Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 65

What Have You Done For Yourself Lately?

(Though this post first ran March 2, 2012, I find I’m still saying the same thing to authors today. What have you done for yourself lately? ~Callie)

Dear Author,

What have you done for yourself lately?

You’ve written a book?

Not enough.

You’ve had it accepted and printed by a publisher?

Not enough.

You met with your publisher and came up with a marketing plan.

Not enough.

What have you done to ensure your book reaches all the people you know will love it?

What have you done for yourself lately?

You want radio. You want TV. You want print. You want to go viral.

Yeah, I know . . . You were counting on your publisher to make some magic.

Here’s the deal: Some publishers rock n’ roll, while others are rock bottom.

And even if you’re with a rock n’ roll star of a publisher, your “baby”—your book—is just one of hundreds of books your publisher is raising. You gave your publisher custody, but there’s still some major co-parenting to be done.

Learn about publishing so that you understand what your publisher and the publicity department are talking about.

Be upfront with your publisher. Ask: What are you going to do? And if you aren’t happy, don’t waste time complaining. Bury the complaints and sort out what you can do on your own. And if you need help, sort that out, too.

What have you done for yourself lately?

I know you don’t want to blog. You don’t have time for that. You are writing other books and articles and a million other things.

Do you have a site? Or a blog where you could include info. about all the awesomeness you are creating every month? Can you repurpose any of it, to develop a series on your site?

If you do change your mind and decide to blog, will you consider a theme, something that you can repurpose for later—perhaps as a book?

What have you done for yourself lately?

I’ve checked out your  Facebook profile. Why do you have one for friends and one for your book? Every time you have a new book, you’ll have to start another following. Do you really want to do that over and over? Instead of building a book presence, build a YOU presence. Readers want to get to know writers, not a book. Yes, they’ll read the book, and get to know it that way, but their questions will be for you. Their interest will be in how you wrote it, why you wrote it, and so on. Find them. Don’t wait for them to find you.

What have you done for yourself lately?

You’ve heard the power of online outreach, but your ego is still stuck on the traditional.

You still dream of Oprah, knowing if she’d just had you on her show . . . That would have been it. Your book about the gentle caring side of the T-Rex, and the inaccurate pop-cultural portrayal of it as a killer, would have been a best seller.

Stop the insanity. Time to wake up.

What have you done for yourself lately?

Please look in the mirror.

If you aren’t happy with the outreach for your book, blame the person looking back at you (unless it is your mother, or kid, or significant other, standing in front of the mirror with you , in which case you should make sure you are looking at yourself—and blaming yourself).

What have you done for yourself lately?

Unless your name is Janet Jackson, stop singing others the line “What have you done for me lately?”

Do something for yourself.

The Muse and Me, Part Two

 

I wouldn’t blame anyone who read last week’s post if they thought, “Man, that’s a bit airy-fairy, ain’t it?”

Lemme answer by getting even more airy-fairy.

Philip Roth

Consider this artist’s body of work:

 

Goodbye, Columbus

Portnoy’s Complaint

My Life as a Man

The Professor of Desire

The Ghost Writer

Zuckerman Unbound

The Counterlife

Sabbath’s Theater

American Pastoral

The Human Stain

The Plot Against America

Indignation

The Humbling

           

Clearly there’s a theme here. Without doubt Philip Roth is dealing with a unified, ongoing issue. He’s examining this theme from every angle, playing games with it, turning it inside-out and upside-down.

How about this artist?

 

Born to Run

Darkness on the Edge of Town

The River

Nebraska

Born in the U.S.A.

Tunnel of Love

Human Touch

Lucky Town

The Ghost of Tom Joad

Working on a Dream

Wrecking Ball

High Hopes

           

The Muse’s fingerprints, to me, are all over both bodies of work.

But why?

What’s her purpose? Why is she doing this? We can agree, can’t we, that the world is a better place because Philip Roth wrote the books he wrote and Bruce Springsteen recorded the songs he recorded?

So something positive is going on.

Why did American Pastoral come after Zuckerman Unbound? Why did The River follow Darkness on the Edge of Town?

The artists are evolving, aren’t they?

Or, looked at another way, why didn’t Philip Roth write Beloved or The Color Purple? Why didn’t the Boss record Blood on the Tracks?

Each of these souls is on a journey specific to him. Just like I am and just like you are. If we’re artists, the works we produce are the material articulations of that journey.

The journey itself is interior.

The journey takes place within the soul.

The Muse gives us works to bring into being in the same way and for the same purpose that the Unconscious sends us dreams.

