How to Tell a Killer Story (The Robert Greene Blueprint)

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 you're making them feel it and tell me how do you create that well um so there's there's several things involved so what ends up happening is when I think of the best-selling non-fiction writers of the last 20 25 years Robert Green 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 write of pass.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 um all of my books are story based chapters begin with the story to kind of ground you in the sort of Timeless element of of being a human being right 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 and I try to make the style 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 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 Machi 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 that's what I'm aiming for in the

style not just in in the content the style has to have that kind of Timeless resonance and as you think about those stories CU 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 that's the whole that's the work the key to everything and honestly um well I mean there's more to it but that's 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 to 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 out 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 the drama of people throughout history having to struggle with that and dying for a cause or making a mistake and dying is 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 they they were they were killed for expressing their

opinion my God that that that story you know that 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 eye 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 at a professor at USC and said I've had I've had no luck so um 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 it's something I'm not good at a lot of things but research is something I've I've done for many many years

and I'm good at I'm good at finding things and recognizing a story so in 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 man there was one book I found that I used a lot in in the 48

Laws an absolutely fantastic but way out of print although somebody might have brought it back called the power of the charlatan okay it was written by somebody I can't remember if it's a man or a woman in the in the 30s a German who was seeing Nazism rise and they were they never mention Nazism in their book but you could see that as they're talking about these charlatans from the 17th century they were thinking of goal right you know it was just the was a gold mine 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 's chair and you just read and you read and you read and you research and you research tell me about that process well um so there's there's several things involved in in the process the first is finding the book H there's a lot of sifting through garbage things that aren't 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 trigged and you start reading 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 um 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 you

know 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 so it's ingrained in me for some reason sure I know the writer Vladimir Nabokov used a note card system I know Napoleon had a note card 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 um let's say I'm writing a chapter um in in the laws of human nature on envy and the the story that I used for Envy is about Mary Shelly the author of Frankenstein sure and that relationship with that woman who was very envious of her so I read a thick biography about Mary Shelly 500 600 page the elements that have

to deal with Envy in her life are scattered throughout the book so I have take all the little parts of the 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 so 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 you know sometimes it's like a book that I use in human nature there

would be books about psychology olog that would be very Elemental and basic um there's a man named Hines kood who's a psych 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 SI through this very abstract book and pick out the things that I can make real and and put into lame in terms as your writing a book let's use the example of envy and Mary Shelly 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 it's a mix of things when I read Mary Shelly uh I was fascinated by her because she's married to the poet Shelly her parents were extremely famous Mary wal stonecraft was her mother um her father was is a very famous writer so I was attracted to the story and then I read it I believe I don't 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 this and I go in search of a story and sometimes it's very difficult sometimes I find it you know pretty quickly um so I have uh I 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 did she fit in this book at the time I didn't really know and then as I develop the chapters and then I come upon my chapter on the demo 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 I and I wanted something better to lead the chapter in I was scratching and I was clawing my way I was searching here and there and that I saw a blurb on the back of one of my books referencing this other book and it was a quote from the from the film director um verer herock yeah the he wrote the blurb that's interesting so I looked up that book I

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 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 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 um yeah it's a mix of things us it you know you think at this point I I'm kind of like Houdini after eight books and wiggling out of this is my eth book and 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' think I'd have that ingrained in my head every time have faith but I don't you think it's

not 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 H 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 use the word better how do you think your words

have 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 H so when you're younger and I wrote 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 a WI a spirit that's very fast and I could

write and things would come to me very quickly I've lost that okay 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 of 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 I try and always go deeper and deeper and deeper so the laws of human nature ended it being a long book um it's because

I really wanted to get at the core of what I was writing about I didn't want 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 try and get better and closer and closer thank God because the the shortness of it is what makes it was what makes such a best seller but now I I put more thinking into things you know 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 a higher level in 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 your s in your late 30s that would have helped you get here no uh everything happens for a reason if I had my experience now back in when I was in my late 30s it wouldn't have worked it worked at the time everything happens in its season but um I wrote about this in

