How This Attorney Retired and Became a Successful Author

I met Mark Shaiken when he was referred to me by a mutual friend who thought he might be a good fit for my podcast. Thank you Cristin Crampton Day! I was intrigued by Mark’s transition from a bankruptcy attorney to author. I wondered just how good of a writer he might be so I replied to Mark asking for a couple of his SIX books to sample. I read with amazement his samples of his two books of essays, “And Just Like That,” and “It’s What Makes Me Me – A Retired Attorney’s Relationship with Life and Times.” Both are moving, easy to read, funny and caused me to move into useful introspection. I then listened on Audible to one of his four legal thriller books, “Cram Down.” I enjoyed the unique story! I decided there was a ton I wanted to talk with Mark about including:

• How did you shift your identity from that of an attorney to that of an author?
• What did those around you think of this transition to a completely different focus at the time in life when most people are settling back?

Such a great conversation!

Read my Blog called Rules For Being Stubbornly Young and let me know what you think!

Email your thoughts at dave@stubbornlyyoung.com

Check out where it’s all happening on the Stubbornly Young website

Thanks and looking forward to hearing how you’re remaining stubbornly young!

Transcript

[INTRODUCTION]

Mark Shaiken 00:00:02  Practicing law was what I did. It wasn't necessarily who I was. And that kind of way of looking at it began as I began to think about what my next season would look like. I truly longed to be Spider-Man in real life. We had so many similarities, including the character flaws. There's a lot of things that sort of drive you into a profession. As the walls start closing in and you're getting a family and you need to figure out how you're going to actually feed these creatures. And I have much more freedom now.

[INTERVIEW]

Dave Tabor 00:00:46  Welcome to the Stubbornly Young podcast. For people in their 50s, 60s and beyond who want to remain engaged in the world and relevant to the younger people in their lives. I'm Dave Tabor, and you know, I started this podcast basically for myself. I'm exploring the notion of middle age and moving beyond in a way that's exciting and purposeful for me. And this podcast essentially shares this, which is my journey, including all of my curiosities with you. And to that end, I'm joined today by Mark Shaiken, bankruptcy attorney, retired, turned slowly, slowly into a memoir writer and then an essayist, and then turned successful novelist. So I'm planning in this episode to explore those transitions, including topics around shifting gears and even shifting one's identity later in life. Mark, I love your writing. Actually, I love your essays and your novels, so thanks for helping me on this journey and for being on Stubbornly Young.

Mark Shaiken 00:01:43  Thanks very much. I'm excited to be on the show.

Dave Tabor 00:01:45  Yeah. And you know, I actually said slowly transitioned. Did you really slowly the transitioned as you stepped away from law to retire and become a writer, or was that quick?

Mark Shaiken 00:01:55  I was like walking right off the cliff. It was instant.

Dave Tabor 00:01:58  Wow. So talk about that decision. 

Mark Shaiken 00:02:01 Yeah. I mean, I practiced bankruptcy, corporate bankruptcy law for four decades. And eventually it came to my mind that I'd really done everything I could do in corporate bankruptcy. I really sort of was losing my passion for what I was doing.

Mark Shaiken 00:02:16  And I, you know, had been in big law firms, one in particular, for most of my career, and I felt like it was time to just step away. It's not that easy to gradually step away from the practice of law. You're either going at 100 miles an hour or you're not doing it anymore. So, on January 2nd, 2019, I went down the elevator for the last time on the 16th Street Mall here in Denver and moved on to the other things that I'd hoped to do.

Dave Tabor 00:02:43  Well. And again, I'm gonna come back to that comment I made, which is probably wrong, that you slowly transitioned because did you go right from being a lawyer to being a writer?

Mark Shaiken 00:02:51  That was the plan. The first thing that happened was I woke up the next day and had this incredible sense of euphoria wash over me. And while you have a lot of different emotions when you practice law and go to court all the time, euphoria isn't really one of them that you experience.

