September 7, 2023 • 48 mins
In this episode, I talk with the many-time New York Times Bestselling author Donald Miller. We talk about what makes a book a bestseller, why it’s such a powerful exercise to write your story, and the attitude that creates longevity in a writer. If you want to join me and Don at our final in-person Write Your Story workshop in Nashville, TN (Oct 20-21 2023), you can register at writeyourstory.com.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun When
you write your story. You get the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down and cover what it's all about.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
And write.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Write your story. Write you write your story.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Hi, there, write your story. Listeners, this is Ali fallon
your host and today on the podcast, I have a
really special surprise for you, a bonus episode where I'm
going to share a conversation that i had with my
friend and colleague Donald Miller. If you don't know who
Don is, I would be surprised. Many of you may
have found me and my work through him. But Donn
(00:50):
is the author of several books, a handful of memoirs.
He's been a New York Times bestselling author many times over.
He is the creator of the Story brand frame Work,
which is a framework that helps business owners communicate about
what they do, and also the founder of Business Made Simple,
which is a platform that supports small business owners. Don
has been a friend and a colleague of mine for
(01:11):
a very long time. His wife is one of my
closest friends and Don is an absolutely brilliant creative person,
a brilliant creative thinker, an amazing author, and someone who
has so much to contribute on the topic of writing
your story. Not to mention, as I'll talk about in
this conversation with Don, Don was a big reason why
(01:31):
I started this platform called Write Your Story. He was
an inspiration to me. He definitely gave me a push
in the right direction, and I have him to thank
for the fact that this is the work I'm doing now,
so I know you're going to love hearing from him.
We talk about what's really going on in the mind
of a writer when he's writing something brilliant. I ask
(01:52):
him a question about his book Blue Leg Jazz, which
was his big breakout book. I asked him if he
had any clue before he wrote that book what that
book was going to do in the marketplace. And his
answer is really poignant and I think is going to
surprise you. We also talk about why one story sells
or works in the marketplace while another doesn't sell. We
talk about what creates true longevity for an author, for
(02:16):
any creative person. We talk about how to access your
own creative genius, and we talk about writer's block and
so much more. I can't wait for you to get
to hear this conversation. Like I said, Don is brilliant.
He's been a huge inspiration to me and I always, always,
always learn so much from him. So please enjoy this
conversation with Donald Miller. Welcome Don to the Write Your
(02:40):
Story Podcast. We're so happy to have you here.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
I'm so happy to be here. Ali.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
I'm excited to have you for a lot of reasons.
But one of the reasons I'm excited to have you
is that you have played a really big role in
the existence of this program, this workshop, this platform, and
I'd love to tell that story. Maybe I would love
for you to tell it from your perspective, But in
my mind, this wouldn't be here if it weren't for you,
because you really have encouraged me to step into this
(03:05):
kind of new way of talking about the work that
I do. So from your perspective, tell us how right
your story came to me?
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Well, if I remember correctly, we were all sitting around.
Your husband is a good friend of mine, my wife
is good friend yours, and we were all sitting around
at our house and we were just talking about what
I think what we were all going to do with
our lives, and you're already helping people write books. But
I really don't know except I looked up righteyourstory dot
com and it wasn't taken yes, and we grabbed it.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
Yeah, yeah, yeah it was. It was like nine pm.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
I just remember thinking, like, that's the thing that she's
already doing.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
You should call it this.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Yeah, And we sort of came up with a little
business plan, which I do that all the time. Ali,
I mean, you know that, but it's just very rare
that anybody follows through. So I'm happy to be on
the Write Your Story podcast talking about write your Story
workshops and write your Story online courses because it means
somebody actually was listening.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
I'm glad to be one of the few who actually executes.
What was it about the idea of write your Story
that made you excited? Because I think one of the
reasons why I took hold of it and ran with
it is I could see the excitement coming from you,
and I was obviously already excited about it on a
personal level because I've written a couple of memoir based
(04:27):
books myself and I had had a really powerful experience
with writing down my own story, and so personally speaking,
I was already really excited about this, and I loved
the idea of helping people to write their story. But
when I saw you get excited about it, I thought, Oh,
maybe there's actually really something here that even more people
would get excited about. So I'm curious what it was
about the idea that made you think people would be
(04:50):
interested in this.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
You know, the thing that I've gotten from writing more
than a few memoirs is an understanding of what my
story is in a sense that the role that I'm
playing in this world is important. And I don't mean
like I'm an important person as much as I mean
other lives are positively affected by it. And I think
(05:12):
that that only came from having written it all down.
And the other thing that comes from writing it all
down is ownership of your life. I mean that this
idea of you know, so first it's like, okay, you know,
here's my interaction with my mom, my dad. You know
these friends we went on the road trip, we encountered beauty,
and maybe you could go on a road trip to
(05:32):
I mean, those are all like really simple, simple ideas.
It's not like they're groundbreaking, but at the same time,
they're positive and they're nice, and that gives you that
that sort of just raises your sense of confidence or
really what Victor Frank would call an experience of meaning.
But I don't know that I would realize all that
unless I had sat down to actually process what had
(05:53):
happened in whatever season I was framing to write a
book about.
Speaker 4 (05:59):
So that to me was really positive.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
And then the next thing that happened as I started
writing my story was I started taking ownership of my life.
And by that I mean I was the one who
was directing my story more and more as I wrote it.
You know, I was when you learn, like, when I
do this, it's really dumb, and when I do this,
it's really smart, I mean, and the very basic you know,
(06:22):
in terms of like basic learning from life, that's kind
of all there is to it is these are dumb decisions.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
These are smart decisions, but you don't.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Know it until you write it down, and then from
then on out you can own it more and more
and just start making a lot smarter decisions. So there's
two benefits right there, from writing your story and not
publishing your story necessarily because there's other things about publishing
your story that are also really nice, but just writing them,
writing your story down, is transformative in those two ways.
(06:53):
And so I think what you and I realized was,
you know, people want to publish a book and all
that kind of stuff, and that's nice.
Speaker 4 (06:58):
I definitely recommend that, But there's also.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
So this massive benefit to actually sitting down and in
four or five pages unpublished, you know, maybe sharing with
friends and family, writing your story down just for the
purposes of what I just shared, I think are worth it.
And so I didn't know of anything in the market.
I'm sure it exists, though I didn't know of anything
in the world where people were helping you figure out
(07:20):
your story and write it down in short form. It
was mostly for commercial success or something like that. So
I thought, what if you and I did this together.
Because we've done so much of it and taught other
people to do this and our live workshops, it.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
Seems like the results have been pretty fantastic.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
It's almost like, I guess it's like therapy. It's therapy
through sort of self discovery, don't you think it is.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
It's a form of self therapy. Not that having an
external therapist is also wonderful, but yeah, a way to
sort of mine your life for the wisdom that it's
trying to give you. There you go, and it is
a really powerful experience to begin to see something on
the page that you didn't see when you were living it.
And I think that's a lot of what you're talking about.
(08:05):
You know, when you see yourself as the hero of
a story, you are able to have that vantage point
that you're the one who moves the plot forward, and
if you don't move, then the plot doesn't move. And
if you act this way, the plot moves this way,
and if you act the other way, the plot moves
the other way. Right, And it's hard to see that
when you're living it. It feels, at least for me,
(08:26):
it felt a little bit more like life was happening
to me. I would ask myself the question a lot,
like why did this happen to me?
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Or why?
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Yeah, why did I have this experience? And when I
began writing about my life, I started to see that
I was co creating every experience that I had one.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
Hundred percent agreed.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
In fact, you're really helping me realize now, like the
difference between me at eighteen or nineteen and me at
fifty two.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
I think I'm fifty two. Is that that is the
biggest difference.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
It was ninety percent happening to me at eighteen, I'm
ninety percent happening to it at fifty two. And I
can't help but think that writing has been a big
part of that. I don't think it's been all of it,
but writing has been a big part of it.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Well, speaking of commercial success, your book Blue Like Jazz
was your first big breakout book. This was the book
that made you known as Donald Miller the way that
you are in the world, and I'm so curious to
hear if all these things you're talking about the power
of personal storytelling did you have a sense of that
before you wrote Blue Like Jazz. Did you go into
(09:29):
writing Blue Leg Jazz having any idea that this was
going to have a positive impact on your life or
that it was going to become the kind of commercial
success that it has become.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Well, when I was a kid in high school, I
wrote down my goals, and one of those.
Speaker 4 (09:42):
Goals was to be a New York Times bestselling author.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Then I wrote a book and it failed, and then
I struggled for a season I really struggled with, like,
what was that a delusional fantasy? I sort of felt
like that's where my life was supposed to head. And
am I some sort of weird person who believes things
about themselves that that aren't true? You know, there's a
fine line between extremely strong internal locust of control and
(10:07):
narcissistic personalities sort of, so it's just wondering which one am.
I probably elements of both, and so I think that
was actually really important for my own humility. And it
was also this realization that when we wrote the first book,
(10:28):
the whole time I was writing it, I was just like,
this is fantastic. I mean, it's just so well written.
And now I look back and it's just it's not
just yeah, it's it's And so I think that was
really humbling. And so when Lucas took Off, which was
the second book, I was in a much healthier place
(10:50):
for something like that to happen to me, because instead
of feeling like I knew this all along and I'm special,
I felt very grateful. I felt lucky and grateful, and
you know, it didn't go to my head like it
probably would have if I would have gotten if I
would have not encountered some sort of failure. So that's
(11:10):
how I experienced it at the time, and then I'd
never you know, I'd come from a really poor family.
