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That's great. All right, so now I've got that set up, and in 60 seconds, we'll get going. Good afternoon from Normal, Illinois. Okay.

Well.

Okay. Certainly is good to see everybody.

Why are you in Normal?

Huh?

Why are you in Normal, Illinois?

Okay, you make me get back on camera. It's just my overnight stop on my way towards back home to San Diego. They have RV hookups at the Loves Travel center now.

Had a lot of them, so that'll give me power.

Good, good.

All right, I'm about to go check in now. I'm going to start recording.

This.

Guys. Weird. It's strange how the recording button. There it is. This meeting is being recorded and livestreamed. You bet. Well, welcome to fire dance for April 20th. And before I go any further, I'd like to, for the absolute record, share my screen and show what we were up to last night. And Annarive was winning the Los Angeles Times book award for science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction for her novel the Reformatory. So I would love it if people would give her a big round of applause for that, because that is. Congratulations, Pete.

Thank you. I will be camera ready in just a second. I'm still. But thank you.

Yeah, she's actually going back out there today, so she's going to be guesting on here and helping out as much as possible, but also taking care of business in various ways. Stopping that sharing. So that is a very, very good thing. Anyway, so what I'd like you to do is to unmute yourselves and everybody say hello to everybody else and give virtual high fives.

Hello to everybody else.

Great, great. Well, welcome. My name is Stephen Barnes, and I'm the creator of these technologies. And I'm also a life coach and a father and a husband and martial artist and a writer. That's right. I'm a writer, you know, so there's two writers in this family. And I'm very, very proud of the one that was up on that stage last night. She worked very, very hard. That's seven years of work. That is no small thing whatsoever. Very Tanari. Would you say a little bit. A little something about the reformatory and your path to writing it? I'd like to make sure that that gets official. I'll take care of.

Hold on.

I'll take care of the guests.

All right, here I am. I'm not. I don't have full makeup on yet, but. Yeah, it's okay. I don't need full makeup with y', all, so. Hello, everybody. Yeah, this was a monster of a Project. It was. It was something I. I knew I had to write as soon as I heard that I had a. A great uncle who died at the Dozer School for Boys. But like I said in my speech last night, I. I knew I also wanted to write a different story for him. And I wanted to add ghosts because, you know, when you're writing about an institution like the Dozier School that is very violent and your narrators are children. It's a balancing act, to be honest, about how violent the facility was without traumatizing either the readers or myself while I'm trying to write it. And I was getting traumatized from reading the research for the book, so I kept the worst stories just to myself. Like, there's a line in the reformatory where Gloria says that her mother kept her worst stories locked behind her eyes. And that's kind of how I was approaching. I was like, okay, I'm filtering through all this muck to create something that makes sense, something that is arced, something that ultimately I hope would be hopeful. And there were so many times. Steve knows how much I struggled emotionally with this book. So many times I was finding excuses not to. I wrote a whole short story collection, procrastinating when I was supposed to be writing this book. Any, like, script assignment. We were trying to break into Hollywood that, you know, homeschooling our son during COVID But it really. And. And the biggest. I didn't talk about this in my speech last night, but I think you all know that the biggest reason I almost just stopped writing the reformatory, and it almost seemed like an excuse to stop writing the reformatory was when I heard that Colson Whitehead was also writing about the Dozier School for Boys. I felt like, well, that's a wrap. If Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead, and he did win a Pulitzer prize for that book, by the way. The Nickel Boys. If he's writing about that, is there any oxygen left for my story? And at first, I didn't know if it would have magical realism or not. And I swear, if he had had ghosts in his book, there would be no other reformatory. I don't care what my agent was like. Well, you know, there was another book about the underground Railroad that came out the same year as Colson Whitehood's book about the underground Railroad. And I was like, yeah, but I've never heard of that book. No one's heard of that book. So I. You know, my agent deserved thanks that I gave him, convincing me to keep writing and an editor who believed in it. The whole time I was working on it, and of course, my baby sitting right here to hold my hand and prod me and sometimes lash me, figuratively, to keep moving, to get this story out. So I was thinking about my mom, my late mother, for whom I named Gloria. And like I said on my speech last night, at every turn in this novel, I just had to ask myself, what would mom have done because she had so much courage? So, yeah, it's. I'm almost getting teary just thinking about it, because even though I hoped I would win, maybe even halfway expected I might win, I still. I'm still a little breathless about it. It's. It's a. It's a major award, and I'm not used to getting those, so it's exciting.

Fantastic. Well, you earned every bit of it.

Thank you, sweetie.

Very proud of you. So let's. Let's get into what we're going to do today, because there's always so much to do. Always so much to do. I have something in the background. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to do things here, but I'm going to share my screen for something here for a moment because there are a couple of different things that I wanted to talk about. So here's one of them. And it has to do with the difference between looking for. To win an award, for instance, and looking to honor her mom, her ancestors, the people who pretty much got us here. When you have a purpose in life, your efforts over time become more and more powerful, more and more refined. You never lack an understanding of what motivates you. You know what motivates you, your purpose. Now, you could hear that Tanari let herself get almost overwhelmed. So you need stress coping mechanisms, because if your purpose is important enough, then you can feel just overwhelmed. I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I'm the right person to do this. Maybe somebody else can do this better, all that Colson Whitehead stuff. But what would have happened had she followed the diagram on the bottom? Chasing validation. Suppose she'd written this trying to get an award. Suppose she'd done this even trying to get sales. I mean, there's one part of a successful artist that has to be concerned with the market. You have to be. But that's the commercial part of you. That's the part of you that can become a fraud. That part of you can become a hack. How do you create something that is simultaneously honest and powerful? I say you find a powerful purpose. If you have three Major aspects of your life, your physical aspect, your emotional aspect and your career aspect. One of the things that you need to do following that rpm, the rapid planning method, the thing you have to do is one thing, that's the what. But then you have to ask yourself the why. You need a powerful why. You need to know why you want to do this. So for 7 years Tonanariff dealt with this and you know the sense of why I want to do this. If you have the what and the why is powerful enough, then the how becomes easy. The how am I going to do it? Well, I'm going to do this number of pages per day, I'm going to do this much research, I'm going to have to do this much stress coping, whatever those are the hows. But once you have the what, the next thing you need is the why. So this illustration that I just came across today accidentally is about what happens when you have a why. So if chasing validation is the same thing as trying to do it for money is the same thing, there are many other ways you can dead end your efforts by having the wrong why money isn't enough, it just isn't. But on the other hand you could say money, I want to support my family, I want to give my children a wonderful education. If you do that, then you say I need money for that. But you're concentrating on seeing your kid in a cap and gown, graduating from their ideal school or something like this so that their is joy involved. Then you're not. You might be a commercial writer, but you're unlikely to be a hack.

What?

And can I, can I jump in for a second?

Oh, I would love for you to jump in. I'm gonna, I'm gonna stop the sharing and I would just love.

I'm getting closer to being video ready. So the the Reformatory may be my bestselling book. After its launch, my editor said, and this was shocking to me because I have not been promoting it since January, that It's selling like 300 copies a week, which in hardcover is very significant. Steve had already noticed that it had more reviews already than My Soul to Keep. And My Soul to Keep came on in 1997. But even within that, if all I had been aiming for was if I finish this book, this could be the best selling book of my career. That was not going to be enough to get to my why. My why had more to do with trying to honor this family history, to try to bring the horrors of the Jim Crow era to life so that people better understand the present, to give people a sense of hope who already know what those horrors were, but to, you know, to honor the heroes who stood up against unbelievable odds. And that ending. I mean, I don't want to give away the ending, but I had a very specific ending of an old woman in a pickup truck. I saw her as Cicely Tyson I was writing toward. So all of that was my why. Like, who was Robert Stevens? He mattered. He lived and he mattered. That was my why. If it had been about just the money. And believe me, you know, as I have a half an eye on retirement, I'm always glad to think about sales that can. Can give us more of a. A family nest egg, don't get me wrong. But it wouldn't have been enough. That would have just pricked my imposter syndrome. I'm trying to rip off my. That family story to profit from it, you know, or you. It wouldn't have been enough for a while. I just wanted to say that.