Mastery the value of you know people now say the 10,000 hour rules been debugged which is a bunch of nonsense it's not 10,000 hours the number that we have to fetishes 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 and 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 they're strange ideas they're not

things that people normally think about and um it comes from all of this work and all this experience tell me about that let's follow the word strange how do strange ideas show up for you out of nowhere um you know like like an intuition um so I I wrote a chapter in in the sublime book um on on our relationship to the past and to history and and um people have this idea of history is this kind of dead thing and I have this idea that history is very alive H 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 in this way I've read books that talk about history can have that effect but they're very academic and they and and and they're they're abstract and they're hard to put connect the dots together right and so I was trying to

express this feeling I have sometimes when I watch a movie um 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 try I 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 um 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

they were there before you were born same but when you see them now they're very alive and so they they kind of predate your birth but they have this aliveness to them they have particularly from your Early Childhood they wow 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 any nowhere because I had that feeling when I watch films but yeah I don't know that should give you an idea 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 I can't connect to them right so um you know some philosophy will seem on the face value very abstract um and then if I think about it deeply if I think about what kard 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 I'm I'm there's this woman who wrote a book on

on day mon 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 Yung Stu blah blah blah blah I can't relate it to my life sure 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 I you want the sensations the visceral exper exper is how do you create that in the writing well um 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 it's exaggerating but a lot of times until I I feel like I'm getting that feeling I'm cutting everything out that's extraneous I have the 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 that directed her everywhere and the feeling of Fate 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 or you're inviting the reader into the story you're making them feel it certain Mark or certain way of words that you use that grab them and say pull you into the story and you focus it very deeply on on the theme it will have that kind of visceral effect and sometimes you know I get it really good sometimes I miss it maybe by a little bit and I do the same on 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

talking to them almost putting your arm around them and being The Guiding Authority who's much closer to a friend yes so so first of all there's you have to be accepting of people you can't be judging so the judging moralistic writer is looking down on the reader h i 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 just an evil side to it there's a dark side to it I won't deny it and the tendency for people now 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 the 14th oh my God makavelli 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 to I'm treating them like a child and instead I'm presenting to him them 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 um that this is something I'm

not going to practice I can't you know i' 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 but preaching to people never changes that never leads to anything important instilling with them other ways of thinking that can change your life right 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 MH 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 they I

have to come attack them from and give them the the sense that they're discovering it on their own but the other thing is I genuinely feel 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 straight 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 um this is before you wrote 4 I didn't write

48 Laws until I was basically almost 40 when it was published and uh 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 suicide 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 read 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 for Mastery so I'm I'm being authentic in that feeling I really um 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 is 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 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 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 no 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 H you have to bring yourself and 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 the culture that you live in plus you know language itself yeah 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 um my wife she she edits my my chapters and sometimes she she notices how strange she likes to try and you know make it a

little more not so strange what do you mean by strange I have rhythms I I like um 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 is not literary it's like a way of talking right 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 my my thinking goes sometimes it's it's awkward and it doesn't communicate and I take it out

but so those are kind of natural things that you have but for the 48 Laws the kind of disguised anger in it kind of slight bit of hostility the kind of violence didn't veiled in the words in the language it's something very me and it came out but then I saw oh this is good and so I used it and I and I kept using it I felt like this is going to work and I and then that kind of disguised anger isn't going to work so much for seduction but the kind of vment of

the writing style the kind of urgency the sense of hey out there people can be some 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 the kind of anger and violence of 48 was in appropriate seduction 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 book so I've had to kind of each

time find away 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 to almost Galvanize you into action well I've talked about that in Mastery um we all have dark energy we all have the 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 for good reason I I imagine but we repress it so deeply that um 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 puts anger into their work into a film into a novel or even into music people love it they drawn to it because they're so repressed inside and there's something Primal about anger there's something the the the the Mind turns off in a state of anger and

it's just a 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 often times the brain is just blocking because it's trying to be perfect or polished but you have to um you can't just vent you can't just rage 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 here was a man with a lot of anger and rightly so you know he was a hustler a lowlife 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 that he that of of blacks in in America particularly in the 40s and 50s it was pretty radical pretty 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 word 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 he controlled it it's what I call like controlled rage controlled anger is 10 times more powerful than just venting you feel you feel the undertone of anger in there and you 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 ID 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 teenager in your mind is more open and malleable there were probably writers who had a big influence on me one of them would obviously be friederick n my favorite philosopher of all time some 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 of your thinking was 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 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 and besides which you know which is what I'm writing about now he was also going insane totally and by the end his mind was UN unspooling and and the style got even Wilder and more exciting and interesting I've always probably the number one influence on my writing St but also my probably my favorite equivalent as a novelist is Fodor doeski um read a lot of him when I was younger and he has a style like that as well

that's in in the novel form where it just feels so alive so natural so real he brings you into a story and like one of my favorite novels of his is the possessed I think it's also translated the demons but I like the title possessed what an amazing novel that is and it's kind of terrifying they have all these insane characters that are so vivid to this day I'll think of Koloff the guy who decided he's going to kill himself when he turns 30 and shatov and of course of stav roin the greatest most fantastic

evil person in the history of of novels I think these memorable characters but they're so alive he has such a great style so conversation 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 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 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 know you you feel what I'm trying to express and that makes it alive um 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 on a video I created about alive ideas versus dead ideas and um a dead idea is something you haven't really thought about right you you've heard it from some other people um 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 this these are the cliches the conventions of this kind of academic writing okay um so it's dead it it it doesn't Sparkle with life because life is fluid life is changing

