Creating great writing habits

Hello and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is the show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grohl. I am a brand new fiction writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. And joining me soon is Sean Coyne, the creator of Storygrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with 25 plus years experience. And he's helping me figure out how to tell a story that works. In this episode, we talk about writing habits, we talk about how writers get their writing done when they get it done in the day. And Sean even shares a couple behind the scenes stories of writers that he has worked with that were really interesting. We also just dive in a little bit into what a writer's life looks like and my own fear of creating. So it's a great episode. I think you're really going to love it. Let's dive in and get started. So, Sean, I'm finally going to be able to commit the time to writing that I really want to. I just finished up a big project at work and my promise to myself was after that I was going to set aside a certain amount of time to write every day or work on my book every day, I guess I should say. And so I started that yesterday. So I'm two days in. But I've been thinking a lot about writing habits and how people get their writing done and how people get their books done. And I would love to get your kind of behind the scenes input on how writers really work. Because you hear people like Stephen King that say, write a thousand words every day. And he probably does write every day. But then like, I hear about these authors that have a year and a half book contract and basically they start writing their book three weeks before it's due. I had a client one time, he told me, he's like, Tim, you know, there's the deadline that the publisher gives you, but that's not the real deadline. The there's actually a secret deadline that they don't want you to know about. He's like, really? That's not the deadline either. And he ended up finishing his book like three and a half months before it was published. And his original deadline was supposed to be like, you know, nine months or ten months or something. So I was curious, like, what have you seen out there as far as like good writing habits or bad writing habits or how do authors really work on their books?

Well, this is a really great question because everyone is different. But I will tell you what I found in my career and all the hundreds of writers I've worked with is that there's sort of. And I would put myself in one of these categories. There's sort of two categories of writer. There's the writer who has to physically do it every day or they become impossible to live with.

It's sort of their reason for being on the planet. And Steve Pressfield's kind of like this guy. And Steve doesn't have any word count that he's shooting for. What Steve does is that. And I know this because I've worked with him for 20 years and we, we talk every week, if not more. And basically what he does is he starts every day with a single intent. He doesn't say, oh, I've got to get 500 words done or I'm a bad boy, or he sits down and he has a single intent. So what that intent would be could be anything from. My intention today is to go through my outline for my next project and to really nail down and not allow myself to accept mediocre or half assed ideas for a particular major turning point in the story. That could be one of his intents. Usually his intents are scene based or multiple scene based. And when I say that is, and I talk about this a lot, and I couldn't give people this advice enough. I think the way to really laser focus on your work without getting too out of your head is to work on scenes. And so when Steve does something, be it nonfiction or fiction, he's looking at one particular component of a larger whole for that day. Now he may be stumped and after five hours of work, he just can't. He's out of gas. He sort of goes on the four hour principle, which I think is a very good one, and I've discovered it myself in my own writing, is that you really sort of lose gas after four hours. And anything you do after that is, is almost like wearing a hair shirt or you know, self flagellation. Because I think there's a limit of where you can let your mind and living within your brain how long you can sustain that. So that's the one category of writer which is sort of like the Steve Pressfield, I would say Stephen King, who writes every single day, even on Christmas. These are people who, they need to actively be writing or they don't feel, they feel wrong, they're physically unhappy. And then there are the second category of writer, which are sort of the grinders. Not that Stephen King and Stephen Pressfield don't grind. And when I Say grind. I mean, doing work that it doesn't feel all that fun, but you insist on continuing and pressing through until you finish a particular goal or accomplishment. So the grinders are people like me who will say to myself, I have to finish this thousand word post, and it can't be just okay. It has to be very clear. And I'm not going to quit. I give myself, you know, Monday I can write the rough draft, Tuesday I can edit the rough draft, Thursday I have to do my third edit. And then I give myself very specific goals and then I can go. And I've done this a lot recently. I can go weeks without writing. And what I find is that the longer away I am from it, the more difficult it is to get back into it. So I think the secret that the real professionals like Stephen King and Stephen Pressfield understand is that use it or lose it. You know, if you are in the trenches every day, maybe it's not for four hours every day, maybe it's an hour. But if you're in there every day, you get into such a rhythm that it's like anything else. If you're shooting free throws at a basketball court, the more you do it, if you do it every day, you get a little bit better every day. You're never going to shoot 100%, but you're going to go from 50% to 60% to 65, and maybe you'll get in the, you know, upper 80s after a period of five years, maybe in the 90%. But that's what those kind of writers do is that they say to themselves, I am a writer. I think Jeff Goins talks about this too. I'm a writer, so I'm going to behave like one. And my job is to sit down and write for X number of hours a day with a particular intention. A lot of people, I'm just going to go on a sidetrack here@sports1. You know, I had a football coach when I was younger who was a really great coach. He never yelled, he never raised his voice, and he would say all the time, practice. You always have to have an intention in your practice, because when you. You play as you practice. So if you have an intention when you're writing, or if you have an intention when you're going to practice, say a sand shot. If you're a golfer, you need to say to yourself, I'm going to hit 25 straight balls from 50 yards out within three feet of the cup. I'm not going to be able to have lunch until I Do that. I'm not going to have lunch. And you make little games like this for yourself and you can do the same thing for yourself as a writer. I'm going to come up with at least 10 different turning points of this one scene before I can have my marshmallow. You know.

