Sci-fi writer Andy Weir doesn't love writing | Re:Thinking with Adam Grant

[Music] foreign [Music] Andy it's great to meet you it's great to great to be here thanks for having me you are one of my most reliable sources of flow I um I devoured uh the Martian and then Artemis and then project Hail Mary I'm I'm a huge fan thank you thank you appreciate it I'm excited to talk uh to the guy behind these books I've loved so much and I think your mind is just endlessly interesting you know the the the characters you come up with and the the worlds that you transport me into would never have crossed my mind in a million years so I can't wait to figure out where that that comes from um a lot of daydreaming I guess for me I come up with like 100 ideas a day and usually a hundred of them suck so but you know once in a while I'll come up with something I'm like well that's actually kind of interesting maybe I could maybe I could work on that a little more I feel like we could take maybe 90 of those ideas and just Farm them out to other writers I don't think you understand how much these ideas suck one time I came up with an idea of like this guy who just seems to be lucky all the time he wins the lottery he just keeps going on but it turns out it's actually his cat that's just really lucky but the cat likes him so he's lucky and and that that's the story the big twist at the end is it's actually the cat that's lucky not him so just so you understand some of the ideas that I you know that I don't develop [Music] [Laughter] could be an interesting short story I'm not I'm not sure if I would stay with him the whole book what are you talking about man this is a a six book series [Music] felicitous feline and volume one [Laughter] the fact that you were able to pull off Castaway on Mars uh and make it so endlessly interesting I feel like you could do the same thing with a lucky cat I I do think though that hearing this is is liberating to a lot of people who want to be creative right because we only get to see your best ideas exactly we don't see the ones that are on The Cutting Room floor well you also don't see the first draft of even the good ideas like so you know I write a book if you read any of the you know any of my books first drafts you would you would not you would not like what I what I tell uh you know authors or you know people who want to try to break into the business or people who are in the business and just ask my advice because they erroneously think I know things what I tell them is that imagine you're a sculptor instead of a writer and you're you're driving along and you see this big chunk of marble out in the field and you're like you know what I I the the shape of it and the the the the texture of it that would be perfect for like a statue of Zeus you buy it from a farmer who owns it then you go and you get your your truck and you get like a winch and you do all this stuff this thing weighs like four tons you've gotta get it up into your truck then you drive it to your workshop and then you you've got to do just all this back-breaking labor to get that chunk of marble into your workshop and there you go now your way you just start carving the statue of Zeus so all that work you did right there that's like the first draft for a writer that's like so you have completed the entire book before you've really started the book project Hail Mary for instance I think it was the 18th draft um that that went to print it's not just like I sit down on my keyboard type magic and then walk away it's hard work and also um there's another thing I try to tell writers that like some people really just enjoy the process of writing they really enjoy the creativity and getting things out on the paper and just like oh this is this it's like cathartic to them or or something um I'm not one of those people for me it's hard work and it's unpleasant and I don't like doing it okay yeah here you are right what I I think of of writing as being kind of like gardening it's like you do it because you like the result you do it because you're like I like having the end result of having this beautiful garden lots of flowers trees shrubs everywhere I wanted everything worked out exactly the way I wanted but actually when you're digging the ditches and pulling the weeds and you're back breaking labor of doing every step of it it's it's not pleasant you do it because you want the result and so that's that's that's kind of the kind of writer I am anyway that certainly tracks with what I've heard from other writers but it doesn't it doesn't match my experience at all um I I feel like when I sit down to write I do it in part because I love getting creative ideas out there and in part because writing is one of my best tools for thinking just a just a side note can we swear on your show or yeah of course yeah okay so you I hate I hate doing the work if I enjoy doing the work like you did I would be so much more prolific I just oh man no I I for me the hardest part of writing is sitting my lazy ass down and writing like what what's that old joke it's a joke that's like older than me I'm sure or is it a guy two guys at a bar one of them says I'm I'm writing a novel and the other one says yeah neither am I [Laughter] there's a bit of a mystery for me here which is if if you're in love with the result and that's what motivates you that result is already out there in a lot of forms right there are many great writers who have written books you can enjoy their products no just me why do you need to be the one