This is a transcript of SYS Podcast Episode 523 – Tik Tok and Social Media For Writers With Jason Pargin .
Ashley
Welcome to Episode 523 of the Selling Your Screenplay Podcast. I’m Ashley Scott Meyers, screenwriter and blogger with sellingyourscreenplay.com. Today I am interviewing writer Jason Pargin. Jason has a very inspiring story. He wrote a novel called John Dies at the End that got turned into a movie. And that actually helped launch his novel writing career. So, we dig into all of that, how that came about, and how he continues to write novels for a living to this day. I actually found Jason through his Tik Tok channel, he creates sort of just random interesting Tik Toks. And then every once in a while, he will use this Tik Tok channel to promote his latest book. So we talked about that a little bit, what is his sort of strategy and how he uses his Tik Tok channel, we also get into AI a little bit. As a professional writer, I was curious to get his thoughts on where he thinks AI is going to impact writing. So, there’s a lot of great insight in there as well. So, stay tuned for that interview.
SYS is a six-figure screenplay contest is open for submissions, just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/contest. We have two more deadlines at the end of each month at the end of June, we have our late deadline. And then at the end of July, we have our final deadline, you will save a little bit of money if you enter before the June 30 deadline. If your script is ready, definitely submit now to save money. We’re looking for low budget short scripts and features. I’m defining low budget as less than six figures. In other words, less than 1 million US dollars. We’ve got lots of industry judges reading scripts in the later rounds, we’re giving away 1000s and cash and prizes. We have a short film script category as well 30 pages as less so if you have a low budget short script, by all means, submit that as well. I’ve got a number of industry judge producers who are looking specifically to read short scripts. If you want to submit to the contest or learn more about it just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/contest. Also, again this year, we are running an in-person Film Festival in tandem with our screenplay contest. It’s for low budget films produced for less than 1 million US dollars. We have a features and shorts category. The festival is going to take place here in Los Angeles, California from October 4th to October 6th. If you’ve produced a short film or a feature film, or you know someone who has, by all means please do submit it. And you can learn more about that by going to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/festival. And that will actually direct you to the Film Freeway page where we are actually taking our film submissions again that’s on the Film Freeway page. So again, if you want to enter the contest www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/contest and if you have a finished short or a finished feature film, you can enter that at www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/festival. if you find this episode valuable, please help me out by giving me a review in iTunes or leaving a comment on YouTube or retweeting the podcast on Twitter or liking or sharing it on Facebook. These social media shares really do help spread word about the podcast so they’re very much appreciated. Any websites or links that I mentioned in the podcast can be found on my blog in the show notes. I also publish a transcript with every episode in case you’d rather read the show or look at something later on. You can find all the podcast show notes at www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/podcast and then you just look for episode 523. If you want my free guide How to Sell a Screenplay in Five Weeks, you can pick that up by going to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/guide, it’s completely free. You just put in your email address and I’ll send you a new lesson once per week for five weeks along with a bunch of bonus lessons. I teach the whole process of how to sell your screenplay in that guide. I’ll teach you how to write a professional logline and query letter, and how to find agents, managers and producers who are looking for material, really is everything you need to know to sell your screenplay, just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/guide.
So, now let’s get into the main segment. Today I’m interviewing writer Jason Pargin. Here is the interview. Welcome Jason to the Selling Your Screenplay Podcast. I really appreciate you coming on the show with me today.
Jason Pargin
Thanks for having me on.
Ashley
So, to start out, maybe you could tell us a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up? And how did you get interested in being a professional writer?
Jason Pargin
So, I grew up in a small town, Illinois and Midwest where I had no dreams whatsoever of becoming a professional writer because at that time, I didn’t know how that kind of thing would happen. I was born in an era before the internet, so the idea of like creating online and then getting noticed that wasn’t yet thing. So, I thought just you know, because I consumed novels and paperback, Stephen King novels and Tom Clancy novels, whatever they had at the grocery store. We didn’t have a bookstore. When I thought about like if I would want to be a writer, the writers I saw in movies, they seem to be people that lived in New York that were part of a specific social circle. And they all went to these cocktail parties for fancy writers and agency stuff. And it’s like, well, how do you get from here to there? And my assumption was that you don’t that these are people who got degrees in English or literature or Whatever. And then they somehow knew somebody in the industry. So, somebody invented the internet after I was out of high school. And I just started writing online, again, not with the strategy toward this will get me published because again, that wasn’t a thing at the time I started writing online before the word blog was invented, where the internet was just a bunch of websites that people typing text, or posting the, you know, very low-resolution pornography.
Ashley
And so, we’re talking about 2005.
Jason Pargin
We’re talking 1998, we’re talking at a time when most homes still did not have an internet connection in the United States. So, I had like these, they had these services like geo cities, things like that, where you could just they would give you a blank page, and you would have to go look up how do you do HTML, then you would figure out how to do the formatting of the text, and maybe insert a little spinning animated GIF or something like that. So, I was just writing whatever I was writing movie reviews, or just poems or anything, anything silly that occurred to me. And back, then you just slowly gained a following from people finding your page and then telling the friends in chat rooms and on message boards and bulletin boards, the business before social media, this is before it, you know, video on the internet, this is the early, early days. And so, I had starting around the year 2000. On this, what you would now call a blog, but on my web page of just all the crap that I wrote, started writing a series of short stories, because I thought it would be fun. And it’s called the series, John Dies at the End as a joke, implying that at the end of the serial that the character John was going to die. And that went viral. The way things went viral back then just one link at a time, somebody’s emailing it to their friends, somebody going back to the message board, where they hung out and saying – oh my gosh, you’ve got to go read this thing. So I did that. And just again, giving this away for free, and obviously not making any money off of it. It’s just, you know, my own hobby thing. But it went viral it became it started to get read by 1000s of people. And I would generally post an update every fall, usually in October around Halloween because it was kind of horror themed. And it kind of became somewhat of a big deal. It got read by 10s of 1000s of people probably upwards of 100,000 by the time it was done. And so, in the mid-2000s I literally had like an indie horror press come to me and say, Hey, would you want to actually publish this as a paper thing that people can read without having to stare into their monitor for 150,000 words of text, which would do permanent damage to your eyes? I think I said sure. They gave me an advance of $500. It sold a few 1000 copies. And one of those copies by just blind luck wound up in the hands of a Hollywood horror legend named Don Coscarelli. He made the Phantasm films made a film called Bubba Hotep made the movie Beastmaster back in the 80s. And he emails me cold and says, who is your agent? Like, who could I talk to about getting the rights to the story. And at the time, I had no agent I had no editor I had no real publisher. I didn’t have any of that stuff. I was working at an insurance company that and not selling not writing copy for ads not doing anything like that. I was doing data entry on insurance claims. I just there was a job I got through a temp agency. I had no background in writing professionally or anything.
Ashley
What was your degree in college?
Jason Pargin
I got a degree in broadcast journalism. And then did that I immediately got a job at a local news affiliate did that for about a year and a half and was very bad at it. But yeah, he got like an assistant producer job for their early-early morning news thing. So, yeah, why am I not using that degree I graduated in 97. So wound up you know, it would spend the next decade kind of bouncing around doing jobs that just part-time jobs or office jobs whatever I could get usually working two jobs at a time doing filing and spreadsheets and whatever you know, basic computer stuff I could I had learned or taught myself.
