Kenneth Atchity's Blog, page 91

Is It Story That Makes Us Read?

Photo: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine
Recite a plot backward and you’ll discover some things. Try it with a classic you haven’t read in years. You remember the green light on the last page of The Great Gatsby, of course, and probably Gatsby’s corpse in the pool a chapter earlier. Do you remember who killed him? It was Wilson, the husband of Tom Buchanan’s lover, Myrtle, who was run over by Gatsby’s car with Daisy at the wheel. It was Tom who told Wilson, a man with a few screws loose, that the car belonged to Gatsby, so you could make a case that Gatsby’s death was all Tom’s fault — that he was the real killer and had plenty of motive. You could also argue that Fitzgerald’s end plot is a shambolic mess heaped on a pile of coincidence, though there’s a beauty to the end of the novel that does express one of its great themes: that Gatsby was a careful man who involved himself with careless people and died as a martyr to their carelessness.

But my point here isn’t to pronounce on that novel’s worthiness. What I mean to get across are the thin traces the plots of even the most memorable, near universally read books can leave in our minds. If a work of fiction has any force to it, we close the book with a head full of images, lines, and emotions.

We’ve gotten to know characters and may think of them the way we think of the heroes and villains of our own lives. That sense of them can stay with us for years, even if we forget their names. A good prose style will stay in our ears the way memorable music does. But there’s something that goes away quickly when we close a book, or the screen goes dark, or the curtain falls: the memory of just what happened, in what order, and why. Plots are ghostly things in our brains. It can be hard to keep a grasp of them even as you’re reading a novel or watching a film or a play. I sometimes fret that I have a better memory of the font certain novels were printed in than the incidents that riveted me as I was reading them.

But it’s plot that keeps us turning pages, even when we feel no sympathy or the opposite of sympathy for a fiction’s characters and animating ideas. Nell Zink has said that when she wanted people to read a book about avian conservation and militant environmental activism, the logical way to do it was to embed those elements in the sex-farce plot of The Wallcreeper. Yet a summary of that novel wouldn’t tell you much about why it’s so good. The late Robert Belknap points out in his study Plots (a work largely devoted to close readings of King Lear and War and Peace) that some argue that the only adequate summary of War and Peace is the text of War and Peace, the implication being that you can never really know the novel unless you memorize the text, something that’s possible with a play but not so with Tolstoy’s masterpieces. Others hold that “the summary of a book is the plot of the book,” since the act of summarizing a plot mimics the way our mind grasps a story as it unfolds. On this view, we are all critics when we read, unconsciously adding emphasis to certain events, flattening out ambiguities, lending our loyalties to some characters over others. Some readers want plots that will sweep them away. Others want to keep their distance and examine plots the way a doctor might look down a patient’s throat. In between is a style of reading that takes temporary possession of a text, creating a new work of art that exists only in the reader’s head.

It was Aristotle who first called plot “the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy.” (The elements of less importance for him are character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song.) He was writing about Greek drama, but we can apply his ideas to novels, though he considered narrative works, particularly epic ones, inferior to tragedy. There’s something hostile to the bagginess of the novel in Aristotle’s notion that the best works are those in which nothing can be  subtracted without the meaning being lost. A more generous theory of plot arrived about a century ago in Russia. The Formalists Vladimir Propp and Victor Shklovsky held that every work of fiction has a fabula and a syuzhet. The fabula is the set of fictional events related within or implied by the work; the syuzhet is the manner in which the fictional information of the fabula is conveyed to the reader. Together they constitute the plot.

There’s something beautiful to me about the concept of the fabula. Every narrative implies an entire world beyond the confines of the narrative, and another history stretching backward and forward in time forever. Thus books proliferate that enter into other books’ fabula to fill in backstories, portray familiar events from other perspectives, and see characters on to further escapades. Television spinoffs and movie-franchise universes operate within shared fabula, and great care is taken not to violate the illusion of a consistent fictional world. Lots of people, after all, are keeping track.

Theorists of plot tend to think of the concept elastically. If plot is the arrangement of incident, each incident itself is also a plot in miniature. The crucial question is the level of causality linking the incidents — or if not causality, the appearance of design, as in Aristotle’s example of the murderer of Mitys dying when a statue of Mitys falls on him. Paradoxically, he says, tragic wonder is greater when it happens by accident.

Aristotle scorned the epic, but he would have hated television. “Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst,” he wrote. An episodic structure tends to do away with any causal link between the episodes. It’s a string of plots where all the conditions are reset between episodes, and each character returns to his or her mean. Of course, seriality is something else: an episodic structure nested within larger plot arcs — more a linked chain than a string of beads.

