The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
― Rumi
All my problems are meaningless,
But that don’t make them go away.
– Neil Young, “On the Beach”
Every story is about being broken and trying to be whole.
All of us, even the happy ones among us, are in some way broken. At some point, usually early in life, we have experienced a moment of cracking and breaking. The breaking continues throughout our lives.
Start with the iconic heroes of literature: Oedipus, Odysseus, Lear, Macbeth. Gatsby (Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby), Jake Barnes (Papa Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls), Yossarian (Joseph Heller’s Catch 22), Holden Caulfield (J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye), Sethe (Toni Morrison’s Beloved). More recently: Camille Preake (Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects), Rachel Watson (Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train), or Harry Potter (the series by J.K. Rowling).
The exception proves the rule: Socrates, the hero who surrenders his life Plato’s dialogues, struggles with the brokenness of the Greek political elites.
How about real life? So: presidents? Oh, god yes. FDR, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden? Broken, everyone one of them.
We are all broken in many ways, actually. The challenge for the storyteller is to find the defining brokenness of the characters and and figure out how they compel their actions. Once we understand this primary brokenness, we can understand all the broken ways that we try to survive, day by day, and pursue our goals.
The story is about how we struggle to become whole. Some of our strategies are conscious, others less so. Some are more effective, others less so.
Unconscious Strategies to Fix What’s Broken
A character’s unconscious strategies come from our deepest, most repressed selves. This repression comes from experiences and emotions that are too hot to handle. In youth, they could have been abused of neglected. Either way, their development is stunted by the need to survive their early traumas. Their story, then, is about trying to handle things that are (at first) too hot to handle.
Think of those strategies: Money. Fame. Career. Service. Security. Popularity. Power. Love. Respect. Knowledge. Religion. Fear. Friendship. Booze, drugs, porn, and other external addictions. Boosterism. Do-gooderism and caretaking. Civic leadership.
These are all adaptations. In their way, most of them have positive aspects. They help the character survive to face another day. But the are, at best, incomplete reaches—and ultimately fail to achieve wholeness.
Most of these strategies don’t work because they only address a part of the brokenness—and that, badly. In doing so, they actually repress the other parts of the brokenness, even more intensely. Success with the strategy, like making a lot of money, serves to intensify the pain.
A Larger Brokenness
Here’s the hardest part: Not only is the character broken–so is the society. Gabor Mate has written about “the myth of normal.” We are raised to think that society is “normal,” that is, functional and fair. But it’s not. It’s a hot mess of trauma: inequality, abuse, ill health, neglect, blame and self-blame, addiction, distraction. When we accept the values of modern society, we set ourselves up for a fall.
Mate lists a number of basic needs:
belonging, relatedness, or connectedness;
autonomy: a sense of control in one’s life; – mastery or competence;
genuine self-esteem, not dependent on achievement, attainment, acquisition, or valuation by others;
trust: a sense of having the personal and social resources needed to sustain one through life;
purpose, meaning, transcendence: knowing oneself as part of something larger than isolated, self-centered concerns, whether that something is overtly spiritual or simply universal/humanistic, or, given our evolutionary origins, Nature.
The story lies in the struggle to realize some of these needs in the face of an often-brutal or indifferent environment.
Genre
Which leads us to genre: there are two basic kinds of story. A tragedy is about the failure to become whole, while a comedy is about success in becoming whole.
Beyond those two super genres, there are lots of working genres—which are just different circumstances of the broken/whole story. (We explore genre here and here.)
What Does Success Look Like?
So what does success look like, for the hero and other story characters? Think of the Japanese tradition of kintsugi, also known as kintsukuroi. It means repairing broken pottery by filling the cracks and gaps with lacquer.
The result is not perfect; it is better than perfect. In the Japanese philosophy of mushin, the imperfections symbolize the importance of non-attachment and acceptance of change. They also symbolize the the hard work we do to achieve this wisdom.
When Alfred Hitchcock roamed the sets of his movies, he could be seen with a small book called Plotto. With this book of prompts, storytellers can connect 15 characters types (listed in Column A) to 62 conflict situations (Column B) and 15 consequences (Column C). In a sense, Plotto is a guide for mix-and-matching the elements of a story.
Published in 1928 by William Wallace Cook—who used it to write an endless series of pulp novels—Plotto was responsible for the greatest stream of thrillers, this side of John Grisham. A former lawyer named Erle Stanley Gardner used Plotto to create a series of pulp novels featuring Perry Mason. Those novels sold 170 million copies and inspired the classic radio, film, and TV productions.
Enter Eric R. Williams, a screen/virtual reality writer who also teaches storytelling at Ohio University. His book The Screenwriter’s Taxonomy goes far beyond Plotto. In this fascinating guide to genre, Williams lays out 260 different elements of stories, arranged on a hierarchy that looks like this:
Super-Genres: These 11 basic categories (Action, Crime, Fantasy, Horror, Life, Romance, Sci-Fi, Sports, Thriller, War, Western) establish the basic expectations for stories.
Macro-Genres: These 50 story contexts show different “worlds of the story” (from Addiction to Workplace), each with its own distinct settings, values, and patterns of behavior.
Micro-Genres: These 199 details help to give further definition to the 50 Macro-Genres (e.g., a Legal Macro-Genre could have a Micro-Genre of Courtroom, Investigation, Tales of the System, or Underdog/Whistleblower).
All this might remind you of the old barb about academic analysis—that it’s an endless process of figuring out “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.” In other words, it may seem like nothing more than mind-numbing insider-speak. Occam’s Razor, it ain’t.
But wait. This typology offers a brilliant way to understand stories and how they work. It’s a great way to brainstorm stories and to create a great plot.
Williams suggests using his story-generation machine in three stages:
Start by looking at the 50 Macro-Genres. What kind of world do you want to explore? The world of Addiction? A Gangster story? A Love story? Maybe a Procedural? How about a Romantic Comedy?
Now look at the kinds of stories you can tell within your Macro-Genre—in other words, look at the Micro-Genres. If you want to tell a Love story, figure out what kind. You have five basic choices: Disguise (think Roxanne), Nonconventional (Her), Obsession (Fatal Attraction), Traditional (Emma), and Unrequited (Remains of the Day).
Now, decide what Super-Genre you want to use. Theoretically, once you have picked your Macro-Micro combination, you could tell 11 different kinds of stories. If you wanted to tell a tale of Unrequited Love, for example, it could fall under the Super-Genre of Action, Crime, Fantasy, Thriller, and seven other Super-Genres.
If this still feels overwhelming, that’s OK. Life is complicated, right? Williams estimates that his system could produce as many as 187,816,200 permutations of story types. But never mind.
My advice is to get the book, download a handy cheat sheet, and let your imagination roam over these three levels of story categories. Whatever you do, don’t rush.
This is not simple. But the more you work with it, the more you understand the internal mechanisms of stories. Lucky for me, I had an opportunity to talk with Eric R. Williams about his approach to genre. Here’s a transcript of our talk, edited for brevity and clarity.
We might think about genre in business terms. A corporate brand is essentially a promise. The brand says to the buyer of Corn Flakes or iPhones or UnderArmour: This is what you can expect if you enter this world.
Or look at it as a niche. It’s a way of zooming down to the most elemental or unique aspects of whatever we’re talking about. So a smartphones are a niche of the telecommunications business, along with flip phones, land lines, and even Zoom.
When you’re writing a film, just like when you’re creating a product, you are trying to meet the promises that you’ve made to your audience. With The Screenwriters Taxonomy, I wanted to help writers specify different elements that they’re going to be working on creatively. I realized that genre is just so broadly used that it’s lost its meaning. As storytellers, genre (as a concept) has to be useful.
In essence, I believe, genre is about character, atmosphere, and key expectations of the story. So if I’m doing a War movie, it’s going to be the us versus them, right? It’s going to be soldiers against those conspiring against the soldiers—other soldiers or people in a foreign land or political opponents.
So, what’s atmosphere? Well, where is the war going to take place? Here are some options: probably a contrast between foreign lands and back home, right? We’ll probably see some sort of combination of battlegrounds, training grounds, and the spaces in between. Atmosphere also includes props and costumes (so, in War, we’ll see uniforms and weapons and war machines and symbols of peace and patriotism).
We also know what’s going to happen in a war movie, right? We know the basic tenets and themes of stories of War. Sacrifice and survival, patriotism and camaraderie, and the effects or war on society and the individual. That sort of stuff, right? That what we expect in a war movie? Not all of it—not all at once, but some of it.
And we know these key tentpole scenes: Battles and injuries and captives and freedom. Decisions of life and death. Questions of rank and leadership. Themes of Us versus Them. We know thematically a handful of areas that we might explore in a war movie. We pretend that each war movie is unique. But they’re not. Not really.
Looking at your 11 Super-Genres, that’s one of them. Suppose we want to do a War story that’s a Comedy, like M*A*S*H. So we have a war with different ways people are fighting each other. The ongoing fight between the North Koreans and South Koreans is an obvious level. Another level is the dumb bureaucrats and martinets against ordinary people who are just trying to survive. So we have a comedy that falls in the Super-Genre of War. And then we look at the 50 Macro-Genres.
The War Super-Genre typically has multiple characters. Maybe a big band of brothers going off and fighting. But what else are we exploring besides war? You might have someone who, in a B plot, has left his family behind. So now we have a Family story as a Macro-Genre. And we can take that further by exploring the Micro-Genre of the Family story: is this a story that tests the family bond? Or is this a story about a family dealing with loss? Or has war created a feud within the family?
Or let’s take this war Super-Genre in a completely different direction with a Macro-Genre of Time Travel. We could have a war movie with all the typical trappings you’d expect, but then what would happen if one of the soldiers discovered a time-travel mechanism? All of a sudden, in the second act, it becomes a War story with a character who can travel forwards and backwards in time. Now you’ve paired your Super-Genre of War with a Macro-Genre of Time Travel. In essence, that’s what Kurt Vonnegut did with Slaughterhouse Five—except that the character Billy Pilgrim didn’t have a time machine, he was just unmoored in the time-space continuum.
You could also have Addiction—a character who is addicted to X, Y, and Z. During the course of the battles, he overcomes that addiction—or he becomes addicted. You can weave those thematic or personal stories (the Macro-Genre) into that larger Super-Genre in a variety of ways. So there’s 50 Macro-Genres, probably more. You can put any one of those 50 Macro-Genres into any of the 11 Super-Genres.
So one or more of the 50 Macro-Genres can be combined with any of the 11 Super-Genres. What’s the sweet spot for the number of Macro-Genres that might go with a Super-Genres like War or Romance or Life or whatever? Is it three or …
Off the top of my head, I’d shoot for two or three. Obviously, when you start telling stories with more characters, you might to pull more Macro-Genres. It’s also important to note that any of the 11 Super-Genres can act as a Macro-Genres. For instance, the 2021 film Cherry takes Crime as a Super-Genre, then mixes it with War and Addiction and Love Story as its three Macro-Genres to create a really amazing and complex character study.
It depends on the clarity of the expression. If by having four or five or more Macro-Genres, the story flies off in too many different directions, that could confuse the audience. The ultimate test is to have a core that holds everything together.
That’s exactly right. And I would add that, just because there’s some sort of storytelling element, that doesn’t mean it’s a Macro-Genre. Just because one of our soldiers wants to get home to his sweetheart, that doesn’t make it a Love story. Just because somebody is addicted to heroin, that doesn’t mean that it’s an Addiction story. For a Macro-Genre to emerge, you actually have to explore the character, locations, and story expectations of that Micro-Genre.
Do the Super-Genres have to have their own mini arcs? You hear people talk a lot about the B story. That B story is a complete mini-story unto itself, but it’s subordinate to the main story. Is that the ultimate test of whether you should think of it as a Macro-Genre—whether it helps contribute to the main story or theme?
That’s a great way to put it. The Macro-Genre really needs to be a B story (or even a C story).
If we think of genre as a promise, the B story and C story have to help fulfill that promise—not just for the genre, but also for the setup, right?
In the opening scene of The Godfather, it’s about family, it’s about loyalty, it’s about control. But to me, the main moment is Michael telling Kay, “This is my family, but it’s not me. I’m getting out.” So the big question is: Can a guy like this escape the vortex of a crime family? Everything gets back to that issue: How total is the experience of a crime family?
To me, this is the central difference between Super-Genre and Macro-Genre. Coppola is telling a Crime story (the Super-Genre) which also has elements of a Love story between Kay and Michael (the Macro-Genre). However, it would be possible for someone to take the exact same characters and situations and change the film into a Romance between Kay and Michael, right? That would change how those scenes are told.
If this was a Romance, it might start with Michael and Kay driving into the wedding. Little do we know about this guy who’s in love with his new girlfriend and is bringing her to meet the family. Well, the family is actually—nudge nudge, wink wink—a crime family. That changes everything. Now we have a Romance (Super-Genre) combined with a Gangster story (Macro-Genre). One way to think of Super-Genre is to ask: “How are they advertising this film?”
When I’m walking into a movie theater, looking at all of those movie posters, am I going to see Godfather: The Romance? If that’s the Super-Genre, then I want to see Kay and Michael deciding whether their marriage is going to work out, because that’s going to be our central set of expectations since it’s a Romance and not a Crime movie, right? But of course, as Coppola and Puzo imagined it, Kay and Michael’s love story becomes a secondary element in the Crime Super-Genre.
A movie involving the mafia doesn’t necessarily have to do with organized crime. Analyze This, for example, is not really about organized crime.
No, that’s a Day in the Life story, with Gangster elements. Day in the Life is the Super-Genre and Gangster is the Macro-Genre. It’s similar to the TV series The Sopranos. The brilliant thing that David Chase did with that series it that he chose a different Super-Genre. He made it a Day in the Life story as his Super-Genre, and then used Family and Gangster as Macro-Genres. See how that changes the focus of the piece?
Genre also forces you to be particular, specific. We all have an innate human urge for storytelling. But we also have a huge human tendency toward summarizing and generalizing. A niche forces us to stay specific.
A lot of it has to do with the medium. Film and television are hyper-specific, right? We get into these details because we can actually see it on the screen so we have to be specific. In that opening scene of The Godfather we see a room with specific actors doing specific things in a specific environment. The detail exists for us to point at and agree to: Brando petting a cat and discussing murder. Mario Puzo’s novel has a certain amount of detail, but you can still allow your mind to wander. For instance, Puzo can write, “the men talked about justice for Bonasera’s daughter” and the idea doesn’t need details the way that a filmed scene needs details.
One of one of the problems with biopics is that they try to do too much rather than getting specific. Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, for example, covers a huge sweep of time. Might it have been better to focus on one element of the story, like Malcolm’s break with Elijah Muhammad or his trip to Africa or his time in jail? Then you could have a tight theme, a strong story arc, with the details that really get it.
Yeah, I would buy that. Spike Lee tried to cover a lot of ground in three and a half hours. The story of Malcom X might have been better served by exploring a smaller section of his life in more detail. But keep in mind, the movie came out in the early 1990s and that was the biggest canvas Spike Lee had to paint that story. Now you could take that same story and stream it as a 12-part series and add a lot more specificity and detail.
In his interviews with Truffaut, Hitchcock said something to the effect of, “I have this funny idea of creating a movie not out of characters or situations, but out of scenes. And then I try to think about what would happen in the scenes.”
That all goes back to genre, because those are the audience’s expectations when they buy a ticket. You can subvert some of those expectations. You could have a gangster movie that takes place in space. But you have to set that expectation up for your audience so that they know that, okay, the theme and the characters are all going to still be a gangster movie, but people are going to be wearing funky futuristic costumes because the story takes place in outer space. Dark City, Dredd, Elysium, and maybe even Tenet would be good examples of Gangster movies that subvert our expectations by placing the story in outer space.
Similarly, if your audience is expecting to see a Western, they don’t expect the story to be in New York City. That just goes to say that if you’re trying to tell a Western and it’s surrounded by skyscrapers, you’re probably starting in a hole.
It could be a fish-out-of-water story. But that’s but that’s a different story. That’s a different niche or a different genre as well.
I’m all in favor of subverting expectations. If we’re going to tell a Western, we could start it in New York and make it out of fish-out-of-water story. But they better get out west by the second act or your audience is going to be wondering why the film was billed as a Western. Remember Back to the Future III. It becomes a Western as soon as Michael J. Fox gets catapulted into the past. It doesn’t start there, but we knew, going in, that’s where they’re going.
If you’re a hierarchical thinker, you probably start with the Super-Genres and then work down. But maybe if there’s a kind of Macro-Genre situation that you really love, you can start there.
I would almost always start with the Macro-Genre. People think in Macro and Micro terms. They’re specific. And their stories bubble up.
We have been talking about Gangster stories, so let’s continue along that line. You might be drawn to telling a Gangster story—be it from the anti-hero’s POV or the lawman’s POV—but that’s just a starting point. Next, ask whether it’s a Western or Sci-Fi or Fantasy or whatever. I mean, it’s possible to have a Gangster Western (3:10 to Yuma) or a Gangster Sci-Fi (The Dark Knight) or even a Gangster Fantasy film (The Forbidden Kingdom).
A story is only as good as its details. That requires research. You might think you know a subject. A young writer might know a lot about high school theater. But those aren’t the details that are going to tell the story. They have to somehow still do research to get the details for other aspects of the story.
Right. They also have to understand the details of the characters that populate those stories. If you’re doing a story about a high school musical, you might have a drama teacher who is going through a divorce and he’s torn because the topic of the play is about children while he’s in a custody battle in court in his real life.
As a writer, you might know everything in the world about high school musicals, but what do you know about divorce and custody battles? To tell this part of the story in your musical though, you’re going to have to write scenes about what that person is going through. And that’s the research you need.
You can’t create that high school drama teacher unless you know something about relationships and the awkward stuff that goes on between divorcing couples and how their friends and families react to each other. There’s a million things that you need to know, besides the world of theater.
Typically, I find that my Macro- and Micro-Genres help me to identify what to research. I might have enough of a general idea about the tropes of my Super-Genre to start imagining my screenplay. But when I dig into the details of the Macro- and Micro-Genres, then I need more specificity to create those characters and the nuance that makes them unique and interesting.
Let’s talk about beats. Robert McKee, in his Story Seminar, does a complete showing of Casablanca. He analyzes the bazaar scene, where Ilsa goes out and looks at fabrics and Rick comes out and tries to atone for his bad behavior the night before. Every moment of dialogue moves that scene forward—and not just the scene, but the whole story. (See this discussion.)
But it’s not just whether it moves the story forward. Sometimes we want a thematic beat that helps us understand the context, the values of the people in the story. Even if it doesn’t change the story, a moment can be valuable for revealing something about the character.
There’s a scene in Black Mass, about the Boston mobster White Bulger. There’s is a scene where he convinces one of his henchmen, Stephen Flemmi, to strangle his girlfriend to death in the trunk of a car. There’s really no other reason for this scene other than to create a distaste for Whitey Bulger.
You see, there’s also this idea of primary and secondary emotions. Primary emotions are what the character is thinking. Secondary emotions are what the audience is thinking. In that example, Whitey Bulger is smiling. He’s happy. He’s like, ha ha.
So the primary emotion is Bulger’s twisted glee. Then there are those beats that hit a switch in the audience’s heart or mind. In this case, hopefully, the audience is horrified by Bulger. That’s the secondary emotion. Secondary emotions are super important because they’re not very many of them. But when they when they hit, they carry this weight. So they don’t necessarily move the story forward. But thematically, and contextually, they play a crucial role in the story.
As the script doctor steps off the stage, a look at his impact and storytelling lessons
Years ago, when I was transitioning from academic life to nonfiction narrative writing, I attended Robert McKee’s immersive Story Seminar. For three days, I sat in a New York theater for a complete course from one of Hollywood’s leading experts on narrative for the page, stage, and screen.
I felt like I was in that famous scene in Adaptation:
Brian Cox, the brilliant British theater actor who was the malevolent Logan Roy on Succession, played the McKee role to perfection. Stalking on stage, Cox/McKee barked out commandments for storytelling and dismissed the lily-livered comments of pretenders who do not want to work hard to construct a good story. His massive brows furrowing or rising to signal anger or glee, he teased, charmed, and berated the audience. He prompted the audience to agree with his takes on movies and literature. “Who thinks, as I do, that…” he would say. A forest of hands would rise.
Some view McKee’s performance as an ego trip, and it’s obvious McKee has a strong ego–at least in the sense of knowing who he is and what his mission and standards are. He knew what he wanted to teach and did not want to be distracted or deterred. He did not want to pal around with seminar participants. Many attempted to follow him at lunch and accidentally-on-purpose bump into him and ask a question. He would have nothing to do with it.
His standoffishness was one part self-preservation and one part lesson: I can show you what to do, but you have to put your goddamned ass on the chair and do the goddamned work yourself.
McKee started teaching storytelling after the release of his TV miniseries Abraham (1993). He realized, he said, that he could never be a great screenwriter–but he could become a great storytelling teacher.
Last year, Robert McKee performed the last of 400-plus of these marathon seminars. At 82, he has decided retire from his role as the Socrates of the Screen. But “retire” is not a word anyone uses to describe McKee, and he will stay plenty busy. For years, Story (1997) was the only way most people could learn McKee’s approach to create narrative. But in recent years he has produced four followup works: Dialogue (2016), Character (2021), Action (2022), and Storynomics (2018). He is now writing a new version of Story, which he calls Story II. (May it be a worthy sequel, more like The Godfather Part II than Return to the Blue Lagoon). McKee is determined to share all the tricks and wisdom he gained in a lifetime of writing and teaching. Obviously, his seminars and books overlap. But he has also expanded and deepened his core insights.
A few imperatives of storytelling
So what must the storyteller do? So what does McKee want us to know about storytelling? Here are some of the pieces of his wisdom that I have found most useful over the years:
• Forge character in the furnace of desire, conflict, and obsession: Nothing happens without a character’s passionate desire. That desire leads to action, with causes conflict, which tests everyone. Whoever emerges from the conflict more whole can be called heroic, even if they lose. Therefore, force the character to make hard choices–and make the choices harder as the story proceeds. Don’t give a character the choice between good and bad; make it good against a competing good or a competing bad. Make every choice involve loss.
• Create two great desires, one external and the other internal: People begin their quest with an simple, obvious, superficial desire: “I want to protect my family” (The Godfather) or “I want to rescue my son” (Missing) or “I want to get out of here” (Groundhog Day). As they encounter more obstacles, they deepen their understanding of what they want: “I want total control” or “I want to expose the truth about the Chilean coup” or “I want to be worthy of love.” By the end, they discover that their internal desire is the real point of it all.
• The point of action: Action is essential but only matters if it makes a difference in the story. If you have a great “action” scene but it changes nothing, it’s not worth keeping. Even the most exciting fight or car chase will drag down a story if it does not propel the story forward. By the same token, even the most mundane moments provide action if they make a difference and raise the stakes.
On the last day of the Story Seminar I took, McKee played and analyzed Casablanca, scene by scene. The highlight was his breakdown of the bazaar scene with Rick and Ilsa. Every line of dialogue is action: Every line changes the trajectory of the story and our understanding of these iconic characters.
• Alternate positive and negative beats: Audiences want change–or the possibility of change–at every level and at every step of the way. Make even the small actions (like a nod, an averted glance, or a soft-spoken word) matter. That’s what McKee calls a beat. Then alternate positive and negative beats. If a positive moment occurs, counter with something negative, then positive, then negative, and so on.
In a sense, action is a form of dialogue. Each act says something and forces others to respond.
• Make dialogue sound human (but better): Capture character with the way people talk: brave or cowardly, certain or confused, risk-taking or cautious, quick witted or slow, jocular or stiff, and so on. But remember that most people speak like fractured, conflicted, uncertain, and inarticulate beings. Find the sweet spot between realism and art. The goal is not mimicking reality but (to use McKee’s term) “enhanced expressivity.”
Also, remember that speech is a form of action. “Life is dialogue, action/reaction,” McKee says. But don’t use dialogue when you can tell the story in other ways. “When the screenplay has been written and the dialogue has been added, we’re ready to shoot,” Alfred Hitchcock said. First create the scenes, then the action, and finally the words.
Whatever you do, don’t “write on the nose,” using dialogue to provide backstory, which murders subtext and irony and treats the audience like a bunch of dummies who can’t add 2 plus 2. Avoid this kind of fake dialogue/exposition: “Yeah! I remember you! You sat in the last row of Mr. Leonard’s class! He was such a demanding teacher! And we just wanted to goof off!”
• Hit ’em again–harder: However much your hero suffers, make him suffer even more. Escalate the abuse, even if it’s just kidding/not-kidding taunts from friends. Giving your characters a hard time tests them, reveals them, and gives them an opportunity to respond and grow. “Pressure is essential,” McKee says. “Choices made when nothing is at risk mean little.”
“The more powerful and complex the forces of antagonism opposing the character, the more completely realized character and story must become.”
• Don’t say anything at face value: Everyone lies–like, all the time. No story should gather a group of good-spirited, accommodating truth-tellers. It’s fake and boring. Even honest people speak honestly in an oblique way. Even blunt statements of truth are oftentimes covers for something else. So make sure that dialogue contains two levels of truth: first the surface-level meaning of the statements, then the hidden misunderstandings and agendas of the speakers.
This, dear English majors, is where we find the all-important element of irony: The man-of-the-people radio star (A Face in the Crowd), the shy and skinny kid who knocks the block off the bully (Back to the Future), the legal secretary who learns tenacity she needs to fight polluters by managing life as a single mom (Erin Brockovich).
• Don’t mess with genre: Readers need to know what the story offers. Genre offers a wide but limited range of eternal tales, each one tapping something fundamental about the human condition. A genre, like a brand, is a promise: Read/watch this story and you’ll get the elements you’re expecting.
Genres also help us to get the story sizzling right away: “We don’t want people coming to our work cold and vague, not knowing what to expect, forcing us to spend the first 20 minutes of screentime clueing them toward the necessary story attitude.”
McKee lists 25 genres; that’s too many, I think. Mockumentary, for example, is not a genre but a way of presenting a story; a mockumentary can be a tragedy or comedy or Bildungsroman or any number of other distinct genres. Still, McKee’s list is useful for devising the right style of story.
• Pursue unity and truth: Ever the Aristotelian, McKee insists that all stories must reach closure by the end. As Aristotle says in The Poetics, the story should be “complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude.” The story and the fates of the characters should wrap up, even if they lose their quest. The ending should feel like a surprise, but it should also feel inevitable.
Of course Michael was destined to be a ruthless mob boss. Of course Rick would embrace patriotism and love over possession of Ilsa. Of course Macbeth would lose his kingdom. Of course Ed discovers the corruption and complicity that led to his son’s death during Chile’s coup.
To some, these rules of storytelling feel contrived, almost like a paint-by-numbers approach. But as in any other creative, skilled work–carpentry, sculpture, dance, architecture–the rules provide the grounding needed to work creatively. The rules prompt the writer to struggle through a raw, deep, agonizing, contradictory, and hard journey.
The Ultimate Hack: Do the Hard Work
The reason storytelling will never die, even with AI, is that it requires real imagination and struggle. The human experience is not an algorithm.
We have to do the work ourselves. Lots of people write “content” for “media outlets” and “clients.” Lots of people write “books” to promote their “brand.” But how many of them are willing to dig deep and work hard enough to produce a worthy story?
In a sense, McKee’s core message was that writing a story is a lot like being a hero in a story. It’s about having a goal and a determination to meet that goal. It’s about delusion, failure, denial, blindness, and laziness–and working hard to overcome these universal flaws to create something worthwhile.
The greatest challenge, then, is to find something worth saying. In a valedictory profile in The New Yorker, McKee tells Dana Goodyear: “The problem with Hollywood is, they’ve all read the book, they’ve all been to these lectures. They know how to tell a story, but they don’t have anything to say.”
In Adaptation, McKee tells Charlie Kaufman, played by Nick Cage: “Your characters must change. The change must come from them.” He’s telling Charlie that the writer has to do as much hard work as the characters. No formula or shortcuts for anyone.
What if (spoiler alert) all the wisdom of writing, storytelling, problem-solving, adventure, crisis management, and deep learning could be summed up in a two-word phrase?
Thanks to Angus Fletcher, a leading authority on storytelling and the brain, we know that two-word phrase: “What if?”
Fletcher is the professor of story science at Ohio State’s Project Narrative. He not only teaches and writes books, but also consults with the Army and Hollywood. He teaches them how to do what comes naturally, until we’re denatured by modern life: How to soak up the world with a sense of wonder and then to create a strikingly original approach to living the best life.
OK, back up.
Fletcher’s basic insight is that human’s don’t just create and enjoy stories. Stories are not somehow some thing “out there.” Stories organize all our experiences. No, that’s not quite right; it still suggests that stories are outside of us. We are stories. Stories as as much a part of our experience as blood and organs and skin and bones and sinews. Just as we must understand all those elements of life to understand health, we need to understand the elements of storytelling to understand experience.
“Storythinking hails from a time prior to authors, prior to humans, prior to language,” Fletcher writes in Storythinking. “It dates back hundreds of millions of years to the first creaky machinery of the animal brain.”
Cogito, ergo sum? Actually, Diigoúmai, ergo sum—or, I tell stories, therefore I am. “The human brain empowered our Stone Age ancestors to respond to unpredicted challenges and opportunities by linking creative actions into new plans—which is to say, new plots. That hatching of plots was narrative cognition.”
Humans think and operate in two ways: logic and narrative. “Analytically, story and logic employ different epistemological methods,” Fletcher notes. “Logic’s method is equation, or more technically, correlational reasoning, which inhabits the eternal present tense of this equals that. … Story’s method is experiment, or more technically, causal speculation, which requires the past/present/future of this causes that.” Or: What if?
Think about that a minute. The more maniacally we embrace facts ripped from context, standardized testing, getting the “right answer,” an so on, the less capable we are of storythinking. And storythinking is essential to the human experience.
Fletcher suggests three major skills to improve storythinking:
Prioritizing the exceptional: Finding what’s unpredictable, surprising, weird, deviant, extreme, shocking, even gross or repellant. That’ll get attention, right?
Perspective shifting: Imagining being someone completely different—not just with a nice, cozy empathy, but with a kind of embodiment of another. Getting out of your own skin, as extremely or totally (see 1, above) as possible.
Stoking narrative conflict: Testing ideas and scenarios as a kind of epic battle that takes you “boldly … where no man has gone before” (catchy phrase, no?). Submit characters and situations to stress tests that take the storythinker’s mind far beyond where it was before.
Fletcher’s story has more than its share of plot twists. After four years in the neurophysiology lab at the University of Michigan Med School, he decided to focus on storytelling. He learned from the best, studying Shakespeare for his Ph.D. in literature at Yale. Then, at Stanford, he connected with Pixar storytellers and became a script writer for TV and movies. He has also worked with the Army Special Corps.
I recently spent an hour exploring these issues with Fletcher on the phone. But the recorder wasn’t working. (This was my “all is lost” moment.) So rather than giving you his word-by-word account, I offer a paraphrased summary. Fletcher okayed my summary of our conversation.
On the brain, evolution, and storytelling …
The brain is not a computer. It’s a way of experiencing the world. It’s not like we just gather data and then assemble those data. To be sure, we often develop stories out of information that we have stored in our brains, at different levels including the subconscious. But even more important, we create stories to produce something, not just organize information. We can actually produce stories out of nothing. We can actually create whole new worlds.
That’s what scientists do. They are always telling stories, trying to figure what will happen in this situation and that situation.
Over the course of human evolution, humans have not only mastered the art of storytelling—and, in turn, been shaped by stories. The human experience is itself inseparable from storytelling. Humans could never step out of storytelling even if they tried.
On the clutter of the modern mind …
We once had the ability to imagine something out of nothing. Before modern technology, we had to entertain ourselves when we were bored. We had to observe and imagine. But now every time we get bored, we turn to our iPhone. The best thing we could do to reignite our imagination is to smash our phones.
When we come into a room, we don’t notice anything unless something is out of place. Babies and toddlers, when they come into a room, they see something new every time. Even if that room is familiar, they look at the details in a room with fresh eyes every time. They don’t assume that anything is going to be the same way. In a way we have to recover our ability to look and observe like two-year-olds.
On the need to slow down and notice things, detail by detail and moment by moment …
People automatically make causal arguments and take all the interesting details out of the equation. They say X causes Y. But in fact, there are lots of other factors involved besides X and Y. The blandest ideas come from sanding over the details.
We are a storytelling species, to be sure, but we’re also a summarizing and simplifying species.
When we think that X causes Y, we have to push ourselves to see how X causes x1, x2, x3, and so on—actually more than that, like y1, y2, y3, et cetera—before getting anywhere close to Y.
Of course, as a writer and a storyteller, you don’t want to overwhelm people in details. You want stories to offer some coherent view of how the world works. You want stories to explore a coherent “What if?”
On ever-evolving genres …
Genres are not eternal. Working within genres, we need to twist and combine genres. Genres are always being invented and reinvented to put storytelling on new paths. (On the topic of genres, see the interview with John Truby.)
A number of important genres, like the Western or Detective story, are reflections of modern life. They could not have been imagined before the settling or urbanization of America. Science fiction is another new genre. In ten years, someone might discover or invent a completely new genre, like Poe did with the Detective genre.
On the power of unusual, surprising, shocking, and even perverse experiences …
The best skill writers could develop is to notice things better. Look for what’s out of the ordinary. Notice what you don’t see right away. Stretch your mind and imagination to include what you don’t see right away … and what you don’t see at all.
Every great advance in storytelling comes from doing something deviant and disruptive. Some examples include Hamlet, The Decameron, and Don Quixote.
What makes those stories so fascinating is that they do something completely different. In Hamlet, an action story, you have this thoughtful character who is thinking like a philosopher. In Don Quixote, the characters themselves are reading Don Quixote! Who would think of that? Only a “What if?” creator.
Take a modern example. Better Call Saul is immediately exciting and engaging because, in the very first episode, it does two things. First, it introduces a complete set of divergent characters. Second, it creates some very strange worlds that the audience probably has never imagined before. A case in point is the home of Chuck, Jimmy’s brother. Chuck is living in a house wrapped in aluminum foil and devoid of all electronics because of his belief that microwaves are messing with his body and mind. That’s a strange character and a strange world. And we want to know more.
Better Call Saul is an elaborate “What if?” story. The characters are believable in their own ways but also stretched beyond their own experiences. What if there was a lovable con-man lawyer whose life is dominated by his domineering and troubled brother? What if that lawyer got involved in a wild range of experiences that take him to skateboarding stoner conmen to drug dealers to a sweet, wry fellow lawyer to an Asian hair salon, et cetera?
On the structure of experience and stories …
In a sense, all kinds of experiences seem to take Aristotle’s format: beginning, middle, and end. Something prompts you to pay attention, then you process the idea, and then you resolve it.
Actually it doesn’t work quite that way. When you hear a dog bark, you’re actually in the middle of the story, not the beginning. That bark prompts you to work backwards to figure out what made the dog bark. And then you look into the future to see what’s going to happen next. It’s the familiar storyteller’s approach: in media res. You start in the middle of the action.
In all our everyday experience, we’re constantly looking backward and forward at the same time. Storytellers, take heed: Just saying who does when and when and how is not really a story. Story requires a structure that engages the reader in saying (you guessed it), “What if?”
On deliberate training to see, notice, and tell fresh stories …
Working with the Army Special Corps, one of their most important skills is to react constructively to strange and unexpected circumstances. They can’t just respond with the three automatic actions: fight, flight, or freeze. They have to respond more imaginatively. In those circumstances, where absolutely nothing is familiar, they have to learn how to construct a brand new story, not just fall back on familiar stories. That takes discipline and skill. They need to be able to imagine a diversity of possibilities—not only a whole batch of factors that led to the moment, but also a bunch of possibilities that might happen in the future. This takes discipline. That takes an extra brain muscle that they have to develop.
Until about 20 years ago, the military lived and worked in a world of “hurry up an wait.” They experienced a lot of dead time. Now soldiers are allowed to have cellphones with them so they fill that dead time. They would be better off observing and thinking. That’s the most important thing that artists do. They wander around, thinking and observing and speculating. To outsiders, it looks like they’re doing nothing. But really, they’re doing the most important thing—noting what other people don’t notice and thinking about the world in fresh, different ways.
On the power of fresh details …
Storytellers who think that everything comes from Aristotle or the Hero’s Journey don’t understand that a story’s energy and intrigue comes from the surprises. When a story fits a simple format (like the Hero’s Journey), it won’t be able to hold the attention of the viewer. It will be too familiar. After a while, the audience will turn away.
On the importance of asking “What if?”
“What if?”is the ultimate question for the brain and the storyteller and the audience. We need to imagine what might happen, outside of ordinary circumstances. We need to be able to construct whole new worlds.
Inventive and expectation-busting stories make the audience ask “What if?” They get us out of out of own world and into a wholly new place where we can imagine things in completely different ways.
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Kate Daloz is the prototypical child of hippies—even if her parents abjure the term.
She grew up in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom when her family participated in the “back to the land” movement. As other Americans embraced the creature comforts and congestion of the suburbs, the Daloz family left to live independently among other naturalists, rebels, activists, and free lovers.
In her book, Daloz describes how her parents, Peace Corps veterans, joined their neighbors as they struggled with the realities of living on the land—from the long, hard winters and lack of indoor plumbing to the rivalries and resentments that result from the idea of free love. For some, the alternative lifestyle was inspiring and even life-saving; for others it was a long, hard grind bereft of the support they needed to live well.
Daloz received her MFA from Columbia University, where she also taught undergraduate writing. She was a researcher for biographers Ron Chernow (Washington: A Life), Stacy Schiff (Cleopatra: A Life), and Brenda Wineapple (White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson). She has written for The American Scholar, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone, among other publications. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.
Daloz visited my class “Writing the City” at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation to talk about the joys and frustrations of writing and her unusual childhood. Our class conversation went like this:
What do you write and why do you write it?
The common advice is to write what you know. But more important is: What are the deep questions that you don’t have answers for?
When I started writing my book about communes, I started thinking about the context where I grew up. My family was not interesting enough for an entire book, but the time period was. I was talking to my parents and they said, “Oh, you know, we weren’t hippies, but the people who lived on the commune next door, they were hippies.” Three groups of back-to-the-land newcomers lived nearby. They all showed up in northern Vermont within two years of each other in the early 1970s for the same type of experiment. I realized that this was clearly a historical moment that I hadn’t seen described anywhere.
This was a fleeting moment of experimentation. A lot of families like ours had gone back to the land. My family was pretty square but sex, drugs, and rock and roll–all of that happened at the commune.
I expanded the view outward from my parent’s little hill to three communes that were near each other. My parents belonged to a small community of couples living singly. A mile away there was a mini-commune with two couples living together and trying to farm with horses–in the 1970s, they had gone back to 19th century technology. And then a little further off there was the anarchic, free-love commune where they were really trying to live with no amenities at all. It was a very radical experiment with mixed results.
Once I looked at all three of these groups together, I could start to see the shape of the time period.
Your research eventually found a really specific focus—privilege among the utopians.
At the beginning, I thought, there’s the history of this period that has never been written. Later, I realized I was basically writing another book about middle-class white baby boomers celebrating themselves, which was not exciting to me.
Then, after reading an essay in The New York Times Magazine about privilege, I suddenly started understanding causal relationships that I hadn’t been seen before. The people that I’m writing about were incredibly privileged and they brought that privilege into these experiments in “poverty,” as they put it to themselves at the time. Their experiment was complicated by their own privilege and they didn’t understand that at all. That became by far the most interesting thing to me. Suddenly I had something new to say about this period.
They came from tremendous economic, racial, and educational privilege but were frustrated by what they saw as the limitations of Eisenhower-era American culture. They thought they could just wipe it all away and start a new society. The idea was, “We’re starting from scratch and everything is possible.” To some extent they were right. They threw out everything and in some ways never went back. One example: They decided they were against canned food and so they started to eat organic. If anybody had organic food for lunch today, it’s partly because of these guys. All kinds of stuff that came into the mainstream through the 1970s counterculture.
But sometimes in rejecting everything, they threw out too much. In the commune, theybuilt a house with an open sleeping loft. The concept was, why do we need doors? They were also practicing free love and partner swapping. But not everybody was on board with that. People were telling me stories about having to be downstairs while their partner was upstairs with somebody else. And you could hear everything. There was no privacy. They kind of didn’t take their own emotions into account.
Over the course of research and writing a major project, your ideas are constantly changing, right? How do you focus so you can figure out what’s going to be the big idea?
I have learned to ask myself: What do you want your reader to take away from this? What do you want your reader to understand? What is it that you want for them? And then can you articulate that? Because if you can, then you’re in control of your material. I couldn’t answer these questions at the beginning of writing the book, but by the end I had a razor-sharp answer.
In my daily process, I often sit down in the morning and answer by hand for the section I’m planning to work on, “What do I want my reader to understand?” Even if I did the same thing for the same section the day before, it’s interesting to notice how sometimes the wording changes just slightly. It’s okay that it’s repeating, it’s okay that it’s recursive, because the important part is the process. By the end I’m going to have a really good answer.
The next question are: What are the details that the reader would need in order to understand this? What do I need to tell them about? It helps me make all those decisions that we have to make as writers. Do I tell them this? Do I go into this background? It helps me sort through all the things I learned doing research: Does this detail belong in the piece? Does my reader need this in order to understand? If they do, then you put it in. If they don’t, then it doesn’t go in.
Brainstorming and organizing ideas—figuring out all the pieces, how they fit, and what they mean—can be a crazy process. You can never predict how it might go.
Exactly. I’ve noticed that there’s a moment in my writing process when I can hardly sit in the chair, usually when I’m thinking about structure. So when I feel this happening, it’s more productive to allow myself to get up and walk and talk to myself. One time I was struggling with a structure problem when I coincidentally had to leave the house on an errand–I pretended to be on the phone and walked down the street talking to myself. It worked! I got there, and was like, okay, I solved that problem with the chapter. I wrote it down in my notebook so I wouldn’t forget, and then, you know, picked up my kid or whatever I was doing.
When I feel that restless writing stage coming on, I’ve learned to deal with it by treating myself like a bright but not very focused 12-year-old. I’m like, “OK, it seems like you have a lot on your mind. Let’s talk about that.” (This is me talking to myself.) I try to gently set boundaries on my own digressions rather than becoming severe with myself, since I find that entirely counterproductive to my productivity.
I’ve also noticed that understanding periods of restlessness and digression as part of my creative process can be really fruitful, so now I try to leave a certain amount of space for it.
At one point, I sat down to work on the book’s introduction and I could not focus. My brain was insisting on thinking about a different issue that had absolutely nothing to do with hippie communes–but did have to do with privilege. I finally gave in and hand-wrote an eight-page essay that never saw the light of day. It was strictly for myself. A week later it was like, Bloop! I realized, “Oh, this book is about privilege.” By not fighting myself [and telling myself], “Be on the same team as your own brain,” I let myself come to an interesting insight.
When you’re interviewing someone, do you direct them or just let them go off?
Within reason, let people digress. When you let people just talk, you start to hear what’s their agenda. If you give them some time, you learn a lot about what they want to talk about. And then you can take that lens and apply it back to what they told you and see if it changes your understanding of their narrative to some extent.
Tell me about your writing process? When do you write—and what’s your process?
The key part is just carving out time and just doing it. Someone once told me that keeping a journal doesn’t count as real writing because it’s not reader-facing. I find that to be a helpful distinction–to ask for a reader’s time and attention, you need to offer them something beyond what you’d write for yourself.
Before I was a writer, I was teaching adult basic education at LaGuardia Community College in Queens—really long days, but I loved it and didn’t have to work on Fridays. I always wanted to be a writer so I would use that Friday and sit down and make myself write. It was absolutely awful stuff. Then I started a writing group. On the strength of something I wrote there, I got into Columbia’s writing program. That program forced me to have deadlines and that taught me to make sure to block off writing time every day.
As far as my actual practice, I do a lot of work away from the computer. Especially in early stages, where I’m trying to articulate a big, new idea, I now spend weeks not typing at all. I sometimes write with a pencil on yellow legal pads. Very often the first draft happens there, then I type it and then it gets better. I did it this morning, actually. I often write in fragments, I do it in pieces. Over time, I start to see, OK, here’s how I would tell someone else about this. I spend a long time writing super informally.
Sometimes people think working by hand sounds inefficient, but for me it’s actually extremely efficient. When I’m writing by hand, I’m not sitting there in front of a blank screen, pulling my hair out, suffering. I’ve realized that sitting and suffering is the ultimate waste of time and that literally any other mode of working would be more effective. Now, whenever I write something on the computer and think, “Oh, this is awful, I hate it,” I just immediately close the screen and start writing by hand. Almost always, I move forward. I can’t tell you the number of times that’s happened. I just stop typing and start writing by hand and I’m free. I let myself make more mistakes and then I write 500 words that way. And then I come back the next day and type it up.
How do you sort your material so you can always find what you need?
I worked for two biographers, Stacy Schiff and Ron Chernow. They showed me how they organized research materials so carefully that their notes would still be absolutely comprehensible if they didn’t get back to them for a year or two, when it was time to start writing.
In my own, informal notebook, where I’m thinking through my central arguments, when something really good happens, I highlight it. So if I come back looking for that phrase or insight, I can find it. I make a list of notes that’s not linear, and not at all ready for a reader. Nobody should ever see it. It doesn’t look like final writing. It just is like fragments of phrases.
It just happened today. I’ve been trying to write a book proposal where I have to say, “Here’s my big idea and how to do it.” It’s hard to take something huge and express it in three sentences. So I have all these fragments of phrases and I printed them all out. And I look at them and I mark them up with a pencil—a pencil because that lowers the stakes, makes me feel like I can erase it and not lose anything–and gradually move them into a shape that will make sense to someone else.
Do you use any writing tools?
I use Scrivener, which lets you build folders. I like that you can compose in fragments, very moveable fragments. You’re not stuck thinking that you have to develop the whole piece from top to bottom. And for me, that’s really freeing.
On the research side, it offers nested compartments. I had one called “Myrtle Hill,” (the commune) and then a sub-folder called “physical layout.” Any time someone said something like, “you could walk from Lorraine’s tent to the cook tent” or, “you could see the outhouse from the road”—I copied and pasted those details into the “physical layout” folder so I would have them ready when I worked on that description.
How to you hunt for details—the kinds of “for instances” that surprise and enlighten the reader?
I used to do this exercise with creative writing students: Find a picture of a generic room, like from a magazine, and then decide something that might have happened there—somebody died or there was a birthday party, or whatever. Describe the room based on what you wanted the reader to think about that event. How do you describe the curtains if you want the reader to think about a party versus a death? This particular exercise leads to over-the-top descriptions, but the idea is how to get the reader to think about what you want them to think about even when you’re not describing action directly.
To write well you need to “start strong, finish strong” at every level—sentence, paragraph, section, and whole piece. How do you think about that?
The function of the beginning of a piece is to say, “Hey, reader, you were thinking about Spiderman a minute ago. Now I want you to think about this. Here’s all the things I want you to think about as you go into the meat of my piece.”
For me, I can’t get the opening right until later in the process. Once I know where I’m going, I can give somebody directions to where I am going. But I can’t give someone directions till I’ve gone there myself.
Clarity does not come in the beginning. I revise my way into clarity. I always ask myself, ‘What do you offer the reader? What do I want them to think about? Where am I turning the camera?’ Writing a strong beginning and end is one of my favorite things to do in revision.
When you’re describing something, you’re either slowing down something that’s really fast or speeding up something that’s really slow.
Sometimes you get to describe something in real time. Darcy Frey wrote a book about basketball called The Last Shot. The prolog shows his main character dribbling the ball. Frey just watches this kid at dusk dribble and then take a foul shot. The amount of time it takes to read the paragraph, that’s the amount of time covered in the scene.
I did something like that on an essay I wrote about the closure of the last roller disco in Brooklyn. I went to the rink and took my camera and filmed people. I knew I wanted to do something like Frey’s opening, so I found somebody in a red shirt and filmed them going around the rink once. Then when I was writing, I used that footage to help me build a one-sentence description of the rink that took that same amount of time to read. It was a long sentence, but it was a really fun exercise.
How do you speculate about something, when you only have scraps of information—but you want the reader to imagine a scenario?
I wrote an essay in The New Yorker about my mother’s mother, Win, who died of self-induced abortion in 1944. We have a ton of letters that she wrote, but none from the day before she died. I wanted to speculate about what was going on in her mind as she made an extremely momentous decision. So I say: “Win left no record of what she was thinking or feeling that weekend as the others tilled the garden while the children napped in a hammock. But when I imagine her, these are the things I think about: of how provisional and precarious early pregnancy feels…”
Also, when I wrote about her early pregnancy, I could say something because I knew what that feels like myself. The reader knows it’s me, it’s not her, in that sentence, and yet I want the reader to imagine what she was thinking.
What situations fascinate you, when you’re describing them moment by moment?
I like situations in which two things shouldn’t be true at the same time, but they are. One idea: Wouldn’t it be cool if you could find a situation where two people are doing the same thing, but one of them is doing it well and one of them isn’t? Like, you’re at the gym and there’s like a novice and an expert. Or two people fishing—one experienced, one doesn’t know much about what he’s doing.
Sometimes you need to use pictures—or even draw pictures—to understand them. You can’t just describe them, detail by detail.
When I was describing the commune, I had this map that someone else had drawn and then I walked around with her and took all these notes. Later, I drew my own crazy map that actually shows three time periods. Once I could do that, I was in control of the material. Once I could draw the map, I sort of kept looking at it to write. I eventually internalized it enough that I could just move around in that space comfortably, without looking at notes.
What’s the biggest difference between experienced and inexperienced writers?
Studies show that inexperienced and experienced writers work in different ways. Experienced writers did their work far from the deadline and under low-stakes circumstances. They use a notebook to develop big ideas, or talk a new idea through with somebody, or scribble notes on a napkin–their most important intellectual work starts far away from the version that a reader is going to see. By contrast, inexperienced writers tended to try to do everything at once in the final draft. They didn’t separate out stages of their process.
I never start the day typing, ever. I warm up with my notebook, because sometimes I just need to sit down and be like, “What am I doing?” or “Oh my God, this sucks, I’m so distracted.” That takes, I don’t know, like five minutes, before I’m ready to work more formally, sometimes more. Even if the warm-up takes a half hour, I get so much farther that day than I would if I sat in front of a blank screen for four hours.
