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John David Mann on the Art & Craft of Storytelling · The Daily Writer

0:32
SPEAKER_00: Hey my friend, welcome to this Saturday edition of the Daily Writer Podcast.
0:37
SPEAKER_00: There are a lot of different types of writing.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: Just to list a few, we could think about journalism, novels, short stories, nonfiction, blog posts, graphic novels, and probably 150 other things as well.
0:50
SPEAKER_00: But one thing that ties all of those types of writing together is storytelling.
0:55
SPEAKER_00: Stories are the way that we process information and make sense of our lives as human beings.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, it is critical that we learn how to construct and weave stories the best way that we can.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: It's a craft that I am still very much learning, and I'm thrilled that our guest today is here to help us to learn to be better storytellers.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: John David Mann is the co-author of more than 30 books, including four New York Times bestsellers and five national bestsellers, including the GoGiver, which he co-authored with Bob Berg.
1:23
SPEAKER_00: The GoGiver has sold over one million copies and also won the 2017 Living Now Book Awards Evergreen Medal for its contributions to positive global change.
1:34
SPEAKER_00: John is married to Anna Gabriel Mann, and he considers himself the luckiest man in the world.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: Now you might remember that I had both John and Anna here on the podcast as guests a couple months ago to share about their brand new book called The Go Gibrip Marriage.
1:49
SPEAKER_00: And I have the pleasure of having John back on the show today to talk about his even newer book that was just released this past week.
1:56
SPEAKER_00: It's called Cult Fear, and it's a novel that he wrote with Brandon Webb.
2:00
SPEAKER_00: And this is a sequel to their previous novel, Steel Fear, which was really, really successful.
2:06
SPEAKER_00: In this conversation, we dive into all things related to storytelling, and I get to ask John about his experience as a ghostwriter and collaborator.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: I ask him about the biggest challenges of writing a sequel, the ins and outs of writing a novel, how to write an action scene, how to start a story, and all the things related to storytelling that I could think of.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: I just kind of figured while I've got John on the line here, I'm going to ask him all of my burning questions about storytelling.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: I had a lot of fun in this conversation.
2:32
SPEAKER_00: I learned a ton as well.
2:34
SPEAKER_00: And this is one of those conversations that I think you've got to listen to two or three times to really pick up on all the wisdom that the guest is sharing.
2:40
SPEAKER_00: And that is absolutely the case with this conversation.
2:43
SPEAKER_00: So I am thrilled to bring to you this conversation with my friend John David Mann.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: John, it is so good to have you back on the Daily Writer Podcast.
2:51
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for making some time to chat with me about writing and creative stuff and all the things related to writing.
2:59
SPEAKER_00: So welcome.
3:00
SPEAKER_01: There are very few things in the planet I'd like to do more than that.
3:03
SPEAKER_01: So thank you.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: Well, I have a whole list of things here to talk about.
3:07
SPEAKER_00: And whenever I get really, really excited about talking with the guest, which of course is every guest, um, you're a little bit of an exception though, because I've been wanting to talk to you for quite a long time on the show, specifically about some writing things.
3:19
SPEAKER_00: So I just I jotted down what are all the things I want to ask John about?
3:23
SPEAKER_00: And uh this this won't go like three hours or anything like that.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: So don't worry.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: But um one of the things that I'm ready.
3:30
SPEAKER_00: I'm struck.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: One of the things that I'm of course, you know I'm a ghostwriter, and um and you collaborate with people as well.
3:38
SPEAKER_00: One of the things that I'm super intrigued about about your career in particular is that so I know a lot of ghostwriters who write books for a lot of people, but it's usually not a public thing, you know, they kind of stay in the background as ghostwriters typically do.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: But your collaborations um have been very public, uh, at least most of them, of course, the ghostwriting ones I don't know about because that's the nature of ghostwriting.
4:00
SPEAKER_00: But I'm curious how your career has taken this super fascinating trajectory where you just col you collaborate with lots of different people.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: So you're kind of like the go-to collaborator.
4:11
SPEAKER_00: And I'm super interested in how that came about and and what your thoughts are on that.
4:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that is it is interesting because it it wasn't something that I set out to do.
4:21
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it wasn't exactly a strategic uh you know trajectory.
4:26
SPEAKER_01: I didn't sit down and say, here's how I'm gonna work out my career.
4:28
SPEAKER_01: Um, I have kind of pinballed from career to career in my life anyway.
4:32
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of been my my life pattern.
4:35
SPEAKER_01: Um, I think this is career number six or something.
4:37
SPEAKER_01: I started out as a uh a cellist and composer in music, cascole music, and then I I uh got involved in nutrition and natural health, and I got involved in education and started high school when I was still in high school, and um then I got involved in in publishing, publishing a magazine, started a couple of different journals, business journals and environmental journaling.
4:58
SPEAKER_01: And I kind of slid into writing through the back door.
5:02
SPEAKER_01: I was always sort of the guy who would edit the newsletter or edit the article or edit whatever.
5:08
SPEAKER_01: So I really started as an editor.
5:09
SPEAKER_01: I did a lot of editing of other people's stuff, mostly for magazines, mostly for journals.
5:15
SPEAKER_01: And that led to people who contributed articles to our magazines would want to write a book, and I ended up ghostwriting, as you described, collaborating, really writing other people's books, or taking their first draft, I'll say this charitably, taking their taking their their efforts.
5:33
SPEAKER_01: I know what you mean, their early efforts, um, and then you know, uh nudging them into actual actual prose form that would work.
5:42
SPEAKER_01: And that naturally morphed into collaboration projects.
5:46
SPEAKER_01: Um, so some of the earliest books I wrote were were kind of your classic ghostwriting slash collaboration, where my name might be on the cover in some cases, might not be, but what I was really doing is writing somebody else's life story, writing somebody else's memoir.
6:00
SPEAKER_01: I did a bunch of memoirs.
6:02
SPEAKER_01: I've probably done half a dozen or maybe eight or ten, I don't know, memoirs.
6:06
SPEAKER_01: Where my job is really to take someone's life story and and package it, figure out what the what the arc of it is.
6:13
SPEAKER_01: Where does it start?
6:14
SPEAKER_01: Where what are the high points?
6:16
SPEAKER_01: What's the shape?
6:16
SPEAKER_01: Give it a structure, put it in prose, package it, and boom, it's a book.
6:20
SPEAKER_01: It's my job.
6:21
SPEAKER_01: Their life, my craft.
6:24
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but that quickly led to books where it was all it was more a a melding of the other person's experience and my experience.
6:34
SPEAKER_01: So it wasn't ghostwriting in the sense or in the sense of I'm telling their story, but more a collaboration in the sense of we're gonna do this together.
