Episode 235 - The Source Code of Storytelling with Rob Hart
April 23, 2024
"I think it's important to just get this idea out of your head of everything has to be done a certain way. Everyone's process is going to be uniquely their own. and it's going to look different from everyone else's. Everyone starts off from a place of copying. We want to know what everyone's rituals are because we need to find what works. The thing that I get worried about is when people take everything as like a rule. It's, oh, you write like this, I have to write like this. No, you have to write like you write." —Rob Hart
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Rob Hart discusses THE SOURCE CODE OF STORYTELLING, including the importance of making your readers laugh; getting rid of the rituals; doing a backwards editing pass; posing the villain as the hero of their own story; not counting out the Riders of Rohan; and writing an outline and throwing it out.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
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Rob Hart is the author of THE PARADOX HOTEL and THE WAREHOUSE. He also wrote the Ash McKenna crime series, the short story collection TAKE-OUT, the novella SCOTT FREE with James Patterson, and the comic book BLOOD OATH with Alex Segura. His next books, coming in 2024, are ASSASSINS ANONYMOUS, and DARK SPACE, the latter of which is co-written with Alex Segura.
Links
Rob's Links:
www.robwhart.com
https://www.instagram.com/robwhart1/
https://www.facebook.com/robwhart1
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
www.robwhart.com
https://www.instagram.com/robwhart1/
https://www.facebook.com/robwhart1
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Rob! Which of Rob’s tips most resonated with you, and how are you going to put his advice into practice?
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AI-generated Summary
In this episode of The Indy Author Podcast, Rob Hart covers various aspects of storytelling and writing techniques. Rob emphasizes the importance of humor in writing, even in serious stories, to create intimacy with characters and make dramatic moments land more impactfully. He discusses the utility of humor as a tool for building trust with the reader and making characters more relatable. Rob also touches on the need to avoid strict writing rituals to adapt to life's unpredictability, suggesting that flexibility in the writing process is crucial.
Rob advocates for editing novels backward to infuse fresh energy into endings and ensure they are as polished as the beginnings. He highlights the significance of villains being the protagonists of their own stories, arguing that depth, drive, and ambition make for compelling antagonists. Rob also mentions the power of the "come-from-behind save" in storytelling, which emphasizes community and support among characters.
Furthermore, Rob suggests writing outlines then discarding them to ensure only the most impactful elements remain in the narrative. This process helps in streamlining the story and avoiding unnecessary details. Lastly, Rob shares personal anecdotes and examples from popular culture to illustrate his points, providing a comprehensive overview of his approach to storytelling and writing.
Rob advocates for editing novels backward to infuse fresh energy into endings and ensure they are as polished as the beginnings. He highlights the significance of villains being the protagonists of their own stories, arguing that depth, drive, and ambition make for compelling antagonists. Rob also mentions the power of the "come-from-behind save" in storytelling, which emphasizes community and support among characters.
Furthermore, Rob suggests writing outlines then discarding them to ensure only the most impactful elements remain in the narrative. This process helps in streamlining the story and avoiding unnecessary details. Lastly, Rob shares personal anecdotes and examples from popular culture to illustrate his points, providing a comprehensive overview of his approach to storytelling and writing.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today my guest is Rob Hart. Hey Rob, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Rob: Hey, thanks so much for having me.
[00:00:07] Matty: I am happy to have you here.
Meet Rob Hart
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Rob Hart is the author of "The Paradox Hotel" and "The Warehouse." He also wrote the Ash McKenna Crime Series, the short story collection "Take Out," the novella "Scott Free" with James Patterson, and the comic book "Blood Oath" with Alex Segura.
His next books, which are coming out in 2024, are "Assassin's Anonymous" and "Dark Space," the latter of which is also co-written with Alex Segura.
The source code of storytelling
[00:00:33] Matty: And the topic of our conversation today is going to be the source code of storytelling. And this came from a wonderful presentation that Rob gave at the 2023 Writer's Digest conference that I attended. And I wrote down lots and lots of points he had made. And then when I got in touch with Rob, I said, "Rob, can you pick six of these points that you would like to talk about with my podcast listeners?" And he graciously did that. And so I'm just going to throw them out for the conversation and see where the conversation takes us.
Make your reader laugh
[00:00:59] Matty: So the first topic that I wanted to hit was "Make your reader laugh." Why should we make our reader laugh?
[00:01:07] Rob: I think that's so important to be able to inject humor into your work, even if you're writing something really serious. You don't have to take what you're writing and make it into a comedy, but the thing is when we can laugh with characters, we like them more.
This is something that I did with "Assassins Anonymous," which is coming out in June, and it's about the world's best hitman, who's like a John Wick-type character who gets into a support program for killers because he doesn't want to kill anyone anymore. And one of the earliest decisions I made with him was that I had to make him funny.
I had to make him really funny and really charming because he's going to do things later in the book that, if you don't love him, I'm going to lose you as a reader. So there needs to be that sort of intimacy and closeness to the character. And I think in a general sense, when an author or director can make us laugh along with the characters, it opens us up a little bit more and once we're a little bit more open and a little bit more vulnerable, that's when the really dramatic moments can hit, and they land like body blows.
And I think the master of this is James Gunn, the director who did the "Guardians of the Galaxy" movies, which are really goofy, silly, ridiculous, over-the-top movies, until you get to the end, until you get to those really resonant, emotional moments, and they just land so, so hard. Because we've spent all this time just falling in love with these characters because of how goofy and ridiculous they are.
[00:02:37] Matty: The example that often strikes me when I think about making people laugh where you wouldn't expect it is in "Pulp Fiction," when they shoot the guy in the back seat. It's been a long time since I've watched "Pulp Fiction," but "Pulp Fiction" is not the normal kind of movie I watch, and I had put it off for a long time because I figured it was probably not for me, but I got really engrossed in the movie and that moment came just like when I needed a break.
[00:03:15] Rob: Yeah, and that's the thing—it also works as a pressure release valve. Sometimes you need that. When things are really dark for a long time, you have to give your audience a break. You have to let them laugh and decompress a little. Because if you're hitting them with the same tone over and over again, it becomes too much.
[00:03:33] Matty: Yeah, I like the idea of making the reader laugh because it helps them trust you. That's a different perspective than I'm used to hearing. Can you talk a bit about how humor can build trust with your reader?
[00:03:45] Rob: Yeah, so this is something I go back to a lot. Chuck Palahniuk, the author of "Fight Club," talks about establishing authority. There are two ways to establish authority: the head method and the heart method. The head method is demonstrating knowledge and technical proficiency. For example, when writing an assassin character, showing him being good at his job or how brilliant he can be in a stressful situation—that's the head method. The heart method is about being vulnerable and honest with your reader. I think a lot of humor comes from honesty and vulnerability. When we lean into that heart method, it's another access point to remind us that our characters are just like us—they are regular people. That's what we aim to write. And once we establish that trust, you can really take the reader anywhere.
