Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 62

Love Story Cheat Sheet/Conventions

At long last, we’ve come to the end of this romantic journey.

I’ve been compiling a category-by-category cheat sheet for the must-haves of any working love story. To read the series from end to end, here are the previous five posts—1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

The final topic to cover is the conventions of love story.

Conventions differ from obligatory scenes in that they are not formalized beginning, middle and end units of story. Instead they are the milieu of a particular content genre, distinct add-on elements that give the story context, which elicits an emotional response from the reader/viewer.

A convention for a lawn mower is to have a pull cord to get the engine started. You can certainly change that convention to an on/off switch, but whatever choice you make to abide the convention (a force is necessary to begin a chain reaction) you’ll need something to get the engine started. Or you’ll have little chance of cutting the yard.

So conventions evolve over time—like a pull cord to an on/off switch. Some are added and some discarded from a content genre depending upon the cultural context.

Readers intuitively expect them to be present without formally checking that they are. That is, they don’t know that they’re supposed to be there. They just know something’s off when they’re not. The story just doesn’t “feel” right. They don’t emotionally connect to it in the way they’d anticipated.

In Donald Rumsfeld-ian terms, the conventions are UNKNOWN KNOWNS.

Conventions of a particular content genre are key to delivering the emotional experience a reader is expecting from the genre itself.

One love story convention that’s been shape shifting since it’s introduction back in the days of Chivalry is the necessity for clearly defined gender roles…traditional female and male characteristics played by the male and female players, respectively.

Now the two players can have both the traditional male (emotionally guarded and more obsessed with consummating the relationship than connecting emotionally) and traditional female (looking for a deeper connection before physical connection) sensibilities.

There’s a terrific series on Netflix called “LOVE” that plays with the convention very well. The man is more “female” and the female is more “male.” It’s perfectly in tune with our culture today.

That great movie BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN does a terrific job abiding the convention too. Even though the love story is between two men, there are distinct gender roles played.  Watch it again and see if you can pinpoint what I mean.

Conventions are the ways in which storytellers deliver emotional experiences to their readers. They are the means to the ending emotional effect. So to best understand convention we need to examine what emotional experience a particular story genre promises.

Crime stories concern justice as their core value and the core emotion is intrigue. We become fascinated with discovering the how, who, what, where and why of the fictional crime as we follow an investigator from beginning to middle to end. And that emotional experience, intrigue, keeps us coming back for more and more.

Similarly, action stories, which revolve around the life/death value, deliver excitement as their emotional experience. Excitement is best described as the “tiger in a cage” phenomenon. We witness a very dangerous thing but from the safety of having it confined at a safe distance.  We won’t get bitten, but we can watch the tiger bite something else inside the cage.

This is a similar emotional experience we get from love stories.

We get to fall in love when we read or watch a love story and experience all of the sturm and drang of love…but at a safe distance. We don’t actually have to put ourselves in any vulnerable position. We get to vicariously experience love without risk.

How great is that?

For some people that’s the only kind of love they’re interested in.

Why do you think 200,000,000 units of love story are sold every year (that’s 500,000 copies every single day!)?

Love story makes up 45% of Amazon.com’s entire book market.

Check out this incredible presentation from “Data Guy,” to see the hidden sales details of the dominant story of our time (and probably of all time!).

We experience the feeling of romance when we enjoy a love story, the butterfly in the stomach churn when we are attracted to another person.

So how do writers ensure that they deliver this emotional catharsis?

By making sure they have these ten elements in their love stories, they’ll give the reader the best possible environment to fall in love with their lead characters.  It’s incredibly effective.  Literary alchemy.

The Rival: There must be a competing force for the affections of one or both characters. Without rivals, there is no possibility for Crisis (if there is no alternative choice how do you have a best bad one? or an irreconcilable good one?) Sometimes a Rival isn’t flesh and blood. Check out Alfred Hitchcock’s NOTORIOUS. One major Rival for Ingrid Bergman’s affections is her dependence on booze. Will she choose booze or Cary Grant? Which brings up another major convention of the love story.
Moral Weight: This is the baked in INTERNAL GENRE to the best love stories. The idea is this… If the lovers cannot elevate themselves morally, they will not be able to find authentic love. That is, they must have a worldview shift that raises their moral fiber. In Pride and Prejudice, you guessed it, if the two central lovers do not overcome their pride and prejudice, they won’t be able to properly love one another. This is why the book works so well.  It clearly tells us that Love requires self-reflection and change. Sweet talk and roses mean nothing without moral elevation.
Helpers: There are those in favor of the love match who help the two come together.
Hinderers: There are those who are not in favor of the love match who work to destroy the match.
Gender Divide: Distinct differences in the ways the two lovers view love and its responsibilities must be in play.
External Need: One or both of the lovers have to have external pressures on them to find a mate quickly. There’s a great movie called A NEW LEAF with Walter Matthew and Elaine May. A perfect example of external need. P and P is perfect too.
Forces at Play Beyond the Couple’s Control: Social convention often fits the bill here. The woman, or the man, is from the other side of the tracks…
Forces at Play In the Couple’s Control: This usually goes hand in hand with the moral weight convention. One or both of the lovers has to get out of their own way and change their behavior and worldview before they’ll be rewarded with authentic love.
Rituals: The lovers develop little things that they only do with one another. In P and P Elizabeth and Darcy only tease one another…they don’t do that to any other character in the story. In The Apartment Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine play gin rummy

And last but not least, there must be

Secrets: There are four varieties, a.) Secrets society keeps from the couple, b.) Secrets the couple keeps from society, c.) Secrets the couple keeps from one another d.) Secrets one of the couple keeps from himself/herself.

