Writers Ink
host: J. Thorn
heavy metal guitarists, writing process, minimalist style, social media rage, book distribution
listen: (download)
Transcript:
J. Thorn
I have to be a little selfish, the first question I need to ask you is who is one of your favorite heavy metal guitarists from the 1980s?
Derek Sivers
My absolute first favorite like special place in my heart was Randy Rhoads. In fact, I even know the day he died, March 19th, 1982. I bought a black flying V and went to the stationery store and got a bunch of white polka dot stickers and stuck it on my flying V exactly the way Randy Rhoads had his. Memorized all his guitar solos and had his posters all over my wall. Randy Rhoads was like my first favorite. Then Ingvar Malmsteen blew me away later. All of those late eighties, mid eighties fast fingered heavy metal guitarists. I was immersed in that pool. I loved all of that and I would memorize every solo. I’d learn every solo, use them to practice my finger technique and pick them technique, memorize them and play along. I was in a band that would play all that stuff. And yeah, I just loved it.
J. Thorn
It seems like there’s a classical theme running through that. It seems like you like the guys that played with a more classical style.
Derek Sivers
Later I went to Berklee School of Music. Where people are seriously studying music and we joke about how we would call it the classical part because Randy Rhoads switched to an acoustic guitar for a minute. I guess maybe because I grew up in Chicago, I was never that into the Blues side of things because it seemed to be too common place for me. Growing up in Chicago, I didn’t realize till a couple of years after I left that not every venue that serves alcohol in the entire world has a Blues band. In Chicago it feels like they did. I thought that was a given. Wherever alcohol is served, there is a Blues band. It wasn’t until I left Chicago, I went, “oh okay I get it, I grew up in Chicago, the home of the Blues”. Blues based guitarists were not as interesting to me, that was a fun first question.
J. Thorn
Thank you. Oh, you’re welcome. I kind of figured with your background and knowing what the 14 year old Derek was up to, I thought you’d have a few guitarist on the tip of your tongue.
Derek Sivers
One of my best friends from high school and also the bassist in my band that I talked about that we’d play all these songs. His name is Mark Strigl, and now he runs a podcast called Talking Metal. Mark Strigl stayed with this and still does, Talking Metal is on episode 100,000 or something now. He has interviewed all of our old heroes and stayed in that world. It’s so impressive, it’s so cool. Go to: talkingmetal.com. Check out his video podcast and podcast. It’s so cool to see my old high school buddy talking to all of our old heroes.
J. Thorn
That’s awesome, man. I’m going to check that out as soon as we’re done. I can’t wait.
Derek Sivers
Which, by the way, I’ll tell you, a semi-secret is in one of my books, Your Music and People. I talk about my friend Captain T, Mark Strigl is Captain T.
J. Thorn
Oh, nice. He’s Captain T, that is cool. Well, as much as I like to talk to you more about metal, that’s probably both in our distant past. I thought maybe we could talk about some other things, especially your writing. I’m really curious to talk to you about your writing. Why don’t we start with a more general question. What’s an example of something you’ve removed from your life that most people think is indispensable?
Derek Sivers
Getting angry. I could also say coffee, but that’s not as interesting of an answer. It seems to me like most people seem to think that or most people seem to want to get angry about things that they read in social media. There is a bumper sticker that somebody in my neighborhood had that I saw a lot. The bumper sticker said, “if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention”. That always bothered me and I still think of it. Here I am I saw that bumper sticker 15 years ago. If you’re outraged, you’re not channeling your attention or your energy wisely. If you’re going to make real change, then rage is unstrategic. If you’re not going to make real change, then rage is just making yourself upset for no reason. The best I can figure for now is that, the reason people do this rage on social media thing is it’s kind of social signaling. To broadcast what you’re against to help define who you are like I’m against this. I’m mad about that. This is who I am. Personally, I have no need for that. I think that there are much better ways to show who you are.
J. Thorn
Oh, such as?
Derek Sivers
Doing something, making something. Just sitting at home and clicking outraged at this, outraged at that. Mad about this, retweeting that, it does nothing. It’s just unfocused, unproductive waste of energy. On the other hand, for eons people have enjoyed gossiping and getting mad about what Lucy in the next town over is doing. I guess it’s also just a modern version of that. It’s like a thing that humans do, I just find it really unproductive or a waste of our human minutes on Earth.
