Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 23

Why “invoke?”

I remember studying about papal indulgences in Comparative Religion in college. These were documents that the wealthy could purchase from the Church that would guarantee them entrance into heaven, even if their worldly sins had banished them to the back of the line.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

Because we all sense that you can’t buy your way into forgiveness or redemption or love, let alone into the precinct of the Almighty. You can’t command your way, you can’t bribe your way. You can’t make deals with heaven, even though many of us have promised, “God, if you’ll let me off the hook on this one, I’ll never drink/cheat/steal/gorge on donuts again.”

Not the real “Moby Dick” … but close.

That’s why the Prayer to the Muse is just that—a prayer. An invocation.

We come before the goddess in humility. We set aside our vanity. We acknowledge her primacy. We are here not to bug her or importune her or cajole her or con her. We are here to seek her favor.

What does the divinity ask of us?

She asks that we be true to our gift. She asks that we respect it and give its expression everything we’ve got.

She asks that we be willing to sweat.

She asks that we be willing to undergo pain.

She asks consistency and devotion over time.

She asks that we not sell her gifts for profane purposes. (Recall the verse recounting the fate of Odysseus’ men—” … to destroy for meat the oxen of the most exalted Sun, wherefore the Sun god blotted out the day of their return.”)

She asks fidelity.

She asks trust.

She asks love.

When my friend and mentor Paul Rink introduced me to the concept of the Muses, he didn’t make a big deal out of it. He did better than that. By his posture and his tone of voice, as well as his words, he expressed his absolute belief in the goddesses’ reality and in our dependence upon them and our need as artists of deference and respect and reverence toward them. This was, as I’ve said, over morning coffee at the fold-down table in the back of Paul’s camper/pickup “Moby Dick.”

I had never really thought about the words “invoke” or “invocation” before.

Since then, they’ve never left my mind.

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Do you believe in the gods?

Let’s get back today to our subject from a few weeks ago—the Muse.

We were talking about Homer’s Invocation of the Muse at the start of the Odyssey and the Iliad. This was the great poet’s prayer for divine assistance as he set about creating his masterworks.

Mount Olympus in Greece

Here’s another (slightly lesser but still very interesting) example of the same principle. It’s from Xenophon’s short treatise The Cavalry Commander. I cited it in The War of Art, page 103.

The first duty is to sacrifice to the gods and pray them to grant you the thoughts, words, and deeds likely to render your command most pleasing to the gods and to bring yourself, your friends, and your city the fullest measure of affection and glory and advantage. 

The ancients really believed in the gods. It wasn’t a joke or a quaint exercise to them. The historical records cite numerous occasions upon which the Spartan army (to cite one example) marshaled, armed, provisioned itself, and marched off to battle, only to reach the frontier of their territory, offer sacrifice, and discover that the omens were bad.

They turned around and marched home. Not once. Many times.

Most of us have read the Iliad in college. We remember Achilles and Hector and Odysseus and all the spearing and hacking and fighting. What we often forget is that in Homer’s tale, the Olympian gods were everywhere on that field of battle. Athena routinely batted arrows and spears out of the air to protect the mortal warriors she favored. Thetis, the Nereid goddess mother of Achilles, soared to Olympus to plead with Zeus on her son’s behalf. Aphrodite produced a great mist on the battlefield to save her favorite, the Trojan prince Paris.

Crazy, isn’t it? It’s 2021. We all know the gods don’t exist—and certainly not these colorful and charming but ultimately preposterous Olympian deities.

Or do they?

I myself recite Homer’s prayer every morning before I sit down to work. And you know what? 

It works.

Maybe “the goddess” isn’t a female entity gowned in a white peplos who zips back and forth between her home in the clouds above Mount Helikon and Mount Olympus and your house and mine. 

But SOMETHING exists … and that mysterious something has SOMETHING to do with the ideas and impulses that come to you and me as we labor to produce our work.

The ancients anthropomorphized. They gave human faces and names to these occult and unknowable forces. That can seem kinda silly to our modern minds.

All I know is SOMETHING is “out there” (or possibly “in here,” inside us.) And that something is positively, actively, intelligently engaged in assisting us in our enterprise as artists. Just like Athena and Aphrodite and Thetis on “the plain of windy Troy,” these unknowable entities intercede on our behalf and guide us on our way.

They are real and they haven’t lost a step.

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The Understory in “Lawrence of Arabia”

What is Lawrence of Arabia REALLY about? And how does this deeper story inform and shape the surface drama of the film? 

