Lee Child: How to Write Strikingly Well | How I Write

Summary

How I Write with David Perell

Episode: Lee Child: How to Write Strikingly Well | How I Write
Date: February 4, 2026

---

Overview

In this deep and candid conversation, bestselling author Lee Child, creator of the Jack Reacher series, joins David Perell to unpack his writing philosophy, the mechanics behind his global commercial appeal, and the lived experience that shapes his work. The discussion explores how sense of place drives narrative, the illusion of “natural” dialogue, the myth and reality of violence, and why reading widely comes before writing well. Lee’s unapologetic approach to commercial fiction, coupled with his perspectives on discipline, creativity, and authenticity, offers aspiring writers and avid readers a rare behind-the-curtain view into the craft of storytelling.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Choosing America as the Setting

[00:47–05:03]

• Lee was fired from his TV job in England and wanted to escape the confines of British fiction, both literally and narratively.
• British crime fiction often felt limited—claustrophobic in geography and psychology—whereas America represented myth, legend, and a vast canvas.

“You needed that frontier feel. So it really had to be America from the narrative point of view.” (Lee Child, 03:14)

• Lee’s personal connection: 100 U.S. visits over 24 years due to his American wife, allowing him to write as both insider and outsider.

2. Bringing Place to Life

[05:03–07:26]

• Lee’s approach focuses less on detailed research, more on visceral elements—especially temperature: “hot vs. cold, hard vs. soft.”
• Place isn’t just a backdrop—it dictates the physics of the story and makes certain plots plausible or not.

“...the place and the temperature kind of dictates the story in a way.” (Lee Child, 06:39)

3. Writing Process and Planning (or Not)

[07:26–08:36; 13:08–14:48]

• Lee never outlines: “If I plan a story… I’ve told myself the story and I’m bored with it at that point.”
• He improvises, letting narrative emerge organically from setting—writing is “about starting somewhere ... and then see what happens.”
• Sticks to a highly disciplined schedule: starts each book September 1st, delivers by March or April.

“The imagination somehow is biddable. You can quiet it down and you can crank it up depending on when you need to.” (Lee Child, 14:43)

4. Influences and Series Structure

[08:36–12:51]

• Avid reader: cites Alistair Maclean for hero plausibility and John D. McDonald for irresistible slow-burn openings.
• Prefers recurring characters for the “pre-approval”/familiarity they confer on readers: “...they really want the familiarity and the comfort of their old friend coming to visit for a couple of days.”
• Contrasts his approach with Stephen King, whose genre-hopping generates unpredictability.

5. Lifestyle and How It Shapes Writing

[14:48–18:56]

• Rejects notions of virtue (exercise, moderation), lives “unapologetically” and for pleasure—a rebellion against a repressive upbringing.
• Attributes post-war British creative explosion to the stability and freedom unique to his generation:

“My micro generation...was probably the luckiest generation in all of human history.” (Lee Child, 16:59)

6. Commercial Aspiration as Artistic Integrity

[18:56–22:04]

• Sees the reader as integral to art—believes writing for an audience doesn’t cheapen the work.

“If you write a book and nobody reads it, have you written a book?” (Lee Child, 20:23)

• Success requires appealing simultaneously to habitual readers (“the center of Saturn’s rings”) and occasional ones on the “outer rings.”
• The core skill is a multilevel style that is both palatable to literati and accessible to casual readers.

7. Propulsion and Pacing

[22:04–25:03]

• Rhythm and propulsion (“forward, forward, forward”) are central: each sentence nudges the reader toward the next, much like a pop song accelerates imperceptibly.
• Helps less-avid readers feel accomplishment in finishing a book—a “hand gently on their back.”

8. Cliffhangers and Plot Questions

[25:03–29:10]

• Instinct from TV: always, subconsciously, ending chapters and books at moments of tension or question.
• Humans are hardwired to need answers: “the easiest part of constructing a novel...is to imply a question.”

“Plotting in that sense is way overestimated in terms of difficulty. Plotting is really pretty easy.” (Lee Child, 28:46)

9. Writer as Adventurer

[29:10–31:06]

• Finds joy in the unknown—writing is an adventure parallel to the reader’s journey.

“I want to feel that power when I'm writing it as well as reading it.” (Lee Child, 30:21)

10. The (Un)Teachability of Writing and the “Don’t Try Too Hard” Principle

[31:06–33:14; 58:36–59:18]

• Cites David Mamet: don’t try to force likability; self-confident indifference is magnetic.
• You must believe fully in both the art and business of writing—paradoxically, 100% each.
• Lee is skeptical about teaching creative writing itself, though practical shortcuts can be taught.

11. Authenticity and Emotional Contract with Readers

[33:14–34:55; 36:12–38:25]

• Discipline and reliability (a book per year) become a moral contract with fans.
• Building a compelling main character is about honest portrayal, not engineering for likeability:

“You absolutely can't have a character designed to be hated. You absolutely equally cannot have a character that's designed to be liked...You’ve just got to have an honest, authentic portrayal.” (Lee Child, 37:08)

12. Dialog, Rhythm, and Illusion of Naturalism

[38:25–42:23]

• “Natural” dialogue is an illusion; real conversation is incoherent. Writers construct dialogue to “seem” natural.
• Rhythm and strategic repetition drive emotional emphasis—a verbal music.

“Somehow the rhythm lands you on the important word. And that is, I think, It's partly an innate skill. It comes from reading a lot. It comes from listening a lot.” (Lee Child, 40:36)

13. Beginnings and Endings

[43:15–47:45]

• Start “in medias res”—in the middle of things—not with backstory.
• Readers demand resolution (“loose ends tied up”) and do not want to fill in blanks themselves.

14. Why Writers Must First Be Readers

[47:45–52:22]

• Most successful genre writers are in second careers and had “lives before writing.”
• Lee’s seemingly planless process is actually a product of a massive “internal database” from decades of reading.

15. Violence: Purpose and Portrayal

[52:22–56:56]

• Real violence is quick, messy, anticlimactic—stories grant readers vicarious release.
• Book lovers, though civilized, enjoy a safe space for their secret “10 people you’d cheerfully shoot in the head.”

“Why do they want violence in the book? ...they love the consolation of being in a fictional universe.” (Lee Child, 54:13)

16. Characterization through Clothing and Detail

[56:56–58:22]

• Clothing and physical details offer “shorthand” to character type and background—often done instinctively.
• Even fan mail from a dental hygienist highlighted his recurring attention to characters’ teeth as characterization.

