The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

The Small Journeys That to Lead us to Our Destinations with Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey has on the surface what might appear to be Cinderella story from the world of self publishing. His best selling series Wool caught the attention of Ridley Scott and has been turned into a screenplay. But as you might expect, there's alot more to this story.

Why so few writers follow a traditional path
The role that our life experiences play in our writing
Saying yes to every opportunity to for adventure
Gaining it back when you've experienced a loss of faith
The importance of having a flexible career
Learning to question what we've been told and taught
Why living on a boat taught Hugh the value of patience
Inside the creative process of writing fiction
Why Hugh doesn't read things similar to what writes about
The importance of being committed to a creative craft
How 1000 true fans can radically transform your life
Keeping yourself constantly delighted with little successes
Why everybody has a story about their life

Hugh Howey is the author of the award-winning Molly Fyde Saga and the New York Times and USA Today bestselling WOOL series.

Why so few writers follow a traditional path
The role that our life experiences play in our writing
Saying yes to every opportunity to for adventure
Gaining it back when you've experienced a loss of faith
The importance of having a flexible career
Learning to question what we've been told and taught
Why living on a boat taught Hugh the value of patience
Inside the creative process of writing fiction
Why Hugh doesn't read things similar to what writes about
The importance of being committed to a creative craft
How 1000 true fans can radically transform your life
Keeping yourself constantly delighted with little successes
Why everybody has a story about their life

Hugh Howey is the author of the award-winning Molly Fyde Saga and the New York Times and USA Today bestselling WOOL series.

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Duration:: 1h 16m
Broadcast on:: 12 May 2014
Audio Format:: other

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Hugh Howey has on the surface what might appear to be a Cinderella story from the world of self-publishing. His best-selling series, Wool, caught the attention of acclaimed director Ridley Scott and has been turned into a screenplay, but as you might expect, there's a lot more to this story. Listen in, as Hugh talks to me all about the small journeys that lead us to our destinations. Hey there, it's Sreeny, I hope you're having an awesome morning. Before we get into today's episode, I want to share a quick story with you. In my earliest days of being a freelancer, I had no processes and no systems and I basically operated in a reactive mode and this hindered my progress for many years and I didn't even realize it, I was overwhelmed with paperwork, chasing down clients to get paid and other time-consuming administrative activities which weren't really all that valuable. Some simple math turned out to be one of the most revealing insights ever. I actually had the CEO of FreshBooks on the podcast and he asked me, "Is your time worth more than $20 an hour?" And when I said yes, he said, "Well then you should be using FreshBooks and I have ever since." And now you can even try it free for just two months and stop wasting your time dealing with invoices, paperwork and all the other headaches that keep you from getting paid faster. Visit GetFreshBooks.com and enter Unmistakable Creative and how did you hear about a section. You welcome to the Unmistakable Creative, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Thanks for having me, Matt. Yeah, my pleasure. So I have heard your name mentioned to me for years, I've come across you through a number of friends of mine, we've had multiple requests from you from some of our own listeners and big fans. Tell us a bit about yourself, your background and your story and how that has led to the work that you do today. I guess the best way to describe myself is I guess I'm something of a dilettante. I haven't really stuck with anyone thing in my whole life. I've bounced from job to job and adventure to adventure or whatever. It seems exciting and new. I've dreamed of writing a book since I was very young and it's something I tried several times and gave up on and thought I would never do. After working in the boating industry for quite a few years, I got pulled inland by my wife and finally had the time to sit down and work on a novel and after realizing I could do it after completing that manuscript, I got hooked and I was writing two or three novels a year and then a short story I wrote called "Wall" took off. I was working at a book store at the time in writing and all my spare time and this story took off and next thing I know I'm quitting my day job and writing full time and the book just went nuts and got picked up all around the world and for a film deal but really Scott and yeah, it's just been the last two years, it's just been a pretty wild ride. I mean, you're really kind of a poster child for one of these stories but before we get into all of that, I want to go back to the very beginning of this, you mentioned sort of this dilettante period of your life and I'd love to dig deeper into that because one of the things that I always find when I talk to people is how much those periods of their life which seem almost inconsequential impact what is happening going forward and I'd love for you to talk about that in more detail because I think that's something that I personally relate to the sort of jumping from job to job thing before finding a calling and I'm wondering how that influenced the work that you do today and kind of your worldview and your perspective on things. It's everything. There's no way I would have really anything you think interesting to write about or when you look at the people who become writers, very few of them go straight from university to an MFA program and then produce their writing, usually they come from an odd profession. They have some life experience that they're writing about and I guess that's the case with me as well. I majored in English when I was in college but I certainly didn't learn to write there I learned to write from sailing around the Caribbean and visiting a lot of different countries and having a lot of different unique life experiences and reading a lot of nonfiction. Yeah, I don't know, okay, I'm sorry we have to do something, I just had a delivery guy come to the door. Okay. I got to run up there and sign something. Hold on a second. Come on, I'm going to go back and edit. Okay, that was horrible timing. No problem. Do you want to start the question from the beginning and I'll go back and edit? Sure. Okay. Do you remember the question? Yeah. You asked about my earlier adventure. So just start it from there and I'll go back and slice this all out. That'll just make for a clean edit. Okay. All right. Yeah, I don't think I would be writing today if it wasn't for all the travels and the things that I'd done. The difficult thing about writing is you have to pull from something that you know and the more you experience and the more adventures you have, the wider variety of stories you're able to write and the more characters you meet. You travel all over the Caribbean and down in Central and South America and spend time in places that are hard to get into otherwise like Cuba and Little Islands owned by Columbia, South America and spending a lot of time around different cultures and just