Writing Tips: To Build It, Live In It | 083

Jess, this is fun. We get to gab with other people listening, as opposed to the privacy of our sessions. Every week, I'm excited to talk to you about story. So were you always in love with books and reading? Where did that start for you?

Age six? I think it started when I broke my leg and was laid up for months, and there was nothing to do but read and get into stories.

And so what did you learn from that?

From that experience, I think what I learned at age six, really was just you always have to be prepared to make your own way. As far as finding uses of your time and keeping yourself entertained and not getting bored, you have to be pretty resourceful when it comes to

keeping yourself engaged. Because for, you know, four months, when I was six years old, there was no going out and playing,

and all the other kids were learning all the sports. That's when you learn all the sports, and you were holed up with a cast, and you completely incapacitated. So you were immersing yourself in the worlds of other people?

Yeah, exactly. And I think it was then that I discovered that what people are able to imagine is every bit as vast as what we can find outside in the world, maybe more vast. And at age six, when you get into a story, what you really want to do is believe, right? Yeah, and you don't want to make

believe. Make believe is for little kids. And you're six, you're a grown up. It's not for if you don't want fairy tales and nonsense like that. And so you look for stories that you can actually believe, you can buy into. And so at that age, I started to develop this idea that coming up with something

that people could believe was real was a really significant achievement. Yeah, people are skeptical. They bore easily, and they have really short attention spans, so getting them to believe in some construct, something you've made up that's that's a tall order,

and this buying into this, and this passion for this was something that you shared with your mom, right? She would read aloud to you, and you would stay up late at night immersing yourself in these stories.

Yeah, when I had the broken leg, my mom really got into reading aloud with me, and because I was laid up, I learned to read in the first grade, like you might learn to read much later. We would read stories and books together. So after I was over the broken leg, we just continued this. Now all

the way through grade school, my mom and I were always reading something aloud, yeah, and very often we would end up, when I was in third grade, staying up till three in the morning to finish a book because we were both dying to see how it was going to come out. And having a mom who would get, as you know,

involved in stories as fantastic. I mean, my mom would be reading a story with me, and she'd be there in tears, you know, reading

some, oh, tell me one of your favorite books from that time, one that

was super memorable then for me, was a book by Paul Gallico. I think it was called the man who was magic. And it was just this brilliant story of a magician who had to find this kid who was actually the heir to, like, the throne of a kingdom. And it was really moving. Everybody loved the

Island of the Blue Dolphins. Yeah. Scott O'Dell, a great book. And there was the movie, of course. And you know, at that age in the 1960s when you read the book and you saw the movie, that was still, it was still a thing, you know, that still felt like you were right at the cutting edge, of course, you

know, Charlotte's Web, like, Yes, oh yeah, we all read that without parents. Stuart Little, and then when I was in third or fourth grade, my sister introduced my mom and me to the Roald Dahl books, James. Oh, I love those books, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Yes, those were really a game

changer, because I tapped into this idea that I hadn't been exposed to before, that it was okay for kids to be shitty. It was so irreverent, yeah, well, and especially toward adults, right? But also, I mean, James of the Giant Peach was very relevant toward adults, whereas Charlie the Chocolate Factory

was very reverent toward other kids. The other kids were just horrible, but they were so wonderfully entertainingly horrible, right? And that that I think was a great breakthrough for me, because that's where I realized, you know, stories are not about role models,

yeah, not necessarily. Verily, yeah, and you can, it's like acting. You can get away with things in Maple in stories that you can't in real life. So you can completely, you know, completely, live outside the bounds from which you were, you know, born or bred into, or

whatever. So books then turned into a love of movies.

Yeah, that took. That took a little while to happen. Just because I lived in a very small town, there was one movie theater. It ran a movie for a couple of weeks. This was in the days when we still had double features, right? Yeah. It was also the days when movies came back. The Sound of Music

came back every year, Gone With the Wind. Came back every couple of years, right? But the movie thing really took off for me when I was 15, I think, and I got a job as projectionist at the only revival house in the town, which showed its old movie only twice a week, Friday and Saturday nights. And so Friday

night I just see this movie I'd never seen before, Casablanca, the Maltese, the end of the Sixth Happiness. You know, some classic movie that, because I was 15, I'd never seen, right? And so I see it Friday, and then I'd show it again to the audience on Saturday, but that night, I would just watch it and

sort of think about how it put its story together. And that was a real revelation, because I began to realize that stories are put together in a way that is so much more complicated than it looks from the front. You know? I mean, particularly a movie which has to tell a story so much bigger than you can fit

into 100 minutes, right? A movie is crafted as much by omission as by inclusion, and the art very much is, what do you leave out and then have you juxtapose this and this to make them infer all that part that we omitted, right? And what movies also do that I it took me years afterward to start to really

figure this out. But you know what great acting is, is putting point of view from narrative and prose into something audio visual, right? You know you watch Ingrid Bergman, you never are wondering how she feels, because she can put it into the sound and the image you watch Betty Davis, you're always

wondering what she's up to, because she doesn't put it for She's up to something, and you don't know what. And the fun is figuring out that's exactly what point of view is in a novel, right? But point of view in a novel has to do in an entirely different way, right? But a lot of my intent interest in how

stories get told in prose, really came out of movies, right? And just thinking about like, how would you have written that down? Right? How would somebody have written this role for that actor, right? Yeah. And, of course, what I learned later is they didn't,

yeah. I mean, I often read a screenplay after I've seen a movie, or read the screenplay before I've seen the movie, and then you compare what's not on the page. It's a really beautiful exercise. Tell me about what working in politics and being around really politically engaged people

taught you as a teenager about crafting story and controlling narrative.

Well, when I got into politics, first, it was Nixon and it was Watergate, and that was a phenomenal thing to watch as a kid, ages 12 to 14, because, of course, it was something unprecedented in America that the President would be forced to resign or face being impeached. And what really

made it remarkable, and I think pertinent to now, is what really now, is what really happened to Nixon's public opinion turned against him. And as soon as that was clear that public opinion wanted rid of him, the Congress turned against him, like rats off his sinking ship, right? We may see that again, right?

We can only hope what happened,

of course, in terms that we would use today is Nixon failed to control the negative, or, sorry, the narrative, right? But at the time, no one even thought in those terms. Interesting enough when I was working for Leon panetta's first campaign for Congress, which was only four years after Nixon's re

election, 76 so two years after he resigned, it was very much about the narrative, though I don't think anybody used the word at the time and in that particular campaign, it was pretty simple. He had a great story. His opponent, a seven term Republican, had no story at all. Well, the guy was just a

seven term Republican incumbent, right? Whereas Panetta had been an outspoken opponent of the administration's neglect of civil rights law, he quit his job to do that. He he made himself visible with what was already a really good story, right? And then, of course, he was, he was just a better

character than the other guy, right? As we just saw with the New York City Mayor's race, yeah. I mean, Mom Donnie didn't win simply because he had a better story, right? But I can say Andrew Cuomo lost because he had a really crappy story, right?

And often when you know a lot about somebody that works against you, oh,

well, and he's, I mean, unfortunately, he's been utterly miscast as himself. He was right for the role when he was 43 but they need, they need to do a new production and replace him. Oh, God, we could do a whole podcast about that.

So then you decide to go to Harvard on a whim. Yeah, as an as an archeology major of all things. But then English pulls you back in and the love of language. So tell me about what being in that institution, in an intellectual environment and rather progressive environment, what

did that teach you about story?

