My guest this week is author David Roth, who spent thirty-five years as a professional writer of documentaries, corporate communications, multimedia, and more before turning to creative writing. He completed his MFA in 2017 and published his debut novel, The Femme Fatale Hypothesis in 2019. That book just received the American Book Fest’s 2023 International Book Award for Best Literary Fiction. David and I talk about the differences between professional and creative writing, the pros and cons of the MFA, the inspiration for his novel, and more (and yes, the hypothesis is a real thing!).
Episode breakdown:
[00:03:28] Imagination, challenges, and collaboration in writing.
[00:09:12] Being curious drives David to learn more.
[00:12:46] What is “The Femme Fatale Hypothesis”?
[00:16:59] Pursuing professional writing.
[00:27:02] MA experience: Learn, broaden, and challenge your writing.
[00:29:10] Seek critical feedback to improve your writing.
[00:37:00] Don’t copy others, focus on your uniqueness.
[00:44:04] Beginnings of “The Femme Fatale Hypothesis”
[[00:48:04] Death: Grief, fear, agency, and choices.
00:56:16] “The Swerve” as a wake-up call.
[01:01:10] Second novel set in the fictional town of Marsville, Pennsylvania.
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Transcript: David Roth
Please note: This is an unedited transcript, provided as a courtesy, and reflects the actual conversation as closely as possible. Please forgive any typographical or grammatical errors.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:06]:
Welcome to Follow Your Curiosity. Ordinary people, extraordinary creativity. Here’s how to get unstuck. I’m your host, creativity coach Nancy Norbeck. Let’s go. My guest this week is author David Roth, who spent 35 years as a professional writer of documentaries, corporate communications, multimedia, and more before turning to creative writing. He completed his MFA in 2017 and published his debut novel, The Femme Fatale Hypothesis in 2019. That book just received the American Book Fest’s 2023 International Book Award for best literary fiction. David and I talk about the differences between professional and creative writing, the pros and cons of the MFA, the inspiration for his novel, and more. And yes, the hypothesis is a real thing. Here’s my conversation with David Roth.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:59]:
David.
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:00]:
Welcome to Follow Your Curiosity.
David Roth [00:01:02]:
Well, thank you, Nancy. I appreciate your invite.
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:05]:
So I start everybody with the same question. Were you a creative kid or did you discover your creative side later in life?
David Roth [00:01:13]:
Well, actually, those are yes and yes questions. As a kid, I suppose I was creative, not in the sense that most would think of it in terms of, oh, I was writing stories when I was six years old or anything like that, or painting pictures or singing and dancing around the house. But I was always intrigued and curious and interested in things that were going on and imitating. And I think probably the most from the creative side of things, it was more of the imitating and having a good time and a good joke over things. It’s the kind of kind of thing where in high school, my girlfriend and I actually were voted class wits because of the way we would the way we would banter back and forth in school. So I’m not sure if that was a compliment or not, but I think that’s where the creativity came in was basically in language and joking and having a good time. Now, the serious side of that came much later. I did engage in the creative arts as a professional in the sense that I was writing for a living. But it was not my writing. It was professionals writing for either research, nonfiction, like medical writing, that sort of thing, or it was just corporate writing training, that sort of thing as well. So the personal writing, the fictional writing that I’m doing now came much later.
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:53]:
You have some interesting distinctions in there because you said class wit, and I thought, well, that seems like an upgrade from class clown. And I don’t know how many high school classes would have thought to have a class wit.
David Roth [00:03:05]:
They have both.
Nancy Norbeck [00:03:06]:
Yeah, that’s kind of interesting. But also I think that it’s super important to distinguish writing that you do as part of a job or for other people from the things that you write for yourself. And I know a lot of people think that that’s kind of the same thing, but it’s really not.
David Roth [00:03:28]:
No, I mean, this is where I’m sure we’ll get into this idea of imagination. I make it very clear, and I don’t know how clean you prefer your language. Be careful. I guess I could use a little softer terms, but there’s this moment when you’re writing professionally where you basically don’t want to make anything up, because the people who are going to sign off on it pay for it, but somebody’s going to say, who wrote this crap? And you’re going to have to raise your hand and say, I’m the guy in the room who knows the least about this, but nobody else wants to face a blank screen or a blank piece of paper. So I’m the guy who put some words on the page. And now you’re all editors. I know it. You’re all great editors, and you know what’s best. So now you tell me what you want this to say. And I’m that guy who is willing in the professional environment, because I enjoy facing a blank piece of paper and a challenge. And so I would put something down on paper, and if you’re going to do that, you cannot have skin that’s really skin. It’s got to be leather, thick, and you just have to just roll with it, because no matter how much you love it or you think it’s clever, it’s probably not going to be the final product. Right? When I started talking to my editor about my book, On The Other Hand well, you know, there were there were, like, gauntlets thrown down, you know, no, I’m not changing the ending. I’m just saying, you know, you know, and this is my ending. This is my book. So that’s where, for me, there’s a big difference between saying, look, I just put some words on the page. You do what you want. And there’s a big chasm between that and these are my words. Don’t mess.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:13]:
Yeah. And I think it helps. I don’t know if this was the case for you, but I think it helps if your name is not on the stuff that you’re writing for someone else, because I find it’s always easier. I do something and somebody’s like, no, we want this and we want that, and it should be this way. And I reach a point where, even if I feel really strongly about it, I’m like, yeah, you know what? My name’s not on it. You can do whatever you want with it. I don’t care.
David Roth [00:05:35]:
Absolutely.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:36]:
But if my name is on it, then that’s a different story.
David Roth [00:05:40]:
Yeah, it’s a different story, but it is just a different world, because what people care about when you’re writing professionally is, are you easy to work with? Are you flexible? Do you understand that? There’s a guy who’s going to come in and it’s typically a guy who’s going to come in at the 11th hour and blow everything up because nobody in the group, the production manager didn’t bother to get him to sign off on various drafts coming up to. So you just have to realize that you’re going to write three different drafts and then somebody who has the ability to say yes or no is going to jump on at the 11th hour, everything’s going to change. You’re going to be staying up late to write the words that he wants to fall in love with. And it may just be a matter of changing a sentence so he thinks he had some power, whatever it is. But that’s what you have to get used to when you’re writing for somebody else. And nobody looks at the name on the coverage as of who wrote this and don’t ever hire him again. What they’ll do is they go, that guy was a pain in the ass to work with. Don’t ever hire him again. So I just try to be when I’m working professionally, I just try to be very flexible and very amenable to change. And I save all the egoism for my own work.
