If you have discipline and no talent, you're way better off than if you have giant talent and no discipline.
The more that you love something, the more resistance you're going to feel and therefore the more you need to do it.
That concept is a one move checkmate.
My job on a first draft is just to get paint.
Every part of that kinship doesn't matter how bad it is.
Movement forward is everything.
You know, Hunter S Thompson rewrote The Great Gatsby just so he could feel what it was like to write a great novel.
Really?
Oh, I think.
God bless him.
Great.
Morgan Howsell asked me to ask you this.
Has your writing improved throughout your career, throughout your entire life, or has it peaked in plateaued?
Ah, that's a great question.
Because I think that I hate to say this, but you know, two of my best things were like right out of the box the Legend of Bag or Advance and Gates of Fire.
And I'm now on my like 24th book or something like that.
So I hope it's not plateauing.
I'm certainly working as hard as I ever did and doing you know what, to me, is new stuff all the time working as hard as you've ever done.
What does that look like for you?
You know, it's a seven-day-a-week thing.
It's one thing I will say over the years.
I know, at least I tell myself this, I can now do in two hours what I used to do in four hours.
It's like going to the gym or something, you know, for me, the writing process.
You just go against the wall as hard as you can until you can't anymore until you start.
For me, I always stop the writing day when I start making mistakes.
When I start making typos and things like that, because I know I've hit the point of diminishing returns and it's not going to get any better after that.
What are the typos revealing?
Is it like carelessness?
Is it like a lack of flow?
Like what is... I think it's just plain exhaustive, you know?
You run out of glucose or whatever it is.
Because I can go, you know, the first 99 of a working day and not make mistakes.
You know, not make typos.
And all of a sudden I'll start making them bang, bang, bang one after the other.
And I know that's when it's time to stop for the day.
How do you separate the writing work that needs to be done from the other work that needs to be done emails, conversations with agents, all that stuff?
Compartmentalization of time, right?
I'll put a certain amount of time on that and give it my full attention.
And then when it's over, You know, turn the page and go to the other thing.
When I do sit down to actually work, everything else gets shut off.
You know, there's no emails coming in, there's no phone calls coming in, that kind of thing.
Tell me about that cabin that you lived in.
It was like $15 a month in rent or something.
That was a long time ago and I really was running away from writing at the time.
I was working as a truck driver at the time and I wound up working jobs where The only thing you had to have was a pulse, you know, to get the job, or where they would train you on the job.
And I was just sort of running away in shame from failing on that book so badly, you know.
And I always carried my old typewriter with me. to all those things, even though I never touched it.
And finally, one night in New York City I was driving a cab.
I was living in a 115 sublet apartment.
I was just at that point where what was I going to do this night?
Was I going to go out and chase women, get drunk, whatever was I going to do to distract myself?
And I just said, I just can't stand this shit one more night.
I can't do this.
You're fed up with it.
I can't do it anymore.
So I sort of pulled out the typewriter expecting, you know, for no reason.
Like, what did I expect?
I was going to write, the sun also rises or something.
So I sat down for like about two hours and just wrote a bunch of crap that I just threw away immediately.
And I went back to the kitchen And there was a big pile of dishes sitting in the sink from wherever.
And I just started washing them.
And as I was washing them, I realized that I was whistling.
And I thought, I've turned a corner here somehow.
Wow.
You know, this thing that I've been running away from for all these years, trying to write now works for me.
At least I felt like I sat down crazy and I woke up And so I knew that it was going to be forever until I got anywhere with that.
It certainly wasn't like immediately anything good was going to happen.
And in fact, it was like another 20-something years before I had a book published.
But at that point, my life changed.
So you talk about how do I believe in gods and goddesses?
I do.
I do believe it's something clicked.
And I found the thing that worked for me, which was sitting down and trying to fill a blank page.
Wow.
You don't still write with a typewriter, do you?
No, I used computer.
Yeah.
But my first few books I did write because that was all there was.
What did a typewriter give you that the keyboard doesn't?
Well, I only did it because there was no such thing as a computer at the time.
I definitely like a computer better because obviously you can move paragraphs around and correct things and import and export all that stuff.
Well, it's funny.
I've been thinking a lot about what handwriting gives you in terms of style, what typewriting gives you in terms of style, what the keyboard gives you in terms of style.
And I do worry that the delete key is too accessible with the keyboard.
And what I mean by that is.
So for years I struggled when I would write.
I didn't feel like my writing had the same style, the same hutspa as my speaking.
And I think it was because when I'm speaking, if I make a mistake, if I go off somewhere, I connect all the way.
I kind of have to run with it, right.
Whereas when I'm typing, There's a rigidity to it.
And I make a mistake and I can instantly hit delete, copy it, remove it.
Sometimes I'll throw a piece of paper over the screen or something so that I can't see the mistakes.
And I feel like in those early drafts, like those mistakes, letting the schmutz pour out of you, can actually be good.
Ah, well, I would agree with that.
I mean, the way I work, though, I never worry about correcting the stuff.
I just let it go.
Better rep.
And then I'll correct it later.
Well, that's what you're trying to do in your first draft.
You're just trying to get to the end, right?
I have a mantra that I use for first drafts, and it's cover the canvas.
Oh, that's good.
And I feel like I'm looking at that TV screen over there.
If that's a canvas, my job on a first draft is just to get paint on every part of that canvas.
It doesn't matter how bad it is.
In fact, it's going to be bad.
It just has to be bad.
It's like Jackson Pollack.
And that's just splattering stuff.
Another analogy that I use I wrote a book a few years ago about the Six-Day War in Israel, the 1967 War of Arab-Israeli War.
And there's a famous speech from an Israeli general named Israel Tal, who had an armored division on the Egyptian border and, although they didn't know this at the time, they were going to the Suez Canal.
And I liken this to a first draft.
What he said to his troops was there's no slowing down.
Whatever you come to, that blocks, you just go around it.
I don't care if you lose nine tanks out of 10.
Keep advancing with that one with that 10th tank.
And so that's my theory on first drafts.
No matter what is in the way, go around it or and it's it's the idea of blitz Greek.
Yeah.
You know, and the theory is, if you let some obstacles stop you so that you're getting into as kind of a slugging match or a war of attrition, that's the worst thing that can happen in warfare.
And it's the worst thing in writing too.
So if you come to an obstacle, go around it.
You know, even if you leave your rear exposed, it's okay.
Movement forward is everything in a first draft.
Yeah.
What I think is so cool about you is you have this hard heavy masculine, more side the king, the warrior.
And then, on the other side, you have this magician lover of like this tenderness of spirit and this heart of like the muses.
And the duality there is I think what makes you so unique.
If you only had one, you wouldn't even be close to who you've become.
But I don't think I'm at all unique in that.
I think any working artist is like that, that they know there's two habs to it that you are seeking inspiration, you're seeking the flow, you're seeking something coming from another level.
You have to be your instrument quote unquote.
Like an actor would say, has to be ready for that, has to be ready to be a professional, to take that voltage, like if you're a choreographer, if you're a Twilight Tharp or somebody like that.
And an inspiration for a move or whatever is comes to her that she can perform it.
You show it to her dancers and stuff like that.
So the only way you get to that place is flat out training like an athlete or like a soldier.
So I do think you have to have the two levels to make it work.
I love that turn of phrase, take that voltage.
What are you hinting at there?
Well, actually, I have a friend.
I'm speaking from his perspective and not mine, who's like a really intense meditator.
Oh, wow.
I mean, way beyond, I mean, I obviously can't go into his head.
