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I was at a high school graduation party and listening to an engineer turned lawyer turned retired-at-50 world traveler describe how he uses Claude. He uses it as his architect, to sketch the home library he’s building. He uses it as his research assistant, to dig up books and source material for any consulting he does. He uses it as his hiking buddy, to map out a multi-day trek he’s planned for later this summer through the Sierra Nevada.

The more he uses Claude, he told me, the more useful Claude shows itself to be.

I nodded, politely.

He could tell I didn’t share his enthusiasm. Perhaps, he asked, Claude could draft an outline for one of your books? Or edit a book?

I tried not to sigh.

I said I used AI for admin tasks. Otter.ai has saved me thousands of hours in transcription. Claude itself helps me source disparate books which carry a similar theme. But I don’t let AI anywhere near my creative work. The outlining, writing, editing—that stuff’s sacred to me. Perhaps I’m old school, I said, but I want AI to make me toast. I don’t want it to write my book.

He laughed.

He said the LLMs would continue to improve. Maybe, he said, you’ll have to integrate them.

I won’t. I don’t say that in stubborn defiance, either. My conversation with the engineer turned lawyer turned retired-at-50 world traveler has been my constant companion the last three weeks. I’ve debated what he said, tested it, and come to realize something I’ve suspected since I took out my Claude Pro subscription half a year ago:

AI is great if work is results-oriented.

AI is terrible if work is process-oriented.

Writing is process-oriented. Editing is process-oriented. When I’m not writing my own books I’m editing the books of founders or C-suite executives or media personalities and celebrities.

I’ve experimented off and on for months now to see how Claude might edit a client’s chapter or book proposal or manuscript.

It remains awful. It’s way too aggressive with some works; way too passive with others. Every time it sees the editing along quantitative lines. Reducing a work by, say, 16 percent, or 31 percent, per my prompts.

Editing is qualitative. It requires taste. A deep knowledge of how a work is similar to others in its field. It requires imagination. So often editing is not reducing a word count. It is seeing what’s not in the body of a text and asking the writer if he/she has the reporting or research material to add something new. Something essential.

Cutting, adding, refining, the sort of work that is not only qualitative in nature but—and here’s the bigger point—process-oriented: That’s editing. I work with clients for a period of months. I work with some authors for years.

Why?

Because that’s the work of creativity. Creating a story, shaping it, refining it: It takes time to get it right. Everything is process.

The same goes when I’m the writer. Everything is process there. It took me three years to report and 14 months to write the first draft of Book No. 3 only to realize, after my editor pointed it out, that Part I of the book sucked.

In the last five weeks I’ve overhauled it. Reduced it, yes, but added sequences and synthesized still others. I would never prompt an LLM to do any of that because, okay, sure, writing books is my life’s deepest joy but also: I know from experience an LLM can’t handle it. It can’t take in a whole work and see where to cut, where to add, where to synthesize.

And that’s fine. That’s good. Readers themselves don’t want LLM-assisted writing. Its soulless proficiency and cliched sentences and syllogisms: We can identify all that shit now. It disgusts us. It disgusts even Silicon Valley heavyweights like Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator:

Graham’s tweet speaks to, among other things, this process- versus results-oriented divide that’s now bifurcating the world.

All the Silicon Valley coders who’ve been laid off? Theirs is mostly results-oriented work. Writing X line of code to get Y outcome.

AI can do that results-based work now. And so, increasingly, it is. You can be sad about that—no one wants to see hundreds of thousands of people laid off—but the more result-reliant the outcome, the more AI can be utilized in the process toward it.

Viewed in that light, it’s obvious why my engineer turned lawyer turned retired-at-50 friend loves Claude. Every shelf he’ll build in his home library will have work specs drafted by it. Claude can tell him, after my friend verifies it himself, where to cut the wood and hang the board. How he uses Claude for that or how he maps out his multi-day hike through California is always toward some concrete tangible result.

Claude works for my friend’s sort of work.

But Claude only works in certain situations, and you see this play out in sectors far removed from home improvement.

Curing rare diseases is results-based work. Artificial intelligence is assisting medical researchers to develop new drugs and treatments. Here, the medical establishment sees AI as a savior.

Fighting a war, though, is mostly process-driven work and when AI is seemingly over-utilized, it hurries along the bombing of an all-girls school in Iran mistaken for a military target. Here, AI is a war criminal.

This divide between process and result is not absolute, because so much process-driven work leads to some quantitative result. The medical field, for instance, will always need doctors to put into practice any AI advancement.

But where the result is itself qualitative? Where the end-result product is a song or a film or a piece of writing?

That product is meant to be enjoyed, which means the result is subjective and qualitative. When we sense that the process to create this qualitative product was itself AI-reliant, we repel.

And it doesn’t matter the creative field, AI is not wanted in these circumstances.

Similar to what we read, the same trend plays out these days in what we watch and listen to. As soon as we know some creative thing was made by AI, we hate it.

We are a 200,000-year-old species hardwired for story. Stories have told our forebears to band together and hunt, to worship certain game they kill. We told ourselves stories about planting certain crops, about erecting certain city-states, about fighting wars to defend those same city-states. The currencies we traded and still trade remain a story we tell about a piece of paper or a line of code’s worth. Every facet of our civilization and so much of our day-to-day lives remains reliant on the stories we tell. A story well-told—and here I’m taking about its depiction in a book or on a screen—is a reflection of our lives.

At its best a story mirrors life.

So when something that is not us tries to tell us a story, in any form, when it tries to be as creative as we can be, we don’t trust it. We don’t like it. We feel, as no less a Silicon Valley luminary than Paul Graham put it, cheated.

That sense of being lied to isn’t technological Luddite-ism.

It’s 200,000 years of hardwiring.

So where does that leave all of you, and me? The writers of stories?

In a fantastic spot.

Tim Ferriss wrote a fascinating post this week about how all the sales for his how-to books are way down over the last few years.

The culprit?

ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and every other LLM have gobbled up the core points of Ferriss’ books and spit them out in bullet-pointed summaries.

AI is doing the same for self-help YouTube videos and podcasts: Gobbling them up, spitting out summarized results particular to a user’s idiosyncratic prompt.

You would think this gobbling up and spitting out would terrify Ferriss, who’s built his media empire around self-help.

He’s not terrified, though.

He’s pivoting to storytelling.

Will anything survive in roughly its current form?

Probably. Experience that isn’t solely information: comedy, entertainment, storytelling, fiction, etc. You don’t ask an AI to summarize a stand-up special, and a synopsis of a great novel is not a great novel. Voice, taste, and personality may end up being the only durable moats.

It’s no longer the transference of information that matters.

The game is the transformation of the reader herself.

That’s always been the game. How a story moves the audience is the reason great storytelling has endured from the oral tradition to papyrus and scrolls to the printing press and now well into the digital age.

Story remains king.

My bet is the AI age will be like any other: If you can craft a story, there will be demand for your skill.

After my engineer turned lawyer turned retired-at-50 friend and I finished our conversation, I told the high-school graduate who’s party we were attending the only thing I thought I could.

I told that kid to read great books. Watch great movies. Study every great story he consumed.

He wants to be an artist and his future, I told him, will be like so many artists before him: informed by the stories he knows and shaped by every story he can relay in his work.

The future for him will be like all our futures. It will look very much like the past.

Trust yourself. Trust the process.

This newsletter requires a lot of man hours. Please offset that by becoming a paying subscriber.

Then, if you’re hungry for a longer read, consider buying one of my books. Publisher’s Weekly says of the latter you’ll be “riveted from the first page to the last.” The New York Times says, “The richness of Kix’s dramatis personae simply staggers.” The book was named to Amazon’s and The New York Times’ and Kirkus‘ respective Best Books of 2023 lists. To the extent that matters to you.

Book No. 3 is looking like it’ll be out in 2027.

Welcome to This Week Paul Likes.

Most weeks, I throw out hits of inspiration—three recommendations, one tip, one quote—from the writers who inspire me, in the hope they’ll inspire you to do your best work.

This week, there’s no tip. I’m revising Book No. 3 and also working on a bigger piece, for here, about AI.

There are a lot of recommendations, though, so let’s get to those.

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Discussing Backbone: This needs a set-up.

The New Yorker published Backbone, a David Foster Wallace short story, three years after his suicide, in 2011. The story was composed from fragments of DFW’s last and unfinished novel, The Pale King. Any longtime TWPL subscriber may know my DFW zealotry, but I had never heard of Backbone.

It’s well worth your time, whether you’re a zealous fan or not.

DFW was working toward something big with The Pale King, a novel of persistence and rejecting the mind-sucking distractions of modern technology to sit with one’s boredom and quietly pursue one’s deepest calling. It was a novel about the IRS but also hoped to be a novel about every reader who would pick it up. Not every sequence works—or rather, not every one was in its finished form by the the time of DFW’s death.

Backbone, then, is a liminal read. You finish it and can sense where the larger story will go. As a beginning-middle-end short story, though, Backbone also stands on its own.

It’s bizarre. A boy spends years trying to kiss every square inch of his body. There’s an absent mother and a father distracted by his entrepreneurial pursuits in the self-help industry. A father and son who each in his own way focuses on himself becomes a recursive motif.

The most resonant part, though, is its ultimate presentation: as a recent podcast, with the story read by another zealous fan, the novelist Adam Levin. After his read, Levin and The New Yorker’s fiction editor Deborah Treisman discuss how DFW sent Treisman a version of Backbone in 1999. You learn what was in the piece then and what remained upon publication, which means anyone who loves discussions of craft will just swallow this podcast whole.

One of the better ones you can listen to this weekend.

Backrooms: My 15-year-old son saw the film last weekend with friends. He came home and said, “I hated it.”

He woke up the next morning and told me, “I think I love it.”

I went with him and his twin brother Wednesday night to see for myself.

Backrooms deserves its hype. It’s a layered and complex psychological thriller where its secret and dystopian world mirrors, ultimately, the protagonists’ lifelong memories.

It’s shocking that the director is 20. This kid created something wholly original, erudite, thrilling.

Joe Eszterhas telling stories: An Hungarian immigrant, scared and not yet fluent in English, he saw a dude killed outside his parents’ low-rent Cleveland apartment when he was 12. He became a journalist because he wanted to be a novelist and thought a cops-and-courts beat at The Cleveland Plain-Dealer might serve his later books. He befriended homicidal cops. He befriended righteous criminals. He once reported a story of his homicidal cop in pursuit of the righteous criminal he knew.

That sent him into despair. He drank way too much and whored around. On assignment one night, he drank and smoked weed with Otis Redding. The next day, Redding’s plane crashed and the star was dead. Joe Eszterhas was probably the last person Otis Redding ever spoke with.

His stories got better. He was told he was a “cinematic” writer by a Hollywood producer and should pursue screenwriting. He based one script off that homicidal cop and a 39-year-old woman he had an affair with when he was 18. He called that script Basic Instinct.

Basic Instinct sold for a record $3 million. He moved to Hollywood and started snorting blow. Coke nearly ruined him, just as drinking nearly did, just as, ultimately, living in L.A. nearly did.

He moved to Northern California. Found Jesus. Became a lay scholar of early Christian texts and wrote books about who Jesus of Nazareth really was.

You listen to Joe Eszterhas tell stories like this—and these just from the first hour of his appearance on Joe Rogan—and you realize the point of life.

Assemble experiences, man. Go without the drugs, sure, but expose yourself to new people, new places, be brave enough to do the thing you want to do.

Joe Eszterhas is 81 years old. He has lost great swaths of his money.

He is one of the richest people you will ever meet.

A Summer Project: My boys love video editing and cinematography. Our summer project is a new YouTube channel, where the stories I tell become the pieces the boys shoot and edit.

We posted our first one this week, about a single day, January 31st, 2014, which I thought was the best day of my professional life until it devolved into something much worse in the weeks and months ahead. The video essay is the lessons I ultimately learned about failure and impostor syndrome.

Our plan is to expand beyond personal essays. Do pieces from U.S. and world history. Repurpose and update magazine stories I’ve done. We want to ultimately post new and deeply reported stories.

If you’re a video editor or established YouTuber, or, hell just a TWPL reader, let me know what you think.

What do you like? How can this channel be improved?

The boys and I are hoping to do six to eight pieces this summer. A video’s run time will be between 7 and 15 minutes. Is that too ambitious? Manageable?

Let me know.

Quote of the Week: “All we can know is that we know nothing. And that is the height of human wisdom.”

—Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace. My 16-year-old daughter is loving the limited-series TV adaptation.

Have a great weekend. I’ll be back next Friday.

This newsletter requires a lot of man hours. Please offset that by becoming a paying subscriber.

Then, if you’re hungry for a longer read, consider buying one of my books. Publisher’s Weekly says of the latter you’ll be “riveted from the first page to the last.” The New York Times says, “The richness of Kix’s dramatis personae simply staggers.” The book was named to Amazon’s and The New York Times’ and Kirkus‘ respective Best Books of 2023 lists. To the extent that matters to you.

Book No. 3 is looking like it’ll be out in 2027.

Welcome to This Week Paul Likes.

Every week, I throw out hits of inspiration—three recommendations, one tip, one quote—from the writers who inspire me, in the hope they’ll inspire you to do your best work.

This week I’m sticking with the experiment we started the last edition: The weekly tip for longform writers first, then the recommendations, then the quote. Why?

In previous editions, I would write a headline and the first part of a dek that wouldn’t correspond with the first thing you read. That seemed dumb. Maybe. I still don’t know. Tell me what you think in the comments or by email about starting with the weekly tip.

As always, subscribe below if it’s your first time to the party.

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I got cocky Tuesday and said, out loud, I loved revising Book No. 3. The reduction or even reimagining of chapters, the shaping of paragraphs and the tweaking phrase by phrase of each sentence: What fun! Confronting problems! Solving them!

I wrote a note to self, in all caps, as if shouting for all to hear, about where I planned to take the story next now that I had revised the first five chapters:

Yesterday I told myself I’d read from the top just to get in the flow of shaping Chapter 6.

Uh oh.

My book is a true story of Special Forces veterans and civilians who rescue wartime allies from Afghanistan well after the U.S. government left in August 2021. The protagonists carry out rescues no one in the world could. The revised chapters 4 and 5, though, didn’t cohere and play nearly as nicely with the first three chapters as I’d assumed. Chapters 4 and 5 sputtered, which meant the larger story was failing to launch.

Did you see Adaptation? That scene where Charlie thinks he’s cracked the structure of his script and then, later that day, going over what he’d thought was great…

That’s how I felt. A little panicked. Fairly disgusted. Uncertain. I believe in this story and yet—and yet!—it wasn’t doing what I wanted.

So…what to do?

That’s the point of this week’s tip for longform writers.

The first thing to say, something a bit woo-woo to say, is stories always reveal how they want to proceed—but some guard their revelation.

You Have to be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live just ushered forth. I saw the book’s structure, in a flash, followed that bright light for more than a year and, outside of a few sequential tweaks in a few scenes, published the book I saw in that one moment.

The Saboteur was different. Five drafts. A reduction of more than 30,000 words. A reimagining of the first and last chapters—twice. A smoothing out of the whole story.

Neither book is better. Each was the best I could do with it. The work of Book No. 3 in the revise stage is somewhere in between. Big chunks of it cohere, but its first part is…

Troublesome.

Even saying that, though, elides the point. Each story you publish will always be its own thing. John Updike said near the end of his life that writing novels never got easier. He just came to understand how each required its own attention.

I love that. Though I write narrative nonfiction, I try to follow that. You should, too, in your pieces or books or YouTube videos or whatever you do.

Again, it’s woo-woo, but every story will reveal how it wants to be told if you just keep listening to it and grinding away at it.

How can you grind? How can you listen to the story? Three things stand out.

Pay Attention to When You’re Bored. The biggest thing I’ve learned across a generation of writing and editing—especially at the revise stage—is to pay attention to when you lose your attention. Don’t tell yourself a passage is probably fine.

It’s probably not. Reread the passage, reread the chapter if necessary. Isolate what’s wrong. Everything stems from honesty about what isn’t working.

Be bold. Otessa Moshfegh, during the writing of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a novel that features the bitchiest, funniest, most craven anti-hero going, said she read her first draft and scrapped over 200 pages of it. She built the novel she ultimately published from, like, a 40-page sequence near the back.

She was honest about what wasn’t working, which meant she could be bold to shape what was.

It’s not easy to be bold. Many times in my life I’ve told myself, Ugh, that’ll be so much work—doing what it’ll take to improve the story.

Yeah, it will.

But you only get one chance to publish this one story. Do you actually want to publish something less than the best possible version?

You can’t see the whole staircase. You can take the next step.

I’m lightly paraphrasing a Martin Luther King Jr. quote because it applies to writers, too.

I wish I could tell you I know exactly how Book No. 3 will be revised but, as yesterday’s reread of the first five chapters showed, I can’t be exact. I don’t know.

When certain stories guard their secrets of how they want to proceed, certain stories will continue to humble you. This Esquire piece took eight drafts to get right. Book No. 3 may continue to tell me, Nope, not yet. We’re not done.

That’s okay. I like this framework of listening to the story because it turns the revision(s) into a dialogue.

What would happen if I try this?

Or this?

Yesterday, after my Adaptation-like moment of disgust, I reread chapters 3-5 of the book and noticed—oh!—if I took one sequence of chapter 5 and tweaked the language slightly and plugged it into chapter 4, the whole of chapters 3-5 may read smoother.

I’ll spend tomorrow and early parts of next week seeing if I’m right.

If I am, I’ll take the next step up that staircase. Start in on Chapter 6.

If I’m wrong, you guessed it: I’ll pause where I am and ask the story, What do you need now?

If I listen, eventually it’ll tell me what it needs. Eventually I’ll hand this book back to my editor and she and I can start in on the revise to the revise.

Listen. Grind. Repeat.

Eventually: Publish.

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This Week’s Recommendations

“A Talent for Seeming:” Jonathan Franzen knows from getting cocky. He said, in an interview after he published Crossroads, in 2021, that it was the first novel in a trilogy and he would release the next in two years.

It’s five years later and the second book isn’t out. We do have an excerpt of it, a short story published this week in The New Yorker.

“A Talent for Seeming” is choice. A trailer-trash devout Christian named Adele who has a talent for acting but lives in Montana and…

I don’t want to say more.

Actually, I do.

Franzen is so good at keeping you fascinated with his characters’ lives.

