The Secret To A New York Times Best Seller – Tucker Max

number one rule to writing for myself at least what's the truth how can I actually get real truth colors shapes feelings in the body yeah I've never met a person that didn't have an interesting story in most creatives turn their suffering into art I want to write a funny story what do I need to be thinking great humor is speaking the truth that everyone sees and feels but no one's willing to say oh wow there isn't a formul for selling books Beyond today's guest is Tucker Max and you probably know him as the guy who wrote books like I hope they serve beer in Hell books about parties and drinking and sex going back 15 to 20 years and he's written now a bunch of Memoirs collectively they've sold I don't know something like 5 million copies and then he's also ghost written a bunch of Memoirs for celebrities and I asked him I said Tucker what is the key to writing a good Memoir and he said telling the

truth and of course you hear that you're like okay that's obvious David but really how do you tell the truth how do you not skirt your emotions how do you face your fears face your feelings and how do you get that sincere unencumbered truth onto the page because that's what makes for a good Memoir that is the essence of what makes for good stories so if you're someone you want to write your story you want to publish a memoir someday you're looking for guidance well we made this conversation for you

writing for me was the way to feel emotions in a safe controllable way at the beginning right which is why I wrote humor because that's what jokes are jokes are a way they a way to tell the truth and they a way to say what you're feeling but but distance yourself from it right like if you actually so many people had so many opinions about my books that didn't read them right but the people who read them why they love them so much is yeah there's like a lot of arrogance and a lot of nonsense and a lot of you know 20-year-old male Y and buffoonery but there's also a lot of vulnerability there's a lot of places where I'm like I recognize that I'm being destructive or mean or angry or something that's kind of toxic and I make I recognize it I make a joke about it and then I'm just like ah well whatever I don't know what to do so I'm going to keep going right that's comedians dude every you cannot find a

comedian who's not deeply wounded and isn't using comedy to deal with their emotions it's a productive way to deal stuff if you're not going to deal with it directly right and that I just put that in writing writing is a great way to deal with your emotions as well and to feel your emotions and that's absolutely what I was doing I was just I was only able to feel five or 10% of my stuff then you know you get to the point where you're like you're writing and you're like what do I say next you know and I literally it's like if I had my the Tucker mach's number one rule to writing for myself at least is whenever that question comes the answer is always whatever the truth is what's the truth and I made that commitment to myself very early on honest to God truth is because I wasn't that great of a writer like in terms of technical fancy sentences and I was good but I wasn't one of the greats at all and so I'm like

well how why is I even want to go to read my stuff and I'm like well everyone wants everyone wants to know the truth yeah like if you tell the truth people will stop and listen one of my favorite lines ever on this podcast is do you want to be interesting if so tell your story with uncommon honesty and I think

that's what you did that's exactly what I did even though I was totally dissociated and totally messed up emotionally in so many ways I told the truth about it the best I could in the moment right me bro when I go back and read my stuff now some of it it's still funny but then there's also like I'm like oh my God this dude is so sad and so messed up and he doesn't see any of it it's kind of funny meet people like this now who are at that stage in their life and like oh my friends tell me I'm just like you and I'm like you kind of are and I know what's I know your next 20 years is going to be like man it's not going to be super fun in certain ways um I feel so much compassion for that dude cuz he was suffering so much had no idea how to deal with it like comedians do it most creatives turn their suffering into art yeah right Memoir is one of the most powerful therap utic modalities that exists and

in fact David it's crazy so you know about like the social science uh controversy over the last couple years where like almost all social science replication replication crisis like 50 to 70% of them don't replicate right one of the most robust findings in the the broadest You Know Field all of social sciences prior to the replication crisis that has survived is journaling about your life has the best therapeutic tangible measurable therapeutic impacts is that right like the at UT pearlmutter has done most of the research or a lot of it not all of it but he's done a ton of it uh he like he and a couple other people in the field did a whole another Bevy of studies after the replication Christ came up and they actually look they scored a little bit better right so if you if you want to dig into your emotions one of the safest easiest but most impactful ways is writing about your life doesn't

necessarily have to be a memoir as a book right but um dude Memoir is one of the most effective therapeutic practices out there so when I hear that I say okay that's great for Tucker that's great for David but what makes a memoir take the leap from this is a really good journal entry that's going to help me to this is something that's going to entertain the reader first question I always ask people is why like I I'm a big believer everyone has a memoir in them and everyone would do very well to write one in their life but I never use the word should or have to that's shame based and I you have to write a memoir no you don't have to write a m like that's nonsense right that's just me trying to project what worked for me and what I like onto the world there I really do think it's a great thing to do and it's super effective and I believe it and I have proof in my life and literally thousands of other people I've helped

doing it but doesn't mean you have to that's not true but a lot of people want it like they feel like they want to and so I like to start there if you feel like you might want to write a memoir the first question ask is why why do I want to do this right and a lot of people actually haven't really which is fine they haven't unpacked explicitly to themselves well it's more of a feeling right which is okay but I like to get people to make the reason explicit to start going inside and feeling right and if you really break down all the answers there's kind of two categories Umbrellas of answers there is the I want to tell my story group right and those people generally what they really mean is I want to do some sort of therapeutic process to help me feel my emotions understand my life and my story and most importantly tell myself the truth about it the other umbrella and I I probably could to use harsh language but nothing

judge it's not a right or wrong umbrella I'm not trying to be judgmental the other umbrella is what I call the um the Legacy group right like they want to to leave you he people say I want to leave a legacy right which is great nothing wrong with that if you get on the surface and you really ask and and they're honest in their answers what they really want is they want people to think about them a certain way I was going to say control perception exactly see like even control perception true but I'm like ah I feel so judgmental I'm trying not to be judgmental about it uh because that's just me projecting my own stuff right uh I think it's it's a valid way to do it it's a valid desire um it's not where I am in my life right but that group of people they tend to be the ones who are like um you know like the CEOs of big companies or magnets of industry or this celebrities right yeah yeah I want to tell my story of course I want

to tell the truth my rule with them now I won't take a celeb Memoir one unless it pays a lot but then also like are you going to tell the truth right and um so when you're working with a celebrity bigname person we all know about them been on TV movies whatever and you're sitting down with them to get that information out of them how do you cross get beyond the sort of protective walls that we've built up so that you can actually get real truth the only celeb

book I've ever done who didn't make me sign in IND was T Tiffany hadish and that's the best one I've done and she we I caught her I met her before she really blew up in Hollywood and she kind of came from nothing and so she was it was just before the system got hold of her and made her understand you can't tell the whole truth if you want to get big and so she told if you go read the reviews on Audible audible specifically it's all these young black girls who like tons of them are like oh my God I had no idea celebrities face the same things I did the story was so inspiring cuz Tiffany I mean she talked about how like she married this dude who is so Vis physically violent beat her ass like police reports and like she went back to him like it was this incredible honesty about the mindset of a woman who comes from where she came from in a violent abusive relationship and it's just part of the book right

yeah and that that's why I did the book with her CU she at the time she was not a big star and there was there was no money in the advance and so I was like do you want to tell the truth she like yeah I'm like like okay if you're really willing to tell the truth and she did and that book was a joy every other CB book I've worked on I had to sign you know all these ndas and blah blah blah blah blah they sit there and so sincere cuz they're amazing Pretenders right and they they do like dude one of the ones I work with is as big a name as it gets and and this person is an amaz I believe this person believed that they wanted to tell the truth I do actually cuz like I I don't think you can fool me but you can definitely fool yourself enough that you fool me right and this person fooled me man we sat down and I and I I earned this person's trust and um they told me their whole story and it's incredible

their story is like it like it still to this day um hits me and then when it came time to actually edit no [ __ ] way bro all the BET like I mean it was like it was man it was Soul crushing to me in a which is part of my own I was investing too much in them and and and they wouldn't they wouldn't do it this is one of the Tucker Max core ideas right that there's really two things going on that we need to separate one is writing your Memoir and then the other is publishing your Memoir and there's actually three things you can do you can write it keep it for yourself then you can publish it share it with the world and then you can also write it and kind of keep it private print a few copies and share it with people yeah no that that's one of those things where when I tell people like they have an absolute Epiphany that they can't believe that they have three options in fact teach and when I teach