Not delivering conventions with innovative verve will alienate your audience. It will make them feel as if something was missing in the telling (Unknown Knowns) and for that very reason the story will not satisfy their expectations.

They just won’t get the emotional oomph they’d hoped for when they gave your story a chance. And we all know what happens when a story fails to meet expectations…it does not spread.

Take the time to work up some dazzling satisfactions of these conventions…and you’ll find that you’ll be well on your way to solving the rest of the riddles of your global love story.

 

You, Inc.

[This is Post #3 in our new series, “The Professional Mindset.”]

Cary Grant and Victor McLaglen in “Gunga Din.”

 

I had a friend named Victoria when I was working in Hollywood. Victoria was a successful screenwriter, very much a role model for me. One day Victoria took me out to lunch and gave me some insight into how she handled herself as a professional in “this town.”

 

Steve, you and I are going up every day against Twentieth-Century Fox and Warner Bros. and Paramount. They’re our competition. We’ve got to be just as organized as they are, just as tough, and just as smart.

 

Victoria told me how she organized herself mentally to compete in this arena.

 

Fox has a slate of pictures in development, right? I’ve got one too. Warners has a five-year plan. I’ve got one too. Everything the studios do, I do. I’m not just as organized as they are, I’m more organized. And I can react ten times faster than they can.

 

I immediately adopted Victoria’s mental model.

Have you ever worked for a corporation? Then you know about Monday morning status meetings. [See pp. 97-98 in The War of Art.] The group assembles in the conference room or the boss’s office. Plans are discussed, assignments are given out. The boss’s secretary types up an Action List and distributes it. Now every team member knows where every ongoing project stands and what action is required of him or her for the coming week.

I adopted that plan exactly. I still work that way.

Every Monday morning I have a meeting with myself. I go over everything I’ve got to do in the coming week. I assign myself tasks and set myself goals and deadlines. I type up an Action List and distribute it to myself. If I succeed through the week, I reward myself. If I screw up, I kick myself in the ass.

The Professional Mindset begins with a radical reconceptualization of ourselves as artists and entrepreneurs.

When we adopt the Professional Mindset we stop thinking of ourselves as individuals.

We start thinking of ourselves as enterprises.

After I’d been in Hollywood for a few years, I realized that many screenwriters worked as one-man corporations. They provided their writing services not as themselves but as “loan-outs” from their businesses. Their writing contracts were f/s/o—“for services of”—themselves.

I formed my own corporation the minute I could afford to.

Why did this idea appeal to me? Not just for the tax benefits or the advantages involving medical insurance.

I loved the metaphor.

I loved the psychology.

If I think of myself as me-the-writer, I’m a fragile, isolated individual. I’m hesitant. I’m insecure. I’m vulnerable.

But if I reconceive myself as Me, Inc., I’m no longer so alone in the world.

I’m now an entity, like Apple or Fedex or General Dynamics.

I’m an operation.

I’m an enterprise.

As Sgt. Archibald Cutter (Cary Grant) declared to Sgt. ‘Mac’ MacChesney (Victor McLaglen) in Gunga Din, as he set out to find the Temple of Gold:

 

You’re not looking at a soldier, MacChesney, you’re looking at an expedition! Stand aside! Make way for the expedition!

 

Remember, our enemy as writers is not the marketplace or the competition.

The enemy is Resistance.

The enemy is our own internal self-sabotage.

Thinking of myself as a corporation gave me an invaluable weapon against Resistance.

I could no longer say to myself (or, more accurately, allow my own Resistance to say to me), “Steve, you’re a loser. That last piece of work was garbage, and you’re gonna follow it up with more garbage, etc.”

Now I say to myself, “Okay, the team suffered a bit of a setback. Perhaps our instincts were not as spot-on as we had thought. Let’s schedule a meeting with ourselves to regroup and decide on next steps.”

I may still be myself-the-writer, but I’m also myself-the-CEO. Under pressure, the writer may fall prey to self-doubt and impulses of self-destruction. But the CEO maintains his cool. He’ll send the writer to Palm Springs for a three-day vacation if he thinks that’ll get him back to his old self. Or he’ll put him up against the wall and read him the Riot Act.

Either way, I/me/my company are operating at the same professional level as the corporations we are competing against. We are the Google and the Facebook and the Tesla of our own mind.

Those Fortune 500 corporations are not going to falter and neither are we. We’re as self-energized as they are, as self-organized, and as self-sustaining. There is nothing they can do in their sphere that we can’t do in ours.

Stand back, MacChesney! Make way for the expedition!

 

 

 

 

 

The Creative Penn

My last few posts have focused on the importance of growing your own platform (“Common Sense” and “Should Writers Be Paid For Everything?“).

Now for an example, via Joanna Penn, a.k.a. The Creative Penn.

If you visit Joanna’s site, you’ll learn something new. That’s a promise—and a personal experience. She’s always teaching and thus I’m always learning when I step into her world. She’s honest with her experiences, clear with her voice, and generous with her knowledge.

The site itself is organized and deep (in both quantity and quality of content)—the product of YEARS of work.

One of the things I like the most about Joanna is that she’s “out there.” She always seems to be traveling (or our correspondence and her travel exist on the same cycle) and taking in the world around her. What I pull in on the other side is a worldview from an author who has a life in and outside of publishing, who has the unique ability of being able to go narrow and understand the big picture, too.

I’m partial to Joanna’s podcasts, especially this most recent podcast with Steve.