being naturally curious. I think that has certainly helped my writing. Yeah. And you know, when you look at the people who become professional writers, very few of them follow up a direct path through university and MFA program and study writing and then become a writer, it's a great way to learn to edit and to learn to write grammatically correct sentences. But you know, the people who, if you look at John Grisham or people like that, they come from a profession where they know something about what they're going to write about. And in my case, you know, the stories that I wrote when I started my career with these adventure stories that really were modeled after the sailing that I'd done. And I don't recommend to anybody having near-death experiences and going through hurricanes and doing some of the really stupid things that I did. But I do recommend, if you want to be a writer, to say yes to any adventure that comes up. Like a quick example, when I was working at a bookstore in a university setting, you know, my spring breaks were spent doing these alternate spring breaks and taking, you know, I could have taken a week of vacation, but instead I took a week of unpaid work to take kids to the Bronx and work in soup kitchens and live in a monastery in the Bronx. And, you know, I pull from experiences like that. And I think if you want to be a writer, anytime that you see some adventure pop up and you could say yes or no, just always say yes. Yeah. Well, I love that. I think there's this pure girl there. I do want to talk about this in a bit more depth, but I want to ask you something. You know, you mentioned the sort of notion of a dillotot. And I think that for every writer or every person who is a creative of any sort, there's almost this sense that they're a misfit or sort of displaced from fitting in into society, the way that it works, and I'm really curious to kind of hear your thoughts around that. And of course, I think there's also a sense that maybe there was something special about it is that we lost in our childhood, you know, you mentioned also, you know, wanting to write a book ever since you were a child and then stopping multiple times along the way. And I'm curious, you know, one, why you stop and then two, how we tap back into that sort of enthusiasm that we had when we were kids for these crazy, wild-eyed and practical dreams? It's a great question. It's a great couple of questions. You know, I think a lot of my skipping around and trying a lot of things comes from a my loss of faith. It's interesting that about the same age that I dreamed of writing a novel is about the same age that I lost my belief in and God, and I was very young, I was raised in a Christian home, and you know, every year we went to a camp meeting where we spent, I still go to the to this camp meeting every year that I'm in town. I've only missed a few in 38 years, but it's, you know, 10 days of going to church twice a day and, you know, very religious household, but by the time I was 12, I had lost all that belief, and I was really consumed, you know, I have all this poetry, this horrible poetry that I wrote back then, just consumed with the idea of death, and I would lay in bed at night, terrified that I would close my eyes and not open them again. And you know, I got over that, but for a while there, and I think the way that shaped me is that I feel like I want to live as much as possible in this life that I have here, and as long as it doesn't impinge on other people's ability to live their lives, it's not like a single-minded pursuit of like, get out of my way, I'm having a good time here. Part of that as well is to try to make my immediate environment as pleasant as possible, you know, be nice to strangers and hold doors for people, and do whatever little impact you can to improve your day-to-day, because that's all I believe we have. I could be wrong about that. I mean, everyone has a different idea on what life holds for us, but that feeling that we only have one chance at this has made me very impatient about, you know, like my greatest fear, and I say this, even though I admire people who have done this, my greatest fears that I would like work one career for 50 years and retire and not know to do with my time, you know, and that would be my whole life experiences. It would be one routine, so it would feel like I lived one day over and over again. I groundhog day, to me, is one of the most deeply satisfying, philosophical, I don't even see it as a comedy, even though there are funny parts to it. I think it's just one of the more thoughtful films out there about how horrible that life would be, and so, yeah, it seems I can go about five or six years in any career before I'm looking at some other challenge, and it also means that I don't master anything. You know, I studied chess and started playing tournaments until I found myself on the second table at a major tournament, said beside these two Russians playing at table one, watching me to see if I was going to win, to decide whether or not to take a draw between the two of them, I was never going to play until I was at table number one, but I played to chess competitively until I sat at table number two, and then I thought after that tournament, I was like, that's it, I'm done, I don't want to expend that 90% of energy to increase that final 10% of ability, and I admire people who can spend their entire lives mastering something perfectly, and that's just never been made. You know, I really appreciate that, you know, you're bringing up this idea of one career for the rest of your life, because I think we've kind of reached an era where that's just not even viable anymore, right? I mean, we're seeing it in the economy, we're seeing technology disrupt things like never before. You know, when you see something like Amazon's drone delivery, if you're a UPS driver, you probably should be considering the possibility that there's not going to be much of a future in this. So it's just one of those things that you think about, and the other thing, I mean, I'm glad that you brought up the idea of retirement, because that does, I mean, it seems like such a boring existence, and I remember thinking back to something, it jogged my memory when you said that to something Ziggler said, he said, you know, we somehow bought into this idea of retirement, and he said, but the reality is that some phenomenal things can be accomplished in an older age if you allow them to be, and I, you know, I think it's funny because that almost brings that idea of, you know, writers getting to where that through a very somewhat, you know, strange path, full circle, because I look at, you know, what I've accomplished in my 30s and compares into the 20s, and it's night and day. Yeah, you know, it's funny, when I was 23, I took a leave of absence from university, and I was living on a little cell boat, and I just took off for the Bahamas, and by the time I was 25, I was, I was a yacht captain, and I was driving 100 million dollar yachts for the rich and famous, and I thought, you know, people, I guess, in that industry looked at the course that I was on, and they thought that, you know, I'd be driving cruise ships by the time I was in my 40s, because that's the kind of trajectory I was on. But I knew even then that this was, I was having a lot of fun, but you do anything long enough, and it becomes routine, and that terrifies me. So even then I knew that I was going to do this for as long as it felt enjoyable, and then as soon as some other opportunity came up, I would do that. And I do agree that you have to be flexible with your careers, because of how many, I mean, you look at how many people use TurboTax versus the CPA these days, and how many people just book their own flights and hotels instead of using a travel agent. There's so many ways that programmer, one programmer can provide a tool that allows everyone to kind of use the self-checkout line, but a lot of people, a lot of people stay in careers that are somewhat related, maybe that'll become less and less of an option. And I think it's terrifying, but it could also be a very, it's going to be a good thing for us. I think people can live fuller lives, even though the transition is certainly painful. The unemployment rate, despite the recession, stays about the same, even with this mass upheaval and the economy in different types of jobs. Those people lose their jobs and tend to find new ones. It's not fun. I've been through it several times, and just because I seek out new things doesn't mean that it's easy. It's terrifying and painful, but that's part of why I do it. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I love that you've got up, that's part of why you do it. I had a guy here who you guys will have heard from me by now who had this amazing story and wired about how he hacked, okay, Cupid using math. He was a math PhD student to end up meeting the love of his life. But one of the things he talked about was intentional discomfort and how putting yourself intentionally in uncomfortable situations is an amazing catalyst for growth. I totally believe that, yeah, especially for a writer, I think that's just so important. You have to embrace all the things that you fear the most. I have so many fears, fears of tight spaces and heights, and my response to that is to jump out of airplanes and to live on little sailboats and to be a commercial scuba diver in a city where there's a foot of visibility and things that are just make it difficult to go to sleep at night, but also make you feel alive at the same time. Yes, it's a challenging thing to do, but I highly recommend it. I want to get into this in a lot more depth, but I want to go back to something that you said earlier. You mentioned this idea of losing your faith. The question I have around the loss of faith is when we go through challenging experiences in our lives and when the circumstances of our lives seem like they're not temporary and that they're never ending, and we start to lose our faith. How do we keep that from happening? Is there a way or is losing the faith the key to getting it back? What are your thoughts on all that? For me, faith was an epistemological system that was kind of foisted on me. I consider my parents two of my best friends, and they did what their parents did, and it's a cycle. But when I look back on it, it almost seems abusive to take a kid before they're old enough to think for themselves and teach them some of the things that I was taught and teach me to have that kind of a fear for reprisal and for punishment being meted out, and that I had to talk to someone every night and ask for forgiveness and all these things that whether or not they should be part of our lives, I think the time to teach them was probably about the time that I was dismissing them. I think when someone's old enough, we teach them things that are to us so crucial, and that's our faith, before we even have a talk about sex or drugs or curfew or any of that stuff. We really start that process so young, and I don't know that we're ready for it. So for me, losing my faith wasn't really necessarily a bad thing. I see it as the start of me sorting out the world for myself, and I had to replace that epistemological system of knowing the world around me with something else, and I chose the scientific method, which was to just doubt things and be a cynic and be skeptical and questioned. And so I had to start doing a lot of, it takes a lot of extra work to do that than just to be told what the answers are and just believe them. And so it certainly was at the easy path, but it was more rewarding when I found beauty in the cosmos than I never found in being told creation stories. Yeah, I love the idea of this willingness to question what you've been told and to ask questions, because you're right. I mean, I think that we are, especially as children, I mean, even as adults, we're sort of force-fed ideologies and propaganda that life is supposed to be a certain way. And I think that when you start to question all of that, things start to unravel in somewhat of a fascinating way. And when they start to unravel, it can be a bit overwhelming, but I think what's really amazing is when you get to the other side of that, one of my friends describes it. It's like you've just been handed the red pill and you can finally see the matrix. Yeah. Now it is. And by seeing the matrix, you can see how confusing the matrix is, and that, you know, maybe you get a little glimpse here, and that makes it a glimpse of, you know, so exciting also something cool about the scientific method and that you get really excited to be wrong. And that's, to me, the biggest difference between faith and reason. When you adopt a system of reason, any time you get proven wrong or you discover that some previously held belief was incorrect, you get excited because you realize that, well, that's an upgrade. The only way you can go from being wrong to right is to have your belief systems, your understanding of the world somehow improve. And when you are raised with a system of faith, anything that says that you're wrong is a challenge and it instills fear and anger. And so we get through our lives just being wrong about most things and having a system where every time you're wrong, you see this as an opportunity for growth versus a system where every time you feel like you're wrong, this is a challenge and an attack on who you are as a person. That's a very freeing place to arrive at. Well, it's not something I want to force other people or tell other people they're wrong for what they choose. But for myself, when I made that transition and it was a gradual transition, it happened over years. I can maybe say that it's even happening now. To me, it was a much happier life that I discover on the other side. I love that. That's poetic. So let's do this. One of the things that you've brought up multiple times is sailing. These influences are always interesting to me, especially as a surfer. The ocean has had this profound impact on my creative capacity. It's the driving force and the fuel behind the fire. I'm really curious of all things how sailing has influenced you as a creative person. What kinds of perspectives it's brought into the way you see the world and the work that you do. And specifically speaking about the craft of writing. Yeah, for me, sailing has been the most profound experience of my life and it started very young. It started when I was maybe 10 years old. The beach house we went to every year, we spent two weeks there and we had this little sunfish sailboat that wasn't really a challenge for me to even get down to the sound behind the beach house and rig up. Stepping the mast was quite an effort. This is the kind of boat that you and I at our age could grab the mast with one hand and just stick it in the deck of the boat. And for me, I felt like I was one of those soldiers in Iwo Jima, raising that flag. It felt heroic to get that mast in. So the challenge of sailing that boat, but then the freedom of being out of the water and being able to go where I wanted to and not have any kind of supervision and being really feeling at one with the water and the wind and