Hi, this is just a quick message to say that if you’re in New York, I’ll be doing the first ever Castle event at the BELL HOUSE in BROOKLYN on Sept 1, the day of the US publication.

This won’t be like a regular reading. I’m bringing the book to life on stage, with audio and video clips, like a live, unfolding documentary.

I still need to be cloak and dagger about where this story goes, although here is a little more about it. I’m glad those cloak and dagger days are nearly done!

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Only a tiny number of reporters got access to the South Lawn itself for fight night, and I was one of them. I wasn’t forced to watch it on a TV in the inauspicious basement of the nearby JW Marriott like the shut-outs were. I’m writing it up for GQ magazine. It was nuts. And funny.

I did it because it’s theme-adjacent to The Castle: how various men - feeling unglued from society – have created strange, fake worlds for themselves inside which they don’t have to interact with other people except on their own terms. But while being a wayward, boundary-less maverick might sound good in theory, how does it work out in real life?

Anyway, I have a bunch of news relating to The Castle. First, I’m touring AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND and then SINGAPORE. I’ll be in Auckland, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Singapore. I honestly don’t know how big a crossover there is between Ronson fans and people who live in Singapore, so it may just be me and a drunken sailer on shore leave.

Next, there’s the UK tour. I will end this newsletter with those tour dates.

And I’ll be telling the story for the very first time on stage at The Bell House, BROOKLYN on Sept 1, just before I set off for the UK.

I’m intending for these shows to be like a live documentary version of the book, unfolding on stage, with video clips and audio clips.

Only a tiny number of people have read The Castle so far. It’s embargo-crazy out there. But I was very flattered to get some early endorsements, including this from Patrick Radden Keefe.

Oh, and I play the voice of Shameus the shame deity in the new season of Adventure Time: Side Quests. Episode 13, Island of Shame! And we redesigned my website. And I’m putting the finishing touches to Season 3 of my BBC show Things Fell Apart. It’ll be out in January,

Ok that’s it for now. Thank you!

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I am delighted to share this video unveiling the UK cover of THE CASTLE, which is available for preorder. I’ve been cloak and dagger about the story, because the twists and turns are really something, but the video includes some tiny slivers of audio from my reporting.

I love the artwork and the video. (Thank you Rose Poole and Richard Bravery at Viking, and Joel Ronson for the music.)

So: only a very small number of people have read the book, but one of them is Louis Theroux, and he very kindly wrote this:

‘Ridiculously compelling and wonderfully weird …The Castle is vintage Ronson: wise, timely and extremely funny’ LOUIS THEROUX

I’m touring The Castle in the UK in Sept/October, bringing the adventure to life on stage, with audio and video clips, like a live unfolding documentary.

Here’s what we’re putting on the back cover. I really can’t wait for you to read this book.

Jon

From the million-copy bestselling author of The Psychopath Test comes a twisting, darkly comic true-life story about one man, his castle, a generation of unravelling men – and a secret hidden deep behind the castle walls.

I honestly have no clue what is going on.
This is very weird.
We left. Was completely fucked. All good now.

When Jon Ronson received a series of disquieting texts from his son Joel who’d been lured to a mysterious castle in the forests of New England late one night, it sets Ronson Sr. off on an extraordinary adventure into an underworld of unmoored and disaffected men.

As Jon follows his instincts and deepens his investigation into the castle and the wider ‘man crisis’ – some of whom are feeling tossed around in a sea of conflicting ideologies of what it means to be a man – urgent questions come to light. What exactly is ‘Princessing’? Why did a charming lawncare influencer dress as a baby in front of billions of online viewers, with catastrophic results? And more pressingly, why are two recently released murderers on their way to pay Jon a visit?

From the death of utopian factory towns to the false promise of YouTube influencer culture, Jon shows us our rapidly changing world like never before, and the men caught in the middle. A world drained of purpose, of collapsing institutions, where a new era of disinhibited behaviour has taken hold of our online and real-world selves. And as the castle mystery twists and turns into a cat and mouse story, will Jon be able to discover its terrifying secret hidden from the world?

The Castle marks Jon Ronson’s triumphant return to the written page. Utterly hilarious and criminally entertaining, this is one of our greatest non-fiction writers at the top of his game: diagnosing our societal frailties in a narrative of blistering pace, insight and intensity.

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I'm delighted to let you know that my new book, THE CASTLE, is coming to the US on September 1 and is now available for preorder wherever you buy books.

Through several unfolding stories, some of them quite hazardous and extraordinary, I piece together the reasons why I think many men have been unraveling in the 21st century. From the death of utopian factory towns to the false promises of YouTube influencer culture, these are stories about why some men are feeling tossed around in a sea of conflicting ideologies about what being a man actually *means* - and are, as a result, becoming detached from reality, behaving like separatists, creating a new era of disinhibition. It’s a book about how there are suddenly lots of things that men have been used to doing that they can’t do any more - and are, as a consequence, unraveling, creating fake realities, strange worlds for themselves inside their homes and castles…

It’s my first book in eleven years (unless you count my podcasts) and it took three years to write. The US cover is beautiful. As is the UK one, which I will be unveiling as soon as I can…

So cross the moat with me as I throw open the gates to THE CASTLE!

Ok bye!

Jon

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Sorry I haven’t been touch. I’ve been finishing my new book, my first in eleven years - The Castle. Anyway, it’s very done now. I’m being cloak-and-dagger about its story, but I like how this preview in The Shortlist described it:

Anyway - UK people, it’s 25% off to preorder at Waterstones from now for three days, until midnight Friday night (Feb 20). Offer code FEB26. There’s an ad below to prove it.

I’m touring a show based on the book in September / October.

It’s coming out in the US too and I’ll tell you about that soon.

Oh, to move onto a different matter, I won’t be turning on paid subscriptions for my substack again. It was too stressful. It reminded me of writing a weekly column in the Guardian when I started to pray something bad would happen in my domestic life so I’d have something to write about. But I didn’t want to be a selfish giant with the previously paywalled posts, so I’ve just removed the paywall to them all.

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It was a pretty niche substack, to pre-warn you. It was just me writing about the process of narrative nonfiction, while I was figuring it out myself. Anyway, paywall removed now.

Speak soon, bye, and here’s the ad.

Jon

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Thank you! I really love this book and am very excited to get it out into the world.

Hello! I want to introduce you to a very interesting and little known mental disorder called Scrupulosity. It’s a kind of OCD, where the sufferer has an obsessive concern with religious or moral matters. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, apparently had it. One time he accidentally stood on two bits of straw in the shape of a cross and it tormented him for ages. Martin Luther apparently had it too. He once accidently omitted the word ‘for’ during the Eucharist and he later said he might has well have murdered his parents. That’s why Lutheranism was so stringent - it came from his Scrupulosity. All those poor Lutherans, being forced to be super religious because of their leader’s mental disorder. And look at Trump - a different mental disorder but we all still have to live inside it. Plus ca change.

Anyway, I mention it because I think I briefly had a touch of Scrupulosity when I was making my podcast The Last Days of August. I want to write a little about that, and about journalistic ethics in general – about when we don’t worry enough, and when we worry too much.

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The Last Days of August was about the death of a porn star named August Ames. She took her life on the same day she’d been piled in on on Twitter for making a comment that was considered homophobic. A few weeks later her husband Kevin told me he was releasing a statement naming the porn stars he held responsible. After that, a bunch of porn stars told me her death was far murkier than Kevin was letting on, and maybe I should investigate him. And so it began.

In the end, The Last Days of August is basically a nonfiction An Inspector Calls where everyone bears some responsibility for mistreating August in the months before she died. But the difference between my podcast and the JB Priestley play was that his was fiction and mine was nonfiction. I was digging around inside August’s real life world just weeks after her death, asking her loved ones difficult questions.

I became so obsessed with getting the ethical balance exactly right I started having panic attacks. It kind of did me in for a year. I had to stop working. Now, when I look back on it, I think I succumbed to a kind of Scrupulosity. And if you’re a journalist with Scrupulosity, you should probably avoid true crime podcasting.

To be totally honest, most journalists are hard bastards who don’t care about morality or people’s feelings. They care about getting the story. In that sense, most journalists are like the police, only interested in getting an arrest. So when I started to worry too much about ethics, I was really straying very far from what’s considered appropriate journalistic behavior.

One good thing came from my Scrupulosity, though. When I was working on the screenplay for the movie Okja I decided - in the spirit of writing what you know - to give one of the characters Scrupulosity. He was Silver, a member of the Animal Liberation Front:

Jay turns at the sound of something falling and sees Silver barely being held up by Blond. He looks pale, sickly.

JAY: Are you okay, Silver? (To Blond) He didn't eat anything even today?

BLOND: He's still trying to leave the smallest footprint he can on the planet.

SILVER (weakly): All food production is exploitative.

BLOND (exasperated): What about tomatoes?

SILVER: Ripened with ethylene gas. Transported in trucks.

JAY: I admire your conviction, Silver, but your pallid complexion worries me.

In the midst of that weird period of my life, I had a meeting at This American Life. I was making an episode about the conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones’s teenage years. I’d heard a rumor that Alex had been the worst bully at his high school, once beating a classmate almost to death. The other kids got so sick of it that, in retaliation, they lured him to a party in the countryside and beat him up very badly. And that’s why the Jones family left Dallas and started afresh in Austin.

Whenever I’m setting out on a story I always try and think in advance of its very worst version, so I know which pitfalls to avoid. Often, the worst version of a story is one with too many experts, too many boring talking heads, and not enough movement or adventure. With the Alex story, I got very worried about the ethics of digging around his high school years. Shouldn’t a person’s childhood be off limits? I certainly wouldn’t anyone to investigate me at Cardiff High at 13 or 14. Yes, this was Alex Jones, who hounds the parents of children killed in school shootings. But even so: was this really a story I should be telling?

Anyway, I brought those worries to my meeting at This American Life. I said, “I think we should only do this story if Alex is willing to be interviewed for it.” One of the producers look annoyed at me and said, “Yes, but what about his victims?”

I’ve thought a lot about that exchange since. He was right. I’d got myself so worked up about the ethics of being fair to Alex, I forgot about the people he’d hurt. Last week I alluded to a similar situation unfolding in my next book. Maybe the answer is for us to ask ourselves a question whenever we’re undertaking a story: If someone has been hurt, who’s been hurt the most?

In The Last Days of August, the person hurt the most was, obviously, August herself. In my Alex Jones high school story, the person hurt the most was the boy beaten almost to death by Alex. His name was Bubba. Also, everyone else Alex has hurt – the parents of the children murdered at Sandy Hook, and the rest of us who have to endure all the lies spread by public figure narcissists like him. And at the end comes Alex himself, who was very badly beaten up at that party, but in retaliation for his own bullying. I’m sure he doesn’t want to have a narcissistic disorder that leads him to such destructive behavior, so that has to figure into it too.

I think this is a very good way to keep anything approaching Scrupulosity at bay. Our stories serve many purposes: We have to be fair to the characters in it, but also fair to anyone they’ve hurt. But we have to be fair to ourselves and our readers too. Our aim is to tell very great stories that shed interesting new light on the way the world works. And we shouldn’t let some obsessive concern with scruples stop us from that.

A good book about all of this is Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist And The Murderer.

By the way, I managed to see You Me Bum Bum Train and I loved it so much I went back to volunteer the next night. If you’re in London and you want to volunteer, I recommend it highly. I’d go back every night if I could. It’s kind of lifechanging.

As always please keep the conversation going in the comments if you fancy it. Okay thanks! Bye!

I’ll tell you more about my worry next week, because I want to skip straight to his advice. Which was: “Put it in there.”

