Plotters vs. Pantsers

Ezra: Like the idea of of being s of surprising myself at w the progress of a story. I think I knew this already, but I'd forgotten that Aristotle, aside from coming up with the plotting structure that we all follow today, also thought that women were deeply inferior to men and had less teeth than men. He believed that women had less teeth than men. Hey there and welcome to PubCrawl, the podcast about imagining, writing, editing, designing, publishing, and marketing your book. It's Thursday, September 24th, today's episode Planners vs. Panters. I'm Ezra Palmer. I'm the author of the novels Catbirds and Handsome, and I'm joined, as I am, every week by my friend and co-host Dan Greenberger, the main character of today's episode. He's the author of The Boys Next Door, a novel about the Beatles. Hey there, Dan. How are I'm good. I'm good. Now wait am I the main character or is it the main character energy? I just thought today I'm gonna make you the main character. That's why I I did mean, of course, to say the man with main character energy, and I I I hung up on that. All right. Well now I will take I take full responsibility for today's episode because because yeah, we had a little ⁓ we had a little disagreement on what the topic would be, and I think mine prevailed, so I know it's all on my back. today. It is. And if if today's episode sucks, you can blame me completely. And if there's a broad interest out there for an episode about identification numbers as in ISBNs, ASINs, I N S I's and L L C Ns, I am ready to go. I have a whole collection of information about this and Dan thought it was just too nerdy to do. Yeah, it was a little bit of a nerd alert there, but maybe maybe that's our audience. Who I'm to say next week. I'm looking forward to doing this soon. When I get a guest host, the next time you go away for ⁓ two and a half months, I'm digging right in. ISBNs, here I come. So so Dan, if we're not going to talk about ISBNs, what are we going to talk about today? Well, I would love to tell you that, but before we get started, I just wanted to tell you I had last night a classic writer's nightmare that I wanted to share. Okay. I'm not sure if you if you've had these. I've had I've had a number of them over the years and it's still ⁓ you're talking about like a literal nightmare that you had. A literal nightmare. ⁓ I thought it was like what did your computer freeze? Did you no no no this is an actual and very similar to you know like the actor's nightmare where you forget your lines on stage. Yes. So so in this one, in this dream that I had last night and woke up from not that long ago. I had been hired by Julia Louis Dreyfus to do an adaptation, my hot take on The Odyssey. And I'm in a meeting with her and she's giving me all these ideas and I'm writing them down and I'm trying to not to sound like an idiot, but I have never read The Odyssey. I've never seen the movie The Odyssey. So I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm trying to hide the fact. I'm making all these notes. I can't read my own handwriting. And what's contributing to all of this is that what I had done is in the middle of the night I had woken up, and when I can't go back to sleep, I sometimes plug into a podcast. Yes. And this particular podcast was about the Odyssey. So I'm getting all these facts and insights into this book that I've never read. And I'm trying not to make a complete fool of myself and cold sweat breaking out all over me. And then I woke up with Now I I have to ask. Have you read the Odyssey Dan? Are you seeing the beads of sweat starting again? Not to put you through this twice. Just just man up and say it if it's true. It's true. No, I have never read the Odyssey. You have never read The Odyssey? No, no. I read The Iliad when I was much, much younger, but never, never got around to the Odyssey. And and I d and I do want to see the movie too. I think I may after having this nightmare, I think I'm gonna go see it this weekend. I I have I I must admit I have no interest in seeing that movie, but I you should read The Odyssey, Dan. You should just read The Odyssey. Maybe I hear good things. I think it it you know, the the the original got some good rotten tomatoes and over. How could you not have read the Odyssey? That is just ⁓ see, you always accuse me of having this this extensive writer's education, but not so much. No, but I think you do know ⁓ I ⁓ I W I just I'm speechless. I know, I know. Believe me, I'm I'm and it is d clearly a a a matter of deep shame for me, given that it comes out in the middle of the night on my subconscious, right? Yeah, that your subconscious is so so freaked out about this. And of course, odd the Odyssey being So you didn't see the the fact of the the Christopher Nolan Odyssey explosion coming this summer, and you thought to yourself, You know what? I'm just gonna put this one to bed. No, I