Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 25

“A Man at Arms” as a Western

We’ve been talking in the past few posts about the evolution of A Man at Arms from its shaky, unclear inception—and how one narrative element led to another until we had a fully-formed, living and breathing story.

We started with a potential hook (the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Corinthians), identified this as the McGuffin (the item that the villain wants), added a villain (the Romans in first-century Judea) and a hero (the solitary mercenary, Telamon of Arcadia).

What’s next?

How about genre?

This one was easy. I sensed immediately that A Man at Arms was a Western (even though it is set in the ancient world). 

I consider “Seven Samurai” a Western.

Before we address the question, “Why is A Man at Arms a Western?” let’s identify the elements of a Western, with emphasis on the Western hero. Think John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson in Mad Max or Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson, or any samurai in any samurai movie. 

The Western hero is almost always a loner. 

He is a man of violence—a gunslinger, a master swordsman, a formidable fighter with any weapon  (I include the character of John Wick in this roster and would classify John Wick movies as Westerns). 

The Western hero is a man with a past. Almost always this is a past that has scarred him and driven him to become the solitary, wary individual he is when we encounter him. In many classic American Westerns, the death and destruction of the Civil War is the past that haunts the hero.  I would call Bogey in Casablanca a Western hero. The past that has wounded him is Paris and, before that, his experiences in the Spanish Civil War.

A Western hero is almost always a man with a code. Though the Western hero is typically a master of weaponry, he is not a beast or a savage. He has a personal conception of honor, often eccentric but deeply-felt nonetheless.

The Western hero exists in a landscape beyond the law. The American West, post-apocalyptic Australia, ronin-era Japan. When the nearest marshal is two days’ ride away, the inhabitants of this “world of the story” must themselves decide what is right and what is wrong. The Western hero, because of his fighting skills, is often the central figure (think Shane, The Searchers, The Book of Eli, Unforgiven) in this drama.

Denzel Washington. “The Book of Eli” is a Western.

When I laid this Western template over the embryonic bones of A Man at Arms, I said to myself, “Check, check, check, check and check.”

The wilderness of Sinai, across which the action-chase will take place, would fit perfectly as the Land Beyond the Law. We have Romans and Arabs and bandit tribes to serve as the Bad Establishment, the Outlaws, etc. And we have Telamon, who could easily stand beside Clint Eastwood, Gary Cooper or Toshiro Mifune.

Westerns, like all other genres, have conventions and obligatory scenes. Reckoning, then, that A Man at Arms is a Western, I can pretty safely speculate that the story will need  

An initial “shootout” to establish our hero’s formidability

Some kind of chase across a wilderness

A series of set-piece clashes, escalating as the story progresses

and

 An ultimate mano-a-mano “gunfight” between the hero and the villain.

I can also conjecture (see Stagecoach, Shane, Unforgiven, Seven Samurai, The Road Warrior, The Wild Bunch) that I’ll need a colorful and wildly-diverse troupe of supporting characters who will participate with Telamon in this adventure.

Lastly, we’ll need at least one character (and possibly more) whose dilemma and vulnerability will force our Western hero, Telamon, to choose in the climax between his own selfish ends and the needs of the greater community. See Casablanca, True Grit, The Wild Bunch, Logan, Shane, High Noon, The Searchers, Seven Samurai, News of the World.

Genre, to me, is like the master key to a story, particularly at the very beginning when we’re trying to figure out what we’ve got and how it might be made to work. 

If I can identity what type of story I have … many, many unknowns and imponderables fall effortlessly into place.

The post “A Man at Arms” as a Western first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

The Hero in “A Man at Arms”

In our previous two posts, we examined several embryonic elements as they came together at the inception of an idea for a novel. 

First, we said that we had the idea of using the historically-real letter from Paul the Apostle to the fledgling Christian community at Corinth as an “atomic bomb” of the ancient world, in the sense that its dissemination across the Roman empire could provoke insurrection and worse. That was Element #1 in the genesis of A Man at Arms.

The model for our hero?

Second, we identified this letter as what Alfred Hitchcock used to call “the McGuffin,” i.e. the item that the villain wants. In this case, the villain would be the Romans. Their aim, as the dominant military and political force in the ancient world, would be to stop this letter from reaching its destination—to destroy it and its courier.

So far so good.

We’ve got a Villain. We’ve got a World of the Story (Jerusalem and Judea in the first century CE). And we’ve got a McGuffin. 

What’s next?

