How You Write It: Louis Martin

An interview with the American author.

This interview combines two of my passions: writing and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. (To learn more about BJJ, check out this article from Stephanie Hayes.)

Louis Martin is the author of The True Believers and, more recently, co-author of the bestselling How You Bear It with Tom DeBlass. He has written for numerous martial arts publications, including Jits Magazine, Jiu Jitsu  Times, and Grappling Insider. 

Tom DeBlass is a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practitioner, submission grappler, and former MMA fighter. A world, Pan American and US champion, he is the owner/operator of Ocean County Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and runs a network of over thirty affiliate academies around the world. -JRS

Where did your love of reading and writing begin? Were you a reader as a kid or teenager?

I tried to write a book when I was ten years old, a Star Wars book. Before I knew about copyright and any of that stuff. There was this series I used to read, the Wally McDoogle series. I wrote the author when I was about 11 – my grandma helped me mail it on a postcard – and said, “I want to be a writer someday.” And he wrote me back.

Funnily enough, last year I found him on Facebook, he’s in his late sixties now. I sent him a message and said, “Hey, I became a writer.”  He wrote me back right away, and said “Louie, you never wrote back!”

Later you went to California State University, where you studied writing and rhetoric.

Yeah. At that point, I wasn’t planning to be a writer. I just knew I liked writing, that I was good at it. But, as you know, there’s this stereotype about writing jobs: authors aren’t successful. So, I got a Communications degree with a focus on writing and speaking because I thought, Well, you can do anything with that. I was basically right: every job I’ve had has involved writing. I found out later that good writers are actually in very high demand. If you can write, you’ll always have work. 

It was much later that I thought, I’m going to write a book. But it wasn’t something that my trajectory was taking me towards. I just finally made the decision that I could write a book – one that no one would likely read, but I’d be able to say that I did it.

You’re talking about the book that became The True Believers, right? Were you working full time while writing that book?

Yeah, I’d work until five and then everyone would leave the office and I would stay, sometimes until seven, and just bang out a couple thousand words. It didn’t really go quick, though. I mean, it took me a year to write it. I think it takes a year to write a good book. 

In terms of the process, did you have a daily quota? 

I tried that, but someone gave me good advice – I can’t remember who it was – they said, “Don’t set a daily word count, because inevitably, you will not be able to keep that consistency.” 

If you miss two or three days where you don’t write a lot, or you just have a bad week and you barely get anything down, well, then you’re going to be really down on yourself because you’ve kind of derailed your goals. 

The advice – which I’ve followed ever since – is write what you write. As long as you’re trying consistently, you’ll have a really good week and think, I did 10,000 words this week, and then, you know, you’ll have a not good week, but it’s okay. Just hang in there. Writing is a muscle, you have to exercise it to get up to those big, 5,000 word sessions. 

When it came time to edit The True Believers, did you do that yourself?

No. Best decision I ever made: I got a real developmental editor. Their job was to help give me feedback on the story itself. He asked, “How many more drafts do you want to do?” And in my mind, I was thinking, zero. And he’s like, “I think you need three or five more drafts. Because this is good, but it’s not great.” 

And I thought, Shit. But that was really important: You need an editor that really can tell you that your story needs work because I think every story needs work after the first draft.

In that first draft, you’re in the zone. You write as fast as you can, keeping that momentum. After that, it’s the opposite: You want to slow down and resist the urge to think, It’s good enough, it’s ready to go. Then it’s a game of patience really – take a break for two weeks and come back to the draft, you’ll see stuff you didn’t see before. 

After the editing process, did you find a publisher? 

I self published The True Believers. 

How did that work? 

You know, that’s another thing where there was this urge to rush through it. But I did my best to slow down and learn about some of the common mistakes of self-publishing – for example, giving the rights exclusively to one platform like Amazon, instead of buying your ISBN so that you own the book, getting it copyrighted appropriately. I had to learn about all of that as I went.

You published the first book and then started doing more writing as a freelancer?

Yeah. The book didn’t sell, it didn’t make me any money – but it didn’t cost me much money either. It was popular in martial arts circles, however. The right people read it and people started contacting me for interviews on their podcast or show. And that led to conversations about, “Hey, could you write an article about this?” Before I knew it, I had a nice little freelance thing going. 

Did you stop working a full time job? 

No, I kept working full time. I always had a day job for health insurance, because that’s a thing in America. I did the writing on the side for extra money.
 

How did you first encounter Tom DeBlass? 

On social media. I wrote an article about the top inspirational Instagrams, and included his profile in the list. I first spoke to him in 2019, I was writing for a website called Grappling Insider, and the owner, Roy Billington, was pretty well connected. ADCC [an international submission grappling tournament] was coming up, and Roy asked me if I wanted to interview Tom Deblass, because he runs the North American trials. That was the first time we spoke.

How did it get from that first interview to the book?

I was freelancing and I ended up working for a publisher, DartFrog Books. Roy contacted me – he knew the publisher – and said, “Hey, I know it sounds crazy, but what if we wrote a sports biography?” We went to the publisher and made the pitch, because the publisher didn’t know anything about Jiu-jitsu. They didn’t know about the market, how popular it was. 

It was a pretty easy sell with Tom. We said, “Hey, he’s got a huge Instagram following. He’s a proven seller. You know, he has all these DVDs. He’s got 30 academies or under him. This is a no-brainer.” The numbers and size of Tom’s following made it easy.

You have a co-writing credit for the book. Tom Deblass could have easily chosen a ghostwriter, which happens all the time with celebrities, politicians. Why do you think it was different in this case? 

