Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Anne Lamott & Neal Allen

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

Anne Lamott is a bestselling novelist and nonfiction writer. She is best known for her books Operating Instructions and Bird by Bird, enduring touchstones for readers and writers seeking honest insight into life and creativity. Her husband, Neal Allen, is a former journalist and corporate executive turned spiritual coach and author who writes and teaches on inner life and self-inquiry. Lamott and Allen frequently collaborate on workshops and public events that blend writing, spirituality, and practical wisdom. They are the coauthors of the 2026 craft book Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences, a concise, technique-driven guide that pairs Allen’s sentence-level principles with Lamott’s reflective, experience-based commentary. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Anthropic https://Claude.com/tetra ------ AG1 https://DrinkAG1.com/tetra ------ Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www.AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Lectio 365 https://Lectio365.com ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

tetragameter. I was a reporter, newspaper man, in a first career. And the first thing that I got told by an editor was these vivid verbs, not weak verbs, like instead of walked,

if I'm using tripped along, all of a sudden now I've got a very specific notion of that character, right? And so that was the first rule I learned about writing. Not a grammatical rule, but a rule for once that

I had a sentence that was grammatical how I could punch it up so that the reader would be persuaded to follow along and see something novel or interesting in it. And so that one rule really got me going and really helped my writing for a long time. And then gradually over the years, I picked up other rules and eventually I had more than 30 of these rules that I had collected over 30 or 40 years. and I realized there are a whole lot of lists of rules for better writing Elmore Leonard has one Hemingway had a famous one

Kingsley Hamas had one all these writers but they were usually just eight or ten rules Hemingway's case I think it was four rules right and I was like yeah but they're 30 of them I mean I know 30 of them and I realized there wasn't a book that had all 30 of them that I had noticed right and I'm sure

there are more but And I thought, well, okay, I've got this list. I wonder if I could turn it into a book. And what I did was for each one I just wrote a kind of stream of consciousness essay about the rule. And I ended up with, I don't know, I think at first 18,000 words. And I went to Annie and I said, hey, I've been working on this. It's not a book. It's just not long enough.

You know, it's a brochure. I still think there's a book in here somewhere. can you look at it? And Annie came back a couple days later and said, what did you say? This is not how I remember it. So how I remember it is that Neil said he'd written a book and I read it and it was wonderful. And I went to him somewhat bitterly and said,

hey, I know something about writing too, young man. And I said, why don't you let me add my two cents to all of your rules? So Neil's rules are very practical and encouraging. they're an efficient way to just really easily make your writing better. But mine are usually from a more spiritual angle, like that no one writes well, that none of the writers anyone loves produces anything readable in our first draft. It's awful.

It's too long. The prose is very purple. The descriptions are too long and whatnot. And so I teach writing and I teach people that, you know, you keep your butt in the chair. It's going to go badly. And it's not, what you're longing for isn't out there. Getting published is going to make you probably mentally worse than you already are.

But the writing can fill you and the writing can heal you. And the only freedom I've ever found in the world is from discipline and habit. And so what I like to do is to get people committing to having the intention to give me 45 minutes or an hour every day where they're going to write badly. And then Neil is very educated and has very wise thought sometimes. And then I come in and I say, no, wait a second. This guy is so overeducated. And I just have to tell you that I would never recommend that you'd bother with that. Here's what I would try instead.

And then it'll be more like my Sunday school classes. So turned into a dialogue. That's a conversation. Yeah, a conversation. And it is the conversation. It reflects a conversation. writers living under the same roof and we actually are each other's first readers for almost everything that we write and so we're constantly in the position of critiquing and editing and that sort of thing

and somehow we manage it and through talking about that we're also talking about how as you know in music we know in writing it's collaborative right there isn't a guy in a garret doing it from soup to nuts You know, there's always other people around who are helping out and helping with blind spots and helping to amplify things that work. And Annie and I do that. And by the time we were putting together that end of the first draft, we started to realize it was a book also about collaboration. And the joy of collaborating and how everything I've ever done by myself just felt, I mean,

I love to be alone. I love to be alone. I spent a lot of time alone, but playing tennis is so much fun if you have a devil's partner. And everything is much more playful when you have someone to collaborate with. And you can say to them, will you honestly tell me if the lead here works? And Neil will often say, you know what? This first page feels like you're just clearing your throat, getting ready to start your story. So I'm wondering if you might start on at the top of page two, stuff like that.

But once you have that, God, such a relief. and then it becomes play. Yeah. I suppose there's also always a collaboration with the reader. What you're saying and what the reader's reading might not be the same thing. Probably rarely the same thing. Correct.

Well, I've always said to my writing students, write what you'd like to come upon because that's really good information from your soul about what matters to you most and what's kind of in the ragback right now. And so I'm often, writing stuff that I really need to hear. Then it might be examples of peace and goodness in the world that it's been harder to notice lately, or it might be information that it just turns my whole

day around that makes me laugh out loud. It might be a quote, you know, that I see on Twitter or that somebody texts me with me where I, it kind of spritzes me awake and I go, oh, God, love that. So I try to include stuff like that. And I did it all through the book, you know, when you'll see, there's all sorts of stuff that kind of came over the transom that we just shoehorned in because it was valuable for any creative person to be reminded, say, what Shirley Jackson said, that great quote of hers, that a confused reader is an antagonistic reader, you know. And when I was young, I think we might be older than you, but when I was young, I could read like esoteric Japanese New Wave novels, right, or German or Peter Honki or whatever.

and I don't want to anymore. I'm tired and I'm confused. And I live by something, this is in the book, but that our friend Randy Mayam Singer, who wrote Mrs. Dau Pryor said, tell me a story, make me care. How do I make you care? Well, because by being real, by being very human, I'm not going to care because you are so ironic and snarky.

In fact, I'm going to not care. That's hurtful to my being. I encourage my writing students to write towards compassion, to write towards real. You know, the ancient Greeks called God, the really real. And I think that's the very best definition ever to me. And I just, I think when I'm reading something or hearing something that is real, that is human, that is simple, that it has breath in it, that has a little light in it,

I feel like I can breathe again. I feel like I'm going to be okay. And so that's the stuff I try to write. And that's what I'm hoping that I've continued. invade in my sections of good writing. You know, you raise an interesting question, which is how do you write to a reader? Who is the reader? When I was a newspaper, man, there was a term Joe Sixpack, write for Joe Sixpack,

and there was a picture of a guy sitting in front of his TV with a beer. And you're supposed to think about that as being what his intelligence level was, what his interests were, how far he would go with you, all of those sorts of things. And so I learned to think about a reader and to imagine a reader when I was first learning how to write. I just shed that, right? Because now if I was to write to a reader, I would be aiming, which would be a projection of my idea of how other people should be or are. And I would lose the plot. I just can't do that anymore.

And so my reader is myself. And I think that's when Annie says, write what you would like to read. then you're writing to yourself, and that gives me much more room to explore, because I know myself is allowed to be a little crazy one day, a little sincere another day, a little ironic another day, paradoxical, all those things that I get to work through as I'm exploring whatever the topic of the book is or whoever the character is, it's fiction. And it's those explorations that create the personal rift. There's, everybody gets taught in Creative Writing 101.

Show don't tell. Show don't tell. What it really is, if you read the great authors, they show and then they rip. It's show then tell. Show then riff on what you just showed, right? And a great author is like Sonny Rollins who can take a very simple show, a little calypso tune. And keep that going in the back of your mind for five minutes. straight with no accompaniment and just take you into all sorts of different places. He's shown you

the Calypso RIF. He'll remind you of it a little bit as he goes, and then he just lets himself go. And that's what we want to read. We want to read the inner workings of an interesting mind that might be a little quirky. Yeah. It's interesting that the first rule came from an editor in a newspaper. Yeah. Because it really is a... creative writing rule. It's not a commercial writing rule. Well, there's no difference. There's only writing. There's a commercial writing and business writing. I've had a corporate career. I've had a newspaper and career. I've written business letters. I've written PowerPoint slides. I've written fiction. I've written nonfiction. I look at every sentence that I write exactly the same way.

These rules work for songwriting. They work for business writing. They work for writing an e-man. Writing is writing. Good writing is good writing. Period. Yeah. Period. I mean, I have a lifetime as a hack writer, right? And Annie has a lifetime as a literary writer. And when we mark up each other, we use the exact same language and the exact same diacritical remarks and the exact same nudges. There's no difference.

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get started with Claude at clod.a.ai slash tetra. Try it today. So, Annie, because you wrote bird by bird, and it's a classic book on writing, how is this book similar and how is this book different? Well, I think that there's a lot more technical help in this book, because of Neil. But I think that readers will find that the voice is the same, which is really, I don't mean to put myself down, but just this kind of Sunday school teacher, you know.

It's like you've got this, you can do it. You got to meet me halfway. You know, if you can't find me an hour a day or hour five days a week or it's not going to happen. And then I would convince my kids, you're going to feel terrible if it's always been on your heart to do this. and you never got around to it because you were so busy with all this BS that life throws at you, you know, and your to-do lists. And so many of the people I've worked with have wanted to write a memoir for their grandkids because they want their grandkids to know about their years in the Peace Corps in Peru or in Appalachia. And they don't get around to it because they keep getting distracted by all the dumb stuff that tugs at us, you know. And so if I can get my myths, and I mean this on a warm way, if I can get my mitts and claws into someone and convince them,

just like you would with the meditation to give me an hour a day, then I can promise that if they stick with it, they're going to get a miracle. They're going to get 300 pages at some point. And it's going to be unreadable. And that's great. That's when we push back our sleeves and we start using the rules and we start showing it to someone else and we ask for help.

You know, the American way is you do it alone and you don't ask for help and he shouldn't enjoy it all that much. And our way is that if that's true, don't bother. Don't even start, you know. If it's not going to become a richening to your life, then don't bother. Then go do this things on your to-do list. But I think for most people, if they can find they write down one passage a day, one memory a day, they start to feel this thing. They start to get it. and they go, okay, I'm in.

It's kind of like the water's really cold at first, and I've got to convince people. Just get on in. It warms up really quickly. So Bird by Bird is about how you might want to be a writer. And if you do, how it works, how it works to become or be a writer. This book, Good Writing, is about what to do once you've got a first draft. And it might be a first draft of an email.

I don't mean first draft being a first draft being a first draft. big, hairy thing. It could be whatever you just wrote. But you've already done the writing. Now, go back and look at your sentences again. And so, as Annie says, it's kind of technical. And as a technical manual, the problem is being boring. And this is a particular problem for me, because I'm an explainer, right? And so I'm going to be boring. So I had to work trying to find Annie's model to keep it light, keep it humorous. And in particular, Annie isn't an explainer so much as she aims for catharsis, right? And so she's a cathartic writer. And bird by bird has a lot of catharsis in it. There's an emotional thing that's going to happen and here's what happens if you

get through the emotional thing. And here's some ways to get through the emotional thing and bingo. So she brings that to this book also because that comes naturally to Annie. Yeah, and also, I think a lot of this book, even though it's based on these 36 rules of nails, a lot of it is sort of subversibly about hoping people will stick it out just long enough to find their own voice. Yeah. You know, because that's why we're here, right, to strip away all the layers of identity and all the false layers of the, all the persona and all the stuff we do or say to get people to think we're really charming or spiritually evolved or, you know, whatever, and just to get down to it and to find your own voice. So there's a lot in this book.