17. Why Britain and Ireland Breed Storytellers

[60:43–62:55]

• Scotland’s culture born of “neglect and resentment” by the English center drove an alternative literary tradition.
• Ireland’s greatest gift “is they give you a chance”—everyone gets the stage to tell a joke or story in the pub.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Place:

  “The idea that a stranger can wander miles into a community that is effectively isolated... that is not plausible in Britain... you needed that frontier feel.” (Lee Child, 02:19)

• On Planning:

  “Even if I did a two-page outline... then I’ve told myself the story and I’m bored with it at that point.” (Lee Child, 07:49)

• On Series Characters:

  “...the comfort of their old friend coming to visit for a couple of days. They’d love that.” (Lee Child, 11:15)

• On Propulsion:

  “For the people on the outskirts, the non-habitual readers, it’s like I have my hand gently on their back, just pushing them through. They don’t notice... but I am just easing them through the process.” (Lee Child, 23:09)

• On Plot:

  “Plotting is really pretty easy. You imply a question—it doesn’t matter what it is... people will stick around to find out the answer.” (Lee Child, 28:46)

• On Literary Illusions:

  “Honestly written dialogue in a book—there is nothing less natural than that.” (Lee Child, 38:53)

• On Teaching:

  “I’m pretty sure that writing is not teachable... Actually how to write, I’m not sure can be taught.” (Lee Child, 58:46)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• The Move to America and Place: 00:47–05:03
• Writing Process & Not Planning: 07:26–08:36
• Discipline and Imagination: 13:08–14:48
• Commercial Art vs. Literary Snobbery: 18:56–22:04
• Propulsion and Reader Psychology: 22:04–25:03
• Plot Questions & Cliffhangers: 25:03–29:10
• Dialogue as Illusion: 38:25–42:23
• On Beginnings and Endings: 43:15–47:45
• On Reading Before Writing: 47:45–52:22
• Real vs. Fictional Violence: 52:22–56:56
• Cultural Roots of Storytelling (Britain/Ireland): 60:43–62:55

---

Tone and Style

Lee Child is candid, direct, and often wry. He honors structure and work ethic while rebelling against self-seriousness and “virtue.” The conversation balances reverence for the craft with an arsenal of practical, “unapologetic” truths—challenging myths around talent, likability, and planning in writing.

---

For aspiring writers and fans alike, this episode is a masterclass in writing well—and living freely.

Transcript

[A]

Lee Child, the man behind the Jack Reacher series. A series that sold more than 200 million books. The best selling series of all time on Amazon in the uk. Yeah, more than Harry Potter, which is crazy. And also a series where a new book is sold on average every nine seconds. So how does he do it? How does he write it? How does he come up with the ideas? Well, he. Here be answers. You know, where I want to start the interview is creating a sense of place. Like obviously you're English in England when you got fired, and then you're like, hey, let's go base a story in America.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So first of all, why'd you do that? But also, how do you make that real and vivid?

[B]

I did it because, for a bunch of reasons that all pushed in the same direction. One was that, as you say, I'd just been fired and it was a kind of political thing whereby the TV industry in Britain was being altered externally in order to give Rupert Murdoch a foothold for his satellite business. So that I was just annoyed, you know, really just pissed off with what had happened. So in a lot of ways I wanted to escape. I was done with it, I wanted to get out. And if I couldn't do that yet physically at least I could do it in my head in terms of narrative. And I had when I started out writing, and this is something that a lot of readers don't want to hear, but writing is not just the muse, you know, you don't sit down compelled to just write. It's a job. And especially because I'd been fired, it was a serious thing. I had to make a living. And in order to approach it that way, you've got to start thinking about it in a rather commercial and strategic way. And British thriller and crime fiction, I love. I got nothing negative to say about it, but it is very tight and very internal and very psychological. A little bit like the island itself. This is a small country, very densely packed and. And if you look at the great crime fiction that I was reading out of Britain at the time, Barbara vine, who was. That's a pen name for Ruth Rendell. And it was a certain kind of fiction she was doing very much in a couple of streets in North London, you know, that was the world you look at Ian Rankin, another great British crime writer, that's literally like a couple of square miles in Edinburgh. It was very internal in their heads, very small geography. And I thought my heart wasn't in that. I wanted something that was a lot more related to myth and legend from the Past the idea of the mysterious stranger, the noble loner who shows up here and there. And for that, you need a gigantic geography to make it plausible. The idea that a stranger can wander miles into a community that is effectively isolated and cut off and has mystery and intrigue going on unbeknownst to the rest of the world, that is not plausible. In Britain, everybody knows everybody else's business. Everybody lives cheek by jowl. You needed that frontier feel. So it really had to be America from the narrative point of view. And I had been a lot. I first went to the US more than 50 years ago now, and I eventually, in 1974. I eventually emigrated in 1998, which was 24 years later. And part of the immigration procedure, if you do it legally, is to apply, you know, numerous forms to fill out. And one of them is you've got to list every previous visit you'd made to the US So I guess so they can check with police departments here and there that you're not some kind of murderer or something. And so I had to go back through all my old passports, and in those 24 years, I'd visited the US exactly 100 times.

[A]

Whoa.

[B]

Because my wife is from there. And so every trip we took, she's from where? She's from New York.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

So I felt I knew the country well enough to write about it with the advantage of doing it with an outsider's eye, which I think is huge. I think that you run the risk of getting details wrong. You run the risk of sort of not quite connecting with the culture. But there's an enormous advantage in your seeing things fresh. You're seeing things that Americans no longer see because they're so familiar.

[A]

And as you go about creating a sense of place, what are the things that you're thinking about? I mean, I don't know. There's different instruments you can play. You could play the instrument of sound, you could play the instrument of sight. You could play the instrument of light. You could play the instrument of color, of the way the sun sets and rises in the morning, whatever it is. How do you think about bringing a sense of place to life?

[B]

Good question. And for me, I would say mostly it's temperature. You know, I never.

[A]

Heat versus cool.

