Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 76

Storygridding

For a while now, over at www.storygrid.com I’ve been writing about Malcolm

September 1, 1939

Gladwell and his first book The Tipping Point.

I’m doing something that I call “storygridding it.” And that’s just my short hand for creating a revealing infographic that a writer can look at lickety-split for inspiration.

And if she gets stuck writing her Big Idea nonfiction book, she can look deeply into the data of the story grid. And that data will reveal how a fellow scribe solved the same problem that she’s battling.

So say, you’re writing a thriller and you don’t know when to drop in the obligatory “hero at the mercy of the villain” scene. You can look at the Story Grid for The Silence of the Lambs and see where Thomas Harris put his. Knowing that story masters face the same dilemmas you face and seeing exactly how they confronted and defeated those same problems is a cathartic experience.

What you discover is truth.

You discover that the problems driving you mad are just problems. Not your own deeply ingrained character defects. You discover the truth that with a little elbow grease and perseverance (and don’t tell anyone, but fun too), your writing problems can be solved.

If you can’t identity the problems though, (you can’t see them through the thousands of words that they hide behind) what happens is you lash out at the idiot who just can’t get anything right.

And you know who that is right?

It’s you, you think, the talentless, lazy fraud of a writer that is just kidding themselves that they could possible create a thriller that has any resemblance to The Silence of the Lambs.

I’m here to tell you that thinking is bullshit.

To be more specific, it’s Resistance. It’s a hugely powerful form of Resistance that every single pro faces too. I promise you that Thomas Harris stared down that bastard himself before, during and after he wrote The Silence of the Lambs. He’s still fighting him. Just like the rest of us.

What settles me is the knowledge that story grids ground us to the realities of the creative process—that there are systematic ways to take a brilliant idea with a lot of niggly problems deeply burrowed into it, like parasitic worms, and then one by one surgically remove them.

So that’s what story grids are all about…giving writers a practical blue-collar way to improve. No meditation or opening oneself up to the mysteries of the universe so that one can be a vessel for an otherworldly force required.

The Muse isn’t here to use you like a typewriter. She’s your cut man. And if you ain’t fighting hard, there are plenty of other mooks stepping in the ring for her to help. She’ll come back not when you’re ready to do the work, but when you’re actually doing the work, not before.

Story grids are fight plans, after action reports, Monday morning quarterbacking sessions. They’re Bobby Fisher’s queen sacrifice strategy from 1956, Bobby Orr’s textbook give and go goal in the 1970 Stanley Cup, the to-the-second planned quick strike Israeli Air Force bombing raid that launched the Six-Day War.

Story grids are the work plans behind the “magical” expressions of human genius. The stuff grinded over for 10,000 hours that allows the artist to forget all of it in that critical moment called Performance.

You don’t have to ask Joe Namath what he was thinking when he launched the 52 yard fourth quarter bomb to fellow New York Jet Don Maynard in the 1968 playoff game against the Oakland Raiders of find out what Bob Dylan had for breakfast the day he wrote It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) or find audio of United Farm Workers’ Cesar Chavez referencing the techniques of Edward Bernays when planning the use of Boycotts to effect change.

Chances are they’ll have no answer for you anyway. Or their answers will be unsatisfying, cliché, boring… They did all of the work before the performance, not during.

A diver doesn’t think about the training it took her to be able to execute the perfect tuck when she’s about to launch off the ten meter platform. She trusts the work, relaxes and let’s her muscle memory take over.

This is why we need translators. People who make it their mission to look at works of art in different ways, practical ways that make sense to artists in training. People who X-ray the work and detail how it’s put together.

This is what storygridding is about. It’s a way for people cranking out hour number 5,231 to learn from the craft underneath the work they admire. The things the journalist and writer Gladwell did to train his writing muscles before he wrote The Tipping Point. The stuff he forgets today that he did yesterday.

One of my favorite commenters over at www.storygrid.com put forth the idea that all of my analysis doesn’t mean much if I don’t interview and confirm all of my thoughts with Mr. Gladwell and his agent Tina Bennett. If I’m not able to get Gladwell and Bennett to confirm or deny how I propose they worked separately and together to create and market The Tipping Point to publishers, then my work will settle on the value line graph alongside the benefits of noxious gas emitted from anxious canines.

Perhaps.

Here’s the thing. It’s been my experience that the artist’s methodology is his secret sauce. The way he cleans his desk. The kind of pencil he uses. The prayers of invocation before the work begins. And that’s the stuff they are loath to talk about. For good reason. For them and for us, they are magical. Let them be so.

The only thing they like to talk about less (or even remember or care to remember) is all of the bloody work they had to do before settling in to their profession. I’ve edited and published so many books by so many amazing performers who were as interested in talking about how they learned their craft as Tom Brady is talking about football inflation. They want to talk about the performance, of how it came out of them with grace and beauty. And that’s what most people want to read about too.

God knows we can’t bring back W.H. Auden and ask him about how he wrote “September 1, 1939.” We just have the work to consider. I put forth that the work is all we need. Auden, God bless him, was the corporal force that brought it forth, but the work is all that matters.

Good arguments right? But come on, why don’t I just make those calls and get the “truth?”

Alright then. Here’s the real reason why.

I’m not really writing about Malcolm Gladwell or Tina Bennett or Thomas Harris or any of the other characters that inhabit corporate book publishing.

 

All Storytelling is About Metaphor

A boxer takes a haymaker to the jaw. He falls. He struggles to one knee as the ref stands over him, counting, ” … two, three, four … ” Watch the faces in the arena. They have become that fighter. He is living their life, their struggle.

You are that fighter

That’s metaphor. That’s art.

You, the artist, are that fighter. You enact via your struggle (and the struggle of the characters you create), the life drama of those who look on as you fight. When we speak of “finding our own voice,” we’re not talking about finding our petty, selfish voice, mewling and sniveling about our own selfish shit. The voice we’re seeking is much bigger. It’s noble. It’s generous. It’s universal. It does not inflict itself upon the reader for its own self-interested reasons. Instead it seduces, intoxicates and incorporates the reader into a tale told of the reader and for the reader.

Your protagonist is not you. Your protagonist is the reader. You are not telling your story for yourself. You’re telling it for her. You’re telling her life story. You’re expressing her pain, her longing, her struggle.

Can you be that artist? Can you become that boxer? Can you train yourself and discipline yourself and motivate yourself to be good enough to merit a fight in an arena, a contest that people will buy tickets to see? Have you got the speed, the strength, the mental toughness?

Are you that fighter?

Always Come Out of Another Hole

[I forgot about this post from Aug. 30, 2013, until I ran into Kevin Spacey’s speech again. Take a look and scroll down for Sir David Lean, too. For as much as things change, they stay the same. — Callie]

At about the 1:20 mark in Kevin Spacey’s MacTaggart Lecture, given during the Edinburgh International Television Festival, he looks straight into the audience and says, “It’s the Creatives, Stupid.”

It’s a television festival, so he keeps on the “television” theme, but that deeper thread is about change and taking risks.

When facing one of his first offers for a television role, he contacted his mentor, Jack Lemmon. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to take part in a television program that network execs had their hands all over—poking here and there within the creative process . . .

