#210 Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

What I learned from reading Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- My earliest memory is of imagining I was someone else. By the time I was fourteen the nail in wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all. I'm not editorializing, just trying to give you the facts as I see them. There was also a work-ethic in the poem that I liked, something that suggested writing poems (or stories, or essays) had as much in common with sweeping the floor as with mythy moments of revelation. The realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit. If I ever came close to despairing about my future as a writer, it was then. I could see myself thirty years on, wearing the same shabby tweed coats with patches on the elbows, potbelly rolling over my Gap khakis from too much beer. I'd have a cigarette cough from too many packs, thicker glasses, more dandruff, and in my desk drawer, six or seven unfinished manuscripts which I would take out and tinker with from time to time, usually when drunk. And of course. I'd lie to myself, telling myself there was still time, it wasn't too late. You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair – the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.“When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.” Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. The sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate - four to six hours a day, every day – will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things and have an aptitude for them. You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself. These lessons almost always occur with the study door closed. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  What is writing? Telepathy, of course. My name is Stephen King. I'm writing the first draft of this part at my desk on a snowy morning in December of 1997. There are things on my mind. Some are worries, some are good things. But right now, all that stuff is up top. I'm in another place. This book is scheduled to be published in the late summer or early fall of 2000. If that's how things work out, then you are somewhere downstream on the timeline for me. But you're quite likely in your own far-seeing place. The one where you go to receive telepathic messages. Not that you have to be there. Books are a uniquely portable magic.

• 0:42David Senra?

  I usually listen to one in the car and carry another wherever I go. You just never know when you'll want an escape hatch. A mile-long line at a tollbooth plaza. The 15 minutes you have to spend in the hall of some boring college building waiting for your advisor. Airport boarding lounges. Laundry mats on a rainy afternoon. And the absolute worst, which is the doctor's office when the guy's running late and you have to wait a half hour in order to have something sensitive mauled. At such times, I find a book vital. If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or another, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library. So I read where I can, but I have a favorite place, and you probably do too.

• 1:25David Senra?

  So let's assume that you're in your favorite receiving place, just as I am in the place where I do my best transmitting. We'll have to perform our mentalist routine not just over distance, but over time as well. Yet that presents no real problem. If we can still read Dickens, Shakespeare, and Herodotus, I think we can manage the gap between 1997 and 2000. And here we go. Actual telepathy in action. You'll notice I have nothing on my sleeves and that my lips never move. Neither most likely to yours. We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room. Except we are together. We're close. We're having a meeting of the minds.

• 2:08David Senra?

  That is an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today and the one I had a hard time putting down, which is Stephen King on writing a memoir of the craft. And I wanted to start there because I thought Stephen King was making a similar point to what I think is might be my favorite all time quote about books, and that comes from Carl Sagan. Let me read it to you real quick. "What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But at one glance at it, and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions.

• 2:52David Senra?

  Binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs, books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." And before I jump back into the book, I want to start with two other quotes. This comes from the back of the book, and it gives you a description of why this book is so unique. And it says immensely helpful and illuminating to any aspiring writer. I think it applies to entrepreneurs, investors, anybody trying to do something creative or difficult, actually. "This special edition of Stephen King's critically lauded million copy bestseller shares the experiences, habits, and convictions that have shaped him and his work. Part memoir, part masterclass, by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this

• 3:32David Senra?

  suburb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer's craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have." And I have one more quote for you. It actually came from a listener when he found out that I was reading this book. He said, there's a line, there's a paragraph in that book that's my favorite quote of all time. And so I'm going to read it to you. He says, and this is Stephen writing, "When asked, how do you write? I invariably answer, one word at a time, and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true. But consider the Great Wall of China, if you will. One stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope."

• 4:16David Senra?

  And so Steven's going to come back to that idea throughout the book. One word at a time, one day at a time, one hour at a time, over and over again. He talks about the process that allowed him and the schedule that allowed him to write over 60 books. He has sold over 350 million books, which is one of the reasons I wanted to read this book. And I'm going to start with one of the last things he ever says in the book. I have the updated 20th anniversary edition. So there's a, in the very back, at the end, is this interview with him and his son. And I just want to pull out this one part before I go into his early life, because this is just, it's really important to remember. This is said by something. He said this in 2019, after he has sold 350 million books.

• 5:00David Senra?

  And what he's describing is a variation of the entrepreneurial, emotional roller coaster that we see over and over again, that anybody that's building anything, anybody that's doing something difficult, experiences themself and shows up in every single one of these biographies. And he says, "The most important thing is to push through, to not become depressed. I try to remember that we're all amateurs at this. And every time I sit down, it's like the first time. I battle doubts all the time about whether or not this thing is working, or that thing is working, and whether or not the idea is any good." And so that idea where he's talking about, "Every time I sit down, it's like the very first time I've ever wrote anything. I have to constantly battle doubts. I have to make sure I'm going forward, I'm not being depressed."

• 5:43David Senra?

  I'm glad I read that paragraph after I just finished that gigantic 500-page biography by Steven Spielberg, because what was so mind-blowing to me is the fact that even now, after all, you know, he's one of the most successful filmmakers of all time, Stephen King is one of the most successful writers of all time, they said the same thing. He's like, "I have to battle doubts." Steven Spielberg literally throws up. He's so full of anxiety and worry before he starts a new movie, that he vomits. Think about that. The next time you have these periods of self doubt, am I on the right track? Is this idea any good? Should I be doing this? And when it does happen, you'll remember that Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, and countless other people before you have gone through this exact same thing. I'm going to start his early childhood. This guy's writing. I've never read,

• 6:28David Senra?

  I have to admit something, I've never read a Stephen King book. My sister's bought me, I have two or three of his books at my house. I have not got around to reading them yet, but no surprise. If somebody sold, was able to sell 350 million books, he's obviously going to be a good writer. And I was amazed at how efficient he is and how he can tell entire paragraphs, or entire stories and just paragraphs. Going to start out with his disjointed childhood and his broken family. He gets you emotionally invested in the unbelievable struggle that he has to go through before he sells his first book. So he says, "I lived an odd, herky-jerky childhood, raised by a single parent who moved around a lot in my earliest years and who, I'm not completely sure of this, may have farmed my brother and me out to one of her sisters for a while

• 7:11David Senra?

  because she was economically or emotionally unable to cope with us for a time. Perhaps she was only chasing our father, who piled up all sorts of bills and then did a run out when I was two and my brother David was four. If so, she never succeeded in finding him." And then on the next page, one sentence that tells an entire story. "My earliest memory is of imagining I was someone else." That reminded me of a line in the Steven Spielberg book, which says, "He did not like the world, so he made his own." Then he gets into a little bit why he's writing the book. This is very similar to why founders exist. What he's going to say about writing, you and I believe about entrepreneurship, right? "I believe large numbers of people have at least some talent

• 7:55David Senra?

  as writers and storytellers, and that those talents can be strengthened and sharpened. If I didn't believe that, writing a book like this would be a waste of time." So they move around a lot. His mom never has really a stable job. Never, they really don't have a lot of money. He's also sick. At this point, he's about six years old. He's got a lot of like inner ear infections and throat problems. And so he's going to actually be held back one year. But the point of this short story he's about to tell us, the main point here is that imitation precedes creation. So he says, I was pulled out of school entirely. I had missed too much of the first grade. My mother in the school agreed I could start fresh in the fall, the next year, if my health was good. So what

• 8:37David Senra?