Spend the weekend digging into Joanna’s site. Go deep. Visit often. Learn.

Tk Ths Job n Shove It

 

[This is Post #2 in our new series, “The Professional Mindset.”]

 

When you and I were working on the line at Ford in Dearborn, we had to worry about our production quotas, our standards of workmanship, our supervisor’s evaluations of us.

What we didn’t have to worry about was the structure of our day.

That structure was imposed on us from outside.

Nope, we ain’t making these no more.

Then one day we quit.

Suddenly we were artists.

We were entrepreneurs.

We thought it would be easy. We were free! Nothing could stop us!

It turned out to be the hardest thing we’d ever done.

Suddenly, like Dorothy swept up from Kansas or Luke following Obi-wan Kenobi, we had embarked upon our own Hero’s Journey. We had left the Ordinary World and entered the Inverted World, the Extraordinary World.

In this new world, all things became possible. Our life could change. Our future could change. Our prospects could change.

There was only one problem: we ourselves had to change.

We could not survive in the Extraordinary World using the mindset that had worked for us in the Ordinary World.

How exactly did we have to change?

 

We had to make the mental shift from externally-imposed discipline to self-discipline.

 

This, in one sentence, is the difference between the laborer-for-hire and the entrepreneur.

This is the Professional Mindset.

 

I begin each day of my life with a ritual. I wake up at 5:30 A.M., put on my workout clothes, my leg-warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st Street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours [before heading to my dance studio to begin the day’s work.] The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed my ritual.

 

Do you see the Professional Mindset in this passage from Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit?

I’ve quoted these sentences before, and I’m sure I’ll cite them again and again because they so eloquently articulate the Mindset of the Artist.

Encapsulated within Ms. Tharp’s morning ritual are virtually all the qualities of mental toughness that the artist/entrepreneur needs:

Self-motivation.

Self-discipline.

Self-reinforcement.

Self-validation.

Self-belief.

And they’re all wrapped up in the artist/entrepreneur’s secret package: habit.

When you and I worked on the line at Dearborn, we didn’t need the Professional Mindset. Ford supplied that for us.

Ford told us when to show up for work and where. It told us what attitude we must have when we arrived for work and what state of mind we must maintain throughout the day (cheerful, alert, patient, collaborative, committed, professional, imbued with aspiration for excellence and a vision of the big picture melded simultaneously to the capacity for attention to detail.)

Ford told us how many hours we had to stay on the job, how many days a week, how many months a year. It told us when we could go to lunch, when we could take a vacation, when we could leave the line to heed nature’s call.

Ford even supplied a factory whistle to tell us when the day was over and we could go home.

We were not amateurs at Ford. We were professionals. But we were professionals whose professionalism was imposed upon us from outside by our employer, under penalty of disciplinary action, penalty of fine, penalty of termination.

There’s nothing wrong with any of the rules or strictures that Ford or any other company imposes on its employees. If you and I were running a similar enterprise, we’d make our workers do exactly the same. It’s how good cars get made. It’s how professional work gets done. It’s how a business survives and prospers.

What exactly, we might then ask, is the Professional Mindset … the mindset of the individual who has left the factory and has set herself up as an artist and an entrepreneur on her own?

What should she do differently from when she worked on the line?

 

Answer: We do exactly what we did when we were working for Ford, only instead of Ford telling us what to do, we tell ourselves.

 

Instead of Ford setting the agenda, we set it.

We decide what our goal is—and how we intend to reach it.

We decide how much we’re willing to sacrifice to reach that goal.

We decide how many hours we will work (our total, bank on it, will be MUCH HIGHER than it was at Ford) and how many weeks and months per year.

We decide where we will work.

We decide when.

And with whom.

We decide what time we get up and what time we go to bed. We assign our own vacations and our own days off. (We also assign all-nighters and working weekends.)

We alone will be the arbiters of our success.

We’ll give ourselves a raise if we deserve it.

And we’ll kick ourselves in the butt when we screw up.

We will be our own boss, our own employer, our own mentor and teacher and psychiatrist.

Can you make that mental shift?

Can you flip that switch in your head?

Can you be your own master, run your own show without adult supervision?

If your goal is to be a writer or an artist or an entrepreneur, you can’t do it any other way.

 

 

 

 

Love Story Cheat Sheet/Obligatory Scenes

If the lovers never “meet,” can the love story work?

This is the fifth in my series about love story. If you’d like to catch up, here is the first one, here is the second one, here is the third one and here is the fourth one.

What scenes must be in every Love Story?

While the following list may seem obvious, you’d be surprised how many amateur writers fail to deliver these essential must-haves. Or if they do deliver them, they toss them off with an uninspired let’s get this over with sensibility, thus disappointing readers looking for something singular and magical.

Lovers Meet Scene.

In order to tell a love story well, we need to bring the two people together.

Duh…

But what if you decided to write a love story in which the lovers don’t actually meet face to face?

Could you do that?

Would it work?

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff, published in 1970 before our crazy social networking world, worked and the two lovers never met. It’s a memoir/love story with a devastating climax. But it abides the lovers meet scene nevertheless.

You see, the two lovers meet via the UK and US post offices. And their chaste metaphysical connection is absolutely irresistible. The book was so heart wrenching and delivered such an innovative form of love story that it had very successful stage, television and feature film adaptations.

The movie with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins is a guaranteed rainy day delight. Especially for us sentimental book nerds who yearn for the days when Manhattan had a used book store just a few doors down from our favorite independent movie theater (And there was one of those in every neighborhood) where we’d meet our dates twenty minutes before the Sunday Double Indemnity/Maltese Falcon double feature. (Note to Elon Musk…get working on that time travel machine!)

