Latest / How To Talk To Humans / What Stephen King Teaches Us About Communication, Writing & Success -Part 1

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What Stephen King Teaches Us About Communication, Writing & Success -Part 1 · How To Talk To Humans

• 0:02
  Larry Wilson: Hi, this is Larry Wilson, and this is How to Talk to Humans.
• 0:07
  Larry Wilson: This is the podcast that shows you how to improve your communication skills.
• 0:13
  Larry Wilson: Are you looking to get a better job?
• 0:15
  Larry Wilson: Are you looking to find a relationship?
• 0:18
  Larry Wilson: Are you trying to do things in your life that have frustrated you and eluded you so far?
• 0:24
  Larry Wilson: I can show you so easily how to change that.
• 0:27
  Larry Wilson: Now, I can only do it with humans.
• 0:30
  Larry Wilson: If you're looking to deal with vampires or zombies extraterrestrials, this is not the show.
• 0:36
  Larry Wilson: But if you're really looking to improve your communication skills, I can show you what I've learned for 40 years in the show business working with the biggest celebrities and superstars in the world, and their secrets are unbelievable.
• 0:54
  Larry Wilson: What I'm going to be teaching you during the course of this podcast every week are tools that you can use to communicate toward success.
• 1:09
  Larry Wilson: So I tell you this because that idea of a main character changing their need, that's completely legitimate, honorable, doable.
• 1:23
  Larry Wilson: You can do that.
• 1:24
  Larry Wilson: You might start off telling people, oh yeah, I wanted to be the most successful car salesman in America.
• 1:36
  Larry Wilson: And then at some point, which would be essentially like your midpoint in your story, you realized, oh, I can never compete with these huge companies and these this.
• 1:46
  Larry Wilson: And then you decided, well, I would like to become the most famous used car dealer in my state because of my honesty.
• 2:04
  Larry Wilson: I may not sell the most cars, I may not make the most money, but I want to have a reputation that everyone knows.
• 2:11
  Larry Wilson: Oh, you want to know who the most honest guy in this car is so-and-so.
• 2:16
  Larry Wilson: So maybe you could change the, maybe that's how you change your need, or it could be anything else.
• 2:21
  Larry Wilson: Or maybe you decide you meet a person and fall in love with them and get married, have a children, and you decide I don't want to be a car salesman anymore.
• 2:34
  Larry Wilson: I don't want to be away from my family.
• 2:36
  Larry Wilson: And so you come up with something that allows you to stay at home.
• 2:41
  Larry Wilson: I I can't write your story for you, and uh, you know, you can do whatever you like.
• 2:47
  Larry Wilson: But bringing this all full circle, I come back to Carolyn Bick's uh book about she um I I haven't read her book yet, uh, but I read a fascinating article about her.
• 3:04
  Larry Wilson: She was given an opportunity that had never ever happened before.
• 3:10
  Larry Wilson: Stephen King agreed to let her look in his uh archives.
• 3:16
  Larry Wilson: I guess, you know, in the days before computers, writers would type up manuscripts on a typewriter on paper, and they would keep every draft they wrote.
• 3:30
  Larry Wilson: Now, I know from having done this myself, uh not an easy thing to do.
• 3:37
  Larry Wilson: But sometimes before computers, we would cut up paper to change pieces of writing around.
• 3:46
  Larry Wilson: You don't realize how much easier it is now with computers.
• 3:49
  Larry Wilson: You highlight something, you drag it, move it to a different part, no problem.
• 3:53
  Larry Wilson: Or there's a big chunk you think shouldn't be in there, you highlight it, delete, you're fine.
• 3:58
  Larry Wilson: Not so in the old days.
• 4:00
  Larry Wilson: But apparently, King kept all of his original drafts, not just the first draft, but many subsequent drafts.
• 4:10
  Larry Wilson: And of course, when he goes back to reread them, he's handwriting notes on them stuff.
