Blocked Momentum: A Conversation with The New Yorker Staff Writer D.T. Max
D. T. Max. Photo Credit: Flash Rosenberg
By Eleana Kostakis
It was November and I hadn’t been able to write a single thing for five months. As someone who had written for years, the thought of a blank page was starting to make me cringe, so when I was given the chance to talk to D.T. Max, a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of Finale: Late Conversations with Stephen Sondheim (Harper Collins, 2022), I knew I had to ask about writer’s block.
On a very windy and cold afternoon, I met with Max to discuss his work as a writer and journalist. His career began with editing for The Harvard Advocate, the college’s literary magazine, while he was attending Harvard in the mid-'90s. He occasionally felt stagnant, falling into periods when it was difficult to read and write. However, joining the staff of the magazine helped him to get to know the inner workings of the magazine world.
After college, Max sometimes felt anxious while writing and would find himself blocked for a very long time. He intended to find a job that would feed his work as a writer, and joining a book publishing company as an editor helped him get over that mental block as he learned new editing and writing skills. After working for the publishing company, he moved on to reporting. He was able to use his experience to snag a job at The New York Observer, where his beat was publishing. Beat reporting, which is a type of reporting that focuses on one sector, helped Max acquire editing skills that improved his writing. When I asked Max about editing others’ work, he said that it’s “very good practice as a journalist because it's very hard. So it's kind of like extreme skiing and it helps you build skills that, in one way or another, come in handy for your entire career.”
Although Max had been a writer for years, freelancing for The New York Times Magazine where he contributed profiles, features, and personal essays, he didn’t find himself at The New Yorker until 2006 when he wrote his first article for the publication. For the next six years, he wrote for many different sections at The New Yorker. If an editor had a piece – whether it was covering art, books, or people – and it had a particular regional or thematic significance it would go to a “slug.” These “slugs” show up in the magazine as “A Letter from…” or under the heading of “The Annals of…” and they get linked together with other pieces from the same section in the magazine’s digital archive, which can give readers a robust sense of a place or issue. Though Max didn’t always choose what he covered for “slugs” in these years, he was building a more long-form writing practice than in his beat journalism days. In 2012, he was brought on as a Staff Writer.
As a Staff Writer for The New Yorker, Max’s daily writing life is regimented and he goes through phases of researching, reporting, writing, and editing on a number of pieces simultaneously. He doesn’t actually go into the office as much as one may think. He currently resides in New Jersey and usually writes from his home. Therefore, he has to figure out where and when to interview his subjects. After that, he focuses on gathering as much research on his subjects as he possibly can, by visiting and interviewing them. Depending on where a subject is, Max will communicate in person or through Whatsapp, particularly if the subject is overseas. According to Max, the amount of time it takes to move from interviewing to writing differs story to story, because he wants to gain as much information on his subjects as he possibly can. Sometimes he is in a hotel room meeting with a subject and other times he is sitting in front of a laptop watching and listening to his subject. Putting his hand to his chin and thinking, Max stated, “My stories can take very different amounts of time to report. You know, I have some stories I’ve been reporting on for two or three years.” Max enjoys being able to take this time to compose his articles.
Some of his articles, such as his interviews with the famous composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, took just a couple of weeks to complete, but were useful in more ways than one. He was able to write and publish a book about Sondheim that is entirely made up of their interviews. Those interviews originally were for a profile piece. Though we might assume that a journalist only interviews a subject one time, that is not always the case. With Sondheim, Max had interviewed him many times and he insists that it’s important to meet with someone and get to know them for a profile. Even though the interviews took place over a couple weeks, the information gathering phase took longer. Max is very careful with his information gathering phase and asserts that you must do a great deal of research on your subject.
When crafting an article Max finds himself in between the type of writer who can compose an article in the back of a taxi cab and the type who toils over every clause. He mainly focuses on getting to know his subject before creating a story that tells the readers who his subject is and why they should care. Describing the process, he said, “I must have in my head by now a certain architecture of how a piece could be written, and that doesn't mean that I don't get surprised. I mean, I get tons of surprises.” But having enough information on the subject allows this architectural element of an article to stand out.
Even with this strong sense of compositional architecture, Max articulated that some articles can “take a wrong turn,” which “really slows you down” as a writer, but he reminded me that it’s important to make sure the writer and the reader do not get lost in an article. Readers crave some type of force in the article, so a great way to keep the reader on track is to have momentum in your writing.
This momentum is something that can propel us as writers as well. Writing is part of Max’s identity. Every article has fueled his love of writing and, according to Max, once you start writing, you never want to stop. Max could be basking in the hot sun in Bali, and he would still find himself writing. “Once you are a writer you want to stay a writer. Keeping a journal is still writing. Even if I went to Bali, I would still be a writer,” Max said with a massive smile on his face.