[B]

Temperature. Yeah. Hard versus soft, Hot versus cold. Things like that. I don't plan. I never have a. You know, I'm not one of these guys that has a list of the next eight plots. You know, the little index card saying, you know, set this one in main or something. I don't do that what I do, and this sounds terribly pretentious, but if you were a composer writing music, you start with a concept of the key that you want. You know, G major is a cheerful, upbeat key. E flat minor is the opposite, you know, down and rather melancholy key. So what I do as a writer is I have just a vague idea. I want this to be hard and cold, or I want this to be hot. And then you pick a location that you have been familiar with. I never do research specifically for that book. It always draws on impressions formed over the years from previous visits to places you know. Do you want it to be the west of Texas, where it is baking hot and arid? Do you want it to be on the Atlantic coast of Maine in April, where it's gray and cold and misty? So that's how I start with the sense of place. And then it's just constructing it around that. In a way, the place and the temperature kind of dictates the story in a way.

[A]

Almost as if they're like the driving factors.

[B]

Yeah. Or it gives you a stage on which certain action is inevitable and certain is implausible.

[A]

Like almost sets the physics of the.

[B]

Story, I think it does, yeah. You know, is it mostly an indoor story? Is it an outdoor story with. With wondering? Is it just the flavor of it? I'm absolutely not a planner and I never have a preconception, really, of what?

[A]

Why do you say that with such emphasis?

[B]

Because a lot of people assume that a book needs planning. They assume that you write out an outline or at least a hit list of plot points, some kind of a synopsis or outline or plan. And I've never ever done that. I just. Because for me, writing per se, making it with words is not really the issue for me. It's the story that I want. And if I were to plan a story, and I've got friends who do huge outlines, you know, 300 page outlines. Even if I did a two page outline with, you know, two lines per proposed chapter, then I've told myself the story and I'm bored with it at that point. I want the next story. So I can't afford to tell myself the story ahead of time. I have to just improvise it as I go along. So it's about starting somewhere which is defined by location, and then see what happens. It really is that simple. Yeah.

[A]

In your life, who are the writers who you've made a point to read everything they've written?

[B]

Oh, lots and lots of them. I mean, there was a British, Scottish, actually thriller writer Called Alistair Maclean, who was huge when I was a kid and really appealed to me. I read everything of his.

[A]

What'd you take from him?

[B]

I took from him, actually, something I've used. Two things I took from him, actually. Number one was he had a real skill of having a hero that was so good that he was almost a cartoon character. He was almost falling off the edge of being ludicrous and yet never did. He just kept in the right side of plausibility. And I learned that. The other thing I learned was a completely negative thing, that he got drunk and lazy and bored after about eight books and fell off a cliff in terms of quality. So I learned, avoid that if you can. John D. McDonald, who was a Florida writer, did 21 books in the Travis McGee series, which is really one of the most magnificent series, and pulls up a trick that I cannot explain. There was 21 books, as I said, and only one of them. Only one of them has anything happen on page one. And the other 20, nothing happens on page one. Nothing really happens on page two. But you cannot put them down. Now. Explain that to me. I can't.

[A]

What happens in the first few pages?

[B]

Just two guys hanging out, chatting or whatever, you know, and somehow it's so compelling. One of them, they're sitting in a boat, page one. They're sitting night fishing in a boat on a canal in South Florida. You know, they're chatting for half a page and then all of a sudden somebody throws a body off the bridge and it lands in their boat. That's the only story where something happens on page one. And yet all of them are utterly addictive. You literally cannot put them down.

[A]

How do you think your career, your writing unfolded differently by virtue of having one character who you brought in over and over again, versus, hey, I'm gonna do this story with all these characters. This story with all those characters.

[B]

Yeah, it's a great question. And again, I think an awful lot of it depends on what turns you on as a reader. I think you can't get away from that. I think that if you find a guy who has enjoyed reading a certain genre or a certain style within a genre, that is what they've got to write, really. And again, from the audience's point of view, everything I do, I try to remember how I felt as a reader, what really turned me on as a reader, how did I feel as a reader? And with a series with a strong recurring character, there's a kind of pre approval amongst the readers if they've tried one and liked it. Then they're very happy that the same guy comes back in the second book. And then they understand it's turning into a series where he's going to keep on coming back. So every year they get the new book and it is pre approved in their mind. They know they're going to like it, they know they want to read it. Certainly they want a different plot, they want a different context, all that kind of thing, but they really want the familiarity and the comfort of their old friend coming to visit for a couple of days, hanging out with the guy for a couple of days. They'd love that. So to me, series were always super appealing as a reader. So naturally I wanted to write a series. And I think it works really well that, you know, I've got a lot of other writers I love Stephen King, for instance. Now, Stephen, he's a great writer, terrific guy, great writer. I mean, literally, America's greatest living novelist, I think at this point. I think so. But Stephen King comes out with a new book, you're never quite sure what it's going to be. Is it this? Is it? That, is it horror? Is it supernatural? Is it some other thing? You don't know. You buy it because you love Stephen King. You don't buy it because you know you're gonna love the story because the story could be anything at that point.

[A]

Obviously, you famously start your books on September 1st, and so what is. How do you sort of structure the year? How do you structure the days in terms of where that imagination comes into play, where the actual work of writing comes into play and how those things come together?

[B]

Yeah, I do. I start on a regular day, which is kind of necessary, I think, because if you're going to publish a book a year, clearly you've got to write a book a year. And you have got to have a certain discipline and structure to you to do that. So it's totally convenient to pick, start 1st of September, deliver sometime in March or April, then that is the way to do it. And funny what you say though, about imagination, because I do a book, let's say I'm finishing it in March or April, done, fantastic, happy with it. And then I suffer a kind of self doubt. Well, not really. It's not that I'm sitting there wracked with doubt, but it kind of fades away. I've done that book, I know it's some months before I have to start the next one. And kind of July, August, beginning of August, I'm thinking I got to start in six weeks or whatever. And I'm just bereft. No ideas, I thought. Every year I think, this is it. I'm washed up now. It was the previous 20 years was just luck. I've got nothing to do, nothing to say. I've got no idea. And I feel a little despondent about it. And then, sure as eggs are eggs, towards the end of the August, I'm thinking, oh, well, you know, I could. Yeah, this might be cool. And then again, a few days later, I have a first line suddenly pops into my head. So by September 1st, I'm up and running again. But the imagination somehow is biddable. You can quiet it down and you can crank it up depending on when you need to.

