Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 60

Baseball, Bouncebacks, and Stealing Joy

A baseball hit me in the face.

The short story:

I was at a baseball game when a player hit a ball, the ball hit a guardrail, and then the ball hit my face.

Every experience in life is spooled on a loop, so as the Camden Yards staff hovered to make sure an ice pack was all I needed, I wondered which loop I was existing in at that moment. Why did this happened? Of all the people at the game, why me? What had I missed? Why was I in that loop? Why not the loop of the happy family enjoying a sunny day and a game? Could I have made an adjustment that would have had me living a different loop when the ball was hit?

The long story:

I was catching a game with my husband and our two kids. It was a beautiful day, the sun was out, the kids were behaving, we had good seats. Everyone was happy.

The row in front of us was empty for the first few innings.

A couple arrived late and spread themselves over six seats. The woman sat at the end while the guy plopped down in front of my daughter, with each arm hanging over the seats to his side.

My daughter is nine years old. She will kick your seat. She’s not one of those consistent kickers you want to throttle during a movie or long plane ride, but due to her age, she’s not fully aware of her body’s spacing and a foot will hit something in front of her from time to time.

A few at-bats after his arrival, the guy started glaring over his shoulder. He could have moved seats, but instead he stayed glued in place—and I started getting annoyed.

In the row behind us, we had the drunk toxic motivators. This variety of motivator spends the entire time yelling insults at the other team. With their own team, they combine the insults with their version of motivation:

“You suck. You better not strike out.”

These guys always attend with an audience in tow. If they can’t have their behaviour validated, what’s the use in attending? (See “The Bar, the Blonde, and You“) Throughout the game the ringleader’s trap yaps nonstop, and they all get louder and louder.

At the end of the next inning, the drunks left and my husband and kids went for pretzels and drinks. My son returned first and handed me a pretzel. As I leaned to the right to brush off some salt, a pain shot through my right cheek.

The baseball player hit a ball, the ball hit a guardrail, and then the ball hit my face.

This is known as the bounceback.

I know about this because I’ve seen it hundreds of times and know to watch for it. The ball’s path is stopped by one object. It bounces off that object and then either hits another object or a fan catches it. In this case, it hit my face.

As I sat icing my cheek, the thought occurred to me that maybe I was supposed to be hit in the face. Had the drunk toxic motivators been there, they would have been hit. Had I not leaned over, the ball would have hit the guy in front of me. I believe things like this happen for a reason. So what was the “Why?” behind this one?

By that point in the game, the guy in front and the toxic motivators behind were annoying me—and Annoyance brought Lack of Focus to the game. I saw the batter hit the ball. I saw the ball go foul. I saw the ball sail over my head. Instead of turning around to watch its path, I was annoyed by all the salt on my pretzel. Stupid…

This brought me to all the projects I’ve worked on when things didn’t go as planned, when the bounceback occurred.

If our projects are games, then it should be as easy as hitting the ball. You go in hoping that you can hit a homerun, but knowing you could strike out, that you could hit a foul, that you could hit a pop up, or a line drive straight to Mike Trout’s glove. But you don’t think about the bounceback as much because it is something that people off the field have to deal with, right? Wrong.

If you initiated the bounce back, it’s on you. It wasn’t my husband that ran for the ice pack. The Camden Yards staff had that under control before my husband and daughter were back and even knew what had happened. They made sure I was ok. The outfit responsible for the bounceback stayed responsible for the bounceback all the way through.

So I thought about the bounceback as something you have to prepare for in terms of customer service. If you launch something, the bounceback is a likely response.

But…

As I was writing this piece, my neighbor’s 86 year old mother appeared at my door.

She’s this petite little thing, with a thick Philly accent and attitude. Her name’s Rita and I adore her. She’s the only person in my life who shows up unexpected, dressed to the nines with pink velcro curlers in her hair. She’s a straight shooter. Feisty. She’s also deeply spiritual. When we first met I was uncomfortable with her devotion, and wasn’t sure what to make of her. Now, no matter what I’m doing I stop to open the door. She’s just that kind of person.

That morning she spoke to me about others stealing my joy. I was moaning about my kids’ school when she told me to stop. I was letting them steal my joy. Yes, there were certain things I needed to do, but giving them my joy wasn’t one of them.

As she spoke, I realized she’d provided me the end of this article in addition to some good advice. Yes, I could pull the bounceback and customer service as the lesson from that baseball game, but the other part of that day was about joy.

I got so wrapped up in the toxic people in front and behind us that I gave away my joy.

At work I’ve done this when a client is trolled. I’m bothered by the hate spewed their way by people who don’t even know them—and I feel the pain of friends who have struggled with mixed reviews themselves. But as Rita, the little Philly grandma said, you’re just letting them steal your joy.

All those Facebook crazies who comment from miles away, or those anonymous posters to your site, are vampires trying to suck your joy.

Ignore them. Keep moving with your project.

And once you launch and are feeling good about yourself, be careful about brushing salt from your pretzel. If there’s a bounceback, it’s easier to deal with it if you’re coming from a place of joy instead of a place of anger.

Warriors and Mothers

 

 

What are the virtues of an entrepreneur?

Allison Janney as “Mom”

What qualities of mind do you and I need if we are going to succeed as artist/entrepreneurs?

One answer (the one I usually use) is to say we need the virtues of warriors:

Courage.

Self-reliance.

The ability to endure adversity.

Another way is to say we need the virtues of mothers.