Memoir uh you don't have to publish it and in fact for many people they don't need to publish it to get the benefit right like what I don't like to work with the Legacy people nothing wrong with them right but I refer them to scribe um or or other people right because if you want Legacy then you need to work with someone who's who's they're what they want to do is get you into your book the way you want to look nothing wrong with that does not where I want to spend my time with the people who want to tell the truth as best they can who want want to look into themselves and look at their past feel the stuff they have to feel or they can feel right there's those I I'm not like oh you have to tell your whole truth man my whole truth wasn't accessible to me when I was 28 I told the I did the best I could right and now I'm not arrogant enough to think oh yeah I'm so enlightened I can I know everything

about me no I'm just going to do the best I can right um and so wherever you are do the best you can tell as much of the truth of your life as you can let's go there and let's do that and those are the people I work with but every so many people are so afraid to tell the truth because of the consequences of the truth and I get it there can be real legal consequences right or real social consequences and so we always start with the Assumption you uh uh don't have to publish it and you're not going to make a final decision on how you publish it until you're done with a manuscript right and and uh and that people that freeze people up and they realize oh this sandbox is mine and it's private and I don't have to show it to anybody I now have a space to be as open and free as I want and I'll deal with everything else later right and then when they kind of get their rough draft I'll read through

it with them you know if they want me to we'll edit I'll you know go through and then help them I'll talk through okay if you want to publicly publish it it'll help a lot of people you'll get these benefits here's the potential downsides uh and then they can make that that decision or if you want to just print 50 copies or 10 copies give it to your 10 closest friends but then your mom doesn't see it right and then your boss doesn't see it you don't have to worry about those consequences that's valid or you can put it in a drawer how do you think about structuring a me structuring a memoir because I mean if I were to write a memoir I'm just sitting here and I'd say I guess what I would do is I'd probably write out a list of things that happened but I have no idea what I structure it chronologically would I structure it in another way like there's so much how do I find the shape of this story it's a great question so and

really the number two question after we go through why are you doing this Y and get real clear which category Legacy or or or truth and uh then the next question actually before you get to structure what part of your life do you want to tell the story of right because

people have a lot of head baggage about like me am I writing a memoir and autobiography and like like the idea a lot of people have this idea autobiography is everything in your life and a memoir is a part of your life that's all I think it's all a nonsense distinction there is no possible way you can tell the whole story of your life cuz that would just be like like everything that happened in your life like even the most complete autobiography ever is not everything that happened in their life right totally so it's always a decision of what part of your life do you want to talk about and then someone like you and me a lot of people have lived big lives and a lot happened and and bro I wrote four Memoirs and they comprehensively dealt with a small section of my life like to the even when I was writing those books I'd meet people and they'd be like you're nothing like I would expected I'm

like what do you mean they're like well why aren't you drunk like under a table yelling at people I'm like bro it's 11:00 a.m. on Thursday like I'm wearing Whole Foods like what's wrong with you but they they literally couldn't conceive of of the fact that I had a life outside of what happened in those books right you can take very thin slices of your life you could write your relationship with your mom and nothing else and that probably will Encompass a lot of other things right but um so the next decision is what part of my life do do I want to tell like my whole life basically story understanding you always got to make decisions or do I want to talk about right a passage right do I want to talk about how I started it you know how I came to decide to end it how it ended all that that those are different books so first you start with what and I always Bri can't tell you how many people I'll tell them have you

thought that maybe you have three or four Memoirs to write that you could write and they'll be like oh my God I hadn't thought about that and then they're free to okay this will be my second Memoir this will be my third it's really interesting that you say that cuz one of the number one things I've seen talking to students is that what they get hung up on is early on if they're not experienced writers they just try to write about too much yeah they're like if they're interested in AI the history of artificial intelligence in the digital age when like a good piece is write about AI that and how it's impacting the robotics industry for manufacturing Rockets okay that is actually a good piece and once you can give people the I want to say confidence probably not the right word just the permission to just really chop off a very narrow slice of reality and focus on that the writing gets way better it

it it gets much better because it's

focused and now your your original question is now easy to answer how do I structure a memoir is easy if you say I'm going to write about the story of write a passage right then it's like oh well it started here it ended here and I'm going to talk about that chronologically is obviously the way to do it right so uh the the structure question is almost always answered by the what Memoir am I writing question you see what I'm saying yep um but yet no dude your your point about like so many people like oh I've got so much to write okay you can you can write about all of it eventually what do you going to do this time where are you going to start and what I've seen man is that people will start big they'll start writing they'll realize it's too big they'll pick a slice they'll chop off that slice they'll dive super deep into that they'll realize everything they thought they wanted to cover is actually

at least tangentially hit on in that slice they'll finish the slice they love it and now they actually want to keep going and they want and they realize oh yeah I can just do a slice at a t if you think about the great memoirists um almost all of them do that like uh do you remember Augustin Burrows he wrote like he wrote uh uh Running With Scissors which is huge like 10 20 years ago uh Donald Miller Mary Carr there's a most great Memoirs write three four or five Memoirs even if they have quote unquote boring lies where not a lot happened you can still unpack a very standard American Life e like in three books might not be enough to UNP because you've got yourself your family your interactions with your husband wife partner whatever like there's a lot to unpack so that is an important implicit point that you just made you don't need a Crazy Life to write a great M no not at all everyone saw down Abby right and

it it like down Abby is episod entire episodes where dudes are seriously upset about who the first footman and second footman is and who's putting the third salad fork down and like you couldn't imagine lower Stakes than that right yeah but doubt and Abby still riveting because those people really cared about that and you know we all know people who who who have a lot of intensely care a lot about low stake stuff and and they got really into what those people actually felt right and if you you can do the same thing with your life well also a lot of times the most simple things are the most relatable like you ever um you ever look at yourself in the mirror and you see your eyes like you look into your eyes you're almost like talk yourself up you're like all right you got this dude right like that's the most simple thing ever and it's very relatable because it is so simple but it's not impressive or Grand at all

so if if you're genuinely honest about your life it's interesting so few people are really honest like yeah hey how are you doing I'm doing great bro no you're not I no you're not like you can look at somebody like I know you're not doing good I know what's going in your life like you know and I don't know if you've had this experience I'm sure I bet you have but you'll meet somebody who like I can actually think of it a time this is in college the janitor in my um the dorm I lived in right he was this old black

guy seemed like just the most normal downto earth like average dude you could ever imagine and one time we were in the comment room and he was in there and it was like kind of late at night and me and a girl two girls were talking to him and uh I always he was such a nice guy I always joke with him I knew him pretty well the the other two girls like were very deeply empathic and they just I don't know what they sens or whatever they just started talking to him and asking him questions and he started telling us his life story bro it's the craziest story I've ever to this day it's a top five craziest story I've ever heard in my life right and he didn't think it was crazy right right it it's like this whole story about how he met his wife and you know dur like a civil rights movement and all all this CR and it was riting it was amazing we sat there for three hours and talked to this guy um and he just opened up to us for

whatever we probably because those two girls are just very empathic and he just felt safe with them and and um bro it was amazing I've never met a person that if you gave me enough time to talk to them and ask them questions didn't have an interesting story in them everyone has love heartbreak sadness disappointment Joy accomplishment it's all there for everybody right yeah some people did way more stuff that's you know noteworthy but this there is no life so small that it does not contain the entire Human Experience you know and you can put that down on paper in a way that's totally riveting if you're honest about your emotions it doesn't have to be the events it doesn't it doesn't at all so many people go like how could I write a book like yours like I didn't have crazy things happen I'm like bro half my stories are me going out and getting drunk and throwing up on myself and nothing else happens it's just my

experiences interactions and I wrote it up in a funny way and I let you into the inside of what was a miserable night for me when you were writing and you know you're living in South Florida at the time just been fired I guess from your dad's restaurant a law firm right before and you're writing these funny emails to friends what did you learn about what

constitutes humor yeah oh such a good question um you can always be funny if you're willing to make like point out an absurdity that you recognize right usually that means making fun of yourself right but a lot of people will take that too far where it's like they they turn themselves into a clown right and of course I did that at times like that's a normal thing my favorite way to teach humor and I'm not saying this is the best or the only way my favorite way is the Court Jester H right I'll tell you why do you know why the Court Jester Court Jester was a real role and has been for almost every aristocracy some form of a court jester right in the west we think of the Court Jester because that's the kind of European Aristo aristocratic model but there were other forms of that huh right do you know why the Court Jester exists no idea bro it's crazy and the history of it you can actually there's I can't remember the

