Brian Schiff: Breathless-How a Novel Started with just Two Lines on Paper

I like it when someone utilizes their gifts in ways unexpected. Like when a left brain engineer decides to write a novel (not a technical manual). "I just started with two lines on a piece of paper..." and off he went into new and unchartered territories. Listen as he shares the simplest of tools and ideas to make it easy to start now. He'll also share how an unforeseen situation gave him the unexpected gift of time. 

You'll enjoy his wittiness and journey!

Breathless-Available on Amazon!

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Hello, everybody out there in podcast Land. We have, Brian Schiff with us today, and Brian actually goes by a different name for his book, breathless. I have a pen name for two reasons. First, Brian Schiff a perfectly great name. I didn't want people come knocking on the door trying to find me. That's number one. The second reason why I chose my middle name Roberts for the pen name was I looked at books in my local library and in bookstores and fiction books are, shelved alphabetically by the last name. So I am a, broadcast engineer. I have a degree in electrical engineering. When I started this project to write, I realize I could not come at it as a writer would, because that's not my skillset. I'm an engineer. My job is to find solutions to problems, to break problems down to smaller pieces to see. So I wrote my book as an engineering project, not as an artistic project. Okay, so tell us more about that. I worked for the federal government and I got put out of my job last year, and I was on administrative leave for 10 months, so I was left with this large window of time with literally nothing to do. So after I climbed down the walls like a lizard after freaking out about not having a job and. I finished painting everything in my house that didn't move, and I finished every honeydew project my wife gave me. I still had tons of time, so I started playing around on my computer. I said, okay, let's try some writing. But in one of the short stories, I came up with this character of Aiko. I kind of stuck her to a side and said, oh, maybe I can use her in a story somewhere. So my wife said, you should try and write a book. You've been writing these short stories. You're trying to make something longer. So I started to write, I was going to the library and I was doing a lot of reading. I said, you know what? Let's try writing our own story. So I wanted to write a Clive Cussler type story. So I came up with the ideas of one and my protagonist was a male with a generic name of John. 'cause I didn't have names yet. The first couple drafts were just horrible. He was too wimpy. So I said, okay, let's beef him up a bit, make him a manly a man. And he went from one to 11, nothing in between, and turned into John Wick. And by chapter four, everybody's dead. Okay, that's not gonna work either. So then I remember I had Aiko and I said, you know what? Let me make my protagonist female. Because it opened up a lot of doors that allowed me to explore different things. So then I said, what can I do to make her different from everybody else? Oh, I make her short. I go with only four foot 10. So when I was growing up my mother wanted me to watch Star Trek because she thought that was really good for both me and my brother. Okay. Well, I was neither. Okay. I became an engineer. I wasn't Captain Kirk. I turned into Scotty and I had a, it was a great time, but I've always loved the ocean. And I became a scuba diver and I got my scuba diving certificate. Then I became an advanced scuba diver. Then I was a rescue diver, and I then I was starting to work on a master diver certification. Wow. But I never finished that up because, you know, life gets in the way. Yeah, so I'm, I'm writing this book and I said, okay, Aiko is gonna be a marine biology student. She's in college, but she's having problems paying for it. So she's working all these odd jobs and she meets this woman about the same age, around 25 ish, whose. Kind of American, Chinese, Japanese combo. The whole story takes place in Japan. So I'm using that part of the world because when I was reading my, the books at the library, nobody's doing stories there. So, okay, here's where I'm going to be my little uniqueness. This woman gives Aiko a gift, which in writing terms I found out is called a McGuffin. McGuffin. Mm-hmm. Have you ever seen the movie Pulp Fiction? Yes. With John Travolta and Samuel Jackson? You remember that movie? Do you remember the beginning, the Black Attache case? The Black Attache case goes throughout the entire movie. First of all, the movie is not even in linear time, jumps back and forth. The McGuffin, all it does is provides, a movement for the story, but it has no outcome in the story. Mm-hmm. Okay. So my engineer brain is going, okay. Check that off. We have a McGuffin. Okay. I have a device that I can move my story along. Now I have to figure out how to write this story. Okay. So I took a large sheet of piece of paper, and I drew two lines on it. Okay? The left side is act one, the middle is act two. The right side is act three. Now I knew where my story began. I know how I wanted to end, and I was able to come up with the transitions between the two acts. Now, these are just