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What he meant was, if there’s ever anything about your story that’s awkward or uncomfortable, maybe some misgiving you have about how you gathered your material, something you might be inclined to sweep under the rug for whatever reason, put it in the story! Don’t hide your concerns – express them. You’re worried, say, that it wasn’t fair to interview this guy so soon after his partner died? Say so.

In a way, Adam’s advice reminds me of a line from So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed: ‘Our shame-worthiness lies in the space between who we are and how we present ourselves to the world.’ If you reduce that space to nothing, you’re more likely to be invincible. Look at MAGA world. They’ve learned to be balls-out about their crimes / sins / bad behavior, and now they’re like post-shame supervillains, hospital superbugs impervious to treatment. It feels like the only way a MAGA person can be brought down these days is if they’re accused of having sex with someone underage. And even then a lot of them get away with it.

Whereas if you’re a pop science author who presents yourself as wise and brilliant and above the fray, and it turns out you slightly fabricated a quote, it can be over for you for the rest of life. It’s because everyone hates hypocrisy.

But that’s not what Adam meant when he said “Put it in there”, nor was it the reason why his advice felt so important to me. I think he was speaking to something big and profound about an author’s relationship with their story, something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Which is: Who’s in charge? Your story or you?

I had a terrible moment in 2003. I was making a documentary for Channel 4 called Kidneys for Jesus about a religious sect called The Jesus Christians who were giving their spare kidneys to strangers. A young member called Casey was about to donate his kidney and I suggested to the group’s leader Dave McKay that because Casey had only been in the group for a few weeks, and he was just 22 or something, perhaps he could be given a cooling off period before deciding whether to go ahead with the surgery. Also, I thought Dave was being a little Machiavellian in general, and I said as much in a Guardian article that was published while we were still filming.

Yes, it was definitely a mistake for me to publish an article while I was still filming. I don’t know what I was thinking. Anyway, Dave hit the roof. He pulled the plug on the filming. He emailed me that my exclusion was ‘permanent. You have only reaped what you have sown. Love, Dave.’

Having access withdrawn in an access-dependent story is theoretically the worst thing that can happen. If a story is a river, and you’re a twig in the river going wherever the current takes you, I had just hit a massive dam.

I’d already spent £50K of Channel 4’s money and I had no film. I was panicking. I remember panicking to my wife, Elaine. And she said, “Who’s in charge of this story? Dave or you? Make the film about this!”

It was the same point Adam was making years later: My story shouldn’t be some artifice, separate from the reality of making the story. I should narrow that space to nothing. Because if I do that, I’ll be regaining control of it. I’ll be in charge again.

But how would I do that with the Jesus Christians? How could I reflect the drama of losing access in a way that would move the narrative forward?

As it happens, with Dave McKay I got lucky. He didn’t go silent on me. He started messaging me a LOT to explain my faults to me. For months I’d wake up to find scathing emails from him about my lack of integrity. So eventually I made him an offer: If I publicly apologized to him in the film, could I get my access back?

The Jesus Christians were DELIGHTED. They immediately invited me round and one of them – Roland – started composing my public apology for me: “‘Hello, I’m Jon Ronson,’” he began. “‘I must apologize for my article, blah blah blah. I said this. That was wrong. And I guess I’ve been doing it for many years. Reading into things or trying to make them more exciting and in my zeal I misrepresented a few things and I apologize.”

“For MANY YEARS?’” I thought.

Suddenly the drama had become funny. And soon after that it became horrific. Dave messaged to say a woman in Scotland called Christine was dying of kidney failure and he WOULD have instructed one of his members to give her a kidney but if he did I’d only accuse him of manipulation so he’d decided to let her die and let her death be on my conscience.

(By the way, Christine wasn’t as sick as Dave had made her out to be. Although I don’t know what’s happened to her since.)

You might be thinking, “Well, Jon got lucky there. How does this anecdote help me if I’ve lost access to a story and the guy ISN’T emailing me every five minutes with excellent material?”

Yes, there will be times when stories become irrevocable disasters. But in general if you think of yourself as being in charge of your story in this way, it can make your life a lot easier, and your story better too.

To return to my river analogy - if there’s an obstacle in the river, the water finds a way around it. You desperately want access to someone and you don’t get it? Find a way around it, because the story has to go on. And who knows, if you’re forced to think differently because things didn’t work out how you wanted, it might end up BETTER than you imagined.

Also, if you’re in charge of your story you’re also in charge of how it FEELS. With my new book I’m loving mashing up the genres. One minute it’s memoir, the next it’s an adventure, the next it’s an investigation. When I started out in journalism I’d never have had the confidence to do that. But that’s another thing I mean about taking charge of your story. You can get to a place where you feel so in charge of it you can start to experiment in genre-mashing ways.

Okay, next week I’ll write about the qualm I alluded to above, and talk about when we can worry TOO MUCH about the ethics of a story.

In the meantime, tomorrow I’m coming to the UK for a week! The Man From Delmonte, a band I managed in the ‘80s, are playing for the first time in 34 years at Manchester’s Band on the Wall on Wednesday Feb 26 and I’ll be there to introduce them.

On Feb 27 I’m going to see You Me Bum Bum Train. Everyone says it’s life changing, so it had better be.

On March 1 I’m DJing at Scared to Dance in Dalston, starting at 10pm. Some tickets are still available, bafflingly.

Then on March 2 I’ll be on Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch talking about the next and probably final leg of Psychopath Night.

Ok bye!

Jon

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Hello! This weekly Substack is mostly about my fixation on how a piece of journalism can be made to feel as distinctive as a novel or a painting - how it can inhabit its own universe and, if it’s a book, be such a one-off bookstores won’t even know which section to put it in.

(That, I confess, is the downside: If your book doesn’t fit neatly into any genre, bookstores may get bewildered and place you somewhere horrific like Wellness. But I think that’s their problem and you shouldn’t let it hamstring you, although publishers may disagree with me on that. But it IS a frustration: I remember all those years when the Costa Book Awards only had one nonfiction category - Biography. Were the rest of us just ineligible?)

Anyway, lately I’ve been thinking about that term ‘worldbuilding’ - that technique from fantasy writing where the writer creates an entire universe with its own set of rules, its own flora and fauna and customs and history that will never be completely evident to the reader. They’ll only ever see the tip of the iceberg, like a unicorn galloping by, or whatever. As you can see I’m no fantasy writer and am impressed with myself for even thinking of a unicorn.

I want to talk about worldbuilding within the context of first person narrative nonfiction. Specifically it’s about worldbuilding as a way to introduce yourself as a character early in your own story.

Let me give you some examples.

I’m reading John Safran’s very engaging book Squat, about his adventure squatting Kanye West’s abandoned mansion in LA. I love John Safran. He does what Louis Theroux and I do but with a twist – he’s Australian!

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Squat is like an absurd, audacious comic version of David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count. Like me, John wants to put the story first and let the themes emerge from it. He’s a storyteller, not a polemicist.

This is how chapter one starts:

I’ve been in Los Angeles half a day. This is seven months before the war in Gaza. I’m in the bumbling stage of book writing, driving to dead ends while the half-thoughts, the no-thoughts and the overthinking are congealing.

I think that’s beautifully put, a reminder that that massively dispiriting early part of the process when you don’t know what you’re doing and everything’s a dead end doesn’t mean you’ve lost your talent and your career is over, but is in fact part of the process. He goes on:

I’m riding shotgun. Antoinette is cutting through the woods, squinting through the windscreen of the Jeep.

‘I’m scared of being shot,’ Antoinette says.

He’s introducing a device here, of course. Antoinette – and we don’t know who she is yet - could be his foil, someone to bounce off, maybe a double act. I really like the confidence of this. This is John Safran being John Safran, not A Nonfiction Writer. He’s creating a John Safran Universe.

‘Oh, there’s a cat,’ Antoinette sings out, forgetting about Americans and guns. She likes cats. She likes all creatures in the animal kingdom besides mosquitos and her family. I’ve only known Antoinette five months.

This is an unconventional, fourth-wall-breaking kind of worldbuilding - a very shorthand, distilled way of indicating to the reader lots of things: This journey will be fun and funny, he’s no professional investigator but a guy ‘bumbling’ through LA with a woman he doesn’t know well, and they’re about to get out of their depth in an audacious and unprofessional way by squatting Kanye’s mansion.

He's telling us that his book is its own unique thing, he’s the right person to be writing it, and we’re in safe hands.

There’s a book called True Story by the journalist Michael Finkel. The backstory is very interesting. Finkel was a New York Times writer brought down by a scandal: He’d published a story - ‘Is Youssouf Malé A Slave?’ - about the slave trade in West Africa, but he didn’t reveal that the main character was in fact a composite of several boys he interviewed. He did it to make his story sharper. No single boy’s experience encapsulated the narrative he’d wanted to tell, so he took a bit from here and a bit from there. See what happens when you allow your preexisting hopes for your story to take over, rather than be satisfied with the nuances, the grey areas? Journalistic frauds almost always occur for that reason.

Anyway, Finkel introduces himself as a character in True Story just as his subterfuge is about to be exposed by the New York Times in the form of an Editor’s Note:

All day, I wore sweatpants and bedroom slippers. I didn’t watch TV or listen to music. I ate whatever canned foods were left in the house. More than once, I crawled into the cramped, dusty space underneath my writing desk and tore at the carpet, rubbing my fingers raw.

I read that paragraph years ago and never forgot it – that image of a man so ashamed of himself, and so terrified of the world closing in on him, that instead of sitting at his writing desk, he’s hiding underneath it.

This is what I mean by the power and brevity of worldbuilding. We’re getting just the tip of the iceberg of his life, and it’s exactly enough. (What happens next to Finkel is extraordinary by the way – just as his life collapses he learns there’s a murderer on the run who’s adopted his identity. Talk about a lucky break!)

Let me write a little about worldbuilding in my own books. Sometimes I think of them all as just one book, released episodically. I definitely think of them as markers in my life. In Them I’m young and free and on an adventure, getting out of my depth with extremists. By the time The Psychopath Test comes around I have a young family, and I’m getting more fraught and anxious as a human. There’s a moment of worldbuilding early on in The Psychopath Test about this. I’m spiraling with my wife about how an interviewee has threatened to sue me, and my son overhears:

“What’s happening?” yelled my son Joel, entering the room. “Why is everyone shouting?”

“I made a silly mistake. I called a man a psychopath, and now he’s angry,” I explained.

“What’s he going to do to us?” said Joel.

“Nothing,” I said.

“But if he’s not going to do anything to us, why are you worried?” said Joel.

“I’m just worried that I’ve made him angry,” I said. “I don’t like to make people upset or angry. That’s why I’m sad.”

“You’re lying,” said Joel, narrowing his eyes. “I know you don’t mind making people angry or upset. What is it that you aren’t telling me?”

“I’ve told you everything,” I said.

“Is he going to attack us?” said Joel.

“No!” I said. “No, no! That definitely won’t happen!”

“Are we in danger?” yelled Joel.

“He’s not going to attack us,” I yelled. “He’s just going to sue us. He just wants to take away my money.”

“Oh God,” said Joel.

I loved reading that back, especially the line: ‘“You’re lying,” said Joel, narrowing his eyes. “I know you don’t mind making people angry or upset.”’

I actually really do mind making people upset, so that made me laugh. There’s a LOT of worldbuilding going on there, mostly about how I’m the right person to be writing this book because I’m prone to spiraling, and full of anxieties, which makes me the neurological opposite of a psychopath.

There’s a moment at the very beginning of my next book where I’m interviewing some people in a very normal way when the following odd thing happens:

I nodded for them to continue, then I let out a scream.