name of the book and the jester is the only person who can tell the truth to the king without being killed great humor is speaking the truths that everyone sees and feels but no one's willing to say so you know you're actually being funny if especially in modern society you know you're funny if people are mad at some people are mad at you if everyone's mad at you you're probably just being an [ __ ] right right but like uh there's a ton of comedians now who are coming up I think Dave Smith maybe I can't remember all their names some really really funny ones really good ones who are speak truth to power now is them talking about like the absurdity of like uh Democratic power politics when I was coming up it was the other way dude 20 it's so crazy because I'm I'm old enough where I've seen the shift when I was coming up read my books making fun of like fundamentalist Christian Republicans they were the ones in power

and uh like they were the ones who were shaming comedians it's totally shifted now it's it's like the other side and and I like a lot of these comedians I know like they haven't changed I I my sense of humor hasn't really changed right and it's like oh those guys used to be the shamers now it's these guy it's crazy that's how you know who's in power is who's mad at the comedians that's what humor is if you uh I I should in general the other form of humor and these you can put these two together is absurdities Right which is not necessarily about power and that you can do that and that's funny and that's more of like a I'm not trying to be disparaging that's like a Mr Roger style humor right which is okay sure or Bozo the Clown or that kind of stuff circus style humor um but like the the Dave Chappelle Dave Chappelle has been speaking truth to power for 20 years and you can see who he goes after based on who he's not

allowed to go after it's totally changed so make this concrete for me so if I'm sitting down at my computer later this afternoon and I'm like I want to write a funny story a funny sentence what do I need to be thinking I'll tell you how I'm funny I write until I say something that is true and I know people are going to get upset or I know I'm not supposed to and then I'll think how do I make this funny huh right like this this is this is true and this could be funny you know like you know some the the the battle of the sex is always fertile ground for jokes right cuz there's so much stuff you're not allowed to say or that's taboo right so an easy place um anything like that man you know like that's where if you try to be funny you're going to force it but if you find yourself speaking truths you think might upset people or that some people would be upset by or would be counterintuitive or controversial that's where I put the

joke that's why the king didn't kill the jester because the jester say oh it's just humor I'm just joking oh well we could laugh about it and dismiss it Oscar wild if you tell the truth make them laugh or they're going to kill you that's he's talking about Jesters like he K Oscar wild came out of that tradition right um that's the European the Court Jester tradition and Oscar wild was that so what's going on when you're reading Memoirs and you're like let's take this the story is authentic yeah the story is worth telling they're trying to be be sincere but you read it and the story sucks what's going on CU

they're not they're not telling the truth they they are covering something dude it's so crazy I've gotten so good at the or so experienced at this authors in my program will say Hey you know do I need to send you like 50 pages you know to get I'm like no they're like well how much like 10 at least I'm like honestly two pages is probably more than enough I'll see everything into two like how could you do that when you have there's a great German term finger spiten G feel yeah which is like Robert Green made that yeah fingers feel um I have such a fingertip feel for Memoir I can tell if you're telling the truth almost couple paragraphs you know you can just tell are they it's not the truth like with a capital T like the you know the scientific you know facts it's more are they telling me what they actually think and feel and believe well it's crazy cuz I've gotten very good at identifying up incoming creators

yeah and people are like how do you know I can read one tweet dude one tweet if you give me three sentences I can tell who just who's switched on who has a way to communicate you get a little bit of distinctiveness originality and language and I'm like all right they got game yeah tweet dude it's 100 I don't know if I'm that good with Memoir I'm not that it takes me at least cuz it depends on the person Memoir is different yeah but two three paragraphs I'm with you yeah yeah 100% man 100% you can just feel it man are they really telling me what they think and feel and believe I'm see that's a important point I'm not sitting here telling you that my first book I hope they serve beer in hell was the truth now man I think I get almost everything wrong in there if I look back at myself I am a such a fundamentally different person in so many not always core thing truth has always been my highest value now it was then uh uh

sovereignty has always been my second highest value still now still then relationships are probably my third highest value now they probably weren't on the table then for me right so some things have changed but how I thought about the world how I thought the world worked what I thought were good goals how I live my life to fundamentally changed it's not that I got things right then I was right about the truth I just told my truth right that's all that's all anyone can do we've got a woman in my group right now she's a uh I don't get too many details great woman just started on her emotional Journey mhm she's telling her truth and it's nowhere near as deep as like another person I'm thinking about who's like really deep in done a ton of psychedelic medicine therapy like they're really switched On Emotion spiritually that person's 10 times deeper than the other one they're both I consider them both at the same

level because they're both telling the same amount of truth they're able to access for themselves does that make sense yep and she'll go deeper the the way she'll go deeper she'll probably write 10 Memoirs and the 10th one will be 50 times deeper than the first one but they'll all be great because they're her expressing her true self as she is in that moment when I spoke to Rob Henderson he said he talked to you and you said to him write about your scars not your wounds yeah yeah we that's the saying in our in our program is uh the

saying is actually right from your scars not from your wounds right um it's it's not no you should write about your scars and your wounds but write writing from Imagine you have a cut right and it's bleeding you can't really do much until you get that cut uh uh stop first stop bleeding then the appropriate you know treatment to make sure it won't keep bleeding in the future then let it heal right when it's scarred up you go back to working out or whatever right but if you try and work out let's say work out you're trying to work out with a bleeding wound on doesn't work right um same thing is true for Memoir so people have been through a lot of trauma in their life I'm one of them actually um uh uh ton of trauma if if I just start to access let's say my relationship with my mom right it was very very difficult um it was about four five years ago I really got into the depth of that and I had a lot of grief around that

relationship and so bro for a year it didn't matter what therapeutic Mo modality I did yoga MDMA talking to my therapist it nothing came up but grief it was always grief it didn't matter what I wanted to talk about it was grief if I had tried to write about my mom then it's going to be an emotional vomit of disconnected grief all over the reader you don't want to read that unprocessed grief that's not that's not yours that's nonsense that's mine I need to I need to heal my wound right now uh I'm literally writing about in my current Memoir I'm writing about kind of how I went from like old Tucker to you know Dad and father and Rancher and all this sort of stuff um I'm going to write about my grief but I'm going to write about it now from a healed place so I can look at it and say what I felt what those emotions were like how hard they were for me in that moment so writing from a wound is me vomiting

unprocessed emotion on you the reader like here take this you know like you have a conversation with someone like oh how you doing oh my God oh my God trauma like oh stop stop dumping your share on me right that's what writing from a writing from a scar is man my relationship with my mom was tough let me tell you how totally different do you ever have that thing where a lot of times remember a year and a half ago I was just going through something really hard and I sat up in my office and I was literally just in tears for like 3 hours and I wrote a few thousand words and even I go back to that night read the descriptions of the emotions I'm like I like what about Shakespeare like I don't know how I access that and the thing is now if I were to go back I I can't this is specifically with pain with pain I feel like I can't describe pain as well unless I'm in it yeah so when you're writing from your scars how do you get

to that pain it's the same thing when you actually hurt yourself right like the pain of you've you've just broken your arm it's been 15 seconds you're in agony what you're explaining then is so much more Vivid than what you can explain two years later how do you get back to that yeah okay so man that's such a good point no one's ever asked me this question it's a great question um when I say don't write from your wounds honestly the more precise statement should be don't publish from your wounds right I have a lot of journal entries that are

un unprocessed vomiting that's the place for unpro is your Journal right so if writing helps you bring something up and just bringing it up helps process it [ __ ] yeah do that that's not a blog post or a memoir though not a finished one right I started journaling in 2014 but I had like a three-month period in 20 2007 where I sat down every day and journaled and it was you're exact right when I go back and read that it is I was in deep pain there things were really bad for me some deep stuff was coming up I had no idea what to do or how to Pro I was stuff was coming up that I was totally unprepared for at that point if it came up now I could handle it I was unprepared and the only thing I knew how to do was write and so I journaled and uh it it I I don't want to say that writing was very good but there were a lot of deeply poetic resonant Parts in there I did a really good job describing

what the process I was going through when I go back and read it now I don't know about you man I actually go back to some of those moments like it's like that's why I couldn't David I couldn't read that for eight years yeah because reading it was so triggering it brought the stuff back up right so um if you want to use writing journaling as a means of processing emotion I think that's awesome all the reseearch we talk about pen Baker that's what that is that works I highly recommend it dump everything there that's a place to put it going back to it to use it as inspiration also good like what I'll do is I'll vomit it out on the page and it's really hard run to like I hate it I hate that I can very distinctly think of a couple of stories I've written where I hated that I hated doing it it was suffering it was awful cuz bringing up old emotions you pushed away for decades maybe is never fun uh you push it away

