Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 66

How NOT to Tell a Story

I’m re-running an article I wrote fifteen months ago about a full page advertisement in The New York Times. 

The reason why is this article from Bloomberg Businessweek, How Hampton Creek Sold Silicon Valley on a Fake-Mayo Miracle, that ran on September 22, 2016.  It details the company’s buy-back campaigns to artificially inflate its popularity and short term financial success. 

Essentially the company funded a wide net of dedicated followers (coined “Creekers” who took the do-gooder positioning of the company at face value) to go into grocery stores and buy its products so that it could use industry trusted data to influence its appeal to investors. The Creekers emptied the shelves of  Hampton Creeks’ “Just Mayo” at Whole Foods which induced Whole Foods to report vibrant sales data and re-order. “Just Mayo” was soon the #1 selling mayonnaise at the chain.

My read from the Businessweek investigation is that the primary purpose of the Hampton Creek is to attract marquee investors to fund it to a billion dollar valuation.  That valuation would pose such a threat to one of the major food conglomerates (Unilever in particular which owns Hellman’s Mayonnaise) that it could induce them to acquire the company at an inflated value.

If the Businessweek piece proves correct, this buy back approach is even more cynical and unethical than those who pay third parties to go to bookstores and buy up their books so that they’ll hit bestseller lists.  And that’s saying something. 

All of this chicanery aside…what’s important for us as writers and entrepreneurs etc. is to remember that having a comprehensive understanding of story structure is not just helpful for us as creators. 

It’s an indispensable analytical tool to save us from charlatans. 

When we understand story structure we are empowered to see through the hype and directly question the motivations of the messenger.  Here’s the post again to walk you through why this advertisement set off my story alarms.

A full page advertisement on Page 7 of the Sunday June 21, 2015 edition of The New York Times—in the main news section a full page requires 126 column inches at a retail price of $1,230 per inch ($154,980)—ran as follows:

Inanity as Philosophy

Dear Food Leaders,

I’ve had lots of successful folks give me advice about you.  Advice on whether to work with you (be wary), on how to grow with you (go slow)—and the good we can do with you (very little).

We built a movement, and the fastest-growing food company on earth, around intentionally ignoring all of it.

We started Hampton Creek because we believe in the goodness of people—in the goodness of you.  And you, the same folks who created a food system that often violates your own values, have validated what all of us knew:  It turns out that when you create a path that makes it easy for good people to do good things—they will do it.

I know we’re all buried in the to-do list of the day.  But you should know, that as of 5:33 AM EST on Sunday June 21st, our movement includes:

The largest food service company in the world

The largest convenience store in the world

The two largest retailers in the world

The second largest retailer in the US

The largest natural grocery retailer in the world

The largest grocery retailer in the US

The largest retailer in the UK

The largest grocery retailer in Hong Kong

The largest coffeehouse in the world

Two of the top ten largest food manufacturers in the world

Two of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women (Forbes)

The sovereign wealth fund of Singapore

A former Republican Senate Majority Leader

The world’s leading virologist

The Co-founder of Facebook

A Medal of Honor recipient

The leading experts in machine learning

The Godfather of hip-hop

4,121 public schools

12 billionaires

And many of your kids

Just three years ago when we started, I thought you were the problem.  And I was wrong.  You have always been the kinds of folks who know what the right thing to do is.  You have names. And families.  And you, just like all of us, want your kids and friends and loved ones to admire who you are.  And you, just like all of us, are just trying to figure it all out.

Did you know that our manifesto was written by you?

And that our 2015 impact is driven by you?

1.5 billion gallons of water saved

11.8 billion milligrams of sodium avoided

2.8 billion milligrams of cholesterol removed

You should feel insanely proud.

Talk soon,

Josh Tetrick, CEO & Founder

PS: You can reach me anytime at (415) 404-2372 or jtetrick@hamptoncreek.com

First of all, I read this advertisement because I’m interested in the food industry.  I’ll spare you my thoughts about big agriculture and of processed edibles and instead just cast my jaundiced editorial eye upon the literal text above.

But before I do, I also need to point out that I do not know Josh Tetrick.  And my criticisms of the words that make up his advertisement and my references to “the letter writer” are in no way a commentary on him as a human being or his company.  I simply have no opinion of the man or the work he does.  I don’t know enough to make a judgment.  I only have the words in this advertisement that appear above his name.

Because I write and publish my work publicly here and at www.storygrid.com, I understand that my words are fair game for third party criticism.  I know the sting of others ridiculing something I’ve written and it’s, to say the least, unpleasant.  So in the past I’ve taken the approach that it’s better to praise the masterpieces of story than to criticize those wonderfully flawed works of artists in training (the rest of us struggling to get better). I prefer to praise than to condemn hardworking artisans.