That'S, that's kind of, that's the advice that I would give. It's, it's, this isn't earth shattering advice. It's really about discipline and intention and just putting your butt in the chair and doing the work and not giving yourself any excuses.

Yeah, I found that what has worked for me in the past is basically scheduling time that is to work on whatever I currently need to work on. So I'm a very. Nothing makes me happier than a fresh to do list that I can check things off of. It's kind of strange. So I find when I approach writing like that, you know, today I need to check this off of my list. So for instance, the last two days what I've done is finish up the Harry Potter story grid and I've just begun to outline some of my own scenes like we talked about last week and started going through some of that stuff. But it's more for me about like okay, I've, you know, I drop my kids off at a little bit before eight. I can be at the coffee shop by eight o' clock and I'm going to probably stay there till at least 9:30 and 10 if I can. So I have this like dedicated hour and a half to two hours that, that may be the only thing I do. And then all as long as I'm there I just start, keep plotting, you know, like, like whatever, wherever I left off yesterday, I just pick back up and move the ball a little bit further down the field. But I find I don't write if I don't have a project. So I'm listening, I'm listening to the book Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. Have you heard of this book? Yes, and I'm just a huge fan of hers. Anyway, I loved Eat Pray Love. I love her TED Talk about creativity. And I like, she's very much on the kind of woo woo, magical side of creativity. So it's really fun to kind of hear that take on it. But she talked about in her 20s of how she just showed up and wrote every day no matter what. And I'm just like, I just don't, I don't do anything, I don't shower every day, you know, like, you know, so the idea that I would do something every single day. I find, like I'll go through dry periods and then I get projects, and those are the project. And then I get really methodical and we'll work on those every day because I have a project, but as soon as that project's done, I have to take a break. Like, I feel strung out if I try to write every day.

Yeah, I absolutely agree with you on that. And I can relate to that. And understanding what kind of bear you are is really important. And you and I both have families that we have to take care of. And we can't really.

Shut down the world in the way that other writers can. In that, I'm not making. It sounds like I'm making a big fat excuse, and I guess maybe to some degree I am. But there is a level of. There's this concept that I've been playing with in my head for a long time, and it's this idea of the work life balance. What segment of your life are you going to dedicate to your life's work? Meaning and for writers and for creative people, that's basically living in your head. And anybody who knows a writer knows what I'm talking about when I say that and that you can be out to dinner with somebody and, and they're living in their head. You, you're having a conversation with them and you know, they're, they're not fully present. Yeah, they're, they're sort of nodding along and they're perfectly genial and nice, but, you know, they're thinking about something that you just can't understand what they're, what they're doing. But what they're doing is they're living in their head. They're thinking about. They're, they're compiling that to do list in their head. They're thinking about their intention for their next day's work of writing or, you know, at the artist studio or whatever. And they're, they're constantly trying to bring form to a process that is often sporadic and unreliable and scary. And so the, the thing that a lot of creative people do is they, they live in their mind a lot, creating characters or creating ideas or just sort of going back and forth about, oh, boy, that wall looks interesting. I wonder what kind of wall, what kind of plaster they use for that. So a writer who lives in their head, they can't fully be present with their wife and children sometimes. So oftentimes, and that's not good. You need to sort of put that on hold sometimes to actually be engaged with your with your daughter while she's practicing the violin and say, no honey, that was a quarter note and that should have been an eighth note. You can't be constantly in your own world thinking about your own shit.

