A Writer's Time: Making The Time To Write - Dr. Ken Atchity [FULL INTERVIEW]

Film Courage: Ken, I have a quote here from the late author Philip Roth and the quote is that the road to hell is paved with works in progress. Dr. Ken Atchity, author/producer: Yes, that's worse than good intentions. What's that? A question as a statement and a question. I assume you have some idea about that. I know it's something I'm throwing away here, but hey, I think unfinished works are that kind of characteristic debris. from the life of the

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rs from the life of any visionary, I want to say that the discards that Leonardo da Vinci had in his studio were prodigious and you simply have many ideas and you cannot do them all and one of the methods that I have developed throughout years is to put aside a new idea and give it a two-week break and check it in two weeks to see if you remember the idea and the key to doing that as a

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r is not to write.

Write it down, look, it's like a rule of thumb that I have is that if you have an idea and as a writer your immediate goal is to write it, write it down because that's what writers do if you can train your brain not to do it. You'll have a much better product in the long run because you won't write everything down, including everything bad, so if you don't write it down when you revisit it in two weeks, if you don't remember it, that's great, that means one. The lousy idea went away instead of trying to do something with every idea you have, so I think that's part of what creative people learn to manage their own minds and, since I was the son of an accountant, I long ago analyzed the creative.

We processed the creative mind and decided that they were not simply crazy as many people think, but that it is actually a method for creativity and, in fact, it extends to all disciplines, whether you are a physicist or a mathematician or know an inventor or The creative process of a writer or an artist has the same steps in the same general pattern, so if you can understand the process then you are not as neurotic as if you don't understand it, you know one of my goals was not to be crazy Salvador Salvador Dalí He said one of my favorite things about this, he said the difference between me and a crazy person is that I'm not crazy and I love that because that's exactly what I'm talking about, is understanding the method in your madness. as Shakespeare put it and if you can understand that then you don't have to be unhappy and neurotic to be a productive writer talking about what to write things about do you make lists?

I make lists, but a little limited, I mean what I What I have instead is a very complicated method of

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management that involves a chart that I make regularly and the chart has room for some lists, but most of what I do is do the same things in compartments of

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that I think are the right compartments. As far as I know, in our last

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, which was about a year and a half ago, we talked about one of your books and you talked about time management and meeting creative people who do things that they are very conscious of. time, so I started monitoring myself, am I really as aware of time as I should be?

Maybe I'm not in a place where it was enough and so it became a new thing that you were talking about before that most people are very productive, they know exactly how long something takes them and I thought it was interesting because I thought I was aware of time and then when I started hearing that, I realized that no, I'm actually not because I don't know how. a lot of time and you know, it ends up that I'm not giving myself enough so that I can't become too conscious of time, although it becomes a hindrance, yes, I think that's possible in today's world, especially with all the clocks Apple and technological devices to keep track of time and that is a completely separate topic, but it is very connected to creativity because time is all we have.

I mean, there are two things in life that you can handle, one is work and the other is time and work. one of them is infinite and the other is finite, so without even talking more about it, you think about it and you realize that by definition you can't manage an infinite thing, so an infinite thing can't be managed, but a finite one yes, but for some time. We reason along the way as we grow up in the world, we think the wrong time is infinite and we think it is time and it is not true, the only one for whom time is infinite is God, for the rest of us it is too finite, but what? it's infinite it's work work is completely infinite because good work produces more work, you know, like my son once told me, dad, you'll never catch up.

I was telling Emily, I really hope I can catch up this weekend and he says, you're never going to catch up and he's right because work is infinite if it's good work it generates more work if it's bad work it generates more work like this that no matter how you look at it work is infinite you can't manage work you can only manage time and you can manage time if you know how to compartmentalize it in a productive way that works with your particular mind. What I mean by this is that I think the first step to time management is apart from keeping track of your time like you were talking about.

When I teach classes on that and when I consult with people about managing their time, I always start by having to make a weekly graph of their time. You ask people how many hours there are in a week and they don't even know. because it never occurred to them but there are a finite number of hours and each week and what I want to know first is what do you do with those hours exactly how many hours do you spend sleeping eating you know walking exercising talking on the phone texting sending emails and work on the things you're supposed to work on and run errands and do all the other things you don't really want to do but have to do to be human, so once you know that, the next first step is to calculate attention span because when I was a teacher, there were students who came and said they were failing history and they didn't understand it because they spent six hours a day studying history and I wait a minute. six hours a day yes, because I'm failing, I'm doing well, it's entirely possible that you're spending too much time and not too little because what happens during those six hours is probably not the most productive way to study history and we would. rearrange your pattern so that you actually study history for only one hour a day but you do it uninterrupted and this is what you do during that hour etc. so what we are trying to determine is what your attention span is for a subject individual, so if we know that this person can pay attention to history for an hour and then you know that his mind starts to wander, then it is a complete waste of time, literally, to spend more than an hour studying history at a time, that It's what I call a compartment. of time, so if it comes to writing, how long can you write while being completely focused and not thinking about the outside world, etc.?

And that's the compartment where your attention span is at its maximum because if you're doing something where your attention span is not at its maximum, you're basically wasting your time and your energy, and both of those things have a sort of negative depressive effect on your motivation. , are not good, so you really want to determine your attention span and then you want to Organize your life into time compartments that have to do with attention span and when it comes to being aware of time, one of my rules has been since I first started thinking about these things when I was 19, so I stopped using a Mire because I realized that the only way I was going to be productive with my type of interests and activities was if I lived on my own. time and I didn't live in other people's time, but everywhere you look there's a clock on the wall, there's big bins on the horizon there's, you know, television monitors with countdowns, there's everything out there that reminds you of the time of day. world and the time of the world is not your time you do not have all the time in the world you have your own time so I discovered a method from years ago that is simply the stopwatch method, which consists of instead of using watches you use the stopwatch and You tell yourself, for example, today I'm going to write for an hour and a half no matter what and I'm going to monitor that on a stopwatch and turn it on when I'm actually writing and what I'm not writing, if the phone rings, I have I have to take it or the house burns down, I have to deal with it, so I'll turn it off. the timer until that particular interruption is over and then I'll go back until I get to my hour and a half on the timer and it doesn't matter, you know if you're doing it at 3:00 p.m. or 3:00 a.m. or 8:00 p.m. etc., as long as you have that hour and a half on the stopwatch you know you're in good shape, so sometimes I have three or four stopwatches depending on the project I'm applying them to and of course I have I have the stopwatch on my computer and I really look at the time, except if there's an appointment or something I have to be aware of because I'm really focused on knowing my time, which is soft clock time and that's what I need to be focused on.

If I want you to know being in that unique category of people who create things and in my case manage people who create things, then you mentioned a conversation you had about work and what a good or bad job looks like, it never really ended and you know we're in this new era of these kinds of gurus and these success articles about five tips to be more productive, whatever that may be. David was talking about a sustained obsession. He said that he had read and heard from so many people. that most successful people are just obsessed with their work, they are workaholics, you think that is true, there is a lot of truth in it and I have gone through the same thought process, especially when writing a book on the mind creative, and I don't think workaholic is the right word, I call it type C personality and because workaholic comes from Selya's concept of type A and type B personality and from what I can gather, type A personality is the unhappy workaholic. that he can't do anything in life except work and that he's basically

making

himself and the people around him miserable because of his job because this obsessive need to be working all the time and then there's a type P personality that's never around. very well defined and and in some ways it doesn't make for an ideal SL, it does describe it, but it's someone who is well adjusted and doesn't feel the same crazy pressures as the guy who feels and I thought well, the problem with that theory is that it leaves out to the people they absolutely love. their work and those who are able to live you know other

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lives at the same time and I started to think about that and realize that there are many people like that and there I call them type ve in one of my books and type C is the creative personality to which who loves to work would probably rather work than anything else, but it doesn't negatively affect him at all, he just thrives on his work.

I mean, there is an example that I saw a long time ago like Pablo Casals, the great cellist. He was so paralyzed by arthritis when he got older that he had to be carried every morning from his bed to the piano bench and because every day he warmed up by playing the piano for half an hour an hour and but it got to the point where he couldn't. walk to the bench, it had to be here, he would take it to the bench and then he would stack it on his bench and he would have to raise his arms over the keyboard and then slowly but surely he would start playing for an hour and at the end of the hour he got up and walked too, you know, to the kitchen for breakfast and he did that every day for his last 10 years and he was reactivating his body through the Curia, you know, the creative process that he was very good at. in tune and I realized that type c personalities are people who have this, you know, creative affliction or whatever you call it, this gift, but they understand it unlike those who don't understand it and who often have tragic endings like Sylvia.

Plath or Hemingway or Virginia Woolf or many others in the creative world who never understand their process who think that every time they finish a book it is the end of the world and they go into a deep depression. This is very common in the creative world. Being depressed after finishing a job so when you really think about it the solution is obvious never get to the point where you are finishing the job and that happens on the negative side as many people can never finish their book or never. finish their article or never finish their poem because they are afraid of finishing afraid of finishing and as a

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professor I was always on committees judging other people who couldn't finish anything and one of my colleagues who, like me, had published many books, we were both on the same committee judging another colleague of Kawa who had not finished a single book and my colleagues said to me: you know, you and I would write a book in the time it takes him to research a chapter of a book and I said Yes, because always I do my research last.