6:44
SPEAKER_01: Great example is the go-giver.
6:46
SPEAKER_01: Um, the the reason the go-giver isn't me writing Bob's story, is that I'd already had a career in sales and leadership.
6:54
SPEAKER_01: And leadership was the thing I wrote about a lot and I dealt with a lot.
6:57
SPEAKER_01: And you know, when I was 17, I started a high school and I led a gang of a ragtag bunch of of uh misfits and near do wells, to quote uh Gary Goleman, and um put this group together.
7:11
SPEAKER_01: So I was suddenly at the age of 17 standing up on stages in front of auditoriums of a couple thousand people explaining our our our educational experiment.
7:19
SPEAKER_01: So I got experienced public speaking and and uh entrepreneurship and leadership at a at a at a young age.
7:27
SPEAKER_01: So by the time I was you know working with Bob on the Go-Giver, he had a ton of experience to bring to it.
7:33
SPEAKER_01: I had a ton of experience to bring to it, and the goalgiver is kind of like our DNA mixed up in a barrel, and this is what came out.
7:39
SPEAKER_01: And the subsequent Go-Giver books, you know, the Go-Giver Leader is kind of more my material, the Go-Giver's uh uh influencer is more Bob's material.
7:48
SPEAKER_01: So it kind of went like that.
7:50
SPEAKER_01: Even when um at that point, even when I was doing books like my Navy SEAL books with Brandon, so the Red Circle was my uh was Brandon's memoir.
8:01
SPEAKER_01: It's our first book together.
8:02
SPEAKER_01: Brandon Webb was a former Navy SEAL, former Navy SEAL sniper, and and uh was the lead instructor of the Navy SEAL Sniper course, which is a you know an enormous thing in itself.
8:13
SPEAKER_01: The Red Circle was his story, but um I was already kind of injecting a lot of myself into the writing by that point.
8:22
SPEAKER_01: And when I when I first started working with Brandon, this is back in 2009, Go Giver had just come out.
8:30
SPEAKER_01: My career as an author was really just starting.
8:32
SPEAKER_01: Uh Go Giver was my second published book, aside from uh maybe half a dozen ghostwritten books that you know we don't need to talk about.
8:40
SPEAKER_01: Those were me practicing.
8:42
SPEAKER_01: Um, my name wasn't on those.
8:44
SPEAKER_01: They're not bad.
8:44
SPEAKER_01: They're not bad, but they're not great.
8:46
SPEAKER_01: But they're good.
8:46
SPEAKER_01: They're you know, they're okay.
8:48
SPEAKER_01: Um that was my high school.
8:50
SPEAKER_01: And so the the go-giver was when I was already now in college, I guess, as a writer, metaphorically.
8:56
SPEAKER_01: Um, when I first tried working with Brandon, he said to me in one of our first phone calls, would you ever be interested in working on a novel together?
9:05
SPEAKER_01: Which I had never thought about doing, did not think was remotely possible.
9:09
SPEAKER_01: I had no idea how these alien species called novelists did what they did.
9:14
SPEAKER_01: To me, the idea of writing a novel was like climbing a mountain without any gear.
9:19
SPEAKER_01: I I honestly I thought I could never do that.
9:23
SPEAKER_01: How do you hold all that in your head?
9:25
SPEAKER_01: How do you even know where you're how do you invent a whole world?
9:28
SPEAKER_01: Not for me.
9:30
SPEAKER_01: But I of course said, yeah, sure, of course.
9:32
SPEAKER_01: Because I I would rarely say no to anything in those days.
9:37
SPEAKER_01: Um and so years went by and and you know, we we finally did do that.
9:42
SPEAKER_01: And I I and the novels are really a it's like the goal giver.
9:47
SPEAKER_01: The novels are really, it's my work and his work.
9:51
SPEAKER_01: It's like a mesh.
9:52
SPEAKER_01: And I think that for me, you know, the short answer to at the end of my long answer is all the collaborations and all the ghostwriting was always sort of stepping stones on the way toward writing my own stuff.
10:04
SPEAKER_01: I've always wanted to write my own stuff.
10:05
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like being on stage again.
10:08
SPEAKER_01: Um, I I don't I I love crafting other people's memoirs, but just from my temperament, I wouldn't have been satisfied doing that for the rest of my writing career.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: Now I have to uh I have to ask you something that I think you're the only person who can answer this question, honestly.
10:27
SPEAKER_00: Um and the question is so I just started work uh so kind of I'm bringing to bringing all what you mentioned to bear on this question.
10:34
SPEAKER_00: So I just started work on my dad's memoir of his experiences in Vietnam.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: He's a Vietnam veteran.
10:39
SPEAKER_00: Wow, wow.
10:40
SPEAKER_00: And I've really kind of been looking at all your stuff and trying to figure out okay, one of my go-to questions as a writer is how does John do it?
10:50
SPEAKER_00: You know, we all have we all have probably a handful of people that we look toward who are our major influences, people that we sort of try to reverse engineer some of their work and pull it apart and see how did they structure this and how would they do this?
11:02
unknown: Yeah.
11:03
SPEAKER_00: And I'm curious, if you were writing someone's Vietnam memoir or a war memoir, which of course you've you've done a lot of that, how do you figure out where to start a story like that?
11:14
SPEAKER_00: Do you I mean that there has to be some kind of thought that you have about here's a really good place to start a war memoir kind of a deal?
11:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, that's a great question.
11:27
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think where I'll start is to say that for me, writing a memoir is a lot like writing a novel.
11:37
SPEAKER_01: Um, and a parable is at least my view of parables is parables are like miniature novels, stripped down novels.
11:45
SPEAKER_01: So it it's you're you're making up a story.
11:48
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, it happened.
11:50
SPEAKER_01: Yes, it's real, it's nonfiction.
11:52
SPEAKER_01: These are you're gonna you're gonna retell true events as best as you can.
11:56
SPEAKER_01: You're gonna recreate them as as more as accurately as you can, but you're still making up a story.
12:01
SPEAKER_01: And I say that because you know, you don't tell a person's whole life to do that would take 70 years.
12:06
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
12:07
SPEAKER_01: Um, you got you know your two-hour window or your 200-page window, or what you got your con your discrete window to tell the story.
12:15
SPEAKER_01: So you have to sort of figure out the story structure of it, which is just what you're asking.
12:20
SPEAKER_01: Where does it start?
12:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, what are the what's the key climactic point?
12:23
SPEAKER_01: What's the appropriate ending?
12:25
SPEAKER_01: And for me, a lot of that is kind of feeling my way around.
12:29
SPEAKER_01: Um, I listen, I do interviews, and where I start with the story is I do how I work is mostly by phone.