The reason I scream is because I just came out of surgery and I moved in the wrong way, tearing at my scar. The world I’m building here is that this is an older and more fragile Jon than in my past books. But it’s also a Jon who is raging against the dying of the light - as Dylan Thomas wrote - too work focused to allow myself time to convalesce. The reader won’t know at this point if this will become thematically relevant later on. But it will.

If you have other favorite examples of ways nonfiction writers introduce themselves into their stories in this way, please add them in the comments.

Oh, two final things:

First: A cliche. I woke up the other day thinking about all the things I still had to do to deliver nine chapters of my book. I was thinking about them all at once, and I found it exhausting and debilitating. My brain felt totally overwhelmed and I almost wanted to go back to bed. And then I remembered the cliche - writing is a marathon not a sprint. You don’t need to fix everything all at once. One thing at a time.

When I remembered that I felt much better, and maybe there will be people out there who need that reminder.

And a quick recommendation: Apple Cider Vinegar on Netflix is fantastic. I love how it captures the Wellness Influencer color schemes and use of language: “That’s not MY lived experience!”

Bye!

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This week I’ve been emailing potential interviewees for my book, and so I wanted to write about what I think are the best and worst ways of going about it.

It’s the most stressful part of the process and incredibly important to get right. We can spend months scrabbling around down rabbit holes trying to find a story to fall in love with, but if we can’t get people to talk to us it’s still - after all that - dead in the water. That’s the horror of access-dependent nonfiction.

And it’s only getting harder. When I started out people felt obliged to talk to journalists. Getting a call from the BBC felt like getting a call from Buckingham Palace. But not so much anymore. People don’t feel as obliged. So it’s more important than ever to get the approach right.

Here are ways we get it wrong:

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Don’t make your email too long

People are busy! You might be so passionate about your story you excitedly splurge out acres of explanation, but your interviewee will look at those paragraphs and think, “Reading that feels like a job.” Then they’ll close your email and never think of it again. Keep it to three paragraphs maximum, I’d say.

But making it too short can be even worse.

Don’t make your email too short

I’ve had many interview requests over the years that reveal nothing about the story they’re working on: ‘Dear Mr. Ronson, I have an interview request I would like to discuss with you. You can contact me on this email…’

That’s literally one I received a few weeks ago. You HAVE to say more than that! Give them SOME outline. Otherwise you’ll just come over as sketchy - like you’re laying a trap for them, or even crazy. In the past, I did sometimes write back to people like that, and they almost invariably wanted me to investigate how MI5 were beaming microwave weapons into their homes from a transit van at the end of their driveway. And so now I never write back when the emails are as cryptic as that.

But what if there’s a very good reason why I can’t reveal in the email what my story is about?

In cases like that, be human about it. Write something like, ‘I’m really sorry but due to the sensitivity of the subject matter I can’t tell you anything more here, but if we could set up a call I’ll explain everything. It’s a very intriguing story!’ Something like that.

The timing

If you’re looking to get access to someone who is currently very newsworthy – someone who a million journalists want to talk to right now, my strong advice is to not approach them just yet. This kind of nonfiction is rarely about getting newsworthy scoops. It can be. But it most often isn’t. You’re writing something that people will want to read 10 years from now – something considered. Splashy scoops are often forgotten a few days later.

So don’t approach someone when their story is blowing up and there’s a thousand journalists camped outside their house. Wait a few weeks. Wait until they aren’t newsworthy anymore and all the journalists have gone home. If you approach them then you won’t have the competition, plus it’ll prove to them that you’re not there for the splash. You’re there for something deeper.

Setting the wrong tone

A few months ago a TV producer tweeted me to say he’d sent me an interview request via DM that I hadn’t responded to. I looked at my DMs but I couldn’t see it, so I tweeted him back to tell him that. He replied, ‘Email me.’

I did NOT email him. Maybe I’m a stubborn idiot, and I’m sure he wasn’t trying to be rude, but that felt like a massive breach of protocol.

I’ve had interview requests where the tone is that they’re doing me a favor allowing me to be in their story. That always puts me in a huff.

Similarly, a few weeks ago I got an offer to speak at the Oxford Union. I emailed back with some follow-up questions but they didn’t respond. And so a week later I wrote again: ‘I’ve had an offer for that same day and so if I don’t hear back from you within a day or so I’ll accept the other offer.’ Finally they replied: ‘We are in the process aligning the dates and will get in touch within a week.’

The Oxford Union has the reputation of being prestigious, but maybe that reputation comes from the decor - that their rooms look like Hogwarts. It’s run by students – and different students each year – and when you try and work with them it really shows. If someone responds to your request, don’t go silent on them! Follow up straight away!

A few years ago I worked with a producer who was very good indeed, but very alpha-male. He was so eager to get the story his approaches came over as aggressively eager – too demanding and intense.

So: those are examples of getting the tone wrong. What’s the right tone?

Setting the right tone

I try to approach interviewees in the most humble, subservient, low-maintenance way possible. We’re asking them a massive favor, so we don’t want to put them to any trouble. We want to make it as easy on them as we can.

If it feels appropriate I’ll subtly let them know how much research I’ve done on them and how enthusiastic I’d be about meeting them. If they’re the kinds of people who respond to flattery, that’ll be flattering. Plus if for whatever reason they’re hesitant about telling their story, if you show them how knowledgeable you are about them, they might feel in safe hands.

Structuring the email

Here’s an interview request I sent a few months ago. In the end I decided not to do this story, hence me feeling ok about sharing it. So…

One episode of my BBC show Things Fell Apart had been about the misuse by conspiracy theorists of Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces. I really liked that episode, and so I spent some time daydreaming about other books I could tell a similar story about, before landing on Sun Tsu’s The Art of War.

I emailed a business coach who uses the book in his coaching. (I don’t want to identify him so there are a few redactions below.)

I started by indicating I was familiar with his work and had already put the hours in:

Dear -

I hope this finds you well. I’ve been listening to your fascinating interviews about The Art of War, and how it can be applied in the modern business world. I was especially taken with your line about —

The reason I did that was because not long ago a researcher I was working with emailed an interviewee on my behalf and started with, ‘I just heard your podcast. Great work!’ She’s a wonderful researcher, but that felt like a not great line. It sounded unintentionally insincere, like she hadn’t REALLY listened to his podcast, and was just trawling. I didn’t want to make that mistake.

So the first few lines were about him, not me. But if George Clooney once turned one of your books into a movie, now might be a good time to reveal it:

I’m a journalist and nonfiction author. Among other books, I wrote The Men Who Stare At Goats, which was turned into a George Clooney movie. I’ve attached my bio below.

(Please know that I only pull out the George Clooney card if I’m emailing an American man of a certain age who I’m sure would otherwise have no idea who I am.)

So: the second section is about me. By the way, if you’re just starting out and you don’t have a good bio yet, or if you’re a student journalist, that’s MORE THAN FINE! Use it. Don’t bluff and make yourself seem more accomplished than you currently are. That would be a mistake. Honestly, a lot of people PREFER to be interviewed by newbies they think they can help out, rather than established journalists who might somehow pose a threat to them.

I’ve recently been telling stories about how great works of art and literature can be misused, creating unexpected ripples. For instance in this episode of my current BBC show I look at how Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey has been misused in that way.

Which is why I’m writing. I was thinking that The Art of War has surely been misused by, say, business coaches or dating gurus who aren’t experts like you are.

I know I sound like I’m blowing smoke up his ass, but I’m not. He IS an expert.

And so I was wondering: if you can think of stories like that - unexpected human stories of people who got the book wrong in ways that might have had surprising consequences, I’d love it if you could point me in the right direction - either on or off the record.

Thank you for reading, and if you have any leads at all I’d love to hear from you.

Anyway, I ended up abandoning that story. Someone asked me here not long ago when you know it’s time to give up on an idea. I think the answer is, I fall down every rabbit hole with enormous excitement. But if I’m spending a day or two down there and I suddenly notice that I’m not feeling excited any more but bored, that’s when I know it’s time to move on. Finally…

Be truthful

Journalists can sometimes be manipulative and tell half-truths in their attempt to get access to someone. And we ARE hustlers – everything about our job is about hustling. We hustle to get access, we hustle to get published. But my strong advice is – when you’re approaching someone for an interview be totally honest. Don’t mislead anyone. It’s unethical, plus imagine the stress if you’ve done something that might get you sued or shamed.

Approaching interviewees is the most agonizing part of the process, especially if you need to cold call them. So let me end with a photograph of an enthusiastic call center worker, and let her enthusiasm rub off on you!

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Last summer Rachel Johnson and Paul Caruana Galizia made a brilliant podcast for Tortoise Media, The Master, revealing for the first time the allegations against Neil Gaiman. It was nuanced and thoughtful while also being completely damning.

Oddly, for such an important and well-made show about a topic with so much mainstream interest, the Master did not go viral. In fact almost no one talked about it. I recommended it, as did a few other people like David Aaronovitch – but the world was bizarrely quiet. (Although it was far from a disaster: It’s apparently heading for 1.5 million downloads.)

But this month, New York Magazine’s Lila Shapiro followed up on Rachel and Paul’s work. After doing six months more research, she published a devastating article, There Is No Safe Word, which this time went incredibly viral. It was extremely powerful, but there were occasions when I did miss the tone of The Master - which was, as I say, totally damning, but in a different way.

Given that this is a Substack about various ways of telling nonfiction stories, I messaged Rachel to ask if I could interview her about all those things.

But first, briefly, to give you a sense of the allegations (which Neil Gaiman denies) here’s one story from Rachel’s podcast.

In return for doing odd jobs, Caroline Wallner lived with her three daughters in a house on Gaiman’s land in Woodstock, NY (a 40 minute drive from where I live, as it happens). After her marriage broke down, she said, Gaiman began pressuring her for sex:

“There were little hints of, ‘We’re going to need the house’. And I remember saying, ‘Let’s talk about it. Let’s figure it out.’ That’s when he would just come to my studio and make me give him a blowjob …And he can say it was consensual. But why would I do that? It was because I was scared of losing my place.”

During Gaiman’s oral sex with Wallner, she said “he used to say to me ‘Call me your master. Tell me you want it. Tell me you want it.’ He would choke me sometimes.”

Wallner recalled one incident where she had fallen asleep reading in bed: “When I woke up, Neil was in the bed and he put my hand on his cock.”

Wallner said that whenever she resisted his sexual advances, Gaiman would say that [his then partner Amanda] Palmer wanted the house back, as well as the studio she worked in. Then he’d add, “But you take care of me and I’ll take care of you,” understanding it to be a reference to what she called the “sexual trade”.

During Covid, Gaiman began sending her sexually explicit videos of himself, asking her to send him ones of herself. After she stopped answering his sexual video calls, in June 2021, she said his business manager told her to vacate the property by December that year.

This was 2021 when our part of New York had been inundated by people from New York City, property prices were skyrocketing, and there were no rentals to be had. What a terrible thing to threaten someone with – a woman in her fifties with three children.

We spoke while Rachel was driving through Balham. This is an edited version of our conversation.

(By the way, a quick nerdy note: I used the new iPhone call-recording feature - that icon in the top left corner. It recorded the call beautifully, but the automatic transcription sucked, despite Rachel talking in a very clear voice. Rev.com’s AI transcription is much better.)

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Rachel Johnson: Are you aware that Coraline has now been canceled as well?

Me: Yes, I read that this morning.

Rachel Johnson: I mean, it’s really snowballed, I'm afraid. I say I’m afraid because there is a part of me that thinks, ‘God, this has had consequences,’ You know?

