Mitch Albom
Author and Detroit Free Press sports columnist
Where to hear and read about Mitch Albom1 episode or test
Mitch Albom is a Detroit Free Press sports columnist and the author of 14 books, including Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven, with more than 40 million copies sold. The lesson most worth taking is to pick one universal theme, write plainly for the reader, and edit by rhythm, inside a daily three hour morning session.
What I want people to say is I couldn't stop thinking about that after I finished it. It made me think about my own life.
How to Write Exceptionally Well (Mitch Albom Interview)
Mitch Albom: the story and the lessons
1Mitch Albom's path from cartoons and music to bestsellers
Albom came to writing late, after wanting to draw and play music. He wanted to be a cartoonist, then became a musician, and only started writing in his 20s. He has now written for more than 45 years and sold more than 40 million copies across 14 books.
He thinks his years as a musician gave him an innate sense of rhythm in speaking, in prose and in songwriting.
He learned to tell stories at the family dinner table. His aunts got stuck on details, like whether Manny was born in 1945 or 1946, and his uncles got impatient. Uncle Eddie's war stories showed him how it is done.
As a kid at camp he was the one picked to tell the ghost story.
Tuesdays with Morrie began as a way to pay a medical bill. He started it to cover his old professor's medical bills, not as a big book. At one point it was the bestselling memoir of all time.
Readers told him it made them reunite with a lost loved one, change jobs, or cope with terminal illness. He knew he would never write another Morrie, so each later book aims at one theme.
2How Albom builds every book around one theme
Albom picks the theme first and invents a story to carry it. The Five People You Meet in Heaven is about people who think they do not matter, and heaven was just a good way to tell it. Twice came from the idea that the grass is always greener in love.
Readers assumed he was fascinated by heaven and dying, but his belief was that there is no such thing as a nobody. In his words: "start with a theme and then I create the story around the theme."
He stays tied to the one big idea, like an astronaut's cord. Detours and anecdotes are fine as long as he is still holding the line back to the idea. He says the worst thing a reader can say is that they tried to read it but got lost.
"The minute they let go of that cord, they're never getting back."
He knows the ending before he starts, even if not the middle. For columns, the first and last paragraphs work together, so he sails toward the last one. For Twice he had the hero's love mistake in mind from page one.
He sometimes rewrites the beginning once the middle is found. Twice opens at the end, with an old man arrested for beating a roulette wheel in the Bahamas.
He fixes where the main character starts, then plans the change. In Five People, Eddie starts as an 83-year-old park maintenance worker, set up by small lonely moments: a fishing line with nothing on it, seagulls, shingles. Then the work is how to move him to the planned end.
"My main character has to go through some kind of transformation or it's not interesting." Nobody wants 300 pages about someone who is the same in the last chapter as in the first.
3How Mitch Albom chooses ideas and readers
He only writes topics where his curiosity overlaps with readers' interest. He lists what interests readers and checks which of those he knows or is curious about. He loves 50s doo-wop but will not write a book on it, because music is hard on the page and the audience is small.
He says he writes 98% for readers, a habit from newspapers, film and plays. "What doesn't make the list is just because I'm interested in it."
He writes for a stranger, a grandmother in North Carolina. She had never seen a Detroit game but still wanted to follow his column. That meant human themes like loss or strife, and statistics translated into plain terms.
A .333 hitter becomes a man who does something good one time in three. Diehard fans read you anyway, so the work is reaching everyone else.
He tells big events through someone standing away from the action. After the Kennedy assassination, columnists wrote grand lines about America, while Jimmy Breslin wrote about the man digging the grave. Through one meticulous worker he captured the nation's grief.
Albom says the pieces readers remember are often told from away from the main action.
Albom dropped the expected story at Barcelona for a human one. He had waited five hours to cover Carl Lewis's 100 meter final. When Derek Redmond tore a hamstring in a 400 meter heat and his father lifted him and walked him to the finish, Albom told his paper he was skipping Lewis and wrote that.
The father said he had taught his son to run by putting the boy's feet on his own. The column became one of Albom's best known, though almost no American knew either man. "Sometimes that means that you have to go against the grain of your business."
He emails every idea to himself under the subject line book idea. Every couple of months he searches that tag, prints the results and adds them to a physical file of themes, titles and first lines. When it is time for the next book, he leafs through it.
The file is inches thick, and he says he has never had writer's block.
