Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 43

The Road Not Taken

I can see Robert Frost’s yellow wood.

In my mind, it’s always Fall and always the golden hour before sunset. A thick layer of leaves blankets the ground and yet every tree is full, as if not a leaf has fallen.

This image has been bubbling up uninvited these past few months. One minute I’m working and the next I’m leaning back in my chair as my mind wanders through a mashup of Van Gogh yellow and Klimt gold and a wee bit of Hudson River Valley, all bathed in amber.

“The road not taken” is the phrase spoken by the unknown voice for the image, kin to “if you build it they will come” for cornfields. Always the same thing. My mind wanders, fighting Frost’s “nothing gold can stay” and thinking about that very golden road.

The teacher who introduced me to “The Road Not Taken” taught that it was about being an individual and taking risks, and marching to a different drummer—and I drank the Koolaid and believed her. Never occurred to me to ask if “all the difference” made by the road taken was really a good thing.

Go back to the poem, and both paths are equally trodden. The one taken wasn’t better or worse. It was different. Nothing in the poem indicates that the other road would have been a bad one to take, yet . . . There’s this notion that not taking it was the right decision.

I’ve been thinking about the roads we travel to share our work and how hundreds of years ago the road was clear, less cluttered vs now, with so many distractions. Is one better than the other? Both are equally trodden, but with different versions of the same problems.

Think about two roads.

One road is post Gutenberg, but also pre-mass communication, before the phone and TV and computer and everything else we have today.

The other road reflects today, with smart phones and smart TVs and smart shoes and all other sorts of smartily smart things.

Road one is rather clear. As time ticks, maybe a billboard starts to pop up. Maybe a car passes and a rest stop appears on the horizon, and other people start to travel the road, and those people share one by one.

The other road is cluttered and noisy. All people on that road do is share and talk and jabber. It’s like navigating through the fog, but on a clear day, with fog replaced by people and images and tweets.

Road one dictates that there are fewer interactions, but when they occur, there’s meaning and they’re remembered.

Road two dictates millions of interactions, but when they occur, they’re insignificant and forgotten. You have to work harder to give and receive meaning.

The road I keep going back to is road one. Less communication. Less clutter.

That road worked for a long time, yet there’s this push to go down a different road. Don’t do what’s been done in the past. Keep looking to the future, to the road yet to be taken.

Why?

Maybe instead of traveling toward the next big thing, the better choice is u-turning toward the past and tapping into what has always worked.

Hard work has always worked.

Being honest has always worked.

Doing the right thing has always worked.

Keeping promises has always worked.

Being transparent has always worked.

Creating something of value has always worked.

Starting small has always worked.

Communicating in more than 140 characters has always worked.

Picking up the phone or meeting in person, instead of only texting or emailing has always worked.

For 2019, I’m looking toward a road of doing less of what’s on the cluttered road and more of the clear road, the old road, the one that worked for years. I want to travel both roads, worn really about the same. I don’t want to sigh somewhere ages and ages hence.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And then cut through the woods and traveled the other road, too,

And that has made all the difference.

“A” Story and “B” Story

 

In the movie biz there’s a terminology: “A” Story and “B” Story. (There’s also a “C,” “D,” and “E” story.)

This is an interesting concept that has carry-overs for us in the fiction world. Nonfiction too.

Matt Damon and Franka Potente enact the “B” Story in “The Bourne Identity”

The “A” story is the main story, the story in the foreground.

In Moby Dick the “A” story is Ahab’s pursuit of the whale. In The Bourne Identity, it’s Jason Bourne’s search for who he really is. In To Kill a Mockingbird it’s Atticus Finch’s endeavor to save Tom Robinson.

The “B” story is the secondary story, the story in the background.

In many dramas, the “B” story is the love story.

In The Bourne Identity for example, the “B” story is the romance that develops between Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) and Marie Kreutz (Franka Potente) as Bourne flees from the bad guys and pursues his quest to find his lost identity.

The “B” story, when it’s a love story, doesn’t have to be between literal lovers. It can be between friends or family members. It can be between a child and a dog, an elf and a human. It can be between Hobbits.

