Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 56

“Trenches #1,” Redux

[Not sure why, but my instinct tells me to re-run this post (the first in our “Reports from the Trenches” series) today, rather than posting a new one. Sometimes things need to be seen twice. I think this might be one of those times. So … here goes, in its entirety:]

I’m gonna take a break in this series on Villains and instead open up my skull and share what’s going on in my own work right now.

It ain’t pretty.

Joe and Willy, from two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Bill Mauldin

I’m offering this post in the hope that an account of my specific struggles at this moment will be helpful to other writers and artists who are dealing with the same mishegoss, i.e. craziness, or have in the past, or will in the future.

Here’s the story:

Eighteen months ago I had an idea for a new fiction piece. I did what I always do at such moments: I put it together in abbreviated (Foolscap) form—theme, concept, hero and villain, Act One/Act Two/Act Three, climax—and sent it to Shawn.

He loved it.

I plunged in.

Cut to fifteen months later. I sent the finished manuscript (Draft #10) to Shawn.

He hated it.

I’m overstating, but not by much.

Shawn sent me back a 15-page, single-spaced file titled “Edit letter to Steve.” That was April 28, about ten weeks ago.

Every writer who is reading this, I feel certain, has had this identical experience. Myself, I’ve been through it probably fifty times over the years, for novels, for screenplays, for everything.

Here was my emotional experience upon reading Shawn’s notes:

I went into shock.

It was a Kubler-Ross experience. Shawn’s notes started out positively. He told me the things he liked about the manuscript. I knew what was coming, though.

When I hit the “bad part,” my brain went into full vapor lock. It was like the scene in the pilot of Breaking Bad when the doctor tells Bryan Cranston he’s got inoperable lung cancer. The physician’s lips are moving but no sound is coming through.

Here’s the e-mail I sent back to Shawn:

Pard, I just read your notes and as usually happens, I’m kinda overwhelmed. As you suggest, I’ll have to re-read a bunch of times and chew this all over.

MAJOR, MAJOR THANKS for the effort and skill you put into that memo. Wow.

I’m gonna sit with this for a while.

Can you read between the lines of that note? That is major shell shock.

I put Shawn’s notes away and didn’t look at them for two weeks.

In some corner of my psyche I knew Shawn was right. I knew the manuscript was a trainwreck and I would have to rethink it from Square One and start again.

I couldn’t face that possibility.

The only response I could muster in the moment was to put Shawn’s notes aside and let my unconscious deal with them.

Meanwhile I put myself to work on other projects, including a bunch of Writing Wednesdays posts. But a part of me was thinking, How dare I write anything ‘instructional’ when, after fifty years of doing this stuff, I still can’t get it right myself?

There’s a name for that kind of thinking.

It’s called Resistance.

I knew it. I knew that this was a serious gut-check moment. I had screwed up. I had failed to do all the things I’d been preaching to others.

After two weeks I took Shawn’s notes out and sat down with them. I told myself, Read them through one time, looking only for stuff you can agree with.

I did.

If Shawn’s notes made eight points, I found I could accept two.

Okay.

That’s a start.

I wrote this to Shawn:

Pard, gimme another two weeks to convince myself that your ideas are really mine. Then I’ll get back to you and we can talk.

Three days later, I read Shawn’s notes again.

This time I found four things to agree with.

That was progress. For the first time I spied a glimmer of daylight.

Two days later I began thinking of one of Shawn’s ideas as if I had come up with it myself.

Yeah, it’s my idea. Let’s rock it!

(I knew of course that the idea was Shawn’s. But at last, forward motion was occurring. I had passed beyond the Denial Stage.)

I’ll continue this Report From the Trenches next week. I don’t want this post to run too long and get boring.

The two Big Takeaways from today:

First, how lucky any of us is if we have a friend or editor or fellow writer (or even a spouse) who has the talent and the guts to give us true, objective feedback.

I’d be absolutely lost without Shawn.

And second, what a thermonuclear dose of Resistance we experience when faced with the hard truth about something we’ve written that truly sucks.

Our response to this moment, I believe, is what separates the pros from the amateurs. An amateur at this juncture will fold. She’ll balk, she’ll become defensive, she’ll dig in her heels and refuse to alter her work. I can’t tell you how close I came to doing exactly that.

The pro somehow finds the strength to bite the bullet. The process is not photogenic. It’s a bloodbath.

For me, the struggle is far from over. I’ve got weeks and weeks to go before I’m out of the woods and, even then, I may have to repeat this regrouping yet again.

[NOTE TO READER: Shall I continue these “reports from the trenches?” I worry that this stuff is too personal, too specific. Is it boring? Write in, friends, and tell me to stop if this isn’t helpful.

I’ll listen.]

Hemingway Did Not Non-Summit

This post returns today with high hopes of deep sixing the non-summit. However, it knows it can’t go it alone. Please help. Instead of pushing procrastination, let’s make sure that the only thing non-summits are pushing is daisies.

A summit is the highest of the high. It is the top of a mountain. The apex. The peak. The zenith.

If it is a summit meeting, it is a meeting of individuals at the peak. Think Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin during WWII.

If you’ve been following this blog, you know my feelings about the trending use of the word summit to describe events, workshops, interviews, get-togethers, and a long list of other things that are not summits of either the mountain or meeting variety.

Another piece to add:

These non-summits are a form of procrastination.

When you’re at the base of an actual summit, don’t hold a meeting. Climb to the top instead.

One more piece:

These non-summits have the potential to steal your work’s soul—and your soul’s work.

Stick with me a bit here, for a short ramble.