Yeah.
But he talks about, as you get to higher levels of whatever it is.
I'm not a meditator, so I don't know.
You're receiving stuff from wherever it's coming from, and the vibration gets higher and higher and higher, and supposedly you have to.
According to him, you have to be physically capable of absorbing that.
You know that if you were it's like if you weren't trained enough to do that as an athlete it'll overwhelm you or it just won't come through.
You know, it'll just be a block.
But I think that's true in any creative art actors filmmakers, certainly dancers, certainly musicians.
You know, the jazz musician is getting inspired from somewhere.
Totally.
They have to be able to be so good that they can just do it, right?
You know?
I don't know if you're a musician.
I certainly couldn't do that, you know?
No.
Yeah. podcasting.
Yeah.
Why do you recommend copy work to new writers?
I should sit down with just pages of Henry Miller or Hemingway and just copy it on my old typewriter.
And I think it's sort of the same as they say that Picasso or any artist would go to the Louvre and just park themselves in front of a Rembrandt or whatever it was and just copy it.
They sketch it.
They sit there, they greet how the little globs are paid.
Those are my favorite people to talk to at an art museum.
I was at the British Museum there was a student and he had this easel right there and it was this beautiful sort of old Roman sculpture and he was copying it.
But you could see it in like the wisps of the pen that he was almost like dramatizing the movement of the sculpture.
I just started talking.
It was like 21, 22 years old, young guy studying.
He's like, I do this every day.
I've been studying this one for like three, three and a half weeks.
This is like my siftieth time drawing this.
But think about Kobe Bryant.
Learning how to do the turnaround jump shot, fadeaway jump shot.
Yeah, Michael Jordan helped him out.
You know dude, this is where your one foot goes, this is where and I'm sure you watched film forever and forever.
One of my favorite articles of the last decade Wall Street Journal article and it's about Jason Tatum, Boston Celtics player, young guy.
And his coaches were commenting on how much better his footwork was because he grew up on YouTube.
And so what he would do is he would pause the video on YouTube.
He would watch exactly what the movement of the feet was.
And the thesis of the article was now, if you have a very perceptive, hardworking basketball player, the footwork when they're rookies is as good as it used to be when a player was 10 years old.
And that's interesting.
And I believe that completely, yeah.
So copying is great because at some point you will find your own voice.
You're just searching for a voice at all.
And if you're like Bob Dylan saying like Woody Guthrie, it all kind of evolves.
So what's specifically in Miller and Hemingway were you trying to emulate?
You know, it's a great question.
I'm not even sure.
It was just something I just loved the way they wrote.
But there's a difference between just reading it closely and actually writing it, and then writing it again, and writing it again.
You know, it just sinks in more on some some level, deeper level I think, than you know, purely intellectual.
You know, Hunter S Thompson rewrote The Great Gatsby just so he could feel what it was like to write a great novel.
Really?
The entire thing.
God bless him.
Great.
And in his style, we can completely differ from Scott Fitzgerald.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
I mean, in golf, People, you know, people will copy tire.
Wood swing, Rory McElroy swing.
Nowadays, like you say, when they have YouTube and slow-mo, you know they can be filming their own swing and or working with a teacher, you know, to match those moves.
You know.
But sooner or later, their authentic swing does come out.
Have you read my book, The Legend of Niagara Vance?
No.
Well, you should read it.
Okay.
You know, it's about golf and it's about this exactly.
Yeah.
You know?
Why golf for your first book?
I mean, I grew up in the game too.
I grew up as a caddy.
Is that right?
You know?
But the concept of The Legend of Niagara Vance, or the core sort of, is the idea of the authentic swing.
And what I mean by that is like a parallel for the authentic self.
But the question like think about somebody here, but we're getting so geeky here that anybody's listening won't.
But think about Jim Furyk's swing you know that big loop swing or Fred Couple's swing, or any of the people that have really distinctive swings.
That the idea of the authentic swing is that we're born with a swing.
Whether we know it like Jim Furyk was born with that swing, right?
And that our job is not to find some perfect swing or perfect self or perfect writing style, but to find the style that we were born with.
That's what, for instance, I had two friends when I was growing up in the caddying days identical twins, same DNA, right.
So you would think they would swing the same.
No, completely different swings, radically different.
So I remember I looked at them, I got, how can that possibly be, you know?
But obviously, you know, we're born with some something, you know?
And so anyway, that's.
You know you like the book, the authentic swing, the legend of Bagger Vance, way better than in the movie.
Oh, interesting.
Do you feel like the movie missed something?
You know, it's very hard to adapt a book to a movie and particularly a book about golf.
Other than catty shack, there's never been, which was like a total force.
There's never been, there's never been a real serious golf movie that was worth a shit, you know?
And I can understand why.
Even whereas in other sports, like they've been great boxing movies, you know, in great skiing movies and other school baseball.
So they did the best they could, they had to cut a lot.
You have it, obviously you have to cut and some of the stuff that got cut was the best stuff.
Why do you think Coppola was able to do it with the godfather?
Maybe just because that was a real story.
You know, it didn't have layers that you could cut off.
You know whereas a bag of ants does.
And when you read it, you'll see.
Yeah, you know, it's funny about golf.
The game has moved to a more technically perfect series of moves around the sport.
And I think that it's moving away from that now.
I think it's moving back towards a little bit more individualism.
But there is, The swings have gotten a little stale and I do wonder if there's a loss of individuality with golf swings.
And I wonder if the internet is sort of like that with writing, because part of the reasons that the swing gets stale is there's so much advice out there.
There's so many videos that you can watch.
You can watch yourself on video and it's easier to get coaching.
And because of that, you don't have that distinctiveness, the Jim Furyk, the Fred Couples.
And I do feel like with online writers.
I don't see the crazy distinctiveness that you get with the Joyce or that you get with a Hunter S Thompson.
And I wonder if these two things are totally different worlds, but actually pulling from the same thread of what's happening in society.
I think you're onto something there, you know, because Somebody like James Joyce or Hunter S. Thompson or so many other writers sort of marinated in their own shit for so long before they kind of came out of the chrysalis as full-grown, you know, writers.
And nowadays, you know, like you say, with the sort of the Internet mentality where you're exposed to so much stuff of do this, do that, the other thing, how do you get to who you really are?
You know, you're a real authentic voice.
People don't have the won't take the time anymore.
How are you a better non-fiction writer for having written so much fiction?
I'm certainly a believer that the same principles that apply to a story or a narrative apply to nonfiction that every story has to have a hero, everything has to have a villain, everything has to be about something, has to have a theme, has to have an inciting incident, has to have a climax.
That you could use those principles in in nonfiction as well.
And the great nonfiction people definitely do.
How have you studied storytelling?
That's another great question.
I had about a 10 year career as a bad screenwriter.
Okay.
About half of that I worked with an older, established writer where I was kind of the junior member of a team.
And so there's very definitely in the movie business an idea of what a story is.
Act one, act two, act three, act one curtain, second act midpoint, all those lost moments, et cetera, et cetera.
There's really beach that you learn as you go along.
You're embarrassed in a meeting when somebody asks you, well, what's your second act curtain?
You go, what is that?
So that was sort of for me, my apprenticeship And at least what a movie idea of a story is.
I buy that completely and I still use that sort of model that's in my brain as a what a story is and what beats have to be hit.
Tell me about this concept of Nishama from Kabbalah.
I saw that in the Daily Press field.
And I thought that would be an interesting rabbit hole to go down.
Well, as you know, the Neshama is the Hebrew word for soul, right?