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:00]:
I think that’s wise. I think that’s the key to sanity.
David Roth [00:07:04]:
Perhaps that’s just one, maybe one of them. Although egoism over your own work can be rather devastating as well.
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:13]:
That is very true as anyone who has ever read a bad review of their work will never know.
David Roth [00:07:20]:
Exactly.
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:22]:
Yeah. So how long have you written professionally?
David Roth [00:07:29]:
I wrote professionally for 35 plus years, but writing for myself is really I’d still call it an avocation. It doesn’t bring me any money. I published my first novel. I’ve had a few short stories published. Boy, it was exciting to get a check for $100 for a short story that I published right out of after getting my MFA. But when you start towing up how many drafts and hours you spent writing that 5000 word story that you got paid $100 for, there’s not a living in that. You could write 100 of those stories, get 100 of those $100 bills. You can’t make a living on the time you’re spending writing a 5000 word story.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:10]:
Yeah. We hate to shatter anybody’s illusions, but 95% of the time, that’s what it looks like.
David Roth [00:08:21]:
I got paid and for the first three stories that I sold, I got $100 for one. I got four copies of the of the journal. That’s how I was paid for another one of my stories. And another one was a I think it was a $200 2nd prize in a contest. So that was very lucrative. So, yeah, that’s big money. Yeah, but I spent a lot more than that submitting to paid paid readings.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:50]:
Basically, you can really quit your day job on that.
David Roth [00:08:53]:
Exactly. Especially when you’re spending $25 to submit to each of the other places that sent you a no, thank you notice.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:00]:
Right? Yeah, right. Well, I’m curious to know how, if you think that it’s happened at all, the professional writing has influenced your creative writing.
David Roth [00:09:12]:
I think what’s basically happened is I realize that you’re talking about curiosity here. What I find is that I’m struck by how much I don’t know. I’m not one of those people who has a particular area of expertise. I don’t have a PhD in something musicology or something else I’m going to write. I just get curious about things and so I look into them. And so I might have the beginnings of a story. I might have something that is sort of drawn from my personal experience. But now that character has got to have an occupation or that character, some situation has to come up and it may involve anything from police work to somebody who is an entomologist. And I don’t know anything about these things and so I just love digging into them. And part of my courage or my willingness to do that and feel and who hubris that I feel that I can actually do it and make sense of it is that I had to do it all the time. People would call me and say we need to write about these new 13 megabit computers or whatever. We have these computers, the latest technology back in the day. I mean, I’m talking decades ago. And then somebody else would call me and say we need somebody who can translate research on Alzheimer’s disease into layman’s English because we are doing a presentation to these people of awards for what they’ve accomplished. And so you need to try to turn all this medical gobbledygook into something that sounds like English. And I said, sure I can do that. I’ve never done it before, but I can do that. So you have conversations with people and you tell them I have no idea what you’re talking about. What did you just say? And you find out that there are 27 different names protein when it comes to medicine. I think that’s what’s informed my writing more than anything. It’s just sort of a fearlessness about what, I don’t know.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:18]:
That’s awesome. And you’re a little bit of an expert on so many different things now, I’m sure.
David Roth [00:11:25]:
Not really. Expert is the absolute wrong word. I’m a dilettant a little bit about.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:31]:
A lot of stuff.
David Roth [00:11:32]:
Exactly. I learned a little bit. And by the way, what I’ve learned that little bit that I’ve learned by anybody who actually knows anything, I would be challenged on what it is I think I know.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:47]:
Yeah, but it’s a cool way to encounter things that you undoubtedly would never have encountered otherwise.
David Roth [00:11:52]:
Absolutely. I just dug into things. My novel was dedicated to a scientist working out of Australia who introduced me to the concept of the femme fatale hypothesis. And that conversation with her, that first conversation, she actually exchanged emails with me and we just talked about my sort of layman’s disbelief in this phenomenon and she explained it to me. And it’s just that sort of thing interacting with people like that who are PhDs studying the behavior of praying mantises in Australia. Now, I’m an expert. There you go.
Nancy Norbeck [00:12:36]:
We might be getting slightly ahead of ourselves here, but I feel like probably everybody else who’s listening is wondering the same thing I am, which is, what is the femme fatale hypothesis?
David Roth [00:12:46]:
That is actually the title of my first novel published in November of 2021, and the only novel that’s been actually picked up and published so far. But that novel is a novel that is named after a phenomenon that takes place in the insect world that intrigues the protagonist of the story. One of the protagonists in the story. And that is that the false garden mantid in Australia has been shown to actually exhibit a behavior whereby females who are in poor health are able to increase their Pheromone production to a level greater than the most healthy females. And so they can attract male mantises, supposedly for mating purposes, but instead they simply eat them. So there’s no mating that takes place because all that female is trying to do is survive and survive to mate another day. And so that was a hypothesis. They were wondering why these females didn’t just expire, why they were able to survive. And so they tested this woman, actually tested the hypothesis, and she proved that the sickest of the females could actually out attract the healthiest of the species, and they could increase their physical being by 40% by consuming one male.
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:25]:
Wow. That is a hell of an evolutionary flex never have imagined would exist, which.
David Roth [00:14:35]:
Is exactly what my main character when I decided that he was somebody who was intrigued by this. His consternation, as he is sort of losing his grip on the world, his consternation of all this is how can this survival technique survive evolution, right? The survival of the individual over the survival of the species. How does that happen? How does a species actually reward a sick, disabled, essentially a disabled diseased creature? Instead of isolating that creature and letting her die and supporting the healthier of the species, how is it that they’re attracted to the weakest? And it’s all about Pheromone production and comes down to that. So I asked her, I said, how do you think this has developed? And she said, she thinks it’s just a strategy for a quick meal. That was Dr. Barry’s response was, I just think it’s a strategy for a quick meal.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:45]:
Does it significantly prolong their lives? Does it boost their health?