Confession of Love Scene

This is the scene when one of the lovers declares that he/she is in love with the other. Hey, we’ve all been in that scene ourselves, right?  Gets your stomach churning just thinking about it.

You don’t want to mess up this scene. And no, they don’t literally have to say “I Love YOU!” Steve wrote about this scene here.

Where do you put this scene in your global structure?

Well, where you choose to put it will inform the rest of the story…just like where you choose to put the “Lovers Meet” or any of the others that follow.

A lot of writers decide that this scene is best in the middle build. Jane Austen did that with Pride and Prejudice and she made out pretty well. That novel still sells more than 400,000 copies a year, just in the English language. Not bad for a 204 year old book.

A movie that placed this scene as the ending payoff climax in one of its eight! mini-plot love stories is Love Actually, written by Richard Curtis. Two of those, though, were not “love with the possibility of sex” as I’ve been defining love story (the bromance story between the singer and his manager and the child crush subplot).

I’m referring to the unrequited love story between the best friend of the groom who marries Keira Knightley at the beginning of the movie. Saturday Night Live did a great parody of this scene recently using Kate Mckinnon reprising her impersonation of Hilary Clinton. I’ll not spoil it if you haven’t seen the movie, a real cheese-fest that you either surrender to or find treacly and impossible.

First Kiss/Intimate Connection Scene

What many call the “first kiss” scene, I add “intimate connection” to further clarify. The reason being that many great love stories never have the lovers kiss in the narrative. Pride and Prejudice is a perfect example. No one ever kisses in the novel and it’s delightful that they never do. Check our Lawrence Kasdan’s film Body Heat (Film Noir Crime/Obsession Love Story) for a killer first kiss scene if you really want a literal interpretation.

So baring a kiss as the driving climax of this scene, an intimate connection works just as well. The intimate connection scene in Pride and Prejudice is when Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet discover the facile wit and intelligence that the other possesses. This connection occurs in Chapter Six when Elizabeth, noticing Mr. Darcy’s “satirical eye,” gooses him by confronting him for listening in to her conversation with another man…

“Did you not think, Mr. Darcy, that I expressed myself uncommonly well just now, when I was teasing Colonel Forster to give us a ball at Meryton?”

“With great energy; but it is always a subject which makes a lady energetic.”

“You are severe on us.”

Is there any doubt that these two are meant for each other?

Their verbal teasing is the stuff of intimate connection, which becomes a ritual between them (a convention which I’ll write about in the next post), and is as delightful for the reader to experience as it must have been for Austen to write.

Austen’s “First Kiss” scene is so much better in my opinion than them stealing a kiss in the moonlight after too much champagne. Mr. Darcy and Ms. Bennet would never be so stupid as to drink too much champagne.

Lovers Break Up

This scene is the one where many writers pull their punches.

It’s the equivalent to mystery/crime/thriller writers who don’t go to the end of the line with their “perfect crime” scenarios. Amateur crime writers bake in solutions to their crimes so that they know how their protagonist/hero will come to figure out the criminal before they begin writing. That’s a big mistake. The big work to explore before you write a crime story is to create the perfect crime. And then challenge yourself to mastermind a way to solve it. You must wear both hats. And the antagonist’s hat in the crime story is even more important than the protagonist’s.

Similarly, the tendency for love story writers is to avoid breaking up the lovers too definitively. They want to leave some wiggle room for them to get back together. They do this so that they’ll know weeks or months before they write the scene how they’ll solve the inevitable “Lovers Reunite Scene.” Which is the final resolution of a courtship drama no matter if the lovers commit or part. More on that later.

That’s a mistake (leaving the easy possibility of them getting back together) because you’ll inevitably telegraph how they’ll reconcile to the reader long before it happens. Remember that the “how they reconcile” is the fuel that gets us to the ending payoff. And readers hate it when they figure out how your ending payoff will payoff.

The trick to this scene is to remember that the lovers need to have an internal change before they’ll be capable of coming back together. More on that in the next post.

Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy both have to change their worldviews before either of them will be capable of authentic commitment. Both must examine their “pride” and “prejudice,” and actively commit to a change of behavior guided by their enlightened point of view.

So when the lovers break up in Pride and Prejudice they do so in an extraordinary way. Austen combines the “Confession of Love” scene with the “Lovers Break Up” scene in a tour de force.

After Mr. Darcy confesses that despite his better judgment, he can’t stop himself from wishing to add Elizabeth Bennet to his possessions and thus he’s decided to make her dreams comes true and accept her as his wife…Elizabeth hits him with double barrels of vitriol. Not only does she decline him because of his arrogant pride, she attacks him and his social class with fury. She essentially tells him that he’s the last man on earth that she would ever love.

This happens just about the middle of the middle build of the novel (Chapter 34 of a 61 Chapter novel)… Just perfect.

Proof of Love Scene

This is the most important scene for the love story. Without a satisfying Proof of Love Scene, your love story will not work.

Like the “Hero at the mercy of the villain” scene for a thriller or the “Exposure of the criminal scene” in a crime story or “The big event” scene in a performance story, the Proof of Love Scene is the thing that every reader is unconsciously waiting for. This is the scene that will turn the entire story from negative to positive or positive to negative.

It’s the core event…the thing that will push someone into committing themselves until death.

The key component in the Proof of Love scene is that one of the lovers must SACRIFICE for the other’s happiness WITHOUT HOPE THAT THEIR ACTION WILL DO THEM ANY GOOD WHATSOEVER. Loving someone and acting on that love by personally suffering… all the while knowing that your sacrifice will not change the other’s mind…is the proof of authentic love.