And the concept of soul.
And it's when I was talking before about.
We live on the material plane, but our inspiration comes from the higher plane.
And that to me is the Neshama.
Like there's a thing in Kabbalah that above every blade of grass is an angel saying, grow, grow.
And I'm definitely a believer that the higher level, the nashama, is trying to well, let me put it in a different way.
If we're at the lower level and there's a sole higher level above us.
When we reach out to that, that is called prayer.
And the artist's prayer is, give me an idea. give me help me, you know, Homer invoking the muse.
God has helped me tell the story, you know.
But at the same time that we reach up to that level, in my view and in the Kabbalistic view, the soul, the Neshama, is reaching down to us, trying to help us.
So I believe that it's not that the world we inhabit as writers or as creative people is not avoid at all, that it's a very living thing, and that there are forces that we can't see or measure that, as there are forces working against us what I call resistance, there are forces trying to give us ideas, trying to pull us through something.
So you know, when I first heard the concept of the Neshama, it wasn't new to me.
It was like ah, that's what I call, something else, you know.
My prayer has been make it obvious.
Make it obvious.
That's what I pray all the time.
Just that it gets revealed and it is handed to me on a silver platter.
Exactly what I should do.
Exactly what the answer is.
And there's a clarity and a simplicity to obviousness.
Uh-huh.
And in what form does that take for you when it is made obvious to you?
It shows up in bullet points for me.
And there's like a one-liner and bullet points.
And it just shows up in my mind.
And the whole thing gets distilled into here's one, two, three, one line.
And I can just describe it.
So I'll give you an example.
I wrote a piece about the investor Peter Thiel.
It's called Peter Thiel's Religion.
And even in the title, it was, here's this Silicon Valley investor, Peter Thiel.
But actually Peter Thiel's religion, there's a religious component to his philosophy.
And people had known that he studied under a Stanford professor named René Girard.
But René Girard was deeply Christian.
And I said, hold on here, hold on.
Peter Thiel wrote zero to one.
But if you actually follow the thread, zero to one is a Christian book, specifically the first commandment and the 10th commandment applied to business and investing.
That was airdrop to me.
Super obvious.
And I just went one level deeper.
Like, it's so simple.
But that simplicity is what the obviousness looks like for me.
And then I can just be in service of the idea.
I could basically be a custodian to bring that into the world.
So you agree with me on what we're talking about here?
Totally.
So what is your version of prayer when you sort of are asking for make it obvious?
What forms does that take?
So I'm a Christian.
So I'm a Jesus follower.
I think the word Christianity has a lot of tricky connotations.
I'm a Jesus follower, so I just pray to Jesus and I get on my knees and I just say it out loud and I just Speak from the absolute bottom of my heart and I just try to Be as honest and talk to God like I'm talking to a friend and just pray like in, I always think, daily and desperate dependence.
Ah well, that's really interesting, huh?
Make it obvious.
I mean, I do sort of a similar thing when I say, before I sit down and work each day, I say out loud the invocation of the muse from Homer's Odyssey that a friend of mine taught me and typed it out for me.
And it's a very sort of similar thing.
You know where I put myself at the service of whatever that Unknown higher force is.
It's nice right, because you've written that these stories sort of exists before you even write them.
So do you see them?
And then it's like, I now have to get it out.
Like, what is that process like for you?
Sort of like an analogy that I use for myself is like if we were digging up a dinosaur that was buried here, a fossilized dinosaur, we might start.
It would get kind of the thigh bone, let's say, you know, and we'd take our little paint brushes and, you know, we'd say oh, this is a thigh right here, you know.
And then we'd know there's a whole dinosaur under here.
But how big is it?
Where is it?
You know, and little by little, I think, you sort of expose it.
You know, you chip away and you're excited at first because you oh, and there's a thigh bone that must be a You know.
Whatever it is under here, right?
And you sort of project in your mind, ah, maybe this is a stake of sort, you know, whatever.
And then as you go along, oh, no, it's not.
We thought it was a planeteater.
It looks like a meteor, you know?
And then you sort of adjust.
And finally, it eventually reveals itself, like the authentic swing reveals itself.
In what ways is your mind wandering different and the pull of your imagination different when you're writing fiction versus non-fiction?
Non-fiction, I think.
I mean the only stuff I've done that's non-fiction.
I did the book about the Six-Day War, where I interviewed 75 people.
What about stuff like this?
And the War of Art and other than the War of Art, and books that are about writing.
I sort of have the ideas clear in my mind because I've thought about them for a long time.
And I'll just sort of sit down, almost like you would write an article and I go.
What order do these things need to come in?
So on and so forth.
So they're clear.
Whereas with fiction, for me, The story really evolves as it goes along and it's so complicated and there's so many different characters and it's a giant machine with a million little parts and they all have to work together like a Ferrari or something like that.
I'm really more at a loss and fiction where I'm sort of going to the goddess who helped me.
What comes next?
Is this working?
I'm not sure.
And you're constantly tying new things and experimenting.
Yeah.
You know Brian Eno?
The musician, yeah.
So Brian Eno invented ambient music and at least he was a very early pioneer in it.
And one of the things that he says with ambient music is it's slow.
And because of that, what he does is he makes the song and then he basically doubles the length of the song as a standard heuristic.
And the reason is because he spent so much time with it that he thinks that the consumer who's hearing it for the first second, third time needs double the length.
And I'm wondering, when you're editing your writing, once you become familiar with it, if there's like a pacing that needs to change.
And if it's hard to really edit from the perspective of someone who's just reading it for the first time.
You know, each time I sort of go to a dude's raft yeah, I will think of myself, I'll put myself in the reader's point of view completely, you know, and say, if I don't know anything about this story, am I going to be interested in this?
Is this going to suck me in at all?
And sometimes I'll do another thing where I'll say I'll imagine a friend of mine.
You know my friend Jim.
Let's say who is it.
Specific person.
Specific person you know, or I'll pick two or three different people and I'll say you know, if Jim was reading this, what would he?
You know he brings a certain attitude to it.
You know, would he be bored by this?
Would he be interested in this?
Is this, you know, and I'll constantly try to do that.
How does the editing change as you go through more and more cycles?
Do you feel like you get almost different knives?
Like you start with an axe or like I'm gonna get rid of this, and then towards the end it's like a chisel on specific words, or what's it like?
Self-editing is really tough, you know, without you work with an editor.
I mean, I used to and had a kind of a falling out.
So when I really missed that help, you know, so now I've sort of got to do it myself.
And it's really it's really hard.
It's funny.
I'm just I'm working on a piece of fiction right now.
And I just this happens to me sort of every time.
It's like I hit the I hit this point where I'm on like a fourth or fifth draft.
I've already got it already.
It's done.
It's readable in that sense.
But This would be the point where I would give it to my editor and who would inevitably come back with something that was a sort of a mind fucker to me.
You know, that would send me back to square one, in a way.
And I just sort of had that moment myself, by myself.
I was on a trip, as you know.
I was out of the country for like three weeks.
And so I wasn't working.
I was just doing other stuff.
But the thing was still percolating with me.
And I had this moment where I'm lying in bed in this hotel room and I'm thinking oh, this doesn't work at all.
This thing that I thought, that happens to me all the time where there's you think you're done and you're not.
And it's not working.
There's got to be.
There's some problem that you've left that you thought you had solved, but you haven't solved it.
And now you have to sort of go address it again.
And then I'm sure there's going to be more as I go through it.
How did writing Wednesday come about?
