Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 57

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.

Report from the Trenches #6

 

First lemme say thanks to everyone who is following this series. Believe me, writing these posts is helping me as much or more than it’s helping you.

Robert Mitchum (100 years old on August 8) in “Farewell, My Lovely”

This new book is my nineteenth, I think. I’ve gone through this same hellish, tear-it-down-and-start-all-over-again process on almost every prior book, but I’ve never really paid attention to what I was doing. I just put my head down and ground it out.

Having to write these posts has made me play witness to my own process. It helps. I never really knew what I was doing.

Okay. Where do we stand today? Let’s regroup from the beginning.

I got Shawn’s original notes on April 28.

Three days ago I finished a scene-by-scene outline for the next draft (#12).

That’s progress.

That’s real progress.

But that’s how long it has taken me, out of the ashes of Draft #11, to whip together a bare-bones, ballpark blueprint for Number Twelve.

Looking ahead, I’ll guess three or four more months to make this into a finished draft.

I post this intel for my fellow trench-mates who are now going through a similar process or will be in the future. For comparison. This is how long it’s taken me, working full-time seven days a week.

But lemme back up a minute, playing witness, and ask myself, “Steve, what EXACTLY have you been doing in these three and a half months? What’s the actual process?”

If you put a gun to my head, I would say that the work has been in three stages, or three levels. (There’s too much detail to cover in one post … I’ll continue this over the next two or three.)

The first level I’ll call

 

GETTING BACK TO BASICS ON GENRE

 

Boiling it down to its essence, this stage of work (or re-work) has been about

Identifying the genre I was working in (thank you, Shawn, for making it clear in your notes that I didn’t know that.)
Re-educating myself on the conventions and obligatory scenes of that genre (thanks again, pard), and
Rethinking the entire book to make it align with these conventions and obligatory scenes.

Okay.

What specifically? What do I mean by genres and by conventions?

Shawn identified the genre I was working in as Supernatural Thriller. (This is what editors do.) In other words, something in the zip code of The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby.

The story was also a Police Procedural.

Something like Se7en.

Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman in “Se7en”

And it’s a redemption story, like Unforgiven or Casablanca.

So … a mix of three genres but basically a Redemptive Supernatural Thriller.

I didn’t know that when I was writing Draft #11.

No clue.

All right. Knowing it now, thanks to Shawn, what specifically did I do?

 

The trick of this sort of story [Shawn wrote in his notes] is to ride out the uncertainty about the true nature of the evil until “all Hell breaks loose.” Remember that in The Exorcist the girl was taken to all kinds of doctors and had all kinds of tests and all possible explanations were eliminated before they brought in Max von Sydow as the last resort to save her. Then and only then does the devil make himself truly known … when the Exorcist arrives with Father Karras as his assistant.

 

That’s a convention of the Supernatural Horror Thriller genre.

Further from Shawn’s notes:

 

The reader and the viewer of both of those stories needed evidence, a progressive narrative build to the revelation that the devil/supernatural is real and on stage.

They needed to be convinced that such a being would come to earth and/or visit earth. The devil/supernatural form needed a vehicle to get here. The little girl in The Exorcist and the woman in Rosemary’s Baby are the vehicles … notice that the devil comes through the female.

I think your character Rachel could come in handy as the force that HaSatan [the Devil] uses to come to life…

 

Ain’t it great to have help like this?

Bottom line: I took both of Shawn’s points (which I had been blind to before) and asked myself, “How can I accomplish these two genre objectives? One, delay the revelation that the villain is supernatural? And two, use the female element, possibly the character of Rachel, to ‘conduct’ this supernatural being into the material world in the first place?”

These weren’t the only two elements that needed attention in order to bring the story into alignment with the conventions of the Supernatural Thriller genre. But they illustrate the issue.

So … in the broadest global sense (remember, this is Level One of reworking the story; I’ll get into Levels Two and Three in the next couple of weeks), I began by trying to solve those two issues in story terms.

Again, how specifically?

I reworked in index-card form the first half of the story to hold off the revelation of “Holy shit, the villain is the devil.” In Draft #11, the reader knew right away. (Of course she’ll know right away anyway, as in The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby, just from the jacket of the book and other meta-cues, but the characters in the story won’t know, at least not for certain.)

