Non-Fiction: How to Write It & How to "Do" Youtube.

for many many years of my life
i was a writer and an editor and many many people during those years asked for my advice on how they could be better writers how they could rewrite and improve specific books specific stories specific chapters of text whether that be fiction or non-fiction and very often i was paid to that job then above and beyond that people who were my friends or colleagues or acquaintances asked for that kind of help with my writing very often just because they had read something i'd written and they regarded me as an extraordinarily talented or experienced writer myself sometimes it was because they knew i actually had professional experience with both writing and editing in the last five years quite unexpectedly from my perspective writing ceased to be a significant part of my life editing other people's writing ceased to be an important part of life and instead step by step the format of the youtube video especially the youtube video monologue became my main creative outlet became the way i express my ideas to the world it's even the main way i hear back from other people about their ideas about the world nobody asks for my advice on how they can make a better youtube video nobody i know now one interpretation of this would be well gee eisel maybe that's because you were actually a talented writer and you have no talent at all for acting or performing or making youtube maybe that's that's one possibility but i have another idea that cuts deeper and i just mentioned these two these two explanations actually are compatible they're not mutually exclusive so if you think i'm terrible at making youtube videos or doing monologues don't worry this this analysis could work for you making youtube videos many people think of as something much more immediate much more intimate much more authentic than professional writing writing for publication something separate from writing in a diary writing for your own satisfaction or writing a private letter something that's only meant to be read by one person this sort of thing now i really felt the contrast when i worked as a professional editor the contrast between dealing with the french and dealing with any other culture of people whether it be americans british burmese thai chinese vietnamese filipinos i dealt with many many nationalities of author when i was an editor the french and the french alone among all the cultures i dealt with they had this powerful conviction that whatever they wrote remained a kind of testimony as to the particular mood and particular frame of mind they happened to be in at the time they wrote it it was only the french whoever said to me when i was in the role of a professional editor who said look i don't care if this is right or if it's wrong that was how i feel like well that's was how i was feeling on that day when i wrote it that's how the text should stand reflecting whatever i was going through with from who that was it at that time and it was only to the french that had to say back look this is a professional non-fiction publishing house we're not publishing your memoirs we're not publishing your poetry this is not about your feelings we're doing the fact checking and if the facts are wrong it's not going to be published you know if there are problems in the text as an editor i'm going to solve them and either you're going to address them or your chapter is going to be deleted or the page is going to be deleted whatever it is and i think what's really instructive there is that that french attitude and by the way i'm not claiming all french people have this attitude but obviously i was dealing with a certain type of person who had a phd or a high level of accomplishment within technical area you know this is not representative of all people but these are the french people i deal with his authors that french attitude is much closer to the attitude that most youtubers have people who speak english language should make youtube videos they feel like the youtube video should just record however they were feeling in that particular day they don't want to think about the composition of the youtube video as something they cerebrally rationally put together as a performance for an audience right so they're thinking of youtube videos more like a diary or more like a private personal letter sent from one person to another or they're even thinking of it like security camera footage right instead of thinking of it in the same category as writing an essay writing a book chapter writing something for an audience that serves something that really exists to communicate to that audience so i think this is actually the deeper reason as to why nobody has ever asked me for advice on how to make a youtube video or how to make their own youtube videos better i have never been asked for that advice not even from other youtubers whom i know have a lot of appreciation for the videos on my channel who either admire me as a person or who really admire my videos or people who've written into me saying this video or that video changed their life profoundly where they really are fans of my content so even even if my content is objectively terrible these are people who subjectively think my videos real great but they don't think to ask for my advice because they don't think of the composition of youtube video as an act of authorship in that same sense they think of it as this spontaneous personal outpouring of emotion or feelings or reflections and capturing that particular moment and interestingly in my experience french authors in particular feel that way too sometimes about the written word about publishing essays book chapters so on and so forth much younger youtuber got started up called ods he's a fan of the channel and i'm