for a reason and then I I will just get it as fast as I can and then I'll come back to it and I will in essence process it by editing it you know if it's too raw for me to even feel through right bro there's a reason there's a lot of ways to kind of heal trauma and to get into that space and and access those emotions and bring them up I for me psychedelic medicine has been amazing because especially MDMA uh because it it it helps me feel loved and and safe and that which is something I never felt as a kid and and so then that stuff can come up for me right well I know people who didn't have childhoods like that they can get to that [ __ ] from yoga which is like I don't know how they do it but that's awesome good for them but like uh I don't like take MD man and go right but like if I hit something bad or something something bad something really challenging and hard for me that's what I have to do is either I I vomit it out

and then come back to it later or if I can't I will do an MDMA session I will let it come up and then uh like the next day um or sometimes if I do it early in the morning late that night uh I will actually write it still in that state you know um then when I'm ready to process essentially when I'm ready to turn the wound into a scar I will come back and edit that through and through the process of editing is how I think I turn my deepest uh most bloody wounds into scars man you're a good interviewer dude that's awesome that's really good it's funny because you know what we call what we teach in Memoirs we teach the first draft is called the vomit draft we tell people to and that's what we literally call it because of that like what what we're trying to do is to get people to vomit out to let all the cuts bleed on the page yeah bleed on the page the first time because often it's time it's only way to get it out

like when you're if you drink too much and you're vomiting like you just want to get it out right like you're not trying to make it right yeah that's why we call it a vomit draft but I hadn't thought about turning it from a wound to a scar is editing if you're choosing Memoir as your therapeutic modality as a it's not the only way of course right but that's what that process serves in Memoir Yeah Yeah you mentioned the word diary a few minutes ago what is it about

an Frank's diary that is so good what was she able to access a lot of the the things people tell you about kids aren't true one of the things that tell that everyone tells you that is true is kids don't give a [ __ ] they'll just speak the truth right because they don't know what they're not supposed to say yet or what's you know socially unacceptable and and my wife and I have raised our kids so that we all as much as we can we never get upset or shame them ever for telling the truth even if it's something like you know some friend will come over and my three-year-old will say daddy your friend's fat and I'm like well like but I don't get upset like I okay hold on there's there's other ways to say this it's um and and so uh but they will tell the truth they don't [ __ ] care man they don't care they don't give a [ __ ] I think Anne Frank uh was one of those kids who had those you can tell she had really pretty good

connected parents who cared about her the way she writes about them and I think she felt that love and that acceptance and her journal was her place where she knew she could at least be honest with herself right like so many so many people are not honest with themselves and they raised their kids to be that way at a minimum an's parents uh Otto I think was her dad's name raised uh her to be honest with herself and her journal was replaced to be honest with herself she wrote as a journal I don't think as a diary she never thought anyone would read it obviously and she's one of those kids she might even have been uh what we now think of as a little bit aspy right Asbergers you know where they're just you know aspy people like oh this this this this I love I love Asbergers people because I'm like that's right I know I'm going to get the truth from you you totally and so she may have been a little bit like that as well or

either either or or both and so her journal is just a raw unvarnished 12-year-old girl truth you know I mean she if you read the unedited version she talks about her period in there like she's just absolutely telling you what she thinks and feels and that's that's why it's good it's not it's not that well written she doesn't use flowery Pros she doesn't no one no one quotes there's no Anne Frank turns a phrase you know like there's a million Oscar wild turns a phrase right he's an amazing technical writer a master of language she's not a master of language she tells the truth yeah that book is the iconic example I give for everybody when they say but I'm not a good writer how could I write a memoir i saidan Frank wasn't a good writer and they're like oh yeah and like literally I want you to go read her book go read five pages and tell me a sentence that you remember like a a word choice or no you don't remember that's

what a great writer is is a master of language a great Storyteller is some in a in Memoir is someone who tells the truth when you say great storytelling how do you think about the pacing of stories what Emily and I teach in our program about story is we tell people we're not going to focus on teaching you how to be a great writer right like what you teach being a great writer is an important skill it's a great skill that can serve you so well in life but we actually totally discard that in Memoir because we want people to focus on story but the way we teach story is different than anyone else like if you're trying if you're a screenwriter you want to learn story um you're going to learn it a totally different way right you're going to you read you know save the cat or one of the you know the writer's Journey or one of those and they're going to teach an amazing structure and you'll write if you have the creativity

you'll write absolute killer screenplays what we tell people with story man is so simple What hap like we l have an we

call it an algorithm just so people will put it in their head there's three questions to tell a great story what happened how did you feel what happened next H how did you feel what happened next how did you feel in Memoir this is one of the key things to you got to understand about Memoir I'm not reading your Memoir to learn about you I'm not I you could be the most interesting famous person on Earth I'm still not reading your Memoir to learn about you I'm reading your Memoir to learn about me so if you tell the truth tell me the truth about you in your life I will me I will take those Reflections and be able to see myself clear like if you're deeply insightful about your journey like what we were talking about before we started right about you tell me about write a passage and you were really honest and insightful about what happened and and why you're closing it down all that and I told you bro this is

super interesting and you you didn't understand why because I a creative entrepreneur too and you were I can reflect myself and my experiences on your honesty and I actually can learn about my self from you if you're telling the truth but if you're if you're posturing if you're telling me things that you think are going to make you look good the that I'm going to be actually be able to get insight in myself are almost no MH you know I want to go through that algorithm so let's do one two three talk to me about each one yeah all right what happened it seems simple right except it's not that simple because obviously don't tell me everything I woke up today uh my phone beeped three times before I hit the snooze button then I decided do I want coffee or tea oh God stop it come on it's it's what happened that mattered right to you right what and and the cool part is you get to decide that you get

to decide what matters right which is we'll get we can get this in a second but one of the core things that I think make me more important to people as a therapeutic modality is you get to deci part of writing a memoir is deciding what your story is you don't get to decide what happened right like what happened happened my mom abandoned me my dad left a certain like I don't get to change any of that right I don't get to have a magical dad right I do get to decide what that means to me me though the events of My Life the Story I tell out of that um uh uh are both my actions and what I how I look at it that's optimism how am I going to look at this set of facts that is unchanging right okay what happens so you're you're deciding what to talk what's important what do what matters to me what events shaped me what what things do I still consider instructive what do I take lessons from how did you feel not what

did you think you're going to write what you thought anyway ah how did you feel because most people are going to cover the think anywhere but the way people avoid emotions is thinking generally speaking and for uh what the the quality the context the meaning in your life is all emotional it's all emotional all thinking really does is help you contextualize that help you uh it's sort of like a you know a spreadsheet versus a great glass of wine both are important right but they're not replacements for each other right you can I have friends out the spreadsheets of all their wine and all that sort of stuff right I'm like yeah but how did this one taste like what was the exper that's an emotional exper you can have both you can have the spreadsheet of your seller and you can also be deeply invested in your experience of that wine they're not it's not either or thing so but I want people to focus on how they felt because

that is how you get to your truth you know how did you even if even if a lot of times you don't understand what we see all the time is someone who tells them my story is ABC and they sit down to write and they keep writing how they felt and they realize wait a minute I've told myself my story is ABC but it's actually not it's actually afg oh my God that happens only all the time like really every time every time in Memoir uh it happened and in fact it just happened to me I've been stuck I've been writing my next mem I've been stuck on it and I realized I was stuck because I was trying I was writing from a legacy perspective I was trying to write Tucker Max's next Memoir instead of just sitting down and writing the truth of how I felt every sentence like if we tell people literally if you write one true sentence after another what happened how you felt what happened next what happened next is important because

it helps you start to see connections between events and emotions so it's not just what happened how'd you feel what happened it's like oh yeah I got hit by a car I felt sad then I you know like no no it's what happened next right cuz that that gets people understanding it's a cycle what happened next I felt this oh my God then I did this I didn't realize and then this and then this and now I can start to see the connections in my life that's why we call Therapeutic great therapy does that this is a th it's not a replacement for talk therapy with a psychologist but it's a therapeutic process right and so I was writing Tucker Max's next Memoir instead of true sentences and so we like we tell people if you literally follow that algorithm and write true sentences you are going to be able to get very deep probably deeper you've ever gotten right for most people um you're going to see your life in a new way and then also

you get to kind of decide what it means and then what you're going to do going forward too this is a I'll give you a really good example what it means so my parents um they didn't really sexually didn't really they didn't sexually or physically abuse me right but I had a very traumatic childhood cuz they were you know Boomer narcissists they basically abandoned me without like the white middle class abandonment right like where I was essentially alone as a kid growing up right uh in all shape emotionally and um that was really hard David and I had to go through all the talk therapy years and psychedelic work and all this other stuff to bring all that stuff up feel it you know like let go of the charge none of the events change right but I'm in such a better place but you know the way I talk about it now and this is true but it took me years to get here to understand this um writing about it and um and feeling it