How do you handle descriptions of long-ago events—when you can’t necessarily rely on the memories of the people you interview?
In a lot of cases, I was talking to people whose marriage had broken up, you know, or like two people who hadn’t spoken to each other in 40 years and they’re trying to remember the same thing. I tried to listen really hard for commonality. I also look for a contrast between their narratives. I also try to find the version that offers the details that are the most historically interesting. Then I see if I can corroborate those details.
How important is the title? And how do you come up with it?
I was with my editor and he told me, “OK, you need a title by Friday.” And I was like, “Cool, it’s Wednesday.” By coincidence, that afternoon I was looking through two versions of the Whole Earth Catalog, and I noticed that the statement of purpose in 1968 was, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” but by 1974 it had changed to include the line, “This might include losing the pride that went before the fall we are in the process of taking.”
That summed up the whole period for me, and many of the themes I was interested in exploring. Plus it looked really cool over an image of a half-built geodesic dome.
People immerse themselves in stories for all kinds of reasons. They want escape or adventure. They care about the characters. They love the world of the story. They love the familiarity of a genre. Many appreciate the “moral of the story,” whether it’s subtly developed or explicitly stated.
Readers sometimes get annoyed when they hear conversations about the story’s allegories or deeper message or hidden structure. Why can’t a story just be a story? Why do academics and gurus have to spoil the immersive experience of a story by breaking it down into patterns and pieces?
Here’s a typical grouse against the analytic breakdown of stories (taken from an online discussion board):
I think some of the analysis that can go on in a classroom for literature can kill the enjoyment of a book. I mean, why does a dude traveling down the road have to be some grand allegory for man’s journey through life? Maybe dude just wanted to go to the store or something.
You could say the same for a piece of music, a painting or sculpture, dance, performance art, or comedy. As E.B. White cracked: “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.”
Here’s the problem with that way of thinking–and why storytellers must always strive to understand the detailed structure of writing:
If you can’t understand what makes a story work, from the scene-setting to the action to the dialogue to the conflicts to the overall arc of the piece–you’ll never be able to write or perform a great story. You’ll never understand why a reader or viewer likes The Sopranos or Succession or Harry Potter or Sherlock Holmes or Frankenstein, to name just a handful of popular stories.
Miranda makes this point in response to Andy’s smirk in the sweater scene in The Devil Wears Prada:
Andy, the whip-smart intern for Runway magazine, is bemused by the endless conversation and debate about fashion. An aspiring investigative reporter, she has taken the job at the fashion magazine as a way to get started in journalism. But she smirks when she watches her boss and coworkers debate the pros and cons of various fashion choices. What’s the big deal?
She doesn’t understand anything about what makes a piece of fashion succeed or fail. When she buys a sweater, she just thinks she “likes” it, the way an uncritical reader or viewer “likes” a story. She doesn’t understand that her sweater was the result of countless discussions, analyses, creative exploration, A/B testing, fashion shows, and more.
So with any creative enterprise. To produce something at a high level, you must understand the deep structure of that thing. What are the necessary elements of a creation? What goes where, when, and how?
For two millennia, storytellers have started with Aristotle’s narrative arc. From there, they have followed the teachings of Shakespeare on tragedy, Jung on character archetypes, Poe on mystery, and Shelley on horror. Modern storytellers turn to Joseph Campbell on the Hero’s Journey, Robert McKee and Blake Snyder on story beats. More recently, we have benefited from John Truby’s work on genres.
Every time we write, we have to learn these architectural elements anew. Storytelling is not a paint-by-numbers operation. But over the millennia, we have learned a lot about what makes storytelling work. We have learned how to structure a story, how to rceate scenes, how to explore complex issues. Certain storytelling basics, which have evolved over time, are eternal. Follow them or doom yourself with an eminently put-downable story.
As John Truby says in The Anatomy of Genres, a genre is not just a familiar way of living in the world of stories. It is a system. Any system–from the biological system of the body or the internal combustion engine of a car–succeeds only when each of its component parts performs its job and contributes to the larger process in a reliable way.
(For an interview with Truby, go here. To purchase The Anatomy of Genres, go to anatomyofgenres.com. For story courses and story software, go to truby.com.)
Truby discusses 14 genres, in the following order: Horror, Action, Myth, Memoir, Coming of Age, Science Fiction, Crime, Comedy, Western, Gangster, Fantasy, Thriller, Detective, and Love Story. They move from the most primal issue (death) to the most transcendent (connection).
To develop your story, follow the complete system for your genres. Make sure to include the specific “beats” essential to that genre.
Horror
Action
Myth
1. Ghost: sins of the past
2. Story world: haunted house and close society
3. Monster attacks
4. Hero as victim
5. Weakness Need 1: slavery of mind and the monster within
6. Weakness Need 2: shame and guilt
7. Desire: defeat the monster, defeat death
8. Opponent: the monster, the other in the extreme
9. Ally: the rational skeptic
10. Crossing the barrier to the forbidden
11. Plan: reactive
12. Drive: the monster attacks escalate
13. Battle: safe haven
14. No self-revelation
15. The double ending: eternal recurrence
1. Hero’s defining crisis
2. Story world: enslavement from physical attack
3. The warrior’s moral code: courage in the world to greatness
4. Weakness need: shame culture in the world to violence
5. Desire: success, glory, and personal freedom
6. Collecting the allies
7. Opposition: external bondage
8. Game plan
9. Revelation leads to decisions
10. Drive: cat and mouse
11. Moral argument: the great versus the good
12. Vortex point and violent final battle
13. Self-revelation
14. Farewell or communion
1. Story world: natural world in two cultures
2. Ghost: difficult birth and losing the father
3. Character web: the great chain of being
4. Character web: archetypes
5. Myth hero: searcher
6. Weakness-need
7. Inciting event: talisman
8. Desire: journey and destiny
9. Allies
10. Opponent: successive strangers
11. Drive: symbolic objects
12. Revelation: opponents attack
13. Gate, gauntlet, visit to the underworld…
14. Violent battle
15. Self-revelation: public/cosmic revelation
16. New equilibrium: outgrow the code
Memoir/Coming of Age
Science Fiction
Crime
1. Story world: system of slavery
2. Hero’s role: detective of oneself
3. Story frame
4. Point of view
5. Ghost: family abuse
6. Weakness need: deepest wounds and shame and guilt
7. Double desire
8. Opponent: family or group members
9. Plan
10. Reveals and decisions
11. Drive: moral argument
12. Battle: family opponent
13. Double self-revelation
14. Moral decision: forgiveness/farewell
15. New equilibrium: moral effect
1. Story world…Weakness need: unevolved
2. Minor characters: creating society and system
3. Desire
4. Opponent: authorities
5. Plan
6. Plot: sub worlds
7. Reveal
8. Battle
9. Self-revelation: public/cosmic
1. Story world: slavery of superficial society
2. Inciting event: crime
3. Cop hero strengths and weakness need
4. Values and moral code
5. Desire: catch a criminal
6. Opponent/mystery: super criminal
7. *Drive: cat and mouse
8. Reveal: criminal uncover
9. Drive: moral argument
10. Apparent defeat: the criminal escapes
11. Gate-gauntlet-visit to death, chase
12. Silent battle or big revelation
13. Self revelation, society reaffirmed
14. Moral argument conclusion, poetic justice
Comedy
Western
Gangster
1. Weakness need: comic gap
2. Character web: comic character types
3. Inciting event: leapfrog
4. Desire: clothesline
5. Opposition: four points
6. Plan: scam
7. *Drive: the overall danger
8. Battle: ultimate worst nightmare
9. Self revelation
10. New equilibrium: marriage of new community
1. Story world the New World
2. Hero’s role: the cowboy as fighter
3. The cowboy’s values: the code of the West
4. Weakness-need: the loner and the man of shame
5. Desire: save the builders of civilization
6. Opponent: Indians and bad cowboys
7. Opponent’s plan: destruction
8. Plan: direct confrontation
9. Battle: showdown
10. Moral argument: the moral showdown
11. Self-revelation: eternal wanderer
12. New equilibrium: doomed man
1. Story world: the corrupt city hero: gangster as killer
2. Weakness-need: contradictory character
3. Inciting event: petty crime
4. Desire: money and empire
5. Allies: gang members
6. Opponent: gang boss, rivals, gangs, and cops
7. Plan: deception and violence
8. Fake ally: gang members
9. Reveal: betrayal
10. Battle: mass murder or massive destruction
11. No self-revelation
12. New equilibrium: death or death of the soul
Fantasy
Thriller/Detective
Love
1. Story world
2. Hero: Explorer
3. Desire: explore an imaginary world
4. Character web: fantastic characters
5. Opponent: authorities
6. Plan
7. Passageways between worlds
8. Drive: Journey through subworlds…
9. The super magical moment
10. Battle: the final test
11. Self-revelation: free and fun
1. Opponent’s plan to commit murder
2. Story world: enslaving society
3. Hero role: search for the truth
4. Detective ghost
5. Detective strengths and weaknesses
6. Detective weaknesses
7. Values: code
8. Detective desire: solve mystery & find truth
9. Opposition: killer, suspects, and mystery
10. Plan #1: investigation
11. Opposition’s plan: red herrings, false meaning, and lies
12. Plan/investigation #2: questioning
13. Plan/investigation #3: intuition and deductive logic
14. Plan/investigation #4: flashback, changed POV
15. Plan/investigation #5: recreate a new reality/story
16. Reveal the killer’s fatal mistake
17. Battle: trial of the killer and the battle of stories
18. Battle: opponent’s final attack
19. Self-revelation: the detective sees her own crime
20. Moral argument: poetic justice
1. Story world/canvas & field of play: Mind-body & exotic subworld
2. Technology: words of love
3. Ghost: cycle of fear
4. Hero’s role: lover
5. Weakness-need: Inability to love
6. Desire: gaze, meeting, longing
7. Allies: love advisers
8. Character web
9. Main opponent: lover
10. Opposition step 1: the joust
11. Opposition step 2: Additional suitors
12. Plan: the scam
13. Drive 1: Initiating
14. Drive 2: Flirting
15. Drive 3: seduction (verbal first dance)
16. Revelation: the first dance
17. Revelation: the first kiss
18. Apparent victory: Perfect love moment
19. Apparent defeat: breakup
20. Moral decline
21. Battle of words
22. Self-revelation: double reversal
23. New equilibrium: Communion or farewell
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The idea of genre can be a touchy topic among writers.
“Don’t classify me, read me,” Carlos Fuentes groused. “I’m a writer, not a genre.”
Genre refers to a type of story–the kinds of characters, problems, places, and conflict you can expect to encounter. People look for different things in stories–and when they don’t find it, they get angry. In that sense (like a brand in business), a genre is a promise. When you buy a detective story, you expect to see a smart loner systematically figure out who had the motive, means, and opportunity to commit a crime–confronted by a cunning opponent who matches him at every turn, until the very end.
But as John Truby says in his brilliant new book, The Anatomy of Genres, a genre is not just a familiar way of living in the world of stories. It is a system. Any system–from the biological system of the body or the internal combustion engine of a car–succeeds only when each of its component parts performs its job and contributes to the larger process in a reliable way.
(To purchase The Anatomy of Genres, go to anatomyofgenres.com. For story courses and story software, go to truby.com.)
Truby lists 14 genres, in the following order: Horror, Action, Myth, Memoir, Coming of Age, Science Fiction, Crime, Comedy, Western, Gangster, Fantasy, Thriller, Detective, and Love Story. They move from the most primal issue (death) to the most transcendent (connection).
Truby offers two essential rules for genre writing:
Each story must use 15 to 20 specific beats, or plot events, that fit its genre. When they’re missing, the reader senses a kind of void. Storytellers who think they can reinvent narrative–who resist the conventions of genre–are in for a rude awakening. You need to deliver what people expect when they pick a story. (For an overview of the beats in all genres, go here.)
Every story needs to transcend its genre by offering something unpredictable and by using two or three other genres in supporting roles. A Sci Fi story can have elements of the Myth and Love Story genres, for example. Why the need for multiple genres? Modern people are surrounded by stories and get bored with overly familiar genre techniques. They need something extra to spritz the experience.
Truby’s work is primarily a guide for storytellers. But it is also a rumination of the role of stories in human life. Stories are not just accounts of people (or other creatures) doing things in an entertaining and meaningful way. Stories don’t just help us to “make sense” of life; they are not, as Joan Didion once said, “the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images” we experience in life. Stories are not just about life; they are life. We could no more “separate” ourselves from the stories we tell and consume than we could separate the heart or the lungs from the body.
Why does that matter? Because the truest stories don’t just follow genre conventions. They tap something ineffable about human experience. That, ironically, is why the conventions matter so much. When we get them right, we are now free to discover the truths that lie deep in our minds and hearts and to somehow get them onto paper. Rules don’t restrict creativity but enable it.
To explore these issues, I talked with John Truby about his new book. An edited transcript of our talk follows.
How did The Anatomy of Genres come about?
I have taught writers for over 30 years. At times, when I talk with writers about what I do, they say, “I know all about story because I use the three-act structure or The Hero’s Journey or Save the Cat and they think that’s all they need. These approaches are fine for beginners, but they have very few practical story techniques—and almost nothing that can tell you how to write at the professional level. We’re talking about being in the top 1 percent of writers.
For me, genres are the highest form of knowledge because they tell us how the human mind works.
When I wrote my first book, The Anatomy of Story, my goal was to include all the professional story techniques a writer would need to write a bestselling novel or a hit screenplay. But the one subject it does not cover, which is the key to writing a hit film or novel, is how to write the different genres that make up 99 percent of popular storytelling today.
What about genres that makes them so important?
The answer is expressed in the subtitle: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works. We typically say that humans tell stories, but I believe it’s much deeper than that. Humans are stories. From birth, our mind creates our first story, and it’s the story of me. And from then on, everything I see and understand is a form of story.
Genres are different types of stories. Therefore, each genre gives us a different portal into how the world works and a different recipe for how to live successfully. For example, Horror says we live our best life when we confront our death and make amends for our sins. Fantasy says we succeed by making life itself a work of art. Each of the 14 major genres has a different approach to how to live.
If you want to be a successful storyteller, you have to express the deeper life philosophy through the plot of that genre. And frankly, most writers don’t do that.
Is it safe to say that the fundamental human problem is that we’re all going to die? Do the genres simply have a different answer to that question?
Absolutely. Horror is the first genre I explore because it deals with that question directly. It’s about how do you face your own inevitable demise. That’s something that nobody wants to face. In fact, nobody really believes it’s going to happen to them. All genres are about how to live a good life in this limited time that we have. Each genre gives a different recipe for how to do that: You will live a fulfilling life if you do X.
The genres each look at different aspects of life. Together, they add up to a comprehensive approach to understanding life.
All 14 genres not only have a very powerful and valid life philosophy; all of them are necessary for a fully rich life.
If you sequence the genres in a certain way, you get a kind of ladder of enlightenment. That’s why I start with Horror and Action at the base level and then move all the way up to the highest levels, which are Fantasy, Detective, and Love.
You could make a parallel with genres and archetypes. Archetypes show the different kinds of people in the world—and they reflect the tendencies that we all have within our own selves.
That’s absolutely right. But genres are much bigger than archetypes in terms of what they pull together into one system. The power of genres comes from the fact that they are based on the major activities of life. For example, Crime is about morality. The Gangster story is about business and politics. Memoir is about creating the self. Fantasy is about the art of living. Love is about how to live a happy life. The question is, how will we do that?
Tolstoy asked: “How, then, shall we live?” Each genre answers that question in a different way.
Exactly. And, you know, it is part of how I wrote each genre chapter. At the beginning of each chapter, I talk about each genre’s mind/action view. By that I mean, each genre expresses a unique way of thinking about the world, and each one shows how to have success, and that is the genre’s theme. Each genre combines the action side and the mind side. That makes it all-encompassing in terms of how to live.
So what are these genres about more specifically?
Horror is really about religion. Action is about success. Myth covers the life process. Memoir and Coming of Age are about creating the self. Science Fiction is about science, society, and culture—that’s why it has the biggest scope of all the genres. Crime is about morality and justice. Comedy is about manners and morals. The Western is about the rise and fall of civilization. Gangster is about the corruption of business and politics. Fantasy is the art of living. Detective and Thriller are about the mind and truth. And Love is about the art of happiness.
You don’t get any deeper or more expansive than that. And when you put all those together, you cover everything human beings do.
The sequence of genres could be arranged along Aristotle’s narrative arc, from the early basic challenge of survival to the ultimate development of the heart.
In my mind Aristotle is probably the greatest philosopher in history. Yeah, he was wrong about certain scientific things. But no philosopher contributed more important work in every major category of philosophy. He begins with metaphysics, with the process of becoming. And that’s what a story is.
My gripe with Aristotle’s Poetics is that it doesn’t give enough practical steps about how to tell a story. That’s one of the reasons I wrote The Anatomy of Story. And that’s why I wrote The Anatomy of Genres—to give writers the detailed, specific techniques they need to write a professional-level story.
We are not only a storytelling species, but also a summarizing, synthesizing, simplifying species. So one of the challenges of being a good storyteller is avoiding too many summary statements and describing specific people, places, and events in detail.
Yeah, it is. In my writing workshops, students often say, “Well, generally, this is going to happen.” But that’s not going to cut it. You need very specific actions. If you’re writing a Detective story, you’ve got to have a very specific clue that gives you a very specific reveal and then you’ve got to build on that. A great story is a series of causal links. You’ve got to be specific about what each person is doing at each moment.
Imagine how bad The Godfather would be if Mario Puzo said, “There was a big wedding in the family and a good time was had by all as Don Corleone did some business on the side.”
Exactly. And that’s the way most writers would do it. And that’s why you’ve got to be so precise in the sequence of actions you put in the story.
In any genre, there are 15 to 20 major plot beats unique to that form. They must be in that story or you’re not doing your job and the reader will be very unhappy with you. Plot is the most challenging thing for writers because they think in terms of individual moments in the story. No, it’s all about stringing together a sequence of events—which are driven by the opponent.
How do you do that?
Start with the opponent’s plan to defeat the hero. That might be the most important technique for creating a plot.
Take the Love genre. Realistically, a love story should take about 10 minutes. You’ve got two people who are attracted to each other. The rest is negotiation. But for a movie, it’s got to last at least 90 minutes. So how do you do that? Start with the opponent—and in a love story, the main opponent is the object of desire.
Back to the importance of action—lots and lots of beats. How do all these beats hang together?
Each individual beat means nothing without being part of 15 to 20 other beats. The beats in all the genres have been worked out in great detail over decades, sometimes centuries or even thousands of years. So you need to know the sequence of 15 to 20 beats for the genre you’re writing in.
But the real key is how you transcend the genres. Otherwise, you’re telling the same story that everybody else in that genre is telling. You’ve got to tell your story in a unique way.
How do you do that?
It means executing the individual beats in a way that we haven’t seen before. More importantly, it means expressing the life philosophy through the plot beats. And that’s the area where writers go wrong. The most underestimated element of storytelling is theme. Writers are terrified of theme. They’ve heard the old rule that if you want to send a message send it Western Union. So, to avoid hitting the theme on the nose they avoid theme entirely. It’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make. You need to express theme under the surface, through the structure, through the plot beats. If you’re not expressing the life philosophy of that genre, you’re getting one-tenth of the power of your story.
Genre is often described as a promise to the reader. When you pick up a Western, you can rest assured that you will get all the elements that have always made you enjoy a Western. Likewise, the character’s expression of a life philosophy is another kind of promise.
That’s the promise that most writers don’t know. They know that genre is a plot system. What they don’t know is that it’s also a theme system. The challenge is to express the theme through a complex plot.
Are there some tricks to express the theme with action? Let’s try an example. Imagine a couple of friends playing pickup basketball and one of them is overly aggressive and the other one is focused on style. And the aggressive guy beats the style guy and says, “See, that’s your problem, you were too concerned about strutting around, so you lost.” So in this case, you could build the theme into the action and dialogue.
Yeah, but the dialogue should be minimal. The theme should be expressed through the action and structure. And that brings us to another point, which is that one of the ways you transcend the genre is to mix genres. You need to combine two, three, even four genres. Each genre has 15 to 25 plot beats. When you combine that with two or three genres, you separate yourself from the rest of the crowd.
If you just mashed together three genres, that could be a mess—and disorienting. Somehow, you need to control your use of the different genre beats.
If you don’t know how to mix genres, you get story chaos. That’s why you have to choose one genre to be the primary form. That provides your structure—your hero, your main opponent, the key desire line, and so on.
Then you grab the beats from the other genres and mix them in—but only when they work with the main genre. If the minor genres come into conflict with the main genre—and many do, since they’re different approaches to handling the same problem—you stick with the plot beat of the major genre.
So your main genre is your North Star. You use the other genre beats when they strengthen the thrust of the main genre.
Exactly. And there are a lot of things that determine the main thrust of your story. But the most important one is the hero’s goal. And so whatever you can attach to that spine, to that goal, you want to use that.
Can you give an example of a great story that uses a major genre but is also supported by other genres?
In The Godfather, Mario Puzo combined Gangster with Fairy Tale and Myth. It’s actually three story forms blended together, with the structure revolving around the father and his three sons. That’s a Fairy Tale technique: the three sons. Each son has a different set of traits and characteristics. You see how each one responds and only the third one has the right combination of traits to be a successful godfather. If you were writing a typical gangster story, you’re not going to come up with The Godfather. It’s unique to Mario Puzo.
Francis Ford Coppola could not have created a movie like The Godfather without the massive level of detail in the novel. The worst writing mistakes get made—the worst cliches happen, the worst stretches of boredom happen—when you don’t have enough raw materials. You need a pile of details and moments and possibilities to create a great story.
That’s why Hollywood prefers to start with a novel, because it’s a lot easier to condense a novel and get a really dense plot in a film. When we think of The Godfather book, people think of it as just pulp fiction. No, this is a great book. This thing is brilliant. And I have learned so many lessons of storytelling from reading that book and watching that film.
You’ve got to have specific details at every level of the story. Only when you have those kind of details can you then sequence them together into an overall story, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Many writers simply do not understand the connection between the detail level and the master scheme level.
Do you have any favorite genres?
I love all these genres. In writing this book, I gained tremendous love and respect for the genres that I didn’t really care about. Each genre gives you this portal to different activities of life. But even though I love all the genres, the ones that I love the most are the Western and the gangster.
The Western is about the rise of the American Dream and Gangster is about the corruption of the American Dream. The Western is completely inaccurate historically, but it’s not about real history. It’s the American Creation Myth. The Gangster is the best expression of how the real world works now because it focuses on the corruption of business and politics.
The Gangster form is the closest genre to the Great American Novel, which explores how America has failed to meet the ideals expressed in its creation documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Great Gatsby is a transcendent Gangster story. Mad Men is basically a modern-day Great Gatsby. Both main characters create a new identity from a lie. They both express the basic American ethic that you can be whoever you want to be.
Mad Men, by the way, is one of the five best TV dramas ever made—just a massive work of art, one of the great American epics ever written.
Mad Men’s first episode tells you everything you’re going to experience in the show. Matthew Weiner knew where he was going to go. He knew the final scene of the series the whole time.
That’s one of the keys to writing a transcendent work in TV—having a sense of the overall track of the main character’s development from the very beginning. Breaking Bad was the same way.
So your two favorite genres are the Western and Gangster. They both explore the American Dream. If you were French, would they still be your favorite genres?
I grew up with the Western, which expressed that whole conception of the American ethic, which is incredibly positive and empowering. When I was a teenager, I encountered the four great anti-Westerns: The Wild Bunch, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Once Upon a Time in the West. They are the Gangster versions of the Western. They are about the fall of the American Dream.
Seeing these films was a major turning point in terms of my understanding of the potential, the philosophical power, you could have from a Hollywood feature film.
Movies do something that no other art form can do, which is they get us out of the utter wordiness of life. We have the tendency anyway to overly simplify things. Images get us to be in the moment.
Images are obviously central to modern storytelling. But one of my bugaboos is the idea that that film is a visual medium. Yeah, it is. We see a screen with images. But that’s not what people respond to. Film is a story medium. This is why I find the idea of the auteur theory one of the dumbest things ever. No, film is created by the writer. It’s the writer creating the character, the plot, the structure, the theme, the symbols, the dialogue, all the stuff that the audience is responding to.
If film was just a visual medium, we should say that silent film is the greatest film we’ve ever seen. But there’s a real advantage to talk. That’s why talkies got to be so popular so fast. People also say, well, you got to express ideas visually. Yeah, well, that’s true of any story: “show don’t tell.”
Look at Casablanca. If we were judging it based on the visuals, we would say that thing’s terrible. But it has probably the greatest dialogue in the history of film. When people say a picture is worth a thousand words, I always say a word is worth a thousand pictures. Words are what give you texture. Words are how we know that that person is a unique from everyone else.
Truman Capote once said that “all literature is gossip.” People are whispering about somebody else, often in a very judgmental and a prurient way, in secret. In that sense, the best stories feel like eavesdropping. You weren’t supposed to see Don Corleone in that room—that’s a private thing and you weren’t invited. You often say that stories are portals into different worlds, where you have no business being.
Right, the portal gets us past the public facade. Stories are about the private, where people have the most painful moments and experiences with each other. This is something we don’t talk about in public because it’s often painful and embarrassing. But that’s what stories allow us to do.
We all have secrets. Because they’re secrets, we don’t want anybody else to know what they are. But stories can get at them. If stories were only about what people do in public, they would really be boring. So in a way, the best way to think of stories is they capture the things that nobody else wants to let you see.
So, shifting focus, I was wondering if you ever feel “storied out.”
It’s just the opposite. When I watch a movie, I am absolutely entranced—unless the writer screws up. That’s what breaks my suspension of disbelief. And then you’re out of the story. But when I see great storytelling, it’s a totally enriching experience. I’m fascinated by the techniques the writer used to get those effects and how they applied the technique to their particular story problem. And then how that illuminates the way life works and how the human mind tries to make its way within it.
I sometimes liken it to sports. Let’s say you watch football. If you don’t know much about football, it just looks like a mass of bodies jammed together, and they just do that up and down the field. That’s boring. But if you know what’s happening, you are literally able to see the details as they happen. You can see, oh, that right guard is pulling, the defensive end did a trick maneuver to get to the quarterback, et cetera. You get into what’s happening structurally, under the surface.
This is why my approach to story has always been about structure. What’s most fascinating is there’s the surface of what’s happening and there’s the deep structure of what’s really happening and why. It’s getting to the deep causes that I find absolutely fascinating. And the reasons for it happening are often very different than we really think.
Can I ask about our current political situation? We have all these performance artists running around, lying, avoiding issues, breaking the law. It’s really the Gangster stage of our development. And a lot of what these gangsters and liars are doing is creating fake stories. So the key thing about being able to put on your story analysis hat is that you’re able to see through that.
With the rise of information technology, the ability to divide image from reality has never been greater—which means the ability to lie has never been greater.
So how do you deal with it? What genre can help us to separate truth from lies?
To me it’s the Detective story. It’s about asking questions, looking at evidence and using methodology. We can never get the whole truth. But you can get to some degree of truth that is not a complete fabrication. And that’s why the detective form is so valuable. I consider it the most important modern genre. Few of us are action heroes. But we can all learn how to look for the truth. The detective story tells us how. Science itself is a detective story.
Robert Caro, the great biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, once said something to the effect of, “I don’t know what truth is but I do know what facts are. And facts can add up to some amazing insights.”
And it is something that everybody is responsible for. I don’t think people take nearly as much responsibility for it as they should. If we don’t do it, the larger system is going to collapse.
If we don’t take control of the detective narrative, if we don’t play our parts, so to speak, then you’re going to let the bad guys write their own horror stories, gangster stories, action stories and myths.
With the possible exception of the Love story, there’s no story form more important to our success, not to mention survival, than the Detective story.
Given the importance of the detective story, is there an ideal detective?
The model for the detective, and the most brilliant of all detectives, is of course Sherlock Holmes. He is one of the most influential, if not the most influential, character in modern storytelling.
But there’s no way I’m going to be able to meet somebody for the first time and know that he was in Afghanistan and that he’s a doctor, et cetera. So in terms of the detective’s fact-finding mission, is there another one? I was I was going to say Woodward and Bernstein …
Sherlock Holmes works from the ground up. It’s not just that he’s a genius. It’s his observations that help to solve the case.
Observations about the dog that didn’t bark in the night.
Right. Sherlock Holmes is the master of starting with the facts, starting with the clues, with the specific physical evidence, and then slowly but surely generating a larger theory, a larger story of what truly happened. And that is the methodology. We need to use methodology to get away from these divisive ideologies. Too many are so trapped by their own ideology, they can’t see basic facts.
And looking is a very hard thing to do. Most of what I see, I’m actually constructing in my brain, based on my experiences and my predictions.
Absolutely right. One of the things that was so fun about writing the detective chapter was to look at all the things that prevent us from being able to see ourselves because of the ideology that we’ve created since childhood. Our stories allow us to see only certain things. Humans are pattern-making animals. But it amazes me how often the pattern people put together is complete nonsense.
We all have stories of our own lives and those stories are usually wrong. So the key, whether you’re a storyteller or reader or just a person trying to lead a decent life, is developing the ability to reject the stories that don’t actually pan out.
That’s what the Memoir genre does. In a memoir, you look back and see the story you created for yourself to help you survive. But those stories were full of errors. You created them when you were young. Or you were given them and you bought into it because it came from dad. So the great question of memoir is: How do you create a new story that allows you to have a better life in the future?
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Every time we commemorate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, we talk about the co-called “I Have a Dream” oration at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963.
The speech is certainly worthy of the praise, as I explore in my book Nobody Turn Me Around. Some other King speeches were probably better. To me, the most profound was his Riverside Church speech against the Vietnam War in 1967.
But a myth has grown that King’s dream passage was a riff. The myth goes like this: Toward the end of the speech, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson called out: “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” King did not prepare to talk about a dream. But, prompted by Mahalia, King gave one of the greatest prose poems in the history of American rhetoric.
The only problem with that story is that it’s not true. In fact, King worked on the dream passage the night before the March on Washington. He debated whether to use the passage the night before with Andrew Young and Wyatt Tee Walker. When Young and Walker left for the night, King practiced the passage in his hotel room.
For my book Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington, I interviewed three people who were with King the night before, as well as a man who stayed in the room next to King’s. In this excerpt from my book, I explain how the “dream” passage actually happened.
Origins of the ‘Dream’
A passage from Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington, by Charles Euchner, published in 2010 by Beacon Press:
King had spoken about a dream for months. At a mass meeting in Birmingham, he sketched out a vision of an integrated society, concluding, “I have a dream tonight.”
The Bible talks of dreamers. The book of Joel teaches that “your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.” In Genesis, Joseph dreams of what will happen in the future, and his father, Jacob, rewards him with a coat of many colors. In Egypt, Joseph lands in jail, where other inmates tell their dreams. When the Pharaoh learns that Joseph has interpreted those dreams, he asks Joseph’s advice.
The “American Dream”—that dizzying collection of images about family and community, flag and sacrifice, immigrants and ancestors, prosperity and ever-expanding inclusion—was a standard trope. King referred to it often.
SNCC and CORE organizers also talked about a dream as they worked in the Deep South. When King visited the site of a church burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan in 1962, in Terrell County, Georgia, a student named Prathia Hall started saying, “I have a dream,” trancelike.
King sometimes hesitated to talk about dreams because he feared those dreams turning into nightmares. He read Langston Hughes’s 1951 poem “Harlem,” which asks what happens to a dream deferred. “Dreams are great, dreams are meaningful,” King said. “And in a sense all of life moves on the wave of a dream. Somebody dreams something and sets out to bring that dream into reality, and it often comes in a scientific invention, it often comes in great literature, it often comes in great music. But it is tragic to dream a dream that cannot come true.” King understood the dangers of dreams.
Always, King remembered the dreamlike state that strengthened his own commitment to God, back during the Montgomery bus boycott. Late one night, King answered the phone and heard a profanity-filled diatribe: “Nigger, we are tired of you and your mess now. . . . If you aren’t out of this town in three days, we are going to blow your brains out, and blow up your house.” Unable to sleep, King sipped coffee. Where does that hatred come from? Why is it so powerful? How can it change?
“And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me and I had to know God for myself,” King remembered later. “And I bowed down over that cup of coffee. I will never forget it. And . . . I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, ‘Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right. I think the cause we represent is right. But, Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. And I can’t let the people see me like this . . . because if they see me weak and los- ing my courage, they will begin to get weak.’”
At that moment, King heard some inner voice: “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.”
That was King’s dream.
Two months before the March on Washington, King led the Great March for Freedom in Detroit. The United Auto Workers organized the demonstration as a trial run for the March on Washington. That march brought out a hundred thousand people—two hundred thousand, some insisted—who walked down Woodward Avenue.
King told the crowd at Cobo Hall: “I have a dream this afternoon.” He de- scribed the dream . . . that one day the sons of former slaves and slave owners could “live together as brothers” . . . that white and black children “can join hands as brothers and sisters” . . . that “men will no longer burn down houses and the church of God simply because people want to be free” . . . that “we will no longer face the atrocities that Emmett Till had to face or Medgar Evers had to face” . . . that his four children will be “judged on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin” . . . that “right here in Detroit, Negroes will be able to buy a house or rent a house anywhere that their money will carry them and they will be able to get a job” . . .
That day in Detroit, people cheered wildly. The theme resonated, more with each refrain. “Yeah!” the crowd shouted. “That’s right!” “I have a dream!”
But the Detroit speech had a clunky feel. And the dream passage consumed four minutes. The speech in Washington was supposed to last only seven minutes. Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP, threatened to turn off the microphone if King spoke for more than ten minutes. If King talked about the dream, he wouldn’t have time for much else.
King asked Wyatt Walker and Andrew Young what they thought.
“Don’t use the lines about ‘I have a dream,’” Walker told King. “It’s trite, it’s cliché. You’ve used it too many times already.”
Young agreed. King looked up but said nothing.
Years before, King came up with the refrain “Give us the ballot” for hi speech for the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. He showed it to Bayard Rustin. “Martin, the mentality of blacks today is not that they want to be given anything,” Rustin said. “They want to demand.” King agreed, but decided to keep the line. “It just rolls better for me,” he said.
In the room next to King’s at the Willard Hotel, Harry Boyte lay down in a sleeping bag on the floor. His father had recently begun work as the office manager of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Harry joined his father in Washington before starting college at Duke that fall.
As he drifted to sleep, Harry heard a booming baritone from the next room. Over and over he heard the same words: “I have a dream . . . I have a dream . . . I have a dream . . .”
“He must be practicing his speech,” young Harry Boyte thought.
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Cleveland’s major league baseball team, known for decades as the Indians, struck out by taking the name the Guardians.
It’s hard to think of a blander moniker, especially for a gritty city like Cleveland with such a great baseball tradition. Seriously, the name was inspired by a statue on a bridge that no one cares about beyond, say, the Scranton Flats.
Zzzzz.
Paul Dolan, the team’s owner, explained the new name thus: “Cleveland has and always will be the most important part of our identity. Therefore, we wanted a name that strongly represents the pride, resiliency, and loyalty of Clevelanders. ‘Guardians’ reflects those attributes that define us while drawing on the iconic Guardians of Traffic just outside the ballpark on the Hope Memorial Bridge.”
Zzzzz.
But Clevelanders might have a chance for a do-over. A local roller derby team with the same name has sued the Not-the-Indians-Much-Longer-But-Maybe-Not-the-Guardians-Either in federal court for a violation of its trademark.
“Major League Baseball would never let someone name their lacrosse team the ‘Chicago Cubs’ if the team was in Chicago, or their soccer team the ‘New York Yankees’ if that team was in New York – nor should they,” said Christopher Pardo, the lead attorney for the real Cleveland Guardians. “The same laws that protect Major League Baseball from the brand confusion that would occur in those examples also operate in reverse to prevent what the Indians are trying to do here.”
I doubt anyone will confuse the rollers and the ballers, but the suit gives the former Indians team a chance to get the name right.
Every writer knows the important of giving characters the most fitting names. Consider a few examples:
The Dickens character Ebenezer Scrooge, from A Christmas Carol, sounds a lot like miser and screw, which is what he does to people before his Christmas Eve epiphany.
Gradgrinds, from Dickens’s Great Expectations, is a school superintendent who cares nothing about the souls of his students–only in disciplining them for their soulless lives ahead.
Holly Golightly, from Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, sounds as airy as her character.
Big Brother, from Orwell’s 1984, conveys the message brutally and clearly, with just enough irony to make the concept chilling.
Lolita, from Vladimir Nabakov’s novel of that name, is best explained by the author himself: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”
Hannibal Lecter, from Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs, sounds a lot like cannibal, which he is. It also evokes the Carthaginian general Hannibal known for his exploitive and uncaring attitude toward his own troops.
Naming can provide a memorable handle for characters. The same goes for place names. Can you imagine Los Angeles being called Buffalo or vice versa? No. Those names belong with those places. A good name rolls off the tongue and sounds like the character or place. Every time you hear the name, you are reminded of their qualities and lit’ry appeal.
So what should the Cleveland team be called? That’s easy: The Cleveland Fellers. By far, the team’s greatest player was Bob Feller, the Hall of Fame pitcher who won 266 games from 1936 to 1956, an 18-year career interrupted by two years of service in World War II.
First, I was rooting for the team to be called the Rockers, which would create countless cross-marketing opportunities with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Can you imagine a Rockies-Rockers World Series? Neither can I, but still …
Rapid Robert Feller deserves the honor. No one ever performed better for the Cleveland Nine and no one better embodied the values of the Clevelanders or the game of baseball.
“I would rather beat the Yankees regularly than pitch a no hit game,” said the twirler of three no-hitters.
“I’m no hero,” he said of his service in the war. “Heroes don’t come back. Survivors return home. Heroes never come home. If anyone thinks I’m a hero, I’m not.”
“My father kept me busy from dawn to dusk when I was a kid. When I wasn’t pitching hay, hauling corn or running a tractor, I was heaving a baseball into his mitt behind the barn… If all the parents in the country followed his rule, juvenile delinquency would be cut in half in a year’s time.”
Talk about good Midwestern values. Corny as heck, but worthwhile.
And imagine the wordplay: “I know my Fellers will bounce back from this tough loss,” manager Terry Francona said. Or how about getting a player named Rocco: A Rocky Feller. The zany players would be called the Odd Fellers, natch, after the old fraternal organization. Rhymes will be fun too: the Stellar Fellers, the Killer Fellers, and the Cellar-Dweller Fellers. Cheer leaders could be called Feller Yellers. At the trade deadline, they’d be the Seller Fellers. The PR staff and broadcasters would be the Feller Tellers.
Once upon a time, teams regularly named themselves after people. The Cleveland Browns were named for the Brown family that owned the team. The Indians themselves were named, some believe, to honor a onetime Native American player. The practice is rich in international football (soccer to rubes). Argentina’s Club Atlético Aldosivi comes from the first two letters of the last names of the team’s founders: Allard, Dollfus, Sillard and Wiriott (typewriters then had no W, so the team used a V instead).
When you have a person whose name embodies everything that is great about a team, city, and tradition, do it.
While we’re at it, let’s name the Washington Football Team the Georges. America’s first president deserves the honor. The helmet practically designs itself. Let’s fill the stadium with powder-wigged fans.
But back to the city on the south edge of Lake Erie. (Note to self: Don’t call Cleveland the “Mistake by the Lake” and don’t talk about the lake catching on fire. They hate that.)
Dear Paul Dolan: Not many people get a chance to recover from such a lame decision like the Guardians name. Take advantage of the moment. Be a clever Feller.
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Will Storr is England’s Malcolm Gladwell–a polymath who uses stories to explore complex and compelling ideas. His books include The Heretics, Selfie, Will Storr vs. The Supernatural, and the Science of Storytelling. His latest, The Status Game, will be released in September. His is also author of a novel called The Hunger and The Howling of Killian Lone.
Everything Storr does informs his other work. The Heretics have him the idea for The Science of Storytelling, which in turn informed his research for The Status Game.
When not working on his own work, Storr teaches writing seminars to audiences ranging from journalists to members of the European parliament.
Charlie Euchner: How can we take the insights from brain science and behavioral science and apply it to the process of writing stories?
Will Storr: About 10 years ago, I was working on a book called the Unpersuadables about why clever people believe crazy things. And the answer, in a nutshell, is that the brain is not a logic processor—it’s a story processor. The brain makes us this hero at the center of the world and we’re overcoming.
I was also working on my first novel. I realized that what the experts were saying about stories were the same things the scientists were telling me about how the brain works. It was the big lightbulb moment. Then I started thinking, well, maybe I can use it to make my own storytelling better.
The basic idea is that the brain is a storyteller and the way it processes reality itself has a story. We are a hero overcoming obstacles. We experience life in three acts, with a crisis, a struggle, and resolution. And that’s why we tell stories. So if that’s true, then these great story theorists have got to have some basis in science.
CE: Aristotle’s Poetics—from 2,500 years ago—still offers a brilliant overview of this. He got it right.
WS: I’m currently writing a book about status and [Aristotle] crops up in there as well. This man was just unbelievably smart. The things that he was coming up a couple thousand years ago! In all these different areas, he’s now being proven right–and wrong in some too. He was quite extraordinary.
CE: When you started to look into the techniques of storytelling, before you got into the brain research, who were you reading?
WS: The big three were Robert McKee, Christopher Booker, and John Yorke. Christopher Booker was the main one. For all of them, [the message] is to the focus on structure, structure, structure. If you compare all the stories that are successful, what they’ve got in common is structure. There are all kind of recipe books. …
But there’s another way. If you take a character-first approach, the plot is designed for the character, rather than starting with the plot and then thinking of a character to plug into it.
CE: The character is where the energy comes from. You can have a perfectly plotted piece, but if you don’t care about the characters and if they have no energy and if you can predict everything they say, the plot is just one damn thing after another—and not a process of exciting exploration and danger and risk-taking.
WS: If you can imagine Breaking Bad with a [poorly drawn] character, it would have completely flopped. For me Walter White was the perfect character—a low-status, embittered, scared character. Breaking Bad was great because of Walter White.
CE: So plot can actually get in the way of a story, without a great character.
WS: For me it’s that marriage of plot and character. When I’m teaching students, they have this great idea. They say, ‘This happens and then this happens, then this happens.’ I say, ‘Well, who does it happen to?’ And they’re not sure. They’re vague or it’s a version of them. They’ve got carried away with plot, plot, plot. They’re convinced they’ve got this bestseller but they haven’t got the character. What matters is our goals in life—the things that we want more than anything, which come out of our character.
We are all flawed characters and we always butt up against our flaws. The plot has to be specifically designed to connect with the characters’ flaws and then test it. Or if it’s a tragedy, make them double down on it. Define your character’s flawed idea about the world in one line, preferably.
At the end of the first season of Fleabag, the [lead character] has this great cathartic moment where she realizes what her problem is—and that is that she only sees herself as a sexual creature, that’s her only value. That problem has created all of the drama. She had sex with her best friend’s boyfriend and her best friend killed herself and that’s destroyed everything. So you begin with that very specific character and that specific flaw.
Another example is The Godfather. Michael’s flaw is his belief that he’s not a gangster. And then his father is assassinated and that tests him. Or in Jaws, the shark comes and starts eating everybody. The protagonist Brody, who is terrified of water, can’t go near it. So that shark, coming into his patch, connects specifically with his flaw and tests it and forces him wrestle with his deepest fears.
So the hero has a flaw and something happens to test it. Once people have done that, the plot thing becomes so much clearer.
CE: When you say flaw, it’s the false story you tell about yourself. It’s like the myth that you believe and live by, which causes you to do all these flawed things. Is that, is that fair to say?
WS: That’s definitely, that’s brilliant. But yeah, the flawed belief about the world.
CE: Your discussion of Lawrence of Arabia was especially powerful. His myth about himself was true in lots of ways. That’s why the myth is so tenacious and why it’s such a worthy adversary—because it actually works, until it doesn’t. Is that what you’re getting at?
WS: Yeah. I ghostwrote a book a couple of years ago for Ant Middleton, who’s a celebrity over here. He used to be in the special forces. I asked why he wanted to do it. “Well,” he said, “I want to be the best.” But why? “Why wouldn’t I want to be the best?” he said. So I asked again. “Because I wanted to be tested.” OK, so why do you want to be tested? Was there somebody in your childhood that made you feel that you had to be the best? And then he tells this amazing story. His father died when he was five. Then the evil stepdad comes along; it’s like a fairy story. He insisted that his kids become the best on pain of physical punishment. And I said to him, you know, would it be fair to say that when you were growing up, you were taught that we’re only safe if you are the best under all circumstances?
And he sort of leaped and said, “Yes, that is exactly it!” And that’s how it works. The idea that “I have to be the best, I am the best,” saved his life. It drove him to incredible heights. Being in the FAS, it’s incredibly difficult. He was in Afghanistan and he was the point man. He was responsible for landing in Afghanistan, 2 in the morning, walking to a Taliban compound and killing somebody and then going home again. You know, he was a tough bastard and they’d be shooting with an AK-47. But he had absolute confidence in his ability. That absolute confidence, he said, saved his life. He sincerely believed that he was invincible. He could dodge bullets—that’s what he said, “I can dodge bullets so that I am the best.” But then once he’s out of the army, he becomes his own worst enemy because he’s not the best anymore. He’s just a guy. And he gets into an argument with a police officer who’s treats him with a certain amount of contempt and he picks him up and he throws him on the floor and he knocks him out and ends up in prison for 18 months.
So that’s how the sacred flaw works. It’s the character’s best friend—but then, usually at a break point, it suddenly it becomes an enemy. And that’s why it’s drama. It’s, “Oh my God, I can’t live this way anymore.”
This myth, as you put it, by which I’ve been living my life and has given me everything that I value, becomes untenable. That’s what happens in great storytelling
CE: Speaking of flaws … Is there a flaw that’s common for writers starting out?
WS: Two of them. The first one is defining your character without specificity, without the understanding that they’ve got to go on a journey of change and they’ve got to be flawed.
CE: The other writer’s flaw?
WS: The second one is related—that you don’t need to know about plot, about structure and process.
I was on a panel at a literary festival and people asked, “What’s your process?” And every single panelist, apart from me, said, ‘Oh, I just imagine a character and see where the character takes me,” and I just don’t believe it. I’m sure some people can write like that and end up with a publishable story. But there’s a lot of bullshit published. And there’s a lot of mythmaking. When [writers say] you’ve just got to close your eyes and let the magic emerge, I think it’s almost cruel, you know?
CE: In your work, you use a process that I call yo-yoing—moving back and forth from scene to summary, back and forth. In The Science of Storytelling, you’ll have several pages where you dig into the brain science and your thinking about technique, which is abstract and not so emotional, right? Then you break away and talk about Lawrence of Arabia or Remains of the Day or other works. You are an explainer on one side, but you are also a storyteller.
WS: The brain wants change. So if you’re going on for three paragraphs about one thing, you need to switch.
In The Science of Storytelling, I had to explain some abstract, complicated ideas. Having the novels and the films is such useful way of describing this complicated brain stuff. It was a real gift to be able to describe confabulation by using Citizen Kane. Storytellers are great because before the scientists got, they understood how this.
CE: Scientists—Darwin, Einstein, Stephen Hawking—have a knack for storytelling. To understand time, Einstein talked about standing on a platform and imagining when lightning struck the top of the train. He was seeing in pictures. He wasn’t seeing equations. Only later did he translate the pictures into equations. So there was a dialogue between the abstract and the concrete.
WS: Jonathan Haight’s a great communicator as well because he really understands the power of simplicity. The way he communicates complex ideas is just absolutely fantastic. So does Richard Dawkins.
CE: Let’s talk about detail and precision. I’m not sure how well people understand the need to amass enormous volumes of information.
When the average person walks into a room, what they see is not enough to describe anything interesting. They just see what they expect to see. As a writer, you have to stay there and just keep observing. You have to collect the most specific details about the character, about the background, about the room, about the conflict, about the other characters, about the situation, about the fears—the more details you get, you get all the building materials you need to build your house.
A lot of writers have an idea of what they want to say. But if they don’t have enough details, it’s like not having enough bricks to build the house and doesn’t stand up. It seems to me that a lot of what you’re talking about in your book is the power of precision—and that requires a lot of work.
WS: There’s precision on two levels. First, the more specific you are about a character at the beginning of a book, the more that character is going to explode out of that story.
In Lawrence of Arabia, he’s a very specific character. He’s an arrogant guy who thinks he’s extraordinary and that’s it. That’s Lawrence of Arabia. But when you put him through all that drama of the war, in all of these different scenarios, he becomes an incredibly complex, realistic character.
So there’s a paradox. I get pushback when I’m trying to define the character in a line or two. People say it’s simplistic. But it really isn’t—there’s something magical about it. You need to be precise about who the character is because you haven’t got the space to write someone’s whole life. You have to write about a precise character.
Also, when you are writing about a precise character, your book becomes about a precise idea. It becomes a deep investigation about how life should be lived. Ira Glass of This American Life once had a mentor who said that all story is an answer to the question: How should I live my life?
I think that’s really true. That’s what that precision in a character gives you. Your character represents a way of living life. And the story is a test of that idea of that—how should I live my life? How is this person living their life? And how is it working out for them? What does it mean? What are the ramifications?
Take Remains of the Day. In a really specific way, it’s about the whole English, stiff-upper-lip, cold, emotionless life. Stevens is very precise. He believes in emotional restraint—those two words, that’s him. That whole book brings out those two words, but it’s incredibly complex and nuanced—and believable. So that’s the first thing about precision.
CE: And the other way to think about precision?
WS: We read books and watch movies and the information comes into our brains in the form of words. The brain reconstructs the world that you’re describing. It’s much more automatic if you give specific details. If you say a monster, your brain doesn’t know what model to use. That’s why we “show, don’t tell.” If you’re just using abstract words, the brain can’t model it accurately.
CE: Then your brain compares the details to its vast database of other monsters. Then the story becomes a process of co-creation. You the author give that detailed portrait of the monster—it could be a dragon or it could be a sadist in a cabin in the woods. But you need to reader to relate it to something that they know. Even if they’ve never had to deal with a dragon or deal with a creep guy in a cabin in the woods, it becomes real to them because they connect something they know with something they don’t notice.
