This episode is presented by Mercury. When I started How I Write, I expected finances to be an absolute nightmare. I’ve got team members in four different countries. Things like taxes, currency exchange, expenses — I was dreading it. But here’s the crazy thing: four years in, banking has been maybe the easiest part. I honestly can’t remember running into a single problem! And that’s because I’ve been using Mercury.
I switched over from other, more traditional banks because Mercury is so well designed. It’s easy to get started and easy to use, while also feeling totally legit and secure. Mercury gives me all the tools to run a global company like virtual cards, unlimited users, and the ability to customize each user’s access level to exactly what they should see. And you know what: if anything goes wrong, their support line is super responsive (and actually thoughtful), which is really rare these days. I genuinely can’t imagine trying to run my business without Mercury.
Bill Browder has the craziest life story of anybody I've interviewed so far.
He wrote a book called Red Notice, which was literally everywhere a decade ago. His story begins in the mid-90s, when he saw an opportunity to invest in Russia after the fall of communism. He raised $25 million, and in the next 18 months, he'd turned that initial pool of capital into more than $1 billion.
Fast forward ten years. He's just landed in Moscow on a flight from London. It's his 261st time making the trip, and he gets detained in the airport. Why? He doesn't know. But he's scared, so he liquidates his assets in Russia and scrambles to get his people out of the country.
Then he hires an investigator to look into it, who digs and digs until he's eventually captured, imprisoned, and ultimately killed. In response, Bill stops being an investor and shifts his attention to avenging this wrong.
That's the backstory for Red Notice, and this conversation is all about how he wrote the book.
Transcript
00:02:49 How to write page-turners
00:08:43 Bill’s writing roadmap
00:14:17 Research as you write
00:23:01 Writing books vs articles
00:28:45 How to bring a place to life
00:34:15 Finding the truth
00:41:02 How to end a chapter
00:46:22 What makes an ending land
David (02:49 – 03:01):
After you wrote Red Notice, you said you wanted to write something that, if someone read the first ten pages, they wouldn’t be able to put the book down. How did you go about doing that?
Bill (03:02 – 04:42):
I’m not the best reader in the world. People give me books, and I buy books. I have a big stack of books next to my bed, a huge stack of unread books because I read the first ten pages, got bored, and put them down. I told myself that if I were going to spend two or three years writing a book, I wouldn’t want someone to read the first ten pages and then stick my book into their pile.
It was crucial to me that, once you started reading the book, you’d never want to put it down. My psychology has been that way for every page, not just the first ten. I always asked myself, “Why should anyone care about what I’m saying in the next sentence? Why should they want to read that sentence?”
I suspect, based on all the books that I’ve put down, that there are a lot of writers out there who write just to write. I was writing for the reader because I didn’t want them to lose interest, get bored, not care, and put the book down. The process for every page of the book was to ask, “What’s going to make them want to turn the page and carry on?” It was, and continues to be, an obsession of mine. I don’t want people to put my book down.
David (04:42 – 04:54):
At the beginning of Red Notice, it’s really a function of two things: the quality of the writing itself and the story of being detained at an airport.
Bill (04:55 – 06:23):
It’s always the story. The writing is just a technical thing. Being arrested in a Russian airport is a pretty dramatic thing. Of course, that’s going to be dramatic.
In my second book, Freezing Order, there’s a whole chapter about a deposition at a law firm in New York, which is a really boring thing. I spent a month reading through all the transcripts of the deposition and everything else going on to try to piece together a narrative of why that should be exciting. I think most people who read it thought that was a pretty exciting chapter.
Anything can be exciting. Again, it’s not about the writing; it’s about the storytelling. It’s about where’s the drama, where’s the tension, and what’s the uncertainty of whatever you’re talking about?
How did you make it exciting? In that particular story, there was a lawyer who used to be my lawyer and then switched sides to work for the Russian government, the Russian mafia. He was trying to use the deposition to get personal information about me that the Russian mafia could use to kill me. That becomes exciting. A deposition or a discovery request by itself could be the most boring thing in the world, but I was able to look at the whole thing, remember it, and find and weed out the things that would make a reader interested.
David (06:23 – 06:40):
It seems like you’re saying you need to find the core thread, the core thing. You look at a deposition and think, “Oh, my goodness, there are so many transcripts, so many things I could talk about,” but the core thing is that this lawyer on this side went to that side. Then, everything orbits around that.