Like, for instance, when I was a young writer, when I was probably in my late 20s, I already had a couple books. I think I had three books out already. I really wanted to sound, of course, like Isabella Yende, you know. But I live in Marin County, you know, and so I realized right, a way to have magical realism in Corle-Madira, you know, with songs and memories coming out of the toaster along with the bagel was my mind. going to work and that I had to find my own voice and the main thing that it was good enough that this is

you know I'm here I can share my truth and I cannot share it in your voice Rick I can't share it in Niels voice I can't share it in Izavel Iende's voice and it's good enough and I love to sing and I love to harmonize with all of you but this book I hope will give people the confidence to just be who they actually are sharing with us their actual experiences strengths and hopes, and the moments that were so momentous for them that they don't want to lose. It's the only way we get to actually meet each other is through us being ourselves and sharing our experience. And the fact that we each have our own is what makes it interesting. Otherwise, we'd be redundant. Annie, you mentioned that writing is therapeutic for you. Neil, is it therapeutic for you as well?

Oh, yeah. I mean, I think I say at some point in the book that, you know, You write what you haven't quite gotten over yet, right? And so I don't write what I want to write. I write what presents itself as material in my life that needs to be figured out in one way or another. That's how an idea for a nonfiction book comes. I want to explore this subject because I think I have some knowledge about it and something to say about it. And I have to figure out how to articulate it. And along the way, I'm going to learn what I don't know about it, because the research,

is going to open me, oh, it goes there and it goes there and it goes there. And so it becomes a form of fascination. And a lot of people say the yearning in humans is for God or for a nurturing mother or for this or that. What we really yearn for is pure curiosity, pure fascination with the world, that feeling of being three years old and just the next thing that comes along is all there is. And there are all these books about being present and as if it's a meditative goal to shut out the world and make yourself so present that you become part of the world and fit seamlessly. Well, no, I don't want that kind of presence. I want the kind of presence that allows me to be intimate with the world and intimate with my garden with my friend, with a stranger. and when I'm writing, I'm intimate with the ideas that I'm writing about.

You know, when I'm writing fiction, I'm intimate with those characters, and I'm trying to understand and watch those characters. And the cool thing about fiction is the characters go where they want, and you don't really control them. Jerry Garcia used to say, you know, I write these simple songs, and I go into the studio and these other guys, they just turn it into this Grateful Dead music, and it's so weird. And I thought I just had this simple song, you know.

And that's where it's fun, right? I get to riff. I get to move out of where I thought I was into someplace new simply by being as intimate as I can, in my case with words or characters. In the 12-step program, you often hear the word intimacy to mean into me, I see. And that's one of the huge gifts of writing,

is that it's a portal into self-realization or into self-awareness. The writing is really about the awakening or it's not important at all. It's about coming to. You know, it's about that you decide at some point that you're not going to hit the snooze button anymore, that you're going to be here for it. I loved Romdaws talking about all the unbaked stuff inside of us that comes up, you know, and it's not lovely. It's often not my lovely, generous childlike side.

you know, ambitious or competitive or judgy or whatever. And yeah, that's Grist for the Mill to quote in a book title of his. It's all material. If I want to write about it, honestly, and with compassion, I give it to a character to discover within herself. And then it's no longer part of the shadowy thing that drives me. Now it's part of something I accept about myself that makes it a lot easier for me to be really friendly with myself. And a wonderful companion in this dark. and cold world to myself. How do you think about what's in your book as presenting a guide as opposed to presenting a framework? I don't know if I know the difference.

Yeah. You might not because you probably think in frameworks because you're able to, you're, you know, you have pretty eclectic career in terms of kinds of genres and that sort of thing. You don't get pinned down in certain ways. And so you probably think in frameworks. But I think that the valuable books within the spiritual and psychological self-help realm are the ones that instead of telling me something to do, offer me general frameworks to think slightly differently, just a degree or two differently than I have about the same old subject.

And that's clearly what your book does. yours is one of those books that basically says, let's do some thought experiments. As nutrition science advanced through the mid-20th century, researchers began to understand that modern eating patterns, limited variety, processed foods, and time constraints could leave small but meaningful gaps in daily micronutrient intake. Today, large population studies confirm that approximately 90% of adults

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Like my last book was called Somehow Thoughts on Love. And I had sat down because I was feeling so, so scared and worried about the world. So I'm a change that I decided to put on paper every single thing I know about everything that has ever helped in really dark, scary times of my own life. And I wanted to write it for my son and grandson who live here with us. I just wanted to say this works, community works, singing works. You know, Neil and I both spent a lot of time with people who are dying and with their families and this has changed our lives. This will work because this will teach you how to live. and this will help you not be afraid of death

and that will be the most free and blah blah. So I started writing these kind of like you. I mean passages that I didn't know quite how they hung together, but all of a sudden a sort of 40 pages in, I realized everything I knew that it ever worked had to do with love. And I actually went, oh, no, I'm writing a book on love. And I thought it's so California, I can't get away with this. But then I thought, well, if every single thing I know that's true,

somehow has to do with, well, I'm just going to go ahead and say it. And if the New York critics have a hard time with it, you know, they get to. And this is a very important thing I share with my writing students, is that that inner critic that Neil works with, he teaches his clients about the inner critic will say, you're supposed to know what you're doing. And you should know what you're doing. But that's not true. That's not the truth. That is just like some voice from your parents or the culture that said, this is how it's done. Make it outline. And then, go ahead and do it. And it's not true. It's much more magical. It's much more mystical and weird and trippy, but that you commit to it. You sort of, you take dictation for it, you know, and I've always

told my students that the material knows what it is, but it needs you to help get it down on paper because it doesn't have hands, you know? It has you. For some reason, it's chosen to come through you. Yeah. And so you get quiet. I used to say a little prayer, God help me get out of the way so that I can write what wants to be written. And then with this book, I didn't have to worry about it because Neil's I'd already written it. And all I did was coming back clean up. My last book, Better Days, Tamir In a Critic,

came because I had been working with clients one-on-one for several years, developing a couple of techniques that I found seemed to have worked with me, and then I tested them out on other people and refined them. And there came a day when I thought, you know, this isn't out there. This is kind of an effective technique,

and maybe there's a book in here, and maybe I can get it out there. And what I didn't do was write an outline. So I feel much more like the painter who looks at the subject matter, whether plan error in the studio, and at some point puts down one dab of paint. That creates the framework for the next dab of paint.

then the two of them, four is a much more limited palette on the third dab of paint. And then you redo things, and you can start all over again, and you can do all sorts of things. But writing for me, even nonfiction is like that. I work without an outline.

Sometimes if I'm writing an essay, I'll write down four or five ideas that I want to make sure I don't forget to insert in there, but I never actually outline. And so the first chapter, I look at it and go, did it work and maybe show it to Annie, does this work? And then the second chapter and then

the third chapter, and I can always restructure later. I basically work not that differently from Annie. It's kind of chapter, chapters over. Think a couple days, chapter, chapters over. Think a couple days, chapter, chapters. You know, Marilynne Robinson, probably the finest pure writer of our time, she writes a sentence or two a day, 50 words maximum. Wow. And she spends the rest of the next day off and on thinking what the next sentence will be and sorting them out. And she doesn't actually need to write, I don't know if this is still true, but it was true of housekeeping. She didn't write a second draft.

It just came out without an outline, sentence after sentence after sentence, slowly like that. Amazing. Totally. I mean, nobody else works that way. but a lot of fiction writers work without outlines. Siri, who's about fiction writer? I once heard her say, you know, I keep writing protagonists who I love who get killed at the end.

I wish they wouldn't get killed at the end. I wish I could write a bird. Well, I knew this. I wrote about this in Bird by Bird, but I had an artist friend, an older guy on the East Coast, and he was a beautiful, beautiful painter. He painted with oils. And he showed me these huge canvases,

and he says, have a kind of shimmery sense about what the upper right hand quadrant looks like. I mean, I think this is true of all creativity. And I think creativity is a calling, you know, just like a monk to the priesthood. And he would have a calling. It would be shimmery and weird,

and that would be all he had to go on. And I don't think that people understand that that is how ephemeral, a lot of what we do, how it begins. Just this kind of thing. So if he'd go and he'd try to paint what was in the upper right hand. quadrant, wouldn't have anything to do what was in his being, in his heart, and his

isness, and his whatnot. So he just paint over it with white paint, and he tried again. It still wouldn't be right, but every time he found out what it wasn't, he'd be closer and closer to what he had been after all along. And I've never forgotten that because it's so often what my passages are like that I think, okay, and then it's not, but when I find out what it is And I go, oh, right. And it brings to mind that beautiful line of the great E.L. Dr. O., who's one of my heroes, who said, and I think this is true of all creation too. He said, writing is like driving at night with the headlights on.

You can only see a little ways in front of you, but you can make the whole journey that way. And I think that's so radical because we're taught as small children. We should know what we're doing, where we're going, what we're going to see, how we should expect to feel a lot of the way, and what it'll be like. when we get there. But it's driving at night. You can see five feet or 10 yards, and you can make the whole journey that way. And in reality, we never know what's going to happen next. Right, but we think we do. Yeah, yeah. Let's go through the 36 rules one by one. You'll teach me each of the rules. And then together, we're going to see how that rule applies to life beyond writing.

Rule number one, use strong verbs. Replace weak verbs, which are imprecise, walked, stood, with vivid verbs which are specific, trudged, malingered. So the verbs you're suggesting are more colorful, would you say? Correct. And more specific so that you can see it. So it becomes more cinematic for you. I could say, Phil walked across the lawn towards his mother, walked.

How did he walk? Phil lurched across the lung. Maybe Phil has had the beverage because he needs to before he gets together with his mother. Phil staggered across the lawn towards his mother. Phil tiptoed across the lawn to his mother. He wants to surprise her. She doesn't even know he's here or so on. And so if I can give you the right verb, you can see Phil getting across the lawn.

So if I say right now it's raining out the window I'm looking up, if I say it's raining, I'll just go, oh, it's raining and I'll have a generalized idea. of it's raining. But if instead I look closer, I might go, I never noticed that there are drops close to the house that have somehow collected into bigger drops, and they actually stand out from all the other drops going. And now I'm in that kind of Taoist place

of you don't have to go anywhere outside of where you're sitting right now to be entertained, amused, and intimate with the divine. beautiful. So strong verbs. And now, how might better verbs impact our life outside of writing? It's so wonderful when somebody can tell you what they really saw or really need for you to understand. And you can do that really most succinctly by using the verb which describes the action, which might be you or it might be something you saw. It describes the action. So the person gets it. it and you all of a sudden have a kind of an umbilical connection between the two of you because they can see what you're trying to say better descriptive but also more precise looking

right and so a lot of intimacy with the world is training myself to be precise and less abstract don't jump immediately from the outside perception to a judgment of it right we're taught to judge it as right, wrong, good, bad, better, worse, all those sorts of things. Those always get in the way of the intimacy. The precise verb is like the precise vision, the precise noticing. Noticing. What's rule number two? Well, the rule is the verbs to be and to have are instead of being verbs of motion, the verbs of identity, right? So when I say I am something, I'm saying I am immobile, it is a characteristic of mine or an identity of mine that it's already baked in. When I say I have something, I'm actually saying I acquired something previously that I'm going to tell you about.