In Moby Dick, the love story is between Ishmael and Queequeg the harpooneer. Remember Chapter Three at the Spouter Inn in New Bedford, where Ishmael is compelled by the scarcity of beds to share a (chaste) bunk with Queequeg? In the final scene of the saga, after Moby Dick has attacked and sunk the Pequod, Ishmael alone survives, using as a life raft the watertight coffin that Queequeg had had made for himself by the ship’s carpenter when he had a premonition of his coming death

In To Kill a Mockingbird, the “B” love story is between Scout (or, we might say, Scout and Jem together) and Boo Radley. Again, this is not a literal love story but a tale of the heart just the same.

Blake Snyder in his indispensable book on screenwriting, Save the Cat!, declares that the “B” story often rides to the rescue of the “A” story.

This happens at the start of Act Three, when “A” and “B” story merge in what I call the Epiphanal Moment. (More on this later.)

For sure, the “B” story resonates with and often completes the “A” story.

In The Imitation Game, the “B” story is between Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), both mathematicians working to crack the German “Enigma” code for the Brits during WWII. In the climax, when Turing is destroyed physically and emotionally by his own homophobic and spectacularly ingrateful government, it is Joan’s love for and dedication to his memory that saves the tale and completes it.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley in “The Imitation Game”

One of the tests I apply to my own stories is to ask of myself, as I’m working:

 

What is the “A” story?

What’s the “B” story?

Do they resonate with one another? Are they both on-theme?

Does the “B” story complete or save or resolve the “A” story?

 

And this crucual question:

 

Do I even have a “B” story?

 

The amazing thing, I’ve discovered, is that a “B” story seems to arise all by itself without me even thinking about it.

Maybe the overall narrative simply cries out for it and I find myself supplying it without any planning or pre-intention.

It’s an illuminating exercise for all of us, when we read books or watch movies that we consider to be truly working, to ask ourselves, “What’s the ‘A’ story here? What’s the ‘B’ story? How do they interact? How does one enhance the other?”

We’ll continue this investigation next week … and thereafter.

Do You Believe?

For the 14th year in a row, my kids and I drove to Pentagon City Mall for a picture with Santa.

Now 15 and 11, they know the fat guy in the red suit is an echo of their childhood. Still there, and still nice, and still happiness-and-laughter inducing, but not the same as before the veil was lifted.

How could it be the same? Once you know, there’s no going back.

Maybe it wasn’t Santa for you, but maybe there was someone or something that you believed in so strongly, and then you got to Oz and realized the wizard was just Oscar Diggs from Omaha, Nebraska.

For my kids, Santa could really be a guy named Harold, who works at the tax office next to Pizza Hut the rest of the year.

We’d still show up because it’s tradition.

The kids don’t believe in Santa, but they believe in the experience.

It’s not even about Santa at this point. It’s about us and reliving the memories (and about pretzels at Aunt Annie’s on the way back to the car).

This year, though . . .

There was a long line. It didn’t move for a good half hour.

The camera broke.

The time for Santa to head back to Ms. Claus arrived and the line was still out and around the Santa display.

The teenager in charge asked each person still in line if he or she would come back the next morning. We all said no. Kids had school the next morning and we’d invested a few hours at that point.

He decided to pile on. “Santa’s been complaining about not getting out on time and we’re trying to close.” Little ears around him heard this. Santa complaining? Really?

When a parent asked if Santa would still see everyone in line, he replied, “I guess I could try to make the line move faster.”

After we made it through the picture line, his stellar salesmanship continued. I requested half a dozen frames and then he looked at my son and asked, “She your mom? If she was my mom I wouldn’t let her buy those frames. Why are you letting her buy all those frames?” My son smiled. Didn’t know what to say.

Yes the frames are overpriced. Same with the pictures.

Yet, I show up every year—and I spend a lot of money because those pictures and frames get sent to two sets of grandparents, a great-grandmother, a few other relatives, and I want one for myself, too. For them—and for me—those pictures are echos of our own childhoods, and the childhoods of their own kids and grandkids, and great-grandkids. They mean something. The same Harold has been Santa for the last 14 years. He stayed the same, but the kids went from babies to teenagers in their pictures with him—and I remember every single one of those pictures, picking their outfits, running combs through their hair, if it was raining or a clear drive. I hold tight to every day.

And the teenage salesman unknowingly tried to stop it.

He didn’t understand or believe in the experience he was selling.

It was a product not an experience—and it wasn’t a product he wanted himself.

That’s okay.