How about a hero? I happen to have a character—the solitary mercenary Telamon of Arcadia—that I’ve featured in three earlier books (Tides of War, The Virtues of War, and The Profession) and whom I’d love to bring back in a fourth.

Why not him?

What I love about Telamon (and what fascinates me as he evolves of his own volition on the page) is that he seems, on the surface, to be utterly amoral (he fights, he says, only for money) yet it’s clear from his conversation that he possesses a highly-evolved and passionately-held code of honor. Who exactly is this guy? He reminds me of Bogart in Casablanca or Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Josey Wales. He could be a criminal or he could be a saint.

In other words, Telamon is the perfect antipodal element to conflict with and react to the divinely-inspired content of Paul’s letter.

Charity beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things. endureth all things ….

For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part, but then shall I know even as I am known.

If conflict is the soul of drama, then inserting the hard-boiled Telamon into a tale whose central element is a document that will become, in historical reality, the book of the New Testament called 1 Corinthians, we as storytellers could have the makings of a cracking good tale. 

To recap: in the evolution of this story (so far in its early, unformed stages), we don’t yet have a plot. We don’t have a theme. We don’t have a climax. We don’t have subsidiary characters. We don’t have any specific scenes.

But we do have a Hero, a Villain, a World and Time, and a McGuffin.

That ain’t bad.

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The McGuffin in “A Man at Arms”

We’ve talked in earlier posts about “the McGuffin,” i.e. the item or person that the villain wants. Let’s examine this today in terms of the genesis of A Man at Arms.

First, some examples to refresh your memory.

The McGuffin in Casablanca is the letters of transit.

The McGuffin in Raiders of the Lost Ark is the Ark of the Covenant.

In Pulp Fiction, it’s the mysterious briefcase.

Can you identify the McGuffin in this scene?

Okay … back to A Man at Arms.

A couple of posts ago, I wrote about the story breakthrough for me of conceiving of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the fledgling Christian community at Corinth (first century C.E.) as a dire political and psychological threat to the Roman Empire. I thought, This letter, when widely disseminated, could incite insurrection and worse. The Romans could not let this happen. They would move heaven and earth to intercept the letter and destroy it.

In other words, Paul’s letter is the McGuffin in A Man at Arms.

You may scoff at such formula-ish thinking. But trust me, nothing helps a writer more than to identify a specific story element like this McG and understand its import for the narrative.

Alfred Hitchcock, who coined the term McGuffin, famously declared that a McGuffin can be “anything at all.” It doesn’t have to have meaning for the story in any narrative sense. All it must be is SOMETHING that the villain is after.

But how much better is it when our McGuffin does mean something? How much more powerful when it’s on-theme, when it reinforces the story’s meaning, and, even better, when it comes to the fore in the climax?

Consider Casablanca and the letters of transit—possibly the greatest McGuffin ever.

First, the movie’s tension revolves around getting out of the city of Casablanca, escaping from the Nazis and reaching safety in Lisbon. Letters of transit? Check.

Second, the theme of the movie is selfish desires versus acting for the good of the greater community. Our hero, Bogey, controlling the letters of transit? Check.

Third, the climax. The central element is the letters of transit. Will Bogey use them for himself and Ingrid Bergman, for his own selfish ends? In the audience we believe so. Bogey has said as much straight out in an earlier scene.. 

But wait! In the crucial instant, our hero hands the letters to Ingrid to help her escape with her husband while he, Bogey, stays behind to fight the Nazis.

BOGEY

(to Ingrid)

Inside of us, we both know you belong with Victor. You’re part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.

When I considered my own letter—the one from the Apostle Paul to the community at Corinth—I thought, This is almost as perfect.

First, the epistle is world famous. Its text is the book in the New Testament that we know as 1 Corinthians.

Second, its content is spot-on to the story’s theme.

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up; doth not behave itself unseemly …

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I thought as a child, I understood as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

And now abideth faith, hope, and charity; these three. But the greatest of these is charity.

Third and last, I knew I could use the letter in the climax. It would work like the letters of transit in Casablanca, only better because the actual poetic content would be the engine of completing the story. It was just a matter of figuring out how.

The post The McGuffin in “A Man at Arms” first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

The Genesis of “A Man at Arms”

My niece Meredith was getting married. She asked me to be the officiant.

My first move was to page through The Book of Common Prayer, seeking appropriate Biblical passages. A few leapt out at once.

Love beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things …

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal …  

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things …

I started here …

I loved all these. I remembered them from childhood. I thought they were not just superb poetry but also spiritual precepts of the highest order. Then I realized (how could I have not known this?) that all these passages came from the same source—Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, the book in the New Testament known as 1 Corinthians.