“Why Steve Kerr stayed with the Warriors” A boring-ass SEO-optimized headline but, man, what a story from my dear friend and former colleague Wright Thompson.

I’m late to this—Wright published the Kerr profile last month—and in case you’ve made like me, rectify your situation this weekend.

A complex coach captured across the whole of a season in all his complexity.

Blood Will Tell: An identical twin who’s willing to serve the murder sentence of his brother?

Wait—that happened?

Why?

How?

Jen Miller’s serialized podcast is an I Can’t BELIEVE This is True kind of story.

Quote of the Week: “The answer to how I did it is the answer to how I did anything…I just revised it dozens of times over a period of years.

—Emily St. John Mandel, describing how she wrote her book, The Glass Hotel, which is as good as its predecessor, Station Eleven.

This email requires a lot of man hours. Please offset that by becoming a paying subscriber.

Then, if you’re hungry for a longer read, consider buying one of my books. Publisher’s Weekly says of the latter you’ll be “riveted from the first page to the last.” The New York Times says, “The richness of Kix’s dramatis personae simply staggers.” The book was named to Amazon’s and The New York Times’ and Kirkus‘ respective Best Books of 2023 lists. To the extent that matters to you.

Book No. 3 is looking like it’ll be out in 2027.

Welcome to This Week Paul Likes.

Every week, I throw out hits of inspiration—three recommendations, one tip, one quote—from the writers who inspire me, in the hope they’ll inspire you to do your best work.

This week I’m trying a new format: The weekly tip for longform writers first, then the recommendations, then the quote. Why? Every week I write a headline and the first part of a dek that doesn’t correspond with the first thing you read. That seems dumb. Maybe. I don’t know. Tell me what you think in the comments about starting with the Weekly Tip.

As always, subscribe below if it’s your first time to the party.

Subscribe now

I’m fully revising Book No. 3 now and, as I mentioned last week, met for lunch with my editor. I had told her I think this book will be my best and she in turn told me over entrees how much she disliked the first 50 pages. Like, hated them.

I no longer had it in me to finish the goat-cheese salad with grilled chicken. I sat there at that Italian bistro and told myself to breathe. Told myself not to attack. That’s the instinct, of course: You’re wrong! An idiot, in fact!

I’d done that in the past. I still see it a lot. When I’m not working on Book No. 3, I’m editing other authors’ books and some of these writers, the passionate red-blooded ones, will get me on the phone within minutes of an email with my—let’s just say—honest assessment of their latest draft.

I don’t begrudge these calls for the same reason my editor didn’t bolt after delivering her view of the first 50 pages. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, “All progress starts with the truth.”

Still, hard truths hit hard and I could feel my blood rising at lunch—until I remembered something the screenwriter Craig Mazin had once said on his podcast,

It’s not what they say about your story. It’s what you ask them about it.

You gotta drop the ego. Or, put another way, Do you want to improve your story or feel as though you won an argument with the editor who just read it?

Mazin’s advice is simple and applies to basically any writer in any genre: Don’t just receive an edit. Ask the editor questions about it.

Why don’t you like this?

What specifically is not working for you?

What suggestion do you have for improving it?

These questions and so many more, whatever you can think up, in fact, should not be asked defensively but genuinely. You really do need to know the answers. The more questions you can ask an editor about the impulse behind certain structural changes or line edits, the more clarity you’ll gain about how to fix your story. Often in ways the editor’s not even suggesting.

That happened this week. The editor had passed along her notes for the first 50 pages and what I saw was a broad problem. The opening sequence was moving too slow and was, at times, too confusing.

My editor’s edits, our shared conversation, the questions I’d asked her during it, led me to something actionable this week. I saw how I could streamline the first part of the book and clarify it, too.

The new sequence will combine, essentially, 50 pages into 25.

It’s been a lesson I’ve learned much too late, not to get defensive when I get an edit: The pieces I’d written in the first 10 years of my career could have probably been vastly better. And not because the editor is always right. The editor is mostly right, at best.

But the editor is always onto something.

That’s the thing you have to recognize. Draw out the information you need by dropping the ego and saying, effectively, How else did I just screw up this story?

This Week’s Recommendations

The Death of Ivan Ilyich: I don’t get why Tolstoy is seen as difficult to read. Pick up any of his books and it’s hard to put down. Anna Karenina was Faulkner’s favorite novel and he liked it for the same reason I do. Heavy on family sagas and romances, it’s a 19th-Century soap opera.

It’s also 864 pages long. That’s probably the reason you stay away from old Leo, right? If so, pick up The Death of Ivan Ilyich this weekend. The novella opens with, yes, Ivan’s death but over its 71 pages questions if he had ever really lived. Ivan’s sense of duty, the perception he strived for from the public—that’s what Ivan thought was important.

The story’s not told from on high, some school marm damning a student’s choices. No, Tolstoy shows you Ivan’s life from inside Ivan’s head. That’s what gives it its power: You can see yourself living Ivan’s life.

You will be wrecked by the end of the novella.

You’ll also want to reread it.

“How to Live an Asymmetric Life”: Whether by coincidence or YouTube’s all-knowing algorithm, the day after I finished Ivan Ilyich I watched Graham Weaver’s last lecture at Stanford Business School. Weaver’s an investor and founder who got wiped out by the Great Recession and had to drain his savings just to make payroll.

It’s bleak, this lecture. You feel Weaver’s anxiety: I’m failing now and will fail forever. The story he tells Stanford’s students about the story he literally wrote himself at his lowest point, imagining his life five years into the future, as an executive coach had asked him to do and as if everything Weaver had chosen had turned out well, may sound like more woo-woo California manifestation b.s. Except Weaver shows how he took the first step, and then the second, and then the third toward the story he’d written. The thing he thought was some far-out fantasy became the company he created.

“Don’t write a story about what happened. Write your story and then make that happen,” Weaver said, a message meant for Stanford’s MBA crowd—and, perhaps, you, too, this week.

“Getting Shilled”: This essay in Harper’s, an excerpt of a much-longer piece on ’s Substack, subtitled “Everything on the internet is fake,” exposes the modern music industry.

“We’ve crossed into a new situation wherein an entire layer of the music industry now simulates the conditions under which virality appears to occur naturally. Digital marketing firms coordinate hundreds of ‘fan accounts’; they seed trends and manipulate platforms, engineering virality from the ground up. Artists and songs do not just ‘take off.’ They are pushed, placed, circulated, and repeated until they feel unavoidable.”

It’s riveting, maybe a little depressing, to read how new artists are not “found” so much as fans are manipulated to download a new album, the public unaware of the conditions under which they downloaded it.

Until now, of course. Props to Tony here. He’s doing original reporting and releasing it himself. Now a 175-year-old magazine like Harper’s wants to excerpt him.

Quote of the Week: “Stay with it: The wound is the place where the light enters you.”

—Rumi

Postscript: A lot of you emailed me about last week’s essay, to join the scrum I’d started on the New York Times’ critics, who’d shit on Billy Joel. One reader though, Tyler Jett, defended the Times’ Jon Caramanica. Tyler showed me the pieces Caramanica had written, deeply reported features where Caramanica was much more than the preening asshole I assumed and so many of us saw last week.

People shouldn’t be reduced to their worst three minutes. Thanks, Tyler, for the broader view.

Have a great weekend. I’ll be back next Friday with another TWPL.

This email requires a lot of man hours. Please offset that by becoming a paying subscriber.

Then, if you’re hungry for a longer read, consider buying one of my books. Publisher’s Weekly says of the latter you’ll be “riveted from the first page to the last.” The New York Times says, “The richness of Kix’s dramatis personae simply staggers.” The book was named to Amazon’s and The New York Times’ and Kirkus‘ respective Best Books of 2023 lists. To the extent that matters to you.

Book No. 3 is looking like it’ll be out in 2027.

Welcome to This Week Paul Likes!

Normally I give you the three recs, the tip, the quote, but this week I went long on something that bothered me, something I used to be.

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I want to talk about that New York Times Magazine list of the 30 best living American singer-songwriters—and not because Billy Joel was left off it, as was (let’s see) Rufus Wainwright and James Taylor and Tyler, The Creator and, if we’re talking generation-defining talents, Kanye West. (Though I get why the Times excluded Kanye.)

Rick Beato has fun assembling a list of the rock or county Hall of Fame songwriters, the multi-platinum artists, the billion-plus-download singers or lyricists left off the list. It’s absurd.

Which is the point. As someone who worked in magazines for 20 years, you assemble a list like the Times Magazine’s to create debate. Consider that list a success: The nation is still talking about it two-plus weeks later.

What I want to consider today is the Times’ critics response to the debate, a podcast they hosted to justify their picks and exclusions. What bothers me is what appears over and over in that response, a very particular worldview of certain creative types. It rises above the group’s discussion, hangs there as some toxic black cloud, thundering and belching and ultimately befouling everything it rains on, the critics most of all.

This worldview goes way beyond music criticism.

Kids, you do not want to be like Jon Caramanica.

To understand why, let’s return to Rick Beato. He recorded a second video this week that went super-viral, had more than 10 times the views of the Times’ podcast.

Beato goes hard on two fronts.

1. The critics’ education. None of them has a music degree. None, as far as we know, plays any instrument professionally or with a passable level of dexterity.

2. Their musical ignorance isn’t nearly as bad as their narcissism and self-aggrandizement.

Let’s take Beato’s first point.

It makes me queasy. If only people who practice a craft may critique it, then this would mean, say, female writers should be banned from NFL locker rooms. Not cool. Mina Kimes joined the staff of ESPN the Magazine somewhere around 2012 or 2013, I forget. She came from Bloomberg but quickly showed she could do much more than write the enterprise features she pitched us or we assigned her. Mina loved the NFL. Now, I played high school football but it was obvious in my conversations with Mina she knew more about the game—more of its Xs and Os strategy, and at the highest level—than I did.

Today, among other things, she’s an NFL analyst for the network. She’s just as funny and smart and incisive in front of the camera as she used to be in the Mag’s office.

To be fair to Rick Beato, I don’t think in the above video he’s saying, If you don’t play music or have a music degree you can’t critique it. I think he’s instead saying, If you’re going to be a critic without any hands-on knowledge of the form, you must make a deep study of music and engage with any piece or album on its terms. What is it trying to do? Does it succeed? Why does it move you? Or, Why does it fail to?

Come to the genre with a respect and generosity of spirit and degree of honesty that, well, Mina Kimes has covering the NFL.

Which brings me to point No. 2, and the thing Beato and I both hate. The writer glancing over his shoulder, smirking at the audience as he types, hoping readers will be just as impressed with his take as he is with himself.

I was going to share the transcript of Jon Caramanica’s rationale for leaving Billy Joel off that list of best songwriters. A transcript doesn’t capture the condescension and smarm though. You need to see it.

So, stop reading. Go to the halfway point of the Beato video, when Caramanica responds to why Joel was left off the list.

Join me when you’re done.

The self-congratulation, the flippancy and dismissiveness of not just the public’s taste but points of fact—it’s a bad look for Caramanica and the other critics on the panel. Billy Joel’s songwriting really is studied in music schools. Billy Joel really did have that residency at Madison Square Garden for more than a decade and really did sell out all those MSG shows.

I’m not even making a Billy Joel argument here. I get why people think he’s uncool. (Though I’d say it’s hard to deny the musical craft of, say, “Summer, Highland Falls” or “She’s Always a Woman.”)

I’m saying I pity Jon Caramanica. That preening three-minute clip shows he will never in his life create unabashedly. For the joy of it. For the unbridled ambition of it. He’s too anxious to please, anxious to be noticed. He’s too uncertain of himself. If that three-minute clip is any guide he’s afraid to show the world what he’s capable of for how it might in turn critique him.

I may be wrong. I don’t know Caramanica at all. I may have just reduced him to his worst three minutes. If I have and if Caramanica is reading this, I apologize. But I know the type. When I was young I was this type, the sort who sneers at the world from a defensive half-crouch because if he falls from here, well, he’s told himself it won’t hurt as much.

It hurts more.

That’s the broader point to share, the thing that goes way beyond music criticism.

I cared so very much in my young writing life what others thought of me. Maybe we all do, but I don’t remember my stories in the late 90s and early 2000s so much as their comment sections. I’d obsessively refresh a page throughout the day after a story posted, aching to know what someone new considered of me. I’d wake up at 1 a.m. to see which randos had commented on a piece since the story’s posting at midnight. When social media came to dominate how stories were distributed, one Friday night I stayed up until 6 am arguing with Twitter usernames like “@peanutboil681” about FBI crime stats and how my interpretation of their influence on Boston mayoral races was dead wrong.

Not healthy. Also highly addictive. The praise, when it came, felt amazing. But because I validated my work through strangers’ opinions, you can probably guess how I felt when those opinions were unfavorable.

And so, my sneering worldview developed, my defensive half-crouch, where I looked at what I might write through the prism of how it might be received. By commenters, by my editors, by the internet’s metrics themselves, about how many people were reading any one piece and how deep they were getting into it before bouncing to something else: If you write in the digital age, the digital world will very quickly tell you how to write and what to say. And it will reward you for writing within its orthodoxies.

It rewarded me. I moved from a job in Phoenix to another in Dallas and ultimately to one in Boston, the pay always a little better, the prestige at each outlet always a little shinier, the need to be well received ever-more neurotic. And so I would find a still-lower position in my defensive half-crouch, afraid of falling. Afraid of being myself.

Maybe you can read it in these stories, too: A technical proficiency, perhaps, but little vibrancy, little emotional warmth. Certainly no risk in the writing. This is the problem with the half-crouch worldview. You’re looking over your shoulder, smiling at the audience, thinking you’re giving it what it wants. You’re really denying yourself what you want.

You’re afraid of falling and yet don’t realize how it hurts more to stay where you are.

Eddie Vedder saved me.

One night in my late 20s, in my apartment in Boston, my wife asleep next to me, I crept out of our bedroom. I couldn’t sleep. I don’t remember the story I’d just published but do remember checking the comments that afternoon and many—or was it only some?—were not kind. My need to tap dance on the page in the hopes of pleasing editors or angry readers morphed, as I sat there on my couch in the middle of the night, into a frustration. Why do I care about these people? When, if ever, will I just go for it and be myself?

It didn’t feel great to ask these questions—I’d been asking them a lot—and so I pulled up YouTube to numb and distract.

I’m a child of the 90s and had listened to Pearl Jam’s MTV Unplugged album maybe 500 times by that point. I’d watched Pearl Jam recordings on YouTube too many times to count. That night, though, when I watched Eddie Vedder sing “Black,” I saw something I’d overlooked.

He was just going for it. That performance was well beyond technical proficiency. It wasn’t even a song. “Black” in that Unplugged recording was Eddie living out his pain.

Eddie was so fully himself in that performance, so nakedly himself, that it lived on some communal plane. You felt what he felt, watching him, listening to him.

That was the point, I realized. Not technical proficiency. Not what Pearl Jam’s record label thought of the recording or even what the audience members that night did. No. Be so unabashedly yourself, create unabashedly, that your experience, your say, your words, might be the thing that breaks through and gets others to say, Yeah, I’ve felt that way before, too.

You see it everywhere once you start to notice it. Toni Morrison wrote with this unashamed creativity, the expression of her whole self. Christopher Nolan directs movies that way. Tom Junod writes magazine pieces that way. writes Substack essays that way, as does . Louise Glück wrote poetry that way.

I could go on. The list is very long.

It’s 15-plus years for me after that night in Boston, and in every magazine piece and book since I’ve tried to just say what I want. Sometimes it burns me. Yesterday, for instance, I had lunch with my editor in New York for Book No. 3 and she spent a good chunk of our lunch relaying how awful the first 50 pages were. Fifteen years ago that conversation would have destroyed me. Yesterday, it stung, of course, but what I said was I had experimented with something in those first 50 pages. I could find another way to relay what I wanted to say. In fact, what I have in mind now will quicken the narrative’s pace—the editor was right; it needs to be quickened—and very likely eliminate that which she finds grating.

But I do not second guess standing tall these days, creating unabashedly, even with elements of cringe or “try hard.” I’ve found it’s the only way to write. What readers really want is for you to be yourself on the page. That’s what they respond to: your idiosyncratic voice. Your originality. Your whole self.

That’s what all people respond to. No one will remember that Jon Caramanica and The New York Times think Billy Joel is uncool. He is uncool. He puts all of himself into so many of his songs.

And for that reason people will listen to “The Piano Man” for generations to come.

Welcome to This Week Paul Likes.

Every week, I throw out hits of inspiration—three recommendations, one tip, one quote—from the writers who inspire me, in the hope they’ll inspire you to do your best work.

Subscribe below if it’s your first time to the party. Let’s start with this week’s recommendations.

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“The American Revolution Wasn’t the Main Event”: A fan-tastic essay from The New Yorker’s Daniel Immerwahr, looking at the revolution from the British perspective, amid its global empire.

Losing to the 13 colonies wasn’t that big a deal. British power and influence grew. Immerwahr draws on numerous scholarly tomes to make his case: The British effectively gave up in the colonies to fight other, larger wars, which it won, time after time.

I guarantee no American child learned in school what you’ll learn reading this.

“It’s Time to Bring Back the Men’s Magazine”: raises questions I’ve muttered for years. Why does every mass-market media outlet these days seem geared for women?

Where are the mass-market media outlets for guys?

There’s ESPN, sure, but that’s just sports. There’s Esquire and GQ, yes, but, c’mon. Their cultural caché isn’t what it was 10, 15 years ago, and I say that as a writer who still enjoys writing for Esquire and had a GQ piece turned into a movie.

What this moment calls for is a daily men’s news site that covers fashion, I guess, if it must, because fashion coverage lures in advertisers, but is unafraid to cover politics and current events straight, not politics as seen exclusively through the prism of Trump Is Evil. I know Trump is evil. So does every American man but the most diehard MAGA-er. The site I envision documents Trump’s evil ways but doesn’t screech about it. It’s too busy covering, say, the dude entrepreneurs of the green-energy space out to save the world. This site is telling readers to abscond with the week’s trendy self-help book and pick up something actually profound: the Bhagavad Gita, or Man’s Search for Meaning, or The Sermon on the Mount. This site is telling young readers to stop fapping it to some porn star and, in its place, this site gives advice on how to ask out the girl at the bar who’s hot. This site tells guys which exercise routine to follow at any age.

