Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 51

Please Repeat Your Message

My husband and I walked in on a wedding.

We wanted a drink and some downtime, but instead we got flower girls, sequins, stares—and a polite request to leave.

It was a reminder that the obvious place for important messaging isn’t always the best place—and a lesson on how easy it is to miss the signs.

Here’s how it played out.

We were in the mountains visiting family.

We got caught outside in freezing rain.

The kids wanted showers and pajamas.

My husband and I wanted a drink and a firepit.

The kids stayed with the family and my husband and I took off to a local cidery.

The cidery’s taproom and restaurant sit atop a hill with a view. Even on the rainiest days and at night, Beauty surrounds the place.

It was late and dark, and tunnel vision led us up the long ramp from the parking lot. This isn’t just a small ramp. It is a hike in itself, going up in one direction, and then turning and going up in another direction.

Once we summited the ramp, my husband swung open the front door and walked in first.

I saw my husband turn the corner.

Then I saw a woman with a full-length, sequin and lace, red gown, leaning over a small table and signing something.

First thought: That looks like my black dress.

Second thought: Why’s she wearing that here?

I turned the corner.

I saw two little girls and a woman bending over the girls. The little girls had white dresses, white socks, white shoes, and flowers in their hair.

I stopped walking.

The bar was to my left, a dividing wall was in front of me, and to the right I could see a bit of the overflow that wasn’t hidden behind the wall—rows of filled chairs and tuxedos.

Light bulb moment. This is a wedding.

My husband is a fast walker. Long stride. He light bulbed at the same time I did, just in a different location.

He said something to the bartenders. One rushed from around the bar and told us it was a private ceremony.

Que a quick exit.

All the way down the ramp, we talked about how we got in there.

Why wasn’t there a sign?

And then we got to the bottom—and saw the sign.

It was one of those A-frame, sidewalk chalkboard signs that are planted outside restaurants and stores during the Spring and Summer, with sales and specials written in different colored chalk.

We walked right by it.

I can’t say that we ignored the messaging because we assumed it was the usual fare.

We didn’t even see the sign. Neither of us remembered it even being there, yet . . . There it was, in a prominent location, with information about the private event.

So why didn’t we see it?

We were too focused on being cold, on summiting the ramp, on getting a seat with a view. We were thinking about everything we thought was ahead of us, and missed what was in front of us.

My first reaction was to blame the cidery for not making its messaging easier to see. Why put an important message on a sign that’s usually used for everything but closing messages? And, if the sign was going to be used, why not do it in bright red, with the word CLOSED in big bold letters with arrows pointing to it—and why not shine a spotlight on it, so the black chalkboard didn’t blend into the night. That would have gotten my attention.

But . . . It’s wasn’t the cidery’s fault that our porch lights were on, but neither my husband nor I were at home.

All we had to do was pay attention. It was right in front of us.

Still got me thinking, though.

I’ve deleted so many e-mails just because they looked like spam, only to find out later that they were something I wanted.

Years ago, the PR department I worked for sent most of its releases via fax blasts. Yes. Fax blasts were a thing. Big headlines at the top, followed by spaced out text, to grab the attention of the recipients. In hindsight, we were spamming fax machines across the country, hoping that the desired person would read the things. They were pretty bad. I sent hundreds and can’t remember but a few bites in return. Then emails came along, then email blasts, and the same thing happened again.

The messaging looks like spam—void of the personal.

So, if it is coming to me, I delete it, and if I’m sending it to someone else, they’re likely to delete it.

I don’t want to slow down and pay attention to their messaging, and they’re just as busy, and don’t want to slow down and pay attention to mine.

Back to the sign and the cidery.

The cidery did its job and I was rushed. What would have helped us both?

One word—CLOSED—and two signs.

The first signs get missed all the time, especially if they’re filled with text.

All that was needed was the word CLOSED, in big bold letters, or something like this:

CLOSED

PRIVATE EVENT

Nothing else should have been on the board. No frilly designs. Nothing. Period.

Then for those that missed the first sign, another sign would sit at the front doors.

That’s the same thing that works in outreach. Send out a pitch with simple messaging, and then follow-up because recipients miss first messages all the time. It could be your design or it could be their state of mind, so you have to assume the first time wasn’t a go (unless you hear from them).

State and then repeat the message with clarity, and then even the most rushed couples will clue in.

Untitled Book, Installment #2

THE HERO’S JOURNEY AND THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY {continuing from last week’s post}

 

 

I have a theory about the Hero’s Journey. We all have one. We have many, in fact. But our primary hero’s journey as artists is the passage we live out, in real life, before we find our calling.

Rocket Raccoon overcoming an All Is Lost Moment in “Guardians of the Galaxy”

The hero’s journey is the search for that calling.

It’s preparation.

It’s initiation (or more precisely, self-initiation).

On the hero’s journey, we see, we experience, we suffer. We learn.

On our hero’s journey, we acquire a history that is ours alone. It’s a secret history, a private history, a personal history. No one has it but us. No one knows it but us. This secret history is the most valuable possession we hold, or ever will hold. We will draw upon it for the rest of our lives.

The hero’s journey ends when, like Odysseus, we return home to Ithaca, to the place from which we started. We wash up on shore. We have survived. We have come home.

Now what?

The passage that comes next is the Artist’s Journey.

The artist’s journey comes after the hero’s journey.

Everything that has happened to us up to this point is rehearsal for us to act, now, as our true self and to find and speak in our true voice.

The artist’s journey is the process of self-discovery that follows.

It will last as long as we’re alive, and maybe longer.

 

 

THE EPIPHANAL MOMENT

 

In Hollywood parlance, there’s an inflection point in every story called the All Is Lost Moment. This moment comes near the end of Act Two, about two-thirds of the way through the movie.