Bill (06:40 – 07:04):
It’s about what a reader can relate to. They can relate to betrayal, a lawyer betraying me. They can relate to the Russian mafia. They can relate to feeling scared.
It’s about finding things where there’s empathy and engagement from the reader, which I think makes my writing readable.
David (07:05 – 07:09):
How do you think about the pacing of stories?
Bill (07:09 – 07:50):
Well, at the end of every chapter, you have to leave the reader with some uncertainties; they want to know what happens after that. It’s like watching a miniseries.
At the end of every chapter, there’s some challenge or uncertainty that you want to pick up in the next chapter and see how it resolves. During the chapter, you also have to create some challenge that you then overcome, or partially overcome, or something like that.
Again, why should anyone care or have any interest in what I’m writing about? Everyone’s interested in their own lives, not someone else’s. So what can you say about your own story that will make them interested?
David (07:50 – 08:03):
Yeah, now that I’m thinking about it, when I think about reading Red Notice, I can see, I would guess that you write chapter by chapter because the chapters are these sort of contained units.
Bill (08:03 – 08:43):
Absolutely. The way I write a book is I write a mini book first, which is just what are the individual stories. It’s not just a ten-bullet-point outline. I write a mini chapter for each chapter.
Let’s say if the book is 140,000 words, the pre-book is 50,000 words. It’s like a third of the book, and it lays it all out. So I already know the drama, the challenges, and the resolutions all the way through. Then I have to fill it in and bring the color, life, and characters into each of those stories.
David (08:44 – 09:12):
Okay, so let’s go specific. Let’s talk about that chapter in Red Notice, “Tuesdays with Maury,” where you meet your wife and you’re like, “I don’t know, does she like me? Does she not?” She’s sort of there as you’re giving the speech. “Tuesdays with Maury” was just three words from that chapter. Obviously, you give her the book, but it was just one very small part.
Is that something that develops and is like an emergent property, or is it, “Nope, this is going to be the Tuesdays with Maury chapter?” Talk to me about that.
Bill (09:12 – 09:57):
This was going to be the chapter about how I wooed my beautiful, intelligent, amazing, who’s now my wife, to be with me. She had a million other options, and I wasn’t necessarily distinguishing myself, so I needed to find a way to do so. That’s what the chapter was about.
It just so happened that I was able to distinguish myself, through a series of challenging situations in the courtship, by giving her a copy of Tuesdays with Maury. That’s what warmed her heart after a few false starts and various other problems along the way in this courtship.
David (09:57 – 10:09):
Right, so then that’s hindsight. So now you’re writing your third book. Tell me about where you’re at now and give me a sense, looking forward, “This is what I have. This is what I don’t have. This is the roadmap for where I think I’m going to go.”
Bill (10:09 – 11:43):
My third book is going to be about a friend of mine, Vladimir Karamurza, who helped me in all the amazing stories in the first and second books. He helped me get something called the Magnitsky Act passed, which is named after my murdered Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, which is the justice that we got for Sergey. Putin hated him for doing that and tried to kill him twice.
The main focus of the third book is about him being arrested in Russia, put in jail, and sentenced to 25 years in a penal colony in Siberia. It’s about the challenge of how I got him out of jail because he eventually gets released. The drama is all about the different things to try to get him out of jail.
It’s a great story, and anybody who reads it will be fascinated, thrilled, and scared. The challenge I have is that I’ve already written two books before. If you just jump right into this story about my friend, you’re not going to be invested in him or me.
How do you get invested in everybody to understand the stakes without repeating the stories of the two previous books? I’ve got to tell other stories in order to feed into this unbelievable, difficult situation that we then end up resolving.
David (11:43 – 11:48):
The stakes. The stakes, the stakes. So how do you go about building the stakes, thinking through the stakes?
Bill (11:49 – 11:53):
Everybody has to get to know you, and they have to get to know you and care about you.
David (11:53 – 11:55):
This is you as the writer.
Bill (11:55 – 12:15):
Me as the character, Vladimir, and various other people involved. As their lives weave together and weave apart, you have to get to know each of them and become invested in them.
So when the really unfortunate things happen, you’ve got to be rooting for the people who have had the unfortunate things happen.
David (12:16 – 12:20):
What are the advantages and disadvantages of writing in the first person?
