Adam Moss: The Story of "The Work of Art"

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of Storytelling. This is the FoST podcast. Welcome.

Today I’m honored to speak with someone whose work I’ve admired for many years: Adam Moss, one of the most distinguished magazine editors of our time. As a native New Yorker, I’ve been a faithful reader of many of the publications he’s edited: from Seven Days, which he founded in 1988, and which went on to win not just a cult following, but a national magazine award for general excellence; to the New York Times Magazine where he expanded the publication’s commitment to thoughtful, long form journalism for which he was named Editor of the Year in 2001 by Ad Age; to New York magazine, where he was editor-in-chief from 2004 to 2019. Under Adam’s guidance, New York magazine won 41 National Magazine awards, including Magazine of the Year. In 2013, Adam also developed New York magazine’s website into a digital powerhouse and successfully launched five standalone sites, including Vulture, the Cut and Grub Street.

He expertly navigated the transition from primarily print to primarily digital content– an impressive feat that few other magazines have been able to achieve. Inspired by his own trials and tribulations as a painter, Adam wrote his first book, The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing, released this past April by Penguin Random House. In it, he records and reflects on conversations he had with over 40 of the world’s most distinguished artists about how they created a particular work, tracing the evolution of paintings, novels, movies, photographs, and songs from scribbled notes to finished masterpieces. Speaking with artists as varied as Ira Glass, Sophia Coppola, and Stephen Sondheim, Adam draws insightful connections between many different kinds of art and creates an inspirational guide for anyone seduced by or frustrated with the alchemy that is creativity. Please join me in welcoming Adam Moss to the FoST podcast.

Adam, welcome to the FoST Podcast.

Adam Moss:

Thank you so much. It’s so good to be here.

Charlie Melcher:

I should start by saying that I’ve been a fan of your work for a very long time. As a young kid growing up in New York City and obsessed with media, I was a reader of Seven Days.

Adam Moss:

Yikes,

Charlie Melcher:

And all those other fun publications coming up around then that time– Manhattan Inc, Spy— I mean, it was a rich time and you just so quickly became this wunderkind in that space and just sort of watched your career take off and the amazing work that you did with the New York Times Magazine, and then of course at New York magazine, I followed you for all these years. We did have a point of intersection a while back when we did a book together when you were at New York magazine, the New York Lookbook–but anyway–

Adam Moss:

Well, you did a beautiful job on that book.

Charlie Melcher:

Thank you, thank you. We were very, very proud of it. I’d love to just start by talking about your role as an editor in chief and what does it take to be an excellent editor?

Adam Moss:

Well, I don’t know what it takes to be an excellent editor. I know what it took to be me.

Charlie Melcher:

I think it’s pretty much the same thing.

Adam Moss:

But they either think an editor is someone who moves commas around, which of course quite a few people do, and it’s incredibly important work. Your main job, I think, is to figure out, well, two things. One is what is it that you’re doing and trying to define the purpose and especially in magazines, figure out the voice. Voice is… is the language you speak in everything that you do. The reader gets a very specific signal as to who is talking to them, and that relationship between the personality of the publication and the reader is crucial. It’s the core of the bond.

And then it’s to be the camp counselor. Then it’s to work with a bunch of, hopefully—and this is another big part of the job—you try to create the most incredible group of people you can, and particularly a group of people that work well together. You kind of lead them toward making the thing that you have in your mind. It is your job to have the thing in mind that is the entity that will eventually reach a reader or a viewer or a listener or something like that in one way or another. You choose the stories.

Charlie Melcher:

I ask about this role of editor because we have a long history of making books and of course we have a role of editing those and I’ve also thought it’s been very misunderstood. The role that we play, particularly the kinds of books that we’ve done historically where we’re really collaborating almost as a co-author sometimes actually as the author, and we’re really figuring out what is that message, what’s the story? How are we going to tell it? We’re helping to create that content. We’re obviously designing or overseeing the design and the look and feel of it. I think in a certain way it’s an unsung art form or underappreciated maybe. At least, I feel that way in the book space. I mean, I always looked up to the magazine world because you guys seem to have all the perks and a lot of visibility.

