September 12, 2025 • 19 mins
An intimate and captivating exploration of Lin-Manuel Miranda's artistic journey, revealing how the creator of the Broadway musicals Hamilton and In the Heights found his unique voice through bold collaborations, redefining the world of musical theater.How did Lin-Manuel Miranda, the sweet, sensitive son of Puerto Rican parents from an immigrant neighborhood in Manhattan, rise to become the preeminent musical storyteller of the 21st century? Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist is his incredible story as never told before, tracing Miranda's path from an often isolated child to the winner of multiple Tonys and Grammys for his Broadway hits Hamilton and In the Heights; a global chart-topping sensation for his songs in Disney's Moana and Encanto; and the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Genius Grant.Miranda's journey is a testament to the power of creativity, collaboration, and cultural synthesis. He was not a musical prodigy, but an insatiable drive to create art and learn from those around him propelled him to fuse his Latino heritage with pop, hip-hop, and the musical styles of Broadway. His was a new way of telling American stories, and of speaking to new audiences.Drawing on interviews with Miranda's family, friends, and mentors-and many conversations with Miranda himself-Daniel Pollack-Pelzner delves into the formative experiences that shaped Miranda as an artist, from his early musicals in high school and college to the creation of his Broadway and Hollywood triumphs. With full access to Miranda's inner circle, this behind-the-scenes origin story is sure to captivate his legions of fans and beyond.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Daniel, your book is coming out at such an amazing
time period because here in Charlotte, I'm sure it's across
the nation, but but Hamilton has been re released in theaters,
and really for the first time since the Lockdown, people
are getting that movie experience, and then all of a sudden,
here's your book, and I'm going, well, wait a second,
I just experienced Hamilton again. I've got to go to
this book because I want to understand the man behind it.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
I love that. That's why I wrote the book is
because I think we often believe that masterpieces like Hamilton
just kind of spring fully formed out of their creators' heads.
But in fact, that show took him eight years to write,
and it was the eighth musical that he had written.
So I loved getting to go all the way back
to the childhood influences, the early projects.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
I had known.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
He wrote a grungemot rock musical when he was in college.
Lots of other you know, some false starts, some raw
and turns, and some great steps along the way that
we're so much fun to dive into.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
So many fans don't understand what it's like to walk
a mile in our creative shoes. They just assumed that
it comes from out of nowhere. They don't realize it
takes teamwork, it takes time, and more importantly, it takes patience.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
That's absolutely true. You know, a friend read an early
draft of this book and said, Daniel, what you're really
arguing is that artistic genius is a team sport. And
I thought, Oh, that's exactly right, because Linn Manuel's always
wanted to tell stories, has always wanted to write songs,
and has always known that he's not the best singer,
not the best instrumentalist, not the best you know, music
(01:26):
theory guy among his cohort, but he loves attracting talent
around him. So even in high school, he'd make a
movie and wanted to have an original score, and he'd
find the guys from jazz chorus who could write music.
He'd find the guys who could play instruments, and he
made it a lot of fun for people to collaborate
with him. He directed a production of West Side Story
(01:46):
his senior year, and when everybody had to learn tricky
dance steps for the dance at the gym, he declared
it National Mambo Week and brought in snacks and did
Latin themed dance break exercises so that it would be
the most fun thing that everybody would want to do.
And as a result, he's a collaborator that just everybody
loves to be in the room with.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
See. He reminds me so much of a student from
Julia Cameron's The Artist Way, because what you just explained
to me is something that you would find in her
book The Vein of Gold, where it's about celebrating art,
it's about inviting people to take chances and have the
confidence to be able to explore their imaginations.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
That's a beautiful way of putting it. And I think
for lyn Manuel, a lot of that confidence and risk
taking goes back to his mother. He was a really
sensitive child. He would cry if they had the news on.
He would cry at the cord changes and bridge over
troubled water. His dad wanted to toughen him up, he
didn't want to get bullied at school. He got him
(02:41):
a rock'am sockem like boxing puppet, and well just hugged
the puppet and said no fighting. But his mom was
a child psychologist, and she told me that she saw
it as her job to let her son know that
whatever he was feeling was okay to feel, and that
in fact, if he wanted to be an artist, he
needed to stay in touch with all of those feelings.