So . . . he calls Jack, and asks him about those “golden years of television” that Jack always spoke about—those years when Jack had first started out. “Was he being nostalgic or was there something different about the way television was back then?” Jack replied:

You have to understand, kid, that television was brand new back then. I mean, it was a new medium and nobody knew if it was gonna last—so you could try anything. Comedy one week … a drama the next… a musical… I mean…. It was terrific. It hadn’t been commercialized yet and no one knew it was going to be around that long. There was this sense of total abandon. Total abandon.

Total abandon. . . Not exactly the words we think of when television, films, music, books, or any other “creative industry” is mentioned today.

Within his talk. Kevin also mentions attending the 1990 American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement award for Sir David Lean—and how Sir David “dedicated his acceptance speech to the idea of promoting and supporting emerging talent. It turns out he was concerned, perhaps frightened by the film industry’s lack of commitment to developing talent and the greater and greater number of films the studios were making that appealed only to the pulse and not to the mind.”

Only to the pulse . . . not the mind . . .

Kevin goes on to quote some of Sir David’s speech. I’ve pulled the entire speech, as there are some nuggets that were left out:

Noel Coward once said to me during our early days, “My Dear, always come out of another hole.” Now, he said a lot of other things, but, I find myself thinking that nearly everything he told me—and everything I learned—in those early days seems to be contradicted today. We don’t come out of any more new holes. We try to go back and we come out of the old holes—parts I, II, III and IV. And I think it’s terribly, terribly sad.

Looking at this list here, in this wonderful program . . . Nearly everybody there is an innovator, a pathfinder. They found new things to do in the movies—and all of us live on new things. Okay. Do old things—parts I, II and III—but don’t make them a staple diet. We’ll sink if we do.

This business lives on creative pathfinders—and there are a whole lot of you here. I terribly miss—we all miss, I think—somebody like Irving Thalberg. He had a foot in both camps. He understood us people, and he understood the money people.

We’re in terrible danger. I think there are some wonderful new filmmakers coming up now. They are going to be our future. Please, you chaps in the money department, remember what they are.  It’s a very nervous, nervous job making a film. They need help.

I would like to read you something. It came from my old friend, Fred Zinnemann. He found something that was said by Irving Thalberg. He said, “The studio has made a lot of money—and they could afford to lose some.”

I think the time has come where the money people can afford to lose a little money, taking risks with these new film makers. I think if they give them a break, give them encouragement, we’re going to come up and  up and  up. If we don’t, we’re going to go down and television’s gonna take over. (laughter from the audience here) Anyhow . . . Wish them luck—I do.

It’s interesting, that in 1990 he spoke about television taking over film, and now we’re seeing television being eclipsed by non-traditional creative outlets—like Netflix. And Netflix, of course, is the outlet that brought us Kevin’s House of Cards.

This past week, Netflix has been in the news quite a bit. Its programming is up for 14 Emmys—and it’s inking headline-making deals.

Netflix came out of a new hole—and further confirmed that consumers don’t care about the medium. They care about the story.

“If you watch a TV show on your iPad, is it no longer a TV show?” Kevin asks later in his speech. “The device and length are irrelevant … For kids growing up now there’s no difference watching Avatar on an iPad or watching YouTube on a TV and watching Game Of Thrones on their computer. It’s all content. It’s all story.”

In the Los Angeles Times article “Netflix executive upends Hollywood,” Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Chairman Bruce Rosenblum said:

Television no longer refers to the box sitting in your living room—television refers to storytelling. The method by which our viewers experience those stories is truly irrelevant.

Yep.

Within that same Times article, director David Fincher’s response to Netflix releasing all 13 House of Cards episodes at once is shared:

“My attitude was, that sounds awesome,” Fincher says. “As television becomes more and more like literature, I’d love to be able to set the book by the nightstand when I want to. It seemed like the natural progression of things.”

That’s interesting, isn’t it? A television show as a book. Makes sense. It’s hard enough to wait for the next book in a series to be released. I don’t know that I could handle it if the book was released chapter by chapter. I’d want it all. At once. I want my books in “binge-happy bundles”—which is how the Times described Netflix’s all-at-once release method. And, I’d say, I’d take the binge-happy bundle for film and television, too.

Binge-happy should apply to multiple formats, too.

The tradition in publishing is to release the hardcover, then the paperback. When audiobooks started to rise, they inserted themselves in with the hardcover release—or just after the release—of the hardcover. E-books followed in audio’s footsteps.

With film, there was the theatrical release and then a delay between DVD and cable releases.

The fear is that if all of the formats are released at once, the ones that often make the publishing houses and studios money—the hardcover and ticket showings—won’t be bought or attended.

But, we do continue to buy the hardcover or go to the theaters, because there’s something special about them.

I cherish the copy of Profiles in Courage that my father inscribed to me. I’m looking forward to passing down my hardcover set of Nancy Drew books to my daughter, when she is old enough to read them. And, my son has already filched numerous books off of my office shelves. I can’t imagine holding onto an e-book with the same memories, not being able to pass on yellowed, dog-eared pages I once turned for my daughter to turn herself, or having my son try to pull something off my iTunes library instead of my physical shelf. It’s the romance and the community.

In the same vein, John Murphy wrote about the “communal experience of experiencing something with a roomful of moviegoers ” in his piece The Future of Movies:

I actually find the human connection we get from great stories and entertainment even more special. It’s like the “water cooler” days of Seinfeld, when coworkers would reminisce about last night’s episode around the water cooler at the office or on the factory floor. It’s that shared, after-the-fact connection that brings us together. . . Whenever I see something great I tell friends to see it. And when you meet someone who has seen something you love, you instantly connect. You discuss its qualities. You discuss how it surprised you, or touched you, or shocked you, or made you laugh until you peed a little. The movie or the TV show or the YouTube video or the Vine or the novel or the Tweet or whatever—it connects you to other human beings in an increasingly disconnected world.

 

So that focus on providing one format at a time? Shouldn’t be a concern if the story is a good one.

“I knew the stakes were high, in terms of the size of the bet,” said Ted Sarandos, chief content officer for Netflix, in the Times story. “But if we believe all those things we say we believe in— that television is going to be mostly on-demand and mostly delivered [digitally]—then someone had to lead that charge. It had to be something as good or better than anything on TV.”

It had to be a good story.

What does that story look like? What does the voice sound like? It’s not just the medium or the format that are changing.

In his book Chronicles, Bob Dylan wrote about working on an album with Danny Lanois.

“Danny asked me who I’d been listening to recently, and I told him Ice-T. He was surprised, but he shouldn’t have been. A few years earlier, Kurtis Blow, a rapper from Brooklyn who had a hit out called “The Breaks,” had asked me to be on one of his records and he familiarized me with that stuff, Ice-T, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Run-D.M.C. These guys definitely weren’t standing around bullshitting. They were beating drums, tearing it up, hurling horses over cliffs. They were all poets and knew what was going on. Somebody different was bound to come along sooner or later who would know that world, been born and raised with it . . . be all of it and more. Someone with a chopped topped head and a power in the community. He’d be able to balance himself on one leg on a tightrope that stretched across the universe and you’d know him when he came—there’s be only one like him. The audience would go that way, and I couldn’t blame them. The kind of music that Danny and I were making was archaic. I didn’t tell him that, but that’s how I honestly felt. With Ice-T and Public Enemy, who were laying the tracks, a new performer was about to appear, and one unlike Presley. He wouldn’t be swinging his hips and staring at the lassies. He’d be doing it with hard words and he’d be working eighteen hours a day.”