Well, what it primarily taught me, which was a real shock and was a shock I had to get twice to be convinced of it, first in college and then in graduate school, is in the academic establishment. In literature, no one has any interest in story at all. They're interested in things

that are derivatives of narrative, and they talk about narratology and narratising, and they use all these words that begin with NAR but talking about making inquiry into story, it's just it's not done, and I think it's considered unworthy of an academic undertaking,

which because it's too much fun. I

think it's because it's too much fun and it's it's well, because it's unserious and, or so they think. And it's also because, at a certain period in the formation of liberal arts education, right, and and a liberal education with the trivium and the quadrivium, and it was all in Latin and all

that stuff. One studied literature to learn the classics because the ancients were superior to us, and one studied literature to learn philosophical things and ask the great questions. But it wasn't for stories. And then one, once public education came along, English teachers had to convince

legislatures and others to pay them. Well, they're not going to pay to talk about stories, so they had to cook up this idea. There was these things called Themes. No one cares about themes, right? I mean, did you ever read a book for the themes?

Like no, but you bring a point, because you really only talk about this. If you're writing a review, you're writing a school paper, you're writing a college thesis. Otherwise, you just talk about what moved you well. And you

know, the process whereby a story assembles itself. I mean, you watch a lot of movies, you know you've made movies. You know movies are made. You can look at movies in two ways. They're made by this incredible collective of people, or in some mystical way, through these people, they make

themselves. The force of the story renders the movie. And where we really see that as when the movie turns out bad, right? It's because the story just didn't have the umph, didn't have the chops, right? Every good story, if it has a life to it, it it develops a will. You know, there's an invisible hand

phenomenon, right? Story? Well, you've written narrative work, you know, at a certain point your job is to get out of the way, because some it has this internal drive.

Oh, but that's so much easier said than done, isn't it? Oh,

well, you can cultivate it. You can nurture it. There's a lot that you can't make it happen, but you learn to recognize the components, the ingredients of that, characters who seem to be real, characters you can relate to. That's essential, right? Certain ways of capturing places, atmospheres,

relationships to time, you know, but it's also all kinds of things that are structural. I. Can't call her a mentor, but a woman I learned a lot from was the woman who co created dynasty Esther. I used to talk periodically when she would come to New York to talk books with agents, and I tell her about a

book, and her first question was always the same, how's the incidentation? Well, I of course, I'd go, well, it's fabulous, Esther. I mean, of course, why would they be telling you about a book that did that? I had no idea what she was talking about. General conversations with her. I

realized she's asking, how is the story delivered in the system or set of incidents? Because that's how nighttime TV worked, right? The story had to be able to break out in incidents. This thing that she taught me about incidentation is invaluable, right? And that's a really big component too, of

getting your story to the point that all of a sudden it starts to turn its own wheels and develop its own energies and push and pull and prod and right? Because when when the incidents have started to form their own floor plan, if you will, right? Something just happens. It's a structure. And

it's structure is one of the worst words we can use, because we always talk about structure in stories. Structure is static. This thing we mean is dynamic. It's in motion, right? And that incidentation fuels that a lot, right? So you can't make it happen, but there's all kinds of ways to sort of hedge your bet

with it a bit.

Yeah, so this critical eye that you put on work as a reader, how did that develop for you. So you're in New York, you get, you're in Boston, and then you're in New York, and you get, you get a job as a reader. Tell me about what just reading, reading, reading and putting that eye, knowing

that you had to report back, as opposed to just reading for pure enjoyment. Yeah, I read first. How did that lens change?

I read first for one of the big studios with its literary office in New York, which would get manuscripts of books that either had just sold or were selling, usually they were sneaked out from somebody. Then I read for a huge agency that was looking to be active in packaging, because packaging was

just taking off. This was the 80s, and my initial job was just read, write a report. Here's the story, here's how I think it might work or might not work as a movie. And I had a real liability there, because it's, I can't read a novel that works and not see a movie in it somehow, right? I mean, because

there's, if the story is good, it can be a movie. So I got sort of switched into something different, where my bosses would give me books that other people had already read and covered, and my job was to rewrite their coverage for specific clients. We want this to work for that director. We want this to work

for that production company. And you know what their taste is, skew it or jigger it all to fit them, which was really fun, because, to an extent, it was kind of like adapting this story, but it was also just, it was just plain old, distorting it right. It was getting taking this story and making it

different in a way that I, with very little experience, felt would appeal to so and so and of course, I didn't feel in any way remorseful about this, because if it worked, this author was going to get a bunch of money, right? If they didn't want the money, they always could say no, right? And it's not like anybody

was going to follow my plan anyway, but

they did, and they did a lot, so

they later when I became an agent, yeah,

so take me inside that transition from reader to agent. What's that? It has to be me moment.

So I went to grad school at Columbia, once again, thinking I would be able to do narrative studies, like real study of how stories work. And I got my master's, and I started my PhD, and I realized I'm not going to be an academic. There's no way. So I quit a year into my PhD, and within a short time, a

couple of agents asked me to join them in a new agency, and we were all about turning playwrights into screenwriters and developing careers for them in that and that was really fun, but I don't know much about the theater, and so I quickly became the book person, and that worked out pretty well, and within a

few months of the time I joined them, they were bought by a very large agency that was entirely publishing focused a book agency. So it was the perfect fit for me, and there too, I kind of got into the distortion business very quickly. I was developing and editing work with some of our clients. I mean,

most notably. Peter Hedges, What's Eating Gilbert Grape was the first thing I got to edit chapter by chapter.

Oh, wow. Oh my goodness, it's so great.

The dreamiest experience imaginable. Everything went wonderfully. Everybody involved was terrific. And when the movie, when I watched the movie at a paramount screening room in New York, I just sat there with tears in my eyes, because it was like, it's the story that Peter always

envisioned. It's here, you know, but there might at the agency my job became, in part matter of taking books that hadn't sold, working with the writer to turn them into something we would then succeed in selling, or taking projects that were very undeveloped, and just developing them enough to sell. And this

worked out pretty well, also because it was the early 90s, publishing had been taken over by all the conglomerates, and so we were just selling stuff like mad. You know, we could sell everything. And so in those days, I remember thinking, I just don't know why everybody doesn't do this. It's so easy to

sell. That was a very short life for the for the 30 years since I started, it's just gotten harder and harder and harder.

Yeah, I mean, there's this just as we know, the landscape just changes and changes and changes. And obviously, with streaming and AI and, you know, it's just changed so much since that time, that time at Curtis Brown, I mean that that was the same time as Diana Gabaldon in that era. And,

and tell me what you learned about timing, you know, and and what the market is offering, and whether something's going to fly or not fly.

Yeah, Peter, Peter Hedges book, to me, was a great timing story, in a way, right when what's in Gilbert Grape was really Dun, dun, dun. The galleys were in hand. The publisher was going to be publishing it in a few months. We followed our plan, which is to send it to directors only,

and we sent it to five. All five really admired the book. For them past one kind of considered it, and then we just weren't going to go any further. We weren't just going to be out there flogging it. We felt like now is not the right time. We'll be there later. What ended up happening is Lassa Hallstrom

discovered it on his own because a friend of his was the Swedish publisher who bought it, and that made the whole thing happen. The timing will somehow happen if it's going to and while you can strategize, you don't have a lot of control. Diana gabaldon's A perfect example. We loved her books. All

of my colleagues were 100% behind her. She sold all over the world. We in the film department simply couldn't get those books lined up for a movie, because they're not a movie. They're huge, they're epic, right? Yeah, it really took until strict streaming was a reality for those books to

happen on the screen. And of course, you know, the series is fabulous. It's, I mean, it's beautiful in every way, every

Oh, I love Outland. Are you kidding me? I'm a super fan. Yeah. This is a phenomenal

phenomenon, which simply couldn't have happened as a two hour movie, right? Yeah, you know, and I was never involved any things. Well, okay, yeah, actually, the there's the new series called Dark winds, based on Tony Hillerman Robert Redford had those forever. They made a couple of them, but they

never really worked, because those books are really much more like a series. They are a series of books. They're much more like a series than like a two hour production, right? You know? And actually, what a series is has undergone such an incredible transformation in the past 25 years, yeah, all kinds of books,

it would never have occurred to us to try to sell for a series in the 90s or natural series material now?

