Just Written Volume 31: Olga Khazan
Hey y’all -
This morning, we’re joined by journalist Olga Khazan. Olga is a staff writer at the Atlantic where she covers health, gender and policy. She’s also written at a host of other excellent publications, check out a sampling of her writing here. In April 2020, she published her first book, Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World. If you’re on Twitter, she’s an interesting and consistently hilarious follow there. Big thanks to Olga for joining us this week - hope y’all enjoy!
What are the tools of the trade you can’t live without and why?
Increasingly, it’s Otter.ai, the transcription service. I almost don’t want to put it in here because it’s so awesome and I’m worried it will somehow get more expensive or less awesome if I promote it. But, truly, I owe my life to it.
Tell us about your writing routine. How do you balance your shorter, reported pieces with the longform or book projects you have?
Routine implies that I have a clear system for dividing up my time, but I really don’t. It’s more like trying to fit little scraps of longer-form reporting and writing around all the other daily and weekly stuff I’m doing. Luckily I’m a night person, so I do a lot of future-oriented stuff at night.
How do you know when you’ve found a story you want to tell?
I’m always interested in unusual characters (fittingly, I guess, since my book is called Weird), and people whose motivations are, at least on some level, understandable, even if their actions seem bad or bizarre. I think back to the Rock Doc, this nurse practitioner in Tennessee who was busted for exchanging sex for drugs. I think I even came to understand the Rock Doc a little bit, even if I was still disturbed by what he did.
Your first book, Weird, came out in April 2020. Take us through the process of selling/publishing your first book?
I was really surprised by how long you have to work on a book proposal before it even sells. I began working on this in 2015, and it sold in 2017. I finished the book in 2019, and then—another thing I didn’t realize—there was another year before it came out. Of course, others have different experiences, but that’s what happened for me.
How has social media been a help or hindrance to your writing life?
I would say it’s both. I like using Twitter as basically a mini-creative-writing exercise. I will kind of get the brain juices flowing on there sometimes. But you have to be careful, because it can also be a huge time suck and basically a machine for starting fights. So I try to keep it light and don’t really hash things out on there.
Tell us about the process of deeply researching a subject for a creative project?
I use Dropbox and Evernote, but honestly for long projects one of the best things you can do is just write little summaries for yourself of everything you’ve learned, so you can pick up your research after a long time away without feeling like you have to re-read 400 studies or something. Not that I’m great about doing this, but it’s a good thing to try to do.
What gives you hope about the publishing/magazine industry? What fills you with despair?
Despair: So many great publications, like California Sunday and Pacific Standard, shut down recently. The economics of the industry continue to be very bad, and the pandemic has not helped.
Hope: There are so many new ways of telling stories nowadays, from documentaries to podcasts to books to Substack to TikTok. It’s harder to find money for all these new ventures, but I think we do live in an environment with the potential for more interesting, more immersive media than in the heyday of newspapers.
What we’re reading:
Cort: The Convivial Society by Michael Sacacas is one of the most consistently interesting and well-written newsletters around. This particular post on questions we should be asking about technology has occupied a large portion of my thoughts for a few weeks now.
Joseph: I recently read Phil Klay’s collection of short stories Redeployment - Klay, a former marine who served in Iraq - published this back in 2014. I can’t recommend the book enough, but for something shorter, here’s his piece in the New Yorker last week, grappling with what the withdrawal means for former troops as well as America as a whole.
Thanks for reading - see you next week.