I had a dream once. I was living in New York, driving a cab at night, trying to write in the daytime. A friend came to visit. My friend was one of these wildly extroverted guys, who immediately went out on the town and came back with fabulous stories of all the fun he was having. I found myself thinking, I should be like him. Why am I denying myself everything, busting my butt day and night? Have fun, Steve! Stop being such a monk!

Then I had the dream. In the dream another friend’s wife, who happened to be pregnant at that time, came to me and sat down at my kitchen table. “Steve, you are pregnant too,” she said, “with that book you’re writing. You can’t go out partying. Your responsibility is to the new life growing inside you.”

The dream was right.

I woke up and immediately stopped worrying.

That movie that’s gestating inside you? That’s your baby.

That novel.

That album.

That new business.

The virtues you and I need to develop are the virtues of mothers.

A mother puts her own needs second (or third or fourth or fifth.) The needs of her child come first.

A mother will kill to protect her baby.

She will sacrifice her own life.

She’ll run into a burning building to save her child.

She’ll lift a Buick off her infant with her bare hands.

A mother knows how to say no.

No, she won’t go to the club.

No, she won’t drink those mojitos.

No, she won’t ingest that banned substance.

A mother eats right.

A mother gets her sleep.

A mother weans herself off Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram (at least most of the time.)

A mother is the definition of tough-minded.

A mother is the consummate professional.

She is in it for keeps.

She is in it for the long haul.

She is in it 24/7/365.

Nothing under the sun can shake a mother from her object, which is to nurture and protect and defend and prepare her baby to grow into its fullest possible potential.

A warrior is nothing compared to a mother.

Wanna be an artist? An entrepreneur?

Be a mother.

Story Gridding The Tipping Point

This is the fifth post in my Story Gridding Nonfiction series.  To read the first, click here .  To read the second, click here . To read the third, click here. And to read the fourth, click here.

We’ve been exploring Story Grid as it relates to nonfiction, specifically Big Idea Nonfiction.

For our case study, I’m going to reexamine Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.  Preparing this condensed series required me to go back to the extended work I did in 2015 and it’s definitely worth another look. The material will be familiar for veteran followers of www.storygrid.com.

When I began analyzing The Tipping Point, I had a handle on the global Genre (The Big Idea Nonfiction Book) and a sense of the conventions and obligatory scenes inherent in it, but I didn’t have any idea of what the overarching “Story” of the book was.

Was there even an overarching Story in there?  Or was it just a really well argued extra long thesis paper that moved between ethos scenes, logos scenes and pathos scenes?

I came up with all sorts of ideas that lead nowhere until I just decided to calm down, take my time and re-read the thing. Not as an Ivory Tower editor looking to sort through the words and sentences and paragraphs and line breaks to uncover their structural design, but just as a regular Joe wanting to be entertained by a good yarn.

Still nothing came to mind about how to begin story gridding this puppy after yet another fly through the book.

Yes, the book held me spellbound as it has numerous times before. And yet again I got sucked into the multitude of stories Gladwell weaves in there like a summer camp counselor around the fire pit, but I was nowhere closer to getting a flat edge into the interior Story.

Desperate, I then did something that I don’t usually do.

I delved into the publisher created “Reading Group Guide” at the end of the paperback edition.

I’ve been in the book business so long that I witnessed firsthand how the whole “Reading Group Guide” thing evolved. Years ago, no one would have dreamed of printing a bunch of author answers to softball questions posed by the publisher’s marketing department at the back of an actual book.

Who would care?

But in the early 1990s what publishers discovered was that there were actually people who got together monthly to discuss a book that they’d all read. They were usually groups of women. And wouldn’t you know it, if you took a survey of the books these groups were reading, they were either the latest bestseller from a popular author or an unknown author whose book would soon become a word of mouth sensation.

In order to better serve these groups and perhaps induce them to choose one of their titles, publishers began creating guides that gave these groups fodder for discussion. The guides were usually Q&As with the author…ideally questions that readers in the group would actually want asked themselves.

Today, it’s hard not to find a reading group guide at the back of a paperback novel or popular work of nonfiction.

But being the grizzled vet that I am, I’ve skipped reading these guides myself…thinking I would learn nothing from whatever it is the author had to say to obvious questions.

So it is not without irony that one of the first questions asked of Malcolm Gladwell in the Reading Group Guide to The Tipping Point is:

How would you classify The Tipping Point?

This is just another way of asking the very first question an editor/author must answer when then begin their editorial work. You can read about the editor’s six core questions here.

The first question an editor/author must answer is:

“What’s the Genre?”

Here is how Gladwell answers the question:

 I like to think of it as an intellectual adventure story.

Now, I can guarantee you that Malcolm Gladwell did not use The Story Grid to help him write or edit The Tipping Point. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that he understood exactly what he was trying to accomplish with the book. And while he certainly understood that he was writing in the arena of Big Idea Nonfiction Books like The Medium is the Message or Future Shock, Gladwell chose to write a Story too.

He wanted it to have the feel, the sensibility, and most importantly the narrative velocity of an action/adventure Story. But instead of the lead character of his book pursuing a bad guy or a prize or a stolen nuclear warhead, Gladwell wanted his lead character to pursue an idea. Not just pursue it, but attack it with all of the vim and vigor of Bruce Willis in Die Hard.

And if you’ve read The Tipping Point, you’ll agree that he achieved that goal.

But how did he do it? This is what Story Grid can tell you.

Okay, so now I know the Global Genre: Big Idea Nonfiction and I know the External Genre of The Tipping Point: Action/Adventure, because I got it directly from the mouth of the author. That’s great.

