Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 70

“Help! I Can’t Find My Title!”

 

Regular readers of our recent posts will know the answer to this cry for help already.

Saoirse Ronan in “Brooklyn”

Theme.

Theme is a golden highway to a great title.

Consider Brooklyn, starring Saoirse Ronan. The story is about a young Irish girl who emigrates from the Auld Sod in the early 50s and winds up in Brooklyn. After a period of struggle and assimilation she starts to find her way professionally, meets a wonderful young guy, accepts his proposal of marriage. Wow, things are going great!

A family tragedy compels her to return briefly to Ireland. Once there, her newfound American self-confidence makes her attractive to certain socially-connected individuals who might have overlooked her charms in the past. The next thing we know, our heroine is relapsing into her old, self-diminishing, allowing-herself-to-be-exploited ways. Another suitor proposes, she says yes … OMG, in the audience we’re cringing. No, Saoirse, don’t fall for it!

I won’t spoil the ending, if you haven’t seen the movie. Let’s ask instead, “What’s the theme? What is this story about?”

It’s about finding the courage to leave an old familiar world that, if we remain under its spell, will destroy our soul and our chance at self-actualization and happiness—and to venture forth (and make our home in) a new land, where true happiness and love are actually possible.

What is the name of that new land?

Brooklyn.

Voila, our title!

Another place-name that became an iconic title: Chinatown. Again because it’s on-theme.

The final line of the movie—“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”—sums up all the corruption, cupidity, and just plain evil that lurk beneath the otherwise-attractive surface of things. In other words, the theme.

The story of an astronaut stranded on an alien orb could easily have been titled Marooned or Lost Among the Stars. What made The Martian an outstanding title (aside from its succinctness and provocativeness) was that it captured the novel’s theme—salvation comes from thinking like a whole different species of being.

Mud was a terrific title, as was Wild, The Boys in the Boat, Just Kids, not to mention The Big Short, Still Alice, Straight Outta Compton and of course Star Wars.

A great title (as Shawn wrote in his recent post, What’s in a Title?) has to hit a number of beats. It has to be provocative. It has to stop the reader and grab her interest. It has to be memorable and unique and it has to communicate the book or movie’s genre. If our novel is a love story, it can’t have a title that makes it sound like a mystery or a police procedural.

But an excellent way to start our search for a compelling title is to ask ourselves, “What is the book’s theme? What’s it about?”

With luck we might come up with Crime and Punishment or The Sun Also Rises, or even To Kill a Mockingbird.

 

 

 

 

 

The Designated Driver

The writer’s search for a Theme as drunkard’s walk.

I’m going to take a break from my series on packaging today to write about what Steve wrote about this past Wednesday. I know you’re Steve Pressfield fans extraordinaire and you probably had your usual “Geez that Pressfield sure knows what he’s talking about” moments a few days back.

But I think his last post is really worth another look. It certainly solidified a lot of my own ideas about the “why of writing” (and the “why of editing” too) into a far stronger internal philosophical fortress.

First some background about how this came to hit me right where I live…

Tim Grahl and I started a podcast dedicated to the principles of The Story Grid in October 2015.

Our premise was: How can an ambitious amateur fiction writer use The Story Grid as a plan of action, a do-it-yourself-manual, a reverse engineering guide…to build their novel from scratch.

So for 28 episodes, Tim has been picking through The Story Grid with me from the point of view of a highly motivated person desiring to support himself and his family writing fiction.

Just a word or two about Tim.

He’s the quintessential master of the “shadow career,” the professional life that parallels real ambition. But one that is not really “all in.” Tim had half his torso inside the primal goo of his innermost desires, but he wasn’t completely submerged.

His shadow career manifested as the founder of a company dedicated to helping writers market their books. First Tim was a “fixer,” an outside contractor for hire that people in the know would recommend as an expensive, but effective fount of knowledge. Tim would spread his secret marketing sauce over a project and get it on bestseller lists. He was a book marketing black hat…a guy behind the scenes who was paid well, but anonymous.

And then Tim decided to expand his market to people who couldn’t afford to pay his soup to nuts behind-the-scenes fees. These people were just like him before he did the due diligence to learn the best book marketing practices. They wanted to learn how to do what he did. By teaching themselves not by just hiring it out. So that they could have a repeatable skill. The capital they’d invest would be skewed to heavy-duty blue collar intellectual labor.

Why not give autodidacts the secret sauce (which really is a methodology that requires sweat labor and a few breaks…like anything else) at a fraction of the cost he was charging Big Five publishing writer/clients?

Both of those iterations of his book-publishing career did well.

Well enough in fact that he could no longer run away from what he really wanted to do with his life—write fiction.

Tim understood that he had to come out of the shadows and do what he knew deep down that he wanted to be doing since he got into this racket. He had to not just talk about it anymore. He had to do it. No matter how traumatic it would prove to be…

So he reached out to me last summer to see if I’d be interested in doing The Story Grid podcast. And when I hemmed and hawed, he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

He would donate his time to the project, run all of the switches to make it work, and basically just call me an hour a week and record it. He did not want anything from me but mentoring. And he’d go public with the entire process too.

What he gets is to ask me whatever he wants about storytelling and solicit specific information about how I would recommend he go about planning and generating a first draft of a novel. What I get is to share all of his struggles with people in similar situations who have no idea of where to begin the work necessary to become a Pro writer. And obviously a vehicle to keep marketing my expensive monster textbook The Story Grid to people just starting out not sure about what it is I’m recommending…

The podcast is free and you can listen to your heart’s desire here.

But it doesn’t matter if you listen to a single episode to get my point about why Steve’s last post was so important.

Okay, so what is my point? I’m getting there. I promise.

The big problem that lurked in the distant future for me (which I did a great job denying to myself) back in October 2015 was this…

What if Tim spends six months or more writing a first draft and then actually finishes it?

What will happen then?

Well, being the industrious and drip…drip…drip worker Tim is, he finished a first draft a couple weeks ago.

Now I was in a terrible position.

If I were to tell Tim;

Congratulations…but look elsewhere for editorial guidance for that first draft. I’m not going to give away my secret sauce, at least not in a podcast. I get paid a king’s ransom as a freelance editor. Instead, let’s do another episode about Inciting Incidents…

I’d certainly be within my rights.

I mean I never told Tim that I’d donate my editorial time to his novel in exchange for his doing all of the drudgery of the podcast. In fact, I keep raising the price of my private editing fees to discourage people from trying to hire me.

For me, it’s as heartbreaking to edit, as it is to write. More so because you don’t have final cut.

But if I bailed on Tim’s first draft, wouldn’t I completely disappoint all of the people who’ve invested 28 hours of their listening life to my ramblings about the power of ten as a means to evaluate a turning point’s reversibility?

Anticipating my horror at coming to this obvious irreconcilable goods crisis question “Do I help him if it doesn’t directly help me?” every single week before we went live, Tim told me not to sweat it if I didn’t want to read his stuff.

Which gave me a great sigh of relief. I’d agree and reiterate that it was best that I didn’t read his story.

I mean it could be terrible, right?

What would I tell him then?

But then like every storyteller who lies to himself that he doesn’t really need to payoff something he set up in his beginning hook if he doesn’t want to, I had to face facts.

And the facts were these:

Using the “amateur gets professional help” set-up hook to lure listeners to The Story Grid podcast and then denying payoff of the deep knowledge I have about how to confront story problems (no matter how big or small) is a shitty thing to do.