Anthony Quinn, Peter O’Toole, and Omar Sharif in “Lawrence of Arabia”

Let’s start with the very first scene after the opening credits. We meet Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) as an obscure English army lieutenant in an office in the basement (not an accident!) of Allied headquarters in Cairo. It’s World War I in the Middle East and Lawrence is as far away from the action as it’s possible to get.  (In other words, Lawrence’s circumstances when we first encounter him are a lot like those of Luke Skywalker on the desert planet Tattooine.) 

LAWRENCE

Here is William Potter with my newspaper!

In comes a corporal. He hands the paper, which is in Arabic, to Lawrence. Lawrence scans a headline, translating aloud. “Bedouin tribes attack Turkish stronghold.” 

LAWRENCE

I’ll bet there’s no one in the whole of this headquarters who even knows this has happened. Or would care if he did.  

What Lawrence of Arabia is REALLY about is the challenge and heartbreak of being a Man of Destiny, an Extraordinary Man. 

The war, the Arab revolt, the fate of the Middle East …  these are important and dramatic and colorful. But they are ultimately only the background against which the deeper story plays out. The director, David Lean, and the writers, Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson, establish this theme right here at the film’s beginning. Lawrence, though obscure and without influence in the army, not only reads Arabic (we can be pretty sure none of the British generals do) but is already alert to the possibility, undreamt of among the upper ranks, of a Bedouin revolt that might affect and even determine the outcome of the war in this theater. 

The filmmakers seed dozens of other “extraordinary man” beats throughout the story.

DRYDEN (CLAUDE RAINS)

Only two kinds of creatures get fun in the desert—Bedouin and gods … and you’re neither.

LAWRENCE

No, Dryden. It’s going to be fun.

DRYDEN

It is recognized that you have a funny sense of fun.

The writers and David Lean set a counter-theme against this idea of Lawrence’s personal extraordinariness and the thought of the Extraordinary Man shaping history. This is the Koranic concept, voiced throughout the film by numerous Bedouin characters including Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif) and Auda Abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn) by the phrase, “It was written.” Meaning that God alone, or Fate or Destiny, determines the outcome of events. Lawrence of course rejects this.

LAWRENCE

Nothing is written.

And his incredible feats—crossing the uncrossable Nefud desert, capturing the uncapturable Turkish port of Aqaba, etc.—seem to bear this out.

SHERIF ALI

Truly, for some men, nothing is written unless they write it themselves.

What’s fascinating to me about the filmmakers’ choices is that, in the end, the narrative they craft (which they could have shaped in any number of other ways) cedes the case that Fate is the ultimate decider. Events as they unfold, including Lawrence’s destiny, apparently were “written.” Lawrence, for all his vision and genius and charisma, can’t seem to escape his own fate … or that of the Arab kingdoms in that era.

What makes this movie so great (in my opinion it’s #1 all-time), above and beyond the scale and majesty of its production, beyond its writing and acting and directing, is the depth of its Understory—the power of what the story is REALLY about.

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The Understory

We were talking last week about Steve Jobs’ two questions to his peeps at Apple. First question: “What business are we in?” Second: “What business are we REALLY in?”

From this idea we extrapolated two questions about our own writing. #1: What is our story about? #2: What is it REALLY about?

I keep a file (among a hundred others) for each story I work on. I call it UNDERSTORY.

What I’m hoping to lay out in this file is what the story is REALLY about. In other words, the story within and underneath the story.

In Star Wars, for example, the story, as I see it, really isn’t about the galactic rebellion or the fate of the Death Star or even Luke and Leia and Han Solo’s external adventures. What the story is REALLY about is Luke Skywalker’s inner passage–his self-initiation or “hero’s journey” from Lost Boy to Jedi knight.

Luke’s passage from Lost Boy to Jedi knight is what the first “Star Wars” is REALLY about

On a deeper level, of course, the story is about you and me—and our own journeys in this same interior sphere.

This understory is, in my opinion, what audiences related to so powerfully and what to this day makes the Star Wars franchise unstoppable.

So what’s the specific understory? If we were writing a parallel script to the actual surface screenplay, what “scenes” would it contain? How would this companion script intersect with the actual screenplay?

My short version:

1. Luke at the story’s start on Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s evaporator farm. How does he view his status on this remote orb? “If there’s a bright center to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.” In other words, the extreme periphery from which Luke’s odyssey begins.

2. Luke’s instinctive skill with his “speeder” — the hovercraft-style hot rod he zips around the desert planet Tattooine in. 

