Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 63

Common Sense

I started off 2017 digging into two publishing rabbit holes.

The first one is related to a guy named Paine. He wrote a pamphlet that went viral a few hundred years ago and is still being read today.

Not long after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Thomas Paine hit U.S. soil. He worked, got political at pubs, and wrote. Paine toiled away on a series of letters to be run in local newspapers. After finding himself way over word count for letters, he decided to publish a pamphlet instead, titled “Common Sense.”

Here’s what your high school teacher didn’t share about “Common Sense” and Paine:

When it came time to publish, Paine went to a printer/publisher/bookseller — a guy named Robert Bell. Bell struck a deal with Paine. He’d print the pamphlet, help promote it, and then split the profits with Paine. If there weren’t any profits, Paine would “make good” with Bell on the printing. Kind of a mash-up of today’s traditional and self-publishing worlds.

Bell printed the pamphlet and then advertised it in local newspapers. Demand increased and “Common Sense” took off. Its popularity lead Paine to add an index and other commentary in advance of the next print run.

Before the reprint, however, Paine heard about the death of General Montgomery and the struggles in the north, and decided to buy mittens for the soldiers. It was winter. They were in camps. No heaters. So . . . Off Paine went to Bell, to obtain his share of the profits.

Bell said there weren’t any profits.

No profits? How was that possible? There was a demand for a reprint, thus there had to be profits.

If this article was the movie Goodfellas, this would be the time to cue a voice-over from Ray Liotta, giving the full skinny on exactly how things went down.

Think of all the stories of young artists who sign a deal too good to be true — the kind where they do the creative work and someone else finances ads and videos and everything else, and somehow the young artist sells millions of albums but the only one making money is the publishing house, because profits aren’t available until everyone BUT the artist is paid.

Paine and the printer got into a battle. A public battle. Today it would have played out in tweets. Back then it rolled out in long letters/articles printed in local newspapers. Think of political groups today that write a letter to the president or someone else on their shit-list, then have 100+ famous people sign it, and then take out a full-page ad in the New York Times to print it. Except with Paine and Bell, the two didn’t stick to one letter. They kept at it for a month, letters back and forth in newspapers — and the public ate it up.

During the fighting, Paine took “Common Sense” to another printer. The demand was high, so the new printer outsourced some of the printing to two other printers — and this time Paine paid the bill. While this was going on, Bell released his own new version, which included packaging “Common Sense” with other non-Paine content. His version sold, and he and Paine continued fighting.

In the end, Paine didn’t make any money on the publication of “Common Sense,” but he did help fuel a revolution, and American kids today can’t get through school without hearing about “Common Sense.”

(This is my abbreviated version. Read the full publication history, including reproductions of Paine’s and Bell’s fighting columns, via The Bibliographical Check List of Common Sense With An Account of Its Publication  by Richard Gimbel, starting at page 15.)

I started digging into this week’s second rabbit hole following Ev Williams’ announcement that Medium is laying off staff and shuttering offices in Washington, D.C., and New York City.

As I read Nate Hoffelder’s take, “Medium Lays Off A Third of Its Staff, Realizes Stealing Underpants is Not a Viable Business Model” and then reread his column from last year, “On Moving a Blog to Medium” I thought about Paine and how the more things change the more things stay the same.

I used to receive e-mails asking why Steve wasn’t on Huffington Post. This past year that question morphed into, “Why isn’t Steve on Medium?”

Here’s a bit of a ramble. Stick with me. I promise I’ll circle back around.

I subscribe to what Wil Wheaton wrote about a year ago, about not working with outlets that don’t pay. “Exposure” doesn’t pay the bills.

Huffington Post sold for $315 MILLION and Ariana Huffington went home with $21 MILLION and a lot of writers never saw a penny of it.

But… Exposure, right?

Well what about the people just starting you might ask? They don’t have Wil’s or Steve’s platform.

To answer this question let’s head to Louis C.K., and reread the quote I pulled from him back in 2013.

In a New York Times interview with Louis C.K., Dave Itzkoff commented, “You have the platform. You have the level of recognition.”

Louis C.K. replied with a question: “So why do I have the platform and the recognition?”

Itzkoff answered, “At this point you’ve put in the time.”

Pause after you read Louis C.K.’s follow-up:

There you go. There’s no way around that. There’s people that say: “It’s not fair. You have all that stuff.” I wasn’t born with it. It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you’re new at this — and by “new at it,” I mean 15 years in, or even 20 — you’re just starting to get traction. Young musicians believe they should be able to throw a band together and be famous, and anything that’s in their way is unfair and evil. What are you, in your 20s, you picked up a guitar? Give it a minute.

Louis CK of 20+ years ago invested the time so that Louis CK of today would have a platform.

This takes us back to Wil Wheaton, and a post he did in December about working for his future self. If you operate every day in favor of Future You, you’ll eventually achieve your goals. Louis CK is one example. Steve is another. It takes time.

Outside of the fact that they aren’t paying every contributor to their platforms, the thing that has always bothered me about Medium and Huffington Post, and other similar platforms, is that artists/entrepreneurs/etc use those platforms instead of building their own platforms. That’s not Medium’s fault. That’s the artist’s decision.

It’s easier for Artist Today to post to Medium than it is to build her own site so Artist Tomorrow has a place to live when yet another publishing platform dies or becomes watered down by crap.

It takes hard work and conviction to build your own thing — and it takes relationships, which are greater investments than ad dollars.