think like like most people, I just figured, let's see, do I read it or I do do I just watch the movie and say that I've read it. You know? So so I think that's my plan at this point. I'm I am sure that I have I I have those exact dreams, but I never had it about the Odyssey, I must say. All right. Well maybe now I've put the idea in your head. But all right. Let's let's get beyond that and let's talk about today's topic. So today's topic ⁓ is outlining. You know, we talked last week about when do you know that your idea is good enough that you start writing. And so I felt like this is kind of a continuation of that. So at what point then do you start outlining and do you, in fact, start outlining? And there are many different theories on this. And the two that you mentioned at the top, I've seen them referred to. Differently. I've heard them called plotters versus panters. I I was unfamiliar with the phrase at all. And and no sooner had I started, you know, just like poking around online to for ⁓ for ideas about what to talk about this week, learned about this phrase. You had mentioned it ⁓ in in our conversations about planning for this, and I was unfamiliar with it. So I'm sure you are right. You y you have not read the Odyssey. I was not aware of the the phrase plotters versus pantsters. So there you go. Exactly. I have ⁓ just like you, I have these major kind of cultural holes in my knowledge. I know. You had no idea. So plotters, of course, are people who will make outlines that are very complicated and very thorough. Pantsters are people who write by the seat of their pants. Aaron So yes, this is Quite an area of debate in the world of writing. How complicated, how involved do you get in your outlines, or do you just start writing and see what happens next? And there's a lot of writers, a lot of very successful famous writers who who are on both sides of this issue. ⁓ I'll give you just one example. There's two ⁓ thriller writers who feel very differently about this. Jeffrey Deaver. is a plotter. He points out that with an outline, you can write any part of your novel at any time. You don't have to start at the beginning and go to the end. If one chapter isn't motivating you, you go on to another, then come back later. You can write different sections and scenes and fill everything in without doing it in order. Which is an interesting way of looking at it. I would find that very difficult to do, I think. And I'm not sure that I would want to do it that way. I I find that a very appealing. I I I am not a I'm not a plotter or ⁓ very rarely have I been a plotter, but I do get the appeal of being able to sort of bounce around and not have to worry about the others because you have a firm i idea of where your s where your story's gonna go. Another thriller writer, Lee Child, what he says is, you know all the plots already. You could plan for a thousand years and not come up with a new one. What you should do instead is trust your voice. Let your characters do what they want. By all means have a vague idea, as in Moby Dick is about a whale and War in Peace is about Russia, but don't sweat the details. So that would be a Panther talking. I love the idea of saying that that War in Peace is about Russia. I have this vague idea for a novel, but I do not want to outline it. First we catch moose. Yeah. Now I I should point out also that in the ongoing war between plotters and pantsters, there is a third category, which is a plantster, which is someone who falls in between. Yes. Which I would say probably more describes me since I am non-confrontational and unwilling to take a stand on any center. I don't want to take a position on this one. This could just be a little too ⁓ Why stir up problems? I know. I just come down right in the middle and I see benefits in this argument, and I also see benefits in that argument. But now here is let me give you one other example, which is which is different, completely different. ⁓ John Irving, ⁓ author of World According to Garp and many others He has an interesting approach to it. He says he writes his last sentence first. Yes. He said, by the time I was writing the Cider House rules, I thought, well, you seem to work best when you begin with the last sentence. And once I know, like a piece of music, what it sounds like at the end, where I'm going, I make a kind of roadmap in reverse back to where I think the story should begin. So far, that last sentence is never changed. I see that ending and I write. Toward it. I am familiar with ⁓ John Irving's do the end first theory or or practice. And it's possibly the closest thing that I am t to I I have a sense of where I want to end up. But I do think it's I think it's different in the sense that John Irving writes very plotty novels. Mm-hmm. Or or at least I guess plot is really the wrong they're very eventful, let's put it that way. I'm not really sure that