In her Scientific American article “On writing, memory, and forgetting: Socrates and Hemingway take on Zeigarnik,” Maria Konnikova opened with the story of psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik.

In 1927, Gestalt psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed a funny thing: waiters in a Vienna restaurant could only remember orders that were in progress. As soon as the order was sent out and complete, they seemed to wipe it from memory.

Zeigarnik then did what any good psychologist would: she went back to the lab and designed a study. A group of adults and children was given anywhere between 18 and 22 tasks to perform (both physical ones, like making clay figures, and mental ones, like solving puzzles)—only, half of those tasks were interrupted so that they couldn’t be completed. At the end, the subjects remembered the interrupted tasks far better than the completed ones—over two times better, in fact.

Zeigarnik ascribed the finding to a state of tension, akin to a cliffhanger ending: your mind wants to know what comes next. It wants to finish. It wants to keep working – and it will keep working even if you tell it to stop. All through those other tasks, it will subconsciously be remembering the ones it never got to complete. Psychologist Arie Kruglanski calls this a Need for Closure, a desire of our minds to end states of uncertainty and resolve unfinished business.

I think this might be why the mornings are so magical for work. The mind just spent hours chewing over unfinished business. Yes, it brought up some family drama I wanted to avoid, but it did a ton of heavy lifting on unfinished work that is of importance. It made the connections between all the fragments clear, helped sew up the loose ends, fuse together the matching pieces. It made the struggle to understand—and view—the path ahead clearer. It’s why I try to wake before the kids and try to avoid talking, even of the e-mail chatter sort, in the early hours. There’s a magic there that’s gone by 9 AM, so I want to catch it within easy reach at 5 AM.

Maybe this is why counseling works, too. Once you talk it all through, you come closer to being able to let go, to find closure.

I just finished Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami and there’s a scene when one of the characters requests that a fellow traveler of the same world burn her manuscript. It isn’t for publication or reading. It is her life. She had to put it all down. Remember everything. Get it out. Once she added that final period, her body died and her soul—or whatever you want to call that “it” thing about her, that essence—moved to a different world.

Once she completed her story, she was able to move onto the next place.

But what if you talk through all of your work—all of your dreams—without actually doing them? You risk moving on, though that’s the last thing you really want.

Back to Konnikova’s article, this time with a quote from an interview Ernest Hemingway did with George Plimpton, for the Paris Review:

“… though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.”

Again, from Konnikova:

Hemingway’s words came from experience. When his wife lost a suitcase that contained all existing copies of his short stories, the work was, to his mind, gone for good. He had written himself out the first time around. He couldn’t recapture it—whatever it was—again. He even fictionalized the process in the short story, “The Strange Country”: the writer whose stories have been lost finds it impossible to remember. “It’s useless,” he tells his sympathetic landlady. “Writing [the stories] I had felt all the emotion I had to feel about those things and I had put it all in and all the knowledge of them that I could express and I had rewritten and rewritten until it was all in them and all gone out of me. Because I had worked on newspapers since I was very young, I could never remember anything once I had written it down; as each day you wiped your memory clear with writing as you might wipe a blackboard clear with a sponge or a wet rag.”

I have a friend who attended an event led by Tony Robbins recently. It wasn’t called a summit, but she left inspired. She didn’t talk through every bit of her life or her dreams. She listened and learned. I’m not opposed to these events, but the ones that continue to come into Steve are increasingly from individuals who are holding meetings at the base camp—who have talked about climbing to the summit for years, but have never given it a shot.

One more thing from Konnikova’s article is this quote from Justin Taylor:

“Don’t take notes. This is counterintuitive, but bear with me. You only get one shot at a first draft, and if you write yourself a note to look at later then that’s what your first draft was—a shorthand, cryptic, half-baked fragment.”

Non-summits shouldn’t be drafts, but that’s what they are—and for some, a draft is an idea closed. It isn’t refined. It isn’t as good as it can be, but it is closed—and not reopened.

One small rant:

If you are early in your career, you don’t warrant your own summit. You just don’t.

The 18 year old who wants to be a life coach needs to go experience life first. Do something. You have something important to say? Go walk the talk. Get out of the house and away from all the screens. Go LIVE and CREATE.

Age, of course, isn’t a determining factor, but one used in the above because I’ve run into more teenage life-coach wanna-be’s.

*With age, the exceptions are related to individuals such as Malala Yousafzai, an extraordinary woman, who became the youngest Nobel Prize laureate at age 17. I’ll listen to her with every ounce of myself because her life experiences, her daily walk, are more than just talk. She’s lived her beliefs. She fought/continues to fight when others have hidden.

The 18 year old who has read a ton of Nietzsche but is still living off his parents? Not so much.

Climb the mountain. Don’t stop at the base. Your words are your oxygen, and if you use them all, you risk running out of breath within view of your goal, but without what you need to attain it.

How Writers Screw Up, Part One

 

For part of my time in Hollywood, I worked with a partner. I called him “Stanley” in Nobody Wants To Read Your Sh*t so I’ll continue that protocol here.

Chris Cooper won the Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for his role in Charlie Kaufman’s “Adaptation”

Stanley was an established writer. He had been the force behind two big hits. I was the junior member of the team.

Stanley was also a major sci-fi enthusiast. He had read all the magazines, the short stories, the novels, the collections. One of the ways Stanley developed movie projects (he was a producer too) was to option a short story or novella by, say, Philip K. Dick and then adapt the piece as a screenplay.

 

Sci-fi short stories and novels [Stanley used to say] almost never work in the form in which we find them and acquire them. They’re part-stories. They’re half-stories.

