Dan Pollock's Blog, page 3

TO PLOT OR NOT

Plot Outline Map from Hollywood Story Structure Guru Robert McKee When it comes to plotting a novel, there are two basic approaches and, thus, two kinds of writers. There are the naturals, the seat-of-your-pants folks who “just do it.” Their stories “just grow’d,” like Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  Then there are the rest of us, writers who, like me, need to build an elaborate track and know exactly where they’re going, or they end up nowhere. Or stranded, at some accidental and inconclusive terminus.
That’s happened to me—especially during the long, frustrating years of my apprenticeship—more times than I want to count. In my garage are stacks of cardboard boxes full of false starts and miscarriages, some of them hundreds of pages long. There’s even some good writing in those fragmentary projects, but so what? It’s all overdue for the recycling bin.
Elmore Leonard 
But what about the “naturals”? How does yarn-spinning work for them?
 
The world recently lost one of these naturally gifted storytellers, Elmore Leonard, a writer who never outlined or plotted in advance.  Here’s how he once explained his process:
           “Most thrillers are based on a situation, or on a plot, which is the most important element in the book. I don't see it that way. I see my characters as being most important, how they bounce off one another, how they talk to each other, and the plot just sort of comes along.”
In fact, “Mr. Leonard is so comfortable allowing his characters to control the pace and action of his stories that he didn't know how Bandits would end until three days before he finished it.” (Elmore Leonard quoted by Michael Ruhlman, New York Times Book Review, Jan. 4, 1987)
Joe WambaughThis approach is usually described as character-driven , as opposed to plot-driven. Another best-selling crime writer, Joe Wambaugh, places himself emphatically in the character-first camp beside Leonard:
“I sort of relegate plot a little bit down on the list of importance in my mind. I don't really have an outline when I start a book. If I did, it wouldn't be any good. I create characters and, if you're really cooking, they take over. They direct you. You follow them.” (Joe Wambaugh interviewed in the San Diego Reader, Nov. 4, 1993) 

Howard & Frazetta's ConanI remember reading about Robert E. Howard, a pulp-magazine writer back in the ‘30s who famously created Conan the Barbarian. Howard had scant success with his adventure yarns until one day, as he recalled, he had this overpowering vision of a big, musclebound, wild-eyed barbarian dude. The visitation drove Howard to his typewriter; and, from then on, the stories just flowed—and sold.


Stephen KingI love these examples, and I love the mystic process of being possessed by characters. But it rarely works that way for me. I'm more like Stephen King, at least in this one regard:
"For me, it's the idea [that comes first]. The characters are a perfect blank. Everything about the character is a blank... the first thing that comes is the situation, and the next thing that comes are characters that will fulfill that situation." (Stephen King, Writer's Digest,  March 1992, p. 24 & 25)
DickensOf course, most writers, including me, have experienced to some extent both kinds of writing—switching back and forth, as it were, from left brain (plot-analytical) to right (character-synthetic). The great novels of Charles Dickens are indelibly character-driven. His unforgettable players come alive on the stage of the reader’s mind and drive the story forward, installment after installment. And yet, before launching on each new book and letting his conjured creatures consume him, Dickens would scribble cryptic notes—names and places, touchstones and benchmarks—for the great narrative journey that stretched ahead.
I suspect that even sly old Elmore Leonard had an inkling of where he was letting himself be led. John D. MacDonald, whom I have quoted so often in past posts, once described a novel-writing process that sounds to me like a hybrid between plot-and-character driven:
JDM"He explained that he never plotted in advance, but let the story form itself as he wrote. Story elements, he said, were in a kind of hopper tapering down to a point where they came out. If you tried to grab them all at once they'd jam, but if you picked them out one by one they'd come in proper sequence." (MacDonald paraphrased by Walter Sheldon, "Plotting the Novel," 1973 Writer's Yearbook)
 
So—to plot or not to plot, that is the question. It would seem there are two equally valid answers. But for me, alas, there is only one.