[A]

Before we started recording, you're like, yeah, I don't walk much, don't work out, love, smoke, cigarettes and all that. And how do you think that what you've produced is downstream of how you've lived your life? Because that is unique. Like, it's this funny combination of. When you said that I was my very dear friend, he's just like, I'm just the laziest guy. He's super creative. He just kind of like sits on the couch. He sort of just like mopes around a little bit. But then there's that contrasted with you had been to the United States 100 times in 24 years, which feels like the antithesis of that.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I travel for fun. I travel for. I mean, I guess I do not do anything that could conventionally be labeled virtuous. Like, take an exercise. I just don't. I mean, I grew up in a dull and very boring repressive family environment where there seemed to be an unspoken target of just living as long as you possibly could, you know, taking care of yourself so that you live to a grand old age. And I remember associating that with the boringness of it. And I remember, literally at the age of eight, literally the age of eight, I thought to myself, I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to do whatever the hell I want, and I don't care what the result will be. My target is to have more fund in 60 years than the rest of them would have in 100. So I've always done that. I live recklessly. I do whatever I want to do. I pay no attention to consequence or health or anything like that. And it's an antidote, I think, to the repression and that uptight kind of. Kind of upbringing that I had, you know, Absolutely. In my family, smoking was regarded as just awful. You know, terrible thing to do. And I don't think, you know, my parents were kind of before the era of exercise. I mean, nobody in that generation, nobody thought I'd taken exercise. But you did, naturally, I suppose, because maybe you didn't have a car so you had to walk to work or whatever. But yeah, anything worthy, anything virtuous, anything like that, I turned my face against. I didn't want to participate in that kind of scheme. I just wanted to live for pleasure. And I was also very aware that I was a very lucky generation. My micro generation, my birth year, maybe a couple years before, maybe a couple of years afterward, was probably the luckiest generation in all of human history. Especially being born in Britain. We didn't even have Vietnam. Yeah, we were born to a stable post war European democracy with national health service that worked back then, with a welfare state that worked back then. We had free education completely. All the major dread diseases were conquered. We never had to go to war. We never had a bomb dropped on our house. We never had the secret police knocking on the door at 4 in the morning. All those horrors that had existed very recently no longer applied to us. And the creativity that you saw exploding in Britain in the 60s, for instance, all those great bands and the great artists and photographers and fashion design, all that stuff was because that was the first free generation. It wasn't that they suddenly developed all that talent. All that talent had been around in every generation, except it had been disallowed. They had to go work in the factory, they had to go to war, they had to do whatever.

[A]

And now the conditions were right.

[B]

The conditions were right, we didn't have to do that stuff. So it did explode.

[A]

You know what? The word that came to mind was just kind of unapologetic. Because there's the unapologetic in terms of, yeah, you're supposed to do this, you're supposed to do that. I don't really do the things that I'm supposed to do. But then the other thing is just the unapologetic decision to write in a commercial fashion. To say, hey, this is my job. Like a lot of writers are like, oh, don't do that. And it's funny, you wouldn't walk into a hedge fund or an investment firm and say, hey, don't try to make as much money as you can. But somehow you get into a library or writer's room and it's like, oh, don't, don't, don't say that.

[B]

In a way it was because I started out in the theater, that was my first enthusiasm, my first love.

[A]

This before TV?

[B]

Yeah, theater before TV. And I remember that, say 1971, 72, that kind of time in theater. There was some great stuff, but there was also some ridiculous crap. And a lot of the ridiculous crap was kind of boasted about. And people would say, you know, people would put on terrible shows and get zero audience and they would be kind of proud of it. Oh, you know, people don't understand art and all that kind of thing. But I saw it as a Zen proposition. If you put on a show and nobody comes to see it, have you actually put on a show? I'm not saying nakedly commercial transaction, but the transactional aspect of it was vital. It was integral. You put on a show, somebody has to watch it before it exists. If you write a book and nobody reads it, have you written a book? You've got to include the audience in the calculation so that it wasn't like a sort of naked meretricious thing where I was trying to make a living, although I was trying to make a living. But that wasn't forefront in my mind. It was that if I'm doing something, I want people to enjoy it. And if you want people to enjoy it, you may as well have the maximum number of people enjoy it. But of course there's a technicality about books and readership is that readership is absolutely not monolithic. It is far more like the rings of Saturn. Even my books, any commercial writer's books, are consumed at the center of that universe by very skilled habitual readers. And I've got all kinds of high grade, high level fans. But in order to sell a lot of books, you've got to push the boundary outward to the outer rings of Saturn, where the audience are people that read one book a year, possibly two books a year. And you've got to satisfy the habitual, skillful literate readers in the center at the same time as satisfying the people on the outskirts that are not habitual readers. And so that is a skill in itself to make a multi level proposition.

[A]

And how does that play out? Like what is, how do you actually think about structurally doing that?

[B]

I think structurally what you gotta do is you've gotta have a style that is both palatable and somewhat enjoyable to the habitual readers in the center, but that is also useful to the people on the outside. And that's inevitably that style needs to be therefore propulsive. I do a lot of it instinctively, but I spend a lot of time concentrating on rhythm, the rhythm of a sentence Because a book is however many thousand sentences in a row and you gotta make it so that each sentence has a rhythm. And that rhythm must always be tripping forward, forward, forward.

[A]

So this rhythm is less artistic and much more about that word that you came back to. Propulsion. Like the rhythm of movement and progress and pace. Absolutely, momentum.

[B]

It's about propulsion. It's as if, it's as if I'm creating a style that the experienced reader in the center appreciates as a style. Call it whatever you want, faux, naive or this or that, they'll find a word for it. But the people on the outskirts, the non habitual readers, it's like I have my hand gently on their back, just pushing them through. They don't notice, they're not aware of it, but. But I am just easing them through the process. And one of the most heartfelt compliments that you get, I've had dozens, hundreds of people say to me, oh, I loved your book I finished is such an achievement for some not habitual readers, some unfamiliar, unaccustomed readers to finish a book. It's a sense of achievement, self esteem and so on. And you do that by helping them finish the book. You push them gradually through. They don't notice, but you're driving them through it. And you do that by propulsion. And you do the propulsion by sentence structure so that the beat is always tipping forward, forward, forward. It's like a great pop song. If you look at a great pop song back in the days before, before, you know, all this electronic stuff came along, the rhythm will speed up through the song very, very, very subtly. Look at a Beatles song, especially live, you know, Ringo will be driving that, driving that tempo, and it always ends up a little faster than it begins. Nobody notices, but it's there. And that's what you got to do on the page. You've got to, you got to make it so that it's a little bit like a carnival ride where they're slipping down this polished tube and there's no getting out of it. Once they're in it, they can't get out.

[A]

And now tell me more about that sense of propulsion. Because there you're talking about sentences, but then there's the sense of propulsion, of opening a question at the beginning, keeping that question open, answering at the end. There's the sense of propulsion that comes at the end of a chapter of hey, we're going to have a cliffhanger. Television does this. And in the next episode you're gonna learn something like that.