  he spent his time, he said, I spent time in bed, mainly in the house. I read my way through approximately six tons of comic books. At some point, I began to write my own stories. Imitation preceded creation. I would copy Combat KC Comics, word for word, sometimes adding my own descriptions where they seemed appropriate. Eventually, I showed one of these copycat hybrids to my mother, and she was charmed. I remember her slightly amazed smile, as if she was unable to believe a kid of hers could be so smart. Practically a damn prodigy, for God's sake. I had never seen that look on her face before, not on my account, anyway. And I absolutely loved it. She asked me if I had made up the story,

• 9:20David Senra?

  if I made the story of myself. And I was forced to admit that I had copied most of it. She seemed disappointed. Write one of your own. I bet you could do better. And listen to the reaction that he has here. Something that, you know, he's six years old. He keeps with his entire life, even to this day. I remember an immense feeling of possibility at the idea. As if I had been ushered into a vast building filled with closed doors, and had been given leave to open any I liked. There were more doors than one person could ever open in a lifetime, I thought. And I still think that. And so this is another example where he has the ability to communicate with no fat whatsoever. This, what I'm about to read you, takes place over three paragraphs. He tells an entire

• 10:04David Senra?

  story. You understand exactly what's going on in his life at this point. The one thing I need to tell you before I read it to you is that his, his mom's name is Ruth. Don't worry about the other names.

• 10:15David Senra?

  Our little family Trioka had moved back to Maine so our mom could take care of her parents in their declining years. Grandma was about 80 at the time, obese and hypertensive and mostly blind. Daddy Guy was 82, scrawny, morose, and prone to the occasional Donald Duck outburst, which only my mother could understand. My mother's sisters had gotten my mom this job, perhaps thinking they could kill two birds with one stone. The aged parents would be taken care of in a homey environment by a loving daughter, and the nagging problem of Ruth would be solved. She would no longer be adrift, trying to take care of two boys while she floated almost aimlessly from Indiana to Wisconsin to Connecticut. She hated her new job, I think.

• 10:59David Senra?

  In their effort to take care of her, her sisters turned our self-sufficient, funny, slightly nutty mother into a sharecropper, living a largely cashless existence. The money the sisters sent her each month covered the groceries but little else. They sent boxes of clothes for us. Towards the end of each summer, Uncle Clay and Aunt Ella, who were not, I think, real relatives at all, would bring cartons of canned vegetables and preserves. The house we lived in belonged to Aunt Ethel and Uncle Orin. And once she was there, Mom was caught. She got another actual job after the old folks died, but she lived in that house until the cancer got her.

• 11:42David Senra?

  When she left the little town for the last time, David, my brother David, and his wife Linda cared for her during the final weeks of her illness. I have an idea, she was probably more than ready to go. And so Stephen weaves all these little stories, anecdotes about his childhood and his early life into his thoughts on writing as well. And so this is what he says, where ideas come from, excuse me, and what our job is. Okay? So he says, "Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no idea dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers. Good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky.

• 12:26David Senra?

  Two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job is to find these, is not to, your job isn't to find these ideas, but to recognize them when they show up." So I want to go back to one sentence in that paragraph. He says, "Two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun." One of my favorite quotes of Albert Einstein, because he believed in that same idea. He says, "Listen, a new idea is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience." A new idea is nothing but the outcome of an earlier intellectual experience. I love that. Okay, so now we're going to get into-- he loves to write from an early age.

• 13:09David Senra?

  He goes from copying comic books and little short stories to writing some of his own. He's somewhere in his early teenage years at this point in the story. And he sends off-- he writes a bunch of stories and then sends them off and tries to sell them to magazines that he likes. And one magazine he loved was Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. And this is again where we're going to see the combination of-- there's a lot of overlap. And maybe it's just because that book-- I just finished it, the book's on my mind. But between Steven Spielberg and Stephen King-- Stephen King's also obsessed with movies as well. But the reason I bring that up is because Alfred Hitchcock was one of the main influences on Steven Spielberg. And Hitchcock also served as an influence for Stephen King.

• 13:51David Senra?

  And so the note I left myself on this section is, "Another rejection letter? Question mark? Cool. I'll keep writing." "When I got the rejection slip from AHMM, that's Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, I pounded a nail into the wall, wrote 'happy stamps,' which is the name of the story, on the rejection slip, and poked it on the nail. I felt pretty good, actually. When you're still too young to shave, optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure. By the time I was 14, the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing."

• 14:32David Senra?

  So some of his main influences at the very beginning, there was magazines, there was like their version of, I guess, newsletters, comic books, but also movies. So he winds up going to see, he would spend a lot of time, just like David Geffen, just like Steven Spielberg, he'd spend all day seeing these like double and triple features, right? And so he's coming back one late at night, or one night, one time late at night, maybe is what I'm trying to say there. And he has this idea, he's like, well, the movie I just saw was great, why don't I write? And it's kind of, it just hit me now that I'm trying to talk to you about this, but it's funny, because now most of, a lot of his books go from books to movies. In this case, he's going from movie to book. So this is a story about selling his first book and then realizing there's always, there's always going to be naysayers. So he's like, I'm going to go home and I'm going to write my own version

• 15:16David Senra?

  of the movie I just saw. And what's pretty crazy is, he's what, 15 at the time, somewhere around there? And he's having to, he doesn't have a car, he didn't have no money, so he hitchhikes everywhere, back and forth, late at night. It's just this young, I guess you could say young kid, young man, or whatever the case is. So he says, "On a long hitch home that night, I had a wonderful idea. I would turn The Pit and the Pendulum," the movie he'd just seen, "into a book. I wouldn't just write this masterpiece. I could also print it using the drum press in our basement and sell copies at school. As it was conceived, so was it done." And he has access to printing equipment, because his older brother, they kind of like put it together in like a rough slipshod kind of manner, because he would

• 16:00David Senra?

  produce like a family newsletter and like a newspaper, actually. And so he's just using his older brother's printing equipment. "I assisted The Pit and Pendulum, and it turned out to be my first bestseller. I took the entire print run to school in my bookbag. By the end of lunch hour, I had sold three dozen and was walking around in a kind of a dream. It all seemed too good to be true. It was. When the school day ended at 2 o'clock, I was summoned to the principal's office, where I was told I couldn't turn the school into a marketplace." And so this is what the principal told him. "What I don't understand, Stevie," she said, "is why you write junk like this in the first place. You're talented. Why do you waste your abilities?" And then this is a fantastic paragraph.

• 16:42David Senra?

  And this is going to echo this thing you and I have talked about over and over again. Sometimes critics are right, sometimes they're wrong. Doesn't matter, they're constant. That is his point that he's saying here. "To her credit, the question was not entirely rhetorical, but I had no answer to give. I was ashamed. I have spent a good many years since, too many, I think, being ashamed about what I write." How crazy is that statement? Think about that. 350 million copies sold, and I'm still spending four decades, sometimes being ashamed by what I write. There's that creepy self-doubt, right? "I think I was 40 before I realized that almost every writer who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent."

• 17:25David Senra?

  That's another important sentence there. "If you write, or paint, or dance, or sculpt, or sing, someone will try to make you feel lousy about it. That's all. I'm not editorializing. I'm just trying to give you the facts as I see them." So while he's still in high school, he gets the opportunity to get a job writing about sports at the local newspaper, even though he doesn't know anything about sports, but it actually teaches him a lot of writing. So what's so fascinating about what's happening to him is we've seen this happen in a few other occasions. So he winds up learning more at the newspaper about writing than he does at school. Ernest Hemingway was very similar.