In the All Is Lost moment, the hero is as far from her goal as possible. It seems certain in that moment that she will never reach it.

The All Is Lost moment is immediately followed by what I call the Epiphanal Moment.

In the epiphanal moment, the hero experiences a breakthrough.

This breakthrough is almost always internal. The hero changes her attitude. She regroups. She sees her dilemma from a new perspective, a perspective that she had never considered before (or, if she had considered it, had rejected), a point of view that offers either hope or desperation amounting to hope.

The movie now enters Act Three. The hero, fortified by this fresh hope (or desperation), charges full-tilt into the climax.

Sarah Conner stops running and turns to confront the Terminator.

Luke Skywalker boards his X-wing and flies against the Death Star.

Bogey makes the decision to put Ingrid, with her husband, onto the plane to Lisbon, while he himself stays to confront the enemies of freedom.

You and I have All Is Lost moments in our real lives.

We have Epiphanal Moments.

Here is mine, from The War of Art:

 

I washed up in New York a couple of decades ago, making

twenty bucks a night driving a cab and running away fulltime

from doing my work. One night, alone in my $110-amonth

sublet, I hit bottom in terms of having diverted myself

into so many phony channels so many times that I couldn’t

rationalize it for one more evening. I dragged out my ancient

Smith-Corona, dreading the experience as pointless, fruitless,

meaningless, not to say the most painful exercise I could

think of. For two hours I made myself sit there, torturing out

some trash that I chucked immediately into the shitcan. That

was enough. I put the machine away. I went back to the

kitchen. In the sink sat ten days of dishes. For some reason I

had enough excess energy that I decided to wash them. The

warm water felt pretty good. The soap and sponge were

doing their thing. A pile of clean plates began rising in the

drying rack. To my amazement I realized I was whistling.

It hit me that I had turned a corner.

I was okay.

I would be okay from here on.

Do you understand? I hadn’t written anything good. It

might be years before I would, if I ever did at all. That

didn’t matter. What counted was that I had, after years

of running from it, actually sat down and done my work.

 

That was my epiphanal moment.

My hero’s journey was over.

My artist’s journey had begun.

 

 

Storygridding 4,000 words of Big Idea Nonfiction

For fun, over at www.storygrid.com a while back, I storygridded Malcolm Gladwell’s seminal article from the June 3, 1996 edition of The New Yorker.  I tracked the narrative altitude in the work that I described in my post from February 2, 2018.

The vertical axis moves from the “street” level perspective at the lowest elevation through the “city” vantage point up to the “national” level and then all the way to the highest “universal” level. Four specific lenses that he uses to progressively build dramatic tension.

The horizontal axis takes us through the piece word by word, beat by beat, and subject by subject.

To see how Gladwell tackled so many academic disciplines (including personal history) as he moved his narrative camera shows just how much craft goes into a single article.

I recommend reading the piece with this graph in front of you to observe the professional writer performing the literary equivalent of Red Gerard’s final run at the Olympics.

 

"This Might Not Work … "

 

Stealing a phrase (above) from Seth Godin, I’m going to try something a little different over the next few weeks and maybe more.

I’m gonna serialize a book I’ve been working on.

Consider the course and contour of this artist’s journey …

The book is about writing.

I don’t have a title yet but the premise is that there’s such a thing as “the artist’s journey.”

The artist’s journey is different from “the hero’s journey.”

The artist’s journey is the process we embark upon once we’ve found our calling, once we know we’re writers but we don’t know yet exactly what we’ll write or how we’ll write it.

These posts will be a bit longer than normal, just because that’s how chapters in a book fall. I don’t wanna post truncated versions that are so short they don’t make sense, just because that’s where chapters happen to break.

Please let me know if you hate this.

I’ll stop if it’s not worth our readers’ time or if our friends find the material boring.

That said, let’s kick it off.

Starting with the epigraph, here’s the beginning of this so-far-untitled book:

 

 

 

I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live—if what others are doing is called living—but to express myself. I realized that I had never had the least interest in living, but only in this which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same time, and beyond it. What is true interests me scarcely at all, nor even what is real; only that interests me which I imagine to be, that which I had stifled every day in order to live.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

 

 

B    O    O   K         O    N   E

 

  T     H     E       H     E     R     O’     S       J     O     U     R     N     E     Y

 

A   N   D       T   H   E     A   R   T   I   S   T’   S       J   O   U   R   N   E   Y

 

 

THE SHAPE OF THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY

 

 

Consider the course and contour of this artist’s journey:

 

          Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.

          The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle

          Born to Run

          Darkness on the Edge of Town

          The River

          Nebraska

          Born in the U.S.A.

          Tunnel of Love

          Human Touch

          Lucky Town

          The Ghost of Tom Joad

          Working on a Dream

          Wrecking Ball

          High Hopes

 

Or this artist’s:

 

       Goodbye, Columbus

       Portnoy’s Complaint

       The Great American Novel

       My Life as a Man

       The Professor of Desire

       Zuckerman Unbound

       The Anatomy Lesson

       The Counterlife

       Sabbath’s Theater

       American Pastoral

       The Human Stain

       The Plot Against America

       Indignation

       Nemesis

 

Or this artist’s:

 

          Clouds

          Ladies of the Canyon

          Blue

          For the Roses

          Court and Spark

          The Hissing of Summer Lawns

          Hejira

          Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter

          Wild Things Run Fast

          Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm

          Night Ride Home

          Turbulent Indigo

 

Clearly there is a unity (of theme, of voice, of intention) to each of these writers’ bodies of work.

There’s a progression too, isn’t there? The works, considered in sequence, feel like a journey that is moving in a specific direction.