You know, I write the book first and then I do the research, so I already know it's going to end, but coming back to this final idea of ​​finishing a simple solution to this postpartum depression is when you know you're almost done.finished when you know that you and the final stretch of a book or a script or whatever it is for, take a day off, take two days off because the energy of finishing is so great that it will easily be possible. Remember when you sit down again to let him into this compartment that you're using, but take a day off and start your next project, really get into your next project because every creative person has another project that's dying to be next, so sit down. , start and keep going, do it to the point where you can't wait to continue with it and then stop, go back and finish the project you were finishing and you will find that there is no more postpartum depression because you haven't allowed it, you just managed time, you know the finite good at your disposal that you have managed. time so you don't have to deal with it because being depressed is basically most of the time a waste of time for an artist, you can allow it for a while if it gives you great ideas and deepens your pathos and the things you need to tap into, but basically it's too much, it's a waste of time and, you know, one of my mentors years ago, the novelist John Gardner, said that people should start doing more, it eliminates all the moods that they have. you're in a bad mood, get up and run around the block and literally that works.

I mean, if you get your body going and run around the block, it's hard to be in that kind of morbidly depressed state that you were in before, so control your mood. This is what separates a creative, productive, happy person from a creative, productive, unhappy person. You'll notice that I'm not talking about the unproductive, that's a completely different topic, but I'm talking about people who are creatively productive and have careers that they still have. divided into the unhappy and the happy and it is a matter of understanding. I believe that how your mind works is what makes you part of the happy group and you don't have to be part of the unhappy group despite many urban myths.

On the contrary, it basically says that artists have to suffer and be tortured and all that is really not necessary, that way you get more attention. I know Julia Cameron talks and I'm butchering this I'm sure, but the unhappy blocked artist gets a lot of attention and Pat is behind him and friends around him, where is the happy productive person? Sometimes they find themselves alone because it's a little threatening or it's just difficult, you know, yes, but being alone is wonderful, very happy and the happy, productive artist loves. to be alone and he also loves to be with people, but he loves to be alone because it is really when he is under the greatest control of all his powers and facilities, when nothing can interrupt him and he is focused on work that is great and receives too much sympathy, I mean.

As a literary manager who has managed hundreds of writers over the course of my career, I think you, the unhappy, attention-seeking ones, really get tired of them quickly if you're dealing with them all the time—that is, if you're in their family and everything and you only have to see them once a week, okay, you just have to see them at Thanksgiving dinner, okay, even better, but if you know someone who deals with them every day, late or sooner, those who constantly complain. follow your life is a shortlist and those are not the ones you are looking for and they are what I call pseudo artists who end up not being productive most of the time you know who but those who long to be artists, but do not have the mental discipline to do it, going back to Philip Roth watching

interview

s with him towards the last years of his life in which he had moved from New York City, a kind of forest in Connecticut where he was left alone and everything. of the journalists said: don't you feel alone here? and he said yes, but I enjoy it. he was bombarded with people's opinions and this was just an easier way for him to continue and I know this is a common thing, like taking yourself off the map in order to create, but still the loneliness was worth it versus the friction, yeah and It obviously worked for him because other people who would go live in the forest end up not being productive because they think that will solve their problem.

I mean, I learned this the hard way because I had to finish a book early in my academic studies. degree and I decided to go to my parents' college and just sit there and finish it and of course I hardly did anything that summer because one thing led to other people coming to visit me because there was the lake and you. I knew the lawn would need tending or that the cabin itself needed work and I used every excuse I could think of to avoid sitting down to write and this is where I worked out a lot of the theories that are, in my view, creative: summer because Pressure is what makes creativity work better, lack of pressure actually works against creativity, so as a producer I'd rather have to deal with a low-budget movie where everything you do has to be a solution to the fact that you don't have enough money to do it, then you get more creative and you tell the team that you know we have to have creative solutions to these problems because money is not going to solve this, we don't have the money and of course, Of course, studio movies don't have that problem, they have infinite pockets, etc., but you can still see that if there was more discipline, many of them would be better than they are when you watch a movie that has six or seven.

The writers listed, you know, at the beginning, as screenwriters, you know, this was simply because they didn't work with writer number three long enough, they just fired him and brought in addendum number four, and that was the expensive way to do it. . and but there is a challenge in the pressure that comes and time pressure is the number one pressure, more than financial, even that works in the name of creativity if you only have a limited amount of time. I always found that I did my most creative work half-half. hour before the committee meeting because I hated committee meetings and I still find that when I have to go to something I'm not very excited about, I suddenly get extremely creative an hour before and instead of being resentful about it I use my creativity around that.

So that's when I do it whenever I can and I think that's what we have to learn about our minds: how to trick them into behaving how we want them to behave, you know, how to produce what we want them to do. produces, so you talked about the type C personality and then in your book how to escape the security of life and pursue your pipe dream, a guy to transform your career, it's chapter six of a day in the life of the type C and I I was wondering if I could speak. About that, what is Dana's life like?

Is it a structured day? Well, it is different from what you know, it will be different for every type C and it will be different from people who are not type C and the different thing is that the type C has learned to organize his day to suit his type, to suit to your mind, to suit your mind, some people are night owls and some people are early risers, and the early bird writer is not going to write late at night because she doesn't feel comfortable writing at night, she feels comfortable in the morning, so If you get up at four o'clock, you'll give yourself as much time as you have attention span to write in the morning, which is when I love to do mine. because no one interrupts you from Florida until 7:00 in the morning but if you're a night owl like a smoker, he wrote The Lord of the Rings completely after one in the night because he was so busy all the time before that time. and I had a family and everything else, so I would write in the middle of the night and sometimes I would write all night and just go to school to teach without sleeping at all, but that was okay because I was doing what I wanted.

I loved it, so their day would be organized differently than you know, someone's day who was on a clock that's not theirs, someone wants to show up for a job at nine, they're not on their own clock and their day will probably be one that they are upset with most of the time, whereas if you are a type C and in charge of your own life, you will reorganize it according to the patterns that work best for your mind and that I think is a crucial part of becoming in Type C it is having your own day.

Well, I go to a lot of meetings to sell the properties we have developed and I don't like going to meetings because it takes a long time. There's a lot of time to get there and once you're there there's a certain amount of time wasted and then you do it. It's always fun, you know, even though you dreaded it, so I try to organize my day so I'm doing something. that's very productive like I wish I hadn't done any work and my wife tells me what are you talking about you went to three pitch meetings that's all you know two on three different networks yeah I know but I'm not sorry . like I've done some work, I mean, that's just your mental view of things, so I think every person's type there, every day of type C is going to be different and what you really need to do is if you're interested in continue with this. yourself, as you need to discover what your ideal day is.

I mean, is it important to you to go for a walk? Is it important for you to meditate? Is it important for you to dedicate the next time to your creative work? Is it important to you? next time with your family and all that stuff and you sit there and rearrange your date to make it work, that's what time management is all about and how you do it, you know, no matter how busy you are, there are people busier than me was. reading Michelle Obama's book and no one could be busier than the president of the United States and the first lady of the United States, but somehow they made time for everything they needed, which tells you that there was time management in work because certainly if anyone had infinite things to do and infinite work to do, it would be those two, but if they can do it, you can do it too.

I think Philip K Dick loved to write at night and he stayed up all night and I didn't. I'm sure some of it was maybe chemically induced, but then when he married another wife, she wanted him to write from nine to five, she said I'm very middle class, that's why I like these hours, and he finally got his own apartment, which he called the shack and it was dirty and he felt like he wrote the best he could when he wanted to in this, you know, a dirty apartment and it just lent itself to what he was doing, so it's interesting how, yeah, you know we are.

Hubble syndrome is interesting because I think every creative person can relate to the fact that President Obama called it the everything and it was always a room that had to be in whatever house they were in, where nothing could be touched. You know he could do anything. he wanted and generally his papers all over the floor and all that and that's where he finished a book or a speech and so on and Hubble is the same idea and I realized that I've always been the same way on the weekend My office is a complete disaster, there are things all over the floor and then, by Monday, everything is in order and when you think about that it is nothing more than the externalization of the creative process because the creative process is bringing order to the chaos, right?

You know? in st. The Gospel of John says in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God he was the beginning with God all things were made through him, you know, and he goes on and talks about the light , let there be light, etc., so when when the artist creates something, he takes a bunch of little things and creates order from them, so the externalized version of that is living in a messy place and tidying it up when If necessary, when necessary and if there is some external force that is forcing you to straighten it out, then that creative person is not in charge of their own life and they can be, you can always find a way to do it.

There is a touching story by Doris Lessing called Room 19 I. I think that is the name: Room 16, perhaps in any case it is one of her best short stories and it is about a housewife who longed all her life to have a room of his own and it was because he couldn't. She wasn't herself in her family and she couldn't do what she wanted and she didn't feel free and I won't tell you how it ends because it's not a fun ending but it's a very tragic example of what happens. if you don't take charge of your own creative life, interestingly, Tolkien wrote a very introspective piece called leaf by niggle, strange title, but niggle was the name of a painter who had this amazing vision of a spectacular forest and his vision was so clear that he could clearly see every tree in the forest, every animal in the forest, every leaf on every tree in the forest and because he was so busy, he could never paint more than one leaf, that's how the story ends, you know? and it's actually Tolkien's agonizing argument for why he had to write in the middle of the night because he determined that it wasn't going to be a pain, you know, even though he wrote something like 40 books on linguistics and different languages ​​and, of course, The Lord of the Ring. and the silmarillion and many other great works, he felt that he had barely reached a tree in his forest and only that because he rode all night,so it's a terrible thing to carry around, the belief that you can do incredible things. things but you don't have time to do them and the answer is that it's not okay, you have time.

