How to Tell a Great Story (The Robert Greene Blueprint)
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A story is a form of seduction. It's probably the most elemental form of seduction. It's very primal in that way. And they have this aliveness to them. What are you doing to create that sense of aliveness? The details make it sparkle, make you feel it, make you see it, make you smell it, make it come to life. There's something unique for you about...

The emotion of anger. When I wrote like the 48 Laws of Power, there's an evil side to it. There's a dark side to it. I won't deny it. I wanted to get at the actual truth, the reality of human beings and create a certain way where you're inviting the reader into the story, where you're making them feel it. And tell me, how do you create that? Well, so there's several things involved. So what ends up happening is...

When I think of the best-selling nonfiction writers of the last 20, 25 years, Robert Greene might be the first person who comes to mind. He has so many hit books. And it all started for him with a book called The 48 Laws of Power. And look, he struggled. He was a struggling screenplay writer. He was a struggling journalist. It just, he couldn't figure it out. But he writes The 48 Laws, and his career just takes off. It just goes stratospheric.

And he developed his own style based on deep research and gripping stories. And he's going to show you how to do both of those things. But fundamentally, this episode is about how to take your writing from a place where it feels dead to a place where it comes to life.

There's a part of this episode where Robert's talking about the loneliness of writing, the despair. And if you feel that, and you want to make writing social, you want to write with other people, well, hey, that's what my writing program, Write a Passage, is all about. We're about helping you get words onto the page and helping you publish what it is that you write. And I'm running one final cohort. After this, there'll never be another one. It starts on October 7th. It ends in mid-November. And if you want to enroll, go to writeofpassage.com.

As you're thinking through a chapter, you're thinking through a book, how important is timelessness to you? Is that something that you focus on? Yeah, very much so. All of my books are story-based. Chapters begin with a story to kind of ground you in this sort of timeless element of being a human being, right? Yeah.

I want to kind of lift you out of our day-to-day world and see that we are products of history, that we have a certain nature that is timeless. And I try to make the style that

The way I write, timeless. So I don't, I avoid colloquialisms. My editors hate me because I don't like doesn't, I like does not. You know, anything to me that seems cute or clever, what I don't like about a lot of writing now today is it seems very cute and clever. And in five, 10 years, people go, I don't want that feeling. I want people to go in 20 years, 30 years, 100 years. Yeah. You know, you read Machiavelli now.

And it has a crispness, a clarity to it. It's like it's modern. 500, 600 years ago. That's an astounding achievement. 500 years ago. Astounding achievement, you know? So that's what I'm aiming for in this style project.

not just in the content. The style has to have that kind of timeless resonance. And as you think about those stories, because they are so core to your work, as you're looking for stories, what are the components of a good story that you're looking for in the research process? Well, that's the whole... That's the work. The key to everything. And honestly, well, I mean, there's more to it, but it's finding those stories is extremely elemental. And it's probably...

What has aged me a lot because I have tried to find researchers to help me in the process. Billy Oppenheimer said, you just cannot find. I cannot find it. He said it was boredom, that they're not able to sit with boredom.

Like you need to. It's that. It's they have an ego. They think they know better than me. They don't listen to the process that I try and tell them. They don't have a sense of drama. I choose stories that have drama to them. A human emotion. You know, I always have this thought, we're all going to die. As far as we know, as Jim Morrison says, no one gets out alive here, right? Yeah. We're all going to die.

That's a basic reality every human faces. And it's so vital to our thinking and so vital to our culture, to everything that happens. Right. And the drama of people throughout history having to struggle with that and dying for a cause or making a mistake and dying.

It's so elemental, so basic. It's so fantastic to read about that. So I've got to have things that have drama where you can go, yeah, that person, they were killed for expressing their opinion. My God, that story, you know, it resonates with you. Those are the highest stakes. Yeah. But I can't find researchers who have all of those things combined where they don't have an ego. They listen to me and they have an I inside.

for what will translate into a story. Because you read a biography and it's just facts and data. I have to transform that into a relatively short story. I have to get the gist of it. But it has to have oomph to it. It has to have something, a power, a punch. I don't know why I can't find people. And I've hired grad students at UCLA. I've hired PhD students, a professor at USC. It's said, I've had no luck.

So, to get back to your question, I have to do it myself. I've been doing it for so long that I have a nose for it, you know? But I had a nose for it when I did the 48 Laws of Power because it's something, I'm not good at a lot of things, but research is something I've done for many, many years and I'm good at. I'm good at finding things and recognizing a story.

So back in the day when I did the 48 Laws of Power, I'd actually go to a library, if you can believe that. Right. I'm that old. And the library, you know, was like a magical journey. You go to a section which was about power, or in that book I wrote about con artists. They have a section of con artists, like 200 books. I'm like in Disneyland now. There was one book I found that I used a lot in the 48 Laws.

an absolutely fantastic book, way out of print, although somebody might have brought it back, called The Power of the Charlatan. It was written by somebody, I can't remember if it's a man or a woman, in the 30s, a German who was seeing Nazism rise. And they'd never mentioned Nazism in their book, but you could see that as they're talking about these charlatans from the 17th century, they were thinking of Goebbels. It was just, it was a goldmine.

Finding books like that is just like, you know, it's orgasmic for me. I'm sorry to say, but yeah. Well, it seems like that's how you're writing these books where you just, you get started with a new book project and you just retreat to a couch or an Eames chair and you just read and you read and you read and you research and you research. Tell me about that process.

Well, so there's several things involved in the process. The first is finding the book. There's a lot of sifting through garbage. Things that don't have what I need or what I want or stories that don't quite click. And can you usually tell right away? Usually you can. You have a nose for it. But sometimes you're tricked and you start reading and you're reading, oh man, this isn't going anywhere. Okay, I'm going to skim the rest of it. So you find a really good book. Okay, and...

I taught Ryan my system of taking note cards because I discovered when I was doing the 48 Laws, I did a lot of research for that book in a very condensed period of time, that the material was overwhelming me. I was reading so many books from all different cultures, periods.

How am I going to organize this? I can't take notes on paper. So I developed a note card system. And I had been using this system since I was a child. My mother showed me in one of my drawers in our house that I used to have, I used to take notes on cards and organize them. So it's ingrained in me for some reason. Sure.

I know the writer Vladimir Nabokov used a notecard system. I know Napoleon had a notecard system. I didn't invent it, but I didn't, I wasn't, nobody taught me that system. I came upon it on my own, which a lot of people have done. But I find a really good book. But the material, so let's say I'm writing a chapter in The Laws of Human Nature on envy.

And the story that I used for "Envy" is about Mary Shelley, the author of "Frankenstein Char," and that relationship with that woman who was very envious of her. So I read a thick biography about Mary Shelley, 560 page. The elements that have to deal with envy in her life are scattered throughout the book.

