Fiction: Andrea Phillips

[00:00:09] Welcome to Ten Thousand. I'm your host, Ben Scofield, and this is a podcast about expertise.

[00:00:13] It isn't about experts though, it's about the journey. My goal with Ten Thousand is to talk

[00:00:18] to people at all stages, from absolute novices to world-class performers, to find out how

[00:00:21] they think about what they do and what it means to excel, and especially how what they

[00:00:24] think changes as they get more experience. With that said, let's get into it. So welcome

[00:00:33] to Ten Thousand. I'm really excited to be talking to Andrea Phillips this week. Andrea is an

[00:00:37] author and a designer of transmedia experiences and a storyteller across a lot of different

[00:00:42] formats. She is the author of A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling, The Daring Adventures

[00:00:48] of Captain Lucy Smokart, the novels Revision and America Incorporated, America Incorporated

[00:00:52] being particularly relevant over the last, I don't know, eight years or so, or maybe even

[00:00:56] longer. And then was also a contributor to the serial fiction project that resulted in

[00:01:03] book burners and remade. And I think you were the showrunner on Control-Alt-Destroy.

[00:01:09] Great. Yeah. Andrea has experience in a lot of different ways of telling fictional stories

[00:01:14] and writing fiction. And I'm really excited to hear how this conversation goes. So thanks

[00:01:18] for joining us.

[00:01:19] Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited.

[00:01:21] Yeah. So I start out almost every episode of this with sort of the fundamental question

[00:01:26] of the podcast, which is what does it mean to be good at doing the thing that you're doing,

[00:01:30] in this case, in writing fiction? So unfortunately, this question in this context

[00:01:36] is basically, what is art anyway? So it gets really, really nebulous really quickly. The

[00:01:44] way I look at these things is the purpose of fiction in specific and art more generally,

[00:01:52] it's to evoke certain feelings and thoughts in people. And sometimes they're serious,

[00:01:58] sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're pleasant and sometimes they're not. But generally, if you're

[00:02:04] a good writer, then you're evoking more or less what you're hoping to. If you're a great writer,

[00:02:10] you're pretty consistent. And if you're exceptional, then you're bringing forward things that people may

[00:02:15] not even know that they had in them or creating experiences inside of someone that they haven't had

[00:02:21] before. Hmm. Does that mean? Okay. One thing that's happened is I've had these interviews in

[00:02:29] several different contexts is some of my ideas about this have started to crystallize. So one of

[00:02:34] them is expertise in general, it seems to be extremely context dependent. And the context I'm

[00:02:40] thinking about right now is the audience. Right? So can you be a good, greater, excellent or expert writer

[00:02:47] of fiction independently of a specific audience? Or does it like, I mean, the trivial example is like, I

[00:02:55] don't know French. So I probably can't be a great fiction writer in French or to four French people.

[00:03:01] No, I would say, to some extent, that's true. To some extent, that's true.

[00:03:07] Um, you will remember that the three body problem novels were translated. And there are times when the

[00:03:14] translation feels a little bit clunky, because there are things that simply can't be translated

[00:03:19] into English, because they have to do with like the specific, not the specific shapes of characters,

[00:03:27] but like the way one character kind of looks like another one, the way a word kind of looks like another

[00:03:31] one. And that doesn't map into English in any way whatsoever. So there are things you can do in

[00:03:37] one language, you can't do in another, there are things you can do for one audience that you can't do

[00:03:43] for another, there are jokes that I could tell you that, you know, my, my daughter wouldn't get,

[00:03:49] there are jokes that I could tell you that my dad wouldn't get. But I will say the more skilled you

[00:03:56] are as a writer, the better you are at adjusting to different audiences anyway. Um, I actually, if I

[00:04:06] may be vain for a minute, I've always thought one of my great advantages as a writer is the ability to

[00:04:13] kind of code switch and write in different voices. So I have, you know, this sort of

[00:04:21] very snarky internet heavy, sort of Gen X-y voice that I can use and do a lot. And a much more

[00:04:31] artsy sort of literary voice I can use for some things. None of those are what I use to write for,

[00:04:38] you know, a children's book. None of those is what I would use to write a thinkies blog post about my

[00:04:45] experiences with, I don't know, a medication or whatever. So part of the skill really is being able

[00:04:53] to change how you're saying things to, to meet who it is that you're talking to.

