How to Write

Dana Gioia shares the secrets of his craft in this deep 3-hour conversation with David Perrell

I often showcase my brother Dana’s work here.

This is more than just brotherly love—Dana has always been an essential role model for my writing vocation. And, over the years, he has gained recognition from many others as one of America’s most inspiring writing teachers.

You can see why in the video below.

“This is the deepest conversation I’ve ever had about writing,” says interviewer David Perell. And Perell has conducted interviews with hundreds of authors.

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Dana is seven years older than me. And he was the trailblazer.

Without much help or guidance, he found a pathway out of the constraints of our working class childhood—eventually proving himself in the intense heat of the New York writing scene.

It was easier for me because Dana showed what was possible. I doubt that I could have figured it out on my own.

By watching him, I learned how to raise the level of my own game. He set an example—in terms of commitment, discipline, passion, professionalism, and independent thinking.

Now others can get a dose in this video.

My brother at his home, an idyllic writer’s retreat in Sonoma County

Even I learned new things from Dana’s three-hour conversation with Perrell. By the way, I’ve also been a guest on Perell’s How I Write podcast—so I know how well prepared David is for these discussions.

He’s a skilled interviewer, and it shows here.

Perell also traveled out to Dana’s home in Sonoma County—a serene writing retreat overlooking wine country. That’s the best place to get a sense of my brother’s worldview as an author.

Here are two extracts:

DANA GIOIA: The advice I would give some people is that I write prose in two ways. There's the piece that's going to be read on Monday, and then there's the piece I want to have read in 50 years.

I take a very different strategy for both of them.

So, I'm the least marketable writer you could possibly imagine. People will ask me for a piece, and I won't give it to them. I'll finish a piece and I say, “No, it's not ready.” That actually has been, I think, the key to my success—saying no.

DAVID PERELL: There's a real stubbornness about you and also your brother in that way.

DANA GIOIA: I'm stubborn, but I'm not as stubborn as Ted.

For example, I am so old that I've lived through a major transformation of culture. When I was a young man, all information was in books, in print, in magazines, in newspapers.

Now, that is really a historical period. Most information now is electronic. It's digital, it's audio, it's on film. We've gone from a culture of silent print on a page to living language in film or audio.

It actually brings us back to the origins of literature, the origins of human consciousness. That's not a bad time for a poet to be alive, because poetry is a technology that's older than writing.

As a poet, especially the kind of poet I am, who uses form, meter, rhyme, and things like that, the culture is closer to what poetry is about than what a novel or a print book is about.

I wrote an article called “Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture,” which I think is one of the best things I've ever written. Lewis Lapham of Harper's bought it. He said, "This is a great essay. It's really, really important."

He paid me a nice advance, and he said, “Dana, I want you to begin in the East Village, where you're going to a poetry slam.” I thought about it, and I said, “No, I don't want to do that.”

I sent him back his check and I published it in The Hudson Review. Rather than publish it in a magazine with a quarter of a million readers, I published it in a magazine with 2,500 readers. The article did not have anywhere near the impact that it would have, but I had it the way I wanted it to be.

I paid for my integrity, but I don't regret that……

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DAVID PERELL: What do you actually do all day? What does your day look like? What does your week look like? I don't really have a sense for that.

DANA GIOIA: Let me give you what my day was like at two stages in my life. I have had a job since I was nine. I worked during college, I worked during vacation. Even on Easter vacation, I would come back for a week and I'd have a job set up—because we had no money.

I went to business school, and no one in the history of Stanford Business School graduated doing less work than I did, because I spent three to four hours every day reading and writing for literary things. I managed my business school studies in a very businesslike manner.

I achieved three things at Stanford during those two years. I was publishing at least one piece a week in the Stanford Daily or some magazine in San Francisco. Secondly, I got my MBA. Most importantly, I met my wife.

Then I went to New York. So, for the next 15 years, this is what my day would look like: I'd get up about 7:00 AM, gulp down a cup of coffee, and drive through terrible traffic to work. I would work for 10 hours…..

I never had a really long period of time to work on anything. Your life is like a wallet full of one-hour bills. I'm going to take this hour, this hour, that hour. You only have 24 hours to spend every day.

I had three important things in my life. I had my marriage and my family. I had my job, which I had to have, because I had no money. And then the third thing was the writing. I could do all three of those things, but I couldn't have added a fourth.

It worked. But I had to have this real focus.

When I was at my business time, almost every hour of every day was budgeted. So that's what I looked like in New York—totally disciplined.

I quit my job at one point and became a literary journalist. I began editing books. I began working with musicians. We nearly went bankrupt for about two years, and then basically it all started working.

Finally, I decided to come back here [to California] because I had two small boys, and I wanted them to know their grandparents. I wanted them to know that they came from working-class Latins—my dad's Italian, my mom's Mexican—because in New York, they were being raised as generic upper-middle-class kids, without much of an identity.

Up here, I spend two or three hours a day in the morning doing physical labor—just to keep the natural landscape healthy around me. Then I'll work for a couple of hours, have lunch, do a couple more hours of physical labor, and then I'll work. If I'm really pressed on a deadline or something, I'll have dinner, then I'll work in the evening.

In New York, it was office work and literary work. Here, it's physical work and literary work.

I learned something when I came here. I'll be working on something, and I'll come to an impasse. I'll say, “I don't know where this poem is going.” Or let's say I'm writing the libretto for an opera, and I won't know what these two characters are going to do.

I'll go out and I'll prune a tree for an hour, cut away the dead wood—and things like that….And while I'm doing that, my unconscious works it out. Then I'll come back here and it's solved.

What I've learned here is the benefit of physical labor and the benefit of shutting off your rational mind and keeping yourself busy—so your unconscious can work. For a poet or for a literary writer, that's invaluable.

Years ago, when I left Washington D.C., I needed money. I took a job at USC each fall semester, and I had a big poetry class—215 students. It was a very popular class.

One of the things I would do is I would take a really big set of keys and I would just throw them at some guy that struck me as kind of athletic. He would just go and catch it.

I'd say, “Well, did I tell you to catch it?”

He said, “Well, no, professor.”

I said, “But why'd you do it?”

“Well, they were coming up there.”

I said, “Yeah, because your body has all this intelligence in it.”

Poetry likes that kind of intelligence. Poetry likes the rhythms of your body and the movements of your body. I realized that, for me as a poet, the more physical intelligence I could put in my poems, the better they were.

That’s because the one thing we have in common is the same body. We have hearts and lungs, and the kind of rhythms of living are very much the same. You can feel those things.