Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 54

The Villain Embodies the Counter-theme

 

 If our hero’s object is to save the world, our villain’s object is to destroy it.

Conrad Veidt as Major Strasser in “Casablanca”

Whatever the protagonist wants, the antagonist wants the opposite.

But it’s a little more complicated than that.

Every story must have a theme.

It must be about something.

The theme, as Blake Snyder so helpfully declares in Save the Cat!, is the case that the story is making to the reader.

 

Better to sacrifice oneself (or one’s personal happiness) for the greater good than to live a life of prosperous selfishness.

 

Or

 

We are defined by our past and cannot escape it.

 

These are the themes of 1) Casablanca, and 2) Shane.

(Please note that themes do not have to be universally “true.” A great theme can be completely debatable, even spurious or “wrong.” It is enough, for storytelling purposes, that a theme be a strong statement about some aspect of life or the human condition.)

The hero embodies the theme.

Rick in Casablanca (Humphrey Bogart) declares in the first half of the story

 

I stick my neck out for no one

 

And

 

I’m the only cause I’m fighting for.

 

In the movie’s climax, however, it’s Bogey who’s putting Ilsa Lund, the love of his life (Ingrid Bergman), on the plane to Lisbon and freedom …

“We’ll always have Paris.” Bogey and Bergman in “Casablanca”

 

BOGEY

Inside of us, we both know you belong with Victor. You’re part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon, and for the rest of your life …

 

while he himself heads off into the desert with his sometime adversary Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains) to join the Free French and fight for freedom.

 

BOGEY

Louie, this is the start of a beautiful friendship.

 

The hero embodies by his words and actions the “case” that the movie is making. He is the personification of the theme, in this instance, as we said,

 

Better to sacrifice oneself (or one’s personal happiness) for the greater good than to live a life of prosperous selfishness.

 

But what about the villain?

The villain in Casablanca is the idea that there is such a thing as safe neutrality, that it is possible to sit out a conflict between good and evil without taking sides.

The city of Casablanca itself represents this, being at that time (1941) the capital of a nation that was neither Allied nor Axis.

Bogey’s cabaret—“Rick’s Cafe Americaine”—represents this same idea, a little Casablanca within the greater city of Casablanca.

Every character in Rick’s place is trying to work some self-interested angle, to escape the Nazis, to profit off others’ desperation to flee, or just to hang on and survive in this transient purgatory on the Mediterranean.

The physical villain, SS Major Strasser, represents the personal force of evil—the Nazi thugs whose aim is to arrest and no doubt torture and murder Ilsa and her husband, the valiant Resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid).

In other words, these elements constitute the counter-theme:

 

To defeat your enemies, make each of them reject solidarity with their fellows and instead strive only for their individual selfish ends.

 

When you and I as writers find ourselves struggling to make our stories vivid and compelling, it’s often because we haven’t truly defined the theme for ourselves and have failed to make 1) the hero embody the theme, and 2) the villain embody the counter-theme.

If we can lick these problems in our story, everything else will fall into place.

 

 

My Secret

(I read “this is stupid,” a post by Wil Wheaton, this week. I felt his pain. It reminded me of where I was last year when I wrote the article below. If you’re out there reading this, and think that the rest of us have “it” together, that we’re enjoying every bit of our work, that it all comes with ease, you’re wrong. It’s hard. It’s tiring. Often, all I want to do is head to the beach. But . . . Not even Kahuna stayed on the beach year round. He headed to work like the rest of us, and I’m pretty sure that the tough work made the summer waves that much more enjoyable. Some days the stuff we love comes to us like Ruth Stone’s train, but there are a lot of “this is stupid” days in between. Whether its a train day or a stupid day, we’re better for having both.  ~C)

When it was my publishing house’s turn to present its Fall/Winter line of books, I was introduced as the senior editor. One of the quick-witted sales reps quipped, “If she’s the senior editor, how old is the junior editor?”

I was 22 years old, attending — and presenting — at my first sales conference, and not yet a full year into being an editor.

My first job out of college was as a junior editor for a small publishing house in Florida. Within a few months, my boss said goodbye to the senior editor and I was promoted. This was a mom and pop operation, so I went from editing sales copy, sending manuscript rejection letters, and answering the phone, to acquiring and editing manuscripts, packaging books, writing marketing materials, negotiating author and vendor contracts, managing relationships with authors and vendors, and developing and implementing publicity campaigns — while still editing sales copy, sending manuscript rejection letters, and answering the phone.

No training.

Lots of time alone in the office, operating on instinct and a prayer.

It ended up being two and a half years of shooting the rapids, of going solo, of working from the gut.

I emerged on the other end confident in my gut’s instincts, but I also emerged doing PR, something that had never been an itch to scratch. I wanted out of Florida and a publicity job offer helped make that possible, so… I headed north.

