In this episode of The Writing Coach Podcast, writing coach Kevin T. Johns shares his thoughts on four quotes related to writing from futurist, author, and founder of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly.
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The Writing Coach Episode #166 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #166 Transcript
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Hello, beloved listeners. Welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach, Kevin T. John’s here.
I give away a free book over on my website. It’s called Novel Advice, and you can get it here. If you have already got a copy of that book, have you joined my Facebook community? Head on over to Always Writing with Writing Coach Kevin T. Johns and ask to join our group so that you can be part of our community of writers over there on Facebook.
Now, in today’s episode, I wanted to talk about some quotes from Kevin Kelly.
Kevin Kelly’s certainly got on my radar initially through Tim Ferriss. I’m pretty sure in the early days where I was really into Tim Ferriss, just as The Four Hour Body was coming out, Kevin Kelley and Tim Ferriss were friends. And I heard interviews and he kind of got on my radar as a smart, interesting person who happened to have the same name as me.
If you don’t know who Kevin Kelley is, he’s the founding editor of Wired magazine. He was the futurist adviser to Steven Spielberg on Minority Report, which is based on a Philip K. Dick story. So he’s a futurist, and I’ve always thought of him as the editor of the magazine or founder of the magazine and as an author of nonfiction books about technology in the future. But I found out while researching this episode that he actually is a novelist as well. I’m definitely going to have to check out one of his novels. Anyone listening to this, have you read any of Kevin Kelly’s fiction work? I’d love to hear about it.
Recently, I just happened to stumble across a blog post, and it was something like “50 quotes from Kevin Kelly,” and Kevin Kelly is a quotable kind of guy, so I am interested in that. I went through the 50 quotes, and there was about four of them that really resonated with me in terms of the world of writing in terms of the types of things that I teach as a writing coach and as a writing instructor. I wanted to go over these four Kevin Kelly quotes and just riff on them a bit and talk about how much what Kevin Kelly is saying resonates with what I tend to think and what I tend to teach.
Let’s kick it off, we’ll go right to our first quote.
“Always demand a deadline. A deadline weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. It prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better.”
The part that really jumps out at me here in this Kevin Kelly quote is definitely the idea that deadlines can actually support creativity.
I interviewed Jenny Blake, I think it was for this podcast many, many years ago, and author Jenny Blake had signed a traditional publishing contract. I asked her, “What are the benefits of going traditional?” And what she said to me was the biggest benefit of traditional publishing is a contractually obligated deadline. She said, I signed a legal contract that said this book was going to be done by this time, and if I didn’t meet that deadline, I was in breach of contract. Talk about a deadline that really means something, right?
That’s why deadlines are such a part of the programs that I run. I just finished up Story Plan a few weeks ago, the latest round of it, and one of the pieces of feedback that one of the members sent to me was they said, “Kevin, thanks so much for the program and thank you so much for enforcing the deadlines.” We do a lot of work a ton of work in a really short period of time in that program, and it’s really easy to want to stretch it out. But if we stick to the deadlines, writers are able to get amazing work done because rather than putting off decisions, they have to make those decisions and they do. Back them into a corner with a deadline, and writers will do incredible creative stuff.
My group coaching First Draft also includes deadlines. The writers in that program establish monthly and quarterly goals for themselves. And some of them have weekly writing goals, all of which is done to continue to create these deadlines for ourselves so that we can do the good work and the interesting work that Kevin Kelly is talking about in this quote.
Of course, self-imposed deadlines are hard to keep. That’s why Jenny was saying that a contract is really, really useful. And that’s why I believe programs like Story Plan and First Draft and having a one-on-one writing coach, all of these are really important for keeping you on track with your writing.
I’ve talked about it many times, but life always gets in the way. Things always happen. And if you don’t have a deadline that you’ve established, and that you’re sticking to, your creative projects might never get completed. So create deadlines when you can and embrace the deadlines assigned to you by others.
The next Kevin Kelly quote I want to talk about is this one.
“Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.”
This quote reminded me of a story my father always told me about the guitarist of Deep Purple, Richie Blackmore, who is this kind of mercurial guitar genius. My father told me that Ritchie Blackmore once said, “If you’re playing music live, and you play the wrong note, just play it again. They’ll think you did it on purpose.” I think this is a perfect encapsulation of what Kevin Kelley is talking about. Pros don’t get caught up in their mistakes. They know how to recover from them.
As someone who so often works with beginning writers, I see them approach their work with such fear. They are wrapped up in this idea of what if I get it wrong? Whereas authors who have one or two or a few books under their belt, they know that they can go into the writing process so much looser because they know that they can recover gracefully, no matter what goes wrong in the drafting process.
This is the beautiful thing about writing literature: we don’t have to get it right on the first try. You’ve heard me talk about this in a previous podcast, but it’s this idea that beginners get really locked up in fear and self-doubt and worry that they’re going to do something wrong and have to redo it; whereas pros know, they are going to do something wrong and it’s not a big deal because they know how to fix it, they’ve probably done it before. And if not, they’ve made a similar mistake, or they recognize that, oh, this thing that I tried in this book is just never going to work. Great. I’ll add that to my repertoire of craft knowledge.
This is the sort of wisdom that’s gained through experience. It’s tough to adopt a pro mindset when you’re, say, an amateur working on your first book. But if you can take anything away from this quote, it’s that if you can recover gracefully, if you can have things not work out 100% in your favour, and roll with the punches and stick to it and not get yourself down and keep being productive, then you are that much closer to being a professional author, and you’re that much closer to adapting the work habits that professional writers use to get their work done and to fix mistakes that they may have made.