So I decided that I had to read Tim’s first draft and I had to give it to him straight no matter what…

And like 99.999 percent of first drafts, I discovered that Tim’s first draft doesn’t work. The episode when I tell him that truth airs next week.

I can’t tell you how difficult it is for an editor to explain to a writer why his first draft is nowhere near ready for prime time without destroying his confidence. And even in extreme cases his will to live…

When I was less confident in my work, there were numerous times my showing off my story knowledge to prove how great an editor I was had the worst possible effect on the writer on the other end of the phone. They’d abandon the book…or had me fired from the project. Back then I thought that they “couldn’t handle the truth.” Now I know I had a lousy bedside manner and I was the one who couldn’t handle the truth: I was overcompensating for my lack of self-confidence by being a didactic ass.

Being an editor is like being a sober friend dealing with someone who has had too much to drink.

You don’t want to his feelings or insult him (an almost inevitability), but you need to let him know that he is in no way capable of driving his own car. He’s intoxicated. (And finishing a first draft of anything is absolutely intoxicating).

The drunk (writer) needs someone else to take the wheel and get him safe and soundly home. Once he gets his equilibrium back, he can drive himself, but now he needs a designated driver.

That’s what an editor is: the designated driver who calmly lets the writer know that everything isn’t what it appears to be to him…but he has in no way made an ass out of himself either. Things aren’t so wonderful, but no one thinks the first draft writer is an idiot for thinking so. So don’t beat yourself up…just take some time to recover your sobriety and then take another look at the thing.

What in the hell does this have to do with Steve’s post from Wednesday?

It made my job telling Tim that his first draft isn’t working a lot easier.

Why?

Because Tim has a clearly identifiable THEME in his first draft.

And what that means is that Tim’s muse/unconscious spoke to him. He has the most precious of things a story requires…a central controlling idea. And it came directly from his drip…drip…drip work writing that first draft.

That theme is a gift from the Gods rewarding Tim for setting aside his shadow career and determinedly getting in the ring with his internal Resistance.

Will Tim be successful bringing that theme forward in a way that is catnip compelling to a large audience dedicated to a particular genre?

Will Tim’s first novel get him a big advance from one of the Big Five?

Can I magically transform his work and eventually Tim himself (like Henry Higgins did for Eliza Doolittle or Andy Warhol did for Nico and The Velvet Underground) into a bestselling writing titan at one of the Big Five publishing companies?

Will The Story Grid be the thing that will get the credit for Tim’s spectacular rise?

Will Tim’s novel hit a bestseller list? Will The Story Grid too?

As Steve so clearly stated in his last post, those pulse racing questions are the furies unleashed from the diabolical realm of Resistance.

What matters is that Tim is in the ring and that he’s engaging with his muse. His inner voice is speaking to him and he’s opened up the channel and is listening.

That’s all that matters.

All of that other crap is pointless. Not just pointless, it’s dangerous. It distracts you from the truth of yourself. Which is all any of us need.

So when in doubt…cling to your THEME.

If you haven’t figured your THEME out yet, find a designated editorial driver to help you find it.

That’s what Steve’s post meant to me. He succinctly pointed out what is now obvious…

THEME is just another word for…

That place we all really want to go…

Home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I Can’t Squeeze My Theme In!”

 

A couple of friends have written in:

Will Smith and Matt Damon in the movie of “The Legend of Bagger Vance”

“I know what my theme is, but I can’t figure out how to get it into my story.”

“How do I know which theme to pick?”

These are critical questions to answer because they both demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of what theme is and how it arises.

1) We don’t have to insert theme into our story. It’s in there already, whether we realize it or not.

2) We don’t pick your theme. Our theme picks us.

What do I mean by this? I mean a story—a novel, a play, a movie, a work of narrative nonfiction—is like a dream. Its source is our unconscious, our Muse. And just as in a dream, the totality arises organically and coheres naturally. The dream/story means something already. All we have to do as writers is figure it out.

(In many ways, this is the vital service our editors perform for us. Shawn has done it for me half a dozen times. He sees the theme that I’m blind to. He explains it to me. He tells me what I’ve already done but can’t see for myself.)

In other words, our theme is already there in the work. It’s built-in. Factory-installed.

Here’s a personal example:

The theme (or one of the themes) of The Legend of Bagger Vance is “the Authentic Swing.” Meaning a parallel and metaphor for the idea of the Authentic Self.

You and I are born not as blank slates but with a fully formed self, personality, and destiny. Our job in this life is to find that self and become it, to live it out.

That’s the theme of Bagger Vance. But I had no idea as I started the book—and even halfway through it—that this was the case. All I knew was that I was following my instincts. Characters arose, scenes appeared, a story began to take shape.

The theme was in there already.

One day as I was writing a scene, the phrase “the Authentic Swing” popped out. I knew at once that I had hit paydirt. “Ah,” I thought “this is what the story is about!”

A few weeks back we did a post titled “Analyze your story like a dream.” The idea was that Theme appears spontaneously in a story we write (as long as we’re truly following our instincts), just as meaning is embedded in a dream.

If you think about it, this is pretty amazing. We find ourselves “seized by” a story. We are compelled to write it. Why? Because on some soul-level known to our unconscious but not to us, the issue of this story is important to our evolution. Just as a dream will warn us of impending danger or encourage us or inspire us, so the novel/play/movie we find ourselves inspired to bring forth is also trying to speak to us.

What is it trying to tell us?

Its theme.

Its meaning.

Its significance.

Why is theme so hard to identify sometimes? Because every cell in our bodies (i.e., Resistance) has been laboring flat-out to keep us from seeing it. Why? Because when we see it, we will advance. Our consciousness will open. We will move one step closer to self-realization, to self-actualization.

This is why writing (or the pursuit of any art) is, to me, a spiritual enterprise. It’s an endeavor of the soul. The stories we write, if we’re working truly, are messages in a bottle from our Self to our self, from our Unconscious/Divine Ground/Muse to our struggling, fallible, everyday selves.

What is your story about?

Roll up your sleeves and do the work. Dig deep. Bust your brain. Figure it out.

I can declare with absolute honesty that every book I’ve written has unpeeled and revealed to me an aspect of my self that I had been unconscious of before I started writing the book. The philosophy behind the idea of the Authentic Swing: I had no idea I knew that, no idea I believed that. Yet I did. Completely. It is now the absolute bedrock of my view of life and death. Everything I do and believe is based on that.

I would never have known it if I hadn’t found it in my own story.

The artist’s journey is not so much about self-expression as it is about self-discovery.

That’s what theme is all about, from the writer’s point of view. It arises spontaneously in her work. It’s 100% true to her soul’s odyssey.

Another question that crops up regularly in correspondence is this: “What if I never find a publisher? What if I write book after book and no one ever even knows they’re out there? What’s the point?”

One answer (it’s a hardcore answer, I admit) is that on the deepest level it doesn’t matter if you and I ever crack Amazon’s Top 100 or hit the New York Times bestseller list. The works we produce are valid in their own right. They are telegrams to ourselves from our immortal, infallible, divinely-inspired souls.

The message is our story’s theme. We don’t have to insert it. We don’t have to invent it. It’s embedded in the work already. All we have to do is dig for it and figure it out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your Pitch: Go Legal, Go Short, Go Reality

If you want to master communicating and building relationships with the gatekeepers, tastemakers, potential customers, etc within your industry, the first step is to leave your industry.