 

          Bob Dylan

          The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

          The Times They Are a-Changin’

          Highway 61 Revisited

          Blonde on Blonde

          Bringing It All Back Home

          Blood on the Tracks

          Desire

          John Wesley Harding

          Street-legal

          Nashville Skyline

          Slow Train Coming

          Hard Rain

          Time Out of Mind

          Tempest

          Shadows in the Night

 

A strong case could be made that the bodies of work cited above (and those of every other artist on the planet) comprise a “hero’s journey,” in the classic Joseph Campbell/C.G. Jung sense.

I have a different interpretation.

I think they represent another journey.

I think they represent “the artist’s journey.”

 

“This Might Not Work … “

 

Stealing a phrase (above) from Seth Godin, I’m going to try something a little different over the next few weeks and maybe more.

I’m gonna serialize a book I’ve been working on.

Consider the course and contour of this artist’s journey …

The book is about writing.

I don’t have a title yet but the premise is that there’s such a thing as “the artist’s journey.”

The artist’s journey is different from “the hero’s journey.”

The artist’s journey is the process we embark upon once we’ve found our calling, once we know we’re writers but we don’t know yet exactly what we’ll write or how we’ll write it.

These posts will be a bit longer than normal, just because that’s how chapters in a book fall. I don’t wanna post truncated versions that are so short they don’t make sense, just because that’s where chapters happen to break.

Please let me know if you hate this.

I’ll stop if it’s not worth our readers’ time or if our friends find the material boring.

That said, let’s kick it off.

Starting with the epigraph, here’s the beginning of this so-far-untitled book:

 

 

 

I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live—if what others are doing is called living—but to express myself. I realized that I had never had the least interest in living, but only in this which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same time, and beyond it. What is true interests me scarcely at all, nor even what is real; only that interests me which I imagine to be, that which I had stifled every day in order to live.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

 

 

B    O    O   K         O    N   E

 

  T     H     E       H     E     R     O’     S       J     O     U     R     N     E     Y

 

A   N   D       T   H   E     A   R   T   I   S   T’   S       J   O   U   R   N   E   Y

 

 

THE SHAPE OF THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY

 

 

Consider the course and contour of this artist’s journey:

 

          Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.

          The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle

          Born to Run

          Darkness on the Edge of Town

          The River

          Nebraska

          Born in the U.S.A.

          Tunnel of Love

          Human Touch

          Lucky Town

          The Ghost of Tom Joad

          Working on a Dream

          Wrecking Ball

          High Hopes

 

Or this artist’s:

 

       Goodbye, Columbus

       Portnoy’s Complaint

       The Great American Novel

       My Life as a Man

       The Professor of Desire

       Zuckerman Unbound

       The Anatomy Lesson

       The Counterlife

       Sabbath’s Theater

       American Pastoral

       The Human Stain

       The Plot Against America

       Indignation

       Nemesis

 

Or this artist’s:

 

          Clouds

          Ladies of the Canyon

          Blue

          For the Roses

          Court and Spark

          The Hissing of Summer Lawns

          Hejira

          Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter

          Wild Things Run Fast

          Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm

          Night Ride Home

          Turbulent Indigo

 

Clearly there is a unity (of theme, of voice, of intention) to each of these writers’ bodies of work.

There’s a progression too, isn’t there? The works, considered in sequence, feel like a journey that is moving in a specific direction.

 

          Bob Dylan

          The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

          The Times They Are a-Changin’

          Highway 61 Revisited

          Blonde on Blonde

          Bringing It All Back Home

          Blood on the Tracks

          Desire

          John Wesley Harding

          Street-legal

          Nashville Skyline

          Slow Train Coming

          Hard Rain

          Time Out of Mind

          Tempest

          Shadows in the Night

 

A strong case could be made that the bodies of work cited above (and those of every other artist on the planet) comprise a “hero’s journey,” in the classic Joseph Campbell/C.G. Jung sense.

I have a different interpretation.

I think they represent another journey.

I think they represent “the artist’s journey.”

 

Don't Major in the Minor

(Past is present. With a December 6, 2013 date, this post is a little over four years old. The drones haven’t replaced humans yet, but Amazon is still pushing distribution, with its announcement that Amazon is going to enter UPS’ and FedEx’s space. O’Reilly has continued to change things up since this writing, but is still leading the way. More cultivated subscription models, too.)

“Don’t major in the minor.”

Mellody Hobson said it, but I’ve thought it these last few days, since watching Jeff Bezos on 60 Minutes this past Sunday.

In case you haven’t heard, Bezos unveiled a prototype for package-delivering drones at the end of the interview. Without missing a beat, the character-bashing, Jeff-Bezos hating, Amazon-vilifying tribes descended, with articles and comments from one site to the next.

They majored in the minor.

I’m not saying that the drones weren’t newsworthy. They were—and I saw mentions pop up in everything from Outside Magazine’s site to Waterstones’ blog. And I’m not saying that Amazon isn’t above criticism, but . . .

There was much more to that interview than the last few minutes of drones. And if you are going to go down the drone rabbit hole, there’s a much bigger discussion that needs to take place, outside whether Amazon will or won’t ever be able to use them.

Instead of responding to the bigger ideas, they went for the jugular and the jocular, playing guessing games about why 60 Minutes ran the interview, why the secretive Bezos shared the drones.

Why does knowing why Bezos shared the drones matter? Why is anyone surprised that 60 Minutes would feature Amazon in a story about Cyber Monday? What is the point of all the guessing games?

The drones may have made headlines, but the rest of the interview held the story I clung to these past few days.