J. Thorn
How did you get rid of it? How did you walk away from anger?
Derek Sivers
I just never got into it. Sonia Lyubomirsky studier of happiness has written some books on happiness. She said that from her studies about 50% of our happiness is just our DNA and 50% is under our control. About 50% is just a lucky roll of the dice. I’ve always been a happy person. It’s really interesting to see that my kid got that roll of the DNA dice, even better than me. Even as a newborn baby, never a tantrum, never really cried, never gets upset. Something goes wrong he just shrugs and goes, “oh, well”. Sometimes I think it’s just DNA. I’m also really lucky and privileged. I don’t know how much of that we bring upon ourselves and how much was a roll of the dice of destiny. I could have been born in Myanmar and having a pretty bad time right now with the new government or something. Maybe I’d be getting outraged more often if that was the case. I think a lot of it maybe also 50% DNA, 50% life circumstances.
J. Thorn
Does your son still run over to people who have fallen and put his arm around them and help them up?
Derek Sivers
When is the last time he did that? It’s been a while, but that’s still in his nature. I think it’s just coincidentally been a while since we’ve seen somebody fall over that he would have the chance to do that too. Thanks for remembering that example. That was a sweet.
J. Thorn
The world’s changed a bit, I think in the past year and a half or so. One of the things too, is that I noticed you had a pretty long hiatus from podcast and I asked you to come on and you did. I’m curious as to why you said yes to me.
Derek Sivers
I like what you’ve done with the author life website, the services you’re doing for self published authors. I think that’s really cool, also because of my past as an entrepreneur, a lot of people want to talk business with me and I just don’t want to talk about business. I’d rather talk about writing. I get lots of interview requests from entrepreneurs that want to talk business. I just don’t want to. I want to talk about writing.
J. Thorn
Excellent. Let’s do that. I think you had said that CD Baby was maybe you’re like chapter two, Chapter three. That’s way in the rearview mirror. Let’s talk a little bit about How to Live. You said that’s the best thing you’ve ever written. Can you explain why?
Derek Sivers
I worked harder on it. You get your initial flash of inspiration. With that moment where I went, “ooh I know what I want to make”. I saw how this thing would play out, but it was going to be a lot of work to do it right. I worked almost full time for two years to write the rough draft of getting in every idea I wanted to include in this book. I had over 2400 ideas indexed and categorized. I explained each of those 2400 ideas. The rough draft of the book came to over 1300 pages. I thought, this is not how the book should be. This was just me getting all of the ideas in place. But God, nobody’s going to read this 1300 page thing. Then began two years of editing, almost full time for two years I chopped down those 1300 pages down to 110 very sparse pages. That made every single word carry a lot of weight. What’s left is something that is unlike any book. It’s really unique. That’s a great feeling. I think about how creators in the past who have made something really unique must feel like. I love the movie Pulp Fiction. Right. I think Tarantino did something really, really unique with Pulp Fiction. He was referencing things in the past, but what he made within the the timelines and the kind of shifting time focus in that movie made something really unique. That’s just a really cool feeling to know that you’ve added something really special and unique to the world. I also love that it lived up to my initial flash of inspiration, like that moment where I thought of how cool this idea could be. Then I surpassed it because I worked so hard on it.
Derek Sivers
I ruthlessly focused on every single word until I just felt like that is the absolute best that this sentence can be. Onto the next sentence. I feel like I could die happy having made this book. If I did nothing else in my life, on my death I’ll be like, I wrote How to Live. That was a good contribution to this planet. It’s a great feeling.
J. Thorn
What did that process look like? I mean, when you say full time for two years, are you, are you typing, are you handwriting or are you dictating? What’s the revision process like?
