The Moment of Truth in ‘Twelve Angry Men’: Standing and Turning Away

Stories are collections of hundreds of moments. In the best stories, every moment plays a critical role everything that happens, both before and after. By studying specific story moments, we can understand the whole arc of actions that make a story feel inevitable, satisfying, and complete.

The Turning Point in Twelve Angry Men

It’s hard to imagine more drama coming out of a small room with 12 impatient, imperfect men than the 1957 directorial debut of Sidney Lumet.

Twelve Angry Men depicts jury deliberations in a capital murder case in New York City in the 1950s. Based on a play, the movie violates all kinds of storytelling rules. It’s about a bunch of people sitting around a table about a case for which no one has a stake. But it is surprisingly tense as the vote to convict the defendant goes from 11-1, moment by moment, till it’s 1-11.

The big takeaway, of course, is the power of one lone man–Juror No. 8, played by Henry Fonda–to stand up against the crowd for his principles. He does so by asking questions and showing empathy for the accused. Sh=lowly, the rest of the jurors become skeptical of the evidence against the Purto Rico kid charged with murder.

In a story fell of turning points, the one that also gets me comes when Juror 10 erupts against the nine jurors who have decided to acquit. Watch it here:

The scene starts with rail falling outside, always a harbinger of gloom and confinement.

Juror No. 1o expressed his worst prejudices as he lashes out against the others. He is a deep well of prejudice and resentment. “Look, you know how these people lie,” he says. “It’s born in them. They don’t know what the truth is. They don’t need any real good reason to kill someone. No, sir.”

With every line, he is confirming the deep doubts about the case.

The longer his harangue, the more he loses–and angers=–the others. One by one the stand and look away. They are so disgusted that they won’t even look at him, much less answer him.

Watch. It’s a sight to behold.

All the previous moiments in the story led to this moment. It’s the perfect capstone for a case that began in certainty and has unraveled completely. Now, only three angry men–each one deeply troubled–wants to convict the defendant. They’re all getting desperate.

Had the screenwriter gotten the other jurors to parry his rant, the scene would have been ruined. Instead, they stage a silent protest against him. They are in a completely differentnplace now.

After six of the jurors turn away, No. 10 falls apart. “What’s going on here?” he protests. After the eighth turns away, he says: “Listen to me: They’re no good.” Another stands. “What’s happening in here?” he says. Now only two other jurors remain at the table as he speaks.

“Listen to me,” he said.

“I have,” Henry Fonda says. “Now sit down and don’t open your mouth again.”

He stammers for a moment and then crumples into a seat.

With this harangue, it’s only a matter of time for the whole jury to join in finding the defendant not guilty.

The Rio Mamoré Effect

The Rio Mamoré, which runs through Brazil and Bolivia, meanders more than any other river in the world.

NASA’s Earth Observatory explains: “The greater the amount of sediment from external sources (glacial, volcanic, or human activity), the more likely the river was to meander; rivers and streams with lower sediment loads wandered less. Those high-sediment rivers also saw more cutoff events, where crescent-shaped oxbow lakes are for.”

There’s a lesson here for writers: To prevent your sentences and paragraphs from meandering, avoid filling them with unnecessary sediments.

Avoid using too many modifiers, which divert the prose from its main point. Instead, try to compose sentences that make a point simply. Make connections between ideas. But avoid making connections that connect with connections with connections.

Consider the following passage from The New York Times, in an article about Judge Tanya Chutkin’s “no-nonsense” handing of the case against Donald Trump for his involvement in the January 6 insurrection:

After watching from the sidelines for nearly eight months as Mr. Trump’s lawyers fought their way up to the Supreme Court with what turned out to be a largely successful argument that he had broad immunity from prosecution on charges arising from his official acts as president, Judge Chutkan moved quickly to get pretrial proceedings moving again.

This 57-word sentence requires too much work to follow. Let’s break down its component parts:

    • After watching from the sidelines for nearly eight months
    • as Mr. Trump’s lawyers fought their way up to the Supreme Court
    • with what turned out to be a largely successful argument
    • that he had broad immunity from prosecution
    • on charges arising from his official acts as president,
    • Judge Chutkan moved quickly
    • to get pretrial proceedings moving again.

Almost always, reporters and editors should break up a sentence like this. Here’s how a clearer might read:

Judge Chutkin paused the case for nearly eight months as Mr. Trump’s lawyers challenged Smith’s authority to make the charges. In a controversial decision, the Supreme Court agreed Mr. Trump had broad immunity from charges arising from his official acts as president. After the decision, Judge Chutkan moved quickly to resume pretrial proceedings.

This 53-word passage is easier to follow because three separate ideas are presented in three separate sentences. Each sentence offers a short and simple statement.

Here’s another Rio Mamoré passage:

In all of this, she distinguished herself from a colleague in Florida, Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who recently threw out Mr. Trump’s other federal case — in which he stood accused of mishandling classified documents — on the grounds that Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed both prosecutions, had been improperly appointed to his job.

This 54-word sentence begins with Chutkin, twists to Alieen Cannon, then twists to the case Cannon oversaw, then twists to special prosecutor Jack Smith, then twists to the charge that Smith was improperly appointed.

The sentence uses commas and em-dashes to create these twists. It’s hard to track the ideas–specifically, what is modifying what.

How might the Times reporter have done better? Try this:

Judge Chutkin’s response contrasts sharply with Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who oversaw the case in which Mr. Trump was accused of mishandling classified documents. After a series of long delays, Judge Cannon tossed that case. She argued that Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed both prosecutions, was improperly appointed to his job.

The new version is still 53 words. But broken into three sentences, it’s easier to follow.

Hey, I understand that the Times reporter was writing on deadline. When you rush, that kind of meandering often results. Still, it’s the job of the writer and editor to take an extra minute or two to make ideas as clear as possible.

In this important article, The Times let too much sediment into the flow of ideas. The result was a piece that meandered like the Rio Mamoré.

 

 

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Whatever Happened to TED Talks?

Have you ever gone back to an old school? Driven past an old Little League field where you used to play? Or stopped by an old mall, where you once did all your shopping, and found it cluttered with Dollar Stores and fast-fashion outlets?

The experience is deflating. In your own mind, you imagined these places more exciting. One day, long ago, they represented promise and growth. But now, visiting the old dorm or ballfield, it’s a letdown.

Is that all there is?

That’s the feeling I got recently when I was sorting through old books and found Talk Like TED–a primer for wannabe spellbinders looking to enlighten the world with their mix of personal testimony and cutting-edge research.

Once upon a time, TED regularly delivered on its slogan: “ideas worth sharing.” My favorite was Ken Robinson‘s “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” Al Gore did a great talk on the climate crisis. Jane McGonigal explored how gaming can make a better world. Simon Sinek explained the importance of asking why. Brené Brown won fame with her talk on vulnerability. Amy Cuddy modeled how to use the Wonder Woman pose to supercharge your mind, body, and emotions. These, by the way, are all still among the top talks, a decade or more after their delivery.

TED, which launched in 2006, is still alive, with 27 million subscribers on its YouTube page. But somewhere along the line, it lost its mojo. Now, it’s a chore to find the mind-altering presentation among the 4,700 videos. With all the regional offshoots with TEDx, topics and speakers seem ordinary, sometimes even tedious.

And curious people have new options. Podcasts, from The Huberman Lab to The Joe Rogan Experience to Call Her Daddy offer sharper points through intense conversation. You can tell these people care about what they’re doing. They go deep on compelling topics.

But the problem is more fundamental: The TED formula got flat and predictable. As obscure speakers marched to the big red dot, armed with their tales of exploration and challenge, they seemed to follow a script rather than sharing their passions

TED succeeded, at first, because its presentations with carefully curated, with strict time limits, an understanding of narrative, an effective interplay of words and images. Plus, presenters practiced their talks endlessly. When they got on stage, they were ready to rock.

More important, the speakers had a passion and an urgency.

About that book, Talk Like TED, a 2014 bestseller by Carmine Gallo. Consider its nine “secrets” for public speaking:

  • Unleash the Master Within (huh?)
  • Master the Art of Storytelling (duh)
  • Have a Conversation (duh)
  • Teach Me Something New (you don’t say!)
  • Deliver Jaw-Dropping Moments (really?)
  • Lighten Up (always?)
  • Stick to the 18-Minute Rule (how about one minute to start?)
  • Paint a Mental Picture with Multisenstory Experiences (natch)
  • Stay in Your Lane (OK, but even if I really need to tell you something else?)

All good advice, I suppose. It can be useful to know Colin Powell’s body language: Both hands spread shoulder-length apart … Makes circular movement … Right hand extends and clasps into a fist ,… Points toward himself … 

And, yes, it’s helpful to think of stories as “just data with a soul” and to give the reader “one character I can root for.”

After this book came out, I watched as TEDster after TEDster followed Gallo’s advice. Problem was, the talks started to sound like stale paint-by-numbers presentations. The speakers weren’t brimming with excitement: Hey, there’s something I gotta tell ya. As the years went by, TEDsters spoke self-consciously rather than exuberantly or intensely.

To communicate well, sure, it makes sense to “Have a Conversation” and “Become a Master Storyteller.” Sure, follow certain do’s and don’ts. But before you do that, you need to care intensely about the topic.

Years ago, I sat in on the Dale Carnegie Training program in New Haven. Every week, participants delivered one-minute talks–without much preparation, without notes, but speaking from the heart. No one tried to out-perform Ken Robinson or Brené Brown. They just spoke about something that mattered to them.

The format was simple:

  • “So there I was…”
  • “And then, … And then, … And then, …”
  • “Until finally … when I realized …”

These talks were often emotional and revealing. Speakers described their fears, regrets, crazy moments, scary moments. They took us on a meaningful journey. At the end, we cared.

As you craft your stories–whether you’re in business, school, journalism, publishing, or just posting on social media–start there. Yes, you can and should use dozens of specific techniques to craft your story.

But the real energy a presentation comes not from a list of nine “secrets.” It comes from something you desperately want to share with someone (RIP, Ken) and willing to be vulnerable about (h/t, Brené). Find a puzzle you desperately want to solve (thanks, Simon and Jane). If you can, make it physical (props, Amy). If it’s socially important, great (thanks, Al).

The key word, I think, is authenticity.With it, you have a chance. Without it, you’re doomed.

I think TED has lost this basic truth. That’s OK. It was a nice run. Too bad it got so bland and predictable.

That’s my personal TED talk. (Bowing, waving.) Thanks very much.

TED’s Greatest Hits (IMHO)

Ken Robinson on creativity (pay special attention to the story beginning at 15:08)

Al Gore on the climate crisis

Jane McGonigal on creativity

Simon Sinek on the power of “why”

Brené Brown on vulnerability

Amy Cuddy on the mind/body/emotion nexus

The Case of the Missing Denominator

Journalism’s greatest sin might be the failure to provide an understandable context for stories.

One example: Too many reporters fail to use the denominator when describing simple statistics. As two researchers note in a recent academic journal, good analysis is “always about numerators and denominators (N/D).”

As any fifth-grader should know, the fraction’s numerator (the top number) tells us the number of parts of the whole. The denominator (the bottom number) tells us the total number in the whole. If 15 students fail an exam, it means something completely different if we’re talking about a class of 30 students (15/30) as opposed to a school of 400 (30/400).

A recent Hartford Courant report describes a protest against “huge school system cuts” in Hartford:

Emotions ran high as about 30 organizers gathered at city hall on Tuesday to demand the city restore $31.5 million in proposed cuts for Hartford’s public schools, which would avoid the 387 anticipated layoffs of paraeducators, custodians, social workers, resource teachers, counselors, and other school employees.

So: $31.5 million out of what? Is $31.5 million really a Draconian cut? One searches this article, in vain, for the denominator. We can start to calculate that amount:

In the 2025 budget, HPS is set to receive $224 million from the state under the ECS, more than half of all revenue. The district receives around $27 million in federal funds and an additional $74 million in other state grants. The city contributes $96 million to the district.

So does that mean the total budget is $421 million (224+27+74+96)? If so, the cuts represent 7.4 percent of the budget ($31.5 million/$421 million).

Not so fast. According to Connecticut Insider: “The Hartford City Council unanimously passed a $623.8 million budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year Tuesday with few alterations from the mayor’s original proposal.” If this report is correct, then the cuts amount to 5 percent of the budget ($31.5 million/$623.8 million).

Oh, and is this the operating budget or does it also include capital expenses?

Either way, we have no way of making sense of Hartford’s school budget problems.

Later, the article calls the cuts “the worst cuts for the district in at least 20 years.” That’s not a quote from an expert or advocate; that’s the reporter talking. I’m skeptical. Might we find a comparison? Also, what does “worst” mean? Suppose the cuts clear out deadwood and make the system work better. Is that bad? We simply have no way of knowing.

Another missing denominator concerns the protesters. Thirty people protested the cuts. How can we make sense of that number? The Hartford schools enroll about 16,500 pre-K to 12 students. Is that the correct denominator? How many people does a protest need to get media attention?

All we can say for sure is that 30 is enough for the Courant. This story ran under a banner headline at the top of page 1 of the May 23 edition.  

(P.S.: You might wonder how I can say that “too many reporters fail to use the denominator.” Good point. I can offer data for neither numerators nor denominators. But one is too many. And I see this problem almost daily.)

Addendum

Donald Trump’s argument that he won the 2020 election relies on his ignoring the denominator.

Trump has repeatedly said that “we got more votes the second time [in 2020, against Joe Biden], by millions, than we got the first [in 2016, against Hillary Clinton]” (quote from a rally in Coachella, California).

If only Trump’s numbers counted, yeah, he did better in 2020 than in 2016. He got 62,984,828 votes in 2016  and 74,223,975 in 2020.

But the denominator (the total number of votes) also grew substantially. The total number of voters increased from 138.8 million in 2016 to 158.4 million in 2020. Trump’s Democratic opponents beat him, in raw numbers, in both elections. Their numbers rose substantially, from Clinton’s 65.8 million votes in 2016 to Biden’s 81.3 million votes in 2020. Their percentages also increased from 48.2 to 51.3–both better than Trump’s percentages of 46.1 and 46.8.

The Missing Denominator strikes again!

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Write a Cover Letter That Gets Attention

Harry and Mary were still working at the Supreme Court Justice’s apartment when I arrived. Harry asked to see my calling card.

“My what?”

“Why, your calling card, of course. And if it doesn’t look just right, you’ve got to have a new one printed.”

I laughed and said, “I don’t have any calling card. I never did have one. Where I used to live we just didn’t seem to need calling cards, and when I got to Harvard I never bothered to have one made up..”

“Lord Almighty!” gasped Harry. How do you think you’re going to get along in Washington without a calling card? Where do you come from, boy?”

The Forgotten Memoir of John Knox

When a young man named John Knox traveled to Washington and went to the chambers of  Supreme Court Justice James McReynolds, he might as well have been invisible. He didn’t bring a calling card.

In those bygone days, newcomers carried cards to introduce themselves. A calling card symbolized professionalism and stature. Without a card–preferably, an engraved card–the job seeker was considered gauche and inadequate.

These days, we use cover letters in place of calling cards. Cover letters introduce the job-seeker to the employer, with the hope of beginning a conversation about employment.

Most cover letters are bad. Bland and unfocused, they say too much that employers don’t care about–and too little that employers actually want to see.
A great cover letter offers direct, tangible proof that the job seeker can help the employer do something important, with a minimum of fuss and the potential for something great.

1. The Power Of A Cover Letter

Almost always, the cover letter provides the first encounter between employer and job seeker. In lieu of a real, face-to-face introduction, the cover letter gives you the chance to say who you are and why you can help.

Unfortunately, most cover letters disqualify the job seeker. Bad cover letters show that the candidate lacks the professionalism, rapport, relatability, or skills to do the job. And so they go straight to the reject pile.

If the candidate is qualified, a good cover letter will prompt the hirer to look more closely at the resume–and to invite the candidate in for an interview.

The best cover letter reveals something–not everything, but something–about your essence as a person and as a professional.

The cover letter offers an opportunity to step outside the details of your career and education and accomplishments and speak–intimately, one on one–to the potential employer. You can begin to forge a human relationship with the hirer, to indicate the specific ways in which you might her life better.

What do I mean by “essence”?

The essence of something is its most distinctive qualities. After you have cleared away all the details, the timelines and projects, and all the distractions, the essence is what remains. When you see someone’s essence, you say: Ah yes, I get this person. I understand this person’s critical values and attributes.

You can find a person’s essence in a story, an experience, a project, or a relationship.

If you’re seeking a job, you want to show your essence in a way that makes the recipient visualize you on their team.

2. Do Research Before You Write A Word

Hate to tell you, but you have lots of work to do before you even think about what you should write.

Before you present yourself, you need to educate yourself about the jobs in your field and how they align with your own background. And you need to find language that shows the obvious connections between your profile and their job.

• Create an Inventory of Skills and Values–But Focus on Accomplishments

Take a piece of paper and create three columns–one for skills, a second for accomplishments, and a third for values.

If you have a good resume, this should be easy. But don’t get lazy and reply on the resume. Create a completely new document using these categories.

Write down everything you can say about yourself for each category. Get everything down. Even if you’re iffy on a skill or accomplishment, write it down. You can cut it later.

Then translate these listings into something specific, something tangible and visual.

We have a tendency–especially in academe and the professions–to use abstractions. That’s fine; buzzwords offer a great shorthand for interacting with colleagues. But when you reach out to a potential employer, you want to help them to see you.

Let me repeat that for emphasis: When you reach out to a potential employer, you want to help them to see you. Our brains come alive when we can visualize something. If I say “social justice,” it doesn’t mean much; but if I say “run community meetings” and “conduct surveys to gather community input” or “serve on a grassroots committee on water runoff,” the reader can picture me doing these activities.

So rephrase every abstraction on your three lists. Show what that abstraction means with phrases that show you doing something. Don’t say “data specialist”; say, “At Place X, at Time X, I used Tool X or Process X to examine Trend X or Problem X.” All those X’s refer to specific things. They are visual. They allow the reader to see you in action.

• Research Job Sites

Don’t just randomly search for jobs and then respond. Instead, do a complete search of all the possible jobs that you would like to win.

Start by going to the online sites. If you have a good presence on LinkedIn, try thyat. Also go to Indeed.com and Grassdoor.com.

Enter all the words that describe your skills and interests.If you’re a city planner, type words like planning, planner, geography, GIS, environment, housing, city, urban, parks, streetscape, urban village, transportation, transit, TOD, streetscape, neighborhood, and grassroots, to name a few.

Use only the terms that speak to your skills, experience, and values. You don’t want to apply for a job that would make you miserable. Don’t search “grassroots planner” if you hate community meetings; don’t search “GIS” or “quantitative” if you hate spending hours crunching data at your desk.

Save the job listings that might be interesting. The best approach, in my experience, is to bookmark the posts in a special folder called “Job Search.” (If you don’t know how, click here.)

When you have identified jobs that sound intriguing, look for the keywords in the ads. Write them down.

• Compare Attributes–And Identify The One Thing

Now finding the right jobs is a simple matter of comparing your attributes with the job postings’ key words. Decide which jobs you might want to get. Take a job’s key words and figure out how you might want to pitch yourself.