nature and being quiet, I really found myself as a young kid out there. And then every time I would get back on the water, I would rediscover myself. And this still happens. I now live in a house, but my wife and I go on vacations and we'll charter a boat. And that's when she sees every care in me just melt away and that's when I feel like I'm in my element. And I don't know what that did for me with my riding. One thing sailing does and living on a boat dead is it taught me the value of patience and of slowing down and you don't get where you're going in a day. To get from, you know, I did trips while I was gone for a year one time to sailing around and I would have a destination in mind and it might take me months to get there. And every day was a small journey and dropping anchor and resting and contemplating and writing is a lot like that. You know, I think a sailing journey has a lot in common with getting through a novel. So yeah, who I became as a person, most of that transformation happened at sea. You know, I'm really glad I asked you that question because as a surfer, I can really appreciate that perspective, especially the patient's piece, right? You know, one of the people I was like, why can't surfers have normal jobs? Because you're not on your own schedule, you're kind of at the mercy of what the ocean decides to do that day. And some days, there are no waves and you're just waiting for an hour for that perfect wave to show up. But, you know, it's that one way you're there. Sometimes 10 seconds creates so much joy that the four hours you spent was worth it. Yeah, I've always appreciated that about surfing. I've never lived in a place where I had decent surf. It's the East Coast has fewer options, but I do remember as a kid taking the longboard at that same beach house out and I would sit forever waiting for one little swell that would actually get me up. But yes, it's a very, there's something serene about sitting there and watching and you really get to sense the pulse of the sea and you see how they come in and sets and you kind of feel that there's something happening far away that's influencing us. Yeah, it's a wonderful, I think being outside hiking, anything you can do where you're in nature and it's quiet and you're unplugged is a boon to not just as creators, but I think for all people, it's becoming more and more important to find that. Yeah, yeah, especially in the world we live in today, you know, it's funny, we had Steven Kotler who wrote a book called The Rise of Superman talking to us about the neuroscience of flow. And he said that what we find is activities like this while seeming, you know, like you're wasting time, it turns out across the board when you can put yourself in states of flow, you find significant increases in human performance, which, you know, it's interesting to hear the scientific breakdown. It's no surprise to me having been somebody who finally found it, but I love that you mentioned that you sort of found yourself at sea. Let's do this, let's just gears a little bit and let's start talking specifically about the craft of writing and your creative process and how you approach all of this. And I guess where I really want to start with that is, you know, taking in all the sensory input of your life experience and then translating it to the blank page. I mean, what does that look like for somebody like you? You know, before I can write a story, I have to have some theme or something, some observation about life, something that I want to comment on. So it's not quite like satire, but that's the closest thing I can really, because satire I think has elements of humor implied. But when I'm writing a book like wool, you know, I'm thinking about totalitarian states and I'm reading a lot of nonfiction, a lot of current events. And it's that writing is a way for me to consolidate my thoughts. It's almost like journaling where you don't really know what you think about subject to your force to describe it to yourself. And writing is a way for me to do that. I think the reason I failed at writing when I was younger is because I was just trying to write a story about events. I just had characters that were doing things and they might have one major thing that they wanted to accomplish and then all the other little things they had to do on the way. And you can put a story together like that, but I can't stay interested enough in a story as long as it takes to write it. When that's my entire goal, for me it has to be a lot more than that. And so that's my challenge with each story is, you know, what do I want to say about what I'm learning or what I'm observing with each story? For Sand, my latest book was The Opposite of Wool. I was instead of looking at totalitarian states, I wanted to write about what it's like to live in a lawless condition and in a way as a complete departure from Wool, but they complement each other because of that for me. Hey, everybody, it's Trini. As you know, the unmistakable creative is advertiser supported. And we're asking for your help by completing the short anonymous survey. It'll take no more than five minutes. Your answers will help us match our show with the advertisers that best fit the sensibilities of our podcast and its listeners like you. Most who complete the survey will be entered into an ongoing monthly raffle to win a hundred dollar Amazon gift card. We promise not to share or sell your email address and we won't send you an email unless you win. So if you go to podsurvey.com/story, that's www.podsurvey.com/story, to take our survey, you'll be entered for a chance to win a hundred dollar Amazon gift card and we really appreciate your support. I think it's really interesting that you're a fiction writer, but nonfiction is like one of your big influences. That's somewhat unusual. But I want to ask you a question based on something that I heard our friend Justine Musk tell me to tell our participants at the instigator experience when people were asking her about the creative process. She said, you know, if you think about it this way, reading is the inhale, but writing is the exhale. And I thought about that a lot and I thought, yeah, that's pretty brilliant. I said, but my thought immediately after that was I'm like, I want to ask somebody if reading is the inhale and writing is the exhale, how do you keep writing from becoming the echo instead of the exhale? Does that make sense? No, that's a great, it's a good point. Yeah, how do you, I don't know that it's good to be sustained off the breadth of another to continue that analogy. I think at some point you have to, you have to go find something new and unique to take in. And when I enjoy reading in the genres in which I write, but I avoid them while I'm writing in them. I grew up reading a lot of science fiction, but I read very little of it today because I don't want to encounter anything that I might go explore on my own because it just closes me off from that. You know, people think that writers would have a temptation to copy, but in my experience, reading anything similar to what you might explore just closes you off from it. Now that you've seen that idea touched upon, you're terrified of going anywhere near it. So it really limits you to know it's been going to know what's going on in your genre. I've also had a lot of feedback from readers that several of my books are in genres where I kind of break all the roles and do something completely different. And I think that's been part of the reason for the word of mouth success that I've had. Spark something uncommon this holiday with just the right gift from uncommon goods. The busy holiday season is here and uncommon goods makes it less stressful with incredible handpick gifts for everyone on your list, all in one spot, gifts that spark joy, wonder delight and that it's exactly what I wanted feeling. They scour the globe for original, handmade, absolutely remarkable things. Last year, I found the perfect gift for my nephew, periodic table building blocks. These blocks were a big hit and considering he was talking in full sentences before he even turned two, I'd say that's a pretty good win. They're not just educational, but also a fun way to spark his curiosity. 