a fan of his he made his first youtube video sorry his first video in english i should add um talking about the ancient philosophy of plato as set down in the gorgeous and watching that video immediately reminded me of the advice that i've given to aspiring authors in the past when dealing with their writing and of course it didn't remind me of advice i've given on youtube videos i haven't given any advice on youtube videos in this sense right so something i've done when sitting down with authors and talking about their manuscripts and keep in mind a lot of these manuscripts were maybe written first as a phd thesis or some kind of academic formal essay um i would always say to them what i'm trying to avoid here is a narration of generalities and we stop and think about a lot of academic writing is the narration of generalities you know if i would sometimes ask them okay for in these five pages what are you doing here what's the point of this text and someone said well i'm trying to summarize this this and say no no summary we don't publish summaries so if it's a just delete that that's that's not going to press right so what's the point what are you getting to and very often in talking to the authors or just in reading the text just inserting that you'd come to a point the text where they they may say out loud they may just say in the writing this is really interesting you know there's like a pause there's a punctuation to stop and say wow this is really interesting and i would stop them and say to them hey why isn't that the title of the article or why isn't that the title of the chapter why didn't you write an article about that get rid of the summary get rid of the narration of generalities if that's what's interesting that's what you want to write about and then something i said again and again to other writers was think about your audience you're writing this you're not writing this for yourself you're writing this to communicate to an audience so you have to tell them this is what i'm going to tell you this is why i'm telling you and now this is why it matters a brief digression here i'm going to come back to ods in his video about about plato there are some topics i would say especially when you are debunking a misconception when the answer to those three or four questions is implicitly obvious right um so let's say you do a video on how the americans won in world war ii you don't sorry specifically how the americans beat the japanese in world war ii okay you probably do not have to explain to your audience that world war ii is an important event or that's an important question and you may be able to just in a single sentence communicate the fact most people assume that the invention of the atom bomb nuclear weapons that that was the crucial factor that allowed the united states to defeat japan in world war ii but i'm going to debunk that notion i'm going to tell you that this is what really mattered instead that there's something else there's a different fact of the message so when you have that format when you have a debunking format debunking a misconception about something where the audience already knows why it's important that makes you unaware of the obligation of the author or the creative artist or actor or performer here on youtube to explain to the audience hey this is what i'm telling you about today this is why it matters etc etc to really go over those those bases so you can imagine by contrast there's a huge burden for me to explain to you why it matters and why you should be interested if even just by contrast i'm going to tell you about what happened in cambodia during world war ii like hey did you know whether it's cambodia or maybe myanmar there's this whole other history of what happened in world war ii in cambodia there's this whole other history of what happened in myanmar and of course it wasn't decisive for the beginning middle or end of world war ii but it's interesting or important in some other sense that i have to get across you i have to tell you why i'm telling this to you what i'm going to prove in plain english you have to explain to the audience what is the point and again the greatest enemy of having a point is the narration of generalities the greatest enemy of having a point is a summary right and that's very counterintuitive even those two examples you might think well okay the way to do that video is to start by giving a summary of what happened in world war ii whether it's in japan or cambodia or or myanmar no right that's a waste of everyone's time including your own right so discarding the summary mindset disc discarding the narration of generalities mindset no there's a specific question that i'm going to answer here's what the question is here's what i'm telling you here's why i'm telling you here's and here's the answer right problem and problem solving you know and if there are many problems you should have many chapters or possibly many separate books depending on many essays whatever it is right but to start thinking in these terms this is what's going to make your writing accessible and interesting and this is what's going to make your youtube videos accessible and interesting because ultimately it's making your communication of ideas functional it's making it outcome driven instead of being narration of generalities instead of being thought of in terms of telling a story that existed in your imagination before you came here to tell it that's the wrong way to think where you're narrating or summarizing someone else's story no you're starting from a blank piece of paper and you're telling a story no one's ever heard before because it's your story that you've made up starting from a blank piece of paper like my specific thesis about why america beat japan in world war ii that's a new story