Here’s where it gets tricky. If you’re applying for a professional job–even an entry-level job, after college or grad school–you probably have lots of interests and abilities. That’s great. But when you seek a job, you cannot list all those attributes in a cover letter. A cover letter has to be short.

Your cover letter should give the recipient a clear vision of the superpower you bring to the job. A Russian parable goes: “When you try to catch two rabbits, you don’t catch either.” If you use a cover letter to list all your attributes, you will fail to convey your essence–what makes you distinctive and special.

So identify the ONE Thing that you want the reader to see when considering your application. (For more on “The One Thing,” see this recent post.)

• Do Not Just Restate the Resume

When you apply for a job, you almost always provide both a cover letter and resume. The cover letter offers a way to make a quick hello–and to distinguish yourself from the hundreds or even thousands of other candidates.

Many candidates are tempted to offer a complete summary of their careers. They list jobs, responsibilities, projects, and results. They often quote people praising them. Often–way too often–they use bullet lists to show the range of experiences and skills.

Some people use the cover letter to review the resume. That’s a mistake–usually a fatal mistake. Hirers can read your resume. If you have created a good, well-formatted resume, they can get a sense of your career, skills, and aspirations in a matter of seconds.

Don’t do that. That’s what a resume is for.

3. A Minimalist Approach?

The best advice you’ll ever get about writing comes from Polonius, a character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Polonius, the father of Laertes and Ophelia, says: “Since brevity is the soul of wit / And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief.”

Good idea. Keep it simple. Keep it short. But how?

David Silverman of the Harvard Business Review says the best cover letter he ever got went like this:

Dear David:

I am writing in response to the opening for xxxx, which I believe may report to youI can offer you seven years of experience managing communications for top-tier xxxx firms, excellent project-management skills, and a great eye for detail, all of which should make me an ideal candidate for this opening.

I have attached my résumé for your review and would welcome the chance to speak with you sometime.

Best regards,

Xxxx Xxxx

That’s fine for a position that requires a simple list of attributes. It’s like advertising something by offering a simple recitation of attributes and benefits. That’s fine for many products–basic food and clothing, taxi fares, movies in a theater, meals in a diner, and so on. When you’re selling commodities–that is, goods and services that lots of people offer–this approach works just fine.

Maybe They Want To Know More

But maybe–just maybe–you are a unique person with just the right experience, skill set, and personality for the job. If that’s the case, you probably want to reveal more about who you are.

These days, most hirers want to understand your character. They want a sense of what you would be like working in their organization. The absolute requirement is that you can do the job–that you have the necessary skills and experience.

But they also want to know: Will you be bright and creative? Will you be an engaging and challenging colleague? Will you be creative? Will you identify solutions that others miss? Will you lead and follow well, depending on the circumstances?

They want to see you. They want to visualize what you will be like in the office, in meetings, working in teams, representing the organization outside the office. They want a sense of how you handle problems. Therefore, let me suggest another brief but more intimate strategy for writing a cover letter.

A More Revealing Cover Letter

You can write a cover letter that fits on one page and grabs the hirer. It’s a simple formula. Let’s get right to it.

• Opening salutation

If you are writing to a specific person, say “Dear Mr. Gates” or “Dear Ms. Jones,” or “Dear Dr. Zhivago.” Don’t use first names. Show that you respect them, first and foremost, as professionals.

If you don’t have a specific name, use a general title, like this: “Hiring Manager.” Since this is a business letter, use a colon rather than a comma.

Whatever you do, don’t say “Hi” or “Hey.”

• Introduction

Referencing the resume, indicate how you could help the employer. Focus on the hirer’s needs and how you will fulfill those needs. Indicate something about your spirit as well.

Do one–just one–of the following:

• Reveal one aspect of your biography: Say something about your background–something unique about your story that might matter to the hirer. You can do this in a phrase.

“Growing up in Silicon Valley, building computers and participating in coding competitions, I knew I wanted a career in tech. At the same time, I have been passionate about the environment–and became a computer science/environmental studies double major at Euphoria State. So when I saw your position for a GIS expert or a major parks project, I knew I found my ideal job.”

• Reveal one aspect of your values or approach: Hint at how your values and commitments have driven you to achieve, like this:

“To manage teams, I take a three-part approach: (1) Engage the professional on my staff. (2) Set big goals with intermediate goals that advance our cause every day (3) Provide regular feedback. This approach fits the job for project manager at Acme Consulting.”

• Reveal one aspect of your results: Show how you have achieved something great, somewhere. Hint at how you can produce this kind of accomplishment to your new job.

“Since taking over as interim marketing director, Acme Widgets Inc. has increased its B2B sales by 35 percent and its B2C sales by 20 percent. Now I would like to bring my skills and experiences in web marketing to your firm’s growing marketing department.”

You might want to start the letter with your results and accomplishments. HR and other hiring agents often get hundreds of letters. Make sure they do not miss the value you would add to their team.

The goal here is to offer an enticing glimpse of your value as a team member. Don’t go into detail in the intro. Just signal that you have something real–something tangible and concrete–to offer.

Avoid all abstraction. If you cannot see it, don’t write it. Don’t say you’re a problem solver; indicate a knotty problem you solved. Don’t claim to be a great bargainer; describe a bargain you struck. Don’t say you care about equity or grassroots participation; show yourself doing something to get people involved to get a fair shake.

Be specific. Provide a vivid image. Make it physical. Put yourself and your potential colleagues in the same picture. Like this:

“At Acme Widgets, we convened the Monday Club at 10 a.m. It was an all-hands-on-deck opportunity to share our work and plans for the week. It was a way to prime ourselves to connect last week’s work with this week’s vision.. Looking back, we realize that most of our breakthroughs came on Tuesday and Wednesday–and we spent Thursday and Friday honing them and thinking about next steps.”

I would want to have that player on my team. How about you?

• Your achievements/results

Now you can go into some depth on results you have achieved. Here’s where you can get narrative.

Set the stage by stating a specific time and place. Describe the problem. Then show how you made things better. Describe the specific actions you took. Describe a barrier (a deadline, resistance, a lack of resources, whatever). Then show how it all turned out.

Try something like this:

“In the summer of 2017, I coordinated a community planning process at Bronx River Park that led to the adoption of a new master plan. Working with 12 community groups, I planned cleanups, evening concerts, and fundraisers. In three months, we got on the Bronx borough president’s agenda and got media attention to the area.”

Once you have given your narrative–again, with as many visuals as possible–you can connect this experience with the job you seek:

“I hope to bring this hands-on organizing work to your agency’s environmental advocacy work.”

That’s all. paint a picture, then make the picture relevant.

• Go deeper?

This is optional. If you have shown how you achieve results, you will get the hirer’s attention. But you may want to go deeper.

If so, isolate one quality that will bring great value to the company. Provide more fine-grained detail to show yourself at work, providing value for the organization. Something like this:

“This kind of grassroots work, I think, has the potential to give greater credibility to the organizations work. When people feel part of a process, they are willing to speak up at community meetings and in local media. They also get friends and neighbors involved. It’s a win-win. We get their energy and support; they get connections to friends and neighbors.”

Show how that work led to a great result for the company. maybe close with a quick statement of value.

• Conclusion

Restate your interest, this time with something specific about how you see yourself contributing to the company. Convey your enthusiasm. Make them what to get to know you. Be friends, without being presumptuous. Like this:

“Again, I am eager to explore ways I can help your organization. I hope we have a chance to talk soon. Thanks for your consideration.”

That’s all it takes. No groveling or posturing. Just a simple statement of respect and interest.

• Closing salutation

Be warm but professional. “Best regards” and “Sincerely” work. Avoid the overly stiff (“Sincerely”–too boilerplate) or overly familiar (“All my best”–ugh; they don’t even know you). Keep it simple. Then type and sign your name.

Other Considerations

• Too Much or Not Enough?

The template above might seem overwhelming. You want to keep your letter as short as possible. So do this: Do everything above and the edit, edit, edit. Look for ways to sharpen your main point. But don’t go short just for the sake of going short. If everything you say has value, keep it. Cut the fluff but keep the revealing information.

Consider hiring an experienced writer and editor to go over drafts. Overall, you can probably hire someone for an hour to work through all phases of writing your letter.

• Know their World

In an informal way, show that you know and appreciate the employer’s work. Say something specific about their organization, its reputation, its uniqueness, etc. Speak as a colleague. Like this:

“Having followed the park planning process in Queens in recent years, I know you have been a key player in raising funds and getting local experts (like architects, environmentalists, and educators) involved in the community. Your volunteer work after Superstorm Sandy was especially impressive. So I would be honored to join your team.”

Show you are one of them, with your values and insight.

• Keep It Active, Simple, and Direct

Keep your sentences short and direct. Use active verbs. Avoid tangents.

Good writing often requires longer sentences. I call them “hinge sentences,” because they connect and relate different ideas with hinge words (like for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so). You can use one or two of these longer sentences–if they absolutely do a better job at explaining and visualizing ideas better than short sentences. But as a rule, keep it short.

• Be Confident, Not Cocky

Some applicants get hesitant because they don’t think they have enough experience. They will make try to explain why their inexperience might be overlooked. They’ll say something like: “While I have only been working on GIS for a year, I have developed a strong working knowledge…”

Don’t do that. Don’t emphasize your limitations. Instead, emphasize the abilities that you do offer. Say something like this: “In my GIS work, I have analyzed the causes behind gentrification in big cities, identified possible sites for new housing construction, and analyzed the changing ecologies of coastal areas since 1980.”

The reader of that passage now has a way of imagining how you’ll fit in. If you can do these tasks, you can also do other tasks.

• The Question of Informality

We live in the age of informality. Students wear PJs to class. Adults wear baseball hats to the office. People style their hair like anime characters and decorate their flesh with tattoos. Professionals open letters with “Hey.”

I’m not going to pass judgment on this informality. But hirers will.

A hirer generally wants to see you at your best. They want to know that having you on staff will not require getting a babysitter. They want to know you’ll get dressed like a professional, show up on time, work hard on company time, avoid childish distractions, listen intently in conversations, and think before you speak.

The cover letter offers a hint–a minor hint, but the only evidence at first–about your overall seriousness and maturity.

So speak clearly and simply. Be direct. Don’t try to be clever. Don’t use “bro” lingo. Whatever you do, don’t be a smart ass. Don’t crack jokes, as if you’re old fraternity brothers at a reunion. Don’t gossip or make cracks about people. Don’t be self-deprecating.

Be a pro. Speak with simple assurance and professionalism.

• Make Mass Applications?

Don’t cut and paste your prose from an application for another job. Write each cover letter fresh. If you want someone to pay you the big bucks–and give you a desk and a computer–give them the courtesy of your complete attention when writing your cover letter.

One hiring manager complained: “Nothing gets a cover letter tossed in my trash faster than seeing another publication’s name in the ‘to’ field.” Oops.

Proofing Your Letter

Don’t make grammatical mistakes or misspell words. Nothing says sloppiness more than avoidable mistakes. Fairly or not, the hirer will assume you’re as careless in your job as you are with your cover letter. Even if you’re seeking a job as a firefighter or engineer or cook, the hirer gets a bad vibe with dumb writing mistakes. It’s even worse if you’re seeking a desk job that requires attention to detail–as a graphic designer, say, or a coder.

Again, consider hiring an experienced writer and editor for an hour to do this for you. Get them to read the first draft. After you make revisions, get them to read the final draft.

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The Universal Blueprint

This is the first in a series of posts about blueprints–simple formats that you can use to write all kinds of documents.

Almost everything you write takes a 1-2-3 format. Aristotle explained this format in The Poetics, two and a half millennia ago. More recently, brain researchers have confirmed that we perceive, process, and act on the world in three steps. The specifics vary depending on the format (email, memo, report, web copy, etc.). The specifics also vary depending on how narrative, reportorial, or analytic your piece.

Now, let’s get a sense of the universal 1-2-3 Blueprint:

  • Part 1: Beginning. Show or tell the reader what you’re writing about and why. State a problem. Introduce us to the key issues or characters. Maybe hint at how it will work out–at least, what factors might help to resolve the matter.
  • Part 2: Middle. Work through the issues. Break them down into manageable pieces. Work your way up to the more difficult aspects of the problem. Reveal the contradictions and conflicts. Explore some of the possibilities for solving the problem.
  • Part 3: End. Resolve the matter. The resolution could be positive or negative. It could leave some loose threads. One way or another, complete the journey.

You might think of the blueprint as a Bento Box–a container with several distinct sections. Let’s explore this breakdown in more depth.

PREFATORY MATERIAL

Give the reader–right away–reason to read your document. You only have seconds to engage the reader. If you fail, the reader is likely to skim and miss most of what you want to say. So start with a clear statement–subject-verb-object–that states why they want to read on and pay close attention.

Summary / Abstract / Precis

Many longer pieces–reports, RFPs, proposals, and case studies–provide a paragraph-long description of key problems and conclusions (findings). Summaries are best for pieces with complicated issues and many parts.

Indented, in single-space type, this summary offers a simple description of the piece, often with a listing of three or so fey components. You might also indicate the kind of evidence you’re using. You might also say why the research and findings are significant and for whom.

Some professional documents also list keywords. Some indicate something about the authors and their work.

Tips on Technique: Keep sentences short and use the simplest words possible to express the essential ideas. Whenever possible, use the active voice. Also highlight essential terms.

Nota Bene: Short pieces rarely have a summary–but even an email or short memo might benefit from a one- or two-sentence precis.

PART 1: BEGINNING

Introduction

Begin your piece with a bang, whether it’s a simple email or a longer piece. State the issue or problem right away. Grab the reader’s attention right away, in one of two ways:

  • Provide a vignette that distills the major issues at stake in the piece.
  • State the challenge, as directly and succinctly as possible. Make sure that the relevant reader knows, right away, why reading this piece will be worthwhile.

Once you have worked through one of both of these, summarize the information you will be exploring in depth.

Conclude with a summary of the findings or “moral of the story.”

Plan of Attack

Describe how you plan to address this issue.

This probably should not be more than a third of the first page.

The purpose is to give the reader a quick overview so she can be in the right frame of mind for reading—especially a long and/or complex topic

Describe the methodology—perhaps with a label (statistical analysis, assessment of lab studies, case study, comparison of life/unlike situations, etc.)

  • State the evidence to be gathered—and perhaps how.
  • Describe how it will be evaluated.

Look ahead to what it might show?

PART 2: MIDDLE

This is the most important part of your piece. If you have w=set u=it up well in part 1, the reader will be ready to dive in to explore even difficult topics.

The Body, With Background, Definitions, and Evidence

The heart of your email/report/proposal/whatever is your breakdown of the problem into three or more parts (usually), with explanation of each one.

What’s the best order for these parts? It depends.

  • From Big to Small: Sometimes it’s easiest to talk about the biggest, most important and inclusive part of the issue.
  • In Ascending Complexity: On complicated issues, with lots of moving parts, it often makes sense to build from ground up–starting with the easiest ideas that people can easily understand, then moving to more and more difficult spinoffs of these ideas.
  • By Category or Segment: On some topics, all of the aspects of the issue might be equally important and complex. If you’re describing the tasks of a corporate team on a project, everyone plays an essential role (e.g., product development, production, marketing, distribution, accounting, etc.). So just describe each as fully as necessary.
  • Chronologically: Sometimes, we best understand an issue by understanding its development or evolution.
• A Note on Background

When necessary, provide enough background information for people to gain an understanding of the issue. If you’re describing a new product launch, for example, you might mention the customer discovery process or the R&D innovation that led to the product. If you’re describing a scientific process, you might mention the key ideas that make the process possible. If you’re describing a company reorganization, you might summarize the problems the reorg hopes to fix.

You could use basic prose–good, old-fashioned sentences and paragraphs–but bullet points might be fine too. Whatever helps the reader get what they need, as clearly and simply as possible–that’s what matters.

• A Note on Definitions

Especially in specialized fields, you may need to define terms. You can do this in three ways: parenthetically, in paragraphs, and in side discussions. If you can define a term simply (that is, with just a few words–knowing that the reader will understand you right away), you might use parentheses. If it’s more complex, you might step out oif the flow of your writing and devote a short paragraph to the definition. Sometimes, you want to offer a detailed definition without losing the flow of your prose, so you create a definition in a sidebar.

• A Note on Evidence

Be clear about what evidence you provide. Scientists might report on laboratory results. Economists or marketing folks might use case studies or statistical analyses. Theorists might break down ideas analytically, using logical analysis to make sense of things–looking for commonalities and contradictions, sharpening definitions, and the like.

Counterarguments and Complications

By this time, it’s likely that readers will have objections or at least questions. Show respect by raising and addressing those points.

Nota Bene: You might want to integrate these points into the body of the piece (“Heart of the Matter”).

Discussion

Once you have explored your topic in depth, now what do you make of it? A discussion section allows you to open a new conversation with your audience. as if sitting side by side, you can review the findings and sketch out some implications.

What If?

The discussion could lead to a larger speculation about reform or change. Rather than just understanding and issue, we might consider some “what if?” scenarios.

Scenario thinking offers a useful way to do this. Business and planning professionals often use scenarios to sketch out different possibilities for the future. No one can predict the future of course; as Stewart Brand notes, “All predictions are wrong.” But we can consider the far-out extreme possibilities–the absolute best and worst possibilities–and prepare for both.

PART 3: END

As we approach the end, we want to prepare for action. Somehow, we need to make a decision–even if it’s just whether to accept the arguments of this piece of writing.

Options

When you offer the reader options, you take a step toward engaging them–and bringing them to your side of the issue. Consider the different between a mother asking her child “What do you want for breakfast?” versus “Do you want macaroni or a hamburger?” The choice creates involvement.

If possible, reduce the options to three distinct choices–or three clusters of choices. Try to label these choices or clusters with simple, clear labels.

Next Steps/Call to Action

Say exactly what should be done now–with specific assignments and dates for action to be completed. For larger initiatives, indicate phases of action–short-term actions, near-term actions, and long-term actions. As much as possible, be specific.

Conclusion/Summary

Finally, sign off. Conclude, perhaps, by referring back to the opening image or question. Summarize your findings and the options suggested by your piece.

AND ANOTHER THING . . .

Depending on the document, readers might want a coda. Many appreciate getting references, so they can follow up on the ideas you have offered. Many also appreciate other resources, such as professional contacts or programs, that they can use.

References and Resources

If useful, provide references–especially those that allow the reader to dig deeper to explore the issue.

Some reports describe their methodology–how they gathered information, how they analyzed it, why it’s valuable … as well as its explanatory limitations.

Also list other resources, including organizations and programs that can help people educate themselves and take action.

For Further Discussion

Some pieces close with a brief discussion of related topics. Academics, in particular, list ideas for future research.

Appendices or Exhibits

On issues with complicated evidence or analysis, it often helps to offer appendices with charts, tables, graphics, and even quotations.

Identify the issues that might be explored next. In academic writing, scholars often suggest next phases for research. Business writers often suggest new areas for R&D or new markets to pursue. A look ahead often reinforces the importance of the present document.