So it's static. It's static and the reader gets stopped. And interestingly, Sanskrit uses two words for to be. One of them is static and stops on. And it's like a Western to be. But interestingly for Sanskrit and you can see it in Hinduism, they have another word for 2B, which is the one that you see all the time in the Bhagabagita, which is boo, which actually means more becoming than being.

And so it looks at being this as a fluid motion rather than a static presence, in which case, I would say use boo all the time as the Bhagavagata does. doesn't slow the motion of the story of the enlightenment of the human being. It sounds like that also takes into account that change is always occurring. Exactly. Oh, yeah, yeah. We're never static. So in some ways to be and to have are never correct.

Well, they certainly are the least of whom we are, right? My identities, the things that people can say they know I project on the world are probably the least interesting parts of me. Can you give me a 2B or a to have sentence first and then change it to the active version? Well, sure. I am a writer, right? I struggle with writing books. Or one of my life's great enjoyment is to get a good sentence built.

And that's a writer's life. And that's a lot different than I am a writer. Yeah. Which is a dead sentence. Yeah. It doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't actually lead to a question even. Do all good sentences lead to a question?

I would hope so. I mean, that was the struggle of being a newspaper man was that the thing that distinguishes writing for a daily newspaper from magazine or book writing or essay writing or substack writing is that in a daily newspaper you can only write sentences that present the possibility of a question that can be answered in the next sentence. You can't have open-ended sentences, and it's stifling. You know, you have to close everything down. And I write a lot with question marks. Question marks litter my

writing because I'm puzzled and I'm not clear that there are simple answers to anything that are anything that is kind of like that any problem that can be solved with money isn't a very interesting problem. It's like any statement that can Not open a question isn't a very interesting statement. Yeah, and let me add that I think at the end of a good sentence or a good song, you may feel a question. You may feel a sense of nourishment, like Barry Lopez said, sometimes we need a story, whether we need food.

You may feel a renewed sense of curiosity like Neil was talking about earlier, which is such a gift of art, you know, is that it gives us back that sense of curiosity about life that we got indoctrinated away from. since we were at some point expected to have the answers and figure out things. We didn't know that figure it out is a bad mantra. So a good sentence, a good song might make you curious to go further or more deeply into what you've been listening to or reading so that you're going, oh, my God, instead of whatever, it all helps you become a little bit more awake.

You think about the Goldberg variations. They are all about suspending resolution. keeping the question open way past the time that normally we want to keep questions open. And can I keep that tension going and novel and interesting enough so that the listener is going to keep with me before I finally hit that big end chord. So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy, using one of Squarespace's best-in-class templates.

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You said you write often with using question marks. Do you always actually write the question mark or can a question be a question without a question mark? Oh, yeah, yeah, tension of any sort in writing, anything. There's always tension. Any thoughts, any writing, anything that we call meaning has a beginning and a middle and an end. And the beginning is usually a situation. The middle is usually a complication. The complication is all the questions.

The situation may create a simple question, but the complications add more possibilities, more questions. And the resolution pits of response. So, yeah, I'm asking questions of myself every time I, I look back at something that I said and wonder who it was or what it was I was I was saying. The real world version of not using to be or to have, how that impacts everyday life. Well, I think that's just boost identity work. I want to get rid of my identities to see who I have. Accepting change, maybe?

Yeah. Uh-huh. except that it's all, all, all impermanent and in transition, which I hate and doesn't work for me at all. Because I would like things to be pretty much to say in those days. I only eat about eight foods. But Neil is very adventurous. And what I met was going out to hear live music three times a week. Now, I would go every so often and I would end up in tears and have to go home because I'd feel so overwhelmed.

But I think what it gives you is it's like being with people that are dying. that it gives you, true, it gives you ultimate reality, right? That we're all in a transition. There's a cycle. It's birth, death, new life, or resurrection or the spring, birth over and over and over again. You know, it's not always comfortable, and that's where the action is. Yeah.

Yeah. What if life is all transitions, just transitions? Can I live that way and not have a feeling of a need to be grounded into identities? What's rule three? keep it active pay attention to words the dend in ed or en and are preceded by a form of to be and watch out for i ng endings try flipping the sentence to get it more active the passive tense keeps me looking backwards yeah right and so i'm stuck not in the present the active tense keeps me boldly in the present now let me just read you this paragraph which is about the

great Douglas Adams begins his sequel to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in a perfectly used passive voice, quote, the story so far, in the beginning, the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad foof, unquote. So that he does not say who created the universe makes it so much more mysterious and quirky, so that sometimes it really calls for the passive voice. This casual thing happened. the universe was created like so it goes this is what matters notice that has been widely regarded also as passive which adds a distinctively rye tone and i urge people to though after bringing those examples up of the passive voice i urge people as often as possible to change the sentence to be more active and muscular and thus to win dour neal's approval okay so rule four stick with said okay this is is a quickie. You really just have to say said in dialogue that anything you say, if you say

he chuckled, I'm never going to read another page. I'm going to run screaming for my cute little life. You said, we should be able to tell who's speaking by the rhythms of their speech, their word choices and whatnot. But I wrote, many verbs to replace said sound like the efforts of a person whose first language was not English. Chuckled is the worst of all. Ever, ever used chuckled and have said, Pearson Hill. I'll read the rule. When attributing a quote,

said is the default verb. The reader's attention is on who said it, not how it was said. This takes us to, it's a form of show don't tell where it's basically saying in the meaning of what people are saying there's enough emotional content

that I don't have to reinforce the emotional content by using a verb other than said as the attribution. In real life, in a certain way, it's basically saying listen hard. And the emotion, the importance, the revelation that is in there will count more if you listen hard to the words than if you try to describe the emotion surrounding the words. And meanings and things people say are very specific to the words. situations, whereas our abstractions of emotions are very generalized and kind of useless.

What's Rule 5? Don't show off. Let others be erudite. Your job is to befriend your reader. Now, see, this is a great life lesson because so much of our energy and the energy of the people that I'm close to, that without intervention, it goes to showing off to, it goes to seeming to be very, very with it and up on the latest stuff and to understand the politics of it all or the or to be able to speak about books with the very literary and elite, you know, and it is not why I ever would want to sit next to somebody at the dining table. I called the sacrament of pluppage, you know, if someone will sit down next to me and we can just have a conversation about who we are

and what it's like for us and our version of things, what we saw earlier that day, I'm in heaven. but it's so tempting because a lot of us, and maybe this is more true of women, were raised to think about the appearance, the surface, the packaging, and the performance art, you know, and then that just keeps you in this false self your whole life until maybe you're given a diagnosis that means you better get real, you know, because the clock's running out. You know, my dad said when he was dying, he said, we're all on borrowed time, and it's good to be reminded of that every so often. And if you are not showing off, if you're doing real, if you're doing the deep dive with people, you know, you're getting somewhere, you're healing a lot of old mistruths about yourself and about life.

How sweet and precious and weird and it is and we are. So that one's about authenticity, would you say? Yeah, I would. I was raised like Annie was in an achievement-oriented intellectual family. and I was 52 years old and sitting with a therapist and I remember just looking at him and going, wait, you mean I can be ordinary? That's enough. Yeah. And this massive weight fell off of my shoulders.

And it's not stretching things to say that within a couple of years from that moment, the world had become much more vivid and much more approachable. and I had become less interested in presenting myself to the world in a shiny fashion. That's beautiful. I love that. What's rule six? Rule six, prefer Anglo-Saxon words. Favor shorter, plenshire Anglo-Saxon words over fancy, abstract, Latin, eight words. Okay, so I'll do my take first. I dropped out of college at 19 to be a writer, and since then, I've gotten old and funny. As a result of those two developments, I had to actually look up the difference between Anglo-Saxon and Latinate.

Neil tried to explain above, but let me restate what he said. Anglo-Saxon words are typically short, simple, and specific, whereas Latinate words are longer and more formal. Job versus profession. And versus Terminate, light versus illumination. And I think I can get at the exercise by reading, this. We are three-centered beings. We live not only inside our minds, but also within the sensations of our bodies and the emotions of our hearts, which define their own truths. As a long-specialized language, Latin tends to omit the body and heart. Of course, Latin didn't, when spoken by early

Romans, but in the ensuing centuries, the subtleties have been left behind as Latin accepted its for sharing technical practical knowledge. What does it mean to read and write with the body and heart as well as the mind? Words evokes sensory feelings and emotional memories. If a car crash lived only in my intellect, I might get away with the sentence, Newtonian laws of motion proved true when John's automobile disassembled. Instead, I say John's car was totaled, and a picture of a heap emerges in the might eye, a sinking feeling in the belly, and a sympathetic gloom in the heart.

And in the real world, lawyers and doctors use Latinate, and it creates distance and makes us think they're talking about something that we're not really even allowed to understand. Right, Britt. And couldn't possibly, anyway. It's good for classification of things. Rule 7. Sound natural. Unless you're writing a technical manual, keep your language.

conversational, and use modern speech patterns. Well, I mean, I think that goes without saying that when you pick up a book, a novel, say, or a fiction or a screenplay, and you assume that the writer has created a world for you to enter and it's landscaped and it's furnished and it's peopled by all the elements of a world that were fascinated by, such as manners and food and drivers and little little. kids and old people and disease and resurrection and all of it the whole mixed grill of life and you want to be able to get lost in it because over and over again that's how we get found and if somebody is using fancy words or going on too long in a kind of highfalutin way I get so impatient

I just feel I want to get lost with you tonight and I fight and I resist it and if I'm in a bookstore auditioning a book, I'm not going to buy it. Yeah, I get distant. Yeah, we get distant. It's kind of like I have a problem with anthem-oriented bands because I feel like they're, even though there's a kind of fascist intimacy with kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I also feel as if the preaching keeps the distance and that anthems are a form of preaching and telling me what to think right now and are, you can say anything manipulated, right, but that they are a particular form of distancing that takes me out of my

natural self and my ability to be curious. That also sounds like it relates to not showing off. Those feel connected. And I think those three in a row feel connected, yeah, don't show off, don't use Latinate words. Yeah, they're all different takes on staying in a minute with the person next to you. Don't get pompous. Don't separate. What's eight? Rule 8, trust your voice. I spend so much time in my writing workshops trying to convince people that they really are enough that how they see the world is what I'm interested in hearing about.

And then Neil in this section talks about finding your inner beetle. And I'll just read, Neil says I'm Paul, a melodist with lots of brightness and surprises, metaphor and humor. But Paul is my least favorite beetle. Plus, Neil and I went to see him last year at the Oakland Coliseum, and we both got COVID. So I'd like to be John. By the same token, I'd like to write like Barbara Kingshulliver or Virginia Woolf.