I was terribly overweight, you know, bullied, and there was
a little bit of a sense of Okay, I'm not
a total loser, which was helpful in a very sort
of earthy, worldly sense.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
So looking back now, if Blue Leg Jazz hadn't done
what it did in the marketplace, would the experience of
writing the books still have felt powerful in the same
way or do you feel like it's partly connected to
I mean, I'm asking the question mostly because I think,
you know, encouraging people to write their personal stories is
(11:48):
partly about helping them to see themselves as the hero
of their own story and understand the control that they
have inside of the story, and understand that their co
creators in the story. And it's also because the thing
that you create gets to be witnessed and experienced by
people outside of you, even if it's five people. Yeah,
So I'm just curious, like what connection you make there.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
I think anybody who's written and published a book, even
self published a book, has accomplished the equivalent, let's say
of running a marathon, which is a big deal, you know.
I mean if you have trained and run twenty six miles,
you know, first of all, similar to having written a book,
there's something wrong with you.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Especially those of us who keep doing it again.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
And again and again again.
Speaker 4 (12:31):
Yeah, there's something very wrong with us.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
I don't think it needed to be a bestseller for
it to have really helped with obvious insecurities. There is
a part of life just that asks you to earn it.
And what I mean by that is like it is
an incredibly magical existence, and it is. It is incredibly
insanely imaginative and creative of some entity for us to
(13:00):
actually exist. And there's a feeling whether or not it's accurate.
Speaker 4 (13:04):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
It's way above my pay grade that you owe it something,
and by it I mean life, and I think I
think literally, like running a marathon, raising a family, writing
a book could be one thing is a sense that
you've like, Okay, I've made I've made something. I've paid
back a little bit of what I owe to the world.
And none of this is rational. Please don't think I'm
(13:26):
like I'm trying to build some sort of religious system here.
But there is that feeling. And I think, who's to
say if it wasn't a commercial success what it would
have been. But I still think it would have been transformative.
And I also think that a lot of the stuff
i've I wouldn't have. I probably wouldn't have, you know,
the career that I have today. But I'm confident I would.
Speaker 4 (13:46):
Actually have created a pretty darn good career.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Yeah, and in my past somewhere would have been this
season where I wrote a couple of books and I
probably would go months without remembering that. Yeah, but then
I'd go, oh, yeah, I remember I wrote that book. Yeah,
there's a copy around here. I don't know that the
quality of my life would have been any less or
is any more today because it was a commercial success,
I guess.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Yeah, I agree with you. I think you would have
just found a different way to get.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
To where you are today, find your way of growing up.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Yeah. I think it's interesting too. The act of writing
a book or running a marathon, or any other number
of examples you could come up with like that also
follow a narrative arc. It's also, you know, sort of
inserting a struggle into the ordinariness of our existence, Like
our existence is magical and it's also ordinary because you
(14:35):
just wake up every day and kind of do the
same things over and over again. So when you can
insert an objective or insert a struggle into that that
it gives you an opportunity to lean into it and
to interact with that struggle and to become something different
along the way, which is exactly what happens inside of
a narrative arc.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
I mean you, A hero is thrown into.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
Their life is distable lives.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
They are thrown into a challenge, almost always against their will.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
I call it a hero and a hole.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Every story starts with a hero and a hole, and
the story is about them climbing out of it. And
you know, to sit down and write a book is
definitely to throw yourself into a hole, or to decide
to jump into a hole. A lot of people would say, well,
it's self you know, it's a self started sort of challenge.
I don't know that I personally identify with that.
Speaker 4 (15:25):
It might be true.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
I'm curious about your take on this alley, but I
didn't feel like I had much of a choice. Yeah,
And it's what's interesting is like I didn't feel like
I had a choice on a book called To Own
a Dragon, which was not a commercial success. I didn't
feel like I had a choice on a book called
Hero on a Mission, which I wrote a couple of
books ago, which was not a commercial success. They all
felt exactly the same. So I'm very curious, like, on
(15:48):
the other side of this life, will somebody sit me
down and explain, Well, here's why I had you write
that book. And it wasn't about it being commercial success.
There are books that I've written to get it done
and did not even promote them. Yeah, because I actually
never wanted to write that book. I had to write
that book, yeah, and I just didn't promote it.
Speaker 4 (16:08):
I just thought, I don't actually really want this book
to sell anything.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
But I am being obedient to whatever is inside of
me that says this is I mean, you know, who
knows who we're talking to. It could be God. I
certainly have my own sort of religious worldview, but it's wide.
But there are times when I've thought, well, you should
do this, or it's time to do this, and I thought, well,
that's interesting, and then literally that feeling inside me says
(16:33):
I wasn't asking I was not suggesting you do that.
This is a demand and it's like, oh gosh, okay,
here we go. I better do this, And it doesn't
always work, which is very very strange.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
Yeah, work being a word that is hard, a little
hard to define. I feel similarly to you, where every
book I've written has been because the idea comes in
and sort of and doesn't let me go until the
thing is done. But of the three books that I
have currently published, the one that has been the most
commercially successful was the one I wrote first, which is
(17:12):
the one I'm least proud of, the one I least
knew what I was doing. It's still, to this day
doesn't totally make sense to me why that one has
performed better than the other two books. And the one
that I'm most proud of, the one that was most
transformative for me, is the one that has sold the
fewest number of copies, and yet it has brought the
most abundance into my life. My second book is the
(17:32):
story of walking through my divorce, and I would not
be in the marriage I'm in right now, or in
the life or have the family that I have right
now if I hadn't written that book. Because I needed
to see that story on paper to be able to
become the woman that I am today. So you know,
in terms of like what's given me the most, that
book has given me the most, but certainly doesn't look
(17:54):
that way on paper.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
No, And you know, I take comfort from, like, you know,
a lot of our heroes. I mean, you know, Bill
Cosby is commercially successful.
Speaker 4 (18:06):
But he was a dirtbag.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
I take cover for the fact that commercial success is
absolutely no sign of quality or any of that stuff.
There is a there's a bit of a comfort in that,
I guess, but.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
Yeah, I'm with you, I'm with you.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
I also love the idea. I don't know if you've
done this. As I've gotten older and written more and
more books, my identity is just less and less tied
to a book as it's released.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
In fact, I use a metaphor of or the.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Analogy I should say of, you know, if you're if
you're a master craftsman and you build furniture, you build
it and you sell it. Yeah, you don't drive by
the person's house and say, can I spend a little
time with that hutch that I built for you? Can
I be alone with with this Credienso I think it's
(18:54):
the same for me. In books, you write them, you
deliver them to the people who you hope that will
engage in. And that's it's not that you don't care.
You care about them, but it's not like you're going
to them saying, hey.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
You know, are you proud of me? Did you like it?
Speaker 2 (19:07):
You know?
Speaker 4 (19:07):
It's just like, no, yes, no, that's not why I
wrote this book. I wrote this book to serve.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Somebody and because of the incredible thrill it is to
sit down and put words on a page.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
Yes, and you and I have talked about this too,
But just the idea of not keeping a bunch of
copies of your book around. It's not like I don't
have like I don't go back and revisit pages of
a book that I wrote that's already been published. Like
there's almost like an aversion that I have to rereading,
even Indestructible, which I'm very proud of. Like I've never
gone to the shelf and just been like, let me
(19:37):
read a page.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
No, you know I did when I first started, did you.
I mean I would sit and read that stuff and
just think, oh, that's a good line.
Speaker 4 (19:47):
I do collect copy foreign copies.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
That's like, I can't say I don't have copies of
my book because literally behind me in the picture that
we are on on Zoom, there are foreign copies.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
But I just think the covers are cool.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Me too much, because I'm an obsessive editor and I
cannot read anything that I've written in the past without
wanting to change it. And so to me, that's mind
numbingly painful, and that's the main reason I don't want.
Speaker 4 (20:13):
Those books around. Yes, agreed, it's never done. You just
have to ship it.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
It's never done. I know if they didn't give you
a deadline, you would just keep on keeping on that
same Yeah, Okay, I want to talk about the Write
Your Story workshop that we've been doing for a handful
(20:40):
of years now. We've done this I don't know five
or six times, and I want to talk about the
type of person who comes to this workshop because we're
doing our last iteration of this workshop live and in
person this October, and we've got about fifty people coming. Again,
We've had fifty people each time come, so it's going
to be a really great experience. But can you talk
(21:00):
about the kind of person who comes to this workshop?
And not just the workshop, since this is the last
time we're doing it. The kind of person who's drawn
to this process, I'm.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Sure you feel the same, But they tend to be
incredibly sort of altruistic people, so they're very much sort
of serving hearted. They also are not afraid to sort
of look inside themselves and try to figure out what's
going on. So those are the common characteristics. And then
to me, there's been two different types of intention. One
(21:32):
intention is to process pain, hard things that have happened
and try to make sense of it. And then there's
also to process expertise and to sort of leverage their
story to build a personal platform and to sort of
say here's who I am in the world, and here's
what you can hire me to do in some ways.
(21:56):
And amazingly we're all sort of in the same room together.
To the people who are pross pain tend to be
a smaller group of people, but I think everybody in
the room recognizes and is honored to have them sitting there.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Yeah, and I would argue that those two people are
the same people. They're just on different stops on their journey.
Like the ones who come who are processing pain just
haven't gotten to the place where they've seen who that
pain makes them to be. And when you process that pain,
I think this is the gift of writing your story,
(22:30):
is that when you process that pain, that becomes somehow
like the gift that you have to give to the world.
And so some people have come and they've already processed
a lot of pain, so they're coming to share their expertise.
And some people have come and maybe they are three
steps steps back on the journey and they haven't quite
had a chance yet to process that pain. But when
(22:51):
they do, then they become the second type of person,
They become the leader.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yeah, there's a sense universally amosty writing in the room that
they're trying to figure out what this is about, like
what their story is about, and what it means and
what to do with it. And so I think everybody
in the room sort of has this these open story loops,
if you will, these questions about who they are, why
they matter, and what they can how they can leverage
their life experience for the betterment of others. And what's
(23:17):
amazing to me is in the room, how many of
those story loops close even before they finished writing it.