Prestige television inherited this structure from the 19th-century novel. Many are enthralled by this development — novelists like Jonathan Franzen among them — but the parallel development of binge-watching has exposed some of the seams of the serial television drama. Binge-watch Breaking Bad and you’ll notice that Walter and Jesse will often reverse their stances on the meth-cooking business every few hours. What would the writers do with them if they weren’t constantly getting out and then being pulled, or jumping, back in? Even The Sopranos shows its reliance on formula if you watch it quickly enough. Rapid rotation of personnel within Tony’s crew means there’s always some problem capo around whom it’ll take a season for somebody to whack. Aristotle thought a tragedy should unfold over the natural course of a day — so perhaps he would have been a fan of 24.

 to put plot in its grave, and tried to replace it with intellectual or aesthetic dazzle, but it always returns zombielike, and suddenly we’re again reading books that end with weddings. “All plots tend to move deathward,” Jack Gladney says in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. “This is the nature of plots.” Of course, a marriage is its own kind of death, the death of the individual in the union of a couple. That’s the sort of death that gives people hope for the future, and it’s a plot’s power to trigger the emotional release — catharsis — that Aristotle values. Tragedy’s power rested in its ability to stir feelings of terror and pity in an audience. Unlike Plato, who thought the emotional manipulations of poets a danger to society, Aristotle saw emotional release as a healthy thing — a way to purge the heart of pity and terror before going to war, where such feelings are a liability.

What sort of feelings do we look for from plots today? On television, it’s been well documented, we’ve watched an era of criminal males enacting power fantasies at a time when patriarchy seems to be waning. I’ve seen a different pattern, another prevailing feeling recently in literature, both in novels I’ve admired and many I’ve detested. The feeling is shame. Many fictions these days are animated by a shameful trauma lurking in the fabula, but typically undisclosed until the reader is half or three-quarters of the way through the work. The strange thing about such shame-inducing secrets is that they exist apart and without a direct causal link to the rest of the fictional events but still exert an overpowering distortionary force on subsequent events: Plots become sand castles washed away in a tide of shame. Jay Gatsby had a shameful secret too — that his fortune was criminal. He wanted to get rich in order to marry Daisy. He ended up a corpse floating in a pool.

By Christian Lorentzen 

*A version of this article appears in the August 8, 2016 issue of New York Magazine.

Read more

Listen: How Walden Media Navigates the Mega-Budget Film Era

“Dora and the Lost City of Gold” is just the kind of family-friendly movie you’d expect to see from Walden Media, which teamed with Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon to bring the iconic kiddie character to theaters (premiering Aug. 9). But while the company is as dedicated as ever to burnishing the inspirational fare-focused brand it has built over the past 16 years, the strategies CEO/president Frank Smith has employed to keep Walden in the game have evolved considerably in recent years. “The industry has changed so dramatically around us and so quickly, you realize to continue with your mandate, to be relevant, you have to change with the industry,” he explained in the latest episode of the Variety podcast “Strictly Business.”

Read more

Nicole Conn's More Beautiful For Having Been Broken Playing at OUT at the Movies of Winston-Salem the first weekend in October

Calling it quits: When leaving your job is the right thing to do

Listen here

In 2009, Bill Murphy Jr. landed a top-level law job making big bucks. But when he showed up for work, he realized pretty quickly that he wasn't the right person for that spot. On his very first day, Murphy already wanted out.

Correspondent Tony Dokoupil asked, "What was it about a competitive, six-figure income that wasn't attractive to you?"

"Yeah, I know, that's a question a lot of people would ask," he replied. "I recall going to the orientation, and one of the speakers got up, 'Hi, I'm John Smith, I've been here for 21 years and three months, so that means I have, you know, eight years-plus to retire.' And that became a running joke with a few of the others speakers that got up. But that's not really what you say if you love your work and you really want to come in there every day."

So, rather than count his own days behind a desk, he did something you won't find in most career playbooks: He quit on Day Two, telling his boss, "I'm really very sorry, I can tell that I made a big mistake in accepting this job."

The move was radical, but the mindset is not so uncommon. According to a recent CBS News poll, more than half of Americans with full time jobs say they daydream at least once in a while about leaving those jobs behind.

Michelle Singletary, who writes about personal finance for the Washington Post, says the fantasy of quitting your job is more prevalent today than it was a generation ago. "And for many people, it is a fantasy unfortunately," she said.

Singletary said employers are largely to blame: "I think the companies broke the contract, because they made us expendable at every level. I mean, it got to the point where they could boost their stock prices by firing people. And people are saying, 'If that's the case, I don't owe you my entire life.'"

That may help explain why some employees now put early retirement at the top of their to-do list. But making that happen takes work, and a whole lot of savings. Singletary said, "You've got to save a substantial amount of your salary, upwards of 40, 50, 60%."

Dokoupil asked, "If you're 25 right now and you have it in your head that you want to retire early, to be clear, the things you would have to do in order to save are, sounds like, not have kids?"