[B]

Yeah, well, that's and that's really where I got it from. I did 40,000 hours of television of every kind. And it kind of bakes it into your DNA. Ending a chapter, to me is never thought about. It is always utterly, sort of instinctively obvious.

[A]

When you say that, do you mean that the book begins to reveal itself? That, hey, this is where it should be, or is it something else?

[B]

Yeah, exactly. And even the end of a book. I remember one of my book the hard way. I think it was that book where I remember finishing a chapter very late on and thinking, great, I'm almost done. I've just got to kind of do, I don't know, maybe a chapter and a half to wrap it up. And then I suddenly realized, no, this is the end of the book. This is done now because you just know it's all about asking the question. And TV. There was a situation in 1980 that changed completely by 1990. By 1990, people had something that they did not have in 1980, and it utterly changed the business. And you see, now you are thinking, why? What is he talking about? What did they not have in 1980 that they did have in 1990? I've implied. No, I've implied a question there, and you now want the answer. And the answer is remote control. In 1980, people actually physically had to get up off the sofa and change the channel. In 1990, they could do it with the push of a button. And that utterly changed the business. And because you could rely on a certain amount of laziness in 1980, you could rely that if they finish one program, they're going to stick around through the commercial break for the next one. By 1990, absolutely all bets were off. They could jump around at the press of a finger. And that utterly changed it. And so how did we react to that? We reacted to it by something that has largely disappeared now. But you still see, for instance, in baseball or certain sports, where in baseball you get to the sort of fourth inning and it's pretty clear maybe which way the game's going and so on. And so they usually have a trivia question that they'll tell you the answer at the end of the break when they return to the game. And it's incredibly powerful that humans are hardwired to want to know the answer, even if they're not interested in the subject. If it's a movie show or something, you might say, who was the first choice for Dirty Harry in terms of casting? We'll tell you after the break. And people are like, whoa, who was the first Choice. Wasn't Clint Eastwood the first choice? And they want to know. Even if they do know, they want to stick around for the gratification of being proved right.

[A]

That's why people have jeopardy.

[B]

Yeah. And the answer to who was first choice, believe it or not, for Dirty Harry, was Frank Sinatra. He turned down the pot. So we learned that humans are hardwired to want the answer to a question. And I think actually that is the easiest part of constructing a novel. Absolutely the easiest part. You imply a question doesn't matter what it is, doesn't matter how important it is, people will stick around to find out the answer. And so that really plotting in that sense is way overestimated in terms of difficulty. Plotting is really pretty easy.

[A]

And now as a writer, do you feel like you're going on an adventure yourself, kind of like, oh, yeah, fingers are following the story or something?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Again, I try and replicate. What I want is this feeling that I have as a reader. And you know this. When you've got a really great book on the go, you're really angry if you have to put it down and you just cannot wait to get back to it. You know, let's say you've got to do a chore, an errand or something, or go to work and then you get back and you pick up the book and you're like, ah, what's going to happen next? Yeah, I need that feeling as a writer. It's incredibly strong as a reader. I remember one Christmas day I was. Our daughter was working in a cinema and she was doing the day shift on Christmas day and therefore our Christmas was going to start when she finished work and got back, which was maybe, I don't know, six o' clock or something. So I was reading a book that afternoon. It was a great book. I was just loving it. And I was thinking, I was hoping that there would be a big snowstorm and she couldn't get there or something like that. I was hoping that she wouldn't arrive so that I could keep on reading the book. And that's the power of story. And I want to feel that power when I'm writing it as well as reading it.

[A]

Well, you were talking about needing to know the answer to the question, kind of being pulled along. The other word that came to mind for me was just the feeling of being absorbed. Absorbed in another world, absorbed in a pattern of language, absorbed in characters and scenes.

[B]

Absolutely immersed, I call it. And that is such a subtle thing. I mean, how do you do it? Nobody knows Nobody do. It absolutely happens or it doesn't happen. You know, that's one of the strange things. There's all kinds of cliches or jokes about, about how to write a book. People say a thriller. It needs just two things. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are. And that's kind of true.

[A]

I was so excited for you to.

[B]

Tell me what they were exactly. It's a mystery. Sometimes it grabs you and sometimes it doesn't. Is that individual to the reader? Is it general? Can you trust it for a large population as opposed to individual readers? I don't know. I think certain books appeal to different people in different ways. But yeah, either you are immediately sucked into the world. And I think probably the way to do that is not try too hard. I think that is absolutely true at practically every aspect of writing. Don't try too hard. There's a great, great quote by David Mamet, screenwriter. He was talking about actors in this particular quote, but really it can be about book characters or anything. And he said essentially an actor steps onto the stage or steps onto the screen and he says, hey, I'm the main character. And the audience says, are we going to like you? And the worst possible answer is to say, yes, you are. And I'll tell you why that's the worst possible answer. The best possible answer. Are we going to like you? I don't know and I don't care. That is the. That kind of insouciance. Self confidence is the way to do it. He was talking about that generation of actors that had come out of the Korean War, people like Gene Hackman and Lee Marvin and people like that. They had a certain kind of self confidence. They were not needy, they were just there, take me or leave me. They weren't trying too hard. And that in a strange, roundabout way, the less you worry about, are they gonna like you? The more they do like you.

[A]

So help me reconcile a few things. So on one hand, what I'm hearing is this sort of don't try too hard. And then on the other side, it's a real sense of discipline, of treating your writing like a job, showing up every day. Help me work that out.

[B]

Well, it is. I mean, it is. But writing is a strange thing. And that you have got to believe two things 100%. Both of them, it's not believing one 50%, the other 50%, you believe them both 100%, which is mathematically impossible. But you've got to do it. You've got to believe it's artistic, it's creative, it is Noble. It's part of that great tradition that stretches back a few centuries. Now, writing novels, you've also got to believe it is a job, that your family's income depends on that. You have responsibilities to publishers and retailers. You've got to believe both things 100%. And so you do need structure, you do need discipline. Ultimately, you owe it to the reader. And that is what has been the driving force for me. Initially, I'd lost my job. I was broke, I was out of work. And initially, the implied contract was purely financial. Could I keep a roof over my head? Could I pay the bills? And then when that turned out to be, yeah, happily that happened. Then it became an emotional contract with the reader. The reader has loved these books. The reader has bought these books, enthused about them, talked about them, enjoyed them. So my obligation from that point on was never to let them down. And part of that, of course, is actually showing up with the product, because if a reader, not just me, of course, but hundreds of series writers, publish a new installment every year. If you miss one, the reader is really disappointed about that.

