Begun

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(Transcript)

Hello there everyone. We have received another question. Uh, I am, I just finished writing a thing and I'm about to tomorrow start writing a thing and editing a thing at the same time. It's gonna be very busy, and so I figured I would take this time. To do one of these again, uh, because we have a question and that's fun.

Okay, so the question is this. I've been collecting thoughts and ideas for a project I want to make for maybe two or three years now, and I want to finally begin work on it. My problem is I don't know how. I don't know how to make an interesting introduction scene for the protagonist or world I want to show off, or how it can capture an audience's attention before they scroll to the next thing.

I've written three starts to the same story, and I'm not content with any of them fully, and I can't seem to figure out why it's leaving a sour taste in my mouth. So I suppose my question is this. How do you start? Okay. Starting something, beginning something.

I've got a, uh, quote here. Uh, from EB White. Okay. EB White said a blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me, more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a little red wagon. It holds all the hope. There is all fears. I can remember really quite distinctly looking a sheet of paper square in the eyes when I was seven or eight years old and thinking, this is where I belong.

This is it. This kind of makes you wanna punch Eby White right in their face, right? Because beginnings are hard. It's hard because it's. You are imagining the thing that's ahead of you and it can be quite daunting. And so actually getting started is one of those things.

It's maybe the hardest part about the whole process, right? So let's talk about beginnings. how you start your story depends to a large degree on what your story contains, what's in your story.

Um, different stories should start different ways depending on how your story goes. There are stock ways to start a story. Uh, you see this as a meme sometimes, right? Record scratch. How did I get here? I bet you're wondering how I got here, right? Um, that's sort of a way to start a story. You'll see a lot of stories that will begin by showing you a scene from way deep in. Right, and you're sort of making a promise, like this is where we're headed everyone.

So I'm showing you this scene first so that you watch the next scene, you watch the quote, unquote beginning of the story with this extra amount of weight that I've just put on you. I'm not a big fan of that, maybe because it's been done so much, but, uh, there's always a interesting way to do a thing that's been used up a little bit.

Um. You know, it's, it's an idea that can be expanded on, right? So like, let's say you're writing a story about Gilgamesh and you don't begin with Gilgamesh. What you begin the story with is like some sort of. Professor in front of a class describing the story of Gilgamesh, and then you fade into the actual story of Gilgamesh, right?

You're sort of saying like, record scratch. I, I bet you're wondering how I got here in this history class. That sounds, that sounds really terrible. That's a bad example. But you understand the idea.

If you're dealing with a story that has, uh, a very complicated world, uh, there's a, there's a great world to explore. You might try starting on the fringes of that world. Like let's say you are making a story. You're making the, making the movie of the Legend of Zelda. Okay. And, uh, so what you do is, because Zelda contains a lot of mythos and a lot of adventures, and there's a whole lot in this kingdom, right?

And so what you do is you begin in the provinces, you begin on the fringes. You begin in the quiet parts of the world that you're going into, and then you slowly make inroads into this world, right?

So you begin with some sort of farmer and their kid. On the edge of the kingdom of high rule, and, uh, you know, they're attacked by an ORC or whatever, and Link saves them and turns out he's the guy we're gonna be following throughout the story, stuff like that. You start small and then you slowly expand the world, right?

Because giving them the entire world right up front can be a little too much. I mean, legend De Zelda does not do that. Legend de Zelda starts with, Hey link, you've gotta save the princess. Which, you know, you could try starting there too if you wanted to, but that's just one way to get into a very big world is starting incredibly small and working your way in, and then the story gets bigger and bigger.

The deeper and deeper you go into the world. There's also, you know, the mundane to the fantastical, which is another sort of version of starting small, right? So you have a kid named Harry Potter who lives under. The stairs, and then he gets a letter one day and he's whisked away to this magical world.

You could begin your story with a sort of collision course, right? So if you think about like the dark night, uh, you know that Batman is out there as this force of nature, and in the beginning of the movie you introduce this. Other force of nature, right? The joker. And you know that these two forces of nature are eventually going to collide.

Uh, so you're setting up these two opposing stories and they're slowly making their way to each other, like two freight trains headed directly at each other, and you're just anticipating that moment when they finally collide, right?

There's a billion ways to start a story, which is why. Starting a story might be kind of hard. You know, there's, there's infinite ways you can go. Uh, a cheap and dirty thing to do is like, you watch a movie and you think to yourself, how did this movie start? What is that kind of beginning for my story?

What would that be? Right?

when you're beginning a story, you're giving the audience three sets of things. You're giving them a group of questions, a group of answers, and a group of promises.

It's not unlike throwing a party, okay? So you get an invitation in the mail and the invitation says, please be here at this time to do this. Okay, what's gonna be happening there? And in the invitation says there will be an open bar. There's gonna be karaoke. We will be playing this particular game. We will be honoring this particular person.

We're gonna be doing the, these sets of things at this party. Okay? So you know where you're going and you know what you're gonna be doing, right? And then the questions come up. What am I gonna sing at karaoke? Who is gonna be there? Is this particular person gonna be there? Do I want to see them? Does that change how I feel about this party?

If this particular person is going to be there, right? So you want to, with the beginning of your story, give your audience those three groups of things. They need answers, they need questions, and they need promises, right? You're making a series of promises at the beginning of your story. We're gonna go here, we're gonna get to here, we're gonna explore this,

And there's all sorts of ways that you can do that. Sometimes the questions and the promises are the same thing. You're making a promise to answer this question, but also sometimes the promise can be, here's these two people. They're gonna be spending a lot of time together. or here's this one character you like. You are going to see them interacting with a lot of different people in a lot of different ways throughout this story, right?

A set of questions, a set of answers, a set of promises.

Now, odds are all of those things that I just described are probably not helping this person start their story. And there's a reason for that, and I go back to the question.

I don't know how to make an interesting introduction scene for the protagonist or the world I wanna show off, or how it can capture an audience's attention before they scroll to the next thing. I've written three starts to the same story, and I'm not content with any of them fully, and I can't seem to figure out why it's leaving a sour taste in my mouth.

Right at the start, you're thinking about way too many things. First of all, right at the start, you're thinking about the audience and you've gotta stop. Now. Listen, I know I just said that there's a lot of things that you have to give the audience at the beginning, and all of those things are true.

However, that's homework and you leave your homework at home. That list of things that I gave you about what should be at the beginning of your story, you shouldn't be thinking about any of those when you're starting your story. When you're starting your story, you shouldn't be thinking about anything.

Thinking too much is murder. It'll kill you every single time because if you really think about it, this is a ridiculous thing you're doing with your time. Right. You are taking a gigantic goofy risk with the free time that you have, and if you think about that too much, it's gonna scare you off of absolutely everything.

so the biggest problem with the start of your story is in your head. It's not in your story. Alright.

Part of the reason why you're not able to start your story is maybe because you don't know what it is yet, but you're not gonna figure it out by thinking about it because when you read this question, you're already in your head. You are already screwing yourself up and you've gotta stop that and you've got to write, and it's gotta be painful for a second.

And then you've gotta second guess yourself. But second guess yourself. While you are writing it. Write it thinking, this is bad, this is gonna be bad. But see, the thing is the more you write it, the easier it will get. And you know what happens sometimes is that when you write the story without thinking about the best way to do it, or the best way to roll this out, or the, or the reaction from the audience, or you're afraid of the audience, scrolling away.

If you can get those things out of your head and just write your story, you eventually may come to a point where you think, oh, right, that's how it should start. Which doesn't mean you throw away everything you've done, it just means you may have to rework some things. But sometimes the answer is in the writing.

In fact, most of the time it's so if you're not writing, you can't get to that answer. The best way to explore it is in the writing of it, and there's so many things that you're doing to your brain at the beginning that you're not gonna be able to start writing.

I would say that part of the reason why you're second guessing yourself is about the attitude that you're taking towards what you're writing. You know what I like thinking about when I think about beginnings and beginning a story, I like thinking about. The goofy ass shit that writers do before they begin something.

Okay. Ernest Hemingway would sharpen a shitload of pencils. I. August Wilson, August Wilson made his own ink. He would make a batch of ink that he was going to use for this story that he was about to write. apparently Maya Angelou would, uh, check into cheap hotels during the day. She would check into a cheap hotel with a bottle of Sherry and a deck of cards.

My favorite one, this may be apocryphal, but my favorite one is Victor. Hugo would have his servants hide his clothes. Like his going out clothes, like it's, it's time for me to begin, which means all of my clothes that I used to leave the house, you have to hide them. You have to force me to stay in the house so that I will write this.

There's goofy rituals. That writers do a lot before they begin something, and what it feels like initially is like, this is the most pretentious bullshit I've ever heard in my life. But there is something to it because what they're doing is they're regarding what they're about to do as important.

That's what Ritual does. Ritual highlights the thing that you're about to do. Now, I say all that. I don't do that. I don't have one of those things. I don't have some sort of ceremony that I go through before I start another script of Midnight Burger. Okay? What I do is I just, I go into the living room.

You know, I don't do it here. 'cause this is where all the editing bullshit happens. This is like the house of pain that I'm in right now. So what I do is I take my laptop, I go into the living room, and it's just me and my laptop and the cat and a cup of coffee. I make a cup of coffee. I guess that's one.

So it's not something that everyone does, but there's something to that idea because you are saying this is important. I am going to do this. And in this question, I can see you regarding what you're doing as not important because you're second guessing it. You are saying that it's stupid and it's not stupid.

It's important. Why else would you take this time to do it? We all have precious time on this planet. And we take the time to make things like this, to write things, to create stories. We take that time, which means that it's important and it should be regarded as such. So in the beginning, the very first step is not figuring out the best way to roll out the story or figuring out the best way to introduce the character.

The first thing you do is say, this is important, and I am doing this.

So I've told you what I think the beginning of a story should contain a group of questions, a group of answers, and a group of promises. Right now it's time to forget all of that. That idea of those three groups of things, that's an idea you come back to later, right?

After you've written, you look at those groups of things and then you go back to your beginning and you say, am I doing these things right?

right now. What you've got to do is regard what you do as important and then do it. I. It's not going to be what you want it to be, but it never is. And the hardest part about the beginning is not about figuring out the best way. To do it. The hardest part about the beginning is not giving up and continuing. Even though you have all these questions, even though you have all this doubt, even though you think that you're kind of foolish for doing it.

Writing is terrible. Writing is really miserable. It's really difficult and it's really crazy making it's anxiety inducing. It's all of, it's a long list of things, but I guarantee you. Yeah, there's nothing like the feeling of persevering in a writing project of getting to a point. It's not even at the end just getting to a point where you look back and you think, oh, okay, I made it to this point.

I now know this is good. I now know this is real and important. It's a very gratifying feeling and it makes all of that pain and suffering really worthwhile.

When you're writing a story, the real beginning you have to worry about is not about your story. It's not about your main character. It's about you. Believing in what you're doing.

