Creator and Critic Voiceswith T.D. Donnelly

You have to understand, these people are horrible people, okay? They're probably going to cut this out. But everybody in our friend group at all of these conventions...

And we're gone.

Okay, so, and we're out. Thank you guys so much.

That's the soundbite we use for the show.

Oh my gosh.

Welcome to The Two Authors' Podcast, an entertaining chat show hosted by bestselling mystery and thriller authors Douglas Pratt and Nicholas Harvey, in lively, humorous and informative conversation with distinguished guests who share their thoughts and experience about forging a successful author career.

Welcome to this week's show, brought to you as always by Vellum, the best formatting solution.

Very fabuloso. That's right. If dinosaurs had had to format, they'd have used Vellum, but they didn't have to worry about it back then.

What an obscure reference. That's so silly, Doug! Dinosaurs don't have opposable thumbs. How would they type on a keyboard?

Like a velociraptor, tapping away. I'm just saying that even a dinosaur could use Vellum, because it's pretty damn easy. So there you've got it.

Wow, you just stole the commercial from the guys who sell insurance. "Even a caveman could do it."

I was trying to go totally different. Dinosaurs existed before cavemen.

True. I get you now. I'm on the same page, ish.

So, an indie trick here. Speaking of pages and cool things you can do in Vellum: one little trick we indies use is a call to action in the back of the book. If you put "The End", which we don't for a reason, Amazon likes to recognise it as the end and cuts things off. But after the story ends, you can put a scene break and put your call to action behind it. So if you've got a bonus chapter, a link to your newsletter, or the pre-order link for the next book, put it there on the next page. On Kindles, when you scroll past the end page, it kicks you out to that buy page. It's got your next book if you have it, or some of your others, and about a hundred other books from other people. So you've got this shiny page of all kinds of things to distract readers. You want to keep them on your page with your call to action right there.

It's also very easy not to put "The End", because let's be honest, if they flip the page and the book's over, it's already there. You don't have to tell everybody it's the end. They should know. I'm always thinking, why do people tell me it's the end? There's no more book left. It's obviously the end.

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And if you feel you get any value from this show, I don't know what to tell you, really...

You're easily pleased, and we appreciate you.

Then you should head over to Patreon and support us over there. It's three dollars a month, and you get a lot of cool bonuses. We have bonus questions from every guest. Just check us out at patreon.com/thetwoauthorspodcast. We have all sorts of fun stuff over there.

We have a guest today.

No...

We do have a guest, a good friend of ours, Mr T.D. Thomas Donnelly, who's joining us today. We've joked with Tom, he's a good friend of ours, but I think this will be very educational. So if you're interested in Hollywood, or in hearing from somebody who's been writing for thirty years, this is a good one.

We held out on this longer than I thought we could, actually, as an in-joke with Tom, not having him on the show.

He's a really good one. He's got a new book coming out called Super Draft, and he'll talk about that. But before we get going, we'll have a Two Authors' Question from our recent guest, Deany Ray.

Thank you, Deany Ray, for sticking around for our Two Authors' Question. It's always great to keep you around a little bit. So what have you got for us?

I was thinking, if you guys were to co-write a book with a villain and a good guy, and you were in the book, which one of you would be the superhero and which one of you would be the supervillain?

I want to be the villain.

I don't know if he'd be a really good villain, though.

"Go and save that woman from the burning building." "Nah, it looks a bit hard. I set fire to it."

I will say that for the most part, we as writers probably identify more with the hero than with the villain, with a few exceptions among people who write from the antagonist's point of view. I think we all naturally see ourselves as the hero. Then again, the villain often sees himself as the hero too. So I think we write the protagonist because that's more the ideal we'd want. Realistically, I'd probably prefer to be the superhero, but I do love a good villain.

That's a great point. I think all of our main protagonists have a little bit of us in them, whether consciously or unconsciously. And it's not necessarily the us that we are. It's the us we see ourselves as, or want to be.

Mainly want to be. All right, Deany, superhero or villain?

To be honest, I'm leaning towards supervillain, but only for the thought of living vicariously through that. Especially as a woman, because we're taught to be all nice and polite and whatnot. Every time I read a book with a heroine or a villain who's a bit badass and female, I'm like, heck yes, I would love to do that.

There's also a reason why Deany travels and moves to countries she can't go back to.

There's also a reason why the hero in my book is an ex-criminal.

