Please enjoy this transcript of a special compilation episode devoted to a subject very close to my heart and currently consuming a large percentage of my waking hours: writing. Over the years, I’ve asked some of the writers I admire most questions like: How do you choose a project and stay with it? How do you begin when inspiration refuses to show up? How do you build a practice that reliably produces pages? And how do you keep going when you fear your pages are terrible? Listen in as some of my favorite authors answer these and other questions as we explore the craft of writing.
Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview
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How to Start When You’re Stuck, Finish What You Begin, and Stop Waiting for Inspiration — Creative Advice from Elizabeth Gilbert, Seth Godin, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Lamott and More
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Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
ELIZABETH GILBERT
Tim Ferriss: This makes me wonder how you choose, and I’ve wanted to ask you this for a while, and I don’t think we got into it in our prior conversation, which is how do you choose projects, how to spend your time, where to allocate your limited life force? Because there’s, “what do you want” which is where a lot of people would start. Although that’s a pretty — it can be nebulous in a handicapping way because that could take you in all sorts of different directions. But how do you choose your projects, things to spend time on?
Elizabeth Gilbert: I’m kind of a hard-ass about it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, great.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Part of the thing I’ve noticed that people tend to get stuck on sometimes is that they get this inspiration. Inspiration comes first. Inspiration is the breathing in of God. So something, even the most empirical, scientific, atheist people in the world, when they talk about where an idea came from, they say, “An idea came to me.” They say that. They don’t even know they’re saying that, but that’s they’re reporting accurately what the feeling is because that’s what everyone I’ve ever met who’s had an idea. It’s the eureka moment. It’s like, “Oh, I just heard, saw, and felt an inspiration.” I know the difference between something that comes from me and something that comes to me talking about prepositions again, and I think most creative people do as well. Like, “Oh, this came to me.” And then it can feel like an assignment or it can feel like a challenge. It’s like, “Now, I want to make this thing.” But a place where I think people get sidetracked and distracted, it’s very, very, very similar to meditation. Meditation, spirituality, and art have so much in common.
This may sound familiar to people who — maybe you’ve had this experience. You start working on this thing that was this inspiration, and a couple weeks, couple months into it, couple days, another idea comes. And that idea seems more interesting than the one that you’ve already invested some time into. And then you’re like, “But I want to do this thing. This thing is fresh and exciting. This is the really, really cool thing.” And then you go and do that one, and then another idea comes, and then it’s like you’re dealing with this melee. And so oftentimes people will say to me, “I’m working on a book and I’m halfway through it, but I’ve got this other idea that I think is way better. This book feels really stale and it doesn’t have any life in it.” I always say like, “Okay. Well, I give you permission to quit working on that first project, but only if you have a proven track record of ever being able to finish a thing.”
Tim Ferriss: That is so smart.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Right?
Tim Ferriss: Yep.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Because then it’s legit. It’s like, “No, I’ve got this better idea.” But do you have 30 unfinished things? Because if you have 30 unfinished things, now, we have a problem. I have those same things happen to me. Like I’m a third of the way, a quarter of the way, a fifth of the way in a project, and then something so much more interesting comes along. I’m like, “But I know enough to know.” I’m like, it comes dancing. It’s like a dancing girl. It just comes across the stage.
Tim Ferriss: I was just going to say the hottest girl at the dance —
Elizabeth Gilbert: The hottest girl at the dance —
Tim Ferriss: — just showed up.
Elizabeth Gilbert: — just showed up, and you’ve been married for two months. And you’re like, “Oh, I’ve been married for two months, and the hot…” But what I know is that if I abandon my, let’s call it wife, this project that I’ve been working on for a few months to go off with the hot girl, in a few months, she’s going to be just as boring and stale. And then, a new hot girl is going to come along, and I’m never going to complete anything. So stick with the one you came to the dance with. If I’ve got multiple ideas and I’m not sure which one I’m beginning, I actually have a team meeting and I make the ideas make proposals to me about what do you actually want me to do?
Tim Ferriss: This is like project-based IFS.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Totally. It’s like I’m the angel investor and these ideas are like, “We want your time and money for this.” I’m like, “Well, what are you?” Like, “What are you? What do you have for me? Why should I invest my money and time in you?” A lot of ideas when I challenge them, they disappear into the ether. Because they’re like, “I don’t know. Something about birds.” I’m like, “You haven’t thought it out.” And then, some other ideas like, “No. I want to write about this very specific thing and it’s going to take…” I’m like, “Okay, so this one’s got their act together. So when the bird idea is more formed, come back. Come back when you’re ready. Come back when you’re ready to be real and not just to be tantalizing me with…” So I’m a real hard-ass about it. I don’t mess around. I don’t let these ideas push me around.
ANNE LAMOTT
Tim Ferriss … And I’m going to ask a question that no doubt you’ve been asked before, but I have to ask, what do you think it is about Bird by Bird that affected so many people so deeply? And certainly that’s true of many of your other works, but in this particular case, what do you think it is that has that type of effect on people?
