Washington post columnist, thriller writer who writes about the cia and such. This month, Pulitzer Prize winning author, Colson Whitehead as our guest. His most recent book is the under ground railroad. Mr. Whitehead, whats the appropriate response new book is appraised by oprah, president obama, you won the National Book award, what is the appropriate response . If only it took the pain aw away. [laughter] has taken off in a way thats unexpected and startling and wonderful. Just try to enjoy it despite my best efforts. Why does it put you in a better mood . Ive been writing for 20 something years doing fiction 20 some years, sometimes we write a book and people dig it and understand it sometimes write a book and no one cares and its sort of disappears so i have the pride the job i did with the book. Either you dig the groups of two prospectors or you dont and so you are either along for the ride description or not. Definitely when i was writing was my second attempt at a novel. My first one was pretty terrible and it went to a bunch of publishers and everyone hated it. I went to an agent and the agent dumb to me because it wasnt going anywhere so for a year and a half i had to send to my friends imwriting a book about elevator inspectors and they make fun of me. So eventually after a year and a half in writing it i finally got down to what sounds like an interesting book and i headed to my agent, my new agent duggan and luckily double dated as well host is there a connection between that intuition is, and someone in the underground railroad . There are a couple of things i circle around, i love writing about new york, i get a lot of ideas and vitality and energy from the city. Culture, race in america, technology and some of those things are in some books, not somuch in others. My book about new york, the gloss of new york is about a racialized take on new york because new york is not black new york, my poker book , noble also. Theres not much to say about technology but those are four or five areas that i tend to circle around. Host how should people read your book . Social commentary, autobiographical . Guest sag harbor which is my fourth novel does take off from my childhood. I would say underground railroad is my lease autobiographical book just because im not in there in some sort of coded way which is probably why peoplelike it. But so i think from the beginning to the end, thats a good way, start to finish. Thats a good way to read them and some booksare funny. Some are alittle more tragic. I hope that the experience is worth your time. And sometimes the books are social commentary, sometimes their commentary on whatever weirdthing im growing through this year. Host in sag harbor are you benji with the bad haircut . Guest benji is a 50yearold kid growing up in new york in the 80s. As idid. Unfortunately my life wasnt very interesting so sadly my 1985, number of the mind is not that cool or compelling take a little bit of license. When i started the book i wanted to base characters on my friends and unfortunately whenever they appeared on the page they became less and less like my friend david or my friend scott as the book took over so it started as fairly autobiographical and im definitely in there but the demands of the story always supersede any kind of autobiographical or memoir urge. When im trying to make story means exaggerating what happened to me. Host Colson Whitehead, what is the process to get the elevator inspectors or zombies or a underground railroad that actually exists in physical form. Guest i like to mix it up and not do the same thing from book to book. If you know how to write a certain kind of book why do it again . Perhaps thats foolish but i think writing a book, thats maybe plot heavy and following up with a book thats not as plot heavy is a way to change it up and not do the same thing. A book that has a firstperson narrator, a book thats funny, maybe not so funny is a way to keep it very for me. So the last couple of books im on a perverse street. I went from sag harbor, realistic story about the 80s to an apocalyptic zombie tail to noble hustle which is a historical book to this book underground railroad which is a historical novel so im keeping it verydifferent and i think i get my ideas from articles. Just weird musings i have on my couch, a lot of times i spend a lot of time on my couch so sometimes the ideas stay with you and you get an open spot in your schedule, you can consider it, are you ready or do you want to do it, not do it and sometimes they fall away but they come from a lot ofdifferent places , my ideas. There seems to be a common theme in your book about a guy who really didnt get the rules of life, has a certain unease aroundother people. Guest thats a little biographical but i dont want to take my hand to early, were here for three hours. I want to save the goodstuff for the last hour. I think theres something about an outsider, i think whether you are misanthropic like i can be sometimes or were all sort of outsiders in different ways and an outsider makes a good observer, a good protagonist, a good storyteller. Youre in the action and also standing apart so someone who observes and is part of the scene but also a bit removed i think is a good vehicle for telling a story and definitely in theapocalypse , in the world of elevator inspectors, its nice to have a point of view character for thereader. Most of us arentelevator inspectors , sadly. So my outsider characters become a way, in addition or the reader to enter the story. Host zone one didnt come out until 2011 but i read you had written that asa young guy in the eighth or 10th grade. Guest know, i definitely was a big horror fan and for me it was a way to write horror fiction and Science Fiction. And love the zombie genre from going back decades but i wrote to terrible stories in college. Didnt really start writing fiction until my mid20s but the obsession with zombies does go back to my childhood. I had parents who love horror movies, we watched horror movies together and i remember seeing night of the living dead at an early age. That stayed with me, to refresh your memory its a story about the eve of the zombie apocalypse. People are trying to hide, dont