So I have to take all the little parts of that book that fit the theme, put them on a note card. So I have five note cards that detail every instance of envy in her life, the quality of envy, the nature of envy, what page it's on. And from that, I can kind of mold the story itself and mold some of the chapter. That's a story. Sometimes it's theory itself.

Sometimes it's like a book that I use. In the human nature, there would be books about psychology. It would be very elemental and basic. There's a man named Heinz Kohut who's a psychologist. He's wrote a lot about narcissism, very dense books. So a book like that, that grounds my whole theory of narcissism,

That's even more complicated. It's not a story. And then I have to go through this very abstract book and pick out the things that I can make real and put into layman terms. As you're writing a book, let's use the example of Envy and Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. Do you know before you start the book that you're going to be looking for those sorts of themes or is that something that emerges over time? It's a mix of things.

When I read Mary Shelley, I was fascinated by her because she's married to the poet Shelley. Her parents were extremely famous. Mary Wollstonecraft was her mother. Her father was a very famous writer. So I was attracted to the story.

And then I read it, I believe, I believe. And then I discovered within it the envy story. And I took notes on it and I saved it for when I write the envy chapter. Sometimes I have a chapter, I have a theme, but I don't have a story. Right. And then I, because I've read so much and I have pretty extensive knowledge of history, I'll think of people that might fit this. And I go in search of a story. Right.

And sometimes it's very difficult. Sometimes I find it, you know, pretty quickly. So I have my book on the sublime. I wanted to not make this book just about white men. It's always been something in my books I try to avoid. And so I was intrigued by the story of Harriet Tubman. Right. And I read that early on in the research process.

And I'm trying to think, where does she fit in this book? At the time, I didn't really know. And then as I developed the chapters and then I come upon my chapter on the daemon, which I described to you, I go, wow, she'll fit. She'll fit that perfectly. I already done the research. Other times I have to find the story. So I have a chapter in my book I'm doing now on animals and our relationship to animals. And I had a story about an octopus and it was good.

But it wasn't great. Right. And I wanted something better to lead the chapter. And I was scratching and I was clawing my way. I was searching here and there. And then I saw a blurb on the back of one of my books referencing this other book. And it was a quote from the film director, Werner Herzog. Yeah. He wrote the blurb. That's interesting. So I looked up that book.

I bought it and it was absolutely perfect. It was one of those golden books that fit the chapter perfectly. So it's a process. There's a mix of things. Sometimes I have to go in search of it. Sometimes it's kind of there and I know it and I find it. Other times I read it and then later I see where it fits.

How much time do you spend stuck in a state of agony? Or has that process of stuckness changed? Do you feel like you're able to enjoy the stuckness more? Or do you still feel like ripping your hair out? Like, am I going to be able to do this? Yeah, it's a mix of things. You know, you'd think at this point...

I'm kind of like Houdini. After eight books and wiggling out of, this is my eighth book, wiggling out of these situations where I thought I was going to die, where I couldn't find the story, or I couldn't make a chapter work, I always made it work. You'd think I'd have that ingrained in my head. Every time. Have faith, but I don't. Do you think it's now gotten better? Well, it's gotten better. I know that I will solve it.

But it's still a struggle and it's still painful and still there's a doubt in the back of my mind. Because you know what? If you don't have doubt, then you're never going to make something better. So if I thought, yeah, this is good enough. Okay, it's fine. You know, I found it.

I don't think the books would have the effect that they do because I keep trying to find something better. When you use the word better, how do you think your words have improved? Like if you look at 48 Laws, where do you feel like you've had the largest margin of improvement? Well, nothing in life is quite so linear. So things are better than the 48 Laws, but they're also worse. So when you're younger, and I've written about this a lot, I was in my 30s, late 30s at the time.

You have, first of all, your mind is functioning more quickly. I wrote that book so fast, I can't even believe it. You have a spirit that's very fast. And I could write and things would come to me very quickly. I've lost that. I've had a stroke, but I've also aged. I've lost that. I have to do double the effort to create that kind of effervescent style that I like to have. So I've lost something. But what I've gained is...

I think I've gained a little bit of depth in the actual thinking that I put into the process and how I try and always go deeper and deeper and deeper. So The Laws of Human Nature ended up being a long book because...

I really wanted to get at the core of what I was writing about. I didn't want it to be superficial. I'm not saying 48 Laws is superficial at all, but it's a shorter book because I didn't agonize over things, trying to get better and closer and closer. Thank God, because the shortness of it is what makes it such a bestseller. But now I put more thinking into things. So I don't think my style has gotten easier or better. I think my thinking...

has become after so many years, after so much experience, after so much digging, I think I've reached a higher level on that. And is that a change in process? Is that something that just comes with maturity? Or is there something that you could say now back to yourself in your late 30s that would have helped you get here? No, everything happens for a reason. If I had my experience now back when I was in my late 30s, it wouldn't have worked. It worked at the time.

Everything happens in its season. But I wrote about this in Mastery, the value of, you know, people now say the 10,000 hour rule has been debugged, which is a bunch of nonsense. It's not 10,000 hours, the number that we have to fetishize. It's the idea that depth and hours of thinking creates changes in the brain. I don't think anybody would deny that.

So years and years and years and years of thinking around problems has created a depth and richness in my brain, the synapses, the ways of thinking. Sometimes the really ecstatic fun moments are ideas come to me

And they're strange ideas. They're not things that people normally think about. And it comes from all of this work and all of this experience. Tell me about that. Let's follow the word strange. How do strange ideas show up for you? Out of nowhere, you know, like an intuition. So I wrote a chapter in the Sublime book on our relationship to the past and to history.

And people have this idea of history as this kind of dead thing. And I have this idea that history is very alive. And sometimes when I read history, I feel like I'm there. And I wonder, do other people ever have that sensation? Okay, I want to explain it. And I want to explain where it comes from. You know, and that's not an easy thing to do. Because...

Quite frankly, the editor who read that chapter said, I've never seen anybody describe that in this way. I've read books that talk about history can have that effect, but they're very academic and they're abstract and they're hard to connect the dots together. And so I was trying to express this feeling I have. Sometimes when I watch a movie, like we're watching at home now, we're watching these Japanese movies from like the 40s and 50s.

And I have the sense, I know what it feels like to be in that room, right? I don't know why. I've certainly never been to Japan. They're sitting on the floor. They have screens up instead of windows. I had the sensation like I'm there. What is that? Why does that happen? So I wanted to explain that. And in the process of explaining it, certain ideas came to me about, you know, about us and about how... So...

It's hard for me to completely verbalize here, but I have at the end of the chapter, I give readers exercises to create the sublime in their life. And I'm going, think back. This is where I'm talking about an idea that comes to me. You asked, think back to your childhood. Think back to your first couple of years and the house that you lived in and the objects that were in that house. Okay.

And those objects were there before you were born. So they were there before you were born. But when you see them now, they're very alive. And so they kind of predate your birth, but they have this aliveness to them. They have, particularly from your early childhood, like, whoa, yeah, you can relate to that. So I'm thinking back, like, I'm born in the late 50s.

