Re:Thinking with Adam GrantThe craft of storytelling with Ann Patchett | ReThinking
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
35 min read · 7,198 words- 0:00 – 0:16
Reading as a “gateway drug” and why any reading matters
- APAnn Patchett
I think every book is a gateway drug. If you can get people to read and you get them comfortable in a bookstore, then they're going to read other books. If you read nothing, you're always gonna read nothing. [upbeat music]
- 0:16 – 1:39
A father in the LAPD: famous cases, family distance, and being shielded
- AGAdam Grant
I have to start by asking you about your upbringing.
- APAnn Patchett
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
Because not many of us grow up with a father who was a police captain arresting serial killers, and I have to know what that was like and how it shaped who you are.
- APAnn Patchett
Well, [laughs] you know, my father had just about every job in the LAPD. He was involved in some high-profile cases, but I don't think those cases defined his career. He was one of the first people to interview Manson before they brought him in, and he also was the guy who picked up Sirhan the night he shot Bobby Kennedy and drove him in. That didn't affect my life, I will say, because I was a kid, and, uh, they... Those were names, um, and that's what my father did, but I was very young. And my father wasn't somebody who sat around and talked about murderers either. He, he would not have been interested in that at all.
- AGAdam Grant
That actually maybe answers the, the next question I was gonna ask you, which is it's s- so clear throughout both your work, your writing, and the reputation you have that you see the goodness in people. And I often worry that, like [laughs] when kids are raised in an environment where you're just acutely aware of the fact that there are bad people in the world, does that skew your worldview? And it sounds like you were shielded from that.
- 1:39 – 2:37
Divorce, moving to Tennessee, and a “civil servant” family identity
- APAnn Patchett
Well, my parents got divorced when I was four or five, and my mother moved me and my sister from Los Angeles to Tennessee, so I didn't grow up with my father. I saw my father a week a year, which was a great sadness. The two things that have gotten cheaper over the course of my lifetime, plane travel and long-distance phone calls, which are now free, but were a huge defining deal when I was growing up. So it wasn't like my father was coming home at night with blood on his hands, you know? I, I didn't live in that world. We loved to go to the police academy when we went out to visit, but I just thought of my father as a very popular guy. Everybody came over to the table to pay their respects. I had an uncle who was a career firefighter in Los Angeles and another uncle who was a prosecutor in the DA's office, so we were a very civil servant family.
- 2:37 – 3:45
Helping her mother become a novelist: discipline beats mystique
- AGAdam Grant
Okay, let's talk about your mother.
- APAnn Patchett
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
She was, she was a nurse before becoming a novelist, which is also my wife Allison's trajectory.
- APAnn Patchett
My mother was 60. She wanted to retire. She didn't have enough money, and I kept saying, "Write a book, write a book, write a book. You know, I'll help you." I made her do it because I saw it as the best road to retirement, and she was somebody who used to write and I think wanted to be a writer when she was young, didn't have the self-confidence. But by the time I was a writer and I was, you know, moderately successful, I could really set a course for her and push her through.
- AGAdam Grant
There's something very poetic about that, that she brought you into the world and you were able to bring her into your world.
- APAnn Patchett
Yes, absolutely. And, you know, so much of it is just discipline and having somebody to say, "I wanna see chapter four by the end of the week. You know, Mom, get on it. I'm, I'm not taking no for an answer. Okay, now I wanna see chapter five." And that's really what she needed. She just needed somebody to keep her on track.
- 3:45 – 5:15
Wanting to be a writer from age seven—before she could read fluently
- AGAdam Grant
So when did you know that you wanted to be a writer?
- APAnn Patchett
I never knew that I wanted to be anything else. I... If you were interviewing me when I was seven, I would say, "I wanna be a writer." And I don't know what that's about, but it's always been where I've landed.
- AGAdam Grant
If you go back to when you were seven-
- APAnn Patchett
Mm-hmm
- AGAdam Grant
... how much of that was you loved words, you loved books, you loved stories? What do you trace it to originally?
- APAnn Patchett
I trace it to the fact that I didn't go to school very often. There was a lot of upheaval in my family. My parents had gotten divorced. We had moved across country. We left in November, uh, when I was in first grade, and so I was very nominally going to school with some kids we were staying with, and the idea was we were gonna go back to Los Angeles. It was just all very sloppy. We moved a lot. I really didn't learn how to read until I was in the third grade, uh-
- AGAdam Grant
Wow
- APAnn Patchett
... because we just didn't really go to school regularly. I couldn't read or write with any fluency, but I could tell a story, and that became the thing that got me through. At the bottom of the class, but I would probably still be in second grade were it not for the fact that I figured out that telling a story was a good skill set to have, and I became very loyal to the skill set.