            *

Up top I described myself as one of those “who need to build a track and know exactly where they’re going, or they end up nowhere.” A writer friend of mine put it this way: “Learning to write is track-laying. Writing is running on the track. What people are always trying to do is run without a track.”

In subsequent posts, I’ll talk about how I eventually learned to lay that story track. The learning process, for me, was methodical and laborious, but utterly essential, lacking as I did (and still do) that unerring narrative gift or instinct with which some writers are so wonderfully endowed. And, as I say, careful plotting is still essential for me, all these years and novels later. Novel construction has not gotten noticeably easier. Each new project I undertake, like the building of a house, requires careful blueprinting and frequent piece-by-piece inspections to assure solid story structure with satisfying character trajectories, plot tendencies, resolutions, declining action and so forth.

And I suspect I’m not alone in my predicament. So, if you are like me, stay tuned to this space as I pass along some hard-won tips on plotting, from short stories to long-form novels.

THE RUNNING BOY FEATURED ON KINDLE BOOKS AND TIPS BLOG

Self-Promo Dept Update: THE RUNNING BOY is a featured title on today's Kindle Books and Tips blog  ; once there, please just scroll down to the first book cover (after the boxed set).
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LAIR OF THE FOX FEATURED ON KINDLE BOOKS AND TIPS BLOG

Self-Promo Dept Update : LAIR OF THE FOX is a featured title on today's Kindle Books and Tips blog ; once there, please just scroll down to the second book cover (unless, that is, you desperately need to buy the first title, HOW TO FIND A JOB).

The Kindle Books and Tips blog has been ranked the #1 blog in terms of paid subscriptions in the Amazon Kindle store since 2010, and is consistently ranked in the Top 100 for all Kindle titles week in and week out. If you would like to have the blog’s posts sent to your email, you can subscribe here, or via e-Ink direct to you Kindle, you can click here

DESCRIBING STUFF

Your characters are obviously more important than their settings, but there is a critical and creative synergy between character and setting--a synergy that takes place in the reader’s brain.
The late, great John D. MacDonald codified it this way: "When the environment is less real, the people you put into that environment become less believable, and less interesting."
He illustrated his point with two descriptive passages. Here is the first:
“The air conditioning unit in the motel room window was old and somewhat noisy.” MacDonald called this an image cut out of gray paper. It triggers no vivid visual image.
By contrast, see what happens in the imagination while reading this passage:
"The air conditioning unit in the motel room had a final fraction of its name left, an 'aire' in silver plastic, so loose that when it resonated to the coughing thud of the compressor, it would blur. A rusty water stain on the green wall under the unit was shaped like the bottom half of Texas. From the stained grid, the air conditioner exhaled its stale and icy breath into the room, redolent of chemicals and of someone burning garbage far, far away."
From these close-up clues, MacDonald said, you the reader can construct the rest of the room--bed, carpeting, shower, with vivid pictures from your own experience. The trick is how much to describe--the telling detail--and what to leave out. Too much detail and you turn the reader into a spectator, no longer part of the creative partnership whereby the reader fills in the rest of the scene out of experience and imagination.
“No two readers will see exactly the same motel room,” he added. But “the pictures you have composed in your head are more vivid than the ones I would try to describe.”
Note that MacDonald did not label the air conditioner as old or noisy or battered or cheap. Those are all subjective words, evaluations that the reader should make. “Do not say a man looks seedy. That is a judgment, not a description. All over the world, millions of men look seedy, each one in his own fashion. Describe a cracked lens on his glasses, a bow fixed with stained tape, an odor of old laundry.”
Note also that MacDonald is using sensory cues in his quick sketch of the air conditioner. You not only see the bottom half of Texas, you smell the burning garbage, you hear the coughing thud.