Yeah, tell me what you learned being in LA as opposed to New York. So you go out and you start working with endeavor. What? What did you learn there about crafting story in a different Yeah, or selling stories in a different environment?

Well, I think the most important thing I learned at endeavor where I had great colleagues whom I admired a lot, is I was just not a very good agent. And the reason I was not a very good agent was a good agent can sell the material regardless of his opinion of the material, and I am way too vain

about my own taste. I can only sell what I love myself. I can sell a script or a book, if I'm going to read, read the book or see the movie myself, I want to recommend it to my friends, and I just wasn't good

at that. So is that how you felt about sideways? Yes.

Sideways, you know, I, I loved the story completely. And I, I knew right away, you know, that sideways would make a terrific movie. I also knew right away there was only one person in the whole industry who could get it made. But fortunately, he was a client of endeavor and terrific, amazing,

wonderful person. Alexander Payne, yeah, yeah. And I, you know, I had a good connection, and I could give him the book and know he would read it, you know. And so that was a wonderful little piece of serendipity, too, right? I got the book, and if I hadn't known pain, there wouldn't have been

anybody to give it to. And I, I like Alexander's movies consistently. I think they're great, but I still think sideways is one of his best.

It's glorious. Yeah, glorious.

As far as developing stories, you know, one of the things I think the Hollywood agents are very smart about is they largely don't do that. You know, they attach people to do that. You know When? When? When an agent at an agency like endeavor or, well, Liam Morris, Endeavor now, CAA

agencies of that scope and that stature, when they have, say, a team of writers who have a really great story in their heads, but it needs some development. The agent doesn't muck around in it. The agent says the producer to work on this with you is so and so I'm setting up a meeting for you

with her, because the agent's not going to be part of that creative team, right? It doesn't make sense for the agent to but also, the agents don't have the time, and frankly, most of the agents don't particularly have the skill set, right? I mean, being an agent is a particular combination of talents, right?

And yeah,

and your colleagues all along the way. I know we've spoken about this, didn't really understand your approach, that you were really working as an editor with your clients to help craft their books and bring their vision to life in a way that other agents you know were not doing. And so

take me inside the it does not have to be me moment where you're like, I'm not an agent. I don't want to be an agent anymore, and you found your vocation, so to speak, as a personal editor,

yeah, and I just preface it, I think many of my colleagues did understand it, they just didn't agree with it, right? Okay, important distinctions, yeah, for different reasons. And for one thing, it's for agents. It's not cost effective, right? You know, agents have to maximize the

utility of every single minute, and development is not a way to do it. So the it has to be me moment probably came when I taken my first vacation from endeavor like a real trip, one of the things I love that endeavor is they obligate you to take vacation. You must take vacation, and you must go away.

You cannot just sit on your sofa for the three weeks of your vacation. So it was in Thailand, and I'd had the great luck to meet a whole bunch of Thai people, particularly a family. And it was, it was a guy, his grandmother and his aunt. He was a former boxer, recently out of the military, and they were very

poor, and he and I were making an offer offering rather one day at a temple, and I was a little unnerved by it, because we're going to burn incense and put down gold leaf and a flower. And I'm like, and he's like, what's up? And I go, Well, I just, I don't. I feel odd because I don't understand it. I don't, I

don't know what it means. And he goes, he's Lacher. He goes, it doesn't mean anything. You just do it. We're driving, and he's driving, and he looks at me and he goes, you know, the problem with you is you think too much. I go, Yeah, I've been told that before. You know, that's not news. And he goes, but what I

mean is, you think you have to understand things to do them. And that's not how it works. You understand things by doing them, that that was a big change for me, because I've always been the kind of person who would get lost in the prep rather than just jump in and do right and just get way over invested in

sharpening my pencils. You know, I'm going to be ready to do that when. And that carried over for me in a couple ways. First off, I quit my job as an agent, and in a short time, not right away. And. Really invested myself in editing and developing books and stories. And it's like, am I a pro? I'm half baked. But gotta

do, you know, as they say, and begin in Brazil, begin by beginning, right? But equally, that's, that's actually one of the precepts I work by, with writing, with stories, with the elaborating of them. You know, you can't understand your story fully before you write it. You have to start writing it in

order to understand it. Yeah, I learned that actually, in translation from Portuguese to English, the best way to understand a book is to translate it into another language, right? It's an incredible amount of work, but it's so worth it because you come out. I mean, every come

out. I mean, every time I've translated a book, I come out feeling like I understand this book better than the author does. You know you you gain understanding by getting your hands into the mix and the mess and all that and that weird I was. I was 39 years old before I learned that, and that kind of

put me over a certain crest.

Yeah, and Greg was your first client in that iteration of your career, who you had met years before Greg Hurwitz loved him.

Greg Hurwitz came to me when he was 24 he was not quite just out of college. He was just out of Oxford, where he'd gotten a master's in psychology and Shakespeare, if

sounds like Greg

and he he'd been client as an agent, and when I was an agent, and then as soon as I'd quit, he was the first one to get in touch and say, Hey, I've written this new book. Would you edit it? And he and I did it over a summer. I was east coast, he was west coast, so it was a whole lot of FedEx,

because this is like, before there were attachments, yeah, you know. And I learned a great deal from Greg, I mean, more than I can cite here. But the thing that the great moment came with Greg, when he and I had done nine books together, and it was clear he just didn't need me anymore, and that was just like

the greatest feeling of success. And the way he was able to get to that is we never edited any book the way we had edited the previous because every time we did a new book, he had already learned everything that we did in the previous book, and he needed it into his system so there was never just sort of

like repeat. You know, it's like you weren't covering the same stuff again and again. And not only does that save a lot of tedium, but even better, it lets you start getting to more advanced, complicated, sophisticated stuff, which, before I worked for them, I didn't really know, because I

didn't have that kind of continuity with any one writer, you know? I mean, he's still the writer I've done the most books with.

Yeah, everybody has a book in them. How do you feel about that statement?

Oh, yeah, everybody has a book in them. And I would back one step back really quickly and say, though, for some people, it's not a book. For some people, it's a movie. For some people, it's a monolog. For some people, it's a 247 line poem that may or may not rhyme, but everybody has a story.