- 5:15 – 6:35
What makes a storyteller: ear for language and relentless practice
- AGAdam Grant
What was it as a second grader that made you a good storyteller?
- APAnn Patchett
I'm, I wasn't a ham. I was a quiet kid, but I could put together little poems. I could make rhymes. I had a good sense of language. I had a good ear.
- AGAdam Grant
And now, what do you think are the most crucial skills of storytelling?
- APAnn Patchett
The ability to work. The ability to keep showing up when you have sat in a chair all day long and come up with nothing, to be willing to go back and do it the next day and the next day and the next day. I feel so far away- From talent and muse and creativity and those words that seemed so important when I was young, and now I think it's the people who make it are the people who just keep showing up. It's much, much more like learning to play the cello. You're gonna put in the hours a day of practice. People don't tend to think about writing in terms of practice because we can all write. We can all tell a story, and so then if we sit down and we can't write, we can't get the story in our head onto the paper, we say we're blocked. We're not blocked. We just need to spend more time practicing.
- 6:35 – 9:15
How to practice writing: revise, get feedback, discard—and grow
- AGAdam Grant
What does that practice look like for you? Because when I hear practice, I start to think about the psychology of deliberate practice and deliberate play where there's a skill development component, and you have a cycle of, you know, I do a rep, I get some feedback, I make an adjustment, I repeat, and I'm, I'm constantly trying to improve. And I think that's a, that's a place where people get stuck writing because it's hard to gauge objectively whether you're getting better. You can gauge whether a story has gotten better or whether a sentence has gotten clearer, but did I learn anything from that? Have my skills grown? I don't know, so I don't really know how to practice, I think is the feeling many people have. You do. Tell us how.
- APAnn Patchett
Well, the willingness to work on a story, revise it, get a friend to read it, figure out how it can be better, revise it, do it again and again, and then when you get to a place where you think it's great, throw it away, and take what you've learned and put it into the next story, and work on it and revise it and revise it, and throw it away, and go again to a new story. The idea that I think so many people have is, "I'm gonna work on this story and polish it and polish it, and when I'm finished, I'm gonna send it to The New Yorker," and that's the end game. The end game is not publication. The end game is becoming a better writer.
- AGAdam Grant
The idea of writing a whole draft, refining it, and then throwing it away to start over, I think is foreign to a lot of people. I think it's smart in two ways at least. One is I think it overcomes what in psychology we would think about as anchoring and escalation of commitment biases, where you get stuck in the way that you've done it before and you don't adjust enough. And two, it, it's also a chance then to really experience your growth and progress so that you can take, as you said, all the learning that came from revising the, the previous draft and start over fresh. At the same time, it's [laughs] really hard for me to imagine just abandoning all the work that I put in. Does that ever bother you?
- APAnn Patchett
Well, it doesn't happen very often anymore, although it does happen. The ability to be honest with yourself, the ability to see your own work clearly, which if we're serious about writing, we should have. You can read something and, or I can read something of my own, and I know if it's any good or not, and I often write things that are bad and I marvel in a sense. Like, wow, I didn't know that I could be 62 years old and at this point in my career and still write something that bad.
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- 9:15 – 13:16
Writing for love, not outcome: Elizabeth Gilbert’s private essay lesson
- APAnn Patchett
But also bedrock to all of it is love. I'm doing this because I love to do it, because it's who I am, because it's how I see the world and experience and figure things out. I can think of a couple of great stories. One, years and years ago, uh, my friend Elizabeth Gilbert gave me an essay that she had written, and it was just the best thing I had ever read. It was spectacular, and I said, "Where are you gonna publish this?" And she said, "No, no, no. I wrote this for myself. This is private, and I'm showing it to you. I'm not showing this to anybody else." I said, "No, no, no. This is th- this is astonishing. You have to." She said, "No, this is a private thing. This is a true private story, and I'm not going to publish it, but I needed to write it because that's what I do." That was a huge lesson for me. So just going into something and saying, "I am writing this for the sake of writing it, always, and when I'm finished writing it, then I'll decide where it may or may not go in the world." And that is the place that you have to come at writing from. I do this because I love it. I play the cello not because I'm going to be Yo-Yo Ma in Carnegie Hall, but because I can't imagine a whole day without playing the cello.