There are many masters of detailed description. One that comes to mind is the late Joseph Hansen, author of the David Brandstetter mysteries. Here is an example, picked almost at random from his 1973 novel, Death Claims :
“…The front wall was glass for the view of the bay. It was salt-misted, but it let him see the room. Neglected. Dust blurred the spooled maple of furniture that was old but used to better care. The faded chintz slipcovers needed straightening. Threads of cobwebs spanned lapshades. And on a coffee table stood plates soiled from a meal eaten days ago—canned roast-beef hash, ketchup—dregs of coffee in a cup, half a glass of dead, varnish liquid…”
It’s clearly of a piece with MacDonald’s example. But Hansen, a poet as well as novelist, seems to describe everything, every setting, every character, with such laser-like attention to detail, while MacDonald picks his spots. For me as a reader, exhaustive detail is exhausting.
There are celebrated passages, of course, where an author intends to glut the reader with overflowing detail. A famous example occurs in Gustave Flaubert’s descriptions of Madame Bovary’s wedding, in which every costume and every menu course is lavished with loving prose:
“Upon [the table] there stood four sirloins, six dishes of hashed chicken, stewed veal, three legs of mutton and, in the centre, a comely roast sucking-pig flanked with four hogs-puddings garnished with sorrel. At each corner was a decanter filled with spirits. Sweet cider in bottles was fizzling out round the corks, and every glass had already been charged with wine to the brim. Yellow custard in great dishes, which would undulate at the slightest jog of the table, displayed on its smooth surface the initials of the wedded pair in arabesques of candied peel…”


MacDonald cites another exception to the less-is-more dictum: “In one of the Franny and Zooey stories, [J.D.] Salinger describes the contents of a medicine cabinet shelf by shelf in such infinite detail that finally a curious monumentality is achieved…”
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ORINOCO NOW PUBLISHED ON KINDLE

As a happy postscript to the previous, Orinoco is now available on Kindle  and in paperback  through Lulu.

Even better news, Orinoco will be FREE for download this coming Saturday and Sunday, July 13 and 14.

I quoted Tom Keneally's blurb on the previous post. Here are a few more I was tickled to get for this adventurous thriller:

"I never give quotes for fiction books, but Dan Pollock is a writer of talent and drive. His Orinoco is a riveting read." --Len Deighton

 "Vivid and unforgettable..." --Liz Smith, syndicated columnist

 "The mining of iron ore in thejungles of Venezuela is hampered by archaeological finds, and we have the ingredients of a good old-fashioned action-adventure story. Dan Pollock brings the reader right into the exotic locale and peoples his story with interesting characters. A well-written and obviously well-researched novel; classical escape reading."--Nelson DeMille

 

A RIGHTFUL TITLE RESTORED

My South American-sited action-adventure thriller Orinoco suffered a strange fate at the hands of its original publisher, Pocket Books. Despite rave endorsements from three best-selling writers—Len Deighton, Thomas Keneally and Nelson DeMille (author of Schindler’s List)—the publisher decided to change my title to one that I found vague and actually meaningless.
I was informed, but not consulted. I felt like a parent watching helplessly through the hospital nursery window as the nametag is switched on the bassinet bearing his child. Orinoco was thus born into the book world as Pursuit Into Darkness. With this eminently forgettable dust jacket over its face, the novel was barely promoted, scarcely noticed and soon forgotten.
The brilliant Australian novelist Thomas Keneally captured my feelings perfectly when he called me from “Oz” just about that time with his solicited endorsement. He had read an early proof of Orinoco and was properly disdainful when I told him of the last-minute name change. He dictated his blurb thus:

“What a ripping read. Orinoco--or by whatever meaningless name it is now being called--is a rapidly moving, thoroughly satisfying opus, good for a winter’s night or a summer’s day.”

Flash forward a bunch of years to the present era of self- and independent publishing. In my case (and in the case of many another published writer), it affords the glorious opportunity to republish out-of-print titles—and do it right this second time around.
This time no committee, no finger-to-the-wind marketing manager, gets to rename my opus. This is why I am particularly excited about the imminent independent publication of PURSUIT INTO DARKNESS ORINOCO. In a couple weeks, it will be available under its rightful and original name, and be judged by its proper merits.
You see, the title was the book at its inception. I began not with an idea, but just that rhythmically resonant name. Other tributaries of the story flowed into that riverine trunk. As I mentioned in a previous post, among my early inspirations was Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, though I skipped the dinosaurs that Doyle’s imagination deposited atop Auyán-Tepui, the giant sandstone mesa from whose prow Angel Falls plunges endlessly down into the surrounding Venezuelan jungle.
Now I've just reread my manuscript for this South American thriller and discover that it's good! In fact, I have to agree with Nelson DeMille's generous plaudit: "A well-written and obviously well-researched novel; classical escape reading." (Thank you again, Mr. DeMille!)