About ten years ago, I ran across Michael J. Critelli’s Harvard Business Review article “Back Where We Belong.” I kept a copy of the article, surprised that a Pitney Bowes executive had mentioned the book The Sling and The Stone. I was repping the title and it was not a business book, nor one I had considered pitching to a business audience. However… Critelli’s attention to the defense world as a part of his “ear to the ground” strategy made sense. (It’s even more interesting to read now, as Critelli wrote the article during a time of great upheaval in the shipping industry, which plays into shipping today.)

A few takeaways from the article:

1) I needed to pay more attention to cross-over audiences. Who else might be interested in the projects on which I was working?

2) I needed to learn the language of different audiences. I could speak defense and history, but was not fluent in business and other potential crossover industries.

Going Legal

One of my college roommates used to tease me for saying everything twice. For example, if someone asked my opinion, I might reply, “You’re right. You’re definitely right.” If they needed to learn how to do something, I might say, “You need to go to the store and buy x, y and z first. You can’t do it without buying x, y and z first.” I didn’t pay attention to my looping dialogue until her good-natured teasing, but I’ve self-edited ever since.

Digging into the legal industry has been helpful as clarity is key within the legal world, where wordiness and poorly-thought-out letters can lead to trouble. You’ve got to get to the point and edit out the distractions.

Letter to the Stranger

Among the best advice I’ve read about writing letters (both within and outside the legal world) is in Pam Wright and Pete Wright’s book From Emotions to Advocacy. I’m partial to the book’s “Letter to the Stranger” section, in which the authors ask readers to:

Assume that before you mail your letter, your letter slips out of your notebook and falls into the street. Later, a Stranger sees your letter and picks it up. The Stranger puts the letter in his pocket and takes it home to read. What impression will your letter make on this Stranger?

The authors offer the example of seeing “couples arguing or parents disciplining their children in public” — something we’ve all experienced. They then ask:

What was your reaction? If you are like most people, you felt uncomfortable. Perhaps you had a stronger emotional reaction. You did not like it! You felt sympathy for the person who was being humiliated. People have the same reaction when they read angry letters.

In a previous article, “How to Pitch,” I shared a number of e-mails/letters that Steve and/or Black Irish Books have received, with examples of what to keep and what to avoid within the e-mails/letters. I didn’t include “Angry Letters” as a section, but what the Wrights wrote about angry letters applies to all categories of letter writing.

Strangers receiving your letter are viewing one slice of you/your project. They don’t have the full context, just as you don’t have the background for the couple fighting in the park. That couple’s appearance in your life is similar to your letter’s appearance in the life of a journalist (or potential customer or anyone else). It is unexpected, and often unwanted, contact. Your letter can not turn off the journalist the way the arguing couple turned off passersby. You want to engage, not push away.

Keep it Short.

There’s a scene in John Grisham’s A Time to Kill, when head-honcho lawyer Jake Brigance is waiting for the District Attorney to finish his opening statement. Both he and the D.A. have an hour each to make their statements. The D.A. eats up every minute, which results in his losing the attention of the judge, the jury and even the court artists. Jake Brigance decides to go short. He knows:

Most people don’t like lawyers to begin with, especially long-winded, tall-talking, wordy lawyers who feel that every insignificant point must be repeated at least three times . . . Jurors especially dislike lawyers who waste time, for two very good reasons. First, they can’t tell the lawyers to shut up. They’re captives. Outside the courtroom a person can curse a lawyer and shut him up, but in the jury box they become trapped and forbidden to speak. . . . Second, jurors don’t like long trials. Cut the crap and get it over with. Give us the facts and we’ll give you a verdict.

It’s a fiction example that is repeated in the non-fiction world daily.

After you write your letter, identify the adjectives and then delete, delete, delete. Same with repeating sentences. Get your point across in the first try. Just when you think you’ve finalized your letter, read it out loud to make sure it is a letter you’d want to read yourself — and then try to cut it in half.

What’s the Skinny?

Many of the e-mails we receive include embellishments, such as calling a workshop or seminar a summit, or using other words to fancify reality.

Reality can be painful and it can lengthen the process, but it often leads to open-minded people who value the truth. The most extraordinary people I’ve met have been the ones who are open and honest about their personal realities.

In the comments section, following my “How to Pitch” article, John C. Thompson shared the content of a letter he wrote years ago:

Dear Jack Knopff, I just got out of prison. I accepted Christ as my Saviour and I am turning my life around. I have the rudimentary skills of a bookkeeper. Based on your expertise, what would you recommend I do. Respectfully, John C Thomson.

It was an extraordinary letter to write, so I asked John for more information. The following is an excerpt from what he sent. It’s an equally extraordinary story.

I was 13 when I was first arrested, I would be 33 when I was last released from prison (a 19 year period). I had spent 17 ½ years in confinement. What would I have learned that was transferrable to the job market? I wasn’t skilled, disciplined, nor did I have the wherewithal to conduct a successful job search. . . .

I had read several books on job hunting. While I learned how to prepare a resume, I was extremely lacking in the job experiences to put in it. I walked out of D. Wm Berry and Associate and headed to the newspaper stand on Chicago and Main St. A Crain’s Business Report headline grabbed my attention. “The Top 100 Privately Owned Companies in Chicago.” An idea slowly developed in my head, and I purchased the magazine. I would write a letter and address it to the CEO’s and presidents of companies and bypass the Human Resources Department. At first I thought I would test my plan and contact the bottom of the 100 list, but hey, why would they hire me any more than the top ones on the list? I would start by contacting the top 20 on the list, and include several local large companies in Evanston, such as Northwestern University, Evanston Hospital, Washington National and American Hospital Supply.

Now for the letter. I had nothing with which I could impress them, so I altered my approach. It was entirely opposite from what anyone else would do. In the body of the letter, I told them three things.

1) I had recently been released from prison.

2) I had accepted Christ as my Saviour and had turned my life around and was starting a new life.

3) I had the rudimentary skills of a bookkeeper.

I closed the letter with a question. “Based on your expertise and experience what would you suggest I do? After I wrote the letter, I passed it around to three English majors and my wife. I asked them to edit the letter for grammatical perfection, but don’t change the letter itself. We prayed and then mailed the letter.

Of course there is the rest of the story, but I was hired by Leo Burnett Advertising in Chicago and six months later hired away from them by Northwestern University.

I admire how honest John was about his past and how he didn’t ask for pity/sympathy. He stated the facts, kept it short, and stuck with reality. (John, if you’re reading this, I hope you’ll share the full story with all the readers).

Go legal.

Go short.

Go reality.

My Resistance Dream Diary #2

 

Picking up where we left off last week …

Me, fly one of these? Really?

I’m starting a new fiction project, very heavy with Resistance, self-doubt, doubts about the viability of the project, etc. I decided to keep a dream diary. Last week I posted the first two dreams. Here are the next two.

This first one comes about a week into the work (3/28/16). Self-confidence in very short supply. I’m committed, but still feeling extremely tentative …

I was a pilot. I had somehow gotten the training and become qualified. I was traveling via ship and train to Antarctica with my friend David and one other guy that I didn’t know; they were both pilots too. We were going to join some kind of military force in operations somewhere around the South Pole. The planes we would be flying were WWI-era biplanes (though these didn’t appear in the dream.)