They're like Oh, that's what this was about, and that's
why this matters, and that's why this is important. I
think some of that happens because they're actually writing it down,
and some of that happens because you're in a room
for two days talking about it. Yeah, with other human
beings who are giving you feedback on it. You know,
(23:39):
I don't know that we knew fully what we were
getting into. We are not therapists, but boy, you talk
about quick healing. Yeah, we ought to be We ought
to be paid like therapists. Seriously raise no therapy, by
the way, ye offer any advice writing.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Speaking of what a story is about, I'd love to
have you talk about this because I'm sure people who
are listening or thinking, I think maybe I'll have a
story to tell, but I'm not sure what my story
is about. So how would you help guide someone to
determine what their story is about?
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Figuring out what your story is about, or what a
story about is about. It's all about whittling it down.
And so the first realization that happens really quickly in
the room is that you go from I don't know
what my story is about to my story is very
clearly about fifty seven things that happens very fast because
(24:35):
one of the things that you realize when you sit
down to write a story is that it can't be
about everything, and good storytellers leave almost everything out. And
this story has to be about that one trip you
took to Florida, yep. Or this one relationship that didn't
work out, or this one traumatic experience you had in
(24:55):
your family, or this one success that you experienced. It
has to be about one thing. That's the first realization.
And then the second realization is that once you choose
what the story is going to be about, that it
has a moral, that it has a life lesson, and
the life lesson is death and tragedy are real, but
(25:17):
it doesn't ruin life. Now you've created the moral of
the story, and you're going to build a story to defend.
Speaker 4 (25:24):
That idea and teach other people that idea.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
And then when you actually write that down and walk
out of the room, you believe it. And you didn't
even know about the moral walking in. Now not only
do you have a moral walking out, but you believe
that moral and it becomes a foundation for who you
are and how you live life. That's what write your
story actually offers you in the long run.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
Oh, it's so good. And while you were talking, I
was thinking about how this is one of the ways
that writing your story strengthens who you are as a person.
Is that as you whittle it down and decide what
your story is about and include only the necessary. I
don't know if you've had this experience, but when you
do this with your personal story, you actually forget about
(26:06):
everything that doesn't need to be in the story. Like
every detail that doesn't get included gets forgotten, and it's
almost as if it never happened. And the only details
that get included are the ones that need to be
remembered in order to defend the more.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
The idea, yeah, yeah, or to make it interesting. If
your story doesn't have a moral, it certainly should entertain. Yeah.
And the beauty of that is that you get to
leave with a little bit of a framework you can
use to self edit your actual life. You know what
(26:41):
I mean. Where you're just going, I don't think that
character needs to be in my story. Yes, yes, And
you're like, we're gonna literally like we're cutting that person out. Yeah,
Or boy, if I say this to my friend, I
sure am gonna look like a villain, and probably because
(27:04):
I am one.
Speaker 4 (27:05):
Yeah, so I'm gonna hold my tongue.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
And that doesn't really happen until you step out of
your life and begin to see it as a narrative
and do the work to write it down that you
can actually you can actually edit in real time. And
you know, I don't know about you, Ali, I'm curious
about this, but it's actually a voice in my head
that I carry with me. I mean, you know, to
give you an example, I am you know, I have
a company, I have thirty employees and almost a thousand
(27:30):
people in our certified community. I'm a husband, I'm a dad.
I am also still I still have a nine year
old sense of humor, and I'm a cut up and
I'm a goofball. And that doesn't always serve me. And
so you know, in the last several years, it's been
like did you just got Like sometimes in a meeting
when people are serious, you just have to be serious.
(27:53):
And I literally think that voice is the editor editing
my life in real time. And it is annoying and
it's also served me, yeah very well. And I don't
I wonder if that whatever would have happened without the
writing exercises, I would.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
Argue that it wouldn't happen. I call that voice the
narrator voice, Yeah, which it's the voice that's narrating your
story for you. And it's got like the higher perspective,
it's got like the bird's eye view, and it's telling you, like,
this is not what you want to do with your life.
Don't go down that path, or you know, don't say
yes to this gig. It might seem good in the beginning,
(28:32):
but it's not really going to fulfill you deeply. Or
those are the sorts of things that my narrator voice
is saying to me along the way. And I do
think that's a skill that is honed and perfected through
the writing process, because what other reason would you have
for having that running narrator in the background. Or the
other thing that happens too is your narrator just gets
(28:54):
more mature as you write down your story, because when
you first write it down, you realize your narrator is
saying stuff you like, you idiot, or you know, it's
just like a critical, mean voice. And as you mature
your narrator, you realize that your narrator actually can really
serve you in life. It can see things that you
can't see. It can see the end of the story
(29:15):
before you can see it. As the hero, you don't
see the end of the story, but your narrator knows
exactly where the story is going.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
I find it very helpful.
Speaker 4 (29:23):
Yeah, it's been very much foundational. I think, can we talk.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
About villains in stories because this is not part of
the framework. But probably the most often question I get
from people who are writing personal stories is how do
I write about the people who have hurt me? And
I really really like your perspective on this, so I'd
love to hear you. I've heard you answer this question,
but hear you answer the question yeah again.
Speaker 4 (29:47):
Well, there's many sides that question. I mean, first is like,
are you going to name names?
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Yeah, yeah, And my mo with that is I do
not name names because people are fluid and they change,
and when you put them in a book, there that
is who they are to everybody who reads it. So
it's unfair even if they've done something really terrible.
Speaker 4 (30:13):
I don't think that's.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
Like, you know, a rule. I wouldn't say that's an
ethical requirement of every writer. It's just my personal conscious
won't allow me to do that.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
You also may run into legal issues if you use
someone's real name, so it's just easier to change their
name or leave it out.
Speaker 4 (30:29):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
And even if what they did is true, if they
come after, you've got a bunch of legal bills to
prove that it's that it's true, you know. So that's
my idea that I do think like the biggest shift
for me from not studying literature, but from just interacting
with people who are so incredibly confusing in terms of
their selfishness and their lack of conscience. I think villains
(30:53):
exist in stories because there are villainous characteristics in all
of us, but I actually do think there are villains
in life.
Speaker 4 (30:59):
I think are people who are just wired to be villains.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
And the characteristics of those people, for me, are an
incredible selfishness, like what they're doing, no matter how great
it is or how nice it is or how kind
it seems, is really about them. And then the second,
and this to me is the tailtale sign of evil,
(31:24):
is deception. That deceit is literally a part of their strategy.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
And they do it with no conscience.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
And to me, those are if I were writing a
story and I needed a villain, those would be the
two driving characteristics that I would want to display in
that person's behavior. Is everything they're doing, they're doing to
benefit themselves, and they literally would probably not be able
(31:55):
to even know what is true and what is not true.
Speaker 4 (32:00):
And I've met those people in life.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
And you know, when you think about like Vladimir Putin
and you have any Pregosian, the president of Russia and
his warlord mercenary who he recently most likely recently killed,
they were both they're both wired exactly that way. And
those are, by the way, fantastic villains in the overall
story of life. So you know, I would have told
(32:26):
you that villains don't actually exist, and that everybody is
good and people just make mistakes. And it was not
till I was older than fifty so in the last
two years that I actually no longer believe that.
Speaker 4 (32:38):
Yeah, I believe there are people who are just villains,
that's who they are, yeah, and not that they shouldn't be.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
You know, they don't have a right to adjust trial
or whatever. So I now believe there are people who
simply can't change. M Scott Peck would actually say they
are evil.
Speaker 4 (32:54):
Now, I'm sorry. He would not say they're evil.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
He would say they are not evil, but evil is
the operating system that we're within them. There's kind of
how I think he would word it, and I now
agree with that.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Yeah, I agree too. And I also think that as
we think about our life as a story unfolding, it
ups the anne for the heroes and the story. I
think heroes in the story in a literary sense, have
a tendency to not think very highly of themselves, not
want to draw too much attention to themselves.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Yeah, that's what makes us like a hero is that
they're they're insecure like the rest of us, and so
we identify with them.
Speaker 3 (33:27):
But we need the heroes in the stories to step
up to the plate and take action and defeat the
villain so that the villain doesn't win in the end
of the story.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
We do. And that's another deceptive thing about you know.
That's the difference between stories, the stories that we find
in literature and the stories that we live in real
life is that is actually not what usually happens in
real life, that when the hero stands up to the villain,
the villain often wins, which is true in stories that
are categorized as tragedies are rampant in life itself. But
(34:04):
that doesn't mean that the story is an inspirational for
those who stand up, you know, in the first place.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
So you're saying, in real life, when a hero stands
up to a villain, the villain often wins. So you're saying,
in real life, when a hero stands up to a villain,
the villain often wins. Yes, So how do you write
(34:31):
that story?
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Well, I mean, a good inspirational speaker might say that
just means the story is not over yet.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
Sure, I would say that there all is lost moment.
If it seems like the villain has won, your story
hasn't hasn't finished yet, you would disagree with that.
Speaker 4 (34:47):
It depends.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
In that case, was the story of the men who
stormed the beaches at Normandy and died there. That's that's
of no comfort probably to them. Sure, well, you know.
Speaker 4 (35:01):
It's pretty darn over.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
So I think there's an unfairness and injustice about life,
And I think that's one of the reasons that we
love stories that in with the villain going down and
being defeated, because it gives us this this hope in
this sense that we only get a little bit of
on earth. This all sounds like terribly sad, but you
know what if on the other side of this life,
(35:26):
all of that is actually redeemed and the longing that
we have for a story to come full circle and
for story loops to be closed and justice to have
won the day. You know, I think there's a pining
in all of us for that to happen. So, you know,
even Christian theology and Islamic theology and shoot, I mean
Jewish theology, it all heads toward that. In fact, I
(35:48):
think most stories, if you look at Joseph Campbell's treatment
of stories, most myths, you know, the justice actually happens
on the other side of death.
Speaker 3 (35:56):
Okay, So that brings us to a question about resolving story.