• 18:07David Senra?

  He credited his time, I think he was in St. Louis, I forgot where he was, where he was just giving like basic wire news reports, right? Like no really opinion, just here, this is the facts, this is the stuff that happened. And he talked about later on that that's where he learned to write short sentences and learned to have like really clear writing. And if you've ever read Hemingway, especially the Old Man and the Sea, like there's just no fat on any of his sentences. And so the same thing's about to happen to Stephen King here. And then I want to read two other things to you because Dr. Seuss, when I read his biography, Frank Capra, which is, this is interesting how it all ties together. So Frank Capra was this famous director, writer, producer. The guy that wrote Steven Spielberg's biography that I read last week actually wrote a biography on Frank Capra, right?

• 18:52David Senra?

  And so Frank Capra is like a decade or two older than Dr. Seuss, Ted at the time, Ted Geisel, or whatever his name was. And he actually taught, he's the one that taught Dr. Seuss how to write concisely. So I'm going to share, I'm going to tie all this together in a minute. So let me first start with what's happening with Stephen King. And then I want to also bring up how this reminds me of one of my favorite stories that I've ever heard. And it's about that there's no speed limit. So let me see if I can tie this all together and hopefully it makes sense to you. Okay, so it says, he's, he's this guy, his name's John Gold. He's actually proofreading this story, right? That, that, that a young Stephen King has written. So he says, "Then he started in on the feature piece with a large black pen.

• 19:35David Senra?

  I took my fair share of English Lit classes and my fair share of composition, fiction, and poetry classes in college, but John Gold, John Gold taught me more than any of them and in no more than 10 minutes." Remember that 10 minute part for the story I'm going to talk about, no speed limit, okay? "So he taught me more than all these classes and he taught it to me in 10 minutes. When he finished marking my copy in the manner indicated above, he looked up," and there's, there's pictures of the actual, like what he did to this. If you want to see it, obviously read the book, it's fantastic. "When he finished making my copy in the manner indicated, marking my copy in the manner indicated above, he looked up and saw something on my face. I think he must have mistaken it for horror. It wasn't. It was pure revelation. Why, I wonder, didn't English teachers ever do this?"

• 20:18David Senra?

  And he's just essentially crossing out the stuff that is unnecessary, that's not advancing the story. And so he said, I only took out the bad parts, you know, Gold said. Most of it's pretty good. I know, I said, meaning both things. And then King, Stephen King says, I won't do it again. He laughed. If that's true, you'll never have to work for a living. You can do this instead, meaning write. Do I have to explain any of these marks? No, I said. Now we go back to the advice that he gets that taught him more than in 10 minutes than anybody else, than all the classes he took, right? When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story, he said. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story. So let me read that to you again. When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story, he said.

• 21:02David Senra?

  When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story. And let me pause here because while I'm reading this too, another thought just popped in my mind. It might be, I don't know if I've been clear or not, but like, why is this so important? Especially for entrepreneurs, investors, creative people, people are doing anything difficult because the power of learning, the storyteller is the most powerful person in the world, right? That's a, that's a quote from Steve Jobs. It's actually one of my favorite quotes from Steve Jobs. And it's not only did he apply that, the quote I'm about to reach you comes from when he was at Pixar, and this is actually before he went back to Apple the second time. But it's also what he did at Apple. When you, when you hear his speeches and how he talks about marketing is about values, how you communicate why you're doing what you're doing. People don't buy what you're doing, they buy why you're doing, right?

• 21:46David Senra?

  So he says, this is now Jobs speaking. The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda for an entire generation that is to come. The founder is the chief storyteller in a business. Jobs knew that down to his core. So let's go back to this. When you rewrite, your main job is to taking out all the things that are not the story. Gold said something else that was interesting. On the day I turned in my first two pieces, right with the door closed. Now, this is fascinating because now I'm rereading this, right? I've read, I'm only in the very like one, the first quarter of the book still. But he, he talks about this. Stephen King is going to take this idea that he's learning when he's probably 17 and he's talking about for the rest of the book. He repeats this over and over again.

• 22:27David Senra?

  So he says, "Write with the door closed. Rewrite with the door open." These are metaphors, okay? I mean, they're also, he means that literally and figuratively, I guess is the way to, better way to put that. "Your stuff starts out being just for you," in other words, "but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and you get it right, as right as you can anyway, it belongs to anyone who wants to read it or criticize it. If you're very lucky, more people want to read it than criticize it." Okay, so before I share one of my favorite stories, a story I've told on the podcast several times, it's something I read over and over again to remind myself, there's just no speed limit. It's very important to know that because we just saw him, a lesson that he carried with

• 23:11David Senra?

  him for decades, he learned in 10 minutes. "Let's go to Becoming Dr. Seuss. I don't remember what podcast this is. You can find it in the archive, though." But I'm just gonna read this to you. He says, "Seuss was in awe of Capra's ability to distill a script down to its essence. This is one of my favorite things I've ever read about writing, and just the idea of being able to communicate with other people, right? Communicate with customers, communicate inside your company, communicate with your family. It's just essential to being able to work well with others. He would bring Capra his first draft of a script, then watch with near reverence as Capra slowly went through it with a pencil." Now we have, this is what Capra says. "The first thing you have to do in writing is find out if you're saying anything." Capra would carefully go through Dr. Seuss's script, this is before he was Dr. Seuss,

• 23:55David Senra?

  "underlining the places where he had advanced the story. The rest he left unlined." So I'm looking at your copy, right? Looking at your writing, "I'm only underlining where you advanced the story." Okay? Which means that's the part we're gonna keep. This is this, "The rest he left unlined," remember Dr. Seuss. "Most of his first drafts would be returned to him with little or no underlining." And so this is what Dr. Seuss took away from that. "Capra taught me conciseness. I learned a lot about the juxtaposition of words and visual images. The tight storytelling discipline instilled by Capra would be formative in shaping Dr. Seuss's future art." And that idea of the tight storytelling discipline, that's really what I feel about,

• 24:39David Senra?

  why I had a hard time putting this book down. I neglected all my other responsibilities until I finished reading this because how tight Stephen King, he tells entire stories in a paragraph or two. So did Frank Capra, so did John Gould, and so did Dr. Seuss. Okay, so now I'm going to share the story that I love. It's from Derek Sivers. Sivers.org is the website, but if you Google Derek Sivers, there's no speed limit. This will pop up. This was written over 10 years ago, and I still think about it all the time. And again, it's called "There's No Speed Limit," and it's how he learns an entire semester, or entire semester or two of music class in just a few lessons with a gifted teacher. So he says, "I was 17 and about to start my first year at Berklee College of Music.

• 25:23David Senra?

  I called a local recording studio with a random question about music type setting. When the studio owner heard I was going to Berklee, he said, 'I graduated from Berklee and taught there, too. I bet you I can teach you two years of theory and arranging in only a few lessons. I suspect you can graduate in two years if you understand there's no speed limit. Come by my studio at 9:00 AM tomorrow for your first lesson if you're interested. No charge.'" And so another idea just popped out that me, that you and I have been talking about. The idea that it's, for whatever reason, like we think of Chuck Silvers from last week's podcast, this older guy, generation older than Steven Spielberg, took an interest in Steven when he was 20 years old and literally changed his life by teaching Steven everything

• 26:07David Senra?

  he knew, trying to support him. A lot of these entrepreneurs that we read autobiographies of, they do the same thing. Towards the end of their life, inevitably, they're like, "Listen, I learned a lot over my multiple decade career. I'm going to write it down. This is for future entrepreneurs, for the benefit of future entrepreneurs." That is said so explicitly in the founder of IKEA's autobiography, Ingvar Kamprad. "I didn't want to write this autobiography, but I love entrepreneurs and I'm going to help the future generations, and they can use my ideas long after I'm gone." That is literally in his book, right? And so we see the same thing here. We have this older guy, his name is Chemo Williams, we're about to introduce you to him. "Hey, you love music? I love music. Let me try to help you as well." If we are in a position to do that for younger people, to help them, we should do so, man. We can literally change their lives.

