Everyone Is...with Jennifer Coronado
The intent of this show is to engage with all types of people and build an understanding that anyone who has any kind of success has achieved that success because they are creative thinkers. So whether you are an artist, a cook, a bottle washer, or an award-winning journalist, everyone has something to contribute to the human conversation.
Everyone Is...with Jennifer Coronado
Tom Bissell: Empathy and Curiosity
What happens when a celebrated writer like Tom Bissell ventures into the world of video games, fiction, and journalism? Join us as Tom shares captivating stories from his childhood in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and how early encounters with arcade classics shaped his creative journey. With literary influences from his father's circle, including Jim Harrison and Philip Caputo, Tom embraced a life of writing without a fallback plan. His insights into the evolution of gaming and the creative process offer a fresh perspective on artistic identity and the pursuit of one's passion.
We also delve into the nuances of storytelling, highlighting how imagination and empathy drive the creative process. From the technicalities of screenwriting to the fearless exploration of emotions through art, this episode is a testament to the transformative power of creativity.
www.slightlyprod.com
Good writing always rushes you to a place that is surprising and inevitable. That's to me what good drama is and what a good literary experience is, and doing them both at the same time is the trick.
Jennifer Coronado:Hello and welcome to Everyone Is. I am your host, jennifer Coronado. The intent of this show is to engage with all types of people and build an understanding that anyone who has any kind of success has achieved that success because they are a creative thinker. So whether you are an artist or a cook or an award-winning journalist, everyone has something to contribute to the human conversation. And now, as they say on with the show, I was asking a friend of mine who came from the video game world, who can I talk to in that space? Who's emblematic of someone who's a creative thinker? And he immediately said oh, you have to talk to Tom Bissell. He's a great writer and I have to say I am both grateful and resentful because I started to dig into Tom's career and I saw he contained multitudes. He's a journalist, a critic, a screenwriter, a video game writer, a nonfiction writer, an award-winning short story writer, a Guggenheim fellow. So I'm excited and a little trepidatious to welcome Tom Bissell to Everyone Is.
Tom Bissell:No need to be trepidatious my career baffles me as much as it baffles you.
Jennifer Coronado:Well, here we go, let's get into the bafflement. So I start interviews with the form of this question, which is where are you from, as in, where'd you grow up?
Tom Bissell:I grew up in the Upper Peninsula or on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, kind of an obscure part of the country. It's a part of the country that is virtually impossible to go to accidentally. You have to go there to go there. It's very hard to pass through it. No-transcript wasting quote unquote all their time playing video games and worrying they're not going to be interested in things like books or linear media. You know, don't necessarily despair, it might be all right. You can love multiple things with a full heart.
Jennifer Coronado:So tell me about what were your favorite comic books and what was your first video game. Was it in a console or was it at an arcade? What was that?
Tom Bissell:I think the first games I really remember playing were the early stand-up arcade games Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Missile Command. We would go to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for family vacations and stay at a very nice hotel there called the Fister and they had a little arcade and I just thought it was just a cabinet of wonders for me. I would wander down to that arcade and play for hours. And that's the thing I often remark about video games is that this is an art form that began as a way to suck quarters out of the pockets of children.
Tom Bissell:It's such a ignominious beginning for an art form. But there you have it. Well, you know, epic poetry began as a way to like flatter Kings while everyone stuffed their faces with pheasant and wine. So, you know, not every art form has noble beginnings, but my first memory was playing those standup arcade games and then graduated to the Atari 2600 and, just you know, played all that and just kept going, marching right through the console generations as they came.
Tom Bissell:And my daughter was a big video game player and I showed her some of the early Nintendo games that I used to play when I was a kid and she was looking at them like, you know, someone looking at a tablet written in Sanskrit. She was like, how did you play these things? You know, they're so unpleasant, they're so hard. And I just told her you don't know what you don't know at the time. You know, and the fact that video games have probably come faster, farther than any other form of technology with the exception of stuff like AI in my lifetime is, you know, it's a source of delight and some consternation for me because it feels like we could have used some of those advances in other areas. But, alas, this is the entertainment age we're dumping it all into entertainment.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, it's so true. It's funny when you say your daughter is like, how do you play these games? You said the Atari 2600. I was like, ooh, that was fancy. We had the first Atari. She doesn't know the pleasure of playing tank where you're just moving a joystick hard to the left and hard to the right just to get a tank to go an inch up a screen.
Tom Bissell:Yeah, riveting family matches in tank. I remember those vividly. My father really liked that game.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, so was your dad a writer. Do I get that right? What would your dad do?
Tom Bissell:No, no. My dad was very close friends with two pretty well-known writers though, and that's how I got the writing bug early on. So my dad was a lover of reading, friend to writers, and he knew the difficult and these were very successful writers, mind you and he'd been there at their sides for some pretty wild career turns. So when I told him I wanted to be a writer, it wasn't one of those parents saying you'll never make any money. It's a stupid thing to do, you know, don't daydream. He just knew intimately like the struggles for even successful people trying to write for a living, and so he had a pretty clear eyed view of what the bloody voyage ahead of me. But he was also pretty supportive of it, and, um, you know, especially once his two friends, the writers Jim Harrison and Philip Caputo who are like my literary fathers they showed some early enthusiasm for my juvenilia encouraged me to keep going, and I did. I never really had a plan B.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah. So Philip Caputo. For those who don't know, he was a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, right, and he wrote Rumors of War. Did anything in his style influence how you thought about writing, or was it just his stories of writing?
Tom Bissell:Phil's an excellent prose writer. So I think everyone's style is just an amalgamation of the first five or six people you imitate. Right, that's all style is. It's just mature imitation mixed with a bunch of other people, and that's why people's styles are so different, because they all have different feeder rivers flowing into them. So Phil and Jim were both, you know, very formative influences on me. But then as I got older gosh, I think the writers that I sort of went craziest for. Thomas McGuane was one.
Tom Bissell:A great Western novelist, john Updike blew me away when I read Rabbit Run when I was like 13 years old and I can tell a funny story about reading in John Updike. I was in maybe sixth grade in Catholic school and I was reading the Updike novel Couples, which came out in 1968, which was absolutely filthy like just filled with sex on every 10 pages or so, because Updike was a very graphic writer. And I remember dragging that book around school and reading it and all these adults looking at me and patting me on the head oh, tommy is so precocious, look at him reading John Updike, because they knew the name right. I remember thinking they have no idea what's in this book. So books became like a secret portal into forbidden knowledge for me.