Each work is a message in a bottle from the higher level—our soul, our Self, our being-in-potential—to our stumbling, struggling incarnations here on the material plane.

Can we say that Philip Roth and Bruce Springsteen as artists have led fulfilled lives? Maybe we can’t bet the ranch on it, since we’re not all-knowing beings. But it sure looks like they’ve done pretty well, doesn’t it?

For sure we have to give it to them that they’ve followed their stars. They’ve clearly been true over long careers to their most profound interior callings.

In other words, if you ask me, the Muse is not just giving us as artists the works we produce.

She’s guiding our soul’s journey.

She’s our mentor and our navigator.

[Remember, this post is Why I Write, Part 7.]

Have we entered this life as the most recent in an extended succession of incarnations?

Will we re-appear at some later time in another life?

Will the theme of our current and prior lives carry over?

Will Philip Roth and Bruce Springsteen, in some transfigured forms, continue to “work on” the issues that have possessed each of them in this lifetime?

I told ya this was gonna get even more airy-fairy.

Remember the first post in this Why I Write series? It asked the question, “What if a person produced an original, authentic body of work over a lifetime but never saw it recognized by the wider world? Would that artist’s working life have been in vain?”

We’ll consider this a little more deeply next week.

What I Mean by Love Story

The first thing we need to define before we get too deep into the mechanics of the conventions and obligatory scenes of the Love Story is to clearly understand what kind of love we’re talking about.

There’s the love between mother and child.

There’s the love between brother and brother.

There’s the love between friends.

There’s the love of country.

There’s the love between business colleagues.

There’s the love of Apple computer products.

There’s the love of pizza.

None of the above is our concern. Other story genres explore those kinds of love either directly (the domestic drama for family, the performance genre for friends and/or business colleagues etc.) or indirectly as one of a slew of characteristics of a particular player in the story.

What we’re talking about when we’re talking about the Love Story Genre is the love between two people that involves the possibility of sexual congress.

The story does not have to be traditional male/female love story, like Jane Austen’s classic, Pride and Prejudice. It can be male/male (Brokeback Mountain) or female/female (Carol) or male/transgender person (The Crying Game).

So that’s the very first thing. The Love Story Genre concerns stories about people (or anthropomorphic beings) that fall into a romantic relationship, which includes the possibility of sex.

You’ll notice I stuck in the word romantic in there.

What’s that all about?

Ahh, romance…

Now before I dive into the three sub-genres of Love Story and the emotional needs that each examine (desire, commitment and intimacy), we should take a stroll down memory lane.

Our understanding of what love is…isn’t all that old.

It was the age of Chivalry (12th century) that put forth a set of romantic ideals that to this day retain tremendous power. A French writer of the era, Chretien de Troyes, was perhaps most responsible for planting the flag for the modern romantic ethos.

Like many of his contemporaries, Chretien wrote narrative poems that featured the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. But he was the first to introduce the exciting idea that Lancelot and Arthur’s wife Guinevere had a deeper form of attachment than the traditional King/Queen kind of partnership. Forbidden attraction!

He innovated the age-old epic action adventure story (who will pull the sword out of the rock?) by moving away from action tropes and throwing in something subversive…an attraction between a queen and one of the King’s most trusted brothers-in-arms.

In Chretien’s popular story, Lancelot, The Knight of the Cart, the pivotal love story notion of a “proof of love” comes to the fore. And that proof of love element proved so cathartic for his audience that it became the must-have for every love story that followed…yes even for that cheesy movie of the week re-run you saw on Lifetime last night had a proof of love scene.

Guinevere, ashamed of her attachment to Lancelot after he rescues her from being held hostage in another kingdom (Lancelot cuts himself as he breaks through the castle’s door and spills blood on Guinevere’s bed sheets…subtle Monsieur Chretien was not!), asks him to lose in an upcoming knight tournament so that their alliance remain undiscovered. He agrees even though it will mean certain death.

Lancelot’s chivalrous act (to die in order to protect his beloved’s reputation) of self-sacrifice moves Guinevere all the more. Which leads her to renounce her request when it becomes clear that he will surely die in the fight. She goes on to root him on to victory.

At the end of the tournament, they share a chaste embrace.

And from thereon the love story evolves.

Great debts are owed to the unknown poets, minstrels and songwriters of the age too. In addition to Chretien’s “proof of love” obligatory love scene, traveling performers told stories and sang songs that put forth five general love principles that make up the foundation for our deeply ingrained ideas about romance.

The first is the notion that one plus one doesn’t equal two. Love between two people is actually a third thing in and of itself. Once two people fall in love, the two come together to form a third mystical union, often called “our love” or “us.”