I don’t know why this site doesn’t exist. Esquire and GQ were successful for generations because their print magazines covered everything, with erudition, and care, and curiosity. Surely the same can happen in the digital age.

Harry Cheadle has similar thoughts:

What I envision is something like the Cut for guys⁵. The Cut started out as a fashion website but now covers a wide range of topics: celebrity news, wellness, relationships, horoscopes, politics from a feminist lens. I read the Cut sometimes, especially when it runs a particularly compelling feature, but I’m clearly not its target audience. The Cut’s ideal reader is probably a woman in her late 20s or early 30s, college-educated, who lives in a major metropolitan area, earns a six-figure salary, and is interested in celebrity gossip in a semi-ironic way.

Where’s the publication targeted at her boyfriend, who also makes six figures, tolerates but does not believe in astrology, and is increasingly interested in military history? Where’s the website that speaks to his inner life?

Read Cheadle’s piece then tell me in the comments what you’d want from a news site geared for guys, and if this site exists but I’ve missed it.

Exercises to do Instead of Back Squats: I know: This edition of TWPL is hard-swerving toward the bros. Am I staking claim to that men’s news site?

I am not.

I just want to share that which knows. What he knows is applicable for men as well as women and maybe especially the men and women writers. We must all do something every day that is the opposite of typing, if we want to type until a very advanced age.

So why not consider some leg exercises this afternoon?

Von Zielbauer and his Substack, Aging with Strength, is a good guide for the writer set. He himself is a former writer for The New York Times who was once nominated for a Pulitzer.

I’m a recent subscriber to Aging with Strength and did so based on this piece. Back squats, the king of exercises, aren’t so imperial after age 40. They compress your spine. Exacerbate imbalances, like one leg that’s stronger than the other or one that’s far more flexible.

What should you do instead?

Well, I won’t give away all alternative exercises and the context for why you should do them—I believe in subscribing to other writers’ Substacks—but will tease how the hex-bar dead lift and Bulgarian split squats—with dumbells in hand or without—are two of the six exercises you should work into your routine.

Weight training is perhaps best thing to do at any age, man or woman. Von Zielbauer shows how certain exercises will strengthen you while decreasing the risk of injury.

Win-win for all who type for a living.

This Week’s Tip for Longform Writers: The Uncertainty, THE UNCERTAINTY!

I’m about to full-body-submerge into the editing of Book No. 3. I don’t know what sort of book will rise up.

I’ve submitted three scripts to a Hollywood producer based on a fourth I wrote that he liked. The producer has a separate story he’s hoping to develop and is looking for a screenwriter. I have no idea if I will be that writer.

I’ve started the proposal for Book No. 4 and, when I finish it, have no idea how it will be received by my very discriminating agent.

I could go on: A magazine story I want to do but don’t know how to gain access to the subject or the relevant documents I’ve FOIA’d to which the federal government has denied me; a YouTube channel I’d like to launch based loosely on TWPL that may take way too much effort with no discernible return; book-writing clients who’ve delayed, in one case indefinitely, the start date by which we’ll collaborate.

I am living in liminal time, where there are no known outcomes, in multiple facets of my life. This is not comfortable. Or in any way comforting: Everything I’ve listed above could go to shit.

So, what to do?

Well, this liminal time and its uncertainty—THE UNCERTAINTY!—is something you’ll face, too. You likely already have. You’re likely nodding along right now because you know how this feels.

The inner noise of What if this does, indeed, go to shit?

The poor sleep.

The lack of motivation on certain days which leads you to think, Maybe a job as an actuary IS something I could pivot to.

That we’ll all face this is in its own way comforting. But knowing that everyone suffers is not exactly the end of suffering.

Here are three things helping me. I share them in the hope they’ll help you, when you next live in liminal space.

1. The Bhagavada Gita: I mentioned it above for good reason. You don’t need to be a Hindu—I am not—to take in the book’s wisdom on outcomes. Verse after verse, paragraph after paragraph implores you to stay in this moment of your life, to trust this particular process of the thing you love to do. That’s where sanity lies. The outcomes? You can’t control those. Don’t try.

   Instead, trust that the processes themselves will lead you where you need to be. My processes have worked for me in the past, not every time, but enough. Why should this batch of liminal time be any different?

2. Talk to a therapist. You need someone who is not a spouse, or a friend, because you can exhaust your spouse or best friend with the uncertainties of liminal time. Plus, a paid professional gives good advice. My therapist this week told me to think about “Who Owns This Problem?” If it’s not me, don’t think about it. Or, more specific still, If I’ve solved my part of the problem, let the person with whom I’m collaborating work with it next. Sage words.

3. Read biographies of people who live through liminal space. I’m reading a dual biography of Erasmus and Martin Luther. It ostensibly covers how they were friends until they were very much enemies but, man, the 95 Theses Luther nailed to that church door sure did lead to a continent-wide liminal space. Seeing how Luther responded to the veiled threats on his life, watching him write as he knew his latest book (dude was so prolific) could see him imprisoned or burned at the stake, well, it’s inspiring, even if you have no faith. I’ve said before but it bears repeating that Phil Knight’s memoir is perhaps the best self-help book you’ll ever read, though it contains no self-help. It’s just a story of Knight getting kneed in the balls for 300 pages, failing as a founder of Nike for 15 some years. In those failures you see how Knight lived through the uncertainty—THE UNCERTAINTY!—and navigated his liminal space. You can take almost endless lessons on doing the same from these sorts of books.

Quote of the Week: “So that morning in 1962 I told myself: Let everyone else call your idea crazy . . . just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought to where ‘there’ is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop.”

—Phil Knight, Shoe Dog

Have a great weekend. I’ll be back next Friday with another edition of TWPL.

This email requires a lot of man hours. Please offset that by becoming a paying subscriber.

Then, when you’re hungry for a longer read, please consider buying one of my books. Publisher’s Weekly says of the latter you’ll be “riveted from the first page to the last.” The New York Times says, “The richness of Kix’s dramatis personae simply staggers.” The book was named to Amazon’s and The New York Times’ and Kirkus‘ respective Best Books of 2023 lists. To the extent that matters to you.

Book No. 3 is looking like it’ll be out in 2027.

Welcome to This Week Paul Likes.

Every week, I throw out hits of inspiration—three recommendations, one tip, one quote—from the writers who inspire me, in the hope they’ll inspire you to do your best work.

Subscribe below if it’s your first time to the party. Let’s start with this week’s recommendations.

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“What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’ Private Retreat”: Impossible not to click that, right?

Novelist and TV showrunner Noah Hawley tells what happened eight years ago when, for reasons never properly explained, he and his family were invited to Campfire, a Bezos-funded retreat in Santa Barbara where 80-plus guests—anyone Bezos thinks is interesting, from any walk of life—were whisked to a private resort to…

Network?

Drink Bezos’ liquor?

Attend the panel discussions Bezos’ staff staged?

Hawley never found out. But he did take notes.

“Why Movies Just Don’t Feel Real Any More”: If you’re like me you pay attention to movies for their story. This video essay from the YouTube channel Like Stories of Old, examining shifts in cinematography over the last 50 years as more films are shot digitally, will still leave you riveted.

Deeply informed, too.

I won’t pretend to know all Like Stories of Old does about haptic filmmaking or depth perception. I will say this video shows the power of an enterprising storyteller. You can take your idiosyncratic passion and, as this video essay does, expand it to broader cultural shifts and gain an audience, something which rivals even that of a movie.

Like Stories of Old now has over 1 million subscribers on YouTube.

How I Make Money Writing: ’s Substack, where he interviews writers of all genres about how they bring in cash, will be catnip for you, too.

Hao once interviewed me but that’s not why I read every edition. I read it for the commonality of experience. What writers do for love is not always the same—is seldom the same—as what they do for money.

If that sounds grim, know that Hao’s featured writers show incredible creativity when it comes to making bank, too. They follow their idiosyncratic passions or curiosities until they becomes bottom-line revenue.

(To that end, You Have to be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live is out now in paperback and showcased in a new online excerpt where—what do you know?—a buy link appears at the bottom of the page. Just sayin’.)

This Week’s Tip For Longform Writers: Yank The Tap Dancer Off The Stage.

I got the edits back for Book No. 3 last Friday. Among my editor’s comments was one of voice. The book was too voice-y, the editor said.

Now, I was weened on DFW and other post-modern, style-first writers like Jonathan Safron Foer and William H. Gass. My favorite nonfiction author these days might be George Packer and my favorite working novelist Patricia Lockwood. Their writing voices shout on every page. It is delicious to hear.

So I fought this idea that the book was too voice-y until, rereading certain sequences, I noticed something.

A tap-dancer emerging on the page, prancing and tapping back and forth, in front of one dramatic scene and then another.

This is wildly reductive but there are two types of writers: the clean ones, and the stylists.

The prose of clean writers tends to feature shorter, unadorned sentences whose aim is to move the reader briskly into the narrative where the focus remains thereafter on the story. Erik Larson is a clean nonfiction author and Hemingway a clean novelist. I enjoyed, say, The Devil in the White City and For Whom The Bell Tolls. I appreciated the storytelling. I think a clean style can be beautiful, too. I’m not alone. Joan Didion once dedicated vast swaths of a New Yorker essay to the first paragraph of For Whom The Bell Tolls.

I just need a little zhuzh. Give me a Rich Cohen biography to read. Give me Fitzgerald instead of Hemingway.

I want writing to entertain me, delight me, leave me in awe. I want to read, as I said last week, Philip Roth.

Stylistic writers have their problems, however. They can interfere with the story. This is the case, in my opinion, with Martin Amis. Dude flaunts his style, especially in his early novels. At one point, his father Kingsley, a celebrated novelist in his own right and a formidable stylist, too, asked Martin, Why don’t any of your books ever include a sentence like, ‘The man crossed into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water’?

Martin scoffed. (I’m recounting this exchange from memory. I swear Martin wrote about his dad’s reproach but have spent too much time this morning trying to find the passage.)

Kingsley’s point was simple: It is exhausting as a reader to be relentlessly entertained.

And so, rereading certain sequences of Book No. 3 this week, I noticed a pattern. Not relentless entertainment, but something close: a tap dancer who gets the audience’s attention but then, when the drama begins to unfold behind him, fails to exit the stage.

This is common mistake of mine. I want the prose to pull you in until I can get the story to rise behind me, but too often I’m unsure if the story is keeping your attention. So I zhuzh it up.

I think the book is too voice-y in certain sequences and the majority of draft number two, I imagine, will be given, well, to writing clean sentences. They’ll allow the reader to better take in the drama.

I emailed my agent that the goal will be to tell the tap dancer that, sure, he can dance—but he’s not the star of the show. I reserve the right to yank him off the stage whenever I see fit.

Lots of stylistic writers strike a balance between entertaining a reader and allowing a story to breathe. Kingsley Amis is among the best. I like Kingsley’s stuff a lot more than his son Martin’s. My favorite Kingsley novel is Lucky Jim. It’s that rarest of satirical books—still funny generations later.

My favorite passage is Kingsley describing what a hangover feels like to the story’s hero:

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth has been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by a secret police. He felt bad.

So much fun. The stylistic flourishing of “spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning” next to the simplicity of the following line: “The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did.” I’d argue that line is hilarious, as is the next phrase—“he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again”—because it’s a clean sentence. No big words. No worked-over metaphor or image. Just Kingsley knowing when to ease up and when to go full throttle once more: “His mouth has been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.”

Kingsley was the best, man.

I’ve already stored as a note on my laptop the following mantra: Have more lines in draft number two where a man crosses into the kitchen and pours himself a glass of water.

In your own writing, know when to yank the tap dancer you’ve created from the stage, too. You can get a sense for how by reading more Kingsley Amis.

Quote of the Week: “You'll find that marriage is a good short cut to the truth. No, not quite that. A way of doubling back to the truth. Another thing you'll find is that the years of illusion aren't those of adolescence, as the grown-ups try to tell us; they're the ones immediately after it, say the middle twenties, the false maturity if you like, when you first get thoroughly embroiled in things and lose your head. Your age, by the way, Jim. That's when you first realize that sex is important to other people besides yourself. A discovery like that can't help knocking you off balance for a time.”

—Kingsley Amis, proving once again why Lucky Jim is worth your read.

Have a great weekend. I’ll be back next Friday.

This email requires a lot of man hours. Please offset that by becoming a paying subscriber.

Then, when you’re hungry for a longer read, please consider buying one of my books. Publisher’s Weekly says of the latter you’ll be “riveted from the first page to the last.” The New York Times says, “The richness of Kix’s dramatis personae simply staggers.” The book was named to Amazon’s and The New York Times’ and Kirkus‘ respective Best Books of 2023 lists. To the extent that matters to you.

Book No. 3 is looking like it’ll be out in 2027.

A programming note: We’re closing registration for the writing mastermind today at 5 ET. If you have a big honking writing project you ache to do or don’t know how to start, and you want results akin to what these people got, apply.

Just email me and tell me about your writing project. We’re capping the four-month mastermind at six people, tops. Why not be one of them?

Welcome to This Week Paul Likes.

Every week, I throw out hits of inspiration—three recommendations, one tip, one quote—from the writers who inspire me, in the hope they’ll inspire you to do your best work.

Subscribe below if it’s your first time to the party. Let’s start with this week’s recommendations.

Subscribe now

Once a day, do the opposite: This year exacts its toll, man.

My father-in-law died in February and my wife and I are still dealing with the fallout—to put it diplomatically—of a complicated man. My mother-in-law lives with us and her dementia worsens, visibly, with every week. I’ve been to the ER with gut issues. Been dealing since January with what my ortho calls a frozen shoulder. I’ve been waiting on edits for Book No. 3 for longer than a hot-minute now. My teenaged daughter has had her struggles, as have my teenaged sons…

You get the point.

Your life is hard, too, or will have its moments when the hard crowds in. I’ll offer what’s helped this last week through a hard season of life. We’ll all have one. We’ll likely have many.

Let’s start with the bolded phrase above.

Once a day, do the opposite is a line from, I think, Schwarzenegger. I don’t remember exactly because I heard the line in high school and I began that—my gawd—three decades ago.

Especially if you’re a writer or creative type, you spend your days before a screen, sitting down. Once a day, do the opposite means, Move. Aggressively, violently even. Swim some hard laps. Lift some heavy weights. Run until it burns. I don’t care. Just do the opposite of sitting and typing and stewing during your hard time.

I’ve been lifting since I was 14 and it is my release from the day’s stress. My frozen shoulder hasn’t allowed me to lift since January, so my opposite in 2026 has been hill sprints, bodyweight leg workouts, long walks, something, anything, every day, which is the opposite of sitting and typing.

It is impossible to feel like shit, to be depressed, after you do the opposite.

Do the opposite.

We need two things from life: To grow and to give.

In the aforelinked, you’ll see how Tony Robbins has been saying that for years. Just because it’s a catchy self-help phrase doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Certain jobs, even certain cushy ones, used to bore me. I wasn’t being challenged and I knew it. Put another way: I wasn’t living up to my potential. When you’re bored, I think your body and mind are telling you, We need to grow here.

Achievement and ambition become their own traps though. I’ve felt that, too. It’s a hollow feeling, craven, like everything you have is about to be taken away from you unless you do more.

The more here is not doing more for yourself. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, The best way to make yourself happy is to make others happy first.

That’s what Robbins means with his give half of the equation. It’s volunteering, sure, but you can also think about it by way of guidance. Take that writing mastermind. It benefits me, sure, but the real compensation came one day last fall when I got a phone call from Reggie Smith. The manuscript he and I had worked on, Reggie’s dream, the one he had struggled to write for 10 years, had just been accepted by a major publisher, Reggie said.

In our Zoom call, Reggie and I both had tears in our eyes. It’s one of my favorite memories from last year.

The best way to make yourself happy is to make others happy first.

The bigger the dream, the bigger the story: I’m not gonna lie: Many moments the last few weeks I gave up. I stayed in bed. Ignored the blinking cursor on the proposal for Book No. 4. Ignored the kids and scrolled YouTube.

What pulled me from the funk was the memory of an anecdote from Stephen King’s On Writing. You may know it.

When King wrote his first novel he took a nail, a large nail, the biggest he could find, and tapped it against the wall of his bedroom. King didn’t flush the nail. He lightly tapped it so it would stick out some three inches from the wall.

When he finished that novel and submitted it, the rejection slips made their way back to him. He stuck each of those rejections through the nail. He soon had so many rejections he had to buy a spike. (This sounds a little too dramatic but it’s King’s story. Let’s roll with it.)

Soon, that spike couldn’t hold any more rejections slips.

King’s point here is two-fold, but most people focus on the first:

Persevere.

Write through the rejections. Improve, improve, improve until they won’t reject you because you no longer reject any aspect of yourself because you’re undeniable.

A fine point, sure. But King’s second is the one I like.

He knew that one day he would have quite a story about his early rejection and giant nail—a rail spike, even!

The bigger the dream, King said, the bigger the eventual story you get to tell about it.

What pulls me out of any funk these days is thinking about 40 years from now, on my deathbed. Will my family and friends want to hear about the times I posted to LinkedIn?

Or will my family and friends want to hear when I went for it? Success isn’t even the point when you go big. It’s the experience of trying and trying and trying and trying and trying and trying.

It’s the story you eventually get to tell.

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I wrote The Saboteur between 4:30 and 7 each morning. Back then Sonya and I had three kids in diapers or pull-ups and they would be up no later than 7:15. Our two pugs would be up no later than 7:30. I didn’t want to write my first book before the house woke up but didn’t have a choice.

After breakfast and changing diapers and taking out the dogs, ESPN beckoned. I was an editor at its magazine in those days and was simply too tired after work, too tired after the kids’ bedtime, to crack open the laptop and advance the manuscript.

So: 4:30 am it was, with a fruit-and-protein shake in the blender, slurping extra-strong coffee, opening the computer and reviewing what I wrote the day before and, somewhere between 5 and 5:15, writing another 500 words of the book.

I threw myself a pity party each morning in those early months. I may have thrown myself a pity party for the book’s entirety were it not for what I came to call The Guidance.

The Guidance could be any writer—any friend of mine or idol or long-dead author—who talked or wrote about his or her process. I would ask people questions during the day or read books like ’s Daily Rituals at night or find time on the weekend to download some podcast about super-boring topics: When do you wake up? How many words a day do you write? Where do you sit?