[00:04:39] Matty: I find it interesting, I'm trying to decide if this is the same example or the opposite, that when you have a cast of characters, and one is kind of goofy and explicitly there to make the reader laugh, and then you show something different than the humorous side, like a deeper or seemingly contradictory side, it builds trust because the reader sees that you're not using stereotypes or caricatures and are willing to explore the depths of your characters beyond their ostensible function.
[00:05:22] Rob: That's 100 percent true. That's authority from an unexpected source, which I really love, and I think it can be used incredibly well. One of my favorite jokes of all time on "The Simpsons" is when the family is going to Japan and Homer is upset. Marge says, "You should be happy about going to Japan; you liked 'Rashomon,'" and Homer responds, "That's not how I remember it."
If you've seen "Rashomon," it's about perspective and memory, so it's a very clever joke. But it's also Homer Simpson, the world's most famous idiot, making a fairly clever reference to a Kurosawa movie, which is unexpected from his character. And that's why that joke lands so hard for me—because it's a dumb character referring to one of the greatest movies ever made in a way you wouldn't expect him to understand.
[00:06:48] Matty: Yeah, those are my favorite characters—when they're going along and you have expectations of them, then they do something unexpected. It's the kind of surprising yet inevitable twist. You can't just drop them into suddenly becoming a movie critic, but I like your example as well.
Get rid of the rituals
[00:07:07] Matty: Moving on to the second of the great points you made in your presentation, another point is to get rid of the rituals. This is kind of surprising because I think a lot of people talk about how they always have to have their cup of coffee and always have to be sitting at this desk. Why do you recommend against rituals?
[00:07:23] Rob: I think rituals can be really self-limiting in the sense that life doesn't always allow for ritual. I had this idea in my head, you know, back when I was a little baby writer, that I needed to only write at night, and only if I had a glass of wine, and only if there was a certain type of music playing. Sometimes it was like getting all those things to line up was really difficult.
And the thing that I learned from being a parent was that you write when you can. Because your schedule is not your own anymore, your time is not your own anymore. There was a period when my daughter was in her first year. I would know that when she went down for her afternoon nap, I had an hour and a half.
And I've got it now, and I've got to use it. Or even now, on days when she's with me and I don't want to write, I just want to hang out with her and do dumb stuff. And then on the days that she's not with me, I need to really knuckle down and focus on what I'm doing.
So, you know, rules and rituals scare me because if you're not adhering to those rules and rituals, it's easy to feel like, "Oh, this isn't going to work." I've always thought it's better to just say the work gets done or it doesn't, and that's really the only thing you need to focus on.
[00:08:35] Matty: Of all the authors I've spoken with, I think having a child is the best example of the benefit of not being tied to rituals, and their duration of allocated writing time suspiciously matches up with their child's nap duration at that moment.
Nothing has to be done a certain way
[00:08:51] Rob: Yeah, and I think it's important to just get this idea out of your head that everything has to be done a certain way. Everyone's process is going to be uniquely their own. And that's really what you spend a lot of time on, even like the first couple of years of me trying to learn how to do this was me trying to figure out the way that I need to do this, you know, and it's going to look different for everyone else.
[00:09:04] Matty: And I think we all, you know, start off from a place of copying. We want to know what everyone's rituals are because we're looking for what works. The thing that worries me is when people take everything as a rule. It's like, "Oh, you write like this, so I have to write like this."
And it's not like that. You have to write the way you write. You don't have to write like I write because the way I write might be weird. You know, I have a buddy, Jordan, who pound for pound is, I think, one of the best novelists working today. Jordan Harper, his last book was called "Everybody Knows." His book "She Rides Shotgun" is going to be a movie soon.
He's unbelievable. He writes his book, writes all his favorite scenes out of order, and then stitches them together. That's insane to me. It's like, I, how? That is not something that I could ever understand or recommend to anyone, and yet he's amazing, you know?
But that's his process, and that's okay. It looks different for him, and I'm happy for him, but if someone told me the only way I could write is if I wrote like that, I don't know if I can write.
[00:10:12] Matty: I think that's an extension of exactly what you're saying. If you decide you can only write between 8 and 10 in a dark room with a glass of wine, then it's not only a problem when you run out of wine or your daughter wants to play with you at 8, but being that reliant on ritual probably makes people overreliant on whatever approach they're using at the moment.
So, let's say outlining everything in a Five act structure is what's working for you, and if you allow yourself to get into a rut in your writing schedule, you might also get into a rut, maybe the five-act structure stops serving you, but you don't notice because it's just what you do, and that getting into a rut can link into a lot of other areas of your writer life.
[00:10:56] Rob: Exactly. And that's the thing, it's such a hard thing to do. It's hard to say, "I'm gonna sit down for several hours today and look at a word document and make up funny little people and then make them get into trouble." Because not only is the act itself really difficult, but then the fact that you're gonna do it for months, and then edit it for months, and it may turn out to be all for nothing.
There's no guarantee that it's even going to work. It is this incredible leap of faith. That somehow, someway, the whole thing is going to work out, and I still start off novels like, "I don't know how to write a novel, I don't know how to do this, I can't finish this, what am I doing?"
I've written eight, and I still don't always believe that I have the ability to write a novel. But that's the thing; I'm always trying to remove impediments, not add them. And I think as you add impediments, it just makes it that much harder.
[00:11:51] Matty: Yeah, I never know whether it's heartening or disheartening for baby authors to hear that even very experienced authors like yourself still face that. I guess it's good to know you have company.
[00:12:03] Rob: I mean, I would hope that it's encouraging, just to luxuriate in this feeling, because it's never going to get better. In fact, it's probably going to...
[00:12:11] Matty: Because god forbid you do a good job, then someone's going to expect you to do it again.
Yes. These things unto themselves could be whole podcast episode discussions, plumbing the depths of these kinds of questions.
Edit Backwards
[00:12:24] Matty: The third point you talked about in your source code of storytelling was doing a backwards editorial pass. So talk a little bit about that.
[00:12:33] Rob: Yeah, that's one of my favorite things to do, and that's one of those things where, like I always say, I keep on saying it, nothing I say is a rule, but this is one of those things that I say to people, and I think it's resonated with a lot of people that I've shared it with, is that I always edit my books backwards at least once.
Usually, as I'm nearing the end, when I know that I'm almost done, I will go in and start with the last chapter and then just start working my way forward to the beginning, and it does a couple of things. It helps to see the book out of order, because sometimes you might clock things about the flow or the narrative structure that weren't really working, but more importantly what I think it does is it infuses a lot of fresh energy into the ending.