I can hardly wait until Orinoco is reborn and rechristened on Kindle (and in Lulu print-on-demand). In fact, I'm going to be giving copies away, in lieu of cigars, as soon as they emerge from their digital womb.
Stay tuned for the official birth announcement!

SPECTATOR TIME TRAVEL: POSTSCRIPT

Three months back, in a post called “SPECTATOR TIME TRAVEL,” I posed the hypothetical, “If you could be whisked backward in time, by some Dickensian spirit or H. G. Wellsian device, where and when would you go?”
I offered a grab bag of suggestions off the top of my head—attending one of Charles Dickens’ legendary readings; sneaking into Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Beverly Hills home back in the '30s and '40s to listen to the composer and his dear friend, Vladimir Horowitz, play through the “Rach 3” on dovetailed concert grands; or,  maybe even more exciting, one of the legendary “cutting contests” matching stride piano players such as Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson, Count Basie, and Earl "Fatha" Hines.
It’s not that I wouldn’t want to be among the select few for the Sermon on the Mount or at the foot of Sinai when Moses came on down with the Ten Commandments; but Hollywood has already been there and done those, and the Gettysburg Address, tool.
Another notion recently popped into my brain. How about being a fly on the wall in the Writers’ Room at Sid Caesar’s old “Your Show of Shows,” which, as Wikipedia states, was “a live 90-minute variety show that was broadcast weekly in the United States on NBC (Saturdays, 9:00-10:30 p.m. Eastern Time/6:00-7:30 p.m. Pacific Time), from February 25, 1950, until June 5, 1954...”
The main comedy quartet--Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris--was brilliant in skit ensembles. But behind them was marshaled perhaps an even more awesomely talented team of comedy writers.
At various times (and, actually, on various Caesar shows), the all-star lineup of jokemeisters included Mel Tolkin, Sir Caesar, Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Neil Simon, Danny Simon, Sheldon Keller, Mel Tolkin, Gary Belkin and Aaron Ruben.
To our great good fortune all these decades later, some Spectator Time Travel is possible  in this case. You can purchase a (somewhat pricey) DVD of “Caesar’s Writers” on Amazon.
The photo of “A Reunion of the Greatest Comedy Writers" is at the top of this post.
 Here’s the caption:

"On January 24, 1996 at the Writers Guild Theater in Los Angeles, CA, legendary comic Sid Caesar was reunited with nine of his writers from Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour. The event was taped, and later broadcast on PBS in the United States, and the BBC in the UK as a 1 hour special, with only select portions of the full two-hour event. The full event was previously available only as a VHS, offered as a pledge premium by local PBS stations. Now, the full two-hour special CAESAR’S WRITERS is available on DVD for the first time! Be prepared to laugh non-stop as the panel, made up of head writer Mel Tolkin, Caesar, Carl Reiner, Aaron Ruben, Larry Gelbart, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Danny Simon, Sheldon Keller, and Gary Belkin share stories about their time working on Caesar’s shows and offer their insights about writing comedy..."

HIGHER EDITING

The title of this post is drawn from the autobiography of Rudyard Kipling, Nobel laureate, the second most quoted name in English literature (according to Bartlett’s) after Shakespeare.
“Do you like Kipling?” goes the old joke.Answer: “I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled.”
But I’ll get back to Rudyard in a moment. First a plug from our sponsor, namely me.
My chase thriller, The Running Boy,  can be downloaded in Kindle format free for the next three days – Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I’m hoping to drum up some interest, obviously, for what I consider an exciting read. So spread the word, if you will.
You can read an online interview with the author about the writing of The Running Boy here.  