"You can have kids. You can't have five," Singletary replied.

House? "Not too big."

Can you go out to eat at restaurants? "You can every once in a while. You're not gonna be taking a $5,000 cruise, no."

"You essentially have to ignore every cue from our culture, every commercial on TV?"

"My husband and I keep our cars until we're on a first-name basis with the local tow truck drivers," Singletary laughed. "And we don't care!"

That's the sort of thing Susan Emmerson might do. She remembers telling her accountant, "'I'm gonna save half of my income.' He said, 'No, you're not. Don't give me that.' And I said, 'Watch me.'"

Before retiring at age 47, she kept close tabs on everything she spent, and we do mean EVERYTHING. In her little notebook she wrote down every expenditure, even a Coke.

calling-it-quits-susan-emmerson-promo.jpg
Frugality helped Susan Emmerson quit her career as a physician at age 47, to take up a second calling: art.   SUSAN EMMERSON
Thanks to that tight budget and some savvy investing, Emmerson, now 61, has spent more than a decade pursuing her lifelong passion of art.  To do that, she walked away from a career as a physician. "The best part was turning in the beeper, because they can't get me anymore!" she laughed.

But can someone who isn't earning a doctor or lawyer's income afford to retire early? Singletary said, "Yes, absolutely. Early retirement isn't just for people making six figures. It's you. But it's you making different choices. Your early retirement may not be some big villa in Florida. It may just be a nice two-bedroom condo where you live, and the car that you have had for 20 years."

Emmerson said when she announced her early retirement to her mother, "Oh God, she had a fit! She told her friends that I had gotten sick and had to retire, because that, I guess, seemed like a more acceptable reason to retire."

Legendary football coach Vince Lombardi may help explain her mom's reaction. A famous quote attributed to him is woven deep into the fabric of American culture: "Winners never quit."

Author Seth Godin is the anti-Lombardi; he says quitting is often the best possible move, because it frees us up to thrive where we're better suited.


"We've been brainwashed into thinking that quitting is somehow wrong, it's somehow weak," he said. "If you have a choice between being unemployed for one, two, three years or sticking with a job that's a dead-end, most people are afraid of the unknown, so they will stick with that job."

Dokoupil asked, "We met an individual who quit on his second day of work. Would you advise such a thing?"

"I'm not sure what the difference is between the second day and the 200th day," Godin said. "If I got a job working at a payday loan company, I wouldn't even last two days."

Which brings us back to Bill Murphy Jr. After quitting as a lawyer, he went all-in on a childhood dream: Journalism.

He's now a contributing editor at the publication Inc. "I would not go back. I have no regrets."

And one thing's very clear: He's happy now, having quit his way to a better life.

"I call it the joy of quitting," he said.

"Sell Your Story to Hollywood" Translated into Portuguese!

Purchase at Barnes and Noble 

New From Story Merchant Books: Educating Marston: A Mother and Son's Journey through Austism

LOS ANGELES, CA—Story Merchant Books releases its newest work of nonfiction: Educating Marston: A Mother and Son’s Journey through Autism by Christine Weiss. In 1995, Marston was born five weeks premature but otherwise “fine.” As days turned into weeks (and months), Christine realized her son was not like the other so-called normal kids. With her husband, Dr. Eric Weiss, taking a second job in an ER on the weekends, Christine began her journey of researching and implementing every therapy and treatment out there to help heal Marston’s injured brain.

“Autism wasn’t widely talked about back then, and Facebook (networking) didn’t exist. We were on our own. This memoir is our journey of educating Marston through programs like The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, Vision Therapy, the Tomatis® Method, Marion Blank’s approach to reading, hypotherapy, ballroom dancing, and the list goes on…until we discovered STEM CELL REPLACEMENT THERAPY.” 

In PART II of Educating Marston, Eric Weiss, MD details his history studying stem cells, how they work, and how he put their healing potential to the test with an experimental surgery, and then with Marston.

“For the first few weeks after ‘Gail’s’ surgery, the umbilical cord strips just lay there, neither hurting nor helping her open wounds. We needed more time. Three months later, she walked into
my office for the first time without assistance in years. She was healed. The affected regions contained 95 percent new tissue, and only about 5 percent of her skin had scarring. The umbilical cord stem cells had programmed her body to regenerate healthy skin cells. That’s when we knew stem cells could heal our son—and we had to try.” 

Not only did the Weiss family find a doctor to help Marston, they went on to devote part of Eric’s private practice to administering stem cell transfusions. He’s been treating people for autism, physical traumas, and other diseases and disorders through stem cell replacement therapy since December 2018.