When you begin, there's gonna be a million questions. There's gonna be a million doubts, there's gonna be a million distractions to keep you from doing it, and the true challenge of starting your story is in you ignoring all of those things and going forward anyway.

It is always a gut check. It's always a leap of faith, but I guarantee you, if you keep going, you'll have a moment where you look back and you say, okay, I've finally begun.

-j

Believe Final

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Podcast version here.

(Transcript)

Hi there.

I'm at the end of a long day of writing and editing.

And, uh, I have a question from a reader.

Here's the question.

Um, I got a piece of feedback on my writing recently that I don't disagree with, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around.

I was writing a scene between 2 characters, and my feedback was these characters don't sound italics, believable.

I read through it again, and I thought to myself, yeah, they're right.

This doesn't sound believable at all.

And then I just sat there staring at the page at a scene I've been working on for hours, wondering how the voices I had constructed and my head sounded perfectly natural at the time, and yet when they translate onto the page, they don't sound believable.

So my question for you is less of a question and more of a prompt, believability.

Some further questions if it's helpful.

Do you care about it?

Do you work at it?

How do you imagine the voice of a character in your head?

How do you translate it onto the page?

Is it just through dialogue, or is there another part of your practice that you've developed and worked out over time to make characters sound believable?

How do you track a character's emotional journey, or their individual manner of speaking, and do either play into your process of making a character believable?

Just to reel it back to the beginning, I'm going to start with the idea of believability.

I've been thinking about it a lot.

And I think, after much consideration, that this is a bullshit note.

There are notes that you will get from people that they give you these notes just to get you to go away, or just to have something to say.

See, the problem with getting notes from people is that sometimes they don't have anything to say, and they need to come up with something to say to you, and so what you end up with are bullshit notes, like, it doesn't sound believable.

Throughout your life, you can get all kinds of notes from all kinds of different people, and there's these sort of corporate notes that you can get, and those are the notes that are like, this person's job is to give you notes.

So even if they don't have anything to say, they need to come up with something so they give you these notes.

And you have to take these notes, even though they're pretty useless notes.

And then there's the kind of note that I was just talking about, right?

It's like you ask someone for their opinion.

They don't have anything very specific or useful to say, so they give you something that could not be more vague.

Which is believability.

I don't think I even know what that means in the context of this question.

I don't know what it means to read something and say, I don't believe it when you are reading something that is literally fake.

It is fiction.

Of course, you don't believe it.

It's not real.

Now, I guess what they're trying to get at is that they don't have a real experience when they're reading this dialogue. That they don't have some sort of something that they were expecting, and that's understandable, but here's the thing.

It's a scene.

It's not a complete work.

It's a scene from something that isn't complete yet.

So how do, in fact, they know it's believable when they don't know the context and they don't have the broader piece to look at.

You could take a scene out of like Hamlet, let's say.

And if you forget all about Hamlet.

The scene's not gonna be believable.

Because you don't know what the story is.

You don't know what the end is.

You don't know what the beginning is and you don't know what this particular scene has to do with anything else that's going on.

So the 1st thing that I want to talk about is the fact that People, I believe, should not share incomplete work.

And if you do, There's only a very, very small group of people that you should be sharing it with, people who you really, really trust, people who really understand what you're going for.

Okay?

And they know what you're going for because you have a long history with this person.

But that doesn't just apply to excerpts of your work.

That applies to everything, because I want to get back to the very beginning of this question, in the very beginning of this question.

There was something that was written.

It was given to someone. Someone had a criticism of it.

And then the person, going back to their work, decided it was true.

That worries me.

Because where did that voice in your head come from?

It came from them, possibly.

It came from this person.

They said it's not believable, and now you don't believe it.

But you know what?

You also haven't finished your work.

You also don't have the thing in front of you.

You also are not quite complete on where you're going.

So how do you even know?

If you don't even know, how do they?

It's an incomplete work.

It's still in the idea phase.

And so it should not be analyzed yet.

It is something that should be protected from analysis.

I understand that people want to share their work.

I understand it's a sharing economy.

I understand that you are alone, writing this thing, and you really are desperate to know whether or not you're wasting your time.

And so you reach out to people for input, on what you're making.

But they will not be able to give you input on what you're making until you're done making it, because it's got a beginning and a middle and an end, and all of these pieces fit into that.

So if you're giving something incomplete to someone, then they're going to make a bunch of assumptions about what it is you're making.

And those assumptions could be completely wrong.

So, their criticism then, in my opinion, becomes invalid.

It's something that's not useful to you.

And in fact, in this particular situation, I think it's a detriment.

And I think you should stay away from it.

A lot of the time when people share their work, and it's not ready to be shared, they're doing it, because they need some positivity, they need some motivation, they need a bump to their confidence.

And so they say, I'm going to share just a little bit of this with someone.

And hopefully they tell me that it's good, and then I'll feel better, and then I'll feel more powerful moving forward.

That's the trap that you fall into, right?

Because you can't control what they say.

And if they say something negative or something kind of wishy-washy like believable, then you're in this nebulous zone and you don't know what you're doing anymore because you basically gave them a cake with a gooey center.

All right?

Of course, they don't like the cake.

The cake is not done.

Cake batter is not cake.

Therefore, you can't ask someone how the cake is, right?

Now then that brings up the whole question, like, well, when is something done then?

Well, it's done when you feel like it's good enough.

You're done when you feel like your piece can like take a punch, right?

But even then, even when you're ready, even when it feels pretty solid.

The number of people you should be showing it to is exceedingly small.

All right?

There should be maximum 5 people in your life. That you show a new work to.

People you really trust, who really understand what you do and what you're going for, and everybody else should be in the dark. Until it's ready to roll out to the general public.

I worry a lot about people doing things like this, about talking to people too early, about sharing things too early, because this is really hard.

Telling stories is incredibly hard.

To do it in a way that is good and interesting and new.

And full of energy, it's incredibly difficult.

And so, what you need is momentum.

And you need boldness, and you need to be unafraid.

And honestly, you need to be kind of in your own private little bubble for a long time until you're ready to roll it out.

Criticism that's too early can be a death sentence.

It gets in your head and you can never get it out.

So you really need to be prepared for that criticism.

And the only way to be prepared is to be done and ready.

When your peace is something that you feel ready to fight for, because if it's not finished, if it's an unfinished piece, if it's just bits and pieces, how do you fight for that?

How do you defend it?

It's not anything yet.

You're building a fortress, and it has to be ready for barbarians at the gate.

Now, in hearing this, you might think, I feel like Joe doesn't like a lot of criticism.

And the truth is, who does?

Right?

There's no one's who I don't know of anyone out there who's like, ooh, yeah, criticism.

Woo, here we go, right?

That person doesn't exist.

But I have a problem with people seeking it out, with people putting themselves in a vulnerable position too early.

And that criticism affects their work, and it degrades it, and it makes you 2nd guess yourself.

You need to have boldness.

And it's hard to have that boldness when you've got people kind of snip, snip, snipping at you.

You need to block them out.

There needs to be nobody in your zone while you are in the middle of being bold.

In 1976, Franz Klummer had the weight of all of Austria on his shoulders.

He was a downhill skier, skiing for Austria, and the Olympics were in Austria.

He was on home snow.

Everybody was rooting for him.

There was a lot of pressure on him to win the gold.

And so the big day comes, and he's, like, 15th in line.

And so he's watching all these other skiers goes down the slopes, and he's just kind of getting in his head, and he's getting really worried.

And then along comes Bernard Rusi from Switzerland, and he blazes down the trail, right?

He turns in an amazing time, and everyone says, oh, no.

Oh, no, Franz, what are you gonna do?

We're very worried about Franz.

Is he gonna be able to beat this time?

So Franz gets up there.

It gets ready.

Pulls in hand, and he goes down the slope.

And what follows is what is referred to as one of the greatest downhill runs of all time.

Franz goes very, very fast, but he doesn't just go fast.

He goes crazy out of control fast.

You can still watch the clip on YouTube.

Franz is going down this hill so quickly, but also, it's a little messy.

He almost bites it 5 or 6 times.

People calling from the sidelines are like, oh, oh, it's such a shame that he did that.

Oh, that's definitely going to ruin him.

He almost falls.

His skis are getting a little weird.

He almost just flies into the stands at one point.

I mean, it is a mess, and it is fast, and it turned out to be pretty glorious.

He was bold.

He just went for it.

And for some reason, when you go and you watch this on YouTube, it's like inspiring as a writer.

And it kind of makes you feel like you should just go for it.

You know, block everything else out.

It doesn't matter how messy it is as long as you can cross that finish line in the time you want to cross the finish line.

Someone asked Tony Kushner once about writing plays.

And if there is any sort of analogy he uses for plays, and the analogy that he uses is lasagna, because apparently he likes making lasagna.

And he thinks that a great play should be like a lasagna.

It should have many layers.

There should be a lot of stuff in there.

There should be so much stuff in there that it almost feels like the whole thing is gonna collapse.

When you bring the slice up out of the pan and onto the plate.

It should look like it's about to topple over and just become nothing.

But there's so much in there. That the flavor is amazing, because you are constantly in this dance with destruction.

Because you have boldness.

And to have that boldness is really difficult.

And if you let too many voices into your head too soon, you can lose that boldness, you can start to 2nd guess yourself.

You can end up crashing out on the downhill slope.

You could end up having the lasagna that falls over.

But if you can keep that spirit of boldness, and if you can really tempt destruction like that and block out the other voices and just go, That will be much more beneficial to creating whatever it is you're creating.

And if you do wipe out, if your lasagna does fall over, if you do crash on the slopes, you have at least done something for yourself that that early criticism could never do.

You've learned something.

-j

Listen to the podcast version here.

(Transcript)

So I was asked the other day to talk a little bit more about how I write dialogue and so I'm going to attempt to do that. I'm pretty sure it's gonna be disappointing, but we'll see. Uh, but it did remind me if you have a question you want me to try and answer, I can certainly try and do that about Midnight Burger or about writing or about, you know, whatever. If you want my take on something, I'd be happy to give it a shot. Hit me up on, you know, on whatever platform you find me on. And um, you know, if it's something that I feel like I can talk about for a few minutes, uh, I'd be happy to do that. Um, so let me give it a shot here.

Dialogue. I did a whole talk about dialogue over on our Patreon. I did this five part series about making audio drama and being a creator and all of that stuff. And so I went off on dialogue for a while. So this will be a kind of an addendum to that. Um, what do I want in dialogue? I think dialogue should be funny even in very dramatic situations. I think it's a good idea for the characters to have a sense of humor, even if it's dark material. I don't know why that is. I think it brings you into the story very easily. I want dialogue to be surprising. I want it to be true. I want it to be purposeful. Um. Treating dialogue like it's an information delivery device is a good way of looking at it, but people think the only information to be conveyed is the movement of the story, but dialogue can and should contain multitudes.