The landscape was gorgeous as we traveled south toward Patagonia, like I imagine Alaska looks: spectacular mountains, bays, valleys, all wild and unpopulated. But through the whole trip, I kept worrying, “We’ll have to fly over hundreds of miles of open water, water so cold that you’re dead in ninety seconds if you hit the drink–and those old-time biplanes are just fabric and balsa wood, with only one engine. How reliable can they be?”

We reached our destination—the last place on dry land. David and I and the other guy were driving, each in his own little car, south toward the jumping-off point. We came to a checkpoint, manned by a single Aussie female. David drove up. The female guard challenged David aggressively, asking him what we thought we were doing. He answered by singing, “We’re off to see the Wizard … “

I take this dream to be a spot-on depiction of my state of mind starting this new book. I feel exactly like a newly-minted, zero-experience Sopwith Camel jockey about to take off in a rickety crate to fly over hundreds of miles of sub-zero ocean into the polar unknown.

Somehow the dream encouraged me. I thought, “Yeah, that’s the situation. That’s exactly how I feel.” It is what it is. Let’s get on with it.

Two nights later, still very shaky, I had this dream:

It was the aftermath of the Civil War, the immediate days after Lee’s surrender. I was a rebel. A bunch of us—ragged and starving, but still carrying our muskets (with bayonets)—were straggling on foot toward home, apparently back to South Carolina or Georgia, wherever our little farms were. Parties of Yankees kept passing on the roads, celebrating their victory, not just soldiers but civilians in carriages, dressed up in their finery, just driving like a parade. Union troops in large numbers were closing in everywhere as well.

Jude Law in “Cold Mountain,” the movie

Some sort of very serious announcement was being made by the Yankees to us, not by loudspeaker since that hadn’t been invented but the equivalent. Something like, “You Johnny Rebs have ceased to be granted the status of soldiers and now will be treated as traitors. You no longer possess any civil rights and are not protected under the laws of the United States.” More announcements followed. Each one was more grave than the one before, letting us know that we were even more screwed than we thought we were. It was as if the stakes kept getting raised and then raised more after that. A few of our guys had gotten shot by the advancing Union troops. It was clear that the rest of us were in for a long, hard haul just trying to get home, hundreds of miles overland on foot, through the woods, hiding out.

At one point someone of our party, possibly even me, gestured with his bayonet close-up toward a carriage of Yankee civilians, revelers, well-dressed, men and women, who were passing and abusing us verbally. This soldier (like I said, maybe it was even me) pointed his rifle at the Yankees, with that long steel bayonet aimed right at them. He said, “We may have lost the war, but we’re still men, we’re still armed and still capable of taking a life. So shut your mouth.”

Again, I take this dream to be about the new book. Its message to me seems to be, “No matter what anyone else says, or how dire realistically the situation is, you’ve still got your skills and your will. You’re still viable. Don’t lose faith. Keep heading home.”

I had a third dream, a week later, that continued this theme of marching home, heading south. In this dream I was just myself, wading through a swamp thick with alligators and praying that I didn’t run into one. At dream’s end I spotted a cabin up ahead with a chance to get a meal and a short rest.

Here’s my takeaway from these five dreams, which came over the first three weeks of starting a new and, to me, extremely daunting project:

As writers, artists and entrepreneurs we all look for “creative capital,” i.e. something we can “take to the bank” and call upon in moments of self-doubt, isolation, hesitation, and fear.

What works? Is it prior success? Can we call on that? Is it past praise from book reviews, editors, agents, from the writers’ group we meet with every week? Is it the love of our spouses or lovers who believe in us? Is it our number of “likes” or “followers?” In our darkest hours, what resource can we call upon that will actually help us?

To me, it’s dreams like these. Or other visions and insights. (See the chapter titled LARGO, pages 128-9 in The War of Art.)

Dreams like these are God’s currency, solid gold, legal tender in any country. They’re absolutely free and absolutely self-contained, springing forth from our unconscious to support us and encourage us. When we speak of “the Muse” or “the Quantum Soup” or “the Divine Ground,” this is what we’re talking about. Dreams like these are worth a million bucks.

I can tell you that, based on these five dreams (though any one of them by itself would suffice) I will bust my butt for the next two years writing this book I’m talking about. Yeah, I’ve laid the idea on Shawn for real-world feedback and gotten his blessing. That definitely helps. And a couple of other trusted friends have stamped it with their approval too.

But the dreams are the money shot.

This, as I said, is the artist’s inner world. It’s the artist’s interior life.

[Back next week to continue our posts on Theme—though I’ll continue to keep my dream diary and report in from time to time as this adventure progresses.]

The Vision Thing

When the book cover is so good…why change it for the movie?

So you’re happy with your title for your novel.

How do you translate that title to a cover image?

Before I launch into my own private cover principles, though, I do need to point out that there is no rule book that I know of for book packaging.

That’s not to say that I don’t have strong opinions about packaging and I have zero doubt that the best packagers in the industry absolutely have rules, but like writing, design is very much a “works/doesn’t work” proposition.

Graphic design is a craft and art as difficult and inspiring as writing. Mastering form and structure (again like writing and any other creative endeavor) is essential. But without a mystical whisper from one’s muse (or someone else’s muse), it can quickly devolve into copycat-itis or worse, a complete cover misfire that pushes primary target readers away from the work instead of drawing them in.

Check out one of publishing’s star designers, Chip Kidd, and his work for more on packaging. His website is a treasure.

My goal with this series is to explain to the aspiring layman self-publisher how a writer or editor or publisher can best collaborate with a graphic artist.

Which brings me to my one and only, ironclad, unbreakable rule for book packaging:

Have one vision. Just one.

What “have one vision” means is that you must know what your novel is about (that damn theme/controlling idea thing again) and visualize how that theme/controlling idea can best be hinted at or expressed in one image.

Since I mentioned Chip Kidd, I’ll use one of his seminal cover designs to explain. The one that made him a star just a few years into his career. I think he was only 25 when he came up with this idea…which was obviously a response to the book’s crystal clear theme…

Years ago (1989 to be precise), Michael Crichton was an A-list writer with numerous bestselling novels in his backlist—The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man, The Great Train Robbery, Eaters of the Dead, Congo, and Sphere.

But the new manuscript Crichton delivered to his publisher (Sonny Mehta at Knopf) was something else altogether. It would come to epitomize book publishing’s throw-down response to the rise of Hollywood’s rapidly evolving “High Concept” paradigm.

Not just its response but also book publishing’s devouring of the concept entirely. So much so that that this novel would serve as the source material for a 5 billion dollar and counting story franchise.

This is an important side note for all of you who think books are cute and all but the real money and power is in finding success in Hollywood.

Think about Harry Potter. Think about The Hunger Games. Think about James Bond. Think about Twilight.  Think about John McClain. Think about Rambo.

What do all of those Hollywood franchises have in common? The source material came from novels…that good old fashioned thing created by a solitary person slamming their fingers one by one on a keypad.

Books are the magic rings of the intellectual property realm.

We constantly hear that “the novel is dead.” And perhaps it is as an intellectual ground-shifter. The last one that did that was Infinite Jest.

But as good old-fashioned campfire entertainment that can be exploited as intellectual property across multiple media…novels are still the best things ever.

So perfecting your craft as a writer of long form fiction is not a bad investment at all. The worst thing that will happen is that you’ll become a better communicator and storyteller, which will inevitably make you a better businessperson, friend, entertainer, sibling or parent. To write well is to empathize and consider global narrative arcs. We sure could use more of that today.