I don’t wish Medium ill, but I don’t suggest building homes on their island either. We can look back at Thomas Paine and see the same crap happening now as happened then. It’s always harder, but Future You will be happy if you use Medium and other platforms as a tool instead of THE answer. And, if there is only one thing you do, make it an investment in relationships. You need people in your corner more than anything else. That’s the bit that Medium and others don’t seem to get. It isn’t just about content and ads. It’s about the conversations and relationships you build around and in addition to that content. (Additional Medium-related articles sharing two publishers’ perspectives, one of which launched on Medium the day of Williams’ announcement: “Unexpected News from the Establishment” and “Medium and There Is Only One R.”)

As a side: A few weeks ago we started posting Steve’s Writing Wednesdays posts on Medium and LinkedIn, just to test the waters. Will we connect with new readers? Maybe. Will any of the articles be originals for those platforms? No. We’re fine with a visit, but they’ll never be home.

Supporting Characters in Your Real Life

Remember when Michael Jordan got into trouble for referring to his teammates on the Chicago Bulls as “my supporting cast?”

William Holden in “The Wild Bunch”

He was, of course, only telling the truth. (Though Scotty Pippen, we must admit, has a right to be a little miffed.)

But back to you and me and our novels based on our real lives. What about our spouses and kids and bosses and friends and the other crazy characters we’re going to write about? They may not like to think of themselves this way, but ..

They are supporting characters in our story.

Putting their egos aside, the question becomes

How do we as writers portray these individuals?

Are we free to change them? Can we put dialogue into their mouths that the real-life personalities never said or would never say? Can we have them do things that they didn’t do or wouldn’t do in real life?

Yes, yes, and yes.

We said in an earlier post that you and I, crafting a fictional version of our real-life story, have to detach ourselves emotionally from our real selves (if we ourselves are the hero of the story we’re telling). We need to step back and gain perspective. We must be able to see our real-life self coolly and objectively, the way a stranger would see him or her. Then and only then can we write that character on the page.

Same for supporting characters.

Your mother Joann, as soon as you start to write about her, has ceased to be Joann. She is now “Joann.” Your feckless ex-husband Dwayne has now become “Dwayne.” (Or whatever name you choose to call him.)

Let’s return for a moment to my favorite subject: theme.

Flashing back to our basic principles of storytelling, we recall that

The protagonist embodies the theme.

And that principle’s corollary:

Every supporting character represents an aspect of the theme.

(By the way, this same principle applies not just to characters, but to animals, to inanimate objects, to Jack Nicholson’s sliced-up nose in Chinatown, and to William Holden’s six-gun in The Wild Bunch. None of these exists only as itself. Each represents an aspect of the theme.)

In The Knowledge, my cat Teaspoon (the fictional version of my real-life cat Mo) represented my character’s Muse. In other words, an aspect of the theme.

In The Knowledge, the city of New York represented the greater creative life, both internal and external, that I (my character, Stretch) was trying to learn to navigate. So did the city of London.

The fictional Nicolette represented a realized artist. She was the ideal that Stretch was trying to achieve. Again, an aspect of the theme.

The fictional Peter represented an artist who went too far into the potential insanity of the creative process. His fate stood for the dark side of this enterprise. Like Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin, he represented the fear Stretch had for his own future.

What about the real people upon whom these characters were based? Were they exactly as The Knowledge portrayed them?

No.

The real woman upon whom Nicolette was based was a true, realized artist. But she never read me the Riot Act like she did in Chapter 32 in The Knowledge. Her diatribe in that chapter is a straight-up recital of the book’s theme. I, the writer, put those words into “Nicolette’s” mouth.

This is exactly what you have to do with your mom Joann and your ex-husband Dwayne.

What does “Joann” represent in your story? What aspect of the theme does “Dwayne” stand for? Should there be a scene where “Joann” dumps a platter of steaming spaghetti down the front of “Dwayne’s” trousers? Should “Dwayne” dive into the frigid waters of Sheepshead Bay to save “Joann” when she spills off the stern of your second husband’s fishing boat?

Yes, if the scenes mean something to the story. Yes, if they are on-theme. Yes, if what Joann represents and what Dwayne represents come together in that way as part of your story.

This is how a writer thinks.

This is how a writer structures a story.

The real Joann may be pissed off (or she may be delighted) by the Pasta Scene or the Sheepshead Bay Rescue. But that should be no concern to you, the writer. And it certainly won’t mean a thing to the reader.

You are telling a story about “yourself” and “Joann” and “Dwayne” and all the other nutty inhabitants of your own nutty life. Your fidelity is to that story—and to the fortunate strangers who will read it.

The real Joann and the real Dwayne? They’ll just have to get over it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Power of Negative Thinking

[I’ll return to my Love Story mini-series in my next What it Takes post in the new year.  In the meantime, this oldy by goody from 2015 is worth another look. ]

So just how do you take your story to the end of the line…to the limits of human experience?

The storyteller needs a tool to not only understand this concept, but to evaluate whether or not they have successfully done so. And if you’re writing a big story, you have to go to the end of the line.

Positive Thinking Gets All the Press

The trick to figuring out how to do that is discovering what Robert McKee calls the negation of the negation of your global story value.  Once you understand the negation of the negation of a global story value you will discover whether or not your draft or your murky foolscap sketch for a story has legs.  And in the process, if you do this work early and often, you’ll be able to clearly understand the obligatory scenes and promises that you are making to the reader by your choice of genre and or mix of genres.

Let’s take a step back and look at Story values again.

What the Hell am I talking about when I use the phrase “story value?”

