Mark West

He's also spent the last year studying Hemingway and Salinger, authors of Doll's Generation, for a project that he's writing.

I asked Jesse about the importance to these writers of going out, experiencing the world, and having big adventures.

By the way, it's a theme Jesse very much incorporates into his own life.

While I'm sitting in my bathrobe at home in Brooklyn right now, I caught up with Jesse where he's living these days in Santa Eulalia in the north of Ibiza.

We're going to come back to Jesse.

But first, I want to talk a little bit about where and how Dahl wrote his own pretty decent documents.

Because they're the only reason we care at all about the adventures Dahl had, right?

Dahl's writing process is completely fascinating to me.

How did a guy who was used to flying aerial battles in the war and playing spy games in DC, how did that same guy find the ability to sit quietly in a room for years on end and produce mountains of writing?

Here's Dahl in a Random House video, The Author's Eye from 1988, two years before his death.

He gives maybe the best analogy for the writing process that I've ever heard.

It really gives Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird a run for its money in terms of finding the poetry in the act of writing.

The writing life is clearly a subject Dahl thinks about a lot.

Many of his most celebrated books are sort of extended metaphors for what it means to be a writer.

Like my favorite of Dahl's adult works, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which we talked about last episode.

That story is maybe the most revealing mirror Dahl ever held up to his life as a writer.

On the surface, it's about a wealthy narcissist who discovers a way to literally see through the backs of playing cards using meditation techniques.

But strip away the magical realism, and it's about a man who locks himself away day after day, year after year, pursuing a single skill with monastic devotion, just like Dahl did with his writing.

Learning to see through playing cards is just a more dramatically interesting version of learning to write well.

And the practice completely changes Henry Sugar.