Episode Thirteen – Aaron Goldfarb, Author & Writer

This week’s guest is Aaron Goldfarb, author of three novels and five books in total as well as contributing writer for a number of publications including Esquire and The Daily Beast. Here’s some of the stuff we talked about: how has getting married impacted the sort of fiction he’ll write going forward (1:46), writing about things you didn’t quite experience (3:10), why he doesn’t like to let people know what he’s working on when he’s writing (7:07), why, among other reasons, he doesn’t like having a job and how that works into his writing process (7:54), why he doesn’t set day-to-day amount goals as he writes (10:11), how he writes the concept of a book, mostly doing the envisioning in his head (11:34), why he doesn’t send people his work until he’s finished (13:17), his passion for screenwriting for feature films and TV (16:22), the logically inane process that is screenplays getting optioned (17:41), how he determines whether an idea would work best as a book or movie (19:12), does Hollywood’s lack of originality piss him off, especially when he knows he’s created so much original content (22:23), why this era is the best in history to “chose yourself” when it comes to creating content (26:46), the correlation, or lack thereof, between his career as an author and as a writer (28:03), is there a tipping point where giving your stuff away for free becomes a bad thing? (31:08), would he go with self-publishing or the major houses with his next book? (31:55), the best way to get your book seen by the people who matter (34:30), how important is it to him to come up with “clever” ideas when thinking of topics for books and movies? (38:10), have his ideas ever been considered gimmicky, is that even a bad thing? and how people tend to treat authors (41:04), a brief discussion about, yes, Beanie Babies (44:50) and Aaron takes his spot to ask me a question: who is the most famous person I think I can get on the podcast? (48:47)