• 4:15
  Larry Wilson: So this woman, Carolyn Bix, gets a chance, is invited.
• 4:19
  Larry Wilson: I can't remember exactly what the impetus for this whole thing was, but she takes him up on it.
• 4:26
  Larry Wilson: So she's gonna go and wade through all these manuscripts and read all these things.
• 4:30
  Larry Wilson: And what she discovers shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone.
• 4:37
  Larry Wilson: But it's fascinating that uh King's first drafts were sometimes radically different than the finished published book.
• 4:53
  Larry Wilson: And if you take nothing else away from this training here, if one of the most successful writers in history, I mean, uh I would think King has to be number one or in the top five of published authors in terms of how many books he's sold.
• 5:17
  Larry Wilson: Literally tens of millions of copies of his books.
• 5:23
  Larry Wilson: And he's just like you.
• 5:28
  Larry Wilson: Although I will say this, I think he may be more disciplined as a writer than you.
• 5:34
  Larry Wilson: He writes every day.
• 5:37
  Larry Wilson: Doesn't matter if he's inspired or not.
• 5:43
  Larry Wilson: That's what real writers do every day.
• 5:46
  Larry Wilson: You write, you get some pages down.
• 5:49
  Larry Wilson: You may go back later and go, oh, that was terrible.
• 5:52
  Larry Wilson: Fine, no one's ever gonna see it.
• 5:55
  Larry Wilson: Especially in these days of computers where nothing's printed out, you know, they have to open a file you have.
• 6:02
  Larry Wilson: But that discipline of writing every day was a great habit to get in.
• 6:10
  Larry Wilson: As she starts to go through this, she sees uh very interesting things.
• 6:16
  Larry Wilson: Um she said she was surprised that so much of King's um, you know, King's his genre's horror, and uh she realized from reading his stuff, and I think also from talking to him, she had access to him, that he built the horror a lot of times on word choice and the sound and the music of the words.
• 6:54
  Larry Wilson: Um and uh he told her, he said, When I rewrite, I have to be aware of word reps.
• 7:07
  Larry Wilson: I assume he means repetition, and unintentional rhymes.
• 7:14
  Larry Wilson: Anything that will clang on the reader's ear.
• 7:19
  Larry Wilson: Now, something I've brought up again and again here is that uh when people ask me why what I have against emojis, I don't have anything against emojis.
• 7:33
  Larry Wilson: Um people ask me what I have against putting funny insertions into an email or plays on words or something.
• 7:45
  Larry Wilson: King is describing something that clangs on the reader's ear.
• 7:50
  Larry Wilson: I describe it differently, but it's the exact same thing.
• 7:54
  Larry Wilson: I can assure you that anything that interrupts the reader's attention, even literally for a microsecond, and this is why punctuation is critical, because I know that's very popular with young people to text with no punctuation, no capitalization.
• 8:21
  Larry Wilson: But if you've ever read a text from someone where you had to read it five times before you could figure out are they talking about something in the past or something that's going to happen?
• 8:31
  Larry Wilson: Are they talking about something they said or someone said to them, or something they're thinking, or something they want me to know?
• 8:38
  Larry Wilson: When you have to interrupt the flow of communication to figure out what's actually going on, you diminish the power of your communication.
• 8:50
  Larry Wilson: And that's why I don't ever want you to do anything.
• 8:54
  Larry Wilson: Now, in your personal life, you can do whatever you want.
• 8:58
  Larry Wilson: Uh, you know, I've said this before that about emojis.
• 9:02
  Larry Wilson: There's a study that found that uh people weren't aware that they were saying this, but the the study showed that people thought that others who wrote using emojis in their email or in their text were less intelligent.
• 9:22
  Larry Wilson: Doesn't mean they are less intelligent.
• 9:24
  Larry Wilson: It doesn't mean that everyone thinks, but a great majority of people felt that way.
• 9:30
  Larry Wilson: So only reason I mention it, bring it up to you, is if you would like to not be thought of as less intelligent, then don't use them.