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Genre, Simplified

To succeed as a storyteller–or as a musician, architect, scientist, or other creative person–you must work within a specific genre.

The story genre provides the style, rules, and expectations for the tale. What kind of hero and other characters will we meet in the story? What kinds of settings, struggles, and values will we explore? 

A genre is a promise: If you read this detective/romance/action/whatever story, you will get what you’re looking for.

In recent years, the idea of genre has spun out of control. One recent analysis posits thousands of kinds of stories. That’s way too many. That’s why I decided to create a simple framework for understanding genre.

How Genre Got Out of Control

Virtually every reader or movie-goer will recognize a dozen or so genres. Besides the overarching categories of Comedy and Tragedy, most people will recognize genres like Romance, Love, Western, Crime, Thriller, Gangster, Horror, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Memoir.

So far, so good.

But in the age of the screen, people are overwhelmed with stories. Stories were once a means of standing back to observe reality; now stories are embedded into everything we do. As a result, we can bet bored with the standard sets of genres. Detective, ho hum. Horror, yawn. Romance, (eye roll). Gangster, so what?

Storytellers these days have to be ever more clever, so they stretch existing conventions of storytelling (e.g., Memento, Life’s Arrow) and mix-and-match different genres (e.g., The Godfather and The Sopranos as family/gangster tales). Think of the opening montage of The Player. After hearing a pitch for a movie about a TV star who gets lost on a safari, the producer says: “It’s like The Gods Must Be Crazy except the coke bottle is an actress.” “Right!” the writer says. “It’s Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman.”

Eric R. Williams, a story and gaming guru based at Ohio University, has developed a rigorous system with three basic levels: Super-Genres (11 categories), Macro-Genres (50 story contexts), and Micro-Genres (199 specific story details). By mixing and matching these genre elements, Williams says we can come up with 187,816,200 distinct story types.*

Has the proliferation of genres–and the constant stream of genre theories–made the craft of storytelling overwhelming? Where is Occam when we need him?

Genre, Simplified

That’s why I decided to create The Simplest Genre System Ever.

I began with a simple idea: All stories are either comedies or tragedies. Comedies are struggles (often but not always ha-ha funny) that end with the hero getting what she wants. Tragedies are struggles that end badly, with the hero not only losing but often destroyed. That hero might gain a new understanding of life, but comes too late to save her.

But that’s just a starting point. To tell a good story, we need to answer two questions:

  • In what kind of setting does the story take place, ranging from someplace close to home to a faraway locale?
  • What kind of quest does the story depict, ranging from an inner, psychological quest to an outward, more material or transactional quest?

That’s what genre is all about. It’s about offering a distinctive kind of story, based on the setting and quest.

Plotting Genre

Take a look at the four-cell chart on the top of the page. With this format, I have arranged the genres that John Truby describes in his master work, The Anatomy of Genres. Let’s look at these genres, quadrant by quadrant:

Inner Quest/Close to Home: These stories play out on familiar ground of the heart.

  • Love stories almost all take place close to home and always awaken the heart. For example: Romeo and Juliet, Poldark, Wuthering Heights, Sleepless in Seattle.
  • Memoirs are even more interior in some ways, often depicting the Hero’s battle with herself to overcome the problems of living close to other people. Think: Running With Scissors, Listening to Prozac, Educated.
  • Ha-ha comedies also tend to be close to home, since they rely on misunderstandings revealed  by everyday fumbles. Such as: Duck Soup, Groundhog Day, Airplane!

Inner Quest/Faraway Place: These stories also plumb the mysteries of the heart but take place in strange places.

  • Horror stories often take place in the home, but also take place in mysterious and creepy woods, city streets, and even other worlds. For example: The Exorcist, Dracula, and Frankenstein.
  • Fantasy tales are set in whole worlds of invention and unreality. Think of the Harry Potter stories, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Game of Thrones, or The Hobbitt. Or if you’re old-fashioned, think of the enchanted forest of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
  • By traveling to whole new times and places–and even different dimensions of being–sci-fi goes deep on intimate or emotional issues. Think: Star Wars, The Bladerunner, 2001.

Outer Quest/Close to Home: In some takes, people are emotionally dead and battle exterior challenges.

  • Crime stories are all about solving problems, often with domestic characters, highlighting the power of logic and persistence. See: Anatomy of a Fall, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Thelma and Louise.
  • Thriller and detective tales do the same, but with the heightened tension of impending catastrophe. Think of Hitchcock’s oeuvre and the gumshoe tales of Dashiell Hammett and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Outer Quest/Faraway Place: In these takes, the force and violence rules the untamed frontiers of human existence.

  • Action stories show characters clashing to the death, usually far from any domestic concerns. The goal is to vanquish a foe more than to find any inner child. Think Stallone and Ah-nold.
  • Westerns show the clashes of the good guys (sheriffs, cowboys, ranchers) trying to create order out of disorder–or to survive or thrive in that disorder. Bonds are based on opportunistic calculations, not emotional commitments. Think of Unforgiven, Tombstone, and Killers of the Flower Moon. Going back further, see Duke Wayne’s classics and James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
  • Gangster stories bring the Western to the anarchy of city streets, where order is more dependent on a balance of power than a common ethos. For example: A Bronx Tale, Once Upon a Time in America, and Good Fellas.

This is just a starting point. We might debate the genres organized on the four-cell chart. But it offers a simple starting point for understanding the concept of genre. Ultimately, it’s up to storytellers to find the right place on that chart.

*That reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s story “Sylvie and Bruno Concluded,” in which people devise a map with “the scale of a mile to the mile.” It kind of defeats the purpose, no?

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How Does a Writer Develop Voice or Style?

Jim Bouton gave me the best advice I ever got on developing voice or style as a writer.

Bouton, remember, was the New York Yankees pitcher who became a literary sensation in 1970 with his scandalous book Ball Four. Later in life, he became a protector of baseball’s truest values. I met him at a “vintage” baseball game–a game played with nineteenth-century rules.

I brought a couple of Little Leaguers to this game. They asked if they could get some pitching tips from Bouton, who won 20 games for the Yankees in 1963.

The challenge, Bouton said, was finding the best possible motion. No sport has such a variety of motions as baseball. Motions are the signature of great pitchers, e.g., Bob Feller’s high leg kick, Tom Seaver’s drop-and-drag, Luis Tiant’s body-twist, Bob Gibson’s falling followthrough, Chad Bradford’s dirt-scraping submariner, Fernando Valenzuela’s skyward gaze, Tim Wakefield’s push pitch, Hideo Nomo’s long reach, and Dennis Eckersley’s slingshot. So how can a young pitcher find his own best possible motion?

The answer, Bouton said, could be discovered in long-tossing.

To develop a motion, don’t even think of developing a motion. Instead, play catch from long distances. Toss the back and forth, with a friend, from the longest possible distance. Lean back and let the ball soar. Get in a rhythm. Then move a little closer and play catch again, getting into a new rhythm at that distance. Over time, get closer and closer. Eventually, you will be playing catch from the distance between the pitcher’s mound and home plate. That will be your natural pitching motion.

With this approach, you can find your most natural motion. Without thinking too much, you also meet the needs of your receiver. You don’t throw for yourself; you do it for your partner in the game of catch.

Likewise, as a writer, do not try too hard to develop your distinctive style. Just write, as naturally as possible. Pretend you’re writing a letter home or talking with a friend.

Try different voices and styles. Write long, meandering passages and short, telegraphic passages. Use a cascade of simple words. Describe using specific details. Deploy sensual images, then evoke sound and touch. Usually write right-branching sentences but try some left-branching sentences too. Play with punctuation: try to use as few punctuation marks as possible, then construct sentences that deploy all the tools in your kit. Be literal and be figurative. Move back and forth, like a pendulum, between scene and summary, short and long sentences, and abstract and concrete lamguage.

Play with language, without any intent to develop your “voice.” When you have written something, edit it to make sure that any audience can follow what you do. Think carefully about where you “meet” your reader at the beginning of the piece and where you want to take them.

This is the equivalent of long-tossing. You are writing, in the most natural way possible. By not thinking too much about voice, your voice will emerge.

It cannot happen right away. Just as it took years for you to speak at a high level, it will take some time for your to write in a distinctive way. That’s OK. There is no rush.

Whatever you do, do not devise a voice artificially. It has to come from your best skills and habits as a writer (which means you need to develop those skills in the first place). You will never develop your own voice if you are slave to some else’s voice. Do not aim to be Fitzgerald or Gilbert, Woolf or Wolfe, Hemingway or Mencken. Imitations are annoying and distracting. Don’t imitate arch academic writing or policy language.

You be you.

As you work to find your truest voice, the great Steven Pressfield notes, do not write for your own selfish, preening, attention-seeking ego. Be a servant of the topic and the reader:

What voice does the material want? Find that. You the writer are not there to impose “your” voice on the material. Your job is to surrender to the material–and allow it to tell you what voice it wants in order to tell itself.

Throw your pitch to the catcher. When you do that–at whatever distance–you will find your best style.

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Broken and Whole

All my problems are meaningless,
But that don’t make them go away.
– Neil Young, “On the Beach”

There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.
– Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

Every story is about being broken and trying to become 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, who surrenders his life in Plato’s dialogues, struggles not with his own brokenness but with the brokenness of the Greek political elites. “You’ve acted as you have now because you think it’ll let you off being challenged for an account of your life,” he tells his prosecutors. “In fact, I tell you, you’ll find the case quite the opposite. There’ll be more, not fewer, people challenging you.” In other words: Your fake wholeness cannot hide your real brokenness.

How about modern American politics? So: presidents? Oh, god yes. 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 to figure out how it compels 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. Boosterism. Do-gooderism and caretaking. Civic leadership. Booze, drugs, porn, and other external addictions.

These are all adaptations. With the exception of addictions, each one of them has positive aspects. They help the character survive to face another day. But the are, at best, incomplete adaptations—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 Maté 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.

Maté 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.

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.

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Thinking, Fast and Slow: The Perfect Overview of How the Brain Works from a Nobel Laureate

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

Harry Truman once said: “Being a president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or he is swallowed.”

Actually, Truman’s insight holds for the rest of us too. Living even ordinary lives can be like riding a tiger. But the lesson from Daniel Kahneman’s masterpiece, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is different. Truman says presidents have to rise to the frantic challenge of riding a tiger. But Kahneman tells us we need to get off the tiger and control our own pace.

Kahneman, a psychologist who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for economics, has died at the age of 90. His influence spans not only the social sciences (economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, and more) but also business and the arts. Where the pioneers of psychology and economics often fell back on their wits, he did the hard work of experimentation and data analysis.

Kahneman worked with his friend and colleague Amos Tversky for decades before Tversky died in 1996. Undoubtedly, the two would have shared the Nobel Prize had Tversky lived long enough.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman describes two minds or “systems” that govern how we operate in the world.

In System 1, based on our more primitive brain, we are constantly reacting to the world—even when we don’t know what happens. We evolved to have fast-twitch responses to events in the world. Until modern times, people faced constant danger when they ventured out to hunt or explore frontiers beyond their home base. To respond before they suffered a calamity—like getting eaten by a tiger—they reacted instantly. Humans responded by fight, flight, or freeze. This is a crisis approach to life. It’s useful when trying to survive in a wild and dangerous world. But it’s less helpful in modern times, when we overreact to even minor “crises” in our lives. Too often, we overreact to the words of actions of a family member, coworker, peer, or another driver. Hello, road rage.

Which brings us to System 2, the slower, more deliberative mode of thinking. Even though we are reactive creatures, we also have the capacity to slow down and carefully consider situations and problems. When someone cuts us off in traffic, we can overreact by nonking, shouting, or making a rude gesture. Or we can make an effort to pause, let the “crisis” pass, and decide how our better self should respond. Usually, we can just let a crisis pass. Then, if it makes sense, we can think through what just happened. If there’s an actual problem to be solved, we can break it down and decide what makes sense to do. We can collaborate with others.

Thinking, Fast and Slow builds on this foundation. But the heart of the book is a detailed discussion of the biases that we humans have. And oh boy, are we ever biased—and not just for people like us and against outsiders. We have “availability bias” (the tendency to rely on readily available information), “confirmation bias” (seeking information that confirms existing beliefs), “anchoring bias” (relying too much on what we learn early), and “loss aversion” (the tendency to prefer avoiding losses over making equal or greater gains).

That’s just for starters. Kahneman’s book shows that in every aspect of our lives, we fall back on primitive ways of understanding and action. So how do we deal with it? Acknowledge the power of System 1 and then nurture and develop System 2.

This book requires that you settle in for some concentrated reading—System 2 reading, if you will. But for anyone who wants to understand how humans really think and act, you can’t do any better.

You might also read . . .

The Lucrative Drama of Super Bowl Ads

It’s Super Sunday again, and all the chatter is about the commercials—that and Taylor Swift. But every year, millions tune in for the ads. This year, a 30-second ad goes for $7 million. At that price, companies better have the perfect message.

Luckily, about a decade ago, a couple of business professors figured out what works. Spoiler alert: It’s narrative.

For “What Makes a Super Bowl Ad Super? Five-Act Dramatic Form Affects Consumer Super Bowl Advertising Ratings,” Michael Allan Quisenberry of Johns Hopkins and Michael Kevin Coolsen of UNC-Chapel Hill did content analyses of 198 Super Bowl commercials with some degree of narrative structure.

So what is “narrative structure”? Just turn to two old friends: Aristotle, the philosopher and author of The Poetics, about three centuries before Christ, and Gustav Freytag, the nineteenth-century German philologist and author of The Technique of the Drama. Aristotle posits a three-act structure, mapped on an arc, with a beginning, middle, and end. Freitag posits a five-act structure, mapped on a triangle, with an exposition, complication, climax, reversal, and denouement.

That is to say: Hook the audience, show some conflict, and resolve the conflict in a way that changes the hero.

Quisenberry and Coolsen theorized that narrative works better than arguments or evidence to engage and persuade audiences. They mapped the consumer favorability ratings of the 2010 and 2011 Super Bowl television commercials from the voting results of the SpotBowl.com and USA Today Ad Meter national ratings polls. Then, they assessed the engagement of viewers viewing ads structured with five formats: one-, two-, three-, four-, and five-act formats. The more acts, the greater the dramatic power—and the greater the viewer engagement.

Acts Sponsor and Title SpotBowl.com USA Today
5 Anheuser Busch: “Fence” 4.07 7.82
4 HomeAway: “Griswold’s” 2.87 7.07
3 Denny’s: “Chicken Warning” 2.73 6.31
2 Dockers: “No Pants” 2.10 4.85
1 GoDaddy: “Talk Show” 1.64 4.82

The higher the scores, the more consumer engagement the ads produced.

So let’s see these ads:

Anheuser Busch’s “Fence”—a complete five-act drama

HomeAway’s “Griswold’s”—a four-act drama

Denny’s “Chicken Warning”—a three-act drama

Dockers’s “No Pants”—a two-part drama

GoDaddy’s “Talk Show”—a simple presentation of an idea

Let’s track the “Fences” add, act by act:

  1. Exposition: We are introduced to a young Clydesdale and a young calf and see that they are friends. The Clydesdale is, of course, the icon of Anheuser Busch, the maker of Budweiser and other beer labels.
  2. Complication: The two friends realize that a fence separates them.
  3. Climax: Years later, a mature Clydesdale runs along the field, pulling the Budweiser wagon. The grown steer sees his old friend and runs along the fence dividing the two.
  4. Reversal: The steer breaks through the fence.
  5. Denouement: No longer divided, the two old friends run together.

As Quisenberry and Coolsen note, a complete drama requires all those stages. In a 30-second ad, an act might last just a few seconds. As long as the stage of the story is clear, it doesn;t matter. All that matters is a complete journey.

As a contrast, Quisenberry and Coolsen look at another Anheuser-Busch add called “Ice Bottle,” which” also aired in the 2010 Super Bowl. The ad lacks any drama. “The ad shows a a bottle of Budweiser Select 55. The superior taste makes it select, and 55 calories make it the lightest beer in the world.” That’s it: No characters (unless the beer itself is the hero that saves the consumer from bad taste and/or too many calories). No action (moving a camera down a bottle is not action). As Quiseberry and Coolsen note: “No rising action, complications, turning point, falling action or release of tension occurs. Gustav Freytag’s dramatic arc never forms and a story does not develop. Some may say that the plot never ‘thickens.’”

One one ad, Anheuser Busch understands the power of a full drama. On another add in the same Super Bowl, the company seems oblivious to the power of drama.

 

Eric R. Williams on the Machinery of Genre and Storytelling

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:

  1. 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?
  2. 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).
  3. 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.

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Varieties of Writer’s Block

No writer has ever escaped the curse of writer’s block.

You sit at the keyboard, immobilized. You thought you had something to say. You thought you had the words. You thought that persevering would help. But your ideas are stuck, like the water that won’t move in a stopped-up faucet. If you’re lucky, if you keep adjusting the hot and cold spigots, you’ll get a blast of water. But the chances are that it’s just a filthy torrent of dirty water: worthless dreck.

So what do you do when the faucet stays stopped up–or, even worse, when the words flow but they’re all terrible?

There are three causes of writer’s block: psychology, research, and perfectionism. Let’s look at each one in turn.

Writer’s Block 1: Psych Out!

Writer’s block is usually known as a psychological malady. Writers are, after all, simultaneously egotistical and insecure. They think they’re the king of the world and the worst pretenders and fakers ever.

Steven Pressfield use the term The Resistance to describe the force that blocks creative expression. In his tidy little book, The War of Art, he notes that many would-be creatives torment themselves with negative self-talk. After grandiosely imagining writing the Great American Novel (or other art form), they procrastinate, make excuses, drink and/or do drugs, find escape in shallow relationships, and otherwise piss away their creative juices.

Fear is not all bad. “Are you paralyzed with fear?” Pressfield says. “That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”

Nothing is worthwhile without a struggle. Creation is a process of struggle. If we have nothing to push against us–internally or externally–we will glide along the same old path and discover nothing along the way.

Pressfield’s answer is to man up–or, as he puts it in another tidy little book, commit to “turning pro.”  He contrasts the amateur and the pro like this:

“When we’re living as amateurs, we’re running away from our calling — meaning our work, our destiny, the obligation to become our truest and highest selves. Addiction becomes a surrogate for our calling. We enact the addiction instead of embracing the calling. Why? Because to follow a calling requires work. It’s hard. It hurts. It demands entering the pain-zone of effort, risk, and exposure.”

Writer’s block, then, is simply a refusal to face the daunting challenge of hard work. Pressfield spent years wasting his talent on bad jobs, bad relationships, and incomplete drafts. Like the alluring but degenerate artist in an alluring but degenerate subculture like New Orleans–a place where characters and misfits are celebrated– he refused to surrender his vices in order to realize his creativity. Until, one day, he rented a tiny house in northern California and lived a life of isolation.

Every day he got up, read, wrote, ate, read, wrote some more, and slept. He avoided newspapers and TV, relationships, and the life of the glib raconteur. The day he typed the words “THE END,” he knew that he had turned pro.