Because my experience as a freelance editor has been that I've seen people have given me books that I see, so much time and so much effort has gone into the beginning of the story, and then you can tell by the end, they were just like, "I just want to be done. I am finished." You know, and things kind of peter out, and you lose some of that energy.
You get that "I want to be done" energy. And I think taking that sort of like beginning energy and really letting it sit in the ending is something that could be really useful. And it's always useful for me because whenever I do it, I sit there with my last chapter and I'm like, "Man, looking at it just out of sequence with a fresh set of eyes."
I'm like, "Yeah, I get it. I get it. This is not working. And this is why—it's because I want it to be done."
[00:13:54] Matty: Have you ever written the last chapter first?
[00:13:58] Rob: Oh God, no. I very much write in linear sequence and that's the best way for me. I always know, mostly what my ending is going to be, if not in specifics, then at least in spirit. You know, I don't know that I could ever write a story without understanding where I was going because if I was just sort of like writing, then I would write forever and would never stop.
But yeah, it's usually my endings, I feel like, are pretty close to where they always.
[00:14:28] Matty: You had talked about the, sometimes the energy has become, "I just want to get this done" energy. Are there red flags you look out for when you're reading that ending, or tips you have for people if they try this out and they experience that but they don't know how to fix it?
[00:14:46] Rob: That's a good question. I always try to take each section that I'm working on, whether it be a chapter or a larger section of the book, and try to view it completely in isolation, almost like it's its own little island, you know? I'm still considering the rest of the story and how it plays out, but I'm most focused on what this one particular scene means, what needs to happen here, am I accomplishing that, am I getting across the point that I want to make, are the characters doing what they need to do. It's isolation, it's trying to view these things in isolation, almost like you would consider an episodic season of television.
Thank you. Where, you know, you've got an episode that keys into a broader story, but it's still telling a very specific narrative that's confined to 30 to 45 minutes or whatever. And when I think of it in terms like that, it's easier to kind of look at that and say, "Okay, the only thing that matters right now is this scene. These two characters in this cafe having this conversation. Am I accomplishing what I set out to accomplish when I put it here in the first place?"
[00:15:51] Matty: Yeah, I really like that. I really like the analogy of having it be like assessing a TV series. That's very cool.
The villain as the protagonist
[00:15:57] Matty: So I'm going to move on to the fourth point you made that I called out, which is, pose the villain as the protagonist. And I don't know if this is what you intended there, but the way I saw this play out, and if listeners are bored with hearing this story, just fast forward like one minute.
So I had to write a novella between my third and fourth Lizzie Ballard thriller, because the chronology was such that whatever happened to Lizzie Ballard, the protagonist, could happen days, weeks, even months after the end of book three. But the thing that was going to happen to the antagonist next was going to happen literally seconds after the end of book three, and I kind of left it hanging there because it's a cliffhanger, it's a series I wanted people to read on, and then when I started working on book four I realized that accommodating this disconnect in the chronologies meant that like the first five chapters of the fourth book were about the antagonist, which isn't really what I wanted so I ended up writing a novella.
And I'm really kind of perplexed about how to market it because it's definitely for the people who read book three, they're getting on to book four, and they, they need that bridge. And it's for me because I love my antagonist. And certainly, in that book, the antagonist of book three is the protagonist of the novella.
So that's the example I came to this tip with. And can you talk about what you intended for people to take from that tip?
[00:17:17] Rob: Sure, sure. That's a really cool idea that you did that. I really dig that. Yeah, I mean, it's always important to remember that no one wakes up and says, "I'm going to do evil today." You know, even people that we might, as a larger society, perceive as bad, a lot of them wake up and say, "I'm gonna do the thing that is best for me today, or I'm going to do the thing that only I can do because only I am right and everyone else is wrong."
The villain is the hero of their own story
[00:17:41] Rob: This idea of sort of like pure evil that does evil for its own sake is sort of... You know, it's more of, I don't want to say it's kind of childish, but it's you know, this idea of, "Oh, there's a devil and the devil just does evil." That's not what a real villain is.
A real villain is someone who has depth and drive and reason and ambition. They're just like your protagonists. They're just on the other side of the coin. Yeah. You know, I tend to use Marvel movies a lot when I'm using examples, because a lot of people have seen them, so it's really easy to do it.
But I think Thanos, in the Infinity War movies, is the most perfect example. Here's a guy who looks at the universe and says, "We're struggling to feed people, we're running out of resources. So I'm gonna find this magical device that's gonna wipe out half of humanity. I mean, half of life in the entire universe."
And then there's going to be more resources to go around, which, you know, on one hand seems dumb, right? Because why not make more resources if you've got a magic device that will do literally anything? But it actually makes sense for his character, because Thanos is a warrior, that's what he does.
He was literally born in blood and has never known anything but strife and conflict and battle. So of course, a character like that, the first thing he's going to go to is the bloody option. Not the compassionate option. So, it was a decision that was informed by his character, and the thing that Infinity War did so well is you saw that weight that he was carrying.
[00:19:44] Matty: Yeah, one of my favorite scenes to write in that novella was a scene where the antagonist of the first three books, whose name is Louise, she finds one of the other good guy characters tied up, and he's been tied up for a long time, and he's been injured, so she helps dress his wounds, and she unties him so he can use the restroom, and then she ties him back up again, and he asks, "Well, why did you do that?"
And she says, "Well, because it doesn't serve any purpose not to do it," and I thought, I enjoyed that as an encapsulation of her reasoning, because she does the bad things she does because she thinks it's like killing half the people in the galaxy. It's the way she knows, it's the tool in her toolbox that she knows how to deploy to pursue what she sees as unselfish ends.
But then she doesn't do things to be intentionally cruel. You know, she's a good person when it serves her and needs to be a good person. She's a bad person when it serves her and needs to be a bad person. And I do wish I could just sit with readers as they read that novella and have them have a little dial that says, "I like her more, I like her less," and see if it hits where I expect it to.
Have you ever had that experience of trying to understand how a reader is reacting to a character that's in that sort of tricky moral area?
[00:20:59] Rob: You know, I've had people make straight comments to me where they'll say, "Oh, I hate that this character did this," or "Oh, I love that this character did this." One of my favorite insights I ever got was from my agent's assistant when he first read "The Warehouse," because "The Warehouse" is about a company that's basically Amazon that takes over the American economy, and so there are three characters in the book, and two are people who work in one of these warehouse facilities, and one is the CEO. So he's like a trillionaire Jeff Bezos type, super evil, super not cool.
