#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

25:36Tim Ferriss:You want to eat good food, of course, but 75 plus ingredients including probiotics, B vitamins, and whole food nutrients act as, in my opinion, pretty cheap nutritional insurance. I take it first thing every morning with cold water. And at this point, it's automatic like brushing my teeth. If you're looking for one simple daily habit that supports gut health and fills common nutrient gaps, this is where I'd start. So check them out. Subscribe today to try the next gen of AG1. Listeners will also get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 welcome kit, and AG1 travel packs with your first order. So start your journey with AG1's next gen and experience the difference firsthand.

26:15Tim Ferriss:Simply go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1.com slash Tim.

26:26Next up, Mary Carr. Mary Carr wrote the bestselling memoirs The Liar's Club, Cherry, and Lit, and her book on writing The Art of Memoir. So let's talk about revision. Okay, revision. I'm a big reviser. I'm a big reviser.

26:45Tim Ferriss:You are a big reviser. So you have said 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 like a really naive question because I know that there are many, many aspects to revision. So I'll lead with just a bit. This is from writermag.com. But Car 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?

27:17Tim Ferriss: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 over about, I want to say, five or six years. And I remember when I threw it out. Tim, I was so upset. I had been, well, first off, they were about to hang me. I was so late. I was like seven years late on a contract. I mean, they, and so I finally, my agent called me and said, you 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.

27:54Like it's just going to take me a minute. So anyway, so I had sent them, I don't know, I'd sent them like 130, 140 pages. And my editor at the time estimated that I'd thrown out 1 ,200 pages. And let me tell you, when she said that they sucked as bad as I thought they sucked, I mean, I knew they sucked when they sent them, which is why I didn't want to send them. I wanted to keep working on them. So I just, I went to bed for like two days. And I watched, 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. He was one of the people I call. It's like the nuclear button, who's just one of the great novelists and who also happens to be a friend of mine. And I said, Don, I think I'm writing. He's like, what are you crying about? I said, I think I'm writing a bad book. And he said, well, who doesn't? And I thought about that. And I thought, God, he's right. Tolstoy's written bad. I mean, people I read, every writer I know has written a bad book. 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 became willing to fail to just say what happened.

29:24So basically what it looks like is just clawing through a line at a time or a sentence at a time. I think one example I give in the art of memoir is that when 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 have 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 air conditioner. So at that time you could buy an air conditioner that strapped under the dashboard.

30:15Well, it would build up condensation. And when she turned right, and I was sitting in the shotgun, the water in the air conditioner would spill out onto my bare feet. And it was icy, icy cold water. And I remembered that we had stopped and gotten a bushel of peaches in Arkansas. And she was drinking vodka, driving, drinking vodka and orange juice and eating these, watching her eat a peach. When you're 17 years old, to watch your mother eat and show any desire for anything is just so horrifying. You just want to die. There's just nothing uglier than watching your mother eat a peach when you're 17.

30:58You just think, my God, woman, shut your mouth. Take a smaller bite. Jesus, it's not going anywhere. But the smell of the peaches and being in the— And suddenly I remembered that I had a copy of 100 Years of Solitude that I had got. It was her book, but I had started reading. And she said, read it aloud to me. And I remembered reading that book and driving. And I remembered the, you 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.

31:43You know, it's these rows and rows of corn and these big cinnamon colored silos. And I remember driving into that landscape up to that college and reading that book and thinking I could be a writer. I somehow was able to remember those details and occupy that body in space and time and remember how disgusted I was by my mother and how terrified I was that I wouldn't do well at school, that I would fail. I've been such a screw-up. I'd been arrested the year before with a bunch of kids, and there was a bunch of dope, and some of them went to jail, and I didn't. because the judge was a guy who had known my mother when she was a reporter for the local newspaper.

32:36And 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 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 ever eaten on his tie when she came to pick me up. And he said, I remember your mother. She was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. And she said, oh, you old fool. I mean, it was just like, oh my God, mother, get me out of here. Sucking up is underrated.

33:17So anyway, yeah, I think it's It's memory. I do an exercise with my, I just did it the other day for a colleague of mine, Dana Spiotta, a wonderful young novelist I teach with. And she's teaching an undergraduate class. And I said, you know, I want to do this right. There are 90 kids in the class. I said, I want to do this writing exercise. She said, well, the 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.