notes, they're not like story, right? These are just where that's gonna happen. So then I just had to fill in from the ends into the middle of these three sections with ideas. That's interesting because it's such a simple way of doing it, right? Exactly. I think that's what happens with a lot of people with writing. There's just so much, you can look up the software programs and all of this, but really that's probably the simplest way to do it. Two lines and a piece of paper. Exactly. And then you just put in ideas in each one of these boxes, which become chapters and you're gonna have more of them than what you need. And then I read an article about Andy Weir who wrote The Martian and Project Hail Mary, which is out in the movies now. And what he does is that he creates these Excel spreadsheets with all of his characters, details and places. It's all this rich information he can add to, he even puts pictures of people to represent his characters. That's what I was doing. I have spreadsheets that just places names. I researched ships, computers, diving equipment, locations, all of that. It's in this massive Excel sheet. So when I'm writing and I need to pull up a piece of information, I can go to that sheet. Like, here's the boat that Aiko. Is going to have her big fight on, a Japanese long line tuna boat. Let, let's look those up and find one. I found the manufacturer and the year it was made I found maritime lists of ships to see where this boat is. It's like you're getting to do whatever you love. Like, oh, I'm gonna do it in Japan. I'm guessing you, have been to Japan? Yes. In fact, my wife is from Japan. Well there you go. You get to put all this great stuff that's in your brain into your own creation. Exactly. You have to write what you know and how you do things. I think a lot of people, when they start to write a book, they say, well, I wanna write a book. And there was a ton of great stories out there, and they start writing literally from the beginning. I think you have to write your major points in your book and then go back and fill in. I think that makes a whole lot of sense just because that's what happened with me with writing but it just ended up being this long monologue of 300 pages of just stuff. And that's what I hear with a lot of people. And then people are shocked to find out that I wrote the book in five weeks. The original manuscript, Breathless ended out at 115,000 words, give or take. Mm-hmm. It was a bit long, it was a bit bloated, it needed to be edited down. So that's when my engineer brain again, how are books made? Alright. You have to get the right formatting for your book, the right font for your book, the right spacing for your book, the right paper for your book. You have to know all of this stuff before you even publish. I knew I was gonna publish through Amazon. I know I have a good story, but I'm not a particularly good writer yet. I consider myself an author more than a writer. When I get the second one or the third one done, then I consider myself a writer before an author. Being a writer is skill, right. Fair to learn any skill, to become a great musician, you have to play that instrument eight, nine, 10,000 hours to get that level of expertise down. I wrote a lot. I have millions words that I've typed away on my keyboard, but. I'm not a writer yet. Being an author is a skillset, something you learn, okay? Like math, like language, and you can master that quicker than artistic. Okay? Once you understand the mechanics of getting a book together, getting it out. You can now put more emphasis into the writing part. I think a lot of people, they write great stuff, but it's poorly formatted, it's poorly, edited, it's poorly put together. And then you have a book that it's a great story, but no one's gonna see it. So you have to put in this extra effort. So five weeks to write it. Probably six months to get it out the door. So tell me about that six months. Okay, so when you look at a book, if you open a book to any page, all right. The left page is called Virgo Folio. The right page is called Recto Folio. These are Latin words. One means left, one means right. Okay. Your right page has to have your title, your dedication page, your prologue, your chapter one always is on the right page. Okay. Did you know that? No. Okay. The left page, the Virgo, the Al Folio page is your legal page with your ISBN and your LCCN numbers. Okay. Your author name and some additional pages, usually blank, and those are even number pages. Also, your left page will have your author's name at the top, and the right page will have the book name at the top. If you go open any novel, you'll see these things if you want your book to, to look like a professionally book, you have to know these things. So I finish the book and I have it formatted and I do all these things. And by the way, you can really automate a lot of this in Microsoft Word. Up on the ribbon, there are these little boxes called styles and you can go in and you can customize them and you can set them up to do exactly that. So the computer will do all of this for you. As you create the book. Okay. then you have to figure out your margin sizes. I went to the library with a ruler and a notepad, and I. It must have taken a hundred books off the shelf from different time