No, but do you understand? Let me. I'm actually going to pin myself as well, because this is a really solid conversation to be had. Because the question of artistic integrity is not different from the question of going to work every day. Why are you going to work every day? To a certain degree, artists are blessed to be able to take our dreams, our hopes, our hearts, and then through craft, create products that create emotional changes in other people. The question of how you do that, how do you survive in the field long enough to build a body of work? How do you find the people who are going to respond to your work? Looking at the struggle that you had and then looking at what has come out the other end of it. I think that this is a fantastic subject and one that we can go into as much as we can. Given your time constraints, this won't be true for every week, but I think it's true for today. The day after this happened, the day after this acknowledgment. Asking yourself, how did you do it? It's going to be a combination of all the skills you have and your heart and how you were taught to care so deeply. The meaning of life is to move away from pain. That's money. Money is mostly good for removing pain, embracing joy. You know, the absolute joy of standing up there on that stage and being acknowledged. Was that not one of your peak experiences?

Oh, my God, yes. And I was a nervous wreck all week. I really, really, really wanted to win. No, I didn't get nominated for an NAACP Image Award, for example, which. Which would have been very meaningful to me. The NAACP actually is a part of the story, so. So that kind of hurt not to even get nominated. And this was a pleasant surprise. I didn't see this nomination coming. I was up against Victor Laval. You know, a lot of you know him, excellent writer Daniel Kraus Whalefall. His book had been on the COVID of the New York Times Book Review and a couple of other writers I didn't know as well. So to stand on that stage also as a transplant to Los Angeles from. From Miami who has struggled over the years to feel like I have a new home. Always envying Steve because he could drive by and say, oh, I went to high school there. Oh, I. You know, that's where I grew up. And feeling sort of that sense of not having a community, I felt. I think maybe that was the most important feeling. Steve was feeling like a sense of community in. In that room. From the Los Angeles Times. I'm a former journalist, so I have a lot of respect for newspapers and reporters, and it was absolutely a peak experience. It was like my Oscars. In fact, when I tweeted it out today, I said, guys, I won. Which is what Jordan Peele tweeted when he was sitting at the Oscars.

He wrote.

He tweeted out, guys, I won, because that's how it felt. It felt like getting an Oscar, you know, and balancing that, like Steve said, against how hard it was to write this book now that all the.

The.

The. I mean, literal blood, sweat and tears. I mean, really sobbing when I thought I would have to let this book go when another book was going to come out on a similar topic. And I grieved, and it was so difficult to march forward. I think it would be probably helpful at this point to talk about some of the tools that got me over the finish line, some of which will be helpful to you and some of which won't, because they're very specific in some ways. But one was, gosh, I don't know how many years I'd been toiling on the book. Maybe I was about halfway done when one of my Mother's Day gifts was to spend a weekend in a cabin in Idlewild. And I've never been one of those writing in a cabin writers. I've always taught write in the margins. That was what had gotten me to halfway done sentence a day sometimes, or just here and there. But having a little focused time to read over the book and map out the rest of the book and really feel it in my bones was incredibly helpful. So I Think that's probably no surprise to artists that finding and guarding your flow time and your solitude can be an important part of your process. Even though you can't do that every day. You can't go to a mountain cabin every day, but maybe you can plan a little personal retreat for yourselves. That the second thing was literally the fear that I might die without finishing the book. That was because it was Covid. I finished it in 2020 because I thought, oh, my God, I've been messing around so long, I literally could die and this book won't get finished. So that was scary. I kind of scared myself into finishing it. And the third thing, which I think is the most useful tool that everyone can use, was a page quota and chart that I put up on my wall. That was huge, huge, huge, huge, huge. Because I could see, like, my quota was three to five pages, and I could see where I made my three, my four. Hey, toward the end, sometimes seven, you know, once I got toward the end, I could really ramp up my page count.

Three to five pages per day, right? Per day, yes, per work day.

And some days were zero. So I couldn't lie to myself that I was writing, working on it every day, because I could see all the zeros on my chart. They were, like, right in front of my face. And that was. I think the clincher was the quota and the chart. That made it very concrete. That helped me not lie to myself about what my progress was or what my progress wasn't, you know, because sometimes you feel like you're not making progress, but you could like your chart and say, well, you were. You wrote, and you met your quota every day. So calm down. But those are the three things. The protection and solitude of that weekend. Fear that I wouldn't finish it. So that really made my why. It sharpened my why a great deal during COVID Because then it was like, this may be my last legacy as a writer, and if I leave it unfinished, what. What a way to cheat myself. What a way to cheat this story, this young man that I wanted to world to know about. So that really sharpened it. But the concrete tools, the chart and the quota people, writers don't like words like quota, but trust me, it really worked.

Listen, with your permission, I'd like to find out when not anybody would like to ask you a question. Sure. Could we. Would you be willing to take some questions? Okay, great. So let me unpin myself, and I'm actually going to unpin you from.

Thank you, Holly. Your honor. Thank you, your honor. I'm Going to call Holly.

Your honor, do you have anybody want to raise their hands if anybody who has a question for Tananari, this might be an opportunity to do that. If you don't, that's all fine, but if you do, then okay, I guess we don't have any questions right now. So I'm gonna go with Holly first, because we talked to Jaime a lot and so we'll talk to him second. Let's talk to the lady first.

Okay.

Okay. So I. My question was, you know, it's such. It was such a wide ranging book. I mean, I read it, you know, and. Meaning that I could see the ins and outs of your life story and you know, but just a broader context also. And like you just said, you know, NAACP was in it, you know, different, you know, civil rights, you know, it touched on civil rights in the south, et cetera, and really throughout our country. But what I really. How do you this. Like, I have things in my head that I think are big and far reaching too. How did you just narrow it down to, I'm going to tell this story. And one thing that the, the. That they said when they were talking about your book was that all of the minor, even the minor characters were fully developed. So you created this whole world. And all of the characters were so well developed. How do you get a handle on where do you start? You know, I guess I wanted to say, where did you start to. Because it's so big, you know, you could just go off in a 50 million directions. And what that does for me is that it never gets started. You know, it never gets pinned down.

Trust me, I overstand that dilemma. And that probably was one of the things I was grappling with as I got lost in the research. You know, you read memoir after memoir after memoir. I read Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King, which is about Thurgood Marshall and his case. So the first thing for me, and I think I knew this from the beginning, was to have a narrow focus on the lived experiences of my two young protagonists, Robert and Gloria. Like, at its heart, it was going to be his experiences on the inside, her experiences trying to free him on the outside. And while there are a couple of times I veer into the point of view of the side characters, we get into the social work point of view for a minute because I did want to give a glimpse of the dilemma of a Jewish white ally in 1950 who wants to do the right thing, but is also afraid for his family. I wanted to give a glimpse into the Psychopathic mind of the warden, because that's fun. So I had to do that, but I don't think I did any other point of view characters except Gloria, Robert and those two outside representatives and everything else is only what they experience. So if I want Harry Timor in my story, the martyred NAACP leader who was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan probably in about 1951, I think, then that's going to have to be because Gloria met him. If Gloria didn't meet him, he's not in the book. If Gloria didn't meet Ruby McCollum, a woman who just a few months after this book takes place, was going to shoot a white physician to death in. In. In broad daylight in his office and become a huge national sensation. If she's going to be in my book, it's only because Gloria met her. And we're only going to know that there's anything odd about their future, because Gloria can sense it. She has a little bit of shining. She can feel that there's something important about these people. And that was really the secret was to keep it as narrow as possible. I mean, I haven't counted it, but I don't think this book takes place over more than about five days. It's a very short time span. No, there were a lot happened. So that was really the key. Because otherwise, as you said, it could have just sprawled hither, thither and beyond, as they say. I've never said that in a sentence that was fun.