Tom Bissell:So my plan to make kids interested in reading is leave just a bunch of really scandalous books around the house and pretend like you don't know what's going on and your kids are sneaking off with them. Because reading had like a dark glamour to me. It was explicit and it was funny and I was getting news from books that I wasn't getting from anywhere else. So Updike was a big influence on me. Later on, david Foster Wallace was a big influence. Laurie Moore, a great Midwestern Well, she's not a Midwesterner by birth but she's probably one of the funniest writers alive and has written a bunch of wonderful books. Martin Amis people that were funny, people that were sort of had a lusty appetite for life all that stuff made me want to be that way, which is ironic because I was not that way at all.
Jennifer Coronado:I was a small town kid scared of his own shadow for years circumstances and you don't even often know that you're placing yourself in those circumstances. But when you really engage with your imagination, you can be in whole different worlds than you're occupying in your real physical space.
Tom Bissell:Yeah Well, movies, books, games, their whole goal is to give the reader or the player or the viewer a surrogate experience as powerful as the things the characters on the page or on screen are feeling, and it's the magic of imaginative art. It's also the bane of imaginative art. So trying to supply my audience members, no matter what I'm working on, with something that makes them as excited and as gripped and as interested in whatever it is I'm making I am, is the it's both the challenge and the reward.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, so you went to college in Michigan. You went to community college, first, I believe, and then you went to your four-year college and then you went to the Peace Corps. So how did you end up? And in Uzbekistan, right, that's is that where you went. So how did you end up in Uzbekistan, right? Yes, is that where you went. So how did you end up on that path?
Tom Bissell:Well, not a lot of demand in 1996 for English majors graduating from middle tier Midwestern ag colleges, michigan State University. No disrespect intended. I didn't know what the hell to do with my life. And then a Peace Corps volunteer came to one of my college classes and just talked about what that entailed. And I mentioned before, as a small town kid scared of his own shadow, I wanted a life of experience, intense experience and intense adventure, because those are all the books I loved reading. But I myself was just not cut from that cloth. I did not like that about myself. I hated my fearfulness, my anxiety. So I decided to drop a neutron bomb on it by going to Uzbekistan as a Peace Corps volunteer. I think cognitive behavioral therapists there's a term for that. I think exposure therapy.
Jennifer Coronado:I believe it's called the thing that frightens you.
Tom Bissell:Well, boy, howdy, did I do that? And it worked. The Peace Corps said it opened my eyes to the world and travel, and I became a very peripatetic traveler for years after that. And I have no regrets about parenting or being a parent, but the one thing I do miss is just picking up and going somewhere for three months, cause I feel like that was my life for, you know, better part of a decade, and I think it gave my writing. I don't know, I don't know if it made me a better writer, but it's certainly made me a more widely ranging writer. You know, the more you expose yourself to other cultures and other people, I just think it's all fuel for your imagination to other cultures and other people.
Jennifer Coronado:I just think it's all fuel for your imagination. No, no, totally. And also it helps you get out of. You can fall into a rut of self where, if you're in your everyday and the patterns that you develop, particularly as you get older, keep you from exploring other things and then immediately you go to another place and you don't quite understand the language. You may understand a little bit of it, but how people see things is so different. It really opens up your experience to the world.
Tom Bissell:Yeah, yeah, I always called that the monoglott's sudden understanding that reality does not take place in English, and that's a really emotionally crucial insight to make, because the world is so much more complicated and people's motives are so much different from what you imagine they might be. I just love discovering how narrow my understanding of the world is. I like that feeling. Some people don't, but I perversely enjoy it.
Jennifer Coronado:No, I think that's great. One of the things I love is don't, but I perversely enjoy it. No, I think that's great. One of the things I love is when you travel somewhere else. For example, I've been to Italy and then I've come back, you know, and been in New York after that and I and you can see the DNA of Italy in the way some people in New York react, or how the whole Hatfield and McCoy's feud in the South came from Scottish tribalism. All these things are very connected. You know what?
Tom Bissell:I mean yeah, the New York accent is basically a 500-year-old Dutch accent.
Jennifer Coronado:Exactly right, or Old English is actually closer to Southern accents that we know today, which I think is amazing. You went on to become an intern at Harper's and so you're working for a magazine. How did how? You went from Peace Corps and now suddenly you're like all right, I want to get a writing job. How do you go about doing?
Tom Bissell:that I've had a subscription to that magazine for God for close to 40 years at this point and I'd always seen these ads in the back apply for the Harper's Magazine internship and this is a story I've told a few times before. But after the Peace Corps I didn't really have any prospects. So I applied for two things. One was a paper mill internship in my hometown. There were three applicants. Two of them were granted an interview. I was one of them. And then I applied for the Harper's Magazine internship, which had 2,000 applicants or something, and eight people were called in for an interview. I got interviews at both. I did not get the paper mail job it was down to me and another person and I didn't get it. But I did get the Harper's Magazine internship, which struck me then and strikes me now as just a completely absurd turn of events. And so I moved to New York City not knowing a soul, stayed with one of my father's Marine Corps buddies in New Jersey, madison, new Jersey for two months.
Tom Bissell:While I did it I was commuting into my unpaid internship at this august literary institution and just realized New York was the place for me. The publishing world was a place for me. I met my people. The first time I was in New York, I got on a subway. It's probably very different now with the advent of smartphones, but I got on a subway in New York and I'm always a very nosy investigator of what people are reading in public spaces. And suddenly, for Subway in New York, people were reading, everyone was reading a book and they were good books and it was maybe the first time in my life I'd ever seen someone reading like a book that I had that I was like oh, that's a good book, that's not just some trashy airplane thriller. Oh, this is, these are my people, this is where I need to live. And, yeah, I was in New York for a decade.
Jennifer Coronado:When you say that these are your people, was it related to the literary nature of how they were exploring things, or what else made that, the place that you found, your people?
