Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Many times, people ask me-- they say,

what is my writing process?

Often, I start by telling them-- by telling you--

what is not my process.

I don't have a special chair, a special room, a special desk,

special music, special incense, a special place in town.

I write wherever I am, and I write whenever

I wake up in the morning.

I had too much to drink last night,

I may not get up until 11 o'clock and write.

But usually, I wake up about 5:00 or 6:00,

and I write for three hours almost every day.

My goal has always been to write 1,000 words--

not 1,000 perfect words, just 1,000 words.

I do that on, let's say, Monday.

I wake up, 6 o'clock, write three hours, 1,000 words.

Next day, I wake up at 5 o'clock.

I start writing.

The first thing I do is reread that 1,000 words

I wrote yesterday and make very small editing on that.

And then I write my next thousand words.

And that goes on and on and on and on

until I get to the end of the novel.

When I tell you that you should write every day,

I'm speaking to exactly 99% of you.

Most people get the best work out of getting up every day

and writing for three hours.

And when I say get up--

a lot of people write in the middle of the night.

OK, fine.

If that's the best time you write,

that's what you should be writing.

You will find, if you write every day,

that the next day, ideas have bubbled up

from someplace that you had no idea were there--

ideas about oh, yeah, that reminds me of my mother.

Oh, no, a black bird will be sitting in the window.

Oh, I think that after this, they're

going to go somewhere else.

The ideas that start bubbling up are

from these unconscious places.

You've written for three hours, and then for the next 21 hours,

your unconscious is working saying, what was that about?

What was that about?

And they're-- and they reach into different parts

of yourself and bring out all of these new ideas.

After 100 days, when you go back and reread

what you've written, which is the first rewrite, you'll say,

hey, I've been mentioning that black bird all through here.

I wonder what that means.

Or I've been repeating this word so many times.

I better get rid of that.

What you're doing is you're discovering yourself.

You're discovering yourself as the storyteller

as you're writing the novel, and that's the unconscious element

of the work.

If you stick to my schedule of writing for two to three

hours every day, you will have a completed novel

in a year's time.

You'll write and write and write and finish a draft.

Maybe it's three months.

Maybe it's four months.

Then you'll start going over it and over it and over it.

Every time go over it, it's a draft,

even if you only change one word.

Then you will maybe you have a friend read it or somebody else

read it.

Maybe you'll read it out loud into a tape recorder.

Maybe you'll do a public reading, you know,

where people do these things, in coffee houses or something.

But by the end of that time, you will

have a decent draft of a short novel-- you know,

60,000, 70,000 words.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

If you've gotten up in the morning

and you're sitting down in front of a piece of paper,

in front of a screen, you start writing and nothing comes

and nothing comes and nothing comes,

and you look at the clock and it's

been an hour and 27 minutes and nothing has come yet,

the answer is to push through that.

The best way to push to do that, the most satisfying way,

is to start writing words--

and really, any words.

Just start saying, you know, I hate monkeys.

I like the zoo.

I hate pizza, but I love, you know, Italy--

you know, whatever you're going to start saying.

And hopefully, that's going to lead you to your character.

And don't ever be upset with yourself,

as long as you took the three hours to write.

It's very true in the modern world

and in education, people want methods beyond our own humanity

to do things.

How do I do this even though I can't do this?

And the answer is will.

You just will yourself to do it.

Now, I feel I'm making a pretty easy--

two, three hours every morning.

So OK, that might be really torturous.

You sit there for two or three hours,

and nothing is coming for 10 days, for 20 days.

But it's going to come, ultimately.

I promise you, it's going to come, ultimately.

But it's going to feel bad.

And the only way to continue is to have the will

to say, OK, I know this is going to work because I

know there's a novel in me.

I just have to work at it every day.

Enough days of maybe writing gibberish

will slowly turn into something, and you'll be amazed.

Wow, so this is what my character thinks.

He thinks all these crazy things.

Well, how do I start to put them together?

That's on Thursday and Friday and Saturday and next Saturday.

It will hurt sometimes.

It will feel like you're not getting anywhere.

It will feel like you're failing.

But that's OK.

Such a large part of art is failure

that it's just another day.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Many people-- maybe you--

are frightened by the blank page.

How do I start?

The reason you do this is because you've

read some great novel--

you know, "The Idiot" by Dostoevsky, "Dead Souls"

by Gogol, David Copperfield.

And it starts so beautifully, and here

you are at the blank page, and there's no beauty,

there's no sentence, there's no structure like you've

read in these great novels.

Of course, the mistake you're making

is these great novels were draft after draft after draft written

by novelists who had written for so long

that they knew all kinds of things

about writing before they sat down to this blank page.

Their first draft didn't sound like that.

Their first draft didn't work like that,

and that's what's great.