It can deepen the connection between the characters in a way that doesn't necessarily have to do with the plot moving forward. You can do deep background on the story; details about the world that the characters are existing in. That doesn't necessarily have to do with the plot moving forward, but it does help to, sort of put a nice color on the background.

Dialogue should be fun, and I don't mean fun like goofy. It should be, it should be a roller coaster. If a scene goes exactly the way the audience is expecting, you have probably failed in the scene. It's the worst feeling in the world, and this happens to me and Finlay all the time. When we're sitting there and we're watching some sort of TV show, and either she or I will say the next line, like we literally, we don't know what the next line is, but we say it and we end up being right.

That's gotta be a terrible feeling for a writer. The audience really shouldn't be able to do that. It means they're ahead of you and if the audience is ahead of you, you are behind and you are the one telling the story and they want you to hurry up. Right?

A very meat and potatoes approach to writing dialogue is to always know what your characters want, and to have them go for their objective in the scene. that's what a good acting teacher will say to you as an actor as well. Know what your objective is, go for your objective.

I'm not sure I agree with that.

If a character goes into a scene knowing what they want, it may take a sense of discovery out of the scene. Sometimes that's appropriate. If the scene is about something very cut and dried, like I need that person to, to give the other person the Twinkies, if that's, if that's what the scene is about. But in a scene where there's something more complicated going on, you might be better served just knowing how your characters are feeling going into the scene.

You might do better for the spontaneity in a scene if even you don't know how it's going to go.

You know a scene needs to be there. You know how your characters are feeling, the rest is discovered in the writing of the scene.

So I was asked to talk about how I write dialogue and like I said, I think I'm going to ultimately fail at that mainly because the main reason why I've come to write dialogue the way I do really is just practice. I did it a whole lot, and the more I did it, the better I got at it,

and the better I got at it, the easier it became. I don't really talk about craft a lot when I talk about stuff, mainly because everything is different for everyone, and every tip that works for someone is an absolute failure for someone else.

So mainly I try and focus on people who aren't writing. The key to writing is writing. The way to do it is to do it. That's incredibly frustrating to hear from someone who just wants some advice, but it is true if you're sitting there and you've never actually finished a thing, I can guarantee you that getting to the end and finishing it, no matter how garbage it is, is going to feel great.

And not only will it feel great, each finished thing is like an apple crate. You keep stacking them and stacking them, getting a better and better view over the wall until you can finally see clearly towards the type of writing you've always dreamed of doing.

Right. Okay, but enough about that I won't dwell. Dialogue. Here's the thing. The way I write dialogue is not a logical process. It's not a rubric that I apply or a grocery list of things that I tick off when I write dialogue... when I write dialogue. I can hear the scene in my head like a melody, but I can't hear the words.

And when I write the dialogue, it's almost like writing a libretto.

Something needs to be here because I can hear it. But what are those words? I am sorry how artsy fartsy that sounds. I wish it was something more teachable, but that's how it goes for me because I really did think about it. I really did think, how do I do this? And that's the best estimation I can come up with.

I know what this scene sounds like, but what are the words?

And there's music that I hear with each character too. I can't write a scene with Deidre and Verge without hearing the, without hearing the Flower Duet from Lakmé. I can't write for Gloria without hearing, uh, Calexico. Simple, straightforward, A little Dusty. Casper's Warren Zevon: weird, mournful, a little funny.

Ava is Eric Satie. Leif is the Stooges. The Mucklewain's, The Mucklewains sound like Watchouse to me.

It's weird, I know, and probably not very helpful, but that's how it is. But hey, even though it sounds weird, try it sometime. It might get you out of your head. Don't think about the story or the plot. Just think about how your characters are feeling and think about how the scene sounds in your head. You don't know what the words are, but you know how it sounds.

Now, try filling in the words. You never know. It might work for you.

Dialogue is a bit of an orphan in the writing world. If you have too much of it in a novel, it can feel a bit odd in film and television. Writers are always encouraged to shorten scenes and to get to the action. And in theater there's a presentational quality that writing kind of has to have that can make it hard to find a place for the, the subtlety and the nuance of an artful interaction.

So maybe the reason people struggle with dialogue is because it's discouraged in so many forms.

It's rare in a dramatic format for a story to encourage you to just sit there and listen for a while. In audio drama I've found that that's not the case. Maybe that's why I like it so much. It seems to be a place where you can finally find a moment to talk.

You can't take your cues from tv, film, or theater when it comes to audio drama. It's not the same thing. You have to find your own way of doing things, and I think all of us in audio drama are still trying to figure that out, which is probably why it's such a hard thing for me to talk about. It's all very new.

So I think for the time being, it's better to just do it and keep doing it and use your instincts. And then a few years down the line when someone says, Hey, how did you do that? You can have this lovely moment that I'm having lately where I say, right, how did I do that?

-j

(Transcript.)

So I'm in the middle of a very busy time right now.

And, uh, I should be moving on to the next thing, but I literally just cannot move on to the next thing.

I needed to do something different, and also did not have the energy to go and do something different.

And the microphone was right there, so I pressed record, because there's been this thing on my mind lately, and I want to talk about it.

So, about a year and a half ago, Apple, you know, the phone company.

They decided that they were going to start taking 30% of all the money that went through the iOS Patreon app, on the iPhone, 30%.

Now, does Apple add 30% of value to the show?

No, they do not.

They were doing it. Because they could, because they were a giant, and just kind of said, nice app you've got there.

Be a shame if something happened to it.

And that was going to be 30%.

On top of the 12% that Patreon already takes, which is going to be a real big deal for us.

So we tried to figure out ways to, you know, deal with it.

But then, I watched.

As another giant came along, and sued Apple, and these two giants went to war, and the other giant won, and all of a sudden, that 30% wasn't happening.

And I just kind of sat there.

Also about a year and a half ago, Spotify decided that it was going to start highlighting different podcasts of different genres, and they were focusing on fiction for a few weeks, and so they contacted us, and they said, hey, can we highlight your show?

And we said, sure, I have no idea what highlighting means, but yeah, go ahead.

And they basically turned their algorithm on full blast, and suddenly everybody on Spotify was getting our show thrown at them for a few weeks.

And it made our numbers go artificially through the roof.

And there was this bizarre few weeks on the charts.

We were actually beating the Ben Shapiro show.

It was a wild time.

And then they stopped doing that, and our numbers went back down to normal.

It was fun.

But they just increased the numbers for our show with a flick of their wrist, which, to me, implied how easy it would be for them to flick their wrist in the other direction.

We live in a land of giants.

I had this professor in college who said, culture is a battlefield of images.

And I've kept that with me through my life.

It's a good analogy.

And I've always imagined culture as this war of images and ideas always being waged.

I've never felt like I fought in that war, though.

I never felt like, you know, a soldier sort of loading their blunderbuss or whatever.

I always felt like I was watching this battle from the trees.

I think we all kind of feel that way.

We watch from the trees as giants go to war, right?

The Catholic Church, Marvels, the Avengers, Vogue magazine.

We watch these giants try and become the dominant paradigm, and we watch the spectacle of it.

And then after the battle, we sort of sneak onto the battlefield. And look for bits and pieces of things that we can use, and we take those bits and pieces of this cultural war and we incorporate it into the things we make.

A gospel song from the 1920s.

A scarf from the '80s, an idea from ancient Egypt.

We live in a land of giants.

All of us, urchins, on the quiet battlefield.

The other day, it was announced that there was going to be a merger of two media companies.

Two giants becoming an even bigger giant.

This is a merger that will result in a lot of people getting fired, less movies being made, TV getting stupider, because the amount of debt accrued for this merger means that there's going to be a lot of pain and a lot of stupid things happening.

Also recently, we saw a war, a war that nobody wanted.

A war that nobody wanted, and will do nothing.

The interesting thing is, this war might lead to money drying up from one of the giants, one of the giants, that is investing in the endeavor of these other two giants, merging.

One giant attacks another giant, preventing two other giants from becoming one big giant... and we just sit there.

We live in a land of giants.

And by we, I don't just mean independent creators.

Even if you are the big director making the big movie, you are doing that in service of one of these giants, these hulking masses that have become far too powerful.

We live in their shadow, hoping they don't look our way.

But every once in a while.

Fee fi, fo, fum.

I'm taking 30%.

I don't know if there's much to be done about it, other than the usual things, but the usual things to be done to eliminate these giants, they take a very long time.

They work very slowly.

And I have, at this stage in my life, never met a giant slayer.

And of course, you can try and live your life and make your stuff in a safer place that is away from these giants.

Unfortunately, everyone likes to hang out where the giants are, so you kind of have to hang out in the land of giants.

Everybody knows how dangerous it is, but they do it anyway.

So how do you function?

How do you live in this land of giants?

How do you live in the land of giants until one day the giants are all gone?

Well, there's still joy to be had in the land of giants.

With the rise of any culture, there is always the rise of a subculture.

There's a lot that thrives in the shadows of these really big things.

There's a lot of really great work that can be done in this shadow just as long as they don't turn your way.

There's joy to be had in the land of giants.

And then every once in a while, you know?

They're enormous footprints make a nice lake.

They, unbeknownst to them, blaze a trail through a forest that you found impassable.

There's joy to be had, even though they're tremendous, even though they're terrifying.

There's joy to be had.

Just to never, ever, take your eyes off them.

-j

Podcast version here.

(Transcript)

So, interesting thing about this American life.

This American life is run uh, a little bit like a co-op.

So everybody, generally speaking, makes the same amount of money, including Ira Glass himself.

They all make the same amount of money, according to him.

So it's because of that, that there's a lot of tape out there, of Ira, just talking, because the way that he makes extra money is by going and doing speaking engagements, right?

So you'll have an evening with Ira Glass, at the 92nd Street Y, and stuff like that, or such and such person, interviewed by Ira Glass, he's out there, making money, getting that paper, as one might say.

And it's in the middle of all these various sort of speaking engagements that he does that he said something that a lot of creative people turn to, when they're looking for some sort of guidance, some sort of level of inspiration, right?

And he talks about when you're 1st starting out, and he talks about how you use your taste to guide your creative journey, right?

And he says that when you're 1st starting out, you have this fantastic taste.

And the work you're doing doesn't add up to the great taste that you have.

And so you constantly work towards trying to get to a point where your taste matches the level of work that you're doing and really the key in the end is to just keep working and do lots and lots of work and eventually your work gets to this point where it matches your taste.

I think it's good advice.

And I think it's it's simple, and it's it's easy to understand.

It really does have the most important core concept with any artistic endeavor is that you just need to keep working.

Keep working, keep working, keep working.

It can't not get better, right?

And I've considered that unassailable, really, for a very long time, until just a few days ago.

Uh, Joshua Rothman.

In the New Yorker.

He's got a regular column called Open Questions.

And in this very short column, you can read it.

He's talking about a couple of books, and he's talking about the idea of taste, right?

