"No one writes 5,000 words a day!"
Coming out of the Demoral haze that was my recovery from surgery, I was almost clinically depressed. I guess the older you get, the less you are able to handle such strong drugs. But in the end, it was a nice clearing of the deck. It really was a mental reboot of sorts: two weeks of almost complete downtime in terms of thinking about the book. Plus I got to watch entire gigantic miniseries like Pride and Prejudice, Ken Burns’ Civil War, HBO’s Band of Brothers and From the Earth to the Moon, plus every really long Bible movie I own on DVD.
All this movie watching left me with a strong sense of narrative, however, and a strong desire to express not just my search for the map, as Neil Nyren would later dub it, but how my entire career led up to this point—to this book. I must admit, the way the book turned out (half high-concept book, half-career narrative) was not at all what I had in mind when I wrote the proposal with Jennifer, and yet, as Mark Warren likes to point out, the proposal certainly promised a book very much like the one we produced—but at roughly twice the size.
Why did I aim so low in terms of wordage? Truth be told, I feared, not unlike a few publishing houses that decided not even to bid on the proposal, that all I had was a great article I was trying to stretch across an entire book. Since I am very comfortable writing 1,000-word op-eds, I figured I needed to come up with at least 75 or so such nuggets to spread across 75 op-ed sized essays. I guess I sort of imagined myself being like a Thomas Friedman or a Paul Krugman, except my book would be made up of unpublished op-ed columns. That would be in keeping with my career-long habit of writing as though I were someone famous, instead of a nobody.
So, as part of my bargaining with Jennifer about not abandoning the proposal process, I got her to agree that I would only offer to write a high-concept length book of about 60 to 70k. I figured that was about the number of total slides I had used in the brief I gave on behalf of the Office of Force Transformation, so each slide would be worth one op-ed sized essay.
Yes, that’s how pathetically unimaginative and un-self-confident I was going into the writing process, which is amazing considering my long career, all the great stories I tell from that career, and a decade and a half of being a true vision hamster—meaning I pedal away furiously in my wheel, spinning out new visions all the time.
Neil Nyren was really cool about this when we first spoke on the phone after the deal was set. I was still sorta stoned on Demoral and I got all excited and started babbling, but Neil took it in stride, commenting on how pleased he was to have me and my book in his stable. When I broached the concept of length, he interrupted me and said, “It will be as long as it needs to be. I’m not worried about that. I'm worried about getting it right on paper.”
That was just what I needed to hear. And so I chilled the weekend following the deal and got ready to go to NYC to brief the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, right across the street from Ground Zero, in my first return to downtown Manhattan since June 2001. That brief went very well, considering how shaky I was, using both my brain and my vocal cords for the first time in two weeks since surgery, and afterwards I got together with Mark Warren at this great Greek restaurant for about three hours of conversation.
It was our first big meeting since the time I briefed Esquire back in November, and we were both very excited to see one another. We drank lots of coffee and ate some fabulous baklava, but mostly we just spoke with great passion about the journey we would begin together.
Mark really triggered a long rift from me when he offered that I must be feeling enormous pride in looking back now over my career and realizing it all led up to the tipping point of this book we both felt would rock the world. I said I was proud, and in my need to pull myself out of the depressive funk I felt myself in from the Demoral’s shadow, I started spewing out every good story I could remember from my entire professional career.
When I was finished, Mark said simply, “We’ve got to get all of that in the book!” This was exactly what I wanted to hear, and yet I knew it was impossible. I knew I had 70k worth of high concept, and that is what I promised Putnam, and I also knew I had about 70k worth of career narrative, but that Putnam would balk at such a long book, and maybe even at the notion of including all that personal narrative with the high-concept material. I mean, wouldn’t that be some weird hybrid that maybe someone who’s already famous might pull off, but how in the hell could I manage it?
Mark’s point was this: no one would be able to believe this entire universe of thought I was about to lay at their feet unless they could get to know me also as a person. In effect, I had to create myself as a character in the book to sell the veracity of the material, otherwise readers might just go, “Who in the hell are you to be saying all these things?”