Within the first month, the questioning started. I didn’t do what the other publicists did. Was I wrong? Was there a better way? The publishers my employer represented all expected top-tier media coverage — and when I advised a publisher that it was a waste of money to promote the book to the top-tiers, that the book wasn’t well written and wouldn’t be picked up by the outlets she wanted it pitched to, I learned that I had landed in a world where Reality was on permanent vacation. Publicists weren’t honest with publishers — and publishers believed the same approach could (and should) be applied to every book.

I needed a paycheck, so I pitched cardio-kickboxing to Bill O’Reilly and Wiccan rituals to Howard Stern. I mailed dozens of books to the New York Times and Washington Post book reviewers — and I attended conferences, and conventions, and expos, where dinosaurs manned booths and roamed the aisles.

Here’s my secret:

I hated it then — and twenty years later, I still hate it. Every time I write a column for this site I feel like a fake, because I’m not passionate about everything I write about. I don’t enjoy learning about MailChimp or Google Analytics or following Twitter’s next move.

So why the hell do I do this?

It makes me better.

The stuff I don’t enjoy is the yin to the yang of my passion. One provides knowledge and thus the ability to self advocate, which allows the other to soar to greater heights.

Here’s how it plays out in the rest of my life:

This weekend includes replacing the flapper in a constantly-running toilet bowl, reinstalling a bathroom tile, replacing the hardware on two dangling cabinet doors, and removing the base of a broken lightbulb that’s stuck in a socket. I don’t want to do (or learn how to do) these things, but . . . If I know how to do them I’ll save money by doing the work myself — or if I hire someone else, I’ll know exactly what’s involved, how much the service should cost, and how it should be done.

There this, too:

I get high on seeing stories I’m passionate about take flight

So, that means focusing on things I don’t enjoy spending time learning about — and then implementing what I’ve learned, writing about what I’ve learned, and sharing what I’ve learned, because there’s a high in seeing others learn from my experiences, too.

Back to my secret.

I hate doing the same things I often suggest that you do. You’re not alone, mucking your way through all the crap that can be PR/marketing. I’m not a fan either.

Here’s what helps me move along:

On the other side there’s Joy.

 

The Villain is Not Always a Person

 

Or even a creature.

Julianne Moore in Todd Haynes’ “Far From Heaven”

Sometimes the villain is entirely inside the characters’ (almost always the protagonist’s) head.

The villain can be a fear, an obsession, a desire, a dream, a conception of reality, an idea of what “the truth” really is.

The villain in Blade Runner 1978 would seem at first glance to be the replicants, Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and his team of Leon (Brion James) and Pris (Daryl Hannah), who have escaped off-world and come to Earth sowing destruction. But the real villain is an idea—the conception of creating faux-human slave labor.

The replicants are actually the innocent victims of this idea, which in fact has been deemed by the world to be brilliant, epochal, even salvational, and whose progenitor, Eldon Tyrell of the Tyrell Corporation, is universally lauded for his genius in conceiving such a notion.

But a slave by another name is still a slave, and the idea of creating soul-less, expendable creatures whose only purpose is to do the dirty work of the greater society (no matter how exceptional or beautiful these creatures may be) is still evil.

This is the same villain, by the way, as in Birth of a Nation (2016), Twelve Years A Slave, and The Help.

The villain in Blade Runner 2049 is another idea—the idea of the willing acceptance of one’s role as a soul-less cog in a greater machine.

Often these “idea villains” are embodied and personified by human or creature antagonists who have actual physical being in the story. In David O. Russell’s The Fighter, the idea-villain—the self-sabotage of the individual of talent and destiny (in this case Mark Wahlberg’s character of Micky Ward, “the fighter”—is personified by his family of mother, brother, and seven sisters. They’re undermining him and sabotaging his career at every turn.

But the deep villain resides in Mark’s own head, as it does in K’s (Ryan Gosling) in Blade Runner 2049 and in Nat Turner’s (Nate Parker) in Birth of a Nation.

In other words the villain in these stories is not sabotage, but self-sabotage.

The hero is enslaving himself by his own belief.

The turning point in all such stories is the moment when the protagonist snaps out of it and says to him or herself, “I am in control of my own destiny. I will no longer believe the lies that others have told me about myself and that I have abetted by repeating them and believing them in my own heart.”

In Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven, the villain is 1950s suburban-American conformity. The hero is Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) who believes at the story’s start that she is one of the lucky ones, blessed with a handsome, successful husband whom she loves and who loves her, a beautiful family, wonderful friends, and a perfect, secure life in a prosperous, upwardly mobile community.

Suburban conformity is a great villain, not only because it is internal—existing entirely, as it does, in our heroine’s psyche as well as within the community—but also because it’s invisible. Julianne has no idea that this idea is evil. She believes in it like Stalinists believed in the Workers’ Paradise. To her it is the universally-desired state of being, i.e., what every human on Earth would aspire to if they had the chance. In Julianne’s mind, at the story’s start, she is living the American dream, and her family embodies this fantasy perfectly.

By movie’s end of course Julianne will have lost husband, friends, community, as well as her self-conception and self-assurance as a secure, happy wife and mother. The movie’s final image is Julianne with young kids in tow, driving off in her station wagon into a totally unknown (and probably for quite a while desperate) future.

