Steven Pressfield: 21 Proven Methods for Writing Great Stories | How I Write

Steven Pressfield is a master in the art of storytelling. He spent decades studying what great stories have in common, so I said, "Hey, come on the show, that's what we're going to talk about." What are the principles of storytelling and character building? I want to know the things that transcend genre and culture, and speak to the heart of the human condition. I want X-ray vision into what makes stories great. I want to know what makes you get to the end of the story and just say, "Wow!" So that's what this conversation is all about. You wouldn't believe it, but how I write costs a fortune to run, and it's thanks to Mercury, but I can even do it. They're the sponsor of this episode, and a banking platform that I've been using for the past four years to run my own business. When I started how I write, I expected finances to be an absolute nightmare. I got team members in four different countries, I think to think about currency exchange and taxes and expenses, and I was just dreading it. But honestly, banking has maybe been the easiest part. I can't remember running into a single problem, and it's because I've been using Mercury. I switched over from other more traditional banks, because Mercury is so well designed. It's easy to get started, it's easy to use, while also feeling totally legit and secure. And Mercury gives me all the tools to run a global company, like virtual cards, unlimited users, and the ability to customize each user's access level to exactly what they should see. And you know what, if anything goes wrong, if I have any sort of challenge, I can always talk to their support team, which is super responsive and actually helpful, which is pretty rare these days. And all that is why I can't imagine banking any other way. Mercury is a fentech company, not an FDIC-in-chirb bank, banking services provider at Choice Financial Group and call them in a, members FDIC. All right, back to the episode. Let's just zoom out into the three-act structure. What is it about the three-act structure that you've embraced after initially being like, "Ah, I don't want some formula over here." I just think it's so true, you know, the concept of, "I forget who said this, but somebody, some wonderful writer was saying, "Here's the key to any story they could work on. Break it into three parts, beginning, middle, and end." And I remember thinking at the time, you know, there's a lot to that, you know? I think a lot of times there can be more than three-act, but mostly if you can do three-act, it really makes a lot of sense. The first act is supposed to hook the audience and get them involved in the story. The second act is kind of progressive, things get more complicated like the midpoint of act two. That's where the stakes get higher, it gets more interesting. And then act three is where you kind of put the accelerator down and go to the climax. And I think a joke is like that, you know, you sort of a rabbi and an alligator walk into a bar, right? And then there's the punchline is act three. So it is sort of a natural kind of rhythm for storytelling. Tell me about the inciting incident. The inciting incident is the moment, usually at the end or the middle of act one, when the story really starts, and what had come before that, you could kind of call setup. The first rocky, if we remember that, is kind of a long buildup of introducing Rockies and Philadelphia. He's kind of a crumbum fighter. He goes into the gym. He finds that Mick, the trainer, has kicked him out of his locker. You know, he gets, he gets no respect, right? And then we see kind of parallel to that. Apollo Creed, the heavyweight champion, has scheduled a fight because it's the centennial year of America, right? And he says, "Geguala fight in Philadelphia." And his opponent breaks his hand or something. So Apollo has to kind of go, "How am I going to save this?" And he says, "Okay, I'm going to change it. And I'm going to give some local fighter a shot at the title." Right. And so he looks through the book of the local fighters. And he comes through the Italian stallion page, and that's Rock. And he says, "This is the guy I want to fight." He's an Italian immigrant. Columbus was an Italian, he discovered America, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the word comes down to Rocky. You've been chosen to fight the champ. That's the inciting incident, right? All of a sudden the story, the rubber hits the road. And we end, another thing about the inciting incident is, when we in the audience, when we as readers, hit that moment, we can kind of see the climax. We sort of flash forward. It's like, "Ah, he's been chosen to fight the champ." Well, the climax is going to be him fighting the champ in the ring. And we're excited by that. So the inciting incident gets the story rolling. Now, you were talking about how the inciting incident can basically foreshadow the climax. Yeah. Is there a way where the inciting incident can basically show a sense of mystery that's going to be a recurrent thread throughout the entire movie, or the entire book, the entire story? Because what came to mind was, when we're in the Truman Show really early on, the light falls on the street. And it's like, "What is this light?" And then basically the whole movie is like, "What is the light?" And then he realizes that he's living in this manufactured reality. Ah. And so, I think that maybe that is a kind of inciting incident, but a different