Well, awesome question. Thank you so much for sticking around with us, and we'll see you soon in Vegas.

Well, welcome to the show, Tom Donnelly. So excited to have you on, finally, after you've strong-armed us.

Is that what's going on here?

Wait, is that Tom Donnelly? Hell froze over.

Somebody cancelled, I'm pretty sure.

You mention me enough on your god darn podcast. How dare you take this long?

What are you talking about? We also talk about Franklin a lot, so we hold you in high esteem.

I take that as a good sign. I'd rather be in that company than most others.

There's a few other people. If we don't mention you, that's a whole other issue.

But let's get started. You've got a long history of writing, so back us up and tell us how you got started in writing, and then we'll dive into how you got into indie publishing too.

I guess it depends how far you want to go back.

Tom writing in the bathtub.

Well, no. I was a science geek growing up. I thought I was going to be a great scientist. Then my first crush, in about the seventh or eighth grade, was one of the smartest kids in school, and I was really smitten with her. She wrote a poem in the literary journal. I didn't know what a literary journal was, and by the way, a middle school literary journal could not be worse. But the moment she started doing that, I thought, wow, that's something I could do too. So I started doing a little of it.

Then I had an English teacher in the tenth grade, Doc Flanagan. He'd basically been a university professor who'd been laid off, because it's tough for English professors, and he came to teach at my high school for a brief period. He was one of these firebrands: you can do anything you want with your life. We had to wear ties and jackets at Catholic school, and he'd say, get rid of that nonsense. I was totally into it. He set us five hundred words describing the night, just experiential, go out there and write it. Mine was very different from everyone else's, and he made a point, in front of the whole class, of saying, "This is a writer. What you have here is not nothing." And boy, was that wind in my sails, because I had only thought of it as a hobby.

A way to get girls, it sounds like.

Well, a little bit, right? I mean, that's fair. Say what you want, Cyrano de Bergerac is a thing for a reason.

So I decided at that point, why not consider it? Then the drive-in movie theatre in my town was torn down and replaced with one of the early multiplexes, a ten-screen cinema. And by the way, the writer and director Chris McQuarrie, who does all of the Mission: Impossible movies, was a security guard at that same cinema at the same time. I'd ride my bike there, even on the highway for a bit, which I didn't tell my parents about. I'd get there at 10am on a Saturday, pay five bucks for a matinee, and then sneak into two or three other screens, avoiding Chris McQuarrie.

That shows a little love for film.

Yeah, and I fell in love with it. I suddenly had this idea that if I could write movies for a living, I could be happy my entire life just doing that. I became a dog with a bone, and my guidance counsellors and everyone else could not dissuade me. It was the late eighties, when we thought the Japanese were going to take over everything. Crichton's Rising Sun came out, and there was this idea that they apprentice for ten thousand hours to become masters. I got that ten-thousand-hour idea in my head, broke it down one day, and thought, that's only about ten years. If I start now, I could be twenty-six or twenty-seven and a master at this, and if it doesn't work out, I can still do something else with my life. That's what I decided to do.

I went to school in New England and got a degree in English and drama, then went to USC film school. The whole time I was just writing, writing, writing. I wrote my first feature as my thesis at USC, and then worked as an editor in Hollywood for a couple of years, until a producer said, "I'd very much like you to edit the next thing I've got going on," and I said, "I'm sorry, I can't." He said, "I thought we had a good relationship." I said, "We have a great relationship, but whenever I've saved up enough, I always write for six months. I'm not just an editor. I want to be a writer as well." He said, "Wow, okay. Can I see something you've written?"

I literally had this one thing, and I gave it to him. Before I knew it, he'd sent it to a few friends, and little did I know, he used to be a senior executive at 20th Century Fox. Of the three people he sent it to, two put in bids, and later somebody else put in another. There was a three-studio bidding war for it. I paid off eighty thousand dollars of student debt in one day, with more left over to spare, and boom, I was a writer. That's been thirty-one years now: no day job for thirty-one years, just surviving as a writer.

That's a brilliant story. We've had other guests on where we've talked about this: the path to success, especially in something like Hollywood, which is madness. The odds are so poor, but you have to put yourself in the position. You have to do all the work beforehand. Amy, who we had on the show, went ballistic on TikTok, and her series did really well because she had a TikTok hit, but everything was already in place. It sounds like that's your story. You did all the fundamentals, you had everything in place, and a door opened.