And tomorrow, storytelling will be the one skill that will be as indispensable and as valuable  (far more valuable even) as it was yesterday and is today. Being able to tell a compelling story will feed you, your family, and even your descendants for generations. That’s no joke.

Balzac was right when he wrote that in the industrial age “behind every great fortune there is a crime,” but for our global electric village, nothing beats story as property. And the only crimes you have to commit to build your fortune are imaginary.

Create once…sell forever. Intellectual property is your get out of jail-jobs card. And the best IP is story.

So Michael Crichton delivers his new novel Jurassic Park. By May 1990, the film rights have been auctioned off for one and half million against a percentage of the gross! to Crichton. Universal Studios with Steven Spielberg attached to direct beats out Warner Brothers, Sony and Fox.

Knopf schedules the book for November 1990.

All they need now is a good cover.

Easy, right? Spielberg attached, bestselling track record from the author…you could put the thing in brown paper and it will fly off the shelves…

Not on your life.

I can’t tell you how many novels have been set up in similar ways…great big idea with a big movie deal behind it…and then…pfft.

Usually what happens is that the book’s cover is okay and the book performs well enough, but it doesn’t become the next dominant thing in the culture.

Why?

Because the cover is derivative.  It looks just like a book that was published before and so doesn’t give off any “fresh” heat.  Or the cover is so completely innovative that it alienates the target genre. The genre’s fans don’t “get it.” So they ignore it. No, they don’t even ignore it.  To ignore it is to be aware of it.  They’re not even aware of it.

And when a genre’s fans (its innovators in marketing speak) don’t know there’s a new book they might love, chances of it crossing the chasm from the book’s arbitrary early adopters who just found the cover cool so gave it a chance to the early majority are pretty much nil. See Geoffrey A. Moore’s book Crossing the Chasm for more about the chasm between the early adopting audience and the early majority…

So how do you create a cover that is innovative but still genre specific? [Let’s not forget that this is what you have to do with the actual story too…]

It requires a singular central vision that can be accurately and incisively communicated to a graphic artist who can then execute that vision.

Sometimes the vision comes from the author. Sometimes from the editor or publisher or publicity director. Sometimes from the graphic artist himself or herself.

Chip Kidd is so good at it that publishers expect every designer in their employ to be able to do what he does…which is totally not fair. Visions are rare.  We must be open to them coming from any and all sources and not fall into the trap that any one person is the singular fount of creativity.

Sometimes the vision comes from someone completely unrelated to the project altogether. My wife has provided countless visions and ideas for projects I’ve worked in the past. And a lot of her ideas I stole and presented as my own. And they worked!

A quick sidebar mini-story about that.  When Bob Dylan was recording Like a Rolling Stone, the cheeky 21 year old Al Kooper sneaked onto the organ (he was a guitar player who realized he wasn’t good enough to play on the song) even though all he knew were some basic chords.  The story is too good to ruin for you.  Watch this instead.

Dylan doesn’t care who has the vision.  As long as there is one, turn that organ up!

The key thing is that there must be a vision. A bad vision is far better than no vision at all. A million times better. Like I always say to Steve…this idea is going to be great or terrible!

I’ll not get into the cover art process at the Big Five publishers (I wrote about 1000 words of it and started to drowse off with all of the inside baseball I was covering…). But I can guarantee you that when a brilliant cover vision comes forward; just about everyone will recognize it. A few won’t, though, and they can easily kill a great thing. So you’ve got to stand up for your creation or it will never stand a chance in a big committee.

So what was the big dilemma about coming up with something great for Jurassic Park?

Come on, it’s a no-brainer right?

Well, just think about that first word of that title for a second. Jurassic.

Can you honestly say that Jurassic was a word commonly used before this novel came to be? Jurassic is one of those “science” words that is a huge auditory turn off. It sounds like something that some nerdy guy would say in a National Geographic special about Mollusks.

I’d make a bet that there were probably a lot of people at Knopf who hated that word. They probably wanted to change the title to something like “Dinosaur Park.” But even that sounds kinda stupid.

Jesus…is anyone going to buy into a thriller about resurrected dinosaurs in a theme park?

Really kinda cheesy when you really think about it, isn’t it? I can visualize the eye-rolling at Knopf’s sales conference when Sonny was presenting it in my mind’s eye…

But then, like Al Kooper did for Like a Rolling Stone, a 25 year old Chip Kidd showed them all his vision for the cover…

Which would not just let readers know that this book is all about bringing back long dead life forms…

But the absolute thrills and terrors those animals would unleash on our arrogant species if we did so. The irrefutable message is that these aren’t friendly purple Barney the dinosaurs…they’re serious sons of bitches who’ll rip a human body in half to get to its tasty gooey center.

What Kidd did was to use imagery that every single one us has stored in the recesses of our minds…burned in there from that first moment we walked as little tiny kids into the ending payoff of every Natural History Museum across the world.

But the cover had to be on theme too.  Let’s not forget that.

Uh…what’s the theme of Jurassic Park again?

Don’t Mess With Mother Nature

And here is Chip Kidd’s cover….

It was so innovative while aligned with action genre conventions that it served as the link that made the word Jurassic synonymous with raging dinosaurs as mass entertainment.

Kidd’s vision was so specific and on theme that it even made Universal Studios decide, just as Paramount Pictures did in 1972 when it cribbed the hardcover image from The Godfather, to use his graphic sensibility for their film franchise too.

Think about that… How many movie posters do you see that don’t have a movie star driving the message?  Crichton’s story and Kidd’s cover was so hooky that the movie studio decided it didn’t need Harrison Ford or Arnold Schwarzenegger to bring in an audience.

All it needed was a great director and computer generated dinosaurs… So they skipped the conventional idea that they’d need a huge star in the movie and instead what they did was put every extra penny of their budget into the dinosaurs.

They turned up the organ.

My Resistance Dream Diary

I’m gonna take a break this week from our series on Theme (we’ll be back) to address an issue that’s happening with me right now.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Dream #2 was just like one of his books.

Dreams.

I’m just starting a new fiction project that’s overwhelming me with Resistance, and my dreams have been really interesting. I’d like to share a few of them—and the whole interactive process between waking, working life and nocturnal who-knows-what—over the next couple of weeks.

Maybe this will ring a bell with your own psychic adventures.

Here’s the backstory:

About two months ago I had an idea for a story. Immediately I was swamped with Resistance.

Was the idea any good? Could I pull it off? Did I want to? Would anybody be interested? Was it a movie or a book? How would I tell the story?

Maybe I should just forget it. The idea is not very “me.” I’ve never done anything like it before. I don’t know how to attack it, I don’t know how to position it, I don’t know how to promote it …

I decided to shelve it.

Then I had this dream.

 

I was playing golf with my old friend Phil. We were on the first tee of some course I had never played before. Two other guys were paired with us. The course was crowded. A bunch of foursomes were lining up behind us, ready for their turn.

I reached for my golf bag. Only it wasn’t my golf bag. It was some terrible, ratty bag about eighty years old. The clubs were antiques—scruffy, beat-up old sticks with wooden shafts warped with age and cracking with mildew. Then I zipped open the pocket that held the golf balls. OMG, all I had was the scroungiest collection of dimple-free, waterlogged, dead-ass balls that looked like they wouldn’t fly ten yards. Arrrgggh!

Meanwhile Phll was teeing off; our other two guys were getting ready. Somebody said to me, “There’s a decent ball out there.” He was pointing about two hundred yards away, down a side patch of grass. I took off on a run, picked up the ball and raced back to the tee. By now the other two guys had hit their drives; Phil was 150 yards away, striding down the fairway. The next foursome was already teeing their balls. I was out of breath, sweating, totally discombobulated.