David Roth [00:15:48]:
Sure. Absolutely. 40% with the consumption of one male. And now she can go back to trying to get herself back up to a more second state, and then she can start reproducing again. But she suspends the creation of eggs so she can drive more hormone, more energy to Pheromone production. So she has fewer eggs, she has less ability to actually procreate, but she attracts more males. It’s pretty dastard.
Nancy Norbeck [00:16:23]:
That’s just wow.
David Roth [00:16:26]:
And it was just that I mean, it’s that curiosity in my mind trying to figure out how an entomologist, how somebody like that would reconcile that, their study of the insect world, and then what that could do for me metaphorically as a writer in terms of taking that and weaving it into a relationship between two people.
Nancy Norbeck [00:16:48]:
Wow. Well, let’s back up slightly and talk about how you decided to do more creative writing and then we’ll jump back to this point.
David Roth [00:16:59]:
Well, the thing is that I think the skip I made from high school and being Mr. Witty and then going into professional writing and then leaving that to focus on my own fiction, there’s a point, flexion point where I didn’t stop. And that was I was accepted. After completing my studies in film and television communications at Stanford, I was accepted into the Ma program, creative writing fiction at NYU. And I was studying with one of my childhood heroes, el Doctoro, whose book of Daniel was one of the books that I read and felt suddenly that I understood why books were so important you and how reading could feel if you read deeply and seriously. And we’re just trying to pass the test. So I was delighted that I was admitted and I was at home working on my fiction and studying for my Ma with a one and a half year old daughter in my lap and realizing there’s not a future in medicine. I have to figure out how I’m going to feed this child. It’s not going to come from paying NYU to teach me how to write. So at the same time that I was at NYU studying for this Ma, I was also doing some freelance creative writing for people who were doing museum installation video, you know, interactive video installations and writing promotional videos for corporations, that sort of thing. And I was sitting there one night and said, I know how to write. Why should I pay somebody else to teach me how to write? I’m making money writing. So I dropped out of NYU. And that move sort of condemned me to a life of professional writing because it’s very difficult to especially when you’re doing my career, if you want to call it a career, included a great deal of freelance writing and then periods of being professionally engaged for four or five years with a company and then going back to my freelance writing. So there wasn’t a clear arc I mean, there wasn’t a clear arc where I was suddenly somebody’s CEO. I was just sort of in and out of these roles and got the most pleasure out of just being a contract writer regardless of what I was writing. But it’s very hard to do that, make that living and then come home and do what so many of these gloriously talented writers do. And that is get up at 04:00 in the morning and do 2 hours of work before the kids wake up and somehow, some way, after a year, crank out some glorious novel that we all get to enjoy. That was not me. And part of the problem was I had not gone through the process of really learning how to write. And so I finally realized not only that, I hadn’t put the time in and gotten the licks in where when you’re 20 something years old, you think, oh, these people are saying no to me because they’re just jealous or whatever. It’s like, this is brilliant stuff. And then you realize that when you realize you don’t know anything, not only about what you’re writing about, but you don’t even know anything about writing, then you open yourself up to the possibility of going back to school. So I did go back, and I got an MFA. And that is just what launched me into focusing on all that I did not know. And it’s been a really great adventure. I mean, for me, it’s less about publishing now, it’s more about writing. It’s more about just the exercise of sitting down with a blank page and trying to fill it with your own imagination, as opposed to somebody else’s idea of what they need to say to sell some products or train some people.
Nancy Norbeck [00:21:20]:
Yeah, there’s such different kinds of writing, and I don’t know about you, but I have encountered an awful lot of people who say to me, oh, but you’re a writer. You can write, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, no, I don’t know anything at all about that kind of writing. That is not the kind of writing I do. That is a completely different beast.
David Roth [00:21:38]:
Yeah. First time I heard the term technical writing, I thought, oh, I could do that too. And then they told me what it was. I don’t want to do that.
Nancy Norbeck [00:21:46]:
I did that for like, a year.
David Roth [00:21:49]:
Oh my God.
Nancy Norbeck [00:21:51]:
And it’s interesting because this was early mid ninety s, and I remember hearing people talk about how, oh, being a technical writer made my other writing so much better, and I can see how that would be the case, and yet at the same time, it didn’t encourage me to write at home. I think that I used up all my energy on trying to be super clear about everything at work, which is where I am sure the improvements came from that people saw. But I was just like, I’m tired of dealing with words for today. I am not writing anything else. When I get home, I will read someone else’s, but I am not writing my own. And I think that’s a tough line, and I’m sure that happens in other professions, too, but I think it’s a tough line for writers if you’re writing for other people all day, it is tricky to find the energy to write your own stuff at any time, whether it’s 04:00 A.m. Or 08:00 P.m. Or whatever.
David Roth [00:22:51]:
It is absolutely, exactly what I was running into. And by the way. It’s kind of exhausting to deal with that kind of work all the time. I’m working on a project right now to make a little pin money, and I’m dealing with law stuff related to the law, and I’m being shown these documents that explain issues related to defending a deposition. And I’m having trouble keeping my eyes open reading this stuff. And it’s really tough to go through this kind of stuff staring at it all day long, trying to translate into something, trying to create something creative out of it in terms of how you’re going to communicate this to somebody else and then switch gears and say, oh. Now I’m going to go to scene three. In this novel between these two characters I’ve created, you just can’t hear their voices at that point. You’re like, I’m so distracted by this other work, I can’t even hear my characters think.
Nancy Norbeck [00:23:47]:
Yeah. And it’s interesting because when I was in high school, there were people who said, oh, you like to write. You should be a lawyer. And you’re saying that. And I’m going, no.
David Roth [00:24:00]:
You talk about technical. Those people who were talking about technical writing were probably saying that it made them having to be very concise, very specific and very clear in their writing, and they probably thought that made them really better writers. If you want to be a lawyer, you have to obfuscate, you have to deceive, you have to be as unclear as possible and hope somebody else steps in and steps in the muck and reveals something that they weren’t supposed to reveal because you’ve asked the question such an obtuse way that they thought they understood it, but they didn’t. So it’s a completely different world.
