From pastoral ministry to journalism
Jordan Raynor sits down with Marcus Brotherton, four-time New York Times best-selling biographer, to talk about the important distinction between preaching Jesus and showing “the ministry of Jesus Christ” through our work, why Marcus pivoted from pastoral ministry to “secular” journalism, and how Christians should respond to career setbacks.
Links Mentioned:
[00:00:04] JR: Hey, everybody! Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I’m Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. Every week, I’m bringing you a conversation with a Christ-follower who is pursuing world-class mastery of their craft. We’re talking about their path to mastery, their daily habits and work routines, and how their faith influences their work.
Today, you’re going to hear from my new friend, Marcus Brotherton. He's a four-time New York Times best-selling biographer famous for biographying – Biographying? I think that’s it. Gary Sinise, better known as Lt. Dan in my all-time favorite movie, Forrest Gump, he has chronicled the story of Derrick Coleman Jr., the first deaf athlete to play offense in the NFL. Most recently, he's released a very interesting new book, called Blaze of Light, about a marine in Vietnam War.
So Marcus and I sat down. We talked about the important distinction between preaching Jesus and showing “the ministry of Jesus through our work.” We talked about why Marcus pivoted from pastoral ministry to “secular journalism” at the age of 31, and we talked about how Christians can respond differently to career setbacks and disappointing book and product launches. I really loved this conversation. If you're an aspiring writer, I promise you’re going to get a lot out of this conversation with a world-class writer, Marcus Brotherton.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:01:48] JR: Marcus, thanks so much for being here.
[00:01:50] MB: Jordan, great to be here.
[00:01:52] JR: So I got a story here. You wrote the biography on Gary Sinise, who starred, of course, as Lt. Dan in my easily hands-down all-time favorite movie, Forrest Gump. What was it like working with Gary?
[00:02:07] MB: It’s a box of chocolates. It was great. It was –
[00:02:11] JR: You’ve given that answer once or twice, huh?
[00:02:12] MB: Yeah, yeah. Gary was super. He’s in my top, I don’t know, three all-time favorite people to work with, and I would consider him a friend. Today, we still text on our phones every once in a while and just check in with each other. We’ve got another book in the works in the next couple years that's under contract. Gary is the real deal. He came up through the ranks. He paid his dues and then sort of hit fame. Then he used his platform for good. I mean, he’s shining the spotlight on national offenders and first responders and just doing a tremendous work.
[00:02:41] JR: Yeah. I’ll be honest. Until I was researching you in preparation for this podcast, I didn’t realize how much work Gary has done in his fame. It’s really impressive. It always – Especially as a Christ follower who believes that like any position of influence is giving us a steward and to use sacrificially for others, I'm always impressed by celebrities who do that, who use their platform to write some wrong in the world or to do some good in the world. I'm curious, is there a gem of a story from Gary's work on Forrest Gump that like really stands out in your mind? The Forrest Gump fan boy in me is really curious.
[00:03:17] MB: He told me about – they had to really define the motivation for Forrest wanting to sort of take over Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. In the original script, that wasn't defined, and so that conversation led to just that hilarious piece where Bubba is talking about all the things that he's done with shrimp and everything there is to know about shrimp as to boil it, fry it. It just sort of goes on and on forever and ever, and that came from a just sort of on-the-fly conversation, “Have we really defined why Forrest wants to help Bubba in his shrimping company?”
[00:03:54] JR: It is kind of random, right? That's really good but it makes one of the better sequences in that film.
[00:03:58] MB: It’s awesome.
[00:03:59] JR: So here’s the deal. My listeners who have read my books know I love stories, right? My books are filled with micro-biographies of Christ followers that illustrate some lessons about how Christians should think differently about work. It’s probably the reason why I'm excited to pick your brain, someone who’s dedicated to biographies and mastering that craft. I know you’ve written some other stuff, but the majority of it recently has been biographies. What led you to focus your career on biographies in the first place?
[00:04:29] MB: Well, that’s a great question. I mean, how far back do you want to go there?
[00:04:32] JR: As far back as you want. As far back as you want. This is your time.
[00:04:36] MB: Yeah, I appreciate that. So I was – We talked about this just before the show started how I was born in Canada. I was raised in Canada, and my mother was a newspaper journalist, my father was a pastor, and so I grew up in this world of God, and books, and sort of thinking big thoughts, and trying to write down those big thoughts. The concept that everybody has a story and everybody has a story worth telling, that was really deeply ingrained in me from – So, I went to a university and to graduate school, and I studied both disciplines, Bible theology and then also journalism and writing. I was thinking initially about becoming sort of a writing pastor, like Max Lucado, or somebody like that.
Out of college and through graduate school, I worked as a youth pastor and eventually as a social pastor for almost a decade. I actually became ordained and thought that this might become a career. Then, when I was about 31, I made a pretty hard career change and just went – I am called to write, and I need to go write, and write hard, and just pursue this thing with all I have. I became a newspaper reporter and just learned the craft from the ground up, every day writing a thousand words, researched, edited, interviewed, and was just in the trenches. I was general assignment. I covered everything – you name it. I talked with everybody. I was at kind of a feisty independent newspaper in Southwest Washington. Yeah, just every day in the trenches of the world of newspapers, it teaches you how to be fearless. You have to talk to everybody and you have to figure things out as you go.