Mark Shaiken 00:03:07  And euphoria is pretty amazing thing. It takes over your entire being. And while it makes you feel great, you really sort of take a view that whatever I was going to do today, I can just do tomorrow. And so you just, so I had to wait for the euphoria to wear off. But once that wore off, I wrote the first book, which, and just like that, you know, the essays on a life before, during and after the law and, sort of just traced, my improbable entry into the practice of law and then my, more planned exit.

Dave Tabor 00:03:43  Did you plan to write that book as soon as you retired?

Mark Shaiken 00:03:46  I had been thinking about that book for 30 plus years. 

Dave Tabor 00:03:50   Wow. 

Mark Shaiken 00:03:51  And I'm a list keeper. And so I had been making lists of chapters or things that I would write about if it was a particularly bad day in court. Something might make 

the list. If it was a particularly bad day at the firm, something might make the list.

Dave Tabor 00:04:06  That's kind of fun. Your life was informing your creative application later.

Mark Shaiken 00:04:11  I laugh about this in the latest book, it kind of wrote itself, although we all know books don't write themselves. When I say that, I mean that I already knew what it was going to say pretty much start to finish, and I just had to sit down and be organized and diligent about the writing, which is why the euphoria needed to wear off.

Dave Tabor 00:04:30  Yeah. Well, one thing I really want to talk about, this is a fascination for me because I've got friends that are roughly our age who are also looking at retirement and so forth. This notion of like when you left as an attorney, you also left your identity as an attorney behind. And was there any tension around that for you as you, you know, transition away from this, who you are.

Mark Shaiken 00:04:52  As a young attorney? When asked that at a cocktail party, you know who was I? I would answer and say I was an attorney.

Mark Shaiken 00:04:59  As an older attorney, it's more seasoned, more sort of thoughtful over the decades, I didn't like to answer that question by saying I was an attorney, and I came to believe that I wasn't an attorney. Practicing law was what I did. It wasn't necessarily who I was. And that kind of way of looking at it, began as I, as I began to think about what my next season would look like.

Dave Tabor 00:05:26  Yeah. So it sounds like you were transitioning away from your job as your identity to something different.

Mark Shaiken 00:05:32  I'd been thinking about it for some years. Yeah.

Dave Tabor 00:05:34  Because that's kind of, I mean, I, I actually is I think about, you know, myself and I think about others and friends, people close to me, you know, the idea that we are sort of our jobs in many ways in our society, right? I mean, that's a bit of a habit or a bit of a mindset to change, right?

Mark Shaiken 00:05:50  It is, although I also came to believe that that's not the healthiest mindset.

Mark Shaiken 00:05:53  It's a very common one.

Dave Tabor 00:05:55  Yeah, certainly.

Mark Shaiken 00:05:56  Certainly for what I know amongst lawyers, it's incredibly common that you are what you do. but I didn't really want to be what I did. Meaning that wasn't really who I was. I had other interests. I had other things that I love to do, that the practice of law made it very difficult to squeeze those in. Writing was one of them. And I came to realize that who I was was more of an amalgamation of all these kinds of things that I enjoyed doing, rather than I was a guy that went to court every day.

Dave Tabor 00:06:26  Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, in your books. And by the way, listeners, there are two books that are essays and then four novels. We're going to talk about all of that. But in your books, the essay books And… Just Like That and the other book essay sort of writing, It's What Makes Me, Me, these are sort of musings about yourself, of how you see the world, like what motivated you to decide to write a book about how you see things?

Mark Shaiken 00:06:51  I have these lists and I continued to keep the lists even after I exhausted the first list when I wrote the first book, And… Just Like That and the lists became, sort of not really my journaling method of, you know, reflecting.

Dave Tabor 00:07:09  Yeah. I was thinking, is this like, are these cathartic, like a journal, or is this really did you really intend to write something you thought people would want to read? Like, why?

Mark Shaiken 00:07:18  Well, the latter, especially as I've gotten older, I'm about to turn 69, and, you start to think a lot about your life, and you start to think a lot about the fact that you're old or I have there is a chapter where I don't concede that I'm old yet, but I'm getting old.

