Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 64

Pick a Genre and Run With It

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

Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe in “Farewell, My Lovely.”

The problem with real life is it’s messy. It doesn’t fit into neat categories.

But if you and I are going to use our real lives as material for fiction, we have to do just that.

We have to wrangle it.

We have to bring it under control.

We have to pick a story category, i.e. a genre, and make our real-life narrative work within that genre.

Or put another way, we have to ask ourselves, “If this mess in our real life were a publishable, ready-for-prime-time story, what genre would that story be?”

Is our real-life tale a Love Story? That’s a genre.

Is it a Thriller? That’s another genre.

A Western?

A Coming Of Age saga?

Shawn was the one who put his finger on what The Knowledge was. He nailed it the instant I showed him the first draft. (That’s how editors are trained to think.)

It’s a private eye story. It’s The Big Lebowski. It’s a detective story where the detective is not a hard-boiled private eye but a screwed-up young writer.

I can’t tell you how much that helped me.

Why? Because every story falls into a genre and every genre has conventions [see Chapter 41 in Nobody Wants To Read Your Sh*t].

A convention is an obligatory scene. It’s a story-beat that MUST be in the narrative if it’s going to fit into the genre.

Here’s how this helped me in working out the story for The Knowledge. I thought:

Hmm. If The Knowledge is a private eye story, then I have to have at least one scene where the private eye (i.e. Stretch, the character-that’s-me) gets beaten up.

Why? Because a Private-Eye-Gets-Beaten-Up scene occurs in every Sam Spade story, every Philip Marlowe story; it happens to Jake Gittes in Chinatown; it happens to the Dude in The Big Lebowski.

I literally sat down and wrote myself this note:

Come up with beat-up scene.

What other conventions does a private eye story mandate?

If the private eye gets hired by a woman, he must become romantically involved with that woman.

Note to self:

Come up with Romantic Involvement story.

In every private eye tale, the detective gets offered a second assignment (“Find so-and-so”), usually by the person that he was hired to find in the first place.

Further note:

Come up with this one too.

If you’re following along in The Knowledge, #1 is Chapter 15, “Glen Island Casino.” #2 is Chapter 28, “University Village.” And #3 are Chapter 18, “Empire Diner.”

Does this sound like formula?

It’s not.

This is how a writer thinks.

This is how a writer works.

This is how a writer structures and shapes a story.

Remember that our Most Dreaded Outcome in attempting a story based on our real life is that the tale will be too ego-centered, too ordinary, too internal, too boring.

Our aim as writers is to

1) Heighten the drama

2) Make the internal external

3) Give the story meaning, i.e. THEME.

4) Make it universal

5) Make it beautiful

When we pick a genre and work within its conventions, we automatically accomplish all five points above (assuming we do a good job with the story).

But even better, we acquire a road map and a structure that are invaluable to us as we’re working out the fictional, and even the real-life, aspects of our tale.

Genre is not a four-letter word.

It’s our secret weapon for real-life-based fiction, and for every other kind as well.

 

 

 

My Cat, Teaspoon

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

When we as writers use our real life in fiction, we tend to use real-life personalities too. One of the big ones in The Knowledge is my cat, Teaspoon.

Not the real “Teaspoon,” but pretty darn close.

My real-life cat was named Mo. I changed the name for a reason, which I’ll get into below. But first let’s flash back [see Chapter 52 in Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t] to one of the seminal principles of story-telling:

Every character must represent something greater than him- or herself.

And its corollary:

 Every character must represent an aspect of the theme.

What, you may be asking, does this have to do with Steve’s cat?

The answer comes back to how a writer views material, whether that material is pure fiction, i.e. totally made-up, or borrowed from real life. In either case, the writer’s first question to him or herself is, “What does this character represent?”

Are you working on a story that has your ex-husband as a character? Your mother? Two buddies you served with in Afghanistan?

You must ask, as a writer, “What do these characters represent? What aspects of the story’s theme do they stand for?”

In The Godfather, every character represents a different aspect of the theme of family/immigrants-in-a-new-land/”criminal”-ethos-as-nobler-than-the-ethos-of-the-greater-society.

Every character in the Corleone family represents a different angle on this complex theme. Vito. Michael. Sonny. Fredo. Connie, Mama, Tom Hagen. Tessio, Clemenza, Luca Brasi.

The characters outside the family do the same. Kay represents the counter-family in terms of Mayflower WASPiness; she represents what Michael and the Corleones can never become. The gangsters in the other Five Families represent a different counter-family—criminals whose code of honor is a few levels beneath that of the Corleones.

But back to my cat, Teaspoon.

I really did have a cat during the period [see Chapter 5] in which The Knowledge takes place. I really did find him on the street as a tiny kitten; he really did travel with me all around the country; he really was an outdoor cat; he really did pad out the rear window of my apartment and down a two-flight staircase to roam around our NY neighborhood every night all night.

And my real cat really did curl up next to my typewriter as I worked, with the typewriter carriage shuttling back and forth over his head.

He would stay in that spot for hours. He became my lucky charm. As long as Teaspoon was there in his spot, I could write like a bandit. One time in California he got sick and had to stay at the vet’s for four days. I was paralyzed. I couldn’t write a word till he got back.

Did I include that last passage because it was cute? Partly. But mainly because it was on-theme.

The theme of The Knowledge is an aspiring writer must overcome his demons of Resistance, i.e., distraction, self-sabotage, and self-betrayal, before he can become a real artist.

Teaspoon represents an aspect of this theme.

He represents this struggling writer’s muse.

