21. John David Mann: How To Write Good (Or At Least, Gooder)
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Hey everyone, it's Alex from Alex and Books, and you're listening to The Reader's Journey, the podcast that takes you on a journey to meet amazing authors, discover brilliant books, and learn valuable lessons along the way. Now, let's get started. ♪

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the reader journey podcast today We have john david man the co-author of more than 30 books including the go-giver the latte factor and many more wonderful books Today, we'll be talking about his book how to write good or at least gooder john Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for the invitation This is an honor to be here

Yeah, I'm super excited to talk because I've been a big fan of your books, such as The Go-Giver, which you co-wrote with Bob Berg, Mastering Fear, which you co-wrote with Brandon Webb. But when I learned about your past, you were actually a cellist and a composer. So the first question I have to ask is, how did you go from that to being co-author of more than 30 books? Like, how did that happen?

I've been asked that question before, and I'm still not sure if I know the real answer, but I can tell you sometimes my life feels like it's been a little bit of a pinball game, you know, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. Following kind of my interests and my passions and my curiosities, I never, I really intended to be a concert cellist and a composer. I loved composing. I loved classical music. I grew up with classical music.

My father was a classic, was a choral conductor and a musicologist. And my mom was in classical music. And my brother is a professional classical musician. And that's what I was going to do. But I just got this bug after that. And I got very interested in all kinds of things, nutrition and health and kind of world affairs and philosophy. And it led me to, to a whole variety of different business. Eventually everywhere I went, I,

It seemed like I was the guy who ended up editing the newsletter or editing the flyer or doing the interview and cleaning it up for publication or what have you. So I always ended up having some kind of writing task or writing chore. There was never a day where I said, I think I should become a writer. It kind of just happened.

And I created some periodicals. First, a journal, a local journal, which became a national journal and a magazine about the health and the environment. And then I got involved kind of in founding or co-founding one magazine or journal after the other. And I was always the editor guy.

So I ended up editing a lot of other people's books, other people's writings for many, many years and eventually that turned into writing books. - All right, well that's really fascinating. - And I love it.

And I love it. I love where I arrived. I mean, I got to tell you, I think I finally found my, it still feels like I'm writing music. It's just that it isn't notes. It's letters. Right, right. It's a different kind of music that you use, you know, words decorate like history and memories and knowledge and, you know, music kind of decorates like sounds. So I think there's definitely some similarities there. I think it's also amazing that like you weren't, like growing up as a kid, you weren't like, I want to be a writer or something that you kind of stumbled upon later. Cause I was really surprised to learn, like you didn't,

you don't have like a writing degree or like an MFA or something and you've written all these books. So I think that's a big like inspiration for like all of us who think, oh, you need to get a degree to become author or something like that. Yeah, I'm often just kind of

stupefied by all the stuff I don't have and the credentials I don't have the experience I don't have all the books all the great books I haven't read yet but you know we all start where we are with who we are and that's just what it is so John a lot of people who are listening you know they're aspiring writers they want to be an author one day and in your book you say to write better you need three things which you mentioned intention practice and critique can you kind of elaborate on each of those ingredients

Yeah, sure. So that's my recipe. Three ingredients. Intention. Yeah, and intention is a cool thing. I was talking about the etymology of intention. And if you break it down into its Sanskrit roots, it means something like a stretched string, like on a bow. And intention is like you're shooting an arrow. And you don't know exactly where it's going to land, but you hope you're pretty close. I think that you...

You don't become a good writer by accident. You don't write good writing by accident. It really is something that I think you need to intend to do. It's kind of like you make a decision. It's another way of saying it. I really, that's why I called the book How to Write Good or at Least Gooder. I mean, none of us is excellent to start with. I don't even know how to be excellent. But I know, one thing I do know is how to take what I've done

and improve it, make it better. And so that intention of making it better, making it better, making it better, that drives me. I get such a kick out of making something that I've written, it's mediocre, better. And if you make it better enough, it might even become good, you know? And so the intention, I think, is really important. Practice is the thing of doing it regularly all the time. Like I used to play the cello. And when I played the cello, I played every day.

I don't anymore. And I, you know, people have said, oh, you should play the cello. You should go back to the cello. Well, you know, no, this is what I do now. And this is my practice. If you're not doing it every day means kind of like five days a week or six, maybe a day off, but pretty much you're writing every day.

And even if it's only 10 minutes or 15 minutes or 20 minutes, when my dad was doing his doctoral thesis, which later turned into a book, which is still selling today decades later, the only time he had during the day, which he could put time in, it was 10 o'clock at night. So from 10 to 11 o'clock at night, he worked on his thesis. And this is now 60 years later and the book is still selling, but he took that hour a day. So it's a practice.

And so I think those two are obvious, intention and then the practice, which is putting the intention into effect. The third, I say, is critique. And I think critique is so critical because there are people who have perspective on you that you don't have on yourself. You can critique yourself, but it's tricky propositions.

Yeah, it's kind of like trying to tickle yourself. Even trying to tickle yourself, it doesn't really work because you know what's coming. You already know, it's my hand. I'm not ticklish.

