Hi, it's Steve back immediately. Thanks for joining me here. Let's plunge right into what I'm here for. One of the things that I get asked a question I get asked a lot is how did you break through with your first published novel? And the reason people ask me that is they know that it took me 30 years from the time I first started till the time I had a book published. And it's this one here, the Legend of Bagger Vance, which came out in 1995. It sold about 250,000 copies and was made into a movie. Whether it was a good movie or not, I'll leave up to you. But it was a success. And so the questions that people ask, as they ask any writer that said that happened, what was so bad at the beginning, what you, the first stuff you were writing? Why was it so bad? So unbublishable? How did it change? What got better? So anyway, I've been working on a kind of a long form piece. It's called the authentic swing that is about the writing of the Legend of Bagger Vance and kind of how it all happened. Agents, publishers, editors, the whole internal process of it. What I want to talk to you about today is something that I call the fool scapment. It's called a fool scapment. It's kind of a trick or a technique that changed my life as a writer. Cost nothing. Now, if you look at this book, if you look at the cover of this book, behind the title, you can see what looks like a kind of a page of notes. And these are the notes that I use writing this book. And this is the actual thing here. It's called the fool scapment. I learned it from my dear friend and mentor, Norm Stahl. Thank you, Norm, many years ago. I was struggling, starving, living in a sublet place, writing, going nowhere, nowhere close to even thinking about having any success at all. And Norm, let me take a little bit of that Norm. He's a documentarian who has done at least 200 hour long film documentaries for the history channel and for other things, maybe 300. The kind of a guy who takes no bullshit, no creative writers bullshit from himself or from anybody, the great kind of a getter done kind of a guy. So Norm took me out to lunch and I was sniveling and whining and whimpering about how tough it was and I couldn't get it together. The Norm reached into his briefcase. He took out a yellow legal pad like this, a fool scap paper. And he said, Steve, God made a single sheet of yellow fool scap to be exactly the right length to hold the outline of an entire novel. Now let me say that again because that changed my life. Steve, God made a single sheet of yellow fool scap to be exactly the right length to hold the outline of an entire novel. Now what did Norm mean by that? He meant don't be precious, don't over prepare. The way that we as amateurs and as one of you writers, the way we screw ourselves up there, two ways we screw ourselves up. The first way is we plunge right in on a project. We're in love with something and we start off for Tahiti without a plan, without a map, without a chart. And of course we get lost somewhere east of Hawaii and we go down and I never heard from again. The other way that we screw ourselves up is we over prepare. We think, well before I begin, I've got a research after that a library, I have to have a three by five cards all over the wall. I have to outline everything I have to have a 55 page treatment or 300 word Bible that goes into the back stories of every character. You don't need any of that at all. Norm's method, the fool scap method, outline it, block the whole thing in on one page, do it quick and get it over with. This is to me the way professionals work. Now I have a bunch of friends, I live in Los Angeles, I have a bunch of friends who are really top level screenwriters and it is amazing to me how fast they solve a problem and how fast they will block out a story. They just go right for the gullet, right for the jugular and they kill. Now let me tell you some of the reasons going back to the fool scap method. Why this work so well. The first thing is because it's only one page, it takes away every excuse that you have for not doing your work. I mean, I will, I can whimper and moan and say, I can't handle 55 pages, I can't do it. But there's no way that I can say to myself, I can't do one page. One page you have to be able to do. That's number one. Second thing is when you do, when you outline a project on a single page, kind of like A-blink and doing the Getty's Bear good dress on the back of a single envelope, it forces you to see the project as a whole from beginning to end. Now this is another way that amateur writers or amateur entrepreneurs, anybody starting on a project, the way they screw themselves up is they don't think all the way to the end. They don't see the finished product whereas the way a professional work is they'll start at the end and then move backwards from there. If we're building a restaurant or designing a restaurant and we decide and we can visualize what it's going to look like, what we want the experience to be for the diner, what the decor is going to look like, we visualize the finished product, then it's easy to work backward and design the thing from there. Same thing with a book, if I've got Moby Dick and I know the climax is going to be A-hab plunging his hard pun into Moby Dick while they go under, then I've got the book, I can work backwards from there. So the fool's cap method blocking it all out on a simple square like this forces you to answer the question, what's the beginning, what's the middle, what's the end. The third thing that the fool's cap method does is it makes you get rid of all extraneous elements, it makes you boil down your project to the absolute essentials. Now if we're thinking about, let's say we're going to build the Golden Gate Bridge and here's the span between the shores. We know that we have to have an anchoring post on this shore, an anchoring foundation on this shore, we want towers in the middle and we want a suspension and a roadway. There it is, we've got the bridge. So, and again, the way we as an amateur screw ourselves up is we start building the bridge from one side. We start extending the roadway out there, out there into dead air, air thin air, and the damn thing crashes halfway across. So the fool's cap method is a great way to see the project as a whole, blow down to its essentials and lick this right away. If I had a young writer coming into me right now and he was going to tell me a project that I can tell you exactly the way you would do. He would start telling me about the first scene. He'd tell me some amazing killer scene. He'd tell me about how it spools out into an amazing first act. And I said to him, well, how does it end? He wouldn't have the slightest idea. So what I would say to him, I'd put this in his hand and I'd say go into that back room and come back in 15 minutes with this whole thing solved. And he would. Now, the last aspect of this is it fills you with tremendous confidence. Because you say to yourself, all I have to do is execute. All I have to do is fill in the blanks. Now, I was in Florida a couple of years ago and driving up to North Carolina and the highway department was adding a lane to the highway for like 100 miles. As I drove along, I'd see huge stockpiles of culverts and drainage pipes sitting on the side of the road. Big piles of rebar, piles of reinforced concrete sitting there. And this was what went for 100 miles. And as I was passing this, I said to myself, this is exactly what the book is written. This is exactly the way any major enterprise is worked out. And how smart and how professional these guys were back at the highway department. They planned it all out. Some guy, you know, drove the length of the thing they with surveyors and engineers and they said, you know, at mile 201, we need 16 culvert pipes. We need a ton and a half of rebar. We need XYZ here and they had it all. They ordered it. They shipped it. They delivered it. And there was sitting all along the highway so that when the workers came ready to actually build that way when that's you and me as we're going to sit down to write the book, everything was waiting for them in place. All they had to do was move the stuff over and put it in the ground. So that's what this fool scapment that does for you among other things. What we're going to do here is there's going to be a second video that's going to follow this. I'm going to send this to you by email as well in the next few days. And the second video, I'm going to take the actual the actual fool scap thing from the legend of agar dance and take you through it line by line to show you exactly what goes on this page and how it works and how it helps. I'll show you in terms of this book, but also in terms of other other movies and things that you may be more familiar with. We're also going to include an excerpt for this book, which I think you'll find interesting. And we're going to send a transcript as well of this talk about the fool scap method. So thank you very much for sticking with me. This is something new. We haven't done it before. Like Seth the Godness says, this may not work. But I hope it does. And I hope this has been help before you. I'll see you again in a few days with the second half of this video.