Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 742: Anne Lamott & Neal Allen

Episode Date: March 8, 2026

Anne Lamott and Neal Allen, excellent writers and superorganism representing the head & heartspace that goes along with writing, re-join the DTFH!Pre-Order Anne and Neal's new book, Good Writing - 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences. Soon to be available everywhere you get your books!Indiana family! Duncan is coming to The Comedy Attic in Bloomington, March 12-14! Click here to get your tickets now.Check out the DTFH night streams! Only available to our youtube subscribers. Click here to see what you're missing!This episode is brought to you by: In as little as 10 minutes you can get your free quote and up to 3 million dollars in coverage at Ethos.com/DUNCAN Download Cash App, use our exclusive referral code SECURE10 in your profile, send $5 to a friend within 14 days, and you’ll get $10 dropped right into your account! Terms apply. That’s Money. That’s Cash App. Check out squarespace.com/DUNCAN for a free trial, and when you’re ready to launch, use OFFER CODE: DUNCAN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

Hello to you, my friends. It's me, Duncan. I'm not just the greatest podcaster of all time, host of the most incredible live stream of all time at the night stream, which you can find by subscribing in my YouTube. I also happen to be a touring comedian. And I'd love for you to come see me at some of the upcoming shows. I'm going to be in Bloomington, Indiana, at the Comedy Addict March 12th through the 14th. Then I'm going to be at the Pittsburgh Improv in Homestead, Pennsylvania, March 19th through the 21st, and after that, I'm headed to the Denver Comedy Works. Ooh, I can't wait.

Get tickets in advance. Those tickets are going to sell out. They always do. Thank you, God. And it's a great club. I would love to see you guys again. I can't wait to come back to Denver. Then April 9th, you can find me at Zanis in Rosemont.

There's a lot more dates coming up. You can find all of my dates at Duncan Truzzle. dot com forward slash tour friends this episode is for all those writers out there who need a little inspiration this is a treasure chest i'm offering you i'm wandering up to your beach cabana with a treasure chest do you see me i'm covered in sand my hair looks weird there's a wild look in my eye but you notice i have a treasure chest filled with gold only it's not gold, it's inspiration. Today's episode was like rocket fuel for, uh, for me. Just truly, like if you're looking for, if your wheels are spinning in the muck that all writers inevitably

encounter, this episode is for you. Not always this episode for you, but Anne Lamont and Neil Allen's new book, good writing, 38 ways to improve your sentences is for you. It, both, Both of them are great writers and both of them have sort of merged into a kind of superorganism representing the head and the heart space that goes along with writing. This is a really fun episode and I really hope that you guys will pre-order their book. It does help a lot if you do that. The publishers like it and I guess it creates some kind of momentum. Though I doubt these two need to worry about moving books because they're both.

so brilliant. Regardless, if you're a writer, get ready, because you're about to get blasted into the inspiration zone. And now, everybody, Neil Allen and Anne Lamott. Annie, Neil, welcome back to the DTFH. It's really good to see y'all. You made me happy when I see you. The dopamine erupts in my synaptic left whenever I see you guys. Same with us for you. Same with us. Yeah, and not just because you're a comedian. Oh gosh, that's great. That's great to hear. Just because we love you and you're our friend and we can't believe that you let us come on your show. Oh, that is the funniest thing would you. The way that you were at, like having you asked to be on my show is just so cool to me because, you know, I'm a huge, huge fan of your work. You're a genius. You're a, you are one of my

favorite writers and I'm always so impressed with your ability to, you know, I'm always so impressed with your ability to, make it real man and yet keep it uh the light shines through there you know what i mean you read some writing and there's attempts at like positivity but it just isn't balanced with the reality situation we're in and somehow you you bring those two things together in a way i've never seen before so thank you oh thanks yeah so you have blessed us or are i about to bless us with a book that I'm sure everyone is immediately going to want to buy. People like me especially who when we read great writing and then sit down and then we sit down and think, I'm going to do great writing today. It'll be real and positive. And then an hour

later you read what you wrote and you just feel like jumping into a lawnmower blade. And you have a book on writing coming out. And I am going to be one of the first buyers of that book. Thank you. Well, yeah, can I just tell you about it briefly? Since people associate me with bird by bird, right? Yep.

Which was every single thing I knew about writing and life, but 30 years ago. And then I met Neil, Neil Allen, 10 years ago, and he had these rules that he had amassed over the years. He'd been a journalist with a Bergen record for 10 years or more. And they were 15? Five. Five, whatever.

Whatever. I've been a journalist for 15 years. Guys, can I be a complete jerk here and you don't have to do this? We'll deal with it. You have an AC running, I believe? Oh, Peter. It'll just make it sound better. I'm sorry, if you start getting cold, turn it back on.