By the way, on Monday and Tuesday Amazon will be giving away my most popular thriller, Lair of the Fox. After that, both return to their regular Kindle price of $2.99.
And now back to our regularly scheduled post and Rudyard Kipling’s “Higher Editing”…
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Kipling flashed across the London literary firmament like a comet at age 23 with the delicious short story collection, Plain Tales From the Hills, followed a year later by Barrack-Room Ballads, which showed him a master versifier.
His sensational debut at such a young age was comparable to that of Charles Dickens. "The star of the hour," said Henry James when Rudyard was only 25. "Too clever to live," said Robert Louis Stevenson.
But the shooting star did not flame out. While he continued to produce stories and poems at a prodigious rate, he never joined his own rabid fan club. He was certainly aware of his genius, but his approach to the craft of writing remained ever that of a conscientious workman. He edited himself ruthlessly.
“Higher Editing” he called it, and I’ll get to the specifics of his technique in a few moments.
But please note: It is possible to expand a story or novel through good editing. To diagnose what is lacking and suggest the addition of needed material.
That is emphatically not the kind of self-editing I’m talking about here. I’m talking “less is more,” a strictly reductive process.
The most famous editor I recall hearing about was the legendary Maxwell Perkins, editor and hand-holder of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Not our Tom Wolfe, but the great undisciplined contemporary of Hemingway and Fitzgerald “whosetalent was matched only by his lack of artistic self-discipline.”
Wolfe's great big doorstop novels—Look Homeward, Angel, You Can’t Go Home Again, Of Time and the River—all landed on Perkins’ desk as cartonloads of verbal tonnage, all requiring major surgery. For instance, from the brilliant but bloated manuscript of Angel, Perkins managed to remove 90,000 words.
I have a similar tale, with far punier statistics. My first thriller, Lair of the Fox , was sold on the basis of an outline and the first 100 pages to a small publisher. The completed manuscript weighed in at 120,000 words – every one them perfect, I'll have you know.
So I was shocked to learn from my editor that this small publishing house (Walker & Co.), in order to reduce their printing and binding costs, never published trade books over 80,000 words. Therefore--would I please cut 40,000 words from my manuscript.
I did it. And I relied on Kipling’s “Higher Editing” method to do it. And the book is much the better for it.
It wasn’t easy. As a legendary teacher of fiction writing once explained, “This is why surgeons never operate on members of their own family and dislike to work even on close friends.” (William Foster-Harris, The Basic Patterns of Plot, p. 112)
A famous American editor has his own take: “Play ‘digester’ to your manuscript; imagine that you are an editorial assistant on a digest magazine performing a first squeeze on the article to be digested. Can you squeeze out an unnecessary hundreds words from each thousand in your draft?” (Gorham Munson, The Written Word, p. 170)
John D. MacDonald used the reductive process as an intrinsic part of his creative plan. A magazine profile of the mystery master described him “tapping out the 1,000-page drafts that he whittles down to 300-page manuscripts in four months.” (Newsweek, March 22, 1971, p. 103)
For this reductive process to work, however, you have to put your heart and soul into that first draft, like Tom Wolfe or John MacDonald. Don’t edit or second guess yourself the first time through; let yourself be driven forward by the compelling emotion of your story; to switch metaphors, trowel on the raw pigment, which you can shape later at leisure.
To quote Gorham Munson again, “Write as a writer, rewrite as a reader.” (The Written Word, p. 167)
Another master of mystery, Elmore Leonard, went from a journeyman paperback writer (westerns and detectives) to best-sellerdom and Hollywood fame by taking an opposite tack. He began to edit himself in advance — on his first draft. As he famously put it (his rule No. 10 of good writing): “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”
If you can do that, bravo! Others, some very great writers among them, have had to go back over their work and painfully cut out the deadwood.
Here is the method used by Georges Simneon, whom I profiled in an earlier post..
“In response to the imperious instruction given him by Colette, "Suppress all literature," he embarked on developing the pared-down style which he made so notably his own." (“About Simenon,” The European, Nov. 2, 1990)