they actually gave me a gift because they didn't mix a lot of love with their abuse most people um their parents really loved them the best they could but their parents were traumatized and so their parents dumped all their [ __ ] on like that's my wife right like like her mom's amazing and a sweet amazing grandmother an amazing woman but was like in certain specific ways a really shitty mom and dumped all her anxiety on on my wife Veronica and Veronica resents that but she loves her deeply and so they have this weird toxic LoveHate relationship right my parents didn't do any of that they just neglected me and so as a result I I'm so independent thinking and I'm such independent acting and so uh like I bro I don't I knew when I was three that Santa didn't exist like I don't it's why I like I am so such a true genuine critical thinker and why I'm so independent-minded and it's helped me so much in my life become a

competent formidable man right because I never thought I had to rely on abusers for love like my wife does y right it's been like a superpower now that superpower came with some downside right okay but like the story of my life is not my parents neglected me abandoned me and everything shitty the story was yeah they neglected they abandoned me it was hard but as a result I developed these other skill that they don't necess get credit like my dad's like yep I abandoned him and look how great he like you don't get credit for that Dad but like uh that's that's the story of my life that I tell myself and it is sad and and grief stricken and also super inspiring like any great story right and so that's the story and so I that's the story I right now I tell about my life and I've chosen to to act out hey I want to tell you about a new site that I built called writing examples we take writers like Seinfeld

warwell and break down what makes their writing so good if that sounds like it's kind of your thing we'll go to writing examples.com and if you go there you enter email I'll send you my three favorite additions right away all right back to the episode when you're wrting and that grief really comes up cuz I've had moments like this where I'm sitting down and trying to share something and I just like I just start crying like you you're you're you're just in tears and you're just you're sitting there it's it sounds so dramatic talking about it but it's actually so undramatic you're sitting there in a room alone and by yourself and it's like 10:00 a.m. and you're just crying and you're just trying to process something I'm laughing cuz I've done it

and you're trying to get the stuff out what do you do in that moment do you do you keep going you keep going bro it that is a major gift stay with it as long as you can the the way to you heal trauma right like go the iconic book on trauma Bessel Vander Kirk's uh body keeps the score right all trauma is you have an unprocessed OT a feeling you have not felt that is stored in your body literally right and and it it is is essentially think of it almost like a a PO a like a bag of not poison it is kind of because it's stored in there it shouldn't be emotion supposed to flow it's stored in there it's not flowing and it's like leaking some sort of lowgrade poison right and so what you're doing in that moment is healing yourself you are bringing a stuck emotion up and feeling it's not that you're not feeling grief in that moment for what happened in that moment right like you're not grieving because you're sat in your

apartment alone like that's fine you're grieving because your mom yelled at you when you were three and and you thought you were going to die he has a three-year-old right or whatever right and that's actually healing so the more you can stay in that moment with that emotion and and let it have its say so to speak you can let it go it doesn't mean the event didn't happen what what is causing the anxiety in you is is unfelt emotion that's anxiety is the body's response to to depression which is unfelt emotion people who love you and care about you doing their best can still totally unintentionally abuse you and and not even realize it and you're still carrying that potentially like they may not even perceive it as abuse bro I've been at sports games where dads are enraged yelling at their kids and like I'm like ah the kids are have therapy about that [ __ ] later yeah the dads honestly think

they're they're trying to help their kids got to toughen up he's got to get better he's the dad is preparing his child for a world he thinks he needs like there's not a bad guy there I mean the the don't get me wrong the dad's mistaken his dad did that to him it's coming downhill right um it's sad but who's the bad guy there no still abusive still traumatic not necessarily a bad guy so as these stories come up and I do 1 2 45 46 as I begin to shape my Memoir are you intentional about themes no no no all that does is confuse and [ __ ] up people even someone who's a great writer like you truly because then you start writing to the theme what I just told you dude I fell into this trap I'm one of the all right this sound arant I'm one genuinely one of the great Memoirs of my generation and I fell into this trap right I was writing Tucker Max's next Memoir I was writing to create a specific result

again that's a legacy style nothing wrong with that BR I teach truth I teach the tell your story method it's what I call my company and I was doing the opposite thing totally as soon as I realized that of course I laugh and I'm like oh dude but uh I wasn't focused on writing TR ask what happened how did I feel write the truth about it right which could be what happened next right I don't like to to to make that the write the truth about it is the algorithm it just tees people this is how you tell a story as you tell the truth and then it's easier for people to do it that way but I uh if you start thinking about theme if you start thinking about all that sort of stuff that is almost always a way to dist if you're writing the truth if your goal is to tell the truth that's a way to distract you from truth because if you just sit down and tell the truth there will be themes they will emerge your themes and but what's funny

is nine times out of 10 if you tried to tell me what the themes were ahead of time you're not going to know usually discovering them is an emergent process right now if we're talking about how George RR more Martin writes his novels probably totally different I'm not a novelist I don't novelists are a whole different thing like some novelists just uh they call it pancing they just I don't know I just create characters and write what they do I have no idea what they're going to do which actually blows my mind I've have no idea how you could do that crazy idea I know right but then a lot of other novelists like no no no no I like I I do whole character arts for all of them I do character diamonds I know who they are uh I do a basic plot I I understand how it unfolds yeah that's different you're talking about your story and your experiences what you felt right that's if you just write the truth you

will see the themes how do you think

about writing dialogue and accessing the truth of dialogue because you have this Triad where there's like fact fiction and Truth yeah and I was like wait how are those three different things yeah um when I teach Memoir to people we'll bring them in we have a whole workbook we work them through a whole structure basically what I'm telling you right now it's like everything we work them through and we don't teach them the structure of writing hardly at all we te them write clearly the basic the absolute Basics right simple and clear you know clear as Clarity is kindness that kind of stuff and that's it that's all we we teach because what I've learned is if I try and teach them how to write for Memoir I'm only talking about for Memoir if I try to teach them how to write uh how to do dialogue how to do this how to do that they get it gets in the way of Truth and I would rather them develop their own style in

this in the Journey of writing their Memoir than try and teach them all the different styles or how to do them because some people will be like me and they they'll write dialogue books like the whole goddamn book is a dialogue which I love that's like what I do right I love that that works great if I try and teach people that no man we've got like the woman I was talking about earlier her entire she's one of those people like um reminds me of uh Anna Green Gables like everything's in her head there's almost not the the entire book is in her head right which is fine that's a totally valid way to write there's no dialog she has no dialogue in it it's here's what happened here's what they said here's what I said but it's all like it's all she's writing as if the thing is contained in her head I write describing scenes both are totally valid and both can be awesome and I don't want to push people to either one

right so what I like to do in our program is once their style emerges I help them get better at their style right oh I'm like oh okay you're a dialogue person great whatever my my partner Emily is much more of an inner head person not all that so she helps those people get better at their style I cuz what the style doesn't matter man like it doesn't we're not I don't care like this isn't a football team running a a wishbone offense we got to run that offense no dude you get to pick your style how do you express your truth best go so when you see B bad dialogue is the problem is it's just not true yeah bad dialogue is usually someone trying to make a character sound a certain way right I almost never see bad dialogue in Memoir unless they're lying to themselves right because in Memoir if someone in my group the people I work with if they really are are dedicated to truth if they're writing dialogue it's

just because they remember what the person said and it's what they said the applied question might be something like if you don't remember the exact words but you definitely remember the conversation the tener of the conversation how do you write a conversation out of that that's a different skill right I do that for sure like I for sure have stories that I wrote where I wrote out a lot of the dialogue and and I'd be a liar to say I have a photographic memory of every single thing everyone said but I wrote the dialogue the way I remember it and bro I've had people do this this is true uh like there's a a story about Texas in my first book and and the guy Doug who was with me the whole time um he read the story he goes I'll never forget this he goes yeah this is true this is what happened but this is not at all how I remember it but think about that statement right this is the truth but it's it's not at all how I and he was

mainly talking about the dialogue and he'd be like i' like what do you mean he's like ah well this person said this and there other person said this I'm like that's not how I remember at all and so like I kept it the way I had it and it's not I didn't lie right this is a big thing a lot of people get stuck with what if someone else has a different memory of something I write okay but there are always three truths