Then when I was in newspapers, the newspaper industry was really going downhill at that time. It was just sort of like the music industry where everything is going online, and people are getting laid off. So I would go to apply for sort of the next job up the ladder, and there would be literally 120 applicants, and 119 would've just been laid off from the New York Times. I knew was never going to advance very far in newspapers, and so I had a former professor who had gone on to work as an Executive Editor at Penguin Random House, and so he was throwing me just some freelance work. By that time, I was married and had a child and a mortgage and just needed the moonlight just to make ends meet, and so the freelance world of books started to overtake my life. Eventually, I just built up work and I saw books as a really huge opportunity, and you can kind of write anything you want, depending on your audience.
In 2005, I had built up a ton of freelance work and made the decision to go full-time into books and started my own company. I quit my day job, went for it, and have never looked back. That’s kind of the big story of how I got into books.
[00:07:20] JR: That's awesome. I love it. So I want to ask some questions about that craft specifically, and I imagine we’ll use your latest biography, Blaze of Light, as a case study. So before we do, can you give us the one to two-minute overview of this latest book?
[00:07:34] MB: Blaze of Light, sure. It’s a story of a Green Beret Medic, Gary Beikirch. He is a Medal of Honor recipient, and he received his medal for actions taken during the siege of Dak Seang in April 1970. It’s kind of like Hacksaw Ridge if you ever saw the movie or Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand’s book. Yeah.
[00:07:51] JR: I loved Unbroken, yeah.
[00:07:53] MB: Yeah. So Gary is a remarkable guy. He was defending this village with twelve Green Berets, and there's 400 indigenous fighters, and 2,300 women and children inside this village. The siege happens. There’s like 10,000 enemy soldiers who are surrounding the camp. They’re shellacking it, just absolutely flattening out. Gary is hit three times. He’s paralyzed from the waist down, can't move, can't walk. Or he can move his upper body. He's the chief medic. He realizes he still got a job to do, and so he calls two helpers to a side and he says, “Carry me. Carry me around the battlefield.” He is carried from one wounded person to another, and that's how he continues to administer aid.
[00:08:33] JR: Wow. What an unbelievable story. How did you find this story?
[00:08:37] MB: That one, it was a friend of a friend that we were talking on the phone one day. I heard about it and just went, “Man, that story absolutely needs to be told.” As a journalist, your ears get tuned to stories that need to be told, and I just went, “Wow, holy cow. You’ve got to be kidding me.” So, I reached out to Gary, kind of cold, via social media and introduced myself, and it was amazing, because he and his wife had been talking about writing a book for some time. So it’s just a really fortuitous meeting.
[00:09:03] JR: That's amazing. So what does the process look like from there? You engage somebody like Gary like, “Hey, I want to tell your story.” What does the process look like between biographer and subject?
[00:09:15] MB: So Gary himself is a very humble guy. And plenty of guys, they want to kind of write a book in first person or have the book written for them. It's their story. You write it with a collaborative writer. Gary was like, “You know, I don't want to write this book about myself. I want to have somebody write this book about me because there's the stories that I know I'm not going to be able to tell in their full sort of spectrum of what happened,” because he just has to – He’s just too humble of a guy.
We went back and forth in sort of how to present this, and eventually it was decided that I should write the book third person about him, and I can really write about his heroics in a better way in that manner. So with Gary and I, we did a lot of interviewing, and then it was me hitting the research books and archives, and just sort of digging up all the facts surrounding the valid stuff that I could to flesh out the story.
[00:10:05] JR: I think the big challenge for anyone who produces content for a living, whether it's books or podcasts or music, is just always hunting for the next idea, right? So for me, writing nonfiction is like hunting for the next book concept, right? For you, the next story to tell in a biography. What do you do? You mentioned like you're on the phone with a buddy of yours and you just happen to hear the story, but what you do to intentionally hunt out for new stories to tell? Or do you not? Do you just kind of wait for the story to come to you?
[00:10:37] MB: That's a great question. Yeah. So people have often approached me and say, “Well, I want to be a writer,” and that is one of the first questions that I'll ask. I’m like, “Well, what do you want to write about?” They’ll go, “Well, I don’t know, man. I just want to be a writer.” The sort of the very gentle and yet harsh truth there is that’s not good enough. I mean, because if you're a writer, then it’s just writing. It’s just a vehicle to get across content. Any writer or any podcast, you’ve got to decide what it is that needs to be told, that you're passionate about telling, that also connects in a really big way with your readers or your audience. What is the subject matter that’s going to bring them benefit? Because ultimately, at the end of the day, that is what moves product, what sells books. That's what takes a story home, so to speak.
I tell people, “Imagine it from the eyes of the reader.” So the reader walks into Barnes & Noble, the bookstore, and literally there's 47 –
[00:11:33] JR: What’s a bookstore?
[00:11:34] MB: What is a bookstore?
[00:11:35] JR: I’m not familiar, yeah.
