Craft Advice with Anna Malaika Tubbs
On a day in the life of a writer, organizing extensive research, braiding narratives, vulnerability, and how to know what you're supposed to be writing about.
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
Anna Malaika Tubb’s writing is crisp, muscular, efficient, and somehow also beautifully lyrical. She takes complex, multi-layered topics and makes them accessible and, more than that, transportive. By which I mean, the subject matter is difficult, at times even brutal, but the storytelling itself is exquisite; with Anna as our guide we enter long ago worlds, such as the time of Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea, and also contemporary ones, such as the rise of Trump. Yet no matter the moment, the experience is vivid, visceral, and alive.
Anna’s work is also meticulously researched. The Bibliography for Erased is twenty-one pages—and the print is small! For The Three Mothers, it’s twenty-two pages—once again, small print!
Both books are New York Times Bestsellers, and with good cause: They will change you at your core. They will break down the way you see the world. And then they will light you up with hope.
It was such a delight to speak with Anna about how she pulled this off.
If you missed Part One of our conversation, you can read it here.
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Where do you write?
I write here, actually. This is my office space, but it's also our guest area. So when guests are here, I have to tell them that during the day I still have to work here because I have to work in my normal office space. It has my desk, and my stuff around me. I can't do cafes. I can't co-work. I need to be in my curated space. Also my desk, because I'm six feet tall, is where I need it to be. If I'm at any other space, I have to do this [Anna hunches over], and I can't actually produce the work that I want to produce.
Do you need quiet?
Yes, I absolutely need quiet. I can't even have music playing. Also because I'm talking to myself a lot.
Oh, interesting!
Different ideas come up, or I'm thinking, “Oh, that's interesting.” It's not like a full conversation. But I'm definitely saying something while I'm working and doing my own thing. So noise is really hard for me. I get distracted really easily.
Are you in a separate building, or is this part of your home?
In California we have these ADUs, Additional Dwelling Units. A lot of people converted their garages into office spaces or guest spaces. It's separate from the house. The kids know that this is Mom's office. They get really excited when they get to come in, because it's very rare. Then my husband's office is right below me.
That's so cool. How many hours a day do you write?
That's a great question. I feel like so much of writing as a career is not actually writing. There's wonderful phone calls and interviews. I just got off a call with my talent team because I'm starting to get into screenwriting and getting shows out there hopefully. Then my next call is with an agent. There's so many different elements which is why I have to protect my time. It's really easy to say yes to everything and then by the end of the week, I didn't get to write anything new. But really I probably only get to actually sit and write four hours a week. It's not a lot of time.
Wow.
And I have three babies. I think once they’re at the age that they’re all in school from 9 to 3, I’ll start to be able to turn things out a lot faster. It's funny because, a lot of people say, “How did you get two books out and three children and all the other things that I do: I consult, and I do speaking?” If people thought I was productive then, just wait till my kids are in school from 9 to 3!
So you do block out time every day, even though you're not necessarily writing.
Yes. It's working time, which consists of a lot of things. This is actually hard for me, because every week I say to myself I need to protect my time, and I just have a hard time with it, because it's not only the things that I work on, it's the time that I get with my own brain which includes call Doctor so-and-so, because my eldest has an ear infection and things like that.
I once heard Norman Mailer speak, and someone asked him how many hours a day he writes, and he's said, “Eight hours. Part of that I'm paying bills, returning phone calls…,“ and he went down the list.
Exactly.
Do you write on a computer or in a notebook?
Computer. That was a transition for me, because I used to always prefer hand notes. I started writing my honors thesis by hand. I realized, once you get to that scale of something that's beyond ten pages, it’s just inefficient. I've always been aware that I have so much to put out in the world. I already have so many ideas for the next things that I want to do. If I'm going to get close to getting those out in my lifetime, I have to take out a step and go straight to typing it.
Both your books must have required massive research. Did you do most of it online? Libraries? Did you have anyone assisting you?
Yes, I love research, and both of these books required an intense amount of research. That's why so many of the pages are just the index and all the sources that I'm citing. I do most of it online. With The Three Mothers, I traveled to a lot of different places, to get the experience of where each woman lived or to interview some of the people in person, and to go through more archival data: letters that you can actually touch, and newspaper articles, et cetera.
For Erased, it was much more online. Searching as many articles as possible and putting it all in the context of what was happening in the time of all of the different examples that I'm speaking to.
