Open to the Outlandish: A Conversation with Rebecca Renner

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Brendan O’Meara’s Creative Nonfiction Podcast digs deep into all aspects of storytelling, taking us behind the scenes with authors to learn more about how stories get made. Here, we’ve got an excerpt of Episode 420, in which he speaks with author and journalist Rebecca Renner about the process of writing her book, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades.

In writing, there’s a tendency to overthink, maybe even overprepare, trying to ensure conditions are just right before beginning a draft. It’s overwhelming to the point of paralysis. That’s when it pays to write before you’re ready. Or, in the case of author and journalist Rebecca Renner, “Just put words on paper.” Renner talks about the surprises she encountered after getting into a writing flow state and the critical role of a thoughtful editor.  

This excerpt has been edited for clarity and concision. Subscribe to The Creative Nonfiction Podcast wherever you get your podcasts to hear this conversation in full.

Rebecca: I was writing this during the deep part of the pandemic. And I don’t think any of it came easily because we were all going through turmoil, and I just could not write. And my editor and my agent were like, “Just put words on the paper.” And they just kept harping on me to do that. And I kept saying, “Once I start, I’m not going to be able to stop.” I overwrite, and I’m very verbose. I was correct: I couldn’t stop. I ended up with junk that did not belong in the story. But I also ended up with surprising elements I don’t think I would have encountered if I hadn’t just let my brain open up and get into that flow state where I finally stopped criticizing myself to the point of paralysis. 

I’m very lucky that I had an editor who helped me find those diamonds in the rough. Because I don’t think it would have been as good of a book without her.

Brendan: Maybe expand a little bit about that relationship between you and your editor, and how that dynamic helped shape Gator Country. There was one passage I had highlighted, where you write, “writing a book is itself an adventure, no matter how much you plan, you must be open to the unexpected, the outlandish, because that is where the story lives.” 

Rebecca: The thing that I said about my editor sort of goes with that. So I’m glad you brought that up. I sang her praises. And this is in the acknowledgments on the very last page, “This book isn’t exactly what I pitched her, it is so much better. Like I did while investigating the story, she put aside her expectations and let herself see the astonishing even when I didn’t, it takes a lot of talent and a lot of hard work, and I thank her.”

But I do think that some editors might have been rigid and dead set on the exact book that they had been pitched and unable to see that the reality of the story was not the same. I had done all my due diligence in researching before I pitched the story and the proposal is pretty long. My editor said it’s one of the best proposals she’s ever gotten. And so it really takes some introspection and I want to say a made-up word like “outro-spection,” being able to remove the sunglasses you’re wearing and see the world as it really is to be able to come upon the story in a way that is not exactly how you pitched it. Even though you’ve done all that work. I really do think that the editing stage is where a lot of the art comes in.

There’s an essay that I have gone back to several times. I used to teach it. It’s called “Revisioning ‘The Great Gatsby’” [Susan Bell]. And the writer looks at the various stages of editing that famous book. But one of the things that I go back to is how the writer describes revision as a process of seeing the manuscript, the story in a new way. And so I think we really did that. We had to figure out not what the story was, but what it was supposed to be, and get it to be the best version of itself. 

I’ve worked with so many editors from being a journalist that I like to say that I really know what good editing looks like. The best editors will make this very small change, like putting a sentence in a different place, and it’ll change everything. And it’s just gentle, subtle. But it’s also illuminating when you’re working with an editor of that caliber. There’ll be little, tiny shifts that make it come alive. And then, of course, there are parts where she was like, “This doesn’t make any sense and needs punctuation,” or “Can you rewrite this part to have it sound like all the rest of it?” So it wasn’t all perfect. It was definitely a collaborative effort. And I really like working with editors like that.

Brendan: What you were saying a while ago, you were just urged to write, just get stuff down on the page. It’s really important to do that, because that early draft, that rough draft, or maybe the zero draft, as Roy Peter Clark might call it, it’s terraforming the world or making the map. And there are always going to be gaps in that cartography, and you’ve got to feel like “Okay, here’s a dark spot in the map. How do we fill this in?” But sometimes you don’t know that gap is there until you start and it reveals what else you need to do. Unless you have—for lack of a better term—the courage to start and write before you’re ready, that stuff has a tendency to always be in the shadows, and you need to write your way through it.

Rebecca: I’ve actually been reading The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. And I feel like some people think that book is a little woo woo. I did when I first started reading it, but I really like how he talks about being open to the possibilities of the creative act and the potential there, being able to get into the flow state and stopping yourself from self-criticism and over-analyzing, getting yourself to open up. That has been one of the most important things to do in my creative process because I have to remind myself that I have all the things I need; it’s all there. And then I don’t have to keep going out and getting more details or over-report things, which I have a problem doing, or even in fiction that I just have to believe that I have the story and that I have to get it down. Then I’ll see the lacunae.

Listen to the full episode here.