The voices of our stories continue to change. They don’t always fit in the neat little Part III version of our favorite hole. They’re often scorned upon appearance—and then decades later called revolutionary. Hindsight… Don’t wait for it. Get the blinders off today.

The wrap-up

Four more lines from Bob Dylan, via The Times, They Are A’Changin‘:

Don’t stand in the doorway

Don’t block up the hall

For he that gets hurt

Will be he who has stalled

I don’t think he was referring to industry execs when he wrote the song, but they sure do apply.

Those who are stallin’? They look like Elmer Fudd staring down a rabbit hole. Thinks he’s a threat . . . Just a loud annoying guy wasting his time on an old hole, while Bugs always comes out of another hole. Bugs is the Creative, the Netflix, and Fudd is that old television station, movie studio, publishing house, music label . . .

Stop stallin’ and come out of another hole.

Giving Ourselves Some Props

I missed out on the self-esteem movement. My day was about twenty years too early.

Serena at Wimbledon. "Good job, kid. You did it."

My generation was more like the Un-self-esteem movement. The Self-Disesteem Movement. We were constantly being told what bums and losers we were. Be a man! Suck it up! What’s wrong with you? Those were the child-rearing mantras that our parents, teachers, and coaches—the Greatest Generation—dished out to us. If you brought home a report card with straight A’s, the only question was, “Where are the A+s?”

Personal validation became a big issue with my peers and me. I’m not sure where this topic sits with Gen X or Y or the Millennials or the generations after. Maybe those waves are cool with themselves. I don’t know.

But for my era, this area is a problem. The tough love cited above is pretty much the soundtrack playing inside my generation’s heads.

Now add Resistance. We all know what those tapes sound like. Pretty soon we’ve got a whole symphony, or dys-symphony, of self-denigrating abuse running non-stop on a loop inside our skulls.

Stir in the next element of this toxic brew—the fact that you and I are artists and entrepreneurs, i.e., we’re on our own, with no supporting social structure to pat us on the back, tell us when we’ve done a good job, give us a raise or a promotion, etc.

Now add the final component: the reality that, no matter how great a job we do at whatever we’re pursuing, there’s every chance that when we expose it to the real-world marketplace, it’ll fall on its face. Our screenplay will not be optioned, our novel will not be picked up (or worse, it’ll get published and sell 200 copies—199 to our immediate family), our app will fizzle and die.

Oh, I almost forgot the kicker. Our family and loved ones. It’s not that they don’t care or don’t understand. They’re just busy. They’ve got their own issues. And they’re a little pissed off at us, if you wanna know the truth, for spending so much time on that stupid script/novel/app instead of bringing home some real rent money. And by the way we haven’t been spending nearly enough time nurturing and caring for them and supporting their dreams.

These are First World problems, I know. They’re not like getting your entire city blown off the map in Syria. But they’re real, just the same.

This is the world we live in.

So what’s the antidote to this relentless tide of rejection, isolation, negativity and disdain?

Self-validation.

Self-acknowledgment.

It sounds crazy, I know. What are we supposed to do—lock the door to the bathroom, stand in front of the mirror and tell ourselves we’re doing great?

Well, in fact … yeah.

Did you watch the women’s final at Wimbledon a few weeks ago? One thing I always wonder: what does Serena do when she gets back to the house she’s renting for the fortnight? When it’s late and the reporters are gone and her family and friends have slipped off to bed. Is there a moment when she sits alone with that golden Rosewater dish (the trophy for the ladies’ singles champion) and says to herself, “Good job, kid. You did it.”

Of course your world and mine is not as palmy as Serena Williams’. She’s got external validation coming in from everywhere. Trophies, checks, bonuses, sponsorship deals, her picture on TV and the covers of magazines.

You and I may get lucky. Once in a while, we may hit the jackpot. But over the course of a long career, the bottom line is this:

What the world does for Serena, we have to do for ourselves.

We have to self-acknowledge.

We have to self-validate.

(And actually Serena has to self-validate too.)

Who else is gonna do it?

Dumb as it sounds, we have to say to ourselves (and really make it sink in): “Okay, maybe we didn’t hit the best-seller list this time. Maybe we didn’t crack the top 10,000 on Amazon. But we did what we set out to do. We finished. We shipped. Yeah, our stuff could’ve been better. But we learned. We’re still standing. We got better. Good job, kid. You did it.”

Another critical aspect of validation:

Give it to others.

Show it to your homies. Kick it to your rivals. Give ’em some props when they hung tough, when they showed class, when they bit the bullet.

Full many a flower may be born to blush unseen, but that doesn’t mean you and I can’t see and appreciate them—and can’t single them out for praise. And it doesn’t mean we can’t see ourselves when we’re that flower.

There’s a term for this type of behavior.

It’s called mental toughness.

It describes those silent internal actions and habits, the ones that nobody sees but us, that no one knows about but us.

You won’t see these moments portrayed in movies. They’re not cinematic. They’re not heroic.

Even the people who perform them won’t talk about them. It’s unseemly. To admit to such actions seems silly, even a little shameful.

But these private actions and habits are make-or-break. They’re the difference between success and failure, between being a pro and being an amateur, between hanging in and dropping out.

I think back to my Mom and Dad, whose worldview was shaped by Depression and war. Maybe they were smarter than I thought, when they withheld easy praise and set standards for me that were higher than I believed I could achieve.

Whose opinion counts most in the end?

Who’s the one person we can’t fool?

Who really knows how deep we dug or how true we played it?

The Write Stuff

[To read more of Shawn’s stuff, subscribe to www.storygrid.com]

Last week I read something very exciting.

It was a review of a book that I hadn’t read, nor did I know the author in any real way. Here it is.

What was exciting was in the way that the writer absolutely ripped the work to shreds. The review was funny, intelligent, and somehow apologetic in the way that the reviewer went about his surgical eviscerating. As if he didn’t really want to be doing what he was doing, but owed it to the public to reveal the fraudulent and shameful creation he’d been forced to read and critique as a blatant example of a contemporary Emperor’s New Clothes hoodwink by the incestuous cabal that controls big book publishing.

The attitude reminded me of that wonderful quote from Ted Knight playing Judge Elihu Smails in Brian Doyle Murray, Harold Ramis and Doug Kenney’s masterpiece Caddyshack.

I’ve sentenced boys younger than you to the gas chamber. Didn’t want to do it. I felt I owed it to them.

I doubt Dwight Garner, the author of the review, felt he owed Bill Clegg (the author of the book) anything.

What Garner owed the readers of The New York Times, though, was all of the backstory behind his review. The stuff that experienced book-publishing people like myself know simmers beneath every bit of ink any book receives.