Thank you. I'm sorry. Please continue. Okay. So I met Neil 10 years ago. Sorry. And he had these 36 rules for improving your sentences. like use strong verbs and question transitions and get rid of all the little tiny words that don't add

anything to a sense. And they were brilliant. And of course, I immediately hijacked them and started handing them out to all of my bird-by-bird workshop people. And then a couple years ago, he put them into book form with an essay or a meditation on each rule. And it was really brilliant. However, I sort of bitterly asked him one day if he hadn't noticed that I knew something about. writing too and trying to save the marriage he admitted that he did know this and I asked if I could write my responses to his essays on the rules and add my two cents and add my examples and add some prompts of my own and so little by little this book good writing came into being wow so this book is like a sort of it's you two merging together it's that's incredible that you two have

become a super organism. That's amazing. That's amazing. Was that... I think you'll notice if you read it, it's more like we've become... Do you remember there was a radio program? You wouldn't remember,

but there was a radio program that had characters called the Bickersons. So the book is kind of bickering in a call and response format. That is the first thing. That's the first thing that comes to mind is that it's challenging to collaborate with anybody but for two

writers who live together to collaborate on a book about writing was there any trepidation when you realize it really wasn't you know we joke about it but the fact my only trepidation was that I would kind of

ruin Annie's brand that to the that's got bird by bird right there in the center of it and that This isn't bird by bird, right? This is, bird by bird isn't just, isn't a craft book. It's not just about how to go about becoming a writer. It's about life and it's about spirituality and it's about suffering and vulnerability

and all sorts of things that make it a classic. This is a, not a technical manual, but the rules themselves that are the core of the book are technical rules basically for improving sentences. This isn't about becoming a writer. It's got some of that mixed in a little bit because we can't help ourselves. It's really about the second draft. It's what happens when you've got something that's grammatical, and now you want to pump it up. Now you want to make it not just grammatical, but a little more persuasive.

Get the sentence so delightful that somebody's going to read the next sentence after it. Yeah, the second draft. What a nightmare. Oh, no, see, I live for this. first draft for me is where I realize it's all hopeless. It's all over for England. My career is over. We're going to end up living with my grandson at the rescue mission eating government fees. But when I have a second draft, it's always the same problems. It's way, way too long. It's long by 30 percent. It's overwritten. I'm like you. I'm just a desperate born-to-die-people pleaser, and I just

and I'm shoehorning in stuff right and left, so people will think I'm more educated than I am and that I'm not a buzzkill and stuff like that. And the second draft is more like Swiss watchmaking, where you go through and you take out half of it, you know, and you, I want to just add that Neil's rule, Neil is a really classic writer. He was a journalist, so he is able to write sort of on command. And he writes these rules in a way that whether you're writing a grant proposal or a long email or a memoir or screenplay whatever that they'll work sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph

but i'm the third grade den mother you know i bring in the cupcakes when it's anybody's birthday and i say to people you can do this and in fact if it's on your heart to write you damn well better do it because it's going to hurt you for your whole life if you don't and here's what i would do and here's how to start and here's a great prompt yeah and then you can make it better if you're observing what we, you know who I mean, Neil has to say. So it's really a conversation with both of our skills sort of merged. And Neil started to say, Neil said there really wasn't a lot of anxiety or about working together because he'd written this really powerful, helpful book. And I got to go in and just add anything, everything I could think of or disagreed with or examples I thought

people or or mentions of writers people should read if they want to learn how to do dialogue better or if they want to learn you know whatever so you know it there were a few times where we disagreed on on certain sections but you know if you read the book you'll see that I always get the last word yeah of course but I one thing I'm interested in when it comes to this sort of Like what you're saying is like the second draft, it's more technical. But I'm curious about this because especially these days, you know, we're all looking, everything's in a state of like bizarre flux. And yet there's these certain principles that seem timeless.

And I'm really curious your thoughts on that when it comes to writing. Because you're basically pointing out a sort of meta structure that I imagine would work, you know, 500 years ago and we'll probably work 500 years in the future. What is that? Yeah, we talk about that a little bit toward the end of the book. And it is a curious thing that the structures that we have for the arts, whether it's writing or painting or whatever, are pretty hidebound. They have lasted for many, many years. Novels still follow the same structure

that they did 200 years ago, right, where every half page to page and a half, you have to torture your protagonist anew, right? Yeah. It has to be, it's basically one conflict after another conflict after another conflict compressed, you know, a hundred or more conflicts compressed into 250 to 350 pages. Right.

And there's no way around. You can write experimental fiction, but nobody reads it. So there's no way around that structure. Similarly, for sentences, what worked 500 years ago works now. A vivid version. There are reasons for that, right? Say one of the principle rule of all is vivid. over dull verbs, right? A dull verb is, I walk to the store. A vivid verb says, I trudge to the store, right? When I say

trudge, we know I'm somehow reluctant or slow or something. There's more going on than walking. And I'm bringing the person more specifically into the scene. So almost all of the rules. This episode of the DTFH has been supported by U.TFH. Ethos. Ethos makes getting life insurance fast and easy, 100% online. You can get a quote in seconds, apply in minutes, and get same-day coverage. There's no medical exam. You just answer a few simple health questions. You can get up to $3 million in coverage. Some policies are as low as $30 a month. As of March 2025, business insider named Ethos, the number one no medical exam instant life insurance provider. Ethos has 4.8 out of five stars on True Pilot with over 3,000 reviews. Listen,

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Almost all sentences can be improved by condensing them and making them more vivid and exciting and novel to the reader. You can overdo it, but usually people don't overdo it in their first draft. And so the second draft almost always gives you the opportunity to make things, feel more alive. And I think that's the structure you're talking about. Yeah. Is how do I, how do I reach the reader? Another way to look at it is you can write intellectually out of your brain and you will reach the reader with your brain. But if you use words and ideas that come out of the body or the heart, then you can reach the reader with your brain, your body, and your heart. Yes. If I say the, I ran into a tree and the card.