[A]

Okay, so we're talking about how do you get your writing done? And if you're thinking about work and how you can be more productive there. Well, I recommend a tool called Basecamp. Basecamp is a project management tool. And it's different from the other ones, which are loud and noisy and cluttered. They're feature bloat. Basecamp says, no, no, no, no, no. We're going to keep things simple so that you can focus on what actually matters, which is just getting the work done, you know? Now, for us, Basecamp is a place where we can track what we're doing with how I write, when episodes are being recorded, where we're recording them, the publishing day, all those sorts of things in one place for our entire team to look at. And I had the founder of Basecamp, Jason Fried, he came on the show, and I noticed that he really cares about writing. He cares about manifestos. He cares about great copy. He cares about telling a great story. And him and his co founder, they've written five books. And I can tell you that they bring the same care and attention to detail to their books as they do their software. So if you're thinking about work and you're asking, hey, how can I be more productive? How can I make my team more cohesive? Well, then I recommend Base Camp. All right, back to the episode, and tell me about what goes into making a main character, because you were talking about likability and Is that important in a main character? When is it good? Hey, should we like the main character? Should we hate the main character? Should we think they're funny?

[B]

I don't think that you can have a character that you hate.

[A]

A main character that you hate or a character.

[B]

Well, obviously a character, you know, a despicable bad guy or a henchman or something like that, you can absolutely hate them. But in terms of the main character or the implied main character, Hannibal Lecter, for instance, would be as close as you could get to a character that you should hate. But there is something compelling about him. You can have characters that you ought to hate, but you kind of don't.

[A]

Breaking Bad.

[B]

Yeah. All that noir style. There's something about them that makes them likable, even though you shouldn't. You absolutely can't have a character designed to be hated. You absolutely equally cannot have a character that's designed to be liked. Because the more you design it, the worse it gets. You've just got to have an honest, authentic portrayal. And then you've got to hope for the best. You know, when I start, I did the first Reacher book, I thought, and there's a clue in what I'm going to say. I thought, I'm happy with this. I love this. You know, this is 100% what I wanted it to be, obviously, otherwise I would have done it differently. This was exactly what I wanted. But I thought, ah, nobody else is going to like this. The guy is a filthy, dirty barbarian. He shoots people in the back. He lies, he cheats, he steals, he. He never changes his clothes. Nobody's going to like this guy. And then I thought, well, maybe some men will like him, but women won't or whatever. But the clue is I liked him. Now, I am obviously a unique individual, just like you are, just like everybody else is. But we're not that unique. We all share quite a lot of culture together. And so if I like him, the chances are that many, many other people will like him too. The only unknown at that point is how many exactly. Is it going to be thousands? Is it going to be hundreds of thousands? Is it going to be millions? You don't know that yet. But if you like it, a substantial proportion of other people will like it too.

[A]

What matters, let's bring together two themes. We've been talking about rhythm, propulsion. And I think there, we've been talking about a kind of truth, right? You're saying if you planned it, it's not going to kind of feel real. There's something about the following the roller coaster that actually makes it feel real. So bringing together the propulsion, the truth, what matters in dialogue as you're writing dialogue, bringing that to life.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, dialogue is the ultimate kind of illusion. In fact, I once, I think, won a competition prize or won some literary prize. I think it was from. It was years ago. I think it was a Fort Worth Evening Telegraph or something. In Texas. I won the prize for natural dialogue. And honestly written dialogue in a book that is nothing less natural than that. It's really instructive to actually seriously, really listen to how people speak in a real dialogue exchange where people are talking. Go on the train and eavesdrop the seat next to you or whatever, listen to how people really talk. It is incoherent. It is. Stop, start. It was. It's absolutely full of placeholders. You know, all this kind of stuff. People jump from one subject to another. There are long gaps. It's utterly, utterly unlike anything you will ever see written down in a book. It is utterly unnatural that people talk in a structured way and actually exchange information. A B, a B like that. It absolutely never happens in real life. And except you can do it in a way that makes people think. It's utterly natural. One of the greatest illusions in entertainment. Again, rhythm is important because dialogue, when. When you listen to people talk, they put emphasis on words that vary throughout the sentence. And how do you do that on the page? In Extremists, you can use italics, I suppose, for the emphasized word. I prefer not to, because otherwise you've got italics peppered over the entire page in random spots. You don't really want to do that, but you've got to construct the rhythm in such a way that the emphasis is thrown onto that word as opposed to any other words, so that you go d d. Somehow the rhythm lands you on the important word. And that is, I think, it's partly an innate skill. It comes from reading a lot. It comes from listening a lot. And it comes from listening a lot.

[A]

How do you do that?

[B]

Like listen to people chat, listen to real people talk, listen to movies, listen to tv. I mean, there's a lot of great dialogue on tv. There's a lot of great dialogue in the movies. Just immerse yourself in it. Listen, listen, listen. And you pick it up. How to do it, man.

[A]

I was on the train last night coming back from Gatwick, and there was a woman sitting next to me, an Indian woman. She was with her husband, and something had happened where she had lost a bunch of money and she was in a financial struggle. And the way that she kept on emphasizing the word money. I need my money, I lost my money. And just the tension of it, it was just this. This. You talk about listening like there's a story there, you know?

[B]

Absolutely. And, you know, you've laid it out very well there that you use a little bit of repetition. I need my money, I have lost my money. That creates it to a larger extent. The repeated words kind of dissolve in the air and you got, need money, lost money. The emphasis automatically ends up on those words.

[A]

Yeah. You know, it's funny now that you're saying it back to me, in moments of anger, there's a great simplicity in language. I need my money, I lost my money. There's no room for the highfalutin. Whatever it's. You are in a primal state.

[B]

You are. And you also tend to use that. That emphatic repetition of certain words that almost then relates it to song in a way. You know, it's like lines in the chorus of a song, which, again, you know, let's venture back into prehistory. What was the first ever art form had to be singing. You know, we already had expressive voices because of the development of syntactical language in our evolution. So obviously the first music was sung. And singing depends on rhythm and repetition to a large extent. So we revert to it when we are in an excess of emotion. That's a great story. I can absolutely picture that woman. I can hear what she's saying, and I would know how to write it.

