Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 40

Start Before You’re Ready

We feel a book inside us. It’s there. We see the characters, we feel the structure, we sense the contours. We just need another week/month/semester to get our heads in the right place to begin …

William Hutchison Murray, author of “The Scottish Himalayan Expedition”

Start before you’re ready.

Forget that week.

Strike that month.

Start now.

Don’t wait till your ducks are in a row. Dive in now.

Why does this seemingly irrational principle work?

Because the sphere of invention operates by different (and higher) laws than that of normal, conventional enterprises.

The Muse works by her timetable, not ours.

When the train leaves the station, you and I had better be on it.

Or consider this corollary:

Go to the station. The train will appear.

Many of the principles that work for us as artists are counter-intuitive. They make no sense in the world of logic and rationality, but they are spot-on in the quantum sphere of creativity. Here is William Hutchison Murray from The Scottish Himalayan Expedition.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.

I quoted this passage in The War of Art seventeen years ago. Its brilliance (and its truth) remains undiminished.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision [to begin], raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.

I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.

Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now!”

That book/screenplay/business venture that we feel inside us? We may think we’re not ready. We’re wrong.

The goddess is at work within us.

Trust her.

Start before you’re ready.

 

 

The First Page

There’s a terrific book that I often recommend to young writers—The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman. Mr. Lukeman is a long-time agent, editor, and publisher. The thrust of his counsel is this:

You gotta come outa the blocks FAST

Most agents and editors make up their minds about submissions within the first five pages. If they spot a single amateur mistake (excess adjectives, “your” instead of “you’re,” “it’s” instead of “its”), your manuscript goes straight into the trash.

Grind on those first five pages, says Mr. Lukeman. Make certain they are flawless.

I would go further. The make-or-break page, to my mind, is Page One. Even more critical: Paragraph One.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness …

The first paragraph, the first sentence is do-or-die. It has to be more than just free of error. It has to kick ass.

All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Those two opening sentences are from A Tale of Two Cities and Anna Karenina. I’ve abbreviated them to show that they still work, even when they’re cut off. A great opening can hook a reader in as few as three words.

Call me Ishmael.

Nor does a riveting opening have to be particularly literary, or display masterful erudition, or inform the reader that the hero of the tale has just woken up to discover that he has been turned overnight into a cockroach.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all that before they had me, and all the David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

I think of Page One as a battlefield or a stage for seduction. The contest is between the writer and the reader.

We have to win that battle, you and I, and we have to win it fast. We have to complete this seduction by Paragraph One, and certainly no later that Paragraph Two.

Here’s one trick. Start at the very beginning of your book and read down till you get to a sentence, or a run of sentences, that possess genuine magic. Then look back at the sentences that precede them. Can these sentences be cut? Cut them!

The legend is that Maxwell Perkins convinced Ernest Hemingway to get rid of the first two chapters of The Sun Also Rises. Not sentences or paragraphs. Chapters. He cut them till he got to this, at the start of what was originally Chapter Three.

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed with that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing; in fact he disliked it. But he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing that he could knock down anyone who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym.

Never take the reader’s attention for granted. We have to earn it, you and I, and that ain’t easy. What we want is for the reader to stop resisting. She must trust us. She must believe us. She must surrender to us.

If you can do that in the first paragraph or the first page, there’s a good chance she’ll hang on for the whole E-ticket ride.

Write It Like a Movie

 

The men were silent and they did not move often. And the women came out of the houses to stand beside the men—to feel whether this time the men would break … The children stood nearby, drawing figures in the dust with bare toes … Horses came to the watering troughs and nuzzled the water to clear the surface dust. After a while the faces of the watching men lost their bemused perplexity and became hard and angry and resistant. Then the women knew that they were safe and that there was no break.

 

Feel the power in this passage from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath?

John Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962

Why does this simple passage work so well?

I think it’s because it’s written like a movie.

The characters’ feelings are conveyed to us (almost) only by what we can see from the outside.

In other words, we’re seeing like the camera sees.

No interior monologues.

No statements or descriptions of emotion.

