The Elements of Writing

As the script doctor steps off the stage, a look at his impact and storytelling lessons

Years ago, when I was transitioning from academic life to nonfiction narrative writing, I attended Robert McKee’s immersive Story Seminar. For three days, I sat in a New York theater for a complete course from one of Hollywood’s leading experts on narrative for the page, stage, and screen.

I felt like I was in that famous scene in Adaptation:

Brian Cox, the brilliant British theater actor who was the malevolent Logan Roy on Succession, played the McKee role to perfection. Stalking on stage, Cox/McKee barked out commandments for storytelling and dismissed the lily-livered comments of pretenders who do not want to work hard to construct a good story. His massive brows furrowing or rising to signal anger or glee, he teased, charmed, and berated the audience. He prompted the audience to agree with his takes on movies and literature. “Who thinks, as I do, that…” he would say. A forest of hands would rise.

Some view McKee’s performance as an ego trip, and it’s obvious McKee has a strong ego–at least in the sense of knowing who he is and what his mission and standards are. He knew what he wanted to teach and did not want to be distracted or deterred. He did not want to pal around with seminar participants. Many attempted to follow him at lunch and accidentally-on-purpose bump into him and ask a question. He would have nothing to do with it.

His standoffishness was one part self-preservation and one part lesson: I can show you what to do, but you have to put your goddamned ass on the chair and do the goddamned work yourself.

McKee started teaching storytelling after the release of his TV miniseries Abraham (1993). He realized, he said, that he could never be a great screenwriter–but he could become a great storytelling teacher.

Last year, Robert McKee performed the last of 400-plus of these marathon seminars. At 82, he has decided retire from his role as the Socrates of the Screen. But “retire” is not a word anyone uses to describe McKee, and he will stay plenty busy. For years, Story (1997) was the only way most people could learn McKee’s approach to create narrative. But in recent years he has produced four followup works: Dialogue (2016), Character (2021), Action (2022), and Storynomics (2018). He is now writing a new version of Story, which he calls Story II. (May it be a worthy sequel, more like The Godfather Part II than Return to the Blue Lagoon). McKee is determined to share all the tricks and wisdom he gained in a lifetime of writing and teaching. Obviously, his seminars and books overlap. But he has also expanded and deepened his core insights.

A few imperatives of storytelling

So what must the storyteller do? So what does McKee want us to know about storytelling? Here are some of the pieces of his wisdom that I have found most useful over the years:

• Forge character in the furnace of desire, conflict, and obsession: Nothing happens without a character’s passionate desire. That desire leads to action, with causes conflict, which tests everyone. Whoever emerges from the conflict more whole can be called heroic, even if they lose. Therefore, force the character to make hard choices–and make the choices harder as the story proceeds. Don’t give a character the choice between good and bad; make it good against a competing good or a competing bad. Make every choice involve loss.

• Create two great desires, one external and the other internal: People begin their quest with an simple, obvious, superficial desire: “I want to protect my family” (The Godfather) or “I want to rescue my son” (Missing) or “I want to get out of here” (Groundhog Day). As they encounter more obstacles, they deepen their understanding of what they want: “I want total control” or “I want to expose the truth about the Chilean coup” or “I want to be worthy of love.” By the end, they discover that their internal desire is the real point of it all.

• The point of action: Action is essential but only matters if it makes a difference in the story. If you have a great “action” scene but it changes nothing, it’s not worth keeping. Even the most exciting fight or car chase will drag down a story if it does not propel the story forward. By the same token, even the most mundane moments provide action if they make a difference and raise the stakes.

On the last day of the Story Seminar I took, McKee played and analyzed Casablanca, scene by scene. The highlight was his breakdown of the bazaar scene with Rick and Ilsa. Every line of dialogue is action: Every line changes the trajectory of the story and our understanding of these iconic characters.

• Alternate positive and negative beats: Audiences want change–or the possibility of change–at every level and at every step of the way. Make even the small actions (like a nod, an averted glance, or a soft-spoken word) matter. That’s what McKee calls a beat. Then alternate positive and negative beats. If a positive moment occurs, counter with something negative, then positive, then negative, and so on.

In a sense, action is a form of dialogue. Each act says something and forces others to respond.

• Make dialogue sound human (but better): Capture character with the way people talk: brave or cowardly, certain or confused, risk-taking or cautious, quick witted or slow, jocular or stiff, and so on. But remember that most people speak like fractured, conflicted, uncertain, and inarticulate beings. Find the sweet spot between realism and art. The goal is not mimicking reality but (to use McKee’s term) “enhanced expressivity.”

Also, remember that speech is a form of action. “Life is dialogue, action/reaction,” McKee says. But don’t use dialogue when you can tell the story in other ways. “When the screenplay has been written and the dialogue has been added, we’re ready to shoot,” Alfred Hitchcock said. First create the scenes, then the action, and finally the words.

Whatever you do, don’t “write on the nose,” using dialogue to provide backstory, which murders subtext and irony and treats the audience like a bunch of dummies who can’t add 2 plus 2. Avoid this kind of fake dialogue/exposition: “Yeah! I remember you! You sat in the last row of Mr. Leonard’s class! He was such a demanding teacher! And we just wanted to goof off!”