This is a happy ending. Why? Because Julianne has emancipated herself, however excruciatingly, from this villain that is only an idea.

She has seen it for what it is and seen through it.

This act puts Julianne light-years ahead of her self-enslaved neighbors/replicants/Stepford wives in Suburban Hell who are still “living the dream.”

We said in an earlier chapter that

 

Every villain is a metaphor for Resistance.

 

What this means is that the ultimate antagonist is not a man-eating shark or a monster from space. It is an idea carried in our own heads (we’re the heroes, remember, of our own lives) and as invisible to us as Julianne’s and K’s and Nat Turner’s self-enslavement was to them before they woke up.

The turning point for us too comes when we see through the Wizard’s curtain and reject this idea once and for all.

 

 

Combatting the “DQ”

How do you tune out dismissive quips about your work? Here’s an edited post from www.storygrid.com that explains and all too familiar event for anyone who has accomplished anything…

Ten years ago, I had knee replacement surgery.

As one is required to do after being made bionic, I imprisoned myself post-op at home. Rehab centers are strictly for the better insured. For the first two weeks, I remained doped up on Oxycodone in between grueling physical therapy sessions.

A charming older woman, an emigre from the Philipines, came to my apartment every afternoon at 2:30. And tortured me…but in the sweetest way possible.

I’m so excited today…we’re going for 130 degrees of motion! We’re going to crack apart that gunk stuck in your new knee once and for all!”

In between those medieval manipulations, I stared slack-jawed at daytime television.

As I was watching Power Lunch on CNBC one day, there was a wonderful argument between two talking heads brought on to kill a three-minute segment about some Advertising merger. There was an in-studio Donny Deutsch (Advertising muckety muck and cable show mainstay) on the left side of the screen and a remote Charles Gasparino (former Wall Street Journal reporter “Live from the New York Stock Exchange”) on the right side.

At first glance, I could tell these guys didn’t like each other. Or perhaps that was just their on-air shtick.

Deutsch said something about the stocks for each of the companies, and then closed his comments with a reference to his own advertising gravitas. He is associated with Deutsch Inc., a company founded by his father, and is worth a rumored $200 million.

And then it was Gasparino’s turn.

“Donny, being born on third base doesn’t mean you hit a triple.”

Now of course, Gasparino didn’t credit the man who first came up with that zinger (former Oklahoma and Dallas Cowboys football coach Barry Switzer) and neither do the scores of journalists today who use it to poke Jeb Bush or Donald Trump either.

What struck me about the put down then and still does today is that there is a endemic human need to discount others’ accomplishments, be they rivals, and sadly, even more so friends. The closer someone we hang with comes to realizing her potential, the more snarky we become.

This phenomenon gave birth to phrases like “she used daddy’s money to start her company” or “he brown-nosed the CEO to get that job” or “they just bought out the competition.”

When we hear these caustic asides that seemingly set the record straight, it gives us a momentary sense of relief. Like, Thank God they didn’t actually work to get where they are…they were handed what they’ve got. Hearing that someone got something because the fix was in, takes the pressure off of us.

We think that since we weren’t born with silver spoons in our mouths or that we don’t have access to the upper levels of management are the reasons why we’re getting nowhere. There is a certain comfort to the belief that corruption reigns. Even honest to goodness hardworking grinders like us just can’t get ahead in a world riddled with fraud.

Despite the extremely negative Weltanschauung necessary to maintain this POV, you have to admit that this sort of self-talk gives us satisfaction. Because it absolves us lickety split from the responsibility of finding the work we need to do and then just doing it.

As Steve Pressfield and Seth Godin like to remind me when I vent and spew bile—and they do it somehow without pissing me off—the only thing we are entitled to is the work…not the bennies from the work.

Needless to say, writers and artists are superlative practitioners of what I like to call THE DQ, or the “dismissive quip.” And just like the frosty treats at that more widely known DQ, Dairy Queen, verbal DQs taste great when first consumed, but later on leave one with dyspeptic emptiness.

One of my personal favorites among writers is this one:

Oh yeah, that article/book/review/poem by New Writer on the Scene was great…twenty years ago when Mr. or Ms. Real Genius first wrote about it. An obvious rip off from Ms./Mr. Flavor of the week.

The not so subtle subtext of this particular DQ of course is: What she or wrote wasn’t even an original idea. She or he stole it.

These are the very same arrows being launched at Elon Musk today. He didn’t invent electricity or rocket propulsion or pneumatic tubes. Musk just riffed on them like any of us could and brought forth Tesla, SpaceX and the potential for high-speed travel without burning up the atmosphere. So how come he did it and we didn’t?

Which brings me to the third longform—five thousand word-ish—piece Malcolm Gladwell wrote for The New Yorker for the June 3, 1996 issue called “The Tipping Point.”

First of all, “The Tipping Point” was not an original idea. Gladwell “stole” it.