Tom Bissell:It's pretty simple. It's just are you interested in books? Are you interested in writing? Do you like movies? Are you engaged in a life of imagination and thinking about stuff? It sounds very artsy-fartsy, airy-fairy to hear me spell it out that way, but you know where I grew up. It just and this is no shame to these people, the people around whom I grew up, and not I'm not trying to suggest they were all like knuckle-dragging Neanderthals, but it's just hard to have a conversation about literature knuckle-dragging Neanderthals, but it's just hard to have a conversation about literature.
Tom Bissell:And again, I don't say that as a criticism. People have lives and issues and problems. And now that I'm, you know, 50 and have gone through the emotional ringer and all the ways you expect for a middle-aged person to do, that pure love I had of talking about that stuff. I don't derive nearly as much pleasure from it. In fact, a lot of my friends aren't even writers today because you know, I don't need that. Myself no longer needs the validation that other people are interested in the stuff. I am Like I'm beyond that point.
Jennifer Coronado:For sure, because you're blossoming into who you are and you're also exploring what that looks like, and so you do need that validation to feel secure. Particularly as you were talking about if you're a very reserved person. You want to be able to easily have those conversations with people, right? You want, versus having to struggle to find a space where you guys meet. So what was the first thing you ever wrote for yourself? That wasn't an assignment.
Tom Bissell:I wrote a short story for the first creative writing class I ever took. I was probably a sophomore in high school and it was about a father burying a dog with his two sons next to him and, as I recall, the father had hit the dog. And, as I recall, the father had hit the dog but he didn't want to tell his kids that. So while they're standing next to the dog's grave, the kids ask a series of increasingly invasive questions about who hit the dog and the father has evading telling the truth about what happened.
Tom Bissell:I doubt it was very good, but the psychological pressure cooker that I put my poor dad character into, I think is very indicative of what drew my interest as a writer even from the very first efforts. Like an incredibly intense situation that starts out at a moment of someone thinking, okay, I got this, and then, as the story unravels, the protagonist realizing that not only do they not have this, they're actually drowning and they just didn't know it. It's like a lot of my stories just keep circling back to the unknowability of the situation you thought you were in versus the situation you're actually in. That's a theme I keep turning to. I don't know why.
Jennifer Coronado:You're writing at least some of the criticism and some of the short stories I've read. I would define it as muscular, and what I mean by that. It's very tightly written, but within it there's very big ideas, and you talked before about how, when you're finding your style, it's an amalgamation of four or five different styles that really resonate with you. How would you define your style?
Tom Bissell:Oh God, I don't know if I have an answer to that. I try to think very little about it, about that stuff, because it's your instrument, right, and you don't want to take it apart. You don't want to disassemble it and put it back together. I love thinking about other writers' styles and analyzing what they do, but it's very it's funny. I've never really thought about this until you said something.
Tom Bissell:I've never even attempted to sort of subject my own prose to that kind of rigorous analysis of what's going on, partially because I'm the one who wrote it.
Tom Bissell:How could I possibly have anything intelligent to say about it? Because it's coming from a place that's subconscious but also calculated, you know, but also you know the subject of endless revision and also, hopefully, has bursts of like in the moment, inspiration in it. I mean writing is a. It's a very hard thing to do and the more you do it the better. You don't necessarily get, you know like it gets easier. You probably do fewer revisions than when you were young, but the sheer act of imagining whether you're writing a piece of journalism from your notes, you're inventing a story or writing a screenplay, having to imagine things that are simultaneously surprising but also true, is a real challenge and good writing to me always again, fiction or nonfiction, let's be genre agnostic here. Good writing always rushes you to a place that is surprising and inevitable. That's to me what good drama is and what a good literary experience is Surprising and inevitable, and doing them both at the same time is the trick.
Jennifer Coronado:And inevitable, and doing them both at the same time is the trick. Yeah, so just to give you a little bit of background. So our company is called Slightly Disappointed Productions and we call it that because when creative people are striving for things they're never done and they're always slightly disappointed with what they've delivered, because they've always wanted that perfect thing and it's what keeps creative people coming back to trying things over and over again. But there are points when you're creating something where you can find that one aha moment or that one man. I know this line I just wrote is the perfect line for this moment. Have you ever had that happen in any of your writing?
Tom Bissell:Yeah, just moments that feel true and just strong. Yes, if you're lucky, you'll get a couple of those a day. When you're struggling through something and you swim from buoy to buoy, you know when you're those just real pure moments. And oftentimes when I'm revising, it's often those pure moments are the only things that survive, sort of my first call. You know, I've often written a hundred pages to get to that moment and then realize, okay, this is where it starts. All those pages I had to write them to get here, but now they don't need to be here anymore because now I actually understand what I'm doing. I understand what this story is about. One of my books is a nonfiction book called Apostle. It's a travel book wherein I traveled geez to nine countries over a period of six years just visiting these supposed resting places of the 12 apostles. The first draft of that book was 2,300 pages, I think.
Tom Bissell:Oh, my God, because I had no idea what it was about. I was just writing. That's all I was doing. It was just, and there was great quote, great stuff in it, but it wasn't about anything and it took me like the last three years I worked on that book. I was just cutting, I was just moving stuff and cutting, and it was a very helpful writing experience because I'd never worked like that before, where I created a piece of granite and then had to find the sculpture that was inside it. And it's not a very pleasant way of doing it because you know, I think the final manuscript I turned into my publisher was 700 pages long. So I cut two books from the book, which is sane to me now to think about it.
Tom Bissell:But that's sometimes what it takes to find out what it is you're doing. Something can be good, it can read well, it can have funny moments, but if it doesn't have an overriding sense of purpose, it's just aimless. If it doesn't have intent, now you don't have to know what the intent is. I'm not talking about didactic art here. I hate didactic art, I hate art that preaches. But intent is, I think, the crucial component for any creative person to think about when they're trying to create something, Not. What am I trying to express? What are the points I'm trying to get across? That's not quite what I mean. I think it's more of an intent is how do you want this to feel for the person on the other end of the canon? How do you want them to feel coming away with it? Do you want to give them a sense of delight, anxiety, lovelornness, a feeling of life's richness and wonder? Do you want to leave them with a sense of disquietude? I think you really have to think hard about the type of experience you're trying to create, and it's going to vastly differ from project to project. And I think a professional, someone who does this for a living, is like a studio musician. You know, studio musician can sit down, hear a few bars of something and just start to jam. I view myself as like a jam person when it comes to writing.