[00:11:36] MB: Please visit your local bookstore. So, a reader walks into their independent local bookstore, and 47,000 titles are staring that reader in the face. Why do you pick up the books that you do or the book that really intrigues you? Why do you pick that book up, look at the front cover, and turn the book over, read the back cover copy, and then sort of crack open the book, and read the first page? Why do you do that? Because there's something in that book that informs, inspires, entertains. Something that gives you benefit as a reader. That is your job as a writer to figure that out. That reader may not even have articulated his or her needs while walking to the bookstore, but that reader is walking in the bookstore with needs. Figure out what those needs are and then deliver.
[00:12:19] JR: I want to press you even further on this question. This is a very selfish question for me. How are you hunting for those ideas? Are you constantly reading specific news sources to look for new stories? Are you listening to podcasts? What’s your regimen for going out and finding these stories that sell?
[00:12:37] MB: Desperation. Fortunately, I work with several good agents right now who have their ear to the ground, so to speak.
[00:12:46] JR: That helps.
[00:12:47] MB: Yeah. They are bringing me material, and these days, at least pre-COVID anyway, I was turning down stories as much as anything. So having good people on the ground who are just really finding stories for me and going, “Hey, this is probably in your wheelhouse. I know it’s commercial, and an agent is attached to it or publishers are attached to it. They need a collaborative writer. Let’s put you guys together.” That's really cool. At the same time, I am pitching stories myself. And so after doing this now for 19 years, basically being a professional writer, I am asking myself – I'm trying to find the intersection of what interests me and what interests other people. Or to put it more crassly, what excites me and what do I know will sell.
[00:13:34] JR: Exactly, right.
[00:13:35] MB: Yeah. I mean, that sounds really harsh, but this is what I do for a living.
[00:13:38] JR: I don’t think it’s harsh at all. I talked about this in my book, Master of One. This advice of, like, do what people will pay for. That sounds crass. But typically, what people will pay for is a fairly objective measure of the value you're creating in the world and how well you're serving the market and customers, right? The same thing is true in books.
[00:13:59] MB: Yup, it is. We shouldn’t really apologize for this because we all have an electrical bill to pay, right? I mean, we live in the world where bills happen, and work happens, and actually work is not a bad thing. I mean, work is a very good thing. Work is a noble thing, and it's great to sort of get up in the morning and have a purpose to your day. I mean, work is a good thing, and commerce is attached to work. I think the only time this breaks down is where a really good story will come along my way where it’s a powerful and a poignant story, and yet you’re just going, “You know, this just won't fly. Nobody's going to pay to read this.”
I can't tell you how the people sort of approached me with, I don’t know, like a hard-luck health story, and they've been through something really sort of tragic and difficult, and they've overcome it. Now, I have written books in this avenue. At the same time, they are harder to sell and harder to find a readership. Who wants to read about your cancer journey? Probably you want to tell that story. But will that story find its readership? That's the harder truth of it’s a harder sell.
[00:15:01] JR: Yeah. So in Master of One, the book I just referenced, I talk about these three keys to mastering anything vocationally, right? Number one is apprenticeships. Number two is purposeful practice. The third is just discipline over time. I'm curious, in your own career, which of those three keys you found to be most critical to your success as a writer?
[00:15:24] MB: All of them. Yeah, it's hard to quantify there. People approach me on a regular basis and they say, “Hey, I want to write a book. People have told me I should write a book. How do I get started?” I try and be both gracious and realistic in the same avenue and I tell them two things right up front. I say, “It's not easy, and yet it can be done.” Both halves of those, it’s not easy and it can be done, both halves of those are really, really true. It is not easy, and you got to treat this craft as an investment, in terms of time and money. Think of it like you’re getting sort of a university degree where you're putting not simply months into this but years into this, and bring your absolute A game. The competition is that difficult. I mean, it's an American Idol line out the door around the block.
Usually, if you want to be an author, you need a day job. You’re a writer. You’re a professor. You’re an editor. You’re a speaker, a blogger, a TV or radio personality, or something like that. People say, “Hey, I’m going to quit my job and become a writer.” Don’t do that. I mean –
[00:16:23] JR: Bad idea. Bad idea.
[00:16:24] MB: Keep your day job until you really built it up. But it can be done. Absolutely, it can be done. The craft of writing, I mean, it really isn't just about writing the book anymore. Maybe 30 years ago it was that, where you could just sort of come up with a brilliant idea, sit down, write your book, and congratulations. You finish this huge dissertation of a work, and now you’re going to find a publisher, and the publisher is going to place in the bookstore, and people are going to wander into the bookstore, and find your book. That doesn't happen anymore. These days, particularly nonfiction, the whole process of building the platform and reaching your readers and sort of being out there already and in motion.
Then, with that, there is learning how to craft a proposal and learning how to write in sales language, so that you're approaching the publishers and prospective agents with a description of your work. There's also wooing an agent, and I use that word carefully, because agents can't be hired. Literary agents have to be wooed. They have to be impressed because they don’t –
[00:17:20] JR: You have to sell.
[00:17:21] MB: You have to sell. Then with the agent’s help, landing that publisher, boy, that’s a competitive piece these days, and then researching a book, and writing the book, and then editing the book, and then marketing the book. So writing the book, yeah, there's probably 7 steps in this process or 100 steps in the process. Are you truly prepared to go the distance to do all that's necessary in this super competitive environment to truly get your message out there?