Your Truth my truth what actually happened the truth right I don't believe we as humans have perfect access to the truth now I totally believe that an objective truth can exist I believe humans can do a really good job uh accessing it getting it you know asymptotically close to it like sure you know if you can put a man on the moon or Elon Musk can launch a booster back then clearly we can get really close to some like clearly that that's that's Pro but if you're talking about social interactions um and there's actually good psychological studies about this where people they'll have an interaction that's very filmed everyone will write about it they'll write completely different things and no one's actually lying they're just completely different views you see this in reports of car accidents exactly and what I would posit is that the more emotional the experience the more varied the recollection exactly and so what I focus

on with my students is I tell them look um I don't care about the truth with a capital T because I'm not a cop I'm not that's not what this is about right if there's people who that's their job and that's cool they can care about that I I care about you telling your story your story not your mom's story not your dad's story not your boyfriend's story I want you to tell your story and I'm here to help you tell your story how do you think about originality like originality like do I need to be original in my Memoir oh you know there's been a thousand memoirs about families and relationships with d like do I really need to write the 10,000th one of those no you don't need to right the question is do you want to yeah uh there is if you tell your truth I don't believe you can write on original Memoir h s like and I mean that literally and

figuratively I don't think it's possible to write an unoriginal Memoir and if you think about the best Memoirs meaning the ones that have impacted the most people that have sold the most that are the most resonant West With the Wind you know barel uh oh my goodness the writing in that is unbeliev amazing life and amazing writing but bro I would tell you I could actually we're not going to do this cuz it would probably be tedious I could go through Page by page with you on West with the wind and I if she were a client of mine she were in my group I would hammer her she has a crazy good story she is a very good writer she is avoiding her truth and she is writing using her writing to hide from her emotions is that right oh bro a lot in there a lot a lot there were at least huh oh man I hope I'm not EX but I think it's like 50 times when I read that book where I'm like well what happened here

how did you she'll like uh me we talking about like um a couple of times interaction she was having with with people or whatever and she'll just skip over the and then they like rob me or whatever then this and then like she then skips like the next event I'm like bar what happened like how did you feel about this what H like like what's going on like she's she a lot of people who have super uh eventful lives are very emotionally dissociated ask me how I know right like my life right now on a day-to-day basis is pretty boring but it's really healthy like when I was 28 it was really exciting not very healthy obviously it's you don't have to it's not a a must but that is people who H who are very in a lot of emotional turmoil very dissociated uh will run from their stuff by okay external right uh I mean how many superachievers do you know are that way because they don't want to sit with their emotions in a room for an

hour almost all of them see the man in the mirror sometimes oh dude ask me how I know how was that dude too and so uh so I like I get why she's doing it right like it's not a knock on her like in fact she's the example if you wanted to look at um someone who's a great writer has an amazing story but doesn't go very emotionally deep but still worth reading it's still a good book how do you think of titles because I was thinking of I hope they serve beer in hell yeah that is not on the formula of that title I don't think it's on any recommended formula but it's an insanely cool title I mean it's just wait what okay I got to go pick this thing up how do you think

about that um the most important thing for a title is that it makes you want to look inside H and there's a there's honestly 10 ways to get there right but uh the title especially in the world we live in where uh there's a million things trying to get your attention the title has to get your attention first and foremost and you know like H how do you get attention something counterintuitive something clever something a clear benefit like there's a lot of ways to get attention yep but um first get attention and then second the the second best thing is it makes you it gives you some idea of what's in that book in an engaging way like you don't know what I hope they serve beer and hell is about but you're like okay hold on I have a general idea kind of what that might be about and it's interesting let's go yeah it's going to be kind of a bender scary close hm what's that you know Snakes on a Plane I always think of just

immediately sounds terrifying and riveting exactly right now you don't have to have here's the thing with the Memoir don't have to have a great title huh the Diary of an Frank not a great title I don't think educated is very good title not at all terrible title um you West with the win what does it mean I don't know like I don't care about going west or the wind um uh you don't have to because all books this is true for all books but it's 10 times more true than memo you don't sell the only way to sell books is Word of Mouth huh all the fancy marketing plans all that stuff that what that can do is help you get the first five or 10 thousand readers if the book sucks it will fall flat if it's good it will spread that's it bro I've sold I've sold four million myself I've helped Tiffany I helped Tiffany sell a million I've helped other celebs okay talk about sell more than that and uh uh that bro

if there was a formula to this I'd be selling that formula for a lot of money and other people would be too it doesn't exist there isn't a formula for selling books Beyond write a great book get it seated with uh your initial readers and let it spread wordl people bro I I for years I thought I was a marketing genius because of I hope they serve be and hell I'm old enough mature enough now wise enough to realize I'm not a marketing genius at all I wrote a really honest funny Memoir that was the right thing at the right time yeah and it took off how

do you think about the audio book for Memoirs I would say that actually the audio book is might be more important for the Memoir genre than any other one I think of mcc's book like that book green lights is incredible the audio book in a way it's okay the physical book but it's that you hear him talk about trips to Australia and all these funny things that happened and when I think of a memoir I think about I'm going to read something that's going to help me connect with the writer person and audio books really hearing their voice the voice is instrument of course he's good at and the voice is such an instrument of connection that the audio book seems particularly suited for this genre again very insightful great question um I read all my own audiobooks and the only reason I did that is because at the time Publishers were paying authors like five grand to read their audio books now they don't but

that was you know years ago and so I was like [ __ ] yeah I'll make five grand more great yeah and I don't think I have that great of a voice like in terms of uh like I'm much cooler on paper usually I'm I'm I'm pretty cool in person but I'm way cooler on paper yeah so I didn't I didn't want to read the Audi book I I wanted to have like I don't remember what actor I had in my head but someone had a cooler voice like the white version of Samuel Jackson should be reading my audio book right whoever that would would have been and but no they paid five grand so I did it but I had a ton of people tell me they loved my Audi books because what I did and it was funny cu the producers hated it and they would try and cut it out and I I said no no I'm not I wouldn't let them I I as I'd be reading my stories I would laugh sometimes when like things would be happen that i' remember yeah and I would put in these little sides oh man I

remember this this was so bad and then like I would I would read the text people Lov that of course they did of course they did bro more than any that actually shocked me I didn't know that was going to happen yeah so by the time I got to my third and fourth audio book then I I I I was fully on board with doing that and being that way you're 100% right the author should read their own Audi book if at all possible did you

listen to David gagan's Audi book like he's obviously a brilliant dude but like uh he he sound he reads slowly and kind of like stilted like you know like the kid that you make fun of in class would read like if you're an [ __ ] right um he reads like that and so he didn't want to read the audio book right like it's going to make him sound bad I'm bro I get it I'm with you he's like all right well what if we get my writer like his the guy who did the all the line work with him Josh what if we get him to read the chapter and then he interviews me at the end of each chapter and I honestly at first I like man I don't think this is going to work and I gave him a couple reasons why I wasn't going to work and he had really good answers I'm like okay let's try it you know what let's try it and then we eventually settled on a five to 10 minute interview at the end of each chapter bro it worked so good one

of the to me the big fo Paws that make Memoirs not work is when you try and I'm gonna tell my life story but I'm also going to tell people what to do right I'm gonna I'm gonna teach lessons no no no your Memoir is your story and you can talk about your lessons and what you learned all you want but don't point the finger outwards at the audience and tell them what to because that's just not only emotionally is that you distracting yourself from yourself but also is very disconcerting to the audience and David wanted to have lessons in his book and and and we got him that he understood pretty quickly that no he put the lesson have tell your story then put the lesson at the end as a separate section and so he combined the lesson part of the audio book with the interview and bro it was so good it it was I've heard that from everybody I'm telling you if you got a drive coming up yep buy that audiobook

listen audiobook even if you've already read the book you will take a lot from that audiobook that you did not get in the Memoir because it's not it's not in there it is genuinely a different piece of art and it's way better well one of the things that to tie these threads together we talked about your title I hope they serve beer and hell we talked about the audio book your kind of not supposed to do that yeah when you were talking there did it anyway and what shows up when it comes to voice when it comes to writing is there's all these conventions that people think that good writing means surrendering to yeah rules what nonsense what nonsense that the things that we saying created connection that people just loved and adored it just came from saying you know what this is right for me this is right for my voice and once again this feels particularly true for Memoir writing so