What I mean is the context of what the book represents. Not what it actually is or where it sits in its chosen genre/s.

This is the stuff (the backstory of the writer) that made a lesser part of myself—the envious and snarky and pathetic part that roots for other people’s failure—so excited. And I suspect the story behind the book is also what drove Garner to such vitriolic scorn of an original creation that’s obviously just not his cup of tea.

After reading the thing (the review, not the book which isn’t in a genre that floats my boat) a few times, I think Garner should have passed on reviewing the book altogether.  Or at the very least he should have found a different “take” on it that would have meant more than “this book is stupid and I hate it.” Instead he reviewed the hype about the book in the guise of warning people off from poor writing.

Please. Give me a break. Poor writing?

The fact that Garner was able to pull out a bunch of phrases in Clegg’s book that are repetitious and cheesy doesn’t mean much. You can find poor writing in anything if you look hard enough and are a good enough writer to frame it as such. And Garner is a terrific writer. Which makes the backstory about Clegg all the more important to reveal.

Before I launch into the Clegg story as I know it, I’ll just say that I’ve only met him once…and it was at a dinner party probably fifteen years ago for a duration of about sixteen seconds. I doubt we traded more than four words between us.

But because big book publishing consists of probably 500 people in totem and is spent lunching and drinking and coffeeing ad nauseum within that small universe, everyone knows about everyone else and everyone has an opinion about everyone else.

And if you don’t have one, someone will give you his or hers whether you wish to hear it or not. It’s like high school.

Here are the facts of the backstory behind the publication of Did You Ever Have a Family (I confess that the fact that there is no question mark in the title bothers me).

Bill Clegg is a very successful literary agent who has a stellar list of clients and now has his very own shop called The Clegg Agency. The not too subtle subtext of that is that he has a healthy personal bank account.


He started working at the very successful and respected agency, The Robbins Office (Kathy Robbins’ literary agency), and did quite well there in the 1990s


After the turn of the century he started up a new agency with an editor friend named Sarah Burnes. The new agency “Burnes and Clegg” did quite well until…


Clegg went on a crack binge that destroyed his company and his relationship with Burnes.


Burnes shut down the company and went to work with David Gernert at The Gernert Company and is doing great.


Clegg pulled himself together and resurfaced at the William Morris Agency. He worked there very successfully for a few years and then…


He wrote a memoir about his crack problem called Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man. The co-head of the book department at the William Morris Agency, another powerful literary agent named Jennifer Rudulph Walsh, successfully sold the book and another follow up memoir about Clegg’s recovery to Little Brown for a reported $600,000 two book deal.


The two books, the second one was called 90 Days, came out and were well reviewed and sold well too.


Last year, Clegg’s first novel was sold at auction by Jennifer Rudulph Walsh for a reported seven figures.


All of Clegg’s works have gotten extraordinary review attention. And his personal story (rube from small town makes it in big city literary world, throws it all away and then has a comeback) is of that post-modern American variety (rise-fall-resurrection) that has proven rather irresistible to the media industrial complex since Elvis’s comeback concert on NBC in 1968. Hell, Richard Nixon road that same story into the White House in 1972 and Robert Downey Jr.’s done pretty well with it too. Clegg’s also extremely photogenic and looks as if he’s walked straight out of a John Cheever story.  Which is nice.

Okay. Those are the facts.

Now say you work in the same industry as Mr. Clegg. And you’re a pretty darn good writer or agent or editor or publisher or whatever yourself. But for some unknown reason, you have just never received much attention. Certainly not seven figures worth of acclaim.

You’re sort of the mule in the barn that does all of the plowing and keeps the farm afloat, while the prize horse in the platinum stall is the animal everyone wants to visit and appreciate. It seems that every time the horse relieves himself, there are gold buckets that arrive to catch his effluvium, which is repackaged and sold to the hoi polloi as precious discharges of genius.

All you and your fellow equine proles can do is commiserate over grogs of $2.00 draft beer at Maggie’s Farm Bar and Grill about the injustice of the show horse that lives extravagantly and never gets a comeuppance.

Hmm, can you see where this is going?

So Mr. Clegg’s first novel excites a number of publishers and it’s sold for a sizable advance. The book is so wonderful to his publisher that she starts a brand new imprint dedicated to “literary fiction” in order to showcase it properly. Press releases are written! Profiles of the author are pitched with very nice photographs of Mr. Clegg enclosed! The pre-sell of the book is on!

Remember that book publishing is a teeny tiny community. What do you think happens when a book is called brilliant and amazing and the next big thing for month after month after month before it goes on-sale?

It begins to rot.

The reviewers who have been begged and prodded and lunched to death to pay attention to said book start to get seriously sick of it. They’re tired of all of the Hosannas about this damn prized horse with his big advance who has written this thing that they’re supposed to genuflect about in print.

But they can’t just “not cover it” now.

Every other big newspaper and online site is going to write something about the damn thing…if they don’t, then their paper will be considered “out of it…not on the cutting edge of the culture.” This is why every fall round up of books (and movies, and music, and plays etc.) is pretty much the same. The fear of being unique isn’t just for kids in seventh grade.

So if you’re Dwight Garner or Shawn Coyne for that matter and you follow book publishing, do you think this stuff starts to get on your nerves? Do you think to yourself it’s time that someone tell the truth about this poseur? This guy who gets more acclaim than I?

I think that’s what happened in Garner’s review of Did You Ever Have a Family.

All of this stuff about Clegg just riled him (whether consciously or subconsciously) and he attacked the book as a way to attack Clegg and the system he came from in response.

What could he have done instead?

Well, how about reading Clegg’s book and then putting it into perspective? That is, what about thinking about where the book sits in the world of its particular Genre and then if you think it comes up lacking for that particular Genre, how about explaining why exactly. Why isn’t it one of the best books on metabolizing grief ever?  What does it compare to?  Who actually wrote a better book than Clegg?  How as it better?  See what I mean?

Say, as Garner suggests, that the novel is in the Love Story by Erich Segal or Message in a Bottle by Nicholas Sparks arena. I don’t think it is offhand, but Garner makes that allusion in his review. How about explaining what that particular Genre he’s writing about is all about? And why it might be so popular?  I mean Segal and Sparks may not be your line-by-line writing cup of tea, but they have told stories that appeal to millions of people.  Isn’t that kind of interesting?  What is it about their storytelling that appeals to so many readers?

Why do people love novels about grief?

I play this parlor game all of the time with fellow book nerds.  I think it’s fascinating.  Why did Fifty Shades of Grey become such a huge sensation?  Does it speak to some primal need/desire?  How about some of that Mr. Garner?

Anyway, here’s my bottom line. And it’s one, like a lot of things I’ve discovered, that was best epitomized in a story.