WTF, there’s no point in even swinging. I picked up my ball and ratty old bag and gave up.

 

Now I may not be the greatest interpreter of dreams, but this one’s message seemed pretty unmistakable.

The first tee is the start of a project.

It’s an unknown golf course, i.e. totally new.

I’m unprepared. I’m rushing. I’m freaking out. I’m letting intangibles completely throw me off my stride.

I’m quitting before I begin.

In other words, the dream was simply depicting my state of mind in regard to this new project. I could see it now, and I didn’t like what I saw.

I changed my mind. I decided I would do the project.

I started the next day.

I got in about two hours (pretty much my max for the inception of a long-term work).

The day went pretty well. I was just trying to get my thoughts down on paper—what the story was about, who the characters were, Act One, Act Two, Act Three, how would it end. Just a toehold.

That night I had this dream.

 

I was in a foreign country, in a rental car, heading somewhere on a freeway that was not too crowded. I found myself behind a couple of cars driving ridiculously slowly. I began cursing them. What’s wrong with these foreign drivers? Then the cars turned off. I kept going.

The freeway got worse and worse in terms of road condition. Suddenly the pavement ended entirely. I was driving over a bed of gravel and rocks. Then the road became a dirt track. Suddenly the surface dropped down a slope and an actual stream cut across. I was cursing out loud, “This is like a freakin’ Third World country.” I decided to keep going. What else could I do? I drove deliberately down over the road edge toward the stream, aiming for a sort of natural causeway so I could drive over. The causeway ran out and suddenly I was in the water …

[Side note: water is a recurring image in dreams for me. It always means creativity, the flow of ideas. The greater the volume of water in a dream and the faster that water is flowing, the more creative power is moving through me.]

Somehow my rental car vanished and I was floating in the air, still going forward along the channel of the now-long-gone freeway.The channel still existed but it had become a river.

I found I could move forward if I “swam” through the air. I was maybe fifteen, twenty feet above the surface of the river, which was crystal-clear and about 100 feet wide, passing through shaded, canopied jungle. Not dense, there was plenty of soft sunlight. It was gorgeous, like Gabriel Marquez’ magical realism. It even felt South American.

I was propelling myself forward by drifting to the bluffs at the side of the river (kind of like retaining walls beside a freeway) and pushing off with my hands. Suddenly the river turned left. A breeze hit me, pushing me back. I was struggling against the wind. But when I got around the corner slightly, the wind changed and was now at my back. I looked ahead to the right and I could see the ocean. The sky was bright through the jungled canopy. I could see part of a beach, like a fishing village in South or Central America.

Suddenly ahead, between the river and the ocean, I saw a spectacular domed cathedral rising in the sunlight beyond the jungle. Spanish-looking. Absolutely gorgeous. I thought, Wow, what the hell have I stumbled onto here? Then I looked downriver. About a mile ahead, out in the clear on the right-hand bank, I saw a city. A beautiful city with South American style architecture.

I was close alongshore now, still flying. I passed slowly, just above a couple of local fishermen mending their nets. One told me, “It’s better to go all the way down to the city traveling along the river, rather than cutting inland, and land at the city so that you’re coming in off the river. More impressive. Good karma.”

I liked that. I decided that was just what I would do.

 

What could this dream mean? I take the universe depicted to refer to the work now, the new project I’ve just started. I’m in some “new world,” like the kind discovered by Cortez or Balboa, of which I’ve been very dubious and in fact didn’t even know or believe that it existed. Could I survive there? Yes! There’s plenty of water (creativity),  a whole brilliant new species of architecture, and a spectacular new city to explore. And the water is pellucid-clear, straight out of Eden.

In other words the dream is saying that this new work will be, at least for me (if not necessarily for anyone else), a totally-novel, consciousness-expanding adventure and experience.

This dream is one of the greatest I’ve ever had. It’s almost a Big Dream in the Jungian sense of once-in-a-decade, life-changing, epochal communiqués from the Unconscious.

I put aside all doubts about the new project.

I decided to go for it.

I was all in.

I’ll continue this exploration next week with the succeeding couple of dreams (and maybe the week after) to track the progress of this crazy thing. But the bottom line for me is the amazing dynamic architecture of the psyche.

It’s a battle.

A war.

On one shoulder we’ve got Resistance, diabolical as hell and absolutely out to destroy us, mind and soul.

On the other shoulder we have our brilliant sage/Merlin/Harry Potter/whatever, our benevolent Unconscious, sending us a Netflix movie tailored specifically for us and exotically beautiful, insightful, loaded with significance and meaning and wisdom.

And we’re there in the middle.

This is the artist’s inner world.

This is the artist’s life.

 

The Why of Pitching — and the Five Constants

There’s an important piece I should have hit when I started this series of articles about pitching:

Why you have to pitch — or market — yourself.

A scientist I spoke with this week said her peers go out of their way to avoid media exposure. To them, scientists who do a lot of press aren’t taken seriously.

That perspective is why important work dies in academia and why certain sectors are plagued by consistent wheel-recreation. The messaging gets lost or forgotten. Unfortunately, the scientists aren’t the only ones doing it.

If you want to make an impact, doing the work isn’t enough.

A few years ago I wrote about artist Arthur Pinajian, whose work, according to the New York Times, is mentioned by fans “in the same sentence as Gauguin and Cezanne.” Yet, the Gauguin and Cezanne comparison didn’t arrive until after a life as a hermit and death preceded by Pinajian’s advice to just throw away all of his work.

At the end of a second New York Times article about Pinajian this quote appears:

“He thought he was going to be the next Picasso,” Mr. Aramian said. “They believed he would become famous and this would all pay off for them one day, but it just never happened. So he became frustrated and withdrew from everything and just painted.”

Fourteen years after his death, two of his paintings were on the market for $87,000 and $72,000.

Would his work have emerged as it did if he had been known, if his lifestyle was different? Or would his work have increased if he’d had the fans he has now?

What would have happened if he’d continued sharing while painting?

Whether your goal is to be rich and famous or to make an impact on the world, you have to share your work. “Being there” isn’t enough.

A few weekends back, my father and I spoke about medical residents he’s mentored. He’s 40 years in as a family physician, yet still receives some eye rolls when he advises the next crop of docs to reach into the community, telling them that being a doctor isn’t enough for them to survive within their profession. If they want to be successful, they have to do more.

There are tons of doctors. Why would someone want to go to you?

What do you offer that can’t be found elsewhere?

Why should a patient remain loyal and recommend potential patients to you?

Why you?

Why should anyone choose you?

Same thing goes for other entrepreneurs and artists and scientists, and pretty much everyone else, period.

If you want to be famous (or infamous) and make some cash, you can strip down and dance naked, and mix in some other stupid crap, and throw it up on a monetized YouTube channel — and then repeat the stupidity, and hope for more views and money.

If you want your work to grow, to last at least a few decades, you’ve got to share your work and you’ve got to message it in a manner that is accessible to the rest of the world (basically everyone who is not you).

What’s that message?

Dad advises the residents that within their careers they “will see many technical changes. Five constants, however, will remain as they were in the days of Hippocrates.”

The following are his five constants (with his words in italics), which hold true no matter what your work.