A Story value has nothing to do with “family values” or financial currency.  A story value is simply a human experience (a judgment of reality) that can change from positive to negative or negative to positive.  It’s best to just list a whole slew of them so that you’ll get the gist.  Alive/Dead, Truth/Lie, Love/Hate, Justice/Injustice, Hope/Despair, Good/Evil, Right/Wrong, Happy/Sad, Naïve/Experienced, Young/Old, Smart/Dumb, Rich/Poor, Freedom/Slavery, Honor/Shame, Chosen/Ignored, etc.

Where one goes off track is in forgetting that these story values aren’t just black and white polarities.

There are progressive degrees of positivity or negativity for each.

For example, the opposite of love may be hate, but there is something in between love and hate that is worse than love but less than hate.  That in between is called indifference.  And there is also something worse than hate.  That something is what Robert McKee coined as the “negation of the negation.”  And for the love/hate spectrum, the negation of the negation is “hate masquerading as love” or “self-hatred.”

Let’s look at a very popular external content genre, crime fiction, and examine the core value at stake in four different ways. [It’s not necessary, but if you’d like to dive deeper into what I mean about external content genres, click here]

The story value at stake for crime fiction is JUSTICE.

A crime has been committed.

Will the crime be solved?

Will the perpetrator be brought to justice? That’s basically it.

By choosing the crime genre the first promise you are making to a reader is an answer to these two fundamental questions.

But we’d all agree that there are varying degrees of crime right?

Stealing a piece of candy from a drugstore is far less of a crime than the wholesale slaughter of an entire village.  There is a wide spectrum of mendacity. Because there is such a wide band, the writer has a choice of how far to take his story.  As every story must progressively complicate, a crime story needs to begin one place, get more and more difficult to solve, and then end in a surprising but inevitable final solution or conundrum. Just how far you take the crime (how globally threatening it is) requires you to figure out exactly where the line ends in terms of the JUSTICE value.

To do that, we need to look at the negative progression (or degradation) of the value at stake.

So let’s begin with the POSITIVE end of the spectrum, which is JUSTICE, and place that at the very left of our degradation line. And we know that the opposite of JUSTICE is INJUSTICE, so let’s put that down the line on the right hand side, further away from the epitome of positive.

JUSTICE                    INJUSTICE

But we also all know that there’s more to the negative world than injustice.  There’s crime with extenuating circumstances…like the thief who steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving children.  Did the man steal the bread and did the owner of the store lose a valuable asset?

As Arnold Schwarzenegger would say: “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, that is true.”

But is this an offense that threatens society?

No.

So somewhere between JUSTICE and INJUSTICE lies a nether region of unfairness.  It’s unfair to the owner of the store not to be compensated for his bread. But the fact that the bread was used to feed starving children—a good outcome from a bad act—lessens the act’s venality. So between justice and injustice, let’s put UNFAIRNESS, which is something in between black and white.

JUSTICE     UNFAIRNESS     INJUSTICE

Now the question arises, is there something worse than an Injustice?

The bad mojo that off the charts sociopathic narcissists bring into the world is something more than just unjust, isn’t it?  The serial killer or warlord or fascist genocidal perpetrator is emblematic of a world that is always unjust. In this kind of world, there is no justice.  By definition, it is run with complete unpredictability.  The rules are changed whenever it suits the whims or desires of a central body or figure.

That kind of more negative than the opposite JUSTICE is the world of Tyranny.

So on a straight line spectrum from positive to negative, let’s put Tyranny even further to the right of injustice.

JUSTICE     UNFAIRNESS     INJUSTICE     TYRANNY

To recap, while there is a direct opposite of Justice (injustice), the value has far more nuance than purely positive or purely negative.  There is the degree of negativity less than the direct opposite, unfairness, and the degree of negativity far more abhorrent than the direct opposite, Tyranny.

It is the darkest of the dark that McKee has termed the Negation of the Negation.

Here’s the way I would chart the spectrum of positive to negative

JUSTICE  (+)   UNFAIRNESS (+/-)     INJUSTICE (-)     TYRANNY (- -)

If we were asked to assign a power of ten number for each of these (the number one being the most positive and number ten being the most negative), it would look like this:

JUSTICE  (1)   UNFAIRNESS (3)     INJUSTICE (7)     TYRANNY (11)

If you’ve ever seen the movie SPINAL TAP, I think you know where we should try and reach by the end of our crime story.

Using the power of ten system by assigning a numeric value to the degree of negativity can help you track the progression of your story.

The beginning section of your story should progress from say a 1 to a 4, the middle from 4 to an 8 and the end from an 8 to an 11. The resolution of the story would then bring the story full circle, back to 1, or end on a more somber note, ending on 8 or even 11.

If your crime story is a straight action James Bond kind of thing like THUNDERBALL or LIVE AND LET DIE then your resolution will circle back to Justice, 1…all’s well again in the world.  James Bond has fixed it. Major positive ending.

But if your story is APOCALYPSE NOW of CHINATOWN, you’re going to end on a 11 on the negativity scale. The world is a mess and we’ve gone completely to the dark side.  It’s every man for himself.

What about those stories that have a positive ending for the global story, but have an ironic twist?

Is there a way for a crime story to somehow return the global story value back to Justice (or life back to life in the case of the thriller, action story or horror story) but do it ironically?  That is, bring a criminal to technical justice, but lose something in the process?

If your story is DIRTY HARRY, you can accomplish this irony through your choice of theme/controlling idea.

