An epic road trip

A Q&A with Ben Goldfarb on following research where it leads

Welcome back from the long weekend. Did you go anywhere fun? Did you happen to drive there? If so (and if not), have I got a book for you! It’s called Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet (W. W. Norton & Co.) by my friend, Ben Goldfarb. And it’s fantastic.

Crossings examines the staggering impact of our car-centric lifestyle on plants, animals, and ecosystems—and what to do about it. Equal parts heartbreaking and humorous, it is a masterclass in turning deep research into prose that feels as smooth as fresh pavement (sorry, couldn’t help it). Crossings comes out September 12, and yes—you can pre-order it now!

This week, I’m thrilled to share a Q&A with Ben in which we discuss wrangling quotes, “freezing” your darlings, and allowing research to guide the structure of your book. There’s so much great advice here—I hope you enjoy!

One challenge of writing about big topics like road ecology is choosing which specific stories to tell in order to make your overarching argument. How did you decide which species or scientists to focus on for each chapter?

I think the answer is two-fold. First, any nonfiction book risks redundancy. Repetition is narrative death; it’s the fastest way to get a reader to tune out. If you have a chapter about how highways are genetically fragmenting populations of mountain lions, you don’t also need one about how they’re fragmenting wolverines. I tried to choose species and scientists whose stories illustrated diverse points within the broad topic of road ecology. Variety is the spice of both life and literature.

Second, I was seeking access. Whenever I reached out to prospective sources, I did so with a simple request: Can I speak to you over the phone for an hour? If that conversation went well, I’d end by asking if they had any exciting fieldwork coming up, and whether I could tag along. To use one example, my book proposal didn’t contain anything about how highways disrupt deer migrations in Wyoming. But when I spoke to Matt Kauffman, director of the Wyoming Migration Initiative, he graciously invited me to accompany his team on some mule deer research in the Red Desert, which turned out to be so fascinating that I devoted an entire chapter to the subject. That flexibility, I think, is vital. My goal isn’t to squeeze my material into preconceived boxes — it’s to let the book’s structure and content bend to fit my reporting. 

Crossings is packed with so many fantastic (and often funny) quotes. In just the first few chapters, you cite everyone from Annie Proulx to Homer Simpson. Did you stumble across these gems in your research or did you actively search out road tidbits?

A bit of both. Some quotes and references came from ambient cultural knowledge. For example, from high school English, I vaguely recalled a scene in The Grapes of Wrath in which a truck driver deliberately hits a turtle and tracked down that passage without much trouble. (The turtle, somewhat implausibly, survives!) Other gems I sought out. I found that Simpsons quote after watching an hour or so of cinematic deer-vehicle collisions on YouTube, which is a fun if gruesome way to spend an afternoon.

Many cultural references came from other people. One wonderful thing about writing a book is that your friends and colleagues become your informal research assistants. I can’t tell you how many people emailed me Mary Oliver poems about roadkill, for instance. Writing appears to be a solitary and personal pursuit, but most nonfiction books are actually communal efforts produced by a vast network of acquaintances and strangers.

I’ve had the same experience with talking to people about grass—it’s wonderful! But it can be hard to keep track of everything. How did you organize quotes so they were at your fingertips when you sat down to write?

Imperfectly! My system involves a combination of thematically organized Google docs and Evernote tabs. One of those Evernotes is titled “Cultural References That Need a Home,” where you can find scattered tidbits from the likes of Wallace Stegner, Billy Collins, and Rachel Cusk. Every couple of months during the writing process, I would scroll through that growing compendium of quotes to see if any pertained to passages I’d recently written and plug in those that did.

I have another Evernote with the extraordinarily vague title of “Assorted Nuggets,” which tells you something about how arbitrary and ad hoc my notes tend to be.

Kirkus called the book “an astonishingly deep pool of wonders” and I have to agree. Every few pages there is something new and fascinating dropped in alongside the main narrative. But I’m curious: as you ran across tantalizing anecdotes, how did you decide whether—or how far—to go down the research rabbit hole, and how much space to give each in the final text?

Well, thanks! To me, the opportunity to follow rabbit holes wherever they may lead is the beauty of writing books versus magazine stories, in which your word count is limited. I’ve always found curiosity to be an appealing literary trait — it’s probably the quality I admire most in David Quammen, my favorite science writer, who can digress for many pages at a time without losing his readers. His books feel like human conversations in all their nonlinear, sprawling glory. Research rabbit holes (the secret history of DEER X-ING signs, or the hodgepodge of state laws that govern roadkill consumption, or what have you) present opportunities to take readers on brief and pleasurable journeys to unexpected places. I’ve always tried to abide by this famous dictum: Anything you’d tell your friends at the bar belongs in your book.

Of course, you can sometimes follow tangents too far, and clot your own narrative — which is where your editor comes in. One of my drafts contained a footnote, wedged awkwardly into a section on grizzly bears, about a male koala who had claimed a wildlife overpass as his territory and bellowed at interlopers. I thought it was fun, but my editor, Matt Weiland, cut it, and wrote in the margins: “Keep it moving, koala-lover.” Or maybe it was “koala boy.” Either way, it pains me to admit that he was right — the territorial koala was one narrative speed bump too many.

This is your second book. What did you learn from researching Eager and did it influence your approach to Crossings?

Honestly, I wish I’d learned more. Eager was a remarkably straightforward book, in that the final product stuck closely to the proposal. I faithfully followed my own script. Crossings, by contrast, deviated wildly from my proposal in structure and content as I learned more and its scope grew. Maybe that’s the difference between writing a book about a single rodent and writing one about, like, the entire ecological history of human transportation.

To my regret, I initially resisted that expansion. I wasted a lot of time massaging transitions between sections and chapters, with the expectation that the book’s structure was relatively set in stone. But as Crossings expanded and evolved, Matt and I rearranged its components several times, and my precious transitions became obsolete. I guess the lesson is to get everything on the page first, and worry about how your pieces fit together once you have them all in hand.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give other writers about researching a book like this?

This might be writing advice rather than research advice, but: discard nothing. I ultimately cut 35,000 words from this book between the first draft and the final version, and every single one of them survives in a Google folder called “Detritus.” Saving everything is crucial for two reasons. First, you never know when you’ll want to repurpose some lines you deleted from chapter two in a new context in, say, chapter six. And second, when it comes time to promote your completed book, you’re going to be writing standalone essays, articles, blog posts, and so on, ideally drawing upon material you left on the cutting room floor. Right now I’m in the process of adapting a few thousand words of deleted scene as a magazine feature, and getting paid for material that I’d written, cut, and saved.

If I had to adapt this idea into a pithy aphorism, it would be: Don’t kill your darlings. Just freeze them in carbonite.

Ha! Great advice. Thanks again, Ben!

Just as a reminder, Crossings is available to pre-order before it comes out next week!