Anne Lamott: I think it’s because I didn’t try to con people into thinking that if they just got a book finished, that my agent would want to take a look at it by the end of the week and that it would almost certainly be published. And that then all the Swiss cheese holes inside of them would be healed and they’d be well, and they’d get that FDA stamp of approval and be validated. And then their parents would start to respect them. I said, “None of that’s going to happen all of that as an inside job.” But I’ll tell you a funny story. When Sam’s little boy, who’s 12 now was five, I was teaching his kindergarten class a writing workshop. And instead of saying “shitty first drafts,” I said, “really poopy first drafts.” And the kids loved me. And after I was done, my little grandchild came up to me and he leaned in and he sounded like Tony Soprano.
He said, “Oh, Nana. That was terrible.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “You told people you would teach them how to write a book, but you only taught us how to write one page.” And that’s really what I can help you do is the one chapter on shitty first drafts. So I don’t try to teach kids or grownups how to write really, really well. I just teach them to stop not writing. I teach to keep their butt in the chair and to write badly. And that all first drafts of any book you’ve ever read by the authors you esteem most began as unreadable first drafts. And I teach people to take it really small, Bird by Bird. Is it okay if I tell the story?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, please. I would love for you to tell the story just so people know the genesis.
Anne Lamott: Well, my older brother — I was like a super superstar achiever in school and my older brother hated school. And he was kind of a rebel. And in California, in the ’50s and early ’60s, in fourth grade, you wrote two term papers. One was the Sacramento paper, that’s our state capital. And the other was on birds. And you had to write all year, all semester, a paper on birds. And my brother hadn’t started. It was due on a Monday, and on a Saturday, he admitted to my dad that he hadn’t started. And my brother was a tough guy and he was in tears. And my dad sat down with him and put his arm around him and he said, “Just take it bird by bird, buddy. First you read about chickadees and then you write a paragraph in your own words about chickadees and then you draw a picture. And then you take pelicans and you study up on pelicans, and then you write a paragraph or a passage on pelicans.”
And I never ever forgot that. And then years later, probably 20 years ago, so in my forties, I heard E.L. Doctorow say that writing was like driving at night with the headlights on. You could only see a little ways in front of you, but you could make the whole journey that way. And I think that is the most profound advice I can offer anyone on any topic. That you can only see a little ways in front of you and you can make the whole journey that way. And another thing that I think helped people when they read Bird by Bird was the chapter on perfectionism and how perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor. It’s the voice of the enemy. And if you listen to it, it keeps you crazy for your entire life because we all fall short. You’ve written books and you think you’re creating this golden and crystal palace that people can walk inside of and see all of truth and beauty and reality.
And you kind of end up — your books and my books, all of them are kind of shantytowns and like in the [inaudible] the peace marches where people set up tents and thought it made sense to bring their dogs during the rainstorm. And that’s a miracle to have written a shantytown. And so I think these ideas of not knowing what you’re doing and letting yourself do it really badly and to try to help grind down that critical voice. I’ll just mention my husband’s work here. He’s Neal Allen. He wrote Shapes of Truth. And the work he does with people in these Shapes of Truth is taming the inner critic. And what his position is: “You’re never going to get rid of it. We don’t get over very much here.” What he does with people is he has them bring forth the inner critic and actually just put it on the table in front of him.
And he thanks them for keeping him alive when he was six and seven, because that critic kept him small and controllable. So he didn’t run out into the street. He didn’t swim out past his ability to stay afloat, but that at the age of 60 or whatever, we probably don’t need it anymore. And so he has his clients give the inner critic a great new job, which might be ethical consultant for the project so that the inner critic can go off to the library where there’s an incredibly comfortable chair and a good reading light and 2,000 books. And he will sit there and read, which he loves to do, and when we need an ethical consultation, we’ll come get him. But we don’t need that constant — is it okay to say the F word on this show?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. Yes please.
Anne Lamott: Okay. So in Bird by Bird, there’s a whole chapter on K-Fucked Radio, KFKD. And without a lot of help and a lot of transformation and healing, K-Fucked Radio’s on 24/7. It’s telling you how far short you’re falling. It’s telling you how great you started out and what a disappointment you’ve turned out to be. It’s telling you that what you’re in the middle of is beating a dead horse, on and on and on. And so the Shapes of Truth work and the inner critic work and Bird by Bird is 90 percent about turning down K-Fucked Radio. Anyway, out of the left-hand speaker is all this stuff about that you can’t do it perfectly, and why bother, and that this has been blah, blah, blah. But out of the right-hand speaker, is like the voice of the people who love you most. The voice of like, for me, Sam or my husband or my two best girlfriends. And they’re saying, “I love your stories. I love how you write. I can’t wait to read more.” But you can turn down the left-hand speaker and it’ll always be there to some degree.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Tim Ferriss: I read a beautiful line from you describing a certain aspect of your creative process. This is from the Paris Review, The Art of Fiction, Number 72. “One must be pitiless about this matter of ‘mood.’ In a sense, the writing will create the mood.” And you continue to say, later in that same paragraph, “I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes … and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.” Could you expand on any of this? I mean, I think it’s pretty well put. But I know that there are a lot of people who feel they need to get themselves into the mood to write. Is there anything else you could add to this?
