Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 52

The Key to It All

Sherlock Holmes pays attention. His big details are the ones ignored as little. His knowledge of crimes and human nature come from his own experiences and from books and reports. He reads of wrongdoings, scandals, atrocities and the like, in reports from other countries, and he is a devoted reader of The Times’ “Agony” column.

Holmes is fiction, but what he observes is not—nor are his sources.

The Times did have an “Agony” column. It’s an aged rabbit hole worth diving into. The personal advertisements that ran in it aren’t so far from what’s found in this online world of ours. (Read a compilation of selected ads in the 1881 book The Agony Column of the “Times” 1800-1870 via Archive.org)

Here’s a clip of one ad, dated Wednesday, July 15, 1801:

From The Agony Column of the “Times” 1800-1870

Go deeper into the “Agony” column’s ads and you’ll find more of what was on the minds of Holmes’ clients, and neighbors, and the random passersby. You’ll find themes. The same story played out over and over—and on and on into this century. Two hundred and some years later, the ads of the “Agony” column sit well with online posts of today.

They speak to experiences and plotlines that outlast all of us.

At the end of the world, it will be the cockroaches and these plotlines hanging together.

Arthur Conan Doyle was observant himself. He had to be in order to gift Holmes with such powers of perception. They see what’s in plain site.

At the beginning of A Bohemian Scandal, John Watson visits Sherlock Holmes. Holmes states that Watson has been getting himself “very wet lately,” that “he has a most clumsy and careless servant girl,” and that he didn’t know Watson had gone into “practice again.”

Watson asks Holmes how he knows this.

Holmes shares the observations that led him to the facts:

“It is simplicity itself,” said he; “my eyes tell me that on the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant boot-slitting specimen of the London slavey. As to your practice, if a gentleman walks into my rooms smelling of iodoform, with a black mark of nitrate of silver upon his right forefinger, and a bulge on the right side of his top-hat to show where he has secreted his stethoscope, I must be dull, indeed, if I do not pronounce him to be an active member of the medical profession.”

In The Man with the Twisted Lip, a client presents Holmes with a letter from her husband—a husband who has been missing and is believed to be murdered. Upon a look at the letter, Holmes observes that, though the letter might have been written by the husband, it was addressed and mailed by someone who was decidedly not the husband.

The client asks Holmes how he can be so sure. Holmes describes the facts in plain view on the envelope.

“The name, you see, is in perfectly black ink, which has dried itself. The rest is of the greyish colour, which shows that blotting-paper has been used. If it had been written straight off, and then blotted, none would be of a deep black shade. This man has written the name, and there has then been a pause before he wrote the address, which can only mean that he was not familiar with it.”

While investigating a murder in The Boscombe Valley Mystery, Holmes needs only to investigate the murder site in order to locate the murder weapon and to identify the physical characteristics of the murderer. As is his way, Watson reports on everything that occurrs:

The Boscombe Pool, which is a little reed-girt sheet of water some fifty yards across, is situated at the boundary between the Hatherley Farm and the private park of the wealthy Mr. Turner. Above the woods which lined it upon the farther side we could see the red, jutting pinnacles which marked the site of the rich landowner’s dwelling. On the Hatherley side of the pool the woods grew very thick, and there was a narrow belt of sodden grass twenty paces across between the edge of the trees and the reeds which lined the lake. Lestrade showed us the exact spot at which the body had been found, and, indeed, so moist was the ground, that I could plainly see the traces which had been left by the fall of the stricken man. To Holmes, as I could see by his eager face and peering eyes, very many other things were to be read upon the trampled grass. He ran round, like a dog who is picking up a scent, and then turned upon my companion.

“What did you go into the pool for?” he asked.

“I fished about with a rake. I thought there might be some weapon or other trace. But how on earth–”

“Oh, tut, tut! I have no time! That left foot of yours with its inward twist is all over the place. A mole could trace it, and there it vanishes among the reeds. Oh, how simple it would all have been had I been here before they came like a herd of buffalo and wallowed all over it. Here is where the party with the lodge-keeper came, and they have covered all tracks for six or eight feet round the body. But here are three separate tracks of the same feet.” He drew out a lens and lay down upon his waterproof to have a better view, talking all the time rather to himself than to us. “These are young McCarthy’s feet. Twice he was walking, and once he ran swiftly, so that the soles are deeply marked and the heels hardly visible. That bears out his story. He ran when he saw his father on the ground. Then here are the father’s feet as he paced up and down. What is this, then? It is the butt-end of the gun as the son stood listening. And this? Ha, ha! What have we here? Tiptoes! tiptoes! Square, too, quite unusual boots! They come, they go, they come again–of course that was for the cloak. Now where did they come from?” He ran up and down, sometimes losing, sometimes finding the track until we were well within the edge of the wood and under the shadow of a great beech, the largest tree in the neighbourhood. Holmes traced his way to the farther side of this and lay down once more upon his face with a little cry of satisfaction. For a long time he remained there, turning over the leaves and dried sticks, gathering up what seemed to me to be dust into an envelope and examining with his lens not only the ground but even the bark of the tree as far as he could reach. A jagged stone was lying among the moss, and this also he carefully examined and retained. Then he followed a pathway through the wood until he came to the highroad, where all traces were lost.

“It has been a case of considerable interest,” he remarked, returning to his natural manner. “I fancy that this grey house on the right must be the lodge. I think that I will go in and have a word with Moran, and perhaps write a little note. Having done that, we may drive back to our luncheon. You may walk to the cab, and I shall be with you presently.”

It was about ten minutes before we regained our cab and drove back into Ross, Holmes still carrying with him the stone which he had picked up in the wood.

“This may interest you, Lestrade,” he remarked, holding it out.

“The murder was done with it.”

“I see no marks.”

“There are none.”

“How do you know, then?”

“The grass was growing under it. It had only lain there a few days. There was no sign of a place whence it had been taken. It corresponds with the injuries. There is no sign of any other weapon.”

“And the murderer?”

“Is a tall man, left-handed, limps with the right leg, wears thick-soled shooting-boots and a grey cloak, smokes Indian cigars, uses a cigar-holder, and carries a blunt pen-knife in his pocket. There are several other indications, but these may be enough to aid us in our search.”

