Uncorking a Story

Neal Lipschutz grew up in Brooklyn as a big reader with a strong urge to write, and as a teenager he fell in love with the New York newspapers. Practicality won out: he spent more than four decades in journalism, first as a reporter and then mostly as an editor, including a stint as deputy editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal. Only after retiring did he take up fiction full-time, treating it as a new job he showed up for every day. Neal talks with Mike about which newsroom habits carried over to fiction and which he had to unlearn, what it felt like to be on the other side of the editor's desk, and why he finished his first novel before looking for a publisher. He also introduces Long Arm of the Past, the sequel to his debut No Write Way to Die. In it, management consultant Scott Morgan investigates the suspicious death of his firm's former chairman, and his partner is the retired NYPD detective who was his antagonist in book one. Along the way, the secrets Scott buried in the first book start working their way back to the surface.

For the 500th episode, Mike turns the microphone on himself. He goes back to 2011, when he was a brand-new focus group moderator who started a podcast because he couldn't show clients his proprietary work, and to the publicist who told him to make the show about authors. From there he walks through what 500 conversations have taught him: where writing careers really begin, why there's no such thing as an overnight success, and why it's never too late to start. He also gets personal about losing his brother Greg and his mother a year and a month apart, how writing carried him through it, and the 3 a.m. "download" that became The Waiting Room. And he finally answers the question he's asked every guest: what would you whisper to your younger self?

Ellen Holtzman didn't grow up writing. She was a history graduate student who taught herself to write by working through The Elements of Style page by page. When her husband decided he didn't want children, and then that he didn't want the marriage, her plans for an academic career fell apart along with it. She couldn't find a tenure-track job and had to support herself, so she went back to school for a second doctorate and became a psychotherapist. Years later, after her son left for college, she took writing courses at Grub Street in Boston. There she learned to tell stories instead of making arguments. Bouncing Back weaves her own divorce together with the stories of two of her therapy clients: Lisa, fifty, whose husband of thirty years kept returning to an affair, and Megan, thirty, whose husband told her he didn't want a second child. Ellen tells all three stories twice, once as a memoirist living through it and once as a therapist asking what it all means. In this conversation she talks about why she couldn't have written the book in the first ten years, how women lose themselves in marriage, and the recurring dream that finally stopped once the book was done.

Sal Amato has spent almost five decades in entertainment — he started as a kid actor in a 1978 Betty Crocker commercial, became one of the youngest members ever at Chicago's Second City, and has film and TV credits including The Untouchables, My Best Friend's Wedding, Chicago Overcoat, and Chicago Fire. On this episode he talks about his debut novel, Hidden Powers Disclosure from Within, a political sci-fi thriller built around the alleged 1954 Eisenhower UFO meeting. Sal traces his fascination with the unexplained back to childhood — Chariots of the Gods, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Star Wars — but he's quick to say the book isn't really about aliens. It's about tribalism, the algorithms and bots that keep us divided online, and the fact that people do more damage to each other than any outside force ever could. He also opens up about writing and revising the book while his mother was dying, and how his Second City improv training still shapes the way he writes and edits today.

In this conversation, Dena and Mike talk about the oral tradition both of them grew up inside, what happens when a writer traces a coping mechanism back four generations and finds it still running in her own kitchen, why rejection never derailed her, and what it costs to look at the people who came before you with compassion instead of judgment.