There’s not even any dialogue.

The passage is powerful because we, the readers, are compelled by the writer’s technique to participate in the drama. We see the men silent, the women watching, the children tracing in the dirt with their toes. We see the expressions on the men’s faces and we think (we can’t help but think), These families are at the brink. Their land is drying up, their crops are dying. They are close to panic, close to giving in.

But no one states this overtly.

Not the characters and not the narrator.

We the readers supply all of that ourselves.

What makes movies so powerful when they’re done right is that they can show us faces and postures (i.e. non-verbal cues) and make us read emotion into those cues. We think to ourselves, Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) is falling in love with Ally (Lady Gaga) in the drag club scene in  A Star is Born, even though he hasn’t yet said a direct word or made the slightest romantic move in her direction.

We see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice.

Steinbeck was a master at portraying emotion on the printed page, not by overt statement or in dialogue but by describing the scene and the action from the outside, the way a camera would see it—the motion and the stillness and the hesitation and the action of the characters.

You and I can do it too, in our books and our plays.

We can write them (or at least parts of them) like a movie.

 

I put the mail on the table, went back to the bedroom, undressed and had a shower. I was rubbing down when I heard the door-bell pull. I put on a bathroom and slippers and went to the door. It was Brett. Back of her was the count. He was holding a great bunch of roses.

 

There’s a reason why Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize and it wasn’t just because he used short words.

Ernest Hemingway picked up the prize in 1954

Hemingway taught himself to write not only the way the camera sees, but the way the eye sees. And he taught himself how to use this.

 

 It was Brett. Back of her was the count. He was holding a great bunch of roses.

 

It may seem on first reading as if no particular emotion is being conveyed in this passage. What’s happening, we may think, is only the magic of black marks on paper creating a cinematic image in our mind.

But if we look a little closer …

 

We see the door opening.

We see Brett.

Then we see the count.

Then we see the great bunch of roses.

 

That’s exactly the way the eye works, isn’t it? It’s precisely the order and sequence of the way you or I, opening the door of our flat in Paris, would see someone standing there, then another person standing behind them, then whatever that second person happened to be carrying.

But what Hemingway does is show us this through the eyes of our narrator, Jake Barnes (who’s in love with Brett but whose manhood has been shot away in the war), who wants on this particular evening only to be left alone after his shower and now is being summoned forth by the obligation of good fellowship to a night of drinking and carousing that is going to tear his guts up.

All this in six short sentences with no dialogue and no overt expression of emotion.

Write it like a movie.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Little Joe

 

[Resuming our deep dive into the structure, characters, and theme of the classic 1953 Western, Shane.]

Brandon deWilde as Joey in “Shane”

 

The character of Little Joe or Joey (Brandon deWilde) is worth examining in some detail because he serves so many purposes in the story yet, if you think about it, the core of the drama doesn’t need him at all.

The movie is really about the gunfighter Shane (Alan Ladd) and the dynamics between him and Joe Starett (Van Heflin), him and Joe’s wife Marian (Jean Arthur), him and the cattle baron Rufe Ryker (Emile Meyer), and him and the gunslinger Wilson (Jack Palance).

Why Joey then?

If you and I were composing this tale from scratch, we might ask this very question:

Do we need this character at all?

Answer: yes.

Without Joey, there might be a story, but it wouldn’t carry half the emotional resonance or dramatic weight.

Let’s start our examination with the novel Shane by Jack Schaefer from which the movie originated. Consider the first two sentences:

 

He rode into our valley in the summer of ’89. I was a kid then, barely topping the backboard of father’s old chuck-wagon.

 

In other words, Joey is our narrator.

More important, Joey is our point of view.

In the book and in the movie, we the readers/audience will see everything through Joey’s eyes. This is critical.

Consider this comparison from the opening of another novel of about the same vintage:

 

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow … I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.

 

From the first words of To Kill a Mockingbird, we are seeing the world through six-year-old Scout’s eyes. That point of view will color everything. We will see Tom Robinson through Scout’s eyes, and Bob Ewell, and Mayella Ewell. And we’ll see Scout’s father, Atticus Finch.

