If you’re struggling to write a book, here’s a great way to get unstuck:
Write hundreds of tiny books instead.
Inspired by Austin Kleon’s new book Don’t Call It Art, the words poured out of me when I changed my tools (paper scraps instead of Google Docs), scaled down the size, and decided not to call it a book.
In the 1950s, a Johns Hopkins biologist named Curt Richter dropped rats into glass cylinders half-filled with water and watched them swim.
The rats paddled around in frantic little circles, searching for a way out. Richter, as Nir Eyal writes, sat nearby with a stopwatch and recorded how long they kept going before they stopped trying.
Most lasted around fifteen minutes.
What’s interesting is that the rats were not drowning from exhaustion. Their muscles still worked, their lungs were fine. They had just decided, in their little rat brains, there was no point.
So Richter ran the experiment again, but with one small change.
He dropped a fresh group of rats in and watched them swim. Right when each one was about to give up, he reached in, scooped the rat out, dried it off, let it catch its breath, and plopped it back in the water.
How much longer would you guess those rats swam?
Thirty minutes? An hour? Double their original time? Triple it?
The answer: sixty hours.
Not sixty minutes. Sixty hours. Two and a half straight days of paddling. Roughly the amount of time it takes elite ultra-marathon swimmers to swim from Cuba to Florida.
They were the same type of rats as the first batch, with the same bodies. The only difference was that they now believed rescue was possible.
When I’m on the treadmill and my breathing is labored, I think about the rats.
I think about the rats when a blister on my foot is screaming, or when my mouth is painfully dry. Basically, I think about the rats when my brain is begging me to quit, but my body is still capable of continuing.
Marcus Aurelius said it’s shameful for the mind to give up when the body is still going strong. That’s what the rats remind me of. With the first group of rats, their minds had given up before their bodies.
The second group didn’t suddenly become stronger. They didn’t get better at swimming. Nothing about the water changed.
They had been pulled out once before. They knew, in whatever small way rats know things, that rescue could come.
So they kept swimming.
Their only job was to keep going.
Before landing roles in Euphoria and The White Lotus, Lukas Gage struggled to break into the industry.
At eighteen, he moved to LA and enrolled in an acting class while searching for an agent. But it turned out to be harder than he imagined. No one would talk to him. Maybe he just wasn’t cut out to be an actor.
Feeling low, he asked his acting teacher, Leigh Kilton-Smith, if she had a moment to talk. He confessed his doubts about his abilities.
“I really need you to tell me the truth,” he said. “What’s the worst thing about my acting?”
“You know my biggest criticism right now of where you are in your career,” she said. “I see your plan.”
“What?”
“Did I stutter? I said I see your plan. I see that you’ve done the work and now a day later you’re stuck in preparation, and you haven’t done the necessary work to let your plan go. [. . .] You’re relying on your plan, and that’s when your work runs the chance of being dull and uninteresting. You’re many things, Lukas, but uninteresting ain’t one of them.”
He thought he might cry. She was right, he knew, but he wasn’t ready to fully accept it.
“But if I don’t know what’s going to happen—”
Suddenly, something flew toward his head.
Reflexively, he reached out and grabbed it: a tissue box his teacher had thrown at him.
“What the actual fuck?”
“Bet you didn’t see that coming, did you?”
He had not.
“And yet you caught it. You didn’t have to think about it. You didn’t have to reference any notes on how to catch a tissue box being thrown at your head by your crazy acting teacher. You simply caught it, instinct kicked in, and you were in a state of trust.”
“Trust!” she continued. “Trust in yourself. It’s what’s missing from your characters, and from you, Lukas. The art suffers and runs the risk of looking and feeling and smelling and being like everyone else.”
Trust.
That was it.
The work he’d already done was in him. He didn’t need to cling to the plan anymore. He needed to trust himself enough to let it go.
“I can only say all this,” she added, “because I’m also deeply and profoundly afraid every moment of every day. I am a fuckup, I’m a fraud, but either I trust my life experiences and my path or I become the world’s oldest hooker.”
Early in his career, Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston was auditioning constantly.
After each audition, he would pace by the phone, anxious to hear if he had gotten the part.