This meant cutting five chapters out of fourteen and inserting four new ones. I made the detectives work harder. I made them dig up clues without any help. This radically re-energized them as individuals—and made them more interesting as well.

The great thing about adhering to conventions in any genre is the freakin’ process works.

Conventions work.

The gunfight at the end of the Western works.

The lovers parting and then coming together in a Love Story works.

Making detectives follow clues works.

So that was Step One in aligning the story with the genres I was working in.

Step Two, per Shawn’s notes, was having a female character ‘conduct’ the Evil One into physical form.

Again, this is a convention I wasn’t even aware of until Shawn pointed it out to me.

At first I thought, “That is a TERRIBLE idea. And there’s no way I can do it.”

But of course Shawn was right.

After a week or so of thrashing, a potential scenario came to me. I’m not gonna spell it out here (it’ll take too long) but suffice it to say, the idea went off like a firecracker. It gave me three or four new scenes, totally overhauled the character of Rachel (in a good way), and gave me a modified climax that was twice as dramatic and five times as satisfying as the previous one.

Of course I haven’t written any of this stuff yet.

It’s all in outline/index card form right now.

But it should work.

I think it will, anyway.

In my early career as a screenwriter, I worked with a partner. When we’d start a new project, the first thing we’d do was watch a boatload of movies that were similar to the one we were working on. We didn’t call it this, but we were studying the genre and the conventions of that genre.

One of the scripts we wrote was a film-noir detective flick for Dino DeLaurentiis. When we noticed that the private eye always gets beaten up in these movies (Chinatown, Farewell My Lovely, The Long Goodbye), we stole shamelessly.

Obligatory scenes work.

Genre conventions work.

So … that in general is Level One of my self-observed process for taking a crashed-and-burned project and trying to set it back up onto its feet.

 

Identify the genre you’re working in and bring your story into line with the conventions and obligatory scenes of that genre.

 

At least that, it seems, is my process.

We’ll talk about the next two levels in the coming weeks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What’s the Big Idea?

I’m working with two writers right now on Big Idea projects.

It’s easy to lose your focus putting these kinds of projects together. Even as the developmental editor supporting the writer.

Because you must nail Ethos, Logos, and Pathos…you begin to obsess about credentials, research, prescriptive advice, complimentary storytelling…you can easily lose the thread of why you’re working on the thing to begin with.

Here’s the secret to the Big Idea book. It’s simple but easy to forget. I do all the time.

You’ve got to nail the Big Idea in the most straightforward, easiest to understand and exciting way possible.

Once you do that, all of the other stuff (the research, the stories, the central passion of why you feel driven to write the thing in the first place) will fall into place.  In fact, you’ll laugh about how easy it is once you nail the idea.

What I mean is that you have to boil down your controlling idea/theme into its purest essence. Like making the darkest, richest maple syrup, you keep applying heat until its pure Grade B (which is the really good stuff…Grade A is a marketing effort to get people to buy the lesser syrup).

So how do you do that?

(What follows is an edited version of a post I wrote a few years back about Malcolm Gladwell’s seminal Big Idea Book, The Tipping Point.)

So what the hell is a controlling idea/theme?

To refresh your memory, I wrote a long piece about controlling ideas/theme for The Story Grid. You can read it here.

For our purposes now, though, here’s the three-part requirement for a controlling idea/theme.

A controlling idea/theme must be boiled down to the fewest possible words and cannot be longer than a one-sentence statement.
A controlling idea/theme must describe the climactic value charge of the entire Story, either positively or negatively.
And it must be as specific as possible about the cause of the change in the value charge.

Before I get into the nitty-gritty of the controlling idea in The Tipping Point, it’s important to note the differences between controlling ideas/theme in fiction and controlling ideas/theme in nonfiction.

In fiction, controlling ideas are beneath the surface.

The writer never explicitly states them. Instead the reader intuits the message from the actions and results of those actions in the Story.

Well, some fiction writers do seem to explicitly state controlling ideas/theme in their novels, but these statements are rarely accurate. I’m thinking of that irresistible Eric Segal novel and the later wildly popular movie adaptation Love Story. The novel’s famous line “Love means not ever having to say you’re sorry,” and the movie version’s “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” seems like the controlling idea/theme of the story…right?

It isn’t.

The controlling idea/theme of Love Story, like a lot of multimillion-copy selling love Stories, is: Love conquers all…but death. 

