Five Minutes with....Dan Epstein
Dan Epstein has been a twitter friend of mine for several years. He's a tremendously nice fellow and, if you like baseball or rock and roll, his writing is fantastic!
Dan Epstein is the author Big Hair & Plastic Grass: Baseball and America in the Swinging '70s, Stars & Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of '76, and (with Ron Bloomberg) The Captain & Me: On and Off the Field with Thurman Munson. He writes about music and pop culture for numerous publications, including Rolling Stone, Revolver, and the Jewish Daily Forward. Jagged Time Lapse, his Substack, offers regular ruminations on his latest musical obsessions; you can read (and hopefully subscribe to) at http://danepstein.substack.com
After the research is done, do you have a specific process that you follow when doing the actual writing?
I take a can opener to my head, then lean forward and spill whatever's in there over the page. Okay, that's not quite accurate, at least from a literal standpoint, but it's the best description I can come up with. I may have a basic outline/framework going in, or I may not; but once the research is done, I'll always have a pretty good idea of what I want to say and what points I want to hit. The most difficult thing for me is figuring out how to start a piece or a chapter; but once I've got the first paragraph or two down, I'm usually off and running. Then, once I've made a mess on the page, I'll go back and clean things up a bit, see if I left anything out, etc.
Do you prefer writing in the morning, during the day, or late at night?
I generally get my best writing done in the morning (especially if I've dreamed about what I want to write the night before, which actually does happen sometimes), and between 3 pm and 8 pm. Mid-day is a more difficult writing time for me (maybe because more of the day's distractions have surfaced by then), and I find that any writing done after 8 pm usually results in a case of seriously diminishing returns
Do you have a writing nook or do you write wherever/whenever?
Back before the pandemic, and before my laptop bit the dust, I would often go to a coffee shop, library, etc. just to give myself a change of scenery while I did online research or transcribed an interview. But I've found that for actual writing, be it an article, blog post or book, I do my best work sitting at my desk in my home office. The comfort and convenience of familiar surroundings helps me concentrate (and generally get in the groove) in a way that I can't do while I'm out in public. Plus, taking a break to play with my cats, play guitar or play a record is a great way to get un-stuck whenever I'm at a writerly impasse.
How many hours a day do you typically write?
Parts of my work days are usually taken up by doing research, conducting interviews, transcribing them, pitching ideas to editors, etc., so it probably averages out to about five hours a day of actual writing.
If you could give your younger self any writing advice, what would it be?
Don't waste energy trying to write "edgy" stuff, because you'll only look back and be embarrassed by it later. And write from a place of love, not anger or hatred, because you'll write (and feel) a whole lot better if you do.
What does literary success mean to you?
Once upon a time, I thought literary success meant being able to write books full-time for a living, but the publishing landscape has changed so much in the last two decades that such a thing now seems impossible unless I somehow manage to pull a best-seller out of my ass. On the other hand, not a week goes by without at least a couple of emails from readers who tell me how much they've enjoyed my books; plus, it's pretty clear to me by now that Big Hair & Plastic Grass has really changed how 70s baseball is viewed, discussed and appreciated, which is what I hoped it would do when I first began writing it. That definitely seems like literary success to me.
Who are your writing heroes?
In baseball, Roger Angell. My mom gave me Five Seasons for my 11th birthday, and it really opened up my eyes to the human side of the game; reading it, I realized that there was much more to the players than the statistics on the back of their baseball cards, or the generic bromides that they offered reporters. And he wrote from a fan's perspective — not "fan" in the sense of the obnoxious lout whose own identity is completely wrapped up in the success or failure of his favorite team, but "fan" in the sense of someone who could step back and really appreciate the eccentricities and whimsicalities of the game, as well as its beauty, drama and history.
I'd also have to go with Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling, both of whom wrote so wonderfully and evocatively about life in New York City and elsewhere in the mid-20th century. Mike Royko, too, though as a kid I think I absorbed too much from his crankier columns and not enough from his incredibly perceptive and well-reported stuff like his book BOSS. And also Tom Wolfe; everything he wrote up through From Bauhaus to Our House really made me want to be a writer, though I found all his work from the mid-'80s onward to be fairly impenetrable.
In the music journalism world, Lester Bangs was far and away the biggest hero for me, though some of his pieces have aged pretty horribly, and of course a lot of writers (this one included) produced a lot of unreadable stuff while trying to cop his style and attitude. But then that's kind of like blaming Sgt. Pepper's for the emergence of progressive rock, isn't it?
I am always looking for new authors to tell us about their writing process. Let me know who you'd like to see here.
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