Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lots of people come up to me and say--

like this, they say, well in order to write,

you have to read, don't you?

I was once being interviewed on a radio station

and the guy said, in order to be a writer,

you have to be a big reader, right?

And I went, no.

You don't.

And he was so upset.

We couldn't even continue with the interview

because I had-- you know, this was obvious.

He wasn't a writer, but he knew what I

needed to know to be a writer.

And it was interesting.

And you can tell this, because if you go out

on a street corner, some people are hanging out, some of them

tell great stories.

And people who can tell jokes-- and jokes are like--

jokes are tiny little novels.

They can just tell one joke after another.

They might not ever read a book, you know.

Homer was blind and illiterate.

And he's the father of the tradition of the novel.

Even though what he wrote were poems, those poems were novels.

The idea of telling a story is not about reading a story,

otherwise what you end up with is writers

writing about writers writing.

And there are people like that.

They read books and they write books.

And they become very similar.

To be a writer you have to be able to tell a story.

Anybody can tell a story.

Three-year-old kids are telling stories all the time.

Mothers taking care of children are telling stories.

Once upon a time, there was-- you know, on and on and on.

And what's so wonderful about it is the story

that the mother tells the child is not the story

the child hears.

The child is hearing something different--

slightly different, maybe, or maybe very different.

This kid wants to be the wolf.

This kid is wondering about size.

How does somebody live in a stomach after they get eaten up

and then come out again?

You know, there's all kinds of different avenues

that we go on.

We hear stories.

We know stories.

We know stories about what happened

to our fathers or our mothers or our lovers or ourselves--

deep, powerful stories that have nothing to

do with reading a book.

You were walking down a street and somebody shot you.

Well, you don't need to read a book

to tell the story about somebody shooting you.

You need to tell about that and what it meant,

and who you were, and where you went.

Now, I'm not trying to say that reading is a thing that people

shouldn't do.

You like reading books?

Read books.

Absolutely.

But don't mistake the fact that you're reading books

with the issue of you becoming a good writer

or a person who can write a beginning, middle, and end.

Reading and writing are two different things.

And if we know that, then it's fine.

And if you like reading, great.

Reading is very important.

It's one of the most important things we do.

But it's not necessarily going to make you a writer.

So take it from med--

if you haven't read everything or half of everything

or 1/10 of 1% of everything, it's OK.

Even if reading isn't your favorite thing

and you do it sometimes but it might be a guilty pleasure,

it's OK.

Whatever it is, it's not going to stop you

from being a writer.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

One of the great failings of literature in the university

since, let's say, 1960 has been all of these programs

about writing--

writing programs.

Iowa starts it, but it goes everywhere.

And you spend thousands, tens of thousands,

hundreds of thousands of dollars, in quotes,

"learning" how to be a writer.

And the university has these notions,

these kind of cockeyed notions that they understand

what great writing is.

We understand great writing.

We have the libraries.

We have the professors.

This professor studied Jules Verne.

And this professor, you know, whatever they did

and whatever it was.

And they're teaching you about what great writing is.

And then they're teaching you how to write,

continually telling you that you can't

write as well as the great writers did,

because you've come up in a different generation,

of course.

And they never seem to understand that all great

writing in prose, in fiction--

that includes some poetry--

has been popular writing in its day.

Homer, with "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," later the "Aeneid"--

Zola, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain,

Herman Melville--

all of these people, the reason that people

read them and remember them is because they

were popular writers.

People went out to buy them.

Charles Dickens was the most popular writer in the world.

But you know, he wrote great literature,

incredibly powerful literature.

He actually entered debtors prison

by writing about debtors prison.

I mean, who does that, right?

But people coming up to you, say, well, this

is not great literary writing.

And I say, you can't know it's great literary writing

until after I'm dead.

What are you talking about to me?

You know, these people before, they're

writing their little philosophical novels.

Nobody's reading them today, but in 100 years,

they're going to be considered the greatest

novelist of all time.

You have to understand that popularity

is a very important part of literature.

And the popularity is the story.

David Copperfield, it's the story.

Oliver Twist, it's the story.

The great white whale with Ishmael and Queequeg and Ahab--

it's the story.

It's a gigantic adventure which is deeper than almost anything

Shakespeare ever wrote.

Shakespeare-- it's the story.

When you read him-- and you see it, too--

it's the story.

And it has to be a story that speaks

to us, that helps us understand our world and ourselves.

And if it lasts, it's great literature.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Genre is a really interesting question.

What is a genre?

A genre could be a form.

For instance, you might write plays.

Play is a genre.

You know, it's written words and people speak them

and they're on a stage.

And there are people sitting in the audience.

Well, that's a play.

It could be a screenplay, which explains not only

where the people are and what they're saying,

but how everything around them looks and how it changes

and how we follow them, how we come close on them,

how we see them from two directions at once.

Poetry-- probably the oldest genre--

is a very specific form of song, actually, which slowly

develops into a more prosaic--

but not prose-- format.

Short stories is a genre.

Novels are a genre.

Within genres, though, you can have subgenres.

So like within novels, you can have science fiction stories,

mystery stories, romance stories, erotic stories.

There are all kinds of different stories.

And each one of them has a genre.

And in subgenres, you can have sub-subgenres.

Like for in crime, for instance, you can have mysteries.

You can have cozies.

You can have purely logic-driven mysteries.

There's so many different kinds of genres.

But in the end, writing is writing.

It's the same language.

It's the same words.

It's the same grammar.

It's everything put into slightly different structures,

seen in slightly different ways, labored over

by slightly different numbers of people.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

It's true that when I started to write "Devil," I didn't know--

I don't know that it was going to be

called "Devil," for one thing.

And I just started writing.

And I got kind of halfway through it

and I realized it was going to be a mystery,

a kind of a noir book.

And so I wrote it in that way.

I was successful at it.

It was good.

But also it taught me something.

There are people who read books because they're

mysteries, period.

They don't care who wrote the book.

They don't care who stars in the book.

They just want to read a good mystery.

Now, if you write a mystery about black people

in Los Angeles, people--

not only black people-- are going to read that book

and are going to say, wow, that was a good mystery.

And so I realized in a political sense

that I could talk about the people

that I love so much to a much wider audience

by just sticking with it, by saying,

I'm going to write this mystery and then

other people are going to read it and talk about it,

and I will enter into worlds that nobody

would have let me in otherwise.

When I'm about to write a story, I

wonder what it is I'm trying to talk about.

I remember once-- I'm not a very religious person.

I'm not a very spiritual person.

The only thing in any of that that means anything to me

is that I believe in the soul.

I can't help it.

I believe that I have a soul.

I feel like I have a soul.

I can't prove it.

But I believe it.

And I wanted to write a book in which my characters got

the closest to understanding and experiencing a soul.

Now, a mystery would be a ridiculous thing to try to--

so you hire this detective to go out and find the soul.

I mean, I guess it might be kind of funny.

But no, I'm not going to do that.

And a Western?

I don't know.

A short story?

Well, yeah.

But what kind of short story?

A novel?

Yes, I think definitely a novel.

I finally decided, well, I need to write

a speculative or science fiction novel called

"Blue Light," in which the nature of life on Earth

is not what we thought it was, but something else that's

becoming something else.

And in becoming something else, the soul is revealed.

And I thought, wow, OK, so I need to write a science fiction

novel called "Blue Light" in order to understand the soul.

And that's what I decided to do.

Genre is only limiting for a writer

if a writer feels limited by that genre.

If you like writing romances or cozy mysteries or very

intellectual short stories, that's

your thing, that's great.

Do that.

The day you feel limited by it, do something else.