periods. And I'm measuring margins to see how they're doing this. Looking for commonalities. That's how I'm granulating this. Here's another thing. Novels are printed on cream colored paper. Right? Novels and old poetry. books that are on white paper are textbooks, nonfiction books, minimalist poetry, and haiku children's books, and picture books that are in color. Hmm, right now there's a method to all the madness. Yes, there is. I mean, and once you understand this, you, it makes things go much faster. I had printed up a number of, sample pages in different color paper. With different font styles and I gave them to my beta readers and I said, I want you to read it, but I don't want you to think about. Which is easiest on your eyes, which font is easier to read? Which font sizes looks better, which spacing looks better? Which color paper works better? I was looking at this under different color lights again, I'm a broadcast engineer. All of this matters in my job and another Excel spreadsheet, and I'm putting all these results in and we came up on, okay, we want to go with Amazon's cream style paper number one, we want the 60 pound paper. And everybody who reads my book tells me two things. One, my style is very cinematic. I feel like I'm there. The second thing is, it's like. This book was so easy to read. It was, I didn't need to put my glasses on. Those little fine tuning, it truly makes a difference. Yes. And because of that, I found something that I could do to the reader. This is a story that takes place out on the ocean and underwater in a shipwreck. So there is this section of the story where Aiko has to dive into the shipwreck to get to a safe right and inside the safe. She has a thumb drive with billions of dollars of cryptocurrency. So I can have a massive treasure in a tiny little space that's easy to move around. Perfect for a four foot 10 girl, and that's her superpower. She is the only one who's small enough who can go in there. Okay. And IKO was based on a good portion of my wife and some other people that I know, Uhhuh. And there is some, some funny attributes that I have taken from our life together. 'cause I've been married for 26 years now. So, there's this one, one of the things that Aiko constantly gets, misidentified as being younger than she, is. And because she's so short, she can't get adult clothing in her size, she has to shop in the children's department. My wife and I were on vacation one time and our bags went missing so we had to go to a local store to try and get, some t-shirts and shorts and a bathing suit. We walked in and I had no problem and the guy looks at my wife and goes, well, nothing here is gonna fit you, but we do have the children's department over there. And I have literally put that in the book. It was so funny. Okay, so keep going with that five month period. So I give it to my beta readers. They go through it and I make some corrections along the way. And I write what I think is a really good ending and my beta readers go. Great ending. Love the book. But I said, what do you mean? He said, the ending's good, but we need a better ending. Okay, so the story ends where the, Aiko gets rescued and the, people who rescue her are Japanese government people and US military government who are researching all these crimes, and that's how it ends. I write this ending where it's eight weeks later. It's the perfect happily ever after ending where the characters come together and celebrate and yay all of that. I give it to my beta readers, they read it again and go, great ending. Loved it. Fantastic. But, and I said, but what? He said, I don't know it, it needs something else. This is like a Marvel movie. And that rang a bell. Perfect. I know exactly. I ran back. Two days later I snapped out another ending that I tacked on the end as an epilogue. It is a cliffhanger ending that foretells the next book and I gave it to my beta readers and they're going, when's the second book coming out? So had you even thought about a second book before that? Oh yeah. So I'm about about eight months into my sabbatical, Uhhuh, and I'm combing through and I have, oh, wonderful. We got the book out. I put it up on Amazon. Me and my wife go out to celebrate that evening and it's like you are an author. I get an email notice on my phone that I sold my first book in Australia. Oh my gosh. Like what? The first person that bought my book Online Live was somewhere in Australia. Wow. Yeah. Isn't that just absolutely mind boggling. It is. Hmm. So, another thing about writing a book is you're not writing a book. You're writing multiple versions of your book. Right now, Breathless is a six by nine paperback. There are plans to make a hardback version of this. There's also a Kindle version of this book, and there is an ebook version of this. All right, so I have three current versions of my book out. So, getting back to the minutia as to writing your book that a lot of authors don't look at is, how does this book translate from physical to electronic? Alright, the electronic version was off, margins were off, spacing was off. So I had to retune the book for an electronic version. All right. Interesting. So, okay. I found a simulator that I can put, on different versions of Kindles on my computer screen, and I would display the book on pages