4Why Albom writes plainly and cuts hard
When he could not write beautifully, Albom wrote plainly. At 37, a sports writer, he read the recommended books on death and saw he could not match their poetry. He wrote Tuesdays with Morrie as simply as possible and let Morrie carry it.
His own opinion went in one sentence, often the last line of a chapter. "If you have something to say, say it in one sentence." The contract wanted 320 pages, and his triple-spaced draft paginated to 160.
He cuts the long stretches of detail readers skip. His mother liked his books because they lack pages of explanation, like Tom Clancy on how a submarine works. Early editors and teachers had criticized his long, awkward sentences, so he whittled them down.
At normal size his books would run only 220 to 230 pages. He now thinks he may err the other way and move through things too quickly.
He edits his own draft hard before an editor sees it. He rereads until he can nearly recite the book, and almost every pass takes lines out. He keeps going through several drafts until the publisher pulls the manuscript from his hands.
Being told you're too fat hurts, so he does the combing himself. "I want to come in skinny."
He stopped polishing page one because readers give you ten pages. He rewrote the start of Morrie about 20 times. His editor Bill Thomas said he was thinking like a sports columnist, when a book buyer will give a few pages.
"I just have to get them in the first 10 pages. I don't have to get them in the first page."
5How Albom paces a story by rhythm
He rereads mostly for rhythm and fixes wherever it stalls. His wife noticed he rocks while writing and stops when a passage is not working. When he stops, he goes back and reworks it until the beat flows.
His highest newspaper compliment came from readers who started a column and were at the end already, without rereading a paragraph.
He added a quiet scene when The Little Liar overwhelmed readers. An editor said the Holocaust opening third was relentlessly heavy. Albom added a gentle scene of a grandfather telling how a prisoner painted the red White Tower white to win his freedom.
The scene gave readers a breath and paid off later in the story. He describes the job as "monitoring the heart of your reader."
He ends scenes at a peak and makes readers wait. He puts a pin in a story and returns later, like his uncle telling a war story at the dinner table. In Twice, a chapter ends on a look at a tombstone, so the next chapter's memory of his mother feels earned.
He also watches the crescendo: do not peak too soon, and do not save everything good for the last chapter.
He learned pacing by watching children's eyes fade. Telling stories to the children at his orphanage taught him to spot the moment attention drops. Then he adds a bold line or dialogue and gets back to the point.
"You see it on their eyes like when they're starting to fade."
He reads the finished draft aloud to his wife, out of sight. Near the end of a book he reads the whole manuscript to her in big chunks while she sits around the corner. Reading aloud shows him the book differently.
He does not want to react to her expression. She hugged and kissed him at the last line of Twice, and he dedicated the book to her.
6Albom's daily writing routine
He writes about three hours each morning with no input. Roughly 7 to 10 a.m., with no music, news, email or phone calls. He knows the size of his gas tank and says staying at the desk until 5:00 will not produce more.
Most writers he knows, like those in the Rock Bottom Remainders with Stephen King, Amy Tan and Dave Barry, treat writing as a job. Greg Iles was the exception, writing from 2 a.m. to 11 a.m. when it hit him.
He stops each session in the middle of a sentence. He leaves the desk mid-sentence in something he wants to finish, so the next morning starts with excitement instead of dread of bad pages.
He calls it a little trick and uses it every day on a book, often seven days a week, following Red Smith's advice to open a vein and let it bleed.
Newspaper deadlines made delivering on time second nature. The Detroit Free Press had some of America's earliest deadlines. For one 8 p.m. game he faced deadlines at 8, 9:45, 11:30 and 1 a.m., rewriting each time.
In the Pistons-Trail Blazers final he wrote a winning and a losing column at once. Vinnie Johnson hit the winner with 0.07 seconds left and fans jumped over his back as he hit send. Book editors are surprised he delivers on the day.
7Albom on faith, humility and loss
He writes about faith from humility, not from wanting to sound beautiful. Writing honestly about God pushes him out of ego and into awe, which changes the language he finds. He points to Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and the Psalms, where simple observation produces beauty.
Thinking about how to write something beautiful works against it. "That's when your writing becomes most beautiful."
Twice is his first book about the loss of love. His earlier books, including Tuesdays with Morrie, dealt with the loss of life. In Twice, Gianna still knows Alfie but no longer feels the same, so the loss is felt next to the person who is still there.
He calls it a flame going out, with no tombstone and no cemetery. It is also the first book where love is the theme, and he says nobody talks about nurturing the embers for the long run.