Dave Tabor 00:07:35  We're going to talk, we are going to talk about that. That's in my outline. So we'll come to that. Yeah.

Mark Shaiken 00:07:40  And I've enjoyed the whole process of getting older. I don't know if I'm any wiser and maybe I'm a little bit more (inaudible). 

Dave Tabor 00:07:46  Of course you're wiser. Of course you’re, don't you, I mean, come on, anybody with their eyes open as they age, it gets wiser, don't you think? I mean, isn't that a realistic expectation?

Mark Shaiken 00:07:56  I hope so, I hope. You know, your life experiences make you a better person and a little wiser and maybe a little a little more thoughtful. And the new book started with me really collecting all the things I'd been thinking about getting older over the last few years, and writing those essays and getting those out of my system and, you know, talking about whether these really were at the beginning of my golden years or if that was some kind of scam and things weren't really, you know, and, you know, getting old sucks as opposed to it's great. And when I got those out of the way, and that's probably the largest section of the new book. There was still this list of all these other things that I, that I, that I thought felt, you know, and I thought, well, if I'm telling the world what it's like for me to get older, maybe the world needs to know something about me.

Dave Tabor 00:08:44  Well, why did you think, why did you suppose that someone else would want to read your thoughts about you. I mean, I write a blog post, I guess. I assume people want to hear what I'm saying, but like, why?

Mark Shaiken 00:08:57  That's an excellent question. You know, some of the books I do write for the audience, like the legal thrillers, the four of those, some of the books I kind of write for myself, and I hope that people are interested. And that would be the first in the latest. The book would certainly fall into that category. It turns out that people do seem to enjoy reading about me. Am I, you know, growing up and the crazy way I grew up and the numbers of the dozens of places we lived as I was growing up and what effect that may have had on me and what may, you know, all of those things would sort of fed into how I look at getting older.

Dave Tabor 00:09:36  You know, the reason I think people might want to read and I recommend your essays and your books is that you're specifically spending time thinking about things that affect most of us at this place in life, and maybe you know your deep thoughts, for me, actually, I found kind of thought provoking and it helped me think more deeply about my own life because you had sort of got me jump started. And I think there's value in that.

Mark Shaiken 00:10:07  That's nice. I'm grateful that you had that reaction to the book. One of the reviewers said they liked it because it was like a bunch of friends sitting around a campfire exchanging stories about their life. And I thought, well, that is, that's wonderful, because that's what I'm sort of hoping for, that people not just learn about me, but that as they read about me, they find something that makes them them when they read the book.

Dave Tabor 00:10:34  Well, I love that about it. And so here's the question now is I think any of us that have a notion of retirement that's not stopping work, which was yours, right? You stop being an attorney, you start being a writer. You know, I'm still working, and I'm also podcasting, and I plan to continue that well into my whatever, you know, my professional life when that changes.

Dave Tabor 00:10:54  So. But this notion that friends and family, you know, watch us do these kind of things and, you know, I think they're a little quizzical. I think maybe they are even embarrassed potentially, for those of us that, you know, think we're going to try something new and different and, you know, out there, did you have that experience? You're nodding a little bit like, do people look at you kind of funny and awkwardly about this thing before you got it?

Mark Shaiken 00:11:19  I, my wife was, you know, my best friend, did not, I mean, she, you know, lived, lived with me for the 46 years so far. And so she, amongst anybody else that I know, she knows everything and therefore none of this surprised her, I think, and I don't have a ton of friends, but I think my, my handful of close friends, some of them were a little surprised, like, what the heck are you doing? You're not going to court anymore. You're not working in a law firm and you're going to do what?

Dave Tabor 00:11:50  Yeah, yeah. How did you feel about that? Or did you feel like you had to justify it? Or just ignore them or laugh and sit and shrug or how? How did you handle that?

Mark Shaiken 00:12:00  My usual response was, read the book and let me know if you liked it or not.