Tom Bissell:If I'm coming in to write something for the screen, to work on a video game, if I'm writing something for myself, they're all going to have very different types of intent. Collaborative art form is always like a miasma of a bunch of different stuff, especially a corporate entertainment like a big blockbuster video game. Good luck trying to have a steely-eyed authorial sense of intent in that particular arena, but it's important to actually think about what is this team trying to make and how do I fit into that mosaic, how do I highlight all the stuff this team seems to be interested in and sort of then smuggle my own kind of unique zhuzh into it, and it's served me pretty well because I think thinking about it in those terms, thinking about audience not in the sense of like slavishly giving them what they want, but almost finding yourself in the audience. What if I had amnesia and I knew nothing about this project, what would I like?
Tom Bissell:And I think that's the most honest thing you can do as a creator, because I think trying to write for the widest possible audience doesn't always work because sometimes comes across as pandering. Hollywood, of course, is our maestros of creating the crowd-pleasing pander. Four quadrant yeah, yeah, the four quadrant pandering project that manages to appeal to precisely no one, versus being able to trust yourself as having good and a good enough sense of what a civilian is going to think about what you're a part of creating and try to position it as what would I respond to? And I think you get better, truer, more interesting art that way than trying to give the so-called audience what it wants, and I'm putting square scare quotes around that.
Jennifer Coronado:There's so many questions I have here, but the real question I have is you said you don't like art that preaches, but what do you think about art that hates its audience?
Tom Bissell:Oh dear. My only prerequisite is that just something be interesting. Now, obviously, there are lines you don't. Lani Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will is a, you know, is a pain to Nazism, even though it's a technically astonishing movie.
Tom Bissell:I think I don't want to champion films that like, have you know, truly misanthropic points of view, and I think a lot of Lars Venturer's films do misanthropic points of view and I think a lot of Lars Ventrier's films do. But he's also a pretty interesting filmmaker. Do I love his movies? No, but am I glad? Like? Melancholia, I think, is an odd, bizarre masterpiece. I'd never want to watch it again. But there's a movie that feels both surprising and inevitable, has utter contempt for humanity, its audience, the performers on screen. Surprising and inevitable has utter contempt for humanity, its audience, the performers on screen, and yet it somehow becomes this really hypnotic meditation on the end of the world. It's a beautiful movie that I don't love but I really respect. So you can hate the audience. As an artist, I think the odds are stacked against you. But that doesn't mean you can't create a really interesting experience, but you're never going to create something that people love.
Jennifer Coronado:That's so interesting. You say that I was exactly thinking. I'm not kidding you. I was exactly thinking of Melancholia, but I also think about the plays of Bertolt Brecht, because I think Brechtian theater really alienates its audience a bit in how he approaches, how he tells a story. So I just that was my esoteric question. I'll have several more of those, not to worry. You've been called the master of the literary pivot by Jane Chiavattari, and what do you think she meant by that?
Tom Bissell:Oh, I think she meant that I've just. I've had a lot of stages in my career. To me it's just all felt like the same thing the endless attempt to make a living without having to get a so-called real job. But you know, whenever an opportunity is presented itself, I've always just gone for it, and anytime a door is opened I've walked through it. I think that's all that means. I don't think maybe I'm just wired weird, but to me jumping around in genres isn't that insane. To me it's never been like that big of a deal.
Tom Bissell:All these forms of writing have different constraints and again it's just asking yourself what is this for? Why am I doing this? If you know the constraints, then you can understand the form. If you can understand the form, you can work in the form. Some of them take longer to master than others. Not saying I've mastered any of them, but I think I have some facility with a lot of them. Screenplays take a while to learn how to write. They're weird in a lot of ways. Video game scripts, holy cow, that's a whole other ball of wax Writing. Prose takes a long time to learn how to do with authority and with muscularity and with verve, but it's not something that you're ever going to get better at thinking about it. You actually have to do it. About it, you actually have to do it. And so it took me, I think, a few years before I really came to risk Cause. When I first started writing screenplays I was. I thought I was slumming it. I thought, well, I can use this to fund my quote real writing.
Jennifer Coronado:Oh, that's very New York influence of you.
Tom Bissell:Oh, totally. I hate that line of thinking now and I'm embarrassed. I ever thought that way. You read a screenplay by Scott Frank or Tony Gilroy and you're going to tell me that these people are not writers of the highest order and their screenplays are beautiful.
Jennifer Coronado:Well, and think about Tony's father too, and his, you know.
Tom Bissell:Days of Wine and Roses and the beautiful writing there. Can I tell a funny story about that? This is illustrative of a lot of what we're talking about. So one of my first illustrative of a lot of what we're talking about. So one of my first in terms of not really knowing what lays in store for you. Career-wise, one of the first books I ever published as an assistant editor was a reissue of a 1973 novel called Desperate Characters by Paula Fox. It was out of print. I put it back into print. It's one of the most successful things I ever had a hand in publishing as an editor.
Tom Bissell:It became a small sensation among the New York literati. Everyone was like oh my God, this novel's incredible. It's so prescient about so many things, it's so intense, it is it's just a fall down great novel. I highly recommend it to anyone listening to this. Paula Fox has added interest as having been Courtney Love's grandmother. But Paula became really an important person in my life for a while and we just sort of rode this wonderful train where she thought that's it, my career's over, and then had this wonderful burst of late in life recognition. That was great.
Tom Bissell:Well, it was a movie made of desperate characters by Frank Gilroy. I watched the movie after the book came out and I said to my boss, jerry Howard, debbie Norton, hey, you know, I watched the movie after the book came out. And I said to my boss, jerry Howard, debbie Norton, hey, you know, I watched this movie last night. Desperate Characters, I didn't know. It made a movie and the movie was really good. He's, oh, that's a Frank Gilroy movie. It's like I don't know Frank Gilroy, you don't know Frank Gilroy. He was the king of New York theater and independent films in the 70s. That guy was a beast and I thought, well, that's interesting. So I went down to the Strand I got a volume of his one-act plays. I got the Subject was Roses.