• Hit ’em again–harder: However much your hero suffers, make him suffer even more. Escalate the abuse, even if it’s just kidding/not-kidding taunts from friends. Giving your characters a hard time tests them, reveals them, and gives them an opportunity to respond and grow. “Pressure is essential,” McKee says. “Choices made when nothing is at risk mean little.”

“The more powerful and complex the forces of antagonism opposing the character, the more completely realized character and story must become.”

• Don’t say anything at face value: Everyone lies–like, all the time. No story should gather a group of good-spirited, accommodating truth-tellers. It’s fake and boring. Even honest people speak honestly in an oblique way. Even blunt statements of truth are oftentimes covers for something else. So make sure that dialogue contains two levels of truth: first the surface-level meaning of the statements, then the hidden misunderstandings and agendas of the speakers.

This, dear English majors, is where we find the all-important element of irony: The man-of-the-people radio star (A Face in the Crowd), the shy and skinny kid who knocks the block off the bully (Back to the Future), the legal secretary who learns tenacity she needs to fight polluters by managing life as a single mom (Erin Brockovich).

• Don’t mess with genre: Readers need to know what the story offers. Genre offers a wide but limited range of eternal tales, each one tapping something fundamental about the human condition. A genre, like a brand, is a promise: Read/watch this story and you’ll get the elements you’re expecting.

Genres also help us to get the story sizzling right away: “We don’t want people coming to our work cold and vague, not knowing what to expect, forcing us to spend the first 20 minutes of screentime clueing them toward the necessary story attitude.”

McKee lists 25 genres; that’s too many, I think. Mockumentary, for example, is not a genre but a way of presenting a story; a mockumentary can be a tragedy or comedy or Bildungsroman or any number of other distinct genres. Still, McKee’s list is useful for devising the right style of story.

• Pursue unity and truth: Ever the Aristotelian, McKee insists that all stories must reach closure by the end. As Aristotle says in The Poetics, the story should be “complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude.” The story and the fates of the characters should wrap up, even if they lose their quest. The ending should feel like a surprise, but it should also feel inevitable.

Of course Michael was destined to be a ruthless mob boss. Of course Rick would embrace patriotism and love over possession of Ilsa. Of course Macbeth would lose his kingdom. Of course Ed discovers the corruption and complicity that led to his son’s death during Chile’s coup.

To some, these rules of storytelling feel contrived, almost like a paint-by-numbers approach. But as in any other creative, skilled work–carpentry, sculpture, dance, architecture–the rules provide the grounding needed to work creatively. The rules prompt the writer to struggle through a raw, deep, agonizing, contradictory, and hard journey.

The Ultimate Hack: Do the Hard Work

The reason storytelling will never die, even with AI, is that it requires real imagination and struggle. The human experience is not an algorithm.

We have to do the work ourselves. Lots of people write “content” for “media outlets” and “clients.” Lots of people write “books” to promote their “brand.” But how many of them are willing to dig deep and work hard enough to produce a worthy story?

In a sense, McKee’s core message was that writing a story is a lot like being a hero in a story. It’s about having a goal and a determination to meet that goal. It’s about delusion, failure, denial, blindness, and laziness–and working hard to overcome these universal flaws to create something worthwhile.

The greatest challenge, then, is to find something worth saying. In a valedictory profile in The New Yorker, McKee tells Dana Goodyear: “The problem with Hollywood is, they’ve all read the book, they’ve all been to these lectures. They know how to tell a story, but they don’t have anything to say.”

In Adaptation, McKee tells Charlie Kaufman, played by Nick Cage: “Your characters must change. The change must come from them.” He’s telling Charlie that the writer has to do as much hard work as the characters. No formula or shortcuts for anyone.

What if (spoiler alert) all the wisdom of writing, storytelling, problem-solving, adventure, crisis management, and deep learning could be summed up in a two-word phrase?

Thanks to Angus Fletcher, a leading authority on storytelling and the brain, we know that two-word phrase: “What if?”

Fletcher, 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

• “Three Exercises to Boost Your Team’s Creativity” (Harvard Business Review)
• “Why Computer AI Will Never Do What We Imagine It Can” (Project Muse)
• A new method for training creativity: narrative as an alternative to divergent thinking (Annals of the New York Academy of the Sciences)
• Optimizing Machines Is Perilous. Consider ‘Creatively Adequate’ AI (Wired)

Will Storr is England’s Malcolm Gladwell–a polymath who uses stories to explore complex and compelling ideas. His books include The Heretics, Selfie, Will Storr vs. The Supernatural, and the Science of Storytelling. His latest, The Status Game, will be released in September. His is also author of a novel called The Hunger and The Howling of Killian Lone.

Everything Storr does informs his other work. The Heretics have him the idea for The Science of Storytelling, which in turn informed his research for The Status Game.

When not working on his own work, Storr teaches writing seminars to audiences ranging from journalists to members of the European parliament.

Charlie Euchner: How can we take the insights from brain science and behavioral science and apply it to the process of writing stories?