Dave Tabor 00:12:05  That's you know, the other thought I had is, you know, some people, I think, consider retirement at the time when you can stop being ambitious, where you can stop exerting yourself and you can just chill. And, you know, I wonder if, did you get any sense of people like, why are you doing that when you're supposed to do this?

Mark Shaiken 00:12:26  That one I didn't get. And everybody that knows me knows that I actually enjoy being busy. I just changed what I was busy doing every day. You know, I don't have partners. I don't have judges, I don't have clients. I don't have those things, but I'm pretty busy. I mean, it's 8:00 at night. I'm talking to you, and I stopped what I was doing about the book and marketing it to hop on with you. So I actually enjoy that and I have a hard time imagining my life at this phase where I'm not really busy, I just, I enjoy it. 

Dave Tabor 00:13:04  I think that's great. And does that keep you motivated to write or, you know, are you doing it for the money? 

Mark Shaiken 00:13:13  Well, no. Yeah. The classic writer's joke, unless you're Michael Connolly, is the difference between a writer and a pizza is that a pizza feeds a family of four. So I'm not really doing it for the money. But I do enjoy writing, and I always have. And I always have written, since I was, you know, high school and college kid on writing for the college newspaper. So that's something I've always done and I just enjoy doing it.

Mark Shaiken 00:13:39  What keeps me motivated to keep doing it and come out with another book is people seem to enjoy the books and I seem to really super enjoy writing them. And as long as there's that mix, I'm pretty happy sitting down. I'll start the next one, probably in November. That'll be the next in the legal thriller series because I need to, I need to replenish the list before I can do some more.

Dave Tabor 00:14:03  Haha. That's great. And you know, listeners, this isn't really about writing books—my conversation with Mark. It's about, you know, what are we finding in life to keep us excited, motivated, engaged and so forth. And so I'm kind of using you, Mark, as an example, you know, and having said that, I still want to talk about your writing because it's topically relevant to me, to the audience. And so, in the book, It’s What Makes Me… Me, I love the clever chapter names and there are several that I wanted to kind of pull out and tease out a little bit.

Dave Tabor 00:14:39  The first one is more about writing and come on, let's face it, probably half the listeners have dreamed of writing a book. And you know those of us that haven't, I, by the way, I've gotten halfway through too. So, I don't think I'll ever. It's hard freaking work. But here's the one chapter. It's called A Quest For Readers, and you are really transparent that you thought the hardest part of writing a book was actually writing a book. And it's not.

Mark Shaiken 00:15:04  And I was spoiled. When I practiced, I co-authored two law books, technical bankruptcy books and had a traditional publisher for each—John Wiley and Aspen Publishing. And then I thought, getting up at four in the morning to write a textbook when I still had to go to court at nine, was going to be the hardest thing I'd ever done. And it was at the time. But what I didn't know was how spoiled I was, because all I had to do is write and research, deliver the book, the chapters as I went along to the publisher who had their own editor, their own design, book designer, formatter, marketing, you know, department.

Mark Shaiken 00:15:42  And all I got was a check, you know, for every quarter, which was great. And Amazon showed up originally, you know, the online bookstore.

Dave Tabor 00:15:51  Yeah, the whole self-publishing, the whole so easy and quick and cheap.

Mark Shaiken 00:15:54  Easy, quick, cheap. But I had the old mindset. The hardest thing I'm going to do is write the book. and I wrote the book, published the book. Two days later, the pandemic shutdown order came in Colorado, and now all of a sudden, what am I going to do to sell the book? So the whole quest for readers and how to market a book has been a true learning experience, but it's kind of like my own little business, and I do something to that end every day.

Dave Tabor 00:16:23  You know, I'm not bad, I'm pretty good at sales, I suck at marketing, and I find it to be so painful. And so, you know, as you're, whether it's, you know, songwriting or writing a novel or whatever the case, I mean, you've had to go from doing something you love, which is the writing part, to doing something that you don't know much about. You're not very good at it yet. So like, how does that feel in this journey of you towards euphoria that you had?