An animal, a creature of nature, stands for the unspoiled, instinctive connection to the Source.

I respect Teaspoon because he is his own man. I have no idea where he goes at night. He roams as far afield as Nicolette’s basement apartment, which is six city blocks away. I have no idea how he gets there. He navigates by cat radar …

He has been with me [forever] and has always been true blue. He’s the kind of cat who would lend you money, no questions asked, if he had it.

Remember our two principles regarding characters in fiction:

Every character must represent something greater than him or herself.

And

Every character must represent some aspect of the theme.

There’s another constellation of characters in The Knowledge—the gangsters Yehuda, Ponytail, and Ivanov.

They represent distraction. The self-sought-out “drama” that keeps our protagonist, Stretch, from doing his work as a writer.

Therefore, if GANGSTERS = DISTRACTION and TEASPOON = MUSE, what must happen in the story?

 The gangsters have to kidnap Teaspoon.

(This was actually Shawn’s idea, after I showed him the first draft. Immediately he said, “You gotta have Yehuda kidnap Teaspoon. Teaspoon is Stretch’s muse. Stretch has gotta go all-out to recover his cat. It’s like The Big Lebowski, where the Dude is trying to get his carpet back.”)

So …

A huge part of the story became Stretch trying to get Teaspoon back from the gangsters.

Does this sound crazy? Maybe. But it works.

It works because it’s on-theme.

It works because it’s the story-in-miniature.

The reader gets it, even if only on an unconscious level.

To continue this line of thinking, let’s throw in a third element.

The character of Nicolette in The Knowledge represents a different aspect of the theme. She is, and stands for, a realized artist. She is Stretch’s semi-girlfriend, a painter who has truly found her groove and is a bona fide working, professional artist. She is in touch with her muse and in control of her artistic power.

Nicolette represents what Stretch wishes he could become.

So …

If TEASPOON = MUSE and NICOLETTE = REAL ARTIST, who winds up saving Teaspoon and giving him back to Stretch? [See page 261 in The Knowledge.]

This is the way a writer constructs a story. This is the architecture undergirding the various acts and sequences and scenes.

When you and I use our real lives as raw material for our fiction (and when we thereby recruit real people as characters), we must process these real people the same way a novelist processes purely fictional characters.

We ask ourselves, “What’s the theme? What’s our story about?”

Then: “What aspect of the theme does this character represent?”

Oh yeah, why did I change “Mo” to “Teaspoon?”

Again, to stay on-theme.

I found my cat when he was a tiny kitten, at midnight on a street called Cheyne Walk in London … The kitten was so small I could cup him in one palm and fit him into the breast pocket of my jacket. In England they call this the “teaspoon pocket.” So he became Teaspoon. I slipped him in next to my heart and he curled up and went to sleep.

Key phrase: “next to my heart.”

That’s where an artist’s muse lives.

[Don’t forget, if questions occur to you about this stuff, write ’em in in the Comments section below. I’ll do my best to answer them.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t Be Afraid to Make Sh*t Up

 

Oops, I lied again.

Tyrone Power and Ava Gardner in the movie version of “The Sun Also Rises”

I promised we’d get into the Seven Principles of using your real life in fiction. But again I’m gonna jump forward to a critical corollary:

 

Don’t be afraid to fictionalize.

 

I used to be. I thought if I made stuff up, that would be lying. Being untrue to real life.

I would read Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway and think, “See, they’re telling the truth! Everything they’re writing is real! That’s why it works! That’s what I’ve gotta do!”

Of course they were fictionalizing.

They were exaggerating.

They were heightening reality.

The trick was they were doing it so skillfully, I couldn’t tell. You mean Henry Miller didn’t really do that thing with the carrot in the doorway in Brooklyn?

Even if he did, who cares?

The truth is not the truth.

Fiction is the truth.

Remember, going back to our first principle of using your real life in fiction:

 

            Make the internal external.

 

Why do we as writers do this? To involve the reader. In my real life, during the era of The Knowledge, I was allowing my inner demons of guilt, regret, and self-loathing to keep me from coming together as a real working writer.

The reader is not going to sit still for that.

It’s too interior.

It’s too bornig.

The answer:

 

            Make sh*t up.

 

Was I really beaten up by gangsters at three in the morning in the wetlands near Glen Island Casino? Was my boss Marvin Bablik really honored with a gala at the Waldorf-Astoria? Did my wife really fire seven shots from a nickel-plated .45 into the rear end of a vehicle loaded with Haitian assassins?

No, but all of those actions were on-theme. They all could have happened and should have happened within the invented reality of the story. And all of them are explicit statements of the parallel interior redemption narratives of the two central characters.

The rule is

 

          You can fictionalize, but only to make the internal external.

 

Or put another way:

 

           You may fictionalize only on-theme.

 

The Sun Also Rises is one of greatest pieces of American fiction ever. If you haven’t read it, please do. (We’ll give Hemingway a pass on his pages of anti-Semitism, homophobia, etc.)

How much of the book is “true?” My guess is 97.8%.

For sure, Hemingway hung out at the Select, the Dome, the Deux Magots. For sure he was in the First World War. For sure he traveled with friends, post-war, to Biarritz and San Sebastian and Pamplona. The bars, the bull fights, the countryside, the fishing streams, I’m sure they’re exactly as he described them in The Sun Also Rises. The Lost Generation emptiness and ennui, the hangovers, the hipper-than-thou humor, the avoidance of all topics of seriousness, the habitual drunkenness … I’m sure these are spot-on, down to the English expat slang and the details of the men’s and ladies’ wardrobe. Hemingway’s friends in the book are either real or easily-recognized composites. He probably knew someone exactly like Lady Brett Ashley and probably was in love with her and she with him.