Ashley
So, I’m curious I just I read a little blurb about John Dies at the End. How about how you were releasing it as a sort of a serial and getting feedback from the readers and then somehow incorporating that into revisions or future chapters? So, can you talk about that process a little bit? Where are you actually taking feedback was this very much a way of sort of getting your audience to interact with you and feel invested in it? Was their strategy to it was just sort of the process but maybe you can just talk about that a little bit. This this back and forth with your audience.
Jason Pargin
There definitely was no strategy, because there was no template for doing this. There was no like a day it’s common for people to have gotten their start writing on the internet, usually writing fanfic, things like that, of course, that’s where, you know, the Twilight series came about and 50 Shades of Grey, like, these are people from, like the online writing scene on, you know, a oh three, and all of these Wattpad all of these sites to put millions of pages of fiction, that’s a thing now, back then it wasn’t the concept of writing a story on the internet was not a thing that existed when I started doing this. Or if it was, it wasn’t something that I was aware of. So, having like, a strategy of what how do you build readership? Or how do you get feedback? How do you do this? It was all being invented on the fly. So, I had like a message board where the fans hung out. So when I posted something, people on the internet, one thing you can say about them is they do not hold back with their criticism and their bluntness. So, I could two things. One, I could see the traffic stats, because I had it paginated like different sections of text, you’d have to keep clicking through I could see where people were leaving off people were quitting. But to if I made something unclear, I even have a million comments saying – well, what happened to this guy? Why did you say this guy? So, it’s feedback that previous writers in previous eras had never gotten where it’s directly from an audience and from an audience, it’s been very blunt, because they don’t care about you.
Ashley
And is that would you recommend that today, like for a novelist, just a new novelist, or even yourself who’s now established? Do you want that kind of feedback in your in your development process?
Jason Pargin
Today, no. I have an editor today, I’ve been doing it long enough, that if you’re new and are trying to because this is what I try to emphasize when I was doing this and posting this, you know, every year, that was my novel, writing school, I did not have another novel under my belt. This is the first long form story I had ever told. But I spent five years posting it. So, the early stuff I posted, I’m sure it was a disaster. And as time went on, I would circle back and re edit those opening parts. Because why not? It was being posted for free. It’s a live thing. I could just go in and edit the webpage anytime I wanted. So, I was constantly circling back and revising the old stuff as I figured out what I was doing. But if anyone out there, if you’re going to do that, if you’re going to try to post it and say I’m going to learn the way Jason learned, I’m going to let the internet I’m going to let internet strangers tell me what I’m doing wrong. You need to find a supportive environment where one people are being honest. But two people are not just being cruel. Because the thing was, I had this website, I had this blog, and I had existing fans, people who liked me knew what I was doing knew who I was. So, they weren’t just trolls coming in and slinging insults at me. Or if you wrote like today, if you wrote a novel that touched on some controversial subject, if you had a main character who was trans, think about how many of your comments there’s going to be trolls like, more woke propaganda, bah, bah. Like it’s not going to be helpful feedback. I was very fortunate enough to have a community to one it was in the nature of community to be honest about things tend to be blunt about things if you didn’t like something to just comment, say but also they their goal was not to make me stop writing. Whereas today, a lot of the trollish comments you walk in in the YouTube video, like how many of the trolls like why do you why do you post this get you know, delete your account. You have to find a space out there. That’s, that’s actually going to help you because if you wind up in the wrong space, they will just scream at you until you delete everything and never posted again.
Ashley
Yeah, yeah. Did you read any books? I mean, I know with my screenwriting journey, I didn’t have any real templates or role models. And I went out and found books in the screenwriting space. It’s Syd Field screenplay. Blake Snyder, save the cat. Are there some how to write novel books? Like did you do any research? Obviously, it sounds like you were a voracious reader as a child. So, that’s obviously good training but we’re there’s some how to write books, like how to write a novel type books that you checked out.
Jason Pargin
I’ve never read one of those that helps me. I’m not seeing other people shouldn’t be like Stephen King has a wonderful book called On Writing where he talks about his method, but I didn’t take any of his advice. I just thought it was interesting to see how he worked. For example, He says he never outlines a novel in advance that it reads to mechanical when he does that. Well, I relentlessly outline I couldn’t work without outlining. The one thing that I’ve you know, and I think I read a book of writing tips from Elmore Leonard and you know, people have posted things like that. It’s always very fascinating to see how other people work. In terms of giving, like a list of tips, or here’s how you do it. The one thing I’ve learned reading all the great writers of the past and how they worked is that no two writers work the same way. I think it’s like Ernest Hemingway saying like, oh, no, you can only write in the morning, get up early in the morning before everybody. So, I can’t, I’m not a morning person. So, I’m not saying don’t consume tips like that. It’s just don’t take it as a prescription. Because ultimately, it’s going to come down to how you and your brain works. And you know, there’s some writers in the past who said they couldn’t write their novel unless they literally went and rented, like a cabin in the woods to be totally away from distractions. Well, all of my books were written on a computer with another tab had a YouTube video plane, and there’s probably a TV show on in the background. I mean, I’ve done my whole career like that, because that’s the brain I grew up with, where there’s a million noises going on. And sometimes I’m listening to music while I’m writing. Other people say, no, you can’t do that. You have to have all of your focus on the work. Everybody’s different. So, it’s good to consume tips. But I think what I found is you may read 100 tips, and then out of those 100, you’ll see one that’s like, Ooh, I’m going to try that. I’m going to try if somebody recommended using like, white noise in your headphones to try to if you get to block out distractions, like, I’m going to try that never worked sometimes. Yeah, but otherwise, there’s not there’s not a set. I think screenwriting is different, because there are very specific rules that you either you have to follow where else, you have to make it clear that you know them novels are completely different. There’s no set structure for a novel.
Ashley
So, did you find that building this audience on these, this website actually helped translate it into actually selling books. And then the flip side of that is, was there a concern from the publisher that this book is already available for free on the internet, so a lot of people have already read it and might not want to buy the actual book when it’s published.
Jason Pargin
Correct. And in fact, I did not shop it to a publisher, because I assumed they wouldn’t want it in the name of everyone that wants to read it has already read it. So I’d never bothered again, the possibility of me becoming a published author, even after I’d written a popular story on the internet, I still saw it as this means I’m good at writing on the internet. Because this story, as I saw, it, was very much intended to, there’s a style of writing that came along in the internet, especially in the early blogging era, where people realize that if you’re going to write long form, you have to write for an audience that at any second can be gone to go look at pornography. So every sentence needs a punchline, every sentence needs to be basically be a cliffhanger that leads to the next sentence, there’s no such thing as taking your time setting the scene. This is an audience that has invested no money in reading this thing. They’ve invested nothing, the second, they’re bored, they’re gone, because there’s an infinity of free entertainment that we’re looking at instead. So to keep them engaged, you quickly learn through necessity, how to write to keep the reader engaged, because you figure out oh, and so by reading the other great bloggers of that era, many of whom are no longer around. But you see the same thing where it’s very dense, there’ll be you know, if they’ve got a long sentence, there’s a lot of different points or punch lines in this ends, where it’s just very much it’s very tight. And, you know, it rewards your attention. And the assumption is, we’re not going to waste any of your time whatsoever. So that training helped. That taught me how to write in a specific way that I think now works very well on the page that a lot of writers don’t work this way. But we were trained by the internet to do that. But remember, I never got a book deal based on it going popular in line, I got a movie deal, after the movie deal was signed in news and press releases went out that this is going to be done customer rallies next movie, then all of these horror outlets and all these magazines printed that news. Then I got a contact from Macmillan. And in print, they’re saying, do you have a publishing deal for this thing? And I had explained well, yeah, it’s technically in the hands of this indie, horror press. And they negotiated a deal to basically we had to deal with the three of us so they could do it. And because they wanted to do a big, you know, hardcover release with, you know, international rights, everything built in. And that’s how I got the book deal. But again, once again, they asked me who’s my agent? I was like, I don’t have an agent. How do you get an agent? So I had to, it’s everything’s backwards. I had to go approach a literary agent. Like I literally asked a publisher, do you know any agents, I had to go to a literary agent say – Hey, I wrote this thing. It’s already going to be a movie. It’s already got a book deal. I need you to do the paperwork. So, it’s completely different everything you all the tips, people want to give you that well, how do you query yourself to agents? How do you make yourself like how do you find an agent? How do you sell yourself like I didn’t have to do any of that. I came in saying, I have all of these deals done. I need you to make the documents for us to sign. And then they put John dies out, John dies of Dan out as a hardcover. And it earned back It’s a dance in seven days. So
Ashley
now that you’ve been doing this a while maybe you can speak to that a little bit to new writers, novelists, screenwriters, whatever, what advice do you have, if they are in a similar situation where they get a little bit of heat on a project? And then but they don’t have an agent? They don’t have a manager, they don’t have a lawyer. How do you find one and then now that you have some years of experience, what are some tips you have maybe some mistakes you made or just some basic tips that you might have for new writers, new novelist?