Next up, let’s look at this quote.
“To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just redo it, redo it, redo it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.”
I had an episode about this just a couple of episodes ago: writing is iterative. Writing is all about revisions, revisions, revisions.
Many people go into writing with this high school mindset of I’m going to pound out my essay the night before it’s due and then I’m going to hand that first draft in to my teacher the next morning, and that’s it. That’s how writing works. You put things down first try, and, normally, it’s in a time crunch. And that’s that.
Whereas real writers know that getting something good takes revisions. It takes time you come at it again and again.
This is kind of a one-two punch here, with the comment about recovering gracefully and understanding that you need to redo it, redo it, redo it to get something great. Those two quotes work together. When you understand that the road to excellence is via revisions, then you have that mindset of being willing to make mistakes because you know you can always fix them in the revision process.
Those two quotes go hand in hand. Let go of the idea you’re going to get it perfect on the first try, let go of the idea that you’re not going to make mistakes. Instead, adapt, recover, know that you can fix your mistakes and know that you’re going to come back to your story again and again and again, via the revisions process.
Then once you think the book is as good as you can get it on your own, a coach like me is going to review it, or a copy editor is going to review it, or beta readers are going to review it, and they’re all going to have ideas or comments or ways that you can improve the story to make it even greater. That’s what you do. You redo it, you do it again, and you make it even better.
I love this idea from Kevin Kelly here: how you make something great by redoing it and redoing it.
Our next quote is this one.
“Separate the processes of creation from improving. You can’t write and edit, or sculpt and polish, or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgment.”
I love this. Anyone in my First Draft program knows that I’m going to resonate with someone saying just write and write, just write that first draft.
That first draft is so much about just getting out of your own way, and getting ideas and words down on the page so that we have something to work with in revisions.
This idea, though, is also why I highly believe in planning and why I run a program called Story Plan and why I really encourage writers to think ahead of time. If you’re a pantser, if you’re a discovery writer, you are both developing your story and writing it at the same time. You’re trying to do any number of creative acts all at once. And as Kevin Kelly points out, it’s really tough to write and edit at the same time. It’s really tough to make and analyze at the same time. If you’re discovering writing your book, you’re both plotting a book and writing it at the same time, which I believe is why so many pantsed books are a complete mess. It’s because it’s nearly impossible to properly plan a novel in the process of writing it.
Now, a lot of pantsers claim that making it up as they go along it supports their creativity. But I am a huge believer that creativity is best supported by going in having already done the research, having already done the interviews, having already done the outline, so that you know what needs to happen in the scene or a story. Then you are able to just sit down and write and unleash your creativity because you’re not trying to sculpt and polish at the same time. You’re not trying to write an edit and plot at the same time. You’ve already done the plotting. Now you’re going to do the writing with the knowledge that down the road, you’re going to do editing via revisions.
All of these quotes of Kevin Kelly’s that tie into writing, they also all tie into each other and into the process that is writing a novel.
Let’s look at the last quote of Kevin Kelly’s that I want to talk about today. That’s this one.
“There is no limit on better. Talent is distributed unfairly, but there is no limit on how much we can improve what we start with.”
This idea of talent being distributed unfairly, it really jumped out at me with Joss Whedon. I was a huge, huge fan of Joss Whedon’s writing on the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He was well known for his creative and quirky dialogue, as well as his really just amazing storylines and character creations. But in response to people saying that perhaps he was using his clever dialogue as a crutch, he went ahead and made an episode in season four of Buffy called “Hush” with no dialogue whatsoever or minimal dialogue throughout the entire episode. And it’s one of the best episodes of the show ever. Plus, Joss Whedon was always the best director on the show. His episodes always looked better than everyone else’s, and so he proved he could write amazing stories with amazing dialogue, he proved he could write stories without dialogue, he proved that he was an incredible director. And then, when it came time to do a musical episode, he sat down and wrote all of the music and the lyrics for the episode. And that was the moment where I was like, “That’s not fair!” It’s really not fair that Joss Whedon gets to be the best writer, and the best storyteller, and the best director, and, oh, also he’s an incredible musician and songwriter. Like why don’t you throw a little bit of talent my way? But that’s just how it works. Some people are granted with more talent, and more genius than the rest of us.
But if we use Joss Whedon as an example, he’s now cancelled. He’s no longer able to create his art, at least for the time being, because of the way he treated people, which goes to show you raw talent can take you a long way. Talent can take you nearly to the top, but there’s no limit on improving. There’s no limit on being a good person. There’s no limit on being a valuable member of an artistic community.
This idea that we’re all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master, it’s so wonderful, because what it means is it’s never too late, and it doesn’t matter where you’re starting from. You could be the most talented, the most naturally gifted writer out there, or you could have no natural talent whatsoever. It doesn’t matter because hard work trumps talent every time, and there is no limit on improving yourself and improving your writing. It is an ongoing process, becoming a great writer.
You can only ever have so much talent, but you can have more craft knowledge, you can have more experience, you can be a harder worker, you can have more perseverance. These things aren’t gifted the way talent is. These are things that you can learn in practice and implement. I really love that final quote from Kevin Kelly there.
All right, that is it for this episode. Just I was really digging those quotes and just wanted to riff on them a little bit. I think they actually all resonated together a little more than I even expected before I hit record here.
I hope you enjoyed that exploration of some quotes from Kevin Kelly that I think apply to the writing process.
Thank you so much for listening to this. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button and I will see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