Will Storr: About 10 years ago, I was working on a book called the Unpersuadables about why clever people believe crazy things. And the answer, in a nutshell, is that the brain is not a logic processor—it’s a story processor. The brain makes us this hero at the center of the world and we’re overcoming.

I was also working on my first novel. I realized that what the experts were saying about stories were the same things the scientists were telling me about how the brain works. It was the big lightbulb moment. Then I started thinking, well, maybe I can use it to make my own storytelling better.

The basic idea is that the brain is a storyteller and the way it processes reality itself has a story. We are a hero overcoming obstacles. We experience life in three acts, with a crisis, a struggle, and resolution. And that’s why we tell stories. So if that’s true, then these great story theorists have got to have some basis in science.

CE: Aristotle’s Poetics—from 2,500 years ago—still offers a brilliant overview of this. He got it right.

WS: I’m currently writing a book about status and [Aristotle] crops up in there as well. This man was just unbelievably smart. The things that he was coming up a couple thousand years ago! In all these different areas, he’s now being proven right–and wrong in some too. He was quite extraordinary.

CE: When you started to look into the techniques of storytelling, before you got into the brain research, who were you reading?

WS: The big three were Robert McKee, Christopher Booker, and John Yorke. Christopher Booker was the main one. For all of them, [the message] is to the focus on structure, structure, structure. If you compare all the stories that are successful, what they’ve got in common is structure. There are all kind of recipe books. …

But there’s another way. If you take a character-first approach, the plot is designed for the character, rather than starting with the plot and then thinking of a character to plug into it.

CE: The character is where the energy comes from. You can have a perfectly plotted piece, but if you don’t care about the characters and if they have no energy and if you can predict everything they say, the plot is just one damn thing after another—and not a process of exciting exploration and danger and risk-taking.

WS: If you can imagine Breaking Bad with a [poorly drawn] character, it would have completely flopped. For me Walter White was the perfect character—a low-status, embittered, scared character. Breaking Bad was great because of Walter White.

CE: So plot can actually get in the way of a story, without a great character.

WS: For me it’s that marriage of plot and character. When I’m teaching students, they have this great idea. They say, ‘This happens and then this happens, then this happens.’ I say, ‘Well, who does it happen to?’ And they’re not sure. They’re vague or it’s a version of them. They’ve got carried away with plot, plot, plot. They’re convinced they’ve got this bestseller but they haven’t got the character. What matters is our goals in life—the things that we want more than anything, which come out of our character.

We are all flawed characters and we always butt up against our flaws. The plot has to be specifically designed to connect with the characters’ flaws and then test it. Or if it’s a tragedy, make them double down on it. Define your character’s flawed idea about the world in one line, preferably.

At the end of the first season of Fleabag, the [lead character] has this great cathartic moment where she realizes what her problem is—and that is that she only sees herself as a sexual creature, that’s her only value. That problem has created all of the drama. She had sex with her best friend’s boyfriend and her best friend killed herself and that’s destroyed everything. So you begin with that very specific character and that specific flaw.

Another example is The Godfather. Michael’s flaw is his belief that he’s not a gangster. And then his father is assassinated and that tests him. Or in Jaws, the shark comes and starts eating everybody. The protagonist Brody, who is terrified of water, can’t go near it. So that shark, coming into his patch, connects specifically with his flaw and tests it and forces him wrestle with his deepest fears.

So the hero has a flaw and something happens to test it. Once people have done that, the plot thing becomes so much clearer.

CE: When you say flaw, it’s the false story you tell about yourself. It’s like the myth that you believe and live by, which causes you to do all these flawed things. Is that, is that fair to say?

WS: That’s definitely, that’s brilliant. But yeah, the flawed belief about the world.

CE: Your discussion of Lawrence of Arabia was especially powerful. His myth about himself was true in lots of ways. That’s why the myth is so tenacious and why it’s such a worthy adversary—because it actually works, until it doesn’t. Is that what you’re getting at?

WS: Yeah. I ghostwrote a book a couple of years ago for Ant Middleton, who’s a celebrity over here. He used to be in the special forces. I asked why he wanted to do it. “Well,” he said, “I want to be the best.” But why? “Why wouldn’t I want to be the best?” he said. So I asked again. “Because I wanted to be tested.” OK, so why do you want to be tested? Was there somebody in your childhood that made you feel that you had to be the best? And then he tells this amazing story. His father died when he was five. Then the evil stepdad comes along; it’s like a fairy story. He insisted that his kids become the best on pain of physical punishment. And I said to him, you know, would it be fair to say that when you were growing up, you were taught that we’re only safe if you are the best under all circumstances?

And he sort of leaped and said, “Yes, that is exactly it!” And that’s how it works. The idea that “I have to be the best, I am the best,” saved his life. It drove him to incredible heights. Being in the FAS, it’s incredibly difficult. He was in Afghanistan and he was the point man. He was responsible for landing in Afghanistan, 2 in the morning, walking to a Taliban compound and killing somebody and then going home again. You know, he was a tough bastard and they’d be shooting with an AK-47. But he had absolute confidence in his ability. That absolute confidence, he said, saved his life. He sincerely believed that he was invincible. He could dodge bullets—that’s what he said, “I can dodge bullets so that I am the best.” But then once he’s out of the army, he becomes his own worst enemy because he’s not the best anymore. He’s just a guy. And he gets into an argument with a police officer who’s treats him with a certain amount of contempt and he picks him up and he throws him on the floor and he knocks him out and ends up in prison for 18 months.