Yeah, I think this goes because I wanted to talk about this too. And this comes into that is there, there's a lot of writers that have actual like non writing full time jobs and I'm sure you've worked with a lot of authors that, you know, they're just kind of getting their book going. What have you seen? Is it just, you know, for me it was, you know, because up till last year I had a consultant practice that took up, you know, more than a full time job. And so when it was time for me to write I would just, I'd get up at 4:30 in the morning and be writing by 5 and then, you know, done by, you know, 6 to 6:30 when my kids get up and then my day starts. Is that like just what you got to do?

Yeah, that's, that's the way I work too. When I have a project that I have to, to get done. That's how I wrote the story grid. I wrote another book with a wonderful writer named Chad Millman about the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Dallas Cowboys and that's the way I got that done too. So I think there's a lot to be said for that self discipline of, you know, even just getting the quiet for the 4 to 5:30. And the great thing about writing in the morning, it's like working out in the morning, you know, once you get it done, it's, it's over and it's out of your head.

And yeah, I feel like no matter how what I've done for the day, my creativity ends at 1 or 2 o'. Clock. Even if I haven't done anything creative, like if I try to sit down and do anything, I'm just like, oh, you know, because that's actually I did this last spring for about four months and then we moved and my schedule got all out of whack and then I just switch my schedule back around where I have basically three and a half hours set aside for creative stuff. And then I go work out and then at 11:30 and then I do like businessy stuff in the afternoon and I find that's a really nice break where, you know, if I feel like I need to check my email or feel like I got something to do, it's like no, no, I'll do that this afternoon. I have my creative time like Something set aside and it's the first thing I do. Otherwise it just, there's no way it'll get done. Like if I like check my email, my day is over.

So yeah, it's, it's interesting. It's also interesting because I was talking to Joe Conrath. Do you know him?

Oh, I know of him. I haven't met him, but yeah, he's, he's terrific. He writes his website and he's one of the, the first guys to talk about self publishing in a way that is self empowering, I think.

Yeah, yeah. So his stuff is great. And I was talking to him last year and he was talking about how his life. Because I think I always had this picture of like becoming a full time writer is like this beautiful, glorious. I roll out of bed at 9 o' clock with the sun streaming through my big bay windows and I like make my, you know, French print press coffee and I sit down at somewhere around 10 o' clock and my writing flows until 4 in the afternoon. And then, you know, I kiss my children as they come in from school. You know, it's like this kind of magical thing and he's like, I have more. He gets less writing done now that he's successful. And yeah, I was listening to last year, or was it. Yeah, last year Patrick Rothfuss did a short run podcast with Max some something or other Max Timke, something like that. He, Max started, created, was one of the creators of the Cards Against Humanity game. But Patrick Rothfuss is a very successful fantasy writer, right. And he's like, he's like all I do is answer email. That's his like full time job now is answering email and he has to fight for his writing time way more than when he was like this. Nobody, you know. And I just think it's funny as I've worked with so many different authors as well and just seen like as they become more successful, they end up fighting harder for their writing time than when nobody knew who they were.

Well, that's true. And it's also the other thing that you always have to keep in mind is, and this is kind of like another category of writer is the writer who's writing for. I wouldn't say the wrong reason, but they're writing for a result.

So oftentimes you'll, especially when you're a book agent or a book editor, you'll run into people who look at writing as a means to an end. So they just want to get that book done and they call it their calling card. Oh I wrote this book, therefore I'm legitimate. And so those kind of writers often are the kind of people who will just do everything in their power to not invest themselves too emotionally in the actual writing of the book. And then maybe, you know, they'll do a follow up book later if that can get them say, a speaking gig somewhere or whatever. And I guess that's perfectly valid. But I don't think that those are really the kind of writers we're talking about. Especially.