Santa isn’t everyone’s thing.

But if you don’t believe in Santa, or at least in the experience, you probably shouldn’t sign up to be one of Santa’s helpers.

I put a few hundred dollars down and he tried to get my son to stop me—even though I wanted to pay the money. Harold is worth every penny, and my hope has always been that some of that money gets put in his his wallet end of season. The more I buy the better he does, so yeah, I’m okay with spending more on this experience.

Years ago, one of my jobs included sales conference duty, at which books were pitched to the sales reps, who were then tasked with pitching the books to B&N and Borders and Books-A-Million and all the other now non-existent bookstores.

I hated going. I was never convinced that the sales reps believed. It was just their job. The books were products to be pushed or ignored. The reps got excited by co-op dollars and large advertising budgets, but the books alone? Many went unread by the reps. They didn’t understand the power of all the books. Yes, some of the books were real stinkers, but many were extraordinary – and they were more than words on pages with nice wrappers. They were experiences. Both fiction and nonfiction could transport the reader to different worlds and leave them better off for the experience. They just needed someone to believe in them.

That’s what Black Irish Books has always been about. Believing.

Believe in yourself.

Believe in your power to create.

Believe in your creation.

Earlier this month Black Irish Books launched a subscription series titled Black Irish Jabs, which are bite-sized books by Steve, delivered almost once a month for the next year, which pack a powerful punch..

The series feeds into the power of believing and creating—and we believe in its power ourselves.

You have to believe in what you’re selling to make a go in this world, to achieve any sort of success.

So, if you find yourself working a seasonal job as Santa’s helper, if you don’t believe in what’s being sold, find another job, or at least don’t ruin the experience for paying customers.

But, if you do believe . . . If you happen to see a lady with the oldest kids in line to see Santa, and she wants to put a few hundred down on overpriced frames and pictures, let her do it. Show her the best frame you’ve got and show her the picture snow globe too. She might not be one to spend money like that the rest of the year, but this means something to her family. Help her. Make the sale. She’s been at this for 14 years and will back again next year.

Let her have her experience.

Believe in what you do.

Our Characters and Ourselves

I’ve been thinking about an obscure point of storytelling, and I wonder if this isn’t something that a lot of us have been aware of but maybe haven’t thought about too deeply.

Chris Pine and Ben Foster in “Hell or High Water”

(I’m gonna get a little writer-wonky in this post, so please bear with me.)

We know as fiction writers that our story (Act One) starts in “the Ordinary World.”

Then something happens (the Inciting Incident) that propels our hero out of her or his everyday life and into “the Extraordinary World.”

Dorothy is whisked away from Kansas, Luke bolts from the planet Tatooine, Wonder Woman leaves the island of the Amazons.

What happens then?

Usually we conceive of Act Two, the Extraordinary World, as a sequence of obstacles that our protagonist must overcome. It’s her hero’s journey. It’s her struggle to restore some form of equilibrium to her world.

Maybe I’m the last one to catch onto this, but lately I’ve been thinking of this passage in a different light.

The light of “knowing.”

What happens to our hero first, as she is propelled into the Extraordinary World, is that people see her immediately in a wholly different way. Not the way others perceived her or related to her before.

Think of Dorothy or Luke or Diana. Or Michael Corleone after he kills Sollozzo and police captain McCluskey. Or Toby Howard (Chris Pine) in Hell or High Water after he and his brother Tanner (Ben Foster) start pulling off bank robberies.

In the Extraordinary World, these characters are perceived at once and by everyone in an entirely different way.

And they react to this.

They react positively.

They become empowered by it.

Each of our heroes realizes that he or she is someone else, or at least seems to every other character to be someone else.

A strong case could be made that this is the point of the whole story, of every story.

Our narrative—any narrative—is about the hero’s journey from one self-conception (an obsolete, no-longer-working version) to another (brand-new, scary-but-absolutely-necessary) version.

Confronting the challenges of the Extraordinary World, our hero comes to know herself in a way she never did before. She discovers a new self, a just-now-being-born self, and she comes to embrace it as the answer to her dilemma.

This happens in real life too.

We fall in love.

We take a new job.

We move to a new country.

At once, everyone we meet sees us with different eyes.

We perceive this ourselves. We react to our new challenges not as our old selves but as this newly-hatched, revised-and-updated version of ourselves.