either you have a vision or an idea that you believe in that hasn't been written yet I mean your stories are so original I would actually disagree with you there believe it or not I don't think my stories are that original I've accidentally come up with my own way of telling well trodden ground stories so I'm a hard sci-fi author I like to stick to real science as much as possible and that's just because I'm a science dork it's it's it's my hobby my passion these are this is what's interesting to me everybody's good at their hobby right if if I was a Gearhead if I was way into cars then maybe I'd write stories about cars you know but I'm I'm all about the science so that's just what I'm into if you just write down the basic plot outline you know of of my stories without any editorializing or any opinion they're very well trodden ground an astronaut is stranded on Mars okay like there was a movie in the 1950s called Robinson Crusoe on Mars like where he is stranded on Mars like the the exact same plot right my second book Artemis that no one remembers that's like you know a a criminal a low stakes criminal living in a city in space and then finally project Hail Mary is like a first Contact story like it's been done so the only thing that I bring to the table is I I try to do it with like my own like obsessive attention to like scientific detail and that that ends up taking the story in places that a lot of the other ones don't but so while I appreciate you claiming that I have original ideas I think I don't I think I just have like my own way of doing really really well trodden ideas I mean if you're gonna take that perspective we could go to Joseph Campbell and say there's no such thing as an original story right yeah what is it they say is there's like seven stories or something like that yes but I to me the details are where the originality lives right so like I I remember when I was reading project Hail Mary I'm like I I don't even know how one would begin to think about what it means to be a species that functions this way see that's the part of writing that I love the research and conceptualizing and and just glorious spreadsheets spreadsheets spreadsheets everywhere like uh two or three spreadsheets open and then four Google searches for different things because I'm passionate about science but I'm also kind of a dumbass so I have to look up so my thing is I know enough to know how to find out what I need to do to solve a science problem so I know how to look it up and how to follow the instructions I see so but that I I just love the ideating I wish I had like some secret silent partner who would do the writing for me and I'd just do the research like I love it it's so fun like so for for the aliens in Project Hail Mary side note spoiler I mean like if if you're listening to this you know and like you haven't read project Hail Mary and you somehow didn't know know that there are intelligent aliens in it then I I don't know what to tell you so working out how iridian biology was that was really fun for me because I started off by saying like Okay I need to pick a star okay that they're from what a real star okay so 40 eridani all right okay great that that star it's a solar analog later in the book we learned out that there was probably a pen spermia event so it makes sense that it'll have a star similar to ours okay great um then I wanted to pick a real exoplanet so the the the first planet in the 40 eridani system is actually it's a real planet and it's its name is like 40 eridani capital a lowercase b because astronomers suck at naming things right but we know some things about this planet we know it's about eight times the mass of Earth we know how long it takes to orbit the star we know how far it is from the Star and stuff like that I'm like okay this is a planet that's like eight times the mass of Earth so the gravity is going to be high okay that's something that's worth knowing second off it's right next to its star but I want there to be a biosphere here which means it needs an atmosphere if you're gonna have an atmosphere and be right next to a star then you need a really strong magnetic field or the star wheel is sandblasted Away Your Atmosphere okay so the planet what makes a magnetic field is um a liquid metal core and the planet rotating this one's got a badass magnetic field so I'm just gonna say it's rotating really fast so that's why iridians have like a six hour day and I'm like okay so I've defined something about this planet next up it's right next to its star I mean it is closer to its star than Mercury is to our star and I'm like so that planet would be hot really really hot and I want there to be like liquid water for life to be there and um I said like okay so how do you have oceans on a planet that's like right next to the star and I'm like well you have an incredibly High atmospheric pressure because the higher the atmospheric pressure the higher the boiling point of water so the water there is like the the oceans are like 210 degrees Celsius which like 400 degrees Fahrenheit but it's still water because the atmospheric pressure is like 29 atmospheres that means the atmosphere is so thick there wouldn't necessarily be much sunlight reaching the ground and so I'm like okay so the life forms that live there would probably not rely on site so why would you evolve eyes in the dark and so you know this is bit by bit how things came together so that was fun nobody wants to read a 40-page Wikipedia article on iridium biology so I just I