Mary Badham as Scout in “To Kill a Mockingbird”

To Kill a Mockingbird will not be about Scout, any more than Shane is about Joey. Each character, instead, will be our window into the tale.

The thing for us as writers to keep in mind here is that this—the telling of the story through the eyes of one specific character—is a deliberate, conscious choice on the part of the artist.

Jack Schaefer writing the novel Shane and A.B. Guthrie, Jr. and Jack Sher (Schaefer’s screen pen name) writing the movie made this choice for very specific reasons.

Let’s examine two or three.

How does it help us as writers to have Joey as our point of view in the movie? How does it heighten the story’s emotional power? How does in reinforce the theme? How does it help us at critical inflection points in the story? And how does it pay off in the climax?

First, Joey’s POV colors the way we view Shane.

From minute one of the movie, Joey is smitten with Shane. Tucked into Joey’s belt is a carved wooden six-shooter, which he loves to “draw” in make-believe gun duels. On Shane’s hip rides the real thing.

Shane is obviously a gunfighter. Joey has probably never seen such a creature in his whole young life. His world is the universe of his father and mother and the other homesteaders in the valley—honest, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth farmers and ranchers, utterly devoid of glamour or romance.

Suddenly into Joey’s ken rides what to his impressionable young boy’s eyes must be the most magnetic, charismatic entity imaginable. Joey recognizes Shane’s vocation at once. He sees it in his buckskin shirt and trousers, the silver-studded saddle and bridle of his horse, and the way the man carries himself.

For contrast, consider how Joey’s father Joe perceives Shane.

 

JOEY

Pa! Somebody’s comin’!

 

JOE STARETT

Well, let him come.

 

Big Joe too recognizes Shane at once for what he is.

Trouble.

Big Joe is too decent a man to deny the stranger a drink of water or even hospitality for the night. But his strongest (unspoken) wish is that this rider will saddle up in the morning and move on.

Joe’s wife Marian feels the same, at least the “mother” side of her. She doesn’t want trouble either. Though her woman’s heart, if she were willing to truly plumb it (which she isn’t), might admit that she is not entirely unmoved by the sex appeal of this obviously dangerous stranger.

But we are not seeing Shane through Joe’s eyes or Marian’s.

We’re seeing him through Joey’s.

Just as we see Atticus Finch through Scout’s eyes.

And through both these lenses, our protagonists can do (almost) nothing wrong.

This will prove critical as the tragedy of Shane (and it is a tragedy) unfolds.

More on this subject in the coming weeks.

 

 

 

Villain = Resistance

 

[St. Patrick’s is a special day here at Black Irish Books. So to celebrate, we’re giving special pricing on Black Irish JABS. From now through Sunday, you can get a book every month from me with a $50 discount. Click here to get going: https://blackirishbooks.com/jabs.

[And now to today’s post … ]

 

Every villain is a metaphor for Resistance.

I know this sounds all-inclusive to the point of outrageousness, but it’s true.

Kevin McCarthy beholding evil in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” 1956

In Jewish mysticism, the negative force (translated by my friend Rabbi Mordechai Finley as “a turning toward evil”) that equates to Resistance is called the “yetzer hara.”

And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually … And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.

In Kabbalistic thought, the soul—neshama in Hebrew—is a divine and entirely good force that seeks to communicate with us on the material plane to our benefit. Kabbalists say that above every blade of grass is an angel whispering, “Grow! Grow!”

But there’s a catch.

Between us and the neshama stands an entirely negative force—the yetzer hara, aka Resistance—whose solitary aim is to block the soul from communicating with us and us from communicating with our soul.

That is the “turning toward evil”—the built-into-Creation impulse, even compulsion, to self-obstruction and self-destruction.

Why does the human being need stories? Why do each of us hunger for saga and myth so instinctively?

Because we all feel that “turning toward evil” inside ourselves. We fear it. We hate it. We’re desperate for wisdom and insight into how to combat it.

That’s what stories are for, and that’s why every story has to have a villain.