It did not matter that the novel was an inferior work or that he failed to sell it. What mattered was that he devoted himself, finally, to the work. He made that his priority and refused to let outside distractions and excuses rule his life. Like an alcoholic who no longer has any desire for a drink, Pressfield was now a different man. He didn’t need a spare and isolated houaw any more. From then on, he showed up to do the work. He was a pro.

“Ambition, I have come to believe, is the most primal and sacred fundament of our being. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not to act upon that ambition is to turn our backs on ourselves and on the reason for our existence.”

Writer’s Block 2: Not Enough to Say

Not all writer’s block is as exquisitely psychological as The Resistance. For those seeking less than the Life of the Artist–people who just want to produce something worthwhile–writer’s block “presents itself” (to use the psychologist’s term) as a feeling of dumbness.

We have written before, maybe even well. We get an assignment–a paper, report, article, chapter, or even a book. We know the subject well–or at least better than 99.99 percent of the people that we pass on the street. We have piles of notes. We have talked about the subject with others. We have demonstrated our superior knowledge and even cleverness.

Then we sit down at the keyboard and nothing comes out. Or even worse, what comes out is garbage. The sentences are passive and clumsy, over-reliant on meaningless words (hedges like “almost,” “probably,” “almost,” etc., and emphatics like “very,” “strong,” “smart,” “best,”  etc.) Sometimes we can’t even write a sentence, so we resort to awkward phrases. Our drafts (if you can call them that) are filled with “TK” (the journalist’s note to herself meaning “to come”).

A friend or fellow writer, seeing the frustration, comes along to offer support: “Just tell me what you want to say.” It doesn’t help. Why would it? They haven’t been researching your topic. What can they offer besides a pat on the back.

This is the most common variety of writer’s block.  The only way out is to stop writing and do more rounds of research. Whether you’re writing a journalistic profile or a work of fiction, your job is to gather enough information to create a reading experience. Often, we think we have mastered the subject but have not. Nothing reveals our basic ignorance more than clunky writing about the subject.

So conduct more interviews. Dive into the archives. Explore more cases in point. Gather data. Go to the scene of the story and take notes. If possible, take a video so you have something to describe, moment by moment.

How do you tell when you don’t have enough information?  When you tell more than you show.

General summaries offer a dead giveaway of thin understanding of a topic. The lifeblood of good writing is details–details that the reader can see, hear, feel, taste. Even when exploring an abstract topic, the reader needs enough details to get a tangible sense of the topic. The more general your discussion, the less you probably know–and the less the reader will care what you have to say.

Here’s an example from my own book project about Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 campaign for the League of Nations. In the course of discussing Wilson’s speeches in the Upper Midwest–Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana–I learned about one of the most exciting reform movements in modern American history. The Nonpartisan League championed reforms for farmers: railroad rates reform, silos for storing grain, a banking system with fair rates. But such a summary does no justice to the movement. I had to learn about who organized it, how it pressured both parties, the backstory of failed previous reform efforts, and the backlash from big business and political elites.

Even more, I had to create some scenes to show how the NPL operated–how recruiters traveled from town to town, buttonholing farmers, rallying local leaders, endorsing candidates. I had to read the NPL’s weekly newspaper and track down arguments in court cases. I had to show how mercenary gangs threatened and beat NPL recruiters. Even if I did not use all these details, I needed a bounty of details so that I could select the right ones.

I had to follow Hemingway’s classic advice to seek out “the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places, and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

Details make writing come to life. When you don’t have enough details–when you fall back on generalization–you are probably failing.

Writer’s Block 3: Thinking Too Hard

What if we have committed to acting like a pro and done all the research imaginable. But we’re still stuck?

What do you do when you’re truly, deeply committed to doing the work and have done your job as a researcher. You know all you need to know but can’t get the words down?

Sometimes, we’re so bent on perfection that we can never accept anything less. Rather than gifting the world with something worthwhile, we immobilize ourselves because we are too committed and too diligent. Rather then doing our best and then moving on, we are obsessed with producing Big-A Art.

This is the situation that Tom Wolfe faced when he was assigned profile of young hot-rod race-car drivers in Los Angeles for Esquire. No one was more committed or hard-working than Tom Wolfe, who was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He did everything that a committed writer could do but sputtered into a state of incoherence.

With the magazine all laid out–including a set of enticing photos–Esquire editor Bryon Dobell told Wolfe not to worry about writing a draft. Just type up your notes, he said. We’ll find someone to turn those notes into a story. And so Wolfe went on a writing bender. he wrote 50 pages of notes, in the form of a letter, and sent them to Dobell.

Because Wolfe was no longer under any pressure, the words flowed. The result was a literary sensation. Under the title “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy Kolored (Ahhhhhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rash!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm) …,” Wolfe described a world that no one knew. With a mastery of psychological and cultural insight, a love of details, and an energetic stream-of-consciousness marked by inventive phrasing and punctuation, Wolfe changed the way journalists approached their subjects.

As you might expect in a letter, Wolfe begins simply: “The first good look I had at customized cars was at an event called a ‘Teen Fair,’ held in Burbank, a suburb of Los Angeles beyond Hollywood.” He simply shares his thoughts and observations: “Inside, two things hit you…” He makes simple transitions: “As I said…” With no pretension, he introduces characters: “All this time, Tex Smith, from Hot Rod Magazine, who brought me over to the place, is trying to lead me to the customized-car exhibit…” He ventures some broad observations: “Things have been going on in the development of the kids’ formal attitude toward cars since 1945…”

Once he brings us into this world, his diligent research, mastery of details, and love of oddballs have a chance to shine. He’s a pro and he did the work and it shows. He just needed to get of his own way–to forget about what he was trying to do and just do it.


Feedback from All Over

On Facebook, Jesse Highsmith writes:
When I started, I thought I was supposed to “plant my butt in the chair and write,” as many people say. That didn’t work for me. In fact, it was the fastest way to sculpt a writer’s block.
My formula now is so much better: make a basic outline. Figure out where it ends. Figure out where the start should be. Think about the chapter for days before typing a single thing. Obsess over the first sentence. Sit down. Type that sentence. Walk away. Think about the rest of that paragraph. Come back to write that paragraph. Usually, after that, it starts to flow. I start my chapters with an action, then use the second paragraph to give some short exposition before jumping right back into the action and running with it. Also, there’s two types of chapters.

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Don’t Believe a Word Your Friends and Colleagues Say. Instead, Find Someone Who Will Tell You the Truth.

The first time I published an article in my college paper, I asked a senior editor to give me a critique. I was expecting a pat on the back for a job well done. But I got a tear sheet* filled with red ink.

If you give a piece of writing to a friend or colleague, you will be lucky if you get the same treatment. You should always be open to critiques, of everything: the focus of the piece, the organization, the style, the evidence, and more.

But we writers are a sensitive lot. When we write, we put down not only what we know at the start, but also ideas sparked by the writing process. So writing takes on a life of its own. We often labor in isolation and get lost in our own world.  Because we get lost, creatively, we lose perspective.

But don’t count on friends and colleagues to offer good critiques and feedback.

Most people, when asked to read a friend’s work, want to be nice. Even if the writing bores them or confuses them, they will not say it. They will look for something nice to say.

“Great topic.”

“You know, I didn’t know that…”

“It was interesting the way you tied together those two events…”

Even your most critical readers will still avoid a real critique. Not just because they are sensitive to your feelings but because critical reading is a hard and laborious task. So if you press them, they’ll find a couple of nits to pick but avoid the big issues.

I have worked with writers in a wide range of settings: newspapers and magazines, government, websites, think tanks, and book publishing. Many of the people in these settings are open to critiques. They are grateful for any ideas you might offer about making copy more clear and energetic. But some resist.

“But that’s my style…”

“No one ever said that was a problem…”

“We always do it that way…”

Some sensitive types protest vehemently. They are (to use the word in vogue) triggered by any and all criticism.

This kind of resistance increases the chance that, next time, the critique will be softer. Rather than battle a sensitive writer, even determined editors give way. Why hassle?

Even if you want a real critique, then, you often get the most general praise or meaningless nit-picking.

How do you get past the politesse and avoidance of friends and colleagues? If you want to get better, find someone who will read your work thoroughly and respond honestly and specifically. Ask them to critique:

  • How clearly you state a controlling idea and build the piece around that controlling idea. (See my discussion of “The One Idea” here.)
  • How clearly you write every sentence and paragraph. Every sentence should state the idea right away, with specific subjects and active verbs. Every paragraph should state and develop a single idea.
  • How well you stay on the right track–and how well you get back non track after a necessary diversion.
  • How well you highlight different sections of the piece with subheads.
  • How convincingly do you make your points, with specific data and other evidence that speaks directly to your points.
  • Where you make spelling and grammar mistakes.

Ask them to mark the sections clearly. Get them to underline or put brackets around specific passages. Specificity is the key. You need to know exactly when and where you go wrong.

Find the people who will be honest and show them your appreciation, however you can.

As for your friends and family? Appreciate their support but don’t count on them for any meaningful critiques.

*The term tear sheet comes from advertising. It refers to a page torn from a periodical to show proof that the ad had been published.

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Andy Reid’s Approach to Creativity

Behold the genius of Andy Reid.
As the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles in a game against the New Orleans Saints in 2012, Reid had one of his players, Riley Cooper, lie down in the end zone for a kickoff.

Lie. Down.
The Saints thought they the Eagles had just 10 players on the field. They did not notice Cooper. When Brandon Boykin caught the ball, Cooper jumped up. Boykin threw a lateral pass to Cooper, who ran 93 yards for a touchdown.
Alas, the referee called back the play. Boykin’s pass went forward, so the ball got brought back to the 3 yard line.
But talk about a clever pay, which caught the opposition off guard and had the potential to change the game.
Andy Reid is one of the most successful coaches in football history. He is the only coach to win 100 games with two separate teams. His Kansas City Chiefs have won the AFC West for eight straight years. After winning the 2024 Taylor Swift game, the Chiefs have also won three Super Bowl championships.

Reid’s secret is creativity, as Rodger Sherman explains in The Ringer:

Reid will invent strange new football ideas unlike anything that has been seen before—or at least not in the past few decades—and run them in the biggest moments of a season. And while his trick plays may appear like cockamamie inventions of a football mad scientist, they often take advantage of the unique strengths and talents of his superstar players. They are gimmicks and yet functional. “If you practice them long enough, they aren’t trick plays,” Reid said when I asked about his trick plays on Monday night, “they’re just plays.”
How does he come up with these plays? Like most coaches these days, Reid thinks about football all day and all night. At the highest levels of pro and college ball, coaches much give their lives over to the game. They arrive at the stadium early and stay late, every day. Some of them sleep at the stadium. With their team of associate coaches, they work on every facet of the game with their players during the week.
Wherever he goes — driving, eating at a restaurant, even sleeping — Reid carries a stack of index cards. As he turns over plays in his restless, football-obsessed mind, he frequently has eureka moments: “What if we…?” And when these ideas come to him, he writes them down.
In a profile of Reid in The New York Times Magazine, Michael Sokolove notes:
The index cards he always keeps with him spent the nights within easy reach because he never knows when he’ll think of a new play and want to draw it up. I wondered if plays ever come to him in his dreams. “I don’t sleep enough to dream,” he said.
Over the years Reid has gathered a massive collection of plays, many tried-and-true but others different and even bizarre. This collection is, in essence, a blueprint for the whole organization, as Sokolove notes:
What the best N.F.L. coaches have in common, Banner told me, is that they’re “so detail-oriented they even annoy everyone around them.” Reid aced the interview the moment he showed up with a thick notebook he had been keeping for years. It was filled with his meticulously logged plans for all the things he would do if he ever became an N.F.L. head coach.
Think about this. Creativity does not come in magical bursts of eureka moments. It is the deliberate, careful, disciplined gathering of half-developed ideas–and then the deliberate, careful, disciplined processing of those ideas.
Sustained effort, not magic.

Reid’s obsessive genius offers two lesson for writers:

  1. Always take a notebook, wherever you go. Your mind is restless and more powerful than you might know.  Your subconscious is busy around the clock–and far more creative than your conscious mind. Your subconscious makes connections our conscious mind could never make. Your job is to be ready to capture all the ideas that come to you. You will almost never remember great ideas unless you write them down.
  2. Process the scribblings from your notebook. Other coaches and players say that, when they come to the stadium, Reid is already there. He’s transferring his scribblings from his notebooks to whiteboards. Later that day, he’ll review his clever ideas with his coaching staff. It’s not enough to capture stray thoughts, 24/7. You also need to process them, so that you can turn them into something useful.

You need to follow this process. Wherever you co, carry notecards. Whenever you have an idea — a fragment of dialogue, an idea for a character or conflict, a way of describing an idea, whatever — you need to capture it. Then you need to process and store your ideas so that they will be available when you need them.

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Let Us Now Praise Robert McKee

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.

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‘What If?’ Angus Fletcher on the Brain and Storythinking

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?”

Storythinking, which will be published by Columbia University Press in June 2023, is available for pre-order.

Fletcher, the author of the landmark work Wonderworks: Literary Invention and the Science of Stories (2021) and the forthcoming Storythinking: The New Science of Narrative Intelligence, says the brain has evolved to be creative. We abuse that creative brain in our bureaucratic, mechanized, mediated, overwhelming society. But the brain remains ready to take its place as the out-of-box imagineer and battler against stale ideas.

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.

Other Resources

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Kate Daloz on the Process of Researching and Writing

This is the second part of a two-part interview with Kate Daloz, a writing teacher at Columbia University and the author of We Are As Gods. You can find Part 1 here.

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.

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.

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.

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’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.

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. Writing We Are As Gods, 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.

Kate Daloz on Exploring a Bygone Era and Research as Me-Search

This is the first part of a two-part interview with Kate Daloz, a writing teacher at Columbia University and the author of We Are As Gods. You can find Part 2 here.

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.

Daloz, the inaugural director of the Writing Studio of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University, tells the story in her 2016 book We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America, .

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, they built 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.

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Why the Hidden Architecture Matters

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.

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Ellen Jovin on the Strangely Universal Fascination with Grammar (And Other Topics)

If you have been in one of America’s 50 states lately, you might have seen Ellen Jovin.

In 2018, Jovin had a burst of inspiration. A lifelong grammar nerd, she decided to set up a table in Manhattan and answer questions about grammar.

Really.

Why didn’t I think of that?

Sitting at the 72nd Street subway station on the Upper West Side or near Central Park, she hung out a sign inviting passers-by to ask questions about periods and prepositions, colons and semicolons, run-on sentences and Oxford commas, and a whole lot more. Most people, of course, just walk on. New Yorkers are in a hurry, you know. But many stopped by—first out of curiosity, then with real problems to solve and arguments to press.

When she became a regular presence, Jovin got some media attention. Then she got a book contract. Then she took a 50-state tour to expose America to her passions.

Ellen Jovin is a cofounder of Syntaxis, a communication skills training consultancy, and the author of four books on language—the most recent one being the bestseller Rebel with a Clause: Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian (HarperCollins, July 2022). Her other books include Writing for Business, English at Work,* and Essential Grammar for Business.

She earned a B.A. from Harvard College in German studies and an M.A. from the University of California at Los Angeles in comparative literature. For grins, she has studied 25 languages. She lives with her husband, Brandt Johnson, not far from the World Headquarters of the Grammar Table in New York.

I first saw you outside the 72nd Street subway station in New York. Your popup table reminded me of Lucy’s setup on “Peanuts.” What made you think of turning writing and grammar into a public event? Is it even more than that— performance art, for example?

I never had any inclination to be a performer, so I’d say no to the performance art idea. I happen to love talking to strangers, and I love talking about grammar and language, and I was sick of being online so many hours a day. I wanted to be outside, in light and air and with people. Those were my main reasons.

What is fascinating to you about the mechanics of writing? Do you see writing as a kind of system or machine? Or is it about relationships?

I am drawn to excellent writing for its art and beauty, and I am also drawn to—and delighted by—the technical details. On complicated projects, I tend to write a whole bunch of stuff quickly, creating a big, chaotic mess many times longer than I need, and then I clean it up by going through that chaotic mess hundreds of times. When I edit my work, I suppose I am often thinking about the pieces of a sentence in a technical way, but it is so automatic that it doesn’t feel separate to me from the aesthetic qualities.

Someone recently asked me about a subject-verb agreement problem in a sentence, and I responded that it was technically correct but hard to read because the subject plus modifiers contained eighteen words—three prepositional phrases and one relative clause with a total of six different nouns and pronouns that shifted back and forth from singular to plural—so even though the verb was technically right, it was a failure stylistically. My impression is that I experience style more technically than most writers do.

Who are your favorite writers and why? How do these authors speak to you? How much is intellectual and how much is emotional?

I don’t have favorite writers, at least not now. I love so many. One of my most joyful experiences as a reader was when I was in my mid-twenties. I had just left graduate school in Los Angeles and moved to New York, and I could suddenly read whatever I wanted without having to take exams and write papers with deadlines, and I was constantly excited about it. Those first couple of years I regularly bought books on the street at St. Mark’s Place.

I read dozens of novels, many of them English-language novels that English majors might have read in college but that I hadn’t, because I wasn’t an English major. Instead I had studied German and then comparative literature. I had already done a lot of reading in various other literatures, and in English I had intentionally read a lot of works outside of the traditional canon, and I loved all of it, but there were so many books left for me to read by some of the standard big names in English literature.

It was like living in a magic land to be able to plow through book after book by Edith Wharton, all the Brontës, Dreiser, Thackeray. Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Dickens, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, and a whole lot of others. For a small amount of money, way smaller than the cost of a television, I could buy compactly packaged worlds of words off the street.

OK, now I am wondering if frequenting book stalls in the early 1990s made me more likely to have a Grammar Table. Never thought of that before. Hmmm.

Oh, and the feeling is both intellectual and emotional. It’s a soaring feeling of joy like the one I get when I climb a steep trail and then get to look down at spectacular scenery below.

I’ve always thought that grammar is easy—or easy enough to write well—once you care. So the challenge, in mastering writing, is to care. Just like kids easily memorize sports statistics and teenagers remember arcane song lyrics, we master what we pay real attention to. Angela Lunsford at Stanford argues that people are better writers today because they have more opportunities to find an audience. What do you think of these musings?

How delightful to hear that! I say that all the time, though I think the benefits are not distributed evenly across personality type. I personally think social media transformed my writing life. It gave me free daily outlets for creativity and a way to geek out about grammar and language with people around the world. It’s because of Facebook that I ended up in tons of online language groups, and that’s how I got sucked into too much computer time, and that in turn has a lot to do with how I ended up outside at the Grammar Table.

Even now I still love discussing language topics on social media, and Twitter and Mastodon are fantastic for language polls about usage and punctuation and grammar. One thing about the online audience: To benefit fully, you have to have empathy and enough training or innate writing sophistication that you can actually pick up on the details of reader responses and the reasons for them. It is also far from automatic that well-intentioned, thoughtful people know how not to feel devastated when other people are mean.