have to just the hardest part for me is like I came up with a bunch of cool stuff and now I don't get to tell like 90 of it like I worked out how iridian muscles work like I worked out all this crap this is reassuring to Me Andy because I feel like we've we've located your intrinsic motivation um I I was I was honestly starting to feel bad for you okay you should you're suffering and you're sacrificing yourself to create these stories for us what a martyr but no there is a there is a part of this process you love you love the beginning in the end just not the in between yeah yeah I love I love coming up with the idea and I love when I'm done writing the idea and I love receiving praise I'm curious about though what what happens to your motivation over the course of the part you don't like so you start out fascinated by these questions you come up with this whole world you have principles of science behind it and you know that if you don't run with it you're not gonna deliver something that you can be proud of but you don't like the day-to-days how do you keep yourself going well it's not like I I I just you know wake up and weep for half an hour it's just it's it's it's just hard work you know it's like I said it's hard work I have to like kind of like make a bunch of rules for myself so when I'm working on a first draft I I make a rule okay I gotta gotta write a thousand words a day and until I make my words I there's a bunch of things I am not allowed to do quote unquote I'm not allowed to watch any form of Video Entertainment no YouTube no no no streaming things no TV nothing not allowed to do that not allowed to do woodworking or crafting stuff which is I'm into that that's my hobby um certain websites that are just absolute time wasters that I'm not allowed to go to um you know until I've made my words then after that I can do what I want and so it's just you know self-discipline I mean everybody everybody every job everywhere it has like periods of hard work that you don't want to do that you just gut it out yeah well I'm glad I'm not the only one who has a to-done list yeah in order to move move forward on yeah on something that I kind of want to do yeah oh now I want to go back to something you you touched on at the beginning of the conversation which is uh the just the sheer number of bad ideas that you have hell yeah you would be amazed the most creative people have more bad ideas than their peers and that that's just part of I mean this this has been demonstrated time and again with Scientists inventors musicians artists playwrights um the more ideas you have right the better you're shot at stumbling onto something truly original and so exactly you need a lot of bad ones to give you good ones it's just shotgun this is part of what's intriguing to me is I think that's where where a lot of people fall apart is they generate a lot of ideas but then we're too close to our own ideas to know whether they're good or not I have a former student Justin Berg who studied this and he finds that we're we're pretty bad at creative forecasting sometimes we fall in love with terrible ideas yeah because we're really passionate about them um and in other cases we actually don't see the potential in good ideas and there was a great a great study of Beethoven for example where you look at his own predictions about how how his compositions were going to do and uh he he committed a bunch of false positives he was crazy about this seventh symphony is is a banger this would be the one that they remember but the fifth it is garbage yeah so um so self-assessment is hard it's hard even for Creative Geniuses you seem pretty good at knowing when you have a bad idea how can you tell I mean at any given time any idea I have is probably bad right so so the thing is it's very easy for me to identify a bad idea the hard thing for me is identifying a good idea so I I just have what I I feel are a Litany of bad ideas and every now and then I'll I'll kind of remember one and go like well you know maybe you know I guess if an idea keeps kind of resurfacing in my head and I keep thinking like yeah there's something there there's something there's something there there's something interesting there to fantasize about like what if I had this McGuffin device or what if I had this power or you know and it's like if I find myself thinking about the idea a lot then that probably means it would be interesting to a reader people often don't believe this but project Hail Mary was uh it seems I mean I I put a lot of work into making this happen but it's a single cohesive story where each thing leads into the next and all of the things that are going on in it all make sense in context with each other but they were originally a bunch of unrelated story ideas that I had like a Pastiche of like like I had one idea about you know wouldn't it be cool if we had a a you know a fuel that used light as propellant that would be like the most efficient specific impulse you could you could like a few kilograms of this Fuel and you could like travel the solar system and then I was like and then unrelated to that like months later I was like coming up with an idea about what if a guy woke up aboard a spaceship and didn't know it and then like how would you figure it out you know and and so on and then I've of course only because I I live and breathe and like science fiction I've always wanted to do a first Contact story you know and so all these things just like were unrelated ideas that I you know that I glued together