So that’s how the sacred flaw works. It’s the character’s best friend—but then, usually at a break point, it suddenly it becomes an enemy. And that’s why it’s drama. It’s, “Oh my God, I can’t live this way anymore.”

This myth, as you put it, by which I’ve been living my life and has given me everything that I value, becomes untenable. That’s what happens in great storytelling

CE: Speaking of flaws … Is there a flaw that’s common for writers starting out?

WS: Two of them. The first one is defining your character without specificity, without the understanding that they’ve got to go on a journey of change and they’ve got to be flawed.

CE: The other writer’s flaw?

WS: The second one is related—that you don’t need to know about plot, about structure and process.

I was on a panel at a literary festival and people asked, “What’s your process?” And every single panelist, apart from me, said, ‘Oh, I just imagine a character and see where the character takes me,” and I just don’t believe it. I’m sure some people can write like that and end up with a publishable story. But there’s a lot of bullshit published. And there’s a lot of mythmaking. When [writers say] you’ve just got to close your eyes and let the magic emerge, I think it’s almost cruel, you know?

CE: In your work, you use a process that I call yo-yoing—moving back and forth from scene to summary, back and forth. In The Science of Storytelling, you’ll have several pages where you dig into the brain science and your thinking about technique, which is abstract and not so emotional, right? Then you break away and talk about Lawrence of Arabia or Remains of the Day or other works. You are an explainer on one side, but you are also a storyteller.

WS: The brain wants change. So if you’re going on for three paragraphs about one thing, you need to switch.

In The Science of Storytelling, I had to explain some abstract, complicated ideas. Having the novels and the films is such useful way of describing this complicated brain stuff. It was a real gift to be able to describe confabulation by using Citizen Kane. Storytellers are great because before the scientists got, they understood how this.

CE: Scientists—Darwin, Einstein, Stephen Hawking—have a knack for storytelling. To understand time, Einstein talked about standing on a platform and imagining when lightning struck the top of the train. He was seeing in pictures. He wasn’t seeing equations. Only later did he translate the pictures into equations. So there was a dialogue between the abstract and the concrete.

WS: Jonathan Haidt’s a great communicator as well because he really understands the power of simplicity. The way he communicates complex ideas is just absolutely fantastic. So does Richard Dawkins.

CE: Let’s talk about detail and precision. I’m not sure how well people understand the need to amass enormous volumes of information.

When the average person walks into a room, they don’t see much that’s interesting, at least right away. They just see what they expect to see. As a writer, you have to stay there and just keep observing. You have to collect the most specific details about the character, about the background, about the room, about the conflict, about the other characters, about the situation, about the fears—the more details you get, you get all the building materials you need to build your house.

A lot of writers have an idea of what they want to say. But if they don’t have enough details, it’s like not having enough bricks to build the house and doesn’t stand up. It seems to me that a lot of what you’re talking about in your book is the power of precision—and that requires a lot of work.

WS: There’s precision on two levels. First, the more specific you are about a character at the beginning of a book, the more that character is going to explode out of that story.

In Lawrence of Arabia, he’s a very specific character. He’s an arrogant guy who thinks he’s extraordinary and that’s it. That’s Lawrence of Arabia. But when you put him through all that drama of the war, in all of these different scenarios, he becomes an incredibly complex, realistic character.

So there’s a paradox. I get pushback when I’m trying to define the character in a line or two. People say it’s simplistic. But it really isn’t—there’s something magical about it. You need to be precise about who the character is because you haven’t got the space to write someone’s whole life. You have to write about a precise character.

Also, when you are writing about a precise character, your book becomes about a precise idea. It becomes a deep investigation about how life should be lived. Ira Glass of This American Life once had a mentor who said that all story is an answer to the question: How should I live my life?

I think that’s really true. That’s what that precision in a character gives you. Your character represents a way of living life. And the story is a test of that idea of that—how should I live my life? How is this person living their life? And how is it working out for them? What does it mean? What are the ramifications?

Take Remains of the Day. In a really specific way, it’s about the whole English, stiff-upper-lip, cold, emotionless life. Stevens is very precise. He believes in emotional restraint—those two words, that’s him. That whole book brings out those two words, but it’s incredibly complex and nuanced—and believable. So that’s the first thing about precision.

CE: And the other way to think about precision?

WS: We read books and watch movies and the information comes into our brains in the form of words. The brain reconstructs the world that you’re describing. It’s much more automatic if you give specific details. If you say a monster, your brain doesn’t know what model to use. That’s why we “show, don’t tell.” If you’re just using abstract words, the brain can’t model it accurately.