But he starts off, because again, he's the hero of the story, he's the hero of his story. You know, he's the one who came in and like saved the planet by, you know, reducing commute times because he built live-work facilities and because he, you know, took all these sort of outdated models and updated them, but in a way that just happened to make him richer. And I patterned him after Sam Walton, who founded Walmart, because, you know, that guy's autobiography is nefarious. This is a guy who did a lot of bad things, a lot, a lot of bad things that reshaped the economy for the worse, and he has such a kind and warm voice, and he's always talking about family, family, family, and it's like, "Man, your company used to lock workers in the store at night, that's not how you treat your family."
And, you know, anyway, the main character of Cloud, Gibson Wells, who runs this company, you know, he starts off like that as like this sort of like down-home Arkansas guy that you kind of want to love. And my agent's assistant was like, "Oh man, I was hoping he would be good."
[00:23:01] Matty: Yeah, those characters are super fun to write and they're super fun to read. I love reading those characters in other people's books.
The come-from-behind save
[00:23:08] Matty: So the fifth point that we called out here was, don't count out the Riders of Rohan. What's behind that?
[00:23:13] Rob: That's one of my favorite ones. In the "Lord of the Rings" movies, and "The Two Towers", when they're at Helm's Deep, and it's like, oh, they're screwed, and then the Riders of Rohan show up with Gandalf at the top of the hill, and then they ride down, and they kill all the orcs. And that does a couple of things that are really important. First, you do have a real visceral feeling that they're gonna lose at that point.
Because they are completely outnumbered, they're completely screwed, and they basically say to each other "We're dead. We're just gonna go down fighting." So right there you're creating a good amount of drama, and then when you have that come-from-behind save, I think that's really important because it just, it kind of reminds us that we're not alone, and that we can get help if we ask for it, and that people will back us up if we need them to.
It gives us a greater sense of community, which is what I think we read books for. We read them because we don't want to feel so alone, and that's why I think it's always such a powerful moment, and it doesn't need to be this big, sweeping battle scene for it to be a come-from-behind save. Like, I call it the Riders of Rohan moment just because it's funny, but it's really that come-from-behind save that you need.
And I've got in "Paradox Hotel", like I've got this little tiny scene where this one character just, you know, gives this other character a little nudge. And it's like, "I got you." And that's it. That's exactly what that is. It's the same thing, just on a much, much smaller scale. And it's because I think we kind of crave those moments of not feeling alone.
And that's why those moments are so, so powerful. And when they are done well, they are incredibly memorable. And again, that's why I go to "The Two Towers", because that is just, I mean, out of all three movies, that might be my favorite scene.
[00:24:53] Matty: Yeah, the scene that reminds me of, I think it's in "Band of Brothers", but there's a scene where they're in the trenches, and you know, the Germans are coming and then the tanks come over the hill, you know, right when they're just about to be overrun, same exact kind of thing, you get all chipped up watching that happen.
But yeah, I think it's trickier when you're trying to do it on that more subtle, non-majestic level, like you were describing, just that little moment, not people sweeping over a hill.
[00:25:23] Rob: Yeah, it's definitely a little bit more challenging because you're sort of losing that bombast, and that big sort of frenzy. But I think that if you can find those moments when characters can just step up for each other and show support for each other, I think those always really resonate with people.
Write an outline, then throw it out
[00:25:43] Matty: So we're going to move on to the sixth of the points that I pulled out of your presentation, which was write an outline and then throw it out.
[00:25:52] Rob: I was explaining this to someone recently, so this is going back to what I said about adapting things for your own process. I have this buddy, John Gingrich, who's a brilliant short story writer. And he will write a short story, and then he'll delete it.
And then a couple of days later, he'll rewrite it from memory, and to me, that's insane. I'm never gonna do that with a short story, because it's like nah, I can't delete that many words. But the reason he does it is kind of brilliant. He's like, "You know, I always remember all the good stuff. I always forget all the bad stuff, and the time in between, you know, things that I've been trying to figure out will crystallize and solidify."
And I thought there was a lot of wisdom to that. So I started doing that with my outlines, because I really like to have a pretty solid outline going into a book. It helps me sort of move through it a little bit more quickly. And I found that, you know, that first outline is kind of a mess. It's like there are parts there that I know are important, but there's a lot of just like fat there that's not really resonating for the story or there are parts that are missing or there are connections that are not making sense.
It's like I know I've got characters here and I gotta get them there and I have no idea how I'm gonna do it, so I'll just look at it and get mad and I'll delete it. And then a couple of days later I will sit down and I'll do it again and I realized as I was doing this that it would get more streamlined and it would make more sense.
Because I had had time to think about it. And it's true, like, the really good stuff you don't forget about. It's always gonna be there in your head. It's just the sort of, the fuzzier stuff starts to fall away. So, I'll do it, two, three, four times, and find that by the fourth time, the outline actually looks pretty solid.
And I think it serves a dual purpose, it helps you to not be so precious about the words. Because, again, they're gonna be there, they're inside you, you have them all. There's only so many words we know them all, we just have to put them in the right order. And so, if we can sort of come to this place of understanding that, like, hey, you know, just because I put it down on the page doesn't mean that I need to keep it.
It's a good and it's a healthy thing, you know, because I've certainly been at points where I've written something and I'm like, "Man, I love this so much, I don't want to delete it, and I have to delete it, I know I have to delete it." It's that kill your darlings thing, it's you know, just because you love something doesn't mean it works for the story. And I think this is an exercise that kind of helps make that whole process a little bit easier.
[00:28:12] Matty: I can imagine that a, like training wheels version of this, if actually deleting the word sounds alarming to people as it does to me. And I think in part because I'm a person who, like actually typing out the words is kind of the last part of the process for me. Like I'm mulling it over in my head.
And so I feel like I'm doing some of that deletion mentally. But I think a baby step could be, don't necessarily feel like if you're at the grocery store or out walking your dog or just out and about and you have an idea, you necessarily have to grab it in your note-taking app, because those are the things that I find that, I might have seven seemingly brilliant ideas while I'm walking the dog, and when I get home I've forgotten five of them.
But there's a reason I've forgotten five of them, and the two that are left are the ones that I can work on. So that could be like step one if people are kind of intrigued, but they're a little scared about the actual deletion of words idea.
[00:29:00] Rob: I like that, I like that, because I do that all the time, where I have Google Docs on the home screen of my phone, and I have a different file for everything that I'm working on. And then I will do that all the time. I'll just pick up my phone and start jotting down notes on something because something struck me.
But yeah, it's, and then sometimes I look back at them and I'm like, half of this is nonsense. I didn't need to write this down. Or like, my favorite is when I take a note and I'm like, oh, I should do this in the story, and I go back to the story and it's already there. And I'm like, man, writing books This whole process is, you do it in, a fugue state. It's ridiculous.