And I’ll continue to take that tack when I storygrid future works of fiction and nonfiction.  I’m currently in the throes of storygridding Malcolm Gladwell’s seminal work of Big Idea Nonfiction, The Tipping Point, a process that’s teaching me a boatload about the power of an idea.

But when I’m presented with a block of text the purpose of which is to induce me to purchase a product or sign on to support something (an advertisement), I have no problem pulling on the critical boxing gloves.

I hope that my admittedly severe nitpicking below can teach something about the importance of Story.  And of how telling a Story poorly is far worse than not telling the Story at all.

Let’s begin with the format of this advertisement.

Why would a food company’s CEO use the epistolary style genre to tell his and his company’s Story? For an explanation of my big picture Genre theory, click here.

The company Hampton Creek…from what I understand after doing some searching…produces an egg-like substance from plant material and uses it to create two retail products, Just Mayo (a mayonnaise substitute) and Just Cookies.

What it makes and even how it makes it isn’t exactly the stuff of narrative drive.  How do you get around that?

One way is to share a heartfelt letter. Because letters connote intimacy.

This is why we keep the old love letter from our first girlfriend tucked into our high school copy of The Catcher in the Rye.  Letters make us feel connected.  They provide comfort or… proof.  Proof of love, of betrayal, etc.

There is a reason why every civil lawsuit begins with the discovery process.  All letters and emails etc. must be turned over to the court so that the “truth” can be parsed from the trail of intimate conversations of the parties involved.  The understanding is that letters and emails reveal the authentic feelings of their authors.

We have an expectation of sincerity and truth, at least the writer’s version of the truth, when we sit down, open and read a letter.

So when a storyteller chooses to tell his story with a letter, he’s taking advantage of a powerful genre, one that immediately pulls the reader in for an intimate experience.  The reader has the expectation from the very first word that the writer of the letter is going to “open the Kimono” of their true self.

Once the storyteller has chosen the epistolary style, his next choice is who to address the letter to.

He can address the letter to a single known reader or a global group of known readers.  “Dear Shawn,” or “Dear People of Earth,” for example.
He can address an unknown single reader or a group of unknown readers.  “To Whom it May Concern,” for example.
He can address a specific group or organization or corporation and share the open letter with the public as a means to affect a very specific, time sensitive change in the behavior of that group.  An example would be the “Authors United” letter criticizing Amazon.com in their dispute with the Hachette Publishing Group in August 2014.

Now for anyone who’s followed my stuff, you’ll know that I’m always looking for the inherent structure of a Story.  I want to figure out the Beginning Hook, Middle Build and Ending Payoff. Because these three parts are indispensable in a story, no matter the length.

The addressee is the Beginning Hook part of the epistolary story.

Remember, a well-told story is like a joke.  It promises a specific type of payoff (a specific kind of laugh) with its beginning hook.  And after the progressive complications of the middle build, it pays off that hook in an unexpected, but inevitable way (a bigger laugh than we anticipated).

Let’s go to the text of the ad:

Josh Tetrick’s letter begins “Dear Food Leaders,” which is choice Number 3 from above.   And the Number 3 variety’s beginning hook implies a “call to action” payoff.  That’s the obligatory element.  What that means is that we as readers subconsciously expect the letter to end with the writer asking something of the addressee or of us. Or both the addressee and the reader.

The Authors United letter wanted the readers of the 900 writers who signed the document to email Jeff Bezos and ask him to settle Amazon’s dispute with Hachette.  Obviously, the 900 writers didn’t expect the general public to check to make sure that they’d read one of the books those writers wrote before considering the call to action.

They used their impressive group number to influence anyone interested in the writing life to email Jeff Bezos.  Publishing the letter in The New York Times made sense because chances are that people who read the newspaper also read books.

Now, when I first saw the “Dear Food Leaders” ad in the paper last Sunday, I was hooked. I like these kinds of letters/stories.

I’m interested in what agricultural insiders have to say to “Food Leaders.”  If Joel Salatin shared a letter with readers of The New York Times that began “Dear Food Leaders,” I’d know that he would pay off the letter by calling for action from them or directly from me the reader.  And I’d want to know what that action was.

Plus I know that a full-page ad costs a lot of money, so the fact that it’s in the paper means that whatever this ad says is really important to the person who signed it.

So I’m willing to give this unknown author my attention just with that opening.  That’s the hook.

I’m thinking that the author is obviously going to fill me in on who these “Food Leaders” are, right?  Just as the Authors United clearly identified Amazon.com and Hachette and its major imprints in the very first sentence of their letter.

But no, instead the author leads with this:

“I’ve had lots of successful folks give me advice about you.”