and then sanded down the seams and it looks like a single cohesive story that's amazing so you're telling me that Rylan Grace Rocky and astrophages originally started out as separate narratives yeah yeah and more uh Strat as well that's so interesting because she reminded me a little bit of of the kind of profile you see in someone like Elon Musk which is very high concern for Humanity and relatively low concern for many individual humans well um I wouldn't put her in the category of like Elon Musk because I think musk does a lot of cool stuff but she is like Elon Musk likes to go in 50 directions at once and Strat is singularly obsessively focused on this one objective and she doesn't and to be fair if she fails Humanity will die right so she's not really worried about the morality of anything she does like she's like you know if I have to kill a thousand people to save a billion I will and I'll sleep like a baby that night the ultimate utilitarian so are you ready for a lightning round I suppose so excellent uh looking for short answers a word a sentence whatever whatever you prefer Peru not a random word the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago I'm ready that is not that is not going to be a valid answer to any of the questions I prepared but you don't have a single question about the Mexican-American War I'm ready questions to fit your predetermined answers if you want uh how many deadly sins are there what country has Lima in it and yeah yeah anyway I had no idea talking to you would be this much fun by the way oh good thank you I imagine this is what it was like to interact with Douglas Adams but fun fact I did interact with Douglas Adams briefly I worked at a software company called nicest that made a word processor that Douglas Adams used and he had a technical support question and I fielded his email and I said how and I said by the way I love your books and he said yeah thank you for uh helping me clear it up that that solved the problem and thanks I'm glad you like my books that was it but were you were you tempted to reply initially just with 42 no it was my job to answer these questions you know wasn't gonna dork around on that so you probably are in a more interesting position to answer my first question than almost anyone okay if you had to predict what year are humans gonna set foot on Mars I would guess uh 2055. that's a lot later than I've been told by uh some space flight friends I know why so late I know um I I just think people have been overestimating our ability to get to Mars for quite a while I think we'll get there I think it's a good a good chance that you and I will be alive there's technology yet to be invented and also the drive to spend the money to do it okay when it happens if you're offered a seat are you going I'm an Earthbound Misfit I um I write about brave people I'm not one of them I'm not astronaut material I like my I I like pizza delivery I like uh living in the trappings of civilization uh yeah I'm not I'm not a Frontiersman I'm I'm not an Explorer I'm I'm just a nerd in his office and I like it that way will that nerd in his office be producing a sequel to project Hail Mary anytime soon people ask me that all the time it is of of my books it's it's one that really kind of says like oh oh there could be a sequel you know um I have had some ideas for it but I I'm not like working on one right this second um definitely leaving uh leaving it open it's not enough just to sequel a popular book it has to be a good idea in its own right like in other words if I just started with this book and no one had ever heard of project Hail Mary would it would this idea be good and uh I don't have one yet everybody says oh you should write a book about what happens back on Earth and I'm to which I say like okay if I came out with a sequel to project Hail Mary that didn't have rocky in it uh there be like an angry mob with pitchforks and torches at my front door so I can't just do that no although I I can imagine Rocky's showing up on earth right but Rocky shows would at best show up on Earth well after the astrophage crisis has been completely solved so what people are saying like hey I want to know what was going on on earth when we're Rocky and Rylan were off doing their thing I'm like well if I told that story there wouldn't be an Iraqi or Ryland frankly I think people could live without Ryland but they can't live without Rocky I think that's exactly right where do you stand on whether extraterrestrial life exists I think it's extremely likely in fact almost guaranteed that there is uh extraterrestrial life however I also firmly believe it's never been here it's never come here to our solar system I don't believe that we've been visited by aliens intelligent or or even microbes um so the reason I believe there is extraterrestrial life is just that the universe is so huge there are so many stars so many galaxies so many planets I it is extremely difficult for me to believe that you know chemicals that end up making copies of themselves have only ever happened on one planet and one star in one Galaxy in this entire universe I find that impossible to believe so I've got to believe there's life out there but the nearest life might be like two million light years away also I firmly believe that we will never be able to travel fasting light or send information faster than light people are coming up with ideas for like oh well maybe wormholes or quantum entanglement but no I've looked into all that and no you can't you can't