Jason Pargin
For one thing, the one piece of advice that I’ve seen that I think is bad if people say you don’t need an agent, because they’ll say, well, you’re just giving 15% of your income away, you know, if you if you just know how to do the contract, if you know what to look at. I personally think that’s madness, the average creative person that I know, does not have a mindset for doing that stuff. And making sure that you’re protected in the deal that all the possible, you know, it’s like, well, are you giving the publisher foreign rights? Are you giving them audio Are you separately want to be able to go out and sell that? These are all questions that an agent who has seen a million contracts can talk about where you yourself trying to do it, I would be very afraid of doing that. If you’re coming in, like, again, I found an agent literally by just asking the publisher if they knew and like in theory, that’s a conflict. You’re asking, can you give me somebody who can negotiate with you against you and my interest, but they recommended me somebody who was very good. And you know, it worked out fine. But in terms of if I had to do it again, I don’t know. Because now I would assume your first step would be to go online and see if this agent who you think would work with you? Do they have a good reputation? You know, or are there other writers out there saying they’ve gotten screwed over or anything like that. But otherwise, I just don’t know it’s in the landscape changes so quickly that I’m afraid of giving outdated advice.
Ashley
Yeah, yeah. So, let’s start to get into your writing process a little bit. So where did the idea from John Dies at the End come from? Just maybe you can walk us through sort of your process? Do you have some sort of vague ideas? Do you have a notebook? Do you have a Google Doc that you put random notes in? Maybe you can just walk through that process? How does an idea like this come to you? And how do you sort of start to organize it into a novel?
Jason Pargin
This is something that I think is really important, because every novel you’ve read, there’s a real good chance that it started in a different place. And it’s often is not the story that it starts with, because a lot of people think will tell me why can’t a great idea for a story, but I don’t know where to start writing that. A lot of the first things that an author thinks of it may not be, you know, a story or premise, it may just be a character. Or it may just be a tone. Like I had this idea of writing a book where it’s just very deadpan humor throughout, like you can hear this voice you can hear like the voice of this narrator. Or you may have an idea for like a storytelling gimmick, I kind of like to tell story where the whole thing is just told it’s a series of emails, like, it’s the whole thing is told as a series of emails back and forth to different parties. And that will really be the format, you may start with that. And then from that starting point, it’s always about executing that in some way. So John dies at the end, it was just supposed to be a short prank, it was a joke where because at the time, a lot of the blog, the articles I were writing, they were comedy articles. But the idea is the first paragraph read is something very straightforward. And then as you read it, it just kept getting sillier. And there’s some point there’ll be a tipping point, oh, this author has wasted my time. And people loved it, because it’s the people who were used to realize what I was doing. And it built this community of, because the way people consumed the Internet back then were they would get on their PC or waste time at work. And they would just browse around for things. And people would give these links to them, like, oh, go read this. And it was a way to, like, trick them. But then they would find that thing rewarding because it was very funny. And so it built this community of people who were like in on the joke. So in the round around the year 2000 around Halloween, I did this post it was like, Hey, this is a true story, something that happened to me and my friend, and it sounds like it’s going to be me talking about how we saw a ghost one time and it starts You know, like a serious ghost story. You hear this woman who says like her boyfriend was hiding her house, she wants us to come look at it. And then it just keeps getting more and more ridiculous until you realize, oh, this is ludicrous what this person is talking about the internet winds up with all of the meat in her freezer getting possessed and taking the form of like a shape of this monster that chases them around the house. And then to end the situation they like. They know this guy who’s an exorcist, but he’s not going to be able to come there. So, they just get him on the phone with the monster and they work it out, like off scene like you don’t hear the conversation. It’s extremely silly, and it’s very It has a weird anticlimax. And that was it. It was just supposed to be that dumb story. Look, I have wasted your time. And then this is something you can send around like, oh my gosh, just the creepiest thing I’ve ever read out and then your friend reads it and they realize, oh, okay, this guy is an idiot. But people liked it so much that you’re asked like, well, what’s the next? When’s the story going to continue? When? And I didn’t know. It was but it was the readers who told me? Well, no, I want to see more, I want to see the next thing they do. So, I just started doing it every once in a while. And again, in between posting these updates. I was posting other stuff that was a little bit more mainstream in terms of what people wanted back then where it’s just, you know, it’s me doing an essay on some subject or criticizing some movie or the kind of thing you would see from YouTubers now where they’re getting commentary, and it’s about their personality and about how they talked about things and all that, you know, reviewing the video game or doing some commentary about…
Ashley
Which is what you do now on tick tock, basically, correct?
Jason Pargin
Yeah, that’s a good example, because that model kind of hasn’t changed. Like I joined tick tock, and it was late 2022. So, I was 47 years old. And I’m starting new on Tik Tok, I had never done anything on-camera before, I was not a YouTuber, I was not an on-camera personality whatsoever. For most of my life, I wrote anonymously, I did not want my own face out there. But the market, you know, the blogs are dead, that’s not a thing you can do anymore. Really, there’s not really such thing as a viral blog post anymore. If something goes viral, it’s going to be a short video. So okay, I’ll go where the people are. And so I, you know, pushing, nearing my 50, start a Tik Tok account doing the same thing, where the vast majority of it is just observational kind of talking to them through a subject making some point about a subject. And then every once in a while, we’ll drop a promo for my book. And it’s that kind of has your I’ll do a reading from one of my books, and that will sell some copies. And that kind of that model has kind of never changed, format changes.
Ashley
Yeah. So, obviously, I usually have screenwriters on and talk about their process. So it’d be interesting to hear sort of your process. And I’m really probably more interested in just hearing how your day to day is now after having some years of experience. Where do you typically write you have this home office? I can see but do you need that? ambient noise? Do you go to Starbucks, can you be Writing Your Novel in Starbucks, you just need to be so maybe we can talk a little bit about that. When do you typically write the morning? The sounds like you’re not a morning person? So maybe afternoon nighttime, we just what is your writing process look like? How do you actually start cranking out pages and outlining and stuff.
