Why Failing More Can Help Your Writing, with Stephen Marche

Paul interviews author and cultural critic Stephen Marche about his new book On Writing and Failure. We delve into the challenges faced by writers in the digital age, and the evolving landscape of publishing, and discuss the inherent failures that are part of writing process, and the struggle to bridge the gap between intention and reception. 

Discussed on this Episode

• “The End of the English Major,” by Nathan Heller, The New Yorker, Feb 27, 2023

• CanLit's Colonial Habit: Literature in the age of Reconciliation and ‘peak’ diversity, Literary Review of Canada, November 2017

• Death of an Author is an AI-generated novella published in April 2023 by Stephen Marche and Pushkin Industries.

Buy the Book

On Writing and Failure is available from Bookshop | IndieBound | Barnes & Noble | Amazon

Credits

This episode was edited and produced by Chérie Newman at Magpie Audio Productions. Theme music is "The Stone Mansion" by BlueDot Productions. 

Show Transcript

PRE-EPISODE QUOTE FROM STEPHEN MARCHE: You know, I think we are sort of in between stages, right? Like, and I think the last time it was really like this was the jump from patronage to professionalism in the late 18th century where there was a gap of about 40 years where basically, no writer could make a living.

HOST INTRO (PAUL): Welcome to "The Book I Had To Write." This is the podcast where I talk to authors about their most compelling stories and why these journeys matter to anyone who wants to publish. I'm Paul Zakrzewski. I'm a book coach, podcaster, and essayist. On the subject of writers and failure, there's a lot to say. And today's guest, Stephen Marche, doesn't shy away from any of it, like the challenge of making a living, always precarious, but never more so than today with the rise of digital publishing, or the fact that rejection is endemic to the writing life, no matter how famous you are.

"The Diary of Anne Frank" was rejected 15 times. "A Wrinkle in Time," 26. Even though "Lolita," perhaps the greatest novel of the 20th century, was turned down by every serious publisher that Nabokov approached. "What I find strange is that anyone finds it strange that there's so much rejection," Marche writes.

Stephen's new book is called "On Writing and Failure," and it's a terrific little meditation and call to arms for writers. He's also the author of a half dozen books, including "The Next Civil War" and "The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and Women in the 21st Century." Stephen was a longtime contributor to Esquire Magazine, and his op-eds and essays have appeared in "The New Yorker," "The New York Times," "The Atlantic," "The Walrus," and many others.

He's based in Toronto, where I talked to him about living with rejection and the state of writing and art-making in Canada.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: Welcome, Stephen. Thanks very much for doing the show.

STEPHEN MARCHE: My pleasure.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: And congratulations on the, on the new book.

STEPHEN MARCHE: Oh, thank you. Thanks very much.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: There's a funny anecdote that you start with at the top of the book involving you and the short story writer and novelist Nathan Englander, and it's also about Philip Roth. For folks that won't be familiar with your book, can you recount that anecdote here?

STEPHEN MARCHE: Well, I mean, it was sort of, there was a friend of mine who was... She's trying to sell this piece about her death of her mother. It was a really good piece, she just couldn't find a home for it. And I was trying to help her through, and I was trying to get her... Giving her editors names and so on. And she was like, "Does it ever get easier? Like, do you get a thicker skin?" And I didn't have an answer, so I told her this story, which is that I'd been... Nathan Englander moved into my neighborhood just before COVID, and we... To this day, actually, we haven't been in each other's houses.

But we would sit around in my backyard and I got this fire pit, and we would drink and complain and I asked him like, "Did you ever get a thicker skin?" Like, and he didn't have an answer, so he told me a story and he asked Philip Roth this, when he was about to release a new novel, he was like, "Does this ever..." He was having lunch with him or something, and he said, "Does it ever get easier? Do you ever get a thicker skin?" And Philip Roth said, "You never get a thicker skin. It just gets thinner and thinner until they can see right through you."

So, I mean, the point of that anecdote is really that there's never a point where you feel like you've achieved success, and that therefore everything is okay, and the struggle is over. The struggle never ends even when you're Philip Roth.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: Ooh. If it's bad for Philip Roth, what hope is there for the rest of us? So you talk about a lot of different, writerly failures in the book. And one kind that seems to come up is just the issue of earning a living. But you say something interesting that you kind of came up kind of working inside, I think the phrase you use is crumbling institutions. Can you tell me a bit more about what you meant by that?