send information faster than light because the speed of light isn't just how fast photons go it is really the speed at which reality can affect its neighbors and so I just I just don't believe it'll be possible to travel faster than light so that's my answer to the Fermi Paradox by the way I was just gonna say you foreshadowed your answer to my next question yeah where is everybody they're too far away too far they're too far away also as an added Downer I will say I don't think there's any native life anywhere in our system other than earth like I don't think there's any native Life on Mars because if there's life on a planet it would be all over the damn place life is very very good at evolving to fill every Niche every Niche everywhere if you if you were some aliens and you came to Earth and you said like I wonder if this place has life you could grab like a handful of anything from Earth put it under a microscope and it would be teeming with life like you could grab just some air from the atmosphere there'd be microbes in it you grab dirt from the ground microbes you grab sand from the most Barren parts of the Sahara Desert there'd still be microbes in there you have the edge of a volcano or the bottom of the North Pole whatever you'd find life everywhere you cannot avoid finding life and yet we've gone to Mars and we've looked all over the place and done these exact experiments and found nothing so I just yeah I believe that if life ever existed on Mars it would be all over the place on Mars even if it was just microbial it would still be all over the place and it's not there shouldn't be that hard to find it shouldn't be that hard to find and also it wouldn't have gone extinct people are saying like oh Mars used to have liquid water and all this stuff and but but you know so maybe there was life way in the past but I don't think so because Mars didn't like one day suddenly freeze it happened over millions of years life can deal with that life can deal with slow change over millions of years so life would have uh uh found a way you know what about um your own thinking about your own taste in sci-fi do you have a favorite book or author I grew up reading actually my father's science fiction collection so I'm about I'm a gen xer and I'm but I'm kind of a one generation off I'm a baby boomer era sci-fi fan so basically I grew up reading Robert Heinlein Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov if I have to pick a favorite author I say Isaac Asimov um he was a Visionary and um if I have to pick a favorite book I say I always say I Robot those three authors and also like you know that book and their books are kind of what defined for me what science fiction was because I read it when I was a kid and so that's what it was and that's why I have like a I guess one way I differ from a lot of other sci-fi writers is that I have a very optimistic view of humanity and those books back then they did they they would always these were science fiction universes that you would want to live in you know like they had their problems the characters had their problems and there might even be a space war going on or something like that but it was still pretty awesome and a lot of I feel it's really too bad that a lot of Science Fiction has been hijacked by these miserable dystopian hellscapes where teenagers doing random is the only way to save the day and I'm just like no guess what I see you know across your novels is um you know the the human characters are flawed but they're still Heroes and in most cases they try to be yeah like you see the good in The Human Condition not just I really do and honestly I think humanity is good I mean we notice right away it's newsworthy when when humanity is bad so but the fact that we hyper focus on it and notice it so much when humanity is bad should show you that the default is that we're good one thing I like to do when I'm at you know Live Events and stuff like that is I challenge the audience and I say name any technology that has ever been invented that has done more harm than good name anything and you know whatever it is they name I'll be able to tell them like yeah well what about this atomic bomb atomic bomb okay nuclear power how many people have not died in Coal Mines because we have nuclear power plants how many how much CO2 and pollutants are not in the air because of the percentage of the global power Network that's provided by nuclear power plants so Humanity has an inherent desire to do good by other humans so if you have any sort of Technology there'll be one guy who goes like you know what we could kill a lot of people with this and there'd be like 50 other guys who come up with interesting ways to improve people's lives writing uh what is the worst writing advice you've ever gotten I I don't know if this is advice I was given but in general um it's it's a contraindicated you should never be writing in your mind a series of books you should always be writing one book so don't be thinking like oh in book one this is going to happen and I'm setting up for book two where this will happen and the book three because the end result is you'll just end up with a crappy book that's just basically a really really long prologue to some other book write write the story and if it ends up taking more than one book okay but don't and and the last thing you want to do is say I've got this awesome idea but I don't want to put it in this book because I want that to be in the next book it's like no put it in that book now that book