DIRTY HARRY ends on a positive/negative combo plate of irony.  Our cop gets the guy and justice is served but he breaks the law doing it and leaves his job in disgust (remember he throws away his badge at the very end). The world no longer has a vicious killer in it, but the kind of man who can take him out has been lost too. The only way to stop the killers is to empower fascists/”good” killers is one interpretation of the theme/controlling idea of DIRTY HARRY.

Another way to add irony to story is to add an internal genre along with its inherent value progression underneath the global external genre.  That is, the protagonist undergoes an internal quest as well as an external quest in the story.  The external genre ends on the positive, while the internal genre ends on the negative, thus producing irony.

An example of that scenario would be the movie THE SOCIAL NETWORK…  The lead character wins the Business Performance external genre (Facebook is a huge hit) but fails his internal morality test plot (he succumbs to the temptations of wealth and power at the expense of real connection to fellow human beings).

Bottom line, should you wish to reach the pinnacle of your chosen genre/s (don’t we all?) you must think deeply and clearly about the negation of the negation and how best to express its arrival in your story.

[Join www.storygrid.com to read more of Shawn’s Stuff]

Shawn’s Question

 

In the Comments to an earlier post in this series, “Using Your Real Life in Fiction,” Shawn wrote:

Steve and Shawn at the Noho Star at Bleecker and Lafayette, NYC

 

My question, which I think a lot of writers will have is this …

Do you deliberately think of this stuff re: characters and their thematic roles, before you write your first draft?

Or do you save this analytical/editor thinking for later? And then go back and tighten it all up?

 

Great question, pard. Lemme answer with a confession of exactly how dumb I am.

A few years ago I wrote a novel called Killing Rommel. (No, it was NOT one of the Bill O’Reilly series with “Killing” in the title.) Killing Rommel was a WWII story about a British commando expedition during the North African campaign of ’42-’43. Kinda like The Guns of Navarone, only set in the desert, with “Rat Patrol”-type jeeps.

The story was about a raid whose aim was to kill Gen. Erwin “The Desert Fox” Rommel, the German commander of Panzerarmee Afrika.

Here’s the confession: I had been working on the book for eighteen months (seven or eight drafts) before it occurred to me, “OMG, I’d better have my commandos actually have an encounter with Rommel.”

In other words, I had left that little item out.

So, to answer your question, Shawn: “No, I don’t always plot all that stuff out in advance.”

How about in The Knowledge?

On this one, I’d say I planned it to about the 50% level. I had the interior story down cold—and most of the elements of the exterior story. I knew what “Stretch” (the character that was me) represented thematically, and Nicolette and Marvin Bablik and Peter and Marty my agent and Teaspoon my cat, sort of.

But again, the most important piece of the story eluded me.

I’m talking about the relationship between Stretch and Bablik.

This may be a pattern with me. Maybe it’s common to a lot of writers. I tend to miss the element that’s right in front of my face. It’s like a fog or a blank spot.

I was maybe three months in to writing The Knowledge when it began to dawn on me not only that a friendship was developing between Stretch and Bablik, but that this was the most important element in the book.

In that instant, Shawn, I did pull back, as you say, to the “30,000-foot view” and ask myself

 

What does this friendship mean?

How does it play thematically?

Is it just an accident or should I jump on this and really beef it up?

 

I decided that this element was happy serendipity. I lucked out. I stubbed my toe on gold.

I suddenly realized that a huge architectural element in the story was that Bablik, like Jesus, was going to take on Stretch’s sins and, by his own self-immolation, atone for them, at least partially.

Suddenly The Knowledge became a buddy story. At the center, I realized, was an unlikely pair like George and Lenny in Of Mice and Men or Ishmael and Queequeg from Moby Dick. One was going to save the other.

In other words, the narrative element originated with instinct (I was just writing scenes and letting characters talk), but then I pulled back, figured out what the element was, and deliberately went forward trying to enhance it.

I asked myself, “How can I make these guys bond with each other in a way that’s not sappy or treacly?”

Chapter 13, Bablik gets furious with Stretch for having sex with a girl in the back seat of his taxi cab. “You’re like a son to me. Stop with these skanks! Have some respect for yourself!”

Chapter 21, Stretch’s uncle warns him for the third time to stay away from Bablik. “He’s a gangster. And his brother’s worse.” But Stretch doesn’t listen. Chapter 15: “I like the guy. He’s in the shit. He’s suffering.”

Bablik cooks eggs for Stretch at his hideout in Westchester. “He cuts the omelet in half with a Case pocketknife. He gives me the big half and slides the smaller onto his own plate.”

Why did I have Stretch sleep with Bablik’s wife? Partly because it was a fun scene, but mainly to deepen the bond between them, when Bablik finds out and forgives Stretch. Bablik offers Stretch his AK-47 for protection. Stretch declines. “Too bad,” says Bablik. “You were this close to becoming a gangster.”

In the end I loaded up the story with a number of asides (and no few overt statements and acts) that showed that each one of these characters cared for the other.

More than that, I strengthened their parallel arcs. Each character was dealing with extreme guilt over a crime he had committed, which only he knew about. Each one was desperate to redeem himself. Neither one knew how.

For the entire second half of the story, Stretch is trying to save Bablik from a headlong rush to his own extinction. In other words, he’s trying to save himself.

Like I say, Shawn, I missed this parallel story completely at the start. I was months into the writing before I felt the first glimmer.

So what’s the answer to your question? I guess my method is to do both—to plan from the start as much as I can, but not too much … not so much that I don’t leave room for instinct and for happy accidents.

And when those accidents happen, I try to be alert for them and to pull back at once to 30,000 feet and ask myself the left brain/editor-type questions:

 

What does this accident mean?