I mean, where did Michelangelo find the time for him? Where did Lonard finally find the time for him? You know, everyone had exactly the same number of hours as us. You have it and your job is to take your vision seriously and find those hours to make it a reality. It might happen or someone like Alice Monroe, who when she started out was raising four kids and didn't want the other housewives in the neighborhood to know she was a writer because she thought they would receive the strange label it ended up with. get it and she didn't care anyway, but I guess when you win a Nobel Prize it doesn't take away all that, but yeah, but she did it when the kids were napping and if the other housewives were knocking on the door.

I know I would put it all aside, I didn't want people to know, but I realized that the stigma probably doesn't exist anymore nowadays, no, it's filler, yes, it originates in people's families and It's when you announced to your father or your mother that you are going to be a writer or that you are going to be a circus clown or that you are going to be a dancer or that you are going to be an actress and that is where it begins because you know that the normal response is what are you going to do? what to do to earn a living and that haunts you? there's another book, one of my books, my talk about learning as you move into the creative life, learning who your real friends are and who your friends are.

Associates is because you lose most of your friendly associates when you make the decision to go from an irrational life to a creative life and once they taught that class, I taught a regular class at UCLA called Keeping Your Spirits Up for creative people and one time there was a group of actresses in class and I said at the beginning of class I said let's go around the circle and everyone introduce themselves and tell me your name and where you're from and what's the worst question you've ever had? made. it could be asked at a bar or at a cocktail party in Los Angeles and you would answer and when the lady said she knew he was from Arkansas and his name was Joe and the worst question she had in Los Angeles was when would he be back. to Arkansas and to work at the post office again and I said hi, we said that's terrible and she usually bursts into tears and leaves the room and I said well I hope this class finds some help for that, next woman She said her name was Jenny and she was from California and she said and the worst question I have is what have you been up to lately?

That I have seen and said yes, that terrible question: she goes and I understood what your answer is, she goes to the Pacific Ocean. and I always loved her because she showed that here is a creative person who has discovered how to protect her mind from the inevitable things that are going to happen in the big world. People are not born with sensitivity, they do not leave our homes. on the way to a party I'm going to be particularly sensitive today and the first thing they say to an actress who knows us that you've been in big ones that I've seen is not because they're bad or that they're unpleasant people, but maybe they are, but probably whether it's because they're not being sensitive and having that answer instantly bonds you with them and makes them respect you for respecting yourself enough to not take seriously their questions that you never have to answer. any question anyone asks you unless you feel like it then when she answers it that way it disarms the whole situation while the first girl isn't doing such a good job because she shouldn't go to parties until she can answer that question about Going Back to Arkansas and working for the post office and that's another example of protecting your mind and not protecting your mind, having the introspection to know how to deal and you were talking about if people react, how people react to you. decide to be creative, you know, I always say it's like there's a guy on the street who's been painting in his garage for the last ten years and you know, when the neighbors talk, they're talking about a disaster, he's crazy, you know, it's crazy, he's been doing that for twenty years and then one day they read in the paper that one of his paintings sold for a million dollars and what did they say, what did they say, I always knew the guy was a genius, you know I had to be.

It's a genius to work so hard, but everything suddenly changes when the world accepts your creativity, but the only way to get to that point is if you absolutely control what you're doing and believe in it yourself, and even if you don't. you don't believe in it keep acting like you do and with words you don't have to believe in things you don't have to feel good to work and you don't have to feel good to do good work it can work and usually when you work you get rid of these feelings anyway, so these are all examples of how to deal with the creative mind and how to make it your friend instead of something you're afraid of and don't want.

I went to a cabin in the woods, well, I realized that with "A Star is Born", which is now nominated for an Oscar, we are only a month away, what caught my attention about the movie was the loneliness of the creative process and the lack of people around them when they were working on things and whether it was their drinking or whatever, but it was so lonely and it was just them and their material, yeah, they had handlers around them and dancers and different things, but when they were at home I was, I was very lonely and I thought it was very interesting, yeah, it's a kind of loneliness that you can't really describe to people who aren't part of it, so after a while you stop If you try to describe it, you might leave. talking to one of my clients' psychiatrist he is a psychiatrist for creative people and probably half the people in the Hollywood business go to him and they all have the same problems related to the unbearable weight of what they do and the fact that which is a lonely process that no one understands, like I'm a producer and people ask what a producer does and I go.

I have to give a Pacific Ocean answer to that because it's a long conversation and no one understands it and no one is really interested anyway, so that's what you're dealing with in the creative world, you're trying to articulate things that are alien to most people who don't live creative lives and it's a burden. but it becomes easier to bear the more light the more likely you are to take it in when you don't take it so personally when you have a dog or a cat or you know something you can do makes you feel human if you cook I love to cook and I love to play tennis and I don't have creative thoughts when I cook or play tennis, I just do those things, so I think you learn, you have to give yourself the opportunity to be. with your own mind and figure it out and realize that you know you can control it, you know, I always think that the creative mind has these parts that the artist really needs to be aware of and the parts are a big bunch of If you imagine the mind as a big globe, there is a huge continent in the middle that I call the continent of Reason and it is all the things established in your life, it is all your education, it is your ability to tell the time and how many Languages ​​you can tell the time, it is even language because if you were not on that continent you would need a language.

If you weren't communicating with millions of people, you wouldn't need languages, so everything that is ordered is from that continent of reason and then there are these islands everywhere that are each individual and have nothing to do with the continent and Strange things can happen on those islands, they are like all the visionary islands of a mind and most people are trained. as they grow up, when their parents convince them not to be painters and convince them to be dentists, you know, or convince them to stop being dancers and convince them to be tellers at the bank, you know. those people are trained to be members of the continent to be good members of society which is the continent of reason where everything is ordered where you arrive at nine you don't arrive at 9:05 you know whether to show up at a quarter to nine that's okay , but a quarter past nine is the end of the work, so those people are raised that way and the artist refuses to be raised that way, he wants to be, he wants to visit all these islands and he wants to do it somehow. do something with those islands and eventually you want to introduce those islands to the continent because you need things from the continent like language to write a story, you need things from the continent like knowing colors, lines and framing to be a painter and If you don't know those basic conventions , you know you can, you can't be a painter, but you learn them, but your goal as an artist is to make them different from anything that has existed before on the continent, and eventually.

If you succeed and you leap forward then what you have done now is part of the continent if you succeed and I have never heard that expressed more eloquently than in a brilliant little book called Picasso by Gertrude. Stein that all artists should read, but one of the things she says there, everyone thought that what Pablo was seeing was different, but he was just seeing what he was seeing, he wasn't seeing what everyone else was seeing, he was just I was seeing what he was. seen and after a while he started to paint what he had seen and only what he was saying and before long suddenly we were seeing what he was seeing and that explains the whole process by which an original vision is translated into a classic, you know, Picasso.

He was now considered a classical painter in terms of art history and just because he saw things differently and had the courage and strength to convey his vision and eventually his vision started to become popular because someone bought a napkin for a million Dollars. We know that and he was no longer the crazy painter he was before that first cultural breakthrough, that commercial breakthrough and that's part of the thrill of seeing how artists changed the culture by sticking to their eccentric kind of anti-cultural stance, yes, we. When talking about artists, it is anti-cultural at first because he pursues his own private vision of him and when his private vision begins to be accepted by the culture at large, then he becomes an established artist and that sounds good to the people who live on the continent of reason, but for the artist that becomes dangerous and full of danger because he was never interested in being like the people of the continent and now he is one of those people, so what does he do?

He goes through periods of his Picasso, you know, he starts writing different types of books if he's a writer and his editors don't like that because they like him to write thrillers because they're part of the continent of reason and they have the continent of reason inventing pigeonholes and Niches, you know, find your niche, young man, someone once told me find your niche because he was trying to make a magazine about dreams and the arts and he was the psychology editor today and that word niche is the continent that tells you that you are too far away. there you know that's not going to work and that's okay, we stubbornly continued with my editor, my co-editor and I and created a magazine that lasted ten years published in New York and so on, but only because we ignored him and he told us to look. the niche, but when we find that niche, you know, we have to think about what we're going to do next and that's what Picasso has to think about, so he switches to his blue period and switches to his cubist period and so on just because now competing with himself, you know that his part of the culture now predates Picasso and that is a tremendous burden for the successful artist.

Think about Stravinsky, whose most important works are his first works, but the guy lived to be 90, but The Rite of Spring, Petrushka and the Firebird Suite were written when he was much younger, so how can a guy thus living the next 40 years with great difficulty and experimentation and going from composing to conducting and many other things that It's not that he didn't have a worthwhile life, but he was always bothered and tormented by the fact that his art was in a sense premature when it comes to healthy and happy mental development, you know, these are the kind of problems that artists deal with. and that's why a lot of people say don't do that just work for the post office, you know, working in a secure position didn't work out for Bukowski, no, no, he was a good friend when he was around and I. he spoke of hovels and chaos.

One time I took my five-year-old daughter to his house to pick up something because he was speaking at a poetry series at Occidental College that I was in charge of and she came into the house and her voice went up high. They had this the loudest house. dirty that I have ever seen in my life and it's true there was toilet paper on the floor there were dirty dishes all over the floor it was a disaster but you know he wrote incredible poems that moved everyone when I went to Italy as a Fulbright professor. I was surprised to learn that instead of Wallace Stevens and Hemingway Elif, who I was willing to teach at Melville, only wanted to hear about Bukowski, his books were translated into Italian, all of them and him.