Meredith got married. Two years passed. I forgot about this and never thought of it again.

Then one day I had a flash: “This letter of Paul’s was a real letter. It was really sent from the Apostle to the fledgling Christian community at Corinth in Greece. It was meant to fortify the beleaguered believers, who were under attack from all sides. The letter was intended to strengthen their faith in the face of life-and-death persecution and adversity.”

I thought, “What if the Romans tried to stop this letter?”

“Surely,” I said to myself, “the masters of the ancient world feared the rise of this new and revolutionary faith. In many ways, the Apostle Paul’s letter was the atomic bomb of its time. If its ideas were allowed to spread and take root, the result could be empire-wide insurrection and much more. Surely Rome and her invincible legions would stop at nothing to intercept this epistle and destroy it.”

Suddenly I had the germ of a story. But so much was still missing. What could come next?

… and finished here.

A few years earlier I had written a nonfiction book called The Lion’s Gate. It was about the Six Day War, the 1967 Arab-Israeli clash whose centerpieces were the infantry struggle for Jerusalem and the air and tank battles of the Sinai desert. I spent nine weeks in Israel, interviewing pilots and tankers, recon scouts and infantry soldiers. By the time I was done, I felt like I knew Jerusalem, the coastal plain, and the Sinai desert by heart.

But other forces were pulling on my attention. Again I forgot about this and moved on. Then one day, musing about this potential new story, it hit me that I could use this Holy Land geography as the setting for an action chase story—Jerusalem, with its Antonia Fortress, garrisoned by the infamous Tenth Legion; Gaza and the coastal plain as the first places to which fugitives might escape; and the Sinai wilderness as a desolate and forbidding “land beyond the law,” across which our heroes (whoever they might be) could flee, pursued by Roman columns and cavalry and every other bad guy I could think of.

Now I had some action. The story was gaining momentum in my head.

More on this next week.

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Lawrence of Arabia’s Private Moment

Can you stand one more post about Private Moments?

This one may be the greatest of all, at least in cinema. It comes from David Lean’s classic, Lawrence of Arabia. This moment is the final scene, immediately before the closing credits, and it’s the payoff of the whole movie.

Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia

First, a little setup to establish the moment in context.

Lawrence of Arabia begins with T.E. Lawrence’s death. The sequence plays under the Opening Titles. We see a youngish man, clearly Lawrence, mounting a powerful motorcycle and starting off into the English countryside. Lawrence accelerates. Faster. Faster. Till he’s traveling so fast—and on a dangerous, twisting, narrow lane—that we start to think, “Is this guy trying to kill himself?” 

Sure enough, Lawrence loses control. The bike crashes. He is killed. 

Now the story begins, told in flashback. Here’s the short version:

Lawrence, as a young army lieutenant in the Egyptian/Arabian theater during WWI, becomes involved with a rising of Arab Bedouin tribes. He literally takes over, becomes the charismatic commander of what will come to be known as the Arab Revolt. Lawrence falls in love with the Bedouin and they fall in love with him. Together, armed only with rifles and operating only as camel-mounted mobile forces, they achieve incredible victories against the Turks, capped off by the capture of Damascus, ahead even of Gen. Allenby’s mechanized, modern Allied army.

But …

Throughout this extraordinary adventure, Lawrence’s aim has been to “win freedom” for the Arabs. His dream is to bring into being an independent Arabian state. But the Brits and the French have other plans. The secret Sikes-Picot Agreement divides the post-war Middle East between the European victors, England and France, for their own selfish purposes (read: oil). The Arabs are cut out.

Worse for Lawrence’s inner anguish, he himself has been a party to this betrayal … if not consciously and deliberately, then passively and with private awareness.

BRITISH DIPLOMAT DRYDEN (CLAUDE RAINS)

(to Lawrence)

If I’ve told lies, you’ve told half-lies. And the man who tell lies, like me, merely conceals the truth. But the man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it.

In other words, the movie ends with Lawrence riven with guilt and anguish, considering himself a traitor to the people and the cause he has loved with all his heart.

Now to the Private Moment:

The campaign in the desert is over. The Bedouin fighters, outfoxed by their European allies, withdraw to their tribal fastnesses. Lawrence himself, now a colonel, is ordered home.

In this final scene, he is being driven in an open-top military Rolls-Royce to the port (Haifa? Port Said?) from which he will take ship to England. The Rolls speeds along a desert track. The driver is a sergeant of some kind. Lawrence sits beside him in the front seat.