Tom Bissell:I just read a bunch of Frank Gilroy and got really this is way before I even I don't think Tony had a public career at this point Flash forward 20 years later.
Tom Bissell:And 20 years later and Tony and I are being introduced and I say, strangely enough, I'm a big fan of your dads, I'm a big fan of yours too, but I'm a big fan of your dads and I told him the story and he just marveled and it was a wonderful ice-breaking thing for us to sort of connect with. You know, before I was officially hired to work with him on season two of Andor and I just thought to myself what better endorsement for curiosity and just following what interests you than that? So this writer obscure to me not to the rest of New York, obviously this obscure to me writer that I hunted out and read a bunch of because I was interested, later paid off in this really resident, interesting way with that man's son decades later. Forget careerism, forget calculation. Follow your sincere interests and they have as good a chance of any as paying off in ways that you're in no position to understand now.
Jennifer Coronado:Getting more into the video game of it all, because that's sort of where this journey started. When I wanted to talk to someone around that space, you wrote a book called Extra Lives why Video Games Matter. Where did that book come from for you?
Tom Bissell:That book came from one of the first, longest and most frustrating bouts of writer's block I ever had. I was living in Las Vegas, nevada, on a fellowship at UNLV, supposed to be writing my aforementioned Apostles book and just couldn't write, probably because, again, I didn't know what the book was about. So I had a good six to 10 months where I just played video games, rediscovered how much I liked playing video games. This is around 2008. Video games suddenly got pretty good. I mean, they were good before, but they were achieving a level of sophistication that I wasn't used to, that I wasn't aware of. Pc games had gotten there a lot sooner than console games because they just had more stuff going on. And then, but I was never a PC gamer, I was always a console gamer, I was always a console gaming peasant. So I was discovering all these games for the first time and thinking, holy shit, there's something like genuinely interesting and innovative going on here, that I'm like feeling things playing these games that I'm not accustomed to feeling, while holding a piece of plastic in my hand and staring at, you know, a cathode tube. So I thought to myself why don't I take these six to eight lost months and try to make something of them creatively.
Tom Bissell:So I proposed to my publisher this book, extra Lives, which they did not want me to write. They thought it was a risky proposition and could possibly do damage to my career as a writer of serious literary fiction and nonfiction. But I insisted and I did it. And that book, which was really about storytelling and video games and the need for it to improve a book, whose thesis I now completely reject because I think it's way more complicated than I was ever aware of when I was writing it as an outsider to game development.
Tom Bissell:Now that I've done it for over a decade, I'm a lot more sympathetic to quote bad storytelling in games, because it's a tricky one. There's all sorts of headwinds that push against you when you're quote writing a game. But that book's publication got you know nobody had really written a defense of games from like a non inside position before you know I it wasn't an insider saying no, these things are important, I was a total outsider to the industry saying no, these things are. That was genuinely new and the book did fairly well. And then suddenly I started getting approached to work in the games industry and put my money where my mouth is and you know, have been happily providing shitty writing for video games ever since.
Jennifer Coronado:Well, that brings up a quick. Well, you wrote criticism of games too, and so when you're on the flip side of it and you're suddenly embedded, I think was it Gears of War was your first, or which was your first game?
Tom Bissell:Oh, I did a couple other little things before that, but Gears of War was like the first big studio game that was released. I'd worked on a couple before that, but they were canceled so they never saw the light of day. But yeah. Yeah, gears was the first kind of big blockbuster game that came out. Yeah, yeah.
Jennifer Coronado:So I guess my question and you diving into the game space is here you are, you've written these wonderful books about historical travel, you write short stories, You've been an editor and a critic and suddenly you're in the games world. And so what did you bring in to that and what did you learn that? You were like oh, what were your aha moments as you came in?
Tom Bissell:The first one was a comic one. I published my first book when I was 29. I was a full editor at a major New York publisher when I was 27. I was very accustomed to being the youngest person in the room.
Jennifer Coronado:Are you trying to make me feel bad about myself here? Come on.
Tom Bissell:No, I'm just saying I was very accustomed to being the young person in the room and being told oh my gosh, you're so young. Well, I go to work in the games industry and then very consistently, at 34 years of age, I was often the oldest person in the room or one of the oldest people in the room. So that was a really whiplash kind of inducing sort of realization that I wasn't the whippersnapper, that in this world, that I wasn't the other one that I was in, but a very healthy one, you know, because context determines everything in life. You know your age, your wealth, your attractiveness. It's all just context, baby. It's all context.
Tom Bissell:So the other thing I noticed was just how complicated games are, and I don't mean writing them, I just mean everything. It's like a miracle any of them actually function. So many of them are just held together with digital duct tape. That I realized that something that functions, plays well, is fun and has a story that gives you any kind of emotional resonance at all is like a triumph. And I was reviewing games all along.
Tom Bissell:But the deeper I got in development, the more I just backed away from having grand thoughts about the place of narrative in games, because I realized I don't even know what it is. I'm not even. Certain games are like even necessarily have to be a storytelling medium. It's cool that they are, and some of my favorite games are storytelling games, but I also have a lot of favorite games that just run on vibe. You know it's a very rich, multifaceted art form. Well, film is the same way. Same way films don't have to be narrative films like verner herzog's film. Some of my favorite of verner's films are not strictly narrative films. They're sort of imagistically driven films and keeping an open mind to how you need now, unique's not the right word how well, the word I just said is multifaceted, how multifaceted a medium can be, is a very useful thing to keep in your head when you're working.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, I want to tell you a really quick Werner Herzog story. So I'd seen him at a screening once and I think it was for his documentary about the death penalty, and he was in the lobby. He was very gracious, he actually was talking to a lot of people and there was this boy. He's about 16 years old and he comes up to Werner and he asked him how do you look at life? It was like a very philosophical 16-year-old question. And Werner Herzog turns to him and he goes oh, my boy, you ask only the questions that a very young man would ask. And it was just the best, the questions that a very young man would ask, and it was just the best moment. And so Werner Herzog if you've seen behind the scenes of Fitzcarraldo or anything he's, you know it was such a Werner Herzog moment. So and I know he adapted one of your stories right?