• 26:53David Senra?

  So he says, "Graduate college in two years? Awesome. I liked his style. That was Chemo Williams. I showed up at his studio at 8:40 the next morning." Remember, he said be there at 9:00, right? Derek? No, that's not good enough. This is some Charlie Munger stuff right here. "I showed up at his studio at 8:40 in the morning, super excited, though I waited outside before ringing his bell at 8:59. He opened the door." We're about to get the second lesson that pops up over and over again that's going to differentiate you and I as well. "I showed up..." Whoa, I read that part. "He opened the door, a tall man in a Hawaiian shirt with a big hat, with a square scar on his nose, a laid-back demeanor, and a huge smile, sizing me up and nodding. Recently, I had heard him tell the story from his perspective. He said, 'My doorbell rang at 8:59 one morning, and I had no idea why.'" And this is the second part. "I run across kids all the time who say they want to be a great musician.

• 27:37David Senra?

  I tell them I can help, and I tell them to show up in my studio at 9:00 a.m. if they're serious. Nobody ever does. It's how I weed out the really serious ones from the kids who just talk." But there was Derek, ready to go. Everybody, the vast majority of people. The reason this is called the misfit feed is because most people just talk. Most people quit. Most people don't do anything remarkable. They waste their one shot at life. What did Steve Jobs tell us? Half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the unsuccessful ones is just pure perseverance, just not giving up. That is half. Listen to what this guy's saying. I'm giving you free lessons. You can knock off two years of your college education if you just show up and you don't even show up.

• 28:23David Senra?

  Let's go back to this. "After one-minute welcome, we're sitting at the piano, analyzing the sheet music for Jazz Standard. Don't worry about too much of this. You'll understand his main point very quickly because Derek is a fantastic writer." "He was quickly explaining the chords based on the diatonic scale. I have no idea what that is. How the dissonance of the tritone and the V chord with the flat 7 is what makes it want to resolve to the I. I have no idea what any of this is. Within a minute, he started quizzing me. If the V chord with the flat 7 has that tritone, then so does another flat 7 chord. Which one? The flat II chord? Right. So that's a substitute chord. Any flat 7 chord can be substituted with another flat 7 that shares the same tritone." So reharmonize all the chords you can in this chart. Go.

• 29:06David Senra?

  And this next sentence is bold by Derek. "The pace was intense and I loved it." Remember that because Stephen King talks a lot of shit, too. Where he is not, he's like, "Listen, if you're not willing to work hard, forget it. Just put the book down, you're going to fail." This idea, just like he said at the very opening, he's like, "How'd you write so a book? How many did you write so many books?" "One word at a time." "Most people give up at everything. We are not like most people." "Finally, someone was challenging me, keeping me in over my head, encouraging and expecting me to pull myself up quickly." "I feel the same thing when you read Stephen King's book. He holds you to a very high standard. You're going to go at this every day and you're not going to give up," is what Stephen King's going to tell us. "I was learning so fast." I felt, and Spielberg said the same thing last week. "I was learning so fast, I felt like an adrenaline rush, which you get when you're playing a video game."

• 29:50David Senra?

  "He tossed every fact at me and it made me prove that I got it." "In one three-hour lesson that morning, he taught me a full semester of Berklee's Harmony courses. In our next four lessons," remember Derek shows up and he doesn't quit, right? This guy winds up selling a CD baby to the company for 25 or 30 million dollars, something like that, a few decades into the future. "In our next four lessons, he taught me the next four semesters of Harmony and Arranging classes. When I got to college and took my entrance exams, I tested out of those six semesters. Then, as Chemo suggested, I bought the course materials for other required classes and taught myself, doing the homework in my own time. Then I went to the department head and took the final exam, getting full credit for those courses."

• 30:32David Senra?

  If there's a paragraph that, I mean, come on, you read that paragraph about somebody, that's not an entrepreneur right there, too? That is the definition of entrepreneurship. He's just applying it to school. This is amazing. "By doing this, in addition to completing my full course load, I graduated college in two and a half years. I got my bachelor's degree when I was 20. Chemo's high expectations set a new pace for me." Let me repeat that to you and tell me that's not exactly what Steve Jobs has told us, right? "Chemo's high expectations set a new pace for me." Go back to Steve Jobs. His advice to entrepreneurs, be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected. Right? It's the same idea. Chemo's high expectations set a new pace for me.

• 31:16David Senra?

  He taught me that the stand, this is one of my favorite, I repeat this so many times to friends, to conversations with friends. He, and I got it from this article, this post, he taught me that the standard pace is for chumps, that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you're more driven than most people, you can do way more than anyone expects. And this principle applies to all of life, not just school. Before I met Chemo, I was just a kid who wanted to be a musician, doing it casually. Ever since our five lessons, I have, I've had no speed limit. I owe every great thing that's happened in my life to Chemo's raised expectations. A random meeting and five music lessons showed me that I can do way more than the norm. Chemo knows how much he means to me.

• 32:01David Senra?

  We're friends to this day. Absolutely fantastic. I love rereading that. Again, Derek Sivers, just Google Derek Sivers, there's no speed limit. If you really want to read it, you'll find it, don't worry about it. Okay, so let's go to his high school schedule. This is his senior year. His schedule is insane, insane. And he has to do this because remember, his mom, single mom, not making a lot of money. So he says, "I got a job at the Warmboll Mills in Weaving. I didn't want it. The work was hard and boring. The mill itself was a dingy fuckhole overhanging a polluted river, but I needed the paycheck. My mother was making lousy wages as a housekeeper at a facility for the mentally ill." So let's go into his schedule. "During my final weeks of high school, my schedule looked like this. I woke up at seven.

• 32:46David Senra?

  I was off to school by 7:30. The last bell was at 2 o'clock. I would punch in at 2:58 at the mill, bag loose fabric for eight hours, punch out at 11 o'clock at night, get home around a quarter of 12, eat a bowl of cereal, fall into bed, get up the next morning, and do it all again." And there's no really wasted, just like there's no really wasted words in his writing, there's no really wasted experiences. Because it's this whole time, he's struggling, he's still writing as much as he can. Like, two or three years later, he remembers, there's a story that happens when he's working at the mill, where they have to like, clean out the basement and they find...

• 33:22David Senra?

  They find rats like the size of dogs and cats and stuff like that. And he's like, OK, well, he wanted, he wasn't the one cleaning the basement. Somebody told him the story. And so he used that idea a few years later. And he wrote a story about it. And this is where he gets his first big sale. So you'll always remember your first big sale. So this is my final semester at college. I recalled Guy's story about the rats under the mill, big as cats, big as, some as big as dogs, and started writing a story called Graveyard Shift. Two months later, Cavalier Magazine bought the story for $200. I had sold other stories previously to this, but they had bought in a total of just $65 altogether. This was three times that, and in a single stroke. It took my breath away. It did.

• 34:06David Senra?