34:01And try to close your eyes and smell that because, you know, smell is the most primordial memory and the most emotional memory. and it's stored way back in that snake brain hypothalamus we have that is where all the trouble starts. You try to get in that memory and interrogate your body about what you can smell, taste, touch, and then finally what you want. What are you yearning for and what's keeping you from getting it? Maybe it's a bite of the brisket or some of the barbecue or daddy's oysters coming up out of the fryer or what's going to keep you from getting it. It's my big-footed sister who, as Daddy said, nothing ever got between her and a bag of groceries.

34:45You 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 Archive series, completed Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, and raised more than$41 million on Kickstarter for four secret novels.

35:24Tim Ferriss: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 writer earning a full-time living from your writing in the next 10 years. That we're going to pretend because most of you, that's probably not why they're there, 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.

36:06It 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 it was an itch. You enjoyed it. I think writing is legitimately just good for people. In the same way that working out is good for people. Learning to write a narrative and get those thoughts out of your head on a page, 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?

36:41But if you write a book, people will say, so when are you going to publish it? And I say to the students, it's okay if that's not your goal. If you want to write just for you, if you want to be on the, I spend 20 years and then produce one book route. Totally fine. However, I want you to know everything you would need to shoot for the highest level, which is earning a full-time living as a writer, and everything else falls underneath that. So during the class, we pretend that that's your goal. Once you walk out of it, you can make your own goals, whatever they are. But while we're there, we pretend that.

37:16And 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 uh survivorship bias says who knows what i actually say is going to be relevant some of it hopefully but i can't really determine what really played a part in me being successful and what sure of course and i want to approach it as a toolbox giving people all of these various tools some 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.

37:54Some of the things that Stephen King tells you will be wrong. Some of the things for you, some of the things that I tell you will be wrong for you. You have to find your own way. And so I kind of start off with, I'm going to pretend you want to be a professional writer and then follow it up with, but learn when to ignore me. What are some of the contradictory tools or approaches in the toolkit? it. 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.

38:29And 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. But Stephen King at one point said, do not make an outline. Do not use a writing group. These will destroy your writing. And Scott Card is like, I need an outline. It is fundamentally vital for me in order to build my book. Now, Stephen King is what we generally call, these are George R. R. Martin's terms. He's wonderful the way he speaks about fiction. If you're really interested, anything George says is golden. He calls them gardeners. Stephen King is a gardener.

39:08For Stephen King, exploring and discovering his story is the thing that makes him excited. He wants to take a seed. He'll often say, I take two really interesting characters, and I put them in conflict and have something go wrong, and I see where the story goes, and I just write. And he says 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 then polish that little piece and see where it goes and then take the next piece that they've already built as part of their structure and build a story around that and most people are somewhere in between these two extremes but those were two extremes where i realized i can't do both of these i can't both not have an outline and have an outline i can have a hybrid approach but if you try to take both of their advice equally weighted, then you're going to get nowhere.

40:10You can try both methods in different ways. You can try some hybrids, but a lot of things you'll learn in writing, you kind of have to choose one or the other and try it out and see how it works for you.

40:21Tim Ferriss:What are some of the assignments that have most resonated with students or you think best served to 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 that. If someone comes up to me and says, I am having a lot of trouble going back and revising my chapters over and over again, instead of writing the next one, I'll say, okay, try writing longhand. This works for some people.

41:00You 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, but then forcing yourself to do something new. That works for some people. If people are having trouble with dialogue, I say, all right, Go do the exercise where you sit and listen to people on campus, and you just write down exactly what they say, exactly as it's said, and then take it and try to write it under different styles of dialogue.

41:40If 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 the 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.

42:19Those are the people who go, rent a cabin, take two months, walk in without a book, come out with a book and then they don't write for 10 months, 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 every day that you do this. that you don't do a lot of other things. Go to the coffee shop, go to a certain room in the house, turn on certain music that you only turn on when you're writing.

43:00Build 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 the class to write 35 ,000 words. Class is around a third of the year. If you do that all year, you will end up with 100 ,000 words, which is your average novel.

43:38Tim Ferriss: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 old school manuscript format where everything's 12-pointed in Courier. And it's a holdover from the days when certain typesetting things are done that are too nerdy, perhaps, to talk about here. But I think in words. So I do 2 ,000 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.