Let’s test it with my 1-2-3 method:

Is the statement Love conquers all…but death as succinct as possible?

Yes. Five words!

Does the statement Love conquers all…but death describe the climactic value charge of the entire story, either positively or negatively?

Yes. Death defeats love at the end of Eric Segal’s Love Story. It ends negatively. As all love stories do.  Someone dies first unless you drive off a cliff together (Thelma and Louise).  Can’t be avoided.

Of course Oliver still loves Jenny at the end of the book/movie of Love Story, but he can’t actively love her. Nor can she actively love him. While we just don’t know what happens to us when we die, we do know that our bodies no longer work. Spoiler alert. She dies at the end.

A quick sidebar here. In Story (and I believe it’s true too in Life) Love is an action that requires the live beings to be “present.” I don’t mean just being present for the sex act. But like when you pick up your wife’s socks off the floor, take them downstairs to the laundry room…wash/dry them…and then put them in her sock drawer all fresh and clean. Or scrape the windshield of her car after the previous evening’s snowfall and make sure the engine is running well and that the gas tank is never below 1/2.

Those are acts of Love.

You do them because you actually enjoy cleaning her socks. Because you love her and desire to make her life a small bit easier. She doesn’t thank you every time. And you don’t give her crazy thanks for the boots of yours she bought out of her “rainy day” fund to replace your holey ones with the double-knotted laces.  That would be weird. Those are just everyday acts of love that you do for her and she does for you that you both come to rely on. She can count on you and you can count on her.

I’m just saying that the trappings of what we’re told Love is (candlelight and hot tubs and “love meaning never having to say your sorry”) and literal expressions of real love (getting up at 6:00 a.m. to pack your husband’s lunch for the day so he doesn’t have to leave work to grab a sandwich, which means he’ll be home a half hour earlier to catch the last inning of his daughter’s baseball game and see her strike out the side or strike out herself and lose the game) are what bind us when the shit really hits the fan.

Because when things go south, and they do every once in a while, few remember that precious moment in Bali when the moon perfectly illuminated the swell of our beloved’s hip.

No, we remember whether or not our partner helped us plant a vegetable garden to cut down on our monthly expenses. And actually made it fun. Out of that desperate necessity, she brought joy and communion. That’s love.

Is the statement Love conquers all…but death as specific as possible about the cause of the change in the value charge?

Yes. Death trumps love, so death is the cause of change. Death sucks.

Don’t be alarmed when fiction controlling idea/themes reveal themselves as cliché. Things become cliché when they are familiar. And it’s important that they are familiar.

We need to be reminded about what’s important.  That’s what stories do.  Justice is important.  Love is important.  Self-sacrifice in the service of others is important.  Surviving is important. The Crime, Love, Redemption, and Action genres respectively are all about reminding us of shared values.

There is no need to flagellate yourself because you are exploring a reiteration of a desperately needed statement of truth.

But come on, right?

How more cliché can you get than Love conquers all…but death?

But when the Story delivers, it’s still packs a solar plexus wallop…Midnight Cowboy? Cold Mountain? Titanic? Terms of Endearment?

You gotta love at least one of those and if not all of those.  If not, I’m sure you’ll find something in your mind’s vault that turned on this same controlling idea/theme that you define as a masterpiece.

Thriller fiction is another genre that can make a lot out of a fundamental controlling idea/theme that on first inspection seems rather pat.  Here’s an oldie but goodie:

Justice prevails when an everyman victim is more clever than the criminals.

The Firm? North by Northwest? The Fugitive? These are absolutely great stories…even though the controlling idea/theme for all three isn’t earth shaking.

But what of the controlling idea/theme in Big Idea Nonfiction?

How is it different than the undercurrent takeaways in fiction?

Here’s what’s different. Not only must Big Idea Nonfiction controlling idea/themes be worldview altering statements (I once was blind, but now I can see and I’ll show you how to see like me too…); Big Idea writers must blatantly state them.

And writers have to have the courage to throw them down before they actually prove their truth to the reader.

Does this mean that lazy readers could just scan the introduction of Big Idea Books, write down the controlling idea/theme and then skip the rest of the book?

Yeah.  That’s why a lot of business book readers just buy those cheapo summaries.

