As a writer, I’m always looking for new ways to improve my craft and learn from others. Recently, I’ve been enjoying watching interviews with creative people about their processes and the tools they use. Continuing in my series of articles about what has captured my interest recently, today I’m highlighting two video series that you might also enjoy.
Although I’ve never taken David Perell’s online course “Write of Passage”, I’ve admired his online writing for a long time. Recently he began a series of videos on YouTube titled “How I Write“. In each video he interviews some great writers about their writing process and takes the time to really understand what they’re saying. I admire his questioning style – he asks a great question and then gets out of the way and lets the answer flow.
Perell’s now shared quite a collection of these interviews – including a recent one with fiction author Amor Towles, writer of “A Gentleman in Moscow” among other books. But I’d recommend starting first viewing this series with this one: I Spent 50 Hours With 20 Master Writers as it’s a great introduction to some of the key takeaways he got from many of his first group of interviews.
In addition to his Amor Towles interview, let me also recommend his interview of writer Steven Johnson: The Expert Behind Google’s Secret A.I. Writing Tool who has recently been spending much of his time working for Google on the NotebookLM product.
Do enjoy these interviews that Perell has shared – they’re very enjoyable to watch. Bridging into my second recommendation, Dan Shipper of Every.to recently did his own interview of David Perell: How David Perell Uses ChatGPT to Write for Millions. This is part of a series of interviews that Shipper has conducted about how ChatGPT is being used in some very interesting ways.
Another in Shipper’s series that quite fascinating to watch is his interview of Steph Smith: How to Find Your Next Big Idea Hiding on the Internet in which she shares some of her tricks and techniques for doing Internet research.
I really enjoyed these videos – they provide great perspectives on how creative minds work and how some of the best tools currently available can assist.