12:39
SPEAKER_01: I will meet in person with it with my subject if I possibly can, um, and get to just get to know them.
12:45
SPEAKER_01: Nothing like face-to-face, but mostly I get my content by via phone.
12:48
SPEAKER_01: That's how I've always done it.
12:50
SPEAKER_01: I'll do interviews that are maybe 45 minutes to an hour, uh, record them, I'll transcribe them, or I have a great transcriptionist I work with, I'll have her do it, or else I'll do it, depending on how complicated the interview was.
13:04
SPEAKER_01: If the interview went all over the all over the place, I'll probably transcribe it because I want I start to untangle it while I'm transcribing.
13:11
SPEAKER_01: If if the interview if the subject is is speaks in a really kind of clear prose way, um, I did an interview once with Stephen Covey, uh, the father, you know, and it was it was like it was like transcribing a book.
13:27
SPEAKER_01: I I can imagine.
13:28
SPEAKER_01: You didn't need to do any editing.
13:30
SPEAKER_01: It was like he just talked talk for 45 minutes and you could have just put it in the page.
13:34
SPEAKER_01: I've done other interviews where I have no idea what this man's talking about.
13:39
SPEAKER_01: It's like he's going in so many circles at once that oh my God.
13:43
SPEAKER_01: And um, it's like looking inside a rat's nest of a of a brain, and yet there's brilliance in there, but you have to kind of pick it out.
13:50
SPEAKER_01: And for those interviews, I'll usually transcribe myself because the transcriptionist would be would be like lost in a grimm's fairy tale for us.
13:57
SPEAKER_01: Right.
13:58
SPEAKER_01: Um, but I'll do the interviews and I I you know I try to be as as as Oprah, I try to be as as Barbara Walters, I try to be as as good an interviewer as I can be to ask them questions that kind of lead them a little deeper into the story, and trying to kind of feel where is there where is there something important here we need to get into without you know sticking an instrument and probing too deep so that the tooth hurts.
14:27
SPEAKER_01: But I I try to draw out of them as much as I can in my in my interviews, but mostly I see where they go, I see what they remember, I see what's important.
14:37
SPEAKER_01: Um, I'll transcribe and then often in the tr in in a transcribed interview, I'll say, you know, I'll find three or four things I need to know more about that, and go back and so that I can ask you more about what happened with this guy when you were six years old, or when you were 12, or when you were 20 or whatever.
14:55
SPEAKER_01: I get all the material and it's in the process of listening, which is it's eight, 95% listening, the interviews.
15:04
SPEAKER_01: In the process of listening, to me, mostly the story starts to reveal itself.
15:09
SPEAKER_01: I start to say, oh, this is where it starts, this is where it's key.
15:13
SPEAKER_01: And or this is where maybe we have a chapter that's the childhood, but this is the pivotal moment where the real story starts at the end of chapter one or at the end of chapter two.
15:22
SPEAKER_01: I'm almost looking for, you know, I guess I have the hero's journey template in my brain.
15:30
SPEAKER_01: Um, so that there, you know, there is sort of the ordinary life, whatever he calls it, and then there's the call to action, or there's the call, whatever the call is.
15:38
SPEAKER_01: There is kind of a the context of the person's life, and then there what is that pivotal moment or pivotal event where the real journey starts, the reason that we're writing a book, the reason that makes their life interesting to the reader.
15:52
SPEAKER_01: What happens that makes their life like, oh, I gotta read about that?
15:57
SPEAKER_01: And then that's the trajectory that's gonna find its resolution in the last you know 50 pages.
16:03
SPEAKER_01: So it's by list mainly it's by listening, is the short answer, I think.
16:08
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
16:08
SPEAKER_00: That's I'm gonna have I'm gonna have to go back and listen to this section.
16:12
SPEAKER_01: This is this is one of those rat's nest interviews, by the way, right now.
16:15
SPEAKER_00: Well, but that that's good.
16:17
SPEAKER_00: Um, that's always occasionally when I'm doing a conversation on for this podcast, I will say, I've got to go back and re-listen to that because yeah, like every word that you said was so helpful that I have to go back.
16:28
SPEAKER_00: Really, I just I'll just make a transcription of it and go back and dissect it all.
16:31
SPEAKER_00: Oh, there was like 15 things you just said there that were immensely helpful.
16:36
SPEAKER_01: Ah, and I love that.
16:37
SPEAKER_00: I love that.
16:39
SPEAKER_01: Good.
16:39
SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm I'm glad because I never knew what's gonna come out of that mouth of mine.
16:44
SPEAKER_00: Now, when it comes to doing a a novel, particularly when you did the first one with Brandon, where did you start with that process?
16:52
SPEAKER_00: Because obviously a novel is a it's it's a beast, it's a long, detailed, complex kind of story.
16:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
16:59
SPEAKER_00: When you're starting a large project like that, do you think in terms of the hero's journey and major story beats and then kind of want once you have some some basic semblance of a story, then you start to fill it in and and just go from there?
17:11
SPEAKER_00: Is is that kind of where you have to start that process?
17:15
SPEAKER_01: So let me take that in a sort of in a big view first and zero in a little bit.
17:19
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna start with a big view and say, first of all, about the hero's journey.
17:22
SPEAKER_01: I definitely don't think consciously in terms of those beats.
17:25
SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm I don't I don't start out with a structure in my head.
17:29
SPEAKER_01: I'm okay.
17:29
SPEAKER_01: I start out, but I do start out looking for the story structure.
17:33
SPEAKER_01: Um, what you know, my philosophy is that every story has its own unique structure.
17:38
SPEAKER_01: Every story, it's kind of like the thing that this thing that Stephen King said in on writing, where where he considers a story as an already formed artifact.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: Right, and you're just sort of uncovering it.
17:50
SPEAKER_01: Right, and you're the archaeologist with the dust the whisk room trying to take out the take out the fossil without breaking it.
17:56
SPEAKER_01: Um, so I I do my philosophy is that is that there is a story that has its own unique structure to it, and I'm careful not to impose the structure of previous stories I've done onto the new one, which is tempting and easy.
18:13
SPEAKER_01: Great example is the Go Giver series, because they're all every one of them has five principles.
18:18
SPEAKER_01: It's a parable that that the story beats are five principles, but you know, the the first goalgiver book took place over a week, and the second story took place over a week, and it was really easy to just fall into that template.
18:28
SPEAKER_01: Here's the storyline, it's a week, it's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then the hero kind of ruminates over the weekend and has the aha, and then Monday is the revelations.
18:36
SPEAKER_01: Well, the goalgiver marriage, we just talked about in the previous podcast, takes place in a single day.
18:41
SPEAKER_01: I didn't have that plan when I started writing it.