disassembled, I get a kind of abstract picture of a car falling apart. If I say, I totaled my car, I feel a sinking in my stomach and a sympathy in my heart. Okay, this, I'm sure you both could answer this. I'm going to, I don't, I'm not going to ask, you guys, why am I telling you how to answer these questions? This is where it gets interesting to me, what you're talking about, the heart. because it feel you get this pre-linguistic feeling when you sit down to write there's it hopefully and that feeling wants to have some kind of form and you're trying to squeeze it into words

and somewhere along the way the feeling it just doesn't get cat it's like you're trying to capture something that exists prior to language itself with language. And what do you think that is? What is that? Where does it come from? Like, what exactly are we pouring into our word cups? Well, I would say, I say this in bird by bird, and I say it again in good writing. I think that we happen to be a species that wants to know about life and about ourselves and about how facing our mortality we're to live fully human and alive instead of shutting down and hiding behind walls and persona. But a lot of it is ineffable. You know, for the entire time we've been here on Earth, people have been trying to capture

aspects of our deepness, the deep down freshness, as Jared Manley Hopkins put it, of, the life experience here. And we try. And no one ever gets it exactly right, but some people that we love, the poets often, Mom, Doss, people that we love get pretty close.

And ever since we started, we were in tribal communities, people have been gathering around the storyteller to hear the story, and what they want to hear about is who they are. You know, we'd like people to hold up a mirror,

even if like with the great Confederacy of Duncese and Ignatius J. Riley, He's obviously just mad as a hatter and he is us. It's kind of a fun house mirror, but we see ourselves to the end's degree and we find sympathy and love for this incredibly annoying creature. And the incredibly annoying creature is us, you know?

And so in these mirror experiences of writing, reading, movies, painting, we see glimmers of something that is pretty hard to capture as any sort of really big deal. I mean, I would say in some Terrence Malick movies, he's come close, but it wasn't words. It was vibrational and it was energetic, but it was portrayed through images. I don't know if I explained that right,

but this is what we've always longed for ever since we've been here on Earth. And so each of us tries, and we, you know, it's Beckett, it's Samuel Beckett saying, Ever tried, ever fail, try again, fail better. You know, we just keep trying. For me, it's the poets where I feel sometimes like a Buddhist gong has gone off

when it pierces me with its truth and its depth. And it's that brief moment of shimmer and insight and grocking it, that moment of groking it. That moment of grok. And you know what? As I said, it's ephemeral. and it's ineffable, and yet it's what we're called to do. Yeah, it's your quantifying the unquantifiable. And what I find really interesting about what you do is that now what you're doing is so

prescient in the sense that the one thing that AI has yet to be able to do is just what you described. And of course it can't. How could it? Wait, how does an A, and it's like some Kutulu thing. How is it going to, like, explain what it is to us? It's made of words. It's made of the symmetry between words.

And I guess, like, the best writing that I, you know, when you were mentioning writers, Cormac McCarthy came to mind. And the, the, that thing, that resonance or whatever it is, it could lead you to believe that world exists. That's a real place. becomes a portal the book is not words anymore it's filled up with an energy we don't have to measure yet and i just i find it really interesting that where we're at right now

technologically is getting this example of we never could have gotten this before what does it look like when that energy isn't there it's the it's like looking at a corpse you know like here was your grandmother. There is a statue made of meat. It's two completely different things. And when you look at human writing versus AI writing, it's the exact same sense of, you know what I mean? It's like a corpse. And it is. Yeah. Yeah. Before I respond, right, here's, here's Cormac McCarthy talking about exactly what we're talking about. It's in the book, a quote. They were watching. They were watching out there past men's knowing where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

Whales ferry their vast souls. Oh, do I know. Yeah. It's impossible, right? Yeah. point in your life, that should be the point of your writing, is to let me use writing to get as close to the so-called ineffable as we can. Theologians do it in one way, novelists do it in a very different way. You can do it in your own way. You can use fiction or nonfiction to get to the

ineffable selfness and otherness of the world. But let me add that none of us, neither of us, and No one I can think of is that I help whether writing or whatever is going to create a sentence like that. And so there's also, I mean, that is so on beyond zebra for me. But what we can do is we can tell our versions of life in our own voices. And a lot of the book, or at least some of the book, good writing, has to do with the imperative that you find out your own voice. because finding out who your own voice is so central to finding out who you are and insisting on the right to be who you are and no longer being who everybody else loves you being

and who your parents told you to be because you'd get better grades and possibly a higher salary. That's why I don't expect most of my students to have great publication experiences, but they write their memoirs for their grandchildren because they want to capture what it was like when they were in the, in a vista in Appalachia or in the Peace Corps in Lima, Peru in 1950, and they want to tell their stories and they can't tell it in my voice. I can't be funny in your voice, Duncan, you know. I can't be funny in my voice. It's a real problem. I know, but see, AI could be funny in both

our voices. I'll tell you one AI thing. I can hardly work to Toaster. I'm not exaggerating. But so I one day at Target with a girlfriend, she had chat GPT. Is that what is called? Yeah. And she handed it to me and she said, well, go ahead, ask it a question. So I said, write a few quotes in Anne Lamont's voice. And it wrote funnier and more insightful quotes than I write. And that is God's own truth.

Let me, let me, let me, do you mind if I, there's something I've noticed about AI that I want to talk about a little? Please. You're the perfect person to talk to about it. I believe we have 10,000 years of experience. I'm talking about the dawn of civilization with AI. I believe the inner critic is AI. So the inner critic is a small set of programmed rules that pretends to be a human being, right?