Me: I do understand that feeling some journalists have of wanting to write exactly what we want but without there being consequences. Did it surprise you that your podcast didn’t go viral last year? Because it surprised me.

Rachel Johnson: It was very surprising. The big streamers - Netflix, Disney and Amazon - publicly distanced themselves from him, but the publishers still said nothing. I felt he was too big to fail, that you don't kill the golden goose.

Me: Can we talk about the differences between your podcast and the New York piece? There’s a tonal difference.

Rachel Johnson: But before we get to the tonal difference, the most important thing to say is we had our hands tied by UK libel laws. New York magazine was freed by first amendment liberalism and free speech absolutism. Lila could report things that we, wet drippy Brits, just… I wanted to. I was more gung ho. But I wasn’t paying the legal bills at Tortoise.

I do want to acknowledge Lila’s work. You should probably note that she's done a podcast interview where she says she used to have therapy four days a week but [due to writing the story] she upped it five days a week.

But what we reported and what Lila reported comes over very differently. We didn't include some details we knew, and Lila did. And what we included, which she didn't, was his side of the story, that we got from Neil Gaiman’s team. She said a couple of times, ‘He denies all the allegations.’ But I thought his side of the story was gold dust that really enriched our podcast. We really noodled away at what he said, and what she said, and I thought it added depth and complexity, which was intriguing for the listener because they really didn't know at any point who’s side they were on, or whether indeed they were on anyone's side.

Me: So including Neil Gaiman’s side made the whole thing more interestingly complicated?

Rachel Johnson: Well, what we have is a classic examples of intimate partner sexual violence. Where the person who’s involved with the alleged abuser sort of feels love, and they think they can somehow change the dynamic if they respond to the abuse in a different way. We reflected that even if the sex was horrific, they sent him tender messages because they were in a dysfunctional sexual relationship with him. What I wanted to do was explore this very grey area. We did not use the word rape. Lila does. She very much firmed up the allegations and made it more black-and-white in terms of his behavior. It was much more victim and perpetrator in New York magazine.

Me: Your podcast was still very damning, though. Do you think the reason why the New York piece went so insanely viral, while yours didn't, was because she made it much more black-and-white?

Rachel Johnson: Well, I think there's lots of reasons. There's the legacy media still having a huge impact - the cover story of New York magazine compared to a podcast start-up. And she worked on it for six months more. Also, we didn't get a huge amount of pick up because of me. People didn't want to think that I - the Zionist TERF sister of Boris - could be anything to do with this. I’m not even marmite. So they had a terrible kind of anguished reaction, which was: Tortoise is great, tick. But oh my God, Rachel Johnson. How do we process the fact that she's the one who got the story?

Me: It’s also been suggested that people didn’t want to see Neil Gaiman be brought down. But I don’t know about that.

Rachel Johnson: Oh my God yes, yes! He works for the refugee council. He's a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature or something. He sells millions of books. He provides work for thousands of people. Somebody came up to me at a screener and said, “Well thanks a bunch. My boyfriend is the director of Sandman or Good Omens or something and now he's out of a job.”

Me: Did that person mean it? They were angry?

Rachel Johnson: Yes, they were furious. I’m seeing them tonight, actually.

Me: So clearly not THAT furious if you’re seeing them again tonight. Anyway, you're right that the legacy media has a lot to do with it, and Tortoise is a start-up, and there’s prejudice about you, but to go back to that thing I asked you before: Yours was nuanced and complicated, and the New York piece was devastating, and I wonder whether that was another reason why the dam broke with her story.

Rachel Johnson: I don't want to criticize that piece and compare it to what we did, but she included details that you just couldn't get past. Scatological details that the reader couldn’t get past. And she reported and we took out, but knew all about, the presence of the child on a couple of occasions at least. We knew, but we didn't include it out of sensitivity. I think there was kind of an American version and a British version and the British version was much more reserved. And I was very concerned for the child. At one point I was arguing we should've kept the child in, but I was talked out of it.

It looks like he’s been canceled, and how do I not feel kind of responsible for that? I've got to say, I’m uncomfortable with #metooing people. Is that all right to say? I don't believe in cancel culture. We all do bad stuff and we all do good stuff and he's done good stuff and he's done bad stuff and he is now regarded as an evil monster. I think the women who accuse him would say he hurt them, but that’s a female-male dynamic that unfortunately happens to be incredibly common.

But I do think there was genuine public interest in reporting what we did. And the way he has responded since has made me double down. That non-apology that he blogged just put salt in the wounds. No acknowledgment that he had done anything wrong. He was a wrong’un sexually. He's got lots of other good things going for him, but he has got a very dark center. And that probably comes from his childhood, scientology, who knows? Or It could just be pure misogyny.

Me: And are you done with it now or will there be more episodes?

Rachel Johnson: I'm done, I'm done, I'm done.

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Last summer I gave a talk at my favorite book festival – The Festival of Writing and Ideas at Borris House, in Carlow, 90 minutes outside of Dublin. It’s really magical. It’s tiny but my fellow speakers have included Laurie Anderson, Patrick Radden Keefe, Mary Robinson, Minnie Driver, Ruth Wilson, Colin Greenwood from Radiohead ...I just love it and recommend getting a ticket. It always sells out.

Anyway, at the party on the last night I looked at the schedule and saw that they’d booked the taxi for unnecessarily early - 6am, meaning I’d have a crazy long wait at Dublin Airport. So I talked to the organizers and we agreed to move the pickup time by 30 minutes to 630am. As I went to bed I said, “And you’ll DEFINITELY let the taxi driver and the other authors I’m sharing the ride with know about the change?”

“DEFINITELY!” they said.

But it was late at night and everyone was drunk and happy and so unfortunately the message didn’t get through to the driver, nor the other passengers - an extremely esteemed novelist and her husband, a grand American politician.

I only learned this when I waltzed up to the taxi at 630am and said, “Good morning everyone! I’m glad you all got the message about the change of pick-up time!”

“We didn’t,” the novelist said, coldly.

The 90 minute journey to Dublin airport took place in complete silence. Even though it was not my fault everyone was blaming me. They were quietly furious nonstop. It was very uncomfortable.

But it wasn’t total silence. Because the taxi driver was so annoyed with me that for the entire journey he quite loudly played a CD of IRA fighting songs: “They say the Englishman is the Devil…”

The songs were on a loop. He played the one about the Englishman being the Devil at least twice. I’ve always believed the best kind of aggression is passive aggression, and this was consummate.

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Anyway, I bring it up because until now this newsletter has been mostly about being curious and empathetic towards our interviewees, but the truth is that annoying people can be funny. We SHOULD annoy some of our interviewees. Part of our job is to irritate blowhards and powerful narcissists by pricking their pomposity. Journalists should be the bullied kid standing at the edge of the playground trying to work out why the elites are such dicks. That’s why we should be unaligned from any elites or ideologies: we should be outsider loners. So for the next few weeks I’ll be writing about that – about annoying our interviewees, who does it best, and when it makes the story better or worse.

I actually think being curious and being annoying can have the same positive impact on a story, and here’s why:

I’ve often thought that a journalist’s favorite question should be ‘Why?’ In fact if I’m interviewing someone and I have a brain freeze and run out of questions, I often just ask “Why?” It can jolt their thought process and lead to surprising answers. The same goes for annoying someone. We’re tying to shake people out of their schtick - their regular thought process - and into something new and revealing.

In NLP – neurolinguistic programming - they call it a Pattern Interrupt. Here’s an example from a NLP sales training session I read online but can’t find the link for anymore:

Instead of starting a cold call with "Hi John, how are you?", you could say "Hi John, this is a cold call. Do you want to hang up?"

As it happens I once tried a pattern interrupt on NLP’s co-founder Richard Bandler, who I’d written about in The Guardian. I asked him how he’d feel about me putting him in my book about psychopaths. He replied that my question made him want to “break” my “fucking legs”. So that didn’t go well. But he should have been proud of me. I was doing a pattern interrupt.

I want to draw a difference between annoying people and the adversarial interviewing style. In the British media especially, the default interviewing technique has for years basically been to corner someone – from a politician to a showbusiness figure - and then yell at them. It may be entertaining to watch but I wonder how often it works, if ‘works’ means drawing out of them some hitherto hidden information. Normally all it reveals is how someone responds to being cornered and yelled at. Some people handle it well. I’ll tell you how I handle it: poorly. I stammer and clam up. But I don’t think either response reveals much about a person’s character. It feels like a strange and arbitrary way to judge someone.

So I’m not advocating for that, but I do think a smattering of questions that might irritate blowhards can lead to memorable results, and I’ll be writing about that during the next few weeks.

Oh: I wanted to let you know I’m doing a bunch more Psychopath Nights in the UK in November 2025 - mostly in places I’ve never spoken before. It’s a show about how the corridors of political and business power have been growing ever more psychopathic, and how those traits are rewarded on social media too. The show will teach you how to spot a psychopath, and then make you feel guilty about your new psychopath spotting skills. I have mystery guests, whose stories twist and turn in extraordinary ways. My new book is nearly finished and I’ll be switching to that in 2026, so this will probably be the final run of Psychopath Nights, at least for a long time. Tickets!

One last bit of news. I’ll be in London on March 1, DJ’ing at Scared To Dance at the Victoria in Dalston. There will be My Bloody Valentine and The Velvet Underground and X-Ray Spex and Jack White and so on. Bye.

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Hello! A few paid subscribers have asked me versions of the same question this week: What are the ways in which making yourself a character can go bad? For instance, from Dr Simon Rogoff: ‘I find myself wondering about the mistakes that we can make with this. Have you seen examples of it being done badly and backfiring in terms of how it lands with the reader?’

I’m sorry but this newsletter is a little shorter than normal, because one of my past stories has suddenly blown up in an unforeseen way, and everything’s all over the place. I’ll tell you about it when I can. But I DO have some examples, and I think they connect in a telling way.

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Jonah Lehrer

This is a slight cheat because he doesn’t appear as a character in the manner I’ve been writing about, but in a way he kind of does - like Malcolm Gladwell you can very much picture him on the page, a serious, erudite, all-knowing young professor who is just eccentric enough to be interesting but is basically serious.

As readers of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed will know, it turned out that he was fabricating quotes. They weren’t – in the grand fake news scheme of things we’re currently enduring – the worst crimes in the world, but they were arrogant, sloppy and stupid. Let me give you an example, from his book Imagine:

It was May 1965 and Bob Dylan was weary from a grueling tour. He told his manager he was quitting the music business, and he moved to a tiny cabin in Woodstock, New York. But when he was there he was overcome with a strange feeling. As Lehrer wrote,

‘“It’s a hard thing to describe,” Dylan would later remember. “It’s just this sense that you got something to say.”’

Sitting at home reading Lehrer’s book was the journalist, Fifth Column presenter, and keen Dylanologist Michael Moynihan. He thought, ‘When the fuck did Bob Dylan say that?’

As Michael later put it to me, “It just didn’t sound like Dylan. In that period, in every interview Dylan did, he was a total asshole to the interviewer. This sounded like a Dylan self-help book.”

In fact it sounded like the kind of airily erudite thing Jonah Lehrer might say. A horrific cat and mouse game unfolded between Michael and Jonah, which I captured in my book, but I want to focus here instead on a line that popped into my head as I was writing those chapters:

Our shame-worthiness lies in the space between who we are and how we present ourselves to the world.

Jonah Lehrer’s space was as wide as the Grand Canyon. He was flawed but he presented himself as omniscient. I’m sure he’d have been brought down anyway by his transgressions – I’m reminded of this extremely funny albeit very dark Norm MacDonald joke about Bill Cosby - but that SPACE poured a massive amount of gasoline on the fire.