It is a phrase that has been widely used in Physics to define the moment in time when the addition of any unit of mass to a balanced object “tips” it over. We all remember doing those cheesy experiments in High School. Finding the center of mass in an irregular object and then positioning that center out of equilibrium. The exact moment the gravitational force pushing the “top” of the object to the earth exceeds the mass at the “bottom” keeping the object static or “up,” is when the thing falls over. It tips.

The Tipping Point is also a term used in epidemiology when an infectious disease moves from contained (staying in one particular population at an equilibrium state of infection, i.e. one guy gets the disease at the same rate as one recovers from it) to an epidemic—infection moving in a geometric progression…an n+ 1 increase in infection.

Okay so physics and epidemiology speak of Tipping Points, that’s interesting. But it’s not something that will burn up five thousand words and still make Tina Brown happy.

Gladwell knew that.

In fact, he’d been sitting on this Tipping Point notion since 1984. That’s twelve years of inside his mind marination before he thought he’d found a phenomenon counter-intuitive enough to make for an interesting story.

Here’s the thing about newspaper journalists who leave their particular “beat” and become longform piece creators. They don’t forget about their past work and start “thinking Big Original Thoughts!” They don’t abandon all of the stuff they learned as crime reporters and start writing about how Pret-a-Porter fashion influences the Tokyo Stock market.

Instead, they go to their brain pantry that they’ve lined with idea-stuffed sardine cans over the years.  Then they key open something that hasn’t exceeded its expiration date and gone bad and see if they can use it. They dig through all of the stuff they had to cut to make deadlines long since past in search of connections.

Remember that Gladwell was at The Washington Post for ten years before he went to The New Yorker. He first covered business for deputy editor Steve Pearlstein before he moved over to the science desk, which meant that if there was some FDA hearing on the hill, he had to show up and “write up” what happened and file that story for inclusion in the next day’s newspaper. Whether he liked it or not.

Every now and then, and at his editor’s discretion, a beat writer earns the latitude to go outside the wire of his/her particular niche. But not often. Pearlstein spoke of how it’s done for Chris Wilson’s profile Gladwell’s Brain in the January 8, 2007 edition of The Washingtonian magazine.

You have to develop a reputation…when you do that sort of thing, editors like it and print it and give it good play, but you don’t ask permission beforehand. It has to come in the back door.

Gladwell didn’t go to J-school so he had no idea of where the front door was, let along the back door.

So he wasn’t clued in to the fact that the typical beat writer hired out of Columbia keeps his head down and minds his knitting… He doesn’t inject “personality” into the 500 words he files on an FDA hearing. And he certainly doesn’t compare the FDA commissioner to a famous historical dullard like Gladwell did in 1991, “(David) Kessler broke from his Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge impersonation just once…”

So Gladwell was not your average Washington journalist dreaming of one day getting promoted to an office off of the newsroom floor. In fact, Gladwell is so enamored with the din of the newsroom that today he prefers finding a table of a noisy restaurant to work. Simulating the chaos of the Post in the late 80s comforts him.

But what of this notion that he’d been sitting on the idea for The Tipping Point since 1984?

The thing about Gladwell I think is that he understood a fundamental life truth much earlier than most of us do. Finding something interesting to do and practically applying the craft of doing it over and over again to feed yourself and put a roof over your head while you take every opportunity to push yourself to get better at it…is the recipe for a happy life.

So after his College graduation and failure to get a cool job in advertising and after a stint at the American Spectator, Gladwell took a job in 1985 at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. The EPPC is a conservative soft-lobby/think tank that dedicates itself to having its scholar/writers create articles that can be featured in its own publications as well as op-eds in other more mainstream papers. Gladwell could keep writing and pay for his ramen noodles too.

The EPPC is what Edward Bernays would call a Propaganda outfit with a mission to shape public opinion to its core mission—increasing the influence of Judeo/Christian morality on public policy. I’m not really sure what that means beyond a desire to reduce big government while simultaneously increasing government’s upholding of the EPPC’s definitions of fundamental moral principle. It’s complicated…on purpose. Because unfortunately manipulating human behavior for the “better” is dependent upon one’s definition of “better.” And when we try and define “better” we find ourselves dealing with ambiguity.  And no one likes that.  Especially in Washington.

As Gladwell himself said, “I was Canadian, so this was all very unfamiliar.”

In Washington, Gladwell came to share a four-person house with an intern taking a year off from Yale at The New Republic named Jacob Weisberg, a macher from a long line of machers who is now editor in chief of Slate. Weisberg became his “connector” and a lifelong friend. As Gladwell admits in the book The Tipping Point:

My social circle is, in reality, not a circle. It is a pyramid. And at the top of the pyramid is a single person—Jacob (Weisberg)—who is responsible for an overwhelming majority of the relationships that constitute my life.

As is typical for a unique thinker like Gladwell, the most critical introduction wasn’t the chain of people who led him to meeting his eventual literary agent Tina Bennett. She was the newbie agent at the powerful Janklow and Nesbit Agency in 1996 who masterfully worked with Gladwell to position and sell The Tipping Point for a big advance.