[00:05:00] Yeah. It makes me wonder though, is there a way of writing that would speak, like what is the widest set

[00:05:09] of people you could communicate to successfully with a single piece of writing?

[00:05:14] A widest set of people you could communicate with.

[00:05:18] And this is, this is very much the simplest possible Hemingway's baby shoes, never worn

[00:05:25] kind of situation. But even, even that it's a little obscure. There are people who aren't going

[00:05:30] to be able to read anything into that. Especially now that like classified ads aren't really a thing.

[00:05:36] Why? Why would someone even be?

[00:05:39] Why would you have a limit? Well, I guess Twitter at one point would have been

[00:05:42] the comparable thing, right? Yeah. Okay. So there, I think there are two ways that we could

[00:05:48] look for the widest set. One is the widest set that would get the same message using message very

[00:05:53] broadly out of it. And one, which would be the, the set of folks who would get any message out of it

[00:05:59] or any, any interesting message out of it, as opposed to just like knowing how the words fit

[00:06:04] together grammatically or something. Well, so this is where you sort of tie into

[00:06:09] realistically, the broadest audience you're going to reach with any form of writing is a Coca-Cola ad,

[00:06:16] basically. That's what it's designed for. And I very much believe that commercial speech is art

[00:06:23] in the same way that other forms of art are. The same way they're trying to communicate something

[00:06:27] to you. They're trying to make you feel a certain way that a certain way is go buy a Coke, but that

[00:06:33] doesn't mean that it's not the same skillset that you might be using for a side note. I, I,

[00:06:39] I maintain the perfume business is single-handedly keeping the surrealist short film industry.

[00:06:46] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. So you can do things with imagery and with music in terms of narrative,

[00:06:58] in terms of evoking emotion that you can't do with words as such. So you can, you can actually remove

[00:07:03] language from this sense of artfulness and communication entirely. And almost everyone,

[00:07:09] almost everywhere in the world will get kind of the same thing out of it. Although even then,

[00:07:16] even then you can run into things like the American smile and the way that someone in Russia will find

[00:07:24] the way that Americans smile creepy and artificial. Right.

[00:07:28] Sort of assuming an intimacy that doesn't exist.

[00:07:31] Or different musical traditions where certain chords have different cultural connotations,

[00:07:37] essentially. Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:07:40] Yeah. Interesting. Talking about commercial speech actually makes me wonder if it's meaningful to

[00:07:46] differentiate excellence in writing for fiction or writing fiction from writing for any purpose at all.

[00:07:51] Right. So is there a difference in between being good at writing fiction and good at writing

[00:07:55] nonfiction and good at writing commercially and good at writing self-reflective?

[00:08:01] I guess, or any other way?

[00:08:05] I'm thinking here, I don't remember the name of the kind of diagram that's like a star.

[00:08:10] You can have different levels of things all around the chart.

[00:08:14] Like, so there are different kinds of writing and some people are really great at some of them and

[00:08:19] really terrible at others. So an amazing essayist might be really awful at coming up with a snappy

[00:08:27] five-word slogan. And both of them might be really terrible at any sort of informative technical

[00:08:34] writing. And all three of them might be absolutely the worst at script writing because these all require

[00:08:41] very different strengths, which is not to say that one person couldn't actually be good at all of them,

[00:08:47] or at least passively skillful at all of them. But the tools are different. And to some extent,

[00:09:00] you can't master everything all at the same time. So if you're spending all of your time writing prose,

[00:09:08] you're not getting better at writing scripts. So that doesn't mean you're going to be a bad script writer,

[00:09:15] but it does mean you're not going to be as good of a script writer as if you had chosen

[00:09:19] to hone your skills in a different way.

[00:09:23] Okay. Great. There are actually a couple of things I want to dig in there.