[00:17:46] JR: So earlier today, I was working on a course that we will have launched on jordanraynor.com by the time this episode releases on how to land a book deal. Even if you have no platform today, it doesn't mean you can't stay there, right, but how to build a platform and get the book deal. I was doing an analysis of my time that I spent on my last two traditionally published projects. I'm really anal-retentive about tracking my time and figuring out where it's going. I spent 800 hours on the last book, and about 50% of that was marketing and publicity, and the other 50% was into making them, right? It’s both. You can’t just write anything, so there’s a lot of wisdom there.
Speaking of writing, one element of purposeful practice is this idea of rapid feedback, right? Masters distinguish themselves in that they get feedback regularly, pretty often on their work. I’m curious what your process looks like for getting feedback on a biography because that’s a little bit different, right? So what does your feedback cycle look like?
[00:18:48] MB: Yeah. I do hire a reader, at least one reader and sometimes a whole group of readers, 5 to 6 to 10, before a book hits and gets out there. Definitely ask yourself all the hard questions on this side of publication, right? Because once that book is out there, it takes a life of its own and it's vulnerable. It's open to attack. Fortunately, 95 to 98% of people that read my books like them, but not everybody’s that way. That process of securing readers that you trust who are both reading your book warmly, but they're also reading it with an eye to improvement. You can't be afraid of that process, because every first draft needs polishing. Even if you’ve done 10 drafts or 50 drafts, there are things that probably you’re too close to the work to see them yourself, and so you need a trained set of eyes on that material to help you walk through the process.
[00:19:40] JR: Every single time, that’s true. Every single time, even when I think I've nailed it, like absolutely nailed the first draft. So, Marcus, I'm curious, a typical day for you. From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, what does it look like?
[00:19:52] MB: Pre-COVID or now?
[00:19:54] JR: Let's go in now, yeah.
[00:19:56] MB: Now, I'm a big blob at my desk, trying to figure out what to do. No. Actually, let me answer for pre-COVID because I give you sort of my –
[00:20:04] JR: Yeah, perfect.
[00:20:05] MB: Yeah. So I'm up at 6:30, breakfast with the kids. People tell you not to check email first thing of the day. I actually do. I'm West Coast. Some of my contacts are East Coast, New York. So I’m always checking email. I walk our youngest to the bus stop and then I usually take a walk by myself about half an hour each morning brisk just to think and pray during that walk and just sort of clear my head. I come back, shower, change. I do dress for work. I am not one of these people sort of sit around in sweats and a T-shirt. I think if you dress the part, you think the part that much better, so I want to come with an A game every facet of my day.
I do have a home office, which is set up with everything you can imagine in terms of connecting with people. Big screens, so I can pull up several documents at one time. My day is the typical eight to five day of research, interviewing, and writing. I'm typically working on a couple different projects at the same time in different facets of that project, and so I'm pitching a project, I am writing a book, and I am promoting a book. That’s sort of a very –
[00:21:05] JR: Interesting.
[00:21:06] MB: Yeah, very regular and very consistent pattern. If I have an errand to do or if I’m going to meet with somebody, it's almost always the end of the day, sort of a 4:00 to 5:30, because I wanted sort of my freshest and creative work by myself in my office or on the phone with somebody. I don’t meet with somebody later in the day. Dinner with my family. I put our youngest to bed and definitely I’m there for the two older ones as well. Then depending on the project, yeah, there is more research and more writing in the evening. Depending the subject matter, like when I was doing the war books, I would try not to read war after like 9:00 PM because it's just hard to get that stuff out of your head sometimes. Yeah, that’s a typical day.
[00:21:49] JR: Yeah, I know. It’s good. So you're in the middle of the day when you're researching or writing. How long are your blocks, right? For example, my day is three to four 90-minutes blocks of time, with 15 to 30-minute breaks in between. Is that typically how you do it? And if so, what do your breaks look like? I love the morning walk. But throughout the rest of the day, what are you doing to kind of disconnect and make creative connections?
[00:22:11] MB: It’s a great question. It is hard to concentrate hard for eight to nine hours like that intently. I'm a list maker, and so I actually cross things off my list as the day progresses. I do try and take a break every 50 minutes to an hour and a half. I actually had an eye doctor tell me this that if you – Like our eyes aren’t sort of naturally made to stare to the screen all day. So if you take a break and then blink your eyes rapidly and sort of squeeze her eyes together every about 20 times at the end of an hour, that’s actually good for your eyesight in the long run. So, yeah, just take a break to walk around and just to get up and get a drink of water I think is a good practice.
[00:22:51] JR: Yeah. Can you talk about the brilliance of walking daily when it comes to writing and doing creative work? What's happening for you mentally in that morning walk? Because I do the same thing. I do it after my first 90-minute block when I go for a run. What does that do for you?
[00:23:08] MB: Back when I was in college, I was definitely one of these sort of intense students who – I mean, I was in college ’86 through ‘90, and so like I didn't own a pair of jeans. I was dressed in slacks, sort of the ‘80s dressed for business. Then I carried a briefcase and took the steps to the library too at the time. I mean, it was just always so intense.