  I was rich. So he's got this idea first that when he's writing, he talks about the ideal reader, IR. And he's saying like, if you're creating something, you should create for one person in mind. He writes for his wife in mind. That's his ideal reader. I would say I would compare this a lot with like, if you're creating a product, like if Steven Spielberg said, I am the audience. Steve Jobs and his team made the iPod for themselves. Like, so you might be your ideal, you know, the person to use your product or service. He just happens to use that for his craft, which is writing. But listen to how he tells the story of getting and staying married. And again, he does this really, really rapidly. He meets his wife in college, they're still married to this day. "One day in late June of that summer, a bunch of us library guys had lunch on the grass

• 34:51David Senra?

  behind the university bookstore. Sitting between Paulo Silva and Eddie Marsh was a trim girl with a raucous laugh, red-tinted hair, and the prettiest legs I've ever seen. I hadn't run across her in the library, and I didn't believe a college student could utter such a wonderful, unafraid laugh. Her name was Tabitha Spruce. We got married a year and a half later. We're still married. It worked. Our marriage has outlessed all of the world's leaders except for Castro. And if we keep talking, arguing, making love, and dancing to the Ramones, it'll probably keep working."

• 35:26David Senra?

  And so I want to pull out one paragraph here. He's talking about this poem that his wife wrote. And this is going to be a weird thought that spawned in my mind, but come with me here. And really, this is what Stephen King believes. Like, he's a professional, right? It's not, I'm not just going to sit around waiting for this inspiration. He's like, no, I'm going to show up every day. And if I show up every day and put in the work, the inspiration comes, right? You don't just sit there and then, like, strike of lightning and then, then I have to go write. It's like, no, you show up every day and you do it. And so it says, "There was also a work ethic in that poem that I liked, something that suggested that writing poems, or stories, or essays, or I would add, anything else, had as much in common with sweeping the floor as with mythy moments of revelation." And so what this reminded me of was, actually, there's an interview, or like, a clip from

• 36:11David Senra?

  an interview I saw one time, with the musician, the artist, Akon, talking about what it's like, what he learned from working with Eminem, and how, once he observed Eminem's process, it changed his approach to his own work forever. And what he said, he said, "He didn't know that Eminem worked on a schedule, right? So it's like, he shows up at 9 o'clock, he takes a lunch break at 1, and he leaves at 5, and he does this every day." So Akon shows up to Detroit, shows up to the studio at 6 o'clock. They're like, "Oh, yeah, M just left." He calls M, he's like, "Hey, man, you know, you ready to, let's do this. You coming back to the studio?" He's like, "Yeah, I'll be there, I'll be there back there at 9 a.m. tomorrow." And Akon thought he was joking. He's like, "Are you serious?" He's like, "Yeah." So they show up, in the middle of his verse, 1 o'clock happens, he stops, goes, takes

• 36:56David Senra?

  lunch, comes back, 2 o'clock, picks up right, right back on it. Then he's halfway done with the song, 5 o'clock, he's like, "All right, I'll see you tomorrow." And Akon's like, "You're not going to finish it?" He's like, "No, I can do it tomorrow." And Akon was talking about, he's like, "Well, most musicians, you know, they work in these little brief spurts, whatever the case is." He's like, "His approach to the business was to treat it like a job." And to show up every day. And there was actually a comment that I saved. I took a screenshot of the comment of this clip in the interview, because what I just described to you is going to be very similar to what Stephen King does. I was watching this interview to prep for this podcast with George R.R. Martin, the writer of Game of Thrones, right? And he's having a conversation with Stephen King. He's like, how do you write so many books? And Stephen King's is like, well, the first thing I do in the morning, I set

• 37:41David Senra?

  aside, I'm uninterrupted for many hours a time, and I write six pages a day. And I do that every day. And in 60 days, I have 360 pages, and that's another book. That's how you write six, that's how he's able to write 60 books. He treats it like a job. And it's not like, it's the consistency over intensity again. It's, you know, it might take me five, six hours, whatever his time is, but I do it every day, seven days a week. Then in the afternoon, he has a very set schedule. It's like writing in the morning, then he takes a nap, he has lunch, takes a nap. I think he answers the letters, stuff like that in the afternoon, has dinner with his wife, spends time with his family, watches a baseball game, that kind of thing. That's Stephen King's schedule. But this quote that I saved, I think is a perfect illustration of what I'm trying to tell you, says, "This

• 38:22David Senra?

  is the sign of a true professional. He doesn't sit in the studio waiting for inspiration to come. He goes to the studio rigidly, ready to work, knowing that it will be there for him when he calls on it." It has a very similar idea from what Stephen King is telling us right here, where he's like, listen, the writing, the act of writing poems, stories, essays, has a lot more in common with sweeping the floor than you think it does. So him and his wife, they get married, they're still really young. This is Stephen King writing about being a father. And we're gonna, I mean, it was just, it just blew my mind. I did not know this before I read the book, like, how much he struggled. They were living in a trailer. His wife was working at Dunkin' Donuts. He's cleaning maggots out of laundry.

• 39:07David Senra?

  I'll get to it in a minute. They're trying to support two kids on no money. And so when he hits that break, like, you feel it when you read this book. Like, I had tears in my eyes when he finally hits with Carrie, because you know how the struggle and all the crap he went through. And I don't want to run over my future point, but it sticks out of my mind. They're renting a crappy little apartment for like 90 bucks a month, and somebody buys the paperback rights to Carrie for $400,000. That is going to come from a guy that was so poor, he couldn't even buy medicine for his sick daughter. This is crazy.

• 39:44David Senra?

  This is him on being a father. When Tabby went into labor with my son, I was at our, with our son, I was at a drive-in movie theater with a friend. We were on the third movie in the second six-pack when the guy in the office broke in with an announcement. This is when there were still pole speakers in those days. So if you've ever seen an old-school drive-through theaters, you have this like portable speaker. Every car has its own speaker, so you can hear the movie, and it's like attached to your car. And so it says, "The manager's announcement thus rang through the entire parking lot. Steve King, please go home, your wife is in labor. Steve King, please go home, your wife is gonna have the baby." As I drove our old Plymouth towards the exit, a couple of hundred horns blared a salute. Many people flicked their headlights on and off, bathing me in a stuttery glow. When I got home, Tabby was calm and packed.

• 40:29David Senra?

  She gave birth to Joe less than three hours later. He entered the world easily. For the next five years or so, nothing else about Joe was easy, but he was a treat. Both of them were really, they were a treat. And so anybody that has kids knows exactly what he's talking about. Yeah, it's really, really hard. It's the greatest thing that'll ever happen to you, though. So this is his wretched job just after college. This is what I just alluded to. I couldn't find a teaching job, so I went to work at New Franklin Laundry. The laundry is like commercial laundry, so think of stuff coming from hospitals, stuff coming from restaurants. And he's in Maine, so everybody's eating seafood. By the time the tablecloths reached me, they stank to high heaven and were often boiling with maggots. The maggots would try to crawl up your arms as you loaded the washers.

• 41:12David Senra?