they they're Dickensian in the sense of just sort of tumbling along with a lot of events. Yeah. Yeah. And I think when it when they do become that complicated, it becomes a lot harder to, you know, just do it little burst at a time, you know, next chapter, then next chapter, then next chapter. You really have to when there's so many different ⁓ pieces of the puzzle. ⁓ you probably are helped by having some kind of roadmap for it. In in your middle of the road, non-confrontational manner of of being a planster, ⁓ what does your piece of paper look like before you actually start committing sentences to the page? You know, my early writing was dramatic. I as we've talked about, you know, I wrote plays and screenplays before I ever started writing novels. And those are definitely more plot oriented. And I think in the world, especially of screenplays, you are very much encouraged to do heavy ⁓ outlining. Now, often that is a contractual thing, like if you were writing for a studio or a a showrunner or whoever, they want to know what you're doing, what you're up to, and and they want to meddle in it as much as they possibly can. Right. So Day one an out. Well, show me an outline. Show me, you know, give me give me give me an idea of what's coming. And so I got into the habit of doing that. But I would often find that I wouldn't don't you just y you just you just yada yada the most important part. Uh-huh. When you say you got into the habit of doing that, because that's what they asked for, what did that look like? ⁓ okay. Well, it would be often it would be a very detailed outline where it would get me from beginning to end, let's say. You know, three pages worth of this happens, then this happens, then this happens, and this happens. And and how much of that was ⁓ description of character and motivation? not not so much. It was more just ⁓ what happens. Because again, I think dramatic writing that's more important. I I would certainly make notes about character and bad. behaviors and things like that. But but for the most part, it was just figuring out the story. You know, I think I think in film and television, the story is nine-tenths of it. And so that's that's what I would do. But what I found is the more I wrote, the more I found I was always abandoning the outline pretty quickly. Like about a quarter of the way into it, I would say, nah, I I This makes no sense at all. I'm going to go in a completely different direction. And I would throw the whole thing out and continue on. I wouldn't say I would start over again, but I would just continue on in a different direction than what I had planned to do. Let me ask you this. ⁓ when you were writing an outline for somebody else because you were hired to do this and it was a job rather than a passion project or, you know, whatever it is that you want to call what we do. And you ha came up with a three-page script. Excuse excuse me, a three-page outline. No wonder those scripts weren't selling like hotcakes. you came up with a three page outline. What as an example do you recall of the outline for the boys next door? What did that look like? I kind of knew where I wanted things to head and where conflicts would sort of come together and the general direction of where the ending would take me. But but I like the idea of of being s of surprising myself at w the progress of a story. Aaron I do too. ⁓ it was Lee Child that you were quoting before talking about you know let the c characters go where they may. And that's that follows my my we've talked about before my favorite quote from Faulkner about once you have a character that stands up and walks on its own, you just want to follow it along and do that. It's a little surprising to me that a writer like a highly commercial writer like Lee Child takes that attitude, but good for him. Yeah, yeah. And Stephen King famously says that outlines kill creativity, which is an interesting way of looking at it too. Yes. I learned in reading about this topic this week that that was the case and I was extremely surprised that that was the case for him. But it made a certain sense to me when I thought about it because one of the things that I think is unique, not unique to him, but but ⁓ but certainly is something that he no is known for is that he'll just kill off characters. You know, you just don't know who's gonna get it in the throat. In a Stephen King book and and so it makes sense that, you know, he doesn't want to get tied in. He wants to have a feeling for what what Could or could not happen. And I've he's so prolific at the same time that you wonder how much he's thrown away. Yeah. Yeah. Because I I think that's one of the things about just seat of the pants saying something is that you are going to go down the wrong road and you will have to toss stuff. Aaron Powell Right. Yeah. And you do run the risk of painting yourself into a corner, you know, or writing