Now I’m going to apply what I know about Action/Adventure stories to his work and check and see how he delivered the conventions and obligatory scenes inherent in them.

Let’s go back to The Story Grid’s GENRE section and look again at what the Action Adventure Story is all about. A

Action Adventure/Man Against Nature Stories: These are stories that use the natural world or a specific setting as the villain/force of conflict. They can be further delineated by four kinds of plot devices:

Labyrinth Plot: The object of desire is to save victim(s) and get out of a maze-like edifice. (Die Hard)


The Monster Plot: The villain is an animal. (Jaws)


The Environment Plot: The villain is the actual global setting (Gravity)


The Doomsday Plot: The victim is the environment. The hero must save the environment from disaster (Independence Day)

Okay. The above narrows our focus a bit.

Of the four sub-genres of Action Adventure, I’d have to say that The Environment Plot is the best fit. If you remember the movie Gravity, outer space was the villain of the film. In the movie 127 Hours, the villain was the rock that trapped Aron Ralston (played by James Franco). The very environment is the thing that threatens the protagonist/hero of the story.

And it’s a life or death threat too.

Now I know from experience that one of Action’s must-have conventions (for every single one of its sub-genres) is all about the core cast of the story. It doesn’t take a genius or publishing veteran to know this. This convention is embedded in everyone’s subconscious too. So it’s not going to be a big shocker for you.

Remember that when you begin to make a list of “conventions and obligatory scenes” for the genre/s that you want to explore, write down everything that you know to be true about that genre. No matter how obvious. The little things are hugely important.

Now to tell an Action story you must have at least three characters. They are:

The hero
The victim
The villain.

These are not suggestions. Without a hero, a victim and a villain, you just can’t deliver an Action story.

That doesn’t mean that there can only one hero, one victim or one villain.

You could have a number of heroes with differing individual traits who come together as a unit to free a single victim or a group of victims from a single villain or a group of villains. The key though is that the sum total of the individual parts of the heroic cast must add up to a formidable force of strength. The Seven Samurai, The Dirty Dozen, Gates of Fire, Inglorious Basterds, Ocean’s Eleven, Ghostbusters, are examples of stories with multi-protagonist/heroes.

And remember also that the hero can also play the victim role too. A great example of that is The Fugitive. Or in the case of The Incredible Hulk, depending upon the situation, the Hulk can play hero, victim or villain. All three.

Or another show-stopper, one of my all time favorites…Chuck Palahniuk’s masterpiece Fight Club. All three (hero, victim and villain)…all in one character. Brilliant!

The three roles must be filled, but again they do not have to be filled by a single character. Part of the innovative fun is figuring out the cast.

But above all, the villain is the crucial role to fill in an Action story…because the villain is the force that provides all of the conflict. And conflict drives Story. Here’s something I wrote about the importance of the bad guy a while back.

Okay, so an indispensable convention in the Action Adventure story is that there must be hero/s, victim/s, and villain/s.

That’s nice, but what does that have to do with the Big Idea Nonfiction The Tipping Point?

Strictly speaking, does The Tipping Point have the required conventions of hero, victim, and villain?

Who would be the hero of The Tipping Point?

With his use of the first person point of view “I remember once as a child…” (Page 13) and his direct address of the reader “I made some of you reading this yawn simply by writing the word ‘yawn.'”(Page 10), Gladwell places himself at the center of the story.

So Gladwell is one possible hero.

What makes a protagonist a hero? Here’s a short definition: A Hero is a character who sacrifices himself to free victim/s of the villain/s.

But Gladwell also brings in other characters throughout the book that act as co-conspirators of a sort in his quest to figure out what makes things “tip.” He even addresses the reader in the collective “we” at times to bring him/her into his search party.

What that all adds up to is that there are numerous protagonists/potential heroes in the Story, including the reader.

So let’s put a check mark next to the Hero requirement in an Action Adventure Story and move on.

Who would be the victim of The Tipping Point?

The victims in The Tipping Point are its readers. They are our ignorant selves.

And in a fantastic choice, Gladwell also makes himself a victim too. He writes about his missteps in his journey to codify the mysterious idea he has labeled The Tipping Point. He’s poking and prodding in the darkness, hoping to free a pattern that gives form and structure to something we just don’t understand, which he states is…

Why seemingly overnight, some things become ubiquitous…

And when phenomena emerge that he has difficulty fitting inside his theory, Gladwell narrates his struggles with them.

It’s all well and good to label heroes and victims in The Tipping Point, but if there is no compelling villain in the Story, there is no way it could be categorized as an Action Adventure. So does it have a villain?

Well, The Tipping Point has the most dastardly villain of them all…an unbeatable one to boot.

The villain is our state of being.

No, it’s not specifically “outer space” or “a rock” or “ a snowstorm.” It’s the implacable foe that each and every one of us stares down and most often retreats from every single conscious moment of our lives.

The villain of The Tipping Point (and all of Nonfiction for that matter) is the human condition.

As Matt Weiner’s Don Draper on Mad Men so bluntly put it:

“Well, I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie. There is no system. The universe is indifferent.”

We know very little about what makes the world go around. Physically or spiritually.

So the villain in The Tipping Point is the chaotic indifferent universe, the things that happen that we don’t understand.

In an Action Adventure Story, the hero sacrifices and fights the villain to free the victim.

And that’s exactly what Malcolm Gladwell does in The Tipping Point.  He spent years on the book with no certainty that anyone would really care what he was writing (sound familiar?).

He seeks an answer to a big question…

Is there a process by which things suddenly become extraordinarily commonplace?