All that is “real.” It’s all “true.”

What’s fiction?

One critical component: that the protagonist, Jake Barnes, i.e. Hemingway, had his manhood shot away in the war.

I know, I know. It’s been done before. Other characters in fiction have suffered similar emasculating wounds.

But nothing ever matched the power of that fictional incapacitation, because it told the whole story in one stroke.

That war-spawned impotence defined Hemingway’s generation as surely as “I can’t get no satisfaction” defined a later one.

What does that mean for you and me as we begin the novel that’s based on our real life?

It means

 

 Don’t hesitate to go beyond the truth.

 

Identify its essence, in your character-in-the-story and in the story itself.

Then heighten that truth.

Make it pop, so that we the readers feel it and get it.

 

Make the internal external.

 

Don’t be afraid to make sh*t up.

 

 

 

 

 

Detach Yourself From “You”

 

[Continuing our new Mon-Wed-Fri series, “Using Your Real Life in Fiction” … ]

I said last week that we would go through the seven principles of using your real life in fiction. But on second thought, we’d better skip to Principle #7 and study it first. It’s by far the most important.

J.D. Salinger

 

Detach yourself from the character that is “you.”

 

The first three novels I wrote (all unpublished and unpublishable) were excruciatingly autobiographical. I was the central character. Everything was about me. But what made them unbearable to read was that the real-life me, the writer, was still inextricably, personally bound up in the agonies that the fictional-me was going through on the page.

The stories weren’t fiction, they were therapy.

I was inflicting my real-life angst on the poor reader.

I was not giving her gold; I was giving her ore.

The manuscripts should’ve been stuck in a drawer and left there.

Reading this, you may be thinking, “Steve, you’re being too hard on yourself. I’ll bet if we pulled these pieces out of your closet, they wouldn’t be half as bad as you’re describing them.”

Trust me, they are.

And so is every other manuscript I’ve read from aspiring writers who use themselves as the protagonists of their works before they’ve gained perspective and emotional distance on their own selves and their own lives.

By the way, this principle applies to nonfiction and memoir as well. That story you’re writing about your grandmother who was a spy for MI5 in Cairo during World War II? Be careful. Don’t let family pride and ego blind you to that indelible truth:

 

Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t

 

The Big Positive about using your own life in fiction is that you know it intimately. You feel the emotions in your bones. You have passion for it.

It’s your blood.

It’s your baby.

The Big Negative is that self-intimacy can blind us to how our character—that wonderful, fascinating “us”—is playing in the eyes of the cold-blooded, easily-distracted, unknown-to-us reader.

Remember what you and I as writers are competing against.

Batman.

The Revenant.

The Martian.

Donald Trump’s tweets.

The bar is high, baby.

We’re going up against Spiderman and Harry Potter and Vladimir Putin.

It is imperative that we, as writers, detach ourselves emotionally from the character that is “us” and assess that character’s appeal and interest with complete objectivity (or as close to objectivity as we can come.)

I know, I know. When we hear Beyonce sing certain songs of marital betrayal, we think, “Wow, this is being torn straight from her guts, it’s so real!”

Keep in mind: Beyonce has sung that song 876 times. What we’re watching is not real-life agony or rage enacted in the moment. We’re watching a performance by an artist.

That’s what you and I have to deliver in our work.

Art is artifice.

The character of Holden Caulfield is, I will wager, very very close to the character of J.D. Salinger. But Holden Caulfield is not J.D. Salinger and J.D. Salinger is not Holden Caulfield. Holden Caulfield is the creation of an artist named J.D. Salinger who had gained perspective and distance on his own life and, from that, had created a deliberately-crafted, artificial entity to which he gave the name “Holden Caulfield.”

Was it hard for me to use myself as a character in The Knowledge?

No, because I had thirteen years (from the time I was twenty-four till I was thirty-seven) of writing about myself the wrong way. Thirteen years of being too close to myself. Thirteen years of having no perspective.

And I had another thirty years of writing after that.

So I could do it. I could step back. I could see “myself” as a character. I wasn’t tied up in “me.” I had no ego about the character that bore my name.

But that capacity takes time to develop. It takes pain. It takes embarrassment. It’s a process of maturation.

If you’re a young writer using your real life in fiction, focus first on that.

Get out of your own space.

Pull back to thirty-thousand feet.

See yourself cold.

See yourself without attachment.

See yourself the way you’d see another person.

Real-as-real is a tough sell. If we put J.D. on the page, we’re gonna fail.

We gotta put Holden.

[Next post we’ll get back to our Seven Principles in order.]

 

7 Rules for Using Your Real Life in Fiction

Today we start a multi-part series on using your real life in fiction. The example I’m going to use is my own newest novel, The Knowledge. We’ll bounce back and forth from story principles in the abstract to how these concepts were applied in The Knowledge.

“Hey! Taxi!”

I’m gonna put up a new post every Mon-Wed-Fri, just for this series. Hopefully we’ll run through Christmas.

If you have any questions, please feel free to write them in to the Comments section below. I’ll answer them as best I can.

Ready?

Let’s start with what was honest-to-God, real-life true in The Knowledge:

In truth, I was driving a cab in New York City. I was broke. It was a high-crime period. I was finishing my third novel (all unpublished and unpublishable so far).