 

This reality was a giant plus in Stanley’s eyes, because it meant he could option these pieces for peanuts, whip them into shape, and sell them as movies.

Stanley made me read a raft of these sci-fi works.

 

See how they all stop halfway through? The writer will have come up with a brilliant premise, like the idea of “replicants” and “blade runners” or the concept of erasing or implanting memories. But they almost never take the idea to a dramatic conclusion. They stop at Act One.

Or they’ll come up with fantastic heroes but without the right villains. There’s no theme. There’s no climax. There’s no third act.

 

Stanley didn’t fault these sci-fi writers. He was in awe of them just for their gift for coming up with such wild-and-crazy premises.

In Stanley’s view it was our job—the screenwriters who would adapt these novellas and short stories—to finish the work that the original writer had started.

Our job was to save her.

To make her stuff work

Have you seen Adaptation, written by the great screenwriter Charlie Kaufman? The movie is not science fiction but the problem its writing presents is exactly what we’re talking about here. The adapting screenwriter, “Charlie Kaufman,” accepts an assignment to write a script based on a Susan Orlean article in the New Yorker. The piece is about orchids.

In other words, there’s no readily apparent movie there.

The adapting writer, “Charlie Kaufman,” has to come up with a hero, a villain, an Act One, Act Two, Act Three.

If you haven’t seen the movie, Netflix it. It’s hysterical, with great performances by Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper.

But back to what we were talking about.

Why am I bringing this subject up?

What’s the point of exploring half-stories and part-stories?

Because that is exactly the problem you and I have when we write a novel and it crashes halfway through.

[Sorry, you guys. I promised last week I would stop writing these “Reports From The Trenches,” but I’ve had a few more ideas since then so I’m gonna keep going for another week or two.]

What I’m trying to say is that when you and I write a draft of a novel and the damn thing DOESN’T WORK, we find ourselves in the same position as Stanley after he options a Philip K. Dick short story or Charlie Kaufman when he signs a contract to adapt a magazine piece about flowers.

Nicolas Cage as Charlie Kaufman and Meryl Streep as Susan Orlean

We are stuck with a half-story.

The only difference is we did it ourselves.

We didn’t have to acquire the half-story from another writer; we banged the sucker out all by ourselves.

Again, why am I beating this nearly-extinct horse?

Because before you and I can chart our course for Tahiti, we have to know WHERE WE ARE EMBARKING FROM.

This challenge is, as I observed earlier in this series, “writing at the Ph.D. level” and “overcoming Resistance at the Ph.D. level.”

Our assignment, yours and mine as we stand over the smoldering wreckage of our half-story/half-novel, is to

Acquire objectivity about the material
Detach ourselves emotionally from our own prior work
Mentally regroup, so that we can summon our courage
Open our minds to every new and fresh story possibility
Start again from Square One.

Can we do it?

Will we fold?

Is the challenge too daunting?

Are we too attached to our original (half) story to let it go?

Lemme rephrase what I said about Ph.D.s.

This isn’t about a distinction between academic levels.

This is about the difference between being a professional and being an amateur.

We may have thought, you and I, when we started out in this business (I use that word deliberately, in contrast to “art”) that it was easy.

It ain’t.

Nonfiction Objects of Desire

We all know that fiction requires objects of desire for the protagonist and the antagonist. 

What about nonfiction? 

Are there objects of desire at play in a Big Idea nonfiction work? 

If so…what are they? 

And how can we clearly think about these wants and needs before we structure our work? 

Below is the next post in my continuing series about Big Idea nonfiction using Malcolm Gladwell’s masterwork The Tipping Point as my case study. Just to remind everyone, this is an edited version of something I wrote over at www.storygrid.com a while back.

We’re moving down our Foolscap Global Story Grid for The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and we’ve reached Objects of Desire.

Which reminds me of that great line from Bob Dylan in “Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again:”

Your Debutante knows what you need, but I know what you want.

Gladwell also knows what we need, but he’s wise to give us want we want first. Guess which object of desire hooks our interest and which one lies underneath?

Before I answer that, let’s take a step back and review exactly what these objects of desire are in a story and why they are so important. Here is a post dedicated entirely to objects of desire and their importance to global Storytelling.

Here’s the bottom line that I’ve cribbed from that earlier post:

A protagonist or multi-protagonists go on a mission at the beginning and by Story’s end, after overcoming or not overcoming forces of antagonism (inner, personal or extra-personal conflicts), he or they are irrevocably changed.

But don’t forget though that something must happen at the very beginning of the Story—an event that throws the lead character’s life out of balance—the inciting incident.

Either a good thing happens or a bad thing happens. The event can be a random coincidence [aliens attack] or a causal occurrence [your lead character’s wife leaves him]. A positive change or a negative change in the life of the character unsettles his world and requires that the character do something to get back to “normal.”

Let’s see if The Tipping Point abides this must have Storytelling structure. [Archplot and Miniplot necessities]

So first things first, a Story requires at least one protagonist. So who is/are the protagonist/s in The Tipping Point?

With his courageous use of point of view (shifting from third person omniscient to first person and then second person after establishing his inciting incidents in his introduction) Gladwell sets himself up as the protagonist of the story. And his direct address of the reader invites him/her to join him on his quest too.

So the protagonists of The Tipping Point are Gladwell and his readers.

What happens at the beginning of The Tipping Point that throws Gladwell and his readers’ lives out of balance? What is the inciting incident/s?

What happens is that Hush Puppies, a brand that had been all but dead in 1994 (30,000 sold), became wildly popular in 1995 (430,000 sold)…seemingly instantly. The shoes went from cheesy to cool overnight.