is even more awesome do you have another favorite tip for aspiring writers yeah I have actually like three things that I like to tell any aspiring writers number one to be a writer you have to write it's not enough to daydream it's not enough to just think about exactly the history of why the king's Royal Guard wears their buttons on the left and or whatever else it's fun to do World building but that's not writing you have to be like putting words onto paper or into your word processor or whatever your process is you you have to write and that seems obvious but it's hard work um once you start writing is when you realize all the problems and so you guys you got to fix them um that's number one number two is very difficult resist the urge to tell your friends and family your story uh writers most of us me certainly are driven by a desire for other people to experience the story if you tell your story to your friends and family which can also be difficult when they are explicitly interested in asking you oh tell me more tell me where that sounds cool then it satisfies your need for an audience and it saps your will to actually write it so the best way to combat that is to make a rule for yourself saying like no one can experience this story in any way other than reading it and so I've got to write it um so you can still give it to your friends like a chapter at a time so you can get that incremental validation that you crave but don't just verbally tell them the idea and third and finally um we are in a wonderfully unique time period here um there's never been a better time in human history to self-publish if I definitely recommend trying to get a traditional publishing deal because um traditional Publishers have these publicity and marketing departments that you cannot possibly do anywhere near as well as on your own but if you can't get a traditional publishing deal self-publish there's no barriers there's it you know 20 years ago and all the way back to the Gutenberg Press from there you had to convince a company that they would make money by selling your book now there's no longer an old boy Network between you and the reader you can post things directly to the reader it costs you literally zero nothing and so the the only thing it costs you is the time that you're going to spend writing that book which is theoretically something you want to do anyway so if you can't if if you can't get a traditional con uh you know publishing deal then self-publish um it's fantastic a lot of authors have broken in vsl publishing myself included excellent is there an opinion belief or idea that you've rethought recently lots of personal life stuff I have a baby uh he's 20 months old now and that has completely changed my viewpoint on like a lot of things in the world um and a lot of things about my own history and my own relationship with my own parents and stuff like that it really changes every aspect of your of your life your whole outlook changes when you have a baby like I kind of care about what happens to Earth after I die now you know like never really did before you did it before well I mean not too much if I'm being honest I'm like okay yeah no I I'm like yeah climate change is a real big issue but also I'm 50. you know so people talking about what's gonna happen like you know 50 60 years from now I'm like a good chance I won't have to deal with that but my son will so now I kind of care right wow I'm shocked I think we need a little more Strat in you clearly um I guess so well there's only so much you can care about right it goes along believe it or not with my kind of generally optimistic human nature is that that if you spend all of your time focusing on places where the world is going wrong then you're not going to make any room for your own happiness I mean yeah the there there are climate problems out there but I'm still gonna fly to California to visit my my family you know I'm not going to start a Coal Power Plant I have LED light bulbs and I work from home so I have zero commute but I'm also not going to spend my entire life being ashamed of the fact that Humanity has modified the planet to make it more convenient for us so I was going to turn the floor over to you and say if you have a question for an organizational psychologist I am at your disposal well okay so what do you think about um my completely made-up psychology in Project Hail Mary that they had to put the crew into Comas or they'd kill each other I you you have no idea how many hours I spent thinking about that one I I thought I thought it was an interesting premise because even if the risk of that is very low it's not zero right and we know um petersonfeld and his colleagues have done some fascinating studies of humans and capsule environments um and we know that you know the possibility for severe conflict um and you know some kind of combustion is uh is non-trivial right so as a safeguard I thought it was not a totally ridiculous direction to go um at the same time I I think that from you know both a selection standpoint and a team building perspective we should know enough about how to put together a crew that's more concerned about saving Humanity than they are about you know killing their crewmate who pissed them off it's interesting because I was thinking this could go either direction because bear in mind this isn't just a normal space mission this is a suicide mission from day one like so they all know they're going to die so they're all just in a small capsule that they know they will not