The antagonist, whether it’s the Alien or the Predator or Dr. No or Dr. Lecter or Dr. Strangelove, is a metaphorical version of the yetzer hara, of Resistance.

Resistance is insidious.

Resistance is implacable.

Resistance is indefatigable.

Resistance is protean. It shape-shifts. It lies. It dissembles. Its aim is to destroy us, body and soul.

Michael Biehn as Kyle Reese tells it like it is to Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in “The Terminator,” 1984

 

KYLE REESE

Listen and understand. That Terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

 

And, though Reese doesn’t mention this …

The Terminator, i.e. Resistance, i.e. the yetzer hara, does not change and cannot change.

The villain in our stories, yours and mine, must share as many qualities with Resistance as possible.

Resistance is impersonal.

Resistance is a force of nature.

Resistance advances upon us like night, like winter, like death.

 

I rode a tank, held a general’s rank,

When the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank

 

The villain we write should be like a wildfire on a mountain or a storm at sea. Like racism, like misogyny, like homophobia, like the Thing, like the shark in Jaws or the Tripods in War of the Worlds, our villain must be as unaltering as the stars and as void of mercy as Satan.

Resistance never relents.

Resistance never changes.

Resistance = Villain.

Villain = Resistance.

 

 

 

 

Unseen Forces

 

The tragedies that have come down to us from the ancient Athenian stage often feature as prominent players gods and demi-gods … and such unseen forces as Fate and Destiny.

Prophecies are a frequent device, as they are in the Bible.

Even in real-life, oracles such as Apollo’s at Delphi made pronouncements that the Greeks took with deadly seriousness—and many in fact proved true.

 

The wooden wall alone shall preserve you.

 

Either Sparta will fall or she will lose a king.

 

In other words, the Greeks believed (and the Book of Ecclesiastes concurs) that man was by no means in control of his destiny. Unseen forces were always at work.

 

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

 

Which brings us back to the classic Western we started talking about a few weeks ago—Shane.

Alan Ladd as Shane in a “save the cat” moment early in the movie … showing kindness to Little Joey, played by Brandon deWilde

From the moment the gunfighter enters the Valley in the movie’s opening sequence, invisible forces are taking a heavy hand in the action.

In truth, the story’s dramatic power comes from our sense of the struggle between these forces, more so even than the surface clash between the cattlemen and the sodbusters or between Shane (Alan Ladd) and the black-hatted gunslinger Wilson (Jack Palance.)

What are these forces?

The first is Shane’s past.

He is a gunfighter. We recognize this at once from his fringed buckskin jacket and trousers (definitely not the garb of a farmer or rancher), the silver buckles on his horse’s bridle, and the .44 on his hip.

The second is Shane’s aspiration for the future.

He wants to hang up his guns.

His dream is to live a normal life—settle down, find a wife, raise a family.

Shane never verbalizes these hopes overtly. But in the audience we grasp them at once, and we become emotionally involved.

The movie gives us several early “save the cat” moments, as screenwriting guru Blake Snyder would say, where the gunfighter displays kindness and empathy. We like him. We’re rooting for him. In the audience we want Shane to realize his dream.

In other words, we are pulling for one of the unseen forces against the other.

What exactly is the other?

It consists of the decisions that Shane has made and the experiences that he has lived throughout his life up to the moment he enters the Valley. The movie gives us no specific information about these. We are left to fill in the blanks, which we do of course with ease.

Shane seems to be about forty. It is highly probable, we in the audience imagine, that he has been in the business of killing for at least twenty years.

That’s a lot of history.

It looms over the story-in-real-time like a Damoclean sword.

The movie asks, Can a person change? Can an individual step away from a lifetime lived as one type of man and become a different kind?

And more importantly, Will the world let him?

In a Greek tragedy, the playwright might have employed an oracle to make this dynamic clear. A blind seer would have made some pronouncement about Shane’s future.

Or warring gods on Olympus might be contesting his fate.

Or he may be ensnared in a web of multi-generational family intrigue, compelled by events to live out some saga originated by his father or mother or grandfather and grandmother.