that's something you have something you even thought of before and it's maybe something you didn't even realize you were interested in until i pointed it out to you hey you assumed it's because of the atom bomb it's not really it's not as important as there are these other factors you don't know about okay now you're interested now you're on my pitch and if you're not interested you know you'll click on another youtube video or you wouldn't read that book you wouldn't read that paper what have you so when i'm watching this video by ods again much younger guy he's just getting started making youtube videos right he's doing a narration of generalities he's giving a summary he's basically just summarizing this text from plato and narrating this text in general terms what happens and i would say at three points maybe at four points he stops and he kind of dramatically pauses and even looks at the camera and he says more or less plainly this is really interesting this is really important right that should be the video that that moment should have been when you start the video that should be the topic of the video it could be three separate videos could be four seven videos right everything everything that's gonna go that point and you should tell me why it's interesting and that's you gotta make a make a video about so to give an example one portion of the video he's going on and on narrative narrative narrative summary summary summary and then he stops and you can actually feel the dramatic tension in his voice when he reads out a passage where socrates kind of turns a corner and socrates says hey you know what he thinks of himself not merely as a politician and not merely as a great politician but as the only true politician in the whole history of athens that all the other politicians are frauds that only socrates is a real political leader of politician and you know you could see this this young guy ods this is a big deal this is interesting and you just briefly comments you know this might relate to some other issues and some other texts where socrates is a little bit of that's a topic for a video all right now what's the hook people say socrates was a philosopher he thought of himself as a politician and he thought of himself as the only true politician and all the other politicians are frauds now i'm interested now you've got a story to tell and it's your story it's your narrative it's not somewhere so it's not summarizing what the text already says it's not narrating in more general terms what the text says right that's your story because you picked it out you noticed it you reacted to it and you could even start by saying how that made you feel that's a great way to start a youtube video you could start the youtube video saying hypothetically you know i was always told that socrates was a philosopher i was told that he talked about the meaning of life and he talked about religion and he talked about duty and honoring your prayer i was i was given this vision of socrates as a man who suffered for philosophy and died for the lesson i thought it was quite a passive character i thought of him as someone who had nothing to do with politics someone who just stood there in the marketplace and kind of chit-chatted with people and you know i had this idea of socrates from school and you know what when i came to this point when i was reading this text by plato i suddenly realized just how wrong all that was that this guy really was a political philosopher now this links to another another point in the in the specific text repeatedly socrates makes this joke he's talking to his his enemy or his opponent and he says you love the demos which is a play on words meaning the people in general and there's also a particular guy named dennis and and socrates says himself whereas i love alcibiades right and this is linked to what he's saying about his political program alki biatis was a political leader including a military leader and he was very specifically the political leader and military leader that socrates groomed to take over government to take leadership of athens right so this whole notion we have of socrates as this kind of passive man of peace uh hippie wearing sandals who just hung out in the marketplace and ask people witty questions and referee and pick their brains there's all this crap people say about socrates if he was he was like a stand-up comedian or i've even heard someone say he was the original internet troll that he was just stimulating people this way the image of the gap like no this is telling you in a stone-cold serious manner that socrates is in his way a political radical or revolutionary and it's also very shocking if you take the time to unpack it the fact that he has no respect at all for these other political leaders who are named from that era of athens and from decades and centuries before did he say no these other guys you worship as having been like the winston churchill of your society or as having been the abraham lincoln ever said i regard all those guys as a fraud and he says that he only regards himself as so now we're going to talk back this is my ultimate point really what i'm presenting here isn't even my opinion of what that youtube video should be and you could say this also about an essay you know a book chapter whatever it might be if you just watch that video by ods and you pay attention to the moments where he stops and he says in effect hey this is really interesting this is surprising to me you can hear in his voice see what he says you can actually just present an analysis of that video and those moments of tension within it already emerge and show you what even from his perspective not from my perspective but from the greatest the creative artist's own perspective what that video could or should be