[00:09:30] One, scripts to me seem actually fundamentally different because the way that they're consumed

[00:09:36] is not the way that you consume other writing, right? Scripts, I mean, typically they are consumed

[00:09:41] by being performed and often recorded, but they are always filtered through someone else's

[00:09:47] actual reading of the script. Unlike commercial jingles or, I mean, I guess those are recited,

[00:09:53] maybe songs or something. Yeah, those are also being performed through someone else.

[00:09:57] What would you make of an audio book in this context?

[00:10:00] Yeah. So I think that's a, I mean, that's a really great example of one that they can be performed

[00:10:08] and sometimes they're not, right? I've heard terrible audio book narrators and I've heard

[00:10:12] amazing. And then there are like fully cast, essentially radio productions.

[00:10:17] You look at the classic of having to read Shakespeare, you know, reading plays,

[00:10:21] and I don't see a meaningful difference between a play and a script for film to some extent.

[00:10:30] I will also say this, that this is a little, a little like galaxy brain here, so I'm sorry.

[00:10:36] To some extent, to some extent when you're writing a script, you're not actually writing it for the

[00:10:41] audience of people who are going to view the film. You're writing it for the audience of the director

[00:10:46] who gets excited about your project and wants to make it. That's the one person who needs to really

[00:10:51] understand and be inspired. And then they can then communicate that vision onto everyone else.

[00:10:58] But you're not directly speaking to the audience. So, well, the final audience, I should say.

[00:11:05] Well, but you're, you're still trying to produce the reaction in the final audience. You're not only

[00:11:10] trying to please the director because then no one would actually go and watch the movie and it would,

[00:11:15] it would die and your message wouldn't get out. Right. So it's sort of like there are multiple,

[00:11:19] and I guess this is true for traditional publishing too, right? Where you, you need to impress your

[00:11:23] agent and your editor and the people with the money to actually publish the book.

[00:11:30] I wonder now if this is a digression into gatekeeping that maybe not, what does it mean to be good at

[00:11:36] gatekeeping? Yeah. Interesting. So one, one of the types of writing that I didn't mention when I was

[00:11:43] making my little list earlier is writing for games and interactive fiction, which is different than like a

[00:11:50] novel or a short story, right? Because you have to worry about the different paths that people might

[00:11:55] take through it. And the, and so you are, so with a novel, I guess you're assuming that they have

[00:12:01] whatever normal context about the story a person would have. So if it's a science fiction novel,

[00:12:06] you have to do a bunch of world building to tell them about what about the world is different than

[00:12:09] what they normally live in. Yeah. So with games, you can't like, you have to do that level of context

[00:12:16] setting, but you also have to be aware that whenever they get to a different step in the game,

[00:12:22] they may or may not have any particular, like in fiction context that they could have passed by or

[00:12:27] something. Well, the reason that I've always loved writing for immersive experiences, immersive

[00:12:36] projects of some kind, no matter which set of buzzwords you want to call them this time,

[00:12:42] is that you get a different set of, of emotions to work with than if you're doing something that's

[00:12:49] about someone who isn't the, the player, the, the audience that you're speaking to. It's because if

[00:12:57] the person that you're telling the story to sees themselves as the person with agency in the story,

[00:13:04] then you can make them feel personally responsible for things that happen. You can make them feel

[00:13:11] guilty that someone died. You can make them feel proud that they accomplished something.

[00:13:16] And you can feel sad about what someone in a book does. You can be absolutely wrecked, destroyed,

[00:13:23] but you're never going to feel like it's your fault. Yeah.

[00:13:28] Yeah. Whereas, whereas it can very definitely be your fault specifically in any sort of an interactive

[00:13:34] experience. Yeah. Well, and I think there are some non-interactive fictions that try to get at

[00:13:41] that too, that make you complicit in, in the, the outcome. There are some movie critics who I listen to

[00:13:48] fairly regularly. I think one of them was talking about a horror movie, maybe from the seventies,

[00:13:53] because it feels like they were more inventive than, um, that in him, at least generated the

[00:14:01] feeling that he was complicit by choosing to watch the movie. Like that part of, part of the terrible

[00:14:06] things that were happening to these people on screen was because he was there to witness it.