Mark Shaiken 00:16:51  I feel like I wish I had, you know, majored in marketing when I was in college instead of American Lit. So, you know, A, I literally knew nothing about marketing other than the quest as a lawyer to get clients, which is a little different because, yeah, you're a professional. The firm helps you, they teach you, you learn from somebody that's older than you, that you watch what they do. This has been an exercise in developing another list of what I could do. And then where's my comfort zone? Because to do something that you hate is, you're not going to be good at it. I'm getting better. You know, I'm learning what you know, sells on Facebook and what doesn't. What will get somebody to click so that they go over to either Barnes and Noble or Amazon and see the book, you know, on for sale.

Mark Shaiken 00:17:38  But it's been a very big learning process too. 

Dave Tabor 00:17:41  Yeah. So let me, I kind of, I want to explore this notion of like you started out doing what you love and now you're doing something that's hard to support, something you love. Like, I don't know, how does that, I deal with that with the podcast too. Like, I love recording these podcasts. I don't want to do the marketing, but if I don't market it, like if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, right? So how do you cope with that?

Mark Shaiken 00:18:07  There's a whole lot of the tree falling in the forest that I feel and I think about, and I would like people to read the book. I would like people to email me and tell me what they thought for the career pivot book, which is how I described the first book, out of the blue. I was getting dozens and dozens of emails from lawyers who were, who were, as if I was a career counselor opening up and talking about, you know, maybe it's their time to start thinking about transition.

Dave Tabor 00:18:35  Should I quit now? (inaudible) Yeah, yeah, yeah.  

Mark Shaiken 00:18:37  And I enjoy that. I enjoy the interaction. I've found some things that I'm comfortable with like podcast interviews. I've found some things I can't stand, and I don't do those anymore. And then for each book, I identify a new thing that I've never done before. Try to learn about it, and then, see if I'm any good at it and see if I can, you know, sort of crack the code of how it works.

Dave Tabor 00:19:03  That's kind of cool. So you measure, you take a measure of something new rather than a grind of it. That's cool. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. All right. I'm going to switch chapters. This chapter is called—and completely different path here—this chapter is called The Struggle to Belong. And I was actually moved by this chapter. And I wanted to read a quick excerpt with your permission. 

Mark Shaiken 00:19:23 Sure, sure. 

Dave Tabor 00:19:25  And then I want to ask you about it. And here's the excerpt. When I've written a book and people read it and talk to me about the book, the story, the characters, the plot, suddenly I belong. To what? To a group that's interested in what I've done, curious about what I've created, communicating with me, about me and mine. I belong to the discussion. I belong to the story. Sometimes I am the story. I belong to the process. That's the end of it. Now, what I'm curious about is that, you know, experts tell us that belonging is the key to a happy, long life, having friends and family and so forth. But it sounds like you're kind of shifting who and how you want to belong. Does it feel that way?

Mark Shaiken 00:20:06  I'm still trying it out, you know, 68 and 11 months, 68 years old and 11 months into the life. I don't belong easily. I'm a loner I guess would be the word that people would use. although I don't tend to use that.

Mark Shaiken 00:20:22  I just have a hard time finding a place to belong. I didn't have any problem, as it turns out, in belonging to the firm, but I just have had a hard time being a joiner, being a participant. When I get done babbling in court, you know, for five days, I'm a wallflower after that. Happy to watch, but I'm not really participating.

Dave Tabor 00:20:48  So in a weird way, maybe not so weird, you're creating your own little community of people who, you know, like Mark Jenkins’ books. 

Mark Shaiken 00:20:59  I think that's what's happened. I finally found something that I can belong to, but I had to make it up myself.

Dave Tabor 00:21:04  Yeah. All right. Next chapter. I love the title of this, Spider-Man and Iron Man. By the way, your favorite superhero is Spider-Man. Mine, too. And I didn't know. Yeah, I mean, of all of them. And you liked him because you said he was riddled with character flaws, just like you, and that he was trying to find his way in life.