In the movie, The Right Stuff, there’s a great scene where a bunch of test pilots who decided not to become astronauts are watching a news report about one of their old buddies, Gus Grissom.  Grissom has just returned to earth. His capsule, though, was lost at sea and Grissom is being blamed for the mishap. Here’s the dialogue:

Jack Ridley: [chuckling]… Nothing these guys do is gonna be called a failure… But you’d think the public’d know that they’re just doing what monkeys have done…

Chuck Yeager: Monkeys? Think a monkey knows he’s sitting on top of a rocket that might explode? These astronaut boys, they know that, see? Well, I’ll tell you somethin’ – it takes a special kind of man to volunteer for a suicide mission, especially one that’s on TV. Ol’ Gus, he did alright.

It’s not easy to write a book.

It might not be a suicide mission, but I’ve seen it destroy a lot of people in my day.

Let alone THREE books, two of which open the kimono of your darkest self.

(As I was polishing this piece, it was announced that Clegg’s book was long listed for the National Book Award. For his sake, I hope he’s already ankle deep in his next one…Resistance wears many hats, but his best disguise is as an award.)

[To read more of Shawn’s stuff, subscribe to www.storygrid.com]

Our Fractured Days

Years ago I rented a little house in Northern California and went there to write. I left New York, resolved to finish a book or kill myself trying. (I wrote about this period in The War of Art.)

The weather can get wild at the British Open

The great part about that time—it lasted about eighteen months—was that I had nothing to do all day but write. True, the chore was Sisyphean. I was busting my butt trying to learn not just how to put words on paper but, far harder and more critical, how to finish something. How to wrap up. How to ship.

Still, life during that period was idyllic. I recognized it even then. I remember thinking to myself, “Man, if the process is this hard when you’ve got every hour in the day, how are you ever gonna manage it back in the real world of demands and distractions and the general craziness of life?”

That’s a helluva question.

I’m still not sure I have an answer.

Things can get loony here on Planet Earth. Our days can fracture. Our precious schedule gets torn up and blown out the window.

How do we handle it?

In my little house in California I used to get up and eat breakfast, then sit down and do nothing but write till evening, when I sank into a chair beneath a reading lamp and plunged into War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, The Red and the Black, and all the books that I knew I should have read but until then had never had the time.

Now, back in the real world, I’ve gotta make the same process happen, only now it’s amid hail and gunfire, not to mention Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If it wasn’t hard enough keeping up with the Kardashians, now I’m got Caitlyn Jenner to worry about, not to mention Donald Trump, the Iran nuclear deal, my family and friends, the drought, global warming, and how to get maximum support to Bernie Sanders.

My day breaks up. It fractures. No longer do I have the luxury of one smooth unbroken expanse of time. Now the hours splinter. They come at me, chopped and diced into fragments.

How can I work this way?

A writer has to focus. She can’t just flip a switch and start grinding. She needs time to settle in, to let the current start to flow. She can’t do that in fifteen-minute increments with the kids screaming and her husband phoning from the office. Nobody can.

How do I do it?

I have two rules:

1. No matter what, I will get my time in.

I am on a mission. I am not screwing around. I fear the Muse. I fear falling out, even for one day. I know how hard Day Two will be, and Days Three and Four.

The habit of work is ingrained in my bones. I refuse to break it.

2. If my day fractures, I improvise.

I have taught myself over many years the knack of adjusting on the fly. In the army they say, “It wouldn’t be a plan if it didn’t keep changing.”

That’s my mantra.

I have learned to re-set without breaking stride.

I was gonna work from ten till one. Now for some reason I can’t. Okay. I’ll move that block from three to six. Do I have to cancel an appointment? No problem. I’ll do it. I’ll reschedule.

I make the mental switch and three-to-six becomes the same as ten-to-one.

Did you watch any of the British Open at St. Andrews back in July? They have crazy weather over there in the kingdom of Fife. Squalls and knee-buckling winds come whipping in off the North Sea. Play gets suspended for three hours, four, five. But the competitors have to somehow retain their focus because the sun can pop out on a dime and suddenly the horn is sounding, “Resume play.”

If your mindset is that of an amateur, this off-and-on stuff will take you right out of your game.

The professional, on the other hand, has worked hard to acquire the skill of managing his emotions. He takes a deep breath. He dials down his impatience. In his mind he prepares for the moment (even though he doesn’t know when that moment will come) when play resumes.

He knows that this skill is just as important as the ability to drive the ball in the fairway or to hole a right-breaking downhill slider from four-and-a-half feet.

You and I as artists face the identical problem: how to hang onto our writing resolve when the day fractures.

No one is born with this ability. We have to fall down again and again and keep getting up and trying harder next time.

It helps, I’ve found, to remind myself that the day is fracturing not just for me but for everybody.

It happens.

It’s part of the game.

Will I let it defeat me?

Or will I learn how to adapt and adjust?

What Used The Darling Ones To Do?

Back in 1964, when Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published, Mike Teavee’s obsession with being on TV, led to him exiting the scene with this Oompa Loompa sung verse (add “adults” to the mix every time you see the word “children” and substitute “TV” with “social media”):

“The most important thing we’ve learned,

So far as children are concerned,

Is never, NEVER, NEVER let

Them near your television set–

Or better still, just don’t install

The idiotic thing at all.

In almost every house we’ve been,

We’ve watched them gaping at the screen.

They loll and slop and lounge about,

And stare until their eyes pop out.

(Last week in someone’s place we saw

A dozen eyeballs on the floor.)

They sit and stare and stare and sit

Until they’re hypnotised by it,

Until they’re absolutely drunk

With all the shocking ghastly junk.

Oh yes, we know it keeps them still,

They don’t climb out the window sill,

They never fight or kick or punch,

They leave you free to cook the lunch

And wash the dishes in the sink–

But did you ever stop to think,

To wonder just exactly what

This does to your beloved tot?

IT ROTS THE SENSES IN THE HEAD!

IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!

IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!

IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND

HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND

A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND!

HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE!

HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE!

HE CANNOT THINK–HE ONLY SEES!

‘All right!’ you’ll cry. ‘All right!’ you’ll say,

‘But if we take the set away,

What shall we do to entertain

Our darling children? Please explain!’

We’ll answer this by asking you,

‘What used the darling ones to do?

‘How used they keep themselves contented

Before this monster was invented?’

Have you forgotten? Don’t you know?

We’ll say it very loud and slow:

THEY…USED…TO…READ! They’d READ and READ,

AND READ and READ, and then proceed

To READ some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks!

One half their lives was reading books!

The nursery shelves held books galore!

Books cluttered up the nursery floor!

And in the bedroom, by the bed,

More books were waiting to be read!

Such wondrous, fine, fantastic takes

Of dragons, gypsies, queens, and whales

And treasure isles, and distant shores

Where smugglers rowed with muffled oars,

And pirates wearing purple pants,

And sailing ships and elephants,

And cannibals crouching ’round the pot,

Stirring away at something hot.

(It smells so good, what can it be?

Good gracious, it’s Penelope.)

The younger ones had Beatrix Potter

With Mr. Tod, the dirty rotter,

And Squirrel Nutkin, Pigling Bland,

And Mrs. Tiggy–Winkle and–

Just How The Camel Got His Hump,

And How The Monkey Lost His Rump,

And Mr. Toad, and bless my soul,

There’s Mr. Rat and Mr. Mole–

Oh, books, what books they used to know,

Those children living long ago!