kind. Let me go back and talk about, for a second, talking about inciting incident in my newest book about a recurring character of mine who lives lifetime after lifetime as a doomed cursed figure, a warrior from the ancient world that has pulled farther and farther into the modern world. And in this story, what happens is a horse appears kind of mysteriously following him. He's serving as a mercenary in some unknown conflict. And he recognizes the horse as his horse from 1500 years earlier when he served in the Roman legions, complete with a brand, the X for 10, for the 10th legion that he served in. And so, when we see this talking on a mystery, now we wonder what the hell is this? Where are we? How did this horse suddenly come out of it? But also, it's the inciting that starts the story. Now, we see, ah, some crazy stuff is going to happen. It's going to pull him through to a resolution. Yeah, tell me about animals, the symbolism of animals. Like, why did you choose a horse? There's a mystery about them, such as the creativity about them. I know you're getting a sort of a principal and storytelling principal of mine, which is that the child carries the divine. He's a kind of a principal of mine. And children or animals who are innocent, naturally innocent people, in stories, almost always carry the divine element of the story. In the case of this horse I'm talking about, and in the Arcadian, the horse is sent by heaven, by God, by somebody to restore justice to the world. And the reason I picked a horse is because, although it could have been other animals, it could have been an eagle or something like that, but horses are kind of magical creatures that, right, their heart is five times four times bigger than the human heart. And they have, because they're flight animals, they're sensitive to moods and emotions and everything in the environment. So a horse is one of these creatures that can, you know, like the flying horse, Pegasus and all of us, that can bring, again, the element of the divine, the element of the supernatural. And it applies with children too in stories, where they're often the one that, like the Emperor's new clothes, that sees truth and that will open their mouth and say, "But the Emperor's not wearing any clothes, right?" So it's, again, when I'm kind of writing a story, if I have a child or an animal in there that just comes sort of naturally, like I feel like I need some kind of an animal in here, when I switch over to my left brain and ask myself, "What's going on here?" A lot of times, if not always, that child or that animal will carry some kind of element of the divine in the story. And again, I'm not sure exactly what that means, but it does seem to be a principle that is true, not just in my stuff, but in anybody's stuff. How does this show up in biblical stories? The story of Moses, the story of Jesus. I pulled this from the book of Luke, and behold, you will conceive in your womb and barisana, and you should call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his Father, David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever and of this kingdom that will be no end. Well, that's, I hadn't even thought about that, but that's probably the classic instance of the child, Jesus, bringing the divine into the world. I think about Moses, right? He was floating in the bull rushes in a little basket, almost all of the great heroes, you know, these he is, Heracles, whatever. They have a moment of their birth that is sort of miraculous. There's a sense of hope and possibility, even whenever you pick up a baby or you see a really young baby, you're just like, wow. Yeah, their eyes are seeing everything for the first time. They're, they haven't been screwed up by life yet. Just like you and I when we were babies. Yep. And, but I'm thinking about, here's another movie that your readers will never know because it's too far in the past. Shane, do you know that one? I've never even heard of it. Oh, great Western starring Alan Ladd as a gunslinger that comes into this threatened environment of sod busters, you know, in a kind of range war against cattlemen. And Brandon DeWilda, who at that time was like six years old, he was the innocent. He was the child and that thing. And at the end of the movie, the last beat that became famous of the movie, Shane has to leave the valley after killing Jack Pallin's the bad guy. And the child calls after him, "Shane, come back, come back, Shane, come back." What is the Michael moment? What is the Michael moment? Michael Coleon? I think it's from the Godfather. And there's a long quote where basically what happens is in these stories, there is what is going on, something happens. And now the stakes are bigger, the story's really taken on a new form, a new meaning. Tell me about that. Okay. There's a moment usually in Act 2 Midpoint in movies and in any books too, where like the the moment in the Godfather, the first Godfather is when Bolland Brando's character has been shot. He's in the hospital and the bad guy, Virgil Salazzo, has reached out to the Coleon family. Let's have a meeting, you know, and we're going to somehow settle this out. And the scene takes place kind of in the office of the Godfather. And Michael Al Pacino is sitting in a chair in the center of the room. And at this point in the story, he's really been not a member of the crime family. A member, if you remember, he's a decorated marine officer from World War II. He's married to all American, Mayflower, Girl, not definitely not