STEPHEN MARCHE: Well, the first way that I was gonna make a living was as a professor, was as a Shakespeare professor. And I actually got a tenure track job and gave it up because my wife got a job here, and we moved back for that. But academia and the humanities are crumbling. There's like a new Nathan Heller piece in "The New Yorker." I've written about it before too. Like, it's well known that it's... I mean, in that piece, it revealed that there are 60 English literature undergraduates at Harvard right now, which is a bit ridiculous, right, that it's that low. Then I moved from there to novels where they... That is also like sales for novels have been declining for 25, 30 years.

And also journalism, where like the number of journalist jobs is about a third of what it was in 2005. I only ever tasted really briefly the golden age of magazine journalism. And so yeah, like these institutions have all been in decline my entire life. And there are things that replaced it and there are things that are very interesting and new opportunities that have presented themselves, podcasting and so on. But yeah, like the traditional ways of making a living, they've all been in decline my whole life for sure.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: So there's this kind of failure, this potential, this kind of difficulty in just being a writer. And you kind of allude to this in your last answer. There's also just been been this kind of incredible digital revolution. I mean, the internet's been around, obviously, for a few decades now, but things seem to really sped up in terms of, like, the death of print, or the punitive death of print, and certainly, the rise of a lot of online publications, although even those are really unstable.

STEPHEN MARCHE: Super unstable. They never last longer than a few years, really.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: I mean, what do you find yourself telling other writers, younger writers, who are just struggling with the kind of the realities of the digital publishing now?

STEPHEN MARCHE: I mean, I don't give anyone advice, you know what I mean? Like as I say in the book, like good writers offer advice, great writers offer condolences. I mean, I don't really have any advice for anyone except you're gonna have to roll with the punch. I think we are sort of in between stages, right? Like, and I think the last time it was really like this was the jump from patronage to professionalism in the late 18th century where there was a gap of about 40 years where basically, no writer could make a living. And I think we are in a similar space for that, like a lot of creative industries, really. This transition is incredibly rough.

But like the advice I give is like this is kind of... You know what this is. Like, this is the reality that we're dealing with and you're gonna have to deal with it if you want to actually make stuff. But that's not very useful either, really. I mean, that's not super... Like get used to it is not super helpful advice, I understand.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: It's interesting though, because this isn't the first time, as you're suggesting, that writers are challenged this way. And you use this really great example of even someone like Samuel Johnson who it sounds like was a figure who was this transitional figure from patronage to having to earn money.

STEPHEN MARCHE: Yeah. He was the exact... I mean, he started in patronage and then ended up in professionalism. I mean, in the dictionary, his dictionary was that move, right, where like he was able to make a living off of that dictionary. And, I mean, to me, he was very much a recognizable figure in that he's out there doing everything. Like he's out there, just... Like the scope of what he's trying to write, like what he's writing during this period is like, he's judging poetry contests, he's translating Latin poetry, he's writing his own occasional verse for the magazines, he's hustling.

Like, he's telling life stories of hookers, he's writing life stories of other writers, he's editing Shakespeare. He's just doing everything of every level that could possibly pay him money. And, of course, it's never enough, right? It was a definite struggle. And, I mean, he's also Samuel Johnson, so he's like maniacally compulsively creating this stuff as well. But yeah, I mean, I think a figure like Samuel Johnson is much more of our age than say...of our moment than say even older living writers like Salman Rushdie, or something like that. Like, there will not be a kid Salman Rushdie anymore. There won't be a kid Margaret Atwood anymore. Like, that world is gone.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: So, and you're kind of alluding to this, I mean, one of the forms of failure is just the failure to publish. Like the challenge of publishing, and not just today, but you use the exam... These kind of classic examples, whether it's James Joyce, or Agatha Christie, I think you talk... There's several different examples.

STEPHEN MARCHE: Well, James Joyce is a really interesting example because obviously, the greatest novelist of the 20th century never made a living at it. Like, never came close to making a living at it. That's not really surprising given the nature of the books that he wrote. But he was also just really incompetent. Like he did not know how to run his life, like he was...he just couldn't win for losing. Not that he wasn't a hustler, and not that he wasn't smart, because he was. He was just one of those guys, you meet them who it's just never gonna work out for them.

