How I Write Clips @PerellClips

Gustave Flaubert was a method writer. Robert Greene says that's what makes Madame Bovary so alive: "Flaubert was this creature of the right word, and he would sometimes spend three days trying to figure out the right word for this one sentence." "He gets very much caught up in his stories. So when he wrote Madame Bovary, he was, like, literally becoming Madame Bovary. He becomes the characters that he writes about." "But at the same time, he's a very careful, conscientious writer who's pouring over every sentence. They're not contradictory. The two go together." "But because he's inside her world and he's a very disciplined writer who focuses on how language can create a world, he's able to bring the two together. That's sort of the dance that the greatest writers go through."

"There's no points awarded for difficulty in writing." "If you have to reread the paragraph four times, that's not on you. That's the author's fault." "It's supposed to be easy to read. And you can be deep and insightful and communicate well." "A lot of the philosophers that have been translated over the years weren't the best writers. They're very deep thinkers. You could learn a tremendous amount from them, but you really have to crank the gears in your brain to get it." "I think there's other people who can tell a story that can be equally profound that you can just get." -Morgan Housel

"Nobody thinks they're very good at it while they're doing it." Michael Pollan has been writing for 40 years. He's written multiple best-sellers. And yet: "Every time you start, every time you face that white screen, is, you know, why doesn't this come more easily?" "There's a tendency to think if it's hard, it's not for me, or I'm not good at it, or I'm not the right person. But it's hard for everybody, to one degree or another." "And I still struggle, you know, every time I sit down to write, play games with myself, how much I have to produce before I can go have a snack." "So just because you find it difficult doesn't mean you're not born to do it."

Robert Greene is rereading Dostoevsky to make sense of America today: "I was reading Demons. It's all about the nihilists in Russia who were kind of the starting point for the Russian revolution and a period where nihilism was in its ascendancy. And I kind of compare it to what's going on in America right now." "He loves the marginalized in culture. He loves the prostitutes that everyone's forgotten about. He loves criminals. He literally loves them in a Christ-like way." "Even the evil characters, the villains, he brings to life with this sort of love. That universe of not judging is an act of grace." "I read Brothers Karamazov when I was 16. I probably didn't understand a word of it, but I was so entranced by this guy."

Patrick Collison @patrickc

a week ago

Brothers Karamazov was Einstein’s favorite novel, a verdict he shared with Freud, Hillary Clinton, and Murakami. Dostoyevsky was Pope Francis’s favorite author. Indeed, he approvingly quoted Elder Zosima; perhaps an interesting case of art molding life. At the risk of betraying

254 369 5K 651K 6K

Computers did to architecture what AI is doing to writers: "When you had to design a building, it was this process of working on paper and sketching things out. It was like art in a way." "At some point, it got computerized. You program it, and out comes your building." "You go to a hotel, and the faucet is in a location that doesn't make any sense. The whole building is designed that way. It's a formula." "People now don't know how to write because they depend on AI. They become lazy." "The whole art of architecture is disintegrating because people don't know how to design and sketch anymore." -Robert Greene

"Now things are so expensive, and there's so much pressure to make money." Robert Greene on why it's harder to make a living as an artist today: "Back in the day, you could be an artist and life wasn't so expensive. You could afford to write something a little bit unconventional and you'd still make a little bit of money, but you could still afford your loft in New York." "If you're a writer, how are you gonna make money? Well, you could become a professor, and that's pretty soul sucking. Or you can write books. Do you know how hard that is?" "It's easy for me. I am so lucky. But for most writers, you get a $20,000 to $50,000 advance. I have to write the book in a year, otherwise I can't live on it. And how often do you see royalties?" "So you have to write the book quickly, and you have to make a living. And that's what I think is making writing suffer, because it's no longer something that you can just take your time with."

Taylor Tomlinson on the key to good crowd work: "I like to do crowd work at my live shows, but I do it in a very structured way. I usually sprinkle it throughout the show every 15 to 20 minutes." "I ask the audience a specific question that is related to the hour. So it's generally something that I do wanna know. I think that's kind of the key to crowd work." "If it goes weird, I'll deflect or I'll make it about me. I never want anyone to feel bad or regret talking to me." "Sometimes it goes somewhere. Sometimes it doesn't. It's why I'm so meticulous about writing out my set and having clear transitions so that I can get back into the hour really seamlessly."

"People have forgotten about stand up, the actual art of it." This is what Mark Normand told me about how comedy has changed: "It's a bittersweet thing because before, you had the industry. When's David Letterman gonna put me on? When's The Tonight Show gonna put me on? You had to wait for the industry, but there was a lot less work. You can do the same hour for ten years." "Now it's, I gotta cut a clip. I gotta tweet. I gotta post something. I gotta write about the news. I gotta write my own act. I gotta do a podcast. I gotta do another guy's podcast. I gotta go on the road." "Now you can make your own career, but you're gonna do a lot more work." @marknorm

Ruzy @0xRuzy

2 weeks ago

Conan O'Brien exposes the brutal truth: everyday internet creators have completely destroyed the late-night TV monopoly "Now you're competing with... hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of people are making funny videos" "NBC in particular capitalized on it... you

17 62 743 62K 336

@trimsplicecut Thanks for watching and sharing!