WS: Absolutely. That’s that beautiful thing. As you say, great art is an act of co-creation.
CE: Now let’s talk about the Two Plus Two Rule. If I say two plus two and immediately tell you it equals four, that’s an insult to you. But if I say two plus two and let you conclude, oh yes, that’s four, then the story is a lot more powerful. If I give you three details about that monster in the in the cabin in the woods, you can conclude yourself something about that character. But if I tell you what it means, it takes away the joy.
WS: You can’t spell everything out because then the reader has got nothing to do. The brain is a prediction engine. If the prediction’s unsure, that’s really fun. If there’s nothing to predict, there’s no participation from the reading brain. The more literary you get, the more writing is about hints and clues—the more gaps there are to fill. On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan, has very little actual story in it: A couple has bad sex and then breaks up. All the rest of it is like a smorgasbord of clues about what is it that triggered this terrible eventuality and why it’s there.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
The first time I met Bob Moses, I was sitting in a lecture hall with a group of more than 100 puzzled students at Holy Cross College.
The college invited Moses to speak to the First-Year Program. In that program, students in a wide range of classes–philosophy, history, theater, math, physics, the languages–grappled with a common question. The question that year was: “In a world bound by convention, how then shall we live?”
Robert Parris Moses, who died on July 25 at the age of 86, grappled with both sides of that question his whole life.
The convention ruling black lives then was not just oppressive and violent, but intellectually and emotionally crippling as well: Either accept the idea of white superiority, living submissively with your own kind in a segregated and unequal world, or face vicious retribution.
Moses was awakened in 1960. Teaching at a prep school in the Bronx, the 25-year-old Moses followed the exploits of the student sit-in movement with awe.
“Before, the Negro in the South had always looked on the defensive, cringing,” he later said. “This time they were taking the initiative. They were kids my age, and I knew this had something to do with my own life.”
Bob Moses went to Mississippi, the most violent of all the old Confederate states, and took up the challenge. Joining the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he worked to register voters in the isolated towns where blacks had never been encouraged to speak or act for themselves. White mobs attacked him and cops arrested him. In Greenwood, sitting in the passenger seat of a car, bullets missed him but hit the driver and he had to steer the car to safety. In Liberty, someone attacked him with a knife as he was leading a small group to register at a courthouse. Bloodied, he was arrested; when he pressed charges, his assailant was acquitted by an all-white jury on the grounds that he had provoked the attack by assuming a threatening stance.
In 1964 Moses was the leader of Mississippi Freedom Summer, perhaps the most audacious moment of the civil rights movement. Hundreds of white students came into the state to register voters and lead freedom schools. The campaign led to countless attacks, including the murders of James Cheney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, which put a glaring spotlight on violence in the system of segregation. Later, Congress passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Moses also helped to organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a democratically elected slate of delegates that demanded to be seated at the party’s 1964 national convention in Atlantic City. They lost that battle–the convention seated the traditional slate of segregationists–but that challenge transformed the Democratic Party. Before, it accepted segregation; after, it rejected segregation.
Back to that moment at Holy Cross.
Moses stood in front of the lecture hall and described a lynching in which (not uncommonly) crowds gathered to watch and celebrate, even photographing themselves near the hanged, charred corpse. He read a letter by a witness, who described the moment in detail, without a trace of understanding or care.
Moses asked students for a response and then fell silent.
Confused, students shifted in their seats. Their eyes darted to each other and to their professors. They expected (as did we all) an inspiring account of heroic exploits. Moses was defying this convention. Finally, the long, awkward silence broke and students began to talk. Moses stood and watched and listened. Some students later felt disappointed that they did not get their expected burst of inspiration; others walked out transformed. Moses had given them the ultimate lesson: You are responsible. You can’t wait on others. You need to find your own voice. In your own way, you need to face the brutality of this world.
That’s how he operated in the movement. He was the quietest of all movement leaders. Taylor Branch, Martin Luther King’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said: “Moses pioneered an alternative style of leadership from the princely church leader that King epitomized. … He is really the father of grass-roots organizing — not the Moses summoning his people on the mountaintop as King did but, ironically, the anti-Moses, going door to door, listening to people, letting them lead.”
Moses understood, as activists often forget, that the greatest resource in any struggle is the people themselves. They have the intelligence and strength to resist; the organizer’s job is to help them understand, develop, and exercise their own power. The greatest leaders are themselves servants who help others to become leaders.
In Mississippi, Moses found activists in isolated hamlets by bouncing a ball. He knew that blacks had been terrorized for generations and faced abuse if they stood up for their rights. If he approached them cold—knocking on doors, talking with them in stores or fields or churches—they might be too scared to talk. So he stood on street corners and bounced a ball. That attracted a crowd of kids. Then, inevitably, the ball got away. “Before long,” Moses explained, “it runs under someone’s porch and then you meet the adults.’’
If King was the Moses of the movement, as Taylor Branch said, Moses was the King of the movement in Mississippi. He was revered because he knew how to listen and guide people to become their best selves. In fact, hearing him often took great effort. He spoke so softly that you had to lean in and really focus on what he was saying. Since he was not nearly as voluble as others, what he said really mattered.
I met Moses again as I was researching my book Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington. We met in Cambridge, where he was leading the Algebra Project, an effort to bring math literacy to blacks and poor people everywhere. He talked so softly that when I got home, I had to play the tape on a speaker, crank up the volume, and listen intently.
That conversation covered all the familiar topics. But to me, the most telling moment came when I minimized the importance of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The law established the civil rights division in the Justice Department and empowered federal officials to prosecute people who conspired to deny others’ right to vote. But the law did nothing to open schools or public accommodations or voting booths to black Americans.
Moses corrected me. That law made a bolder civil rights movement possible, he said, by giving activists a “crawl space” in the government. If a later president was sympathetic to civil rights, the activists could develop relations with the civil rights people in the DOJ. And so when John Kennedy became president, he sent John Doar and John Siegenthaler to DOJ. They offered critical help to the movement. They coordinated activities, shared intelligence, and developed a trust that made better things possible.
The civil rights movement required a wide range of heroes. The movement needed the audacity and grit of A. Philip Randolph, the nonviolent cunning of Bayard Rustin, the soul of Martin King, the egalitarian ways of Ella Baker, the intellectual rigor of James Lawson, the impatience of Stokely Carmichael, the love of Daisy Bates, the stubbornness of Fannie Lou Hamer, and the quiet servant leadership of Bob Moses–and so much more. In the story of civil rights, the idea of “a hero” is nonsensical. Countless heroes, most of them quietly working in the “crawl spaces” of the society that oppressed them, were necessary for success.
They were then, they are now.
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On June 2, 1925, a 21-year-old rookie named Lou Gehrig played first base for the New York Yankees against the Washington Senators. He replaced Wally Pipp, a star player who was struggling with a .244 batting average. Gehrig was hitting only .167 in limited duty, but the Yankees were just a game out of last place and something had to change. That day, in an 8-5 Yankees victory, Gehrig got three hits in five at-bats.
You know the rest of the story. Poor Wally Pipp never returned to his position and ended up getting traded to the Cincinnati Reds. Gehrig, the “Iron Horse,” played in 2,130 consecutive games until he took himself out of the lineup on May 2, 1939. His consecutive-games record stood for 56 years. Cal Ripken broke the record on September 2, 1995 and then extended it to 2,632 games.
Why Gehrig benched himself is the stuff of tragedy. After just eight games in 1939, he realized he had no energy or power. He could not control his athlete’s body any more. His teammates had noticed his physical decline for a year but he tried to ignore the signs. On June 19, his 36th birthday, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, later known as Lou Gehrig Disease. He never played again. He died on June 2, 1941, the 16th anniversary of the streak’s first full game (he pinch-hit the day before), at the age of 37.
What most people remember about Gehrig, thanks to Gary Cooper’s portrayal in “The Pride of the Yankees,” is his simple, decent, sweet, uncomplaining, stoic response to this awful disease, which ravaged a once virile man until he could not walk or speak or swallow. In possibly the most iconic moment in baseball history, Gehrig summoned his strength to thank 61,808 fans who gathered at Yankee Stadium for Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day on the Fourth of July in 1939.
“For the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break,” he told the crowd. “Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” He thanked the team’s owner, general manager, recent managers, teammates, parents, wife, in-laws, groundskeepers, and fans. Then he concluded: “So I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for. Thank you.”
If that scene doesn’t move you, you can’t be moved.
But as baseball honors this man on June 2, a greater tragedy has never been appreciated. By not exploring this greater tragedy, baseball misses the opportunity to honor Lou Gehrig in the most meaningful way.
The Cost of Trauma
The following question cannot be answered with certainty: Did the traumas throughout Lou Gehrig’s life — and his heroic stoic response to those traumas — kill him?
Dr. Gabor Maté, a leading authority on trauma and addiction, argues that 90 percent of all disease originates in trauma. Emotional stress, Maté says, causes terrible strains on the brain, the hormonal apparatus, the nervous system, and the immune system.
Trauma, Maté says, is a “disconnection from ourselves.” Trauma often begins with outside events, like a car crash, the death of a loved one, a debilitating accident, physical or emotional abuse, or a sense of abandonment. When a person experiences an awful event but does not get enough care or love, she represses her feelings. She does so to survive, to get through another day. It’s an emergency response.
Emotional stress overwhelms the physical system. Maté, the author of When the Body Says No, often quotes a 2012 article in the journal Pediatrics. Jack P. Shonkoff of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University and his colleagues argue that the repression of trauma creates a series of compensations, making the body susceptible to longterm damage.
Under conditions of extreme disadvantage, short term physiologic and psychological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival may come at significant cost to lifelong health and development. Indeed, there is extensive evidence that the longterm consequences of deprivation, neglect, or social disruption can create shocks and ripples that affect generations, not only individuals, and have significant impacts that extend beyond national boundaries.
Emotionally, repression can lead people to avoid acknowledging pain, to pretend it’s not there or doesn’t matter. It can cause them to be stoic and uncomplaining — turning the early trauma into ongoing trauma.
Although manageable levels of stress or normative and growth promoting toxic stress in the early years (i.e., the physiologic disruptions precipitated by significant adversity in the absence of adult protection) can damage the developing brain and other organ systems and lead to lifelong problems in learning and social relationships as well as increased susceptibility to illness.
Since Decartes, scientists and medical experts have separated mind and body. The isolation of distinct systems can lead to greater understanding of those parts, as well as treatments for maladies. But the brain is actually inseparable from the body; the brain is as much a part of the body as the digestive tract or the pulmonary system. Damaged brains lead to damaged whole body systems.
A variety of stressors in early life … can cause enduring abnormalities in brain organization and structure as well as endocrine regulatory processes that lead to reduce immune competence and higher or less regulated cortisol levels, among other consequences.
The evidence is jarring. Consider a few examples. A Canadian study found a 50 percent higher cancer rate for people experiencing childhood trauma. An Australian study found a ninefold increase in the risk of developing breast carcinoma among those who suffer trauma. A West Point study found increased likelihood of Epstein-Barr virus for cadets struggling to meet a father’s high expectations. In another study, women struggling with marital problems were found to have diminished immune functioning.
Does this argument put blame on caregivers who might not be able to give adequate care? Gabor Maté says no. He recounts his own experience to make the point. Maté was born in Budapest in 1944 as the Nazis were taking over Hungary. His mother, frightened that they might be killed, gave baby Gabor to a stranger on the street. She hoped to reunite but was determined to save him no matter what happened. Mother and child did reunite but her anxiety, before and after, was intense. As the family learned the full extent of their tragedy — two were killed in camps, others were missing — young Gabor’s whole world was full of anxiety and fear. That created anxiety for the baby. Was it the mother’s “fault” if she could not provide a warm, healing, safe environment under such extreme stress? The very idea is obscene. The point is that we need to make sure everyone, parents and children and their extended circles, gets the support and help they need to deal with this toxic and debilitating stress.
Failing to do this, Maté and other researchers say, has dire consequences. Diseases resulting from trauma include atheroschlerosis, diabetes, Cushing’s disease, Parkinson’s, muscular dystrophy, coronary artery disease, hypertension, stroke, and major depression. Also: ALS.
The Lou Gehrig Story, Take 2
Lou Gehrig suffered trauma from a young age and spent a lifetime quietly compensating for that trauma.
Gehrig was legendary not just for his excellence on the field, but also his willingness to sacrifice for others. He was, by all accounts, a selfless teammate who led by example rather than claiming credit. He played injured for the sake of the team. He guided younger players, protecting them from playing hurt. He gave other stars the spotlight.
Gehrig was the son of German immigrants, an alcoholic father and an overburdened mother. His father Heinrich came to America in 1888 from Adelheim, Germany. He found work sporadically as an ornamental ironworker and sheet metal worker. But he was unreliable, owing to his alcoholism. He spent countless hours at a local tavern. After suffering a debilitating illness, during the time of Lou’s adolescence, Heinrich spent the rest of his life as an invalid. His mother Christina, came to the U.S. in 1899 from Wiltser, Germany. She worked as a maid and a cook to earn most of the family’s annual income of $300 to $400. She was tough but also brittle, unable to address the trauma in her own life.
The Gehrig family lost Lou’s two sisters and brother in childhood. His older sister Anna died at the age of three months. His younger sister Sophie died from a combination of measles, diphtheria, and bronchopneumonia before her second birthday. Lou’s brother died soon after birth and was never named. Lou never spoke about the deaths.
Growing up in poverty, Lou managed as well as he could. Chunky and uncoordinated, he was picked last in pickup games. As he grew into a muscular teen, he was hobbled by a painful shyness, made worse by wearing old clothes and shoes. When he went to school without a coat in winter, he was embarrassed. Like lots of immigrant kids who shared the same fate, he did not complain. He played soccer for three years before he started playing baseball at age 14. He could hit the ball far, which compensated for his shortcomings on the diamond. Eventually, he was good enough to play baseball and football at Columbia University.
Gehrig took a $1,500 bonus to leave Columbia to play for the Yankees to tide the family over until his mother could recover from illness and get back to work. “There’s no getting away from it, a fellow has to eat,” he later told The New York Times. “At the end of my sophomore year my father was taken ill and we had to have money. … There was nothing for me to do but sign up.”
After playing 13 games in 1923 and 10 in 1924, Gehrig got his break with Pipp’s slump in 1925.
He became the steady force on the greatest dynasty in baseball history. Over 14 full seasons, Gehrig batted .340 with 493 home runs. For 13 straight seasons, he scored and batted in at least 100 runs. He led the league in runs four times, home runs three times, RBIs five times, on-base percentage five times, and batting average once. And, of course, he played in 2,130 consecutive games.
The Ongoing Tragedy
Baseball’s greatest tandem was Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. The Dionysian Ruth was as different as could be from the Apollonian Gehrig. But the two happily supported each other in their roles and even socialized together. Ruth was a favorite of Lou’s mother Christina, who fed him her German food and idolized him. But the two stars grew to resent each other. Their fallout began when Christina made a clumsy criticism of Ruth’s wife. Ruth cut off Gehrig. Then in 1937, two years after his retirement, Ruth questioned Gehrig’s commitment to the streak:
I think Lou’s making one of the worst mistakes a ballplayer can make by trying to keep up that “iron man” stuff… He’s already cut three years off his baseball life with it… He oughta learn to sit on the bench and rest… They’re not going to pay off on how many games he’s played in a row… The next two years will tell Gehrig’s fate. When his legs go, they’ll go in a hurry. The average ball fan doesn’t realize the effect a single charley horse can have on your legs. If Lou stays out here every day and never rests his legs, one bad charley horse may start him downhill.
Ruth was right. But for Gehrig to stop, he would have had to abandon a moral code forged in trauma.
Gehrig’s streak subjected his body to constant punishment. While he protected young teammates from playing with injuries, Gehrig insisted on playing with dozens of injuries (including traumatic injuries) his whole career.
As researchers have struggled to understand the specific causes of ALS, they have focused in recent years on traumatic head injuries. God knows how many blows to the head Gehrig suffered playing college football and batting in the era before helmets. Consider this moment: On June 29, 1934, in an exhibition game in Norfolk, Va., he was beaned on his right temple and lay unconscious for five minutes before the team trainer revived him and sent him to a hospital. Gehrig was quoted in the next day’s New York Times: “I have a slight headache and there is a slight swelling on my head where the ball hit but I feel all right otherwise and will be in there tomorrow.” Sure enough, he hit three triples the next day against the Senators before the game was called for rain.
Other injuries were debilitating too: broken bones and backaches and pulled hamstrings, headaches and colds and viruses and the flu. Later X-Rays showed at least eight broken bones on his hands.
Around the time when Cal Ripken broke his record, Gehrig’s former teammate Bill Werber remembered a few of those incidents. After breaking the middle finger of his glove hand, he barely waved his bat. “He’d hit with part of his hand literally off the bat,” Werber said. “Don’t ask me how.” When Gehrig’s foot was spiked in a play at first base, Werber said, “he hurt terribly.” But he kept playing. By playing, he probably contributed to his untimely demise.
Baseball fans celebrate the Iron Horse for his selfless sacrifice. The Los Angeles Times rhapsodized that “there was an essence of nobility, courage and resolve to it. For a country that was enduring a crushing Depression, Gehrig’s record seemed a uniquely American achievement.”
But what if the streak sends exactly the wrong message? What if this individualist model of suffering in silence not only claimed Gehrig’s life but has also harmed generations of American children and families?
Gehrig’s stoic bearing is celebrated, in large part, because it exemplifies the ethos of American individualism. According to this ethos, we should all work hard, take our hits, stifle our hurts, not complain, and tough it out. Americans celebrate toughness and dismiss or even demean those who suffer. In dismissing victims, this ethos has contributed to countless cases (many millions, for sure) of people denying their own pain and not getting the help they needed.
This is, of course, not Gehrig’s fault. He was a victim of this stoicism too. But as we commemorate this man’s life, feats, and spirit, let’s think hard about creating a greater legacy for him and others who have struggled with trauma.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Long ago, when I was starting out in the world of journalism, I discovered the anonymous but irreplaceable character of the “slot man.”
On the various section desks of the daily newspaper, editors were seated in a horseshoe arrangement of desks. When reporters weren’t out on a story, they worked there too. The slot man, or “slot” for short, put the section together: gathering stories, deciding on placement, laying out the pages. The best slot was also an editorial maestro. Moving paragraphs around, demanding a quote or a fact to strengthen a point, adding a nut graf, sharpening definitions, and shifting emphasis, he could make a good story great.
Legendary slots went even further. They took locally reported material and blended it with information from wire services like AP, UPI, Reuters, The New York Times, and more. With a broad and deep knowledge of the news — and history and human nature and storytelling — they could fashion a compelling, fair-minded, and sprightly summary of the latest news developments. If the byline didn’t carry the local scribe’s name, it would simply read: “From Wire Services.”
A friend once told me about the slot man on The Tennessean, back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, who reworked the stories of a young reporter named David Halberstam. Starting out, Halberstam’s stories needed help: better reporting, better leads and transitions, better quotes, better background information. Later, Halberstam became a superstar reporter in Vietnam for The New York Times. He wrote a series of bestsellers, like The Best and the Brightest, The Powers That Be, and (my favorite) The Breaks of the Game. But Halberstam needed that boost from the slot man in Nashville.
That gets us to the matter of Seth Abramson, the professor/author/podcaster/columnist/tweeter/lawyer/poet/gadfly who has attempted, in his own way, to provide a comprehensive overview of the many sprawling and tangled scandals of Donald Trump. This story, of course, reaches back to Russian beauty pageants, Saudi development deals, sketchy bank loans, crashed gambling dens, lawsuits, bag men, and enforcers.
To describe his work, Abramson uses the term “curatorial journalism.” With some exceptions, Abramson doesn’t pound the pavement and work sources for his information. He gathers news and legal documents from all over the world and tries to fit them into a larger whole.
Abramson’s great insight is that, too often, journalists forget about their stories almost as soon as they get posted. Reporters constantly chase the next new story and don’t have the time or inclination to weave old revelations into new stories. Abramson decided he would do just that, gather all of the great scoops and revelations from all the amazing reporters and bring them together into a single compelling narrative.
He is, in other words, a modern freelance slot man.
Abramson’s output has been overwhelming. He has written three dense books — Proof of Collusion, Proof of Conspiracy, and Proof of Corruption— that detail the crimes, high and low, of Trump businesses and political operations. He has a hit podcast and a feed on Substack. And he has almost a million followers on Twitter, where he spins out lengthy “threads” of tweets to make exhaustive arguments. He even did a Playboy interview.
Some people don’t understand what he does, but it’s really quite simple: He compiles info, wherever he can get it, and works it into stories. He checks his sources, as much as anyone can check sources about shady meetings in the Middle East to fix presidential elections for Russian assets. He’s serious about getting his facts right.
Abramson rankles some. The term “curatorial journalist” has a rarefied feel to it; curators, after all, acquire and arrange art in fancy, hushed museums. He also talks a lot about poetics and meta-journalism and metamodernism. If you care about literary and cultural theory, these ideas all offer some good chin-scratching opportunities. But for ordinary people, trying to make sense of this dangerous autocratic moment, such language can feel abstract and egotistical.
The old-time slot would not have talked like that. He would have said: “Look, I’m just tryna make sense of this mess. Who did what, when, and why? You know, follow the money. Connect the dots. That’s all.”
Hit Job?
Enter Lyz Lenz, an Iowa-based writer whose work has appeared in the Pacific Standard, Marie Claire, Jezebel, and The Washington Post. She is also the author of a new book on pregnancy called Belabored. Her writing has a certain snarky pizzazz.
Lenz wrote a long takedown of Abramson, titled “Thread Man,” in the Columbia Journalism Review. Her main contention is that Abramson splices together unverified rumors and hearsay, as well as real facts, in his work on Trump.
She claims, for example, that he embraced the Steele Dossier as if it were proven fact. “The reliability of the Steele dossier is, to put it mildly, in question; a report by Michael Horowitz, the inspector general, found that the dossier was dubious, unvetted, and shady as hell.” Actually, Abramson has carefully tracked what parts of the dossier have been verified independently and which parts have not. He says about 70 percent of the dossier has been confirmed. I’ve heard other experts say the same.
In the guise of demanding better accountability from Abramson, she absolves Trump: Oh, just forget about the Steele Dossier. That’s just gossip.
Abramson says he has spent about $75,000 to hire his own fact checkers. He did not want to get caught making an avoidable error in his books. Without doubt, his book will have some errors. Journalism is still just the first draft of history. As Abramson says, we now understand only the surface of the recent period in our history. It will take years of work, by legions of historians and journalists, to get to the bottom of it all.
Lenz has a hard time understanding Abramson’s logic. She complains that he uses others’ work. Well, that’s his point: to gather and synthesize an otherwise sea of confusion, like the slot man of yore. That’s his project. If she wants a different kind of book on Trump’s business and political activities, maybe she should write it. To undermine his deep dive, she says his extensive sourcing is actually, deep down, a trick.
Abramson is meticulous about sourcing, yet it feels a little disingenuous: he can say that his assertions have been verified by “major media reporting” and if he’s wrong, it’s not his fault; if he’s right, the facts were always there in front of us, and only he was smart enough to see the big picture. (How can he be a conspiracy theorist, he asked me, if “it’s all reporting from major media outlets”?) Slap a label of “proof” on the cover and call it meta-journalism—when really what you’ve done is news aggregation, selling three books based on other people’s work and claiming to offer proof of things that these very same journalists have said they cannot, did not, find.
Read that passage carefully. Abramson’s citations don’t count because “it feels a little disingenuous.” When he offers credit to the countless reporters who have reported on this topic, she holds that against him too. She says Abramson takes credit when the facts prove true and avoids responsibility if they fall short. That’s Lyn Lenz reading Seth Abramson, not reporting or even analysis.
Is Lenz doing performance art here? Take a look at how she impugns his character without evidence: “He denies doing it for the money, insisting that he is a public servant and educator. He just wants the truth to get out there, he told me. But his virality speaks to a different kind of validation, one that is less about monetary reward than cultural capital.” Work backwards to see her logic: His work is viral, therefore he must be in it for fame, if not money.
By the way, did Lenz actually meet Abramson? Yes, I realize we’re all locked down in the pandemic. But from her story and Abramson’s accounts, it doesn’t seem like there was a real effort to meet him on his own turf. Zoom’s fine, so’s the phone, even email. But if you’re doing to do a long-distance profile, make sure to connect in a meaningful way with the subject. Especially (LOL) if one of your complaints is that he doesn’t get out of the house for research.
Deep down, Lyz Lenz seems to resent Abramson for his Twitter fame. He has 928,000 followers but she has only 63,000. Reason for jealousy, right? You can practically feel her snarky anger bubbling up …
Ha! Gotcha! Actually, I have no idea about her motive. But Lyz Lenz makes these kinds of rhetorical moves often in her CJR takedown.
Abramson is hopping mad. He is threatening to take her to court. He is sending a detailed recitation of Lenz’s alleged errors and misstatements to the general counsel at Columbia University. He points out numerous instances where he tried to explain himself, both to Lenz and a fact-checker for CJR, to no effect. He lists a number of cases where she flat-out misstates the record. And, he says, he has the receipts. Working on his books about Trumpism, he had no choice but to carefully track every source, every fact. So he’s armed for bear.
Back to Basics
Seth Abramson, a man of unusual energy and stamina, took a risk and tried to do something no one else wanted to do — that is, to lay out a complete record of the Russiagate, using every scrap of information he could find. Most journalists don’t do that. Too often, journalists slight the scoop they did not get. Abramson did not have the opportunity or the inclination to get out and act like Bob Woodward, so he decided to do something different. He decided to be the slot man for the Trump era.
But something about Abramson rankles people. He sometimes acts like a know-it-all on Twitter. He waves his credentials around. He uses abstruse academic jargon (surprise, surprise). Lenz joins the Daily Beast in accusing him of exaggerating his place in various artistic events, like he’s Zelig. That bothers me, but others do it too (hello, Papa Hemingway; step right up, Truman Capote) — not an excuse, but also not the main point when assessing his actual work.
In a brief email exchange last summer, I told Abramson that I wish he had given his story a leaner arc, alternating tight narratives with essential definitions and background information. That’s the ultimate formula for complicated stories: Trees, forest, trees, forest, trees …
To his credit, Abramson wanted to avoid contriving scenes: “When Bob Woodward wrote Fear, he was stuck taking Steve Bannon’s word for how Bannon’s conversations with federal agents unfolded, with the predictable result that in those conversations Bannon sounds like Aristotle and Mueller and his assistants—some of the best legal minds in America—uniformly sound like Deputy Dog.” I mostly disagree but I get his point. So ixnay on the Woodward-style scenes. As Lyz Lenz notes and he acknowledges, that can make his writing dense and hard to read.
But you know what? Seth Abramson did a good job putting pieces together, as a first draft of history. Now it’s time for a break. Let’s get everyone to go to their corners. Let the pieces hang for a while. Then, as Trump and his gang get hauled into court and investigators, reporters, and historians do their thing, let’s see how the pieces come together. My bet is that Abramson’s work will offer a worthwhile roadmap.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
If you want a fun ride through the bizarro world of Florida, the modern spirit of destruction, and how ordinary people get pulled into wild tales of adventure, you can’t do better than Carl Hiaasen.
Hiaasen is a columnist for the Miami Herald and a bestselling author. Everything he writes offers a clinic on how to draw the reader into a story. Take a look at the opening paragraphs of Skinny Dip:
At the stroke of eleven on a cool April night, a woman named Joey Perrone went overboard from a luxury deck of the cruise liner M.V. Sun Duchess. Plunging toward the dark Atlantic, Joey was too dumbfounded to panic.
I married an asshole, she thought, knife headfirst into the waves.
The impact tore off her silk skirt, blouse, panties, wristwatch, and sandals. But Joey remained conscious and alert. Of course she did. She had been co-captain of her college swim team, a biographical nugget that her husband obviously had forgotten.
Bobbing in its fizzy wake, Joey watched the gaily lit Sun Duchess continue steaming away at twenty nautical miles per hour. Evidently only one of the other 2,049 passengers was aware of what had happened, and he wasn’t telling anybody.
Bastard, Joey thought.
She noticed that her bra was down around her waist, and she wiggled free of it. To the west, under a canopy of soft amber light, the coast of Florida was visible. Joey began to swim.
What does Hiaasen do in this 169-word passage? Hiaasen follows eight simple rules of attraction, providing:
An immediate glimpse into the story: In the first sentence, we see Joey plunge off the side of a luxury liner. It’s almost as if we’re on the deck, watching as she f a l l s.
A low-cost threshold: Joey’s plunge is easy to see. We have questions, but the immediate moment is not at all complicated. She falls. We have good reason to suspect she was pushed. Now what?
A view of the goal: We immediately see that survival and revenge are Joey’s twin goals. “Bastard!” says the former collegiate swimmer as she begins to dig her arms into rough sea, hoping to survive and swim to safety.
A hint at the paths needed to get there: The path is simple: Bobbing in the choppy waters of the hostile sea, she needs to find her way to land. She’s got the athletic ability. But how far is land? Is there some island nearby? Or maybe someone sailing nearby? Or is there any way for someone to see her or notice her missing?
Sensory involvement: We see a sexy, fit, feisty woman plunging into the dark waters below: the ripped clothes and undergarments, the fizzy water, the light. It’s just enough sensory stuff–sights, sounds, and feeling–to get a sense of the moment. Not to mention the sex appeal of this feisty heroine.
A sense of what it means: We have good reason to know that the Joey’s husband, who forgot that his wife was a swimmer in college, tossed her overboard. That makes him the villain. More to come …
The right balance of adventure and safety: No reader wants to fly overboard into ice-cold choppy waters. But as Hitchcock noted, we’re delighted to watch from the comfort of our armchair. So settle in for a rollicking tale of survival and revenge. Don’t worry. You’re safe.
An early win: Joey’s surviving and keeping her wits is a major victory. She’s supposed to be dead, after all. That early win whets our appetite for the drama ahead.
We could do worse than to follow these eight basic rules for drawing the reader into the story.
Growing up in Detroit and northern California, Jennifer Mercieca used to watch the TV news with her father. Her dad, an autoworker, was an immigrant from Malta, about 60 miles from Sicily, which, she notes, is “the birthplace of rhetoric.” Over time, as she explored journalism and public affairs, she developed an interest in rhetoric. But it wasn’t until college that she started to explore the topic in depth.
“I liked Reagan as a kid and thought of myself as a Republican, but I didn’t memorize his speeches or anything like that,” she said.
In her first rhetorical analysis as a student at the University of the Pacific, she dissected the eulogies for Richard Nixon in 1994. Robert Dole pronounced the post-World War II era “the Age of Nixon.” Bill Clinton asked that “may the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.” But Mercieca was not impressed. “I didn’t find those speeches inspiring,” she said.
Since earning a Ph.D. in speech communication at the University of Illinois in 2003, she has taught at Texas A&M University. Her new book, Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump (Texas A&M University Press), identifies six key rhetorical maneuvers of the president. Three of them draw him close to his audience; the other three create a division between him and his supporters and the rest of the world.
Her favorite rhetoricians? “I love to read Thomas Jefferson, I love Abraham Lincoln’s speeches, I’m amazed by how presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama took advantage of then-new media to connect with Americans—expanding the role of the presidency by expanding its reach.”
Mercieca has always been fascinated with the heroic figure in politics. Her first book, Founding Fictions, examines the way the nation’s revolutionary generation defined the new republic’s citizens as romantic heroes, tragic victims, or ironic partisans. Her second book, The Rhetoric of Heroic Expectations (coauthored with Justin Vaughn), explains how Barack Obama rose to the White House with heroic rhetoric, only to struggle with the disappointment of followers who expected more from his presidency.
The surprising takeaway from Mercieca’s book on Trump: He is not the random and chaotic figure he appears to be. During the 2016 campaign he was calculated in his wild attacks and claims as he depicted himself as a historic, blunt-talking heroic businessman and denigrated his opponents as stupid, venal, and corrupt.
How do you define rhetoric? What makes it different from demagoguery?
I think of rhetoric as Aristotle did: as a method for decision making in a political community. Aristotle said that “rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic”—both were methods, but dialectic would lead to sophia (philosophical truth) and rhetoric would leader to phronesis (practical truth). Both were necessary, in Aristotle’s view, because some decisions would need to be made under circumstances that required phronesis rather than sophia.
Aristotle explained how ethos, pathos, and logos work to help persuade, but the fundamental purpose of rhetoric for him was political decision-making. He didn’t explicitly write about ethics and rhetoric, but if you understand his Politics, Rhetoric, and Nicomachean Ethics as a system, then his criteria for justice—giving your neighbor what is good for them and what is owed to them—works for an ethics of rhetoric as well.
So rhetoric is an ethical exercise, a way of bringing people together to solve problems.
When I teach courses on rhetoric, argument, political communication, and propaganda I explain that rhetoric is addressed to people who know themselves to be addressed; it is a meeting of minds in which one person asks another person to think like they do, to value the same values, to remember or forget history in the same way. It doesn’t force. It affirms human dignity by inviting. A person who seeks to persuade gives good reasons and formulates arguments in the best way they know how, always affirming that the recipient of the persuasive message has a mind, values, and experiences of their own and that they may not change their mind. Rhetoric uses persuasion as a tool of cooperation.
And demagoguery?
Demagoguery uses rhetoric as a tool of control. It is not “persuasion,” but compliance-gaining. The opposite of rhetoric isn’t “truth,” it’s force and violence. Compliance-gaining is not a meeting of minds; it does not invite; it does not value the thoughts, feelings, or experiences of the other person. Compliance-gaining does not affirm human dignity and it doesn’t make good arguments.
A person may force a change in someone’s mind with compliance-gaining strategies. But because minds are changed without consent, compliance-gaining is a short-sighted strategy that will ultimately undermine the relationship between those people.
How did you get interested in rhetoric? Was it politics or literature or what? Can you note one or two early influences and what wisdom you still carry from those early lessons?
I always loved words. I was a really early reader and I would read anything I could: cereal boxes, dictionaries, kid’s books, grown up books, you name it. I also watched the news all the time with my Dad. I was in journalism in high school and on the speech team in college, where I majored in communication and worked in radio and TV. I thought that I would be a journalist, but I ended up studying rhetoric because I wanted to understand the ways that democracy and citizenship and rhetoric work together.
The first book that really mattered to me as an undergrad was Plato’s Republic. I loved that it was an entire book about how to form a just political community and I loved the dialectic game. But something seemed off about Plato’s version of things too and I think part of my interest in political theory and rhetoric has been in trying to sort that all out.
When you look at the “genius” of Donald Trump’s rhetoric, how much do you think is conscious and deliberate? How much comes naturally, from his own superficiality, prejudice, and sadism?
I know that “genius” is an awkward word to use with Trump. Rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke described Hitler’s “demagogic effectiveness” in his 1941 book review of Mein Kampf, and that’s essentially what I mean. I used “genius” because Trump likes to call himself a genius and I thought that would make more sense to a general audience than “demagogic effectiveness.”
That being said, Trump is very strategic and consistent in how he uses language to distract, attack, and ingratiate himself with his followers.
I don’t know where he learned it. He hasn’t released his school transcripts, so we don’t know if he took a class in rhetoric. One of his ex-wives said that he had a copy of Hitler’s speeches, but we don’t know if he ever read them. A dangerous demagogue is an unaccountable leader and Trump’s rhetorical strategies are designed to prevent us from holding him accountable. I think that he’s probably developed these language strategies over a lifetime of refusing to be held accountable.
Aristotle famously said that all virtues can be turned into vices when used to extremes. Can an honest and well-intentioned person do the opposite and turn Trump’s techniques—ad populum, ad baculum, paralypsis, ad hominum, reification, and tribalism (my catch-all term for nationalism, American exceptionalism, etc.)—into positive and constructive appeals? If so, how?
Accountability is the difference between a “heroic demagogue” who leads the people justly and a “dangerous demagogue” who leads unjustly. A dangerous demagogue uses language in ways that prevent us from holding him or her accountable.
I argue in my book that Trump repeatedly used six strategies—three to bring him closer to his followers and three to separate himself and his followers from everyone else. For some of Trump’s strategies, the answer is yes—they could maybe be used for good ends; for others, the answer is no.
A heroic demagogue could use American exceptionalism, or paralipsis, or ad populum (perhaps) in ways that were accountable.
The rest of these strategies are fallacies that are designed to distract our attention from the central issue of the debate, to dehumanize, and to deny standing. These last strategies are poisonous to public argument. Of course, there are so many other rhetorical figures that a heroic demagogue could use, there’s no need to limit a heroic demagogue to the six things that Trump did.
In interviews and debates, Trump talks in a rush, speaks over other people, and interrupts, making it hard for the other person to respond thoughtfully. Trump probably produces more “elevator moments” than anyone. Are there techniques to confront this bulldozer effect?
I think of this as part of his ad baculum (threats of force or intimidation) strategy. It’s a kind of force to overwhelm the opposition so that they can’t enter into debate or discussion. It’s certainly a way to prevent your interlocuter from holding you accountable for your words or actions.
The only way to confront it is to break the “naturalness” of the “image event,” which is really awkward. What I mean by that is that interviews operate by specific rules: reporters ask questions and politicians respond—it isn’t “scripted,” but there’s a script of sorts. Interviews operate as a certain kind of game. Trump violates the script of those events and the only way to stop him is to intervene and call out the violation. But doing that only highlights the unnaturalness of the image event itself. It acknowledges that the news is itself a spectacle and a fraud.
The only way to confront Trump’s violation of the rules of the game is to admit that it’s a game in the first place. Acknowledging that plays into Trump’s hands, unfortunately. It’s an asymmetric game in Trump’s favor now and that’s why he has been winning.
One of Trump’s most powerful techniques is to overwhelm people—journalists, fans, opponents, other public figures, etc.—so they can’t respond thoughtfully. It also undermines the power of facts, since facts get caught up in a constant churn with lies, insinuations, and uncertainty.
Trump’s whole rhetorical strategy is to use language as a kind of force (he claims to be a “counterpuncher,” but he uses force by default). He uses rhetoric for compliance-gaining, which is anti-democratic. He uses language to overwhelm his opposition. I sometimes call it “weaponized” rhetoric or communication—the widespread use of ad baculum. It’s exhausting to try to track all of Trump’s plots and sub-plots, to keep up with his lies and distortions, to refute all of his fallacies. It probably can’t be done. What’s worse, is that in the process he has made you look foolish and he’s already moved on to other lies, distortions, and fallacies. His is a very effective strategy that allows him to get away with whatever he likes.
Trump also trucks in false equivalence, which disables people’s power of discernment—treating minor non-issues (like Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account for some public business, which many of Trump’s aides have done as well) with major outrages (violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution, undermining masking and testing, using pardons for coverups, and much more).
He repeatedly uses tu quoque (appeals to hypocrisy) to attack the ethos of his opposition. He may accuse them of doing the same things he does, or bring up arbitrary issues as equivalences, or say that they’re self-interested, or hypocrites in some other way. It is a pernicious strategy because it erodes public trust. It’s a strategy designed to deny standing to his opposition so that they can’t legitimately criticize him or hold him accountable. Anyone who opposes Trump loses credibility themselves, which makes him that much harder to oppose.
What about Trump’s demagoguery—and others’ response to it—gives you despair? What gives you hope?
The despair comes when I think about how effective these strategies have been for him; the hope comes when I see so many people resist him; then the despair comes back when I see that his base has held firm.
I despair because our public sphere is broken and we’re unable to use language to solve political problems—we’re unable to use rhetoric as a method to decide practical truth (phronesis). Trump didn’t break our public sphere himself, but he took advantage of crisis levels of pre-existing distrust, polarization, and frustration and used dangerous demagoguery to attack America.
I still have hope that we can rebuild trust and bridge polarization and end Americans’ frustration with each other and their government, but it’s much harder after what Trump has put us through over the past five years.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Living in the Age of the Coronavirus, we lose touch with reality. We live in the “eternal present.” Isolated from normal activities and places—and restricted in our actions—we lose our outside reference points. We rely, more than ever, on the information and opinions of mainstream media, government officials, and (God forbid) social media.
That makes us vulnerable to gaslighting.
That term, which comes from a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton called Gas Light, refers to a deliberate process of making someone doubt their sense of reality. In the play, a husband drives his wife mad by manipulating minor elements of her environment—and then denies anything has changed. The man turns off the house’s gaslight at odd times and then, when his wife asks, denies there has been any change at all. When she asks about noises in the night—she heard him rummaging in the attic for the jewels of a woman he killed—he denies hearing any such sounds. Slowly, the wife goes mad. That was his goal since he seeks to have her institutionalized for insanity.
Gaslighting is abuse. It’s a sadistic form of mind control. It aims not just to shape the way people think. It also aims to undermine people’s ability to trust their own perceptions and thinking.
“Gaslighters use your own words against you, plot against you, lie to your face, deny your needs, show excessive displays of power, try to convince you of ‘alternative facts,’ turn family and friends against you,” says Stephanie Sarkis, a psychotherapist and author. They revel in “watching you suffer, consolidating their power, and increasing your dependence on them.”
In a time of crisis and confusion, gaslighters fill the air with denials of simple reality (that the coronavirus is “just like” seasonal flu), false charges (that Democrats stoke fear of the virus to undermine the president), fake theories (like the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab), offer false assurances (the virus will disappear “magically” and “it’s something we have tremendous control of”), sell sketchy remedies (like prescribing hydroxychloroquine, injections of disinfectants, or the use of ultraviolet light in the body), prevent people from getting the basic tools they need for gathering accurate data (like testing and tracing systems), and then deny basic facts including their own statements (“I felt this was a pandemic long before it was a pandemic”).
When gaslighters persuade even a small group of the population to believe propaganda, they undermine the very possibility of public debates with reliable information.When autocrats shout “Fake News!” at reporters and purvey thousands of lies on social media, their aim is not to win an argument. Their aim is to prevent a true argument even happening. Might makes right.
But listen up: You have the power to screen out the lies and deceptions. It takes hard work to find true experts, people with sterling reputations who display respect for facts. You need to give up your own desire for easy and quick answers. You need to accept the complexity of the situation and accept that even the smartest people cannot make reliable predictions in a volatile situation.
When you hear people making wild claims, which run counter to those of the experts, ask some simple questions:
• Does this person have training and expertise in the field? Does he have experience with the scientific issues at issue? Has he done research or worked on the front lines?
• Does he consider and acknowledge all of the facts, even the inconvenient ones? Does he avoid cherry-picking facts and claims to bolster his claims? Does he welcome new troves of data and information, even when they contradict his working theory of the issue?
• Does he avoid generalizations on topics that remain matters of serious debate? Does he avoid taking slivers of possible truths and pretending they are final and authoritative?
• Does he adopt a scientist’s mindset? Does he look for evidence against his hypothesis? Does he look for weak links in his own argument?
• Does he acknowledge mistakes when they occur? Does he adjust his thinking and actions when new information comes to light?
• Does he treat people with respect when they question his and others’ statements and records? Is he hungry for different perspectives on issues?
When you can answer “yes” to these questions, you can trust the source. Otherwise, remain wary and vigilant. Don’t get sucked into debates that do not respect facts or values.
It’s understandable why so many people fall for propaganda and false narratives. Most people want to believe the authority figures that they like and trust. We all want to belong to a larger tribe. We are social creatures. We want to fit in.
We also crave answers to complex questions. Given our limited time and expertise, we want to find a shortcut to understanding. We want to know when the pandemic will end. We want to embrace a model for understanding this nightmare.
So it’s understandable why people submit to false prophets and easy answers.
But if you fall for the fakery of the gaslighters—whether it’s the president or a propagandist on cable TV or a snake-oil salesman on Facebook—you will lose your sense of reality. You will forfeit your greatest power, which is the ability to think for yourself.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
America is now in the midst of one of its periodic awakenings about race.
Every generation or so, something happens to force race into the consciousness of mainstream America. Sometimes these awakenings lead to reform; sometimes they don’t.
The current awakening arose from the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis and the growing realization (long understood by anyone paying attention) that police treat blacks differently than whites. Weeks of demonstrations have extended the race discussion beyond police brutality to a broader agenda. Inequality in education and jobs. Higher death rates during the COVID crisis. A culture that celebrates the treasonous legacy of the pro-slavery Confederacy.
But as Shelby Steele argued years ago, debates over race quickly degenerate into contests over innocence. In an essay entitled “I’m Black, You’re White, Who’s Innocent?” Steele noted that
the human animal almost never pursues power without first convincing himself that he is entitled to it. And this feeling of entitlement has its own precondition: to be entitled one must first believe in one’s innocence, at least in the area where one wishes to be entitled. By innocence I mean a feeling of essential goodness in relation to others and, therefore, superiority to others. Our innocence always inflates us and deflates those we seek power over. Once inflated we are entitled; we are in fact licensed to go after the power our innocence tells us we deserve. In this sense, innocence is power.
The white claim to innocence arises any time blacks and their allies propose solutions to the enduring problem of race in America. In 2014, for example, the Roberts Court struck down provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required states with histories of racial exclusion to get approval from the Justice Department for changes in voting procedures. The appeal of Southern states went like this: How long do we need to get approval over our voting laws? We weren’t the ones who banned blacks from voting. We’re not the ones who are guilty. Give us control over our own elections. That was so long ago!
When the Roberts Court agreed, giving the old Confederacy power over its election rules, states across the South and beyond enacted rafts of new rules and procedures that made it harder for blacks to register and vote. Voter ID laws. Purges of voter rolls. Shorter voting hours. Not enough provisional ballots. Closing polling stations. Hacked voting machines.
The Roberts Court’s reasoning was the same reasoning of many whites who oppose addressing the issue of race: We’re not responsible. We didn’t create the problem. We didn’t own slaves. We didn’t benefit from Jim Crow. We didn’t redline black communities. We didn’t push blacks into toxic-waste zones. We don’t support the cops who abuse blacks. All of which is to say: We are innocent.
The concept of “white privilege” is intended to refute this claim of innocence. Even if they did not actively participate in racist policies and practices, whites still benefit from them. Generation after generation, whites get advantages in all areas because of this nation’s long history of direct and indirect racism. Inequality and unfairness and one moment begets inequality and racism at another moment … and another and another and another.
But that feels abstract, like a long game of telephone where everyone has forgotten the words spoken at the beginning of the line.
In her new book Caste, Isabel Wilkerson offers a much more useful metaphor for the enduring injuries of race in America: The broken-down house.
Wilkerson notes the discovery of a long-festering welt in a ceiling, which, unfixed, could undermine the integrity of the house’s structure. “Choose not to look … at your own peril,” she writes. “Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.”America’s race problem, she says, is like an old house that has performed many basic roles well but has carried forth damaging imperfections. We have made some patches and additions to improve this structure. But many basic flaws have remained and festered.
We in this country are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even. Many people may rightly say: “I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked Indigenous people, never owned slaves.” And yes. Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures in the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.
And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands.
Unaddressed, the ruptures and diagonal cracks will not fix themselves. The toxins will not go away but rather will spread, leach and mutate, as they already have. When people live in an old house, they come to adjust to the idiosyncrasies and outright dangers skulking in an old structure. They put buckets under a wet ceiling, prop up groaning floors, learn to step over that rotting wood tread in the staircase. The awkward becomes acceptable, and the unacceptable becomes merely inconvenient. Live with it long enough, and the unthinkable becomes normal. Exposed over the generations, we learn to believe that the incomprehensible is the way that life is supposed to be.
No, as a white, I was not present at the creation of racism in America. I didn’t own slaves. After the Civil War, I did not prosper from sharecropping or Jim Crow. I did not fight the right to vote or blacks’ access to education or housing or public accommodations. I have never used racist slurs. I embrace the equality of all. I support Black Lives Matter. I would like to sit at Martin Luther King’s table of brotherhood.
And yet …
Like all Americans, whatever their age, I have grown up in this house with enduring (sometimes growing) structural flaws. I didn’t build the house. I was not responsible for the flawed foundation or construction. But here I am, living in it.
I have, without doubt, benefited from the flawed house. Weeks after my birth in 1960, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I returned to the hospital with pneumonia. Looking through a family scrapbook years later, I discovered that I was treated in the “white baby’s ward.” I have often wondered whether I would have gotten the care I needed in the other ward. I doubt it.
Here’s another example: Years ago, eager to meet a friend, I sped down a highway in Georgia–passing a black driver and then seeing a cop pull over the black guy and not me. I was probably going 75 miles an hour; he was probably going 65. He was driving while black; I wasn’t.
Those are two of countless examples from my life of privilege.
I should also note the everyday, structural advantages I have gotten by living in our sturdy but flawed national house: great schools, great communities, a smile when I offer my resume, access to any place with nary a second look. No one has ever treated me badly because of my skin color, not that I can recall anyway.
I never asked for privilege. I did not create it. But I have gotten it.
Now, I might not be responsible for how the house was built or how it has evolved over the years–and who it houses well and who it houses badly. But it’s my job, as one of 330 million occupants of that house, to do something about it. Rather than just putting buckets under leaks and taping the rattling windows, it’s my job to help get down to the bones and fix the structural problems.
How we fix the house can be a matter of debate. Liberals have some good ideas, and so do conservatives. But we can’t avoid the matter forever. Using the latest tools–the equivalent of the housing inspector’s infrared lenses that spot flaws under the structure’s bones–we need to find the broken parts and repair or even replace them.
Isabel Wilkerson’s new book is priceless for many reasons. But its greatest value, for the debate over structural racism, might be this metaphor of the dilapidated house. It gives us a way to understand our common home–and its flaws and the job that needs to be done–without the self-serving and avoidant claims of innocence.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Never in our lifetimes have we faced a challenge like the coronavirus. Coming at a time of intense division and mistrust, we must volunteer to give up our way of life in order to save our way of life. We must sacrifice not just for the people we love but for the ones we don’t.
How will we do? No one knows. In America, we got off to a dreadful start. We delayed action, at all levels. Because of widespread skepticism of facts, we have ignored evidence and science-based strategies. Because we have become addicted to trivial things — we are “amusing ourselves to death,” in the words of the late Neil Postman — we have struggled to mobilize against our greatest threat.
How are we, as writers, to think about the coronavirus pandemic? What should we do?
Let’s start by noting that the current crisis is one hell of a story. It makes Jaws look like a game of Bingo at an old folks home.
As writers, it’s our duty to use our skills to understand the magnitude of the story. Events move so quickly — so far away and often so invisible — that we risk losing memory of this experience unless we make a point of writing it down. Right away.