44:28And 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 looking 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, including Purple Cow, Linchpin, and The Practice, and a daily blog of more than 10 ,000 posts.

45:19Tim Ferriss:All right, so I'm going to personalize this selfishly because that is my nature. To 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 opportunity to showcase my insecurities, I don't know.

46:02Tim Ferriss:But I would love to hear what you think it is that I torture myself with or that tortures me, that leads me to ask you these types of repeated questions on different occasions. Because you are, as much as anyone I know, you seem from the outside looking in. 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 biting your nails, fretting about doing A or B. You seem to pretty calmly do your thing. And I wouldn't describe myself that way. So in what you've seen, is there any outside perspective where you're like, I think that these are some of the reasons Tim gets tied up in knots?

46:51Tim Ferriss:Is there anything that you have to...

46:53Seth Godin: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.

47:00Tim Ferriss:No, I love our dinners.

47:01Seth Godin:So I think that you left out the thing I said after I said the thing about eight months, which is, 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. And I learned this from Isaac Asimov.

47:46Seth Godin:He and I worked together on a project years ago. he published 400 books back when it was hard to publish a book. 400 books. And he told me that every morning, sorry, that's the volunteer fire department. Every morning for six hours, he would sit and type. 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, what was left. And the subconscious understood that if he's going to type anyway, you might as well type something good.

48:24Seth Godin: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 really like it. When you write a book, they roll their eyes and say, I read the whole thing. Aren't you proud of me? What a pain in the neck. It takes a year. Just do the other thing. I totally get that feeling. This is where we lead to the second part about being conflicted.

49:06Seth Godin: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.

49:17Tim Ferriss:Is this like a Manson family reference?

49:20Seth Godin:Barry Gilmore.

49:21Tim Ferriss:Wow. I have no idea. All right. That'll be for people to research on their own.

49:25Seth Godin: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, the 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.

50:16Seth Godin:And I was willing things to work out. And I was spending a lot of time dramatizing all of the perfect problems that I was confronting. 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.

51:00Tim Ferriss:Two things. The first is you are a delightful dinner host and I love our dinners. So not to cherry pick and make this look like a sort of...

51:11Seth Godin:Okay, you're invited back.

51:15Tim Ferriss:To 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, will, for instance, look at something I wrote in 2010 and say, I can't do that anymore. And if I practice, I could still practice for weeks and publish something on the blog and it would not be that good.

52:01Tim Ferriss: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 stuff, 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?

52:41Tim Ferriss: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. He writes to think. He doesn't think and then write. And that I'm shortchanging myself by using perfectionism as an out. Hearing all of that, what comes to mind for you?

53:05Seth Godin: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?

53:17Tim Ferriss:Says me, right. That's me.

53:20Seth Godin: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 and keep doesn't match the writing that's in front of you. But I dare say, as talented as you are at so many things, this might not be your best skill, knowing when it's ready to publish.

53:44Tim Ferriss:Yeah, true.

53:45Seth Godin:And it may make sense in this world where it is ever easier to hire somebody to do the thing they are good at, to say to this person, here's 5 ,000 words aimed at this kind of reader. Tell me where I 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 any, I mean, there was no YouTube or anything. And I was quizzing him. What's that like? Well, he said that the first weeks are just spent walking up this trail that's not that hard a trail to walk up with tea houses along the way and stuff like that.

54:29Seth Godin: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 before 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.

55:07Seth Godin: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 because I said, I can't hit lightning like that again. And thanks to Malcolm Gladwell, he was unknown. He sent me this new book called The Tipping Point, and he asked me to write a blurb for it. And I read it in one night and realized that without knowing it, I had been writing a book about how ideas spread.

55:54Seth Godin:And in the next 12 days, I wrote a 225-page book. And 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 forward. And I realized in that moment, I couldn't write permission marketing again. That day was gone. But I could write this book and someone would benefit from it. And then 10 years later, the same 2010 you're saying, I wrote a book called Lynchpin.

56:34Seth Godin: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. 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.

57:18Seth Godin: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 we go.

57:37Tim Ferriss: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 two 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. It 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.

58:20Tim Ferriss: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.friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog.friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.