Authentic love does not require reciprocity.   A tough nut to accept, but until you do, you’ll be incapable of living the dream.  Remember that this notion is part of the romantic myth which has evolved from the Age of Chivalry to the present.

So how does Jane Austen handle this high task?

She beautifully and gracefully allows Mr. Darcy to prove his love…off the page. This choice was incredibly courageous (not having him make some grand on the page gesture could have really backfired), but this decision is the thing (well one of them) that makes Pride and Prejudice a perfect story.

Why? Because it is perfectly in character.

Austen decided that Mr. Darcy would arrange to solve the Bennet family’s impossible situation (it is suggested that death would be preferable to the predicament they face) behind the scenes. She does not show us the particulars or negotiations he must accomplish to succeed at this task. Rather she has third parties inform Elizabeth about his actions.  And their betrayal of his confidence is in character too. These actions provide yet more proof of the fallibility of the average person and the necessity of forgiveness, something Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy have had to painfully learn throughout the novel.

When Elizabeth thanks Mr. Darcy for his efforts, he quickly changes the subject. It’s not to be discussed. He did it simply because he is enlightened now, and knows that love is more important than pride, even in the service of unreciprocated love. His actions are merely those of a proper gentleman.

What Darcy sacrifices is part of his fortune and his pride in order to save his beloved. And he does it without hesitation too.

Mr. Darcy’s proof of love turns the global story and convinces Elizabeth to devote herself to him without reservation. By the way, Elizabeth proves her love for Darcy in an earlier scene.  That one, though, is on the page. As it should be.  Elizabeth is the central protagonist after all.

The Lovers Reunite Scene

This is usually the resolution scene of the entire love story, most especially the courtship drama or comedy. That is, the lovers get back together and agree to commit to one another. Or decide it’s best that they part ways.

SPOILER ALERT

The recent film, Manchester By The Sea (a very courageous work of writing supported by impeccable performances) used a subplot love story to girder its global Redemption Plot.

The Lovers Reunite Scene in this case does not result in the two lovers getting back together. In fact, it serves as impetus for a heartbreaking negative outcome that turns the global plot irreversibly.

What makes this choice so courageous is that the writer and director Kenneth Lonergan decided that he had to be truthful to the realism of the world he created on the page.

When he was writing, let alone when he was directing, Lonergan had to know that ending his story with a dark negative would really hurt the movie’s chances commercially. But he did it anyway. He didn’t put in a feel good ending. I doubt he ever considered it. Even though redemption relief is what we all want when we watch it…sometimes we just can’t get what we want.

Because the characters he created would not end well.

Contrast this dark decision to another realistic film, Good Will Hunting, a story that explores a similar blue-collar world as Manchester By The Sea. I really enjoyed it and thought it was very well done, but anyone who truly understood the characters in that film knows deep down that it would not have ended well in real life.

The self-hatred the protagonist was consumed by in Good Will Hunting would not have been slayed after one cathartic therapy session…or even a thousand. But that was that key scene that left audiences smiling when they walked out of the theater and it is what pushed the film to a 225 million dollar box office.

Manchester By The Sea won’t come close to Good Will Hunting numbers. By design. It’s not because it’s not truthful to the characters or to the world’s those characters represent. It’s because it is truthful.

To be fair, I think when we’re younger (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon were in their 20s when they wrote Good Will Hunting) we tend to think that lightening bolt catharsis moments are possible. We think one good cry will prime us to move forward.  It will get us into our metaphorical life journey cars and we’ll never look back.

A decade or two down the road, though, that kind of magical thinking proves tenuous.

The truth is that our deeply negative experiences refuse our prepared place for them in the rear view mirror. Cry a river, talk yourself silly.  No matter. Some just won’t budge from the shotgun seat, their methamphetamine chatter inflicting an inescapable internal torment. Their sounds tend to rise above our better angels’ counter-programming reminders coming from the back seat. For whatever evolutionary reason, loss and regret argue better than gain and satisfaction.

Some things we don’t beat.  We endure them.

I think it’s interesting that Matt Damon was a key driver behind the making of Manchester By The Sea. In many ways it’s what could have happened to poor Will Hunting further on down the road.

 

Writer = Entrepreneur

 

Are you a writer?

A filmmaker?

A dancer?

Then you’re an entrepreneur.

It’s also why I read Seth Godin’s blog every day.

You have more in common with the young Steve Jobs and the early Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg than you do with your dad who worked all his life for AT+T or your aunt who’s five months away from collecting her pension from the Post Office.

[Today’s post, by the way, is the kick-off for a new extended series that I’m calling, until someone comes up with a catchier title, “The Professional Mindset.” Over the succeeding weeks we’re going to examine the inner world of the writer and the artist, not in terms of craft or even of overcoming Resistance, but of self-management.]

What emotional and psychological skills does a writer or artist need to conceive a project, to initiate it in the face of self-doubt and the indifference and even outright opposition of others, to hang tough through the “second act horrors,” to bring the work to completion, and then to take it to market out there in the cold, cruel world.

How should she think of herself, this writer or artist? What is her most effective self-conception? Warrior? Mother? Jedi knight?

Step One, it seems to me, is to recognize that all of us–writers, artists, filmmakers, actors, musicians–are entrepreneurs.

We don’t work for the Man.

We work for ourselves.

These are two completely different modes of operating in the world and of thinking about ourselves.