Then what advice would you give to someone who's writing
a personal story and feels that their resolution hasn't come
or may never come for them. Like I'm thinking of
someone who's battling cancer and you know, feels like they're
losing that fight, or maybe is losing the fight, or
(36:17):
someone who is up against some other goliath.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
My advice would be to actually resolve it in some way.
There are many kinds of resolution your battle with cancer,
the resolution that you may come up with the battle
that you face. Then, even though you may be losing,
the battle to cancer is actually a battle to see
life is beautiful and to be grateful for it. And
(36:41):
if you can resolve this, if you can resolve the
story that way, then that story has resolved. The beautiful
thing about writing your story is you get to decide
what the story is about, and you get to frame
it the way you want. The reality is there have
been one hundred billion people who have walked this planet.
The overwhelming majority of them are now dead, and all
(37:02):
the rest of them will be dead relatively soon. So
death is going to be every single person.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
And to me, if you can frame your own personal
story where that somehow is still beautiful, that is a
heroic accomplishment.
Speaker 4 (37:23):
And what other choice you have?
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Yeah, you know, I mean give up and you quit
or you say, okay, we're in something really weird here. Yeah,
And I'm going to actually frame this in such a
way that I get the most out of it, and
I get the most beauty possible because I can, I
am able to frame the story that way and subscribe
to it in that way, and it gives me hope
(37:46):
and it passes along a perspective to the next generation
that makes their stories actually bearable and perhaps even enjoyable.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
Yeah, when people come to the workshop to write their story,
what are the obstacles that you feel like are in
their way as far as actually executing on the story.
What are people up against?
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Ali the You know, the big thing that I think
is true of all writing is the biggest, absolute, biggest
obstacle is you are writing in order to have written,
instead of writing in order to discover. Ooh, and you know.
I saw a clip with Kobe Bryant recently and he
was asked back when he was playing, He was asked,
(38:28):
are you driven more by the desire to win or
are you driven more by the desire.
Speaker 4 (38:32):
Not to fail, not to lose? And he profoundly answered neither,
because if you're driven to win, you're driven by fear,
and if you're driven to not lose, you're driven by fear.
I am driven to discover. I'm driven to discover what
else can be done in this game and what are
other ways to shoot?
Speaker 2 (38:53):
And he said, if you're just driven by a constant curiosity,
the score takes care of itself. And I think that's
the thing when you sit down to write, if you're
if you're trying to write in order to be brilliant,
you will never ever be perceived as brilliant.
Speaker 4 (39:08):
But if you're.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
Writing to discover what is possible when you put a
when you put some ink on a page, and what
is possible in terms of you mining your soul, you
were much more likely to actually put something on the
page that is profound. I actually had a conversation late
one night. I was in San Diego. There's a guy
named John Foreman who's the lead singer of a band
(39:30):
called switch Foot, and John and I became friends. And
you know, it's really late at night. We're sitting on
a beach in San Diego in the dark, and we
were talking about the creative process. And I was at
a point where I was probably probably writing my third
or fourth book, and writer's block was getting to me
and the negative Amazon reviews were in my head, and
(39:52):
I just said, how do you deal with that? He's
like I he literally like didn't even understand. I mean,
I don't. I don't know if he'd ever even I
add the thought or the fear he said Donna, I
just see myself as an archaeologist. I just go dig
and see what I can find.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
Hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
I was like, wow, you know, and now I identify
with that. All these years later, I identify with that,
and I sit down to write so that I can
go find, so that I can go discover what's under
their dirt, and then I, you know, I find something,
wash it off, clean it up, see what it is,
and maybe it's worthy to put on in chapter three. Yeah,
(40:31):
and to me, that's a much more sort of healthy
relationship with the written word than trying to project an identity.
Speaker 3 (40:38):
It definitely creates longevity, at least for me. Hearing that,
I think, I definitely don't access that or actualize it
every time I sit down to write. But when I do,
I really enjoy the experience of writing. And when I don't,
and when I'm trying to sort of like, this is
a paradigm flip because so many people come to this
process going like I want to help people, I want
(40:58):
to inspire people, and it's like, you do get to
do that, but you don't get to do it without
first going I'm going to go into my own pain
or into my own story, or into my own confusion,
into the chaos, into the you know, the mess of
the idea and untangle the not and as you do that,
(41:19):
you uncover something that's for you first, and then it's
for an audience also, you know, could be one person,
there could be a million people. But yeah, I mean
people come to the process going I want to help people.
I want to inspire people. I want this to reach millions.
And it's like, if you come at it from that direction,
you miss out on I think, at least the real
(41:41):
part of it, the part of it that's trying to
speak to you, speak through you, and from the energy
of I want to inspire people. You can create something
that may sell, but in my opinion, you miss out
on all the really good stuff of the creative life.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Agreat Well, I think that a lot of amateur writers,
me included, when I first got started, we're trying.
Speaker 4 (42:03):
To project an identity.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
I was trying to write something to make people think
that I was this person who I wanted to be
was John Steinbeck. Yeah, I wanted to be you know,
a Nobel Prize winning talent. Yeah, And and I was
writing to try to get the world to say you
are Yes, while I lived in the delusional fantasy that
(42:28):
I was, it was really really great. And then to
put it out in the world. I'm not kidding. I
mean I would walk, I would go smoke a pipe
and I'd walk. I lived up near Mount Hood and
would walk on these back farm roads for miles and miles,
smoking a pipe, coming up with whatever was next. It
was just one of the most enjoyable experiences. And I'd
sit down, I'd get so excited. I mean, what, you know,
(42:50):
what about what if I worded it this way and
get back and write that down and just thought it
was brilliant and then and then the uh and then
other people when they read it they didn't agree with me.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
Yeah, those pesty other.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
People oh Man should have done. Was never published, and
then I could still live in this delusions, which I
think that's what JD.
Speaker 4 (43:16):
Salinger actually did. I really do.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
I think he wrote Catcher and the Rye and an
obvious work of genius, and then I think that got
in his head and he was unwilling to find out
that it was of it was not a fluke. Yes, yeah,
I personally think that. Yeah, I don't know, but I
personally think that's what happened to Sallenger?
Speaker 3 (43:38):
Well, I think it seems like that could happen to
any of us, right, I mean, like I asked you
the question about Blue Leg Jazz, Like what would have
happened if that book didn't break out the way that
it did. And it's impossible to really calculate why one
book does and another book does it, or even music,
you know, like why any piece of right sort of
like takes off and another one doesn't. You can look
at the influen, but you can't really know why you
(44:02):
catch lightning in a bottle one time and not another time.
But the reason I bring that up is I do
think it seems very likely or possible for any creative
person to have a moment where they have that divine
experience of like a thing coming through them that's bigger
than them, and then to go like I want to
go catch that again. It's that it's that I want
(44:22):
to catch that again, and some people stops you from
having it. Sure, yes, many idea.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
I mean I'd like to sit down with Ed Sheeran, Yeah,
And just how God's name are you doing this?
Speaker 3 (44:34):
I mean I don't know Ed Sheeran, but I don't either.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
I didn't mean to suggest I do, but I still like,
if he's listening, give me a call.
Speaker 3 (44:42):
Yeah, call us up, call us up, ed, send us
an email, let us know. I mean, I would imagine
any musician would have to say that there's an element
of getting out of your own way that has to
take place for you to make something that resonates.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Have you seen the documentary series Get Back. No, it's
Peter what's his name who directed The Lord of the
Rings during COVID. He had nothing to do and I
think it was in New Zealand, and he could he
just couldn't do anything, and so somebody gave him I
think hundreds and hundreds of hours of Beatles footage from
(45:20):
from the studios I have heard about while they were recording, Yeah,
while they were recording their final studio record. And it's
a very strange documentary in the sense that I mean
for the first forty minutes to an hour, literally nothing happens.
I mean that, Yeah, the camera is just kind of
following them around and they're figuring out where to put furniture,
(45:42):
and they're kind of moving into this big warehouse and
this is where they're going to record and Yoko's hanging
out and I mean nothing there. Occasionally somebody will hit
a drum and blah blah blah, and then Paul McCartney
just starts strumming, and you right, and you recognize like
he's strumming, and then like a minute in you're like, wait,
wait a second, I've heard that, and he literally just
came up with a lick that is now you're watching
(46:05):
him do it, that is crazy. Yeah, and then you
know then the lyrics are just like, you know, he's
singing a song that you recognize, but the lyrics are wrong.
Oh my gosh, and you're like, though those were the
that was the first evolution of that lyric. Yeah, it
was really comforting just to watch him do it because
(46:27):
Paul McCartney it does. I mean, the documentary really shows
that he's the most you know, most talented of all
those guys, and you know he's just going for it
and he just doesn't.
Speaker 4 (46:38):
It just does not seem like he's trying so nute.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
He's just he just won't quite He just like he
just keeps going, keeps going, keeps going. Then he's able
to like an archaeologist, he's able to realize, oh, so
that's that's cool, that's cool, yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:51):
Which I mean you're describing, at least for me, the
writing process. There's a lot of writing that comes out
that's just garbage, you know, but you just keep at it,
You keep at it, you keep at it. And that's
why I think going back to your point about like
enjoying the process of mining the wisdom in your life.
If you can and if you can see it like
a puzzle, that you're you're doing this for the sake
(47:14):
of the enjoyment of it, it creates a longevity where
you're at this long enough that you actually find the
genius that's inside of it.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
Yeah, and it's such a wonderful experience to find it.
It really is anything.
Speaker 3 (47:28):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, thank you so much, Don for
the conversation and just everything that you shared. It's been
really fun to do this experiment with you, and I'm
excited to see where write your story goes. We've got
a lot of really fun new things coming. The workshop
is coming to a close, but the podcast is here.
There's a book coming.
Speaker 2 (47:48):
There's a book coming, there's an online experience. I think
it's coming that you're putting together lots.