Everybody is a story. And everybody can have everybody, yeah, I think everybody can have an incredibly rich experience seeing what that story is, how they want to tell it, what the variations are. If it's a story that comes out of their own life, they can have an incredibly great time figuring

out just what is their recollection of what occurred. If it's a story that they've invented, they can have an incredibly great time just giving themselves whatever it is, 1214, 18 months, just to live in their imagination for 16 or 20 hours a week, right? And everybody, I believe, can derive

this benefit regardless of the success of the project, because the reason to create a book or a story is to do it. It's not to make a best seller list. I mean, if you do nice, and if you do and you do it with me, that's even nicer because,

and it'll be a whole lot more fun

the process of. Creation of a book isn't always fun, but it's always a thrill. It's always a wonderful challenge, and it's it's an incredibly big learning experience,

yeah, and we can certainly attest to that separately and together, for sure. So for somebody that hasn't, well, we've all written something, we've all written an email, we've all written a letter, we've written a card, you know, and so forth. But in terms of potentially deciding it

has to be me to write something that would then be put out for others to read in a more public way. What would your advice be on? Where to start? You know, for someone going, Oh, I've always wanted to write a book, or always wanted to write a story or a screenplay or something, a blog post, even,

let's say, or start a sub stack, but oh gosh, I don't know if anyone's going to read it, or even if I have any talent, you know, that's what people think. So. Are there resources that you would suggest, or books about it that you like, that you could recommend?

Um, most of the books that I think are useful, or actually more oriented towards screenwriting, people like Sid field and others with their story, and they're talking about structure, and they have application to narrative books, be they fiction or non fiction. David Lodge, once a client in

the Curtis Brown days his art of fiction is very useful. It's more thinking and philosophical. It's not quite instructional, but as far as just you know, you think you want to give this a try. You want to take a crack first. You want to select whatever medium for the moment to get started is comfortable

for you. For some people, it's writing on a legal path. For some people, it's writing on a keyboard. For some people, it's talking, if you're going to talk it. And I advocate this a lot. I've my own my writing has changed dramatically in the last eight years, because I've learned to talk my first draft,

which is, it's a zero draft. It's not a first draft, but it's a very, very rough draft. And, oh,

tell me about the zero draft. Yeah.

Okay, let's yeah one. Okay. So when I have to write something, and I say, have to, because I only write when I have to. One of my favorite clients of all time is a finance writer. He is not a native speaker of English. He is super fluent in English, but he does not write publication quality

English. So I co write the book we're working on with him, and we want this book to be so short and really simple, 200 pages long. Read it in a weekend. Very clear. Anybody with a 10th grade education can read it well. We had been writing in this the first part of it, which is the first third and blown up, 280

pages. His suggestion was, let's just throw that away. I said, let me see if I can whittle it down. Okay? I threw out 180 pages. I got out my voice recorder, my voice memo recorder in my phone, and I took a walk, and in 28 minutes, I just told the voice recorder the entire story of those 180 pages, it

worked out in transcription to, I can't remember how many pages it was like 32 pages, and I just that was my zero draft. It was not stream of consciousness, but it was somewhere between stream of consciousness and actual prose, and in three days, I turned it into an 84 page draft, which blew everybody's socks off

because it was the same stories before, only just so much tighter and better, right? When I need to write something truly from scratch, and it's more narrative than that. That is a narrative book. More narrative than that, you know, I I just, it's very important to be walking. You have to be in

motion, right? I'll walk around my garden here, or I'll walk around the block and I'll just talk through whatever. Here's, here's my take on that chapter. Throw the transcription in. What's so great about talking is you can't get fancy. You keep yourself honest when you're talking, you don't get carried

away being writerly. You know, we talk pretty honestly. We don't, we won't, we won't distort our own voices, right? So that's a really great way to get your zero draft in hand, and it enables you, okay, well, that actually told the story. So I have now the story here as an entire. As a unit. Kind of got

that put to bed. And the voice recording devices in our phones now they automatically transcribe. You don't even have to send it to otter or something like that, right? So that's the way I advocate for almost everybody, not everybody's so comfortable talking so keyboard or writing on a legal path, but

basically just take and as quickly as you can and as concisely as you can write out your story or your argument or your course of instruction as you understand it right now, just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, write it. Don't even read it. You've put it down. The act of writing it down or

speaking it will have embedded it in your head, but that's your zero draft that you want to work with if you want to test drive it a little. And I'm all for this, that not everybody's ready for it, tell it to a suitable audience. Choose one friend, take your friend out for coffee or a beer, tell them the story.

See how they react. See if a movie unspools in their head as you're telling it to him, or, even better, tell it to a group of people. Say how that how they react. Takes a lot of courage, but there's something about this too that's really valuable, which is you're telling the story to your friends or your

acquaintances or your in laws or whoever it is, you'd be a really unusual person if you can somehow not be yourself as you're telling it, You're gonna know is that story true to you? Right? The match between story and storyteller is pretty essential, right? When? When, when you're going to devote all

these months, maybe a year, maybe more, to the creation of a story, you gotta have that kind of affinity with it for sure. That's how you can test your story. Then you want to start getting into questions like, you know, narrative mechanics, if you're going to write it as a book, start getting into

questions as basic as, how am I going to narrate? This? Is it going to be Omni with multiple points of view, omniscient, with only one point of view, is it going to be a first person narrator? Is it going to be multiple first person narrators? These questions are so vital, and you may have to experiment

to find out what's going to work. Don't make that decision arbitrarily. Don't just sort of go well, this seems right, because once you get far into that and committed to that, and it turns out it doesn't work. It's really, it's really hard to fix. You know? I mean, when you've written an entire novel

first person, and you go, Oh, now I see why that is no good. And you got, you got you created a lot of work for yourself.

Yeah, I want to ask you about voice like finding the voice of the story.

Well, this, of course, is part of the whole question about how you want to narrate it. If you're going to have a narrator who isn't first person, some kind of awareness, consciousness, being who isn't identified in the story, a third person, semi omniscient narrator, that voice is going to

have some relationship to you, probably right, but not necessarily. I mean, after all, if it's a novel set in the 17th Century in China, it's probably not going to sound a lot like you. That voice. You just have to start experimenting with a lot and see what starts to sound right. You know, inevitably, if

you're into the story, that voice will start to sound like somebody and not necessarily like you. That narrator will have a personality. That narrator will become a character, even though that narrator is never identified and never steps into the frame. If you're going to use points of

view of your characters, which you almost certainly are in that kind of narration, then their voices are going to step in, and you get to experiment with how they talk and then how it sounds inside their heads, right? One of the many ways I like to experiment with that is, I don't think about casting necessarily

in terms of, oh, that actor, right, but I do picture it as performed or filmed. And I go, Well, how does that person sound? Yeah, this, this. Imagine, because. They'll start it's they don't. They don't just have the voice, this voice, literally, they have the voice that we're talking about, the

voice in terms of how they how they arrange a sentence, right? You know, do they talk with semi colons?

You're You're a big you're a high Fact Finder, high information gatherer. You do a lot of research as a person you know, when you and I are speaking, I'll say something, wait a second, and you'll start looking it up. And you're really getting in the weeds with every bit of of information that

you're taking in, you're in touch with, you're absorbing. So as an editor, on a personal level, when you're working with someone, you're always doing your own research. You know, as the authors doing theirs, you know, you just don't take somebody's word for it. That's, I mean, that's what I that's one

of the things I love about you. Oh, yeah,

I I don't fact check per se. But when something sounds weird. I go, let me and of course, this has become weirdly not easier, but more difficult in the internet age, because the internet is such a vast cesspool of disinformation. Yes, and I mean the chat GPT will just lie.