Did you know that he was a mess and his personal life was a mess and she kind of liked him that way? He never ran out of writing material and he is one of the few who was able to sustain a long career without feeling trapped. According to his previous career, he was happy doing whatdid over and over again. I was talking about editors who wanted a writer to do thrillers constantly because that's where their niche is and that's where they should be able to do fillers but the writer says no, I want to write mysteries now I want to write romance the editors aren't interested, wait a minute , we've made six million dollars off you as a thriller writer and I don't know if you know that you could talk to the romance audience, well I like to try, well then we'll have to use a different name, so a typical answer is for an artist like Agatha Christie. having four or five pseudonyms and writing under a lot of Stephen King names, for example, because they want to write different things, they don't want to be repetitive and they forced their art into a mold that is part of a continent of reason and that's me.

I've always seen those as the two most important things that happen with the artist, but then there's a third thing that I call the editor-in-chief, which is the part of the mind that sees all of this. It is similar to meditators until I met them. There is the third eye, there is the Watcher, which you have to develop to see your thought and realize that it is not you, there is more to you than just the thought, well, that is what we talk about in one of my books, the editor-in-chief is the one who says that I have to negotiate an agreement between the mainland and the islands so that we can finish this book because we need things from the mainland like time, of which the continents are in charge because on the islands there is no time . everything happens at once and there is no beginning, a middle and an end, everything simply happens at the same time, but on the continent where that is not allowed, things have to have a beginning, a middle MN in that order, Unlike the Italian director who said that this film did not have to have an intermediate beginning, it had to have an intermediate beginning, but not necessarily in that quarter, he was giving an island answer to a question about the continent and the question was: a Does the movie have to have an intermediate beginning?

He says yes, but no. in that order and those are the editors-in-chief, the part of your mind that sees this and says, "Okay, let's negotiate if you say I'm going to go to this cabin and write this book no matter how long you know how long." take I'll stay there until it's finished the continent gets scared because it's leaving, oh I'm going to starve like what will happen if you never finish the book, what will happen then, but my intended editor makes a deal and says no, we will only do two hours a day, three hours a day and then we will do it for ten weeks and in the end with so many hours we will end up and this is the way, so I could play it so that the continent can relax because this intervening force has told it to the crazy islands who want to write this book.

You guys can go out and do this, but you can only have so much time and blah, blah, blah. within this compartment and that's what I think makes the artists themselves, as opposed to someone who doesn't say they're working on deals like that with themselves, maybe not as formally, but that's what they do, they make deals. to keep his art currency well in the In Bukowski's case, the kind of slavery of his nine-to-five job, if you want to call it, was the impetus for many of his stories and it helped feed him and helped him give him that resentment and something like that.

He gave voice to what so many people felt, so it's almost like it worked for him, yes, and well, Stevens, who was one of my favorite American poets and, interestingly, similar to Bukowski in very interesting ways, was selling insurance all the time. his life. writing his best poem like Sunday morning on a train traveling from Hartford to New Haven wearing a three-piece suit because he was an insurance salesman and that's what he had to do and TS Eliot worked as a bank teller when he was writing The Waste. The earth, so yes, ordinary jobs can be used to spark creativity and artists like Bukowski in his later years found himself increasingly troubled when he had an unstructured life and didn't have to go anywhere the last time the we visited.

It was before the release of the magazine, I think it was last summer, how has the release of the movie and its success impacted your life? Ken, well you know, one answer would be not at all, but it wouldn't really be a good or funny answer. you know, funny answer, the real answer is that it was disconcerting to be validated by something that I believed in 22 years ago and that I got a lot of other people to believe 22 years ago, including Doubleday to the tune of two million dollars at Disney for the sum of a million, a new line for the sum of a million more and so on and then it didn't happen and suddenly all these years later it happens and people say: you must feel good to be corroborated and I said yes, but the truth is that it taught me the most important lesson of all, which I wrote in it.

They called the waiting room. If I had been waiting for Meg to happen or for any movie I started 20 years ago to happen, I would probably be miserable if it wasn't suicidal, but what you're doing in the waiting room is doing something else, that's how you manage your time when you're waiting. something that can be annoying and a burden and what you have to do is other things, so what I did was 50 other things as a result, 30 movies happened and hundreds of books and a new publisher and many other things and yes, it is satisfying to see the world support what Steve Elton and I believed 22 years ago, which was, you know? a very popular subject for a story and throughout the process brave people, especially Bill Avery who brought it home and Lorenzo from Bona Ventura rightly said that all the other producers made it possible too, but I guess what it shows , among other things, is that don't waste time waiting for something to happen, do your job and then put it out into the world and let the world take care of it.

That's one thing and another part is trusting the work that happened when you know when you create it. this baby, Meg, in this case, if it's a good baby, it will survive and show us muscles when the time comes, maybe it's been hidden all these years, but all of a sudden it comes out and everyone knows about it, that's great, but it What that says to the Artist, I think it's focusing on what you have at hand, what's in your workshop right now and doing it well and then not worrying about things you can't control, focusing on what you can control and I guess That's my main feeling about it.

We worked a lot on Meg at first creating the form for her and finally she came out and worked really well. It surprises me, no, I'm happy, but it doesn't surprise me, because I always believe it, but I'm very happy. I didn't rely on my personal psychology because if I had done that I would have been, you know, locked up. I know she's like me. Steve wrote eight more books on different topics and built another career around his talents. and will continue to do that, he learned that less than two was disappointing, that it didn't come out then, well that's how I felt at the time, in hindsight things are meant to be and I always tell writers that I make it. that each project has its own clock and the only problem is that you can't see the clock, so what you do is you work the best you can and you screw the screws correctly, you know the cover screws and you send them.

Go out into the world and wish it well and move on to your next project, which hopefully you will have done before you finish this one, what a project and that's what the Creator does. They continue to work on new projects, so this role was not created or perfectly created by God. another world maybe it's better how often do you believe do i believe well? I am always involved in at least two creative projects. I've just finished three screenplays in the last 12 months and one book that's already published and one book that's about to be published. will be published and I always and never run out of creative things to do or you know, that's what keeps me going, it's that creative juice, that's why I'm drawn to helping other people with that creative juice because I understand it after having spent my life Living it and analyzing it If you could be remembered by a quote, what would your own quote be?

Oh my God, I don't know. Now I see my dates on the Internet, honey, I'm doing well, that's good, I said that. That's good, I mean, I think I'd probably expect to be remembered for doing it and never giving up, but none of those things are original. My mother was when she told me: "Do it all the time and never give up." You know, that was Churchill. I think those are the things that make a creative writer stick to those two principles and not let anyone tell you that you can't do it or that you shouldn't do it or even that you should do it.

Don't do it this way because if you have a clear vision of where you're going, you have to stick to that vision until you can't anymore or just do it, but Nike does, just do it, you know, it's funny, all these slogans. Athletes are extremely creative. I mean people who break records break them because of their creativity and because they have also understood their mind and also have this kind of management. editor within the mind who knows how to keep the world at bay on the one hand and his vision of it on the other. People say this particular high jump record can't be broken, but they believe it can and maybe they believe it because they had a dream. that they did it or maybe they believe it because they calculated you know that if this and that then I could do it and maybe they just believe that out of sheer stubbornness but they are just a way of proving a belief in the creative world and We have to do it, just do it and Every time it's interesting, people say this 3-minute mile can't be run, you know, this 2-minute mile, whatever, but when someone breaks the record like that within the next 12 months, it's equaled or broken by three other people, what does that tell you?

It tells you that the role of creativity in human life is to keep us moving forward as a species. It is the creative people who have the vision to say that this could be done and that it has not been done. before this could be done better, this could be done differently and we hear it and we believe it or we don't believe it, but at the end of the day, if it works, suddenly everyone is doing it and the continent of reason It's reshaped by this eccentric vision of a little island that came out of nowhere and suddenly people believe it.

I mean, no one would have known what to do with tweets, Instagram or Facebook just a few years ago, 2008. I think that's when a lot of this really started or before, it's a little before 2006 and now it's hard to imagine the world without it and that's how quickly the continent changes due to creative change. You know, people who look at art after Picasso can no longer see things the same way because he came. advanced and changed the way we see and that is the beauty of being involved in the creative world was reading that a high school journalism teacher was teaching her students to decipher tweets and fake news and that is something that five years ago we would not have I've even been having those conversations, yeah, I have a really weird theory about this whole fake news thing: I don't even know how to say this because I think Trump is some kind of groundbreaking cultural figure.

I don't have any affection for him. I have feelings for him and I could go on and on about it, but he is an eccentric creative person, he is the most incredible producer I have ever seen in my life and I can't even imagine one more powerful than him a few years ago. people around the world didn't even know who he was, people in New York knew who he was, but mostly in a negative way, but in today's world, whether you are in Thailand like I was a few weeks ago or if you are in On an island off the coast of Samoa or in Latvia or Estonia or Albania you can't pick up a newspaper that doesn't have the word Trump in it, and his ability to get the media to do what he wants them to do is almost infinite.

It's amazing and people say he's a liar, but the more I hear that over the last few years, the more I start to think about what's really going on and my wife would kill me for saying this: that it's changing or maybe waking us up to strangers. points of view. of the truth because I don't think he knows it, I don't think he's aware of his part, but he instinctively knows that the truth is completely relative and if a society decides that it is not relative then that is a social decision like the container of reasoning that He says: We're going to agree that this is true, but he says whatever is true, we're negotiating this truce.