I'd like to make a comment here. I think that is important. The question. You've talked about making a lot of decisions, and it's going to be a natural inquiry into, well, how do you learn how to make those decisions properly? And you do that by scaling your way up. You start with short stories. You start with tiny little stories that you can hold. You can write in a day or in a week where you can hold everything in your head at the same time. It's like, how do you learn to juggle? You don't start with six chainsaws. You start with three scarves until you get that right. And then you add another scarf. And then you try oranges. By starting with something that is small enough. All those different things that she was talking about, all the fears, all everything. A beginning writer is going to feel all of those for a short story. She's feeling all those for a novel. It was almost overwhelming. So if you're talking about something huge, choose a tiny little piece of your story and write a short story about it. Until you have published 75 to 100,000 words of short stories, don't worry about going up to the novel size. That is so complicated, that is so big. So many writers hurt themselves by trying to do something that's bigger than they can handle. And then they're convinced that they didn't have the talent because they try. It's like going to the gym and trying to lift a 300 pound barbell. No, you can't lift that barbell, but that doesn't mean you can't lift a hundred pound barbell and work your way up by giving yourself time to, you know, let me try this, you know. You know, let me rest from it. This was tough. You come back, oh, I'm a little stronger. I can try a little stronger story, a little bit larger story, a larger canvas, a more complex canvas. So, I mean, Tony, you teach writing actually more than I do at this phase because you're in terms of the UCLA type class. So what are your thoughts about how you work your way up to a project as complex as this?

Well, whether it was in the prose program at Antioch University Los Angeles or their new screenwriting program, yes, I echo your message. We teach students through short works. And that one anecdote I've told often, and I'll repeat it here, in case you haven't heard it, is that I had a very good friend, actually, from our youth at the New York Times as interns, who was writing a novel years and years and years and years, years toiling away on her first novel, which, by the way, is just about to come out this year. So that's how long it took her to publish her first novel, like 30 years. So that's real. What Steve is talking about is real. I know another friend who got lost in the weeds writing a novel and hasn't basically finished one since in 20 some years.

One of the things I'd like to, you know, the Life writing premium program, www.lifewritingpremium.com is all about what skills does it take to create a masterpiece? And then how in the hell do you start from zero and get there? Because it's replicable. If you study enough successful writers, you'll start seeing that there are patterns. And for God's sake, if you'll give yourself the chance to let your talent develop, let your skills develop, let your heart develop, learn how to deal with the fear, fear the doubt in your head by working on little projects rather than putting, imagine putting seven years into a book and being too scared to send it off to Be published. Happens all the time. People spend their eye drop.

Go ahead, T. I was just going to say, and there's also hope, you know, for those of you who are working in longer works and you. And it makes you feel pain. The idea of working on a short story, arc a short story out of your work in progress, that is something else I did. And maybe that was one of the tools I should have mentioned that kept me on the path, because I think in about 2017, I had finally gotten to a pivotal moment. I wanted to write it as a short story previously, but I didn't know it well enough. So it's about a third of the way through the book. Robert has just come to the reformatory, and it's not too spoilery to say that he's sent to the whipping shed. It's that chapter at the whipping shed. That was. That was something I had been writing up to. Like, the most difficult thing I was writing up to, but also the most important moment in the book for me, because that's the instant when Robert realizes that these ghosts he's been afraid of, these little ghost stories he's been hearing, are not. What's the scariest part of being at this reformatory? That it's the human monstrosity that is the most scary. And in fact, the idea that there are ghosts that he can see ghosts is actually kind of uplifting in that moment because it reaffirms that there's more than what he can see. And he hears his voice saying, there's more than this. Which I think is something we all have to tell ourselves when we're going through those periods, you know, those periods when, as Gloria says in the book, when God blinks and life falls apart, there's a hurricane, there's cancer. It's like death comes in threes. You're like, what did I do, Lord? What did I do? That those moments, you have to tell yourself there's more than this. This, or this too shall pass is another version of that thinking. And that's what Robert gets in that chapter, which I turned into an arc short story. All I had to change was taking some details out that the readers didn't need. It was actually an arc chapter as written. And even if you don't have that in a longer work, you can create a prologue that takes place before the events in your novel. And that's what I told Nadine. That's the other thing I was going to say from my longtime friend when I read her novel in progress. And I thought, wow, you are the best unpublished writer I have ever read. What the heck? How are you not publishing? And when I heard Akashic Books, my publisher for the Wishing Pool, was going to do an anthology called Haiti Noir, and she's Haitian American, I said, you need to arc some part of this novel as a short story and submit it to this anthology. Which she did. And she got in and she got interviewed. I mean, she got better known. So that's another reason not to just rely on that 2, 3, 5, 7, 10 year process of writing your major work in progress. You're languishing in anonymity in the meantime, when you could be publishing, enticing agents, winning prizes, potentially getting option, potentially. So there are. There are like 10 reasons to write.

There's so many. There's so many. And one of the things you can do, you know, the. The Life Writing Premium program is an investment. But come to these zooms. Ask anything that you want. This is free. We're here every week hoping that, you know, whether it's about writing or other aspects of life or relationships or whatever, that's why we're here. We're 100% here. Whatever your level of resource and commitment, we'll meet you right where you are. You don't have to pay a dime to, you know, here. Today is the day. I'm really proud of what it is that we're able to offer you guys, of what it is that we're able to do, you know, so join the program if you can, but come here and just hang out in the chats, exchange ideas and support other people. Let yourself be supported. We have the tools here to get you all the way to being a successful writer. Use them, please. So let me move on to the next question. Thank you very much, Holly. It's good to see you.

I think Jaime was next.

Yes, Jaime is next.

Thanks, everybody. In light of what you were sharing at the beginning, Stephen, about having an internal purpose versus going after external validation, and when, as soon as it was released to the public, I read the Reformatory, and I have read two to three books a week for the last 50 years. And out of the many thousands of books I've read, there's that handful of favorites that I read and reread and reread. And I just wanted to pass on that the Reformatory has passed into that group of books that I reread. And the reasons why are twofold. It's more than twofold, actually. It's great entertainment. It's got wonderful historical research about a story that not enough people know about. But because I participate here and the value of talking to you and Tananarive about your writing process, I get to read it not only as a reader who's enjoying it, but as a writer who is learning from it. And that is valuable beyond words. And I'm so grateful. And I know that the award yesterday was well deserved. I'm sure there might be more coming, but that external validation, whenever it comes, is always welcome.

Oh, my gosh.

It may not be the greatest goal to drive as the main goal, but, boy, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Well, thank you, Jaime. And I'll also add to this, and no shade to my agent, because he also gave me a great idea for the novel. But when he first read it, he said he wasn't sure it was ready, and all that was missing was the final chapter. I did add a final chapter at my editor's suggestion, but I literally changed almost nothing else between that manuscript he thought wasn't ready and this book. So, again, still kind of walking out on faith, like, well, let's just see. We'll send it to this one editor as a test balloon. You know, you have to have sort of your inner barometer, because I could have panicked. I could have said, oh, my gosh, it's not ready. Let me rewrite or re. You know. No, just send it out.

That's great.

Let's move on to Tom Barkley.

Hi, Tanariva. And again, congratulations. Even though I put it in print, I wanted to say it again. This is. This has been an amazing year for you. I am delighted to see your success.

I really, really appreciate that. It means a lot coming from my little.

Our group.

Well, and you created that, too. So, again, you know, there's yet another.

Well, one of the things that I'm happy about, if our success can inspire people to think, well, maybe what they're saying works because we're not teaching you anything, that we're not using ourselves or teaching our children to the degree that our success can inspire you to believe in yourself that it is worthwhile to talk about this. Otherwise, it's just bragging, which is fun, don't get me wrong. But what we're hoping is that you're going to. You're going to kind of say, well, let me try this. Let me. Let me suspend a little bit more of my fear. Maybe I can. Maybe there is a possibility. If it helps for that, then that's wonderful. Was there anything else you wanted to say, Tom?

Yeah, you've. Steve You've talked about how you get started on a piece of work and writer Duet Tananarive. I am under the impression that you do things very differently at the beginning. How do you get the first word on screen or on the page or in the notebook?

It's tough.