Lestrade laughed. “I am afraid that I am still a sceptic,” he said. “Theories are all very well, but we have to deal with a hard-headed British jury.”

“Nous verrons,” answered Holmes calmly. “You work your own method, and I shall work mine. I shall be busy this afternoon, and shall probably return to London by the evening train.”

“And leave your case unfinished?”

“No, finished.”

“But the mystery?”

“It is solved.”

“Who was the criminal, then?”

“The gentleman I describe.”

“But who is he?”

“Surely it would not be difficult to find out. This is not such a populous neighbourhood.”

Lestrade shrugged his shoulders. “I am a practical man,” he said, “and I really cannot undertake to go about the country looking for a left-handed gentleman with a game leg. I should become the laughing-stock of Scotland Yard.”

“All right,” said Holmes quietly. “I have given you the chance. Here are your lodgings. Good-bye. I shall drop you a line before I leave.”

Having left Lestrade at his rooms, we drove to our hotel, where we found lunch upon the table. Holmes was silent and buried in thought with a pained expression upon his face, as one who finds himself in a perplexing position.

“Look here, Watson,” he said when the cloth was cleared “just sit down in this chair and let me preach to you for a little. I don’t know quite what to do, and I should value your advice. Light a cigar and let me expound.”

“Pray do so.”

“Well, now, in considering this case there are two points about young McCarthy’s narrative which struck us both instantly, although they impressed me in his favour and you against him. One was the fact that his father should, according to his account, cry ‘Cooee!’ before seeing him. The other was his singular dying reference to a rat. He mumbled several words, you understand, but that was all that caught the son’s ear. Now from this double point our research must commence, and we will begin it by presuming that what the lad says is absolutely true.”

“What of this ‘Cooee!’ then?”

“Well, obviously it could not have been meant for the son. The son, as far as he knew, was in Bristol. It was mere chance that he was within earshot. The ‘Cooee!’ was meant to attract the attention of whoever it was that he had the appointment with. But ‘Cooee’ is a distinctly Australian cry, and one which is used between Australians. There is a strong presumption that the person whom McCarthy expected to meet him at Boscombe Pool was someone who had been in Australia.”

“What of the rat, then?”

Sherlock Holmes took a folded paper from his pocket and flattened it out on the table. “This is a map of the Colony of Victoria,” he said. “I wired to Bristol for it last night.” He put his hand over part of the map. “What do you read?”

“ARAT,” I read.

“And now?” He raised his hand.

“BALLARAT.”

“Quite so. That was the word the man uttered, and of which his son only caught the last two syllables. He was trying to utter the name of his murderer. So and so, of Ballarat.”

“It is wonderful!” I exclaimed.

“It is obvious. And now, you see, I had narrowed the field down considerably. The possession of a grey garment was a third point which, granting the son’s statement to be correct, was a certainty. We have come now out of mere vagueness to the definite conception of an Australian from Ballarat with a grey cloak.”

“Certainly.”

“And one who was at home in the district, for the pool can only be approached by the farm or by the estate, where strangers could hardly wander.”

“Quite so.”

“Then comes our expedition of to-day. By an examination of the ground I gained the trifling details which I gave to that imbecile Lestrade, as to the personality of the criminal.”

“But how did you gain them?”

“You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.”

“His height I know that you might roughly judge from the length of his stride. His boots, too, might be told from their traces.”

“Yes, they were peculiar boots.”

“But his lameness?”

“The impression of his right foot was always less distinct than his left. He put less weight upon it. Why? Because he limped–he was lame.”

“But his left-handedness.”

“You were yourself struck by the nature of the injury as recorded by the surgeon at the inquest. The blow was struck from immediately behind, and yet was upon the left side. Now, how can that be unless it were by a left-handed man? He had stood behind that tree during the interview between the father and son. He had even smoked there. I found the ash of a cigar, which my special knowledge of tobacco ashes enables me to pronounce as an Indian cigar. I have, as you know, devoted some attention to this, and written a little monograph on the ashes of 140 different varieties of pipe, cigar, and cigarette tobacco. Having found the ash, I then looked round and discovered the stump among the moss where he had tossed it. It was an Indian cigar, of the variety which are rolled in Rotterdam.”

“And the cigar-holder?”

“I could see that the end had not been in his mouth. Therefore he used a holder. The tip had been cut off, not bitten off, but the cut was not a clean one, so I deduced a blunt pen-knife.”

Sherlock Holmes pays attention to what’s going on around him.

The key to building relationships and contacts, to pitching, to writing—to pretty much everything—is to pay attention.

Every mistake is a lesson.

Every success is a building block.

Every person met is a mentor.

Every location visited is a scene.

Get out AND get lost in every story you can find.

They will inform every part of your work, from your creation to your marketing. Just take a look at Doyle’s work for proof.

(If you do choose to get lost in stories, Gutenberg.org’s collection of Arthur Conan Doyle’s works is a good place to visit. For audiobook fans, Stephen Fry’s narration of Holmes’ adventures is wonderful. It’s been my companion for some time.)

Ask Yourself, "What Does the Villain Want?"

 

For James Bond villains, the answer is easy: world domination.

The Night King and the Army of the Dead. When we know what these suckers want, we can write the next season of “Game of Thrones”

That’s a pretty good want.

Here are a few others:

 

To eat your brain.
To eat your liver.
To eat you, period.

 

Or even better:

 

To destroy your soul.
To destroy your soul and laugh about it.

 

If you’re keeping score, the answers to the above (among others) are 1. All zombie stories, 2. Hannibal Lecter, 3. The shark, the Alien, the Thing, etc., 4. the Body Snatchers, 5. the devil in The Exorcist.

Why is Hillary Clinton such an inexhaustible object of hate to the Right? Because she, in their view, wants all five of the above.

(For the same notion from the Left, see Donald Trump.)

The hero’s “want” often changes over the course of the story. She may start out in Act One wanting her marriage to succeed, only to evolve by the end of Act Three into wanting to come into her own as an individual.

But the villain’s “want” remains the same from start to finish.

Identify it.

Be able to articulate it in one sentence or less.

Then build your story around it.

If we know what the Army of the Dead want, we know what our heroes in Game of Thrones’ next season are up against and what they have to do to combat it.