For The Three Mothers, I didn't have any assistant. For Erased, everyone told me I should try working with an assistant, so I had someone with me for about a month when I first started thinking through the topics that I wanted to cover in the book. It didn't work that well for me. I have a hard time sharing my brain with another person, so it felt like more work to explain the questions that I had, rather than just diving into the questions myself and seeing where each question led me. I don't see myself working with assistants moving forward, but you never know, maybe in some other capacity.
How did you organize all this research, and where do you store it all?
I basically keep a folder on my desktop of articles, and I get a PDF of them and I put them in that folder. It's pretty old school, considering we have other ways of organizing research now, but it feels to me like the way that I can have everything almost ready as a book. I like to go back to that folder and see those resources again.
As I'm writing, I’m not citing as I go; I'm just trying to get the story together. Often, I will go back through the draft and find that original source that I used. It also forces me to find several other sources that might confirm the same detail. If I can't find others, then I sometimes question if I will still be using whatever fact I've pulled originally, because I think it's really important to see if various different sources confirm it, or if there is some controversy. As a research tool, it’s great to be able to go back and say, “Here's the person that I was quoting to begin with, and here are several other people who agree with that take.”
What are your most trusted sources for news?
That’s a great question. This is tricky, because I'm very aware that every storyteller, including journalists, including networks, are not unbiased. So it really depends on the topic that I'm interested in, which news source I would say is more reliable. I tend to lean on Google Scholar and the articles that have gone through reviews and that are at the highest academic standards more than rapid news stories as my primary sources. On a day-to-day basis, when I'm seeking news, it's CNN, New York Times, The Guardian, and combining all of those.
The reason for that is that my parents would sit together and watch the news every single day, and they would watch several different channels. That was a way of showing us that you need all these different sources of information, and you can never trust one source.
So true! You beautifully summarize what you've covered in previous chapters through the lens of that chapter's focus, and you set up the next chapter. How did you come up with this structure? Both your parents are lawyers. Did they influence this? In the wrong hands, this could be so clunky, but you handle it so elegantly.
Thank you so much. It was important to me that the book didn't feel confusing at any point. I'm introducing so many different stories and people and timelines and places, I felt like if I didn't do this summary, if I didn't walk people through it as if I was teaching a class and reminded them, “Okay, so we've talked about this thus far. Here's what we've added. And here's where we're going,” that it could have felt very disjointed. I wanted people to feel like I was holding their hand through the book.
It's already a topic that brings up a lot of feelings and reactions, and could be easy for people to try to critique and attack, and I didn't want one of those potential critiques to be that it was unorganized or that it didn't make sense. I would rather have heard that, “Maybe at times she told us too many times the summary,” than people say “I was confused.”
Being raised by two lawyers means you always back up your claims with evidence, and you show that you're ready to debate or engage in conversation about the thing that you're bringing to the table. You're keeping track of where you've been and where you're going in your argument. It’s a way of showing your preparedness and showing your process so people can feel like they're closer to being in your brain.
You interweave stories from your own life with the research narrative. Why did you decide to include yourself?
When I sat down to write this book, I felt overwhelmed initially, because I realized I could talk about anything and American patriarchy would be relevant to that. It shows up in everything that we do and in everything that we are. It felt like the way I could at least get started was to explain how I came to understand American patriarchy by taking readers through the trajectory of my own life. And, of course, stemming from The Three Mothers, I believe our stories start with our mothers, so I wanted to start with my mom's story.
I did a larger outline, but I didn't know exactly where I was going until I wrote one of the stories. Then I would ask a question about that story, and that would lead me to the next story. Starting with my mom, and then thinking of the fact that she was from Clarkston, and saying, “Oh, Clarkston got its name because of the Lewis and Clark expedition.” Then I thought, “Maybe I should talk about that in the second chapter, and think about Sacajawea.” And then by the end of that, I'm thinking, “Okay, the president who sent them on the Lewis and Clark expedition was Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Jefferson is on Mount Rushmore. So that would be an interesting thing to research.”
That's how the whole book ended up coming to be and how I chose the stories that were included. It all started by saying, “How did I, Anna, become an expert in American patriarchy? How did I study it personally as well as professionally?”
How did you know which stories from your life to include, and how did you know what parts to share and what needed to be kept with you?
