#878: 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

0:00Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is a special ASMR edition of the Tim Ferriss Show. Welcome. It is very late night after a long day of writing in an undisclosed foreign location, and this is the Tim Ferriss Show. We are going to cover a compilation of incredible insights and advice devoted to a subject very close to my heart and currently consuming a very large percentage of my waking hours, and that is writing. Over the years, I have asked some of

0:31the most amazing writers I admire questions like, how do you choose a project and stay with it? How do you begin when inspiration refuses to strike? How do you build a practice that reliably produces pages? What does your routine look like? How do you keep going when you fear your pages are terrible? Garbage. Absolute garbage. That happens, at least to me. You'll be hearing Elizabeth Gilbert on choosing and committing to an idea, Anne Lamott on first drafts, shitty first drafts at that,

1:02and taking things bird by bird. Joyce Carol Oates on why you should never wait for inspiration, and Jerry Seinfeld on systematizing your writing session and training your brain. You'll also hear Mary Carr on revision and throwing out 1,200 pages. Brandon Sanderson on habits behind hundreds of thousands of words per year. Yes, that is not a mistake. I did not misspeak. Hundreds of thousands of words per year. And Seth Godin coaching me, Tim Ferriss, through my own fear of bad writing.

1:34And I loved putting this together. It is exactly the medicine that I need right now. It applies to many creative projects and crafts outside of writing. So please enjoy this special combination of some of my favorite people on the craft of writing. First up, Elizabeth Gilbert. Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of Eat, Pray, Love, Big Magic, and City of Girls. Her 10 books have sold more than 25 million copies worldwide. This makes me wonder how you choose, and I've wanted to ask you this for a while, and I don't

2:10think 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. Yeah. 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? I'm kind of a hard ass about it. Yeah. Great. So part of the thing I've noticed that people tend to get stuck on sometimes is that they get this

2:45inspiration, right? So inspiration comes first, and inspiration is the breathing in of God, right? So like 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. Like they say that, like 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, felt, and inspiration, and I know the difference between something that comes from me and something

3:18that comes to me, talking about prepositions again, and I think most creative people do as well. Like, oh, this came to me, right? And then it can feel like an assignment, or it can feel like a challenge, and 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. Like meditation, spirituality, and art have so much in common. So this may sound familiar to people who are like, maybe you've had this experience. You start working on this thing that was this inspiration, and a couple weeks, a couple months into it, a couple days, another idea comes. And that idea

3:53seems 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 like fresh and exciting. This is the really, really cool thing, right? And then you go and do that one, and then another idea comes, and then it's like, you know, you're dealing with this melee. So oftentimes people will say like, 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, and this book feels really stale, and it doesn't have any life in it. And I always say like, okay, well, I give you permission to quit working on that first project, but only if you

4:27have a proven track record of ever being able to finish a thing.

4:31That is so smart. Right? 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. And I have those same things happen to me. Like I'm a third of a way, a quarter of a way, fifth away in a project, and then something so much more interesting comes along. And I'm like, but I know enough to know. It comes dancing. It's like a dancing girl. Like it just comes across the stage. I was just going to say the hottest girl at the dance. The hottest girl at the dance. Just showed up. Just showed up, and you've been married for two months. And you're like, oh, I've been

5:06married for two months in the hottest. 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 on. And I'm never going to complete anything. So stick with the one you came to the dance with. And if I've got multiple ideas, and I'm not sure which one I'm beginning, I actually have a sort of like a team meeting. And I make the ideas, make proposals to me about how they

5:39want, what do you actually want me to do? So this is like project-based IFS? Totally. It's like I'm the angel investor, and these ideas are like, you know, we want your time and money for this. And I'm like, what are you? What do you have for me? Why should I invest my money and time in you? And a lot of ideas, when I challenge them like that, disappear into the ether. Because they're like, I don't know, something about birds. You know, like they don't like, they haven't, I'm like, you haven't thought it out. You know, and then some other ideas, like, no, I want to write about this very specific thing. And it's going to take that, you know, I'm like, okay, so this one's got their act

6:10together. So when the bird idea is more formed, come back. Like, come back when you're ready. Come back when you're ready to be real, and not just to be tantalizing me with, like, so I'm a real hard ass about it. I don't mess around. I don't let these ideas push me around. Next up, Anne Lamott. Anne Lamott is the author of 20 books, including Bird by Bird, Operating Instructions, and Help, Thanks, Wow. And co-author, with her husband, Neil Allen, of Good Writing.