Is it important? Is it on-theme?

Should I drop everything and focus on this alone for a while?

 

P.S. My favorite moment in The Knowledge comes near the end, the last words that Stretch and Marvin Bablik exchange, at the Waldorf-Astoria before Bablik heads onstage to collect his big award, after which (and he knows it) he will be killed.

 

“What’s your first name?” he says. “I’m sorry, I never asked.”

“Steve.”

“Steve.” He holds out his hand. “I’m Mordechai.”

 

That wasn’t planned.

[P.S. As this post hits the air, Shawn and I are indeed having breakfast at the Noho Star. I’m in town from LaLa Land. It’s great!]

 

 

 

 

 

Do This

Bruce Springsteen has a memoir out — and interviews have followed its release like B pursuing A.

During an interview for PBS’s “Newshour,” Jeffrey Brown brought up Springsteen’s voice.

Jeffrey Brown: You write about your voice. You say, about my voice, “First of all, I don’t have much of one.”

Bruce Springsteen: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: Right? But you worked at it.

Bruce Springsteen: Initially just sounded awful, just so terribly awful, but there was nothing I could do about it. So, I just kept singing and kept singing and kept singing.

And I studied other singers, so I would learn how to phrase, and learn how to breathe. And the main thing was, I learned how to inhabit my song.

Jeffrey Brown: Which means what?

Bruce Springsteen: What you were singing about was believable and convincing, that’s the key to a great singer. A great singer has to learn how to inhabit a song. You may not be able to hit all the notes.

That’s OK. You may not have the clearest tone. You may not have the greatest range. But if you can inhabit your song, you can communicate.

Focus on that last line.

“If you can inhabit your song, you can communicate.”

Now jump to the beginning of the interview, where Brown asked Springsteen how much of him is in his songs.

Jeffrey Brown: What about that voice, though? Because in songs — I think of writers I have talked to, or poets, and there’s always the question of, how much of that is you?

Bruce Springsteen: I would say, in your memoir, it’s you.

I think that, when you’re writing your songs, there’s always a debate about whether, is that you in the song? Is it not you in the song?

Jeffrey Brown: What’s the answer?

Bruce Springsteen: So, every song has a piece of you in it, because just general regret, love. You have to basically zero in on the truth of those particular emotions.

And then you can fill it out in any character and in any circumstance that you want. If you have written really well, people will swear that it happened to you.

His answer reminded me of Steve’s recent “Use Your Real Life In Fiction” Writing Wednesdays series. Springsteen zeroes in on the real emotions — love, regret — and on the truth of those emotions he hangs lyrics that may be fiction, yet ring just as true as nonfiction.

Let’s take a quick detour to something else I read this week, “How to Build Relationships That Don’t Scale,” by John Corcoran, which closes out with “6 Tips for How You Can Build “Unscaleable” Relationships.”

The relationships the tips are focused on helping you achieve aren’t the Facebook friends who like everything you post but never buy your book. I’m talking about the neighbor who remembers your kid’s birthday every year, or the friend who buys your new books (who never asks for freebies), or the secretary at the doctor’s office who slips you in with the doc before everyone else in the cramped Friday afternoon waiting room. I’m talking about the people who have a connection with you — who like you and what you’re doing — and want to support you and your work.

Now take Corcoran’s tips and combine them with Springsteen’s advice about inhabiting and finding the truth. What you get at the end of the baking time is the one thing you need (other than a superb creation) to share your work.

You get a message that people buy into and want to share.

Look at what I’m doing here. I’m sharing Springsteen’s interview because I respect his honesty and work. I like that he tells the truth, that he shares what he’s experienced – and then there’s his work code and creativity. I’m sharing Corcoran’s post because 1) it’s good and 2) it’s on the Art of Manliness site, which I bought into years ago because I respect its founders Brett and Kate McKay.

One last stop for this thought train: James Altucher’s Facebook post “Be A Person Not A Personal Brand.”

Don’t be a book or a film or a tube of toothpaste. Focus on the person not the product.

And if you’re still trying to sort out you (as most of us are), consider trying on some of the things that made Springsteen “The Boss.” You might find that you like how they fit, too.

Detach Yourself From Everybody

(You guys, as of this post we’ll revert to the every-Wednesday mode for the remainder of the “Use Your Real Life in Fiction” series. I hope this recent barrage of Mon-Wed-Fri posts hasn’t clogged up too many friendly inboxes. I just got excited about this subject and couldn’t help myself.)

We were talking in the previous post about killing off characters. We observed that this can be hard when the characters are based on people in our real lives.

Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man”

Can we kill off our best friend?

Our neighborhood priest?

Our mother?

Answer Number One:

We have to, if the drama demands it.

Answer Number Two:

We must detach ourselves emotionally from all our real-life characters.

We made the point in the last post that an old self must die before a new self can be born.

That’s why deaths (including emotional ones) are important, even mandatory, in drama.

Tom Cruise’s slick, self-centered Charlie Babbitt must give way before he can become a loving brother to Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.

Michael Corleone’s clean-cut Marine officer must step aside before Michael-the-next-Godfather can be born.

Four of the Magnificent Seven must die before the village can be saved.

But how do you and I, as writers, kill off our own mom?

How do we destroy our own career?

Our marriage?

The answer is the most critical element in this whole series on Using Our Real Lives in Fiction.

We have to treat our real-life characters as if they were fictional.

We have to detach ourselves emotionally from the real-life version of our characters, including (especially) the character that is ourselves.
We have to free ourselves in imagination and give ourselves permission to fictionalize.
We have to see our real-life-based characters as aspects of our theme and act toward them accordingly.

