"Ingenious" by Jason Fagone

Ingenious by Jason Fagone was an interesting book the covered a group of remarkable automotive inventors.

Fagone is a writer who I've posted on a number of times and who sent me a galley copy of the book due out November 5th. When I first heard of the book a number of months ago, I thought it was going to be about the electric car industry, but the thread pulling together the aforementioned inventors was their respective efforts at winning the Automotive X Prize. The contest was started by Peter Diamandis out of his successful X Prize for private space travel, which featured teams attempting to win a $10M prize by sending three passengers to 100 kilometers into space and safely back, and then repeating it two weeks later.

The Automotive X Prize was an attempt by Diamandis to kick start an industry just as the original X Prize helped launch prize space travel, but rather the intent of this contest was to push forward automotive hyper fuel efficiency. The contest went through various iterations of how it would run and it wound up with a target of 100 MPGe, or MPG equivalents, and a $10M total prize purse split into three divisions with one $5M prize and two different $2.5M prizes available. Entrants had to satisfy the MPGe threshold along with meeting various performance and safety benchmarks. If multiple cars within a division satisfied all criteria for winning the prize, then a 100 mile race would decide the winner.

What stood out the most in Fagone’s book were terribly interesting characters, and great stories about them that clearly came from thorough reporting done. The people and teams featured most prominently were the West Philly Hybrid X team of high school students led by former math teacher Simon Hauger, Oliver Kuttner and the “Very Light Car” from his Edison2 team and Kevin Smith and his team Illuminati Motor Works. Towards the end of the book Fagone wrote about the electric car industry and its most successful entry to date in Tesla Motors and while Tesla certainly an interesting company led by a fascinating guy, what drives (no pun intended) Ingenious forward is the bootstrapping efforts and entrepreneurial spirit of people like Kuttner and Smith and their work with physical objects in their hyper-efficient cars.

If I were to quibble with Ingenious, the blend of different characters written about made it at times hard to keep apart who was being written about, but that was primarily a difficulty just in the beginning of the book, and perhaps was a function of the chapter titles not always being terribly descriptive of the topics or people they covered.

Regardless of this minor annoyance for me, it was definitely a compelling read on terribly interesting people trying to accomplish something great.

Book writing wisdom from Jason Fagone

There was a series of tweets on the subject of writing which caught my eye a week or so back that I wanted to preserve in posterity (well, keep track of here).

Jason Fagone is a writer I came across around the time I started this blog and I then posted on and linked to his really solid 2008 Esquire story "The Video-Game Programmer Saving Our 21st-Century Souls". In Nov of this year, Fagone comes out with the book Ingenious: A True Story of Invention, Automotive Daring, and the Race to Revive America and for the past few months he's been tweeting both from his personal feed and from his IngeniousBook twitter feed.

Below was taken from posts made on May 26th to the IngeniousBook feed and contained I thought some very cool stuff on two writing-related topics...

Thoughts on writing a book

In response to someone asking if writing a book takes a lot of time - "Yes, it takes a shit-ton of time. For me, anyway. For some it takes less time, for some more. My first book took a year, start to finish. This one has taken 3. It's more complex, ambitious. It's just temperaments. Mine happens to be suited to ruminating on stuff." 

In response to someone asking how to manage the time required to write a book - "You try to set up a series of targets, then give yourself a break after hitting each one. First time you finish a draft. First time you show the draft to a friend and the friend kicks the shit out of it. First time you revise the draft so it's better. Share it again. Step back, breathe. It's still there, is always there. You make time to step away so that when you come back each time, it's slightly alien to you, and you see it new." 

Thoughts on writing a book proposal writing 

"A proposal is kind of a weird document. It has a standard format, like a screenplay. Editors read a ton of them, all the time. 3 main sections: An overview, a sample chapter, & chapter summaries. You have to lay out the whole book. The paradox is that you have to describe the book before you've fully reported the book. This is the hard thing. 

I think editors want to know 2 things: 1) Can this person lay out a plausible book that will sell? and 2) Can he/she write it? They want to know if you can think through a book. And the funny thing is, if you dedicate yourself to the proposal, by the time it's done, you really are ready to write the book. 

The overview might begin with your best character or scene. The "sample chapter" can be a mixtape of the best of what remains. I get the sense that people get stuck on the formality of proposals. But just start writing your best scene. Go from there. The book's structure can change from what's laid out in the proposal. Again, the Q is: Can this person think in book structure? Often the book veers away from the proposal. Still, it's helpful. I have a friend who ran into trouble while writing a book. He meandered. He went back and read his proposal, and he's like, "What genius wrote this?" The whole structure was right there. 

The harder thing, of course, is finding a great story. I have no advice there. The proposal you can do. It just takes time."