Tom Bissell:Yeah, yeah, I've known Werner for 20 years and you just remind me when I first interviewed because I profiled him first that's how I met him and I asked him a question, one of the first questions I asked him. I did not put this in the profile for what will soon be obvious reasons, and he thought for a moment and he said I don't think that is a very interesting question. Next, and I said, fair, okay, I don't think that's a very interesting question. I like that energy. I like that honesty. There was no offense intended in it, he's just no, let's not talk about that, let's move on.
Tom Bissell:That cut to the chastenedness. That's something that I intensely value the older I get. It's just the ability to not shame anyone but just say, eh, let's not do that, let's not talk about that. What are we going to get from talking about that man? That is a gift that creative people need more of, because you wind up just tolerating a lot of endless discussions about bullshit in these various industries, because sometimes people just are talking to work something out or figure out what they think or impress someone else in the room. I just like cutting right to it. What are we doing here. What is the point of all this Again? What are we trying to make the audience feel? Can we just stay on that?
Jennifer Coronado:In the book you wrote back in 2013,. You had said you had not seen a video game at that point that had crossed over into art. Have you seen that happen since you first wrote that?
Tom Bissell:Oh, I think. Yeah, that's one of the lines in that book that even as I wrote it, I was like I don't think, I believe. Well, I don't think I believe this. I think there's tons of video games that are art. I think they're all art. Art can be bad. Art can be bankrupt and lousy. Let's not pretend that calling something art is the be all end. All that whole debate that has been going on in video games for the last several years. It's cooled down now, thank God.
Tom Bissell:But I was an eager participant in that debate for a while and I just realized that it's horseshit, no-transcript.
Tom Bissell:It's cool that Led Zeppelin gets played at the Kennedy Center, but the thrill of illegitimacy is to me what gives newer art forms all of their rawness and their excitement. And I go back to some of those kind of garage band teams of developers in the 90s making Doom and Castle, wolfenstein and Marathon and all these like really early first person shooters. These were just kids like solving some of the most challenging programming and engineering problems imaginable, like people at 3M and people at Boeing working with three-dimensional models could not do. They were creating virtual movement in virtual space, not just relying on the tile flip trick that early 3D simulations and computers did. They were basically laying the foundation of the modern game industry, modern computer graphics industry, modern entertainment, and their response to these breakthroughs was to stick a shotgun in the middle of the screen and, like a demon Nazi, a big pixelated demon Nazi in the middle of the screen. That was how they were channeling this climacteric technological breakthrough. People who were respectable never would have done that.
Jennifer Coronado:Well, that's because they didn't know there were rules. Because once you know there's rules, you get so hamstrung by the rules that the breakthroughs become harder because the rules become the dominant. The breakthroughs become harder because the rules become the dominant. And you know, we do need rules, but you need. That's why kids are so amazing, because they're just, they don't know everything yet and then they're not knowing. They can totally make change. It's that energy that allows them to make change the not knowing, you know, yeah energy that allows them to make change.
Tom Bissell:The not knowing. You know, yeah, their quote.
Jennifer Coronado:Idiotic solutions can sometimes seem unusually elegant after you think about them. Yeah, so you wrote a lot of books about. You know traveling and historical traveling, Like you wrote a book where you traveled with your father to Vietnam. Do you see video game scripts as travel documents? Because you're moving through a world?
Tom Bissell:Yeah, in a way they are weird travel logs, because that's the funny thing about writing a game. I've written a lot of action games, right, and if you're writing a scene in an action movie or an action heavy sequence in a TV show, here's the car chase. You're just putting all your effort into making it sound exciting on the page. Here's how we're going to shoot it. Here's why it's cool. Here's the new kind of twist on the familiar chase. And then the car wrecks and the characters get out of the wreck and you, okay, I'm okay, cut, come back up. They're in an apartment somewhere, ice bag on their head. This is all dumb, obviously on purpose, but I'm just trying to illustrate the point. It's the best story I've ever heard. But that cut is crucial because you don't have to live with the aftermath of the car crash In a game.
Tom Bissell:Something unimaginable happens. The car crashes and then the characters get out and then it's back to gameplay and the character's standing there and they got to start walking and you have to have all the conversations that every other form of visual entertainment cuts out, because they're bullshit, because it's hard to have people talk at length about unimaginable things that just happen to them, and that's why video games are. It's so hard to get real human emotion into them, because I wrote this in a review once that it's really hard to get real human emotion into them, because I wrote this in a review once that it's really hard to create believable human reactions to things few people have experienced. Video games are about trying to create believable human reactions to things nobody has ever experienced, being repeated once every 10 minutes for 12 hours.
Tom Bissell:So that's the challenge, like the fact that the camera just hangs there after the most crazy, unimaginable thing and then you have to fill the silence while the characters walk away from the explosion, walk away from the monster they just slayed, walk away from the car crash and that man that gets hard to do over and over again in a way that again feels human Cause. That's sort of what I try to bring to game writing is just some little glimpse of authentic humanity. I haven't always succeeded, I don't even know if I've often succeeded, but that's sort of my attempt to create characters that are something other than just placards for being cool or tough, like actual human beings. That's true I would. I endeavor for that to be my specialty.
Jennifer Coronado:It's funny when you talk about some of the mundanities that we sort of skip through when we're editing a film or writing for a film. One of my favorite things to do is to watch people eat a meal in a movie. I don't know why, it's because it's just so real. You know, it's just you have to have some sort of food to sustain your energy, to move on to your next thing, and that's just a real place to live in a film. I love stuff like that, so I think that's neat.
Tom Bissell:Yeah, and I've. I don't know if I've ever shot an eating scene. I've shot a few virtual eating scenes. I've never shot a like a real one. But I'm told they're a nightmare to cut together because everyone's glasses and forks and it's what you just said is true, it's real, it feels homey, it feels natural. But actually imbuing it with that naturalism is one of the biggest. Like editing and shooting nightmares, because everyone has to have a rough sense of what they were doing when they said what. When you're shooting the coverage, because it just creates this like continuity nightmare for the editors to piece together and I never thought about that.
Jennifer Coronado:Like how hard shooting a dinner table scene can be technically when you're writing characters in either games or in short stories, or in journalism or in screenwriting. How much time?