Of course this happens to us as artists every time we embark on a new project. We’re writers. Our Muse is calling us to shed an old skin and grow a new one.

Each new book, play, or screenplay is a new hero’s journey, a fresh crossing of the threshold into an ever-different Extraordinary World.

I’m working on something new now, and I’m trying to apply this (new-for-me) insight to it.

When my hero crosses the threshold into the Extraordinary World (I’m asking myself as I evaluate what I’m writing), do the other characters in the story perceive him and relate to him differently than they would have, had they encountered him in the Ordinary World? Does he see this? How does it affect him? Is he in fact different? How? Why?

Who is his old self?

Who is his new one?

I’m asking this of myself as well, as I too cross into my own Extraordinary World.

Will a new me appear? Has it already?

Who is he?

How is he different?

In the end, our stories and our real lives are about our heroes (and we ourselves) incorporating this new knowing, this novel self-knowledge, and growing and changing with it.

First Things First

A jab is a quick, sharp punch.

It’s the setup for other punches—that seemingly small thing that serves you well in the ring.

“It is their most important weapon. Fighters throughout time have spilled blood and sweat attempting to perfect it—to make it fast, to make it sharp, Every punch, heavier than the last.

“Is is the single most significant punch in boxing, both offensively and defensively . . . Its importance is undeniable. Every fight, every fighter, the very fabric of the sport, starts and ends with the jab.”

—Robert Aaron Contreras, via Bleacher Report

Master the jab first, all other punches second.

That’s the philosophy of the Black Irish Books JABs by Steve.

Small. Pocket-size small.

Basics. Do-this-first type of basics.

Powerful. Knock-you-out powerful.

JABs are books that are small in size, powerful in messaging, and which teach the basics.

If you signed up for the print version of the JABs subscription, you should receive your first two books any day, if you haven’t received them already.

They are truth.

Bare-bones.

No fluff.

Straight to the point.

Titles and subjects of the first two are How Does A Story Start? and What Is A Story About?

The third brings with it a two-word title: Why Write?

We hope you’ll join the subscription.

At whatever point you join, you’ll receive all the previously released books up to that point. For example, if you join in March, you’ll receive a box with the two December releases, the February release, and the March release. (No new release in January.)

You’ll be sent a coupon code for a free digital subscription, to share with a friend, too.

Our hope is that Black Irish Books’ JABs will become the most important punch in your arsenal, too.

Welcome, JABs Subscribers!

Thanks and welcome to everybody who leapt off the cliff with us and signed up to receive a year’s worth of Black Irish JABs. The response has been beyond our hopes. Thank you!

Click here to order a year of JABs 

To anyone still teetering on the fence, lemme take today’s post to give you the old-fashioned hard sell. (Then I’ll stop, I promise.)

On second thought, let me just list the titles and premises of some of this year’s coming JABs:

JAB #1 (December): How Does a Story Start?

This one’s about the Inciting Incident of a novel or a movie. It talks about the hero acquiring in this moment his or her intention (the drive that will carry him or her through the story), about making the internal external, about the two “narrative poles” that are established here and how they keep the reader turning pages. Etc, etc.

JABS #7 and 8 (June and July): Bad Guys, Part One and Bad Guys, Part Two.

An in-depth look at villains. Why does our story need them, how to make them memorable, what characteristics do all the great villains possess?

I cite these three as a way of describing what JABs are and how they can help every writer—rookie or seasoned pro.

I know they helped the hell out of me, just writing them and getting my thoughts straight by doing so.

JAB #4 (March), The Professional Mindset.

This mini-book doesn’t talk about craft at all. It’s exclusively about you and me as professionals. What is the optimal mindset for a writer or an artist? How do we manage our emotions, contain our expectations for ourselves and others? How do we keep from being our own worst enemies?

JAB #5 (April), Learning to Say No.

Another aspect of professionalism. Becoming tough-minded, kicking the habit of being a “nice guy” or girl. How to stop saying yes to time-thieves, even well-intentioned and deserving ones.

JAB #9 (September), Dudeology.

An in-depth dive, for fun and profit, into The Big Lebowski. What does genre mean, how did the Coen brothers use it (and subvert it to devastating effect) in this greatest of slacker comedies? What does the Dude have in common with Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe and J.J. Gittes? Why, in the end, does he abide?