Critique is like that. You need somebody else to do it. You need someone else to read what you wrote and say, you know what? I love this. And you weren't sure if it was worth loving. You weren't sure it was great. And they say, I love this. This part here, I'm just not sure about. And I thought that was the best part. So you need, I think you need, if you want to really refine and improve, you want to raise the level of your writing,

Absolute essential ingredient is having people of good judgment, people whose judgment you trust, who are qualified. Typically, you want people who are really avid readers, who love books and who read a lot and who will read your stuff and tell you the truth, tell you what they think.

I think it's crucial. Every time in my life, I think I say this in the book, my writing story is not like a straight line of getting better, better, better, better. It's mostly like this. And every now and then I've taken a little leap and improved.

Every one of those leaps has been because I had a great teacher or a great editor or a great agent or somebody who really pulled me up a level by saying, this part doesn't work. This part works. This part, I just don't know. You got to do it, et cetera. So.

Yeah, I think all three are definitely valuable. But I think most people kind of avoid that critique part because they're afraid to be vulnerable and like, you know, put their words out there and have people say like, hey, this is good, but it could be better. And that's sometimes kind of hurt. But that kind of that's also kind of how you grow in life, whether it's writing or some other professional activity. So I think that's a very valuable trait to learn. And you make a really good point because so how do you survive that? Because I'm going to tell you, I've been doing this for I mean, I've written like 30 books have been published.

And it still hurts. You know, when someone says, I didn't like that part, I'm like, what do you mean? You didn't like that part. It's my baby. How could you not like that? I love it. So how do you survive that? You have to have a, like this sort of unshakable ironclad belief in yourself, faith in yours, in yourself and in what you're writing. And it's this weird thing of two, two opposite things at the same time. And if you can't do this, you can't, you can't become a good writer. You have to be able to one,

Totally believe in yourself and your project. There's a good book in here, or there's a good article or a good blog post or whatever you're writing. It's in here. I know it's in here. At the same time, open the door to someone telling you which parts work and which parts don't. And those are contradictory mind states. I like to say it's kind of you have the arrogance of a teenager and the humility of a Buddhist monk. And you can't do it if you're missing either one.

You really have to believe in yourself. And that's, that's like, that's the faith part of writing. Yeah. I love that duality. You have to be arrogant in your, in your, while you're writing, but when someone's editing your work, you gotta be humble about it. Yeah. And I just, yeah, your book is just filled with wonderful advice for writers. And another thing you mentioned is that, uh, for aspiring writers is to read great books. And you talk about how, uh, East of Eden and on writing by Stephen King and like a lot more other books had a big impact on you. So can you kind of talk about the relationship between, uh, reading books and becoming a better writer?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, we talked before about intention, practice, and critique. Intention is where it starts, and reading is part of intention. Now, I think Stephen King says in his book On Writing, which is probably the most read, tons of famous authors have written books on writing, and a lot of them are just fantastic. They're all fantastic, but I think his is probably best known, and it's a really good book. But I think in there somewhere he says, if you don't have time to read, then you can't

then you don't have time to write, you know, it's like, you're not going to be, or the skills. So yeah, reading great writing is such a critical part of writing, of being a writer, becoming a writer, improving as a writer. Reading is like,

Eating is to caloric output. Reading is like inhaling is to out, you know, to exhale, to out breath, to physical effort. Reading is like sleeping, where you rebuild your body, where you repair your tissues, where you restore yourself. Reading is the lifeblood of writing. So it's like I heard Lee Child talking, and I think I mentioned this in the book. He was, I heard him at a virtual author's event.

you're talking with somebody else and Karen Slaughter or somebody, and he casually mentioned that he reads about a book a day. Dude reads a book a day. I don't read that much. I mean, no wonder it's like this guy reads. So you don't need to read a book a day necessarily, but you know, a book a week, isn't a bad idea. And so it's, sometimes I say, I,

I say, and I think this is a good idea, you don't have to read in the same genre you're writing in. Like if you're writing nonfiction, you can read fiction. And if you're reading, if you like to write horror, then it's okay to read romance. And if you like to write romance, it's okay to read children's books and so forth. I say that at the same time I have to admit that

For years, I wrote nonfiction and all I read was fiction. I wrote all those parables. I wasn't reading any parables. All I was reading was crime novels. And so now I'm finally writing crime novels. That's what I've been wanting to do for 20 years. But yeah, reading is crucial. And sometimes you, you know, we'll talk about writer's block, but sometimes you hit a block where you can't, I hit a block where I can't do anything and

And it's because I need to take a break and read. I need to refill, refill the inspiration. Yeah. And this was multiple like kind of advantages to reading there. One is like you're getting inspiration. Two is like sometimes you need a break. And three is like you have to learn from the masters if you want to get to like that level. Yes.

It's cool to read, and I should do this more than I do, and I admit that. I mean, I think it's a great thing to read something that just hits you like a two-by-four and then say, okay, now wait, how did she do that? I mean, what words did she use? What order are they in? What's the magic here? And put yourself behind the curtain and try to figure out what this author did. Every now and then I do that.

And it just, I learned so much from it. I don't do it as much as I might think I should because I'm being sucked along by the book, but I do think it's a great thing to do. And some of my favorite books I've read multiple times. If you want to read a book two or three times, that tells you that there's a lot of juice in that book to get out. Yeah.