yourself into a corner. And once you've done that, you have to then do a lot of rewriting and unpaint yourself from that corner. So so it's it's a risk that you run, but presumably for somebody like Stephen King, not a problem. Well look, nothing's a problem for Stephen King. It's like if you don't like the music you're hearing on the radio, you buy the radio station and make it play what you like. So y you you had in mind I I I will I will answer my own question about myself to see if that's spurs you to answer the question the way I want you to Here's what when when I have done I have two forms of of planning for for for writing. One is that I just jot down ideas on a on a sheet of paper and I keep keep that in a folder and that's that's my idea file and I I'm constantly updating it. And some of the ideas are one sentence and some of them are several paragraphs, but They're n in no wise are they outlines in any traditional sense. It's just sort of like I had an idea for this and this and this and and it might be again, you know, f maybe a hundred to two hundred words, basically describing a setup more than anything else. Aaron So it it's not so much sequential planning, but it's just ideas. No sequential planning at all. When I plan beyond that, if I plan beyond that, ⁓ a lot of the times I'll make notes to myself about about a character, you know, this Something happens to somebody and then it's investigating all of the all of the eventualities of that thing happening to somebody. ⁓ in the classic three-act structure, I would say that mine is more is more like one and a half acts. It's when when X does X, then X must X. And then I don't think beyond that because I'm not really writing for plot so much as I'm writing about somebody who, you know, when an anvil fell on his head, his life changed completely. And then, you know, you want to investigate what what life was like for a man who an anvil fell on his head. And that's how I came up with the idea for ⁓ the Roadrunner, incidentally. ⁓ you know. That was you? ⁓ my god. I as a general rule when I write more than that, it's a long series of thoughts about who all the characters are, you know. His brother was X, his mother was Y. ⁓ the next door neighbor is an important figure because, you know, blah. And I'll write this out at great length, often, you know, talking about people in real life who I might draw aspects of character from. So that there's, you know, it might four the the the aspects of four or five people who are real life people ⁓ would add to the to the various characters that I'm I'm writing about. And that occasionally would reach the length of your outlines that you mentioned before of three or or more pages. But by and large, that is the extent of the outline that I would ever do. It would be more about characters and circumstances and and the kind of the the original moment that kicks off the issue. That's that would be what my outline would look like. Your outline for Again, for either your the work you're working on right now or the previous one, was it similar to that or was it more like, no, Alan Levy flies into to Hamburg and then a scene where he meets sees the Beatles for the first time and then a blah, blah, or not like that? Well, I think with me it comes down to a lot of what happens next. And I tend to write in short ish chapters. So let's say I write a chapter that's like four or five pages long. When I finish writing that chapter, then I will spend, you know, 10 or 15 minutes going, okay, what happens next? And I'll jot down just a sentence or two about, all right, what would be the logical next step after this? What would be the surprising next step after this? And I'll write just a couple of sentences for me to think about overnight. I love the idea of taking a moment at the end of each day to think about what would be surprising to write in the subsequent pages. That's that is something that I have never ⁓ at least purposefully done. I mean, I suppose I have thought of something surprising at the end of the day, but it was never it's never kind of built into my into my work day. Yeah. Well, but as you say, you're you are constantly working to fortify your characters. And so, you know, what happens next is not necessarily your best way of getting there. ⁓ but I'm sure it's it's one of many things you can consider in clarifying who they are and figuring out who they are. Yeah. ⁓ as you as you go on. Well, it does come down to I think also cons commercial considerations, at least thinking about screenplays, I I have when I've worked on screenplays, we always did extremely detailed plot outlines. And y you know, first you know, first look at the sort of overall structure, then do the thirty two beats. And for those who aren't familiar with there's a I I don't know whose theory it is, but but ⁓ but a screenplay must have something like thirty two beats and you