know whats happening and the main protagonist is a black man being pursued by white people who want to devour him and eat him which of course is part ofthe story of america. So about growing up as a horrorand Science Fiction fan , five books in i thought i was ready to follow my influences. Host i got the impression there was an obsession with horror movies. Guest sure, i dont want to get all judging. But yes, a real interest. My brother and i came of age during the ec horror boom so we go to crazy eddies and rent horror movies, Science Fiction movies and every friday we go through them, return them and start over again by the next week. And it was sort of Science Fiction and horror comic books that made me want to write, i had a love of Marvel Comicswhen i was growing up. My parents would like even came novels and i would be in my brothers room and read them. So fantasy, horror has always seemed to be a potent storytelling tool. People have different ideas about what zombies mean. For me, i find my own interpretation and put my own stamp on the genre was sort of fun and important for me. Host what does zombies mean to you . Guest i think different generations interpret different horror genres according to their own needs. I think like dracula. Vampires mean something in the 19th century england and they mean Something Different to the twilight generation. Zombies mean Something Different now. To me theyve always been an expression of social anxiety, fear of otherpeople. A zombie store you go to bed and your loved ones, neighbors, teachers, coworkers are so many zombies out to get you read a stop pretending to read theyve always been monsters but they let themask down and now they are out to get to and speaks poorly of my psychology that i interpret zombies that way. The sort of zombie myth has always stayed with me and i finally felt ready to tackle it. I have these various ideas in the back of my head ready to be on the page. Host is social anxietya common trait among novelists . Guest idont know. Im not sure. I think it helps to, worrying about your work, worrying about your job is maybe a good fill for being a novelist it helps you not coast. Host worrying about what others may think of your work. Guest know, doing a good job, i think its anxiety versus worry. I think a healthy amount of worry else you make sure that putting everything into this paragraph, into that page, making sure its coming out right even if youve done eight books and this is your ninth book and you have eight books under your belt. Host in the new yorker in 2012 your quoted as sayingto be a good novelist, for you , its to fully inhabit one solution to get intoevery kooky aspect of ones freakish. Its a handy survival strategy. Guest well, i think what i like about my different books is they are sort of odd and allowed to express different aspects of the world, different theories and i think writing is becoming a way for me tointerpret the world for myself , to figure out how i feelabout things. About societal systems, politics, so that license is very important for me. Not being tied to expectations, following my own inclinations and just because writing a book about elevator inspectors sounds like a bad idea, adumb idea , can you make it work and can you sell to the reader at the same time youre selling it to yourself so the delusion that you have something to say, the delusion that your work is worthy of being read by others i think is useful for being an artist. Host where did the germ of the idea for the intuitionist come from . Did you see an inspector . Guest im in the aforementioned book that everyone hated. Host what was thatbook about either way . Guest remember gary coleman the tv star . Little black boy . He was a tv critic at the time writing about black imagery and pop culture so i figured ill write a novel about a gary coleman type child star who grows up and has misadventures and it seemed like a good idea tome. And in the novel hes on a sitcom called im moving in because he was always getting adopted by rich white people. Said im moving in and she sent out the book and everyone hated it. I think i became a writer then, i was going to get a real job and become a lawyer. Maybe people will like it, maybe they want but ill learn to write by the end of it. People like plot, maybe ill have a plot driven book, try that. I write a lot of detective novels and studied suspense and i thought i was watching 20 20 as i often do. In those days in my 20s. In the 1990s. And there was an article, a piece on the hidden things in escalators. Apparently if you dont repair escalators they can detach from the sides and remove a toe, its a terrible thing obviously and they had an escalator inspector that they interviewed and i thought that the random job and as im growing up in new york you always see, theres a law not necessarily enforced anymore but the elevator inspector signs the certificate, ive been here, everythings fine. They come once a year and suddenly you see that the elevator inspector has been there. Wouldnt it be cool if an elevator inspector had to become an inspector and solve thecriminal case . Aha, funny, postmodern detective story so i went to the library to see what kind of skills and elevator inspector would bring to a criminal case andof course the answer was not because they are elevator inspectors. So it became not like a murder mystery but holding the mystery of afallen elevator and i made up a different culture for elevator inspectors. I figured they are conservative and progressive and that became the empiricists versus the intuitionist who are progressive and that duality plays out in thebook in different ways. And so maybe i was trying to teach myself how to write. I hadnt had a female protagonist before so when i put the female protagonist, i hadnt had a book that had a plot or any kind of linear momentumso to try and do that. And then i took it this weird whimsical idea of elevator inspector,solving a criminal case. Host prior to starting this you look at your books on the table and said sorry for the clunkers that you had to read. What do you consider to be a clunker . Guest i think theyre all pretty good but hopefully if you do something for a long time and get better