and it's like page after page after page. And you are looking for little errors where there's going to be some spacings that you put in that work, fine in print, but not in electronic, and you have to hunt and find all those little gremlins and take them out and fix them. Did you have to pay a different price to do that too? No, I, you gotta remember, I am the one man band. I'm doing this all by myself. All right. The writing of the book is relatively inexpensive. Everybody has computer and I recommend doing it in Microsoft Word. that's pretty much the industry standard. There's a bunch of online different writing programs and writing apps and writing suites that you can use, and they're fine, but I don't wanna put my stuff up into a cloud. I don't know who else is looking at it. Even though I'm writing it, I'm the author. I am technically the copyright owner until I have a finished product and send it off to the US Copyright Office and have a physical copyright on that material, somebody might take it. So I was kind of leery about putting my stuff out where people could see it. That's why I would only give beta readers physical copies. Then when they were done, I would take them back. It's not that I was worried about someone's stealing. My neighbor who, this woman who's a fantastic person, she's a lovely lady, I didn't think she was gonna go run off and steal my book, because I don't want to have other versions floating around out there. Sure. You know, you gotta be pretty, willing to accept criticism. Yes, yes. 'cause I'm like going, whew. If I looked at all this, I'd be like, wow. I don't know, it was just kind of like. A cover designer for a book is an artist. There are people, that's all they do is design covers for books. And if you go to the library and you look at some of the iconic books that come out that covers are incredible, they are literally works of art that deserve to hang in a museum on a wall. I had this idea of what I wanted my cover to look like. You've seen the cover, right? Mm-hmm. Yes. Okay. It's this girl in this position. She has one fin on, she's swimming up through the water. Yes. It's pretty much a snapshot from one of the chapters in the book at the end of Act One, and it sets the tone for the book and. I'm a guy who's writing a part for a woman. I'm describing what a woman would do. I am really stretching my wheelhouse here. Okay, Uhhuh and I had this idea, and I'm not an artist. I can draw great straight lines with a computer drafting program. Don't ask me to do it with a pen and paper. There's a place called Fiverr out there where you can find all sorts of artists who will do all sorts of work for you. Can you spell that out? F-I-V-E-R-R. Okay, thank you. In case anybody wants to look at that. I found a graphic artist somewhere in the Netherlands who was willing to take on this project at a price that I could afford, and I said, I need a girl with black hair, a white t-shirt, a red bikini bottom, one fin on her, or a left foot in this stretched out position, and I need it with no background at all. I went through several iterations with her and we finally nailed it. It looks terrific on the cover. I put it together, I'm all set to go hit, publish on Amazon and I said let's just do one more, Google search on this image to make sure that it is indeed original and sure enough. It's somebody else's. It was from a movie poster that she lifted it on from the 1980s. I take it to a friend of mine who's an attorney, and I said, here's what I want to use. Can I do this? And he goes, absolutely not. You are gonna get a letter from some movie company saying, cease and desist, pull all this back. You can't use it. So again, it was back to Fiverr. Go to that artist. I said, okay, I need you to change this up like this. I need to have enough difference in it that it cannot look like this. She did it, it's like, how's this? The attorney goes, yep, that's good. Perfect. You're good to go. But, she wasn't the only artist that I was working with. I've had a number of artists who were coming up with things, some are really good and some of them aren't. And like there was a lot of this, oh yeah, I can do this for 80 bucks. Sure. And it's like. You know, threw something together in chat GPT, and in 20 seconds, it's like, how's this? No, that's not gonna work. Let me ask you this. If people were gonna get on there, do you have to pay beforehand? How does that work? I contracted with this woman. I believe we put a deposit down and then we set a contract where I got x many, versions that I could go through, and she was pretty good. Because I'm new with this and I don't have a huge pot of money to throw at a project like this. I'm looking for people who are new to this, who want to get their feet wet, who want to have something, they say like, okay, here's my design that I did. It's on a book cover, so I can use that as a reference to somebody else So they can go to the next level. Yes. So they need you as much as you need them. I'm now working with this woman out in Northern California who I found on A CX, which is Amazon's audio book division. I went online, I found a number of people whose voices I liked. I contacted them and I said, I would like to contract you to do an audiobook. I wanna do something called Royalty Share. So you