At virtually the same time, New York City Crime plummeted from 2,154 murders and 626,182 serious crimes in 1992 to 770 murders and 355,893 serious crimes in 1997.

Seriously? How did that happen? Somehow a dead product goes through the roof? And crime in what most people envision as the most dangerous city in the world nosedives? Are these things connected? How is that remotely possible?

So two POSITIVE changes in the world (a product becomes wildly popular and crime falls) throw the protagonists (Gladwell and his readers) out of whack. Why and how did these things happen?

So far so good. We have two inciting incidents that upset the lives of the protagonists of the Story. These events give rise to an object of desire in the protagonists…they want something.  They want to know why and how these events happened.

Can we delineate the conscious want of The Tipping Point more specifically?

Remember that to figure out the want, we need to look at the external genre at play. That will define the want. In a crime story, the want is identifying and bringing the criminal to justice. In an action adventure story, the want is the prize at the end of the journey.. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy wants to go home…the scarecrow wants a brain, the tin man wants a heart and the lion wants courage.  Those are their conscious wants.

And as you’ll recall, Gladwell describes his work as an intellectual adventure story, and like any journalist, he spells out exactly what the object of desire is for the reader and for himself. That old nonfiction saw “Tell them what you’re going to tell them… Tell them…and then Tell them what you told them” is all about concretely addressing the wants of the audience.

Gladwell lays it on the line in the last three sentences of the Introduction.

The point of all of this is to answer two simple questions that lie at the heart of what we would all like to accomplish as educators, parents, marketers, business people, and policymakers. Why is it that some ideas or behaviors or products start epidemics and others don’t? And what can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own?

So the want for Gladwell and the reader is to figure out how to “Tip” things ourselves…we want a “Tipping” formula. The magic fairy dust that will make our product “go viral” and make us rich. This mission, to find the formula, is the on the surface external driving force of the action adventure story in the book. It’s the want.

What about the need of the protagonists in The Tipping Point? Is there one of those?

Remember that the subconscious object of desire is what defines a need. And that the internal genre is the arena of the subconscious.

Scrolling up to the top of our Foolscap page, we’re reminded that the internal genre for The Tipping Point is Worldview Revelation. And that the value progression of Worldview Revelation moves from “Stupidity perceived as intelligence” in its most negative form to “Stupidity (incapable of understanding)” to “Ignorance (capable of understanding but not having enough information to do so)” to “Wisdom.”

Foolscap Story Grid for The Tipping Point

So while the protagonist/s of The Tipping Point set off on their external “on the surface” mission to find the magic Tipping Point formula, internally there is something else at play too. It’s a “beneath the surface” progression, a subconscious journey.

That pursuit is the search for universal/holistic truth. That’s what we really need.

I contend that Gladwell is well aware of both the desire of the reader (and himself) to get what they want out of the intellectual adventure story, the means “to deliberately start and control” tipping points.

But I also believe that Gladwell understands that it is more important for him to deliver what the reader (and himself) needs too.

The clue for me to his understanding is in the phrase he uses to follow the expression of the active wanting to “deliberately start and control.” That phrase is “positive epidemics.”  You’ll notice that he doesn’t specify the type of epidemic that tips in the sentence before…

The reason he does this is that Gladwell is planting the seed in this last sentence of his introduction that he’s going to pay off this book in a big way…

The Tipping Point isn’t just about how Hush Puppies became overnight bestsellers or of how behavioral shifts in New York practically dramatically reduced crime.

There is darkness ahead. What goes unsaid in the introduction is that if we are able to deliberately start and control positive epidemics, we’ll be just as capable of unleashing negative ones too.

This is the need of the book.  We need to know the dark side of The Tipping Point.

For didn’t The National Socialist German Worker’s Party tip? What about Social Darwinism? That tipped too, right? How about Segregation?

But telling us up front about the flip side of positive social epidemics when we’re so keen to learn the secret formula to getting rich would kill his book’s narrative drive. Gladwell understood that going to the negation of the negation of his story in the introduction would be a huge mistake. He has to hook us before he can change us.

Gladwell knows what we need, but he’s going to give us what we want first.  That is a master storytelling.  Hook ’em with a compelling inciting incident and surprise them later on with an inevitable truth.

So on our Foolscap page, let’s fill in the object of desire of The Tipping Point thusly:

Objects of Desire: Wants a Tipping Point Formula, Needs the global truth about the phenomenon.

Last Report from the Trenches

 

My sense is that maybe it’s time to dial down our “Reports from the Trenches.”

“You picked your feet in Poughkeepsie!”

The big takeaway of the series actually came in the first week:

 

Even long-time successful writers crash and burn. It happens to me just like it happens to everybody.

 

I hope the follow-up posts have been helpful. But my sense is that we may have reached the point of diminishing returns. The last thing I want to do is bore anybody.

So …

Lemme try to wrap up today with a quick “lessons learned” post.

Aside from the acknowledgment that EVERY WRITER screws up and EVERY ARTIST sometimes has to go back to Square One, I reprise here three tricks of the trade from previous posts in this series.

The object of all three is to GET AT THE STORY, when the story is hiding from us and remains half-buried like a dinosaur fossil.

I’ve been using all three techniques myself throughout the process I’ve been reporting on from the trenches. They all work. They all help.

Go back to conventions of the genre.

If we’re writing The French Connection and the story is stuck, there’s no shame in pulling out “Conventions of the Police Procedural” (ah, if only there were such a book!) and following this precept:

 

 You must have at least one foot chase.