in our program what we tell people is there's one rule for Memoir there's one rule do what works for you even if we're all trying to get to the peak of the same Memoir Mountain there are an infinite number of paths up there yep you can follow someone else's path it might work really well for you you can carve your own path you can half and half whatever as long as it gets you to the top it's a valid path MH when you're working with writers they come to you they say tucker now I got to actually get this thing out and I don't have a writing habit what do you tell them my program is only Memoir and it's only for people who want to tell the truth of their story it's not for the Legacy people right Y and we kind of we help them understand which one they are if they're a legacy person we push them to scribe or or somewhere else and and and if they want to write their Memoir they usually are already on board with

creating a writing habit because we don't do ghost writing either I don't do any ghost writing like if you want me to go well that's not true if some big person wanted to come in and pay me a million or $2 million that goes right their Memoir and they wanted to sell the truth I I I I may may not take depending on who they are if I think it's going to be enjoyable um and they're I think they're really sincere then I I'll probably take the gig but gig but we're not like I'm not trying I'm not soliciting ghost riding gigs right y like I want people who want to write it themselves they want to tell their story they want to tell it honestly and they want to write it once they're already in that headp space I don't have to convince them to have a writing habit right so then it's just teaching them how to create a writing habit and so really what I do man I make it we get super granular I'll tell you exactly how

we teach it first we you know Hey listen you know you got to have a right habit yeah Okay cool so then it's like what days and times do you want to write like literally and then we go through why morning tends to be advantageous if you can make it work how long in your day

should you carve out we we recommend for most people an hour if uh to two hours not more than three because uh even if you have the time um it's almost impossible to be productively creative uh Beyond three hours you can't do it no right maybe one day like I haven't written a while of but there's no way you can do it day you can't sit down at a table for four hours and write for four straight hours every man Isaac people like what about Isaac aam off it's like bro there's a reason he's Isaac I like stop it you know come on when I was doing this for a living in nothing else I was I blocked out four hours and I was lucky if I got two and a half in those four totally most people have enough shame and enough betrayal and enough condemnation they don't need any more coming from me right we like to take Emily and I both a very uh there's there are there there's a firmness here but it is couched in caring compassion

empathy understanding this is a hard process H you don't need to make it harder let's make it as easy and enjoyable as possible while yeah you know I don't want to go the other way too oh yeah everything's fine everything's good you can do anything you want like yeah I'm not that touchy fely either like yeah there's some boundaries and there's some you know some things you need to do but but inside of that let's make it as easy and fun so what do you tell people when they just can't sit down to write they're just not doing it oh I'm not WR or something like that David no [ __ ] on my Memoir part of why I started my uh my Memoir coaching company this is the God's honest truth I was uh after I sold scribe got s my Ranch to my family everything's good I'm like all right I need to write it's time for me to write my not need to it's time for me to write my next Memoir everyone like you know how did you go

from beer and Hell tuer Max this guy I like it's a crazy story there's a lot there uh I want to write it it's time to write it I sat down to write it I wasn't getting anything done and I know all the tricks I know all the techniques literally all of them I went through the entire Bevy one of the last ones at the bottom is a forced accountability right so where you make a public commitment or do something with a group that kind of forced accountability right because it's just a high effort thing right and so that's it's at the bottom of my personal list of the tricks I use to get myself going if I feel stuck and um so I'm like all right I'm going to teach people Memoir and I'm going to commit to them that I'm going to write my Memoir with them so that's what's very different like with my group is I'm not just their coaching and Mentor I'm writing my Memoir with them and they get to see my

rough drafts like not just like my finished stuff which when it started off I had you know I don't know uh 10,000 words booked I'm like okay I'll Dole this out the first couple weeks and so so I don't have a lot of pressure I'm like you know I'll be able to stay ahead of it didn't work that way dude I got behind man and so then what ended up have it like by about the third month I had to start showing them my really raw like vomit draft stuff that was just garbage dumpster fire which all r i get rough drafts are always have a level of of uh of raw to them but these were like my really really rough stuff right that I hadn't even like I wasn't that embarrassed or ashamed cuz you know they all love me they're all like we all work we all know each other you know once they join the group and stuff so they were a great crew but I was just like man I can't believe I have to show this to people like I wouldn't even show this

to my wife it's just not ready right but it's what I have it ended up being one of the best parts of the program and now I've actually solidified some of those drafts and make it part of what people read when they on board because I didn't of course as soon as it happened I was like oh but I just didn't think about it ahead of time so many of these writers think that like the fancy publish writers like you or me or whoever like we we just [ __ ] out gold right trust me that is not the case we of course but we tell them this they don't believe us they don't believe us dude they don't they look at my books and they read them and they see how polished they are they read David goggin or they read whatever and they're like this is so good I could never do this and anyone who did this is could never be where I am even if they don't tell you that that is their belief and then they saw my truly and these are

real like I wasn't yeah like I didn't have anything else to show them and I committed I was so I had to show them my shitty stuff bro they were blown down of course yeah like one of the dudes who's in England I'll ever forget he goes M this is right [ __ ] go this is [ __ ] and I'm like yeah dude I know like he did you really need he goes no no I'm not criticizing he goes I didn't believe you when you told me I didn't believe you and now I can see it you he was so energized and excited he goes oh I can get where I'm going I can do it I believe it now because what you just wrote looks like what I write mhm I'll have broken sentences and paragraphs and like I will wake up in panics and even last week I was in New York and I I I had something to do Friday and uh I just woke up I I I went through a walk in Central Park and then I really didn't want to work on it so I like got myself a coffee and then I got

myself another coffee and then I got myself an e on water cuz like oh if I could have a fancy water able to write you know like like just like I could even do Dan I needed e on so I could have a good one then I went to the flagship Apple Store and like got some headphones cuz I was like okay I'm going to talk this one out like I need literally to buy buy headphones so that I could properly do this I walk at Central Park I do it I then like I can you not sleep for two hours to keep procrastinating then I end up writing it like that night after dinner with a friend shipping it a day late and the whole thing was an absolute disaster I really didn't want to do it and that's what it is it's like this that particular was a letter a final sales letter for r a passage and I was just so reluctant to do it yep well I started the accountability group and then uh then I got stuck so to come all the way

back to your original question what do you do when you're stuck right and uh I it got to the point where I couldn't I couldn't even write a bad draft like I was genuinely like my body I I'm in touch with myself enough to know now my body is a n dude like the the next step is you're going to get sick oh wow like I'm going to make you sick uh so you can't get out of bed so you wake the [ __ ] up yep and so um I did the last sort of pull in case of break glass in case of emergency thing and I I told them and I was real honestly guys I need to take a break not from the group I'm going to be here teaching you guys mentoring uh my capacity as coach is easy I love it it's fun that doesn't change I need to take a three-month break from writing and so you aren't going to get drafts from me for three months and I'm sorry I know like I promised you'd see all my drafts so it's not like I'm holding it back I'm not

going to write if I write anything I'll show it to you immediately I just don't have I need to give this to myself they of course I'm like I'll give you guys refunds if you feel like this is like a betr like no no they're like was amazing and um it was great and then uh Emily who's my partner in the business I told some story on one of our support calls about my kid and she's like you can't just write that down yeah I was like all right fine so I wrote that out it was a good story and everyone loved it and now I'm slowly coming back and I'm like you guys just need to give me permission to let let me come to this as I as I'm able instead of having to rush back like yeah of course and um and then it's ended up being a great teacher for them because what what part of our program is once you join the program uh you are in it until you're done with your Memoir and I don't care how long it takes because

that's the thing is like I can't say Hey listen go deep be emotional put your whole story as much you can on the page and then be like ah you got six months to fear your emotions David like that's [ __ ] right it doesn't you can't you can't have it that way if it's like a non-fiction book and you're writing a sales page yeah I could be like let's go dude you're on the clock right not emotions not fair not how it works and so um what a lot of them I think were pushing themselves and pressuring themselves they've seen me take a break they got to a hard play they took a break what they two weeks then they came back they like feel refreshed they realize this is not a rush there's no emergency you get to take the time you need yeah right and some people are like bro they're churning out tons of and stuff they're just they're at that space right I have those spaces too where I'm 3,000 words a day yep effortless um and