Regarding what you said about caring: Yes, caring is key. How you make young people (or anyone) care about certain useful topics they tend not to care about automatically is an endless instructional and motivational challenge. I always loved grammar, even when I was in grade school. It tickled my brain. I was fortunate enough to have great instruction from first grade through the end of my education, but on top of that, grammar was like the idea equivalent of ice cream for me. I just wanted it. I didn’t want to perform in school plays—I wanted to do more sentence diagramming.

What surprises you about the questions people ask and how they get invested in the writing process? Can you think of two or three strange (or just memorable) characters you have met on your travels?

I am not surprised all that often, at least not in this realm. I’ve been around a while, you know! But because I have not spent a lot of time in the South, those Grammar Table stops were among my favorite—and for me the most educational.

A man in New Orleans didn’t like that object pronouns were called object pronouns. He thought that was dehumanizing and suggested that I, as a language professional, might be in a position to do something about picking less objectifying grammatical terms. I enjoyed that.

And then there was the construction worker I met in Decatur, Alabama, who was obsessed with punctuation and apostrophes, who loved calligraphy, and who was thoroughly annoyed by people who wrote “ya’ll” rather than “y’all.” He surprised me.

So you have now been in all 50 states with your amazing road show. What do regional differences tell you about writing—about what varies and why, and also about what is the same everywhere?

People move around a lot in this country, so everywhere I went, I met people from somewhere else. Mostly people had similar questions across state borders. In Ohio I was asked about the status of “ain’t” twice—more than in any other state—and I was also asked what I meant by “grammar” more in the South than elsewhere, but I don’t make much of the former (it’s not statistically significant) or much of the latter either.

I don’t think people understood less about grammar in the South, but it would make sense if a word associated with judgmental editorial orthodoxy were approached more tentatively in a region whose dialects are often picked on by the rest of the US.

How can mastery of grammar and mechanics help people to find their own distinctive style? Do you see this with your favorite writers?

When I look at a piece of writing, I really cannot tell how the writers got there. Was that cool sentence with a record-challenging string of opening dependent clauses leading up to a single punchy, zingy independent clause thought through grammatically by the writer and intentionally structured that way? Could the writer name the grammatical elements? And how much did an editor rewrite the person’s work? No idea.

I am confident that most skilled writers feel their way through sentences rather than engage in clause-counting. That’s true for me too, most of the time, and I think it’s the way it should be. Our grammatical explanations followed language; they didn’t predate it. I just happen to like supplementing my instincts with super-geeky technical analyses. Everyone has their hobbies.

Being closer to language and more aware of language, however you choose to acquire that awareness, helps people become more themselves in writing. Getting older helps a lot too. On average, people become more likely to say what they want to say as they age. Therefore, I recommend aging.

OK, seriously: How in the world can anyone ever not use the Oxford comma? It’s bad enough that some editors disdain it. You could write that off as a personal quirk. But for style guides to ban the O-comma is unthinkable and even unconscionable. What does that tell you about human nature?

Nice try, Charlie, but you are not going to get me to stop sticking up for the people who omit it. Despite the memes and public disputes and even litigation, I remain attached to my agnosticism on this point. “I ate carrots, celery and cucumbers” means exactly the same thing as “I ate carrots, celery, and cucumbers.” I currently use the Oxford comma, and I usually like it, and I sometimes even insist on it, but this is not an issue that rouses my passion.

Is the phone ruining people’s reading experience by making it so easy to get off to read a text, search a topic, or check social media? 

Ugh, this question distresses me. I am struggling with this issue. I don’t want to discuss it publicly right now. I will come back when I am emotionally prepared to look at the damage caused to my attention span.

*Sorry, Ellen, the Oxford Comma is not optional.

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John Truby on the New Rules of Genre Writing (Part 2)

This is the second part of a two-part interview with film guru John Truby. You can read the first part here.

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.

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.

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.

John Truby on the New Rules of Genre Writing (Part 1)

This is the first part of a two-part interview with film guru John Truby. You can read the second part here.

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.

What makes a story unique, within the boundaries of a genre?

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.

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.

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.

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?

This is the first part of a two-part interview with film guru John Truby. You can read the second part here.

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The Elements of Writing Outline

In my updated book The Elements of Writing, I offer simple, actionable techniques for storytelling, mechanics, and analysis.

You can get a sense of my system with this outline of The 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 IdeaThe 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

  • 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

  • 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’

Act III: Analysis 

16. Storytelling for Analysis

  • Narrate Complex Issues: Eugenie Ladner Birch’s ‘From Flames to Flowers’
  • 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

Seminar on Business Writing

Writing is writing. The kinds of skills you need to master writing in journalism, fiction, or academia are the same skills you need in business.

Except . . .

Business professionals face unique challenges as writers. They usually write to produce results, not just to inform audiences or express ideas. They often use specialized language, with technical meaning, but must also connect with general audiences. Finally, professionals also operate in a pressurized environment where the priority is to produce on other, non-writing tasks.

Therefore, any good program for business writing must do two things: (1) Master the core skills and techniques of writing, which apply in all fields. (2) Adapt those skills to the unique context of professional life.

That is exactly what this seminar does. With clear, step by step guides and examples relevant to your everyday life, we explore the dimensions of writing in business, government, and nonprofit organizations.

We pay special attention to the specific kinds of documents you need to produce. Before meeting, we get an inventory of the major documents in your organization and identify its special form and style. We also provide specific techniques to apply what we learn to your work—right away, as soon as you return to your desk.

The result is a program that will improve your efficiency and creativity not just as a writer, but in all you do.

This seminar will:

  • Show you the core skills of great writing in all fields—and adapt those skills toi your challenges as a professional.
  • Use your actual documents—in draft or final form—to show how to use the elements of writing for all challenges.
  • Provide a checklist of all t=of the considerations for all professional writing challenges.
  • Offer a strategy to deploy your new skills and understanding … as soon as you return to your desk.

Course Overview

  1. The T Bar—Why Writing Power is Business Power

Most companies—especially in technical, specialized fields or with large corporate structures—focus on their “verticals.” But whatever your mastery of the verticals, you also need to connect across the silos. McKinsey Consulting uses the T-shaped organizational structure to describe how. The horizontal bar of the T represents the connections between the divisions. When a business can provide the depth of expertise of the I’s—and then connect those I’ s with good, smart communication—the company has a chance to do extraordinary things.

  1. One Simple Technique to Transform Your Writing—Right Now

The Golden Rule of Writing provides a simple and intuitive hack for all levels of writing: the sentence, paragraph, section, and whole piece. Using the Golden Rule—with the help of the Landscape View—provides a process for you to gain control of your writing and to “burn” good writing habits into your brain.

  1. ‘One True Sentence’—How to Get it Right, Line by Line

The sentence is the single most important unit of writing. If we can write great sentences, every time, we have a chance to write great paragraphs and whole pieces. The sentence begins with a simple core. But to gain real power, you need to master the “hinge sentence.” Also: In professional settings, writers need to be on the lookout for wordiness and jargon.

  1. Writing Stellar Paragraphs with Buckets and Tabloid Headlines

The paragraph is the most neglected element of writing—and it shows. Too many paragraphs ramble without purpose or focus. In this unit, we will use the concept of the “idea bucket” to stay focused. Using the Tabloid Headline and Landscape View, we’ll gain mastery of the second most important unit of writing.

  1. Finding the Right Shape: Blueprints for All Pieces

Writing a great piece requires finding the right shape. The eternal structure of all communications is the story. But how does that work? And what are the variations on this theme? What are the different “shapes” of pieces? How can we adapt this core structure to different kinds of writing? Can we use simple blueprints to structure our work?

  1. Editing With Focus, from Big to Small

“Write with your heart,” Hemingway once said, “but edit with your head.” Most writers struggle with editing because they try to do too much at the same time. In this unit, we explore how to break editing into stages to focus on one challenge at a time. With techniques like the Landscape View, Tabloid Headlines, and Clutter Cutter, we can create the focus we need to do it well.

  1. Getting the Right Style—What You Have in Common With George Clooney, the Williams Sisters, and Stephen Curry?

Style is the unique expression of an idea, often with surprising and delightful flourishes. But in all fields—art, music, architecture, and even science and business—style requires mastery of the basics. Using a process we call “stacking” —and building on the skills from our unit on sentences—we will explore how to transform the simplest elements of writing into your own distinctive style or brand.

Following Up

Learning is never enough. What really matters is how you apply what you learn. This seminar is designed to give you a clear plan of attack—whatever you want to do as an organization or department.

Seminars for Storytelling in Business

Seminars for Storytelling in Business provide the core skills for connecting with people inside and outside the organization.

Research shows that people evolved as a narrative species. We pay the most attention–and learn and engage more powerfully–when we hear and tell stories.

Amazingly, you can “storify” writing in all fields (business, government, nonprofits, education), in all documents (emails, web copy, reports, proposals, and more), and at all levels (sentences, paragraphs, sections, whole pieces).

This seminar will:

  • Explore how storytelling could enhance the communications of your organization with your own people, clients, vendors, customers, and others.
  • Show how to develop characters to create empathy with audiences of all kinds—even for documents that do not have any obvious characters.
  • Demonstrate the essential elements of storytelling, building on Aristotle’s three-part model of drama and modern research on the brain and classic stories.
  • Apply those skills to business writing and communications, from emails and web copy to reports and other major pieces.
  • Engage students in storytelling exercises, as a group, to start to “burn” storytelling skills into the brain.
  • Provide useful templates/blueprints for using stories in different documents.

Course Overview

A great story can engage employees, build loyalty among customers, and strengthen the culture of an organization. No matter the goal, strong leaders know how to harness the power of stories to their advantage.

This course explores the value of stories, reasons to use them, methods for collecting tales, narrative patterns, character construction, and delivery skills. During this session, participants will also learn how to plan a story inventory and begin building a library of narratives.

The group will also learn the art of story spawning and the importance of story hearkening. By the conclusion of the workshop, those who attend should understand how to leverage their stories and others’ stories for a variety of purposes.

Workshop Outline

  1. How Stories Engage Everyone, From the Biggest Clients to the Newest Hire

It’s a truism that humans evolved as a storytelling species—that a great narrative can engage audiences emotionally. But it’s deeper than that. The narrative is the most basic form of thinking. Every day, we have 50,000 or more thoughts—and they take the form of mini-narratives. If we understand a basic 1-2-3 structure, we can master the art of great sentences, paragraphs, sections, and whole pieces.

Group activity: Explore the three-part structure of all perception and thinking, writing and storytelling. In a “one-minute presentation,” you will learn to tell your three-part story on the spot.

  1. Before and After—Reverse-Engineering Bland and Narrative Passages

Stories are not just “one damn thing after another,” as an eminent historian once commented. It’s not enough to record a series of actions or events. Stories are sequences with change and meaning.

Group activity: Compare a set of passages—some simple and bland accounts of events, others full-fledged stories—and identify and dissect the specific maneuvers that make stories stories.

  1. Finding the One Idea—Discovering What Story You Might Want to Tell

Stories are usually about lots of people and events. But they need to converge on a single idea, or else you will alienate the audience. Hollywood uses the “logline”—a short and simple statement about a story’s setup and delivery—to capture the essence of a movie. Sometimes we can’t know the “One Idea” of a story till after we have written it and struggled to find its meaning.

Group activity: Explore a process for moving from a jumble of ideas to a coherent, clear, compelling idea that will drive the story from the first word to the last.

  1. ‘Everything Begins With a Character’—Why People Love Characters More Than Anything Else and How You Can Give Them What they Want

All good storytelling begins with character. A good character evokes the empathy and concern of the reader, making the reader a hidden part of the story. Rendered well, characters not only lead a story but also dramatize and explain key ideas.

Group activity:  Develop a compelling character out of thin air. Moving around the room, we will create a “dossier” for a character. By creating a character, we will take a major step toward building a whole story.

  1. Creating a Dynamic Narrative Arc—In Everything You Write

Two and a half millennia ago, Aristotle identified the key elements of a story. In our time, neuroscientists and business mavens show how these elements affect the reader as she goes about her day—working, learning, caring for family, shopping, playing, and more.

Group activity:  Dissect a mini-narrative from film. We will block out the beginning, middle, and end. Building on the basic story structure, we will boost the story’s power with specific moments that define characters and struggles and move the story forward to its inevitable conclusion. We will use blueprints for specific business pieces that use these story moments.

  1. Story Moments—Structuring a Great Explainer, Post, Proposal, Pitch, and More

Big Data on stories—concerning takes from Sophocles to Succession—show that stories succeed best when they use about a dozen key “moments.” These moments can be found in the best ads, blogs, sales copy, pitches, and more. The challenge is not just to use these moments, but blend them seamlessly into the piece.

Group activity: Consider a series of ”fact sheets” on issues of importance to the organization. From these, we will create powerful and dynamic stories that reveal the essence of the issues at hand.

  1. Thinkfast—Make a Story Out of Mush, Instantly

The world, as William James once commented, often seems like “a blooming and buzzing confusion.” As noted at the beginning of this seminar, the brain automatically organizes this confusion into a coherent narrative. To succeed, we need to take control of the narratives of our work and lives.

Group activity: Work with a series of “fact sheets” on issues of importance to the organization. From these, we will create powerful and dynamic stories that reveal the essence of the issues at hand.

By the end of this course, those who attend should have a solid grasp of the power of storytelling in business and how as leaders they can develop and deliver narratives to achieve wide-ranging goals.

Following Up

In this seminar, you will learn a full suite of skills and techniques to “storify” all of your writing in your organizations—from emails and web copy to reports and proposals and RFPs … even speeches and presentations.


Photo by StockSnap

Can We Dispense the Myth about King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Passage?

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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Why Do Politicians* Talk Like This?

Liz Cheney risked her career to uncover the truth of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. A month before her Republican primary in Wyoming, she was 20 point behind her Trumpist opponent. Once a darling of the Right, she was now its most bitter foe. She faces the ugliest attacks, including death threats, because of her mission to expose You-Know-Who’s role in the attempted coup.

In her statements and questions as the vice chair of the January 6 committee, she is clear and direct. She also knows how to create a cliffhanger and throw shade.

But she talks like this when interviewed:

Jake Tapper of CNN: If you end up losing your job in Congress because of your work on this committee, it will have been worth it to you?

Liz Cheney: There’s no question I believe that my work on this committee is the single most important thing I’ve ever done professionally. It is an unbelievable honor to represent the people of Wyoming in Congress. And I know that all of us who are elected officials take an oath that we swear to God to the Constitution and that oath has to mean something. And that oath means that we cannot embrace and enable a president as dangerous as Donald Trump is. And my obligations and my responsibilities on this committee are to ensure that we understand exactly what happened so that we can establish legislation and recommendations to help ensure it never happens again.

Cheney answers the question. She says what she means. She does not equivocate. But she takes 114 words to do it. That’s almost half of a double-spaced page of type. If you break it into four sentences, that’s 28 words per sentence. Research shows that people understand best when sentences average fewer than 20 words.

Worse, the response is as lively as lead. There are no sensory words — no words that evoke sights or sounds or texture.

Why do politicians do this? Who do bureaucrats and corporate people do this? Why do intellectuals do this?

I can see six possible explanations, not mutually exclusive:

  • Orwellian obfuscation: This is the most obvious explanation in official-speak but does not apply here. In 1984 and “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell warned about the tendency of people holding or seeking to cover up the truth with circumlocutions as well as outright lies. Any time someone faces some uncomfortable situation, they try to talk their way around it. Most famously, Bill Clinton claimed he “didn’t inhale” when he was a college student trying pot. In a sense, Clinton didn’t have any choice but to dance around the topic. Self-righteous pundits, politicians, ministers, and moralizers treated smoking pot as a disqualifying action. Douglas Ginsberg, remember, lost a seat on the Supreme Court solely because he smoked pot while a member of a university faculty. So it’s understandable when public figures dance around inconvenient truths. But when it becomes a habit–when every public utterance is processed by the Truth Obfuscation Machine–it’s a dire problem.
  • Thinking while talking: Politicians talk all day, under the glare of TV lights and with opponents waiting in prey nearby. They are expected to produce an answer to every question, without thinking through the words they will use. Oh sure, they can fall back on previous utterances and talking points–and they do. Still, it can be overwhelming to speak continuously. They have to start their answer before they think through how to answer. They can’t pause for five or ten seconds or the interviewer will begin to press them. Five seconds is an eternity on TV.
  • Hedging while being emphatic: Public figures want to be stalwart and provocative in their pronouncements. They want to appear not only knowledgable but also strong. They want to stake out strong claims. There’s no room on TV for the mealy-mouthed. So so they proclaim and declare and challenge and pronounce–emphatically. The desire to be bold runs into the wall of wanting to be safe. So she talks about the “single most important” and “unbelievable honor” and “swear to God,” but buries these emphatics in a mush of bureaucratese.
  • Holding the floor: On TV–and in the other forums where politics, media, and egos converge–you always risk losing the floor. So Liz Cheney uses the technique that her droning father Dick used: Just speak without interruption till you’ve made the points you want to make. The point of Sunday talk shows is not to deliberate or debate or reconsider anything; it’s to leave with soound bites that get coverage in the media. Who cares if it’s lost in a bog; it’s still there, fodder for friends and foes alike to use in the next round of argument and posturing. Therefore: speak till you drop your talking points.
  • Living in abstraction: Politicians, technocrats, academics, and (shame on them) journalists live in a world of abstractions. They talk about “the American people” and “public opinion” and “the narrative” without any real care for the flesh-and-blood people and issues that make up those categories. If you live in a world dominated by fundraising, polling, gerrymandering, and talking points, the human element gets buried. Pols try to fight this with their anecdotes: “Just last week in Dubuque, I met a farmer named Ned struggling to pay for seed…” But it’s still lifeless and bloodless.
  • The long game: The best-case scenario is that Liz Cheney is channeling Ike. President Dwight Eisenhower was famous for his bland and meandering speech in press conferences and other public appearances. But behind the scenes, as Fred Greenstein shows in The Hidden-Hand Presidency, he was sharp and concise. He used bland Ikespeak to lull the public (and his opponents) to sleep. Ike cared more about his agenda than winning praise for cleverness. Maybe that’s Liz Cheney’s game, too.

So how might Liz Cheney have done a better job answering Jake Tapper? Try this:

Jake Tapper of CNN: If you end up losing your job in Congress because of your work on this committee, it will have been worth it to you?

Liz Cheney: Oh, God yes. No job is worth endangering the Constitution. Donald Trump is a walking, talking threat to everything I care about. Look, I love representing Wyoming in Congress. It’s an amazing honor. But Donald Trump is the greatest danger to American democracy since the Civil War. The January 6 Committee must make sure he never gets close to the White House ever again.  That matters more than my job.

This response is 70 words in eight sentences–an average of 8.75 words. Each sentence is punchy and direct. Speaking like this, she would never lose the audience in a long drone of bland and abstract language.

Whatever the reasons for Liz Cheney’s manner of speaking, she and other public figures would do better to speak with greater clarity and verve–not just for their own cause, but for the larger cause of truth and honesty. If you lose a little wiggle room or deniability along the way, so be it. In the long run, direct language will produce a better payoff for your cause and for your own state of mind.