To render myself as a character, in Mark’s mind, meant I needed to generate a narrative arc to the entire book. That way we could interweave the career narrative with the high concept material, in effect, creating an autobiography of the vision, as Mark likes to call it.
Now when Mark and I hatched this plan over baklava, I have to admit, it felt pretty radical. I kept saying, “But this isn’t what we promised Putnam.” But Mark kept countering, “No, it really is. Read your own proposal for God’s sake!”
So I left NYC all jacked up about this notion of writing the autobiography of the vision. Although I had promised Neil all sorts of advance peeks at the material as we created it, as a result of this seemingly radical new plan, we didn’t show him squat until the entire first draft was complete and given a first basic edit by Mark. Our deadline was Halloween. I had my meeting with Mark on 21 July. I would take a short vacation in PA with my family and my brother-in-law’s family and would start writing an op-ed a day on 2 August, finishing sometime in mid-October. That would leave two weeks of dedicated joint editing, but Mark would edit stuff along the way, except for a chunk somewhere in the middle of all this when his wife was expecting child number two.
It was a plan, an insane plan, but a plan nonetheless. We had to have the final first draft to Putnam by Halloween to keep to the schedule of getting the book out in May of 2004, in order to catch the presidential election in full swing. That was a key promise of the proposal: we would deliver and deliver on time.
So between 21 July and 2 August I came up with a map of the Pentagon’s New Map, or an Excel spreadsheet in which I plotted out 75 “beats,” as I called them, or op-ed sized essays. There would be six substantive chapters and a conclusion, with the 75 beats spread across them. My plan was as rigid and Procrustean as ever (I like rule sets): I would begin each chapter with one beat that was autobiographical. These would move chronologically through my career. The following beats in each chapter would present high-concept material, and then each chapter would end with a beat that I called the “myth busters,” or common myths about the world and U.S. national security that I would summarily demolish. 75 beats = 75k. It was that mathematical. I would write the book in 75 days. Boom, boom, boom.
Of course there would be two breaks in the steady drum beat: I have season tickets to the Green Bay Packers (a conceit I insert at the very beginning of the book, as you will see), and my three-game package (the Gold, or old Milwaukee package) that year featured a preseason game in late August (Panthers kicked our asses) and a regular season game in mid-September (we stomp the Lions yet again). Writing the book of my dreams was one thing, but missing any chance to see Brett Favre sling ’em was quite another. I mean, let’s keep it real!
So I had my plan and I was going to execute it like clockwork: one beat per day, one thousand words.
I started on 2 August writing the first autobiographical beat in Chapter 1 entitled, “Playing Jack Ryan.” It clocks in at almost 3k.
Hmmm.
On to second day of writing: the first high-concept segment. Strangely enough, as I stand in the shower that morning, I try to figure out how to start the segment. I end up using another autobiographical bit, which itself stretches on for more than 1k. Then I write the actual segment, and the total effort clocks in at 4k.
[I would repeat that process on all the supposedly pure high-concept segments, as the autobiographical wormed its way in on virtually every single one.]
Next day, 5k. And from there on out it was roughly 4 to 5k per day.
Now, I would have my brother-in-law Steve Meussling read each segment after I sent it to him at the end of the day (often creeping into the morning hours of the next day), and he would give me immediate feedback that suggested that not only was the personal narrative and tone working, it was most welcome. Steve, therefore, became my proxy for the masses. Smart, good reader, but not an expert in the field. So to sell him was not to talk over anyone’s head, but not to talk down either. So long as he was happy, I was happy.
Mark Warren was happy too. He liked how it was turning out. “Don’t worry about the length,” he kept saying. “That’s my problem. All you need to do is whatever it takes to get it out the way you want it—whatever feels good.” He noted along the way that I tended to do a lot of what he called “pre-writing” each morning, meaning I would meander around for about 1k before settling down on the theme and then somewhere around 2k I would kick it into overdrive, whipping out the last 3k like hell on wheels. I knew already, even as I wrote, that big chunks would disappear under Mark’s knife, but as instructed, I did not care one bit. The key was keeping up the incredible pace of getting all this material out. “No one writes 5,000 words a day!” said Mark. “That’s simply insane.”