- AGAdam Grant
And that's how you feel about writing today?
- APAnn Patchett
That's how I feel. Yeah. I mean, heaven knows I can go for long periods of time without writing, although I think about writing all the time, and that's, for me, a very similar state. I, I fall asleep every night thinking about a novel, a story, an idea in my head, the story I tell myselves. What's that Joan Didion quote? "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." And that is definitely true for me. So yes, but also it's, it's luck and privilege, and if somebody said, "You know what? It's over. You're never gonna write another book," I would say, "I've had such a great run, and I've been so lucky." I, I wouldn't die. It's not air, but it's great.
- AGAdam Grant
That seems like a healthy attitude toward it. I'm reminded of some research suggesting that for people to stay motivated writing, they have to be as interested in the process as they are in the content.
- APAnn Patchett
Absolutely.
- AGAdam Grant
And I, I think that's what a lot of people miss about writing, is you can be fascinated By the topic. But if you don't love the craft of formulating sentences and shaping paragraphs and trying to make ideas and stories and characters come to life, then you [laughs] probably shouldn't be a writer.
- APAnn Patchett
So, um, years and years, decades ago, I used to teach in a summer program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and I would teach with my friend Lucy Grealy. And she taught nonfiction, and I taught fiction, and we shared a little apartment together. And at night we would look at the homework that came in, and my students were so much better than her students. And I said, "Why is this? Why are my students better?" She said, "Because your students want to write. My students have had something horrible happen to them, and they wanna figure out a way how to sell it. They're not primarily interested in writing at all." But boy, a lot of people don't understand that. They want to be a writer, but they don't wanna write. [laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah. It, it's really unfortunate. I think, you know, it makes me think that we should, we should be careful not to define ourselves by nouns, and make sure that the verb of the activity actually resonates with us and is something we, we would wanna do, not just be.
- APAnn Patchett
Yes. Exactly. Well said.
- 13:16 – 16:20
Fiction vs. nonfiction: freedom, constraints, and essays that “arrive”
- AGAdam Grant
I, I'm really curious about your experiences with fiction versus nonfiction. As a nonfiction writer, there are moments when, when I say to my wife, who represents the more of the fiction side of our house, it would be really nice one day to wake up in the morning and be able to invent a story because, you know, oftentimes I'm trying to unpack an idea or explain a study, and I know the narrative arc that I'm looking for for the story that I want to illustrate it, and I can't quite find it, and I have to play journalist for a bunch of weeks, and it just feels like a big diversion. Like [laughs] it would be, it would be so fun to just be able to, to have total freedom. And I'm so curious because you do both about whether you feel that too, and how you would compare and contrast the joys of fiction writing versus nonfiction writing.
- APAnn Patchett
What does your wife say?
- AGAdam Grant
Allison said, "Yes, it's great to have freedom, and it's also terrible to have freedom because you could take the story anywhere." And she said, "At least you have constraints."
- APAnn Patchett
I agree with Allison.
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- APAnn Patchett
So when I am a fiction writer, and I am first and foremost a fiction writer, to be a fiction writer is to be God. You have to make the people, the trees, the leaves. You decide when the day starts, when the day stops, who lives, who dies, who falls in love, who goes on the hero's journey, all of it, and it's a massive undertaking. When I write nonfiction, I don't go looking for nonfiction. Nonfiction finds me. Sometimes something happens, and I just think, wow, you know, the universe has just handed me a perfect essay. Several years ago on my birthday, phone rings, rings, rings. Normally I don't just pick up the phone without checking caller ID, but it was my birthday, and I picked up the phone and it was a guy whose grandmother had bought a night table in a antique mall, and it turns out that this night table had been my night table in high school. A bunch of my papers from high school had fallen down the back of the drawers, poems, photographs of my friends, notes, and an award. An aw- this is why the guy tracked me down. It was, like, an award that I had won from Rotary about an essay I had written on the Pledge of Allegiance, and I'm thinking, "This is just like someone is saying, 'Okay, here you go. Here's an essay.'" And where does the essay begin? It begins when the phone starts ringing. Where does the essay stop? It stops when this guy comes to my bookstore with his wife and his baby, and he brings me these papers. And in the middle, I'm thinking about the journey of this piece of furniture and how things can come back to you. It sounds like a piece of fiction, but it's a completely shaped essay about our relationship to our past and to things and how what means so much to one person means nothing to another person. It was a great essay.