Bill (12:22 – 14:17):
I don’t think there’s any disadvantage to writing about my own life. The advantage is that I don’t have to do as much research, though there’s still a lot to do. The disadvantage is that I’m now 61, and I don’t remember everything that happened. A lot has happened in my life.
I often have to go to the other characters who I was interacting with and spend time with them to reconstruct all the events, scenes, situations, and conversations. Sometimes they’ll remember something differently than I will, or they’ll remember things that I didn’t remember. We have to put it all together and then try to create a narrative. I’ll ask, “Do you remember that day when we were in the Parliament in the Hague and we were trying to do this? What were you trying to do? Why did that happen?”
I pull on the threads, take rigorous notes, and then pluck out the interesting things that would be interesting to somebody outside. I also consider how it all ties together with the rest of the story. It’s actually very satisfying to do that.
The only people I can’t do that with are the bad guys because there are good guys and bad guys in the story. There’s this traitorous lawyer who switched sides, and I couldn’t go and talk to him because he became an enemy. If I said anything that was wrong, he would sue me because he’s a lawyer.
I had to rely entirely on the court transcripts, which told everything. There was so much stuff from depositions, and I could get all of his quotes and speeches and then distill the things that were interesting from all those documents.
David (14:17 – 14:26):
You’ve mentioned court transcripts a few times, which implies you spend a decent amount of time doing research as you’re writing these books?
Bill (14:26 – 14:57):
Everything is researched. The outline is in my head, but all the details are in the research and the recollection and the recreation. It’s gotten easier with AI because some of the stuff that I would have had to really go deep into Internet research for is a lot faster now. I have to do a lot of research, and I have to do a lot of original research in the sense that no one’s ever written about some of this stuff before because I’m writing about it in the first person.
David (14:57 – 15:06):
You’ve talked about research, and I’ve talked about recollection because a lot of this stuff is intense. Talk to me about recollection.
Bill (15:07 – 16:04):
Recollection is interesting because, again, I’m 61 years old. I’ve had a lot of experiences in my life, a lot of intense experiences. I remember stuff, and sometimes it comes back to me when I’m going over stuff. It’s often the things that come back to me which really make the story come alive. I have to go over situations a bunch of times for it to all come back.
When you read the books, it’s very visual and intense, but that doesn’t come easily. It’s a torturous process to write these books. People say, “Wow, isn’t it satisfying? Isn’t it a catharsis?” No, it’s just pure torture. Every day that I’m writing is pure torture.
David (16:04 – 16:09):
Is that “it sucks” torture, or is it “it’s meaningful, let’s go for it” torture?
Bill (16:09 – 16:34):
There’s a process. It sucks at the beginning because when you’re staring at a blank sheet of paper, and you’ve got nothing, it sucks. Eventually, when it starts to form its own body, then it starts getting pretty cool.
When you have something that you like, then it’s really satisfying. It’s satisfying when there’s something where I could go back and read it, and it’s entertaining, and I know it’s good. Then it’s great.
David (16:35 – 16:50):
In that process of recollection, do the ideas come to you when you’re just sort of sitting there and pecking at the keyboard, thinking, “I’m gonna write a lot, and then I’m gonna kind of distill”? Or is it a little bit more like you went for a walk and suddenly remembered something?
Bill (16:50 – 17:07):
It’s everything. The best places I’ve ever come up with ideas are in the shower, by far. I would say that 40% of the inspiration for every book comes from standing under a stream of hot water.
David (17:07 – 17:10):
So we can increase writer output with more showers.
Bill (17:10 – 17:38):
A good hot shower when you’re stuck with something, and then all of a sudden, it comes to you when you’re not trying to think about it. Then there it is.
I always have my phone with me and take notes whenever something comes to mind. It always happens when you’re not trying to make it happen. It just happens throughout life, which is one of the benefits of taking three years to write a book because stuff comes at different times that builds up the story and makes it good.
David (17:38 – 17:42):
Do you write the books in a pretty linear fashion?
Bill (17:42 – 18:02):
I start out with what I think is just the outline of the story. Then I do these mini books where I fill it in, and then I do these full-on books after the mini book, filling in each chapter. It’s a very organized, linear, outlined process.