are gonna produce this book. We're gonna put it out. I'm gonna give you half the money. I get half. You get half. That's how it works. I found this one woman who's beautiful voice. She wants to get into this. She has good equipment. She understands how audio books are put together. And she is going through this chapter by chapter. She sends 'em to me. Listen to 'em, wow, I can't believe I wrote that. So what I did was I took the print version of the book, the final file, and there's a tool in Microsoft Word that will allow you to add line numbers. So from line one to line 9,700 and something or other. So I said, okay, in line 1,257, can you change this to this? Oh my. And she goes again, engineer. All right. I make it easy for the people who I'm working with. Yes. And she can do that. She can go into that file. She can change that one word. As opposed to reading the whole thing again, edit and paste in the new word and then send it back to me. That's that beautiful technology that we love so much, but don't like a lot of the time. Right. And this is a thing I, I think when, when you are Stephen King or Andy Ware or those jK Rowlings you have this army of people behind you who are handling all of this. All you're doing is writing it out, and it is that army that's coming out with, okay, let's make sure that everything is correct. I'm literally the guy with the drum on his back with the harmonica and the bugle and the symbols. Like a, yeah, like the monkey, your one man band. I'm the one man band. But isn't it kind of interesting how life happens? You know, here you are going through this shocking loss of your job and look what you've done instead. I know. Weird, right? It it is. And the cool part about this is I'm at the bottom rung of publishing. Right. It's not like, okay, here's Brian Roberts or Brian Schiff's, new, exciting, novel, whatever, and you know it's out. And I sell 500,000 copies. I'm lucky if I sell five or six copies a month. So one of the things that I do is sell this book. I'm holding a bookmark that I made. Okay. Oh, great idea. All right. Yeah, I like that. Okay. I got, I got a couple thousand of these for like 40 bucks. And I hand them out. And it has a QR code on it where someone can scan it with their phone and it takes them directly to my Amazon page where they can select which format book that they want. That's inexpensive, easy advertising. Wherever I go, I always have a couple dozen. So if i'm at a restaurant and I talk to the girl at the restaurant i's like, oh, by the way, do you like to read novels? Oh yeah. Oh, great. I'm a new author and this is my new book and I just put it out and she goes, oh, thank you. I, I'll go look this up. And people love that they met an author. You know, it's cool when, yeah. That's another, you met the author of a book. Another great place to sell a book, airports. Flight attendants read everything. If you are on a flight, you have these bookmarks or something like this, you hand them out 'cause they have a Kindle. Or they read it on their phone. Right. And they, I can get this for five bucks. Yeah. I'll get this right now. Yeah. Boom. Literally, it's like, okay, great. I don't do social media. I'm not a 14-year-old girl, okay? So I have no clue about Facebook, Instagram. I just can't wrap my head how someone can sit there for hours with a phone in their face. I feel like I wanna know just enough to do these kind of things Exactly. That's where a lot of scamming comes in too. Because I'm on these Facebook chat groups, I'm promoting my book, authors, helping authors promote your book, Amazon, whatever these different Facebook groups. 'cause they got 10, 15, a hundred thousand subscribers to these channels. Perfect place to put it. And yes, I've, I've seen some traffic from that, but. You do that and all of a sudden you have inbox get filled up. Oh, I can help you promote your book. It's only going to cost this. Oh yeah. And it's just scams. Yes. Or it's AI that someone has generated that says, I can make a cinematic version of your cover that does this. It's like, and it's only gonna cost this. I'm like, no, thank you, boy, boy. Yeah. Oh, and by the way. I did not use any AI writing this book. I do have Grammarly on my computer which is an AI program, and Microsoft has copilot built into their office system now. It is fun to watch the two of them argue over a word. Where, Microsoft would say, this is grammatically the wrong word, and it will change it. And then Grammerly pops up and says, no, this is the wrong word. And it goes back and forth. That's hilarious. I've ever seen AI arguing with each other. And that's why I was like, isn't it cool that you've take, can take something pretty traumatic? Losing your job like one day, not even knowing this is gonna happen, to switching your world and finding another joy. It's kind of cool. It is. All right. We haven't talked about the book. Okay, so in the story, my protagonist, Kochi Yumi. Is a 25 ish year old, college student. Studying marine biology. She goes through this college in Okinawa, which is, Japanese, Hawaii. The source that drives this story is this safe that was on this ship and inside this safe is this thumb drive with billions of dollars of cryptocurrency. The problem is the safe is in a shipwreck, 150 feet underwater. And Aiko