Brad Listi Returns
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Brad Listi is the author of the novel Be Brief and Tell Them Everything (Ig Publishing / May 2022). His other books include the novel Attention. Deficit. Disorder., an LA Times bestseller, and Board, a work of nonfiction collage, co-authored with Justin Benton. In 2011 he launched the Otherppl podcast, one of the longest-running literary interview podcasts in the world. It features in-depth interviews with today's leading authors. He is also the founder of DeepDive, a digital learning platform that creates in-depth audio courses. DeepDive's debut course is called How to Write a Novel. It features more than 50 hours of insight and instruction from nearly four dozen leading contemporary authors. He lives in Los Angeles.Brad, welcome back. You're the third return guest to Gemini Sessions. On a scale of 1 to 10, how honored are you?
Solid 7.
You're an alumni of an MFA program, which seems to be as mothballed as my engineering degree. What does DeepDive offer that may be missing from the MFA space?
It’s a tiny fraction of the cost, for one thing. MFAs cost tens of thousands of dollars. How to Write a Novel is $397. DeepDive delivers 50+ hours of never-before-heard insight, inspiration, and instruction from nearly four dozen of today’s most celebrated contemporary authors—writers like Emily St. John Mandel, Stephen Graham Jones, Melissa Broder, Steve Almond, Juliet Escoria, Kevin Maloney, Betsy Lerner, Kimberly King Parsons, Porochista Khakpour, Deb Olin Unferth, Madelaine Lucas, Jonathan Evison, Elle Nash, Tiffany Clarke Harrison, Antoine Wilson, and many more. You can stream it online or, better yet, via the DeepDive app. So it’s more convenient than an MFA. You can take a DeepDive course while you’re walking the dog.
Are the courses made from specific content or recordings from the podcast? Give me the rundown of how it's put together.
It’s all original content. Never-before-heard. There are some clips from Otherppl episodes woven into the course as flourishes, but the material in How to Write a Novel is brand new. It was a pretty monumental undertaking, putting it all together.
For your market research, did you check out any of the Masterclasses by James Patterson, Margaret Atwood, etc? What are your thoughts on those?
They have their merits. Some of that stuff is great. You can learn a lot. But me personally, I don’t like to sit in front of a screen and take a course on writing. And frankly I don’t have the time. Also: writing fiction is an almost-entirely internal process. There’s really no vital need to have a visual on the teacher.
I created DeepDive with the initial intent of building out the writing vertical, because that’s my wheelhouse. And I intend to create audio courses—as this, too, is my wheelhouse vis-a-vis the Otherppl podcast. And audio is also something I really love. I love to listen to great radio or podcast conversations. I love the intimacy of it, the depth charge that it delivers. And I also like that I can listen while I’m in my car or on a plane or grocery shopping or whatever. Essentially I’ve created the course that I would like to have.
That's an interesting approach to engage at a strictly audio level. But I remember putting tape recorders in a lecture hall and listening to them later and taking it in way more than I did sitting in my classes. So one section is 50+ hours. How did you go about shaping the courses? Because technically, you could just keep adding from more and more sources and cram more and more.
I love audio. I’d much rather listen—that’s just me. Plus, this is a writing course. There’s no compelling need for video. Later, as DeepDive grows and expands into other verticals—the visual arts, for example—there could well be courses that do include video as a matter of necessity.
And yes, How to Write a Novel is a big course. This is part of the strategy at the outset, to begin with the ultra-long-form. I like to say that the course is commensurate with the size of the task at hand. Writing a novel is difficult. It’s complex. It’s a big undertaking. So it seems logical that a course on writing a novel would reflect these basic truths.
I also want to deliver real value. Anyone who takes this course, I want them walking away feeling great about it. I want them to feel like they got an extraordinary deal. Why? Because that’s how I’d want to feel if I were them.
Regarding the length of the course and how I shaped it: The course teaches you how to write a novel, obviously. But it also teaches you how to be a novelist, which I think is equally important. There are nearly four-dozen first-rate authors featured in the course. Each of them shares insights into their creative lives and their approaches to the work. It’s an incredibly rich resource, and it allows students to learn from the best, to hear a variety of perspectives, and to build their own unique approach as a result.
Are you compensating contributors to the audio courses, or did they offer it up as a gesture of goodwill? Sorry if that's prying, but the mechanics of this thing are interesting to me.
The teachers in How to Write a Novel were incredibly generous with their time and agreed to help me make this course, gratis, so that I can get DeepDive off the ground. I’m very grateful to them.
Going forward, I’m going to be partnering with writers/instructors on new courses on a rev share model. I want to help writers and teachers make a better living. That’s a core part of my vision for DeepDive, and it’s something that I’m excited about.
As you get older, do you have any nostalgia about when you first started writing? Do you miss the naivete you had about how writing worked or how you used to get lost in it?
I have some affection for my younger artist self — so earnest. But I wasn’t very good at writing back then, and I was also incredibly naive when it came to the business realities of publishing. I can’t say I’m pining to go backward.
I've recently started taking the business side of writing seriously. Literary agents, proper promotion, and whatnot. I find it all soul-crushing, to be honest. Are you concerned about that at all when you start a venture like this? And if so, what do you do to protect that part of yourself when you mix business and art?
I have a family to support. I have to work hard and do well and support them. That’s my reality and my primary responsibility. I don’t spend time worrying about whether my business pursuits are somehow sullying my artistic pursuits. I frankly don’t have the luxury of worrying about that. I’ve got to survive and take care of my kids. That’s just where I'm at.
That said, I’ve been mindful in the decision-making process when it comes to what kind of business I’m creating. It’s important to me that I do some good in the world and try to help people. This is a core value for me, and it informed my decision to create DeepDive. I know that in the grand scheme of things, it’s a benign enterprise. DeepDive is helping people learn and make their books and cultivate their inner lives, and it does so at a more-than-fair price. Were it otherwise, then I think I would have real concern about "losing my spirit.” But I have no interest in losing my spirit. It doesn’t sound like fun.