Nancy Norbeck [00:24:35]:
Yeah. Law is like the embodiment of why use one word when 37 will do.
David Roth [00:24:41]:
And when 28 of them are words nobody’s ever heard before or the lawyer might have made up on the spot.
Nancy Norbeck [00:24:47]:
Half of them are in Latin.
David Roth [00:24:51]:
And that’s where the medical writing comes in, too. That’s what I mean. You realize that all these different words. So what is that? Oh, it’s just it’s a protein. And what is that? Well, that’s a protein, too. Why do they have all these different names for protein?
Nancy Norbeck [00:25:04]:
I’m glad you can keep track of which protein is which, because to me, they’re all just protein. Yeah. Which no disrespect to people who do that because it is definitely a talent and it’s one that I don’t have great respect for anyone who does. But yeah.
David Roth [00:25:25]:
That’S why Chat GPT does better on medical tests than doctors, which is terrifying. Well, it’s just because the doctors are like, what was that word again for protein?
Nancy Norbeck [00:25:38]:
Which Latin word is the one I.
David Roth [00:25:40]:
Which was the word? Was this an allele or was this a let’s see, wait a minute. What kind of protein was it?
Nancy Norbeck [00:25:45]:
Yeah, so how did you strike that balance when you started writing your own stuff.
David Roth [00:25:50]:
I quit.
Nancy Norbeck [00:25:52]:
That’ll do it.
David Roth [00:25:55]:
I walked away from my professional life and like I said, I’m working on a project now. Right now I don’t look for work anymore. But I was that guy who was easy to get along with, a quick learner, very flexible. So I still have people calling me and saying, hey, I don’t know what you’re doing right now. I know you’re working on a novel probably, but we need somebody to knock out this script or whatever. And I’m like, yeah, I can do that. What’s it pay? My professional rate has gone up. My hourly rate has gone up. The less interest I am in having the work, I think that’s totally fair.
Nancy Norbeck [00:26:34]:
I’ll pull myself back into your world, but this is what it’s going to cost you.
David Roth [00:26:38]:
Yeah, especially. They say they need somebody to fix something somebody else wrote. Like, oh, my repair rate is really high.
Nancy Norbeck [00:26:49]:
Yeah. Wow. So you went and you did the MFA. I’m curious to know how the MFA experience compared to the Ma experience, as much of it as you did.
David Roth [00:27:02]:
Well, the Ma experience was interesting because it was college again, so it wasn’t just creative writing. So I was taking a creative writing course with doctoral, and I was also taking other courses where basically when you’re studying for an Ma, it’s a place like NYU. What they’re basically saying to you is, you don’t know anything. You have nothing to write about because you don’t know anything. So you have to learn stuff to write about. So we’re going to have you reading books and studying history. So take other electives that are outside of the creative writing department. We expect you to earn enough credits to graduate, and we’re not going to tell you which ones what you have to read, but go find other stuff. Learn about other stuff so that you have stuff to write about when you get done. Meanwhile, you’re also going to take these classes and workshops. And again, when I was at that point, I was late 20s, early thirty s, and I thought I knew everything. So what the hell, what do we need NYU for?
Nancy Norbeck [00:28:03]:
Yeah. We all think we know everything at that age, right?
David Roth [00:28:07]:
Sure. I read a couple of books. I read on moral fiction by John Gardner. I knew what it meant to be a writer.
Nancy Norbeck [00:28:19]:
Having done an MFA, it is an interesting choice because it’s not necessarily the right choice for everybody. I don’t know about your experience, but I think a lot of people go into an MFA thinking that it’s going to get them a teaching job, which I think is less and less likely as time goes by, especially now that there are PhDs in creative writing. I think fewer places are taking an MFA as a terminal degree. Yeah, but I think it’s either that I’m going to get a teaching job in teach writing or I’m going to become the great American novelist. And neither one of those is guaranteed with the MFA. So it’s if people ask me whether or not they should go get an MFA, I usually say, it depends on what you want from it.
David Roth [00:29:10]:
Yeah, my answer to that would be, what do you need? What is your writing need? Because I think what my writing, what I needed is people whose job it was to have to read my work and have to give me good feedback on it. I could send a story off to my sister, and she’d tell me what I spelled wrong or where my punctuation was wrong, but she wouldn’t be able to offer willing friends. Same way with friends, people who are familiars, they’ll tell you general statements about, I liked it, I didn’t like it. I was a little confused by this. But they won’t say, this was my experience of reading this story and articulated in such a way where you can go, oh, if that’s what you were thinking about, I screwed up. I’m not talking about somebody telling you how to fix it, because as a writer, that’s your job. It’s your job to figure out how to get it right. But understanding in a very critical way. Somebody who is a deep reader, a critical reader. Someone like a Francine Prose. You read her book, if you’ve ever read how to Read Like a Writer. Somebody who reads like that and understands that they do not have to put on the kid gloves, they can tell you exactly what you need to know is their experience as a reader of your work. Because if you’re trying to create a certain type of experience, you’re trying to give rise to certain emotions, and you’re trying to befuddle and intrigue or whatever it is, and none of what you’re trying to do is coming across, then something is wrong and you have to figure out how to fix it. But if you’re getting the feedback that you expected, people are asking questions as they’re going through that are exactly the questions you want them to be asking and exactly the things you want them to be wondering about and exactly the reasons why you want them to turn the page. Then you can revel in the fact that you’re doing it right, it’s working. And so you need that kind of feedback that you can tell, is it working or is it not? And I needed I did not have that group of friends around me at that point in my life. If I’d stayed at NYU, maybe I would have had ten people who were all in different phases of their careers and their lives that I could send papers to and say, hey, could you read this for me, man? Remember when we were back six years ago, when we were back at NYU? Oh, yeah, dave, nice to see you again. I’ll read that for you. This sucks, man. But. I didn’t have that group. I didn’t have those people. And when I did my MFA, I finally had those people. Now, you’re not going to listen to all of them. You’re going to find those people who understand what you’re trying to do. Those people who so many people who care, people who say, I love your work. I want to help you make it better. And you’re going to find those people who are just sort of, you know, mailing it in like anybody else. But if you want a workshop where people have to read your work and they have to give you feedback and you want teachers, experienced writers who have been through this as well and they are being paid to read your work and give you criticism, if you feel you need that, go get an MFA. If you don’t feel you need that, then there must be some other motivation. Like you think you need a terminal degree. I was there. I was actually studying with a guy who is a friend of mine now, very good friend of mine. I was studying in the program with a guy who could have taught me, could have been my sole mentor in the program. But he was a student who had written five novels and he needed the MFA because they wanted to hire him at Portland State. But they couldn’t hire him without an MFA. He didn’t have an MFA. And the problem was he hadn’t even finished his undergraduate degree. This is a guy who had written and published books and yet he still couldn’t get a teaching position because he needed the MFA. So he found a program that would admit him even without his BA. So he got his MFA without getting a BA. And he is now a teacher at Portland State. So there are reasons, there are good reasons for going and getting an MFA. But if you don’t know what it is you’re seeking there, then you’re probably not going to find it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:33:28]:
Yeah, I just think MFAs don’t come cheap. So if you want, you got to make sure you’re getting it for the right reasons.