They can just never make anything stick. And, I mean, the story I tell in the story is like, he just couldn't get a job at an Italian technical college in Como. It's like applying for this job, they make him write these three days of examinations and give a job talk. The job talk he gives is his lecture on Robinson Crusoe, which is literally one of the greatest lectures ever given on a novel. I mean, it's totally extraordinary if you... Very few people have read it, but it is wonderful essay.

And they were like, "No, your qualifications don't work." So it is like, yeah, you're James Joyce, you've already written "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," portrait... Sorry, you've already written "Dubliners." You're in the middle of "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," and these dudes think you can't speak English. This seems to me very typical, right? This seems to me... Or particularly exemplary of the discrepancy between ability and the marketplace, if you will. The most extreme case maybe.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: It's interesting because when I thought of the word failure, what occurred to me is just what happens very often, what I hear about, especially with emerging writers, which is just things not coming out the way you hope they did. But that's not at all what you're talking about. You're talking about really great writers, and that this disconnect between their ability and the great work they're putting out and actually the ability to publish, they're really different things.

STEPHEN MARCHE: Well, I think there's like multiple layers of failure. So, there's the career aspect of failure, but I think also in writing there's very much failure is inherent to the process. So most writers, even successful writers, most of their books are failures. I think the other thing to think about is like, when you're writing, there's very few processes where you're throwing out more of what you do, right? Like you're making things, and then you're like, "Oh, I hate that." And you're throwing it out. Like you're actually... The process of it involves an inherent failure.

Like the task of it involves acknowledging your own failures all the time. In fact, that's the biggest part of it, right? Is like going over what is wrong about what you've been saying, right? And how you can say it better, and how you can do it better. And like the act of refinement, which to me, is the act of writing is really this process of rejecting failures. And then underneath that, I think you have the sort of deeper failure of writing, which is the most profound aspect of it, which is the way you're trying to communicate between your privacy, your private language, and communicate that to another privacy in another time, in another language, in another place, in another person's private life in their own person.

There's just this a gap, there's this enormous gap between your intentions and what is received. Like this book came out of a bunch of commonplace... Like, I used to collect these stories in my mind and in a small notebook because they made me feel better, right? Like, they make me feel much better than the stories of writers eventually succeeding. Like, those stories are no use to me, no practical use to me. These stories, I found much more useful. But when I started to stitch them together, I'm like, well, there's a reason why all this failure is so endemic to this business. And that is because failure is really inherent to the career stuff, the process of doing it, and the fundamentals of the task you're trying to do. So, failure is this kind of centering reality of writing experience.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: So, why is it worth persevering then?

STEPHEN MARCHE: That's a question everyone should ask themselves. And I think another thing is people tend not to persevere for the right reasons, right? Like people persevere in writing for a lot of bad reasons. And a lot of great work gets made for money and a lot of pure crap is made for the best possible reasons, right? Like, I think it's certainly not that the argument of the nobility of the soul or something like that. Like that's of very little interest to me. Like, I don't think that explains why we write or why we persevere. I mean, I think a huge amount of it is, "I'm gonna show those bastards."

Like that is like a huge impulse behind this. Because one of the more interesting parts of writing the book is when I came across the few people who experienced no resistance, who had nothing to persevere through, the people like... This is particularly the post-war American types, like the guy who wrote "Joe Gould's Secret" for "The New Yorker" or Ralph Ellison, where really, they were, you are the greatest writer in the world, write whatever you want, and they couldn't write anything, right? Like they couldn't find a way to say anything. And I think there is... And even when you think about someone like JK Rowling, where it's like she could do whatever she wants. So what does she do? She starts over as like a random bad novelist in Britain, right? Like, because that's the only way that she...

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: Writing crime fiction.

STEPHEN MARCHE: Yeah. Right? Like, and that's the only way she can experience some kind of resistance. Although she got sick of that resistance pretty fast when she realized like she wasn't gonna sell any books. But you need the resistance in order to have the impulse to write, I think. I think that's a big thing. As for like, I mean, I think I write compulsively, I think I write out of like some kind... Like the other way people are gamblers or alcoholics, that's kind of the way that I write. I think I would never question other people's motives because I'm not sure they're relevant.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: What inspired this book? You talked a few minutes ago about a notebook that you capped with these kind of little stories of failure. Was that the inspiration?