As difficult as it is for me, I’ll let the letter’s deliberate homespun colloquial tone slide for now.

Sorry, I thought I could, but I can’t let it go without comment.

The use of the word “folks” smacks of such an obvious attempt of the letter writer to make himself come off as just an “aw-shucks ordinary Joe” that my immediate reaction is “this writer is full of BS…he’s playing a game…don’t believe a word of what he writes.”

Seriously, the very first sentence alienated me.  And while I’m unique, I don’t think I’m the only one who finds that kind of forced “simple talk” grating.

What’s even worse is that there is absolutely no transparency about what the letter writer wants or what he was even looking for in the past that solicited advice.

“I’ve had” is a Present Perfect verb tense.  You use it to refer to an experience or action that happened at some time in the past, when the specificity of time is not important.  “I’ve had benign mosquito bites,” is an example of an appropriate use of the Present Perfect.

And just who are these “successful folks” who gave the letter writer advice at some unspecified time in the past?  Specifically?  Are they Warren Buffett? Jimmy Buffett? Kanye West? Adam West?  Who gave the advice?

We never find out.  Which begs the question: Why isn’t the letter writer telling us?

And, who is “you,” the Food Leaders?  Monsanto? Sysco? Aramark? US Foods? Tyson?

We never find out. Which begs another question: Why isn’t the letter writer telling us?

Who is “I?” for that matter? I don’t know the writer of this letter.  Why is he assuming I care about what some nameless successful folks have told him about some nameless Food Leaders?

What the Hell is going on?

I can only infer that the letter writer is someone who works in the “Food” world wishing to get something from its “Leaders.”  He’s making his statement public (at great expense) in order to convince someone like me “not in the Food World, just a reader of the The New York Times” that what he wants from these Food Leaders is worthy of some action on my part.

I’m completely on guard now.  But I’m still curious what his “ask” of me will be.  So I read on.

The letter writer then talks about the subjects of the advice that he received from the nameless successful folks.  Whether he should work with unnamed Food Leaders.  How he can “grow” with unnamed Food Leaders.  And lastly what “good” “we” can do with unnamed Food Leaders.

Now, the letter writer has shifted from first person singular “I” to the first person plural “we” without ever telling us who he is or who he represents as part of this new “we.”

It’s been my experience that writers change the point of view so suddenly from “I” to “we” to hide inside a group.

Hey, it’s not just me…it’s a whole group of “us” who think this way.

This First Person Singular to First Person Plural mid-stream shift is a way of protecting the writer from opposing views by warning the critical reader that there are a whole slew of others (again unnamed) that stand behind the writer’s previous and future statements.  It’s a preemptive strike against dissent.

And it ain’t a good idea. It reminds me of schoolyard playgrounds when some loud mouth takes it upon himself to tell another kid that everyone else wants him to scram…

Here’s a bit of advice.  If you are the only signatory to a letter, write in First Person Singular.  If a whole group of people signs a document you’ve written, use First Person Plural.

The subtext for me from this early mess of sentences is that the writer is trying to tell me that he is in possession of such a remarkable product or idea that “Food Leaders” long to be in business with him. He is also in a social circle of smart and rich folks in the same arena who have advised him not to rush into business with these anxious door-knocking Food Leaders.  The reasons given why he shouldn’t quickly align with these Food Leaders are mysterious. Why be specific now?

The next sentence is even worse.

“We built a movement, and the fastest-growing food company on earth, around intentionally ignoring all of it.”

HELP!

Who is “We?”  What “movement?” What’s with this crazy hyperbole, “the fastest-growing food company on earth?” Why would you, sorry “we,” ignore the advice of “successful folks” so cavalierly?

Oh, okay, in the next sentence comes the explanation of what the Hampton Creek movement is all about:

“…we believe in the goodness of people—in the goodness of you.”

WOW!  They believe in the goodness of people!  And in the goodness of Food Leaders too!

Of such pandering inanity are pseudo egg dreams made.

This reminds me of the motto of fictional Faber College in Animal House:  KNOWLEDGE IS GOOD.

The rest of this letter/advertisement is so opaque and loaded with false modesty and treacly sentiment that if I hadn’t gone online to research the company, I’d have thought it was a gag ad written by someone like John Cleese.

Needless to say, there never is a call to action.  The hook doesn’t pay off.  There is no middle build.  It’s not a Story.  I’m not sure what it is.

One last thing that really strikes me as just crazy Chutzpahdik is the cynical attempt to lodge the letter writer in our minds alongside the modern era’s patron saint of irrepressible entrepreneurship (Steve Jobs).