Adam Moss:

Magazines traditionally have been more nimble, but a lot of them haven’t. And you and your world here, I’m just looking right now, we’re sitting in a room with bunches of books and there’s so much innovation that’s just visible to me right now, I’m just sitting here talking to you. But in our case, it was always very important to me— one of the aspects of our voice was that the thing feel new and original and different even if sometimes it didn’t work. But we were always trying to tell stories in innovative ways. I mean, I always have been fortunate to have an audience for the work that I was doing that was very sophisticated and would appreciate like, wow, look at this really interesting way you told this story. Innovative storytelling was a very, very big part of how I saw my role and the joy that I personally took from it.

Charlie Melcher:

And talk about how you tried to come to magazines and reinvent.

Adam Moss:

Well, most of these things you don’t really know, but I will say that when I was, it had a lot to do with I think the circumstances of my growing up. I was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Long Island, a place I really didn’t like at all. This was, let’s just say the late sixties. And my ticket to New York City, to cosmopolitanism, to the big city, was magazines, sophisticated magazines, and it happened to have been for those people who are students of the history of magazines, a particularly thrilling time for magazines. So you had Esquire, which was doing all sorts of amazing, innovative things that thrilled me as a 12-year-old who would be sitting in my living room just looking for a way to escape. It was the medium that many of the most creative people wanted to work in. If you were Tom Wolfe or whatever, Gay Talese, you know, you want to write books, but basically magazines were your canvas. So for all those reasons I got into magazines. It was like, wow. And of course when I got there, it was somewhat different than the magazine life I had inhaled as a child, but still I saw it as an incredibly nimble medium, a fun place to play.

Charlie Melcher:

You’ve recently published your first book with your name on it that you’ve authored, and it’s a beautiful book, I just want to say.

Adam Moss:

Thank you.

Charlie Melcher:

The Work of Art, also a brilliant title. I’m curious to hear from you about the difference for you of working in a book format as opposed to a magazine format.

Adam Moss:

There were many strands that came together to make this book. After I got the idea for the book and really was driven to write it largely because I had started to paint and I was so frustrated. I was struggling so much with painting and I realized at a certain point that I wanted a book that would put me in the artist’s mind as they were making something. And at first it was just painting, but then it was like the novelist mind and the songwriter’s mind and et cetera. And I didn’t see that book anywhere, and so I thought maybe I would try to write one, even though I had no real interest in books. I spent my career talking people out of going into books because there was always a sort of competitive temptation for the talented people that I had working for me. They would get a book contract and I would say, why do you want to write a book?

It’s going to take you three years and it’s going to be read by a fingernail worth of the people you get every time you write something, which takes you far less time. I mean, I was a magazine evangelist and books were the enemy. But in this case it’s like, okay, I had this thought of a kind of book I wanted to write, and then I also had a obsession for a long time, but particularly the last several years with process artifacts of creating. I’ve always loved lyric fragments on hotel stationary that like David Bowie and Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, there’s millions of them. They’re so great. I love looking at drafts and particularly seeing the mark of the writer as they’re thinking, rethinking. I love unfinished paintings where you can actually see the artist in mid-thought.

Charlie Melcher:

And you love these things because you like being in the mind of—it gives you some access to the creative process, the mind of the creator?

Adam Moss:

I mean, I think there’s a lot of reasons I like them, but yeah, it’s a little bit like a hologram. I mean, you’re able to be there with the artist as they’re doing it, and I’ve always been extremely curious about the process of making anything and these artifacts were the ticket. I don’t know. And also I just think I happen to think they’re beautiful.

Charlie Melcher:

I was going to say, I mean, clearly you look at the book and you’ve chosen them as if they are works of art themselves.

Adam Moss:

And I feel that way that they are, and in many cases I think that they’re more interesting than the finished thing that they’re on the way to being.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, I don’t know if the case, the example I’m going to give is more interesting than the thing it became, but– the James Joyce Ulysses with the crayons—

Adam Moss:

Oh my God— so beautiful, right?

Charlie Melcher:

So beautiful. You could hang that at MoMA.

Adam Moss:

Absolutely. Yeah. And then the cover is a manuscript page of Proust’s. There are thousands and thousands of them, and the cover has a two Xs in blue, which everybody thinks that I appended to it or an artist did, but no, this is Proust himself.