Joyce Carol Oates: No. I definitely feel that you create your mood by working. And I have a work ethic. I come from a part of the world where people did work rather than just talk about it. And so if you feel that you just can’t write, or you’re too tired, or this, that, and the other, just stop thinking about it, and go and work. Life doesn’t have to be so overthought. You don’t have to wait to be inspired. Just start working. Particularly, I think, first go for a long run and a nice walk, and think about what you’re going to do, come home, and start working. But try not to be interrupted. That’s the problem. Most people are living in families, or they’re living with a partner, and the other person has a schedule and expectations. And while you may love your family, they can be the ones who drain you of energy.
For women, that’s always been a problem. Women are nurturing. There’s nothing wrong with that. But women find it very hard to say no. Women writers are always being asked to do things pro bono, to volunteer their time, to do different things, to read manuscripts, to be on committees, and so forth. And the instinct is really to say yes. I say yes on lots of these things. If you’re a careful custodian of your own time, like Philip Roth, for instance, or Flaubert, you would never give away a whole lot of your time. Philip Roth would never — he wouldn’t do one 100th of the things that I do. He was too smart. He knew how to guard his own privacy.
JERRY SEINFELD
Jerry Seinfeld: Well, my guiding rule is systemize. What’s the problem? The problem is — like my daughter. My daughter is very creative. She’s extremely bright. She’s got an incredible head on her shoulders, and I’ve seen myself in her at that age. She’s way further advanced than I was at that age, but she doesn’t know —
She has a creative gift. Okay? So I say to her, “When you have a creative gift, it’s like someone just gave you a horse.” Now, you have to learn how to ride it. You got to learn how to ride this horse. I’ve seen people that are born by the dozens and dozens, I’ve seen people that were given black stallions, and it usually — if you have a black stallion, like from that movie, and you’re born, and they just put you on it — and that’s what happens. They just put you on it. And you either learn to ride this thing, or it’s going to kill you.
And we have many, many examples of that. So she’s trying to write this thing. She’s struggling, “I can’t write. I keep putting it off.” So I explain to her my basic system, which is, if you’re going to write, make yourself a writing session. What’s the writing session? I’m going to work on this problem. Well, how long are you going to work on it? Don’t just sit down with an open-ended, “I’m going to work on this problem.” That’s a ridiculous torture to put on a human being’s head.
It’s like you’re going to hire a trainer to get in shape, and he comes over, and you go, “How long is the session?” And he goes, “It’s open-ended.” Forget it. I’m not doing it. It’s over right there. You’ve got to control what your brain can take. Okay? So if you’re going to exercise, God bless you, and that’s the best thing in the world you can do, but you got to know when is it going to end. “When is the workout over?” “It’s going to be an hour.” “Okay.” Or “You can’t take that? Let’s do 30 minutes.” “Okay, great.” Now we’re getting somewhere. “I can do 30.”
I’m trying to teach my son, who knows how to do Transcendental Meditation, how to do it. You know? I assume you know about that.
Tim Ferriss: I do. Yeah, I practiced this morning.
Jerry Seinfeld: Okay, so — “I can’t do it 15 minutes.” “Okay, let’s do 10. Let’s do 10. Let’s come up with something you can do. That’s where you start everything. That’s how you start to build a system.” So my daughter — so I said to her, “You have to have an end-time to your writing session. If you’re going to sit down at a desk with a problem and do nothing else, you’ve got to get a reward for that. And the reward is, the alarm goes off, and you’re done. You get up and walk away and go have some cookies and milk. You’re done.”
If you have the guts and the balls to sit down and write, you need a reward at the other end of that session, which is “Stop now. Pencils down.” So that’s the beginning of a system that to me will help almost anybody learn to write, which is something I’ve kind of wanted to teach in a way, because I think it’s so simple.
I think exercise is pretty simple too, but people don’t — they don’t come up with good, simple little systems. They just try and do it, and to me, that’s — you’re going to fail.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The simple doesn’t mean easy, and the point you made —
Jerry Seinfeld: No, no, no. Not easy —
Tim Ferriss: — is to —
Jerry Seinfeld: — but simple.
Tim Ferriss: — so important. The incentives. Right? Having a reward. Having a defined format. How long did your daughter end up choosing for her writing duration, or how long —
Jerry Seinfeld: I told her —
Tim Ferriss: — have you chosen?
Jerry Seinfeld: I told her, “Just do an hour.” That’s a lot. She says, “I’m going to write all day.” “No, you’re not. Nobody writes all day. Shakespeare can’t write all day. It’s torture.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If you taught a class on writing, what other lessons might you have, or resources, or anything, exercises? Because I’m imagining that your daughter could sit down, she says, “All right, I have an hour.” And then you ask her how her writing session went, and she said, “Well, I didn’t have any idea what to write.” So you’d have — I don’t know what age the students would be in your course, but what else would be a component of your class on writing?
