How Robert Greene Crafts Masterpieces: A Journey into His Writing Process

Robert Greene is a best-selling author of six books but before he became an author he had almost 80 jobs, including construction worker, translator, Hollywood movie writer, skip tracer, and magazine editor. He is well known for his controversial book "The 48 Laws of Power."

His work as a writer is legendary, and it has impacted millions. As a writer, he has always fascinated me with his research methods & routines, as well as how he has maintained productivity & outstanding work over the past 24 years. Let's take a dive into his writing process.

In Greene's view, every experience and interaction is content. The things, people, and environment you see and observe around you could be translated into writing. The experiences he received doing 80-odd jobs provided countless inspiration for his writing.

He says that knowing how to tell a story is essential for any writer. He suggests you should tell it in a way that lures the readers & doesn't reveal where you're headed with the story; there's a surprise at the end, a lesson to be learned but it's not necessarily what you think.

Stories keep our minds engaged and entertained. It's the only way to persuade your readers to pay attention to your content. Dramatic stories appeal to our brains with human elements that everybody can relate to at some level. Good storytelling is the foundation of good writing.

Robert Greene picks and reads books like a master, over a span of two decades he has read close to 2000 books. He writes his thoughts, reflections, and insights on the margins and picks out characters, stories, and nuggets of wisdom that add their own charm to his books.

Reading once is not enough, he often lets a book cool down for a week and revisits his notes and highlighted passages to gain fresh perspectives, surprising insights, and new themes. He takes the juice out of each book and uses that juice to fill up his own books.

When you read hundreds of books, organizing and summarizing them becomes an excruciating task. Robert Greene follows a more old-school approach to this task. He is a digital minimalist and prefers a physical note card system to arrange his reflections and notes.

For every single book, he has a diverse category of sub-topics. He then transcribed key points from every book into these different note cards. For every project, he creates thousands of cards. Once he finishes with research, he initiates the writing process.

He pursues a single task with incremental focus. He constantly encounters ideas about shaping his books by avoiding distractions & focusing more on mindful activities, meditations, yoga, & physical exercises. This is where he differentiates his books from mediocrity to legendary.

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