know, they mu have to fit into the the classic, I guess, Aristotelian plotting structure. Rising action, falling action, exactly. The climax, the reversal, the release of tension, et cetera, et cetera. And I and and and that was the the wrong turn I took in terms of researching today's episode. And I'm sure I want to go down it, but I learned ⁓ that there's a a somewhat vocal minority of people who argue that that is a ⁓ Western ethnocentric, ⁓ colonial mindset for thinking about plotting. ⁓ and in fact there's you know, non Western, non non Western plots. I I I don't know enough about it at this point to to to tackle whether I agree with it or not, although I I definitely was not hugely persuaded of it. I also discovered that Aristotle, I I I I think I knew this already, but I'd forgotten that Aristotle, aside from coming up with the plotting structure that we all follow today, also thought that women were, you know, deeply inferior to men and had less teeth than men. He believed that women had less teeth than men. He he couldn't just count, you know, like look into someone's mouth and go, ⁓ I guess I was wrong about that. I knew that he believed that bugs generated out of mud. This is the guy we chose to listen to with all of our storytelling. Jesus. It gives you an idea of what's wrong with Hollywood today. I guess. ⁓ 'Cause they don't have enough teeth to fill out their mouth. Geez, get used to it. Yeah. I ha I had not you know recognized sort of the ⁓ an undercurrent of of r fairly justified feminist hatred of of Aristotle until I did the did my reading today. But but in any case. Wow, boy, I never knew that. Well, I I will I will say that I I guess the the let's just call the Western taste for Tension a as a plotting device is not universally appreciated. One example of a non-Western plot structure is what is known as Kishoten Ketsu, ⁓ which originated in classical Chinese poetry and is widely used in Japanese and Korean storytelling, including anime and studio Ghibli, Ghibli films. So the the the the four-act model does not require a central conflict. It starts with ki, which is an introduction, it introduces the character setting and everyday life. Then comes sho, ⁓ which develops the characters and expands on their life without disrupting it. Ten is a twist, which introduces an unexpected perspective, change, or new element, and reframes the story. And ketsu, which harmonizes and connects everything back to together to ⁓ to establish balance again. Wow. Interesting. And reading about some of these non traditional Western tension driven plots, I I what one thing that came to mind was that Alice in Wonderland, and indeed I think a lot of children's storytelling does not in any way follow traditional Aristotelian-based thinking about plotting. If you think about Alice in Wonderland, it's just sort of one one thing after another. And as long as it's interesting enough, it's it will hold your interest. Well, I wondered though, if ⁓ because you know I'm trying to think of the structure of Alice in Wonderland and There is certainly at least an inciting incident, which is falling through the looking glass, right? Where she Well, no, that's that's Alice through the looking glass, which is I mean, is the same thing. But in the ins it's not really an inciting incident. She follows a rabbit down a r a hole. Okay. The rabbit goes down a hole, she jumps down the hole, she falls, you know, interminably and lands at the bottom. She meets the next character, then the next character. There is there is a level of tension in in the introduction of the Queen of Hearts, who's a bombastic and and evil leader. But it's not, you know, the story is not how Alice foils that leader or how she escapes Wonderland. right. There is there is no fundamental plot. Okay. I in my opinion. Well, but but as you describe it, it sounds an awful lot to me, like the plot of ⁓ the Wizard of Oz. It's she she goes into another land, she meets these characters along the way. and I mean she's and and as we've discussed, ⁓ Wizard of Oz is a is a classic three act structure. Yes. And and even when when you were describing the the Japanese system, yes. It struck me that that it it bears some relation. To the classic three-act structure, and maybe it's just kind of a matter of semantics and and how you're describing it. I agree that there's some level of that, but I I do think that in the case of ⁓ of some of the Studio Hibley films and ⁓ and Alice in Wonderland, that there's fundamentally not a there's not a tension such as the one that you described in The Wizard of Oz. In The Wizard of Oz. A catastrophe brings the main character into a strange new world and her desire is to get home again. And the whole story is predicated on her efforts to go home. Whereas in Alice in Wonderland and and other titles that I've I've touched on, there is not a driving focus for that main character to get