Eli Cranor
Author
20
APPEARANCES
2
PODCASTS
Oct 13, 2026
Eli CranorGUEST
I recommended one of his books earlier a few weeks ago called Angel Down, which won the Pulitzer.
Eli CranorGUEST
This book came out in 2023 from MTV Entertainment Books, which I didn't even know was a publisher.
speaker_3UNKNOWN
is
Eli CranorGUEST
Like, we'd been in France the week before and saw what a festival looked like there, and then to come right back here and a week later, um, same, some of the same guys who were there with me are here in Little Rock.
Eli CranorGUEST
And Jeffrey Condren, a Little Rock author, teaches at UALR, is getting the Porter Fund Literary Prize, which is like a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Eli CranorGUEST
Yeah, if you're a Little Rock person, there is all sorts of stuff going on tomorrow evening.
Eli CranorGUEST
And Jeffrey Condren, a Little Rock author, teaches at UALR, is getting the Porter Fund Literary Prize, which is like a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Fort MinorSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
And
Eli CranorGUEST
And then when we get back, the big thing that I really wanted to put out to everybody listening to this is Six Bridges Book Festival.
Eli CranorGUEST
It's kinda, it's kinda time to start talking about that and make sure everybody's aware of what's going down in Little Rock.
Eli CranorGUEST
So on October 2nd they're doing that, the Porter Prize and the Booker Working Prize which Mississippi Blue got.
Eli CranorGUEST
And then when we get back, the big thing that I really wanted to put out to everybody listening to this is Six Bridges Book Festival.
Eli CranorGUEST
It's kind of time to start talking about that and make sure everybody's aware of what's going down in Little Rock.
Justin AcriHOST
I know Armand Katane, I don't know this other cat that's involved in this book, but what is The Price about?
Eli CranorGUEST
Man, The Price thus far has been the very best historical account that I've found on everything that has happened in college football since name, image, and likeness went into effect in 2021.
Eli CranorGUEST
So totally just nonfiction, basically based off a ton of, of, um, just, in-depth reporting, like crazy interviews.
Talon GreenSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
where
Eli CranorGUEST
Once I start writing, um, a book to see it through to the end and not do anything else.
Eli CranorGUEST
That doesn't always happen, but at least on a first draft, you know, once you've started, it's almost like a race because you can get derailed and you can lose your confidence or not know where you're going.
Eli CranorGUEST
And so if you can just come back to it every day, I mean, the old Saban quote about the process, that applies to writing a novel because you just got to sit down And a book is a novel decides crime thriller mystery.
Eli CranorGUEST
Um, so if on average you're writing about a thousand words a day, you can finish a rough draft in 80 to a hundred days.
Paul FinebaumHOST
So how do you do it? I mean, what type of discipline goes in to being a novelist?
Eli CranorGUEST
So when football was over for me, I didn't know what in the world to do with my life.
Eli CranorGUEST
And so I went after writing just the same way I would have quarterbacking or coaching.
Paul FinebaumHOST
So there is some commonality, but when you read novels, because everybody's always looking for something, like who do you read?
speaker_1ADVERTISER
I
Eli CranorGUEST
try with all my might once I start writing books Um, a book to see it through to the end, um, and, and not do anything else that doesn't always happen, but at least on a first draft, you know, once you've started.
Eli CranorGUEST
it's almost like a race because you can get derailed and you can lose your confidence or not know where you're going.
Eli CranorGUEST
And so if you can just come back to it every day, I mean, the old Saban quote about the process, that applies to writing a novel because you just got to sit down.
Eli CranorGUEST
A novel decides crime, thriller, mystery is what I write in, anywhere from 80 to 100,000 words.
Eli CranorGUEST
So if on average you're writing about 1,000 words a day, you can finish a rough draft in 80 to 100 days if you don't miss a day.
Eli CranorGUEST
And I do, I think there's a certain kind of momentum, a certain kind of echo chamber if you can just stick with that one project and not get distracted by something else.
speaker_1HOST
Does this book cover all eras? How far back does it go? I mean, what are we talking about here?
speaker_3HOST
of war,
Eli CranorGUEST
I mean, it looks like something Walter Camp would have written and published in the early 1900s.
Justin AcriHOST
Does this book cover all eras? How far back does it go? I mean, what are we talking about here?
Justin AcriHOST
What's going on? Are you hanging out with Roger behind her back? It's not behind her back because he told us about it.
Eli CranorGUEST
And it's just he and I in a short film written by one of my students at Arkansas Tech.
Eli CranorGUEST
I don't even know what that's called when older people can just come back and go to college.
speaker_3UNKNOWN
I
Justin AcriHOST
What's going on? You hanging out with Roger behind her back? It's not so behind her back because he told us about it.
Eli CranorGUEST
And it's just he and I in a short film written by one of my students at Arkansas Tech, actually an older dude in his mid-60s that kind of just came and set in.
Eli CranorGUEST
I don't even know what that's called when older people can just come back and go to college.
Eli CranorGUEST
And at the end of the semester, like a year ago, He gave me this, like, suspicious-looking manila envelope, and it has a post-it note on the front that just says, you want to make a movie? And so he wanted me to see it.
speaker_3NARRATOR
thing.
JimmyAUDIENCE
year.
Eli CranorGUEST
And right, like, in the wheelhouse of kind of Southern, grit-lit, Greg Owls, John Christian.
Eli CranorGUEST
He's like, the last thing I want to read about at night after doing what I do all day is football.
Justin AcriHOST
And his dad has written some notable things that I'm sure most people are pretty familiar with.
Eli CranorGUEST
And I think the best way to introduce this, I mean, people are probably familiar with both of those, especially from the TV and the film adaptations.
Eli CranorGUEST
But for me, I had made it all the way through college and never read Lonesome Dove or seen the show.
Eli CranorGUEST
But then in terms of my novel, and I'm hoping here within the next couple weeks we can share that.
Justin AcriHOST
What does that, what does that mean exactly? What does that mean? And how do we decide between whether it's going to be a film or TV or both?
Eli CranorGUEST
Well, so yeah, that's been the craziest thing about all this part of it is like, So what an option means is a company, Chernin Entertainment, which they've done like Planet of the Apes series, the recent one.
Eli CranorGUEST
They bought the option for two years, which means they own like the intellectual property for two years.
Eli CranorGUEST
So they have the option to try and get it produced and try and get it made over the next two years.
speaker_1UNKNOWN
series.
Roger ScottADVERTISER
I mean
Eli CranorGUEST
meanSo it's these two dudes, a Black dude and a white dude, that are like best buds and they're not really detectives or anything, but they solve these kind of crimes.
Eli CranorGUEST
And so the show's great, ran for three seasons, but there's like 20-something of these novels.
Eli CranorGUEST
It's a thinly veiled autobiographical novel about by a dude named Lee Durkee over in Oxford, Mississippi.
Eli CranorGUEST
And this book came out probably like 2021, and it was 20 years after Lee's debut novel, which had just raved reviews and was blurbed by people like George Saunders.
speaker_7UNKNOWN
But yes,