- 16:20 – 18:07
Turning real love into fiction: grief, friendship, and writing ‘Whistler’
- AGAdam Grant
I imagine, though, you have experiences in fiction that are like that where something happens in your life and it becomes a jumping-off point for a story, or you meet somebody and you think, "You know what? I could base a character on them."
- APAnn Patchett
Yes. That's true. It doesn't happen as often. I'm kind of clawing around in the dark or squinting. That's what putting a novel together always feels like to me, squinting. And really, Whistler was very different because that was a case in which a friend of mine died, Jim Fox died on his 85th birthday, and I was writing a piece for The New Yorker about a glow worm cave in New Zealand, and there was a little piece in that essay about Jim's death, and I thought, "Oh, wow, I can really write Jim." And I thought, "What if I wrote a novel in which I took all of the love that Jim had for me and all of the love I had for Jim, and I made up a story, and I put the real love onto made-up people in a made-up story?" It was a very easy and joyful book to write because I had such a sensation of being with my friend.
- AGAdam Grant
Oh. Well, you did it beautifully. I could feel the love in the book, and I actually read it about half as quickly as I would normally read a book of similar length because I didn't wanna miss a sentence.
- APAnn Patchett
Hmm. Thank you.
- AGAdam Grant
No, thank you. It was, it was- It was a delightful experience, and it's, it's not my typical genre, as somebody who normally turns to fiction for sci-fi, thriller, mystery, and I enjoyed it, I think, all the more because of it.
- 18:07 – 19:14
Who reads what—and why she’s content as long as people read
- APAnn Patchett
That's really fascinating. Um, I was doing an interview recently, and the topic of conversation is, how do you get men to read literary fiction? And somebody was saying, "Oh, literary fiction, it's really been taken over by women." And I was like, "Well, you know, it's, it's not like the writing's been taken over. It's that more women read literary fiction and more men read nonfiction." I own this bookstore, and the nonfiction, when you walk in the door, is to the right, and the fiction is to the left, and it's not 100% true, but the men tend to go to the right, and the women tend to go to the left.
- AGAdam Grant
How do you think about changing that? 'Cause I think, I think we all need to read fiction and nonfiction.
- APAnn Patchett
You know, I, I don't think about changing it. I'm happy that people read. [laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- APAnn Patchett
Anytime somebody is reading, I think it's a bonus, and I think if you read always in the same genre, someday you might trip over into another genre. So I would never say, "Well, I just wanna make sure that kid grows up and reads literary fiction."
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- APAnn Patchett
I just wanna make sure that kid grows up and reads.
- 19:14 – 23:00
Why she opened Parnassus Books—and how it changed her life
- AGAdam Grant
Spot on. And we have to, we have to talk about your decision to run a bookstore because, you know, b- when I think about what would, what would compel any writer to own a bookstore, the first thing I think of is discovery. I have such fond memories of being a kid and walking into the library and walking into several bookstores and not knowing what I was gonna find, and that does not happen on the internet, for the most part.
- APAnn Patchett
No.
- AGAdam Grant
I, I get recommendations that are similar to what I've already read. And so how does that relate to your motivation for doing this?
- APAnn Patchett
[laughs] You're absolutely right. It's completely true, and it doesn't relate at all to my motivation.
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- APAnn Patchett
So my motivation was the bookstores in Nashville closed. This was 15 years ago. And I waited around. I've never wanted to own a bookstore. That was never my dream. I waited for someone else to do it. No one did it. I met a woman who was a retired sales rep from Random House. She wanted to run a bookstore. We decided to go into business together, total strangers. So, you know, we just started this thing from nothing because a city has to have a bookstore, you know? You just have to do it.
- AGAdam Grant
Well, some would say also you could easily hand it off and not have such a central role in it. What has kept you so involved?
- APAnn Patchett
Well, it, to a large extent, I have handed it off. I hire people I really love and trust, and they run it. And the main thing I do in that bookstore is we have a first editions club, which I like to say is like Fruit of the Month Club that doesn't rot.
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- APAnn Patchett
So I'm always picking a book six months, five months out. It absolutely destroys my life because this is what I'm doing constantly. I'm just on the hamster wheel. People are sending me galleys night and day because they want me to pick their book, and yet, even as it drives me out of my mind, I have read so many fabulous books that I would never have found otherwise, and that's been great. The other thing I do, I interview authors who come to visit for the store, so that's an amazing opportunity. I just interviewed Douglas Stuart about how ... his new book, John of John, which is one of the best books of the year. He wrote Shuggie Bain and won the Booker several years ago. But as I was going home that night, I thought, "If I didn't own this store and Douglas Stuart was coming to, say, Vanderbilt to do an event, would I have gone?" I don't know. It was, like, one of the greatest nights of my life to meet this guy and sit there and be in conversation with him. It was holy. It was absolutely amazing for everyone in the room, and I could have missed it had I not been the person who was interviewing the author.