 

Bingo! How about having Popeye Doyle and his partner Cloudy chase a dope dealer through New York’s mean streets—and for a giggle have Popeye (Gene Hackman) wearing a Santa Claus suit? The cops run down the dude in a vacant lot and pin him against a wall.

 

POPEYE

Still picking your feet in Poughkeepsie?

 

DEALER

(scared)

What?

 

POPEYE

Don’t lie to me! You were in Poughkeepsie, you sat down

on the edge of the bed. You took off your shoes and you

picked your feet!

 

DEALER

Whatever you say, man!

 

I know, I know. It’s formula. But it helps. It gives us a great scene. It displays Popeye’s wild and crazy charisma. And when the dealer reveals in the climactic beat that a new shipment of heroin is coming into the city soon, this new scene advances the story.

Go back to Timeless Storytelling Principles.

Zero in on our stalled story. Ask the questions Aristotle (or Shawn) would ask:

What is the theme? Does the hero embody it?

Does the villain embody the counter-theme?

Does every character represent something greater than him or herself?

Do all supporting characters embody aspects of the theme?

Do hero and villain clash in the climax over the issue of the theme?

Faye Dunaway as Evelyn Mulwray in “Chinatown”

Yeah, yeah … this stuff is elementary, I know. But out of this exercise can come

 

EVELYN MULWRAY

She’s my sister! She’s my daughter!

 

(The theme: unspeakable evil lies just beneath the placid surface of society, invisible to us all until it is exposed.)

And this:

 

WALSH

Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

 

Give every key character scenes with every other key character.

Ah! The scene we’ve been waiting for!

You won’t keep them all. But explore the possibilities. Speck out a scene (or more) between Tyrion and Cersei, between Sansa Stark and Cersei, between Daenerys and Jon Snow. How about one between the Night King and a dragon? (If one of the characters is dead, don’t let that stop you. Use his or her ghost. Have the character appear in a flashback. Or have the scene happen in a dream.)

To recap:

The three techniques above are some I’ve been using myself during this “Reports from the Trenches” period to bust up the story logjam in my brain.

If one of them produces even one good scene, the technique is a winner. Because that scene may lead to another, or something a character says or does may shed light on their dilemma and open up new scenes and sequences to come.

One last thought before putting this series to bed:

 

Any and all of these techniques can be used when we’re STARTING a story or just working it out in our heads. We don’t have to wait till the tale implodes before using them.

 

Good luck to all of us!

 

 

The Definition of Crazy

It’s back to school time, which means I’m back to yelling at my wall because I don’t like yelling at people.

Every August, as freshman start moving into dormitories, the last minute phone calls and e-mails from campus bookstores start flying into Black Irish Books.

Them: Do you have The War of Art available?

Us: Yes.

Them: What is the discount?

Us: Fifty-five percent off orders of ten copies or more.

Them: A professor wants six books for her class.

Us: It’s cheaper to buy ten books.

Them: She only needs six.

Us: I know, but you’d save money if you bought ten.

Them: I’m only authorized to buy what the professor orders.

Us: Six books it is.

I know I need to drop it. Their poor business practices shouldn’t bother me, but . . . Drives me up the wall.

Whenever I read about the rising costs of college tuition and the costs associated with running these centers for higher education, I want to scream.

The books that go along with the tuition would be less if the schools inspired better decision making. AND—this is a BIG AND—in addition to ensuring lower costs for students, the schools would ensure profits for themselves.

Here’s a breakdown of the costs related to purchasing one to ten copies of The War of Art. Note that the 55% bulk rate hits at the ten-book mark, which means it is cheaper to buy ten books than it is to buy five-to-nine books.

1 = $12.95

2 = $25.90

3 = $38.85

4 = $51.80

5 = $64.75

6 = $77.70

7 = $90.65

8 = $103.60

9 = $116.55

10 = $58.30

We don’t pay for shipping either, so the school stores have no way to run on the positive, unless they sell the book above the cover price—an act that would turn students running for alternate shopping locations.

I contacted the corporate office of one of the stores in the past, to let them know that they could save money. I was thanked for the information—and then the next semester rolled around and more of the same occurred.

It’s like being in the movie Ground Hog Day, except I’ve failed in the role of Phil. Each time he faced Crazy he tried a different strategy, until he finally hit upon something that worked. Every semester I’ve faced Crazy, Crazy shows up just as he did the semester before.

Stay tuned for next semester, when I complain about the professors who e-mail requests for free desk copies because their departments don’t have a budget for buying desk copies.

Rant over.

Every Story Has a Shape

 

 

I’ve always been a believer that our stories exist before we write them. Our job as writers, once we stumble upon these tales, is to bring them up into the sunlight in such a way that their best and most truly intended contour is revealed.

Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen and James Caan as Sonny in “The Godfather”

What has screwed me up on my current project—the subject of this “Report from the Trenches” series—is that I excavated the story wrong the first time around. If we think of the tale as a giant dinosaur fossil, I inadvertently chopped off the legs and dug so deep under the skull that the whole damn thing collapsed.

The process of readjudicating a story that we’ve written once and that has crashed and burned is kinda like digging up that dinosaur all over again, only revealing the true beast this time.

I said last week that, though I’d been through this process over and over on previous books, I’ve never really watched myself as I did it. I’ve never taken notes on what the hell I’ve done, or if it worked or not.

But I noticed a couple of things last week.

You could call them “tricks of the trade.” (I prefer the term “storytelling techniques.”)

Here’s one that really helped:

 

Give Character “A” scenes with “B,” “C,” “D,” and “E.” And so on.