Neil says Kingsolver is John, a rhythmic harmonist with a dense mass of score, people with lots of instruments, color, and heart. Wolf is George, somewhat distant, but yearning, disruptive because she is a truth-seeker, appalled by what she sees, capable of shouting, but not interested in it. That is a really great tool that Neil's given me to help people understand that you can have many, many different ways of expressing yourself. There's not one way. There's like finding God, one mountain, many trails, you know,

and there are many trails to telling stories. There's only five plots, you know, and I want to hear your version of things, and I want to hear it in your voice. That's why I came. Yeah. So this chapter relates the music rubric of music is made up of melody, rhythm, and harmony to writing and to thinking in general.

And I alluded to it in that thing about the car disassembling, turning into mind, body, spirit, or heart. And people write, just like musicians write or sound like, usually with a particular balance of rhythm, harmony, and melody. And it's basically saying, listen for that and build on your strengths and don't try, if you're not a great melodist, quit trying to be a great melodist very early on. And it didn't matter. Paul Lowe could just think of a brilliant melody every 10 seconds, presumably. He was just a great melodist. Well, John didn't have that. And it didn't stop him from being able to express himself and he didn't care. And in fact, that's why the collaboration was so strong was that they were approaching it from different directions. Number nine. Question transitions.

Transitional phrases, then, next, when, meanwhile, however, are not needed unless a gap in time or logic has opened. And can you give me an example of a sentence with a transition that you could remove and it would be better? Here's the bad way to do it. John raised his arm. when the teacher called on him, he hesitantly stammered out his usual wrong answer. On cue, his classmates broke out laughing. Fortunately for John, the teacher called them to order. By reducing all of the transitions, it becomes, John raised his hand.

He stammered out another wrong answer, igniting the class into an eruption of snickers and laughs. The teacher wrapped her ruler for silence. The reader knows that raising a hand results in. being called on. When the teacher called on him is an unnecessary transition. On cue is another, and anyone with a heart recognizes that the teacher's intervention is fortunate for John. And in the real world, that would be about that we don't have to necessarily explain ourselves.

Right. Exactly. Right. It's like when little kids are telling you the plot of a movie, they've just seen, first of all, they sort of start in the middle to go, okay, so then there was this guy, and he had a red head and a bark. And so, and then you go, well, wait, where was this? And then go, okay, so then, and then, and then, and then, it's implied. If you've written your sentences, like the good version that Neil just read, it's implied. You don't need it. And we write in this book about

how often, without an editor, it does sound like a child telling you the plot of something. You can always, both of us end up taking a quarter out of everything we write, because we're always explaining or trying to help the reader understand what we're up to or giving too many discreet, you know, and it's like cut, cut, cut, cut. It feels so good not to have to explain myself. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good rule in life.

Yeah. You just say it. You know, what they say in 12-step programs, say what you mean, mean what you say, and don't say it mean. But, you know, say what you mean. Yeah. And say it mean, yeah. Rule 10. Link ideas with semicolens.

If two sentences are tightly linked and one progresses from the other, consider separating them with a semicolon. Now, I love semicolins, and it makes some people very worried, but I'll just read, I love semicolins. There are self-righteous people who secretly think that the semicolon is a hybrid invention that is neither this nor that, unnecessary and lazy, and they get to think this. I use semicolons, whenever it makes sense to connect two related sentences. two cousin sentences that are not complete necessarily. They are cousins to each other. I put a semicline. I don't want you to stop a full stop.

I just want you to glide into the second part of what I'm trying to share with you. The life lesson might be something about there is nuance in life, and it's worth stopping a second and watching for the nuance, because that second part of a sentence built on two statements with a semicolon it's usually a nuance. Yeah, exactly. When you put a semicolon between two sentences, do both sentences need to function as well-written sentences or no? Yes.

Yes. Yeah, they do. So two sentences that become one sentence with a semicolon, if you were to put a period instead of a semicolon, they would still each work as their own sentences. Yep. Semicolons have two uses, that one, and as a super-copy. When you have a bunch of commas and want to categorize things within parenthetically, kind of. But, yeah, semi-cullogs require complete sentences on either side. I love a super comma.

That's a great way of thinking of it. Number 11. Draw very and other crutch words. The word vary seldom improves a sentence. Yeah, and when I go through my work, if I go to the search function, Oh my God There went to 20 varies Because it's just like a tit

I was very relieved Very happy of She was very scared She was very very very good And so I always do the search function With very It's actually a separate thing or something That actually is in here

And so we also say you really can't use actually You know and once you're aware of how frequently people use And say actually you'll hear It's a tech You know so it's like Have you ever been to Alaska? Well, actually, I never have. Are you a vegetarian?

Well, actually, I'm not. Do you have a dog? Well, actually, no, I don't have any dogs. You know? It says nothing. And you get used to it, and it's easy to take out and you lose nothing in the process. An interesting thing about it is that both of us and everybody uses very and actually, in other words, in everyday communication, oral communication, as ways of adding an emotional

emphasis. When it becomes disallowed in book writing, it's basically saying you want to stay on an objective level. And if there is emotion, you want it to have a very specific purpose. Very. You want it to have a specific purpose and very and actually have no real specific purpose except to add a kind of dynamic in speech. And it doesn't work on the written page. Yeah, I imagine really is another one of those. And really is another one. So really and very, and actually, that's not your real voice. Yeah.

It also takes me out of truth and into belief. Right. What's the next rule? Rule 12, jettison all those tiny words. And he's taken out in the title of this rule, all those. Right. So it's really just jettison tiny words. Remove the clutter of short words, pronouns, prepositions, connectors.

If you see a bunch of little words in a sentence, you can probably get rid of some of them. And then he takes out the of them, right? You just start to notice how many, how you just keep the sentence going with these little words that add nothing. And you could have stopped the sentence five words earlier. I used to buy little pieces of furniture for holding books, papers, goo gougas, whenever the most recent piece of furniture I'd bought for this purpose was crammed with stuff. So I might have three cute cabinets and bookcases in one room. And I loved each of them.

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Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Are less words always better? Pretty much. I mean, almost all of editing is a condomizing. Yeah. And I never write short. I never hand-neal something that needs to be filled out. I always hand-neal stuff that needs to be trimmed, like a hedge. Or like when I had my hair in a natural. You know, you trim it so the face shows more beautifully. Or you trim the hedge so that it like springs to life in a different way. And that's true with sentences, too. So in general, letting the first draft belong is okay.

Oh, absolutely. Oh, yeah. These rules are about refining the story, not telling the story. Yes. And in fact, you want the first draft to be long because you want to allow yourself to riff and riff and riff, because it's the riffing where things are going to really come to the surface that are important. And then you're going to pull back a lot of the riff. right because it took a while to get to the point because you were thinking it through for the first time.

But the point is actually there. It wouldn't be there if you hadn't dragged it out for a while. So along the way, the third or fourth idea that you get to when explaining it might be the idea. And then the first two or three might come out. But if you didn't keep going until you got to the fourth one, you would never got to the fourth one. Right. Yeah, exactly. Next rule.

Rule 13, dress up the word this. Pronouns are hard for readers to follow, especially this and it. Neil writes, adorned the naked this, place the noun after it that names it. Not this was hard, but this conversation was hard. Not this was complicated, but this process was complicated. So, I mean, I think that it goes back to how Shirley Jackson's saying a confused reader as an antagonistic reader. It's just so nice to know what the writer is talking about right now. You leave a lot of them in, but the rule is that you try to dress up most of them.

Now, we have a great friend named David Roach, R-O-C-H-E, and he is a monologist, but he is also the pastor of a church he's founded called the Church of 80 percent. sincerity. And the mantra of the church is that 80% of anything is just a miracle. You know, 80% compassion, 80% selflessness, 80% of anything. So take 80% of any of these rules. It's just going to make your work so much better. And that doesn't mean that the 20% that left in are wrong or that you've gotten away with it or they might be right. They might be easier to read in that context or whatever, it doesn't actually matter. All that matters is you're fine with 80%. Getting that perfectionism out of the way is so essential to everything in life, but particularly

to spiritual work. I'd say 75% of the people I know on a spiritual path hit a brick wall because of that path's expectation or mention of the possibility of perfection. It's an awful false hope. Is there a time to break any of these rules? Oh, yeah. I break them all the time, and I'm going to continue to break them all the time. That's what I'm saying. I'm going to break them consciously, and I'm going to break them unconsciously.

And as long as I'm watching for it 80% of the time, it doesn't matter whether I'm breaking them consciously or unconsciously, as long as I've got them about 80% of the time, I'm fine. The conscious times are because of, you know, interfering other rules. Other rules are going to interfere. Other ways of improving the sentence are going to make doing this rule is going to add a complication or add a mess to the sentence. I might need a vary because I've got a person who speaks in a particularly commonplace way, right?

And if I didn't have a couple of berries in there, it wouldn't sound like they're were speaking in a commonplace way. That would be a conscious one. Other ones, I just let them through. I mean, I'm scared to death, you know, as this comes to the public, that people are going to point out all the sentences where I've broken them, because there are plenty of sentences in this book where I've broken the rule. And they're going to say, look, he's a hypocrite. No, I'm 80%. In a case where you're using Very to amplify the energy, instead of removing the very, might you say very, very, very. Yeah.

Go the other way, you know? Yeah, of course. And I say over and over again in the book, you can do anything you can get away with. It's true with music, too. You can break all the rules if you can get away with it. If I feel like listening to your song, like Tracy Chapman and Fascair or something,

I mean, there's just so many rules that are broken, and it's exquisite, it's perfect, it's a perfect song, but you can do whatever you can carry and hold it kind of, if the basket holds, you know. Out Cooper had never played organ before, Highway 61, right? Never played organ, he lied in order, because he saw Blumfield sitting there, and he knew he wasn't going to get the guitar gig, because he knew Bloomfield. And so he said, oh, I can play organ.

And it ended up being the signature of the song. Signature of the song of the album, really, that organ just comes through over and over and over again. And he absolutely says I had no idea what I was doing. Talk about breaking the rules. Okay, rule 14, this is the most important rule of all. Remove the boring stuff. Spend less time defending what you've written and more time revealing the truth. It's just so painful when somebody goes through your work for you and starts, we use parentheses, often, for work that we want.

each other to notice or to maybe consider working on. It's so painful to have any of your deafless prose challenged and it will just save you for someone to say, you know what, this description is beautiful, but you lost me two sentences in. We say something really nice, like maybe we'll use it somewhere else, but really you only need a two-sentence description of what is actually like to be at the county dump and the smell and the crazy things that people throw away. You've written a page and a half, and it's kind of amazing, but you lost me. How do you know what the boring stuff is? You really probably have to have a writing partner or an editor because I know more when I'm

doing something show-offy or I'm interjecting some humor because they're worried that people will think I'm a buzzkill or I'm a depressive or something. and I take that out. I take out when I'm trying to get people to feel a certain way about me. In my case, I explain things way too much, and then I have erudite characters, and I've written mostly prosaic nonfiction in my life.