Jason Pargin
So, the first step in getting a new book going is I am always, always taking notes. I think every writer in the world does this, if you hear an interesting fact, or you think of a funny joke, you write it down and I just have a Notes app on my phone. And then I have a notepad on my PC and something occurs to you or you think of something interesting, or you hear something interesting, or a little interesting piece of trivia or something, you write it down. And I will start with, I’ve always got a giant mountain of notes. And this will be like, oh, this sounds like a John Dies at the End Note, this is a type of weird thing that would come up in that book. So, I have hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of those notes. And when it’s time to sit down to like, for example, the last book has been turned in it’s been put to bed, it’s now time to really get going in the next one. I sit down start outlining. And I have posted notes. I have a giant dry erase board here in my office to try to outline everything my say outline, I don’t just mean a list of scenes, I will sit down with the marker and pen and paper on the whiteboard. And I will map out a character arc. And it’s like, well, this character is going to start here. This is what they’re going to learn this is where they’re going to wind up. And I will have that for every character and then I will start thinking in terms of like monsters and creature designs. And because the monsters in these book, they kind of are thematic to the plot of the book. And what the book is about is you know, the theme of the monster is kind of supposed to be you know, the design of the monster kind of fits the theme of what you’re talking about. It’s all supposed to be coherent. So, I will do all of that and then that will get rustled into the shape of an outline. And then I will write up a very detailed outline that is pretty much scene by scene, almost page by page of exactly what’s going to happen in this book. And then I start writing it. And the reason that works is because of my, I have such a bad attention span, that if I get bored with writing the part that I’m writing, if I say, you know what, there’s this part halfway through, that looks really fun, I’m going to just skip ahead and start writing that or, I’m going to write something on the ending, I can do that. Because the outline is the outline, I know that’s going to be the ending. And of course, that gets tweaked as time goes on, it takes me either one to two years to write a book, depending on the book. And there’s no doubt at some point, I’m going to say this ending doesn’t work, or I need to tweak all of this. But I go through and tweak the outline, because I want it to be extremely clear where we’re going. And I never want to do that thing that some writers do. I think George RR Martin wound up doing this to himself with this song of ice and fire books where you keep dreaming up new things to happen, or new characters you want to introduce. But you keep it doesn’t lead you back to the conclusion they come up with. So here and it keeps it very coherent. I know I’m on deadline, I can’t just keep dreaming up. Well, wait a second, what if they all went to France? And it’s like, no, that’s not in the outline. We didn’t that’s not part of the plan. If you dream, if you want that to happen, that will be in some other book, this book, we figured we know what’s going to happen. And you say what you’re going to say. And you’ve decided that all in advance, and it makes it a little bit more of an efficient process. Because otherwise, with my attention span, I would go off on some tangent and start writing, God knows what and a character would just go off and do something that I that occurred to me that day. To keep myself on task I have to outline. Most authors do not write that way. Many authors say you shouldn’t write that way. This is again, don’t take this as advice as for when I write, the one thing I cannot do is write in public, one problem I had working before I got this job, and writing books full time. I’ve been working at home since around 2007. Prior to that working in an open office playing cubicle type thing, I was not a good employee, the sound of people talking around me makes it extremely difficult for me to focus, I can be listening to an audiobook, I can be listened to all sorts of things. But the difference here is I am in control of it. So, if I’m playing music, I chose that music. If I have coworkers having a conversation to cubicles down, I can’t fully focus on what I’m doing. Same thing if I tried to go to Starbucks, I that’s unthinkable to me, I would not be able to write a single word that way. I could do other tasks, I could check my email, I could get out of the crap out of the way their troubles of writing fiction, dreaming up the world, putting myself into this world, trying to hear the voice of these characters in my head, so I know how they talk. There’s no way I could do that in public. Then in terms of time of day, I literally will just like I’ll write five paragraphs in between this zoom call I’m doing with you. And the other zoom call I’ve got later this evening, I’ll sit down and write someone that and then I’ll switch off and do this other this other work thing, or publicity thing, or I’ll record a Tik Tok, which is now part of my job. And then when that’s done, I’ll write maybe another half page before bedtime, and I just squeeze it in where I can and then when I get closer to deadline, where I’ve got it to where it’s in a more like crunch time where it’s like, no, we’ve got to get serious work done, then I will clear my schedule of everything and may write for 16 hours in a row. But that’s I try not to do that. That’s not a very healthy process for me, where I’m just like, pulling an all nighter. I’m getting too old to do that.
Ashley
Yeah. So, you mentioned it takes one to two years to complete a novel. I’m assuming that’s including this outlining stage, maybe you can break that down how much, once you have this, this sort of loose outline, you write it into this very detailed outline, how long does it then take you to actually crank out the novel once you have these detailed outlines done?
Jason Pargin
It used to take me every bit of a solid year of writing. Once the writing part started the last book deal I signed, I committed to doing a book a year across basically three books. And that was too much that required me to do some overlap where I was trying to finish this book while outlining the next book. And that’s hard for me, it’s hard for me to have because I know there’s some authors that write they’ll have five things going on at once. I’ve never been able to do that it’s got to be one book at a time. So that was too much that required me to work way too many weekends way too many late nights. To write at my natural pace. It should be a two year long process where the actual writing should be probably one year of it and then before and after that you have outlining and then if course there’s extensive editing that happens once you, no matter how careful you are when writing, there’s always an enormous amount of editing, even before it goes to the publisher for their feedback. This is just looking back at what you wrote. And then it’s constantly a matter of circling back and fixing things early on. Because the rule is the same with the rules and screenwriting that if you’re Indian doesn’t work, it means you messed up something at the beginning, not at the end. So, you have to circle back and fix it there. But yes, to comfortably do it, beginning down the whole thing. It should be two years.
Ashley
So, one of the issues that I deal with I’m sure other writers deal with this as well. And I’d be interested to hear your thoughts, especially the way you’re describing your process as being almost a year of just outlining. When I’m in and out. I mean, screenwriting I do a lot of outlining. But I often feel at the end of my day, like I didn’t really accomplish anything, because you’re kind of just noodling on this outline, and especially if it went on for you, I mean, with a screenplay, you can kind of crank it out in three months or six months. But how do you just get through those days emotionally? Because there must be days where you literally didn’t really accomplish anything on the novel? And you just feel bad about that. But how do you get through those days, just emotionally, when some days are better than others?