The cars from the very year that I was born, I'll have no conscious memory of them. But when I see them on the screen, they feel familiar to me. It's kind of an eerie, uncanny experience. And you have that with things just before you were born. And I'm saying history can have that effect. So that idea came to me, not out of nowhere, because I had that feeling when I watch films. But yeah, I don't know, that should give you an idea. Yeah. Yeah.

You've used the word abstract a few times, implying that that's not what you're going for. And I guess the opposite of abstract would be concrete. What is it about concreteness that is so, so important? You know, abstract ideas could be very interesting sometimes, for sure. But then the abstract ideas have to be concrete. Otherwise, I can't connect to them. Right. So, you know, some philosophy will seem on face value very abstract. Right.

And then if I think about it deeply, if I think about what Kierkegaard or Hegel is writing, I can find a connection to my life. I can make it concrete. Sometimes, though, particularly nowadays, you read books by philosophers, by psychologists, and I can't make that leap. It's so far out there. I can't make that leap to my life. You know, there's this woman who wrote a book on daemons. We were talking about that.

connecting it to, it's a feminist book and in theory it looks very interesting, but it's all of the psychological jargon, this Jungian stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah. I can't relate it to my life. And so I don't like just words and verbiage. I want feelings. I want sensations. I want visceral experiences. And tell me, how do you create that? You want the sensations, the visceral experiences. How do you create that in the writing?

Well, a lot of editing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting until I feel like I've gotten that point to that point. So particularly when I'm writing a story, I'll rewrite a story hundreds of times. I don't know if it's exaggerating, but a lot of times until I feel like I'm getting that feeling. I'm cutting everything out that's extraneous. I have a theme.

Everything is directly focused on that theme. And by the theme, so that's in the law of the book and then the title of the chapter. Yeah, more or less. So if I'm writing about Harriet Tubman for this chapter, you know, her life encompasses many different things. It's a very rich, beautiful life. But I'm focusing on this voice that she heard in her head, the voice of God that told her what to do, directed her everywhere, and the feeling of faith that she had.

So everything has to be, first of all, I cut out all the excess and I'm just focusing on that feeling of fate of something guiding her. And if you just focus so deeply on these experiences and you create, you have a way of writing that you involve the reader in.

which is something you learn if you write for films or theater. You create a certain way where you're inviting the reader into the story, where you're making them feel it. Certain markers, certain ways of words that you use that grab them and say, pull you into the story and you focus it very deeply on the theme. It will have that kind of visceral effect.

And sometimes, you know, I get it really good and sometimes I miss it maybe by a little bit. And I do the same on the philosophy part, which doesn't have stories, you know. So I'm telling you about this chapter I'm writing now and how it's a little bit abstract. And I'm focusing on

The physical sensations that indicate the existence of this entity inside you. The literally physical sensations in your body, in your blood, in your heartbeat. And in that way, I can make this abstract idea very concrete.

One of the things that I notice is that for how informationally dense your books are, most other people who write like that talk down to their readers. And this seems to be something that you really value, is not talking down to your readers. Talk to them, almost putting your arm around them and being the guiding authority who's much closer to a friend. Yes. So first of all, you have to be accepting of people. You can't be judging people.

So the judging moralistic writer is looking down on the reader. I don't want people, I don't want to tell people what to think. I want to guide them into thinking it on their own to come to the same conclusion that I did or to come to an opposite conclusion. But I don't tell you precisely this is what you need to do with it. I want to leave it open-ended. And when I wrote like the 48 Laws of Power,

It's kind of a, you know, there's an evil side to it. There's a dark side to it. I won't deny it. And the tendency for people nowadays in our hyper-partisan environment would be to moralize, to judge. You know, manipulation, it's evil. These characters are evil. You know, Louis XIV, oh my God, Machiavelli, Napoleon, oh, they were horrible. They killed people, blah, blah, blah. And I find that treating the reader like a child. Like if I told people,

Already in the book that crush your enemy totally is a very evil thing. Don't do it ever. I'm already talking down and I'm treating them like a child. And instead I'm presenting to him then the idea throughout history of the lessons of crush your enemy totally and what it could actually mean in a world where people don't think like that without judging it, without saying this is bad or wrong or evil.

I'm obviously hoping that the adult reader out there comes to the conclusion that this is something I'm not going to practice. I can't, you know, I'd have this idea that you can't change people's morals and ethics with a book. They have to come to that on their own. You can give them the information. You can lead them in a certain direction. You can tell them these stories and

But preaching to people never changes. It never leads to anything important. Instilling with them other ways of thinking, that can change your life. Do you see the difference between the two? Yeah. And so trying to instill a different way of thinking, a different way of looking at the world. So the 48 Laws of Power is...

This is a different way of looking at the power game. You enter the work world and you're not judging or moralizing. You're looking at all the moves people are making. It's a power game, right? Some people play well, some people don't play well. I want to change that you think that way when you enter the work world. And that shift...

has more power over you. But I can't tell people to do that. I have to be indirect, go back to the Napoleon thing. I have to come attack them from the side and give them the sense that they're discovering it on their own. But the other thing is, I genuinely feel that

I don't have a very high opinion of myself, to be honest with you. It goes back to my childhood, whichever, you know. I never did well enough in school, even though I was a straight-A student. Parents, you know, more and more and more. I never felt comfortable about myself, right? Yeah. And I had a lot of failure when I was younger.

This is before you wrote 48 Laws. I didn't write 48 Laws until I was basically almost 40 when it was published. And for then I had lots of failure. I mean, I did fairly well, but I never had any, I never had a job for more than 11 months. So I know what it means to not make it in life. I know what it means to suffer. I know what it means to feel bad about yourself, to even feel depressed and suicidal. I know how that feels.

And I never want to lose that, no matter how successful I am. So I don't want to talk down to readers, but I actually also feel great empathy for people who have to work in bad jobs, don't feel like they've understood their life's task, to quote something from Mastery. So I'm being authentic in that feeling. I really empathize with people and what they're going through in this world. How conscious are you about...

cultivating your style. You've really developed a style. It started with 48 Laws and it has continued and continued. In what ways do you feel like you've surrendered to the style that's developed organically and in what ways do you feel like that's been a more conscious top-down effort? Well, your style is a mix of things.

It's you. It's your voice. It's something very unique to you. Although some writers don't have a style, I'm afraid. But if they do, it's unique to you. It's like your fingerprint. Right. Nobody else can replicate that. But on the other hand, it's you, but it's enhanced. It's you being conscious. It's you working on it. It's you using it.