It actually was an idea of my publicists at the time, Callie Ottinger, where I first started to do a website, or I don't even know what 2007 or something like that, having no idea what it was or what I was trying to do.
And it originally was kind of a military website.
It originally was about Afghanistan and stuff like that.
But I found this was after the War of Art came out that the comments that were coming in were all in the war of art here.
They were people asking about writing.
They didn't give a shit about Afghanistan or anything like the military aspect that I was talking about.
And so Callie was my publicist.
She said, you know, you should do a day where you just talk about writing. on this blog.
And she said, call it writing Wednesdays because it's two W's.
And so I sort of resisted that.
But then it's, you know, I started doing it.
And that seems to be the area that people want to reach out to me about.
They don't care about other areas, stuff as much as they do about that.
If you held a one day writing seminar and you had to teach your readers how to write, what are the most important things they need to know?
I would not talk about the craft of writing at all.
I would only talk about the mindset that you need, the professional mind.
I would talk about resistance, about self-sabotage and just about the obstacles that you're going to run to and the mindset you need to have to make it all the way from page one to the end, because everybody thinks that they can write.
They wouldn't think that they couldn't become a concert pianist without putting in 15 years.
Or they wouldn't think that they could become a brain surgeon without going to medical school.
But everybody thinks they can write.
I would like to kick their ass and tell them, you can't.
You know?
And even though there are a few people that do it, but the mindset that you need to have, the level of mental toughness, as you know, is way beyond anything that people think.
So I would just if I were giving a one-day thing, my main thought that I would try to impress on people was this is 10 times harder, like they say, raising kids.
As hard as you think it is, it's 10 times harder than that.
And it's the same sort of thing here that, as hard as you think it might be, it's 10 times harder than that, and be ready for it.
Curious ratchet yourself up, that's what I would do.
Reading is the simplest thing ever.
You show up and you just type and, you know, get distracted.
And yet that is so hard to actually do.
There is.
I mean, you spent the last 20, 30 years writing about why that's just so brutally difficult.
The self-sabotage, the doubt, the resistance, all that.
Like just a moment that I was just talking about that.
I'm in now where on this project, where I now have to basically go back to square one in certain areas and do it.
That's not the kind of thing that a lot of people are able to do.
Because you got to get away from your ego, away from all the sunk costs that you put in.
And that's a skill that nobody teaches you.
You don't learn that in school.
And the skills that you need to get from page one to the end.
There's a whole bunch of them and nobody teaches you any of them.
If a book takes me two years to write, the first nine months to a year, I am racked with self-doubt all the way through.
Is this a dumb idea?
Am I crazy?
Why am I doing it?
Et cetera, et cetera.
I'm not good enough to do this.
And still, oh, yeah, all the time.
And if you don't feel it, I think it's a really bad sign.
So how do you keep going in the face of that?
That's a skill that nobody teaches on a name for.
Keats call it negative capability.
The way to advance in the middle of doubt to keep going.
But that's a skill that I never knew about when I started, and know about it after I've been doing it for 20 years.
And nobody sits you down and says that, unless you maybe have a mentor if you're working with Aaron Sorkin or somebody like that.
But if you don't have that skill and if you don't have another dozen skills that have no names and nobody ever talks about, you're not gonna get.
You might get to the end, but it's not gonna be any good.
And it's not gonna be you, it's not gonna be coming from your heart.
I mean, think about, just as a, I'm sure you saw the last dance.
Michael Jordan thinks.
And if you think about here, Michael Jordan comes into the league and he's like the best player, right.
But along the way, they were constantly, the bulls would get beat by the Detroit Pistons every time.
They weren't tough enough to take that punishment, the Jordan rules.
As soon as he left the floor, they knocked him down.
And then he had to go through a number of stages, including how he was going to lead his own guys, how he was going to make them better and how would he actually let somebody else take the last shot.
You know, and all those things that nobody, nobody teaches you that, you know, maybe Phil Jackson helped him along the way, but he had to, as hard as he thought it was, he had to develop one skill and then another that he didn't, hadn't thought about the start.
And then another, and another, and another, to make his teammates better, to let somebody else take the last shot, that kind of thing.
And finally, you know, even he, you know, the greatest that ever played had to, had to evolve and evolve and evolve.
Yeah.
Well, so I run a company called Reddit Passage and we probably have 800 to 1000 students here.
And one of the biggest things that they struggle with is the delta between what I feel like I'm supposed to write about.
Whatever that is, whatever internal story, that's a great example.
That's a great example versus what they actually want to write about.
That's a great example.
Now, who teaches you that?
Nobody teaches you that, right?
Yeah.
And that skill could take you 30 years to learn.
I mean, that's what Hunter Thompson learned, right?
First he thought, well, I got all right, that's Scott Fitzgerald, right?
And somewhere along the lines I don't know if he ever wrote about this there was a moment when he said this isn't me right.
And I'm sure if he did Scott Fitzgerald, he wrote a lot of other people's in a lot of other people's style too.
And he probably thought you know, I want to write into this crazy style, but nobody writes that way.
You know, if I write that way, they're going to laugh me.
And finally, he said, I'm going to do it.
And all of a sudden, there he was.
He became Leonard Thompson.
How do you give someone the courage to actually just do the thing that you innately do rather than trying to like contort yourself into these things, that these little boxes that you think that you're supposed to be in?
I think it's a question sort of for me I can only answer it for me for my own process.
Yeah, I think you reach a point where you sort of give up.
You know, you're trying to do what you think you should do, what writing really is.
And at some point you just say, I just can't do this, you know?
And let me write this crazy shit that nobody's going to be interested in with me.
And then to your amazement, you go, wow, people like this.
But I do think you have to sort of hit a wall.
Yeah, I think of it as a surrender to your nature.
Yeah, that's a well put.
Yeah.
But how hard is that to do?
Can you just tell somebody that?
I don't know.
I think, you know, the person himself has to kind of have a moment, you know, where they hit bottom.
You know what I struggle with?
It's the things that come naturally. come easily.
They're fun.
And I.
There is just something.
I don't know if it's the residue of the Protestant work ethic or something, but I just have an idea that things that you're successful in should be hard.
They should be arduous.
You need to grind because that is the price of success.
And like actually there, when I see people who are in a flow, there's like a joy that comes from it.
And even someone like Jordan.
There's a little scene in the last dance where he's all the bulls are running suicides.
And he's a mile ahead of everybody else.
You can just see that those are NBA players at the top of the world in terms of basketball.
And yet, you could park a football field or a Walmart between Jordan and the next guy running.
And I know that he's gritting his teeth.
I know that he's grinding.
But a guy like him, a guy like Kobe, there is still a love behind that work.
And it still pours out of them.
They can't even help themselves to work that hard.
I think that that has been a real struggle of mine to just actually surrender to those things that come a little bit more easily to me and actually come to appreciate that hey, I'm actually good at these things.
Yeah, I would agree with that.
Except within that, then it's still arduous, you know.
But you still have to have all those skills and you still have to.
You know you can get into that semi-flow state, or whatever you want to call it.
Well, you're spewing it out, but you still have to pull back and look at it and with cold eyes and say, you know, is this working?
You know, and how can I fix it?
How does the word discipline factor into your work?
I mean, it's everything.
You know, it's everything.
If you're going to write, you know, this is another thing I would say if I had a one day class.
Think about if you're going to write a novel.
If you're going to write something that's going to take two and a half or three years, every day, full time.
Or if not full time, pretty much full time.
I forget who this was.
It might have been the lead child.
It was some very successful thriller writer.
And it was just saying that for him, a first draft is 400 hours.