By the time I'm a senior in college, I have an inflammation in my duodenum. I mean, it’s the beginnings of an ulcer. It’s literally I'm at the doctor’s office and he’s saying, “You’re too stressed out,” and I'm like 20 to 21 years old. He’s asked me. He’s like, “Well, what do you do for exercise?” I’m like, “Well, you know, I’ve got this bicycle that I ride a couple times a week and I go skiing in the ski season.” He’s like, “Yeah, but what do you do every day to get that stress out of your system?” I couldn't think of anything. It was literally like a doctor's prescription. He goes, “Okay, I want you walking half an hour every day of your life from here on out.” I took that to heart and it felt good and I was like, “Okay, I guess I need to move every day of my life. Just take a brisk walk every day for half an hour.”
Over the years, it's been a great thing and it just clears my mind and gets me outdoors. I’ve tried different times, sometimes after lunch, sometimes in the early evening, sometimes a couple times in a day. I find that I can plan things when I walk so much better than sort of sitting at my computer screen, staring at a screen for half an hour. Yeah, go take that walk and you will figure something out.
[00:24:36] JR: Yeah. I find that my walks are ironically some of my most productive times of the day, especially, and I’m learning this more and more, if I know what the variables are on a particular project, right? For example, there are five points I want to make in a chapter outline. I’m trying to figure out how best to organize them. If I take that walk with those variables defined, it almost always sorts itself out, right? There's something about just physically getting out in the world and doing that. There’s genius to that.
So I want to go back to 31-year-old Marcus. You’ve been a youth pastor. You grew up – I love the home that you grew up in already. Your dad's a pastor. Your mom is a journalist. You yourself were a youth pastor. When you made that decision and say, “You know what? I am going to go write. I’m going to go be a journalist. I’m going to go to tell stories.” Was there a sacred secular divide there? Was there guilt that what you are about to go do is somehow less honoring to the Lord than what you were doing previously? How did you sort through some of those thoughts or did you not struggle with that?
[00:25:41] MB: That’s a great question because that really is your wheelhouse, isn’t it? I mean, you’re really teaching people that it’s okay to have a job. I think in generations past, if you're in the Christian subculture, there was this hierarchy of, you’re going to go be a pastor or a missioner. If you’re really going to ring that bell for God, then by all means it’s pastor, missionary, and everything else is kind of secondary. Was I raised with that? I don’t know. I mean, I think that’s certainly in the Christian subculture and you have to deal with that mentally.
For me, I loved pastoral ministry. I practically loved youth ministry. It's not easy work, mind you. Definitely, there's a crisis of the day when you're working with students, sometimes real and sometimes imagine. But there's a lot of crisis management and a lot of just intensity in the counseling and in students’ lives as they’re working through very hard issues at that stage of life for them. So by the time I had done it for 10 years, I knew there are very few older youth pastors. I mean, the national average work span is like 9 to 18 months. It's a pretty short job, and I had done it for almost 10 years. So I love the job. I love the students and cared for them.
At the same time, I was pretty tired and not tired of the work but tired in the work, and that was a distinction. So I just went, “Can I do this for the next big chunk of time, 30 years or whatever?” I didn't see myself doing it. But it wasn’t sore of reaction to get out of it as it was just a huge call. I really wanted to write and I wanted to explore that side of life and just felt, as much as I prayed about it and studied about it and talk to people that are respected, they were saying, “Yeah, you do have an inclination to this end, and you should proceed in the calling.”
When I switched careers like that, yes, there were definitely people who said, “So, you've left the ministry?” That's a loaded question. I didn't feel that I did. It's just like, “No, I'm just working with a different vehicle right now because there's still this motivation wanting to do my best work, and wanting ultimately to lead people a step closer in their faith.” Or maybe they don't have faith and I want to make sort of skeptics out of unbelievers. As T Bone Burnett said, “You’re sort of just bringing people like one step along in process wherever they’re at.” It’s not an ulterior motive but it would be an ultimate motive, that I would want to glorify God with whatever I do.
When I'm in the writing world, my audience is definitely secular. I mean, I’m a general market writer. I am out there in New York and I'm interfacing with people who have sort of any faith or no faith, and that’s fine. And yet I don't ignore people who work. I mean, your audience is predominantly Christian and I have great respect for that because, I mean, there is – People say, “Are you singing – Are you preaching to the choir?” No, there is no choir. There is no sort of one block of people who all believe the same thing. Everybody needs to walk a step closer to God no matter what step of the journey they’re at, so different people have different callings. Fantastic that you're speaking to Christians and I'm speaking to general market. It’s all part of the same.
[00:28:54] JR: That's exactly right. I want to ask you something, and hopefully this comes across. Hopefully, I can articulate this well for my audience. But, yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how – I would say the majority of the time, when people point to like life-changing moments, career-altering moments, whatever, it almost is always tied to either a person that helped change the trajectory of somebody’s life or a book specifically, right? There’s something about books, I don't know, that we just have this deep connection to. They have this like life-altering power that podcasts don't have, that online courses don't have, that digital communities don't have.
Do you share that perspective? And if so, do you have any ideas as to why we are still so drawn to books?