[00:14:11] Yeah. Chuck Wendig and Sam Sykes did, uh, a Twitter thread that was turned into a film. And the name of it

[00:14:20] was, are you ready? Brace yourself. The name of it was, you might be the killer. Uh, and, and so you can

[00:14:27] actually, I mean, in this particular case, I'm pretty sure the film was, was not shot in second

[00:14:33] person as it were, but you can do some interesting things with that second person point of view

[00:14:38] that aim to, that aim to create those feelings. But if there isn't that element of choice, if they don't

[00:14:45] have the feeling that things could have turned out differently, then it's not quite the same.

[00:14:51] Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah. It's not an act of complicity as much as, uh, uh, so, uh, side note,

[00:14:58] have I ever told you my, my fundamental problem with Skyrim? I know you have not. I found a terrible

[00:15:03] hole in Skyrim at one point. So I went, I went to a town and there was a dragon. It was attacking and

[00:15:09] somehow I got lost and didn't succeed in, in fighting the dragon. And I don't know, a bunch

[00:15:14] of people went missing, but, uh, I found a terrible hole in this story at that point, which was that if

[00:15:22] I don't show up somewhere, nothing happens to it. And so the best thing to do to save the world in

[00:15:30] Skyrim is nothing. You go and do a bunch of blacksmithing and bake a bunch of pies and that's

[00:15:37] it. That's all you do. And then everything is wonderful. Like no bad thing happens to anybody

[00:15:43] ever. As long as you stay where you are, it's you personally, you're the problem. Um, and I,

[00:15:51] I had trouble playing the game after that. Yeah, I can, I can understand. And I think this is,

[00:15:57] it's a fairly common problem with any open world game, right? The world does only progresses if

[00:16:03] there is some, if there is someone with agency there to like be the catalyst, uh, to be the trigger.

[00:16:09] Um, one of the things I liked about Baldur's Gate three actually, is that there is some progression

[00:16:15] of time, even when you're not doing stuff. Um, it's, it's not always dramatic, but you do get the

[00:16:22] sense that what you're doing matters more than the one scene where you do it. And it's, it's actually a

[00:16:29] real triumph in, in progressing a world to, to grow along with the things that have happened along

[00:16:35] the way. It's, it's really an achievement of the game. Yeah. Okay. Let's, let's, this has been a

[00:16:40] fascinating track of, of, uh, discussion, but let's back up a little bit. Um, do you think that your

[00:16:46] notion of what it means to be good at writing fiction has changed, uh, particularly as you've

[00:16:50] switched between media or has it remained like relatively constant at being able to generate the

[00:16:57] response in the audience that you want them to have? It's, it's fairly constant. The thing that's

[00:17:03] mostly changed over time is my perception of how you do the trick. It's like, if you're, if you're a

[00:17:10] magician and you, you start with learning sleight of hand, right. I would compare that to the way that

[00:17:17] a beginning writer kind of does everything on instinct because there are choices that you're

[00:17:23] making that you don't know where choices. And as you become more skilled, you become aware that things

[00:17:31] that you didn't realize were choices, um, actually do matter. So this is the magician adding better

[00:17:40] pattern to the sleight of hand. This is the magician adding a flourish so that someone is looking in the

[00:17:45] wrong direction, sort of building onto the core until eventually you can do a lot of things that

[00:17:52] you couldn't do to begin with purely on instinct because instinct can get some people really far.

[00:18:00] But when you start to take the tools into the realm of conscious thought, you can do, um, much more

[00:18:09] dramatic and interesting things. So a lot of people, a lot of writers, um, do something where

[00:18:16] the more tense an action scene is, the shorter the sentences are that you wind up using.

[00:18:22] So, uh, description is, is long and flowy dialogue has to be somewhat shorter and easier to understand.

[00:18:30] And then when things are moving and you want everyone to be really worried, you don't go

[00:18:34] more than maybe five words, if you can help it, maybe seven in a sentence. Um, and you know, three is

[00:18:41] really strong. And, and that's the sort of thing that sounds weird if you're not actually doing it.