And he tells the story of how he came up with his conclusion by using the conventions and obligatory scenes of the Action Adventure Genre.

More to come.

Politics and the Professional Mindset

 

Candidates for office in all lands and in every century make the same promise to the voters they hope to attract:

The Great Exception

 

I will get you what you want and it will cost you nothing.

 

“Want your job back? A free college education? No problem. I’ll get it for you.”

Something for nothing is the offer a drug dealer makes to an addict or a mother provides for an infant.

In the grownup world, something for nothing does not exist. Yet politicians sell it to us, and we fall for it every time. Why?

The amateur, the infant, and the addict operate out of the identical mindset. Each looks to others—specifically others perceived to be more powerful or capable—to supply their needs or solve their problems without pain, effort, or risk.

 

I will get you what you want and it will cost you nothing.

 

The candidate for office adds two particularly pernicious corollaries to this proposal.

 

The straits in which you find yourself are not your fault. You are blameless. You were duped and betrayed by (insert Vulnerable Minority here), upon whom you shall now, by my agency, wreak your vengeance.

 

And

 

You need pay nothing for the solution to your problem. We will take the money from (insert Affluent Minority here.)

 

Why am I bringing this up? It’s not a rant, really. My aim is to contrast the amateur/addict/infant mindset to the mindset of the professional—whether she be an artist, an entrepreneur, a mother, a student, whatever.

The professional and the entrepreneur start from the following assumption (I’m borrowing from Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach here):

 

I will expect no opportunity and no remuneration until I have first created value for someone else.

 

I was watching a terrific PBS “American Masters” documentary about David Geffen, who rose from humble beginnings (in Brooklyn, natch) to become a legend in the entertainment biz and a renowned philanthropist. When he was a boy, David was offered the following piece of wisdom by his mother:

 

You’d better learn to like to work, because we have no money and you’re going to be working for the rest of your life.

 

Another authority figure once made a similar statement to a pair of innocents under His care:

 

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

 

The professional is immune to politician-type promises, whether they come to her from the outside or from within her own head. She recognizes them for what they are.

Instead she tells herself, Whatever I want, whatsoever problems confront me and my family, no one is going to solve them but me. The only way I will change my circumstances for the better is through good sense and hard work.

The professional mindset is hard-core. Why? Because it reflects the realities of life.

How do you write a novel?

How do you make a movie?

How do you raise a child?

The only time life is not hard-core is when it is portrayed in the speeches of candidates campaigning for office.

By the way, whatever happened to

 

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”?

 

Not to mention

 

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

 

Maybe I am ranting. The point I’m trying to make is that JFK and Winston Churchill in those phrases addressed their constituents as if they were adults and as if they possessed the professional mindset.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brian Wilson, Warren Buffett, Albert Einstein, and Ruth Stone

[REMEMBER: Registration for Shawn’s Story Grid Workshop closes tonight. Haven’t checked it out yet? Dig in here: Story Grid Workshop]

In the documentary Beach Boys: The Making of Pet Sounds, Al Jardine said Brian Wilson “sees things I don’t think the rest of us see and hears things, certainly, that we don’t hear. He has a special receiver going on in there, in his brain.”

What is that special, indefinable “it” about Brian Wilson? Is it really related to seeing, hearing, and receiving? And, if it is, what’s different about how he sees, hears, and receives? What of the rest of us? Why aren’t we all walking around composing “God Only Knows” or any other Wilson and Tony Asher masterpiece?

What Are You Hearing?

In his book The Brain’s Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity, Dr. Norman Doidge shared the work of Dr. Alfred Tomatis, whose groundbreaking work identified “the ear as a battery to the brain.”

From the chapter “A Bridge of Sound” in The Brain’s Way of Healing:

In the late 1940s Tomatis continued to attack the conventional wisdom that the larynx is the key organ for singing. He showed that contrary to conventional wisdom, singers with bass voices did not have larger larynxes than those with higher voices. Human beings aren’t constructed like pipe organs, in which larger tubes produce lower sounds. Powerful tenors sing at frequencies from 800Hz up to 4,000 Hz but so do baritones and basses; the only difference is that the baritones and basses can add lower notes, because they can hear lower notes. He summed it up by saying provocatively “One sings with one’s ear,” a statement that caused much laughter.

But when scientists at the Sorbonne presented their studies of his work to the National Academy of Medicine and the French Academy of Sciences, they concluded that “the voice can only contain the frequencies that the ear can hear.” The idea came to be called “the Tomatis effect.”

Tomatis didn’t stop there. He invented a device called the “Electronic Ear” to help struggling singers. The device blocked out different frequencies, which trained the singers’ ears to hear the frequencies with which they’d been struggling/missing. By exercising their ears, they strengthened their voices, just as they might engage in exercise to strengthen other parts of their bodies.

Among us non-singers, Tomatis found, too, that the frequencies we hear can be influenced by our countries of origin. For example, he found that the French “hear in two ranges, 100 to 300 Hz and 1,000 to 2,000 Hz. Speakers of British English hear in one higher range, from 2,000 to 12,000 Hz, which makes it hard for French people to learn English in England. But North American English involves frequencies from 800 to 3,000, a range closer to the French ear, making it easier for the French to learn.”

More from Doidge:

Arguably [Tomatis’] most important discovery was that the ear is not a passive organ but has the equivalent of a zoom lens that allows it to focus on particular noise and filter others out. He called it the auditory zoom. When people first walk into a party, they hear a jumble of noises, until they zoom in on particular conversations, each occurring at slightly different sound frequencies.