As I’ve written here before, we should be open about our flaws and our biases. Why not? They’re fun to write about, and fun to read, and they make you a LOT more likable and shame-proof. I’ve been doing it for decades and nothing bad has happened. Okay, sure, I sometimes wake in the middle of the night mortified that I’d been so open about, say, my mental health on stage in front of 1500 people, but still nothing bad happened besides my own mortification.

Also, if our job is in part to highlight other people’s flaws, we really should do the same to ourselves.

So my question is: who ARE you? Who are you REALLY? Because that should be how you present yourself. I think it’s fine to be comedic about your flaws and idiocies, and that might involve some exaggeration – but it has to be an exaggeration of your authentic self. The coolly all-knowing narrator can be off-putting in a society that values authenticity.

Hotel Auschwitz

A few weeks ago I posted a radio documentary I made in the early 1990s - Hotel Auschwitz. I posted it to highlight its mistakes, the main one being that I should NOT have been a character in it. In a funny way I made the same mistake Jonah Lehrer did: inauthenticity. I hadn’t EARNED THE RIGHT to speak about the Holocaust the way I did. It probably wasn’t my fault - I think Radio 4 insisted I did, because at times my voiceover does sound like a hostage video. But still…

Earning the right to make yourself a character in your story

I used to believe that we should follow the same rule vampires have – we need to be invited in. If one of our interviewees says, “Come and look at this,” or whatever, that’s our permission to be a character.

That was my rule for some years. But now I am much more audacious about it. In the new book I’m writing I slam in memoir sections whenever they feel appropriate. I don’t think I’d have had that confidence before, to make genres collide in that way. It’s a confidence that comes with doing it for years. Finally…

As I’m sure you’ve seen, Neil Gaiman is in the news, along with his former partner Amanda Palmer. 13 years ago I spent a day with Amanda Palmer and I wrote this story about her, which I think is worth revisiting.

The exchange people remember most from it is:

“I was a very weird, troubled kid,” she says.

“Troubled in what way?” I ask.

“I was just a very dark kid,” she says. “My family was complicated.”

“Oh?” I say, my ears pricking up. “What were the problems?”

“I actually put my finger on it recently while discussing something with my family,” she replies, “and realized what precisely the chasm between me and them might be. It was a house of no metaphors. I had very literal parents and I wanted to survive with metaphor and art, and there was a real sense of shame around it.”

“They were judgmental towards you?” I ask.

“There was a real judgment cast in my family about me wanting attention,” she nods. “It wasn’t that my parents didn’t encourage my artistic pursuits – they did very much – but they didn’t understand them.”

Amanda HATED the story. In fact on two occasions she tried to drum up a posse against me on Twitter, which was a frightening thing to watch unfold. Both times her fans tweeted back at her, “I don’t know why you’re so upset. I thought the story was very nice about you.”

I think it holds up very well – a nuanced and revealing study of a highly complicated person, with all her talents and flaws.

Again, sorry it’s slightly shorter than normal. I’ll try to make amends by writing two newsletters within the next week.

Bye!

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Hello! I wanted to build on last week’s free post by focusing on three good, practical reasons for making yourself a character in your story – how it can solve all kinds of storytelling problems, how it might (gulp) help you get work, and how it can take your writing to interesting, experimental places, encouraging you to mix up styles and create something original.

There are many pitfalls, of course. If you do it badly, it’s BAD. But I’ll save that for a future column. So, here goes:

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1. It can solve all kinds of storytelling problems

Writing is hard. Maybe like me you stagger out of your room at the end of the day feeling exhausted and broken. That’s ok, though, because writing should be hard. But to make things easier, how about something like this:

I’m getting off a plane. I’m picking up the rental car. I’m driving into the countryside. I turn onto a winding driveway. At the end of the driveway is a house. I knock on the door. It swings open and my eyes widen…

It’s already gripping, and nothing has happened! Except my eyes widened I suppose.

I’m reminded of this great five-minute YouTube video by Ira Glass on the power of the anecdote. Ira’s saying the same thing – that there’s something effortlessly suspenseful about this kind of storytelling: “What is a story in its purest form? It’s somebody saying ‘This happened, and that led to this next thing, and that led to this next thing, and that made me think of this, and I said this…’ It’s a sequence of events. You’re moving from space to space. You can feel inherently that you’re on a train that has a destination.” Anyway, watch Ira’s video.

But it isn’t only good because it’s gripping. It’s good because it can make things very easy, for the writer and the reader. How will you introduce a new character? No problem! You came across them in your research, or someone told you about them, so you visited them. Transitions can be hard, but not so hard with this kind of writing: “I was curious to learn more about X and so I decided to Y…”

When I tried in the past to take myself out of stories, those things became harder. I’d come up with some fancy, experimental way of introducing a new character, but it would feel too convoluted, too many words, too pretentious or literary. Sometimes the simplest writing is the most powerful, and why make your life harder when it’s already hard enough?

2. It can help you get work

I promise you that a frantic lust for fame was not at the forefront of my mind when I started out writing this way. I did it because my heroes were journalists who trailblazed the style, like Nick Broomfield and Lynn Barber and Hunter. S. Thompson.

I’m not saying I was entirely without ego. Who among us can say that? In fact Sight and Sound once asked me to write about the genre that Louis Theroux and Nick Broomfield and I had molded. Given that it was for Sight and Sound I decided to give the genre a French name, so I called us Les Nouvelles Egotistes. I was joking, but it caught on and now a Nouvelles Egotistes Wikipedia page exists.

But the truth is: things are crowded out there. It can hard to break through. Making yourself a character in your story does help you get noticed, as long as your character is MEMORABLE in some way. If you’re just some anonymous ‘I’ it can help in other ways I’m writing about, but less so in this way.

I watched an Instagram video last week where the guy was dissecting the personas of the women who made it big in music in 2024 and how they were all very clearly defined. Charlie XCX has parties. Sabrina Carpenter flirts. Chappel Roan is a drag queen. Then he criticized Dua Lipa for not being clearly definable enough, and said that that’s why her record didn’t do as well.

Now there’s something horribly reductive about all this, of course. But, also, he’s kind of right. Sabrina Carpenter and Chappel Roan and Charlie XCX are likable exaggerations. So, is the character of ‘you’ in your story actually you, or an exaggeration?

Let me tell you about the first time I included myself in a story in a big and audacious way. It was in my book Them. I’d been scoping around the hotel in Portugal where the secretive and powerful Bilderberg Group were supposed to be meeting. As I drove away I noticed to my horror that I was being tailed. Tailed by the shadow henchmen of the secret rulers of the world. Or maybe it was hotel security. I didn’t know. But it didn’t matter. For the first time in my life I was in a car chase. I say ‘car chase’ but I was going 28mph and so was he. But if I’d gone faster, he’d have gone FASTER.

I was terrified. I didn’t need to exaggerate my terror on the page, because I was already exaggeratedly terrified. Even back in London I thought they’d planted a listening device behind my rearview mirror.

I imagine that some writers in this situation would be too proud and gung-ho to admit how terrified they were. Or maybe they’d see their terror as irrelevant to their story. Or maybe they wouldn’t be terrified at all. But I thought my paranoia was (once I’d calmed down) funny and, moreover, extremely relevant. Because it meant I was no longer a liberal urbane skeptic. I had become one of THEM: I was seeing the world through the eyes of the conspiracy theorists I’d been writing about. I can’t overstate what a big moment that was for me. It was a lesson in empathy. Also, I felt like a character in a novel! I’d been chased through the streets of Portugal by powerful and mysterious forces! I was going through the kind of life-changing arc you’d expect from a novel. That’s what we should be reaching for. Our nonfiction should feel as BIG as novels.

I suppose this answers that question in a roundabout way. I didn’t exaggerate my terror, but I caught hold of it before it dissipated into the air, because I was able to see that it would be great scene for the story. And it also kind of cemented my character - as anxious and nebbishy, but also someone willing to unshackle themselves from their preexisting beliefs to try and see the world through the eyes of whoever they’re chronicling.

3. How making yourself a character can encourage you to experiment with mixing up your styles to create something original.

As I’ve written here before, most nonfiction writers have low ambitions when it comes to the way they write, and that includes sticking rigidly to a genre. They’ll write a data book, or a memoir, or a book recounting scientific studies, or a biography, or a travel book. I completely understand why: it’s the most sensible thing to do. Especially because with hard-to-categorize books bookstores can get confused and shove you in somewhere terrible like New Age.

But the older I get, the more I want to mash up genres. I can’t see any problem with it at all, and it’s actually very exciting to experiment in this way. And first person narrative can be a very easy way into it.

I think I’ll mostly save this for a future column because this is already getting quite long and I’ve read that Substacks shouldn’t be much longer than 1200 words. But let me give you one small example from So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

I wanted to write a history section about early American public shamings. Like: why did the stocks and the pillory fall out of fashion in the 1800s? I think most nonfiction writers would have gone straight to the history, instead of doing what I did - which was make my trip to the Massachusetts Archive its own funny scene:

I took my seat at a microfilm reader and began to carefully scroll through them. For the first hundred years, as far as I could tell, all that happened in America was people named Nathaniel had purchased land near rivers. I began to speed up, scrolling unprofessionally, decades passing before me in seconds, until I suddenly found myself face-to-face with an early American shaming.

I tell you who does this mash up of science and memoir and adventuring very well: Will Storr. In fact Will does it so well I’ve asked him to write a guest column for this Substack, which he will in February when he launches his own new Substack.

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Okay, that was a lot! In the next few weeks I’ll expand on the things above that I’ve already said I’ll expand on. Let me finish with two videos from the trail cam I got for Christmas. First, deer…

Second, the most dangerous animals of all…

Bye!

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Hello and happy new year! Ever since I started this newsletter the question I’ve been asked most often is: how can a writer make themselves a character in their story in a way that’s compelling and imaginative, as opposed to egotistical and superfluous?

And so over the next few weeks I’ll get very in the weeds about this. For instance: what’s the purpose of putting yourself in there? Do you represent something – and, if so, what? Are you there to be right while your interviewees are wrong? Do you represent proper society? Or are you flawed? Also, is the character of you actually you, or an exaggeration?

I’ll get in the weeds about those things and more over the next few weeks, because while many nonfiction authors have low aspirations about the WAY they write - seeing their books basically as information providing services - this newsletter is about being more ambitious than that. I think our books should be their very own unique thing, like movies, never interchangeable with other people’s books. And the way you include yourself as a character goes a long way toward achieving all that.

So this is a free post. If it interests you there’ll be plenty more in the coming weeks, albeit paywalled.

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My heroes growing up were the journalists who experimented with first person narrative in memorably strange and complex ways. Like Hunter S. Thompson, who’d take LSD and gatecrash police conventions.

In the ‘90s EVERYONE wanted to be Hunter S. Thompson. I remember an article in, I think, the NME that basically began, ‘I’ve been up for three nights straight snorting cocaine. Bats are flying around my hotel room or are they hallucinations? My skin is peeling off me, and in three hours I’m supposed to be interviewing Iggy Pop.’

This was a journalist who had read way too much Hunter Thompson but had, I believe, missed the essential point. When Thompson took LSD and crashed a police convention, it was disparate worlds smashing into each other. Thompson represented counterculture waywardness, the opposite of a police convention. It was audacious and thrilling and tense and odd – not least because his character was an uncanny mix of weirdly formal and totally insane. Whereas within the context of interviewing Iggy Pop, taking cocaine for three days straight and hallucinating doesn’t mean anything at all. The stakes could not be lower.