  It was as if the little fuckers knew you were planning to cook them. The maggots were bad, the smell of decomposing clam and lobster meat was even worse. Hospital sheets and linens were worse. These also crawled with maggots in the summertime, but it was blood they were feeding on instead of lobster meat. So this is all about the struggle. All the highlights I'm gonna give you for the next short while is all about the struggle. Broke, two kids, hoping on a dream, right? Just hoping I can live the dream I want. I want to be a writer. Can I support my family doing this? From a financial point of view, two kids were probably too much for, were probably too many, were probably too, too many, excuse me, for, for college grads working in the

• 41:56David Senra?

  laundry and the second shift at Dunkin' Donuts. I wrote after work. I would sometimes write a little on my lunch break, too. There were times when it occurred to me that I was simply repeating my mother's life. If I happened to be tired, or if there were extra bills to pay and no money to pay them with, it seemed awful. I'd think, this isn't the way our lives are supposed to be going. The stories I sold to men magazines were just enough to create a rough, sliding margin between us and the welfare office. You know, he's selling stories for, you know, a hundred bucks here, fifty dollars here, seventy-five dollars here when he could, right? And then one day it just hits him. It's like, I don't, I can't even pay medication for my sick daughter.

• 42:40David Senra?

  And then he has a lucky break, a small lucky break here. And he talks about that. Trudging from the car to our apartment building was a low point. We both knew Naomi needed the pink stuff, which is what we called liquid amoxicillin. The pink stuff was expensive and we were broke. She was so feverish, she glowed against my chest like a banked coal. When I saw there was an envelope sticking out of our mailbox, a rare Saturday delivery, I snagged it, praying it wouldn't turn out to be another bill. It wasn't. It was a check for a long story I hadn't believed would sell anywhere. The check was for $500, easily the largest sum I'd ever received.

• 43:24David Senra?

  So this goes on for many, many years. I'm going to still read to you. Really, the note, this is the struggle and the belief and support of his wife. We were living in a trailer. I was driving a Buick with transmission problems we couldn't afford to fix. We had no telephone. We simply couldn't afford the monthly charge. I wasn't having much success with my own writing. Think about that, where he's at in his life. Picture yourself in his shoes, in his mind. You know, there's times in his mind, let's tell him, give it up, Steve. Give it up. This isn't going to work. You can't be a writer. No one's buying your stuff. Give up. The bigger deal was that for the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching.

• 44:06David Senra?

  So now, he's doing laundry on the summer break, but he's teaching, I think, high school or something like that. By most Friday afternoons, I felt that I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain. If I ever came close to despairing about my future as a writer, it was then. I could see myself 30 years on, wearing the same shabby tweed coats with patches on the elbows, potbelly rolling over my gap khakis from too much beer. I'd have a cigarette cough from too many packs of cigarettes, thicker glasses, more dandruff, and in my desk drawer, six or seven unfinished manuscripts, which I would take out and tinker with from time to time, usually when drunk. This is fantastic writing. And of course, I'd lie to myself, telling myself there was still time.

• 44:50David Senra?

  It wasn't too late. My wife made a crucial difference during those years. Tabby never voiced a single doubt. Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife or a husband, I smile and I think, there's someone who knows. Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don't have to make speeches, just believing is usually enough. This goes on for several years. He has the idea for Carrie. This is his first hit. Not only does the novel sell fantastically, but it's turned into a movie that also is very successful. This is before this happens.

• 45:35David Senra?

  He writes it, the beginning of it. He hated it, and he threw it in the trash. His wife takes it out. The next night when I came home, Tabby had the pages. She spied them while emptying my wastebasket, had shaken the cigarette ashes off the crumpled balls of paper, smoothed them out, and sat down to read them. She wanted me to go on with it, she said. You've got something here, she said. I really think you do. And this is what Carrie taught him, and he's gonna repeat this over and over again in the book. Variations of the same idea. "The realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea.

• 46:20David Senra?

  Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it. And sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit." He winds up writing the manuscript. He sends it off. And this is a much-needed break. This is the first one, okay? "The manuscript of Carrie went off to Doubleday, that's a publisher, where I had made a friend named William Thompson. I pretty much forgot about it and moved on with my life. The intercon came on, and so he's still teaching at school. He's got like a free period, and he's just sitting in the teacher's lounge grading papers. He says, "The inter came on in the office and asked if I was there. I said I was, and she asked me to come to the office. I had a phone call, my wife." Remember, they don't have a phone at home, okay?

• 47:05David Senra?

  They're too poor to have a phone at home. So he's really worried. "I hurried, my heart beating hard. Tabby would have had to dress the kids in their boots and jackets to use the neighbor's phone, and I could think of only two reasons why she might have done so. Either Joe or Naomi had broken a leg, or I had sold Carrie. My wife, sounding out of breath but deliriously happy, read me a telegram. Bill Thompson had sent it after trying to call and discovering that the Kings no longer had a phone." "Congratulations," it read. "Carrie officially a Doubleday book. Is $2,500 advance okay? The future lies ahead. Love, Bill." So then they wind up celebrating. They have a little bit of champagne, maybe a cigarette, something like that.

• 47:48David Senra?

  And then they just have a conversation, like, you know, his wife's kind of curious, like, what does this mean? Like, could there be like a future in this? And so...

• 47:59David Senra?

  This is the note, and I wrote this note to myself after I read this section. And it's like, maybe, just maybe, there's something here. A future different from our present. I'd read that Mario Puzo had just scored a huge advance for paperback rights to The Godfather, $400,000, according to the newspaper. But I didn't believe Carrie would fetch anywhere near that. Tabby asked if I thought the book would find a paperback publisher. I told her I thought the chances were pretty good, maybe seven or eight in 10. She asked how much it might bring. I said my best guess would be somewhere between 10 and $60,000. So he would get half that. That's the contract he has. So if it was 10, he'd get 5. If it was 60, he'd get 30.

• 48:44David Senra?

  $60,000? She sounded almost shocked. Is that much even possible? I said it was, not likely, perhaps, but possible. Probably just pie in the sky, but it was a night for dreaming. And this is the part where it hits you, because at this point, you've spent a few hours inside the mind of Stephen King, and you're reliving how much struggle that he had to get through, and how many times he was given the opportunity to quit, and he refused. So this is a phone call that's going to change his life. And it needed to come, because not only is he doing really poorly financially, but his mom is dying of cancer at the same time.

• 49:24David Senra?

  And he'd just got off the phone with his brother earlier, and they were talking about, what do we do? Our mom is dying of cancer. Okay? So it says, "One Sunday, not long after that call, I got another one from Bill Thompson. I was alone in the apartment." "Are you sitting down?" Bill asked. "No," I said. "Do I need to?" "You might," he said. "The paperback rights to Carrie went to Signet Books for $400,000." I stood there in the doorway, casting the same shadow as always, but I couldn't talk. I hadn't heard him, right? I couldn't have. The idea allowed me to find my voice again, at least. "Did you say it went for $40,000?" "400,000," he said.

• 50:08David Senra?

  "Under the rules of the road," meaning the contract I'd signed, "200K of it is yours. Congratulations, Steve." I was still standing in the doorway, looking across the living room toward our bedroom and the crib where Joe slept. Our place rented for ninety dollars a month, and this man I'd met only once face to face was telling me that I'd won the lottery. The strength ran out of my legs. I didn't fall exactly, but I kind of whooshed down to a sitting position there in the doorway. "Are you sure?" I asked him. He said he was. I asked him to say the number again, very slowly and very clearly, so I could be sure I hadn't misunderstood. He said the number was a four followed by five zeros.

• 50:52David Senra?

  We talked for another half hour, and I don't remember a single word of what we said. When the conversation was over, I tried to call Tabby at her mother's, but she had already left. I walked back and forth through the apartment, exploding with good news and without an ear to hear it. I was shaking all over. When she came home, I took her by the shoulders. I told her about the paperback sale. She didn't appear to understand. I told her again. Tabby looked over my shoulder at our shitty little apartment, just as I had, and began to cry. That is the start of his writing career, the start of the success that he's going to build upon for the next few decades. He almost destroys it because he winds up becoming an alcoholic and a drug addict.