Anybody who has any interest in Story grid is somebody who really wants to dive deep into the craft of storytelling. And so as anything, if you're a carpenter or a bricklayer, the more you do it and the more you practice it, the better you're going to get and you're not thinking about that perfect moment that everything's going to coalesce and come together for you and you'll have this magical moment like you described, where the light shines through the window and you have your perfect children. And, and that's what's so great about Stephen King's book Misery is that the lead writer, the writer in the story is fascinated with sort of becoming that, that big literary figure. He's, he's sort of like Stephen King in essence. The lead character of Misery is a writer who writes these very popular sort of quasi romances about a lead character named Misery. And he wants to throw that off and write a real book. Right. And so he has this, this great thing that he does when he finishes a book is he has one cigarette, one glass of champagne and then, you know, that's his celebratory moment. And then of course all hell breaks loose when his number one fan finds him, you know, stranded on a road. But I think writing habits are, are just really important. And you can be the kind of person like we are, which is, goes is project based where you say to yourself, I want to complete this project by X date. And I always, I always recommend that you give yourself a deadline. And that's why publishers give writers deadlines because it helps them from getting into this nebulous, nitpicky world where you, nothing is ever good enough and you never finish anything. It's like people who spend 15 years writing a novel, it's just, they've spent too much time.

Yeah, I don't, I don't really. Again, I don't spend that much time on anything. No, you got, I'm also 34, so I haven't had 15 years to do anything. But yeah, I, I was talking with a writer Last week. And she was asking my advice because she's now, like, over two years into a novel. And I'm like, you gotta call it. Yeah, you gotta. You gotta just call it. She's like, well, I've tried to put deadlines. Oh, this is interesting. So she's like, well, I tried to put deadlines on myself, but I never keep them. And there was this. This is kind of a tangent, but people might find this interesting. So five or six years ago, I had done the whole thing where, like, I got, like, graduated from college, got super sedentary, and gained, like, a bunch of weight. And so I went on this really strict diet for a year, and I ended up losing £50. But the way that I kept to it was I basically told everybody in my life that I was going on this strict diet. I put it online, I put it out into the world. I told all my friends. I basically. And I lived in a small town at the time, so pretty much every time I went out, I saw people I knew. And I basically put myself in a situation where I would be so ashamed if I didn't like people. I would just be so ashamed that I would stick to the diet. And I did. And I heard this story on a podcast called Radiolab where these two friends, and they both were smokers, and they both were big into civil rights. And so, anyway, one friend was able to quit smoking, but one just couldn't. Couldn't quit smoking. Couldn't quit smoking. Years and years go by, and finally she wrote a check to the Ku Klux Klan, gave it to her friend, and said, if you ever see me smoke a cigarette again, put this check in the mail. And she never smoked again.

And so what I encourage the writer to do was put something that was so excruciating that if she didn't. If her book was not on sale at AM on Amazon by this day, that something so excruciating would happen that she would do it. You know, this kind of like, well, you know, I want to finish my book by June 1st. Like, that will never happen. But if I don't know, all the money in your savings account gets sent to the Ku Klux Klan because you didn't get your book done. I bet you'll get your book done and out into the world.

That's. That's true. That's true.

Not that every writer should do that, but I found, like, I've done that for two or three things in my life where I'm like, okay, I have to reach this goal. And So I put something out there that is just so. Either shameful or painful. I'll just do it so I don't have to experience that shame or pain.

Well, that's certainly a great strategy. The other thing to think about is a lot of people get really, really bogged down in first novelitis. And what I mean by that is that they just can't let that first novel go. They're gonna polish that thing until it's perfect. And this is usually the way I'll judge whether or not a writer is really serious is that sometimes somebody will send me something that shows great promise. The writing and the ability to craft scene is quite good, but the story is a mess, right. And there's. There's just no way to make it work that will be reasonable. And so what I'll usually suggest to them is, okay, you definitely have the ability to, you know, write a really strong novel, but this one is not it. So here's my suggestion. Put it in a drawer and start a new book. And usually what happens is that the people who are capable of saying, you know what, you're right, that's what I'm going to do. Can you give me any suggestions about what a good genre would be for me to explore? And then we can start having conversations about what they're interested in, what could be fun for them, what could be an interesting idea. And the reason I think, that people want to hold on to their first novels, Tim, and anything in general, is that they're too attached emotionally. Their self is so personally involved in the work that it. It becomes a reflection of themselves in a bad way. It's almost as if they're narcissistically attached to this thing that they just can't let go of. And, you know, yeah, go ahead.