David Roth [00:33:36]:
Absolutely.
Nancy Norbeck [00:33:39]:
Because I’ve talked to some people who hire a specific writing mentor to work with. And depending on what kind of thing you’re looking for, if you can find the right person to do that, that’s probably going to be cheaper than an MFA. I would never tell anybody unconditionally, good grief, no, don’t go get an MFA. I just think you really need to make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons.
David Roth [00:34:01]:
I started off before you have to go through the application process. So it takes a while to get into an MFA program. So while I was waiting, I was looking for area workshops and things and and I want a formal ones. Like again, you want, you want someone you you want a workshop that is led by somebody who, who knows something. It can’t be just somebody who’s doing this because this is their way of making a little bit of money because they don’t have a job either. And so they’re going to tell you you have to find somebody who you really respect. And I found nomi Eve in Philadelphia teaching at what she called Story Lab through Drexel, sponsored by Drexel University. And she was not Drexel University at the time, but she was doing the Story Lab project in affiliation with them. And just to jump ahead in the story, she’s now running their MFA program that they started, the Low Residency program. She started it since I have done the workshops with her, but it was working with her in those workshops, multiple workshops. I think I did four different one where she just gave me a free workshop because I’ve done so many with them. But I did somewhere three or four workshops with Nomi. And it wasn’t until she said to me, dave, I think you found your voice, that I was in a position to go off and feel like I had something I could show to an MFA program that might get me admitted to the program. The MFA is not what prepared me to write. It was Nomi who really got me to the point who mentored me to the point where I had something where I could submit it and it would not be embarrassing. So find that person, you find your Nomia.
Nancy Norbeck [00:35:57]:
And that’s a good point too, because I bet a lot of people apply to a program like that and aren’t accepted and can’t figure out why and think that this is just not for them. And that might not be true. It might just be that you need to find somebody to work with before then because it’s hard. In fact, it’s probably basically impossible to figure out how to write well on your own. People, I think, think that they can sit down and no disrespect to Julia Cameron, but read all of the Julia Cameron books or read all of so and so John Gardner or whoever and figure it out themselves. And you can’t see your own work as well as somebody else can, whether they’re MFA faculty or somebody in a workshop who can help you get ready to get there. If you haven’t been accepted, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not any good. It may just mean that you need more practice. You need to figure out some more stuff that you don’t know so that you are ready for it.
David Roth [00:37:00]:
Well, there are I mean it’s hard to generalize any of this and I never do when people ask me for any sort of advice, what would you tell somebody? I just basically say there’s nothing in my experience that you can generalize to anybody else. And that’s why I’m so befuddled why so many people want to hear about a particular writer’s life, background, how they got to where they were how they write, whether they write standing up, whether they write in the morning, whether they write, why does anybody care about this stuff? If you want to write, I mean, you might be interested in somebody’s biography. That’s one thing. It’s a whole nother thing to want to know how they do what they do. Thinking like, oh, if I just imitate that, that’s like taking somebody’s work and transcribing it out of the book and writing it down yourself and thinking that that’s the same as writing it yourself from your own imagination. It’s an exercise. You can do that. There are people who have taken and transcribed other people’s work as an exercise in trying to understand how to write a good sentence or how to write a great paragraph. But that’s not necessarily, if you can do that kind of self talk thing, fabulous, more power to you. You’re probably a genius. You’re amazing. I got nothing to say to you. Go do it. Most people can’t just read somebody else’s work and say, Now I get it. I understand how that person did that. There are just so many little details. I mean, some of the things that Nomi Eve taught me was just little tidbits, just little pieces of advice about the importance of specificity of detail. It’s like how many times I’ve read and we won’t disrespect any writers in this conversation, but there are people that you will read that you just go, how does an editor not tell this person that they’ve said, a red slash of lipstick three different times over 30 pages? I mean, that level of detail is cool once, but three times? That’s a tick. And then you have why is it that nobody’s telling this person that their writing is horribly cliche, that this is not interesting imagery, this is all just pulling off easy stuff to get a picture in somebody’s head that is just a stereotypical normal picture of an individual in this particular setting. Why isn’t anybody calling it this person on that? Well, it’s because most people don’t read at the level of detail and the depth that people who want to write well do. So don’t get caught up in reading bad, shallow work and thinking, oh, if I just copy that, I’ll be a bestseller, too. You should say, what do you want to leave behind? What do you want your legacy to be? Do you want your legacy to be a best selling, cliche, boring novel? Or do you want your legacy to be a novel that sold 250 copies but never goes out of print because people think it’s worth having on a shelf somewhere? I don’t know. Everybody makes their own call.
Nancy Norbeck [00:40:10]:
Yeah. And it’s interesting because the kind of interviews that you were talking about remind me of every once in a while, and not for a while, but especially a couple of years ago, I would answer questions about writing on Quora, and most of them were pretty reasonable questions. But I started getting these questions that really blew my mind, and not in a great way. They kind of made me sad, because they would be questions that were so focused on technical detail, literally, they would be questions like, how many pages should my chapter be?
