Re: What do you do?

Description: According to his late wife, Trillin is more a writer than a reporter.

Question: Beyond a simple title, how would you describe what you do for a living?

Transcript: Well there isn’t any simple title, so it has to be beyond a simple title. I used to say I was a reporter. And I live in Nova Scotia in the summer, and my wife used to say, “You shouldn’t say you’re a reporter when people ask you what you do. You’re actually more like a writer than a reporter ‘cause you do a lot of other things.” And so the next time we came home from Nova Scotia, we were in the customs line after getting off the ferry at our harbor late at night, and these two sweet little girls sleeping the back seat. And the guys said, “What do you do?” And I said, “I’m a writer.” And they just took the car apart on me, and I think they took the hubcaps off. And I said, “I’m going back to being a reporter. I think I’d rather describe myself as a reporter.” I think what I do is all based on being a reporter, but it comes out in different ways. I . . . The New Yorker has been sort of headquarters for what I do since 1963, so for a long time. And most of the stuff I’ve done for The New Yorker, certainly by words, has been relatively straight reporting; but I’ve also done attempts at humor for The New Yorker, and I’ve written . . . For about 20 years I wrote a column, “First For the Nation”, and then for newspaper syndication, and then for Time magazine. And I now still write what we call “Deadline Poetry for the Nation”. That’s more averse than poetry. The word “___________” has been used also to describe it. And I’ve written a few memoirs and a few novels. So I write a lot of different things. I think my publisher says in releases, “I’m very versatile.” The other way to look at it is I’ve never quite gotten my act together.

Question: What is the joy in what you do?

Transcript: Well it’s better than work for one thing. I . . . At about every two or three years I make myself laugh. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes something just sneaks out before I can stop it and I laugh. So if I . . . I always figured if I got put in solitary confinement I would not be totally without resources. I’d get a chuckle every couple of years. My wife, when she heard me, would say, “I know that’s the silliest line in the piece that made you laugh.” So there’s that kind of joy. It’s satisfying. I mean it’s satisfying to get something right. I mean I think it’s the same feeling that somebody has in building a house or something; that it starts out looking like a mess and just a bunch of boards; and then a hole in the ground; and then eventually you get it so that . . . You never get it quite perfect, but as close as you can get it if you have to make a living

Question: What is the struggle in what you do?

Transcript: Well I think writing is . . . It’s not the actual sentences. I mean it’s not the language, I think, for most people. I think you can write a sentence as well as you can write it. I mean it sounds like a truism; but in fact if you work on it long enough, write it enough times, you can write it as well as you can write it. You may not write it as well as John Updike could write it, but you can write it as well as you can write it. The hard part of most writing, I think, is the structure of wanting to know . . . of trying to figure out what goes first, and what goes second, and how that leads into something that doesn’t jump around. Or at least the hard part of the sort of writing I usually do. I think the hard part of, say, trying to write a column or a piece of humor is just staring at the page and realizing you might not be able to write anything. I mean that’s not true in reporting pieces where you have sort of a corpus to work on.

Question: Which form comes easiest to you?

Transcript: Well the easiest is the verse, I guess. I always say I just put the shower on to iambic pentameter on Sunday nights, and then usually a poem follows. I think writing verse is something that some people can do, and some people can’t do – almost exactly the equivalent of the person in the family . . . Most families have somebody who can do something like bend his thumb back and touch his wrist. That is a very minor facility that . . . but an innate and perhaps genetic minor facility. I think that’s what writing verse is. And so that’s, in a way, the easiest. I mean once I . . . I mean at times it’s difficult if I insist on using some sort of form, or following a song exactly or something like that. But usually it’s the easiest. Or once I have the idea, it’s the easiest to write. And sometimes humor comes very quickly. And sometimes reporting pieces sometimes . . . It’s odd because non-fiction – at least in my experience – sometimes it’s like just a path in the woods. You can sort of see which way to go and you don’t have to cut out much underbrush to go. And sometimes it’s just a thicket and it’s very hard to do. And it doesn’t seem to me predictable what it’s gonna be; although obviously if there’s a narrative in the story to start, it helps.