The driver sounds his klaxon horn as the Rolls overtakes a group of camel-mounted Bedouin. These veer off the road at the vehicle’s speeding approach. Lawrence rises in his seat in alarm and concern for the Arab warriors. His glance tracks them as they skitter off the track. What had been, only days earlier, a brilliant and victorious force of desert raiders now seems like a gaggle of impoverished and forlorn nomads.

Lawrence resumes his seat, silent, in obvious distress and consternation. His sergeant driver, oblivious to Lawrence’s chagrin, attempts to make cheerful small talk.

DRIVER

Going home!

LAWRENCE

What?

DRIVER

Home, sir! Going home!

Lawrence’s expression and posture portray deepening despondency.

The sound of a fast-moving engine strikes Lawrence’s hearing. He turns in his seat as, from the road behind the Rolls, a dispatch courier appears, moving fast.

The courier booms past the Rolls and accelerates swiftly out of sight.

Lawrence’s gaze follows the rider intently.

The rider is mounted on a motorcycle.

FADE OUT.

END OF MOVIE.

In the audience in this instant, we can’t help but flash back to the film’s opening sequence. Did Lawrence take his own life in that motorcycle crash? Was this private moment in the desert the genesis of that impulse?

Let’s return to our original definition:

A private moment, in a movie or a book, is a scene where a character (usually the lead, but not always) is alone with his or her thoughts. It’s a contemplative moment. It’s in a minor key. Almost always there’s no dialogue. Everything is communicated by facial expression, body language, or action. Often this is extremely subtle.

This moment in the final scene of Lawrence of Arabia qualifies on all counts. More importantly, it’s not a minor or peripheral moment. It’s the personal and moral climax of Lawrence’s entire interior journey. And it works like gangbusters.

All  this is achieved despite (actually because of) no dialogue, no action, and with only the most nuanced of facial expression, posture, and body language. The effect is achieved entirely by the emotional content of the scene and by its chronological and sequential placement within the narrative, i.e. as the bookend payoff to its corollary scene at the start of the film.

SIDE NOTE: this private moment may or may not be true to the historical Lawrence. In fact, the moment is a creation of screenwriters Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson and director David Lean, drawing from history and from source material (Seven Pillars of Wisdom and other writings) of T.E. Lawrence himself.

Historical pieces are tricky. Whose truth are we receiving? History’s (whatever that may be)? Or the artists depicting and re-creating (see Shakespeare, Homer, Dickens) history?

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Show ’em where the bullets strike

I never realized till I worked on movie sets that it’s not the director who shoots most of the action stuff. It’s the Second Unit Director. (Not always, but most of the time.)

The Second Unit Director often comes up via the stuntman/stunt coordinator/stunt choreographer route. Here’s something I learned one day from one of these gentlemen.

Always show ‘em where the bullets strike.

He was filming a shoot-out in a warehouse. Two good guys vs. ten bad guys. Pistols, machine guns, high falls, squibs of blood … hundreds of different camera set-ups. “How do you keep it all in your head?” I asked.

The Second Unit Director showed me a shot list that looked like War and Peace. Everything had been thought out and mapped out.

Bad Guy #6 pops up from the rafters, Good Guy #2 shoots him from below, Bad Guy #6 does a high fall into a dumpster.

But the key item to remember when filming such a sequence, the director said, was

When one guy shoots, always get coverage (meaning film) of where the bullet hits. (Even though, obviously, there is no real bullet.) Otherwise the action looks fake. It looks like you’re cheating. And the audience will see it and know it.

Gwendoline Christie as Brienne of Tarth in “Game of Thrones”

I’ve been binge-watching Game of Thrones lately and the filmmakers violate this principle all the time during the swordfights—to their detriment. Brienne of Tarth will swing her sword, Oathkeeper, and the camera angle will cut to her opponent ducking or falling or parrying … but it won’t be in response to that specific blow. This happens again and again, whether it’s Jon Snow dueling with Dolorous Ed in the yard at Castle Black or even a deep flashback sequence with the young Ned Stark slugging it out with other rival swordsmen.

The result is the fights look fake. I cringed. I kept thinking, “The filmmakers must’ve decided they didn’t have the time or the budget to put the actors (or their stunt doubles) through a really serious fight choreography preparation.”

But the bigger lesson here goes way beyond shootouts and swordfights.

When a character in a book or movie takes an action (or expresses some thought in dialogue), we must see (somewhere, at some time) the consequence of that action or speech.