The language that you didn't create, that other people created for you and fitting your own ideas into it and molding it and creating a style. What do you mean by enhanced? Well, so if I just blurted out automatic writing-wise my ideas, you know, they wouldn't... They'd have a style, but they'd be kind of gibberish. They wouldn't have any power to them. So I have to take...

my natural way of thinking, and I have to make it sophisticated. I have to elaborate on it. I have to make it fit into something that other people can understand. So you can't just be yourself. You have to bring yourself and mold it to the conventions of language, to the conventions of a book.

to the conventions of the 21st century, you have to adapt it, right? So you enhance it. So in the end, your style is like a hybrid. It's you plus the culture that you live in, plus, you know, language itself. And so for me, I probably had the style prior to the 48 Laws. I've been writing my whole life. I have a rhythm. And my wife, she edits my chapters and

Sometimes she notices how strange it is. She likes to try and make it a little more not so strange. What do you mean by strange? I have rhythms. I'm somebody who thinks orally. So when I'm writing, I'm hearing it. And sometimes putting in and so, I like to put and so. It's not literary. It's like a way of talking. So I bring the kind of talking thing to it. I also will have...

parenthesis, a comma without using and afterwards because like a string of things. It's just how my thinking goes. Sometimes it's awkward and it doesn't communicate and I take it out. But so there's a kind of natural things that you have. But for the 48 laws, the kind of disguised anger in it, the kind of slight bit of hostility, the kind of violence hidden, veiled in the words and the language is

something very me. And it came out, but then I saw, oh, this is good. And so I used it and I kept using it. I felt like this is going to work. And then that kind of disguised anger isn't going to work so much for seduction, but the kind of vehemence of the writing style, the kind of urgency, the sense of

hey, out there, people can be so stupid sometimes. This is what you need to do. I kept that, and I've kept that through all of the books, but I have to adapt it to each subject. So the kind of anger and violence of 48 was inappropriate to seduction, a little more appropriate to war, certainly appropriate to the book for 50 Cent, but not for mastery, and not so much for human nature, and certainly not for the sublime books. I've had to

kind of each time find a way. So now I'm trying to create a style that's sublime, quote unquote. I have to adapt. But it's still, the underpinnings are still that kind of vehemence. I've gathered that there's something unique for you about the emotion of anger in terms of its ability to create a charge in you, to inspire something and almost galvanize you into action. Well, I talked about that in Mastery.

We all have dark energy. We all have a dark side to our nature, the shadow. We all have anger, envy, even murderous impulses that come out in our dreams. And we all repress that for good reason, I imagine. We repress it so deeply that we lose a part of who we are. We lose a part of our nature. And so when an artist, and I say this in mastery, when an artist dies,

puts anger into their work, into a film, into a novel, or even into music. People love it. They're drawn to it because they're so repressed inside. And there's something primal about anger. There's something... The mind turns off in a state of anger, and it's just a shout. It comes out. Like, in moments of anger, I found myself saying things that I didn't even know that I knew or didn't even know that I thought. And there's that element of...

of instinctual surprise that comes out that oftentimes the brain is just blocking because it's trying to be perfect or polished. But you have to...

You can't just vent. You can't just rage. There's a lot of people, some people do. So I talked in The Art of Seduction about Malcolm X, and I used him in the chapter on charisma. And when I talked about Malcolm X, I said, he was a man with a lot of anger, and rightly so. You know, he was a hustler, a low-life hustler in Boston where he grew up. He spent years in jail and prison.

And then he kind of discovered himself in prison. But he had a lot of anger about the white world and the oppression of blacks in America. Particularly in the 40s and 50s, it was pretty radical. We don't realize how awful it truly was. He had a lot of anger. But when he spoke, what made him so charismatic...

is the words you didn't the anger was like an undertone to it he didn't go out and say all these nasty violent things he controlled it it's what i call a controlled rage controlled anger is 10 times more powerful than just venting you feel you feel the undertone of anger in there

And you connect to it. Instead of being blast, instead of being passive, it draws you in and it makes you participate in it. I like what you just said about charisma in writing. In what ways have you consciously looked at writers throughout history, their style in particular, and said, ah, I'm going to take a little bit of that, maybe from Ovid or a little bit of that from somebody else over here? Well, um...

You know, when you're a child and your mind is, or, you know, a teenager and your mind is more open and malleable, there were probably writers who had a big influence on me. One of them would obviously be Friedrich Nietzsche, my favorite philosopher of all time, somebody I'm writing about in my new chapter here. He had a style that when I was a kid, I just, God, this is the most fantastic style ever. It's very alive. And what's so good sometimes is he would argue something from the opposite side.

He would say exactly what he didn't believe in. But you knew that he didn't believe in it. But that kind of twisting of your thinking was so exciting and so interesting. Yeah.

And he just had a way of grabbing you and being very direct in his language. And he would take and he would say things that he didn't necessarily believe in. He was playing with the idea and that kind of playfulness. And besides which, which is what I'm writing about now, he was also going insane. Totally. And by the end, his mind was unspooling and the style got even wilder and more exciting and interesting.

I've always, probably the number one influence on my writing style, but also probably my favorite equivalent as a novelist is Fyodor Dostoevsky. Read a lot of him when I was younger. And he has a style like that as well that's in the novel form where it just feels so alive, so natural, so real. It brings you into a story and...

Like one of my favorite novels of his is The Possessed. I think it's also translated as The Demons, but I like the title, The Possessed.

What an amazing novel that is. And it's kind of terrifying. You have all these insane characters that are so vivid. To this day, I'll think of Kirolov, the guy who decided he's going to kill himself when he turns 30. And Shatov. And of course, of Stavrosian, the greatest, most fantastic evil person in the history of novels, I think. Stavrosian.

These memorable characters, but they're so alive. He has such a great style, so conversational, yet very real. I want to follow this tack of aliveness because I think if you were to say, David, give me one difference between writing that you don't like versus writing that I do like, I would say it goes from dead to alive. So as you're editing and you're editing and you're editing, what are you doing to create that sense of aliveness? Yeah.

Well, there's several things. So some of that's in the style. Some of that is in bringing the reader into the story and involving them. So anything that might take them out of the story or distance them, a fact that's irrelevant or that isn't quite rightly expressed, I want to draw you in so you feel what I'm trying to express. And that makes it alive.

So in the story sense, there's very much that is drawing people in and it's like a current that makes them go with the story. Great analogy. Okay. As opposed to standing out to the side, which is kind of dead. But the other thing is I've talked about it on a video I created about live ideas versus dead ideas. And a dead idea is something you haven't really thought about, right? You've heard it from some other people.

A lot of academic writing is so dead because it's all accumulated ideas that they, you know, it's conventions. It's received ideas. These are the cliches, the conventions of this kind of academic writing. Okay. So it's dead. It doesn't sparkle with life because life is fluid, right?

Life is changing. Nothing ever stays the same. So if you have a phenomenon that's out here in space and you look at it just this way, you're only seeing it from that angle. But it's a three-dimensional angle. You have to look at it from here, from here, from here, from here, from here, to make it alive, to bring it into focus, you know? So I can't remember what philosopher, I think it was Simone Weil, a very interesting philosopher, said, you know,

We can't see a three-dimensional object. We only see one side of it. But through thinking, we can recreate those three dimensions. Right. Okay? Well, that's what thinking is. You're recreating the dimensionality of life. So I like to think of things from all different kinds of angles. I like to contradict myself. I like to say, this is where you're wrong. That's why I had reversals in so many of my other books.