Rather it was Weisberg simply introducing Gladwell to his mother Lois that proved indispensable.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Where did “The Tipping Point” as Big Idea really originate?  That’s up next.

The Villain Drives the Story

 

I sometimes get asked, “Why does Resistance exist?”

Stefan Gierasch as Del Gue in “Jeremiah Johnson”

It’s a good question.

Why did Creation include this monster? For what purpose? Just to screw us all up and make life difficult?

(When I say “Resistance,” I mean in story terms “the Villain.”)

Isn’t Resistance entirely negative? What possible evolutionary purpose could it serve?

Here’s my answer. It might not be anybody else’s answer, but it’s mine.

 

Resistance gives meaning to life.

 

Or to put it in narrative terms:

 

The villain gives meaning to the story.

 

Think about it. If there were no villain, there’d be no story. If there were no Shark, no Terminator, no Alien … if there were no Coriolanus Snow, no Noah Cross, no Hannibal Lecter, we writers would be up a tree with no way down.

The villain drives the story.

The villain gives meaning to the story.

The snake (actually “the serpent”) in the Garden of Eden saved Adam and Eve from a life of picking fruit and hanging around naked and happy.

Is that Edenic life really human?

I mean seriously. Is that the noblest destiny our race can come up with?

It was supposed to be seen as a calamity when God kicked our original Mom and Pop out of the Garden. Maybe it was. But it was the greatest thing that ever happened to you and me as writers.

 

Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

 

Call this myth if you like, but I daresay there’s no truer depiction of life-as-we-live-it anywhere in literature.

The human condition is the ultimate villain, as it is the consummate blessing. The Almighty cast us forth into the Land of Nod, east of Eden, because we dared (no doubt blindly and obliviously, but dared nonetheless) to steal a share of His nature, that is, free will, the knowledge of good and evil, the capacity to create.

In our path He set evil, villainy, Resistance, that indelible, indefatigable aspect of our nature that craved despite everything to destroy itself.

How do we measure a hero in a story, except by the obstacles she faces and overcomes.

 

“‘Mongst Injuns,” Del Gue declares in the movie Jeremiah Johnson, “a tribe’s greatness is measured by how mighty its enemies be.”

 

Actors love to portray villains because they sense, even if they might not always be able to articulate it, that the villain drives the story. The villain gives meaning to the story.

If there were no villain, there would be no story.

Spend Your Time

I. The patient took the pain medicine as prescribed and didn’t understand why the doctor was upset.

Patient’s point of view: He was in pain and followed the instructions on the bottle.

Doctor’s point of view: The pain medicine was prescribed by the patient’s veterinarian, for the patient’s dog.

II. The drug rep walked into the doctor’s office dressed as the Grim Reaper and didn’t understand why the doctor asked him to leave.

Drug rep’s point of view: It was Halloween, he was having fun.

Doctor’s point of view: He had patients with life-threatening diseases/illnesses. The last thing they needed was to be met by the Grim Reaper upon a visit to their doctor’s office.

III. The office manager put examination table paper on all of the doctor’s examination tables and didn’t understand why the doctor asked him to remove it.

Office manager’s point of view: It was free paper provided by a drug company and would save money.

Doctor’s point of view: It was flat out wrong to have a young teenage girl sitting on examination table paper that advertised a drug for erectile dysfunction.

These are true stories (well true, but with a few tweaks . . . ).

They make me laugh because they are real examples of real people doing what real people often do best—fail to fully think through their actions in advance.

I value the stories because they are real examples of real people, taking real actions that I never would have been able to make up on my own.

To obtain these stories I had to 1) experience them myself or 2) lift the stories from the doctor to whom they belonged. I went with the latter.

I’ve been working out of my home office since 2001. The upside of working alone: No other people. The downside of working alone: No other people.

I’ve never wished myself back into a traditional office, but at the same time, I often feel the walls around me becoming more comfortable and harder to leave.

I have everything I need—and if I don’t have it, I can order it online—except for great experiences.

With a few exceptions, all of my great stories occurred pre-2001—or when on vacation from the home office.

We talk a lot on this site about keeping our time safe, not wasting it, doing the work instead of becoming distracted by the rest of life and the people within it. But… We miss a lot if we go too far.

As the end of 2017 approaches, and so many of us think about the changes for the next year, I want to encourage all of you to get out of your office.

The sounds of the streets help inform musicians. The colors of the sky speak to painters. The actions of everyday people inspire the writers.

It’s important to save your time, but you’ve got to spend it, too.

“Keep Working”

 

[I’m gonna interrupt this series on Villains for a quick “Bulletin from the Trenches.”]

 

When I first came out to Hollywood from New York and I was scuffling around desperately for employment, I wound up doing a couple of small writing jobs for the director Ernie Pintoff. Ernie was a seasoned pro (he had actually won an Oscar for a short subject, titled The Critic). My frantic state was very clear to Ernie and, one day after we had finished work, he drew up and gave me a look that told me he was about to impart some serious wisdom.