I think honestly the realization I had last week was that was the thing it was man I was trying to I was trying to create a result I was writing for legacy without realizing it I wasn't sitting down and writing true sentences and it was just the last week I've sat down and started writing what is a true sentence that's funny it kind of comes back around what you talk about I've been going back to my journal my 0 journal and then my 14 Journal looking I I'm not actually ready to write about this stuff in 07 like the stuff where I vomited out the deepest wounds even though I've processed a lot of that stuff in my life I think editing that is going to be another level of processing that I just wasn't ready I'm not ready for today and so but today I can write about like when I started talk therapy with my psychoanalyst in like 13 or 14 like I started that's when I started my journal was when I was working with her and long

before psychedelic medicine whatever and now started writing dialogue it's just L I'm not even worried if it's going to go in the book whatever it's like what were the the the sessions that I remember the most that were impactful like the time that like she broke my [ __ ] brain about like uh if I wanted to basically like I was saying I wanted a girlfriend and then a wife but I everything in my life indicated that all I really wanted to do was hook up and she asked me a bunch of questions and got me there and I was like and I melted so I just wrote that the dialogue that I remember that interaction right I don't know where it's going to go I'm not sure it'll be in the book but I don't know and then stuff like that so when I'm writing about emotions what are some of the things that I can focus on so that it doesn't feel like a trauma dump but it also feels real yeah well like we said

before if you start with a trauma dump it's okay like your first draft is for you right your vomit draft is for you it's for no one else right so it it what that's actually one of the problems if we're talking about writing emotions specifically is that I face and a lot of other even new writ new writers and experienced writers is they try to get it out edited almost like it needs to come out good it's why we teach the vomit dra draft method especially for emotional writing you've got to give yourself permission to give to to put out sentence fragments and nonsense and garbage it that's a lot of times what it feels like inside of you right this is why like what we were just talking about with the the the the people in my pram would see my true vomit draft messes and be like oh wow that's just like mine right and so that's that's a totally valid thing now that being said what are some other techniques you can use to

help you identify those emotions and describe them right because emotions

emotions are inherently non-physical non-tangible things you're describing the impacts of them not the thing right so it makes it hard so we like to start with the most teaching this the most fundamental thing like literally it colors shapes feelings in the body like my hands went numb my legs were jittering I I felt uh butterflies in the stomach I felt nauseous hands are sweaty right sweaty hands like what texture right uh so what a lot of people call Great writing is actually someone who's channeling a trauma response effectively So like um uh if I were to let's say I was super nervous in this this interview and I were to write about it I would say you know I I rubbed my sweaty hands on the what do they call it like the felt whatever the name for this sort of fabric is there's a name for it the sort of felt veneer uh and it made me think about you know like the manufacturing process of blah well I I go down rabbit

hole but the point is I'm describing these little yeah yeah this Bay yeah is that what it's called yeah how the hell do you know that's amazing cuz I have well that's sort of like a bay couch these are Bay chairs I have a bay couch at home I love this texture okay that's amazing that you knew the name of that a lot that's a lot of people think great writing is knowing the names of something it can be if you're good at that and that's your thing right I don't know the names of anything I'm still a good writer it's just like well the way I would explain it is this is the kind of couch that a cat's CL claws would really get their hands into that's so good you know it feels like a c a couch that a that a cat had already scratched up yeah but that's actually the way it came it's called B clay whatever and then I can I'm when someone's feeling a high-intensity emotion usually what they it's called

tunneling right or Port holing they they get super into the like everything becomes hyper aware right I feel the fabric I feel my my the oils and sweat on my skin going into the fabric I feel like whatever what that does is Anchor you in the experience and in the then you can start thinking okay as I'm rubbing this and picking at it like my cat would do what is the like uh you know how's my body I'm tense my muscle my upper arms are tense so you know this that I can feel me constricting my hamstrings holding me in the chair right things like uh like uh uh what your body's doing what what is your brain thinking about right which is one of those things what do you mean what am I thinking about it is a super normal thing in in uh high intensity situations to have either flashbacks weird references uh weird thoughts you know like whatever put those on the page right so literally go through what are you seeing

in the room you know like I can describe the plant the greenness of it uh I didn't realize it was fake until halfway in the interview but I wasn't looking at it but the point you know like all those sorts of things that's a way to what you're trying to do is Center in the experience MH and here's the key thing it's just a bunch of very simple observations like the cat thing actually comes from like my four-year-old self there's no fancy words there it's just like this is the kind of chair that it kind of looks like the cat ripped it up no right but see what people would say some people I think would say is I never would have thought of that you didn't make that reference it doesn't need to go into your book you did though right so all you're doing is bringing up and making explicit the references you're making in your mind the connections in your mind I would think about something else right I can that's also good

writing it's not about how do I sound fancy what's going on in my experience so many people who try to be good writers as I'm sure you know or even in their Memoir they think they're supposed to be good writers so they try to sound fancy instead of just sounding like themselves and being honest about what they're thinking and feeling mhm every great story is three second incre increments described completely back to back that's all the story is final question one of the things I found very interesting as as I was prepping for this is this concept that after somebody picks up your Memoir you have to keep selling them and that's the job of an

introduction it's not to just explain what the entire book is it's actually to keep pitching them to they've already bought the book with their money now they got to do it with their time and that's what you're trying to get people to do I really Hammer that idea home with non-fiction books for sure like an instru like if you were write a book how to write a book or how to write or we're working Emily on the book how tell your story how to write a memoir you know like a that time uh we're going to hammer that like it's a constant sale to get them without being saly right yep Memoir I think you do the same thing but the way you do it's way easier um I think all you have to do is keep telling the truth you know great movies will start right in the middle of a super intense scene like somebody's holding the gun to their head scena Royale it's exactly like that it justar I remember being in the movie theater like holding

the chair it's just riveting right at the beginning they're like running on beams 300 feet above the sky you're like whoa here we go start right in the middle of the action it doesn't have to be the most intense action but very intense action and then um start there tell that story not to completion just like sort of like you like Casino R Great tell it to like you get this still you may have wondered how I got here like that kind of without literally doing that you tell and then you're just kind of like okay this is part of my story this is whatever um I'm going to tell you the whole story now and then you generally this is almost if said you would ask me what's the one Memoir structure that I can use forever that will always work this is it start your don't start I would born a young boy on a ranch no no no I'll start this boring start start with a an very intense scene maybe even like the culmination if you

want start in that scene start in the intense moments y

like I bro I will tell you you can actually pull this up right now if you want and read it the the book that does this the best I've ever seen this ever seen it it's called redeployment by Phil clay we [ __ ] dogs we shot dogs not [ __ ] [Laughter] them we shot dogs not by accident we did it on purpose and we called it operation Scooby I'm a dog person so I thought about that a lot are you not in on are you not in on this book now yeah yeah yeah totally like that is one of the greatest and he talks about the specifics of shooting the dog first time was in yeah you didn't think about it the thinking comes later when they give you the time dude like I I I'm not exaggerating I remember I someone sent me an excerpt from that and uh it was I was I had a meeting like I read that and I finished the the look inside function yeah and I bought the book I canceled my meeting and I I kept going you can't

have a book that's constantly at that height of emotional impact but you it's got to go up and down in Cycles that's just what stories do right right but the book it keeps going like it keeps going like that it's super super uh uh engaging the first chapter it kind of falls off a little bit towards the end but um I read the whole book I read the whole book because that I was so gripped by that intro and by that first story you know well so Eric Jorgenson is now the COO of scribe company that you founded and I was at his uh lake house and he walks in he goes David I I got a book to you you got to read yeah and I go what's it called go Sean trom and I go okay tell me about it he goes like it's a thousand pages and I go no absolutely not he goes I'm just going to read you the first the first sentence here it is it took me a long time in most of the world to know what I know about love and fate and the choices we

make but the heart of it came to me in an instant when I was chained to a wall and being tortured damn true damn I know bro what I had the I read Sean from and the follow-up book because of that I'm with you it's exact he's a great writer I think he's totally [ __ ] up I think he is in completely emotionally dissociated and there were 50 time a 100 times in his two books where I wanted to shake that [ __ ] and be like dude feel your emotions deal with your tra your emotions but an amazing writer an amazing Storyteller I read all of both books some people have debated whether any of those are true or not I I take them as memoirs I don't really care that much about the truth of it um uh they were so honest and so deep and that even though I uh Greg Gregory David Robert is Fred me so much but I didn't get mad at him uh I still loved him I still kept breeding because he was honest even if it's most [ __ ] up he

just he told the truth all at least it felt like the truth I don't know him I've never met him I don't know any of the facts of his life that book read and felt like the truth at all moments at all moments that 2,500 Pages or whatever both books are you read them because you always feel like you're getting the truth and the truth is always compelling that is how you sell someone constantly to finish your Memoirs you just keep telling the truth no one's going to stop yeah like why you don't ever stop listening to it's like a great conversation like this I'm telling my truth you're telling your truth it could literally except for the demands of our body in the outside world go on for it there we go cut that was fun man that that was great good stuff