Jardine’s comment that Brian Wilson hears what others don’t hear, might be right. It’s possible that Wilson tunes into frequencies and zooms into sounds/rhythms/conversations that the rest of us aren’t accessing. Even more remarkable is that Wilson is deaf in his right ear, which is the dominant ear for the majority of us. By accessing sound through his left ear, he’s automatically processing sounds outside the norm.

What are You Seeing and Receiving?

In the same Beach Boys documentary, Wilson mentioned that he “copied The Four Freshman singer, the high singer,” when he wrote “Surfer Girl.” He tapped into a musical influence and merged it with interests of his peers. While he didn’t surf himself, he understood—he saw—the appeal of the surfing culture, just as he did the car culture, just as he did the raw fact that the lives of most of his peers revolved around school and dating.

There’s a difference in this sort of seeing, just as there is in hearing as researched by Tomatis. There were millions of other guys Wilson’s age seeing the same thing. Even Wilson’s own bandmates saw the cars and girls and surfing culture, but . . . They didn’t do what Wilson did.

Why?

In the documentary Becoming Warren Buffett, Buffett was asked the following question:

“What are the key indicators you look for in companies before making an investment?”

He replied by talking about Berkshire’s investment See’s Candies:

“If you give a box of See’s chocolates to your girlfriend on a first date and she kisses you . . . We own you. . . We could raise the price of the boxes tomorrow and you’ll buy the same box. You aren’t going to fool around with success. The key here is the response.”

Buffett is right. My godmother introduced me to See’s Candies’ boxes of chocolates over forty years ago. I loved them then—and now she’s gifting them to my kids today. That’s loyalty.

But why does Buffett think like that? Why did he see that potential in See’s Candies? Just like Brian Wilson’s peers could see the response to songs about surfing, cars, relationships, and school, Buffet’s peers could see the response to the gift of a box of chocolates. What’s the difference between Buffett, Wilson, and their peers?

Why do they find creative configurations for random puzzle pieces, when all anyone else sees are mismatched puzzle pieces?

Exposure and Experience

Wilson had to be exposed to The Four Freshman and Buffett to See’s Candies—and to what was going on in the world around them—in order to connect songs and products to cultures. In order to do this, they needed experiences that would allow them to connect the dots. This comes from constant exposure and experimentation—paying attention to what does/doesn’t work in the surrounding world, and learning from it.

This is reading everything you can read, listening, painting, practicing whatever it is you love over and over and over again.

For Buffett and Wilson every song composed and deal made can be filed under practice, which brings more experience.

Internal Engine

To do all the things mentioned above, there has to be an engine, a drive to capture it all.

In a TED talk, Elizabeth Gilbert told a story about how poet Ruth Stone described poems coming to her, on a “thunderous train of air”:

It would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet.

She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, “run like hell.” And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page.

And other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she’d be running and running and running, and she wouldn’t get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it “for another poet.”

And then there were these times—this is the piece I never forgot—she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she’s running to the house and she’s looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it’s going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand it and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first.”

I love this story. It’s like capturing a dream. You have to write it down the second you wake or you risk it floating off to Never Happened Land.

What powers an engine like Stone’s or Buffett’s or Wilson’s?

I think it’s curiosity.

Have you watched the new National Geographic series, Genius? In the first episode, a young Albert Einstein is driven by a need to know. Curiosity is at the helm, pushing him for answers.

Why Does Any of this Matter to You?

Within the first few minutes of the Beach Boys documentary, David Marks said, “People think ah, I can do that, but they can’t. It’s only something Brian could do.”

Wilson, Buffet, Williams, and Stone had/have a gift for connecting the dots. Their ability to bring together all the information coming their way—whether in dreams, Muse-driven trains, or cocktails parties—is extraordinary.

Do I think we can all do what they do/did? No.

Do I think we can tap into what I’m guessing to be qualities existing within their creative process? Yes.

We talk about hard work on this blog all the time.

What we don’t talk about as much is what we see and hear. Sometime you have to lift your head from your work and process what’s going on around you. What do you really hear and see? And of what you’re receiving, is it the full experience or are you missing out on an entire cocktail party?

The other part of lifting your head is this:

Big ideas aren’t necessarily a sign of genius, but of someone with the capacity to make connections between all the dots swirling around them.

How often do you hear about those ideas happening after an all-nighter of working?

They arrive during a hot shower and in the seconds before you go to sleep. They float in on a song, or a well-crafted sentence—and come along just when we least expect them—sending us flying like Ruth Stone to capture them.

We can do all the work and practice in the world, but minus the mental gifts Wilson, Buffett, Einstein, and Stone were born with, I think the thing we need most is to really see and hear the world around us and within us. Just as Tomatis helped improve the voices of singers, I think his same methods of tapping into different frequencies can help guide our creative endeavors. And when I say frequencies, I’m not necessarily talking just about traditional “sound.” Remember, Beethoven composed even after losing most of his “hearing.” (Maybe he did this by relying on “bone conduction?” *Read Doidge’s book.)

Are you tuned into all the frequencies possible?

Wanna Have Lunch With Stephen King?

 

Suppose you, an aspiring writer (or even an established one), got the chance to have a two-hour lunch with Stephen King?

How much would that be worth?

Shawn at his February STORY GRID seminar in New York

If you had to put a dollar figure on it, how much would you pay to have that experience? What price would make it fair to Stephen King for the expenditure of his time, for permitting you access to his wisdom? What would it be worth to you, just to hang out with the master of horror over a cheeseburger and fries?