Record your own changing moods. Note the changes in your neighborhood. Check in with family and friends — not just the current roster, but people you have lost track of. Make sure they are OK and share your experiences and hope and fears. Take some videos for you to consider later.
Avoid getting sucked into the cyber version of reality. Social media can offer great glimpses of everyday reality. But it can also pull us into spirals of anxiety. We need our sanity to survive. People make their biggest mistakes when stressed.
Think like a storyteller. Think about the passions and throughlines of the people you know and the people you read about. What secrets lurk beneath the surface? What heroic powers await a call to action? What barriers will get in the way?
I recently interviewed Will Storr, the author of a brilliant new book called The Science of Storytelling. Storr, a great teacher as well as nonfiction storyteller, explores narrative by way of the recent research on neuroscience. I will post the Q&A on the website soon.
Storr offers the simplest and best definition of plot I have ever read: “The job of the plot is to plot against the protagonist.” Plot is not just a series of events that force the hero to act and change; plot is a conspiracy against the hero. Brilliant.
So what are the elements of modern life plotting against us during this crazy, unnerving pandemic? If we understand that question, we will not only get a great story. We will also get powerful insights into our jobs as citizens of the world.
In dark times, I think of Viktor Frankl, the neurologist and psychiatrist who survived the sadism of the Holocaust.
To survive, Frankl taught, we need to find a way to pause and not just react. “Between stimulus and response there is a space,” he wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning. “In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Meaning requires action–conscious action. But to act well, we need to think first. We need to avoid being reactive. That pause will enable us to assume full responsibility. Which brings us to another great insight from Frankl.
“Ultimately,” Frankl writes, “man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.” To act, you must the willing to accept responsibility for your own life.
What if other people do not follow the same caring ethic? All the more reason to do the right thing. We have a better chance if we understand both.
There, dear reader, lies the essence of storytelling … and the challenges we face together, right now.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Wherever he went, Alfred Hitchcock carried a small book called PLOTTO. The book provided a mix-and-match formula for storytelling.
By taking an idea from three categories–A, B, and C–the “master of suspense” could fashion the plots that terrorized the world for decades. Now, you can get it all here…on a single page.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
The challenge of philosophy, the ancient thinkers said, is to “know thyself.” But as he turned 50 in 2015, Tommy Tomlinson struggled with a different, more difficult question: How did I get this way?
Happily married and surrounded by friends, he struggled silently with the problem now pandemic in America. He was obese—morbidly obese, in fact—and in danger of keeling over from a heart attack at any time.
On the day of setting resolutions, New Year’s Eve of 2014, Tomlinson weighed 460 pounds. People rarely talked about it, but his obesity spoiled every aspect of his life. He was a success as a journalist, a popular columnist for the Charlotte Observer who also wrote for national publications like ESPN the Magazine. Despite his success, he had to think about his weight wherever he went. Before meeting people for a meal, he had to scope out the restaurant ahead of time. He had to think about the ordeal of climbing stairs. He had to strategize every element of his otherwise satisfying life. Life was one compensation after another.
Like tens of millions of other Americans, Tomlinson had tried lots of diets and tried to burn calories on the street or in the gym. But if he dropped 10 pounds, he gained them all back—sometimes more.
When he told his literary agent about scoping out the restaurant where they met, the agent knew Tomlinson had to tell his story. The result is the tragicomedy of a memoir, The Elephant in the Room. That book is not just Tomlinson’s story. It’s his answer to the great question: How did I get this way?
It’s complicated. The child of working class Georgians, Tomlinson grew up in a culture defined by family reunions, snacking during commutes, college parties, and drive-thru windows—and by barbeque, fried chicken, burgers, cakes, chips, beers, and deep-fried everything. Food was everywhere, a constant delight but also numbing, a matter of compulsion as much as desire.
It’s a story of triumph but also, sometimes, failure. This battle is not won easily. So how’s Tommy Tomlinson doing now? Not bad, he says: “I’m doing fine on weight … lost about 100 pounds, hurt my back, gained a little back, but am headed back down the scale again.”
The Elephant in the Room, recently reissued in paperback, has earned raves. Curtis Sittenfeld says it’s “warm and funny and honest and painful and poignant.” The New York Times praised Tomlinson’s “clean and witty and punchy sentences, his smarts and his middle-class sensibility.” Kirkus Reviews says: “He doesn’t hold back in his comments about his needs and wants and interjects enough humor to offset the more serious parts of the narrative and keep the pages turning.”
I am as impressed by Tommy Tomlinson’s writing soigne as by his bravery in confronting such a hard question. So I decided to seek him out. An edited transcript of our conversation:
You’ve gotten an amazing response for this book. How does it feel? Emotionally, it’s a risky book. You’re jumping off a cliff.
I’ve been incredibly grateful for all the response from writers I admire and strangers as well. I’ve probably gotten a couple thousands emails and just recently I got a five-page handwritten letter from Austria. What was especially gratifying about that letter is that this guy was not dealing with weight issues. He had other issues like depression and he saw parallels. That’s exactly what I was hoping for, that people would see themselves in the story.
That’s the definition of good writing. The more specific you get, the more universal. Only when people see and feel something do they have empathy for that other person.
I heard a podcast interview with the songwriter Mary Gautier. She has done cowriting with veterans and spouses of veterans. How did she get them to tell their stories? She said there’s the generic story, there’s the personal story, and below that there’s the deeply personal story. The deeply personal story is universal.
The details of the story might not be universal, but the subtext can relate to anybody. And that’s what I was shooting for.
What gets at the deepest level? Is it just going into increasing discomfort? I like to think of writing as pointillism, so is it adding more dots? What is the difference between going deep and going really deep?
Sure, making yourself uncomfortable helps. But to me it’s the details that matter. I thought about which details would illustrate the points I want to make, which ones provide a subtext and a larger meaning. The right details make it powerful.
That’s the sorting that I did. I started with a lot of stories I could have told. Then I narrowed it to the ones that carried the most symbolic or metaphorical weight.
Why did you write this book? I’m sure it involved a lot of pros and cons. What if people read it the wrong way? Do you want to expose yourself? What it it lands like a thud? So what was your process for deciding to write this book?
You’re describing my thoughts pretty closely. The topic came to me in 2011. I met my agent in New York and he asked the usual question: “What are you thinking about lately?” I told him that I had Googled the interior of that restaurant the night before to make sure there was a comfortable place to sit. I made sure I got there early and scanned the place like a gangster and figured out what would be the safest place to sit. I lived my whole life that way, like an obstacle course.
I had a wife I loved and people who cared for me but I was miserable a lot of the time because I could not solve this one puzzle. He said: “Well, dude that’s the book.” I knew right away he was right but I was afraid of it, what I would have to reveal about myself and how it would affect the people I cared about.
Years later [in 2014] I was working for ESPN the Magazine and started working on a story about Jared Lorenzen, the biggest quarterback anyone had ever seen. He played in the NFL for a while, now he was playing minor league football in Lexington, Kentucky, and he was 400 pounds. I went to Kentucky and we talked about all the things that had been in my head and weighed on me all these years. It was really cathartic for me. As I finished that story, I realized I could see a way to doing mine.
When people do memoirs, the writing process is a process of discovery. Only when they put their fingers on the keyboard did they realize that they thought this or remembered that.
When I started, I didn’t have much of a clue about why I got so big in the first place. What about my early life contributed? As I worked on the book, I saw connections and started to have feelings and insights that I had not had before. It caused me to be self-reflective in a way that I hadn’t been before. I had been reflective about other people’s lives, but I failed to hold myself to the same standard.
We all have issues about weight or drinking or the way we were raised or relationships. We tend to deal with it in a fleeting way. But writing a book, you have to go deep.
After the book was done, someone asked about my writing routine. My wife said, “I could tell your writing routine: You would get up, have breakfast, write for three or four hours, come out of the office, and sleep for two hours. You were so emotionally drained.” It was true. It was exhausting to dig into that stuff in a deep way and confront things I had only done in a fleeting, shallow way before.
What people did you interview to fill in the blanks of the story?
I sent questionnaires to 30 people, saying, “When you think about me, what do you think about? Do you think about my weight? When I’m not around and my name comes up, what do people say?” I discovered that my friends were really worried about me. They asked, “Is there something we can do” and “What’s going to happen when he’s not around?”
I did deeper interviews with my wife and my mom—long sit-down interviews that we recorded. Those thoughts informed everything. We had never just sat down and talked about this stuff in that way. They were uncomfortable conversations. If I published nothing, they would still be useful to me. And I thought they would be useful for other people trying to understand their own issues.
It’s almost like arranging your own intervention. And it’s a way of coming together with friends and family in a new way.
I never thought about it being an intervention, but that’s actually pretty accurate. My friends said we want to get you help but didn’t know how to do it. It was a wakeup call for me and a new insight about how they saw me from the outside.
Was there anything that totally blew you away—something you never thought about before?
My mom told me she and my dad would lie in my bed and try to figure out how to deal with me and my weight. Should they yell? Take me to doctors? Get me out of the house more? Intellectually I knew they had to have had these conversations. Just the image of them lying there sleepless—that hit me really hard. Seeing that movie in my mind was devastating.
For the reader, that’s something that brings empathy because they can imagine—and they’ve been part of—conversations just like that.
You’ve devoted your whole life to being a writer. It shapes everything you do. How and why did you became a writer? Who your influences?
I come from a family of storytellers. At family reunions, as a little kid, I got to run around and listen to the conversations of adults. My parents grew up in that oral culture, where part of your value was, could you sit on the porch and tell a great story? I absorbed all that as a kid.
I was a devoted reader because my parents were devoted readers. They were not educated people but they were readers. My dad’s favorite two books were the Bible and the Bass Pro Shop Catalogue. My mom, to the day she died, was a devoted reader of romance novels. So there were always books. I went to a library where we read all the Hardy Boys books, the Nancy Drew books, and lots of stuff.
One of the sacred times in our household was when the afternoon paper came at around 3:30. My job was to go and divide the sections up between my mom, my dad, and myself. From the time I was little I had this notion that storytelling was important and the news mattered.
I always wrote poems and short stories and all kinds of terrible stuff during high school and college but I still didn’t know what I wanted to do until my junior year when I went to an open trial for my college newspaper, The Red & Black, at the University of Georgia. I did a couple stories and I immediately knew that’s what I wanted to do the rest of my life.
Where did that satisfaction come from? I’m guessing 90 percent from being able to express yourself and maybe 10 percent the thrill of recognition and the byline.
It might have been more than 10 percent. I remember my friends would clip out stories I wrote and put them on my door or someone in my class would say, “Is this you?” and it was a thrill. It’s still a thrill.
There’s stuff that reporters do because it’s their job, and there’s stuff that writers do because it matters to them. What was your experience?
The big transition for me was when I realized I cared nothing about institutions and I cared about people. I covered city hall and the state legislature and cops and courts. When I started writing about people and their stories, that’s when I got engaged.
Every person I write about, I learned about myself in the process. Every time I went deep with someone else, I hoped it would show a little piece of our commonality. That’s been the big theme of what I’ve tried to do over the last 20 years. At our core, we’re more alike that we are different.
Do you remember a moment when you were bound to be a people writer and not an issues writer?
I did a story for the Observer about a group of autistic kids going through music therapy. They respond to music in ways they can’t respond to spoken language. The loved the experience of reporting that story.
I was becoming invisible in ways that led to more meaningful stuff. The therapy class was at a local college—and the teachers were 19, 20, 21 years old, all young women. They would get together and discuss their students. I went to these meetings for months every day and one of those meetings one of the women asked another if their periods had changed. Yeah, they had. I’m sitting there realizing I’m just a fly on the wall.
Your writing reminds me of my favorite columnists, like Mike Royko. When I get to the end of a great column, l want to say, “Aren’t you going to keep going?” What I love about your book is that you do keep going.
A column needs to make an emotional point, in an engaging way that’s accessible to anybody. I wanted to do something different than everything else in the paper. Rather than presenting a dossier of information, I want it to feel like we’re sitting together on the front porch and I’m telling you what happened.
Bob Greene talks about hanging out with City Hall reporters in Chicago. They would have a drink and talk about what they had written for the next day. Then someone would say, “What really happened?” Bob Greene said he wanted to write about that stuff. That’s also what I wanted to write about. What’s the humanity behind the story? That requires building to an emotional point.
When you’re writing a book, some people say it’s just a bunch of little things that are stitched together. But actually, that’s not quite right. All of these pieces have to make a much larger whole thing.
When I was writing this memoir, I was always conscious of what it was building toward. Each scene stands for itself but it also has to carry some meaning that will pay off at the end. Does this scene matter for what I want the book to ultimately say? The whole scaffolding of a book is a lot bigger.
Did you have a sense of the whole thing at the beginning or did the arc of the story change?
When I started I didn’t know where I was going to end up. Part of the process was going through this deep thinking. I hadn’t done that before. I knew I was building a deeper understanding of myself. I knew I wanted to set up that idea but I didn’t know what it would be.
What authors influenced you when writing this book?
I loved to read Nora Ephron, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe and more contemporary people like Tom Junot.
I really admired David Carr’s memoir and Mary Carr’s three books. There there were three memoirs that dealt directly with being overweight—Roxanne Gay’s Hunger, Libby West’s Shrill, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy.
Was there a book on another topic that you used as a model?
There’s a book by James McManus, Positive Fifth Street, about the World Series of Poker, and it’s also about murder in Las Vegas. The poker part took me into a world that I didn’t know about and he was my tour guide into that world. I wanted to be a tour guide into the world of being overweight. A lot of people literally cannot fathom how somebody can get so fat. I wanted to describe that as clearly as I could so people would get it. That’s what makes books great—they take you into a world you’ve never been and make it part of you…
Do you have tips for writers? What are some tricks you’ve learned along the way?
I came up with 15 tips for my class at Wake Forest. Be a human being. Don’t be a reaper of information. Don’t interrogate the people you’re talking to—have conversations. Tell the story you need to tell while being as gracious as possible. Tell the story as if you’re talking to someone across the table rather than just giving information.
Be as simple and clear as possible. Remember that every story has two tracks—the plot and the subtext, what it means. The subtext has to come together in a powerful, emotional way by the end.
Also: Endings are always more important than beginnings. If you just get started and come to a powerful ending, that’s better than having a great hook and then the story peters out. Sometimes I could write a great hook and move that to the end.
Everyone gives the advice to be as simple and clear as possible. But that’s a goal, not a technique.
Anything that feels like writing, cut it out. If you have a beautiful piece of writing but it’s not contributing to the story, take it out.
Also, if you’re stuck, just tell the story. Sit down and turn on the voice recorder and just tell the story. When you do that, all the writing BS gets that in the way, you will get rid of it. You might stumble and get stuff out of order, but that’s easy to fix.
When all else fails, fall back on the ultimately plotter—just give a straight chronology. I tell my students to structure their writing like this: First, … Then, … Then, … Then, … Finally, … That gets people out of being too self-conscious of being writers. Then you can adjust it to make it sparkle.
That’s really meaningful. The more you can write without feeling like a writer, the better you are. For tens of thousands of years, we didn’t write, we just told stories. That’s what’s in our DNA. It’s all based on that chronology and then putting pieces where they can be more powerful. So when in doubt, write it out; after you get it down, then you can play with it.
By the way, keep what you don’t use. You never know what you might use later. So don’t throw it away. And be proud of doing it. But always remember that your service to the reader is telling a story.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Maybe the greatest challenge of writing is what comes before writing: gathering materials.
Often, we are so eager to put words to paper that we start drafting before we have the necessary materials — stories, portraits, facts, definitions, background information, and so on.
We begin with a topic and then start to write what we know about that topic. Alas, what we know at the beginning of any project is a lot less than we need.
When you don’t have enough materials to build something–whether it’s a house or an essay–there’s a tendency to fake it. When you’re missing key information, you pretend you don’t need it. Or you use other information that doesn’t quite answer key questions. You generalize.
Suppose, for example, I wanted to tell the story of a bus that travels from San Francisco to the 1963 March on Washington. The bus is filled with civil rights activists of all types, young and old,. professional and working class, black and white and Asian, and so on. On this journey, the people on the bus talk, debate, sing, sleep, and eat. They get to know each other and deepen their commitment to the cause of civil rights.
So far, so good. But such a description doesn’t really tell us anything about the people or their journey. To really say something interesting, you need specific vignettes. You need to zoom in on the conversations. You need to capture the people, as they cluster together and interact.
That’s what Haskell Wexler does in his classic documentary The Bus. Wexler and his film crew were on the bus for the whole cross-country journey. They shot miles of film. They never outlined what the film would say until long after they gathered the materials for the film.
Haskell Wexler, if you don’t know, was a pioneering documentary filmmaker. Medium Cool, his documentary about the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, is considered one of the most radical experiments in film history. He did other documentaries on the Weathermen (Underground) and the Occupy movement (Four Days in Chicago). He was also cinematographer for Mike Nichols (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), Norman Jewison (In the Heat of the Night), Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and Hal Ashby (Bound for Glory). He died in 2015 at the age of 93.
Here’s the thing: When Wexler and his crew were shooting The Bus, they had little idea what information they were capturing. They turned on the cameras, put microphones in front of people, and let the machines record the moments. When the march was over, they sent the tins of film to a lab for processing. Then they watched hundreds of hours of footage. That’s when they discovered what they had.
They did not try to assemble their story until they had all the raw materials they needed. Wexler didn’t write storyboards before the bus journey began. He also didn’t start to craft his sequences along the trip. He didn’t get together with his crew in Iowa and say, “OK, let’s start putting together our documentary. How shall we start? How shall we end?”
No, Wexler waited until he gathered all the material he could possibly gather. Then–and only then–he could start to put together his story.
I interviewed Wexler when I was working on Nobody Turn Me Around, my narrative account of the March on Washington. I was at first surprised when he told me he had no idea–no idea at all–what the documentary would be about until months after the march.
“The film is made in the editing room,” he told me. There is no way–no way at all–he could even begin to figure out his story until long after he had gathered his materials.
“A lot of times, the bus makes noise and I don’t know what’s being said, what’s going on. A lot of times I ’m not physically close to the person. A lot of times I don’t really hear. I don’t like to point the camera close to people’s faces, if I can get it otherwise. So the people talk to the sound person, not the camera. And I don’t hear what’s being said.”
Wexler knew some of the characters he was shooting. After all, he lived with them for days. Here’s an example. During the trip, one of the bus passengers urged him to interview an old man named Joseph Freeman. Back in 1919, Freeman was a laborer in Washington, D.C. When he left work one night, he had no idea a race riot was under way. A bunch of thugs surrounded him and tried to pull him into an alley. He escaped, jumped on a train and went all the way to San Francisco. Now he was coming back to Washington fir the first time. (See Freeman at 1:21 in the above video.)
Wexler had his crew shoot Freeman talking with a young marcher. But he didn’t know if the material was any good till he got back home.
We writers should be like Haskell Wexler. We should gather material–tons of material, for more than we could ever imagine using–without worrying how we might arrange it. We should read books and periodicals, dive into archives, read oral histories, conduct interviews, study videos and audios, and analyze data sets.
But we should never start writing until we have a lay of the land–until we have the materials we need.
Like Wexler, we should understand the basic subject we are exploring, as much as possible, at the beginning of the project. And we should consider different lines of inquiry.
But we should avoid all temptation to write until we have tons of material. When we get that material, we should read it all and tag the different ideas. When I tag ideas in my notes files, I highlight the ideas and put them in brackets <like this>. That way I can use the FIND function in my Word software to scan my files for key ideas.
At that point, I know what themes and ideas I need to organize in my final piece. Then I can start to come up with the right structure for my piece–and start writing.
Whatever you write, don’t even think about organizing your material until you have gathered a rich collection of materials. Let the research guide you. You’ll never get stuck again.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Daniel Menaker likes stories that go “spooling off” in different directions, in unpredictable but necessary ways. His own life—as a red diaper baby, high school teacher, fact checker, editor, and writer—has had its own way of spooling off in different directions, sometimes tragically and sometimes humorously.
Menaker’s first story treated, fictionally, the death of his brother Mike. In a family touch football game one Thanksgiving, Mike came down hard on a pass play and ripped his ligaments. He got surgery, which should have fixed the problem. But weeks later, he contracted a septicemia infection and died. He was 26.
Just like that, the Menaker household was ripped apart. At the time, Menaker was working as a fact checker for The New Yorker. That job offered means of distraction until Menaker finally found the words to confront his family’s tragedy. His first story, “Grief,” appeared in the January 20, 1974 New Yorker.
Fame for humor came when he and Charles McGrath wrote a parody of a book called The Best. Not long after the publication of that parody–titled, naturally “The Worst”–Roger Angell came to Menaker’s desk waving a piece of paper. “Sorry, you’ve got to give the payment back,” said Angell, the magazine’s literary editor. “It’s a New Yorker tradition.” Wait—what? “It’s a rule,” Angell said. “Anyone who gets a fan letter from Groucho Marx for his first humor piece has to give the money back.” The letter is now framed in his country house upstate.
Menaker’s career as a writer and author is enviable. He rose to become fiction editor of The New Yorker. He published novels and collections of stories (Friends and Relations, The Old Left, and The Treatment, which became a movie), a book about conversation (A Good Talk), and a memoir (My Mistake). He rose to become editor in chief at Random House, working with writers like Alice Munro, Salmon Rushdie, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Elizabeth Strout, David Foster Wallace, and Billy Collins. He’s also taught writing at Stony Brook.
He lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his wife Katherine Bouton, an editor and writer.
Charles Euchner: Why did you decide to write? Who were your influences? What early lessons did you learn about writing?
Daniel Menaker: My mother was an editor at Fortune. She was an expert in grammar and rules. She was a classics major at Bryn Mawr. She was exigent about rules without being a pain in the ass about it. I just heard a boy say to another boy, “If you want to ride on the bicycle, get the f— on the handlebars,” and she said, “I wonder what part of speech f— was in that sentence.” I never heard her use that language before. When I referred to the famous jewelry store as Tiffany’s she said “If you say Tiffany’s anymore I will disown you. It’s Tiffany.” That was the background.
After college I became a teacher at the Collegiate School and Friends Seminary. I was staying out of the Vietnam War. I loved teaching and was pretty good at it. I would have kept on teaching except for grading papers. That was so onerous to me. It’s not that they were terrible, but it took an incredible time to do it well.
Then I got a job as a fact checker for The New Yorker. I was around writers and stylists and copy editors and people who cared about language. That begins to get installed in your neurons, practically.
Partly out of the long span of grief about the terrible event in my family, I was a very good fact checker. I needed to concentrate on something. I was very exigent and careful and respectful. I did what I was asked to do. I was taught well—the guy who ran the department was helpful and patient.
William Maxwell [the magazine’s fiction editor] coached me. He made his retirement contingent on me being allowed to be an editor. There were older editors, all in their 70s. People wanted to have some change but there was no reason to fire them. He said, “I’ll go but you have to give Dan Menaker a chance.” That was 1976 and I floundered around and then began to find my footing.
CE: And moving from editing to writing…
DM: The thing that made me decide to write was my brother’s death. I always felt guilty about it. We were close—I was shocked and my family was devastated. But I didn’t decide to write—it decided me.
I continued writing and the psychological pressure and the grief and the mourning eventually gave way to the professional aspect of it. I wrote my first book of stories—it was pretty dreadful, except that one story. I did a two-book deal and I couldn’t write the second book. So I returned the minuscule advance, $2,500. [The editor] told me he had never received a repayment of an advance, without asking for it, so he framed it as an example of good conduct.
I just kept on writing. My first nonfiction essay was about TV news, which came from years of watching TV during a grief-stricken state that lasted for a decade. There were formulae. It was scripted, from the introduction of reporter to the signoff. Lewis Lapham liked it and published it in Harper’s.
CE: The key thing for any story is coherence, not literal truth, right? A piece of fiction doesn’t require that every detail be correct. Like with your novel The Treatment …
DM: I was in analysis for ten years and the analyst I was working with bore a strong resemblance to the character in the book. But if you’re talking about correspondence between real life people and people in the book—the dialogue and events and conversations—close to 80 percent is fictional.
Roger Angell once came in with a story by Susan Minot (“The Accident”). He said, “This story is very troubling.” I asked why. I thought it was really good and sad. He said, “I know this family and it’s based on her mother’s death.” Well, I don’t care about that. Fictional stories and novels have to work as what they are, like a painting. If you try to find out who the subject was and that the artist had an affair and her husband killed himself—none of that matters to the painting.
It’s very interesting to read about writers and painters’ lives. But what do you do with an anonymous poem like “O Western Wind”? Nobody knows who wrote it, but it is so beautiful …
CE: Who were your academic influences?
I was taught aesthetics by Monroe Beardsley at Swarthmore, who taught that every work has to be judged on its own isolated qualities. You can ask a writer about what his or her poem or story is about, but they can be wrong. I have this militant feeling about fiction having more to do with the presentation of sentences than any correspondence with real life.
Headley Reese taught a seminar on Baroque art and modern art. We would go to the museum and he would not talk about Rembrandt’s life. He would say, “What do you see in this painting?” It was a time where there was a great deal of new criticism, focused on the objects themselves. It was in full swing at that time.
CE: What kind of research do you put in?
DM: Almost none. I’ll check if I care about getting some geography right or the years of a presidency; I’ll be a fact checker for myself. I just reviewed Oliver Sacks’s posthumous book. In writing the review, I looked stuff up. At one point I simply couldn’t call to mind the ten famous writers about science and medicine in the last decade or so, so I just Googled “most important books about science and medicine.” There’s a condition, anomia, where you can’t remember names.
I’ve worked with historic fiction writers and they do a lot of research. I tend to stick more closely to my own life. I don’t need to know a lot of historic background.
CE: What about writing a memoir? How do you make sure to get that right?
DM: I relied heavily on memory. No one has pointed out any gross errors. I do have family documents—letters, obituaries. I found out about my father’s membership in the Communist Party [by talking with] an FBI guy who investigated by family. I read the Venona Papers. They mention my family. For the New Yorker stuff, the archives are online. I can check to see the first Alice Munro story I edited.
Memoirs are shaky, in my opinion. They’re not the same as autobiography. They’re much more loosey-goosey.
CE: Now, on to storytelling tactics. The best place to start is with in media res, right?
DM: That’s right—start in the middle, with action. That tendency is an outgrowth of movies. In the 20s, 30s, and 40s, suddenly there would be a scene and you would figure out what was happening later.
But that was also true with nineteenth century writers like Charles Dickens. He has a novel where you start with two people on a dingy raft on the Thames looking for a body. You have no idea why there are there. Pride and Prejudice has the same kind of immersion—Mr. and Mrs. Bennett arguing about who’s going to marry their daughters. Other authors do it—Fitzgerald and Alice Munro and J.M. Coetzee …
CE: It works well, in media res, but it works better with some authors than others. What’s the difference?
DM: What really works is when an author startles me—and that doesn’t happen very much—in a way that’s not a gimmick, that feels legitimate. Look at what Coetzee is doing in Disgrace. Hilary Mantel—her first novel is very domestic and close to home, about a social worker, but it had that same necessity and it’s startling.
When I was a kid, anything would grab me, because everything is new. I hadn’t had 50 years of editing. You get a little jaded. Or things become overly familiar.
CE: Who provides the greatest surprise?
Alice Munro. She’s an amazingly complex writer who hides her complexity under the most conversational, seemingly casual narration, but oh man, it is complicated, especially from the standpoint of time. She uses time almost as if it was a place. … Little by little, she begins to zero on the psychological and thematic concerns of the story that are not narrative, even though she uses narrative. Often near the end you have a dead-center target of some revelation or something that contradicts or changes something.
All this is in the service of her conviction that she’s writing about the chaos of the human heart. She ends up in the middle of the target and what you find is so basically elemental, so affected by drives and childhood that you don’t know about. But she ends up nowhere. Here’s what happened and why it happened, but it doesn’t make much sense.
CE: So it has a very strong arc. But it’s not a simple or obvious arc.
DM: Exactly. The resolution is an un-resolution. It’s a literary and eloquent and down-to-earth demonstration of chaos that rules most of us.
CE: When you write something, do you plot it out or do you do one page and the next—
DM: When I write, I know pretty much where it’s going. I know the plot and the five or six things that have to happen. It would be surprising if it went off direction. But there are these side streets that you don’t see till you get there.
In my new novel, a sequel to The Treatment, the shrink is 85 and only has a couple old patients. The teacher is now the headmaster and someone on the board wants to fire him. He’s a patient of Dr. Morales. He wants the headmaster to know, but he is precluded from telling.
CE: So you know the basic structure, but you can improvise along the way—
In this new novel, this guy goes to his wife’s funeral at Riverside Chapel. Since she was a very philanthropic and social sort, I decided that I could, with some humor and knowingness, create a list of people who attended the funeral. Some are friends and some have very fancy social names and some have names that are conglomerations. I didn’t plan that. I like lists and list humor; they seem funny to me. Since this guy’s a teacher, maybe some of his students will come. It’s as if you can play with a toy—you didn’t expect to find that toy.
CE: What do you make the state of publishing these days?
DM: It’s fine. Books are selling well. The supposed takeover of ebooks has not happened. They have reached a certain level and they’re useful. And the projections that they would be 80 percent of the market has not worked out. I have a theory that when two-year-olds start with Goodnight Moon, and they’re reading a real book, that feeling is never going away.
There was a time, six or seven years ago, I thought publishing was in serious fiscal trouble. It’ll never be a huge profit center.
Publishing is really gambling. You put down money on a table with a bet. Six out of seven times it doesn’t succeed, it doesn’t earn back the advance. But that seventh time, that other bet…
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
When you talk about the subjects of Robert Caro’s magisterial, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies–Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson–you have to look at them from two perspectives.
Before Caro, or B.C., they were viewed as great men whose legacy was marred by their personal flaws. This conventional wisdom is true as far as it goes, but it’s been told so often, and in such familiar ways, that it begins to take on a cartoonish quality. I remember the celebrations of presidents at one of the Democratic conventions describing Johnson as having a heart “as big as Texas.” That’s how you described Johnson: Like other successful politicians, only bigger.
Except that neither Moses or Johnson was anything like the complex, Shakespearean figures that Caro has revealed in his works. After Caro, these two figures–and dozens of other supporting characters, like Moses’s mentors Al Smith and Belle Moskowitz, or LBJ’s mentor Sam Rayburn, to take a few examples–are pulsing with energy. Just as important, these works are also pulsing with whole new ways of looking at the world.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is about a good a definition of genius that you’ll ever find.
How does he do it? The simple, and true, answer is that he researches the hell out of his subjects. Fans complain that Caro is taking too long with the fifth volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, covering his five-plus years in the White House. But as Caro explains, there is no other way:
While I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And finding facts–through reading documents or through interviewing and re-interviewing–can’t be rushed; it takes time. Truth takes time.
Researching the hell out of his subjects is just one of the many lessons for writers in Caro’s new book Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing (Knopf, April 9). Caro’s brief work–and, by the way, this is the first and last time the words “Caro” and “brief” will ever appear in the same sentence–offers a master course in the art and craft of writing.
In this little book, Caro shows how and why he picked his subjects, how to find the throughline and plot the story’s arc, how to conduct archival research and interview subjects, how to write great scenes, explain complex processes, how to write with style, and much more. Here are a few highlights:
Subjects
The British historian Arnold Toynbee once said that history is just “one damn thing after another.” Clever line, but untrue. History is a way of revealing something about the human condition. A great work of history, then, aspires not just to tell a story–about a person or place, event or period–but reveal some truth about life. The purpose of Caro’s works is to understand power.
“From the very start I thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the times of the man I was writing about and the great forces that molded those times – particularly the force that is political power. Why? political power? Because political power shapes all of our lives. It shapes your life in little ways that you might not even think about.”
To achieve this requires much more than writing one damn thing after another. For Caro, biography must serve as a “vessel for something even more significant: examination of the essential nature—the most fundamental realities—of political power.” And what should serve as the vessel? For Caro, it was a subject “who had done something no one else had done before” and then figure out how he did it.
For another author, biography could be the vessel to explore art or love or psychology or sports. Whatever its purpose, it cannot be just a recounting of what happened.
Research
Discipline–exploring every possible angle, looking at every piece of evidence, chasing down every lead–is the key to all great nonfiction narrative. Caro learned that lesson early, as a reporter for Newsday. He once got a call about the corruption behind the disposition of an Air Force base on Long Island. Come see these documents, a source told him. And so he did. He spent all night reading the documents and taking copious notes.
His editor, who had previously ignored him, was impressed. From now on, he said, you will be an investigative reporter. “Just remember,” he said. “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page.”
He took that advice to heart, making it his mission to dig deeper than anyone ever dug before on his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson.But when he got to the Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, he knew he had to be more selective. The library held 40,000 boxes containing 32 million pages.
No one of historical importance wants his career to be investigated without fear or favor. Historic figures spend their lifetimes creating a mythology. They do not want it dismantled.
Therefore, the biographer must start far away from the subject. When Caro started work on his Moses book, he refused interviews for years. So did his top aides. When Caro took on Johnson, most of LBJ’s aides were and friends and family were circumspect. So Caro draw a set of concentric rings on a piece of paper.
The innermost circle with his family, friends, and close associates, and I was prepared to believe that he could keep me from seeing them, and probably the persons in the next circle or two, also. But surely, I felt, there would be people in the outer circles – people who knew him but were not in regular contact with him – who would be willing to talk to me. And, in fact, there were, and, as I was later to be told, Commissioner Moses was more and more frequently encountering people who, unaware of his feelings, said that this young reporter had been to see them.
To know a subject, Caro suggests, you need to find a way to get the subject’s colleagues and family and neighbors talk. You can’t just show up and expect people to talk. You have to show a commitment to really know the subject. And so Johnson moved to Texas. It was then that people started to tell him more than the hackneyed old stories: “I began to hear the details they have not included in the anecdotes they had previously told me – and they told me other anecdotes and longer stories, anecdotes and stories that no one had even mentioned to me before–stories about a Lyndon Johnson very different from the young man who had previously been portrayed.”
Interviewing
Interviewers have to be persistent and reach their subjects on a deeper tlevel than they even understand themselves. But sometimes they also need to be manipulated. As a reporter for Newsday, he was working with a reporter named Bob Greene to expose a charitable organization that was using “the bulk of its money on a luxurious lifestyle for the director and his mistress.” They had the evidence but needed the organization’s director to acknowledge it. “When you talk to him, don’t sit too close together,” their editor, Alan Hathway, told them. “Caro, you sit over here. Greene, sit over there. You fire these questions fast—Caro, you ask one; Greene, you ask one—I want his head going back-and-forth like a ping-pong ball.” The ploy worked. the director got rattled and revealed more than he intended. They had their story.
After Caro worked on The Power Broker for years, Moses agreed to a series of long interviews. Caro had done so much work that Moses had to give him time now if he wanted his point of view in this definitive work. Now Caro’s task was to take in all that Moses had to offer.
Silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it–as long as the person isn’t you, the interviewer. … When I’m waiting for the person I’m interviewing to break the silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write SU (for Shut Up!) in my notebook. If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of SU’s there.
It’s just a dogged pursuit of facts. No good interview is possible without the research to back it up. You interview someone to learn more things–but before that, you need to have enough facts to push and prod the subject. When you know some significant part of the story, then listening becomes golden.
When interviewing people, Caro pushes them–to the point of annoyance–to describe what they saw and heard and felt. It’s not enough to say the limo ride from the Capitol was quiet; Caro wants to know what that quiet was like. It’s not enough to decry the viciousness of racism; Caro wants to know what it felt like for blacks to attempt, time and again, to register to vote and get rejected by cracker election officials.
If you talk to people long enough, if you talk to them enough times, you find out things from them that maybe they didn’t even realize they knew.… My interviewees sometimes get quite annoyed at me because I keep asking them “What did you see?” “If I was standing beside you at the time, what would I have seen?” I’ve had people get really angry at me. But if you ask it often enough, sometimes you make them see.
Caro prods interviewees to remember what it was like to sit in a particular place or walk along a particular road. Sometimes they tell him but it doesn’t make sense until he recreates the scene.
One scene is especially notable. When he first came to Washington as a congressional assistant, LBJ would arrive at the office out of breath. On the last part of his morning walk to the capitol, he broke into a run. Why? Caro retraced the steps, again and again, but didn’t notice anything. Then he realized that he should retrace LBJ’s trip early in the morning.
At 5:30 in the morning, the sun is just coming up over the horizon in the east. Its level rays are striking that eastern façade of the capital full force. It’s lit up like a movie set. That whole long facade—750 feet long—it’s white, of course, white marble, and that white marble just blazes out at you as the sun hits it.
With that extra effort, Caro was able to be there–in the same time and place as the excited young congressional aide would would become president–and put the reader in the same place. That one moment captures the excitement better than anything else could.
Puzzles
All great stories present puzzles inside puzzles. The ultimate puzzle is about the characters and the vents of the story. Who is he? What makes him tick? Why does he do what he does? Why did X happen and not Y?
To understand complex topics, look for the moments when something big changes. Notice the turning points, even if no one has ever seen those moments that way before. While interviewing the LBJ story, poring though archives, Caro noticed a change in tone in letters written to LBJ early in his congressional career. In his earliest years in Congress, LBJ looked like every young legislator. He sought the favor of his seniors. Then the letters showed something different. “in which they were doing the beseeching, asking for a few minutes of his time. What was the reason for the change? Was there a particular time at which it had occurred?” Caro pursued the puzzle until he discovered the reason. Johnson got monied interests to funnel contributions to Congressmen though him. Suddenly LBJ was the money man on the hill.
One of the oldest puzzles concerned the 1948 Senate race. After Coke Stevenson was declared the winner, a recount in Precinct 13 found 200 extra votes for Johnson and two for Stevenson. That gave the election to LBJ. Most people treated the election as a “Texas size joke, with stealing by both sides.” But Caro needed to know. After searching bars and other old haunts, Caro finally found Luis Salas, the man behind the discovery of those extra votes.For years Salas lived in Mexico, but he had recently moved back to a trailer park in Texas. Salas not only agreed to talk, but also to share his memoir of the incident. He wrote the memoir because “I am running short of time, feel sick and tired… Before I go beyond this world, I had to tell the truth.” No one had ever gotten this first-hand account–this confession–before. And so the mystery was settled. LBJ did steal the election.
Exemplars
Caro’s books are known for their heft. He’s written thousands of pages on his two subjects. He offers detailed examination of complex topics and intimate portraits of the people and places and scenes. But in those books are smaller stories that serve as parables for the larger epics. They are intimate accounts of ordinary people and how their lives were affected by these two political giants.
The most excerpted section of The Power Broker, a chapter called “One Mile,” tells how Robert Moses built the Cross-Bronx Expressway right through the neighborhood of East Tremont. This route led to the demolition of 54 six- and seven-story apartment buildings. He could have shifted the highway just two blocks and only demolished only six buildings. Community people asked him to do just that but he refused. Caro’s story is a devastating story of the destructiveness of power–and the callousness of the man behind it.
In the LBJ books, Caro tells of how electrification transformed the lives of rural Texans … how civil rights laws overturned brutal systems of racism … how LBJ began to use his ruthless tactics to control campus politics as a college student … his his brief period teaching in rural Texas have him empathy for the poor and dispossessed. These stories ring with energy and power because they are about ordinary people and how their lives were shaped by the was power was deployed.
Being There
To understand LBJ, Caro learned, he had to understand his father Sam. As he learned Sam’s story, Johnson’s cousin Ava decided Caro needed a reality check. He needed to see how foolish Sam was to settle in the Hill Country. So she told Caro to drive her to the Johnson ranch. When they got there she told him: “Now kneel down.” He did. “Now stick your fingers into the ground.” He could not move the whole length of a finger into the ground. The land had almost no topsoil. It looked like a lush land with its endless expanse of grass. But it could not produce anything. Sam was snookered by the appearance. Lyndon vowed not to make the same mistake.
Most biographies depicted Johnson as a popular BMOC in college. But Caro heard lots of rumblings that this was a myth. One of Johnson’s old classmates, Ella So Relle, grew agitated when Caro kept asking questions. “I don’t know why you’re asking all these questions,” she said. “It’s all there in black-and-white.” Where? In the Pedagog, the college yearbook. Caro had read it and found nothing of interest on Johnson. He want back and looked his his copy and again found nothing there.
He called Ella and asked her to tell him what pages she was talking about. Those pages had been skillfully razored out of the book. When Caro went to a local used bookstore to see other copies, the pages in question were also cut. Finally he found a complete copy, filled with stories alluding to Johnson’s early days as a political manipulator.
Writing
Before writing the actual draft of a book, Caro tries to articulate the point he wants to make. He writes one to three paragraphs that summarize the driving idea of the book. The process can take weeks. So what might this summary say. Caro summarizes his first Johnson book, The Path to Power:
That first volume tries to show what the country was like that Johnson came out of, why he wanted so badly to get out of it, how he got out of it, and how he got his first national power in Washington through the use of money. That’s basically the first volume–at the end of it, he loses his first Senate seat, but it’s pretty clear he’s going to come back. When you distill the book down like that, a lot become so much easier.
With that North Star, he begins to write an outline of the book. He posts those pages on his wall so he can see the whole book at a glance. Then he writes detailed outlines of chapters, which is really the whole chapter without the details. A long chapter might get a seven-page brief. Then, each chapter gets its own notebook, filled with all the chapter’s stories and quotations and facts.
Caro writes his drafts longhand on white legal pads, three or four times. Then he types these drafts on an old electric typewriter, using legal paper and triple spacing to leave lots of room for editing. Some drafts have more pencil marks than type.
He starts each day by reading the previous day’s output. “More and more frequently when I reread the stuff I wrote in the late afternoon the day before, it was no good and I had to throw it out. So there was no sense in working late; I stop earlier now.”
Writing takes enormous concentration. “Any interruption is a shock, a real jolt,” he writes. Once, working at the Frederick Lewis Allen Room at the New York Public Library, someone tapped his shoulder to go to lunch. “I found myself on my feet with my fist drawn back to punch the guy,” Caro says.
Research and early drafts make art possible. It’s the Michaelangelo Principle: To produce art, you chip and carve a massive hunk of granite until you find, inside it, your own David. Caro’s original drafts of The Power Broker were more than a million words. He cut that down to 700,000 words.
Style
When writing the preface for The Power Broker, Caro struggled to describe just how totally Robert Moses had transformed New York with bridges, highways, tunnels, beaches, parks, housing, dams, and more. Then he remembered reading Homer’s Iliad in college. Homer listed all the nations and all the ships that went to fight in the Trojan War. The epic’s use of dactylic hexameter gave this list a sense of drama. And so Caro, in describing the long list of Moses projects, made them sail across the page, as if ships going to Troy.
“I thought I could have a rhythm that builds, and then change it abruptly in the last sentence,” Caro remembers. “Rhythm matters. Mood matters. Sense of place matters. All these things we talk about with novels, yet I feel that for history and biography to accomplish what they should accomplish, they should have to pay as much attention to these devices as novels do.”
Genius
Lyndon Johnson was one of America’s greatest tragic heroes, a Shakespearean figure who transformed a nation but got brought down by his own demons. Johnson, Caro says, had “a particular kind of vision, of imagination, that was unique and so intense that it amounted to a very rare form of genius – not the genius of a poet or the artist, which was the way I had always thought about genius, but the type of genius that was, in its own way just as creative: a leap of imagination that could look at a barren, empty landscape and conceive on it, in a flash of inspiration, a colossal public work, a permanent, enduring creation.”
Here’s my definition for genius in a nonfiction writer: Someone who is intensely curious about the world and how it works, someone who wants to show it whole but also reveal its contradictions. To achieve this ambition, the writer restlessly explores issues that others consider settled or uninteresting or beyond anyone’s ability to know. This restless exploration depends on a commitment to facts–gathering them, checking them, making sense of them. And then, when the facts are gathered and organized, they are used to construct a work that reveals something fresh about how the world works.
By this definition, I think we’d have to say that Robert Caro is a genius. His body of work is as great as that of any biographer–or maybe any nonfiction writer, or maybe even any writer–now alive.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Like other journalists of this late-print/early-digital age, Tina Cassidy has taken on a number of challenges as a writer. And more than most, she has succeeded.
Cassidy was a reporter for ten years at The Boston Globe, where she covered business, politics, and fashion. A Rhode Island native, she published articles in the Providence Journal as a high school student. She studied journalism at Northeastern University. After college she worked for the Boston Business Journal and the Associated Press before joining the Globe.
Since leaving the Globe, she has written books about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the process of being born, and, most recently, the battle for the women’s vote.She is now executive vice president and chief content officer at InkHouse, a national public relations and digital marketing agency.
She is active in civic affairs as a board member of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting and as an activist for women candidates and passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. She was a founding member of the Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors, a national organization dedicated to coverage of state and local government.
She lives in the Boston area with her husband, Anthony Flint, another ex-Globe reporter and author of acclaimed books on architecture and planning, along with their three sons and a Norfolk Terrier named Dusty.
Charlie Euchner: You began your writing career as a journalist. In your years with The Boston Globe, you also worked a number of different beats. Too often, beat writers get stuck in a rut, writing the stale old thing year after year. Can you talk about your experience covering different topics?
Tina Cassidy: I had pretty good self-awareness about when I needed a new beat. The clues included the feeling that I had exhausted interviewing all experts on the topic; that nothing I was writing about was surprising or felt new anymore. Weirdly, it was as if I had a biological clock timed to switch beats — typically every four years. Not sure if that was a coincidence or, as with a college degree, that’s about how long it takes to become an expert on something.
CE: Can you tell me about starting out as a teenager in Rhode Island. What kinds of stories did you do and what kinds of lessons did you learn then, about writing and reporting, that you remembered and applied thereafter?
TC: I wrote some articles for my hometown paper The Cranston Herald, mostly about school-related issues, and I was a stringer for the Providence Journal‘s West Bay briefs section; I think I got paid $25 per submission, which felt like a lot at the time. What I learned is that local journalism is essential, that people really care about what’s going on in their community and that there are stories all around us that go uncovered but shouldn’t. Today’s collapse of local journalism is a dangerous thing. Research has found that when community papers shut down, polarization increases. This is the last thing we need.
CE: Are there any stories for the Globe that you were especially fond of? Can you say a thing or two about them?
TC: “Fond” is not the word I’d use. But the most memorable ones for me were covering the 1996 Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Green Bay Packers (there was more drama off the field than on); JFK Jr.’s deadly plane crash; being in New York City on 9/11 and running toward the World Trade Center when it collapsed–and then somehow managing not just to survive but to run uptown in high heels and file a story before the special edition; and covering the 2000 Presidential election, from being on the bus with John McCain to looking at hanging chads in Florida.
CE: How did you make the transition from short pieces to full-length books? Some people think of books as collections of shorter pieces, and there’s some truth to that. But books need not only detailed stories and ideas, but also a sense of wholeness. So what helped you make the leap?
TC: The leap felt more like a continuation for me. I only write nonfiction and I am a compulsive writer who thrives on deadline. (I wish this weren’t the case.) If I sense a good story, I can’t stop myself from writing about it. At the heart of journalism and writing books is either a great story or the attempt to answer a big question.
My first book, about the history of childbirth (Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born) sought to understand how modern birth had gone so off the rails. I wanted to survey the historical and cultural landscape to see why it was that every generation and every culture had its own way of giving birth as a way to put modern birth in perspective.
My latest book, Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait? Alice Paul, Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the Right to Vote, is a great story that had not really been told before, pitting a little-known suffragette against a president whose multiple biographies may include a paragraph on suffrage (and his opposition to it) but little more. So it was a blue sky topic for me.
CE: Who are some of your role models as writers? Who do you try to emulate? What “tricks of the trade” do they offer to you as a storyteller, explainer, and book author?
TC: I’ve always admired nonfiction writers such as Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, who bring a journalistic eye and curiosity to their wildly different styles of writing. I can’t say I try to emulate anyone but I have worked hard to change my own writing style as I transitioned from journalism to writing books.
My first book editor, the wonderful Elisabeth Schmitz of Grove/Atlantic, told me to slow down my writing. Pacing is something they don’t teach you in journalism school. So I’ve worked on that. I also have to work at showing, not telling. I am always editing myself on that front.
CE: What’s your biggest challenge as a writer? How do you manage problems? Are you a plotter or a pantser? What “tricks of the trade” have you picked up over the years.
TC: I am a plotter. Structure is the first thing I figure out. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t change, but I need a road map to clarify the story or the question I need to answer — to proof it out. For my book on birth, it was about organizing millennia of history not chronologically but around subjects such as pain, fatherhood, postpartum.
For my book on Jacqueline Onassis (called Jackie After O) it was a tight chronology of one transformative year. So I built the structure, month by month, on a timeline. For my current book on Alice Paul, the heart of the book spans Wilson’s two terms as president. Plotting that story arc was fun but most challenging!
CE: Can you reflect on living in a writing household? I assume that you and Tony have lots of conversations about reporting, research, and writing. That’s very cool.
TC: Living with another writer means someone is always picking up the slack for the other. When I’m on book deadline, my husband is managing more kids stuff and meals and vice versa. It also means we truly understand the exhausting agony that writing induces, we can encourage each other and help each other get unstuck. Of course, there is also the brutally honest feedback (often accurate and helpful) that we give each other. My husband is always my first editor, though he doesn’t really have a choice because we live the process together. Thankfully, he is a brilliant thinker and writer.
CE: Tell me about your new book on the women’s suffrage movement and Woodrow Wilson. It’s a classic setup–pitting fallible protagonists against a fallible antagonist. How did you move from topic to story? What were some of the surprises and revelations for you, both about the subject and the writing process?
TS: I was scrolling twitter on vacation and came across the trending hashtag for #womensequalityday, which celebrates the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. I clicked and within an hour, learned about the leader of that suffrage movement, Alice Paul. The next logical question for me was what did the president think of Paul? Turns out, Wilson was the perfect foil – he did not believe the Constitution should give women voting rights. I was surprised to see that many Wilson biographies barely mentioned suffrage, and if they did, it was brief. Paul had been relegated to more academic biographies. I saw an opening and enjoyed weaving these two individuals together.