18:44
SPEAKER_01: I had the plan of doing it for a week, but I let go of that really quickly because every story has its own internal structure.
18:50
SPEAKER_01: So the reason I say that is about the novels.
18:53
SPEAKER_01: The first novel, now, right now I'm working on Finn book number three.
18:58
SPEAKER_01: Finn is the hero of Steel Fear and Cold Cold Fear and the new book, book three.
19:04
SPEAKER_01: Right now I'm working on book three.
19:06
SPEAKER_01: Book one, Steel Fear.
19:08
SPEAKER_01: We had a given starting point, which was based on a real experience Brandon had in the Navy.
19:16
SPEAKER_01: And quick uh quick recap of that, Brandon was in the Navy before he was a SEAL, he was a rescue swimmer and sonar operator in a helicopter.
19:24
SPEAKER_01: He was in a helicopter squadron, HS six or something, the Indians, his famous helicopter squadron.
19:32
SPEAKER_01: And so he was a Navy guy, rescue swimmer, and he he did two six-month tours on two different aircraft carriers, and they were like night and day.
19:42
SPEAKER_01: His first six-month tour was a nightmare.
19:44
SPEAKER_01: It was everything went wrong.
19:45
SPEAKER_01: It was just awful.
19:47
SPEAKER_01: Food sucked, everybody complained, everything broke down, the air conditioning didn't work.
19:51
SPEAKER_01: And the second one was just inspiring and incredible.
19:56
SPEAKER_01: On the first tour, there was a sexual predator on board.
20:01
SPEAKER_01: Um, this is back in the in the mid-90s when they were just in starting to integrate women into warships.
20:07
SPEAKER_01: And so there were women on board.
20:09
SPEAKER_01: It was one of the first tours in the Navy with uh with significant female uh you know element.
20:18
SPEAKER_01: So there was a sexual predator on board who sneak into the women's dorm area, birthing area, uh sneak to their bathrooms, reach his hand and flick off the lights, and go and and attack somebody, grope somebody.
20:32
SPEAKER_01: And it it sounds freaky because it was, it freaked everybody out.
20:36
SPEAKER_01: They never caught the guy.
20:38
SPEAKER_01: He did it like seven, eight times or something.
20:40
SPEAKER_01: And uh Brandon had a good friend named Mona, who was a helicopter pilot that he was talking with at the time, and she was telling him how freaked out they all were, the women on board.
20:49
SPEAKER_01: And Brandon had this thought, what if the guy was a serial killer?
20:54
SPEAKER_01: Boom.
20:55
SPEAKER_01: That was Steel Fear.
20:57
SPEAKER_01: That was the story.
20:58
SPEAKER_01: Actually, the way I tell it is that that was the that was the first seed.
21:02
SPEAKER_01: What we needed to make the story ignite was the hero.
21:06
SPEAKER_01: It was the character Finn, who was this profoundly damaged, traumatized Navy SEAL.
21:12
SPEAKER_01: And when we injected Finn onto that aircraft carrier, we even used the same one that Brendan was actually on, the USS Abraham Lincoln.
21:19
SPEAKER_01: You have this traumatized Navy SEAL who's running from his past.
21:22
SPEAKER_01: He's just come off a disastrous, you know, there's a lot of questions about his past.
21:26
SPEAKER_01: He has a faulty memory, and uh he's trapped on this boat basically with a serial killer who we don't know who it is.
21:33
SPEAKER_01: And that was the that was the plot bomb that went off in Steel Fear, and that's all I had to go go, you know, go with.
21:42
SPEAKER_01: Um, the structure of the book was very strongly influenced by Brendan's experience with these two six month tours.
21:51
SPEAKER_01: The difference what made one crappy, miserable, and one inspiring and fantastic was the captains on the two ships.
21:59
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: An awful terrible captain and a wonderful, brilliant captain.
22:04
SPEAKER_01: And so I have those two captains in Steel Fear.
22:08
SPEAKER_01: And they help to kind of suss out the structure of the book.
22:14
SPEAKER_01: But here's the point that I want to make.
22:16
SPEAKER_01: For Cold Fear, which you see over my shoulder.
22:19
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: I love the cover, by the way.
22:21
SPEAKER_00: I have to give major props to the design team behind this series because I am in, I'm totally in love with these book covers.
22:30
SPEAKER_00: They're so fantastic.
22:32
SPEAKER_01: Let me just tell you something, digress for a minute and say something which I I fervently believe.
22:36
SPEAKER_01: First of all, to tell you a secret, that the um the you know, inside the the books, the cold fear has this, each chapter has this kind of incredible graphic of ice floating and water.
22:48
SPEAKER_01: And the Steel Fear had an incredible graphic of a radio of a radar uh screen.
22:53
SPEAKER_01: And the interior design is simple, but it's really cool.
22:56
SPEAKER_01: The same person who does the interior design for the Jack Reacher books does our interior design.
23:02
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
23:02
SPEAKER_01: And the same guy, the same guy who does the covers for the Jack Reacher books does our cover.
23:08
SPEAKER_01: And here's the point that I want to make.
23:10
SPEAKER_01: How did we get to rate Jack Reacher's design team?
23:15
SPEAKER_01: And I think that the answer is, of course, we have the same publisher, it's a great publisher, and we love them.
23:19
SPEAKER_01: But I think the real answer is I just worked my tail off 30 books, developing my craft and making it better and better and better and better and better, being really open to critique and just worked really hard at just trying to make my stories as compelling as possible.
23:36
SPEAKER_01: So that by the time we got to first novel, uh, you know, if the novel had been crappy, we wouldn't have ended up with Lee Child's, you know, design team on there.
23:48
SPEAKER_01: So I'm just so, so grateful for these guys at Bantam.
23:51
SPEAKER_01: They've done a phenomenal job.
23:52
SPEAKER_01: I love the cover too.
23:54
SPEAKER_01: Um, but back to the out of digression.
23:58
SPEAKER_01: With Cold Fear, we had no real event to start with.
24:03
SPEAKER_01: Um so where does the structure come from for a novel?
24:08
SPEAKER_01: Uh we started with an environment.
24:12
SPEAKER_01: Um all we knew was we want to go to Iceland.
24:15
SPEAKER_01: Brandon had actually Brandon had told me the story about going to Iceland in the dead of winter, which he'd done a few years earlier.
24:22
SPEAKER_01: He visited Iceland for a week, he went to Reykjavik, he went all around the island, and he talked about diving into this place.
24:29
SPEAKER_01: It's called the Sophra Silfra Fisher, diving into the spot, probably an hour outside Reykjavik, where he was deep in the water, ice cold water, touching two continental plates at the same time.