Well, not quite everything in place. It actually happened a little earlier than it should have. I don't know another writer who sold the very first feature they ever wrote. So I was really fortunate, but it came with a consequence. Suddenly I'm in all of these rooms, expected to pitch and talk story and do all these things before I'm ready. There's a real blessing in those early days, though it doesn't feel like one when you're struggling to get your first thing out there: you get to make your mistakes in private, which is a very advantageous thing. Suddenly all of my mistakes were embarrassingly public, in rooms of fifteen executives all thinking, who the hell is this bozo? That created a lot of imposter syndrome and a lot of writer's block, and everything that comes with that.

But Nick, you're absolutely right. Hollywood is a lottery, and it's really, really hard to do anything there. But you have the opportunity to increase your odds tremendously by being ready, being prepared, being proactive and doing the right things. There's no lottery in the world that gives you extra bites of that particular apple.

So let's jump back. You talk about facing imposter syndrome at a young age. Most of us who are writing now are, let's say, of advanced ages. How do you overcome that? I can imagine standing in a room full of execs whose names you see on the credits and feeling, why am I here? How do you go from being that scared little kid to being the obnoxious filmmaker you are?

Wow. You almost landed that plane. You were so close to landing that plane.

I'm impressed he waited almost ten minutes to take a swing and whiff it.

I wasn't even going to. I was going to slide right through it, and then I thought, nah, I've got to drop it. He'd have felt so left out.

Listen to your NINC roundup. I know the character assassination was going to happen at some point. You didn't even mention the fact that you threw a water bottle at me.

A water cup. And it was empty.

All right, whatever. The truth is, I have a book coming out in a couple of weeks called Super Draft, which is about the writing process. That book began thirty years ago with me trying to overcome this imposter syndrome and this writer's block. I had writer's block on and off for easily the first ten or fifteen years of my career.

I've said it before: the writers' group we're all in, I call it Smurf Village. It's so different from Hollywood, where Hollywood is a knife fight in a phone booth. It's blood sport every day when you're out there. So imposter syndrome can come back when you think you've vanquished it, because there's always somebody trying to cut you down or challenge you. Sometimes they want their own writer on the project. Sometimes it's simply a power play to make sure the writer doesn't get too cocky. And sometimes it's none of the above. Sometimes it's just plain rank sociopathy. That's the way it works out there sometimes.

That's what Nick does to me all the time, that rank sociopathy. That's a big word.

Pretty good, right?

You're lucky. I had to sound it out before I said it, to make sure I said it right.

So I'll tell you the basics of Super Draft. I was in my early to mid-twenties when I sold the first script, and all my friends were film school grads who wanted to do the same thing, so we were constantly talking about this. I came to the conclusion that every human being on the planet has two voices in their head: the creator and the critic.

I've never in my life needed to explain the critic voice to anyone. They immediately say, "Oh, I know that one. I'm intimately familiar with that one." You could be a janitor in a high school and you'd know the critic voice. Mine sounded a lot like my eleventh-grade English teacher, to be honest, Mrs Bond. She had a really nasally voice.

Is that the voice you hear when you get doubts in your head? Her saying, "I knew you couldn't do it"?

For a lot of women, it's their ex-husband's voice a little bit. Whereas the creator voice is very different. It's quiet and whispering, just giving you a little hint here and a little hint there. And I came to the conclusion that you can never hear both voices in the same room. If the critic voice is operating, you cannot hear the creator. And working in a critic-only process, for a creative process, is death. It is pain. You can do it, but you're grinding the words out, just trying to get to the next sentence. Write, delete, adjust, rethink, despair, write.

It's probably going to take you a long time to write that manuscript too.

It does. And yet so many people have that same process to this day. So I realised I needed to separate those voices, so that there's a creator-led part of the process and a critic-led part, and you go back and forth. Brainstorming is a creator-led process. It's the only time in the business world you'll ever hear any acknowledgement of a creator voice. What do they say? "There are no bad ideas here." And why do they say that? They don't believe there are no bad ideas. They're executives. They think there are horrible ideas all the time. They've just figured out that if you don't say that, nothing good happens in a brainstorm. It's literally shutting the critic out of the process, which allows the creator to come forth.

I'm a big fan of that, Tom. The business I came from was super competitive motorsport.

It's a sport. You had to win a trophy.

