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Michael Chabon is a Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction, having written several books including The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Wonder Boys, and most recently, Moonglow. Recently he visited the Library for a conversation with Richard Price, the acclaimed writer behind books like Clockers and Lush Life and television shows like The Night Of and The Wire. For this week's episode of The New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present Michael Chabon and Richard Price discussing plot, feeling his way toward secular Judaism, and remembering to make stuff up.

Chabon spoke of his greatest challenge as a writer, plot. What was more surprising was the sentiment he expressed that plot is also his least favorite part of reading:

"Plot is always the hardest thing for me. It's always the thing I wrestle with the most. It's a part of writing books that I hate the most, and to be honest, it's a part of reading them in a way that I hate the most because it's always because of plot that character is betrayed. Like when a book goes wrong, and you start to feel like 'He wouldn't say that, he wouldn't do that, she wouldn't do that to him.' That's when you can feel the author's wrestling to get the character onto the armature of plot, and when a book is really well-plotted, so tightly plotted, so suspenseful, I hate that the most. I can't stand suspense. I would rather never find out what happened than have to like suffer through the tension of waiting to find out."

Asked about secular Judaism, Chabon described a long process of exploring religion:

"It took a while. I think it was something that actually began outside of my writing for me when I was in my late twenties and after the end of my first marriage and just before I met Ayelet, my wife. I had been married to a woman who was not Jewish, and it seemed to be a total non-issue to me, and when we got married, we had a judge perform the service and I think I stepped on a glass as a token nod, but really, religion, no aspect of it, certainly not the part where you have to believe in God and stuff, none of it seemed to be that important to me. But then any time on the occasions when we got into a discussion about having children, which we didn't, and started to talk about how they would be raised, I would start to say, we couldn't have a Christmas tree in the house; I wouldn't feel comfortable with that. And I seemed to be always sort of pulling for the Jews in this marriage, in this future, imaginary children... After this marriage and not because of that, that's when I started thinking, well why does it matter to me? What about it matters to me? And so I started to attend services more frequently and I started to light candles on Friday nights and tried to feel my way back to some sort of religious practice, and right at that point is when I met my wife Ayelet who's also Jewish. And I felt like that was my reward. You know, I light a few candles, meet a great woman. That's all you gotta do. And then we moved to Berkley, California and Berkley is a place where there are a lot of interesting new ways to be a Jew."

Both Price and Chabon have performed a great deal of research for their fiction. Price spoke of the way in which the details of research can become so powerful that he must sometimes remind himself that he is free to concoct:

"You can fall down the well of getting everything right. One of the reasons I can never write a historical novel is I don't know how people wiped their ass in 1870. I don't know how they folded napkins... When people read my books, they go like, 'This is like being.' And I go, 'Well, you know I did my homework.' Every once in a while, I need to remind myself, 'You're a fiction writer. Your job is to make stuff up! You're not a journalist. You will not get in trouble if you make stuff up.' But then I read your stuff or Doctorow, and I feel intimidated like, 'How do you know this?'"

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