Excerpt: ‘The Advancing Army’
The following is an excerpt from Tina Cassidy’s new book, Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait? (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2019), 304 pages
The women slowly made their exit from the East Room and returned to their new headquarters. After four years of toil and hardship in the damp basement on F Street, the CUWS, NWP, and the movement Paul reignited, were finally in a sunlit space, in a place of prominence. Cameron House stood at 21 Madison Place, on the edge of Lafayette Park—the green space in front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The building—a wide, three-story, brick townhouse—had several benefits. First, it was visible and just two hundred steps away from the White House; the Wilsons could see the suffrage flag fluttering from its perch on the third-floor balcony. Second, there was ample space to work and entertain guests—from tourists and strangers walking in off the street to catch a glimpse of the women, to those attending ever-expanding fundraisers. There were also bedrooms to accommodate Paul and others, eliminating their daily commute. Paul was now using Susan B. Anthony’s old desk, a Victorian cylinder roll-top that Anthony’s secretary had donated to the NWP.
When the indignant suffragists walked through Cameron House’s front door, they entered into a great hall with a large staircase and a fireplace that burned eternal. Paul was there, waiting for them, ready to stoke their anger as they dropped into comfortable chairs in front of the flames and asked the question again: How long must we wait?
With the women assembled in front of the fire, Paul pitched a carefully orchestrated idea, which she asked Blatch to present. Cameron House. “We have got to take a new departure,” Blatch told them.
“We have got to bring to the President, day by day, week in, week out, the idea that great numbers of women want to be free, will be free, and want to know what he is going to do about it. We need to have a silent vigil in front of the White House until his inauguration in March. Let us stand beside the gateway where he must pass in and out so that he can never fail to realize that there is a tremendous earnestness and insistence in back of this measure.”
So far, with Paul as their leader, the women had marched four years earlier, in 1913, in the largest and most outrageous protest America had ever seen. They had assembled an eighty-car brigade to deliver signatures from all over the nation. They had testified, editorialized, and reorganized. They had formed their own political party. They held May Day parades in nearly every state in the union. They fundraised and actively worked to defeat Democrats. They had a booth at a global exposition, collected a miles-long scroll of signatures, and drove it cross-country from San Francisco. They dropped leaflets from the sky and a banner from the House chamber’s balcony. And they had sacrificed one of their own. On this day, in front of the crackling fire at their new headquarters, with the White House at their backs, they may have been exhausted, but they were neither depleted of ideas nor the passion to continue the struggle.
They listened as Blatch offered a new form of protest. In America, pickets had become a common union tactic, typically ending in violence. But suffragists had been employing the practice as well. Blatch had used pickets in her Votes for Women campaign with the New York Legislature in 1912, so when she delivered her final plea to the women of Cameron House, they stirred.
“Will you not,” she asked, “be a ‘silent sentinel’ of liberty and self-government?”
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
In another post, I describe the importance of finding The One Idea for everything you write.
I have both succeeded and failed in this quest.
Success: Nobody Turn Me Around
About a decade ago I was in the midst of writing a book about the 1963 March on Washington. At the same time, I was maniacally studying the elements of writing. I devoured books and articles about the brain, learning, memory, storytelling, and writing mechanics. I looked for any and all insights that would give my book the drama that the subject demanded.
That’s when I first realized the importance of The One Thing. The brain, research shows, simply cannot manage more than one idea at a time. Sure, as research in the 1950s showed, people can remember a list of seven ideas or things. But that doesn’t mean they can do anything with those ideas. To really act in the world, people need to focus on one thing.
At all levels of my book, Nobody Turn Me Around (Beacon Press, 2010), I tried to identify The One Thing that should serve as a North Star for readers. Here’s what I came up with.
The book
The One Idea, driving everything else in this book, is this: The March on Washington was essential to hold together the disparate factions of the civil rights movement, at a time when support was fraying for the movements integrationist and nonviolent ideals–when President Kennedy’s civil rights bill offered an opportunity to create historic reform.
The book explores all kinds of issues, but they all relate to the need to hold the movement together.
This throughline animated every action of the movement’s organizers (Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, and others) and allies (Kennedy, congressional supporters, leading celebrities, ministers, organizers, and more). It also animated the opponents (like Strom Thurmond and other congressional segregationists, conservative intellectuals, the FBI, and others), who worked to divide the movement.
The parts of the book
The book had five parts, mirroring Aristotle’s narrative arc. Each section had One Idea:
1. Night Unto Day: In the wee hours of August 27, 1963, people made their final movements to the march. Dr. King prepared his speech, ignoring advisors’ counsel to avoid talking about a “dream.” Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin set the march’s goal: to put the movement’s bodies on the line to force Washington to act–and to do so nonviolently. Meanwhile, thousands streamed into the capital, with varied values and goals but a commitment to following the movement’s highest ideals and to ignore figures on right and left who would divide the movement. The One Idea: United, we stand.
2. Into the Day: As people arrive at the Mall, the systems are in place for a successful march. bayard Rustin successfully managed all the logistics, as did the Justice Department. The One Idea: Plan it right to avoid problems.
3. Congregation: As the March on Washington began, the movement’s far-flung members were on full display. They came from all walks of life, from all over the U.S. and beyond. They included rich and poor, intellectuals and laborers, blacks and everyone else, radical and moderate, Northerners and Southerners, religious and nonbelievers, believers in nonviolence and “any means necessary,” and more. The One Idea: There is unity in numbers and diversity.
4. Dream: After performances from musicians and speeches by notables, the afternoon program began. Each of the ten leaders of the March offered their own perspectives, from a faith-based confession of apathy (Matthew Ahmann) to a youthful cry of impatience (John Lewis) to a movement veteran’s call for reform (Roy Wilkins) to a labor leader’s warning about America’s world reputation (Walter Reuther) to an urbanist’s call for jobs and opportunity (Whitney Young) … to the transcendent call for a dream (Martin King). The One Idea: Civil rights is the underpinning of all progress.
5. Onward: At the end of the day, everyone returned home, determined to fight for civil rights in their communities, aware that that fight would be long and hard. The One Idea: Struggles require fighting hard, not just expressing grand ideals.
Each section has One Idea. Each of those ideas, in some way, supports the book’s One Idea.
Fragments in the book
Each of the parts comprises a number of smaller pieces–what I call “fragments,” vignettes and background information. Fragments range from a page and a half to nine pages. Each fragment advances the One Idea of the section, and therefore the One Idea of the book.
Let me mention a few examples–the sections that offer portraits of Phil Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King. Each brought an essential quality to the civil rights movement. Randolph insisted on mass demonstration. Rustin insisted on nonviolence. King understood that the movement had to be transformational, inspiring courage and commitment.
Those three forces–body, mind, and soul–were essential to pursue the movement’s long-term strategy. They were also essential to hold the movement together (the book’s One Idea).
Paragraphs and sentences in the book
Every paragraph and sentence also contains just One Idea also. This is important. All too often, writers treat the paragraph as simply a container for a bunch of ideas. In his book on writing, Steven Pinker actually argues that “there is no such thing as a paragraph.” When we break the text into paragraphs, Pinker says, we’re doing nothing more than providing “a visual bookmark that allows the reader to pause.”
But that’s not right. When you look at great writers, from Hemingway to McPhee, you see how they state and develop just one idea per paragraph. In my classes, I require students to label each paragraph with a “tabloid headline.” That way, they learn not to stray off course. If anything in the paragraph does not address the label, it’s gotta go.
I’ll offer just one paragraph from my book, about the writer James Baldwin, for illustration:
In all of his years in the U.S., Baldwin struggled to understand his own alienation. “It was in Paris when I realized what my problem was,” he told the New York Post. “I was ashamed of being a Negro. I finally realized that I would remain what I was to the end of my time and lost my shame. I awoke from my nightmare.” The whole race problem, Baldwin argued, required the same kind of rebirth nationwide. But he despaired that such a rebirth would not occur. Black communities from Harlem to Watts were committing slow suicide with violence, drug and alcohol abuse, violence, and alienation from schools and jobs.
My tabloid headline for this paragraph would be “Alienation of All” or “Split Souls” or some such. By the way, that paragraph speaks to the One Idea of the book, its section, and its fragment.
Think of each One Idea as part of a Russian nesting doll. The One Idea of the whole piece contains The One Idea of all its smaller parts.
Failure: Little League, Big Dreams
I didn’t fully understand The One Idea when I write a previous book about the Little League World Series.
Originally, I hoped to present the drama of the LLWS the way the documentary Spellbound presented the National Spelling Bee. I wanted to show different contestants prepare and then advance through many rounds until the drama of the final competition.
And so I tracked the monthlong Little League tournaments, from districts to states to regions to the final tournament in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Along the way, I found some great stories and explored some fascinating issues. When it was over, I spent time in the hometowns of the two finalists in Ewa City, Hawaii, and Willemstad, Curacao. I learned lots more.
Then I started writing. I liked what I wrote, mostly anyway, but it lacked the power and drama. The deadline approached and I turned in a draft. My editor liked it. We debated titles. We settled on Little League, Big Dreams. I didn’t like the title; it seemed too mushy and too upbeat for the story I wrote. But the publisher gets the final call on titles. So we passed the manuscript to a line editor.
Then I had a eureka moment. I realized that one word captured the essence of the book. I called my editor. “Can I have more time?” I said. “I figured out what it’s about–hustling.” The book was about the kids’ hustling, their dedication and earnestness, their willingness to work hard for something. But it was also about a more negative form of hustling–coaches manipulating rules, driving kids too hard, helicoptering and bullying parents, Napoleons who run the local leagues, pressure from sponsors, the glaring spotlight of TV. I wanted to give the book a simple title–Hustle or Hustling–and realign the text to tell that story. It would have taken just a week.
The answer was no. “We’re too far into this,” he said. “Sorry.”
Without The One Idea, the book was a mishmash. One reviewer said it was like a long Sports Illustrated article, not a book. She was right. Books gain their power when they state and develop One Idea, with a variety of stories and exposition.
If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.
–Russian proverb
In projects small and large–everything from an email to a book–we often struggle to develop and state a clear point. Too often, we spit out a mess of ideas rather than deliver a clear message. The result is confusion–for both the writer and the reader.
To think this problem through, I recommend a business book by Gary Keller called The One Thing. The answer for all business problems, Keller argues, is to be clear on a simple question: What’s “The One Thing” that matters most for your business? The same principle holds for writing. To write well–clearly, with energy and creativity–you need to know what is “The One Idea” that you want to convey to your readers.
Keller is the founder and CEO of Keller Williams, a real estate company that beats the worldwide competition on all the key measures, like the number of agents, the sales volume, and the number of units sold. He is, in other words, a salesman, and good salespeople understand communications. They know how to approach a prospect, how to connect, and how to close. Their knowledge, properly understood, can be applied to any challenge involving communications and relationships.
It’s worth quoting Keller:
People can actually do two or more things at once, such as walk, talk, or chew gum and read a map; but, like computers, what we can’t do is focus on two things at once. Our attention bounces back and forth. This is fine for computers, but it has serious repercussions in humans. Two airliners are cleared to land on the same runway. The patient is given the wrong medicine. A toddler is left unattended in the bathtub. What all these potential tragedies share is that people are trying to do too many things at once and forget to do something they should do.
When you try to do two things, one or both suffer from inadequate attention. But when you figure out The One Idea, magic happens.
When you have a definite purpose for your life, clarity comes faster, which leads to more conviction in your direction, which usually leads to faster decisions. When you make faster decisions, you’ll often be the one who makes the fastest decisions and winds up with the best choices. And when you have the best choices, you have the opportunity for the best experiences.
The single greatest challenge in life–in all endeavors–is to decide “The One Thing.” If you’re a business, what’s The One Thing you offer that your competition does not?
The ‘One Thing’ for Books
Keller’s book The One Thing is, naturally, proof of his thesis. His book focuses on a single idea–namely, that success requires a total, fanatical dedication to one single approach to your challenge.
After reading Keller’s book, I surveyed my shelves to see what other books focused on just one idea. Here are ten seminal books that state and develop just one idea:
• Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: All people and organizations face a simple choice when they don’t like how things are going in their organization: leave, speak out, or stick around.
• Peter Thiel, From Zero to One: To succeed in business, find a product or service that no one now offers (zero) and become the single, dominant provider (one).
• Konstantin Stanislavski, The Actor Prepares: To portray a character, feel what you would feel if you were in that situation.
• Greg Albert, The Simple Secret to Better Painting: To produce engaging art, put key elements off-center.
• Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: Companies can fail when they do everything right. As they refine their production process, they can lose control of their business by farming out parts of their production process.
• Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies: The real divide in politics and policy concerns people’s attitude to change. Dynamists love change and seek to play a part in making it happen. Stasists fear change and fight it at every step.
• Karl Marx, Capital: Everything in market economies turns on the battle over “surplus value”–its creation and distribution–and that battle is inherently expansionist and unstable.
• John Stuart Mill, On Liberty: All political arrangements should be subjected to a single question: What arrangements produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number? Over the long haul, the greatest happiness requires guaranteeing the widest possible freedom for individuals (something known as “rule utilitarianism”).
• James David Barber, The Presidential Character: All presidents (and all leaders?) can be assessed by two dimensions–their levels of energy and affect.
• Arthur Schesinger Jr., The Cycles of American Politics: American politics moves, back and forth, from periods of government expansion and reform to periods of government contraction and conservatism.
I could list 50 more books, but you get the idea. In each of these works, the author states and develops just one idea. The book’s idea, though, is so powerful that it requires us to look at it from a number of different angles, the way a jeweler examines a diamond.
Identify The One Idea for All Levels of Writing
Identifying The One Idea is essential not just for books, but for everything you write.
For every email, letter, memo, report, proposal, query, RFP, web copy, speech, presentation, make sure you can name The One Idea you want to discuss.
Sometimes, when I teach this idea, I get pushback. Strangely, the pushback comes most intensely on smaller pieces, like emails and memos. “Do you really want me to send two emails just because I talk about two issues,” business people ask.
“Yes,” I respond.
Let me explain.
Whenever you communicate, you need to make sure your audience knows exactly what you want to accomplish. Confusion at any point will create a long string of confusion. Confusion results when one idea gets mixed with other ideas.
Suppose you send an email about two issues in your company–like whether to spend X dollars on a new web consultant and what strategy to take on the Y campaign. You’re sure about X but uncertain about Y; meanwhile, a colleague is uncertain about X but sure about Y; another is sure about both; yet another is uncertain about both.
Inevitably, the conversation gets tangled and confused. When you zap ideas back and forth, people are talking about both … or are they? (Cue Hitchcock’s Psycho music here.) As both conversations continue, people aren’t always sure what they’re talking about. Some discuss X, others Y, and others both; meanwhile, others drop out. The conversation gets vague and muddied–or, worse, a few know-it-alls take over. Meanwhile, the string of missives fills the email queue. Unless you settle both issues, the emails keep coming.
If you send one email on one issue you can isolate the issue till it gets settled. The issues are always clear. You don’t lost in a thicket of confusing messages about many topics. You focus wholly on one topic that can be settled, one way or another.
The One Idea, of course, can contain several sub-issues. But those sub-issues should relate to The One Idea. You can’t veer off to other topics. Otherwise, you create uncertainty and confusion: “Hold it–I thought we were talking about X. How did Y get into the conversation?”
When people get confused, they often drop out. You hoped to “save time” by knocking off two ideas–two rabbits–at the same time. But now you don’t know the status of either.
When your pieces have The One Idea, everyone gets on the same page. You always know the topic of discussion. You always know the issues, the pros and cons, and the to-do list. You know when the issue gets settled–and when it still needs attention.
How to Do It: Gather, Sort, Apply
So how do you find The One Thing for your writing? And how do you respond when readers say they want a bunch of things? Take it in stages.
First, gather lots of material. Start by brainstorming what you already know. Get it all down on a single piece of paper, so you can see it all at once. Look at that sheet. Draw lines and arrows showing relationships.
Once you have a picture of your current mind, figure out what’s missing. The extent of your research depends on your topic and the scale of your project. Do research. Talk to people. Google the topic. Search databases online. Go to the library. Dig into archives. Do surveys or experiments. Analyze data.
Second, sort your ideas. Let the ideas play out. Don’t rush. When you rush, you have a tendency to force your preconceived ideas on yourself.
As you sort your material, write down possibilities for The One Idea. You should have lots of candidates for most of your project. You will think X is your One Idea. Then you’ll think it’s Y. Then you’ll think it’s Z. That’s OK. It’s important to consider a range of possibilities. You’ll only find your One Idea if you have considered–seriously–lots of ideas.
Third, discover and apply your One Idea. See if you can organize the different level of your piece to The One Idea. If something doesn’t fit, ask why. It might be that you’re wandering off topic. Or it might mean that you have not sharpened your One Idea well enough. Continue to play with your ideas.
Often you cannot discover The One Idea until you’ve been struggling a long time. That’s fine. This is a process; it’s not flipping a switch. Once you get The One Idea, you can use it to restructure and sharpen your points. All the work–all the research, all the debate, all the confusion–will be worth it because you’ll produce a piece with total clarity.
Push for the One Idea
So my advice to you: Push yourself to identify the One Idea. Whatever you’re writing–an email or a report, an article or a book, a speech or web copy, and RFP or a proposal–make sure you have One Idea.
The football great John Madden insisted that only one quarterback can lead a team. When two QBs share duties, you lose. “When you have two,” he said, “you have none.”
Sometimes it takes a long time. Usually, you change your mind as you proceed through research to rewriting to rewriting to editing. That’s OK. But when you get it right, it will give meaning and unity to everything in the piece.
(Oh, by the way. Did this essay state and develop just One Idea?)
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Every great story contains a bunch of basic elements–complex characaters who offer glimpses into the variety of human motivation, action that reveals motivation and conflict, details that offer glimpses that most readers would miss, and more.
To many, the setting offers the container of characters and action. To others, the setting is like an all-present “extra,” which affects the story as much as any character or conflict.
The best advice I ever got on setting came from Mark Kramer, the gifted author and former curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. The trick, he said, is to set the action in “small, knowable” spaces.
Sitcoms succeed when they do just that. Think of the TV-oriented living room in All in the Family or the art/antique-oriented living room of Cosby. Think of the regional branch of Dunder-Mifflin in The Office. Think of the snazzy swingles apartment in Friends. You get the idea.
The Advantages of Small, Knowable Places
Small, knowable places offer a number of advantages for description:
‘Put Three People in a Room’: The filmmaker Martin Scorsese was once asked for advice on how to write a good scene. His answer: “Put three people in a room.” When you put two or three people in a limited space, you can see their dynamics without complication.
Three people might include two characters plus the knowledge of a third character or issue. In Thomas’s Harris’s 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs, for example, Hannibal Lecter confronts Clarice Sterling with her demons. The setting is Hannibal’s jail cell and the area just outside the cell. The cell contains spare, bolted-down furniture. On the walls are Hannibal’s detailed drawings of European scenes, done in charcoal and crayon. Outside the cell is Clarice and a chair. The cell’s bars separate the two, but the bars seem to disappear as Hannibal baits Clarice about her tragedies and fears.
Contain the Story to Prevent Narrative Sprawl: The storyteller’s ultimate job is the same as a magician’s–to direct the attention of the audience. The storyteller and magician both say, in effect: “Look here, not there.”
The best way to say “here, not there” is to keep “there” out of the picture. So zoom in on the small place and moments that you want to audience to see. Keep the other stuff offstage.
Focusing on “here, not there” can also ratchet the tension. Consider Stephen King’s creepy novel and film Misery. The first tense moment comes when Paul Sheldon drives off the road in the middle of a snowstorm. We see him, alone in his car, and wonder: Will anyone rescue him? Being stuck in that car with Paul–“here, not there”–gets our minds racing about what’s happening out there.
The answer finally comes in the person of Annie Wilkes, a psychopathic fan who takes him home. The bed where Annie puts Paul will be the “small, knowable space” for most of the book. The tension rises as we realize Annie’s sick obsessions. All the time, we wonder: Will anyone figure out that Paul’s missing? Will anyone come knocking on Annie’s door? When that time comes … well, I don’t want to spoil it for you.
Avoiding Distractions: In a small space, the focus is on the characters and their struggle. You can’t get distracted when you place two or three charactersm in a room and have them interact.
Avoiding distractions is especially important when people have their “come to Jesus” moments–when they have to make hard decisions about their values and behavior. It’s hard to make decisions when you;re surrounded by a clamor of competing demands. How many times have you faced a tough call and had to go to a quiet place to focus on the decision?
Give your character a small, knowlable space to act, speak, listen, hesitate, and debate, without distractions. You will be amazed how much it supercharges the other scenes in the story.
Showing the Character Struggle Against Limits: In a small place, you can show the characters struggling against their limits. Most people’s limits are psychological, and a small place provides a great way to isolate those limits.
Imagine, for example, someone getting news of a great tragedy in a small place, like an office. How does she react? First, she has to absorb the news. To gain privacy, she closes the blinds that separate her office from the rest of the workplace. Then zoom in and capture her emotions. Her only connection to the outside world is her phone, so you can focus on how she decides whether to call someone. Finally, you can show her getting ready to leave. Does she try to pull herself together, to pretend nothing’s wrong when she walks through the office door?
We can pay close attention to the character when she’s in a limited space. We don’t get distracted by other people or by the swirl of activity nearby.
Symbolizing Some Larger Aspect of the Story: Small spaces are often rich with clues about someone’s character. On the wall are pictures and mementos from the past, indicators of friends, family, jobs, hobbies. Some artifacts are purposeful–that is, the owner of the space put them there for comfort or inspiration, as well as their usefulness. Other artifacts are accidental leftovers–that is, the owner of the space did not think much about them, but they still reveal the character’s habits and ways of life.
A small space reveals loads about the values and desires of the characters. People inhabit their small spaces differently. Some decorate it, some don’t. Some are elegant, some aren’t. Some display their allegiances (like a school or company or team), some don’t. Show show off their knowledge (with jammed bookshelves) and others their wealth (expensive art and furniture).
Revealing Contrasts Between Characters: In a small space, you can emphasize the contrasts between characters. In a larger space, the characters can look the same. In a larger space, with lots of characters, we see those characters as abstractions. But when we get close up, we see them as one-of-a-kind individuals.
When you see a crowd coming in or out of a subway, everyone looks the same–especially from a distance. It’s just one big mass of humanity. Then when you get inside the train, you can pause and look around. You notice how different everyone is–the Wall Street trader, the tattooed student, the dolled-up department store clerk, the kids on their way to school, the construction workers, and so on. The small space–and the way it suspends time–gives you a chance to look closely.
Revealing Contrasts Inside and Outside the Small, Knowable Place: People act differently depending on the location. A man acts differently in the small, knowable space of his home than in the small, knowable space of his office or club or parents’ home. We can see these people’s different “sides” in bold relief when we put them in different places.
Contrasts, by the way, lie at the very core of great stories. In every great story, characters struggle to reconcile the different demands placed by their different worlds. At home, a parent needs to care for partners and kids; in the neighborhood, she needs to develop networks of friends and helpers; in the office, she needs to work efficiently and professionally, with a minimum (usually) of intimacy. And so on. Place not only reveals character; it also shapes character.
Creating an Extra Character in the Story: In a sense, the setting is the “extra” character of your story, creating possibilities and barriers, just like the flesh-and-blood characters. We see this in sports all the time. Classic venues like Fenway Park (home of the Red Sox) or Bryant-Denny Stadium (home of the Crimson Tide) are packed with attentive, fervent, and loud fans. Some venues give their teams a real home field advantage.
When I lived in Boston, I went to Red Sox games all the time. The atmosphere was electric, even in a mid-season game where the Sox were losing 7-2. If a Sox player got a hit, the crowd would come to life. Two or three hits and the place had a World Series atmosphere. Sox players fed off the energy. Home gives almost everyone an edge. From 1871 to 2015, teams did better at home in all but one year. The advantage is even greater in basketball, where refs making tough calls get swayed by the crowds.
All this raises a question: How can we find the right small space to focus our action. To begin, let’s look at one of the greatest TV series ever–AMC’s Mad Men.
Case Study: The Elevator in Mad Men
Mad Men set 59 scenes in elevators in the first 85 episodes. Why? Well, for starters, it’s hard to find a cheaper set. Also, elevators offer terrific transitional spaces; people come and go, introducing or concluding scenes, in elevators. Elevators are public places–but when the door closes, they can turn in to private spaces.
But also, as Mark Kramer pointed out, elevators clear away all the distractions so you can focus on the characters, conflicts, and tension. “It’s the simplest of sets,” the Journal‘s John Jurgensen writes.
Two of the great Mad Men scenes focus on the status of women in 1960s America.
The first scene of the whole series features Peggy, a young woman from Brooklyn headed to her first day of work at Sterling Cooper. She stands, stiffly, as three men leer and cackle. “Can you take the long way up?” one tells the black elevator operator. “I am really enjoying the view here.” It’s a perfect preview of the show’s examination of the system of class and power in 1960. This simple scene also introduces us to the characters we will see developed over the next several years. We get a good glimpse at their characters–and their room for growth–right away.
The longest ride comes when Don and his former mistress stand together, silently, for 43 seconds in Season 6. Without a word, the two contemplate their failed relationship–and the audience contemplates everything that came before. It was a perfect coda to the story. Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner says: “I made sure that I had built enough time into the episode that I could let this thing play out to its excruciating end.”
An even better scene comes in “The Beautiful Girls,” from the fourth season. In that episode, Don’s daughter Sally arrives unannounced at the firm, where Don’s secretary Megan comforts her; Peggy meets a Village Voice journalist named Abe, who insults her in a discussion of woman’s place in society; Joan learns that her husband is being sent off to Vietnam, then has a tryst with Roger (which will produce a child) after getting mugged in an alley; Don’s affair with Faye reveals the splits in their personal and professional lives; and, for good measure, the matronly secretary Miss Blankenship dies at her desk.
What better way to cap the scene than to show the convergence of the three main survivors–Joan, Peggy, and Faye–standing in the elevator, silently, after an exhausting day?
These few moments allow us to absorb the whirlwind of activity that happened before. The scene also symbolizes how women–and all of us–are “alone together” to face life’s challenges.
Other Great Small, Knowable Places
So what kinds of places are small enough to contain the story, without distractions, while also conveying the values of the characters and society?
Let’s consider a half-dozen examples from literature:
The ship in Homer’s The Odyssey: At the end of the Trojan War, Odysseus began his long journey home to Ithaca. Odysseus and his crew get off the boat, from time to time. But the ship centers the story.
My favorite scene occurs when the ship approaches the Sirens. It poses a life-or-death challenge. On the one hand, Odysseus wants to hear the transcendent voices of the Sirens. On the other hand, if he listens to the Sirens, he will get seduced and chase them, abandoning his men. At the advice of Circe, Odysseus followes a clever solution. He will have his men lash him to the mast so he can listen without the danger of leaving; meanwhile, his men will fill their ears with wax and pilot the ship beyond the Sirens.
The raft in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn: This is the ultimate modern road trip. Huck and Jim escape the constraints of their hope to find adventure on the Mississippi River. Huck and Jim confront numerous dangers along the way–pirates, bounty hunters, weather–but also get to know each other. Huck deepens his appreciation for Jim as a full human being. Quiet time on the raft, freedom from the noise of “sivilization,” allow Huck to get to know his companion.
“There warn’t no home like a raft, after all,” Huck says. “Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.” The raft gives them freedom–but freedom of a certain sort. Huck and Jim can barely steer the raft. The currents of the river take charge. That’s a profound lesson in a world where “sivilization” tries to control every thought and movement.
The boat in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea: Santiago is a pathetic old man with the story begins. After going 84 days without catching a fish, he is considered “salao” by the townspeople. The boy is banned by her family from joining the old man. Then Santiago catches a great marlin and the struggle begins. After three days of struggle, Santiago develops a bond with the fish. But he finally hauls him in and straps it to the side of the boat. Now he must fight off the sharks who smell the marlin’s blood.
Hell in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit: No story does such a great job containing a world of emotions in a such small, knowable place. That small space is Hell, and it focuses all the action and dialogue on the characters and their inner lives. Could Sartre have used a larger, sprawling setting? Could he have shown the characters before their death and assignment to Hell? Could he have shown the moments in their lives when they earned eternal damnation?
In this spare place, even the smallest details standout–like the bare lightbulb, which is always on, preventing the three characters from getting decent sleep or escaping the others’ gazes. Such a detail would have gotten lost in a more complex space. But here, it stands out and reveals much about the characters and their situation.
Maybe. But Sartre’s purpose was to reveal the characters–and, especially, his point that “Hell is other people.”
The motorcycle in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Management: Over 17 days, the author traveled by motorcycle from Minnesota to California. The time on the bike allowed him the opoirtunity to take in lots of sites and to muse philosophically. The bike both contains the story and allows contact with the outside, as Pirsig explains:
In a car you’re always in a compartment. … You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.
The bike is also an artifact, an object worthy of attention. The bike must be maintained. When something breaks, Pirsig has to fix it. That requires skill. So is it hard? “Not if you have the right attitudes. It’s having the right attitudes that’s hard.” That’s the ultimate lesson of this story of a man, his son, and their bikes.
The room in Emma Donaghue’s Room: A woman is held captive in a small room by a kidnapper, where she raises her young boy. To protect her son from the loss of innocence, she pretends the room is a wonderland. Together, mother and son watch the seasons come and go from a small window. They watch TV and read stories. This isolation is cruel but the mother uses it as an opportunity to love and teach her child.
The room offers a fresh perspective on the comings and goings of ordinary life.
In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. … I don’t know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. … I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter all over the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there’s only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.
To avoid your story getting spread around, like butter, concentrate the action in small, knowable spaces.
How Do You Decide on Your Small, Knowable Place?
So what kinds of places are small enough to contain the story, without distractions, while also conveying the values of the characters and society? The limits are endless:
• A room, any room, in a house or apartment.
• A bench or other contained space in an open area, like a park or a plaza.
• An office–especially a small corner or nook.
• A locker room for a sports team.
• A deserted island.
• A classroom, lunchroom, or detention room of a school.
You get the idea. Any place is OK as long as it’s small and contained. And when you have a huge place–think, for example, of the Grand Canyon–be sure to zoom in on a small piece of that space. From that perch, you can contemplate bigger things. Danny Glover explains this idea (in a small space, by the way) to Kevin Kline in the film Grand Canyon.
To contemplate big ideas, then, locate yourself in a small space. Use that small space as a perch, a place to get intimate.
The Ultimate Benefit: Plot Your Story With Small, Knowable Places
So what kinds of places are small enough to contain the story, without distractions, while also conveying the values of the characters and society?
Alfred Hitchcock, cinema’s master of suspense, sometimes plotted his films by first describing places. Once he identified the locales, he developed characters and storylines to fit those places. Hitch explains:
Of course, this is quite the wrong thing to do. But here’s an idea: select the background first, then the action. It might be a race or might be anything at all. Sometimes I select a dozen different events and shape them into a plot. Finally—and this is just the opposite of what is usually done—select your character to motivate the whole of the above.
Hitchcock built The Man Who Knew Too Much this way:
I would like to do a film that starts in the winter sporting season. I would like to come to the East End of London. I would like to go to a chapel and to a symphony concert at the Albert Hall in London.
Once he had a setting, Hitchcock figured out which characters belonged and what they would do in that setting.
Whether or not you use Hitchcock’s approach, survey all the possible scenes as you develop your story. If you write about sports, consider the stadium, practice fields, locker rooms, bars, and after-hours nightclubs. If you write about the civil rights movement, start with the streets, lunch counters, churches, schools, and jails. If you write the life of a high school, think about classrooms, corridors and stairwells, pizza joints and Saturday night party spots.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
When you watch a great period television show or movie, it’s always fun to see the artifacts that help to revive bygone periods in history.
Every prop reveals something about the characters, their community and culture.
Artifacts being us into a particular time and place. The objects say something about the values of the characters. Holding a Wall Street Journal signals something different than a New York Post. Putting a glass on a doily reveals something different than putting it on a piece of mail. Chopping vegetables with gleaming knives on a butcher-block cutting board says something different than dumping a can of Hormel chili into a pan on the stove.
Props also provide something for the characters to use; they give us an excuse for action. Let’s call this the Party Rule. When people go to parties, they need something to hold. My parents propped cigarettes between forefinger and ring finger as they gesticulated at parties in the 1950s and 1960s. College students hold Solo plastic cups of beer at frat parties. Millennials always hold smartphones.
Whatever your story, use artifacts to reveal everyday life–and to give your characters something to keep their hands occupied.
Look at this passage from “Fun With a Stranger,” a short story by Richard Yates:
Miss Snell kept a big, shapeless old eraser on her desk, and she seemed very proud of it. “This is my eraser,” she would say, shaking it at the class. “I’ve had this eraser for five years. Five years.” (And this was not hard to believe, for the eraser looked as old and gray and worn-down as the hand that brandished it.) “I’ve never played with it because it’s not a toy. I’ve never chewed it because it’s not good to eat. And I’ve never lost it because I’m not foolish and I’m not careless. I need this eraser for my work and I’ve taken good care of it.
A simple object—a key prop in a classroom, a small knowable place—offers instant insight into a stern, dreaded primary school teacher.
Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being uses the letter to the editor to symbolize Tomas’s decision to take a moral stand and risk his privilege. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien uses a girlfriend’s letter to symbolize innocence and separation. In In Cold Blood, Truman Capote uses a number of objects and events — the radio, the diary, the insurance policy, letters — to condense a wide range of emotional ideas.
These objects represent larger ideas. This is not heavy-handed symbolism. You might remember the conversations in 10-grade English class about how Santiago carrying the staff in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea “symbolizes” Christ’s cross and crucifixion. There’s no need to get so heavy. Let’s just say that objects reveal or represent something about the story’s characters, actions, or ideas.
I realized the full power of the prop when listening to a radio interview with the economist Barry Bluestone. Talking to Tom Ashbrook of NPR’s “On Point,” Bluestone described working at a Ford plant during his college summers in the 1960s. Bluestone actually brought an object to the studio for show-and-tell.
“This is a two-barrel carburetor from 1964,” Bluestone announced, as if the audience could see. “It went into a Mustang and there’s a good chance that I built that thing.”
Bluestone then recounted watching a worker at a McDonald’s restaurant a few days before. “I’m looking at a guy operating a fryolator and he’s going through the exactly same motions that I went through but he’s making one-fourth what I made.”
When I heard this, I was amazed. Simply bringing an object into the conversation, acting as if we listeners could see it, Bluestone activated the visual parts of our brains and our memories. He put us on that assembly line in Roseville, Michigan, and in that fast-food restaurant in Boston, Massachusetts. The power of props to enliven a scene—even when you can’t see them—is profound.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
People are storytelling creatures. We evolved to tell stories.
From 30,000 to 100,000 years ago, out great ancestors began telling stories. It happened around the time that the size of clans expanded and those clans began to wander longer distances and then come home again.
Sitting by fires or in caves, by streams or in mountains, our ancestors told tales that helped them understand the day-to-day perils and potential of life. They warned each other of predators (“Bear in woods!”), discussed the weather (“So hot!”), angled for advantage with potential mates (“Hubba, hubba”), and taught their young with stories (“In my day …”).
More than anything else, the power to tell, hear, and remember stories separates humans from other species. Other species eat, find shelter, reproduce, and make things. Some species—like apes, chimps, whales, and birds—use language. Others—including chimps, birds, dolphins, and elephants—use tools. But as far as we know, only humans tell stories.
Stories take us away from the here and now, move us emotionally and intellectually, and help us understand and organize our lives. “We experience our lives in narrative form,” the novelist Jonathan Franzen once remarked. “If you can’t order things in a narrative fashion, your life is a chaotic bowl of mush.”
So what are the essential skills of storytelling? Consider these seven “must haves” for all stories:
1. Develop Compelling Characters
Start with characters. Nothing excites our brains more than images of our own kind. We’re a narcissistic species, so find or create characters with strong qualities. Make sure you know the characters’ deepest desires. Present these characters in all their complexity—avoid cardboard heroes and villains—and show how they deal with conflict and adversity.
Put those characters on a journey. Put them into action. Show how they interact with different people and situations. Show them fretting and fighting, arguing and negotiating, holding and helping, guessing and calculating, wondering and deciding. Emphasize the word show.
Put these scenes in a setting that helps tell the story. To really bring your story to life, find the details about your settings that help explain the characters and action. How you depict places—homes, offices, schools, parks, cars, camps, churches, prisons, streets, and parking lots—will set the parameters for your characters and stories.
2. Show the ‘World of the Story’
Every story needs a container. We need places for characters to go and to interact. Simple enough.
But places do more for storytelling than to offer a sandbox for characters to play. They also offer insights into the values and abilities of the characters and community.
The world of the story shapes how people feel and behave—and are perceived by others. Well-designed places make it easier for people to do what they want to do. They boost people’s energy and focus. Poorly designed places disorient people, sap their energy, and alienate them from others.
Put your characters in different places. Note how they change as they go from home to school to work to mall to ball field to theater to pizzeria to pub. Place determines possibilities. Create settings that make the characters who they are.
3. Give the Reader Action and Emotion.
We live in the Age of Science.
Science has made all kinds of wondrous things—cities and skyscrapers, cars and rockets, machines from digital pens to and the energy to fuel them, medical miracles and yottabytes of data. Those advances come from a vast accumulation of data, equations, rules and laws, and analyses. It’s all very abstract.
Which is great. But …
To connect with readers—to get and keep their attention, to explain complex ideas—you need to show action and tap into emotions.
Animals—including the human animal—are programmed to respond to movement, sounds, touches, smells, and changes in the environment. Action arouses our attention. Your job as a writer, quite simply, is to attract and keep people’s attention. So show action.
What do I mean by action? It could be anything from a wink or nod to a riot.
A scientist named Paul Eckman has developed a whole system for interpreting people’s “microexpressions.” As the name suggests, microexpressions are small and often last for just fractions of a second. A psychologist named John Gottman can assess the likelihood of marital bliss in couples by watching their microexpressions for five minutes.
So, you see, you don’t need a lot of explosions or chase scenes to show something meaningful happening.
So what makes someone’s wink or nod “action”? And does that mean everything that moves, great and small, is action?
Action must matter. Somehow, to count as action, something has to change. Suppose I sit in a crowded theater and nod when a speaker says something. If our story focuses on the speaker, my nod doesn’t change anything. It’s not meaningful; it’s not, therefore, action. But suppose the story focuses on me and my struggle to understand an idea. When I hear the speaker’s words, I nod. That nod constitutes action if it changes my story.
What about emotion? Do stories really need emotion?
Absolutely. Emotions don’t just help people stay engaged. They also help people to understand. In fact, brain researchers have found that rational thought is not possible without emotion. The intellectual development of many autistics, to take one example, gets stuck when they cannot develop or express feelings.
Emotion compresses ideas. If I feel emotional when I visit my old primary school, it’s because that image distills all kinds of ideas—about my family, friends, childhood, hopes, fears, successes, failures, losses, and more. When I need to understand something about education, my emotions help me to organize my ideas.
4. Provide Details that Show Something New
Just as action arouse the reader, so do details. So what do we mean by details?
You could look at details at two levels. On one level, a detail refers to anything specific in a piece of writing. So if I describe a cafe, I might provide details about the tables, the aroma, the crowd, the murmurs of conversation, the interaction of customers and baristas, and so on. But there’s a problem.
Most readers could anticipate most of these details. But it doesn’t make sense to just tell the reader what she already knows. Readers want to learn something new, not get told what they already know. Readers want to be surprised.
So that’s the second level of details. To be effective, a detail requires some kind of surprise. As a writer, you need to discover new and fresh information and insights, something that adds to the reader’s knowledge. So before you include a detail in your descriptions, ask: Would this surprise the reader? Would it add something new to her knowledge or experience?
For inspiration, consider this passage from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables:
There were corpses here and there, and pools of blood on the pavement. I remember a white butterfly which went and came in the street. Summer does not abdicate.
The appearance of the butterfly in such a grim scene is surprising. But it makes sense. Whatever tragedy happens, life goes on. Look for the details that offer not just a surprise, but also a contrast–and which speak to the larger realities of life.
5. Organize Events Into a Narrative Spine.
The most important of all resolutions. In this day of blogging and cable TV shout programs, everyone has an opinion. Which is fine. But if you really want to capture your reader’s attention, tell a story. For most writing, you can tell stories at least once a page. If you tap into the reader’s hardwired love of narrative, you will be to explain even the most abstract concepts.
Put the reader in a time and place, with a character struggling to realize some goal and encountering resistance. Use concrete details. Try to inject at least one surprise in every paragraph of narrative.
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Aristotle, in The Poetics 2,500 years ago:
A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be.
An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it.
A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it.
A well-constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end haphazardly, but conform to these principles.
Dividing all drama into a beginning, middle, and end might seem simplistic. And many authors violate the rule. The French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once quipped: “A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” But for most stories—and for other kinds of communication as well—readers need a journey that moves through these stages.
6. Give Characters Props.
A simple object—a key prop in a classroom, a small knowable place—offers instant insight into a stern, dreaded primary school teacher.
Avery Chenoweth, a wonderful storyteller, told me he uses props to break out of writer’s block. “If I’m stuck, I get my characters to work with their hands–fixing a light bulb, changing a tire, anything sweaty and detailed that will get me into his or her skin. Being in that intensely focused problem transports me out of my chair and into the page.” But you don’t have to wait for writer’s block. Show a character working with his hands to start a scene or an analysis.
I realized the full power of the prop when listening to a radio interview with the economist Barry Bluestone. Talking to Tom Ashbrook of NPR’s “On Point,” Bluestone described working at a Ford plant in during his college summers in the 1960s. Bluestone brought an object for show-and-tell. “This is a two-barrel carburetor from 1964,” Bluestone announced, as if the audience could see. “It went into a Mustang and there’s a good chance that I built that thing.” Bluestone then recounted watching a worker at a McDonald’s restaurant a few days before. “I’m looking at a guy operating a fryolator and he’s going through the exactly same motions that I went through but he’s making one-fourth what I made.”
When I heard this, I was amazed. Simply bringing an object into the conversation, acting as if we listeners could see it, Bluestone activated the visual parts of our brains and our memories. He put us on that assembly line in Roseville, Michigan, and in that fast-food restaurant in Boston, Massachusetts. The power of props to enliven a scene—even when you can’t see them—is profound.
Wherever you set your story—at home or work, out in the larger world or on the road—create a container for the characters and action. Show the characters develop themselves there. Put objects around them; better yet, put objects in their hands.
Once your characters have established themselves in small, knowable places, they can venture into the big, unruly world outside.
7. Use Storytelling Techniques Even for Technical Subjects.
S.I. Hayakawa, a linguist who also served as a college president and a U.S. Senator, used the image of a ladder to explain the range of ideas that people need to use. At the low rungs, we see lots of detailed information-specific people, places, actions, and results. At the higher rungs of the ladder, we see abstract ideas—concepts like war, justice, fairness, and mind.
He called the “the ladder of abstraction.” And he explained that good communication requires climbing up and down the ladder, to talk at the appropriate level of specificity or generality.
I like to think of it this way. All writing is about storytelling. It’s just that some stories are on the lower rungs of the ladder—and others are at the higher rungs of the ladder.
Stories talk about particular people doing particular things in particular places at particular times, with particular results. So: Dorothy pined for a place “over the rainbow” after being shooed away by her aunt and uncle and attacked by an angry woman named Miss Gulch. Then a tornado came along and …
Analysis talks in categories, in generalities—at the higher runs of the ladder. Rather than talking about specifics, analysis gathers up whole batches of information to talk about how things tend to happen. Now think of Dorothy as just one of countless children.
So: Young people need to belong and feel special. When adults ignore or scold them, they dream of going someplace else. Not just Dorothy, but young people everywhere and all times. Not just Auntie Em and Uncle Henry and Miss Gulch, but all adults. Not just over the rainbow, but any kind of place far from the pains of growing up.
Get it? When you tell a story, get particular; when you analyze, generalize.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Mad Men is not only one of the greatest TV shows of all time. It’s also a guide to the techniques of persuasion. Here are a half-dozen of those techniques, arranged by the arc of life.
The Innocence of Babies: ‘You’ve Got the Cutest Little Baby Face’
In her new job at Cutler, Gleason, and Chaough, Peggy devises an ad campaign for Koss headphones. The ad shows a man in a toga, listening to music on headphones. The slogan: “Lend Me Your Ears.”
Then a comic’s appearance on “The Tonight Show” creates a crisis. The comic jokes about an Army G.I. in Vietnam who cut off the ears of Vietcong and created a necklace with the ears. The G.I. was court-martialed. The incident, symbolizing the brutality of the war, has gone viral.
And so late one December night, Peggy gets a call. The people at Koss are upset about the potential association of the headphones with the atrocity in Vietnam. The slogan “Lend Me Your Ears” has to go. Koss will air a commercial on the Super Bowl and needs a new campaign—right away.
At first, Peggy resists. “As horrible as this is,” she says, “I don’t think anyone has made this connection outside of this comedian.” But the client insists on a new campaign. So Peggy gets to work.
She brainstorms the way Don Draper taught her. She writes a letter to a friend, describing the product, , how it works, how it makes her feel, why she loves it so much. As she brainstorms, she gives the headphones to her boyfriend Abe and asks him to think of words that describe the experience.
As Abe gets carried away by the music, bobbing and swaying, she smiles. That image plants a seed.
Peggy and three of her underlings continue to work on the campaign on New Year’s Even Her boss Ted Chaough shows up to offer moral support. Peggy shows Ted an outtake of a shoot of a guy “clowning around” while listening to music on Koss headphones.
Peggy describes her latest idea: “I think you can show him with no sound, making these faces and no music and saying something like: ‘Koss headhones: ‘Sounds so sharp and clear you can actually see it.’”
Ted is immediately impressed. He likes it better than the “Lend Me Your Ears” campaign. “Makes me smile more than the original,” he says.
Tip: Evoke the Universal Appeal of a Baby
What will viewers of Peggy’s ad experience when they view the images of a pudgy, smiling man, softly rocking and swaying to the sounds from Koss earphones?
Subconsciously, they will see a cute baby. And that image will arouse feelings of attraction, a desire to approach and engage. Baby-like traits include a round face, high forehead, big eyes, and a small nose and mouth. Psychologists call this cuteness factor a “baby schema.”
Cute infants are rated as more likeable, friendly, healthy and competent than the less cute infants, an effect that may be mediated by the baby schema. Furthermore, cute infants are rated as most adoptable. The baby schema response can have behavioral consequences. For example, cute infants are looked at longer, and mothers of more attractive infants are more affectionate and playful. Other factors such as an infant’s behavior or the caretaker’s familiarity with the infant may also be important for adult’s evaluation of children. Nevertheless, our results show that baby schema in infant faces is an intrinsic trigger of cute- ness perception and motivation for caretaking. This effect generalizes to adult faces with enlarged eyes and lips who elicit more helping behavior than their mature counterparts.
As Linda Meisler and her associates found, the cuteness effect translates to the design of products. When a product has many of the same expressive traits as babies—like a Volkswagen Beetle or a Mini Cooper—people are attracted in the same ways they are attracted to babies.
Cuteness doesn’t just arouse people. It also prompts a need to dosomething. Consider an experiment by Yale graduate students Rebecca Dyer and Oriana Aragon. The psychology students presented 109 subjects with pictures of cute, funny, or normal animals. They asked the subjects how they wanted to respond after seeing the pictures. How much did they agree with statements like “I can’t handle it” and “Grr” and “I want to squeeze something”?
The cuter the image, the more respondents agreed with those statements about needing to act on their feelings.
Then, to test the response further, Dyer and Aragon conducted another experiment with 90 respondents. The purpose of the study, they told the subjects, was to test motor activity and memory. Dyer and Aragon gave subjects sheets of bubble wrap and told them to pop as many bubbles as they desired. Subjects viewing the cute images popped 120 bubbles; those viewing the neutral slides popped 1`00 in the same period of time, and those viewing the funny slides popped 80 bubbles.
In the right context, cuteness sells. If the Koss ad prompts automatic smiles, if it causes the viewer to want to approach the subject of the ad, it will cause people to at least consider getting headphones.
Peggy understands the power of this attachment to babylike cuteness. Remember the first season when Peggy gave birth and immediately gave up her baby for adoption? The nurse brought her the baby and asked her if she wanted to hold it. She refused. She knew that if she held the baby, she might want to keep it.
She knew the power of a baby to arouse uncontrollable feelings. And now she was using that power to sell earphones.
Help for the Overwhelmed Mother: Keep It Simple
The conclusion of Roman Polanski’s horror movie “Rosemary’s Baby” gives Peggy and Ted an idea for the St. Joseph’s Aspirin account.
In that scene, Rosemary has given birth to the devil’s baby. A crowd gathers in a living room to look at this unusual creature. An Asian man snaps pictures. Rosemary decides to raise the child, as best as she can, even though it is full of evil.
Peggy wants to depict Rosemary’s sense of being overwhelmed to sell St. Joseph’s children’s aspirin. The TV commercial will take the point of view of the baby, who is surrounded by forces trying to force themselves on him.
Peggy asks Don to sit down and pretend to be the baby in the commercial. Imagine, she says, feeling completely overwhelmed as a series of people press a solution on the infant with a headache or some other minor malady.
“What you need is a mustard plaster,” a crazy old lady, played by Peggy, says.
“You need a compress,” says a wrinkled old man, played by Ted.
“How ‘bout a bowl of chicken soup?” says an annoying nebbish neighbor.
One by one, the faces in the crowd press in on the baby. A Japanese man takes a picture, causing the scene to go white with the popping of the flashbulb.
Finally, the baby sees his radiant young mother. She holds out a St. Joseph’s aspirin. Ted intones the message of the ad: “You don’t need anyone’s help but St. Joseph’s.”
Tip: Find the One Thing to Overcome Overwhelm
Childbirth is a joyous occasion for new parents and their families. After months of anticipation, an innocent being enters the world. In a room filled with flowers and balloons and cards, the newborn coos and cries to the delight of loving family and friends. The miracle of birth touches even the most cynical among us.
Underneath those joys are (often) fear and pain and a sense of overwhelm. Most modern mothers usually do not have to worry about losing their baby or dying in childbirth. But childbirth can be a major operation, which requires both physical and psychological recovery. The famed doctor T. Berry Brazelton notes:
The immediate neonatal period is fraught with constant adjustment. Often she feels she has not fulfilled her ideal regarding delivery. … Any minor difficulty with the baby—psychological, psychophysiological—even the normal drowsiness of the newborn is blamed upon herself. These guilty feelings may obstruct her early adjustment. … Emotional depression joins forces with physiological depletion to produce the commonly recognized “blue period.”