When I heard that, I thought, that's about right.
I would agree with that.
That's 10, 40 hour weeks and nobody can work a 40 hour week as a writer.
You can't do that.
So it's more like 20 20 hour weeks for a first draft, when you're going to do 10 drafts or something like that.
How are you going to do that without discipline?
It's everything.
If you have discipline and no talent, you're way better off than if you have giant talent and no discipline.
And the other thing if you're a writer or any kind of not any kind of creative artist, but certainly a writer you also have to do that alone.
It's not like You're on the Chicago Bulls and you have Phil Jackson and you have a trainer and you have.
Or it's not like you are going to medical school with your brain surgeon, where they actually have classes.
You're going to go to this class and that class.
You have teachers and at the end of the semester you get a grade and you get to have a scholarship and you have any of peers that you can talk to.
If you're writing a novel, that's something completely new.
And everyone is.
You can't talk to your own wife, you know?
It's boring.
And you know, you can't do it.
So you're in that tunnel by yourself, you know, except for the muse.
Do you map out your novels?
Like I do as much as I can.
But of course, there's so much that changes.
Yes.
So how do you externalize your thought?
Or do you, or is it just all in your head?
I mean, I definitely map things out.
I have a whole idea of what a story is for me and the beats that are in a story.
And the principles that a story needs to adhere to, in my mind, my own version.
So what would an example of principles be?
I'm a big believer in three-act structure.
So I ask myself if I have an idea for a story.
What's Act 1?
What's Act 2?
What's Act 3?
Or maybe it's four acts or something like that.
I'm a big believer in villains.
That the villain is a huge part of this.
Who is the villain?
Is it a person?
Is it a thing?
Is it something in somebody's mind?
Is it a societal?
So the villain in the war of art is the resistance.
Exactly.
Okay.
Yeah.
Even in a non-fiction world.
There's still a villain in a non-fiction world.
There's always a villain in a non-fiction, in my opinion.
So you got the hero, the villain, the axe, what else?
I have a whole lot of other stuff there.
It would take too long to say, but I'll give you one thing as a thing.
I have a principle that I call the female carries the mystery.
And if you think of a classic example like, let's say Chinatown, the movie with Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson, right.
Or any detective story there's always it's a male detective, always there's always a kind of a vamp, a femme fatale, and the femme fatale always carries the mystery.
Or for instance, it doesn't always have to be a woman in Moby Dick, The sea is the female.
And the sea carries the mystery, right?
That's the whale dives down into the sea.
In Lawrence of Arabia, the desert is the female.
And the movie is shot to make the desert absolutely gorgeous, right?
And Lawrence himself falls in love with, and it's a theme.
If you watch that movie, it's hit again and again and again.
The Anthony Quinn character, Alda Abutai, says to Lawrence for you there is only the desert, you know.
And even in a story like Seven Samurai, the movie which is like I don't know.
Do I dare ask that you haven't seen it?
It's the Magnificent Seven in Japan by Akira Kurosawa.
And it's the same story of a village that hires gunslinger samurai to defend it from, and the female in that story are the rice fields that produce the rice that the bandits want.
And at the very end of Seven Samurai.
The final thing, when the samurai have won and the bandits have been killed, is the villagers planting rice.
So that's a principle that I will have.
The female carries the mystery, and I'll ask myself of any idea that I have.
What's the female in this story?
Is there a mystery?
And what is the mystery?
And the mystery is almost always something that cannot be solved.
It's like, what is life?
What is the sea, the ocean?
What is it?
And it gets back to God, it gets back to creation, it gets back to life.
So I have like many of those that I'll sort of I ask myself those questions of the story.
Is this working?
Does it have that element?
You are a master.
I have a, I collect videos of experts talking like experts.
I'm gonna add that.
Not the last two minutes to the, to the video list.
Well, it makes a good villain.
We're all up against a villain in our own life, whether it's resistance that's stopping us from writing our novel or creating our symphony, or whatever it is.
We're all up against that.
The ultimate villain is death.
The villain really gives life to the whole story.
If there isn't a great villain, there isn't a great story.
The greater the villain, the more the hero has to fight it.
I'll give you an example of somebody, an internal villain.
Have you seen a movie, silver linings, playbook?
No, it'll be a joke on how I write, moving forward, that I haven't seen any of the movies.
I just read.
I don't really watch movies.
Well, I'll give you the short version of this and maybe it'll explain it.
There we go.
It stars Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper.
And it's maybe about 10 years old or something.
And great movie.
And the story is about Bradley Cooper.
He's coming out of a mental hospital at the start of the thing.
And he's obviously nutty.
He's an OCD crazy guy, right?
But he's trying to get his life back together.
And the one thing that he has built his sort of new sanity around is he's going to get his wife back.
His wife Nikki has, you know, restraining orders.
He's insane.
And this is the thing in his head he's going to get Nikki back.
Very early in the movie he meets Jennifer Lawrence, another sort of and as soon as that happens in the story as we're watching it, we know these two are meant to be together.
And we know that's gonna be the climax, right?
Somehow they're gonna get together.
The villain in that story is Bradley Cooper's obsession with his wife, Nikki.
And you know that at some point, if he's going to be happy, he's got to get rid of that.
He's got to confront that somehow and say, this is bullshit.
I'm driving myself crazy.
Here's a beautiful girl in front of me.
I love her.
So that's a villain.
That's not a person. not an animal, but it's in his head.
And that villain, the way the movie is written by David O Russell, who also directed it, that villain is in every scene.
He makes this obsession.
It just plays and plays and plays.
And finally, in a very creative way, he overcomes it.
When you're creating suspense in a story, how do you think about building the suspense without having that suspense build for so long that the story moves too slowly?
Another rule that I have is to always start at the end, to start with the climax.
This is a screenwriting principle.
Like if you're a young screenwriter, they'll beat this into your head, you know?
What's the climax?
What's the you know.
So I just try to think how am I going to build to this moment, to this climax, so that it's a surprise, but yet it's huge and it works.
It's a payoff.
So I don't know if that's suspense or not, but you don't want to shoot your wad too soon.
Tell me about Paul Rink.
Paul Rink was a great mentor to me.
Like I told you, I'd failed writing a first novel.
I'd run away from it again and again.
Finally, after like maybe about 10 or 12 years, I'd saved up money working at 2700 bucks that I knew I could live for a year on.
And I moved to this little town in Northern California.
And Paul Rink was an older, established writer who just happened to live in a camper down the street for me.
And every morning I would take a walk and I would stop at his camper that was called Moby Dick and we would have coffee together.
And he just sort of took me under his wing, told me like he would tell me books to read.
You've got to read this, you've got to give him to me.
Read this, read this, read this and talk to me about the discipline that a writer needed, you know.
He also gave me, I told you that I say this prayer to the muse.
He's the guy who showed me that prayer, typed it out for me and gave it to me.
So he was a great mentor to me when I needed it.
When you were struggling for all those years, do you feel like you had more of a I really might not make it, I'm not gonna make it.
Oh my goodness.
Where do you feel like you had this internal sense that life will come through for you?
I never really thought that I would make it.
I wasn't.
I was coming from so far back that back of the pack that I just wanted to.
I had found this thing, the act of writing that kept me sane, you know, and that gave me some hope.
But I knew, well, I take that back a little, but I did have certain hope along the way.
I just kind of thought, oh, maybe this is going to be good.
Maybe I'll, you know, break through with this.
But it took so long.
And I still have a really broken through me.
Nobody knows who I am or anything like that.