24:43
SPEAKER_01: The plate that holds North America and the plate that holds Eurasia.
24:48
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
24:50
SPEAKER_01: Only place on Earth where you can touch two continental plates at the same time.
24:54
SPEAKER_01: And Iceland is a country that's it's actually a mountaintop of the longest mountain range on earth, which is the mid-Atlantic uh ridge, they call it.
25:04
SPEAKER_01: And it is being slowly pulled apart every year by oh, like an inch a year or something.
25:11
SPEAKER_01: I forget the exact amount.
25:12
SPEAKER_01: I say it at the end of the book.
25:13
SPEAKER_01: And so it's this land of volcanoes and earthquakes.
25:16
SPEAKER_01: It's just this bizarre environment.
25:19
SPEAKER_01: And when Steel Fear, when they they booked us for a two-book deal, and we knew we had to write book two.
25:26
SPEAKER_01: I immediately thought we got to go to Iceland.
25:30
SPEAKER_01: So all I knew was we had to go to Iceland.
25:33
SPEAKER_01: And then Brandon came up with this plot idea that surrounds a uh a Saudi Arabian bomber, long dead, that he used the he and his team wrote about in his his media company, SOFREP years, years earlier, which gave us a plot idea.
25:49
SPEAKER_01: But that's you know, that was the beginning of the story is Iceland.
25:53
SPEAKER_01: I knew I wanted a young girl to drown in the opening of the book somewhere in Iceland.
25:59
SPEAKER_01: I didn't know where.
26:01
SPEAKER_01: And I almost set the book in this lake in Russia, which is the deepest lake in the world.
26:06
SPEAKER_01: It's also this huge, huge lake.
26:09
SPEAKER_01: And uh ended up deciding, no, we're not going to go to Russia, we're just gonna stay in Iceland.
26:14
SPEAKER_01: And I didn't know where she could possibly drown or why she was gonna drown.
26:18
SPEAKER_01: I just knew I wanted her to someone to drown.
26:21
SPEAKER_01: And so I started looking at Reykjavik on Google Maps, and I saw this little dot of blue in the middle, and I zoomed in, and there's this pond called Tjornin, which just means pond, and and it's a duck pond in the middle of the city.
26:38
SPEAKER_01: And the duck pond, I zoomed in and I thought it's iced over, but she can't drown.
26:43
SPEAKER_01: And then I searched and searched, and I found this weird little tidbit, which was that they keep the northwest corner of the pond thawed all through the winter for the ducks.
26:55
SPEAKER_01: I thought, oh, she could slip in right there and drown.
26:58
SPEAKER_01: That's where she drowns.
27:00
SPEAKER_01: And that was the you know, and we're off and running.
27:02
SPEAKER_01: And then it's like, where do you go from there?
27:04
SPEAKER_01: Well, then the story starts telling itself.
27:06
SPEAKER_01: But that's where well, I didn't know why Finn would be in Iceland.
27:10
SPEAKER_01: I had no idea, you know, that that was the that was the deal.
27:14
SPEAKER_00: One of the things that I that I noticed about your writing is and and I could never put my finger on it until just a few minutes ago when you mentioned, and of course I already knew this, but you you mentioned your background as a musician, and then it struck me and a light bulb went off in the back of my head that there has to be some kind of connection between your music and your impulse as a musician and the rhythm that you have in your writing.
27:39
SPEAKER_00: Your writing is very uh even your prose, it's very poetic, it's very rhythmic.
27:44
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
27:44
SPEAKER_00: I hope I'm saying that right.
27:45
SPEAKER_00: That's my impression.
27:47
SPEAKER_00: Do you think that your background as a musician informs your storytelling and and the rhythmic, the rhythm, the poetry of your prose?
27:55
SPEAKER_01: I completely um I do.
27:58
SPEAKER_01: Uh I think uh my background as a musician, music is kind of my my my original language.
28:04
SPEAKER_01: I almost still have classical music going in my head most of the time.
28:08
SPEAKER_01: Um, I I think the way that music influences my writing is in two ways.
28:12
SPEAKER_01: One is I I was a composer and I studied classical music like crazy.
28:17
SPEAKER_01: And two things in particular, one is the way a whole symphony is constructed, the movement of a symphony is constructed or a whole symphony is constructed or a sonata or whatever, some big piece of classical music.
28:29
SPEAKER_01: Understanding this sort of the big structure of it, I I think in structure terms of a story, not in artificial structure terms like I need to have bop, bop, bop, bop these beats because this is some formula that somebody gave me, but in terms of where is the crescendo going toward?
28:46
SPEAKER_01: Where is the where is the symphony leading?
28:49
SPEAKER_01: Where is the moment where the sort of the tension of the whole thing breaks and you go, oh god, it's like my favorite point in the zip.
28:57
SPEAKER_01: Where is that?
28:58
SPEAKER_01: Where you know, where does this tempo suddenly change?
29:01
SPEAKER_01: Where's the pace change?
29:02
SPEAKER_01: What are the big structural points?
29:04
SPEAKER_01: I'm always kind of thinking that in relation to writing.
29:07
SPEAKER_01: And then the other thing is one of the things you learn as a composer is you know, I remember doing what they call ascent descent exercises, where you take ascent descent, where you take a melody and you're gonna take take it up to a high point and then bring it down to a low point.
29:23
SPEAKER_01: But if you just do a scale up da da da da da da da da, and then a scale down, da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da um, it's not very interesting.
29:29
SPEAKER_01: You learn how uh you know Mozart or Bach or Beethoven or Strabinsky or or even different composers would where how would they meander, how would they alter, how would they change to get to the high point and then come back to the low point?
29:43
SPEAKER_01: You learn how to make the direction you're going, whether it's a crescendo getting louder, or whether it's it's melodic getting higher, or whether it's tempo getting faster.
29:54
SPEAKER_01: In writing, whether the action is getting more intense or the suspense is getting more intense, or you're getting closer to your goal, how to make movement not boring and monotonous and all equal steps, but how to take zigs and zangs and ups and downs and rights and laps and be unexpected and do things so that it's always moving and interesting, and yet you're going from A to B.
30:20
SPEAKER_01: And I'll give you an example in The Go Giver.
30:24
SPEAKER_01: Like a parable is like almost like like a like a child's fable, in essence.
30:29
SPEAKER_01: It's a pretty simple thing.
30:31
SPEAKER_01: Parable is a simple story.
30:33
SPEAKER_01: Your characters don't have hair color, don't have eye color, don't have pasts.
30:39
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you don't it's like the opposite of a novel.
30:43
SPEAKER_01: Um, but they have to be rich and have to have to feel real.
30:48
SPEAKER_01: In the Go Giver, there are this, there's a there are some chapters that are really, really short.