His rabbi's file on God held only questions, and Albom took that as faith. In Have a Little Faith, the rabbi had asked Albom to give his eulogy. The file on his top shelf held notes, Xerox pages and underlined questions.
Albom decided God is a series of questions, so faith is the journey, not the answer.
How to Write Exceptionally Well (Mitch Albom Interview)
Mitch Albom explains how he builds books around one theme, aims every page at a reader, and edits for rhythm and brevity. The habit worth hearing is his three hour morning session with no input, which he ends in the middle of a sentence so the next day starts easily.
Albom came to writing late, after wanting to draw and play music. He wanted to be a cartoonist, then became a musician, and only started writing in his 20s. He has now written for more than 45 years and sold more than 40 million copies across 14 books.
He thinks his years as a musician gave him an innate sense of rhythm in speaking, in prose and in songwriting.
He learned to tell stories at the family dinner table. His aunts got stuck on details, like whether Manny was born in 1945 or 1946, and his uncles got impatient. Uncle Eddie's war stories showed him how it is done.
As a kid at camp he was the one picked to tell the ghost story.
Tuesdays with Morrie began as a way to pay a medical bill. He started it to cover his old professor's medical bills, not as a big book. At one point it was the bestselling memoir of all time.
Readers told him it made them reunite with a lost loved one, change jobs, or cope with terminal illness. He knew he would never write another Morrie, so each later book aims at one theme.
Albom picks the theme first and invents a story to carry it. The Five People You Meet in Heaven is about people who think they do not matter, and heaven was just a good way to tell it. Twice came from the idea that the grass is always greener in love.
Readers assumed he was fascinated by heaven and dying, but his belief was that there is no such thing as a nobody. In his words: "start with a theme and then I create the story around the theme."
He stays tied to the one big idea, like an astronaut's cord. Detours and anecdotes are fine as long as he is still holding the line back to the idea. He says the worst thing a reader can say is that they tried to read it but got lost.
"The minute they let go of that cord, they're never getting back."
He knows the ending before he starts, even if not the middle. For columns, the first and last paragraphs work together, so he sails toward the last one. For Twice he had the hero's love mistake in mind from page one.
He sometimes rewrites the beginning once the middle is found. Twice opens at the end, with an old man arrested for beating a roulette wheel in the Bahamas.
He fixes where the main character starts, then plans the change. In Five People, Eddie starts as an 83-year-old park maintenance worker, set up by small lonely moments: a fishing line with nothing on it, seagulls, shingles. Then the work is how to move him to the planned end.
"My main character has to go through some kind of transformation or it's not interesting." Nobody wants 300 pages about someone who is the same in the last chapter as in the first.
He only writes topics where his curiosity overlaps with readers' interest. He lists what interests readers and checks which of those he knows or is curious about. He loves 50s doo-wop but will not write a book on it, because music is hard on the page and the audience is small.
He says he writes 98% for readers, a habit from newspapers, film and plays. "What doesn't make the list is just because I'm interested in it."
He writes for a stranger, a grandmother in North Carolina. She had never seen a Detroit game but still wanted to follow his column. That meant human themes like loss or strife, and statistics translated into plain terms.
A .333 hitter becomes a man who does something good one time in three. Diehard fans read you anyway, so the work is reaching everyone else.
He tells big events through someone standing away from the action. After the Kennedy assassination, columnists wrote grand lines about America, while Jimmy Breslin wrote about the man digging the grave. Through one meticulous worker he captured the nation's grief.
Albom says the pieces readers remember are often told from away from the main action.
Albom dropped the expected story at Barcelona for a human one. He had waited five hours to cover Carl Lewis's 100 meter final. When Derek Redmond tore a hamstring in a 400 meter heat and his father lifted him and walked him to the finish, Albom told his paper he was skipping Lewis and wrote that.
The father said he had taught his son to run by putting the boy's feet on his own. The column became one of Albom's best known, though almost no American knew either man. "Sometimes that means that you have to go against the grain of your business."
He emails every idea to himself under the subject line book idea. Every couple of months he searches that tag, prints the results and adds them to a physical file of themes, titles and first lines. When it is time for the next book, he leafs through it.
The file is inches thick, and he says he has never had writer's block.
When he could not write beautifully, Albom wrote plainly. At 37, a sports writer, he read the recommended books on death and saw he could not match their poetry. He wrote Tuesdays with Morrie as simply as possible and let Morrie carry it.