I don't have a huge record, and so I'm now writing fiction, and I'm having to cut one character out of a book I just did. I had to cut 50% of that character because that character was explained, explaining everything. And Annie just looked at me and just said, uh-uh,

you've got to change it. This character is great, but you've got to strip out all the explanations. The reader is not going to follow them. And Neil can be brilliant on a number of subjects, and he included a lot of what felt to me like short talks on these subjects. And I went through and I said, take them all out.

Don't talk at me. Yeah. And it's a much better book. And the character is really interesting. Yeah. And people want the characters to succeed now. They probably really hoped that he was going to die a very miserable death about halfway three of the way he was originally written. Rule 15.

Refresh your words. Don't repeat a distinctive word unless you must. I'm going to go ahead and read the first three paragraphs. Don't repeat the same word in a paragraph. Don't repeat the same unusual usage in a chapter. Don't repeat the same aphorism in a book. Thought through exceptions are frequent. Propositions, pronouns, connectors, those sorts of skeleton tools of speech don't count.

We humans seek novelty. We constantly pull things close to examine them. We call it curiosity or joy. They're oddly the same thing, curiosity and joy. We want to catch what's new and different and get tickled by the knowledge or the upcoming puzzle and how the new object fits in.

If I encounter a distinctive word, I don't want to see it again for a while. I already got a kick out of it. And as with my taste buds, I need time between bites before it can again jolt me with a thrill. Keep them drooling. Let me read this.

You cannot use an exotic word twice in the same book because we will feel we have caught you trying to slip something past us, and we will turn on you. Also, never use Bloom, even though it is a beautiful word, because everyone is taken to overusing it to sound poetic. Once you start to look for Bloom, it will disrupt every work of fiction you read and ruin otherwise pleasant literary experiences. Only in emergency situations is it okay to use granular, existential, myriad, bespoke, lament, and, of course, cherish. The committee is out on luminous. I also don't recommend any word that you pause to carefully defining your mind before setting down, such as liminal.

You know, come on, you just, these words are cliche words now. We used them to death. What would be the real-world relationship to that rule? Well, I think it is the taste buds metaphor that we seek novelty. Our curiosity is what drives us, right? We're just constantly looking for the next puzzle to solve and call the meaning and the next one and the next one. And to do that, we're going to filter out things that we think we've already solved. And so we're looking for that novelty.

And that's just reflected. And, oh, he already used that big word. I already saw it. Show me something new, Neil. Yeah. So seeking novelty in life is something that would probably. yield more than more of the same. Right. And it's also offering it.

It's offering novelty. If somebody uses a verb that it's just so right on, I just look up, you know, and I smile or I read it to Neil or I text it to Neil because I'm so grateful for that, for somebody who bothered finding the right word that I know and that, you know what it's like. It just starts to make you smile for somebody to get the right word. I remember when I read into the novelty of Jane Austen, I was about, I don't know, 18, 19 years old.

And she read six novels. And I remember as I finished the fourth, I told myself, I got to slow down. Because I want to see this magic on the page for a longer stretch of time in my life. And I've got to read these slower not because they deserve it. to be read slower, but because I want them to stay in my life. Well, you know, Jane Austen keeps it fresh over and, oh, you know, even though the plot is determined 40 pages in, you have no idea what fresh insight she's going to have on the next page. Any suggestions on how to develop a better vocabulary of verbs? Thesaurus. And you sit at the feet of the masters. You see how they did it. You see

what inspired them. You see how carefully they chose each word of the sentence. MFK Fisher, the great food writer, who was actually really writing about soul and life and spirit, said you write one simple, clean sentence, and you put a period at the end of it. And then you write another one, you know? And so you keep noticing how the masters are,

how clean they're keeping their sentences, and how clean, paradoxically, makes everything really fresh. It's like rain. So the thing about a the thesaurus is somehow, you know, most writing requires having been well read, right? Good writing requires good reading. But assuming you're well read, those words are vaguely available to you. What the the thesaurus does is let you pick the perfect one.

Because one of the words in the the theorists will go, oh, that's what I was looking for. Exactly. That's what I was looking for. decision is there. I tell the story in the book of many years ago. I was in my 20s, and I had a friend, a Turkish-Canadian writer named Yashem Therner, and she was writing short stories at the time. I happened to glance over at a bet. She wrote longhand and I said, what are those tiny, tiny words that you have kind of stacked in certain places? And she explained, and I looked at it, and it was, there was a word that was really important to the story and she stacked up a bunch of possible synonyms

and she wrote them in tiny and so that they were like sticking with her so she could get and she spent so much time on getting a particular word right in a particular sentence. Yeah. So using a the thesaurus is not cheating. No, oh God, no. It's expanding. It's expanding your words. Okay.

Rule 17, stay in tune. The better word is both precise and unnoticed. Yeah, and then we say a thesaurus is your book of magic spells. So I write that all of us know what it's like to have gone over a sentence over and over again, obsessed with finding the right word. You like the image or the idea, but you keep changing your mind. You can't decide if a wispie, palm front is feathery or feathered, plumbed or plum-rose. which means having filaments of branches

that sustain a feathered appearance. Plumose is almost exactly right, but you cannot use it because it is obscure and esoteric and phony. I'm not even sure of the pronunciation. But then you do, you go ahead with it. You send your work off to an editor-agent or someone at a quarterly who is asked to see it and you bold to wake at dawn

filled with dread and self-loathing. They're going to laugh at how pretentious you sound. And in fact, read it out loud, to nearby editors, you know. So don't. Simple, clean. And this goes again to being precise in your noticing in life. So most of what we call our strengths,

our physical strengths as civilized people in the 21st century, most of what we call our strengths, our ability to discern one thing from another and to make hair-splitting discriminations between things. and we get a lot of joy out of that. We get a lot of pleasure out of making up little puzzles that require separating out variables and seeing how their valences meet and how they lock together or don't lock together or don't work together. But it asks for a level of noticing and precision that is entertaining to us, right?

Our self-nuration of our lives is primarily an entertainer, right? we can get tricked into thinking it's for productivity and the betterment of the species and all of that kind of stuff. But we had a self-relating narrator for at least 100,000 years before civilization where we lived exactly the same way as we had before having. So it can't possibly be about productivity. What if it's just about the entertainment of life

and being precise in discerning one thing from another? There's a long tradition of reading sacred text slowly, allowing each word to settle, echo, and reveal meaning over time. Rather than rushing to conclusions, this practice invites reflection, listening, and attention. For centuries, this repetition has been used to stay close to wisdom. Not by studying words as information. but by receiving them as something lived and experienced over and over again. This tradition is known as Lectio Divina.

Emerging in early monastic life, it engages scripture through four gentle movements, reading, reflection, repetition, and rest. A short passage is read, A single phrase is held. Silence becomes part of the practice, creating space for insight to surface naturally. Lectio 365 brings that ancient rhythm into the present moment. Designed for modern life,

it offers brief, guided, scriptural reflections throughout the day. To begin with intention, pause at midday, and wind down at night. The readings are less about information gathering and more for returning to wisdom again and again, letting familiar words meet new moments. A modern way to keep biblical wisdom close, quietly present, steady,

and alive within everyday life. Lectio 365 is a free resource. Find inspiration there, now and always. Learn more at lectio-365.com. Do you think that developing your vocabulary would give you a richer life experience? I'm not sure that it does. You know, I remember something Krishna-Murdy said a hundred years ago.

He said, once you teach a small child the word for bird, they never see a bird again. You know, they see a bird and they know the word. It's a bird. It's not the pure experience. It takes away the mystery. Yeah, the mystery and the miracle. There's a robin right outside on our lawn right now, and I'm thinking, oh, it's a robin.

But also, then I can catch myself, and I can just see it. So I don't know about vocabulary adding all that much to your life. I think that vocabulary may not, but vocabulary is an asset to hair splitting things. and hair splitting is a requirement of complicated puzzles and if you're engaged with the world you're going to be interested in puzzles that meet your processors complicating possibilities do you both read your writing out loud

I don't very often unless there's a lot of dialogue and then I read it out loud because God you can hear how phony or pretentious or unnatural sounds if you read it out loud, whereas if you see it on the page, you might think, oh, it's fine. It's very, very witty. It's been years since I read it out loud. And I got worried, but like when we were doing the audiobook, going in that I was, ah, maybe I should have with this book, right?

Because we recommend it because I think it's particularly early on important and it's particularly important for rhythm. You don't learn much about melody and harmony from reading it aloud, but you do hear flaws in rhythm. And that's my strength is rhythm. Hers is melody. My strength is rhythm. And I'm pretty confident with my rhythms at this point. So I don't read aloud to myself in the long time.

We also, neither are us journals. We write for a purpose. If there is content out there that is beckoning to be written, then I write. I wouldn't know what to do with writing for the sake of writing. How was the experience of recording the audiobook? Terrible. Yeah, it's painful. It's just a nightmare.

Nobody likes their own voice. Yeah, I can't. I've never once listened to an audio recording of me. I've never listened to me on YouTube. And also, you just realize how much better it could have been. And you think sort of bitterly, where were my editors? Why is this still in? I thought we'd taken this out.

Or this makes no sense at all. And then they're going, oh, excuse me, Annie, you're popping your peas again. And I'm a little sibling. I have a bit of a lisp. And they're going, okay, let's, why don't we do that over, Annie? You were both popping your piece and you were sibilant, and I just hate it. And I'm like, please speed at me up 10%, because they sound normal then. Yeah, yeah.

Number 18. Find the hidden metaphor. Metaphors mirror humdrum experiences through elegant comparison. In the hands of an expert, they both illuminate and offer depth of field. Metaphors fit in everywhere. A parable is a metaphor. as are allegories and analogies. Fairy tales are metaphors, as is any moral tale.

Your moral thoughts operate metaphorically, taking a skeletal system of good versus bad, right versus wrong, first learned by wrote as a child, then imposing it on a new situation, searching for what is similar. We call that pattern recognition. We might also call it metaphorical thinking. And metaphors are really beautiful attempts at expressing

the inexpressible, you know, and they're so right. You know, life really is a road. It's a long and winding road, and it's a thunder road, and the moon really is blue, but you have to be careful that you don't perpetrate a cliche. You can't say life is a bumpy road. You could say we were driving along a bumpy road. You could mention that it's a bumpy road, and life really is a bumpy road. But you just have to be really careful that you're not using cliches or hackney, expressions that don't bring any novelty at all. I wrote bad metaphors, stick out of otherwise good sentences and songs. Let's look at the two worst metaphors in all of musical history since those first stone flutes. Number one is, of course, MacArthur Park in the cake that

someone left out in the rain. The writer, Jimmy Webb, whose other song show he knows better, was describing how he felt after the catastrophic end of a passionate affair using images he had seen in Los Angeles says MacArthur Park. Some of these visual images are lovely, such as the old man playing checkers by the trees. And then that goddamn cake, I do believe he saw such a thing and knew how this sodden cake felt, and it pierced him. But I ask you, is this image not better to take one's therapist rather than included in a song of heartbreak, which will go on to be mocked for nearly five decades so far and counting? Okay. Now, this rule, Rule 19 is twist cliches.

And this is really Neal's. I really don't have much to say, but I'll read what he's written. We already think in cliches. You owe it to your reader's search for novelty to remove or deconstruct your hackney cliches. Use cliches to your heart says, but only if you twist them until they bleed.