David (18:02 – 19:23):
Okay, so we’re talking about how you get your writing done, and how you can be more productive at work. I recommend a tool called Basecamp. It’s a project management tool, but it’s different from the other ones that are loud, noisy, cluttered, and full of features. Basecamp keeps things simple so you can focus on what actually matters: getting the work done.
For us, Basecamp is a place to track what we’re doing with “How I Write”—when episodes are being recorded, where we’re recording them, the publishing day, all in one place for our entire team. I had Jason Fried, the founder of Basecamp, on the show, and I noticed he really cares about writing. He cares about manifestos, great copy, and telling a great story. He and his co-founder have written five books, and they bring the same care and attention to detail to their books as they do to their software.
So, if you’re asking how to be more productive or make your team more cohesive, I recommend Basecamp.
All right, back to the episode. What are you trying to achieve with writing your books? Obviously, there’s a sense of justice and mission, but why books? And how does that fit into the ensemble project of what you’re trying to do?
Bill (19:24 – 21:33):
I’m not an author. I didn’t go to the Iowa Writers thing. I was a hedge fund manager. I had some really terrible stuff happen to me, and to people around me. My lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was tortured and murdered because he was my lawyer. I felt so compelled to do something about that that I gave up my life as a businessman and became a full-time justice campaigner.
As a justice campaigner, I would meet with politicians, government officials, and law enforcement people, tell them the story, and try to get them to support me. It became really tedious. Beyond tedious, the most I could get was half an hour with somebody; nobody has that much time.
I thought I should do a movie about this, so I went to Hollywood to meet people, and they said it would be a hundred times easier to get a movie made if I had a book. So I started working on a book, expecting it to be the intellectual property for a movie. I thought nobody would read the book, but 10 million people would watch the movie. That’s how I would achieve general knowledge of my situation, and I wouldn’t have to brief everybody. I would create a groundswell of support.
As it turned out, I wrote my first book, Red Notice, and it became a major international bestseller. I mean, I can walk down the street in different places, and people recognize me. It was everywhere. Red Notice was published in 2015, so we’re now 11 years later, and Hollywood is still petrified. They don’t want to go anywhere near the story.
David (21:33 – 21:34):
Is that because of the content?
Bill (21:35 – 23:00):
Yeah. They don’t want to touch going after Putin. Nobody wants to be on Putin’s shit list. But it doesn’t matter to my objective because everybody’s read the book.
One of the objectives of getting everyone to know the story was to get the Magnitsky Act passed, which freezes the assets and bans the travel of human rights violators and the people who killed Sergey. I got the Magnitsky Act passed in 2012, which is one of the main culminations of Red Notice: the justice that we get from that.
When I wrote the book, I wrote about getting the Magnitsky Act passed. It’s all very dramatic, and everyone feels good about it. A senator from Australia read Red Notice and was so inspired that she got in touch with me cold during COVID and said she wanted to do a Magnitsky Act in Australia. As a result of her inspiration from Red Notice through COVID, and without me ever visiting Australia, I did a bunch of Zooms with different members of their parliament and officials, and we got a Magnitsky Act passed because she read the book. So it actually very strongly supported what I was trying to do.
David (23:01 – 23:09):
What do you get from the articles that you don’t get from the books, and what do you get from the books that you don’t get from the articles?
Bill (23:10 – 24:39):
If you write an article for the Financial Times, and let’s say their circulation is a million people, what’s the probability that somebody actually read the article? Low. If they read it, what’s the probability that they read it all the way through? Low. What’s the probability that they remember it afterwards, because they read a lot of articles? Even lower.
With a book, if you write a good book that people care about and read to the end, you’ve got 12 hours with that person. You have 12 hours to flesh out human emotion. You feel something when you read my books, and you remember it afterwards. Many people remember all sorts of stories and come up to me and talk to me about the stories that they read. It’s a completely different thing.
It’s kind of risky, because let’s say you’re listening to this podcast and you’re a campaigner who’s had something terrible happen to you, and you say, “I listen to Bill Browder; I’m going to go and write a book.” There’s a chance, like with mine, that you write a book and nobody reads it. Most books, nobody ever reads. It’s a really risky proposition to spend three years, four hours a day, five days a week, and not do other stuff, and then find out that a thousand people read your book, and it doesn’t make any difference at all.
David (24:39 – 24:40):
So what happens to most writers.