But because Shane is modern, and because he’s quintessentially American, the destiny that holds him is of his own making.

It consists of the decisions he has made over long years before he rode into the Valley.

For the story to work, we in the audience don’t need to know the specifics of these decisions. Did Shane fight in the Civil War? Is that where he first learned about guns? As a youth, did he have a chance to marry and settle down but elected instead to strap on a six-shooter? What enemies have shaped him? What friends?

The sum of all this constitutes the unseen force against which Shane struggles—and which ultimately overcomes him.

The weight of Shane’s past, coupled with a love he experiences in the present, compels him to strap on his gun and face the hired killer Wilson. And this act, even though he triumphs in real-time, ineluctably forces him to abandon his dream and ride away from the Valley.

 

SHANE

There’s no living with a killing, Joey. No going back from it. Like it or not, it’s a brand. A brand that sticks.

 

The unseen force of Shane’s past holds him despite every noble and honorable action he has taken in the present to overcome it. In truth, it is these noble and honorable actions that bind him even more tightly.

 

SHANE

A man’s got to be what he is. He can’t break the mold. I tried. It didn’t work for me.

 

This is real drama, and it represents a truly deep understanding of human life and the mortal condition.

We’ll take next week’s post to examine these unseen forces from another angle—the dramatic device of the character of little Joey (Brandon deWilde).

[P.S. re the prophecies above:

[“The wooden wall” refers to ships. When the Persian army and fleet came to attack Athens in 479 B.C., the citizens abandoned their city (which king Xerxes promptly burned) and chose instead to confront the invader at sea. Their victory in the Battle of Salamis preserved Western civilization.

[The prophecy about Sparta losing a king likewise proved true, when Leonidas and the Three Hundred delayed the Persian advance at Thermopylae by sacrificing their lives—and gave the allied Greeks time to rally the greater defenses that would in the end prevail.]

The Understory

 

Editors call it “narrative drive.”

Matt Damon on the run in “The Bourne Identity”

Writers want it.

Readers need it.

How do you get it?

One way is by skillful use of an Understory.

One of my favorite scenes in movies of the past few years is the Frozen Park Bench scene in the first of the Jason Bourne movies—The Bourne Identity.

To refresh your memory:

 

It’s early in the story. We’ve met Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) and learned that he is a young man who has lost his memory. He doesn’t know who he is. He’s an American on his own in Europe, specifically Zurich (where Swiss bank accounts are), in the depths of winter.

Jason’s recall may be void at the moment, but he has been able in the film’s earlier scenes to deduce a few things about who he might be.

First, he knows he is somebody specific. He does have an identity. He just doesn’t know what it is.

He knows something mysterious (and almost certainly nefarious) has happened to him to blot out his memory.

He knows he is part of some ongoing plot or scheme that involves other individuals, possibly allies, more likely enemies. But he doesn’t know who they are or how he fits in with their designs, and of course he can’t remember what their specific scenario is.

It’s night. Outdoors in Zurich. Freezing cold. Jason is in jeans and a down jacket. He has stopped in a park and lain down on a bench, just trying to survive till morning.

Two Swiss cops appear. They roust Jason roughly. They start to collar him, handcuff him. Suddenly …

Jason turns into a kung fu master. Chop chop bam bam he hammers both officers with Bruce Lee-like skill, using only his bare hands. He knocks the cops cold and even strips one of his weapon.

For a moment Jason stands over his victims, staring at his own hands, amazed at what he has done. Then he dashes away into the night. (See the YouTube clip of this scene, hyperlinked above.)

 

This scene, or something like it, is a staple of action novels and movies. It always works. It always plays great.

It hooks the reader/viewer.

It propels the story forward.

Why?

Because implicit in it is a mysterious and exciting understory.

The reader/viewer wants to learn this understory.

It’s the understory that hooks the reader/viewer, even more than the real-time story.

Not every book or movie has an understory.

Many unfold simply in real time.

But certain types of narratives always have understories. Detective stories. Amnesia tales. Many sci-fi sagas. Mysteries of every kind.

What keeps the reader turning pages is the desire to get to the understory.