And I think you just touched on a really important point, which is like you're being a deliberate reader. Like not only are you reading the book, but you're seeing what kind of words do they use? What kind of sentences? How do they organize this paragraph in the story? I think a lot of writers kind of just, okay, I'm reading this book for entertainment, but they don't really take that next step and become deliberate about what they're reading and how the author structured the book. And you can do both. I mean, you can completely enjoy them, but it's nice every now and then. And here's the thing you can do is, the way you can do it is just,

Keep tabs on yourself and notice when you had your socks knocked off. Notice when you have to sit back and go, whoa, that passage was so beautiful or that passage was so shocking or I am so surprised or I'm so gripped or whatever it is. I have to stop and go, whoa. When that happens...

If you don't want to stop right now because the story is pulling you along like a riptide, bookmark it. Bookmark it. Go back. Highlight. Go back. And maybe tomorrow, after you finish the book, whatever, it's worth the time. Go back and find your favorite spots and say, okay, now, what just happened here? Because it isn't always obvious. Sometimes I go and I look at a passage that I just adored in Tana French or in Raymond Chandler or in Lee Child, whoever.

And I'll go back and look at it later and go, I never even realized, you know, that the guy had like three or four or five pages of paragraphs that were this long. And suddenly went boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, short paragraphs. And then boom, a one liner. I didn't even see that happening when it was happening. When I go back and I, and I kind of analyze this, Oh, right. I get why I was like choking in my, in my, in my chest because he, because he did that to me with his, with his, with his paragraph breaks, right?

yeah, it's cool. It's so much discovery to do there. Yeah. So that's a wonderful tip for all the writers out there is to study books. And you also share another tip, which is kind of like study words, study the etymology of words. Can you kind of dive into like why that's important for aspiring writers? Yeah. I mean, I think first of all, that the, there are so many words I don't know. And one thing that I do is I, um,

I used to sit with a dictionary nearby. Now I've got a phone. It's cool. I don't even have a dictionary on my phone. I just hit Google. I hit my browser. And I do this when I'm reading a lot. I'll read along and I see a word I don't know. And in the past, I would just skip over it because I get the gist of it in the sentence. Go find out what it means because it's like using a muscle you don't usually use.

So I'll just hit my browser, put the word in, boom, and I start to learn all about it. Cool. I learn all about it, look at some synonyms. So before etymology or anything fancy like that, I like to just look at how a word sounds and how it feels and what the implication is. Like what is cook versus burn versus sear versus char versus scald? I mean, all the different words that mean the same thing.

Because sometimes you're writing something and you use a word and either you just use it so you don't want to repeat it, or it just doesn't have the bite or the power or the flavor that you want. And it's really a cool exercise to say, okay, what are five other ways I could say that? What are seven other ways I could say that? So here's a pro tip. This is something I do all the time. Let's say I'm using the word jump. I don't know. I'm

And I want to find a different word for jump. I'll go to my browser. I'll just type jump and then space and then S-Y-N for synonym. That's all I type because I don't want to waste time. I'm going to jump, space, syn, and boom, it pops up synonyms. And without even going to other, it'll just drop down on your screen. You can see all these. It's such a great tool. And I admit to doing that constantly. I'm always looking up words and their synonyms. The etymology of words, I think, is really cool because synonyms

A word, here's an example. I want something. I want a place in the country. I want to be successful. I want to be handsome. I want a bigger house. You look at the word want. You're using the word, right? So what does it mean? Look at the history. Go to the etymology. And what you find out is for a long time before it meant I crave this thing, I desire this thing, what it meant was I lack this thing. I don't have this thing.

So I'm a big believer in self-talk, by the way. I'm a big believer that the things that you say out loud or the things that you think out loud in your head are really powerful in the way that they shape your thoughts. Your thoughts are really powerful in the way they shape your life. So if you want your life to change or go in a certain direction, you need to start with your words, what you're saying to yourself. So if I'm saying, I want this, I want this, I want this, I want this.

etymology says what you're saying is, I like this, I like this, I like this, I like this. I don't have anything. I'm a pauper. I am a wretch. I am a failure. I am terrible. I'm not worth even living. So why do I even try? You don't know you're saying that because you don't know the history of the word. But it's not like you don't want to get paranoid about every word you speak. But sometimes looking, taking the long historical view of a word,

Just gives you insights that are kind of cool. And by the way, it's as easy as going to your browser and you can get an application called Etym online, E-T-Y-M online. And just like that, you can pop your etymology up on your phone and you, and you find out the history of the word. Yeah. I love it. It's like a simple way to kind of add a like second layer of meaning into your writing, make it deeper, make it like more beautiful instead of just kind of using the same word over and over again. So yeah, I think that's a great piece of advice.

Yes. So, John, we've kind of shared, you know, a bunch of writing tips right now. And I would love to kind of get into a little bit more of the weeds. And if you could share kind of your personal like writing routine or practice that you do for writing your books, I'd love to hear that.

Sure. Sure. It has varied over the years. First of all, I want to say that I'm always fascinated to hear writers talk about this because I listen to writers a lot, you know, in interviews. And this is always my favorite part. Like, how do you do this exactly? Because it's so different. Everyone has their process. Yeah.

And, you know, of course, the meta message there is that any way works, you have to find what fits you. But I'll tell you what has evolved that fits me. So I, first of all, in terms of daily routine, I have two kinds of work that I describe as right brain and left brain work. And I think that's a kind of a shorthand. I'm not sure if it's scientifically accurate, but there's work which is

You could call it brainstorming, like coming up with ideas, coming up with the beginning of a chapter or the beginning of a scene or the beginning of an article or a post or something, or solving a problem. Like I've got a plot problem where I know this happens, but I have no idea how we get there. So that requires brainstorming. I need sparks to fly, and I don't know how to make that happen.