Speaker 3 (47:53):
Of different things in the works. So so thank you
for your inspiration for me, Thanks for sharing your wisdom
with our listeners, and thanks for having us conversation.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
My pleasure MHM.
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun When
you write your story. You get the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down and cover what it's all about.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
And write.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Write your story. Write you write your story.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Hi, there, write your story. Listeners, this is Ali fallon
your host and today on the podcast, I have a
really special surprise for you, a bonus episode where I'm
going to share a conversation that i had with my
friend and colleague Donald Miller. If you don't know who
Don is, I would be surprised. Many of you may
have found me and my work through him. But Donn
(00:50):
is the author of several books, a handful of memoirs.
He's been a New York Times bestselling author many times over.
He is the creator of the Story brand frame Work,
which is a framework that helps business owners communicate about
what they do, and also the founder of Business Made Simple,
which is a platform that supports small business owners. Don
has been a friend and a colleague of mine for
(01:11):
a very long time. His wife is one of my
closest friends and Don is an absolutely brilliant creative person,
a brilliant creative thinker, an amazing author, and someone who
has so much to contribute on the topic of writing
your story. Not to mention, as I'll talk about in
this conversation with Don, Don was a big reason why
(01:31):
I started this platform called Write Your Story. He was
an inspiration to me. He definitely gave me a push
in the right direction, and I have him to thank
for the fact that this is the work I'm doing now,
so I know you're going to love hearing from him.
We talk about what's really going on in the mind
of a writer when he's writing something brilliant. I ask
(01:52):
him a question about his book Blue Leg Jazz, which
was his big breakout book. I asked him if he
had any clue before he wrote that book what that
book was going to do in the marketplace. And his
answer is really poignant and I think is going to
surprise you. We also talk about why one story sells
or works in the marketplace while another doesn't sell. We
talk about what creates true longevity for an author, for
(02:16):
any creative person. We talk about how to access your
own creative genius, and we talk about writer's block and
so much more. I can't wait for you to get
to hear this conversation. Like I said, Don is brilliant.
He's been a huge inspiration to me and I always, always,
always learn so much from him. So please enjoy this
conversation with Donald Miller. Welcome Don to the Write Your
(02:40):
Story Podcast. We're so happy to have you here.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
I'm so happy to be here. Ali.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
I'm excited to have you for a lot of reasons.
But one of the reasons I'm excited to have you
is that you have played a really big role in
the existence of this program, this workshop, this platform, and
I'd love to tell that story. Maybe I would love
for you to tell it from your perspective, But in
my mind, this wouldn't be here if it weren't for you,
because you really have encouraged me to step into this
(03:05):
kind of new way of talking about the work that
I do. So from your perspective, tell us how right
your story came to me?
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Well, if I remember correctly, we were all sitting around.
Your husband is a good friend of mine, my wife
is good friend yours, and we were all sitting around
at our house and we were just talking about what
I think what we were all going to do with
our lives, and you're already helping people write books. But
I really don't know except I looked up righteyourstory dot
com and it wasn't taken yes, and we grabbed it.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
Yeah, yeah, yeah it was. It was like nine pm.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
I just remember thinking, like, that's the thing that she's
already doing.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
You should call it this.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Yeah, And we sort of came up with a little
business plan, which I do that all the time. Ali,
I mean, you know that, but it's just very rare
that anybody follows through. So I'm happy to be on
the Write Your Story podcast talking about write your Story
workshops and write your Story online courses because it means
somebody actually was listening.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
I'm glad to be one of the few who actually executes.
What was it about the idea of write your Story
that made you excited? Because I think one of the
reasons why I took hold of it and ran with
it is I could see the excitement coming from you,
and I was obviously already excited about it on a
personal level because I've written a couple of memoir based
(04:27):
books myself and I had had a really powerful experience
with writing down my own story, and so personally speaking,
I was already really excited about this, and I loved
the idea of helping people to write their story. But
when I saw you get excited about it, I thought, Oh,
maybe there's actually really something here that even more people
would get excited about. So I'm curious what it was
about the idea that made you think people would be
(04:50):
interested in this.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
You know, the thing that I've gotten from writing more
than a few memoirs is an understanding of what my
story is in a sense that the role that I'm
playing in this world is important. And I don't mean
like I'm an important person as much as I mean
other lives are positively affected by it. And I think
(05:12):
that that only came from having written it all down.
And the other thing that comes from writing it all
down is ownership of your life. I mean that this
idea of you know, so first it's like, okay, you know,
here's my interaction with my mom, my dad. You know
these friends we went on the road trip, we encountered beauty,
and maybe you could go on a road trip to
(05:32):
I mean, those are all like really simple, simple ideas.
It's not like they're groundbreaking, but at the same time,
they're positive and they're nice, and that gives you that
that sort of just raises your sense of confidence or
really what Victor Frank would call an experience of meaning.
But I don't know that I would realize all that
unless I had sat down to actually process what had
(05:53):
happened in whatever season I was framing to write a
book about.
Speaker 4 (05:59):
So that to me was really positive.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
And then the next thing that happened as I started
writing my story was I started taking ownership of my life.
And by that I mean I was the one who
was directing my story more and more as I wrote it.
You know, I was when you learn, like, when I
do this, it's really dumb, and when I do this,
it's really smart, I mean, and the very basic you know,
(06:22):
in terms of like basic learning from life, that's kind
of all there is to it is these are dumb decisions.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
These are smart decisions, but you don't.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Know it until you write it down, and then from
then on out you can own it more and more
and just start making a lot smarter decisions. So there's
two benefits right there, from writing your story and not
publishing your story necessarily because there's other things about publishing
your story that are also really nice, but just writing them,
writing your story down, is transformative in those two ways.
(06:53):
And so I think what you and I realized was,
you know, people want to publish a book and all
that kind of stuff, and that's nice.
Speaker 4 (06:58):
I definitely recommend that, But there's also.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
So this massive benefit to actually sitting down and in
four or five pages unpublished, you know, maybe sharing with
friends and family, writing your story down just for the
purposes of what I just shared, I think are worth it.
And so I didn't know of anything in the market.
I'm sure it exists, though I didn't know of anything
in the world where people were helping you figure out
(07:20):
your story and write it down in short form. It
was mostly for commercial success or something like that. So
I thought, what if you and I did this together.
Because we've done so much of it and taught other
people to do this and our live workshops, it.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
Seems like the results have been pretty fantastic.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
It's almost like, I guess it's like therapy. It's therapy
through sort of self discovery, don't you think it is.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
It's a form of self therapy. Not that having an
external therapist is also wonderful, but yeah, a way to
sort of mine your life for the wisdom that it's
trying to give you. There you go, and it is
a really powerful experience to begin to see something on
the page that you didn't see when you were living it.
And I think that's a lot of what you're talking about.
(08:05):
You know, when you see yourself as the hero of
a story, you are able to have that vantage point
that you're the one who moves the plot forward, and
if you don't move, then the plot doesn't move. And
if you act this way, the plot moves this way,
and if you act the other way, the plot moves
the other way. Right, And it's hard to see that
when you're living it. It feels, at least for me,
(08:26):
it felt a little bit more like life was happening
to me. I would ask myself the question a lot,
like why did this happen to me?
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Or why?
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Yeah, why did I have this experience? And when I
began writing about my life, I started to see that
I was co creating every experience that I had one.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
Hundred percent agreed.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
In fact, you're really helping me realize now, like the
difference between me at eighteen or nineteen and me at
fifty two.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
I think I'm fifty two. Is that that is the
biggest difference.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
It was ninety percent happening to me at eighteen, I'm
ninety percent happening to it at fifty two. And I
can't help but think that writing has been a big
part of that. I don't think it's been all of it,
but writing has been a big part of it.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Well, speaking of commercial success, your book Blue Like Jazz
was your first big breakout book. This was the book
that made you known as Donald Miller the way that
you are in the world, and I'm so curious to
hear if all these things you're talking about the power
of personal storytelling did you have a sense of that
before you wrote Blue Like Jazz. Did you go into
(09:29):
writing Blue Leg Jazz having any idea that this was
going to have a positive impact on your life or
that it was going to become the kind of commercial
success that it has become.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Well, when I was a kid in high school, I
wrote down my goals, and one of those.
Speaker 4 (09:42):
Goals was to be a New York Times bestselling author.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Then I wrote a book and it failed, and then
I struggled for a season I really struggled with, like,
what was that a delusional fantasy? I sort of felt
like that's where my life was supposed to head. And
am I some sort of weird person who believes things
about themselves that that aren't true? You know, there's a
fine line between extremely strong internal locust of control and
(10:07):
narcissistic personalities sort of, so it's just wondering which one am.
I probably elements of both, and so I think that
was actually really important for my own humility. And it
was also this realization that when we wrote the first book,
(10:28):
the whole time I was writing it, I was just like,
this is fantastic. I mean, it's just so well written.
And now I look back and it's just it's not
just yeah, it's it's And so I think that was
really humbling. And so when Lucas took Off, which was
the second book, I was in a much healthier place
(10:50):
for something like that to happen to me, because instead
of feeling like I knew this all along and I'm special,
I felt very grateful. I felt lucky and grateful, and
you know, it didn't go to my head like it
probably would have if I would have gotten if I
would have not encountered some sort of failure. So that's
(11:10):
how I experienced it at the time, and then I'd
never you know, I'd come from a really poor family.
I was terribly overweight, you know, bullied, and there was
a little bit of a sense of Okay, I'm not
a total loser, which was helpful in a very sort
of earthy, worldly sense.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
So looking back now, if Blue Leg Jazz hadn't done
what it did in the marketplace, would the experience of
writing the books still have felt powerful in the same
way or do you feel like it's partly connected to
I mean, I'm asking the question mostly because I think,
you know, encouraging people to write their personal stories is
(11:48):
partly about helping them to see themselves as the hero
of their own story and understand the control that they
have inside of the story, and understand that their co
creators in the story. And it's also because the thing
that you create gets to be witnessed and experienced by
people outside of you, even if it's five people. Yeah,
So I'm just curious, like what connection you make there.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
I think anybody who's written and published a book, even
self published a book, has accomplished the equivalent, let's say
of running a marathon, which is a big deal, you know.