To be clear: you should do whatever you want. I know that some of my subscribers are completely happy to present themselves in their stories as uncomplicated objective authority figures – and I understand why. There’s an impulse to let the reader know that you know what you’re talking about and they’re in safe hands. And if that’s what you want to do, that’s totally fine.

But even if that IS your style, I think you should still consider highlighting your own flaws and biases a little - because it’s fun to write, and to read, you’ll come across as human and relatable, and it can lead you to interesting, unexpected places.

In my book The Psychopath Test – and even more so in the book I’m writing now – I decided to really go for it, in terms of characterizing myself in odd and flawed ways. For instance, there’s a tiny moment at the very beginning of The Psychopath Test where an academic has received a puzzling book in the mail and she wants me to investigate:

“In essence,” she said, “someone is trying to capture specific academics’ attention to something in a very mysterious way and I’m curious to know why. The book is trying to tell us something. But I don’t know what. I would love to know who sent it to me, and why, but I have no investigative talents.”

“Well …” I said.

I fell silent and gravely examined the book. I sipped my coffee.

“I’ll give it a try,” I said.

That slightly self-important gravitas at the end, like I was Sam Spade bestowing my brilliance on her. I like that, because it’s setting up the idea that this really will be a pulpy page-turner, a Dashiell Hammett style mystery story – the mystery eventually being whether psychopaths rule the world – but I’m also making fun of myself and my self-seriousness. Which embeds the idea that I won’t be a conventional narrator.

After that, every time I behave in a way that feels a little psychopathic, I draw attention to it. Like when I email a CEO, but instead of asking if I can interview him to find out if he’s a psychopath, I tell him that his ‘amygdala might not shoot the requisite signals of fear to your central nervous system and that’s perhaps why you’ve been so successful and so interested in the predatory spirit, and can I come and interview you about your special brain anomaly?’ (Conning/Manipulative is an item on the psychopath checklist.)

In the book I’m writing now I do something audacious and surprising on page one. I’m interviewing some people about an unsettling situation they had found themselves in. It feels like a very standard interview. It’s normal, normal, until suddenly, out of nowhere…

I nodded for them to continue, then I let out a scream.

I won’t tell you here WHY I screamed, but I think it works because it sets up the idea that I’m not going to be a bland narrator. Instead, I can go anywhere and do anything in this book.

I sometimes feel annoyed with journalists who work hard to present themselves as representatives of righteous society, scolding or mocking the bad people. It’s performative, unempathetic, and hierarchical. Being aware of your own flaws and biases is a good way of breaking down the hierarchy of journalism. It’s harder to demonize someone if you understand the psychological impulses, the tricks of the brain, that lead people astray.

Actually, I think acquainting yourself with the cognitive biases – so you can spot them in yourself and other people – is a great thing for a writer to do. Confirmation bias. Cognitive dissonance. All these strange psychological tricks we play on ourselves. There’s a book on this topic that I recommend, although I haven’t actually read it, called Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me.

Ok, I have a lot more to say about making yourself a character in your story, and will do so over the next few weeks. If there are any particular aspects of it you’d like me to dig into, please say so in the comments.

And happy new year again!

Jon

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A couple of weeks ago I was talking with a journalist friend who works for a center-right media company. He told me that his editor had just said to him that the purpose of journalism is to “provide moral clarity”.

I told him that that was the worst thing I’ve ever heard. And I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Because it’s not only the worst thing I’ve ever heard, it’s also how people have been making money in journalism lately. Those who paint themselves as morally correct and their opponents as morally inferior are the ones getting rich.

Well: this is a newsletter about why we SHOULDN’T be in the business of providing moral clarity, despite how popular and lucrative it currently is.

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First, let me say I understand the appeal. When Trump was elected the first time I was so horrified I watched CNN every night for four years. Every night for four years I watched Jake Tapper and Erin Burnett and Anderson Cooper reflect my constant fears back at me in smart and eloquent ways. I wanted to hear it. I was gripped. I remember reading a story about a terminally ill man who said his biggest regret about dying was that he wouldn’t be around for when the Mueller report came out. If only he’d held out a few months longer he’d have died underwhelmed.

There was the odd, albeit infrequent, moment during those four years when I thought, “Hang on.” One was on the day Trump ordered the assassination of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani on Iraqi soil. I remember Erin Burnett that evening saying, “Well I can’t see how this won’t start a war. There’s going to HAVE to be a war now.” It was like The Day Today.

At the same time I was watching CNN every night, something new was happening in the wider world of news journalism. In the old days student journalists would try out experimental ideas in college – about, for instance, why certain stories or voices should be suppressed in case they’re traumatizing to readers, or how there’s no such thing as objective truth, only “your truth” – but then they’d leave those ideas behind when they entered the workplace. But not anymore. People were fired up and saw journalism as another form of activism, and those journalists who disagreed with them as morally weak, passé, or suspect. This shift was pejoratively called The Great Awokening, and Episode 6 of Season 2 of Things Fell Apart is about this very thing.

It washed up to the shores of lots of journalists I know. Editors from the left, right and center began to give journalists ideological notes instead of story notes. These editors really seemed to care more about ideology than facts and found my friends’ un-alignment suspicious – like it was indicative of some darkness in their souls.

One person I know was offered a writing job by a center-right magazine extolling Libs of TikTok. When he told his editor about all the times it had outed some random gay teacher from a backwater town after which his school would be inundated with bomb threats, he had no idea and it didn’t seem to shake his conviction that Libs of TikTok needed to be extolled. Conversely, from the left, I heard stories about how if a woman in a story came over as too morally complicated, editors would discuss whether the journalist was doing it because he’s a misogynist.

Anyway, I remember the moment it hit me that four years of getting my news almost exclusively from CNN hadn’t been a great idea. It was during the 2020 election campaign. Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff had seen someone getting crushed in a rally crowd and so he jumped over the barrier to rescue them. CNN went crazy for his heroism. Now it’s possible that nobody from Trump world would ever jump over a barrier to rescue someone from getting crushed, but if they did I bet CNN wouldn’t have covered it.

I started to joke to friends that that CNN was my Q-Anon, and Anderson Cooper was my Q. I listened to everything he said, believed it all, and saw the world in a more black and white manner as a result. Even Trump’s ‘very fine people’ speech – widely considered the nadir of the nadir - was more complicated than the news reporting had led us to believe.

All of which, of course, contributed to Trump winning his second term. Because as institutions crumble, narcissists thrive.

The right-wing media lies all the time – and the lies they tell are quite easy to spot. They’re big, dramatic, almost mythological lies: Pizzagate, QAnon, they’re eating the cats in Springfield. When the left-leaning media lies, the lies are more subtle. They’re lies of omission.

But journalists HAVE to be unaligned. We have to be on the outside looking in. I was picked on at school, pushed to the edge of the playground, which I think is perfect training for a journalist. We have to be part of no gang, especially not an elite gang. We’re the awkward outsider trying to figure out why people behave the way they do.

I’m most definitely not saying there’s no place in journalism for moral clarity. Some of the most powerful stories are moral stories. Just look at any piece of activist journalism that has changed the world for the better. But moral clarity has to be EARNED during the reporting process. It has to be hard won - from an opening position of neutrality. Whereas if you SET OFF ON YOUR JOURNEY with the ambition to provide moral clarity, there’ll be no room for curiosity, for being surprised, for your story taking you where you least expect. If you’re being led by ideology, you’ll succumb to wishful thinking or conspiratorial thinking. Also, journalism shouldn’t be a popularity contest.

As the NY Times columnist Bret Stephens puts it here:

We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded.

Otherwise the pursuit of moral clarity is bound to turn you into a liar.

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Hello! This week I’ve been consumed by the murder of the healthcare CEO, and whether it might be some kind of a harbinger, some early shot in a war by individuals on institutions. And so while this is usually a newsletter about nonfiction storytelling, I want to try and write about that instead.

Just as Luigi Mangione was being arrested I was on the phone to a friend in Missouri, one of the main characters in my next book. He’s a very regular middle class midwesterner. He said to me, “90% of people I know, people who live around here, don’t want him to be caught.”

Vast numbers of regular Americans were wanting a man who summarily executed a CEO to get away with it. I mean: America still turned him in. So they weren’t THAT serious about it. But it was kind of a dream people had - that there might be a different way to live.

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I first realized how profoundly Americans were slaves to their health insurance payments in 2012, the year I moved to the US. I worked out that there are six degrees of economic separation between a man making $10 hour and a Forbes billionaire, if you multiply each person's income by five. So I decided I’d journey across the United States to write about someone from each of the six income brackets.

People who remember my story will most likely remember the man at the top, because we tend to be drawn to extremes. He was B. Wayne Hughes, net worth $4 billion. He invented the concept of public storage. He talked crankily to me about “derelicts on welfare” who check themselves into hospital because they're “bored” and “want feeding,” and “we're paying for all that activity. Give me a break!” Wayne was the richest and also the grumpiest of my interviewees.

But for me the most extraordinary moment was something that the couple on the second-lowest rung of the ladder told me. Their names were Dennis and Rebecca. They lived in Des Moines, Iowa, made $900-a-week, and had two toddlers. They told me their fifth anniversary was approaching.

“We'd like to go to the east of the state where we had our honeymoon," Dennis said. "But that would cost gas and food and a bed-and-breakfast stay, so maybe we'll stick around here, save the gas money, and get a hotel room for a couple of days."

“You can't afford to drive across the state?” I said in a startled screech.

And their reason? Health insurance.

"Dennis gets paid every two weeks," Rebecca said. "For state and federal tax they take about $180. Then for health insurance they take about $375.”

"The health costs go up every year," said Dennis. "And not just the regular 4% for inflation. It could be 10%, 17%...”

I told them about the NHS – how as imperfect systems go it seemed massively better than what they were going through. But it fell on deaf ears. They just looked at me warily – as if I was selling them some weird socialist lie from a faraway country.

But then things began to change. It was, frankly, impossible to live in America and not grow to hate the healthcare system – the constant denial of claims, the hoops you have to jump through to appeal, the mountains of paperwork, the way they change the rules for no reason, the maddening irrationality of the whole thing. Right now my wife is appealing the $600 I was mysteriously charged for my flu and covid jabs a few months ago. Last year I got it for free. This year they took $600 from my account. She’s been on it for a month.

Not long ago I was rushed to hospital with a blood clot in my lung - apparently the mortality rate is 30% - and the insurance company wanted to know: Was it REALLY an emergency?

You start to think it may be less hassle to just die.

It makes me think about the psychopathy of institutions. Usually when I think of that I think of Partygate. How many items on the psychopath checklist did Partygate tick? Lack of empathy. Grandiose self worth (the rules apply to us and not to them). Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom. Irresponsibility. Impulsivity. Institutions can become psychopathic. With healthcare, people die because claims are denied. But people die for another reason too.

In 2017 two Princeton economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, discovered that life expectancy in America had fallen for the previous three years, and that there were 600,000 dead Americans who shouldn’t be dead, had progress continued as expected.

So they studied the death certificates stored by the CDC in Atlanta, and learned that almost all these ‘excess deaths’ were white people in middle age without college degrees. And the causes were either suicide, alcoholic liver disease or drug overdoses.

You might be thinking that poverty must have been at the root of it. But they discounted that possibility: the poverty rates hadn't changed, yet there was dramatic increase in deaths.

Their conclusion: those 600,000 people had died due to “the erosion of a way of life”. Meaning, blue collar Americans were “no longer being offered a framework within which they could lead dignified and meaningful lives.”

But there was something strange. All of this was unfolding in Europe too. Blue collar Europeans were suffering de-industrialization. But they had nowhere near the same level of excess deaths. So what was Europe doing right?