Here is the last sentence before the letter writer’s saccharine sign off of “Talk soon”

“You should feel insanely proud.”  (Italics mine)

What this ad represents is nothing to be proud about.  It’s an insanely great example of how not to tell a Story.

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

Why I Write, Part Two

 

If you’re a writer struggling to get published (or published again) or wrestling with the utility or non-utility of self-publishing, you may log onto this blog and think, Oh, Pressfield’s got it made; he’s had real-world success; he’s a brand.

J.K. Rowling has earned her spot on the Elite List

Trust me, it ain’t necessarily so.

I don’t expect to be reviewed by the New York Times. Ever. The last time was 1998 for Gates of Fire. That’s eighteen years ago. The War of Art was never reviewed, The Lion’s Gate never. My other seven novels? Never.

I’ve got a new one, The Knowledge, coming in a month or two. It will be reviewed, I’m certain, by no one.

If I want to retain my sanity, I have to banish such expectations from my thinking. I cannot permit my professional or artistic self-conception to be dependent on external validation, at least not of the “mainstream recognition” variety. It’s not gonna happen. I’m never gonna get it.

If you’re not reviewed by the New York Times (or seen on Oprah) your book is gonna have tough, tough sledding to gain awareness in the marketplace. No book I publish under Black Irish is going to achieve wide awareness. BI’s reach is too tiny. Our penetration of the market is too miniscule. And even being published by one of the Big Five, as The Lion’s Gate was by Penguin in 2014, is only marginally more effective.

There are maybe a hundred writers of fiction whose new books will be reviewed with any broad reach in the mainstream press. Jonathan Franzen, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, etc. I’m not on that list. My stuff will never receive that kind of attention.

Does that bother me? I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t want to be recognized or at least have my existence and my work acknowledged.

But reality is reality. As Garth on Wayne’s World once said of his own butt, “Accept it before it destroys you.”

On the other hand, it’s curiously empowering to grasp this and to accept it.

It forces you to ask, Why am I writing?

What is important to me?

What am I in this for?

Here is novelist Neal Stephenson from his short essay, Why I Am a Bad Correspondent:

 

Another factor in this choice [to focus entirely on writing to the exclusion of other “opportunities” and distractions] is that writing fiction every day seems to be an essential component in my sustaining good mental health. If I get blocked from writing fiction, I rapidly become depressed, and extremely unpleasant to be around. As long as I keep writing it, though, I am fit to be around other people. So all of the incentives point in the direction of devoting all available hours to fiction writing.

 

I asked hypothetically in last week’s post, What if a writer worked her entire life, produced a worthy and original body of work, yet had never been published by a mainstream press and had never achieved conventional recognition? Would her literary efforts have been in vain? Would she be considered a “failure?”

Part of my own answer arises from Neal Stephenson’s observation above.

I wrote for twenty-eight years before I got a novel published. I can’t tell you how many times friends and family members, lovers, spouses implored me for my own sake to wake up and face reality.

I couldn’t.

Because my reality was not the New York Times or the bestseller list or even simply getting an agent and having a meeting with somebody. My reality was, If I stop writing I will have to kill myself.

I’m compelled.

I have no choice.

I don’t know why I was born like this, I don’t know what it means; I can’t tell you if it’s crazy or deluded or even evil.

I have to keep trying.

That pile of unpublished manuscripts in my closet may seem to you (and to me too) to be a monument to folly and self-delusion. But I’m gonna keep adding to it, whether HarperCollins gives a shit, or The New Yorker, or even my cat who’s perched beside me right now on my desktop.

I am a writer.

I was born to do this.

I have no choice.

 

 

 

Pitching, Productivity & Strangers: That’s Not How It Works

Mark McGuinness has a new book out. He’s giving it away for free.

I haven’t read it yet, but I’m suggesting you check it out.

Why?

Trust.

I know I’ll respect whatever Mark produces.

That’s Not How This Works

Last week a pitch letter from a stranger arrived. The stranger has a book idea and wants to obtain a signed author contract with a publishing house before he writes his book. In order to achieve this goal, the stranger explained that he is requesting support from established authors. He wants the established authors to provide an endorsement for his book idea.

Breakin’ it down:

The stranger doesn’t have a book to review.

The stranger has a book idea he’d like supported.

The stranger doesn’t have a relationship with the established authors.

The stranger wants established authors to spend their time on his work.

The stranger doesn’t have a proven track record.

The stranger wants authors to trust him and lend their names to his unproven work.

As I read the pitch, an Esurance commercial — the one with the woman posting pictures to the wall of her home — came to mind. She and her friend start disagreeing and her friend says, “That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.”

You know that saying “time is money?” When you ask an author to spend his time on your work, you’re asking him to give up time that he could spend on his own work, which means you’re also asking the author to give up money. Instead of the author making an investment in his own work, he’s making an investment in your work.