“And then when I heard I didn’t get the part, I’d marinate in disappointment and introspection. Could I have done something differently?”
His wife eventually set him up with a self-help coach, who told Cranston he needed to focus on the process, not the outcome.
That’s when everything changed.
By detaching from the outcome, Cranston put himself back in control. He realized auditions weren’t about competing with other actors. They were about giving something.
“I wasn’t there to get a job. I was there to do a job. Simple as that. I was there to give a performance.” Whether or not he got the part was not up to him, and therefore not his concern. Instead of pacing by the phone after each audition, he would throw the script in a basket when he got home and forget about it.
“I’d let go. You can’t fake letting go. You have to really genuinely detach from it. If I’d get a callback, I’d fish out the script and say, ‘Oh yeah, I remember this guy.’”
Auditioning became enjoyable.
How could it not?
With the outcome no longer in charge, with his trust placed in himself and in the work instead of the result, he walked into each audition holding all the power.
That’s the thing about trusting yourself: it’s more a decision than a feeling.
When Christina Applegate first started working on the set of Anchorman, she had never done improv comedy. She walked around asking anyone who would listen, “Teach me, Obi-Wan.”
Steve Carell insisted that she didn’t need to be taught. She could do it on her own.
It was, Applegate writes, “such a beautiful act of belief in me.”
“No one sat me down and held my hand and looked lovingly into my eyes and told me their wisdom. They just said: ‘Fuck you: you know how to do this.’”
Trusting yourself is deciding to put your weight on what you’ve already practiced, what you’ve already lived through, what you already know.
The rest of it—the part you don’t control—you set down.
Then, you keep going.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
One of my favorite reading memories from when I was younger was sitting on the couch in my parents’ house and cracking open a new David Sedaris book. Ones like Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and Naked. That’s why I’m so excited that his newest book, The Land and Its People came out this week! My wife and I went to see him earlier this month at the Orpheum Theater and we cracked up the whole time. He’s just so damn funny. It made me want to reread an old favorite, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. I’ve yet to read another author who so accurately—and so side-splittingly—captures the absurdity of daily life.
Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences by Neal Allen and Anne Lamott
I found this book while browsing the shelves of Changing Hands, and when I saw it was co-written by Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird, I bought it on the spot. There are so many gems of writing advice here. One favorite: “Spend less time defending what you’ve written and more time revealing the truth.” Lamott writes that when she edits her own work she removes anything “that put me in a more sympathetic/desperate light so the reader will feel sorry for me or anxious on my behalf, and like me more,” and that there is nothing more stunning than the truth presented carefully and unvarnished. I just love that. On a similar note, a huge piece of writing—and life—advice I’ve been thinking about is Ryan Holiday’s positive contribution every day rule. Seriously, read this article. And if you like to write, read this book.
London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe
Oh my goodness, I LOVED this book. It’s one of the best I’ve read this year. Keefe is a master of narrative tension. The slow-but-propulsive unfolding of the story made it almost impossible to put down—I needed to know the motives of the people at the center of it all. In that way, it reminded me of—dare I say—the true crime classic In Cold Blood. You find yourself needing to know how the cast of characters came together, what stories they told themselves and others, and how the chain of choices led them where they ended up. It’s seriously so good. (Also, on a semi-related note, crime writer Patricia Cornwell published her memoir this month, and it looks really good.)
Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better by David Epstein
I wasn’t sure if this book would be gimmicky, but I gave it a shot because I loved his book Range. This one is just as good, maybe better. We tend to think unlimited time, money, and freedom would solve our creative and business problems. It turns out what we often need are constraints: rigid limits, real or self-imposed, that force us to think more clearly and creatively. From some of the biggest companies to the most influential artists, from Steve Jobs to Johann Sebastian Bach, Epstein argues that constraints were not just the catalyst but the key ingredient in their success. It’s fascinating, and on top of that, it’s well-written and easy to read. It reminded me of the ideas in one of my favorite books on creativity, Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist. (Btw, Kleon’s newest book Don’t Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again comes out next month!)
Misc: I also read and loved Christina Applegate’s memoir You With the Sad Eyes, which is where the Anchorman story above came from.