Jason Pargin
Let me be absolutely clear. It is my personal opinion that this is what kills some writers. Like I think they drink themselves to death or kill themselves because the depression that they feel when they are not productive enough, or they’re in a period of writer’s block, and the worthlessness you feel because this is a very lonely process, there’s no conference calls, there’s no people to show this to this. There’s nobody that can, I don’t have friends where it’s like – Hey, I’m stuck in this pipeline helped me through I don’t work that way. It is just me for two years. Like literally the first time that publisher was seen anything on this book is when I send them the completed polished edited manuscript. It’s not something where they show them chapters as we go, I don’t get feedback, it is just me. So those periods where it is just you when everybody’s depending on you. And whether or not you can pay your mortgage depends on whether or not you get this book done in time, and it sells, and you hit that stretch where it feels like you’re not getting anything done. That takes you to an extremely dark place. And I think a lot of writers turn to substance abuse. Because of that, I think they are self-medicating that feeling like they are worthless, like their brain is not producing. And like they’re not doing anything in the works no good, especially that period about 75% of the way through a project where you look at it as like, this is garbage, like I have wasted the last year of my life, this isn’t working, what am I doing. And then that feeling always passes two weeks later, it’s like, oh, I am a genius. This is going to win me best book at the book Oscars. So that way, this is not a light thing to deal with the thing I would like to impress on all the writers out there. So, either writing and creative process looks like doing nothing at all, because most of the work is not done by your conscious mind. Whenever you’ve had an idea hit you in the shower. That wasn’t your muse that wasn’t God talking to you. That was the fact that you’re most of your thinking is done in the back of your brain and the method that writers have always shared, where you think intensely about the problem you’re trying to solve in your plot, and then you push it over your brain and go for a walk, but go mow your lawn do something else. And the answer will just appear fully formed in your brains because that part of your brain is always working. So, this is one where people who are the bosses of writers of the editors, or writers or whatever, get very frustrated with the writers, because a lot of the work they’re doing does not look like work. It looks a lot like they are taking an app or playing a video game. You have to understand the creative work is being done. It’s being done in the background. But those things because where people don’t realize it, where you get stuck is there’ll be some plot problem you’re trying to solve where even me doing the outlines, you realize, well now hold on. Why would she do this? If she doesn’t yet know about that, and you’ve created this, you’ve created a pothole, you’ve created something that doesn’t really make sense. And you have to figure your way out of that. No amount of sitting at your keyboard at your desk will make that answer appear to you. At some point that writer part of your brain that operates in the background has to manufacture it and it will pop the answer will pop into your brain as if it was has been given to you by someone else. So, it is an awful process of having to kind of do something I think every writer Agatha Christie used to go on walks I think lots of writers I think CS Lewis did the same thing. JRR Tolkien, they go through walks through the woods and they would swear that that would once they came back from the walk the answer would have appeared in their brain but ultimately, it all comes down to having some kind of a habit that is doing something that isn’t writing. And that lets your brain go to work on the problem. You know, because people talk about working in the garden, something, I think repetitive tasks, that kind of thing help. That’s something where the thinking part of your brain kind of zoned out. And eventually it will appear to you but people who are new and young, when you hit those periods where you hit balls seems like an unsolvable problem where you can’t break applied, as they say, and you don’t have a writer’s room you can sit down with and help you work through it. They really emotionally have trouble with that. And they really get into destructive habits, or whatever, or the self-criticism gets out of control. So, managing that, I think is, if you can’t, you shouldn’t be writing. It’s too unhealthy. It’s too dangerous.
Ashley
So, you mentioned a little bit about your development process. In terms of dealing with the publishers, you’re just going to drop a finished polish novel on them. So, you don’t even send them like a sentence or two, just saying this next novel is going to be here’s a premise, and they vet any of that they’ve seen not anything you haven’t talked to them. And I just I wonder if you ever get to the point where you drop this polish novel on your publisher and they say, Yeah, we’re not publishing this, like, do you ever run into something like that? Or do you ever get some pushback without sort of re vetting the idea first?
Jason Pargin
I mean, that possibility is always out there. I mean, you spent two straight years, hoping that this thing you’re doing is going to work. Because if it doesn’t, you’re screwed. But now, of course, there’s an editing process, they’ll come back with notes about Well, I feel like we should develop this a little bit more, I feel like that final part needs more action. And we’ll spend a few months going back and forth and adding things cutting things, that kind of thing. But in terms of turning it in and then saying, Hey, this is not like we don’t think we can work with this, we you know, I don’t even know where we start with that, because you’ve already been paid in advance. So but in terms of like giving them a once in synopsis, for example, the book that I’m selling right now is not part of the series that may be mildly famous. It’s a standalone novel that’s in a different genre than I’ve ever done before. The title is I’m starting to worry about this black box of doom. I told them what that was at the contract stage. See, like, they signed me to a three book deal. They wanted to know what those three books were, it was not just whatever pops into your head. So it’s like, well, it would be, you know, a third book and Zoe Ashe series, the standalone novel, and then it’d be a fifth book and the John Dies at the End series. And then the standalone novel, I gave them a synopsis of, here’s what I have in mind. And I assume if they had looked at that and said, that doesn’t sound like anybody’s going to buy that they would have said, well, how about we’ll just take these two or whatever. But you know, they also just pay you less for the other idea because it’s like, well, this is not part of the series with the built in fan base, or whatever.
Ashley
And do you get into those sorts of business meetings where your publisher is like, you know, Jason, it’d be better to just continue along with the series writing more in the series. We don’t need a standalone book, do you get any kind of pushback, or you’re giving them two of these series? So, they’re like, okay, well, we’ll let you have the standalone one.
Jason Pargin
I know that other authors get that conversation, I happen to have not. But again, this is where I keep trying to emphasize how unusual my example is. Because I didn’t have to sell John Dies at the End to anybody. It was an existing story that had gone viral and an existing fan base. And that was going to be a movie. And so it was, you know, and they weren’t having to buy it for millions of dollars, it was a lot of money to me at the time, but they were buying a fourth is probably a pretty modest deal. So, it was a very low risk investment. Well, the next book deal I signed after that was just for John Dies at the End, too. But a sequel, well, again, very easy to sell in built in fan base. Now there’s a movie in production that’s about to come out. So that’s going to come out right in this video. So there again, I didn’t have to sell them on anything. The first time I had to sell them on a concept designs, like I wanted to start another series, the Sci Fi novels called Zoe Ash novels, and they bundle that into a book deal with you right as a third John Dies at the End book. And then we’ll also do this other thing for less money, because you break up the advances by book. So that’s where I’m saying, okay, I, if I had said, No, let’s sign a deal for just three more John Dies at the End books, I probably could have been signed for a lot bigger advancement saying no, no, I want to branch out and I don’t just want you to do this one series forever. And so, they let me in and that of the series became successful, and it’s done very well. So now we would get three of those in the world. But there’s not been a case where I pitched them on something and they’d come back and said, we don’t want it but that absolutely happens. That’s a common experience with authors where they’ve just you know, somebody’s like, well, I want to do you know, why a fantasy now? and they’ve just come back. So that’s not, we don’t think there’s a market for that, or whatever we’re not interested in, they’ve had to go find a publisher. That does not happen to me yet. It could happen at any time could happen when the next book deal.
Ashley
So, is there some, like method to your madness in terms of doing the series? Like was that it just interest you to continue to write these sequels to these other books? Or do you just have a sense that there is a built-in audience? So yes, there’s some sort of business sense to not doing constantly doing standalone books.