- AGAdam Grant
Well, I think it's safe to say that you love people much more than the stereotypical writer does.
- APAnn Patchett
If you had interviewed me before I opened a bookstore, I think I would have seemed much more like the stereotypical writer because I was always protecting my privacy. My idea of myself is I am a shy, quiet introvert who wants to stay home and write fiction, but for 15 years, I've owned a bookstore, and now I am the national spokesperson for all things independent books, authors. And constantly being pushed out of my comfort zone has made me a happier and more productive person.
- AGAdam Grant
It does track with the evidence that even we introverts get energy from interacting with other people.
- APAnn Patchett
Yes.
- 23:00 – 26:35
A tent revival for reading: community, tours, and optimism vs. “toxic positivity”
- AGAdam Grant
You spoke to this in your recent TED Talk when you said, I'm gonna quote you, "That solitary endeavor has proven to be a means of connection."
- APAnn Patchett
Yes. And that's what I see in the bookstore, and that's what I see when I go out on book tour, and 1,000 people come in a city, and it's n- they wanna talk about my book, but they wanna talk about reading. They wanna talk about everything they're reading. They want recommendations. They wanna meet each other in the signing line, who's sitting next to me in the audience, and talk about books. It's like a tent revival for reading. And so when people say to me, "Reading's dead. Books are dying. This is all over," I'm like, "Maybe it is in your world, but every morning when we unlock the doors at Parnassus, there are lines of people who wanna come in and buy a book and talk about books." So my evidence is, is different.
- AGAdam Grant
We need more of that in the world, I think.
- APAnn Patchett
Yes, absolutely.
- AGAdam Grant
So let's talk a little bit about Whistler. I don't wanna spoil any plot points, but there were a few themes that jumped out at me that I thought would be interesting to ask you to riff on. You are, um, a You are not particularly kind to a self-help author who's peddling positivity in this book. And th- there were, there were two h- I thought, hilarious lines, um, that came out of one of the books that he was well-known for. "Bounce on your toes while brushing your teeth. Feel the positivity radiating up from your ankles." A- I wanna know, why were you so eager to poke fun at that? Have you been bothered by toxic positivity in the world and the Pollyanna sense that people are pressured to be upbeat and optimistic at all times? Like, what, what's, what's behind this?
- APAnn Patchett
I like the idea of a really grumpy guy pushing positivity as a unit of sales. You know, this is, this is how he has figured out how he is going to make his money. He is not a positive person, but this is his empire. So, um, also, I will say, and I hadn't thought about this before, I, throughout the course of my career and in my life, I get a lot of grief from people because I am a positive person, and people call me a Pollyanna and unrealistic. And I always say, "You know, why would it be more realistic if I wrote books about serial killers?" You don't know any serial killers. I don't know any serial killers.
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- APAnn Patchett
I know plenty of nice people. You know plenty of nice people. Why do we take the darkest parts of our nature to be somehow more credible and true? And I don't believe that. I believe in what I see, and what I see in my life, in my bookstore, my house, my neighborhood, the people that I interact with, if I'm in the airport, if I'm in a restaurant, I just see people, by and large, being really kind to one another. Now, granted, these are the eyes that I have in my head, and I looked at the world through my eyes, and I am, by my nature, a positive, cheerful person, and I have been ever since I was a child. No virtue in that whatsoever. I was born this way. And if you have a cheerful, sunny affect, people tend to meet you in a cheerful, sunny way.
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah, I, I don't think anyone who's ever interacted with you would doubt it-
- APAnn Patchett
[laughs]
- 26:35 – 40:31
Randomness, agency, and bittersweet love: ‘Whistler’ themes and closing segments
- AGAdam Grant
... for a second. Another thing that, uh, that I was so curious to hear your reaction to is you have a line about randomness, a paragraph about randomness. I'll, I'll just read you a bit. You say, "There's so much randomness to youth. The person assigned to share your room becomes your friend. The girl you pass on your way out the door becomes your wife, and from these random encounters our entire lives are built. There are 10 grandchildren now, 10 new people who in part owe their lives on Earth to a series, essentially, of random events." How do you feel about that? And [laughs] does it delight you? Does it bother you?