[00:29:46] MB: A book has a good shelf life, and that's one of the things that has really drawn me to books for a long time. A good book can be around for 5 to 10 years at least and if it's a great book, 50 to 100 years. When I was in the newspaper, I mean, you are writing things today that will line a birdcage tomorrow morning, a very short shelf life on your work there.
[00:30:09] JR: There’s some genius here though. So C.S. Lewis is like notorious of like didn't read the newspaper, right? He hated the newspaper.
[00:30:15] MB: Right.
[00:30:16] JR: He’s like, “No, only read the timeless stuff.” I think there are brilliance there, especially today when information is so cheap and so rapid. It’s like now books have passed through so many filter. They pass through an agent filter, a publisher filter, a bookstore retailer filter. If it’s been published 5 years ago, 10 years ago, it’s still worth printing. You’re almost using the market as an editor of sorts to say, “Hey, this is still important,” right?
[00:30:29] MB: Absolutely. I mean, I do have respect for bloggers and people who are writing, even people on Twitter. I mean, good grief. Twitter is the language of lament and outrage in our culture, and it should be listened to, at least to a certain extent. It has its place in other words. There is a call for immediate and throwaway communication. Yet, a good book is buffeted by the market, and it's going to be buffeted by a lot of different editors before it ever sees the light of day, and then by readers itself. If you're doing second or third editions of a book, yeah, you do have the power to change things, and shape things, and correct mistakes if they’re in the first edition.
[00:31:21] JR: Yeah. So you're a Christian, but I got to imagine some of maybe the majority of people who you’re profiling are not. How do you think your gospel lens, your Christian worldview shapes the telling of those stories, if at all?
[00:31:38] MB: People tell you – So much of my work is interviewing other people and then writing about their stories. People tell you, “Don't ever talk about religion or politics.” I mean, those are the questions I go for. I’m going to dig up whatever I can, and it’s not about digging about dirt. It’s just about going as deep as I can with a person to really find out what makes them tick.
It's funny, when I did book called We Who are Alive and Remain, I don’t know, 10 years ago now and it was where I interviewed 20 of the last surviving Band of Brothers, so they’re elite World War II paratroopers. So these are gentlemen in their late 80s, early 90s. I mean, they are literally at the end of their lives, and I would ask some questions about religion and politics. Interestingly enough, very few of them wanted to talk about politics. I mean, it’s a few years ago before we were in such a polarized environment. But their attitude toward politics was kind of like, “Eh, whatever.” I mean, it was literally like they don’t care.
[00:32:30] JR: Who cares?
[00:32:31] MB: Yeah. Like, “Who cares?” But when I talked about faith, every man to a man wanted to talk about faith, regardless of what his faith was. Out of these 20 men, they were all over the place in terms of atheist, agnostic, faith-based sort of Baptist, Catholic, Presbyterian. You name it. They were all over the place. But I think when you are facing life and death to the extent that they had and to the extent that they were at the end of their lives, every single man wanted to talk about what comes next. To add to that, every person in life has got to answer sort of the three big questions; where do we come from, why are we here, where am I going when I die? Every person, regardless of faith or not, has asked and answered those questions to some degree or another.
[00:33:13] JR: Why are you here?
[00:33:14] MB: Why am I here personally?
[00:33:16] JR: Yeah.
[00:33:18] MB: Why am I here personally? On a vocational level, I hope to communicate the ministry of Jesus Christ with art. I hope to write thoughts of God to the world in places and ways that the world understands. I'm not here necessarily to write about Jesus, although I am here to communicate the ministry of Jesus Christ. Sometimes, that is simply turning the other cheek or learning to have a gracious response. Or sometimes, that is being fired up about an issue that's really lousy and an issue that needs to be overturned. So that's why I'm here.
[00:33:51] JR: I love that distinction, right? That’s a nuanced but a really important distinction. You’re not preaching through your art. You're telling good stories, and you're revealing the ministry of Jesus Christ, and attitudes of graciousness and respect and service and virtue. I really love that.
Speaking of artists, I’ve read something recently. I think it was Lecrae who said that when he's writing a song, he's trying to create characters that are neither heroes or villains entirely right? He’s like, “Basically, we all have sinned, right?” We all share sin nature. We share some qualities of both heroes and villains. You’ve interviewed these like amazing people, these very heroic people. I’m curious if you’ve experienced the same thing that at the end of the day, yeah, they’re heroes but they’re also villains? They also have these demons that they’re battling, and whether or not those themes come through in the stories that you tell?
[00:34:48] MB: That’s a fascinating question, yeah. No person is sort of all right or all wrong, right? This is the tremendous power of teaching empathy, and writing empathetic works, and living an empathetic life, where you are imagining yourself in the shoes of somebody else and trying to go, “Okay. Well, they have reasons for doing what they're doing,” right? I did a book called call A Company of Heroes after We Who are Alive and Remain, and A Company of Heroes was the stories of the deceased men from Easy Company, as remembered by their family members. What made that a fascinating book was there were – It was the good, the bad, and the ugly, all sort of thrown in place where their family members, I really encouraged them to speak warmly and speak honestly and to have that – It was a tribute book, right? We are remembering heroes in warm lights.