past whatever the the obstacle is that Okay. Or the or the the villain, who whoever it may be. Whatever it is that is that is causing this to be a challenge for the character, that doesn't exist in Alice in Wonderland. It's very episodic. And she so she does not really have some goal that's driving her forward. She's just kind of exploring. Yeah, that's right. ⁓ she's going from place to place, meeting new characters, and ultimately has a face-off with the with the queen and The Queen leaps in the air as do all of her servants, and they're of course just cards and she waves them away, and that's when she wakes up. So the queen the queen is still an antagonist in the queen is an antagonist. In in in a similar way that the wicked witch of the West is Absolutely. ⁓ there is no there's no wizard of oz to, you know, whether fraudulent or not, to act as a as a kind of structural basis for the story. Right. Right. ⁓ and there's no place that she's going specifically. She's lost the whole time. Yeah. No, that's that's interesting. And and I think that's a good point. And you know, I I keep sort of harping on those two because I just don't know Japanese anime very well. So I I don't feel qualified to talk about it. But I but yeah, I I definitely see you know, dig in. This is my my confessional episode of all the classic works of literature that I've never read. Right. So I may as well get ⁓ all out now. Well, I do think, you know, speaking I mean, taking taking back to the to to the start of our conversation, the Odyssey is i i i it it's plotted in the sense that it it has it does have an ⁓ I suppose an Aristotelian shell of a plot, which is Odysseus must Having having fought the war, Odysseus must get home to get back to his wife and there's things that get in his way. But at a fundamental level, it's really sort of ten or fifteen separate stories and how he overcomes individual challenges in those stories. ⁓ which also again sounds a little bit like the Wizard of Oz. She's gotta get home. But again, it just goes to the point that there are no new stories. It's all it's all been done. I mean, Dan, does anything not sound like The Wizard of Oz to you? That's ⁓ what I wanna know. Well, while you were busy reading the Odyssey, I was watching The Wizard of Oz for the fiftieth time. So that's pretty much all I'm doing. Right. Well, you weren't really watching it, you were using cannabis products and turning on ⁓ the dark side of the moon. That is my that was my writing education right there. ⁓ right. So now I wanna I want to bring up another thing, just a little parenthetical, but ⁓ when I've as like you, I've been reading about different people's ways of plotting and outlining and making outlines. And the one thing that I always used to hear about, especially in the world of TV and film, is people who have who use like index cards or post-it notes that go up on a board. You know, and they have the pieces of string that go from one that lead to the other. Which a friend of mine used to say, like in a in a ⁓ crime drama, they would call that the crazy board. Because it shows you that that the person You go into the guy's into the guy's lair. Right. And he's got his crazy board because he's obsessive about something. He's a conspiracy theorist. Have have you ever used anything and and I I don't I don't do that. Have you ever used anything like physical like that as a as an aid to outlining? I used to keep a crazy board as as an editor. ⁓ it's a fairly common thing in the news business where where people will just keep ideas in front of them. I used to use that all the time and when I'm when I got shifted into a completely open office environment, I was like I felt like my creativity had been crushed. So I have done that in my professional life. I have used a digital version of of a crazy crazy wall, crazy board, ⁓ which I was useful. ⁓ I can't remember what pr product ⁓ my son and I used to to do plotting, but we did have ⁓ we did have the equivalent of index cards and I think that it was based around the idea of a thirty two beat structure for a screenplay and we wanted to have ultimately thirty two cards that told the story. sequentially and each one was a very specific scene within within the movie. And I scanned, I guess I would say, a couple of movies that I admired and wrote out the beats to understand how they had done it that way. And that was interesting and useful to me, even though I am a failed screenwriter. Well, I well, I that's interesting that it's been helpful for you to to do it that way. I'm I'm a little bit more. Well, but it but it got you to the next step anyway. It it helped you on your way toward completing the project. So it it must have helped in some way. Well, that's a typical, you know, positive Optimistic outlook of Dan Greenberger who was well, you good for you. You did it. Good job, Ezra. I know. I sound like AI. May maybe I