We must see a reaction.

Maybe the reaction doesn’t come till thirty scenes later, as Tom Courtenay’s actions in 45 Years only pay off with Charlotte Rampling’s reaction in the final twenty seconds of the story. But one way or another, we cannot allow ourselves to portray an action or a speech that just sails off into nowhere and is never heard from again. 

For every action, we must see a reaction.

We have to see where the bullets strike.

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CBS This Morning

The tale of Telamon in A Man at Arms is one I’ll never tire of.

I had the chance to appear on CBS This Morning recently to talk with the hosts about the new novel and my personal journey.

Hope you enjoy it!

Grab your copy of A Man at Arms here.

We are running some exclusive giveaways each week you won’t want to miss.

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Pike decides to die

William Holden plays Pike Bishop, the leader of the “Wild Bunch,” in the 1969 movie of the same name. He has one of the all-time great Private Moments toward the end of the final reel.

Remember we defined a Private Moment this way:

A private moment, in a movie or a book, is a scene where a character (usually the lead, but not always) is alone with his or her thoughts. It’s a contemplative moment. It’s in a minor key. Almost always there’s no dialogue. Everything is communicated by facial expression, body language, or action. Often this is extremely subtle.

The Wild Bunch, directed by Sam Peckinpah from a screenplay by Peckinpah and Walon Green, is about a gang of American outlaws (based loosely on the real-life Hole in the Wall Gang, also mined for cinema in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) who get caught up in politics and war on the Mexican border in 1913. 

William Holden as Pike Bishop in “The Wild Bunch”

To cut directly to the finish. one member of the gang, Angel (Jaime Sanchez) has been captured and is being tortured by the evil generalissimo Mapache (Emilio Fernandez). The last four members of the Bunch—Pike, Dutch, and the Gorch brothers (Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson, Warren Oates)—have been helpless to save Angel in the face of the overwhelming numbers of Mapache’s troops. In fury and guilt, they spend the night with local prostitutes in the village where Mapache’s soldiers are garrisoned.

Morning comes. Heaven only knows if Angel is still alive or, if he is, if he can ever recover from the horrors that Mapache’s men have inflicted upon him.

Here’s Pike/William Holden’s Private Moment:

Pike’s woman of the night is a sweet young mother, not a hardened prostitute. Her infant bawls in a basket beside her; she is clearly just trying to survive. Pike dresses and cinches up his gun belt. From his pocket he takes a few coins. We’ve seen, earlier in the film, that a single silver or gold piece can be worth a small fortune. Pike jiggles the money thoughtfully. He seems to be deciding how much he wants to leave for the young mother. Whatever amount he decides on (in the audience we can’t see precisely), it is apparently, judging by the woman’s reaction, extremely generous—not to say everything he’s got.  

Pike pauses thoughtfully, regarding the young mother and her baby. He seems to come to some grave decision. He tugs his hat on and turns toward the door.

That’s the scene. No dialogue. No further indication of Pike’s interior deliberations. Yet we in the audience know exactly what he is thinking and exactly what decision he has come to.

The next scene is equally powerful. Pike appears in the door of the room next door, where the Gorch brothers, Lyle and Tector, are arguing over payment with the woman they have together spent the night with. All haggling ceases when Pike appears. He meets his comrades’ eyes.

                                    PIKE

                        Let’s go.

Lyle peers hard at Pike. Can his jefe really mean what Lyle thinks he means?

                                    LYLE

                        Why not?

In the bloodbath that follows, all four of our guys are cut down, though not before they put an end to Mapache (who slits Angel’s throat for fun before their eyes) and scores of his soldados.

But the movie has one more private moment for us.

Robert Ryan plays another gunfighter named Deke Thornton. Deke had once been a member of the Bunch but has been compromised (by the imminence of being sent back to Yuma prison, apparently a real hellhole) into leading the pack of miscreants and saddle tramps who have been hired to pursue Pike and his men across the border. 

Deke has always admired and respected Pike. He hates the rotten job he has been forced to take. Now he rides in, late and alone, to come upon the grisly aftermath of the massacre in the village. Deke dismounts. He passes slowly on foot among the bodies until he comes to Pike’s corpse, contorted in death but still partially upright. Pike’s right hand clutches the pistol-type grip of the M2 Browning machine gun that he had been firing when he was killed.

Deke lingers for a long moment. His eyes settle on the Colt single-action revolver in Pike’s holster.