1) Complaining is not a strategy

When Charlie Rose asked Bezos about worries of small book publishers and traditional retailers, and whether Amazon is ruthless in its pursuit of market share, Bezos replied:

“The internet is disrupting every media industry, Charlie. You know, people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. Amazon is not happening to bookselling. The future is happening to bookselling.” (about the 9:15 mark of the interview)

He’s right. And the future isn’t just happening to booksellers. Look at how the rise of e-mail played into the decline of the U.S. Postal Service’s revenues. After years of struggling, a plan was sent to Congress for approval, to end Saturday delivery. Congress nixed the plan. A few months later, Amazon stepped in with a different plan—to add Sunday service. Via this partnership, the USPS will deliver Amazon’s packages on the one day of the week that no one else delivers them, thus increasing delivery options for Amazon customers and bringing in revenue to the USPS. A win-win.

The examples of industries sideswiped by the future is long, as is the list of industries that have risen, offering much needed innovation and efficiency.

But . . .

It’s easier to bash Bezos and Amazon than it is to look in the mirror and ask, Why didn’t my publishing house lead the charge to sell books online? Why did we focus on the chains as the future when we saw the indy stores struggling to stay afloat? Why didn’t we recognize the potential for the future?

It’s easier to hate Bezos and Amazon than it is to ask, Why didn’t my bookstore stock backlist, long-tail titles, and books from indy publishers in addition to all those big publisher frontlist titles? Why didn’t my bookstore create a model that could be tapped by indy publishers and authors, instead of requiring top co-op dollars that only the big guys could pay for prime placement?



It’s easier to vilify Bezos and Amazon than it is to ask, Why didn’t I keep spending dollars with indy stores instead of spending them at the big chains, which then caused the indys I love to die?

It’s easier to major in the minor.

Here’s the thing: No one in the publishing equation is innocent.

Bezos didn’t kill publishing. The Future didn’t kill publishing. Publishing’s inability to adapt killed publishing…. Same thing with the USPS, the music industry, and businesses in so many other sectors.

2) It’s all about fulfillment

Neither the chains or the publishers or the indy’s of yesterday thought about fulfillment the way Amazon has, which was one of the most fascinating portions of the interview. And when I talk publishers, I’m talking in terms of movies and newspapers and albums, too.

It’s popular to say content is king. I’d give joint reign to content and fulfillment instead.

Content doesn’t matter if you can’t get it out in today’s I-want-it-and-I-want-it-now on-demand climate. Amazon figured out how to do it. I’ve been in a few warehouses and I’ve never seen anything like what was shown during the interview.

The fulfillment part is another reason why the drones didn’t faze me as much. Do I question them? Yes. I immediately saw the kids in my neighborhood tagging them with Nerf bullets. But that was it. Fulfillment is what Amazon does well. It’s where I expect them to continue as innovators. So the drones? Surprised by the how, but not the why.

3) Greenlighting is changing.

For a long time the traditional publishers were the only game in town – whether the big sixish or the mid-sized or indy. Want to get something published or recorded? You went to them or did it on your own or gave up.

Amazon announced its own publishing program a while back, so it shouldn’t have been such a shock when Netflix left studios in its dust, after adding award-winning original programming to its menu. Where they were both sellers, they’re now producers, too, offering alternatives to traditional publishing outlets.

In Amazon’s case . . .

“We’re changing the greenlighting process,” said Bezos of Alpha House, an original series from Gary Trudeau, which Amazon is producing. “Instead of a few studio executives deciding what gets greenlighted . . . we’re using what some people would call crowdsourcing to help figure that out.” Yep. He went to the customers.

So if I was a publisher and/or a bookseller, how would I compete with Amazon?

I’d bring back the indy.

While Amazon offers so much, it doesn’t offer the touch of a specialized store, with employees that breathe books. There’s no one to chat with, to ask for a specific holiday book suggestion for a father who likes the military, medicine and gardening, or a sister who likes to read arts and crafts guides, and legal briefs.

The indy store reboot wouldn’t be the old school bricks and mortar store. It would exist online, cultivating very specific genres, building equally specific communities. And, it would most likely be a collaboration project—perhaps booksellers or authors or even publishers could develop a shared place online to sell those titles and grow a community. Instead of everyone trying to create their own wheel and grow a community around that wheel, thus competing for the community, they’d build one wheel together. Instead of everyone operating all for one, they’d operate one for all.

The closest example? O’Reilly Media is the only one I can think of . . . O’Reilly has been cultivating a very specific community for years, selling very specific genres of books and growing a specific audience, with an unwavering—yes, specific—focus.

When O’Reilly launched Safari Books Online, in July 2000, it offered its audience a new way to tap into books, but with the indy approach you might get in one of the old mom and pop stores. That was over ten years ago, when Amazon was just losing its baby teeth.

While there are some publishers, such as Praeger, which launched PSI a few years back, that have found ways to fulfill books and other content online, they’ve taken the institutional approach, which most book buyers can’t afford. The individual books aren’t for sale and the pricing is based on universities and other organizations making purchases. There isn’t a genre-specific indy that I can think of, other than O’Reilly, that nailed the genre in terms of options and community building – AND – in terms of price point, offering readers a model they can afford.

And, O’Reilly is collaborating with other publishers, too. It built Safari, but you’ll find books from publishers such as Microsoft and Wiley featured within Safari, too.

O’Reilly is indy in style, majoring in everything BUT the minor.

It’s an amazing model and one that Amazon doesn’t have going for it.

So…

Look to the indy. Look to collaboration/partnerships. Look to other options. Look to the future.

And, stop majoring in the minor.

Amazon and Bezos aren’t above criticism, but they aren’t the problem either. Complaining about them will get the publishing industry nowhere.

Don’t Major in the Minor

(Past is present. With a December 6, 2013 date, this post is a little over four years old. The drones haven’t replaced humans yet, but Amazon is still pushing distribution, with its announcement that Amazon is going to enter UPS’ and FedEx’s space. O’Reilly has continued to change things up since this writing, but is still leading the way. More cultivated subscription models, too.)