[A]

Beginnings, endings, what matters as you're writing those?

[B]

You know, one of the beginnings and endings. Let's talk about beginnings and endings. First of all, for you as a writer, when should you begin? When should you end? And I find it very difficult to. I get invited to, let's say, a college somewhere or even a high school to talk about writing. And there's all these people keen on being writers, and really the only valid message to them is, don't. Don't do it. Now, wait, too young, too young. Read for 20 years and then do it. Because there's a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of talent amongst young people, but there's no content yet. They haven't lived, they haven't seen things. They don't know much. You need to know when to start, and you need to know when to finish your career as well, before you get worn out and boring. That's the macro sense. In terms of the book. Where do you start and where do you finish? You don't Start when the earth cooled. That is what a lot of beginning writers get wrong. They give you the backstory. You've got. Let's say you have a great line of dialogue. Your character has a great line of dialogue. They feel they need to tell us about where you grew up, where you went to school, who your parents were, what formed you, all that kind of stuff. Do not start when the earth cooled. Start with the action. Right now. There's a Latin phrase in media res, meaning in the middle of things. Start in the middle of things. Don't give all the explanation yet. Just start with something intriguing and see where it goes. And where do you end it? You end it when the story's over. How do you know when the story's over? You just got to judge that on a gut level, instinctively. One thing that does not work. I've tried this. I've done a long series, and so I've had room to experiment a little bit. We had a thing in television. See, television developed over the years a tremendous amount that television used to be what you would call a series activity that you would concentrate on TV before you did whatever was next in your day. You know, you would. And your grandma still does it. She sits and watches her show.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But most people don't do that. It develops into a parallel activity in as much as now you watch the show while you're on the phone to your mother, while you're cooking dinner. Yeah. In other words. And we went through. We had to cope with that. And so what we would do, we had this sort of shorthand way of saying it. We would tell you that we're going to tell you. Then we would tell you. Then we would tell you that we told you that sort of in order to help people who were very distracted. And I wondered, was I doing that a little bit too much in the books? And so I thought, I'm going to try an experiment where I don't explain everything. I will give the information. The information will be there, hiding in plain sight, but I will not pull it together and make the conclusion. I'll leave that up to the reader. That happened in one book very explicitly. In another, earlier book, there was quite a fascinating minor character, quite a brave woman whose husband was in trouble, and she was brave about it and so on. And I left it completely unstated. What happened to her, Thinking that this character would live on in the reader's mind and the reader would decide for themselves what had happened to her. In both cases, readers hated her. They wanted all the loose Ends tied up. And they wanted situations explained so that you can't leave it too unexplained. The readers want your version rather than. It's not like a writing prompt. If you were at college during an mfa, the professor probably gives you a writing prompt and then you tell the story. Readers don't like that. Readers want you to do the work and tell them the story.

[A]

You were talking about writing being a second half of your life kind of thing. Right. The first half is about more indexed towards collecting, reading, and picking up life experiences. And then the writing comes a little bit later. How do you think that varies across genres? Because, like, intuitively I'd be like, hey, you're making up stories. Why do you need to know stuff? But no, no, no. Clearly I'm missing something in that assumption.

[B]

Yeah, I think what you need to. And nothing is ever all one thing or all the other. Sure, sure. I mean, I know that in my genre, virtually everybody that's successful is doing it as a second phase career, having done something prior. That often does require an audience. Either they're a journalist or they're a lawyer with a jury in mind or something like that. And then they go on to be a writer. There have been a couple people that have started fresh in their 20s, early or mid-20s, that have made a success, but it's very much the minority. And even though you might be inventing an entirely new genre because an old guy like me, there's all kinds of stuff, vampire fiction, this, that, the other that. I have just no concept of what it's about, but it's about something, and it's about structure, in a sense. And so what you do have to have is enough reading. I think that you have internalized the idea that there must be a structure and what structure is. People are very skeptical when I say I never make a plan, I never make an outline. Every single line is improvised on the spot. And that is absolutely true. But it is not quite as naked as it sounds, because I've read tens of thousands of books. So in fact, I have an enormous internal database of virtually every available plot, virtually every type of character, virtually every type of cliffhanger or structure or whatever. I've got it in there somewhere. So actually, I have a monster plan and outline.

[A]

Yeah, I've been going down the rabbit hole of just all sorts of different creatives. And what you realize is that the bank of how much they've consumed is just so much greater than people would realize. Martin Scorsese used to watch a movie every Single night you look at someone like Ralph Lauren, people say, hey, what was it like talking to him in the early days? He just knew every single thing about the different kinds of ties. Talking to a musician, musician was saying, hey, the way that you can remember how things look, I can remember how things sound. So I can tell you how Oman sounds versus how Israel sounds versus how China sounds. And you just realize that when you're talking to great creatives, it is this process of constant consumption, but this even more, this very naturally created filing bank that somehow you're pulling from without even realizing in the process of creation that.

[B]

Is very well put and very well diagnosed. And that is exactly what happens that you. I mean, for instance, I remember the first Jack Reacher movie with, with Tom Cruise, Directed by Chris McQuarrie. McQuarrie. I mean man, movie crews work hard, you know, it's 12, 14 hour day, maybe up at 5 in the morning or whatever, work all day. Incredible. And then what would happen? Macquarie invites everybody to his suite and they watch a movie. Because it's not that it's like a duty to top up their knowledge, it is their enthusiasm. But they end up, they work all day making a movie, then they watch a movie and that internal database gets bigger and bigger and bigger, more and more passionately analyzed. And you're absolutely right, whoever it is, interior designer, they know this stuff because it's their life. And writers are like that. It's. We're total consumers, actually, we're not predominantly a writer, we're predominantly a reader. You write one book a year, you read hundreds. And so you're much more of a reader than a writer. So your internal supply of reference and stimulation is by the time you get to halfway through your life, enormous by that point, violence.

[A]

Making it feel real, the purpose of it, what matters with violence.

[B]

I think making it feel real is again, it's a bit of an illusion, a bit like dialogue. In as much as most violence in the real world is over really quickly and most violence has got very bad medium term effects. I mean the thing that you see in the movies where, or in a regular story where you know, somebody is hit hard and they stagger back and then they come back at you and swing at you and back and forth, back and forth. That does not happen in real life. If you get hit in the head, you are sick and dizzy for a week, you know, you're just out of action.

[A]

Yeah. Also if you watch the average bar fight, it's just so lame.