I ended up cranking roughly 160,000 words stretching over exactly 40 days and nights, or 5k a day when the Lambeau pilgrimages are factored in. Five thousand words is more than the entire Esquire article plus all the verbiage in the List. It’s a serious thematic essay every day—day after day. When I first wrote the preface (6k that day), I wrote “This book took only 40 days to write but 14 years to imagine.” Neil cut that line in his first edit. He said, “No one wants to hear you wrote a book really fast—sounds sloppy.”
But it wasn’t. It was a maniacal dream. It was the most magical creative period I have ever known. The only thing it trails is great sex with my wife, with a Brett Favre TD pass (in person) and anything my kids ever do to amuse me coming in tied for third.
Alright, Brett is fourth and should stay there.
It was really fantastic, though. About 4 hours a day of writing and about 4 hours a day of editing, writing in the very early morning hours and edit after work. An insane pace, but I loved it. I developed all sorts of weird writing routines, like having a salad every day at work with bleu cheese dressing, something I’ve never eaten before because I always hated it. I also would do the first edit of the text on the elliptical trainer at the gym during my workout. Two very strong rules.
The third strong rule was that I always sent the draft—without fail—to both Steve and Mark before I would hit the hay. No excuses, no failures, no matter how long it took.
What’s probably most strange about all this writing was how I manage to lose the three dozen PowerPoint slides from my brief that I was fairly adamant about—going in—being in the book. When I gave the long list to Neil before writing, he gave me a big, menacing “Hmmm.” Mark picked up on this, and said—in effect—let me handle this.
What happened was this: every time I inserted a slide in the text, Mark would bitch about it almost immediately, saying it “stiffens up the page,” and “you start lecturing the minute you start explaining it.” He always whined that whenever I used a slide, “You stop commanding the material and the material starts commanding you”: basically this editor’s preferred way of calling you a pussy.
At first when Mark tried this line on me, I got a bit pissed and prepared to hold my ground, but each time he raised the issue, I would get an email from Steve saying in effect: “Great tone and drive through the piece until you hit that graphic, and then everything bogged down and my mind started wandering, thinking about food or some chore I needed to complete. Too bad, because you had me right up to that moment.”
Well, Steve’s comments were always the killer, reinforcing Mark’s basic wisdom and pushing me to kill the slide and—in Mark’s words—write through the material.
When I finished the first Chapter, designed to be 5k in all, it turned out to be something like 15,000 words. Hmm. I could see the whole 75 “beats’ thing falling apart, not just because of the huge volume I would inevitably create, but because I found myself “stealing” concepts and lines from later beats and putting them into earlier ones. In short, I was writing the book far faster and in a more integrated way than I thought possible.
When that reality sunk in, I really started to relax. Various beats that I had considered weak or thin, I simply collapsed with other stronger ones. After Chapter One was complete, I edited my Excel spreadsheet with a big black marker and cut the remaining 70 beats down to about 60. After Chapter Two weighed in even heavier than One, I cut the remainder down yet again to yield a total of roughly 50 beats. After Chapter Three weighed in at roughly 30k, I whacked away even more, ending up with the final plan for 31 beats spread across six substantive chapters, plus a conclusion I counted as one beat and a yet-to-be-conceived Preface I did not count, because Mark said I had to write the book before we could figure out exactly what the Preface would introduce.
When I was all done with the 31 beats over six chapters (New Rules, Rise of Lesser Includeds, Disconnectedness Defines Danger, Core and Gap, New Ordering Principle, and Global Transaction Strategy), I penned the conclusion (Hope Without Guarantees) in one fell swoop of about 7k. This was all complete by the time I returned to Green Bay with Kevin to see the Lions game, hitting Six Flags Great America the Saturday before. I had started the book on 2 August and basically finished by 13 September—at just over 150k.
When I got back from the Lions’ game, I wrote the Preface in one day at about 8k, and it was complete. Now it was just a matter of Mark cutting away and forcing me into rewrites. So the rest of September I basically relaxed and worked the endnotes big time. Meanwhile, Mark kept digesting the text in two long reads, and dealing with the birth of child number two.