nothing ever stays the same so if you 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 from to make it alive to bring it into into Focus you know so I I can't remember what Phil I think it was Simone vile 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 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 um it could be the opposite so when you look at things from different angles they start to come to life as being 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's 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 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 not cards and I think 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 um 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 Whittle 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 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 card's very laborious process tell me about that that laborious process well you know so we'll take this the Harry Tubman for example because it's fresh in my mind I I I read a biography of her and what all often happens is I realize there 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 so 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 have to work on it over and over and over again and then I go on to the 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 a first draft at going through the cards writing the story writing the keys writing in the other sections and

um this says a couple months and now the really hard start stuff starts to be now now's the hard part yeah now's the hard 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 off operating on a slightly different track than 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 and I write the interpretation of the story and it's not right it doesn't feel right and I rewrite it and then I and then I realize a chapter has to have a whole feeling to it has to be an organic hole this idea here is repeated over there I have to change that I have to make

everything have to come up with a different idea I can't repeat what was in the interpretation of the Harry tman story so it 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 reached maybe four or five months and and you're getting closer to the end but you're not there you're like somebody climbing up a mount no and you can see the top but you're tired and you slip and the Oxygen's Getting Thinner and you fall and you have to come back

up and and and you 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 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 unsu blime they're like academic Toms

yeah because it's it's a concept that became very big in the art world and Aesthetics you know Dera talks about all these Heavies and some of they have interesting ideas don't I'm not going to knock it but it's 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 the writing has to

have that that so I'm 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 in eight to my editor and the editor keeps going these are great this is even better than the last one 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 sule kind of Falls so I have these standards I have to keep it going I have to keep it Sublime and exciting and

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 and and 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 and complains but what are they complain about the cost the cost more tell them it's a work of art yeah I don't know quite where this come from but there were like um

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 in the T there would be like an interpretation of that passage I don't remember if it was on the margin are not you know obviously the Torah you're reading it's in Hebrew right but um so but and maybe the interpretations for in English I don't remember I have a tour at home and there's uh 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 additions by Rabbi Scholars and then on the bottom there's interpretations and I really like reading it CU 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 um in when I I studied ancient Greek in college and you would have a passage of of thides and you yourself would write on the margins sure the ideas and translations and

then um I things like the iching that I that I I used to love a lot they have kind of a similar structure so the idea of of having things on the side the kind of comment that aren't my writing the 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 but they're not like 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 in power that these esops fables and others that are so element such Elemental lessons about power so I thought putting those on the side be really great how much do you think of creativity as a process of a kind of divine revelation that just boom idea gets aird dropped into your brain versus it's just the emerging property of extreme sweat and toil it's uh a mix of things um 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 no doubt you know and you know I took drugs when I was in college and I had very wild interesting creative thoughts open the doors of perception yeah right but um that create kind of creativity isn't a kind of creativity that leads to anything that TR truly lasts so I mean there is people like Arthur rampo who's very young whose poetry still has has incredible appeal and power to and I love it still um

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 noted 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 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 in 18 so the people who are truly creative are able to grind or able to learn be able to discipline and then they're 3032 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 not mo didn't live that long but so it's a mix of of discipline of learning of Rich ideas is and then letting it go and being experimental and open and fluid and permeable that creates 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 finger spitzen I love that word the fingertip feel yeah yeah it's better in German finger spiten it's perfect in German yeah

when you have that fingertip feel things will feel like their air dropped 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 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 right 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 um if if you can when you're a child or if you have children and uh you pick the child up and you throw it around or you put them on your back and you Le 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 you take 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 our brain operates by continually telling us stories and so mimicking that process and and getting people on a journey in which there are elements of surprise is so Primal that it it you know it

it never loses its effect and so um my trajectory was I had um 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 I taught me a lot about writing but I I hated the fact that what you wrote lasted for about three days it was disposable and I was 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 uh was not well I'm from Los Angeles and I'd been teaching English in Spain at the time and I came back here to be with him but also um 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 um through my sister who was like a 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 is a screenwriter very nice very wonderful people um and my idea was I'd be writing screen plays 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 um people from from Mexico or Central America to the United States they're called coyotes and she wanted to write do a screenplay about that she said Robert can you do research for it and then I'd go to the UCLA library and I you know hone some of

my 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 they if you read them you you'd giggle yeah because I liked 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 go Robert you you know you should really think about maybe writing for the theater well yeah I love the theater and then I'd go home I realize they would actually it was kind

of a dick what were they getting at what was 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 the the you know the popul sense to 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 I didn't like the hypocrisy the power games the uh the fact that um you had no control