STEPHEN MARCHE: Yeah. I mean, that was, that was really it. Like I had these... I just sort of kept them for myself, these little anecdotes. The fact that Herman Melville wrote a better book every time, and couldn't... Like every time they sold worse, every time he had to dig deeper into his pocket to pay for more for his self-publication. The fact that "Billy Budd" was in a bread box for like 30 years before it could be published. Stories of like Li Bai, and [inaudible 00:16:41], and [inaudible 00:16:42], like these Chinese writers who really were great geniuses but got nothing. I found them very encouraging, very consoling.

And so that was the kind of... That was the origin of the book. I mean, then Dan at Biblioasis said, "Hey, do you wanna write this little pamphlet for us?" I said, "I'll write about this." And he said, "Great."

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: I know that you have a PhD in, I think it's early modern drama. You talked about the start of your career as possibly being a Shakespeare scholar. Did that academic background figure in any way in this book?

STEPHEN MARCHE: Well, not really. I mean, there were a few occasional... I mean, I know that Shakespeare had unproduced plays and lost plays. And I mean, it is weird to think of like Shakespeare... Like Shakespeare wrote things that guys were like, "Mmm, I don't think so. This one's not for us. Let's not do that." You know what I mean? And like, I think it's important to know, especially for kid writers that it really doesn't stop. Like, you know what I mean? I didn't put it in the book because it's not really about writing, but I mean, one of my favorite stories is about Steven Spielberg trying to sell, I think it was a behind the scenes musical drama or something like that as a television show. And he just couldn't sell it. He just couldn't find someone to buy this story idea.

And I just keep thinking about like, what were these meetings like? It's like, "Hi, my name's Stephen." "Oh, hi. Yeah, I invented the '80s. Yeah, I've got a new show. Like, everything you remember from the 1980s? Yeah, that was me. I got this television show idea." And they're like, "Eh we're just not feeling it, Stephen." But that's that's the nature of this game, really. And so, my academic stuff really didn't figure into that very much except for a few examples, Middleton and John Webster who I knew about their careers and I knew about Shakespeare's career too, but and I guess they wouldn't be typically well known.

But, I mean, really, the only thing that gave me is I know how to write a literary history, right? And I know what real literary historiography is, and I know how do you find out what the real stories are and what's nonsense, which is a pretty important skill when you're dealing with, first of all, anecdotes, but second of all, in the age that we're living in where there's just this glut of lies.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: Misinformation.

STEPHEN MARCHE: You know? And to be able to, yeah, to be able to figure that's what I do have from my academic life is I know how to tell shit from sunshine, really.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: And then did the book... I'm just trying to understand the book, did it change shape or, I mean, it sounds like there's this series that basically, these kind of short, like they're longer than pamphlets.

STEPHEN MARCHE: Well, I tried... I mean, if the process of writing it, it was in middle of COVID, I'd been fired from everything. I had nothing else to do. Like it was just like, I had no other work. And so, I decided, okay, I'm just going to do this as perfectly as I can. Like, I'm just gonna write this as perfectly as I can. So I would get these anecdotes and I would take these notes, and then I would hand write them with a fountain pen, which I've never done before, on paper. And, I would say them... I would think them through completely, each section, and then write it in a kind of burst so that I had like... So that it was like, each one was like a spoken single thought.

And then the other thing that I was determined to do was write a historical, like, it is mostly history, as you say. And I didn't want to use the word "when" ever, right? Like I was just like, I'm gonna write out an entire history book without using the word when, because the word when is a really terrible English word. It ruins sentences, and it breaks up thought, and it distances readers. And so that also required a lot of concentration. So, that was the basic process of writing it.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: This podcast is partly, I think, for non-fiction writers who are looking to finish their books. It's one of the streams of audience. And I think I know what you're gonna say, but if you had one piece of advice for writers who are trying to finish their books, what would that be?

STEPHEN MARCHE: First of all, I don't really... As I said, like I don't... Good writers offer advice, great writers offer condolences. But I will tell you that one thing that I've told to writers that just really that... When I talk to other writers about like, productivity. Because I've gone through periods where I've had to be extremely productive, right? Like, where I've had multiple projects on the go, writing columns, write... Like writing columns to stay alive, writing novels at the same time. Or like when I was writing my dissertation, and I was writing novels and short stories at the same time.