David Roth [00:40:44]:
Oh, yeah, amazing.
Nancy Norbeck [00:40:46]:
What font should I use?
David Roth [00:40:51]:
Nancy the problem is that people actually answer these questions, right? People actually will tell them, oh, your chapter should, and people will write books. How to write a best selling novel. And they’ll tell you, make your chapter no more than five, or whatever.
Nancy Norbeck [00:41:07]:
I would answer them and say, what font do you like? Until you’re going to submit it to somebody else, it doesn’t matter what font you use. What font do you like? What matters is that you put the words on the page, and then you do something with them once you have them. And you’re missing that part because you’re hyper focusing on all of this little Piddly stuff that doesn’t actually matter. Your chapter should be the number of pages it needs to be to be the chapter that you need it to.
David Roth [00:41:34]:
Be, and then probably end up being half of that when it gets edited. So you don’t worry about it now.
Nancy Norbeck [00:41:39]:
Yeah, no, you’re getting way too hung up on this. Just write this story. Right. And it makes me sad because it’s like you’re either using this as an excuse not to write or you are just so worked up on trying to get all the details right that you’re not actually getting any words on the page because you can’t if this is what you’re focusing on or you’re writing.
David Roth [00:42:02]:
For the wrong reasons, basically.
Nancy Norbeck [00:42:03]:
Right.
David Roth [00:42:04]:
I think the antidote to all of this is for people to read some Nobel Prize winners. If you just read Nobel Prize winners, you realize that everything’s on the table. You want to use quotation marks. You don’t want to use quotation marks. You don’t want to have paragraph breaks. You want to have 1300 page chapter. You want to have an entire novel from one person’s interior, monologue point of view. You want to have omniscient third person. You want to have three different voices. I mean, everything is on the table. And all you got to do is read a few of these people whose books are considered groundbreaking, whose life’s work is considered worthy of being acknowledged by the Nobel Committee, and you’ll see it’s all over the place. Just picking up some of these books by these people, and you realize, why am I troubling about whether or not I indent my paragraphs? And if you’re concerned about your font, just read the submission guidelines. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:43:20]:
But until then, use whatever font you like. You can change it. It’s all okay. Yeah.
David Roth [00:43:28]:
Don’t use that comic, whatever it is.
Nancy Norbeck [00:43:33]:
I know somebody who’s made me completely paranoid about papyrus. Now every time I see it, I think of her. So, yeah, I can’t use that one anymore.
David Roth [00:43:44]:
So.
Nancy Norbeck [00:43:47]:
How did you take this insect phenomenon and turn it into a novel? Which is a huge question. It’s probably not a fair question, so feel free to break that down into whatever makes sense.
David Roth [00:44:04]:
That wasn’t actually the process at all. The process was that I had this idea of a novel called The Good Neighbor. And the Good Neighbor was what Nomi Eve was reading when she was seeing 25 page chunks of what I was doing, and it was about a man or a woman. The wife is dying of lung cancer, and the husband is trying to take care of her. He’s a retired professor emeritus from University of Pennsylvania, and I decided he was an entomologist. And the early scenes were just the fact that the stress and strain of taking care of his wife was taking a toll because his mind is beginning to slip. So he’s starting to show signs of dementia, early signs of dementia as he’s taking care of his wife and the stress and the grief of doing that. And through that, he starts noticing out his window, he starts taking much more interest in what’s going on in his neighbor’s life. And he realizes he can basically see her whole life in, like, a diorama outside his window. So he spends so much time in his office down the hall from his wife’s room, where she’s basically bedridden, that he starts noticing her life, the people that she has working in the yard, the fact that you can see all the way across her living room from his window, and you can see the stairs where she goes upstairs. You can see her walking from her bedroom to her bathroom through the window. He’s noticing all of these things and taking great interest in her. That’s where it started. And then when I realized I needed to expand these characters and put some meat on their bones, I decided, okay, he’s an entomologist. How does that factor into this story? And when I read about the femme fatale hypothesis, I just thought if I were an entomologist, particularly if I was a failing, my mind was beginning to slip. And I was a professor emeritus, and I was looking for some sense of identity. I would want to write an essay on this phenomenon and try to hypothesize about why nature had taken this odd turn. So I started delving into it and imagining a person with a couple of gears slipping here and there infatuated with this mantis idea, and basically that mantis becoming his muse as he sits at his computer and tries to write the riddle of the femme fatale hypothesis. So he’s working on that paper. He’s working on a paper about the femme fatale hypothesis as part of the novel. And that’s where we get into some of his interiority and some of the conflicts and things that are going on in his mind. And that’s how you as a reader learn a little bit about just how far appealed his mind is going. Particularly as that mantis becomes more and more character in his life, somebody that he is speaking to and sort of the transparency does between his relationship with his wife and his relationship with this mantis that has been turned into a paperweight that’s sitting on his desk. Anyway, that’s the brief of it. Wow. The not so brief of it brief of it. Yeah. Anyway, it’s interesting.
Nancy Norbeck [00:47:54]:
A lot of things to learn about, not just but the dementia part.