I know it’s daunting to plunk down a serious chunk of change on a subscription. But by the end of the year you’ll have twelve of these mini-books, a regular library of wisdom from the writing trenches . . . with more coming in Season Two. And if don’t wanna continue, bail then with no hard feelings.

Have I convinced you? If so, here’s the link to sign up now.

One last sales point:

Each subscription comes with a gift code so you can give a digital subscription of the JABs (eBook and audiobook) to a friend.

I love these little books and I hope you will too.

Thanks again to everyone who leapt into the pool with us.

Back, next week, to our regular posts.

 

Print on Demand Wins

Steve announced the release of Black Irish Books’ first subscription-based product earlier this week.

Fitting in with Black Irish’s boxing glove logo, the subscription features “JABs” from Steve—mini-books that pack a punch—starting with two books from Steve this month, and then one a month starting in February.

We’re excited about this new offering, but also exciting is the production model.

This marks the first time Black Irish Books has launched a product available only via Black Irish Books (No Amazon or B&N or anyone else)—and the first time it has done a print on demand (POD) project without going through Amazon.

When Black Irish Books launched, it was doing print runs of 10,000 copies at a time. This kept the per book production costs low. However, it brought up the cost of warehousing. Those books have to live somewhere—and until they take up residence on someone else’s shelf, savings from large print runs are lost to warehousing costs.

In a perfect world, those 10,000 books sell out right away—except that with every year more individual sales go to Amazon. We haven’t flown through books on the BI site as quickly as needed to offset the warehousing costs—and then the printer stopped handling distribution, which led to relocating all those books to a new warehouse.

As we ran through print runs for individual titles, Shawn set up the books for POD on demand via Amazon’s Create Space, instead of going back to print for another 10,000 copies. This is why some books on Black Irish’s site aren’t available in print on the BI site. It was proving less expensive to go through Amazon than to go through the process of reprints and paying for reprints and warehousing.

Amazon provided a solution to allow for distribution without high warehousing costs. However, the per book cost is more with Amazon and we don’t have connections with customers.

The Amazon model makes bulk discounts challenging, too.

While Amazon’s share of individual titles increased, Black Irish’s share of bulk orders has increased. When BI first launched, we received pushback from bookstores that wanted to 1) order through wholesalers instead of BI; 2) wanted BI to cover shipping costs to them; and 3) didn’t want to adhere to BI’s policy of no returns and prepayment. The prepayment and no returns were big sticking point since bookstores were used to being able to order books without having to pay for them right away—and then having the ability to return them at no penalty. Not great for a publisher since no sale is ever final. The bookstores—especially the university bookstores—came around. The 55% discount off orders of 10 or more copies of the same title beats the 40% discount most publishers offer (which usually goes into play at a quantity much higher than ten copies)—even if they have to cover shipping themselves. BI now has return bulk customers, placing orders of hundreds of copies every few months and/or thousands at a time.

However . . . It’s challenging to make a profit off bulk pricing when the books are printed one by by one, vs via the 10,000 print run model.

There’s also the fact that there’s an entire customer base at Amazon, with whom BI has no contact. We don’t know their names, addresses purchases, etc. Nothing.

How to keep costs lower and have a connection with customers?

Find a competitively-priced print on demand printer that can handle distribution and warehousing as needed.

We found just that—a printer that beats the per book POD pricing of Amazon.

This affords BI the option of providing exclusive print projects, without having to give Amazon or anyone else a slice of the pie, and helps keep warehousing costs down and direct connections with customers up.

Ever since Penguin Press provided quality books at affordable soft cover pricing, instead of the traditional hardcover premium pricing, publishers have been challenged to innovate in more of the same ways.

Ebooks, many thought, would be the wave of the future, and eliminate the need for books, but that’s not been the case. Enough of us still prefer print books.

With POD, though it has been around a while, it wasn’t accessible (or even available to) everyone—and it’s been looked down upon, partly because self-publishing wasn’t respected and the thinking that there must be something wrong with books that go straight to paperback.

This is the same thinking that brought us “it-must-be-bad-because-it-skipped-the-theater-and-went-direct-to-DVD thinking. And yet . . . Netflix’s “The Haunting of Hill House” is one of the best productions I’ve watched this year—created and distributed by Netflix, direct to consumer instead of the traditional theatrical release, and cut into bite-sized viewings instead of film length. Todd Jacobs, a film guy and former high school classmate of mine, called “Haunting” the future of film. I agree.