survive you know they'll they'll never see anything outside the spaceship ever again so that could go one of two ways one could be like all right well this I have one overarching goal that I must accomplish because that is now the entire purpose of my legacy or the other thing it could be is like you know you could succumb to depression or whatever you could be like I'm gonna die anyway I may as well die right now killing this who's just driven me over the edge you know it's it's such an interesting question I think that in general I would bet on the will to survive um and the will to you know to protect the human race yeah um but yeah I think if you get your selection wrong um or your team composition wrong you could be in Jeopardy I wondered about all sorts of alternative Arrangements there and I'm sure you you considered lots of them um you know what I thought about was oh let's let's stagger the waking times the whole reason the coma pods and all that stuff was in there was I needed an excuse for there to just be one person I didn't want to tell the story of a crew I wanted to tell the story of one person and putting this Mission together they wouldn't just send one person I I needed I needed it to make sense okay yeah they sent a crew of three but only one of them survived the journey what it also did was it gave us a chance to think about okay if I were that person what would I do um and it made it much easier to put yourself in the shoes of Humanity's Last Hope as opposed to if it's a whole crew it's not really on your shoulders you don't feel the stakes the same way it would be more of an ensemble cast it wouldn't be about Rylan Grace it'd be about Yao ilukina and Grace as a team and that's I mean I just I from the start I wanted him to be by himself one of the places I wanted to go was to talk a little bit about your career pivot okay I know you were a software engineer you worked in the the video game world and also at AOL uh how did you go from that to becoming a Sci-Fi writer and why I mean I always wanted to be a writer like even when I was a teenager I was writing um and you know so I I graduated high school in 1990 and so computers were just really like the the software Market was just beginning kind of at that time and I was into them I liked him and but I also wanted to be a writer so I kind of like weighed my options when it was time to go to college do I want to be a writer or do I want to be a software engineer and I decided I liked regular meals so I went for software engineering but I always wrote and so um I ended up doing uh being a computer programmer for about 25 years uh but I was always writing the whole time and the Martian Was a Serial that I posted a chapter at a time to my website I mean at this point I had about 3 000 regular readers that I'd accumulated over 10 years um I posted short stories I had other serials going on on my site the Martian was the one that people liked so that that kind of like spurred me forward to keep working on it when I finished it I figured I was done but I mean it was so popular I ended up self-publishing it to Amazon Kindle and then that sold well enough that that got Random House attention and then that got like Fox's attention and that got like Ridley Scott's attention and everything just spiraled wildly into control um and I mean I to this day I don't know what I did right like because basically at the time I had this tiny I don't know what I consider a very small Niche audience of like literally like 3 000 people that was the size of my mailing list and these were hardcore science dorks like the sort of stuff I wrote was like really intensely science focused so I thought I was writing for this tiny Niche audience like I thought this is for absolute dorks who want to see me like do the math in the narrative right because I like that so there are a few other people who like that but I never imagined that a book which is basically a long series of algebra word problems would end up being so popular but it did so I uh am still baffled as for my career pivot I actually I really liked being a computer programmer I I really enjoyed that career um um like when the Martian you know made it big I did not quit my job I I continued working and I I really liked it I I only quit my job because I I got a second book deal where you know and I now had like one year to write a book but it was like a kind of Bittersweet leaving the the software industry because like I said especially you know by that time I'd been in the industry for 25 years I was a senior level architect level engineer I ran my team I was like the the technical lead um I liked my co-workers I liked my bosses my my company was really good now I'm married and I have a an adorable baby but at the time I was single and so I left that social environment where I'm like this respected pseudo leader and like everybody likes me and I go in every day and I have all this social interaction to being by myself just in my home office typing at my computer like with nobody to talk to all day and it was it was it was an adjustment you know I really missed that and I would still like go to lunch with my former co-workers you know like I'd be like hey when are you guys going to lunch let me know I'm gonna go hang out with you so you're the guy who no longer works there but still shows up at the office party yeah yeah yeah like the whole company went and like rented out an entire theater to watch The Martian they invited me and of course I went and so yeah I mean it was