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Go to linkedin.com/results to claim your credit. It's linkedin.com/results. We are back and better than ever, and if you are interested in winning every sports debate and you're interested in winning every sports debate, you'll be able to reach people who, you know, are interested in winning every sports debate. I'm not sure if you're interested in winning any sports, but I'm sure you're interested. I'm sure you're interested in winning any sports, but I'm sure you're interested in winning any sports, and I'm sure you're interested in winning any sports, and I'm sure you're interested in winning. In order to write, you have to constantly read. I think it builds from vocabulary. It's like listening to a tuning fork. You develop a certain picture tone with your writings where not just the grammar, but it just flows and sounds correct. The best way to learn that is to just absorb as much quality writing as you can in all genres. Well, you know, I love that you're bringing it from genres that you don't read something that is in the genre that you're currently working on. I mean, even Robert Greene told me that when he said he was working on mastery, he made a point not to read things like outliers because he had his own ideas on the subject. And, you know, I mean, even when I've written books around marketing or anything like that or self-published books, I try not to look within the field itself. My inspiration comes from sources that just are out there. You know, you go and look for something that is way different than what you'd expect. And that's usually where I find this cross-pollination leads to really interesting things. I mean, my friend Meg Warden talks about creative cross-training and how powerful that can be as well. So I think it's a really, really, it's a wise observation that you have to be careful because that's exactly how you end up echoing everything you've heard is if you read a bunch of books that are in the same genre. And that's a big part of the reason when I look for guests on this show, I'll go and choose somebody who has robbed 30 banks over somebody that, you know, is some famous social media marketer. That's interesting. Well, and yeah, I guess it's the same thing, you know, if there's a lot of noise out there, then make it different noise, you know, it's hard to be heard over all the den, especially when you're making the same sound as everyone else. Definitely. Well, let's talk about risk. I mean, one of the things you just said was that you break all the rules. And I love this. This is one of my favorite areas to explore with creative people is how you take creative risks that don't blow up in your face, but move you forward or cause you to grow even if they're disastrous. Does that make sense? Yeah, you know, there's been several books that I've tackled that I thought, well, this will definitely in my career, you know, this is like, this is the absolute wrong thing to do. And I think I did that on purpose and I think I sought those things out and I don't know, it's not to be destructive. I think it was to be creative and the things that felt like, okay, this is a non-obvious follow-up or this is the wrong book to write next kept me interested. And I'm normally not a big risk taker, you know, like I'm very conservative with my finances and I don't put myself in harm's way needlessly. But when it comes to creativity, I think that that's how I stay interested to do whatever is orthogonal to my current direction. You know, as soon as I take right turns, you know, I take right angles basically instead of just forging along them, one path that seems linear. When I get done with something, I just want it to zig and zag and see what else is out there. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's interesting, right? I think that if we're not taking risks with our creativity, we run the risk of the what I call the sequel syndrome where, you know, you've seen these movies in Hollywood where they get a hit with one. It's like, what? We're on Fast in the Furious 10, really? Have we gotten that far with this series? And they don't really change very much because they think they've found a winning formula. And of course, as a result, the work just keeps getting watered down until it caters to the lowest common denominator. Yeah. And the screen book about that out now called Blockbusters, I think it's called and it has to do with how that makes complete financial sense. If what you're, it really helps me that I've never been motivated by money. I've always lived a very impoverished lifestyle, even when I've had money. I've enjoyed living on a small sellboat that costs less than most people's cars. And even now I live in the cheapest house and the cheapest neighborhood in town because I just prefer that. But what's awesome about that is that you don't have to make decisions based on maintaining a lifestyle or maximizing your income. I think what studios have to do is they have to make different decisions than individuals. And there's a lot of creativity that comes out of independent voices because of that. Yeah. Well, speaking of which, I think that it's, in my mind, I mean, I'm really glad we're getting to hear your story because I think that it's very easy probably for somebody from the outside. And I do want to talk a little bit about this to kind of look at what you've had happen and think that you won the internet lottery. But the reality of it is many, many years of refining a craft. And I'd love for you to talk about kind of the journey since, you know, the success of your books and kind of what that has been like and what your thoughts are on, you know, creative independent voices and the role in the world today and what the opportunities are. Well, I think there's never been more opportunity. The challenge, of course, is that there's opportunity for everyone. When I hear people disparage that, it's, I don't know, it has that feeling of someone got in the treehouse and now they're pulling the ladder up behind them. And I just can't understand that. I think the fact that there's more opportunity for more people is just a good thing. And we should embrace the, I don't even want to call it competition because I don't think we're, I don't think it's a competitive thing. It's just more of a communal thing and I wouldn't want to limit access to anybody. I think what helps is to realize that most of the people who get involved in any creative endeavor don't take it seriously enough to rise to the level of the people who approach this as a potential career. If you, there are plenty of people who just want to write one book to say they've written a book and they should, if they want to publish that and see it alongside everyone else's on Amazon, I think that's great. Those books are not going to get much visibility. It's just so difficult for any book to climb up the rankings that I don't think we have to worry about 99% of them. But for anyone