[00:18:49] Like you're not going to, to go to a bunch of fourth graders and say, okay, what you need to do

[00:18:53] is write really short sentences. So that, because you have to get to the long sentences place before

[00:18:59] understanding when and how to reel it back in. Right. Um, similarly, I did some work with Amazon

[00:19:06] studios for ring of power, uh, year and a half ago, two years ago. And when I was writing my bits of

[00:19:14] Tolkien pastiche, I realized very quickly, I needed to, as much as possible, stick to words

[00:19:21] with an English Germanic route rather than a French or Latin route, because they, they have a different,

[00:19:29] more grounded feeling to them. Like kingly is a Tolkien word where royal is not.

[00:19:40] Yeah.

[00:19:41] The, uh, English winds up having tons of, of duplicates and triplicates of words that it's the classic, like cow beef,

[00:19:49] right? Most, most languages don't make a distinction, but we do. And the distinction are class distinctions.

[00:19:56] We have the earthy sort of farmer laborer words from Germanic, and then we have the sort of more

[00:20:03] fancy, sophisticated French based words. And then, and then further on from that, we have

[00:20:09] the academic Latin based words and which set you use are, are very different, but that's something

[00:20:18] that's, that's a tool people would be using on instinct, but when you can look at it and choose

[00:20:23] which one for a specific purpose, um, then suddenly you're, you're actually doing a lot better than

[00:20:30] you've had been before.

[00:20:32] Sure. Sure. Or you're doing it, uh, you're doing better, like more reliably, right? So you might have

[00:20:37] lucked into it by, oh, it feels like the farmer would say cow instead of beef. Uh, but like I'm going

[00:20:43] out and get some cow when you go to the burger place or something. Um, but when you know why that sounds

[00:20:49] better, then you can use that knowledge to improve in other contexts, as opposed to just the one that

[00:20:53] happened to accidentally work. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.

[00:20:57] So a lot of expertises are sort of irreducibly social. Uh, they involve working with other people

[00:21:03] and some are, I mean, this is a theory. Some are much less social and could be pursued entirely

[00:21:08] independently. Where do you think writing falls on that?

[00:21:13] Writing itself is very solitary and writers tend to famously have a lot of depression and alcoholism,

[00:21:21] possibly because it's a really solitary and lonely profession. Uh, uh, truly, but at the same time,

[00:21:30] the writer needs to be a keen observer of the social because you need to be able to

[00:21:39] not accurately, but you need to be able to portray feelings and social dynamics in a way that feel

[00:21:45] true, even if they're not strictly true or accurate to any real situation. And so, so there's,

[00:21:55] there's a certain amount of, of social savvy, at least intellectually that a writer needs to have

[00:22:01] that maybe not all writers can, can carry over into their actual real lives.

[00:22:06] In fact, I would say it's not an uncommon condition for people to be keen observers of other people's

[00:22:12] behaviors, but, but not quite be able to connect. So think that there's, there's something there,

[00:22:22] like that the social instinct is, is required. It's necessary to do good work, but not to do

[00:22:31] the actual labor of the work. Well, how did that work when you were working on Control-Alt-Destroy and,

[00:22:38] and Remade and Bookburners where there were writers collaborating on, on essentially a single story,

[00:22:43] right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's actually, I, I really, truly love team writing in this way. I,

[00:22:49] I think it's the best thing ever. In those cases, the way that those projects were done, we would have,

[00:22:56] like with TV, we would have essentially a kickoff meeting where we would break down what the story

[00:23:02] for the season was going to be, what the character arcs were, which big things had to happen, and then

[00:23:08] fit everything into neat episodes and assign, you know, do you want to write this one? Do you want to write

[00:23:14] this one out until everybody's covered? Sure. And it's, it's frankly a fantastic way to work because you don't have

[00:23:23] to think of everything on your own. Yep. Which is, which is really hard actually. So it feels easier.

[00:23:30] It feels like it goes faster. And there's this more sort of surprise in, in things that, that didn't

[00:23:36] come out of your brain, but you get to write about them anyway. And then, you know, there's the sense of

[00:23:42] we're all in it together. The way that process worked is you would make an outline of your episode and

[00:23:46] then the zero draft. You would all trade and read and compare notes to make sure that, you know,

[00:23:53] someone didn't break a leg in one episode and then it wasn't broken the next or whatever, like basic

[00:24:01] continuity stuff. Yeah. Like continuity issues. Yeah.