And he wrote something in this very brief piece that is kind of sticking with me.

So I'm thinking through it.

Here I go.

Here's the quote.

The world is always telling you what to like.

As a result, taste is suspect.

When are you expressing your true self, and when are you allowing others to reshape you?

Visit one beautifully appointed Brooklyn apartment, and you'll admire the owner's taste.

Visit 10 identical apartments, and you'll wonder if having perfect taste actually means having none at all.

There's this idea out there that a lot of people like to stay away from, this idea that free will does not exist.

One of the aspects of this argument is that with every move you make in the world, with every thing you think, with every action you take, you are, at that moment, being influenced by about 10,000 outside forces.

Your upbringing, that book you read, that commercial you just saw, all of these exterior forces, are constantly putting pressure your thoughts and your actions.

How, then, could you or anyone have free will?

And then there's that really nasty Einstein quote, right?

If the moon were sentient, it would be 100% convinced that it was choosing to revolve around the earth.

Anyway, you can go real deep into the hole.

Does free will exist thing, if you want to, me personally, it's something that you can never really prove, so I don't spend a lot of time with it.

But that idea that you are secretly, unbeknownst to yourself, being changed and influenced by something.

Does call something like taste into question.

Why do I like this thing?

Why do I believe this is the way?

Is it something that I've decided for myself?

Or is this something that has been delivered to me by some sort of, I don't know, subliminal message from such and such thing?

Sticking to your guns as hard as an artist.

You have to be, well, they say you have to be fearless, but no one's fearless, everyone's constantly terrified, you have to sort of sojourn despite the fear, right?

And because of that, you are a ship on the ocean, and the instruments that you use to navigate the ocean need to be unassailable.

They need to be something that won't fail you.

And according to Ira, that thing that won't fail you is your taste.

But then along comes Joshua Rothman, in the New Yorker, saying taste itself, is suspect, because where does it come from?

Do you think something won't work because of something someone else told you, or do you really and truly believe that?

It's not a lot of fun to think about, because you want your thoughts to be your own, and you want your impetus as an artist to be your own.

But is it?

I will admit that throughout my life, there have been things that I've sort of clung to as an artist or storyteller or whatever you want to call it, that I have eventually discarded, left by the wayside.

I realized that this thing that I was using as a rule, was not, in fact, a rule, but someone's idea.

And ideas aren't rules.

I think the real quick example of that is in audio drama, there's the idea of a framing device.

You're listening to this story, and it's fiction, and it's dramatized.

Why is it only audio?

And there are some people out there who think that you need to always, with audio drama, come up with a reason why it is only audio, which is why you have a lot of audio dramas out there that are just like the tapes of this person.

Right?

This is the audio diary of the scientist creating the thing.

Stuff like that.

And for a while, I sort of thought, yeah, that makes sense.

You need a framing device.

You need a reason why it's audio only.

And so what you'll see with the 1st things I made, like live from the zombie apocalypse, or Omega station, those were framing devices.

One was a radio show, the other one was communications between space stations.

And that's what you were hearing.

But then when I started doing Midnight Burger, I thought to myself, why?

I mean, why do I need this?

Why do I need this?

It's audio because I say it's audio.

It's audio because of what you get to focus on.

It doesn't have to be audio for any real reason in the story.

That was something that I was regarding as a rule.

As a rule of taste, let's say.

And it fell by the wayside.

Where did that come from?

I don't know that it came from me.

But I did see a lot of audio dramas out there, all of which were through a framing device.

And in my mind, I thought this is the way.

This is appropriate.

But it wasn't.

So your taste, according to Ira, this thing that you used to navigate your creative life, can be flawed.

It's not unassailable.

It's not a constant.

Which means You can lead yourself down the wrong path using this.

Tool that you thought couldn't fail you.

The rules by which you are using to judge your own work can be called into question.

Now, that doesn't have to be a big deal.

The tools that we use to make it through the world, don't have to be perfect.

They can get you, at least in the right direction.

But when you're trying to see through the fog, when you're trying to get a true sense of the direction that you need to go.

What is the unassailable thing?

What is the thing that will never fail you?

And I think the only thing is desire.

What you want to do, even if there's this part of you that says this is wrong, you still have this desire to do it.

Maybe your taste is telling you that something is stupid.

But your desire to do it is still strong.

In the last episode, I talked for a 2nd about artists and how artists can be sometimes considered to be notoriously self-interested, which is absolutely true.

I wonder if.

Because your desire is the only thing that won't fail you, is that maybe a reason why so many artists are self-interested bastards, is because the only thing they have in the end is that desire, their own personal desire to do this thing.

And taste, in the end, is subjective.

Our desires rarely survive contact with reality.

You have a desire to be a billionaire, but reality is right there, stopping you from being that.

And maybe that's what this taste is, this taste that iverglass is talking about is what happens when your desire as an artist comes into contact with reality.

You have this desire to do something, and taste says, no, don't do that.

Is that.. A good force to have.

There are a lot of artists who don't actually know how good their work is.

There are people who spend their lives talking for a living and hate the sound of their own voice.

Is this their own idea of taste attacking themselves?

Like an overly active immune system. Trying to attack a foreign body.

Because an interesting desire, an interesting impulse, as an artist can often be regarded as a foreign body, something to be attacked.

You'll do something new or try to do something new as an artist, and voices will come to life saying, you can't do that that way.

And a lot of heroic artistic stories out there revolve around someone who, everyone told to stop, and they didn't, they defied taste.

So what does this leave us with?

We have within ourselves, this standard that we use to judge the work that we make.

And we quite often view this voice as unassailable.

It's inside your head.

How could it be wrong?

And what Joshua Brothman proposes is that it can be wrong.

That this voice in your head may not be coming from in your head.

The call might actually be coming from outside the house.

Is this voice that you've used to guide your art, is it flawed?

Has it been influenced?

Okay, so that's a lot of thinking out loud that I just did.

So how do we boil this down?

There you are.

You're sitting there, and in front of you is something that you just created.

You are, as per usual, judging the shed out of it.

Consider for a moment. That the voice that you have in your head, that voice you use to judge your own work, that that voice could be wrong.

In fact, that voice might not even be yours.

It is entirely possible that you don't know what you have in front of you.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hated Sherlock Holmes.

Led Zeppelin hated Stairway to Heaven.

John Steinbeck hated the grapes of wrath.

Tchaikovsky hated the nutcracker.

Franz Kafka hated basically everything he wrote.

Something that you created is sitting right in front of you.

Consider for a moment that it's time to set it free.

Set it free of the judgments you've placed upon it.

It's okay to be critical of your work.

It's okay to approach your work with an analytical mind.

As long as you consider, for one moment, that that voice in your head telling you that your work is not good enough yet.

It could be very stupendously, amazingly.

Wrong.

-j

Fringes

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Transcript:

Hi, my name is Joe, and I work in an underappreciated medium.

Is this the support group?

We're into our 5th year doing Midnight Burger.

And Finlay and I are very proud of the little community that's formed around the show.

And sometimes I think about the fact that I would have no idea how to explain all this to your average human being, you know, that guy sitting next to you on the plane, who asks you what you do for a living.

When you think about sci-fi or any kind of fiction, really, you think of the usual places you go to find it. Books, TV, film, graphic novels.

No one ever thinks of it coming from an audio medium.

And so because of that, you have to stick to the sort of lawless outer rim and set up your own little outpost.

Never taken seriously or let into the wider conversation that's taking place in the zeitgeist, and all of that's fine.

In the end, maybe it wasn't that interesting of a conversation anyway.

It does get you thinking, though, about people's brains.

In the Midnight Burger community, for whatever reason, the neurodivergent is the neurotypical.

Throughout our community, there are all sorts of people with all sorts of oddly working brain parts, like an island of misfit toys, but for brains.

And I'm no brain expert, but I don't think that's an accident.

I don't think that's a coincidence.

People gravitate toward the thing that speaks the best to their particular syntax.

Sometimes that's not a book.

Sometimes that's not a graphic novel.

Maybe it's a TV show or a movie, but a lot of those, uh, suck these days, I could go off about the new generation of Star Trek shows, but I don't like to talk shit about people.

I'm not exactly sure where audio drama fits in with all of the other forms of storytelling, but it has something to do with what a friend of mine told me one time.

He had just been to see Captain America the Winter Soldier.

And I asked how he liked it, and he said something weird.

He said, There's this part of the movie where he, Captain America, has a list of all the things that he missed, while he was frozen under the ice for all those years.

And they're random things like, you know, Thai food, right?

And my friend said that he would have watched an entire movie of just Captain America doing that list.

And I agreed, actually.

That does sound like you know, an interesting movie.

Audio drama comes in somewhere in there.

I'm not sure what you call that place.

What my friend described was not a book.

It was not a movie or a TV show or a comic.

It was something else, and something that was needed.

His brain needed something that he wasn't going to get from anything out there.

The common conception is that if it's not a book, and it's not a comic or a TV show or a movie, it's not real.

But people slip through the incredibly large cracks between these mediums.

And audio drama can be there for those that slip through.

There's a 1000000000 brains out there.

They're not all going to fit into the few boxes that are out there.

The same goes for people who write things.

A long time ago, I met a playwright named Michelle Carter.

Michelle was a bit new in the playwriting world.

She had just gotten some notoriety for writing a play called.. Called Hillary and Soon Yi Shop for Ties.

And a lot of people really liked it.

And she was relatively new to playwriting.

And I was at a playwriting festival with her, and she was talking about how she ended up writing plays.

She was a novelist.

She wrote primarily short stories and taught short story writing at University of San Francisco, and that was her life.

And then she got into a car accident.

And she got really, really bad, brain damage.

And after a long time of recovering and that whole process, when she finally started to get back to her life, she realized that she couldn't write anymore.

For whatever reason, she sat down in front of the keyboard and she just couldn't do it, like it didn't make sense.

She could still read books, and still teach people how to write them, but writing herself became this foreign thing after she had received this brain damage, which is wild, right?

So she just thought that was her life.

And then, one night, a friend drug her out to see a play, and she's sitting there in the audience, and she's watching this play happen, and she thinks, wait, I think I can do that.

And so she sat down in front of a keyboard, and she could write dialogue.

She just couldn't write narratively anymore. And did really well for herself too.

She's won the Penn Award for drama a couple of times.

Maybe there are too many brains out there of different shapes and sizes for us to say that these things, books, TV, movies, these are the things that everyone enjoys, and so you now must find a way to fit yourself into one.

And then as I was thinking about this, a whole other conversation came into my head, and since this is the place where I think out loud about things.

I'm gonna keep doing that.

There's a lot of people out there, these days, lamenting the loss of the monoculture.

We don't have rock stars anymore.

We don't have movie stars anymore.

Rather than that one show or one book or one movie that everyone engages with, We have a 1000000 tiny little fandoms all over the world.

How will we be able to ever have a cultural conversation ever again as a society?