Jerry Seinfeld: Well, I would teach them to learn to accept your mediocrity. No one’s really that great. You know who’s great? The people that just put tremendous amount of hours into it. It’s a game of tonnage. You know?
Tim Ferriss: Totally.
Jerry Seinfeld: How many hours are you going to work per week, per month, per year? You might even want to chart that. Or with your exercise, if you want to get in shape. I couldn’t get in shape. I started out as a jogger in the ’70s, and I would run three miles a day. And then I got older, and I got married late, and I had young kids. And I really had to get in shape, and I picked up this book by Bill Phillips called Body for Life.
Tim Ferriss: Body for Life, yeah.
Jerry Seinfeld: And it’s really, really — it’s such a system for a primitive brain, and I do it to this day. I think it’s a work of genius, this book. And it really got me in shape, because he broke it down to, “Here’s what we’re going to do. In minute one, here’s what you’re going to do, to minute five, minute 12. And this is going to end in 45 minutes.” Or whatever it is. And every minute, I know exactly what I’m doing, and that turned the key for me. And all of a sudden, I was getting in shape, because I never had to ask, “What am I doing now?” Or, “What are we doing next?”
It’s like you’ve got to treat your brain like a dog you just got. The mind is infinite in wisdom. The brain is a stupid, little dog that is easily trained. Do not confuse the mind with the brain. The brain is so easy to master. You just have to confine it. You confine it. And it’s done through repetition and systematization.
MARY KARR
Tim Ferriss: Let’s talk about revision.
Mary Karr: Okay, revision.
Tim Ferriss: Revision. This doesn’t have to be serious.
Mary Karr: I’m a big revisor. I’m a big revisor.
Tim Ferriss: You are a big revisor. But, so you have said, “Anyone who has read a rough draft of anything I write is just shocked at how bad it is.”
Mary Karr: It’s terrible.
Tim Ferriss: What does the process look like? I mean, I know this is a very—hopefully it doesn’t sound like a really naive question, because I know that there are many, many aspects to revision. So, I’ll lead with just a bit. This is from writermag.com, but Karr says she takes a hard look at every sentence she writes: “Can I make this sentence less boring? More interesting? Prettier? More colorful? More true?” So that’s a teaser. What does your revision process look like? Because I’ve read that you threw out something like 1,200 pages.
Mary Karr: Threw out 1,200 pages of Lit. Yeah. Finished pages too, that’s not draft. And that was written over about, I want to say, five or six years. And I remember when I threw it out, Tim, I was so upset. I had been—well, first off, they were about to hang me. I was so late. I was like seven years late on a contract. I mean they—and so I finally my agent called me and said, “You’re going to have to…” I said, “You know what? I will sell my apartment and give the damn money back if they don’t shut up and leave me alone. It’s just going to take me a minute.” So anyway, so I’d sent them, I don’t know, I’d sent them like 130, 140 pages. And my editor at the time estimated that I’d thrown out 1,200 pages.
And let me tell you, when she said that they sucked as bad as I thought they sucked, I mean, I knew they sucked when they sent them, which is why I didn’t want to send them. I wanted to keep working on them. So I just, I went to bed for like two days and I watched Dr. Phil reruns and a lot of cooking shows. And I ordered a lot of curry. I think I had a whole pizza at one point and slopped around in my bathrobe. And then I called Don DeLillo, who’s one of the people I call, it’s like the nuclear button, who’s just one of the great novelists, and who also happens to be a friend of mine. And I said, “Don, I think I’m writing a…” He’s like, “What are you crying about?” I said, “I think I’m writing a bad book.”
And he said, “Well, who doesn’t?” And I thought about that. And I thought, “God, he’s right. Tolstoy’s written bad,” but I mean, people I read, every writer I know has written a bad book. So, okay. So, okay. So maybe it’s just going to be a bad book, but it’s the book that’s standing in line to be written. And I think I became willing to fail to just say what happened. So basically what it looks like is just clawing through a line at a time or a sentence at a time.
I think one example I give in The Art of Memoir is that when my mother is driving me to college, and I think the sentence I started with was something like, “Mother drove me to college in her yellow station wagon. We stopped every night at the Holiday Inn and got drunk on screwdrivers.” I can’t remember. Might’ve said puking drunk on screwdrivers. And so I somehow was able to remember being in that car. The thing about my mother’s yellow station wagon was that it didn’t have an air conditioner. So at that time you could buy an air conditioner that strapped under the dashboard. Well, it would build up condensation. And when she turned right, and I was sitting in the shotgun, the water in the air conditioner would spill out onto my bare feet. And it was icy, icy cold water.