Bill (24:40 – 24:47):
Yeah. If you’re a campaigner, and you have something terrible happen, it’s probably too risky a proposition when you could be doing other things.
David (24:47 – 24:57):
How do you balance the desire for truth with the desire for safety for the people that you love?
Bill (24:58 – 25:36):
That’s an interesting point. Throughout my campaign, everyone told me to keep my head down. This terrible thing happened, and maybe I could set up a scholarship fund for Sergei Magnitsky’s son and widow, but just disappear.
If I had done that, they would have killed me, and nobody would have known why, and they would have gotten away with it.
David (25:36 – 25:37):
The Russians.
Bill (25:37 – 26:09):
Yes, the Russians. But by going public and being everywhere, it’s counterintuitive, but it actually works. If anything ever happened to me, particularly because the book was well-read, everyone would know who did it and why.
It doesn’t mean that they don’t want to do anything to me, but the cost of assassination and the prospect of assassinating me without any repercussions is pretty low.
David (26:10 – 26:20):
What are the components of a good book? Like layers to a cake, or different instruments that create a symphony? What is the ensemble of things you need to write a great book?
Bill (26:21 – 27:22):
You need characters that everyone can relate to. People first.
Sometimes, places are characters, where the place takes on its own feeling. You want to make sure that everyone is familiar with things, so you want to share places, people, and situations that they’re familiar with.
Many people write to me about my book and say, “I grew up in Chicago, and I was an investment banker. We have so much in common.” Everyone wants to relate with the character, in different situations. The more touchpoints where there’s something relatable, understandable, and part of their experience, the better.
David (27:23 – 27:29):
Is that touchpoint something like, “Okay, we’re in London, oh, the London Eye, the Golden Gate Bridge?” Is it landmarks or something?
Bill (27:29 – 27:39):
It’s usually not the London Eye or the Golden Gate Bridge, but it could be the Villa d’Este Hotel in Lake Como. Something specific, classic, something like that.
David (27:39 – 27:41):
That’s exactly what happened to me.
Bill (27:41 – 27:42):
You were reading Red Notice?
David (27:42 – 27:44):
Yes, and I thought, “I know that place. The big swimming pool.”
Bill (27:44 – 27:46):
Of course, with crazy gardens.
David (27:47 – 28:09):
I can imagine you taking the phone call as the markets are tanking. That’s exactly what happened to me. The juxtaposition of your wife and your son David being there, then you’re getting this call from Russia. The place is indistinguishable from that story because that chapter is about relaxation and chilling out for a bit.
Bill (28:09 – 28:12):
Yeah, and the place becomes a character.
David (28:12 – 28:12):
Yeah.
Bill (28:13 – 28:45):
That touched you, but there are probably 150 or even a thousand other things that somebody might be able to relate to throughout the story. Different people relate to different things, but the moment you relate to something, it connects you with me.
By connecting you with me, you become part of the whole thing. That is a really important part of writing, and it’s important for the reader’s experience to feel connected.
David (28:45 – 28:54):
Tell me more about bringing a place to life. What do you focus on? Sight, sound, smell, vibe?
Bill (28:55 – 29:13):
It’s whatever is distinctive and unique about that place. In the first chapter of Red Notice, we talk about Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, and it has a certain smell.
David (29:14 – 29:15):
Yes.
Bill (29:15 – 30:12):
It has these weird brass things on the ceiling that look like coffee cans. Anyone who’s ever been there knows the smell at that time and knows these coffee-can things. For anybody who’s ever been in that airport, it immediately grabs you because you get it.
As you felt with Villa d’Este, anybody who’s ever been to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport will have that same feeling. You have to be descriptive, but not boringly descriptive. Describe things that are poignant, not just describing things for the sake of describing. Describe the two or three things that any person who’s ever had that same experience will be able to relate to. Because it’s such a poignant experience, even if you haven’t had it, you kind of get it.
David (30:12 – 30:32):
You describe somebody or something with two to three super vivid descriptors, and then you get on with it. With the Moscow airport, I think it was built in the 1980s, but it had really shown its age. You can see that. Boom. Get on with the story.
Bill (30:32 – 30:51):
It also brings you a feeling of what Moscow is like. People don’t have that much mental capacity to take in all the details, but just a couple of things give you the feeling that it’s a dated, strange, unkempt place.
David (30:53 – 31:01):
Tell me more about how you build the relationships that the readers have with characters that are not you.