One way looks outside itself—to a boss, an authority figure, an established organization of which it is a part–for daily structure, for validation, for monetary remuneration.

The other way generates these from within. From her own self and her own labors.

This is an earth-shaking, life-altering, monumental watershed of the mind and the heart.

What is an entrepreneur anyway?

My online dictionary says the word comes from the French, entreprende, “to undertake.” It’s related to “enterprise.”

 

A person who sets up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit.

 

Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach defines an entrepreneur as

 

Someone who has an exceptionally personal relationship with the 15th of the month.

 

Meaning payday.

Payday where nobody is going to cut you a check except yourself.

Payday when YOU are the only one generating income.

The artist, if you think about it, is the quintessential entrepreneur.

On the upside, she possesses total workplace freedom. She can tackle any project she wants, execute it any way she wishes, take it to market any way she chooses. She can write a novel, audition for a Broadway play, compose a symphony, lay out the next Assassins’ Creed.

No one is stopping her. No one is telling her “it can’t be done.” She can rise as high as her gifts will carry her.

On the downside, she is all alone in a stark, indifferent universe.

No one guarantees her an income. No one provides daily structure. No one motivates her, no one mentors her, no one pats her on the back.

That’s an entrepreneur.

Over the coming weeks we’re going to examine what it takes—emotionally and psychologically—to succeed in this raw, often cruel, Wild West universe.

We’re going to take a hard look at the Professional Mindset and how it applies to those of us seeking to make our living/satisfy our soul at the intersection of Art and Commerce.

 

 

 

Should Writers Be Paid For Everything?

I received a question following my last post (“Common Sense“), which is tied to writers being paid for their work, and I’m still thinking about the question, and my answer, almost two weeks later.

Here’s the question:

You argue that writers shouldn’t work for free, but isn’t that exactly what they are doing when they spend time on social media? What about their blogs?

I see both as examples of writing as marketing, and no one is paying them.

Doesn’t that go against your point?

Here’s my answer:

On your question, I approach it as I do my yard.

If I mow/rake/weed/etc my own yard, I have to do the work, but I benefit in the future. In the beginning, my yard might be crap, but in a few years it could be a glorious masterpiece due to all the work put into it. I don’t get monetary payment up front, but I learn how to do things on my own, gain professional experience, and benefit from the hours of repeated actions, which help me trouble-shoot in the future, and make me more knowledgeable about the craft. When I sell my house, that yard becomes a selling point and thus has monetary worth.

If someone else maintains my yard, he goes home after doing the work, and doesn’t get any of the future benefits – but, he does get paid, and my neighbor might hire him because he likes the look of my lawn.

So if my site/book/etc is my lawn, I can choose to do the work myself or hire someone else – but in the end the site/book/etc is mine and I benefit from the growth (and possible future sale), which is a type of payment itself.

If I write for someone else’s site, however, there’s no ownership in the future, so I want payment now, kind of like the guy/crew maintaining yards. I can’t count on a neighbor hiring me. I need something that pays the bills.

So both models offer a form of payment — one more immediate than the other. As the person doing the work, I decide which form I’ll take. If I’m writing for “exposure,” I’d rather do it on my own terms instead of helping to drive traffic to people who have money to pay – Huff Post – and don’t.

Going back over the question and answer now, my issue with writing for free isn’t the giving away work for free part.

Long-time readers of this site know that Steve, Shawn, and I are advocates of giving away work as a good way to reach new audiences. HOWEVER, we set the terms for what is given away — and how it is given away — and base the giveaways within the Black Irish Books and Steven Pressfield platforms, neither of which popped up overnight. We’ve been at it on Steve’s site for almost ten years, and he had a static site long before that.

My biggest issue is giving away your opportunity to build your own platform.

When you look at a platform with large audiences, be careful of thinking a place on those platforms will fast-track your success. It won’t. To quote Seth Godin’s “How to Be Heard” post from earlier this week, “Convert six people before you try to convert sixty.”

Resist the temptation  to jump to where millions of others are hanging out.

If you’re going to bust your ass, do it for yourself, not for a platform that will either 1) make its executives (and not you) rich off of a sale or 2) take your work down with it when it fails.

Do what grows you before you help grow someone else.

50 Ways to say “I Love You”

A case could be made that many, many books and movies are about one thing and one thing only: getting Person X to say to Person Y, “I love you.”

Paul Newman and Robert Redford saying it in subtext in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”

The trick is our characters can never use those blatant, overt words. That wouldn’t be cool.

It wouldn’t ring true to life.

And it wouldn’t possess the power and the impact we want.

In fiction, “I love you” has to come in subtext, not text.

Here’s one of the ways William Goldman did it in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

It’s the final scene. The outlaws are shot up and bleeding in a cramped hideout in a town square somewhere in Bolivia. Surrounding them, outside, are hundreds of uniformed, rifle-toting Federales. The instant our two “bandidos yanquis” step out through the door … well, we all know what’s coming.

BUTCH

I got a great idea where we should go next.

SUNDANCE

Well I don’t wanna hear it.

BUTCH

You’ll change your mind once I tell you.

SUNDANCE

It was your great ideas that got us here in the first place. I never wanna hear another one of your great ideas.

BUTCH

Australia. I figured secretly you wanted to know so I told you: Australia.

SUNDANCE

What’s so great about Australia?

BUTCH

They speak English there.

SUNDANCE

They do?

BUTCH tells Sundance about the banks, the beaches, and the women Down Under.

SUNDANCE

It’s a long way, though, isn’t it?

BUTCH

Aw, everythings’s always gotta be perfect with you.