Dave Tabor 00:21:24  And I get that. I wrote it. In fact, I wrote a post. I'll share it with you about that I'm still making mistakes at this point in my life, and I actually thought I was going to be done making mistakes, I think I was actually going to be a much better formed person by now. What's your thought about this, this whole idea of being riddled with character flaws now, at our age?

Mark Shaiken 00:21:43  Yeah. I mean, I accept it, and every, every once in your life. Yes. For sure. I mean, exactly. Every once in a while, a new one bubbles to the surface. And perhaps I didn't know that I, that I even had.

Dave Tabor 00:21:55  I know, isn't that frustrating? 

Mark Shaiken 00:21:59  I mean or maybe not as much for me as it is for those hanging out with me. They've all got another flaw. Look at that. 

Dave Tabor 00:22:07  Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah, yeah. But it doesn't seem to bother you? 

Mark Shaiken 00:22:09  No. I mean, I can't be bothered by it. I'm human. So is everybody else. And I longed to be, I truly longed to be Spider-Man in real life. And, we had so many similarities, including the character flaws, but he got bit by a radioactive spider. And try as I might, that never happened for me.

Dave Tabor 00:22:28  Oh, bummer. Yeah. Now. Okay. Next chapter, Wins And Losses. How do you think about winning and losing? And now what you're calling life 2.0? I mean, you're still if someone doesn't read your book, you're losing. But do you care as much? Like, if somebody gives you a bad review, do you care as much?

Mark Shaiken 00:22:45  This is so topical. Because I had an hour phone call from my sister in law, who I love, who all she wanted to talk about was the Winning And Losing chapter. And, so I've had an hour of really deep thinking about winning and losing. And, you know, we are conditioned, in so many respects for winning and losing, that it's not terribly surprising that if the book isn't selling, that I would count that as, some form of a loss and, you know, but it starts when you're playing Little League and it goes when you're going to court and you're somebody has to win and somebody has to lose in a trial.

Mark Shaiken 00:23:21  And, there really aren't, aren't any ties at that level. And, it continues in my new endeavor. Although I try to dial it back, it's still there. And another thing that, not terribly healthy, but it's still there.

Dave Tabor 00:23:36  Yeah. Well, it's, you know, you'd hope to have at least I hope to find more sort of peace and, sort of, I don't know, less stress in my life, at this point. And, yeah, I don't really want to feel the losses the way I used to.

Mark Shaiken 00:23:50  Yeah, maybe I don't feel them as intensely as, you know, when I thought I was winning and I ended up, I lost the trial, but, But it's still there. it is still there. And, you know, I'm a Rockies fan, so I guess I'm used to losing. 

Dave Tabor 00:24:04  Oh. Rough year. Yeah. Hey, last chapter I want to call out. And that's, you, you've titled, I'm About To Be Old, and you define yourself, you mentioned it earlier in our interview our conversation about us getting older but not yet old. And I certainly relate to that. I mean, come on, I'm on that journey with this podcast. Like, I'm not old, I'm getting older. But you've thought it through.

Mark Shaiken 00:24:25  Well, it confronts me. It seems like more and more or more noticeably every day. And maybe that's, you know, just me, but, I ache in places I didn't ache before. I talk about in the book how, you know, I'll walk into the living room with purpose, and once I get there, I can't remember why I went there. And so now I go back to the bedroom and then, oh, there it is now I remember. So back I go. you know, things happen, you people do get older. and then they get old. And so right now I'm sort of struggling with when do I stop getting older and I'm just plain old.

Dave Tabor 00:25:02  Do you have an answer? 

Dave Tabor 00:25:03  I don't .

Dave Tabor 00:25:04  You're just not there yet.

Mark Shaiken 00:25:05  No, but when I get there, I'll have a party. 

Dave Tabor 00:25:09  Oh, good. A “Mark’s Old” party.

Mark Shaiken 00:25:10  And hopefully I recognize everybody that I invited to the party. 

