Adam Becker

It's 40!

It is 42.

Yeah, shitty drafts are really important.

I also had I had like a spare parts bin where if I had like one of my one of my darlings that I couldn't kill, like a sentence that I didn't want to get rid of, but it didn't fit.

I'd put it in there and tell myself like I'd lie to myself and tell myself that I'd come back.

It never came back.

But more generally, I spent a lot of time thinking about narrative structure.

My overall approach was, this is a book about really abstract ideas.

People care about ideas, but they generally care more about people than they care about ideas.

And I wanted to make it compelling.

I wanted to see if I could write a book about some of the most abstract and strange ideas in physics or in all of science that was difficult to put down.

And so I thought, OK, the way to do that is to wrap these ideas up in people and stories about people.

So then it was a question of, OK, how do I build a narrative arc that that will give me good excuses along the way to explain the ideas and introduce the new characters that are that are going to come into the story?

And that was a real learning process for me.

And I spent a lot of time like watching YouTube videos about film editing to learn like what narrative structure looked like in other forms of stories.

That was the rule.

No math.

There was one equation in the book, and I didn't want to have any math in the book, so I wrote it out in words.

The equation was...

Two times three equals three times two.