(03:02):
And she gave him this, this mantra that he still
repeats to this day, which is, it's all grist for
the mill. Whatever you're feeling, you can turn it into
your art. And he would tell her his first job
was working at a McDonald's on the Upper West Side
of New York, and he had terrible math anxieties and
used to have nightmares about having to calculate the tab
(03:23):
for the customers and the allotted amount of time, and
in his dream, the pencil from the cash register was
impaled in his head and he told his mom, I
can't do this anymore, and she said, you know what,
you want to be a writer. It's all grist for
the mill. Remember these feelings. And sure enough, after he
became a Broadway composer with his first hit in the Heights,
another composer, Stephen Schwartz, came to him and asked if
(03:43):
he would write a song about his first job that
Schwartz could use for a musical called Working and Lend
Minwell said, I got a song for you. And he
wrote about working at the McDonald's, how terrible was during
the day, and what a thrill it was to go
out on a delivery run and his mom's head sea.
It's all grist for the man.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
See I call that stream thinking. Take the situation that
you're presently in and don't go to the negative side.
Sit there and find out the positive and locate a story.
Be an archaeologist, dig.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
In, yeah, boy, And that is something that lin Manuel
really has the ability to do. I hadn't realized how
many songs in Hamilton go back, deep, deep, deep into
those dark parts of his childhood. So he told me
about being in preschool and having his best friend with
the girl he would call his girlfriend, they'd hold hands,
(04:31):
he gave her a kiss every day. One day he
wakes up, his mom is crying and she tells him,
your best friend drowned, no terrible accident in the in
her parents' backyard, and he says the next he was
four years old. He said, the next year just was
gray for him. He felt lifeless, and then he went,
you know, went to high school. It sort of got
filed away, but he learned about Alexander Hamilton's own son,
(04:54):
dying in a duel before Hamilton fought his own duel.
And when it was came time to write that song
about Hamilton and his wife grieving their son's death, a
song called its Client Uptown, he remembered what he imagined
his childhood friend's parents must have felt like experiencing that
terrible loss, and he told me the roots of that
(05:16):
song came from when he was four years old.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Wow, being a writer, is there something in your past
that you would love to step back into just to
see what you were expressing? Because I mean as it was,
I mean Linnmanuel, what he does is he takes the
you know, these experiences in personal life and he brings
it forward in a storytelling way. I mean, I've still
had poetry from the nineteen seventies, but I don't want
to go back there and re experience it. But then again,
(05:40):
I could be missing out on something because this guy
is proving to me, don't ignore what you have written.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
You know that it was true even down to the
musical level. Actually, a story I really loved, which is
that you know, Lynn was always writing this stuff in
high school, but he hadn't he hadn't really gotten good
at it. Yet, and so he wanted to make a
movie about out the talent show at his high school
in New York, the Battle of the Bands, and he
asked he wrote a little song, and he asked one
(06:07):
of the actual bands at his school if they would
play it for the real talent show and he could
film them doing it and then weave it into a
little romantic movie that he was doing. And they looked
at his song and they were like, why would we
play the song by this sixteen year old instead of
like the sixties do wop number that we've been practicing
for weeks. They got up on stage. Lynn had his
(06:27):
camera ready to film them, and they didn't perform his song.
They perform a dream Lover, which was the song that
they'd been working on. They came off stage, and he
was in tears because he couldn't make the movie that
he wanted to they wouldn't perform his original composition. He
felt terrible, but he filed away that song. And then
about fifteen years later, when he was writing his first
(06:49):
Broadway musical, in the Heights, he needed a melody for
the I Want song in that show, a show a
song called ninety six thousand where all the characters in
the barrio, imagine what they would do if they won
a ninety six thousand dollars lottery payout. And he thought,
what did it sound like for me when I was
dreaming about what would happen if my fantasies came true?
(07:11):
It would sound like I was in high school hoping
that my friends would play my song. And he took
the same melody for that song you'd written in high
school that his friends wouldn't play at the Talent show,
and he used it for ninety six thousand, the show
that won the Tony Award for Best Musical.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Let me ask you a question, how did he handle
being so creative at such an early age, Because I mean,
I'm sure you went through it as well, where people
said you're a freak, what do you thinking outside the box?
For think like the rest of us.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
It was challenging for him. He told me he went
through a period, even though he's always been a sweet
guy and a beloved collaborator, but he went through a
period of being really angry at his friends for not
wanting to spend every free moment making art the way
that he did. And in fact, when he was in
tenth grade, he decided he'd always made little, little home videos.
(07:57):
He wanted to make a feature length movie, really spired
by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, those nineties indie cinema
guys who just said, write a script, film it with
your friends. Put it up. So for a while his
friends were willing to trek all the way up to
two hundred and seventh Street in northern Manhattan every weekend
to film their kung fu hip hop Way Simpson's spinoff
(08:20):
show called Clayton's Friends. And then one weekend, Lufis Bell's like,
I'm not doing this anymore, and he went off to
summer camp, and he got this letter from Lin Manuel saying,
how dare you abandon the filming of our movie to
go to summer camp? And you know whatever, laniards of
your friends. And then the next week the friend told
me he got another letter from lin Manuel apologizing for
(08:42):
the first letter and saying, you know what, I was
a jerk. Our friendship is the most important thing to me.