Why would he do that? He doesn’t know you or your work.

That’s an ask you’ve got to work into. It requires getting to know the author, showing that you’ve taken the time to familiarize yourself with the author’s work, and it takes doing some work on your own. We’d all like a book contract without writing the book first, but that’s not how it works for most authors — especially when those authors are first-time authors. Usually the book comes before contract — or a large portion of the book-in-progress is available to submit with the contract.

Back to Mark McGuinness.

Mark didn’t ask me to share his book. I learned about the release because I subscribe to his site. I subscribe to his site because I value his work. Part of the reason I value his work is because I’ve had the honor of being in touch with the gentleman behind the work.

He’s not a stranger.

Why I Write, Part One

 

I stumbled onto the website of a novelist I had never heard of. (He’s probably never heard of me either.) What I saw there got me thinking.

What if we worked our whole life and never sold a single painting?

The site was excellent. It displayed all fourteen of the novelist’s books in “cover flow” format. They looked great. A couple had been published by HarperCollins, several others by Random House. The author was the real deal, a thoroughgoing pro with a body of work produced over decades.

Somehow I found myself thinking, What if this excellent writer had never been published?

Would we still think of him as a success?

(In other words, I started pondering the definition of “success” for a writer.)

Suppose, I said to myself … suppose this writer had written all these novels, had had their covers designed impeccably, had their interiors laid out to the highest professional standards.

Suppose he could never find a publisher.

Suppose he self-published all fourteen of his novels.

Suppose his books had found a readership of several hundred, maybe a thousand or two. But never more.

Suppose he had died with that as the final tally.

Would we say he had “failed?”

Would we declare his writing life a waste?

[I’m assuming, for the sake of this exercise, that our writer had been able somehow to support himself and his family throughout his life or that, if he had been supported by someone else (as van Gogh was looked after by his brother Theo), that that was okay with him and with the person supporting him.]

Then I asked myself, What if that was me?

How would I feel about those fourteen books? Would I consider them an exercise in folly? Vanity? Demented self-indulgence?

Would I say to myself, “What’s wrong with you? Why do you continue this exercise in futility? Wake up! Get a job!”

Could I justify all that effort and somehow convince myself that it was worthy, that it had been an honorable use of my time on Earth?

It won’t surprise you, if you’re at all familiar with my thinking in this area, to hear that I would immediately answer yes.

Yes, I would consider that hypothetical writer a success.

I might even declare him a spectacular success.

No, his writing life was not wasted.

No, he had not squandered his time on the planet.

And yes, I would say the same if that writer were me.

My own real-life career is not that far off from this hypothetical. I wrote for seventeen years before I got my first dollar (a check for $3500 for an option on a screenplay that never came near getting made.) I wrote for twenty-eight years before my first novel was published.

What, then, constitutes success for a writer? Is it money? Sales? Recognition? Is it “expressing herself?” Is it “getting her ideas out there?”

Or is it something else?

I’m going to take the next few weeks’ posts and do a little self-examination on this subject, which I think is especially critical in this era of the web and Amazon and print-on-demand and instant and easy self-publishing, these days when literally a million new books appear each year. How do we, how do you and I navigate these waters, not just financially or professionally but psychologically, emotionally, spiritually?

[Thanks to our friend David Y.B. Kaufmann for suggesting this topic.]

 

 

 

The Vote Is In!

Option 1.

Thank you for all of your input about our potential covers for Steve’s new novel, THE KNOWLEDGE.

And yes, we’re changing the subtitle from A Too Close To True Memoir from the bestselling author of The War of Art to A Too Close To True Novel from the bestselling author of The War of Art.  As my grandmother used to say, we were being “too clever by half” with that Memoir classification fudge. If this were a movie, the tagline would be Inspired by a True Story which basically means it’s mostly made up. And readers know that fiction is a “novel,” not memoir…A Million Little Pieces notwithstanding.  Big thanks for that help!

We’re thrilled at the enthusiasm of the response and how many people wrote in. Plus our grand tally of votes came in over 1000. It was tremendously helpful and we can’t thank you enough.

Option 2.

We are going back to the drawing boards and rethinking heavily to incorporate everybody’s GREAT input.

And wait to you see our back cover image!

Stay tuned for the upcoming launch on Wednesday November 23, 2016…the day before Thanksgiving.

Without further ado, here are the results:

Red Cover, Option 1., received 653 votes (64%)

Yellow Cover, Option 2, received 366 votes (36%)

Callie Oettinger will be back next week at What It Takes for our regularly scheduled programming.