Bill (31:03 – 31:12):
That’s the most important part. There are two types of characters in my books: friends and enemies, good guys and bad guys.
David (31:12 – 31:12):
Sure.
Bill (31:14 – 32:21):
You want to see the humanity, charm, and lovability of the good guys.
It’s just the rotten shittiness of the bad guys. I’m not caricaturing them. Sometimes good guys become bad guys, and sometimes bad guys become good guys.
There are definitely those types of transitions, but you want to, with not too much information, get a sense for those people so that you can—it’s just a few details because you don’t have that much time and you don’t have that much of people’s attention. If I spend too much time describing a person, you’re going to get bored.
It’s a real challenge to be able to share enough information so you understand that person, understand why they’re likable, what’s likable about them, without oversharing information. So you’re thinking, why am I spending all this time on this person? What’s relevant about this person? Enough time so you can get through it, get the information, because the information may not be relevant here and now. It may be relevant five chapters down the road.
David (32:22 – 32:43):
You seem like you really developed a knack for finding the truth about things in your work. Before becoming a writer, there was a line in Red Notice where you talk about how you were amazed at how open people in Russia were about what was going on, and if you could just find the right person to interview, they would just share everything.
Bill (32:43 – 33:29):
Yeah, and I think that’s true. It’s not just true in Russia, but it’s true everywhere. People want to talk about stuff. They want to talk about themselves. They want to brag; they want to impress.
Everybody wants to, and I’m always interested in getting to the bottom of things. When I was an investor, I wanted to know what was really going on in that company. Is it going to do much better than everyone thinks? Is the stock price really low? Then when we discovered all these crimes in the companies, we started researching who’s doing all the stealing and how they’re stealing.
Pretty much everything is transparent in the world. It’s not nearly as opaque as one thinks generally.
David (33:29 – 33:41):
Wait, explain that. It seems like a lot of things are mediated in a way where there’s always kind of a narrative here and a narrative there. But I guess what you’re saying is things are very transparent so long as you know who to.
Bill (33:41 – 34:17):
Talk to, where to look, as long as you’re ready to talk to people. If you’re an investor in the stock market and you just read your screen, you’re not going to learn anything. If you’re a person working in a parliament or Congress and you read the economists, you’re just going to learn the headlines.
But if you go and visit a bunch of people and have coffee with them or lunch or breakfast, all you have to do is dig below the surface and start talking to people, and you learn a lot of stuff in every different context.
David (34:17 – 34:39):
If you’re trying to make sense of a situation, you found an oil company that you think is way undervalued. You’re looking at the assets, you’re like, that doesn’t match up with the valuation of the company. So you’re starting off where, and you’re ending up where? What do you do to make sense of reality, to find the truth?
Bill (34:39 – 36:50):
Some people are too smart for their own good. There’s too many different things they’re looking at.
There’s a chapter in Red Notice where I’m talking about discovering something called preferred shares of Russian companies. I go to meet the CFO of an oil company, an oil refinery, I think it was, and I was just sort of going through and saying, how many shares do you have outstanding of your company? And he said, are you asking about ordinary shares or preferred shares?
No one ever heard of preferred shares as an investor in Russia. I said, what are preferred shares? He said, oh, these are the shares where they have a guaranteed dividend, which is 10% of the profits of the company.
I said, that’s interesting. And do the ordinary shares have a guaranteed dividend? No, they don’t have an ordinary dividend. I said I’d never heard of these preferred shares before.
After the end of the meeting, I call up my Russian stockbroker. I said, I’m looking at this company, but I’m not interested in ordinary shares. I’m interested in their preferred shares.
He said, I’ve never heard. No one’s ever asked me about preferred shares. He said, let me come back to you.
He said the ordinary shares are trading at $10 per share, but the preferred shares are only trading at $1 per share. I said, how can that be right? These are better shares because they have this dividend, and they’re cheaper—90% cheaper.
I started poking around; maybe there’s something wrong with them. There was nothing wrong with them. It’s just nobody had ever asked the question.
I discovered this, and I bought the preferred shares, and we made a huge amount of money on these preferred shares because no one ever bothered. I wasn’t spending my time getting into the quality of the oil or this or that. It was something much simpler than that. This thing doesn’t make any sense.