SUNDANCE

I just don’t wanna get there and find out it stinks, that’s all.

In Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, junior exec Baxter (Jack Lemmon) has been in love with elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley Maclaine) for the whole movie. But Shirley is blind to Jack’s infatuation. Instead she’s in a doomed affair with married exec Mr. Sheldrake (Fred McMurray). When Shirley tries to poison herself after Sheldrake dumps her, Jack saves her life by getting her stomach pumped and sitting up all night with her playing cards. Next day he stands up to Sheldrake (who’s his boss), quits his job, etc., all the while believing Shirley still has no romantic interest in him.

Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon in “The Apartment”

In the final scene Shirley sees the light, races to Jack’s apartment just in time to catch him before he packs up and leaves town.

MISS KUBELIK

What’d you do with the cards?

BAXTER

In there.

Shirley gets the deck. sits beside Jack on the couch.

BAXTER

What about Mr. Shelkdrake?

MIS KUBELIK

We’ll send him a fruitbcake every Christmas. Cut.

He cuts a deuce, she cuts a ten.

BAXTER

I love you, Miss Kubilek

MISS KUBELIK

You got a two, I got a ten. I win.

BAXTER

Did you hear what I said, I absolutely adore you.

MISS KUBELIK

Shut up and deal.

Joe E. Brown and Jack Lemmon in “Some Like It Hot”

Billy Wilder topped this of course with the last line of Some Like It Hot, when Jerry (Jack Lemmon), hiding out from the mob in drag with a girl band, explains to his zillionaire suitor Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown) that he can’t marry him.

JERRY

You don’t understand, Osgood. I’m a man!

OSGOOD

Well, nobody’s perfect.

Subtext beats text every time.

That’s love.

Love Story Cheat Sheet /Controlling Idea (Theme)

Matthew Macfadyen as Mr. Darcy and Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet in Joe Wright’s Adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

This is the fourth in my series about love story. If you’d like to catch up, here is the first one, here is the second one, and here is the third one.

If there is one question I get more than any other it’s this:

“Could you tell me what the controlling ideas/themes, obligatory scenes and conventions are for Genre X?”

Well, I could.

And I did go through the OSs and Cs for Thriller and Crime in The Story Grid book as well as those in the Redemption story (part of the Morality Internal Content Genre) too over at www.storygrid.com.

(And I plan on analyzing each of the twelve content genres, plus some of the reality genres too, with serious coursework specificity in mind before I leave this mortal coil…click here if you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about.)

But come on…part of being a writer is exploring the story universe you wish to enter all by your lonesome. And there’s no better way than reading a whole bunch of your favorite novels from a particular genre and then compiling a list of what they all have in common.

That’s a lot of work. I know. I’ve done it. You should too.

Getting the answers to the test so you don’t have to study is rather lame, but I get it.

Just like the next guy or gal, I like to know that something is worth learning before I book a long trip into the autodidact’s lonely intellectual desert for an extended stay.

So as I pick up where I left off with the mini-love story genre course I’ve been writing here for What It Takes, I thought I’d just throw down a three part cheat sheet for love story.

So here you go:

What’s the global value at stake in love story?

The value at stake in a love story is…duh…love.

But what spectrum of love are we talking about here?

Here is a nine level list of the varieties of romantic love from the most positive love to the most negative.

Intimacy ++++

Commitment +++

Passion ++

Attraction+

Ignorance ~

Dislike –

Hate —                       

Indifference —

Hate masquerading as love —-

(HMAL is when someone tells you how much she cares and loves you, but really she can’t stand you. Behind your back she does everything in her power to make you miserable. See Gaslight and Gone Girl.)

So when you set out to write a love story, you’ll need to make a big decision about where you will begin on the love value spectrum (hint…ignorance is a good place to start…that is when the lovers haven’t met yet) and where you’ll end up.

In the last post in this series, I discussed the three subgenres of love story. Here they are again with the movement from beginning to end indicated.

Obsession (Moves from Ignorance to Passionate Desire and usually ends negatively)

Drama (usually ends hugely negative or at most ironically; positive and negative
Comedy (usually ends positive)

Courtship (Moves from Ignorance to Commitment, or lack of Commitment)

Drama (usually ends positive, or ironically; positive and negative)
Comedy (usually ends positive, or ironically; positive and negative)

Marriage (Moves from Commitment to Intimacy, or sinks beneath Commitment negatively on the spectrum)

Drama (usually ends positive, or ironically; positive and negative)
Comedy (usually ends positive, or ironically; positive and negative)

I’ll also restate that the most commercially viable love sub-genre is the Courtship drama and/or comedy that ends positively with a concrete commitment made between the two lovers.

Controlling Idea of the Love Story (often referred to as Theme):

 Obviously, the controlling idea (theme) is crucial to the telling and commercial success of a love story.

If you decide to end your Courtship story negatively (the lovers do not end up together) you better have a damn good reason (and a sequel planned to bring them back together).

Remember that the controlling idea is about answering the how and why life has changed.

Have I mentioned before that All Stories Are About Change?

The controlling idea is a simple sentence that explains how the core value of your story fared by the ending payoff.

What caused the move from one place on the value’s spectrum to another?

So as I’ve been putting together a new love story book featuring Pride and Prejudice as the overarching case study, I’ll construct the controlling idea behind that brilliant novel.

First of all, how does it end?

It’s ends positively. The three love stories in the novel result in marriage commitments.

So lets’ begin our controlling idea to reflect that positive ending.

LOVE TRIUMPHS

Great. So now we need to add the “how it changed element” to the sentence.