I just made the ask. I thought, Hey, the worst they can say is, no.  And I got the idea from Trump’s biography, I forget what it was called, but it’s written in the nineties and his ghostwriter got the same thing and he just asked for writing credit and they said yes.

For the ghostwriters out there, I’d say it never hurts to ask. Just ask to put your name on it. 

Tom DeBlass keeps an extremely busy schedule. When it came to the writing, what was the actual process, e.g. talking on the phone, etc.?

We did it all on WhatsApp. Almost all through voicemail. I would leave him a voice message and say, “Hey, tell me more about this experience.” And then, you know, sometimes I’d get a reply three hours later. At other times, often late at night, we would basically be talking in real time. 

You would take those conversations and write a draft of, say, a chapter, and then would you send it to him? And would he read it? 

No, not always. I think I sent him the first, 20,000 words or something, a couple chapters. He read some of it, but he didn’t have a lot of time. So I just powered ahead, and I always made it available for him to see. But really, it wasn’t until, like, the very end that he read everything – which scared the shit out of me. Because by then it was basically done. 

It took a lot of trust between him and I – but also, because he runs a business that’s large, I think he’s also used to just delegating things.

You used Tom’s relationship with his father to structure the narrative, Tom picking him up to go to the methadone clinic, at least in that first part, up until his father gets sick. How did you decide to do that as a way to tell Tom’s story?

Everything has to move towards a climactic moment where the hero of the story overcomes something and then comes away better. He learned something from it and he kind of powers on into the future. We need a central conflict that we’re moving towards. And I realized that was Tom’s dad – not that he was the antagonist, but he was the constant that remained unresolved.

As I’m writing, 2020 is happening in real time. COVID-19 is killing off vast swaths of New Jersey. We’re trying to write this book and Tom’s messaging me, “My dad’s in the hospital.” He’s sending me pictures. And, you know, at some point I was like, “I think this should go in the book” – or maybe Tom suggested it, I don’t remember. But it was obvious: That was the way out.

In terms of structure, I was inspired by Tuesdays with Morrie, or a Driving Miss Daisy kind of thing, i.e. people doing an everyday ritual and learning about themselves through that. And I didn’t have to fabricate a bunch of situations in which Tom would be relaying his life story to his dad – he actually did that every morning, drive him to the clinic, and they would talk. As I got to know Tom better, I learned about how his father wasn’t always there, or wasn’t mentally there, for a lot of events in Tom’s life, due to addiction. And I thought, well, maybe this was a way to mend some of that.

In the prologue, Tom thanked you, stating, “He asked the hard questions and never stopped writing.” Tom has dealt with a lot in his family life, his father’s addiction being one example. There’s also the fact that he had been sexually abused as a child: Prior to working on the book, Tom had not shared it publicly. Can you share your thoughts on how that got into the book? 

Pretty early on, Tom just told me that almost casually, “Oh, you know, I was, I was abused when I was eight or whatever.” I kind of dug a little and suggested we talk about it. And he said, “Well, we can’t put that in the book, but, you know, I’ll tell you about it and you can use it to kind of color the story or whatever.” And I thought, Okay, that’s fine. 

The months go by and we kind of come back to it. And I never pried, but I would ask, “Oh, do you think that is because of this thing that happened to you?” I never really pushed hard to put it in the book. Eventually, he said, “Okay, we’re putting it in the book.” 

We talked earlier about trust. In this case, not only are you sharing someone’s story, which is a responsibility, but also sharing some really heavy stuff. How did you feel about that? 

It weighed really heavily on my heart, as it should have, because I’m a human being and I care about Tom. His dad had just passed away, and he was telling me stories about how he found his daughter spraying her grandpa’s perfume, you know, after he had passed, just like spraying it in the bathroom. And that was heartbreaking to me. 

That’s why I wrote that prologue, it was my way of saying, “Hey, if anyone has any problems with this, it’s on me.”Because I wrote about people, I wrote about Renzo [Gracie] and Gordon [Ryan] and Garry [Tonon] and Tom’s mother. I’m responsible for what’s in here. 

You published in late November of 2021. How do you feel about the book now? 

I’m very happy with it. I mean, it was an Amazon bestseller. It reached number one. There’s more than 1,000 books in the martial arts category and it outsold all of them for several days, including the Rickson Gracie biography, which was a USA Today bestseller. We got featured on CNN International. We got featured in the New York Post. That’s a credit to the story, it’s a credit to Tom – and I’d like to think it’s a credit to me for the writing, too. 

What’s what’s next for you in terms of writing projects? 

I’m writing a book for the McDojoLife guy, Robert Ingraham. It’s an amazing story about Rob fighting in bars in the early 2000s in Florida. When he was in high school, 14 or 15 years old. Fighting grown men in nightclubs. Florida had a totally unregulated combat sports environment at that time. And he’s got incredible stories. That’s going to be out by the end of this year. 

Are you doing any freelance work on the side now? 

No, I transitioned out of that. I don’t even know, honestly, if I’m going to keep writing, you know, at least not for money. I’d like to write a fiction novel someday just for fun. But I got a new job that I really enjoy. I have a kid. We’re talking about having another one. I want to get to a point where at 5:00, I clock out and I don’t have to think about, Oh, I’ve got to go home and write. 

One of the reasons why I’ve been able to be successful at writing is that I do treat it like a job. It’s a passion, but it’s also work. I need to put in the time. I’m at a point in my life where I want to try to maximize my happiness, the time I spend with my family. Maybe that means I only write two nights a week now instead of four or five.