It’s just— you can actually— you’re suddenly there with Proust as he’s writing on– you know, he’s lying in bed, famously, and writing this manuscript and saying “urgh!” and just crossing them out with this kind of violence. And as soon as I saw it, I said, it ought to be the book. So the trick of the book was to marry the text and the– it’s a highly layered book to marry these artifacts and the book is full of them and to make sure that the book itself told its story as much visually as textually. So you have these three things: you have the artifacts, the artist texts, and you have me in footnotes, and they all had to live together between the hard covers of a book.

Charlie Melcher:

There was one of the footnotes I just thought was a great example of that. It’s in this section when you’re talking to David Mandel. David Mandel was the showrunner for Veep.

Adam Moss:

And the chapter is about reconstructing how two throwaway jokes on Veep were written.

Charlie Melcher:

Right? This is just one of three footnotes on this page and it says, “As they’re shooting, they rarely seem to throw out a joke and start over. They just keep reworking the joke. They’ve got to make it better. Was that because at the point it was too difficult to start over or because reducing what you permit yourself to fix brings the most successful (funniest) results—maybe the second.” So you’re asking yourself questions and answering it.

Adam Moss:

Yeah, I mean it’s very—well, I’m throwing it to the reader. I mean, I’m just trying to…as an editor, one of the things that you do, I’m sure you do this too, is when you’re reading, say you’re reading a manuscript, you make notes. And your notes are like, sometimes it’s like, well, you’d be better if you said this at the very beginning or whatnot, but a lot of times you’re just in a conversation.

Charlie Melcher:

The other thing that I think is so fun is that you are both trying to tell a story or let the artist tell a story about their process, and there’s a real effort in a way to be a nod to a practical guide. There are things you want people to be able to take away that are lessons about how to create. It’s obvious by just what the headers are for each section– you’re thinking, here’s a little bit of how to.

Adam Moss:

Yeah, well, it’s funny. I didn’t want to write a how to book. In the process of researching the book and talking to… I talked to amazing people: Stephen Sondheim and Louise Glück and Sofa Coppola and Moses Sumney and George Saunders and Michael Cunningham. Anyway, lots and lots of people, and each of them get their own chapter. As we were going through this, I myself was learning all sorts of lessons that were helpful to me as I was trying to paint, and in fact, even trying to write this book. Yet I didn’t want it to be bluntly self-help. Although I read a lot of self-help books, I was kind of allergic to writing one. There’s a footnote in the introduction that could have been the whole book. It said, as I was listening to all these people, I kept thinking that everything that they were saying boiled down to three Fs, which was focus, fanaticism, and faith, and it sounded self-helpy, but it was also kind of true.

Charlie Melcher:

You mentioned three insights there from a footnote in the introduction, expand. Are there other insights that you had after talking to, what is it, 43 different brilliant people about their creative process? What are some of the things that sifted to the top?

Adam Moss:

For one thing, all creative work seems to have three stages. One of them is the imagining stage where you allow associations to be made and you’re open to them. The judging stage, when you look at what you’ve spewed in that first stage and you begin to strategize, edit, you begin to actually like: “how and what am I going to do?” And the last stage is the shaping stage, which is craft and technique. A lot of the artists kept describing themselves as having ADD or ADHD, and I dunno whether they do or not. They didn’t even know whether they had it or not. But I began to feel that the very definition of high functioning ADHD, which is kind of distractibility and then hyperfocus, was in fact what made an artist good. They were able to be dreamy and anal at the same time, in equal measure. They were able to be, as I came to think of them, as child and adult in equal measure. And they were able to move flexibly to and fro.

Throughout the book I’m like, I’m in this kind of pointless quest to figure out what talent is, and I talked to everybody. I said, what do you think talent is? And I talked to Sheila Heti, the novelist. She said, I don’t know. She said, I think it’s just a combination of personality characteristics that are good for art. So it’s like in her case, she was talking about, I like to sit around. It’s very helpful to be, if you’re a novelist, it’s very helpful to be able to sit in one place for a long time and to get kind of obsessive about a particular thing. And so obsessiveness and comfort with tedium is another part of it. And yeah, I mean a lot of things that aren’t necessarily considered actual virtues. Certainly persistence and drive because there’s so many things that thwart you as you go along. A tolerance for failure—you can stomach it. And you kind of have figured out how to work yourself out of it, because really the story of the book is the story of failure and getting up off the floor and sticking with it.