This tedium was fuel. These conversations and passages from books became my companions, my cheerleaders, frankly, instructing me how I might keep going until I realized, My God. I’m making real progress here.

This is not an email to make like me. I don’t care when you write. I just care that you do. Which means this email is really about the companions.

I got lucky. I’m fascinated by process and could hold in my head for weeks how Hemingway wrote with the break of morning, which inspired me to make like him.

I realized when I went out on book tour, though, that most people need more than, say, Hemingway’s journal entries to keep going. Over and over I heard from readers who whispered, “I have a book in me, too. I started it but life got busy.” Or: “I want to start it but don’t know how.”

I could tell them about 4:30 am but they would say, more times than not, how writing is so lonely and 4:30 am is so early. (It is. I don’t wake up then any more, either.) With the passage of time I came to see that a lot of people crave a community of like-minded peers to go after their big, scary, redemptive writing dream.

So, two years ago, I launched the writing mastermind.

Community is why Bob Beverly signed up. He’s a therapist and author who wanted to sharpen his newsletter and start another book—and a movie script. Bob’s ambitious, if you can’t tell, but his problem, he told me, was how lonely he felt writing, which led to inconsistency.

Bob had a major health setback during the mastermind and yet he continued to advance his projects, buoyed by the people around him. He not only started his latest book during that time but refashioned his newsletter based on what the group and I encouraged him to do.

Bob’s health is better now and new clients have made their way to him—and a lot of new readers, too—based on the success he’s had the last couple years. He made me blush when talking about what the mastermind did for him:

I love gurus that live up to the hype. Paul Kix surpasses it. He’s the real deal...where you hear about his writing skill, his bright mind at once curious and humble, his grit and determination and resilience. And then you meet him and see his confidence, his openness, his ability to encourage and to challenge. Above all, you see his skill which is only surpassed by his integrity.

He delivers what he says...and more.

It’s not for everyone, this mastermind. It’s not meant to be. We’re only accepting up to six people; those inside will be like-minded peers. We’ll work for four months on your big honking writing project, in whatever form you’re hoping to take it.

If you’re interested, if writing makes you lonely and that loneliness leads to inconsistency, email me. We’ll set up a time to talk about your project this week.

I’m a huge believer in community, but I can’t invite people inside forever. We’re closing the registration window for the mastermind tomorrow.

Best wishes,

Paul

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She grew up in India, with a dream to be a poet and writer, but her parents steered her toward a “practical” life. So Richa Shukla found herself working as a lawyer at a corporate firm in London.

The work was stimulating, or at least could be on the best days, but the hours were insane. Sixty-, 70-, 80-hour weeks. She needed out of London and out of the law.

She would have never anticipated it but her curiosity, her probing intelligence, her judgement of which stories were told well served a particular kind of underwriting, which is how Richa Shukla ended up in insurance of all industries, and in Singapore of all cities.

The hours were better, the city cleaner, but as the years passed the childlike longing remained.

She desperately wanted to write.

What a ridiculous idea, she told herself. She was a middle-aged woman now, with no background in writing outside of the books she bought at her favorite indie store each weekend.

And yet the longing intensified. It was a physical ache on some days.

She subscribed to TWPL and took The Storytelling You, but learning the craft of writing was not the same as actually writing, she found.

Two years ago she heard of the writing mastermind. Just six people in the class. We’d work together one-on-one and in group sessions for four months. This wasn’t about acquiring knowledge. These four months were about writers applying what they knew.

“I hesitated for two days,” she said, before emailing me and asking more about the program.

All that time, from girlhood onward she’d wondered if she was worth it. Could she actually publish her poetry? Could she actually start the bi-weekly Substack she dreamed of?

She had so much fear and doubt, she said.

Still, she hit the send button.

Most people in the mastermind had a result in mind, I said, during our screening interview.

Take Reggie Smith: He wanted to finish the book he’d failed to write across 10 years and see it published by a major press. (Reggie ultimately accomplished both of those goals via the mastermind.)

Richa said that’s why she’d hesitated to email me. Her goal was to at last feel whole. Her result would be actually carving out the time to write, and then finding the confidence to publish what she wrote.

I told her everyone else in the mastermind had been a writer in some capacity, and for some set number of years. I’m honest in the screening application. I told Richa I was 50-50 on whether she was a good fit for this.

But I could hear it in her voice: that longing. I’d heard that same longing as a boy on a farm in Iowa, when I’d talked to myself and doubted if I could actually make it as a writer.

I welcomed Richa into the mastermind.

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Two years later, you can judge Richa’s results, if you’d like, by the poetry she’s written and submitted to local and regional contests and the Substack she’s started.

But the real result is this deep communion with something that is almost spiritual in nature, she says. Writing what she thinks, improving what she writes, day by week by month by year.

Writing is a form of therapy, she says, and these days a practice in gratitude.

She is so grateful she is at last writing regularly.

Here’s a brief conversation I recorded with Richa last week, about why the mastermind was worth so much more than the tactile results.

The mastermind’s aim is to help you complete your big project. Your “big project” can be as idiosyncratic as you. I’ll hear you out.

You apply for the mastermind much as Richa did. By responding to this email and actually hitting send.

Now, some of you have worried whether what you email is reaching me or going to some spam folder.

Some emails have ended up in spam. So, if you’d like, feel free to email me at paul@paulkix.com.

P.S. My calendar is filling up and we’re closing the registration Thursday. If you’re like Richa and ache to fulfill your dream, but don’t know how, send me an email.

Meet Reggie Smith.

Reggie had a memoir he’d been working on for at least 10 years. He tried to write it himself. Tried working with an agent. He couldn’t master it on his own and the agent ultimately abandoned Reggie.

He felt lost, distraught, frustrated. He reached out to me two years ago and wanted to be part of a small mastermind I was then running.

Working with me and five other people in our group, Reggie not only finished the book—an achievement in itself, he said—but based on the strength of the manuscript, Reggie found a publisher for it, without any agent or book proposal, a rarity in the nonfiction world.

How did he pull it off?

Well, here Reggie talks about how the writing mastermind gave him the guidance he couldn’t find on his own. That confidence translated to the page. Those pages led to the book.

Today I’m offering a seat at the table. A chance for you to work alongside me as Reggie did, day by day, week by week, for 12 weeks, and go deep on your big writing project, your big writing dream, the thing you really want to take on but are scared to, or maybe don’t know how to do on your own.

The writing mastermind is open to six people. We’ll run it for four months.

Why offer this writing mastermind?

Because a lot of TWPL gives practical advice for writing. The Storytelling You, for the people who’ve taken that, does the same. You know what you need to know.

But so many people who email me don’t know how to apply what they’ve learned.

• They feel lost.

• They second-guess themselves on the page.

• Or they don’t know how to start, or finish, their big writing project.

The writing mastermind will fix that. Its aim is the implementation of what you’ve learned.

Whatever big project you’ve been putting off, waiting for the right time and perhaps the necessary motivation to start?

This is that right time.

And I am your motivation.

How will this work across four months? It’s pretty simple.

You and I will have:

1) A weekly 60-minute call, once a week for every week of the four-month window.

2) You’ll get daily access to me and the five other people in the mastermind cohort via text and/or email. This will keep you on track day by day.

3) And you’ll get a once-a-month group call via Zoom, where all six of you, and me, will discuss the joys and complications and frustrations and triumphs of the progress you’re making on your big writing project.

The goal is to get you to finish that project, or get you to the point where you see the finish line.

Let’s talk about your project.

--It can be a book.

--It can be a feature you’ve been longing to pitch and write.

--It can be some work-in-progress project of your devising.

--It can be some new storytelling-based business you want to launch.

--It can be a newsletter, a podcast, a storytelling-based YouTube channel.

You know you’re big project. You know your big writing dream.

Bob Beverly knew his big writing dream. He’s a therapist who took the mastermind two years ago. He had a new newsletter related to his practice he wanted to try out. We found how to get the newsletter up and running and to talk about how to improve the books and scripts he’s writing. The newsletter and new writing projects have netted Bob new clients.

Here’s what Bob wrote about the mastermind.

I love gurus that live up to the hype. Paul Kix surpasses it. He’s the real deal...where you hear about his writing skill, his bright mind at once curious and humble, his grit and determination and resilience. And then you meet him and see his confidence, his openness, his ability to encourage and to challenge. Above all, you see his skill which is only surpassed by his integrity.

He delivers what he says...and more.

If this writing mastermind is not for you, fine.

I don’t want you to apply if you’re not feeling this, or if you’re not looking for one-on-one mentorship and a community of writers out to help each other reach their big writing goals.

But if this is you, if you’re hungry, aching to achieve your dream?

Apply.

Because I want to help you get the result you’re after.

Something important to note: I’ll screen applicants.

If you want in on this mastermind, email me. Just respond to this email and tell me you want to learn more and then you and I will have a conversation about it.

That’s the screening: The conversation.

I want to make sure you’re a good fit for this mastermind. Like I said, I’m only allowing in six people at most.

And I’m dedicating my own time every day to helping you. So I want to know you plan to do the work. I want to know you plan to help others in the group. I want to know that you’re serious about tackling this big project across a four-month period.

The costs: The Storytelling You retails for $2,500. The writing mastermind will be more than that.

I’m offering a payment plan but I’ll also say that the cost won’t be the barrier here so much as making sure that you are in a position to tackle your big writing project and that you’ll fit in with the five other writers who’ll be part of our mastermind.

Here’s what you should do if you’re interested. You should respond to this email and tell me as much.

You and I will then set up a time to talk this week.

If it’s a good fit, I’ll formally welcome you into the four-month mastermind and it’ll then be your choice whether to accept the offer.

If you’re sick of second guessing yourself, of feeling like your alone, if you can’t stand how you keep putting off your big writing project, man I really hope to hear from you.

Paul

P.S. I’ll be closing the registration soon for this, Wednesday, or perhaps no later than Thursday. I want to start the mastermind next week. In the hyperlink above, Reggie Smith said he was on the fence about applying but was “of course very glad I did.”

Programming note: I still have the three recommendations, the weekly tip and the quote, but this week everything I liked fit within a theme.

What Is This For?

I know. That clarifies nothing. You’ll pick it up.

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Jason Feifer Once Told Me The Point of a Magazine Piece is Not (Just) to be Published: Feifer is a good friend, the EIC of Entrepreneur magazine. Six years ago he and I had a conversation about what a magazine piece is for.

What a ridiculous question, you’re thinking. It’s meant to be read and you, the writer, are meant to be paid, right?

Not if you’re the author, Feifer argued.

If you’re the author, the point of the magazine piece in our crowded digital age is to ask, What else can this magazine piece do for me?

What speaking opportunities can it present? What Hollywood option might follow? How could it be repurposed into a Substack article, a YouTube video essay, a post on social media. Something, anything, where it can live on and where the writer might, on a long enough time horizon, be paid again.

The one-to-one transaction—I, the writer, am paid to write a piece and for writing it my influence grows—those days are over, Feifer argued.

We must instead think about stacking. How can one thing become many things? If there is not at least one but most likely two ancillary benefits to the thing you’re doing, don’t do it. Writers need to get out of the business of I do this thing and then I get paid; I do that thing and then I get paid. These one-to-one transactions will exhaust us, keep us poor.

The above link, a podcast episode with Feifer, goes into greater detail on his theory of stacking. At the core of that theory is a question: What is this really for?

It’s forced me over the last six years to think about not just magazine pieces but everything on a longer time horizon. The projects I take on, the relationships I form. There’s a mercenary aspect to all that, sure, maybe even a gross one, but the question also poses a deeper, dare I say philosophical inquiry.

Who benefits from this thing at present? How might I benefit from it in the future? And in numerous ways?

What is this for has become a preoccupying mantra the last six years, since going out on my own as a writer. It’s also a good way to orient you for what follows this week in TWPL.

Who is AI Writing Actually For? You may know the YouTube channel Man Carrying Thing for its book reviews, its trenchant sketches, but here Jake—and it’s just Jake; the internet doesn’t know his last name—Jake tells everyone to quit with the hyperventilating around AI.

He breaks down a review ChatGPT carried out of The Rachel Papers, a novel by Martin Amis, which a Times of London columnist thought threatened his job. On the surface, the GPT review seems brilliant.

Jake shows all the ways it isn’t. Jake asks above all who AI writing is actually for? Who benefits from it? Who enjoys it?

It’s not writers and certainly not readers. (It’s exhausting to just list all the ways people hate AI these days.)

No, AI writing will be the province of people who can’t write, read by people who don’t read. Useful idiots. Accountants, say.

Art will carry on.

Why Was This Elon Musk Biography Published? Sam Kriss poses a question beneath that, too: Why is a particular brand of sycophantic biography published more and more?

It can’t be because readers enjoy these way-too-long-and-far-too-tedious books.

Kriss looks at the world differently. Take the opening paragraph of his Elon review:

I know that I’m supposed to hate Elon Musk; I was asked to review his biography because I’m the kind of person who can be relied upon to hate Elon Musk. Because of his terrible politics, or his hideous wealth. Or simply as a matter of taste. But despite everything, I find it very hard to hate the man. I can’t summon the energy; it all feels too much like a sideshow. Elon Musk barely exists. He’s just the name we’ve given to a certain mass delusion. I can tell you who I do hate, though. After nearly seven hundred pages of warm dribble, I started to really, really hate Elon Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson. The questions the book had me asking weren’t to do with billionaires, or power, or our destiny in the stars. Instead, I was wondering: What is a book, exactly? What are people doing when they read? Might banning a few books actually be a good idea?

This Week’s Longform Tip for Writers: What is Your Career For?

I was talking with a music writer yesterday about what to do with our lives now that magazines are, with few exceptions, dead.

I laid out for him what I laid out here. When we hung up though, I thought about Gandhi.

I read a ton of Gandhi for You Have to be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live. The book of his that’s stuck with me some four years later is his autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth.

Read it for its lessons in nonviolent protests, sure, but what’ll linger is how Gandhi tinkered with everything: His diet, how he chose to lead people, how he tried to influence governments, how long he slept.

Everything was an experiment to him. Life was an experiment. His philosophy, in fact, of Life as an experiment is liberating when applied to your own.

I’m speaking from its application here. It is terrifying to try something new. What if I suck at it? What if it takes too long to get good? Gandhi answers that question with, What if you just experiment for a little while?

In that little while is whole worlds. Because the best experiments will catch on. You’ll want to continue the experiment, for months more, but likely indefinitely. That’s what happened to me.

I’ve moved from a magazine writer to an author of books, and now a ghost-writer/ghost-editor of them, by finding out that I liked writing books even more than I liked writing magazine pieces, and that I liked editing books just as much as editing articles in magazines.

That may seem like a natural transition, but Life as an experiment also allowed me to try and then commit to teaching others, and not via some university but online, among you all mostly. Because why not?

What’s the worst that can happen? I won’t like it? Then I would have quit.

But it turns out I do like it!

I would have never considered myself a teacher—I would have never created my own digital courses or services, would have never found joy in teaching online—if I hadn’t first followed Gandhi’s example of experimenting, just for a little bit.

(By the way: Monday I’ve got something new for you. Stay tuned.)

The point of bringing up my own life is to extrapolate to yours. The easiest thing to do is see your career on a fixed path. But what you’ve done in the past need not be what you do in the future. In fact, if you’re a magazine writer like me or my music-writing telephone buddy, or pretty much any legacy-outlet writer these days, you need to find something else to do in your future.

That seems daunting, I know. But if you break any new action into a little experiment, it’s manageable, even fun. You get to tell yourself, I’m just gonna do this for a bit longer.

Gandhi’s life showed all of us how you can pursue fully only the things you deem worthy.

So, what is the point of your career?

Tinkering with it, especially these days.

Quote of the Week: “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

—Gandhi

Have a great weekend. You’ll hear from me again Monday.

This email requires a lot of man hours. Please offset that by becoming a paying subscriber.

Then, when you’re hungry for a longer read, please consider buying one of my books. Publisher’s Weekly says of the latter you’ll be “riveted from the first page to the last.” The New York Times says, “The richness of Kix’s dramatis personae simply staggers.” The book was named to Amazon’s and The New York Times’ and Kirkus‘ respective Best Books of 2023 lists. To the extent that matters to you.

Book No. 3 is looking like it’ll be out in February 2027.

Welcome to This Week Paul Likes.

Every week, I throw out hits of inspiration—three recommendations, one tip, one quote—from the writers who inspire me, in the hope they’ll inspire you to do your best work.

Subscribe below if it’s your first time to the party. Let’s start with this week’s recommendations.

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I Am Dynamite! Good gawd you’ll love Sue Prideaux’s biography of Nietzsche. You’ll see the fragile and sickly and poor man behind the übermensch and likely write as many notes in the book’s margins as I did. Like this one:

If Nietzsche were alive today, would he be a Redditor?

I ask because he was a simp: Putting on a bravado in his books of staring down one’s fate and building one’s life on the model of nobody else, and yet in real life being photographed getting whipped by the woman he loved, as if he were some oxen and she the farmer, a woman he couldn’t directly ask to marry him, either. Nietzsche outsourced the ask to the girlfriend’s live-in boyfriend (!). Which means Nietzsche was, among other things, a cuckold.

(The woman said no.)

Nietzsche was the third point in a separate love triangle with Richard Wagner’s wife, too.

I Am Dynamite! is more big-hearted than Nietzsche’s romantic and sexual timidity. Prideaux’s towering intellect shows the full sweep of Nietzsche’s philosophical influences and how he countered or complemented them in wise and often witty prose. Especially when Nietzsche goes mad, and even later when his writing is grossly misinterpreted by the Third Reich, you’ll come to have real sympathy for old Friedrich.

I loved this book.

Mr. Nobody Against Putin: The film won Best Documentary at the Oscars and deserved it.

A high school teacher in Russia films his students for a period of years after the start of the Ukraine war. The students’ fears and their teachers’ efforts to indoctrinate them—coerced efforts often, but not always—makes this doc propulsive. You come to sympathize with kids and the sad state of Russian discourse and culture, all the things Russians cannot say (but can film).

This is a movie of loaded silence and innuendo and, by the end, bravery.

“Getting a Return on Your Failures”: I’m not above a good self-help podcast.

Ed Mylett brings on the leadership author and coach John Maxwell. To say that failure weaves itself with success is to state the obvious, but the discussion here, where Mylett and Maxwell take it, raises the gooseflesh.

I listened to the episode a second time yesterday.