And I understand that sentiment, but it's not as though all of these differences in people's brains showed up all of a sudden.

It's entirely possible that those different minds have always been there, and the only difference now is our awareness of them.

And I wonder if there ever really was a monoculture.

Back in the day where there were only three TV channels, and everybody watched I Love Lucy.

Are you trying to tell me that no one was left out in the cold culturally?

For a long time in our history, there have been people out there languishing in the cultural darkness.

And with this kind of diaspora from the monoculture these days, they can find a home now in weird fandoms and antiquated art forms.

Somehow, our show has become one of those.

I don't know that the audience for audio drama will ever be big, but I do think it's always been there.

And it's only now that they've been able to find this home.

So I'm thinking about two things in my mind right now.

I'm thinking about, one, this idea of this sort of universe of fandoms out there.

And the other idea of the monoculture, and how everyone seems to be abandoning it, and how it doesn't work anymore, and how the closest thing that we can get to a unifying cultural moment is like Barbenheimer or something.

And I think the reason why I'm thinking about these things at the same time is because there's a relationship between the two of them.

I don't think that any of this is going to stop.

These weird things that we make out on the fringes are just going to get easier and easier to make.

And the big dinosaurs of monoculture are just going to get more and more expensive, and there will be more and more pressure put on them to make a zillion dollars in the 1st 5 days of something's existence.

Everybody's best friend Netflix is currently in negotiations to buy Warner Brothers.

To the tune of about $86 billion, giving them access to a massive library of movies and television.

Netflix isn't buying Warner Brothers because they love the WB.

They're buying Warner Brothers because they don't have any choice.

It's expand or die, because, for whatever strange reason, none of the major streamers seem to be able to compete with just plain old YouTube.

YouTube is the most popular reason why people watch a television these days.

And it's an existential threat to them.

Such an existential threat that they are buying literally a cursed company.

To quote Julia Alexander in the verge.

"Every company that has ever bought Warner Brothers has killed itself."

AOL in 2000, AT&T, and 2016.

At 1st glance, you may be thinking to yourself, well, this is great.

I'll be able to, you know watch more stuff on Netflix now.

And that may be true.

But the unfortunate fact is that when corporations are allowed unfettered access into any sector of our lives, they try to turn it into an ATM, and they ruin it.

I was 8 years old when I moved to Los Angeles and I turned on KROQ, 106.7, and it was an independent station playing alternative music that I had never heard before.

And it was transformative for me.

It changed my life, that music.

It was the soundtrack of my life.

That station is still there, but that station is gone.

Because at some point along the line, corporations were allowed to buy as many radio stations as they wanted to.

And they absolutely ruined terrestrial radio.

Sadly, we see all of that happening again.

Just like they did with terrestrial radio, major corporations were allowed unfettered access into a space, and they are now in the process of ruining it.

And as chaos reigns supreme, and everybody buys everybody else, here we all are, out here in the lawless provinces, making as much stuff as we can.

As it turns out, people out here making weird things for weird brains were at a safe distance from the massive cultural train wreck that's going on right now.

So what does that mean for us?

We weirdos out here.

In 1995, Thomas Cahill wrote "How the Irish Saved Civilization," offering the theory that Ireland became a safe space for Western thought while the European continent descended into the Dark Ages.

And that's a wildly simplistic and perhaps a bit biased view of history.

But the idea is interesting.

What do we, out here, keep safe?

While everything else goes to shit.

Are we the proverbial meek, inheriting the proverbial earth?

Honestly, that's probably a bit too simplistic and biased too.

So I started this, wanting to talk about how there's no ideal medium, and there needs to be different mediums for different brains, and wound up on this sort of global thing that I'm doing, but to connect the two...

Making things on the fringes is very gratifying, and also takes a lot of work.

But it can feel a little bit lonely.

And it can make that conversation you have with the guy sitting next to you on the airplane pretty awkward, and your parents will never really know what the hell you're talking about.

But it's very possible that operating on the cultural fringes is actually the key to survival during the sort of cultural upheaval that we're currently in, and that we'll see more of in the years to come.

I know I sound like some sort of cultural doomsday prepper right now.

I know I sound like a person who is foreseeing doom and gloom.

But right now, what we're seeing in the world of culture and entertainment is conglomeration, everybody buying everybody else, and everything moving towards, you know, eventually in the future, there is only Netflix.

And that is the only place you get television and movies from.

That is, of course, very bad.

Because, like I said, when a major corporation moves into any space, they just ruin it.

And are we eventually going to be left with just rewatching the office over and over again?

Maybe not.

Because certainly, there's all kinds of wonderful things still being made out there. 10 years down the road?

I don't know.

What I can tell you is that making things out here on the fringes like this, in times of upheaval and conglomeration and chaos, it's nice to be out here.

It's nice to feel a little bit untouched by it.

And that way out here, you know, on the lawless outer rim, if you can build a thing, get some people to come to it, then you can kind of, you know, take care of your people, tell your story, do your thing, and just kind of watch as...

Well, things kind of burn to the ground, you know?

But beyond the survival part, I go back to Thomas Cahill and his possibly imagined Ireland, where you are keeping something safe, keeping something preserved.

And on the mainland, as people descend into this cycle of doing the same bullshit over and over again, you as an independent creator, a bit untouched by all of that, can continue to say ever forward.

That way.

Now, I can hear my own bias as I'm talking, right?

Thomas Cahill, as an Irish American, imagined the Irish as saving everybody.

Myself as an independent creator, sees independent creators as saving everybody.

I can hear it.

But, I think for the time being, I will operate as if I am correct.

And honestly, I think you should, too.

If there's ever anyone I really want to talk to when I'm making these things, it is 2 particular constituencies.

Either the people who are mid making something and doubting themselves, or people who have not gotten to work yet.

It is time to get to work.

No matter how stupid you think your idea is, no matter how much you think it sounds like this other thing, no matter how much time you don't have, the time is now to get to work.

Things are on fire just a little bit, guys.

And we are out here, trying to build, while other things burn down.

So I'm afraid it's time to get to work.

This is me calling you in.

I'm tagging you into the ring.

The time is now.

Pick up the pen, or whatever implement you use.

It's time to get to work.

It's entirely possible we've got a world to save.

-j

Podcast version here!

(Transcript)

So the other day I was watching an interview with Ryan Coogler about the making of Sinners, and he was asked about what his non-negotiables were. What were the things that he would not budge on when trying to make this movie?

One of those non-negotiables was that the whole thing be shot on film, and the interviewer asked him why he would make something non-negotiable that 95% of the audience probably wouldn't even notice.

And he said something interesting, he said, "Just because they can't articulate why they like something, I think it still affects them." And I've been thinking about that. In 1886. Georges Seurat and Paul Signac kind of went on an impressionism side quest by engaging in something called pointillism.

Rather than brush strokes, they created images through a series of dots. Not unlike pixels in a digital image. I'm sure you've seen it. Through a series of dots of pure color, they trusted the human eye to blend the colors and see things like a scene on a Sunday in the park.

The same thing happens with film.

You see a rapid succession of images, and as you hit 24 images per second, there's a moment when your mind says, I'm going to see one fluid image now. I have this experience making Midnight Burger. Sometimes I can't find the sound I need, so rather than settle for something I don't like, I combine three unrelated sounds and when played in the context of the scene, the audience hears the one sound that I want them to hear.

There's three sounds there, but they hear one sound

In the audience, there's another audience, a shadow audience. There's this thing in everybody's head that watches and takes in your art along with them. This little voice in their head that when you see a movie on film instead of digital, the little voice says, yeah, that's good. We like this.

And then the front of your mind says, this is good. I like this. This invisible art enjoyer, this ghost in the audience, in the end, they are the one running the show. If you can't win over the shadow, you can't win over the person that casts the shadow.

So many times in my life, I've talked to someone who's just seen a thing. They've just seen a movie or a play, or there's a new album that has come out or something like that, and I'll ask how they like it And the response that I've sometimes gotten is what I believe is really the death nail of piece of art, which is the following.

"It was good."

That's it. It was good. It didn't really have an effect. The, "it was good" response is usually for something that's constructed very well and logically. And plays out in a logical and structured way, but there's nothing in it for the shadow, for the Secret audience member, for the person in the back of the audience member's mind.

Apparently the movie Memento, an early Christopher Nolan film. It doesn't make any sense. I can't really remember. It's been years since I've seen it, but apparently, notoriously the film does not add up, plot wise. But the movie got a real cult following and it got a lot of fans, even though in the end it didn't make any sense.

So what is that about? Well, that's about the fact that the front of your mind, is not the one running the show in the end. Things like "Some problems with the plot maybe not all adding up exactly right," can be forgiven as long as the shadow in the audience is really, really loving it.

Which is frustrating because it's much easier to just make something logically work than it is to do this unknowable thing for this unknowable art enjoyer that's out there because you can never talk to them directly. When you ask people how they like something, they'll just respond.

"It was good."

And what that means is there was nothing in it.

It was fine.

It was a painless experience. So there you are with this person that you have to make happy that you can never talk to and is kind of unknowable.

So how do you deal with that? How do you make something that appeals to the viscera of people, that appeals to the part of themselves that they themselves can't articulate?

This is one of the many things about being a creative person that's so frustrating because it is so unknowable.

So for a long time I was asking myself, you know, how do I, how do I deliver this unknowable thing to this unknowable person? But then I kind of realized that, part of being able to appeal to that secret side of people is in forgetting about them altogether.

It's kind of shocking, even though so much of art is about delivering it to some sort of audience, it's shocking how much of making your art has to do with forgetting about those people because that really is one of the ways of addressing this unknowable person in the audience is by forgetting about them entirely. And if you're forgetting about them, you're forgetting about the audience member that they're attached to.

You are forgetting completely about the audience, which by the way is what the whole thing really revolves around. ' cause nobody wants to make art in a vacuum sharing it with people is really kind of the point.

But to make something worth sharing, you have to forget about the sharing part. It's a huge conundrum. It's something that people struggle with their whole lives, and if you're not supposed to follow this, if you're not supposed to think about this audience, whether they be knowable or unknowable, then what do you follow? How do you navigate things? And I think one way of going about this, is to focus on the shadow in yourself, that unknowable part of yourself. Are you doing the logical thing in your art, the thing that makes the most sense?

Or are you following where your interest is taking you? Do you want to do something because it makes sense, or because that's where you're interested in going, because sometimes where you're interested in going with your art is not the most logical place, and the front of your mind will say, what are we going in this direction for?

And you kind of have to say to yourself, I don't know, but I know that's where I want to go. I know that there's something there for me. There is something inside of me that says, go there, even though you can't come up with a reason why.

The more and more I think about art, the more and more I think about how it's not a logical communication. It's not a debate, it's not a philosophical discussion. It's something intrinsic in yourself reaching out to the intrinsic parts of others, those parts that we can't quite know

That is in the end truly a connection.