3. The idea that Luke’s father (whose identity he doesn’t knnw) was a Jedi knight. In other words, in combination with #2 above, Luke possesses the bloodlines and the native spirit to live out his destiny. 

4. Various scenes and intersections with Obi-Wan Kenobi, specifically all the lessons that this mentor imparts concerning “the Force.”  (We could also make the case that the even-deeper story of Star Wars is the battle between the two sides of the Force.) 

5. Clashes with Darth Vader, specifically this villain’s attempted seduction of Luke to the Dark Side.

6. Death (or willful vanishing into the Force) of Obi-Wan Kenobi. In other words, a moment after which Luke is on his own to decide his own fate. 

7. Climactic battle against the Death Star. Obi-Wan’s spirit appears to Luke as he propels his X-wing fighter into the heart of the Empire’s most evil weapon. “Trust the Force, Luke.” 

These to me are (some of) the primary beats of the understory of the first Star Wars—-the depiction of Luke Skywalker’s passage to initiation (or self-initiation) as a Jedi knight.

We could change every other specific in the story, replace Princess Leia with another character, alter Han Solo’s relationship with Luke, etc. But we must retain these beats or others like them as our understory. They are Luke’s hero’s journey. That are what the story is REALLY about.

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What Business Are We In?

I heard a story about Steve Jobs. They say he used to roam the campus at Apple sometimes, poking his head into random offices and cubicles. He’d ask people, “What business are we in?” and listen attentively to whatever answer he got.

 Then he’d ask, “What business are we REALLY in?”

I love that. From the moment I heard it, I began incorporating it into my own process for working on a book.

I ask myself, first, “What is this novel (or piece of nonfiction) about?”

I let myself answer.

Then I ask, “What is it REALLY about?”

I’m trying to get to theme.

Deep theme.

Almost always, the answer to the second question will take me to a level well below consciousness, meaning the consciousness of the characters in the story (or of the reader’s consciousness if we’re talking about nonfiction.)

What is Game of Thrones really about?

What is Mare of Easttown really about?

What is Grand Theft Auto really about?

I imagine Steve Jobs was looking for an answer way beyond computers or smartphones or even tech in general. I think he wanted to hear something about human consciousness or the spiritual evolution of the species.

You and I as artists have to dig just as deeply.

To say that our story is about courage or honor or redemption is not enough. That may be what the piece is about. But it’s not what it’s REALLY about.

What is your story REALLY about?

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Recommended by Mister H.

We spoke last week about the Invocation of the Muse from Homer’s Odyssey [translation by T.E. Lawrence] … and the tattered copy of that prayer that I still have (and still recite each morning) from my dear friend and mentor, Paul Rink.

Today let’s talk about the composer of that prayer, the epic poet Homer. Who was he anyway? And why should we pay attention to anything he did or said?

Homer is the author (though of course his works were originally meant to be sung or recited orally) of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Are there two greater works in the Western canon? Does Western Civ in its entirety not derive, pretty much on every level, from these two sagas? Would not Shakespeare himself pass the prize of honor to Mister H?

The Spartans believed that the Iliad was the only work that their young men, and probably young women as well, needed to know to complete their educations as citizens. All wisdom and ethics were, they believed, contained therein.

Alexander the Great slept with a copy of the Iliad—annotated by his tutor, Aristotle— beneath his pillow. 

Brad Pitt as Achilles in “Troy”

As for the Odyssey, it was and remains the archetypal “hero’s journey” saga of Western civilization. A case could be made that virtually every drama, novel, epic, comedy and even videogame and hip-hop song descends from this single document and follows the structure and narrative principles it embodies.

We can safely declare, I believe, that Homer knew what he was talking about. 

So what does it mean that he started the Odyssey with the Invocation of the Muse that we cited (and wrote out in its entirety) last week?

Was Homer serious? Was he truly invoking the aid of the goddess as he embarked on his great opus? Or was this just a literary trope, a style of intro, a formality without real meaning?

I can’t prove it but I believe Homer meant every word. I think he was expressing a universal truth that all writers and artists know—that they, the artists, are not the true authors of the works they produce but that the narrative or visual image or music comes through them from some source they cannot define or locate and whose very existence they cannot prove. Homer, like his fellow Hellenes, anthropomorphized this source. He gave it a face and a name. He addressed it as “Divine Poesy, goddess, daughter of Zeus.”

Homer did the same in the opening verses of his other great work, the Iliad.

Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Achilles, Peleus’ son, which brought pains thousandfold upon the Achaeans, hurling in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls of heroes …

In last week’s post, I wrote about my friend Paul Rink typing out the Invocation and giving it to me as a kind of blessing or benediction upon my fledgling career. Like Homer, Paul believed that it only made sense, before we as artists sat down to work, that we take a moment to show respect for the mysterious (female) force that we hoped would guide and inspire us and that we humbly invoke her favor upon our enterprise.

“If it was good enough for Homer,” Paul said, “it should be good enough for you and me.”

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A Prayer to the Muse

I wrote in The War of Art about my old friend and mentor, Paul Rink. When I lived in Northern California years ago, I used to have coffee every morning with Paul in his camper, “Moby Dick.”

Paul was a writer. He was about thirty years older than I. Learning from Paul was one of the great experiences of my young life. Paul would turn me on to writers I’d never heard of, lecture me on the evils of the marketplace, and tell me stories about Steinbeck and Henry Miller, both of whom he knew.

But the best thing Paul did for me was he introduced me to the idea of the Muses. I had never taken such stuff seriously, but during those years when I was alone all day doing nothing but trying to learn to write, the idea of a mysterious force beyond the material plane began to make a lot of sense. That was all I was doing, day after day, week after week—trying to access the goddess.

Paul had a prayer that he said every morning before he started to work. 

“It’s the Invocation of the Muse, from the very beginning of Homer’s Odyssey, the T.E. Lawrence translation. I’ll type it out so you’ll have it.”

I still have that page that Paul banged out for me on his manual Remington atop the little formica tabletop in the back of his camper. Here’s a photo.

My Prayer to the Muse, still hanging in there

The typing is so faded it’s barely legible. You can see where the page has disintegrated into four parts. Sometimes wind will blow the parts off my desk. I can’t tell when I put them back together if I’m even getting them in the right order.

I say this prayer myself every morning before I sit down to work, just like Paul did.

            O divine Poesy!

            Goddess, daughter of Zeus,

            Sustain for me this song of the various-minded man,

            who, after he had plundered the innermost citadel

            of hallowed Troy, was made to stray grievously

about the coasts of men,

            the sport of their customs, good and bad,

            while his heart, through all the seafaring,

            ached with an agony to redeem himself 

            and bring his company safe home.

            Vain hope! For them! For his fellows he strove in vain.

            By their own witlessness, they were cast aside.

            To destroy for meat the oxen of the most exalted Sun,

            wherefore the sun god blotted out the day of their return.

            Make this tale live for us in all its many bearings, O Muse!

A couple of days ago I exchanged emails with a lady named Francesca Mihok. She told me that her mother had translated and written out the identical prayer, but in Greek, on brown mailing wrappers that Francesca taped together and kept on her wall as a source of connection to her mom. 

Francesca’s Prayer, translated and written out by her mother

“I carried this hanging with me,” Francesca wrote, “not knowing what it said till I met a university student who was studying Ancient Greek and she said it was the opening to the Odyssey. I am floored!”

More on this prayer and its meaning in the coming weeks.

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Francis Ford Coppola on Re-writing

I was having breakfast the other morning with D.B. Sweeney, the actor/writer/producer. He told me a story about working with Francis Ford Coppola that was funny and charming and loaded with writing wisdom.

This was from 1986, when D.B. had been picked by Coppola to play the leading role of Jackie Willow in Gardens of Stone, with James Caan, Anjelica Huston, and James Earl Jones.

(To refresh our memories, Francis Ford Coppola won a screenwriting Oscar for “Patton” and two more for “The Godfather I” and “The Godfather II.” He has won six Academy Awards in all.)

[image error]D.B. Sweeney in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Gardens of Stone”

During the rehearsal process, D.B. began to get to know the great writer/director. Here’s D.B.’s account, from an email he sent me a few days ago.

With Francis, family style meals are everything. So after an intimate cast dinner, he retreats from the table and finds a big chair to thumb the film script. After a bit I wander over and ask if he’s thinking of changing anything in it. Sensing my unease and perhaps trying to diminish the mountain of intimidating elements I was facing, he starts chatting. He asks me about my theater work, knew I’d directed some things. Finally he asks me what I thought was wrong with the script, which had been adapted from a novel.

I said I’m no expert, but it seems a  little talky. He liked that answer, said he agreed and then said “I’m going to teach you had to do a full production re-write.” He took a piece of paper and wrote “Page 99” at the top. Then he wrote “The End” at the bottom. “You write a script front to back but you re-write it back to front.” And he proceeds to furiously scrawl the key plot events in reverse order. “If it’s not directly tied to these things, it goes.”