A few people sort of know, but not many.
But but it's enough, you know I, for me To feel like I'm okay.
I'm okay with it, you know, But no, I didn't really think I was ever gonna break through anything like that.
I just had found something that worked writing, and I just wanted to get better at it.
You know I could see that I didn't.
It was so little that I knew and so many people were so much better than me and I wasn't able to find my voice.
I wasn't really.
You know.
I was like struggling in the Italian leagues, you know, trying to get to the NBA, you know.
When you talk about your struggle, other people being so much better than you.
What was the nature of that delta?
The Delta.
Yeah, it's a split.
Yeah, exactly.
So what was inside where you were here and they were here.
What was that different?
I always felt like Like, um, I wasn't blessed with any great gift.
You know, I didn't have any point of view that I really wanted to get across.
I wasn't fluent to write a sentence was like, you know, took me forever.
Um, and I, you know, and I read other people that were like really good writers.
I say, Oh man, that's the way I can do that.
You know, so, um, But over the years, I sort of think the talent is overrated.
And at least in writing, maybe talent is not overrated if you're Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant.
But at least in something like writing, if you have a modicum of talent, I think with enough work and enough luck you can at least get to the level that you're capable of.
What kind of luck are you talking about?
I didn't expect you to say that.
A lucky break where you get the right agent at the right time or book manuscript gets into somebody's hands at the right time.
And something that's completely out of your control.
You can do the best you can.
And if you don't have luck, an actor that gets cast, you know, that sort of thing.
You ever go back and read your own books?
Yeah, you do.
Yeah.
Sometimes when I need to read something good, I go back and do that.
I do that.
But yeah, I do, yeah.
Which ones do you read the most?
It's one that I'm sure you've never heard of called Tides of War.
That's a long, really ambitious book about the Pelop and Asian War, a historical novel about the war between Athens and Sparta, the 27-year war, and about a certain character that I know you've never heard of either.
But it was a real ambitious book.
And it's one of those books for me that sometimes when I read passages over I go.
That's really good.
That's really beyond me.
I didn't think I could do that.
I see this a lot.
I know a lot of creatives who the work that they interface with the most is not their most popular work.
Yeah, wouldn't surprise me at all.
Yeah.
What do you think that is?
I mean, sometimes the most popular stuff is a fastball right over the plate, you know?
And, you know, because people can relate to that, you know?
An action story where it has a big climax, that kind of thing where sometimes something that's more ambiguous, that has shades of meaning, then you know it's not.
It's not a fastball.
It's a, it's some sort, you know, it's a, I don't know what, loopy slide or something.
To appreciate it.
If you're a baseball fan, you're going.
Wow, that was a screwball right over the outside.
You know, nobody does that since Disney Dean, you know?
And not many people can appreciate that.
So when you are lucky enough to do something like that, I think you yourself appreciate it, even if nobody else does.
What is it about the story of Christ that is so resonant?
Why do, where does that question come from?
That question comes from, you lay out certain stories and then it's one of your pieces.
You get to the story of Christ at the end and you say there's something particularly resonant about this one.
That is like the story, you know?
Otherwise it wouldn't have lasted so long, you know?
The idea of the interface between the mortal and the divine and the fact that when the divine appears, we nail it to a cross.
And then there's the resurrection, which it's really the story we all live in a way.
The moment of doubt and pain to quote Mick Jagger, Leonard Cohen, that song, what was it?
Jesus was a sailor.
He walked upon the water.
He spent a long time watching from a lonely wooden tower.
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him, he said all men will be sailors then, until the seashell freed him.
So that's it.
It is the story.
We all live.
Man, when the divine disappears, we nail it to a cross.
That is an unbelievable sentence.
But it's true.
You know, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Lincoln, JFK, RFK.
When, you know, over and over.
That is a crazy idea.
And, you know, in our own life, right?
You know, you're asking for, make it obvious, right?
Good for you that when it obvious appears, you accept it, you know.
But a lot of people most of us reject that when that happens.
So it's too scary.
What's the lesson in the resurrection?
That you know, I mean this is deep, deep questions, but I mean I do think that that A lot of stories are about them and a lot of stories.
Are you familiar with the concept of the all as lost moment?
Does that bring a bell in there?
This is another, you're talking about principles of story, John.
And this is another screenwriting thing where they will.
If you're a screenwriter, you're delivering a script to a company like Jerry Bruckheimer's company and you're working with executive, they'll ask you where's the all's lost moment?
And the all's lost moment always comes around the end of the second act or the start of the third act, and it's the moment, like Jesus on the cross.
You know, it's the moment when the hero is as far away from achieving his or her goals as possible.
And it's also the moment when the hero sort of hits by it and it has to go to another level, has to go, can't solve the problem by material means, can only solve it by kind of spiritual means.
And when the hero makes that switch, then it goes into act three and everything starts to happen.
But that's sort of the, that's the resurrection moment.
And in a way, like the typical story of an alcoholic, right?
Somebody's in denial, they have a drinking problem.
And finally the moment comes.
You know they come home at two in the morning and the house is through.
All the locks have been changed.
Their wife is gone, their kids are gone.
At that point, that's sort of the on the cross moment, right?
That's the all is the lost moment. in the real world.
And if you go to an AA meeting and people get up there and tell their stories, it's all the same thing.
It always comes down to a moment like that.
And then the resurrection moment is when the person says, I am fucked.
I have a problem.
I've got to do something about this.
Jesus, God help me, right?
And then they go to AA or they go to rehab or whatever it is.
And at that point, they are resurrected.
But again, like we were talking about discipline, it's not a resurrection of Smooth sailing.
From then on, it's like every day is about one day at a time.
Get through this day, you know, and But that is, in my opinion, that is the resurrection in our, in our lives, You know, and so for me, like my moment when I was doing the dishes and I'm trying to sat down and started right, that was sort of my resurrection moment Yeah, but from then on It's still incredibly hard, right.
You still have to do all the stuff year after year, day after day, week after week, right?
I said earlier, desperate, daily dependence.
Yeah.
It's every day.
Yeah.
But again, as you say, it's fun.
At the same time, it's fun.
There's a weird liberty to once you get to the edge of yourself and you've actually gone beyond where you can be self-reliance, there's a surrender.
There is something very freeing about not having to be completely self-reliant and just Acknowledging that there's something beyond there, something beyond you, that you can just serve.
Yes, I was completely, you know.
I mean, it's the old question of, are we...
Material beings having a spiritual experience or always spiritual beings in a material world.
And in some way I mean I'm definitely a believer we're spiritual beings in this material world that isn't our real home and that when we sort of accept that there's another level, then you know, everything becomes, You know, workables.
What is it about writing that has felt so magnetic for you?
Is it like a compulsion to write?
Is it a need to express yourself?
Is it a desire to tell stories?
Is it a love for the craft?
Is it a vision that you had as a kid?
And you were like, I want to be that person?
What is it?
That's another great question.
Thanks.
I never wanted to be a writer as a kid.
Never was an ideal of me, never idolized writers or anything like that.
I sort of fell into it for all the wrong reasons, because I thought it was easy.
I was one of those idiots who thought, oh, I can do that.
And in fact, I was working when the first job was in advertising in New York.
A copywriter, right?
Oh see, I was like a junior copywriter in a group of like eight or nine people and then a boss named Ed Hannibal and he wrote a novel and it was a hit.
And I sort of said at age 22, well, what did I do that?
You know.
So I was so like, when I tried, you know, and like you know, 35 years later I finally did have it that I got in for the wrong reasons.
