JRW Member Kristen Green recently interviewed Christopher McDougall, the author of the NYT best seller Born To Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen. The book told the story of Mexican Indians that run hundreds of miles without injury in thin homemade sandals and sparked a debate about the running shoe industry. McDougall told Kristen that he originally set out to write a book about ultra marathoners, and it didn’t dawn on him to incorporate the Tarahumara Indians and a race he ran with them in Mexico’s deadly Copper Canyons until after it happened. McDougall, a featured speaker at the James River Writers Conference in October, is at work on an as yet untitled book about World War II resistance fighters due out next spring. He is also writing a screenplay of Born to Run.

Question 1: You are a former war correspondent for the Associated Press and a freelance magazine writer, so I assume you’re accustomed to cranking out copy. Was it painful for you spend so much time on one subject in order to write Born to Run? What was your process?

It was a really difficult learning process. Whenever you jump up in length, I think it’s a whole new discipline. For the AP, it’s 500 to 600 word stories, and that was its own discipline. You have to get it all super condensed into a very tight space. Then you move up to magazines where you’re like 2,000 to 5,000 words, and it’s like you’re looking across the sea and you can’t see the horizon, and it just seems way too far for anybody to swim. Then you learn that, and you jump it up to 100,000 words. What made the difference for me with Born to Run was I finally figured out to just make each chapter its own 2,000-word story. I actually learned that from reading Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer’s book. His chapters ended pretty short. Each one deals with one idea, and then he moves on. That was a life changer for me. Once I figured that out, then I could actually marshal the information together.

Question 2: One of the things I loved about your book was how well reported it was – how you took us deep in the Copper Canyons of Mexico to meet the Tarahumara Indians and how you explained the science of running. How long did you spend researching the book, and how did you know when to stop?

That is the life and death question because, as we all know, researching is way more fun than writing. We’d much rather be talking…on the phone, traveling, or reading books.… So, what I learned from Born to Run is that you need to actually start the writing early on in the reporting process to find out what it is that you need to know. Otherwise you could end up constantly gathering thread that leads nowhere. I tried to be a little more disciplined about that this time around, but I still find myself coming across interesting people that may or may not be in the book….so we hop on the plane and fly out for the weekend with them, and I realize they’re not going to be in the book…You get as much as you can, and you have a lot of things at your disposal to fall back on. You never know. Sometimes that two-hour interview you did with somebody only results in one sentence, but it’s a really cool transitional sentence that you really needed so it was worth it.

Question 3: You move in and out of places and time throughout the book. How did you achieve this? Did you do most of it in your first draft, or did you weave the story together during editing? Were you able to outline the book before you started writing it, or did it come together in a more organic way?

That was the thing to me that was most vexing. I actually wrote almost an entire full draft, which I had to shred because it just was off course. I was off target. I tried to open the book a certain way, with a certain story, and it led me further and further astray, and I couldn’t circle back and get my main points in. So, I had to basically stop, and I was a good 60,000 to 70,000 words in, and I had to stop and shred it and start over again. I had all these different components I wanted to assemble, and I didn’t know how to put them together. The second time around, I figured out what I really needed to do…Whose story is this? It’s Caballo’s story. He’s the beginning and he’s the end….And then there’s me bridging those points. Now I had three points: beginning, middle, and end. Then I took a giant piece of poster board, and I just wrote down a list of all the other things I wanted to stick in there – the evolution of the running shoe, anthropology, barefoot running, the Tarahumara diet – a whole list. Where can I stick them? All the science is going toward the end because science is boring. I wanted to at least get readers to the halfway point before I started hitting them with science. So there are going to be 30 chapters, science is going to be chapters 15-30. What’s going to be in chapters 1-15? I looked at where I could put things on the agenda, on the playlist. It was like I was putting together a mixed tape….You get whatever orientation points you can, and then you figure out what’s got to be shoved in between them….Once you get a narrative structure in place, there’s not a whole lot of shuffling you can do. What stymied me in the first draft, I need to get all this stuff in, but the way I started telling the story I couldn’t transition back….The second time around, once I figured out a way through the woods, you stick with that way through the woods. It’s going to have to end with the race. …. I would alternate chapters. I would do one chapter of something dramatic and narrative and one chapter of…more background and research.

Question 4: I loved how you pop in and out of the story. How did you strike the right balance of not being overly present in the book but being there just enough?

I tried to keep myself out of the book. It was my editor who urged me to include more of myself. That came about in a revision. My thing was that of all the people in this book, the least interesting is me. I don’t want it to be this `man goes off and tackles challenge and perseveres.’… I really think the focus of the book should have been Caballo and the race. But my editor made, I think, a really smart point that so many of the people in the book are such wild characters that they are kind of removed from normal earthlings. There needed to be a point of access, and the point of access would be me. So in one of the early draft,s I was pretty much invisible. Then I went back and looked for places I could step in a little bit. I just wanted to be a master of ceremonies, nothing else.

Question 5: I’m guessing that a lot of crazy things happened to you during your research. Can you tell us more about the journeys into jungles full of drug lords and other scary moments that may have been cut from the book?

A piece of good editing advice I got from my book editor was that you’ve got to remember you’re telling a story; you’re not presenting a soap opera that went on for 14 years and had daily episodes. You become immersed with the world and with the people. Mostly what was taken out were things that happened after the race. By the time I was finishing the final draft, the race had happened two years previously, so I had had lots of interactions with everybody … and all sorts of bizarre twists of life had occurred so I wrote this long epilogue,  a 7,000 word epilogue. The editor said drop that. The race ends, drop curtain, exit stage. You’re telling a story. You’re not trying to be encyclopedic or biographic. The idea is, can you tell a really ripping yarn that still gets all your points across?

Question 6: You have become passionate about ultra-marathon since you started researching the book. How else did you change while writing the book? What did you learn about being a writer?

You spend a lot of your time as a writer wrangling with people. You’re trying to get interviews, and you’re trying to get your expenses reimbursed, and you’re butting heads with your editor, who is butting heads with her editor. All these voices are trying to push you in different directions. Ultimately you’ve got to understand what it is you’re trying to do and do it and just stick to that. Don’t get too buffeted around. One of the real gratifications for me is when I originally wrote this article for Runner’s World. By the time I had the lede figured out, I thought this is good, man. I felt like this is one of the best ledes I’d written for any story. The editor was like, “No, no, no. That’s totally wrong. You can’t do it.” I’m not being stubborn. When you do something that is worthwhile, you understand it. Eventually I had to change the lede, [but]….when the book came out, I got to reuse it. The lede of Born to Run is the lede I could not persuade this guy to use…. What I learned is you really have to figure out in your own head what story you’re trying to tell and just go after it.

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