We'll finish the movie when you get back. And what
I felt you could see was like in real time
lin Manuel learning how to adjust his own passions to
what was realistic for the people around him and how
he could still value those relationships and also make a
(09:03):
feature film that he premiered at his house later. So
it was a negotiation, but I loved seeing him go
through the learning stages on how to do it better.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Please do not move. There's more with Daniel Paullack Pilsner
coming up next the name of his book Lynn Manuel
Miranda The Education of an Artist. We are back with
Daniel Pollack Pilsner. You know what the lesson was that
I had to learn on that because I too, am
very selfish when it comes to creativity. If you're not
doing seven days a week, you're not working with me.
But this is what a psychologist told me. Go find
(09:33):
a baby something, baby bird, baby squirrel. Your selflessness will
teach you to be more open to other people in
accepting their life as well.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
What a beautiful lesson. I think that's a lovely thing
to do, is to sort of focus on how you
can help other people. And yes, got seen in the
book Where in the Heights is the lin Minmil's first
musical is about to open on Broadway. He's got cameras.
Following Newsweek is called this the first musical of the
Obama era. It's a big deal. And what does he do.
(10:04):
He spends the whole opening, the whole day before opening
night making gifts for everybody else in the cast. So
he said that's the only way he could handle the
pressure and the sort of ego of that moment is
by focusing on all the other people around him.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
We've let that happen. You know, you brought up something
that I've been I need to talk about, and that
is is that you said that you opened up your
book for your friends to read before it was released.
And I just did research on Stephen King, who says
that you should be doing all of your writing behind
closed doors. And so when you talked about that door
being open for them to read it, I went, oh
my god. I mean, it's like, inside my heart, I'm
(10:39):
going you just broke the Stephen King rule.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Well, Stephen King is a master, and I would never
dispute him. But this was my first book. This was
a learning process for me, and you know, you're sharing
your own creative process. For me, it's often a really
daunting thing to just face that empty blank page, that
cursor blinking on my screen. And so I felt like
(11:05):
what I had to think, what have I learned from
the subject of my book about how to create something valuable?
And what I learned from len Manuel was he doesn't
always hit a home run at his first step bat.
Sometimes he does, sometimes it comes out perfect. But for
that first show in the Heights, his former girlfriend had
saved the original script and there was not a single
(11:27):
word from that original script that made it into the
Broadway production except the title phrase in the Height, And
so that freed me out from thinking I had to
get it right the first time. I thought, I'm just
going to get a draft down and then I'm going
to do what Len Manuel does, which is share that
first version with people I trust, some people who are
my aunt's going to read everything I write and love
it and give me the cheerleading fuel I need to continue.
(11:50):
My dad's going to read it and say, Daniel, I
don't share your enthusiasm for this subject. I wonder if
there's another way you could tell this story, So, you know,
having a little bit of cheer leading and a little
bit of you know, loving criticism, That's what I did
for every single chapter. And my hope is that the
result is something not just that tickled me to write,
but that other people would enjoy to read too.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
From one published author to another, what do you do
about fermintine time? When you know that it's finished and
you've got to set it aside because the next time
you come back, you have to be the reader and
not the writer.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Man, that is so hard. You're absolutely as you know
from the process. I remember one of my advisors in
grad school said, you know, you take the roast out
of the oven, you got to let it sit for
a while before you start cutting it open. And indeed
it was true. So the first the publisher had asked
me for I think three hundred pages, my first draft
(12:44):
was six hundred pages because I was so excited to
learn every poster that was on Lin Manuel's freshman year
in college dorm room, and I wanted to put it
in the book, and I thought every reader will want
to know this too. So it took me a while
to get out of that process and then come back.
Can see, Oh, I guess they don't need to know
every single production that was put on at in Mental
(13:05):
Health High School from nineteen ninety two to nineteen ninety eight.
This is the story of the education of an artist,
So I have to now go back and cut out
anything that's not telling that story. And my dad then
read the revised version after it'd gone through the whole
process of the publisher, and he texted me, thank god
for your editor exclamation point.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Well, I think what inspires me most about this book,
Lynn Manuel Miranda the Education of the Artist, is the
fact that it is about the creation of the artist.