Ask Yourself, “What Does the Villain Want?”

 

For James Bond villains, the answer is easy: world domination.

The Night King and the Army of the Dead. When we know what these suckers want, we can write the next season of “Game of Thrones”

That’s a pretty good want.

Here are a few others:

 

To eat your brain.
To eat your liver.
To eat you, period.

 

Or even better:

 

To destroy your soul.
To destroy your soul and laugh about it.

 

If you’re keeping score, the answers to the above (among others) are 1. All zombie stories, 2. Hannibal Lecter, 3. The shark, the Alien, the Thing, etc., 4. the Body Snatchers, 5. the devil in The Exorcist.

Why is Hillary Clinton such an inexhaustible object of hate to the Right? Because she, in their view, wants all five of the above.

(For the same notion from the Left, see Donald Trump.)

The hero’s “want” often changes over the course of the story. She may start out in Act One wanting her marriage to succeed, only to evolve by the end of Act Three into wanting to come into her own as an individual.

But the villain’s “want” remains the same from start to finish.

Identify it.

Be able to articulate it in one sentence or less.

Then build your story around it.

If we know what the Army of the Dead want, we know what our heroes in Game of Thrones’ next season are up against and what they have to do to combat it.

Recognizing Opportunity

Continuing my musings on the evolution of The Tipping Point, here’s the next installment from www.storygrid.com…

It’s time for Malcolm Gladwell to deliver a fourth piece for The New Yorker.

He decides the moment has come to open up that tipping point sardine can that he’s had marinating in the back of his mind’s idea pantry for ten years.

The question now becomes how does he make it interesting to a wide audience?

He knows it is worthy of so much more than just a longform magazine piece. It’s been with him for a decade plus and it’s not any less fascinating to him. More so as each day passes. Which is nice.

But if Gladwell can’t make others feel the same way about it…the internal chatter will remind him that he’s either completely lacking in intelligence or he just doesn’t have the skills to translate it into the “aha” release he’s sure it contains.

At this point in his career, I suspect Gladwell recognizes these two nasty forms of Resistance rearing their ugly heads. Mr. I.M. Stupid and Mr. I.M. Incompetent have knocked on his workshop door before. But he’s wise enough now not to let them inside. He cordially says hello to both, gets them a cup of tea and ushers them to the wicker chairs on his front porch and tells them that he’s too busy today to entertain.

When you do that enough, those two creativity sucking vampires eventually give up and move on to someone else’s house.

Gladwell surveys the global landscape for the tipping point idea. His aim is to build a road into the center of the place—the “there” there where everyone will want to go… not just nerdy outliers who read American Journal of Sociology. So creating an idea map detailing the early trails bushwhacked by the others who’ve been in this terrain before him is a good place to start.

Here are the trail names:

GRODZINS ‘57: The University of Chicago academic Morton Grodzins successfully contributed his idea of neighborhood tipping points to a self-selected group of sociologists in 1957.

Ivory tower theorists use the GRODZINS trail throughout the 1960s until an economist/game theorist forgets to bring a book on a long plane ride. All he has are some pencils and paper and a fascination with self-segregation.

With nothing else to do, Thomas Schelling takes out a legal size piece of paper on his flight and comes up with a theory about how white flight actually happens–one house at a time.  Check out this interview with Schelling… At time marker 58:10 is when he discusses what he found out.

SCHELLING ’69, ’71, ’78: Schelling is a perfect example of a guy who just gets interested in stuff and thinks about it in a very systematic and nitpicky way. His dead time on an airplane was a major contributor to what is now called “agent-based modeling,” which is basically looking at the behavior of people based upon how they perceive others to be behaving. Or what Gladwell would call the “context” of one’s choices. If everyone is jaywalking…does that make you more likely or less likely to jaywalk too?

Schelling’s work led to that 30% approximation which was the agreed percentage to hold minority tenant occupancy at the Starrett City development in Brooklyn.

GRANOVETTER ’78, ’83: Mark Granovetter widened Schelling’s trail and added extra disciplines beyond the “white flight” self-segregation model, including theories about innovation, voting, strikes, rioting, whether or not to go to college, and even whether or not we should leave a boring lecture.

MORLEY ’84: The academic literature about tipping was so firmly established by 1984 that Jefferson Morley didn’t think it necessary (nor did his editors) to explain tipping points or their percentages to the readers of his piece “Double Reverse Discrimination” in The New Republic. What Morley did to widen the intellectual path surround the tipping point was to explain the practical implications of applying the theory as public policy. His piece proved volatile in political circles and among readers of high-minded periodicals serving a niche audience—wonky smart people across the country.

CRANE ’89: Jonathan Crane’s work introduces the notion of contagiousness to the central idea of tipping. His work “The Epidemic Theory of Ghettos and Neighborhood Effects on Dropping Out and Teenage Childbearing” is featured in American Journal of Sociology, though. Which doesn’t quite have the readership of People Magazine.

So that’s the lay of the land. The tipping point is an idea that’s been around for a while…but…and this is a big but, it has never been written for an audience larger than the 50,000 people who read The New Republic. And that piece is 12 years old.

Opportunity, thy name is…

No one has written about the tipping point for the 1,000,000 readers of The New Yorker, let alone The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or any of the other daily read newspapers of the “educated classes.” This is the audience Gladwell is being paid to reach.

Obviously, if you’ve read about a phenomenon in science journals and a smarty pants magazine and it’s been in the intellectual lexicon for decades, you better add something to the stew. You can’t just regurgitate the findings and analysis of others and call it yours. Instead, you have to have a unique “take” on the material to move forward.

So how is Gladwell going to translate the wonky stuff into narrative that a critical mass of readers will actually want to read?

Let’s go back to a post I wrote early on in this series, Nonfiction’s Big Genre Silos.

Here’s a cheat sheet to remind you:

1. Academic: These are essays/books that are written for and read by a very focused readership.

The groups of readers are clearly defined, but small in number. As Seth Godin would say, these are Tribal readers dedicated to very specific passions/professions.

2. How–To: These are generally prescriptive books “for the trade audience.”  What that means is that these books are written for the general Joe who wants to learn the best way to plant his garden, without having to enroll at Penn State’s Agricultural school. Or a general Jane who wants to learn how to change the oil in her old Volkswagen Beetle without going to a mechanic’s trade school.