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,

Go throw your TV set away,

And in its place you can install

A lovely bookshelf on the wall.

Then fill the shelves with lots of books,

Ignoring all the dirty looks,

The screams and yells, the bites and kicks,

And children hitting you with sticks–

Fear not, because we promise you

That, in about a week or two

Of having nothing else to do,

They’ll now begin to feel the need

Of having something good to read.

And once they start–oh boy, oh boy!

You watch the slowly growing joy

That fills their hears. They’ll grow so keen

They’ll wonder what they’d ever seen

In that ridiculous machine,

That nauseating, foul, unclean,

Repulsive television screen!

And later, each and every kid

Will love you more for what you did.

P.S. Regarding Mike Teavee,

We very much regret that we

Shall simply have to wait and see

If we can get him back his height.

But if we can’t–it serves him right.”

A good question: “’What used the darling ones to do?”

I have a love/hate relationship with social media. I love it for the ease of connecting with others. I hate it for the timesuck and addictions it has spawned.

On the hate side, I find myself channeling the Oompa Loompas, asking, “How used they all did share? Aside from the books our darling ones did read, how did they share? How did they learn about those books?

Think about the wheel, perhaps one of the most popular backlist bestsellers of all time. It was good. It solved a problem. It got shared — all without the Michelin Man and a marketing team.

How? The wheel didn’t explode on the scene, as readily available in one part of the world as it was in another during the same era. It grew in popularity. According to Smithsonian.com:

Researchers believe that the wheelbarrow first appeared in classical Greece, sometime between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C., then sprung up in China four centuries later and ended up in medieval Europe, perhaps by way of Byzantium or the Islamic world.

Maybe a few different individuals had wheel ideas sparked around the same time. Wouldn’t be a first. But . . . There wasn’t a mother sharing her son’s invention on Facebook, telling her friends “You gotta get yourselves one of these.” It got around on its own, picked up by others who recognized its value, perhaps with the help of a father whose life became the envy of the other dads due to the increased amount of work he could accomplish.

While social media has made sharing easier, allowing us to connect with the rest of the world, I often think about what would happen if people stopped trying to connect with the rest of the world and instead spent their time 1) creating value and 2) sharing value, rather than generations of Mike Teavee’s creating crap and sharing crap. Sharing would be a slower process, but that might not be a bad thing.

Going back to what the darling ones did do has its positives.

 

Wordsmiths and Storysmiths

From time to time over the years I’ve worked with partners. The experience has taught me about the kind of writer I am, and the kind I’m not.

David O. Selznick, perhaps the greatest showman-writer ever

Am I a wordsmith? Or am I a storysmith?

A great partnership is a wordsmith and a storysmith.

Even better is to be both yourself.

What’s a wordsmith? (Another term I’d use for this is writer-writer.)

A writer-writer was born with a verbal gift. She can talk. She can sling bullshit. She’s glib. She’s articulate. She can turn a phrase.

If you’re a writer-writer, you’ve got an ear for dialogue. You can write crackling scenes and machine-gun exchanges between characters.

Writer-writers are bursting with ideas for books, movies, scenes, sequences, characters. They’re fountains of inventiveness and creativity.

The problem with writer-writers (and this was definitely true for me) is they can’t tell their good ideas from their bad ones.

It’s easy for a writer-writer to lose her way.

That’s when she needs help from a storysmith. (Another term would be hyphenate-writer, as in producer-writer, director-writer, even showman-writer, the David O. Selznick-writer.)

The wordsmith is great with rhythms of speech, dialogue, description, vivid interesting prose. She’s brimming with story ideas and character concepts, usually far too many for her own good. The storysmith or showman-writer, the David O. Selznick-writer, on the other hand, possesses no (or very little) flair for prose or dialogue, can’t write a scene, couldn’t compose his way out of a paper bag. But he understands the dynamics of story. He has brilliant and original ideas for plot twists, dramatic breakthroughs, and show-stopping scenes. He has a feel for spectacle. He grasps infallibly the story’s theme and, just as important, he has a gift for putting himself empathically inside the reader or audience’s heads. He senses instinctively the places in the story where the readers are getting bored, where the narrative is confusing to them, where we as writers have overplayed or underplayed our hand. He understands where we can get away with a logic flaw and when we can’t, when the story isn’t working and how to fix it.

My first partnership in Hollywood was with a renowned producer-writer/showman-writer. (I’ll call him Stanley for purposes of this blog post.)

Stanley had a genius-level feel for story. He didn’t analyze. He didn’t dissect. He just knew. I was by far the junior member of the team. I was replaceable. Any one of dozens of journeymen writer-writers could have contributed what I contributed. (And in fact once the partnership broke up, succeeding writer-writers did exactly that.)

The way we worked, Stanley and I, was that I threw idea after idea at him. I had no conception of which ones were the good ones. Stanley did. I could tell from his face when I’d heaved a bad idea at him. “Ah,” he’d say when a good one showed up.

He’d stop us at the good idea. Then we’d work on that.

But Stanley was not only a fielder of ground balls. He also had GREAT ideas himself.  (If I told you a couple of them from movies, you’d agree, trust me.)

Stanley could not write a scene. If you sat him down at a keyboard, he was paralyzed. He couldn’t write dialogue. He couldn’t create characters. He knew them when he saw them or heard them. But he couldn’t sit down and put them on the page.

Working with Stanley made me see all my weaknesses. I thought, “I’ve got to learn to recognize a good idea the way Stanley does. I can’t just sling thirty of them against the wall like spaghetti and be unable to tell which ones stick and which don’t.”

And I thought, “I’d got to find my own madness and genius and access them like Stanley does. I’ve got to get to great ideas. Not good ones. GREAT ones.” Otherwise I’ll always be just a wordsmith, a journeyman, a writer-writer.

Most writers, in my experience, are writer-writers. That’s their strength and that’s their weakness.

One of the great effects that Shawn’s THE STORY GRID is having, I hope, is to open wordsmiths’ eyes to the need to be storysmiths as well. But that skill, witness Stanley, is more than keen analysis and brilliant dissection.

It’s access to one’s own genius and instincts on the broadest and deepest possible level. If you’ve got this gift, God bless you. If you don’t, the best thing to do in my opinion is to put yourself around writers and artists who do have it, then just watch them and imitate them and be inspired by them.

I will never be the producer-writer that Stanley is naturally. He’s a genius. He’s got the gift. But when people ask me what I learned from working with Stanley, it’s simply that: to think big, to trust your instincts, to be wild and crazy and grab for ideas that seem lunatic on first glance but that are flush with genius once you look at them closely.

I don’t think a storysmith can ever learn to be a wordsmith. But a wordsmith can become a storysmith.

How?

If I knew, I’d bottle it and sell it. In the broadest terms, it seems to be a process of internal expansion, of casting aside all preconceived notions of what’s good or what’s true (or even what works) and digging deeper to find one’s own specific crazy genius and then learning to trust it. It’s like befriending that little lunatic elf that lives in the center of your chest, or that mad troll who hangs out under that bridge inside your heart, and then convincing that brilliant but easily spooked little character, instance by instance, that it’s okay to show himself, that he can stick his head up and come out into the daylight; you won’t hurt him or make fun of him, that you want to hear what he has to say and that you value it.