If the character based on our ex-husband represents immature self-indulgence, maybe somebody has to give him a wedgie at the office Christmas party.

On the other hand, if he represents selfless integrity, maybe something really good has to happen to him. (Or bad, if it’s that kind of story.)

This is why it’s so hard to write something good based on our real life.

We’re inhibited by the material.

We’re loath to heighten its drama, to have fun with it.

We don’t want to hurt the real people we’re writing about.

All these inhibitions must be dismissed. We have to get over them.

Our loyalty must be transferred from the real-life characters (including ourselves) to the reader and to the story itself.

In a way, this is good.

It forces us to grow up.

It demands that we step back from our real-life self (and from all the real-life characters in our story) and ask, “What is this story about? What’s the deep, honest truth here?”

Can we do that?

That’s the artist’s charge when using material from her own life in fiction.

We, the readers, won’t sit still for a sob story or a self-justifying rant. We don’t want to read your diary or your journal. We want The Great Santini. We want Riding in Cars With Boys. We want To Kill A Mockingbird.

The book or movie you write will be judged as pure fiction, willy-nilly.

You’ll get no points because “this is my real story.” You will be cut no slack because “the characters are all true.”

You must make them truer than true.

You must handle your characters and scenes, no matter how real they were and are, exactly as you would if they were pure fiction.

 

 

 

 

 

Killing Off Characters

(Tune in to Writing Wednesdays on the next few Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the continuation of the series “Using Your Real Life in Fiction” — and for more of The Knowledge‘s backstory.)

We were talking in the previous post about making the stakes of our real-life story life and death.

Michael Douglas and his Gordon Gekko suspenders in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street”

Sometimes that’s hard to do.

As writers working with our real lives as material, we can be naturally reluctant, say, to kill off a character we actually know.

Our ex-husband?

Our boss?

Our mom?

I’m sure you’re ahead of me on this. I’m about to say, “Kill ’em dead.”

Whack ’em.

Knock ’em off.

Don’t hesitate for a second.

Death is always energizing for a story. If you don’t believe me, watch Game of Thrones.

But let me expand this axiom.

Don’t be afraid to put the quietus to elements other than human beings.

A marriage can die.

A dream can expire.

A way of life can end.

Death is drama, and drama is what you and I are paid for. (Okay, maybe we’re not being paid. But you know what I mean.)

We want drama. Drama keeps our readers emotionally involved. Drama pulls them through the story. Drama delivers the meat-and-potatoes ending they’re hoping for.

Drama is change.

And no change is greater than death.

“But Steve,” you’re saying, “isn’t death a bummer? Aren’t you being dark and morbid? I want my story to be uplifting! I want a happy ending!”

I agree, I agree.

But death (the demise of a character or a dramatic component) can be an upper. Why?

Because before our hero can be reborn, she has to die.

Before Luke can become a Jedi knight, the child-Luke must expire.

Before Harry and Sally can truly share a marriage, the single-Harry and the single-Sally must be left behind.

Before France can be saved, Joan must be consumed at the stake.

Here are the deaths that happen in final third of The Knowledge:

Stretch’s marriage dies

His wife takes up with his best friend

His agent Marty expires of a heart attack

His newest friend Marvin Bablik is murdered

His book crashes and burns

Yehuda Bablik kicks him out of New York

His dream of being a novelist bites the dust

In real-life only three of these demises occurred. The other four are invented.

Why?

Because these deaths either echo, parallel, or are components of the Big Death that happens to Stretch.

He dies as an amateur.

He dies as a wannabe.

He dies as an aspirant.

These deaths are good deaths.

They are doors that close so that a brighter, better door can open.

Reading the ending of The Knowledge, we don’t know for sure what will happen with Stretch. But all signs point to him getting his act together and becoming (or at least starting to become) the professional, realized writer he has always wanted to be.

At the risk of plagiarizing from Oliver Stone’s character of Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko from the movie Wall Street, let me suggest that, handled properly by the storyteller …

Death is good.

Don’t be afraid to use it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Make the Stakes Life-and-Death

(Tune in to Writing Wednesdays on the next few Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the continuation of the series “Using Your Real Life in Fiction” — and for more of The Knowledge‘s backstory.)

Our Most Dreaded Outcome in crafting fiction based on our real lives is that the story will be too internal, too ordinary, too boring.

Jennifer Lawrence as Joy Mancuso in “Joy”

Life is internal.

Life is ordinary.

Life is boring.

And don’t forget our first axiom of the Lit Biz:

Nobody Wants To Read Your Sh*t.

How can we make our real-life story dramatic, involving, and exciting? I’ll answer by quoting my old mentor Ernie Pintoff:

“Have a body hit the floor.”

I don’t mean we have to kill off a character (though that always works,)

I mean raise the stakes.

Did you see the movie Joy, starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, and Bradley Cooper, written and directed by David O. Russell? The entire first half hour is about nothing but establishing the stakes for the protagonist, the real-life Joy Mancuso, as life and death. Not literally, but emotionally.

Act One introduces us to Joy as the only responsible adult in her crazy, dysfunctional extended family—all of whom are living under the same roof. We meet Joy’s bedridden mom (Virginia Madsen) , who watches soap operas all day and refuses to leave her room. Her estranged father (Robert De Niro) suddenly appears on the doorstep; he moves in to the basement, where Joy’s ex-husband is already living. Joy’s sister hates her. Joy’s boss fires her from her job. The plumbing explodes in the floor of her mom’s bedroom.