Their answer: in Europe there’s a healthcare system that doesn’t cause financial ruin.

As they wrote in their book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, in America…

…medical emergencies are increasingly being used as profit opportunities. Ambulance services and emergency rooms have been outsourced to service companies and are sending “surprise” medical bills. Many of these services are not covered by insurance, so that patients are billed even when they are taken to a hospital that is covered by their insurance.

[American healthcare is] a system that transfers money upward, from people in distress to private equity firms and their investors.

And so it’s entirely understandable why we want to see the collapse of institutions. Clergymen assault children. Healthcare companies crush us with absurd, frightening bills. Legacy media gatekeepers keep out whichever voices they find unpalatable, depending on the dominant ideologies of the time.

In fact earlier this year I got caught up in that last example of a conflict between an individual and an institution. I was recording a bonus episode of my BBC show Things Fell Apart at the Hay Festival. We decided to do the whole thing as an audience Q&A. A woman put up her hand. I’ve edited our exchange here:

WOMAN: “As someone who's read some of your work, I personally am really disappointed to see you stand there calling people conspiracy theorists.”

ME: “Oh, okay.”

WOMAN: “Chemtrails were a ‘conspiracy theory’. But we can see them! While we were in lockdown loads of 5G towers went up without safety certificates. Whoever's laughing, I don't care. With regard to the vaccine, lots of people have been killed by the vaccine…”

ME: “Uh…”

WOMAN: “Now, let me just finish what I've got to say please.”

ME: “Can you make it a question rather than a statement?”

WOMAN: “No, I'm just going to say what I've got to say. The World Economic Forum…”

ME: “I do need to stop you because I really do think you've made your point.”

WOMAN: “I bet you do. Typical BBC.” (Or something similar. We were talking over each other.)

ME: “The reason why I stopped you wasn't because this is the BBC and we need to silence ‘dangerous truths’. The reason why I stopped you - to be completely honest - is because it can get irksome for somebody to give a long statement instead of ask a question in situations like this. I'm just trying to run the talk.”

She was seeing me as the institution and herself the outsider, the truth teller. Whereas I saw myself as someone in charge of a tent full of hundreds of people and it was my responsibility to keep them from getting annoyed.

The fact is, we both had valid points. My point was – to be honest – more valid than hers. But I understood what she meant about legacy media gatekeepers. During the early years of my career I fell victim to it. Media gatekeepers were frequently put off by my odd, awkward, lower-middle-class demeanor and weird voice. I had to beg commissioners to give me a chance. It felt frustrating to be powerless in the face of hierarchies. No wonder Rumble and YouTube and other companies formed, companies that advertised themselves as gatekeeper-free paradises.

But despite their myriad downsides, at their best institutions can offer something important. They can be a coming together, the culmination of experience, a consensus. As Yuval Levin writes in his book A Time to Build, institutions remind us that…

…we aren’t just loose individuals bumping into each other. We fill roles, we occupy places, and that helps us understand our obligations and responsibilities, our privileges and benefits. Institutions move us to ask: “Given my role here, how should I act?”

Whereas narcissists are the opposite of that. Narcissists aren’t a consensus. They’re just some guy. They’re some guy who, as institutions collapse, fills the vacuum with themselves. No wonder there are so many of them on Rumble. Of course, I’m not calling the woman from the tent in Hay a narcissist. I know literally nothing about her. I know nothing about Luigi Mangione’s mental state either – although you’d have to be somewhat narcissistic to decide that YOU’RE the person to murder the CEO of a company you don’t like.

The reason why so many Americans wanted him to get away with it is because the American healthcare doesn’t metaphorically ruin lives. It literally ruins lives. But we should be careful what we’re cheering for. Because as institutions crumble, narcissists thrive.

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Hello! I’m back home, readjusting to life after doing 30 Psychopath Night shows in seven weeks. (I paused payments to this newsletter when I set off, and have just now un-paused them.)

Having never done a tour anywhere near this intensive before, I’d been stressing in advance about whether it would be too much to handle. For me, it’s all down to if I think the audience is getting a good show. If I do, I practically float back to my hotel every night. If not, the whole tour is a trudge through despair. And so I’m happy to say it turned out to be a lot of fun, and successful too. (Thank you very much to Simon Sweetman and Kate Leaver for their lovely Substack reviews.)

Given that this is mostly a newsletter about the process of nonfiction storytelling - although that might change - I thought I’d note down what I think worked and why.

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First, most authors on speaking tours will either read from their books, or else be ‘in conversation’ with a local host. I didn’t do either, and I’m going to argue against both.

‘In conversation’-type events can be great. I’ve done some terrific ones - for instance with Jenny Kleeman and Miranda Sawyer. You can gel fabulously with your interviewer and a kind of one-night-only magic happens. But if you don’t gel, it can be a disaster. A friend of mine was on a tour of Australia at the same time as me, and she experienced both. An awkward ‘in conversation’ is basically a bad blind date. Do you really want 1,500 people sitting there scrutinizing your bad date? Or worse, PAYING to see your bad date, and feeling like they wasted their money?

You want to be in control of how well a show goes, and with ‘in conversation’-type events, you aren’t in control. Even if they’re successful you’re still basically improvising, you’re busking it, and the temptation to blah on and on with no structure can be overwhelming.

Next: reading from your book vs memorizing and performing the writing. The latter! Unless you’re brilliant at it like, say, David Sedaris, watching an author read from their books is usually very, very boring. I’ve done it on stage before, and I’ve also read from scripts. While I’ve kidded myself that it’s fine because David Sedaris does it, it ISN’T fine.

But memorizing can be hard. And so on this tour, for the very first time, I typed some lines into my keynote to remind me what was coming next. This was my view each night.

I rarely looked at them, but they made me feel like nothing could go wrong. They were a safety net. I very much recommend.

My show felt like a variety show. I had mystery guests, rare video clips, experiments, lots of illustrations. Nothing lasted long so it was hard for anyone to get bored. All four of my mystery guests were amazing, not least Mary Turner Thomson, whose story first inspired me to write The Psychopath Test all those years ago.

But I want to talk about Colin Stagg for a moment. Colin has never done this kind of thing before – told his story in theaters with thousands of people watching. At first, it felt a little strange because unlike Mary and me he’s not a storyteller. He’s not the sort of person you usually see on stage at events like this. But his comparatively low-key demeanor made him all the more engaging, and he very frequently stole the show. Some nights people yelled out, “We love you Colin!”

By the end of the tour, my conversations with him and Mary had become like scenes in a play, with the dialogue practically set in stone. People would ask me, “Doesn’t it get repetitive, having the same conversation night after night? My answer: No! If there’s nothing to change, that means it’s working.

Fern Brady, my mystery guest in Salford, says that as an autistic comedian her aim is to say exactly the same thing every night. I very much get that. For me it’s like any other writing. Hone it down. Omit every unnecessary detail. Whittle it down until it’s the perfect version of itself. After that you can tentatively ad lib, and if it works, add it to the show.

By the way, Colin’s story is not only horrifying, but at times it’s one of the funniest stories I’ve ever told. (I won’t recount it here, because we’re planning another run of shows next autumn, and I don’t want to spoil it.)

I know this next piece of advice may seem useful to only a very small number of people, but it helped me a lot to have a tour manager/tech person with me. In the old days I’d arrive with my laptop at whichever venue mid-afternoon and plug it in myself. I know that sounds like no big deal, but invariably it wouldn’t work for reasons no one could understand and the venue’s own tech people would urgently surround my laptop while I’d stand uneasily on the periphery. It always reminded me of the time my wife had an emergency cesarian - huge numbers of professionals encircling a loved one.

Whereas on this tour I could just swan in before the show.

As I say, most speakers don’t have that luxury – I didn’t for decades – but I do think there’s a more universal helpful piece of advice here. Which is that when you’re on tour the only thing that matters are the hours you’re on stage. Try and eliminate every other stress, anything that drains your energy. It’s the reason I stopped doing this Substack for seven weeks. If you’re stressed and tired you can carry it onto the stage with you. You could still say the exact same words but if your mind is elsewhere the audience may pick up on it and not have quite as good a time. Whereas if you bounce on stage feeling no residual tension, you’ll much more likely be in the moment, and the audience will feel it.

And so I tried between every show to do nothing taxing at all. There was undoubtedly something weird and desolate about those periods of enforced relaxation. You can feel very unanchored. I think the healthiest way to handle the nothingness is not to lie there staring at the ceiling, but to go outside. I’d run along rivers or find the nearest tourist attraction or botanical gardens or whatever.

I’d listen to a lot of audiobooks too (my favorites on this tour being 11-22-63 by Stephen King and Q by Craig Brown).

So now I’m back to writing my new book. All I’m going to do for the next eight months is that, and this Substack. It’s a little discombobulating to be back. For the last seven weeks an app called Master Tour has told me what to do: Get to this hotel. Park in this car park. Be at this venue at this time. Now there’s no app to tell me what to do. The app has gone away.

But it’s nice to be back jogging the country lanes. I’ve started running without my glasses because they were bouncing painfully on my nose. Which means I can’t see the cows’ facial expressions, but you can’t have everything.

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I’m about to set off on a Psychopath Test anniversary tour of the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. It’s very exciting – there’ll be mystery guests – but it’s also long and grueling. My son told my wife he thinks at some point I’m going to hate it and go crazy, but she reassured him, “Don’t worry. If he does, he’ll be a long way away.”

I wish I could remember who it was, but some big theatre star like Maggie Smith once said something like, “When you’re going on stage every night, don’t do ANYTHING during the day. The whole day should all be about the two hours you’re on stage.”

Hence my announcement: I’ll be putting this newsletter on hiatus until early December. I’ll pause everyone’s payments in a few days. Which means that if you want to became a paid subscriber now you’ll get access to the whole archive and chat and you won’t be charged again for seven weeks. I MAY still post things, but I don’t want to feel I have to in case I’m too exhausted, hence the freezing of the payments. But I'll be back at the beginning of December!

So …omitting unnecessary words.

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In 1996, I read George Saunders’ brilliant debut short story collection, ClvilWarLand In Bad Decline.

The whole thing knocked me over, but one paragraph in particular - from his story The Wavemaker Falters – ingrained itself in my brain and taught me more than almost anything about how to write.

Well, from Kurt Vonnegut I’d already learnt the power of abrupt tonal shifts. I mean: Slaughterhouse Five is a novel about the WW2 firebombing of Dresden in which the lead character is kidnapped by space aliens and displayed in a zoo with a porn star called Montana Wildhack. Reading Vonnegut taught me that if you have humor crash up against horror, it can make the comedy funnier and the horror more horrific. People shy away from these kinds of tonal shifts – they’re worried about getting it wrong and coming over as facetious or glib or offensive - but I say as long as you’re aware of the moment you need to STOP being funny, it can be very powerful.

But from George Saunders I learned about brevity - about how breathtaking it can be to omit unnecessary words.

In The Wavemaker Falters, a man who operates a wave machine at a waterpark loses concentration and a child accidentally dies in his machinery. Here’s the paragraph that had such an impact on me:

And then the story moves on. To my recollection, NOTHING in that paragraph is ever referred to again. We never again hear of him doing secret chores to mitigate his guilt. George Saunders could have written a WHOLE NOVEL about a man who does that, but instead he gave us that huge and complicated and funny and devastating idea in a tiny number of short and simple sentences. A novel in a paragraph. It just blew me away.

With superfluous words, your reader will feel like they’re in a car with a slightly faulty engine. It’ll judder and judder. Even one superfluous word can feel like an engine misfiring. Whereas how smooth was that George Saunders paragraph? It’s like ice skating.