Yeah, I do that. And I really do that, mainly because I just want to find out more stuff, right? And my primary motivator for that sort of, oh, go look it up, is I go, Well, I bet you there's something even cooler connected to that. Yeah, right, you know, I didn't know that at the Battle of such and such, Napoleon was

wearing double knit hose. And you always find something more, right? I mean, when you start, yeah, doing that kind of research, yeah. I mean, here's one that I love, okay. A client is wearing on this amazing, wonderful, rich novel that an agent you and I both know well has taken on London, and it

concerns the earliest days of what become private investigators. And it's rich with the stories of these guys who have come back from, in fact, the Napoleonic Wars, and are setting themselves up in this trade. And it's incredibly, fabulously researched and detailed. And I was so

fascinated when dug into it turns out she has made the entire thing up. It's all an invention, and it's so convincing that you're, you're sure, right? And, and, I mean, it just, it blew, blew me away, because it's increased my admiration for this book so vastly, because I'm like, my

god, this is the most incredible construct. And I never doubted for a minute that this is where private investigators came from, right? Yeah, it's all entirely her invention.

Oh, I love it. I love it. I want to ask you about that like we talked we're talking about, you know, using our experiences, creativity, imaginings, and then casting it in your mind and thinking about how somebody would talk and walk and move, and what are your suggestions for expanding your

lexicon so to speak, or the words that you typically use in order to construct a world that is not something that you've inhabited you You are imagining or you're fascinated with, yeah,

yeah. Funny enough, I did have a conversation about this just this morning with chat GPT, which, you know, English has twice the vocabulary just in sheer number of words in any other language, right? But a lot of that's fluff. It's archaic words we never use, like a vast Ye, or it's technical words that

aren't really in common use. But we do have 16 words for every action and 12 for every it drives foreign speakers crazy, like you know, why do you have so many words for the same thing, right? So the first thing is, you've got the vocabulary. Just think about it. Does your character walk across the room?

Does he stroll across the room? Does he glide across the room? Does he sashay or mince across the room? Like a bit of mincing? We have so many words for walk, right? Does he dash across the street? Does he Dart across the street? Does he race across the street? You've got it already, just start looking for it that

way, right? And don't be don't feel like you're cheating if you use that synonym for button in your Microsoft Word and the Thesaurus function of things you

know, please you and I. I've used that many times together, there will be

something, and it'll very often be not really a synonym, but kind of vaguely related and better, kind of metaphoric, kind of not quite spot on. But more than anything, you just gotta read, read, read, read, and you got to read writing that is good enough that people use their vocabularies.

And if you're writing, if you're writing fiction, you're writing narrative nonfiction, just read voluminously in whatever relates to your topic or topics or your setting or your place, or whatever. Right? You know, if you're writing a novel that takes place in Arkansas in the 1950s go find those books

written in Arkansas in the 1950s they're going to they're going to have a vocabulary, right? I mean, again, this 1820 just post Regency, English novel written by a woman who is not English by the way, you know she has done this homework, and every four or five pages, there's a word, and you're like, I've never

encountered that word, and yet she used it so well in the context, you can tell what it means, Right? Yeah, it's like, really deft So, and remember, too, your narrator's not you, your characters aren't you. When your characters are using their point of view, not their speech, they're different from how they

talk. And so we don't have to be inhibited, right? We don't have to feel embarrassed about using quote, fancy words, right? Most of us, most of us try to dumb down how we talk. Yeah, we

don't have to, you know, I like to do that. I like to keep everything very conversational and and you know what's coming up for me as I'm speaking to you, obviously, because we work together every week, and have, for many years, this notion to just trust your gut and your instincts. You know

that when I write something, it doesn't feel right, it's not right, you know, and getting to a place where it's right, and then just deciding it's right, and then being able to let it go and move on, you know, and not pontificating over and over about something

when my instinct says that's wrong, I can trust it, but when my instinct says that's right, I may need my medication.

Oh, god, thank you. Well said, Yeah, well, I mean,

it's trust, trust your instinct when it goes on, get something else. But otherwise, it's Trust, but verify. When you have an instinct, when your instinct says, when she walks into the kitchen and her mother in law is feeding the dog, and she asks, Why are you feeding our dog? The

mother in law is going to do X, right? Okay, come back later and look at it. You're probably going to see exactly the logic of that progression of action and speech. And you go, of course, that's why, right? So your instinct is right, but it's not simply instinct. There's the characters did it and you knew

they would do it, but the logic whereby they're operating isn't clear to you at the moment, right? Your instincts are always going to be ahead of your conscious processing, particularly in story, right? Because stories, if you're involved in story, you're always thinking onward, right? You're

always ahead, or not, I shouldn't say thinking, because that sounds like conscious, right, but you know, part of what makes stories work for us is that we almost can't avoid anticipating, right?

Yeah, so I want to ask you more about developing character and at the same time letting things unfold. You

What have you learned about the different Yeah, I'm just fascinated by this process, because it feels like a chicken and the egg thing you know, like this, this very convoluted labyrinth of a journey, which, which we know it is, yeah,

the this is probably the hardest thing for most people to tackle, and it's particularly vexing because, of course, it's what has to be achieved in the first 100 pages of your book or the first 35 pages of your screenplay, right? I mean, the the thing we understand from watching well

made movies and reading well wrought novels is you don't do characterization and then start plot. You don't start plot and then they have to happen at once. But, okay, how, how, how, how, how. How do you do that? Right? Well, part of what we forget with plot. Lot is if the action, if the behavior, is true

to the person, it's illustrating who the person is, right character will emerge from what people do. For sure, it really is a good thing for a lot of people to create character dossiers or sort of one sheets on your character. Here's what this person's about. I find that's a liability for me and a

lot of people, because then we somehow deceive ourselves into thinking because we know that the book knows that the reader knows that it's like that's on a cheat sheet that that, you know, we handed that to Diane Keaton before she did the role, but she's got to put that into the movie. It's right. So those,

those can be kind of double edged sword. This also comes down, I think, to something closely related to incidentation, and I learned this mostly from memoir and biography. I think all lives, be they lived lives or imagined lives. Fictional Characters involve highly concentrated,

specific scenes that just astonishingly illustrate who a person is. You know, I'm working on a memoir where a woman she's a young decorator in a big American city. She's invited to do a room in a show house. She says, give me the smallest room in the house. And she does the dog's room. And it pisses off

everybody, right? And I'm like, This is who you are. This is so great. This is a featured scene, right? Anybody who doesn't know who this woman is after that scene, it's like you're not awake, right? Figure out ways to give your character those scenes that illustrate who they are, right? This is what

screenwriters, the really good screenwriters are just so good at, right? A four second interaction that shows us who somebody is, right. The other thing that I think most writers are averse to is this is, this is where you get in touch with your inner Rodin. If you visit the broader museum in Paris, and

you have, right, there are 7000 studies for the burgers of Calais. There's only one actual burgers of Calais, or maybe they're too unknown. But he's creating the characters in these studies. You write 16 scenes for that person to figure out who she is, and then you bring in the parts that really reveal

her, right? We we start in with characters. We think we know them, and we do, but we don't know who they are. We need, we need, you know? I mean, think how, think how long it took you to get to know you your producers of this podcast, right? It's a process of successive approximations,

right? There's all this stuff that happens, you know? And, sketches are a great way to interact with your own characters, right? Because, tell me about that. Well, when we write story and we feel like what we're writing is content, we're doing this job in which we have to be very focused on a set

of deliverables. When we just write a scene to see what will happen with this character, we're so much more interacting with that character ourselves. Right now, the character may not be on his own or her own in the scene or their own, but we're still we're focusing on this character. We're letting this

character's point of view drive things and observe things, so we're having a closer interaction with that character now, and we're giving ourselves a chance to get to know that person better, right? And this is, you know, this is invaluable, and it works so well if we're not deeming this

content for inclusion in the work or doing this for ourselves. It's like, if you could take your, if you could go up for a drive with your character, you know you and James Corden singing Adele tunes, right?