Same with POD.

This idea that a book has to be hardcover is dated and unnecessary—and prevents a wide-range of individuals from having the means to purchase and/or manufacture it.

The softcover opens the market. The POD version rocks the market—and the printer that does POD and distribution is the future.

For publishers—traditional, indie, and the guy next door—POD kills warehousing fees. POD with distribution kills the need to rely on Amazon. POD with distribution and competitive pricing is a win win for everyone. Author makes money. Printer makes money. Customer and authors/publisher have an opportunity to engage.

All good—and exciting!

(If you’re interested in learning more history about the paperback, and in being inspired by publishing innovators, check out Smithsonian Magazine’s article “How the Paperback Novel Changed Popular Literature” and Mental Floss’ article “How Paperbacks Transformed the Way Americans Read.”

Introducing Black Irish JABs

For those who can’t wait, here’s the link to get the full story.

(Oh, and before I forget, there’s a great Black Irish baseball cap that comes along with the JABs.)

But let’s back up first to say what Black Irish JABs are, and how you can use them.

I’m trying to save you from eating too many of these

How do you learn to write?

I mean really.

How does an aspiring artist of any kind (or even an accomplished pro) get her ideas onto paper? How does she tell her stories? How does she make it all work?

The standard prescription is read read read and write write write. And that’s a good answer and true.

But you and I can immerse ourselves in Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Toni Morrison . . . we can bang out novel after novel and screenplay after screenplay (I know because I did) . . . and still not grasp the basics of storytelling or of artistic professionalism.

Someone has to teach us.

A mentor, a professor, a workshop leader. Our peers. Our bosses. Our brothers and sisters in the trenches.

We have to learn in the real world.

We have to read books on craft. We have to take courses. We have to apprentice ourselves to accomplished artists, even if only by watching them in documentaries or listening to them on podcasts.

What “craft” am I talking about that isn’t apparent in real life or in the experience of the creative endeavor itself?

I mean stuff like three act structure, like the difference between setup and inciting incident, like the characteristics of the midpoint of Act Two, the mechanics of the All Is Lost Moment, the difference between stakes and jeopardy.

I mean the qualities of a great villain (and the necessity of having one, even in nonfiction), the distinction between tragedy and comedy, the conventions of genres (Western, film-noir, thriller, love story, etc.) and how to use and apply them in our own work.

I mean artistic professionalism.

I mean learning how to manage our emotions, to take criticism, to withstand rejection.

I mean learning how to say no, how to overcome Resistance in all its manifold and diabolical forms. How to pick one project over another. How to dial back perfectionism. How to deal with self-sabotage and sabotage by others.

I mean how to handle success.

This stuff is not self-evident.

These answers don’t grow on trees.

Somebody has to show us.

Somebody had to show me.

Over the years, I’ve choked down a lot of bad cheeseburgers, worked for a lot of crazy bosses, woke up in bed with a lot of people I shouldn’t have—all in pursuit of these answers.

They come slowly and they come hard.

They come at a price.

That’s what Black Irish JABs are about.

Here’s the link again for the full story.

We’ve got twelve JABs ready right now and another arsenal in the works.

Each one is my version of the answers cited above.

The stuff that nobody teaches you.

The skills you can’t learn on your own.

The bottom line is Black Irish JABs are bullets. I hope they’re magic. But for sure they’re real.

Each JAB is a one-shot at the heart of a specific issue or dilemma that you and I as writers and artists and entrepreneurs struggle with every day.

I’m trying to save you from downing all those bad cheeseburgers.

I hope you’ll join us on this adventure, this artist’s journey.

 

 

 

Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Lose and Sometimes it Rains

From the Archives, via May 10, 2013.

The story of David and Goliath is one of history’s greatest reruns—played out on repeat in books and boardrooms and battlefields.

Big Guy goes after Little Guy.

Little Guy finds inner strength.

Little Guy taps into inner strength.

Little Guy fights Big Guy.

Big Guy falters.

Little Guy knocks Big Guy’s lights out.