Coppola’s shooting draft was much tighter than the original script and then in the edit phase he made big changes again. When I did a voiceover narration after he finished the assembly he said, “You really write three movies. The script everybody signs on for, the movie you shoot, and then the one you create in the editing room.”  

[image error]Francis Ford Coppola

Page 99 is shorthand for the final page of any screenplay. That’s about how long a script should be. In other words, in a rewrite where of course you know how the story ends …

Start at the finish and work backward.

All I can add is, “Thanks, D.B., for telling this great story.” Even the tiniest insight into the mind of a great writer or filmmaker—or in Francis Ford Coppola’s case, both—is priceless.

“You write a script front to back but you re-write it back to front.”

 

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Be a Pro for one hour

When I used to work a forty-hour-a-week job and could only write in my spare time, I often thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could write full-time … instead of squeezing in an hour here and an hour there?”

Guess what? I am writing full-time and it’s true … I can still only squeeze in an hour here and an hour there.

[image error]Even Hemingway had to get up at dawn to find time to write.

My friend “David” is a bestselling thriller writer. His work schedule is even more screwed up than mine. He has a wife and three kids. He’s active in politics, he works for charities, he has networks of friends he mentors and assists … 

Between podcasts (some where he’s the guest, others where he’s the host) and promotional activities, ZOOM calls, talks, recording sessions, consulting on a TV series being made from his books, co-branding with various products he endorses, etc. etc., David is lucky if he can find an hour a day to actually sit down and write.

And because he’s on the road half the year, most of that writing time takes place at tables in Starbucks or Peet’s or The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.

In other words, the full-time-artist’s life is not that different from yours and mine.

I’ll bet it’s the same for filmmakers and choreographers, comedians, actors, photographers, not to mention start-up entrepreneurs, non-profit CEOs, and deep-sea-diving camerawomen filming great while sharks off the coast of Australia.

Let us be of good cheer then.

Even if we’re working a full-time job, waitressing, driving an Uber, juggling kids and ex-husbands and all the other heartaches and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, we’re in the same boat with many, many full-time, big-name professional artists and entrepreneurs.

They don’t have any more time than we do. Therefore, let us take courage. Let us resolve:

We can be pros for an hour a day.

(Maybe even two hours.) 

We can carve out the time just like the heavy hitters do.

We can be full-time writers for an hour a day.

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It Ain’t Stealing if it Twists

We’ve been examining over the past few posts how the disparate story elements came together into the finished product that became A Man at Arms. Last week we talked about a “Vulnerable Character”— specifically the mute, feral young girl, Ruth—and how she proved to be the emotional heart of the story.

Today let’s talk about stealing.

I’m a big believer in stealing. I stole the structure for The Legend of Bagger Vance from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. I can’t tell you how many other tales I’ve shamelessly ripped off. But as my old mentor Zoltan Medvecky once told me, “It ain’t stealing if you put a twist on it.”

 What did I steal from for A Man at Arms?

Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn in “True Grit”

  Three movies:

 Paper Moon.

True Grit.

 And Logan.

(I could add News of the World, except I hadn’t seen it as a film before I started on A Man at Arms … though I had read the book.)

In all four of these stories, the male protagonist is a self-centered, ego-identified (often hard-bitten) loner. In other words, he fits the mold of the classic Western hero we talked about two posts ago as the central figure in this drama. 

In all four stories, the dynamic between the craggy, embittered Old Guy and the young Vulnerable Girl is a version of Father/Daughter.

In all four, the male makes his primal moral choice in the climax … and sides with/rescues/give his life for the girl.

I thought, Hell yeah, that’s a dynamic that works.

That’s A Man at Arms.

Further studying these four stories, I asked myself, “What is it about these youthful heroines that breaks through to the Crusty Old Guy’s heart?” In all cases, two elements seem to be primary.

One, moxie. The girl shows herself on multiple occasions to have tremendous spirit and unstoppable guts. In other words, though she technically is “vulnerable” in the sense of being small, young, unskilled in weaponry, and without material resources, in all cases she more than makes up for this in courage, resourcefulness, and “true grit.”

Two (and most important), love.

The girl-children in all four of these stories clearly and demonstrably come to love their paternal counterparts. That love may be prickly and feisty and often expressed in less-than-sweet ways. But it’s real. And it’s that love that produces the reciprocal response in the Craggy Old Guy.

I used these four stories as models for A Man at Arms. I borrowed their beats and their rhythms and their climaxes. 

I just put an ancient-world/post-Crucifixion/Telamonian twist on them.

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