6:41I'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? 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

7:15certainly be published, and that then they would, 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 is 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. But after, and the kids loved me, and after I was done, my little grandchild

7:49came 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 one chapter is on shitty first drafts. 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 them 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

8:23as unreadable first drafts. And I teach people to take it really small, you know, bird by bird. But is it okay if I tell the story? Oh, please, please. I would love for you to tell the story just so people know the genesis. Well, my older brother, I was like a 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 it all year, all semester, a paper on birds. And my brother

8:58hadn't started. It was due on a Monday, and on a Saturday, he admitted to my dad that he hadn't started. 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. You know, 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. I never, ever forgot that. And then years later, probably 20 years ago, so

9:32in my 40s, 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

10:04is 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, you know, in like in D.C. during the peace marches where people set up tents and thought it made sense

10:35to bring their dogs, you know, 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 of 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 Neil 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. You know,

11:06we 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 the 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

11:41critic 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 the show? Oh, yes, please. In Bird by Bird, there's a whole chapter on K-Fucked Radio, K-F-K-D. And without a lot of help and a lot of transformation and healing, K-Fucked Radio is on 24-7. It's telling you how far short you're falling. It's telling you how great you started

12:17out 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 that why bother and that this has been blah, blah, blah. But out of the right-hand speaker is it's 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

12:51saying, I love your stories. I love how you write. I can't wait to read more. So, but you can't turn down the left-hand speaker and it'll always be there to some degree.

13:03Next up, Joyce Carol Oates. Joyce Carol Oates has written more than 70 books, including Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys, and won the National Book Award for her novel, Them. I read a beautiful line from you describing a certain aspect of your creative process. And that is, this is from the parish 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

13:34paragraph, I've forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I 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 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? No, I definitely feel that you create your mood by working. And I have a sort of work ethic. I come

14:09from 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. I mean, life doesn't have to be so overthought. And 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.

14:42That'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, you know, to read manuscripts and

15:16to be on committees and so forth. And the instinct is really to say yes. And I say yes to lots of these things. But it's really, if you are 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 hundredth of the things that I do. He was too smart. He knew how to take care of us to guard his own privacy. Next up, Jerry Seinfeld. Jerry Seinfeld co-created and starred in the sitcom

15:52Seinfeld, which ran nine seasons and won 10 Emmys and later created Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and wrote, is this anything? 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 see myself in her at that age. She's way further advanced than I was

16:23at that age. But she doesn't know. I say to her, 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've got to learn how to ride this horse. And I've seen people that are born by the dozens and dozens. I've seen people that were given black stallions. And it usually kills, if you have a black stallion, like from that movie, and you're born, and they just put you on it. And

16:56that's what happens. They just put you on it. And you either learn to ride this thing, or it's going to kill you. Then 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 explained 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

17:29torture 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's it going to end? When's the workout over? It's going to be an

17:59hour. 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. I assume you know about that. I do. Yeah. Yeah, I practice this morning. I can't do it 15 minutes. Like, 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

18:34at a desk with a problem and do nothing else, you 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, you know, I kind of

19:09wanted to teach in a way, because I find it, I think it's so simple. I think exercise is pretty simple too. And, but people don't, they don't come up with good, simple little systems. They just try and do it. And that's, to me, that's, you're going to fail. The simple doesn't mean easy. And the point you made is 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 have you chosen?