*Not just politicians. Other public figures, too, as well as academics and professionals in all fields — anyone, in fact, with something to gain and lose with their speech. More than we would like to admit, the rest of us follow these models of speech. *sigh*

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Paco Underhill on Shopping, Observing, and Writing

Paco Underhill, the son of a diplomat, turned his liabilities as a boy into his greatest assets.

Underhill grew up on the move as his father took new postings with the State Department. Living in Poland and Malaysia, he did not experience the retail riches of Western life. Partly because of his itinerant life and partly because of a childhood stutter, he learned to observe his surroundings carefully.

He developed those powers of observation even more acutely as a city planner, working for the Project for Public Spaces under the direction of the legendary William (“Holly”) Whyte. Underhill then created a consulting firm called Envirosell that analyzes how people use stores, museums, and other public and private places. Using direct observation, time-lapse photography, interviews, and data, Underhill and his team identify ways to make the shopping experience more engaging to users and more lucrative to retailers.

Since its founding in 1986, Envirosell has worked in 50 countries and with more than one-third of all Fortune 100 companies. He has worked in all sectors, in virtual as well as brick-and-mortar environments.

Underhill’s new book How We Eat offers a friendly guide not just to the shopping experience, but also to the larger issues of food, e.g., organic versus mass farming, small versus supermarket buying, home cooking versus prepared foods, and varieties of diets and eating traditions. Like his previous books—Why We Buy, Call of the Mall, and What Women WantHow We Eat offers insights into the everyday design decisions that shape human behavior.

Winston Churchill once remarked: “First we make the buildings, then the buildings make us.” Underhill offers a methodology for remaking the spaces of our lives. The $1 trillion food industry makes us, for sure; but with the right insights, we can also redesign the systems that produce and sell food

Underhill, a graduate of Vassar College, lives in New York City and Madison, Connecticut.

You started your career as a city planner and analyst—using time-lapse photography to track how people behave in public spaces. How did that come about?

I went to Columbia for a summer and in one of my classes heard a lecture by Holly Whyte. As I walked out, I thought, “Man, this is so cool.” It was a way to observe people and understand how the built environment worked. It made complete sense.

After I heard him lecture for 45 minutes, I knew what I wanted to do. And then I ran my own study. I looked at a pedestrian mall in Poughkeepsie and how the street furniture and signs worked. Then I knocked on his door: “Hello, you don’t know me, but I just did this…” That’s how I got my first job. That’s when the Project for Public Spaces was just launching. I became the first staff member. One of my first jobs was working at Rockefeller Center.

Holly Whyte was a magical guy. He had a gift of gab. I saw him entrance people at least 100 times after that first lecture. I learned about how he wrote and presented himself.

How did you make the transition from city planning to retail analysis?

I was a junior member of a crew that would go to different cities and look at traffic patterns and rewrite zoning ordinances. I was on the roof of the Seafirst Bank building in Seattle, 60 stories up, and there was a stiff wind blowing. My job was to install cameras and I could feel the building rocking. I did what I had to do, but I would rather have a job where I don’t have to go into the roofs of buildings.

A week later I was in a bank and getting madder by the moment and realized that the same tools I used to explore cities, I could use to understand a bank or a store or an airport or a museum or a hospital and deconstruct how they worked. I had never worked in banking or retail or even took a business course. But I knew something about how to measure how people move. It also helped that I came to it with a certain degree of freshness.

A lot of observations seem obvious after the fact—but they are fresh insights at first.

One of my jobs was analyzing a Burger King and its new salad bar. It was in the early 1980s in Miami. Yes, my job was to look at the salad bar, I was going to look at the entire pad. There were so many things that were painfully obvious, but to the marketing research team, were just completely new and different. When a man walks into a Burger King, the way he chooses a table is different than the way a woman does it. We tracked who parks in the lot and who goes through the drive-through. If you drove a Cadillac, you would use the drive-through. That’s obvious but no one had noted it before.

There are implications in terms of design and management. I started with restaurants, then worked on hardware stores, music stores, fashion, then food. I was able to come up with [store design changes] that someone could do in a week or two or even overnight. Business in those days was focused on strategy—McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group. I was able to say, “Here are five things you can adjust and make a difference.”

Some of it was comic. The first hardware store, I said the brochures are in the wrong place. They let me move them but at the end of the first day the manager yelled at me: “You’ve gotten rid of a week’s work of circulars in one day!” One of the first drugstores, I asked, “Why are the baskets only at the front door?” I showed them video clips with customers walking to the register with their arms full. What if we trained staff so that when they see someone with four things in their hands, the customer would get a basket? We did it and the average purchase went up 18 percent.

How did you learn how to observe carefully?

Growing up I had a terrible stutter. As we moved every 18 months or two years, I was more confident looking and trying to understand how things worked than asking questions. So I took a coping mechanism and turned it into a profession.

I also remember looking at Sears and Roebuck catalogues—toys and furniture and all these things. Nothing in Warsaw duplicated that catalogue. Going into Germany during a family trip, getting into the first PX, it was a world I had never seen before. I am not a material kind of guy, but I do have a passion about understanding how things work.

How can we train ourselves to make careful observations?

When I taught field work at City University, we were right across from Bryant Park. I would pick one person from the class and say, “I want you to go and walk around Bryant Park for 15 minutes and come back and tell us what you did. After he left I would pick out someone else and say, “I want you to go follow him and record what he did.” Then they would come back and we would contrast what the two reported. There were obvious differences. People didn’t lie but what they said and did was often completely different.

What kinds of habits—and what kinds of people—make for good observation?

Over the last 34 years I sent out crews of trackers all over the world. When I’m in an environment observing, I have to be very careful after doing it for an hour—I haven’t seen what I need to see. It’s often the second or third day when you really see and understand. So a lot of it is a Zen-like state of patience.

One man did 500 missions for me. He had a short career as a guitar player in a prominent early 90s band called Codeine. It had its own distinct beat. He became a kindergarten teacher. I found him doing substitute teaching and he was so patient and so observant and so rhythmic, with a slow steady beat, and he was so empathetic.

I also had an Endicott Prize-winning illustrator of children’s books. He would work for me for nine months and then he would come in and say, “Disney just optioned one of my books, I need to take some time off.” So he would go and then come back when he was ready. I would rather have someone great for 60 percent of the time than someone not as good 100 percent of the time.

How did you develop as a writer? How did you develop your informal, avuncular style?

In my early college years, I had a wall in my dorm filled with rejection letters. I wrote stories and even poems. I wrote fiction into my 20s. I took the skill set I learned writing fiction and used it in my nonfiction writing.

There are nonfiction writers who are trying to show how smart they are. I firmly believe in edutainment. If I can entertain you, I can educate you. I want to change readers’ prescriptions [lenses] in how they see the world.

How do you break down and manage major writing projects?

I have always been a writer of columns. The form I feel most comfortable is a 2,000- to 3000-word piece. People’s attention spans aren’t the same that they were when Charles Dickens wrote his books. Therefore, when I think of a book, it isn’t 12 chapters, it’s actually 50. I’ve broken it down so it’s easy for someone to pick up the book, read for a while and put it down and not feel as if they’re missing anything.

To write How We Eat, I had 40 columns, 50,000 words already written. It was a matter of piecing them all together. I learned from writing reports, it’s important to create a framework to start out. It isn’t as if you start at the beginning and go to the end. Get a frame and put pieces into that frame.

The modern book isn’t measured in pages; it’s measured in words. I was informed early in my career that to get read, a book needs to be 70,000 words.

Also, I also recognize that I need to keep vocabulary simple. As a column writer, I’ve been very careful about use of adjectives and adverbs. I should say careful, not very careful.

I have always been a storyteller. Being able to take business or nonfiction knowledge and do it as a story is very reader-friendly. There are a couple of sections where it goes from being a monologue to a dialogue. That’s part of what pleased me—the transition between one and the other. It makes it m more informal. It’s storytelling.

What writers have you admired and emulated?

I always loved the fiction writer James Lee Burk. He could describe smell better than anybody I knew. His books are formulaic, but he can go on for 1,000 words describing a smell.

Then there’s the foreign service man, Edward Hall, who write The Hidden Dimension and The Silent Language. Growing up in a third world country, even as a teenager I didn’t have TV. I consumed a prodigious amount of books—60 to 80 a year.

How did How We Eat develop?

When COVID hit, I had been working on the manuscript for over a year and had to take 60 percent and throw it out. A year ago, after having been battered by COVID, I gave Envirosell to my young employees and shifted to being a strategic advisor. That means my platform is a lot freer because I don’t have to worry about stepping on toes.

This book feels lighter—the style and flow and personality—than Why We Buy. Am I right about that?

That’s a very conscious effort. The purpose is to get to a healthier version of ourselves and our planet. I’m not going to tell you what to do but I can change the prescription [lens] by which you see the world. In changing that, you able to make better decisions. I was also aware I wanted to write for a popular audience. Everybody eats and drinks and buys food and beverages. Why We Buy targeted a certain audience and What Women Want targeted a specific audience. This one was targeting everyone.

Hollywood uses the “logline” to describe the essence of a film—a simple one-sentence line about the major character or mission. What’s your logline?

Mine would be: I want to change your prescription to get to a healthier version of yourself and create a healthier planet.

When COVID hit, we recognized that the world was going through a fundamental change. It wasn’t World War II breaking out, but it was global and there was a great deal of hurt. And it affected the structure of our own lives. I realized I don’t want to write a negative book. I don’t want to say, “Oh, man, are we screwed!” I wanted to write a positive and enlightening and challenging book.

The word I kept using is “post-pan.” I want to focus on the post-pandemic period. It will be over at some point. There are going to be some big changes and we need to be ready for them.

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The Quietest Hero: Remembering Bob Moses

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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Finding Focus and Organizing Ideas with Architect Christopher Alexander

How can creative people–architects and planners, artists and writers, musicians and performance artists–foster a sense of “wholeness” in their work?

Christopher Alexander, one of the last century’s most important architects, who died last month at the age of 85, offers a mind experiment to explore this question.

Take a blank piece of paper, he urges in his masterwork The Nature of Order, and put a dot anywhere. Below, compare the sheet of paper with nothing (on the left) and the sheet with just a dot (right).

“Although the dot is tiny, its impact on the sheet of paper is very great,” Alexander says. “The blank sheet of paper is one whole, one kind of wholeness. With the introduction of the tiny dot, the wholeness changes dramatically.”

The dot creates a number of possibilities for organizing and understanding space. When we focus on one thing, everything else changes around it.

Then what? The dot can give rise to a number of different possibilities. Like this:

Or this:

Or This:

Or this:

Those arrangements, in turn, suggest dynamic relations between the parts, as we see here:

“We begin to experience a subtle and pervasive shift in the whole,” Alexander says. “The space changes throughout the sheet of paper (and not only where the dot is), vectors are created, differentiation reaching far beyond the dot itself occur within the space. As a whole, an entirely different configuration has come into being, and this configuration extends across the sheet of paper as a whole.

Alexander, as an architect, is most concerned with the implications for place-making. A good place—a building, a park, a plaza, a beach, anyplace really—begins with a center. One center often spins off other smaller centers, which relate to each other. Each center has its own character—not just scale and materials and shape, but also feelings of warmth and character and naturalness.

Consider the centers that help orient us in a simple house. The front door provides the center to the front of the house; everything relates to that focal point. Once inside, a prominent window in the parlor provides a new center. So does an arch. So does a fireplace. So does a prominent piece of furniture. So does a piece of art.

But Alexander’s mind experiment also teaches important lessons for writers and storytellers.

Singling out any detail has the effect of shaping everything else. Your greatest challenge as a writer, really, is to figure out which ones—which ideas or feelings, images or relationships … .which centers—you want to highlight.

Christopher Alexander’s dot is similar to Wallace Stevens’s famous jar:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill. …

Amazing, isn’t it, to see how a whole landscape can be transformed with a focus on a single object. So when you write or design, ask yourself: What’s my dot? What’s my jar?

Tommy Tomlinson on the Craft of Writing

This is the second part of a two-part interview with the longtime columnist, author, and podcaster Tommy Tomlinson. You can find Part 1 here.

You’ve devoted your whole life to being a writer. It shapes everything you do. How and why did you become a writer? Who were your greatest 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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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The One Idea: Success and Failure

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.

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Avery Chenoweth on Telling Stories for Business

This is the second part of a two-part interview with Avery Chenoweth, a writer and Spanish language translator based in Charlottesville, Virginia. You can see Part 1 here.

In recent years you have used your storytelling chops to develop a business. HeresMyStory.com engages students and others who use historic sites, but getting them to interact with Augmented Reality characters who come into view on their phone at these sites. To pursue this business project, you participated in a special business-development program at U.Va.’s Darden School of Business, the i-Lab How has learning about business informed your life as a writer and storyteller? What do you now know that makes you a better writer and storyteller?

What I came away with was complicated–but it seemed to me that in business we were all talking past one another, and using English differently enough that it was a dialect, or pidgin, that we were speaking.

As an older entrepreneur, I had a hard time being heard by younger people. The business people would listen to me as if I had slipped into Mandarin (what, again?), and I found myself at times listening carefully to professional jingo and admiring how well it telescoped ideas into verbs, like some verbal vortex opening over a conference table. It was also interesting how everyone had a story, and that everyone spoke in a story, or in a case, which acted like parables–encoding a message in the action so that, even if the interpretation eluded you, the fall out of bad decisions did not.

How do you train for that?

In the i-Lab at Darden, we were called on to pitch routinely and unpredictably, as a way of finding ourselves doing an elevator pitch in a heartbeat without prep. So it was a magical story, with a mysterious and compelling opening, and not unlike a Wall Street Journal story with an anecdotal opening, followed by a nut graph. If you were lucky, you’d get a card and invitation to follow up. And if something was wrong with your pitch, everyone would coach you to start on another point, or at a better selling point.

Pitching depends, of course, on who’s catching. Some don’t and others won’t. That’s good: they’re honest. The worst are those who spend all your time window shopping because they like the attention, feel powerful as they dangle a check out of reach, or merely enjoy the sadism of passive aggression, the one cultural monument here in Virginia that cannot be moved.

Standup comics can be harassed, berated, or torn up by furious drunks, and singers can get booed, writers and directors can get diced by vicious critics, and worse yet by nasty trolls posing as critics. But when you’re pitching investors, it’s all interactive. If I ever thought a creative writing workshop was tough, I had zero idea of business pitching. Investors can lean in; lean back; chill you with silence; badger you with irrelevant details to show you that they’re the smartest guy in the room; and then lead you on with meetings, suggestions, name dropping, money dangling, all just messing around because it alleviates their soulless boredom.

Quick example: I used to start my pitch this way: imagine you come up to a huge battlefield. You get out. The kids mill around. All you see is a field, well mowed into stripes like a ball field. A cannon. And a plaque. There is “nothing” there. The kids are bored and want to leave. Then your phone pings. There on your phone is a civil war soldier, standing right before you. And he says, “They shot me over here. Come on, I’ll show you…” He walks into the distance, and as you scan your phone, the field disappears, and you see on your phone see a Matthew Brady landscape all around you, as you follow him into American history. That possibility would light up people–in the beginning, in the i-Lab, back when this was still an idea. As for story-telling: I am telling them a story. It is not the one in their heads. They are looking for a denouement; I am managing their expectations. As we got closer to making a product, the illusion faded, and rather than look at the meadow, they gazed into the weeds. They ask, who is the market for this? Is this an App? Are you using AR, or VR? Is it triggered by GPS, or beacon? Is the site you mention nearby? What person is stopping there? How much do they spend a year on vacations, how long do they go? If they have 350k people visiting every year, how are you going to market to them and monetize the app, by subscription, rev share with the park, sponsorships, or advertising? Cause I don’t see advertising working here. Who’s your law firm, who’s doing your contracts? Do you have employees or are they all consultants; are they getting paid, working for equity, or a cash-equity split? What kind of network support will you need to launch this? Are you going to build your own platform, because you will need at least $400 thousand, and what kind of revenues are you projecting over the next five years, and when do I see my ROI?

What happens with dilution? You’re offering a convertible note at a 30% discount, but can I really protect my position in future rounds at that discount? Are you now planning to go to institutional investors, philanthropists, and how much have your raised, and how much of the company do you own, and is this your series A? And, of course, are you paying yourself? You need to be putting in sweat equity–this from the millionaires, that the impoverished entrepreneur had better damn well be working slavishly so that they can become still richer on your ingenuity.

A pitch is just a story, with a different purpose.

Interestingly, the pitch parallels Freytag’s pyramid: they like the hook, they invest and cross the dramaturgical climax, they cannot go back, and look ahead to their own denouement, with a return on their investment (ROI). If all goes to plan, they will find the pot of gold, and return home wearing a golden fleece, with chests full of gold and jewels; if badly, they will reap the wind, or, a tax write off.

Storytellers can tell the same story to different audiences, though, and get different results that arise from the regions where they try to cast their spell. A successful entrepreneur once explained it to me in terms of coastal cultures: People on the West Coast fall in love with the vision. They love the story, see the possibilities–and want it to happen for their children and in their lifetime. Meanwhile, the East Coast gang are strictly ROI, and don’t care whether you are selling marshmallows or machine-guns. They just want their return–fast, or else. As it turns out, startups are falling into this sophomore slump after their first product launch–if kids don’t start weeping and screaming “Ringo!” “Paul!”, the investors freeze them out, and figure it’s all over.

Charlottesville has many lovely festivals in film, photography, books, and entrepreneurship and music–which that puts most people into the audience, and that’s where they love to remain, among the informed cognoscente of the coffee shop–well-read, insightful, and full of discernment. We analyze politics for its art, and art for its politics. They are my people. My tribe. My peeps. And when I leave their steaming midst, and come to the business community, I find others from the festival audience from the business world. Yet, in spite of our hip rectitude, there is still a whiff of Zenith, Ohio, in the air. I’ve met with some country club brothers of George Babbitt. They play us for weeks, months about investing, then switch away from investing to making introductions, and then merely fade away to the first tee, and are not heard from again–but for the faint sound of their slapping someone else’s back for a change.

A few years ago, something like $29 million came into local startups, making us town the best town for startups in the US that year, according to the media. Our local media gushed. The locals knew what the writer didn’t: every dime came from out of town, and went to two companies. Call it an absurd generalization, but that is a story, too, one that Charlottesville sells every day, and that journalists repeat in national magazines–while we laugh. To be sure, our investors were NOT as I’ve described above, but staunch and helpful, all the way–many great people helped us. And still with us, I’m sure.

With their backing, we were able to bring history to life at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, hosting 2,500 4th and 5th graders, adults, families, and college students. We might have changed the lives of who knows how many kids by sparking a new interest in history, and by changing how and where they see and encounter history. That’s great. That’s what we wanted to do. We launched our app in the Apple Store in May/June 2017. We got glowing local print and TV coverage, and a terrific piece in the New York Times. As I write this, the last field trips are going through our app games there in the park this fall.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Howard Bryant on Tricks of the Trade

This is the second part of a two-part interview with Howard Bryant, the journalist and author of books about racism and the Boston Red Sox, the steroids crisis, and activism in sports and biographies of Henry Aaron and Rickey Henderson. You can read the first part here

CE: What essential skills did you learn as a newspaper reporter, especially covering a beat like baseball?

