Meet the Author: Mike De Socio

I quit the Girl Scouts in fourth grade (long story), so I wasn't sure what to expect when I picked up Mike De Socio's Boy Scouts-focused book, Morally Straight (affiliate link*)—but I couldn't put it down.

So, I was extra excited to talk with Mike about how he wrote the book, his decision to weave his experiences as a queer scout into the story, and what he's working on now.

We talked about so much good stuff, including the five-year writing process for his book (and the draft of another book that he wrote in a month!), why it's important for writers to embrace vulnerability, and how Mike helps nonfiction writers finish their first books.

​Mike De Socio is an independent journalist based in Boston, writing about social justice and solutions. He’s also the author of the book, Morally Straight: How the Fight for LGBTQ+ Inclusion Changed the Boy Scouts—And America (affiliate link*).

Mike's newsletter, The Author's Trail, shows writers the path to becoming published nonfiction authors.

What was your journey to writing, and writing this book in particular?

They're really intertwined, actually, because I became a journalist in high school and did so sort of unexpectedly. I often tell the story about how my brother kind of forced me to join the school paper. He was like, “This is what the smart kids do.”

I said, “Okay, fine,” but I didn't like writing at the time, and so I joined as a photographer. Through high school, that was my focus. I fell in love with photojournalism. That's what I majored in.

From that beginning stage in the high school newspaper, I was really drawn to the story about the Boy Scouts because I was a scout at the time, and it was the same years that this huge issue was blowing up. People were debating quite intensely whether gay people should be allowed in scouting.

My first articles about that were actually for my high school newspaper. I did a little bit of writing only because I was really passionate about the topic. As I followed this path of journalism through college, it was something I always picked up now and again, even as my focus was more on photography.

A few years after college, when I was at my first newsroom job, I tackled the story in a bigger way. I realized that no one had really done a cohesive history of the whole thing, and it felt like, well, why not me? Right?

I am a journalist, I am a lifelong scout, and sure, I'm going to have to do a lot more writing than I'm used to, but I want to figure out how to tackle this. That's how it got started.

Talk to me about writing the book. What was that like?

The whole thing, start to finish, took me about five years. It was a lot of work. When I first started, I was still working full time in a newsroom, in an office, before COVID.

I was doing interviews at the margins of the day, like right after I got home, or on a lunch break. I was squeezing in interviews with some of the key people, at least the first people I thought to reach out to.

James Dale, who's a Supreme Court plaintiff I write about in the book, and his lawyer. Those were some of my first interviews. In my free time, I started chipping away at an early chapter or two, and then COVID happened.

I had some more free time, and I was working from home, so I was inching my way along like that for a long time. Once I got a book contract, it really kicked into overdrive. I had this 18-month period where I basically dedicated half of my week every week to the book, because I was a freelancer and still am.

I condensed the freelance work into one half of the week and then used the other half for book research. Most of that was phone interviews. I don't know how many individual people, probably not quite 100, but at least 50 separate people who I interviewed in depth.

Then there was all this other archival research, old newspaper clippings, court records, all that. I got this rhythm going where each week I would do enough reporting to have enough to write about.

There were five reporting trips all over the country: California, Minnesota, West Virginia, among others. It was a very intense 18 months, to go from having two chapters to having a book that was locked in at 100,000 words.

How did you handle freelancing and writing the book?

Having the basic structure for it was really helpful. It wasn't rigid. There were definitely days where it all mixed, but my goal for the week was like, “I'm only going to allow client meetings or calls on those two days. I'm reserving these two days for less work than the other two.”

That way, I could do book stuff all day for those two days if I needed to, and if not, again, it was flexible. I can dip back into client work if I need to. It was really, really helpful to have that basic structure in my calendar.

I ended up tracking my hours pretty closely. “This week, I spent this many hours writing, this many hours doing interviews and transcribing and whatever.” That helped me understand, like, how much time do I need every week to dedicate to this? I refined the schedule from there.

It really came down to the calendar. Honestly, I live and die by my calendar, and it got messy at some points, but mostly it worked.

You have a deeply reported book that also weaves in your own stories. Why should writers embrace vulnerability?

I think it matters for a few reasons. From a journalistic perspective, it was the most honest and transparent way for me to approach this book.

I realized very early on, it would be weird and disingenuous for me to try to approach it in this traditional objectivity mode, where I'm detached and don't have any feelings about it. That’s impossible for me because I am queer, I was a scout for my entire life. I have opinions, I have feelings.

I decided early on to pitch that idea and say, let's embrace the personal connection I have and see where that takes me, which was very scary at first. I went to college for journalism. I was drilled with the traditional “keep yourself out of it” kind of mentality.

But at least for this project, I felt like that didn't work, so I did weave my own story in where it made sense, especially where it overlapped with the history.

What I learned along the way, which is the second reason, is it's just more interesting that way, too. The dispassionate reporter stance has its place, but I felt like it made this story a lot more dynamic to bring the reader along with how I was feeling about things—not just when I was a teenager, but even when I'm on a reporting trip as a 27-year-old.