CE: Then your brain compares the details to its vast database of other monsters. Then the story becomes a process of co-creation. You the author give that detailed portrait of the monster—it could be a dragon or it could be a sadist in a cabin in the woods. But you need to reader to relate it to something that they know. Even if they’ve never had to deal with a dragon or deal with a creep guy in a cabin in the woods, it becomes real to them because they connect something they know with something they don’t notice.

WS: Absolutely. That’s that beautiful thing. As you say, great art is an act of co-creation.

CE: Now let’s talk about the Two Plus Two Rule. If I say two plus two and immediately tell you it equals four, that’s an insult to you. But if I say two plus two and let you conclude, oh yes, that’s four, then the story is a lot more powerful. If I give you three details about that monster in the in the cabin in the woods, you can conclude yourself something about that character. But if I tell you what it means, it takes away the joy.

WS: You can’t spell everything out because then the reader has got nothing to do. The brain is a prediction engine. If the prediction’s unsure, that’s really fun. If there’s nothing to predict, there’s no participation from the reading brain. The more literary you get, the more writing is about hints and clues—the more gaps there are to fill. On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan, has very little actual story in it: A couple has bad sex and then breaks up. All the rest of it is like a smorgasbord of clues about what is it that triggered this terrible eventuality and why it’s there.

Daniel Menaker likes stories that go “spooling off” in different directions, in unpredictable but necessary ways. His own life—as a red diaper baby, high school teacher, fact checker, editor, and writer—has had its own way of spooling off in different directions, sometimes tragically and sometimes humorously.

Menaker’s first story treated, fictionally, the death of his brother Mike. In a family touch football game one Thanksgiving, Mike came down hard on a pass play and ripped his ligaments. He got surgery, which should have fixed the problem. But weeks later, he contracted a septicemia infection and died. He was 26.

Just like that, the Menaker household was ripped apart. At the time, Menaker was working as a fact checker for The New Yorker. That job offered means of distraction until Menaker finally found the words to confront his family’s tragedy. His first story, “Grief,” appeared in the January 20, 1974 New Yorker.

Fame for humor came when he and Charles McGrath wrote a parody of a book called The Best. Not long after the publication of that parody–titled, naturally “The Worst”–Roger Angell came to Menaker’s desk waving a piece of paper. “Sorry, you’ve got to give the payment back,” said Angell, the magazine’s literary editor. “It’s a New Yorker tradition.” Wait—what? “It’s a rule,” Angell said. “Anyone who gets a fan letter from Groucho Marx for his first humor piece has to give the money back.” The letter is now framed in his country house upstate.

Menaker’s career as a writer and author is enviable. He rose to become fiction editor of The New Yorker. He published novels and collections of stories (Friends and Relations, The Old Left, and The Treatment, which became a movie), a book about conversation (A Good Talk), and a memoir (My Mistake). He rose to become editor in chief at Random House, working with writers like Alice Munro, Salmon Rushdie, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Elizabeth Strout, David Foster Wallace, and Billy Collins. He’s also taught writing at Stony Brook.

He lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his wife Katherine Bouton, an editor and writer.

Charles Euchner: Why did you decide to write? Who were your influences? What early lessons did you learn about writing?

Daniel Menaker: My mother was an editor at Fortune. She was an expert in grammar and rules. She was a classics major at Bryn Mawr. She was exigent about rules without being a pain in the ass about it. I just heard a boy say to another boy, “If you want to ride on the bicycle, get the f— on the handlebars,” and she said, “I wonder what part of speech f— was in that sentence.” I never heard her use that language before. When I referred to the famous jewelry store as Tiffany’s she said “If you say Tiffany’s anymore I will disown you. It’s Tiffany.” That was the background.

After college I became a teacher at the Collegiate School and Friends Seminary. I was staying out of the Vietnam War. I loved teaching and was pretty good at it. I would have kept on teaching except for grading papers. That was so onerous to me. It’s not that they were terrible, but it took an incredible time to do it well.

Then I got a job as a fact checker for The New Yorker. I was around writers and stylists and copy editors and people who cared about language. That begins to get installed in your neurons, practically.

Partly out of the long span of grief about the terrible event in my family, I was a very good fact checker. I needed to concentrate on something. I was very exigent and careful and respectful. I did what I was asked to do. I was taught well—the guy who ran the department was helpful and patient.

William Maxwell [the magazine’s fiction editor] coached me. He made his retirement contingent on me being allowed to be an editor. There were older editors, all in their 70s. People wanted to have some change but there was no reason to fire them. He said, “I’ll go but you have to give Dan Menaker a chance.” That was 1976 and I floundered around and then began to find my footing.

CE: And moving from editing to writing…

DM: The thing that made me decide to write was my brother’s death. I always felt guilty about it. We were close—I was shocked and my family was devastated. But I didn’t decide to write—it decided me.

I continued writing and the psychological pressure and the grief and the mourning eventually gave way to the professional aspect of it. I wrote my first book of stories—it was pretty dreadful, except that one story. I did a two-book deal and I couldn’t write the second book. So I returned the minuscule advance, $2,500. [The editor] told me he had never received a repayment of an advance, without asking for it, so he framed it as an example of good conduct.