David Roth [00:48:04]:
It’s much more story about grief and loss and love and also a lot of time spent on death and not death just like the dying part, but the part about what death’s role is in our life and how we should. I’m a big fan of Stephen Jenkinson’s books. He’s got come of age and he’s got die wise. Steven Jenkinson is somebody who worked in palliative care for years and years, and he feels like the reason we have such a fear of death and the reason that we treat death so badly in our society and fear. It and run from it all the time and want to be protected from it and want to be drugged so we don’t have to experience it. Is that it’s all about how we live our lives leading up to that death? If you live your life in fear, you will die in fear. If you live your life in celebration of life, you realize that the end of it is just another moment of celebration. He is somebody who a lot of his writing about this I tried to internalize as I’m thinking about when we recognize that we are losing our agency. Most of us have a choice in the end. I’m a person of a certain age. I’ve buried a lot of people in my life, including a sister and a mother and a father in law. And a mother in law. Good deaths, bad deaths, the whole thing. In every case, nobody was. Only my father years and years ago was taken out by a heart attack quickly. Everybody else died knowing they were going to die, aging out, dementia, whatever it is. And the people that died the most graciously were those people who came to grips with their lives. They understood their lives and they wanted to control how they died. They wanted to have full control over. They didn’t want to be hooked up to a life saving monitor with a breathing tube and they didn’t want to be force fed. And they just said, I’m taking control of this. That agency is something that once you are demented and you can no longer decide for yourself, that agency is gone. It’s gone. And in this day and age when particularly people in their 80s, we have so many people showing signs of dementia, it’s something that is very close to my heart. It’s a topic very close to my heart. My mother lived till 90 and then decided she was done. And she knew what her choices were, and she stopped eating and drinking, and she went out peacefully and of her own choice. And it was a gift. It was a gift to the family. She basically said, this is how I want to die. And she engineered that whole process with the help of my sister, who’s a death doula. Meanwhile, I’ve seen my mother in law die kicking and screaming and completely terrorized by life. So there’s good ways and bad ways to go. And I really feel strongly that we all need to think about this now, I’m not saying that the way my book ends and what Kelsey’s fate is at the end of this book is the right thing to do. I’m just saying that it’s one way. There are other ways. Some people might think that there are better ways. Some people may have a completely different approach to death and may really feel like it’s not our choice, regardless of how much agency we have at the time. I’m not saying there’s a right or wrong way. I’m just saying we all got to think about this. It’s a very important topic, and so I spent some time thinking about it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:51:51]:
I feel like we could have a whole separate conversation just about, I’m sure, because I think you’re right. We certainly seem to have a really growing population of people who won’t get to have that kind of choice.
David Roth [00:52:09]:
So not unless they they understand what the mensch is and realize they’re not getting their mind back, that it’s only going to get worse. And it may be a question of slowing down the process in the short term. I don’t know. Are they going to come up with a cure for Alzheimer’s? When I was writing about this in the 1990s, I spoke to a doctor who was doing research on this disease, alzheimer’s in particular. I’m not talking about Parkinson’s or any of these other ones, but Alzheimer’s in particular. He said, we’re five years away from a treatment or perhaps a cure. That was 30 years ago. So these guys are having real trouble figuring out pathology of Alzheimer’s disease, what triggers it, how to stop it, what is a symptom and what is a cause. They don’t know yet. They’re still fumbling around. Anybody who thinks that they’re about to solve Alzheimer’s disease is diluting themselves. So if you’re sitting around, if you’re 80 years old right now and you’re starting to feel a little bit like things are slipping, you have to make a decision right now because there’s no calvary coming to pull this all back to you.
Nancy Norbeck [00:53:23]:
That’s cheery. And yet wanting to avoid things that aren’t cheery is how we end up on this mess. Haven’t made a decision or thought of.
David Roth [00:53:35]:
My mother’s death was a beautiful thing, and she could have gone on for at least months, maybe years, but it was a beautiful thing.
Nancy Norbeck [00:53:46]:
But it’s also fascinating to me that that is what gripped your imagination to help fuel an entire novel.
David Roth [00:53:56]:
Yeah, it’s a short one. It’s only 200 pages. I don’t think I could have used it to fuel another 100. It would have been a little bleak.
Nancy Norbeck [00:54:06]:
Still, it’s not the kind of thing that really that most people want to think about for more than five minutes, much less to spend that much time with it.
David Roth [00:54:16]:
That’s true. That’s why there’s organizations like Compassionate Choices that want to explain to you what your options are. So, you know, going in and what’s happening now is a lot of people my age are being forced to have conversations with their parents, or, you know, people a little younger than I am being forced to have conversations with their parents because their parents aren’t facing it. We need to have those conversations with our parents so that they can have the death they deserve and they can understand how they can participate in that. And then we have to remember that when it comes our time.
Nancy Norbeck [00:54:48]:
That’s the tricky thing, right?
David Roth [00:54:50]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:54:51]:
I watched all of this with my grandparents and now hoping, because apparently I just never bothered to do the mental math, that there would be more time before my turn. And we’re not there yet, but there’s no denying that every day we get closer to that point, it’s just like, do you remember all the things you learned 20 years ago?
David Roth [00:55:15]:
Exactly. Remember what you saw. Remember what you saw that you didn’t like? Yeah, but I keep trying to remind people when they talk about having time or, why don’t you go do this, or whatever. I try to remind everybody that I have a lot more to look back on than I have to look forward to. So I have to be very picky about what I do with the time going forward, which is part of the reason why I just quit. I quit the full time job and just said, okay, I’m retiring, quote unquote, retiring. Now I’ll go back and figure out I need to supplement my income. I’ll try to figure out a few ways to make some money. I’ll go be a greeter at Home Depot. But I’m not going back to just full time sitting at somebody at a desk writing stuff for somebody else. There’s got to be time for me to write for myself.
Nancy Norbeck [00:56:06]:
Yeah. I think that’s a perspective that we also kind of avoid, because denial is powerful stuff.
David Roth [00:56:16]:
One of my favorite lines, I think I told you about this from the book The Swerve. That was my my mother, you know, when she was when she was dying, one of the things she recommended I do is read the Swerve, and it’s Greenblatt’s book. Stephen Greenblatt. Harvard guy. And he wrote a book about the book hunter Bercoleo, who followed his dream instead of getting a job being ascribed, he he followed his dream of hunting down lost books. And one of the books he this is a true story. One of the books he rediscovered was on the Nature of Things that was written by Lucretius about the epicurean philosophy. Epicurious philosophy. And the bercole character is interesting because the reason he picks to give up the life of the paid life and do the roaming book, the wandering book hunter’s life is that the pattern of dreaming deferral and compromise, he says, was the altogether familiar pattern that is the epitome of a failed life. And so when I saw that sentence, the pattern of dreaming deferral and compromise being the epitome of a failed life, I said, oh, my God, that’s my life. And you can only defer for so long.
Nancy Norbeck [00:57:45]:
Yeah, well, I think you can probably defer indefinitely, but you’ll pay for it.
David Roth [00:57:50]:
There’ll be a point where there’s no time left to defer.
Nancy Norbeck [00:57:53]:
Exactly. And then you’re really up a creek because there’s no time left to make up for it.