Jason Pargin
Oh, I know, I’ve never had a business strategy. And in fact, the way I’m doing it makes no sense. Because I, for example, if you get known for a genre, the smartest thing by far to do is to stay in that genre. This is something that Stephen King talked about, he did not set up to be a horror author. It’s just that his first bestseller happened to be a horror novel. And so he actually had the conversation with his agent to following up carry with Salem’s Lot and he’s like, now you understand this is another horror thing. You’re now a horror novel. You’re now a horror author. Because when you release a book, you’re depending on certain publications, a certain outlets to talk about it and to get the word out. Well, if you’re a horror, then you have all these horror magazines or you know, personalities for talk shows whatever, to talk about the next. The next Stephen King thing is that well, Stephen King, then for his third book, wanted to write a romance novel Fangoria, all of these magazines, they’re only going to talk about like, well, you have to wait a little while longer for the next Stephen King horror because he’s doing romance for some reason. You’ve lost your connections to all the people that were doing interviews with you that were doing press releases, you’ve put them aside while you go do this other thing. And he in fact, tried that he wrote a fantasy novel called Eyes of the dragon in the backlash from fans who wanted horror was so severe that he wrote the book misery about that backlash and which an angry fan tortures an author into writing the book she wants him to write. That’s how bitter that made him. The to this day, he’s mostly horror. So even he who was a billionaire gets trapped into that. So I wrote, I had these two books, the second one made the New York Times bestseller list in this horror comedy series and said, No, my third book has to be something else, because I knew I would get bored. Forever writing John dies at the end, I just would, most creative people do get bored doing the same thing too much. So I had this idea that was actually kind of an action science fiction thing like near future sci fi that has no supernatural elements. And I was extremely fortunate that, you know, the, the fans, my existing fans were willing to go with me on that. But for example, those books have a female protagonist like that tends to be a different horror film is heavily male. It’s mostly like 80% Male watch horror films. So, this is like a sci fi with a woman narrator That’s a in depth more of a female audience. That’s not a thing an author supposed to do. And then when you have multiple successful series is, in the middle of all that doing what I’m doing now releasing a standalone novel is just a ticking clock thriller. There’s no sci fi elements. There are no supernatural elements. There’s no horror. Again, that’s not what that’s not the way you’re supposed to do it. But they were they were good enough to let me do it. There probably is more money in being more disciplined about always writing in the same genre, but I just again, it’s not about volume. A true artist. I don’t want to be pigeonholed. I just get bored, I get bored writing the same thing again, there was nothing. That thing that went viral happened to be horror, but I liked Stephen King did not grow up, say one day I will be a horror author. It just happened to be poor, because I happened to write it on Halloween.
Ashley
Gotcha. So, your let’s talk about titles. Your books all have sort of witty clever titles. And now that we’re talking, I can see your you sort of tend to not be pragmatic in some of these approaches. But how important do you think the title is? And how much time do you spend coming up with these clever titles?
Jason Pargin
Well, this is another thing that in the world of book publishing is clearly not how you’re supposed to do it. Because most books you know, the best seller of the year will be called something like the maple tree or something where it’s just like it’s a few words. It doesn’t tell you anything about what the book is about. It doesn’t suggest for or anything is just you know, and people like oh, the book of the year it’s the staircase, and that in the book and the world of books, I guess titles are not considered to be that big of a deal. I also get the sense that covers are not considered that big of a deal because it seems like a lot of the best-selling books. They just have camera like smeary colors under the title you know, I’m saying that it would be better than bookstore they don’t the cover doesn’t like jump out at you. Well from the beginning in the world. The Internet your title is everything or your headline is everything you talk about like clickbait, well, I’m not trying to write clickbait, but I’m definitely trying to write something that catches your eye. It’s like the first book was called John dies. At the end, I think half of that thing success was people thought it was so funny to call a book bet. Because you’re giving away the ending, supposedly, and to this day people, people tell me they buy it, they bring it up to the cashier, they laugh every time when they check it out. It’s like what’s called, it’s like the second book in the series was called This book is full of spiders seriously, do don’t touch it. And I told people in press interviews that the book had no text in it that had like just the plastic spider in it, when you open it, like it would shoot a spider out to you that and I told him that we, the publisher side of that would be too expensive to manufacture, though. So, we just had to write a book instead. The third book in that series is called What the hell that I just read. The fourth book is called if this book exists, you’re in the wrong universe. So, in theory, you could say, well, that’s very smart business, because you see that on a shelf and you that catches your eye. But everything they tell you about book titles, for example, they should be short. Because if you go on Amazon, you go on your Kindle, it will truncate the title if it’s too long, right? Because there’s not they don’t have finite, infinite room to display a title. So you are, you’re screwing yourself by making it only display part of the title and you’ve rendered it nonsense. People say that your title should be short and memorable. And that’s not how I do it. These titles keep getting longer to the point where in this most recent book, you can see on the cover, they struggled to fit the whole title on there.
Ashley
Let’s talk about some of your other projects. I found you on Tik Tok, it sounds like you spend quite a bit of time every day on that. I mean, I can definitely attest you spending a lot of time just because I see so many of your Tik Toks. But maybe you can talk about that a little bit. I saw one of them where you did recently, where you sort of laid out how many actual book sales you ended up getting from these Tik Toks. And it seems kind of low considering the amount of effort you’re putting into it. But maybe you can talk to that a bit. What is your strategy with Tik Tok? Do you recommend this to novelists as a strategy to bring people to their content, and just give us sort of your overall view of that?
Jason Pargin
Well, the point I was making is that Tik Tok is that you have to do a massive amount of volume and a lot of people don’t seem to understand that because it’s like, okay, if I go on Tik Tok and I tell people, I’m an author, and every day I do a little update about my writing. And then if I have 10,000 followers, that means I will have sold 10,000 copies of my book. And that is not how it works. So, what that that Tik Tok video I made was saying that, if I do a video that is not about my books, I’m just doing I’m just explaining some interesting thing, I will generally sell a copy of a book, or in this case, I’m promoting pre orders for this new one, I’m starting to worry about this black box of doom, I will generate a pre order about one for every million views of a video. So, if the video goes super viral and does 10 million views, it will sell 10 copies of the book. So, if I do a video that is about the book, because I will do readings, I will do excerpts or talking about the book or whatever. About one out of every 2000 views will sell a book. So, like I did a promotional video on because I have a lot of followers now people have not heard of me, I have almost half a million followers on Tik Tok. So I did like a promotional video basically, explaining the premise of this upcoming book, where it’s this guy, he’s a Lyft driver, he pulls up and there’s this woman sitting on this big black box, and she says I will pay you $200,000 to drive me across the country. But you can’t look in the box. And you can’t ask me about the box. That’s the setup. That video got something like half a million views. And I think I generated about 250 pre orders off that video. And in the world of writing, that’s pretty good. Like that was a couple of hours of effort. And it generated a couple you know, a couple 100 Or you know, between two and 300 orders. That’s a really good turnout. But if you are like I do I average about two videos a day on Tik Tok. I’ve been on there for two years. So, I’ve probably done I don’t know, like 1000 videos or 1200, something like that. I’ve not done the math, but it’s a lot. And cumulatively they’ve generated something like half a billion views, I think. And you know, in that time, I’ve sold several 1000 copies of books from my Tik Tok. But that’s it because if sitting and doing the math, it works out to about 45 minutes of work per copy sold. And that’s how you sell books. Because if you say well, that’s crazy, because you’re working most of an hour to sell a single copy. It’s like yeah, but you do that every single day. And then you know that you make that your part time job, and that adds up and you eventually the web sold 30,000 copies of your…
Ashley
So, you’re saying you’re doing two videos a day, let’s just say Monday through Friday. So you’re doing about 10 Tik Tok videos a day and yours, you think you can do both videos in less than two hours. Like that’s how much time from start to finish?