[00:24:03] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I don't know. I just really loved that process. I would be really happy to

[00:24:10] primarily work in a team environment like that forever. But the, the economics of it are really hard,

[00:24:16] unfortunately. Sure.

[00:24:17] The economics of writing are really hard. Yeah. Yeah. So I wonder if we talked about being good

[00:24:24] at writing as being good at producing the response in the audience that you want them to have, right?

[00:24:29] So part of what you were doing as a team is figuring out the large scale, like we want the season to look

[00:24:35] like this and to do this for our audience. And then each author or each episode is, I mean,

[00:24:43] it's recursive, right? It's doing the same thing at a smaller level. And you are collaborating with

[00:24:48] others and getting feedback to make sure that you're all able to accomplish the goals that you have,

[00:24:54] right? So you don't take a character off the board that someone else needs to use,

[00:24:58] or you can help them by putting the characters in the right space to get to the story they want to tell.

[00:25:03] Yeah. Interesting.

[00:25:05] Yeah. And, and there are opportunities that, that come up where you read what someone has put into

[00:25:09] their outline and you're like, Oh, I can take that and do this other thing over here. You know,

[00:25:16] if you, if you had a moment in your episode where these people are a little tense with each other,

[00:25:21] then I can have an argument in this episode and progress whatever's happening here.

[00:25:26] And it makes it into something stronger than it would have been before or the opposite. You can see

[00:25:33] that something is happening in this episode. You're like, you know what? I think I can make a

[00:25:39] little bit of an on-ramp to that and telegraph that this is going to be a thing later on.

[00:25:47] I don't know. It's just really great.

[00:25:49] Nice.

[00:25:49] You can do this all in your same work too, if you're writing all by yourself, but it's not as

[00:25:54] much fun. Well, and more brains can come up with more things than one brain can come up with.

[00:26:01] So yeah.

[00:26:02] So I know you, you said you've been thinking about these sorts of questions as you finish up

[00:26:08] one book and start on another. Is there anything that you would want to talk about here?

[00:26:15] The one thing I keep thinking about is that thing about, about instinct and skill.

[00:26:19] And I've, I've actually been doing a lot of, well, how do you, how do you intentionally become

[00:26:24] better at the craft of, of doing, you know, if you're, if you're trying to learn how to become

[00:26:30] a better cabinet maker, then you can look at other cabinets. You can look at other styles of cabinets.

[00:26:37] You can talk to other carpenters. At the end of the day, there's nothing that's going to actually

[00:26:43] replace the muscle memory of making the joints and doing the hammering, you know, painting the stain

[00:26:50] on your own. And I think to some extent, there are some things that you really can only do

[00:26:57] through it's, it's not muscle memory, but through, through mental exercise, essentially.

[00:27:04] But, but that gets again into that sort of mystic place of what is the thing that's happening in your

[00:27:09] brain. And there's a sort of a weird tension here because I'm talking about, I don't know where the

[00:27:15] words come from. And at the same time I'm talking about when I know which words are the right one,

[00:27:21] then, then, then, you know, I can, I can make conscious choices. And I think there's a sort of a

[00:27:27] virtuous loop where the more, you know, about the choices that are being made, the more you can look

[00:27:35] at the things that you're doing and decide if they're good or bad. And that feeling of whether

[00:27:42] something is good or bad feeds back into whatever instinctual thing is, is actually giving you the

[00:27:48] words to begin with. So there, there's a process of improvement that I guess it's like, it's like

[00:27:53] driving, right? You have to drive very consciously to begin with. Sure. And the better you are at

[00:28:00] driving, the less you have to think about which one is the gas and which one is the brake.