All I know how to do, all I've learned how to do, I know that if I sit and stare at my computer screen and I stare at what I've already written and I have files open and I'm in my chair, I know that nothing will happen. It's like I'm just grinding my gears and getting frustrated. So I don't know how to make inspiration happen. I don't know how to make sparks fly. I don't know how to brainstorm, but I know how to set the stage for it.

And how I set the stage is I get in my, I will show you here just for a moment. Here I'm in my office. There's a lovely painting my wife bought. Over here is my Marty Crane chair. It's my overstuffed comfy chair. It's ugly as sin. It's very comfortable. Now over there is my desk where I sit with my computer. I go sit in the corner.

like a good student, go sit in the corner in my comfy chair with a blank pad of paper with nothing on it and a pen. There's no computer nearby. I've got a cup of tea. And I just sort of asked myself a question. It's like, how does this character, you know, what is this character thinking? How does this scene begin? Or I ask myself, how do I, I pose a number of questions. And then I just kind of, it's almost like meditation. I just kind of wait. It's, it's like waiting for,

for Godot. It's like waiting for, you know, for the mailman to come, I guess. And I scribble and I get an idea and if I were to evaluate that idea, this book would never get written.

I have to just wait for stuff and write it down, have thoughts. I don't even know how they fit. But then all of a sudden my pen is moving and I'm scribbling and I might get a full page of writing. That's a good morning for me. And my handwriting is terrible. I might get a half a page. I might get three or four or five lines. But what I've learned is if I'm like set the stage well and I'm open to it and I've asked good questions before starting, then

then I might only get a line, like a couple of sentences or a sentence. But if I hit the mark, that this afternoon may turn into two, three, four, five pages. So then the other way of working is sitting at my computer. I take what I've scribbled. I put it in the computer. I start typing. I start looking. I start thinking. I might pace back and forth, which I like to do.

Work with the clay that I came up with. I find that for me, writing, making progress is a constant back and forth between kind of those two mindsets of getting in the flow of creativity, I guess, or at least of receptivity and then doing the work, doing the heavy lifting of whittling away at the block of stone.

um so what my day looks like my writing day looks like depends on where i am in a project yeah i think it's just really interesting how you kind of separate that uh kind of like one kind of creativity process versus like the editing process i think uh i think it was hemingway that said uh you know write drunk edit sober and it's like you want to do it two different times yeah i like to say when you're right be promiscuous when you edit be a prude yeah that's a good way but i will say this um i i think that

There's so many ways to say this, but the tendency to critique your own writing while you're writing it is...

It's writer's poison. And I think it has killed off more, paralyzed and then killed off more potential writers than any other potion on the planet. The tendency to critique yourself. You can't do it. You can't critique yourself. You have to just let it fly. It'll be garbage. It'll be weird. It'll be wrong. It doesn't matter. Just let it fly.

And I still catch myself, you know, choking myself, you

You can't choke. Yeah, and I think that's one of the most valuable takeaways I took from your book because that's something I found myself doing. Like, I'll write something and then I'll reread it. And I'll be like, oh, this is terrible. Let's just delete it. And then I'm back to the blank page. And it's like... I think also, Hemingway said, it's like the first draft of anything that's going to be crap. And also, you share in the book, the most important part of the writing process is actually the rewriting process. Yeah, and that's later. And that's later. And that's... I love that process. And, you know, some people find...

have the idea that that must be painful. No, the reading writing process, the rewriting process is the opposite of painful. It's just a joy. As long as you have faith that you're going to get to a finished product. If you don't know how to do it,

then of course it feels terrible. So you just need to learn some rewriting skills. That's why in my book, I really focused heavily on them. I put a lot of passages of my own that were awful, frankly, in the book. And then show you how I rewrote them because to me, that is where the book gets great. But where the book has its genesis, where the book is born,

where the post is born is when you're just writing and not judging and letting it be awful if it is. Yeah, I really enjoy that section because you include like the first draft of the Go-Giver and then kind of the edited draft and you're kind of showing like the raw unpolished material and like so many aspiring writers, they only see the finished product of the book. They never see those first manuscript. So the fact that you included that is like, oh, he's like, he's just like me, like his first book.

draft wasn't perfect and there were a lot of edits but he kind of went through that rewriting process and that made it a lot better and that's very like inspirational oh that's so great to hear yeah in fact the first draft was honestly pretty terrible

And the final draft has done really well in the world. So yeah, that's true for anybody. - So we have don't edit while you write. But let's say someone just stuck and they have writer's block. What kind of strategies could you share with them to kind of get over that? - There's different kinds of writer's block. Sometimes you get, and it depends also on what you're writing.

So I'm going to do a little sort of scattershot here. Let's throw out a couple of different ideas. One may apply to you and the others may not. Sometimes you get – I find that I've run out of gas or the gears are grinding down and my car just isn't going to move. And I'm somewhere in the middle of the story and I'm just kind of stuck. I mean I got these story problems, but it's bigger than that. I just can't seem to move. And this could happen in writing an article or a nonfiction book as well.