The thing where you. Where the first letter goes down this.

You know, starting a project is tough. I kind of backed my way into my new novel, which is going to be called Bear Creek Lodge, because I didn't know it was going to be a novel. And I wrote it first as a short story, Incident at Bear Creek Lodge, which won a World Fantasy Award last year. But even before it won that award, I felt like I wasn't finished with that world. So I also wrote a follow up story for Ellen Datlow. And at that point I started to think, well, maybe this is a nolla. Maybe there's more to this story. And so it presented itself in chunks, it presented itself in vignettes to me, which was very, very helpful because it helped me kind of frame. Huh? What is this story actually about? Because the backstory appeared first. Everything that the short stories take place years, 30, 40 years before the main novel will take place. So that was helpful to know the backstory. And I think that would be my number one piece of advice. It's the number one piece of advice for this script Steve and I are working on right now. That it was what was missing. What the studio was picking up on is that the writer did not convey the backstory. Why is this happening? Know the backstory. That backstory, coincidentally, might also be your first short story that comes out of the larger project idea. But knowing that backstory, I'm kind of a chronological kind of writer. So when I started writing the novel, I'm not introducing the. The modern day aspect of the story. I'm starting back in 1926. Since I know my. My grandmother, the grandmother's backstory I'm starting when she's a little girl. This is where this starts. And I don't know if it'll end up that way in the final book. Maybe I'll take that chapter and shift it somewhere else when it's of significant importance. But that's just how I know how to walk in. I like to start at the beginning and I like to polish as I go. You know, you just. So that's like right now I'm very busy. I haven't had a lot of time to work on the book. So all I can do sometimes is go back, reread the Two pages or three pages I've written and polish them to a high shine to motivate me at what level of writing I want as I continue. I hope that answers your question.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding that because what you're saying is that there is no single way that you approach that day one first page. It is subject to always and fluidity and the market and the editors and whatever else comes to mind.

Yeah, I guess so. I guess what I would add to that though is outlining. I didn't mention outlining. Outlining is stupendously important. So even though this started from two short stories over the writer's strike, Steve and I wrote a spec script, which in my mind kind of is the outline for the novel. You know, it's based in the same world, it introduces the modern day story. So unless I see reasons to change the events as I'm working on the book, that is my outline. And I think probably outlining should have been the first thing I said. But I do, given that, though, I like to start at the beginning.

Thank you.

Thaddeus Howe, who is just, you know, really, one of my favorite posters over on Facebook is watching and he said that, he said this very thing for years. Short stories are a gateway drug and not just for you, but for your audience and potential avenues towards success. So thank you very much, Thaddeus. And we have another question here, and it is from Stymilli.

Yes, you got it right, Steve. Thank you.

Thank you, thank you. So what, what, what question do you have for our golden girl today.

And always? Sorry, Golden Girl? In many ways.

Yes, yes. Number one, I wanted to say what, you know, congratulations on the award yesterday. What. Well deserved. Number two, I wanted to say thank you, Steve, for those directions on, you know, how to be more prolific and get the writing done. And to you as well, Tananari, for those directions. You know, that that idea of I might die before this has done is really real, something that I'm dealing with now. It's 70 something years old trying to write this piece that I've been wanting to write for two or three years. So, you know, I know that, you know, from what you've said, just do the work, you know, do the work on a daily basis and it'll get there, hopefully. And if it doesn't, well, I'll leave. What I leave, you know what.

And I'm glad you brought that up because I, as a horror writer especially, I have come to believe that a little bit of fear is a healthy, healthy thing when Fear becomes unhealthy is when it paralyzes us. Like, oh, my God, I might die soon and I'm paralyzed. I'm not doing any of the things that I wanted to do or I hope to do. Whereas I try to stare death in the eye every day and ask myself, what do I need to do to feel fulfilled and to feel like I, I, I. All the gases out of my tank. You know what I mean? And I think that has been a healthy component in my life. I think it's, it's a bit tragic when people wake up and realize, oh, my God, I'm 80 years old. And it's a shock. You know, it's a shock and. And there's so many things left undone because there wasn't that eye at the corner. I think you. Just the corner of your eye. Just remember, we're not here forever. Just the corner of your eye as a motivator, not as something to overwhelm us.

Thank you. Yeah, I think that's so true. You know, I mean, I'm getting other things done. I won't say I'm not getting things done that I need to get done or want to get done. Want to get done. But, yeah, that's useful information. The third thing I wanted to say. I'll think about what you just said. Thank you for that. The third thing I wanted to say was I have a science background, the science educator most of my life, and never was really into horror or sci fi on a large level until I read your books and Octavia's books, and that drew me in. Still not my favorite genre, but you are two of my favorite writers, which is really interesting.

Thank you.

Might remember that you and I met when I worked at Hero Books many years ago in Brooklyn. Several of your books. So that, you know, that was my introduction to your work. And, you know, I am forever grateful. And I wanted to say that what draws me into what you and she write is your commitment to social justice and being able to bring that in with the horror and, you know, turning me on to understanding that looking at what all of this that we combat as social justice workers is the horror. You know, Stephen King didn't do it for me that way, you know, all the other writers, but you did because you connected it to my culture, our culture, and to the struggle. And if you would just say a few words on that, how you, you know, I know your parents were social, were in the movement early on, so you started out that way early in your life, but just. It doesn't seem like that was a connection that was. That was easy, easy to make in my mind.

Yeah, I'll speak to that. I'll speak to that. Briefly. I didn't get to say this in my speech last night. One thing I wanted to say was that I was struggling a bit as a newer writer right out of college after being exposed to the canon. I had started writing quiet epiphany stories with white male protagonists. Because that was canon. That was what a story looked like and felt like. Not because I thought I was self aster either. I think that would have even been a more admirable position. It was just that I lost myself in my own imagination. So no wonder I wasn't publishing. I was sending out all these like short stories that were just like everybody else's short stories, none of me in there. And it wasn't until I wrote the Between. And that was in part because of Mama Day by Gloria Naylor for the racial aspect and in part because of Anne Rice, an interview with her for the genre aspect to realize I could have impacted as a writer writing horror about black people. And even if I had no examples of other people who were writing horror, I didn't know any other black horror writers. I didn't even know Octavia's work until I had already started my soul to keep. So that was very important to write my truth. And I think that's for everybody out there. I mean, yeah, keep an eye on the marketplace, but don't lose track of who you are because you are the thing that is unique about the work that will make it jump to the pile, the top of the pile. When I look at the lists of books that were nominated for awards, these were all very personal experiences by these writers. So don't lose yourself, stay true to yourself. And as a child of civil rights activist, there was no way I could write without having some kind of history of social justice in there. My mother was always telling me these stories over and over and over again. So I think that's where I learned the impact of storytelling.

Great. Thank you very much. So let's see who's next. We have Otis Johnson.

Hello.

Hey.

I just also wanted to say congratulations on your award. And I just went ahead and ordered.

The reformatory as we're sitting here and.

I look forward to reading it. And also thanks for the idea of just. I don't know, a lot of us have internal words that worlds that we want to get out of our heads and we're learning the skills to do so. So thanks for the idea of presenting us with doing like shorts to get those out. And ever since you talked about that a couple weeks ago, I've been like writing a lot to get these little micro pieces of, you know, the big novels I dream of writing later out.

Worst mistake people can make is, is looking at the finished work of mature world class artists and comparing their current work to that. And one of the things is they're looking at books. They love books, sometimes trilogies. So people think, well, that's what I'm supposed to write. Without looking at the fact that the safe stair step approach is much more likely to get you there. There's no downside, except maybe a little ego. You know, I want to jump right into a book, but if you start with projects that are too big, it's like going into the gym and trying to lift a weight that's too large or trying to spar with a black belt class, getting your butt kicked and figuring, well, I guess I'll never learn karate. No, you simply took on more than you could handle. You know, give yourself time to develop. And by writing stories that are extracted, you're protecting your ip. You're having fun, you know, you're, you're getting yourself known. You're learning about the market. You are attracting agents and editors. There's, it is, it's the perfect way to get started. Plus there's the fun of getting published. You get published, you make a little bit of money. It's not a lot, but you're paying maybe one bill, you know, so that whole idea of I'm going to pay my light bill with the stories that I write, you do that and suddenly your writing takes on additional significance. It's actually contributing to your family. It's not just a hobby. Maybe it won't turn into a world beater. You know, maybe you're not going to be at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, but you're actually in the game. You're actually in the game. You're in the big leagues. I mean, it's like there's a gigantic difference between somebody who has never published and somebody who's published and paid one bill with that money. Those are completely different people. So you get to feel proud, honestly proud. And when you do that, I am proud of you.