At the same time, what was it really like to live with a person who had been to war, and then came back, and experienced what we would call PTSD today? That generation, the World War II generation, their drug of choice was alcohol, and so any number of soldiers came back from the war and just went, “Man, I can't handle life right now. I can't handle working a normal job or interfacing with my family. To find relief, I’m going to turn to my drug of choice.” Then along with the alcohol came anger, and rage, and shutting down, and not talking.
Yeah, we explored some of those stories. What was it like to live with people who had gone through that? Then so many of the men as well sort of had this epiphany later in life where they kind of went, “Well, how is this working for me? I mean, I have tried this avenue of being closed and angry and evasive, and it's just not working well. Now I’m going to try the opposite of that. I'm going to try and reach out to people, and not be closed to trusted friends, and then to tell my story so that others will hopefully understand it in clear ways. I’m going to try, and maybe I'm going to turn to a higher power if that's part of my story.” Many of the men did sort of come out of their dark experiences if they did have those dark experiences, and that was fascinating to record as well.
[00:37:02] JR: What a privilege to be able to record that. I know a lot of artist, a lot of writers, a lot of content creators can tend to like live and die with launches, right? I mean, launches are such a big deal. You’re in launch mode right now, right, promoting Blaze of Light?
[00:37:14] MB: Yeah.
[00:37:15] JR: How do you practically remind yourself that you're worth is not tied to whether or not this book does well, right? That your worth ultimately is in the work of Christ? How do you do that?
[00:37:29] MB: You’re getting a rueful response here just because I – Blaze of Light came out March 26. I mean, it was two weeks after the lockdown and it was just – I described it as – I think my phrase was circumspect fanfare because the whole world – Nobody's happy, right? Yet you’re sort of like, “Hey, come celebrate this book lunch with me,” and it's kind of a dark subject. I mean, a guy who's been through the war and come by this book. What do you do?
Yeah, we’ve just been through this unprecedented time in history, and bookstores were closed. How do you get this message out and how do you not take it personally when nobody's buying your book? Blaze of Light was reviewed just so well. I mean, Publishers Weekly loved it. It got [inaudible 00:38:12] reviews.
[00:38:13] JR: The reviews are off the charts, yeah.
[00:38:14] MB: Okay. You’re going to love this book, okay. It's the next Unbroken. Laura and I, we’re holding hands on this subject matter, and yet nobody’s walking into bookstores because they literally can't, and then everybody's just got like just weightier matters on their mind. Personally, yeah. Can I give you honest answers here? There were ups and downs.
[00:38:36] JR: Yeah. Please, yeah.
[00:38:37] MB: Absolutely. There are moments of despair where I'm going, “Holy cow. This book that I've just bled into and sweated over, it’s selling 12 copies and 11 of them are going to my mother.” I mean, so there is dismay. Okay, so I guess what I want to say there is, dismay is a real emotion, and many of us have walked or are walking through right now seasons of dismay, seasons of disappointment, where things have been canceled and plans have been changed. Maybe it's just your summer vacation that you can't take it now like you had hoped to take it. We’re all walking through some real emotions and it is okay. I think what I've discovered, harder than ever in this last season, is that it is okay to not feel great about something that has disappointed you.
[00:39:26] JR: Well, yeah. Sorry, let me interrupt real quick. I'm just reminded of Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus, right? I mean, obviously disappointed at a much more cosmic scale. But like Jesus was in agony right? He was in – By the way, He knew He was going to raise Lazarus from the dead, but yet he’s still standing there, saying, “You know what? This is broken. Death is wrong, right? I’m going to grieve over this thing before I redeem it.” So, no, I think just mourning over loss if it's the loss of a person or even the loss of a project, a book that you spent years working on, I think it’s really real. I appreciate you being so transparent about that. I’ve experienced that too.
[00:40:05] MB: Yeah. Well, it was highs and lows. We had had such great publicity lined up. I mean, this was a book that people were hungry for in the news cycle. It was coming out on the 50th anniversary of the battle. I mean, there were huge media hooks they call them in this industry, right? Then the lockdown happens and just we can't get in the news cycle. Everything is shutdown.
[00:40:24] JR: Yeah, nobody cares. Nobody cares.
[00:40:25] MB: Yes. Unless you’ve got a story that has to do with COVID, you can't get in the news. SO, yeah, there’s just huge pieces of real, raw emotion there where you were dealing with the loss of a dream. Fortunately, Gary Beikirch, I mean, he and I are close through this, and Gary actually did get on the news eventually a couple times, and so the book did see an uptick in terms of sales. It’s not even so much the sales that bother me. It’s just like, “Well, this is a good message and it’s a great story and you’re going to love this book.” And I want people to have a great experience with the product I’ve created, right? It’s like, “You are going to love this book. It’s helped me help you. You’re going to have a great reading experience.”
[00:41:04] JR: Yeah. But you know what and you know this, you’ve seen this movie a few times. At the need of the day, a great product is your best marketing tool, and great products have legs for years and years and years. Even if the launch isn't as big as you want it to be, right? And you do what all great creators do. The best way to market the current project is to start working on the next project, right? This is going to be thing that lifts all of those other things. No, I love it.