• 51:35David Senra?

  And so this is what, again, great writing, this is what it's like being an alcoholic. Telling an alcoholic to control his drinking is like telling a guy suffering from the world's most cataclysmic case of diarrhea to control his shitting. My nights during the last five years of my drinking always ended with the same ritual. I'd pour any beers left in the refrigerator down the sink. If I didn't, they'd talk to me as I lay in bed until I got up and had another and another and one more. And he winds up doing cocaine, alcohol, Xanax, Valium, drugs I've never even heard of. They wind up having intervention. He's sober now. But he says there's entire books. Like, he wrote the book Cujo, which I was also turned

• 52:19David Senra?

  into a movie. He's like, "I don't remember writing that book. I was so drunk and high all the time. I don't remember any of this." And so at this point, he's writing the story he's about to tell us. He's sober. They wind up having an intervention. His family and everybody else worried about him. And I think his wife and kids were threatening to leave. And so he wound up getting his act together. But this is just a fantastic story, and it's about putting work in its proper place. The last thing I want to tell you in this part is about my desk. For years, I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room. No more child's desk in my trailer laundry closet. In 1981, I got the one I wanted and placed it in the middle of a spacious, skylighted study. For six years, I sat behind that desk, either drunk or wrecked out of my mind, like a ship's

• 53:04David Senra?

  captain in charge of a voyage to nowhere. A year or two after I sobered up, I got rid of that monstrosity and put it in a living room, and put in a living room suite where it had been. So this is in his office, right? In the early 90s, before they moved out onto their own lives, my kids sometimes came up in the evening to watch a basketball game or a movie and eat pizza. They usually left a box full of crust behind when they moved on, but I didn't care. They came, they seemed to enjoy being with me, and I know I enjoyed being with them. I got another desk. It's handmade, beautiful, and half the size. I put it in the far west end of the office, in a corner under the eve.

• 53:46David Senra?

  I'm sitting under that eve right now, a 53-year-old man with bad eyes, a gimpy leg, and no hangover. I'm doing what I know how to do, and as well as I know how to do it. I came through all the stuff I told you about, and plenty more that I didn't, and now I'm going to tell you as much as I care, as much as I can, about the job. As promised, it won't take long. It starts with this: Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.

• 54:28David Senra?

  And so the first, that's what he considers his CV, his mini memoir. And he goes into like how he thinks about his craft. So there's more highlights there. But this is really about how to approach your work. And you're going to see like his intensity, I would say, that he brings to it. It's like, I'm not, it's not going to run my life, but it's an important part of life. Right. It's there to support life, but it isn't life. So this is Stephen King on how to approach your work. He's going to talk about writing, but this applies to so many other things. Right. You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair, the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fist clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world.

• 55:12David Senra?

  Come to it anyway, but lightly. Let me say it again. You must not come lightly to the blank page. I'm not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly. I'm not asking you to be politically correct or cast aside your sense of humor. This isn't a popularity contest. It's not the moral Olympics and it's not church. But it's writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't, it's time for you to close the book and do something else. And so we see he's going to hold us to, just like Chemo held Derek Sivers to high expectations, right? Stephen King's going to say the same thing to us.

• 55:56David Senra?

  Well, follows us everything I know about how to write good fiction. I'll be as brief as possible because your time is valuable and so is mine. And we both understand that the hours we spend talking about writing is time we don't spend actually doing it. I'll be as encouraging as possible because it's my nature and because I love the job. I want you to love it too. But if you don't want to work your ass off, you have no business trying to write well. So if you aren't willing to work hard, forget it. Right. It's right that you should do all the work and burn all the midnight oil. There's stuff in there that can change your life. Believe me, I know. And so this idea that books are just made out of books, right? And he says that, "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others. Read a lot and write a lot." There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of. There's no shortcut.

• 56:41David Senra?

  I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through 70 or 80 books a year, mostly fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft. I read because I like to read, yet there is a learning process going on." And so that's an echo of the idea that we covered a few podcasts back, the Almanac of Naval Ravikant. Find work that feels like play to you, but looks like work to others. And then this is another idea he points out that I've seen over and over again, that you can draw inspiration, or you can know the right way to do something by seeing it done the wrong way. So it's like, most writers can remember the first book he or she put down, thinking, "I can do better than this. Hell, I am going to do better than this." What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize

• 57:25David Senra?

  that his or her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his or her stuff? And this is where he goes back to unquestionably holding us to high standards. And his whole point here is like, most people are full of excuses, which we just saw in that story. Chemo offers his services for free, just to help out to a ton of people. "Yeah, I'll be there tomorrow." They never show up, right? That's just, this is just what, most humans quit. Most humans can't stick to anything. Most humans are full of excuses. And so Stephen's gonna draw the line and stand here. It's like, you better make sure that you're actually gonna do the stuff. Why are you reading this book if you're not gonna act on it, right? Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write. It's simple as that.

• 58:10David Senra?

  And that was in response to people saying, "Yeah, I want to be a writer, but I don't have time to read." They actually say, and he said, he's had people say this to his face. Imagine getting that close to Stephen King, and you should be embarrassed. I'd be embarrassed to say something like that, assuming that this is a writer that you admire, you worked yourself into a position, maybe you went to one of his book signings, or had a case, and it's like, "Yeah, I want to do what you do, but you know, I don't have time." I mean, come on, man. He's gonna talk about, and he's gonna expound on this idea. Because you could have, I mean, really, if it's important to you, you make time for it, right? Actions, one of my favorite sayings, I talk about all the time, and chastise myself with is actions express priority. Like, if I'm saying something's important to me, then I analyze what's coming out of my mouth, what I'm actually saying is important, and then I compare how I'm spending my time.

• 58:52David Senra?

  How I spend my time is actually what's important to me, not the lies I tell myself, right? It's very easy to lie to yourself, "Yeah, I wanna be a writer, I wanna be this, I wanna be this, I wanna be the best at this, I wanna do whatever the case is." Okay, well, how did you spend your day yesterday? Take an inventory of your time. Those are the things you actually wanna do. Actions express your priority. So he's talking about one of his sons, his young son Owen, wanted to play, like, wanted to play the saxophone. And he starts out, you know, practicing his own time, and then slowly, before he tells his dad he wants to quit, his dad already knew he wanted to quit. And he says, "I knew, not because Owen stopped practicing, but because he was practicing only during the periods that his music teacher had set for him. As soon as his practice time was over, it was back into the case, and there it stayed until the next lesson or practice time.

• 59:36David Senra?

  What this suggested to me was that when it came to the sax and my son, there was never gonna be any real playtime. It was all going to be rehearsal. That's no good. If there's no joy in it, it's just no good. It's best to go on to some other area where the deposits of talent may be richer and the fun quotient higher." And so Stephen King's approach to writing and reading is the same approach that Kobe Bryant had to basketball, and I'll talk about that in a minute. Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless. When you find something at which you are talented, you do it, whatever it is, until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head.

• 1:00:18David Senra?

  That sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate, four to six hours a day, every day, will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things and have an aptitude for them.

• 1:00:34David Senra?