Because there's all kinds of people out there that you can intellectually agree with and intellectually communicate with. But can you connect to them?

This may shock you to hear, but throughout history, artists have been accused of being notoriously self-interested. Breaking news. Now, sometimes the reason for that is because the artist is a jackass, but I think part of that may be related to the fact that, as someone making art, you look out at an audience full of shadows.

They are unknowable and unnameable, and they are the ones you have to connect with. And the only way to really do that is to listen to, as closely as possible, that shadow in yourself. By connecting with that shadow within yourself, you then connect to theirs.

It is not logical. It is unfortunately very magical.

So you have to stay very still. And very quiet and listen to that part of yourself, because I truly believe if you get in touch with that unknowable part of yourself, it connects you directly to that unknowable part of anyone.

And you don't really know in the end what the reaction will be when that connection is made, but I can guarantee you the reaction will not be:

"It was good."

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So the other day I took a look at the stats for this thing to find that people are actually listening. I think that's great. I hope you're enjoying it. I hope you're getting some use out of it. I get a lot of use out of it. It really helps me to think out loud about these things, but it's been a minute, and so I wanted to get one in before the end of the year.

Things have been really busy. Midnight Burger sometimes fills all of the empty space in my life, and it's the only thing I have time for. But in the new year, I am going to endeavor to get back to doing these because they're really helpful for me. And if they're helpful for you, that's even better.

So at the end of the year, I wanted to quickly talk about two text messages that I got from my dad. The first one was the type of text message that I get from him from time to time where he drops a crazy story on me from when he was young. When he was young, my grandmother was a bit of a wandering rich lady and kind of dragged him all over the world for a while, and it's because of that that he wound up going to high school in Morocco. And the most recent story he told me was about when he and his friend were on a beach in Morocco and he was about 14 years old and he had his guitar with him and he was playing a Bob Dylan song.

Coming up the beach was this lady who was flanked by two dudes in suits, and she walked up to him and he played a song for her. He played, I think, "Bob Dylan's Dream." Turns out the woman that he played the song for was the mother of the King of Morocco. He played a song for her and she said, "Thank you," and she kept walking along the beach.

He dropped stories like that on me all the time. You know, one day there was a bat in his room and he had to shoot it with a slingshot and then throw it over the balcony. He jumped into the ocean one day and was surrounded by man-of-war jellyfish that could instantly kill you. He had to all of a sudden leave Morocco one day because my grandmother's latest husband may have been a smuggler.

Things like that. And then the second text I got was about the present day, which was him telling me that he was finally going to retire. As I'm recording this, last night my dad played his last gig ever as a musician. Now this is not the first time he's retired, but for some reason this one does feel like the last time.

It makes me a little sad, to be honest, and I think it makes him a little sad too. But he is pushing 80 and I think he's beginning to wonder why he's wandering around with this heavy thing strapped to his shoulder. These two texts encapsulated his life as an artist. His very first gig on a beach in Morocco at 14 years old, playing for the mother of the king, and now his final gig playing in a weird little town in Texas.

I think it's a nice feeling to have something in your life that you've been doing from a very young age to your current age. That thing that's been like your companion, something that becomes ingrained in your DNA. But it did get me thinking about starting things and how we feel about starting things and why we stop ourselves from starting things.

We stop ourselves from starting creative projects for a million different reasons. I think the main reason is probably we don't start because we don't want it to be bad, and we don't want to spend a lot of our time doing a very bad thing. That's understandable. That's a whole hobgoblin of its own that we could talk about at a different time.

One of those myriad reasons why we don't start things has to do with age. We feel like we're too old. We feel like it's too late to start something. We have this concept—I don't know where it comes from—but we feel like when you're young is when you start something. You start this thing when you're young, you develop it over the course of your life. Then in your old age, you look back on all the great works that you've created. Sometimes you get to a certain age and you think, "I'm too old to start a new thing. This is not something that people my age do."

But when you really drill down into that thought and you really look under the hood, you'll see that that's not exactly true. Vera Wang didn't enter the fashion industry until she was 40. Laura Ingalls Wilder didn't publish her first Little House book until she was 64. When Frank McCourt won the Pulitzer Prize for "Angela's Ashes," right before that, he was a 66-year-old high school teacher. These things that we make, they can happen at any time, at any stage in our life. Sometimes it only happens when it's time for it to happen.

Now I've been a writer all my life. It's the only thing that I've done with any consistency in my life. But I didn't create Midnight Burger until I was in my late forties. And though I've done other things in my life that have been more financially lucrative than Midnight Burger, Midnight Burger is definitely the most successful thing that I've written in terms of something that I feel good about, something that feels like I'm finally writing the way that I want to.

In Midnight Burger, we talk about the past, the present, and the future, and how these moments all exist simultaneously right now. And we all live forever in every moment we've existed, but the only moment that you have access to is right now. So as we move this moment of now into this new year, maybe we should try and let go of the lamentations of the past or the anticipation of the future and acknowledge that there is only right now. Now is the only moment you have. So now is the only time to start.

Okay, everyone, here we go. Another year.

-j

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So there's a whole lot of takes out there about AI art. A lot of them are really brilliant and really make you feel better about being a creator amidst this, you know, tide of total garbage. But there is an air of sadness to it all. It doesn't really feel like it can be stopped.

People like to feel like artists and not everyone can be in artists and AI art gives people a fraction of a percentage of the feeling of what it's like to actually create something. And for them, that's as close as they're ever going to get. So for them it's enough. On top of that, you have the fact that at the current moment, AI seems to be the only thing making the US economy look good. I say, look, not is. So all these takes are like, "This sucks. Not much to do about it. I guess we just keep being awesome." And I guess that's the only thing to do.

We can keep shaming people when they upload their favorite artwork so that they can do some nonsense with it. we can try and fail to get politicians to regulate it, and in some cases, sue. But it doesn't feel like any of that is going to stop anything, at best delay it. I've heard a lot of references to Pandora's Box when talking about AI, and some have gone so far as to say in the myth of Pandora's box, after the horrors of the world escape from the box, try and remember what's left at the end is hope. It's the last thing left in the box. In the end.

The thing is Hesiod's story of Pandora is still debated to this day regarding what was actually left behind in the box. Some say it's hope, some say it's not. Also is probably a jar, not a box.

We don't know what's at the end of this thing. But it has been great to hear a lot of these takes that are essentially, "This sucks, but at least we're in this together, hand in hand against the machine."

That has felt really good. So this post is not like an attempt to weigh in on AI. I think the conversation is over and what we're left with is sadly, you know, "This sucks. Here it comes."

But the reason why I wanted to talk about it, to think out loud about it, is because the conversation has caused me to think about something I've never thought about before: The effort required in the art's creation being intrinsically embedded in the art itself. The rigor as part of the expression.

When you're showing someone something that you've created you are, in addition to the story your piece is telling, you are telling them the story of how it was made. You are telling them the story of your process. Now, they may not know your process, but the story of it is still there in what you've created.

They can see that. They can see that someone did something. The work behind something great is always implied. The story behind your story is always there, and if the story behind what you made is "I pressed a button," then the creation itself is a lie. It's a lie because it implies a story in its creation when there is none.

There's a photographer in Virginia. Named Em White. Em takes pictures of the same things a lot of photographers take pictures of scenes in nature, portraits of interesting people, But Em uses a large format camera made of wood, and steel and glass on a huge tripod. A camera not that much different from some of the first cameras ever used. She covers panes of glass in photoreactive chemicals, loads them into this massive device, opens the shutter, and waits and waits.

Her pictures are monochrome and ghostly. The feeling that you get when you're trying to recall a moment in your head. You can't look at EM'S photos and not think about her. Out in the humid Virginia Summer, shoving half of her body into a dark bag as she develops these plates right there in the back of her van, you can feel it in every single photo.

The the story of everything she does is embedded in the art she makes. The two are inseparable. Now, maybe you don't have to struggle as much to make what you make. Maybe you have it a little easier, but that doesn't matter because at the end of every great work is a revelation to the audience of what we as humans are capable of. What we are watching or absorbing or reading, as much as the work itself is the story of humanity and what is achievable through passion, sacrifice, and fortitude. Every work subtly dedicated to all of us here on earth right now. Look at the things we can do.

This has led me to a really weird thought. Art isn't inherently beautiful.

It doesn't make sense coming out of my mouth, but, but that's what I'm left with. And then it doesn't make sense that it doesn't make sense. But eliminating the human element from art makes it nothing. I'm sitting here asking myself, if the Sistine Chapel was made with AI, how would I feel?

And the only thing I can come up with is, "Well, this sucks now." My reaction is, "Well, of course a machine can make this. The point is that a human did. Someone like me."

Somewhere in the ocean of AI takes, someone said, "If you're skeptical of the existence of the soul, have a look at art made without one. Now, how do you feel?"

I'm depressed by all of this. It's going to ruin the internet for a while, but it has brought a lot of clarity to me about why we do all these things. And I've had to ask myself a lot of questions that I wouldn't have had to ask myself.

And after all these questions, I come back to the most important one. Can we make it through this? Honestly, I don't know.

But look at what we can do.

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Transcript:

So I was asked by someone to read the first few pages of their audio drama, and it had the problem that you may recognize as "Blade Runner Theatrical Release Syndrome," AKA "You have a complicated world mythology. And so you roll out a narration at the beginning that lets everyone know what's going on and where we are and what the rules are," stuff like that.

So what I wanna do in this situation is give them the old chestnut of "Show. Don't tell." But we're talking about audio drama. So how exactly do you show? What is the audio drama version of "Show Don't tell?"

Because Audio drama shares so much DNA with audio books, We feel pretty comfortable with narration, but I think the problem with that is that books aren't narration. A good book doesn't just plainly give you the story in the way that narration does. A good book makes you work for the story the same way that an audio drama should.

Oftentimes in audio drama, we put narration in there because we don't have the option of showing anyone anything. But no one wants a plain explanation of the world. They want to be invited into it. So what is that invitation? If your story begins "The year is 2195, and because of a blank, it's caused the earth to blank, and now we all have to blank for our blank." If you do that, what do I do as an audience member?

There's nothing for me to figure out. There's nothing for me to activate on.

I'm not curious about anything because you've already told me everything. I referred to this as "Blade Runner Theatrical Release Syndrome." In case you're not aware, in the theatrical release of Blade Runner, there's narration in the film explaining the world to the audience. It's really bad and unnecessary. And Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford fought against it really hard. Harrison Ford apparently performed it really badly on purpose so that they wouldn't use it, but they used it anyway.

I wish I could have originally experienced the movie without that narration, because I would've had the experience of investigating the movie, looking at the clues that it gave me to piece the story together myself. I wish the movie could have just been showing me things, not telling me things.

In audio drama, you don't have the option of that amazing shot in Blade Runner when the flying car goes into the sky and you'd see the giant future dystopia city. So what do you do in audio drama. When you want to show and not tell what do you do?