• 9:40
  Larry Wilson: If you're dealing with someone who's your best friend from sixth grade, well, you can do anything you want.
• 9:46
  Larry Wilson: Of course you can, but they're not going to think that it has to do with people who maybe you don't know or you have only a business relationship with, something like that.
• 9:54
  Larry Wilson: But King in many ways puts it in a way that's much clearer than the way I said he says, I don't want something that will clang on the reader's ear.
• 10:07
  Larry Wilson: And what he means, of course, is it pulls them out of the suspension of disbelief when you're reading and it's very real, something that just strikes a wrong tone.
• 10:20
  Larry Wilson: Um and it's uh she gives an example of uh one of King's stories.
• 10:29
  Larry Wilson: Again, uh if you don't know these, you may really enjoy this.
• 10:33
  Larry Wilson: My complaint with him is in recent years, I find that a lot of his writing, you know, when you get to a certain level of fame and fortune and power, it's really hard for people to say no to you.
• 10:50
  Larry Wilson: Um, some I've heard people argue about why the first three Star Wars movies are so great and then they turn to crap.
• 11:02
  Larry Wilson: Well, by the time they make the fourth Star Wars, George Lucas is king of the world, and no one's gonna say to him, Oh, that uh Jar Jar Binks character is dreadful.
• 11:22
  Larry Wilson: What good can come of you telling George Lucas that?
• 11:26
  Larry Wilson: Not gonna help your career.
• 11:27
  Larry Wilson: He's not gonna say, I admire your honesty.
• 11:31
  Larry Wilson: Sorry, that's not gonna happen.
• 11:33
  Larry Wilson: This screenplay that he wrote for the fourth one is his baby.
• 11:37
  Larry Wilson: He wrote it, he loves it, you know, and so that's a problem.
• 11:43
  Larry Wilson: I I kind of feel like Stephen King fell into that mindset.
• 11:49
  Larry Wilson: And I could be completely wrong, and if I am, I'd be the first to apologize.
• 11:55
  Larry Wilson: But it seems to me, I can't give you uh the name of a book, but somewhere in there, he comes up with such clever ideas and startling and terrifying images and situations and all kinds of that they can be very compelling where you really have to stay up and find out what happens next.
• 12:20
  Larry Wilson: But then in a lot of his more recent work, the ending just falls apart.
• 12:27
  Larry Wilson: It either becomes so loopy or it goes off way afield from what he started with, or it almost in a couple of his books, it just seemed like he was tired of writing, and so he just wanted to wrap it up and didn't care whether it made sense or not.
• 12:45
  Larry Wilson: What had come before was very compelling, scary, powerful, and now okay, I'm done.
• 12:50
  Larry Wilson: I'll just, you know, I don't really know how it ends, I'll just wrap up.
• 12:54
  Larry Wilson: I don't know if that's the truth, but that was my feeling.
• 12:57
  Larry Wilson: But in his early days, there's a book he wrote called Pet Cemetery.
• 13:02
  Larry Wilson: And if you're interested in reading it, uh cemetery is spelled incorrectly, because it you learn in the story it's written by children.
• 13:10
  Larry Wilson: So it's spelled S-E-M, A-T-A-R-Y, Pet Cemetery.
• 13:16
  Larry Wilson: And there's some very scary stuff in it, and in this pet cemetery, things that are buried there have a tendency to come back to life.
• 13:27
  Larry Wilson: King talked with this woman, Carolyn Bix, specifically about uh stuff in this scene.
• 13:35
  Larry Wilson: His son is killed by a drunk driver.
• 13:41
  Larry Wilson: And of course, it is interesting, this woman, Carolyn Bix, points out, that the details of the son's accident, the little boy's accident, mirrors exactly uh Stephen King's own son almost got killed by a drunk driver and the road where it takes place and all these other things he's used in this fiction book.
• 14:08
  Larry Wilson: And you can feel it, you can feel the authenticity of it when you're reading.