Jason Pargin
Now I’ve gotten very efficient at it. But because again, a lot of Tik Tok if you’ve not been on there, there’s you can videos can either be 10 seconds long, like just a dumb jokey thought of, or they can be seven or eight minutes long. The limit now is 10 minutes, you can go and some of my biggest Tik Tok videos have been in the six-seven minute range like people don’t understand that that they tend to occasionally favors longer videos now. So, I videoed is very involved. It’s got a lot of research, and I’ll take a couple of hours. But I may have like a dumb, like a joke or a response to a video that literally took me five minutes to come up with. And it may it may do a million views or something like that, because it just resonates with people. So, the amount of time and effort involved varies, but I just treat it like a job I get what I do on the morning, what I’m going to do in the evening. And that’s kind of just did otherwise you’re just on there and you’re paying attention to what works and what doesn’t. Because it’s like anything else. I again, I had never I did not have the Tik Tok app until I started using I had never been on there I thought it was all just like teenagers dancing to like songs or like lip synching. I didn’t realize it had become just a mini-YouTube where people did like Hank Green videos explaining science concepts, things like that. So, I got on there spent about six weeks just watching videos, and then finally started trying to make my own and then spent months learning how to do it, I had to buy a microphone, I had to buy lights, and just had to teach just like any other task, I said that there’s no magic to it, I just had to learn how to do it. I’m a trivia junkie. So, I know a million weird little facts is just a thing that I do is I just, you know, I’m always on Reddit, I’m always on various places, just looking for interesting facts and I write them down. And then you know, we’ll talk about them or talk about some trend, or I will talk about some movie I liked or didn’t like. And just over time you figure out what format people like how you have to kind of get to the point and very quickly, you just start to get a sense of how it works. But that again, about 95% of the output has nothing to do with my books, you have to give away that 95% to draw an audience. So, they will then look at the other 5% which is book promotion.
Ashley
What’s your take on just the app in general? And are you concerned that the Chinese are going to use your data to try and mind control you? Just what’s your take on sort of the political nature of where Tik Tok has been in the news lately?
Jason Pargin
It Tik Tok is a very dangerous app and the way it works, especially if you’re a young person, I don’t know if people who don’t use it realize, the reason Tik Tok a special and the reason it’s a separate thing from because people say well how’s it any different like YouTube shorts, or from Instagram reels I see short videos anywhere. Tik Tok is about its algorithm. And as an algorithm takes a little over a month to train where you have to tell it, I don’t want to see the teenagers dancing to the songs, I don’t want conspiracy stuff, you have to tell what you don’t want. And it will eventually filter that out of your feed. And it will customize your feed to just the stuff you’re interested in. And it is amazing at doing that. But if you are, for example, a young man, and you watch a few videos about, I don’t know some extreme right wing conspiracy theory stuff, you can absolutely fall down a rabbit hole because it will train its algorithm to only show you like hateful stuff about women, videos of women misbehaving and public videos of a man who was betrayed by his girlfriend, an endless stream of the stuff that you’ve told that you want to see. I want to see stuff that will reinforce my hate or my anger or my rage or my insecurities, my paranoia. So, for example, when I first got on there before I told I told him what I wanted, it was started to feed me COVID conspiracy stuff. Before like it before it that was part of the default algorithm. It fed me before it determined what I wanted. It gives me conspiracy stuff about vaccines, stuff like that. I had to block those users and click not interested to train it. That if I hadn’t done that, yeah, it would have tried to brainwash me. I do not think teenagers should be using Tik Tok. I think the way it operates is I think all of these sites should have greater oversight. Even if you don’t trust the government. I get it. There should be another party overseeing what’s happening here because if you are a completely mentally healthy teenager with lots of friends and a good social support network, you’re probably fine. If you’re kind of lonely, if you’re kind of paranoid, if you kind of scared to be kind of angry. Tik Tok even more than YouTube will grab you and pull you down to a dark place. So, I completely understand why multiple countries have already banned it. India has already banned it. China does not allow this version of Tik Tok to be shown to its own citizens. They have a different more sanitized version. So no, if they banned it, it will hurt me a lot career wise, because that’s by far my biggest platform. Also, I get it, especially if they don’t want to be more transparent if they if their whole deal is we’re not going to sell because we don’t want to turn over our secret algorithm sauce. No, they’re right to say, hey, this is having an effect on our youth.
Ashley
It’s interesting. I mean, we could debate this all day. And I’m sort of on the opposite end of that spat or at the opposite side of that argument. As you I’m really don’t belong to this goes, I’ve become more and more of a free speech absolutist. The one thing I’ll say to push back on that is I have two kids, 11 and 14, who both use tick tock a lot. And when I say a lot, it’s frightening how much they use it. But it’s always amazing to me how much I mean me and my youngest daughter, especially we joke about some of the stuff the crossover stuff that we both get, but I’m actually amazed. I know, everybody concentrates on the negative aspects. And I don’t disagree. I mean, obviously, there’s people out there that have mental health challenges and Tik Tok is certainly doing them no favors. But I’m amazed, my daughter has gotten into history and how much history she’s learned through tick tock, and it’s exactly what you’re saying she enjoys it, she gives it a like, and so they feed her more history. So, I do think that there is an upside to this to her. She’s being exposed to things same with myself, I’m exposed to stuff and people like yourself that I never would I never would have thought to look you up, or I never would have thought to sort of come in contact with you. But it feeds me this stuff that I do find interesting. Anyways, let’s talk about AI a little bit. I saw one of your Tik Tok on AI. And I know this is something that a lot of writers are very concerned about. How do you see AI impacting professional writing in the coming the short term and the long term?
Jason Pargin
I think I agree with those who say that the problem is not necessarily AI. The problem is CEOs who have decided already, that AI can replace their writers, because like websites and articles started publishing AI slop before anybody even was claiming that it could do that job. They were so in a hurry to cut staff and to cut labor costs that it’s like, somebody joke that somebody it’s like they came out said – Hey, we come up with this thing that can kind of make human type sentences. And then the CEOs are like, great, I have fired my entire staff. How do I put this in charge of my whole organizations? Like even the people in visiting the AI are not telling you to do that? This is you wanting to cut costs, you already wanted to cut costs. I don’t think that even the people who are the most ardent AI believers, so like, yes, this can write a novel that connects on a human level. But already, there’s dollar signs writing up from investors, it’s like, wow, you could get all of the profit from writing that without having to pay a writer. You don’t have to owe anybody any residuals or anything. It’s just free labor. I think they will figure out eventually why that’s bad. I think people tend to think that technology only ever marches Forever Forward. But you know, there was a time in the past people tried to replace like servers and restaurants with just an automated thing that you punched the numbers in and eventually realized, oh, no, people like having a server at a restaurant. And it’s going to be a saint here. I think that eventually, publications are still employed people you’re going to be able to tell. And there will be some stuff that they can automate away. Like I get it that if you’re just looking for a 500-word summary of what happened in a baseball game, and AI can probably scrape the box score and give it and for most readers, that’s the only one they just want to read. Okay, the Mets lost three to nothing, I want to read what happened and it’s like, oh, there’s this guy had another bad game or whatever. They don’t need flowery prose, taking them to the sound of the ballpark and the smells of the they don’t need that they just want to know and so that’s where AI probably can fill the gap but I think people trying to write AI novels things like that. I think it’s going to have the effect of like spam email where you now it’s part of it’s just understood to be part of your life if you have an email inbox part of your office having to filter through the crap or just the human stuff that saying you try to use Twitter you have to reply to our bots from you know, sex workers and things like that or scams W just start mentally filling it, you know, filtering it out. I think when people go to look for a book to read he’d give me the same thing. They’re going to start scrolling through Amazon’s like, Oh, here’s all the AI slop. And here, oh, I recognize this writer. There we go. And I think it for the most part, there’s a few simple things that can we’ll be able to write it will be able to write a weather report that basically sounds reasonable that in terms of trying to write something that actually connects with a person or tells a story, at best, is just going to offer you a remix of whatever is already out there. And I think cynic cynics will say, well, yeah, but that’s what Hollywood movies are. Anyway, every action movie is just a remix of the same scenes is just in a different order. I mean, not, not really. I mean, there’s, I’m sure there’s direct to video stuff, direct to video action movies that are just a dime a dozen. And there’s cranking them out whatever movies like Steven Seagal makes, yeah, then AI could probably generate ex cop wife was killed on re-vengeance. And then you let the star just ad lib some one liners boom. And AI wrote the script. Congratulations. That to write something that actually connects with people that does well that people enjoy. At best, it can deliver a framework and then on set, they’ll have to improvise an actual movie out of it.