Or …

Suppose you were a young architect and you could have dinner with Frank Gehry? Suppose Mr. Gehry would not only answer your questions or take a look at your portfolio but that he would actually prepare a two-hour piece of instruction for you? Suppose he would distill everything he had learned over sixty years in the profession—and present it all to you?

How much would you pay for that?

Clearly those happy meals are never gonna happen.

You and I are not going to get to sit down with Toni Morrison or Joyce Carol Oates or Margaret Atwood. They’re too busy. They’ve got work to do and lives to live.

There’s an alternative however.

Joyce Carol Oates teaches at Princeton. Frank Gehry is doing an online MasterClass. Margaret Atwood spoke last weekend at the Los Angeles Times’ Festival of Books.

This is all by way of getting around to Shawn’s three-day STORY GRID course on writing Love Stories this past February in New York.

Shawn gets e-mails every day asking him to read manuscripts, be somebody’s mentor, go out to lunch and let some young writer pick his brain.

Shawn can’t do that. And the people who ask him are asking, whether they realize it or not, for thousands and thousands of dollars worth of hard-earned skill and savvy, for which they are willing to pay nothing.

The answer is to take a course from Shawn.

A few years ago, before Shawn and I had become partners in Black Irish Books, I needed his help. I asked him to read a manuscript I was stuck on. He did it. I wrote him a check for $35,000.

A few years later, feeling guilty, I asked him, “I got off cheap, didn’t I?”

Shawn laughed and said, “Yeah, you did.”

Expertise has value.

Decades of sweat and pain are worth something.

Frank Gehry is not going to write back to you and me saying, “Sure, let’s meet for lunch at Gjelina.” Philip Roth is not gonna have a drink with us at the St. Regis. And J.K. Rowling? Her security staff shredded our note before it got within a half-mile of her.

Maybe you and I can’t take these masters to lunch, but we can sign up the next time one of them teaches a course or a weekend seminar.

Okay, we won’t get Alice Munro one-on-one. But we can raise our hand and ask a question if and when she teaches a course. We can approach her during a break.

People write to me all the time, wanting me to put them in touch with Shawn so he can read/edit their novels. I don’t even tell Shawn. He’s too busy.

The answer, again: take a course from Shawn.

Become a member at Shawn’s blog, www.storygrid.com. Watch for the announcements of upcoming events.

In The War of Art I went off on a rant against workshops. I called them “colleges of Resistance,” which they are, if you’re using the workshop as an excuse not to do your own work.

But my assessment has softened over the years. The right course, taught by the right teacher, can be invaluable. Not just for the specific content (which a lot of times we can glean from a teacher’s published books or blogs or articles) but for the experience of actually meeting the person we hope to learn from. It seems silly but there’s a kind of magic to it. There’s no substitute for it.

For years Shawn has been playing with the idea of teaching what he knows, not just in books but in person. It’s taken him a while to wrap his mind around the idea of booking venues, preparing material, and actually getting up there onstage and engaging an audience.

But he’s doing it now.

If you and I are smart, we’ll get on a plane and go.

We might not be able to get him to have lunch with us, but we can learn a lot from three days in the same room with him.

Ethos, Logos, Pathos

This is the fourth post in my Story Gridding Nonfiction series.  To read the first, click here .  To read the second, click here . To read the third, click here.

We’ve been exploring Story Grid as it relates to nonfiction. And we’ve come up with four big categories/genres of nonfiction: Academic, How-To, Narrative Nonfiction and the Big Idea Book. As the Big Idea Book, at its best, is an elaborate combination plate of the other three, let’s pick it apart a bit more and see if we can suss out its secrets.

Where did the nonfiction Big Idea Book come from? That is, from what form did it emerge? What’s the tadpole version that has the potential to morph into a complex frog?

Fiction has shorter forms than the novel right? There are novellas and short stories. So nonfiction must have equivalent shorter forms.  Thinking about a smaller version of a Big Idea Book will narrow my focus and give me some clues about why one works and another doesn’t (Story Grid’s raison d’etre) as well as how to create one of my own.

I’d say that Ph.D. dissertations (Academic) and Operating Manuals (How-To) and Extended Essays (Narrative Nonfiction and Big Idea) would be the medium forms of Nonfiction. And fiction’s short story equivalents for nonfiction would be research papers (Academic), driving directions or Ikea furniture assembly diagrams (How-To) and short form reporting pieces like W.C Heinz’s classic “Death of a Racehorse” (Narrative Nonfiction) and Tom Wolfe’s “The Me Decade” (Big Idea).

But where did all of those things come from? Is there some Nonfiction form from which these all sprang forth?

I think there is. It’s one of those inevitable, but surprising reveals too.

It’s the form of the High School Thesis paper.

You remember those, right?

The 2,000 to 5,000 word, dry as dust compositions our English Lit teachers put us through in High School and our Professors put us through in College?

As you’ll recall, the structure of a thesis paper looks like this:

Thesis Paper Form

Start with an inverse pyramid, moving the statements from global to specific, and then transition into


Three or more boxes of supporting evidence/data/examples and then round it out with


A pyramid moving from specific to general.

That’s basically it.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the three parts mirror the Beginning Hook, Middle Build, and Ending Payoff in fiction.

But how do you construct these three Nonfiction Beginnings, Middles and Ends? How do you make an argument? How do you persuade someone to believe you? How do you persuade them to act?

Let’s go all the way back to Aristotle for the answer. Because his was a very good one. Aristotle suggested that there are three forms of persuasion: ethos, logos and pathos. And I think these are the three building blocks for Nonfiction Scenes.