It could be the opposite. So when you look at things from different angles, they start to come to life as opposed to being a dead idea. As you're working on your book now, how do you structure your days? How do you structure your weeks to make progress on it? Right now, you're in the midst of this chapter and you're grappling with it. You're trying to fight through it. And you were telling me before we started recording that it almost takes you over.

that project. So what do you do as you're writing to create the conditions to keep kicking the ball forward? Well, there's a kind of a rhythm to it. So when this chapter is over in a week or so, it's like all the air goes out of a balloon. I finally relax and now I start gearing up for the next chapter. And I go through my note cards and I kind of have fun and I play with my note cards and I think,

And I'm kind of just sort of figuring out what this chapter could be. So you don't have the name of the chapter? Yeah, I do. Of course I do. Okay. I know all chapters by now. Yeah. Because when you have the note cards, you organize them into themes and those themes become your chapters. And I started off with maybe 20 some chapters for this book. They're now 12 because I whittled them down. But now I'm on to the next chapter and I'm looking at my note cards. I'm kind of taking notes.

I go through all of the cards and I note down salient things in each one on a paper. And from that, I see themes that'll turn into the chapter. So slowly it starts coming together. I have to choose the story to introduce it, which I usually know. Sometimes I don't know and I have to find it or I have to figure out which of my stories is the main one.

And then I start constructing the story from my note cards. Very laborious process. Tell me about that laborious process. Well, you know, so we'll take the Harriet Tubman, for example, because it's fresh in my mind. I read a biography of her. And what often happens is...

I realize there are pieces that are missing and I don't want to just depend on one book. So at the last minute, I'll read a second, a third, even a fourth biography. Or I'll read books by other slaves who escaped to get more kind of color and detail. But from the original book, I look at the note cards and I kind of say,

These are the details of her life that are going to fit into this. And I create a schema of, I put them all on paper. And I, usually the story is linear, but sometimes it's not. And I kind of figure out these are the main points I want to discuss in her life. And at that point, it's not very interesting. And then I start to write it and it doesn't have the life that I want and I have to work on it over and over and over again.

And then I go on to the key section, the philosophy section, and I take all my note cards. Anyway, to make a long story short, slowly through the note card process, I create a first draft, which will take a couple months at least. For the entire book? No, a couple months for the whole chapter of my cards. I'll get a first draft going through the cards, writing the story, writing the keys, writing the other sections.

And this is a couple months. And now the really hard stuff starts to be now. Now's the hard part. Now's the hard part. Now I have to like grind. I have to get it better and better and better and better and better and better. And at a certain point, so what ends up happening is I'm a little bit tired. I'm getting older. I had a stroke.

I don't know if my brain, you know, I had brain damage, to be honest with you. Yeah, of course. I don't know if things got a little off kilter. Sometimes that's good because I know my brain's operating on a slightly different track than it used to. But sometimes it's like, man, I have to really focus twice as hard to figure out the same things. But I write a story now.

And I write the interpretation of the story. It's not right. It doesn't feel right. And I rewrite it. And then I realize a chapter has to have a whole feeling to it. It has to be an organic whole. This idea here is repeated over there. I have to change that. I have to make everything, I have to come up with a different idea. I can't repeat what was in the interpretation of the Harriet Tubman story.

So it's just constantly redoing things, constantly trying to make new ideas so I don't repeat myself, don't repeat other chapters. And by the time you reach maybe four or five months and you're getting closer to the end, but you're not there, you're like somebody climbing up a mountain. And you can see the top, but you're tired and you slip and the oxygen is getting thinner and you fall and you have to come back up.

And you just know that feeling, but you can't quite get there. What do you love about this? Because it's so funny hearing you talk. I can feel both this. This is my life's work. This is my love. David, this is what I do. And at the same time, I just feel this agony, this pain, this labor. Well, okay, so the book is sublime. And, you know, I've done research, incredible amounts of books,

And 99% of the books with the title Sublime in them are so unsublime. They're like academic tomes. Yeah, because it's a concept that became very big in the art world and aesthetics. You know, Derrida talks about all these heavies. And some of them have interesting ideas. I'm not going to knock it, but it's not sublime.

The language isn't, doesn't connect to you. It doesn't give you that feeling, that kind of vibratory feeling. So the book has to be sublime. I want the reader to go, whoa, yeah, I never thought of that before. Wow, that is weird. That is truly weird. That's interesting. You know, so the writing has to have that. So I'm not getting there. And so I have to get there to that point. And part of the problem is,

I'm on the ninth chapter. I've turned it eight to my editor. And the editor keeps going, these are great. This is even better than the last one. And I'm going, God, I have to keep going. I have to keep this up. I can't have a chapter that kind of, the souffle kind of falls. So I have these standards. I have to keep it going. I have to keep it sublime and exciting in the style and everything. And if it's not quite clicking...

I feel like I've got to put one more ounce of effort into it. And then when it's done, when the chapter is done, all the agony is over and I feel very happy and enriched. And like, I have a feeling that most people, a lot of people don't have. Like, I built something and it'll work, you know. Right. But,

Those moments aren't that many. Well, we'll show photos on the YouTube screen here. But I think that one of the things that is so unique about your books is the way that you have quotes and stuff on the side. You have such a unique structure and style to the visual presentation. Where does that come from? Well, that's the first three books. And I've been wanting to put it in the other books, but I haven't been able to because of A, deadlines, and B, because the publisher bitches and complains. But what do they complain about?

The cost. The cost more. Tell them it's a work of art. Yeah. I don't know quite where this comes from, but there were like, sometimes there were a couple of things. So I'm Jewish. I went to Hebrew school. In Hebrew school, you had passages from the Torah that you had to learn and that were relevant for your particular bar mitzvah. And I remember hearing

In the Torah, there would be like an interpretation of that passage. I don't remember if it was on the margins or not. You know, obviously the Torah you're reading is in Hebrew. Right. But so, but and maybe the interpretations were in English. I don't remember. I have a Torah at home and there's one translation on the top that's just the what's actually written in the Torah. There's another one to the left that is...

editions by rabbinic scholars, and then on the bottom, there's interpretations. And I really like reading it because I can get so many different things on one page. So I thought maybe it comes a little bit from that. The idea of interpreting a text, it's also...

When I studied ancient Greek in college and you would have a passage of Thucydides and you yourself would write on the margins. Sure. The ideas and translations. And then...

And things like the I Ching that I used to love a lot, they have kind of a similar structure. So the idea of having things on the side that kind of comment, that aren't my writing, they're writings of other people, it's kind of a dialogue between history and quotes and what I've written, I think adds a dimension to a book that most books don't have. I mean, a lot of books have quotes, right?