His own opinion went in one sentence, often the last line of a chapter. "If you have something to say, say it in one sentence." The contract wanted 320 pages, and his triple-spaced draft paginated to 160.
He cuts the long stretches of detail readers skip. His mother liked his books because they lack pages of explanation, like Tom Clancy on how a submarine works. Early editors and teachers had criticized his long, awkward sentences, so he whittled them down.
At normal size his books would run only 220 to 230 pages. He now thinks he may err the other way and move through things too quickly.
He edits his own draft hard before an editor sees it. He rereads until he can nearly recite the book, and almost every pass takes lines out. He keeps going through several drafts until the publisher pulls the manuscript from his hands.
Being told you're too fat hurts, so he does the combing himself. "I want to come in skinny."
He stopped polishing page one because readers give you ten pages. He rewrote the start of Morrie about 20 times. His editor Bill Thomas said he was thinking like a sports columnist, when a book buyer will give a few pages.
"I just have to get them in the first 10 pages. I don't have to get them in the first page."
He rereads mostly for rhythm and fixes wherever it stalls. His wife noticed he rocks while writing and stops when a passage is not working. When he stops, he goes back and reworks it until the beat flows.
His highest newspaper compliment came from readers who started a column and were at the end already, without rereading a paragraph.
He added a quiet scene when The Little Liar overwhelmed readers. An editor said the Holocaust opening third was relentlessly heavy. Albom added a gentle scene of a grandfather telling how a prisoner painted the red White Tower white to win his freedom.
The scene gave readers a breath and paid off later in the story. He describes the job as "monitoring the heart of your reader."
He ends scenes at a peak and makes readers wait. He puts a pin in a story and returns later, like his uncle telling a war story at the dinner table. In Twice, a chapter ends on a look at a tombstone, so the next chapter's memory of his mother feels earned.
He also watches the crescendo: do not peak too soon, and do not save everything good for the last chapter.
He learned pacing by watching children's eyes fade. Telling stories to the children at his orphanage taught him to spot the moment attention drops. Then he adds a bold line or dialogue and gets back to the point.
"You see it on their eyes like when they're starting to fade."
He reads the finished draft aloud to his wife, out of sight. Near the end of a book he reads the whole manuscript to her in big chunks while she sits around the corner. Reading aloud shows him the book differently.
He does not want to react to her expression. She hugged and kissed him at the last line of Twice, and he dedicated the book to her.
He writes about three hours each morning with no input. Roughly 7 to 10 a.m., with no music, news, email or phone calls. He knows the size of his gas tank and says staying at the desk until 5:00 will not produce more.
Most writers he knows, like those in the Rock Bottom Remainders with Stephen King, Amy Tan and Dave Barry, treat writing as a job. Greg Iles was the exception, writing from 2 a.m. to 11 a.m. when it hit him.
He stops each session in the middle of a sentence. He leaves the desk mid-sentence in something he wants to finish, so the next morning starts with excitement instead of dread of bad pages.
He calls it a little trick and uses it every day on a book, often seven days a week, following Red Smith's advice to open a vein and let it bleed.
Newspaper deadlines made delivering on time second nature. The Detroit Free Press had some of America's earliest deadlines. For one 8 p.m. game he faced deadlines at 8, 9:45, 11:30 and 1 a.m., rewriting each time.
In the Pistons-Trail Blazers final he wrote a winning and a losing column at once. Vinnie Johnson hit the winner with 0.07 seconds left and fans jumped over his back as he hit send. Book editors are surprised he delivers on the day.
He writes about faith from humility, not from wanting to sound beautiful. Writing honestly about God pushes him out of ego and into awe, which changes the language he finds. He points to Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and the Psalms, where simple observation produces beauty.
Thinking about how to write something beautiful works against it. "That's when your writing becomes most beautiful."
Twice is his first book about the loss of love. His earlier books, including Tuesdays with Morrie, dealt with the loss of life. In Twice, Gianna still knows Alfie but no longer feels the same, so the loss is felt next to the person who is still there.
He calls it a flame going out, with no tombstone and no cemetery. It is also the first book where love is the theme, and he says nobody talks about nurturing the embers for the long run.
His rabbi's file on God held only questions, and Albom took that as faith. In Have a Little Faith, the rabbi had asked Albom to give his eulogy. The file on his top shelf held notes, Xerox pages and underlined questions.
Albom decided God is a series of questions, so faith is the journey, not the answer.