[00:28:06] So there's a little bit of that in writing, like the, well, no, a lot of it's like the,

[00:28:11] the better you are at it, the less you have to think all the time about which is the gas and which is

[00:28:17] the brake because you, you, you know which one to use in which situation, but you do have to have

[00:28:24] that stage of knowing which one is the gas and which one is the brake, like thinking about it

[00:28:30] and deciding before you can internalize it on that instinctual level. I'm not sure if I'm making

[00:28:37] sense. I'm still kind of modeling through this myself. Yeah, no, there, there are a lot of things

[00:28:42] there that resonate. I talked to Barbara Gilmontero, who's a philosopher, professor at Notre Dame at the

[00:28:46] end of the last series. And she was a professional ballet dancer before she became a philosopher.

[00:28:51] She's written fairly extensively on the just do it approach to expertise, where expertise is all

[00:28:58] about automating away and not paying attention to the things. Her position is that that's actually

[00:29:03] wrong. So at the very highest levels as a professional ballet dancer, she actually is like

[00:29:09] paying attention to the angle of her arm against her body, which is something that for a less experienced

[00:29:14] person, they would just sort of do and have it be sort of right. But she needs to get it perfect,

[00:29:19] right? And so one of the things that I started thinking as I read her work was that part of

[00:29:25] expertise is attentional fluidity, and being able to move what you're focusing on around.

[00:29:31] So sometimes I actually do need to pay attention to which is the brake and which is the accelerator

[00:29:35] when I'm driving my car. It's not as frequent as if I were a race car driver. But in my everyday

[00:29:41] life, sometimes I do like if it's wet or something in a rare condition. And so I wonder if there's

[00:29:46] something analogous in writing where normally the words are just flowing. I think you're right that

[00:29:53] by doing the intentional work later in the process, you're also training the word generator piece.

[00:29:58] And so you get better, you get better material to then go and edit. But I wonder if

[00:30:05] there is something in what you're paying attention to while you're writing the words.

[00:30:09] Because you're not just looking at your, I assume you're not just looking at your fingers on the

[00:30:12] keyboard. Yeah, so you're thinking about where the story is going to go or something.

[00:30:18] This is this is a really weird analogy, based off of your your ballet analogy. I really like doing

[00:30:25] archery. I've only done it a couple of times in my life. I really enjoy it. And I got way better

[00:30:29] when I realized I don't just, you know, sort of sort of aim and shoot, I can look and think about

[00:30:36] where it went last time and consciously change what my body is doing a little bit so that it

[00:30:43] doesn't do the same thing that it did last time. And then it'll actually hit center. Because I thought

[00:30:51] about it. This was a revelation to me. And if I'd had this when I was in, you know, second or third grade,

[00:30:57] that I could pay attention to the way that the bat did not hit the ball and change it for next time,

[00:31:05] I might have much better at sports than I was. It literally didn't occur to me that these were

[00:31:10] things you could think about. But I think that conscious attention, being able to think about it

[00:31:18] and figure out like this is what it feels like when it's right, then turns into,

[00:31:25] I can, you know, put the bow down for a little bit and walk away. But when I come back, I know what

[00:31:29] it looks like when it's actually aimed at the right spot. Like I know what I'm going to hit based

[00:31:34] on what I see in the way that I didn't when I started. So I think it may be a process akin to that. You can go

[00:31:43] around on instinct forever and hit something. You can, you can have that process. If you think about it,

[00:31:50] you can figure out what it is you're doing that isn't right. And then you can figure out what it

[00:31:57] feels like when it is right instead and go from there. So I think, I think that's what I'm going to

[00:32:04] stick with. That's yeah, that seems, that seems right. Yeah. Yeah. And even if you can't necessarily

[00:32:10] identify what's exactly right in the best attempts, you can get incrementally closer to it. You can,

[00:32:15] get less and less wrong. And I feel like that's the best I can hope for a lot of the time. So

[00:32:22] great. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. This has been a fantastic chat.

[00:32:27] It's been super fun. I like thinking about these things. I, I feel like I don't get enough

[00:32:32] chance to talk about all of this stuff, but I really love thinking about it.

[00:32:36] Yeah, absolutely. Thanks again to Andrea Phillips. And thank you for listening.

[00:32:40] We'll be back soon with another episode of 10,000.