[00:29:34] Matty: Yeah, sometimes people will ask me if I get ideas in the middle of the night, and if I do, if I write them down and I'm like, oh no, no, that would be awful. I wouldn't want to see the results of what I would write down if I captured the things I thought about in the middle of the night.
[00:29:47] Rob: Every now and again, every now and again I get a good one. I was watching Kung Fu Panda with my daughter the other day, and there was something in the story of that movie that, kind of, crystallized a point for me. I'm writing the Assassin's Anonymous sequel now. and it was, like, an idea that I sort of, have been circling around, and I just needed it to be crystallized for me.
And watching Kung Fu Panda, I was like, Oh. Oh. That's what I'm supposed to do, so I'm just sitting there on the couch with her, just taking down notes.
[00:30:13] Matty: Well, I love the idea of wrapping up our conversation at the point where we have now gone from Rashomon to Kung Fu Panda.
[00:30:20] Rob: There we go. Can I contain multiple things?
[00:30:23] Matty: So Rob, thank you so much. I enjoyed your presentation at Writer's Digest so much, and I appreciate you encapsulating, six of your ideas here for the podcast listeners. So please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
[00:30:34] Rob: Sure, my website is robwhart. com, I am on, Instagram and threads at robwhart1. I still kinda use Twitter at robwhart, but mostly, for promo stuff, that's a dumpster fire of a site that I'm trying to get away from, but the website is always a good place to start.
[00:30:51] Matty: Thank you so much.
[00:30:53] Rob: Alright, thank you for having me, I appreciate it.
[00:00:05] Rob: Hey, thanks so much for having me.
[00:00:07] Matty: I am happy to have you here.
Meet Rob Hart
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Rob Hart is the author of "The Paradox Hotel" and "The Warehouse." He also wrote the Ash McKenna Crime Series, the short story collection "Take Out," the novella "Scott Free" with James Patterson, and the comic book "Blood Oath" with Alex Segura.
His next books, which are coming out in 2024, are "Assassin's Anonymous" and "Dark Space," the latter of which is also co-written with Alex Segura.
The source code of storytelling
[00:00:33] Matty: And the topic of our conversation today is going to be the source code of storytelling. And this came from a wonderful presentation that Rob gave at the 2023 Writer's Digest conference that I attended. And I wrote down lots and lots of points he had made. And then when I got in touch with Rob, I said, "Rob, can you pick six of these points that you would like to talk about with my podcast listeners?" And he graciously did that. And so I'm just going to throw them out for the conversation and see where the conversation takes us.
Make your reader laugh
[00:00:59] Matty: So the first topic that I wanted to hit was "Make your reader laugh." Why should we make our reader laugh?
[00:01:07] Rob: I think that's so important to be able to inject humor into your work, even if you're writing something really serious. You don't have to take what you're writing and make it into a comedy, but the thing is when we can laugh with characters, we like them more.
This is something that I did with "Assassins Anonymous," which is coming out in June, and it's about the world's best hitman, who's like a John Wick-type character who gets into a support program for killers because he doesn't want to kill anyone anymore. And one of the earliest decisions I made with him was that I had to make him funny.
I had to make him really funny and really charming because he's going to do things later in the book that, if you don't love him, I'm going to lose you as a reader. So there needs to be that sort of intimacy and closeness to the character. And I think in a general sense, when an author or director can make us laugh along with the characters, it opens us up a little bit more and once we're a little bit more open and a little bit more vulnerable, that's when the really dramatic moments can hit, and they land like body blows.
And I think the master of this is James Gunn, the director who did the "Guardians of the Galaxy" movies, which are really goofy, silly, ridiculous, over-the-top movies, until you get to the end, until you get to those really resonant, emotional moments, and they just land so, so hard. Because we've spent all this time just falling in love with these characters because of how goofy and ridiculous they are.
[00:02:37] Matty: The example that often strikes me when I think about making people laugh where you wouldn't expect it is in "Pulp Fiction," when they shoot the guy in the back seat. It's been a long time since I've watched "Pulp Fiction," but "Pulp Fiction" is not the normal kind of movie I watch, and I had put it off for a long time because I figured it was probably not for me, but I got really engrossed in the movie and that moment came just like when I needed a break.
[00:03:15] Rob: Yeah, and that's the thing—it also works as a pressure release valve. Sometimes you need that. When things are really dark for a long time, you have to give your audience a break. You have to let them laugh and decompress a little. Because if you're hitting them with the same tone over and over again, it becomes too much.
[00:03:33] Matty: Yeah, I like the idea of making the reader laugh because it helps them trust you. That's a different perspective than I'm used to hearing. Can you talk a bit about how humor can build trust with your reader?
[00:03:45] Rob: Yeah, so this is something I go back to a lot. Chuck Palahniuk, the author of "Fight Club," talks about establishing authority. There are two ways to establish authority: the head method and the heart method. The head method is demonstrating knowledge and technical proficiency. For example, when writing an assassin character, showing him being good at his job or how brilliant he can be in a stressful situation—that's the head method. The heart method is about being vulnerable and honest with your reader. I think a lot of humor comes from honesty and vulnerability. When we lean into that heart method, it's another access point to remind us that our characters are just like us—they are regular people. That's what we aim to write. And once we establish that trust, you can really take the reader anywhere.
[00:04:39] Matty: I find it interesting, I'm trying to decide if this is the same example or the opposite, that when you have a cast of characters, and one is kind of goofy and explicitly there to make the reader laugh, and then you show something different than the humorous side, like a deeper or seemingly contradictory side, it builds trust because the reader sees that you're not using stereotypes or caricatures and are willing to explore the depths of your characters beyond their ostensible function.
[00:05:22] Rob: That's 100 percent true. That's authority from an unexpected source, which I really love, and I think it can be used incredibly well. One of my favorite jokes of all time on "The Simpsons" is when the family is going to Japan and Homer is upset. Marge says, "You should be happy about going to Japan; you liked 'Rashomon,'" and Homer responds, "That's not how I remember it."
If you've seen "Rashomon," it's about perspective and memory, so it's a very clever joke. But it's also Homer Simpson, the world's most famous idiot, making a fairly clever reference to a Kurosawa movie, which is unexpected from his character. And that's why that joke lands so hard for me—because it's a dumb character referring to one of the greatest movies ever made in a way you wouldn't expect him to understand.
[00:06:48] Matty: Yeah, those are my favorite characters—when they're going along and you have expectations of them, then they do something unexpected. It's the kind of surprising yet inevitable twist. You can't just drop them into suddenly becoming a movie critic, but I like your example as well.