her grandmother was, a Japanese Amma diver. These were women who could hold their breath for long periods of time, dive down into the cold ocean. And collect or, or sea urchins and sea cucumbers and abalone and clams and things like that and bring them back up. And that's how they made their living. And she taught ICO at a very young age these skills. this makes her a very skilled diver. She is being forced to do this dangerous dive to get to this, safe, to get this thumb drive out. You have all the great adventures that happened and things along the way. And this all started from putting two lines on a piece of paper. Right. I mean, that's just fascinating how it just started. So to get the story to work, I knew this is what the story was gonna be. I knew I had this great protagonist I had. The object of what everybody was looking for. I had a fantastic setting and I knew how the struggle was gonna end. This is, it's like Star Wars. You draw your two lines, you have your three acts, and I knew that I have to have iko at a certain place at a certain time with the, with the bathing suit. Okay. And so like, okay, here's how it, how this section has to end. So then I just have to go, okay, how did I get onto that beach? Okay, we're on a boat. In the beginning of the story, I left all of these places like bookmarks where I could insert. Details that helped me into the back of the story. All I had to do is just draw, this line, I need to connect this point to this point, come up with something. And then when I'm working on the second act into the finale of the book. Now I can take these things that I left from the first section and connect them to the third section. If you have A, and you have C, you just need to connect to B and it follows a logical step that. Look at the movie Star Wars. Everybody has seen that movie. And if you can see how they connect things from one section to the other, it's like, oh, this is a really good story and it follows this progression. I am not a Lit major, i'm not an English major. This is my first book, I did this through my strength as an engineer. So if I look at it as an engineering problem, how do I get the solution from what I know, this is how I do it. So I did the same thing with the writing, and for me, this worked out very well. It's easy to just get overwhelmed with the amount of information available to us about how to write a book. Right? And then, just because this works for me, it may not work for somebody who's listening to this podcast, but it may work for somebody else. When you're writing your story. It's like a movie that you're writing in your head back and forth, and you are the director and you are the actors, and you're the editor, and you are the writer. And just imagine, you just have this, this knob that you can turn back and forth. So I can rewind time and I can go back and I can play these conversations over and over again in my mind. Another thing that I did was when I would be. If, let's say I'm on the, uh, the metro going to work, or I did this before I went back to work. I was at home, I was in the gym, I was working out, and I was thinking about this in my back of my mind. It's like, I just came up with a great idea and I'm listening to my music on my headphones. I got my iPhone with me. I hit pause, I bring up the recording app and people are looking at me when I'm on the treadmill and I'm dictating into my phone this conversation of what's this guy doing? You can record your. Your thoughts. You can record dialogue, you can record settings where you wanna play this. Oh, I just had this great idea of the Tahoe Maru, so the bridge is centered on the left side of the ship and not in the center because I need a door on the right side because I need to have this person be able to come up a set of stairs. Then when I get home, type these notes up and come up with a line or two and throw 'em into a Word document. When I'm writing. I have another monitor with my main page, and on this other monitor I have all of my notes so I can look at my notes and go back to my thing and I can say, okay, let me move this around. I, I just can't tell you how interesting all of this is because it's all such simple little things that we can do. I cannot tell you how many brilliant ideas I have when I have no way to write it or type it out. It's that antiquated thinking. I keep forgetting I could do voice recording at any time. Yeah. You, you literally have in your pocket a movie studio of, an authoring system. the whole sum of human knowledge. We never could have dreamed, growing up with those three stations on TV as technology to this. Someone once said that if a primitive civilization saw what we have now, they would consider it magic. Wow. They have, it's a great way to look at it. Yes. I grew up when computers were transistors. My father grew up with time when computers were vacuum tubes in World War ii, and they filled an entire building and they could barely do something. But think about this, the Apollo moon landing went to the, the Apollo spaceship landed on the moon and a computer that is incredibly antiquated compared to what's in your pocket, and was programmed by women who threaded beads on little spits of copper wire. That's how they wrote the programs. That's nuts. I did not know that. They