I. Kindness

There is no wisdom greater than kindness. Kindness goes a long way to promote effective communication with the patient, the family, and the healthcare team.

With the rise of the internet and trolls, emotional disconnects have grown. More than anything, most people simply want positive connections and validations — whether that comes from you saying thank you, listening to their idea, just being flat-out nice. You don’t have to personally care about every customer, but you have to show that you value them.

II. Passion

Patients respond well to a clinician possessing passion for the chosen profession of healing.

In the film Field of Dreams, Ray Kinsella approaches Dr. “Moonlight” Graham, who played in one major league game before saying goodbye to the boys of summer and becoming a doctor.

Ray Kinsella: Fifty years ago, for five minutes you came within… y-you came this close. It would kill some men to get so close to their dream and not touch it. God, they’d consider it a tragedy.

Dr. Graham: Son, if I’d only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes… now that would have been a tragedy.

It sounds like the real Dr. Graham wasn’t much different, that his passion for medicine still is impacting his community today. Baseball was a dream for him, but medicine was his passion.

III. Social Responsibility

Ways must be found to make medical advances available to all patients.

I’m a few pages into When Books Went To War by Molly Guptill Manning, which is the story of the War Department and publishing industry joining together during WWII to donate “120 million small, lightweight paperbacks for troops to carry in their pockets and rucksacks in every theater of war. . . . Soldiers read them while waiting to land at Normandy, in hellish trenches in the midst of battles in the Pacific, in field hospitals, and on long bombing flights.”

And from all the free books, which offered servicemembers a mental escape from Hell, came something unexpected:

“After the war, the accessibility of mass-market paperbacks — together with the GI Bill — helped build a new literate middle class, spreading reading to a wide and democratic public. The wartime book programs had made The Great Gatsby into a classic, engaged dozens of authors in pen pal relationships with thousands of soldiers, and touched the minds and hearts of millions of men and women.”

IV. Affordability

Patients have limited resources and medical care must remain within their economic reach. This will be the greatest challenge for your generation.

Whether you’re Sal Kahn, providing free education, or a publisher providing a free book, or a restaurant offering a complimentary meal, making your product available to a wide range of individuals increases social capital. The investment in free goodness yields high returns.

Marking up a life-saving drug 5,000 percent won’t earn you friends.

V. Leadership

Community physicians are leaders within the healthcare system. As technology advances, the patients and families want a physician advocate to provide guidance with navigating the maze of healthcare options. They also want a physician leader to provide direction for the healthcare system.

You are the expert in your field. There’s a different dynamic between a painter and a doctor, but on the other side, both can be leaders within their communities and both can give back, which… Yep, you guessed it, will return to them.

Bottom Line

You have to share your work. You don’t have to do it via the five constants above, but you’ll find if you do give them a shot, you will build social capital, which really does have a nice rate of return. These five have been paying off since Hippocrates’ time — in every industry, not just medicine.

How to Make Your Novel Universal

 

My answer will not surprise you.

Dana Wynter and Kevin McCarthy in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”

Theme.

Theme is what makes the specific universal.

Remember the first post in this series? I was relating a conversation with a friend who’s a literary agent in Hollywood. She represents screenwriters. She told me that she had read 500 screenplays in one year and couldn’t find a single one she wanted to represent. Why? “Because so many of them were not about anything.”

What she meant, in crassly commercial terms, was this:

 

I can’t sell a script unless the reader (studio, director, production company, actor) can either identify with it or imagine that the audience can identify with it. The story has to be universal. We have to root for its hero. We have to care. The story has to resonate across a wide, or at least a significant, bandwidth of readers or moviegoers.

 

What makes us, as readers or moviegoers, root for a hero? What makes us get involved in a story? What makes us care?

One factor is theme. Why? Because theme makes the specific universal. Theme can take a slasher film or a cheesy detective story and make it pop. It can take a narrow, superspecific premise and make it irresistible to millions.

Consider Invasion of the Body Snatchers, from the 1955 novel by Jack Finney (who also wrote Assault on a Queen and Time and Again). If there ever was a low-budget “B” horror flick that seemed on the surface to be exactly like every other, this is it. But Body Snatchers became a cult phenomenon, spawning two remakes and endless movie-buff articles and tributes. To this day, it packs revival houses and produces late night fits of the munchies every time it appears on cable.

Yes, the actors (Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter among others) were terrific. Yeah, Don Siegel’s directing was spooky and paranoia-saturated, cinematography suitably creepy, the script crisp and crackling.

But the theme (and the levels of theme) was what made Invasion of the Body Snatchers universal. Remember the story? Evil spores from space land in Northern California. They grow, evolving into plant-like pods that become weird featureless doppelgangers of individual humans. When a human falls asleep, its pod takes over its body. Each new “recruit” joins the others in propagating the pods (and the pod people) worldwide.

What is the theme? What’s the movie about?

The theme is “If you sleep, you die.”

The movie is about coerced manipulation of consciousness. The Specific is alien entities taking over and inhabiting human beings by stealth, rendering these humans soulless, vacant—and creepily content. The Universal is we are all being brainwashed and we don’t know it.

The book came out in ’55, the movie in ’56—i.e. the Eisenhower Era.

The Age of Conformity.

Body Snatchers may have looked like a run-of-the-mill sci-fi freakout flick. But it was anything but. It was different from the others because its theme hit the sweet spot of unconscious paranoia in the era of Ozzie and Harriet and Ward and June Cleaver.

“OMG!”, viewers thought when they caught this feature at the drive-in, side by side with every other generic Chevy and Ford. “That’s my life! I feel like the pods are taking me over too!”

In ’93 The X-Files accomplished the same trick, using a slightly different theme of paranoia and conspiracy, and in ’99 The Matrix took the same theme and raised the ante one more time.

The key to these stories’ success was the universality of their themes.

Everyone could relate, even if they couldn’t articulate why.

Peter Finch in Paddy Chayefsky’s NETWORK. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!”

Paddy Chayefsky’s Network came out in 1976. (How about a shout-out, by the way, for the man who gave us not just three Oscar-winning scripts, but Chayefsky’s Rule of Theme?) Its narrative was of a TV conglomerate cynically and shamelessly pursuing ratings by turning its once-prestigious news division into a pandering-to-the-lowest-common-denominator laughingstock.

Its theme was selling your soul on every level.

In other words, a universal theme.

It’s an enlightening exercise to pick at random a handful of books or movies that have become runaway hits and ask yourself, “What’s the theme of each? No matter how insular or specific the subject matter, is the theme universal?”

Trust me, it will be.

 

 

 

 

Genre First, Target Market Second

My last post was about practical ways to create alluring titles for fiction.

What about nonfiction? How do you approach that?

You’re probably going to roll your eyes reading this, but I’ll write it again anyway. The best place to start when figuring out the appropriate title for your magnum opus is…GENRE.

Here are my four main big silos of nonfiction, which I’ve cribbed from a longer post over at www.storygrid.com, which you can read here.

Academic:

These are essays/books that are written for and read by a very specific readership.

These groups of readers are clearly defined, but usually small in number. As Seth Godin would say, readers of academic works are Tribal readers dedicated to exacting passions/professions.

The narrative form of the writing is far more about “presenting the findings” than it is about entertaining the reader. The assumption of the writer of academic work is that her readership is absolutely engrossed by the subject matter itself and so really just wants to get the skinny on what it is the writer discovered or what the writer’s particular argument is. These readers don’t need to be spoon-fed the previous data or history of the art. They just want to know the innovative stuff.

