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   By Derek Sivers · 27 Jul 2026

   I write to see what I can write. I code to see what I can code.

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   By Derek Sivers · 3 Jul 2026

   17 conversations in Jakarta, Indonesia: sive.rs/met/at-14

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   By Derek Sivers · 30 Jun 2026

   16 conversations in super-multicultural Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur: sive.rs/met/at-13

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   By Derek Sivers · 12 Jun 2026

   India tech friends: I just bought my ticket to IndiaFOSS in BLR Sept 26-27: fossunited.org/indiafoss/2026 Want to meet? Email me: sive.rs/contact

5. 5. Writing for Emotional Impact - by Karl Iglesias

   By Derek Sivers · 22 May 2026

   summary: About the craft of writing a great film screenplay. A bit tedious (with sloppy repetitive writing) but I always love these books for making me see the craft behind movies I know well, and pointing out how to use this craft to make better stories in any medium. recommend: 6/10 my notes: Read one page at random. If it doesn’t grab them, if it doesn’t make them want to turn the next page, the script is tossed away. Try it yourself with a classic script. Pick up Casablanca, Chinatown, or The Silence of the Lambs. Open it at random on any page and start reading. You’ll be hooked by the dialogue, characters, or conflicts in the scene, and you’ll want to turn the page. Art is fire plus algebra. Voyeuristic emotions relate to our curiosity about new information, new worlds, and the relationships between characters. When we identify with a character, we become them. We feel what the characters feel. Visceral emotions are anticipation, tension, surprise, fear, excitement, laughter, etc. Character emotions vs. reader emotions: distinguish these two types. For example, in a comedy, a character may be stressed, but as viewers, we laugh. Or in a thriller, he may be calm and unaware, while we fear for him because we know something he doesn’t. This distinction is essential because whether your character cries is not as important as whether the reader cries. Emotion means “disturbance”. Move them: disturb their hearts and minds. What convinces them to read that script is its appealing idea. The appeal of the concept: uniquely familiar, and it should promise conflict. We love stories with conflict, an idea that offers a clear and compelling conflict within its logline. The clearer the conflict, the better. Doesn’t have to be directly relatable: Finding Nemo was a fish! But if the fish goes through familiar events, such as losing a wife, searching for an only son, they are emotions we can all understand. Ask yourself what’s the worst thing that could happen to a character? The ultimate _____ from hell. Contrast a character with the environment: “fish-out-of-water”: Wizard of Oz, Matrix, Beverly Hills Cop. Add a time limit or a deadline. Genre tells the reader up front what to expect The dominant genre will give you the main “flavor” of your story, while the other genres you combine to it will be the various “spices”. Scenes, characters, dialogue, and images should ideally be a reflection of your theme. Your story is simply a tool to create circumstances that will showcase your theme. Careful not to make the theme so obvious that it becomes preachy. Make the reader feel it instead of telling him. Reveal themeo in the form of a question rather than a statement. Storytelling is the creative, emotional demonstration of the truth you want to express. Never explain intellectually. Dramatize emotionally. Chinatown theme: the feeling of knowing what’s going on, while not really knowing it. Gittes in the dark as he tries to solve the mystery, thinking he knows what’s really going on. Evelyn, with her dark secret, is unaware of her father’s water-diverting scheme. Even Noah Cross, the mastermind holding the strings, doesn’t know that Evelyn is planning to escape Los Angeles with her daughter. Tootsie: being a woman makes him a better man. 5 subplots: how Michael treats his girlfriend Sandy his relationship with Julie: his central romantic interest the male chauvinist director Julie’s widowed father who wants to marry Dorothy the show’s leading man who tries to seduce Dorothy. Each subplot represents an aspect of the overall theme. Each character reveals a facet of the overall theme. In Tootsie, each of its subplots is represented by a character. The Godfather, which is about power: 1. Vito Corleone wants to keep it, 2. Michael doesn’t want anything to do with it at first, but then he’s forced or seduced to embrace it 3. Sonny can’t control it. Present the opposite argument as powerfully as your truth. Do the Right Thing, which examined racism in all its complexity. Casablanca, where Rick repeats the line, “I stick my neck out for nobody” at various points throughout the film, reinforcing the theme of isolationism versus altruism. Leitmotifs: Chinatown involves a water scheme. Water is a constant symbol throughout the film, through visuals (water torrents, the ocean, a fish pond), plot (characters drowning, corrupt villains controlling the water supply) and dialogue (“He’s got water on his brain.”) In Asian metaphors, Water can represent women, fertility, love, or an obstacle. Make them care about somebody. When you stop caring for the characters, you’re no longer involved in the story. “Anti-Hero” is a character who’s the opposite of the reader. Evokes fascination since we’re intrigued by glimpses of the dark side. Maybe we feel a hint of guilty admiration for their courage to be bad and challenge established morals. They’re not likable, so to form the crucial bond with them, the reader must understand them and admire something about them - their intelligence, their motives, their lack of options, or even a rare positive value, such as loyalty to family (The Godfather). Stories become more interesting when a need clashes with the goal, like when a character is torn between what he