If you had been an oil petroleum expert, you would have been spending all this time on all this nonsense about the quality of their equipment or this or that when there was just something so blatant staring in the face that was much simpler.
David (36:50 – 37:06):
Okay, so break a book down into chunks. We’ve talked about the planning phase, about 50,000 words. Maybe there’s an idea phase before that. Again, there’s just, you got to live life, man. Then there’s the writing. We talked about the editing. So just walk me through the entire timeline.
Bill (37:06 – 38:27):
You start out wanting to write a book. Okay, what are you going to write a book about? Why is that interesting to anybody other than yourself?
You come up with the idea and then you ask where’s the drama? Where’s the challenge? What’s the overall arc of the book?
In Red Notice, it was a rags-to-riches story, then flying too close to the sun and everything screwing up, then a tragedy, and then trying to make some sense and some justice from the tragedy. That’s a good overall narrative arc.
Then you take that and you ask what are the really interesting things that happen? I’ll start with a chapter title without actually writing the chapters. I like to have really short chapters, ten pages max, so I have 45 chapters or something along those lines. I’ll have 45 of these little things and then I start filling it in.
By the way, when I have the mini book, that’s when I go to the publisher.
David (38:28 – 38:28):
Oh, really?
Bill (38:28 – 38:30):
Yeah, I go to the publisher with a mini book.
David (38:31 – 38:32):
And what do you send them?
Bill (38:32 – 38:33):
You send them the mini book.
David (38:33 – 38:36):
That’s it, and then they say, hey, look at this.
Bill (38:37 – 38:49):
I look at it purely from a businessman’s perspective. Why should they want to pay me a big advance or give me a good deal if they’re going to take a huge risk? You’re taking much less of a risk if you can actually see what’s there.
David (38:50 – 38:50):
Right.
Bill (38:50 – 39:01):
It’s obvious that there’s a book there, a good book, that they want to buy, so they’re ready to give me a decent advance and all that kind of stuff.
David (39:01 – 39:02):
The timeline: mini book.
Bill (39:02 – 41:02):
Once the mini book is in shape, then I know that there’s going to be a publisher. I don’t know how people write without a publisher, because you could spend three years of your life and then not have anyone to distribute your work.
I wanted the publisher who’s going to get it all out there, who knows how to deal with bookstores and all that kind of stuff. So I get the book deal, and then once I have the book deal, it’s really helpful because then there’s a deadline, and somebody’s paying you money, and you’re responsible to deliver something on a certain date.
Then you have this mini chapter that you have to make into a real chapter, and that’s actually the satisfying part, because then you know pretty much everything you’re going to say. It’s just like really getting in, and that’s when it becomes fun, interesting, and gratifying, when you get the chapter done.
I’ll tell you an interesting story about my second book. My publisher was Simon and Schuster, same as my first publisher. I had a deadline, and I wrote the mini book, and then I wrote the book. I think it was due on June 1st, and I’d finished writing, like, the first week of May. I was going on vacation with my family to Portugal, and I decided to give the manuscript to my wife, my son who, at the time, was in his early 20s, and to my agent. I thought they might have a few things to say.
All three of them came back and they said, “This sucks!”
I said, “Oh, shit.” So I called up my publisher and I said, “Listen, I need another three months.” Then I just rewrote, like, a third of the book, and then it didn’t suck anymore.
David (41:02 – 41:23):
I want to go to chapter endings. I want to read you this chapter ending. I want to hear what really matters to you as you’re thinking about ending one. This is from Red Notice: “He didn’t realize that Russia had no rule of law. It had a rule of men, and those men were crooks.” Talk to me about what goes into those.
Bill (41:24 – 42:13):
Yeah, this was when Sergei Magnitsky was arrested or being imprisoned. If I can remember correctly, it was a big revelation moment when we thought, how could the people who did the crime arrest the person who was reporting the crime?
I’m a big believer in show, don’t tell, but it doesn’t harm anybody at the end to summarize in one or two sentences what you’ve just seen, what you’ve been shown. It puts the nail in properly, and that’s where that sentence came from.
David (42:13 – 42:25):
As you’re writing your books, what would any given Tuesday or Wednesday look like? How do you fit the writing and the researching of books in with the rest of your life, the rest of your commitments?