Come October we began editing for real. Mark would send me a chapter, in one fell swoop, with all the sections edited and placeholders inserted for where he felt I needed to expand. He also made me write an intro to each chapter. Didn’t say what I had to write, but gave me just a hint of the tone. We worked our way through the chapters that way, and along this process Mark basically killed every slide I had inserted (only 12 made it in the first rough draft), except for the infamous Manthorpe Curve graphic, which Mark said deserved to be left in as a relic or artifact of history. In the end, it was the only PPT slide in the text, and it wasn’t even mine!
Oh, and we also left in William McNulty’s iconic two-globe rendering of the Gap territory, that you now see on the top of my web pages, thanks to my webmaster Critt. Neil Nyren had promised from the start that the big maps from Esquire would be unified into a single map and put in the front and back of the hard-cover final version as “end papers.”
As a side note, let me say I got my first copy of the hard-cover final book today via FEDEX from Neil, with a note saying “hot off the presses!” The maps and everything else looks fantastic, to say the least. Putnam did a beautiful job all around, and it makes me very proud to be associated with such a fine company.
Enough kissing up … even if I mean it.
Here is the reality of what I got when I hired Mark and gave him a percentage of my earnings from this point onward: he took a very good book, and—in my unbiased opinion—turned it into a great one. I gave him 160k and he cut 40k (some of which should burn in hell and some of which will eventually appear on this website). Then he forced me to write about 20k new in the editing process. So the difference he made to the text was a swing total of 60k, which is enormous. He cut the flab and the nonsense and the pre-writing, and he forced some of the best and most sharply analytical and passionate stuff I penned in that additional 20k he ordered up. In all, he did more than coach this writer. He shaped the tone and narrative arc of the book very intimately.
Don’t get me wrong. Mark didn’t ghost this book on any level, and his original text doesn’t add up to a full page, but he got the performance out of me like some very focused Broadway director working over the star in this one-person show. I wrote the book and star in it, but it’s Mark’s direction that subtly shapes this narrative arc from start to finish.
Well, we turn in 140k on 31 October, right on deadline. We’re still editing the last two chapters, Six (The Global Transaction Strategy) and a new synthetic chapter that Mark creates by combining three “myth-busting” segments that were scheduled, in my final plan, to end Chapters 1, 2 and 4. Mark decides to break those three beats from the ends of those three chapters, saying none really serves well as a concluding segment. I am wary of this concept of creating a whole new chapter and sticking it right in front of the Conclusion, but Mark is convinced it’ll work—a separate myth-busting chapter that will be the smallest in the book (of the now seven-numbered chapters). Mark says it’s good to have chapters of varying length, so I go with it. When I finally read the trio of myths united in the new chapter, I am delighted. For many who have read advance copies, this one stands out as a favorite, validating Mark’s superior judgment.
When everything is all turned in on that Friday, Mark and I figure it’ll take Neil a week to read it all. Still, I feel very nervous. What if he doesn’t like it? What if he feels like the whole autobiography of the vision concept just doesn’t work? If he rejected it outright, I could kiss goodbye the second (due on delivery of the text) and third (due on publication) portions of my advance. In short, a lot of money was on the line.
Mark and I are stunned when Neil sends us both an email the very next Monday. He said he spent the weekend reading the entire text, and he’s very happy. Wants the Preface cut in half and fundamentally rewritten, but some tweaking here and there in the main body, and that’s basically it. So long as he can intimately shape the first big chunk of text out of the box—the first thing the reader reads—he’s willing to buy off on the approach for the rest of the text. We have delivered what he thought he had bought back in July.
Mark and I breathe a sigh of relief. We know full well what a hurdle we have traversed. Neil is Da Man as far as Putnam is concerned. This was his find, his deal, his baby. He no like and we are in a world of s---, plain and simple. More to the point, we just earned a chunk of moolah!
But beyond all that, I had accomplished something I had spent a lifetime dreaming about. I had penned the book that only I could write, and I wrote it exactly the way I wanted to. It was an amazing feeling that lingers to this day, when I first hold the hard-cover publication copy of this book—this future worth creating.
