Interview with New Yorker Writer D.T. Max
How do you go from your notes, recordings, quotes and research to your final piece?
I often begin my articles on the airplane home, while the information is still fresh. I have two small children, so when I get home my brain turns to mush. I will often work at a café and do the writing there for the nonfiction work. I like to work while I drink cups of tea and eat pastries. I lay everything out and try to make a stack of stuff so that I’m not interrupted in the creative process by searching for material.
I never read anything on the person I’m writing about beforehand. I don’t read the direct profiles, but maybe there’s a piece that’s informational without being in the same subject as what I’m writing about. Otherwise you run the risk of writing things that have already been written, and what’s the point?
What’s the biggest challenge you face as a writer?
Inventiveness and freshness and never agreeing to the same thing on a page twice. As a reporter, you can always write a perfect article if given the perfect information. I’ve done very few pieces with someone willing to tell me everything. It just doesn’t happen that way. Even in a magazine as powerful as The New Yorker, you’re always asking and hoping to be informed. And you’re separating truth from truth. The hardest thing I do as a reporter is get the information that makes a piece both unusual and accurate. And it’s a very different challenge from being a writer, I think.
When I was a child they told us that it takes about 60 pounds of maple sap to make one pound of maple syrup. So in magazine pieces it takes an enormous amount of reporting, often times, to make just 300 words to a piece.
What is the most gratifying thing about writing for a living?
The world spins so fast, everything is gone in a second and what was true yesterday isn’t true today. Writing is pinning down some tiny piece of what’s real forever. I don’t know any other effort that can get you that response. You can’t capture much with one set of eyes in one lifetime but you can capture something.
How did you start writing “A Man of Taste”?
The New Yorker asked me to do the story. I was interested in it for a couple of different reasons. One is the obvious irony but also, my book (The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery) is about the experience of living with disease. So Grant Achatz seemed to me like somebody who might have an unusual point of view about living with this sort of disease. And then I also am interested in food. I always liked food but I certainly wasn’t prepared for the kind of food that Grant was preparing. That wasn’t anything I was aware of until I began to engage with him.
The reason that I thought Grant was a story I wanted to write about was … he has a remarkable voice when he talks. I mean, Grant was immediately interesting and there was a plain, unpretentious way that he spoke in regards to his work and his life and I tried to capture that.
How did you decide the way to portray this story?
It looked like there were a few ways in that nobody had ever done. But if you want to quote him on how he felt about the disease, when he found out he was sick, Grant isn’t someone whose emotions would play very prominently–they’re not offered up on the first date.