Get rid of the rituals
[00:07:07] Matty: Moving on to the second of the great points you made in your presentation, another point is to get rid of the rituals. This is kind of surprising because I think a lot of people talk about how they always have to have their cup of coffee and always have to be sitting at this desk. Why do you recommend against rituals?
[00:07:23] Rob: I think rituals can be really self-limiting in the sense that life doesn't always allow for ritual. I had this idea in my head, you know, back when I was a little baby writer, that I needed to only write at night, and only if I had a glass of wine, and only if there was a certain type of music playing. Sometimes it was like getting all those things to line up was really difficult.
And the thing that I learned from being a parent was that you write when you can. Because your schedule is not your own anymore, your time is not your own anymore. There was a period when my daughter was in her first year. I would know that when she went down for her afternoon nap, I had an hour and a half.
And I've got it now, and I've got to use it. Or even now, on days when she's with me and I don't want to write, I just want to hang out with her and do dumb stuff. And then on the days that she's not with me, I need to really knuckle down and focus on what I'm doing.
So, you know, rules and rituals scare me because if you're not adhering to those rules and rituals, it's easy to feel like, "Oh, this isn't going to work." I've always thought it's better to just say the work gets done or it doesn't, and that's really the only thing you need to focus on.
[00:08:35] Matty: Of all the authors I've spoken with, I think having a child is the best example of the benefit of not being tied to rituals, and their duration of allocated writing time suspiciously matches up with their child's nap duration at that moment.
Nothing has to be done a certain way
[00:08:51] Rob: Yeah, and I think it's important to just get this idea out of your head that everything has to be done a certain way. Everyone's process is going to be uniquely their own. And that's really what you spend a lot of time on, even like the first couple of years of me trying to learn how to do this was me trying to figure out the way that I need to do this, you know, and it's going to look different for everyone else.
[00:09:04] Matty: And I think we all, you know, start off from a place of copying. We want to know what everyone's rituals are because we're looking for what works. The thing that worries me is when people take everything as a rule. It's like, "Oh, you write like this, so I have to write like this."
And it's not like that. You have to write the way you write. You don't have to write like I write because the way I write might be weird. You know, I have a buddy, Jordan, who pound for pound is, I think, one of the best novelists working today. Jordan Harper, his last book was called "Everybody Knows." His book "She Rides Shotgun" is going to be a movie soon.
He's unbelievable. He writes his book, writes all his favorite scenes out of order, and then stitches them together. That's insane to me. It's like, I, how? That is not something that I could ever understand or recommend to anyone, and yet he's amazing, you know?
But that's his process, and that's okay. It looks different for him, and I'm happy for him, but if someone told me the only way I could write is if I wrote like that, I don't know if I can write.
[00:10:12] Matty: I think that's an extension of exactly what you're saying. If you decide you can only write between 8 and 10 in a dark room with a glass of wine, then it's not only a problem when you run out of wine or your daughter wants to play with you at 8, but being that reliant on ritual probably makes people overreliant on whatever approach they're using at the moment.
So, let's say outlining everything in a Five act structure is what's working for you, and if you allow yourself to get into a rut in your writing schedule, you might also get into a rut, maybe the five-act structure stops serving you, but you don't notice because it's just what you do, and that getting into a rut can link into a lot of other areas of your writer life.
[00:10:56] Rob: Exactly. And that's the thing, it's such a hard thing to do. It's hard to say, "I'm gonna sit down for several hours today and look at a word document and make up funny little people and then make them get into trouble." Because not only is the act itself really difficult, but then the fact that you're gonna do it for months, and then edit it for months, and it may turn out to be all for nothing.
There's no guarantee that it's even going to work. It is this incredible leap of faith. That somehow, someway, the whole thing is going to work out, and I still start off novels like, "I don't know how to write a novel, I don't know how to do this, I can't finish this, what am I doing?"
I've written eight, and I still don't always believe that I have the ability to write a novel. But that's the thing; I'm always trying to remove impediments, not add them. And I think as you add impediments, it just makes it that much harder.
[00:11:51] Matty: Yeah, I never know whether it's heartening or disheartening for baby authors to hear that even very experienced authors like yourself still face that. I guess it's good to know you have company.
[00:12:03] Rob: I mean, I would hope that it's encouraging, just to luxuriate in this feeling, because it's never going to get better. In fact, it's probably going to...
[00:12:11] Matty: Because god forbid you do a good job, then someone's going to expect you to do it again.
Yes. These things unto themselves could be whole podcast episode discussions, plumbing the depths of these kinds of questions.
Edit Backwards
[00:12:24] Matty: The third point you talked about in your source code of storytelling was doing a backwards editorial pass. So talk a little bit about that.
[00:12:33] Rob: Yeah, that's one of my favorite things to do, and that's one of those things where, like I always say, I keep on saying it, nothing I say is a rule, but this is one of those things that I say to people, and I think it's resonated with a lot of people that I've shared it with, is that I always edit my books backwards at least once.
Usually, as I'm nearing the end, when I know that I'm almost done, I will go in and start with the last chapter and then just start working my way forward to the beginning, and it does a couple of things. It helps to see the book out of order, because sometimes you might clock things about the flow or the narrative structure that weren't really working, but more importantly what I think it does is it infuses a lot of fresh energy into the ending.
Because my experience as a freelance editor has been that I've seen people have given me books that I see, so much time and so much effort has gone into the beginning of the story, and then you can tell by the end, they were just like, "I just want to be done. I am finished." You know, and things kind of peter out, and you lose some of that energy.
You get that "I want to be done" energy. And I think taking that sort of like beginning energy and really letting it sit in the ending is something that could be really useful. And it's always useful for me because whenever I do it, I sit there with my last chapter and I'm like, "Man, looking at it just out of sequence with a fresh set of eyes."
I'm like, "Yeah, I get it. I get it. This is not working. And this is why—it's because I want it to be done."
[00:13:54] Matty: Have you ever written the last chapter first?
[00:13:58] Rob: Oh God, no. I very much write in linear sequence and that's the best way for me. I always know, mostly what my ending is going to be, if not in specifics, then at least in spirit. You know, I don't know that I could ever write a story without understanding where I was going because if I was just sort of like writing, then I would write forever and would never stop.
But yeah, it's usually my endings, I feel like, are pretty close to where they always.
[00:14:28] Matty: You had talked about the, sometimes the energy has become, "I just want to get this done" energy. Are there red flags you look out for when you're reading that ending, or tips you have for people if they try this out and they experience that but they don't know how to fix it?