30:55
SPEAKER_01: And it's like I remember my agent telling me all your chapters should be about the same length.
31:00
SPEAKER_01: And I remember myself, my musician head saying, No, that's not right.
31:06
SPEAKER_01: They don't, because it's not symmetrical, it's not mathematical, it's a living, breathing thing.
31:14
SPEAKER_01: So you always it's always you always has to be interesting.
31:18
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, that's why I say those let the story tell itself.
31:22
SPEAKER_01: You gotta kind of let the characters and the story and the plot kind of breathe and speak, speak itself.
31:28
SPEAKER_01: And that's I think it is a musical thing, it's a rhythmic thing.
31:32
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I love that.
31:33
SPEAKER_00: I love that.
31:34
SPEAKER_00: And I cannot imagine reading a book and trying to make all the chapters these the same length.
31:39
SPEAKER_00: When you watch a great movie, all the scenes are not the same length.
31:42
SPEAKER_00: Some are long, some are short.
31:45
SPEAKER_00: You know, when you watch the original Godfather, I'm glad they didn't follow that principle because yeah, the first scene would be you know five or six minutes long and you would miss out on all that great stuff.
31:55
SPEAKER_00: Right.
31:56
SPEAKER_01: I love 70s movies because you know, you see the scenes in 70s movies where the camera just lingers and the thing goes on from you.
32:03
SPEAKER_01: Oh man, I can't get away with that today, but I wish they could because it's so, so cool.
32:07
SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, yeah, I think that's that's it's really true.
32:11
SPEAKER_01: There's you know, who is the most telegraphic, rapid fire, not rapid fire, but but you know sentence fragment writer you can think of.
32:21
SPEAKER_01: Well, Lee Lee Child is famous for Jack Reacher being this guy who doesn't say much, right?
32:27
SPEAKER_01: So a lot of the a lot of the dialogue in Jack Reacher books is like sentence fragment, sentence fragment, sentence fragment, sentence fragment, you know.
32:36
SPEAKER_01: And uh, and yet you turn the page and you'll find this florid description that goes on for a page and a half.
32:44
SPEAKER_01: That's like, wait, what the hell is Lee Child doing writing that?
32:49
SPEAKER_01: It's because the man is not bound by his own cliches, you know?
32:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I I I love that.
32:54
SPEAKER_01: I think that's true for everyone.
32:56
SPEAKER_01: It's true for Raymond Chandler, it's true for you know, Tana French, it's true for everybody.
33:01
SPEAKER_00: Are there some other writers that that you turn to for inspiration, whether it's fiction or nonfiction?
33:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, weirdly enough, um, the first writer that I really as an adult, I really kind of my childhood writer was C.
33:14
SPEAKER_01: S.
33:14
SPEAKER_01: Lewis.
33:14
SPEAKER_01: I just love C.S.
33:15
SPEAKER_01: Lewis.
33:16
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, not only the Narnia books, but his other stuff too.
33:20
SPEAKER_01: But as an adult, the first writer I really fell in love with was um was John Irving.
33:28
SPEAKER_01: And Irving writes these kind of grand epic 19th century novel kind of things.
33:35
SPEAKER_01: These huge beasts.
33:36
SPEAKER_01: I don't read them a lot these days, but but um I I really enjoyed the way Irving has the structural view.
33:46
SPEAKER_01: You know, he he famously um messes with the story, plays with the story in his head, messes around, messes around, messes around until until he finds the last sentence.
33:56
SPEAKER_01: I I this is so weird.
33:58
SPEAKER_01: He writes the last sentence, it's the first thing he nails down, is the last sentence in the book, which often ends up being the title of the book.
34:06
SPEAKER_01: The world according, the world according to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany.
34:10
SPEAKER_01: You know, a lot of his books, though this is the last the last night in Twisted River.
34:15
SPEAKER_01: It's the last sentence of the book, and it's also the title of the book.
34:18
SPEAKER_01: And then he he says he tells the story backwards until he comes back to the beginning and knows how and understands how he got there, and then he writes it, which I is it sounds bizarre, but I kind of get what he's doing.
34:35
SPEAKER_01: It's like he's he's feeling his way through the whole structure first.
34:39
SPEAKER_01: It's like he's looking at the at the book out an airplane, looking down out at an airplane window first before he gets down there in the ground and starts carved, you know, cutting the path.
34:49
SPEAKER_01: And so I love John Irving for that.
34:51
SPEAKER_01: My the the the writing the writers who have inspired me most and I turn to most are Kate Atkinson.
34:57
SPEAKER_01: I adore Kate Atkinson.
34:59
SPEAKER_01: My my number one favorite novel of all time is her first, which is the uh the um, I forgot the name of it.
35:08
SPEAKER_01: Behind the scenes at the museum, it's called Behind the Scenes at the Museum.
35:12
SPEAKER_01: It's it's a wild, wild epic.
35:16
SPEAKER_01: She wrote four now five uh detective stories, the Jackson Brody series, which are her version of genre novels, crime fiction.
35:27
SPEAKER_01: Um, I love her stuff.
35:28
SPEAKER_01: I love Tana French's books, and those have really inspired me a lot.
35:34
SPEAKER_01: Um and I I love Raymond Chandler, and I love John D.
35:39
SPEAKER_01: McDonald.
35:42
SPEAKER_01: And and I have mentioned Jack Reacher, I've mentioned Lee Child a number of times.
35:47
SPEAKER_01: He's co-writing with his brother now, and there's you know much heated debate about whether the books have gone downhill because his brother's writing them now.
35:54
SPEAKER_01: Uh, I won't enter that fray, but I'll just say that uh I've that uh Child has been a hero of of mine also.
36:03
SPEAKER_00: There's others, but those are how many Jack Reacher books does he have out now?
36:07
SPEAKER_01: He wrote 24, and then I think it was 24 before he started working with his brother, or maybe the 24th was with it.
36:15
SPEAKER_01: I think there's 25 now or 26.
36:17
SPEAKER_01: It's been I kept track up to a two up to 2000.
36:21
unknown: Yeah.
36:22
SPEAKER_00: No, I know obviously uh the Jack Reacher books have been made.
36:25
SPEAKER_00: I think there was were there two movies with Tom Cruise?
36:28
SPEAKER_00: One or one or two?
36:29
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
36:29
SPEAKER_00: There were two.
36:30
SPEAKER_00: At least the person.
36:30
SPEAKER_00: Okay, and I think there's a new TV show as well.
36:33
SPEAKER_00: Correct.
36:33
SPEAKER_00: Um can we possibly see anything developed out of out of the novels that you're working on?
36:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's in it's in development, uh TV series.