[B]

It is, it's just swiping and brawling. There's no style to it. There's no technique to it. So, again, violence is something that is nowhere near realistic. And why do we. It's a really interesting question. Why do we want it in a story? Why do we like it? And the answer to that, I think, is it's paradoxical. Because generally speaking, out of the population as a whole, people who read books are the most thoughtful, probably the most educated, the most, in some way, what you would call not virtuous. But they're on one side of the divide. Why do they want violence in the book? And I think it is because they know that in a civilized society, you shouldn't have it. You should have law, you should have due process, you should have rights for the accused. People know that that's the price of civilization. That's how we organize ourselves. They get that. They understand it. They approve of it. They would not like to see the real world any different. But, man, is it frustrating if somebody has stolen your car. You just want to smash them in the face. Oh, yeah. You don't want to go through a big old hook.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, so that the real world that they're committed to, that they feel like they need to have and support in a good, solid, liberal way. And I don't mean liberal politically, necessarily.

[A]

Lowercase L. Yeah.

[B]

I just mean in terms of modern civilization. They know that we need these rules and safeguards, but it is terribly frustrating. And so they love the consolation of being in a fictional universe. They know it's fictional, but they love to see it happen as a release, as a consolation.

[A]

So then, as you're writing violence and we're talking about the illusion and bringing that to life, what matters there? And do you feel like it's the same sort of thing where you're pulling from a reference bank of violent stories that you've read?

[B]

Yeah, largely. And also lived. You know. Cause I grew up in a. In a very. It was a huge manufacturing city, and it was very inarticulate emotionally. Everything was. Every dispute was about a fight. And numerous little triggers constantly. You know, I was a smart kid. I did well in school, and that was a trigger. You know, people hate you. They think you're above yourself. You think. They think you're a class traitor if you're doing well. So I'm experienced at it and I'm good at it. So in a way, it was kind of remembering the ballet moves, as it were, for that. But mainly it's about tuning into people's secret, hidden desires and When I did bookstore events or public events, I used to have a line, I said, the reason why you like Richer is that even though you are good citizens, you are civilized people, you are all of the good things. Even though you all have a list of 10 people you would cheerfully shoot in the head, and they do, and they see it happen on the page, and it is a release. It is getting the satisfaction without actually having it in real life.

[A]

Clothing. Clothing is your writing. How does clothing inform character?

[B]

I think it is a symbol. It's a very quick way of describing a type of person that we all have a kind of internal comparative database of. If you see an old, old guy with a long gray ponytail and double denim, you kind of know who that person is. Yeah, you see a guy wearing, you know, laser Boxfords and pleated chinos or something like that, you know who that guy is. They are quick references, I think, like teeth as well. I once had a fan who was a dental hygienist, and she would write in about every reference to the appearance of people's teeth in the books. And I found that fascinating because I realized I was doing that instinctively, again, kind of trying to sum up a character through a quick visual reference. You know, a snaggle tooth person, a person with missing teeth, a person with wolf like teeth or something like that. She was obviously a professional and very interested in it and was picking up on everything. And I wasn't really realizing I was doing it. It was a shorthand way of describing people.

[A]

All right, we're. You're invited to a university. You're given a semester to teach a class on writing, a seminar on writing. How do you structure the curriculum? What are the core things that you're trying to tell people?

[B]

I would turn down that gig. I absolutely would. I don't think I'm. I don't think I'm good as a teacher. I'm pretty sure that writing is not teachable. I think plenty of shortcuts within the business of writing are totally teachable. You know, how to get a good agent, what pitfalls to avoid, how to relate to a publisher, how to do this or that. I think absolutely that can be taught based on experience of what has worked and what hasn't. But actually how to write, I'm not sure can be taught.

[A]

When you say not teachable, does that also mean not learnable? Or can something be, yes, you can learn how to do it, but that doesn't mean that it can be taught.

[B]

I think you absolutely can learn to do it. And I would allow possibly the possibility that something that might take you 10 years of reading before you figure it out for yourself could be explained a little faster. But that's probably a rare occurrence, and it's probably only very partial. I don't think you could take a completely untutored person. Let's say you've got an intelligent person who is capable at lots of different things. I don't think there's any process by which you could turn that person into an accomplished novelist. You either are or you're not. It's, again, a bit like being a musician. You've either got those pathways in your brain or you don't. I've got musician friends. In fact, I made a CD with a couple of musician friends. They did the music, I did the lyrics. Oh, cool. Totally cool. Just the best fun ever. And hanging out with them, you know, structurally, biologically, our brains are all the same, obviously. But it's almost like there are little tubes that. In my brain, some of them are big and fat and can let things through. Others are collapsed like flat tires that nothing will get through. And their brains are different. They've got different tubes open and different tubes closed. And it just. If you are a musician, you are. And if you're not, you never will be.

[A]

Last question. You're English. Why has so much good writing come from Scotland, from England, from Ireland? What is it about this part of the world?

[B]

I think it's a different answer for each of those different countries. I think Scotland is. I mean, England is the center of the uk and all the power lies exactly where we are right now in London. And I think Scottish people feel neglected and resentful of that, and so they build up an alternative culture that's theirs. I think in Ireland. It's very clear in Ireland. I love Ireland for this reason that if you go there, they give you a chance, whoever you are, even you're not a writer. You're just some guy. You're in the pub with a bunch of friends. You start to tell a joke, or you start to tell a story or whatever, they will give you a chance. Maybe it's only five seconds, maybe it's only 10 seconds, but you've got the stage to state your case, and they will listen to you. And I think that's huge, that people grow up feeling that they will be heard. Not for long if they're crap, but they will give you the chance to be heard. I think that's huge.

[A]

You know, that reminds me of a bunch of Irish friends. Bunch of Irish friends I was trying to think about how were they different from my American friends? And the way that they're the same is that they're pretty career oriented, but the way that they're different is all of them to a T. They know how to tell a joke. They know how to tell a story.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

And one of the things I noticed that when I was in Ireland is like, if you could go to the pub and you can tell a good story and you can keep people engaged, you can make people laugh, you can just hook them in and keep them there. You're part of the squad, right?

[B]

You are. And you get to be that because they give you the chance. If you seize it, then you have the space, you have the table, you have the platform. And I think that encourages. Certainly emboldens people. It encourages them. And they think, yeah, I can do this.

[A]

Well, you are welcome on how I write anytime. This was so fun. It was great to meet you.

[B]

Good to meet you, Tim. Thank you very much for the opportunity. Yeah.