Dave Tabor 00:25:13  Oh, I hope so. Hey, I want to switch gears a little bit, because I really admire you moved from essays about life to fiction. And by the way, I think essays about life—I was going to say they're easier—they're not. They're not easier to do well, but the content’s easier to at least conceptualize, to have an idea about. But to me, going into fictions like, I would, I would have no idea. Now, you’re four books into a series about an area that you know, you know, bankruptcy law. And by the way, I really enjoyed, I didn't realize that Cram Down was your fourth, and I read it and I really enjoyed it. Actually, I listened to an Audible and whoever performed it, I don't remember their name, did a really nice job. So, but, it had a great storyline.

Dave Tabor 00:25:51  But how hard was it for you to shift from essays about things you knew to writing fiction, which just seems like completely different?

Mark Shaiken 00:26:00  Yeah. It was hard and kind of a shock when it, when I, when it happened because I, lawyers write every day and that's part of what you do for a living as a lawyer. So the act of writing never bothered me. Lawyers don't write fiction, Lawyers don't really write narratives, fictional narratives. They don't write dialogue. They don't have storylines. They're given cases that have their own storylines. And, you know, when you do fiction, it was a shock because my first reaction was no big deal. And then, oh my God, huge deal. What do I know about writing fiction? You learn as you go along. The latest book Cram Down is the best of the four. So I'm glad you read that one. But you, you know, you're sort of the, you're sort of the emperor of your own universe.

Mark Shaiken 00:26:54  You're creating this whole thing out of whole cloth, and you get to create your characters. You get to give them whatever flaws you want them to have. For dialogue, the way I decided to do dialogue was to play both parts out loud. So it might be a little weird if you walked by my computer while I was writing and you'd hear me doing, you know, two voices and maybe going like this and like that back and forth, and then just sort of, system check. Okay. Did that sound authentic? Was that really how the lawyers or the bankers or the bad guys in the book would talk? And I've gotten better at it. I can write dialogue now, quicker, and still have it come out hopefully sounding because this is my goal, hopefully sounding like what lawyers really sound like, what a judge really sounds like, what a banker really sounds like when they want their money back.

Dave Tabor 00:27:49  But in a tone that readers would consume, right? I mean.

Mark Shaiken 00:27:53  Hopefully. Yeah. So that's part of the balance when you're writing a legal thriller or a medical thriller or something like that, you have to be careful to not overload the law part, especially in the dialogue.

Mark Shaiken 00:28:05  Or you just people won't find it accessible. 

Dave Tabor 00:28:09  Yeah. I could see where that would be, where that would be a tricky little dance, really. And speaking of that kind of a dance Mark, like, does shifting from essays to novels, I mean, is that change how you think about like yourself now, even yourself going forward. And you know, again to that identity question or what makes you happy.

Mark Shaiken 00:28:30  Well, there's a little bit of me in most of the characters I'd like to think in Cram Down, the the mobster, there wasn't much of me in the mobster, but in the repeating characters, be they, you know, 3J, who's the the the the female protagonist in the book or her mentor, Pascal, that you'll find things about me in them. It's inevitable. And, because you're right. What you know. And to that, to that end, it would seem like it would be easier then to create the character if I'm using me as sort of a guide. But it really wasn't, it really wasn't.

Mark Shaiken 00:29:11  It's just sort of inevitable that there's something about me in them. 

Dave Tabor 00:29:16  Yeah. Do you have any thoughts as you talk to friends? You know, you've had a journey going from being a lawyer to being a writer to being a novelist. Have you seen friends or if people confided in you of going from being a this to a that to a that, to a that? I mean, are there parallels that people are coming to you with, with their lives or their aspirations as they see you do this?

Mark Shaiken 00:29:37  There are. I reject the notion that there's only one thing you can be decent at, or only one thing you can do in life. And I think that notion can create some fear. You know, change, of course, is always difficult and can create fear. And there's probably nothing bigger as far as a change goes than changing from a profession or a career to something else completely different. It's hard. It's hard to walk away because you don't know what's on the other side of the fence when you cross over.