Derek Sivers
Typing. I use an old school seventies Unix terminal editor called Vim. It’s the same thing I use for coding and programming. It’s got a steep learning curve, ot’s got a really steep learning curve. Once you have it under your fingers, you can be like a magician moving blocks of text around and this and chopping this and delete seven words and place them here. It’s an amazing skill to have for both programming and writing. I do everything in the terminal and it’s completely ancient open source program that can be used on any piece of hardware ever. You don’t have to buy it. You don’t have to subscribe to it. That’s another thing I love. The initial two years was just me brain dumping. Writing not dictating. I might get more into dictating. I’ve noticed that when I’m texting on my phone, I don’t use my thumbs so much as I hit that little microphone and talk, let it do the speech to text transcription of my thing. I might get more into that in the future for writing, but only for the rough draft. When it comes to editing I really want to look at every single word and make it prove its purpose on Earth, you know. It was kind of hundreds of hours of just editing more than anything for those last two years.
Derek Sivers
Does that make sense? Sorry, I can’t remember if that answer to your original question.
J. Thorn
No, it does. I was trying to imagine what that looked like and how you were coming up with those massive number of pages. It might be worthwhile sharing the premise. We don’t want to spoil the end.
Derek Sivers
I’m just talking to my fellow authors now, I’ll give it to you from that point of view. There is a book by David Eagleman called Sum. I highly recommend everybody read this absolutely brilliant little book. If you make me pick just one book to say it’s my favorite book ever written. It would be Sum by David Eagleman. The format of Sum is called 40 Tales from the Afterlives. It’s 40 little short stories, two or three pages long each, but each one tells you what happens when you die. It’s repeatedly answering the same question. What happens when you die? With a different answer every time. Chapter three will say: when you die, you kind of wake up with an angel type of person there to tell you that in your last life you chose to be a man or each time you’re born, you can choose to be whatever creature you want. You choose to be a horse this time because you admired the simple life of a horse. As soon as you say that your body starts to turn into a horse and this happens and you feel your brain turning into a horse and you think, I’ve made a horrible mistake, because what I wanted to be was a complex man admiring the simple life of a horse.
Derek Sivers
Now I’m forgetting what a man even is. I won’t be able to appreciate my horse life. In your final moment, before you become a horse, you think I wonder what kind of complex, beautiful creature I might have been before that chose the simple life of a man. That’ll be chapter three. Brilliant little short story. Chapter four: When you die, you find yourself on a table surrounded by these little thuggish creatures, saying, “what does answer? What does answer?”. It takes me a while to find out that what you knew of as your life was actually an artificial intelligence program. You are an artificial intelligence program that these creatures wrote to find out the meaning of life. Now the program has ceased running and they want the answers. You get the idea. It goes on like this with 40 very creative little chapter, creative but also profound. I love the format and the fact that each chapter disagrees with all of the others.
Derek Sivers
I loved that book. I read it twice over a couple of years. Then one day I was driving down the road and suddenly had that little flash of inspiration where I went “oh I want to write a book called How to Live in that same format where each chapter thinks it has the answer of How to Live. In itself should be profound and complete, but then disagrees with all of the other chapters. That was the big idea that drove me for three years. Only after three years did I realize how I needed to end this book. It’s got a very weird conclusion. The full title of How to Live is, How to Live 27 onflicting answers and one weird conclusion. The book Sum doesn’t really conclude it’s just 40 tales and then it’s done. I deviate from the format, the first page of the book says that this is an homage to the book Sum by David Eagleman. It’s a direct homage to his format that I admire so much.
J. Thorn
I admire your writing so much. All of the works you’ve published so far. Hell Yes or No is one of my favorite books ever. You have this very minimalistic style in that you make every word count. As a writer, I can tell that you’ve revised for months or years because only what needs to be there is there. I was kind of surprised in an older interview, you said you’d never really thought of yourself as a as a writer of words until a few years ago. How did you manifest this sort of minimalist style in your writing?