What I'm saying right now and this is how I see it, is true and he has a lot of people who believe it. While some of this sounds just crazy, isn't that what creative people always sound like at first? So I am afraid and somewhat excited about the fact that we may be entering a whole new era of post-truth Europe. You know, no one answered the question the pilots asked 2,000 years ago about what their truth was, but I think Trump's world is a world that's getting closer to answering that than ever before, because what if we just decided that? ?

If we did without the concept of truth, many things would change, but they are already changing thanks to it and I think it is a very strange and worrying situation, but it is also somewhat stimulating because maybe it is time for us to have a different vision. what the truth is and maybe we can learn something fromall of this, so I don't know if this has anything to do with our interview, who paid well. If we look at him writing and fake news, I mean, if you look at whether it's Randolph Hearst or really Randolph Hearst, I think he would stage different things in the past where you know a woman would faint in the street and then I wrote about it and it was part of just generating content.

The thing is, we didn't have the Internet back then, so it wouldn't spread as fast and it couldn't create chaos in other countries or here and then it was ratified fine. When you look at what happened here, the American people decided with their votes one way or another, I mean, I know it was the electoral college, not the popular vote, but a lot of Americans voted for a reality show instead of someone who was a little too much. sincere or whatever, too logical, too much from the continent of reason, they voted for the more entertaining of the two characters, so they voted for entertainment basically and that's scary, I mean, all these other actors are talking about running and some of them already are.

They have run and actresses, etc. and the confusion between politics and entertainment is very dangerous, but what if it changes the world? and if it changes the world for it, not only for the worse, but also for the better. Know? What if an enlightened one? a guy like George Clooney becomes president and is elected because he is George Clooney is elected because he is an artist, do you know what would happen if a guy named Ronald Reagan became president? He was a great communicator, although yes, well, he was a great actor, a great communicator. I know he didn't need to write his lines, you know how to pronounce his lines, so I think that's all very interesting and it's about how creative worlds intertwine with our daily existence.

Look, you watch the stations and I try to watch Fox News from time to time and I find it very difficult to watch it, but then when they go back to CNN or MSNBC, I realize that they must find, you know, I understand how they feel, That is hard. You have to observe because both sides of the coin are manipulating visions of reality to transmit messages and that's what writing is all about, isn't that what creativity is all about? I painted a painting with no figures at all, just color and that's the world we're going through, so it's like we're on another frontier of the evolution of the human mind and we'll see what happens from that.

I fear certain things will be gone forever after this presidency, we may never have any candidate who isn't a visionary in one way or another, and you know Trump is a visionary even if you think his vision is dark. He's clearly a visionary, he doesn't like the way things are and he's trying to break it up and only when things are broken can they be put back together again, so it's a spoiler and the world is, you know, the story is full of spoilers. and there have been huge catastrophes and huge changes for the better because of spoilers and who knows where it goes, but I think it's interesting that you know that the world of entertainment is mixed with the rillette world of reality, it will make it much more challenging and I think the Internet is largely responsible for that because the first thing you know is that if you have a certain medical condition, you instantly Google it and the first thing you read is you say, oh my God, I'm going to die.

I'm going to die in this really weird way and then you read something else that makes it seem like everyone has this problem and it's not a big deal and then you keep reading and you make more and more achievements, you know, confused and you hope to leave. Wait a minute, this doesn't make sense since it's all out there and how do you organize it? And in the face of that you know that you are facing the issue of creativity because the Creator is the boy you know or the girl who looks at things and says, this is all a disaster.

I'm going to do something spectacular. I'm going to make sense of it. Yeah, and I think that's why the world is getting more, you know, more interesting where it's going. I don't know you. I know, but it's going to be interesting during the McCarthy era, you know, a lot of people's lives were interrupted and a lot of people were silenced and lived in fear and I don't know if we're in some kind of parallel time, it's not the same. in terms of labeling someone a communist, but it seems like there are some similarities there and having to keep silent about certain things and with the McCarthy era, how have you seen the evolution of cinema?

It changes the story well because we were on the subject of Trump. and I'd like to say something about the McCarthy era and how it's different from Ari, well because I think the difference is that during the McCarthy era everyone was afraid of McCarthy, apparently the entire Congress was afraid of him until they finally turned on him , but they were afraid of Him and so was the entertainment business and so were the people of the country. Everyone was more or less controlled by him for a while and even the media was afraid of him because he didn't want to.

I don't want him to turn on them and that's a big difference because in today's world the media is not afraid. You know about Trump or people who support Trump. The media attacks you as much as it supports him. There are different media that support it. Others attack. him and I think it's a healthier environment even though it's a crazy environment. I mean, we're getting crazier and crazier, but if you can hold on to your mindset, you know that the alacrity through all of this is a very exhilarating time and it's a very evolutionary time. where do we see where things are going with this because you know his attacks on the media have caused the media to say well we're not going to stop doing what we're doing, while McCarthy was attacking the media, the media was being coerced. to remain silent. sometimes and that hasn't happened, which means that the kind of wall between the government and the people that the media operates through has pretty much disappeared in the sense that no one feels like the governor knows the people in the legislature and the White House and the Supreme Court are separated from us by this wall of respect that they used to be separated by this insurmountable wall that the media has become so powerful in part because of the Internet and cell phones and all that, well. it's almost non-existent now and that's why it will cause evolution in this country and around the world, so I really call Veit causing evolution, we just can't define yet where it's going to go, so I think it's fascinating and Sorry I didn't answer your question exactly about Karthi, but then, when, when McCarthy was, I guess he was overthrown, I mean, how did it end?

I think the Senate finally got tired of him and realized how dangerous he was. he was and he realized that the problem was that he was saying, you know he was a head of the House of American Activities non-American activists, these committees, you know, and if you attack him, you're not an American, but After a while people began to see the damage it had caused. was doing by having the power to call anyone an American and I think he was just taken down by his own, he went too far and he was taken down by his own impulse and people just got fed up with him, yeah, and they saw that too.

A lot of people were victims of what he did, so I think it was a natural evolution, but it was certainly painful, so those who were blacklisted, how did his careers turn out? Once they were out of it until you know, he was gone. in power and then reappeared on the scene, but were never fully exonerated until later. I think they were all dead, you know, because that's how long it takes for bureaucracies to change. You know, whether Brock gets the Film Academy or whether it's the US government, it's still a bureaucracy and it takes a while to make sure the coast is clear and make some changes, so I think we're in very interesting and creative people should be, you know, just absorb everything. inch all the facts from all directions to try to mold them into something that makes sense.

I mean, one of the interesting things about Trump's ear is that I can't imagine people writing a story about it, you know, like writing a satire about Washington. He's already larger than life and that's because an artist took over, you know, an artist is running the movie, you know, he's running the show and he knows how to make himself larger than life, all he has to do that is to say a new madness. The next day you know we have complete peace with North Korea, everything is settled, everything is fine and Iran is building nuclear weapons and suddenly the fact of what happened yesterday with their accusation of this and that is not on the mind of the people because the media is controlled by him saying something new and they abandoned the old, they didn't abandon it completely, but it goes down to the shelf where it's not that important and that's why it's very difficult to write about it in any way.

I mean, I find myself very much in love with The New Yorker. It's okay to get bored writing reading the anti-Trump stories because what else can you say? What more can you say? It's a reality show that we're all glued to, but it's entertainment. and then, fortunately or unfortunately, it's changing the shape of American life and where it goes depends on the people of the United States, what we're going to do in the next election and, you know, in this last election people decided that they wanted a change, but such big changes couldn't have happened, so you throw a wrench into Cambridge analytics and if we think that's true, then how easy, how easy we will be if all that is true, if somehow we were surprised the messages and the people who know it. our kind of emotional surveys and then we try to play with that and like what is the question.

I'm not sure there's a question, it's just a statement, yeah, and I think it's already happening because Facebook already knows all that stuff. Google already knows everything. Google knows when you have a cold because you know you Google what's the best cure for a cold today and they know you have a cold and in fact, there's a study that showed that they can predict how many people in a city like Chicago have a cold this time. moment simply because of what people search on Google and they crawl it, they crawl everything mainly with our permission, well there are also voice activated ads, no, so I could be talking about cat litter and then the Next thing you know It's just that you get bombarded with ads for cat products, yeah, and now it's global, which is interesting.

I mean we just got back from Japan and Thailand and all of a sudden I'm getting ads from Thailand and Japan and I don't I don't know why I guess I got on the internet in those countries right now so now you know I'm getting bombarded with spam and even though that It's very annoying, it's also very interesting and exciting to think that we are actually becoming that. that global and that connected to a great global brain, you know, years ago, a Jesuit philosopher named Taylor de Chardin wrote a book called the Omega Point and in it he predicted that the human race was heading towards the Omega Point and that point, he said, It was a point where we are only present we are omniscient and therefore we are only powerful, all-powerful, which are the three characteristics that Thomas Aquinas defined as the characteristics of God and omniscience means that we know everything that is happening well, even We haven't reached that point. but we are quite closed because people send us videos from the South Sea islands and from Sakhalin to the north of Russia and from the South Pole to the North Pole and we are omnipresent because we can be on the streets of Iran during a revolution.

You know we can be in Tiananmen Square, etc. and the power comes directly from that look at this girl who escaped from Saudi Arabia and went to a hotel room when she was about to be detained by the country she was in and just tweeted until the country was forced to take her to a safe place and avoid returning her to Saudi Arabia. This was the power and she had this power in her hand and she knew how to use it and this will become more and more frequent. I mean it's already everywhere, but the next generation will have a complete science on how to use this power to change the world and you know ER de Chardin was excommunicated by the Catholic Church because of this book because it basically said that we were evolving towards divinity, after all, why wouldn't we be doing that?