And I remembered that we had stopped and gotten a bushel of peaches in Arkansas, and she was drinking vodka. Driving, drinking vodka and orange juice, and eating these—watching her eat a peach. When you’re 17 years old, to watch your mother eat and show any desire for anything is just so horrifying. You just want to die. There’s just nothing uglier than watching your mother eat a peach when you’re 17. You just think, “My God, woman. Shut your mouth. Take a smaller bite. Jesus, it’s not going anywhere.” But the smell of the peaches and being in the—and suddenly I remembered that I had a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude that I had got, it was her book, but I had started reading, and she said, “Read it aloud to me.”
And I remembered reading that book and driving, and I remembered the—you grow up around these Texas dirt farms. I mean, there’s plenty of corporate farming in the state of Texas, but then you get to the Midwest and it’s just so organized. It’s just there aren’t the rusted cars in the yard and the refrigerator on the porch. It’s these rows and rows of corn and these big, cinnamon-colored silos. And I remember driving into that landscape up to that college and reading that book and thinking I could be a writer. I somehow was able to remember those details and occupy that body in space and time and remember how disgusted I was by my mother and how terrified I was that I wouldn’t do well at school, that I would fail.
I’d been such a screw up. I’d been arrested the year before with a bunch of kids and there was a bunch of dope and some of them went to jail and I didn’t because the judge was a guy who had known my mother when she was a reporter for the local newspaper. And I still remember sitting in—she came to pick me up wearing a leopard—she had leopard skin pajamas. It was July 4th. And she had on a beaver coat with a mink collar and those leopard skin pajamas on this hot night and Kountze County, Texas, and here sits this judge behind this—this liver-spotted judge with these palsied hands and every meal he’s ever eaten on his tie when she came to pick me up. And he said, “I remember your mother. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.” And she said, “Oh, you old fool.” I mean, I was just like, “Oh, my God, Mother, get me out of here. Sucking up is underrated.”
So anyway, yeah, I think it’s memory. I do an exercise with my—I just did it the other day for a colleague of mine, Dana Spiotta, wonderful young novelist I teach with. And she’s teaching an undergraduate class, there are 90 kids in the class. I said, “I want to do this writing exercise.” She said, “Well, the writing, it’s been uneven.” But I said, “Trust me, everyone will write well.” And you have them focus on a room they grew up in and to try to occupy the smell, to try to remember a room you were in where your mother’s cooking, your grandmother, wherever you had a good meal when you were little and try to close your eyes and smell that, because smell is the most primordial memory and the most emotional memory and it’s stored way back in that snake brain hypothalamus we have that is where all the trouble starts.
And you try to get in that memory and interrogate your body about what you can smell, taste, touch, and then finally what you want, what are you yearning for and what’s keeping you from getting it? Maybe it’s a bite of the brisket or some of the barbecue or daddy’s oysters coming up out of the fryer, or what’s going to keep you from getting it? It’s my big-footed sister, who, as Daddy said, “Nothing ever got between her and a bag of groceries. She’s going to get all the oysters and I won’t get any.” And so it’s really more about trying to occupy a former self, because I think as you know, just as in trauma, the body remembers. The body also remembers beauty. It also remembers pleasure and love and those other things, too.
BRANDON SANDERSON
Tim: Are you still teaching the creative writing class at BYU?
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, I am.
Tim Ferriss: Brigham Young University. What is the first class?
Brandon Sanderson: First class, so first class is some things I just told you. I get up and I say to them — actually, the very first thing is I say to them, “During this class, we’re going to pretend you want to be a professional writing writer, earning a full-time living from your writing in the next 10 years. That we’re going to pretend, because most of you…” that’s probably not why they’re there. Most of them, they’re just curious. They may have a book of them, and we have this curious relationship with art in our society. It is, as soon as you say, “I’m going to write something,” people are like, “Oh, when will you monetize it? When will you earn money from it?” And that can be kind of destructive.
Like you mentioned you’re writing a book or you wrote one just because it was an itch. You enjoyed it. I think writing is legitimately just good for people in the same way that working out is good for people, learning to write a narrative and get those thoughts out of your head on a page, it’s just innately good. Most people, when they go play basketball, if they look like me, people aren’t going to be like, “So when are you going into the NBA?” But if you write a book, people will say, “So when are you going to publish it?” And I say to the students, “It’s okay if that’s not your goal. If you want to write just for you — if you want to be on the, I spend 20 years and then produce one book route, totally fine. However, I want you to know everything you would need to shoot for the highest level, which is earning a full-time living as a writer. And everything else falls underneath that.”
So during the class, we pretend that that’s your goal. Once you walk out of it, you can make your own goals, whatever they are. But while we’re there, we pretend that. And then the second thing I say is, “You’re going to have to learn when to ignore me.” And that is really hard to do because I’m an authority. I’m up there. Survivorship bias says who knows what I actually say is going to be relevant? Some of it hopefully, but I can’t really determine what really played a part in me being successful and what didn’t.