The other thing I should say just cause it was fun is that, man, this group of people was so superstitious that they are constantly playing tricks with themselves. They make a deal. George Saunders makes a deal, says, I’m allowed to write this book for six months and not give a shit. And I give myself permission: a six month free period, free pass, and that enabled him to write Lincoln in the Bardo, this amazing book and an example almost in every chapter of this sort of thing. They’re weirdly mystical, superstitious. They don’t really understand what it is that enables them to create, and that’s one of the reasons they talk to me is they wanted to try to understand it.

Charlie Melcher:

But they’re also worried about upsetting it, right?

Adam Moss:

Oh, yeah. People are worried about the talking itself. There’s a Joan Didion quote at the beginning where it says that— you know, she talks about the superstitious that creators have about talking about their work because they’re afraid as soon as they speak it, it will vanish. That’s a common feeling.

Charlie Melcher:

One of the other things that I took from it is just that the work itself is the reward.

Adam Moss:

The work itself is the reward is absolutely the truth is that the—and by work in this case, I mean the small W “work”: the act, the labor of making the thing. It was absolutely true that as a storyteller, I’m a storyteller. That’s what I do for a living. I wanted an epiphany. I wanted each of these chapters to have a dah, dah. I make the thing and bam, fireworks, it’s so great. And I didn’t get that. Nobody would give me that, and I was very frustrated. What they would say is, “yeah, I finished it. I felt pretty good about it. It was okay. I was finished. I didn’t have anything more to do. I couldn’t figure out any way to make it better, so I just put it out there in the world.” It’s like Suzan-Lori Parks, the playwright, she talks about it as breathing. “For me, it is breathing.” And in my own frustrations about my own painting, I had to realize I don’t feel that way about painting. Painting is not breathing to me, painting is something interesting and fun that I do, but I don’t have this compulsion.

Charlie Melcher:

But making magazines, you felt that way about.

Adam Moss:

I did. I did.

Charlie Melcher:

That maybe was your art.

Adam Moss:

Yeah, no, I think it was, and I think what I got excited about in making magazines were two things: I did feel very excited by some of the product of our labors, but I also really, really, really enjoyed the group project of it. When I left my job, that’s what I missed the most. I missed what I have always referred to as the “kindergarten” aspect of making something, that you’re just sitting in with scissors and glue and construction paper and putting something together. That was the great part of that. And part of the other book, I should say, just because I’m on the subject, is that I spent a whole lifetime having creative dialogue out loud. And this book… most of the people I talk to work by themselves, and so the book is in a way about talking to yourself, how do you talk to yourself, which was brand new to me because all of my conversation was with others.

Charlie Melcher:

Very public, and I imagine that was part of your journey when you went from running a magazine and being able to play in a big kindergarten room to alone in your studio with your paintbrush. That must’ve been a very hard transition.

Adam Moss:

It was.

Charlie Melcher:

You’re working it out in this book.

Adam Moss:

Yeah, that’s true. That is true.

Charlie Melcher:

I feel the same way, by the way, I just so relate to that, and I think even more so as I’ve gotten older, I realize that the great joy in what I get to do is the collaboration with the other people and the opportunity to do that with people that I respect in some cases have gotten to work with for many, many years or just the new people who are very high levels. And you get access to other great creative people and you think to yourself, wow, how did I get in this room with this person and we’re getting to do this work together?

Adam Moss:

Oh, it’s amazing. And to be in that situation with someone who has someone— I mean, you run this joint, I ran the various joints I was in, but you’re constantly working with people who are teaching you all sorts of stuff and know how to do things you don’t know how to do. And there’s a phrase that comes up in the book in relation to David Simon who made The Wire, where someone else talks about David Simon as being really into the bounce. And the bounce is the, if you can imagine, a circle where the ball’s bouncing back and forth between people, where the creative energy is bouncing. And that’s what my whole life as a creator was, and when you are experiencing the bounce with someone else, something fabulous happens, it’s like physics. It’s like you’re playing tennis, the ball goes faster.