Since it says in Genesis that God created us in her image and likeness, then if that is true, why wouldn't we be evolving to be like him or her? Why not? the church excommunicated him because it was not a good thing to say as far as they were concerned, but of course he is now enormously respected even in the Vatican for his predictions. He wrote all this in 1910, before radio took off, but television was you. knows only one anion and someone's mind and social networks and all that was not yet conceived but he predicted everything, he predicted that all people would be in simultaneous communication with all other people and that the world would become something that would form a single consciousness. and the interesting thing about how creativity fits into a global consciousness is that if creativity is not encouraged, that global consciousness will have no other form than the one given to it by the media and the media is completely untrustworthy for one reason only, its ability of attention ismicroscopic: changes on a whim Someone important dies and suddenly we no longer care about this case going through the Supreme Court for three days.

You know, we covered McCain's funeral and that's a little strange when you think about it, when you think about reality, like what's more important, this particular bill. that means something to millions of people or seeing every moment of the funeral of a senator or president well that is a decision of the media it is not based on any deep human reality it is based on sponsorship it is based on what they can get so that the people pay the money to apply and that's what they do, so if it wasn't for the creative people, we wouldn't have, you know, a feed that wasn't based on anything but immediate feedback about what we need to keep this channel going. open to keep CBS running.

I have to do this programming and not this programming, while the creative person is like: It has nothing to do with me. You know this person is involved in

making

paper statues and probably doesn't even know what's going on. in the world half the time, so creativity is more important than ever because it is the different part of us, it is the part that perhaps foresees the future and gives us a better future to record or a worse one because it affects us . a great service when it gives us a dystopian vision of the future because perhaps we have been warned not to go in that direction.

I remember reviewing some science fiction books years ago for the LA Times and some of them predicted humidity. a lot of the climate changes that we're going through now and what could happen to the world and I'd like to think that a lot of the legislation that's been produced over the last thirty years was put forward by some of these creative visionaries saying this could happen And you know , why people can say it's not happening is simply because they don't know. A lot of people don't understand the importance of the truth and that's what I think we're heading towards, it's a world where the truth, imagine if the media was in charge of the truth because everyone has an opposite view of it.

I mean, one of the most annoying things in these roles was watching a panel of people arguing on TV because they can't hear each other and everyone is making interesting points. but there is no dialogue there is no exchange there is no progress from this conversation which is what dialogue used to mean two things coming together for the purpose of moving forward and we are not living in that world right now except on the creative path when one novel is written or a great painting is revealed or a statue is revealed it makes us see everything differently what are the three rules that someone needs to know about screenwriting well, three rules, I mean, it's just an arbitrary number, but Let's continue with that, I think the first thing a screenwriter needs to know is that everything has to be connected, everything else.

In my opinion, the biggest difference between a screenplay and a novel is that in a novel you can get away with saying something on page one that doesn't directly connect to something on page 158 and so on, but anything you say on a script has to connect everything else you say in the script, if it doesn't, the audience will leave, you know, what I don't understand is why that guy was wearing a red baseball cap and that's the first thing and then in the fourth scene he was wearing a blue baseball cap and then he wasn't wearing a baseball cap anymore, that's the guy, that's the kind of thing that people say when they have a drink or a coffee after a movie, so every thing It has to connect to everything else, it's much more challenging because it's almost like building a building where if one thing isn't connected correctly the whole building could collapse, so I think that's the first thing to do.

The scriptwriter has to know it and I think the second thing that scriptwriters should know is that in chronological order and in logical order and in psychological order they have absolutely nothing to do with it, the only thing that matters is the dramatic order, that's the only thing that matters to the audience. get hooked properly no matter where we go in the story after that hook because we'll figure it out we'll be so hooked that we'll figure it out you don't even have to say ten years later or five years before or whatever you can help say that maybe but no It's necessary because we're not stupid, you know, and that's the third thing: the audience is the main character in the story, not the characters, and pleasing the audience is what made great directors what makes them great is that they know what the public is expecting in birds, you know, as one of my favorite examples.

Alfred Hitchcock has what's-her-name Tippi Hedren coming up the creaky wooden steps into the attic because he hears a noise in the attic and um, she's wearing underwear because women always wear underwear in the last scenes of, you know. , usually white underwear in the last scenes of a horror movie like Sigourney Weaver, an alien, so she goes there even though she's locked into this. alone at home because she is afraid of the birds that have tried to come in through the windows whose beaks you know come in through the windows, so why on earth would she climb those steps?

You know, why would I do that? So if you start thinking. about the character or the logic or you know the psychological order you don't understand everything you know what's happening to her this is what you're thinking you, the audience are watching this and she gets halfway up the stairs and the noise gets worse and stops and You hear the noise and why does it stop? Well, there's a very good reason why she stopped him. She stops because we need time. The audience needs time to catch up with the story because we have to remind ourselves to say it first. all this stuff about how stupid she is and why she's not wearing any clothes and why she doesn't try the flashlight she got behind the couch, she doesn't even turn it on, she just has it, of course, on top of the steps aren't going to work, but that's typical and we're going through all of this in our heads, but when she stops at the last step before going to the door, suddenly all of our internal dialogue stops and we're actually doing fine.

I paid $22 to get me out of fear and that's where we are now she's going to open the store and I'm going to be scared and when you're ready for that then she can open the door, but a person who doesn't I don't understand that the audience is the character most important in history. She would make her go upstairs. Maybe you would take our test. The Lantern would have a completely different way of doing it, but everything a good director does is based on the audience, no. based on the characters or what happens logically in the next order is based on what the audience is paid why you're here and whether I get a Lewis shoe or not because on that middle step where she stops you want to leave the theater you know, It's the last time one of these stupid movies is coming, but okay, get up and go, but if you're still there, she goes up a couple more steps because he knows exactly what's going on in your mind and it's his job to get it.

You get to that point where your mind is blank and you're waiting to be afraid because that's what you paid for and that's what I mean by what you know, it's a lot called audience psychology, which is the part most important of me. I think writing a script is knowing what the audience wants to see here, not what they don't, what I have to do first and what I have to expose first, what kind of exposition I need, it's how I can grab the audience by the throat and never let it go. What is the formula for writing a great story?

I think a great story starts with finding a character in a strange situation and getting that character out of that situation, and Faulkner said that's what his novel is like. What it started is a character was chasing him and he allowed it to chase him until he responded and said questions started coming up and he gave the example of, you know, a novel I wrote that started with a girl sitting in a tree wearing underpants. muddy and her knees were bruised and she was looking out the window of the house from the tree and she was crying and he said then I started asking questions about it like why did her knees break, well I know why he wasn't the first , they were not versed and it's because she climbed this tree and she was small and she had no problem climbing the tree because her pants were very dirty because her brother had pushed her into the stream and that's why she ran home and why was she looking out the window because they told her not to enter the house, what was she looking out the window?

Well, it was her grandfather's funeral and so on, and when he asked her all those questions, she was able to answer them and the thing about Falcor that illustrates my point. of creativity is that he didn't write this, you know, I always say that if you trust your mind, the story will form in your mind the moment you start writing it, you are interfering with your mind because now you are dealing with with with with pieces of paper and we start to feel possessive about the pieces of paper and we want to do something with them, we want to put them in order, but what if one of these pieces of paper is the good one?

Well, he'll forget about that. He will forget about his knees, you know, for example, if that one is not good, but he leaves it all in his mind because that way he is free to form almost like an embryo, anyway he wants to form and once he is fully formed, then you sit down. write it down and write it down I always said that people will never get writer's block if they just never sit down to write until they know what they're going to write when they sit down and if you know it in advance and just start putting in the effort, that's why you limit your time to forty and five minutes an hour and in the end you can't wait to write more perfect now, go to tomorrow and do it then because that energy will already be there. whereas if you run out of things to write about, you've misused your time management, so I guess that's how a story starts, with some character chasing you until you have to write about it and then you go and apply all.

Besides that, there are other rules about storytelling, but basically it starts with a character and it doesn't matter how good a writer you are, if you don't have an intriguing character at the center, it doesn't matter, you won't make it. hold your reader, you're not going to hold your audience, the audience just wants to see people, what is your process for developing characters, how do you do it well, does a character develop on its own and what do you need, basically what do you do? When What you're dealing with is that you're like a checklist instead of developing the character, you let the velvet character develop itself, but you say you know what she has to have and the next thing she has to have. . her problem, you know, for example, is that clear because if that's not clear, your story won't engage the audience and what is she, do you know what her problem is interfering?

I called this mission in life as it is normally his motivation in the story, his problem is getting in the way. With her missionary life, you know that she is someone who wants to become a nurse, but something through what happens in the opening scene seems to make her, if you want to save this person, you have to do something violent and therefore , your motivation if you are going to do it. saving this person interferes with his mission those are two parts of the checklist and you go on to talk about how he changes this is called his arc you know what the arc of his change is how it's different at the end of the story because a lot of times we cover stories, you know they send them to us and we're fine, you know the characters don't change, she's exactly how she was at the end or the beginning, so why do it?