We're pattern seekers as humans, and that means that our ideas, our spoken words, rest on hackneyed ideas that are recombined in new ways. Clices are us. We're spitting out old thoughts all day long. Writers think like everyone else. We have an alphabet and we also have a canon of idiomatic shortcuts

to abstract ideas, adages, and stale phrases. So do musicians. How many times have you heard a jazz soloist blurt out a phrase from a childhood ditty? Of course, my favorite things, you know, right off the bat. But Neil is much better on this idea of twisting cliches because the whole, those two words frighten me. But I think it's again, it's just a particular way of noticing things more carefully. If I get rid of the cliche, it's going to get me closer to the subject because I'm going to be removed from this kind of veil of prefabricated patterns.

It's no different than if I walk into it. my enemy's office and say to myself, I don't know this person. A different person will appear than my enemy, at least for 20 seconds. Yeah. Yeah. And we both use clichés all day, and they're funny sometimes, but in our writing, we try to take him out where Neil will breathe his hot, nervous breath on my neck, trying to get me to come up with something more original. But it's fun to twist them. Like, you know, Ian Fleming took live and let live and let live and let die. Talk about a memorable title. You could take, she was good as gold. And if you say, she was good as brass, maybe, right? You've got a good son. Maybe, yeah. That's a great one.

Rule 20, knock three times. For a series of terms to land, you usually need three. In English, three is the magic number. The good, the bad, and the ugly. The land. The in the wardrobe. I mean mine. Now, Neil says that this is the best way to do it and we like our pauses, our punchlines, our presciendas, and our familiar patterns. Three examples is a familiar pattern. Two things can be alike in many ways. Three things can be alike in few ways. But then the rule of threes is true for Neil and probably most writers. I use two in a series as often as I do three. So this difference in how we roll put enormous strain on the marriage. But you also write about it that you like the openness of not having the landing third.

Yeah, yeah. Right. So if I go da-da, there's an openness. I can't even say da-da-da without putting an emphasis on the third. It lands, right? It's like, this is John Lennon, by the way, who, whether he was working in 4-4 or 6-8, he has triplets all over the place. He just thinks and da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

You know, it's like a brass player that way. What do you think it is about triplets or threes that speaks to us? Well, I think that it's really making it clear. You know, they're giving three examples, and it's just helping the person understand what you're saying. Can you giving three examples of it? I love examples. I love when a writer gives me examples of what they're trying to say.

So you say the person was sweet, complicated, and cranky. Right? Now, those are sort of paradoxical because you don't expect somebody who's sweet to be complicated and cranky. But in those few words, we start to get a sense that this is a person of depth. This is a real person. This is somebody I might actually be willing to sit next to a dinner. But if you say sweet and complicated, well, everybody is complicated. We're humans and we have what Gabriel Garcia says.

we have the public life that's so curated and the private life, which is like a lot more free form and a lot more real, and then we have our secret life, you know. And those three things, that's three examples. We have a public life, we have a private life, we have a secret life. If you say we have our public life and our personal life, right? But when you add that third one, the secret life, wow, that's who we really are as human beings.

I also think it isn't an accident. The dancing often is in three. So there's something about the walls. Something physical about it. Yeah. The jazz swing beat, which is really a three, right? It's the dotted eight-16 pattern. It's really a three.

Yeah, there's something about that pattern. I mean, it's a great question. It's musical, too. It's musical. Two can be kind of staccato. Yeah. It's just in this. But if you give me three examples of something you're trying to express to me, I may get it.

You know, it's one extra later. I wonder if it's true in all languages or if it's an English thing. It's an English thing because Yashem Tena, the Turkish woman I was talking about, Turkish is Tis. She had to learn in English that she needed the third when she switched from writing and Turkish to writing in English. Rule 21, stretch out. Long sentences require attention to detail. injunctions and rhythm and a payoff at the end. Neil writes long sentences are acceptable, but they need to be linear, propulsive, and forward-moving

with parentheticals that don't double back. Used judiciously, a long-sentence catapults the reader through real-time with urgency, immediacy, and a sense of working consciousness. Now, Neil doesn't mind really, really long sentences. And I just get lost now. I didn't mind them when I was young. I wrote, many of our greatest writers have used long, long sentences, such as James, Joyce, and William Faulkner.

But it has been decades and decades since I felt like reading them. There is a nearly 4,400-word stream of consciousness passage in Joyce's Ulysses, not so much as sentences and outburst, which I think is very nice, which thrilled me in high school when I first read the book, but some or less so in my early 20s when I ostentatiously re-read the book so that people would think that I am smarter than I am. My reading group chose Ulysses when I was 30, and by that point I found it mostly impenetrable. Yeah. And that's just me.

I think in general attention spans have gotten shorter, so that would make sense. And mine definitely has. I'll bet there are still a lot of long sentences out there, but I'll bet they're enclosed and not experimental, but very, books of consciousness where you're seeing primarily internal dialogue. Yeah, Nicholson Baker is a great novelist and I have enjoyed his work. I mean, there's always exceptions, 80% of anything. But yeah, Neil can make a case for long sentences, but I'm not sure I'd lie it. Here's the next rule.

Rule 22, short cells. Interrupt lyrical or otherwise long passages with an abrupt short sentence. Short also works. Use intentionally short sentences to bring the reader home like this. Well, I think this is like life. We like staccato experiences and we like experiences that flow. And, you know, a bad side effect of Wu-Wu spiritualism is a kind of flowing cadence that always sounds sort of artificial to me. often it's in a yoga teacher's kind of flowing sentence, which may, to be fair, within the context of the yoga room, makes sense.

But outside of the context of the yoga room, I am as present on a roller coaster as I am with my eyes closed in a meditation room flowing softly. And that punctuation of staccato movement is joyful and arresting. And arresting is a resting. of punctuating staccata word that, you know, stop, stop. I like to stop, too. And I mentioned that two of my favorite sentences in my life here,

my time here on this side of eternity are two words. One is from the Sound and the Fury where it has the delineates the cast of characters. And for Dilsey, who's the black matriarchal slave, who has endured the most horrific losses and racism in Jim Crow. her description says, Delcey endured. And it says everything. She's a woman of faith.

She's a woman of family. She's a woman, she's a woman of the earth. And Delsey endured. And the other one is from the Bible, when it says Jesus wept, and it's specific to when Lazarus dies, and Lazarus's sisters, Mary and Martha come, and they're kind of pissed off at Jesus

because he didn't come right away. And they think that, and then, but Jesus knows that Lazarus is actually part. of eternity, but he cries for his brother, Lazarus, who has died. And he says, Jesus wept, and we assume it means he weeps for all humanity, for all the suffering in the world today and forever. And it's so beautiful. But it's hard to do. It's hard to write a very short sentence. But when I come upon one, and here's a cliche, and it lands on a dime, I stop with it. I stop with it. And I breathe it in. It sounds also like the long sentence and the short sentences,

both work as variation. If all the sentences are the same length, that gets old fast too. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the, our reflexive writing is subject, verb, object, subject verb, object, subject verb, object, and boy, does that get boring fast.

Yeah. 23. Give your sentence a finale. Even if you begin your sentence with a punch, and it's stronger. The strongest element of a sentence usually belongs. at the end. Instead of my brother got the hiccups on the way to the movies, make it, on the way to the movies, my brother got the hiccups. Hickups is a great work. Yeah. It's abrupt. And I think this is, so we don't notice it, but as we experience life and we're narrating it

back to ourselves, we're basically saying to ourselves what just happened. So our narration tends to have a beginning, middle end. What just happened was I got curious about something. I brought something else in to compare it to or bring it into resolution with, and then I want to move on to the next experience, so I'm going to end it. And what you get with an abrupt ending to a sentence or a strong ending to a sentence is the knowledge that I've got a gap that I can fill with something new that's interesting to me, right? It's kind of like the very bottom of my breath, right? And there's a little bit of samadhi or emptiness at the very bottom of my breath, and it clears things so my next breath can be fresh and new.

And it's interesting. We tend to begin a sentence in our mind with the bottom of the breath. We don't always, by any mean, but we often actually match our breath to our sentence making. And we want to be clear that we finish that sentence, concluded. that experience, given it what we call a meaning, which is mostly a concluded, so that we can start all over again, because we want to start all over again. It's almost as if without that conclusion, the rest of the sentence doesn't warrant being there. Right. Yeah. Or it's going to linger into the next sentence. One or the other. You're right. Yeah. And I learned you end your sentence

with your strongest word, you end your paragraph with the strongest word of image, and you end the passage with your strongest image. And so those are three finalities. I didn't love that one. Yeah. Do you think about that, or does it just happen? I don't think about it while I'm writing a first draft. I really do, I will do anything to keep going, and I don't let the inner critic tell me I could write a better paragraph than that, because it might just be a placeholder, and I let myself just get through it. I write all nine pages when I actually can only send in four. I do consciously think about a lot of these while I'm rewriting.

That's the whole point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 24. 24, crystallized for dialogue. Dialogue needs to be as zippy and economical as the rest of the book. So Neil will have interesting things to say, but I just want to read the last paragraph of my meditation on this. My advice is to read the masters and see how they do it.

J.D. Salinger, Raymond Carver, and Virginia Woolf for some of my favorites. Watch great modern movies whose screenwriters are legendarily great with dialogue like Aaron Sorkin, Diablo Cody, Billy Wilder, John Sales, Nora Ephron, William Goldman, study how their conversations canter along without sounding clipped and arch. then just do that. Meal. Well, if I was looking for a meaning to this, it would be that dialogue and conversation combines meaning and personality

in a way that we wanted to encourage an interest in truth and the truth of the situation and the truth of the conflict rather than necessarily an emotional belief. about the conversation. And I think people are inclined to write dialogue that feels like it's expressing emotion. And there's something imprecise

when we move into belief in emotion and don't stay very tightly tethered to the objective truth of the complication of the situation. So would you say writing less what the character is feeling and more of what's happening? Yeah, and what they're saying about it, if they're saying something about it,

usually the dialogue, they're saying, they're telling you what they believe about the situation, but they're telling it to you because it's a critical piece of information for you to know how they're going to get out of this complicated situation and believe it when the resolution comes. So let the story do its job.

Yeah, exactly. They're helping the story along by exposing some interior dialogue, but only piecemeal because you only want it to be a clue. You don't want it solved for you. All fictionist detective work. I've never heard that before. That's great. But it is. You know, we're all reading at guessing what's going to happen next.

Yeah, we're anticipating and anticipating because we know that every page and a half or so, there's going to be. be a new torture inflicted onto the major characters. And it's really that often in the framework of fiction, unless you're an experimental fiction, every half page and a half you have a new conflict. Now, you may only have 60 big conflicts that get measured or whatever, but it doesn't actually work that way. You don't see very many five-page arcs that don't have a couple of little conflicts stuck inside them.

So it's a lot of torture. That's what keeps you reading, right? Yeah. The conflicts are what keeps you interested. The tension. Everybody, what is at stake for these people? Danny and I spend virtually every evening binging detective shows because that's what we like doing. We like anticipating through the troops.

