Q+A: Writing a Magical Non-Fiction Book with Ian Frisch

Author Ian Frisch talks about becoming a character in his nonfiction debut.

Interview by Study Hall co-founder Kyle Chayka

Ian Frisch is a feature writer for publications like Bloomberg and Playboy and the author of the newly published non-fiction book Magic Is Dead, from Dey Street, not to mention a strong member of the Study Hall community. We talked to him about the process of writing a non-fiction book (from agent to proposal to edits) and how an author becomes a character.

Magic Is Dead is about a secretive society of young magicians, a changing artform, and Ian’s relationship with his family and his past — his father passed away when he was 14 and poker became the backbone of his relationship with his mother.

SH: How did you initially hit upon the idea for the book, like what were the earliest inklings of covering magic as a story? 

IF: It was the summer of 2015, and I had just started freelancing full-time. I was really struggling to make a living, and I was doing my best to dig deep for ideas that would surprise editors and land me more lucrative assignments. At this time, actually, I was crashing (ok—squatting) up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in an empty office next to my friend Nick’s film and production studio. I had no money, so I spent a lot of time searching for ideas. One day, I watched Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay, and I was enthralled by the life of this magician. But I asked myself: Well, what’s going on with magic nowadays, with the younger crowd?

It seemed to be coming back, albeit slowly, into the mainstream, so I started poking around on social media. I found Chris Ramsay on Instagram, who kind of demolished all the stereotypes I had associated with magic, and that’s what sparked the idea. We kept in touch over the phone for the next six months, and then he took me to a magic convention. After that, I was hooked—and I thought I maybe had a book on my hands. (He became one of the main characters in the book, too.)

SH: How do you handle the transition from magazine story idea to a larger project? What are the actual logistics? (Did the magazine story ever actually come out?) 

IF: I had originally wanted to write a magazine story about the new-age underground world of magic, but I couldn’t land it anywhere. WIRED commissioned a draft, but ended up killing it, and no one else wanted it. I realized, after a few failed attempts to sell it in the spring of 2016, that the story was just too big for a feature. And, too, that I, now fully immersed in this subculture, was becoming the story. So I thought, well shit, if I am going to do a book, I may as well figure out how it’s done.

I read a few first-person participatory journalism books, including Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein and Alex Mar’s Witches of America, and made notes on their structure and why they were so good. I knew that I would have to bounce between my personal journey, my other characters, the history of magic, and what’s going on now, so I started mapping out a book proposal based on my assumptions of what I thought my book could become.

SH: You found your agent in a pretty specific way, tracking down big nonfiction deals. Do you think that was useful for you, and how did your agent help you shape this story into that kind of format? 

IF: I wrote a rough book proposal in late-summer 2016. Once I had that, I went on Publisher’s Marketplace and searched for the best agents in the narrative nonfiction space. I took the top 25 agents—those who not only had the most deals, but the most deals for the most money—and cold-pitched them a super short and cryptic query (very on-brand for magic, obviously), saying I’d send them my proposal if they’d like. I heard back from about 15 of them, most of which were rejections. (Many said: I can’t sell a book that doesn’t yet have an ending.) I took six meetings, and chose Larry Weissman, who specializes in narrative nonfiction and only represents journalists.

We spent the next nine months working on my proposal. You have to understand that the story was changing weekly. New things would happen, and I would have to adjust the proposal. It was actually quite frustrating. But, in June 2017, we got to a point where it was strong enough to send out (I had lived, and reported, about 3/4 of the book by then), so he took it to market. Carrie Thornton, VP at Dey Street Books, had been teased by Larry about the project during the preceding few months, and she loved the proposal. We took a meeting, they made a preempt a few days later, and I signed the deal. Honestly, the proposal process was the hardest part of this whole ordeal.

SH: Were there any big differences for you between the book proposal and the final product?

IF: The main difference was the inclusion of all those chapters about my mother and father. The top-level narrative about my adventure with these magicians, and my progress as a magician myself, stayed pretty much the same, but we streamlined that stuff to make room for the more memoir-esque stuff that builds out the emotional through-line with my character.

SH: How did you develop the structure of the book? There’s a chronological narrative to your deepening relationships with the characters, but there also needs to be forward momentum. I liked the part where you were developing your own original trick. 

You’re exactly right: There has to be some sort of climax that you’re building towards. I can’t just write a travelogue where I tag along and that’s it. There’s no payoff for the reader with a story like that. There’s really two narratives going on here: Me striving to invent this magic trick, and have it be filmed and then sold to other magicians through an online retail outlet (that’s the logistical climax of the book), but there’s also the emotional momentum we see with my character, where I’m trying to come to terms with my father’s death, and trying to understand my place in the world. And this layer also reflects what all the other characters are going through simultaneously. They are using magic to understand their own identity.

My book, at its core, is a coming of age story, not a jaunt through magic’s new-age underground; magic is just a vessel for me to tell this larger story.