We, we don't get excited about that, you know, no, we're not satisfied with a story where the characters don't change, so these are kind of checklists that you apply to the characters once you get them going and they start with that. intriguing situation and then adding along the way, you know, but just comparing them to traditional characters that work well, do you think the notion of the antihero has become stronger in our culture now? Yes, I think you know that the antihero has been around for a while. a hundred years or more maybe longer than that actually maybe all the way back to the Odyssey because maybe Ulysses is a kind of anti-hero, he lies most of the time and will avoid a fight by telling the story that breaks up the fight, although he does get into some fights, but still most of the time he's kind of an anti-hero because his purpose is his mission, you know, is to get home and it's not just about defeating this person and defeating them, so he chooses his battles and I create an antihero has been with us everywhere and will be, I mean characters, and you know, in a lot of television series like Breaking Bad, you definitely know an antihero in the Oz arcs.

I mean, I think antiheroes are all around us and one of the things we don't notice is that over the years the public starts to prefer antiheroes, you know, a part of the public prefers them to heroes and therefore , they look so familiar to me that I don't even realize they are antiheroes anymore, the other part of the audience, I guess the younger part is interesting toobecause I think a younger need prefers heroes to overt heroes, Ironman and you know, Spider-Man and all that, but I think as people get older and more experienced with the complications of life, they start to realize that what they find most interesting is that an ordinary woman who works at the post office becomes a hero against her will because she doesn't. you have a better option and a lot of people can relate to you, you know, I think the older you get, the more you can relate, it's easier to relate to heroes when you're younger and you still think you can conquer the world, so I think there's a lot room for both and one of the things that people don't think about is the fact that we now have so many channels, so many ways that stories reach us in today's world that we are enormously sensitive to small stories. signals that make us decide instantly whether we want to watch a story or not.

You know, take the remote control that allows you to move forward quickly. You know you could catch the beginning of a commercial by mistake because you didn't advance it. but if even a second catches your attention, you can watch the entire commercial, which is a story, but or you can fast forward because it didn't catch your attention and only the first time it takes a person to do it that indicates how tuned in Are we two stories? You know, you turn on, you're channel surfing and you come across the news and you hear a couple of words and you go to the next channel because I'm not listening to that story. again I heard it I heard it enough or I can't stand this guy's story, you know, I always thought that the most typical human question the most characteristic human question is what is your story and are we facing people from another planet. that would be our first question, it would be your first question unless you already knew our story, but in our case we would like to know what your story is and the first question on a date like the one you are going to have, you finally agree to continue. a date because you want to know what your story is and after the day you leave you know that I didn't like her story I just didn't like her I didn't like her story I didn't understand what happens with the jury I know the two lawyers who tell stories, The journey is deciding which of the two stories you don't buy, so the fact that we are surrounded by stories, I think it means that storytelling is probably the number one human science. that everyone needs to learn and know and the more you know, the better you are.

I mean, you can tell a story and you know a couple of lines like one of the shortest stories in American literature is Richard Ratigan's. I think his name was Scarlatti. He leans in and says like this: Have you tried living in a one-room apartment with a man who's just learning to play the viola? That's what he asked the police when he handed them the empty revolver. You know, the whole story is that they're right and one of my favorite jokes is I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather and not like the passengers in his car in the car he was driving, you know, so there's a three-act story in one. sentence and you know you get it, no You don't have to tell a 20 minute joke to get the point and jokes are jokes or stories, commercials or stories, songs or stories and songs become enormously popular because they tell a story with which millions of people are identifying at that moment, so it's very exciting to know this world of storytelling and see the masters of it, you know, what about the artist, the antihero, whether it's the writer, the musician, the filmmaker, where their own backstory makes them the antihero and therefore perhaps the people.

They would gravitate more towards his work if they knew they had a simpler existence and wrote something great, well yes he had a lovely life, it was easy for him, but if someone has more of an anti-hero art in their own life. and they are working, do you think people gravitate more towards them? Know? I really don't understand your question. Okay, it's very esoteric and feels like you're in a graduate seminar. Yes, and I'm going to fail because I did it. I didn't even get it, okay, I like it, I consider it a portrait of the artist when he was young, but yeah, try again, okay, sorry, I think it's my San Francisco influence seeping through.

Sorry, someone like John Lennon, okay, we know he had it. his own problems, you know, his problems with the government, you had different things in a turbulent love story, different things, which made it more interesting, would we have been so attracted to him at all? I don't think that's it, that's really his kind of publishing story. in a sense because we didn't know who the Veals were at first, we had no idea who they were, we just fell in love with their music and that made them more interesting when we started to find out that they have crazy lives and girlfriends and you know the feelings about the government.

No, actually, it made them more human and which is not necessarily a good thing for an artist. You know they are in a tradition of the Catholic Church. The artists could say they were divinely inspired. That was great, I mean, it was very good PR, it was a very good twist, but when you found out that they really weren't divinely inspired or they were inspired by the devil, and that might be a good twist, but that's what What happens is that when a work of art catches you, it catches you. I think he is completely separate from his creator because he is like a living being that you suddenly know exists.

I mean, I'll never forget my first reaction yesterday. You know that amazing Paul McCarthy song? I think it's true, it's like the moment you finish listening to the song, you say that song always existed. I had never heard it before and they say it was just a release, but debt is an eternal song and that is the power of a work of art. because now it's part of you know, it's live, it will continue to live for some time, we don't know how long, but at some point, and when you think about it, I have very little to do with the artists, very little to do with it. your knowledge of the artist and when you start to know things about the artist, you start to deflate your view of the art a little bit.

It's funny because I used to run a poetry series at Occidental College and I could invite all my favorite poets like Bukowski to my C and I learned that there was a double edged sword, in some cases I loved it like Pukowski but in other cases I won't mention when I discovered that the guy is just a self-centered, miserable, drunk guy who has all these pre-Madonna needs, etc., he's just a poet, you know, he comes to read it at the university. He couldn't read his poetry the same way anymore and I thought, thank God I didn't invite him.

Do you know some of my favorite poets? I hadn't invited them yet because I don't want to know what they are like and that's how I feel about it, it's like the artist and his work are two separate things, if you create great work, it does itself. route and knowing it is, you know, maybe it's an advantage, maybe it's a disadvantage, but in any case, if I had to choose, I'd rather not, I'd rather not and I don't believe in a kind of academic approach that says you have to understand the artist in order to understand art.

I really don't think that's true. I think you have to understand the society in which art appears before you can understand art, but I don't think you can understand yourself. I know you need to understand the artist and I have a hard time dealing with that too, well let's go back in time and say all of Woody Allen's movies are banned because he's a creep, you know? I just have a real problem with that because those movies live. on their own in my opinion and they no longer have anything to do with Woody Allen, he created them and I think that has been true since the beginning of time, it is that we do not have to know who Homer is to be able to understand the power of Iliad or the Odyssey, you know, like a professor said years ago, the Iliad in the Odyssey was not written by Homer but by someone else with the same name, you know, or the Shakespeare controversy, like who cares who it was?

Shakespeare, his works are incredible. and yes, it is curious to know more about him, but nothing I could learn about Shakespeare would change my mind about his works. I could change my mind about his work based on something, but not what I knew about the artist, so that's how I feel about you. knowing learning about the artist I don't think we need it don't think it romanticizes who they are let's take someone like Marvin Gaye and you listen to his stories and he was at the top for a while, he wasn't He went, I guess, to Europe or I forget where he went , but he came back and we're starting to get his career back and then tragedy strikes.

That makes us feel more attracted to his work, not me, no, no, I mean, it might pique my curiosity. Enough to watch it, but then when I do, let's say I've never heard his work before, right, and then I go listen to it because I heard something. I hope that, first of all, it is difficult for me to listen to it objectively and therefore. It bothers me that this is the way I came to him hmm you know and let's say you know Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet that I love, I learned something about him and I'm going to read his poems and now I read them through the lens of what I learned about it and I don't like that way.

I like to look at the artwork itself and I used to teach a course where I would show examples of artwork and ask the class how much they thought they were worth. and I showed ancient Babylonian statues along with electrical circuits and along with, you know, a strange mix of pictures and a slide show, and it was very interesting to see what the class's reactions were to something that they knew nothing about because during the rest of the course was about learning about these different things which was ancient which was now which was a work of art by the way which is just interesting and the artist really comes down to the artist what people agree is art and the purity of that's why I think creating, creating, creative people are superior in a strange way to the media because that is something pure like what you created, this is something that people accept or not, if they do it, then you know that It's very, very interesting, you know it's a success. work of art I'm not saying that a work of art has to be successful because some art workers or not yet successful ones like Moby Dick didn't sell more than, I think, 12 copies during Melville's lifetime and then 20 years later After his death, it became a best-seller and that's because the world in 1906, when it became a best-seller, was ready for it.

You know, I was right in that world and I wasn't ready for that yet in Melville's world, but it was a work of art even. Before that, some people recognized that and saw it that way, so we could go on talking about this forever, but I don't like what I call the biographical fallacy of having to know about the artist. I think, in fact, I think it's a deterrent and so it makes it very clear to me that when people try to reject a person's true art, you know the artistic career because they did something bad that seems silly to me.

I like artists to be kind of sacred and even priests do that. Bad things, true, but they're still supposed to be sacred and we just live in this post-truth world where everything you say is fraught with difficulty because you're going to offend someone no matter what and I think we need to vibe. We can keep talking because otherwise we're all going to fall into some kind of terminal silence, well, today's Esquire, today's kind of uproar on Twitter was about the cover of Esquire, which and I'm butchering what it was about, but the life of a kind of white environment. middle class male team in the age of social media shows a boy in a room that you know looks like a middle class house or whatever, okay, but I guess yeah, we're leaving out a lot of people, women , including whatever I am.