Derek Sivers
Initially from writing lyrics, I was a songwriter for 15 years. I wrote over a hundred songs. The way that you write lyrics is, you get the melody first, you’ve only got six syllables because you’ve got these six notes and you want to fit what you’re trying to say into those six syllables. I was already in that mindset, songwriting is a lot of it. Also the marketing emails I sent out when I was running CD Baby. I learned the hard way that if you say too much, people don’t read it. If you send a ten page long newsletter or even a two page long newsletter, people look at it quickly on their phones and they go like, “ohh, I should read that later”, but they don’t. If you can say what you need to say in three sentences, they might read it. Maybe six sentences top. I found that if I went like over seven or eight sentences, people wouldn’t read it. They’d reply back to the emails saying, “great, how do I get involved?”. Please see sentence seven that tells you how to get involved. It says right there in the email you’re replying to. I had about 2 million customers, if I was at all unclear or used one too many sentences. I would get 5000 replies, which would take hundreds of hours to reply to. I would feel the ultimate pain. For every single sentence that wasn’t necessary or every word that was unclear meant hundreds of hours of work and a lot of money lost in hiring people to answer those emails. If I had written one unclear word or added one unnecessary sentence. That was also my boot camp training. Then it’s also this minimalist desire to not put anything into the world that doesn’t need to be there, for the same reason we don’t dump our garbage outside. Why should we dump our unnecessary sentences into the public? It’s coming from that same place. Even if you see my house, my only refrigerator is a is a little silent thing about one meter square. That’s my only fridge, because I just like to make things as small as they can be. For most of my life, I’ve had a fridge that was full sized but sat mostly empty. For the first time in my life, I moved into a house that had no fridge. I had to go buy a fridge and I would finally get a fridge that’s only what I need and nothing more. I’m like that with my words, clothes and everything.
J. Thorn
Your computer code. Same way?
Derek Sivers
I guess so, the fact that I spend my whole day in a programming terminal typing out every line of code by hand, I don’t use any code generation tools. If you do view source on my website on sive.rs, you’ll see no line of HTML code that doesn’t absolutely need to be there. So yeah, you’re right. It’s my code too.
J. Thorn
You had the luxury in hindsight of getting massive amounts of feedback when you were being too wordy or not being efficient enough. Is that a skill that’s just now ingrained in you, or do you try and replicate that now that you’re writing by yourself?
Derek Sivers
To me, it seems like that’s how things should be. Even when I’m listening to somebody’s podcast and they take a long, unnecessary tangent, I’m like, “come on, get to the point”. I’m reading a book that has unnecessary sentences. I’m like, “come on, I don’t need the fourth example”. When all of us were in school, we probably all had the experience of being told to write 20 pages on a subject that we had only one page of anything to say about. You get used to this habit of going, well, blah, blah, blah. In other words, I believe that, you know, henceforth and so and so. Let’s say it again and again, I will say it in another word from another angle, because once again, what I am trying to say is so and so. What you’re trying to do is make more words. You’re trying to fill pages, you’re trying to meet a minimum word count. Yes, a minimum word count is what I’m trying to meet. In that mindset, it’s like the more words, the better. There are people that want to write books.
Derek Sivers
They want to have lots of books in the world. They lots of words onto lots of pages and they say there’s my book. Because of what I just said about this aesthetic of trying to put the least into the world. I’m trying to do the absolute opposite of that, I’m trying to put the least number of words into the world that I can, so that they’ll actually be read. I also think it’s considerate for the reader. The more blather you say, the more people tune out. Whereas if they can tell that every sentence counts, they pay attention better. What I started doing with How to Live for the first time is challenging conjunctions, words like so and because I would look at them and think “I say one sentence and then I say so and I say the next sentence”. Actually, just by putting those two sentences adjacent to each other, the relation is a given, I don’t need the word there, do I? I don’t need the word because. We definitely do not ever need to say I think or in my opinion because if you’re speaking we know this is just your opinion and we know you are not God. We know you’re just another person on Earth with an opinion. Just say your opinion. Say the thing as if it’s true, because we know it’s just your opinion and. When you remove every unnecessary word, it makes you sound more assured, because most of these puffy phrases are softeners. We use them in everyday speech to be polite. Without them your sentences are so much stronger if you remove all these softeners. It works for me on so many levels. It’s putting less noise into the world. It’s making the sentences more assured. It makes people pay more attention to them. I love it all the way around.
J. Thorn
You’re very intentional in everything you do. That’s reflected in many ways.
Derek Sivers
In my writing, there are a lot of other things I do in life that are very unintentional. I consider writing to be putting potential noise out into the world. It’s our responsibility to denoise it as much as possible.
J. Thorn
You have a contrarian view of one of the modern precepts of living, which is this idea of family. So I’m putting this in air quotes. Who’s in your “family” and what do you consider to be your “family”?