It's like, great.

Welcome to the game. It's all there is. Once you've done that, all there is is a matter of degree. It's just a matter of degree. You're on the path, you're one of us. One of us. Well, that's great, Otis. Anything else we can do for you today?

Oh, nothing much. You were talking about that. I just found out that a second story that I did is actually, I published it for a quarterly, and I'm just happy that it's going to be in print. And, like, I'm just super excited about that.

Yes.

Never, never lose the part of you that gets excited about that. There is always so much stuff in life that can drag us down. Be the kind of person who is easily amused, who is. It's easy to feel joy. It's easy to feel excited. It's easy to be proud of yourself. Start building your walls so that life has to work harder to beat you down, that it has to lift you up. One of the things I tell Jason coming back from school is, what did you enjoy in class today? Tell me something you enjoyed in class today. When you do that, you're looking for the things that give you energy, that lift you up. And you will start noticing that there are people who look for reasons to be unhappy, and there are people who look for reasons to be happy. And the people look for reasons to be happy are happier people. And since the meaning of life is to be joyful and of service, you get to decide every day whether or not you're going to be a winner every single day. And once you've won at anything, you know how to win at anything else. I mean, it just so happens that finding joy is a great way to write every day. It's a great way to, you know, to read every day. It's a great way to get past the fear that stops you from sending stuff out because you're happy. So happy breeds happy. Crappy beats breeds crappy. So that's great. Congratulations, Otis. And let's move on to Dr. Matt.

Hey, everyone. Sorry I haven't been able to jump into the the group in the last few weeks. Spend a little bit.

We've missed you. Document. Where have you been, young man? Where have you been? We've missed you. Get off my lawn. Anyway.

Her voice right now, Steve. But no, thank. Thank you all for holding the space down. And again, congratulations to Nana Reeve and to you, Steve, as well.

Thank you.

I mean, I know none of this. You all clearly show every week, like, this is not something you do alone. And, you know, I don't know, I'm just overwhelmed right now just seeing a bunch of things like Tananariva, I follow you on Instagram and like, I saw your post about the ward and stuff, but like the part that really hit me when I saw it was the one in your slide with you and Steve there on like, I don't know, it was a red carpet or something like the picture wall. And it was, I don't know, it's just beautiful to see you two support each other. And oh man, I'm glad he was there.

Yes.

Yeah, there's a couple things that I wanted to sort of like, I don't know, poses comments, but maybe also questions and things I'm struggling through.

That's why we're here.

Yeah. So it's funny. So my friend who's a writer, but he's a doctor by day, but he writes, he sent me this mentorship program that the science fiction SFWA or something was creating out of nowhere. I didn't hear of it. He sent it to me, but he was like, hey, like, maybe you should apply and I've already been a part of your life writing program and like this group for a while. So I was just like, well, let me just like do the exercise of whatever they were saying in this thing. And it's. Something really came up for me when I was writing that and it connects to something else I noticed, which is like this hunger for a blueprint or this hunger for like a pathway or some way that's the first step in.

The magic formula is finding a map or model. That's the first. That's your first. That's your first assignment.

Yeah. And I was like realizing that, so I went through and like wrote a little bit for it. And they told me I didn't get accepted into it, which is fine because I didn't. I didn't feel like I necessarily needed it, but I wanted to go through the process of writing about it and seeing what came up for me. But I wanted to say that program plus I ran across on social media this guy who I guess he's gotten fallen into some recent success with like Spike Lee or something is like offering sessions for people to like give them advice. And I went and clicked on his page and it was like $400 for like a 30 minute session with this guy. And it just made me think of YouTube because I was just like, wow, like they're out here like dropping gems and not charging like crazy exorbitant amounts, really, and like changing lives. So I just wanted to like give you context for this that like there's a real need.

I understand that. I would. I have no doubt that the Gentleman is worth $400 an hour because this is this Is actually part of our marketing funnel. A certain number of people who come here will want to invest in these programs. But it is also true that we make the vast majority of our money directly in Hollywood or through, you know, through selling things, selling books. So we can afford to do something that is in our heart anyway, that we love talking about writing. I love talking about martial arts. I love talking about love. I love talking about how can we be in the world. How can we move through the world with power and passion? You know, the meaning of life is to. Is to move away from pain, embrace joy, and give service. So this is part of our dharma. This is part of what we do. And people who are charging $400 for a half hour, good on him. And it'll be up to him to provide enough value that the people he helps will tell other people, go to this guy. We're not in competition with him. He's not in competition with us. What we want is for everybody to move forward together. And it is my joy to share with you and others the things that people shared with me. We also loved getting your money. Every time somebody. Every time somebody signs up for one of our courses, we get the email, and it's like, yeah, that's great. So we're not shy about that. But we also.

That's more accessible, I think, is. Is what my. What. I was just really grateful. Wow, $30.

That's.

That's fine. I just. I guess I wanted to put some context on that. What we want is for you to be happy. If writing will help make you happy, then we want you to write. And if we can be of assistance there, that's great. Including, you know, pointing out other people's books or courses that might be useful to you. You know, we're going to get ours. We want you to get yours.

Yeah. Thank you.

Anything else we can do for you?

Yeah, no, just the other thing I was going to say was. Or thinking about and sort of curious about with you both was sort of like the. I guess, the role of partnership and the creative path, and you all work together on a lot of things. And part of why I'm asking this is that I'm originally from California. A lot of my life has been shifted toward here in Philly. My partner is an elected official, and so a lot of my life has been geared and shifted and shaped a lot by that. But it's been funny because as I committed to this pathway that you all have helped lay out and everything, he's been really inspired by a lot of that and just being like, you know.

Can you bring him on the show? Bring him on sometimes, you know.

Well, he had his elections on Tuesday, so he's really busy until the primary at some point.

If we can coach you guys, if you wanted to, like, do some work together or something like this, I'd be delighted. That would be so much fun.

Yeah, he has some really cool ideas and fantastic.

You know, there's nothing I can tell you that. We knew we wanted to work together when we first met. So one of the first things that we did was to create rules. Under what circumstances can we work together? So the rules that Larry Niven laid out when I was first working with him, I gave those to Tanari, but there was an additional one, and that is, you have to be capable of fighting fairly. You have to be able to fight, because as an artist, you would fight within your own mind about, is it this line? Is it this?

Is this?

Is it this? So it doesn't make any sense to expect that if you're collaborating with another person, you're not going to have arguments. So what you have to do is understand how will we fight fairly? And even more importantly than that, if you're married to a person that you're in love with that person. Our first and most important rule was that the relationship itself is never on the line. There is never any it's my way or the highway, look up here. There's never any sense that if you don't do it the way I tell you to do it, maybe I will withdraw my passion, maybe I will withdraw my friendship. If I ever had the feeling that the work was hurting our marriage, then we'd have to stop working together because the marriage is more important. Love is more important. It just is.

So.

Bring your vision of what it is that you want to do with your partner to us. Because whether it's about. Especially if it's about writing, but even if it's about relationships, relationships are one of the three big ones that we love to brainstorm about. And we would be honored to interact with you on that basis. Okay, Great to see you, man.

Likewise.

All right, so let's see who's else is up there. Nick Hovik?

Yes. Hello.

Hello, Nick.

You remember me?

You seem so familiar. Where do we meet?

When did you start doing this online stuff, Steve? Your life writing course?

Oh, Jesus, I don't know. It was 20 years ago.