My first book was basically about the birth of an artist,
and I documented everything about growing forward, what to do,
how to practice, blah blah blah, blah, blah blah. And
so when I tap into this, I'm going, Oh, my god,
we aren't just freaks. We're so in touch with reaching
(13:45):
people that there's nothing that's going to stand in our way.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
I love that you found that connection to his story,
and that's really it's why I wanted to write the
book for anybody who wanted to be an artist, or
just be creative in their life, or be able to
tell their own story. And used to teach a class
at my university for first year students on coming of
age stories, where we would read a lot of ones
about people straddling different cultures trying to realize their dreams
(14:10):
and then students would write their own coming of age
stories using the techniques we'd learn from these books at
the end. And that was my challenge for me for
the book is like, could I write a nineties Ya
coming of age story and that's actually true and that
would provide not a blueprint but kind of a mindset
for exactly what you're describing. How do you develop the
confidence to be able to bring all of yourself into
(14:32):
your work? And for Lin Manuel, I mean he grew up,
you know, in an immigrant neighborhood in northern Manhattan. He
went to school mostly with non Latino students who couldn't
even pronounce his name, lin Manuel. He was Lin at school,
lin Manuel at home. His abuela spook Spanish, his classmates,
you know, mostly spoke English, and he felt like there
was this fracture within him. And it wasn't really until
(14:54):
he got to college. He lived at a Latino cultural
house at Wesleyan University. Right around the time of the
Life and Pop boom in the late nineties, with you,
Ricky Martin and Mark Antony starting to write songs in English,
he felt like he had permission to write from his
full self and that was the kind of journey that
I wanted for everybody, whether it's a cultural identity they're straddling,
(15:17):
or a gap between how they see themselves and how
other people do, or whatether their parents want them to
do and the career they've envisioned for themselves. Like, it's
not going to get resolved overnight, but I hope this
book would give people the courage to continue.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Along your writing journey. Did you want to be a
YA author? And the reason why I bring that up
is because you present this story in the way that
so many YA authors are saying, I'm going to put
an identity on this man, and you're going to finally
start seeing yourself in stories, and that inspires cultures to
step into it, going, oh my god, I can do
this too, because someone like yourself made it so simple
(15:50):
for them to see it can be done.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Well. I'm glad that came across that way to you.
By one of my relatives read an early version of
this and said, Daniel, this is less pretentious than your
writing usually is.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
A lot of that was the case. And you know
what the most gratifying response has been, I'm staying with
friends in Brooklyn of mine from grad school. They've got
a ten year old son. He's the kind of guy.
He didn't like to practice be anybody likes to make
up songs himself. He told me he's read the book
four times, and I can't believe it, but that was
(16:23):
my dream that a ten year old could read this book.
And I've got, you know, grandma's who are reading the
book to and finding things that are new for them.
So I really tried to write it in a way
that would be inviting and accessible to anybody. And that's
really a story, and it's a story not just of triumphs.
There are a lot of moments when Lynn's in tears
in this book, when he feels like he's wasted the
(16:44):
resources he's been given, when he tried a project and
it didn't work. And I felt like that was really
important to include two, not just the high points, but
for everybody who wants to make art, to know that
even our heroes don't hit a home run every time.
It's often on a long and slow process.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
You talked about Lynn Manuel being well, not such a
great singer, and right away I got to tell you
I thought of Bob Dylan, and I thought O'Neil young,
and I thought to myself, he's in the right boat.
At least he's trying. At least he's connecting.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
That's true. I remember my dad saying to me with
reverence to Bob Dylan, like there's a difference between having
a good voice and being a good singer. And I
might put Bob Dylan and Lin Manuel maybe together in
that category of people who you're not going to go
see him at the Metropolitan Opera, but boy, they they
giving voice to stories that we've never heard before and
(17:33):
putting language together in a way that just refreshes our
sense of what English can do and how we can
see the world around us. And I think people you
know interviewing his high school choir director is like Lynn
wasn't the guy I would go to for pitch, but
he was the guy I would go to to everybody
else up when we were singing before a Knicks game
(17:54):
going on tour Senegal, I'd say, mister Austin, this wonderful
choir director would say, Lynn, do your thing, and Lynn would.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Do a warm up.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
He would he would jump on top of the desk
and sing a Disney song to get everybody energized, and
that's kind of the you know, the touchstone role that
he plays for everybody.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
Where can people go to find out more about you
and give you some love?
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Sir? Oh well, I got a website Daniel Pollackpelsner dot com.
I'd love to hear from people who read the book.