Most young mothers—and fathers too—experience a feeling of being overwhelmed by the experience. Other people’s efforts to help them sometimes make young parents feel even more overwhelmed. In this time of transition, young parents welcome simple answers to their problems.
Peggy’s St. Joseph’s Aspirin pitch exploits young parents’ need for simplicity in a suddenly complicated life.
The ad depicts the infant as the overwhelmed character. Surrounded by busybody family and friends, the baby cries for help. That help comes when the baby’s mother—beautiful and radiant, who has nurtured the baby for months and now offers absolute love and sustenance—comes to the rescue. She holds out an aspirin made especially for children.
But make no mistake: It’s the mother who really needs the help that St. Joseph’s Aspirin offers. The mother needs to comfort this extension of herself—and to overcome the insecurity that comes with the awesome responsibility of motherhood.
Peggy has entered the most euphoric and scary moment in the mother’s life. She has stilled the noise with a simple offer of relief.
Tapping the Memories (and Projections) of Family
Kodak has invented a new device for projecting slidesonto a screen. It’s a wheel that holds the slides in slots, and turns around to capture one image at a time.
It’s a funny device—old-fashioned and cutting-edge at the same time.
Few inventions are older than the wheel. The wheel turns in countless machines—cars, engines, factories, shelving, doors.How much can you say about a wheel?
But at the same time, this wheel offers a great innovation. Until now, slide shows required placing one slide into the machine at a time. Making presentations was a clumsy process. It’s hard to produce a flow, to explain a sequence of ideas or tell a story, with those constant interruptions.
Now this new technology makes it easy to project a seamless, continuous show.
After much soul-searching—looking though old family photographs, reflecting on the passages of life—Don discovers the answer.
In his presentation to the Kodak executives, Don starts by discussing the lure of technology.
“Technology is a glittering lure. But there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product.”
Don tells about his first job, writing copy in-house for a fur company, he talks about his Greek boss, a man named Teddy, who extolled the virtues of “new” because it “creates an itch.”
So Don sets up the explanation of his idea not with an abstract discussion, but with a story, with a character the audience can picture right away. Who cares if Teddy actually existed—or if the ideas Don attributes to Teddy were his. Don is creating anticipation with his sentimental yarn about his mentor.
Teddy, Don says, also understood that newness can be trumped by a deeper value—nostalgia. “It’s delicate,” Don says, “but potent.”
Now Don signals to turn on the projector. As he turns toward the screen, he talks about the deep meaning of nostalgia.
“Nostalgia, in Greek, means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.”
Now Don gives a slide show of his own family—Don and Betty and Sally and Bobby—at a cookout, on Christmas morning, playing on the sofa, kissing.
“This device isn’t a space ship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards … forwards … it takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”
The images click, one after another, to illustrate the power of memory and longing, dreaming and loving.
Don connects this device to the merry-go-round in an amusement park or a county fair, which creates a never-ending swirl of smiles and memories. This merry-go-round symbolizes family, youth, innocence, and memory.
“It’s not called the wheel,” Don tells his stunned Kodak clients. “It’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels, round and around, back home again, to a place we know we are loved.”
Tip: To Understand Desire, Tap Into the Past
Nostalgia, the old quip goes, ain’t what it used to be.
In fact, it ain’t. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, doctors treated nostalgia as an illness. In the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, nostalgia was considered a mental disorder. But now research suggests that it might actually offer benefits.
Nostalgia, researchers say, happens in all cultures across history. It inspires art, music, architecture, understanding of history, teaching pedagogies, and much more. So it must offer some kind of help in understanding and navigating the world.
Nostalgia operates on three dimensions.
First, stories and artifacts of nostalgia often conjure up a specific person important to the community. In families, we think of a grandparent or a parent. In politics, we think of legendary personages like John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. In sports, we think of transformative figures like Babe Ruth or Vince Lombardi.
Second, nostalgia focuses on a specific place. Family homes, old buildings or stadiums, lakes and beaches, workplaces and bars—all burn images into our memories. When we talk nostalgically, we remember what the place looked like, sounded like, even smelled and felt like. It’s a total sensory experience.
Finally, nostalgia often revolves around a specific event. The most memorable events involve surprise. Birthdays, promotions, weddings, first dates become the stuff of nostalgia. So do formal ceremonies, which draw people from distant places. But routine events and rituals—Thanksgiving dinners, summers at the lake, bar mitzvahs—also tap our nostalgia.
Don Draper’s carousel pitch merges these three elements perfectly. His slides show people, places, and events that touch all families emotionally. The very process of sharing family pictures is itself a nostalgic act; people do it when they come together for special moments..
To connect the past with the future, understand the power of nostalgia.
What Matters: Glamor or Functionality?
Playtex has given the Mad Men a challenge: Make its practical, utilitarian bra sexy.
The men at Sterling Cooper theorize, like graduate students, the deeper meanings of the bra—identity, appearance and reality, psychology, and the power of the subconscious.
Paul Kinsey reports that Playtex “has an amazing bra, but it doesn’t take you anywhere.”
After a murmur of approval from Don, Paul continues his thesis on the psychology of women.
Women, he says, have fantasies—but they’re not fantasies of adventure, of travel or conquest. Instead, women fantasize about matters much closer to home. And they live those fantasies every day.
“It’s right here in America—Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe,” he says. “Every single woman is one of them.”
He walks the other Mad Men to the door for a peek into the vast open office space of the firm. Their eyes dart from one secretary to another. Here is a woman with brunette hair and a businesslike dress, like Jackie. There is a woman with blonde hair and a more suggestive dress. Jackie. Marilyn. Jackie. Jackie. Marilyn.
Don is impressed. Peggy is too, but she doesn’t see herself in either role.
“I don’t know if all women are a Jackie or a Marilyn,” she says. “Maybe men see them that way.”
Pete falls back on a standard chauvinist line—that women care only about pleasing men, so all products should be designed for men.
Sal distills the discussion.
“You’re a Jackie or a Marilyn,” he says. “A line or a curve. Nothing goes better together.”
Don later summarizes the thinking to Duck Phillips: “Jackie by day, Marilyn by night.”
Tip: Appeal to People’s Views of their Whole Selves
How we look at people depends on whether we see them as whole beings or as a collection of their body parts. We see figures like Jacqueline Kennedy as a whole—a refined, educated, charismatic wife, mother, and social icon. We see figures like Marilyn Monroe as a collection of body parts—lips, cheeks, hair, breasts, legs, and bottom.
Sexism—viewing women as less than complete, whole beings—results in part from this bias.
In an ingenious 2012 study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, research subjects viewed photographs of both men and women from the waist up. Then they viewed two more pictures—the original picture and another with one of the body parts altered in some way.
After looking at the pictures, respondents were asked which picture they had seen before. Men and women both identified the altered pictures of women by focusing on the body parts. They identified the altered pictures of men by looking at the whole pictures.
People look at objects in two ways—globally or locally. When we look globally, we see the whole image or idea; we might call this the right-brain or forest approach. When we look locally, we focus on the discrete parts of the picture or idea; we might call this the left-brain or trees approach.
The tendency to look at women locally—that is, to pay attention to their lips or breasts or hips or legs, rather than their whole body—objectifies women. It makes women important not for their whole selves, but for their pieces.
But all is not lost. In another experiment, the researchers showed subjects pictures of letters made up of collections of tiny letters—an H made up of lots of tiny T’s, for example.
When participants focused on the little pictures—all the T’s—they then viewed women as collections of body parts. But when they focused on the big picture—the single H—they viewed women as whole persons.
“Our findings suggest people fundamentally process women and men differently,” says the study, written by Sarah Gervais of the University of Nebraska and four colleagues. “But we are also showing that a very simple manipulation counteracts this effect, and perceivers can be prompted to see women globally, just as they do men. Based on these findings, there are several new avenues to explore.”
The upshot: With prompting, all of us can view women as Jacqueline Kennedys rather than as Marilyn Monroes.
Focus on What People Want, Not What They Fear: ‘It’s Toasted’
Don has been struggling for weeks to come up with a new idea for Lucky Strike.
Finally, Don has to deliver. But in his meeting with his Lucky Strike clients, Don’s doom deepens as they complain about U.S. regulators.
“Might as well be living in Russia,” says Lee Garner, Jr., the son of the company’s chairman.
“Damn straight,” his father says, as the smoky table breaks out in coughs.
Roger Sterling, the Mad Men’s silver-tongued front man, expresses concern for their plight. “Through manipulation of the media,” he says, people have a “misguided impression” that cigarettes cause death.
But that only angers the clients.
“Manipulation of the media? Hell, that’s what I pay you for!”
Not ready to make his presentation, Don stares at his notes.
Pete Campbell, the accounts manager who fears any unscripted moment, jumps in. He repeats a marketing consultant’s idea about making the “death wish” the driving idea of a campaign. “So what if cigarettes are dangerous,” he says. “You’re a man!”
That only enrages Lee Garner, the head of the company.
“Is that your slogan: ‘You’re going to die anyway, die with us?’ … Are you insane?”
The Lucky Strike clients begin to leave. Then, after a long silence, Don speaks.
The government’s ban on health claims, he says, might be a blessing, he says. It means that none of Lucky Strike’s competitors can make those bogus claims either.
The feds have cleared away all the confusing claims of cigarette manufacturers. Health claims, in fact, invite debate—they remind people of all the reports about cancer, emphysema, heart disease. Now, with the health claims gone, so are the reminders of tobacco’s deadly properties.
“This is the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal,” Don says.
A clever company—and its clever ad firm—can now grab market share with a clever campaign.
Don leaps up to the easel. He starts asking questions. How do you make Lucky Strikes?
Garner is unimpressed, but his anger has disappeared.
“We breed insect-repellant tobacco seeds,” he says, “plant them in the North Carolina sunshine, grow it, cut it, toast it—“
Don has what he needs.
He writes the following on the board:
LUCKY STRIKE. IT’S TOASTED.
Silence takes over the room. First incomprehension. Then recognition. Then excitement.
“It’s toasted.” That’s a fact. It contains no health claim. And yet it sounds so healthy, so natural.
The perfect end run around the whole controversy.
Tip: When the Truth Is Ugly, Reframe
People who face uncomfortable truths have two choices: They can face the issue directly or devise strategies of avoidance.
To face any issue directly, we need to be “mindful.” That is, we need to consider, openly, to all of the issues, concerns, fears, and conflicts of the matter at hand.
At the core of honesty/mindfulness is acceptance of even the scariest, most uncomfortable truths of life. Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the great teachers of mindfulness, says: “Mindfulness practice is really a love affair with what we might call truth …how things actually are, all embedded here in this very moment.”
So that’s one approach. The other approach is avoidance.
Avoidance is the opposite of a love affair with truth. It’s a fear or even hatred of truth. It’s a desire to deny and squelch all information that might challenge a difficult habit or idea. Here’s how a psychologist named Trish Bartley describes avoidance:
Avoidance is an almost universal response to painful experience. It is part of the behavioral repertoire available in the face of danger, where the body is physiologically primed to get into fight, flight, or freeze mode. Avoidance may be conscious or more automatic, and can operate at the level of cognition (deliberately not thinking about aspects of the diagnosis), behavior (avoiding situations that remind you of cancer), or affect (distracting oneself from negative emotions. At its extreme end, avoidance can become denial.…
Avoidance happens either directly or indirectly. Direct avoidance entails denying or swatting away the truth. Indirect avoidance entails simply pretending the truth doesn’t exist.
Most persuasion entails aspects of both truth and avoidance of truth. The most moral persuasion offers the audience information and insights that allow people to make the best decisions.
But self-interested persuasion—the approach that Don Draper is devising for his clients at Lucky Strike—is largely an exercise in avoidance.
That tobacco industry’s avoidance once took the form of outright lies, claiming that tobacco actually enhanced health. At other times it focused on the taste and physical pleasures, and at other times the social benefits. When health dangers arose, tobacco companies introduced innovations—like the filter tip and low-tar and low-nicotine brands—that promised (falsely) to provide a safer smoking experience.
Now, with the “toasted” campaign, Don simply changes the subject. “Toasted” sounds wholesome and natural. It doesn’t deny the health risks of smoking. But it gives the smoker an opportunity to avoid thinking about them.
The Need to Choose Authenticity: ‘It’s Not Ann-Margret’
A star was born in 1963. And what was obvious about her appeal—her busty, wholesome good looks—sometimes obscured the charisma that she brought to the silver screen.
The star, Ann-Margret, played a high school girl named Kim McAfee in the movie Bye, Bye Birdie. Kim won a competition to participate in the final performance of a rock star named Birdie, who has been drafted by the Army and is leaving to serve.
The high point of the film is its opening, when Ann-Margret sings a song written especially for the movie. Her energy—sexual but safe—bursts onto the screen.
Now Pepsico wants to use that excitement to sell Patio, its new diet soda. And so the executives at the soda company ask the Mad Men to adapt Ann-Margret’s effervescent scene to a commercial for Patio.
After showing the opening scene to Don, Peggy asks whether Ann-Margret’s voice is “shrill.”
“She’s throwing herself at the camera,” Don says. “It’s pure. It makes your heart hurt.”
The Mad Men find an Ann-Margret type, film her homage to the “Bye, Bye Birdie” number, and show the clients their work.
“Bye, bye, sugar!” the alluring young woman in the commercial croons. “Hello, Patio!”
But when the lights go up, there’s an uneasiness in the room.
“I don’t know, this isn’t what I thought it would be,” the client says. “There’s something not right about it. I can’t put my finger on it.”
“It’s an exact copy, frame for frame,” accounts manager Ken Cosgrove protests.
“I’m sorry, I wish I could explain it but it’s just not right,” the client responds.
After the clients leave the room, Harry Crane agrees with the clients: “It’s true. It’s not right. It doesn’t make any sense. It looks right, sounds right, smells right. Something’s not right. What is it?”
Roger understands the ineffable quality of charisma. He looks at his young ad man. “It’s not Ann- Margret,” he says, arching an eyebrow and walking away.
Tip: Know What’s Authentic
How do we know what’s authentic? It’s something that we feel, deep down, based on a lifetime of experiences with real and fake things. And experts can tell in the blink of an eye.
Consider the kouros that an art dealer named Gianfranco Becchini tried to sell to the Getty Museum—until, in a blink, experts on art warned was a fake.
A kouros is a Greek statue that dates back six centuries before Christ. Archaologists have found only 200 of these relics, so another would be a great find.
When Becchini offered to sell the statue for $10 million, the Getty inspected the relic. Becchini offered documents to verify its authenticity. The Getty hired a geologist to inspect the statue. Using the latest equipment, the expert concluded that the statue was genuine. It was made of dolomite marble and it was coated with a layer of calcite—just what you would expect with an old object like this. The people at the Getty were giddy.
But when the statue went on display, art experts immediately suspected something was wrong. Federico Zeri sensed something about the statue’s fingernails that didn’t seem right. Evelyn Harrison intuited that something was amiss in the first split-second she saw it. Thomas Hoving instantly thought it looked “fresh” for a 2,600-year-old relic. Geogios Dontas said he “felt as though there was a glass between me and the work.”
Something in these experts subconscious told them the kouros was a fraud. Their collective centuries of experience working with ancient art burned images into the brains of what an authentic one looked like. They didn’t have to think to know; in fact, thinking might have undermined their assessment. And this statue didn’t pass muster.
Malcolm Gladwell recounts the case of the fake kouros in Blink, which argues that people make smart decisions without thinking. In a wide range of situations—gambling, chicken farming, marital relations, hiring decisions—people can make good decisions in a snap.
That’s why the Patio representative didn’t like the Ann-Margret lookalike. Superficially, she looked and sounded like Ann-Margret. But there’s only one Ann-Margret.
Creating Ersatz Family in a Distracted Age
To overcome it, embrace it. —Nietzsche
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. —William Butler Yeats
What happens when groups fall apart? When the anchor gets pulled away? And how can the center be restored in a time of tumult?
Those are the key issues at play as Don Draper struggles to become relevant once more in Mad Men’s mythical advertising agency Sterling Cooper and Partners, just as Peggy Olson struggles to find a pitch for a fast food restaurant.
Sterling Cooper loses its mojo when Draper, its creative mastermind, Don Draper, is banished from the company and then brought back only to be humiliated and marginalized.
Lots of creative people still work at the agency. Peggy has a first-class mind; as Pete says in his ever-insulting way, “You know, she’s every bit as good as any woman in this business.” Stan’s got his own creative chops. Ginsberg is a genius—that is, until his paranoid schizophrenia kicks in and he begins to imagine conspiracies in the VW-size IBM computer humming in the glass room.
But every team needs a leader, someone who not only has the brains to solve problems, but also creates a guiding vision and makes everyone better. That’s Don. But because of his boozing, self-destructive ways, he has been dislodged from his leading role in the firm. Now, even though he’s still a partner, he is a minion whom other partners humiliate at every turn. Even his protege Peggy looks down on him.
Now Peggy is leading the creative process for the Burger Chef campaign. Burger Chef is one of the many McDonald’s wannabes. To grow, it needs an identity. It needs to speak to people’s inner longings the way McDonald’s does. It needs to come to mind when distracted and harried Americans need to eat but don’t want to cook or even take TV dinners out of the fridge.
Peggy comes up with an idea aimed at the era’s frazzled mother: Make Burger Chef an expression of love. “All the research points to the fact that mothers feel guilty,” Peggy explains in her pitch to Lou Avery, SC’s new creative director. “And even when they get home they’re embarrassed. Our job is to turn Burger Chef into a special treat, served with love.”
Somehow, Peggy says, “we need to give mothers permission” to take the easy way out and order a bag of fast-food burgers and fries. To Lou, the answer is simple: “Well, who gives moms permission? Dads.”
Peggy’s TV commercial shows a mom in a car with her two kids. The mom is talking to herself about all the things that need to be done: Let’s see. Check that list for the marching band fundraiser. Get the sink trap checked. Get Jim to take down the storm windows…. Then, as she realizes that her husband’s about to get home, the kids start complaining that they’re hungry. “One more stop,” mom announces. Then, as if in a dream, a handsome man comes bearing a bag full of Burger Chef food—and then kisses her deeply. It’s Jim, the husband! Triumph!
The idea is forced, but Lou is too witless to know and Don knows that he can’t speak up. Later Don suggests changing the POV from the mother to the kids. Still resentful and scornful of Don, Peggy rejects Don’s idea as “terrible.” But she’s got this nagging feeling that her own pitch is terrible too.
How can Peggy get the Burger Chef pitch right?
Working on a weekend, Peggy is surprised to see Don come into the office. She dismisses him for presuming to save the day. “Did you park your white horse outside?” she huffs. “Spare me the suspense and tell me what your save-the-day plan is.”
Don has no plan, but he knows how to start over. And so Don and Peggy start brainstorming a new concept.
Now, over the course of the episode, all of the characters in this drama look more alone than ever. Megan leaves for L.A. after a brief visit. Pete’s estranged wife avoids him, his child barely recognizes him, and his new amour leaves for L.A. Joan rejects Bob’s foolish proposal. No one’s happy. No one belongs to the kind of family these ad gurus celebrate in commercials. And Peggy, who sleeps alone every night and gets testier by the day, is full of regrets.
“Does this family exist anymore? Are there people who eat dinner and smile at each other instead of watching TV?” She’s pensive. “What the hell do I know about being a mom?” Peggy’s just turned 30 and now frets about never making her own family.
Don admits his own worries: “That I never did anything … and that I don’t have anyone.”
“What did I do wrong?” Peggy asks.
“You’re doing great,” Don says.
Finally, after letting down her guard and getting in touch with her real feelings, Peggy has the ability to follow Don’s advice earlier in the scene. “You can’t tell people what they want,” Don told her. “It has to be what you want.”
So Peggy asks: “What if there was a place where there was no TV and you could break bread and whoever you were sitting with was family?”
She’s finally got her campaign.
At the heart of the best Mad Men stories beats an existential truth. The truth of this story was expressed best by Orson Welles: “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone,” Welles said. “Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.”
That’s the foundation for Peggy’s new Burger Chef campaign. The fast-food joint isn’t just for takeout. It’s a third place, between work and home. It’s a gathering place for family, friends, classmates, colleagues, everyone. The traditional family might be disintegrating in the heat of the 1960s, but the core need for companionship—to overcome the aloneness of life—remains.
Peggy and Don introduce the idea to Pete at a Burger Chef restaurant. “Look around,” Peggy says as she parcels out cokes and burgers. “I want to shoot the ad in here.”
“It’s not a home,” Pete grumps.
“It’s better,” she says. “It’s a clean, well-lighted place. … It’s about family. Every table there is the family table.”
And so the three of them—whose only true family is each other—eat their meal. In a scene reminiscent of Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” the three are alone, together.
Finding Your Zen Set Point: ‘I’d Like to Sell the World a Coke’
Don Draper’s journey has been a long one, from the bloodshed of Korea to the hustling of New York to the utopian promise of California.
By 1970, Don’s lies and betrayals have caught up with him. He has failed in two marriages. He remains close to his daughter Sally but barely knows his sons. People he cares about have died, at least one because of him. He heard about another, the department store heiress Rachel Mencken, only because a model in a casting call rekindled his lust. His value, as an ad man, is his ability to extract the hope and joy from life’s tragedies and ugliness long enough to turn them into a pitch. Now it looks like he’s lost that ace card.
So Don takes a road trip. He first tries to track down a waitress who he had a short affair with. His lies don’t fool her ex-husband. His standard practice—to use his charm to win people over, until he gets bored or scared and drifts away—doesn’t work. So he goes further west. He arrives at the home of the real Don Draper, the one from whom Dick Whitman stole an identity and a ticket home from the war. There he meets Stephanie, the real Don’s daughter, who has endured tragedies of her own. Stephanie takes him north, to an esalen retreat in northern California. This is not a comfortable place for Don. Here, people speak unspeakable truths. When a woman attacks Stephanie in an encounter group, she flees. The next morning, she is gone. She takes Don’s car, so he is stuck at the retreat for two or three more days.
The guilt that Don has been carrying—for all his life as Don—leads him to despair. He calls Peggy. She’s angry. Where the hell have you been? Get back here! Don’t you want to work on the Coke account? But another account is far from where Don want to be right now. He cracks.
“I messed everything up. I’m not the man you think I am,” he says. Peggy’s confused. She knows about his philandering and alcoholism, but not about growing up in a whorehouse, going AWOL in a war, or stealing another man’s identity.
“I broke all my vows. I scandalized my child. I took another man’s name. And made … nothing of it.”
After saying goodbye to Peggy—is he going to commit suicide?—a sympathetic woman brings Don to another encounter group. Here he listens to an anti-Don—a loyal, reliable, unremarkable, unnoticed, and unappreciated normal—who breaks down because he is invisible to everyone in his life. Don walks across the room and embraces him. The two cry. For the first time, maybe ever, Don can hear and care about another person on that person’s own terms.
In the next scene we see Don, sitting lotus style, on the edge of a hill. Dozens of others sit nearby. A bell chimes. The gathered, all together chant their mantra: Ommmm. For a flash, a Mona Lisa smile crosses Don’s face.
Fade to one of the iconic television advertisements of all time—Coca-Cola’s “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony).”
What just happened? Matthew Weiner, the creator and head writer for Mad Men, obviously wants to maintain some room for debate. Maybe Don, having found peace—if only for a brief ommm—has decided to pursue a new life of enlightenment. But then, as he contemplates the oneness of the world at a time of war and riot and “ credibility gaps,” imagines people of all ages, races, creeds joining together. What brings them to gather is sharing a Coke, the modern equivalent of breaking bread.
I’d like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony.
I’d like to hold it in my arms
And keep it company.
Or maybe not. Maybe Don embraces the communal life, while Peggy and the other creatives at McCann Erickson dream up the Coke ad. Maybe Don sheds his fake identity, befriends the invisible man, joins in a new communal life . . . We’ll never know. After all, it’s an ambiguous ending, right?
(Well, maybe not. Creator/director/writer Matt Weiner explains his final episode in this interview.)
If Don does in fact go from an experience of oneness to masterminding an ad campaign that exploits the longing for oneness, what are we to think of him? That he’s just a cynical con man? That, on the edge of enlightenment, he can’t stand the truth and needs to return to his life of lies? Maybe. But Edward Boches, an ad man and professor at Boston University, has a different idea:
“Somehow Matthew Weiner actually understands the motives that drive creative people,” he says. “They need to create. They can’t stop. They can doubt themselves. They can try to escape. They can question the value and purpose of what they do, but the never-ending urge to make something creative that solves a problem never goes away. And when a good idea comes? You have to see it through.”
Bird fly, fish swim, creators create. Don Draper finds himself—truly finds himself—when he creates something fresh and new. Fulfillment comes not from sitting on a hill, vibrating, but by doing something that changes the way people experience life.
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Jordan Peterson is a modern Mark Twain or Charles Dickens.
You might think of him as the bestselling author of The 12 Rules for Life or as the controversial opponent of speech-control laws in Canada or as the YouTube sensation who has challenged us all to buck up and take responsibility for what we do with our lives. He is all that and he is also an original thinker who blends psychology, philosophy, and spiritual texts in order to face up to the challenges of modernity.
But his real power comes from storytelling. And like Twain and Dickens, he has brought this power to the lecture circuit. I was lucky enough to see him in a recent appearance in Connecticut.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Scientists have the stereotype of brainy figures with a penchant for abstraction.
Medical researchers study microscopic processes that require special tools and powers of deduction—abstract stuff for anyone. Science is, after all, an unbiased search for truth, a world of abstraction, proofs, and testing. In lab work, scientists seek to identify how the world works, piece by piece.
Pretty dry stuff, eh? No, not really.
In fact, the best researchers often rely on stories to understand the complexities of their research. By understanding their petri dishes as great stages, with dramas that unfold the suspense of a thriller, they can better explore the phenomena of the world.
Every experiment provides dramas with vivid characters with goals, conflicts, and setbacks. And groundbreaking research creates the kind of cliffhangers and surprises that would make Agatha Christie or Alfred Hitchcock proud.
Years ago, I talked with medical researchers at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. My goal was to learn about the power of narrative in research. Here’s what I found out.
Machines, Parts and Wholes
For Rodolfo Llinas, it’s impossible to understand the intricacies of the human body without remembering old stories and constructing new stories.
Dr. Llinas, , the Thomas and Suzanne Murphy Professor of Neuroscience and chairman of NYU’s Department of Physiology and Neuroscience, remembers the time, as a child, visiting his grandfather at his psychiatry practice. Young Rodolfo witnessed a patient having a seizure. “I thought he was going to die,” Dr. Llinas said.
“There’s something wrong with the man’s brain,” his grandfather told him. That statement posed questions that Llinas has investigated his whole career. Is the brain separate from our being? Or is the brain, in essence, the whole self? How do we understand how the brain operates?
As a boy, then, Dr. Llinas discovered an approach to problem-solving that would help him understand the brain. He began thinking of the brain–and all of life itself–as a complex machine that can be understood by taking it apart and putting it together again. Soon he disassembled the family’s Victrola and reassembled it. “All of these parts by themselves had no property,” he recalled. “But as a whole, they would make music.”
Rebuilding the machine helped Llinas appreciate its “elegance.” Simple outside, it was complex inside. “Once you understand something at that level,” he explains, “it’s yours.” The Victrola gave the aspiring scientist confidence—and a metaphor for research.
“The universe is understandable,” he says. “There are some unknowns, but it’s not mysterious.”
Metaphor and Suspense
Like Llinas, other researchers also turn to metaphors and stories to find answers amid mountains of data. In their quest for groundbreaking knowledge, researchers often find insight in the ordinary. They seek out surprises and evidence against their arguments. And while digging deep in their own specialties, they also look for ways to connect their work with other scientific puzzles.
Llinas’s colleague Gordon Fishell also makes sense of data by comparing it to other things and putting it in a drama. “At the end of the day, the scientist is a storyteller,” he says. “In prehistoric times, cave dwellers didn’t have a hell of a lot to do but tell stories. Whoever holds the big stick gets to talk. You get to hold it as long as you hold the audience.”
Research, he says, creates a similar kind of suspense. Researchers ask tough questions and develop a collection of answers—some right and some wrong. In their labs, at conferences, and in their writing, they “iterate stories.” In this process, the wrong answers are just as important as the right ones, for they force you to think harder.
Surprise–Or Not
At conferences, Fishell makes a practice of guessing what speakers are going to say. “If people go through details and I know where the story’s going, I’m bored. I’m more interested when they say, ‘We did this, but didn’t get the result.’”
The willingness to make mistakes—countless ones—is what enables researchers to reach. “Whether you’re Spike Lee or Ingmar Bergman or a scientist, it’s all the same,” says Fishell. “Creative people create.” Suspense drew Susan Schwab, assistant professor of pathology at NYU, from one field to another.
Schwab avoided biology because she considered it little more than “memorizing names and pathways.” But as a graduate student in environmental science at the University of California at Berkeley, she could not understand the aerodynamics of fine particulates as a cause of childhood asthma. So she took an undergraduate biology class “it was basically the coolest thing I ever experienced.” The professor, Nalabh Shastri, made the mystery of learning his touchstone.
“His biology was one of how do we know what we know,” Schwab says. Stories are only as good as their surprises, Fishell and Schwab said. At conferences, Fishell says, he makes a practice of guessing what speakers are going to say. “There’s a rhythm to it,” he said. “People are going through details, and I know where story’s going. But I’m bored if that’s what they do. I’m more interested when they say, ‘We did this but didn’t get the result.’”
The suspense starts before experimentation begins. “There’s suspense about whether you’re going to get the right tools to ask the question–whether you’re going to be able to do the right experiment.” As a staffer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, Schwab sought to show that the organization’s policy stances were right. Now she seeks to disprove her own ideas.
Proving–and Disproving–Hypotheses
“It’s very important that you are always working to disprove your hypothesis,” she says. “It helps to have a nice neat picture or story and hope you’re always working to disprove it.”
Evgeny Nudler, a biochemistry professor at NYU, says hypotheses are best considered steps toward finding something else. “You start researching on thing, you get a result that you can’t explain, and you have two choices—either pursue or forget about it. The unexpected result is the most interesting thing in the end.” At its best, one narrative spins off new narratives, says Nudler.
Colleagues sometimes criticize him for “a lack of focus,” Nudler says. But intellectual wandering lead the lab in new directions and inform the continuing work of old projects.
One spinoff project involved the transcription process that controls blood pressure and erections—and contributed to the development of Viagra. “I’m interested in hardcore biochemistry,” Nudler says. However elaborate and far-reaching the narratives of their work, Fishell and Schwab say, scientists ultimately need to follow their subjects’ leads.
The Challenge of Observation
“There’s a quote I read somewhere, we can never do an experiment, we can only hope through careful observation that nature will reveal its secrets,” Fishell says. But only to acute observers. “It really matters who’s doing the experiments,” Schwab said. “Things are pretty subtle. The best experiments are always viewing and looking at each stage until you notice things. Even if you use genetically identical mice, there’s always going to be variation, and so having somebody who can watch carefully” is essential.
The drama never ends. “You’re getting clues all the time,” Schwab says.
Narrative Medicine: A Growing Movement
If you take the 1, 2, or 3 trains to Morningside Heights, you’ll see this narrative approach not just in research, but also in the care of patients. Rita Charon, a doctor at Columbia University, developed the practice of “narrative medicine” when she struggled to understand a difficult patient.
Dr. Charon remembers the moment when she became the doctor she was meant to be. Early in her career, Charon did not always take the time to understand her patients’ lives and problems. Then along came a patient named Luz. When Luz complained about headaches, Dr. Charon prescribed acetaminophen. Later Luz asked Dr. Charen to fill out paperwork for disability benefits. Rushing to an appointment, Dr. Charon signed the forms.
But she wondered about Luz’s plans. She imagined that Luz might be abusing the system. Dr. Charon felt guilty about her brusque treatment of Luz. So she asked Luz to come in for a visit.
Luz then explained her real reasons for seeking disability benefits. The oldest of five girls, who lived with her father and uncle in Yonkers, Luz had suffered sexual abuse since she was twelve years old. Now that she was twenty-one, she wanted to rent an apartment in Manhattan and care for her sisters. She wanted to spare them the abuse she had experienced.
After learning Luz’s real story, Dr. Charon enlisted social workers, emergency shelters, and support groups to work with Luz. She helped Luz find a Manhattan apartment and also cared for her dying father. Oh, yes: Dr. Charon also continued to be Luz’s physician.
That experience, Rita Charon says, convinced her of the need for doctors to make storytelling a part of their care for patients. It’s not enough, she decided, to isolate symptoms and disease for treatment. It’s also not enough to analyze patterns of behavior, like diet, exercise, and relationships.
To provide care, doctors need to understand their patients’ stories. Doctors need to know how their patients got from Point X to Point Y before they can help them go to Point Z. And so Dr. Charon has become a leading figure in “narrative medicine,” a movement to get doctors to write and tell stories about their experiences. Telling stories can transform the way we care for people.
We live in an age when people’s unique stories get lost in the maw of bureaucracy and technology. Professionals in all fields—medicine, law, business, and education—follow complex rules and procedures but do not always understand the people they work with. Administrators, meanwhile, swim in an ocean of statistics and procedures, isolated from the larger dramas of life.
But when you engage people in stories, you give them something to grasp to make sense of their situations. Stories offer all of us—not just doctors and patients, but all of us—an approach to create richer lives for ourselves. Stories make us human; they make us whole. Stories might not make all things possible. But they give all possible things a chance to come true.
A Dangerous Backlash Against Medical Narrative
Peter Kramer, the author of Listening to Prozac and other popular medical works, writes passionately in The New York Times about the power of stories to guide medical care. Despite the rise of narrative medicine, Kramer says, the medical profession has in recent years rejected storytelling as unscientific, irrelevant, and even dangerous.
“In the past 20 years, clinical vignettes have lost their standing,” he says. “For a variety of reasons, including a heightened awareness of medical error and a focus on cost-cutting, we have entered an era in which a narrow, demanding version of evidence-based medicine prevails. As a writer who likes to tell stories, I’ve been made painfully aware of the shift. The inclusion of a single anecdote in a research overview can lead to a reprimand, for reliance on storytelling.”
But stories often clarify issues better than screens of chi-square, regression, and other data.
Kramer tells the story of a man who, in 1954, was hospitalized for panic attacks. Treatments failed. He slipped into decades of substance abuse and depression. Then in 1995, at age 70, the man sought psychiatric treatment when he became suicidal. The doctor treated him with Zoloft. After six weeks, his suffering faded. He lived 19 more years–happily.
So what does this story prove? Nothing, at least definitively. But it does suggest something about the possibilities of treatment, the dangers of mistreatment, and the need to care for each patient on his own terms.
Stories, more than statistics, can touch the deepest part of people’s being. When people read case studies, they see themselves. So they can feel less alone, more hopeful. They can redouble their resolve to find answers.
In a sense, stories are part and parcel of statistics. A single story represents just a single data point, so in that sense it’s insignificant. But a collection of stories is a sample, properly organized, becomes data. With data, we can work toward scientific knowledge. We need more than one story–or two, five, ten, 20, or 100 stories–to draw definitive conclusions. But stories do offer a start–for conversation, questioning, theorizing, and understanding. We dismiss the power of stories at our own peril.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Branding is essentially a merger of storytelling and promise-making.
Here, the advertiser/brander says to the audience: Experience this moment, this sensation, this satisfaction.
Now, put yourself in that moment. Get in that world. Anticipate it. Feel it. Get sensual.
Rinse, repeat.
A brand is a story that the audience #experiences automatically. It’s an experience that is so positive and so reliable that it becomes Pavlovian.
Experiencing a great brand is like experiencing the Fourth of July. Christmas Eve. Wedding-day jitters. The first child. A golden wedding anniversary. Graduation. Opening Day.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
So how does Pixar find its pixie dust? Magic? Inspiration? The Law of Attraction? Um, nope.
It’s hard, grinding work, with the insistence on getting all the big things — and all the little things — right. The process can hurt some precious feelings along the way. But it works.
The storyboard artist Emma Coats has revealed the 22 rules of storytelling that produced hits like Inside Out, Onward, The Incredibles, and more.
We can assume, given its raft of megahits, that the Pixar people know how to translate these narrative tricks into screen gold. But what if you need help applying storytelling skills into words?
In my book The Elements of Writing, I not only offer storytelling techniques, but also techniques for writing, style, and editing. How you express the story–in words–determines whether the characters and story come to life.
You can get a sense of my system with this outline ofThe Elements of Writing. After listing the writing skill, I offer a case study showing how to apply the skill. Most of the case studies come from great literature, film, and journalism.
The Core Idea—The Golden Rule of Writing
• Make Everything a Journey: Brent Staples’s “Black Men in Public Space’
• Start Strong, Finish Strong: William Nack’s Secretariat
• Take the Landscape View: Applying the Landscape View
Act I: Storytelling
1. Narrative
• Give Your Story a Narrative Arc: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood
• For Complexity, Show More Than One Arc: Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power
• Show Characters Hitting Brick Walls: Homer’s The Odyssey
• Nest Journeys Inside Journeys: Andre Agassi’s Open
2. Characters
• Compile Dossiers for Your Characters: Sherlock Holmes
• Explore Characters’ Lives, Zone by Zone: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Find Your Characters’ Throughlines: Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement
• Use the Wheel of Archetypes: L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (55
• Spin the Wheel of Archetypes: Gregory Maguire’s Wicked
3. World of the Story (69
• Create Small, Knowable Places: Emma Donaghue’s Room
• Map the Character’s “Circles of Life”: Gay Talese’s ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’
• Use Place to Explain Character and Ideas: Robert Caro’s The Path To Power
• Use Place to Explore Identity: Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Silent Dancing
• Place Stories in a Larger World: Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep
4. Action and Scenes
• Depict Specific, Deliberate Actions: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men
• Use Speech-Acts to Propel the Story: William Shakespeare’s Othello
• Build Actions into Scenes: William Shakespeare’s Macbeth
• Create a Mystery to Surprise the Reader: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
5. Rhythm and Beats
• Use beats to Move Stories Forward: Casablanca
• Use Beats For Descriptions: Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass
• Yo-Yo Scene and Summary:Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘Lucky Jim’
6. Details
• Find Details By Looking Inside-Out: Isabel Chenoweth’s ‘Hanging Out’
• Isolate Details to Make Big Points: The New York Times ‘Portraits in Grief’
• Use Status Details to Reveal Ego and Desire: Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full
• Put Details into Action: Journalism fragments
Intermission: On Style
7. The Senses
• Help the Reader to Feel: Scott Russell Sanders’s ‘Under the Influence’
• Help the Reader to See: Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi
• Help the Reader to Hear: Varieties of Onomatopoeia
8. Wordplay
• Tap Into Life’s Everyday Rhythms: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
• Use Metaphors and Similes to Orient and Disorient: Rick Reilly and Thomas Lunch
• Riff by Playing with Words: Roy Blount Jr.’s Alphabet Juice
• Remember that Good is Great: Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House
9. Numbers
• Use Ones to Highlight People, Places, and Issues: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead
• Use Twos to Establish Oppositions and Complements: The Yankees-Red Sox rivalry
• Use Threes to Reveal Dynamic Relations: Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters
• Use Lists to Show Complexity: Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried
Act II: Mechanics
10. Sentences
• Follow the Golden Rule for Sentences: Coverage of national Crises
• Give Every Sentence Clear Blasts: Ringo Starr and the Beatles
• Create Revolver Sentences: Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage
• Make Some Sentences More Complicated: Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence
• Alternate Short and Long Sentences: Ernest Hemingway’s journalism
11. Words
• Use Simple Words, Almost Always: John McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy and In Suspect Terrain
• Use Longer Words as Precision Instruments: The American Sesquipdalian
• Use Active Verbs, Even to Describe Passivity: Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken and Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov
• Avoid the Verbs To Be and To Have: Using ‘to be’ and ‘to have’
• Avoid Bureaucratese and Empty-Calorie Words: George Orwell’s ‘The Politics of the English Language’
• Avoid Aggressive Adjectives and Adverbs: Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Girl of the Year’
12. Paragraphs (223)
• Make Every Paragraph an “Idea Bucket”: Journalism fragments
• Follow the Golden Rule in Every Paragraph: James Van Tholen’s ‘Surprised by Death’
• ‘Climb the Arc’ in Most Paragraphs: Martin Luther King’s ‘Mountaintop’ speech
13. Composition
• Make Every Piece a Journey: Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie
• Find the Right Shape: The Bill Clinton story
• Slot Your Paragraphs: Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Terrazzo Jungle”
• Make Transitions Virginia Wolff’s ‘Ellen Terry’
Intermission: Technical Procedures
14. Grammar
• Make Sure the Parts of Speech Get Along: Approaches to the his/her problem
• Use Punctuation to Direct Traffic: Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power
• Select the Right Word: William Safire’s ‘On Language’
15. Editing
• Search and Destroy, From Big to Small: Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
• Fix Problem Paragraphs With Tabloid Headlines: John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty
• Edit by Reading Aloud and Backward: C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves
• Murder Your Darlings: Raymond Carver’s ‘One More Thing’
• Use Beats to Make Arguments: On the Electoral College System
• Use Cliffhangers to Drive Analysis: Barry Bluestone’s ‘The Inequality Express’
• Use the Senses in Arguments and Rhetoric: Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a Dream’ Oration
• Allow Ideas To Unfold, One by One: ‘Falling Man’
17. Questions and Brainstorming
• To Get Started, Spill Your Mind: Brainstorming nonviolence
• Ask This-or-That and W Questions: Brian Lamb’s interviewing techniques
• Always Ask: What Causes What?: What’s the ‘best’ form of government?
18. Framing
• Use Testimony of Experts and Others: The Debate Over Global Warming
• Consider Hypotheticals and Scenarios: Social contract theorists
• Find a Super Model to Guide Analysis: Super models of social science
19. Making a Case
• Climb the “Ladder of Abstraction”: Garrison Keillor’s Lena and Ole Joke
• Identify and Operationalize Variables: The causes of fatigue
• Crunch the Numbers: Edward Glaeser on Urban Vitality
• Play the Game of Halves: Exploring the causes of war
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
How does creativity happen? Is it, as some would say, a mystical process somehow connected to muses and gods? Or is it a process of grinding, getting up every day and working on the pieces so you can eventually put those pieces into a meaningful whole?
This is, of course, a false dichotomy. It’s not a matter of either/or. It’s both. So we need to understand how the mystical and the grinding come together.
One hint comes from something Linda Ronstadt said long ago: “In committing to artistic growth, you have to refine your skills to support your instincts.”
Or, to quote Louis Pasteur, “chance favors the prepared mind.”
1. Decide on a Plan
To build anything — a bridge, a treehouse, a casserole, a story — you need the right materials and the right skills. It takes a long time to develop the skills. The noted psychologist Anders Ericsson calculates that it takes 10,000 hours of focused, intent work to achieve mastery over a skill. It’s not just practice, practice, practice. It’s practice intently, practice open-heartedly, practice curiously.
I once met a banker named Stanley Lowe who was active in inner-city neighborhood revitalization and historic preservation. For Lowe, good intentions were never enough. Whenever do-gooders offered an idea for a project, he would challenge them: “What’s the plan?”
Without a plan, you don’t have much.
Writing well requires a vast trove of skills. Writers need to master the basic elements of the craft — sentences and paragraphs, grammar, punctuation, quoting, asking good questions, breaking down evidence, finding the right words, observing, sequencing ideas and images, zig-zagging back and forth from scene to summary, and much more.
Anyone can write reasonably well if they can write a great sentence. Nothing matters more than the sentence, as Ernest Hemingway explains in A Moveable Feast:
Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, … I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.
Contrary to mystics who say that writing is a gift from the gods, bestowed on a lucky few, writing can be taught. I can spend an hour with anyone and show them how to write better and faster, right away. I can show anyone how to write “one true sentence” … and then another and another. After that, it’s up to you.
For you to master this and other skills, you must practice intently, as Ericsson says. You must practice in all kinds of contexts, with all kinds of subjects. You must practice with an open mind. You must realize that everything you write needs revision and editing. You must not be discouraged, but instead more determined, by that basic reality.
So burn all the necessary writing skills into your brain. I have identified 81 specific “elements” of writing. That’s my list. Yours might be 97 or 42. Whatever. You can master a whole raft of techniques and apply them to all kinds of challenges.
You can and must, as Ronstadt says, refine your skills. Or, as Pasteur says, prepare your mind.
Then what?
This is when it gets interesting.
2. Let Go
Now it’s play time. Now it’s time to let your imagination, your subconscious, direct you. In this process, mind and soul blend together. Here’s how William Faulkner’s mindsoul worked:
It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
Passages like this encourage the mystic’s point of view, that writing is a gift of the gods proffered to a lucky few. But if you know anything about Faulkner or any other great writers (or even just good writers), you know that they work hard. They get up every morning and grind. When they want to quit, they don’t. When they experience writer’s block, they step away, like Hemingway, and reframe their problem.
But when you’ve done the hard work and struggled, mystical stuff does happen. And there’s even a process for that. Here’s how George Saunders describes the process:
A guy (Stan) constructs a model railroad town in his basement. Stan acquires a small hobo, places him under a plastic railroad bridge, near that fake campfire, then notices he’s arranged his hobo into a certain posture – the hobo seems to be gazing back at the town. Why is he looking over there? At that little blue Victorian house? Stan notes a plastic woman in the window, then turns her a little, so she’s gazing out. Over at the railroad bridge, actually. Huh. Suddenly, Stan has made a love story. Oh, why can’t they be together? If only “Little Jack” would just go home. To his wife. To Linda.
What did Stan (the artist) just do? Well, first, surveying his little domain, he noticed which way his hobo was looking. Then he chose to change that little universe, by turning the plastic woman. Now, Stan didn’t exactly decide to turn her. It might be more accurate to say that it occurred to him to do so; in a split-second, with no accompanying language, except maybe a very quiet internal “Yes.”
He just liked it better that way, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, and before he’d had the time or inclination to articulate them.
Once the process of creation begins, it exerts its own power. The deeper you get into a story, the more detailed you must be. Every detail does two things. First, it makes everything more real and compelling. No one (except ideologues) gets excited about generalities. But everyone can get intrigued by real, flesh-and-blood characters. The more specific a situation, the greater its universal appeal.
Second, detail closes down some avenues while opening others. As we learn new details about the hobo, we open ourselves to new possibilities. Maybe the hobo had a relationship with the object of his eye, or someone like her. Maybe he once occupied a comfortable house, too. Maybe he has a whole world, far from the bridge, that he longs to recover. Every detail opens new possibilities. But it also closes possibilities. If the hobo remembers an old flame when he eyes the woman, other story lines fade away. He that woman is the image of an old love, then she is not the image of an old nemesis or landlady or teacher or boss or prosecutor.
Creation, as Faulkner says, begins to move of its own accord. The creator cannot plan everything at the beginning of the process. The creator can set the parameters of the story — it will take place at a certain time and place, with a certain set of characters, with a certain destination — but then allow the process of discovery to play a big role in moving the narrative forward.
3. Make Tweaks and Adjustments
Once the story takes off, it’s tweaking time. Hemingway said to “write with your heart, edit with your head.” Get stuff down on the page, then fiddle with it.
Again, George Saunders explains:
What does an artist do, mostly? She tweaks that which she’s already done. There are those moments when we sit before a blank page, but mostly we’re adjusting that which is already there. The writer revises, the painter touches up, the director edits, the musician overdubs. I write, “Jane came into the room and sat down on the blue couch,” read that, wince, cross out “came into the room” and “down” and “blue” (Why does she have to come into the room? Can someone sit UP on a couch? Why do we care if it’s blue?) and the sentence becomes “Jane sat on the couch – ” and suddenly, it’s better (Hemingwayesque, even!), although … why is it meaningful for Jane to sit on a couch? Do we really need that? And soon we have arrived, simply, at “Jane”, which at least doesn’t suck, and has the virtue of brevity.
But why did I make those changes? On what basis?
On the basis that, if it’s better this new way for me, over here, now, it will be better for you, later, over there, when you read it. When I pull on this rope here, you lurch forward over there.
It’s not just intuition, of course. A good writer has a process for tweaking and editing. I call my method “Search and Destroy.” Deliberately, I search for certain kinds of problems — weak starts or finishes, too many bully words (adjectives and adverbs), unclear images, muddled explanations, and so on — and then try to fix them.
As I look for problems in this way, new ideas occur to me. I need a different detail. What if I juxtaposed these characters/ideas? How can I fix this phrasing? Sometimes, addressing these issues opens the whole process up again. Sometimes I scrap whole sections or revamp them, with whole new approaches.
4. Bear Down and Let Go: One Strategy
In my seminars on storytelling, students learn how to both plan and let go. One of my favorite exercises is the Character Dossier. I give students a list of questions about the character. Step by step, we create a character from whole cloth. Every answer defines the character a little more. Every answer provides more detail, opening some possibilities and closing others. If you say a character was born in Moline, Illinois, in 1963, she cannot be a hipster millennial in Brooklyn in 2017. If she lost her parents in a plane crash when she was 12, she can’t deepen her relationship with them when she’s 40.
When we fill in the Character Dossier, we write much of the story. When we know enough about characters to set them into motion, they take over the story. That’s what Faulkner was talking about. Before the characters can lead us, we have to prepare them.
When we have a complete command of all the skills of writing — and when we have set up the model town, as Saunders describes it — we can let go. After we let our characters loose, we need to intervene again to give some kind of order to all the character sketches and scenes and details.
So, you see, creativity is a process of bearing down, then letting go … then bearing down again. Bear down, then let go, again and again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
How can we see–really see, and not just project–what’s in front of us?
That’s the writer’s ultimate job. The best writer is an observer. The best writer sees what others do not see. This writer pays attention, carefully and with an open mind, to what’s going on. Rather than falling into lazy habits and assumptions, the best writer looks to see what is not instantly apparent.
Which reminds me of a morning encounter on Election Day 2016.
The Encounter: A Story
I was walking down Wall Street. As I crossed Water Street, I saw a car stopped at a red light.
I was intrigued enough to stand in the intersection to take a picture. I saw a Honda covered in pro-Donald Trump signs. The signs weren’t printed professionally. It looked like an amateur job.