 

If we’ve got a character named Michael, make sure he has scenes with the Don, with Sonny, with Clemenza, with Kay, with Fredo, and with Tom Hagen.

Likewise take Tom Hagen and put him in scenes with the Don, with Sonny, with Kay, and with Michael.

Why?

Because each scene acts like a laser beam scanning that as-yet-unearthed dinosaur.

Each scene reveals a new slice of the buried whole.

When we spitball a scene between Michael and Luca Brasi, even if that scene never makes it into the finished book or movie, it lights up an area that had previously been in shadow.

To write or even just to project this scene, we have to ask ourselves, “What would Michael talk about with Luca? What would Michael want? What would Luca want? What if Luca revealed something about the Don from their younger days, something that Michael did not know? Would that change the story? Could Luca betray Michael? Would Michael sell Luca out to another of the Five Families? Why? To gain what? What further scenes and sequences would this lead us to?”

See what I mean about “lighting up” the buried dinosaur?

I watched myself over the past few weeks’ work and I realize that I’ve been doing this unconsciously. I’m using this technique not just with one-on-one scenes but with scenes containing three, four, and five characters.

I’m mixing-and-matching and watching what happens.

And I’m projecting other scenes that this new scene might lead to.

I have two female characters in the story I’m struggling with. One is a detective, Dewey, the junior partner in the team with the protagonist, Manning. The other is the Mystery Woman, Rachel, whom both detectives believe holds the major clues they’re after.

I realized that I had no scenes with these two women together.

Wow. That’s no good.

“Steve, you gotta get these two females in the same room and see what happens.”

What came out was a scene where Rachel had been badly injured in a car chase and had to be taken to the hospital. I sent Dewey with her, to hold her in custody and to watch over her.

The scene opened up a whole sheaf of possibilities. It gave me a chance to see one character in a completely vulnerable position and to have the other, who up to that point had been hostile and antagonistic, find herself in the role of protector.

Sure enough, the two woman bonded—and that plugged in beautifully to the Act Three and Climax that already existed.

The other thing we gain when we mix-and-match characters and give them scenes together is that we tighten the universe of the story. If Tom Hagen has a way he relates to the Don and the Don has a way he relates to Sonny, then when we have a clash in a scene between Sonny and Tom …

 

SONNY

Goddamit, if I had a wartime consigliere, a Sicilian,

I wouldn’t be in this mess!

 

… the exchange is given added weight and dimension because of the other scenes that set it up and now illuminate it.

If Ophelia has had a scene with her father Polonius and her brother Laertes, both on the subject of her infatuation with the melancholy prince Hamlet (and his with her), those scenes add layers of interest when we put Hamlet and Ophelia in the same room and let them struggle to puzzle out their relationship. And when Laertes kills Hamlet in the climax because he believes his friend was the cause of the deaths of his father and sister (as we’ve witnessed in other scenes between and among them), the whole tragedy becomes a tightly-wound hand grenade, exploding with meaning.

 

 

 

Nonfiction Points of View

In my last post, I reviewed controlling idea/theme as it applies to the Big Idea book.  Now let’s take a look at how to best present the Big Idea to the reader. The following is an edited adaptation of a previous post I wrote over at www.storygrid.com.

Just as in fiction, the choices the nonfiction writer makes about Point of View in Big Idea Nonfiction are make or break decisions.

What is the best way for the writer to address the reader for his particular thesis?

 How will the choice of POV effect the conventional requirement of establishing a consistent and trustworthy Ethos throughout the work?

The way Malcolm Gladwell chose to answer these questions in The Tipping Point is a major factor in the success of the book.

And the brilliant way he introduces each point of view choice very early on in the telling sucks the reader right into his Story.

Remember my post about the need to have the three forms of argument (Ethos/Logos/Pathos) made in a Big Idea book? Well the Ethos part takes form in the writer’s choices of Point of View.

So what POVs does Gladwell actually use in The Tipping Point?

1. He uses Third Person Omniscient, the Authorial Journalist Point of View. Or simply the “reporter’s” POV.

For example, from the very beginning of the book, the introduction, here are the first two sentences:

For Hush Puppies — the classic American brushed-suede shoes with the lightweight crepe sole — the Tipping Point came somewhere between late 1994 and early 1995. The brand had been all but dead until that point.

The above represents journalism’s standard form—simple declarative statements. The point of view is that of the professional, the seasoned reporter. The subtext is that the reporter has done the work necessary to confidently state the “facts” and has the notebooks from interviews and research to back them up.

We read these sorts of sentences all of the time and we subconsciously recognize them as the voice of the professional.

2. He uses the First Person Plural, “We.”

Here is the first sentence from the third scene of The Tipping Point:

A world that follows the rules of epidemics is a very different place from the world we [emphasis mine] think we [emphasis mine] live in now.

Using the first person plural takes real courage because it cedes the usual virtual lectern that journalists step onto when they report their “objective” findings.

Just 1,059 words into his book, in the above sentence, Gladwell tells the reader that what he’s going to share with us is as difficult to comprehend for him as it will be for us. He’s telling us that he walks the same ground that we do.

We’re used to reading nonfiction as proclamations of “truth” and/or “fact” and subconsciously we place the author on a pedestal. And we’re comfortable learning from the writer in that formal manner. It’ similar to the way we’ve been taught since we had to not fidget while penned into a wee desk as children while passively absorbing lessons from our teachers.

We’re accustomed to reading books written by braniacs who have gone into the darkness and have returned with universal truths, which they then bestow upon us, the not so smart unenlightened.