The only time I hesitate to share stories from my own life is when they include my loved ones, which sounds silly, because for the most part all of our stories include our loved ones. But because I’m always aware that these are also their stories, and they'll have their interpretations of these moments, I’m very conscious of if they would want the whole world to know them.
Otherwise, I don't necessarily keep much out of the book. I do try to be a writer who is vulnerable, so that my readers can also allow themselves to be vulnerable. I'm asking readers to do such personal work as they're going on this journey with me that I am willing to do that as well.
I'm trying to think if there were examples of things I kept out. Maybe there're some stories that I could have told about moments where patriarchy shows up in our marriage, and we've grown from those moments. It didn't feel like I needed to place those in there and dissect them; they weren't adding anything that I wasn't already saying.
Did you ever feel vulnerable?
Yes, I feel vulnerable every time I write something, anytime I put anything out there, even captions on social media. My very first blog that I ever wrote that started my writing career, I felt very vulnerable. My first article that the Huffington Post asked for from me, I felt extremely vulnerable. And every time a book is about to go out, I feel very vulnerable.
Every day, at any given moment, dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of people are sitting with my book; they're engaging with my words, and there's nothing I can do beyond allowing it to have its own life—and that is a vulnerable experience. You can't change anything at that point.
But I also find it to be really liberating. To say, “This is what I know based off life experience. This is my expertise based off what I've studied. And I feel prepared to put these words out into the world for people to do what they will with them.”
It sounds like in the writing of your books one thing led to another. Were there any surprises?
None of the stories themselves, even if they're really horrible, surprised me, because this is what I expect from American patriarchy: there's a lot of pain and there're a lot of sad examples that could be perceived as shocking to people who don't understand American patriarchy.
I am often surprised when I find something in my research that we don't know on a national level, like Sacagawea not being given her due in terms of really knowing her story. But those are also examples of how American patriarchy operates and stories that we should have heard we didn't hear.
So there are moments where I think, “Everybody should know this, and that's terrible that they don't.” And then, of course, I remind myself, “Well, that's exactly why I'm writing this book to begin with.”
You have a logical step by step structure to your book. Each section builds on the last. How easy is it for you to adhere to this structure?
I am a very organized person, generally, in all my life and in all the things that I do. So when I have an idea for a book, even before I pitch it, I'm thinking of the potential structure and that structure is the thing that allows me to think, “I can do this.” I see a beginning, and I see a middle, and I see an end. I see where this can go. I see all the potential sections. I have enough to make this a cohesive story.
So structure is easy for me to adhere to if I am the one who's decided on that structure. I think I would have a harder time if someone told me this is the structure and you have to stick to it, if I didn't have any input on that structure.
So many Beyond readers are writers. Do you have a prompt that really works for you?
All of my writing stems from this thought, which is: What are the things that feel really obvious to me that are not obvious to other people? The things that I believe should have already been written about but when I look them up it hasn't been done. That's where I feel the most inspiration and the most call to do something to fix that.
I find that most exciting when writing versus writing about something that everybody has written about. Which is funny, because in a way, I think some people could say that patriarchy has been well studied, but in my opinion, the way I see it was so obvious to me, and I wasn't seeing that analysis anywhere else.
So that's a prompt. What is something that is obvious to you that is not obvious to everyone else, and maybe it's so obvious to you because you're supposed to make it obvious to everybody else. So what would you write about if that was what you were asked to reflect on?
If you enjoyed this Craft Advice with Anna, you might also enjoy this one with
Weiner:
Thank you for being here! ❤️ You know how much I love your comments. I read them all.
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Jane, I love and read each of your posts and interviews with great enthusiasm. This interview with Anna Malaika Tubbs is outstanding! I have not read any of her writing....yet....but I definitely will now. I think her books are especially timely given the current political situation in the U.S. which is affecting the politics, ethics, and economies of the world. It sounds as though both books will be a history lesson that we can learn from. I like her methodical approach to writing and especially her answer to your question about, "what prompt really works for her?" Her answer is so obvious, but I have never thought of it in the way she expressed it....until she explained her process! Brilliant! Love, love love these interviews and you for posting them for us. Thank you so much!!
I love these reflections on craft! Especially “All of my writing stems from this thought, which is: What are the things that feel really obvious to me that are not obvious to other people?” - that’s a great way to think about what to write next!