So these are about translating professional skills into a method and language a layman can actually do herself.

3. Narrative Nonfiction: These are completely Story based. That is, it uses the narrative techniques of fiction in order to contextualize reportage.

In other words, the writer/journalist collects the usual data involved in reporting a story. But instead of just presenting the traditional Who, What, Where, When and How? out of the old-school reporter’s toolbox, these Journalists focus on the WHY something happened.

They have a theory. A point of view. They collect the facts, sort them in their own minds, come up with a controlling idea about why something happened, and then construct a story using the facts as the pieces to build a story. Seabiscuit is not a biography of a horse. It’s a story about resilience and tenacity and love.

Which brings me to the fourth kind of nonfiction silo.

4. The Big Idea Book:

This is the big nonfiction blue plate special with heaping portions of Academic research, How-To, and Story all serving to create the entire global experience, the grand argument.

Gladwell does not fear academic research. His father took him into the belly of that beast any time he wanted as a child. And he knows the most important thing to impart as a nonfiction writer is simplicity.

This from an interview with Charlie Rose:

“I am the child of a mathematician and a therapist…My writing is shuttling back and forth between these two extremes, the obscure, but deeply fascinating regions of academia and this question of how do I communicate with a mass audience …My mother has always been my writing role model….all good writing must have one quality and that is clarity.”

Which is all well and good but what about narrative? How do you tell a Story about the tipping point?

Whenever someone asks me to give a simple answer to the question, What is a Story? I usually quote David Mamet:

“They start with a simple premise and proceed logically, and inevitably, toward a conclusion both surprising and inevitable.”

Gladwell must have asked himself if there was one like that for the tipping point.

And then he remembered Jefferson Morley’s Double Reverse Discrimination piece was all about how there was as settlement of a lawsuit between prospective black tenants and the N.A.A.C.P. as plaintiffs against the 70 percent white/30 percent minority quota system imposed by the Starrett City development as defendant, way back in 1984. And that the parties came to agree that if Starrett City allowed minority tenants to eclipse the number of white tenants a “tipping point” would occur and all of the white people would leave. All hell would break loose and the entire development would become an unlawful mess.

As The New York Times reported, “A lawyer representing the complex, Morris B. Abram, told a Federal judge in 1986 that a decision against Starrett City would tip the racial balance and ”create a segregated wasteland.”

Well, four years after the settlement, the Supreme Court ruled that Starrett City could not continue its racial quota system.

So Starrett City tipped and segregated as predicted, right?

Nope. The white flight never happened. Even as the percentages of white residents fell to 27% (the waiting list was overwhelmingly stocked with minority applicants when the Super Court stopped the quotas, so every apartment that opened up for years went to a person of color), the neighborhood remained safe and family friendly.

So the whole tipping point was proven wrong. Right?

Not if you can recognize that tipping is not a one way and then that’s it phenomenon.

What if the people who had been living at Starrett City since it opened in 1975 through 1988—about a generation’s worth of time—were affected by their surroundings? What if the context of their day-to-day life, year after year, changed their behavior.

That is, what if the white people who lived on the same floor as black people discovered that a guy with a different skin pigment was as likely to be as friendly or as misanthropic as his white neighbor? More importantly, would the kids of white and black parents used to seeing all kinds of people everywhere they went have less fear of pale or tanned people?

Well, duh?

The answer was that by the time the quotas were 86ed, Starrett City had already tipped. The other way. There was no forthcoming wasteland. White people didn’t “flee.” Supply and demand just brought the population into equilibrium. After thirteen years living together in a safe environment with plenty of playgrounds and park benches to share, self-segregation was just not on anyone’s radar.

I mean have you ever tried to move to another apartment in New York City?  You have to be some serious ass racist today to take on that burden just because the guy who lives next door is a different color.

So what would happen if you concentrated on those little things that make life less stressful for people? The Starrett City development had always placed a high premium on a highly visible private security force, clean walkways, fresh paint…that kind of thing.

Could you tip a bad situation into a good one?

This was Malcolm Gladwell’s simple premise as he did the legwork necessary to deliver The Tipping Point for the June 3, 1996 edition of The New Yorker. From it’s very first sentence, it proceeded logically to a surprising and inevitable conclusion.  By concentrating on the little things, we can tip things to the positive.

So convincingly that he’d soon have a big advance to turn it into a book.

Give Your Hero a Hero Speech

 

Let’s take a break today in this series on Villains and turn to the guy or girl opposite him: the Hero.

We’ve been saying in these posts that the Antagonist needs to be given a great Villain Speech, a moment when he or she gets to try to convince us that greed is good or that we can’t handle the truth.

Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, William Holden, and Ernest Borgnine marching to their Hero’s Moment

The hero needs her moment to shine too.

It’s our job as writers, yours and mine, to serve up some juicy, soul-defining, U.S. Prime dialogue for our protagonist to deliver.

Here’s one of my faves from the movie Fury, the Brad Pitt-starrer about a lone American tank driving deep into Nazi Germany in the closing weeks of WWII. The crisis comes when the tank hits a mine and becomes incapacitated just as a battalion of SS infantry is tramping down the road in its direction.

Do our heroes take off into the bushes and live to fight another day? Or do they make a stand, knowing it will cost them their lives?

Brad Pitt as the tank commander makes his own decision. “This is home,” he says, setting a palm on the turret of the tank. The other crewmen (Michael Pena, Jon Bernthal, Logan Lerman, Shia Labeouf) at first reluctantly, then with mounting spirit, join him. Each takes his last-stand position inside the tank, waiting for the SS, who are now only a couple of hundred yards away.

It’s a classic hero moment, the hour when the ultimate sacrifice is imminent, when ordinary men stand at the threshold of rendering themselves extraordinary.

The director/writer David Ayer gives the critical lines to Shia Laboeuf (who does a fantastic job delivering them) as Boyd “Bible” Swan, the tank’s gunner. Swan speaks quietly, in the steel intimacy of the tank’s interior, to his comrades, each of whom is isolated inside his own skull, awaiting the terminal moments of his life.

 

SHIA LEBOEUF

There’s a Bible verse I think about sometimes.