Inciting Incident = Hook

 

Why do we even have inciting incidents? Who says there has to be one? Can’t we just plunge in with Word One? Why are we worrying so much about “starting” the story? Doesn’t the story start all by itself?

“It’s a Great White and it’s feeding in the waters off Amity!” Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider, and Murray Hamilton in JAWS.

Answer: the inciting incident is indispensable because the inciting incident is the Hook.

When Shawn talks about Hook, Build, Payoff (Act One, Act Two, Act Three), he’s talking about the unshakeable structure of a screenplay, a novel (some of ’em anyway), a play, a joke, a seduction, a plot to overthrow a despot, not to mention your secret 18-year-plan to get your newborn daughter into Harvard.

Beginning, Middle, End.

Beginning = Act One.

Heart of Act One = Inciting incident.

Inciting incident = Hook.

Consider these all-time great grabbers:

 

BOGEY

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

 

APOLLO CREED

The Italian Stallion? I’m gonna give this chump a shot at the title.

 

JASON BOURNE

Who am I?

 

What you and I as writers must ask ourselves of our own Inciting incident (once we’ve identified it) is this killer question:

 

Will this moment hook the reader?

 

True, we’re guessing. There’s no way we can know what our reader or viewer will think or how she/he will react. But, using our deepest empathy, imagining ourselves as profoundly as we can into her/his place, we must ask:

“Is this inciting incident engaging? Does it capture and hold the reader’s attention? Does it make her sit up straight and think, ‘Oooh, this story is really coming alive. I can’t wait to see what happens next!'”

 

CAPTAIN AHAB

Know this, men. Ye did not ship aboard the Pequod to hunt whales for profit. Ye

shipped to hunt and kill Moby Dick!

 

EVELYN MULWRAY

You see, Mr. Gittes, I’m Evelyn Mulwray.

 

ATTICUS FINCH

Scout, I’ll be defending Tom Robinson.

 

As Bruce Springsteen once said, “You can’t start a fire without a spark.”

The inciting incident—the Hook—is that spark.

[Special thanks to Joel Canfield, whose Comment two weeks ago inspired this post.]

 

 

Cover Advice

Option 1.

We at Black Irish Books are preparing for our annual end of the year blow-out Thanksgiving/Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa extravaganza and we need your help.

(Mark your calendars for Wednesday November 24th for the Writing Wednesdays launch. For all of you First Look Access people, you’ll get a first dibs email for the deal/s on Monday November 22nd.)

We’ve got a brand new book from Steve called THE KNOWLEDGE to share.  It’s the wild and woolly origin story behind The War of Art.  Set in the mean streets of 1970s New York when Steve made every amateur writing mistake imaginable (how do you think he knows so much about them?), we’re calling it a “Too Close To True Memoir.”

Option 2.

[Attention Joel and Ethan Coen…you guys need to option this ASAP!]

Alas, we’re unsure of which cover to go with…

So we thought it would be fun to get your takes.

You can vote here!

We’ll keep the ballot boxes open until midnight, next Friday September 16, 2016.

Callie will give you the results in her WIT column next week.  Many thanks for voting early and often.

The Inciting Incident and “the Call”

An extremely useful way to look at the Inciting Incident is to see it as “the Call,” as in the Hero’s Journey. The two are identical. They’re the same beat.

Setting sail for Tahiti. The inciting incident is the “Call to Adventure”

Here’s Christopher Vogler from his indispensable The Writer’s Journey:

 

The hero is presented with a problem, challenge, or adventure to undertake. Once presented with a Call of Adventure [boldface his], she can no longer remain indefinitely in the comfort of the Ordinary World.

In Star Wars, the Call to Adventure is Princess Leia’s desperate holographic message to wise old Obi-Wan Kenobi, who asks Luke to join in the quest. In revenge plots, the Call to Adventure is often a wrong, which must be set right. In romantic comedies, [it’s] the first encounter with the special but annoying someone the hero or heroine will be pursuing and sparring with.

 

See the parallels? In each case the Call is the Inciting Incident. It’s the action or event that sets the story in motion.

But let’s back up a moment to review the concept of the Hero’s Journey.

Two ways to look at it: first, the hero’s journey as a template for storytelling; second, the hero’s journey as a living dynamic in our real lives. Here’s what I wrote about the second way in Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t:

 

The hero’s journey is the Ur-Story of every individual from Adam and Eve to Ziggy Stardust. It’s the primal myth of the human race, the cosmic pattern that each of our lives follows (and a thousand increments thereof), whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not.

 

If you are the hero of your life (and of course you are), the hero’s journey is the script your life will (more or less) follow, over and over.

 

According to C.G. Jung, the hero’s journey is a component of the collective unconscious. Joseph Campbell identified it in the myths and legends of virtually every culture on earth. Jung found it arising spontaneously in the dreams and neuroses of his psychiatric patients.