And I want to approach it as a toolbox, giving people all of these various tools, some of which are contradictory. Self-contradictory. I can give you examples of that if you want, but you can’t use them all. So you’re going to have to ignore some of the advice of major authors. Some of the things that Stephen King tells you will be wrong — some of the things for you. Some of the things that I tell you will be wrong for you. You have to find your own way. And so I kind of start off with, “I’m going to pretend you want to be a professional writer.” And then follow it up with, “But learn when to ignore me.”
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the contradictory tools or approaches in the toolkit?
Brandon Sanderson: The one I generally use as my prime example is when I was studying this before I broke in, two authors that I admired, I read their books. I read On Writing by Stephen King and How to Write Sci-Fi and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card. And I read these books, and I honestly can’t tell you 100 percent if it was in those exact books or other writings of theirs on their websites and things. But Stephen King at one point said, “Do not make an outline. Do not use a writing group. These will destroy your writing.” And Scott Card is like, “I need an outline. It is fundamentally vital for me in order to build my book.” Now, Stephen King is what we generally call — these are George R.R. Martin’s terms. He’s wonderful the way he speaks about fiction. If you’re really interested, anything George says is golden. He calls them gardeners. Stephen King is a gardener. For Stephen King, exploring and discovering his story is the thing that makes him excited. He wants to take a seed. He’ll often say, “I take two really interesting characters and I put them in conflict and have something go wrong, and I see where the story goes, and I just write.” And he says if he has an outline, he feels like he’s already done that process in the outline. So when he sits down to write the book, he has no motivation. He’s not exploring and discovering anymore.
The other group we call architects. Architects like to build a structure and then kind of go and take this little piece and then polish that little piece and see where it goes, and then take the next piece that they’ve already built as part of their structure and build a story around that. And most people are somewhere in between these two extremes. But those were two extremes where I realized I can’t do both of these. I can’t both not have an outline and have an outline. I can have a hybrid approach. But if you try to take both of their advice equally weighted, then you’re going to get nowhere. You can try both methods in different ways, you can try some hybrids. But a lot of things you’ll learn in writing you kind of have to choose one or the other and try it out and see how it works for you.
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the assignments that have most resonated with students or you think best served them even though they might not recognize it?
Brandon Sanderson: So what I generally do is I follow a focus on habits approach. Instead of giving them specific writing exercises, if someone comes up to me and says, “I’m having trouble with X,” I’ll give them a writing exercise to work with that. If someone comes up to me and says, “I am having a lot of trouble going back and revising my chapters over and over again, instead of writing the next one,” I’ll say, “Okay, try writing longhand.” This works for some people. You go, you take a page of paper, you write it longhand, and you tell yourself, it doesn’t have to be perfect until I put it into the computer. You start each day taking what you wrote before and putting it to the computer and then leave it alone and write your next chapter longhand, and then use that process to kind of get yourself back into the writing, but then forcing yourself to do something new. That works for some people.
If people are having trouble with dialogue, I say, “All right, go do the exercise where you sit and listen to people on campus and you just write down exactly what they say exactly as it’s said, and then take it and try to write it under different styles of dialogue.” If you’re writing like Soderbergh, how would you do it? Pick some of your favorite people, go watch their movies, write down the dialogue, and compare that to their real life, and just kind of figure out what kind of dialogue you like to do. Those are exercises.
But in general, I’m only doing that when I’m diagnosing a problem. For the class I’m saying your job, if you want to try to be a professional writer, you’re going to have to write consistently.
Brandon Sanderson … Nine out of 10 writers that I’ve found do better with consistency. One out of 10 is a binge writer. I don’t understand binge writers as well, but I can talk about that. Those are the people who go rent a cabin, take two months, walk in without a book, come out with a book, and then they don’t write for 10 months. Most people are better served by writing a certain amount every day really consistently, or at least two or three times a week, and building a novel out of good habits. And I focus on that.
I’m like, break it down, set a goal, have a spreadsheet and try to hit your word counts, or at least your hour counts. If you’re having trouble doing this, go to a specific place every day that you do this, that you don’t do a lot of other things. Go to the coffee shop, go to a certain room in the house, turn on certain music that you only turn on when you’re writing. Build that habit so that you are very consistent. Batch your writing time. If there’s something you already do every day, if you already have built a habit to go to the gym, then try to align your life so that you go to the gym and then have an hour to write. Think about what you’re going to write at the gym, sit and write for an hour so that you are adding onto a habit that you’ve already built.
And that’s my focus in the class is to really be consistent. See if you can write, the goal is in the class to write 35,000 words. Class is around a third of the year, if you do that all year, you will end up with 100,000 words, which is your average novel.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s hit some top line habits from Brandon. How many words per year on average would you say you put down?
Brandon Sanderson: My goal is 2,000 to 2,500 words a day. So whatever, 10 pages to 20 pages is what I’m looking at. Depends, I mean, I write in the old school manuscript format where everything’s 12 point and in Courier and it’s a holdover from the days when certain typesetting things are done that are too nerdy perhaps to talk about here. But I think in words, so I do 2,000, 2,500.