I had committed a terrible crime against my wife, which had broken up our marriage. I was desperate to redeem myself, both in her eyes and my own. I had become fixated on the idea that getting this new book published would, if not atone for what I had done, at least prove to my wife (and maybe to me too) that I wasn’t the bum and the loser that she thought I was.

That’s the set-up. That’s the real-life, exterior and interior foundation of the story.

The All Is Lost moment (again, in real-life) was me finishing the book and it failing to find a publisher. In other words, that’s the crash-and-burn moment at the climax of the true-life story. The Epiphanal moment is me deciding to pack up and move to L.A. to try to find work writing for the movies.

(This move, as it turned out, succeeded. It was the decision that made me a writer for real and put me on the path I’ve been on ever since.)

Still with me? To repeat, the above is the real-life narrative that I began with, about eighteen months ago, when I decided to write this story as a novel.

[By the way, if you haven’t ordered The Knowledge yet, please do. I know it’s tempting to tell yourself, “Oh, I’ll just follow along in these posts.” But trust me, you’ll get ten times more out of these if you can follow along in the book.]

The first thing I knew, assessing the true-life story elements described above, was that they weren’t enough for a novel.

They were too boring.

Too ordinary.

Too internal.

Maybe Henry James could do it, but I sure couldn’t.

I knew right away that I had to, as they say in England, tart this material up.

I had to fictionalize.

The question was how.

How much?

And where?

Before I address these questions, a short digression:

I’m reading a great book now—Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Notebook.

The Notebook tells how Coppola, starting with Mario Puzo’s novel, put together the screenplay and screen story that would become the movie, “The Godfather.”

Coppola had the exact opposite problem I had. He already had the jazzed-up story. He had Mario Puzo’s novel, which was a runaway bestseller. sensation-of-the-decade. Coppola’s issue was how to inform that material with his own sensitivity, to bring his own real-life instincts and genius to it.

Francis Ford Coppola comes from a family of artists and musicians. Like the Corleones, it was a close-knit, ambitious, high-achieving, multi-generational, immigrant Italian-American family.

Imagine for a moment that Coppola had the idea to write a novel about his real family. He might have come to the same conclusion I did about my own real-life material. It’s too ordinary, too boring, not enough drama, etc.

Then (let’s keep imagining) he is seized with an inspiration:

I’ll tell my family’s story. Except I’ll make them a gangster family.

See what I’m getting at?

With that single (imagined) stroke of fictionalization, our hypothetical Francis Ford Coppola has made his real-life family story a blockbuster.

In essence, that’s exactly what David Chase did with The Sopranos.

The Sopranos is basically the story of an upwardly-mobile American family with issues around fidelity, child-rearing, and general panic-attack/freak-out red-white-and-blue angst. What made The Sopranos great was the translation of that universal American family anxiety into the world of gangland crime and murder.

Which brings us to the first principle of using your own life in fiction:

Make the internal external.

Is your interior story about being trapped, held captive, imprisoned in some doomed stasis?

Consider telling it as a prison story.

Make the internal external.

Too much? Then ask yourself, How can I heighten the reality of my story? How can I raise the stakes?

How can I make the internal external?

Here’s what I did in The Knowledge:

I built a parallel redemption tale on top of the real-life interior “How can I redeem myself?” narrative of my own life. Then I wove the two stories together.

My real-life boss at the taxi company was rumored to have a suspicious past. Word around the shop was that he was into all kinds of shady (and maybe-worse-than-shady) activities.

Considering how to structure The Knowledge, I said to myself,

“Let’s make the taxi boss [Marvin Bablik] an out-and-out gangster. Let’s have him hire the character-that’s-me [“Stretch”] for some seemingly innocent extra-hours work. And let’s have that work spin out of control, increment by increment, until the character-that’s-me is inextricably tied up in this criminal’s affairs.”

Further, and critically important:

“Let’s have Bablik’s interior story be one of redemption as well. Let’s make his inner life a parallel for Stretch’s, only on a much more heightened, higher-stakes level. Life and death. Bullets. Murder.”

And finally …

“Let’s have a deep, unlikely, and unexpected bond develop between Bablik and Stretch. Let’s have them come to care profoundly for each other, so that the self-sacrifice of one can mean liberation for the other.”

In other words, I stole the emotional dynamic of Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Do you remember the story? It’s a parallel saga of Woody Allen’s character, a failing film documentarian trying to woo Mia Farrow away from TV big-shot Alan Alda–and Martin Landau, a successful ophthamologist who contracts for the murder of the nutty woman he fell into an affair with, Angelica Huston. One story informs the other. The two work as one.

We’ll get into this deeper in the next post. But as a quick flash-forward, here are the seven principles of using your real life in fiction:

Make the internal external


Pick a genre and run with it


Raise the stakes to life and death


Fictionalize on-theme only


Make it universal


Make it beautiful


Detach yourself from the character that is you

[At the risk of repeating myself, please order The Knowledge if you haven’t already, and read it. It will make these posts ten times more productive.]

Using Your Real Life in Fiction

Today my newest novel, The Knowledge, goes on sale. (Yeah, that’s me in the photo, taken in the same era in which The Knowledge is set.)

You can order The Knowledge right here in a premium “French flap” trade paperback edition not available anywhere else. Also in eBook or an eBook-plus-paperback bundle. There’s a special Holiday Bonus available too.

The Knowledge is my (real-life) writer’s coming-of-age story. I’m the protagonist. The internal story is all true.

The Knowledge takes place in New York City in 1974, when I was driving a cab and struggling to get my first novel published. The story is also, metaphorically, the origin tale of The War of Art. It’s my real-life passage from getting my ass kicked by Resistance to beginning to come to grips with my own demons of self-destruction and self-sabotage.

