive influence on how I think about structure. With the film—I was being talked through the editing because my partner had repetitive stress injury, so he was the brains and I was the motor skills—we had all this film, and we had to cut it into chunks, and whatever isn’t in those saved chunks hits the cutting room floor. So that all your raw material is now discrete scenes or ideas or questions or whatever. Then the trick is figuring out how one “out point” of a chunk leads to the next “in point” of some other chunk. And you just arrange the chunks so out points lead to in puts over and over. (I once read John McPhee describing his writing process, and it felt very similar.) Some structural masters do this so well that they keep you engaged even with silly material. So for example, Wes Craven might have had some silly material sometimes, but he was so good at structuring the in and out points that you often want to stick with it after each scene fadeout.

With my living outline, I think of section breaks and chapters as constituting the in and out points, and I have to order them to keep this journey engaging, and in such a way that the material sticks in the brain well and is easy to learn, and gives the reader a sense of this escalating engagement and exploration of an important question. So, at the end of many writing days, I’ll see where I am and have thoughts about the next few in and out points, and so I’ll write those down beneath the writing I just finished. And I’m constantly adjusting, but that’s often what I do at the end of the day, and then I have thinking to start with right away the next day. (How was that for a prolix explanation?) I read that Joyce had some color-coded sentences he wanted to write into his books for sure, and then the rest was working between them. I think that has some conceptual similarities.

What books or writers have most influenced the way you think and the way you write?

I don’t think this is what you mean, but Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers obviously influenced me a lot. For a recent panel, where Gladwell and I had to introduce one another, he introduced me this way: “This is David Epstein. We met because I was reading his previous book…and he devotes several pages to attacking my work.” So, that’s true, and Outliers magnified an idea that I subsequently thought a lot about and critiqued in my first book. He and I were later invited to have a public debate, and it was really interesting. It was the first time we met, and we continued the discussion on our own afterward, and that led to some questions that lodged in the back of my brain. A while later—when I felt ready to consider another book—some of those became the early questions that fueled Range. (I discuss this a bit in my acknowledgments, for anyone who’s interested in a little more info.) So that might not be the kind of influence you were thinking, but it was definitely a big influence, on both my books.

Hillary Jordan, the author of Mudbound, influenced me. She was my neighbor, and I also took her online writing course. (That was not the online writing course I mentioned earlier.) Among other things, she made me feel like I was ready to take on a very ambitious project that was pretty different than what I’d done before. She also encouraged me to keep experimenting with my writing. Also, ya know, it’s always helpful to meet someone doing creative work you admire and realize they’re a real person, just like you. That sounds trite, and maybe it is, but I think it’s helpful.

As I mentioned above, my film editing experience really influenced how I think about structure, and I noticed that Rachel Ingalls wrote about how she specifically went looking for different types of narrative structure in art forms other than writing. I definitely became more attuned to doing that after I read her mention of it, although I had already been increasingly doing it on my own.

Gary Smith, the only four-time winner of the national magazine award (last I checked, anyway), commiserated with me about not necessarily needing (or even wanting) nut graphs if you can keep a reader engaged in the narrative progression in other ways, whether that’s by seeding questions that carry them along, or whatever other strategies. I was just a fact-checker when we discussed that—because I’d been chastised for writing something without a nut graph—and so it was very helpful to hear from one of the best that I wasn’t crazy and should keep trying it, even if it didn’t work in my initial attempts.

Philip Tetlock’s work—most notably his book Expert Political Judgment—which is discussed in chapter ten of Range, really influenced some of the ways I think. Specifically, it made me a lot more wide-roaming in my information search, and a lot more likely to keep track of my own thinking so that I can hold myself accountable for it, because it turns out we’re really not very accurate at that unless we keep track.

Lastly, Kevin Coyne, author of Marching Home, really influenced me. When I was still a science grad student, he took a meeting with me just out of interest and goodness, and I talked to him about how I wanted to write a book someday about sudden cardiac death in athletes. I had zero published clips and wasn’t a big reader at the time. (I noticed Tommy Orange recently credited getting a late start on reading with his explosive enthusiasm for it. I think something sort of similar happened to me.) Kevin was the first person to talk to me about the importance of structure. Seriously, I think my approach would have been writing stuff just linearly from the top of my head and not really editing, not structurally planning, and so he opened up my mind in a big way in that regard, and made me think about writing as a different kind of task and process than I had previously.

What is your advice to aspiring writers?

I’m going to steal a little advice from Herminia Ibarra, whose research on career transitions I discuss in Range. We learn who we are in practice, not in theory. That is, we have to actually do stuff in order to discern our interests and abilities. There’s a portion of the career-counseling industrial complex that tries to convince people that with introspection alone they can figure out who they are and what they should be doing. Instead, our insight into ourselves is constrained by our roster of previous experiences. So, I think, especially early on, writers should try different forms and genres and approaches and types of work in the writing world. You’ll broaden your toolbox while at the same time beginning to triangulate your interests and abilities. The things I’ve thus far ended up enjoying and being competent at in the writing world are largely not what I would have predicted before I started zig-zagging my way around it. And I’m committed to continuing to try new things in writing. I guess the Zen concept of “beginner’s mind” comes kind of easily to me. By the time one of my projects is published, I’m already feeling like a complete lost beginner in whatever project is next. It’s good for humility for sure! And I never feel like I’m close to having any skill nailed down. I feel further from being a finished product as a writer—whatever that is—than I did when I started.

Related to that, and my last tidbit of advice: you have to carry a big basket to bring something home. I stole that too, from former Girl Scouts CEO Frances Hesselbein, who became something of a personal role model as I got to know her during Range reporting. It means that a mind kept wide open will learn something from every experience. I think we need to proactively be trying to learn from everything we do, or else our brains just coast, because we’re kind of inclined to the lazy way of moving through the world unless we do something about it—like Milo blithely heading into the Doldrums. But if your basket is really big and you resist coasting in prior competencies, you really will learn from just about anything. One day last year, I noticed there was suddenly a bunch of wizards in my neighborhood. I walked toward what seemed to be their wellspring, and it turned out there was an anime convention at a hotel near me. So I grab a ticket and sat in on a beginner’s anime-writing class. The teacher was volunteering and said it was the first time she’d ever taught anything, and there were about five other people in the class. And I wasn’t in there thinking I’d be writing anime, but we spent a little time talking about scene openings and narrative structure and dialogue. I’m now convinced that there’s no amount of anime-writing 101 classes I could take and not continue to get at least something small out of them. So, I guess I advocate that mindset. Carry a big basket.

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