Charlie Melcher:

The energy amplifies.

Adam Moss:

The energy amplifies. Yeah.

Charlie Melcher:

I can see too your just great joy of telling visual stories throughout the book

Adam Moss:

Yeah.

Charlie Melcher:

And over and over again. I see this curator’s eye for these artifacts. And in many cases, they’re the kinds of things that people were probably thinking they were going to throw away. They’re rough drafts, they’re scraps.

Adam Moss:

I know. Yeah. What a struggle to try to find people who actually kept this crap.

Charlie Melcher:

And thank God you found ’em.

Adam Moss:

Oh my God, yes.

Charlie Melcher:

They’re so great. And I imagine too, a lot of people don’t want those to be seen because they are revealing of work not done process.

Adam Moss:

Sure. It makes them vulnerable.

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah, yeah. It doesn’t always…

Adam Moss:

It exposes them. No, I should say that the people who gave me their time and their detritus were enormously generous. It’s a big ask to ask someone to open up their brain and open up their hard drive.

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah, I’m sure they had to find them. They weren’t easy to get their hands on even in many cases. No, I’m surprised that they were so willing to open up, particularly as you just said, that they’re a little bit superstitious and here they are trying to…

Adam Moss:

Some… I did the book mostly during Covid. People had a lot of time. People were reflective and I think that a lot of people were trying to figure out for themselves something that they hadn’t thought about very much, which is where in general does my work come from, and where did this particular X project or Y project come from? Before I started the book, I went to Michael Cunningham, who’s a good friend of mine and who wrote The Hours. And I wanted to do a kind of trial run to see whether it was true that these artifacts, specimens of the making, would somehow get them to be deeper and more honest, and Michael said, “sure, let’s try it. I don’t know what I’ve saved and I don’t know what I have.” And I went over to his studio and he opened up a closet and two gigantic garbage bags full of pages fell out of the closet.

I mean, they weren’t typically there. They were there because his apartment was being fumigated, but still it was just these huge garbage cans full of actual physical paper. To me, it’s like, these are narratives. This is a storytelling podcast. One of the things that so attracted me to the book is that the story of creation is itself an amazing narrative. It has the shape of every great story. It has a protagonist in the creator, and it has obstacles, which are often the obstacles that are created by the creator, and then it has fighting through the obstacles, and then generally it has a happy ending if the thing gets made or happy enough ending. So I tried to build a book around stories.

Charlie Melcher:

You use the word artist here. You use it very loosely. I similarly use storytelling very loosely, and I think we both mean “creators.” Someone who’s going to create something. I don’t even believe that all the storytellers have to be driven by narrative. I mean, there are— Gregory Crewdson tells a story in a single image.

Adam Moss:

Absolutely.

Charlie Melcher:

There’s no sequence.

Adam Moss:

Although the narrative you create— the thing that’s great about his is that the viewer creates the narrative and they all have a different narrative.

Charlie Melcher:

Yes.

Adam Moss:

Fantastic.

Charlie Melcher:

Yes. I happen to be a big fan of his photography also, but I think that my point was just that we can use terms like storytelling very loosely and some of the ways that certain types of media, or art versus storytelling, these terms I think used to be more tightly defined, and we’ve moved into an age of sort of multihyphenate creators and working across media, and I just wonder if you have any insights into that. From your years of experience and this book, do you think of yourself or do you think most people today are sort of storytellers and artists? Is there a big difference between those.

Adam Moss:

Look, everybody tells stories. Everybody… you know, you’re sitting around a dinner table, you’re telling— what did you do today? Here’s the story. And just as similarly, when you crack a joke—forget David Mandell writing a joke for Veep. You’re sitting at that same dinner table and you crack a joke. You have just gone through, without knowing it, exactly the same process that someone goes through when they spend their lifetime writing one book. I have heard the occasional, oh, you, you’ve just thrown everything under this umbrella term. Does it have any meaning anymore? And it does for me, it’s not an academic purist’s definition of what makes art.

Charlie Melcher:

Did you find people who you felt reinvented themselves successfully over time?