Assassin Clive Owen knows the understory in “The Bourne Identity” but Matt Damon doesn’t.

Going back to Jason Bourne and the frozen park bench. In this scene we realize:

 

This young man is no ordinary Joe.

 

He possesses skills unique to “men of action”—spies, assassins, elite military personnel, law enforcement officers, killers.

 

We can’t help but ask ourselves:

 

Who is he?

 

How did he acquire these skills? Did somebody train him? Who? For what purpose?

 

Why is he now “rogue?” What happened to him? Why?

 

Are other people after him? Is he being hunted? By whom? For what purpose?

 

Was he on some kind of assignment? Did something go wrong? What?

 

Is he a good guy or a bad guy?

 

See the narrative drive? The audience is now asking itself a boatload of questions that can only be answered by committing themselves to the story as it unfolds. This one simple scene, with its peek at the understory, has propelled the narrative forward with irresistible velocity.

Better yet, the power of these who-is-this-dude questions is doubled because not only are we in the audience asking them, but our protagonist on-screen, Jason Bourne, is asking them too—and he is now driven, with life-and-death urgency, to get the answers.

Are you working on a novel or a screenplay now?

Ask yourself, “Is my story happening in real time only? Or does it have an understory?”

If it does, you’ve got a powerful tool at your disposal to make your narrative jump off the page or screen.

 

[P.S. Remember a couple of weeks ago I said I had recently done three interviews? Well, the second one was with Marie Forleo for her blog/show “MarieTV.” Here’s the link. The interview is on video.

If you’re not familiar with Marie, she’s based in New York and does a weekly online interview show, usually with writers, entrepreneurs, and creative people of all kinds. Marie herself was made for TV. She has undeniable star quality; she’s a high-energy, high-wattage personality but also a serious, and very successful, entrepreneur, role model, and source of wisdom and encouragement. I’m a subscriber myself. I watch Marie’s show every week.]

Harvey Keitel’s Villain Speech in “Cop Land”

Have you seen the movie Cop Land? It’s a vastly underappreciated 1997 film written and directed by James Mangold, who also did Girl, Interrupted, Walk the Line, and 3:10 to Yuma. The script for Cop Land was good enough to attract Robert De Niro, Sylvester Stallone, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, Anabella Sciorra. It even got Edie Falco (before she became Carmela in The Sopranos) in a no-dialogue, ten-second cameo.

But what I like most about it is the Villain Speech.

Harvey Keitel in James Mangold’s “Cop Land”

An NYPD cop named Ray Donlan (Harvey Keitel) is the Bad Guy in Cop Land.

The story revolves around the idea that a group of corrupt NYPD cops, in bed with the Mob, has managed to create a safe enclave for themselves and their families outside the city, across the George Washington Bridge, in the small town of Garrison, New Jersey.

Sylvester Stallone plays the sheriff of this town, Freddy Heflin. Deaf in one ear, Freddy could not qualify for the NYPD, his lifelong dream. Poor Freddy is pushed around and condescended to by the New York cops living in Garrison but finally, forced to confront evidence of their wrongdoing, including murder, he arrests a central figure in their scheme, a hotheaded cop named Superboy (Michael Rapaport). Freddy plans to take Superboy in. In an eleventh-hour gesture of cop-to-cop fraternity, Freddy goes to the town bar and informs Ray (Keitel) of what he intends to do. Ray is the ringleader of the dirty cops and has tried twice already to murder Superboy. Freddy offers Ray the chance to turn himself in too.

Plainly Ray will never let Freddy do what intends—and neither will any of the other half dozen cops in the bar witnessing this exchange. They will kill Freddy first.

RAY

Freddy, listen to me. I invited men … cops … good men … to live in this town. To make a living, they cross that bridge every day to a place where everything is upside-down, where a cop is a perp and a perp is a victim. But they play by the rules. They keep their guns in their holsters and they play by the rules. The other thing they did was they got their families out. Before it got to them. We made a place where things make sense, where you can walk across the street and feel safe. Now you come to me with a plan to set things right, where everybody will be holding hands and singing ‘We Are the World.’ That’s nice. But, Freddy, your plan is the plan of a boy. You made it on the back of a matchbook. Without thinking. Without looking at the cards. I look at the cards. I see this town destroyed. That’s not what you want, is it?