Which brings us back to my real-life All Is Lost Moment.

What is an All Is Lost moment anyway?

Watch any Hollywood movie. The All Is Lost moment will come around Minute 75, somewhere near the start of Act Three.

In the All Is Lost Moment, the hero is as far away from his or her objective as it is possible to be.

In the first Rocky, for example, Rocky’s moment comes when he leaves Adrian at home and travels by himself, the night before the Big Fight, to the arena in which he will face the heavyweight champ. Standing there, seeing the boxing ring, the huge posters of him and Apollo Creed … the full gravity of the event hits him. Rocky realizes he has no chance to win.

In Silver Linings Playbook, the All Is Lost Moment comes for Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) immediately after the climactic dance contest, when the man she loves, Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper), walks away from her and crosses the dance arena to whisper some secret communication to his ex-wife Nikki, whom he’s been trying to get back together with for the whole movie.

You and I have All Is Lost Moments in our real lives too.

The Knowledge is about mine.

In fiction and in real life, an All Is Lost Moment is hopefully followed by an Epiphanal Moment.

In the Epiphanal Moment, the protagonist makes a decision or takes a stand, often driven my desperation, that propels him or her into the climax of the story.

The Knowledge is about my real All Is Lost Moment and my real Epiphanal Moment. I can still name them both and date them down to the hour.

It was those moments (fictionalized of course) that turned me from a wannabe writer to a real one.

I say “fictionalized” because one of the lessons that writing The Knowledge taught me is you gotta make the internal external.

You, the writer, have to make the real bigger than real.

Real as real doesn’t work.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to do a series of posts on the subject of using your real life in fiction.

I’ll use examples from The Knowledge.

I’ll tell you what was true and what was made up. And why I made up what I made up.

We’ll get into why a writer uses his or her own life as material. Is this a good idea? What could possibly go wrong?

And we’ll explore the counterintuitive link between the real and the fictional. How can it be that the fictional is realer than the real?

One last note:

As a Holiday bonus for the first 500 who order The Knowledge paperback-and-eBook bundle, we’re throwing in The War of Art eBook for free.

Why? Because in some crazy way each book is the alternative version of the other. The War of Art came directly out of the events of The Knowledge, and The Knowledge is the fictionalized real-life story of the origin of The War of Art.

My Secret

When it was my publishing house’s turn to present its Fall/Winter line of books, I was introduced as the senior editor. One of the quick-witted sales reps quipped, “If she’s the senior editor, how old is the junior editor?”

I was 22 years old, attending — and presenting — at my first sales conference, and not yet a full year into being an editor.

My first job out of college was as a junior editor for a small publishing house in Florida. Within a few months, my boss said goodbye to the senior editor and I was promoted. This was a mom and pop operation, so I went from editing sales copy, sending manuscript rejection letters, and answering the phone, to acquiring and editing manuscripts, packaging books, writing marketing materials, negotiating author and vendor contracts, managing relationships with authors and vendors, and developing and implementing publicity campaigns — while still editing sales copy, sending manuscript rejection letters, and answering the phone.

No training.

Lots of time alone in the office, operating on instinct and a prayer.

It ended up being two and a half years of shooting the rapids, of going solo, of working from the gut.

I emerged on the other end confident in my gut’s instincts, but I also emerged doing PR, something that had never been an itch to scratch. I wanted out of Florida and a publicity job offer helped make that possible, so… I headed north.

Within the first month, the questioning started. I didn’t do what the other publicists did. Was I wrong? Was there a better way? The publishers my employer represented all expected top-tier media coverage — and when I advised a publisher that it was a waste of money to promote the book to the top-tiers, that the book wasn’t well written and wouldn’t be picked up by the outlets she wanted it pitched to, I learned that I had landed in a world where Reality was on permanent vacation. Publicists weren’t honest with publishers — and publishers believed the same approach could (and should) be applied to every book.

I needed a paycheck, so I pitched cardio-kickboxing to Bill O’Reilly and Wiccan rituals to Howard Stern. I mailed dozens of books to the New York Times and Washington Post book reviewers — and I attended conferences, and conventions, and expos, where dinosaurs manned booths and roamed the aisles.

Here’s my secret:

I hated it then — and twenty years later, I still hate it. Every time I write a column for this site I feel like a fake, because I’m not passionate about everything I write about. I don’t enjoy learning about MailChimp or Google Analytics or following Twitter’s next move.

So why the hell do I do this?

It makes me better.

The stuff I don’t enjoy is the yin to the yang of my passion. One provides knowledge and thus the ability to self advocate, which allows the other to soar to greater heights.

Here’s how it plays out in the rest of my life:

This weekend includes replacing the flapper in a constantly-running toilet bowl, reinstalling a bathroom tile, replacing the hardware on two dangling cabinet doors, and removing the base of a broken lightbulb that’s stuck in a socket. I don’t want to do (or learn how to do) these things, but . . . If I know how to do them I’ll save money by doing the work myself — or if I hire someone else, I’ll know exactly what’s involved, how much the service should cost, and how it should be done.

There this, too:

I get high on seeing stories I’m passionate about take flight

So, that means focusing on things I don’t enjoy spending time learning about — and then implementing what I’ve learned, writing about what I’ve learned, and sharing what I’ve learned, because there’s a high in seeing others learn from my experiences, too.

Back to my secret.

I hate doing the same things I often suggest that you do. You’re not alone, mucking your way through all the crap that can be PR/marketing. I’m not a fan either.