“The pain, obstacles, and victories over the last twenty-four years have brought us one step closer to our son living a life of purpose with as much normalcy as possible. We’ve cracked the glass wall separating us from Marston, but we believe stem cell replacement therapy will ultimately shatter it. NOW, IT’S OUR JOB TO SHARE OUR STORY WITH THE WORLD BECAUSE ONE WIN FOR AUTISM IS A VICTORY FOR US ALL.”

To request a review copy or inquire about an author interview, please email chris@storymerchant.com

Super-Sized Fun Screening of The MEG!

Just in time for Shark Week, a 70-foot prehistoric megalodon shark – let’s call him “The Meg” – will invade the beaches of South Florida.

Think of its as a float-in theater. “The Meg” will play on a 14-foot inflatable screen, floating offshore along the beach near the park’s Oleta River Outdoor Center. Moviegoers at their own (ahem) peril must watch from the beach or from pool floats.

Perhaps only one screening is needed. “The Meg” is essentially “Jaws” on steroids, an over-the-top fin flick featuring a wet-suited Statham hunting a prehistoric monster-fish with a harpoon gun. During one meaty sequence, the Meg chomps its way through a beach resort crowded with bathers in pool floats.

Read more

What You Need to Know About Steve Alten’s ‘Meg’ Series

There are currently seven books in the series: 1997’s awesomely-titled Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror (recently republished with the 2011 e-prequel Meg: Origins), followed by The Trench (the only Megless title, and digitally released as The Trench: Meg 2) in 1999, then Meg: Primal Waters, Meg: Hell’s Aquarium, Meg: Nightstalkers and this summer’s Meg: Generations, and Meg: Purgatory. Alten, a doctorate of sports administration turned voraciously prolific wordsmith, doesn’t appear to have any plans to slow down.

The Meg is loosely based on the first book (excuse me, novel of deep terror) in the series, with Alten cheerfully signing off on the changes to the source material. Here we’ve got new characters, newly named old characters, a no-longer-albino megalodon and an entirely different backstory explaining protagonist Jonas Taylor’s PTSD. But even though the film diverges wildly from the book that inspired it, it might still help you to know the following about Alten’s Meg series before you watch Jason Statham wrestle a giant prehistoric shark on the silver screen.
They’re FunAlten’s writing tends to the prosaic and weirdly sexist (boyyyyy, is Jonas Taylor’s wife a real piece of work! Fortunately, she's been completely updated in the film, as has the book's character Terry, whom Book Jonas derisively calls "Gloria Steinem." The movie is much better about this stuff). But while these books might not be **pushes glasses up nose, over-enunciates** highbrow literature, there’s no denying they're a blast. The chapters fly by, the energy is propulsive and the premises are uniformly intriguing, from Meg’s deep sea dive redemption story to Primal Waters’ daredevil reality TV plot. And Jonas himself is undeniably compelling, the sort of terse, grizzly antihero with a heart that Statham was born to play.
They’re ScaryWhile Alten may not adequately sell romance or profound human sentiment in these books, there’s one emotion he’s very good at generating, and that’s fear. Meg opens with an account of the Meg back in her Late Cretaceous days. A Tyrannosaurus rex stalks a couple of hadrosaurs into the surf when “a six-foot gray dorsal fin rose slowly from the sea, its unseen girth gliding silently across their path.” Soon the T. rex gives up on the hadrosaurs because it has bigger fish to fry, and we’re treated to a completely gnarly T.rex vs. Megalodon battle that ends with this note-perfect sentence:
A moment later the dinosaur surfaced again, drowning in its own body fluids as its rib cage crushed and crumbled within the powerful jaws of its still-unseen hunter, its gushing innards strangling it to death.
GUSHING INNARDS STRANGLING IT TO DEATH. These books rule.
They’re Science-yLook, I’m not a scientist. The only science class I took in college was called “Science For Liberal Arts Majors.” But these books seem very scientific! There’s tons of paleontological speak, a litany of jargon matched only by the lovingly rendered technical specifications of submarines. Alten goes to great lengths to establish that Megs could still exist in the deep recesses of the ocean, of which we know less than we do outer space. He reminds us in Meg’s preface that dead sharks sink, their carcasses eaten and dissolved, and that less than 5% of the world’s oceans, and less than 1 percent of the deep abyss, have been explored. I’m convinced! Megalodons exist and we need Jason Statham to kill them!
They’ll Make GREAT MoviesOne chapter into Meg and I couldn’t wait to see The Meg. Having now flown through the series and cheered my way through the ridiculously fun film, I already can’t wait for any sequels that Hollywood wants to throw our way. This is fun, silly, thrilling stuff, and as big as Carcharodon megalodon feels in my imagination, she's even bigger on that big ol’ screen.
Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror


Read more

On Being An Artist Is Lonely - Dr. Ken Atchity

Check out Story Merchant Kenneth Atchity's Advice to Writers Playlist!

Story Merchant's goal is to discover exciting books and help them reach maximum audiences in all media.  Playlist