Many times. It goes, ‘And I heard the voice of the Lord

saying, Who shall I send, and who will go for us? Then

I said, Here am I. Send me.’

 

The sacrifice of one’s own life (or happiness or future prospects or whatever) for the good of others is the defining act of the hero.

Have you seen The Wild Bunch? I watch it once a year at least, just to remind myself what great storytelling and filmmaking is all about. The hero speech in that movie (screenplay by Walon Green and Sam Peckinpah) is two words, delivered by Warren Oates as Lyle Gortch.

Here’s the setting:

The surviving members of the outlaw band known as the Wild Bunch (William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson, and Warren Oates) have seen their companion Angel (Jaime Sanchez) captured and tortured by the evil generalissimo Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) and been unable to rescue him because of the overwhelming numbers of Mapache’s soldiers.

The Bunch pass the night in a debauch in the village where Mapache and his troops (and Angel, still in captivity) have laid up. Waking in the morning, William Holden, the leader of the Bunch, pays the poor young mother with whom he has passed the night.

Plainly he is thinking about Angel and how he and his companions have failed to deliver him.

Then something changes in Holden’s face.

Plainly he has come to some kind of resolve.

Note: not a word of dialogue has been spoken so far.

Holden crosses to the room in which Warren Oates and Ben Johnson are squabbling over payment with the woman they’ve spent the night with. Holden appears in the doorway. Ben and Warren look up. Warren sees the expression on Holden’s face. He squints, as if thinking to himself, Is Holden thinking what I think he’s thinking?

One more look convinces Warren.

His own expression hardens into the identical resolve.

 

WARREN OATES

Why not?

 

That’s it.

That’s the hero speech.

The three outlaws step outside into the sun, where the final member of the Bunch, Ernest Borgnine, sits in the dust with his back against the adobe wall of the house, whittling a stick.

Again without dialogue, the companions’ eyes meet each other. Borgnine barks a curt laugh, plunges his stick point-first into the dust, and rises eagerly to his feet.

The final scene of course is these four taking on Mapache’s hundreds and giving their lives in the process.

I’ve seen, in e-mails and in the Comments section of this blog, these posts referred to as “tips.”

I hate that.

What I hope these posts constitute are the collective tool kit of a writer. Today’s post is one I use in every book or movie I write, as are all the other posts in this series and all others.

It’s a box I check to help myself find my story.

“Do I have a hero’s speech? Have I given my protagonist a moment, even if it’s silent, when he or she gets to define the action they will take and explain the reasons why?”

If I don’t, alarm bells go off in my head.

“Take care of this, Steve. Figure it out and do it.”

A Part of Our Lives

Boston, 10.31.2004. The day after the Red Sox’s parade through Boston, celebrating the end of the “curse.” Mrs. Mallard is wearing a Red Sox hat and I’m inserting both into the life of the next generation.

Boston felt like home.

I was in high school when I stepped into Bean Town for the first time, but I already knew Charles St. because I’d traveled it with Robert McCloskey’s Mr. and Mrs. Mallard, and I knew the North Church and Charlestown Shore, because I’d rowed and ridden with Longfellow’s Revere.

I knew the city from childhood picture books and history textbooks, books that had been my friends and mentors, offering comfort and instruction.

They were a part of my life just as much as any living, breathing teacher or relative. They were a part of me.

I headed outside the city to walk with Thoreau and swim in Walden Pond, and daydream about conversations with Emerson, all of which had already run on repeat in my head.

The year I moved into an apartment on The Fenway wasn’t really a first either. Walking home at night, in the light of Fenway Park, always felt just like a bright summer day. Baseball always feels like summer, no matter the time of year or time of day—and I’d been hearing about Ted William’s Red Sox, and the curse of Babe for decades. Dad was a Red Sox fan and I grew into a baseball romantic, fed on the tales of the old players. I still can’t tell you the stats of every team or player, but the first time I went to Spring Training in Florida, tears pooled in my eyes. I’m not a rabid fan. I don’t watch all the games and I’m often out of date on rosters, but baseball is in me. I can’t imagine a world without it.

All of this came to mind this week as I settled into Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. My son and I are reading it together and I’m already behind. In the introduction to The Gunslinger, Stephen talks about being nineteen, how the idea for the series came to him, the development, and the gap between books. In this last bit, he shared stories of an “82-yr-old Gramma” and a death-row convict writing him, both wanting to know the ending before they died. How’d it all turn out? The convict promised to “take the secret to the grave with him,” which gave Stephen “the creeps.” Same here. Feels a little too close to a real life Misery. But, he got in their head just the same—and not all us fans are convicts or gramma’s with guilt letters.

When I think about childhood friends, I often think about King’s The Body, and Stand By Me, the movie that followed, because of the time in my life when I read and saw them. The Body was my first Stephen King story (Buy the book Different Seasons and you’ll receive the gifts of both The Body and Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption) and Stand By Me hit when I was the same age as the characters in the film. They’ve stayed with me.

This past week I read an interview with Bob Newhart, too. One of my godmother’s friends looked like Carol Kester, and for years I thought she was Bob’s receptionist, so I paid attention to Bob and his doings. That grew into an appreciation of him as I left childhood. In the interview, there’s a clip of him doing his routine about Abe Lincoln developing his personal brand with his publicist. A classic. At the very end of the interview, there’s this one last question and answer from the interviewer and Bob:

You were my late father’s absolute favorite. Newhart was his favorite show and we’d watch it together every week. But he never learned the name of it. He always called it “Vermont” for some reason.

But you watched. That’s the main thing. The thing about television is that you become part of people’s lives. People will come up to you on an airplane and tell you, “Thank you for all the laughs.” They look back on it fondly as one of the great times of their lives. Boy, when you’re part of peoples’ lives like that, it’s very special. It’s a very special thing.

It IS a special thing—but not just for television. Creators have the power to enter and influence lives, and to create memories. Those memories might be from a book or a team or a city. They might be from a commercial that makes us cry, or a song that transports us back 30 years to a sun-soaked day on Walden Pond.

So when you think about creating yourself (whether it is a book or a marketing campaign for a book or business, or whatever your thing is), think about what you’ve let into your own life. What has meant something to you? What would you want in your own life? Tolkien entered Stephen’s life and Dark Towers was born. What will inspire you? What will you allow in your life? And what will you create in its footsteps?