We can spend our time figuring out what's going to happen next before it happens. Which are your favorites? Usually the Scandinavian ones. because in the precinct room, they're nice to each other, whereas American ones, they're really snarky and ironic and mean to each other. And I'm just done with that. I grew up on the East Coast. I moved to the West Coast.

I don't want to go back to the East Coast. What are the Scandinavian detective shows? Well, the Icelandic one started this off. So there's one called Trapped that Can't Be. There's one... The Killing? Yeah, the killing. What's who's Sagga in?

Well, Saigon's in. Sagga's in the bridge. The bridge. All of the bridges. Every version, the Swedish bridge is the great one. It's a great one. But there's also an American one and there's also a British one. There's one that's not a detective show but has all the elements called Occupied.

Yeah. It's Norse. It's kind of very cleverly done for several seasons. We're hooked. Yeah. Okay, now this kind of leads into this Rule 25 and Fiction archetype. characters. So as I was writing, everybody in all of my novels, I've written seven novels, all the characters are some aspect of me. Like my second novel is called Rosie. And it's about a

little girl who had lost her father when she's six years old. And my dad had just died, although I was 20 years older than she was. And I could write from that, the depth of that loss, that chasm. Her mother's an elegant alcoholic. And I wasn't elegant, but I was an alcoholic. I am. I'm a sober alcoholic now. Boy, I can write the hell out of alcoholism. Her best friend is this Zoftig black belt codependent, which is an aspect of me. Her future husband, Elizabeth's husband, is a writer,

very neurotic with those equal proportions of grandiosity and terrible self-esteem. That's me. That's you. That's all writers. Equal proportions of grandiosity and bad self-esteem. And so those are the archetypes I've written from. I love what Pico Ayer said, writing is in the end that audits of anomalies,

an intimate letter to a stranger. And if you are writing from archetypes, they're universal, they're young. The archetypes are handy to use if you're having trouble distinguishing your characters of each other. If you follow a Myers-Briggs or an anagram or some other union system,

you can get it right because unfortunately your readership intuitively knows that this sort of person in this sort of situation acts this sort of way. So learn one of the archetypes systems if you're not quite sure if you feel shaky. I tried using them more consciously than that and I fail at it. So I don't know that I obey this rule closely. But there are times when I've got a character, when I'll look at the anagram and see, what does this kind of character do when they're unhealthy? What's cool about that is it's a form of shorthand.

You don't have to say as much because we know people like these archetypes. Yeah, exactly. And then if you twist on the archetype and kind of poke at the person and the person reacts slightly differently, and you can pull it off, then, boy, that's a memorable character. They're not archetypal. They started archetypal,

but then either they learned and got healthy, which is one memorable kind of character, or they can go bad, of course, or they kind of moved into a different archetype, but you better be careful about how they do that in steps. They can't do it instantly. Right. Right. Oh, we talked about this.

What is next? Show then tell. Show then tell, start with the concrete, what happened, and after, when appropriate, riff on your thoughts about consequences. Disasterously, you probably learned this directive as show don't tell, which is often flat out wrong and has led to a lot of strangely thin short stories populating literary journals. The central idea behind show don't tell is that setting character, voice, and plot should go a long way in satisfying the reader's curiosity. It's a helpful old rule so far as it goes. Showing things physically and through the subtlety of diction and psychological tropes is the starting point of any scene. These touchstones are necessary for the seamless world that we cherish finding.

And then I go on to say, but now pay attention to the great writers and see what they're actually doing. They've got a scene with some action, and then somebody's interior dialogue is starting up and reflecting on the action. and anticipating the next conflict. And so there really is a lot of telling going on. That's where the depth comes from. Yeah. Yeah. And that's where the quirkiness comes from,

and that's where the writer's voice. I mean, I'm not saying, look, there are perfectly, and I mean perfectly great, show don't tell writers. There are, you know, Annie Dillard immediately comes to mind, right? And she is very careful,

not to ever tell you anything as an outside observer about a character. And that can be done. And it's a beautiful way to write. But it isn't the only way to write. Rule 27, give them a hero's welcome. Start off by telling the reader who to root for. So what I feel and think and wrote is that you as a writer

are asking us to come sit by the campfire and to listen to your story. And very few of us want to spend all that time with you if your characters are annoying. and if we just kind of wish you would stop. Ethan Canaan, the wonderful novelist who talked to years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, told me years ago that the most important aspect of a novel is a likable narrator. And I think that's true.

They can do terrible things. They can be a complete wreck. Famously, Ignatius J. Riley and the Confederacy of Dungeons, just a chaotic mess. But we love him, and he's a lovable train wreck. We're rooting for him. I also want to mention, and I do in the book, that by the same token, Ethan told me that same day that you should never write out of revenge. And I have told oceans of students that they need no other reason to write.

But then somebody, their editor, will come along and say, do you really want to say that? But anyway, so yeah, as Neil says, start off by telling the reader who to root for. And I think that you'll see in some genre fiction in particular, you'll see a war between good and evil, right? And you'll see a morality play. And what this rule says is everybody's moral. It's possible to be likable.

And if you've got likability already built in, if you've got empathy built in, you can have bad actions show up that have a little more subtlety than good versus bad. So this isn't about, I want to know who the hero is so I know how to follow the plot. This is about in the real world, there are very few sociopaths, and everybody's moral in the sense that they know good from that. That doesn't mean they'll do what everybody thinks is good all the time.

But they're still moral, even if they do things that look bad, because they know. And that's how we empathize with people. that's our first love is for our species, is, yeah, we're in this together. I mean, it goes farther than this. You definitely want to make your protagonist likable very early on. And everybody breathes sensibly. But in a certain way, all your characters have to be human enough to be likable. All of them.

Rule 28, this is another rule that put an enormous strain on the marriage. keep your first description of a character or place distinctive enough that you aren't tempted to add to it later. Now, Neil says soon after any character or location enters, describe them physically in one concise paragraph so that you don't need to ever mention them again. Now, that's very nice. And I used to agree with this rule, and then I got old. Now, I am very glad if a careful writer mentions an important physical detail again that I may have come upon six. pages earlier that I'm very glad to be reminded of, I actually forgot that they have six fingers. I hadn't thought about it.

You know, I'm glad to remind you. But you need to have a writing partner to tell you. We already knew that. I would take it out. Or to say, you know, I've forgotten that. I was actually glad you mentioned it again. And I think this again goes to, I want a precise fix on things. People are physical in the world.

they're distinguished from each other in their physicality. The great writers use the physical description as a foreshadowing of the psychological profile that will emerge over the course of the story. And we do do that. We meet somebody the first time and we go through a catalog of observations and we get a fix on them and we make some psychological interpretations of that. And so a novel in particular should replicate that experience because that is the human experience. I don't ignore the physicality of somebody who, because I think they're really the deep person inside.

When I first meet them, I am looking for what's wrong and I'm in danger and there's a stranger here, you know. All right. Rule 29. Smell the roses. Sight is only one of five senses. Let your readers enjoy touch, hearing smell. and taste. Go back and add the sensory information you left out, smells, flavors, feelings, noises. You're probably already perfectly good at providing the visuals. Most of us have memories that lean heavily on an internal movie screen, but living in the present isn't like that. We're taking cues from sound, smells, and our tingling skin all the time. I literally take a separate pass through my writing looking to add in smell of sounds because I know I won't think

to do it in my first draft. And I know I'm cheating my writer. And I'm so grateful when a writer captures a certain smell, which is such a profoundly connective sensory experience. And it is just, it is like Proust and the Madeline and triggering the outpouring of memories. But I'm so excited when someone captures a taste or a smell or a sound of something because it spritzes me awake. You know, and it makes me feel just happy and grateful that they found the words to express a sound, a scent. It changes it from a silent movie to an experience. Yes, it does.

When we either close our eyes or soften our eyes, we feel a sense of expansion and movement that allows more things to enter and some of those things that. and or smells and other things. And also again and again and again, you sit at the feet of the masters. You see who wrote in beautiful sensory ways. Kerry Tempus Williams and Mary Oliver and Hemingway and Shakespeare. And you see how they did it.

Yeah, and how enlivening it is for you to read it. And so then you try it, you know, and you write it and you do a really bad job on the first draft. But it's like that painter finding out what the top quadrant wasn't and then being closer and closer to what it was. Yeah, that's it. I hadn't even thought I'll have to look at Shakespeare again. The sonnets are really sensory, right? Rule 30, don't filter. This is really Niels from Rule. Don't point out what someone is thinking, opining, or experiencing what is already happening on the page.

Yeah, this is pretty simple. It's for internal dialogue and action to work well, you don't want self-conscious characters. They shouldn't be conscious of the fact that things are happening around them and to them in any other than an immediate way. And so if I say he felt that she was being mean to him rather than having him think to himself without using those words simply, boy, she's being mean to me. Then I'm distancing myself. I'm keeping myself once removed. Right. So I don't want to look through the filter.

the self-conscious human being. Of course, we're all very self-conscious. So we point out again and again, these rules were never meant to dress you as an exterminator, fixated on eradicating every adverb, every filtering word, every variant it. Few of you work for terminix. You work for you.

The rules are simply suggestions for writing better sentences, clearer and more inviting. So sometimes you use, she felt that he was, instead of he was being dismay or that. done. Okay, 31, this is important. Trust your reader. Your reader will fill in the gaps. You only need to be complete enough. This is so interesting. Often in fiction, the reader knows more about the characters in a certain way than the writer. And it's kind of creepy. If you're a writer, it's kind of creepy to think that I'm going to write the character because the character is happening in front of me.

And I'm going to lose sight of motivation after a while. Well, the reader is constantly looking for motivation and looking for connection and all that kind of stuff. I might not need as the writer to be looking for it. This is because the heart of people going up and shoving a microphone in Bob Dylan's face and saying, what did that song mean? And he said, you tell me, right? Yeah. It's partly that I have my idea about it and I don't want to help you.

But it's also partly, I didn't write it in that context. I didn't write it to be summed up. I don't write about people or things or activities as if they are abstract patterns that can be summed up in a couple of sentences. I wrote it because I loved that feeling or I was driving down 10th Avenue and I looked up and there was a golden angel

sitting on a building, you know? And that got me thinking and connecting to things. and those things didn't come to me because I pattered it all out. Of course they add up to something, and of course I could tell you what I think they add up to. But it in a way cheapens it for me because that's not what really happened. It was more organic and personal than you could believe. And I hope that organic personeness, you know, shows up for you.

I hope you can feel that and see that. It allows the reader to participate. Yeah. And I love when the writer trusts me and sees me as an equal and that we're in conversation and that it's a duet. And I love when they are trusting me or being clear, being vivid and bringing me along, but just trusting that I'm smarter than the average bear, you know, and I can keep up with it. It's the most wonderful readerly experience I can have.