19:41I 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. 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. She said, well, I didn't have any idea what to write. So you'd have, I don't know what age the students

20:12would be in your course, but what else would be a component of your class on writing? Well, I would teach them to learn to accept your mediocrity.

20:22You know, 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, 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 was like, I started as a jogger, you know, like in the seventies 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

20:57by Bill Phillips called Body for Life. Body for Life. Yeah. And it's really, really, so it's such a system for a primitive, you know, brain. 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,

21:29I know exactly what I'm doing. And that like turned the key for me. And all of a sudden I was getting in shape. I never had to ask, what am I doing now? Or what are we doing next? It was very, it's like, you got to treat your brain like a dog you just got. You got it. It's so stupid. The brain, the mind is infinite in wisdom. The brain is a stupid little dog that is easily trained. You got to confuse the mind with the brain. The brain is

22:05so easy to master. You just have to confine it. You confine it. And it's done through repetition and systemization.

22:19One name that has come up on this podcast more than once is Dr. Walter Longo, USC professor with decades of peer-reviewed research on fasting, nutrition, and aging. And as some of you long-term listeners know or readers, I regularly fast. I've done a lot of experimentations with fasting over more than a decade, including intermittent fasting, extended water-only fasts up to 10 days. I've looked at the before and after. Frankly, the fasting has been one of the most incredible unlocks that I have found. The before and after, looking at glucose control, oral glucose tolerance

22:52tests, hemoglobin A1C, et cetera, all these things that really do matter for the long-term, for mental health, for physical health, have had dramatic, dramatic shifts. And I've talked about that before. But the sad truth, the truth about fasting is that it can be really hard. And that is why Walter is interesting. He's best known for something called the fasting mimicking diet, FMD, which is essentially a way of eating that produces many of the benefits of fasting while still allowing you to eat food. So if we look at that a little more closely,

23:25he took what he learned in these randomized control trials and so on and packaged it into a five-day program called Prolon, P-R-O-L-O-N. It's five days. So for five days, you restrict your food a bit. And what Prolon does is makes it idiot-proof. It comes in one box. Everything is laid out. There's no guesswork. You just follow the packages. And in scientific studies, five-day cycles of the fasting mimicking diet, improved markers tied to metabolic health and aging, help people drop fat while holding onto lean muscle, and even associated with measurable drops

23:56in biological age. And to put some numbers to it, with glycemic management, blood sugar management, we were able to see in one RCT improvements in 53% of FMD participants versus 8% of controls. So it does make a difference. You get the benefits of fasting, including autophagy, your body's cellular self-cleanup process, while still eating real structured plant-based meals. So you don't have to negotiate with yourself. You don't have to struggle. It all comes in one box,

24:27and it's right there, laid out, simple to follow. And there are other people who recognize friends of mine like Rich Roll who also have used Prolon. For a limited time, Prolon is offering my listeners 15% off site-wide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their five-day program. Just visit prolonlife.com slash Tim. That's P-R-O-L-O-N-L-I-F-E dot com slash Tim to claim your 15% discount and your bonus gift. Back in the day, this was 2004 maybe, I had someone approach me in a coffee shop

25:00and said, good day, mate, and introduce himself. Who was that? It turned out to be the founder of AG1. Believe it or not, way back in the day. And people often ask me, what has survived after 20 plus years of testing every supplement under the sun? Just about. What actually has stayed in the rotation, in the toolbox? This episode's sponsor, AG1, is at the top of that very, very short list. I started using it close to 15 years ago when it was still called Athletic Greens. I put it in the four-hour body, didn't get paid to put it in there, and it's outlasted almost everything else that I've

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26:26Next up, Mary Carr. Mary Carr wrote the best-selling memoirs The Liars Club, Cherry, and Lit, and her book on writing The Art of Memoir. Let's talk about revision. Okay, revision. I'm a big reviser. This doesn't have to be serious. I'm a big reviser. You are a big reviser. But so you have said, you know, anyone who's read a rough draft of anything I write is just shocked at how bad it is. It's terrible. And what does the process look like? I mean, I know this is a very, hopefully it doesn't sound

26:56like 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 Carr 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. Threw out 1,200 pages of Lit. Yeah. Finished pages too. That's not draft. And that was written

27:27over 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 know, you're going to, 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. Like it just going to take me a minute. So anyway, so I had sent them, I don't

27:59know, 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, you know, 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.