Keep the Heavies in Motion

This is the second of Stephen Cannell’s axioms (see last week’s post for #1) that Randy Wallace taught me.

What Steve meant was not just “Keep the villain active during Act Two,” but “Keep him coming at the hero from as many directions as possible.”

Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper in “Silver Linings Playbook”

This works even for interior villains, for antagonists that reside only inside our characters’ heads.

Consider one of my all-time faves, David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook.

The villain exists only inside Pat Solitano’s (Bradley Cooper) head. It’s his obsession with getting back together with his estranged wife Nikki.

The inciting incident of the movie is when Bradley meets Tiffany Maxwell (Jennifer Lawrence). In the audience, we know instantly that these two were meant for each other.

What’s keeping them apart?

Bradley’s obsession with Nikki.

That’s the villain.

Steve Cannell would be proud of how David O. Russell (who wrote the film—based on the novel by Matthew Quick—as well as directing it) “kept the heavies in motion.”

Bradley’s obsession with Nikki cross-crosses Act Two like an Oklahoma tornado.

We see Bradley jogging wearing a plastic trash bag to make him sweat, so he can lose weight for Nikki.

Bradley tells Jennifer again and again how he’s going to win Nikki back.

He obsesses with his shrink about getting Nikki back.

He composes a letter to Nikki and gets Jennifer to deliver it.

Even when Bradley starts rehearsing with Jennifer to be her partner in a dance contest, the endeavor (for him) is all about Nikki. He’s trying to prove that he’s a good guy helping Tiffany so that Nikki will see he has changed and not be so spooked by his nuttiness.

Poor Jennifer is whipsawed by this villain that keeps coming at her from every angle, deep deep into Act Three.

And this whipsawing works.

It makes Jennifer react. How she responds reveals her moxie, her toughness, her love for Bradley.

In the audience we are riveted, rooting for Jennifer and Bradley to get together and energized/terrorized every time Bradley’s Nikki-obsession rears its crazy head.

Try this yourself if you’re stuck in Act Two.

Steve Cannell knew what he was talking about.

Keep the heavies in motion.

Finding a Voice

Here’s another piece from The Story Grid archives about how writers find their voices…using Malcolm Gladwell and the gestation of his wonderful book, The Tipping Point, again as my point of focus.

So it’s 1996, about ten and a half years after the party in Washington D.C.’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood in the rented apartment where the young pishers Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg formed a lifelong bond.

To see just how young these guys were, check out this interview with Weisberg when he was an intern at The New Republic way back in 1986.

That party is the event where Gladwell spoke with Jefferson Morley about Starrett City in Brooklyn, New York, the development that turned away minority applicants because of a theory published in Scientific American in 1957 and a mathematical model that predicted a 30 percent minority “tipping point” for white flight. The whole tipping thing has been marinating in the recesses of Gladwell’s brain since reading Morley’s Double Reverse Discrimination in TNR back in 1984. Its time is coming…

In 1996, Gladwell’s a newbie at The New Yorker. He’s written some solid stuff for the magazine in just his first few months. FYI, a one-year contract as a staff writer at The New Yorker requires delivery of about 50,000 words, or 12 pieces, one per month or so. But in practical terms, delivery of content is loosey-goosey.

On purpose.

Writers serve at the pleasure of their editors who of course serve at the pleasure of their publishers who, if they don’t own the house or magazine themselves, serve at the pleasure of their CEO or Board of Directors. All of which is to say that as long as your boss: 1) knows who you are; 2) has no internal cringe when your name is mentioned and 3) believes that you are pulling your scull for the company boat in sync and with vigor…whether you technically deliver the specific number of words per year is of little consequence.

Within reason of course.

George W.S. Trow was one New Yorker staff writer who’d played the fair-haired boy for editor William Shawn way past his wunderkind expiration date. He didn’t publish much after Within the Context of No Context, preferring to cling to his high end/big think reputation as he kept himself warm and comfortable  inside the editorial boathouse. When Trow resigned in a public kerfuffle about how the barbarians had at last overrun the literary castle with Tina Brown’s appointment as editor, Ms. Brown’s wonderful reaction, reported by the American Journalism Review, outed Trow as more magazine mascot than indispensable contributor. Here’s Ms. Brown’s response:

I am distraught at your defection, but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught.

But to say that staff writers at magazines don’t sweat their contractually stipulated word counts would be a gross prevarication. The only thing a long form journalist fears more than never getting to the big show (and The New Yorker is The New York Yankees of literary magazines)…is getting there and then screwing the pooch. Making it and then getting fired.

So my gut tells me that Malcolm Gladwell probably had a piece of paper tacked up on his virtual corkboard above the writing desk of his mind with the following notations that add up his word counts for his first three pieces:

3205 words—Blowup
2793 words—Loopholes for Living
5260 words—Black Like Them

It’s May 1996 and he’s 11,258 words into his 50,000 annual word nut. Many miles to go before he sleeps…

But his three pieces are very much of a kind. He’s figured out what fiction writers would call his “voice,” which is the mark of the pro.

The voice is a writer’s must-have security blanket. Once a writer “finds” his voice, work is no longer about overcoming a complete lack of confidence in one’s ability to hold a reader’s interest. That is, you’re not trying to imitate someone else in order to create narrative drive anymore.

You figure out that writing like Tom Wolfe or Gay Talese when you’re a Canadian from Nowheresville, Ontario (Gladwell’s hometown) will never work. You learn that truth because you tried mimicking Wolfe-ian prose  so unsuccessfully for so long that you reach a point of such desperation that you quit trying to be someone else and actually begin writing as yourself. And that’s when someone other than your mother and your boss starts to pay keen attention to your work.

So you keep doing that, writing like yourself, and more people catch on…and here you are at The New Yorker.

Now what the work is about after you have stopped running away from your own peculiar way with words is finding enough interesting things to say about something. Not “interesting” for the reader per se. But “interesting” for yourself.

Every single pro writer I know is all about finding material that will obsess him or her.

If they find it, they’re fine. They’ll make deadline. They’ll be able to be nice to their wives and kids or boyfriends or cats or whatever.