They say our love won’t pay the rent… Sonny and Cher

Our love is here to stay… George Gershwin

Don’t give up on us baby… David Soul

Two hearts beat as one… U2

When we fall in love, we become better people than the slobs we were before. To be in a relationship is to live on a higher moral plane.

“You make me want to be a better man”—Jack Nicholson to Helen Hunt in As Good As it Gets

There’s a rule book. You can’t break the rules or you’ll betray the love contract. No Flirting!
Love has rituals. You better follow the procedures that were established early on when one plus one first equaled three…or you’re in danger of violating principle three.
Love is a powerful drug, filled with longing and desire, but it’s best not to ruin it with sex. If you indulge in the physical act, chances are you’ll end up destroying the mystical and unsullied union that keeps you enraptured.

From this fertile ground do all love stories grow.

Next up are the big three sub-genres of Love Story.

The Muse and Me

 

We were talking last week about “what works and what doesn’t,” i.e. what activities produce (for me) peace of mind at the end of the day. I listed a number that didn’t work—money, attention, family life, etc.

“It may be the devil, or it may be the Lord … but you gotta serve somebody.”

Let’s talk today about what does work.

If you asked me at this time of my life to define my identity—after cycling through many, many over the years—I would say I am a servant of the Muse.

That’s what I do.

That’s how I live my life.

[Remember, this post is Why I Write, Part 6.]

Consider this (incomplete and possibly out-of-order) selection from our newest Nobel laureate.

 

Bob Dylan

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

The Times They Are a-Changin’

Highway 61 Revisited

Blonde on Blonde

Bringing It All Back Home

Blood on the Tracks

Desire

John Wesley Harding

Street-legal

Nashville Skyline

Slow Train Coming

Hard Rain

Time Out of Mind

Tempest

Shadows in the Night

 

See the Muse in there? Mr. D might not agree with the terminology I’m employing, but he is definitely serving something, isn’t he? Something is leading him and he is following it.

That’s exactly what I do.

An idea seizes me. Gates of Fire. Bagger Vance. The Lion’s Gate. Where is this idea coming from? The unconscious? The soul? The Jungian “Self?”

My answer: the Muse.

I experience this apparition-of-the-idea as an assignment. I’m being tasked by the Muse with a mission.

 

You are to travel by sea to Antioch. There you will meet a tall man with one eye who will hand you a talisman ….

 

My instinctive reaction, always, is to reject the idea. “It’s too hard, nobody’s gonna be interested, I’m not the right person, etc.”

This of course is the voice of Resistance.

In a few days (or weeks or months) I recognize this.

I accept my task.

I accede to my mission.

This is how I live my life. From project to project, year by year. As the Plains Indians followed the herds of buffalo and the seasonal grass, I follow the Muse.

Wherever she tells me to go, I go.

Whatever she asks me to do, I do.

I fear the Muse. She has slapped me around a few times over the years. I’ve been scared straight.

She has also cared for me. She has never failed me, never been untrue to me, never led me in any direction except that which was best for me on the deepest possible level.

She has taken me to places I would never have gone without her. She has shown me parts of the world, and parts of myself, that I would never have even dreamt existed.

But let’s take this notion a little deeper.

What I’m really saying is that I believe that life exists on at least two levels. The lower level is the material plane. That’s where you and I live. The higher level is the home of the soul, the neshama, the Muse.

The higher level is a lot smarter than the lower level.

The higher level understands in a far, far deeper way.

It understands who we are.

It understands why we are here.

It understands the past and the future and our roles within both.

My job, as I understand it, is to make myself open to this higher level.

My job is to keep myself alert and receptive.

My job is to be ready, in the fullest professional sense, when the alarm bell goes off and I have to slide down the pole and jump into the fire engine.

Again, I didn’t choose this way of living.

I didn’t seek it out.

I didn’t even know it existed.

I tried everything and nothing else worked. This was the only thing I’ve found that does the job for me.

In other words, I don’t do what I do for money. I don’t do it for ego or attention or because I think it’s cool. I don’t do it because I have a message to deliver or because I want to influence my brothers and sisters in any way (other than to let them know, from my point of view anyway, that they are not alone in their struggle.)

When I say I’m a servant of the Muse I mean that literally.

The goddess has saved my life and given it meaning or, perhaps more accurately, she has allowed me to participate in the meaning she already embodies, whether I understand it or not.

Everything I do in my life is a form of getting ready for the next assignment.

Beyond the Words: Pitching Presentation and Sending

We’ve discussed pitch content in previous articles.