Ernie Pintoff

Ernie said he knew that at my stage of the game, most of the gigs I could attract would be pretty low-ball, non-remunerative, and even in some cases a little dubious ethically. But, he said,

 

          “Keep working.”

 

What Ernie meant was don’t turn your nose up at paying (and even non-paying) assignments. “Yeah, a lot of ’em are gonna be pretty lousy and you’re gonna be saying to yourself, ‘This is really for the birds.’ But keep working. You never know who you’ll meet on a job, what contacts you’ll make, what opportunities may present themselves. Stay in the action. Keep perfecting your craft. You’re acquiring experience. You’re learning all the time, even if you don’t think you are.”

I’m taking Ernie’s advice right now, and it’s saving my life.

My “Trenches” book is done. Shawn loves it. I love it. It’s out there now, looking for a publisher.

Now the waiting begins.

Now Resistance appears, big-time.

Now the temptation arises to hold your breath and attach yourself emotionally to an outcome.

That attitude is bad news.

Bad luck.

Bad karma.

 

            “Keep working.”

 

If you’re reading this, I know you know what I’m talking about. We’ve all been in this place, some of us multiple-multiple times. It never gets any easier. The mind never gets any stronger.

Dark thoughts obtrude.

Distraction looms.

I repeat to myself all the psych-up mantras I know so well. But they still ricochet around in my head, seeking purchase and often not finding any.

 

          “Keep working.”

 

I’ve started the next book. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m doing it every day. I have to.

The Muse tests you and me 24/7. She flies over and peers down on us. What she wants to see is that we are dedicated to the journey, to the process, that we are in it for the long haul and in it for keeps.

What she doesn’t want to see is that we are attached to the real-world outcome of one specific project.

The goddess hates that because it shows that we have misapprehended the nature of her alliance with us and of our apprenticeship in her service.

 

            “Keep working.”

 

The pro athlete who gets cut from his team, the ballerina who is let go by her dance company … both must go home and IMMEDIATELY begin training for their next job. The sent-down wide receiver must head over to the local college and recruit one of the young quarterbacks to work with him, alone and at night if necessary, throwing passes on the practice field, letting him run routes, helping him keep his technique sharp. The ballet dancer must sign up for class at once, continue her strength training, keep up her barre work.

For you and me, finishing Book #1 (or #21) means only plunging in immediately on #2 or #22.

We have to.

That’s the law.

 

            “Keep working.”

The Difference Between Heroes and Villains

 

We’ve seen in prior posts that villain and hero are often opposite sides of the same coin.

Villain or hero? Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty in the 1978 “Blade Runner”

Hero believes X; Villain believes Opposite-of-X.

Hero seeks Outcome X; Villain seeks Outcome Opposite-of-X.

Does this mean the Good Guy and the Bad Guy are equivalent?

Is the hero really no “better” than the heavy; he just happens to believe something different?

What separates the Good Guy from the Bad Guy (at least some of the time) is the Good Guy is capable of sacrificing himself for the good of others.

In fact, the climax of many great stories is exactly that.

Bogey puts Ingrid on the plane to Lisbon.

Huck Finn tears up the letter that he believes will save himself while condemning his friend Jim.

The 300 Spartans die to the last man at Thermopylae.

There are exceptions. “The Guru” (Eduardo Cianelli) in Gunga Din, knowing he can’t escape his captors, steps to brink of the pit of vipers and turns back to face the three British sergeants (Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.)

 

GURU

You have sworn to give your lives if necessary for your country, which is England. Well, India is my country, and I can die for it as readily as you can for yours.

 

And he leaps into the pit.

Which makes us think, “Hmm, maybe the Guru is not the villain after all. Could the villain be England’s unjust colonial domination of India?”

Another seeming villain who sacrifices himself is Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), the replicant leader in the 1978 Blade Runner. Roy’s choice in the climax on the rooftop of the Bradbury Building is to save the man who is trying to kill him, Blade Runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) while he himself expires of the wound he knows is mortal. [P.S. Here’s the story of Rutger Hauer changing the dialogue the night before the scene was shot.]

 

ROY BATTY

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

 

That’s not a villain speech, is it? It’s a hero speech. It tells us (though the filmmakers themselves may not have realized this at the time) that the villain in Blade Runner is not Roy or his fellow replicants Pris (Daryl Hannah), Leon (Brion James) and Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), whose only aim is to survive the four-year life span they’ve been doomed to by their creators, but the idea of manufacturing human-like slaves in the first place. In other words, the villain is Mr. Eldon Tyrell of the Tyrell Corporation—and all those who went along with this concept.

The Seven Samurai are willing to give their lives for the villagers.

Clarice Starling enters Buffalo Bill’s den in pitch blackness to save the killer’s captive, Catherine Martin.

Sydney Carton takes Edward Darnay’s place beneath the guillotine in A Tale of Two Cities.

Those are heroes.

The hero is capable of the ultimate sacrifice.