But if they’re struggling to care about something…they’re in trouble. And so is everyone and everything around them. Watch out dinner table! And if you find yourself around such a writer, don’t even think of asking if “something’s wrong.”

Because “Nothing is wrong…when everything is wrong.  Don’t you understand Goddamnit!”

This is one of the reasons why “assignment writing” sucks. Even though it can pay the rent and even more depending upon your connections. What may interest an editor intent on getting something “5,000 wordish on the plight of the Iguana in Papua New Guinea for the special fall edition on ecology” could very well bore the shit out of a writer. This is why around the same time as Gladwell was cutting his teeth at The New Yorker…when I was an editor at Doubleday and asked Steven Pressfield to write me up another epic historical war novel to follow up Gates of Fire…Pressfield politely (actually not so politely) told me to go fuck myself. I knew immediately thereafter that this was a guy I needed to work with no matter what.  And he came around in the end and wrote a novel that I think is far more accomplished than his calling card.

But I digress.

Gladwell’s ten thousand hours as a beat reporter for The Washington Post combined with his early days at American Spectator and Insight and as a moonlighter fleshing out long form think pieces for Washington Monthly and The New Republic by 1996 have taught him how to write as himself. And he now feels confident (as he should) that he can translate his own particular interests and passions into pieces that a certain Beltway/New York/East Coast intelligentsia readership will enjoy.

What is the quality of Gladwell’s “voice?”  It’s easy to discern just from his first three New Yorker pieces.

Blowup is a story that debunks the notion that we can micromanage big systems to eventually reach risk-free perfection. The controlling idea of the piece is little things can have huge effects. Gladwell hammers home this message using the O-ring failure in the space shuttle Challenger explosion to explain that it was just one of a myriad of little things that could have gone wrong. The fact that all of the rockets don’t blow up is remarkable.

Loopholes for Living is ostensibly a standard book review assignment. Gladwell covers two books inside similar legal terrain (Ill Gotten Gains: Evasion, Blackmail, Fraud, and Kindred Puzzles of the Law by Leo Katz, University of Chicago Press, May 1996; and Integrity by Stephen L. Carter, Basic Books, HarperCollins, February 1996). But I suspect Gladwell wasn’t handed these two books and asked to review them for The New Yorker’s book section because they were “hot” titles. According to Bookscan, Ill Gotten Gains has sold 311 total copies since 2002, while Integrity has sold 7,825 which means nothing about either book’s merit of course but it’s reasonable to assume that Tina Brown wasn’t being bombarded with phone calls from their publishers to review the titles either. These books are strictly “mid-list” nonfiction stuck in backs of catalogs.

But Gladwell found and read them on his own. And then he figured out a “way in” that he could use to examine something he personally found interesting—the squishy world of rationalizing our not so magnanimous behavior. He pitched the piece, got approval and then nailed another controlling idea that he’d been poking at for years—conventional thinking is prejudicial and lazy.

Gladwell has held that view since way back in High School. His Ad Hominem: a Journal of Slander and Critical Opinion was a political newsletter he started up and wrote as a teenager. According to an interview he did with J. Timothy Hunt for the Ryerson Review of Journalism in 1999, the ‘zine would focus on “a thing that appeals to a person’s feelings of prejudice rather than his intellect…The rule was that every article had to attack someone personally, says Gladwell. I wrote a column called ‘The Moral Pejorative.’”

Black Like Them was a piece that extended Gladwell’s range, a courageous writing act that added an unconventional autobiographical element to his arsenal. Rarely do you find journalists today sharing anything remotely associated with their private lives…that is without making a HUGE DEAL about it. Nonfiction writers either give you it all in confessional memoir or nothing.

Rarely do they use their own life experiences as simply interstitial tissue to tell a larger story. They’re either THE STORY or they’re not there at all.   By relating a “positive” experience coping with racism straight out of his extended family and an “amusing anecdote” of his own about the stupidity of the whole bugaboo, Gladwell was able to explore another idea stuck in his brain’s craw—that context doesn’t just influence human behavior, it can actually be the direct cause of it.

That is, we can’t help but act differently under disorienting circumstances or surroundings. What’s at the heart of Gladwell’s thinking about race (and what he’ll also put forth about crime in his next piece) is a quote from the antagonist Noah Cross in Robert Towne and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.  (You know it always comes back to Chinatown for me)

…most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of ANYTHING.

Gladwell being Gladwell, though, instead of taking us into the heart of darkness of crime, he tells us an extraordinary story about how changing the context of a neighborhood for the better creates something of a miracle.

And the neighborhood he chooses to concentrate when telling that story?

It’s none other than the 5.6 square mile zone patrolled by New York’s Seven Five (75) precinct. This is the police department tasked with East New York, Canarsie and The Starrett City development…the very same neighborhoods Jefferson Morley wrote about in “Double Reverse Discrimination” in 1984.

Coincidence?

More on Starrett City and how I suspect it profoundly influenced Gladwell’s thinking about Tipping Points next.

The Second Act Belongs to the Villain, #2

 

I learned this from my friend Randall Wallace (“Braveheart”), who learned it from Stephen Cannell, the maestro of a thousand plotlines from The Rockford Files to Baretta to 21 Jump Street.

Al Lettieri as Virgil “The Turk” Sollozzo in “The Godfather, Part One”

What Steve Cannell meant was not that the second act should be packed with scenes of the villain twirling his mustache or plotting in his lair. He meant bring the villain’s effects on the heroes into the foreground and keep them there.

Why?

Because the havoc and jeopardy incited by the villain energizes the story and keeps it powering forward.

The villain in The Godfather (at least the personified individual) is Virgil “The Turk” Sollozzo (Al Lettieri). Remember him? He’s the gangster who comes originally to Don Corleone (Marlon Brando) with the proposal that the Corleone family finance his nascent heroin business. Brando turns him down.

This is the inciting incident of The Godfather.

This moment with Sollozzo comes right at the start of Act Two (in other words, exactly where Steve Cannell would want it to come.)

What happens now as this second act unfolds?