And you know a question I was thinking for readers
is I really tried to highlight Lynn's teachers, so the
you know, the eighth grade teacher, doctor Rembert Herbert, who
saw Lynn kind of huddled up in the back of
the classroom just scribbling lyrics in his notebook and wrote
(18:36):
Linn a note on the back of one of his
papers saying, hey, man, you've been hibernating. It's spring. Why
don't you join us. Let me introduce you to the
Student Written Theater Club because they're going to want what
you know how to do. So I'd love to hear
from readers who was your doctor Herbert, who was the
person who saw you and gave you the encouragement to
be able to pursue something that mattered to you, Because
those the kind of series I'm trying to uplift in
(18:58):
the book.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
You got to come back to the show time in
the future, the door is always going to be open
for you, Daniel.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
Thank you man. What a treat to talk about the
creative process with you and with a fellow writer too.
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Okay, thank you you too,
Daniel, your book is coming out at such an amazing
time period because here in Charlotte, I'm sure it's across
the nation, but but Hamilton has been re released in theaters,
and really for the first time since the Lockdown, people
are getting that movie experience, and then all of a sudden,
here's your book, and I'm going, well, wait a second,
I just experienced Hamilton again. I've got to go to
this book because I want to understand the man behind it.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
I love that. That's why I wrote the book is
because I think we often believe that masterpieces like Hamilton
just kind of spring fully formed out of their creators' heads.
But in fact, that show took him eight years to write,
and it was the eighth musical that he had written.
So I loved getting to go all the way back
to the childhood influences, the early projects.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
I had known.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
He wrote a grungemot rock musical when he was in college.
Lots of other you know, some false starts, some raw
and turns, and some great steps along the way that
we're so much fun to dive into.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
So many fans don't understand what it's like to walk
a mile in our creative shoes. They just assumed that
it comes from out of nowhere. They don't realize it
takes teamwork, it takes time, and more importantly, it takes patience.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
That's absolutely true. You know, a friend read an early
draft of this book and said, Daniel, what you're really
arguing is that artistic genius is a team sport. And
I thought, Oh, that's exactly right, because Linn Manuel's always
wanted to tell stories, has always wanted to write songs,
and has always known that he's not the best singer,
not the best instrumentalist, not the best you know, music
(01:26):
theory guy among his cohort, but he loves attracting talent
around him. So even in high school, he'd make a
movie and wanted to have an original score, and he'd
find the guys from jazz chorus who could write music.
He'd find the guys who could play instruments, and he
made it a lot of fun for people to collaborate
with him. He directed a production of West Side Story
(01:46):
his senior year, and when everybody had to learn tricky
dance steps for the dance at the gym, he declared
it National Mambo Week and brought in snacks and did
Latin themed dance break exercises so that it would be
the most fun thing that everybody would want to do.
And as a result, he's a collaborator that just everybody
loves to be in the room with.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
See. He reminds me so much of a student from
Julia Cameron's The Artist Way, because what you just explained
to me is something that you would find in her
book The Vein of Gold, where it's about celebrating art,
it's about inviting people to take chances and have the
confidence to be able to explore their imaginations.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
That's a beautiful way of putting it. And I think
for lyn Manuel, a lot of that confidence and risk
taking goes back to his mother. He was a really
sensitive child. He would cry if they had the news on.
He would cry at the cord changes and bridge over
troubled water. His dad wanted to toughen him up, he
didn't want to get bullied at school. He got him
(02:41):
a rock'am sockem like boxing puppet, and well just hugged
the puppet and said no fighting. But his mom was
a child psychologist, and she told me that she saw
it as her job to let her son know that
whatever he was feeling was okay to feel, and that
in fact, if he wanted to be an artist, he
needed to stay in touch with all of those feelings.
(03:02):
And she gave him this, this mantra that he still
repeats to this day, which is, it's all grist for
the mill. Whatever you're feeling, you can turn it into
your art. And he would tell her his first job
was working at a McDonald's on the Upper West Side
of New York, and he had terrible math anxieties and
used to have nightmares about having to calculate the tab
(03:23):
for the customers and the allotted amount of time, and
in his dream, the pencil from the cash register was
impaled in his head and he told his mom, I
can't do this anymore, and she said, you know what,
you want to be a writer. It's all grist for
the mill. Remember these feelings. And sure enough, after he
became a Broadway composer with his first hit in the Heights,
another composer, Stephen Schwartz, came to him and asked if
(03:43):
he would write a song about his first job that
Schwartz could use for a musical called Working and Lend
Minwell said, I got a song for you. And he
wrote about working at the McDonald's, how terrible was during
the day, and what a thrill it was to go
out on a delivery run and his mom's head sea.
It's all grist for the man.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
See I call that stream thinking. Take the situation that
you're presently in and don't go to the negative side.