I'm not totally offended if we find out the thinking motivations of a certain group of people, whatever it is, then maybe we can find out other things and have a dialogue about it, but I mean, people were very upset about it and so on. we were in this new age where someone is upset about something every day and like god this is what everyone you know, people are upset all the time but the reason we feel that way is because of the social media and communications, you know this, I mean, I'm sure it's always been like this.

Since the beginning of time, people are fixated on everything all the time, but we didn't know that it took letters for months and months to cross the oceans correctly and before that there weren't even letters about how and how much upset you can make. It's shown in a smoke signal, right, but in today's world every little upset is tweeted, you know, emails are sent, text messages are sent, and people are upset all the time, so we're on a frontier of very challenging communication where we have to learn to keep talking given the fact that every word you choose can be objected to by someone you know.

I had someone, one of my apprentices, read a script the other day and said he loved it, but you have to remove the word rape.on page 96 because when you use rape in a non-sexual way of saying the rape of the Inca civilization, for example, you're going to terribly hurt someone in the audience who has experienced it on a personal level and, honestly, you know the script was written ten years ago before I was moved. Didn't that particular sensitivity come to the fore? But we're at the point where there's not a word anyone can say that won't upset someone somewhere and thank goodness for comedians because they have a way of turning that into fun.

You know, all of us, thank God, but we all have to deal with it because otherwise we'll fall into silence or we'll fall into rants, which is what's happening now where all we do is yell at each other and really We don't listen because we know we can't really talk, you know, three people can't talk, two people can possibly talk. I meet you, you know, my friends like to go or three people be careful with people, sure two people can talk even if they violently oppose each other, but we are losing the ability to communicate because you know people say I felt really offended by the tone of your email what was the tone of my email such a clever cowboy I put a tone on my email it was like writing letters and it was only six words and you thought there was a tone well this is the world we live in and is Why does it challenge your thoughts about work-life balance so much?

Well, if you don't see a difference between work and life, it's hard to figure out how to answer that question, but I guess my basic view is that work is what you get. what you do when you're not alive and therefore every time life interrupts work it makes me happy because you know the grandkids are coming this weekend and what could be better but you know if it wasn't for work , life would swallow you up and spit you out at the end of the day, so work is what I do when I know when I'm coming and balance is just letting life do what it has to do, like the other day when one of my father's father died my friends and although I didn't know him.

I just decided I had to go to the funeral even though it was the day I had, you know, a couple of studio gigs and stuff, but I just went out to make food. funeral because it's fine and I didn't think about work all day and I didn't complain, as I usually do, that I didn't finish any work that day because every once in a while you have to say hello to life and I recognize that it's there, but when I think How many people say they want to work and they work and they don't and I tell them: what are you doing?

They are doing well, life keeps happening and I don't fully understand it. That's because that person has the same amount of time that I do and that we all have and they are chosen men at a certain point. I mean, you can, I mean, we travel, we love going out to eat, we love doing things at home, we love cooking. . We love doing all the things that a lot of people like to do, but we both know that my wife and I work very hard because we love what we do, so I don't know, it's a very interesting question, but d I would love for you to be more specific about what you mean by this.

I'm thinking about an interview I heard with Alice Munro and she says that she felt like she had missed out on a lot of life because even though she became a writer later in her life, I guess she had spent a lot of time writing and eventually she was going to get around to it. a point where he was going to stop and he left it for a year and went back to writing, so he felt like maybe a lot of his life had been dedicated to work and then he felt like he had missed out on life, but then he realized that work was really life.

I don't know, maybe I'm sounding like my no again, that's exactly it, that's exactly it. the right kind of complication when it comes to asking that question because people who love their job, type C personalities like Alice Munro, their life is their job, it's like a calling, you know, it's like a calling and if you don't do it , You are not living when you are not doing it, you are alive, but if you are not doing it on a regular basis and you are not living your life, you are living someone else's life, where you are living, you know anyone's life except the Artist is someone who lives her life, you know her own specific life, that she is shaped by herself and that's why it's an interesting question for anyone who is involved in creative matters, because have I ever thought that way and I am loosing?

About life, you know, maybe for a total of six or seven seconds in my life I thought I had had other thoughts than I might have. You could spend more time suffering. It's a strange thought, isn't it, but I had three sisters and they all stayed in my hometown. and I didn't, so they suffered a lot with the family and many occasions for it with 40 relatives around and something was always happening and I felt like I could really be a part of it, but then I remember it very clearly. The reason I wanted to leave was because I didn't want to just do what I saw around me growing up.

I thought nothing out of the ordinary is happening. Here people are just being and there is nothing wrong with that, yes. I'm all for you guys meeting the people and families who are on the phone all day about someone's latest accident or personal diagnosis of this or that and what we can do and the plans for this thing that I really love. all that stuff and when I'm there I'll be in the kitchen, you know, with mostly the women talking about this instead of the men watching a game in the other room. I'm torn because I love that, but I also knew clearly that I had to get away from that and that I couldn't let that consume me because at the end of the day I always believed what those people say, the one thing you can't live without in the end of the day.

The day is the things you could have done. You know, wishing you had done a lot of things you didn't do. I will never have that problem. You know, all my dreams have turned into plans and/or movies, books or trips. You know, I always did something with them and somehow it all worked out. I go to family gatherings, but no, I won't stay for four weeks and I won't get sucked into all that except for the big moments. and maybe it's total selfishness. I think there's an element of selfishness and creativity and selfishness is maybe just a common word to describe it, but there might be more you to it or something, narcissism would be the worst word to describe it because there are a lot of narcissists in the creative world that I think They're mostly unbearable, but you have to be willing to be yourself, something a lot of people aren't prepared to do.

A lot of people get nervous when you do it and try to maintain it. They stop you from doing it because they really wish they could do it but they don't have the courage to do it because there aren't any railroad tracks that mark it clearly you already know how you're going to get where you're going I don't know well so that's very No you don't think it's very worrying I think it's very exciting yes I don't think it's worrying I think it's exciting I think I can do it and that makes people nervous, you know people who are doing their thing in a continental way, a continent of reason, in a traditional way, They are nervous when people are going to live above a garage and practice, you know the drums until they are famous, that makes them nervous and probably good.

Should I say that if my own daughter had told me that she won to be an actress, I would have said no, please, I would try and I wouldn't have said it directly, but I would have had the same feelings that people have, so I think you have it? be willing to be yourself and my justification or rationalization for that is that you know the universe, if you believe in some kind of higher force that created you and if you are not doing what you are dreaming of, then you are not only failing yourself but the whole universe, the rest of us, as a viewer, a storyteller and that's what you should be and you're not telling stories because you're afraid of this or that, then you failed yourself.

You failed your dream and you failed all of us whose life could be saved by your story or the funniest story they've ever heard and you failed the universe. You were created to dream of telling stories. I used to have students who had weird things like this. I really want to go to my third year in Paris, but I'm afraid I'll feel guilty if I do and go, why would you feel guilty? Well, my parents will have to pay for it and my brothers and sisters. I couldn't do that and it's like oh wait a minute let me think about this with you you're afraid of guilt okay? what is guilt?

What do you mean? Well, it's not guilt, kind of a mental thing, it's not. It's an imaginary thing, I know it's powerful, but it's imaginary, like most powerful things in human life, right, yeah, well then, isn't the fear of guilt also imaginary? So anyway , you will be dealing with an imaginary problem, right? You will either go to Paris to feel guilty about the road in the future, which is speculative anyway, or you will stay here and feel bad for not going, so it seems to me that the choice is obvious: go there, feel guilty if you do and face that. and that type of thinking is what makes someone decide to leave the group and pursue a creative life.

If they can't think about it, then they should stay home and do work at the grocery store or whatever. is that it will make them feel unchallenged by that, lastly, what about fear? I think Norman Mailer said the fear of mediocrity was about how many universities train people to want a mediocre existence. I'm not sure if that's true. maybe just stability, but there's mediocrity in some of that too. I know Flannery O'Connor said that the problem is not that colleges don't inspire people to become writers, that the problem is that colleges inspire too many people. to become mediocre writers, I'm not sure if Norman Mailer was influenced by her, she was influenced by him, but mediocrity is a retroactive judgment, it's not something you strive for, so it's something that if you're talking about artists, he is a meteoric.

Mediocre artists, well, you can't make that judgment until it's all done. In Melville's case, for example, you can't even get to ten because when it was all done, he was buried and no one knew who he was, but 20 years later. has become the greatest American novelist, so what I tell you is that the artist cannot think about things like that, he cannot think about whether what he is doing is excellent or not, he has to strive for excellence because If you don't You strive for it, you'll never get close to it, but you don't judge yourself based on any of those criteria because that's not your job, your job is to make your art and do it to the best of your ability. in the moment the best you can right now and let the world judge it or not who cares about your joy and your mission in life is to do the creative work and that's all you have to worry about let everyone others make their decisions. and the fear of doing that, I mean the strength to do that, means that you have to have a healthy enough ego, not a huge or small ego that makes people selfish, but you have to have one that is healthy enough to to really not do it.

I care what other people think. One time I got divorced and you know, I was worried about my kids and you know what the world would think of him, everything else and I was standing on the phone looking out over the city of Los Angeles. He had a million. It lights up well and my uncle was like, "Remember that no one is really thinking about you." It was at that moment that there are some people that you know who you are and of them there are some that love you and probably others that hate you, but most of the people out there don't even know who you are, so relax, you know, and That's very relaxing, it's thinking that no matter who you are, there are other people who don't know who you are.

I'm constantly amazed that people today haven't heard of half the great artists of the past, but what if you do something great? Focus on that and it will make sense for the rest of your existence and that's all anyone can achieve. I think it's yours. existence