HB: The big issue is access–direct access to information and the people you’re writing about. It’s been one of the greatest things that’s been lost as our business shrinks. We live in a time when people conflate opinion and fact. It seems to be enough to have an opinion. That is the most dangerous thing–devaluing personal experience in favor of my opinion.

One of the differences between being on the sports beat and another beat is that when I was a beat writer at the San Jose Mercury News and covering tech for the Oakland Tribune, 95 percent of it was phone work. When you cover a baseball beat, its 175 days talking to people face to face and you’re in their work environment every day and if you write something that they don’t like, you’re standing there the next day and you have to deal with it. You have to defend what you do, which forces you to be accurate and accountable and even face some of your own demons–are you timid and don’t want confrontation, are you fearless, do you know how to talk to people.

You know, in journalism we teach the inverted pyramid, we teach who, what, when, where, why, we teach how to cover fires. The one thing we never teach people how to ask questions. How do you extract information from someone who doesn’t want to talk to you? How are you doing to talk to someone you’re going see them from early February to the World Series, knowing full well they don’t want you there. It’s an adversarial relationship.

CE: Can you share some of your “tricks of the trade”–the skills and techniques that you use as a writer?

HB: The first thing is learning how to ask questions, how to approach people because in our business everything you’re doing is face-to-face and on the fly and you can’t take it back. So much is done during a scrum [interviews in which a player meets several dozen reporters at the same time]. If i have a sensitive questions, I don’t want to ask in front of 40 people because then the guy looks like a deer in the headlights. You take them aside and ask away, so he doesn’t feel embarrassed and you don’t look like you’re grandstanding..

I outline a lot. I outline columns. All  my books are heavily outlined–even the sections, not just the chapters–to make sure the dots are connected. One of the beauties of books is it’s almost like jazz. You have your main line but also have these solos and tributaries, you can on on these riffs and tell these little stories, as long as you can get back to the main line. If you can’t get back to the main line, you have chaos. That’s what the outline is for. It reminds you to get back to that main line.

For every book I work on, I write a theme. There’s a theme to every book. If you can’t tell me what the book’s about in one sentence, you don’t have a book. In Shut Out, the book was about giving people a chance to speak who hadn’t had it before. When you talked about the race issue and Boston, it’s always been written about from the perspective of the Red Sox and was Tom Yawkey [the longtime owner of the team] a racist. I didn’t really care about that. I wanted the black players to tell me what it was like to play in Boston. Juicing the Game was very different. That was about integrity in a  time of cynicism. Every time you got into the question of steroids, someone would say, “Well, you would do the same thing for $10 million.” But maybe I wouldn’t–and, besides, there were lots of players who didn’t and it cost them a lot of money. In The Last Hero, I viewed Henry Aaron as a locomotive with a coal engine. I wanted to know: What is that coal made of?

The new book, The Heritage, is all about the Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali lineage–the legacy–on athletes today. The book is about post- 9/11 patriotism colliding with the post-Ferguson black athletes. After almost 50 years of athletes not getting involved, suddenly you’ve got athletes reviving their political positions, at a time when sports has become one of the most politicized places in America.

CE: So what’s your best advice on asking questions? Especially someone who’s prickly and wants to get out and get back to the hotel or a restaurant?

HB: It’s all relationships. If you’re the  guy who only talks to a player when he fucks up in the third inning, then you’re going to be the person they all hate, you’re that hatchet man so we’re never going to have a relationship. You have to take an interest in this player, as a person, at all times. You talk to them about as many things outside of baseball as possible. You learn their families, you learn their interests. One of the reasons Johnny Damon and I had such a good relationship is we used to talk fantasy football. Robin Ventura and I used to talk about music all the time. David Justice was a big movies guy. C.C. Sabathia and I argue about Marvel Comics. If C.C. has a bad game and sees me coming up, his back doesn’t get up.

If you do have to [write a negative story] a guy, give him the last word. There have been many situations when guys I liked had bad games, got busted for steroids–whatever, they were in the news for the wrong reasons. You had to do your job, but also from a human standpoint, you come to them and you say, “OK, here’s what I’m writing about, here’s the story, here’s what people are saying,” and you let them have the last word so there are no surprises. The worst thing that can happen to anybody in the news is you’re talking one way and the story that runs looks very different. And suddenly you betrayed somebody.

If you have an Albert Bell or a Mark McGwire who wants nothing to do with you and doesn’t want to talk movies with you, then you get the information you need and simply ask questions directly. You go to Roger Clemons and say, “It seems like you were cruising till the fourth and then it went wrong–what do you remember about that?”

When I first covered the Yankees as a beat writer, George King of the New York Post gave me this piece of advice: When you walk into their environment, always talk to a players. The players hate reporters standing in the middle of the room because they think you’re there to watch them walk around in their underwear, that you’re a fan like everyone else. But if you talk to people and do your job, they’ll respect you.

Tim Ferriss and the Titans (4): On Divergent Thinking, Storytelling, and Integrity

This is the fourth part of a four-part series on Titans, by Tim Ferriss. Other parts are listed below:

8. Divergent thinking

Ideas are great; divergent ideas are better.

To give real value to the reader, you need to offer something they cannot predict

You have to be prepared to fail. That’s how you’re going to expand yourself and grow. As you work through that process of failure and learning, you will really deepen into the human being you were capable of being.

I had a grad school professor who pushed me to do research on why Baltimore was the last major American city to build a modern sewer system. Why did everyone else—New York, Boston, Chicago, Charleston—build systems decades before Baltimore? Why did Baltimore take so long? It was, he said, a “deviant case analysis.” You can often learn more from the outliers than from the norms.

Neil Strauss, a former writer and editor for The New York Times and Rolling Stone and the author of The Game and The Truth, is always looking for deviant cases.

He once asked a billionaire about “the way your mind works.” What separates a billionaire from everyone else? “The biggest mistake you can make is to accept the norms of your time,” he responded. “Not accepting norms is where you innovate, whether it’s with technology, with books, with anything. So, not accepting the norm is the secret to really big success in changing the world.”

The biggest mental trap, says Stephen Dubner, the coauthor of Freakanomics, is to allow your moral values to guide your inquiry. Moral values, after all, are conclusions about the world—and you need to go in with an open mind.

“If you try to approach every problem with your moral compass, you’re going to make a lot of mistakes. You’re going to exclude a lot of possible good solutions. You’re going to assume you know a lot of things, when in fact you don’t, and you’re not going to be a good partner in reaching a solution. With other people who don’t happen to see the world the way you do.”

Chris Sacca, an investor in companies like Twitter, Instagram, Uber, and Kickstarter, says to embrace your inner weirdo. That does not necessarily mean acting out, like the class clown. It means taking away the filters of your “polite company” self.

“Weirdness is why we adore our friends,” he says. “Weirdness is what bonds to our colleagues. Weirdness is what sets us apart, it gets as hired. Be your unapologetically weird self. In fact, being weird may even find you the ultimate happiness.

9. Storytelling

At the center of all great thinking is narrative. A great story gives every enterprise a spine, a vehicle for understanding and focus, energy and creativity.

What Scott Adams says about humor probably applies to other forms of expression. Adams is the creator of the cartoon “Dilbert” and a self-taught “master” of the science of communications. All great humor, Adams says, comes from combining at least two of the following six elements: naughty, clever, cute, bizarre, mean, and recognizable.

Stories have a downside. When we tell ourselves distorted stories, filled with grievances and suspicion and resentment and prejudice, we toxify our relationships. We make excuses for ourselves. We get stuck when we cling to old slights and failings. We believe the BS that others pound into us. If we get stuck in the past–especially in negative histories–we cannot take charge of our work.

In our lives as well as in our writing, we have the power to get the story right. Tony Robbins, takes a three-step approach to getting things right. Start with “state,” his term for your emotional frame of mind. You can change your state in seconds if you want to. Simply changing body language can help you shift from sad-sack gloominess to energy and confidence.

Once you’ve got your state right, get your story right. Figure out what tale you’re going to tell by the way you live your life that day. Finally, develop a strategy—identifying options, resources, and paths to follow.

Despite his success, Ferriss acknowledges the way his own stories have blocked his progress. “The stories we tell ourselves can be self-defeating,” he says. “One of the refrains that I’ve adopted for myself, which I wrote in my journal after some deep ‘plant medicine’ work, is: ‘Don’t retreat into story.’”

10. Integrity

And now a few closing words on integrity.

Above all, as the pompous Polonius counsels Hamlet, to thine own self be true.

Or, as Riann Wilson quotes Oscar Wilde: “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”

We live in a mad, distracting, self-referential age. It’s easy to get pulled away from your core values. So you have to be vigilant against getting too big for your britches—or the opposite, thinking too little of yourself to take charge of your life.

We are not good judges of ourselves. The vast majority of us, in fact, think of ourselves as above average, in intelligence, looks, humor, and compassion. Naval Ravikant quotes Richard Feynman: “You must never, ever fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

As artists—and, pretentious as it may sound, all writers are artists of a sort—we need to avoid getting distracted by all that glitters. Seth Godin, the serial bestselling author, puts things into perspective: “Once you have enough for beans and rice and taking care of your family and a few other things, money is a story. You can tell yourself any story you want about money, and it’s better to tell yourself the story about money that you can happily live with.”

Care not what the other kids on the bus say or do. If you believe in something, do it. Seek out constructive criticism, but do your thing.

“When I articulated that I didn’t care anymore about what anybody thought about what I did except me,” actor Kevin Costner says, “all the weight of the world came off my shoulders, and everything became possible. It shifted to everybody else being worried. Now they’re worried. But everything for me, it shifted to a place where itself free.”

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Tim Ferriss and the Titans (3): On Questions, Research, and Details

This is the third part of a four-part series on Titans, by Tim Ferriss. Other parts are listed below:

5. Gathering Material

Every good project begins with brainstorming. The goal should not be to keep ideas. The goal should be to kill off as many as possible. “Let’s come up with as many ideas as possible, and then … try to kill them off,” says Stephen Dubner. “If they were unkillable, keep going with them.”

When you research a topic or interview someone, take approach subjects from odd angles. By the time most people are worthy of an interview, they have their story down pat. They have given their spiel a hundred times. Cal Fussman remembers interviewing Mikhail Gorbachev, wanting to avoid the usual Q&A about the Cold War blah blah blah, Ronald Reagan blah blah blah, end of the Soviet Union blah blah blah. Finally, the big day came.

I looked at him and I said: “What’s the best lesson your father ever taught you?” He is surprised, pleasantly surprised. He looks up and he doesn’t answer. He’s thinking about this. It’s as if, after a while, he’s seeing a movie of his past on the ceiling, and he starts to tell me the story…

The oldest piece of advice for writers is to “write about what you know.” Partly, that’s lousy advice because it subtly assumes you know everything you need to know—and, in fact, good writing always requires intense research. Still, it’s a good idea to start with something you know—and build on that.

“If you’re going to talk about the neighborhood, talk about the neighborhood you grew up in,” says Joe Favreau, an actor and writer with credits like Rudy and Swingers. “Talk about the neighborhood you know. Even if it’s not you [that you’re writing about], you’re going to have a more consistent world that you’re developing then if you’re putting them on Mars, and you don’t understand Mars.”

Creativity starts with the materials at hand. You can, of course, build on your stock of knowledge and experiences. That’s what research is for. But you can also create something out of the objects nearby. Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez describes making his first movie:

I just took stock of what I had. My friend Carlos, he’s got a ranch in Mexico. Okay, that’ll be where the bad guy is. His cousin owns a bar. The bar is where there’s going to be the first, initial shootout. It’s where all the bad guys hang out. His other cousin owns a bus line. Okay, there will be an action scene with the boss at some point, just a big action scene in the middle of the movie with a bus. He’s got a pit bull. Okay, he’s in the movie. His other friend had a turtle he found. Okay, the turtles in the movie because people will think we had an animal wrangler, and that we’ll suddenly raise production value. I wrote everything around what we had, So you never had to go search, and you never have to spend anything on the movie.(629)

Mark Twain used to do something similar. He would gather his daughters in the parlor and tell stories based on the items lined up on the mantel of the fireplace.

Getting emotional, deep responses requires skill. You can’t ask a series of bland yes-or-no questions, or toss out generalities, and expect a heartfelt response. Alex Blumberg asks questions as quasi-commands.

  • Tell me about a time when…
  • Tell me about the day [or moment or time] when…
  • Tell me about the story of…
  • How did you meet …
  • Tell me about the day you realized …
  • What were the steps that got you into…
  • Describe the conversation when…

Don’t be afraid to ask stupid questions. As long as you have made some effort to prepare for a conversation, don’t hesitate to ask for clarification. Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling author, models his interviewing style on his father, a university mathematician.

My father has zero intellectual insecurities. It has never crossed his mind to be concerned that the world thinks he’s an idiot. He’s not in that game. So if he doesn’t understand something, he just asks you. He doesn’t care if he sounds foolish. He will ask the most obvious question without any sort of concern about it. … So he asks lots of ‘dumb,’ in the best sense of that word, questions. He’ll say to someone, ‘I don’t understand. Explain that to me.’ He’ll just keep asking questions until he gets it right, and I grew up listening to him do this in every conceivable setting. [If my father had met Bernie Madoff, he] never would’ve invested money with him because he would’ve said, ‘I don’t understand’ 100 times. ‘I don’t understand how this works,’ in this kind of dumb, slow voice. ‘I don’t understand, sir. What is going on?’”

The only dumb question is the one you don’t ask. As an old editor once told me, if you’re interviewing some named Smith, ask them to spell it. “Is that S-m-i-t-h?” Or do you spell it S-m-y-t-h-e?”

6. Asking Questions

Asking questions—whether you’re a writer or a researcher, a ballplayer or an actor, an office boss or a programmer—opens the mind.

Here’s a simple conversational trick. Don’t try to persuade people of anything. When you tell someone what to think, something in their brain automatically resists. The second they hear your proposition, their brain looks for reasons to disagree. But when you ask a question, the brain goes into search mode.

“We always need to ask: Is this true?” says Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal and the author of the seminal Zero to One. “And this is always what I get at with this indirect question: Tell me something that’s true that very few people agree with you on.”

As Thiel’s suggests, questions should always seek to expand people’s horizons. Before he answers questions, Thiel reframes them. That framing process forces you to think–not just about the immediate question, but also about the broader context. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, likes to quote Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

Luis van Ahn, the CEO of Duolingo, remembers a mentor who taught him the power of persistent questions:

My Ph.D. adviser was a guy named Manuel Bloom. … I would start explaining something, and in the first sentence he would say, “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” and then I would try to find another way of saying it and a whole hour would pass and I couldn’t get past the first sentence. He would say, “Well, the hour’s over. Let’s meet next week.” This must’ve happened for months, and at some point I started thinking, “I don’t know why people think this guy so smart.” Later, [I understood what he was doing.] This is basically just an act. Essentially, I was being unclear about what I was saying, and I did not fully understand what I was trying to explain to him. He was just drilling deeper and deeper and deeper until I realized, every time, that there was actually something I didn’t have clear in my mind. He really taught me to think deeply about things.

Lots of titans are list-makers, citing inspiration from Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. Wherever they go, they jot down thoughts and observations. So get a notebook, small enough to fit in a pocket or purse. Any time something provokes you, write it down. Does that sound excessive? Actually, by capturing thoughts that matter, you drive the trivial clutter out of your brain.

None of us can resist the Nostradamus Temptation—the built-in tendency to make predictions about the future. Kevin Kelly regularly makes lists of ideas that lots of people think are true and asks: “What if that weren’t true?”

7. Details and Style

Attention to detail spells the difference between mediocre, good, and great. In college, skeptical of his ability to earn a living as an artist, Pixar CEO Ed Catmull majored in physics. “Most people to this day think of [art and science] as so radically different from each other,” he says. “But I want to posit a different way to look at it. It comes from what I think is a fundamental misunderstanding. … In fact, what artists do is they learn to see.”

So, Rule 1 for writers and other creatives: Learn how to see.

Nothing lends credibility more than precision. Andrew Zimmern, an award-winning chef and host of the TV show Bizarre Foods, looks for people who describe things with detail. “If you go on the Internet, there are 20 recipes for pound cake,” he says. “I go with the one that describes to a quarter of an inch the size of the pan. Because if someone is describing that level of detail, you know that they have gone through it. The person who writes the recipe says, ‘Grease the cake pan’? You know they haven’t made it. It’s a tipoff right away that something is wrong.”

Lots of would-be writers complain about writer’s block. But there really is no such thing, as Sebastian Junger, the author of The Perfect Storm, notes:

It’s not that I’m blocked. It’s that I don’t have enough research to write with power and knowledge about the topic. It always means, not that I can’t find the right words, but rather that I don’t have the ammunition.

Everyone needs to develop a unique style. But before developing style, master the basics. If you’re an artist, you need to understand the body and movement, perspective and harmony. If you’re a writer, you need to write great sentences and arrange them into compelling, dramatic sequences.

The greatest creators should be your guides. Rick Rubin, a music producer for artists as varied as Johnny Cash and Metallica, says full immersion is the only way to go.

“The only way to use the inspiration of other artists is if you submerge yourself in the greatest works of all time,” he says. “If you listen to the greatest songs ever made, that would be a better way to work through [finding] your own voice today, rather than listening to what’s on the radio now and thinking, ‘I want to compete with this.’”

When you experience masters in any field, pay attention to their turns of phrase that lend special beauty and insight. Maria Popova, whose blog Brain Droppings has become a literary sensation, says she writes “BL” in the margin when she encounters beautiful language. Find a way to mark moments of special clarity or beauty, then go back and deconstruct them.

Matt Mullenweg, the original lead developer of WordPress, puts syntax at the center of all creativity. He loves “code poets,” the programmers whose every line performs the job impeccably, without making it hard to make revisions or enhancements. How do we get the syntax right? “Slow down,” he says. “I think a lot of the mistakes of my youth were mistakes of ambition, not mistakes of sloth. So just slowing down, whether that’s meditating, whether it’s taking time for yourself away from screens, whether that’s really focusing on who you’re talking to or who you’re with.”

Derek Silvers, the founder of CD Baby, an online store for independent artists, says to iterate, iterate, iterate—not just with writing or other projects, but also with life. Do little tests,” he says. “Try a few months of living the life you think you want, but leave yourself a next the plan, being open to the big chance that you might not like it after actually trying it.”

Ernest Hemingway famously noted that all first drafts are s—. Taking that truism to heart has helped Pixar revolutionize animated feature films. Ed Catmull, one of the founders of Pixar and now its president, says the studio ripped apart early versions of films like Toy Story 2 and Ratatouille and started over from scratch.

“All our films, to begin with, suck,” he says. “This is the big misconception that people have, that [in the beginning] a new film is the baby version of the final film, when in fact the final film bears no relationship to what you started off with. What we found is that the first version always sucks. I don’t mean that because I’m self-effacing or that we’re modest about it. I mean it in the sense that they really do suck.”

