TED Talks Daily
Sunday Pick: Sci-fi writer Andy Weir doesn't love writing | from ReThinking with Adam Grant
12 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Happy Sunday, TED Talks Daily listeners. It's Elise Hugh. As we often do on Sundays, today we're sharing a recent episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective, handpicked by us for you. Andy Weir is the best-selling author of sci-fi books, including The Martian and Project Hail Mary, which is in theaters right now.
He's known for weaving deep, carefully researched science into his novels, including building intricate worlds that have captivated millions of readers. But plot twist, Andy doesn't actually love the act of writing itself. How does he motivate himself to do it anyway? In this episode of Rethinking, host Adam Grant talks with Andy about the creative process,
how to discard bad ideas, and finding joy in building worlds. To hear more deep conversations, you can find Rethinking wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com. Now on to the episode right after a short break.
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Hey everyone, it's Adam Graham. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. My guest today is Andy Weir. He's become my favorite sci-fi writer, best known for his mega hits The Martian and Project Hail Mary.
But he wasn't a number one New York Times bestselling author overnight. He started out self-publishing as a side gig while working as a computer programmer. And to borrow one of Andy's most quoted lines, what I admire most about his writing is his ability to science the shit out of it. Ha ha ha ha. Andy, it's great to meet you. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
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Chapter 2: Why doesn't Andy Weir love writing despite his success?
I'm excited to talk to the guy behind these books I've loved so much. And I think your mind is just endlessly interesting. The characters you come up with and the worlds that you transport me into would never have crossed my mind in a
I can't wait to figure out where that comes from. A lot of daydreaming, I guess. For me, I come up with like 100 ideas a day and usually 100 of them suck. But once in a while, I'll come up with something.
Chapter 3: How does Andy Weir motivate himself to write?
I'm like, well, that's actually kind of interesting. Maybe I could work on that a little more.
I feel like we could take maybe 90 of those ideas and just farm them out to other writers.
I don't think you understand how much these ideas suck.
Chapter 4: What is the importance of discarding bad ideas in the creative process?
One time I came up with an idea of this guy who just seems to be lucky all the time. He wins the lottery, he just keeps going on. But it turns out it's actually his cat that's just really lucky, but the cat likes him, so he's lucky. And that's the story. The big twist at the end is it's actually the cat that's lucky, not him.
Chapter 5: How does Andy Weir find joy in worldbuilding and research?
So just so you understand some of the ideas that I don't develop...
I don't know. I think that could be an interesting short story. I'm not sure if I would stay with him the whole book.
What are you talking about, man? This is a six-book series. Felicitous Feline, Volume 1.
I don't know. I mean, the fact that you were able to pull off Castaway on Mars and make it so endlessly interesting, I feel like you could do the same thing with a lucky cat. I do think, though, that hearing this is liberating to a lot of people who want to be creative, right? Because we only get to see your best ideas.
Exactly, yeah.
We don't see the ones that are on the cutting room floor.
Well, you also don't see the first draft of even the good ideas. If you read any of my book's first drafts, you would not like them. What I tell authors or people who want to try to break into the business or people who are in the business and just ask my advice because they erroneously think I know things. What I tell them is that.
Imagine you're a sculptor instead of a writer and you're driving along and you see this big chunk of marble out in the field and you're like, you know what? The shape of it and the texture of it, that would be perfect for like a statue of Zeus. You buy it from a farmer who owns it. Then you go and you get your truck and you get like a winch and you do all this stuff.
This thing weighs like four tons. You've got to get it up into your truck, then you drive it to your workshop, and then you've got to do just all this back-breaking labor to get that chunk of marble into your workshop, and there you go. Now you're ready to start carving the statue of Zeus. So all of that work you did right there, that's like the first draft for a writer.
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Chapter 6: What does Andy Weir say about writing with sequels in mind?
The hard thing for me is identifying a good idea. So I just have what I feel are a litany of bad ideas. And every now and then I'll kind of remember one and go like, well, you know, maybe. I guess if an idea keeps kind of resurfacing in my head and I keep thinking like, yeah, there's something there. There's something there. There's something there.
There's something interesting there to fantasize about. Like, what if I had this MacGuffin device or what if I had this power? And it's like, if I find myself thinking about the idea a lot, then that probably means it would be interesting to a reader.
People often don't believe this, but Project Hail Mary was... I mean, I put a lot of work into making this happen, but it's a single cohesive story where each thing leads into the next and all of the things that are going on in it all make sense in context with each other. But they were originally...
a bunch of unrelated story ideas that I had, like a pastiche of like, like I had one idea about, you know, wouldn't it be cool if we had a fuel that used light as propellant? That would be like the most efficient specific impulse. You could, you could like a few kilograms of this fuel and you could like travel the solar system.
And then I was like, and then unrelated to that, like months later, I was like coming up with an idea about what if a guy woke up aboard a spaceship and and didn't know it. And then like, how would you figure it out? And so on. And then because I live and breathe and like science fiction, I've always wanted to do a first contact story.
And so all of these things just like were unrelated ideas that I glued together and then sanded down the seams. And it looks like a single cohesive story.
That's amazing. So you're telling me that Rylan Grace, Rocky, and Astrophages originally started out as separate narratives.
Yeah. Yeah.
And more, Strat as well. It's so interesting because she reminded me a little bit of the kind of profile you see in someone like Elon Musk, which is very high concern for humanity and relatively low concern for many individual humans.
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Chapter 7: How does Andy Weir view the concept of originality in storytelling?
And the last thing you want to do is say, I've got this awesome idea, but I don't want to put it in this book because I want that to be in the next book. It's like, no, put it in that book. Now that book is even more awesome. Do you have another favorite tip for aspiring writers? I have actually like three things that I like to tell any aspiring writers.
Number one, to be a writer, you have to write. It's not enough to daydream. It's not enough to just think about exactly the history of why the King's Royal Guard wears their buttons on the left and or whatever else. It's fun to do world building, but that's not writing. You have to be like putting words onto paper or into your word processor or whatever your process is. You have to write.
And that seems obvious, but it's hard work. Once you start writing is when you realize all the problems. And so you got to fix them. That's number one. Number two is very difficult. Resist the urge to tell your friends and family your story. Most of us, me certainly, are driven by a desire for other people to experience the story.
If you tell your story to your friends and family, which can also be difficult when they are explicitly interested in asking you, oh, tell me more, tell me more, that sounds cool. Then it satisfies your need for an audience and it saps your will to actually write it.
So the best way to combat that is to make a rule for yourself saying like, no one can experience this story in any way other than reading it. And so I've got to write it. So you can still give it to your friends like a chapter at a time so you can get that incremental validation that you crave, but don't just verbally tell them the idea.
And third and finally, we are in a wonderfully unique time period here. There has never been a better time in human history to self-publish. I definitely recommend trying to get a traditional publishing deal because traditional publishers have these publicity and marketing departments that you cannot possibly do anywhere near as well as on your own.
But if you can't get a traditional publishing deal, self-publish. There's no barriers. 20 years ago and all the way back to the Gutenberg Press from there, you had to convince a company that they would make money by selling your book. Now there's no longer an old boy network between you and the reader. You can post things directly to the reader.
The only thing it costs you is the time that you're going to spend writing that book, which is theoretically something you want to do anyway. So if you can't get a traditional publishing deal, then self-publish. It's fantastic. A lot of authors have broken in via self-publishing, myself included. Excellent.
Is there an opinion, belief or idea that you've rethought recently?
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