Sit there and find out the positive and locate a story.
Be an archaeologist, dig.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
In, yeah, boy, And that is something that lin Manuel
really has the ability to do. I hadn't realized how
many songs in Hamilton go back, deep, deep, deep into
those dark parts of his childhood. So he told me
about being in preschool and having his best friend with
the girl he would call his girlfriend, they'd hold hands,
(04:31):
he gave her a kiss every day. One day he
wakes up, his mom is crying and she tells him,
your best friend drowned, no terrible accident in the in
her parents' backyard, and he says the next he was
four years old. He said, the next year just was
gray for him. He felt lifeless, and then he went,
you know, went to high school. It sort of got
filed away, but he learned about Alexander Hamilton's own son,
(04:54):
dying in a duel before Hamilton fought his own duel.
And when it was came time to write that song
about Hamilton and his wife grieving their son's death, a
song called its Client Uptown, he remembered what he imagined
his childhood friend's parents must have felt like experiencing that
terrible loss, and he told me the roots of that
(05:16):
song came from when he was four years old.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Wow, being a writer, is there something in your past
that you would love to step back into just to
see what you were expressing? Because I mean as it was,
I mean Linnmanuel, what he does is he takes the
you know, these experiences in personal life and he brings
it forward in a storytelling way. I mean, I've still
had poetry from the nineteen seventies, but I don't want
to go back there and re experience it. But then again,
(05:40):
I could be missing out on something because this guy
is proving to me, don't ignore what you have written.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
You know that it was true even down to the
musical level. Actually, a story I really loved, which is
that you know, Lynn was always writing this stuff in
high school, but he hadn't he hadn't really gotten good
at it. Yet, and so he wanted to make a
movie about out the talent show at his high school
in New York, the Battle of the Bands, and he
asked he wrote a little song, and he asked one
(06:07):
of the actual bands at his school if they would
play it for the real talent show and he could
film them doing it and then weave it into a
little romantic movie that he was doing. And they looked
at his song and they were like, why would we
play the song by this sixteen year old instead of
like the sixties do wop number that we've been practicing
for weeks. They got up on stage. Lynn had his
(06:27):
camera ready to film them, and they didn't perform his song.
They perform a dream Lover, which was the song that
they'd been working on. They came off stage, and he
was in tears because he couldn't make the movie that
he wanted to they wouldn't perform his original composition. He
felt terrible, but he filed away that song. And then
about fifteen years later, when he was writing his first
(06:49):
Broadway musical, in the Heights, he needed a melody for
the I Want song in that show, a show a
song called ninety six thousand where all the characters in
the barrio, imagine what they would do if they won
a ninety six thousand dollars lottery payout. And he thought,
what did it sound like for me when I was
dreaming about what would happen if my fantasies came true?
(07:11):
It would sound like I was in high school hoping
that my friends would play my song. And he took
the same melody for that song you'd written in high
school that his friends wouldn't play at the Talent show,
and he used it for ninety six thousand, the show
that won the Tony Award for Best Musical.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Let me ask you a question, how did he handle
being so creative at such an early age, Because I mean,
I'm sure you went through it as well, where people
said you're a freak, what do you thinking outside the box?
For think like the rest of us.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
It was challenging for him. He told me he went
through a period, even though he's always been a sweet
guy and a beloved collaborator, but he went through a
period of being really angry at his friends for not
wanting to spend every free moment making art the way
that he did. And in fact, when he was in
tenth grade, he decided he'd always made little, little home videos.
(07:57):
He wanted to make a feature length movie, really spired
by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, those nineties indie cinema
guys who just said, write a script, film it with
your friends. Put it up. So for a while his
friends were willing to trek all the way up to
two hundred and seventh Street in northern Manhattan every weekend
to film their kung fu hip hop Way Simpson's spinoff
(08:20):
show called Clayton's Friends. And then one weekend, Lufis Bell's like,
I'm not doing this anymore, and he went off to
summer camp, and he got this letter from Lin Manuel saying,
how dare you abandon the filming of our movie to
go to summer camp? And you know whatever, laniards of
your friends. And then the next week the friend told
me he got another letter from lin Manuel apologizing for
(08:42):
the first letter and saying, you know what, I was
a jerk. Our friendship is the most important thing to me.
We'll finish the movie when you get back. And what
I felt you could see was like in real time
lin Manuel learning how to adjust his own passions to
what was realistic for the people around him and how
he could still value those relationships and also make a
(09:03):
feature film that he premiered at his house later. So
it was a negotiation, but I loved seeing him go
through the learning stages on how to do it better.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Please do not move. There's more with Daniel Paullack Pilsner
coming up next the name of his book Lynn Manuel
Miranda The Education of an Artist. We are back with
Daniel Pollack Pilsner. You know what the lesson was that
I had to learn on that because I too, am
very selfish when it comes to creativity. If you're not
doing seven days a week, you're not working with me.