Derek Sivers
If I take that literally, it’s really mainly two people my kid, age nine and my fiancee. Those are the two in-person people in my life. Then my four best friends are spread around the world. That’s it for my family. Let me just ask. How do you mean the question? Do you mean it metaphorically, or are you referring to my about page where I talk about family?
J. Thorn
I’m not sure. You strike me as someone who might choose who you bring close to you, I guess. Maybe metaphorically then.
Derek Sivers
On my website, there’s an “about me page” where I got weirdly personal. Usually everything I put out into the world, I do it for the sake of others. Otherwise I would just keep it in my private diary. I wrote an about page on my website. It’s a longer about me. I decided to be honest just to see what would happen. In there I admitted that I’m not into family. I’ve never felt any particular bond with my parents or just because somebody is a blood relative it doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t believe that blood is thicker than water or rather, I disagree with that saying because everybody’s got blood and we’re related to all of them, we’re all cousins. I don’t like that thing where people say I need to go back to my hometown because this is my mother or I need to do a special favor because this is my uncle. I think of myself as being equally connected to everybody in that blood sense. I wasn’t sure if you were referring to that, my family of choice. Is this very tiny unit of my kid and my fiancee. Then four friends that are remote around the world, that’s my core family of choice. I wasn’t sure if you meant metaphorically. Like, who are your peers? What group are you in? An interesting thing that happened too when you said earlier that I didn’t consider myself a writer. I still considered myself a programmer, an entrepreneur, until I realized that all of my heroes are authors. I found that telling to where I’m heading. I think this is where I want to be. If those are my heroes, that’s where I want to be. It can be telling for all of us to ask yourself, who are my heroes? Know that what that’s telling you is that’s where you want to be.
J. Thorn
Wonderful. I have one more question for you that can kind of bring our conversation to a close. No right or wrong answer here, I’m looking out the landscape as an author and there’s all kind of things happening technologically. There’s blockchain and NFTs and there’s consolidation of New York publishing. There’s a lot happening. Do you ever look at that and conjecture or think where it might be going, or are you just sort of keeping your head down and and journaling and doing your writing and worrying about it later or not?
Derek Sivers
I’ve always appreciated the people that did timeless things. Driven from their own intrinsic motivation instead of just reacting to the world’s situation. Being proactive instead of reactive. NFTs, I think it’s useful to understand what they really are. Get to the core of it, understand what Etherium is and does, how the smart contracts make an NFT and a unique data item and what that means. Then think proactively how you want to do things in your ideal situation. A lot of my thought processes start out with this idea of, well in a perfect world, how would it be? Or all other things being equal, what do I do? It’s getting to the core of how you would like things to be and doing it your way instead of trying to imitate others or doing things because others are doing them. Being proactive instead of reactive. Even with our books. After I published my books, at first I assumed it was a given that I would put them on Amazon. But every time I was about to sign it up, I felt icky about that. Like, I don’t want to put things on Amazon. You know what? Fuck them.
Derek Sivers
Why did the world of independent distribution turn into this world of just kissing Amazon’s ass. The indie music scene in 1997, eight, nine, when I started CD Baby had this incredible power of people realizing that thanks to mp3s and the internet, they don’t need to sign their life away to a major record label. Musicians were feeling this great power and independence of being able to distribute their music directly to their fans. Independently through the internet and it just gave so much power to people and so much energy. Now here we are 20 years later, if you look at the world of independent distribution, especially for books, it’s just everybody talking about here’s another way to kiss Amazon’s ass, here’s another way to please Amazon, Here’s how to make Amazon happy. It reminds me of the pre-revolution world of 1997. It feels like that’s where we were at before people came in and busted up that monopoly of the major record labels. I know I could make more money doing it, but if I think of things in a perfect world, how I’d like it to be. I just want to sell my books directly. I believe decentralization is good, because it makes me happier, because I like the direct connection between my customers and me and knowing who they are. That one known customer makes me happier than 100 unknown customers. You have to ask yourself about your values and what matters to you. Think of that stuff from scratch. Sorry, I took quite a tangent. You were asking about if I try to predict where things are going? No, I don’t. I try to remain deliberately ignorant about where things are going and not care. And just think of what’s timeless and how I’d like to be.