just had this ous mission where they went to the moon and they were complaining because Outlook kept crashing. It's like, Hey, we have a new message for you. We can't read it right now because Outlook just crashed again. Need to go back to thread that, thread the spools. Yes. On the first space shuttle missions, they had a printer and they would just print out reams of paper and they were reading it. Now we have AI that can figure things out for you. That engineering brain definitely comes in handy in writing a book. Yes, it does. And it comes in handy because another thing is if you're gonna write a book. You really have to read a lot of other books. You have to expose your mind to other ideas. To become a better author, better writer, you can't be. Isolated from everything around you. So read, a romance novel or a political thriller or a sci-fi novel. If you look at a lot of novels, let's say Harry Potter, okay? You could say, well, some of this, there's a great imagination, a fantastic story, but this kind of comes from this and this character resembles of this character from a, the bad guy in a romance novel. Or, here's the detective in a mystery novel. Because it has that feel to it. Harry Potter has to be able to think his way through these things, and a universe that he's never stepped into because he's now went from the land of the mortal to the land of the wizards, and he's in a world that is technically walled off from reality as we know it. So he has to use his train of thought, his experiences in one universe to work out in a new universe. And the writer. She read a lot of different stories and she was able to create this wonderful universe built on her imagination that she seeded from things from other sources. It makes total sense. Every book has a little bit of each of it in it. Is there something else you feel like our audience needs to know? All right, so a lot of people have asked me how can I write a book? Some people that I talked to, they know me and they said, you're the last person I thought that could ever write a book. How did you do it? So if I was giving an advice to new authors, it would be to actually sit down and write something. You can think about world building, you can think about research, you can think about your story. But unless you actually sit down at a keyboard on your computer or with a typewriter or with a pen and paper, you just have to write something. Practice writing, flex that muscle. Use it. Give it exercise, let it grow, let it get stronger. Don't use ai. Don't get into the habit of when you get stuck thinking, oh, how am I gonna get this person from A to B? You know, let me type it into chat. GPT, how would you do it? Oh, that's good. Let me just copy and paste it. It's cheating. People are going to be doing that. They're gonna be whole novels completely AI written. And it's gonna be hard to tell 'em one from the other. But, good craftsmen practice their craft and that's how you do it. You don't need to write an entire book, right? Write a short story, write a novela, get in the habit of just writing something. Okay? And like I said before, the next piece of advice would be to read. Read and read. Find your favorite novel, find your favorite subject, read those, then start reading things that you normally wouldn't read. You get this, whole stream of ideas that flow into you. Watch movies or watch people go into a coffee shop and see how people talk, people interact and it gives you an idea of great ways to come up with conversations for your characters. All of my characters are based on people that I've met. Right. There's a bit of me. I'm the writer, so I wanna be the hero of my own story. There's a little bit of me in Aiko. I'm a scuba diver, that's why she's a scuba diver. She's interested in things that I was interested in. Someone said there like six different types of stories and that's it, and everybody's just doing variations on 'em, but nobody has written my book but me. So I've took all these elements and arranged them in a new compound that is fresh and different, and that was my undiscovered country. I really like this, Brian, because I think what you're doing is you're showing people their natural capabilities because kind of as I mentioned before, it's so easy to get overwhelmed by the resources that are out there, and instead of trusting ourselves in the process. I have to want to. It has to come to me. I have to feel it, and then I can write. I cannot wrap my head around following directions. I really think that maybe that's it, right? I can't follow what other people follow. I need to do it myself. Another thing is I was afforded time because of what happened to me. I had a very large block of time where I could devote myself to this project. writing was technically my job. It was five or six days a week, seven or eight, sometimes nine hours a day. I would sit here and that was my gig I was writing. Most people don't have this amount of time I have a house, I have kids, I have a job, I have a life, and I understand that. Yeah, it took me five weeks to write the manuscript, but it took a long time to edit and come up with a coherent book. It's gonna take someone a much longer time and my advice to them would be great. Do that. Alright, so if you don't write every single day or every single week, you know, just keep at it. And like a like wine. This story will mature and it will get better with time. I want to give a piece of advice don't tell people your story before you've written it. 