But they're not like in this kind of dialogue fashion. They stand out at the beginning. It's an epigram. I wanted it as more like a conversation going on continually through the chapter. And then also like fables. I loved in Power that these Aesop's fables and others that are such elemental lessons about power. So I thought putting those on the side would be really great.

How much do you think of creativity as a process of a kind of divine revelation that just, boom, idea gets airdropped into your brain versus it's just the emergent property of extreme sweat and toil? It's a mix of things. So, you know, your creativity, like when you're a child or you're very young, thoughts will come to you that are very interesting and they'll be creative and

No doubt, you know. And, you know, I took drugs when I was in college and I had very wild, interesting, creative thoughts. Opened the doors of perception. Yeah, right. But that kind of creativity isn't the kind of creativity that leads to anything that truly lasts. So, I mean, there is people like Arthur Rambeau, who's very young, whose poetry still has incredible appeal and power to him. I love it still. And he was very young.

But mostly the kind of scribblings and creative ideas that when you're 17 or 18, they don't last. There's nothing because they're not connected to experience, not connected to anything deep. The roots aren't deep enough. I was about to say they're not rooted. Yeah. So, but there are plenty of people who toil and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind who never come up with anything creative. So there has to be a mix of the two. And I wrote about this most of all in Mastery.

So you have to have those hours of experience. You have to have the soil has to be rich, but you also have to have the looseness that you had when you were a child, when you were 18. So the people who are truly creative are able to grind or able to learn and be able to discipline. And then they're 30, 32, and they can unspool all that tightness and they can release it and they can go off in different directions. They can become that child. You know, like Mozart,

stayed a child, and Einstein is the classic example. They stayed to be children well into the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and they stayed creative. Mozart didn't live that long. So it's a mix of discipline, of learning, of rich ideas, and then letting it go and being experimental and open and fluid and permeable that creates it. And then if you reach that point,

which I call in mastery that the feeling of mastery itself kind of intuitive, to use the German word, Fingerspitzengefühl. I love that word, the fingertip feel. Yeah. It's better in German, Fingerspitzengefühl. It's perfect in German. When you have that fingertip feel, things will feel like they're airdropped into you. You know, it's a feeling of inspiration. It's a feeling like, wow, the gods are filling me with ideas. But it's probably from this, you know, there are things...

We don't know about ourselves. We don't really know exactly where creativity comes from. I can't give you the precise scientific answer. It's a mystery. But that's sort of my way of solving or at least explaining the mystery of creativity. I want to talk about your background in Hollywood, where you started. And I want to build off of this sentence. Stories are what keep the mind engaged. That seems to be a lesson that you've really pulled into your books. Yeah. Well, um...

You know, a story is a form of seduction. It's probably the most elemental form of seduction. So, you know, you can remember, if you can, when you were a child or if you have children, and you pick the child up and you throw it around or you put them on your back and you lead them around. What made the child kind of go crazy and scream was the sense of not having control and having somebody else take over and move you around.

That's what a story does. It's very primal in that way. You don't know where it's taking you. It's taking you on a journey. You're letting somebody else lead your mind somewhere. And it has very, very powerful effect. It's how the human brain, our brain operates by continually telling us stories. And so mimicking that process and getting people on a journey in which there are elements of surprise,

is so primal that it, you know, it never loses its effect. And so my trajectory was I had, to backtrack a little bit, I had lived in New York after college and I worked in journalism and I didn't really like journalism. It taught me a lot about writing, but I hated the fact that

What you wrote lasted for about three days. It was disposable. And I was somebody who thinks in terms of like a thousand years. And I wandered around Europe for many years and I tried to write novels. I didn't have discipline, it didn't work, and I was broke. And then my father was not well. I'm from Los Angeles and I had been teaching English in Spain at the time. And I came back here to be with him, but also...

I thought, all right, I'll get a job in Hollywood. Stupid me, thinking that I could write and I could make good money and all the glamour and the glitz, you know, why not? And through my sister, who was like a typist for a film director, I got a job pretty quickly in the business. I was an assistant to a director and to his wife, who was a screenwriter, very nice, very wonderful people. And my idea was I'd be writing screenplays,

And I was also researching. So like, for instance, the wife who wrote screenplays, she wanted to do a screenplay about coyotes, these people that carry people from Mexico or Central America to the United States. They're called coyotes. And she wanted to do a screenplay about that. She said, Robert, can you do research for it? And I'd go to UCLA library and I, you know, hone some of my researching chops there. But

the main thing was to write screenplays. And I wrote screenplays, and they were pretty funny. I think if you looked at them now, if you read them, you'd giggle. Because I like comedies. I like satire. But I didn't have the knack. I wasn't a good fit for Hollywood. People would read my screenplay, and they'd go, Robert, you know, you should really think about maybe writing for the theater.

I go, "Well, yeah, I love the theater." And then I'd go home and I'd realize they were actually-- it was kind of a dig. What were they getting at? What was the thing? You don't have a commercial sense. You're so-- you're so, um, arty or whatever the word is that you should be in theater. -Artsy fartsy Robert. -Yeah. You don't have the-- the-- you know, the populist sense to write kind of dirty grimy comedies, Robert. You're being too literary.

So I realized fairly quickly that that dream was, and it was kind of a depressing environment. You know, I didn't like the hypocrisy, the power games, the fact that you had no control over what you did. Eight other people would come in and change your writing. And I hated the kind of the falseness, the fakeness of it, where everyone was, oh, I love your work. That's so fantastic. It's wonderful. It's great. It's incredible.

It just seemed really false. And it didn't fit me. I'm somebody who likes kind of realness. And I didn't like the movies people were making. I wasn't relating to it. So it was a bad fit. But it taught me about entertainment. It taught me about... Gave me an element of how to create stories. Disciplined me in that sense. When you write a screenplay, you can't...

You can't go into a person's inner mind. You have to do it, describe it all through dialogue and action.

And that's a difficult thing for people to do. And that's why some people are good at it and some people aren't good at it. So it got me into the idea that I can't just tell everybody what's going on. I have to show it. Sure. Through action, demonstrated. That had an impact on my writing. So it taught me some elemental lessons. How would that show up in your writing, to show, not to tell? Well, you know, some of the stories...

in, in the 48 laws. I mean, there's a story of, they had in, in, in Italy, in the Renaissance, these men that were called condottieres, who were like mercenary soldiers, who a king or a duke would hire to help save the city. And then they would save the city and, and then, uh,

and they were going to be given all this money, et cetera. And then-- and I had the story of this one man, typical stories. They gave him all this money. They gave him-- they called him a saint, and then they executed. And the idea was he had gotten so powerful,

that he was actually now a threat to the Duke. He'd done so well. The Duke had hired him, was now a threat to it. But I had to tell it in a way that just cut out all of the internal monologue. I just focused on the action. And I just showed that here's this-- He does all these great things for the city, he say, da-da-da-da. And then they behead him.