And I love James Patterson's advice, which is research solves all writer's block. I don't think that's quite true, but it's true often. When I was writing the book, Steel Fear, that's the, here, let's get the audio visual aid, Steel Fear. When I was writing Steel Fear, my first novel, it takes place in an aircraft carrier. And at that point, I'd never been in an aircraft carrier, but I did well a little later. But anyway,

I got stuck often. And what I did was I went online and just read a ton about aircraft carriers. I read books about aircraft carriers. And every time I went online, I would learn something that was just bizarre or wild or fascinating. I had no idea how it fit in the story, but all of a sudden, it would spark other sports. Or what if he did this? And what if that happened? And what if, what if, what if? So learning new stuff

It's like people say travel is the greatest way to write. It is a great way to write, but you can travel on your computer. Learn stuff about your subject. Learn stuff about your location. Learn stuff about your characters or that type of person. Gobble it up, even if it doesn't seem relevant. And that often pulls you out of the rut and gets you going. That's one. Another one, writer's block. Often people say, I can't, I have this idea, but I don't know how to start.

I don't know how to start. So here's my advice for everybody who says they have a book in them, but they just, they're afraid of the blank page. They don't know how to start. My advice is don't start at the beginning. Don't try to start at the beginning. Start wherever the apple lands, wherever the dart hits the wall, start wherever something sparks your imagination or catches your fancy or inspires you or intrigues you. Or if you have this random idea for a thing that somebody says or somebody does, uh,

start there and write that and don't read it right just start write that and then put it away don't read it organize where you put it so you know where it is it'd be organized but don't

Don't even edit a single letter, a single punctuation mark. If you forgot to put a period at the end of the sentence, don't go back and put it there. Leave it, leave it, leave it. And then, you know, some people write in a more linear way. Some writers like to start at the beginning and write to the end. Some people write in a very nonlinear way. They kind of, it's like, there's like weaving and they just go the whole thing.

I, whatever your type is, if you're stuck and you don't know how to start, don't start at the beginning. Start wherever I call it, the low hanging fruit. Start where it's easy to start. And don't worry about where it fits in the book. Write a lot of different pieces. And then you can worry about the structure of it. And, you know, your actual starting point, you may not get it until three quarters of the way through. Happens all the time.

Yeah, another part of writer's block is ask yourself different questions.

Ask yourself a question about this book or about this article or about this blog post. You can ask yourself, what am I really trying to say? Sometimes you get blocked because you're trying to do two things at once. You're trying to say two things. You're trying to make two different points. Or you're trying to have two things happen in a chapter. And they're choking each other off. Narrative writing can be like a garden. If you have too much stuff,

It can all choke each other and nothing grows. So I've had, I used to write a monthly column for a magazine. I did this for years. I had a regular column for years and years and years. And often I would get stuck in the column. And I had a friend who would say, you know, you should just take this part out and make it a separate article. And as soon as I took this subject or this concept out of the article, suddenly it was easy to write. I had too much in there.

So sometimes taking some of the toys out of the toy boxes is the solution. Yeah. Just, I really appreciate all those tips to getting, getting over writers, writers block, because that's definitely a big hurdle. A lot of like, you know, aspiring writers face. And I also, there was, you had another interesting point where you say you don't try to come up with ideas. You try to like respond to ideas when like thinking of a book. Can you kind of just touch, touch, touch about that? Yeah. I mean, it's like, you,

You know, a writer who Stephen King is a writer who whatever you may think of as writing highbrow, lowbrow, you like it, you don't like it. You know, if you say I don't like horror, then you missed the boat because most of what he writes is not horror at all. You know, think about Stand By Me or think about, you know, the Shawshank Redemption or think about, you know, some of these incredible anyway.

One thing you got to say about Stephen King is the man comes up with so many wild story ideas. It's like, where did he come up with that? But the truth of it is coming up with great story ideas, most of the time, it's not like you have to invent them. It's not like you have to come up with them. It's not like it's a job you have to do, like extract them from like, or from the earth. Mostly what happens is there's something fairly mundane about

And you come up with a twist. I was, you know, masterclass.com? I love masterclasses. So I did the Neil Gaiman has a masterclass in there. A bunch of great writing masterclasses on there. That's where I heard James Patterson talk about writer's block. But Neil Gaiman has a great, great class. He's one of my favorite writers. And he's talking about taking a mundane idea and just looking at it from a different perspective, a twist. And he said, you know, he says that he read, you know, Snow White, you know, probably, or Sleeping Beauty rather. Sleeping Beauty probably like

A thousand times while he was growing up in a thousand different versions. And one day he was looking at the story. He just said, hang on here. What kind of woman goes to sleep in a car? What kind of woman with a face pale as milk and lips that are bright red as a cherry lies down and goes to sleep in a coffin?

Hmm. And what kind of man comes along on his horse and stops and looks at this and says, here's a dead woman. I think she needs me to give her a kiss. He says, I think this is a vampire. And I think he's a necrophiliac. And suddenly he had a whole new twist on the story, which he wrote into a book. It's like, oh, my goodness. But frequently a great story idea is a mundane situation.

like a Hitchcock character, you know, the ordinary man thrown into an extraordinary circumstance. It's a mundane situation where there's suddenly a twist. That's the story of our book, Steel Fear. You know, Steel Fear, I'm really proud of. However, the thing that gave it such a buzz when we were first selling the book and the thing that people first responded to had nothing to do with me. It had to do with the concept, which Brandon, my writing partner, came up with. And the concept is, well,

This will take 60 seconds, but here's the idea. Brandon was, before he was a Navy SEAL, he was a rescue swimmer. He was in the regular Navy, pre-SEAL days, and he was doing a six-month tour on the USS Abraham Lincoln, where our story is set. I got a chance to go to the Lincoln and actually spend a day there writing the story.