36:43
SPEAKER_01: We actually we actually the the rights to steel fear were actually purchased by NBC Universal for uh um development as a as a streaming series on their streaming platform, which is Peacock.
36:55
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
36:56
SPEAKER_01: And after a year, the rights lapsed and they didn't renew.
37:00
SPEAKER_01: So it it it bounced back out of NBC Universal.
37:03
SPEAKER_01: Um, and Hollywood is a is a bizarre place.
37:07
SPEAKER_01: It's a notoriously famously bizarre world.
37:11
SPEAKER_01: Um, somebody once asked, and I've forgotten which wonderful uh novelist this was, but it'll come to me after we we end the interview.
37:19
SPEAKER_01: But uh he was once asked uh what his experience working with TV adaptations was, and his response was the check cleared.
37:27
SPEAKER_01: That's all he'd say.
37:29
SPEAKER_01: Um novelists famously uh frequently hate what either Hollywood or you know movies or TV does with their novels.
37:39
SPEAKER_01: Uh Lee was very, very gracious about the movies, and I thought the first movie was excellent, second movie was uh not as good, different writer, different director.
37:48
SPEAKER_01: Um, but people just couldn't stand the fact that Tom Cruise was Jack Reacher because Tom Cruise is a short guy and Jack Reacher is a big guy.
37:56
SPEAKER_00: Right.
37:56
SPEAKER_01: Jack Reacher is kind of an ugly guy, and Tom Cruise is kind of a handsome guy.
38:00
SPEAKER_01: Chemistry didn't work.
38:02
SPEAKER_01: I thought he was excellent, so did Lee Child, but anyway.
38:05
SPEAKER_01: Um our book came out of NBC Universal and is now back in in redeployment.
38:12
SPEAKER_01: Um, there's interest, acute interest at uh a number of other household name streaming services.
38:20
SPEAKER_01: Uh I don't know, don't know who's gonna get it, but it's gonna happen sooner or later.
38:24
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna see a Steel Fear TV show.
38:27
SPEAKER_01: Well, I cannot wait.
38:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'll I'll hopefully it'll mean I I'll be on your uh I'll you'll get an email from me when that happens because we'll be talking about it.
38:35
SPEAKER_00: I will be the first one to uh to watch it.
38:37
SPEAKER_00: And I'm already subscribed to Peacock, so so I'll well that won't be there, I guess, but it'll be something also.
38:44
SPEAKER_00: I think I'm subscribed to everyone that's out there.
38:46
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
38:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think it might end up being uh uh uh what are they calling CBS now?
38:51
SPEAKER_01: Paramount, Paramount Plus.
38:52
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
38:53
SPEAKER_01: But but then again, it might be one of the Netflix, Apple, Amazon, one of those guys.
38:56
SPEAKER_01: We'll see.
38:58
SPEAKER_00: Well, as we head into the home stretch here, I want to make sure and ask about your two free books for writers, which I have printout copies of here, right?
39:06
SPEAKER_00: Literally, uh printouts of your books.
39:11
SPEAKER_00: Uh How to Write Good and which I love the subtitle, How to Write Good or At least Gooder.
39:16
SPEAKER_00: And then the book, The Right Stuff, A Decade of Notes on Writing.
39:19
SPEAKER_00: Can you give us a little insight where those books came from and uh what's kind of what's in those books?
39:25
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I know what's in those books, but just just for those who are listening, what's in those books and how can those books help them as writers?
39:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, how to write how to write good um is is a title that I've I've wanted to a title came to me like 10 years ago, 15, I don't know when.
39:39
SPEAKER_01: I've had it in my head forever.
39:41
SPEAKER_01: And I almost thought someday I'm gonna write a book about writing calling how to write good.
39:45
SPEAKER_01: Um and the I what actually happened was when I relaunched my website a couple years ago, I wanted to have a premium to give people who signed up for the website who came on my mailing list.
39:56
SPEAKER_01: And I thought I was gonna write a short story about Finn, the Navy SEAL, or Goldgiver book about Pindar or something.
40:03
SPEAKER_01: But one day I just thought, well, what if I wrote how to write good?
40:07
SPEAKER_01: And I planned it to be, you know, 15 pages, 18 pages, a little, a kind of a little thing, like a free giveaway.
40:14
SPEAKER_01: But once I started writing it, I I realized what a passion project.
40:18
SPEAKER_01: Well, right in the middle of writing, I thought, oh my god, this what a passion project it was for me, and how much I had to say.
40:25
SPEAKER_01: And I loved the process of writing it because you know, I often quote Joan Joan Diddian's uh saying, I write to find out what I think.
40:37
SPEAKER_01: This is so true for me.
40:38
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I often don't know, don't realize that I think something, or know even know something until I'm writing it, until I'm writing it, it comes out in the page.
40:47
SPEAKER_01: And the more I worked on that little book, the more it grew and the more it got bigger, and it it ended up being a full-length book.
40:53
SPEAKER_01: And I had such a great, great time writing that.
40:57
SPEAKER_01: I realized what I wanted it to be was um two things really.
41:03
SPEAKER_01: I wanted it to be a source of encouragement for writers.
41:08
SPEAKER_01: Um, it's why I start out the way I did.
41:11
SPEAKER_01: The writers that that from whom I took encouragement.
41:14
SPEAKER_01: Like if he does this, I start the book starts out with with a with uh a book signing where I was hearing um Dennis Lahane.
41:22
SPEAKER_01: Uh my wife and I went to see Dennis Lahane.
41:24
SPEAKER_01: He was talking about the process of working on a draft of this book and about being out in a car on a frozen lake, much like the one behind me.
41:31
SPEAKER_01: Um, out in a frozen lake in a car, driving around just sliding all over the place, not being able to control the car, slipping and sliding, and what it was like to finally reach the bank and have it have the tires catch.
41:42
SPEAKER_01: He said that's what writing is like for the first, I don't know, month, two, five, six, the first year.
41:47
SPEAKER_01: As I'm writing stuff, I have no idea where the book is going.
41:50
SPEAKER_01: And then there's that feeling when it first catches.
41:52
SPEAKER_01: And I remember thinking, oh, damn, if that's what it's like for Dennis Lahane, then maybe I can do this too, because that's what it was like for me.
41:59
SPEAKER_01: So I wanted this book to be as honest and bird's eye view as I could of what the writing process feels like to me, what it is like for me, in case that is of any help to anybody else doing the same thing.
42:15
SPEAKER_01: And I also wanted to get technical and actually share some of the nuts and bolts.
42:19
SPEAKER_01: Like, how do you make some how do you make a sentence better?
42:21
SPEAKER_01: How do you make a paragraph better?
42:22
SPEAKER_01: How do you make a book better?