Like I was in massive production mode. And like, I don't know how useful this is to other people. Let me just give that a big caveat. But like, there's two... I actually did research into concentration because I wanted to get... I realized that what I needed wasn't really time, it was concentration, right? And when I did that research, that really changed my approach to things because there were two things that I learned. One thing is the amount of prime concentration time you get in a week is about five hours. And the researchers who did that at Harvard said that if you can get five hours of concentrated time, like actual pure concentration time, you'll be like Leonardo DaVinci. You can do anything.

Like, it's not a... Like, it sounds like a very short amount of time, but honestly, the important thing is not necessarily get these huge blocks of time where you're working, but to get these, like the hour where you're going to do it to be perfect. And so, what I do, and this is the thing that no other writer does, but I really believe in, is I sleep the way that bodybuilders eat. Like I sleep... Like, the question you shouldn't ask is how much sleep do I need, you should ask how much sleep can I get? Because if you really want to be productive, like if we're up to me, if I could do it, I don't have the physical ability to it, but I'd sleep 12 hours a day if I could.

And that sounds like I'm being lazy, but the truth is that if you're writing, you're not... Or you're making like very... Because what survives of writing is the best stuff, right? Like if you don't do the best stuff, then you just have to go and rewrite it. That really was a writer tip. I've never really given writer tips before.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: That was a great writer tip, and it ended really nicely.

STEPHEN MARCHE: But on the other hand, I think it's like, it's actually just a sign of my own weird behavior, you know what I mean?

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: No, I love it.

STEPHEN MARCHE: But like, I'm so convinced of it. Like when I hear about people going into offices to do creative tasks where it's rude to nap, like people in advertising, people who do creative businesses where it's like they're not allowed to nap in these places, I'm like, what are you thinking?

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: It's terrible.

STEPHEN MARCHE: It's like going to pump iron without being able to eat all day. Like, it doesn't make any sense to me.

MUSICAL INTERLUDE

[STEPHEN MARCHE READING] A.M. Klein, the Jewish Canadian poet who wrote some of the most fascinating material ever produced in this country, suffered a complete breakdown in his early 40s and never wrote again. He barely even spoke. He sat silently on his porch, and the children who had played on his street believed him to be deaf. Scholars demur on the cause of Klein's breakdown, they attribute it partially to overwork, and partially to an underlying condition.

Later, Jewish Canadian writers, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Mordecai Richler, pitied Klein or mocked him. I fear him. I fear him because I know what broke him. The north, the sheer irrelevance of Canadian life, the confrontation with oblivion implicit in living beside the wilderness, the willful indifference to talent that defines Canadian culture. Klein is the ghost that haunts me. There's a little silenced Klein sitting right now in one of the chambers of my heart."

MUSIC FADES

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: So, in this new book, you talk about this Canadian indifference to talent. And I don't know how familiar this will be to listeners outside of Canada, but those in Canada I think will recognize what you're talking about. Can you explain that a bit more to me?

STEPHEN MARCHE: Well, I mean, I wrote a big piece about it for the "Literary Review of Canada" when COVID broke out, where at one point, I said like, "Canada won't love you for what makes you special, it'll love you for what makes you ordinary." And I mean, it is very much a two-edged sword, right? Like on the one hand, it's kind of brutal if you're a talented person. I mean, well, you just have to go to America, right? Like there's just no choice about it. Or somewhere else, or London, or Greece, or Cuba. You just, you kind of have to go.

But on the other hand, like that's why the schools are so good, and why the hospitals are so good, and why it's easier for people to... It's way easier for talent to emerge from Canada than it is for it to emerge from places like the States or Britain because there is not... Everything is samey samey. And so, talent is allowed to rise in a really big way. There just is a fear and loathing of excellence that sees it as a threat to equality fundamentally. And I guess, in some sense, it's not wrong. Like excellence is a threat to equality. Excellence does show that we're not all the same, and we don't all deserve the same.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: Like, I guess, what they call in Australia, the Tall Poppy Syndrome?