What you can do is something that I would call a slow widening of the lens. You start with something very recognizable and then slowly draw in different aspects of this new world.

Let me give you an example. Uh, we're gonna call this. "Werewolf cop" Okay?

In this world, lycanthropy is a problem and it's very contagious, and the whole world has to approach it like it's a pandemic.

I think the wrong thing to do is begin the story. In the year 2036, the first infestation of lycanthropy happened, right? I don't wanna do that. That's bad. I am bored now because as an audience member, I have nothing to do.

So consider starting your story like this with something very recognizable. A police sergeant starting his morning shift, having coffee at his usual place. The owner starts complaining to him about crime and how the city is going to hell, and something's gotta be done. And the cop keeps getting calls on a CB about some sort of code W in in progress. The code W is in progress and he keeps ignoring it. So finally he can't ignore it anymore, and he heads to the scene.

The police have the building surrounded, but inside are not bank robbers, but a werewolf. And from there you keep widening the story. There's a dedicated department for this. There's a wall around the city to keep the werewolves out, et cetera, but you're never told that by a narrator. You experience it in real time with the characters.

Okay, now I wanna stress that I don't think this is a good idea for an audio drama. In fact, it's quite bad. But I'm doing it to illustrate what the idea of "show don't tell" sounds like in an audio drama. Rather than a big, sweeping camera shot of a dystopian city, It's the slow trickling in of the world you've created, rather than a massive wall of explanation that exhausts the audience before the story even begins.

And when the story slowly trickles in like that, with each little bit of information you're getting, it hints at a very big world and it really draws people in.

Now look, are there audience members out there that want the whole story given to them on a silver platter? Yes. Are there people who like the theatrical release of Blade Runner because they like the narration because the movie tells them exactly where they're going. Yes. Are there even more of these people than you, or, I think also, yes, but this is audio drama and that's not your audience.

Your audience wants a challenge.

They want a mystery. They want something that they can figure out for themselves. And every time you tell your audience something plainly with narration, you are taking that opportunity away from them. Take the time to live in the world you created, and they'll want to live in it too, and they'll maybe even want to stay.

I think people worry when they're writing a story, that they're not going to be understood, and that's a very natural feeling. So the inclination is to do a lot, really make sure you're being clear. But I think you need to have more faith in your audience.

They'll always surprise you. There's this magical moment that happens when an audience truly grips the story when they reach a level of understanding that maybe you didn't think possible.

When they do get there, it's not going to be because you led them there with your hyper-specific narration. It'll be because they chose to follow you into your story as you explore it.

And when that moment of understanding happens, that's when you'll finally be showing them something instead of telling them.

Transcript:

In the Paris Review right now, there's an interview with Elliot Weinberger. Elliot Weinberger is an essayist. Uh, he is kind of the master of the impersonal essay, so his essays throughout the years have never been in the first person. They've never featured himself. His essays are, they kind of read like extended encyclopedia entries, but then also he would do things like read a 500 page book about the Naked Mole rat and then write a two and a half page essay called The Naked Molerat.

When asked about this, he would say that, you know, according to the common logic, the only thing he should be writing about is, uh, a bunch of cabbage farmers in Eastern Europe and Russia, because that's his background. And he had this quote in this essay that, uh, I thought was interesting and it made me think of actually something else entirely, but here it is:

He said, "I do find it dreary, that these essayists end up writing about themselves so much. Even if they're taking documentary information, they add a lot of personal response to it, which seems to be what the new quote lyric essay is. I have no interest in first person investigation. Personally, I've never found myself to be an interesting person."

That made me think of a period of my life when I was going to New York a lot. I was a playwright living in Oregon, But I was going to New York a lot.

I was spending a lot of time there, and I was spending a lot of time with, you know, New York writers. It's really easy to develop a bit of an inferiority complex in that environment, not just because some of them were much more accomplished than myself, but also because they were all interesting people.

They all had very interesting stories. They all had stories of, you know, being a photojournalist in Vietnam, things like that.

Stories of growing up dead broke, stories of being unhoused for a while. And in that environment, you start to think, well, what is so interesting about me? How do I have the right to be here amongst all these other people, all these other people who have these very interesting stories? Because my story, at least from my perspective, is really not all that interesting.

And that brings up the idea: Do you need to be an interesting person to write something interesting.

Fran Liebowitz, speaking of New York writers, would say there are no prodigies in writing because you have to have lived the life. You have to have a life that you can write about in order to write well.

But does it all need to be personal narrative? Can you have a mundane life or an uninteresting backstory and still write well? Well, certainly not every person with an interesting life story as a good writer or even a writer at all, but there is a certain amount of pressure to have an engaging life story.

In 2005, Oprah picked a book. For her legendary book club called A Million Little Pieces. It was a harrowing memoir of addiction and recovery. That was later found out to be largely made up. The author James Fray was then dragged back on Oprah and was forced to confess his sins. The book in the eyes of Some was now invalid because it wasn't true.

He said the story was real so that it would be more popular. Readers striving for that sort of authenticity probably comes from living in some sort of age of the inauthentic. Everything is digital. Everything is mass produced and comes from China. So people search for real things, but it does send me down a rabbit hole.

You liked the story when you thought it was real. Now that it's not real, you don't like it, even though the story stays the same. That's a whole other post. But to get back to my original point...

We're currently in a very memoir centric era. Not just because memoir is more popular than it's ever been, but because of social media and the internet.

Every day we are awash with stories and fragments of stories from people that are allegedly true. People are broadcasting their personal narrative more than in any time in history, and there sits boring you. Your childhood was okay.

Your job is okay. You weren't a child soldier. You didn't have to survive in the woods for two weeks alone when you were 11. What right do you have to write?

In 1817, John Keats wrote to his brothers about a production of Shakespeare He had just seen. And in that letter he created a term, a term that still survives to this day called negative capability. The idea that in the writing, you negate yourself, you dissolve yourself.

he found Shakespeare to be very good at that. When you look at the length and breadth of Shakespeare's work, I know I at least have a hard time discerning what his actual point of view is. So on one end you have the lived experience gang, and on the other end you have the romantics, like Keats and the big mystery that is Shakespeare. You are either telling your very personal, very real story, or you are engaging in the story, in the writing, as a way of doing the opposite.

Not the reaffirming of the self, but an attempt to dissolve the self, to erase yourself in the face of the story you're creating in an almost Buddhist way. So you have these two sides, but in the end it's a false choice and every writer, I think, falls somewhere between the two extremes.

It does seem these days that the favor falls pretty heavily on the memoir side of things.

But maybe you want to tell a story, but you see yourself as boring. You see storytellers as interesting people with interesting stories, and you don't find yourself all that interesting.

Telling a story doesn't have to be personal narrative. You don't have to always write what you know. Writing doesn't have to be about the consecration of the self. It can also be about a journey out of it. It can be an exercise in empathy and a, for lack of a better word, joining of a collective unconscious.

It could be a journey outside of yourself rather than within.

I know we read all these stories about writers and we see them as having these interesting lives, and they always look so well-dressed and disheveled and poetic in and of themselves. They seem very interesting and you seem well, a bit drab sometimes.

But in the end, you don't have to be that person. And in the end, how much of that is us as a society placing interestingness upon these people whose work we love? You don't have to be interesting to write. You just have to be interested.

Transcript:

These Things We Create are Living Things

So I am recording this on the day of the release of the first episode of Season Five of Midnight Burger.

It's always an interesting day. It's a day full of a lot of questions. I'm wondering how it's going to be received? I'm wondering how it's going to be interpreted. You'd think I would be used to it by now, but it's always fresh because I don't know that anyone ever has a concrete expectation as to how the season's going to start or what it's going to look like.

So you never really know how people are going to react. I mean, you do and you don't.

If you ever have the pleasure of making something that people really like, you'll find that a lot of them come to depend on it for this, that, and the other thing, and that can put a certain amount of pressure on you because you need to stay true to what the story is, but at the same time, you don't want people to feel abandoned somehow, like you've left them behind. I do get emails sometimes from people flat out begging me to go back to what we were doing in season one.

When you really think about it, those complaints are, in my opinion, more about the fact that people are upset that things change at all—not just your show, but everything. I do get emails.

And even though you can put thoughts like that in a certain perspective, and you can say, "Well, it's this or it's that, or it's the other thing," or "There's nothing you can do about it," you still do. You know, you still don't want to abandon people.

The thing about that is when it comes right down to it, you're not all that in control, or at least you're not as in control as you think you are. Or at least for me, that's how it is.

Arseny Tarkovsky was a Russian poet and the father, incidentally, of Andrei Tarkovsky, the legendary filmmaker. One time he wrote, "I would readily pay my life for a safe place with constant warmth, were it not that life's flying needle leads me on through the world like a thread."

You feel like you're being absconded with a bit sometimes. If you tell a story over a long enough period of time, like I've been doing, well, it starts to be its own thing. It starts to take on a life of its own. It starts to have wants and needs like a person outside of yourself, and the longer you work on it, the more independent of you it becomes, and you go from being the creator of this thing to the person who is almost acting like the translator or caretaker of this thing.

This thing is going its own way and you're just there to make sure nothing bad happens.

And while that seems like a strange way to regard something that you create, because it certainly doesn't happen without you there, I really haven't found any other way of thinking about it. These things we create, in a sense, are living things and they move past you.

Which helps when people are begging and pleading with you to do something else with it, because you're not in charge, as it turns out. Maybe you were at the beginning, but now you're following the natural progression of something. It would be like yelling at a river, telling it to turn.

So that pressure that you feel—that you want people to receive it well—can be relieved somewhat by the fact that now, in your apartment somewhere, is this thing that's alive and it's actually not up to you what it does.

And I know I'm supposed to be like an artist and be all masterful and like "this is my grand design" and everything like that. And it is, but it's also—it's about the way that you think about it. It's about the way you think about these things. And this is how I've come to think about this big, long, expansive story that I've been telling. It's its own thing now. And you can see that happen in stories that take place over a long period of time.

You can see there's a point where the creator of this thing tries to reel it back in to the thing that they've created. This is a weird thing to bring up, but there was this moment where I was watching this conversation online and someone was talking about how the characters of Bert and Ernie made them feel more comfortable coming out as a gay man because they were watching this gay couple coexist on Sesame Street.

And Frank Oz, the literal creator of Bert and Ernie, logs on, and he says, "Bert and Ernie aren't gay, because I created them and I decided that they weren't." But it's kind of not up to Frank anymore because he put it out there and it became its own thing, and for him to try and reel it back into his creation—it just doesn't work anymore.

You've got to go where the thing wants to go. These things we create are living things.

It's so weird to talk like this because this is not the type of person that I am. I'm a very—you know, I've never used a smudge stick. Okay? I've never read my horoscope.