Then I wondered about who would drive such a car. I imagined a “typical” Trump voter — a blue-collar worker, white, probably stocky, maybe tattooed. There’s no way to read someone’s heart from a distance, but I imagined someone thrilling to Donald Trump’s nativist rhetoric, his disdain for immigrants and minorities. I thought of Trump’s depiction of cities as dens of crime and disorder. I thought of Trump’s claims about illegal immigrants and how a wall along the Mexican border would keep them out — even the people who overstayed a visa or came to the U.S. from places beyond the Americas.
So who was this Trump supporter? Maybe he was a veteran, but more likely he was a middle-aged guy from … who knows? Queens? Jersey? Out of town?
Automatically, I imagined a picture of something that I did not see.
Then I crossed the street. I took a few steps before deciding to go back to see who this Trump supporter was. I clicked another picture before the light changed.
I was surprised. I was not expecting to see a black man behind the wheel. This was not the prototypical Trump supporter. Sure, I knew that Trump got some black support. Nationwide, we would soon know, Trump won 8 percent of the black vote. He also got 29 percent of the Hispanic vote. Both totals, for what it’s worth, were better than Mitt Romney’s numbers in 2012. Romney got 6 percent of the black vote and 27 percent of the Hispanic vote.
My guess about the Trump support was not unreasonable. Statistically, it was correct.
The Built-In Imperative to Predict
The brain, says the business consultant David Rock, is a “prediction machine.” Before we’re even aware of what we’re doing, we guess what’s going on.
“Your brain receives patterns from the outside world, stores them as memories, and makes predictions by combining what it has seen before and what is happening now,” Rock writes. “Prediction is not just one of the things your brain does. It is the primary function of the neocortex, and the foundation of intelligence.”
When you experience something, your mind begins to search through your memories. Rather than paying close attention to the scene in front of you, your brain looks for something familiar. If there’s a “match,” the brain makes a prediction. If X happened before, something like X will probably happen again.
Biologically, we have a craving for certainty. That makes sense when you think of man’s evolution. For most of human history, people’s lives were “nasty, brutish, and short,” to use Thomas Hobbes’s famous phrase. People faced danger daily–from predatory animals, starvation, attacks by rival tribes, and disease. When we achieve a measure of certainty, we feel a rush of dopamine.
Robert Burton, a neurologist at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco, explains: “At bottom, we are pattern recognizers who seek escape from ambiguity and indecision. If a major brain function is to maintain mental homeostasis, it is understandable how stances of certainty can counteract anxiety and apprehension. Even though I know better, I find myself somewhat reassured (albeit temporarily) by absolute comments such as, “the stock market always recovers,” even when I realize that this may be only wishful thinking.”
The Writer’s Need to Resist
But here’s the thing: As writers, we have to work hard to avoid making conclusions before discovering the facts. A statistical is not a story. A probability does not provide the complex, nuanced information we need to understand the world.
In law, it’s a truism that eyewitnesses are notoriously bad witnesses. Eyewitnesses don’t see. Like the rest of us, they view something–often without paying close attention to the details that matter–and then construct a picture based on their existing knowledge and biases. That’s why circumstantial evidence (like fingerprints, items left at the scene of a crime, phone records, and the like) is usually more valuable in legal cases than eyewitness accounts.
The only way to discover something new — whether you’re witnessing an event, sifting documents, asking questions, or interpreting data — is to avoid predicting what you’re seeing.
The Beginner’s Mind
It takes work to avoid jumping to conclusions. The Buddhists have a term for this. It’s called the “beginner’s mind.”
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few,” says Shunryu Suzuki in his classic work Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. The more we know something, the less conscious and thinking we are about it. We take it for granted. We lose the sense of mystery and puzzlement when we know something as an expert. Too often, we cannot see something in front of us.
About the beginner’s mind, Abraham Maslow writes this: “They are variously described as being naked in the situation, guileless … without ‘shoulds’ or ‘oughts,’ without fashions, fads, dogmas, habits, or other pictures-in-the-head of what is proper, normal, ‘right,’ as being ready to receive whatever happens to be the case without surprise, shock, indignation, or denial.”
In conceding the election to Trump, Hillary Clinton said: “We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.” An open mind does not mean acquiescence or a compromise of values. It does not mean forgiving the ugly or dishonest things he said in the campaign. It means only paying attention, carefully, to what you see. Only then can you really know what’s going on and respond appropriately.
Ten Steps to Cultivating the Beginner’s Mind
(1) Scanning: whenever you encounter something–new or old–make a point of scanning for surprises
Start by looking where you usually look. When you enter a park or a building or a mall, you have a tendency to lean in a particular direction, especially if you’ve been there before. As you look, stop. Pause for a few moments. And then look, deliberately, in different directions. If you veer to your right, toward the Starbucks, stop and start scanning to the left. Look up. Look into the distance. Look into a corner. Zoom in and look at the details.
(2) Note your predictions, then un-do them. Every time you assume something is going to happen–every time you make a prediction–stop and take note.
Just pausing will dramatically improve your beginner’s mind. Researchers say we have from 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts a day. They come in a rush, unbidden. They come along, like tourists bustling through Times Square, in bunches. Often they veer off into new bunches of thoughts.
Just hitting the “Pause” button will improve your awareness of this constant sc=tream of thoughts and predictions.
Now take it a step further. Label your thoughts and predictions. Like: “Oh, I just assumed…” Or: “Without pausing, I just thought that…”
Once you label your predictions, they fall apart on their own. You come into a park and see kids racing around. If you’re a grumpy old man, you might assume–you might predict–that they’re aimless youth, irresponsible, reckless, etc. When you stop and label that assumption, it falls apart. You start to notice more about them. Rather than projecting your own assumptions, you’re now paying attention.
(3) Be patient. We have a tendency–all day, every day–to jump to conclusions. Research shows that people’s first impressions, in a job interview or a social setting, make a greater impact than anything else. When we see, hear, or read something, we make snap judgments.
To control this tendency, we need to consciously slow things down. We need to say to ourselves: “OK, what just happened? What was that sequence of events that just happened?”
Let your ideas unfold, deliberately. If you find a salesman’s gambit persuasive, break down the experience into pieces. How did he greet you? What did he say? How did he appeal to your ego? To your insecurity? What kinds of promises did he make? How well did he answer questions? When did you get carried away, daydreaming about the wonders of that new purchase?
(4) Be childlike … and play dumb. It’s a cliche that children are full of wonder, with a desire to explore the world around them. They ask questions constantly. Unlike adults, they are not afraid of not knowing. “Why?” is the constant refrain of the curious child. All too often, parents mask their ignorance of a subject, when it would be far better to say, “I don’t know. Let’s find out.”
We’ll never get that childlike wonder back. But we can try. We can pretend we don’t know as much as we do. That actually shouldn’t be too hard, as long as we remember to try. Most of our knowledge, after all, is superficial.
When you encounter a scene, turn everything you think you know into a question. Rather than assuming, open up the possibilities. If you’re sure that the checkout clerk was dumb or the driver who cut you off was aggressive, open yourself to doubt. If you assume that the student was lazy or the athlete a great guy, open yourself to doubt.
(5) Avoid judgment: Avoid the words “should” and “ought.” Catch your assumptions and judgments–about everything–and deliberately un-do those assumptions and judgments.
When someone asks you something, start with, “I’m not sure.” When someone asserts an opinion with which you want to agree or disagree, pause for a moment. Ask yourself how you might conclude the opposite.
Notice when you label things as smart or dumb, creative or dull, cheap or expensive, beautiful or ugly, etc. Then, un-label them. Become agnostic on the question. Imagine not knowing or thinking or even caring, at least for the moment.
Every time you catch yourself thinking that something’s right or wrong, normal or abnormal, beautiful or ugly, smart or dumb–in fact, any time you find yourself thinking in dualities–stop!
(6) Be like Picasso. I’m talking about the late Picasso, who embraced a more abstract vision of the world.
Pay close attention to the shapes, colors, lights, textures, and sounds of things–not their meaning. Look for the circles and curves. Then look for squares and rectangles, and then the triangles. Observe how the pieces fit together. Notice the colors and how the colors define the shapes and play off each other.
Then listen. First, notice what you usually notice. Then pause and cock your ear for distant sounds. Listen to those sounds intently. Then listen to how the sounds collide against each other. If you’re in a cafe, listen to the sounds of the baristas and the customers making orders, then the sounds of people conversing at tables and the clack-clack-clack of laptops. Tune into whatever music is playing.
Do the same thing on the street and at a ballgame, in a college quad or cafeteria, in an office lobby or conference room.
Do. Not. Try. To. Make. Sense. Of. It. Just. Listen. And. Notice.
(7) Beware of bewitching stories. The human race is a storytelling race. We make sense of the world by making everything a story. When we encounter a great storyteller, we listen with rapt attention. Stories entertain and instruct. They give meaning to the world. That’s all good.
But stories, inevitably, leave lots out. Storytellers want you to pay attention to some things, but not others. They’re like magicians: “Behold as I distract your attention with this flashy trick, while I slip my hand into your pocket and take your wallet.”
Don’t trust stories. They are told to deceive as much as to inform. The simpler the story, the more you need to question it. Distrust, especially, the stories that depict whole groups as having the same qualities. Bigots assume that people from certain groups–race, religion, class, age, profession, education, etc.–behave certain ways. Maybe they do, usually, as I note in my Election Day story. But just because most people behave a certain way, don’t assume that everyone in the group does so.
Observe people, one by one, to see what they actually do. Look for ways that they contradict your assumptions.
(8) Let things unfold. A good writer acts like a tour guide. The tour guide does not point out everything on the tour. By focusing on a few telling details, she helps us to ignore irrelevant details.
Too often, writers attempt to explain every aspect of an issue at once. We pack lots of background information into a paragraph or two, tight as a tin of sardines. But too much information, too soon, overwhelms readers.
The more complicated your topic, the simpler you need to explain. Express one simple idea at a time, so that the reader follows every step of the process. Unpack the many complex aspects of an issue and explain them, one by one. Use simple, familiar terms.
Recipes offer another useful model for explaining. Cooks must perform their tasks one at a time, in the right order. To make a dish, you must move deliberately, step by step. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Then gather the eggs, flour, vanilla extract, sugar, chocolate chips, and so on. Then sift the flour. Then beat the eggs. Then mix the ingredients. Then grease the sheet. Then …
I once convened a writing class in a kitchen, where we made a pie. Each student participated. As students sifted and whipped and rolled, they spoke into a recorder. The student who organized the event narrated the process, offering comments the way about ingredients and her grandmother’s baking tips. Other students talked about family cooking traditions, special kitchen tricks, and likes and dislikes. Afterward, I transcribed the conversation. The result was a good first draft of an essay on cooking. From that point, the students knew how to explain anything well.
Writing requires the same process as cooking: take your time, do one thing at a time, in the right order, and explain as you go.
Here’s a good way to master this skill. Get a video of anything that interests you. It could be a great sports game, like the Super Bown or NBA Finals or an Olympic event. It could be a movie or live coverage of a news event. It could be a documentary by Frederick Wiseman. Play a scene a few times. Then go back and play it in slow motion. Write down every micro-event in the scene. You’ll be amazed at how much happens in just a few seconds. You can train yourself to notice.
(9) Reject causality–or look at things backward–at least for the time being. To understand anything, we need to get a sense for what causes what. We need to identify the “variables” that contribute to an outcome. But even when we gather lots of evidence for a proposition–like the idea that higher levels of education create economic opportunity–we have to be careful.
On its face, it makes sense. College graduates earn an average of $1 million more than non-college grads, according to research at Georgetown University. Annually, college grads earn $17,500 more than non-grads, according to Pew Research Center. The more skills you have, the more you can offer employers–and the higher wages you can earn.
But as Nassim Nicholas Taleb notes, the causal arrows often point in the opposite direction. The more money you earn, the more you use it to get an education. You don’t make the money because of the education; you get the education because of the money.
In fact, Taleb argues, education is often a barrier to economic achievement. “It’s good to have a class of people who are educated,” he says. “But education is the enemy of entrepreneurship.” Scrappy, dedicated, focused people, who think differently than educated people, are the ones who invent new products and services. Education can mess that up. “If you start having a high level of education, you start hiring people based on school success,” he said. “School success is predictive of future school success. You hire an A student if you want them to take an exam, but you want other things like street smarts. This gets repressed if you emphasize too much education.”
So think backward. Like Taleb, whenever you hear some “truism,” ask when that truism does not hold. Or ask whether the opposite might be true.
(10) Imagine something different. Sometimes the best way to think differently is to take in a scene and then subtract specific things from that scene. Imagine what the scene would look like if one object was missing or broken. Now imagine something else being missing or broken.
Imagine what a classroom would be like without the latest technology. Imagine what a city street would be like without sidewalks or benches or street signals.
On that last point, a number of European cities have removed stop lights in the hope of reducing the number of accidents at intersections. How can that be? Don’t red lights help to monitor street movement; don’t we need to make some cars stop so that other cars can go? In fact, with no street signals, drivers pay greater attention and learn how to cooperate better. Traffic management sifts from a command-and-control system to a cooperative system. Steven Johnson an experiment of a Dutch traffic engineer named Hans Monderman:
“As an experiment, he replaced the busiest traffic-light intersection [that handled] 22,000 cars a day, with a traffic circle, an extended cycle path, and a pedestrian area. In the two years following . . . the number of accidents plummeted to only two, compared with 36 crashes in the four years prior. Traffic moves more briskly through the intersection when all drivers know they must be alert and use their common sense, while backups and the road rage associated with them have virtually disappeared.”
Hans Monderman could create a real-world experiment to test his theory that less control produces more order. But you can create whatever mind experiments you want, to open your mind to new possibilities. The point is to get your mind to consider–and pay attention–to more possibilities.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
The first piece of advice that all writers get is to “write what you know.”
By the time we have decided to write for an audience—to share thoughts, voluntarily, with anyone who will listen—we have developed a whole storehouse of experiences and memories, thoughts and feelings, hopes and fears, and insights and ideas.
The trick is to use this storehouse to inspire and drive your writing—without creating unnecessary barriers.
National Novel Writing Month, a k a NaNoWriMo, offers an ideal opportunity to plumb your conscious and subconscious minds. Day by day, you can make deliberate efforts to understand yourself—and use that understanding to create something new.
But you don’t need to wait till November. Set yourself a goal to get a complete a draft of a novel–or memoir or how-to book or any other major piece of writing–in a month.
Without further ado, here’s your 30-day plan for connecting what’s deepest inside you to the novel you want to write—the novel you will write—this November.
1. “Writing is a code.” That’s what Margaret Atwood says, anyway. We all communicate all whole lives. But to become masters, we need to master specific skills and “tricks of the trade.”
Tasks: (1) Spend 15 minutes brainstorming the codes you’re going to have to crack as a writer. (2) Write 2,000 words describing what challenge your hero faces, how he’s going to crack the code
2. The journey. The ancient Greeks said: “Look to the end.” Every story takes the characters—and the reader—on a journey to some powerful ending. The novelist John Irving actually writes the last paragraph of his books first. He keeps that last paragraph as a North Star for his writing process. So ask yourself: Where do you want your characters to end up? How d you want them to differ b y the time they have experienced their adventure?
Tasks: (1) Imagine finishing your novel—how it all comes out. (2) Write your last paragraph and your last 2,000 words or the first and last paragraphs of many scenes of summaries.
3. The Arc. Aristotle said that great drama resembles an arc, which begins by introducing the characters and their world, then confronts the hero and others with increasingly intense challenges, and finally resolves with a new understanding and significant change in the character’s lives.
Tasks: (1) Sketch out an arc for your life—first, as if your life were to end today; second, as if you would live till 90. (2) Write full action passages for one or two of the following points along the arc: Opening scene … The challenge … Crisis 1 … Crisis 2 … Crisis 3 … Recognition … Reversal … Denouement.
4. Scenes and summaries. All stories move back and forth between scenes and summaries. Scenes engage the reader physically; summaries allow a moment of respite and an opportunity to explain ideas and background. Scenes show particular people doing particular things at particular times and places, with particular motions and emotions. Scenes zoom in to capture the details of people’s lives, with a moment-by-moment description of action. Summaries offer sweeping assessments of the bigger picture, with an emphasis on what it all means, in order to set up scenes.
Tasks: (1) write does tabloid headlines for as many scenes and summaries as possible. (2) Write one scene and one summary, each 1000 words long. With the scene, just show the characters doing one thing after another—no exposition!
5. The hero. Who’s your hero? What’s his dilemma? All great stories offer the reader a character to root for—often superior in many ways, but still human with a need to deal with flaws and difficult situations. Is the hero young or old, virtuous or troubled, sociable or hermetic, tall or short, dark or light, fit or flaccid, rich or poor, happy or dissatisfied, knowing or clueless, young or old, male or female?
Tasks: (1) Brainstorm the various challenges you’ll face as an author. Make a list. Tack it over your computer. (2) Write one scene and one summary describing the hero’s deepest challenge.
6. World of the Story. The setting not only offers a “container” for a story, but also reveals much about the characters and their community. The setting is rich with clues about the characters, their struggles, their ideals, and their capacity to act.
Tasks: Describe your situation, your setting, a “day in the life,” and how it affects your work. (2) Describe one or two settings, in a total of 2000 words, by showing the characters moving around. Have each one of these as the openings of a chapter or scene. Example: Herb Clutter’s promenade.
7. The Crisis or Call. Every hero needs to face a crisis or call to action. In the midst of living a settled life, something happens to challenge the hero. Something internal (unresolved feelings and relationships, goals and ambitions, memories from the past) or external (an economic, romantic, social, professional, or other upheaval) takes the hero out of her comfort zone. Or some event issues a challenge. At first, she refuses to answer the challenge. But over time, she realizes she has no choice to do so.
Tasks: (1) Write down three times when you have faced a new, unexpected challenge in your life—and how you responded. Note how you felt physically amidst these challenges. (2) Describe the moment when your hero was first introduced to the challenge that he must face—and how he responded. Include denial and selfmisunderstanding. 2000 words.
8. The hero’s dossier. To tell a satisfying story, you need to know your hero—and other characters—inside and out. Who are these people? What do they look like? Where do they come from? What do they want? What have they done? Who do they spend time with? What do their mannerisms and habits betray about them?
Tasks: (1) Brainstorm intensely on your life and values. (2) Fill out a “character dossier” and write one scene and one summary to show that character to the reader. 2000 words, 1000 words for each fragment. 5. 6. 7. 8.
9. The wheel of character types, Part 1. The best stories use action to reveal something about the hero and other characters—especially what those characters repress. Every character has an opposite. These opposites resist each other, but they’re also drawn to each other. What’s different in the opposite character is something that exists in all of us, but repressed. Start by considering the most consequential of character types—the hero and villain.
Tasks: (1) Think of your biggest rival at one or two specific moments in your life. (2) Show the first interaction with the hero and villain (1000 words). Show a later interaction that reveals something totally surprising—but not, in retrospect since the hero and villain contains parts of each other.
10. The wheel of character types, Part 2. Other characters help to draw push the story forward. The pairs of opposites include the mentor and tempter … the sidekick and skeptic … and the mind and heart. Each one of these three pairs of types represents something in all of us.
Tasks: (1) Brainstorm for 15 minutes, feverishly, about two character types in your life. (2) Create scenes two characters—besides the hero and villain—acting or speaking with reference to the hero. Could be mentor, tempter, sidekick, skeptic, heart, or mind.
11. The wheel of character types, Part 3. Things get really interesting when three characters are part of a scene. Whenever two characters develop a relationship—of alliance or opposition—a third party lurks to scramble that relationship. Two lovers, for example, encounter a past lover. Two business partners encounter a revolt among workers. Parents encounter the demanding desires of a child. And so on.
Tasks: (1) Brainstorm about the dynamics of the triangles in your life—what make them stable, what made them volatile and changing. (2) Create scenes with interactions of TWO triangles. By now, make sure you cover all of the character types in the last three days. 9. 10. 11.
12. Act by Act. Give your story three distinct acts, using the narrative arc: The World of the Story, rising action, and resolution. In the World of the Story, show the people and places in a state of calm and order. Think of this as a settled status quo. Then show the hero confronted with something difficult—something so difficult, in fact, that hero cannot bear to face it head-on. Show that hero slowly, painfully, dealing with different aspects of that challenge, one by one. Show the character change with these encounters. Finally, give the hero an “aha”: moment, when he begins to understand the true nature of his life and world—and the need to change for his own survival and wellbeing.
Tasks: (1) Think about your life as a three-act play. How satisfying is the “conclusion”? Sketch your story on a sheet of paper. Ask what you need to reach your own “resolution.” (2) Review your story to date. Write opening and closing paragraphs for each part, making sure that you start and end strongly. Write a total of 200 new words, however distributed.
13. Dialogue. People’s language—their choice of words, their use of slang, how quickly they speak, their conversational tics— reveal much about their character. How they interact with others—whether they listen, interrupt, stay on the subject, show respect—reveals even more. And of course people speak differently in different places with different people.
Tasks: (1) List three important conversations you’ve had in your life. Show how you connected—or failed to connect—with the other persons. Try to understand what made the conversation work or fail. (2) Write three scenes, 750 words apiece, with only dialogue.
14. Parallel arcs. The best stories are really two or three stories rolled into one. Besides the main plot, which involves the hero’s journey, there are two or three subplots involving other characters or ideas. These plots and subplots intersect at critical moments in the story.
Tasks: (1) Write down the essence of the “plotline” of your life. Then write down the various subplots, involving friends and family and others, that intersect with your story at critical times for both. (2) Sketch out two subplots of your story. For each, describe the main character, the journey, barriers along the way, moments of intersection with the main plot, and how the journey ends.
15. Denial. Most stories are about one thing: How the hero and other characters deny some essential reality, and then struggle because of the denial. When the hero is first presented with his challenge, he does everything in his power to avoid confronting the truth. And for good reason: Change is painful, emotionally overwhelming. But a series of events force the hero to deal with pieces of the challenge.
Tasks: (1) Honestly, with no self-editing, make a list of the problems in your life that you avoid and try to deny. (2) Write a scene in which another character confronts the hero about a problem that he has been denying. Then write the background summary that shows the origin of this denial, with reference to past events—and try to build scenes into that summary as much as possible.
16. The Time Element. “Nothing concentrates the mind like a pending execution,” Samuel Johnson once said. Time pressures force characters to think, act, respond energetically—making more mistakes, but also discovering more things. Suspense begins with a ticking clock. TV shows like “Mission: Impossible” and “24” explicitly race against time. Even stories that suspend time, like Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, create tension about the question: Will the hero reenter the real world in time for a decent life? =
Tasks: (1) summarize all the tasks still ahead to finish your novel draft. (2) Write TWO scenes, 1000 or so words apiece, describing the hero or other character racing against the clock.
17. Taking Risks. The “Hail Mary” is one of the most exciting plays in football. With the game at stake, the quarterback launches a long pass with the hope of scoring big. But it’s also a risk—the other team could intercept the ball. Life is like that too. Sometimes we have to risk losing a lot to gain a lot.
Tasks: (1) Make a list of the riskiest things you have done, either on purpose or by neglect or recklessness. (2) Write a scene in which the character takes a big risk, then write a scene where his villain takes a big risk.
18. Beats. Every scene is a series of actions, one after another. Characters constantly thrust and parry, sometimes dramatically and sometimes subtly. To give your scene pacing and meaning, you need to make sure that every moment advances the story.
Tasks: (1) For ten minutes, write down everything that you said with a friend in a recent conversation. Show a constant move back and forth from positive to negative values and back again. (2) Write two scenes of about 1000 words apiece. Make sure that every moment produces some reaction and/or advances the story. Take out all details and actions that do not move the scene toward a memorable conclusion.
19. Suspense. Engage the reader best by creating a sense of uncertainty, which gets the reader guessing, and then solve that uncertainty. Cliffhangers bring the story to a point when something important is about to happen—and then break off the action.
Tasks: (1) For ten minutes, write down the moments in your life when you know something big was about to happen—but you didn’t know what. (2) Write two 1000-word scenes that do just this. Move the scene forward, beat by beat, and then end with an almost-dramatic conclusion. Save that conclusion—the answer to an important dilemma for the character—for the next section.
20. Senses. People— even reader—are physical creatures. So you need to make your story crackle with physical details. Make sure you use specific, precise words to evoke sights, sounds, and feelings.
Tasks: (1) write down as many sensory words as possible. Make as many observations as possible about the sights, sounds, and tactile qualities of people and things in your vicinity. (2) Go over all your fragments so far and replace all general descriptions with something visual, auditory, or kinesthetic.
21. Sentences. If you can write a good sentence, you can write anything. All too often, we get lost in long and meandering sentences. It’s only natural when you are engaged in such a creative process: one idea prompts another idea, then another and another.
Tasks: (1) Write down, one sentence at a time, all of the writing tasks you need to finish to complete your novel this month. Use full sentences. (2) Go through your drafts so far, sentence by sentence, and make sure that each one takes the characters—and the reader—from one place to another, different place.
22. Shapes. Writing uses three basic shapes—a straight line, a circle, and a triangle.
Tasks: (1) Sketch out your life, so far, using a line, circle, and triangle. (2) Write three separate passages of about 750 words apiece, either scenes or summaries. In one passage, take a straight, linear path. Don’t double back, don’t skip off to provide background; just show one thing after another. In the second passage, show a character or idea begin one place, develop, and end up where you started. In the third, depict the interaction of three characters and/or three ideas. Show how, when two interact with each other, the third has the potential to change their interactions.
23. Numbers. All good ideas can be expressed as ones, twos, threes, or longer lists of things. Ones put a person or place, hope or fear, thought or idea, front and center. You look at that one thing from different angles, as if inspecting a diamond. Twos present complements and oppositions—sidekicks and enemies, reinforcing or opposing ideas, consonant or conflicting feelings. Threes present the opportunity for real complexity. Think of the lover’s triangle. Whenever two sides bond, the third party lurks nearby, ready to upset everything.
Tasks: (1) Write down the most important idea in your life, something about your relationship with one important person in your life, then the most dynamic triangle in your life, and finally the five most important people, events, or values in your life. (2) Write four fragments of 500 to 750 words. In one fragment, focus on one person, thing, or idea. Make everything else revolve around that one person, thing, or idea. In another fragment, show two people, things or ideas competing with each other— and, below the surface, reinforcing each other. In the third passage, show a triangle of people, things, or ideas. Show how any two corners of the triangle can get stabilized or destabilized by the third. Finally, create a passage that explains or shows the complexity of things by listing a whole bunch of things—people, events, things, tasks, debts, fears, etc.
24. Discovery/exploration of sketchy places. Steven King says he writes scenes by imagining places and events that would scare him. Scary places are all around us—roads and highways where we can crash or get hit by a car … pools where children can fall and drown … parking garages or alleys where we can be mugged … hospitals where we can be mistreated or even tortured … taxis where drivers can take us to dangerous places … even offices where nightmare bosses and colleagues torture us emotionally.
Tasks: (1) Describe the freakiest place you’ve ever been in your life, with as many precise details as possible. (2) Create one sketchy place—a place that’s weird, gross, dangerous, sickly, otherworldly, creepy, Disneyesque, or otherwise alienating—and make something consequential happen to your character there.
25. Love. What captures the heart—the emotions, longing, deep and abiding interest or even obsession—of the hero or other characters? How the hero encounters and responds to love defines that character like nothing else.
Tasks: (1) Make a list of the loves of your life, with specific details about what was good and what was bad— and what were most moments in these relationships was most revealing about your character. (2) Write two scenes. In the first scene, show the moment when the hero meets his or her love interest for the first time. Show the character surprised by his or her interest—and holding back for some reason. In the second scene, show a major conflict between the two lovers. Don’t explain the conflict—show the conflict, so the reader can make sense of it on her own.
26. Failure and Frustration. Nothing matters more to a story than failure and frustration. How a character fails—coming up short in an honest effort or neglecting or denying something important—reveals something about his self-mastery. And how he responds—whether he learns and grows or rigidly rejects opportunities for growth—reveals his character.
Tasks: (1) Write down three moments of failure in your life— with as many details as possible about how you responded. (2) Write two short scenes—anywhere from 250 to 500 words—describing the moments when a character experiences failure. Try to show how their expressions and body language change at the moment when they realize they have failed.
27. Not What It Seems. The best stories operate on at least two levels—the level of the obvious and the level of the meaningful. Characters carry out different tasks, interact with others, make mistakes and grow—but underneath, they are really struggling with deeper challenges.
Tasks: (1) Think of three times in your life when you worked or played hard to achieve something (e.g., success in school, sports, work, love)—when something larger was really at stake (e.g., pride, dignity, revenge, honor, vindication). (2) Create two scenes of 1,000 words apiece in which your character strives for one thing, obvious for all to see—but gets his or her motivation from a deeper psychological yearning.
28. Powers. What are the hero’s greatest powers— and how does he deploy them? Does the hero possess extraordinary physical might? Intellectual powers? Emotional insight? Social wherewithal? Or does he possess some supernatural connections to other beings?
Tasks: (1) Make a list of people you know with the greatest physical power, intellectual power, social power, financial power, and moral power. (2) Write two scenes, each 1000 words, describing clashes of characters with different powers. Show how these characters attempt to use these powers, and how they respond to each other. For example, show someone of great wealth interacting with someone with social charisma or someone with a strong moral compass.
29. Surprises. What surprises can you sprinkle throughout the story? Above all, good stories show us things we cannot imagine without some prodding. If everything is predictable, after all, why bother reading? Storytelling is a two-way process. The writer offers a series of moments, with just enough details for the reader to add her own memory and imagination. Think of storytelling as a relay race, where the writer offers something surprising, then the reader adds her own thoughts.
Tasks: (1) List the ten most surprising things to happen in your life. Looking back, identify the missed signals that would have made these events less surprising. (2) Create two scenes in which important surprises happen to the hero and one other character, either together or separately. Then write scenes or summaries that provide the backstories, setting up those surprises.
30. Recognition and Reversal. Great stories end with a new level of understanding—for the story’s leading character’s and for the readers.
Tasks: (1) Make a list of three times in your life when you came to a brand new understanding of yourself, your values, and how the world works. Write down what caused you to gain this new wisdom. (2) Write the climactic scene of your novel. Show the character saying and doing something that he would not have been able to say or do before. Show how this new wisdom changes everyone around him.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Every four years, the American people make history-bending choices when they elect a president. The choice amounts to a bet on character. Who will have the right character–the right knowledge, experience, values, and fortitude–to tend to the nation’s needs?
Back in 2016, I was eager to get some answers from Donald Trump, the Republican nominee. As a longtime developer and TV celebrity, Trump had not been involved in any of the major issues of the day. He spoke out occasionally but never had to work through the complexities of war and peace, the economy, the budget, crime, immigration and labor, and more.
To develop a great character for a story, I often advise writers to use a “Character Dossier.” The dossier poses 33 questions about the character’s background, upbringing, desires and passions, conflicts and problems, and more. When you answer these questions, you not only create a great character. You also go a long way to plotting the story.
I realized, after posing 50 questions for the GOP candidate, that the exercise offered a good model for questioning all your story’s characters. It offers a way to go beyond the Character Dossier. After getting the basic information from the Character Dossier, fashion a set of follow-up questions. Go deep. Explore the questions that the character would rather avoid.
In that spirit, here are 50 questions for Donald Trump.
Personal life
1. Can you say something about your relationship with your father and mother? Were they caring and attentive? How did they discipline you? What worked — and what didn’t? In what ways do you model yourself after them — and in what ways do you depart from their examples?
2. What events played the greatest role in your moral development — at military school, Fordham College, Penn, your early years in business, your early years as a celebrity?
3. Why did your first two marriages fail? Did you grow apart? What kinds of mistakes did you make? How have you learned from them?
4. What role have you played in raising your children? What “values” did you seek to instill in them?
5. What attracts you to Melania? What do you talk about with Melania?
6. What is the biggest personal mistake you have made? How have you learned from that mistake? How did you change your behavior as a result?
7. Explain, in your own words, any of the following concepts or parables of Christ:
• Turn the other cheek.
• Love thy neighbor as thyself.
• Jesus turning out the moneychangers at the temple.
• Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.
• Jesus washing the feet of the prostitute.
• Jesus caring for the leper.
• Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.
• Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.
8. What book most influenced you growing up? Have you read any books in the last year? If so, what was it? How about the last five years? Ten years? Besides The Bible and The Art of the Deal, what are your favorite books?
9. You have bragged for decades of sleeping with as many beautiful women as you can, whether you are they are married or not. Has this behavior ceased? If so, when and why?
10. You characterize the Billy Bush video as “locker room talk.” In the second debate you said that you have not done any of the actions you boasted about with Bush? So you were lying to Bush? What kinds of other topics do men talk about in the locker rooms you have visited? Without naming names, can you talk about how athletes boast about assaulting women? How do the others respond, typically?
11. Just curious: How do you think beauty pageant contestants feel when a lecherous old man enters their dressing rooms when they are changing and sometimes wearing little or nothing? Is it OK for the pageant owner to do this? Why or why not?
12. In one of your attacks on Fox news reporter Megyn Kelly, you said that she had “blood coming out of her wherever.” You have dismissed the idea that you were talking about menstruation. But how can it be decent to conjure images of blood and gore, coming out of wherever, from someone who was simply doing her job?
Psychology
13. Most accomplished people feel no need to brag about their success. You seem to need to affirm your own greatness in every conversation. Why is that, do you suppose?
14. Why do you lie so repeatedly and brazenly? I’m thinking of whoppers (like your five-year birtherism campaign, your claim to see thousands of Muslims celebrating 9/11 in New Jersey, and that you opposed the Iraq war from the beginning) and less consequential lies as well (like your statement that Hillary Clinton was not at Ground Zero).
15. You have criticized a number of women, like presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, for their looks, face, weight, and so on. What exactly do looks reveal about character? What do your looks reveal about you? What does your hair reveal? Your gut?
16. Psychologists say you are a psychopath or a narcissist. Do you see where they’re coming from? Can you define these terms and explain why your behavior does or does not fit these descriptions?
17. You talk a lot about “winners” and “losers.” Can you define these terms, perhaps with examples from history? How do you get to be a winner or a loser?
18. When challenged to state what sacrifices you have made in your life, you mentioned that you started and ran businesses that make you billions of dollars. Hmmm. Back up. Can you define sacrifice? Then can you respond to the question again?
19. Is there anything innate about blacks, Jews, Muslims, Hispanics, Mexicans, Chinese, Russians, and other groups that makes them “good” or “bad”? Or “winners” or “losers”?
20. Do you think America has become too enamored of celebrities and not adequately respectful of quiet, modest people who work hard and care for others? What qualities do celebrities have that we should emulate or avoid?
21. Why did you attack Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, George Pataki — actually, everyone — in such personal terms during the GOP nomination contest? Did you really mean it when you called Carson a child molester and Cruz’s father a conspirator in the Kennedy assassination? Did you sincerely believe everything — or anything — you said? Or did these insults simply offer a blunt way to eliminate rivals?
22. Some psychologists say your harshest criticisms of others are really forms of “projection” — that is, that your criticisms actually reflect your own fears about yourself. So for example you called Cruz “Lyin’ Ted” as a way of diverting attention from your cascade of lies and distortions? Do you believe that people sometimes project like that?
23. You have railed against “political correctness,” saying that people need to toughen up and deal with the everyday knocks of life. Yet you have displayed thin skin when other people disagree or criticize you. What gives?
24. Can you see why people might be concerned about your penchant for violence — saying at rallies that “I’d like to punch him [a protester] in the face,” “knock the crap out of him,” and “in the old days [protesters] would be carried out on a stretcher,” and offering to pay legal fees for Trump supporters accused of assault? Do you not believe that people cannot disagree civilly?
Business practices
25. You have acknowledged not paying contractors who do work for your companies. In a debate, you said you didn’t pay them because you didn’t like their work. Did you specify what aspects of their work dissatisfied you?
26. Over the years you have sued people — or threatened to sue — hundreds or perhaps thousands of times. To what extent is that a tactic of intimidation rather than a sincere desire for redress of wrongs?
27. Have you ever worked with the mob on construction projects in New York, Atlantic City, Florida, or other locations?
28. What lessons did you learn from your many bankruptcies? How did you apply those lessons to later ventures?
29. What’s the toughest business problem you have ever faced? How did you deal with it?
Policy
30. Pick any policy issue. Tell us about five variables that make the issue complex and difficult to manage or solve.
31. You say you “know more than the generals” about ISIS and other foreign policy challenges. Name one fact or insight you can offer that “the generals” do not know or appreciate.
32. How would a wall along the Mexican border prevent people from coming into the U.S. from other entry points? Also, are you aware that there is now a net migration of Mexicans out of the U.S.? Will your wall keep those Mexicans in the U.S.?
33. In your campaign announcement, you called Mexican immigrants rapists and killers but acknowledged that “some of them” might be good. Can you talk about the “good ones.”
34. You have stated repeatedly that you want to create a “deportation force” to locate and remove 11 million illegal immigrants from the U.S. You have also said you would not. Which is the case these days? How would the deportation force work? How much would it cost? What criteria would you use to set priorities?
35. In one of the GOP debates, you said the Trans-Pacific Partnership is stacked in favor of China, which you have identified as the biggest trade threat to the U.S. Now you know (right?) that China is not part of the TPP. So what countries does the TPP involve and what provisions of the pact undermine U.S. interests?
36. Can you explain how currency manipulation works — and how the markets may or may not “correct” for it with changes in exports and imports?
37. You say you will “bring back” manufacturing jobs from overseas. Just how might that work? Given companies’ investment in billions of dollars worth of factories, would you expect them to shut those facilities down and build new ones in the U.S.?
38. Do you really believe that NATO — which won the Cold War and has kept the peace in Europe for decades — is a waste of money?
39. Do you really believe that adding more nuclear powers — Japan, South Korea, even Saudi Arabia — would make the world safer?
40. You say that American companies planning to move their operations overseas would face a major tariff on goods they sell to the U.S. Could you do that unilaterally? Would that possibly provoke other countries to slap tariffs on U.S. products?
41. About the nuclear triad: As Marco Rubio explained, when you looked doe-eyed at the mention of the concept, this refers to the readiness of nuclear weapons on land, sea, and air. Can you say something — anything — about some of the complexities of nuclear policy?
42. Given your stated expertise about tax policy, what specific provisions would you alter to prevent billionaires (?) like you avoiding taxes despite being on a “budget” of $450,000 a month?
43. You have said that your tax dodging and lobbying practices — using government to your advantage, to the detriment of others — is just smart business. Where should a business person draw the line? Do you support any limits on special-interest lobbying?
44. Do you favor — or not — the intervention of Russia or other foreign powers in U.S. elections? What would you do to respond to such interference in the democratic process?
45. Just to be straight, you oppose abortion but now (after stating otherwise) would not prosecute and jail women who received abortions. Is that correct? When does life begin? How would you enforce the law?
46. In your outreach to “the blacks,” you have portrayed African American life as a depraved world of crime, violence, joblessness, and fear? Are you ware that the black middle class is bigger then ever before in history?
47. Likewise you have said that crime has raged back to record highs. Are you aware that crime rates are the lowest in decades, even after small upturns in some crime categories in recent years?
48. Your stance on the minimum wage varies. Should it be raised, right now and in coming years? How much and when? Should the minimum wage be indexed to the cost of living?
49. Unions: Pro or con? Name three things that make unions “good.” Name three things that make unions “bad.”
50. Do your business dealings give you insight about how to deal with organized crime, both domestic and foreign? If so, what?
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Everyone knows about the Type A personality — the driven, impatient, narrowly focused, executive with a bad temper and high blood pressure.
How this personality type was discovered in the 1950s offers a good lesson for writers about paying attention to details. More about that in a few moments.
In Elements of Writing seminars, we talk about the importance of the setting for the story. The setting — what I call “the world of the story” — doesn’t just hold the story. It doesn’t just provide a place for characters to pursue their passions and goals. It plays a kind of character as well. The world of the story establishes possibilities and constraints, just like all the other characters. It establishes values. It shapes what matters to the characters.
To understand the world of the story, I think of Fenway Park in Boston. Say what you will about other great ballparks and stadiums. Rave, if you will, about the newer venues like Camden Yards and CitiField and Turner Field and Miller Park. They’re all terrific. But Fenway Park changes things. It expresses values. When I lived in Boston, I went to a dozen games a season, in good years and bad. My favorite moments came when the Sox were down by three runs in the ninth inning in a game that didn’t matter. The place came alive. Everyone stood and chanted. If the Sox got a baserunner, forget it. The place rocked. It was like seventh game of the World Series in a meaningless game in June.
But all that’s obvious, right? After all Fenway has sold out for 712 straight games, going back to May 15, 2003, when Pedro Martinez faced the Texas Rangers. That’s more than 250 games better than the next best streak in baseball history. Fenway’s appeal is common knowledge. Just read John Updike’s paean from 1960.
To earn your chops as a writer, notice the things that no one else does.
Now, back to the story of the discovery of the Type A personality.
In this account, it was a chair upholsterer who first noticed that a cardiologist’s patients were killing themselves with anxiety. Watch how Robert M. Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, explains the discovery:
When you create the world of your story, find the chair that reveals an important idea. Find the piece of furniture — of the book, piece of art, toy, tshotshke, piece of clothing, window dressing, dish or glass, or other artifact — that helps the reader understand the world of the story.
When I taught essay writing at Yale, students write a different type of essay every other week — profile, action, memoir, idea, parody, review. One of the essays was a complete story about an artifact. It produced some of the best work. Students worked hard to find meaning in objects that could easily be ignored.
Find that artifact that matters. Find the chair roughed up by Type A personalities.
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How frustrated do you get when interviewers talk so much that the interviewee has a hard time answering? How often do you turn off the TV or radio because the interviewer thinks his insights matter more than his guest’s?
One interviewer who has never put himself above his subjects is Brian Lamb, the founder of C-SPAN and the host of Book Notes.
In his interviews, Lamb asks a series of simple questions and lets the subject answer. Lamb does his homework on his subjects. And he does not hesitate to repeat questions or ask followup questions. But he lets people talk.
To see how simply Lamb approaches his subjects, look at this compilation of questions from an interview of the late Christopher Hitchens.
Notice how almost every question is a W question – who, what, when, where, or why.
Now, for the full intellectual delight of this conversation, watch the whole interview.
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Good writing needs cliffhangers and surprise to excite desire. By stopping the story and leaving a character’s fate in doubt, cliffhangers tease the reader. We want to know what happens next. Will the hero be safe … or get the girl … or track down the criminal … or save the business?
God is my witness. Look at the surprises that fill The Bible. God torments Job, his loyal servant. The father rushes out to greet his prodigal son. Jesus allows a prostitute to wash his feet. Jesus expels the moneychangers from the temple. When skeptics challenge Jesus to display his extraordinary powers, he refuses. These cliffhangers and surprises tease the reader.
To create a cliffhanger, create a situation where a character faces a fateful moment—and then shift the scene just before the character acts. Leave the reader guessing about what’s coming next.
A cliffhanger is a gap in knowledge. You create a problem and give the character a chance to act—but then don’t tell the reader how the character will respond. You create a puzzle and withhold a critical piece of information. You reveal some facts, raise a question, then back off. And as soon as you close one gap, you open another one.
The Idea of the Cliffhanger
The term cliffhanger originated in Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes, which shows a character named Henry Knight hanging from a cliff for dear life. The suspense intensifies when the hanging man contemplates the whole history of the earth:
Knight was a geologist; and such is the supremacy of habit over occasion, as a pioneer of the thoughts of men, that at this dreadful juncture his mind found time to take in, by a momentary sweep, the varied scenes that had had their day between the creature’s epoch and his own. There is no place like a cleft landscape for bringing home such imaginings as these.
We don’t know whether Knight will fall. Pages pass before his rescuer arrives. And at that point, we don’t know whether she can save him. And so we remain, like Knight, dangling.
You can also create a series of mini-cliffhangers. Break away from the action in each paragraph. Tease the reader. Describe one moment, then back away to give background information. Describe the next moment, then break away to provide more background information.
At their best, cliffhangers bring out the complexity of the story. They raise questions, complications, doubts, and possibilities. So when you use cliffhangers, you not only engage the emotions. You engage the mind, too.
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Simple constructions can create a dynamic, even dazzling style. Details make all the difference. When you show readers things that they would not notice on their own, and then arrange them in a pleasing way, you’ve got style.
So what kinds of details make the biggest impact on readers? Tom Wolfe answers this question in The New Journalism, an anthology he edited a generation ago. In short, it’s all about status. Wolfe defines status details as:
the recording of everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration, styles of traveling, eating, keeping house, modes of behavior toward children, servants, superiors, inferiors, peers, plus the various looks, glances, poses, styles of walking and other symbolic details that might exist within a scene.
Symbolic of what?
Symbolic, generally, of people’s status life, using that term in the broad sense of the entire pattern and behavior and possessions through which people express their position in the world or what they think it is or what they hope it to be. The recording of such details is not mere embroidery in prose. It lies as close to the center of the power of realism as any other device in literature.”
So when you write, show the reader all the status details that they never noticed but, once they see them, they say, “Ahhhhhhh.” Find the 101 ways that people vie for status, consciously, but would never admit in 101 years.
Make those details fresh. How? Make the familiar unfamiliar . . . and the unfamiliar familiar. Bring the periphery to the center and the center to the periphery. Give your characters just enough rope to hang themselves with their self-indulgent ways . . . and just enough hope to help them find a way to make what they have meaningful. When someone shows off, look for the tic of insecurity; when someone shrinks, look for the surge of strength underneath the shell.
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We start with the Character Dossier, a complete inventory of each character’s traits and backgrounds. If you answer every question in the Dossier, I have found, you will create a character who is complex both internally and externally.
Then we move on to the Wheel of Character Types. The wheel contains eight universal types. We work with four pairs of opposites–hero and villain, sidekick and skeptic, mentor and tempter, and heart and mind. These character types reflect the essential qualities or tendencies that we all contain within us. A healthy person or community manages to balance these traits; most of us struggle to maintain this balance. Your story shows how this process occurs, from scene to scene.
What comes next is even more intriguing.
I call it “Spinning the Wheel.” Once we have established our cast of characters, we imagine the characters are their polar opposites. In other words, imagine the hero as the villain, the mentor as the tempter, and so on.
Geoffrey Maguire “spun the wheel” in his bestselling novel–which became the long-running Broadway play–called Wicked that turns The Wizard of Oz on its head. In this work, the good witch Glinda is portrayed as a bullying, narrow-minded mean girl. The wicked witch of the west is the victim of Glinda and others, who mock her and exclude her because of the color of her skin.
Consider another example–that lovable rogue Falstaff.
John Falstaff plays the sidekick in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I. But in Verdi’s opera, Falstaff plays the hero. Still an egotistical, irresponsible partier, Falstaff now takes center stage. In this tale, he seeks to recover his fortune by wooing a pair of wealthy matrons named Alice and Meg. When they discover Falstaff’s dishonesty, they plot revenge. Alice and Meg lead a group into the forest; dressed as spirits, they scare Falstaff. Falstaff loves a good prank, even when he’s the target. “Stupendous!” he cries when he discovers the gag. In the final scene, Falstaff joins the other characters in singing:
Jesting is a man’s vocation; Wise is he who is jolly, Ready to laugh upon slight provocation, Proof against dull melancholy. Each man makes fun of his neighbor The merry world around: Solace for pain and for labor In gay laughter is found!
Say what you will about Falstaff’s irresponsible and manipulative behavior. You have to appreciate his forgiving spirit. And rather than continuing his deception, he overcomes it when he celebrates the practical joke.
Spinning the Wheel allows you to show all sides of the character. All of us have bright and dark sides. We are brainy and emotional too. We can be loyal, but also betray others. We can be wise but also surrender to temptation. make sure your characters are complex enough to surprise your readers. If they aren’t, they might not be worth writing about in the first place.
This post is adapted from The Elements of Writing, the only comprehensive, brain-based system for mastering writing in all fields.
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The master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, often stepped away from the movie set to refer to a small guide called “Plotto.” The guide lists three sets of 92 ideas that can be mixed and matched to create 1,462 permutations of stories, each with a beginning, middle, and end. Plotto’s plot points were elemental, involving love and death, money and fame, and scheming and revenge.
Hitch might just as well have used “Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” for “Plotto” gave Hitchcock a connect-the-dots formula for writing modern, adult fairy tales. As Marina Warner shows in Once Upon a Time, few things in the human experience run deeper than fairy tales. In enchanted forests and other fantastical worlds, flat characters live outrageous lives, cutting to the core of human fears and desires. Fairytale plots and characters, in fact, offer the tropes that can be found in just about every story we tell.
All Stories Are Mashups
Stories are really mashups of set pieces. The stories remain the same; only the particulars vary.
In fact, Christopher Booker argues that there are only seven plots—the quest, rags to riches, overcoming the monster, homecoming, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth. Others argue that there is only one plot–man’s desire to return to a state of innocence or unity, as expressed by the story of Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden.
Fairy Tales
In Once Upon a Time, Marina Warner shows that few things in human experience run deeper than fairy tales. In enchanted forests and other fantastical worlds, flat characters live outrageous lives, cutting to the core of human fears and desires. Fairy-tale plots and characters, in fact, feature the tropes that can be found in just about every story we tell. Warner surveys centuries of fairy tales and academic research about them. She ties these tales to virtually every aspect of culture — mythology, art, music, movies, games, and psychology. We need them, she says, to make sense of the world.
On one level, she notes, fairy tales seem childish and unworthy of attention. The basic rules of physics are suspended. Fairies and monsters of all descriptions lurk, using magical powers to seduce, fool, metamorphose, taunt, torture, rape, maim, and kill. Sexuality, jealousy, and revenge animate everyone, even innocent girls bringing picnic baskets to dear old grandmothers. Enchanted trees, streams, and inanimate objects come to life, producing tabloid-style gore.
Gruesome and Extreme
Fairy tales come steeped in gruesome and explicit imagery. In contrast to today’s politically-correct sensibilities, folk stories revel in death, torture, sexual perversion, and betrayal. But one tale by the Brothers Grimm went too far.
In “Playing Butchers,” a man slaughters a pig as his children watch. Afterward, one child says to another: “[Y]ou be the little pig, and I’ll be the butcher.” The possibility of copycats horrified 19th-century Germans. Wilhelm Grimm argued that the story taught a valuable lesson about make-believe and real life. But no matter. The story was cut from the anthology.