The hero’s journey arose, both men speculated, from the accumulated experience of the human race over millions of years. The hero’s journey is like an operating system (or software in an operating system) that each of us receives at birth, hard-wired into our psyches, to help us navigate our passage through life.

 

The beats of the hero’s journey go something like this:

Hero starts in Ordinary World.

Hero receives Call to Adventure

Hero rejects Call

Hero encounters Mentor. Mentor gives Hero courage to accept call.

Hero crosses Threshold, enters Extraordinary World.

And so on through trials and ordeals, encounters with weird and wondrous characters, meetings with allies, confrontations with the Villain, finally to Crisis, Climax, and Resolution.

That’s the hero’s journey in our real lives. It’s us falling in love, quitting a job and launching a new venture, joining the CIA, setting sail for Tahiti, writing the Great American Novel.

Which brings us back to the first way of looking at the hero’s journey—as a template for writing a story/novel/screenplay. Star Wars is literally the hero’s journey. George Lucas patterned his script beat by beat upon Joseph Campbell’s template. So is The Wizard of Oz, Titanic, The Terminator, The Martian, When Harry Met Sally, and on and on.

In each case, that beat that you and I would call the Inciting Incident is, in terms of the hero’s journey, the Call to Adventure.

It’s the action or event that launches the hero out of the Ordinary World (also known as Act One) and into the Extraordinary World (Act Two and Act Three), the world of his or her initiation or passage into a deeper and more complete understanding of themselves and of life.

I know. I know what you’re thinking.

Why, you ask, does Steve keep beating this barely-breathing horse? Aren’t such considerations pure arcana? Technical stuff that we, unless we’re going for our Ph.D. in Literature, really don’t need to know?

No, no, and no.

I write just like you do, by the seat of my pants. I wing it. I trust the Muse. I come up with stuff and if it sounds good to me, I scribble it down.

In other words, I work out of my right brain.

But there comes a time (and that time should happen early early early) when you and I, if we’re smart, will and must switch over to our left brains.

We’ll engage our rational intellect.

We’ll take a cold, hard look at the mess we’ve just spewed across X hundred pages and we’ll ask ourselves, Is this stuff working? Is it a story? Will anybody want to read it?

At this point, we start asking ourselves the questions that every professional storyteller asks, among which are the following:

Do I have an Inciting Incident?

What is it?

How do I know it’s a legitimate inciting incident?

Does my hero acquire his or her intention in that moment?

Is the story’s climax embedded in that moment?

Is that moment on-theme?

And, from today …

Does that moment correspond to “the Call” in the hero’s journey?

I’m working on a novel right now and I am doing exactly this. I’m asking myself these exact questions (and many more).

It helps.

It’s critical.

It’s like standing on the deck of a sailboat in the middle of the Pacific, taking a reading of the stars with a sextant.

Trust me, if we omit these steps we will never make it to Tahiti.

Chum or Cream? Asinine or Aristotle?

What was so great about what Aristotle had to say — or how he said it?

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s book The Buried Giant, the dragon Querig is blamed for cursing the land with “a mist of forgetfulness.” With each breath, she exhales a mist with the power to shroud those within her range in amnesia.

The mist is an unforgiving thing, wiping out the good and the bad memories. Pain and Happiness exit stage left hand and hand, with Experience and Knowledge joining them.

Axl, an old man at the center of The Buried Giant, can’t understand why a young soldier is familiar to him because Axl has no memory of his own youth. And when Axl meets an old knight, the same occurs. Why is the knight familiar to Axl and Axl in turn familiar to the knight? How could Axl, just an old man, know anything of fighting and battles?

With the emotional and experience memories, the mist stole the memories of how the The Buried Giant’s many characters connected with each other. A strange woman asks Axl’s wife, “How will you and your husband prove your love for each other when you can’t remember the past you’ve shared?”

As the story continues, we find that Merlin was responsible for infusing Querig’s breath with amnesia. In the post-Arthurian period in which the story takes place, the previously warring Britons and Saxons live in peace because they can’t remember the genocide and other atrocities that occurred. Oblivion is Bliss.

The Internet reminds me of Querig’s breath, with Information playing the role of the mist.

Where cream used to rise, chum resides, fueling the top feeders.

All the information bombarding our in-boxes and Facebook walls and Twitter feeds, is “new” — and there’s so much of it to wade through.

Instead, ignore the now and look to the past. Think about how “they” did it before the Internet.

How did Aristotle get people to listen to him? He wasn’t the only philosopher on the block. Why him?

How did Christopher Columbus pull together a trip to the New World, without a Go Fund Me campaign to back him?

