[John DeRosa] What does the first hour of your day look like? What time do you typically wake up?

[Brett Friedman] I’m usually up at 5:00 or 5:30 AM, but that’s just to get to work. I have a long commute so my preferred method of devoting the first hour of the day to writing isn't practical right now.

[JD] What are some of your daily routines?

[BF] I have a typical wake up-work-dinner-child wrangling routine until the kids are in bed, then I have an hour or two free. As you’ll see, I don’t have a writing routine like all of your previous interviewees.

[JD] How does your routine change on the weekend to decompress?

[BF] I’m really bad at decompression so my weekends are really just catch up. The time normally spent at work is replaced by family time.

[JD] Describe your creative (writing) space and time.

[BF] I combined these two questions because the answer is the same: I don’t have a set routine. I’m more of a guerrilla writer; I write when and where I have time. I have a suite of “expeditionary” tools to support this. First, I carry a notebook everywhere to jot stuff down or map ideas out whenever strike me. Always college ruled. Second, I bought a Microsoft Surface as a mobile Microsoft Word station and it’s awesome. If I have more time to work on a project that is beyond the note-taking stage I break that thing out. It’s mobile, but it’s robust enough to complete projects in the full version of Word plus a detachable keyboard and a mouse. So my creative space is anywhere and my creative time is anytime.

[JD] How do you determine what you are write about?

[BF] I hate to say something cliche like inspiration but that’s really the start, and ideas come to me in two ways: when I’m either reading (listening in the case of audio books) or running. I read the same way as I write: a book is always on my person and if I have the time and I’m not actively writing something, I read. Years of being in the military and waiting around for hours has reinforced this habit. Running, of course, gets the creative juice flowing. Usually, a new fact or idea will fit into preexisting ideas in my head and then it’s like Tetris: a block falls and fits in with other blocks then a whole line of thought lights up. Then it goes into the notebook.

Once it’s in the notebook it gets outlined- I love outlines- then fleshed out. Sometimes a further thought will reveal that an idea is crazy or unsupportable and it gets discarded. The ones that don’t get worked over and worked over until it’s a finished product. It’s a Darwinian process: evolve or get dropped.

Bigger projects are different. My current project, On Tactics, has been germinating for a long time and I used a far more methodical method. Clausewitz and other writers have given us a way to think about strategy and war. But, although strategic theorists usually touch on tactics, none have really given us the equivalent of tactics and warfare. If strategy is physics, tactics is quantum physics and that field is undefined and chaotic. There’s military history, doctrine, and our own experience as servicemembers but no theory with which to evaluate tactics like On War can be used to evaluate war. The exception is the Principles of War. Even those, however, are all over the place. There are dozens of versions of the list. So for this one I found every Principles of War list I could and came up with a huge consolidated list. Then I attacked each one until I had just nine that could not be dispensed with; the same number as J.F.C. Fuller but not the same list. Those nine are the basis of On Tactics which is intended to be a theoretical system of tactics but also an easy introduction to strategy that gives tactics their context. It’s about 36,000 words and it’s short by design. I want it to be a cargo pocket book.

[JD] What does your note taking system look like? How do you gather information for your writing?

[BF] I read voraciously. Mostly military history and theory. My dad is a huge history buff and I when I was growing up, our basement was his gigantic American military history library (around 1500 books) and my play area. I guess I just soaked up military history by osmosis. I read your normal kid stuff until I was about 12 at a swim meet and I finished a book. I had hours left to wait between events and my dad always had 3–4 books on him at any one time. I picked one of his up and never went back to age appropriate material. By 14, I was chewing through all of Robert Leckie’s single volume history books: I got in trouble in freshman Geometry class for trying to read his history of World War II during class. I got an A in history for a paper on Joseph Stalin though. Reading is the only fuel for writing that I've found.

My note taking is chaotic and mostly in notebooks, but I’m trying to bring some more discipline to it through Evernote lately.

[JD] What are you reading lately?

[BF] Like my dad, I keep 2–3 books going at any one time. I try to keep one theory and one history book going at all times, usually with a random third thrown in to keep things interesting. When I need a break, I read fiction. Right now, I’m juggling just two: The Great Arab Conquests by Hugh Kennedy and Clausewitz and the State by Peter Paret. I’m about to start a deep dive into Mexico though so as soon as they arrive I’m adding Cartel: The Coming Invasion of Mexico’s Drug Wars by Sylvia Longmire and Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico by T.R. Fehrenbach

[JD] How do you find what to read?

[BF] Anytime I see a recommendation for something I might be interested in I read some reviews and if it looks good it goes on my Amazon wishlist. It’s about 3,000 books deep so I have plenty of work ahead of me. If I’m researching a specific topic for a piece, I’ll pull from bibliographies. If it’s anything involving American history, my dad ships me stuff from his library. I’m also the nerd who kept all of his books from college so I have a substantial library of my own for reading or re-reading.

[JD] What’s your drink of choice?

[BF] Whiskey. Any kind. Anywhere. Anytime. I know nothing about Scotch though so maybe someday Nate Finney can teach me the ways of the Scotch.

[JD] Where’s the most adventurous places you've been?

[BF] I haven’t had the opportunity to travel as much as I’d like. I've literally been nowhere interesting on a vacation. Childhood vacations were mostly to visit relatives, but my dad and I have been to the majority of historical and battlefield sites in the Eastern US, even though my mom and sisters were bored to tears.

Other than that, Iraq was adventurous but not for normal reasons.

[JD] What bold steps would you like to see MWG take?

[BF] I think we've done a good job of recruiting and helping female writers, which is great since they are so underrepresented in strategic theory. Colin Gray’s list of important works of strategic theory is bereft of female names, but I don’t think he’s wrong: there just hasn't been a work of strategic theory by a female author that is a pillar of the field. But that’s going to change, and probably soon. So the bold step I would like to see MWG take is to make sure that that “female Clausewitz” is one of us.

Follow Brett, John, and the Military Writers Guild on twitter. Cheers!

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