Yeah, that was about the last time I got. I was in that for a while, and then life took several turns and. And so I Ran off the road into the weeds.

Anyway, so how can we serve you?

Well, sir, I was. I. I've been going through a couple of years here where I'm going through all sorts of people's programs. This is going to magically do this, this, do that. I'll refocus.

What is it you're trying to accomplish?

I'm. I've been working on a screenplay. Well, two things, two big things, aside from, you know, cultivating my faith in God. One is I've got a screenplay I've been working on for about four, four plus years. It started, you know, with. With the seminal experience, and then it began to grow and like crabgrass and both directions. And at this point, about two years ago, I know this is really. The timeline is kind of depressing, but I sent it out for cover through the launch pad contest and I got a number of favorable, you know, eight plus out of 10 remarks on dialogue, concept, theme. And. And then I went back to work on it. And my imagination is never failing to come up with yet another twist on how a given scene might go. So I've got a great deal of this thing done. I wrote a draft, that's what I sent out for the COVID And so I. I realize I'm faced with the necessity to practice a better interior discernment about what is speaking to the theme of the piece and not just what's. Although there's always passion in the scenes that explode out of my imagination. And I write them down. They're like many short stories, M I N I. And they're. They're all of them. They seem like little pearls and somehow supposed to go here or there in the story. So anyway, I've got myself kind of bogged down at this point.

So if you've been working on it for four years, then it does sound like it's bogged down, ideally. Why didn't you finish that script and then move on to another script, for instance? Because we talk about that path now. One of the answers could be that you feel like this is the story and you're gonna stick with it. And being a grown adult, you have the right to say that it's simply not the path that we suggest. We suggest that people write, finish what they write and then move on to the next piece. That part of the thing that stops us is that is clinging to an idea.

And how will you know when it's finished?

Yeah, yeah.

So the other thing that I would say is that in terms of theme, okay, so you write the first, you Know, the way I learned it is you write the first draft. All you're doing is following the story. You're telling a good story, you finish the story and then you look at it and you ask, well, what are the thematics here? What is this story about? Yeah, once you decide that what the story is about, then every scene has to either express the theme or the counter theme. Thesis, antithesis. Thesis, antithesis. You know, it's like, you know, love is more important than safety. Safety is more important than love. You're talking about a succession of scenes in which love is more important than safety, where the yearning for love makes people take risks. Safety is more important than love, then becomes the counter theme. And we see terrible things happen every time this character tries to open their heart. Then thesis, antithesis, synthesis. When you look at what your theme is and you're presenting a particular view of the world and then there's a counter view, you then get to ask, how do these things combine? In this particular case, it might be love is risky. So the first thing you have to do is learn to protect yourself. Stop being a child. Love is an adult game. And watching somebody decide to mature so that they're no longer just gushing their heart over everybody they meet, but they kind of hold something back, giving the other person a chance to respond. Now you've got thesis, antithesis in every scene. Plus synthesis is the end as two mature human beings come together and find love. So that is one way to do it. But the only way you learn how to do that is to practice. And through reading. You watch movies and you read books and you read short stories and you ask yourself, how do they get their effects? How do they do this? So whereas you could continue working on this, I would suggest that you also begin working on something new. If you want to keep working on that, that's your business. But I would suggest, you know, we always suggest short stories because short stories are the easiest to get out there. If you'll write a short story, you can publish it. And now you, your idea is out there. If you're determined to make a movie, then you could write short scripts and you could find a filmmaker and say, you know, let's, let's do this little one act play and let's go to the local community college and recruit some students and say, come over, you know, here, and we're going to shoot a little, you know, like My Dinner with Andre type, you know, thing of two people talking to each other and we'll pay you in, we'll Pay you in. In barbecue, you know, and you do it. Shoot it on an iPhone, you know, edited on an iPhone, and you put it up on YouTube. You've got a little teeny movie. You did it.

Yeah. Because if I can jump in here.

Yeah, please, please, please, please.

And this is the super, super challenging thing about screenwriting, is that the path is slightly different. You know, if you're working on a novel, then your next logical step is to stay. Start sending it to a bunch of publishers and someone publishes it. You know, it's not easy. Not everyone can do it, but it happens way more often than movies get produced. So the next logical step in a script is to find someone who's either going to advocate for it and make it a producer, you know, who likes it, or to set yourself up so that this is a writing sample, which is what most scripts turn into a writing sample to get work working on other projects. So I agree. Yes. At a certain point, you have to say, you're done and start working on the next one. If screenwriting is your primary artistic expression, always be expressing. But if you want it to move forward, you need to start asking yourself, what are the steps I need to take to get the script in the right hands? Is there a film festival happening near my community sometime this year where I can go and meet producers, ask questions, smart questions in the Q and A so that I can come up and talk to them afterward? Because Hollywood is a. It's a business of relationships way more than publishing is. You know, most people probably never met their editors in person before they submitted their screenplay. I mean, their book. Whereas most screenwriters know someone personally who is working with them on getting a movie set up. But the good news is you can meet people, and that's the. Where can you meet people where. Based on where you live, who work in the industry, who can advise you? Is there an actor? My. My first book, Blair Underwood, really loved it, and I made a lot of contacts because he was out there trying to get it made. Who will be your Hollywood allies to help get that script into the right hands is a super important question. If your end game is you want some chance of seeing that script produced.

And remember, work backwards from how you want to conclude. The meaning of life is to be happy. So you're, you're, you're. Whatever goal you have, the reason you have that goal is to be happy. So if you would say it would make me happy to have a movie made, well, what is the. What is the simplest version of the thing? Make it Easy to be happy. Does it need to be a major Hollywood film? Does would if it's up on YouTube and people can find it. Is that enough? Something in between? How about a stage play? Have you considered mounting a little play?

You know, and Nick, let me ask you a question. Sorry to interrupt. Do you, do you also write prosecution?

Yes, I do.

Okay, well, this is a little counterintuitive, but most. The way I got into Hollywood, the way most people I know got into Hollywood was because someone optioned their book. The book is the ip. So maybe your next step is to write your script as a book or even as, as we've said, a short story or two so that you can start getting it out there as ip. And you know, there's still our agent, our manager sent us a note a few weeks ago saying short stories are in and whether or not short stories are in, IP is always in.

So let me ask a question. Would it make your heart happy to see this story that you've been writing a movie about published as a short story or an aspect of it published as a short story? Would that be happy making for you?

I'd like to see that. There are other projects I've been working on over the years that I'd rather see published as a novel.

But you see, you're starting with these big, with these big things. Have you published any short stories?

I published one article. That's it.

Short stories. Have you published any short stories? Okay, so then it is reasonable to take the position that that's what you need to do that. That if you had published a dozen short stories, you would have the answers that you need about these larger products, projects. Because in the process of doing that, you will have to learn things. So we always suggest people do the small project that one of the biggest and most consistent mistakes people make is trying to do a project that's too large before they're ready for it.

If you can do that, I can see where the story could as I'm just thinking with you right now about making a short story out of it.

Yeah, I mean, a short story is going to take place in one day. It's happening right now. You know, you choose either choose an incident, a character, and show them dealing with some short term issue that's connected to your story, or you take a look at the, at the plot, the situation, and maybe you write a story based on a character that's not in the book at all, not in the screenplay at all. Somebody who is experiencing this from a different perspective. But what we want to do is shake you up.

Yeah.

Where does.

Where's your. Where does your character undergo a huge moment of transformation? You know, like if you were looking at the hero's journey, Is it the moment when the hero accepts the challenge? Is it the moment when the hero rejects the challenge? Is that the arc? You know, just find an arced piece of the story.

Is it a moment of deep despair? Is it a moment when somebody, cocky gets knocked off their horse and life absolutely savages them? What. Is it a moment when they find faith? You can just choose a moment, a tiny little piece of that arc. But make sure that you're reading short stories so you can see how this works. Short stories are a tiny little piece of somebody's life, whereas a book can encompass generations. You know, so. So take something that happens in just a moment, in the time that it takes you to read the story. It takes place or in a single day. You know, just use. Use Aristotle's unity of time to. To make sure that you're not trying to take an entire novel's worth of idea and boil it down to 10 pages. No, take 10 page. Take 10 minutes of your screenplay and write a story about that.