This Week’s Tip for Longform Writers: Again, and Again, and Again

I needed to listen to that podcast twice. This week I got word from my agent on the proposal for Book No. 4.

He wants me to start over. A rewrite from Page 1.

This rewrite comes after I’ve committed 12,000 words to the page. It should be noted, too, that before this first draft of the proposal I wrote two separate memos to the agent about what it could concern, the second memo being a complete rewrite of the first.

So, if you’re keeping score at home, I’m starting again for the fourth time on this book project.

One way to view what I’m doing is John Maxwellian: Failure is woven with success. Which is true and a message I needed to hear. It kept me from despairing.

Something equally true to the writing life, though, and life in general, is this.

The work works on you.

It’s not just the proposal for Book No. 4. I’m failing all over the place.

I pitched The Atlantic on a magazine piece this week and they didn’t take it.

Last month I launched a new service for my business alongside a partner and we got no real interest.

I have what my ortho calls a “frozen shoulder” and despite months of P.T. and even regular visits to an accupunturist/pressurist, the shoulder is not healed. It may not heal for months more.

Failure is woven with success, sure, but the adage I’ve come to favor is recently, The work works on you.

Alex Hormozi said that, though it’s a close paraphrase of the Apostle Paul. The etymology isn’t nearly as important as what the line means.

It means nothing is wasted. Let’s take Book No. 4.

One way to view the proposal is, Oh shit! I have to start again?? Believe me, I’ve moaned that question. The better way to see it is with each effort, the proposal grows more refined. I’m not starting over so much as taking what I’ve learned from the previous drafts about what is working it and applying that wisdom to this draft.

Everything you do will influence everything you subsequently do.

I came to see this years ago when I edited Wright Thompson at ESPN the Magazine. Wright’s a good friend and a great writer. What I remember even more than the tenacity of our editing sessions is their longevity. Some stories took four, six, eight drafts to get right. He was down for all of it. Wright never tired of the process.

I don’t think he’d phrase it this way but think he’d agree that nothing was wasted. The work worked on him—and me, frankly—until the work was right.

I bear that in mind now. In that way, I took the feedback I got from my Atlantic editor this week, tweaked the pitch, and sent it on to Esquire.

They took the piece.

I love writing for The Atlantic and Esquire because the editors at each pub will not stop. This Atlantic piece took, I think, six drafts to get right. This Esquire piece, my favorite, took eight.

I’ve found the same thing in my entrepreneurial life: Work working on me. That venture a business partner and I launched last month? It failed, yes, but it also provided us data.

That’s not the last time we’ll launch something together. And even if it is, I’ve made a new friend. That’s a win.

There are endless ways that the work can work on you. I repeat it often these days because the more I repeat it, the more I embody it, and the more I see its truth.

If there is a lie about our aspirations it’s that they will be reached when we put in the effort.

Ha! No.

And I say that as someone who falls for this lie all the time.

We instead achieve what we want after some all-out effort and then a failure, and then a second all-out effort, and likely a third, and probably a fourth, and…

Again, and again, and again.

It’s frustrating as hell.

But…

The work works on you.

You get there, eventually.

Quote of the Week: “Writing is a strange and solitary activity. There are dispiriting times when you start working on the first few pages of a novel. Every day, you have the feeling you are on the wrong track. This creates a strong urge to go back and follow a different path. It is important not to give in to this urge, but to keep going. It is a little like driving a car at night, in winter, on ice, with zero visibility. You have no choice, you cannot go into reverse, you must keep going forward while telling yourself that all will be well when the road becomes more stable and the fog lifts.”

—Patrick Modiano, from his Nobel-acceptance speech

Have a great weekend, I’ll be back next Friday with another TWPL.

This email requires a lot of man hours. Please offset that by becoming a paying subscriber.

Then, when you’re hungry for a longer read, please consider buying one of my books. Publisher’s Weekly says of the latter you’ll be “riveted from the first page to the last.” The New York Times says, “The richness of Kix’s dramatis personae simply staggers.” The book was named to Amazon’s and The New York Times’ and Kirkus‘ respective Best Books of 2023 lists. To the extent that matters to you.

Book No. 3 is looking like it’ll be out in February 2027.

I’m writing essays this Lenten season on what I believe after wrestling for some 40 years with God. This is the third and final essay in that series.

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Toward the end of his life Martin Luther King Jr moved beyond what had defined it. He was no longer interested in civil rights but “human rights,” he told the senior leaders of his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, at a retreat in May 1967. “We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism are all tied together, and you can’t get rid of one without getting rid of the others.”

This was King at his most threatening.

His message threatened SCLC leaders, for one. They had joined King as far back as the 1950s to improve the lives of black Americans. To move now beyond the SCLC protests which had led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 would distance his SCLC brethren from King. Abandon the core leaders’ strengths. It had taken 15 grueling years to reform—to begin to reform—the racist South, these SCLC deputies told King. Now he wanted them to “revolutionize” all of America? And across every base of entrenched power?

With what resources? This was another question, and another threat. The more King talked in 1967 about a “radical redistribution of economic and political power,” the more the donor base ignored the SCLC. Andrew Young, the SCLC’s executive director, said financially the group was in a “rather difficult time right now.” If King kept mentioning the unfairness of capitalism or how much he loathed the war in Vietnam for the innocent people it killed and the working-class Americans—white, black, and Hispanic—drafted to fight its battles, especially as more well-off Americans deferred their responsibility, if King kept saying all this, Young cautioned, he would only hurry along the SCLC’s bankruptcy.

And piss off the president. This was a third threat. The same president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had signed his name to the Civil Rights Act in ‘64 and the Voting Rights Act in ‘65 was the president in 1967 who expanded the war in Vietnam. Johnson scoffed at King’s opposition to the war in a speech King had delivered in New York. LBJ thought King, who had received so much from the president, should be more grateful these days and far quieter about a conflict half a world away. If King persisted in his criticism of Vietnam now, SCLC members feared they would lose every last bit of their political clout in Washington.

There was a fourth fear, too, the gravest threat, though it went largely unstated in the SCLC’s discussions at that retreat in 1967. It was King’s death. The SCLC’s civil rights successes had come at the expense of millions of white Southerners, violent white Southerners. King had survived a stabbing which barely missed his heart, a bombing which blew up his home—at least four major assaults on his life. If the SCLC widened its mission now in 1967, took on economic inequality and the military-industrial complex and the racism every other minority faced, too, it would almost certainly increase by millions the number of people who hated King. It would almost certainly increase the likelihood of his murder.

Listening to these arguments didn’t surprise King. He had raised these points himself, he said to the people around him, and for two years now. He’d been afraid since 1965 to pursue this broader ambition. It had taken reflection and even the rereading of old sermons to see how his broader ambition was one Christ wanted for him as well. “I still believe that standing up for the truth of God is the greatest thing in the world,” he’d once preached. “The end of life is not to be happy. The end of life is not to achieve pleasure and avoid pain. The end of life is to do the will of God, come what may.”

And now, at this retreat in the spring of 1967, he told the SCLC leadership he had settled on the path ahead, come what may. He was fully aware of what the future held. “When I took up the cross, I understood its meaning,” he said to the deputies gathered around him. “The cross is something that you bear, and ultimately that you die on.”

It gave me chills: “The cross is something that you bear, and ultimately that you die on.” I first read that line six years ago, researching my own book on King and the SCLC. King meant it literally. You don’t withstand numerous assaults on your life without knowing you won’t always be so lucky. His wife, Coretta Scott King, said that when she and Martin watched the coverage of JFK’s assassination, Martin turned to her. “This is what is going to happen to me.”

The more I read into King’s life, however, the more I saw that bearing the cross and dying on it was a metaphor as well, multiple metaphors in fact, a liberating worldview, even, that had little to do with the absolution of sins.

This is what I want to focus on, on this Good Friday.

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To understand the loftier points, we should start with the on-the-ground activism.

At the core of King’s activism was the notion of suffering. The members of the SCLC time after time turned their bodies into vessels of suffering. Every blow to the skull from a police officer’s billy club or stick of dynamite tossed near a black person’s home showed the ruthlessness of America’s ruling class. When King and the SCLC did not match America’s ruthlessness, when time after time they remained calm and peaceful as the blows fell, the violence became repulsive. Hard to witness. Onlookers almost begged to turn away. This happened in Birmingham in 1963 when the Kennedy brothers did not want to watch the television coverage coming out of Birmingham or read the front page of The New York Times that showed images of the bloody protests. These images “sickened me,” President Jack Kennedy told his brother, Bobby, the attorney general.

The sickening was the point. And by continuing the protests in Birmingham—or anywhere else for that matter—King forced America to keep witnessing violence until it metamorphosed, turned from a series of lurid images into an allegory of the black experience. How America treated King and his nonviolent protesters in the here and now suggested how America had treated black people for centuries. The grotesque videos on Walter Cronkite’s evening news or the photos on the front page of the Times begged a question: How much longer would America treat black people this way?

This, I believe, was how the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed: America witnessing the protests King led in Birmingham and Selma and elsewhere and Americans saying, as a collective, How much longer? No longer.

Decades later, out on book tour, when I’ve heard readers call these civil rights’ protesters and their victories peaceful, I’ve cringed. Any peaceful demeanor was a byproduct of courage. It took tremendous courage to turn one’s body into a vessel of suffering. The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth said on the eve of the protests in Birmingham, “You have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live.” He meant that literally, too. Shuttlesworth had survived the bombing of his home, in Birmingham, and numerous assaults on his life, from the Klan and Birmingham cops, by the time he and King staged their campaign together.

Shuttlesworth was, like King, also after something more than the literal truth when he thundered about preparing for death. Shuttlesworth’s otherworldly courage was indeed otherworldly. It was summoned, he said, by his deep faith in God. That so many black civil rights leaders in the 1960s were themselves pastors or theologians or lay leaders in churches begins to explain why their campaigns succeeded. They believed God’s purpose for their lives was to improve the lives of their fellow black brothers and sisters.

Come what may.

It was a terrible burden, but one Christ Himself understood—had discussed when He said “turn the other cheek,” and had experienced, ultimately, on the cross. The liberation through suffering that Christ extended to these pastors was akin to the liberation they could, in turn, offer the rest of America.

And so they did.

And that is also what Fred Shuttlesworth meant. “You have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live” meant you have to know you will suffer, so that its visualized terror might force you to ask for and receive God’s grace. God’s grace will deepen your faith. With that deepened faith you can take to the streets patrolled by cops who hate you with a new and profound courage, which, over the course of time, will become a new and profound life, for you and everyone else.

There is still another interpretation of suffering, of knowing what the cross represents. King understood this interpretation, too. It was a multi-disciplinary, multi-millennial, ecumenical view, and one King encountered in his protests and in book after book he read. It is summed up by the Holocaust survivor turned therapist Dr. Edith Eva Eger:

“Suffering is universal. But victimhood is optional.”

It meant not just that we all suffer but that we must accept suffering as we experience it.

In the Buddhist tradition, when you accept you will suffer, you stop running from it and can at last examine it. When you sit with your suffering, you can begin to heal it. By accepting your suffering, physical or emotional or spiritual, you gain something like serenity: The moment you accept suffering is also the moment you cease to suffer.

The Buddha called suffering a Holy Truth for good reason.

Across millennia, worldview, and religions, suffering brings growth, clarity, peace—at its best a closer communion with God. That’s what Job gained when he suffered and turned to Yahweh. Embracing suffering drove Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius to write of a love of fate: Amor Fati. Aurelius believed from his Stoic philosophy and pagan religion that the obstacles and pain in your life are meant to be there, destined to be there even. Encountering them, ultimately surmounting them, strengthens you and brings you to a higher plane of consciousness. A love of fate, then, is to accept your suffering now and any that will come your way in the future because in that acceptance of suffering lives the knowledge that you will become a better person.

King knew of amor fati too. For him it was bound up with with what he understood of the cross. Jesus had died for the absolution of sins, yes, but Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection also showed how we might live. How we might imitate Christ. Not as cheap imitators, either, with prissy sanctimony, but doing God’s will even when we are afraid.

Because Jesus was afraid. He was afraid the night before his death, in the Garden of Gethsemane, when he prayed that God might take away his terrible burden. He was afraid on the cross. He doubted God on the cross: “My God, My God: Why have you forsaken me?”

And yet Jesus carried out God’s plan, come what may.

It may seem that the suffering Christ asks of us is the suffering of martyrdom. King knew that wasn’t true, at least not in the sense that outsiders might understand it: Suffering as penalized death, or, in martyrdom’s more modern connotation, suffering as a performative set piece, gaining sympathy from others for suffering.

No. King knew that the cross’ true meaning was the embodiment of Christ in you, seeing how He worked through you so that you might have the strength and resolve Christ did and live out your highest purpose. Suffering brings you closer to God, which is to say, closer to yourself and your true calling.

The point of suffering, King said, the point of Good Friday, even, is how you resurrect, how you become a new and better person, until even the reality of tremendous suffering no longer bothers you because you know the truth the Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Philippians: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

In that sense it didn’t matter in 1967 what would happen to King. Come what may was how the world would respond to him. And here was King with God on his side. Which meant even death, if it came, when it came, could be met nobly, peacefully, courageously.

“The cross may mean the death of your popularity,” he told the SCLC leaders around him at that retreat in 1967. “It may mean the death of a foundation grant.” It may mean quite a bit more than that. “But take up your cross, and bear it.”

He would proceed with this broader vision for the SCLC until his last day, he said. “I will not be intimidated. I will not be harassed. I will not be silent…

“I will be heard.”

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Then, when you’re hungry for a longer read, please consider buying one of my books. Publisher’s Weekly says of the latter you’ll be “riveted from the first page to the last.” The New York Times says, “The richness of Kix’s dramatis personae simply staggers.” The book was named to Amazon’s and The New York Times’ and Kirkus‘ respective Best Books of 2023 lists. To the extent that matters to you.

Book No. 3 is looking like it’ll be out in February 2027.

Welcome to This Week Paul Likes.

Every week, I throw out hits of inspiration—three recommendations, one tip, one quote—from the writers who inspire me, in the hope they’ll inspire you to do your best work.

Subscribe below if it’s your first time to the party. Let’s start with this week’s recommendations.

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In The Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to be a Man: He was the one we all wanted to be. The one who wrote the definitive piece on 9/11 and who got on the phone with Tom Cruise to tell the star that he, a lowly writer, was lying in bed with Cruise’s then-wife, Nicole Kidman. He was the one whose profiles of, say, an abortion doctor who wore a bullet-proof vest, cut to a psychological depth you didn’t see elsewhere and carried a style that was not just verve-y but shocking, like an eel feeding, to paraphrase an old Updike line. Here’s what I mean:

The abortionist would rather let Mr. Beazley go. He is not, as he says, "sentimental," and he is ready to withhold the medicines that allow Mr. Beazley his scant purchase on existence. As a physician, he has decided that Mr. Beazley is already gone, and it is this—his willingness to make decisions, to answer questions of life and death—that permits Dr. John Bayard Britton to believe that one day, should his enemies come to kill him, he will find the courage to kill them first.

Yes, for a certain generation of writers, male as well as female and all of whom began their careers on either side of the 21st century’s precipice, we wanted to be Tom Junod.

It turns out Junod wanted to be anyone but his father. Now deep into his sixties, Junod has written his first book, a memoir.

In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to be a Man sears you. It contains so many family secrets, so many dark revelations, so much great effin’ writing, that you’ll have to trust me on this one because I won’t say more.

Buy this book. Make this your next read. You’ll understand why we all respect him.

The Salaries of 60 New Yorkers: The old magazine editor in me loves a great cover package. New York’s latest, on how much New Yorkers across various industries make, is compulsive reading. Instructive, too, for readers of TWPL.

A magazine and newspaper fashion writer turned Substacker makes $275,300 a year, way more than she ever made from corporate media, she says, and echoing what I’ve been saying for a while:

People will pay you for your expertise.

Especially for the writers among us, pair this piece with ’s new book, Making Art and Making a Living, as well as ’s Substack, How I Making Money Writing, where he interviews writers on, well, you guessed it, and where I was once interviewed.

My point is, even though legacy media shrinks, new opportunities, almost endless opportunities, show themselves.

Warfare: I don’t know how this thing wasn’t nominated for an Oscar.

My 16-year-old daughter found it. She likes movies like this, produced and distributed by A24. Warfare is basically 90 minutes of an action sequence from the war in Iraq, with all the boredom and confusion and terror such a sequence implies.

It is not out to choose sides or gloss its soldiers into heroes. It is a feature film as reported truth.

I told a protagonist of Book No. 3 about it, a Special Forces guy who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He texted back when he watched it: “Yep. Pretty much the most accurate movie I’ve seen.”

This Week’s Tip for Longform Writers: The Enormity of Small Narratives

Warfare continues a tradition you see in other storytelling genres, a narrative technique’s that’s effective as hell:

How to make something small and finite so very big.

I have been seduced by this technique. I saw it in college, in Don DeLillo’s Underworld, in the first sequence of the novel, 80 glorious pages unspooling across one baseball game from 1951 and so complete in its storytelling that DeLillo released it as a novella. You see this technique in Ian McEwan’s novels and the Nike ads Spike Jonze directed in the 1990s and in nonfiction works like James Swanson’s, whose book on Lincoln picks up from the moment he was assassinated and ends with Wilkes Booth’s arrest.

I don’t want to be doctrinaire here—I don’t feel there’s any one answer—but the small story with enormous ambition needs three things, more or less, to succeed:

1. A cast of characters.

2. A backstory for many of those characters or, even better, a backstory those characters share.

3. A beginning-middle-end sequence to the story. It should have the classic tenets of a larger story just on a smaller scale. In Warfare’s case, its one battle serves as a microcosm for the war in Iraq.

This sort of theorizing doesn’t help you see the enormity of small stories—I know—so let’s make it real.

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Like I said, I have been seduced by this technique. I love this technique.

My last book and, frankly, the forthcoming one, Book No. 3, see me trying to make small moments into sustaining chapters, with those chapters themselves linking into ever-larger narratives, which themselves link into one story, which is the book.

Because Book No. 3 won’t be out until next year, let’s focus on You Have to be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live. And let me say that I’m not saying I’m awesome in the foregoing or that you should emulate me. You can choose to buy the book or trash it on Goodreads. I’m choosing my own book here because I can show you what I was thinking as I wrote it.

That’s the only reason we’re talking about my own book.