It's naturally competitive, and there's a lot of ego involved. When I made it to management, one of the things I learned was that there's no bad idea, because the dumb idea you just came up with, the one with a fatal flaw in it, spurs another idea that gets rid of that flaw. Together, the room is stronger than the individual. If you can build that atmosphere, which is really hard, it only takes one personality to destroy it. So I can only imagine it being hell in Hollywood.

They know it in Hollywood. What they say to me all the time is, "Here's the bad version." It's, "I don't know how to put this. I don't like this part of the story. I wish it was more like... well, here's the bad version." I mock them mercilessly for it, but I get it. When you give me the bad version, I get a window into what you're looking for in its basest, most basic form. I can take a bad version and find the great version much more easily than if you give me nothing and just say, "This isn't working for me."

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I had another thought about imposter syndrome, and I'm sure it's similar in many industries. The three of us are indie authors, so we're running our businesses as well as doing the creative work. I have double imposter syndrome. I've got the creative problem: you're trying to put out the best work you can. Then you switch hats and do all the marketing, and my God, it's even easier to have imposter syndrome over there, because it's a minefield and ever-changing. It's a double whammy, and it's hard not to let them blend when, like you said, the critic's pretty loud. When the business critic is second-guessing you, it's hard to sit down, clear your mind and be creative.

This is the new part for me. I tell everybody at these conferences that I'm at once one of the most veteran, experienced writers they'll meet there, and also one of the least experienced authors, because I've only been writing books for two years. We had a Hollywood writers' strike about two and a half years ago, when for ten months I was told in no uncertain terms that I wasn't allowed to write movies or television, because the studios had locked us out. It happened to be the year my second kid entered college, which was a wonderful time for it. It couldn't have worked out better for me.

So I was freaking out, and then I met a lot of these indie authors, who I really count as friends. It was a tremendously welcoming community at a time when I felt very adrift, and getting to know them was a real blessing in my life, one I count very often. But I'm still very new. The third book in my Malcolm Chaucer series only came out at the beginning of this year, and I didn't bother advertising until I had three books out. So I'm maybe six months into the advertising experiment, the marketing side, other than my natural personality for in-person marketing. And yes, there's the imposter syndrome. Hey, welcome back, old friend. I haven't seen you in a little while.

Yeah, welcome to the pleasure dome. It's really kicking off this year in publishing marketing, so you picked a real shitty time to start.

Let me ask you about the flip side. We talk about the critic voice a lot, but what I sometimes see in new authors, the people on Threads announcing their new book, is that they're stuck on the creator side and haven't bothered listening to the critic at all. Their book is the most amazing book ever, and that's what they tell everybody. We've all talked to somebody who says, "No, let me tell you my story," and we roll our eyes, but we were probably all there at some point, because all we were hearing was the creator side. You probably see that in Hollywood as well.

All the time, but let's not misdiagnose that. That's just a person who's really early on the Dunning-Kruger arc. Dunning-Kruger is very simple. When we begin a process, we overestimate how easy it's going to be, and then as we start doing it, we drop down into the trough of hell, the point where we think, my God, this is so hard, it's impossible, I can't get any better. Eventually you start coming up the other side, once you've gained enough experience to have a reasonable notion of your skill level versus how hard it actually is. Those authors are just Dunning-Kruger acolytes. They're at the beginning of that curve, and they haven't really done it yet.

Rare is the person who says, "My goodness, it's the greatest idea ever," and has actually written it, or written multiple books. It's almost always, "I want to tell you this idea because I want you to write it," or, "I'm about to write it," or, "I'm starting it." They haven't hit any of those points yet, because boy, that critic is eventually going to find you. And I don't think you can be a good writer without both.

I used to talk about the critic as the enemy of the writing process, only because more often than not the critic puts in the roadblocks and stops you from writing. But the critic, properly used, is integral to the writing process. Outlining, whether you're a plotter or a plantser, is taking all the brainstormed ideas floating around and picking winners and losers, framing and shaping them. That's absolutely a critic process. Editing is a critic process too, especially if you're free drafting, or super drafting as I call it, where you literally shut the critic out of the drafting and write as fast and as freely as you can. You're going to need to do some critic work after that. So it's a tough thing to come to terms with, but you've got to make friends with your critic, or at least...

A little pressure. A little mix of both probably helps.

A little pressure is not a bad thing. A lot of pressure can be, and it varies by personality, but a little pressure is incentive. If you use it to drive you forward rather than push you back, it's crucial.