But what about presentation and sending? How should they look and how should they be sent?

Presentation

In his free Skillshare class, MailChimp’s Fabio Carneiro reminds viewers that research has shown “people delete ugly e-mails.” He makes a good point using design that speaks to specific types of customers, too.

“If you know your audience is mostly developers, you could make your content more technical. You could generally make your design much simpler as well, so that it’s the textual information that stands out. For designers on the other hand, they might appreciate something that looks a little nicer — and for the content to be less technical and more subjective.”

A friend in the music industry always includes a video of her clients performing whenever she shares information about them. Makes sense. The music and the performance are what’s being sold. For a visual artist, images of artist’s work make sense. Why send all text when the work is a painting?

At Black Irish Books, we’ve found the simpler the better. For promotions, keep it short, to an image, the offer, and a link. If you’re sending a newsletter, lengthy content might fly, but for pitching… Too often Steve and Black Irish Books receive pitches that run the length of short stories. The pitch — what the sender wants — is the most important piece, yet it often ends up being a short ask at the end of two pages detailing the life of the sender. On the minimalist side, there’s this:

Attached is a copy of the flyer going out to the media and public in just a couple of weeks – to promote my new book, XXX…

if would be terrific if you would/could forward it to your email list to let them know it can be pre-ordered through Amazon.com. Also – if they are interested, I will be holding special workshops in the Spring to learn how to use this xxx for xxx.

Thanks muchly — of course I will ALWAYS do the same for anything you wish to promote. Thanks.

First: We don’t know the sender.

Second: The sender’s book didn’t relate to any books written by Steve or released by Black Irish Books.

Third: No personalization. It’s the e-mail equivalent of throwing spaghetti at a wall.

*I’m not going to rip off Fabio’s full class, so go over and check it out for more on presentation. Good info. He won me over with this:

“Essentially what you’re doing in a great post is teaching others. That’s the best thing you can do, is help other people be better.”

Help other people be better.

We use MailChimp for Steve’s personal site and for Black Irish Books. I’m going through their videos now to see what I’ve missed.

Personalization

This past week, Skillshare posted a free class from Ariana Hargrave, director of VIP Services for MailChimp. Personalization is one of the items Ariana reminds viewers to target.

We’ve talked about personalization in the past. Genuine personalization — the kind that involves more than inserting a name in a merge field — is time-consuming, but worthwhile. What we’ll often do is send an e-mail to everyone on our list, and then circle back to friends, with a forward of the e-mail and a few personal notes. We don’t do it every time because we’re a small team and genuine, personalized correspondence isn’t something that can be outsourced.

Onboarding E-mails

If you’ve shopped via an online store, you’ve likely faced a pop-up, offering 10% or some other incentive for subscribing to the site. Once you sign up, you’ll receive an automated e-mail offering the promised gift.

This is important: This is your first e-mail to new subscribers.

Make a good impression.

With the digital download or coupon code, or whatever it is you’re offering, consider providing a special unannounced bonus or a special video about your work, your company’s mission, and so on — and make sure you say THANK YOU.

Abandoned Cart Messa g e

This is the e-mail you receive when you don’t complete a purchase. You went as far as putting a product in a shopping cart and then an important call came in, you had to send a file to a client, the kids came home and you had to get dinner, and then by the end of the day you forgot — or you simply changed your mind once you saw the shipping cost and bailed.

These are particularly good for limited time/limited quantity offers. After almost every promo we’ve done, we’ve received e-mails from customers that started their purchases and then …. “Something came up. Can you squeeze me in? Can I still receive the promo?” Same for customers that thought they made a purchase, but somehow it “didn’t go through.”

Purchase Follow-U p

If you’ve ever bought something on Amazon, you’re familiar with the e-mails that arrive within a week of you receiving your purchase. These are call-to-action e-mails, requesting that you share a review about your purchase.

As with the onboarding e-mails, purchase follow-up e-mails can be used to provide a bonus, too. Maybe you send a short story surprise, a cartoon, or a short how-to video with your thank you.

Timin g

The timing of messages is the piece of Arianna’s video that had me taking notes.

We’ve always sent e-mails out at the same time, which means 9 AM on the East Coast, 6 AM on the West Coast, and later for international. MailChimp allows for staggered sends, “Time Warp” e-mails, so we could send e-mails out at 9 AM whenever 9 AM hits different locations, rather than at one time. This way, e-mails would hit at 9 AM on the East Coast, at 9 AM on the West Coast, at 9 AM in London, and so on… Optimize the timing for different locations.

With onboarding e-mails, strike while the iron’s hot. Set the auto e-mail for an immediate send upon subscription.