The responsibility for fixing all this comes down on Joy. She’s the designated adult. Everyone else in the family dumps their baggage on her.

Plus we see in flashbacks that the young Joy—Joy as a girl—was spontaneously and joyously creative. But that Joy has vanished under the weight of family dysfunction.

The stakes for Joy, we see, are not just life and death … they’re worse. If she can’t change the course of her life, she is doomed at the soul level. What makes the story even more powerful is the contrast between the soul-stakes for Joy and the creative flash that saves her. She invents the “Miracle Mop” and pitches it on the Home Shopping Network. What could be sillier? But the success or failure of that mop is life and death for Joy Mancuso.

I took a different tack in structuring The Knowledge.

Starting with a real-life interior narrative not too different from Joy’s, i.e. a theme of unrealized and self-sabotaged creativity … I added a second parallel story, a murder mystery that embodied this storytelling principle:

Make the internal external.

Or, put another way,

Make the invisible visible.

The aim of both techniques (that used in Joy and that employed in The Knowledge) is the same—to raise the stakes for the protagonist to life and death.

One of the ways that aspiring writers fail, when they’re using their own lives as the basis for their fiction, is they’re reluctant (often for honorable reasons) to mess too much with their truth.

They over-respect this truth.

They’re afraid if they heighten it too much, they’re being dishonest. They’re “going Hollywood.”

They’re hesitant to give their characters scenes and dialogue that the real people on whom those characters are based (including themselves) would never do or say in real life.

In The Knowledge, I had my sweet, reserved ex-wife whip out a .45 automatic and start blazing away at a carload of assassins.

I had myself beaten up, fired, rejected, cheated on, fired again, beaten up again.

I had characters die who didn’t die in real life.

Remember our other prime axiom:

Don’t be afraid to make sh*t up.

I don’t know Joy Mancuso’s real-life family. I can’t say for sure that they were (or are) as nutty and dysfunctional as the movie painted them. Maybe David O. Russell, as writer and filmmaker, was blessed with real-life characters and situations that were already over-the-top wacky.

But I doubt it.

I think David O. Russell pumped up the volume.

I think he made the internal external.

He heightened reality.

He made the stakes for Joy life-and-death.

It’s always a great exercise, when you and I read over our own stuff, to ask ourselves throughout the process:

What are the stakes for our hero?

Remember, the higher the stakes, the more emotion will be generated in the reader.

The higher the stakes, the more the reader will be sucked in.

The more she will care.

The more she will be involved in the fates of the characters.

The more she will root for the hero.

And the faster she will turn the pages.

If the stakes of your story are not life-and-death, change them.

Make them life-and-death, at least emotionally.

Don’t be afraid to make sh*t up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Starting Your Real-Life Story

(Tune in to Writing Wednesdays on the next few Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the continuation of the series “Using Your Real Life in Fiction” — and for more of The Knowledge‘s backstory.)

Let’s talk about the inciting incident in The Knowledge.

Our real-life-based stories have to leave Kansas too.

It’s an interesting question because how do you identify an inciting incident in your real life? Is there a true, real-world event? Do you make it up? And if you do, how do you know what to make up?

The inciting incident in The Knowledge comes on page 29, the first page of “Book Two, The Turk.” Everything before that is set-up.

I’m following a fox fur and a pair of black leather Cossack boots.

Abigail.

Abigail Bablik crosses Eighth Avenue at 40th Street and turns up the block on the west side. I fall in, fifty yards behind her.

I’m following Marvin Bablik’s wife.

This is the job the Turk wanted to talk to me about.

The inciting incident in The Knowledge is when Stretch accepts his boss Marvin Bablik’s offer to tail his wife, ostensibly to find out if she’s cheating on him.

This incident is totally fictitious. But a tremendous amount of thought went into it. I recognized, planning ahead and structuring what was to come, that the whole story would turn on this moment. It had to be exactly right and it had come at exactly the right moment.

Let’s put this inciting incident up on the examination table and see what makes it tick.

First, why. Why is this the inciting incident? Why is this the event that officially starts the story? Because

1) With this event, our protagonist leaves the Ordinary World and enters what Blake Snyder calls the Inverted World. This is, in Joseph Campbell terms, “the Call.” In this moment Stretch embarks upon his hero’s journey. He steps out of his everyday universe and into the Extraordinary World, where all things are new and where major changes are not just possible but inevitable.

This moment is Dorothy getting swept away from Kansas; it’s Rocky learning that he’s been picked to fight the heavyweight champ; it’s Mark Watney getting left behind on Mars.

2) With this event, the internal becomes external.

Remember we said in the first post on this subject that the writer using her real life in fiction must, before all else, make the internal external?

This is that.

Stretch’s story up to this point had been entirely inside his own head. He was wrestling with issues of guilt, regret, self-doubt, self-sabotage, and self-destruction.

In other words, Snoozeville

Boring, tedious, uncinematic.

When our protagonist signs up to become an amateur gumshoe for Marvin “the Turk” Bablik however, he enters a world where vivid, butt-kicking action—car chases, beat-ups, gun fights, sex scenes, clashes with the law—are not just plausible but obligatory (even if Stretch himself is blissfully oblivious to this at the start.)

3) With this event, the genre of the story is established.

When Stretch agrees to take on this assignment, he sets the tale clearly into the Private Eye genre—and we the readers get it. We recognize that this is Jake Gittes accepting the gig to follow Hollis Mulwray. It’s the Dude saying yes to delivering the ransom money for the Big Lebowski.