Deke takes it. A gesture of respect. And more. A resolution to live his life as uncompromisingly as Pike has lived his, come what may.

What’s interesting to me about these moments is that each is the culmination of a movie-long process of evolution for the characters who make them. 

When we in the audience see these moments, we can’t help but flash back through the entire film to the various other moments that have set these Private Moments up. It’s a rush to do this. We feel aesthetic pleasure … and even gratitude toward the artists for structuring their story in such a way as to allow us to participate in these emotions. 

This is a work of art delivering the goods.

It’s a private moment for us too.

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Are You Too Scared to Sell Yourself?

I am.

The illustration below is by the renowned and redoubtable Victor Juhasz. It expresses exactly the way I feel when a book is done and it’s time to get out and sell it.

Resistance at Marketing Time

Arrrrrgggh!

For the past few months I’ve been working full-time promoting my just-published novel, A Man at Arms, and I have to tell you … I am waaaay out of my comfort zone. No doubt you guys yourselves are a little pissed-off at me for the various promo e-mails and pop-ups you’ve seen on this blog and in your Inbox, not to mention Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, podcasts, and everything else I can think of.

Here’s how I feel about it. I don’t see it as selfish (though no doubt there are self-interested elements in there.) For me, it’s about fidelity to the book and, especially, to the characters.

There is no worse feeling for a writer or any artist than to see their book, their film, their comedy, their music go out there and die. Or worse, go out into the world and nobody even knows they exist. I’ve experienced it more than once and it’s heartbreaking.

So I’m promoting A Man at Arms. I want its lead character, the solitary mercenary of the ancient world, Telamon of Arcadia, to have his day in the sun. I want the little girl Ruth to get her moment to shine. If readers don’t respond, so be it. I did the best I could. These characters did the best they could.

But what is unforgivable for me as their champion is to let them sink beneath the waves with no one even knowing that they stood up and acted.

So I’m promoting A Man at Arms.

It’s not my natural way. The enterprise is decidedly not in my wheelhouse. But Resistance works its destruction at marketing time too, just as it does in the writing itself. 

I can’t yield to its sabotage of me and of the characters who have come out of me.

So I apologize, you guys, if I’m flogging my stuff to you too blatantly.

But this is the game today. I have to embrace it for my stuff and you do for yours.

We can’t let ourselves be too scared to sell ourselves.

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The Power of a Private Moment

Why is a Private Moment so powerful in a book or movie?

It shouldn’t be, right? There’s no dialogue. Practically no action. Nothing really changes on the screen or the page.

Yet somehow we, as readers or audience, are moved by these scenes. We’re moved, often, more than by any other scene in the book or movie. 

Why?

The answer, I suspect, is that Deep Change (in our real lives as well as in fiction) happens not in clamorous, action-filled moments but in quiet, pensive beats when the human heart, at the finish of a protracted, often unconscious, process of evolution concludes and cements its transformation.

Consider the Private Moments we’ve examined in the past two posts—one with Robert DeNiro in True Confessions, the other with Ryan O’Neal in Paper Moon.

Ryan O’Neal as Moses Pray has his private moment in “Paper Moon”

DeNiro as Monsignor Desmond Spellacy realizes that the course of life he has followed—that of being the wheeler-dealer right-hand man of his diocese’s powerful cardinal—is ultimately empty and even corrupt. If he doesn’t change, he will lose his soul.

Ryan O’Neal as Moses Pray realizes in his Private Moment that he truly has come to care for, and even love, the orphaned girl—Addie Loggins, played by his real-life daughter Tatum O’Neal—with whom he has shared adventures on the road over the preceding several weeks. 

In both moments, the character changes radically.

In both, he comes to a life-altering decision.

Both moments are point-of-no-return. From both, there will be no going back.

Both moments represent the culmination of dozens of prior scenes, if not the entire narrative of the drama.

Hemingway famously wrote (in Death in the Afternoon):

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. 

A Private Moment is an iceberg moment. Though literally nothing is happening on the surface (other than, perhaps, a subtle alteration in the character’s expression or posture), what’s going on beneath the waves is monumental.

The interesting thing about Private Moments in the writing of a book or a movie is that they often seem to come as afterthoughts. We haven’t planned them. We don’t have them in our outlines. But something in the process gives us pause. We draw up and say to ourselves, “Something’s missing. There’s a hole in the narrative. The story needs something.“ 

What it needs is a depiction of the actual moment when the character changes. 

And that moment is often quiet, reflective, and internal.

It’s almost always a Private Moment.

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