I think the other side of that is also because I've seen this in myself when I've tried to do it. And I want to talk about how I've been feeling lately too. I think it would be helpful. But there's also this. You have this picture of what your life will be like when you've reached X and. Or when you finally put that book out into the world. Like, my life will now look like this. And so putting that book out into the world is when. Oh, right at that point you have this dream that you don't actually. You kind of understand, you don't think you'll ever reach, or you kind of think like, oh, it'd be nice if I got there one day, or whatever, whatever. And Putting that book out into the world is actually that turning point where you actually have to step into that new world. I am now a published writer, so maybe it's not for me, it's not been so much putting out the work. It's the fact that I now have to live with what comes after, good or bad. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Let me just interrupt for a second and say this about what you just said. What you just described is in the hero's journey, it's called the refusal of the call. This is the, this is the time where the protagonist refuses to leave the ordinary world to set off in an adventure in an extraordinary world. And it's absolutely. This is why the hero's journey is such a large part of our culture and the collective unconscious is that each one of us has these moments in our lives that if we step back away from ourselves for two seconds, we can see what exactly we're doing. So the fact that somebody's afraid of becoming a published novelist because that will change the way they view the world, that's perfectly reasonable. It's fine. But you've got to do it. You just have to do it anyway because it's never what you think it's going to be. It's not as good and it's not as bad.

Yeah.

And you know, you wrote about this a while ago about just this stupidity of the bestseller list stuff.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just Wall Street Journal bestseller, New York Times bestseller, whatever it is. And you know the book I was talking about earlier, about the Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers, I wrote that with Chad Millman, and it hit the Wall Street Journal bestseller list the first week it went on sale. And that was probably in the back of my mind for 30 years of my life. Like, someday I'll be a big best selling writer. And you know what? It was absolutely meaningless.

Yeah, it's so funny because, like, writers will say that. It's like. Because I've actually been like, you know, oh, what was that like the first time you walked into Barnes and Noble and saw a copy of your book? They're like, I walked into Barnes and Noble, I saw a copy of the book and I thought, cool. And then my life was exactly the same.

No, what happens is you go in there, you say, nobody has bought my book. It's in the full stack.

Why are all of them still here?

So you just switch your anxiety from one sphere to another, and it's still the same anxiety. It's just changed. You're in a different world, but you have the same anxiety. So you have to keep. You have to keep. Steve Pressfield and I were talking about this the other day. Is that when. And a lot of people always ask me this question is like, how do you choose the next project? You know, and the thing that you have to do is the thing that scares you most. The thing that you don't really want to do because it's terrifying. That's the thing that you should really throw down on all the other projects that seem kind of safe, like, oh, I'll do that thing and I'll do that little book and it'll be okay, and it'll be easy to write. And those are the ones that you should. You should say, you know, I could probably do that another time. I need to find the thing that is going to terrify me because that will push you into getting better, that will push you into leaving your ordinary world into an extraordinary world. So to think of your own life in terms of the hero's journey is not a bad idea because what it does is it demystifies your own bullshit.

That's all these.

Yeah, it's all this stuff that we worry about constantly, like, oh, if I do that, then Jim Smith down at the plan is gonna think I'm a dork. You know what? He doesn't care. Nobody cares about you. Really. You need to demystify your own inner anxiety because it's just holding you back. So if you can step back and look at your life and say, oh, my inability to take on that new client is just like Achilles refusing to go fight the Trojan war.

Then you can kind of laugh about it and say, oh, well, of course I can take on the client. What's the worst that's going to happen? He's going to be a pain in the ass and I'll have to fire him in three months. So what?

Yeah, you know, it's been interesting because as we've gone through this podcast, you know, I've been writing a lot of one off scenes and I've been trying to learn more about the story grid and I've read a lot about here. I've like done all this stuff besides. Right.

And so that's why, like, I made like I had this big project. I'm basically like only really busy in my work about two months a year. And that was leading up until this last week. And so I promised myself, like, it would become my main job would be writing and everything else comes after.

And that's a terrifying decision.

Right. And so. Well, and it was funny because the first day, of course, all of a sudden, all this stuff came up, and I'm like, oh, well, I should probably do these other things. I'm like, no, no, no. I made the promise. And if this is the first day, I can't, like, not do it on the first day. But it was. My wife was like. Candice was like. She said, you know, are you nervous or whatever? I'm like, no, no, I feel good. And then I actually got to where I was going to start, and when I got out of the car, you know, it felt like the first day at a new job. Like, I was fidgety and. And I was nervous. And I'm like, I hope all my co workers like me. I don't know. I don't have, you know, like, I just had all those jitters and, you know, I sat down and got what I wanted to get done that day.