Tim Ferriss: Those are new words?
Brandon Sanderson: Those are new words. Now when I’m doing revisions, I’m not writing new words. And I would say around a third of my time is spent on revisions depending on the year. And this is the thing, some years I’ll do a lot of words. Some years I do a lot more revisions. And so it really depends. But if we’re looking at 2,000 words a day times 50 weeks, that can produce quite a lot of words. So 10,000 words a week is what that would turn into. That’s 500,000 words a year is what I could theoretically produce. Now, a third of my time’s done to revisions. So really I’m looking at around 300,000 words. A Stormlight Archive book is 18 months of work for that reason and things like that.
SETH GODIN
Tim Ferriss: All right, so I’m going to personalize this selfishly because that is my nature, right? To flash back, now I’m going to create a montage of dinners with Seth. This is just a portion of our exchange in the last dinner, same dinner where I misattributed this book to you as a recommendation, where I asked you for advice because I was feeling stuck with writing. You very, very observantly replied, “Didn’t we talk about that eight months ago, the last time we had dinner?”
I said, “Yes indeed, we did. It shows you how little progress I’ve made.” Whether this is just an opportunity to showcase my insecurities, I don’t know, but I would love to hear what you think it is that I torture myself with, or that tortures me that leads me to ask you these types of repeated questions on different occasions because you are as much as anyone I know, you seem from the outside looking in. Maybe it’s like the calm duck on the surface kicking like hell underwater, I don’t know. You seem to be a relatively unconflicted person. You’re not like biting your nails, fretting about doing A or B. You seem to pretty calmly do your thing, and I wouldn’t describe myself that way.
In what you’ve seen, is there any outside perspective where you’re like, “I think that these are some of the reasons Tim gets tied up and nuts?” Is there anything that you have to —
Seth Godin: Okay. Well, first of all, if I’m making you miserable at dinner, I apologize. That’s certainly not —
Tim Ferriss: No, no, no, no, you’re not. No, I love our dinners.
Seth Godin: I think that you left —
Tim Ferriss: This is just a segue into conversation.
Seth Godin: You left out the thing I said after I said the thing about eight months, which is “Where is your bad writing?” And there’s no such thing as writer’s block. Writer’s block is real, but it does not exist. What it really is is misnamed. “I have a fear of bad writing. I have a fear of what the world will say when it encounters my bad writing,” and the way through is to do your bad writing. You don’t have to ship it to the world, but you have to do the bad writing and bad writing over time, if you do enough of it, can’t persist. Good writing will slip through, and I learned this from Isaac Asimov. He and I worked together on a project years ago.
He published 400 books back when it was hard to publish a book, 400 books, and he told me that every morning — sorry, that’s the volunteer fire department. Every morning for six hours, he would sit and type. It didn’t matter if it was good or not, he had to do six hours of typing. Now obviously, he didn’t have a typing problem. Just about anybody can do six hours of typing and then at the end of the shift, he would look throughout the bad writing, whatever was left, what was left and the subconscious understood that if he’s going to type anyway, you might as well type something good.
He got through the bad writing thing and in your case, you have so much skill and such a benefit of the doubt from people you’ve earned it from, that it’s really likely that you’re saying, “Why do I need to get back into that? There’s nothing but downside for me,” because you know how to make one of the world’s best podcasts, you do it on the regular, people really like it. When you write a book, they roll their eyes, they read the whole thing. “Aren’t you proud of me?” What a pain in the neck. It takes a year; just do the other thing. I totally get that feeling, and this is where we lead to the second part about being conflicted, and it’s a small Nike riff, which is “Just do it.”
We’re not going to go into the origin of that phrase coming from a mass murderer, but just do it implies —
Tim Ferriss: Hold on! Is this like a Manson family reference, or?
Seth Godin: Gary Gilmore.
Tim Ferriss: Wow, I have no idea. All right, that’ll be for people to have research on their own.
Seth Godin: That was the last thing he said before they killed him.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Seth Godin: “Just do it.” Now you’ll never be able to unsee that image, sorry. Just do it implies “What the Hell? It doesn’t matter.” That’s not a good way forward, because it pushes you to be a hack who’s not responsible for your own work. The alternative is to replace the word “just” with the word “merely.” Merely do the work that the time you are spending narrating yourself doing the work, the time you’re spending catastrophizing the work is not helping anything. I was a really insecure flailing, failing entrepreneur for at least eight years in a row, just consistently failing, barely breaking, even getting close to bankruptcy on a regular basis.