Question: Which one of your works was the most joyful to write?

Transcript: I don’t think joyful necessarily. I mean there are obviously satisfying things, and some of it is just personal. I wrote a book about my father, for instance. I wrote a book about my wife; but I don’t think I’d think of either one of those as exactly joyful. But I guess satisfying, yeah.

Question: How has journalism changed?

Transcript: Well for one thing people go into it on purpose. I think Watergate had a lot to do with that, or maybe the movie. Or I suppose it did. I think more educated people are going . . . have gone into journalism. Maybe not in the past couple of decades, but in the past probably three or four decades. I remember once when a friend of mine – who is now on the New York Times who was then working for another paper in Washington – who had gone to boarding school, and gone to Yale, and gone . . . gotten a masters at Berkeley in history or something . . . he was talking about coming back from a hearing and trying to find somebody’s secretary so she could lie to him about whether the guy was in. And then he was gonna have to call somebody else. And he looked around the newsroom at the paper and he saw other guys doing the same sort of thing. And he said, “I started to think, is this a job for a college graduate?” And the answer always was “no” really until recent decades. Not as recent as two, but recent decades. The answer was really no. So I think more people with education, and intelligence, and language ability and that sort of thing have gone into journalism compared to the people who . . . I don’t mean that when I went to The New Yorker it was a bunch of yahoos. I mean they were fairly sophisticated people. But I mean in general, particularly __________ out on the country, it wasn’t true. And I think . . . I think people also had different expectations of it. I mean some . . . Some reporters have gotten rich. Nobody ever thought there would be a rich reporter. And I mean not from journalism you see, but certainly the ones on television have gotten rich from journalism. And a lot of it’s become more bottom-line show business; particularly, of course, television which is . . . I mean when you think about the arguments about . . . or the analysis of who’s the anchor on a . . . on a show . . . And I don’t blame most people. Most of them are good people who have worked hard to get there. But when you think about, say, their salaries and what the set costs, or what the improvements to the set costs, and what the remodeling improvements . . . and you’re talking about an organization that has closed bureaus all over the world, so it’s getting . . . And the same is true of newspapers although they don’t have the anchor people. But the . . . So in some ways it’s journalism has more educated people in it, and it’s also shrinking. And one of the ways it’s changed is that if you go to Philadelphia, or you go to Baltimore, and you look at how many reporters are covering the city government, there . . . I don’t know. I recently read, I think it was in Philadelphia, it’s something like a quarter of what they used to be. So it’s . . . In some ways it’s not doing its job

Question: How has writing changed?

Transcript: I’m not sure it has changed very much. I think most writers at some point realize they sound the way they’re supposed to sound – or at least they’re going to sound, maybe not supposed to. And that’s how they sound. And I . . . And as far as reporting goes, I don’t think I do it any better now. I’m not sure I’ve learned anything over 40 years or whatever it is of reporting. I still make dumb mistakes in reporting, and I don’t have any tricks or anything like that. I think it’s just sort of common sense. And I think writing is . . . I think once you’ve sort of settled into the way you’re gonna sound – what the writing teachers call your “voice” – there you are. I have no idea how to find it, but I think most people know when they’ve found it.

Question: Will our society always value writing?

Transcript: Oh yeah, but I think it’s gonna take different forms than it takes now. And it already has in a way. I mean I think younger people are less likely to read books obviously than . . . And often get their news from the Internet or television or something like that. So I think it’s gonna change. I . . . I don’t see . . . I mean I think people who try to predict the future are sort of silly, I mean because you can’t . . . you can’t really tell what’s gonna happen. So people who say, “The book is finished,” I don’t know how they know. I think it’s sort of a scam, the whole kind of futurist thing. But certainly there is less reading now from traditional books than there was. And I think it’ll just take a different form.

Recorded on: 9/5/07