And, well, that's why the intention is so important for your day, because once you start having those feelings, you can step back and say, oh, wait a minute, what am I doing again? Oh, my intention is I have to write that obligatory scene that. That I promised myself for act two. So that's what I'm going to write today. Or I'm going to come up with a really great final climax for my entire story. You know, like we talked about a couple of weeks ago, is a lot of times when you're just setting off on a new project, a novel or even a big idea nonfiction work, what you want to do is start at the end, right? So what do you want to leave people with? What feeling do you want them to have after they finished your book? What exhilaration do you want them to have? How could you craft that final climactic moment in a way that will just drop them to their knees in sobbing? So to think of it in that terms, and if you have that intention on your first day of going in to write, who knows if you're gonna crack it or not? But you're gonna. You're gonna start plumbing the depths of your head with a very, very strong intention. You're gonna say to yourself, well, what are my favorite novels? How did they end? How did One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest? And, oh, my gosh, that's right. Oh, that was horrifying, but also so sad and so beautiful at the same time. Maybe there's something I could use. And we talked about this a couple of weeks ago with the Harry Potter stuff. What are the things that really struck you as A reader or a viewer that just grabbed you by the guts and ripped you so hard that you just will never forget them. Because chances are, those moments really affected other people, too. So in those early days of. Of your first intentions of. Of your new projects, think about what's the big thing you want people to walk away with? What's the big climactic moment? Or what's the theme of the thing that you want to talk about? Because that way, all that other baloney that you're worried about whether or not you're going to get your thousand words done or if anybody's going to respect you now that you're not doing what everybody else is doing, whether or not you're not doing the right thing for your family, because you're taking this two hours away from work, you can go on and on, and that stuff just flutters through everybody's mind all the time. You're not alone. Just get a really strong intention. And again, we were talking about deadlines. What. I think a phrase that I like to use a lot is plan the work and then work the plan. You know, plan all of your intentions over a period of, say, six months, you know, from first idea to the end of your first draft. And also give yourself permission to write lousy stuff, because you will. Everybody does.

Not me.

No, I. You know, it's been interesting. Yeah. With that, you know what. What I've always said or what is, there's nothing that will kill productivity like ambiguity. So sitting down and not knowing what you're supposed to be doing is the worst or probably even worse is sitting down with the to do of writing a book.

Right.

There's just, you know, you don't know where to start. And so I try to set it up where. How I finish every day is knowing where I'm going to start the next day.

Right.

Just so I can immediately sit down and start working. Because I found if I sit down and have to think about what I'm supposed to be working on, I get sidetracked. And all of a sudden I feel like I need to research a little bit more on Wikipedia. So, yeah, it's. But it was like. It's interesting now that I am, like, setting the time aside and I'm going to actually crack down and do this. And honestly, doing this podcast has helped because I'm like, at some point they're gonna figure out I'm not actually writing all that much, and so I should probably start writing, and then I'll have stuff to ask Sean about on the Next podcast episode. So what have you though? I was curious though. Do you? I now I just kind of want to do a reality TV thing here where I'm just curious, like, are there any horror stories you could share about writers, like not getting their work done or like getting stuck and it taking eight months to like break through or like I, you know, again, I heard about that writer that, you know, they had like their 10 months to get the book done or whatever and they started three weeks before it was due and just like finished it and turned it in. Like. I'm just curious, what are those kind of things that you've run into?

Well, I'll give you a very cryptic story that may or may not be true.

You decide.

So years ago I was an editor at a major publishing house and it was my job to bring in big best selling books. Books that would be able to go out at a level of at least 100,000 copies shipped in the first. And that's a lot of copies. Even though it doesn't sound like a lot when we think about movies, 100,000 copies equates to about $1.2 million of revenue right out the door. So because I was doing these big books, I only had to do between six and eight books a year. But when you have that much volume invested in each one, if a book gets behind schedule and you are not delivering one of the big titles on time, it can really screw up the entire publishing house because they're projecting their revenue based upon these books that have to be published at a certain time. So your friends saying that there's the deadline and then there's the deadline, and then there's the deadline and then there's the real deadline. That's absolutely true.

Because what, what publishers have learned over the years is that writers are tremendously unreliable and they always miss their deadlines, or a lot of them miss their deadlines. So anyway, here's the situation. I had a book by a big, big, big writer and he was late and it was such a problem because the fiscal year ended on June 30, as I recall, and his book was scheduled to be our huge summer blockbuster release.