I was willing things to work out, and I was spending a lot of time dramatizing all of the perfect problems that I was confronting. Then I was able to shift to merely doing the work without the narrative and without the drama. As soon as we can merely do the work, then there’s room to see what needs to be seen. I don’t believe in the muse at all. I don’t think there’s any outside force. I don’t think talent really matters. I think what matters is choosing to find your smallest viable audience, understand your genre, and explore what it means to make magic in the small, so you can do it again.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Two things, the first is you are a delightful dinner host, and I love our dinners so not to cherry pick and make this look like a —
Seth Godin: Okay, you’re invited back.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, this is not a video collage of like NASCAR accidents that I want to paint as the experience at your house, that’s not the case at all. Number two, I would love to ask about the decision, the point at which you decide you have something that you would like to publish or share, and that quality cut off or how you think about it because in my head, the helpful and self-defeating depending on how you want to look at it perfectionist side of things will, for instance, look at something I wrote in 2010 and say, “I can’t do that anymore and if I practice, I could still practice for weeks and publish something on the blog, and it would not be that good. Therefore, I’m not going to publish because I feel like people will be disappointed, or I will be letting them down and that the attention they’ll spend on it will not derive or return as much value to them,” right?
That’s the voice that is the deliberation that I have in my own head, and I do actually have hundreds of drafts. I have shitty stuff, but it’s never quite crossed the chasm into good enough to publish. I’ve been stymieing myself in that respect, and there is part of me that’s like, “You know what, the podcast is easier, it’s fun. I feel like it’s a craft I’m still improving on. Why don’t I just do that?” There is part of me that says that, then there’s another part that says that’s a cop-out.
In fact, the writing helps you to learn to think as Kevin Kelly, to invoke that name again, right? He writes to think, he doesn’t think and then write, and that I’m shortchanging myself by using perfectionism as an out.
Seth Godin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: If hearing all that, what comes to mind for you?
Seth Godin: Well, I’ll share my personal experience, but first, I want to challenge something you stated as fact, which is —
Tim Ferriss: Yes, please.
Seth Godin: — that the writing isn’t good enough to publish says who?
Tim Ferriss: Says me, right.
Seth Godin: Right.
Tim Ferriss: That’s me.
Seth Godin: Right. It’s not that the writing isn’t good enough to publish. It’s that when you look at the writing, your analysis of where you are in the marketplace and the promise you’d like to make and keep doesn’t match the writing that’s in front of you, but I dare say as talented as you are at so many things, this might not be your best skill knowing when it’s ready to publish —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, true.
Seth Godin: — and it may make sense in this world where it is ever easier to hire somebody to do the thing they are good at, to say to this person, “Here’s 5,000 words aimed at this kind of reader. Tell me where I’m got light and tell me where I should take stuff out,” because the way you get — my friend who I went to business school, Evan, climbed Mount Everest back when that was a very big deal. I mean there was no YouTube or anything, and I was quizzing him, “What’s that like?” Well, he said that the first weeks are just spent walking up this trail, that’s not that hard a trail to walk up, with tea houses along the way and stuff like that. It’s only toward the end, once you’ve committed to climbing Mount Everest, that Mount Everest actually gets really hard to climb.
It’s a fortunate coincidence for the climbers that it happens in that order because your sunk costs have increased so much by the time that it gets serious that you’re too embarrassed to turn to your peers and say, “I can’t put in the work.” What you’re doing before you get to the hard part is you’re inventing a reason to stop, and you said something was really poignant, which is you look at stuff you wrote in 2010 and you say I can’t do that anymore. Well, two things happened to me. First, 20 years ago, I wrote a book called Permission Marketing. It became a New York Times bestseller and I said, “I’m done. What could I do the first time out of the gate because I’d been a book packager before? This is my first ‘real’ book. How can I beat that?”
So I stopped. I just stopped and I sat in the dark for a year. I just didn’t do much of anything because I said, “I can’t hit lightning like that again,” and thanks to Malcolm Gladwell, he was unknown. He sent me this new book called The Tipping Point, and he asked me to write a blurb for it. I read it in one night and realized that without knowing it, I had been writing a book about how ideas spread. In the next 12 days, I wrote a 225-page book and I sent it to Malcolm. I said, “Look, if you want me to not publish this because it seems like you unlocked the key, and I don’t want to take away anything from The Tipping Point, I will stop and just throw it out, but I needed to get this out of my system.”
He was such a mensch. He gave me his blessing and wrote the forward, and I realized in that moment I couldn’t write Permission Marketing again. That day was gone, but I could write this book and someone would benefit from it. Then 10 years later, same 2010 you’re saying, “I wrote a book called Linchpin, and I will never be able to write a book that good again. I will never write a book that goes that deep close to my bones, that makes me feel the way that book made me feel.” After that book came out, I felt the same way again, which is “Well, if this is the journey, I found the end of the journey.” I realized six, nine months later, that that was selfish and that leads to the other key thing I want to talk about, which is generosity. Because generosity doesn’t mean free.
People pay for a surgeon who’s going to save their life. Generosity means that you’re expending emotional energy, emotional labor to help somebody else and as soon as I could shift it around in my head to say there’s somebody over there who could use a hand, then it wasn’t about me anymore, and I wasn’t parading anything. It got way easier to merely do the work without commentary because there’s somebody over there I’m doing it for, here we go.
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