[00:14:46] Rob: That's a good question. I always try to take each section that I'm working on, whether it be a chapter or a larger section of the book, and try to view it completely in isolation, almost like it's its own little island, you know? I'm still considering the rest of the story and how it plays out, but I'm most focused on what this one particular scene means, what needs to happen here, am I accomplishing that, am I getting across the point that I want to make, are the characters doing what they need to do. It's isolation, it's trying to view these things in isolation, almost like you would consider an episodic season of television.
Thank you. Where, you know, you've got an episode that keys into a broader story, but it's still telling a very specific narrative that's confined to 30 to 45 minutes or whatever. And when I think of it in terms like that, it's easier to kind of look at that and say, "Okay, the only thing that matters right now is this scene. These two characters in this cafe having this conversation. Am I accomplishing what I set out to accomplish when I put it here in the first place?"
[00:15:51] Matty: Yeah, I really like that. I really like the analogy of having it be like assessing a TV series. That's very cool.
The villain as the protagonist
[00:15:57] Matty: So I'm going to move on to the fourth point you made that I called out, which is, pose the villain as the protagonist. And I don't know if this is what you intended there, but the way I saw this play out, and if listeners are bored with hearing this story, just fast forward like one minute.
So I had to write a novella between my third and fourth Lizzie Ballard thriller, because the chronology was such that whatever happened to Lizzie Ballard, the protagonist, could happen days, weeks, even months after the end of book three. But the thing that was going to happen to the antagonist next was going to happen literally seconds after the end of book three, and I kind of left it hanging there because it's a cliffhanger, it's a series I wanted people to read on, and then when I started working on book four I realized that accommodating this disconnect in the chronologies meant that like the first five chapters of the fourth book were about the antagonist, which isn't really what I wanted so I ended up writing a novella.
And I'm really kind of perplexed about how to market it because it's definitely for the people who read book three, they're getting on to book four, and they, they need that bridge. And it's for me because I love my antagonist. And certainly, in that book, the antagonist of book three is the protagonist of the novella.
So that's the example I came to this tip with. And can you talk about what you intended for people to take from that tip?
[00:17:17] Rob: Sure, sure. That's a really cool idea that you did that. I really dig that. Yeah, I mean, it's always important to remember that no one wakes up and says, "I'm going to do evil today." You know, even people that we might, as a larger society, perceive as bad, a lot of them wake up and say, "I'm gonna do the thing that is best for me today, or I'm going to do the thing that only I can do because only I am right and everyone else is wrong."
The villain is the hero of their own story
[00:17:41] Rob: This idea of sort of like pure evil that does evil for its own sake is sort of... You know, it's more of, I don't want to say it's kind of childish, but it's you know, this idea of, "Oh, there's a devil and the devil just does evil." That's not what a real villain is.
A real villain is someone who has depth and drive and reason and ambition. They're just like your protagonists. They're just on the other side of the coin. Yeah. You know, I tend to use Marvel movies a lot when I'm using examples, because a lot of people have seen them, so it's really easy to do it.
But I think Thanos, in the Infinity War movies, is the most perfect example. Here's a guy who looks at the universe and says, "We're struggling to feed people, we're running out of resources. So I'm gonna find this magical device that's gonna wipe out half of humanity. I mean, half of life in the entire universe."
And then there's going to be more resources to go around, which, you know, on one hand seems dumb, right? Because why not make more resources if you've got a magic device that will do literally anything? But it actually makes sense for his character, because Thanos is a warrior, that's what he does.
He was literally born in blood and has never known anything but strife and conflict and battle. So of course, a character like that, the first thing he's going to go to is the bloody option. Not the compassionate option. So, it was a decision that was informed by his character, and the thing that Infinity War did so well is you saw that weight that he was carrying.
[00:19:44] Matty: Yeah, one of my favorite scenes to write in that novella was a scene where the antagonist of the first three books, whose name is Louise, she finds one of the other good guy characters tied up, and he's been tied up for a long time, and he's been injured, so she helps dress his wounds, and she unties him so he can use the restroom, and then she ties him back up again, and he asks, "Well, why did you do that?"
And she says, "Well, because it doesn't serve any purpose not to do it," and I thought, I enjoyed that as an encapsulation of her reasoning, because she does the bad things she does because she thinks it's like killing half the people in the galaxy. It's the way she knows, it's the tool in her toolbox that she knows how to deploy to pursue what she sees as unselfish ends.
But then she doesn't do things to be intentionally cruel. You know, she's a good person when it serves her and needs to be a good person. She's a bad person when it serves her and needs to be a bad person. And I do wish I could just sit with readers as they read that novella and have them have a little dial that says, "I like her more, I like her less," and see if it hits where I expect it to.
Have you ever had that experience of trying to understand how a reader is reacting to a character that's in that sort of tricky moral area?
[00:20:59] Rob: You know, I've had people make straight comments to me where they'll say, "Oh, I hate that this character did this," or "Oh, I love that this character did this." One of my favorite insights I ever got was from my agent's assistant when he first read "The Warehouse," because "The Warehouse" is about a company that's basically Amazon that takes over the American economy, and so there are three characters in the book, and two are people who work in one of these warehouse facilities, and one is the CEO. So he's like a trillionaire Jeff Bezos type, super evil, super not cool.
But he starts off, because again, he's the hero of the story, he's the hero of his story. You know, he's the one who came in and like saved the planet by, you know, reducing commute times because he built live-work facilities and because he, you know, took all these sort of outdated models and updated them, but in a way that just happened to make him richer. And I patterned him after Sam Walton, who founded Walmart, because, you know, that guy's autobiography is nefarious. This is a guy who did a lot of bad things, a lot, a lot of bad things that reshaped the economy for the worse, and he has such a kind and warm voice, and he's always talking about family, family, family, and it's like, "Man, your company used to lock workers in the store at night, that's not how you treat your family."
And, you know, anyway, the main character of Cloud, Gibson Wells, who runs this company, you know, he starts off like that as like this sort of like down-home Arkansas guy that you kind of want to love. And my agent's assistant was like, "Oh man, I was hoping he would be good."
[00:23:01] Matty: Yeah, those characters are super fun to write and they're super fun to read. I love reading those characters in other people's books.
The come-from-behind save
[00:23:08] Matty: So the fifth point that we called out here was, don't count out the Riders of Rohan. What's behind that?
[00:23:13] Rob: That's one of my favorite ones. In the "Lord of the Rings" movies, and "The Two Towers", when they're at Helm's Deep, and it's like, oh, they're screwed, and then the Riders of Rohan show up with Gandalf at the top of the hill, and then they ride down, and they kill all the orcs. And that does a couple of things that are really important. First, you do have a real visceral feeling that they're gonna lose at that point.
Because they are completely outnumbered, they're completely screwed, and they basically say to each other "We're dead. We're just gonna go down fighting." So right there you're creating a good amount of drama, and then when you have that come-from-behind save, I think that's really important because it just, it kind of reminds us that we're not alone, and that we can get help if we ask for it, and that people will back us up if we need them to.