So he's serving on the Lincoln. They're out at sea, out towards the Middle East. And it was in the mid-90s, and they had just integrated the ship's crews, women on board for the first time. And there was a serial predator on board. There was a guy who would sneak his arm into the door, switch off the lights to a stateroom, and then go grope the women in the dark and then run. And people were freaked out. This guy, he did it over and over and over again.

They never caught him. And it stopped, of course, after a while. It never escalated, never got worse. But Brandon had this thought. Here comes the twist, okay? Here comes the, she's a vampire twist. Brandon at that time had this thought. What if this was a serial killer? What if these were murders? Never happened in an aircraft carrier. And the Navy is in no way equipped, Navy out at sea is in no way equipped to deal with a major crime like you would have in a police force in the city or an FBI operation.

That's the story premise. There's a serial killer in an aircraft carrier. It was my job to come up with the hero who would have to solve these things and then to weave the story. But that's a brilliant concept. So, again, he didn't come up with that idea. It was staring him in the face. He just saw the potential twist. And that's, I think, what a lot of great story ideas are. They're just...

look around you and say, hmm, what if that guy were actually a gorilla? Can I give you one more example, a short one? So there's this wonderful collection of stories by Don Winslow called Broken. It came out just about a year ago. And Don Winslow is one of my favorite writers. He's an amazing writer. But his most famous book probably is The Border. He has a drug trilogy, which is fantastic. But he came out with this series of six short stories called Broken. And one of them

He says years ago, he was out in a ranch somewhere in the West and he was working with a crew out on some fences. And he said he is notoriously clumsy with tools and terrible with tools. And I guess he had his hands on a chainsaw at one point. And one of the guys on the crew said handing Winslow a chainsaw is like giving a gun to a chimpanzee. And Winslow says the line stuck with him. It stuck with him. It stuck with him for years. And finally, the line turned into

No one knew how the chimpanzee got hold of the gun.

And then finally he had to answer the question for himself. Well, how did the chimpanzee get hold of the revolver? So one of the stories is called San Diego Zoo. And the opening line is no one knew how the chimpanzee got hold of a revolver. It's like, boom, the whole story is off and running. It's like, where do you come up with that idea? Well, it was just happening in his life. He just had a twist to it. So, and yeah, I'm now I'm like hooked into like steel fear. I'm like, oh, I got to know what happens next to the cash. The guy like how the story goes. So yeah, it's definitely, you know, a good hook.

Yeah. And something you touched upon there is like, you have to sell this book, you have to sell this concept. Can you kind of just talk about, because I think a lot of people think like, hey, I write this book and, you know, I send it to like a publishing house and they send me like $100,000. Could you kind of talk about kind of the traditional publishing route and how you... Yeah, actually, all you have to do is have an idea for a book and they send you $100,000. No, that's not true. Okay. It doesn't work like that. So it's like this.

Publishers are in the business of publishing your book, and they're really good at that, by and large. They're not exactly in the business of promoting your book. It's not really what they're designed to do, not what they're set up to do. Now, this varies. It depends on whether you're doing nonfiction or fiction. It depends upon what niche it's in. It depends upon how well-known you are. It depends on a lot of things. But by and large, people think that if you write the book, the publisher will publish it and sell it. Mm-hmm.

They'll publish it and make it available. This is a simple way of looking at it. You've got traditional publishing and self-publishing. They call them trad and self. If you trad publish, like you traditional publish, you've still got to promote the book as if you would self-publish. If you self-publish, which is another totally equally viable channel,

If you self-publish, you've still got to produce a quality product as if it were traditionally published. And these are the two biggest mistakes I see authors make, starting authors make. Write a book, just exactly like you said, Alex. Write a book, get an agent, get a publisher, get a deal. Isn't it fantastic? And think that the job is done. And unfortunately, it's not. Most of the time,

you need to really be in the business of promoting the book. That's why typically, especially for a nonfiction book, if you're going to publish a book like in your profession or in your expertise,

The first thing the agent and the publisher are both going to want to know is, what's your platform? And what they mean by platform is, how many people can you reach? How many copies can you sell? Not out of the back of your car, not on your website, but how many people can you get the word out to? How much buzz can you create about this book? Now, if you can create a lot of buzz, publisher's great in following up on that buzz.

But, you know, often advice you'll hear an agent give a starting nonfiction writer is, this is a great idea for a book. I recommend you spend a year first building your platform. That's what they mean by platform.

Now, if you're already a bestselling writer, you've got a platform. If you're a nonfiction person and you have a blog, if you have 100,000 followers on Twitter, like Alex does, almost, really close by the time this broadcasts,

If you're like a social media influencer or if you're on a speaking circuit or if you have corporate clients who have lots of employees, all of whom want competition, if you have some way of reaching a large amount of people or if you have access to traditional media just because that's the world you're traveling, you can get radio shows and TV spots and so forth, cool. Then that's part of your platform. There's lots of ways of building a platform, but without a platform,

Nobody knows about your book, and the publisher won't create a platform for you. So that's – it's just a fact of life, a publisher – particularly now when there's so much noise in the world. There's so many books being launched every day that you may have a fantastic book.