INTERVIEWER: "What do you mean by 'too literary'? What do you cut out, certain kinds of words?"SIMENON: "Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence—cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut." (Simenon quoted in Writers At Work, The Paris Review Interviews, p. 146)

To quote Leonard again, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
Granted, that rule does not apply to the beloved storytellers of an earlier era—to Jane Austen or Dickens, to Tolstoy or Conrad. Nor even to my favorite of current thriller writer, Frederick Forsyth. Narrative charm is a special skill of selected yarn-spinners, an honor to be conferred by adoring readers.
So, at last, we come to Kipling’s “Higher Editng.” Here he describes how he used it on his debut story collection, Plain Tales From the Hills:

“They [Anglo-Indian tales] were originally much longer than when they appeared, but the shortening of them, first to my own fancy, after rapturous re-readings, and the next to the space available, taught me that a tale from which pieces have been raked out is like a fire that has been poked. One does not know that the operation has been performed, but everyone feels the effect...
This leads me to the Higher Editing. Take of well-ground Indian Ink as much as suffices and a camel-hair brush proportionate to the interspaces of your lines. In an auspicious hour, read your final draft and consider faithfully every paragraph, sentence and word, blacking out where requisite. Let it lie by to drain as long as possible. At the end of that time, re-read and you should find that it will bear a second shortening. Finally, read it aloud alone and at leisure. Maybe a shade more brushwork will then indicate or impose itself. If not, praise Allah and let it go, and "when thou hast done, repent not."... The magic lies in the Brush and the Ink.” (Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself, p. 224-225)

THE ULTIMATE BUCKET LIST

“Bucket List” seems to have entered the popular consciousness with the 2007 Rob Reiner movie. It starred Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as two terminally ill men on a road trip, pursuing a wish list of things they wanted to do before kicking the bucket.

But the Ultimate Bucket List, in my view, was created on a rainy afternoon back in 1939 by a 15-year-old boy daydreaming of great deeds and faraway lands. Young John Goddard worked on his “Life List” (you can peruse it here) until he’d drawn up “127 goals he wished to experience or achieve in his lifetime.”

He wanted to explore the waters of the Amazon, the Congo, the Colorado and the Nile rivers. He hoped to climb an impressive list of mountains, including Mt. Ararat in Turkey, Mt. Cook in New Zealand, Mt. Popocatepetl in Mexico and Tanzania’s Mt. Kilimanjaro. He wanted to visit the Great Wall of China, the Panama Canal and Suez Canals, Easter Island, the Galapagos Islands and the Taj Mahal.

That’s from his obituary in the May 22 Los Angeles Times. John died May 17 at the age of 88 of
a rare form of cancer. But he exited having completed more than 100 of those 127 life goals.

Many, by the way, were far more audacious or difficult than those cited by the Timesobit. A few examples:climb the Matterhornland and take off from an aircraft carrierfree dive to 40 feet and hold breath two and a half minutes underwaterteach a college coursepublish an article in National Geographicrun a mile in five minuteslearn French, Spanish and Arabicmilk a poisonous snakeplay Debussy’s Claire de Lune on the piano.I had the privilege of knowing John Goddard. He was an elegant gentleman, personifying for me the Victorian adventurer, as at home in drawing room as the jungle. In this he was in a direct line of romantic and intrepid adventurer scholars—Sir Richard Burton, Sven Hedin, Richard Halliburton, Charles Doughty, Fridtjof Nansen, Thor Heyerdahl, Wilfred Thesiger.
Predictably, Goddard has been called a “modern Indiana Jones,” a title he shared with contemporary explorer-adventurer, Dr. Jack Wheeler, another grownup Eagle Scout (like Goddard) who has climbed the Matterhorn, among many other exploits.
I confess to having made my own life lists, usually after a flute or two of New Year’s champagne. Looking them over in later years, I find very, very few checkmarks in my ballot boxes. On John’s list, on the other hand, unchecked boxes are rare. True, he never appeared in a Tarzan movie (No. 93) or visited the moon (No. 125), but let’s give him a pass on those, shall we?
To quote the L.A. Times obit again:

“When he was growing up, he heard older people say with regret that they hadn’t done the things they wanted to do,” his son said this week. “He decided he was going to live a life of adventure so he wouldn’t have any regrets.” 

