ROBERTS I like to think that because you cover so many hundreds of years when you discuss geometry or probability that–and there’s so many interesting characters and they have to be so brilliant to make a lasting contribution to those fields–that you’re able to draw from a richer material than most writers. You have to be a very unusual person to make a lasting contribution to probability theory. [That came out wrong. You have to be a very unusual person to make a lasting contribution to any field.]
MLODINOW Right, well certainly mathematicians tend to be very unusual and colorful, odd sorts. That helps when you’re writing a book about them. The physicist are maybe not quite as odd. My book Feynman’s Rainbow was really about just one physicist and he was very colorful, so I got away with that. The work I do with Stephen Hawking is different in that sense–there’s not that much history in those books. In our new book that we’re doing, he doesn’t want us to much history at all, so we’re going to focus on the concepts.
ROBERTS . . . Let’s start with your writing career. You seem to have been a good writer by the time you got your PhD because as I understand it, you were able to actually get a writing job after leaving Cal Tech. You must have been at a very high level by that time; you wrote a spec script for, what, Star Trek? Or some other show?
MLODINOW Well, my rise in Hollywood is a long and involved story, but yes, I did rise pretty quickly. After Cal Tech I went to the Max Planck Institute in Munich and then I came to Hollywood to make my way and in six months I was working at my first TV job, which was a really crappy show on cable, which was pretty new then–cable, I mean. And from there I worked by way up to network shows–I did comedies such as Night Court, the original Gary Shandling show and I wrote for dramas as well including MacGuyver and as you said, Star Trek: The Next Generation. That was a crazy period of life.
ROBERTS I got the impression that you already knew how to write really well by then.
MLODINOW I think that in a way . . . I guess there’s two components to being able to write. One is your natural proclivity, I try not to say talent, but it’s your voice or the way you express yourself. And the other is the craft part of it that you learn by doing. I think I always had a good sense of humor and maybe a way to say things colorfully or think in terms of dramatic or powerful situations and I guess that’s the first part and served well. The other part is the things you learn as you go, such as what puts people to sleep or how to abandon what you think are good ideas but really aren’t. That’s a hard lesson to learn because it’s difficult to let go of things you might like and to realize that it just doesn’t belong or goes on too far or the idea that sometimes it’s hard to recognize things that may be good but just don’t belong there–that are tangents and they take away the dramatic thrust of where you’re going and they really have to be cut even though they’re good and you like them. You know, lessons like that, lessons about pacing–you learn by doing, by failing. You learn more about pacing, all sorts of technical aspects of writing, whether its fiction or nonfiction or TV or books; there are certain principles that you just learn by repeatedly doing and doing wrong and realizing, absorbing what went wrong and fixing it and you grow that way. In book writing you’re able to do that a lot with rough drafts so a lot of your mistakes don’t end up getting published–you know? TV writing can be so fast that often you don’t see the problems with the script until you actually watch it on the air and then you go, ’Next time I think I won’t have that guy climbing the stairs for four minutes in the middle of the scene; I think five seconds is enough to get the idea across.’