who wants to put in the, you know, Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours and produce, you know, a dozen works over a career, they're going to get better and their works are going to get more visibility because there's more of them all with the same name on them. And the chances of getting one reader who likes your work and then goes and looks for what else you've written improves. So I think looking at the amount of luck that I've had is not useful. I really don't like being a poster boy for anything. I don't think we should use JK Rowling as a poster woman for traditional publishing. That's an unrealistic expectation to place on any creative person. I think it can stifle creativity to set your expectations at high. So I would tell people, you know, that where I was in November of 2011, when I was, you know, making $100 or $200 a month and I had eight works out and I was writing in my spare time but probably would never make a full-time living off of it. But, you know, in three years of writing, I'd sold 5,000 books, which I thought was phenomenal. And I was being invited to talk to creative writing classes and to go to middle schools to talk to classrooms because the teacher there loved one of my books and got her kids to read it. So I had little things like that to hang my hat on and that was enough to sustain me. And where I was after three years of writing, two or three books a year, I think anybody can get to. But very few people, that's why you don't have to worry about a flood of competitors. Very few people are going to devote all of their free time single-mindedly to the pursuit of mastering their craft. And if that's where you are, if that's where you are, someone listening to this, if that's where you are, as a reader and an aspiring writer, you're already in the top fraction of 1% of people who will actually put that amount of effort and energy into this. And that's heartening, I like that it's this difficult because it makes it more rewarding when we accomplish it individually and it also makes it more of a meritocracy when we look at the people who do end up making a career out of it. It's usually because they put a lot of effort and energy into it. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate you kind of shedding light on that because it's true. It's really easy. I remember looking from the outside in, when you're actually, when your feet are finally to the fire, you get a dose of the reality of how difficult it really is and how much work it is. Because we don't hear about, like, we don't know you until all of a sudden you're this overnight sensation, supposedly, right? Like nobody's heard the name Hugh Howie and then suddenly we do. We know who you are. And it's really easy to overlook that three years. And I always say, I mean, how long can you go without any sort of external reward for your effort? You know, as I told you before we hit record here, I think we've been running our show for four years and this is the year in which things have really taken a turn. And even then, what God has here is what we have to keep doing. That's a great point. I mean, that's something that I tell when I talk to creative writing classes, I ask them, like, how long can you write without an audience? Because that's what musicians have to do, it's what comedians have to do. They have to spend a lot of time creating without any sort of reward or any applause or any monetary benefit. You have to do it because you enjoy it. And if you don't have that in you and you don't know until you try, but if you don't have that in you, it's almost impossible to make it. Well, let me ask you this, one of the other conversations, I mean, you talked about sort of the 1% of 1% that have that drive. I want to talk about talent and the role that it plays because Julian Smith, who is somebody we had back here, he said, you know, the web is a ruthless battle for attention, which means that what you create has to be that much more epic than another person's. And of course, that's somewhat subjective, but I think there's still some validity to that. I think that crappy stuff just doesn't see the light of day. That's what I'm finding more and more, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this as somebody who has now kind of, you've gone through the three years, you really sat down and committed to something. I totally agree with that. Crappy stuff will disappear. The other thing that will baffle people is that what you think is crap might not be what most people think is crap, and that can be really confusing when you see something that you just think is obnoxious, and everyone is jumping all over it. We have to accept that as individuals, that we are not the universal arbiters of taste, and there's a collective correctness, and that's the best way to put it, like whatever the crowd thinks is worthy, is a tautology. That's how worth is defined by a subjective partakers. I think when people working in a bookstore, I used to have to defend books like Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey and Dan Brown and say, "Look, these books are bringing enjoyment to a lot of people. They're doing something correct. You're better off learning from them than disparaging them." I think it's too easy for us to act snuddy when our tastes aren't reflected in the taste of the populace. For those books, what I learned from them is that if people can have a choice between plot and prose, they're going to choose plot every time. It's a handful of people who appreciate prose more than plot, and those are the people who are baffled by the breakout successes that they can see. What are rule-breaking, maybe deficiencies, but that's not why there's people are buying those books. I had so many friends who were professors who were writing just beautiful prose, but all the books were about their life, because the only life they'd ever had was going from grade school to high school to university to graduate school to getting their position at a university to getting tenure, and so they were all writing novels about a college professor going through a divorce or something. They're writing beautiful prose, but they have nothing to write about. I think when we see what floats up to the top, we should understand why something floats up to the top and not look at what we wish was up there. I see a lot of that when we take our own tastes and we think that they should be universal, and it's a very egotistical position to have, I think. Actually, I've never heard it put that way, but that's a really, really fascinating way of looking at it. The other thing that I would say based on what I've seen and observed, just based on self-publishing, I mean, kind of like you, I had just freakish success of a self-published book that did really well and has led to a lot of other things, and yet there's a couple of things that come from it. One, I look at it and I was like, "Okay, I definitely could do the next work may not have the same fanfare, but it will definitely be better writing, because now I feel like I have to hold myself to a higher standard." But the other thing that I think I'm finally observing as I watch things like the John Stewart show, or I watch things like the Colbert Report, and I watch the mainstream media, we, yes, the internet has democratized everything, but they have resources, which means our only option is to step up our game and really, really produce high quality work if we're going to compete with that and the legion of people who have access and ability to create like they could never before. Yeah, and when I see things