Tom Bissell:do you spend judging them, if you do, versus being inside their perspective? A lot. I think you spend a lot of time judging and I would distinguish between judgmentalism and judging. Judgment is an inevitable part of life. You're constantly judging. It's an internal process. Being judgmental to me is an external process. That's sharing your judgments on as wide a platform as possible. It's being a gossip, it's being unkind, it's being uncharitable. Judgmentalism yuck Judgment. Mentalism yuck Judgment. Necessary Now, judgment can be without moral condemnation.
Tom Bissell:But I think if you have to understand a fictional character or a real character that you're trying to relate through prose and a piece of journalism or a profile, say, you're judging all the time. Are they telling the truth? Are they having you on? Are they trying to be an unusually interesting version of themselves? Because you know you're, as a journalist, you're Schrodinger's cat made flesh. You know you are the? Or what's the? What's the anthropological term for the presence of the researcher disrupting the thing that they're trying to document? I can't remember what that's called.
Tom Bissell:But I'm judging constantly, but I'm also trying to be kind, I'm trying to be charitable. I really do believe that most people, even awful people, have motives that are understandable, that are human and that sometimes are often sympathetic, even when they do genuinely terrible things. Now, they're exceptional. I'm talking about murderers or abusers or things like that. I'm just talking about the average sort of store-bought, shitty person that you encounter probably has all sorts of reasonable sympathetic reasons for the way they are, and I try to be mindful of that. I really so. I judge, but I'm never judgmental.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, that's fair. I want to get a little bit into screenwriting because you mentioned that was another process you had to learn and I know you wrote the episodic adaptation for Mosquito Coast. How is that a different process for you from the other processes that you've had to go through, from short stories to journalism, to writing for games?
Tom Bissell:Every medium has its distinct strengths and weaknesses. Nobody reads novels for the car chases. Nobody plays video games for the you know effulgent love stories. Nobody sees movies to listen to a character spew out backstory for three and a half minutes about you know some obscure thing that they're interested in? Learning to think visually. As a storyteller, I think I'm a pretty visual prose writer, but learning how to be really deft and really quick, because a screenplay is about establishing well, two things Screenplays are about human behavior, and then screenplays are about how you transition from one scene to the next. It's also about how information travels from one scene to the next, how mood travels from one to the next. Whenever I hear someone say screenplays are just like about dialogue, I instantly know I'm in the presence of a complete amateur. Dialogue is the least of your problems when you're writing a screenplay. They're about structure, they're about believable behavior and they're about transitions, how information moves from scene to scene, from character to character. In my view, Travel.
Tom Bissell:Travel again. Motion Screenplays are about motion. In a novel or a short story you can and I do this all the time, you can sit in a character's head for pages. Because what are novels good at?
Tom Bissell:Prose and novels are great at replicating what human thought feels. It's an illusion. Thought is often not grammatical, it's jumbled, it's not ordered. Thought is often not grammatical, it's jumbled, it's not ordered. And prose good prose is all of those things. But when you're reading prose that is trying to replicate what being inside someone's head is, and you get that thrill of recognition oh God, that's. They just put into words some sensation that I've never seen vocalized before. Oh my God, prose is unparalleled at that. That's what prose is for.
Tom Bissell:So prose has this whole psychological dimension that films do not have, and so you need to supply it somehow, and a lot of the ways you're going to supply it on the page are often going to be overruled in performance or by the director. Right it like this the thing that's shot is never the thing that's written. It's never a one-to-one relationship there. So what you're trying to do as a screenwriter is be really deft, be really economical, be interesting, wrangle information well. So not only does the way information moves from scene to scene work, but the mood and the vibe seems consistent, like the movie all seems to be about the same thing. And so when I start writing a screenplay, the first thing I'm thinking of is an interesting character and putting him or her in a visually interesting place, like where do we start? And that's sort of the gunshot goes off, and then it's like a trial and error process of just trying to move from one visually interesting situation to another until you have something that feels like a journey in which actual change and drama has occurred. And it's a very professionalized form of writing, my God.
Tom Bissell:Everyone is opinionated about how they need to be structured and all this or that. I've talked to a fair number of pretty high wattage screenwriters at this point and all the ones I respect have had very little to say about inciting incidents and you know all these like screenwriter lingo things that people throw around and they've all just said they just try to keep it moving and keep it interesting and keep it surprising. And I think, like the screenplay writing books, when they talk about these structural things, they're often driving home a very real point, which is structure helps you Like it, helps you organize how scenes can work. But I also think, like, a rigid adherence to structure is very rarely going to give you anything that feels unusually rich or interesting, because you know you can create a beautiful painting, painting it by numbers. But anyone who knows anything is going to be able to detect those little numbers underneath all the pictures, and I think that's what a lot of Hollywood storytelling defaults to that. Do we have any belief that?
Tom Bissell:Quentin Tarantino, probably our most acclaimed quote literary screenwriter Do you think he's ever thought about the lessons of save the cat? I don't think he has.
Tom Bissell:So no not everyone be, or even should be, quentin Tarantino, but uh, I think he's a useful antidote to a lot of uh, highly archetypally Hollywood-style storytelling.
Jennifer Coronado:When you were a younger writer, you once Not that you're not young now when you're a younger writer you once said you wrote from a space of anger and desperation. What is the space you write from now?
Tom Bissell:Curiosity, contentedness. I write a lot more from love. Now I've, you know, been in a stable relationship for, you know, 16 years. I have a family that I adore. I don't, I just don't have the anger.
Tom Bissell:Anger is of no use to a writer. Jim Harrison told me that once. He said anger is always a didactic emotion and didactic is of no use to a novelist, he said, and I would upend that to you know, most forms of writing don't need to be angry. Obviously, if you're an investigative journalist and you find out like the Pentagon is pumping plutonium into the Mississippi River, anger is a totally justifiable emotion in writing. That expose, however, drama that starts in anger and ends in anger, I think can only be didactic and it can only, and if only subconsciously, sort of be a series of score settling by the writer him or herself. And that too is a pretty lousy impulse for writing.