feels and what he wants, where difficult choices must be made, often resulting in personal growth. When the character chooses goal over need, we have an unhappy ending, like in all tragedies. When the character chooses need over goal, this results in a happy ending. What happens if he fails? And not only do you need to know what’s at stake, but it has to rise: Things have to get worse during the course of your story. Protagonists must be active rather than passive. Not characters who only react to events. Inner conflict - contrasting traits, flaws, desires, needs, and feelings, which create contradictions: Contrast with other characters: odd couple. Contrast with environment: fish out of water To reveal character: reveal a character through others - how they talk about him or how they’re affected by him. The less we see a character everyone talks about or is affected by, the more we’ll be fascinated by him, and the more attention we’ll give him when we finally meet him. Deep character is shown by how the individual reacts under pressure. Fascinating characters create paradoxes - contradictions within themselves. Conflicting traits, different facets of personality. surprises within characters. What is the character really afraid of? An open wound which haunts the character in your story and affects his inner need. Mystery in the emotional sense, as in “What will this character do next?” No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. What a story is in its purest form: a character who wants something, and is having difficulty getting it. Plot is the ordering of emotions. Change in stories: - discoveries, which are changes in knowledge, - decisions, which are changes in actions. Set up story questions. A question demands an answer. An emotional itch that needs to be scratched. The reader plays a more active role: filling in the blanks, making guesses, and assuming. Every act within a story has its own question to answer. Within each act, every sequence sets up a sub-question, as does every scene within each sequence, and every beat within each scene. Think of these questions as little hooks to pull the reader along from beginning to end. Unclear motives, character secrets, anticipation. Plot is a series of events designed to create anticipation in the form of curiosity, suspense, tension, hope, or worry. When the anticipation is fulfilled, another emotion, depending on the payoff: surprise, disappointment, or relief. Delay the payoff, but also create a whole bunch of mini-problems and mini-goals throughout the story. More important, make sure that a problem is not resolved before another starts. Suspense is about the potential of bad things happening to a character we care about. Play between knowing what might happen and not-knowing what will happen. Character empathy + Likelihood of threat + Uncertainty of outcome = SUSPENSE. Make ‘em laugh. Make ‘em cry. But most of all, make ‘em wait. Character wins some and loses some, to avoid predictability. If character always wins, or always loses, there’s no suspense, no uncertainty of outcome. Go back and forth. Displacing your character to a contrasting environment: “the fish out of water”. Creates conflict and doubt as to how the character will react to it. Sending an introvert to a party, or an aquaphobic on a cruise. Ask what’s the worst thing that could happen if a character doesn’t get what he wants. This adds a believable and compelling motivation to their actions. Casablanca and how often the importance of the letters of transit is mentioned. Each mention is not only a reminder in case you forgot, but an additional injection of suspense. Unpredictable character response: GoodFellas is Joe Pesci’s terrifying “Do I amuse you?” speech. The unstable behavior of Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs. Avoid predictability through surprise. Give the audience what they want, but not in the way they expect. Obstacles and complications must be unexpected to create surprise. Discovery is an active process, whereas a revelation is revealed. This minor distinction is nonetheless important in balancing your story with active discoveries and passive revelations. Reversals turn the story upside down. You can’t get more unpredictable than that. All stories have three movements - a beginning, middle, and end. You could structure a story as setup, complications, and resolution. Or in emotional terms as creating attraction, tension, and satisfaction. The opening hook: Your opening scene must engage. You can’t be in the room with the reader to say, “Keep reading. It gets better!” Types of openings: Hero in action: introduce your protagonist in the middle of conflict. Villain in action . Backstory/prologue: An exciting event that occurs prior to your main story and creates anticipation of what’s to follow. Mystery: Unique world. Inciting event is powerful. It should automatically create the question “How will the hero resolve this problem?” While a good opening hooks you, a great ending will generate good word-of-mouth and leave you talking about the film. Surprising and yet feel like it was inevitable. Bittersweet ending: when the hero loses but wins, or wins but loses. Each scene must: 1. advance the story forward through conflict 2. reveal additional character layers 3. have an emotional impact If page three creates anticipation, the reader will read page four. If page four creates tension, he’ll read page five, and so on. To make your screenplay a page-turner, you need to create emotional impact on each page. Where to start a scene and where to end it: Get in late and get out early. End the scene with a hit of visceral emotion, such as curiosity, anticipation, tension, or surprise. This automatically creates the desire to know what happens next. Use a flashback only when it’s critical. Wait for the moment when the reader is dying to know the information. A flashback should always change the present situation. Find that cliché, then get as far away from it as you can. If a scene is about what the scene is really about, it’s flat.