So what happened was he turned in a manuscript that was really in. It was hard to even call it a manuscript.

And we were about four weeks out from having to have the book to the printer, which means it had already been. Yeah, it had to be copy edited, it had to be proofread, it had to be designed, it had to be all that stuff. So like three or four levels of Six Sigma evaluation before it actually went to the printer. So my publisher didn't say to me specifically, rewrite the book, but when you're under a lot of pressure. So basically what I did is I got on a plane and I went to the writer's house and we sat down and we wrote the entire book in a period of 10 days.

Oh, my gosh.

And, you know, a lot. A lot of my writing is in that book to this day. And we made the deadline and everything worked out. But I wish I could say that didn't happen very often, but that happened at least four or five times in my career. And it eventually got to the point where I said to myself, now a lot of editors would not do what I did. And I'm not trying to pat myself on the back. I think it was a tremendous active hubris for me to do that. But what it did say to me and what I did realize is that if I'm rewriting other people's books, I should at least go out and write one of my own. And that was one of the reasons why I decided to leave corporate publishing and to be more of an independent writer agent, editor, whatever the hell it is that I call myself, because you cannot rescue people from their choices. And obviously what happened was the book did okay, and he just rolled it over into the next project. And it was the same thing that happened after I left the company on his next book. And, you know, the editor who took my job just didn't rewrite this guy's book for him, and now the guy doesn't have a career and he blew up his life, and that was his own choice. You know, I was sort of like the codependent, you know, to the alcoholic, to the writer.

I could save you.

Yeah. And, you know, there's a psychological problem with doing that kind of thing over and over again, which I realized that, you know, my hero's journey at that point was it was far easier for me to be the guy behind the guy that nobody knows without taking any of the credit or any of the criticism. I mean, I was a coward for not wanting, you know, to share in the credit or the criticism. So, you know, we started the program talking about writers habits. And I think one of the first things you have to do as a writer is to accept the good and the bad and make sure it's all on yourself. It's all your work. And yes, be inspired by the masters. Use their structures to inspire you to come up with innovations to particular genres. Don't be afraid of being inspired by One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and coming up with a similar dramatic climax to your story. But, you know, it's important to really own just every word that you write. So these people who avoid deadlines and the writers who are afraid of, you know, being criticized or not making the bestseller list or whatever, they've got things. They've got shit they've got to work out on themselves for themselves, psychologically.

Yeah, yeah, don't.

Don't let your own little peccadillo's stop you from doing the work that you should be doing. Because nobody becomes a writer for fun. They don't. They're compelled to do it.

Yeah, I always say there's a whole lot other less masochistic ways to make money than writing. But, yeah, I've been really enjoying, like I mentioned a few minutes ago, that big Magic book, which I highly recommend. I'm actually going to have my kids listen to it. I'm going to do that mainly because I have always, you know, I don't know whether I got this from my parents or just being raised in America or whatever, but that creativity is like, oh, well, that's cute. And, you know, if you got nothing else to do with your time, sure, go after something like that. And so it's even been hard for me to step into the like to say out loud I want to write fiction because it feels, like, wholly unproductive and useless, you know, in a lot of ways. And she talks about how you have to both, you have to hold two competing thoughts in your head at all times. One is, this is the most important work I can be doing. And this is also completely useless because that is the only way to save yourself from either going off the deep end because you feel like every word is the end of your life or not taking it seriously. And, you know, she says it much more beautifully than I do. But it's been hard for me to one even admit, because what set me on this whole path back last summer that started this podcast ended up, you know, having me talk to you and start this podcast was a friend of mine. I was talking to him about what I wanted to work on next, and he was finally like, you want to write fiction? I'm like, well, yeah. But he's like, well, why don't you just do it? And I'm like, well, I don't know that I can be successful at that. So it's been a big kind of strain for me to actually and even like, setting this down Time aside has been like, my wife was finally like, look, your business has done well. You don't have to do anything productive for the next three to six months. She's like, right, like, just do it. And I'm like, really? Like at 8 o' clock in the morning when everybody else is going to work, I'm gonna actually sit down and like come up with this superhero novel. And she's like, yeah, yeah. You know, it's still, you know, even as I say it out loud, I'm just like, I get embarrassed, honestly, is the only words to use is like, is this really, you know, I feel like people are gonna look at me and be like, oh, that's how you use your time.