Ta-da, ta-da, there's the lesson of the story. Without saying, going into his mind and what he was thinking and what the king was thinking. You don't have to know all that stuff. Just know he saved the city, he did all these valorous things, and they execute him. So that's an example. I'm sure I can come up with better examples. When I did the con artist stories, you know, they're kind of classic, sort of have a kind of a film, a filmic quality to it.

where they're true stories where you don't really know who's the con artist and who's not the con artist and there's no internal monologue going on there you're not telling what people are thinking you're just focusing on the action and it's very exciting so you know if you were to teach me storytelling and i were to say robert i i want to learn all about it what would you say are the core elements what comes to mind for me is something like conflict surprise you said earlier what else well

It depends on what the story is for. And it's not something that's very in fashion these days. So maybe I'm going to give people bad advice. But I believe there should be like a theme. There should be like, not a moral, but this is sort of the lesson. This is what the story is getting at. This is what holds the whole thing together. And so when you have a sense of that,

then every detail kind of goes back to it. Every little color, every little sparkle, every little thing that's in there is related to this theme of somebody who's awful, of somebody who's a con artist, of somebody who's, you know, a barbaric or whatever. Every detail is sort of like a hologram and has kind of like the whole of it is embedded in the details.

And details are incredibly important. So you want to make something come to life, right? So you want to talk about the colors. You want to use, I like a lot of physical cues, like colors.

People can relate to seeing things, to giving a very good visual picture. They can also relate to the smells, to the sounds. So creating a very physical environment gets people into the stories and draws them in. And you want to, like, if the character's from the first person, which some of my stories are, or from an omniscient narrator inside that person,

You have little words and cues that put you inside that character, you know? This is like their experience from the inside. You know, these are like little ingredients that go into the stew that kind of make it a good story. Yes, surprise is very important, you know, to have turning points. And like, I was going here, now I didn't realize that this is happening, you know? A relatability where there's some emotion involved, right?

that is experiential, that everybody can relate to. How do you think about the total addressable market for the things that you're writing? Because you're standing there, it's something that everybody can relate to, but then you also hear, hey, the universal is actually in the particular. Well, you know, we can walk and chew gum at the same time so that you can do two things at the same time. So

The details, the physical details of the environment make it sparkle, make it come to life, make you feel it, make you see it, make you smell it, make you hear it. Okay? Those are the particulars in there.

But the emotional overtone of it, the fact that someone is facing death, that they're on the verge of failure, that they're dealing with envy, that they are somebody who's become grandiose and is hurting people left, right, and center. We all face those things. Yeah. The tone of it, the overall theme of the story is universal, but the details are very particular. So in Mastery, I talk about Leonardo da Vinci,

and how his paintings are so uncanny and weird because they feel like the real life, they feel alive. And he does it through detail. The details, he creates this kind of timeless sense of being there through the intensity of his focus on details. So that's sort of an example. I want to end with what you call your secret ambition.

where you say to make things such as reading, studying the classics and philosophy something hip so that young people would be inspired to step away from the TV and the internet and challenge their minds. Why is that so important to you? Well, you know, I've been blessed since I was young and grew up in a different era in which books played such a large part of my life. They kind of

created my imagination. They expanded my imagination from a very early age. So you've got your own limited life when you're a child. And if you don't have parents that are perfect, and if you don't come from a lot of money, even if you do come from a lot of money, your world is kind of limited. And as a child, you're a bit frustrated by the fact that you're small and you don't have powers. You read a book and

and you're transported out of your little world. You're transported into a fantasy world. You're transported into the real world, into other countries, into the past. And it's like a magic carpet ride. So I remember when I was a kid, I couldn't fathom this idea that human beings existed 500,000 years ago. And what were they like? And what was their world like? You look around now, we're driving cars. We've got

You know, toasters, I'm talking about the 50s, and refrigerators and television. There were no Teslas back then. No. How is it possible? And it obsessed me. And it created my imagination, which if I didn't have, I wouldn't be able to write books. It made my life, you know. And so I want other people to have that. And it's a power thing.

Hopefully you develop as a child, but because kids are so programmed now and they don't have the freedom to discover things on their own and everything is fed to them, I think people grow up and they get kind of cranky and they become kind of desperate because they don't have any inner freedom.

resources when they're bored ah i'm bored okay let me think about a million years ago let me go get a book about that let me look at the national geographic let me go to the library right the word that's coming to mind for me is a like an enchantedness that you have yeah and the world is enchanting it's just you you you stop thinking of it you don't you're not able to see it anymore and so

I remember early on when the 48 Laws of Power, maybe I don't know how much later after that, but I got contacted by this man who was a librarian, head librarian at a library in Dade County, Florida, in a very urban, mostly black neighborhood. And he said there were these kids that would come in. They found the 48 Laws of Power. They're like 10, 11 years old. And now they're like looking at books about Julius Caesar.

and Louis XIV, and, you know, Haile Selassie, and all the other characters in the book that I've written about, they got excited by history. So history seems like something that's so dead to us, but it's the most exciting adventure you can ever imagine. You know, people...

thought differently than we do now. They had different customs. Their clothes were all weird. They're like exotic animals. And yet they're human. And yet they have the same relatable emotions that we have. And to enter those worlds is mind-blowing, right? So I wanted to make history exciting for people, particularly for young people, to kind of make them realize that it's not just a bunch of dead facts.

It's exciting and it also teaches you incredible lessons about the present. What would you say here about the excitement of writing and the excitement of the craft of writing and what you've discovered there? Well, you know, sometimes, you know, when I was younger, I would write. Sometimes if I was drunk or I had drugs or none of that, I would just write. Man, I was so high. It was great. It was fantastic.

Then I would read it the next day and say, oh, this is crap. Or I would read it 10 years later and go, this is total nonsense. Okay. So my point is when you're most excited, you're probably writing your worst crap. Huh. Right? And sometimes you can get that feeling of excitement and things will be good and will click. But nine times out of 10...

It leads you into bad places because you start writing without thinking and you think it's great. And to me personally, the true writing comes in the editing. Now, some people aren't like that. So I can only really speak for myself. But if you're going into writing because you think it's a high, boy, you're in the wrong field. It is lonely. It can be very boring. It can be very frustrating.

And then when it's over, man, you feel fantastic. So when I finish a book or I finish a chapter at this point, I have a really great feeling, but it doesn't last that long. But when the book's finished, now I can look back. I could die tomorrow, which could happen to anybody. I don't, it's fine. I got what I expressed, what I wanted to do. I don't have this feeling like I wasted my life. And that feeling is very, very strong and very powerful. And so it's,

accomplishing a book and writing it well and getting it done and realizing

Despite the kind of dumbed-downness in our culture, writers are still revered for a reason. Because it's something very ancient, and because we all use language to talk and communicate, but people who actually are able to do that in a written form, there's a revered element of it. There's something kind of divine or saintly or godlike about it. So writers are revered. So if you put the time and you write a book...