For abandoned carts, give it some time — and don’t go overboard. A gentle reminder within 24 hours is great, but… You’ll run subscribers off if the e-mails don’t stop.

For purchase follow-up, give it at least a week. Sending an e-mail request for a review five minutes after a print copy was purchased doesn’t make sense. The book hasn’t been sent, so it hasn’t been received, which means it hasn’t been read. By the time the reading portion hits, your e-mail will be forgotten and likely deleted.

Best Customers E-mail

This isn’t something I’d thought about until Ariana brought it up in her video. We have a number of college stores that purchase Black Irish Books’ titles every semester. Every semester, the stores order at the last minute and then want everything rushed. With these routine customers, we could be timing e-mails, sent only to them, at the beginning of each semester, nudging them to submit their orders. Although Black Irish Books wasn’t set up to sell into the school stores, that’s exactly what’s happening. Makes sense to target them on the front end, instead of rushing on the late end. The same can be done with other repeat buyers. If we look at order history, we can identify ordering trends for repeat customers. Makes sense to touch base with them.

MailChimp isn’t the only e-mail system available, but it is the one we’ve used. Whether you use it or not, definitely check out their videos on Skillshare. They are free — and you’ll likely find more to explore on Skillshare, too.

What Works and What Doesn’t

 

I declared in the second Why I Write post that I would have to kill myself if I couldn’t write. That wasn’t hyperbole.

Henry Miller

Here in no particular order are the activities and aspirations that don’t work for me (and I’ve tried them all extensively, as I imagine you may have too if you’re reading this blog):

Money doesn’t work. Success. Family life, domestic bliss, service to country, dedication to a cause however selfless or noble. None of these works for me.

Identity-association of every kind (religious, political, cultural, national) is meaningless to me. Sex provides no lasting relief. Nor do the ready forms of self-distraction—drugs and alcohol, travel, life on the web. Style doesn’t work, though I agree it’s pretty cool. Reading used to help and still does on occasion. Art indeed, but only up to a point.

It doesn’t work for me to teach or to labor selflessly for others. I can’t be a farmer or drive a truck. I’ve tried. My friend Jeff jokingly claims that his goal is world domination. That wouldn’t work for me either. I can’t find peace of mind as a warrior or an athlete or by leading an organization. Fame means nothing. Attention and praise are nice but hollow. “Wimbledon,” as Chris Evert once said, “lasts about an hour.”

Meditation and spiritual practice, however much I admire the path and those who follow it, don’t work for me.

The only thing that allows me to sit quietly in the evening is the completion of a worthy day’s work. What work? The labor of entering my imagination and trying to come back out with something that is worthy both of my own time and effort and of the time and effort of my brothers and sisters to read it or watch it or listen to it.

That’s my drug. That’s what keeps me sane.

I’m not saying this way of life is wholesome or balanced. It isn’t. It’s certainly not “normal.” By no means would I recommend it as a course to emulate.

Nor did I choose this path for myself, either consciously or deliberately. I came to it at the end of a long dark tunnel and then only as the last recourse, the thing I’d been avoiding all my life.

When I see people, friends even, destroy their lives with pills or booze or domestic violence or any of the thousand ways a person can face-plant himself or herself into non-existence, I feel nothing but compassion. I understand how hard the road is, and how lightless. I’m a whisker away from hitting that ditch myself.

The Muse saved me. I offer thanks to the goddess every day for beating the hell out of me until I finally heeded and took up her cause.

No one will ever say it better than Henry Miller did in Tropic of Capricorn.

I reached out for something to attach myself to—and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for—myself. I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live—if what others are doing is called living—but to express myself. I realized that I had never had the least interest in living, but only in this which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same time, and beyond it. What is true interests me scarcely at all, nor even what is real; only that interests me which I imagine to be, that which I had stifled every day in order to live.

Why Love Rules

Lenny Kravitz Launched His Career with Love Story

What if tomorrow everything you’ve learned about storytelling disappeared?

What would you do?

Where would you begin to relearn your craft?

For those of us who spend a considerable amount of our conscious hours inside our heads, the likelihood of this happening is pretty slim. Barring some highly unlikely blunt force trauma to our noggins, we’re not going to lose everything we know overnight.

But is it not instructive to use our imaginations to consider what we would do if the worst catastrophic fantasy of a storyteller were to actually happen?

For anyone who has played competitive sports, this idea of having to start all over again is not exceptional. And the longer you played, the more likely it was to occur.