Well, I don't think embarrassed is quite the right word. And I think everybody goes through the same thing. Who creates, who decides to. Essentially what an artist does is that he pulls something out of his brain and he gives it life on earth. So the things that come, the novels and the stories and the architecture and sculptures, these all come from somebody's brain. And to talk about it is impossible until you've actually done it. So this is one of the things that takes a lot of courage and is to talk about the process as you are in the midst of creating something. And I'll tell you, 99.9% of writers and sculptors and artists, the last thing they want to talk about is the process. They'll talk about craft, but they don't really want to talk about the process of combining craft with that very ephemeral and mystical element of what's going on inside our heads and our brains. Are we self contained units that aren't attached to any other form of consciousness? And where are we getting these ideas? You know, it's a frightening concept and it's one that a lot of people just say, I don't want to deal with that. I just want to do what I do and hope for the best. So the fact is that you are exploring art on two different levels. The one level is craft, which means structuring and figuring out the concepts of story and the form of story. And that's an extraordinarily important thing to understand. But you're also now, what you're now coming up against is that stuff that Steve Pressfield writes about in the War of Art, what Elizabeth Gilbert writes about in Big Magic and what she talks about and what Brene Brown talks about. And it's all about having that courage to look like an idiot. And there's nothing wrong. Nobody really does Think you're an idiot, Tim. And when they do say things like. Or they give you that look like, oh, boy, you're gonna. Tim's gonna write a novel. What an idiot. There's no way he's gonna do that. What they are actually voicing is complete awe of you. Because they would never consider doing that. It takes a lot of courage to come out and say, I'm going to explore this and I'm going to do my best and I'm going to do everything I can to learn it, but I don't know that I'm going to be able to write a great thing. I don't know that I'm going to be successful, but I'm going to do it anyway. And that is what artists do every single day of their lives. When they go to sit down, they have an intention at work. They don't know if they're going to be successful. They don't know if they're going to. Their intention is going to be realized every single day, and 90 times out of a hundred, it usually isn't. And that's what makes the work so hard and what it makes it so wonderful when it works. Because why.

Why do people do this? Like, I just.

Because it's the most important thing that we do to communicate with ourselves. Think about a novel that was written 150. Think about reading Moby Dick, that book. You know, there's a lot of difficult language in that book. You read that book today. It's still great. It's still amazing. Read Pride and Prejudice. It's like an amazing story. It's incredible writing. Those people are immortal because they've created works of art that travel through centuries in time. Now, whether or not you or I will ever be able to do that is beside the point. But trying is important because you are put on earth to do something. And something inside of you is saying that you're supposed to write fiction. And you think you're kind of silly for wanting to do that. You're not silly at all. Because fiction is really important. Stories are so important. I write about it all the time. This is the way stories are what we use to help us learn behavior. We're inspired by stories. We. We get warned off from behavior, bad behaviors from stories. So storytelling and writing and art are what makes us human. They're the most important things that we do. And art can be defined anything from, you know, designing the iPhone to a great short story or Nathaniel Hawthorne's work. We're starting that guy's 200 years dead, we're still talking about. I mean, that's a pretty cool idea. And he would probably be the first one to say, you know, I really got lucky. I had no idea when I wrote the Scarlet Letter that anybody would care about it in 2015. But it's still being taught in every, you know, elementary and junior high school across the country.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast. If you didn't know already, every Tuesday we post the transcript to the previous alert episode of the podcast@storygrid.com so if there's a portion of the show you want to go back and reference, but you don't want to listen to the whole thing, you can get the transcript right there@storygrid.com it's posted every Tuesday after the episode. From there, make sure you sign up for the email newsletter. That's where Sean sends out all his latest stuff. And if you haven't already, make sure you pick up a copy of the book Story Grid. As always, thank you for your comments and feedback. If you want to reach out to us, you can do that on Twitter torygrid. You can ask questions, leave comments, let us know what you think of the show. Make sure you tell a friend about Storygrid. The only reason we do this is to help writers. As you've noticed, there's no advertising. We don't make money off of this. It's something Sean and I just enjoy doing to give back to the writing community and help you become a better writer. So any help you can give us to spread the word to other writers, your writing group, your Facebook group, whatever it is, it really means a lot to us. It helps us keep going and creating more episodes. So thanks as always for listening and we will see you next week.