at it , certain books i wonder, why did i use so many adjectives . Wasnt there a simple wayof doing that . Ill lose a page or two here and there and hopefully im a betterwriter and ill learn how to do things in a more efficient way. Focally you get better and better than obviously you start sucking but hopefully im still in Getting Better phase and Getting Better at my job, learning from each book and taking that to the next one. Host does im movingin still exist . Guest the manuscript is there. For a while i thought maybe ill strip mine for good similes or something but its really terrible and the energy it would take to bring it up to my very high standards now are probably better spent writing Something Else so its in my drawer and if my children have a gambling debt, they can sell it to somebody 30 years from now. Make some quick cash. On broker. Host lila may watson is one ofyour female protagonists, cora is another. Whats the reason to write through a womans point of view . Guest i think women exist and if you tell different stories you should pick differentpoints of view so thats part of that. I had a string of male protagonists before this book so it seems sort of wise to mix it up. I think if you know to do something, why do it so when lila may watson i couldnt do my kids are new york voice, that was in my first novel. I was forced to, or i chose a third person narrator. So i couldnt rely upon my first person narrator tricks. A female protagonist i had done before and by doing it i could hopefully become a betterwriter. And then with cora, i had a female narrators ina row, mix it up. Theres a famous narrative written by Harriet Jacobs called instance in the life of a slave girl she writes about how when a slave girl becomes a slave woman she turns into a much more terrible form of slavery. You are now trade to desires you worked before and youre supposed to pump out babies because more babies means more slaves, more property for your master so that predicament of female slaves seemed worthy of exploring. Sometimes im mixing up, sometimes i want to learn something and keep the challenges going. Host what was your favorite one to write . Guest i think, this book was hard to write because i was broke read this book is hard to write because i was broke and also depressed. There are a lot of different challenges and then you finish and look back on these and think these are pretty terrible it was a special time in my life. So i think with the noble hustle, perhaps that was a freudian slip but that was the most fun to write that its a humor book taking off from a trip i took to the world series of poker. I just tried to cram as many jokes as i could in their area theres a journalistic framework so theres Linear Movement but i really was just trying to cram as many weird jokes and put myself into it and it was really fun. I think it started from a journalistic assignment, theres a magazine called flatland which is pop culture and sports for a couple of years and they had great writing and they called me up to see if i wanted to write about the world series of poker. I was like no, i dont want to go to vegas, its very hot but then i said what if instead of paying for the article we paid your entrance fee and you had to go to the world series and i said okay, illdo that. I didnt actually know how to play poker so i started cramming. I would drop my daughter off at school and the other parents would say what are you up to and id say im going to Atlantic City to train for a poker tournament so i gamble and gamble and come back in a night and i got to the world series and you know, i mostly stayed at home and for the first time i had toget out of my comfort zone. Have a five foot area in my couch so get out of my comfort zones, learn how to play poker so i wouldnt embarrass myself, new york at the world series of poker. And then when i was writing it, i was writing an article , when youre writing a novel you write for joke, make yourself laugh and its a few years before someone else reads it and you feel stupid writing our own jokes for a while. Like dickens did back in the day and does the ascii, you get that Immediate Response and people like it and it gave me energy to keep going. So these are very special writing experience in terms of the material, in terms of how it came to the so i look upon that six months very fondly. Let me paraphrase the first line of that book which is i got to wear sunglasses inside. It was good for me becauseim half dead anyway. For years ive been told i have a good poker face and i realized that because i was half dead inside. Which people think for that half mask of a good poker player so that aspect was for once an asset. In a social situation. You want me to unpack being half dead . Host lets unpack this a little bit, you do right about having a mask on. You do write about the fact that you are semidepressed, hermetic in your writing and that youre a different personwhen youre done with the book. Is that important, is that pain or depression important your writing . I think partially it is and partially i think its good to have a healthy joking relationship with most things you do in life either its art or anything else. So not taking myself too seriously i think isimportant. I think in terms of sharing how i feel about my work with other people, demystifying it is important. Most writers i know would have sort of just been crawling along the payment trying to write some pages and hand them in so no one gets an arcade and we can keep doing what we like to do so a lot of times writing is unpleasant. It also you dont have to be great when you write a new sentence or character or figure out a problem youve been working on but for me, not taking it too seriously and i think the character of a depressive shut in i think is fun to play and its partially true and also its also sort of a default setting in my Public Relations so what the heck, go for it. What was the easiest book to write . Theyre all pretty hard i have to say. Im going to go with the shorter one. Apex is pretty short. The book im working on nowis pretty short. So short isnt easy it tends to not prolong the agony of a 400 pager. When you win thepulitzer at the National Book aw