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   By Derek Sivers · 21 May 2026

   Fight Club: I liked it the first time years ago, but watching a second time when you already know the end reveal? Elevates it from good to great. So many brilliant details in the screenplay. What else in life is better the second time?

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   By Derek Sivers · 14 May 2026

   Prepare your “no” and keep it handy: sive.rs/n0

8. 8. Prepare your “no” and keep it handy

   By Derek Sivers · 14 May 2026

   Someone asks you to do something, and you feel that pressure to answer immediately. You avoid confrontation, and say OK. I felt the pain of this, over and over again. Then I finally figured out a solution that’s worked wonderfully for years. I saved it on my computer and phone, to copy and paste. Now as soon as I get an unwelcome request? Tap-tap-tap. COPY-PASTE-SEND in three seconds, and it’s out of mind. It feels rude to reject so quickly, but I know this refusal is the kindest I could have written. Yet it took three seconds to send. And I can use it over and over again. Amazing. Next: I memorized the gist of my text to use in-person. I won’t post my text here, since it needs to be in your natural voice. But here’s my outline, in case it helps: clear “no” right away gratitude, since I’m honored by my value implied in the ask explanation that to stay focused on a bigger “yes”, I’m saying “no” to everything else invitation to ask again next year Four sentences is enough. Nobody wants verbosity here.

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   By Derek Sivers · 13 May 2026

   My life was changed by four sentences in four books : sive.rs/4s4b

10. 10. My life was changed by four sentences in four books

    By Derek Sivers · 12 May 2026

    Last week someone asked why I prefer books. My immediate answer was that I love their quiet, non-commercial nature. No ads. No hype. Just quiet wisdom with deep rewards for a focused mind. single sentence deep inside a book. Island by Aldous Huxley This is a novel about a British man who shipwrecks on an island with an ideal culture. The natives are role models of mental and emotional health. I was 22 years old, two years into a job. The first year, I learned so much, but the second year was just comfortable. quit, and that was the last time I ever had a job. #2 : Doing Music and Nothing Else by Peter Knickles I was 23 years old, trying to be a full-time musician in New York City, making an average of $100 per gig. I was determined to get into that scene, so I joined the organization, and spent a couple years working hard to crack it. I eventually mastered it, playing at 300 colleges around the country. Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina 200-something pages into this book, it said that to keep learning, we need to be surprised. For example, read books about subjects you know nothing about. Or ideally, it said, move to a place far away, very unlike home, so that you’ll be surprised every day. So in the name of learning and growth, I took the book’s advice to an extreme. I forced myself to leave America forever, to live around the world for the rest of my life. #4 : How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis As I was selling my company for $22 million, I saw this book in a book store, and read it for pure entertainment. poetry. And this is why I read books carefully, all the way to the end, looking for another sentence that will change my life.

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    By Derek Sivers · 6 May 2026

    Geography is four-dimensional: sive.rs/4d

12. 12. Geography is four-dimensional

    By Derek Sivers · 5 May 2026

    Forty years ago, a family moved from India to Canada, and raised their children with “Indian values”. When those children visited India last year, the locals laughed at their outdated beliefs. What their family had said were facts were just a perspective from 1980. Los Angeles. Talking with an old friend that’s still there, I said it’s the nicest place I’ve ever lived, and why. She said, “Oh wow. You haven’t been here in a while. It’s not like that anymore.” She said my description was like looking at an old photo from 1999. China and loved it. So clean, polite, efficient, and all-around nice. A German friend said I’m crazy because “China is filthy, rude, noisy, and awful - with everyone spitting and pushing.” I asked when he was there, and he said 2002. Ah! But that place is long gone. It’s not like that anymore. I was born in America, but the last year I lived there, George Bush was president. So I’m not from the current place, though it has the same name. Doc stepping out of a time machine. “I’m from here, but not this here!” But that place is long gone. It’s not like that anymore.