In fact, most of the time, what the Big Idea Nonfiction book writer delivers is on the surface and that you can get the gist very quickly. What’s important to know is that there is nothing wrong with being on the surface in Big Idea Nonfiction.

In fact, it’s crucial that you do that very thing!

You understand what on the surface and beneath the surface is in fiction (a boy likes a girl so he pushes her into a lake…the on the surface action is violent, but the undercurrent of the action is based on a desire for intimacy).

But what does on the surface mean in Nonfiction? Isn’t that redundant?

What it means is that simply, the writer hooks the reader by revealing his controlling idea/theme.  And then he builds the argument to prove his idea by entertainingly providing the back up data and/or experiments that support his Big Idea. Then he pays it off with a reiteration of the Big Idea at the end with an ironic twist. The beginning hook is the payoff, the middle build is the supporting evidence for the payoff, and the payoff is the paradox of the payoff.

Like Love Story and The Firm with their familiar controlling idea/themes, Big Idea Nonfiction can be straightforward narrative from start to finish and still satisfy. PAYOFF BUILD PAYOFF.  No irony, no paradox…And that’s okay.

Start With Why by Simon Sinek is a great example of a Big Idea Book that delivers in this way. It’s one of my personal favorites. Here’s the controlling idea/theme of that book using my required 1-2-3 list of requirements from above to spell it out.

Business success requires psychological specificity; people buy why you do what you do, not what you do.

Sinek tells you what’s he’s going to prove to you…he proves what he wants to prove to you using a lot of very convincing data/evidence…and then he reiterates what he’s told you.  PAYOFF BUILD PAYOFF.

But what about The Tipping Point and its controlling idea/theme? Is it on the surface too?

Yes it is.

Remember that the Big Idea Nonfiction book requires a blatant statement of the controlling idea/theme.

Here is the controlling idea/theme from Page 7 (1163 words into the book itself):

Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.

Let’s check our 1-2-3.

1. Is it succinct?

Yes. A whole book in twelve words.

2. Does it describe the climactic value charge of the entire Story, either positively or negatively?

Yes. Brilliantly it does.

Now if I had to choose between positive or negative charge for The Tipping Point…and according to this 1-2-3 requirement I’ve put in place for controlling idea/themes in The Story Grid, I must…

 Then I would have to say that the final value charge at the end of The Tipping Point is NEGATIVE. I’ll get into why very specifically down the road.

3. Is the controlling idea/theme as specific as possible about the cause of the change in the value charge?

 My answer to this is also Yes.

 The cause of the change in the value charge is viral in nature. And Gladwell’s use of the words “spread” and “viruses” in this sentence is in no way accidental.

 How many viruses (literal natural viruses, not “safely” DNA manipulated ones) do you know of that we perceive as positive in nature? Not that they’re “bad” for the universe, just bad for our survival as predatory animals on the planet? Maybe that one virus in our duodenum that helps digest our food in coordination with our gut bacteria?

 I don’t remember its name and I used to study that stuff.

So the vector of change in the value charge in this controlling idea/theme is viral. It spreads ideas, products, messages and behaviors. And viruses connote uncontrollable infection and physical decline for people…  The cause in the change of the value charge from the positive of Hush Puppies suddenly becoming very popular and Crime going down in New York City (the two examples Gladwell references in his introduction) is a negative vector, one that is uncontrollable.

Let’s back up a bit and remember why we’re doing this 1-2-3 check in the first place.  It is that the conventions and obligatory scenes of Big Idea Nonfiction require a Blatant Statement of the Controlling Idea/Theme.

Does Gladwell do this?

He does.

Her clearly states on Page 7 that

“The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple.”

And then he ends his paragraph with that idea.

“Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.”

And it is a simple idea. Life is not a linear equation. That might not seem like much, but boy is that a huge statement. If we all could just remember that one fact and act accordingly, we’d have no pollution or global warming problems.

But because of Gladwell’s use of an external action adventure genre in addition to his Worldview Revelation internal genre, we get an undercurrent message that will transform the controlling idea/theme in ways we don’t understand quite yet. Gladwell has a beneath the surface message too…one that will reveal itself ironically by the end of the book.

This is one element that creates his narrative drive.