Ethos is all about the bona fides of the arguer. Does the writer have the character and background to be someone worthy of trust? Is he principled? Does he have experience in the arena in which he writes? Is he an expert?

Logos is all about the evidence/the data/the backup material that the arguer/writer uses to support his conclusions. Because of the following data/examples/case studies, logically we can conclude…

Pathos is the writer appealing to the emotions of his audience to get them on his side, arousing readers’ anger or appealing to their self-interest or sense of identity. As you’ll surmise, employing a fiction writer’s Story technique is crucial for this form of persuasion.  New Journalism’s pantheon (Wolfe, Talese, Didion, etc.) knows how to create Pathos as do the Erik Larsons and Malcolm Gladwells of the world.

Getting readers to “like” the writer or “root” for him to succeed in his argument is another way of making a Pathos based argument.

Or, on the other end of the spectrum, perhaps the writer wishes his readers to “fear” his “Oz-like” all-knowingness. In this case, the reader’s inability to understand is not the failure of the genius writer’s erudition, but of the novice reading the material. This approach is intellectual sado-masochism. Gore Vidal was a master of this kind of “I’m smarter than you” school.

Both “hey, we’re all in this together” and “hey, I know more than you so try and keep up” can work.

Whether they know it or not, arguers/writers confront that old Machiavellian rhetorical question Is it better to be loved or feared? with every mission statement/project they take on. Their preference (their desire to be loved or feared) reveals itself by their choices among these three fundamental forms of persuasion.

Do they include all three persuasion techniques in their global argument? Or do they rely more on their reputation (ethos) than data (logos) or story (pathos)?

How well do they transition from one form of persuasion to another?

And of course, how do they execute each technique?

With this in mind, here’s my take on the building blocks of Big Idea Nonfiction…

Ethos Scenes (the writer/narrator takes center stage and dispenses his wisdom)
Logos Scenes (the evidence takes center stage) and
Pathos Scenes (an emotional appeal to the reader through Story takes center stage)

Steven Pressfield masterfully uses all three kinds of persuasion in The War of Art. And he weaves his narrative in and out of one to the other in practically invisible ways.

But that’s not what makes The War of Art a book that people hold dear to their hearts. Nor is it what makes the book an evergreen bestseller.

What makes it both of those things is The War of Art’s Internal Genre, not its External BIG IDEA BOOK Genre.

More on that next.

 

Make Your Hero Suffer

[Today’s post is a revised and updated version of a favorite of mine that ran earlier in the blog’s cycle. It’s #1 in a new series starting today.]

 

There’s a story about Elvis:

He was about to make his first movie (“Love Me Tender”) and he was getting a little nervous. He phoned the director and asked to speak with him privately.

Elvis was worried that he’d have to smile.

“What is it, Elvis?” the director asked when they got together. “You look upset. Is there anything you want to ask me?”

“Yes,” said Elvis. “Am I gonna be asked to smile in this movie?”

The director was momentarily taken aback. No actor, he said, had ever asked him that question. “Why do ask that, Elvis?”

“I’ve been watching the movies of James Dean and Marlon Brando, and I notice that they never smile. I don’t wanna smile either.”

Have you ever noticed how the most emotionally involving books and movies all have heroes that go through hell? Cool Hand Luke, The Grapes of Wrath, the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Mildred in Mildred Pierce, Sethe in Beloved, even Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind.

One of the most powerful books I’ve ever read is The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer. It’s the true story of the German retreat before the Russians on the Eastern front in WWII. Talk about suffering. You read it and you’re actually feeling sorry for the Nazis.

As writers, you and I may sometimes be tempted to go easy on our protagonists. After all, we like them. We’re rooting for them. They’re our heroes. Sometimes they’re even thinly-veiled versions of ourselves.

But giving our heroes a break is the worst thing we can do.

Instead, pour on the misery. Afflict them like Job.

Beat them up like Karl Malden did to Brando in One-Eye Jacks or Gene Hackman did to Clint Eastwood (not to mention Morgan Freeman) in Unforgiven. Torture them emotionally like Julianne Moore in Far From Heaven or Still Alice. Break their hearts like Meryl Streep in Out of Africa (or any, or all, of her other movies.)

Readers will love it.

Audiences will love it.

Think of your lead character as if he or she were an actor. Actors love to suffer. They win Oscars for it. Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot. Tom Hanks for Philadelphia. Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything.

Luke Skywalker suffers.

Rocket Raccoon suffers.

Even James Bond suffers.

The trick for us writers is knowing how to make our heroes suffer.

In the upcoming posts we’ll examine the storytelling principles that apply to this precept.

Principle #1:

The hero’s suffering must be on-theme.

A Master Class with Shawn

 

There’s a term Shawn uses that I had never heard before:

Story nerd.

(He claims proudly to be one himself.)

Three amigos. Seth Godin, me and Shawn at Shawn’s STORY GRID event in New York this February.

A story nerd, as I understand it, is someone who loves to get into the geeky details and “inside baseball” mechanics of storytelling. A story nerd knows what a Value Shift is. She’s intimate with concepts like “beats” and “reveals.” She knows the Five Commandments of Storytelling. A story nerd is kinda like a Trekkie except she doesn’t wear Vulcan ears or appear in public dressed as a Klingon.

Me, I’d use a different term:

Professional writer.

Anyway, there were about forty of us story nerds/professional writers gathered in Soho in New York this February for a three-day Story Grid event starring my partner, Shawn Coyne. (If you weren’t there, don’t worry. A 10-hour plus set of tapes will be available soon.)