How-To:

These are generally prescriptive books “for the trade audience.”  What that means is that these books are written for the general Joe who wants to learn the best way to plant his garden, without having to enroll at Penn State’s Agricultural school. Or a general Jane who wants to learn how to change the oil in her old Volkswagen Beetle without going to a mechanic or trade school.

Narrative Non-Fiction:

These works are completely story based. That is, narrative nonfiction writers use the techniques and craft of fiction in order to contextualize their reportage so that it conveys a message (controlling idea/theme).

In other words, the writer/journalist collects the usual data involved in reporting a story. But instead of just presenting the traditional Who, What, Where, When and How? out of the old-school newspaper reporter’s toolbox, narrative nonfiction writers focus on the Why? something happened.

What Narrative Nonfiction allows is for the subjective point of view of the writer to argue his case. But the journalist can’t just make things up. He has to present the evidence, the factual details of the reporting that support his particular point of view.

But also he can’t just make declarative statements like an academic because they are not concrete findings.  They are subjective. So he has to embed those ideas inside of the story.

For example, in his seminal work What it Takes: The Way to the White House, journalist Richard Ben Cramer’s controlling idea/theme of the entire work is:

To win a Presidential election (or any public office or mass popular acclaim for that matter) requires pinpointed image manipulation, brazen fear mongering, and standing for absolutely nothing beyond embodying the amorphous unconscious public desire of the time. (Hope, Make America Great Again, Camelot, Morning in America, etc.) 

But Cramer never states that theme. He builds it upon the bedrock of his reporting and how he chooses to tell the story of that reporting. Like a novelist or short story writer would, he tells a story that embodies his theme.

He chose the title What it Takes: The Way to the White House (nice alliteration too with What, Way and White) in order to incite readers to go with him on his journey to find an answer (the theme inside his book). It was a perfect title for a book about how President George Bush (the first) was elected POTUS in 1988… As brilliant today as it was back in the 1990s.

The Big Idea Book:

The Big Idea Book draws from all three of the nonfiction categories above and when one succeeds, it’s capable of satisfying readers of the other three nonfiction Genre silos too.

Academics appreciate the research cited to support the Big Idea. How-To readers take away actionable steps that they believe can better their lives. And Narrative Nonfiction readers are captivated by the storytelling.

This is why Big Five publishers love the Big Idea Book…it can become a blockbuster bestseller.

Examples of Big Idea Books are Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, James Gleick’s Chaos, Thomas L. Friedman’s The World is Flat, and of course Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.

So those, Academic, How-to, Narrative nonfiction and Big Idea are our four nonfiction silos.

Let’s say we’ve written and academic book about Deoxyribonucleic Acid Repair Mechanisms in Eukaryotic cells. We’ve plumbed the depths of research about DNA repair. We’ve conducted our own experiments to explore an uncharted protean repair mechanism. And now we’re ready to write a textbook for post graduate microbiology scholars interested in pursuing a career in DNA repair research.

What should we call our book?

Here are some thoughts using our four silos as inspiration:

DNA for Dummies , How-to get a high paying job spending eighteen hours a day in a sterile laboratory
Double Helical Dreams , Watson, Crick and the Desire to Fix the Unfixable
The Micro Matrix : How Tiny Changes in the Software of Life Have Big Effects
DNA Repair: A Comprehensive Survey with Practical Experimental Methodologies

I think you’d agree that Number Four is right on the money for a $250 textbook target marketed to science geeks deep inside the ivory tower.

Don’t get cute when you have a perfectly identified audience and the means to deliver to them exactly what they want.

Which brings me to the second consideration after you’ve pinpointed whether or not your book is Academic, How-To, Narrative Nonfiction, or Big Idea…

TARGET AUDIENCE

Who is your target audience? The first adopters, the people who will be excited that you’ve written the thing you’ve written?

Let me walk you through my thinking for deciding to call my book The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know and of how I decided to target a very limited, but dedicated readership.

Years ago, when I first started working with Steve Pressfield and we were beginning the editorial process on his novel Gates of Fire, I inadvertently told him that I’d throw my “grid” on his manuscript and get back to him with some suggestions.

Steve jumped all over that notion.

He wanted to know what my grid was. He wanted me to explain to him how I came up with it. He wanted to understand how I went about editing fiction. And as Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine said to Claude Raines’ Louis Renault in Casablanca…it was “the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

So for over ten years, Steve and my shorthand for editing was “gridding it.”

The thing about grids though is that they connote science. They’re mathy. Scary for a lot of people.

When we think of a grid, we think of organizational boxes and very analytic systems. Simply calling my book THE GRID would turn off the very audience that I needed to attract. Storytellers or those wishing to become one some day are the kind of people who ran kicking and screaming from science and math when they were in school.

So just adding STORY in front of GRID made a lot of sense. It has that sort of “these two things don’t go together” quality that is intriguing. Like Jumbo Shrimp.

The thing all of us soon learn when we start to write a story is that it’s a very difficult thing to get a handle on. And after one futzes and fizzles for months getting nowhere, the writer will try anything, ANYTHING, to unblock their confusion. They’ll even turn to math and science if it will help.

Plus there was no trademark in use under STORY GRID, but many using just GRID.  So if I were to ever expand the Story Grid universe to include courses or software etc., I’d be able to protect the methodology from it being exploited by someone else. Nice.

So what about the subtitle?

This decision was tricky.  It would have to be directed at the early adopting target market.

I could have gone broad and commercial, blatantly How-To, with something like: A Simple, Practical and Step-by-Step Method to Becoming a Professional Writer.

There is no shortage of frustrated storytellers out there looking for a quick fix and I could have rejiggered the book to deliver that kind of content.

But I decided not to. I moved more toward the Academic.

Why?

As someone whose dedicated his entire professional life to book editing, I decided to focus on that craft.  To create a textbook for those without any resource available to learn how to make stories better.

I wanted to attract someone like myself when I was just starting out in book publishing, someone with the desire to dig deep into storytelling craft in order to help writers better their work.

I wanted to shine the light on what I think is the most underappreciated art in story creation…the art of story editing.

So while I could have laser focused on the much larger aspiring writer marketplace and published a book that didn’t get into all of the wonky stuff editors concern themselves with (you’ve seen those crazy graphs and spreadsheets), I would not reach that 25 year old guy like I was who wanted the goods on what it means to be an editor.

With the broad How-To approach, that guy/gal would think The Story Grid was another flim-flam method to separate desperate writers from whatever money was left in the checking accounts.  I didn’t want to convey that Story Grid is just another gimmick.  It’s grounded in deep thought and study.

So after I did an elevator pitch saying all of that for Seth Godin and he offered me What Good Editors Know to use as my subtitle. I jumped on it because it was just four words and it makes the promise to my target audience that I’ll tell them what I know.  No pulling back.

I figured then (and still do now) that I’m in this racket for the long haul. If my big mongo textbook only attracts the most nerdy of story nerds and the very limited market of people wishing to learn the editorial craft in order to pursue the editor life, I’m okay with that. [It turned out that there are far more of these nerds than I ever anticipated, so thank you!]

The thing is that I have more than one idea and I have more than one book in me.

And so do you.

That’s a very important thing to remember. You’re going to write more than one book in your career. So don’t overload your first book or second or tenth with such lofty expectations that you overshoot the core of people who would really benefit from it…just to pander to a larger marketplace.

Next up is how to take your perfect title and figure out how to think about it visually.