I got in because I thought it was easy.
The only way I'm going to get out of this paper bag is right my way out of it.
It was a lot of shame involved in that.
But I've never felt like I had anything that I wanted to express or had a concept I wanted to get out or that it was fun, but it was sort of the only way out of that bag for me.
Yeah.
I have two mantras that I think that you really validate, and I'm really feeling it now.
The first is that God doesn't waste suffering, and the second is that anyone who you meet, who has an incredible amount of wisdom, that is on the flip side of an incredible amount of suffering that they had to go through, that they had to make sense of to actually cultivate that wisdom.
And I realized that just now when you said 35 years like that's longer than I've been a lot that you struggled with this craft, from post-ed Hannibal trying to write a novel to being what?
52 years old when you finally were able to publish one.
That's crazy.
But I think there's a certain reality to that.
You know, Robert Greene is, of course, he had laws of power and everything.
I mean, his story is very much like mine.
You know where he worked a million crazy jobs, you know and tried to write various things, tried to be a screenwriter, tried to write a novel and finally sort of found his authentic voice, his authentic swing.
And again it was sort of with luck where somebody came in and said hey, I want you to write this book and the 48 Laws of Power.
I think that's a story.
And it wasn't even his idea.
But he did it and it was like, ah, this is it.
I found my voice.
This is what everything has built to.
You feel like the residue of copywriting shows up in your work, or do you feel like I just did that?
That was one job.
I think a lot is still there.
Is that right?
Yeah.
You said you read my book.
Nobody wants to read your shit.
I love that book, man.
The concept nobody wants to read your shit is the first idea that you realize in advertising.
Nobody wants to read your stupid hand, a senior stupid commercial, right?
Right.
They want to fast forward through it, turn the page, they hate it.
And then shoot it.
I hate it.
I hate it.
I hate it.
That's who wants to see this stuff.
So you then realize from that that if you want to succeed or do a good job, you've got to get around that and you've got to make Your message so compelling, so interesting, so sexy, so funny whatever that it will break through.
And I think that lesson applies to everything.
One act play you're going to write, a dance you're going to do, a song you're going to write.
Nobody wants to hear you listening to your song, right?
My country song about my heart was broken.
So it's got to be so good.
That people, so in other words, you have to work hard.
And you gotta really try to figure out what works and what doesn't work and what works for you.
What's your thing?
And that is art.
Well, the first idea in Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit is to streamline your message focus, pair it down to its simplest clearest, easiest to understand form.
Why?
Well, that's in advertising.
I would not say that applies to say, the 48 Laws of Power, where Robert Greene really gave it a massive amount of stuff.
But in advertising, it's an ad that people are going to spend two seconds looking at.
So whatever your message is, it has to go over really, really quick.
But I would say the opposite is true too, that you can make it really really long, as long as it's interesting.
I like this idea.
This is from number 167 of the Daily Press field, saying yes to A, saying no to B, And I've been thinking a lot about this, which is why I think it resonated.
So I think about writing in 90 minute to two hour blocks.
So if I go hang out with a friend and it's a 90 minute chunk plus a 15 minute commute Every hangout, the price of that hangout is one writing session.
And I think that's a good way to frame the writing process that you and I were both converging on.
Yeah.
Very definitely.
I was just saw a video on Instagram where somebody was saying he called it vitamin N.
It was about on the 70th of this one.
And N stood for no. the ability to say no to that 90-minute thing.
There's actually.
Tim Ferriss did a thing where I've stolen this from him, where somehow he compiled quotations from various writers of scientists saying no and what they said.
Yeah, it's only an hour.
But sometimes, you know, it's a half hour to get there.
It's a half hour to get back worrying about that in the morning.
When I know I have to meet you, it's going to break up my whole morning.
He says, I cannot do it.
I have to do my work.
And I hope you understand.
And so I'm saying no.
I read one last night from the CTO at HubSpot.
He doesn't do meetings, and I actually, he had signed up for Reddit Passage.
I was like, hey, we have this CTO of a public company joining the course.
I'm like, great.
Reach out to him and say, Hey, can I do a 30 minute onboarding meeting?
He goes, I don't do meetings.
But he did something that I'd never seen before that totally depersonalized his no.
He sent me a link to an article and it's called my heart says yes, but my calendar says no.
And I was like, boom, nailed it.
That is exactly right.
And that, I think, is the challenge is how do you have the tenderness and the grace to just say look, You're important to me, but I'm in service of creative work, and not have that land really hard?
I know a few people who are really good about saying no, but no one likes them.
No one likes them.
They're real a-holes about it.
I don't think it's cool.
I tell them, I say, you don't do this well.
You should change it.
But I've been trying to figure out how do I get better about saying no, but in a way that doesn't feel like a right hook.
Yeah, it's really hard.
We're all taught to be nice guys and we don't want people to think you're an asshole saying no, but you gotta protect your time.
If I say yes to somebody that wants to do X Y, Z and meanwhile I'm saying no to go to my daughter's soccer team?
She wants me to go to that game.
So am I gonna say yes to this guy and a no to my daughter?
But that doesn't answer the question of how do you do it nicely?
But if people don't understand, I mean, they just gotta understand it.
There are people out there that are like sociopathic.
You know.
All they know is they want something from you and they don't give a shit you know about your time or what it's cost you, you know, in your reputation or something, if you write them a blurb or something like that.
And you just have to blow those people off and just say I don't care what they think of me, you know.
You know, I just remembered this and I haven't told this to you, but I probably asked you to do an interview five years ago.
And you said no.
But you know what else you did?
You sent me about 30 books that I could share with my readers.
And I really appreciated that.
That was really nice.
Here we are now.
So here we are now.
Tell me about the 60 scenes method.
That's again, it's kind of a screenwriting way of doing it.
I mean, a movie is about 60 scenes.
And so it can be an index cards, three by five cards, and screenwriters do this all the time.
We'll cover the wall, you know, act one as so many scenes, act two, act three.
And you know, you can start with.
I call it kind of a clothesline method, where if you imagine a clothesline and you're hanging, you might only have three scenes.
You have like a great ending.
Captain A.M. and the whale and Duke get out here, you know?
Or here he almost gets to the whale, the whale escapes, and then he sort of asks you, so how do we fill in the blanks?
What has to happen there?
What has to happen at the very start?
You know, who's that kind of thing?
And you can do 60 scenes and just keep changing them as you get better ideas.
You know, that's a way to get at it.
So you're saying you have 60 index cards.
And so you get them all out and then you might go change 27, 34, 41.
And you're constantly upgrading and revising it.
And you say, well, these three, this is kind of boring.
They're really repeating what I did over here.
What do I need in there?
And then you'll take out some other index cards.
In what ways do you think about style in your writing?
It's interesting.
That's another good, brilliant question.
Each book, I think, dictates it has its own style, and it dictates that style to you, the writer.
I mean, that's not necessarily me, you know, but that was sort of the style that that had to be written in.
A bunch of my historical novels are set like in ancient Greece, like Gates of Fire is about the Battle of Thermopylae.
So I thought, how am I going to write this?
I'm going to write this in a kind of contemporary tone.
And what I sort of decided was to pick a very kind of formal and kind of archaic style, sort of the way, like a lot of ancient Greek stuff.
The good things have been translated by Cambridge and Oxford Dons, like in the 1890s and the early 1900s.
And they use a very formal style, you know?
And so I sort of adopted that to try to make the reader feel like he's reading something from the past, you know.
And the characters will talk that way too.
So I sort of look for that in each piece.
So it's a different style with each piece.