Here’s what helps me move along:

On the other side there’s Joy.

 

The Muse and Me, Part Three

 

One of my favorite passages from books about the artist’s life is this one from Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit:

Twyla Tharp

 

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. 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 the ritual.

 

There is great wisdom to Ms. Tharp’s ritual/habit. The key phrase is ” … the ritual is not the gym … the ritual is the cab.”

In other words, it’s the practice, not the product.

What counts is not “Did I come up with a great dance breakthrough today?” (I.e. what happens in the studio.) What counts is “Did I do my practice today?” (What happens through the whole day, from the very first moment.)

What does it mean to “have a practice?”

We usually think of that phrase in terms of yoga, say, or the martial arts or other spiritual pursuits.

“I have a yoga practice.”

“I have a meditation practice.”

Twyla Tharp has a dance practice, a choreography practice.

Or more accurately, she has a creativity practice.

You and I have a writing practice.

As I turns out, I start my day exactly like Twyla Tharp. Except I live in Los Angeles so I don’t hail a cab or an Uber to go to the gym, I drive. But, like Ms. Tharp, my practice starts the instant I roll out of bed.

I am getting ready for the Muse.

My goal for that day—and every day—is not to kick ass at the keyboard or solve Narrative Problem #27 or lick Act Two.

My goal is to do my practice.

A practice is lifelong.

A practice is not about results, it’s about the work.

It’s about the doing.

It’s about the effort, and the patience, and the frame of mind.

A practice is about the link between the physical and the level above the physical.

Starting the day at the gym (for me) is about seeking the proper mindset.

I’m rehearsing.

I’m rehearsing being focused.

I’m rehearsing the confrontation with Resistance.

I’m rehearsing patience.

I’m rehearsing humility.

I’m rehearsing aggressiveness.

I’m rehearsing intensity.

Like Twyla Tharp, I’m practicing for the studio.

The finish of the day, it turns out, is just as important as the start. Because the finish is part of the practice too.

When Ms. Tharp catches a cab home from her dance studio, I’m certain that a part of her is getting ready for tomorrow. She’s rehearsing pulling on her sweats, riding the elevator downstairs, stepping into the street and raising her hand to hail a taxi.

A practice is lifelong.

The point is to do it today and do it tomorrow and do it the day after that.

The Muse is watching Ms. Tharp, just like she’s watching you and she’s watching me. Call it the unconscious if you like. The Self. The soul.

It’s that part of us that knows us better than we know ourselves.

That part that understands our calling.

That part that holds the works-in-potential that we as artists will, with labor and sweat, transform into works-in-reality.

The Muse likes to see Twyla hailing that cab.

On Ms. Tharp’s Manhattan block there may be a hundred, five hundred other aspiring artists, dancers, writers, filmmakers, entrepreneurs.

Which one do you think the Muse favors at 5:30 in the morning?

A final sidebar: I used to drive a cab in New York City. Had I known of Twyla Tharp’s pre-dawn ritual, I would’ve found out where she lived and parked my taxi outside her building every morning. I would’ve made sure that I was the dude who took her to the gym.

I have a feeling she’s a big tipper.

What Are Love Stories For?

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

When you come right down to it, life breaks down into just two states of being.

Alone
Not Alone

We’re either alone, with someone else or we’re a member of a group.

That’s basically it.

And as we all know, being alone all of the time is torture. Solitary confinement can literally drive you crazy.

So if being along all the time results in serious psychological damage, then it’s safe to assume that we are genetically programmed to be social.

Which makes sense.

And that need to be social is all about forming varying levels of connection with others. There will be times when we just won’t be able to survive alone, so we better damn well learn how to get along with others.

You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to understand that the social connection begins with our mothers and soons extends to the other members of our nuclear family. And as anyone with multiple children only a few years apart will tell you, those first connections prove confrontational and dramatic.

But that bickering about inconsequential things (he’s breathing my air!) with our siblings and then as it extends to our peer group slowly teaches us how to manage irreconcilable goods and make the best bad choices. What’s good for me may not be so great for you, so I need to take that into consideration when I’m pressing my agenda. So managing brotherly and sisterly connection/love prepares us for even deeper connection later on.

By the time we reach puberty, though, romantic love and its physical component knocks us way out of our comfort zone.

How do we separate the simmering stew of emotions and feelings inherent with romantic love? How do we approach romance? What do we expect? When is the right time to express romantic feelings?

This is where love stories come in.

Few of us ever felt comfortable talking with mom or dad about romantic love. Just learning the mechanics of baby making from them was enough to send us running into the hills. Those conversations are embarrassing because the sex act is so primal and loaded with so much religious history and cultural baggage that we are at a loss to understand where our biological drives kick in versus when our conditioned psychological/social triggers are firing. Do I like red hair because of my DNA or because of that L’Oreil commercial from 1973? Geez…just writing about this here gives me the willies.

Nor do we want to get into how to talk to Peggy Sue with the guys on the football team or with our fellow mathletes or members of the brass section of the marching band. Being vulnerable in a pubescent peer group is a sure fire way to ridicule. Speaking of desire, in any way, shape or form is a one way trip to weirdo-ville.  Best to keep cool, not show your cards.

So where do we get our strategies and tactics to land our dream companions?

Love stories give us prescriptive (positive) and cautionary (negative) tales to navigate love’s emotional minefield. They give us tools to try out and behaviors to avoid.