42:24
SPEAKER_01: Um, so I do a lot of that in the book.
42:26
SPEAKER_01: I share a lot of concrete examples from my own stuff, very few examples of other people's writing.
42:32
SPEAKER_01: Mostly it's examples of my own writing because I know what I did.
42:35
SPEAKER_01: I know when it was terrible, I know when a sentence stanked to high heaven.
42:38
SPEAKER_01: And I'll actually show you on the page the original sentence that isn't very good, and then what it took to kind of mush it around and make it come out much cleaner.
42:50
SPEAKER_01: Um, so I will the book is only, as you know, it's only available through my website as a free ebook.
42:56
SPEAKER_01: I've never sold a copy.
42:58
SPEAKER_01: One of these days, probably in the next couple of years, I'll probably take that book and enlarge it a bit more and publish it between two hardcovers as a as a real book.
43:08
SPEAKER_01: Um, but meanwhile, I just the more people read it for me, the happier I'll be because it's just like it's barren my soul as a writer and trying trying my best to.
43:19
SPEAKER_01: It's my love letter to writers, really.
43:21
SPEAKER_01: Trying my best to to give writers a helping hand.
43:25
SPEAKER_00: Well, I absolutely love it.
43:26
SPEAKER_00: I think it's a wonderful book, and I'm a little shocked that this is free on your website.
43:30
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is a book that I would, and I think that speaks to your generosity, John.
43:35
SPEAKER_00: This is a book I would happily pay for.
43:37
SPEAKER_00: And not only that, I would happily buy a few dozen copies to give away to all my best writing friends because it's that good and it's that inspiring and encouraging.
43:45
SPEAKER_00: I just I love it.
43:46
SPEAKER_00: I really, really do it.
43:47
SPEAKER_01: I sure do appreciate it.
43:49
SPEAKER_01: I certainly appreciate it.
43:50
SPEAKER_01: And you know, the marketing part of me says if I charge money for it and publish it, maybe actually more people will buy it than are than have got it now.
43:58
SPEAKER_01: So it would be a smart thing to.
44:00
SPEAKER_01: Do, but for now it just it's gonna stay where it is for the for the time being.
44:03
SPEAKER_00: You've got your hands full with a brand new Go Give her marriage book release and uh uh Cold Fear coming out uh pretty soon.
44:12
SPEAKER_01: And book three, I gotta have book three done by March by September 15th.
44:16
SPEAKER_01: And as you and I speak, it's early April, and I'm really just starting.
44:21
SPEAKER_01: So it's a crazy schedule.
44:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you've got a pretty busy next few months, next few months ahead.
44:28
SPEAKER_00: Yep, yep.
44:28
SPEAKER_00: Well, John, this has been an absolute blast.
44:30
SPEAKER_00: I assume that uh to get all this goodness about your books and also get uh the free book how to write good or at least gooder, people should go to your website, john davidman.com.
44:41
SPEAKER_00: Anything else that you'd like to share with us in terms of where people can go to find out more about you or social media stuff or anything else?
44:48
SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't know when this this uh episode is gonna air.
44:51
SPEAKER_01: Um as we're as we're speaking right at this moment, there's a website which is webnman.com, W-E-B-B and M-A-N-N.com, which right now just is parked.
45:04
SPEAKER_01: You you won't go anything if you went to it today.
45:06
SPEAKER_01: I think it'll be up in about a week.
45:07
SPEAKER_01: So it may be by the time your readers hear this, um that's where you're gonna see Cold Fear.
45:14
SPEAKER_01: That's where Cold Fear is.
45:15
SPEAKER_01: You can also see it on my site, which is johndavidman.com.
45:19
SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's you know, almost the the one-stop shopping for all my stuff, all my books.
45:24
SPEAKER_01: That's where the writing book is, that's where Steel Fear is, go give her marriage.
45:27
SPEAKER_01: All the everything I've written basically is is there on my John David Mann site.
45:32
SPEAKER_01: But the web and man site is really, really cool.
45:34
SPEAKER_01: So I want to make sure people know about that too.
45:36
SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
45:37
SPEAKER_00: Well, John, I appreciate you.
45:38
SPEAKER_00: And I just want to take a second to acknowledge all the goodness that you're writing out into the world through all the podcast interviews you're doing, especially right now.
45:45
SPEAKER_00: Uh you've got to be exhausted with all the all the interviews you're doing and the books.
45:49
SPEAKER_01: And it's energizing, man.
45:51
SPEAKER_01: It's energizing, I'll tell you.
45:53
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, there is something nice about being on somebody else's show and then not having to do all the editing and show notes and kind of show up and talk and and answer a few questions, and it's it's wonderful.
46:03
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, hang on to that as long as you can.
46:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
46:06
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
46:07
SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you so much.
46:08
SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate it.
46:09
SPEAKER_01: I I as you say I've just done about a hundred podcasts in the last season, and very few of them are about the writing itself, and it really, really and I love them all, but man, it's fun to talk about the writing itself.
46:23
SPEAKER_01: It's fun.
46:24
SPEAKER_00: It is, and this has been enormously helpful.
46:26
SPEAKER_00: And this this is good.
46:28
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna go back and transcribe this this baby so I can really dig into it further.
46:33
SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
46:34
SPEAKER_01: I so appreciate it.
46:35
SPEAKER_01: There's nothing I love more than trying to nail down the writing process in a way that is I hope is helpful.
46:42
SPEAKER_00: So it is immensely.
46:43
SPEAKER_00: Thank you again.
46:45
SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't know about you, but after that conversation, I feel like I was sitting at the feet of a master storyteller.
46:52
SPEAKER_00: John is so good at what he does, and it was such a pleasure to have him on the show that I'm just thrilled with all the things that he was sharing with us in terms of storytelling and the craft of writing.
47:02
SPEAKER_00: I want to encourage you to grab a copy of Steel Fear and Cold Fear.
47:05
SPEAKER_00: I've got those, and man, they are great books.
47:08
SPEAKER_00: And so if you like thrillers, if you like exciting stories, you're really gonna enjoy those.
47:12
SPEAKER_00: Now, I also want to encourage you to grab a copy of John's free ebook called How to Write Good, or at least a gooder, which by the way is an awesome title.
47:21
SPEAKER_00: You can grab that via the link in the show notes.
47:23
SPEAKER_00: It's really, really great.
47:24
SPEAKER_00: It's a wonderful book on writing, and you're going to love it.
47:27
SPEAKER_00: Plus, it's free, so what have you got to lose?
47:29
SPEAKER_00: So make sure and grab that.
47:30
SPEAKER_00: Again, many thanks to John for being a guest on today's episode.
47:33
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening, and I'll see you tomorrow.