“Don’t major in the minor.”

Mellody Hobson said it, but I’ve thought it these last few days, since watching Jeff Bezos on 60 Minutes this past Sunday.

In case you haven’t heard, Bezos unveiled a prototype for package-delivering drones at the end of the interview. Without missing a beat, the character-bashing, Jeff-Bezos hating, Amazon-vilifying tribes descended, with articles and comments from one site to the next.

They majored in the minor.

I’m not saying that the drones weren’t newsworthy. They were—and I saw mentions pop up in everything from Outside Magazine’s site to Waterstones’ blog. And I’m not saying that Amazon isn’t above criticism, but . . .

There was much more to that interview than the last few minutes of drones. And if you are going to go down the drone rabbit hole, there’s a much bigger discussion that needs to take place, outside whether Amazon will or won’t ever be able to use them.

Instead of responding to the bigger ideas, they went for the jugular and the jocular, playing guessing games about why 60 Minutes ran the interview, why the secretive Bezos shared the drones.

Why does knowing why Bezos shared the drones matter? Why is anyone surprised that 60 Minutes would feature Amazon in a story about Cyber Monday? What is the point of all the guessing games?

The drones may have made headlines, but the rest of the interview held the story I clung to these past few days.

1) Complaining is not a strategy

When Charlie Rose asked Bezos about worries of small book publishers and traditional retailers, and whether Amazon is ruthless in its pursuit of market share, Bezos replied:

“The internet is disrupting every media industry, Charlie. You know, people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. Amazon is not happening to bookselling. The future is happening to bookselling.” (about the 9:15 mark of the interview)

He’s right. And the future isn’t just happening to booksellers. Look at how the rise of e-mail played into the decline of the U.S. Postal Service’s revenues. After years of struggling, a plan was sent to Congress for approval, to end Saturday delivery. Congress nixed the plan. A few months later, Amazon stepped in with a different plan—to add Sunday service. Via this partnership, the USPS will deliver Amazon’s packages on the one day of the week that no one else delivers them, thus increasing delivery options for Amazon customers and bringing in revenue to the USPS. A win-win.

The examples of industries sideswiped by the future is long, as is the list of industries that have risen, offering much needed innovation and efficiency.

But . . .

It’s easier to bash Bezos and Amazon than it is to look in the mirror and ask, Why didn’t my publishing house lead the charge to sell books online? Why did we focus on the chains as the future when we saw the indy stores struggling to stay afloat? Why didn’t we recognize the potential for the future?

It’s easier to hate Bezos and Amazon than it is to ask, Why didn’t my bookstore stock backlist, long-tail titles, and books from indy publishers in addition to all those big publisher frontlist titles? Why didn’t my bookstore create a model that could be tapped by indy publishers and authors, instead of requiring top co-op dollars that only the big guys could pay for prime placement?



It’s easier to vilify Bezos and Amazon than it is to ask, Why didn’t I keep spending dollars with indy stores instead of spending them at the big chains, which then caused the indys I love to die?

It’s easier to major in the minor.

Here’s the thing: No one in the publishing equation is innocent.

Bezos didn’t kill publishing. The Future didn’t kill publishing. Publishing’s inability to adapt killed publishing…. Same thing with the USPS, the music industry, and businesses in so many other sectors.

2) It’s all about fulfillment

Neither the chains or the publishers or the indy’s of yesterday thought about fulfillment the way Amazon has, which was one of the most fascinating portions of the interview. And when I talk publishers, I’m talking in terms of movies and newspapers and albums, too.

It’s popular to say content is king. I’d give joint reign to content and fulfillment instead.

Content doesn’t matter if you can’t get it out in today’s I-want-it-and-I-want-it-now on-demand climate. Amazon figured out how to do it. I’ve been in a few warehouses and I’ve never seen anything like what was shown during the interview.

The fulfillment part is another reason why the drones didn’t faze me as much. Do I question them? Yes. I immediately saw the kids in my neighborhood tagging them with Nerf bullets. But that was it. Fulfillment is what Amazon does well. It’s where I expect them to continue as innovators. So the drones? Surprised by the how, but not the why.

3) Greenlighting is changing.

For a long time the traditional publishers were the only game in town – whether the big sixish or the mid-sized or indy. Want to get something published or recorded? You went to them or did it on your own or gave up.

Amazon announced its own publishing program a while back, so it shouldn’t have been such a shock when Netflix left studios in its dust, after adding award-winning original programming to its menu. Where they were both sellers, they’re now producers, too, offering alternatives to traditional publishing outlets.

In Amazon’s case . . .

“We’re changing the greenlighting process,” said Bezos of Alpha House, an original series from Gary Trudeau, which Amazon is producing. “Instead of a few studio executives deciding what gets greenlighted . . . we’re using what some people would call crowdsourcing to help figure that out.” Yep. He went to the customers.

So if I was a publisher and/or a bookseller, how would I compete with Amazon?

I’d bring back the indy.

While Amazon offers so much, it doesn’t offer the touch of a specialized store, with employees that breathe books. There’s no one to chat with, to ask for a specific holiday book suggestion for a father who likes the military, medicine and gardening, or a sister who likes to read arts and crafts guides, and legal briefs.

The indy store reboot wouldn’t be the old school bricks and mortar store. It would exist online, cultivating very specific genres, building equally specific communities. And, it would most likely be a collaboration project—perhaps booksellers or authors or even publishers could develop a shared place online to sell those titles and grow a community. Instead of everyone trying to create their own wheel and grow a community around that wheel, thus competing for the community, they’d build one wheel together. Instead of everyone operating all for one, they’d operate one for all.

The closest example? O’Reilly Media is the only one I can think of . . . O’Reilly has been cultivating a very specific community for years, selling very specific genres of books and growing a specific audience, with an unwavering—yes, specific—focus.