I mean if you have trained and run twenty six miles,
you know, first of all, similar to having written a book,
there's something wrong with you.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Especially those of us who keep doing it again.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
And again and again again.
Speaker 4 (12:31):
Yeah, there's something very wrong with us.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
I don't think it needed to be a bestseller for
it to have really helped with obvious insecurities. There is
a part of life just that asks you to earn it.
And what I mean by that is like it is
an incredibly magical existence, and it is. It is incredibly
insanely imaginative and creative of some entity for us to
(13:00):
actually exist. And there's a feeling whether or not it's accurate.
Speaker 4 (13:04):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
It's way above my pay grade that you owe it something,
and by it I mean life, and I think I
think literally, like running a marathon, raising a family, writing
a book could be one thing is a sense that
you've like, Okay, I've made I've made something. I've paid
back a little bit of what I owe to the world.
And none of this is rational. Please don't think I'm
(13:26):
like I'm trying to build some sort of religious system here.
But there is that feeling. And I think, who's to
say if it wasn't a commercial success what it would
have been. But I still think it would have been transformative.
And I also think that a lot of the stuff
i've I wouldn't have. I probably wouldn't have, you know,
the career that I have today. But I'm confident I would.
Speaker 4 (13:46):
Actually have created a pretty darn good career.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Yeah, and in my past somewhere would have been this
season where I wrote a couple of books and I
probably would go months without remembering that. Yeah, but then
I'd go, oh, yeah, I remember I wrote that book. Yeah,
there's a copy around here. I don't know that the
quality of my life would have been any less or
is any more today because it was a commercial success,
I guess.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Yeah, I agree with you. I think you would have
just found a different way to get.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
To where you are today, find your way of growing up.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Yeah. I think it's interesting too. The act of writing
a book or running a marathon, or any other number
of examples you could come up with like that also
follow a narrative arc. It's also, you know, sort of
inserting a struggle into the ordinariness of our existence, Like
our existence is magical and it's also ordinary because you
(14:35):
just wake up every day and kind of do the
same things over and over again. So when you can
insert an objective or insert a struggle into that that
it gives you an opportunity to lean into it and
to interact with that struggle and to become something different
along the way, which is exactly what happens inside of
a narrative arc.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
I mean you, A hero is thrown into.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
Their life is distable lives.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
They are thrown into a challenge, almost always against their will.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
I call it a hero and a hole.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Every story starts with a hero and a hole, and
the story is about them climbing out of it. And
you know, to sit down and write a book is
definitely to throw yourself into a hole, or to decide
to jump into a hole. A lot of people would say, well,
it's self you know, it's a self started sort of challenge.
I don't know that I personally identify with that.
Speaker 4 (15:25):
It might be true.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
I'm curious about your take on this alley, but I
didn't feel like I had much of a choice. Yeah,
And it's what's interesting is like I didn't feel like
I had a choice on a book called To Own
a Dragon, which was not a commercial success. I didn't
feel like I had a choice on a book called
Hero on a Mission, which I wrote a couple of
books ago, which was not a commercial success. They all
felt exactly the same. So I'm very curious, like, on
(15:48):
the other side of this life, will somebody sit me
down and explain, Well, here's why I had you write
that book. And it wasn't about it being commercial success.
There are books that I've written to get it done
and did not even promote them. Yeah, because I actually
never wanted to write that book. I had to write
that book, yeah, and I just didn't promote it.
Speaker 4 (16:08):
I just thought, I don't actually really want this book
to sell anything.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
But I am being obedient to whatever is inside of
me that says this is I mean, you know, who
knows who we're talking to. It could be God. I
certainly have my own sort of religious worldview, but it's wide.
But there are times when I've thought, well, you should
do this, or it's time to do this, and I thought, well,
that's interesting, and then literally that feeling inside me says
(16:33):
I wasn't asking I was not suggesting you do that.
This is a demand and it's like, oh gosh, okay,
here we go. I better do this, And it doesn't
always work, which is very very strange.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
Yeah, work being a word that is hard, a little
hard to define. I feel similarly to you, where every
book I've written has been because the idea comes in
and sort of and doesn't let me go until the
thing is done. But of the three books that I
have currently published, the one that has been the most
commercially successful was the one I wrote first, which is
(17:12):
the one I'm least proud of, the one I least
knew what I was doing. It's still, to this day
doesn't totally make sense to me why that one has
performed better than the other two books. And the one
that I'm most proud of, the one that was most
transformative for me, is the one that has sold the
fewest number of copies, and yet it has brought the
most abundance into my life. My second book is the
(17:32):
story of walking through my divorce, and I would not
be in the marriage I'm in right now, or in
the life or have the family that I have right
now if I hadn't written that book. Because I needed
to see that story on paper to be able to
become the woman that I am today. So you know,
in terms of like what's given me the most, that
book has given me the most, but certainly doesn't look
(17:54):
that way on paper.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
No, And you know, I take comfort from, like, you know,
a lot of our heroes. I mean, you know, Bill
Cosby is commercially successful.
Speaker 4 (18:06):
But he was a dirtbag.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
I take cover for the fact that commercial success is
absolutely no sign of quality or any of that stuff.
There is a there's a bit of a comfort in that,
I guess, but.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
Yeah, I'm with you, I'm with you.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
I also love the idea. I don't know if you've
done this. As I've gotten older and written more and
more books, my identity is just less and less tied
to a book as it's released.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
In fact, I use a metaphor of or the.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Analogy I should say of, you know, if you're if
you're a master craftsman and you build furniture, you build
it and you sell it. Yeah, you don't drive by
the person's house and say, can I spend a little
time with that hutch that I built for you? Can
I be alone with with this Credienso I think it's
(18:54):
the same for me. In books, you write them, you
deliver them to the people who you hope that will
engage in. And that's it's not that you don't care.
You care about them, but it's not like you're going
to them saying, hey.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
You know, are you proud of me? Did you like it?
Speaker 2 (19:07):
You know?
Speaker 4 (19:07):
It's just like, no, yes, no, that's not why I
wrote this book. I wrote this book to serve.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Somebody and because of the incredible thrill it is to
sit down and put words on a page.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
Yes, and you and I have talked about this too,
But just the idea of not keeping a bunch of
copies of your book around. It's not like I don't
have like I don't go back and revisit pages of
a book that I wrote that's already been published. Like
there's almost like an aversion that I have to rereading,
even Indestructible, which I'm very proud of. Like I've never
gone to the shelf and just been like, let me
(19:37):
read a page.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
No, you know I did when I first started, did you.
I mean I would sit and read that stuff and
just think, oh, that's a good line.
Speaker 4 (19:47):
I do collect copy foreign copies.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
That's like, I can't say I don't have copies of
my book because literally behind me in the picture that
we are on on Zoom, there are foreign copies.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
But I just think the covers are cool.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Me too much, because I'm an obsessive editor and I
cannot read anything that I've written in the past without
wanting to change it. And so to me, that's mind
numbingly painful, and that's the main reason I don't want.
Speaker 4 (20:13):
Those books around. Yes, agreed, it's never done. You just
have to ship it.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
It's never done. I know if they didn't give you
a deadline, you would just keep on keeping on that
same Yeah, Okay, I want to talk about the Write
Your Story workshop that we've been doing for a handful
(20:40):
of years now. We've done this I don't know five
or six times, and I want to talk about the
type of person who comes to this workshop because we're
doing our last iteration of this workshop live and in
person this October, and we've got about fifty people coming. Again,
We've had fifty people each time come, so it's going
to be a really great experience. But can you talk
(21:00):
about the kind of person who comes to this workshop?
And not just the workshop, since this is the last
time we're doing it. The kind of person who's drawn
to this process, I'm.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Sure you feel the same, But they tend to be
incredibly sort of altruistic people, so they're very much sort
of serving hearted. They also are not afraid to sort
of look inside themselves and try to figure out what's
going on. So those are the common characteristics. And then
to me, there's been two different types of intention. One
(21:32):
intention is to process pain, hard things that have happened
and try to make sense of it. And then there's
also to process expertise and to sort of leverage their
story to build a personal platform and to sort of
say here's who I am in the world, and here's
what you can hire me to do in some ways.
(21:56):
And amazingly we're all sort of in the same room together.
To the people who are pross pain tend to be
a smaller group of people, but I think everybody in
the room recognizes and is honored to have them sitting there.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Yeah, and I would argue that those two people are
the same people. They're just on different stops on their journey.
Like the ones who come who are processing pain just
haven't gotten to the place where they've seen who that
pain makes them to be. And when you process that pain,
I think this is the gift of writing your story,
(22:30):
is that when you process that pain, that becomes somehow
like the gift that you have to give to the world.
And so some people have come and they've already processed
a lot of pain, so they're coming to share their expertise.
And some people have come and maybe they are three
steps steps back on the journey and they haven't quite
had a chance yet to process that pain. But when
(22:51):
they do, then they become the second type of person,
They become the leader.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yeah, there's a sense universally amosty writing in the room that
they're trying to figure out what this is about, like
what their story is about, and what it means and
what to do with it. And so I think everybody
in the room sort of has this these open story loops,
if you will, these questions about who they are, why
they matter, and what they can how they can leverage
their life experience for the betterment of others. And what's
(23:17):
amazing to me is in the room, how many of
those story loops close even before they finished writing it.
