Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 53

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.

The Villain Believes in “Reality”

 

It seems like a long time ago—pre-Trump, pre-Obama—but I remember vividly when Vice President Dick Cheney declared in the wake of 9/11 that to counter the threat of terrorism the U.S. was now going to have to start “working the dark side.”

Robert Redford in “Three Days of the Condor”

Cheney articulated this thought with barely-suppressed glee. I remember thinking at the time, “Wow, this guy is the ultimate movie villain,” not just because he was expressing a classic Dr. No/Dr. Evil/Dr. Strangelove sentiment but because his point of view contains more than a modicum of truth.

I’ve always wished that Dick Cheney would write a book. Not the typical self-serving, bullshit politician’s book but a straight-ahead, from-the-heart articulation of his brass-knuckles worldview.

Why? Because that worldview contains a lot of truth.

We should hear it.

We as Americans should debate it.

What I’m getting at is the “this is reality” school of villainy.

In Three Days of the Condor, Cliff Robertson plays senior CIA officer J. Higgins whose secret war plan for the U.S. to invade Saudi Arabia and capture its oil fields has been exposed by the movie’s hero, Joseph Turner (Robert Redford).

Does Cliff react with regret or shame over his nefarious deeds? (His operatives have also murdered seven Americans to cover up their scheme). Hell no. He doubles down.

 

CLIFF ROBERTSON

It’s simple economics. Today it’s oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. Maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?

 

ROBERT REDFORD

Ask them.

 

CLIFF ROBERTSON

Not now—then! Ask ’em when they’re running out. Ask ’em when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask ’em when their engines stop. Ask ’em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won’t want us to ask ’em. They’ll just want us to get it for ’em!

 

ROBERT REDFORD

Boy, have you found a home.

 

Cliff remains unfazed. His position: “This is Reality. This is the way the world works. Only sentimentalists and weak-minded dreamers believe otherwise.”

Mike Myers as Doctor Evil.

How many villain speeches have begun with this phrase:

 

VILLAIN X

Oh come, come, Mister Bond …

 

How about his exchange from an interview between Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump? O’Reilly was questioning Trump’s often-stated admiration for Russian president Vladimir Putin.

 

O’REILLY

But he’s a killer!

 

TRUMP

There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?

 

Villains love “reality,” i.e. the hardball view of the world, which declares that human nature is inherently evil, that left to their own devices people will always choose the selfish, the vain, and the expedient.

It is their role, the villains claim, to counter humanity’s innate wickedness. They will take it upon themselves to act preemptively to quash this evil for the greater good of the slumbering masses. Here’s Jack Nicholson, from Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men:

 

COLONEL JESSUP

Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to.

 

Remember what we said in an earlier post, that the villain doesn’t think he’s the villain?

To these “reality villains,” the believer in progress or human good is a self-deluded fool. Worse, he is a clear and present danger to the survival of the greater clan/community/nation.

Is there truth to this?

How much?

Does the arc of the moral universe bend toward justice, as Martin Luther King said?

Or was MLK, for all his greatness, deluding himself and the world with a dream that, however brave and kind and noble, will, given the reality of human nature, never come true?

Reality to a reality-villain is always zero-sum, dog-eat-dog. It is the world described by Thomas Hobbes in his book, Leviathan, where life without an externally-ordered structure would be

 

            solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

 

Is that reality?

Is he or she who believes this a villain or a hero?

 

 

Making Connections

So it’s the mid-1980s and as young men do, Malcolm Gladwell and his friend Jacob Weisberg throw a lot of parties at their Washington D.C. rental on Adams Mill Road and Kenyon Street.

At one such low rent Bacchanalia, Gladwell shoots the breeze with Jefferson Morley, an assistant editor and one of the supervisors along with Michael Kinsley and Dorothy Wickenden of the bright young politico Weisberg at The New Republic.

Gladwell brings up a story Morley wrote for the July 9 1984 edition called “Double Reverse Discrimination.”

In The Washingtonian “Gladwell’s Brain” profile by Chris Wilson on January 8, 2007, Morley recalls:

I remember Malcolm questioning me closely both about the sociology and the ethics of the story.

Morley’s reporting concerned the fate of Brooklyn, New York’s Starrett City, a federally subsidized, 1970s era middle-income housing project built on landfill between the predominantly poor black neighborhood of East, New York and the white working class bastion of Canarsie.

What’s fascinating is that in order for the development to get off the ground, the Starrett Company had to quell the protests of Canarsians who feared that their community would mimic the history of neighboring East New York.

East New York had gone from two-thirds white to three-quarters black between 1960 and 1970 and had deteriorated in the process, its property values plummeting and its crime rate rising.” (“Double Reverse Discrimination,” The New Republic July 9, 1984)

In order to get the New York City Board of Estimate to approve construction, which was under assault by Canarsie’s virulent protests, The Starrett Company agreed to maintain a 70% white occupancy rate. So if you were black or Hispanic or some other loosely defined minority looking to get an apartment at Starrett City, you were out of luck if the 30% quota for your kind was already filled. (President Donald Trump owned a 4% stake in Starrett City). No matter your income or your recommendations or your good-guy-ness.