The deep meaning and wisdom that results from methodically exploring this “simple” idea, giving it form, looking for supporting data, etc. (following the yellow brick road to the Emerald City, the book’s external action adventure genre) reveal themselves in ways one would never anticipate reading those two great positive “hook” inciting incidents about Hush Puppies and the decline of New York City Crime that Gladwell begins the book with.

Like The Scarecrow, The Tin Man and The Cowardly Lion do, we readers of The Tipping Point will get our on the surface wants met. We’ll get the road map to create our own Tipping Points (the how-to part of the book).

But we’ll also get what we really need to understand.

Like Dorothy, we’ll discover that while we aren’t in Kansas anymore, there is a way home.

We simply follow along as Malcolm Gladwell leads us to our own private Tipping Point, one that makes us confront the bad with the good of viral popularity and question whether or not that’s a journey worth taking.

Blind Spots

 

I’m gonna get this quote wrong, I’m sure. It’s from Kierkegaard, as cited somewhere (in The Moviegoer, I think) by Walker Percy:

 

I am unable to speak upon this subject in any way but the edifying.

 

That’s how I feel as we continue this series today with “Report from the Trenches, #5.”

David Mamet teaching his MasterClass on Drama

I’m, what, eight or nine weeks into this revision and all I can say is it’s hard, hard work. There doesn’t seem to be any trick or magic stroke that splits the stone. Looking back on prior books, I realize I either got lucky and got it right, more or less, in the first few tries … or I’ve blocked out the memory of how freakin’ hard it is to crack this walnut.

What I am feeling, however, is that I’m dealing with blind spots. My own uncharted areas. That seems to be what’s making it so hard. Which I suppose is the way it’s supposed to be.

I was watching the movie Se7en the other night on TV. I wonder how Kevin Spacey felt, trying to figure out how to play that villain. Or how Bryan Cranston got into the Walter White character on Breaking Bad. Clearly neither one of those actors is like either character in real life. No doubt they took the roles (apart from career considerations) for the stretch it would force upon them.

A lot of the Resistance I’m experiencing on this book is “character Resistance,” as opposed to “work Resistance” (though there’s plenty of that too.) By which I mean what’s hard isn’t just the sitting down to write, it’s the writing itself, specifically “getting into” a character (actually more than one; actually three).

These characters are not “like me.” I can’t access them like I could other characters from previous books.

I said in last week’s post that laziness and fear are two of the primary factors that are blocking me.

That makes sense.

We, none of us, want to go where we don’t want to go.

It’s hard.

It’s a push.

It’s a grind.

I’m having to try to understand characters I don’t instinctively understand. I’m asking over and over, “What does Manning want in this scene?” What does Rachel want?” “What does Instancer want?”

It’s not coming naturally to me. I can’t do it on instinct alone.

The other aspect that’s making this reworking so hard is that the back-breaking part is the Middle.

Act Two.

Arrrgghhhhh.

I find myself recalling what David Mamet always says,

 

It’s hard to remember that you started out to drain the swamp when you’re up to your ass in alligators.

 

Or another great quote of his from Three Uses of the Knife:

 

How many times have we heard (and said): Yes, I know that I was cautioned, that the way would become difficult and I would want to quit, that such was inevitable, and that at exactly this point the battle would be lost or won … but those who cautioned me could not have foreseen the magnitude of the specific difficulties I am encountering at this point–difficulties which must, sadly, but I have no choice, force me to resign the struggle (and have a drink, a cigarette, an affair, a rest), in short, to declare failure.

 

Bottom line: this struggle is as it should be. Our Muse has put us here, in this place, fighting this fight, for reasons that we are blind to at the moment but that are essential to our hero’s journey, not just in the story but in our lives.

It’s hard work overcoming those blind spots.

We have to force ourselves where we don’t want to go. The process hurts. It’s not fun. But, as Mamet says a little farther on in Knife:

 

The true drama, and especially the tragedy, calls for the hero to exercise will, to create, in front of us, on the stage, his or her own character, the strength to continue. It is her striving to understand, to correctly assess, to face her own character (in her choice of battles) that inspires us–and gives the drama power to cleanse and enrich our own character.

 

Thanks, David. I will try to remember that, as this book continues to kick my ass.

[P.S. If you have not checked out David Mamet’s MasterClass on Drama, please do yourself a favor and go for it. It’s ninety bucks but the class is great and Mamet is hysterically funny.]