But they won't beat a path to your door for your mousetrap unless they know about it. They have to know about it. Yeah, I think that's such an important point to make. There's one that's selling that book, getting that book deal, then it's writing that great book, then it's actually promoting and telling people about that great book. And it's actually like three separate parts, if not more. And it's not just writing a good book. That's not just...

You have to do a lot more than that as an author. As you say, you also have to be a marketer. I'm not a very good marketer, honestly. That's one reason that I've made a career out of co-authoring with people who are good marketers. But I'm learning. I'm learning how. In this phase of my career that I'm in right now, I'm starting to move into books where I know that I'm going to need to do some of the heavy lifting. I'm starting to learn better. There are so many tools for doing that. It's like it's not

It's not rocket science. I hate to say it, but it does take some time. When you're a writer, you're an entrepreneur. That's just what you are. You're an entrepreneur. So I hope you like being an entrepreneur. I do.

Sure.

Sure. So I've written a lot of, quite a number of parables, maybe a half dozen or so parables. They are the Go-Giver, and then there's several more Go-Giver books, Go-Giver Leader, Go-Giver Influencer. We have a book called The Go-Giver Marriage, which is coming in a year or so. And I've done a few others, Out of the Maze, you mentioned The Latte Factor. And so those are all, it's funny, they're classed as nonfiction books.

They're usually shelved as like business nonfiction marketing or whatever it is, but they're actually kind of fiction because they're stories. You'll make them up. And so I, for me, my experience of them is I class them with fiction. So that is the two categories you asked about the nonfiction and the fiction. Here's what's similar. Either one, you need a great concept.

And a great concept. You know, I talk about success of a book in sort of three pieces. Again, three recipes, three ingredients in the recipe. Concept, execution, and exposure. And you were alluding to that a moment ago. The exposure is getting the word out there. Execution is getting a really good book. And also graphically and the cover and everything about the product of the book.

But the concept where it starts has got to be great. And great concept doesn't mean what you necessarily think it means. Great concept doesn't mean you think it's great. And I've made this mistake numerous times. Great concept means the reader hears it and goes, oh, wow, I got to read that. Just like that. That's it. Oh, actually, it's a little more than that. The reader hears it and goes,

Oh, I got to read that because they can see it in their mind because they instantly go, whoa, I can see where that might go. Like serial killer on an aircraft carrier. Whoa.

Immediately, you know, you're out in the sea. There's no place to run. Right. And you've got thousands of people on this little tin can and they're all like, is everyone a suspect? I mean, it's like there's so many possibilities that just explode into your mind the moment. You know, there was a movie with Sam Jackson called Snakes on a Plane. The legend in Hollywood was that the pitch, the pitch that sold the movie was the title of the movie.

All they had was snakes in a plane and Sam Jackson's in it. That's it. Well, we made debate about the quality and merits, artistic merits of that particular film. I think we'll probably all agree. They weren't terribly high, but you know, but that movie was going to get made. But anyway, your concept has to be something that is so catchy and that grabs people. And I'll give you a great example of this. That's not me. Um,

The example that is me is The Go-Giver. That was what hooked me into writing books when Bob gave me that idea. It's a very catchy idea. Here's a great example, though. There's an Irish writer named Adrian McKinty who wrote, I don't know, a dozen books, and he won awards. He was very highly regarded in literary circles, but his books just didn't sell.

He wrote this series about a detective during the time of the troubles in Ireland, you know, the IRA conflict. I've read them all.

They're phenomenal. Oh, my God. This writer is so good. These books are just rich with detail and with intrigue, and they're just fantastic. I didn't want to sell. He was on the verge of giving up. I mean, literally, he was going to just go drive Uber. And he actually wrote a blog post saying, I'm hanging in the towel, guys. He'd won some awards. He'd had a great life. But it was like his wife was earning money in the family, and he was contributing nothing financially. And he...

And I won't, long story short, Don Winslow, again, saw this blog post and loved his writing and says, this can't happen. This can't happen. And Don Winslow talked to his agent, said, you got to talk to this guy. And the agent, Shane Salerno, called the guy and he ended up pulling a book out of the guy and says, your writing is great, but it's not the right book for this market. So he pulled out of him the idea for a book that's called The Chain. And The Chain is your kid has been kidnapped.

You get a note from the kidnapper that says, your kid is alive, your kid is fine, but you've got to go kidnap somebody else, somebody else's kid. And if you don't, in 24 hours, your kid dies. And not only that, the people you kidnap the kid from, they have to go and kidnap a kid from somebody else's family. And if they don't, your kid dies.

What do you do? Like that's the concept. It's like awful. It's horrifying. But the book was like the it book of 2019 or 2020. I forget which year. And it's like it made his career because the concept, horrifying though it is, it's

instantly catching so that's that's you know concept yeah and i love how throughout your book you kind of take like hey if you want to become a better writer you need these three ingredients if you want to have a commercial success as a book like you need these three and you kind of just hope kind of break down the whole like writing process and everything about the industry that you know how to write more and i think just i think that's probably what i enjoyed so much about your book especially since it's free and anyone could get it as well

Free. Let me just say one more thing about concept, which is that once you know what your concept is, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, the whole book has to serve that. And one way to create a really, really nice, good book that doesn't sell well, I've had practice at this, is to write a book that has a really good concept, but then has a few other really good concepts.