So how did the love value change in Pride and Prejudice?

It moved from Ignorance (none of the lovers have met at the beginning of the novel) to Commitment. Right, of course, but let’s be more specific than that.

I’m going to focus on the primary love story of the three love stories featured…the one between Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy.

How did Mr. Darcy change? How did Elizabeth change? What were the causes of their being able to finally come together and commit with authenticity?

Mr. Darcy had to temper his pride and dispel his prejudice, right? He had to internally move from a negative worldview to a positive worldview.

At the beginning of the story, Darcy finds England’s country folk leave much to be desired. They’re, according to his myopic vision, provincial and ignorant with suspect character and generally untrustworthy. By the end, though, he sees them as having particular charms and deems them worthy of getting to know.

And Elizabeth had to have a worldview correction too, right? She had to shed her reverse prejudice and temper her pride in being above the pragmatism of her era’s mating rituals.  Interesting that Darcy and Elizabeth are so similar, isn’t it?

Elizabeth had to internally move from someone who finds all wealthy people ridiculous and abhorrent to someone who has a far better grasp of humanity. She has to mature into someone who knows that all social classes have all different kinds of people. And that class does not determine character. Even rich guys can be morally weighty and capable of romantic feeling.

Her family, which she sees as delightful and charming at the beginning of the story, ends up being far less admirable in her eyes by the end.

And the snooty upper class group as represented by the Darcy and his confidants, which she sees as nasty and negative at the beginning? She ends up actually joining that class by the end. She comes to understand that like her own tribe, the rich are made up of all sorts of different people. The rich can be like you and me.

The cause of LOVE TRIUMPHING is in the personal shifting of attitudes/worldviews by the central players involved.

So the Controlling Idea is something like:

LOVE TRIUMPHS WHEN LOVERS DISPEL THEIR IGNOBLE ATTITUDES AND EMBRACE THE VIBRANT MIX OF HUMANITY WITHIN ALL SOCIAL CLASSES.

The “Why” of the change is embodied by the phrase “the vibrant mix of humanity within all social classes.” Change is possible when there are differences in people–freethinking and moral individuals who denounce vanity in favor of authentic expression. And love is the force that will cure society, moving people from one class to another until class distinctions are no longer impediments to romantic engagement.

The “How” of the change is embodied by the phrase “Dispel their ignoble attitudes and embrace.” So that’s how Darcy and Elizabeth changed personally… Those internal changes enabled them to find their true selves and thus fall in love. If neither changed their worldview, they’d never end up together.

A wonderful controlling idea. Far ahead of its time and as moving today as it was 213 years ago.

To love with integrity requires personal worldview transformation.

Indeed.

Next up will be the cheat sheet for the conventions of love story.

Fictionalizing Your Real-Life Story

 

We said a few posts ago that sometimes we, as writers, have to tart real life up.

Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker on the evaporator farm on Tatooine

Real life is too ordinary.

It’s too interior.

It’s too boring.

We have to heighten the drama, ramp up the stakes. Otherwise readers won’t care.

But how, exactly, do we perform this wizardry?

Do we just dream up wild stuff—sex, violence, zombies—and hurl it into the stew willy-nilly?

How do we know what’s appropriate?

How can we tell when we’ve gone too far?

The answer brings me back to my favorite subject: theme.

The principle is:

 

We may fictionalize but only on-theme.

 

I was watching the movie Midnight Special (2016) last night. Have you seen it? It’s good. The film stars Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, and Adam Driver. The plot follows a young boy who possesses mysterious powers as he flees apocalyptic cultists and the NSA, protected by his father. I won’t spoil the climax for you except to say that it is wildly fictionalized … and it works completely.

Why?

Because the filmmakers fictionalized on-theme.

Midnight Special is about a father’s love for his son and the passage the father must endure to face ultimate separation. That’s the core. That’s what the story’s really about.

Michael Shannon and Jaeden Lieberher in “Midnight Special”

An alternative version could have been told very simply: a special young boy gets sick and dies, despite heroic efforts to save him by his father and mother. Perhaps that was the real story from which Midnight Special evolved.

The filmmakers ramped up the tale’s power by making the boy special special special, i.e. possessed of powers that can bring satellites down out of the sky and cause the entire US government to chase him halfway across the country.

 

We may fictionalize all we want, as long as we stay on-theme.

 

When Ernest Hemingway gave Jake Barnes, his fictional protagonist in The Sun Also Rises, an emasculating war wound, he was heightening reality indeed. But that heightened reality was 100% on-theme.

The theme of The Sun Also Rises is the soul-devastation that the horrors of WWI wreaked upon Hemingway’s “Lost Generation” contemporaries. Hence the wound.

There’s a storytelling axiom in Hollywood:

 

If horses can fly, you’ve got a story. If everything can fly, you’ve got a mess.

 

When we fictionalize on-theme, we heighten the drama legitimately. When we make sh*t up off-theme, we just produce craziness.

The first principle we talked about in this series was

 

Make the internal external

 

Or put another way

 

Make the invisible visible.

 

We can make ourselves cowboys or princesses or private eyes as long as that external story is on-theme with our real-life internal one.

What was Rocky but Sylvester Stallone’s fictionalized-on-theme rendition of his own struggles as an unknown trying to get noticed in the movie biz?

What was Luke Skywalker’s journey from the evaporator farm on Tatooine to saving the galaxy as a Jedi knight, except George Lucas’ own odyssey from his boyhood in Modesto, California to entertainment immortality? For that matter, what was American Grafitti?

Fictionalize as much as you want, but keep it on-theme.