But this is what a psychologist told me. Go find
(09:33):
a baby something, baby bird, baby squirrel. Your selflessness will
teach you to be more open to other people in
accepting their life as well.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
What a beautiful lesson. I think that's a lovely thing
to do, is to sort of focus on how you
can help other people. And yes, got seen in the
book Where in the Heights is the lin Minmil's first
musical is about to open on Broadway. He's got cameras.
Following Newsweek is called this the first musical of the
Obama era. It's a big deal. And what does he do.
(10:04):
He spends the whole opening, the whole day before opening
night making gifts for everybody else in the cast. So
he said that's the only way he could handle the
pressure and the sort of ego of that moment is
by focusing on all the other people around him.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
We've let that happen. You know, you brought up something
that I've been I need to talk about, and that
is is that you said that you opened up your
book for your friends to read before it was released.
And I just did research on Stephen King, who says
that you should be doing all of your writing behind
closed doors. And so when you talked about that door
being open for them to read it, I went, oh
my god. I mean, it's like, inside my heart, I'm
(10:39):
going you just broke the Stephen King rule.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Well, Stephen King is a master, and I would never
dispute him. But this was my first book. This was
a learning process for me, and you know, you're sharing
your own creative process. For me, it's often a really
daunting thing to just face that empty blank page, that
cursor blinking on my screen. And so I felt like
(11:05):
what I had to think, what have I learned from
the subject of my book about how to create something valuable?
And what I learned from len Manuel was he doesn't
always hit a home run at his first step bat.
Sometimes he does, sometimes it comes out perfect. But for
that first show in the Heights, his former girlfriend had
saved the original script and there was not a single
(11:27):
word from that original script that made it into the
Broadway production except the title phrase in the Height, And
so that freed me out from thinking I had to
get it right the first time. I thought, I'm just
going to get a draft down and then I'm going
to do what Len Manuel does, which is share that
first version with people I trust, some people who are
my aunt's going to read everything I write and love
it and give me the cheerleading fuel I need to continue.
(11:50):
My dad's going to read it and say, Daniel, I
don't share your enthusiasm for this subject. I wonder if
there's another way you could tell this story, So, you know,
having a little bit of cheer leading and a little
bit of you know, loving criticism, That's what I did
for every single chapter. And my hope is that the
result is something not just that tickled me to write,
but that other people would enjoy to read too.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
From one published author to another, what do you do
about fermintine time? When you know that it's finished and
you've got to set it aside because the next time
you come back, you have to be the reader and
not the writer.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Man, that is so hard. You're absolutely as you know
from the process. I remember one of my advisors in
grad school said, you know, you take the roast out
of the oven, you got to let it sit for
a while before you start cutting it open. And indeed
it was true. So the first the publisher had asked
me for I think three hundred pages, my first draft
(12:44):
was six hundred pages because I was so excited to
learn every poster that was on Lin Manuel's freshman year
in college dorm room, and I wanted to put it
in the book, and I thought every reader will want
to know this too. So it took me a while
to get out of that process and then come back.
Can see, Oh, I guess they don't need to know
every single production that was put on at in Mental
(13:05):
Health High School from nineteen ninety two to nineteen ninety eight.
This is the story of the education of an artist,
So I have to now go back and cut out
anything that's not telling that story. And my dad then
read the revised version after it'd gone through the whole
process of the publisher, and he texted me, thank god
for your editor exclamation point.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Well, I think what inspires me most about this book,
Lynn Manuel Miranda the Education of the Artist, is the
fact that it is about the creation of the artist.