'cause when you do the, you get this satisfaction, oh, look at me, I got this great story I just told to tell you, but it's SAPs your, desire to actually sit down and write it 'cause you told it to somebody. So don't tell people your story. Keep it internal, keep it to yourself, work on it. Write a couple of chapters and then give it to somebody. Join a writer's critique group. Remember that you need to have thick skin or armor to take the criticism. If you write it, you think, oh yeah, here it is. First draft. You know, I'm gonna sell this to Hollywood. Let me practice my acceptance speech for my Oscar for a best writer or whatever. It's not like that. Not at all. You have to go through so many different inundations of your story to get it right and people. The, your sentence structure is bad. You're using the wrong pronouns or verbiage. It's like, you know, you really need to practice with this, but you have to have that armor on so you can take that criticism and you can say, you know what, you're right. Let me get a pencil. Let me start underwriting these things. I have whole pages that I've given to people and I've said, here, mark this up. And it comes back and there's literally not a single line that hasn't been touched. And it's like, you are right. Oh yeah. That's a feel good. Yeah. Oh, this is if, let's say you are a painter and you come out with this wonderful. Picture, right? Something like, Jackson Pollock, this big smear of paint. And some people will look at it and they go, oh my God, that is the greatest thing that should be hanging up in a museum or the Smithsonian or a little Louvre or whatever. And then someone looks at it and they said, oh, that looks like something my 5-year-old did, you know? And I hang it up on the refrigerator for a few days and then it goes into the trash. You know, this, you have to be able to take the criticism and use it to improve. You can't live in a world where you think it's perfect 'cause it's not. And the world's not gonna think it's perfect. You need other people to be honest with you. Here's the last thing is that it has never been easier to self-publish a book ever. All right. There's literally no financial risk to you. You can do it for under a hundred bucks. Everyone has a computer with word processing software, you can get a free one, like, Libre office, or there's literally free downloads. And you can sit and you can write. It's like Microsoft Words. You can publish it on a KDP or literally nothing. They will give you an ISPN number. Here you go. You can slap any cover you want on it. You can have someone design a cover or help you design a cover the way that I did. And you can do it and you can have it out there. So I don't have children, so this is kind of my legacy, is that I was thinking about this. There's gonna be a day that Brian Schiff isn't gonna be standing on this planet anymore. All the things that I hope build will eventually be replaced with newer, better things, and all that stuff is gonna wind up in the trash. People that knew me eventually, they're gonna pass. I'm just an average person like everybody else, but. This book will survive me. And literally decades or even centuries from now, somebody may come across this book. It's like, oh, wow, this guy back in, the 2020 first century. Not bad. These were a fun read. So I, it, it helps me step into the future. I try to tell people you need to leave something, you know? Once we're gone, you're just like, like we do with our parents, we sell off everything. Yes. And we got a few photographs. You know, tell your story. Leave something for the rest of the people that are coming after us. Michelangelo's been dead for what, 500 years? 600 years. And people go into the Sistine Chapel to look up and are amazed at what talent he had. Well, they look at his sculptures, they look at what Leonardo Da Vinci did. And it's like his designs, his paintings, his his frescos are amazing. I'm sure they got a lot of criticism too,. Yeah. They just did what they believed and what they wanted to do and didn't allow the criticism to stop them. I think Leonardo da Vinci was dragging the, the Mona Lisa painting around with him for decades before he finally finished it. It wasn't like, oh, let me just do this. See. Ah, let me Don't like that. And paint it again. And paint it again. And, okay. Here, it's so he felt like it was, it was right. Probably. Exactly. Work and work. So, yeah. So this is for an author. This, this is our legacy, you know? Wow. Well, Brian, I really appreciate everything. I've really enjoyed our conversation. I think you give a unique aspect, you make it easier than, like me, I'm creative, I make it much harder on myself. If I just sat down and put a little structure like two lines, like you, I might get a little further. Best wishes on Breathless. Thank you very much. Breathless is available on Amazon. Search Breathless. Brian Roberts. You can get the paperback version, a Kindle version, and if you have Kindle Limited, it's a free download or you can get an ebook version that you can download to your phone or tablet.