You know that would be my choice. Yes.

You know you could, if you could go, you know, if you could go and take a walk with your character, of course you would.

Yeah, it also writing what interests you?

Well, I'm gonna grind that Ax a bit more. Oh, God. Way. It's a terrific way of finding out whether your character is real to

you. Yeah. I.

You just, you just said something, and I talked over you in my typical way.

No, I know. I love it. I was just, it. Was just bringing up for me, writing what you find interesting, rather than what you think the market will find interesting, or somebody else will find interesting. You know, what actually gets you fired up? And what are you passionate about

what would you want to read? That's what's coming up for me, is that something that is that advice that you would give?

It's a two part thing for me, we we have to write what holds interest for us, and it has to hold interest for us in a way that is sustained, that we're going to want to be living in this for 287 395 pages, because we're going to ask other people to do that, but we're going to have to

give that to it, give that much commitment to it ourselves. And I, I am not particularly experienced at that, because I don't do that very much. You know, I work on eight or 10 projects at a time. I put five or six hours a week into a given project, maybe 1012, if it's particularly a matter of focus.

So I'm always shifting to another thing that's very, very different. So I never, ever get burnt out. I'm always happy to come back to what I was working on for a while, two days ago. I believe for most writers, it's invaluable right to make sure you're getting 20 hours a week, or 18 or 22 whatever is the

allotment you can really make use of, but also be working on something else at the same time. You know, if you're really pouring on steam with your novel, be working on, you know, a non fiction short essay about how you work at the community garden. Because those two things, one becomes, they

support each other. One becomes recess for the Yeah, I love that. Yeah. And then this, this part to me, is, I, you know, I advocated, but it's not controllable. The process has to be fun. It can't be fun every minute. It can be agonizing. It can be grueling, but if it's just plain not fun, that's going

to show through. And a book that is not fun to write, it ain't fun to read. You know, the the thrill, the joy that all these things, it's, it's, it's like athletics in a way, right? Athletics is not Non Stop Fun, it's work, it's pain, it's all this stuff, but there's, there's joy and satisfaction and

entertainment in it, right? If, if you're not getting that when you are writing your book, rethink things, try things differently, because if you really love what you're writing about, you should be able to get that, yeah, particularly if you have connection with your characters, be they real people

or made up people. Yeah, I worked 14 years ago on a really, really good biography of a woman who really made the Cuban revolution happen. And the author's involvement with her subject was just so great that it was just totally sustaining to me, to her. We ended up working on the book on and off

over about five years got it done. Great publisher, great forward by Alice Walker. And we really rode the connection between this woman in Cuba in the 1950s and 60s and the author, right? And I learned a lot from that. You know, the the bond, the tie between person and person across this curious

divide of narration.

What's coming up for me as I'm listening to you is what you brought up when we first started talking about your Thailand lesson of you think too much. So because writing in any medium is about language, which comes from our mind, and that's how we make sense of it, how we communicate with others. When is

the right time to move into collaboration with a personal editor such as yourself, where you can get another eye, another perspective on it? And I know that's really how long is a piece of string, because it's different for everybody. But in general. When do you think is the right time to go? Okay, I

want to work with someone to fine tune this.

Yeah, I I point point to three moments in a project's evolution. And I could say this with regard to narrative books that are fiction, narrative books that are non fiction, screenplays as well things relating to them, like even treatments and articles. You know, feature

articles too, because I've worked on all these things right away at the concept stage, when you can turn your concept into a sustained statement like that zero draft. That's actually a great time to start to talk to somebody. This is what we do when we work on proposals which are usually for non fiction. But

I can't be particularly helpful to somebody until they have that solid concept picture, right? I mean, I could step in, but then I'm going to be messing their concept around, and the concept is why they're doing it. Then the next point is, when they have something that constitutes a first draft, be it rough. Here

it is. It's where I've got it for now. I know it can be better, but this is a rough cut. Come with me. Look at this rough cut, then the next point. And I think most writers do better not waiting to this point when you actually get to what I would call edit ready text, meaning your content is there, you're

not going to be needing to make changes to plot, to structure. It's going to be a matter of literally editing how the whole story is implemented at the level of the line, the paragraph, etc. That I would advocate mostly for established writers who've already done a book or two or have done a lot

of journalism, mainly because simply, that's not actually the value prop of editing. Come in and do all that cleanup work, right? If you need an editor to do that, that kind of really text and copy edit. You don't want to be working. You want to just find a copy editor, yeah, that on an hourly basis, right?

And somebody who will hear your voice and the characters voices, and then just, really, just kind of, and I think if that's what you need, I'd actually run it through an AI first and see what the AI can do. Yeah, I want to

ask you about that. I want to ask you about that in a minute, just because I don't want to forget to ask you what I want to ask you right now, which is, what's your advice about finding the right editor for you? Let's, let's assume we're not looking for a copy editor. We're looking for

someone you know, like what I do with you, which is you really know me. You know my voice. Now you know what my intent is. We've got this established relationship, and obviously we had to establish that many years ago where you absolutely were the right editor for me. But can you what are your thoughts about

that? Like, is it a feeling? You know? How? How do you know if it's the right fit?

So to find the right developmental editor is what people call it right, and you're looking for what they call substantive edit, meaning content, not just wording and grammar, all that. The first thing is to talk to everybody you know who writes. See who they know. Look in the

acknowledgments of writers you like, see who they might mention. If you have the opportunity go to things like writers conferences, those people will be hanging out. And when you get a chance, if you do get a chance to talk to people like agents and publishing house editors, you can frankly ask

them, Hey, I'm working on this novel. I want to work with a substantive editor or a development editor. Is there anybody you know and would want to recommend? Everybody I've ever worked with successfully has come to me on a referral through somebody who was already a client. I don't avoid getting

people who come in over the transit. They just don't really come to me because I don't advertise, right?

So well that that Pandora is out of the box. Now what's what's your criteria for clients? How do you choose who you want to work with? Do. Oh,

well, I I have to read a bunch of the work. I always read all the work to make up my mind, but I'm looking for something that's going to grab me in the first 3040, 50 pages in one way or another, right? And then if, when it doesn't I just keep reading because I'm counting on something to grab me

in the next 30 or 4050, pages. Okay, so the book will start on page 45 because this is where it kicks in, right?

And you do that with everything you read, even if it's it's just not your jam and you don't think the writing's good, you'll still give it 70 pages to

page 100 and I will email the author and say, this seems not to be the kind of thing I know much about, or am the right editor for. So it's your call. I can read the rest and maybe that'll change, or I can just stop. What do you what do you think is right? In fact, this happened a couple weeks

ago. I was reading a novel from a very smart attorney in California, sort of mystical. And the first 100 pages, I was like, this, isn't it? This is like a romance novel. I don't really know how to do this. I don't read this. But then I went back to her email, and it said, I apologize. I didn't really

know how to get through this stuff. In the first 85 pages, the plot really starts. So I read on. It was cool. I want to get grabbed. And I've, I've, I've kind of become old fashioned in a way, like my colleagues were forever. Um, I am looking to hear a voice, and I didn't used to be that way,

right? But I've learned that. You know, the old adage is, writing can be learned, but it cannot be taught, right? And I think it was this coffee Who said you could learn how to cook, but you must be born knowing how to roast if you have a voice, there's everything in the world to work with. If you

do not have a voice, you may acquire one, but I do not know how to help you do that, right? And so I have to hear a personality there. I have to hear something like that. Now, a lot of the people that I do work with are people who literally have a book in them. They're probably going to write one book

only. And in their case, it's not about a voice, it's they have some remarkable story, right?