I'm telling you, “I'm in the pickup truck with this guy, and I'm getting a sunburn, and his cigarette ashes are in my face.” I wanted it to be a little more visceral. I’ve gotten feedback that that’s what people love about it the most, which is very validating.

When it makes sense, include yourself. If I was writing about NASA or something, I don’t have any personal connection to that, so I wouldn’t approach it in the same way. For this story, I think it was worth embracing.

When those opportunities arise, we shouldn’t be afraid of them as writers.

You’re a journalist, you’re a scout, and you’re queer. How did you balance all of that as you wrote this book?

Structurally, it was a challenge. For a long time, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get all my personal story out of the way in the beginning. At one point, it was this 20-page introduction of my story beginning to end, and then it didn’t appear for the rest of the book.

I got feedback along the way that it was kind of weird and I should integrate it as it made sense in the timeline, so that’s what I ended up doing. It took a little bit of playing with to figure out what worked.

Emotionally, it’s interesting. I’m honest about my emotions in the book but it took a toll on me during the writing. I was seeing a therapist the entire time. Not necessarily because of the book, but it became helpful to vent a lot of that.

I was absorbing a lot of trauma from the sources I was interviewing, a lot of things I could really relate to. Some of that made it into the narrative, but it also wasn’t the point of the book, so I tried to vent that in other ways.

From a journalistic perspective, I tried to be as transparent as I could about my connection to things and what my biases might be. I hope I accomplished that. I wasn’t trying to pretend otherwise.

What strategies did you use to get writing done?

That’s a good question. Because of the nature of this book, where so much of it relied on reporting and research, one of my early struggles was getting into the right pace.

I’d have these blocks of time every morning. I’m a morning person, but what happened was I’d arrive at the computer and be like, “Well, I don’t have any new material to work on. What do I do?”

It took me a while to get into the right rhythm of, “This is how many interviews I need to do to have enough to work with in the next week.”

I write in the mornings. I’d put music on and close the door to my office. I listened to this really great piano album written by a friend of mine—it was great background music that helped me focus. I did that as regularly as I could.

I was not the kind of person who disappeared to some place for a month and banged it all out. That just didn’t work for this book. I had to do it over that long period of time.

I thought I was going to be someone who sought a lot of feedback along the way. My editor offered, like, “You can send me stuff as you’re writing or you can disappear for 18 months and come back at the end with a manuscript.” I ended up doing the latter, which surprised me.

I was getting very protective of it, and I wanted it to be perfect. I delivered the entire thing at the very end. The process was kind of solitary over those 18 months, at least.

I just wrote a draft of a book, too, which we can talk about. I wrote it in a month. It’s a very messy, bad first draft, but that was like a total opposite approach. It's also a different kind of book. So, again, it is very specific to the project.

I want to jump immediately to that! What are you working on?

I'm working on a memoir. In November, I did a memoir class that was kind of embracing the NaNoWriMo thing. We all wrote a first draft in a month, which seemed like an insane thing to do. I guess it kind of is, but it worked for me.

The ethos of the class is like, “No backspacing.” Every word counts. You can vomit your thoughts, if nothing else, just hit the word count. I found that to be really freeing. I hit the word count, which was cool.

Now I'm in a different class that is much more about revision, and I'm working through that. But because it is coming out of my personal memory and there's no research or anything like that, I can just crank out a draft that fast. It's totally different.

Are you under contract for it, or is it still in development?

It's still really early, so my publisher has not bought that book yet. I really haven't even pitched it yet, because it still needs a lot of work. I'm doing it mostly for me.

At this point, I would like to get it published, but it's been personally very fulfilling, regardless of the outcome.

What was your publishing and launch experience like?

Publishing was a wild ride. It's funny, because it moved very slowly in one way. In the beginning, my perception was like, wow, compared to journalism, this moves so slowly. Everything took forever in the contract signing and all that stuff.

Even after, there was basically a year between when I submitted the manuscript and when it was published. Everything took a very long time.

I was happy with my publishing experience overall. I ended up with a small independent publisher, which kind of felt like the best of all worlds. I was traditionally published. They partner with a big five publisher to distribute, so I got that benefit.

But then I got a lot of personal attention from my editor, and I got a really great in-house publicist, so I feel like I lucked out in a lot of ways.

The launch was really, really, really good, very magical. Exceeded expectations. It launched in June, which was cool. We got to do a Pride Month release, which was not originally the plan, but I'm glad it worked out that way.

I went on a book tour with about 12 events over the course of the summer, mostly in the northeast, but a couple of other cities. I got to have this really beautiful, crazy summer of bopping around and doing amazing book events and meeting a lot of readers. So it was a dream.

I hear horror stories. Before I got paired with the in-house publicist, I had no idea what it was going to be like. I started looking into hiring outside publicity help. I got some quotes. I got really far down that path until I got assigned someone that was really on the ball.