How did the Wright Brothers convince people to go for a ride when crashing was a reality?

Why VHS instead of Betamax? Or Coke or Pepsi? Or Apple or Samsung?

Slay the shit at the top and dive deep for how people “did it” before all the tech and info access and you’ll find personal relationships and hard work. You’ll find some assholes, too, but in general, you’ll find that everything you need to know today has existed for thousands of years. Instead of figuring out how to game Facebook and Amazon for success today, figure out what Aristotle did it to achieve longevity hundreds and hundreds of years later.

Find out what has always worked, rather than trying to sort out what works right now.

The #1 Mistake That Writers Make

 

Ah, back to my favorite subject—theme.

Diane Ladd as the fake Mrs. Mulwray in “Chinatown”

The Number One mistake that writers make is they forget that their book or screenplay must be about something.

That’s crazy, you say. Of course a story has to be about something. But I can’t tell you how many I’ve read that have no theme, no controlling idea, no unifying narrative and emotional architecture.

Which brings us to the next principle in our exploration of Inciting Incidents.

 

The inciting incident must be on-theme.

 

Let’s go back to Paper Moon, which we were talking about last week. The theme of the book and movie is “family is everything,” “blood is thicker than water.” The story is about a daughter and father—nine-year-old orphan Addie Loggins (Tatum O’Neal) and the itinerant flim-flam man Moses Pray (Ryan O’Neal) who bears an uncanny resemblance to her—and the daughter’s quest to find and connect with her true dad.

The inciting incident of any story, we know, is the moment when the hero acquires his or her intention. The inciting incident, we’ve said, has the story’s climax embedded in it. The inciting incident puts forward the Narrative Question that will pull us, the readers or viewers, through the story.

From Minute Five of Paper Moon:

 

ADDIE

You my pa?

MOSES

“Course I ain’t your pa.

ADDIE

You met my mama in a bar room.

MOSES

Just because a man meets a woman in a bar room

don’t mean he’s your pa.

ADDIE

We got the same jaw. We look alike.

MOSES

A lotta people look alike. I know a woman who looks like

a bullfrog. That don’t make her the damn thing’s mother!

 

See how on-theme this inciting moment is? It is absolutely about the story’s theme of family. It absolutely asks the Narrative Questions that will pull us in the audience through the movie: Will Moses turn out to be Addie’s father? How will we learn this? What will it mean? And it embeds the story’s climax: Addie and Moses coming together as father and daughter.

The theme of Chinatown is “Evil hides under a benign surface.”

Let’s cue up the film and see how the inciting incident embodies this.

The inciting incident of Chinatown is when the real Mrs. Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) walks into private investigator Jake Gittes’ office (Jack Nicholson) with her lawyer and informs him that the woman claiming to be Mrs. Mulwray (Diane Ladd) who hired him a week ago to follow her husband was a phony.

 

EVELYN MULWRAY

Have we ever met?

JAKE GITTES

Well, no.

EVELYN MULWRAY

Never?

JAKE GITTES

Never.

EVELYN MULWRAY

That’s what I thought. You see, I’m Mrs. Evelyn Mulwray.

Clearly Mrs. M. is about to sue poor Jake and make a fool of him in the press.

EVELYN MULWRAY

I see you like publicity, Mr. Gittes. Well, you’re about to get it.

 

Why is this the inciting incident of Chinatown? Because

One, in it our hero Jake Gittes acquires his intention—to find out who played him for a sucker and to get to the bottom of this scheme and subterfuge.

Two, it establishes the Narrative Questions that will pull us through the movie: Who did set Jake up? Why? What will happen because of this? What does it mean?

Three, the climax is embedded in this moment. Evelyn’s tragic death/murder, Gittes’ getting to the bottom of everything, our understanding of the initial deception.

And four, the inciting incident is 100% on-theme. It’s about deception, it’s about ulterior motives, it’s about how the seemingly-benign surface of things can conceal unfathomed and possibly evil intentions.

Here’s my own confession. In a lot of the stuff I write, I don’t know what the inciting incident is until after I’ve written it. I’m flying by the seat of my pants half the time. I know I’ve got a great start to a story but I don’t know why. It’s only later, in Draft #2 or partway through #1, that I sit down and actually ask myself, “What’s my inciting incident? Do I even have one?”

Almost always I do. I just didn’t realize it.

This is how knowledge of storytelling principles is invaluable for the writer. I can ask myself, “Does my inciting incident give the hero his intention?” “Does it ask the Narrative Questions that will pull the reader through the story?” “Is the climax embedded in it?” And “Is it on-theme?”

Next week: the Inciting Incident corresponds to “the Call” in Joseph Campbell’s concept of the Hero’s Journey.