28:34And then I called Don DeLillo. I was one of the people I call, uh, it's like, you know, the nuclear button, you know, who's like just one of the great novelists and who's also happens to be a friend of mine. And I said, Don, I, I think I'm writing him. 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?

28:57And I thought about that and I thought, God, he's right. Tolstoy's written bad. I mean, people I read, you know, every writer I know has written a bad book. So, okay. So, okay. So maybe it's just supposed to be a bad book, but it's the book that's standing in line to be written. And I think I got, 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.

29:33I think one example I give in the art of memoir is that when I'm, 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 puke and drunk on screwdrivers. 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

30:08air conditioner. And 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, you know, 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, and orange juice and eating

30:42these, watching her eat a peach. You know, 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. You know, but I, the smell of the peaches and being in the, and suddenly I remembered that I had a copy of a hundred years of solitude

31:15that I had got, that 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 know, you grow up around these kind of 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 rustic cars in the yard and the refrigerator on the porch. You know, it's these rows and rows of corn and these big

31:49cinnamon 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 could, I, I, 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've been such a screw up. You know, I'd been arrested the year before with a bunch of kids and there was a bunch of dope

32:23and 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 here, 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 in the, on this hot night in Coons County, Texas. And here sits this judge behind this, this liver spotted judge with these palsied hands and every meal he's

32:59ever 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, it was just like, Oh my God, mother, get me out of here. Sucking up is underrated. So anyway, yeah, I think it's, it's memory. It's, I do an exercise with my, um, I just did it the other day for a colleague of mine, Dana Spiotto, a wonderful young novelist I teach with. And she's teaching an undergraduate class. And I

33:33said, you know, I want to do this right. There are 90 kids in the class. She said, I said, I want to do this writing exercise. She, well, they're writing, you know, it's been uneven. And 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, you know,

34:05smell 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. 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

34:39getting it. It's my big footed sister who, as daddy said, nothing ever got between her and a bag of groceries. You know, 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. Next up, Brandon Sanderson. Brandon Sanderson created the Mistborn and Stormlight

35:13Archive series, completed Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, and raised more than $41 million on Kickstarter for four secret novels. Are you still teaching the creative writing class at BYU? I am. Bringing me on university. What is the first class? 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

35:48writing in the next 10 years. That we're going to pretend because most of you, that's probably not why they're there, right? Most of them, they're just curious. They may have a book in 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, right? Like you mentioned, you're writing a book just, or you wrote one just because

36:19it 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 page. 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? Yeah, right. 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 spent 20 years and then produce

36:54one 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

37:29relevant. 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, right? 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.

38:03And 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. What are some of the contradictory tools or approaches in the toolkit? 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% if it was in those exact books or other writings of theirs on their websites and things.

38:37But 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

39:09King, 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 that 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

39:44then 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

40:15you'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. 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? What I generally do is I follow a focus on habits approach. Instead of giving them specific writing exercises, I can give them, if someone comes up to me and says, I'm having trouble with X, I'll give them a writing exercise to work with

40:47that. 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. And 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,

41:19but 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 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

41:50the real life and just kind of like 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. 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

42:20rent a cabin, take two months, walk in without a book, come out with a book, and then they don't write for 10 months, right? 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

42:52every 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 go, 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 where 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 really be consistent. See if you can write, the goal is in

43:28the 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. Let's hit some top line habits from Brandon. How many words per year on average would you say you put down? My goal is 2,000 to 2,500 words a day. So, you know, whatever, 10 pages to 20 pages is what I'm looking at. Depends. I mean, I write in the

44:01old school manuscript format where everything's 12-pointed and 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 to 2,500. Those are new words. 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. It really depends. But if we're

44:34looking at 2,000 words a day times 50 weeks, like that can produce quite a lot of words, right? 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 is done to revision. 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. Last but not least, Seth Godin. Seth Godin has written 21 bestsellers published in 40 languages,

45:11including Purple Cow, Linchpin, and The Practice, and a daily blog of more than 10,000 posts. All right. So I'm going to personalize this selfishly because that is my nature.