so cool that's sweet I love that um I I'm really intrigued by this early sense that you wanted to be a writer because normally when people say I want to be X but I don't like doing X I take that as a sign that maybe they shouldn't do X right like if you if you want to be a writer that means you want to have written not that you want to write and um you know this is kind of a risky decision so what was what was it about writing that was a draw for you and were you just good enough at it that you were willing to tolerate the unpleasantness well I definitely didn't start off good at it I mean it I didn't just write the Martian one day and that was like the first thing I wrote I mean I don't know I I had probably written a total of a million words no exaggeration of other crap before I wrote The Martian and just like everybody else when I started I sucked I mean so it's it I I am not a Phenom or some sort of gifted child I just did a lot of practice and work and just you know you you've got to suck for a long time at a skill before you kind of start to not suck a little bit and I I yeah like for 20 years I was just writing I was just writing stuff nobody's ever seen or heard of because it sucked and the Martian was my third full-length novel that I wrote wow where are the other two one of them I wrote before really the internet was a big thing so it is like there are a few hard copies I'm trying to find and destroy them all um it's really a very bad book like I mean it makes me cringe when I just read like a paragraph from it my mother has a copy that she's hidden um because she doesn't want me to destroy everything but uh yeah it's it's it's really very bad the second one I thought actually even now looking back I think the plot and the storyline had Merit um but it was like very poorly executed because I still had a lot to learn about Pros so that one might see the light of day one day yeah it's out there in the internet it was called theft of Pride I mean I'm sure you could find it online and I don't I don't really make any attempt to I mean it's copyrighted if somebody else tried to make print copies of it I'd sue them but like I don't make any attempt to prevent piracy it's like just go ahead and down there it's out there if you Google around enough you can probably find it and it's I mean it's it's not that good every now and then someone will email me and say like hey I heard you have this other book called tap to Pride I want to see it I'll just like send them the document as an attachment I'm like here you go but it sucks I wrote this like let's see I finished it in the 90s like 1999-ish and then so uh yeah the Martian came out in what 2013. so I was like yeah there's about 15 years of writing skill Improvement between this book and the Martian so bear that in mind when you're reading it you're you're not going to get that same experience fair enough do you enjoy it more now that you've had success because I think you know at some level when I think about one of them is I guess misunderstandings that people have of intrinsic motivation a lot of people think that if they don't love a task when they first try it that it's just not a passion for them and what they don't realize is something that I think you just touched on which is it's very hard to love something that you're terrible at and you have to go from being a novice to at least pretty good if not great in order to find full enjoyment of it did you climb up that intrinsic motivation curve at all I don't know because um you will definitely fail if you go into a new skill set with the idea of like I gotta be the best in the world no one in the world starts out like world class I guess it comes down to just being proud of the incremental progress like saying like wow I'm I'm a lot better at this than I was five years ago that's pretty cool like I'm trending upward I I will probably be a lot better at this five years from now than I was than I am now you know and so just identifying progress is good uh so I guess don't look at you know don't look and say like well I suck instead say like I suck less today than yesterday I love the framing of that it's not I'm better today than I was yesterday it's I'm a little bit less bad yeah exactly I mean there's nothing in the world that you're gonna start doing that you're gonna be fantastic at if it's a complex skill like especially a creative one yeah you've gotta you've gotta you gotta work at it I think that is a beautiful note to land on um Andy this is this has been such a fun and thought-provoking conversation it's almost impossible to love a book without being fascinated by the mind of the person who created it but sometimes like sometimes the most interesting things in people's heads get into their books and then you're like oh wait like that was your that was your max your mean is not that exciting you're mean is on the same level as your max in the books like it's every bit as interesting to talk to you as it is to read the words that you've poured over for years and I think that's well thank you that's I mean that's that's a dream as a podcast host well thanks I I you've convinced me my next book is about the Queen of Clubs with her lucky cat [Laughter] I I definitely think that's a terrible idea I'm running with it thank you

Channel: TED Audio Collective

Views: 2,919

Keywords: TED, TED Audio Collective, Ideas worth spreading, podcast, podcast english

Id: EEuoZrlLfgo

Length: 45min 49sec (2749 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 05 2023