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    By Derek Sivers · 4 May 2026

    1993 communal internet shaped me: sive.rs/netizen

14. 14. Cambridge Language Surveys: Chinese - by Jerry Norman

    By Derek Sivers · 3 May 2026

    summary: 80’s book about Chinese, helped me understand how simplified Chinese writing came about: not as much top-down as bottom-up formalizing of shorthand and cursive that had been in use for centuries. recommend: 3/10 my notes: In the Ming and Qing dynasties there developed a very strong conservative attitude toward the writing system which was opposed to virtually any innovation, especially to acceptance of simplified Chinese. From the Tang dynasty on, a large number of popular simplified characters were created and used widely among the common people for writing such things as account books, pawn tickets, medicinal prescriptions, operatic scripts and certain forms of vernacular literature. Even members of the literati employed these non-official but convenient forms in personal correspondence and for copying materials for private use. Such characters were strictly banned for any public or official use. As part of the general reform movement of the early 1900s, the goverment felt the Chinese script should be simplified. The most practical way was to accept the many simplified characters already current. They issued of a list of 515 simplified characters in 1956, containing many simplified forms which had been in unofficial use for many centuries, and at the same time a number of newly created abbreviated forms were introduced. In 1964 they simplified more than 2000 characters, many from the simplification of common radicals and phonetic components. Many modern simplified graphs were created by regularizing cursive forms. Government proclaimed henceforth Chinese should be written horizontally from left to right. Classical Chinese is the written form of Old Chinese. The major prose works of this period: Qiān’s Shǐjì. Works dating from before the fifth century BC are written in Preclassical Chinese. This language differed considerably from that of the classical age and rarely served as model to later writers. Classical Chinese was almost certainly based on the vernacular language of the period. In the Postclassical period, writers continued to model their prose on this early literary language. The written languages thus began to take on an archaic aspect as the spoken language underwent a very different and large independent development. Thus Classical Chinese came to play a role in China analogous to that played by Latin in Western Europe. Postclassical literary Chinese, sometimes viewed as a timeless imitation of earlier models, often betrays its age by means of such vernacular intrusions. Old Chinese morphemes are almost entirely monosyllabic; moreover, most words are also monomorphemic. As more and more terms were required to meet the needs of an expanding civilization, compounding was virtually the only way to create needed new words. A language rarely increases the overall number of its morphemes except by borrowing. Chinese resists borrowing. Classical Chinese has extraordinary freedom that almost any word functions; nouns can function like verbs; verbs and adjectives like nouns. Most words may function as other parts of speech depending on their place in the sentence. When wŏ is used as a subject, it seems to have a contrastive sense: ‘I (but no one else)’, ‘we (but not you or others)’. Classical Chinese avoids the use of personal pronouns. Second-person pronoun was viewed as intimate, used among equals or to inferiors. A person of higher status has honorific substitutes: Similarly, when addressing superiors. zǐ ‘master’ and jūn ‘lord’. Deferential forms for first-person pronouns: chén servant. The Classical literary element in the modern written language is so important that it is hard to imagine anyone mastering the modern language without some acquaintance with the Classical language.

15. 15. Netizen

    By Derek Sivers · 3 May 2026

    I can relate to the original meaning of this old term that means to be good citizen of the internet. Wikipedia says a “netizen” is someone who actively contributes to the development of the internet, not for personal gain or profit, but to make the internet a better place. only way to connect a Mac to the internet (unless you were at a university) was to buy a big paper book on TCP/IP networking, to get the floppy disk inside the back cover that had the MacTCP drivers with SLIP and PPP, so you could connect a dial-up modem to your computer. It was an amazingly helpful place. We used the web, Usenet, FTP, and email mailing lists to share what we knew. All of this was plain text. Images didn’t really come until a year later. In return, I shared what I had learned about how to copyright your songs, trademark your band name, and get gigs at universities. The U.S. copyright and trademark office was years away from putting their forms online, so I bought a flatbed scanner and scanned their paper forms, sharing them on my website. Wired magazine and many forums pointed to my website as a helpful resource for musicians, since it was the only place online to get these forms and instructions. that’s not what the internet is about. It’s a free helpful place where everyone contributes and benefits from others’ contributions. Slowly the culture around me changed, so now it seems I need to explain my strange behavior — why I don’t monetize everything like everyone else. I’m just a product of my place and time. 1993 shaped how I think of the internet, and I’m keepin’ on in that original spirit. Now my netizen contribution is to… answer emails from about 10,000 people per year, NowNowNow.com, and my site.