What do you make of the way that dictionary definitions have gotten so much less interesting?
If you read the dictionary from 70 years ago, 100 years ago, like Webster's 1913 dictionary, read the definition of the word sublime and then Google the same thing now.
It's so bland.
Yeah, certainly.
I haven't really read what's going on now, but you're right, those old dictionaries are so great.
So good.
I have a friend who has one of those dictionaries.
It's so big.
It has its own stand.
It's like a library, right?
He had to lift the pages and it comes to her from her grandfather or something like that from, like you say, 1870 or something.
And it is fascinating to read that stuff.
You're right.
The definitions are so good.
There's people like Malcolm X who would read the dictionary.
And now you'd be like, that makes no sense.
And I felt that way for a long time.
And then I picked up an old dictionary and you can just read a great definition.
And it's beautiful.
It is great. adapt the nuance of a word when it's well described.
I give you examples of how to use it.
Do you use the source?
I hate to admit it, but I'll use an online version of it.
I'll use whatever Google thing.
You wish there were more words in the English language.
Sometimes you have a choice of 20 or 30 and it's not enough.
You need something.
But I definitely use it, definitely.
But you like making upwards.
I make up words in foreign languages and stuff like that.
I used to, when I was working on gates of fire, to make so, it said an ancient Greece, to make it feel real.
I thought you need to have a few Greek words in there.
You know that.
You know that the reader will go oh okay, I get it, you know.
And so I had a friend, Dr Hippo-Kanzios, and what I used to do was I would make up the word in English and I would send it to him and ask him to give me like to translate this into Greek or make this into a Greek word.
Like just one simple word, was an exercise, a military exercise that took eight nights and was called an eight-nighter.
That was my thing.
And so he gave me a little thing, you know?
And when you put that in the context of the story, it helps.
It makes the reader go, oh, this guy actually knows what he's talking about.
And it's kind of a...
I don't want to say it's a fake, but it's a trick to make something seem like it's happening in that era.
Yeah.
You have any words where the etymology you really like?
Like for me, I really like the word inspire.
Like spirit is associated with breath and breathing in and out.
And I think that there's so much in terms of the way that breath and spirit are actually connected and the inhale and the exhalation of how that then inspires you.
I think that there's so much wisdom in that etymology.
Yeah.
The one.
The example that comes to mind for me is actually in I don't know how to write Japanese, but supposedly the word for spirit in Japanese is like three little squiggly lines or it's part of it that are like heat or steam rising out of a rice bowl.
And so it's a kind of a similar, you know, that's part of the, of the idea gram or whatever it is.
And I thought that's really cool.
There's a Chinese word of revenge bedtime procrastination.
It's very specific, but it is for the way that you procrastinate, if during the day you don't like what you're doing, and then you get home, and then, after the stars come out and the night, the moon comes up.
There's a procrastination that you do to postpone your sleep, because that's when you have your freedom and the way that that time expands and you can sort of just be in that flow.
Wow, I love that concept.
Oh, that's great.
You have storytelling advice.
Make it primal.
Tell me about that.
That's actually from the guy who wrote Save the Cat, Blake Snyder.
And what he meant by that was that again, he was talking about screenwriting, he was talking about movies, and he was saying that the ideal movie should be able to communicate to a caveman.
Make it primal, that was what he meant.
Even without language, it should be, the visuals should be able to.
I don't know if I agree with that, but that's where he didn't come from.
He came from Blake Snyder.
You might not agree with it.
How come?
I think a lot of times, you know, words matter, you know, and it isn't.
All movies aren't an entirely visual medium.
I certainly agree that a story should work for a caveman than most of them do.
But sometimes it's, you know, the ideas are pretty subtle and pretty literate.
Yeah.
And why do heroes need to suffer?
I think because it's about any story is about learning, I think, right?
The hero has to go from point A to point Z, you know, and suffering produces learning.
Unfortunately.
Unfortunately.
I mean, that's one of my mantras is make your hero suffer.
And I think when you look at great work, the writers put their heroes through hell.
And the more they suffer, the better the story is.
And I think that actors, if you think about a movie, actors love to suffer.
My left foot, Tom Hanks, in the cast away, because suffering produces, makes the hero overcome it, you know, and makes the hero learn from it.
You know the suffering produces.
Like you were saying earlier David, there is no real learning without suffering.
What's another example of a story where the hero suffers and you're like, nailed it.
I mean, if you think of just about anything, but the one book that I learned this from was called The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sager, great book.
Anybody who's watching this and it's about it's supposedly a true story about the German army In World War II on the Russian front.
When the Russians were kicking the shit out of them, the tide had turned and they were falling back towards Germany and the Russians had them outnumbered, you know, a million to one, and it was happening in the worst winter you know ever.
And these poor guys were just suffering like mad and the experience of reading.
It was tremendous fun.
And it wasn't because I wanted to see the Nazi suffer or anything.
And I realized, I asked why is it so much fun reading about these guys suffering such hell?
You know?
And I realized that we love to watch heroes suffer, you know?
If it's some rocky training, you know, in the meat...
You know, we want our, you know, swallowing six raw eggs early in the morning.
You know, we love to, we love to see that.
I think because we all know if we're ever going to get anywhere, we got to go through that too.
And it's inspiring to watch, you know, a hero deal with that stuff, male or female.
What is the mantra that you find yourself repeating when you're going about your writing every day?
Uh, you know, I think it's.
Uh, I got a lot of them, but this one doesn't even have a specific words, but it's.
We were talking about self doubt.
Just keep going in the face of of that.
You know that that self-doubt is a form of resistance, and the more resistance you feel to something, the more certain you can be that you have to do it.
So that's what I you know, because I'm constantly dealing with self-doubt and just to keep going through it.
I was reading about that this morning and I was like man.
That concept is a one move checkmate, that the more that you love something, the more resistance you're going to feel and therefore, the more you need to do it.
I feel like you just won I was going to say the War of Creativity.
That's what came to mind.
You called the book The War of Heart, but that's the ultimate one move, Checkmate.
What I want to close by talking about this book, The Daily Pressfield.
There's a few things that I think are really interesting here.
The first is this is a book that you can keep right next to your bed, as whenever you're working on a creative project.
I think you have 373 lessons or something like that. years worth it.
And I think that this is just a companion that you can keep next to you when you're stuck, when you're feeling blocked.
Tell me about this book and why you chose it.
I thought that the book is structured This actually came from an idea.
The guy who gave me this idea was Ryan Holiday who wrote the Daily Stoic.
We were going to a political event and he said, you know, you've got so much content.
He says you've got to organize this into like a 365 day thing that people can use and put on.
You know, right beside where they where they're working.
So I thought beyond that, I thought this book is structured.
If you're starting a novel, page 1, day 1, like the first chapter in this book, day 1 is titled, Resistance Wakes Up With Me.
And it talks about the first thing on the first day and what you have to do.
And the book is really structured about how to deal with your own self-sabotage day by day through a project, like we were talking earlier about certain points, that in the writing of a novel or any creative subject where you're going to get hit with self-doubt, it happens, you know, at the end of act one, in the middle of act two, right before the end, after you're finished, and it hits you like a ton of bricks.
And so this books is sort of designed for when those moments come, that on that day, that week, that month, it'll sort of walk you through it.
So that was the idea.
I wanted it to be something that somebody could keep with them from.
You know, fade in to fade out, you know from chapter one to the end, and it would walk them through it.
Thanks, man.
Hey, thank you, David.
That was fun.
Okay.
It's a pleasure.
Yes.