My first book was basically about the birth of an artist,
and I documented everything about growing forward, what to do,
how to practice, blah blah blah, blah, blah blah. And
so when I tap into this, I'm going, Oh, my god,
we aren't just freaks. We're so in touch with reaching
(13:45):
people that there's nothing that's going to stand in our way.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
I love that you found that connection to his story,
and that's really it's why I wanted to write the
book for anybody who wanted to be an artist, or
just be creative in their life, or be able to
tell their own story. And used to teach a class
at my university for first year students on coming of
age stories, where we would read a lot of ones
about people straddling different cultures trying to realize their dreams
(14:10):
and then students would write their own coming of age
stories using the techniques we'd learn from these books at
the end. And that was my challenge for me for
the book is like, could I write a nineties Ya
coming of age story and that's actually true and that
would provide not a blueprint but kind of a mindset
for exactly what you're describing. How do you develop the
confidence to be able to bring all of yourself into
(14:32):
your work? And for Lin Manuel, I mean he grew up,
you know, in an immigrant neighborhood in northern Manhattan. He
went to school mostly with non Latino students who couldn't
even pronounce his name, lin Manuel. He was Lin at school,
lin Manuel at home. His abuela spook Spanish, his classmates,
you know, mostly spoke English, and he felt like there
was this fracture within him. And it wasn't really until
(14:54):
he got to college. He lived at a Latino cultural
house at Wesleyan University. Right around the time of the
Life and Pop boom in the late nineties, with you,
Ricky Martin and Mark Antony starting to write songs in English,
he felt like he had permission to write from his
full self and that was the kind of journey that
I wanted for everybody, whether it's a cultural identity they're straddling,
(15:17):
or a gap between how they see themselves and how
other people do, or whatether their parents want them to
do and the career they've envisioned for themselves. Like, it's
not going to get resolved overnight, but I hope this
book would give people the courage to continue.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Along your writing journey. Did you want to be a
YA author? And the reason why I bring that up
is because you present this story in the way that
so many YA authors are saying, I'm going to put
an identity on this man, and you're going to finally
start seeing yourself in stories, and that inspires cultures to
step into it, going, oh my god, I can do
this too, because someone like yourself made it so simple
(15:50):
for them to see it can be done.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Well. I'm glad that came across that way to you.
By one of my relatives read an early version of
this and said, Daniel, this is less pretentious than your
writing usually is.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
A lot of that was the case. And you know
what the most gratifying response has been, I'm staying with
friends in Brooklyn of mine from grad school. They've got
a ten year old son. He's the kind of guy.
He didn't like to practice be anybody likes to make
up songs himself. He told me he's read the book
four times, and I can't believe it, but that was
(16:23):
my dream that a ten year old could read this book.
And I've got, you know, grandma's who are reading the
book to and finding things that are new for them.
So I really tried to write it in a way
that would be inviting and accessible to anybody. And that's
really a story, and it's a story not just of triumphs.
There are a lot of moments when Lynn's in tears
in this book, when he feels like he's wasted the
(16:44):
resources he's been given, when he tried a project and
it didn't work. And I felt like that was really
important to include two, not just the high points, but
for everybody who wants to make art, to know that
even our heroes don't hit a home run every time.
It's often on a long and slow process.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
You talked about Lynn Manuel being well, not such a
great singer, and right away I got to tell you
I thought of Bob Dylan, and I thought O'Neil young,
and I thought to myself, he's in the right boat.
At least he's trying. At least he's connecting.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
That's true. I remember my dad saying to me with
reverence to Bob Dylan, like there's a difference between having
a good voice and being a good singer. And I
might put Bob Dylan and Lin Manuel maybe together in
that category of people who you're not going to go
see him at the Metropolitan Opera, but boy, they they
giving voice to stories that we've never heard before and
(17:33):
putting language together in a way that just refreshes our
sense of what English can do and how we can
see the world around us. And I think people you
know interviewing his high school choir director is like Lynn
wasn't the guy I would go to for pitch, but
he was the guy I would go to to everybody
else up when we were singing before a Knicks game
(17:54):
going on tour Senegal, I'd say, mister Austin, this wonderful
choir director would say, Lynn, do your thing, and Lynn would.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Do a warm up.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
He would he would jump on top of the desk
and sing a Disney song to get everybody energized, and
that's kind of the you know, the touchstone role that
he plays for everybody.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
Where can people go to find out more about you
and give you some love?
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Sir? Oh well, I got a website Daniel Pollackpelsner dot com.
I'd love to hear from people who read the book.
And you know a question I was thinking for readers
is I really tried to highlight Lynn's teachers, so the
you know, the eighth grade teacher, doctor Rembert Herbert, who
saw Lynn kind of huddled up in the back of
the classroom just scribbling lyrics in his notebook and wrote
(18:36):
Linn a note on the back of one of his
papers saying, hey, man, you've been hibernating. It's spring. Why
don't you join us. Let me introduce you to the
Student Written Theater Club because they're going to want what
you know how to do. So I'd love to hear
from readers who was your doctor Herbert, who was the
person who saw you and gave you the encouragement to
be able to pursue something that mattered to you, Because
those the kind of series I'm trying to uplift in
(18:58):
the book.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
You got to come back to the show time in
the future, the door is always going to be open
for you, Daniel.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
Thank you man. What a treat to talk about the
creative process with you and with a fellow writer too.
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Okay, thank you you too,
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