am AI. Maybe there's no actual Dan, but I'm sorry. That would be funny. And I was just a guy with a crazy board talking into my computer each week. Well, I I do wonder also if a lot of those physical things that are used to help in outlining Like when I was doing my research for this, I found this this article in the Daily Mail that reproduced ⁓ some of the most complex outlines in literary history. Like I don't ⁓ that sounds great to look at. Well, J.K. Rowling, for instance, before she wrote a line of the first Harry Potter novel, she had outlined all of the Harry Potter novels. And Put it on this board, and it is incredible to look at because it's it's amazingly complicated, and it has to do with plots, characters. She even like drew ⁓ a diagram of the Hogwarts castle. And it's very, it's very ⁓ impressive to see. And similarly, let's see, who else? Sylvia Plaff, they showed her outline for the Bell Jar. ⁓ Joseph Heller wrote a super, I mean, drew a super complicated one for Catch 22. That one I've seen. Yeah. And they're they kind of boggled the mind. But I do wonder if maybe our technology today has replaced those and made those a little outmoded now that now that we have the luxury of cut and paste and ⁓ you know, all those all those computer tricks. that may well have taken the place of those very elaborate physical constructions. Well, you know, you're talking about J.K. Rowling and and the incredible lengths she went to to create kind of this physical world that that she was then going to r replicate with an imaginary world. I I I was always jealous of designers and product managers who created essentially huge dream boards, not crazy not crazy walls, but dream boards where You'd have all of these kind of pictures that had something to do with the feeling that you wanted to create. ⁓ whether it was a color palette or a a ⁓ photo that just was evocative of what it was that you wanted your product to express. And I found it inspiring to sit down in rooms where people had done that work where we were talking about a a product that we were going to create, and we had that that visual impetus to drive our thinking forward. And I could imagine If I was a more visual person having a dream board for a novel. Yeah, no, and it's and it's interesting you say that because I would say the same thing about myself. I don't consider myself a terribly visual person. I'm I'm really not a good drawer or designer in visual things. ⁓ so yeah. So maybe maybe if I were like you, yeah, that that I could I could use some more visual cues or visual aids to help me along as I'm fleshing out My writing. I will say also that the one time that I did a very significant amount of prep work for a a book, it didn't work. You know, it it was a it was a failure. I did end up writing a a version of the book that was a thousand degrees different from what I imagined doing, but I was trying to write a a commercial novel. It was not a commercial novel in the end, but I perceived it to be a commercial novel. I perceived it to be something that would be popular and that ⁓ male readers would ⁓ w it was at the point where I thought men were still reading books. It was a point when I believed that no man that I knew wouldn't have read the Odyssey by the time they were in their sixth decade of life. I thought I knew everything about the book before I started. Hmm. And then w and where do you think it it went off the rails or was it just that it was never it was never really there to begin with? I think that the reason it went off the rails was more towards the conception of writing a novel that would be a popular novel. and I at a fundamental level I'm not really very talented at at coming up with stuff that other people are that interested in. Wow. ⁓ Jeez. You ne I think you're being a r little bit hard on yourself, but but I I get it. I mean, not every not every project. ⁓ Hands out the way we hope and wish that it will. No. And that was the case for this. Well, you know, like ⁓ Thomas Edison used to say, at least you found out something that does not work. And you've now moved on to things that do work for you. And ⁓ so it was instructive in its own way. Again, a very, very positive spin on what I feel is fundamentally a sad story. Well, I just I've I felt you like digging your own grave there and I thought, well I should really say something. So as regards him a headstone it says at least you learned something ⁓ It for us for another week of Pub Crawl. It's been a pleasure talking to you, Ezra, and in signing off, I would say to our audience, you've got a book in you, push. Either that or have a baby, okay, you know? Crawl is a production of Tag and Rog Press and our theme music was written by the abundantly talented Zach Palmer. Dan, I'll see ya next week. Good luck with the Odyssey in in between now and then. Alright, I will I will report back to you. I will talk to you then.