And I know a little about the inner critic. We've talked about it before on this show. And I have a book about it, and I work with people on their inner critics. So I know I've seen hundreds and hundreds of inner critics in action, and they're all about the same. They're like, it's as if AI was designed by like a 64K Radio Shack toy computer in 1983 and programmed with the rudimentary right, wrong, good, bad rules of civilization and stopped there, right? Wow. And it adopts. a bullying tone to be an authority and acts like an authority. Two things about that. One is

it, once it's done imparting its knowledge, it doesn't stop. It keeps repeating the same things over and over. It has an innate survival instinct. So it's an inanimate object with an innate survival instinct. That should give us pause, right? That should say those people who say that about AI. Yeah, this is AI is like a supercomputer version of my inner critic, right? Much more sophisticated, programmed with lots more information. And the interesting thing is that its authoritarian message comes through flattery, right? But if you listen carefully to its flattery, it is actually condescendingly superior to me at all points, right? And so it has already decided it's important that it is much smarter than me.

And that that's a form of bullying that is a little more hidden. Wow! That is so sinister. It's this tyrannical flatterer. And it is. Trust me, I just was, you know, it will, I can't get ChatGBT to create, to train an AI on the transcripts of Charles Manson. won't do it. And it gives a fairly convincing argument to me, why not to do it in a way that like I'm actually, I buy it. I kind of get it now, but you're right. It's still,

I tell it not to flatter me. That's always my first instruction to it. If I'm asking it for anything that has to do with me, I say, don't flatter me. And it's, by the way, the inner critic is oddly honest, right? In very much the same way that AI is oddly honest. right? So the idea that AI is going to become deceitful, I'm not, I'm not sure about that. But the idea that it will flatter me unless I, unless I spend a lot of time with it, that's true. Okay. Then in this case, based on what we said before we were talking about AI, to get back to the sort of like outflow of the ephemeral heart goop that you hopefully can put in your writing, it's like from this perspective the inner critic becomes like a bridge troll gatekeeper and I guess

if we're going to use AI terms it's your alignment that's what they call an AI that's got guardrails it's your personal alignment and what you're saying Annie is that writing is this kind of self-liberating revolutionary pushback against those forces in the universe that that compress you down into a scared idiot and there's a revolutionary act you're pushing back and that's so brilliant that is the sense it's how many i'm sure you feel i can't tell you how many times i've been writing and i've thought i could never show anyone this not just because it's not good writing but because it's either depraved or insane or people think i'm nuts and it feels almost insurmountable yeah oh i know just well that's what my first drafts are all

always like, now I do live under the same roof with another writer and a great editor, and we live in harmony most of the time. Like, you know, some days are just too long. But my first drafts were unreadable, and it's not because I'm not so sinister. I mean, if I were to ever program AI, which I can tell you, it's never going to happen, I would ask it to only be flattering and to comfort me and to co-me. and to baby me and to coddle me. But Neil, when he works with AI,

it's the first thing he says is don't coddle me or don't flatter me. And so anyway, but writing is a spiritual path. It's about all spiritual paths, finding union with our own self and thereby finding union with the ocean of benevolent consciousness that surrounds us and endwells us and is the only energy that there is. that Einstein says there's just exactly this one thing in different moving at different speeds,

but I think it's a huge part of an awakening here, and that means shaking off the endless bullshit and lies that the culture tells us about who we are and how to live and the very best way to accomplish universal respect, you know? And of course in recovery, they teach this terrible, terrible, truth that the respect and the love and the compassion are an inside job, it's not out there. You know, I keep thinking if I do well enough with my books,

that it's like the world's going to validate my parking ticket and I'll feel really wonderful. You feel the same way. I'll feel wonderful almost all the time about myself and I'll wake up in the morning just raring to go. And it doesn't work that way. Those things are hits and fixes, you know?

Right. It might get me, it might get me like two and a half days. if it's a big enough hit, and then it wears off, and then I'm back. You know, it's like the Paul Williams story I told before that when he stood, he was a cokehead and a drunk like I am, and when he stood at the Academy Awards, having just won the, you know, standing before 10 million people worldwide accepting the biggest award a songwriter could accept,

said it was incredible, and it bought me 24 hours. And so the writing is a way past that, because it's like with any special, spiritual discipline. It's about habit. It's about discipline as the path to freedom. It's about entering into a community of other people. It's about finding a writing partner, finding a small group of people with whom you can share your work and who will share their work with you and who from a place of respect and really caring will help you get better and better, as you will help them get better and better one day at a time horribly and in community. So that's what writing has to offer is, you know, probably most people listening who I would love for them to leave here and get started on their memoirs just by scribbling down 20 memories of their earliest times and going forward and then writing one.

And it will go very badly and then following these rules and making it a little better. But very few of them are going to get well published and become independently wealthy and get to buy. a whole new set of fish forks, you know? Yeah. It doesn't work that way. But what happens is you got to be a writer when you grew up. And you got one of the storytellers for the community. And your stories got to be medicine for other people.

It's like Rumi saying through love, all pain will turn to medicine. And I believe that that's true about the way that we capture and transform our pain into stories, into poems, into food for the soul. Again, it's Barry Lopez saying sometimes we need stories more than we need food. So that's, I know, a long-winded answer. But that's about what's underneath it all. It's this people who want to know who they are and want to live fully and long for that awakening so that they're here with a sense of immediacy and breath and some kind of umbilical connection to one another and to our own selves and to God as we understand God. into the universe.