Gladwell could easily have restructured that sentence to abide that standard nonfiction professorial convention. He could have put on the cloak of the genius and written:

A world that follows the rules of epidemics is a very different place from the world as it is lived in today.

But he didn’t. He broke convention and innovated the form. He chose to be one of us, one who struggles understanding why things happen seemingly so suddenly as we do.

3. He uses the First Person Omniscient, “I.”

The use of first person allows the journalist to make himself a character in the reporting. It’s New Journalism 101.

Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved (published June 1970 in Scanlon’s Monthly Vol. 1, No. 4) is a wonderful example of the writer stepping in front of the report to give you the context of what it took to gather the pieces of the story. You know the writer has a payoff in mind as you follow the narrative, but you’re not quite sure where he’s going to take you.

For example on page 13 of The Tipping Point, Gladwell writes:

I remember once as a child seeing our family’s puppy encounter snow for the first time.

Compare this to the first sentence of Thompson’s article:

I got off the plane around midnight and no one spoke as I crossed the dark runway to the terminal.

Both of these first person statements imply that the narrator is setting up a story…one that contains valuable information. The author knows something you don’t. He’s omniscient. And it is the implication that he’s got a payoff in the offing. That promise keeps you reading.

4. He uses the Second Person Singular, “You.”

Like using the first person plural, speaking directly to the reader is another risk. Especially for a journalist. It’s something we were told never to do when we learned how to write the objective “essay” form in High School. The reason being that the writer’s use of “You” can easily come off heavy handed and didactic or worse still, glib and smarmy.

But when it works…

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” – John F. Kennedy 

 When they kick out your front door

How you gonna come?

With your hands on your head

Or on the trigger of your gun

–The Clash

Gladwell wisely introduces his use of the second person singular in the third scene, just as he does with first person plural and first person omniscient.

He gives the reader what they expect in his first two scenes (the first 1059 words) to establish the fact that he is a seasoned journalist capable of playing it straight…but then he jumps down from the lectern, pulls out a chair, sits down next to us and starts to talk. Like he’s one of us.

This on page 10:

I [first person omniscient] made some of you [second person singular] reading this yawn simply by writing the word “yawn.”

We’re not even out of the introduction to The Tipping Point and Gladwell has us in the palm of his hand. This is not an accident. It’s an expert use of POV.

Gladwell’s point of view choices required careful planning. Just as his choices to tell an Action Adventure Story while hammering home the data and case studies necessary to support his Worldview Revelation genre/Big Idea Nonfiction do.  Make no mistake.  The structure and form of The Tipping Point was so thoroughly conceived that it seems invisible.

When we track The Tipping Point’s scene-by-scene construction in The Story Grid Spreadsheet, we’ll be able to see exactly where he used each of these four POVs.  More importantly we’ll see how using one or more serves the Story and Gladwell’s thesis.  It’s these little things that Gladwell does that make a huge difference.

Report from the Trenches #7

 

I said in last week’s post that, watching myself wrestle with this rewrite, I realize I’m attacking the problem on three levels. Level One (which we talked about last week) was about genre—making sure I knew what genre I was working in, and then re-hammering the narrative so that it lined up with the conventions and obligatory scenes of that genre.

The second level of this work, what we’re gonna talk about today, is going back in the global sense to Basic Storytelling Principles.

Sylvester Stallone and Butkus from the first “Rocky”

Specifically:

A story must be about something. It must have a theme.
The hero embodies the theme.
The villain embodies the counter-theme.
Every supporting character embodies an aspect of the theme.
In the climax, hero and villain clash over the issue of the theme.

I have 57 files in the greater folder for this project and 22 for the re-work. Some of the titles of these files are Tuff Middle, Rachel Hunts Instancer, Second Act Belongs to Villain.

If I were working with a partner, the pair of us would talk this stuff out aloud. “What does the Villain want?” But because I’m working alone, I use these files as a way of talking to myself. I just sit down and start spewing.

 

I have no idea where this section goes, or if we have room for it at all, but the question is, “What has Rachel been doing since Instancer dumped her? Has she hunted him, and if so how, since when, and what happened?”

LETS SAY she first suffered with no proof (only a crazy suspicion) that Instancer was supernatural. Still she thought she might be losing her mind, as any woman might after the “ghosted” end of a passionate affair. Then came the “herem.” Excommunication. Family abandoned Rachel, jobs dried up. Etc.

 

At this stage I’m not thinking in scenes or dialog.

My thinking is architectural.

If we were building a suspension bridge, we’d first establish the footings and the anchoring points on each shore. Then we’d calculate where the towers should go and how much stress the steel could take, etc. In other words, design.

We’ll worry about actually building the bridge later.

That’s what I’m trying to do with the story at this stage.

The tension that drives the narrative will be the clash between the hero and the villain, just like in a bridge it will be the weight of the roadway versus the strength of the supporting towers and the suspension cables.

So I’m pounding away at another talking-to-myself file, “Manning (hero) versus Instancer (villain)”, asking myself how are these two characters different, how are they alike, what does Manning want, what does Instancer want? Are they mirrors for each other? How? What does that prove? Are they dependent on each other? How? What does that prove?

I don’t know any of the answers going in. I’m free-associating.

 

If we think of Alien or Predator or Jaws, the heroes spend a big part of the movie trying to figure out how to stop the unstoppable, kill the unkillable. Our story demands the same.

What would Manning think along these lines?

Instancer is physical, at least in this world. He can’t be shot but he can be grappled with. He’s very strong but not superhumanly strong. He can’t lift buildings.
If he can be ‘conducted’ into this world, can he be conducted out?” That’s the key. We have to figure this out. Etc.