When O’Reilly launched Safari Books Online, in July 2000, it offered its audience a new way to tap into books, but with the indy approach you might get in one of the old mom and pop stores. That was over ten years ago, when Amazon was just losing its baby teeth.

While there are some publishers, such as Praeger, which launched PSI a few years back, that have found ways to fulfill books and other content online, they’ve taken the institutional approach, which most book buyers can’t afford. The individual books aren’t for sale and the pricing is based on universities and other organizations making purchases. There isn’t a genre-specific indy that I can think of, other than O’Reilly, that nailed the genre in terms of options and community building – AND – in terms of price point, offering readers a model they can afford.

And, O’Reilly is collaborating with other publishers, too. It built Safari, but you’ll find books from publishers such as Microsoft and Wiley featured within Safari, too.

O’Reilly is indy in style, majoring in everything BUT the minor.

It’s an amazing model and one that Amazon doesn’t have going for it.

So…

Look to the indy. Look to collaboration/partnerships. Look to other options. Look to the future.

And, stop majoring in the minor.

Amazon and Bezos aren’t above criticism, but they aren’t the problem either. Complaining about them will get the publishing industry nowhere.

How Steven Spielberg Handles his Villains

 

Steven Spielberg loves to tease us with his villains.

It’s twice as scary when you DON’T see the shark

He shows them only indirectly.

In the audience we see the effects of the Bad Guys’ actions, but we rarely see the malefactors themselves.

This is tremendously powerful because it makes us imagine what the forces of evil look like, and that’s always scarier than actually seeing them in blinding daylight.

Remember the scene in Jaws with the three yellow barrels? Our heroes in their boat (Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider, and Robert Shaw) harpoon the shark with cables linked to three huge yellow air-tank-like barrels. The barrels float on the ocean surface, enabling our hunters (and us) to see the shark’s movements from the boat even when the finned menace is submerged.

The great cinematic moment is when the three barrels go churning across the surface at high speed toward the boat, then dive under and come up on the other side.

We never see the shark.

But wow, how we imagine him.

That dude, we can’t help but say to ourselves, must be HUGE!

Likewise Spielberg doesn’t really show us the Meanies pursuing E.T. We see only their flashlight beams searching for the little guy, or their keys jangling on their work belts as they close in on him.

The giant spaceship wasn’t really the villain in Close Encounters but it felt like at least an ominous, unknown force at the start. Again, Spielberg withheld for most of the movie all direct sight of this entity.

We saw headlights and amber lights behind Richard Dreyfuss’s pickup truck. We saw screws mysteriously jiggling out of their sockets on Melinda Dillon’s floor and crazy lights flashing under her door jamb. The whole house shook. Electric toy cars began scooting across the floor. Melinda’s little son became mesmerized by the lights appearing outside.

Melinda Dillon as the mom in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”

But we never saw the space ship.

Ridley Scott worked the same magic in the original Alien. We saw the nasty little bugger (the Alien, not Mr. Scott) burst out of John Hurt’s chest and flee into the darkness of the huge space vessel. But after that, the scares all came from shadows and images on search screens, mixed with the odd Holy Crap pop-up of the monster, followed by an instantaneous cut-away.

You and I could profit by stealing this trick from these great scare-meisters.

Keep the villain present and aggressive in the effects he produces, but show him overtly as little as possible.

 

Narrative Altitude

From www.storygrid.com, here is the next piece in my exploration of Malcolm Gladwell’s seminal work, The Tipping Point.

For over a decade, Malcolm Gladwell understood the opportunity and potential of the tipping point idea. And by the time he arrived at The New Yorker in 1996, chances are he’d explored many of its intellectual trails—GRODZINS ’57; SCHELLING ’69, ’71, ’78; GRANOVETTER ’78, ’83; MORLEY ’84; CRANE ’89.

If only in his own head, while waiting in line for take-out coffee at The Red Flame Diner on 44th Street, he’d cleared substantial tipping point terrain of his own. But his goal was not just to add an offshoot to one of his predecessors’ efforts, but instead to pull them all together and carve a freeway into what he felt was the unexplored heart of the idea.

That tipping points are not just useful as predictors of social polarization, but consciously engineered, they can serve as positive behavioral modification systems for entire communities.

That’s great, but how is he going to make a story out of that mess of theory?

How is he going to make the tipping point relevant to readers of The New Yorker in June 1996?

That is, how is he going to do his job?

Don’t forget that Gladwell’s just a newbie staff writer at perhaps the most prestigious literary magazine in the world. He’s got a one-year contract. And he’s only written three pieces, which were solid hits, but they certainly aren’t anywhere near the heavy lifting Big Idea throw-down inherent in this piece.

What Gladwell has been looking for all of these years to make his tipping point notion engaging—at a story level—is a high profile “connector” idea.  A bit of something relevant to contemporary society.  Writing about white flight ain’t that.

What phenomenon he discovers in 1996 is beautifully organic to the original piece that caught his attention back in 1984—Jefferson Morley’s “Double Reverse Discrimination” in The New Republic. It’s in fact shockingly poetic on a story level too.

The connector idea that Gladwell uses to explore his theory about the tipping point—that it can be engineered to effect positive social change—is the one credited with dropping crime in New York City off a cliff. It is George Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s extension of Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s 1969 “broken window experiments” in their article Broken Windows from the March 1982 edition of yet another wonky magazine, The Atlantic.

So how does Gladwell make this crime falls because of a theory into a story?

Well, he starts his June 3, 1996 New Yorker piece, The Tipping Point, like any great novelist would. He introduces a killer beginning hook.