Tom Bissell:And I say that knowing that you know lots of Hemingway stuff was written, you know, from the most petty place imaginable. Like you can be a great artist and just be a petty dick, nobody disputes that. But look at how Hemingway wound up and you might ate him alive. So I used to have grand hopes and ambitions for myself and my level of success and my level of renown, and I don't care about any of that anymore. I think anyone who's allowed to use their imagination and get paid for it. I don't care what you do. If you're allowed to just imagine and make a living, you've already won the cosmic lottery. Just stop complaining. You're already sitting atop a pyramid of unbelievable privilege.
Jennifer Coronado:Speaking of that, I'm asking this question of everyone this season what does imagination and what does creativity mean to you?
Tom Bissell:Imagination to me is empathy in disguise, really, and I don't think you can be truly imaginative without being empathetic. I think all great writers are empathetic to one degree or another, and I think my favorite writers are all people that are able to imagine their way into anyone's lives, and I don't. And sort of some of the identitarian objections to people writing outside their gender or class or race, that stuff sort of really grieves me because I don't understand what the point of literature is without writers feeling utter freedom to cross those lines and imagine your way into someone else's existence, because I don't understand how reconciliation for any social problem is possible without someone being willing to look at something from a point of view completely different from their own, whether culturally or socioeconomically. That is the engine of change and understanding. And I'm not saying writing is here to foster social change and understanding, but I'm also not saying it isn't exactly. Again, it's all what the particular nature of your writing project is. So that's what imagination is to me. It's fearless, it's not scared of going to scary places, it's not scared of violating taboos and it's also not afraid to be sentimental ET is one of the most sentimental taboos and it's also not afraid to be like sentimental. Like ET is one of the most sentimental movies ever made and it's like one of the greatest movies ever made. Like it's just being true to the experience you're trying to present to a civilian and to your fellow citizens, to your audience.
Tom Bissell:Creativity, to me, is not giving up. There are lots of creative people who start projects and give them up quickly. I'm one of those people. I've done that with every creative art I've ever tried. I've tried to learn a lot of different things and what did I do to every single one of them? I gave up eventually, except for writing. It's the only one I stuck with. I don't know why. It's the only one I stuck with, but it's the only one I stuck with.
Tom Bissell:If I'm giving people for advice of a life well-lived, not everyone can have a job they love. Society would not function if everybody had their dream job. So if you're trying to create a life for yourself, there's two things to do. What do you really like to do? If there's a way to make money doing it, try to make money doing it. If there's not, then structure your life around a series of hobbies that you love doing, and your job then become the vessel by which you can explore your hobbies.
Tom Bissell:I don't know anyone who's not consumed with interests outside of quote what they do, who gets to my age, 50, 60, 70, every healthy 60, 50, 60, 70 year old person I know. All have the same thing in common they are curious. And my father God love him, a man I love very much got to the end of his work life, retired, and he kind of lost his mind because all of his hobbies had gone away. I mean, he got old, it became harder for him to do a lot of them and I just watched him sort of recede, just like Homer Simpson, disappearing into the hedge, like all the things that he loved, he took pleasure in, and it was heartbreaking and it just put steel in my back to never, ever lose that sense of curiosity, even if I'm not able to walk as heartily as I once did.
Tom Bissell:Curiosity, you're, quote creativity. So if imagination is empathy, I think creativity is curiosity. I think they're alter egos and if I ever lose that urge, I don't want to think what would happen to me, because I imagine it would be very similar to what happened to my father.
Jennifer Coronado:Well, I have one very final, a very esoteric question for you. Throughout this conversation and in some of your writing, you've talked about the intensity of emotions when you're playing video games or participating in creative endeavors much like we're talking about right now, or like watching a movie, and it makes me wonder if those things that are sort of these realities that we create versus the reality we live in can drive emotional responses like real-world activity, interacting with your family. How real are emotions?
Tom Bissell:So this is a fascinating question. In the Confessions, before he became a Christian, he was a great lover of the dramas and the plays that he would go see in North Africa, in Hippo, where he came of age, and when he became a Christian the first thing he wanted to do was stop people from going to the plays. Because his complaint was why do we take this? We see these agonized plays of people suffering and having heartbreak and if the better the actor is, the more terrible he makes us feel, the more we praise them. This is madness, or so.
Tom Bissell:I put up for my students to read a short story by David Means called Sault Ste Marie. It's a very violent story. There's a really awful assault in a hotel room that happens in the story. That's truly unpleasant. This is before the sort of rise of trigger warnings and stuff. I think maybe they were sort of cropping up then, but there's certainly nothing I ever put any great faith in and I had a student basically say I couldn't read this story. It was just too awful, and I remember saying to her she's an older woman and I just sensed the way she said that she may have been in a few hotel rooms where not dissimilar things had happened. She said I don't need these images in my head, it's not why I read. And I raised my finger to say something like, well, it's a book. And I, jennifer. I did not have an answer for her. I couldn't tell this woman why it was necessary for her to have the nightmarish images of that story in her head.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah.
Tom Bissell:And then I started thinking about my love of slasher movies. When I was a teenager it was my favorite genre. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of slasher movies. When I was a teenager it was my favorite genre. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of slasher movies from the 80s because I saw them all. I can't even bear to watch horror movies anymore. I don't want the images in my head.
Tom Bissell:So I think that kind of intensity of emotion has a real place in life and your creative development. But I don't think it's a coincidence that as our own mortalities become less abstract to us, the nutritive value of those kinds of intensities gets a lot more debatable and a lot more theoretical. It takes a lot for me to expose myself to media that I know is going to be genuinely upsetting, like I have to really. I have to really trust the artists that they're going to take me to a place of new understanding. Because you know, once your friends have killed themselves and you've gotten your heart broken and your parents have died, life is intense enough. Life is intense enough. You don't need to seek out virtually the same kind of extremities. So for that reason I think really intense forms of media and art are often for younger people for very healthy reasons, and they're often not for older, for equally obvious ones for very healthy reasons, and they're often not for older, for equally obvious ones.
Jennifer Coronado:Well, Tom, this has been an awesome conversation.
Tom Bissell:I really appreciate all your time today. Thank you so much for joining us, Jennifer. I wanted to thank you. They were just wonderful questions to think about and talk about, so I really appreciate it.
Jennifer Coronado:Thank you for listening to. Everyone Is. Everyone Is is produced and edited by Chris Hawkinson. Executive producer is Aaron. Thank you for listening.