Hay, Marcus, three questions I love to wrap up every conversation with. I’m really curious about your take. I’m going to have a unique spin on this question. We usually ask which books do you recommend or gift most frequently. I want to know specifically for you which biographies that aren't yours that you recommend most frequently to others.
[00:41:54] MB: That’s a great question. Let me answer that question in a couple ways if I can. Let’s start with biographies and then let’s talk about some writing books even because I think that might help readers and people who are interested in the subject. Definitely Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. It's in a class by its own. She writes clearly and powerfully. There's a tremendous author, Adam Makos. He has written Spearhead and Devotion and A Higher Call. I actually worked on two of those books with him. Adam is young and hungry, and he knows veterans. He gets in their lives. He works with his family as a team, and they run the military art studio. I think anything Adam writes is great, and he's an author to watch for the next 20 to 30 to 40 years because he's probably – I think he’s late 30s or early 40s himself.
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. It’s actually like a fiction about the Vietnam War, but he writes lyrically like nobody's business. That book is worth reading just for the sake of anybody who enjoys a great book. Then there's this guy named Marcus Brotherton. He wrote a book called Blaze of Light. Let me mention that one for a pragmatic time.
[00:43:00] JR: One more time. One more time.
[00:43:02] MB: If you’re looking for –
[00:43:02] JR: It’s still available post-pandemic.
[00:43:05] MB: Coming to a bookstore near you.
[00:43:07] JR: You know what’s sold me on putting Blaze – So, I haven’t read Blaze of Light yet but I added it to my personal reading list because of the Unbroken parallel. I thought Unbroken. By the way, I don’t love wartime biographies. I'm not sure why. I can't tell you exactly why, but they just don't typically do it for me. But Unbroken was just unbelievably well told. There’s themes of redemption, and our mutual publicist was like, “Jordan, you got to read this book. It’s got all the same themes.” I’m like, “Okay, I’m in. Easy. I’m sold.”
I’m really curious who you would like to most hear potentially in this podcast but just talk about how their Christian faith influences the work they're doing in the world Monday through Friday.
[00:43:48] MB: Yeah, good. Actually, let me just cycle back to that question about if there are writing books.
[00:43:51] JR: Please, yeah.
[00:43:52] MB: I’ll mention them really quickly. Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder. It's a book that tells you how to construct big pieces of a story techniques.
[00:44:00] JR: Interesting, yeah.
[00:44:01] MB: Yeah. Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain, S-W-A-I-N. It’s an old book but a good one. He tells you actually how to write. Then Elements of Style by Strunk and White, that was a book I probably read six times cover to cover at least, just pouring through that in terms of the nuts and bolts of writing.
[00:44:19] JR: That’s really good. That’s really good.
[00:44:21] MB: Yeah, and that’s just a starting place. Read about 12 to 20 to 50 more books there. Who would I like most in your show is basically the question?
[00:44:31] JR: Yeah.
[00:44:32] MB: You mentioned Gary Sinise. I think he’d be great. He's a Catholic and then his big story is that faith drives service. He’d be fascinating to have on the show. I love –
[00:44:41] JR: If he will come on, I’ll have him tomorrow. I'd love to talk to Gary.
[00:44:45] MB: I'll send him an email. Yeah, he might. He’s a busy guy and he's hard to pin down like every busy guy but he would be great. Then just let me put a plug out. I'd love for you to sit down with Bono, because who wouldn't, right?
[00:44:57] JR: Who wouldn’t? That’d be amazing, yeah. If we can get Bono on, it’s game over for The Call to Mastery. All right, Marcus, last question. One piece of advice to leave this audience. Some of them are writers. Some of them are entrepreneurs. Some of them are marketers. They’re all over the vocational spectrum. What they share is a commitment to mastering their craft for the glory of God and the good of others. What one single piece of advice would you leave them with?
[00:45:22] MB: I mentioned empathy and to learn to see the world through other people's eyes. Particularly, I think when you're creating art or creating a product, you’re giving people benefit. Think through their minds. See through their eyes. Feel through their heart. Make your product something that will help their life. Then with that, bring your A game. God has given each person a gift, right? And then use your gift well to serve one another. Do you have the gift of speaking? Then speak as though God himself is speaking through you. Do you have the gift of helping others? Do it with all the strength, all the energy that God supplies? Bring you’re A game, lean into the Lord, and go big.
[00:45:59] JR: That's a really good way to end this thing. Hey, Marcus, I just want to commend you for the important redemptive work you do in the world, telling just good stories of hope and redemption and for purposely practicing your craft and bringing your A game and serving readers and publishers and your subjects through the ministry excellence. Hey, guys, the book is Blaze of Light. I'm going to be reading it. I would encourage you to do the same. You could find that in all of Marcus's other work at marcusbrotherton.com. Of course, we’ll have that link right here in the show notes. Marcus, thanks again for joining us.
[00:46:33] MB: Thanks, Jordan.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:46:35] JR: I hope you guys love that conversation. And, yes, I'm working on getting Gary Sinise onto the podcast. Hey, if you enjoyed this episode, take 30 seconds if you don't mind. Go write a quick review of the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Thank you guys so much for listening. I’ll see you next week.
[END]