Let's talk a little about the difference between screenwriting and novel writing. There's a pretty big difference, and you're in the perfect seat to tell us.

On the one hand, writing is writing, and storytelling is storytelling. There are definitely different forms in some very particular ways, but I think anyone who has worked hard enough to become great at one can become at least very good at the other. I don't think it's a chasm you can't cross.

That said, if I'd known how freaking easy novel writing was during the thirty years I was a screenwriter... I am so mad at you guys. You're telling me you can just describe the internal state of any character you want at any time? What they're thinking, what they're feeling, what's going on in their heads? You're telling me my spy thrillers could be seventy thousand words or a hundred and fifty thousand words and no one bats an eye? Are you out of your mind? It's ridiculous.

We get internal monologues too. That's kind of fun.

God. It is so much easier writing a novel. People think it's the other way around: a screenplay is so short, it must be easy, and a novel is much longer, so it must be harder. It's absolutely the other way around, especially when you're doing adaptations, which I get paid to do a lot. Clive Cussler's novel Sahara was 193,000 words, and I had to turn it into a twenty-three-thousand-word screenplay and still capture the same story and feel.

I was going to ask about that. That's got to be a cutting process, especially from the novelist's side: I wrote all these words. How do you as a screenwriter decide what stays on the screen and what goes on the cutting room floor?

I worked with Clive for the better part of a year on that project. I have a rule that I won't adapt somebody's work unless I have at least their initial buy-in and agreement. I want to talk to them and say, "This is a problem in the screenplay form. What can we do about it?" and get their input. At the end of the day we may not entirely agree, and I still have a job to do, but with Clive it was really important to me that we found some agreement.

In the novel Sahara, the main villain dies with 150 or 200 pages of the book still left. You can't really do that in a movie. It becomes The Return of the King, the last Lord of the Rings movie, where you've got seventeen endings and you're thinking, my God, are we done yet?

Just to be clear, Tom, you can't do that in most novels either, unless you're Clive Cussler.

I agree. Well, Clive doesn't agree. He thinks you can do it every time.

Clancy does a good job of it too, of just never ending, dragging it on.

Look, these guys become kings of their own fiefdoms. No one can tell them different, and they get to play by slightly different rules. Would the books be better if they ended closer to the death of the main villain? Maybe, maybe not. I can't say for sure, but my guess is probably.

What you have to do is what screenwriting basically is. The great thing about a novel is that I can write a chapter and it can be about one thing. In screenwriting, I can never write a scene and have it be about one thing. It has to be layers deep. This scene puts out this amount of exposition, so we're layering in the things that need to happen later. I'm doing this beat of the character's change arc and nailing that, and planting three things that will pay off in a later scene. And the scene itself has to be integrally sound, with its own beginning, middle and end. All of those things have to be in there for the scene to work. So the scenes are crafted again and again and continuously adjusted as the screenplay is laid out, compressed and expanded until it fits properly. Does that make sense?

It makes a lot of sense. I'm pretty visual, so I'm picturing it. You take this long novel and pull out the things that have to stay, the key pieces of the plot that make the story work. When you start doing that, you go, well, this has got to happen, so this has to happen, and this has to set it up, and it starts building itself. Then I'm pretty sure you reach the point where you've already got too much, so some subplot or some character has to go. Can we combine? Is that how you go about it?

You nailed it, Nick. That's exactly what it's like. You pick your non-negotiables first, the things that must be in there. Then you find that the non-negotiables make a four-hour movie, so you have to get rid of some of them. But you don't want to, so you find ways to fold them together, to make one scene that accomplishes what took three scenes across the whole second act of the book. You still get that story feel, and those story moments still happen. They just happen in a very compressed way, and in a way you weren't expecting. So it's very hard.

I think we've talked about this before, but I'm more of a half-outliner. What's the difference between writing a screenplay first and then treating that as an outline and adapting it into a novel?

Now you're getting into my trade secrets. How dare you?

That's what we do here. We break down all the rules. This isn't Hollywood, this is indie authors.

Okay. Hollywood buys between ten and twenty scripts for every movie that gets made, which means that over my thirty-year career I've got dozens of scripts that I slaved over for six months or longer, dealt with studio notes and executives, defended this and changed that, and made into highly functioning stories that operate on many levels, that only twelve people have ever read: my agents, the executives and a couple of producers. But give it long enough, seven years or ten years, and those rights revert. I can do something with them again. Little by little, these are going to become new book series. Because when you think about it, a screenplay is actually the perfect outline. It takes months, you can fully visualise the entire story from beginning to end, and it expands into the novel form in wonderful ways. So yes, I absolutely think that's a great thing to do.