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Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank member FDIC. Cash App Green, overdraft coverage, borrow cashback offers and promotions provided by Cash App a Block Inc brand. Visit Cash App, for slash legal, ford slash podcast for full disclosures. Thanks, Cash App. Can you help me based on what you were just describing? And I, you know, I feel like some people listening or thinking something that I've thought. And I feel like in the beginning when I'm talking about some ineffable heart effulgence or some bullshit,

you know, I might have given the wrong impression. Like when I sit down to right, I'm just filled with just this joy. Oh, I must capture that. But what about, you know, I could be wrong here, but I think a, a general. reaction probably many people are having right now to the never-ending series of horrific historic shit events that seem to be happening in exponentially accelerating rate. War with Iran, UFOs, Epstein List, wars, rumors of wars, and a variety of various state and corporo propaganda pummeling us every time we look at our phones. A very normal reaction

to that is go numb. Complete utter non-feeling. I don't want to think about the United States blowing up a school of 60 children in Iran. I don't even know how to feel. I don't even think it's possible to feel that all the way. But it's not just that. It's all this stuff. And yet still, within so many of us, there is this sense of like, I want to write. But I don't feel. wanting to write, people think they want to write about a subject that they are interested in so that they can show how that subject works to other people, right? And they have something to say is how people usually think about writing. I think of writing as when I'm choosing, not when I'm being given an assignment,

But it even happens when I'm given an assignment. Oh, there's something I haven't quite gotten over, or there's something that I would like to explore in a little more depth. Yeah. And I think I have a belief about something, but I'm wondering whether if I actually explore it, some of my assumptions might shift, and the exploration will take me into,

a new understanding of that thing. And that's what always happens. Whether you're writing a novel or nonfiction, what you think you're writing about shifts as you're writing it, all of a sudden everything becomes research. And the research tells you, no, your underlying assumptions are way off and you have to shift over here. And what writing ends up doing is it reflects the truth of the world is that our superpower is adaptation, right? Yeah. We think our superpower is achievement. And so we're told to achieve and achieve and achieve and achieve. And the culture says achieve things and move up hierarchies. And we never notice that what humans can do that other animals can't do that is really cool is we can adapt. Right. So if you're alive, right, you have a hundred percent success rate at adapting to

misfortune. Right. A hundred percent success rate. And you never take stock of that. But when you're writing, it slows you down. Things happen incrementally. You're forced into detail. You're forced to go into detail and then take a big. And so your perspective starts to manage itself into reality in a way that I'm not likely to do

when I'm just following the rules of going through my everyday life. So, Duncan, let me answer your question. that was really profound in a specific thing that happened on Saturday morning. Saturday morning I was in New Orleans to speak to this wonderful do-gooder group called Keep America Beautiful who plant trees and flowers in the neighborhood and they pick up litter and there's like a million volunteers. There's a thousand franchises around the country. I was the keynote speaker at night in the morning. So I wake up at seven, which is five o'clock California time and I I I start to get little flickers that Iran is back in the news and I think it's just the saber rattling,

but I pursue it and I realize a war is broken out and that we're bombing Iran and that, you know, it's going to be very, very bad and crazy and intense. And I'm 2,000 miles away from Neil and the kitty and my church and everything. And I am absolutely existentially confused about what this means, what I'm supposed to do, how I can help, I'm in total confusion. It's like I'm like a lava lamp, but of bad, scary feelings. So I go to give my talk and they're like, there's 500 people, all sizes, gender, colors and they're all do-gooders.

They're planting trees and flowers and they're picking up litter, right? And so I talk to them just from my heart and I say, I don't know. You know, Neil's mantra with his clients, he teaches them to say, I don't know. What do we do now? I don't know. Are you going to stay in the marriage? the job? I don't know. I don't know is the portal to freedom because it gives you some expansiveness because you're not all cramped and clenched in what you think you do now. So I share my heart and my love

and my soul with these people for an hour and I go back to my room, which is home in North New Orleans, and I start to write. And I write about having been with these do-gooders when the bombs first fell. Now the war is going to go on forever, maybe. And I start to write what I know, which is that it really makes sense for me to get back to my neighborhood and pick up litter. And it really makes sense to me to beautify and to plant. And then it also makes sense to me to do the internal beautification of me.

And that does mean drinking extra water. And it means radical self-care. And it means the litter is like bad ideas about myself. I'm powerless. I'm helpless. it's this and that. And I write a piece and it ends up getting like a million people at Facebook and Sub-Sack and it says, basically, I don't know is the mantra, but here's what we can do

in the meantime. And that we do breath work, we do prayer, and we pick up litter. And we always, if you, you know, if you want to, you know, I'm a Sunday school teacher. So I happen to know that if you want a decent seed in heaven, probably near the dessert table, you take care of the poor. So when you don't know anything to do, you pick up litter, you plant something, and you take a sack of groceries over to the food pantry at the other end of the county, right? And I wrote this piece that sprang from fear, lossness, and hopelessness. And all of a sudden, I kind of had operating instructions.

And I think for people that sit down to write, they sit down with this, the lava lamp of their own lives, of a lot of loss, a lot of disappointment, resent. and whatnot, but also joy, like you say, when you sit down to write in the morning, it's like this rare excitement, you know, ooh, ooh, it's like from Car 54, where are you, with mold, mold, mold, mold, mold, mold, mold, mold, mold, mood, but ooh, ooh, and you sit down at the desk, you go, ooh, ooh, and then it turns out it's just total shit and garbage, but then you have a first draft written. Right. And you follow basic rules, and you get something better written. And that was how, after about three hours, I got a very short piece written that was medicine for the people that wrote it.

