Drop the ego and ask, How else did I screw up?
How to question your editor. AND: A Russian dies (but did he ever truly live?); losing great gobs of cash and then writing a story about your future; the internet is fake.
Welcome to This Week Paul Likes.
Every week, I throw out hits of inspiration—three recommendations, one tip, one quote—from the writers who inspire me, in the hope they’ll inspire you to do your best work.
This week I’m trying a new format: The weekly tip for longform writers first, then the recommendations, then the quote. Why? Every week I write a headline and the first part of a dek that doesn’t correspond with the first thing you read. That seems dumb. Maybe. I don’t know. Tell me what you think in the comments about starting with the Weekly Tip.
As always, subscribe below if it’s your first time to the party.
I’m fully revising Book No. 3 now and, as I mentioned last week, met for lunch with my editor. I had told her I think this book will be my best and she in turn told me over entrees how much she disliked the first 50 pages. Like, hated them.
I no longer had it in me to finish the goat-cheese salad with grilled chicken. I sat there at that Italian bistro and told myself to breathe. Told myself not to attack. That’s the instinct, of course: You’re wrong! An idiot, in fact!
I’d done that in the past. I still see it a lot. When I’m not working on Book No. 3, I’m editing other authors’ books and some of these writers, the passionate red-blooded ones, will get me on the phone within minutes of an email with my—let’s just say—honest assessment of their latest draft.
I don’t begrudge these calls for the same reason my editor didn’t bolt after delivering her view of the first 50 pages. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, “All progress starts with the truth.”
Still, hard truths hit hard and I could feel my blood rising at lunch—until I remembered something the screenwriter Craig Mazin had once said on his podcast,
It’s not what they say about your story. It’s what you ask them about it.
You gotta drop the ego. Or, put another way, Do you want to improve your story or feel as though you won an argument with the editor who just read it?
Mazin’s advice is simple and applies to basically any writer in any genre: Don’t just receive an edit. Ask the editor questions about it.
Why don’t you like this?
What specifically is not working for you?
What suggestion do you have for improving it?
These questions and so many more, whatever you can think up, in fact, should not be asked defensively but genuinely. You really do need to know the answers. The more questions you can ask an editor about the impulse behind certain structural changes or line edits, the more clarity you’ll gain about how to fix your story. Often in ways the editor’s not even suggesting.
That happened this week. The editor had passed along her notes for the first 50 pages and what I saw was a broad problem. The opening sequence was moving too slow and was, at times, too confusing.
My editor’s edits, our shared conversation, the questions I’d asked her during it, led me to something actionable this week. I saw how I could streamline the first part of the book and clarify it, too.
The new sequence will combine, essentially, 50 pages into 25.
It’s been a lesson I’ve learned much too late, not to get defensive when I get an edit: The pieces I’d written in the first 10 years of my career could have probably been vastly better. And not because the editor is always right. The editor is mostly right, at best.
But the editor is always onto something.
That’s the thing you have to recognize. Draw out the information you need by dropping the ego and saying, effectively, How else did I just screw up this story?
This Week’s Recommendations
The Death of Ivan Ilyich: I don’t get why Tolstoy is seen as difficult to read. Pick up any of his books and it’s hard to put down. Anna Karenina was Faulkner’s favorite novel and he liked it for the same reason I do. Heavy on family sagas and romances, it’s a 19th-Century soap opera.
It’s also 864 pages long. That’s probably the reason you stay away from old Leo, right? If so, pick up The Death of Ivan Ilyich this weekend. The novella opens with, yes, Ivan’s death but over its 71 pages questions if he had ever really lived. Ivan’s sense of duty, the perception he strived for from the public—that’s what Ivan thought was important.
The story’s not told from on high, some school marm damning a student’s choices. No, Tolstoy shows you Ivan’s life from inside Ivan’s head. That’s what gives it its power: You can see yourself living Ivan’s life.
You will be wrecked by the end of the novella.
You’ll also want to reread it.
“How to Live an Asymmetric Life”: Whether by coincidence or YouTube’s all-knowing algorithm, the day after I finished Ivan Ilyich I watched Graham Weaver’s last lecture at Stanford Business School. Weaver’s an investor and founder who got wiped out by the Great Recession and had to drain his savings just to make payroll.
It’s bleak, this lecture. You feel Weaver’s anxiety: I’m failing now and will fail forever. The story he tells Stanford’s students about the story he literally wrote himself at his lowest point, imagining his life five years into the future, as an executive coach had asked him to do and as if everything Weaver had chosen had turned out well, may sound like more woo-woo California manifestation b.s. Except Weaver shows how he took the first step, and then the second, and then the third toward the story he’d written. The thing he thought was some far-out fantasy became the company he created.
“Don’t write a story about what happened. Write your story and then make that happen,” Weaver said, a message meant for Stanford’s MBA crowd—and, perhaps, you, too, this week.
“Getting Shilled”: This essay in Harper’s, an excerpt of a much-longer piece on TONY PRICE’s Substack, subtitled “Everything on the internet is fake,” exposes the modern music industry.
“We’ve crossed into a new situation wherein an entire layer of the music industry now simulates the conditions under which virality appears to occur naturally. Digital marketing firms coordinate hundreds of ‘fan accounts’; they seed trends and manipulate platforms, engineering virality from the ground up. Artists and songs do not just ‘take off.’ They are pushed, placed, circulated, and repeated until they feel unavoidable.”
It’s riveting, maybe a little depressing, to read how new artists are not “found” so much as fans are manipulated to download a new album, the public unaware of the conditions under which they downloaded it.
Until now, of course. Props to Tony here. He’s doing original reporting and releasing it himself. Now a 175-year-old magazine like Harper’s wants to excerpt him.
Quote of the Week: “Stay with it: The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
—Rumi
Postscript: A lot of you emailed me about last week’s essay, to join the scrum I’d started on the New York Times’ critics, who’d shit on Billy Joel. One reader though, Tyler Jett, defended the Times’ Jon Caramanica. Tyler showed me the pieces Caramanica had written, deeply reported features where Caramanica was much more than the preening asshole I assumed and so many of us saw last week.
People shouldn’t be reduced to their worst three minutes. Thanks, Tyler, for the broader view.
Have a great weekend. I’ll be back next Friday with another TWPL.
This email requires a lot of man hours. Please offset that by becoming a paying subscriber.
Then, if you’re hungry for a longer read, consider buying one of my books. Publisher’s Weekly says of the latter you’ll be “riveted from the first page to the last.” The New York Times says, “The richness of Kix’s dramatis personae simply staggers.” The book was named to Amazon’s and The New York Times’ and Kirkus‘ respective Best Books of 2023 lists. To the extent that matters to you.
Book No. 3 is looking like it’ll be out in 2027.