Sollozzo and his allies in the Tattaglia family kill Luca Brasi by garroting him in a hotel bar. (Remember Sollozzo pinning Luca’s hand to the bar with a smashing stab of his knife.)
Sollozzo’s gunmen attempt to assassinate Brando in the street outside his office at the Genco Olive Oil company.
Sollozzo kidnaps consigliere Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall).
When Brando miraculously survives, Sollozzo’s goons and his allies in the NYPD plot to kill him in the hospital. Only Michael’s (Al Pacino) quick thinking on-site prevents his father’s murder.
Sollozzo’s menace forces the family to “go to the mattresses.”
Sollozzo sends a package to the Corleones—a dead fish wrapped in Luca Brasi’s bulletproof vest. “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.”

Luca Brasi, on his way to sleeping with the fishes … thanks to Sollozzo.

Even after Sollozzo is killed by Michael in the Italian restaurant, the villain continues to dominate (and energize) the second act, culminating in Sonny’s (James Caan) Tommy-gun murder on the causeway.

Even in far-off Sicily, we’re not safe. Michael’s wife Apollonia gets blown up in a car by a bomb meant to kill Michael.

See how the second act belongs to the villain?

And how this keeps the story vivid with momentum and emotion?

The first act belongs to the hero. We meet her or him, learn a little about their world and their predicament, and the villain is introduced.

Then comes Act Two. The villain moves to the fore.

The second act should be packed with the villian’s threats, machinations, plots, and attacks. The hero should have to react and react and react again.

I wrote a screenplay once for a producer who called these incursions of the villain “bumps.”

“We need more bumps,” he would tell me. “Gimme a bump here on page 41 and another on page 48. Never let ten pages go by without a bump.”

He was right.

When you and I find ourselves struggling in the middle section of our story, we could do worse than to take a cue from this producer and from Steve Cannell.

Give us some bumps.

The Second Act Belongs to the Villain.

 

The Road Not Taken

Exit the main streets of Washington, D.C., and you’ll find yourself driving through narrow chutes lined with parked cars, wishing your ride was a Mini Cooper.

The same situation plays out in cities around the world, where buildings were constructed, and inner-city neighborhoods established, long before the rise of the automobile.

A few weeks back, my mother visited Washington, D.C. She found herself near Eastern Market, behind a delivery truck on one of those narrow, one-way roads. Just before the intersection, the truck pulled tight to the right and stopped for a delivery. This left Mom with three options: 1) hold her breath and try to squeeze between the truck and the parked car on the left side of the street; 2) back up and turn down the alley she’d just passed; or 3) wait for the truck to finish its delivery and then move forward.

She eyeballed the open space and decided to keep her side-view mirrors. She looked in her rearview mirror and saw an SUV pulling up and blocking the exit to the alley. She stared at the delivery truck driver and the number of packages on his dolley, and settled on waiting for his return.

The SUV driver had something different in mind.

He laid into his horn. First a few short beeps, then a long, drawn out beeeeeeeeeeeep—and then he got out of his car and started yelling at her. Mom rolled down her window and told him she couldn’t move, but he could back into the alley. He yelled, “You’re pathetic,” stomped back to his SUV, reversed at a high speed, and turned into the alley.

In his book Roads Were Not Built For Cars, Carlton Reid wrote:

Social scientists theorise that humans believe in three kinds of territorial space. One is personal territory, like home. The second involves space that is only temporarily available, such as a gym locker. The third kind is public territory, such as roads.

“Territoriality is hard-wired into our ancestors,” believes Paul Bell, co-author of a study on road rage. “Animals are territorial because it had survival value. If you could keep others away from your hunting groups, you had more game to spear, it becomes part of the biology.”

When they are on the road, some motorists forget they are in public territory because the cues surrounding them – personal music, fluffy dice, protective shells – suggest they are in private space.

“If you are in a vehicle that you identify as primary territory, you would defend that against other people whom you perceive as being disrespectful of your space,” added Bell. “What you ignore is that you are on a public roadway – and you don’t own the road.”

Remember that.

You are on a public roadway. You don’t own the road.

Imagine if the SUV driver had shifted his thinking to he and Mom as fellow travelers, instead of viewing her as an obstacle blocking his path, infringing on his world.

If you’ve ever been stuck behind a stalled car on the highway or a delivery truck on a crammed side street, you know that the worst position is the one directly behind the stalled car or delivery truck. You can’t move forward and often other cars block you from moving backward. If you’re on the highway, you might try nosing out into the next lane, knowing you’ll have to gun it before other passing cars reach you. If you’re on the one-way road, you have to hope the cars behind you back out so that you can move. You have the least amount of power, so you have to rely on those around you.

What if the SUV driver had thought about that, and instead of honking and yelling, had backed up right away and exited via the alley. What if his first thought was about helping two people instead of just helping himself?

Now think about the Internet and Earth.

The Internet is kin to Earth, and just like Earth, the people building upon it built some narrow roads. When they started building, they didn’t do it with Facebook and Amazon in mind—nor did they do it with every territorial issue in mind. No one said, “Let’s build another location to bully people.” Cyber-bullying evolved on its own, just as did road rage and other forms of territorial hatred and violence.

What Mom experienced on the streets of Washington, D.C., is something we’ve all seen play out online.

None of us own the Internet any more than one individual person owns all the public roads or the Earth itself, yet behavior indicates otherwise.

It’s got to stop.

I don’t spew hatred online, but I yell in my car when someone cuts me off—and my kids see it and hear it.

That’s one of my goals for 2018, to check my behavior and think about what’s going on in other cars, lives, and so on—to think about us, rather than me.

And just to tie this into marketing and doing/sharing our work, which is what this blog hits upon, there’s this:

As the SUV driver was yelling at Mom, she got a look at the identification tags swinging on the lanyard around his neck. The driver’s rapid movements kept the tag flipping, so she didn’t catch his exact name, but what if she had—and what if the government agency associated with the tag had received a phone call from her about the behavior of the SUV driver? And what if they knew that this behavior played out in front of my nine-years-old niece, too?

Being kind, thinking about others, focusing on we instead of I all the time, is good for your business.

One more thing: That negative behavior is a distraction. It will get in your head and in the way of your work.

Unfortunately, today it seems the road most traveled. It is the one of rage, and of horn blowing, and of yelling.

So if you find yourself in a yellow wood (or a street in Washington, D.C.), and find yourself with a choice. Choose the road less traveled. It will make all the difference.