an Italian crime family future for him. It looks like he's going to be my professor or something like this. And in fact, Sonny Coleon, James Conn and Robert DuVal, as Tom Hagen, they treat him as kind of, you know, outside the family, they're trying to try and protect him. So in this scene, he has this moment where he says, "Let's set the meeting. Get our informers to find out where it's going to be held." Now, we insist it's a public place, a bar, a restaurant, some place where there's people, so I feel safe. They're going to search me when I first meet them, right? So I can't have a weapon on me then. But if Clemenza can figure it away, they have a weapon planted there for me. They're not killing both. And that is the moment everybody goes and they go, "Hey, you know, forget it. You know, what are you doing?" In the army, you shoot somebody 200 yards away. Sonny says, "I'm here. You're going to right up close your brains all over your nice Ivy League suit." But this is the moment, a turning point moment where the hero takes sides. And at this point, and the stakes rise, right? And at this point, Michael Coyleon goes from being outside the family to inside the family. And now he really has said, and it's setting up the whole arc of the story that he's going to be the Godfather, right, in the end, where he says, "You know, kill him both." In other words, he's in, he's made his decision. I'm not with K, my wife, my Beyoncé. I'm with the family. And I'm going to stay with the family for the whole thing. And everybody is sort of chilled by this, but also it's the thrilling moment. So anyway, I look myself, when I'm writing, I kind of ask myself, "Do I have an act to midpoint like that when my hero chooses sides?" It's a thrilling moment for the audience, because you really feel like the movie or the book is gaining another gear here, you know? And now we're going to. Anyway, so that's the Michael Coyleon moment. As you were saying that I was thinking of, have you seen the talented Mr. Ripley? Yes. Remember me in the Matt Damon killing in the boat? I don't know, but that's the same, but that's sort of what happens where you have Matt Damon, who's jealous. And then there's the killing. And basically, my sense is that in the first, let's say, one third of the movie, there's been a story that's been set up. And we see what's going on, we understand the social dynamics, but now there's the murder. And the entire story basically goes, "Dun, dun, dun, and it gets bigger, and it gets deeper, and the stakes get higher." And it's like, I don't know, it's almost like a new beat comes into the song. It's in a whole new tempo and rhythm, dynamite, you know? Something like that. Yeah. That may be it exactly. Certainly, there always is. We're always looking for that moment, right? Where the story hits another gear. And from the reader, a viewers point of view, they realize, "Oh, I thought this was going to be about this, but it's really about this, and this is even better." I'm even more on board with finding this. Tell me about the "All is Lost" moment. What it is, and so forth. Yeah. This is kind of a staple of Hollywood storytelling that I remember as a young screenwriter, you know, being in a meeting and somebody would be looking at a piece that I had that submitted, and they say, "Well, what's the "All is Lost" moment?" And I would go, "What? What is that?" You know, and somebody would be able to like take me aside and explain what it is. But the "All is Lost" moment comes about three quarters of the way through the movie or the book, and it is a moment when the hero has been trying all through the story to overcome certain obstacles. If it's a detective, they've been trying to solve the case. And at this point, they reach a beat where everything falls apart, and it's like, "We're never going to get out of this. We're all going to die. Everything I believed in so far, and this is kind of a crucial moment that the hero has to overcome. I'll give you a couple of examples. Here's one from Rocky. I'll go back to Rocky. If you remember, okay, he's going to fight the champ Apollo Creed, right? And the middle part of the movie with the theme from Rocky, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, ride his training, and then three quarters of the way through the movie. There's a moment where he's home in bed with his girlfriend, Adrian, and he gets the fight as the next night. He gets up and he goes down by himself in the middle of the night to the arena, and he goes in and he looks and he sees all the seats and she's a big poster of himself, of Apollo Creed, and the moment sort of hits him, the scale of the, oh my god, I'm, what have I got myself into? And he goes back home to Adrian gets back in bed and he has his all his lost moment. I can't do it. What? I can't be. Apollo? Yeah. I've been out there walking around thinking, I mean, who am I kidding, I'm even in the guys leak? What are we gonna do? I don't know. So that's his kind of all his lost moment. At that moment, usually the hero has to kind of switch gears and switch from kind of an ego orientation to a greater orientation. And then it's a question of can the hero rise above whatever it takes to proceed to the climax? If you look at almost any story, there is that moment or even myths or legends, things like that is really important that that thing be there. You were talking about how we get out of it. Did you have more to say about that? Yeah, I do. Okay. Because usually what immediately follows the all his