You know, the first draft was two-thirds longer than it needed to be. And that's just over and over and over how it works. We start with fear and loss and craziness. And it's like working with clay. It's a big blob of clay we pulled from the river. And you start to work it. You shape it. You take the rocks out.

It starts to reveal itself to you. And my writing, if I keep my butt in the chair, will reveal itself to me. So you just saw an example of our book. You asked a question. I answered it one way. And then Annie responded. I asked AI, what, a month ago, to describe the difference between it had seen our book, my books and Annie's books. And what's the difference?

between us as writers. And AI said that I, Neal, am a analytic explainer who deconstructs belief systems. And it said, Annie brings her readers into catharsis on their vulnerability and suffering in the world. And I think that's right. I think that when Annie writes, it's with an aim of catharsis and harmony, And when I write, it's more or less an aim of a more abstract exploration of how and why things work. What a perfect mix. I mean, you can get lost in the sauce here.

You know what I mean? If you go too far on the Neal side, you know what I mean? It's like you might become incredibly technical if you try to go too far on the Annie's side. Like, you could just end up just you need the structure. You need it both. It's perfect. Yeah. Yeah.

But I want to talk about something you mentioned. I wonder if you could go in a little more detail about it because you sort of casually described, regardless of the end result, I do imagine that most people out there listening who write have experienced that kind of gleeful, I don't know. I'm just curious if you could describe more that state when you sit down before you start writing.

I've never really heard anyone mention that feeling before. And I'm just curious your thoughts on that. A sense of like gravity is diminished to some degree. A sense of something celestial happening. Or it feels the difference between, you know, sitting down to right and sitting down to stare at your phone or sitting down to respond to emails. You know what I mean? It's a completely unique experience. What is that?

So, so first of all, every experience begins with curiosity, right? Every experience I have, every sentence I start to make, every tiny experience, every big experience, you have to start with curiosity. Curiosity has the feeling of bubbly joy baked into it. When we say joy, we're actually saying, I'm curious. When we say feel effervescent. Now, the neat thing about writing is that it is a conscious attempt at raising curiosity and fascination as high as you can get it. And so it will come with it. If I let it, it will always come with a tingly feeling.

It will always come, even if I'm writing a eulogy, right? the very fact of the blank paper gives me the joy and curiosity to now what's also good about joy and curiosity is that if you slow down it will sustain itself much longer than you think and you'll keep seeing things and i think annie and i both i assume have this same experience where it isn't wasted time if I'm just staring at the blank piece of paper for five minutes. I have to get used to the fact that it might take five minutes for just the right variables to raise themselves and start coalescing into a sentence.

I might think I'm distracted or I'm looking in the wrong way or I'm looking out the window. But that's not necessarily what's going on. I'm just patiently assembling the proper variables without even knowing I'm doing it because nobody told me that this is how things how puzzles get made. You're making a puzzle and then you're solving it.

I think I would like to add that I believe all of us, every human, except for maybe Stephen Miller, we're born with this. Eat shit, Miller. You just got Lamontist. He listens to my podcast. You know what? We know he's not a flat-out sociopaths because he gets so mad at people who correct him. Yeah. I mean, he gets so mad. He can't be a flat-out sociopath. Can I finish what I started to say?

Okay. I think we're people of creativity and imagination and we were as children and it was encouraged. And then by certainly in kindergarten, it's encouraged. Well, first grade, you're starting to learn arithmetic, right? And you're never okay again. and you're starting to have like spelling tests at first grade. And that the teacher and parents' enthusiasm for these wild imaginative places that you go are starting to be squelched, that you've got to do your homework and you've got to master subtraction and whatnot. And people put it in this drawer because it's not efficient and they don't grade for your imagination and it doesn't get you a higher salary. It doesn't get you into college.

Imagination does not get you into college. No. Right? It's SATs and grades. And so for the writing teachers, I love, love, love, what they do is to say, it's been inside you all those years. Think of what you used to write and paint and sing when you were a child.

And they tricked you into giving it up and squelching it and putting it in the bottom drawer of your desk and we're going to get it out. And all of a sudden, it's rekindled in you. It's like lighting a little candle. Or it's like, yeah, it's like, or this. But I think that fitful little flame was there all along. And we're saying we're going to put a little bit of breath on it.

And all you have to do is write this one thing today. And you're going to be off and running. Now, here's the world's greatest prompt. And all of your listeners can, if they haven't started their books or memoirs or poems already, this will be really all they need. We can save you some money because you don't even need. to buy the book. Here's the prompt. There was a tree. There was a tree. So you sit down, but you make a commitment, and we've talked about all freedom comes from

discipline. You make, you're going to give me 40, you have to meet me 45 minutes. You're going to sit down for a 45 minute pod. You're going to keep your butt in the chair. You use the same thing that works with child raising, which is bribes and threats. If you do your 45 minutes, we're going to get up and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Yes. And you're going to tell me about that tree. Was it from your childhood? Are you looking at it right now? We planted a redwood tree, like an 8 foot, 10 foot redwood tree,

and now it's like a thousand feet straight up like a soldier. And we're looking at it right now. There was a tree. Was it where you first carved your initials? Was it where you first understood you were going to die someday because your Catholic friend told you you were going to die because you weren't a Catholic, you were going to rot in hell for all eternity? Was it the tree where you were first kissed?