Okay, so, one chapter there stands out. It almost shouldn’t be in the book because it’s not about the 10 weeks of the Birmingham Campaign. It’s about Martin Luther King Jr’s relationship with his wife, Coretta Scott King. Specifically their relationship on the eve of Martin leaving for Birmingham.

I liked this moment because it’s small.

Its plot concerns King driving Coretta home from the hospital in Atlanta after she delivered their fourth child. They stay at home for a couple hours and then King leaves Coretta, and the baby, and their three other young children, to fly to Birmingham to start the Birmingham campaign.

That’s it. That’s the plot. A couple hours in the King home before the ever-traveling Martin leaves again.

I opened the chapter this way:

This was his life now, this endless travel. She had to accept it. Coretta Scott King told herself she did.

I opened it this way because I knew something the reader would soon learn. Coretta considered herself an activist, too, an equal to Martin. And for a long time she was—until she had children. Then bit by bit she was forced to shelve her ambition for a more domestic life.

This would be the tension of the small story and the tension of the chapter: That professional diminishment, which she had to accept, which she had to tell herself she was fine with accepting because it was the 1960s and she was a woman—a black woman—in America.

She had to, in modern parlance, gaslight herself.

It was an enormous conflict within this small chapter because what ambitious woman has not found her life diminished or at least compromised by child-bearing and motherhood?

So many women out on book tour the last couple years told me the chapter they most identified with was the one on Coretta, who appears in this chapter and, basically, nowhere else. The rest of the book is the work of men, the work of the Birmingham campaign itself.

So we have our plot, we have our cast of characters and now, the execution of the chapter becomes unspooling those characters’ shared backstory, which is Martin and Coretta’s courtship and marriage and how they saw themselves across time in the movement.

…What pained her was something more personal. She’d begun the movement thinking she was an equal partner in it. The night before the Montgomery bus boycott started in 1955, it was she who’d stayed up late with Martin. Would Black people actually refuse to ride the buses the next day? Would they continue to refuse day after day, month after month, until the city was so damaged economically by Blacks withholding their fares that city leaders would be forced to negotiate with Martin for equal treatment on the bus lines? “We were both filled with doubt,” Coretta wrote. “Attempted boycotts had failed in Montgomery and other cities.” No one else was in the house that night but their fussy firstborn, baby Yolanda. It was Martin and Coretta, facing a very uncertain future but one they’d agreed to share. They went to bed around midnight and woke before 6:00 a.m. because at six the first bus would roll to a stop outside their home.

The job fell to Coretta to peer out the window at the appointed time; Martin was too anxious.

The bus came to a stop.

“Martin! Martin! Come quickly!” she’d said, and he’d rushed over.

No Blacks were on the bus. All these years later she still remembered how his face had lit up. Hers did, too. They stood together, the two of them, waiting for the next bus. When it came to a halt, no Black people were on that one, either. “We were so excited we could hardly speak coherently,” Coretta wrote. It was not only thrilling but, for her, validating. She’d met Martin just three years earlier, in 1952, in Boston, where she was a scholarship student at the New England Conservatory of Music and he was working toward a PhD in theology at Boston University. He had talked of marriage on their first date, and she’d wanted none of it. Marrying Martin, or any man, would end her dream to be a classically trained singer and performer. She had not come from Alabama all the way to Boston just to get married and move back south. But Martin’s mind fascinated her as one date became many: a young man who read Kant and Hegel and Nietzsche, who despaired over Nietzsche, even, over what his gruff Will to Power meant for any other person’s hope to influence the world through collective action and love. She had never met anyone as voraciously intellectual as Martin, and really no one as fun, either. He liked parties. He liked to tease. To dance. He loved music. When Coretta felt herself falling for him, when she knew what falling for him represented, she prayed: “Oh Lord, help me to make the right decision.”

She realized her voice, that beautiful soprano, could do more than sing to serve God’s will. After all, Martin had told her, “I must have a wife who will be as dedicated as I am.”

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One of the maxims to abide by in making a small story enormous comes from Faulkner:

Just make sure a story doesn’t come together too quickly.

You want to let the tension build. Here, I wanted to make sure the reader saw how Coretta had once been central to Martin’s activism (which is the above sequence) but then ultimately distanced from it:

Where did it leave her, this new presence of Martin’s that filled churches, filled banquet halls, filled arenas? There was somehow no longer room to stand beside him. She told herself she was fine with it. She was a preacher’s wife now, and the wife of arguably the most important preacher. If serving the movement meant supporting Martin and caring for his children, well, as far back as the halcyon days of Montgomery she had also been Martin’s secretary. In some sense for the whole eight years of their activism she had been his unseen bulwark. She had to accept that.

And yet she sometimes thought about that trip to India. It had been wonderful for her, too. She’d met Indira Gandhi (no relation to Mohandas), the daughter of India’s first prime minister and a woman central to Indian politics. By the time of the Kings’ trip, Indira served as president of the Indian National Congress and would later become the country’s prime minister. Coretta was so taken by Indira: her grace, her intellect, and above all her ambition. She was going to change the world. “From that first meeting, Indira and I became friends,” Coretta wrote. Indira’s life was hard—“women can be condemned for doing exactly the same things for which their male predecessors are praised,” Coretta wrote— but Indira’s life was always her own. It was riveting to meet her. “The high point of my pilgrimage,” Coretta wrote.

But the point of the chapter is to show how Coretta’s life would not be the one she dreamed for herself, the one she saw other women leading, like Indira Gandhi.

On that April morning in 1963 she settled baby Bernice and hugged and kissed the three other children who had missed her while she was at the hospital. Hearth and home and her life within it. Soon Martin was at the door, telling her he had the flight to Birmingham to catch. Coretta was a woman who would ultimately write more than seven hundred pages about her time with her husband, but about this pivotal moment, the moment of departure before Martin’s most important campaign, she wrote nothing. We don’t know what he told her, or she him. We don’t know if they embraced, or for how long.

We do know she wanted to go with him. “I was deeply concerned that I would not be there to comfort him,” she wrote. She understood him so much better than the men—the donors and pastors and lawyers, all of them “close advisors” of the SCLC—who huddled around Martin wherever he went now. Martin put on a show of toughness for these guys, but she knew that even though he’d been arrested twelve times in eight years, he’d never gotten used to imprisonment. He’d told her about the isolation of a lonely cell or the claustrophobia of an overcrowded one, and always the sneering, threatening deputies who sauntered past the bars. He didn’t like jail, not one bit, but there was another reason Coretta wanted to go to Birmingham. Her “desperate desire” to be “near my husband” was also her desire to stand next to him once more. “I am an activist,” she wrote, and “for the longest time, way before I married Martin, I believed that women should allow our essence and presence to shine.”

She told herself hers would again, and soon. But on that April day in 1963 Martin walked out the door after having walked in only a few hours earlier, and Coretta watched from the window as the car drove off to the airport and to Birmingham beyond.

She turned back to the children. Hearth and home and her life within it. She told herself she was fine.

If that chapter on Coretta works, it’s only because I’d spent a long time fascinated by small stories with enormous narratives tucked within them. Watch Warfare or read the opening sequence of Underworld for yourself, or Saturday by Ian McEwan, or take notes on any of those old Nike ads the great Spike Jonze directed in the 1990s.

You’ll begin to see how you can make small stories big in your own pieces.

Quote of the Week: “It is not histories I’m writing but lives.”

—Plutarch, another writer who understood, and as far back as the the first century A.D., how to make any contained and finite account enormous.

Have a great weekend, I’ll be back next Friday with another TWPL. Sunday you’ll see my final Lenten essay.

This email requires a lot of man hours. Please offset that by becoming a paying subscriber.

Then, when you’re hungry for a longer read, please consider buying one of my books. Publisher’s Weekly says of the latter you’ll be “riveted from the first page to the last.” The New York Times says, “The richness of Kix’s dramatis personae simply staggers.” The book was named to Amazon’s and The New York Times’ and Kirkus‘ respective Best Books of 2023 lists. To the extent that matters to you.

Book No. 3 is looking like it’ll be out in February 2027.

I’m writing essays this Lenten season on what I now believe after wrestling for some 40 years with God. This is the second essay in that series.

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In the first year after losing my job my anxiety would spike early in the morning. The house was mine then—I’m an early riser—and something about facing the day’s uncertain prospects, planning them alone, before my wife or kids woke up, led my mind to race to catastrophe over how I would provide for my family as a self-employed writer. My early-morning journal entries from 2021 were me day after day arguing with myself, pleading, really, to calm down.

It only sometimes worked.

When it didn’t, when black doom once more rose before me and crowded out any sunnier vista, I would try something else. I would close my journal and open a book. It contained the “secret gospels of Christianity,” the ones not included in the Bible, though these texts were written around the same time if not earlier than the canonical Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

The Jesus in these pages was more mystical, less interested in resurrection or what it meant for the absolution of sins. Some writers of these secret gospels even saw the crucifixion as a metaphor and not an event that occurred. I didn’t mind the heresy of that. I wasn’t sure in those days what I believed about God anyway. I just knew I was scared. A deep yearning lived inside to do more than I had in my life, but now that I was supposedly doing it—my own boss, making my own decisions—all I felt was fear. Fear that I would ruin that life or, the same as ruination, retreat to something safe, dull, and come to despise.

In these secret gospels I read about a Jesus who asked you to rise to his plane—“He who will drink from my mouth will become as I am: I myself shall become he”—and who demanded you summon your deepest desire because that aspiration was also His:

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

I underlined that verse, then memorized it. This was a Jesus I wanted to know. He seemed realer here, out to soothe your fear and grant you confidence. A tactile presence even.

I read more deeply into these secret gospels and as I realized I could pray to this Jesus, I also began to ask questions. Why had the church banned these texts? If they’re helping me, couldn’t they help millions more?

And at even more fundamental level: What does it say about Christianity in general or my faith in particular if it is buoyed by blasphemous books?

In the beginning, in the years after Jesus’ death, many texts circulated about his life and teachings. The Gospel According to Thomas and The Gospel of Mary (Magdalene) and The Gospel of Philip. Literary texts: “The Round Dance of the Cross” and “The Thunder, Perfect Mind.” There were even apostate titles: The Gospel of Judas. These and more complemented and in many cases competed with the story of Jesus told in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

For hundreds of years these scores of works—at least 52 but perhaps far more—guided the earliest Christians in understanding their faith. We call these works today the Gnostic Gospels, from the Greek gnōstos, which means a secret, elevated, or mystical knowledge. That’s what they offered: a Jesus imploring you to look within yourself to know Him.

As one gnostic teacher, Monoimus, said:

“Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, ‘My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.’…If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him in yourself.”

That was a dangerous idea even before Emperor Constantine’s conversion and the rise of the Catholic Church. As early as 180 AD, in fact, some 140 years before Constantine converted, in an era when Christians were otherwise martyred by the Romans—torn to death by dogs and crucified and burned alive so the flames of their burning bodies might serve as torches to literally light Emperor Nero’s nighttime garden—even in these hellish times Christians bickered among themselves about the gnostic texts.

“Set forth the views of those who are teaching this heresy,” a Gallic bishop named Irenaeus wrote in 180 AD, in a collection of works against gnosticism called The Destruction and Overflow of Falsely So-Called Knowledge. “…[T]o show how absurd and inconsistent with the truth are their statements…[Y]ou may urge all those with whom you are concerned to avoid such an abyss of madness and of blasphemy against Christ.”

The battle between the sects of gnostic and what we would see today as traditional Christians was so pitched that some scholars now believe The Gospel of John was composed primarily to refute a favorite gnostic work, The Gospel According to Thomas.

Why? Why the animosity between the sects, since it came in an era when there was an overflow of animosity from the ruling Romans against all Christians?

Well, what I came to understand is that the gnostics believed in a secret faith accessed from their texts and then practiced in one’s daily life, by praying, by meditating, above all by summoning the divine within you. Thomas’ gospel, the one I liked, included my favorite verse from Jesus, which doubled as an ethos for gnosticism. “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.” The traditional Christians, meanwhile, the ones who, like Ireneaus, followed the disciple Peter’s early stewardship, believed in a far more orthodox faith, where Jesus’ teachings were not secret nor highly personalized but available to all through the synoptic gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—which were themselves composed or passed down orally by people who knew Jesus during his life.

In short: the gnostics wanted a personal Jesus. The traditionalists wanted a catholic and scalable faith.

So did Emperor Constantine, when he converted to Christianity in 312 AD. He and his church leaders called all gnostic books heretical. Possessing them could see you imprisoned and the books burned.

So they were instead buried. They were buried in Upper Egypt, possibly by a monk from a nearby monastery of Saint Pachomius. This supposed monk took the banned gnostic texts and stuffed them into jars and buried those jars in the sands of Egypt.

From there 1,600 years passed.

In December 1945 an Arab peasant by the name of Muhammad ‘Alī al-Sammān, digging in the Egyptian soil to fertilize his crops near the town of Naj ‘Hammādī, hit a red earthenware jar, very old from the looks of it. He cracked it open, thinking it might contain gold. He found 13 papyrus books bound in leather. These were the first of the buried gnostic texts, and the story from here goes sideways by al-Sammān not realizing the significance of his find and his mother burning a lot of the papyrus texts as kindling for a fire and then al-Sammān killing the man he thought murdered his father.

It’s a wild story. And I’m compressing a lot to arrive at the crucial point. After the murder, Al-Sammān still had some of the old papyrus and leather-bound books his mother hadn’t burned. He thought those books might be worth something and he feared the police would seize all belongings in his home if they questioned him about his avenging ways. So al-Sammān contacted a priest, who in turn allowed a local history teacher to view the books, and soon al-Sammān’s books circulated on the black market, sold and resold to underground antiquities dealers.

Eventually the Egyptian government heard of these texts, written in ancient Coptic, and a decade after the original 13 texts were uncovered, a Coptic scholar deciphered the opening lines of one of them. “These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke…”

That set off a frenzy. What were these books? Were they new gospels? More than 1,600 years had passed: No one in the mid-1950s knew the story of the earliest and most mystical of Christians.

Scholars and archeologists descended on the site where al-Sammān had unearthed the first 13 texts. Eventually they found, in full or in part, 52 separate works.

So much of the above comes from Elaine Pagels’ excellent history, The Gnostic Gospels. Pagels wrote the book in 1979 and though it won The National Book Award and was named by the Modern Library to the 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the 20th Century, it was not embraced by Christendom.

It threatened Christendom.

“Pagels made it clear that early Christianity was far more complicated than anyone imagined,” David Remnick wrote in a New Yorker profile.

Pagels was a professor of religion at Barnard College at the time of The Gnostic Gospels’ publication and would go on to a similar post at Princeton. She says to this day that the Jesus of the gnostic gospels acts less as a god than a spiritual guide, wanting to help you obtain enlightenment. There’s something very Eastern, very mystical, about that.

Perhaps for good reason. We don’t know, for instance, if the apostle Thomas wrote The Gospel According to Thomas but the real-life disciple established seven churches in southern India after Jesus’ death. Was Thomas himself inspired, then, by Eastern mysticism? Is that why The Gospel According to Thomas includes lines attributed to Jesus like:

“…[T]he kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.

Pagels says:

“What we call Christianity is kind of a narrow stream that orthodoxy kept between specific banks, right? With specific doctrines sort of as the guards of that stream. What we now know is that the early Christian movement was a much more diverse, open, complicated network of groups, of teachings, of self-styled spiritual teachers who would offer you different kinds of teaching, who would have heard it from other sources. So it's a much more interesting and complicated picture than we ever had.”

Christianity to this day snuffs out the gnostic gospels. I knew nothing about them growing up in rural Iowa in the 1990s, attending my town’s U.C.C. church every week. And mine was a liberal church. A couple years ago, when I explained to my uncle how much I’d been moved by Pagels’ book, an uncle who has attended all his life a conservative evangelic church, he looked at me with narrowed eyes. He had not heard of Pagels, he said, let alone the 52 works her book discussed.

This is by design. Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches do not recognize the gnostic gospels as canonical, or even divinely inspired.

In a very real sense Emperor Constantine’s ban on the gnostic texts has never been lifted.

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To read the gnostics is to reject canonical Christianity. That’s what I came to believe. Nothing I read in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John resonated with me back in 2020 and 2021—trying to make my own way in life and business but terrified—like Thomas’ gospel, or this passage from The Gospel of Mary (Magdalene):

Beware that no one lead you astray saying Lo here or lo there! For the Son of Man is within you.

Follow after Him!

Those who seek Him will find Him.

There was sustenance in these verses which could be metabolized into courage. That’s why I returned to the gnostics in those years, morning after morning, when the panic spiked.

It shocked me how these texts soothed me. My childhood faith had long since been decimated by a college education and, after it, in my 20s and 30s, a deep reading of Nietzsche or God Is Not Great or even returning to the Bible and noticing with the help of atheists whose books I’d read or lectures I’d watched online how the earliest versions of The Gospel of Mark didn’t include proof of the resurrection.

That was a huge deal to me. Mark is the earliest of the canonical gospels, written between 30 to 40 years after Jesus’ death. The gospels of Matthew and Luke rely heavily on Mark’s narrative to shape their own (I’m leaving aside the Q gospel some scholars think existed). I knew from my own life as a journalist and author how the most authoritative and trusted story is the one recounted closest to the event itself. That was Mark’s gospel. And yet the earliest copies of Mark’s gospel ended, I now saw, at Chapter 16, verse 8, with Mary and Mary Magdalene listening to the young man dressed in white say that Jesus was no longer in the tomb; that Jesus would greet the women in Galilee, and the women, seized by “terror and amazement,” fleeing the site in fear.

That was it. Nothing about what happened when Mary and Mary Magdalene reached Galilee or what they saw there. Just a guy who may have been an angel or perhaps just a dude dressed in white saying Jesus was no longer in the tomb and the women running away afraid.

I felt bamboozled. How come I never knew this? I thought. How come I never knew until atheists pointed it out to me that the earliest version of Mark’s gospel did not include visual testimony of the resurrection? How many Christians didn’t know that to this day?

That led to a quest in my 20s and 30s to understand what any of us can know of the real Jesus, a frustrating quest because it’s not much. Tacitus’ writings, sure, what the Jewish historian Josephus wrote. The more I searched for the real Jesus, though, the more I saw he demanded a faith in him that went beyond what I could independently verify.