Getting to Zero

Revisiting a post from almost four years ago, after Shawn’s What It Takes columns reminded me that I’d visited Gladwell in the past, too.

Do you know “scat” music’s tipping point—that moment just before it started spreading like wildfire?

The short version is that, though artists had been experimenting for years with the form, scat’s explosion in popularity followed the release of Louis Armstrong’s Heebie Jeebies. In the book Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words, he explained:

The day we recorded “Heebie Jeebies,” I dropped the paper with the lyrics—right in the middle of the tune . . . And I did not want to stop and spoil the record which was moving along so wonderfully . . . So when I dropped the paper, I immediately turned back into the horn and started to Scatting . . . Just as nothing had happened . . . When I finished the record I just knew the recording people would throw it out . . . And to my surprise they all came running out of the controlling booth and said – “Leave that in.”

Look it up online and you’ll find doubters of the story, one theory being that Armstrong invented the story to explain his scatting when the form wasn’t yet widely embraced.

Whatever the truth is, end story is that he did it—he tried something that wasn’t widely accepted and continued on the same path the rest of his life. Whether the walls he faced were built on racial prejudices or on personal hardships, he plowed forward, leaving them crumbling in his path.

What drove him?

Weapons of the Spirit

Earlier this week I helped my son with his report about the book Who Was Louis Armstrong?, which got me asking the question above. The book was a good intro for a child, but left me wanting more.

Enter Malcolm Gladwell’s article “How I Discovered Faith” (h/t to the Swagmaster General for the head’s up), in which Gladwell shares the concept of “Weapons of the Spirit.”

Gladwell opens with a story about how Wilma and Cliff Derksen responded to a reporter’s question, after their murdered daughter’s body was found.

“How do you feel about whoever did this to Candace?” a reporter asked the Derksens.

“We would like to know who the person or persons are so we could share, hopefully, a love that seems to be missing in these people’s lives,” Cliff said.

Wilma went next. “Our main concern was to find Candace. We’ve found her.” She went on: “I can’t say at this point I forgive this person,” but the stress was on the phrase at this point. “We have all done something dreadful in our lives, or have felt the urge to.”

I wanted to know where the Derksens found the strength to say those things. A sexual predator had kidnapped and murdered their daughter, and Cliff Derksen could talk about sharing his love with the killer and Wilma could stand up and say, “We have all done something dreadful in our lives, or have felt the urge to.” Where do two people find the power to forgive in a moment like that?

Later in the article, he shares the actions of the WWII-era townspeople of Le Chambon, France, and asks why they had the strength to openly defy the Nazis and shelter refugees, when so many others didn’t.

When the first refugee appeared at her door, in the bleakest part of the war during the long winter of 1941, Magda Trocmé said it never occurred to her to say no: “I did not know that it would be dangerous. Nobody thought of that.”

Nobody thought of that. It never occurred to her or anyone else in Le Chambon that they were at any disadvantage in a battle with the Nazi Army.

But here is the puzzle: The Huguenots of Le Chambon were not the only committed Christians in France in 1941. There were millions of committed believers in France in those years. They believed in God just as the people of Le Chambon did. So why did so few Christians follow the lead of the people in Le Chambon?

Nobody Thought of That

Like Magda Trocme, if asked why he kept moving forward, would Louis Armstrong have answered the same? Would “I didn’t think of that” have been his answer?

In his article, Gladwell wrote,

The way that story is often told, the people of Le Chambon are made out to be heroic figures. But they were no more heroic than the Derksens. They were simply people whose experience had taught them where true power lies.

The other Christians of France were not so fortunate. They made the mistake that so many of us make. They estimated the dangers of action by looking on outward appearances—when they needed to look on the heart.

Is looking at the heart for the Derksens and the townspeople of Le Chambon the same action that lead’s artists and entrepreneurs and so many others to take extraordinary actions, when so many others don’t?

Reducing Your Needs and Clutter

Brett and Kate McKay, the team behind The Art of Manliness, shared a new article this week, titled “John Boyd’s Roll Call: Do You Want to Be Someone or Do Something?”

John Boyd was an innovator—a doer, someone who took one stand after another for what he believed was right, instead of what he believed would advance his career.  Within the piece is the question, “Which way will you go?” and:

There comes a point in every man’s life where he must decide if he will strive to be somebody important, or if he will work to do something important. Sometimes these pursuits go hand-in-hand; often they do not.

What makes someone do something important—whether as an artist or humanitarian or entrepreneur or …. ? Are they born that way or is it something they learn? If learned, why do they make a conscious decision one day instead of the next? Or is it not a conscious decision?

In Brett and Kate’s article, there’s also this quote from Boyd, via Robert Coram’s book Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War:

“. . . if a man can reduce his needs to zero, he is truly free: there is nothing that can be taken from him and nothing anyone can do to hurt him.”