It gives us a greater sense of community, which is what I think we read books for. We read them because we don't want to feel so alone, and that's why I think it's always such a powerful moment, and it doesn't need to be this big, sweeping battle scene for it to be a come-from-behind save. Like, I call it the Riders of Rohan moment just because it's funny, but it's really that come-from-behind save that you need.
And I've got in "Paradox Hotel", like I've got this little tiny scene where this one character just, you know, gives this other character a little nudge. And it's like, "I got you." And that's it. That's exactly what that is. It's the same thing, just on a much, much smaller scale. And it's because I think we kind of crave those moments of not feeling alone.
And that's why those moments are so, so powerful. And when they are done well, they are incredibly memorable. And again, that's why I go to "The Two Towers", because that is just, I mean, out of all three movies, that might be my favorite scene.
[00:24:53] Matty: Yeah, the scene that reminds me of, I think it's in "Band of Brothers", but there's a scene where they're in the trenches, and you know, the Germans are coming and then the tanks come over the hill, you know, right when they're just about to be overrun, same exact kind of thing, you get all chipped up watching that happen.
But yeah, I think it's trickier when you're trying to do it on that more subtle, non-majestic level, like you were describing, just that little moment, not people sweeping over a hill.
[00:25:23] Rob: Yeah, it's definitely a little bit more challenging because you're sort of losing that bombast, and that big sort of frenzy. But I think that if you can find those moments when characters can just step up for each other and show support for each other, I think those always really resonate with people.
Write an outline, then throw it out
[00:25:43] Matty: So we're going to move on to the sixth of the points that I pulled out of your presentation, which was write an outline and then throw it out.
[00:25:52] Rob: I was explaining this to someone recently, so this is going back to what I said about adapting things for your own process. I have this buddy, John Gingrich, who's a brilliant short story writer. And he will write a short story, and then he'll delete it.
And then a couple of days later, he'll rewrite it from memory, and to me, that's insane. I'm never gonna do that with a short story, because it's like nah, I can't delete that many words. But the reason he does it is kind of brilliant. He's like, "You know, I always remember all the good stuff. I always forget all the bad stuff, and the time in between, you know, things that I've been trying to figure out will crystallize and solidify."
And I thought there was a lot of wisdom to that. So I started doing that with my outlines, because I really like to have a pretty solid outline going into a book. It helps me sort of move through it a little bit more quickly. And I found that, you know, that first outline is kind of a mess. It's like there are parts there that I know are important, but there's a lot of just like fat there that's not really resonating for the story or there are parts that are missing or there are connections that are not making sense.
It's like I know I've got characters here and I gotta get them there and I have no idea how I'm gonna do it, so I'll just look at it and get mad and I'll delete it. And then a couple of days later I will sit down and I'll do it again and I realized as I was doing this that it would get more streamlined and it would make more sense.
Because I had had time to think about it. And it's true, like, the really good stuff you don't forget about. It's always gonna be there in your head. It's just the sort of, the fuzzier stuff starts to fall away. So, I'll do it, two, three, four times, and find that by the fourth time, the outline actually looks pretty solid.
And I think it serves a dual purpose, it helps you to not be so precious about the words. Because, again, they're gonna be there, they're inside you, you have them all. There's only so many words we know them all, we just have to put them in the right order. And so, if we can sort of come to this place of understanding that, like, hey, you know, just because I put it down on the page doesn't mean that I need to keep it.
It's a good and it's a healthy thing, you know, because I've certainly been at points where I've written something and I'm like, "Man, I love this so much, I don't want to delete it, and I have to delete it, I know I have to delete it." It's that kill your darlings thing, it's you know, just because you love something doesn't mean it works for the story. And I think this is an exercise that kind of helps make that whole process a little bit easier.
[00:28:12] Matty: I can imagine that a, like training wheels version of this, if actually deleting the word sounds alarming to people as it does to me. And I think in part because I'm a person who, like actually typing out the words is kind of the last part of the process for me. Like I'm mulling it over in my head.
And so I feel like I'm doing some of that deletion mentally. But I think a baby step could be, don't necessarily feel like if you're at the grocery store or out walking your dog or just out and about and you have an idea, you necessarily have to grab it in your note-taking app, because those are the things that I find that, I might have seven seemingly brilliant ideas while I'm walking the dog, and when I get home I've forgotten five of them.
But there's a reason I've forgotten five of them, and the two that are left are the ones that I can work on. So that could be like step one if people are kind of intrigued, but they're a little scared about the actual deletion of words idea.
[00:29:00] Rob: I like that, I like that, because I do that all the time, where I have Google Docs on the home screen of my phone, and I have a different file for everything that I'm working on. And then I will do that all the time. I'll just pick up my phone and start jotting down notes on something because something struck me.
But yeah, it's, and then sometimes I look back at them and I'm like, half of this is nonsense. I didn't need to write this down. Or like, my favorite is when I take a note and I'm like, oh, I should do this in the story, and I go back to the story and it's already there. And I'm like, man, writing books This whole process is, you do it in, a fugue state. It's ridiculous.
[00:29:34] Matty: Yeah, sometimes people will ask me if I get ideas in the middle of the night, and if I do, if I write them down and I'm like, oh no, no, that would be awful. I wouldn't want to see the results of what I would write down if I captured the things I thought about in the middle of the night.
[00:29:47] Rob: Every now and again, every now and again I get a good one. I was watching Kung Fu Panda with my daughter the other day, and there was something in the story of that movie that, kind of, crystallized a point for me. I'm writing the Assassin's Anonymous sequel now. and it was, like, an idea that I sort of, have been circling around, and I just needed it to be crystallized for me.
And watching Kung Fu Panda, I was like, Oh. Oh. That's what I'm supposed to do, so I'm just sitting there on the couch with her, just taking down notes.
[00:30:13] Matty: Well, I love the idea of wrapping up our conversation at the point where we have now gone from Rashomon to Kung Fu Panda.
[00:30:20] Rob: There we go. Can I contain multiple things?
[00:30:23] Matty: So Rob, thank you so much. I enjoyed your presentation at Writer's Digest so much, and I appreciate you encapsulating, six of your ideas here for the podcast listeners. So please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
[00:30:34] Rob: Sure, my website is robwhart. com, I am on, Instagram and threads at robwhart1. I still kinda use Twitter at robwhart, but mostly, for promo stuff, that's a dumpster fire of a site that I'm trying to get away from, but the website is always a good place to start.
[00:30:51] Matty: Thank you so much.
[00:30:53] Rob: Alright, thank you for having me, I appreciate it.