So I abandoned my faith. It seemed rationale. If the earliest version of the earliest gospel doesn’t include a resurrected Jesus seen by others, how could anyone believe Jesus was divine? My life was also, frankly, made easier by giving up on God. I was a magazine writer and editor and all my friends in the industry—the industry as a whole, if I’m honest—sneered at religion, especially Christianity.

It never left though, that sense that something was out there, that Christ might be out there, waiting for me. Just as real as the words in any book that scoffed at Christianity was the memory of what it felt like, as a kid, to pray and feel God’s grace. It was a warmth in my chest that spread outward.

I tried my best to deny that memory in my 20s and 30s, and then in my 40s, I found the gnostic gospels. These made sense. Over and over in the texts Jesus wanted, above all, to help you become the best version of yourself.

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.

I liked that. Jesus as a friend, a therapist. There was Jesus as Christ, too, in certain gnostic texts but I could skim past those verses or at least re-interpret them until Jesus once more fit inside the space I held for him: Jesus as my personal-development guru.

It could have ended there, should have ended there, if I’d had my way.

But the space kept expanding.

The value, the solace, even the superiority I felt reading the gnostics gave way over time to a curiosity. Is there anything like this in the Bible?

Well…

The Jesus of Thomas’ gospel says, “Let one who seeks not stop seeking until one finds…” which is similar to one of the most well-known passages from Matthew: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find.”

Thomas’s gospel quotes Jesus saying, rather cryptically, “…For one who knocks it will be opened,” which is almost word for word what Jesus says in Luke 11: “…knock and the door will be opened for you.”

Pagels’ book shows more than than just this verse-swapping. Her book highlights the gnostic writers’ and teachers’ belief that they held a secret knowledge of Jesus and yet there was also a Jesus, in the Gospel of Mark, telling his disciples, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables.”

The parallels didn’t end there.

The gnostics believed that their secret and hidden teachings could only be passed on to other Christians mature enough to hear them. And yet in the Apostle Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, he writes, somewhat obliquely, about his conversion to Christianity on the road to Damascus and how afterward he was “caught up to paradise.” In this spiritual communion with Christ, Paul heard “hidden mysteries” and “secret wisdom,” which Paul believed he could share only with the Christians “mature” enough to hear such accounts, according to Second Corinthians. The gnostics of that early Jesus-follower era even saw Paul as their own. A major gnostic teacher, Valentinus, claimed he learned Paul’s secret teachings from one of Paul’s own disciples, Theudus.

The more I read between the gnostic and canonical texts, the more I saw they were speaking to each other, complementing each other, fusing a common faith even as the sects competed with one another thousands of years ago.

In that way I returned to the Bible.

In that way I also returned to the scholars. Pagels, for one, and her telling of Jesus’ life and the early Christian faith in her book Miracles and Wonders, but others, too, who knew their shit as she did, who knew the Bible objectively and could read it in its ancient languages and knew how the interpretations to more common tongues transformed the text and times: the New Testament scholars Bart Ehrmann and N.T. Wright and Christian mystics like Richard Rohr and Henri Nouwen and the Christian apologist and acclaimed YouTuber Wes Huff. I sought out what Tolstoy thought of Christianity, and Dostoevsky, and even what Frontline reported of Jesus’ life and the early church in a masterly multi-episode docuseries, From Jesus to Christ.

Why?

I was still after the true Jesus. I needed to know what everyone knew of him, because I needed to know if he was divine. That truncated ending to The Gospel of Mark still bothered me.

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I got a bit of clarity through the Apostle Paul and his life. In N.T. Wright’s biography of Paul, I learned that Paul’s first letters to the Christian churches were written 15 years after Jesus’ death. Mark’s gospel was dated roughly 30 years after Jesus was crucified. Proof of a growing Christianity a mere 15 years after Jesus’ death suggested a group of followers who had orally discussed Jesus’ life and—whatever the story, or however it ended—believed him to be divine.

Paul’s conversion itself began to sway me. I knew the Road to Damascus story as a kid but now as an adult, and through Wright’s biography, saw that Paul before his conversion had been a Pharisee, a strict adherent of Judaism, deeply religious and studied and one of the most esteemed of Jewish scholars, out to persecute the Jesus followers because he saw them as apostates unworthy of God. Paul (then Saul) approved of the stoning of the early Jesus follower Stephen, for instance.

Reading Wright’s biography, I began to see Paul’s conversion differently. Paul was not some dumb brute but an erudite zealot who believed Jesus was a heretic until Jesus himself appeared to Paul in a blinding light on the road to Damascus. Paul’s conversion was not instantaneous. He had to discern for days—Wright suggests it might have taken years and Paul’s own trip to the desert—to process what he had seen and what it meant for the rest of his life. When Paul converted it destroyed that life. Wright believes Paul tried to convert his family and friends; tried to tell them Jesus fulfilled the Jewish covenant of God walking among them. His friends and family scoffed at Paul, isolated him, very likely disowned him. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans of having “great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart” because he had been “cursed and cut off…for the sake of my people, those of my own race, the people of Israel.” Paul gave up everything for Jesus: his family, his friends, his home, his comfortable and esteemed profession as a Jewish scholar. For the rest of his life he would endure ridicule, beatings, imprisonment for traveling to distant lands and establishing churches there for what was soon called Christianity. And so much of Paul’s work, the conversion of hundreds and then thousands of people, occurred before a single gospel was written and published.

That meant something to me. There was a story about Jesus’ life, death, and what happened after that death which got many people—first Paul’s fellow Jews, but ultimately gentiles—to believe what Paul believed, to see for themselves something akin to what Paul saw on the road to Damascus. That orally recounted story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection converted people to Christianity for perhaps 25 to 30 years before a gospel was written. Did it really matter, then, that Jesus’ resurrection was only alluded to at the end of Mark’s earliest recorded gospel? Put another way: If there were multiple narratives of the Jesus story around the time of the Gospel of Mark’s publication, did it matter that Mark was published first? Especially since Matthew and then Luke and ultimately John relayed other interpretations of the Jesus narrative with visual testimony of the resurrection? Did the full spectrum of the gospels reflect the full spectrum of the Jesus narrative and its interpretations?

Or, more pointed still: Did the details of Jesus’ life even matter?

That became the ultimate question, and I asked it because that Frontline docuseries and Elaine Pagels’ writing pointed out something I’d never considered.

The gospels weren’t meant to be read as biography. The gospels were originally written in Greek, and gospel, in Greek, means “the good news.” Not “the story of Jesus’ life.” Pagels in her writing and the scholars cited in Frontline—Christian, Jewish, and atheist—say the same thing: The gospels are works that blend biography and parables and aphoristic wisdom in the hope of doing something greater than tell a story. The gospels are out to convert you. The “good news” is what Jesus Christ might do for you in your own life.

So many atheists I’d admired who’d brutally attacked Christianity—Celsus, Bertrand Russell, Christopher Hitchens, hell, even a YouTuber like Alex O’Connor—so often delighted in pointing out the gospels’ discrepancies. The details within, say, the story of Jesus’ birth or that of his death and resurrection that weren’t consistent across Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. If those details are inconsistent, the atheist argument went, why would anyone trust the story? But I now saw that because the gospels were not meant to be biography—calling them “gospels” distinguished them from biography—it mattered more that the gospels offered a bridge to a better life through their parables and aphorisms. The story of Jesus’ life was the support that held that bridge aloft. Like the beams, arches, or cables that are spaced apart to uphold a bridge, the story needed to cohere broadly: That Jesus was raised in Nazareth, began to preach around age 30 throughout the land, was crucified by Pontius Pilate, and three days after that crucifixion was resurrected. The gospels’ story did that.

And where there were differences in the story, they seemed by many scholars’ reading of the gospels to be intentional, to serve a separate purpose.

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The gospels were meant to persuade different audiences. This is something else I never heard from atheists: The gospel writers wrote with specific audiences in mind.

Take the earliest gospel, Mark. It was published shortly after the Jewish uprising against Rome, from 66-70 A.D., when Jews and Christians in Jerusalem fought and ultimately lost the city to the Romans, at which point the Roman regime destroyed the Jewish temple in 70 A.D. The Christians of that era would have read in The Gospel of Mark about a Jesus who predicted the unthinkable—the destruction of the temple—and a Jesus who understood their anguish.

These early Christians were mostly converted Jews. If they lived around Jerusalem, they would have just witnessed the Romans reclaiming the city with brutality, destroying the temple, subjugating Jews and Jesus followers alike, and leaving everyone wondering what their future held. The ending of Mark’s gospel showed a Jesus in similar pain: feeling alone and despairing over his fate the night before his execution in the Garden of Gethsemane; then the anguish of the crucifixion itself the following day. Even the vague ending of Mark—the man in white who tells Mary and Mary Magdalene that Jesus is no longer in the tomb—has its audience in mind, many scholars now argue. It reflects the ambiguities the earliest Christians felt about what to believe. Who was Jesus? How would he guide them now a generation later? The ambiguity to Mark’s ending, then, was a feature and not a flaw of Mark’s gospel, out to mirror the lives of the people who read the work. It’s for this reason that Mark’s gospel is called by numerous scholars the war gospel: Mark is basically saying to these earliest of Christians around 70 A.D., after losing to the Romans, amid the ruins of their city and lives, I understand your pain.

Viewing the gospels through the lens of whom each gospel was trying to persuade has left numerous modern scholars—Christian or otherwise—with the view that Mark was the war narrative and Matthew was speaking to a Jewish audience through Galilee and lower Syria at a time when the Pharisees gained more power. From how it opens, from how Luke offered an account of a gospel after many other writers have offered theirs, suggests Luke had a broad audience in mind: the Gentiles of the region. John meanwhile was written roughly 70 years after Jesus’ death, some three generations after the crucifixion, around the time many Jesus followers had begun to call themselves Christians and distinguished themselves from Jews. The Jesus of The Gospel of John, then, is less rabbinical than mystical. (John’s story was also perhaps more anti-Semitic, with the Jewish high priests yelling to Pontius Pilate just before the crucifixion, “Crucify him! Crucify him!…We have no king but Caesar!)

I became obsessed with this kind of literary analysis: When each gospel was written and for whom. I’m a writer, so I guess I’m predisposed to this sort of theorizing, but I have absolutely devoured books and podcasts and YouTube lectures over the last four years on the early church, how words became works and the building of a faith. Of course, acknowledging that those words were altered to try to persuade a certain audience did not exactly deepen my faith. It threw it even more into question. And yet the deeper I read into the gospels the more I saw they were never meant to be read literally. Time after time the gospels present a Jesus who answers questions with more questions, thereby asking the reader as well to look beyond any literal truth. To look instead for something deeper, more profound.

More personal even. The more I read the gospels, the more I noticed how I myself changed for reading them.

If there is an abiding message to the gnostic gospels, it is that divinity lives inside you. Thomas’ gospel declares that, Mary Magdalene’s does, numerous other texts and every first- and second-century gnostic teacher: They all say the more you reflect on the work, the more the work works on you, alters you, summons your inner divinity.

I was now finding in 2024 and into 2025 the same thing reading the canonical gospels. There was even a Jesus in the Gospel of Luke who said to the Pharisees, “The kingdom of God is within you.” It became my favorite biblical verse. I came to believe that if you have God’s divinity within you it is your job to live out your purpose because when you do, you honor more than your life. You honor God. But the idea of divinity living within seemed to be telling me something more now, something beyond this fusion of gnostic and canonical verses.

I came to see that the point of the resurrection was how it gave me new life. The more I read the gospels, the more I prayed, the more I compared canonical texts to gnostic ones even, the more I felt a serenity and courage to go about my days. I was a long way now from that scared 40-year-old waking each morning during the pandemic in a panic. By 2025 I knew what I wanted from life and was working toward it with something like boldness and peace. The uncertainties abounded, the fear, too, but I had God’s grace when the anxiety rushed from my chest to my ears.

In the end the scholars were right: The gospels are indeed unlike any other work of literature. I had sneered at them, favored their gnostic counterparts. I had above all doubted their resurrection story. I had then studied everything I could about Jesus because I’d doubted that resurrection story. And now years after seeing how the gnostics’ core message was also the canonical gospels’, I saw that the resurrection I had to trust was not just Jesus’ but the one occurring within me.

Trusting both will shape every facet of the rest of my days.

It’s taken me 45 years, but I think it’s the most Christian message I can tell you.

If you enjoy this essay, please pass it along to others who might get something out of it, too.

Welcome to This Week Paul Likes.

Every week, I throw out hits of inspiration—three recommendations, one tip, one quote—from the writers who inspire me, in the hope they’ll inspire you to do your best work.

Subscribe below if it’s your first time to the party. Let’s start with the recommendations.

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So, this has been my 2026: My father-in-law has died and my wife has inherited—to put it as diplomatically as possible—a complicated legacy of who he was amid her grieving and the executorship of the estate; we’ve seen a dramatic decline in my mother-in-law, who lives with us and has vascular dementia; I’ve been to the ER with searing abdominal pain and still can’t eat what I once did; one of my kid’s struggles in school has come to a pretty scary head; my sister has lost her job; I’ve had three big professional projects delayed or cancelled; an impingement behind my right shoulder and a torn labrum behind my left has kept me since January from doing what best alleviates my stress, which is lift weights.

Some days I’m barely holding on. In this edition of TWPL I’ll share what’s helped me nevertheless do so. Because life will hit all of us hard at one point, probably many points. Consider this, then, a themed issue on how to white-knuckle it through the blow—or even enjoy the fight.

…Really Old Books: Nothing I’m going through is unique. My circumstances are if anything tame to what others feel at present—we are at war—or what people have felt throughout history.

I find tremendous solace reading ancient books. Meditations, The Bhagavad Gita—I like Confucius’ stuff. I remember reading an essay once by a Jesuit priest who wrote, You don’t have to be a Catholic to acknowledge it’s true.

He meant any idea or book that endures for thousands of years must on some level relay universal tenets of the human condition and help people, across those generations, lead better lives.

So, yeah: Meditations, Paul’s letter to the Philippians, the book of Job, I’d say in particular Jesus’ parable within The Gospel of Luke about not worrying because if God will consider the ravens and lilies and provide for them, of course He will provide for you, too: All these works have grounded me, centered me, the last couple months.

Really old books imbue ethical or religious frameworks to help you when life harms you. You don’t have to be a Christian but, man, a faith in something greater than yourself seems like a requirement for life.

If you’re searching for a framework, check out any of the links above. May one or maybe all of them guide you, too.

…Pay Attention to What You Give Your Attention: I remember years ago having a profound a-ha!-mental unlock watching, of all things, a Theo Von podcast. He had Tony Robbins on and Tony asked him to take a look around the studio and memorize everything he saw that was brown. Then he asked Theo to close his eyes and tell Tony everything he saw that was red.

Tony’s point was simple. If you’re looking for brown, you’ll find brown. If you’re looking for red, you’ll find red.

“Once you develop a belief you find what supports it,” Tony said.

It has been so easy the last couple months to examine the shit, to allow the self-pity, to see the general unfairness. And sometimes I have. It never helps though, not for long.

What is equally true—and what I can also be paying attention to—is how my wife is a strong woman who is much more than her grief, my health is improving, projects will once again go my way, and our kids are resilient.

I’ve caught myself so many times over the last couple months thinking, Wait: Am I looking for brown right now?

And if so, What would happen if I looked for red?

Try it yourself. It’s amazing how often you’re looking for the thing that’ll confirm how shitty you feel. Equally amazing how you can change that feeling by focusing on something else.

…Move, and as you move drop the weight of your ego: Shoulder injuries suck. They shut down pretty much all upper-body movements, even body-weight movements. When the impingement was at its worst I couldn’t run, either. Just that back-and-forth runner’s motion inflamed my shoulder.

I did a ton of physical therapy and I walked. Walking is boring and on certain days all I thought was, “I swear I can feel my body atrophy.”

Now, eight weeks after the worst of the injury—brought on, I’m told, by the wear and tear of playing football in my youth and basketball through my 20s and lifting weights since I was 14—now I’m back to the gym.

THANK GOD. The endorphin high, the stress release: I’m starting to feel like myself.

I am also not at all myself.

I’m doing push ups off my knees and bodyweight squats. It’s humiliating. I have to seek out any movement that won’t inflame the still tender, still healing, labrum tear behind the left shoulder and muscular impingement behind the right.

My ego has taken a huge hit.

I’m realizing it needed to be humbled, too. I’m 45 now. I’m not gonna lift the loads I did in my 20s and early 30s. I should probably modify the movements themselves.

And that’s okay. The goal of training is to keep training: Try not to be inspired, after all, by this video of 79-year-old Robbie Robinson lifting four to five days a week. Lifting across the whole of your life, or running across the whole of it, or swimming, or walking—whatever your thing, it’s the best anti-depressant you will ever take. That above all is why you should do it.

I thought as a kid I was lifting to gain strength but really I was lifting to write my own Zen koan. I lift so that I might continue to lift.

And the older I get the more it’ll have to be done without expectation or ego. It’ll be done, I now realize, simply to honor that I get to go to the gym at all. That’s what the last couple months have taught me.

(That and how cool it would be to look like Robbie Robinson at 79.)

This Week’s Tip for Longform Writers: Control What You Can Control

I’ve been waiting for months on the edits of Book No. 3. I can wait in anger or frustration as I’ve waited in the past—I once waited for a year for an edit for this New Yorker piece—but that leads nowhere good. Being pissed off like I was during that New Yorker edit compounds the more you idly wait and focus on it. (It’s definitely a “I’m looking for what’s brown in this room” phenomenon.)

We will all have many occasions in our writing lives where we’re waiting for an edit, or notes from a producer, or a project to flip to a green light. You can wait and stew at the absolute unfairness of how long it’s taking, sure.

Or you can say, What else can I do?

The last couple months, not wanting a repeat of being pissed off, I finished the proposal for Book No. 4 and have been writing more essays here, to accompany TWPL. That output is me trying to control what I can control. Every day I can write, and so I do.

Writing is not joyful—it’s often quite hard—but day after day it gives me satisfaction. I can say at the day’s end: At least I accomplished that. The last couple months I’ve needed that sense of satisfaction and, on the best days, pride in the work.

Sometimes when life sucks people will say you should focus on fixing what sucks. I think you should double-down on your routines and what you can control. You don’t want your whole life to be upended because a lot of it has been. You need some sense of continuity. I think in that continuity you’ll find the clarity to address and fix your problems.