Mark Shaiken 00:30:10  And when people get me talking about this, that's usually what I end up saying, is that you don't have just one thing you can do. It's not one thing that only one thing you can do. Well, there's a lot of things you can do. And that's why I don't like to say I retired. I like to say I sort of retread the tire and I'm doing something else now. 

Dave Tabor 00:30:28  Yeah. That's cool. Retreading the tire is a great expression for this. And, you know, it might be you mentioned things that maybe there aren't more things you can do well, but what if somebody isn't ever going to do something well and they want to be an artist, or they want to be whatever?

Mark Shaiken 00:30:41  I define well, not whether I'm good at what I'm doing. I define well as whether I'm enjoying what I'm doing. And if I'm the worst guitarist in the world, and, you know, I'm not going to get the call from Bruce Springsteen if I'm the worst guitarist in the world, the reality is I still really enjoy it.

Mark Shaiken 00:30:57  And so while the world might not, might listen to me and go, oh, he's not very good, that's not what I mean by doing it well, what I mean by doing it well is that I just really enjoy doing it.

Dave Tabor 00:31:11  Yeah. That's cool. All right. Last question for you. And I'm not sure you'll let me do this, but I'm going to ask you. You and What Makes Me… Me, what struck me is a very lovely comment right at the end. And can I share it? Or do you want listeners to read the book to find it?

Mark Shaiken 00:31:27  You can go for it.

Dave Tabor 00:31:28  All right. Here's what you said. And it's just like what you were where we just came to. But your comment was, here's the quote. “Not everyone can be great, but everyone should have the chance to pull off a great accomplishment or two.” And it seems like, you know, the closer that you did that as much in retirement so far as you did in your early life.

Mark Shaiken 00:31:52  I think more because I've had more freedom. There's a lot of things that sort of drive you into a profession. As the walls start closing in and you need to, you're getting a family and you need to figure out how you're going to actually feed these creatures. Yeah. And I have much more freedom now. And that that last chapter was in Ralph Waldo got it right because there's been a quote that he had that he wrote, that we read in college, that the greatest accomplishment in life, I'll paraphrase it, the greatest accomplishment in life is, is living a life where it's your life, not what everybody else wants your life to be.

Dave Tabor 00:32:32  Yeah.

Mark Shaiken 00:32:33  And so that last quote about the great accomplishment was really his notion, because that's kind of how I've looked at much of my life. I'm not the greatest, you know, guy in all these different disciplines. But, I've accomplished a couple of things that I'm, you know, proud of.

Dave Tabor 00:32:52  That's cool.

Dave Tabor 00:32:53  And you're still doing it, which is even more fun, I think. Yeah, cool. I think that's a good note to end on. So let's do that. Listeners, I'm your host, Dave Tabor. And today on Stubbornly Young, you've been listening to my conversation with Mark Shaiken, a retired bankruptcy attorney turned essayist turned memoir writer turned novelist. And what a fun conversation. Thank you, Mark.

Mark Shaiken 00:33:17  Yeah, this has been great, Dave. Thanks for having me.

Dave Tabor 00:33:19  Cool. And by the way, listeners, one of his chapters—which book was it in—said you don't like doing podcasts where the podcaster wasn't prepared. So, oh my God, I felt pressure.

Mark Shaiken 00:33:28  Oh, you were great. I don't want to rate the different podcasters, but you, actually, this has been the best interview that I've given.

Dave Tabor 00:33:35  Oh, that's nice to hear. Thank you. It's kind of like getting a good book review, but from someone who's got experience. That's cool.

Dave Tabor 00:33:41  Hey, listeners, this has been episode 16 of the Stubbornly Young Podcast for those in their 50s, 60s and beyond, remaining engaged in the world and relevant to the younger people in their lives. Hey, please do me a favor. Share the podcast, help it grow by submitting a review and sharing it with your stubbornly young friends. That's it for now. Catch you next time on Stubbornly Young.

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