Ashley
I saw on your Tik Tok on AI one of the examples you use. And I actually discussed this on my podcast, you made the point that how can some something recommend pizza when it’s never actually experienced pizza? And if you just multiply that out into a novel or a screenplay, you experience is so much of life, it just feels like there’s always going to be that emptiness to it.
Jason Pargin
Yeah, because this is the thing that they’re using AI for us to generate a book of recipes. Well, yeah, it can scrape a book of recipes together. But yeah, it’s not interacted with the world. This is same thing with a headline a couple of weeks ago, they they’re talking about how they had a new version of chat, whatever Chat GPT they had, like a woman’s voice. And then it’s like, we’re this close, this much closer to happen and AI companion that you can be friends with and have like a friendly voice and it can joke, it’s like, yeah, but it can mimic a joke, it can scrape the database for something that sounds like a joke. But an actual joke is from a fellow person who has lived in the world, pointing out something about the world that you have both experienced. And that’s what the joke is, it’s you connecting with another primate saying, you know, can you believe there are so many brands of toothpaste out there. I don’t even know what these are, you know, I’m not even sure what’s in these things, whatever. Even the most like hacky joke, like that piece of observation is still based on having tried to go shopping for toothpaste, and then try to use it, and then wondered if it’s actually doing anything and what you’re actually paying for. That’s if the thing you’re talking to does not have teeth, and has never existed in the world. All I can do is imitate those sounds. And for some people, maybe that’s all they want. Some people have a teddy bear, they can talk to that, you know, humans are good about that. We will you know, they’re saying they’ll say their best friend is their dog, I swear my dog get understands every word I’m saying. Like, okay, that’s fine. But you know, on some level, the dog is not a person it doesn’t. It hasn’t been to work. It doesn’t know what it you know, it hasn’t lived in the same world you’ve lived in it doesn’t hasn’t read any of the books, it doesn’t watch the TV shows you’ve watched it doesn’t you know, it’s just you talking to yourself. And then the expression on the dog space convinces you it’s like, yes, I’m connecting with this. And at the same day, I can do that. You can say, what do you think about this movie AI girlfriend, and she will generate a string of text, it probably sounds like conversation, you could convince yourself. Yeah, I’m talking to a thing people need to connect with, with things. And a lot of there are a lot of lonely people in the world. And they’re going to want something to talk to I don’t begrudge them that it’s probably not any less healthy than having a pair of social relationship with a YouTube streamer. Because the AI is probably not going to demand that you donate money to them.
Ashley
To their crypto project, yes.
Jason Pargin
But ultimately, it is a one sided it’s an illusion of a relationship. And there’s clearly a demand for that there’s a space for that, but no one I think will think that it replaces A) Real relationship any more than you would think that pornography replaces a sex life because the physical act is just one piece of it. And here it’s the same thing like the actual words you’re saying to each other. It’s just one piece of it that the other 99% is both of you share in a life that only works if you’re both living a life and an AI definition is not.
Ashley
So, I just want to you gave us sort of the premise of your new book, I’m starting to worry about this black box of doom. But just tell us about that. Maybe you can give us the premise again. And you can tell us when it’s going to be available. So, if people want to check that out, they’ll know where to find it.
Jason Pargin
It’s up for pre order now in all the formats, including audio, so it’s just like a podcast except the story. Yeah, the title is, I’m starting to worry about this black box of doom. And the setup is very simple. Or there’s a guy who has a Lyft driver in LA, outside LA. And he goes to pick up a woman, and she says, I need you to clock out of your Lyft app. I need me in this big black box, I’m sitting on a box big enough that a person could fit inside of it. She says, I in this box, need to be in Washington, DC within four days, we got to be there by July 4, I will pay you $200,000 in cash. But we have to leave right now. You can’t tell anyone where you’re going. You can’t ask me where we’re going? Or why you cannot ask me what’s in the box. You cannot open the box. You can’t look at the box. You can’t touch the box any more than it’s absolutely necessary. But me and this box have to be at this location. And we have to do it, you have to decide right now you don’t have time to ask anybody you have time to think about it. I need to leave now. And you can’t tell anyone, you will leave your phone behind, you will leave your laptop behind you will turn off your navigation we cannot be tracked. So, this guy immediately says yes. And you learn why he would agree to such a thing when it seems like that’s so clearly doomed to go horribly wrong. And then it is about this trip across the country. This on this mysterious mission. And the people who are trying to stop them and the things we find out along the way.
Ashley
Gotcha. Perfect. That sounds very interesting. And hopefully it’ll get turned into a movie too.
Jason Pargin
They’re having those discussions with whoever, you never know.
Ashley
Yeah, yeah. So, I just like to wrap up the interview. And I really appreciate all your time. We’ve gone way past sort of what I had promised to keep this interview at. And I do really appreciate it, Ben, lots of great information. I’d like to end the interview just by asking the guests. Is there anything you’ve seen recently that you can recommend to our most extreme writing audience, anything you’ve been watching on HBO, Netflix, Hulu, that folks might get something out of?
Jason Pargin
Has any of your previous guests mentioned the movie Last Stop in Yuma county?
Ashley
No, actually, and that one has actually come across the on my podcast. Some of the publicists have said that, have you seen the movie and you thought it was real good?
Jason Pargin
Yeah, it is in the style of there was a wave of crime movies that came out in the 90s, after Pulp Fiction came out where they were these very clever, tightly wound, small, gritty, Ryan movies that most of them were bad. But it was an era of filmmaking that was very, very unique and cover and wedding and the plots are very like, entangled. And there’s lots of twists and setups and payoffs. And so, this one star is Jim Cummings, an actor that I like a whole lot. And it is one of the best executions of that premise where it starts. It’s very simple, where some people have robbed a bank, and they have stopped at a gas station in Yuma County, Arizona. And the series of strangers show up there because they are out of gas and the gas station, meaning it is out of their tankers are waiting for a gas truck to show up. So, everybody stops there. They’re having to just stop and wait for this gas truck to show up. And then all of these different people and different agendas start to reveal themselves. And it is a very tightly wound, very tense thriller, and it becomes clear very early that most of these people are not going to survive this situation. That is great. It’s like a perfect 90 minutes. And it’s very, there’s not a wasted second in it. Every shot is a little bit creative. Every character is colorful. Yeah. I think nobody is watching. It’s on streaming. Okay. I think hardly anybody has seen it. Please go give them some of your money.
Ashley
Yeah, yeah. Perfect. I’ll have to check that out. So obviously, we can find you on Tik Tok. But where else are you active? Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, I will link directly to your Tik Tok channel so people can just click over to that but any of these other social media networks where you’re active where people can find you.
Jason Pargin
My username is JasonKPargin on all of them on not just on Tik Tok, but also that same username, you’re going to show them on tick tock that also works on Twitter threads, blue sky, Instagram, YouTube…Substack I’m on I’m on all of them in case one gets shut down. I will just move to the next.
Ashley
Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, Jason, again, I really appreciate it. I apologize for going so far over, you did warn me that the interview would go long, lots of good information. Thank you very much. Good luck on this new book and good luck, all your future projects as well.
Jason Pargin
Thank you.
Ashley
Thank you. We’ll talk to you later. Bye.
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