FREDDY

I look at this town and I don’t like what I see no more.

RAY

Who the fuck do you think you are?

FREDDY

The sheriff of Garrison, New Jersey.

RAY

Then be a sheriff! Defend this town! Protect these men!

Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone in “Cop Land”

Four qualities are spot-on in this speech. These are common to all great Villain Speeches and they always work.

First, Ray does not see himself as the Bad Guy. In his mind, he’s the hero. He has created in Garrison a safe haven for good men and their families. The villain in Ray’s view is Freddy, for daring to try to overturn this world.

Second, Ray’s logic, from his point of view, is irrefutable. Given his feeling about Garrison and the cop families who have made secure lives here, it makes perfect sense. If you and I were in Ray’s shoes, we would make the exact same case.

Third, Ray’s point of view is based upon “reality” and perceives anyone who would contest it as naive and deluded. The Greater World is corrupt, says Ray. Upside-down. The only way a reasonable person (a “man”) can operate in such a world is to recognize its “reality” and act according to its rules—in other words, be just as crooked as it is.

Fourth, implicit in Ray’s speech (and in the aspect of his grim-jawed police allies looking on) is the idea that no logic, no reason, no appeal to right and wrong can or will sway him. If Freddy tries to bring Superboy in, Ray and his buddies will kill him.

The final element of this speech that is interesting to me is that its logic is that of the Smaller World, in this case the universe of the cops in Garrison and their families. Ray’s logic works for them (if he can pull it off).

Only Freddy the Sheriff is looking to the Larger World. Only he asks the question, “What if everybody acted according to your logic?” Were Freddy to ask this question, how would Ray respond? He’d say something, I imagine, like this:

RAY

Everybody does act like that, Freddy. Open your eyes. The city. The country. How wide you wanna go? Wise up! This is life. This is how the world works.

Villains are great fun to write, aren’t they?

The Final Deadline

December 1, 2010, Steve introduced the “What It Takes” column with his introductory article of the same name, “What It Takes”.

Shawn’s first article in the series, “Getting the Meeting”, went live December 3, 2010, with an introduction by Steve that stated:

“With Shawn’s post, we’ll establish a “What It Takes” slot on the blog every Friday until publication in June.”

The publication Steve was referring to was his then-upcoming novel The Profession, and, as you know, the column lasted a little longer than June of 2011.

“Getting the Meeting”, is a great read and one of my favorites from Shawn—one of his classic behind-the-scenes views of the book publishing industry.

At the same time, over on “Writing Wednesdays”, Steve was writing about The Profession, from his perspective as the writer. “When It Crashes” and “When It Crashes, Part Two”, are raw, unfiltered looks at what happens when, as Steve wrote,

“ . . . the wheels come off smack in the middle of the project—and you’re left dazed by the side of the road, staring at the smoking wreckage of your work.”

If you haven’t read them before, read them now. If you have read them, read them again. Still each word rings as true as the day it was written.

I came into the mix December 12, 2010, with “The Elephant in the Room”. Steve’s introduction to the article shared a bit of our background together, to include,

“But what really got us working together full-time is this blog. “Writing Wednesdays” was Callie’s idea. Without her, it wouldn’t exist or it would have pooped out months ago. In fact, the blog itself was Callie’s idea. She cracked the whip over me to make me do it.”

In my 13 years of working with Steve, the seeding and then nurturing of “Writing Wednesdays” (ten years old as of July 22 of this year) is at the top of my list of things we did together. “The Elephant in the Room”, opens by touching on that early work, then taps into Shawn’s “Getting the Meeting”, and moves over to a message I’m still repeating today about outreach, and reaching your audience.

In the years that followed, Shawn and I alternated writing the column every Friday, with a few exceptions, when Shawn might go on a run for a few weeks, or I might do the same, or we might feature pieces from the Archives.