Mark Normand on the difference between Larry David and Seinfeld: "Larry has a darker bend. He's a little more sex, race, Judaism, religion. He'll go deeper into that stuff." "You see it on his show. He's got shows about Nazis, and there's one episode where his shoes get muddy, so he goes to the Holocaust museum and takes the old shoes, which is hilarious, but Seinfeld would never do that." "Seinfeld's more like zoning in on minutiae." "He has a great one where he's out to dinner as a double date, him and his wife, some other guy and his wife. And the other guy goes, 'I'll get the check.' And he goes, 'Wow. Thank you. Thank you, Bob.' And the wife goes, 'Well, aren't you gonna thank me?' And he's like, 'Why would I thank you? It's his money.'"

"Faith without doubt is a dogma and dogmas are very dangerous." Novelist Elif Shafak says the same about atheists who are certain of their non-belief: "People who are very sure of their atheism, they want to get rid of faith." "I think faith can also be a secular concept. It doesn't always have to be a religious concept." "When you start writing a novel, you really don't know what you're doing, but something tells you to keep going. For me, that's a secular act of faith." "When you fall in love with someone, you don't know if that person is the right person for you, but you do go with it." "I am interested in people who are not afraid of saying I don't know."

@smoot_fit @david_perell Thank you!

"Science fiction isn't a genre. It's a setting." Andy Weir, author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary, on what we get wrong about sci-fi: "You can have a science fiction romance. You can have a science fiction action movie. You can have a science fiction drama." "Isaac Asimov made a science fiction noir detective series, Caves of Steel. Noir detective is a genre, but the setting was science fiction."

Andy Weir began writing The Martian as a series of blog posts. It ended up becoming a best-seller. Here's the story of how he did it: "I'll just post [The Martian] to, like, basically a blog post, and I'll make it a serialized story, kinda like the old days of… Sherlock Holmes[, which] was serialized storytelling in the Strand magazine." "People said, like, well, I love your book, but I hate your website, which is fair." "I put it on Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing. And so I charged the minimum, which at the time was 99¢. So I'm like, okay, everybody. You can read it on my website. You can download the e-reader version from my website, or you can pay Amazon a buck to put it on your Kindle for you. And people paid the buck." "People said like, ah, now here's an opportunity for me to give money. I'm gonna buy the book even though I've already read it." "So Amazon's automated system went well, this is selling well, which popped it into the list of, like, top sellers, which got other people's attention, which… so it snowballed from there."

"It doesn't put butts in seats." A set on late-night TV used to be a comedian's "I made it" moment. Mark Normand says those days are gone: "You work on the set, and then it comes out. And you're like, hey. That got maybe a 100,000 views, but then you can just shoot a video of you on a comedy club, post it, and it'll get a million." "You only do it now just for the fun of it." "I hate to say that because it's an American tradition." @marknorm

R.F. Kuang teaches her students to write emotions without naming the emotion itself: "Emotions are not these abstract concepts that are applied to the body. All feelings are is how your body is reacting to some piece of information." "We did this exercise where I passed out these kindergarten level silhouette diagrams of the human body. Suppose you just got a call and you got a promotion. Tell me where that sits in the body. Describe only what is happening on a physical level." "About half the people in the class were like, when I get a piece of really good news, I am immediately scared about, like, when is the other shoe going to drop?" "You have a much more interesting puddle of feelings, multiple feelings that are going on at once that is so much more interesting to read about than just Bob got the call, that he was promoted, and he felt great. That gives the reader nothing."

"I did seven eulogies by the time I was 32." Harlan Coben's life has been marked by loss. That's become the dominant theme across his books. "Agatha Christie had dead people. Philip Roth had the Jewish experience... I write about missing people, I think, because there's such hope there." "When someone goes missing, there's a chance you can be redeemed, a chance you can still find them. When someone's murdered, they're dead." "Justice doesn't really interest me. Retribution doesn't really interest me. Punishment doesn't really interest me. What interests me is hope."

"You make a rough version of the movie seven or eight times before you go to final animation." A behind the scenes look at how Pixar makes its movies: "When I got there, I was like, what's the secret sauce? Is it the people or is it the system? After about six months, I realized it's really both." "I wrote the first draft of Toy Story 3. We made what they call a set of reels, which is a rough animatic of the movie. And then based on the feedback that we got to that, I wrote another ten more drafts, and then we made a second set of reels." "What's great about the Pixar system is that you write, and then you direct, and then you edit...There's a way that you beta test your story." "It's sort of a series of concentric rings. So the first set of reels, which is usually pretty terrible, you show to twenty, twenty five, 30 people. And then you always wanna preserve fresh eyes." "By the time you get up to your seventh or eighth screening, you're showing it to everybody and his grandmother that you can pull in." -Michael Arndt (Toy Story 3 Writer)

@DavidClairB Thanks for sharing!

Francine Prose wrote a book about Peggy Guggenheim. She told me about the "ditzy" heiress who saved modern art: "Men of her generation would invite me to lunch to tell me how stupid she was. And I would go like, I don't think she was that stupid." "She left Europe with all this art packed up in her crates with her household laundry stuff to avoid paying taxes." "A lot of Picassos and Giacomettis would have been taken by the Nazis. And that was really their definition of degenerate art. And she saved it. I mean, the fact that it exists at all." "She had a great eye. I mean, she was the first person who really got Jackson Pollock."