There are no pantsers in Hollywood, really. You can't say, "Thank you for the four hundred thousand dollars to write this thing. I'm just going to go on feel, but I think it's going to turn out great. See you in three months."

I could be very happy with that.

I tend to argue that pantsers are just outlining in their first draft, and then they go back and fix it. So if you're outlining the first time, that is your pantsing anyway.

To put it in Super Draft terms, I think pantsers are people with a louder creator than most, who are comfortable running with the creator voice and letting it play. Plotters have an overactive critic voice that won't let them proceed very far unless they can see the buoys ahead in the bay, the path out. In the novel world, I'm a plotter. In Hollywood, I'm almost a pantser. I'm one of those people who says, "I know enough from the outline now. Just green-light me to write this thing. Do you really need this eight-page outline to be an eighteen-page outline? I can do it, but it won't make the work better."

And now, a quick word from this episode's sponsor. The Author Nation conference for indie authors is coming up in about a week. I'm Jamie Davis, show manager for the event in Las Vegas. Are you prepped and ready for the biggest and best event for indies ever? I know I am. And that reminds me: what do you call a conference for boomerang enthusiasts? A meet and [unclear]. And now, let's get back to the show.

Being indies, that's one of the freedoms we truly have. Most of the trad authors we talk to, even when they're pantsers at heart, have to pitch their agent first, even when they've got series out there. At some point in the process they pitch their agent, who then pitches the publisher, so they have to outline to some decent degree. It doesn't have to be a forty-page thing, but they have to present it. So it's one of the freedoms we have, which I guess is good and bad.

So tell us a little more about Super Draft. When's it coming out, and if I'm an author picking up a copy, what am I getting from it?

Thank you, Nick, for bringing it back to something relevant. Here we go. It should be out by the end of October. There are hundreds and hundreds of books about the craft of writing, and maybe five or six about the process of writing, which is weird to me. Why do we talk so much about craft and so little about process? At the core of it, I believe it's because we're precious about our process. We're emotional about it in a way we aren't about craft. Tell me something new about craft and I'll throw it into the next book I write and see if it sticks. Tell me you want to monkey with my process, and I get really defensive really quickly.

I'm sorry, you have a monkey write your stuff? I missed that.

Yeah, basically. You don't have a draft monkey? You've got to get a draft monkey.

That should be the name of your next book: Draft Monkey.

It's the name of our band. We're coming out with a new album, Draft Monkeys.

If you gave me a nameplate for my desk that said "Thomas Dean Donnelly, Draft Monkey", that would be a perfect description of what I do.

And yet another T-shirt we have to make.

Anyway, what it comes down to is that writing a novel is extraordinarily hard, and writing a screenplay is extraordinarily hard. We get used to it, so we don't think of it as quite that hard, but in our sense memory we still have that first book and the labour pains of getting it out. We tend to stick close to the first process that got that book out, because getting it out was so hard that whatever we had to do must be the way we're going to do it. We calcify that a little, and we don't explore other options.

I wrote this book first and foremost for people who haven't written their book yet, to get past the imposter syndrome and the writer's block and create a process that works for them. Whether you're a plotter or a pantser, you can use parts of this process to write faster and better, because you're using both voices in your head, not just one. Most of our processes rely very heavily on one voice and give the other short shrift. That's really what Super Draft is about.

The critic has all of these tricks it uses to get into the drafting process. I name mine. My creator is Phoebe and my critic is Philip. And I don't actually have a friend named Philip. I don't know anybody named Philip.

I was going to say, where did this come from?

Phoebe is from Friends, strumming a guitar, playing a silly song, talking to you nicely. I came up with Philip one day when I was annoyed as hell with my critic voice, which just wouldn't leave me alone, and I decided I had to give it a name. And Philip is a great name to say with derision. "Shut up, Philip. You're not welcome here right now. God, Philip, damn it."

"Shut up, Philip" absolutely works. I have a cousin named Philip. I'd buy that shirt just to wear it around him.