45:25To flashback, 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. And you very, very observantly replied, didn't we talk about that eight months ago, the last time we had dinner? And I said, yes, indeed, we did. It shows you how little progress I've made. And whether this is just an

46:00opportunity 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, right, from the outside looking in. And 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

46:32biting your nails, fretting about doing A or B. You seem to pretty calmly do your thing. And I wouldn't describe myself that way. So in what you've seen, is there any sort of outside perspective where you're like, I think that these are some of the reasons Tim gets tied up in knots. Is there anything that you have to... Okay, well, first of all, if I'm making you miserable at dinner, I apologize. That's certainly not... No, no, no, no, you're not. No, I love our dinners. So I think that you left out the thing I said after I said the thing about eight months, which

47:08is, where's 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.

47:44And I learned this from Isaac Asimov. He and I worked together on a project years ago. Now, 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. And 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, throw out the bad writing, whatever was left,

48:17what was left. And the subconscious understood that if he's going to type anyway, you might as well type something good. So 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

48:49really like it. When you write a book, they roll their eyes and say, I read the whole thing. What, aren't you proud of me? What a pain in the neck. It takes a year. Just do the other thing. And so 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 that just do it. We're not going to go into the origin of that phrase coming from a mass murderer. But just do it. Wait, hold on. Is this like a Manson family reference?

49:20Barry Gilmore. Wow. I had no idea. All right. That'll be for people to research on their own. That was the last thing he said before they killed him. Wow. 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,

49:56the time you're spending catastrophizing the work is not helping anything. And so 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. And I was willing things to work out. And I was spending a lot of time dramatizing all of the perfect problems that I

50:26was confronting. And then I was able to shift to merely doing the work without the narrative and without the drama. And as soon as we can merely do the work, then there's room to see what needs to be seen. So 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.

51:00So two things. The first is, you are a delightful dinner host, and I love our dinners. So not to cherry pick and make it look like a sort of... Okay, you're invited back.

51:15To make... Yeah, this is not sort of a collage, 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,

51:46will, 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. So 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

52:22stuff, but it's never quite crossed the chasm into good enough to publish. So 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. And 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

52:56using perfectionism as an out. If hearing all of that, what comes to mind for you? Well, I'll share my personal experience, but first I want to challenge something you stated as fact, which is that the writing isn't good enough to publish. Says who? Says me, right. That's me. Right. So 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

53:30and 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.

53:44Yeah, true. 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. And I had never seen him. I mean, there was no YouTube or anything. And I was quizzing him. What's

54:18that like? Well, he said that the first weeks are just spent walking up this trail that's not that hard of 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. And 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. And so what you're doing

54:54before you get to the hard part is you're inventing a reason to stop. And you said something that 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 first time out of the gate? Because I'd been a book packager before, but this is my first, quote, real book. How could 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

55:30because 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. And I read it in one night and realized that without knowing it, I had been writing a book about how ideas spread. And in the next 12 days, I wrote a 225-page book.

56:00And I sent it to Malcolm, and 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. And he was such a mensch. He gave me his blessing and wrote the foreword. 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. And then 10 years later, the same 2010 you're saying,

56:32I 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. And 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. And 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.

57:04Generosity. 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. And it got way easier to merely do the work without commentary. Because there's somebody over there I'm doing it for. Here

57:35we go. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off. And that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday, easy to sign up easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things.

58:08It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field. And then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll

58:43get the very next one. Thanks for listening.