But with these things, these things that I make, there is a certain amount of spiritual—I don't know—mumbo jumbo that I kind of embrace because I've never found another way of thinking about it. So on these days when the new thing is being rolled out, there is a certain amount of calm that comes from the fact that I'm not in charge anymore.

These things we create are living things, and you've gone from the thing that created it to really just the thing that feeds it.

And though you may want it to go this way or that way, or the other way, in the end, you're not in charge. Not anymore.

Transcript:

Okay, so this next bit is a little, uh, you know, podcaster inside baseball. So bear with me about a year ago, I guess because we had been doing this for so long, we suddenly became people that others would ask advice of. And, um, that was weird because we have no idea what to say, but a lot of the questions asked are about.

Promotion, right? How do you promote your show? How do you make your show popular? What do you do? Do you do Instagram ads? Stuff like that.

and I never have anything useful to say to this question because there is nothing to say,

Eric Newsom, who's a podcast producer of some repute, uh, loves to tell the story about how a show that he was producing got a full page spread in the New York Times, and it did not move the needle for his show at all.

Ronald Young Jr. Made a show called Weight for It a couple years ago, and it was a critical darling and it won a ton of awards. And then a year later I heard him on a podcasting round table talking about how he still struggles to get people to listen to the show. And he has not made any money from the show.

And the biggest bump in downloads he got was actually from being a guest on normal gossip.

and then just recently author Amy McNee in her newsletter starts talking about how she. Was thrilled because she got word that she was gonna be a guest on. Jay Shetty's podcast. Jay Shetty, one of the biggest podcasts in the world. She was very excited, really excited to talk about her book,

and then when she checked her book sales a couple of days later, she was. Shocked to find that nothing happened. She just talked to millions of people about her book and nothing happened.

I.

And in the newsletter, she goes off on this for a while. She talks about how you know artists are taught to chase external validation. Taught to chase big breaks, but these are flashy opportunities and they rarely translate to anything tangible.

So we're sitting here constantly outsourcing our power and we're kind of being sleeping. Beauty, you know, we're encasing ourselves in glass, trying to look as pretty as possible, and hoping that Prince Charming will come along and wake us up.

I am wondering if the days of the big break are behind us. I mean, certainly there are big hits out there from time to time, but I don't know if there's any way to turn that into some sort of math problem, right? Like you do this plus this and it equals big break.

It seems pretty random, like winning the lottery.

We seem to have this inclination to think of everything as if it were the internet. And what I mean by the internet is, uh, going viral and tons of likes and trending and all that stuff,

but the truth of it is some things just don't operate like the internet. Some things are slow.

When you think about all of the things that went viral, they're gone in 10 minutes. You don't even think about them anymore. I, but there are other things out there

that have a long trailing history.

And even though we regard the internet as this place where things happen instantaneously and are gone instantaneously, there are people and organizations out there who have this long history on the internet.

the internet. Writ large isn't this world of the instantaneous. It's an entire ecosystem, and in any ecosystem, you have things that are short-lived and long-lived. There are things on the internet that are like the GAD fly. They have one day in the sun and then they die.

And I think the frustration of a lot of people may come from the fact that they want to be that instantaneous, instantly popular thing, and it's just not a sustainable way to live.

It's not a sustainable way to exist as someone trying to make things. IThe internet is blindingly fast, but creating a reliable entity there goes very slowly and steadily. Like a tree in a forest, it requires a trillion swirling bacteria, all of them with the lifespan of a few seconds. And beneath that, the mysterious network of Mycelia. You are a creature of this forest of the internet, but you are the slow and methodical timekeeper.

You are not the paramecium. You are not the gadfly, you're the oak. Slow to grow, but once grown a giant.

There's so much out there that tries to seduce us into doing something instantaneously, but in the end, what we've always come back to is just patience and time.

And you know what? That sucks. I really hate that. It would be great if it was instantaneous, if it, it would be great if there was some sort of short path, but I haven't found it. And it certainly sounds like no one else has found it either. So it's all the long road. There's so many people out there who are just in audition mode.

They're creating things on the internet in an effort to get the attention of something or someone bigger than them.

And if that's your chosen path to success, then go for it. I celebrate you. I guess my thing is. When you're making something just to try and get the attention of someone else when your several episode audio fiction is just an audition for a TV studio. I can smell it in the work. It doesn't seem like something you're enjoying.

It seems like a means to an end and that's, it's never fun to listen or watch a means to an end. It is that feeling you get when you're at a party and you're talking to someone and the person you're talking to would much rather be talking to someone else in the end. Unfortunately, it's patience and time.

I don't you hate that?

Transcript:

So I'm at the, uh, beginning of season five right now of Midnight Burger. Uh, for those of you who don't know, I don't write everything first. And then we do the show. I get about an episode and a half to two episodes ahead of the show, and I keep writing and we start producing right about then. So we're kind of at the beginning of things right now and, uh, right now.

I'm having this feeling where I'm at the beginning of the season and I'm looking at the end of the season and it's just such a distant mark. You know, like looking at the Empire State Building from Queens, and it could be a little daunting sometimes. Like there's so much, so much writing to do between where I am now and where we'll be then, and it's just.

It's a lot to take in sometimes and it's a lot to take on sometimes.

There's this short story called The Man Who Planted Trees. It's by Jean Gno. It was written in, um, uh, the 1950s and it was turned into an animated short in the eighties and it won the Academy Award. And it's a story of this. Hiker who is hiking through the, uh, sort of foothills of the Alps. And he finds himself in a really desolate valley.

And there's only one man who lives there. And he starts to get to know this man, this man's a shepherd. And he asks the man why he's living there. And the man says that he wants to transform the valley into a beautiful place. And he says, but you're one guy. And he says, I know every day.

The man takes his sheep out to graze, and at the bottom of his shepherd staff, he has an iron spike and he drives the iron spike into the ground and he reaches into his pocket. He takes an acorn and he puts the acorn in the hole. And he does that several times a day, every day when he takes his sheep out.

And so the man, the hiker who encounters this man, he says, oh, okay. Well I, good luck. I guess the hiker goes off to fight in World War I and gets pretty screwed up as many people did by World War I. And he returns to the valley and he sees that. Over the years, there are now saplings growing things are actually happening, and the man who plants the acorns, he has stopped taking care of sheep because the sheep are eating the saplings.

And now he is a beekeeper. And so the man heals, uh, of his. Of his war wounds there in this uh, valley that's starting to grow. And then he returns again several years later to see that the landscape has been transformed and about 10,000 people live there, and there's a river there now, and it looks completely different from the place that he encountered when he was hiking all those years ago.

And all of this was achieved by a guy leaving his home every day and just. Doing a very simple thing, not taking on a gigantic task, but just doing a simple thing. He takes a few acorns, he makes holes in the ground, and he plants the acorns, and he does that over and over again.

So when I have this feeling, I like to think about this guy. I like to think about this, you know, fictional French man who just. Focused on the things he was doing that day. He didn't think about growing this lush valley. He thought about planting a few acorns today.

That really helps me get through times like this because I shouldn't be thinking about that far off goal. What I should be thinking about is what is it today? Because kind of like the man who returns to the valley and finds that it's lush. I sit here and I look back and there are now literally thousands of pages of dialogue that I've written and.

If I had sat down to write episode one and thought to myself, I have thousands of pages to write, I would've found that just too much. I would've found that a pretty crushing burden. So instead it's just every day a pocket full of acorns, a few holes in the ground every single day, and then one day you look back and there's the valley.

Transcript

So the other day in his newsletter, Adam Mastoianni kind of went off and he wrote 28 slightly rude notes on writing. So it's this list of things and there's one that really cracked me up and I wanted to talk about it. So he said The internet is full of smart people writing beautiful prose about how bad everything is, how it all sucks, how it's embarrassing to like anything, how anything that appears good is in fact secretly bad.

I find this confusing and tragic, like watching Olympic high jumpers catapult themselves into a pit of tarantulas, which is funny because he's a pretty cynical guy himself, you know? So to hear him say like, it's such a shame, he's basically saying, what a shame I exist. You know it, and it's a funny quote, but also it just, it brings to mind something that I think about sometimes about this.

Intense pressure that one might feel to make things in their story go poorly for people. Because if it's, if things go poorly, then that's real and that's honest and that's true. And for anything to go well is of course false

and pandering and delusional. Right

now, there's some celebration of things that end happily, you know, when you have a happy ending to your story or when th happy things happen in your story. But somehow those all always get categorized as a beach read or a nice escape or a safe place. And I am just wondering why is this, why do we have this disdain or this compartmentalization of stories that contain joy?

Why is that the case? I don't know. There's this other, okay, so I think it was Friedrich Mont. Who said this, I might be wrong. He said that the artist portrays the world as either the chicken or the egg. So the chicken, the world as it has become, or the egg the world in its potential.

And there does seem to be this pervasive feeling that the chicken stories, the world as it has become are valid, and the egg stories, the potential of the world are not favorable, right? You are not actually an artist. If you are making the egg stories, the world in its potential stories, right? You're not an art, you're, you'll probably be real rich, but you're not an artist, right?

You can't be taken seriously 'cause you're not being honest with your audience, right? Because honesty, of course, is death and grief and sorrow and murder and dishonesty is. Something working out, something being happy, a good thing happening, a celebration, right? How dare you? How dare you tell that story.

Get out of here. We're all hanging out at the cafe. We're dark artists. How dare you? How dare you brighten our day.

I've certainly felt this in the past. You know, I've, I've felt this pressure to be real and have hard choices in the story. And, you know, if you have a commitment, if you have a true commitment to your story, you will not hesitate to just off everybody in your story instantly. George, our, our Martin style.

So we assume that happiness and joy in a story that we're telling is dishonest or not real.

But I don't think all the writers out there who are writing stories that contain joy and that have happiness, are somehow unaware of the world that's around them. I think Nora Ephron read the paper just like everybody else did. The thing about happiness and joy and happy endings is that they're not a denial of reality.

In my humble opinion, they're like a prayer. A prayer for a better world. Seeing the world in its potential, because the world as dark as it may seem, is always brimming with potential.

I do look around and I see the problems of the world. But I do believe that there is a solution for every single one of these problems.

Potential is ever present. The potential for joy is always there, so why can't we write about that potential? Or at least, why can't we write about that potential and be considered serious artists? I'm not sure.

Maybe because it's so hard to tell stories of death and grief and sorrow and murder, that the only thing you can really clinging to is the fact that you're being honest and that you're being true and you are. The problem is, so is everybody else. But they're being true to the potential and others are being true to the world.

They see in front of them. It's just two commitments to two different things. One to the chicken, one to the egg.

 But really these days, what's the bold choice? If you reside in a world that's full of darkness.

It's very difficult to look and see what could be, and it's very difficult to write about that

because you're afraid to have that hope. You are afraid to believe in a better world.

Unfortunately, the only way that better world comes to be is by seeing it, by envisioning it. If we don't take the time and make the choice to envision a better world, Well then all we're left with is the chicken.