So, yeah: Write when life is hard. Hard times tend to if anything inspire great writing.

(Like it did for Bukowski in this poem, one of my favorites.)

Quote of the week: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke

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Then, when you’re hungry for a longer read, please consider buying one of my books. Publisher’s Weekly says of the latter you’ll be “riveted from the first page to the last.” The New York Times says, “The richness of Kix’s dramatis personae simply staggers.” The book was named to Amazon’s and The New York Times’ and Kirkus‘ respective Best Books of 2023 lists. To the extent that matters to you.

Book No. 3 is looking like it’ll be out in February 2027.

Welcome to This Week Paul Likes.

Most weeks, I throw out hits of inspiration—three recommendations, one tip, one quote—from the writers who inspire me, in the hope they’ll inspire you to do your best work.

This week I’m going deep on a single topic that’s helped me a ton over the last six years. In trying to make what follows as clear as possible, I wrote and edited for far longer and am posting this edition of TWPL much later than I would like. C’est la vie.

Subscribe below if it’s your first time to our party.

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Let’s nerd out on craft today.

A story can be as idiosyncratic as the person writing it, sure, but most stories follow a formula, or, more generously, a guiding template of sorts that’s particular to the platform on which the story appears.

• A hard news story tends to follow an inverted-pyramid structure.

• A magazine feature tends to be structured around a Great Lead Anecdote into Revealing Nut Graf into Supporting Anecdotes and Scenes.

• A movie tends to follow a three-act structure.

• Most books, if they’re one continuous narrative, and regardless of whether they’re fiction or nonfiction, tend to follow The Path from Ignorance to Enlightenment: where the protagonist starts the story ignorant of some truth of the human condition and ends the story understanding that truth and acting on it in some way.

I’ve written about a lot of the above in TWPL. I’ve never talked about the framework which I believe influences and persuades others:

Story, Teach, Tool.

The first thing to say about Story, Teach, Tool is that it can exist on more than one platform. It works well for keynote addresses. It works well when you need to get people to see your rhetorical position, whether in a board meeting or in a written essay.

It works particularly well here, when writing a newsletter.

Oh no! Is this a newsletter edition about writing newsletters?

No, not at all. Because here’s the reality, friend. Institutions have failed us, especially the literary ones that supported our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Newspapers and magazines will not hold aloft our writing careers. Half of Hollywood’s writers are now unemployed. Academia pays crap: Wages for liberal arts professors have been stagnant for well more than a decade. Book publishing has always been an Every Writer for Himself game.

These trend lines will not reverse either. With institutions failing us we have entered the Era of the Individual. Now it’s about holding people’s attention: on your social media channel, your YouTube page, within your own newsletter.

I believe you hold people’s attention by helping them.

And you help them by relying on the Story, Teach, Tool framework.

Let’s build up from the basics: Why help others?

Because when you help others, they like and trust you. When they like and trust you, they’ll be more likely to buy something from you: a book you’ve written, a subscription to your writing you’re offering, some merchandise you’re selling on your YouTube page, some service you offer.

You may say, I didn’t get into writing so I could get into sales.

Fine, starve.

Or, to put it more diplomatically: I didn’t get into writing so I could get into sales either, but we must deal with the world as it is (see above re: institutions). The writer in the 21st Century must do many different things: Pursue her creative and literary dreams and also be a marketer, a saleswoman, above all an entrepreneur. If that sounds exhausting, it is. It’s also how writers’ lives functioned from pretty much the 17th- through early 20th-centuries, until the post-World War II boom allowed writers for roughly 50 years a more lucrative and leisurely and institution-reliant life.

(For a great comparison of how the writers of today mirror in their day-to-day lives the writers of, say, the 19th Century, read Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure. The post-World War II boom was such an aberration. Another great book that takes an even longer view of how creatives have thrived—Michelangelo’s entrepreneurial success is a case study—is Jeff Goins’ Real Artists Don’t Starve.)

What you’ll have to figure out is how you, as a writer, will help others without throwing up in your mouth as you do it.

My advice?

Rely on what you already know.

There’s some aspect of your skillset that can be helpful to others. Maybe you’re a writer and editor who can edit other people’s work. Maybe you’re a health reporter who knows how to guide people through a workout that’ll help them lose weight. Maybe you just want to pass on the wisdom you’ve accumulated across your multi-decade career.

Whatever it is, you have some knowledge that’ll be useful to others, helpful to others, if they knew it, too.

How you relay that helpful information and thereby build influence is via Story, Teach, Tool.

It’s pretty simple.

At the heart of Story, Teach, Tool is the lesson you want to relay, the bit of knowledge you want to pass on. That knowledge is the Teach in Story, Teach, Tool.

Here’s the catch, though: People don’t want to learn lessons. Lessons are boring. Lessons are homework. So, before you give the audience the lesson you must give them a story.

People love stories. Yours will complement or illustrate the lesson.

So the progression here is the Story you tell that illustrates the lesson or the Teachable moment you want to relay.

You’re not done, though. It’s not enough to tell the audience a story and then teach them something. You have to show the audience how they can implement what they’ve learned in their day to day lives. That implementation is the Tool of Story, Teach, Tool.

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Let’s use an example.

Let’s say you’re that health writer wanting to help others lose weight through a better exercise routine.

You first tell some Story in your newsletter about how you yourself couldn’t shed weight until you came across a HIIT workout that emphasized sprinting over jogging. Suddenly, the extra pounds fell off.

You then share (or Teach) the particulars of that HIIT workout with your audience: five 50-yard sprints and three hill or stair climbs (or whatever the workout is).

To overcome your readers’ doubts that your workout can benefit them, too—they’ve been bamboozled by exercise or diet plans in the past—you show them the Tools they’ll need to succeed. Your HIIT workout isn’t an hour’s worth of running five days a week. No! In 20 minutes a day, three times a week, they’ll get even better results than what they’ve found jogging. And: all they’ll need is a stretch of asphalt or a treadmill at a gym that can go up to 10 miles an hour. Plus, if they wake up a half-hour earlier and get their HIIT workout in before work, they’ll have an endorphin high until noon.

The wake-up-early bit and the 20-minutes-a-day, three-days-a-week, on the stretch or asphalt or on the treadmill at the gym—all that stuff is the Tools they’ll need to succeed.

That’s Story, Teach, Tool: the story into the teachable lesson into the tools to implement the lesson.

Why should you care?

Story, Teach, Tool builds influence with others: In your social media posts, in your newsletter, whatever.

Just writing that last sentence makes me throw up a bit in my mouth: build influence with others via social media.

But here’s the truth: You need influence these days because no one is coming to save you. Or me. Institutions have, again, failed us. We have to find ways as writers to help ourselves so that we can also do the creative work we love. Story, Teach, Tool helps us by helping others.

When you help others, they’re more likely to buy something from you.

Again, that something could be some book you’ve written. Could be your subscription on Substack. Could be, if you’re that health reporter, an online community you create where for $100 a month you hold other newbie HIIT runners accountable. And why would that health reporter create that community? Because Women’s Health pays like shit these days and our health reporter has a new book she wants to write and she has two kids to put through school. Fifty newbie HIIT runners at $100 a month is $60,000 a year for our health writer, $60,000 for hosting a forum on a topic she knows a lot about, and loves to talk about, and takes far less time than reporting a Women’s Health piece for shit pay.

Story, Teach, Tool gives our health writer influence. Influence leads to people buying from her. Buying leads to a modicum of freedom for our health writer.

To be clear: I didn’t invent Story, Teach, Tool. I learned it from Tony Robbins when I took a course of his on entrepreneurship about a decade ago. Story, Teach, Tool, he said in that course, had been one of the hallmarks of his success as a speaker and entrepreneur.

I myself have mixed feelings about Tony Robbins, but Story, Teach, Tool in the last six years I’ve been my own boss has been just as foundational to my own entrepreneurial ventures. Any success I’ve had there has allowed me to write the books I want, the magazine pieces I want, without worrying about how to support my family of six.

You may still have institutional support as a writer. May it always be there for you. The trend line, however, is not in your favor.

When you enter the Era or the Individual, willingly or otherwise, know that you have tools at your disposal.

You have Story, Teach, Tool.

You’ll actually have more than that, too. I’ll have more to say on this topic next week—a new offer for you, too.

This email requires a lot of man hours. Please offset that by becoming a paying subscriber.

Then, when you’re hungry for a longer read, please consider buying one of my books. Publisher’s Weekly says of the latter you’ll be “riveted from the first page to the last.” The New York Times says, “The richness of Kix’s dramatis personae simply staggers.” The book was named to Amazon’s and The New York Times’ and Kirkus‘ respective Best Books of 2023 lists. To the extent that matters to you.

Book No. 3 is looking like it’ll be out in February 2027.

Welcome to This Week Paul Likes.

Every week, I throw out hits of inspiration—three recommendations, one tip, one quote—from the writers who inspire me, in the hope they’ll inspire you to do your best work.

Subscribe below if it’s your first time to the party. Let’s start with the recommendations.

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…The Pillars of the Earth: It’s a 1,000-page novel about building a cathedral in England 1,000 years ago. It is also feuding clans and the collapse and rise of power and so much sex and scorched-village violence and above all author Ken Follett’s sensibility to KEEP. THE STORY. MOVING.

Two years ago in TWPL I marveled how Lonesome Dove didn’t slack across its 1,000 or so pages. Pillars of the Earth is like that. Follett is not quite a McMurtry-like stylist but he’s far from some mass-market schlub who gives a once-over to any line he writes.

Follett’s skill here is developing character. Once you’re in his story—and Follett’s prologue will hook you—you won’t want to leave.

Pluribus: TV is so weird. There’s no everyone-is-watching-this vibe with any show—except maybe that gay hockey players show—and so a new series from Breaking Bad’s creator can be undervalued or, in my limited polling of creative-type friends, somehow ignored.

If you don’t know, Pluribus is peak Vince Gilligan.

Still set in New Mexico, still with characters as rich and contradictory as Breaking Bad’s, and still rolling out episodes you’ll want to stay up all night to binge. The difference here being Pluribus is sci-fi, group-think taken to its extreme—that’s the plot. Any good sci-fi novel or series or movie doubles as a commentary on our time. When you finish season 1 you’ll inevitably wonder if the whole thing was really trying to talk about the phones that distract us or the rage that unites us with our tribe.

Think all those thoughts, sure. But watch this show. It’s great TV.

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…Read more Mary Oliver: Here’s what’s wonderful about Substack. You can be in the midst of a bleak and over-scheduled afternoon—say, this past Wednesday afternoon—and you can give a quick scroll of Substack between meetings and come across the great and a post of his that screen-shots a Mary Oliver poem—“Invitation,” say—and you can, likethat, view the whole of your afternoon in a radically different light.

This Week’s Tip for Longform Writers: Set an insanely low bar for achievement.

I finished the proposal for Book No. 4 this week. I wanted to get it to my agent before I got notes from my editor on Book No. 3, which’ll be published next year and whose edits I’m expecting sometime in early to mid-March.

All that makes me seem like I’m productive. I’m not. I follow a mandate that—here’s hoping—can work for you, too.

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Welcome to This Week Paul Likes.

Every week, I throw out hits of inspiration—three recommendations, one tip, one quote—from the writers who inspire me, in the hope they’ll inspire you to do your best work.

Subscribe below if it’s your first time to the party. Let’s start with the recommendations.

Subscribe now

…Sentimental Value: One of the best films you’ll see this year. It’s is a father-daughter story of estrangement that, in actuality, runs three- and four-generations deep.

That’s what gives this story its resonance. Yes, Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinsve should win all the Academy awards but it’s Joachim Trier’s script and direction, his framing of the chasm between the father and daughter as one that’s not only about their present-day relationship or even the whole of the their lives that gives this movie its emotional wallop.

That and the ending, which I won’t give away.

…Train Dreams: The adaptation of the Denis Johnson novella is the other movie I loved this year. So I reread the underlying material. Way better than I remember.

Way freakier than the movie, too. Wolves become people who haunt the dreams of 19th-century society and literally stalk the night plains. The protagonist is not nearly as clean or likable as his Hollywood portrayal but Johnson distills a grief that he himself felt in real life. The resulting prose you’ll want to highlight for its tenderness, just as I did, for its ability to capture the passage of time on the body and mind:

You’ll get through the novella in a few hours. Barely longer than the run time of the movie, the novella is even more rewarding in its way. The close of the story asks you to question not just Granier’s life but your own.

Well worth your time.

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…"My Brain Finally Broke”: Jia Tolentino’s essay describes a political moment that is not exactly ours. She wrote the aforelinked last May, which in the Trump Time we now all inhabit equates to—I don’t know—four years ago? Seven? 1997?

My point is it’s still relevant, her piece. She describes what our news feeds do to our brains in run after bravura run of writing, which, frankly, I’d do well to just step out of the way of:

…But there have been ninety more such days and counting, the events of each seeming inconceivable as they materialize in headlines and then are swiftly carried to the purgatorial cognitive landfill of things that have not been fully absorbed or processed or fought against but have been pressed into reality, where they will remain as the fading backdrop of each day’s new, grotesque parade.

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This Week’s Tip for Longform Writers: It’s Never as Bad as You Think

When I’m not writing my own books I’m editing others. That’s largely how I make my living.

In my darker moments, like you, I worry about AI taking my livelihood, income, any ability to provide for my family of six, my purpose, my will to go on, et cetera.

The last couple weeks have exacerbated that thinking. I first read how intuitive Anthropic’s LLM was, Claude, in executing any task with not only proficiency but something like aesthetic taste. Then The Essay came out, the viral essay from an AI start-up founder who said LLMs are already doing his job better than he can and in a couple of years will do our jobs better than we can, too.

Here’s a sampling of the societal freak out that followed:

There’s a practice I’ve adopted from the old Stoic philosopher, Seneca. He came up with it 2,000 years ago and called it, depending on the interpretation, Negative Visualization. It asks you to imagine the worst that can happen and then step back from that visualized scenario and rate the likelihood of it actually happening, on a scale of 1-10.

In stepping back and rating the thing you find objectivity. That’s the point of the exercise.

For instance, my father-in-law died earlier this week. Some of you know my wife Sonya and have already sent her your well-wishes; for that she and I are grateful. Something like a death in the family, even from natural causes—and Philip’s was of cardiac arrest—could have triggered in a younger me a fear of death.

Negative visualization, however, helps with questions like, What if I die tomorrow? because it asks you to rate the likelihood of it actually happening, which turns out to be low, maybe .25 out of 10, at least in the estimation of my life.

Negative visualization helps the most on questions that aren’t as existential however.

Take AI.

What is the likelihood it will eliminate your job within the next two years? I can’t answer for you so I’d ask you to engage in negative visualization. Take out a pen and paper or open a Google Doc and write down what the likelihood is. Once you find your number, write down why you gave it your rating.

My rating for the books I write is a 1. I gave it a 1 because everything I’ve read shows how people despise AI writing when they realize it. They feel duped. And I don’t think that changes in five years, 25, or 50. We’re a 200,000-plus year-old species that has thrived because of the stories we tell each other. An LLM can’t override in the next generation our 200,000-year-old wiring.

Nor do I want AI to do my writing. I write so I might understand myself. Writing doesn’t just make art; writing makes art out of you, the science fiction writer Brandon Sanderson said in a recent TED Talk.

That’s true. I would never enlist AI to write for me. The writing, the process of it, is where I find my joy.

Will AI take away the book editing I do though?

That’s a different question. I didn’t know that answer. And so here I’ll introduce the second step of Negative Visualization.

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When you can’t rate the likelihood of something happening, negative visualization asks you to engage in the thing. Fear lives in life’s vagaries, Seneca argued, not in its known specifics.

So, to figure out the likelihood of AI taking away my book-proposal and book-editing business in the next couple of years, I signed up for Anthropic’s Claude at its $20-a-month premium charge.

Over the last couple weeks, I’ve fed it previous chapters of manuscripts in progress or previous drafts of proposals in progress. Then, when writers have sent me new chapters or new drafts, I’ve fed what was new into Claude and asked it to edit the material as I would.

I wasn’t impressed.

The edits sometimes, maybe, intuited how I wanted more than a copy edit, but often came back with “eliminate this word from this paragraph” or “change the punctuation after this phrase.” In other edits, Claude wildly overcompensated and suggested that a 12,000-word book proposal that was solid—only needed a final line- and copy edit—should instead be cut in half and completely re-imagined.

I used to be a deputy editor at a national magazine. I was line editing certain writers and, far more often, editing the work of other editors. Anthropic’s Claude is, in my professional estimation, a very junior editor, unsure of its next move and, worse, eager to please the boss.

I’ll keep fooling around with it. Maybe the edits will improve with time. That’s what the AI evangelists say: Keep working with it and it can take on more of your work.

Even if that’s the case, I’m rating the likelihood of AI eliminating my book-editing business in the next two years at a 1.

The sort of authors I work with—well-known journalists, bold-faced celebrities, entrepreneurs—aren’t going to entrust to AI the taste and preferences a human editor can provide. To even write that is to state the obvious.

Which I suppose brings me to my final point. The more I use AI for anything, the more I see it as a tool. A wonderful tool at times—Otter.ai has saved me thousands of hours transcribing interviews or important meetings—but a utility, at best.

Will it take on more capabilities in the future? Yes, I’m not naive.

My sense, though, is that the need for human connection and human taste will only increase in a world that automates certain work.

That sense of mine is informed above all by negative visualization, which I’ve used far more in my life than AI.

Negative visualization’s point, in scenario after scenario, for going on a dozen years now, has always been the same for me.

It’s never as bad as you think.

Quote of the Week: “We suffer more in imagination than in reality.”

—Seneca

Have a great weekend. You all seem to like the stand-alone essays I’m writing. I’ll look to do more of those in the weeks ahead.

I’ll be back next Friday with another TWPL.

Good gawd this email requires a lot of man hours. Please offset that by becoming a paying subscriber.

With the money that remains—the subscription above is cheap—and when your mind is voracious and curious for something more, please consider buying one of my books. Publisher’s Weekly says of the latter you’ll be “riveted from the first page to the last.” The New York Times says, “The richness of Kix’s dramatis personae simply staggers.” The book was named to Amazon’s and The New York Times’ and Kirkus‘ respective Best Books of 2023 lists. To the extent that’ll move you.

Book No. 3 is looking like it’ll be out in February 2027.