The blank page invites anybody.

Come to me.

Start writing.

Say whatever you want, doesn't matter.

Start writing.

And then you can.

You just start writing.

Maybe you write a sentence, I want

to tell a story about a guy named Bob.

Bob was a nice guy until he killed Joe Smith.

You know, that might be the story you want to tell.

You don't like it.

That sentence doesn't work well.

But you just keep writing and writing and writing.

You get to your 1,000 words, and you leave it alone.

And the next day, you get up, and you look at it again.

You say, OK, here's what I really wanted to say, maybe.

And so you start again.

There's a second blank page, but it's still a blank page.

The idea is that the blank page makes no judgment on you,

and nobody is going to read it but you.

It's there in front of you.

And do not be weighed down by a novel like "War and Peace"

that had 100 drafts because you're just

writing the first step of the first draft.

You don't have to worry about anything.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The concept of re-writing is worth spending some time on.

I don't even think about writing.

There's pre-writing, and there's rewriting.

The pre-writing is the first draft of your novel.

The re-writing is going over that novel and saying, OK,

this is working.

This is working.

I'm saying all these amazing things that I didn't really

know were there.

I'm wasting a lot of time saying this other stuff.

And you're, you know, restructuring.

Every time you go through that novel,

you might read through the whole 500-page novel

and only change one word.

Well, that's a new draft of that novel.

That's re-writing.

Sitting in front of the blank page trying

to understand what your character is going to say,

that's writing.

You may not write much.

You may not write anything.

But you know, that's the process.

You might have gotten to a certain place,

let's say, in your painting.

I'll talk about another medium.

And it's almost perfect, but it's not exactly what

you're trying to say.

You might have to look at that painting for, like, weeks.

What is this?

How does this?

I wrote a book called "John Woman."

It took me 20 years to finish that book.

I would-- and sometimes I would just sit,

I'd read everything that I'd written.

And I'd go, yeah, it's all right,

but it's not the book I want.

And I'd go, why not?

And I would-- you know, and I kept coming back to it

and back to it.

And one day, I figured it out, you know?

There's just a-- it's just that you need

to have faith in your mind.

I don't want to say heart here because the heart is

wanting to write now.

But the mind is saying, this is not working.

This is not working.

This is-- oh, wait a second.

What if-- and then maybe it starts working.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

A novel is not a project that you're

doing on a drafting table in the garage.

A novel is a living being that you're

creating out of your soul.

It may not be a perfect creature.

It may have some, you know, flaws and deficits.

It may not, in the end, work well enough to get published.

But you have to finish your novel in order

to know what's right and wrong with you writing the novel.

And when you come to the end of that year, you may decide,

at that point, I'm going to write another novel,

or you may spend the next year re-writing this one

to make it work.

But you will finish it.

I've been asked many times by many you know,

beginning writers, but also more experienced writers.

They say, well, how do you know when

you're finished with the novel?

And I say, well, you know, I write the first draft

and then the second then the third then the fourth

then the 10th then the 20th then I

read it out loud into a tape recorder

and then the 21st and 22nd.

And finally, I-- every time I've read it,

I've seen what's wrong, and I fixed that thing.

I've seen what's wrong, and I fixed that thing.

I've seen what's wrong.

But finally, in my last draft, I read the novel,

I see what's wrong, I have no idea how to fix it,

so the novel's finished.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I have written very many books.

I think it is 60 that I've published.

I love writing.

I get up every day, and I start writing.

I start telling stories.

I start trying to understand and describe

and to plumb the depths.

The reason I tell people that they should write every day

is the same reason that Sigmund Freud told people

that they should be in psychoanalysis

five to seven days a week.

Go see your therapist.

Lie on the couch.

Free associate.

And then the next day, you realize,

oh, that free association from the day

before has opened up new avenues.

And it happens day after day after day.

And so I've written almost every day for over 30 years.

In that time, I've gotten deeper and deeper and deeper

into my own unconscious, and so my stories have changed,

have grown, have gotten deeper in many ways.

And so me writing today is different

than me writing yesterday, and me writing tomorrow

will be different than me writing today.

If you make the commitment to write every day--

every day, every day, every day, as the children say--

then you will write differently today than you will tomorrow.

And the day after tomorrow, you will write differently

than you write tomorrow.

It changes day to day to day.

You will get deeper and deeper, better and better.

And that is-- it will be great for your writing,

but it will also be great for you, as a person,

being able to understand this incredibly complex world

that we live in.

I've shared with you my process, and I

hope that you can find your own within the structure

that I presented.

But if you can't, if you have to work outside of that,

if you wake up one day and say, oh, I feel a novel coming on,

and you have to sit down for the next week and write it,

that's fine.

I have complete respect for that.

This is a MasterClass.

But inside this MasterClass, we are equals.