The only real consolation for growing up (someone once told me) was the opportunity to fulfill one’s childhood dreams. To me, John Goddard embodied that quest, and I suspect he had very few regrets when he finally closed his eyes on his lifelong dream.
And I know, if I'll only be true To this glorious Quest, That my heart will lie peaceful and calm When I'm laid to my rest.
(Joe Darion’s lyrics from "The Impossible Dream" from Man of La Mancha)
PS. For the interested, I see there has sprung up a social network website where you can keep track of your personal bucket list, add videos and images, and read about others’ adventures.

SERMONETTE: FANATICISM VS. DILETTANTISM

One of the most powerful motivational speeches blasted out of my car speakers the other day. I was driving my teenage son to school, and, as usual, he’d plugged his iPhone into the dashboard.
I thought he’d selected the wrong track from his wall-to-wall hip-hop playlist. A deeply resonant black voice launched into a story about a young man seeking out a “guru” to learn how to make a lot of money.
I glanced sideways. My son was actually listening, so I listened also. Oh, well. Whatever this guy was getting worked up about, it couldn’t be as distasteful as the nasty hip-hop lyrics I’m forced to endure. (My son swears he hears only to the background music.)
The secular sermon was a bit belabored, with a lot of repetitive phrasing and cadences, slow to reach its predictable crescendo. But when the guy finally got there, I found myself unexpectedly galvanized by the simplicity and force of his message.
Spoiler Alert: Before I write any more, you might prefer to give it a listen. The motivational speaker is Eric Thomas (about whom I know nothing), and you can find his “rant” with a web search of “How Bad Do You Want It?” Or use this link.
Now that you’re warned, I’ll cut to the chase. The young man meets the guru at the beach and is walked out into the water till their heads are barely above the waves. Suddenly the guru pushes the young man’s head under water and holds it there for… well, for  a heckuva long time in the story:
“He had him held down, just before my man was about to pass out, he raised him up. He said: ‘I got a question for you.’ He told the guy, he said: ‘When you want to succeed as bad as you wanna breathe, then you will be successful.’”
That’s it, the moral of the story. It’s not enough, according to Eric Thomas, to just “kind of want to succeed.” You have to want it as much as a drowning man wants to breathe. Anything less won’t cut it.
And, you know, that really resonates with me—and with many thousands of others, including my usually blasé  son. I suspect because it’s true.
A wise man—a guru of sorts—told me once a deceptively simple thing--that life is a crisis. A continuing crisis, in which, by our choices, we define ourselves moment by moment, day by day.
Sounds kinda like “Introduction to Existentialism”? Could be.
The trouble is, we seldom perceive this ongoing crisis. Except when we get the big, obvious theatrical clues. Then it's inescapable.
Like at the final hand at the poker table, when all the chips get pushed to the center and it’s showdown time.
Or in the opera’s last act, when the trumpets sound and the timpani rumble and the Fat Lady gets ready to sing.   Or when we are plunged beneath the weaves and have to fight upward for oxygen.
The trick is to see the crisis when no one else around you does—and to respond with extraordinary effort under seemingly ordinary circumstances.
But Eric Thomas says it better:
“You gotta go days without – LISTEN TO ME! You gotta want to be successful so bad that you forget to eat... I never forget, I went, 50 Cent was doing his movie, I did a little research on 50, and 50 said that when he wasn’t doing the movie, he was doing the soundtrack. And they said: ‘When do you sleep, 50?’ and 50 said: ‘Sleep? Sleep is for those people who are broke. I don’t sleep.’ See I got an opportunity to make my dream become a reality. Don’t cry to quit. You already in pain, you already hurt. Get a reward from it. Don’t go to sleep until you succeed.”