Adam Moss:

Yeah, definitely. Everybody— but the reinvention was within certain parameters that are kind of defined by their sensibility. Look at Picasso, how many different eras he had. Nevertheless, they’re all Picassos. They all come out of a particular kind of brain, formed by an accretion of experience. I don’t think there’s anyone in this book that somehow got stuck. Interest propels obsession and obsession is what makes you do the work, and you got to keep yourself interested, so you keep yourself trying something new within your own language.

Charlie Melcher:

Every medium has in it a certain kind of message. Right? Marshall McLuhan. What did you take from the message of working in a book?

Adam Moss:

Well, I now understand the value of books.

Charlie Melcher:

Instead of shit talking ’em always. [laughter]

Adam Moss:

Exactly. It is kind of fun to go into a bookstore and see the book there, and it’s really fun to eavesdrop as someone’s paging through your book. I used to like that in magazines on the subway, I just loved watching someone flip through a magazine that I had edited, so there’s that. I like the object of it. I like the big permanence of it. It’s really–

Charlie Melcher:

It has good hand. That’s the way I describe it.

Adam Moss:

And I like it just sits in people’s houses, but I guess the thing I like best about it is—this happens in magazines too, but I love the dialogue you have with people who have… you know, now the book’s been out a little while and I get letters all the time from people who want to talk to me. Usually it’s like, “I was writing this book, I was writing this poem, I was writing this song,” and they want to share with me what happened and they want a dialogue. I love that.

Charlie Melcher:

I think a lot of people turn to it when they hit that writer’s block or that creative obstacle for inspiration for in a way, maybe what drove you to write it will drive people to read it. But where I was headed was I feel like you have to acknowledge the fact that it has a depth. It’s 425 pages. None of your magazines were…

Adam Moss:

No, they never– they didn’t.

Charlie Melcher:

It has this hard cover with this beautiful cloth case, debossed, the ability for permanence. Magazines were of the moment absolutely throw away and the book is going to be here for a long time.

Adam Moss:

Yeah, yeah.

Charlie Melcher:

You had a different name for this book originally. What was that?

Adam Moss:

I started the book, it was going to be called “Editing.” I mean, I’ve been an editor all my life, and I felt at the beginning that, well, maybe that should be what the book would be called. Because I was trying to claim the ways in which the word “editing” is misunderstood and I wanted to claim for it a very broad definition, which is: editing is when you speak—as I’ve just started the sentence, I’ve edited myself unconsciously 16 times—60, 6,000— before I’ve gotten to the utterance that I actually say. When I wake up in the morning, I’m dressing and actually fashion-y people call it: you’re editing what you’re wearing, and… Editing came up over and over and over again by the artists themselves as a description of what they did– “then I edited–” and these weren’t just text people. So it was editing, but I just feared that in the end it would be misunderstood as a title.

Charlie Melcher:

I think that for you, editing is your art. That is an art form that you have mastered, and maybe the book is a way of saying that editing is an art form. Adam, is there any sort of insight from having done all of these interviews that you would share with aspiring storytellers, some lessons that might be relevant to their craft?

Adam Moss:

I do think anyone can tell a story. I do think people are telling stories all the time and what gums them up is the idea that it has to be that different when they commit to making something that’s more than a momentary utterance. The essential structure of what I’m talking about in terms of making an incredible painting is the same as telling a story, it’s the same as telling a joke, which is that something occurs to you, it’s kind of freeform—whether you know it or not, you are actually assembling the blocks of telling the story. You are actually outlining in your head. That may take a split second, but somewhere in your brain it’s doing that and then good storytellers have listened and have watched other people do it, and they have acquired a certain amount of finesse in the technique of telling a story. It’s the essential structure of creation.

Charlie Melcher:

Adam, thank you so much. It’s such a pleasure to get to spend time with you and engage in an interesting conversation.

Adam Moss:

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Charlie Melcher:

Once again, I’m Charlie Melcher and this has been the False Podcast. My sincere thanks to Adam Moss for joining me today and to you for listening. The FoST community is comprised of storytellers of all stripes, from editors and animators, to painters and puppeteers, to musicians and marketers. To learn more about us, please check out our website at fost.org and sign up for our free monthly newsletter, FoST in Thought. The FoST Podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.