For three all-day sessions Shawn broke down Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice into its constituent elements and put them all back together again.

He was teaching us how to write a love story.

[By the way, you can order Shawn’s paperback breakdown of P&P here.]

Shawn took us through the saga of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, Mr. Collins, Lydia, and Lady Catherine. He showed us why P&P still sells 400,000 copies a year, 204 years after it was published.

I was there. Seth Godin showed up. We had a great Q&A on Day Three.

And we all came away with notebooks groaning from everything we had learned listening to Shawn.

(Click here for Shawn’s free mini-course on How to Outline a Novel. Or, as he subtitles it, “How to turn a 50,000-word problem into 266 bite-sized challenges.”)

 

In these three lessons [Shawn says] I teach how to tackle a huge problem—figuring out how to write a new novel. By using examples including my inadequacies assembling an above ground pool for my kids, seminal Parkinson’s disease research, and the classic Knock Knock Banana joke, I’ll break down the 50,000-word goal into manageable units of story assembly. To top it off, at the end of the course, I’ll give you a scene-by-scene spreadsheet template to track your progress. Micro-step by micro-step, you’ll build your next novel in 30 days. Plan the work…and then work the plan!

 

But back to Shawn’s New York event.

It was his first. He had never done this before. I flew in for moral support—and because after all these years I remain fascinated by how a big-time editor dissects and analyzes a story, how he assesses what works and what doesn’t work, and how he figures out how to fix it.

I had expected the audience to be young writers, or artists in other fields just starting out. I was wildly wrong. The average age of the attendees was (I’m guessing) around forty. Several were in their sixties. A number were published authors. Everyone I talked to was an honest-to-God story nerd. They were deep into their first or sixth or seventeenth novel. They knew their stuff and they wanted to learn more.

They took the game seriously.

They were in it for keeps.

It was pretty cool to see the desks spread with laptops and notebooks and hear the really smart questions being asked. You could see as Shawn elucidated each storytelling principle that the attending writers were incorporating it on the spot into their own works in progress.

I was doing the same.

I had more than one “Aha!” or “Holy sh*t!” moment when I found myself furiously scribbling notes to myself. “Go back to Chapter X and fix such-and-such.”

As I said, this February get-together was dedicated to the genre of Love Story only. But Shawn is planning a series of such events for all the other genres, including nonfiction. (Yes, the principles of storytelling apply to “true” material too.)

If you’re not yet a subscriber to Shawn’s site, www.storygrid.com, I highly recommend that you sign up ASAP.

And click the link above for his free mini-course on story outlining.

I’ve already clicked it myself.

Another Airline, A Different Story

I flew on Alaska Airlines this week.

Before the flight took off, I witnessed a first.

The pilot joined the passengers at the gate to announce a flight delay.

No microphone. No airline staff at his side. Just him. His voice. His proactive communication.

He thanked us for giving him our attention.

He announced the reason for the delay: The hydraulic lift connected to the flight deck broke.

He announced the steps being taken to address the delay: A team was working on fixing the lift.

He disappeared behind the gate door.

He returned to announce the lift couldn’t be fixed and that our plane would depart via a different gate. Again, he thanked us for our patience, and then disappeared behind the gate door.

The gate change was announced.

I went to the new gate. It was a Southwest gate instead of an Alaska Airlines gate.

The plane arrived, followed by the pilot, who explained why we were boarding at a gate operated by a different carrier.

The closest open Alaska gate was in a different terminal. Moving terminals meant moving through another security checkpoint, too. Instead, his team was using an open Southwest gate that was located near our original gate. However . . . The computer at the Southwest gate didn’t work with Alaska’s tech. His team needed a few more minutes to figure out how to load everyone, track the tickets, and so on.

Once the team on the ground had a solution, the pilot returned to announce it.

The solution: A gate attendant took our tickets and, using her phone, called in our info to someone with an Alaska connected computer on the other end.

Once we were all aboard the plane, the pilot greeted us at the door and the flight attendants invited my kids into the cockpit, to sit in the pilot’s seat (a first for them).

As the flight taxied toward the runway, the pilot made two more announcements.

He knew passengers had tight connecting flights on the other end. He’d gone to the powers that be and asked that they hold as many flights as possible so his passengers could make their connections.

Next he welcomed aboard Ray Chavez, the oldest living survivor of Pearl Harbor. I later learned from news reports that Chavez turned 105 earlier this year. At the time of the pilot’s announcement, I felt like something special was happening, but Chavez being on the flight felt like a blessing.

Alaska’s team showed that they are more than a few well-crafted paragraphs on a web site. For reference, the following appears on their site:

For over 75 years Alaska Airlines, and the people who make us who we are, have been guided by integrity, caring, ingenuity, professionalism, and a unique spirit. A spirit that was has grown out of our geographical roots.

We are product of our history and the amazing people found throughout it. Today, that product looks like a long list of aviation milestones, paired with countless stories of people going above and beyond to help others.

All of these milestone, good deeds, and community involvement have grown us from a small regional airline to an international carrier.

During a week when another airline made headlines for its treatment of customers, Alaska’s team was “guided by integrity, caring, ingenuity, professionalism, and a unique spirit.”

They were proactive in their communications.

They took responsibility.

The cared for their customers.

They were kind and they were patient.

They offered me a first: When airline travel has increasingly been an experience full of wrongs, they offered so many rights.

Seeing their team of pro’s in action was a beautiful thing.