Because these stories are responsible for nothing less than the continuation of humanity, they are hugely important.  And the best ones are rewarded with cultural immortality. Tristan and Isolde. Guinevere and Lancelot. Romeo and Juliet.

But best of all…love stories deliver the emotional feelings of romantic love to the reader or viewer or listener…from a safe distance.

Would you rather put yourself in deep emotional peril by expressing your adoration for another human being without having any clue about how that other person feels about you? Or would you rather read a novel about someone else doing that beforehand? Stories allow us to prepare for what we might be in for.

So of course we read the novels and we watch the movies and we subscribe to Lifetime Cable network. We consume love stories like honey-roasted peanuts. We’re studying them.

We don’t have to be vulnerable in real life when we can vicariously explore the joys and darkness of love in stories. There are millions of lonely hearts out there that find that this love story consumption experience is even better than the real thing. In fact, that’s a trope of many a love story itself (Romancing the Stone).

This is why love stories are in such demand and why a writer who can master the form will find themselves driving fancy cars and having multiple vacation homes.

So if we go to love stories for answers to our questions about how to connect with others romantically, how are love stories divided? How do they break down in terms of the “connection” value?

Is there a hierarchy of connection?

Of course there is.

We all have levels of connection with people.

There’s the friendly smile and “how you doin’” we give to the guy on the corner who sells us our morning coffee. And there’s the knock-down drag out fight we have with our spouse or significant other…the ones that push us to the edge of our connection and force us to confront things about the other person (and especially ourselves) that we’d really rather not.

We don’t have the kind of relationship with the guy on the corner to ever have to plumb the depths of his soul. Which is as it should be. But for someone we’ve decided to spend the rest of our lives with…that kind of plumbing is an inevitable progression to deeper and deeper intimate knowledge of the other’s and one’s own internal self.

So the “connection” value in love has many levels.

Here’s one continuum to consider:

Acquaintanceship  to Friendship to Committed Friendship to Intimate Friendship to Romantic Desire to Romantic Commitment to Romantic Intimacy

I won’t get into the first three levels of love because the Love Story external genre concerns romantic love, which is love with the possibility of sex. I will note that When Harry Met Sally, Nora Ephron’s great love story plays on all of the above continuum masterfully, but it absolutely abides one of the sub-genres.

It is those last three levels…Romantic Desire, Romantic Commitment and Romantic Intimacy that divide the big love story category.

There are three kinds of sub-genres of Love Story that result

Obsession
Courtship
Marriage

And these three levels of love, the depth of connection between the two lovers, correspond to the progression of meaning derived from the love experience. The deeper one goes…the more meaningful the relationship.

That is,

The Obsession Love Story concerns physical Desire. This is the first level of love, thinking someone is cute and wanting to possess them.

The Courtship Love Story concerns Commitment. Monogamous binding of two people to form a third metaphysical being…the “love between the two.” This is a far deeper level of love than an obsession…committing to fidelity and honesty and servitude to one above all others.

The Marriage Love Story concerns Intimacy. This is the deepest level of love.

Now that the two have committed to one another…will they courageously choose to go even deeper?

To confront and accept the inner demons and angels of the other?

To accept the light and the dark and continue to nurse and feed that mystical third metaphysical thing they’ve created, their “love”?

Or will they build an emotional wall between one another and maintain the appearances of commitment but internally live another secret life, unshared with the other?

Guess which subgenre is the one that performs best in the marketplace? Let’s walk through them and see.

The Obsession Story is traditionally a cautionary tale. It concerns two people who just can’t help themselves. They’re so attracted to one another that they ignore the rest of society and do what’s necessary to be together… There’s no deeper connection between them than the physical and/or psychological.

You can guess how these stories usually end…tragically. Loving a lie doesn’t end well. There are two kinds of Obsession stories, dramas and comedies. The dramas are tragedies and the comedies are sex farces…literally comedy about people just trying to get into bed together.

The Gatsby/Daisy love story in The Great Gatsby is and example of the obsessive. At no point does the reader think that Gatsby loves the “real” Daisy. In fact, it’s hard to imagine that there really is anything beneath the surface of Daisy (or Gatsby for that matter) than just longing and desire to be longed and desired.

Gatsby can’t help himself. He’s obsessed with Daisy. Even though it’s not an outward carnal obsession (although that’s certainly part of it in the subtext), Gatsby wants to possess Daisy because she represents the final cherry on the top of the American Dream…the beautiful blonde rich girl. When the rich girl picks a poor boy out of the slagheap and makes him her own, the poor boy gets to eat and hang with the swells. He’s becomes “one of us” instead of “beneath us.”

Daisy is validation personified…more than money itself. If she takes his hand, he’s reached the pinnacle of American society. His blind love for her ends up killing him.

The Great Gatsby bombed when it was published. Despite ourselves, we all still believe in Gatsby’s dream. To reach the end of the novel, witness to it’s obliteration…is a bummer.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wisely chose to describe this love from a distance, through the eyes of Nick Carraway, so as to temper the depth of despair in his audience. And he added Nick’s Disillusionment plot too (as well as a domestic drama) to balance out the Gatsby’s sad end.

The Great Gatsby was just too well constructed…too well executed…and it too convincingly conveyed its controlling idea for it to die after initial publication. Then again, many believe it was World War II that saved it from oblivion…it being one of the novels donated to soldiers abroad and widely read by men with undivided attention.

So betting on an Obsession Love Story to rocket up bestseller lists isn’t the best idea. (There are exceptions of course, but these usually combine another genre in their recipe…Gone Girl being the perfect example)

By far the best bet for commercial success is to tell a well conceived Courtship Love Story. These are the ones that we all absolutely adore. They usually end with the lovers committing to marriage or at least committing to one another.