Okay.

And if you will do that, you know, we're happy to coach people here for free. You know, come on. If you want to get into one of our programs, lifewritingpremium.com. that's us. And we have other things, too, but sign up at 10honoreelist.com or stevenbarnslist.com come here and talk to us like this. This is our jam. This is what we love talking about. We love writers. It's wonderful to see you, Nick.

Thank you.

I'd love to see you get published. I'd love to see you get produced, but I can't. The production is much harder published. We can pretty much guarantee we can get you published. So that's your first step. Once you're published, you're in the game. How far you'll get in the game is another question altogether. But we can get you in the game. Okay.

Okay.

All right. Good to see you, buddy.

Thank you very much for your time.

Oh, pleasure. All right, so let's see. I'm going to. To get off of this. And let's see. Any other hands up? I don't see any other hands up. We've had lots of good questions, so I don't have to call on people against their. Against their desires. There was something I wanted to talk about. We've got 15 minutes here. It has to do with. How do you deal with negative people? How can you learn from negative people if you're trying to accomplish anything? People who have not accomplished will either tear themselves down on garbage or they will say the world was against them. Okay, it's going to be some combination, one of those two things. So if you are positive about yourself or positive about the world, you're going to rub some people the wrong way. And you have to be aware of that and understand that it's not your fault and it's not your job to make them feel, you know, to agree with them. They can. You can always find pity parties about anything. Oh, it's impossible to lose weight. It's impossible to get published. It's impossible to find love. You know, raise your hand if you've met some of those people. You know, just like it's just not possible. That's right. Raise your hand if you've ever been one of those people. I've been one of those people. You bet. Oh, it looks like we have. Okay, Chikay raised her hand. I think she was just raising her hand to respond to this. Not because there's a question. As you can probably tell. We have 90 minutes with you every week. If you have any questions, comments, questions or requests that I will prioritize that over anything I was planning to say. You are what's important. Okay? So never, never hesitate to break into my flow. Don't worry about that. All right, so what I wanted to do is, I wanted to. I did some notes about learning taking advantage of the negativity. The first thing I want to say is when you run into a negative person, the first thing you do is breathe. Be sure you're not holding your breath. Proper breathing is a reset button for your life. It is. The buy in for the entire Fire dance program is 60 seconds of deep, slow diaphragmatic breathing once every one to three hours. So it's like every three hours. Let's say you're just stopping and you're breathing. Deep, slow, diaphragmatic breathing. Be sure to go to YouTube, look up diaphragmatic breathing. I'll put it in. Let me put it in the background here. What diaphragmatic breathing is so that there's no mistakes. It's belly breathing. Okay? So. Belly out when you inhale, belly in when you exhale. So breathing is important because it is the point where conscious and unconscious minds connect. If you take a negative person and have them use these practices we talk about here in Fire Dance, you will actually begin to See them losing their negativity, you'll see them becoming more positive. Just changing their breathing will do this. So if you do it, when a person is being negative to you, if you ask yourself, let me breathe. Other thing is, notice how they're breathing. They're almost certainly going to be breathing up in their chest, in their shoulders, they're doing fear based breathing. They're not getting enough oxygen, they're getting too much carbon dioxide. And their poor little hindbrains are thinking that they're suffocating. So that's one of the first things. Breathe. The second thing is to ask yourself, look at their general beliefs, values, positive and negative emotional associations. The results in life will be modified for their starting point. Because make no mistake, if you are born into a situation of oppression or abuse, it's going to hurt your baseline. But, but assuming that those other things are roughly equal, the results they get are going to be determined by their beliefs, values, positive and negative emotional anchors. Unless you want the same results they have, you better not be modeling their attitudes or their behaviors. Pay very close that they're eating. If you want that breakfast, look at their recipe. If you don't want that breakfast, find a different recipe. Our results, results are going to be based on our actions. So when you run into negative people, pay attention. How did they become negative and what kind of results are they getting? What do they believe about human beings? Kind of maybe number three, just kind of focusing it. What do they believe about human beings that trigger such negativity? It's almost, almost always a person who has a generally negative attitude about life. We'll have a negative attitude about human beings too. And sometimes that ire is directed at a particular group, at men or at white people or at rich people or whatever. But sometimes it's just sort of general, we suck. Look at this, pay attention to this. Remember that the meaning of life is to be happy, is to be joyful in a spirit abandoned. Sense is to move away from pain, embrace joy and be of service. So people who are on that road have similar beliefs and values. They embrace things like the three gates. Asking yourself, is it true? Is it kind? Is it useful? People who are negative all the time will have different core beliefs, different core patterns. Start paying attention when you meet a negative person. Look at the way they breathe, ask questions about what they believe, get some sense of how they're operating their emotions and then do the opposite. You use them as a warning sign of what not to do. Because they're in fear, they're in anger, and usually I think that it is reasonable to say that all anyone ever wants is to be happy, to be loved and loving. And when you meet a bad person, a person who's behaving in bad ways, and there are some in the news right now, these are people who do not have healthy connections with their hearts. These are people who lost that sense of simple joy that every baby has looking at the eyes of their mother. I think that we're all just trying to get back to that sense of peace that we had in the womb or in the arms of the people who loved us. And remember, everybody who's alive today was loved at one time. If babies who are not loved die, it's called failure to thrive. If they're not loved and cooed and cuddled, they die. Babies have to have more than just the bottle. If you can start looking at people who are negative as people who are afraid, people who are disconnected from love, it will help you to understand. The flip side of that is that if you look at the fear and you address the fear, and if you deliberately, every day connect with love in your own life, you're not going to become like that. So, like, you know, just. I hate to say it, but yeah, using people as a bad example can be very instructive. Another question is, do they consider themselves as negatively as they do others? In other words, is it they believe we are stupid as a species or they are stupid or you are stupid? The first thinking that humanity as a whole is not worth anything, that's just damaged ego. Just, you know, human beings are worse than animals is a fairly consistent and common formulation. But if they consider themselves to be better than other people, they are stupid. That's a swollen ego. And a swollen ego is of course, the flipping side of an inferiority complex. The last thing and most important thing, maybe look at their lives. The meaning of life is found in the ability to escape pain, embrace joy, and give service. Where are they on this continuum? Do they have obvious disadvantages that make negativity and likely outcomes? If not, what happens to them that they have such filters? Do they expect to be world beaters and got disillusioned when they found out the world wasn't just going to kiss their hands? I mean, what is it? If you can look at negative people and have compassion for them and realize that that negativity, that anger, is fear and ask yourself, what are they afraid of? You get to turn every interaction into a chance to learn. You don't take it personally. If they're angry at you. They ask yourself, what are they afraid of? They're angry at the world. What are they afraid of? If they're angry that you suggest that they might be afraid and that happened. Believe me, I have lost friends because of this one. They weren't ready to look at this stuff yet. But it's not about you just love them. You know, they'll either come through it in time or they won't. In neither case, is this your problem. Your problem is to live a life of joy and service. That's, that's, you know, and if you can't live the life of service, move out of pain and begin to embrace joy. And you do that and you radiate that joy to the world. And guess what? You're being of service. There are people who believe that we should not dream of being happy unless the entire world changes. Very politicized people. You know something? Okay, in that case, solve the. Whatever problems you see in the world. Solve the individual version of that problem in your own life. If you are seeing that there's too much poverty, figure out how to make money in your own life. Now you figured that out and you can come up with ideas about how to expand that. If you believe that there's too much obesity, have you solved that in your own life? There's too much. People aren't loving to each other. Do you have a loving relationship? Solve the personal value version of the political problem that you want to face. And you have the position, you're in the position to possibly be a leader who could help others. If you're committed to helping others, that's fine.

There's service.

So first, get out of pain, embrace joy, be of service. We have five minutes. Any more comments, questions or requests about anything today? It's been quite a day today and I'm very proud of you guys. You've asked great questions. You've let us really interact with you. And I can't ask. Jenny o'. Brien. Hey, Jenny.