The football player or soccer player who blows out an Anterior Cruciate Ligament on the field on Friday, Saturday or Sunday game faces surgery on Monday. And that unnerving and ethereal experience is soon followed by one of the most painful words in the English language…. Rehab.

Rehab is a process of managing pain in the service of regaining fundamental skills. It doesn’t just require an acceptance of intense discomfort (my old physical therapist’s softer phrase for torture), it requires the abandonment of a taken for granted reliance on previous mastery.

You literally have to relearn how to stand up before you’ll be able to walk. You have to relearn how to walk before you can jog. And jog before you can run in a straight line. And then you have to relearn how to best change directions (that’s when the real pain begins when you’re 90% back to form)…and what muscles must be rebuilt to accomplish those changes.

It’s a humbling process, but it’s not a baffling series of steps.

You simply do what you need to do to stand. Do what you need to do to walk. Do what you need to do to jog. Do what you need to do to run. Do what you need to do to cut. Repeat. Those are the five stages of rebuilding a knee.

Which begs the question…

What would be the equivalent series of intellectual steps to learn or refresh our understanding of storytelling?

What must we do to “stand” as storytellers?

Good old Marcus Aurelius’s recommendation that we peel back the onion layers of a skill and “Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature?” is a good place to start.

All of those who’ve read anything I’ve written about story structure will not be surprised by my go-to starting point to figure out what story is in itself…

I’m going to begin by looking at Genre.

And what I mean by Genre is simply the way by which we divide or classify kinds of stories. What kinds of boxes we put them in.

There are a lot of Genres. Check out my five-leaf clover definition of Genre here and you’ll soon want to run for the hills.

But before you do, let’s take a step back and ask ourselves a simple question…did all of those Genres come from some primal place?

Was there some fundamental want or need that human beings desired or required to survive a hostile environment? And could that want or need be fulfilled by simply following the behavioral prescriptions inherent in a compelling story?

What I mean by “behavioral prescriptions” isn’t as complicated as the phrase may seem. Just think of asking someone or some artificial intelligence for directions.

What do they do? They tell you a story. You start here, turn there, turn there, look for the gas station on the left, turn right and you’ll get where you need to be. Those are behavioral prescriptions that derive from a third party narrative…How to change your behavior to get to the place you want to be.

So what was the first story?

Obviously Action stories were probably first. They concern overcoming an external life threatening force, like hunting prey or avoiding a pack of hungry wolves or something. The stakes are huge and ancient cave drawings prove how important these stories were to our loincloth-clad forebears. Getting our water, food and shelter are mucho importante. And the behavioral prescriptions to get those things are crucial to our day-by-day survival.

And War stories were primal too. They lent direction when human forces intent on our destruction marched into our private valley. So stories about how to outmaneuver and survive an invasion sit alongside environmental Action stories as a primary genre.

But wait, let’s back up even more…is there a need within us all that is even more fundamental than water, food, and shelter?

There is.

It’s love.

Without love, we’re dead.

If mom doesn’t love us enough to take care of us as infants, we die. Simple fact.

None of us can make it alone. Not even Donald J. Trump.

When the state wants to destroy a person, they put them in solitary confinement. Sentenced to 365/24/7 with only our internal voices is torture. It’s just not better to connect with others…it’s life-saving.

Love is the force that not just binds us to the rest of humanity…it’s the very thing that preserves our species. To fail to love therefore is not only an external threat to our own private lives; a love breakdown across humanity will take down our entire life form.

So, sure the short-term primal genres (Action, Horror, War, Thriller) concern the concrete foundation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs…how to survive today.

But the Love Story is the long-term mother of all Genres. It’s not just about how to survive today; it’s about how to last a lifetime…and even how to gain a measure of immortality. Good old Marcus Aurelius has a measure of immortality, doesn’t he? His work still resonates today…probably far more than it did in his own lifetime.

Love story is the structure that instructs us on how to discover the meaning of our existence. Both as individuals and as atomic particles that bump in to one another in a complex action and reaction that comprises the human collective unconscious. Don’t forget that Marcus Aurelius is still bumping around in that soup today even though he left earth 1,836 years ago…and we think Cal Ripken’s Ironman streak is something…

So if we want to refresh our storytelling craft, what better Genre is there to examine than the Love Story?

In the next series of posts, I’ll open up the hood of the internal combustion Love Story engine and see what makes that baby purr.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Writing “As If”

Jerry Garcia. “Dude, ‘as if’ works!”

 

The hippie version of behavioral therapy (I remember it well) was “acting as if.”

Are you scared? Are you anxious? Act as if you’re not.

Shawn has a principle for Black Irish Books: publish as if. In other words, bring out a book/promote it etc. as if we were Knopf, as if we were Random House.