• 14:12
  Larry Wilson: Anyway, of course, he buries the son there, and then his wife is killed.
• 14:18
  Larry Wilson: I don't remember how that happens, but he buries them both in the pet cemetery, and then he's waiting at home to see what happens.
• 14:26
  Larry Wilson: And King told Carolyn Bix said in in the first draft, this guy's sitting in his kitchen in the dark, hears one grating step.
• 14:43
  Larry Wilson: And King said he read that and reread it, and decided, nope, nope, that wasn't right.
• 14:52
  Larry Wilson: And so in a subsequent thing, it becomes a grating step, becomes a series of gritting footsteps.
• 15:05
  Larry Wilson: And the grating he said he moved into her throat, where his wife comes in and her voice is grating full of dirt, and she says, darling.
• 15:28
  Larry Wilson: So in the context of this book, it's some pretty scary stuff.
• 15:34
  Larry Wilson: But the important lesson for you is he didn't write it in the first draft.
• 15:40
  Larry Wilson: It's a process of rewriting and rewriting.
• 15:44
  Larry Wilson: Every time you rewrite, it gets better.
• 15:49
  Larry Wilson: And uh one of my favorite Stephen King books at that time was um was a book called uh Salem's Lot.
• 16:00
  Larry Wilson: And it's got vampires, it's got all sorts of great stuff, but it takes place in a little New England town similar to one that King grew up in.
• 16:13
  Larry Wilson: In the archives, Carolyn Bix finds a hand-drawn map of this fictional town.
• 16:25
  Larry Wilson: And she realizes, oh, this guy's thinking about all this stuff.
• 16:31
  Larry Wilson: He's the the map doesn't appear in the book, but it aids him in the process of visualizing the this story he's telling.
• 16:44
  Larry Wilson: So when he says, Oh, he went from this place to this place, and then someone took a shortcut through these woods, I I mean, it's it's not earth-shaking, it's not like we figured out a cure for cancer or something, but in terms of writing, in terms of you giving yourself permission to try things you've never tried before and make mistakes if you do, and no one gets hurt.
• 17:12
  Larry Wilson: There's no downside.
• 17:15
  Larry Wilson: I promise you, the more times you rewrite, the better it's gonna get.
• 17:23
  Larry Wilson: Guaranteed.
• 17:25
  Larry Wilson: It I'm not just saying this, it literally cannot help but get better.
• 17:33
  Larry Wilson: And of course, this is something that AI can't do.
• 17:37
  Larry Wilson: Now you can say to AI, oh, yeah, you wrote this thing for me.
• 17:41
  Larry Wilson: Now write another draft, make it better or something.
• 17:46
  Larry Wilson: It's not human.
• 17:47
  Larry Wilson: And so things that we do as humans, it doesn't know about.
• 17:55
  Larry Wilson: Maybe one day will, but it doesn't now.
• 17:58
  Larry Wilson: And your rewriting, whether it's conscious or unconscious, will be better.
• 18:07
  Larry Wilson: And if you rewrite whatever you're working on a dozen times, I'm not saying you may not get off course in the middle of that, but by that dozen, oof, it's gonna be tighter, clearer, better.
• 18:26
  Larry Wilson: Really better.
• 18:28
  Larry Wilson: This has been Larry Wilson.
• 18:30
  Larry Wilson: I want to thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you found this information useful.
• 18:37
  Larry Wilson: If you're looking for more, you can find it at thewilsonmethod.com.
• 18:41
  Larry Wilson: There's a ton of stuff there.
• 18:44
  Larry Wilson: That if you want, you can even speak to me because I'm human.
• 18:50
  Larry Wilson: Send me an email at info at wilsonmethod.com because I read every single one.
• 18:59
  Larry Wilson: I hope that you'll join us next week in this continuing journey.
• 19:05
  Larry Wilson: And you'll be with me for the next episode of How to Talk to You.