Examples of these are plentiful. There are two varieties too. The dramatic Courtship Love Story is played mostly straight. The archetype is Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, written in 1813, it ushered in the romance novel that is still the biggest selling category in the book business.

And then there is the Romantic Comedy, which is a mainstay of Hollywood. Four Weddings and a Funeral is a great example of that form. The two lovers end up together at the end, but it is their commitment to “not marry” that seals the deal for them.

Lastly, there is the Marriage Love Story, which has dramatic and comedic subsets too.

The marriage love story concerns two committed people trying to or running away from intimacy. Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections features two Marriage Dramas in its many skeins of domestic drama plot. And there’s always the horrifying Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe? By Edward Albee to give you a very cold plunge into the marriage drama world. Gone Girl is another novel that uses Marriage Drama and its concern with fidelity/infidelity to great effect.

So, to break it all down again:

Love Story has three Sub-Genres:

Obsession

a. Drama (usually ends hugely negative or at most ironically; positive and negative

b. Comedy (usually ends positive)

Courtship

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

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

Marriage

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

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

More to come.

 

Six Years in the Life

I was thinking about Marco Rubio.

Joni Mitchell

I’m writing this a few days before the election, so I don’t know if he won his Senate race or not, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that he did.

I’ll bet Marco and his family are breathing a major sigh of relief. A Senate term runs six years. The Rubios are now set up till 2023.

No worries about fading from the public scene. No shiling for work in the private sector. Marco now, and for the next six years, possesses a position of high status and influence, a guaranteed income, an externally imposed structure of order and significance. He’s got a place to go to every morning. The position even comes with a hopeful future. It confers a six-year tenure on its holder and provides him with a platform from which to work toward his next incarnation—another Presidential run, whatever.

Marco Rubio is locked in, safe and solid, for the next six years.

What about you and me?

What about us as artists and entrepreneurs?

What do our next six years look like, lacking any and all of the perks and advantages that Marco’s got.

You and I possess no guaranteed income. We own no position of power and influence, no staff, no office, no free government car or expense account. We have no workplace to go to in the morning, no schedule of meetings and hearings and fact-finding excursions, no built-in structure to shape our days.

We’re on our own. We can drop dead in the middle of Main Street and passers-by will be stepping over our bodies.

Whatever meaning and significance our lives may bring forth, we have to create all by ourselves.

On the other hand, consider these six years:

 

Clouds

Ladies of the Canyon

Blue

For the Roses

Court and Spark

The Hissing of Summer Lawns

 

(Specifically: Chelsea Morning, Both Sides Now, Big Yellow Taxi, Woodstock, Circle Game, My Old Man, Blue, A Case of You, Barangrill, You Turn Me On I’m a Radio, Blonde in the Bleachers, Help Me, Free Man in Paris, People’s Parties, Car on a Hill, Down to You, Just Like This Train, Trouble Child, Twisted, Sweet Bird, Shadows and Light.

Or how about this artist/entrepreneur:

 

Yoyodyne

Permission marketing

eMarketing

Purple Cow

All Marketers Are Liars

The Dip

Tribes

Squidoo

 

I’m fudging a little on dates here, but you get the idea. Seth Godin had a pretty decent Senate term, didn’t he?

Or how about this dude, in just one year?

 

Photovoltaic Effect

Brownian Motion

Theory of Special Relativity

E=mc2

Mass-energy Equivalence

 

The Muse is an amazing gal, isn’t she? She can reach down to you and me (or reach up from our Unconscious, our Self, our neshama) and supply all the structure, power, creativity, significance, meaning, and fun that any of our fellows might get from a job, a post, an externally imposed structure of daily life.

Can anybody look at the bodies of work of [fill in the blank: any artist, entrepreneur, writer, filmmaker, photographer, software designer, you name it] and say there is no meaning in the universe, no order, no evolution, no progress?

Our job, yours and mine, is 1) to make ourselves open to whatever portion of that invisible force has been set aside for us alone (and believe me, that portion is there, with our name on it). And 2) to make ourselves ready in terms of skills, knowledge of craft, professionalism, and capacity to manage our internal impulses—positive as well as negative—so that we can convert the Muse’s gifts into works that are accessible to our brothers and sisters.

We asked at the start of this Why I Write series, “What if an artist produced over her lifetime an original and authentic body of work, but that work had never been recognized widely among her contemporaries? Would we say that her work had been in vain?”

Again I say no.

That body of work has been her artist’s journey, her destiny as a soul. The realization of that inspiration of the Muse (in other words, its transformation from the invisible state of pure potential to its realized state as material works of art) is as valid a life’s work as raising a family, selflessly serving one’s people or nation or planet, or achieving any kind of conventional recognition or fame.

By producing that work, by following her star, our hypothetical artist has lived as realized a life as an oak that has grown to its full height and breadth, a sperm whale that has circled the globe as a matriarch of her ocean-depths clan, or a comet that has lapped the solar system and is banking around to do it again.

And she knows it, our artist. She may not have had a Capitol Hill office to go to every morning, or been greeted as “Madame Senator” as she went about her day. But she has been true to her deepest internal calling, like Joni and Seth and Albert Einstein.

And I’ll tell you something else. Someday, and maybe much sooner than she or we imagine, that body of work will be recognized beyond her small inner circle.

Soul has power.

Its light cannot remain unseen forever.

Next week we’ll talk about the idea of “having a practice.” (Another answer to that same question above.)