4) With this event, the reader knows she can expect to see certain obligatory conventions of the genre. She knows that Bablik is lying. She’s immediately two steps ahead of Stretch. She knows that Stetch is being played for a sucker. She knows that multiple double-crosses and plot twists lie ahead. If she’s especially clever, she susses out, from this inciting incident alone, that Stretch is destined to become romantically involved with his boss’s wife whom he is tailing. Etc. Etc.

All of this sounds like fun. It’s promising. It pulls the reader forward into the story.

5) Note too that the climax of the story is embedded in the inciting incident.

We the readers may not know exactly what’s coming, but we can be pretty certain that our protagonist’s situation is going to evolve from trouble to more trouble to even more trouble.

6) Note, as well, that this inciting incident is on-theme.

The Inverted World that our protagonist now enters has not been selected randomly, nor is it designed only to carry car chases and plot twists.

Bablik’s world is a duplicate of Stretch’s.

The gangster’s universe is Stretch’s own—only made external.

Bablik—we (and Stretch) will come to learn—is also driven by guilt. He also has committed a crime for which he can never forgive himself and which can only be atoned for, in his mind, by his own extinction.

When Stretch enters this Extraordinary World, he is entering his own universe made visible and enacted, not in his mind, but in the external world.

Writers are often asked, “How much of your stories do you plot out in advance and how much just happens along the way?”

In this case, ALL OF IT was planned.

I very consciously sat down and asked myself of the inciting incident:

Does it get the story started?

Does it launch the protagonist into the Inverted World?

Does it make the internal external?

Is the climax embedded in it?

Does it establish the genre?

Is it on-theme?

I’m also asking myself, “Will this incident hook the reader? Will she get that flash-forward sense of What Is Coming? And will that pull her forward into the story?”

Are you working with material from your real life? Are you using true stuff as the basis of a piece of fiction?

Bear down, then, on the moment when the story starts.

Use a real-life event if that works.

Or make it up completely.

But, for sure, apply to that moment all the tests and criteria you would apply to an inciting incident in pure fiction.

There’s no difference.

The principles are the same.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two Paragraphs

(Tune in to Writing Wednesdays this Wednesday for the continuation of the series “Using Your Real Life in Fiction” — and for more of The Knowledge‘s backstory.)

Two paragraphs on pages 140-141 are what The Knowledge was about for me. That was the payload. The other 273 pages are just the narrative architecture to carry what’s in those few lines.

Sometimes it’s just about the blues

Remember our earlier series on this blog called “Why I Write?” My biggest reason, at least for my early (unpublished) books, was I was writing out of pain. Pain and guilt. Pain and remorse.

I can’t prove it, but I suspect a lot of writers pound the keys for that same reason.

“Everybody commits a crime,” [Marvin Bablik says on pages 158-9 of The Knowledge.] “You, me, everybody. From that day your life becomes about nothing but dealing with that crime. How do you handle the fact that you’ve done something that can never be undone? Deny it? Seek redemption? Do you try to justify your crime? Become a criminal? Do you demand punishment? Square it with God by making sure you pay for what you’ve done? The Jewish religion is about justice. You devout? Me neither. I’m not even circumcised.”

The real-life period on which The Knowledge is based was, for me, about an unforgivable act I had committed against someone I loved. For thirty years I tried to write my way out of that.

It’s impossible of course. Words can never make up for acts. But I wanted, for myself if for no one else, to get it down on paper. To say I’m sorry. To articulate the act and the regret therefor in the hope that, like a blues song or a heartbroken poem, it might ameliorate or at least express something a reader could relate to him- or herself.

But I could never do it. I couldn’t find the vehicle. I couldn’t find the mode of expression. I just wasn’t a good enough writer.

I felt like I was carrying around one mega-concentrated drop of cyanide, and I couldn’t figure out how to discharge that drop into the landfill without poisoning somebody else in the process.

Do you remember this verse from Joni Mitchell’s “Love Or Money?”

He tried but he could not get it down

Not for truth or mystery

Not for love or money

Did something terrible happen to you?

Did you do something unforgivable to someone else?

You and I as writers are, sometimes anyway, seeking to use fiction, to employ narrative to neutralize some real-life cleavage of the heart.

The problem is we can’t just state our pain or regret straight out. It’s whiny. It’s weak. It doesn’t work.

Our novel can’t say, “Look how shamefully X treated me.” Or, “Group Y is evil; see what they did to my beloved Group Z.”

The original pain or crime must be set within a context that

1) Gives it meaning, not just to you and me as the writer, but to the reader

2) Renders it universal so that the reader can enter the experience and claim it as her own

3) Makes it beautiful.

(By “beautiful,” I mean funny if the vehicle is a comedy, scary if it’s a horror tale, sexy or romantic if it’s a love story.)

For me, in The Knowledge, I had to evolve a fictional “me,” an invented narrative, a fictional person-I-hurt, and even a slightly fictionalized crime. I had to create a parallel redemption story, involving other (fictional) characters and other fictional events. And I had to set the whole thing within a genre—in this case a Big Lebowski-type detective story—that allowed for humor, style, and aesthetic distance.

It worked.

I was able to set that single drop of cyanide within a couple of acres of peanut brittle, and when that drop came—the two paragraphs (which are still too painful for me to quote here)—it slipped seamlessly into the narrative. It fit. The puzzle turned on it.

It worked.

Do I feel better now? A little. As much as you can.

Do you, the writer, have your own two paragraphs? That is a valid reason to write. It’s an honorable reason to write. I wish you luck. I hope these posts, and your own Muse, will help you find the vehicle and the language to “get those paragraphs down.”