STEPHEN MARCHE: Yeah. I mean, it's funny because it's like every country has its own version of this, right? Except for America, right? And the South has it. In the South they call it the crabs in a bucket, right? Like one crab gets out, they all drag it back, right? Like there's a lot of different countries that have this feeling. Although, I think in Canada, it is particularly extreme.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: You know, I was looking through your columns, I saw a decade and a half ago you wrote in the Toronto Star that young Canadian writers have to go to the States, what you just said. You gave examples like Yann Martel, and Sheila Heti, David Bezmozgis, you yourself are notable for publishing both in Canada and the States. I mean, do you think things have gotten better or changed? Do you see any difference in the last decade?

STEPHEN MARCHE: Not really. I mean, no, I wouldn't say I've seen any change really. Which is kind of extraordinary when you think how much Toronto has changed. But the institutions are in decline and the cultural institutions in decline that we discussed earlier, which is obviously also happening in America, but it's very definitely happening in Canada. I mean, I feel like the spirit of Canada is managed decline, right? Like that's already a tendency there. And then when you look at...

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: Can you give me a couple examples of that for folks who won't be...

STEPHEN MARCHE: Well, the big one would be the CBC, right? Where you look at how much it's fallen apart, right? And how it's essentially become an administrative proforma activity with very little interest in either the audience or certainly not in the creativity of its performers, right? Because, I mean, I know for a fact that there are hundreds of gifted audio people in the CBC as gifted as anyone in the United States. You would never know it from what they produce, right?

I mean, and they all know that too, right? I mean, like, it's not like I'm telling them something they don't know. Like, they absolutely know that. And meanwhile, NPR is producing... Or Pineapple Studios, or Audible, are all producing like, extraordinary stuff constantly. And Canada just missed [inaudible 00:28:40] on it, you know? I mean, it's getting a little better now. Like the CBC podcast, they are getting a little... There are decent shows on there for sure now which I don't think was true five years ago, but it's a bit late to the party.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: So in doing research for this new season, I definitely came across a lot of cool new Canadian writing that I didn't know about. What are you excited about? What are you seeing out there right now in Canadian writing that's kind of catching your attention?

STEPHEN MARCHE: I mean, what I'm really excited about right now is generative AI, artificial intelligence. I've just been commissioned by Pushkin to write an AI generated novel. And that's what I'm gonna work on right after we're doing this. And I'm also working with... Like, AI is actually quite a Canadian story. Like the people who invented natural language processing as we know it, a lot of them live in this neighborhood that I'm in. I mean, I met them at the dog park. And we're working on some fascinating stuff.

I mean, one thing we're working on is a series where we've trained... I'm working with this engineer at Cohere where we've trained this story on prompts and then trained it on a series of models so that every time you click it, it's the same story but told in a different way every time. So essentially, it's an infinitely generating textual object, like it's not really even a story. And then there's all sorts of other experiments that I'm doing with AI that I'm just...I'm getting really obsessed with.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: Just as it's heating up in the culture. I mean, all you hear about now is not even ChatGPT, but Bing, I guess, and Microsoft.

STEPHEN MARCHE: Yeah, I mean like, I've been working on this... I mean, I wrote my first algorithmically derived story for "Wired" in 2017. I wrote a 17% computer-generated story, a horror story for "LA Review of Books" in, I think it was 2020. And then I did a fully generated one for "Lit Hub" in 2021. But I don't think it has actually registered. I think what we're seeing is like people talking about it as a phenomenon, but like, this is actually gonna be a new medium and there's going to be incredible artwork made out of it. And we've seen a little bit of it on the visual arts side, but mostly crap, really. Like, I don't think it has found what it is supposed to be yet. I'm excited. I think it's gonna be incredible.

PAUL ZAKRZEWSKI: Stephen, I want to thank you so much for your time. This has been fascinating.

STEPHEN MARCHE: My pleasure.

HOST OUTRO (PAUL): You've been listening to my interview with author Stephen Marche. I'm Paul Zakrzewski. If you enjoyed the show, then I hope you'll subscribe to it. I'm always grateful for reviews and for sharing the show with friends. To read a full transcript of this and every episode, sign up at thebookihadtowrite.com/subscribe. And if you're working on your own book you have to write or you wanna get started, maybe I can help. I love supporting experienced authors with expert advice and focused coaching.

I help writers craft book drafts, agent pitches, book proposals, and more. Find out more about me and my coaching at thebookihadtowrite.com.com/coaching. That's thebookihadtowrite.com/coaching. And thanks again for listening.