And I'm not sure which one really is the book, and it gets lost, and, oh, you know, it didn't work. You really need to have the clarity of this is an incredible concept, and the book works. I wrote a book with Dan Burris, the futurist, called Flash Foresight. And Flash Foresight is like a flash of intuition, but it's a flash of intuition about the future. That's it.

The book was a New York Times bestseller. But we spent years ahead of time trying to figure out what the book was. Dan has so many amazing concepts.

We finally decided that's the concept that the book is going to organize around. And, you know, to a degree it worked. Right. Yeah. And that's, that's another thing. A great, great part of your book. You kind of break down, Hey, like these books were bestsellers. Here's what kind of made them so good. And then here's some books that didn't sell as well. And then here's kind of my theory behind why it didn't. So it's like, you don't share just the successes, but you also break down the failures and kind of warn people or advise them, Hey, don't do the same, same, same mistakes I did.

Like avoid these so your book is like a hit. So really great book as well.

Yes. Or if you do make the same mistakes, learn the same stuff from them. So, John, we talked a lot about books and you mentioned On Writing by Stephen King. Is there like one or two more books that you'd highly recommend for aspiring writers that maybe had a huge impact on your career or that you would recommend for listeners? I'm not sure if I have a lot of books that are about writing like King's is. There are quite a few others. And I mentioned a few of them in the back of my book, How to Write Good.

I will mention this book by Harry Bingham, which is How to Write. He calls it How to Write a Novel now. Whether or not you're writing a novel, even if you're not writing a novel, if you're just writing, it's a really highly recommendable book. Harry is one of my favorite writers, but I think personally his very best stuff, I love his crime fiction, but I think his very best stuff is his how-to books.

He's got two of them, how to write a novel and how to get published or getting published or how to publish. I forget. Anyway, Harry Bingham, B-I-N-G-H-A-M. And they're both so chock full of fantastic wisdom and knowledge. And it's knowledge that you can count on. There are so many books on writing that.

that you can't necessarily trust because everyone's got an opinion, but you know, you can really easily get, get led down a path that is maybe not the path that you need to be led down. So I really, really trust those. Then I recommend, you know, finding the greats in whatever sphere you're like and reading those. It's like, I knew for years I had to read Raymond Chandler, but the first time I tried to read, I think, I forget if the, um, is it,

I forget which one is his first of the Philip Arnold novels, but whatever was the first one, I tried to read that and I just couldn't get into it. I set it aside. Two or three years later, I said, I got to read those. I went back and I read them all and I loved them. Select out the greats in whatever genre you're writing and read those. Even ahead of reading books about writing, read great writing.

Yeah, I think that touches back to the point we made earlier, like read those great books, be deliberate and kind of study them. And then the master how they created such something great. So that way you could kind of hopefully mimic or like kind of put a have a, you know, kind of have a remix on your own book. So hopefully it sells well, too.

In that call with Lee Child, where he mentioned that he read a book a day, he also mentioned his favorite writer, a book he likes to go back to most of the time. Now, let's guess who Lee Child, the guy who created Jack Reacher, let's try to imagine who would his favorite writer be? Well, it turns out-

No, it wasn't. It's a great guess, but it turns out it was William Shakespeare. Well, who knew? I mean, it's like, well, it's not a bad thing to have as your favorite writer. So yeah, go back to, you know, my greats are not maybe the same as your greats. My greats are Kate Atkinson.

Raymond Chandler, John Irving. I have fallen in love with Lee Child. And it wasn't just because he wrote the blurb in the front of our book, although that helped. But yeah, a ton of French. These are all crime writers and I love them all except for John Irving. Find your greats in your sphere and just devour them.

So, John, this has been a delightful conversation. I'm sure listeners learn a ton about writing and they would like to get your book and kind of connect with you. Can you tell them where's the best place for them to go, how to find you on social media and just kind of get in contact with you?

Sure. I mean, it's one answer for all that. It's just my website. It's my name, which is John David Mann with two Ns, johndavidmann.com. All my books are there. All my social media links are there. Some more active than others.

There's a little link, a little red button by my head on that side that says free e-book. The e-book, free e-book is this book we're talking about, How to Write Good, or at least Gooder. And I wrote it. I originally intended to publish it as a published book in the marketplace. And I decided this year that I wanted to...

I just really wanted to get it done and get it out there for my readers, period. So you're right. It's on the house. It's free. It's 130 page book. It's like a full size book, but it's, you know, it's my, my love letter to you.

Yeah. And for everyone listening, sometimes like you might think, oh, a free ebook is like kind of like a rough draft or something. But no, it's like when I was reading it, I was like, how come he didn't publish this into like a legitimate book? It's like it's so good. So, yeah, you really deliver a ton of value. And I found that, you know, filled with a ton of advice. So I highly recommend everyone to go to John's website and download the book. It's free, of course. And John, I just want to say thank you so much for coming on the Reader's Journey podcast. This has been a wonderful conversation. I've learned a ton from your book, from this conversation, and I'm sure our listeners did, too.

Thank you so much. I've been watching your tweets forever, and it's an honor to finally be having this exchange in person. Thank you, Alex. Likewise. And everyone, thank you so much for listening to the Reader's Journey podcast.