SH: How did it feel to become part of the story, did you plan that as much at first? You start out as a reporter but by the end you’re fully in the magic world, not really in a reporter role at all. 

I really wanted to have that immersionist feel, but as I wrote the book, I became more aware of how crucial my own experience was to the story itself. I hate writing about myself. I’ve never written a personal essay in my life. It’s really just not my style. But I realized that the reader is really here for me, that they want to understand me more deeply than anyone else in this book. I understood—a bit later than is probably wise, to be honest—that I’m writing a memoir. So, once I came to terms with that, I really put myself out there on the line, and made it truly about me and my life.

SH: You make yourself vulnerable in a way that journalistic nonfiction books often don’t, writing about your father’s death and your relationship with your mother. Was that there from the beginning? And what pushed you to be more memoiristic as well? They’re some of the most powerful parts of the book. 

I submitted 90,000 words to my editor in April 2018, and she brought me into her office a month later. I already knew what she was going to say. There wasn’t enough of me in the book. But, truth be told, I was scared, and in denial, about what this book was really about. I didn’t want it to be a memoir, because I didn’t want to be so crushingly vulnerable. That really freaked me out, you know? I didn’t want to put all that trauma and the complexities of my life and my family out there for the world.

It’s funny, though: I had 20,000 words about my father and my mother stashed away, in a vault, knowing the day would come when I would have to let it out. I had worked on that text pretty rigorously with Adam Ross at The Sewanee Review. He really pushed me to write about my father. So I called Adam, and told him I had to use it for the book. Then I sent it to my editor, and she began restructuring the book to thread all that stuff in there. And, shit, I didn’t even have the ending to the book yet. So we were restructuring the book, cutting whole chapters, adding chapters, and I was still waiting to go to England to grab the final 5,000 words. It was a wild few months. But we finished the book just before deadline, in late August 2018, and it all worked out.

SH: *Extremely Disney voice* The true magic was storytelling all along. How is the journalist’s art like magic? Or how is magic like a magazine article? 

Magic is nothing more than translating a memorable experience to another human being. And isn’t that the purpose of literature, or storytelling? I mean, the best magic transports you into a space where anything is possible, where the world is something that embodies hope, where deception has a happy ending. Magicians using magic tricks to make sense of the world—and to better understand themselves. And that’s why we write, I think. So it’s all the same game. We’re all here together, striving for a more complete sense of self.

SH: How did you handle the extreme mass of reporting and information you must have had? How did you pick which moments made it into the book?

IF: Yeah, I had a lot of raw material. I would sometimes leave my recorder on for hours, hoping to gather good conversations. I think I had ~250,000 words of field notes and transcribed audio, plus dozens of books that I read. I really wanted to write a clean, fast book, so I spent a lot of time thinking about what was a good scene, and what was a throw-away. My agent, Larry, always told me that every scene in the book has to feed into the overall narrative, or the larger point of the book. It took a while to train myself to think this way, and a lot of stuff got cut at the end, but the most impactful scenes really stuck with me, so I focused on those more than anything else. I wanted my experiences to really come alive on the page.

SH: What’s your advice as far as how to pick a nonfiction book topic or know if a topic is worthy of a book?

IF: This is a tough question, but I think the most important aspect of a nonfiction book is its larger appeal to a general audience. If any person can pick up your book and grab onto something that interests them, you’ve accomplished your goal.

I personally think that a book cannot exist without compelling characters, so that’s the most crucial aspect of a solid book idea, but the larger themes also have to be compelling. A lot of times, a book will tell a story, but that’s not what it’s really about. You need that top-level, narrative-based layer to get people invested in the story, but you want them walking away from the book thinking about the emotional side of things. Like any compelling magic trick, a good book should surprise you—and leave you wanting more.

SH: You describe yourself as a character in your own book. I think this happens in all nonfiction books; the author, if they’re present as the narrator, becomes a protagonist and a filter for all the information. What are the challenges of making yourself a character (not just an omniscient, unbiased voice from nowhere) and how do you build that character, as distinct from your journalistic identity?

IF: That was one of the larger struggles of this project. I’ve spent my career becoming quite good at writing other people’s stories—being that lens through which information and its presentation can be filtered and refined—but that becomes much more difficult when you are both subject and filter. I think it boiled down to: How did what I experienced make me feel? The journalist side of my brain wanted to run from that. Feelings over facts? What the hell? But when you yourself are supposed to be a dynamic protagonist, propelled to change through experience, the reader wants to know how these events are making you feel from the inside-out.

I needed to not only tell a clear and complete and honest story about what happened to me, but also about how those things changed the way I view myself and the world around me. It required me to be very introspective, like some sort of therapy session where I had to chronicle the details of my life and the changes I underwent in real-time, and in a way that felt not only honest to my experience but compelling in its translation to a reader. Does that make sense? Probably not, because it’s a difficult process, and one I am not sure I fully accomplished. But I guess I’ll leave that up to readers.

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