It's going to be painful. It may take you a year. For me, it takes several years. But you've done it. People will look at you differently. You'll look at yourself differently. It'll last for years and years and years, hopefully. And so the rewards...

come at some point, but they're not, they're never immediate. Sometimes in the process of writing, you feel excited. You feel, wow, this is great. Those aren't, you can't be motivated by that because there's so few and far between. So tell me, what is the nature of your excitement with the book that you're working on right now? And what ways do you feel a sense of excitement? And what ways do you feel a sense of sort of interest and curiosity? I need to figure this out. I just want you to describe that for us so that we know

what you're feeling when you're writing and maybe we can map that on for ourselves. Well, you know, it's particular to the book that I'm writing. So, when I was writing Human Nature, I wanted to get at the actual truth, the reality of human beings.

Go inside. None of this superficial social stuff. What's really happening inside the human animal for thousands of years? What makes them tick? People smile. They behave a certain way. What is the reality underneath that? Okay, so I want to just, I have a mission.

And so my mission is to get to that core. And that motivates me and excites me. And it also frustrates me because I haven't gotten there yet. So I'm digging, I'm digging, I'm digging, I'm digging. And then when I hit it, wow, exciting, great. And then when the book is published, and this is a book that's 580 pages long, and it's very thick, and there's no, it's dense. And that book has sold well over a million copies by now in a short period of time.

It's because it worked. All that effort worked. So now I feel like, wow, I'm vindicated. My mission succeeded. This book is all about expanding your mind, expanding your consciousness so you see the world differently. So in order to write the book, I have to feel it. I can't just be an intellectual exercise. It has to be a complete body emotional experience for me. So I can't write about things I don't feel. So I have to feel it.

what's sublime about the world in order to write about it. And fortunately, it's going to sound very odd, my stroke has kind of altered the whole thing because prior to my stroke, I had this idea I was going to write a book on sublime and I was going to go to the Gobi Desert and I was going to travel to Antarctica and I was going to swim with dolphins and I was going to go underwater in submarines and have all these adventures

And now I can't do any of it. I can barely even walk. So I have to sit in my office and I have to think and feel what is sublime without going anywhere. So it makes it, the reader can relate to that. Because if you're 22 and you're flipping burgers, you're not going to be thinking about Antarctic and the Gobi Desert. I have to make it something that you can relate to.

To every man. So I have a mission. The mission is to make people feel the sublime. And that excites me and that gets me going. So I guess to answer your question is, there has to be a purpose behind your book, behind what you're writing. And a lot of books fail because...

Why are you writing this? Are you writing it to be famous? Are you writing it to make money? Are you writing it for the attention? Or do you really feel like you need to express something? If you feel like you have to communicate something important, then you will probably communicate something important if you're disciplined enough. So it's really the sense of purpose that's so important behind a book.

And trees and forests are leveled for books that have no purpose, no meaning. They could just as easily have not been written. And I don't want you to be like that, you audience out there. I want you to feel a connection to what you're writing. It's important. Even if it's a trivial subject, even if you're writing about, I don't care, whatever subject you can make, it's important and it's a mission. It's going to connect, change people's lives.

Robert Greene, thank you very much. Thank you for your earnestness and your sincerity. It's really beautiful, the passion that you have for your work, the passion that you have for this craft. It really stuck out. Oh, thank you. For a writer, it's like the easiest thing in the world to talk about.

You know, because you live it every single day. You know, so yeah, it was fun. Thank you. Winston Churchill wasn't just the prime minister of the United Kingdom. That's what people know him for. But he was also a prolific writer. He wrote a novel, two biographies, memoirs, and of course, as prime minister, speeches. He'd spend roughly an hour working on them for every minute that he spoke. So if he spoke for eight minutes, he'd spend eight hours in prep.

And yes, I know he's controversial, but man, there's a lot to learn from his writing. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to play you a short clip from a speech that he gave in 1940. And then we're going to break it down together. We shall fight on beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.

So let's break this down. Like a good battle plan, the structure of Churchill's writing here is simple and strategic. A commander-in-chief can get their squadron, their unit, on the same page with repetition, and that's what Churchill's doing here. There's no mistaking the core themes here. What is he doing? He's using the word fight four different times.

And then he talks about how the British military will fight in five different places. They're going to fight on the beaches. They're going to fight on the landing grounds, in the fields, in the streets, in the hills. So you see all the buildup there. But the entire paragraph is building up to these words right here. We shall never surrender.

That is the main point at the end. That's the climax that everything builds up to. Churchill also uses style to get his point across too. Writers these days, you sit in your fifth grade English class and you'll be told to only keep what's necessary. Cut the fluff, get rid of the excess. But Churchill does the opposite here.

You'll notice that rhetorically, the volume and the diversity of places mentioned, it's actually more important for him than the literal meaning of each place. And Churchill, he could have just added emphasis by ad-libbing a bunch more places with the word fight. So you'll see here, he's got fight, fight, fight, fight. He's got all this fight. But you know what he could do? He could just add a

a whole row worth of stuff. We shall fight in the cities. We shall fight in the skies. We shall fight in the forest. We shall fight in the little Italian sandwich shops. I'm just kidding, right? But he could have just added stuff.

And look at this. The order of the locations is immaterial. So he could take fight the skies and he could make beaches down here, streets. We'll move it up here. Then we'll take this and we'll go over here. We're sort of like shuffling things around. And this all works. Here's what matters. All you need is right at the end. You just need we shall never surrender. This just needs to come at the end. And if it does, the whole thing works.

Now, why is this? It's because speech writing is different from the kind of writing that you usually get on paper. It's this series of phrases, these little phrases that are serving up to the punchline at the end, right? They're just building, building, building into we shall never surrender. And you could arrange any of those little phrases. You could take the first one, make it the seventh, you know, rearrange them however you want it. In the paragraph, it would still accomplish its purpose. A sense of timing is important, though.

adding all these little buildup phrases right here, what are they doing? They're increasing suspense right up until the point that you start losing people's interest. And the more engaged your audience is, like when you're speech writing, the more engaged your audience is, the more of these little buildup phrases you can add. So yeah, you could say the majority of what Churchill is saying here is fluff. He could have taken all this and compressed it into one thing. It looked like this. We shall fight everywhere.

and we shall never surrender.

Eight words could have had the same meaning, but that wouldn't have been memorable. We wouldn't be talking about it almost a century later. Instead, Churchill took 31 words and all of these words right here, they raise the stakes of what he's saying. They're giving his speech an element of suspense right when he wants it the most. And this drumbeat of repetition, we shall fight, we shall fight, we shall fight, we shall fight. It's paving the way for his eventual climax. All of this is paving a way for what comes at the end.

We shall never surrender. Well, that was fun. Who knew that arts and crafts class would come in so clutch, huh? Well, look, I publish one of these writing examples every single week on writingexamples.com. And if you go to the site, you enter your email right at the top of the page. I'll email you the latest one whenever it goes live.