As someone who teaches writing to other people, what skills do you need to write elegantly?

First of all, you have to have an elegant mind. You have to be able to reason things in an elegant way. You really just need to be honest and straightforward, and then try not to write.

Try not to write?

Yes, I always tell students to try not to write. Very bad things happen when you try to write. It becomes too forced. You need to say what you have to say, and tell the story. It is the literary equivalent of what some people do in the plastic arts. They advise people not to think. You can’t write without thinking, but don’t think about writing.

Does that differ when writing fiction?

It doesn’t. I write fiction and non-fiction, and to me it is almost the same process. I even do research for my fiction. The only difference is that with fiction you can control the story. Life doesn’t always write a story as well as it could be written. On the other hand, sometimes it writes it better than you could ever imagine.

How do you come up with the topics for your books, from cod to salt?

I get asked this a lot. I guess the implication is that I write about odd things. What makes my books eclectic is that I write about what interests me, and I’m interested in a lot of things, fields and kinds of writing. I have to think that it’s a great story, and a meaningful story. Contrary to what people imagine, I don’t try to come out with odd things. But I always enjoy the challenge of doing something different. And I always like to think that my next book will be nothing like my last book.

What is your next book?

I have a book coming out in the spring which is a biography of Clarence Birdseye, the inventor of industrial frozen food. You could argue that he was odd! He was an adventurer in very physical ways. He harpooned whales. He travelled out west on horseback for his biological survey in 1910, when it was still really the wild west. He went fur trapping in Labrador [Canada]. And he was attracted to ideas. He would look at a problem, at the way something worked, and try to come up with a better way.

How did he come to invent modern frozen food? His name is best associated now with the “Captain Birdseye” brand of frozen fish.

Initially, he had a job with a fishing association. He became concerned with the fact that fish was not arriving in urban markets in very good shape. That was his original thought. Then he remembered that in Labrador – where he had brought his wife and son along – the diet was very limited because there wasn’t much fresh food in winter, nothing grew, and there wasn’t even much of a fishery because it was iced in.

What he did to provide fresh food year round for his family was freeze everything – which was very easy to do in winter time in Labrador, when the air was well below zero. He would hang food up in the air, freeze it solid and pack it in barrels with snow. He never really thought much about it when he left Labrador, but then when he was confronted with this problem of the quality of commercial fish, he remembered it and started applying it to fish.

So was he a fisherman or a businessman?

There was definitely a commercial aspect to him. He was born in 1886, and 19th century American inventors – as opposed to 19th century European inventors – were very much entrepreneurs. The idea was to get a patent and build a company out of it. That’s what Bell did, that’s what Edison did. Theoretical inventing was a European thing. Einstein even complained about that. He said that Americans don’t care about theory, they just want to make money out of it. Which is why so many things that Europeans invented made Americans rich.