This in a nutshell:

New York City, which is most peoples’ minds since the late 1960s is the land of mayhem, muggings and indiscriminate murder, is not what you think it is. It is now about as dangerous as Boise, Idaho. By June 3, 1996, it ranks 136th on the FBI’s violent crime rate among major American cities.

What happened?

Obviously, this is the underlying question that will drive the narrative into the middle build of the piece…and ultimately pay off with a very satisfying answer. How did a place often associated with the dark desire of the fictional character Travis Bickle in Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver for a real rain to come “and wash all this scum off the streets” actually turn safe?

It’s a very good hook.

But here’s the thing. If Gladwell just flies his narrative in altitude above the city…that is he doesn’t takes us “on the ground” to a real place within the city and what it’s like there…then we won’t really care. We’ll do what we’ve done with innumerable New Yorker pieces before…we’ll skim it and forget it.

What he needs to do to keep us reading about this strange fall in crime phenomenon is to make it human. He needs to give us low altitude reporting with commentary from eyewitnesses to let us “experience” it. We need to hear from a cop in a specific neighborhood tell us what it was like before the change and what it’s like after the change.

After we get a sense of how one particular neighborhood in the big city has changed, then Gladwell can fly a little higher with a larger point of view. He can interview the New York City Police Commissioner, William J. Bratton, who will tell the reader why he thinks the change has occurred in the first place.

And then back to the low altitude, back to the Seven-Five Precinct to hear how Bratton’s big talk actually is put into practice on the street.

Gladwell finishes the beginning hook of his piece with a transition that will allow him to fly above the city entirely. After listing all of the little things that Bratton talks about being instrumental in the plummeting of New York City Crime, Gladwell suggests that it’s pretty hard to believe that stopping guys from hanging out on street corners sipping beer is responsible for a crazy decline in crime.  He does what good storytellers do to keep a reader engaged.  He states what the reader is probably thinking to themselves.

Maybe we need to think differently about this whole thing? Maybe we should consider what the academic world has been saying about social problems? Which transitions the story into the progressive complications for the Middle Build for his piece—that crime can be better understood in epidemiological terms.

The first sequence in Gladwell’s Middle Build is introducing the reader to the world of epidemics. Not the pejorative use of the word like “there’s an epidemic of Axe Deodorant wearing teenage boys on the loose,” but the actual math behind the literal definition of an epidemic.

This is yet another shift in narrative altitude for the piece…one that Gladwell mastered back in his science beat days at The Washington Post. This altitude is “the easy to understand hypothetical scenario that explains a complex idea in a very simple way” vantage point. In this case, Gladwell walks us through an outbreak of Canadian flu brought to Manhattan at Christmas time. You’ll notice that he didn’t choose to base his hypothetical germ fest  in London or Zurich. No, he’s keeping the reader still thinking about New York City even though it’s a made up scenario.

He finishes up the ground level hypothetical flu contagion with the epidemiologist’s definition of the “tipping point.” It is a specific number—“the point at which an ordinary and stable phenomenon—a low-level flu outbreak—can turn into a public-health crisis.”

Even though he’s been noodling the idea for years, this is the first time Gladwell writes publicly about the “tipping point.”

Wasn’t it a brilliant decision to define it so specifically?

What I mean by that is Gladwell could have spoken of tipping points as sort of amorphous moments in time when something goes from unpopular to popular—like he’ll do in his book in a few years when he describes sales of Hush Puppies shoes.

But instead, he chose to define a tipping point with a very definitive number…in the case of his hypothetical outbreak of flu, it’s the number 50. Is there anything more convincing and solid than a number? When someone answers a question with a number, we can’t help but think of it as a fact. We think differently about someone who clearly says “I’m 52 years old” versus someone who says “How old do you think I am?”  One is telling the truth and the other one is just playing games. Right?

So associating “tipping point” with a number is a way for Gladwell to subconsciously say to the reader that tipping points aren’t “theories” or some intellectual bullshit game playing.  They’re facts. So in other words, pay attention!

And then Gladwell progressively complicates his story further. He escalates the stakes of tipping points from a hypothetical bunch of New Yorkers getting an inconvenient flu at Christmas time, to the very real deaths of forty thousand people in the United States contracting and dying of AIDS every year.

The narrative altitude has risen even higher. We’re not just having some intellectual fun looking at what may or may not have caused crime to drop in New York City or how a flu gets spread, we’re grappling with thousands of lives. We’re above the city now, looking at the state of global public health.

There is no way to go higher in narrative altitude than that. Is there? We’re dealing with the global material world—life and death stuff. That’s got to be the ceiling, right?

Well, like a narrative nonfiction answer to Emeril Lagesse, in the very next beat in his piece, Gladwell kicks it up yet another notch.

He takes the narrative altitude above the city and the state and enters the heavens to explain that the way we think the world works can often be wildly incorrect. The world is not always linear. It’s often a geometric progression where big efforts have little effects and little efforts have big effects (the controlling idea of his first piece for The New Yorker, “Blowup.”).

Sometimes big efforts have small effects—like moving ten tons of dirt on a perfectly level field. And sometimes small efforts—like shoveling ten pounds of dirt beneath a precipice—can have huge effects, an avalanche. Simple to understand with the right analogy, but try and remember that when you’ve worked for a week and a half on a post that no one reads…

Just as quickly as his transitions from the upper reaches of public health to the heavens, Gladwell brings his narrative altitude back to the ground. He explains the concept of non-linearity by examining the risks to an unborn child of a pregnant women having a single glass of wine, which amount to negligible.

And then he uses his own life experience as interstitial tissue to lighten the narrative and bring the idea of hitting a threshold home.  He remembers life as a child pounding on a bottle of ketchup and quotes his British father at the dinner table:

Tomato ketchup in a bottle—

None will come and then the lot’ll.