that are that brilliant, I realized I'll never be able to match that sort of quality, but I also realized I don't have to. Someone can have millions of followers or millions of die-hard fans, but at least 6.8 million people for the rest of us. A lot of people are fans of more than one thing, so what's beautiful about this globalization is the long tail is reachable by anybody. You only need, and this is a famous maxim, but watching it play out in my life for real really taught me how powerful this is. When you hear this, it's easy to dismiss it as a number or a saying, but it can transform your life. If you have 1,000 die-hard fans who want everything that you do, you can do what you do professionally. You can do it full time. Now there's two things about that number. That number seems really small when you think about how big other people's fame is. People have millions of Twitter followers, and you can have 20,000 Twitter followers, and you might not have a single die-hard fan. That number of 1,000 seems very small until you go out and try to get people who aren't your friends and family or even your friends and family to pay money for your art or to even sit down and take the hours that might take to consume your art, and you realize the challenge that you have because your mom might be an easy get, but she's not guaranteed. If you disappoint her the first time, she might not sit through your second home film or your second album or your reach or second book, and getting 1,000 strangers to love what you do more than they love anybody else in your field, that's a huge number. If you dedicate yourself, I think you can slowly build yourself up to those 1,000 fans. You just have to put in the hard work, you have to comport yourself professionally. You have to, I can't remember who said, was it Neil Gaiman who said, "Don't be a dick." That's one of his roles, and it's achievable. It's just hard enough that not everyone's going to achieve it, which we should be thankful of, I think. Yeah, so true. As somebody whose dad has never read any of his books, I can totally relate. I'm like, "Wait a minute, thousands of strangers have read this book and you're on a 17-hour flight and you can't read it, it takes an hour." But no, I think that's absolutely true. So, you talked to me about, you mentioned right at the beginning of our chat that you've now, you know, you're starting to look into a film with Ridley Scott. These are like, sort of dream things. I mean, how has your life changed as a byproduct of this? I mean, talk to me about where this is all going and where things are headed for you now. Well, the film, to me, the apex of that whole process was finding out that Ridley Scott, Steve's Alien, read the book and enjoyed it, you know, everything after that's been a bonus. You know, the fact that they optioned it, they've re-optioned it, so it's paid handsomely twice and that's been great. But I don't have any expectations that a film would get made. I think I've used low expectations throughout my career to keep myself constantly delighted with every little thing that happens to me, it all seems unexpected. So I don't expect a film to get made, I was thrilled with every little bit of the process. They've written a screenplay that I think is absolutely brilliant in a lot of ways it's better than the book. And so to me, you know, I guess it's easy to, you can look up and be disappointed all the time or you can look back and just be gobsmacked that this is your life and that's, I choose the latter, and to realize that man, someone's written a screenplay based off a story that I wrote that just seems bizarre and magical to me. Other authors, I think you could sit here and be upset that they haven't made a film and when are they going to make it and are they ever going to make it and yeah, agonize about it. And that's just not how I like to go through life. So I usually disappoint readers when they say, like, when there's a film coming and I tell them never, it's never coming and, you know, if I'm wrong, that would be a date of celebrate. If I'm right, then the satisfaction of being prepared for that, I guess. You know, I think maybe the biggest takeaway for me from all of that is being delighted with every little thing, right? That's so counterintuitive and hard to do for people when you constantly look online or look at somebody else and see that they're up to something far more epic. You know, I was talking to a friend and she said, why are you so excited over people buying a $25 ticket to your local event when you guys just sold out a 60 person conference? You know, I said, I don't know. I mean, because it's small. I mean, somebody just paid to be part of something I created with my own two hands. That's cool. How can you, you know, to me, it was like, and I appreciate that. I appreciate that somebody has that much faith in me. So I think that that to me is perhaps the biggest takeaway of everything you just said is that we have to appreciate those things. You know, with Chris Gillabow here and I remember asking him, he was like, you got this massive audience. And he said, yeah, but it didn't start that way. And he said, if somebody's paying attention, treat them like the most important people in the world because they are absolutely that's been my attitude toward social media. I don't think social media is pretty useful for an artist to reach out and beg for new people to pay attention. I think it's a great way to whisper into the void about what you're doing and just be excited about the creative process and journal about it online. But when you direct what you're saying, you should be directing it to the people who already care because they're the ones who are going around advocating or, you know, spreading your work by word of mouth. People when a friend or a family member or a colleague tells someone, you should check this out. You trust that a lot more than when the person who created it and stands to gain who wants your money. When they ask you to check it out, it's like, you dismiss that. So I would much rather, A, I'm not comfortable doing that. I mean, it's off-putting when I see other people do it and I don't feel comfortable going around saying, like, hey, my book is awesome, you should read this. The more important thing is I would much rather spend my time interacting with people who care to interact with me. People are excited. I'm excited to interact with them, they're excited to interact with me. It's a slower process if your goal is to have a lot of success, but it's a much more genuine and much more enjoyable one, a lot less stress involved. When I had one reader, when I was my wife, you know, so what did you think about that chapter? I thought about this and I can't believe you finished the book and, you know, my wife got really mad when I killed a character in my first manuscript and we had this great debate and I rewrote the book to keep the character alive. And having someone who cared about something I was created that much was, that was all that mattered to me. And then my mom enjoyed the work and my first cousin, Lisa, who became a huge advocate and was telling everyone. She was, you know, sent her the manuscript to the Word file and she was like, can I share this with people? Absolutely. She was sending it to everyone she knew and they were all reading my book on their laptops and want to know when they can buy a print edition. And then when that came out, then all those people wanted to share that with other people and so, you know, having, getting that enthusiasm and interacting with the people who cared was to me much more powerful than trying to get people who don't care to care. Q. The Fireplace and Your Favorite Fall Movie There's nothing better than a cozy evening at home with a class of first leaf wine. First leaf is a personalized wine club that delivers right to your door. Sounds magical, right? 