They're like Oh, that's what this was about, and that's
why this matters, and that's why this is important. I
think some of that happens because they're actually writing it down,
and some of that happens because you're in a room
for two days talking about it. Yeah, with other human
beings who are giving you feedback on it. You know,
(23:39):
I don't know that we knew fully what we were
getting into. We are not therapists, but boy, you talk
about quick healing. Yeah, we ought to be We ought
to be paid like therapists. Seriously raise no therapy, by
the way, ye offer any advice writing.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Speaking of what a story is about, I'd love to
have you talk about this because I'm sure people who
are listening or thinking, I think maybe I'll have a
story to tell, but I'm not sure what my story
is about. So how would you help guide someone to
determine what their story is about?
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Figuring out what your story is about, or what a
story about is about. It's all about whittling it down.
And so the first realization that happens really quickly in
the room is that you go from I don't know
what my story is about to my story is very
clearly about fifty seven things that happens very fast because
(24:35):
one of the things that you realize when you sit
down to write a story is that it can't be
about everything, and good storytellers leave almost everything out. And
this story has to be about that one trip you
took to Florida, yep. Or this one relationship that didn't
work out, or this one traumatic experience you had in
(24:55):
your family, or this one success that you experienced. It
has to be about one thing. That's the first realization.
And then the second realization is that once you choose
what the story is going to be about, that it
has a moral, that it has a life lesson, and
the life lesson is death and tragedy are real, but
(25:17):
it doesn't ruin life. Now you've created the moral of
the story, and you're going to build a story to defend.
Speaker 4 (25:24):
That idea and teach other people that idea.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
And then when you actually write that down and walk
out of the room, you believe it. And you didn't
even know about the moral walking in. Now not only
do you have a moral walking out, but you believe
that moral and it becomes a foundation for who you
are and how you live life. That's what write your
story actually offers you in the long run.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
Oh, it's so good. And while you were talking, I
was thinking about how this is one of the ways
that writing your story strengthens who you are as a person.
Is that as you whittle it down and decide what
your story is about and include only the necessary. I
don't know if you've had this experience, but when you
do this with your personal story, you actually forget about
(26:06):
everything that doesn't need to be in the story. Like
every detail that doesn't get included gets forgotten, and it's
almost as if it never happened. And the only details
that get included are the ones that need to be
remembered in order to defend the more.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
The idea, yeah, yeah, or to make it interesting. If
your story doesn't have a moral, it certainly should entertain. Yeah.
And the beauty of that is that you get to
leave with a little bit of a framework you can
use to self edit your actual life. You know what
(26:41):
I mean. Where you're just going, I don't think that
character needs to be in my story. Yes, yes, And
you're like, we're gonna literally like we're cutting that person out. Yeah,
Or boy, if I say this to my friend, I
sure am gonna look like a villain, and probably because
(27:04):
I am one.
Speaker 4 (27:05):
Yeah, so I'm gonna hold my tongue.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
And that doesn't really happen until you step out of
your life and begin to see it as a narrative
and do the work to write it down that you
can actually you can actually edit in real time. And
you know, I don't know about you, Ali, I'm curious
about this, but it's actually a voice in my head
that I carry with me. I mean, you know, to
give you an example, I am you know, I have
a company, I have thirty employees and almost a thousand
(27:30):
people in our certified community. I'm a husband, I'm a dad.
I am also still I still have a nine year
old sense of humor, and I'm a cut up and
I'm a goofball. And that doesn't always serve me. And
so you know, in the last several years, it's been
like did you just got Like sometimes in a meeting
when people are serious, you just have to be serious.
(27:53):
And I literally think that voice is the editor editing
my life in real time. And it is annoying and
it's also served me, yeah very well. And I don't
I wonder if that whatever would have happened without the
writing exercises, I would.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
Argue that it wouldn't happen. I call that voice the
narrator voice, Yeah, which it's the voice that's narrating your
story for you. And it's got like the higher perspective,
it's got like the bird's eye view, and it's telling you, like,
this is not what you want to do with your life.
Don't go down that path, or you know, don't say
yes to this gig. It might seem good in the beginning,
(28:32):
but it's not really going to fulfill you deeply. Or
those are the sorts of things that my narrator voice
is saying to me along the way. And I do
think that's a skill that is honed and perfected through
the writing process, because what other reason would you have
for having that running narrator in the background. Or the
other thing that happens too is your narrator just gets
(28:54):
more mature as you write down your story, because when
you first write it down, you realize your narrator is
saying stuff you like, you idiot, or you know, it's
just like a critical, mean voice. And as you mature
your narrator, you realize that your narrator actually can really
serve you in life. It can see things that you
can't see. It can see the end of the story
(29:15):
before you can see it. As the hero, you don't
see the end of the story, but your narrator knows
exactly where the story is going.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
I find it very helpful.
Speaker 4 (29:23):
Yeah, it's been very much foundational. I think, can we talk.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
About villains in stories because this is not part of
the framework. But probably the most often question I get
from people who are writing personal stories is how do
I write about the people who have hurt me? And
I really really like your perspective on this, so I'd
love to hear you. I've heard you answer this question,
but hear you answer the question yeah again.
Speaker 4 (29:47):
Well, there's many sides that question. I mean, first is like,
are you going to name names?
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Yeah, yeah, And my mo with that is I do
not name names because people are fluid and they change,
and when you put them in a book, there that
is who they are to everybody who reads it. So
it's unfair even if they've done something really terrible.
Speaker 4 (30:13):
I don't think that's.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
Like, you know, a rule. I wouldn't say that's an
ethical requirement of every writer. It's just my personal conscious
won't allow me to do that.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
You also may run into legal issues if you use
someone's real name, so it's just easier to change their
name or leave it out.
Speaker 4 (30:29):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
And even if what they did is true, if they
come after, you've got a bunch of legal bills to
prove that it's that it's true, you know. So that's
my idea that I do think like the biggest shift
for me from not studying literature, but from just interacting
with people who are so incredibly confusing in terms of
their selfishness and their lack of conscience. I think villains
(30:53):
exist in stories because there are villainous characteristics in all
of us, but I actually do think there are villains
in life.
Speaker 4 (30:59):
I think are people who are just wired to be villains.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
And the characteristics of those people, for me, are an
incredible selfishness, like what they're doing, no matter how great
it is or how nice it is or how kind
it seems, is really about them. And then the second,
and this to me is the tailtale sign of evil,
(31:24):
is deception. That deceit is literally a part of their strategy.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
And they do it with no conscience.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
And to me, those are if I were writing a
story and I needed a villain, those would be the
two driving characteristics that I would want to display in
that person's behavior. Is everything they're doing, they're doing to
benefit themselves, and they literally would probably not be able
(31:55):
to even know what is true and what is not true.
Speaker 4 (32:00):
And I've met those people in life.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
And you know, when you think about like Vladimir Putin
and you have any Pregosian, the president of Russia and
his warlord mercenary who he recently most likely recently killed,
they were both they're both wired exactly that way. And
those are, by the way, fantastic villains in the overall
story of life. So you know, I would have told
(32:26):
you that villains don't actually exist, and that everybody is
good and people just make mistakes. And it was not
till I was older than fifty so in the last
two years that I actually no longer believe that.
Speaker 4 (32:38):
Yeah, I believe there are people who are just villains,
that's who they are, yeah, and not that they shouldn't be.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
You know, they don't have a right to adjust trial
or whatever. So I now believe there are people who
simply can't change. M Scott Peck would actually say they
are evil.
Speaker 4 (32:54):
Now, I'm sorry. He would not say they're evil.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
He would say they are not evil, but evil is
the operating system that we're within them. There's kind of
how I think he would word it, and I now
agree with that.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Yeah, I agree too. And I also think that as
we think about our life as a story unfolding, it
ups the anne for the heroes and the story. I
think heroes in the story in a literary sense, have
a tendency to not think very highly of themselves, not
want to draw too much attention to themselves.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Yeah, that's what makes us like a hero is that
they're they're insecure like the rest of us, and so
we identify with them.
Speaker 3 (33:27):
But we need the heroes in the stories to step
up to the plate and take action and defeat the
villain so that the villain doesn't win in the end
of the story.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
We do. And that's another deceptive thing about you know.
That's the difference between stories, the stories that we find
in literature and the stories that we live in real
life is that is actually not what usually happens in
real life, that when the hero stands up to the villain,
the villain often wins, which is true in stories that
are categorized as tragedies are rampant in life itself. But
(34:04):
that doesn't mean that the story is an inspirational for
those who stand up, you know, in the first place.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
So you're saying, in real life, when a hero stands
up to a villain, the villain often wins. So you're saying,
in real life, when a hero stands up to a villain,
the villain often wins. Yes, So how do you write
(34:31):
that story?
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Well, I mean, a good inspirational speaker might say that
just means the story is not over yet.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
Sure, I would say that there all is lost moment.
If it seems like the villain has won, your story
hasn't hasn't finished yet, you would disagree with that.
Speaker 4 (34:47):
It depends.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
In that case, was the story of the men who
stormed the beaches at Normandy and died there. That's that's
of no comfort probably to them. Sure, well, you know.
Speaker 4 (35:01):
It's pretty darn over.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
So I think there's an unfairness and injustice about life,
And I think that's one of the reasons that we
love stories that in with the villain going down and
being defeated, because it gives us this this hope in
this sense that we only get a little bit of
on earth. This all sounds like terribly sad, but you
know what if on the other side of this life,
(35:26):
all of that is actually redeemed and the longing that
we have for a story to come full circle and
for story loops to be closed and justice to have
won the day. You know, I think there's a pining
in all of us for that to happen. So, you know,
even Christian theology and Islamic theology and shoot, I mean
Jewish theology, it all heads toward that. In fact, I
(35:48):
think most stories, if you look at Joseph Campbell's treatment
of stories, most myths, you know, the justice actually happens
on the other side of death.
Speaker 3 (35:56):
Okay, So that brings us to a question about resolving story.
Then what advice would you give to someone who's writing
a personal story and feels that their resolution hasn't come
or may never come for them. Like I'm thinking of
someone who's battling cancer and you know, feels like they're
losing that fight, or maybe is losing the fight, or
(36:17):
someone who is up against some other goliath.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
My advice would be to actually resolve it in some way.