Grace Under Pressure

Why can some surgeons, poker players, mountaineers, fashion designers, athletes and even writers tune out the external noise—and the even more distracting internal chatter—and perform seemingly effortlessly under extraordinary pressure?

Eric Clapton playing in The Last Waltz

While others with comparable training and technique, while capable and competent, just can’t approach the holy moly level of a transcendent master?

Here’s an example of one such performance I watched with awe and joy almost forty years ago (and still do today)…

By Thanksgiving November 25, 1976, Farther Up the Road, then a twenty-year-old, mid-tempo, twelve-bar, Texas blues shuffle originally recorded on Memphis’s Duke records by Robert Calvin Brooks (aka Bobby “Blue” Bland) was a Rock & Roll standard.

Written by Joe Medwick Veasey and Don Robey, it was, and still is, one of those old reliables—a crowd pleaser that any bar band looking to fill out a set can learn quickly. The song’s genre structure is titanium solid, which makes it difficult for a musician to get “lost.” And even if a player does get lost, it’s not too hard for him to get back in the groove. It has the kind of form that opens up a lot of room to play around in too, to improvise—not dissimilar to some of fiction or nonfiction’s traditional writing genres. Like a “meet cute” love story or an extended obituary.

At around 9:00 p.m. that night at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, after a select group of 5,000 or so invited guests were full of turkey and Asti Spumante and after they’d exhaled enough odiferous smoke to fill the rafters of the historical 1928 ballroom/ice skating rink, the impresario Bill Graham had the dancefloor chandeliers outed.

A familiar voice came over the blackness. It was the voice of the heart and soul of The Band…Levon Helm.

“Good evening.”

Still cameras clicked and flashed, momentarily revealing the baroque stage and the five players upon it. And then an opening drum lick…boom, boom, boom…chit-chit, the opening to the Louisiana gumbo rooted classic “Up on Cripple Creek.”

Cinematographer Michael Chapman and his camera crew filmed drummer Levon Helm, pianist Richard Manuel, bassist Rick Danko, organ/keyboards/saxophonist Garth Hudson and lead guitarist Robbie Robertson from the stage…on the fly…a technique that gives the viewer a feel for what the reality of being a Rock & Roll star is all about. Not just in 1976, but for all time.

All of the exhilaration, but more importantly the absolute terror of facing an audience with huge expectations…

The concert footage would become part of Director Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, his groundbreaking documentary about the end of the road for a group of guys burned out living their dreams.

The movie begins with the story’s controlling idea.

We hear an off screen Scorsese setting up a manufactured bit with Rick Danko at a pool table (a shot that Scorsese would play with again a decade later in The Color of Money). This is a daring choice not to hide the artifice of constructing the documentary’s Story. How the director cues the seeming off-handed commentary etc. pulled down the traditional documentary curtain.

I think the choice lends ever more veritas and gravitas to the work. It’s as if Scorsese is saying “we’ll show you the bullshit behind the Story so that you’ll understand the truth of the music…which you just can’t bullshit on stage.”

Back to the controlling idea.

We hear Scorsese ask Danko, “Okay Rick, what’s the game?”

Danko: “Cut throat.”

Scorsese: “What’s the object of it?”

Danko: “Object is to keep your balls on the table, and knock everybody else’s off.”

And then we get the foreshadowing of the encore from the actual show (“Don’t do it”) which rolls into the opening credits which then sets up an interview with the movie’s central ego Robbie Robertson explaining what we’re about to see…

As inciting incident sequences go…you can’t really do much better than that.

The Last Waltz is so perfect that it was only a matter of time before it was parodied. Rob Reiner’s mockumentary This is Spinal Tap was the hilarious result. Reiner takes the Scorsese on-screen role in Spinal Tap as “Marty Di Bergi” intent on tracking the meaning of the careers of David St. Hubbins, Derek Smalls, and Nigel Tufnel. It’s the yin to The Last Waltz yang, played perfectly straight.

The middle build of Scorsese’s movie is to reveal just how accomplished The Band was as a musical force. To do that, a who’s who list of superstar performers come on stage from a wide variety of genres—Joni Mitchell to Dr. John to The Staples Singers. They’re all backed by the stellar quintet.

Which brings me to the moment when the transcendent master arrives.

It’s just after Muddy Waters performance, about one hour fifteen minutes into the film, which runs about two hours long total.

If I were storygridding The Last Waltz, I’d identify this moment as the ending climax of the middle build. The ending payoff is the arrival of Bob Dylan, which didn’t come close for me to the level of energy and excitement from this moment. But The Band backed Dylan when he went electric, so it makes sense to make him the big closer…even if his performance is somewhat disappointing. Which is probably what he was going for anyway.

Just as Muddy Waters walks off the stage to well-deserved thunderous applause, Robbie Robertson asks a rhetorical question and soon thereafter answers it.

Play guitar? Eric Clapton?

Eric Clapton is 31 in 1976.

He’d been called God a decade earlier and he’s been in some of the biggest super groups of the 60s and 70s. But when he comes on screen in The Last Waltz, he just seems kind of “over it.”

He’s said in the press and in interviews prior to the concert that he credits The Band with giving him a finer appreciation of songwriting and craftsmanship (Layla was one such response to Music from Big Pink), so his appearance on stage makes sense. But his body language suggests he’s not all that into being “on” tonight and he’d just as soon get it over with.

There’s a brief discussion that we the viewers can’t hear that goes on between Clapton and Robertson, which is probably just confirming their trade off of bits they’ll do for the song they’ve chosen beforehand, Farther on Up the Road. Again, Scorsese and Michael Chapman give us a completely unique view of the action…from behind Levon Helms’ drum kit so we see and can almost “feel” the want and need washing over the players from the audience.

DON’T DISAPPOINT US! MAKE THIS ONE OF THE GREATEST NIGHTS OF OUR LIVES!

Clapton kicks off the song with an impeccable intro, but as is his custom, after a visual check or two with Robertson, he proceeds to go into himself, closing and opening his eyes while watching his fingers fret. He’s have a dialogue with himself, one it seems he’s had numerous times before.

And then something absolutely wonderful happens.

Just as he’s finishing up the intro and about to go into the first line of the song, thirty eight seconds in, Clapton’s guitar strap breaks. For some reason before he went on stage, he put it on with a loop, kind of willy-nilly. So with the last slight pull downward from the neck of the guitar emphasizing the final note before he has to start singing, the strap gives and his guitar starts to fall.

With more irritation than panic, Clapton just shouts out “Rob!”

Robertson sees what’s happened as has every other member of the band…remarkably. There is a microsecond of a hitch and then…back to the beginning of the twelve bars with Robertson playing lead guitar as Clapton fixes his strap.

Robertson takes the level up a notch. He plays with a much more of a pressing quality, and for lack of a better description a “blangie” kind of reverb…sort of a traditional rock guitarist sound.

Clapton comes back and settles into his natural groove…just a clean, effortless sort of cool. He doesn’t seem to have to grind out anything. Slow hand, just another of his nicknames, knows what to keep out and what to slide into every single lick.