- APAnn Patchett
I believe it. I would say it neither delights me nor bothers me, but I think it's true. When I was looking at colleges, I had gone to a Catholic girls school for 12 years, and we did not have a guidance counselor, and my parents weren't particularly interested in my going to coll- I mean, they wanted me to go to college, but it was not a group activity. It was just something that I was gonna figure out, and I didn't know what I was doing. And the schools that I applied to were just wildly random because I didn't have any idea what I was doing. And one of the schools I applied to, there was one girl there painting. She said, "What do you wanna do?" And I said, "I wanna write, but I'm also interested in painting." She said, "Oh, if you wanna write, you should go to Sarah Lawrence."
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- APAnn Patchett
And I did. That was the sum total of collegiate advice I received. A stranger in Alfred, New York. I went up to interview at Alfred, and as I was walking around the art department, she said, "That's where the writers go." "Oh, okay. Thanks very much." At Sarah Lawrence, I studied for a year each with Allan Gurganus, Russell Banks, and Grace Paley. You couldn't go to Harvard and get that lineup. In classes where there were 12 students in the class, you stayed with that teacher all year, and you met with them individually once a week. There could not have been a better, more life-shaping education for me, and, and a stranger that I happened to walk by in a ceramics studio was the person who told me to go there. Couldn't be more random, and yet my entire life was built off of that encounter.
- AGAdam Grant
I mean, it's s- it's such a great example of what bothers me [laughs] about the randomness, or used to bother me, which is I wonder how many of those moments we miss.
- APAnn Patchett
Oh, sure.
- AGAdam Grant
Because what if you had arrived a minute later or a minute earlier, right? That, that chance encounter might never have occurred. We might not get to read you, right? [laughs] It's possible, right? And-
- APAnn Patchett
Right
- AGAdam Grant
... that, that I think would be a great travesty. On the other hand, I think, okay, [laughs] we have to also then be extra grateful for all the random connections that do get made. And at some level, you know, it's not the fact that the, the random event occurred, right? It's the fact that then you took the initiative to take that advice to heart, to follow it, and then to make the most of the experience you had at Sarah Lawrence. And so I guess that tells me there's, [laughs] there's still a role for human agency and proactivity in the process. This relates to another moment in Whistler that I wanted to ask you about, which is, it's toward the end. You wrote, "It had been one possible scenario, Eddie and Abigail, which could have worked had every single thing about them been different." It was such a striking line for me because every single thing about them had been different, they wouldn't have been who they were, and yet-
- APAnn Patchett
You know what I meant
- AGAdam Grant
... you're inviting the reader to consider, consider the possibility that they could change much more dramatically than we normally assume, and I wanted to hear you talk about that.
- APAnn Patchett
They couldn't have changed. It could not have worked, but they still loved each other, and it took them their whole life maybe to be able to get to a place where they could look back and see, oh, that would never have worked because we are who we are. But it, there's a sweetness in just acknowledging that I love you. It can't work, but I see you, and I know you, and I love you, and I let you go.
- AGAdam Grant
Okay, time for a lightning round.
- APAnn Patchett
Oh, boy. All right.
- AGAdam Grant
So you can pause in between, of course, if you wish.
- APAnn Patchett
[laughs] If I'm not fast enough for the lightning round. [laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] No one is, it turns out.
- APAnn Patchett
Okay. All right.
- AGAdam Grant
Uh, let me ask you first, what is the worst writing advice that you hear people give regularly?
- APAnn Patchett
Write what you know.
- AGAdam Grant
And you hate that because...
- APAnn Patchett
Well, I mean, it, I don't, I don't hate it, but there are all sorts of things that we don't know, I don't know anything about that I write about. I write what I'm interested in. The very best part of writing is that it means that I get to do research. I wrote a book about ichthyology. I went to the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and hung out with all of those dead fish. That was not writing about what I know. That was writing about what was interesting to me and how lucky that I got to hang out there.
- AGAdam Grant
Write what you wanna find out.
- APAnn Patchett
Yeah. You're writing about your mother all the time.
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] Yeah. I, I think, I think writing about your curiosity is, is much more compelling than-
- APAnn Patchett
Yes
- AGAdam Grant
... writing about just your experience or your knowledge. All right, what's your, what's your favorite writing tip that you don't hear given often?
- APAnn Patchett
Posture is everything. [laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
Uh-oh.
- APAnn Patchett
There is no-
Episode duration: 40:41
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