Bill (42:25 – 43:02):
It’s hard. I’ve got young kids going to school. I’ve got to take them to school. I’m trying to stay in shape. I’ve got to go to the gym. I’ve got business, a lot of business stuff going on. I’ve got all sorts of things happening in my life.
Part of the reason why I think this third book is going to take longer than the first two is that I don’t have that much time. At the moment, I’m doing two to three hours a day, three days a week, and that’s not enough to get this thing done as quickly as I want to do it.
David (43:02 – 43:03):
Do you just say you’re not allowed to contact me?
Bill (43:03 – 43:04):
Yeah.
David (43:04 – 43:05):
I’m focused.
Bill (43:05 – 43:07):
Yeah, that’s what I try to do.
David (43:07 – 43:07):
And where do you write?
Bill (43:08 – 43:28):
I write wherever I can. I write on airplanes, I write on trains, I write in a study, I write on a beach. I write wherever I have to write.
It doesn’t really matter. I’m not precious about my environment. I just try to focus on what I’m doing.
David (43:28 – 43:31):
Do you work with an editor or somebody like that?
Bill (43:31 – 43:49):
Yeah, absolutely. In what capacity? So much. Read back and forth, wordsmith, any help I can get, I try to get as much help.
Once I’m finished with the book, before I give it to the publisher, I give it to ten friends.
David (43:49 – 43:50):
Oh, wow.
Bill (43:51 – 44:30):
I’m not looking for people to blow smoke up my backside. I want people to tell me everything they’ve got to say. I want 10 smart friends—different types of friends—they don’t have to be literary people; they can be any type of person, but someone who’s going to take the time and energy to really read it carefully and mark it up and tell me what’s what.
They bring different things to the quality of the book. By the time it gets to my editor at Simon and Schuster, she’s got nothing to say.
David (44:31 – 44:40):
How do you write about those difficult things that have happened, like being detained? Do you feel an aversion to writing about those things, or is it easier or harder to write about them?
Bill (44:41 – 45:59):
Because I’m trying to write for the reader, those things are exciting, so that’s the easiest stuff to write about. The hardest stuff to write about is something that’s not exciting, like the deposition.
There’s a chapter in Red Notice about when I was at Solomon Brothers, long before I ever moved to Russia. I was in the investment bank and had been assigned to start buying Russian stocks by a senior guy in the New York office. I was in London, working in the investment bank, and I was buying some shares.
One of my rivals inside the investment bank turned me into the compliance officers because you’re not supposed to be buying securities if you’re an investment banker; you’re supposed to do that on the trading floor. There’s a thing called the Chinese Wall.
I wrote this big story about the Chinese Wall, and it was one of these things where I was able to make it interesting. Everyone said, “I never knew Chinese walls and investment banks could be so exciting.”
The reason why it was exciting was because there was this rival who wanted to turn me in, and I was doing something that was sort of wrong, and I was frog-marched out by the internal police. It became an interesting chapter, but it was a big struggle. How do you make the Chinese Wall at an investment bank interesting? Because I needed to talk about that story.
David (45:59 – 46:17):
One of the things I’ve noticed so far in our conversation is looking for the stakes, looking for the conflict, looking for the tension, looking for the rivals. If those two sides are clear, and once you get clear on what those pieces are, my sense is that whatever those fault lines are, the story kind.
Bill (46:17 – 46:21):
...of unfolds from there and it moves, and everyone wants to read to the next page.
David (46:22 – 47:04):
Let’s talk about endings. I’m going to read this: “Early in this book, I said that the feeling I got from buying a Polish stock that went up ten times was the best thing to ever happen to me in my career. But the feeling I had on that balcony in Brussels with Sergei’s widow and son as we watched the largest lawmaking body in Europe recognize and condemn the injustices suffered by Sergei and his family felt orders of magnitude better than any financial success I’ve ever had. If finding a ten-bagger in the stock market was a highlight of my life before, there was no feeling as satisfying as getting some measure of justice in a highly unjust world.”
Bill (47:05 – 47:11):
That almost brings tears to my eyes listening to you read it, which means that it was a good ending, right?
David (47:11 – 47:11):
Yeah.
Bill (47:12 – 47:29):
It’s the crux of my whole life, which is going from a pretty narrow finance guy to being a fighter for justice, and it sort of sums up everything.
David (47:30 – 47:31):
Thank you very much.
Bill (47:31 – 47:32):
Thank you.