We can intuit all of this stuff because Chapman is filming Robertson as he watches Clapton play. His look seems to contain a mixture of awe and what could be interpreted as anger.

Next we get Clapton’s super cool voice singing the first two verses while a whole slew of roadies watch him from back stage:

Farther on up the road,

Someone’s gonna hurt you like you hurt me

Farther on up the road,

Someone’s gonna hurt you like you hurt me

Farther on up the road,

Baby, just you wait and see

 

You’re gonna reap just what you sow

That old saying is true

You’re gonna reap just what you sow

That old saying is true

Just like you mistreat someone, someone’s gonna mistreat you.

 

And then Clapton gives us what we expect to hear from him. A blistering solo that is as impeccable a demonstration of control as it is virtuosity. Speed that feels like molasses…purity of intention and sound.

But what’s this?

Just as Clapton finishes, Robertson runs up to take the lead. He seems to have even played a little over ECs final notes… It’s as if Robertson isn’t going to just sit back and watch Mr. Perfect eat off of his plate. He’s going to show the crowd that he’s not some slouch. He’s a lead guitarist too.

The camera shot includes Rick Danko banging out his baseline behind Robertson as he floors it down the neck of his guitar, pulling out every wild rockabilly run he’s ever played or heard in his life, but doing it with a speed that is surely unsustainable. Danko perks up with a bit of a smirk knowing that there is no way the Robertson will be able to maintain his pace.

Then the camera cuts to EC’s reaction. Which is pure joy!

He’s in the moment now, having actual fun, and he’s loving Robertson’s balls to the wall throw down. Robertson is killing it and Clapton is smiling for the first time since he’s walked on stage.

Cut to Levon Helm who has leaned into his kit with the excitement of a surfer riding a wave into a perfectly forming tube.

Back to the two shot of Robertson and Danko, who isn’t smirking anymore. He’s rooting on his bandmate to bring the solo home. And he does.

Robertson somehow pulls it off and the crowd seems stunned…like what’s going on?  I thought Clapton was going to rock us?

Clapton then steps into the mike to pick up the vocal.

Farther on up the road,

Someone’s gonna hurt you like you hurt me

Farther on up the road,

Someone’s gonna hurt you like you hurt me

Farther on up the road,

Baby, just you wait and see

 

You’ve been laughing pretty baby,

Someday you’re gonna be crying,

You’ve been laughing pretty baby,

Someday you’re gonna be crying,

Farther on up the road,

You’ll find out I wasn’t lying.

 

And then the time arrives for Clapton to respond.

He channels the mysterious force.  It’s the force that can only be unleashed by the very few.  Only those capable of monstrous dedication to craft who also have the courage to forget about the craft under the greatest possible pressure will pull it off.

The speed with which Clapton hits his notes is impossible to convey. But it’s the incredible sense of control and specificity of sound that is truly remarkable. He’s playing several times faster than Robertson, but at no point does it seem as if he is “pushing it.” No one’s worried, he’s not going to go fumble.

When he’s finished the last note and the applause waves over the stage—Danko, Robertson and Helm look like they’ve been on a spaceship that’s gone to Mars and back—Clapton seems as stunned as the rest.

The guy who seemed to reluctantly agree to play just as a favor for some friends doesn’t want to leave the stage.

To get to that place is where we really all want to go.

Resistance and “Hooks”

“Hook,” as I define it in this post, is probably not a legitimate psychological term. It’s more like hippie psychology. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) But it’s such a vivid term and so accurate in its depiction of how this phenomenon works that I’m gonna stick with it, even if it might not pass the DSM test.

A hook is always hostile and always bears evil intent

A “hook” is an action or statement designed to provoke a response.

A hook is always hostile and always bears evil intent. (See this prior post, “The Principal and the Profile.”)

If you’re a working artist, people are throwing hooks at you all day.

Hurling a hook is a symptom of Resistance.

One of the critical skills the working artist needs to acquire is how to avoid being hooked by hooks.

Okay, what’s an example of a hook?

1. Someone tells you they read your short story and they find your attitude “extremely insensitive and offensive” to ­­­­­­­­­­_________________. [Pick a group/victim.]

2. Someone approaches you and tells you they hate your work. You have no talent, you stink, you should not be afforded the forum to show your stuff in public.

3. Someone tells you that your words/actions/images have hurt them deeply. They are suffering acutely because of your cruelty, whether conscious or not.

4. Someone tells you they’re in love with you. You are perfect, you walk on water, they were meant to be with you and can prove it if you give them the chance.

Hooks can come at you from complete strangers or from those who are closest to you.

What do these hookers want? They want your attention. They want you to engage with them.

They provoke you, seeking to generate a response. They accuse you, hoping you will respond by defending yourself. They pick a fight with you, hoping you will strike back.

The practice of throwing hooks is not limited to individuals. Nations can be hook throwers too. North Korea. Iran. ISIS has achieved new heights in hook throwing.

Hooks are thrown by “losers” at “winners.”

Stalking is a form of hook throwing.

I got the chance last year to visit the office of a personal security company, an outfit that specializes in protecting high-profile executives and celebrities. My host showed me an exhibit. It was a stack of letters, piled literally to the ceiling. The letters had all been written to one celebrity by a single hook-thrower. This person sometimes sent as many as eighteen letters a day.

In Turning Pro, I talk about “shadow careers” and “shadow works of art.” That’s what this stack of letters was. When I say hook-throwing is a symptom of Resistance, that’s what I mean. The letter writer felt a burning need to create, but he or she, overwhelmed by Resistance (no doubt unconsciously), couldn’t sit down and do it. So his or her imagination fixated instead on some artist or celebrity (the security people wouldn’t tell us who the letters were sent to) who, no doubt, was producing exactly the kind of work that the hook-thrower wished he or she could create. The hook-thrower then projected onto this individual all the energy, focus, intensity, and love that should have gone into their own work of art.

The stack of letters became this person’s shadow work of art.

The bullets that Mark David Chapman fired into John Lennon were his shadow version of Abbey Road or Sergeant Pepper or (arrrgh) Revolver.

I asked the security executives what principles they employed in protecting their clients from hook throwers.

First, they said: Do Not Engage.

Don’t take the hook. Don’t get angry when provoked. Don’t defend yourself when attacked. Don’t apologize or explain yourself when accused of causing harm.

Do not respond in any way.

Your response—any response—is what the hook thrower wants, said the security execs. The more you respond, the more energized and validated the hook-thrower will become and the more hooks they will throw.

That stack of letters? The client to whom they were addressed never saw them or even knew they existed. They were intercepted by the security company and that was the end of it. The hook-thrower’s gambit was completely neutralized.

It took me a long time to learn, when I receive hook e-mails, to simply delete them and to add a Rule to my Mail Folder that sends any subsequent communications from the hook-sender straight to Junk.

The flip side of this, of course, is to monitor our own selves and be certain that we are not sending out hooks—to people we admire or to our own loved ones.

If we are, we are falling prey to our own Resistance. Our job is to stop sending hooks and instead to focus on our own work—and do it.