From a fictional Xmas Flu to AIDS to Geometric Progression to a Pregnant woman having a glass of wine to a kid pounding ketchup… The narrative altitude, like moving up and down small dips and then medium bumps and then large free falls on a roller coaster—keeps the readers minds engaged. Not knowing what will happen next even though they know where their final destination will be is what keeps a reader reading.

After the ketchup, Gladwell transitions into the Ending Payoff of his piece with a technique I adore. He anticipates a reader’s confusion and addresses it directly with a rhetorical question—“What does this have to do with the murder rate in Brooklyn?”

Now that we’re used to the different levels of narrative altitude, Gladwell will put all of the pieces together for us in a way that will explain exactly why the crime rate in New York City declined so rapidly from 1994 to 1996.

With the fluent storytelling in evidence from his Beginning Hook through his Middle Build of this piece, the reader now trusts that Gladwell knows this stuff cold.  They’ll take him now at his word.

So now Gladwell can act as expert and maintain a comfortable omniscient altitude. That is, he doesn’t have to do as many stunt pilot maneuvers to keep the reader glued to the page. He’s reached the ending payoff so now it’s time to lay his argument out in as clear and engaging way as possible, without going off on hypotheticals or tangents.  He’s reached the punch line. He just has to deliver it clearly and quickly to close.

So he walks the reader through the academic work that supports his conclusions. We get:

A bit about Thomas Schelling’s work on white flight,
George Galster at the Urban Institute in Washington backing up Schelling,
David Rowe at the University of Arizona on teen sexual behavior tipping points
Jonathan Crane at the University of Illinois,
Mark L. Rosenberg at the Centers for Disease Control
Range Hutson and his paper “The Epidemic of Gang-Related Homocides in Los Angeles Country from 1979 through 1994.”

And at last we reach the payoff…which is Stanford University professor Philip Zimbardo’s “broken window” experiments.

Zimbardo parked tow cars in two neighborhoods—one in Palo Alto and one in a comparable neighborhood in the Bronx in New York. For the car in New York, he took off the license plates and popped the hood of the trunk. A day later, it was stripped to the bone.

The Palo Alto car was untouched until Zimbardo smashed one of the windows. In a couple of hours that car was destroyed too.

Gladwell draws this conclusion:

“Zimbardo’s point was that disorder invites even more disorder—that a small deviation from the norm can set into motion a cascade of vandalism and criminality. The broken window was the tipping point.”

He concludes the piece with the report that William Bratton reverse engineered Zimbardo’s work—he cracked down on graffiti and turnstile jumpers when he was head of the New York City Transit police and when he became Police Commissioner extended those “quality of life” crime crack downs.

All of those little efforts made New York City tip from a dangerous concrete jungle into a town as threatening as Boise, Idaho.

Give Your Villain a Great Villain Speech

 

I’m a huge fan of Villain Speeches. There’s nothing better in a book or a movie than the moment when the stage is cleared and Satan gets to say his piece.

Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street”

 

GORDON GEKKO

I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.

 

A great Villain Speech should ring true. It should masterfully articulate a valid point of view. Here’s cattleman Rufe Ryker (played by the great character actor Emile Meyer) in Shane:

 

RUFE RYKER

Right? You in the right! Look, Starrett. When I come to this country, you weren’t much older than your boy there. We had rough times, me and other men that are mostly dead now. I got a bad shoulder yet from a Cheyenne arrowhead. We made this country. Found it and we made it. We worked with blood and empty bellies. The cattle we brought in were hazed off by Indians and rustlers. They don’t bother you much anymore because we handled ’em. We made a safe range out of this. Some of us died doin’ it but we made it. And then people move in who’ve never had to rawhide it through the old days. They fence off my range, and fence me off from water. Some of ’em like you plow ditches, take out irrigation water. And so the creek runs dry sometimes and I’ve got to move my stock because of it. And you say we have no right to the range. The men that did the work and ran the risks have no rights?

Emile Meyer as Ryker in “Shane”

 

A great villain speech possesses three attributes.

First, it displays no repentance. The devil makes his case with full slash and swagger. His cause is just and he knows it.

Second, eloquence. A great villain speech possesses wit and style.

Third, impeccable logic. A villain speech must be convincing and compelling. Its foundation in rationality must be unimpeachable. When we hear a great villain speech, we should think, despite ourselves, “I gotta say: the dude makes sense.”

Here’s Wall Street CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons at his unrepentant best) after laying waste to the life savings of thousands in Margin Call.

Jeremy Irons as John Tuld in “Margin Call”

 

JOHN TULD

So you think we might have put a few people out of business today? That it’s all for naught? You’ve been doing that everyday for almost forty years, Sam. And if this is all for naught, then so is everything out there. It’s just money; it’s made up. Pieces of paper with pictures on them, so we don’t have to kill each other just to get something to eat. It’s not wrong. And it’s certainly no different today than it’s ever been. 1637, 1797, 1819, ’37, ’57, ’84, 1901, ’07, ’29, 1937, 1974, 1987—Jesus, didn’t that one fuck me up good—’92, ’97, 2000, and whatever we want to call this. It’s all just the same thing over and over; we can’t help ourselves. And you and I can’t control it, or stop it, or even slow it. Or even ever-so-slightly alter it. We just react. And we make a lot of money if we get it right. And we get left by the side of the road if we get it wrong. And there have always been and there always will be the same percentage of winners and losers, happy foxes and sad sacks, fat cats and starving dogs in this world. Yeah, there may be more of us today than there’s ever been. But the percentages, they stay exactly the same.

 

How will we know your character is the villain if you don’t give him (or her) a great villain speech?

[Hats off to the writers of the above gems: J.C. Chandor for Margin Call; A.B. Guthrie, Jr. from a novel by Jack Schaefer for Shane; Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone for Wall Street.]