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All that and a whole lot more, it's called Got Your Answers, it's available anywhere you get your books right now. Yeah, well, as somebody who's taken that tack pretty much the entire time I've built this at Presence, I completely agree. We're getting close to the end of our time together, so I want to ask you one last question, and this is how we close our interviews at Unmistakable Creative. We've talked quite a bit about really standing out above the crowd, and our show is called The Unmistakable Creative. Based on your own experiences as a writer and somebody who's really seen your share of success with all this, what is it that makes something or somebody unmistakable to you? That's a great question. I find as much, I find there's something to love and to be fascinated about with every individual, but part of that, well, you know, that's something that I had before I was really focused on being a writer. I've always had this love of listening to other people tell their stories, you know, and if any time that I could spend with someone much older than me and hear what their life was like or if I can, I used to sit with homeless people and just chat with them, you know, and find out what their life is like today and what it was like before. And, you know, if they want money or a meal for me, then I want a story in return, and I want to know, you know, what it's like to be there. And now I met people, I met a homeless guy in Miami who had a law degree and lost his family in a car accident. He wasn't involved in the accident. They were by themselves. I can't remember how many kids he had one or two, but he started drinking and never wanted to work again, like something broke inside of him when he lost them. And, you know, for all I know, he's since repaired that and he's now back practicing law, but meeting someone in that situation, that guy was, I mean, this was, I was 25 or 26 when I met this guy. So it's 13 years later that I'm still thinking about him. I think about him probably at least once a month. And, you know, when I met him, he was trying to convince me to share a bottle of liquor with him out of a brown bag and refusing food because that's not what he wanted. You know, he just wanted money to stay as numb as possible. Is that someone that I respect or admire or not? I don't think those words are quite the right words to use for that, but is it someone that felt fascinating and like I care deeply about? Absolutely. And also, the more you do that, the more you realize that judging people is just an exercise of futility. You just don't know what's going on in someone's life and how they got to where they are. And that doesn't mean that people aren't responsible for their actions. They can't forgive them for being abusive or doing harmful things to other people. But I think it means that we're not immune to being exactly what they are. You know, we could easily be the people that are in their positions. If I've learned that anywhere, it's through fiction. That's the beautiful thing about reading fiction is that it puts you in the skin of someone that you're not a profession, that you're not a gender, that you're not a race, and a time in which you don't live. And I think what you learn from that is what it would be like to be another person. And it makes your pool of your in-group pool more inclusive. And so, yeah, it's hard for me not to be fascinated with everybody. You just have to dig deep enough. I mean, I think the biggest lesson in life is that the people around us aren't decoration in our little bubble. You know, our bubble is what we can sense around us, our perception. And people pass in and out of our bubble. And to us, they're sort of like props or decoration. And the more you exercise empathy, the more you learn that we're just passing through their bubble. And that every person you see, every car going down the road by you, the person in that car has their own goals for that day and for their life and their own dreams and ambitions and their heartbreaks and all these things that make them who they are. And every bit of that is as deep as what we have in ourselves. And I think that's so obvious that when you say it, it's like, well, of course, I know that. But operating with that idea in mind, day to day takes practice because it's very easy to slip into. My wife is my wife rather than the person who sees me as her husband. And she has her, you know, what does the world feel like to her? What does the world seem like to her? That's, to me, that's like the most important thing we can do in life is to have that sort of awareness by the people. And as a writer and as a reader, that's what it's all about. I mean, to me. Amazing. I mean, that was a perfect and beautiful and poetic end to our conversation. Hugh, I really, really appreciate you taking the time to join us and share some of your insights with our listeners that Unmistakable Creative. I have a feeling you're going to be a big head. Oh, thanks, man. Well, I appreciate the interview. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah. And for those of you guys listening, we'll wrap the show with that. Today's episode of the Unmistakable Creative has been brought to you by FreshBooks, a simple accounting solution for business owners who want to skip the headaches of tax time, no more hunting receipts, digging for invoices, or going through records one at a time. For a limited time, you can try it free for 60 days. That's two whole months to see how much more efficient it will make your invoicing process. Visit getfreshbooks.com to learn more. 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Why so few writers follow a traditional path
The role that our life experiences play in our writing
Saying yes to every opportunity to for adventure
Gaining it back when you've experienced a loss of faith
The importance of having a flexible career
Learning to question what we've been told and taught
Why living on a boat taught Hugh the value of patience
Inside the creative process of writing fiction
Why Hugh doesn't read things similar to what writes about
The importance of being committed to a creative craft
How 1000 true fans can radically transform your life
Keeping yourself constantly delighted with little successes
Why everybody has a story about their life

Hugh Howey is the author of the award-winning Molly Fyde Saga and the New York Times and USA Today bestselling WOOL series.

Why so few writers follow a traditional path
The role that our life experiences play in our writing
Saying yes to every opportunity to for adventure
Gaining it back when you've experienced a loss of faith
The importance of having a flexible career
Learning to question what we've been told and taught
Why living on a boat taught Hugh the value of patience
Inside the creative process of writing fiction
Why Hugh doesn't read things similar to what writes about
The importance of being committed to a creative craft
How 1000 true fans can radically transform your life
Keeping yourself constantly delighted with little successes
Why everybody has a story about their life

Hugh Howey is the author of the award-winning Molly Fyde Saga and the New York Times and USA Today bestselling WOOL series.

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