The David and Goliath story is the story of the “win.” Think Luke against Darth Vader, Daniel Larusso against the entire Cobra Kai dojo, and pretty much any Disney classic (insert any princess or talking animal against any evil witch or demented talking animal here.).

The opposite—the story of the lose—plays out in two forms: Little Guy goes after Big Guy and is squashed by Big Guy (think of all the companies Gordon Gekko crushed before being sent to jail) and Little Guy hides from Big Guy, only delaying Big Guy’s deathblow (think George McFly and Biff Tannen before Marty went back to the future).

Then there’s a third option—when David ignores Goliath and Goliath moves on. And it comes with the realization that David and Goliath don’t always have to face off in order for someone to “win”—and that the definitions of “win” and “lose” aren’t so clear cut.

***

There are a million great lines in the movie Bull Durham. One of my favorites:

This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains. Think about that for a while.

Think about it. There’s always a third option.

From time to time someone will write a nasty e-mail or comment on Steve’s site. When it first launched, there was one individual who kept me up at night, made me sick to my stomach. His nastiness knew no end—or so I thought.

As part of the group on the crap end of the stick, I felt like we were David and he was Goliath.  He caused such pain to my thin skin that he became a Goliath in my mind—the bully. I was ready to throw stones, but a friend offered a bit of advice: Ignore him.

Easier said than done. If I didn’t shut this guy down, he’d win, right? And, I didn’t want to see him win.

But . . . We gave the friend’s advice a chance and Goliath went away. Every now and then a Doppelganger shows up and says something equally mean and insensitive, too. Whenever that happens, we insert a rain day and move on.

This third option is always available, but its so easy to look for the polar opposites—one vs the other, good vs evil, David vs Goliath.

From time to time I run into an author who wants to faceoff against Goliath. That’s his strategy for coming out on top as a winner.

The author wants to get into a debate with the talking head du jour and shut that talking head down.

And there’s a bit of danger to that. The danger is that the author, who sees himself as David, actually turns into a nasty Goliath himself.

For that author, a rain day is the best day.

In baseball, a rain day can be the difference between an injured player missing another game or making a comeback, and it plays into the pitching line-up too—one more day of rain equals one more day of rest for that starting pitcher.

For authors, it’s a day of rest, too.  Yes, you should fight, be an advocate for yourself, but there’s a lot that goes into fighting. Step back and take a long-view of the battle. Is this one you really need to win? And what does a “win” mean? Or, can you accomplish your goals by taking a rain day? You won’t be running away. Just recouping, thinking about what’s important, picking your battles, thinking about different strategies.

That guy who had me reaching for Prilosec? From what I’ve heard, he’s a wanna-be author. While I always thought of him as Goliath, I’ve realized that he probably thought of himself as David, and looked at Steve as Goliath—an already published author who he wanted to take down. Ego wanted to fight him, but we said no. Let’s walk away. Let’s take a rain day.

We rested. He left. Our game continued with a refreshed lineup.

So sometime you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes you take a rain day (and realize there’s a solid amount of winning to be done within those days, too).

Don’t You Hate It When …

Don’t you hate it when sites or stores do “teasers?”

I do.

They tell you that “something” is coming [maybe they even give you a sneak peek], trying to snag your interest and gin up your anticipation. But then they leave you hanging and don’t tell you what that “something” actually is.

Huh? What?!

I hate that.

And I’m gonna do it right now in this post.

(Sorry!)

Next week, in this Wednesday space, I’ll be introducing a product that Shawn and Callie and I have been working on for more than three years.

At various points over that time, we thought we had it ship-ready and were psyching ourselves up to announce and launch it. But we never had it 100% right, so we kept setting the takeoff date back.

Finally we’ve got it.

Okay, okay … what exactly is this new thing?

I can tell you this much today:

It’s for writers and artists and entrepreneurs.

There’s nothing like it out there.

It answers a need that writers knew they had but had never quite put their fingers on.

It’s available only from www.blackirishbooks.com. No Amazon. No B&N. It’s only gettable for people who visit this site or have signed up and are members.

(Don’t worry—if you’re a member, you’ll get the announcement in your Inbox. You won’t miss it.)

As I said, I can’t tell you yet what these new things are.

But I can tell you the name.

They’re called Black Irish JABs.

Coming next week.

Full details in next Wednesday’s post.

I’ll curtail the tease now. Thanks for being patient. I apologize.

See you next week!