David Roth [00:58:01]:
I’ll tell you, time flows in one direction, you don’t get any more of it. And don’t be deceived. You cannot save time. You cannot buy time, you cannot make time. These are lovely phrases, but you can’t really do them.
Nancy Norbeck [00:58:18]:
Yeah, boy, but one sentence like that, yeah, definitely a wake up call. Have you heard from anybody who’s read the book who did suddenly say, gee, I need to start thinking about all of these things? I mean, I don’t know that that was necessarily your intent, but since it’s.
David Roth [00:58:38]:
In there well, the interesting thing about it is that I used that conversation as sort of a stepping stone for promoting the book in the early going. So one of the things I did, I put the book out there as being sort of my credential in all of this, and then led a conversation with three other people who were involved in the death trade. And we called that leaning into death, and I hosted it. My credential was I just written the book. So we talked about the importance of planning and thinking about and understanding this whole notion of nobody gets out of here alive. And so I’ve had a few conversations. I was just out last October, I was out in San Diego, and while I was out there for my high school reunion, we organized a chat at the library where I did the same thing. I hosted some people who are involved in advising people as to what their choices are. So it’s been sort of a linchpin to promoting the book, having the conversation about death and dying. So it was never sort of my intent to do that, but it was a natural offshoot. When you write a book and everybody says, okay, now you got to promote it, you’re like, Wait a minute, I thought that was my publisher’s. Job. No, she’s expecting you to do that. I’m like, oh, okay, so you got to come up with clever ideas. And my publicist said, how about this? And so she got me a seat at the Brooklyn Book Festival hosting this conversation. It’s always been a part of the conversation about the book.
Nancy Norbeck [01:00:22]:
That’s fantastic. I like that there’s that sort of silver lining. That’s not the right phrase. Like added bonus. What are you working on? Sorry, go ahead.
David Roth [01:00:38]:
No, I was just going to say everybody needs an angle. You got to have angle. You got to go up with some sort of an angle. Nobody’s just going to take your book and put it out there and all of a sudden everybody’s going to find it. It’s just going viral is not commonplace in this world of books. Maybe every once in a while there’s a 50 Shades of gray. Other than that, there’s like three melted, three and a half million other books released every year.
Nancy Norbeck [01:01:02]:
Yeah. Sorry, young writers, as we shatter another illusion for you. So what are you working on now?
David Roth [01:01:10]:
I finished the second novel about six months ago, and I’ve been trying to get some folks. What I’ve decided to do is the whole write about what you know. That’s a trap. That’s one of my favorite responses to that was by Tony Morrison when she was teaching at Princeton. Whenever new students would come in, they’d always be handing in these somewhat autobiographical stories, and she would criticize them, and then she would say, stop writing about what you know. You don’t know anything. Use your imagination. On the one hand, I am trying to use my imagination and my curiosity to find about things that I don’t know anything about. But I’ve decided just because my time is limited and I’m not going to write 90 books like Stephen King, but I might get out three or four more before I die, I’m going to focus them on this place. I’m going to focus them on where I’ve been living for the last 35 years. I’ve created this fictional town, river town in Pennsylvania that I call Marsville. And Marsville is now the spot of the second novel. This is where the people in The Femme Fatale Hypothesis live. And now I’ve taken that same place, and I put a retired private investigator and his disgraced journalist niece have come together in Marsville. And she’s looking to reboot her life because she’s lost her job in Pittsburgh to a scandal. And he’s trying to be retired and is hoping that her stay in the apartment above his garage is going to be brief. But it turns out that a friend of his brings some ashes to his house, but he thinks they’re ashes to his house and says, these aren’t ashes, this is concrete. And they’re supposed to be the remains, the remains of my wife. And can you help me figure out what happened? And that triggers an. Investigation into 21st century body snatching. That is really it’s really ripped right from the headlines, actually. I don’t know if you heard about the mother and daughter funeral parlor team that were selling bodies recently. I don’t know if you heard about that story, but I was researching this from the 2010 twelve time period. Reuters wrote a big article about this was happening all across the country and a lot of people were implicated in this. So I made up a story about funeral director and his family who get involved in selling body parts. So that’s called the gift of death. And that’s my first attempt to write a crime novel that actually has literary aspirations. But I don’t think I quite reached the level of a Louise Erdrich or John Banville. But that’s the idea.
Nancy Norbeck [01:04:12]:
Wow, what an idea.
David Roth [01:04:17]:
It’s interesting. So I think there’s going to be a second McQuaid novel. It’s Gordon McQuaid and his niece Reina Koie. And I think there’s going to be a second one of those novels because I have another subject that I want to broach.
Nancy Norbeck [01:04:36]:
Very cool. Well, I will definitely be keeping my eye out for that because I’m intrigued.
David Roth [01:04:43]:
I’ll send you the PDF and you can read it now.
Nancy Norbeck [01:04:47]:
There we go.
David Roth [01:04:48]:
It may be a while before it’s between two covers.
Nancy Norbeck [01:04:52]:
Fair enough. Well, thank you so much for coming and talking me with me. This has been really, really fascinating.
David Roth [01:04:59]:
Well, this has been fun for me. I appreciate your giving me the opportunity.
Nancy Norbeck [01:05:04]:
That’s this week’s episode. Thanks so much to my guest, David Roth, and to you for listening. Please leave a review for this episode. There is a link right in your podcast app, and in it, tell us about a time when you knew it was time to quit something and start something new. If you enjoyed our conversation, I hope you’ll share it with a friend. Thanks so much. If this episode resonated with you, don’t forget to get in touch on any of my social platforms or even via email at nancy@fycuriosity.com and tell me what you loved. And if you’re feeling a little bit less than confident in your creative process right now, and you haven’t yet signed up for my free email series on six of the most common creative beliefs that are messing you up, please check it out. It’ll untangle those myths and help you get rolling again. You can find it at fycuriosity.com and there’s also a link right in your podcast app. See you there and see you next week. Follow Your curiosity is produced by me, Nancy Norbeck, with music by Joseph McDade. If you like Follow Your Curiosity, please subscribe rate and review on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. And don’t forget to tell your friends. It really helps me reach new listeners. Thanks.