Tell me about that. They're probably only going to have one book in them.

Well, for example, one of my favorite clients, whom I met some years ago, and she is only able to work sporadically on her book as she has a bunch of kids and does a job. She's a stateless person from Iraq who lives in the Mideast, has bounced around from country to country. Had a horrible time

during the war in the occupation. She was 23 years old, a mom with a three year old child, and her husband was locked up by the coalition forces, and she had to escape the country, and she had no way to do it, because the only thing she had to sell was a car, and the coalition forces took it

away, and then she had jewels, but she had to go to the backyard of a cousin's house in Baghdad, where she had buried them. Her story is incredible, or not incredible, but rather astonishing. This is the one book she's going to write, very likely, and has constant movie interest from people, but she

has to write enough, and we constantly start it and go back. But it's also when we began. She was still too close to the experience, so she's going to get back to it. She's getting back to it now, right? But that's a person who's got one book in her most memoirs. The person has one book in them.

There are plenty of people, though, who write it work of fiction, like, you know, a novel, and they really have one book in

them, diplomatic way,

until she dead for a long time,

Oh, where do you think AI sits, in your opinion? So we work very old school, you and I, we always have. I use it very little. I'll use it to refine something here and there, but I'm probably making way too much work. Myself. But what do you use it for? Where do you see it sitting in a really, really

productive, useful way?

88% of my use of AI is research. Not long ago, I needed to learn about barter markets in the Aztec empire. Before the conquest, a professor I was working with had mentioned these and I was like, Wow, that sounds intriguing. I want to know more for another project. So I went to chat GPT, and I

said, Hey, what? What can you find me in the way of sources on this? I want articles. I want books. Chat gave me four of each, two articles, two books, turned out to be perfect, and they were accessible online. It was fantastic.

Okay, thank you so much for clarifying that, because I was going to go, Wait a second, how do you know what to trust when it's this sea of misinformation?

You do not trust it, but if you get us, if you get a data point that you think you want to trust, then you source it elsewhere, though, just today, chat blew my mind when I was talking with chat about different languages and their vocabularies, and it compared French, English,

Portuguese from Portugal, and Portuguese from Brazil, and it wrote me almost a poem of what these languages are like and their relationships to absorbing. French is a formal garden inside a wall palace. Portuguese is the garden of a monastery that doesn't let the pilgrims in. I can't remember.

It was incredible, right? And I said, Is this original to you? Chad? He goes, Yeah, this is original

to me. That was pretty phenomenal. I said, I'm going to cite that, if that's okay. Cite it like this. And I'm like, dal, just tell me the form of citation that you prefer. And he wanted me to say I had authored it. I'm like, I didn't author it. You did, right? It's like, weird, so, but with chat and

writing, I also use him it.

I was gonna pull you up on that. Don't worry. But you know what you can you can have your personal relationship with chat. All you

want use chat. I'll say I'm in this story. And here's the situation. Is a kind of a generic What do you make of that? And chat will give an interpretation, and it's often really shrewd. I mean, there was this one, a novel set in a country like Russia in the 1920s but it's not Russia, and there's

been a murder of a secret agent, and we're investigating that murder. Oh, and by the way, all the characters are animals. Somebody's reviving an ancient cult, okay? And I'm thinking, this is like the origins of fascism. And I tell chat what I just told you, without saying origins of fascism. They go,

chat, what do you think about this? And chat goes, Oh, this sounds like the origins of fascism. It's like, and the characters are all animals, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, chat is not thinking, right? There's no doubt chats not thinking, but then neither are we. So what are you going to do? Right? It's

processing. We're processing. It's just as a writer's tool, I'm sure if I talk to you in another six months, I'd have like nine other things I'm using, yeah, yeah. But for writers, it's mainly Oh, and it's research. But you don't do the research. You get directed for research. Use it like the

biggest card catalog in the world.

Yeah, the other thing is very important distinction,

yeah, translation, it's phenomenal. You see a paragraph in German. You throw it in there, the translation is way better than Google Translate, and you can ask it interpretive questions, which you can't do in Google Translate, right? You can't do any follow up. And the cool

thing is, it does the translation in front of you, you know, a word at a time, but yeah, and sometimes it stops and backs up to fix and then it goes on again. Yeah.

So do you do you work differently with each client? I mean, I know that's a dumb question in the sense, of course you do, because it's different personalities, but just the basic process, I guess, where I'm wanting to go with it is giving everybody the sort of a broad strokes overview of what

look working with a personal developmental editor looks like, what to expect.

I, I, I. Think I I'd love to be able to say I work differently on the methodological front. I don't. I only have, really about a dozen methods that I use, how I use them, how I describe them. Those change. Mainly. What varies is the more personal aspect of it, the the soft skills part the and

there I just have to learn the person pretty well, and I have to remind myself all the time this person doesn't have your experience in receiving criticism and in rejection. You know, I spent 10 years getting a million rejection letters a week. It wasn't for my books, it was for the books I submitted.

But I was invested in those books. It hurt my feelings when so and so at Random House didn't think this book had impetus, like, Fuck you, you know? And so I have to always remember, for this person who's new to this, and almost all of them start out with me on a first book, you know, this, this experience is a

pretty big emotional challenge, right? Learning a new way of hearing criticism. They've had their work read before, but they haven't had it read before by people who have worked with the market,

right? Yeah, so you're talking about modulating the delivery of your feedback, yeah.

And also the velocity, you know, some people are perfectly with 22 comments on a page. And for some that's just absolute overwhelm. Some people can take in, you know, four or five levels of reading like that's a dangling modifier. I don't think she would say that. That doesn't sound like

her to me, too. This seems just plain, factually wrong, and sorry, the capital of Idaho isn't whatever. It's this, right? You know, it's, it's easy to get into overwhelm, right? Most of the writers that I work with successfully, they kind of not, kind of, they're able to orient me pretty well saying

right now, what I need you to do is sort of operate at this level. You know. Let's look at the plot and structure of this sequence of three chapters. We'll worry about tone and vibe and all that stuff later. The one thing that's consistent with everybody, when I'm working in narrative, is I just grind the

AX endlessly about point of view. You know, the only reason people still read books is there's a thing that movies can't do, and it's point of view. We can be inside somebody's mind, we can have their subjective experience. And it's not done directly. It's done through this filtration,

you know, through the narration. And it's, it's endless in its variety. You know, it can just do so many different things. That's what novelists actually are masters of, point of view. You know, you read the great contemporary novelist there's like, wow, they're just doing this point of view thing, like,

so well and so that that's with everybody. And, you know, it's a really weird thing. Most people who think they want to be novelists have never given that in minutes. Thought it's like, I want to be a filmmaker, but I'm not interested in cinematography or editing. But they find out,

yeah, yeah, I mean, and look the work and the patience and maintaining the interest and the love for what you're doing is so important because it does take time. I mean, you know, the hardest part for me is I'm a very slow writer, and you know that old adage, if I would have written

you a short letter, but I didn't have time, I find the distillation and and being more concise, just so incredibly challenging with all the people that you've worked with, where do you see people getting tripped up the most boy?