Among those messages that appeared within “What It Takes” through the years, reside a few repeated themes that went beyond book publishing insider talk and into each of our lives as and our struggles through our own art and, yes, publishing. They’re along the lines of slowing down and reflecting, learning to say no and learning what no means, doing something and doing something every day, and believing in ourselves when the toxic avengers are on the march. (Baseball and Bob Dylan and the pros from Dover made frequent appearances, too.)

I was thinking about my favorite post, but there isn’t a favorite. When you write over a period of nine years, the articles reflect where you were at that time. There are some I like less, because I know they weren’t my best effort. There were days when I didn’t know what to write and was embarrassed by posting something I wouldn’t want to read myself. Then there were other articles, when I knew the Muse existed outside Steve’s home and was paying me a visit. As I write this now, I can feel her in my head. There’s a soft, calming feeling that comes when she visits. Words just flow. Anxiety doesn’t even try to play her usual games, because she knows I’m on it. I got this. The stomach flip flops leave. The destructive head-talk fades. Frustration flees, too. Just me, the Muse, and my words.

All of the above is a way of saying that, after ignoring that June 2011 deadline, we’re finally hitting it.

This is the last post in the series.

I hope you’ll visit the archived articles. There’s some good stuff in there.

Most important: Thank you for the time you’ve given us every Friday for the past nine years.

“The Moment” with Brian Koppelman

I almost never do interviews. But I went out of my way to do three, in New York, over the past ten days.

I’m gonna take this post to talk about the first one, with Brian Koppelman, on his podcast, “The Moment.”

Here’s the link via Stitcher (though you can listen in other ways too.)

Have you heard of Brian? He’s one of the co-creators (as well as a showrunner and writer) of Billions, in its fourth season on Showtime. He’s also a screenwriter and director, a former music industry exec and producer, and a lot of other stuff. He co-wrote and co-directed one of the most underappreciated movies of the past decade, Solitary Man, starring Michael Douglas and Susan Sarandon.

But his podcast is his true labor of love.

Why?

Because for all his success, Brian remains a soldier in the trenches. He struggles. He beats his brains out. He’s had ups and downs that would’ve taken the heart out of anybody.

But he loves this racket.

He’s a real writer, and he’s got the psychotherapist’s bills to prove it.

Brian calls his podcast “The Moment” because he’s fascinated by writers’ (and other artists’ and entrepreneurs’) stories of their own inner turning points.

When was THE MOMENT when you finally saw the light? Turned the corner? Got it together?

What hellish ordeals did you go through to get to that point?

When did you make the decision to “turn pro,” even if it was only inside your own mind?

I’ve known Brian for about ten years. I wanted to be part of a back-and-forth with him because I knew he would ask hard, probing questions and I knew he wouldn’t let up till he’d gotten real answers.

“Talk about when you were most miserable. Where were you? What were you doing? How did you get there? How did you get back?”

“Did you ever give up? What was that like? When was it? What made you hang on?”

Then he’d tell me his stories of his own darkest hours.

In the past few months Brian has interviewed a bunch of the people I respect most—Rosanne Cash, Seth Godin, Tony Gilroy & Scott Frank.

I found myself telling Brian things I hadn’t remembered, or even thought of, in years. Including the story about me and the gorilla in the parking lot of a banana importing company in New Orleans (tune in for the full version.)

Before we started recording the podcast, I asked Brian who his audience was—and what they were hoping to get from our conversation, or any conversation.

“They’re very intelligent. Highly educated. Creative. Some are young, just starting out. Others have long successful careers, in all kinds of fields, but maybe they’re not completely happy. They’re struggling. They’re trying to break through, not just in a creative or commercial sense, but on a deeper level, a soul level. They’re on their ‘hero’s journeys.’ They’re in the shit and they want to know how other people have handled their own time in the shit.”

I was nodding my head.

It sounded a lot like me.

Anyway, here’s the link to the podcast again. The conversation is about an hour long.

It’s a good one, thanks to Brian being a great interviewer.

Take a listen if you get a chance.

And thanks, Brian, for making it happen.