Fairy tales also speak to everyday terrors as well as hellacious monsters. “The Boy Who Wanted to Learn How to Shudder,” for example, “passes unscathed through a series of fearsome and ghoulish tests, and never shrinks: hanged men from a gallows, a haunted castle, a game of skittles with skulls and bones.” But when the princess spills a bucket of minnows onto a bed, he freaks out. Thus the ultimate lesson and role of fairy tales. Sometimes it’s the trifles that touch us most profoundly.
The Power of Imagination (and Projection)
So much perverse action fills these tales that the characters themselves are not rounded but mere vessels for wild imagination. “There is no psychology in a fairy tale,” notes Philip Pullman, the British author of fantasy novels. “The characters have no interior life. . . . One might almost say that the characters in a fairy tale are not actually conscious.” With the characters lacking depth, the readers project their own lives — and fears and fantasies — onto them.
If fairy tales seem childish, they often embed dangerous adult messages. The more fantastical a story, Warner writes, the greater the opportunity to take on serious issues — and to confront powerful forces without retribution. Dissidents from Christ to Havel understand the power of parables, coded with messages about morality and power. These tales offer “protective camouflage” to speak truth to power. Kings and rich people alike are unmasked as petty and treacherous.
Confronting Evil
Classic tales like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” “Cinderella,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “Snow White” all depict evil beings in charge of isolated, enchanted worlds. The victims’ innocence dooms them, until someone comes to the rescue. But even when the world is set right again, the world’s brutality never leaves consciousness. Fairy tales accept that life is tragic, horribly unfair.
Warner examines the French story of Bluebeard, a wealthy aristocrat shunned by society. Bluebeard tells his young wife that he must take a trip. He gives her a key that unlocks doors to his chateau’s many treasures — then warns her against opening one particular door. Naturally, she can’t resist. When she opens the door she discovers an ocean of blood and Bluebeard’s former wives, murdered, hanging on hooks. In the end her brothers rescue her by killing Bluebeard.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
This originally appeared in The Boston Globe on December 30, 2014.
Fairy tales come steeped in gruesome and explicit imagery. In contrast to today’s politically-correct sensibilities, folk stories revel in death, torture, sexual perversion, and betrayal. But one tale by the Brothers Grimm went too far.
In “Playing Butchers,” a man slaughters a pig as his children watch. Afterward, one child says to another: “[Y]ou be the little pig, and I’ll be the butcher.” The possibility of copycats horrified 19th-century Germans. Wilhelm Grimm argued that the story taught a valuable lesson about make-believe and real life. But no matter. The story was cut from the anthology.
In Once Upon a Time, Marina Warner shows that few things in human experience run deeper than fairy tales. In enchanted forests and other fantastical worlds, flat characters live outrageous lives, cutting to the core of human fears and desires. Fairy-tale plots and characters, in fact, feature the tropes that can be found in just about every story we tell.
In this lively, scholarly work, Warner surveys centuries of fairy tales and academic research about them. She ties these tales to virtually every aspect of culture — mythology, art, music, movies, games, and psychology. We need them, she says, to make sense of the world.
On one level, she notes, fairy tales seem childish and unworthy of attention. The basic rules of physics are suspended. Fairies and monsters of all descriptions lurk, using magical powers to seduce, fool, metamorphose, taunt, torture, rape, maim, and kill. Sexuality, jealousy, and revenge animate everyone, even innocent girls bringing picnic baskets to dear old grandmothers. Enchanted trees, streams, and inanimate objects come to life, producing tabloid-style gore.
So much perverse action fills these tales that the characters themselves are not rounded but mere vessels for wild imagination. “There is no psychology in a fairy tale,” notes Philip Pullman, the British author of fantasy novels. “The characters have no interior life. . . . One might almost say that the characters in a fairy tale are not actually conscious.” With the characters lacking depth, the readers project their own lives — and fears and fantasies — onto them.
If fairy tales seem childish, they often embed dangerous adult messages. The more fantastical a story, Warner writes, the greater the opportunity to take on serious issues — and to confront powerful forces without retribution. Dissidents from Christ to Havel understand the power of parables, coded with messages about morality and power. These tales offer “protective camouflage” to speak truth to power. Kings and rich people alike are unmasked as petty and treacherous.
Classic tales like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” “Cinderella,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “Snow White” all depict evil beings in charge of isolated, enchanted worlds. The victims’ innocence dooms them, until someone comes to the rescue. But even when the world is set right again, the world’s brutality never leaves consciousness. Fairy tales accept that life is tragic, horribly unfair.
On one level, she notes, fairy tales seem childish and unworthy of attention. The basic rules of physics are suspended. Fairies and monsters of all descriptions lurk, using magical powers to seduce, fool, metamorphose, taunt, torture, rape, maim, and kill. Sexuality, jealousy, and revenge animate everyone, even innocent girls bringing picnic baskets to dear old grandmothers. Enchanted trees, streams, and inanimate objects come to life, producing tabloid-style gore.
So much perverse action fills these tales that the characters themselves are not rounded but mere vessels for wild imagination. “There is no psychology in a fairy tale,” notes Philip Pullman, the British author of fantasy novels. “The characters have no interior life. . . . One might almost say that the characters in a fairy tale are not actually conscious.” With the characters lacking depth, the readers project their own lives — and fears and fantasies — onto them.
If fairy tales seem childish, they often embed dangerous adult messages. The more fantastical a story, Warner writes, the greater the opportunity to take on serious issues — and to confront powerful forces without retribution. Dissidents from Christ to Havel understand the power of parables, coded with messages about morality and power. These tales offer “protective camouflage” to speak truth to power. Kings and rich people alike are unmasked as petty and treacherous.
Classic tales like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” “Cinderella,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “Snow White” all depict evil beings in charge of isolated, enchanted worlds. The victims’ innocence dooms them, until someone comes to the rescue. But even when the world is set right again, the world’s brutality never leaves consciousness. Fairy tales accept that life is tragic, horribly unfair.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
In his interviews with French filmmaker Francois Truffault, Alfred Hitchcock constantly emphasized one point: Emotion. Good storytelling connects with audiences at the most visceral level.
And what better technique to create tension than time? By setting deadlines, we create a race against time. By slowing time, we offer an opportunity to look carefully at people, places, and moments.
Every scene, Hitch said, has to consciously manipulate time. We can’t just let one thing happen, then another and another. We have to create a sense of urgency,
“The very nature of suspense require a constant play with the flux of time,” Truffault noted, “either by compressing it or, more often, by distending it. … A fast action has to be geared down and stretched out; otherwise, it is almost imperceptible to the viewer.”
Hitch agreed on the need for a “bold manipulation of time.” He suggests using pieces of dialogue, references to time (like clocks and setting suns) to foster a sense of urgency.
In the thrilling Strangers on a Train, Bruno meets a fading tennis star named Guy and suggests the two swap murders. Bruno will kill Guy’s estranged wife and Guy will kill Bruno’s father. Guy wants no part of the “criss-cross” deal. But Bruno kills Guy’s wife and demands that he reciprocate. When he won’t Guy goes to the amusement park where he committed murder to plant Guy’s cigarette lighter to implicate him.
“When he asks someone at the amusement park, At what time does it dark around here?’ everything is decompressed,” Hitch explains. “Real-life time takes over while he waits for nightfall. That dramatic play with time is really stunning.”
Playing with time can also emphasize the dreary parts of life.
In Psycho, the camera zooms in on a clock in the hotel room where Marion Crane has an affair.
“I did that to lead up to a very important fact: that it was 2:43 in the afternoon and this is the only time the poor girl has to go to bed with her lover,” Hitch said. “It also allows the viewer to become a Peeping Tom.”
To create mystery, Hitch advised showing the same incident over and over from different perspectives:
“I had a car accident [in a TV show]. … What I did was use five shots of people witnessing the incident before I showed the accident itself. … These are moments when you have to stop time, to stretch it out.”
This slow, desultory scene raises several questions.
“The basic question: When will the girl be found out? That’s one question and the other one is: What’s the matter with this girl” Why won’t she go to bed with her husband?”
Time is tricky. Sometimes moving quickly can elongate a moment. In Rear Window, Lisa Fremont moves into Jeff Jeffries’s apartment unannounced and moves toward him directly to kiss him. Hitch wastes no time in getting to that moment, but then slows down the action to bring the audience into the embrace.
“I want to get right to the important point without wasting any time,” Hitch said.
Arnold Toynbee once said that history is “just one damn thing after another.” Hitchcock said that stories are just one moment of tension after another.
“Sequences can never stand still,” he said. “They must carry the action forward, just as the wheels of a ratchet mountain railway move the train up the slope, cog by cog. … There must be this steady development of the plot.”
Great storytellers use time, the most finite of all resources, to strengthen all the other tricks of narrative.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Every story is a journey – from one distinct place to another, different place.
So what goes in between the starting and ending points? A typical scene in a movie contains dozens of moments, which movie people call “beats.” Each one moves the story forward. If a moment does not move the story forward, it doesn’t belong in the scene.
Track the beats in your scenes. Does every beat move you, in some way, toward the end? If not, does it at least give you essential information to understand that journey?
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Years ago, I went to paradise in search of the secret of youth sports champions.
A team of work-class families from an old Hawaii plantation town of Ewa Beach won the Little League World Series in 2005. They beat the top-seeded American team, an affluent band of year-round players from suburban San Diego, and then they beat the defending champions from Curacao.
And they did it without breaking a sweat. As other teams collapsed physically and emotionally, the bunch from Hawaii won easily. Even when they were losing in the final game, they were loose.
So what was the secret to their success?
The coach of the team was an ink-haired forty-something grandfather named Layton Aliviado. We met in the living room of Layton’s house in a development of Ewa Beach, a booming section of Oahu. Like other fathers on the team, Layton drove a truck for a living. Like the other parents, he was devoted to helping his kids go places he could never go—starting with private school and college. In his living room, he sat amidst baseball and football gear, trophies and balls, boxes of commemorative tee shirts, and pictures of his kids.
Layton described the team’s drills for hitting, running, and fielding. In all the baseball drills, Layton taught his young athletes to generate power from the lower parts of the body (the legs and butt), transfer that power with the core (the abdomen), and then to perform specific actions, like throwing and hitting, with the upper body (arms, shoulders, wrists).
Aliviado grabbed a bat to demonstrate how he taught hitting.
“One: stride forward.
“Two: get the hips going, get the hands going.
“Three: bring the hands around into the zone, snap everything forward.”
The key, he said, was to put everything in threes.
“In the beginning of the season, I do 1-2-3 drills,” he said. “I keep it simple for the kids. Everyone can count. Just count out what to do and explain by showing. Then they have it stuck in their heads: 1-2-3. I do the same thing with throwing and pitching. Every kid can count, right?”
That’s exactly what we need to do to master writing. Too often, teachers and editors fail to explain how to do what they demand . They say: “Keep it simple!” And: “Cut Clutter!” And: “Use details!” And: “Show, don’t tell!” And: “Tell a story!” But they don’t say how.
But the key is to break everything down into three parts.
The Power of Three
Groups of three work because they make sense of the world. We think in threes for logic (syllogisms), religion (father, son, holy ghost), dynamic relationships (two people and a disruptive third), architecture (foundation, walls, roof), politics (executive, legislative, judicial), economics (producers, products, markets), the learning process (demonstration, trial, correction), the psyche (id, ego, superego), and families (mother, father, children). Threes give us simple but dynamic models for understanding the world.
The core skills of writing—storytelling, construction, and analysis—begin with that one-two-three structure. Linguists have found, in fact, that children learn words and language in three parts. To understand a simple word like cat, for example, a child first learns the beginning (the letter “c”), then the ending (the letter “t”), and finally the middle (the letter “a”). One, two, three.
The one-two-three code overlaps for all three writing skills. When you learn the 1-2-3 Code, you learn all you need to know about writing.
The reading and writing process: The literary process always involves three elements—author, subject, and reader.
Story structure/narrative arc: In The Poetics, Aristotle explains that stories move from a beginning (1) a settled and stable world, upset by a basic challenge to that world to a middle (2) a series of challenges for the hero to an end (3) a resolution and dénouement, and a new world emerges.
Triangulation: Francis Ford Coppola summarizes the formula for a great scene like this: “Put three people in a room.” Most action involves the interaction of three characters—or the interaction of two characters and something else (a desired object or goal).
The content of stories: Most stories concern the gossipy question, “Who’s doing whom?” Readers want to know about relationships. Relationships reveal all in stories. Word structure: Readers first process the beginning, then the end, and finally the middle.
Sentence structure: Most good sentences begin with a core of subject, verb, and object/predicate. If you build that three-part core into every sentence, the reader will always follow what you say.
Sentences, paragraphs, sections, and whole pieces: The 2-3-1 principle—put the second most important idea first, put the least important information second, and put the most important stuff last. I also call this “start strong, finish strong.”
Analysis: The basic structure of every question and analysis can be stated simply: what causes what? The first “what” refers to the variables that cause change. “Causes” refers to the process of change. The second “what” refers to the outcome.
Why Threes Are Powerful
Threes are powerful for three reasons.
Pattern recognition: The human brain is a pattern-recignition machine. To gain control over our lives–to understand what’s happening and what might be about to happen–we see the world as a three-step process.
Suppose I tell you a number—2, for example. Do you see a pattern yet? No, of course not. Suppose I give you two numbers: 2 and 4. Do you see a pattern? You bet. There are two obvious possibilities. I might be doubling the numbers … or I might be counting by twos.
When will we really know the pattern for sure? With the third term. If the pattern is to increase the numbers by two, then the pattern will be 2, 4, 6. If the pattern is to double the numbers, the pattern will be 2, 4, 8.
Prompt-process-resolution: Every day, researchers tell us, we experience 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts. From the time we awaken to the time we fall asleep, a long train of troughts enter our minds, unbidden.
Those thoughts have a 1-2-3 structure. First we get some kind of prompt. Something happens to draw our attention. The alarm goes off, a driver honks, an aroma wafts across the restaurant, a group of people burst into a house.
When we get that prompt, we process it. We try to make sense of it. When the alarm sounds, we get pulled out of our dream state and into the real world. When someone honks a car, we are startled and pay attention to the traffic and possible pronlems on the road. When the aroma wafts across the restaurant, we wonder it it’s our order or someone elses and also wonder what it is. When people burst into a house, we look up from our book or laundry (or whatever we’re doing) to see who has arrived.
When we process information, we have an internal dialogue that can be short or go on for a while. Once we have processed the information, we resolve the issue.
Dynamism and sturdiness: Mathematicians say that a triangle is at once the sturdiest and most dynamic of all shapes. Moving one corner alters the other two, but does not necessarily upset everything. Triangles create a process of constant adjustment. No wonder, then, that we see triangles in all structures—of art, literature, scientific inquiry, you name it.
Why do so many systems and structures work so well in threes? I’m not sure, but the dynamic relations of a lover’s triangle offers some hints.
Think of Oedipus, Laius, and Jacosta (Oedipus Rex)…Catherine, Heathcliff, and Edgar (Wuthering Heights)…or even Carrie, Big, and Aiden (TV’s “Sex and the City”). A couple can achieve some stability, apart from the world. But when you introduce some outside force—say, a former lover of one of the partners—that stability totters.
How does the arrival of the third party affect the couple? Does it bring them closer together? Create temptation? Jealousy? Anger? Fear? Whatever the case, the couple is challenged—singly and together—when they have to deal with outside forces. The third element, then, reveals all.
Threes in Stories
The greatest single work on storytelling, Aristotle’s The Poetics, describes three parts to all stories.
Part 1: The World of the Story. In the beginning, we meet the story’s hero and learn about his or her home, values, desires, and challenges. We see what’s “normal,” what kind of “comfort zone” the characters inhabit. We also see hints of characters’ limitations.At the end of the first part, the hero must face some crisis or answer a “call to action.” Most people are reluctant to answer the call. They have established a life already and don’t want to do the work — or acknowledge their own psychological or moral limitations — and so they try to avoid doing things differently.
But before long, the hero realizes that he has to do something to respond to the challenge. Typically, he addresses a small aspect of the challenge with the hope that the larger crisis will go away. But it doesn’t.
Part 2: Rising action. The second part of the story focuses on a series of crises. The hero tries, again and again, to avoid the crisis. But to fend it off, he has to confront a piece of it. Each time he confronts a piece of it, he hopes the problem goes away. But it doesn’t. So he takes on a bigger piece of the problem … and then a bigger piece … and then a bigger piece. Finally, over time, the hero learns the enormity of the crisis. He also begins to understand that he cannot remain in denial.
Part 3: Resolution. And as he deals with these pieces, he comes to a new understanding of himself and his situation. And so the story reaches a climax. The hero has to take on the crisis in its entirety.
By the time of the climax, the hero opens his mind and expands his skills.
And so, in the final part of the story, the hero reaches a new recognition of his situation. And he reverses his previous approach to the crisis and to his life. This is what Aristotle called the denouement, the winding down of the action. Now, the hero settles into his new life with a new understanding of his own character and the world.
Threes and the Inner Structure of Writing
The structure of a story offers that same three-part “template” for all other elements of writing. In fact, everything else is really just a particular kind of story. A sentence is a mini-story. A paragraph is a slightly larger drama. And so are sections and larger pieces of writing — even non-narrative pieces like emails, memos, reports, and analysis.
All of these elements of writing take that 1-2-3 format, from beginning (world of the story) to middle (rising action and conflict) to end (resolution and closure).
Once we master mechanics, we can move into the most abstract challenge of writing — analysis. Whether we’re analyzing problems of science, medicine, policy, business, psychology, or other topics, we are really telling a story. What makes analysis different is that the story concerns concepts and categories, rather than particular people,. places, actions, and outcomes.
Storytelling provides just the first building block of all writing skills. Once we master storytelling, we can easily develop skills in mechanics of writing — sentences and paragraphs, grammar and punctuation, editing and style.
We see the three-part code wherever we look, in storytelling and in the movement from storytelling to mechanics to analysis. Consider:
• The core of a sentence: Subject-verb-object
• The sentence and paragraph: Start strong, finish strong, with “bridge” material in the middle
• The elements of a great scene: Triangles
• The joke or scene: Background/setup, expectation, surprise
• Analysis: Dependent and independent variables and result
Here’s something magical: If you can get in the habit of looking for threes in whatever you do — writing a sentence or paragraph, structuring a scene, debating an idea — you will not falter.
What Are the Threes in Your Work?
Threes in your life: Make a list of the threes in your life — relationships, ideas, conflicts, events. Identify how these three elements came together, what kind of conflict resulted, and how that conflict was resolved.
Your three-part story: Sketch out, as quickly as possible, the three-part structure of your NaNoWriMo novel. Follow Aristotle’s narrative arc, moving from the beginning (“world of the story”) to the middle (“rising action” of ever-more intense conflict), and end (recognition and reversal, setting into a new world of the story).
Scenes: Write three scenes, at least 700 words apiece. Use Aristotle’s arc for each scene. Open by showing the characters living in their normal, everyday world — only to confront something new, unexpected, and threatening. Show the characters deny and then, reluctantly, deal with the challenge. And end with the whole situation getting resolved, with the characters at least a little more aware, knowledgable, and capable.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
From fourteen eminent men and women of letters, courtesy of the Guardian of London, come 247 rules for writing fiction.
My favorites:
Be prepared
From Geoff Dyer, a mind game, namely, tricking yourself into a good choice:
Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it’s a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It’s only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I always have to feel that I’m bunking off from something.
From Hilary Mantel, a suggestion for a how-to book:
Read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don’t really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, “how to” books seldom do any harm. You can kick-start a whole book with some little writing exercise.
From Will Self, an alert to be always alert:
Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.
From Rose Tremain, a word to the wise to forget the most common piece of advice:
Forget the boring old dictum “write about what you know”. Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that’s going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.
From Michael Morpurgo, the command to get out of the garrett once in a while:
The prerequisite for me is to keep my well of ideas full. This means living as full and varied a life as possible, to have my antennae out all the time.
From P.D. James, a word to the wise about words:
Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
Getting to work
From Neil Gaiman, encouragement to just do it:
Write.
Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
From Roddy Doyle, exhortations not to beat yourself up — and, in fact, to give yourself some illusion of mastery and progress:
Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph.
Until you get to Page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety – it’s the job.
Building stories
From Anne Enright, this pearl about perspective and POV:
Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
And focus on the point of (almost) all writing:
Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that’s the point to step back and fill in the details of their world. People don’t notice their everyday surroundings and daily routine, so when writers describe them it can sound as if they’re trying too hard to instruct the reader.
From Andrew Motion, a mind game:
Lock different characters/elements in a room and tell them to get on.
From Sarah Waters, this sobering advice to cut, cut, cut:
Cut like crazy. Less is more. I’ve often read manuscripts – including my own – where I’ve got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: “This is where the novel should actually start.” A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it.
Style
From Elmore Leonard, two rules against describing:
Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”, what do the “Ameri can and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story.
Don’t go into great detail describing places and things, unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
From Jonathan Frantzen, sobering words about the value of words in the Information Age:
When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
From Esther Freud, something impossible:
Cut out the metaphors and similes. In my first book I promised myself I wouldn’t use any and I slipped up during a sunset in chapter 11. I still blush when I come across it.Getting help
One more . . .
From Geoff Dyer, an admonition to embrace the labor-saving possibilities of technology:
If you use a computer, constantly refine and expand your autocorrect settings. The only reason I stay loyal to my piece-of-shit computer is that I have invested so much ingenuity into building one of the great autocorrect files in literary history. Perfectly formed and spelt words emerge from a few brief keystrokes: “Niet” becomes “Nietzsche”, “phoy” becomes “photography” and so on. Genius!
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Man is a pattern-seeking animal. To understand anything—from brewing coffee in the morning to understanding Trevor Noah’s jokes at night—we need to see patterns. When we “get” the pattern, we can understand complexity within the pattern.
The catchier we can make the pattern, the easier it is for the reader to follow along—and get invested emotionally.
Consider, for example, the most famous piece of music in the western world, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Everyone knows the opening, the foreboding four notes that announce, in Beethoven’s own words, “death knocking upon the door.” The piece has been imitated everywhere, from the Beatles’ song “Because” to the disco classic “A Fifth of Beethoven.” The Allied forces in World War II used the piece as its victory march, since the opening motif spells out V (for victory) in Morse code.
Go anywhere in the world, whistle or hum those four bars, and you will get an instant look of recognition. Why?
It’s not just that Beethoven makes such a bold statement. Think about how he does it. He starts with triangles: DA da da DUM. That three-part structure looks and feels like Aristotle’s narrative arc. We see a clear beginning, middle, and end. The beginning establishes the theme, the middle moves it forward, and the end brings closure.
We could also look at Beethoven’s Fifth as a simple march of notes and themes, one leading to the next. This march of notes could look like a straight chronology—a long line of experiences, with clear movement and direction, going in one direction. Again, a complete experience with closure.
Or we could see the piece as an endlessly repeated cycle, with the same themes different only in the details.
Finally we could experience a movement back and forth, from heaviness to lightness. We experience power, energy, excitement, and dread from the pounding notes; then we experience lightness, sweetness, and hopefulness from the light notes.
All the structures of writing in one thirty-seven-minute symphony! Maybe the best piece moves forward, one moment after another … three steps at a time, like a triangle or an arc … with a recurring cycle, which advances and develops the piece’s themes … yo-yoing, back and forth, from heaviness to lightness, from specificity to generality.
An interesting thought, anyway: Beethoven’s Universal Theory of Composition.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
To set your hero and other characters on their journeys, know who they are and what they’re trying to do.
Know their physical, mental, and spiritual qualities. Learn everything possible about their lives. Then give the reader the most relevant and, yes, the juiciest tales and details.
Don’t just discover the surface facts of your characters’ lives. Find the backstories. Don’t just get your characters’ names. Find out how they got their names and what they mean. Don’t just talk about their jobs. Find out what it means to them emotionally.
Find the odd moments in characters’ lives, their lost loves, and moments of shame and glory. When you size up their bodies, look beyond the obvious—size, build, hair and eye color. See how they walk and react physically to events.
Most important: Be complete. Just as a P.I. gets his best stuff while tracking down unlikely leads, you will discover telling details when you fill in the details for each of these four categories:
Personal and Family Background
Name
Age and birthday
Birthplace
Parents’ ethnic background, upbringing, hopes and fears, and careers
Place in the family’s birth order
Relations with siblings and other relatives
Physical Characteristics
Body
Build
Hair and eye color
Sound of voice
Conversational tics
Physical peculiarities
Mannerisms while walking, talking, working, and playing
Biography
Pastimes as a child … and as an adult
Sidekicks and mentors
Intellectual and emotional influences
Rivals and foes at different stages of life
Not-so-good influences—skeptics, and tempters
Political leanings—and major political influences
What others notice first
How the character changes over the course of life
Turning points in life
Psychology
All-consuming desires
Pathological maneuver
Most admirable qualities
Least admirable qualities
Sexual identity
Philosophy of life
Optimism or pessimism
Energy level
What the character does when alone
What the character thinks about when alone
Greatest fears at different stages of life
Gathering so much information might seem like overkill. But you need to know everything about your characters before you decide what’s important.
In my Elements of Writing seminars, students join together to create a dossier for both real and imagined characters. Here’s a character created by students at Hillhouse High School in New Haven:
Jodie is a sixteen-year-old orphan being raised by her grandparents. Slender and athletic, with brown hair and hazel eyes, Jodie still struggles with the trauma of her parents’ deaths in a plane crash. She lights candles in her room and holds seances to connect with her lost parents; in a bit of “magical thinking,” she thinks she can somehow bring them back. She can be mean at times, as her two older brothers will attest. She’s energetic but deeply pessimistic. She has a crush on a boy named Cody, but a cheerleader named Heather already has won his affections.
Now Jodie is on an airplane to Egypt, as part of a school field trip. She saved money for the trip because she thinks she can somehow connect with her parents’ spirit in this ancient land. She sits next to a middle-aged woman who reminds her of her mother. And they talk . . . and talk . . . and talk. In a way Jodie has never experienced, this woman is calming her down.
On this day, her sixteenth birthday and the eighth anniversary of her parents’ death, Jodie just might have a chance to overcome her fear of losing someone close.
Then the pilot’s voice crackles on the PA system. There’s some trouble with the fuel tank or one of the engines . . . or something. Whatever the pilot says, people respond with panic. Now, just as Jodie has found a soulmate for the first time since her parents’ death, the trip could end in tragedy.
What’s Jodie going to do?
This exercise does more that helping you to know a character well. It also helps to tell the story. In fact, it’s almost impossible to create a dossier without also beginning to tell the story.
Create a dossier for your own life. Fill in the blanks, as if you were writing a memoir. Be honest. Use as many details as possible. Include the material that you hope no one ever discovers. You might be surprised by the power of your memories and emotions—and by the insights that come with those memories and emotions.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
David Halberstam wrote sprawling books about politics, war, sports, firefighters, mass media, show business, and everything in between.
Halberstam looked for the universal in the particular and the particular. His prose sometimes reached. Sometimes he wanted to get dramatic while describing ordinary people and moments. And as he connected one observation to another — and another and another and another — his prose often turned purple.
But Halberstam was one great a reporter and he helped you to understand how big and little things related to each other.
His two best books, in my mind, were The Best and the Brightest (about the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ bumbling into Vietnam) and The Breaks of the Game (a season with the Portland Trail Blazers).
Here’s what he said about Maurice Lucas, the power forward of the Blazers:
It was, [coach Jack] Ramsay knew, always going to be a test of wills with Luke. Of the blacks on the team, he was by far the most political and also the most willing to test authority, any authority. Some of the other blacks, Ron Brewer and T.R. Dunn, for example, had grown up in the South and had gone to southern schools; there was, some coaches thought, a lack of assertiveness to their play, something the coaches suspected could be traced back to their childhoods, to that region where, despite significant social change, authority still belonged to whites and blacks remained tentative about expressing their feelings openly, whether in politics or sports. But there was no problem like that with Maurice Lucas, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, late of the Hill district of the ghetto. Sometimes the Portland front office, talking about a particular player in college or on another team, used the phrase, and to them it was a positive: obedient kid. Obedient kid. Maurice Lucas was most demonstrably not an obedient kid. He was very black, very articulate, very political, a strong and independent man sprung from circumstances that could also create great insecurity. There was about him a constant sense of challenge; everything was a struggle, and everything was a potential confrontation, a struggle for turf and position. It was in part what had made him at his best so exceptional an athlete. He liked the clash of will. He was at once an intensely proud black man, justifiably angry about the injustice around him, and a superb and subtle con artist, a man who had in effect invented himself and his persona — Luke the Intimidator. When he was making demands, when he talked about race being an issue at point, it was sometimes hard to tell which Maurice Lucas was talking — the Lucas who genuinely believed he was a victim of such obvious American racism, or the Lucas who knew that his cause was more dramatic if he deliberately cloaked it in himself. Indeed, it was not possible at certain times to tell if he himself knew. (He was capable of complaining that Portland would never pay a black superstar what it would pay a white superstar, which was possibly correct, and, in the next breath, of complaining about the fact that Mychal Thompson, a rookie, who was also, it happened, black, had made twice as much in his rookie year as Luke made, then in his third year in Portland.)
Vintage Halberstam. In one sprawling paragraph, he plays the role of sociologist and psychologist. He generalizes about blacks in the South and blacks in the North. He makes knowing comments about the attitudes of coaches and sports executives. He teases out puzzles about the subject: Does he mean it when he complains about racism … or is he self-righteous … or is he trying to use his outsized persona to dramatize the concerns of lesser beings.
You can see how this kind of writing can stretch the limits of storytelling. Specifics and generalities blend together. You don’t get much of an image of the subject, but you do get a sense of the man and his time. No bad.
But try doing this too often, or without the insight of Halberstam, and you’ve got a disaster on your hands. You got long-winded prose, dramatic words and generalizations that can’t be proved or disproved, an air of insight but none of the modesty that should accompany efforts to understand.
In the end, the problem with this stream-of-consciousness writing is that it tries to do too much at a time. Rather than focus on one aspect of the subject, carefully, before moving to the next, it pulls all kinds of observations and judgments together, about different topics.
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President Barack Obama and the Republicans continue to wrestle over the nation’s debt and everything else under the sun — tax rates, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (and, by extension, Obamacare), education and R&D funding, the national parks and the space program, and in fact everything packed into the monstrosity known as the federal budget.
And as they do so, the two sides dig deep into their bag of metaphors. Desperate for the eyeblink’s worth of the attention of the American public, they are looking for the image that elevates their own standing and discredits the other side.
Of course, this is how life works. We think in metaphors. In fact, human cognition would be unthinkable without metaphors, those dandy little tropes that say X equals Y. Everything we do gets tied up in metaphors.
The more desperate we are for understanding — or rhetorical advantage — the more we reach for metaphors.
Which is what makes Barack Obama such an interesting president. We’ve never had one like him before: A black man (actually, mixed race, but O says he black), born in the nation’s most exotic state (actually, if you listen to the birthers, in Indonesia or Kenya or Transylvania or some other place that sounds freaky), a product of the nation’s most corrupt city and state (actually, a lot of us claim that mantle), a reformer (actually, he’s just an ordinary post-1960s liberal) and a spellbinding speaker (actually, he stammers without a teleprompter) …
You get the idea.
Which gave me this idea: The way most of us judge people and events is to compare them to people and events in the same category. So we ask how much Derek Jeter is like the Iron Horse or Joe D or the Mick. Or we wonder whether 9/11 belongs in the same class as Pearl Harbor or JFK’s assassination or the Challenger disaster.
So we endlessly compare presidents to other presidents. By my reckoning, politicos and pundits have compared Barack Obama, who we might understand as sui generis, to more than a dozen other presidents. Interesting, eh? The more singular a person is, the more we compare him to others.
In the first couple years of the Age of O, we have compared him to James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and even George W. Bush.
Which led me to wonder: Are we leaving anyone out?
And so I reached out to some presidential scholars to see if we could compare Barack Obama to every other single president. Now, if O is like everyone, he’s really like no one. That make sense?
Anyway, ask yourself: Which president does Barack Obama most resemble? Finish this sentence: Obama is ______.
Ready? Let’s play.
George Washington: Aloof. That all you got for a parallel?
The Adamses: Stubborn and proud, to a fault. Late in life, J.Q. achieved nobility with his role in the Amistad case. So can O find redemption after the White House?
Thomas Jefferson: Oh, he talks a good game about grassroots politics, but he’ll expand government power without hesitating. If only someone would sell O a massive territory.
James Madison: Gets involved in messy and unnecessary wars. Yeah, W started war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But look who has kept us there … and brought us to Libya.
James Monroe: Era of Good Feelings? Hah! Modesty in foreign affairs? Hardly. Ever hear of the Monroe Doctrine? Talk about overreaching. Hello, Libya … Hello, health care … Hello, GM …
Andrew Jackson: Man of the people? Try man of the mobs … and the machine. O drew masses to his speeches, from Berlin to Denver to Grant Park. Does that make him a populist?
Martin Van Buren: A machine pol, more concerned about payola and patronage than the people. And where did O come from? Daley’s Chicago! Case closed.
William Henry Harrison: Full of ideas about unifying the country and following the lead of Congress, he died of pneumonia before he had a chance to do much. O’s still with us of course, but how’s that we’re-not-red-or-blue-we’re-American thing going?
John Tyler: Despite long struggles with Congress, he still managed to compile an impressive legislative record (e.g., the Log Cabin bill, tariff, treaty with canada, annexation of Texas). Hey, you check O’s actual record lately? Like it or not, he’s done a lot.
James Knox Polk: One termer who wanted to avoid war but got drawn into a historic conflict with Mexico. Hmm … One-termer … controversial conflict …
Zachary Taylor: A media creation, soon undone by his own incompetence. From O the Omnipotent to ah, uh, er, um, ah …
Millard Fillmore: Buffeted by regional conflicts, he oversaw conflicts that only delayed the inevitable. Shades of today’s economic apocalypse?
Franklin Pierce: A conciliator, he also couldn’t bring warring factions from the North, South, and territories together. Who can O bring together these days? He’s even got MoveOn griping.
James Buchanan: Ineffectual because he could not make hard decisions about fundamental matters of national security. He’d rather coddle the law-breakers than confront them. And just what is our rationale in Libya?
Abraham Lincoln: Who better than a black intellectual to finish the work of the Great Emancipator? Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose book Team of Rivals celebrates Lincoln’s willingness to bring political adversaries into his Cabinet, hoped that Obama would do the same to heal a fractured nation. O got a total of one Republican in his cabinet (quick, can you name him?). So much for postpartisanship.
Andrew Johnson: Sanctimonious and stubborn, he got into trouble because he was unwilling to do the bidding of radical Republicans in Congress. Key question: Will O be willing to do the bidding of radical Republicans in Congress?
Ulysses Grant: Corrupt, but a damn good writer in the end. The PersonalMemoirsof Ulysses S. Grant = Dreams From My Father?
Rutherford Hayes: Fatally compromised when he became president, he was unable to bring North and South together. Heck, Hayes reinforced the divisions of the blue and gray states. Now, how’s O doing on his whole we-are-one-nation pitch?
James Garfield: Not in office long enough to make a difference. I’m thinking, I’m thinking …
Chester Arthur: The ultimate technocrat, he instituted the civil service system after Garfield’s assassination. Is there a greater embodiment of civil service values than O?
Grover Cleveland: A DINO — Democrat in name only — who fell under the sway of financiers and left ordinary people to struggle for themselves. And just who followed George W. Bush’s policies of bailing out corporate criminals? And who re-upped W’s tax breaks?
Benjamin Harrison: Activist in world affairs and legalistic to a T, he also wanted to make Hawaii part of the union. Besides that Hawaii connection, think about Professor O’s wanton globalism.
William McKinley: A creature of the political strategist Mark Hanna and his ability to rake in massive bucks to overwhelm the opposition. So how will Axelrod, Plouffe & Co. move O’s story forward?
Theodore Roosevelt: He said “speak softly but carry a big stick,” but you could not shut the guy up. Even on his endless vacations, O won’t keep quiet either.
William Howard Taft: Better suited to the Supreme Court than the White House. The ultimate journey from failure to success at the top. Justice O?
Woodrow Wilson: With limited political experience — two years as governor of New Jersey — Wilson spoke in lofty terms about remaking the world. Like Obama, Wilson believed in guiding human progress. Despite his aloof and elitist ways, Wilson compiled an impressive legislative record. But at the end, the love dissolved into contempt and dismissal. Sound familiar?
Warren Harding: Corrupt, detached from ordinary people, lucky to die before people discovered the extent of his corruption. The GOP can’t make the corruption tag stick to O, but not for lack of effort.
Calvin Coolidge: Thin and humorless. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Herbert Hoover: A technocrat’s view of the world, unsuited to dealing with the flesh-and-blood realities of his people. O also seems to have a technocrat’s mindset, detached from the flesh-and-blood realities of his people.
Franklin Roosevelt: Soon after his election, people called Obama a new Franklin Roosevelt. After all, he was a charismatic man taking office in the midst of the Great Recession. People wanted him to rescue the nation the way we sometimes imagine that FDR did. Obama stoked the comparisons by carrying around Jon Alter’s book The Defining Moment, about FDR’s first 100 days. For good or ill, O did get a lot of what he wanted from the Democratic Congress.
Harry Truman: Everyone down in the polls wants to be Harry. Reviled in his own time but celebrated by revisionist historians, Truman is the ultimate Comeback Kid. To make a phrase: Give ’em hell, Barry!
Dwight Eisenhower: Where’s the president? Off playing golf. Hey, Bam! Fore!
John Kennedy: This comparison is inevitable with a Democrat. Kennedy was, of course, a dashing young senator who gave great speeches but accomplished little in his time on Capitol Hill. Americans voted for Kennedy to overcome the supposed malaise of the Eisenhower years, to “get this country moving again.” And then: fumbling the Cold War and civil rights (at first, anyway). Hello, Libya! Oh, yeah, and you say you’re “evolving” on gay rights?
Lyndon Johnson: If we’re talking about pushing aggressive agendas too hard, the comparison shifted to Lyndon Johnson. LBJ used a brief mandate to push the biggest domestic program since Franklin Roosevelt. But he was, alas, crippled by a war in a far-off land started by his predecessor. Sound familiar? Too rich.
Richard Nixon: A cunning chameleon, Nixon ran on peace and bring-us-together platform. In office, he kept us in Vietnam, expanded government, ditched the gold standard, and made all kinds of hollow claims about drug wars and energy independence. He invented the whole -gate thing too. Is Obama this kind of power-hungry megalomaniac who will stop at nothing to impose his will on the nation? Depends? Do you listen to AM or FM radio?
Gerald R. Ford: The accidental president who gained his real power from the veto. That’s what happens when you don’t enjoy a real mandate. So when will O realize that he’s lost his mandate and needs to use the veto pen?
Jimmy Carter: Poor Jimmy has become the Gold Standard for inexperienced, sanctimonious, inflexible but vacillating, and smiling but mean-spirited. Oh, let’s add: hopeless in an economy crippled by oil prices and a world held hostage by fanatics in the Middle East. Now, what doesn’t apply to O?
Ronald Reagan: During the campaign, Obama discoursed about the need for a transformational figure, someone capable of changing people’s ideas about what’s possible. O channeled the Gipper’s magic worked for a while, but …
George H.W. Bush: Saddled with the greatest financial scandal in history (the S&L fiasco), the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression, and limited by crises like the Exxon Valdez and Tiananmen Square, Bush could only manage a mess. So how much of the following applies to O: He caught hell for making tough decisions, like raising taxes and rejecting an all-out war with Iraq.
Bill Clinton: The great triangulator, he survived by pitting his Democratic allies against his Republican enemies. Is this O’s end game?
George W. Bush: Arrogant and aloof. Cocksure and diffident when critiqued. O? Is that you too?
Philosophers since Hegel have argued that history, some day, will come to an end. Has it happened with the emergence of a man who is … everyone else?
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
What if schools built storytelling and writing into every aspect of learning? What if students saw their schooling as a journey, as challenging and demanding as the adventures found in The Odyssey or Moby Dick or Mountains On Mountains? What if students explored their subjects like great mysteries, using all their gifts as investigators and analysts to understand the inner logic of their subjects and their selves?
What if going to school offered a narrative experience—in which the students/heroes took responsibility for their destinies?
Nobody grasps anything as quickly or well as a good story. Our lives are stories. Evolution hardwired us to love and understand stories. Even if we don’t know a particular story, we recognize the basic form of all stories. Robert Graves famously remarked that there is only one basic plot—the desire to return home, to a state of innocence, found in the story of the Garden of Eden. So we eagerly gobble up the details of any decent tale. Once you put something into narrative form, you can hang a lot of other stuff on it.
Even the simplest stories, like fairy tales, inspire us think expansively about matters of life and death, relationships, longing, failure, and all the other dimensions of life. “There is no psychology in a fairy tale,” notes Philip Pullman, the British author of fantasy novels. “The characters have no interior life. . . . One might almost say that the characters in a fairy tale are not actually conscious.” With the characters lacking depth, the readers project their own lives — and fears and fantasies — onto them.
Remember the scrawny Christmas tree that the round-headed kid brought home in “A Charlie Brown Christmas”?
Remember how the gang decorated it so well that it shimmered?
That’s how stories work. Even a scrawny story (like a fairy tale) can help us to explore a wide range of ideas.
You would think, then, that all schools would want to inspire their students to create their own narratives–something they care about passionately–and then hang more and more ideas onto that narrative.
The Founder
Meet Dennis Littky.
Littky is the founder of the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, a school started in 1996 in Providence, R.I., to provide education “one student at a time.” The Met is now part of a nationwide network of schools run by Big Picture Learning, which includes 69 schools in 17 states and the District of Columbia—and 59 schools in Israel, Australia, the Netherlands, and Canada—educating more than 10,000 students worldwide.
Those schools don’t advertise themselves as places of “narrative learning.” But at the heart of their enterprise, everyone understands that learning is a unique journey for each student. It’s a story, as compelling as the old Greek dramas and anything now playing at the Cineplex.
In Big Picture schools, students take no classes, have no teachers, and sit for no tests. Instead, they spend all four years of high school with an “advisory,” a group of 12 to 15 students that meets weekly with a teacher/advisor. Before they graduate, they get to know this group better than any other group anywhere.
Start by Finding Passion
Met students start their high school career by finding their “passion”–some subject that they want to explore for four years in their school activities and internships.
Many students struggle with this challenge — and the opportunity and responsibility it represents — for months. Sometimes they get angry and surly. Or they feel stupid and empty. They act out, look for easy answers. Many consider dropping out to return to the regimented programs of other public schools.
But at some point — usually in December or January of their freshman year, sometimes earlier and sometimes later — students figure out what they want to study. They begin to develop good work habits. They begin to commit to the full responsibilities of their school community.
The Weekly Routine
The Met does not offer a standard curriculum. Students are not required to master survey material for history, literature, math, science. They are not required to take classes. They have to figure out what activities will help them to learn about their passion. The read, interview, take part in existing groups, and start their own groups. Some take a class, here and there, online or at a local college. They also develop projects–organizing plays, trips, gallery shows, and even businesses. They learn by doing.
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, students go to school, where they read and write, conduct experiments, gather and organize information, and explore their passions. They also take part in schoolwide activities like assemblies and reading groups. Some take classes at nearby schools or organize their own study or work groups.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, students work as interns with local professionals—business people and farmers, botanists and carpenters, artists and musicians, scientists and computer programmers, judges and doctors.
Even though the Met does not have classes, tests, or grades, it sets parameters for learning along five dimensions—empirical reasoning, symbolic or quantitative reasoning, communications, and social reasoning, and personal qualities. Students build these academic and life skills into all of their activities. Every quarter, students make presentations to the whole school. They must write a 75-page autobiography in their senior year.
The Standard American School
The Big Picture Learning represents a tiny part of the educational system. And most educators resist its approach. But the Big Picture offers a powerful model for overcoming the limits of traditional schools.
For more than a century, American schools have operated on a common idea: That education is a mass good to be delivered from the top down. Schools work like a company or government agency, delivering basic goods to customers in exchange for the dollars that their attendance brings the school. Using a set curriculum, with a standard set of subjects, teachers provide instruction to groups of students ranging from 15 to 30 or more. The students show mastery by performing well on tests, papers, and presentations.
Schools do vary the curriculum—offering different tracks for students, providing a mix of core and optional courses, and even allowing students to take part in some out-of-school programs—but the whole student body is expected to master the same kind of mix of materials.
I understand that lots of schools do a good job educating and guiding lots of their students. Inspired teachers, exciting books, high standards, great clubs and sports programs launch, and deep friendships launch countless productive and happy lives. If the system is broken, it’s not completely broken. Lots of parts still work well.
But all too often, vast swaths of students get lost in school. For this group—and even many of the more successful students—the Big Picture schools offer a powerful alternative.
Littky’s Model
Rather than thinking of the school as a delivery system, Littky sees the school as a place where students come to design their own education. Littky’s schools give students the same kind of individualized attention that a personal tutor would offer.
The results have been positive. Met schools have a graduation rate of 92 percent—for a demographic that usually graduates just more than half of its students—and most graduating seniors have been accepted into colleges. Met graduates have gone on to attend Brown, Penn, Holy Cross, Providence College, and other first-rate schools. Of the Met graduates in college, more than 70 percent are the first in their family to ever attend college.
Dennis Littky, of course, is not the only person involved in this success. Littky’s business partner is a thoughtful and creative man named Elliott Warshaw. He spends the better part of his time on the road, helping to set up and oversee schools and negotiating with school systems for the opportunity to set up a Big Picture school. He’s dreaming big—taking over a whole school system. Besides Littky and Warshaw, there are hundreds of smart and dedicated advisors who guide the students.
Ironically, the greatest challenge of school reform is scaling up. At charter schools and elite private schools, teachers work long, hard hours to track their students and oversee their demanding work loads. Students shuffle in and out of classes, making it hard for teachers to know students well. Many teachers have to get to know more than 100 students a year.
The whole process revolves around advisories of 12 to 15 students. Advisors know their students better than anyone in the world. They know their backgrounds, interests, and abilities; they know their neighborhoods, families, and everyday struggles. This intimate knowledge gives them the insights–and the caring–to help guide them to explore their passions.
If any model can be replicated, it’s this one. The advisors are extraordinary people, but so are countless other teachers. The difference is that they get manageable workloads and exciting, nonrepetitive work. However intensive the work, it does not involve as many “moving parts” as other reform models.
Some Big Picture schools struggle to meet the demands of standardized tests, the lingua franca of college admissions processes and school assessment. Reluctantly, Littky gives the OK for some Big Picture schools to bend the learning model to make sure students are prepared for the “real world” challenges of tests and admissions.
‘But what about…’
When learning about the Big Picture schools, most open-minded people are intrigued but concerned. Don’t we need a standard curriculum? Shouldn’t all students read Shakespeare, study American history, get a strong grounding in algebra and the basic sciences? I myself embrace the idea of a strong core curriculum. E.D. Hirsch’s idea of “cultural literacy” is essential to any possibility for a humane community. We need something to ground ourselves, right?
But Littky points out that most high school graduates — not just in the Facebook Generation, but in all previous generations — never really attained this ideal. And only a portion of students — a third? a quarter? a tenth? — ever develop the broad liberal-arts mastery evoked in policy debates. For the rest, school too often seems irrelevant. They get turned off to learning by the fill-’em-up mentality of most schools.
For the majority that doesn’t thrive under the back-to-basics, liberal-arts ideal, doesn’t it make sense to challenge students to find and pursue their passions? If done well, these students will explore a wide range of subjects just to understand their passion. A student interested in studying the Iraq War — and many other topics — will learn geography, history, economics, warfare, literature, the environment, statistics, music, art, and more. Guided well, most passions could lead to a broad education.
And, most important, students will develop a love of learning — and an ability to teach themselves how to learn over a lifetime.
School as Narrative
Since first learning about the Met and Big Picture Schools, I have tried to understand how it works. I have visited three or four times, spent hours talking with Littky, advisors, and students. I recently conducted a writing workshop at the Met.
I have always been impressed at how the students’ manners, energy, organization, and articulate speech. And the work ethic! They work hard, often long past the usual hours of 9 to 5. Of course, you could also find polite and energetic students at lots of schools. I just visited three terrific classes at Briarcliff High School, in Westchester County, New York, that fit that description.
So what sets Dennis Littky’s schools apart—I mean, besides giving kids both opportunity and responsibility?
I think it’s that the Met and other Big Picture schools make every students time at school part of a great narrative.
Evolutionary biologists tell us that, more than anything else, storytelling sets humans apart from other animals. Other animals need food and shelter to survive. All need to reproduce. Many use some form of language to communicate. But only humans tell stories. As the human species grew beyond small settlements, as we developed bigger brains and had to keep track of far-flung activities, we started telling stories.
Stories gave us a way to make sense of the world—to understand the dangers of nature, to set rules for families and tribes, to create new systems of hunting and cooking and building, to create stores of memory and knowledge. Over the ages, storytelling gave us ways to engage each other.
As I ruminated on these matters, I started to wonder why schools do not incorporate more narrative into their curricula. Wouldn’t biology be more interesting if told as a story? Physics and chemistry? Math? Health? Economics? Social studies?
Sure, students need to learn raw knowledge. Students need to learn anatomy and periodic tables, expository writing and grammar, geography and timelines, statistics and the scientific method. I understand that. But can’t school help students accumulate this knowledge as part of a larger quest that make them whole people—that make them part of a larger drama that excites and amazes them?
The Hero’s Journey
Then I realized that that’s just what Dennis Littky’s schools do. Students need to find something that sparks their interest and then become the hero in the greatest adventure of all. They must figure out how to give form to information.
Every year, every student at The Big Picture schools enacts powerful dramas. The hero of each drama is a student trying to find her purpose and capacities. The drama involves advisors and peers. It involves employers. It involves parents and siblings and old friends, not all benign influences.
The hero needs to figure it out. Like the heroes of other dramas, the journey not only reveals countless “practical” truths along the way, but also a larger meaning and purpose. And to make sure the experience becomes a permanent part of history, the student documents the drama with a memoir at the end of the whole process.
Be skeptical. You should be. But also be open to the idea that real education requires a journey of discovery. Any curious, reasonably intelligent person can master facts and skills. But all of us really need—and what we owe young people—a chance to play the lead role in our own dramas.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Which led me to wonder: Are we leaving anyone out?