Well, weirdly, it's the old showing versus telling thing in one way or another that people have trouble with. You know, people don't notice that when they read a book they love, they watch a movie they love. But there's so much they're not told, right? I mean, exchange I have with every writer at a

certain point is, well, I have to explain data, and I go, No, you don't have to explain anything. And the last thing the reader wants is for you to explain something, right? We get that all day, every day in our lives. We want you to illustrate, we want you to demonstrate. We want you to

portray, explain, no, and there's all this info that they think they need to get in there for us, and they don't, well, we can. They can embed it somewhere. We can find it somewhere we'll figure it out. And the well, there's a wonderful line in Randall Jarrell wisdom said William

James is knowing what to overlook, right? And I am wise, if that is wisdom, right? Learning what to omit, learning what not to tell. That's a stumbling block for just about everybody. The other for most people, is thinking that they're creating the book as they write it. Writing a book is like

making a movie. You arrive on the location, on the set, with the story already fully realized in your head, and what you're doing now is putting it into the form it's going to take to go to the public, making up the story while one's writing it, you get all tied up in knots.

You know? The other thing too is is all just trusting that the web is rich and compelling and people want to get caught up in it, because when you're immersed in a beautiful story, you're watching a gorgeous Film TV show, you are filling in the white space as the reader and the viewer based

on what has already been given to you, and then based on your your interpretation and your personal experience intersects with it. I mean, that's what makes life performance so rich and beautiful, is that interaction between between audience and and performer, and you become a character and a

participant in it. You do that with film and books as well. But it's obviously not that electric exchange of physical energy, kinetic energy, but I that, so I guess my where I'm going with it is as I'm listening to you say that in order for that white space to be there and to know or to trust what to omit, you have

to have done that other work first. Don't you where your character is there. The world is there. The construction is there. There's compelling narrative, dialog, etc.

Well, and it is incumbent on the creator of this before coming to this scene or sequence or working on incidentation to know as fully as possible everything that happens. Right? You know, we don't need to know that this meeting convened at 2:30pm but the writer needs to know that

they came from lunch. That matters. You know these it also, it builds the reality. One of the smartest comments I remember hearing from a very smart agent, Gail Hochman, in response, actually, to a book she'd read by Hurwitz. She said, You know, the plot of this and the characters are really terrific.

What I miss is this feeling that life is going on, that people are picking up their dry cleaning, having cocktails, right? That's comes in, where you think about every single piece of the reality and the flow of event and all that. The other thing, though, that's the counterpoint to that, but yet,

the counterpart to that is a great thing for people to come to trust, is that so much of the best stuff in their story and in their book is stuff they didn't put in there. Just happened in there. You know, one of the things I value so much of what I learned in college was this idea of the new critics, you know,

the intentional fallacy, which is things are in literature because they're there, not because the writer put them there, and characters do things we didn't intend. But even a line can have an implication We didn't mean, right? A short sequence of events can reveal something that we never thought

about, but it must be the case, right? If we can appreciate those and trust them, that's where stuff that's that's weave, right? That's the very essence of the weave, and it's very strange. Many writers see things like that, and they, their reaction is a kind of panic. Because I think their, their

feeling seems to be, well, that got in there without me, or I wasn't. Yes, no and, and it's, it's we see this with there's a bifurcation between those who want to see their characters do stuff that they don't anticipate, and there's those who want to keep their characters on a leash.

As I'm listening to you, I'm just thinking about when, when you know you're in the flow state, you know, like, I guess I I'm just comparing it to acting where, you know, it's great writing and everything's in play, where, where the show runs itself. You know, you're no longer in control of it. It has

a life of its own. Yeah.

Well, I've certainly, you know, I've had that experience a surprising number of times, given how little I actually write for me, it's not quite the full thing I believe, or it is the full thing, but it's, it's not typical, because what I I do write things that original to

me, or I'm writing them from whole cloth, but most of the writing I do is rewriting something that somebody else wrote. Yeah, right, and it's the weirdest thing, getting into that flow is nine times more likely when I'm writing, rewriting something that somebody else wrote, and it's

because when you create a set of characters in an odd circumstance and a predicament, you know, they have to find the dog that got away while they were on vacation. That is realer to me than anything I can ever invent. I just don't have the capacity to buy into my own inventions the way I will other

people's. And for me, that flow, that feeling of the wave, has caught the board, and I'm, you know, up on my feet. It's, it's not solely the characters, but it's entirely about the characters. It's entirely my, my forgetting that I'm not them, I mean, and that's why the the job is so fantastic, because that's

what novels do for us, right? When we really love a novel, we forget. We're not the people in the novel for whatever. You know, we forget we're on the plane. We forget, you know, we forget we're eating. It's terrible food we don't eat.

And we are we are fully invested, yeah, in the same way that we are invested in our own lives, yeah,

and, and, yeah, and we are getting this added wonderful experience we never get with a movie which is reading the novel. We get to direct it, cast it, design, direct it, everything. I mean, score it when I saw Game of Thrones, because now how I had pictured, it was banished from

my head, and mine was better,

you know, oh, I mean, it is glory. It is, it is a glorious experience when you get to be the producer, so to speak. It is really extraordinary. And for me, the test of a really great story is when years down the track, I am still wondering where those people are and what they're

doing, and I've got a whole idea of where the story continues. And that's what I know I someone has just, it's buried into my heart.

Yeah, a novel that leaves us with that feeling that the life of the characters goes on, yeah, right, that they've got some kind of destiny, karma up ahead of is just phenomenal, right? And, you know, it's, it's wonderful for me because I I don't believe or disbelieve in karma in life, but I certainly

believe in it for characters, right? I mean, a successful novel for me is one in which at a certain point I understand the characters have a destiny and I'm going along, right? I don't look at life that way, right? It's, it's, it's a different, I don't know what different construct or something, yeah,

yeah. Oh, I could talk to you about this all day long, and you and I will continue our conversations privately. I. Um, as we do, as we do. So I always close every episode with the same question, as you know, which is, and I'll ask it within the context of this conversation that we've

been having. For someone that has a dream in their heart that they want to put their story out there, but doesn't feel like they have what it takes to make it happen, what would you say to them,

boy, I should have thought of this in advance.

No, I love that we're doing this on the fly, yeah.

Well, what I would say to them is really a kind of a repeat of what I've said before, which is simply to write or tell or record that story in the most concise but complete form that you can and see how you feel about it once you're able to take a few paces back and look at it. Does it? Does it

feel like the story that's been inside your head? Does it? Does it have the shape of a story for you? And you then you get to ask it a couple of other questions, right? Like, am I telling this for me? And that's great. I can do that and get satisfaction of it. Or do I want it to find an audience? Then ask yourself, is

it a story, or is it an idea for a story? Idea for a story is generally a premise, whereas the story has more than the premise, right? What? What every taxi driver on earth has and wants to convince you should be a novel or a movie is an idea for a story. It's not a story, right? And as we all know, the story

that really speaks to us is the one that has a good ending. And if you've recorded or written your story in that short form, look at, look at and go, is the ending there? And if the ending is there and it works, well, that's terrific. But if the ending is not there, that's just as good too, because it's not

it's open ended. You still got this open question, this thing you get to work toward as you work toward it, don't think about it as writing. People don't go to bookstores or Amazon to acquire writing. They go to acquire experiences. Think of it as the experience. Build that experience, develop it, and then

then adapt and translate that experience to writing.

Thank you for how you show up in the world.

Thank you. Have a good day. There you.