All right, 32. Layer your sentences. Sentences convey more than information. Their other purposes must be tended. What on earth did you mean by that, Neil? Okay. If you're writing strictly for meaning, the paragraph can be your basic unit. But if your interest is good writing, then the unit is the sentence. No sentence can be bypassed as simply transitional. Each sentence must serve multiple purposes. including two or more of meaning, plotting, character, diction, rhythm, harmony, color, and seamlessly. For Annie and Meas writers, our eyes are on constructing a sentence that does more than convey a simple meaning. Our sentences carry heavy responsibilities. I learned this one from a workshop with Marilynne Robinson.

I hadn't known this. layering a sentence means going back to look at all your sentences and and look at them through character and diction and make sure that they match and make sure that something isn't standing out and that something isn't missing. It doesn't mean making your sentences more complicated. So the sentence is doing more work than is obvious.

Would that be a way to say? Yes. That would be. I mean, I think about how, to me, Sergeant Peppers, they basically decide our responsibility is for every quarter note passage of time. And they stop thinking in terms of lines and in terms of bars. And they start thinking in this really atomistic way about how can I get this next

quarter note passage of time right and include everything that it can include and not be too much in order to express what I want. And by the way, I happen to have this psychedelic notion, right? And so that allows me to layer in even more things. And to me, it was just, it's just overwhelming how each moment is thought through. It's kind of like I listen to Charlie Parker and I think, that guy can hear his own grace notes as a separate note that is passing on to the next Nobody can do that. But somehow he could expand time and do that. Well, once you're doing that, you have a lot of responsibilities on your hand.

And very few musicians have ever attempted to do what Sergeant Peppers does. I mean, they went back and did it for Abby Road, but you've got to assume that by that time they were exhausted from the whole exercise, right? It's nearly impossible to imagine how they were able to do that. But they were doing what I'm asking for here, which is everything counts. That's right. Now, Rule 33 for me is the second most important role after take out the boring stuff. And it is write the hard stuff. Don't shy away from the big mysteries of life.

And in my part, I just really beg people to write about the hard stuff. I'm just starved for it. I'm starved for truth. There's just so little truth in the popular. culture. You know, I write about life and death and hope and faith and the loss of it and how you survive that childhood, how you survive the divorce or the injury or the marriage or the, you know, write about our fears, right about our beauty and our divinity and right about our funkiness and just right about the real and the true and ephemeral. I just start for it. That's really a very.

all I have to say, except I know I'm begging, but that is what I just longed to come upon. When I tell people to write what they'd long to come upon, I want you to write about how we come through, how we come through really, really difficult times, like now in our world. How do we come through and stay buoyant and keep our senses of humor and keep our sense of faith, keep our faith no matter what? And I wrote, write about who you think you are deep down, past the persona and curation and the stories you believe about yourself because you are probably similar to me, and I love it when someone holds up a mirror. I love revelation. We're a species that crave stories about itself. Tell us our story through your lens, whether in fiction or nonfiction, it is really all you have

to offer us. And the way I put it is nothing is ineffable. And if you're an explorer, you should have that assumption. So you think about Judaism and oh, don't name Yahweh because it's ineffable and isn't to be named or in a certain way talked about. And then you've got Maimonides

and Spinoza and you've got the Talmud and you've got the Kabbal and they are all approaching the ineffable and they are important because of that, right? That's what they're doing. We're all called to describe the ineffable. Whether we do it a

or not, you know, self and other is the only thing interesting, right? And self and other isn't ineffable. It is what we're struggling with and admiring and astonished by every single day. And I want to see that. I want to know that there's something with heart sitting inside your purpose. Because I know that I yearn for intimacy. And the intimacy is the most mysterious second most mysterious after consciousness thing we've got around us. Rule 34, break the rules. So we've talked about that a lot in the church of 80% sincerity. But a rule may be of universally used, but need not be universally used.

Neil says, as I've said, these are tips, not rules, until the time that you decide to adopt them. But even then, they're not black and white like grammar. And at some point, you probably will need to break a rule. leave in a very keep a weak verb, stick with a latinate noun. It's just really true. You can break any rule that you can get away with. I say earlier in the introduction, troll us if we must, but believe us when we say we're not scolds.

Yeah. I'm not useful. I am perfectly fine with that. I still read some experimental fiction, and I'm absolutely fine with it. breaking all the rules. Yeah. The main thing, and the reason with this book

is the encouragement just write and write and write and right and get it down because believe me, knowing in your family is going to be happy to hear that you're writing a memoir, you know,

and the fact is really no one cares if you write so you better, you know, and if you just sit down and you write and write, then we can help you write a little bit better. If I'm writing and I'm stuck and it's hard.

There's a good chance. This is an important sentence I'm working on or put a graph or section I'm working. There's a very good chance. All right. There's two more rules. And this one, Neil is a stickler about. Finish the damn thing.

Your job is to complete the project. The final quality and consequences are not yet your business. God willing, you will find a writing partner a writing group or an editor and they will help you one day at a time make your work better and better and clearer and cleaner

and fresher and more layered like a lasagna with depths and sensory details and truths but you've got to just push on through you have got to finish it and the trick to that for me is

whatever quality it has is already baked in when I accept the project So if my antacritic is going to interfere, which it will, it will be saying it should be better, right? And I need to make it better. And I'm like, I have to stop myself and one thing I do is say, wait a minute, in the months it will take me to finish this, my quality will not significantly improve or slide. It is what it is. It is what it is. My blind spots are what they are.

I hope I'll have a good editor who will fill in my blind spots. But my quality is not going to change. and therefore I just need to complete it. And the other thing is get rid of all of those thoughts about what happens to it after it's done. Your only job is to complete it because the next job selling it is hell. There's a reason I'm a writer.

I like writing. I like articulating things. I like the process of writing. That doesn't mean I like publishing or marketing or promoting. I may have to do that. But the goddamn greatest thing in the world is I don't have to do that while I'm writing. Yeah.

Right. And I can keep clear of all of that. It's the only chance it's going to be good as well. If you keep... And the best reason to finish, whatever you're writing is that everything inside you tells you not to, and it's a lie. There's a whole chapter in By Bird by Bird on perfectionism,

and it tells you that your work is not going to be good enough and that it's not going anywhere and that it will never get out there. But if you finish it, God, you're going to... a heroic thing. You have completed a heroic journey. And what happens next is to be decided. In 12th step, we always say, more will be revealed. More will be revealed. More will be revealed. And it's a subversive action. And that makes it a profound and sacred action. So this brings us to the last rule. Worship talented editors. Writing is collaborative and editors save your skin. Editors don't improve me.

They fill in my blind spots. I can't improve much on the many years that have brought me here during the relatively short time I spend writing the book. And I'll probably always have the same blind spots. I'll forget to move beyond the visuals. My characters aren't paranoid enough, or they're too paranoid, or their cardboard, or whatever. Or the language turns flowery.

My prose gets very purple. And when I give my stuff to Neil, this is a true story. he comes over to where we're talking to you to his back cave, and he marks it all up. It's usually four or five pages. And then he comes in and he's got it all marked up in pencil and he stands there. And he might say something like,

I am going to love this. But if you read between the lines, it means he thinks it sucks as it is right now, if you're made. So then he hands it to me. And there's always, and I bet this is true of YouTube, there's always something wrong with the beginning. because you're clearing your throat.

You're trying to find your way into that pond. You know, you're going to bring your reader across the lily pond. But you've got to get in, and it's cold at first. And there are going to be six, seven, eight major lily pads. You're going to land on with your reader, but it's cold. So you kind of get in as you can. And that's heroic again. You've gotten in.

Neil or my book editor or my – they're going to come and they're going to say, it starts getting really good three paragraphs down. I had no idea what you were up to. And this is wonderful. And then he'll marks up. And sometimes he'll even give me suggestions. He'll give me the sentence that I couldn't come up with. He's like a midwife.

He's midwifeing me. And we're very, very collaborative. I would never ever send anything off to an editor or an agent without giving it to Neil because, as Neil wrote, editors save us from ourselves. We're too close. We're too close. We're too close. And we have our blind spots.

and they'll always be the same blind spots plus neurons. I'm thinking about my daughter has this app in her head where after she has words and match them to music, soon after that, she hears the whole orchestration in her head. It just kind of appears magically to her, right? But when she goes into the studio, she doesn't just try to match what she's hearing in her head. She's usually working with a producer,

and they're changing it, and she calls that just as magical as the time spent during the writing. The collaboration has its own groove, its own way of changing things and adding and distracting and doing things. That's what a good editor does, you know? It's like walking into the studio and going, and the editors are like this, oh, wow, I've got ideas, but I'm going to preserve everything that you want me to preserve. and at the same time, let's have some ideas together. Beautiful. How has working on this book together changed you guys? It's funny because, you know, again, in 12-step recovery,

we say the whole system works because we're not all nuts on the same day. And that was really true of me and Neil, because we have worked on it so long and over and over and over again. And Neil will come in and say, I hate it. We can't publish this. And I'll say, no, it's really incredible. It's going to really, really help people get confidence. That being the way that we find freedom is that we, you know, as with everything,

that we follow some rules and it means that we can spread our wings a little bit. And then Neil read the book for the audio version and he said, Just my passages. His passages. And he said, it's just hateful. It's awful. It's the worst thing we've ever done. And I read it.

And I hadn't read it anymore. I said, no, it's fabulous. I couldn't believe some of your passages. They were wonderful. They were brilliant. No, no, no, we're going to be destroyed by the critics. They're going to say all of my stuff is really boring, whereas I think my stuff is just like too comical or too cute and too whatever.

Then other times I would just feel like, oh, my God, what have we done? They're going to compare it to bird by bird. And then Neil will go, no, I love it. I just read it. I just picked it up again. So that's how it's changed us, is that we know that one of us is always, going to be needing a little bit of comfort and support, and one of us is going to provide it, just like real life. Yeah, it's so beautiful that you have each other. Yeah, it is.

It's lucky as hell. You know, it's funny. As soon as you ask that question, I realized it's been a year or more since I actually took stock in why I collected these rules in the first place. and I should try to remember that. I actually, I read this because I noticed that this book didn't exist. And that's what you do. You notice a book doesn't exist and you get the urge to write it if you're a writer. Or even in your case, if you're not a writer, your book didn't exist. And it means your book didn't exist as much as it means that type of book didn't exist.

And I forget that, that it's actually my book and not the reader's book. And I had a purpose for putting it out there because it didn't exist. Your purpose also was you've had these rules for some time and they've helped you greatly and you want to share them. Yeah, that's it. Right. That's a great purpose. That's a great purpose.

I guess, yeah. But mainly it's, oh, I have material I can write and it's content and I get to write it. And so I get to use my chops. And I like spending time. I'm like a musician who likes going out on the road, right? I just want to write. I'd rather be writing than doing just a lot of other things, most of other things. And Annie's the same way.

To a certain extent, the content is secondary. And that's why we think in terms of sentences, because the content is a primary. My last book, Better Days, Tamier and a critic, people came to me, and I'm not bragging in any way because I don't care about this. And I'll explain. People came to me and said, oh, I loved your book. It transformed my life. It was really helpful. I got my husband to read it and we're working through the exercise and all these lovely things.

And all I wanted to hear and never heard was, I really liked how you wrote it. I really liked that because I'm a writer. I don't care about the content. I care about the sentences. Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge. What may fall within the sphere of tetragramatine?

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