I just kept on writing. My first nonfiction essay was about TV news, which came from years of watching TV during a grief-stricken state that lasted for a decade. There were formulae. It was scripted, from the introduction of reporter to the signoff. Lewis Lapham liked it and published it in Harper’s.

CE: The key thing for any story is coherence, not literal truth, right? A piece of fiction doesn’t require that every detail be correct. Like with your novel The Treatment … 

DM: I was in analysis for ten years and the analyst I was working with bore a strong resemblance to the character in the book. But if you’re talking about correspondence between real life people and people in the book—the dialogue and events and conversations—close to 80 percent is fictional.

Roger Angell once came in with a story by Susan Minot (“The Accident”). He said, “This story is very troubling.” I asked why. I thought it was really good and sad. He said, “I know this family and it’s based on her mother’s death.” Well, I don’t care about that. Fictional stories and novels have to work as what they are, like a painting. If you try to find out who the subject was and that the artist had an affair and her husband killed himself—none of that matters to the painting.

It’s very interesting to read about writers and painters’ lives. But what do you do with an anonymous poem like “O Western Wind”? Nobody knows who wrote it, but it is so beautiful …

CE: Who were your academic influences?

I was taught aesthetics by Monroe Beardsley at Swarthmore, who taught that every work has to be judged on its own isolated qualities. You can ask a writer about what his or her poem or story is about, but they can be wrong. I have this militant feeling about fiction having more to do with the presentation of sentences than any correspondence with real life.

Headley Reese taught a seminar on Baroque art and modern art. We would go to the museum and he would not talk about Rembrandt’s life. He would say, “What do you see in this painting?” It was a time where there was a great deal of new criticism, focused on the objects themselves. It was in full swing at that time.

CE: What kind of research do you put in?

DM: Almost none. I’ll check if I care about getting some geography right or the years of a presidency; I’ll be a fact checker for myself. I just reviewed Oliver Sacks’s posthumous book. In writing the review, I looked stuff up. At one point I simply couldn’t call to mind the ten famous writers about science and medicine in the last decade or so, so I just Googled “most important books about science and medicine.” There’s a condition, anomia, where you can’t remember names.

I’ve worked with historic fiction writers and they do a lot of research. I tend to stick more closely to my own life. I don’t need to know a lot of historic background.

CE: What about writing a memoir? How do you make sure to get that right?

DM: I relied heavily on memory. No one has pointed out any gross errors. I do have family documents—letters, obituaries. I found out about my father’s membership in the Communist Party [by talking with] an FBI guy who investigated by family. I read the Venona Papers. They mention my family. For the New Yorker stuff, the archives are online. I can check to see the first Alice Munro story I edited.

Memoirs are shaky, in my opinion. They’re not the same as autobiography. They’re much more loosey-goosey.

CE: Now, on to storytelling tactics. The best place to start is with in media res, right?

DM: That’s right—start in the middle, with action. That tendency is an outgrowth of movies. In the 20s, 30s, and 40s, suddenly there would be a scene and you would figure out what was happening later.

But that was also true with nineteenth century writers like Charles Dickens. He has a novel where you start with two people on a dingy raft on the Thames looking for a body. You have no idea why there are there. Pride and Prejudice has the same kind of immersion—Mr. and Mrs. Bennett arguing about who’s going to marry their daughters. Other authors do it—Fitzgerald and Alice Munro and J.M. Coetzee …

CE: It works well, in media res, but it works better with some authors than others. What’s the difference?

DM: What really works is when an author startles me—and that doesn’t happen very much—in a way that’s not a gimmick, that feels legitimate. Look at what Coetzee is doing in Disgrace. Hilary Mantel—her first novel is very domestic and close to home, about a social worker, but it had that same necessity and it’s startling.

When I was a kid, anything would grab me, because everything is new. I hadn’t had 50 years of editing. You get a little jaded. Or things become overly familiar.

CE: Who provides the greatest surprise?

Alice Munro. She’s an amazingly complex writer who hides her complexity under the most conversational, seemingly casual narration, but oh man, it is complicated, especially from the standpoint of time. She uses time almost as if it was a place. … Little by little, she begins to zero on the psychological and thematic concerns of the story that are not narrative, even though she uses narrative. Often near the end you have a dead-center target of some revelation or something that contradicts or changes something.

All this is in the service of her conviction that she’s writing about the chaos of the human heart. She ends up in the middle of the target and what you find is so basically elemental, so affected by drives and childhood that you don’t know about. But she ends up nowhere. Here’s what happened and why it happened, but it doesn’t make much sense.

CE: So it has a very strong arc. But it’s not a simple or obvious arc.

DM: Exactly. The resolution is an un-resolution. It’s a literary and eloquent and down-to-earth demonstration of chaos that rules most of us.

CE: When you write something, do you plot it out or do you do one page and the next—

DM: When I write, I know pretty much where it’s going. I know the plot and the five or six things that have to happen. It would be surprising if it went off direction. But there are these side streets that you don’t see till you get there.

In my new novel, a sequel to The Treatment, the shrink is 85 and only has a couple old patients. The teacher is now the headmaster and someone on the board wants to fire him. He’s a patient of Dr. Morales. He wants the headmaster to know, but he is precluded from telling.