  That's another way to say, find work that that looks like play to you and but it looks like work to other people, right? And so Kobe talks about this, it's like, listen, if you have to like, if I have to convince you to get into the gym, like, you need to find another profession. I wake up excited to go train. I wake up excited to go practice. I wake up excited to go play the game. And so his point, and he was giving a speech to an audience before, he's like, if you find yourself in a profession where you have to like, pull yourself to do things, or you're like, you're just dreading it, go find another profession. Stephen King is saying the same thing here. You're telling me you want to be a writer? You don't want to write just as much as my son doesn't want to play saxophone. That sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate, four to six hours a day every day, will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things and you have

• 1:01:18David Senra?

  an aptitude for them. And a few pages later, he describes this idea succinctly as possible. For me, not working is the real work. Then he talks about, you know, this, just because I like doing it, doesn't mean it comes easily to me. He gives this advice, like, if you're stuck, take a break, go get bored. This is exactly what David Ogilvie used to say. He's just like, I have long periods, you know, the guy spent all his time working, reading and writing. That was his job, right? And he talks about, you know, when I'm stuck, I wind up, I have long periods where I do nothing. I go ride a bike, I listen to music, I go for walks, I don't work. And then I get this flood of subconscious, from my subconscious, that actually helps me solve the problem I'm stuck on. So he says, boredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam.

• 1:02:02David Senra?

  For weeks, I got exactly nowhere in my thinking. It all seemed too hard, too fucking complex. I had run out of too many plotlines, and they were in danger of becoming snarled. I circled the problem again and again, beat my fists on it, knocking my head against it, and then one day, when I was thinking of nothing, the answer came to me. And that's another benefit of thinking of writing the book. Yeah, the second half of the book, it's all about, you know, his approach to his own craft, but you also see that, you know, he's a human, just like you and I. He's constantly running to dead ends, he's not sure of himself, he's making mistakes over and over again. It's like, everybody, the way you feel, like, that's normal. Everybody feels that way. You're doing something difficult, it's not going to be easy.

• 1:02:45David Senra?

  He's got another good idea on this page, talks about, you know, why are you doing what you're doing? Do you actually know why? Like, maybe you started doing something, you let the momentum carry you forward. Like, take a break and like, why am I doing this? It's really important. It's what we, like, humans need to know why. I've never hesitated to ask myself, either before starting the second draft of a book, or while stuck for an idea in the first draft, just what it is I'm writing about. Why am I spending the time doing this when I could be playing my guitar or writing my motorcycle? What got my nose down to the grindstone in the first place and then kept it there? The answer doesn't always come right away, but there usually is one, and it's usually not too hard to find either.

• 1:03:30David Senra?

  And then he gives advice, like, you are unique in the sense that only you have had your unique set of experiences, the way those experiences are intertwined with the way your mind works, what your personality is, your natural interests are. Like, you need to imbibe your work with who you are. That makes it more unique. We see this, like, many companies take on the personality of their founders, right? It's just like an expansion of what it was, uh, there was a, I think it was in the book, Inside Steve Jobs' Brain. They're like, Apple's just 10,000 versions of Steve Jobs. I forgot the exact, uh, the exact sentence, but it's that same idea. It's like, just an extension of who you are. So, don't shy away from that. Inject more of your weird personality into it. It makes you unique, it differentiates yourself, right?

• 1:04:13David Senra?

  You undoubtedly have your own thoughts, interests, and concerns, and they have arisen, as mine have, from your experiences and adventures as a human being. You should use them in your work. That's not all those ideas that are there, perhaps, but surely, it's one of the things that they're good for. And then he's got a great description of how difficult, you know, anytime you're doing, he's talking about being a writer, being a lonely job. Anytime you're doing something difficult, it's, to some degree, lonely, you know, you have to be a little off to want to do this. Like, why don't you just go get a normal job, like? You're kind of crazy to want to do something different. All the people that we study, all the people that listen to this, they're a little bit crazy, in a good way. But he says, "Writing can be difficult. Writing can be a difficult, lonely job.

• 1:04:58David Senra?

  It's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt." And one of the great things about me reading the words and having a meeting of the mind with Stephen King, right, is the fact that he talks about this. "I know I'm off, I know I'm crazy to do this, but I have to be this way." It's very inspiring and refreshing to read somebody else's inner monologue. And the things that they might not discuss with other people, they write down in books. And you're able to get inside their mind and realize, okay, this guy knows he chose a difficult path in life, and he did so on purpose. "You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot. And the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.

• 1:05:39David Senra?

  These lessons almost always occur when the study door is closed." Another variation of the idea, I think he was trying to express in that paragraph, is that formidable people are built in solitude. You're gonna go out into the world, and you're gonna share with the world your creations and everything else, but you need some alone time with just you. And his son talks about that later on, because Stephen King's wife's a writer, too. And that they would spend five, six hours a day by themselves in their respective offices. Then he goes, he talks more about the struggle. He talks about even writing this book. Remember, by the time he wrote this book, he wrote it from 97 to 2000,

• 1:06:22David Senra?

  because he gets hit by a van and almost killed in 1999. And he's in the middle of writing this book when that happens. He actually talks about it. But he's still, he had still, he could have retired then, right before he wrote this book, and went down as one of the most successful fiction writers of all time. And he's talking about, "I'm still struggling. I almost quit this book. Although it usually takes me only three months to finish the first draft of a book, this one was still only half-completed 18 months later. That was because I put it aside. I was not sure how to continue, or if I should continue at all. Writing fiction was almost as much fun as it had ever been, but every word of this nonfiction book was a kind of torture." And then just one sentence that I think is fantastic. "The scariest moment is always just before you start."

• 1:07:08David Senra?

  And before I tell you a closing thought from Stephen King, I want to talk about this idea. There's like a bunch of like postscripts and epilogues in the book. And something, there was an essay written by one of his sons. I think it's a great idea. And so he says, "My father gave me my first job, reading audiobooks. He would pay me $9 per finished 60-minute tape." So $9 per hour completed audio, right? So what he would do, this is a fantastic idea. I think I'm going to use this as well. Not only does it help like teach your kid about money, but also gets them to read more. So he would hire his son, and then he also did this for his other kids as well. Give him a book, you know? Could be one of your favorite books, whatever it is. Have them, show them, set them up so they can record it, right? Just have them to read the book to you.

• 1:07:53David Senra?

  So at the end, right? You have a book on tape of your kid's voice. So you have that forever. Like, you know, your kid's not, maybe he sounds one way. He's 10, he's not going to sound that way when he's an adult, but you still have that recording. You can listen to it other times because Stephen King was one of the first authors to embrace audiobooks. He was really early back in, I think he said like 87, when he realized, oh, this is a good idea. But I just love this idea. It's like, your kid gets to read, he makes something, he gets paid for what he made because he's realizing, hey, if I provide value to other people, people will pay me for that, right? And then you, as a parent, get like a little time capsule from your son or daughter's childhood. That's a really good idea. I just wanted to share that with you. And so here's a closing thought from Stephen King. "Writing isn't about making money, getting famous,

• 1:08:38David Senra?

  getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work and enriching your own life as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. Some of this book, perhaps too much, has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it, and perhaps the best of it, is a permission slip. You can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will."

• 1:09:14David Senra?

  That is where I'll leave it. I can't recommend this book highly enough. I absolutely loved it. I told you, I couldn't put it down. It was irresponsible how many other things I neglected in my life to finish this book. So if you want to buy the book, you want the full story, buy the book using the link that's in the show notes. You'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. The very, very best way you can support the podcast and a friend is if you want to support the podcast and a friend at the same time, I should say, buy them a gift subscription to Founders. There's a link in the show notes to do so. That is 210 books down, 1,000 to go. I'll talk to you again soon.