What about writing as if?

(Remember, the theme of this series is “Why I Write.” It’s my own admittedly personal, idiosyncratic, possibly demented view of why I do what I do.)

I definitely write as if.

I write as if I’m being published by Penguin Random House/Simon&Schuster/Hachette/HarperCollins.

I write as if my stuff is gonna be reviewed by the NY Times, the New Yorker, the Times of London.

I write as if the Nobel Prize committee will check every comma.

I write as if Steven Spielberg will be personally eyeballing an advance reading copy.

I write as if people will be reading my work five hundred years from now (assuming of course that planet Earth is still habitable by humans at that time.)

More critical than all the above, I write as if the Muse herself will be going over my stuff. I don’t want her saying, “I gave you this?”

But let’s take this line of thinking to a deeper level.

You and I as writers must write as if we were highly paid, even though we may not be.

We must write as if we were top-shelf literary professionals, even though we may not (yet) be.

We must write as if we were being held to the highest standards of truth, of vision, of scale, of imagination, even though we may not be.

We must write as if our works mattered, even though they may not.

As if they will make a difference, even though they may not.

As if our lives and sanity depend on it. Because, believe me, they do.

To say that we write (or live) “as if” is another way of saying we have turned pro.

We are operating as professionals.

We are in this for keeps.

We are in it for the long haul.

We are committed.

We are warriors.

We are for real.

 

Therefore … take no thought how or what ye shall speak; for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak.

 

There is great wisdom in acting as if and writing as if.

Is life without meaning? Are you and I marooned on an atom of dust hurtling in the dark through a pointless cosmos?

Maybe.

But we can’t act as if we believed that.

Art Carney and Lily Tomlin in “The Late Show”

We must act as if there were meaning, as if our lives and actions did have significance, as if love is real and death is an illusion, as if the future will be better than the past, whatever that means.

One of Seth Godin’s great contributions is the idea of “picking yourself.” Don’t sit on a stool at Schwab’s like Lana Turner waiting for someone else to pick you to be the next star.

Pick yourself.

Act as if you were a pro, a fastball hitter, the real thing,

And there’s additional magic to the practice of acting as if and writing as if. In some crazy way, acting and writing as if makes our beliefs about ourselves come true.

What we had only projected takes on its own reality. That’s a law.

“You’re an actress,” Art Carney tells Lily Tomlin at a scary moment in Robert Benton’s great private eye flick The Late Show. “Act brave.”

 

 

 

 

 

You Need More Than A High IQ

“ Knowing how something originated often is the best clue to how it works.”

— Terrence Deacon

The good news: IQ levels are higher today than they were 100 years ago—and continue to increase.

The bad news: Higher IQs aren’t making us smarter.

In a recent interview with the BBC, James Flynn said, “the major intellectual thing that disturbs me is that young people . . . are reading less history and less serious novels than [they] used to.”

From Flynn’s perspective, this lack of reading makes us ripe for an Orwellian dystopia. “All you need are ‘ahistorical’ people who then live in the bubble of the present, and by fashioning that bubble the government and the media can do anything they want with them.”

He’s right. George Santanaya wasn’t joking when he said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Then there’s this quote, also from that BBC interview:

“Reading literature and reading history is the only thing that’s going to capitalise on the IQ gains of the 20th Century and make them politically relevant.”

Let’s take politics out of it and focus in on the individual.

Even at the very basic level, as in considering your personal career goals, being “ahistorical” is a recipe for disaster.

As we’ve spent more time on this site discussing the development and sharing of creative work, emails have continued to stream in from individuals, requesting Steve mentor them, that Steve take a look at their project, that Steve introduce them to people who can help them, that Steve tell them how to fix their personal lives, and so on . . .

I used to blame Laziness for these emails. While Laziness ain’t completely off the hook, Rational Ignorance is the better hook on which to hang their cluelessness.

Just as I haven’t learned how to fix my washing machine, because the investment of time and money spent learning how to fix my washing machine outweighs simply paying a specialist to fix it, individuals e-mailing Steve think that the investment of time and money spent learning their desired trade outweighs the effort to simply ask Steve for help.

These individuals don’t realize that they’re screwing themselves. Rather than asking someone else the answer to 892 + 1297, or using a calculator to figure it out, they’d benefit from knowing how to do simple addition themselves.

And, if they continue to resist learning how to do something themselves, the answers to most of their questions are already out there.

We live in the age of information. “Content” is flying at us from all direction. The answers are on the record.

And yet…

The e-mails keep coming in.