CE: So you know the basic structure, but you can improvise along the way—

In this new novel, this guy goes to his wife’s funeral at Riverside Chapel. Since she was a very philanthropic and social sort, I decided that I could, with some humor and knowingness, create a list of people who attended the funeral. Some are friends and some have very fancy social names and some have names that are conglomerations. I didn’t plan that. I like lists and list humor; they seem funny to me. Since this guy’s a teacher, maybe some of his students will come. It’s as if you can play with a toy—you didn’t expect to find that toy.

CE: What do you make the state of publishing these days?

DM: It’s fine. Books are selling well. The supposed takeover of ebooks has not happened. They have reached a certain level and they’re useful. And the projections that they would be 80 percent of the market has not worked out. I have a theory that when two-year-olds start with Goodnight Moon, and they’re reading a real book, that feeling is never going away.

There was a time, six or seven years ago, I thought publishing was in serious fiscal trouble. It’ll never be a huge profit center.

Publishing is really gambling. You put down money on a table with a bet. Six out of seven times it doesn’t succeed, it doesn’t earn back the advance. But that seventh time, that other bet…

Like other journalists of this late-print/early-digital age, Tina Cassidy has taken on a number of challenges as a writer. And more than most, she has succeeded.

Cassidy was a reporter for ten years at The Boston Globe, where she covered business, politics, and fashion. A Rhode Island native, she published articles in the Providence Journal as a high school student. She studied journalism at Northeastern University. After college she worked for the Boston Business Journal and the Associated Press before joining the Globe.

Since leaving the Globe, she has written books about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the process of being born, and, most recently, the battle for the women’s vote.She is now executive vice president and chief content officer at InkHouse, a national public relations and digital marketing agency.

She is active in civic affairs as a board member of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting and as an activist for women candidates and passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. She was a founding member of the Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors, a national organization dedicated to coverage of state and local government.

She lives in the Boston area with her husband, Anthony Flint, another ex-Globe reporter and author of acclaimed books on architecture and planning, along with their three sons and a Norfolk Terrier named Dusty.

Charlie Euchner: You began your writing career as a journalist. In your years with The Boston Globe, you also worked a number of different beats. Too often, beat writers get stuck in a rut, writing the stale old thing year after year. Can you talk about your experience covering different topics?

Tina Cassidy: I had pretty good self-awareness about when I needed a new beat. The clues included the feeling that I had exhausted interviewing all experts on the topic; that nothing I was writing about was surprising or felt new anymore. Weirdly, it was as if I had a biological clock timed to switch beats — typically every four years. Not sure if that was a coincidence or, as with a college degree, that’s about how long it takes to become an expert on something.

CE: Can you tell me about starting out as a teenager in Rhode Island. What kinds of stories did you do and what kinds of lessons did you learn then, about writing and reporting, that you remembered and applied thereafter?

TC: I wrote some articles for my hometown paper The Cranston Herald, mostly about school-related issues, and I was a stringer for the Providence Journal‘s West Bay briefs section; I think I got paid $25 per submission, which felt like a lot at the time. What I learned is that local journalism is essential, that people really care about what’s going on in their community and that there are stories all around us that go uncovered but shouldn’t. Today’s collapse of local journalism is a dangerous thing. Research has found that when community papers shut down, polarization increases. This is the last thing we need.

CE: Are there any stories for the Globe that you were especially fond of? Can you say a thing or two about them?

TC: “Fond” is not the word I’d use. But the most memorable ones for me were covering the 1996 Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Green Bay Packers (there was more drama off the field than on); JFK Jr.’s deadly plane crash; being in New York City on 9/11 and running toward the World Trade Center when it collapsed–and then somehow managing not just to survive but to run uptown in high heels and file a story before the special edition; and covering the 2000 Presidential election, from being on the bus with John McCain to looking at hanging chads in Florida.

CE: How did you make the transition from short pieces to full-length books? Some people think of books as collections of shorter pieces, and there’s some truth to that. But books need not only detailed stories and ideas, but also a sense of wholeness. So what helped you make the leap?

TC: The leap felt more like a continuation for me. I only write nonfiction and I am a compulsive writer who thrives on deadline. (I wish this weren’t the case.) If I sense a good story, I can’t stop myself from writing about it. At the heart of journalism and writing books is either a great story or the attempt to answer a big question.

My first book, about the history of childbirth (Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born) sought to understand how modern birth had gone so off the rails. I wanted to survey the historical and cultural landscape to see why it was that every generation and every culture had its own way of giving birth as a way to put modern birth in perspective.

My latest book, Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait? Alice Paul, Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the Right to Vote, is a great story that had not really been told before, pitting a little-known suffragette against a president whose multiple biographies may include a paragraph on suffrage (and his opposition to it) but little more. So it was a blue sky topic for me.

CE: Who are some of your role models as writers? Who do you try to emulate? What “tricks of the trade” do they offer to you as a storyteller, explainer, and book author?

TC: I’ve always admired nonfiction writers such as Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, who bring a journalistic eye and curiosity to their wildly different styles of writing. I can’t say I try to emulate anyone but I have worked hard to change my own writing style as I transitioned from journalism to writing books.