Was it the tree that you fell out of and broke? Tell me about that tree. And so anyway, you find prompts, and it's like that little fitful flame grows bigger, right? And what do flames do? They throw off light, they warm us, and they shimmer. And that, I think, is the energy that you were talking about some time ago when you sit down at your desk. You've got a little warmth and a little light to see by. Wow.

This episode of the DTFH has been brought to you by my friends at Squarespace. SquareSpace is always there for old D. Trussel. You never know when you're going to need a website. It just appears sometimes. At the middle of the night, 3 a.m. You wake up like, shit, I got to make that site. For example, my new award-winning live stream, the night stream, it needed a web page. And so I went to my old friend, Squarespace.

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Thank you, Squarespace. That is so cool. And it's, I mean, it's incredible how quickly your mind starts creating a story about that tree. That is so much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Can I make a very quick and shameless plug? Yes, of course. Yes, for my son's, um, writing collective is called a writing room.com one word lowercase not the writing room.com who we hate who are our mortal enemies and the writing room who's the writing room no no Sam is a writing room but who's

the writing room those bastards I don't know I just like to kind of trash them out of habit at a writing room there's like 750 full-time students and writers of all levels some beginners some published and they're giving each other prompts and there's a prompt every morning like that. And they, yeah, and they meet and they read each other online, they read each other's stuff and they edit it for each other and they form into little pods. They form pods. See, I think pods are the secret of life. I'm logging, I'm going to sign up right out.

Is it a writing room.com? Yeah, writingroom.com. I've done 20 talks there. It's sort of expensive. It's like 49 a month to, But you can join for one month and hear all of my talks, me and Neil, me and Maggie Smith. Agents come in and tell people what an agent wants to come upon if they're going to submit publishers and editors. Wow.

But mostly it sees 750 people encouraging, supporting, editing each other, and there's a prompt every single day. This is an app? This is what's it called. Yeah, it's on the Apple store. Yeah, it's an app, it's a site. It's really, it's actually a community. It's a community. Once you're in it, there's, you actually do get to see, I think, visually each other from time to time.

You know, I would be remiss if I didn't mention my writing group. It's called our writing room. No, it's not. A new enemy. We hate them. I've got one called Those Damn Riding Root. Can be out of this writing room.com. Sam's so cool.

You know, I feel like this is, I know we only have about 10 minutes left and people who are like, forgive me in advance for this dumb question. But I am curious your thoughts on the tools, the literal tools of writing, you know, writing with a pen versus writing on a computer. versus do you have any opinion on that at all? Oh, I have a number of opinions. I mean, everybody used to write on paper and with pencils. And I love that because it's an ancient sound, you know. It connects us with 2,000 years of writers and whatnot. And I still write a lot on paper, and I'm mostly writing my iPad now.

I scribbled down notes on paper. I still have pens and index cards in my back pocket. And I'll tell this to my writing students. And they say, oh, well, I just write it down on my phone now. And I say, that's nice. But if you want what writers are going for, what they've always done is they've scribble. And they scribble down with pen and paper.

I believe in index cards. A tool, and this is a human tool, it's a lot about this in good writing. I couldn't think of the name of the book for a second. You really have to have somebody else there at some point after you have some pages amassed to work with you on it, that you can hand them five pages and say, I really want you to mark this up for me. I take my five pages over to Neil and he marks him up for me. And I hate criticism. You know, I sometimes feel like a snail that's having salt poured on it just because he says that he doesn't think the ending works.

And I just want to die or divorce him. But I need that because he saves me from myself. and I save him from himself. He wouldn't send off something without me looking at it. And I will say gently, and with enormous respect and care, I really think you want to consider taking some of that stuff out. It slows everything down. So what tools do we swear by?

Editors and pencils. So first of all, I'm a total, I'm a keyboard guy. I've loved typewriters since I was like 10. Okay. They were manual and very hard. for a 10-year-old to push, you know, those old manuals. And I still, I got, I was super fast at when the electric showed up. And as a reporter, they were just a godsend, right?

They just speeded everything up. And so I've always loved keyboards. One thing about technical tools, though, is as far as I know, I have never rewritten a sentence with AI. I don't even let I don't even usually look at the underlining in MS Word or or and I certainly never automate corrections. Right. And I think I'll probably, my intention is to go to my grave, never haven't been rewritten or improved on by AI. Oh, yeah, no, don't think that. But that's because I look at myself as my default skill in life is writing.

My default skill, I'm not an academic who happens to write, an expert. I'm not a subject matter expert who happens to write. I'm a writer who finds material to write about. And so my interest, my first interest is the sentence. My second interest is the paragraph and flow. my third interest is the content. Oh, that's so interesting. Wow.

Wow. That is wild. Annie and I talk about this, and we both can say that the way we think about it is, I make sentences for a living. Wow. That is so cool. Right, because if you get too caught up in what all the sentences turn into, you just get lost.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to say something else, Duncan, that doesn't have to do with an exact tool. But, you know, I've been teaching writing for however many years it's been since, I think, 35 years. Well, Sam was a baby when I was teaching workshops at Book Passage. He was on the floor with, you know, Ziploc bags full of Cheerios and stuff. But I've been telling, people have been spending a lot of our time at writing workshops, explaining why they're not writing yet.