You guys were at SPS Live in London this year, where my talk on Super Draft was the very first talk of the conference. Every time I mention Philip, there's always one person with a big frown on their face, and I think, there's a Philip over there. I know they're going to come and talk to me afterwards, and they always do: "Hi, I'm Philip." And I say, "I am so bleeding sorry. I don't mean anything bad by it. It just happens to be the name."

But naming your critic is a good thing to do, because you're externalising the voice and giving it its own personality. It's not you. It's something else that you can shut out. You have to learn to tell Philip what's okay and what's not, because Philip hits below the belt. Philip won't criticise the work, he'll criticise you, and that is not okay. I tell my kids this all the time: if I heard anyone talking to you the way you talk about yourself, I would punch that person in the face, and I'd go to prison if I had to. I would never let anyone talk to you the way you talk to yourself, so why is it okay for you to do it?

In Super Draft we talk about things like research. Research can be a very important part of your writing process, and it can also be a fantastic trick the critic uses to put something between you and the actual drafting.

You're talking about us, because that's our rabbit holes. Nick and I always spend...

...down a rabbit hole.

Well, guess what: I've got a chapter on research and how to do it without letting it become critic-led procrastination. I also have the write-downhill protocol. When you're writing, have a timer, and when the timer goes off, stop. Even if you're not a big sprinter, because not every writer likes sprints. Don't think of it as sprinting or hitting a word count. Just stop when the timer goes off. People ask me why. Here's the deal: if you stop exactly when the timer goes off, you're usually stopping mid-sentence, when you know exactly what's coming next. You'll want to finish that word, that sentence, that paragraph, that chapter. Don't. Because if you do, every time you start writing, you're starting cold, at a place where you don't know what happens next. The first word of a writing session is often the hardest, and so are the first sentence and the first paragraph, because you're starting cold. If you know exactly what comes next, it's much easier to start.

I call it writing downhill because I had a really awful car when I moved to Los Angeles. It was a piece of junk and wouldn't start half the time. But I realised that if I parked it on a downhill slope, I could get in, do a rolling start, and I never missed a meeting again.

For all of our younger listeners: cars used to have stick shifts. That trick won't work now, and you can't buy a stick shift any more. Even my Jeep won't do it. It's a stick shift, but they've added a safety feature, which kind of annoys me, because I've tried it a couple of times.

This car was the Ford Festiva L. I couldn't even afford the LS or the LX. I could only afford one letter. It had no air conditioning, in Los Angeles. It had no radio. It had a manual transmission, and it was a McNugget box of a piece of garbage.

Or open like the Flintstones, where you go "brrrr" with your feet and take off.

It was almost that bad. Anyway, I have all these tricks to outwit the ways the critic tries to stop your creative process. The second half of the book goes into ways to hear your creator better. When the creator really fires, it's like a bolt of lightning: my God, where did that come from? But brain science has shown there are all sorts of things we can do to get struck by lightning more often. And as writers, wouldn't we want to be struck by lightning more often?

That'd be nice. Well, people might need to check out Super Draft. You said the end of October, so about the time this comes out, it'll be live.

It'll be out, yes.

We have two more questions for you, because we've kept you a while and we appreciate your time. Our first is one we ask everybody: what do you think is your author superpower?

My author superpower is actually the creator voice. People ask me, "Do you ever run out of ideas?" My God, no. I have more things to write than I could write in four lifetimes, and it's always coming up with something new every day. Over the years I've learned to train my brain to retain those ideas and hang on to them a little more. I was riding on the subway once and saw a homeless woman talking to herself, and I got the idea: what if she's not just talking to herself? What if she's hearing the thoughts of everyone in the train carriage around her and responding to them, and it's driving her crazy, because they're actual voices? That was the impetus for the first screenplay I ever wrote, Thoughtcrimes.

That's a pretty good superpower.

Honestly, from our conversation here, I'd say another superpower of yours is finding the balance between the creator and the critic, because that is a war zone we all go through. The way you've described finding that balance truly is a superpower.

Thank you. I totally agree, but that's not one I was born with. I had to create that one out of whole cloth, out of a lot of pain and a lot of misery.

In fairness, most people aren't born with their superpowers. They get them from freak accidents.

Bitten by a spider.

Superman had them from the get-go, but everyone else got them from weird accidents.

All right, one more question for you: our wheel of questions. I know you're excited about this.

I'm supposed to pretend there's an actual wheel here?

For the audience, he is now pulling up a pre-recorded card. An AI-sorted list on his computer.