My first book editor, the wonderful Elisabeth Schmitz of Grove/Atlantic, told me to slow down my writing. Pacing is something they don’t teach you in journalism school. So I’ve worked on that. I also have to work at showing, not telling. I am always editing myself on that front.

CE: What’s your biggest challenge as a writer? How do you manage problems? Are you a plotter or a pantser? What “tricks of the trade” have you picked up over the years.

TC: I am a plotter. Structure is the first thing I figure out. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t change, but I need a road map to clarify the story or the question I need to answer — to proof it out. For my book on birth, it was about organizing millennia of history not chronologically but around subjects such as pain, fatherhood, postpartum.

For my book on Jacqueline Onassis (called Jackie After O) it was a tight chronology of one transformative year. So I built the structure, month by month, on a timeline. For my current book on Alice Paul, the heart of the book spans Wilson’s two terms as president. Plotting that story arc was fun but most challenging!

CE: Can you reflect on living in a writing household? I assume that you and Tony have lots of conversations about reporting, research, and writing. That’s very cool.

TC: Living with another writer means someone is always picking up the slack for the other. When I’m on book deadline, my husband is managing more kids stuff and meals and vice versa. It also means we truly understand the exhausting agony that writing induces, we can encourage each other and help each other get unstuck. Of course, there is also the brutally honest feedback (often accurate and helpful) that we give each other. My husband is always my first editor, though he doesn’t really have a choice because we live the process together. Thankfully, he is a brilliant thinker and writer.

CE: Tell me about your new book on the women’s suffrage movement and Woodrow Wilson. It’s a classic setup–pitting fallible protagonists against a fallible antagonist. How did you move from topic to story? What were some of the surprises and revelations for you, both about the subject and the writing process?

TS: I was scrolling twitter on vacation and came across the trending hashtag for #womensequalityday, which celebrates the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. I clicked and within an hour, learned about the leader of that suffrage movement, Alice Paul. The next logical question for me was what did the president think of Paul? Turns out, Wilson was the perfect foil – he did not believe the Constitution should give women voting rights. I was surprised to see that many Wilson biographies barely mentioned suffrage, and if they did, it was brief. Paul had been relegated to more academic biographies. I saw an opening and enjoyed weaving these two individuals together.

Excerpt: ‘The Advancing Army’

The following is an excerpt from Tina Cassidy’s new book, Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait? (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2019), 304 pages

The women slowly made their exit from the East Room and returned to their new headquarters. After four years of toil and hardship in the damp basement on F Street, the CUWS, NWP, and the movement Paul reignited, were finally in a sunlit space, in a place of prominence. Cameron House stood at 21 Madison Place, on the edge of Lafayette Park—the green space in front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The building—a wide, three-story, brick townhouse—had several benefits. First, it was visible and just two hundred steps away from the White House; the Wilsons could see the suffrage flag fluttering from its perch on the third-floor balcony. Second, there was ample space to work and entertain guests—from tourists and strangers walking in off the street to catch a glimpse of the women, to those attending ever-expanding fundraisers. There were also bedrooms to accommodate Paul and others, eliminating their daily commute. Paul was now using Susan B. Anthony’s old desk, a Victorian cylinder roll-top that Anthony’s secretary had donated to the NWP.

When the indignant suffragists walked through Cameron House’s front door, they entered into a great hall with a large staircase and a fireplace that burned eternal. Paul was there, waiting for them, ready to stoke their anger as they dropped into comfortable chairs in front of the flames and asked the question again: How long must we wait?

With the women assembled in front of the fire, Paul pitched a carefully orchestrated idea, which she asked Blatch to present. Cameron House. “We have got to take a new departure,” Blatch told them.

“We have got to bring to the President, day by day, week in, week out, the idea that great numbers of women want to be free, will be free, and want to know what he is going to do about it. We need to have a silent vigil in front of the White House until his inauguration in March. Let us stand beside the gateway where he must pass in and out so that he can never fail to realize that there is a tremendous earnestness and insistence in back of this measure.”

So far, with Paul as their leader, the women had marched four years earlier, in 1913, in the largest and most outrageous protest America had ever seen. They had assembled an eighty-car brigade to deliver signatures from all over the nation. They had testified, editorialized, and reorganized. They had formed their own political party. They held May Day parades in nearly every state in the union. They fundraised and actively worked to defeat Democrats. They had a booth at a global exposition, collected a miles-long scroll of signatures, and drove it cross-country from San Francisco. They dropped leaflets from the sky and a banner from the House chamber’s balcony. And they had sacrificed one of their own. On this day, in front of the crackling fire at their new headquarters, with the White House at their backs, they may have been exhausted, but they were neither depleted of ideas nor the passion to continue the struggle.

They listened as Blatch offered a new form of protest. In America, pickets had become a common union tactic, typically ending in violence. But suffragists had been employing the practice as well. Blatch had used pickets in her Votes for Women campaign with the New York Legislature in 1912, so when she delivered her final plea to the women of Cameron House, they stirred.

“Will you not,” she asked, “be a ‘silent sentinel’ of liberty and self-government?”