Hi.

How are you? Yeah, I do do this thing of volunteer or you will be voluntold. And I just decided I wanted to say hi to you. How are you doing today?

Good.

I'm really enjoying all of this. Congratulations, of course, to Sana Reeve. I know she's awfully line now, but.

Yeah, she's getting ready to go back out to the. To the book fair and be famous some more.

So that's definitely.

She's earned every bit of it.

It sounds like it. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit. I know we've Only got a few minutes. About your approach to outlining.

Okay, so the approach to outlining is, first of all, you need to find a way of doing it that works for you and it's going to be different for every person. You know, a stack of 3 by 5 cards is great. You simply take a stack of 3 by 5 cards, write down everything you know about your story. This scene, this scene, this scene, this character, what happened. Just don't worry about the things you don't know, okay? Write down the things you do know because that allows you to have a, a non linear form of outlining because you can shuffle the cards in different orders. You can put them up on a, on a, on a whiteboard. I use post IT notes, I use giant Post IT pads, I use a whiteboard, I use a whiteboard with magnetic index cards, with magnetic dry erase cards. I use three by five cards. I use other things. Every single form of outlining, whether it's Google Docs, using numbers or letters, various forms of brainstorming program like Tony Buzan's mind mapping. What you want to do is take everything you know about your story, get it out of your head and onto paper. Get it out of your head and onto paper. Your ideas will look differently written down than it does when it's sitting in your brain. When it's sitting in your brain, it's hard for you to manipulate the pieces unless you're, you know, Nikola Tesla, you know, it's really, really hard. But the other thing that's beautiful about this is if I gave you a dozen different ways to outline every time you take the same information and put it into a different form, you will see different things about your story every time. So you can take the same information and just say, I think I'm going to create a mind map of this. I think I'm going to put what I know into the form of a couple paragraphs in a Google Doc. I'm just going to create bullet points. Every time you do that, you will learn something new because you're seeing the same thing from different directions. And let me tell you why that is. Your brain has absorbed countless thousands of stories. Countless millions of stories. Because every joke you've ever heard, every comic book, every cartoon, every movie, every episode of a television show, every time anybody has told you what happened at work, every single time, that's a story. Stories have a common structure. We like the hero's journey as something that is a really nice general sense of people want something, if they go after it, it'll Cause some problems. So they're often scared. They have to take a bunch of actions. Think of the full curve of a story as a circle. A short story is often just a few degrees of arc. An outline is a bunch of points along that circle. Now, if you understand geometry, if I give you three points, you can draw the rest of that circle. Two points isn't enough, but three points, you can draw a circle. Four points, and you can draw a sphere. Right? So if you trust your unconscious mind, then if you know a bunch of scattered things about a story, once you start forming them into an outline, there is a place inside you that has an intuitive sense of what the structure of the story is. And some of these things will begin to describe a shape. Now, that's a visualization. They might describe a surface. They might describe a piece of music. I often will look to write until I can start hearing the music in the piece. Your mind will have its own unique way of organizing things. Every time you put it into a different form of outline, you are asking your mind, show me the shape behind the shape. Show me the thing that inspired me. Help me bring this up. It's like the work you do every day is like dragging a block of marble up out of a quarry. Your polishing process is chipping away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. There was an elephant. Whatever it is that you're trying to do, there is something your unconscious is trying to say. There's a shape, there's a sound, there's a feeling, there's something that inspired you, and you're only getting glimpses of it. Each of those glimpses is one of the data points that you know. If what I have said to you makes sense, you'll be able to take this and run with it. Take any form of organization. Start with 3 by 5 cards. Write down everything that you know. Then you put those 3 by 5 cards up in some order on a cork board. Or you carry them around in your pocket. In odd moments, you sort back through them. What if it happened in this order? What if it happened in this order? Whatever form of storytelling, of story structure that you like, Hero's journey, beginning, middle and end. There's somebody who wants something, and something stands in their way. And their efforts are a series of revelatory, increasing failures leading to a precipitating event making necessary a solution followed by a reward. Whatever it is that you do. And I like having a bunch of different ways of looking at story because each structure tells me something different. Experiment. Have fun in Other words, words. You already know enough to do all of this stuff. Every approach, any approach you take could work. Make sure that what you're trying to create is small enough to fit within what you understand about story. Like we said, don't try to do a novel if you've never published a short story. The only way you'll be able to do that is if you're almost an intuitive genius. What you want is to set it up so that even if you're just moderately talented, you can still do it. You can earn a black belt. If you just go to class four days a week, you'll get the hell beat out of you, but eventually you'll have that black belt and you'll understand how to use your body, your mind, in a way that maximizes you. You don't have to be a genius to publish stories or books. I'm sorry, I've known too many authors, and they ain't geniuses. Most of them. Most of them. You probably are just as smart as most of the writers that you have admired. Not. Maybe not the best of the best of the best. I know Shakespeare, but I can study Shakespeare and learn things. I can extract things. So does that help?

That helps.

I have a problem with. I've tried to outline and I kill the story.

What do you mean, you kill the story?

It's when I'm writing every day and I'm working on it and I trust it. There's a point where I've got all of it going, and then at some point, usually my technology fails me. I've only got something to write, and then I write a short outline and I can figure out what's missing. If I can do that with the smaller structures, I'm okay when I try to plot out. And maybe my problem is I've tried to plot out larger pieces or try to outline larger pieces. In my day jobs, outlining is easy for me, and that's how I solve arguments.

So let me ask you a question.

Have you published poetry? And then I have. So.

So that. That's. That's your problem. Assume that your problem is you're getting ahead of yourself.

Okay?

You're simply trying to do a project that is too large. You can't juggle five oranges, but you could juggle three scarves until that gets boring. And then you juggle five. Or you juggle three oranges. Always cut yourself a break. Assume you are smart enough to do this. You think I don't know how to do this yet? The yet will save your Heart. I don't know how to do this yet is very different from I can't do this, which is what most people do. They get frustrated. Take an outlining form that you have enjoyed and write several short stories. When you have published five, six, ten short stories, now you try the next thing. You move the basic skill set to unconscious competence. Any art requires that the basics of that art be integrated at the level of unconscious competence before you can really create art. You, you can't play jazz as long as you're looking at your fingers on the keys. Okay. You can't enjoy driving as long as you're panicking about the gears and this and that. And you don't take a copy of the Kama Sutra to bed with you. It's making love. Creating art, enjoying a drive demands that the basic skills be automatic. So you're simply doing what you feel. Do that, and you're letting loose the engines of your creativity. Does that make sense?

It does. I'll try. It does.

Great. I'd love to see you back here again. You're absolutely welcome to be here. We love talking about these things because the essence of being masterful in any arena of life is the essence of. Of being masterful in every arena. Once you have achieved mastery anywhere in your life, you can take those same lessons and apply it elsewhere. It doesn't seem that way. People think, well, this skill has nothing to do with this skill. They simply haven't looked deeply enough. If you are an adult human being, you already know how. You already have mastery. All I would need to do is to identify the arenas of mastery in your life, show you how these principles apply there, show you how to shift to this new arena, and bingo, you've got it. And that's kind of what we love teaching is, you know, how to demystify the process of mastery. Okay. All right. So once again, if you writers, especially www.lifewriting God, what is it? Lifewritingpremium.com I get into one floor to liferatingpremium.com or just come here. Sign up stevenbarnslist.com tananarive list.com Tell your friends. Come. We're here every Saturday. We will answer any questions that you have. We really just want you to succeed. So I am unpinning everybody, and I would like you all to unmute yourselves and say goodbye. We have had a great time today.

Thank you, everybody.

Thank you.

Have a wonderful weekend. We love you guys. We really do. We hope you can feel how much we do like in this, as we always do. The Sanskrit expression that says that the divinity within me salutes and acknowledges the divinity within each and every one of you. Namaste.

Have a see everybody next week.

Kind to yourselves, be joyful.

End of service.

Bye bye, folks.

Bye bye, everybody.