over what you did people would eight other people would come in and change your writing and I hated the kind of the falseness the fakeness of it where everything was everyone was oh I love your work it's so fantastic it's wonderful it's great it's incredible it just seemed really false and um it didn't fit me I I'm somebody who likes kind of realness and um and I didn't like the movies people were making I wasn't relating to it so it was bad bad fit and um but it taught me about entertainment it taught me about

gave me an element of how to create stories right disciplin me in that sense when you write a screenplay you can't um 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 and some people aren't good at it so it got me into the idea that I can't just tell everybody what what's going on I have to show it sure through action demonstrated that had a impact on my writing

so it taught me some Elemental lessons how would that show up in your writing to 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 keres 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 and Etc and then and I had

the story of this one man a typical story is they gave him all this money they they gave him they called him a saint and then they executed and the idea was he he 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 threatened to it but I I had to tell it in a way that that just cut out all of the internal monologue I just focused on the action and I just showed here's this he does all this great things

for the city he saved and then they behead him t t 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 he saved the city he did all these valorous things and they execute him yeah you know so that that's an example I mean 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

with film equality 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 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 is for but um and it's not something that's very in fashion these days so maybe I'm going to give people bad advice but there I believe there should be like a theme there should be like not a moral but this is sort of the less and 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 Conor of somebody who's you know bar barbaric or whatever every detail is sort of like a hologram has kind of like the the whole of it is embedded in the details um 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 get you want to use I like a lot of physical cues like people can relate to to to seeing things to giving a very good visual picture

they can also relate to the smells to the sounds so so creating a very physical environment gets people into the stories and draws them in and and you want to like if if the character is 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 that 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 this is happening you know a relatability where there's some emotion involved 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 staying there it's something that everybody can relate to but then you also hear hey the universals actually in the particular well you know um 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 we all face those things yeah that that's the 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 they're real life they feel alive and 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 that's sort of an example of I want to end with what you call your secret ambition where you say to make things such as reading studying the classics 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 um you know I've been blessed since I'm was young and grew up in a different era in which um 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 you're transported out of your little world you transported into a fantasy world you transported into the real world into other countries into the past and it's like a Magic Carpet Ride so I remember um when I was a kid I I couldn't fathom this idea that human beings existed 500,000 years ago and what were they like and what their was

their world like you look around now we're driving cars we've got you know toasters talk about the ' 50s and refrigerators and television there were no Teslas back then no how's 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 that hopefully you develop as a child but because kids are so program now and and they don't have the freedom to discover things on their

own and everything is fed to them that I think people grow up and they get kind of cranky and they become kind of desperate because they don't have any inner 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 enchanted 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 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 LW of power they're like 10 11 years old and now they're like looking at books about Julius Caesar and Louis the 14th and you know Haley solos and

all the other characters in the book that I written about they got excited by history so um 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 mindblowing 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 I was so high it was great it was fantastic then I would read it the next day oh this is crap

or I would read it 10 years later 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 you can get that feeling of excitement and things will be good and 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 you 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 if you got it you're 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 um 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 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 accomplishing a book and writing it well and getting it done and realizing despite the kind of dumbness in our culture writers are still revered for a reason because it's something very ancient and because we all use language and to talk and communicate but people who actually are able to do that in 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 you've done it people will look at you differently you'll have a you'll look at yourself differently it'll last for 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 um you know it's it's particular to the 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 yeah okay so I want to just I have a mission and so my mission is to get to that 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 and digging and digging and digging 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 the book has sold well over a million copies by now in in 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 can't just be an intellectual exercise it has to be a complete body emotional experience for me right so I can't write about things I don't feel so I have to feel 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 GOI desert and I

was going to travel to Antarctica and I was going to swim with dolphins and I was going to go underwater and and submarines and have all these and now I can't do any of it I can I can 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 Burg or something you're not going to be thinking about Antarctica in the Gobi desert I have

to make it something that you can relate to to the 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 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 that 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 Green thank you very much thank you for your your earnestness and your sincerity it's really it's really beautiful the passion that you have for your work the passion for you H that you have for this craft it really stuck out well thank you it's um 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 was it was fun thank you Winston Church

Hill 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 SP roughly an hour working on them for every minute that he spoke so if he spoke for 8 minutes he'd spend 8 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 church Hill'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 Church Hill is 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 church show 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 access but Church Hill 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 add living 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 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 IMM material so he could take fight in 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 engage your audiences like when you're speech writing the more engage your audiences the more of these little buildup phrases you can add so yeah you could say the majority of what Church Hill 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 raised 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 drum beat 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 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 writing examples.com and if you go to the site you enter email right at the top of the page I'll email you the latest one whenever it goes live