 

What I want to have at the end of this exercise is a schematic of the story, one that hangs together dramatically and architecturally like the Golden Gate Bridge or the screenplay for Rocky.

I want a hero whose problems, aspirations, wants and needs are as clearly defined and as emotionally involving as those of Rocky Balboa.

I want an antagonist like Apollo Creed, whose emotional surface reflects Rocky’s and works beautifully against it, yin versus yang.

I want supporting characters like Adrian and Mick and Pauly, each of whom represents an aspect of the theme.

And I want a crystal-clear, powerful theme

 

            A bum can be a champ if he’s just given the chance

 

that plays in every scene of the story and is paid off in the climax, not just for the protagonist but for the supporting characters as well. And of course for the reader.

I don’t need scenes at this point.

I don’t need dialogue.

I don’t need sequences.

Level Two is about structure.

It’s about architecture.

By the way, this process that I’m going through now after the collapse of Draft #11 is the process I SHOULD HAVE been doing from Draft #1.

I was lazy.

I was scared.

I didn’t push myself far enough.

That’s why #11 crashed.

That’s what I’m back to Square One, reverting to basics.

That’s okay.

It happens to everybody.

So to recap …

Last week we talked about the first level (for me, at least) of a Ground Up Rewrite.

That level was about genre.

It involved identifying the genre we’re working in (again, a task we SHOULD HAVE done in Draft #1 and even earlier) and defining for ourselves the conventions and obligatory scenes of that genre … then reworking our story to align with those principles.

Level Two, what we’re talking about today, is about doing the same thing, not for Genre, but for Universal Storytelling Principles.

We go back to basics.

We remind ourselves of the timeless principles (and believe me, Homer and Shakespeare had to do this shit too) that balladeers and rhapsodes and puppeteers, not to mention Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino,  have been using forever.

And we go back to those basics ourselves.

Next week, the fun part: Actually WRITING the freakin’ thing.

 

 

Counting

[Have you ever written something that included numbers and then wondered how those numbers played out? This is one of those for me. This post hit March 25, 2011. Apple is now minus Scott Forstall. Scott Forstall is now plus several Tony Awards. On Twitter, Scott Forstall is plus 8 tweets and still following Conan O’Brien. When this article hit, Conan O’Brien was minus “The Tonight Show” and about six months into being plus “Conan.” He’s now plus the title once held by David Letterman, of being the “the longest tenured late-night host on television.” And he did it in less than 3,500 tweets. Must be the content.]

When I was twelve, counting my age in silverware got me to the end of my unloading the dishwasher chore: five forks, five knives, two serving spoons and a butter knife to grow on.

When I was in college, just over a thousand steps, counting every other time my right foot hit the ground, got me from my dorm near the corner of Mass Ave. and Beacon St., to classes closer to Beacon and Berkley.

When I run, 450 steps, counting every fifth time one of my feet hits the ground, gets me to the one mile mark.

These days, counting followers, friends, likes, and visitors is getting me nowhere.

I keep hearing people say they need to increase the numbers. The numbers are being used to gauge worth.

Did you know that Charlie Sheen set a Guinness World Record for “Fastest Time to Reach 1 Million Followers” on Twitter? How many of his followers are there for the long-term? And how many are hoping to catch a train wreck?

As I write this, 37,808 people are in line for Scott Forstall’s first tweet. Ad Age‘s article “Your Followers Are No Measure of Your Influence” turned me onto Forstall’s stats: thousands of followers, listed almost 2,000 times, is following one person (Conan O’Brien) and has (drumroll please) ZERO tweets. So people follow him for what he might say on Twitter, based on what he has said/done elsewhere.

More words of wisdom from Ad Age: Your brand’s fans and followers may not only be disengaged, they may be comatose—or literally dead. A little freaky—your followers might be six feet under. . . .

Olivier Blanchard did a three-part series on Digital Influence Recalibrated, which is where I found the link to Thomas Moradpour’s post, asking:

So is there another way to measure Influence?

We can think of many other ways… such as measuring the “personal bonds” between members of a family, team or group of friends, which explains why close ones will always bear more influence than stars and celebrities of any kind… or measuring the “passion” that some individuals may have for an idea, activity or cause – something others will feel and respond to… or the “thought leadership” of those who project authoritative points of views and can ignite ideas or debates with others.

When I was a kid, friendship pins were popular. Most girls in my third grade class had five-to-ten bead-decorated safety pins dangling from her shoelaces. Then there was Stacy, who had a gazillion. Everyone liked her, but everyone wondered how she ended up with so many.

Back then, we whispered a bit, but we all brushed off the numbers thing, and ignored how many she had because we were her friends and that’s what friends do. It’s kind of like what Thomas Moradpour was saying, about personal bonds being important.

But now, when I see all these numbers and I have no personal bond, all the people and the brands look like Stacy’s shoeful of fake friendship pins and those TV gameshow doors, which keep you guessing about the value behind them. The doors look the same, but is there a new car or a pile of crap on the other side?

When I first joined Twitter I focused on getting my numbers up. And then I stopped, realizing that I was doing what Stacy did—upping my numbers to create worth. And in the process, I was creating useless noise. It’s like being in a crowded nightclub, where everyone talks just to talk, because the quiet is too uncomfortable. What if the focus was on content and not numbers? I’m thinking Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman are right: Content Rules! (thank you David Reich for the head’s up on this one).

Am trying to count passion and creativity instead of numbers these days. Counting has moved my life along, as long as the focus is on more than the numbers. Ready to get back there.