Back to Flynn.

During the BBC interview, it sounds like Flynn gave the interviewer grief for not knowing about the Thirty Years War.

I’m not taking it that far.

I’m keeping it basic.

Start with your own life.

Stop e-mailing and asking others for an “in.”

Understand the history.

Know the players.

Master the business.

Do the work yourself.

Tomorrow you can hit the Thirty Years War.

What Kind of Writer Are You?

“Jim’s looking for something edgy, something David Fincher-esque.”

I had been working in Hollywood for five or six years and had a semi-respectable B-level screenwriting career going, when I got a new agent. My new agent was a go-getter. He decided to mount a campaign where he would “re-introduce me to the town.” That sounded good to me. I said, “Let’s do it.”

My new agent started setting me up with meetings. The campaign would last six weeks, he said. He would send me out to two or three places a week—studios, production companies, the individual development entities of actors, directors, etc.

The meetings would usually last between half an hour and an hour. They were meet-and-greets, friendly, informal. It would be me and two or three development execs. The company people would tell me what they were looking for and I would tell them what I was working on. For example, if it was the production company of an actor, the execs might say, “Jim’s looking for something darker than his usual stuff, something David Fincher-esque, with a real edge to it.” Or I might say, “I just finished a spec Western” or pitch them a supernatural thriller I had percolating inside me.

The hope was that the twain would meet and a gig would come out of it, or maybe I would sell one of my specs. And for the first couple of weeks, everything was going great. The meetings had energy; plans were made; I was doing callbacks and follow-ups.

The only problem was I getting depressed.

I mean down.

Clinically down.

Three weeks became four. My tally was up around ten, twelve meetings.

I was getting seriously bummed and I couldn’t figure out why.

I got to dreading these meetings.

What was wrong with me?

Why was this experience such a bringdown?

My bummed state seemed to make no sense. The people I was meeting and working with were universally smart, dedicated, enthusiastic. They knew movies. They liked me.

What was my problem?

Slowly the answer began to dawn on me.

Floating in the air in every meeting was an unspoken assumption. Everyone in the room bought into this assumption. This assumption was the foundation of everything the studio and development people said and did.

It was assumed that I, by virtue of being in these meetings, accepted this assumption too.

The assumption was this:

 

We will do anything for a hit.

 

The goal was box office. A winner at any cost. Short of producing a snuff flick, the name of the game was commercial success.

Who could argue with that, right?

Hollywood is a business. That’s why they call it “the industry.”

The problem was I didn’t accept that assumption. It wasn’t my assumption. I didn’t buy into it at all.

I wanted to write what I wanted to write. What I cared about was whatever idea seized my imagination. I wanted to have a hit, sure, but out of 100 potential writing ideas, there were at least eighty I wouldn’t touch, no matter how much you paid me or how sure-fire they were at resulting in a hit. They just weren’t interesting to me.

It struck me that I might be in career trouble.

I was actually getting kinda scared.

I realized that I wasn’t in the same business as the executives I was meeting with.

They were looking for one thing and I was looking for another.

In other words, for the first time in my twenty-plus year writing life, I found myself confronting the questions, “What kind of writer am I? Why am I doing this? How do I define success as a writer?”

Am I a writer for hire?

Am I a genre writer?

What kind of writer am I?

And more important: Am I in the right business? Is there a future for me here?

OMG, am I facing a career crisis? At forty-three years old am I gonna have to reinvent myself yet again? As what?

Here was the conceptual breakthrough that solved the problem for me (at least for the moment):

I visualized two circles.

One circle was “Movie ideas that the industry wants to make.”

The other was “Movie ideas that I want to write.”

The two circles might not coincide, one on top of the other. They might in fact barely overlap at all. But there was some overlap, however marginal or occult.

I told myself, “I will make my living in that overlap.”

And it worked.

For another five or six years, for six or seven screenplays (most unproduced but all written to a paycheck), this new theory worked fine.

The problem was I had opened a Pandora’s box by asking those questions, “What kind of writer am I? What is my objective? How do I define writerly success for myself?”

The answers eventually carried me out of the movie biz.

What kind of writer are you?

Why are you pursuing a literary vocation?

How would you define success for yourself?

These are questions that we have to ask and answer, you and I, no matter how uncomfortable they make us or how much we’d prefer to avoid them entirely. For me, the process was life-altering and life-enhancing. These questions and the answers they elicited helped me not only to advance along the path I had embarked on, years earlier, blindly and impulsively, but also to see that path clearly and to understand it (or begin to understand it) truly for the first time.

We’ll keep investigating these issues in the coming weeks.