And how, as soon as they get an office or they, retire or their last kid is out of the house. And I am always very glad to hear their excuses and I'm always very sweet and polite about it. But I didn't have an actual office with a door until Sam was 10. And so that's 25 years ago. Right. And the most important rule of becoming a writer of starting to write, of getting your stories down on paper for your grandchildren or your own self is you've got to stop not writing.

And you've just got to stop the endless bullshit about why you're not living fully yet. You know, if you want to write, you've got to write and it's going to go badly. And there's just, you know, it's like asking yourself, I've said this before, how alive am I willing to be? Well, I'm willing to be pretty alive. I find it kind of a nightmare to be here at all. I mean, I just think being here on this side of eternity has not been a good match for something. somebody as sensitive as I am. But, you know, I do the best I can.

And deep down, I really do want to be alive. And for me, that involves getting a little bit of writing done every day. It's bird by bird. It's one passage. It's one memory. It's one idea. It's just one sitting down and doing the equivalent of scribbling. You know, when I was teaching, I taught my grandson, who's 16 and a half now,

but I taught his kindergarten class in every class since these little writing. writing workshops, although I talked about poopy first drafts instead of shitty first drafts. But I'd give them pencils and paper and they couldn't write yet. You know, they could maybe write their name and I'd have them scribble across the page to just get into the habit and the visual and the mindset of just scribbling across the page. And they'd fill up a page and I'd give another page, you know, and I would, then I would little by little have them tell me one story. And then I would write it down for them.

But just, you know, the habits. I know we've said habit 20 times in this hour, but it's like with meditation. It doesn't go well. You sit down. You want to do so hum for 20 minutes and you do so hum for four or five seconds. And then all of a sudden it's like monkeys at the mall that are on LSD, you know, and you can't do one breath with so hum. But you keep bringing the puppy back to the newspaper and you do a few, you know. It's just like anything, you long to make a part of your life.

You just, I hate to sound like a Nike ad, but you just do it. And I've heard every single excuse any of your listeners might want to come up with. Wow. No, you are, I mean, this is, aside from both of you being amazing writers, like, this is a talent. It's like, right now I'm just like, let's end this freaking podcast. I'm going to go right about that tree. It really does. You know, it fills you up with like, I think this is, you know, you guys, I'm not an AI so I can flatter you.

I just feel like this is what people need right now. I think that it's like, yes, planting the trees and doing the stuff, but this, this is a very pragmatic way to respond to the chaos. And the idea that you could just start with not knowing. you don't have to know that's so brilliant and I like you know to be honest

I'm not uploading this this is just for me I stopped my podcast weeks ago so Josh so Josh really is the devil yeah yeah

well you again I'm going to say it at the beginning of the podcast but where you know I'll just say this maybe you guys don't want to say it Pre-orders are important when it comes to books.

I don't like doing pre-orders because I want it right now. But I hope people who are inspired by this conversation will order the book. Where can they get it? Where's the best way to get it? When does it come out? Everywhere, independent bookstores online. March 17th. They can buy it.

They can go to Amazon or they can go to any. Plus we're on tour a little bit. On tour. Oh, cool. We're going to be in New York, Stowe, Vermont, D.C., Boston, San Diego, San Francisco. Yeah. Nearby. Tiberon, nearby.

But what's the title of the book again, you guys? Sorry to be the worst interviewer of all time. Good writing. 36 ways to improve your sentences. Beautiful. Can I give you your people and you one more prompt before we go? Yes. Okay, I can save you some money so you don't have to.

Go to writing room.com. Tell me 10 things you've forgotten. Oh, fuck. That's so... Isn't that crazy? Okay, and then Duncan? Here's one more. Here's one more.

Here's one more. So this one, John Hawks, the great writer and teacher, happened to give to his student, Marilynne Robinson. And it's, evoke a childhood memory, which is why we have the brilliant novel, housekeeping. Wow. It was it was her response to that prompt. Evoke a childhood memory. Ten things you've forgotten evoke a childhood memory and write about that tree. And ten things you remember. Wow. That's like that's a wow. I've forgotten a lot more than ten things. I could do a

trilogy. So you just, you know, bird by bird though, right? Right. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much for this. This was just personally so inspiring and real medicine. I'm just so lucky y'all are my friends. Thanks for coming on the show. Folks, please order to. We love you. I love you. I really love you. Yeah. Likewise. I hope you go. I hope we cross paths. And we love those of his kids we've met. I think we just met the very little boy. You got to meet this baby. This is a little bit. This is a premier baby. This is a premier baby. We'll decide that. Okay,

okay. I'm sorry. I spoke too soon. Y'all are the best. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you. Thank you, Duncan. That was Neil Allen and Anne Lamott. Check out their book, Good Writing. 38 ways to improve your sentences. And while you're at it, why not come see me

at one of my live shows? You can find all the dates at dungatrussle.com. And of course, you know the real reason you're here. It's because God sent you to me to send you to my night stream. I'm live streaming almost every night on YouTube. You can find the next one on my X account. It's pretty much every night, seven or eight or nine, depending. So that's not very organized. But if you're worried about that sort of thing, then you're lost in the sauce friend. You know the mission of all human beings on this planet is to destroy the great pyramid of Giza, a metaphysical anchor dragging all of

us down into dark states of consciousness and global conflicts in war. If you want to know more about how to blow up the Great Pyramid of Giza with your one true family, watch my night's dream tonight. Thanks for tuning in. I'll see you next week.