They organized the entire book tour, did lots of media for me. I was involved, but they did a lot of the work. I'm very grateful for that. I know that's not the experience that a lot of authors have.

I don't want to make it sound all like sunshine and rainbows, because the launch was really cool, but the period right before launch was really challenging for me.

I struggle with anxiety. With this book, I was really afraid of what the reaction was going to be from a specific corner of the world. I knew that my people would like the book, but then I was like, “Alright, I wrote about a lot of people in power who didn't want to talk to me.” I was very worried about them reacting poorly.

I had all these worst-case scenarios built up in my head about what was going to happen, like getting sued or whatever. Thankfully, none of that happened.

I was even surprised how little online trolling there was, because Goodreads, as you know, can be an awful place. I didn't really get the bad Goodreads reviews that I expected. A lot of my peers were getting bad reviews on their gay books.

Before launch, I was very nervous about all of that, and then I was pleasantly surprised by how little of that actually happened.

What reactions have you gotten to the book?

From the scouting community, specifically, the response was really amazing. I heard from so many people who were like, “Oh my God. Thank you so much for writing this history. We really needed this, and you did it so well.”

It was really validating to hear that. Not that the book was for an insular community. I wanted it to be for a general audience, too. But that kind of approval meant a lot to me, because I'm like, “You know this history as well as me.” To hear that I did it justice is really satisfying.

A lot of LGBTQ young people either saw me at a book event or messaged me or something and were like, “I feel really seen by this book. It's very empowering.” That meant the world to me because I did not have that as a young person.

More broadly, it's been cool to hear people who had no connection to it at all and don't know anything about scouting, or were never a scout, or whatever, and they've been like, “Whoa. This is a whole part of gay history, part of history in general, that I just never knew about.” It's been cool to bring that into people's awareness as well.

The other gratifying part of it, too, has been hearing from some of the people I wrote about. This is tricky. As a journalist, my job is not to necessarily please the people that I'm writing about, even the ones who I'm writing about favorably.

At the same time, when you hear from someone, and they tell you that you really nailed it, even when you maybe showed some parts of the character that were not so great—that's cool, too. I took the time to understand this person and they felt represented.

Where can people find you? What kind of work are you doing now?

The best place people can find me is my website—that's got all of my recent work—and my newsletter. As a writer, in addition to working on the second book, I’m writing mostly journalism about LGBTQ issues and climate and environmental stuff.

I'm helping other authors as well. I’m helping other journalists or nonfiction writers write their first book. When I was doing it, I felt like a lot of the resources were very general or focused on fiction. Writing a novel is a lot more popular.

What I'm trying to do is specifically help journalists who have this one skill set transfer it to book writing, because it is different. There is a lot of growth that needs to happen between those two things. I do that through some self-paced resources as well as one-on-one coaching.

What would you tell someone who wants to write narrative nonfiction?

Make sure that the story you want to tell really is a book and not something else, because a book is a lot.

It's not just a lot of work. It takes a big emotional toll on you, no matter what.

It felt like, in some ways, I sacrificed to write this book, in terms of the amount of time and personal life force I had to put into it. For me, it was completely worth it because I really wanted to tell the story, and I knew it had to be a book.

But a book is very long. Maybe you need to write a magazine article. I don't know. I would encourage people to play with different formats before you immediately assume it has to be a book.

I get it. A book is very glamorous and everything, but maybe it's not the right container for what you're trying to do.

I would also say, as people go through the process, take time to make sure that the people you're working with are the right fit.

I know it's impossible to get an agent, it's impossible to get a book deal. I get it, we don't always have a choice. I didn't have a choice at any of these points, either.

But these relationships are important, and you want to make sure that the people you are collaborating with really get it and have the same goals as you.

I got lucky with my publisher. From the very first phone call, I knew that she understood my project. I did not have to convince her. I knew she was going to be an excellent partner on this journey.

It is a journey—for years, probably. So I would encourage people to be mindful of who you're collaborating with, and make sure that it's the right fit for you.

You don't want to force it. A book is going to live forever. You want to do it right. You want to work with people who can help you do it right.

What's the best book that you've read recently?

I'll say the best book I've read so far this year as of March is The Soul of an Octopus (affiliate link*), which came out in 2015. It's not new, but it was written by Sy Montgomery, who's written a lot of books about nature and science, and it just was delightful.

Octopuses are really incredible creatures. The way that she tells the story is similar to my approach in a lot of ways. She’s going to the New England Aquarium and telling you what her experiences are. It's very first-person as a way of getting you into the science and the drier information about octopuses.

I thought it was incredibly well done. It made me immediately go to the aquarium to see the octopus. It was a delight.

Meet the Author interviews are lightly edited for clarity.

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Mike's approach to writing has so many good lessons to choose from. How do you manage your schedule to make room for your writing priorities? Where might your personal story add more depth to the project you're working on?