Tim Ferriss and the Titans (2): On Planning, Journaling, and Note-Taking

This is the second part of a four-part series on Titans, by Tim Ferriss. Other parts are listed below:

3. Planning

You can’t build anything without a plan. Even simple projects require a sequence. First … Second … Third …

Every plan begins with the category. Every writer needs to ask: What’s the genre? The audience? The style? The level of intellect? The attitude? Real success come from owning a particular category.

Consider Bill Simmons (one of my former students, at Holy Cross College), who broke all the rules of inside-dopester sportswriting when he started a blog called The Sports Guy. Rather than hanging out in press boxes and locker rooms, Simmons covered sports from the viewpoint of a passionate and knowledgeable fan. He blended all kinds of pop culture — movies, music, politics, fashion, TV, you name it — into his long posts about the Celtics or the DH rule. If Simmons had taken the usual sports scribe track, he would have been invisible. Instead, he stood out. He owned the category of crazy fan commentator.

There are lots of other examples. Who owns the category of theory-fueled stories with a theme? Malcolm Gladwell. Who owns the world of wizardry? J.K. Rowling. How about economics turned on its head? Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt. Histories involving murders or attempted murders? Bill O’Reilly. Love and romance amid luxury? Danielle Steel. One more. Who owns legal thrillers? John Grisham. Other authors make a nice living as No. 2 or 3 or 4 or more. But to own a category is to be set for life. More important, it’s to have a real purpose.

Kaskade, one of the founders of Progressive House music, uses the metaphor of putting stones in the bucket. If you put sand before stones, you might not get everything into the bucket. Make sure to put in the big stones first, then smaller stones that can fill the gaps between those bigger stones, and then finally the sand, which fills in the open spaces between the stones.

The legendary chess wizard Josh Waitzkin, the subject of the movie Searching for Bobby Fisher, adapts advice from the ancient Greeks: Start with the end in mind. To master any challenge, don’t start with the simple fundamentals. Instead, jump to the end game. The challenge is to understand the dynamics of the game. Waitzkin’s chess teacher taught him by showing the endgames—say, a king and a pawn against a king. What do you do with that?

At every level of your writing—sentence, paragraph, section, and whole piece—know how you are starting and finishing. It’s like taking a journey. You’re most likely to know the journey’s route and steps if you know the starting and ending point. If you don’t, you’re likely to wander all over the place.

You need to start somewhere, right? So Cheryl Strayed, the author of Wild, offers a set of prompts. She suggests using them to write two pages, without interruption by your inner perfectionist, to draw the creativity out of your repressed self. Here are a few of them:

  • Write about a time that you realized you were mistaken.
  • Write about a lesson you learned the hard way.
  • Write about something you lost that you’ll never get back.
  • Write about a memory of a physical injury.
  • Write about why you could not do it.

That should get you going. Now you’re about to encounter the greatest challenge of all creative—keeping your eye on the ball.

4. Journaling and note-taking

Lots of titans keep journals—first to pause and focus their thoughts, second to capture the countless thoughts that occur throughout the day.

Mike Bibiglia, a comedian, says: “Write everything down because it’s all very fleeting.” Capturing ideas during the day is the difference between good and great. “What I find, the older I get, is that a lot of people are good, and a lot of people are smart, and a lot of people are clever. But not a lot of people give you their soul when they perform.” Your soul emerges all day, in your thought and feelings; you give it form when you take the pieces and sort the wheat from the chaff.

Brian Koppelman, a screenwriter, novelist, and creator of the hit show Billions, follows the routine that Julie Cameron suggests in The Artist’s Way. “It’s three longhand pages where you just keep the pen moving for three pages, no matter what. No censoring, no rereading. It’s the closest thing to magic I’ve come across. If you really do it every day and a real disciplined practice, something happens to your subconscious that allows you to get to your most creative place.”

He says he’s given the book to 200 people. Of those, maybe 10 of them have done the exercises. “Of those 10, seven have had books, movies, TV shows, and made out successful. It’s incredible. That book changed my life, even though it’s very spiritual and I’m an atheist.”

Tim Ferriss keeps a five-minute journal to center his mind. The journal is really just filling in the blanks:

  • I am grateful for 1. –––––––––. 2. –––––––––. 3. –––––––––.
  • What would make today great? 1. –––––––––. 2. –––––––––. 3. –––––––––.
  • Daily affirmations. I am 1. –––––––––. 2. –––––––––. 3. –––––––––.

He concludes at night with:

  • Three amazing things that happened today: 1. –––––––––. 2. –––––––––. 3. –––––––––.
  • How could I have made today better? 1. –––––––––. 2. –––––––––. 3. –––––––––.

B.J. Novak uses a Moleskine Cahier notebook for jotting notes during the day. Because it’s thinner than the standard Moleskine, it’s easy to carry.

What to do once you’ve filled a notebook?

Every midnight, Robert Rodriguez types notes about the day into a Word document. Any time he wants to recover a forgotten insight—or just review his thoughts over time—he can search his Word files. (I do something similar: I outline books that I consider challenging. Surprisingly, it doesn’t take long. I can take notes on a 300-page book in about an hour. The process helps me understand the book for the first time—to make it my own—and then leaves a trail of great ideas to use later.)

James Altucher, a serial entrepreneur and bestselling author, creates lists for everything that might spawn a creative project. A few examples:

  • 10 old ideas I can make new
  • 10 books I can write
  • 10 business ideas for Google/Amazon/Twitter/etc.
  • 10 industries where I can remove the middleman
  • 10 things I disagree with that everyone else assumes is religion

What if you can’t meet these goals? I mean, 10 ideas? Really?

“Here’s the magic trick,” Altucher says. “If you can’t come up with 10 ideas, come up with 20 ideas. … You’re putting too much pressure on yourself. Perfectionism is the enemy of the idea muscle. … It’s your brain trying to protect you from harm, from coming up with an idea that is embarrassing and stupid and could cause you to suffer pain. The way you shut this off is by forcing the brain to come up with bad ideas.

“Suppose you have written down five ideas for books and they are all pretty good. And now you’re stuck… Well, let’s come up with some bad ideas. Here’s one: Dorothy and the Wizard of Wall Street. Dorothy is in a hurricane in Kansas and she lands right at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street and she has to find the Wizard of Wall Street. To get home to Kansas, he offers her a job to be a high-frequency trader.”

That’s bad, all right.

Once he comes up with his 10 (or 20) good and bad ideas, Altucher lists the first steps he would take to realize each one. “Remember,” he says, “only the first step. Because you have no idea where that first step will take you.”

Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn writes things down to prime his subconscious.

“What are the kinds of key things that might be constraints on the solution, or might be the attributes of the solution, and what are the tools or assets I might have?” he says. “I actually think that most of our thinking is subconscious. Part of what I’m trying to do is allow the fact that we have this kind of relaxation, rejuvenation period in sleeping, to essentially possibly bubble up the thoughts and solutions to it.”

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Editing as a Process of ‘Kondoing’

We live in the age of excess. Westerners accumulate more material goods than previous generations could ever imagine. Overwhelmed, we struggle to organize our stuff. Over time, we lose control of our lives.

In extreme cases, hoarding creates a kind of madness, now listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Hoarders refuse to throw away even useless junk—old newspapers and magazines, cheap SWAG, books and records, clothing, plastic bags, food leftovers, broken appliances and electronics, collectibles, dead plants, old pet toys, broken dishes, empty bottles, you name it.

Hoarders—and others who just have a hard time getting rid of stuff—develop an emotional relationship with their things. “I paid good money for that,” people say. “I want to get some use out of it.” They also have a fear of the future. “What if I need it?” they ask, trembling. We develop relationships with things, so we actually feel sorry for the things we discard: “That clock’s been with me since my wedding day. It needs a home.”

But when we keep too many things, they get in the way of living. In a cluttered home, we spend endless hours searching for things. We forget what we own, so we waste money buying more. With an untidy home, visitors avoid us. We lose or ability to make distinctions between what’s useful and what’s not. Over time, the tyranny of stuff isolates us from the rest of the world.

To the rescue comes a Japanese woman named Marie Kondo, a consultant for people who struggle with hoarding. Her tidy little book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, has become a global sensation. Last year, Time magazine called her one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Kondo–or Konmarie, as she is also known–works as an organizing strategist. With the discipline and unwavering commitment of a general, she moves into people’s homes and clears out the mess. Her strategy is simple:

Begin with the end in mind: “Before you start,” Kondo says, “visualize your destination.” Imagine the world where you want to live—where you know where to find everything, where every possession brings not only utility but joy, where you don’t waste a minute looking for things. Get specific. Don’t say, “I want to life a clutter-free life.” Say: “I want to live a more feminine lifestyle.” Or: “I want the kind of place my kids want to bring their friends.” Or: “I want to hold dinner parties and sing songs around the piano.”

Gather and arrange your stuff: Take all your belongings out of closets and bureaus and other containers—all of them, every last piece—and lay them on the floor.

Sort things by category, not location. You can never know how many things you have unless you bring them all together, in one place. Many of our duplicates are scattered into different rooms and containers. Because our things are scattered into other rooms, we often don’t know how much we own. We might think we own eight pairs of pants and actually own 40 or 50 or more. So get them all out into the open.

Only by bringing them all out into the open can we see the absurdity of our accumulation. “In one spot, you can also compare items that are similar in design, making it easier to decide whether you want to keep them.”

Discard: One by one, decide what items to discard and which ones to keep. “Discarding must come first,” she says. “Do not even think of putting your things away until you have finished the process of discarding.

Keep only the items that “spark joy.” If you have not used something for a long time, it’s probably because that item doesn’t excite you. So discard it. “Keep only those things that speak to your heart,” Kondo says. “Take the plunge and discard the rest.” Love is the answer.

Work from easy to hard: Start with the easiest items to assess. Begin with clothes, then books, then papers, and then other supplies and equipment. Go from easy to hard. Getting rid of a garish or torn piece of clothing makes it easier to discard the artwork with sentimental value that no longer matters.

Deal with emotional attachment: If you have difficulty getting rid of something, for emotional reasons, pay your respects as you would with a friend who’s moving out of town. Thank them for the joy and service they have brought you. Think of the good they can do elsewhere. “Let them go, with gratitude,” Kondo says. “Not only you, but your things as well, will feel clear and refreshed when you are done tidying.”

These principles also work for editing. Start with a vision of what you want to give your reader. Lay out all your stuff: the good, bad, and ugly. Examine one category at a time, in the correct order, from big to small.

Start with the whole piece, then move to sections, then to sub-sections, paragraphs, sentences, and specific elements (quotes, stats, metaphors, observations, clever wordings).

Solve your easy problems first; sometimes fixing easy problems makes more difficult problems disappear; other times, it just makes them easier to handle.

Keep only those passages that work—the ones that truly say exactly what you want to say, simply, clearly, and convincingly. When you cut a passage you like, take a moment to appreciate how it helped you to understand your topic. Then let go.

Let’s give the final word to Marie Kondo.

“As you reduce your belongings through the process of tidying,” she says, “you will come to the point where you suddenly know how much is right for you. You will feel it as clearly as if something clicked in your head and said, ‘Ah! This is just the amount I need to live comfortably. This is all I need to be happy. I don’t need any more.’ The satisfaction that envelopes your whole being at that point is palpable.”

Seeing What is There

The obvious challenge of seeing is to apprehend what is present—what is there, within the compass of one’s sight.

Ideally, we see something clearly, and in enough detail to make sense of it, and to give it meaning and to put it in the context. Seeing clearly requires looking with intent and purpose—with an open mind, a will to search, and even with a beginners mind.

To look clearly, and in detail, we need to pay attention to not just what is in front of us, but what we bring to the process, including our biases and limitations, as well as our physical limitations. Rather than just accepting whatever our eyes and our distorted processing deliver to us; we also need to pause and think and reflect.

Usually, we see objects with little clarity and detail. Lacking the appropriate level of detail, we give it less meaning.

We allow our emotions and biases and other limitation’s color and distort what we are seeing. It’s like listening to a phone conversation with a bad connection. We hear or see bits and pieces and can strain to make some sense of it. But that doesn’t mean we here at Hall or that we understand it. We are improvising. We are operating on incomplete information. we might be able to convince ourselves that we are looking at the “real thing.” But deep down, we know that we are looking at the equivalent of a broken plate and thinking that it is a whole and complete plate.

We are more likely to believe what we see when we want to see it – when we have an emotional or other stake in actually seeing some thing. This is true with all of our senses, as well as all of our intellectual, emotional, and social engagements with the world.

Even when we consciously try to say something, clearly, we struggle to do so accurately. We could be surprised by the onset of an event or a scene and therefore I have a hard time focusing in on what’s happening. We spend so much time trying to frame the scene that we do not, take in the details that might be telling. If the scene is fast, moving, what we notice might be gone before we have a chance to check it. We also operate in a world of noise. It is often times hard to separate the signal from the noise —any subject that we want to focus on and the surrounding clutter. Also, when we are assessing a scene or a situation, we are often at war with ourselves or others. We are fighting over, not only what we see, but what we should see, and what we should do about it. And so even the most obvious elements of a scene can be missed.

Looking Forward

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Integrating Art and Life

In civilizations going back to antiquity—in Aristotle’s ideal state in The Politics, for example—people who perform physical labor are excluded from full citizenship. Farmers, mechanics, and shopkeepers are considered lesser beings. Incapable of the broad thinking necessary for making decisions for others.

In a way, this makes sense. The carpenter’s ability to connect two joints or sand the edges of an object has little to do with making decisions for fellow citizens. The farmer’s understanding of planting cycles, seeds and ground conditions, and harvesting techniques offers few skills for inspiring other people.

The Power of Focus

These crafts require immersion with objects that are tangible and specific. The same goes for arts like dance, sculpture, and music. The artist needs to focus entirely on something specific and unique. There can be only one Gene Kelly version of “Singing in the Rain,” only one Michaelangelo masterpiece David, and only one Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 2. The arts (and some crafts) are sui generis—constituting a unique class in itself.

As such, the artist and craftsman must work to concentrate totally on the objects and movements of her craft. Gloria Liu says:

As a dancer in training, you learn to dissociate your self from your body, to relinquish your agency to the structure and aesthetic of the form – whether that’s classical ballet, modern dance or something else.

At times, we need to separate our actions from the surrounding environment. We need to focus totally on our craft, ignoring the larger swirl of activities around us. We need to go “all in” on our project. Especially in activities involving movement, our actions involve all aspects of the neural system.

People in business, the law, medicine, tech, and other professions understand this basic truth. By concentrating intensely on an isolated task, they bring their whole selves to bear on the challenge.

Beyond Focus

But wait. As we focus on the object of our work, we also connect to other ideas. We cannot help but relate one process to another process. The work of a artist, sculptor, or composer offers insights that can inform other activities.

As we narrow our attention, we broaden it as well. Arts and crafts—especially the physical ones—help us to move beyond our limited patterns of thinking. We may train ourselves—with conscious, repetitive movement—to make our actions automatic. But that process, in turn, opens our mind to think and at more consciously.

Athletes understand that developing a broad range of skills and actions enables them to use their whole selves. A trainer named Edythe Heus uses bouncy balls and wobble boards and to put her clients off balance when they exercise. When they are unbalanced, they cannot focus on just one muscle group, like pectorals. They need to activate hundreds of tiny muscles in their back and other parts of the body.

When people move their bodies—running, jumping, twisting, reaching, accelerating, slowing, braking—they gain an intuitive sense of how objects relate to place. When a baseball outfielder sprints after a fly ball and leaps to catch it, he is making countless calculations. He is coordinating dozens of separate actions, in an exquisite sequence of moves. The same goes for a ballet dancer, an assembly-line worker, and a cook.

Toggling

The magic—for people to know themselves and to improve themselves—happens when they toggle back and forth between action and reflection. A danger might perform a routine enough times to make her steps automatic. Then she can step back and analyze what she did, moment by moment, and then consider how to improve or add to her routine.

Leaders do this too. One of the most powerful self-help programs in America, Dale Carnegie Training, teaches people how to overcome whatever is “holding them back” by teaching how to deliver a one-minute speech. Carnegie students, who are not allowed to use notes, must speak directly to the whole class about a different topic every week. The speech has three parts:

  • “So there I was…” Start by bringing the audience into the middle of a scene or situation.
  • “And then, … And then, … And then, … Finally, …” State three to five things that happened and how the sequence concluded.
  • “And so I learned…” Conclude by stating the lesson to be learned from this moment.

For a century, this exercise has helped even the shyest, angriest, uncertain, and agitated people how to focus their minds, collect their thoughts, and connect with other people.

Body and Mind

The exercise works because it is a whole-body exercise. Like a trapeze artist without a net, the speaker must master her command of mind and body in real time. Most students start to get good at the one-minute exercise within three or four weeks of the program. They can use this skill in just about every aspect of their lives. Thinking and connecting with other people become part of their body memory.

All kinds of strategies help budding leaders master their use of bodies and minds. Simple meditation and breathing exercises help to regulate blood flow and attention. Consider this simple 10-minute breathing exercise from “The Iceman,” a Dutch extreme athlete named Wim Hof:

As his nickname suggests, Hof also exposes himself to freezing temperatures for sustained periods. This exposure teaches him to concentrate his mind and to manage his breathing and attention. Again, a physical challenge—especially one that takes us out of our comfort zones—can transform the way we think and behave.

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Seeing What’s There

The obvious challenge of seeing is to apprehend what is present—what is there, within the compass of one’s sight.

Ideally, we see something clearly, and in enough detail to make sense of it, and to give it meaning and to put it in the context. Seeing clearly requires looking with intent and purpose—with an open mind, a will to search, and even with a beginners mind.

To look clearly, and in detail, we need to pay attention to not just what is in front of us, but what we bring to the process, including our biases and limitations, as well as our physical limitations. Rather than just accepting whatever our eyes and our distorted processing deliver to us; we also need to pause and think and reflect.

Usually, we see objects with little clarity and detail. Lacking the appropriate level of detail, we give it less meaning.

We allow our emotions and biases and other limitation’s color and distort what we are seeing. It’s like listening to a phone conversation with a bad connection. We hear or see bits and pieces and can strain to make some sense of it. But that doesn’t mean we here at Hall or that we understand it. We are improvising. We are operating on incomplete information. we might be able to convince ourselves that we are looking at the “real thing.” But deep down, we know that we are looking at the equivalent of a broken plate and thinking that it is a whole and complete plate.

We are more likely to believe what we see when we want to see it – when we have an emotional or other stake in actually seeing some thing. This is true with all of our senses, as well as all of our intellectual, emotional, and social engagements with the world.

Even when we consciously try to say something, clearly, we struggle to do so accurately. We could be surprised by the onset of an event or a scene and therefore I have a hard time focusing in on what’s happening. We spend so much time trying to frame the scene that we do not, take in the details that might be telling. If the scene is fast, moving, what we notice might be gone before we have a chance to check it. We also operate in a world of noise. It is often times hard to separate the signal from the noise —any subject that we want to focus on and the surrounding clutter. Also, when we are assessing a scene or a situation, we are often at war with ourselves or others. We are fighting over, not only what we see, but what we should see, and what we should do about it. And so even the most obvious elements of a scene can be missed.

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