Five black applicants for apartments didn’t think this agreement was fair and so with the backing of the N.A.A.C.P., they filed a class action discrimination suit against the development in 1979, three years after it opened its doors to tenants. And as these things go, it took about five years for anything to happen after that.

And what happened then is really quite remarkable.

The two sides agreed to settle the case before it went to trial.

They both agreed that the quota controls would remain in effect. Just the percentages would be changed. Instead of a 70/30 white/minority split, they’d move to 67/33. And on May 2, 1984, the Federal District Court in Brooklyn approved the settlement.

Huh? Doesn’t make much sense does it?

Why would the N.A.A.C.P. approve of such a thing, essentially an imposed discrimination policy that shuts out black people purely based upon the color of their skin?

What’s even weirder is that the lawyer defending Starrett City’s White Majority quota was none other than Morris B. Abram, a guy who’d made his name representing Martin Luther King, Jr. And Abram had said himself on numerous occasions that race was an “absurd, unfair, and counterproductive” way of evaluating people. So why did he defend the right of a real estate company to do exactly what he felt was wrong?

What was the thing behind these counterintuitive stances? It sure must have been a powerful and convincing idea. The N.A.A.C.P. and Abram weren’t afraid of a good fight. And this seemed like a great one.

So what gives?

Gladwell probably noticed that Morley referenced the controlling idea ten times in his article without explaining where it came from. Hence Morley’s recollection that Gladwell was interested in the sociology and the ethics of the story…the thing behind the thing that made these formidable forces agree that in this case, and by extension other cases like it, a discriminatory quota keeping black people from living where they wished was in the long term in their best interest.

That’s not a knock on Morley. The New Republic was a serious magazine that fact checked and edited each of its pieces with vigor. It was known for that discipline until the whole Stephen Glass series of boners in the late 90s. But that’s another kettle of fish entirely.

The fact that Morley didn’t need to do a one or two-paragraph background write up about the idea only spoke to its prevalence as a incontrovertible and accepted fact amongst the players in the Starrett City drama. And for that matter, readers of The New Republic too.

So what was this idea?

It was an idea first put forth in 1957 by University of Chicago Sociologist Morton Grodzins in the October issue of Scientific American.

White residents, who will tolerate a few Negroes as neighbors, either willingly or unwillingly, begin to move out when the proportion of Negroes in the neighborhood or apartment building passes a certain critical point. This tip point varies from city to city and from neighborhood to neighborhood. But for the vast majority of white Americans a tip point exists. Once it is exceeded, they will no longer stay among Negro neighbors. (Emphasis mine)

But how did this theory result in what Morley refers to in his piece as “the generally accepted 30% ‘tipping point’” of black residents that caused whites to flee the neighborhood?

In the 60s and 70s, urban areas became less and less diverse. It became known as the “white flight” phenomenon. Attracted by the volatility of the issue and its blatant racial overtones, other academics climbed aboard Grodzins “tipping point” train, giving it more and more weight and eventually making it ubiquitous along the way. Repetition has a way of doing that.

Harvard’s Thomas Schelling, a future Nobel Laureate in Economics and renowned game theorist who contributed to Stanley Kubrick’s creation of Dr. Strangelove, picked up on the notion and theorized further in his papers “Models of Segregation” in 1969 and “Dynamic Models of Segregation” in 1971. Using elaborate game theories, Schelling’s conclusions in his 1978 book Micromotives and Macrobehavior gave birth to that 30% tipping point number.

And then there was Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City, which challenged the whole “assimilation” model of American life. Americans don’t shed their ancestral identities.  They embrace them.  Morley characterized Glazer in his piece as the one “who most forcefully made the point in the early 1970s that whites’ fears of blacks were profound and in many ways justified.”

But geez, if behaviors are tipped so predictably one way, couldn’t they tip back just as predictably? Gladwell may well have thought or even put forth to Morley over a beer or two.

All of this Tipping Point stuff must have fascinated him back in the mid-80s and picking the brain of Jefferson Morley was cool too. But what could Gladwell really “do” with the idea? Especially when the next day he had to call Pfizer to check up on their progress getting a new pill approved by the FDA.

He couldn’t do anything with it.

So, he sealed it in a virtual sardine can and stuck it with the rest of the cans in the idea pantry in the back of his mind.

And then, over a decade later when Gladwell looked at crime statistics in New York City and discovered how drastically they had plummeted in just five years time, he made a connection. It was a connection that went all the way back to the conversation with Jefferson Morley at the party he’d thrown with his friend Jacob Weisberg.

Maybe Tipping Points are not just interesting explanations for physics, epidemiology, and sociology…perhaps they’re applicable to crime too? And if they’re applicable to crime, what other phenomena could they explain?