If I were going to do that, I'd have picked a really hard question for you. But this is a good one, so you're in luck. Who is the 1980s or 1970s TV sidekick you'd want hanging around with you?

The facile answer would be Bear from BJ and the Bear, because I need a draft monkey, and I'd have a literal draft monkey right there. By the way, Greg Evigan, the star of BJ and the Bear, is from Sayreville, New Jersey, my hometown. The three most famous people from Sayreville, in ascending order: number three, Greg Evigan; number two, Jon Bon Jovi; and number one, of course, Thomas Dean Donnelly.

Who's the second one?

Jon Bon Jovi. I think he plays guitar or something. He did some music back in the eighties.

All right, Dougie, what's your sidekick?

I'm going to go with Twiki from Buck Rogers.

Twiggy? Twiggy was a British model in the sixties.

Twiki. I take it you didn't watch Buck Rogers. Okay, in all fairness, I'd have gone with Erin Gray.

That's fair. Does Ashley listen? Because Cheryl listens to every one, and I'm still going with Charlie's Angels. I'm taking all of them. They're my sidekicks.

They're not the sidekicks. Bosley is the sidekick. You've got Bosley.

I flipped the script.

That just killed it. Wait a minute, which Charlie's Angel is your favourite, then, Nick?

You know what, I don't mind, honestly. I don't think they had a bad one.

Farrah Fawcett for me. What about you, Tom?

I think I'd go with Kate Jackson. I like the brainy, dark-haired ones.

I agree. That would be mine too.

Well, thank you so much for staying with us and hanging around.

Could I mention my spy thriller series for a quick second?

Absolutely. You mentioned the name earlier, but go for it.

The first book in the Malcolm Chaucer series is called Year of the Rabbit. If you want to see how a Hollywood screenwriter approaches the novel, they're very fun, very cinematic, and they've got a great review average on Amazon. Go and check out Year of the Rabbit.

There you go. I read it. We'll put a link in the show notes, and I've made a note of the timestamp so we can edit that bit out.

By the way, I'm dreading the intro, where I won't even hear what you're saying about me before I come on. You have to understand, these people are horrible people, okay? They're probably going to cut this out. But everybody in our friend group at all of these conventions...

And we're gone.

Okay, so, and we're out. Thank you guys so much.

That's going to be the soundbite we use for the show.

Oh my gosh.

All right, Tom, that's enough of you. Leave us immediately. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me.

T.D. Donnelly, Tom Donnelly, there. So nice to have him on. He's a lot of fun. Whether it's on a chat stream or in person, it's always a good time with Tom.

Some good points, too. I like the idea of the critic and the creator voice. Those are important things to really look at.

We pound away at the keyboard and do what we do, and we talk about how insular we so often are, and we often don't pay enough attention to the stuff going on that really affects what we're doing daily. Bringing it up, talking about it and identifying it helps.

One thing I was thinking about when he named his two: I like that. I've got to come up with names.

Phoebe and Philip.

I'm probably going to name mine Doug.

Yeah. So the creative one, of course, will be named Doug.

No, the point I was going to make is that he named his critic Philip and said he didn't know why it was Philip, it just sounded like a person in a room. That's actually important, because our tendency with the critic voice is to go straight to that one person who was always critical, who never thought we'd come to anything. Don't name it that. Don't give that person any credence.

You're attaching the two together and making it worse.

Make sure it's something with no emotional context for you, just a humorous name for your critic. We all have those voices in our past, those moments we wish we could change or replay, or the person who really made us feel like shit. You don't want that name associated with this. It'll make it worse.

Note: don't use "Nick". There we go. Everybody just made the same note.

All right. Thanks, Tom.

Huge thanks to Vellum. It was great hanging out with you guys recently in Florida, and we look forward to hanging out with you again in Vegas and seeing how things are progressing. I'm on a beta for their new project. Interesting stuff, and we'll learn more about it when we get to Vegas.

Also, thank you to everyone in our Patreon. We really appreciate you. There's a gem in there from Tom Donnelly.

A really good one, yes. Hollywood gold right there.

Three dollars a month, that's all it is. Not per episode, just per month, to subscribe to our Patreon, and you get all that bonus stuff. We appreciate the support. It helps keep the wheels turning on the show.

We've got links in the show notes, for Vellum and for Patreon, so grab those. We'll be back next week with a new episode of The Two Authors' Podcast. Until next time, be cool to each other.

Fair winds and following seas.

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