There are many kinds of resolution your battle with cancer,
the resolution that you may come up with the battle
that you face. Then, even though you may be losing,
the battle to cancer is actually a battle to see
life is beautiful and to be grateful for it. And
(36:41):
if you can resolve this, if you can resolve the
story that way, then that story has resolved. The beautiful
thing about writing your story is you get to decide
what the story is about, and you get to frame
it the way you want. The reality is there have
been one hundred billion people who have walked this planet.
The overwhelming majority of them are now dead, and all
(37:02):
the rest of them will be dead relatively soon. So
death is going to be every single person.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
And to me, if you can frame your own personal
story where that somehow is still beautiful, that is a
heroic accomplishment.
Speaker 4 (37:23):
And what other choice you have?
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Yeah, you know, I mean give up and you quit
or you say, okay, we're in something really weird here. Yeah,
And I'm going to actually frame this in such a
way that I get the most out of it, and
I get the most beauty possible because I can, I
am able to frame the story that way and subscribe
to it in that way, and it gives me hope
(37:46):
and it passes along a perspective to the next generation
that makes their stories actually bearable and perhaps even enjoyable.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
Yeah, when people come to the workshop to write their story,
what are the obstacles that you feel like are in
their way as far as actually executing on the story.
What are people up against?
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Ali the You know, the big thing that I think
is true of all writing is the biggest, absolute, biggest
obstacle is you are writing in order to have written,
instead of writing in order to discover. Ooh, and you know.
I saw a clip with Kobe Bryant recently and he
was asked back when he was playing, He was asked,
(38:28):
are you driven more by the desire to win or
are you driven more by the desire.
Speaker 4 (38:32):
Not to fail, not to lose? And he profoundly answered neither,
because if you're driven to win, you're driven by fear,
and if you're driven to not lose, you're driven by fear.
I am driven to discover. I'm driven to discover what
else can be done in this game and what are
other ways to shoot?
Speaker 2 (38:53):
And he said, if you're just driven by a constant curiosity,
the score takes care of itself. And I think that's
the thing when you sit down to write, if you're
if you're trying to write in order to be brilliant,
you will never ever be perceived as brilliant.
Speaker 4 (39:08):
But if you're.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
Writing to discover what is possible when you put a
when you put some ink on a page, and what
is possible in terms of you mining your soul, you
were much more likely to actually put something on the
page that is profound. I actually had a conversation late
one night. I was in San Diego. There's a guy
named John Foreman who's the lead singer of a band
(39:30):
called switch Foot, and John and I became friends. And
you know, it's really late at night. We're sitting on
a beach in San Diego in the dark, and we
were talking about the creative process. And I was at
a point where I was probably probably writing my third
or fourth book, and writer's block was getting to me
and the negative Amazon reviews were in my head, and
(39:52):
I just said, how do you deal with that? He's
like I he literally like didn't even understand. I mean,
I don't. I don't know if he'd ever even I
add the thought or the fear he said Donna, I
just see myself as an archaeologist. I just go dig
and see what I can find.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
Hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
I was like, wow, you know, and now I identify
with that. All these years later, I identify with that,
and I sit down to write so that I can
go find, so that I can go discover what's under
their dirt, and then I, you know, I find something,
wash it off, clean it up, see what it is,
and maybe it's worthy to put on in chapter three. Yeah,
(40:31):
and to me, that's a much more sort of healthy
relationship with the written word than trying to project an identity.
Speaker 3 (40:38):
It definitely creates longevity, at least for me. Hearing that,
I think, I definitely don't access that or actualize it
every time I sit down to write. But when I do,
I really enjoy the experience of writing. And when I don't,
and when I'm trying to sort of like, this is
a paradigm flip because so many people come to this
process going like I want to help people, I want
(40:58):
to inspire people, and it's like, you do get to
do that, but you don't get to do it without
first going I'm going to go into my own pain
or into my own story, or into my own confusion,
into the chaos, into the you know, the mess of
the idea and untangle the not and as you do that,
(41:19):
you uncover something that's for you first, and then it's
for an audience also, you know, could be one person,
there could be a million people. But yeah, I mean
people come to the process going I want to help people.
I want to inspire people. I want this to reach millions.
And it's like, if you come at it from that direction,
you miss out on I think, at least the real
(41:41):
part of it, the part of it that's trying to
speak to you, speak through you, and from the energy
of I want to inspire people. You can create something
that may sell, but in my opinion, you miss out
on all the really good stuff of the creative life.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Agreat Well, I think that a lot of amateur writers,
me included, when I first got started, we're trying.
Speaker 4 (42:03):
To project an identity.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
I was trying to write something to make people think
that I was this person who I wanted to be
was John Steinbeck. Yeah, I wanted to be you know,
a Nobel Prize winning talent. Yeah, And and I was
writing to try to get the world to say you
are Yes, while I lived in the delusional fantasy that
(42:28):
I was, it was really really great. And then to
put it out in the world. I'm not kidding. I
mean I would walk, I would go smoke a pipe
and I'd walk. I lived up near Mount Hood and
would walk on these back farm roads for miles and miles,
smoking a pipe, coming up with whatever was next. It
was just one of the most enjoyable experiences. And I'd
sit down, I'd get so excited. I mean, what, you know,
(42:50):
what about what if I worded it this way and
get back and write that down and just thought it
was brilliant and then and then the uh and then
other people when they read it they didn't agree with me.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
Yeah, those pesty other.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
People oh Man should have done. Was never published, and
then I could still live in this delusions, which I
think that's what JD.
Speaker 4 (43:16):
Salinger actually did. I really do.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
I think he wrote Catcher and the Rye and an
obvious work of genius, and then I think that got
in his head and he was unwilling to find out
that it was of it was not a fluke. Yes, yeah,
I personally think that. Yeah, I don't know, but I
personally think that's what happened to Sallenger?
Speaker 3 (43:38):
Well, I think it seems like that could happen to
any of us, right, I mean, like I asked you
the question about Blue Leg Jazz, Like what would have
happened if that book didn't break out the way that
it did. And it's impossible to really calculate why one
book does and another book does it, or even music,
you know, like why any piece of right sort of
like takes off and another one doesn't. You can look
at the influen, but you can't really know why you
(44:02):
catch lightning in a bottle one time and not another time.
But the reason I bring that up is I do
think it seems very likely or possible for any creative
person to have a moment where they have that divine
experience of like a thing coming through them that's bigger
than them, and then to go like I want to
go catch that again. It's that it's that I want
(44:22):
to catch that again, and some people stops you from
having it. Sure, yes, many idea.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
I mean I'd like to sit down with Ed Sheeran, Yeah,
And just how God's name are you doing this?
Speaker 3 (44:34):
I mean I don't know Ed Sheeran, but I don't either.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
I didn't mean to suggest I do, but I still like,
if he's listening, give me a call.
Speaker 3 (44:42):
Yeah, call us up, call us up, ed, send us
an email, let us know. I mean, I would imagine
any musician would have to say that there's an element
of getting out of your own way that has to
take place for you to make something that resonates.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Have you seen the documentary series Get Back. No, it's
Peter what's his name who directed The Lord of the
Rings during COVID. He had nothing to do and I
think it was in New Zealand, and he could he
just couldn't do anything, and so somebody gave him I
think hundreds and hundreds of hours of Beatles footage from
(45:20):
from the studios I have heard about while they were recording, Yeah,
while they were recording their final studio record. And it's
a very strange documentary in the sense that I mean
for the first forty minutes to an hour, literally nothing happens.
I mean that, Yeah, the camera is just kind of
following them around and they're figuring out where to put furniture,
(45:42):
and they're kind of moving into this big warehouse and
this is where they're going to record and Yoko's hanging
out and I mean nothing there. Occasionally somebody will hit
a drum and blah blah blah, and then Paul McCartney
just starts strumming, and you right, and you recognize like
he's strumming, and then like a minute in you're like, wait,
wait a second, I've heard that, and he literally just
came up with a lick that is now you're watching
(46:05):
him do it, that is crazy. Yeah, and then you
know then the lyrics are just like, you know, he's
singing a song that you recognize, but the lyrics are wrong.
Oh my gosh, and you're like, though those were the
that was the first evolution of that lyric. Yeah, it
was really comforting just to watch him do it because
(46:27):
Paul McCartney it does. I mean, the documentary really shows
that he's the most you know, most talented of all
those guys, and you know he's just going for it
and he just doesn't.
Speaker 4 (46:38):
It just does not seem like he's trying so nute.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
He's just he just won't quite He just like he
just keeps going, keeps going, keeps going. Then he's able
to like an archaeologist, he's able to realize, oh, so
that's that's cool, that's cool, yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:51):
Which I mean you're describing, at least for me, the
writing process. There's a lot of writing that comes out
that's just garbage, you know, but you just keep at it,
You keep at it, you keep at it. And that's
why I think going back to your point about like
enjoying the process of mining the wisdom in your life.
If you can and if you can see it like
a puzzle, that you're you're doing this for the sake
(47:14):
of the enjoyment of it, it creates a longevity where
you're at this long enough that you actually find the
genius that's inside of it.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
Yeah, and it's such a wonderful experience to find it.
It really is anything.
Speaker 3 (47:28):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, thank you so much, Don for
the conversation and just everything that you shared. It's been
really fun to do this experiment with you, and I'm
excited to see where write your story goes. We've got
a lot of really fun new things coming. The workshop
is coming to a close, but the podcast is here.
There's a book coming.
Speaker 2 (47:48):
There's a book coming, there's an online experience. I think
it's coming that you're putting together lots.
Speaker 3 (47:53):
Of different things in the works. So so thank you
for your inspiration for me, Thanks for sharing your wisdom
with our listeners, and thanks for having us conversation.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
My pleasure MHM.
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