Getting to Zero

Earlier this year, Steve did an interview with Joe Rogan. I’m paraphrasing here, but at one point Joe mentions how getting rid of “the clutter” affected his life. He was talking about the emotional clutter—those things that pull us away from what’s really important. From what he said, that clutter sounds a lot like “Resistance’s Greatest Hits,” which appear on pages 5 and 6 of Steve’s The War of Art. The list is of activities that often elicit Resistance. “In other words,” Steve wrote, “any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity.”

First on the list:

The pursuit of any calling in writing, painting, music, film, dance, or any creative art, however marginal or unconventional.

Last on the list:

The taking of any principled stand in the face of adversity.

When he eliminated the clutter,  Joe said (again, paraphrasing) doing so changed his life. It sounds like he found his way to Boyd’s zero.

My read on Boyd’s “zero” is that getting to zero best enables you to live the person you want to be. You don’t have to get rid of every need (such as food), but everything else. . . Getting to zero gets you to your heart. It could also be that place that allows you to zero in on what’s important to you.

Armstrong’s heart was music. He faced his share of personal drama in addition to other barriers, but he pushed through because he didn’t have needs strong enough to silence his heart.

Treating others as they would want to be treated led the people of Le Chambon. Their hearts cared more for others than the need for personal safety.  The Nazis couldn’t take that away from them.

The heart drove the Derksens, too.

How Do You Get to Zero?

I don’t know for certain, but I have an idea.

After almost ten years of working with Steve—and having just reread all 230+ of his Writing Wednesdays columns—I’ve learned a bit about Resistance and how it can pull you away from your heart. Though there are a few who’ve left me wondering if they were born at zero, there are a greater number who have had to fight to get there.

Often, it seems like something that just happened. Armstrong was placed in a boy’s home after shooting a gun into the air during a New Year Eve’s celebration. At the boy’s home, there was a professor who taught Louis to play the coronet, in addition to a number of other instruments. Music lived within him, but if he hadn’t been sent to the boy’s school, would he have worked his way through the same life? Maybe not. But on the other hand, not all the boys sent to the home became famous musicians. Why him? Something happened to him and—though he didn’t recognize it as a child—that something came with an opportunity. At a young age, he was at zero. He could see the trees from the forest, the difference between opportunity and clutter. And, though he was so young, I wonder if he saw a tipping point. Maybe not defined as such, but something in him knew, “This is it.”

I’m in that second category, of the ones fighting for zero. This past year, something changed. I can feel it like a deep stretch after and insane workout. Everything with which I’ve struggled in the past—from losing baby weight gained five years ago, to the daily battle to create—hasn’t been as difficult.

What changed? I’m a few months away from 40 and for the past ten years in particular, my heart has been torn between family, work, and outside drama. I need the first two, but the last? Minimized. Not gone, but not a daily visitor either. How? I started dropping the clutter. As it fell in one area of my life, a ripple effect occurred and it fell in others, too.

I don’t expect to ever stand as an equal, on the same footing as those mentioned above, but I have an idea of how they got there. Knowing, I’ve been told, is half the battle.

Start With the Villain

 

There’s an axiom among screenwriters:

 

Start at the end.

 

What they mean is, “Figure out your climax first (Ripley blasts the Alien into outer space; Moby Dick takes Ahab down to the depths), then work backwards to figure out what you need to make this climax work.

Don’t you hate this guy? (Even Donald Sutherland hates this guy.)

I’m a big believer in this way of working—and its corollary:

 

Start with the villain.

 

Once we’ve got Anton Chighur (Javier Bardem in the movie), we’ve got No Country for Old Men licked. Once we’ve got Hannibal Lecter, we’re halfway home in The Silence of the Lambs.

It’s natural to want to start at the beginning and start with the hero. Let’s introduce Raskolnikov, we tell ourselves. Let’s intro Huck Finn. But all too often, this way of working runs out of gas halfway into Act Two. We find ourselves asking, “What did I think this story was about? Where were we going with this?”

Answer: identify the villain, then regroup around this axis.

In The Hunger Games, the villain is the corrupt, soulless “system,” embodied by Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland), the commander of Panem.

Let’s start with him.

Pin his picture to the wall.

Place his index card above all our scenes and sequences.

Bad Guy Snow tells us what our heroes (even if we haven’t conceived them yet) must believe in, how they must act, what temptations they must face, and by what means they must fight him and overcome.

Whoever Snow is, our Good Guys are the opposite.

Whatever Snow stands for, our heroes stand for its antithesis.

When we start with the villain, we have a leg up on our climax as well (again, even if—especially if—we don’t know yet what that climax is.)

How does knowing our villain help? Because

We know that the hero must duel the villain in the climax.
We know that the climax must revolve around the story’s theme.
We know that the villain embodies the counter-theme.

In the climax, our hero has to face Doc Ock, Immortan Joe, Bane, the Alien, the Predator, the Terminator.

Hero and villain duel in the climax over the issue of the theme.

When we get our villain straight in our mind—when we know who he is, what he wants, what his powers and vulnerabilities are—we are working from firm, solid ground when he attack every other part of the story.

Start with the villain.