Honestly, it’s happening to me with the book I’m currently writing. It’s like magic! You write a sentence. Then you go back to the same sentence the next day and with a fresh eye you realize you can express the same thought in fewer words. And if you go back to it the day after, with another fresh eye, maybe you’ll find even more unnecessary words to omit. Sometimes you’ll go too far and your sentence will feel too truncated. Then you put back a word or two.

I do that every day for months and months. I go over every paragraph, over and over, every day, maybe 100 times, tweaking this word, moving this comma, omitting every unnecessary word. I spend a LOT of time inside thesauruses. Does that word express exactly what I mean? Which synonym means EXACTLY what’s in my head? Is that word too big? Too small? Is it overstating my case? And if it is, could it be funny to overstate?

And on and on until one day I read it over and there’s nothing left I want to change. Every sentence reads just right.

What we’re trying to achieve, I think, is something that the supreme court judge Olive Wendell Holmes once said:

“For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.”

I think that should be written above every writing desk. We’re trying to take the most complicated ideas, and reduce them to their smallest and simplest number of words. When you distill and distill like that, a real power emerges.

Let me give you a stupid example from my own work. There’s a story in my collection Lost At Sea about me hanging around backstage at Deal or No Deal, watching the strange, almost cult-like dynamics between Noel Edmonds and the contestants:

Jim the contestant carer is forever giving motivational talks. We're getting about four every day.

"GROUP CHEER!" Jim constantly yells, his eyes aflame.

I wonder if this is in any way because of Noel Edmonds' famous antipathy towards negativity. Noel writes in his recently published self-help book, Positively Happy, that he can't abide negativity in the workplace. Noel hates negativity. He even advises readers, on page 88, to dump their sexual partners if they are too negative. I can't help thinking that, if I were Noel Edmonds' lover, he would dump me.

"But surely a bit of negativity makes you - you know - interestingly spiky and sassy," I suggested to Noel earlier, during a break from filming.

"I simply will not get involved with people who are negative," Noel replied. "I won't tolerate people in the workplace who are negative. I like realistic people, but negative people? No. Just get rid of them."

"I have a habit of being a bit negative sometimes," I said. "I'd hate my wife to read Positively Happy and dump me as a result."

"Then be careful," Noel said, looking me in the eye, "because she might."

I was and remain very proud of the sentence ‘Noel hates negativity.’ That’s a lot conveyed in three words.

By the way, my favorite Noel Edmonds quote from the story is this:

I visit Noel in his Winnebago. It is parked deep within the Endemol complex, near a dried-up river. Inside, it is very luxurious, all cream leather seats. Les Dennis's far smaller and less deluxe Winnebago is parked next to it. Les Dennis is filming a Channel 5 game show called Speculation in another studio.

"Les Dennis can have the big Winnebago when he gets the ratings we get," Noel says.

Every word matters. Every punctuation mark too. There’s a famous Isaac Babel quote about writing: “No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.”

It’s all about precision. I’ve always thought of writers as being like sculptors. You’ve amassed your big block of marble by convincing people to talk to you, meeting them, having adventures, transcribing the interviews, and now it’s time to start chipping away at it, turning it into the most perfect version of itself.

I’ll even think about syllables, about the rhythm. If two words work perfectly but one has fewer syllables, I’ll choose the shorter one. It’s like making a dollhouse. The same goes for podcasts, by the way. I make my BBC show Things Fell Apart and my Audible shows exactly the same way.

There’s another reason why it can be so powerful. I love the idea of writing as being like a partnership between the writer and the reader. If you omit all unnecessary words you get to a place where the reader is reading between the lines, figuring things out for themselves.

Around 2015, there was suddenly a big move against this style of writing - writers leaving things unsaid - in case they were misunderstood and got shamed for it. Remember that Justine Sacco tweet from my book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed:

She was trying a South Park / Randy Newman type joke mocking her own privilege - and mocking American ignorance in general - by doing a comically exaggerated version of it and leaving the true meaning unsaid. But while she was asleep on the plane the entire world misunderstood (some of them willfully if you ask me), her life exploded, and that kind of writing abruptly fell out of fashion.

But I’ve always loved that style. I thought Justine Sacco was just doing a pretty bad version of it, unlike the Randy Newman song My Life Is Good, which does it MUCH better.

If you’re forced to explain exactly what you mean, you lose that partnership with your reader, so I’m glad we aren’t quite as uptight about all that now.

Ok that’s possibly it until the beginning of December! It’s been really fun and I look forward to resuming.

Let me leave you with a recommendation: Bob Odenkirk playing Charles Manson as Lassie on the Ben Stiller sketch show. As with some of my other recommendations, I found this incredibly funny AFTER taking edibles, so if you don’t like it, it’s THC’s fault.

See you on the other side, in December!

Godspeed, Jon.

Jon

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Hello! I hope all this advice has been proving useful these past weeks. All I’m trying to do in this series is outline techniques that I know for certain have worked for me. I’ve no idea where they fall on the scale of revelatory to meh. I just know they’ve worked.

So here’s my second post on different ways to make your story a page turner. I’m personally so intent on not boring my readers I once had a review for the Men Who Stare At Goats that accused me of including too many cliffhangers. I think I probably did over-cliffhangerize Goats so I can’t be too angry with that critic who I hate.

This post is mostly about a eureka moment I had when I was writing my first book* Them - an idea for an engine that was so perfect it kept the story rolling forward from the first page to the last. And by engine I mean some big underlying narrative device. There are great, audacious engines and there are small, subtle engines. Both can be equally gripping. But let me start with a big one. Most importantly this post is about how I came to the idea, and why it worked. Because I think those things can be replicable.

(*Actually Them wasn’t, strictly speaking, my first book. I’d already published a book called Clubbed Class, but it was just a stocking filler. When Them got nominated for the Guardian’s First Book award some bastard blabbed on me and the head of the judging panel telephoned to confront me about Clubbed Class. I said, “Well, it was book shaped.” I was disqualified.)

Anyway…

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…as I mentioned last week, Them began life as a series of profiles of different types of leaders. But I was never happy with that idea. It felt way too broad. Which leaders? Any leaders? We need parameters, and the narrower the better, or else a book can be about anything. But how to create parameters?

I’d already written profiles of two the leaders – the militant Islamist Omar Bakri Mohammed and the KKK’s Thom Robb. So I thought, ‘What do those men have in common?’

Noticing connections between two otherwise unconnected stories or people is a REALLY good starting point. This person and that person shouldn’t have anything in common, but they actually have THIS in common. With that, you have the beginning of momentum.

In Omar and Thom Robb’s case, they were both leaders of extremist groups. That was a good start, but it still didn’t feel quite enough for me. There’s a book called Talk Of The Devil: Encounters With Seven Dictators that’s very well written but there’s no momentum. The author meets a dictator. Then he meets another dictator. With each chapter the narrative is reset to the beginning. I wanted more than that.

So what ELSE did Omar and Thom Robb have in common? Then it hit me. They were both conspiracy theorists. They had both told me that shadowy cabals called The Bilderberg Group and Bohemian Grove secretly ruled the world.

Nobody back then was thinking about the relationship between political extremism and conspiracy theories, so it did feel somewhat revelatory. Which was why I made a note about it and filed it away.

Part of our job is to capture a brainwave before it evaporates. It’s very easy to let brainwaves slip through our fingers and dissolve into nothingness. So when I have half-thoughts like that I write them down and email them to myself. If I look at the idea the next day and think, “That’s STILL interesting,” I know I might be onto something.

Anyway, a few months later a producer friend Fenton Bailey suggested to me that we pitch a series to Channel 4 about conspiracy theories. I think he was imagining me meeting JFK conspiracy theorists or whatever. That sounded meh. Realistically, I’m not going to SOLVE who killed JFK. So what’s left? Hanging around Dealey Plaza looking at grassy knolls? If you’re fantasizing about a story’s best realistic possibilities and all you can imagine is sitting with some JFK conspiracy buff looking at diagrams, don’t do the story!

Which leads me to what I think is a massively important part of the process. Whenever I start on a new story my very first thoughts are, “What’s the BEST version of this story?” And, “What’s the WORST version of this story?” Because once you’ve figured that out, you’ll know what to avoid.

Which was how I straight away identified a pitfall to telling stories about conspiracy theorists. Most of them don’t DO anything. They just sit behind their computers theorizing. They don’t get on planes or have adventures. They’re just annoying.

So I knew that I didn’t want to investigate any old conspiracy theory, and I also didn’t want to profile boring conspiracy theorists who just sit there. But Fenton’s suggestion triggered the memory of Omar Bakri and Thom Robb both believing in the exact same conspiracy theory about Bilderberg and Bohemian Grove. I thought, “I don’t want to do conspiracy theories, but I’d like to do THIS conspiracy theory.”

Which was how daydreaming about the worst version of my story led me to its best version. I had to find conspiracy theorists who’d be willing to get out of their rooms and have adventures. And the best adventure of all would be to travel the world with me in search of their fabled secret room. We’d find it, get in, and confront those shadowy elitists going about their covert wickedness!

It was perfect. There was mystery. Was there a secret room? It would be an adventure. Specifically, it would be a half-baked adventure. So there’d probably be some comedy. That was interesting and dissonant. I was about to hang out with extremists and there’d be comedy.

Also, because I only wanted to spend time with conspiracy theorists who DID things, that would automatically make them more interesting than their sedentary counterparts. Two of the stars of that book ended up being David Icke and the then almost entirely unknown Alex Jones.

I’m proud of the fact that my books tend to be populated by the most notable people in whatever world I’m exploring, and that definitely includes David Icke and Alex Jones.

Also, the idea had resonance. It might offer a new way of seeing OUR world. I’d journey to the fringes of society and stand with them as they glared back at us. What would we learn about ourselves? This was a story about something bigger than itself.

Finally, the stakes were high. Maybe there’d be danger. I’d be extremely out of my comfort zone. Which might have been terrifying for me, but it was good for the reader. The funniest stories are the ones that don’t seem at all funny at the time. We expect stakes that high with fictional protagonists, so why not nonfiction ones? These books are our legacy, so we need to put everything into it.

So my sneaking into secret rooms idea had it all - forward momentum, mystery, comedy, adventure, good characters, resonance, high stakes, and no competition! If you’re writing longform narrative nonfiction it’s good to not be in competition with other writers. This kind of writing is SLOW. If you’re in competition with a news journalist, they’ll win.

As I said before, for me the very best place to be before setting out on a journey is: ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know enough to know what whatever it is, it should be good.’ Heading to Northern California to meet Alex Jones so we could sneak into Bohemian Grove was DEFINITELY one of those occasions.

My hunt for the secret room idea had opposition at first. I mentioned it to a TV producer at a party, and he looked annoyed at me and said: “But there isn’t a secret room.” He looked like I’d said something bad. I didn’t listen to him, thank God. Every good idea you have, people will want to dissuade you. I don’t understand why. If you know you’re onto something, don’t let anyone dissuade you.

As I mentioned last week, there’s actually only three chapters in the whole of Them where I’m actively trying to get into secret rooms, but it was such a powerful engine it enabled me to go off and do all kinds of other things, knowing I could return to the hunt for the secret room whenever I wanted – meaning whenever I thought the reader might want it.

Anyway, I don’t think your engine needs to be as HUGE as that, and to be honest eureka moments like that only come around a few times in a lifetime. So I’ll write soon about smaller and more realizable engines, which are just as gripping.

As always please do ask questions or make comments here or in the chat, and I’ll see you soon.

Oh, Londoners: we have just announced a tiny Psychopath Night work in progress warm up show in Highgate in a couple of weeks. Tickets are here.

Bye!

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