lost moment is what I call the epiphany moment and epiphany, the hero has a kind of a breakthrough. Like go back to Rocky the moment I was just talking about before where Rocky is lying in bed with Adrian and he says, who was I kidding to get into this thing, this fight, this guy's the champion of the world, he's gonna kill me in the ring, you know? And then he makes a sort of a shift in his head just in one second and he says, but you know what? He says, if I can just go the distance with him. If I can just last to the fifth, I don't care what he beats the hell out of me. If I'm standing at the end of 15 rounds, then I'm gonna know for the first time in my life that I weren't just another bum from the neighborhood. So he makes a shift from, oh, I thought I might win, I might do something to, if I can just be standing at the end of the thing. And so in other words, a lot of times in the epiphany moment, the hero kind of faces reality and sort of accepts it. And it's usually a kind of a, it's a little bit of a downer in the sense that he had some dream or she had some fantasy and a government this is not if I can only, you know, so there always is that moment afterwards. And it's really kind of a writer's challenge a lot of time to say, well, how am I going to, I want to make the worst possible all-is-loss moment for my character. And then how am I going to get him out of that moment? Like, I'll give you another all-is-loss moment. Another from an old movie from one flew over the cookusness. Oh, yeah. Well, Jack Nicholson is this guy who is kind of a live wire, high-energy guy. He gets sentenced to an insane asylum, right? Where all the people are sort of really down. And he kind of energizes everybody, you know, but he runs the foul of nurse ratchet, the bad nurse that runs him. And the all-is-loss moment is he does something and they take him into the operating room and they lobotomize him. And he is brought back into the ward with his other guys who had believed in him. He was there here when they see the two scars. And it's like he's basically dead. And that's the all-is-loss moment from the movie. And what comes out of that is there's another character called a chief, an Indian big, strong guy who doesn't believe in his strength. And when he sees the Jack Nicholson carry Randall Patrick McMurphy in this terrible state, he takes a pillow, he smothers him, puts him out of his misery. And then he, the chief gets a hold of his belief in his own strength. And he throws this giant heavy thing through the wall or through the window. And he escapes. So the switch was that the chief who had been not believed in himself suddenly does believe in himself through this moment. There's another thing that's sort of like this. Maybe we were going to talk about this, the turn in your badge and your gun scene. This is another sort of principle that I think about that sort of like an all-is-loss moment. Like in a lot of cop movies or detective stories, there's a moment when the boss says to the detective, turn in your badge and your gun, you're off the case. And it's usually like three quarters of the way through the movie. Just kind of like the all-is-loss moment. And in fact, it is kind of an all-is-loss moment. In silence of the lambs, Clarice Stalling gets stripped of her badge and her gun to pursue this case. In the French connection, Jean Hackman and Roy Scheider have to turn in their badge and their gun. Even in Laidrunner 2049, I know I'm citing movies or whatever, the Ryan Gosling character Kay is told, "Turning your badge and your gun, you're off the case." This is a bit like the all-is-loss moment for these characters. The stakes raise again. It's like, are they going to keep going or are they going to crap out? And of course, they always keep going. And at that moment, they go from being a character to being a hero. In fact, I would say in terms of a screenplay, if you were trying to attract an actor, a big name actor, you have to have a great moment like that. Because the actor is going to want to play that moment. You know, they're going to want to be the hero. They're going to want to be up against it and then rise above that. What did I see about the second act belonging to the villain? Ah, that's a principle that my friend Randy Wallace who wrote Braveheart taught me. And it was that the first act kind of introduces the hero. But in the second act, the villain has to come forward. In other words, the obstacles that the hero has to overcome. If you're a writer, you sort of need to say to yourself, when I look at my second act, there's the bad guy big in here like, if you think about the godfather, the first godfather. In the second act, you have Salato the villain. He guns down Don Colion outside the thing. Then everybody has to go to the mattresses. There's the big kind of warfare through the whole thing. And the villain really comes to the fore as the obstacles that the hero has to overcome. So it is true. The second act does belong to the villain. How is the relationship with the world for a hero and a villain different? Like the hero, what are they trying to accomplish? How do heroes generally see the world versus villains? How are they opposing world? That's a great question. So what we're talking about really here are the principles of storytelling. If we're writing a story, we want to ask ourselves of our story, is it adhering to these principles? So one of the differences between a hero and a villain is that the hero is capable of self-sacrifice. And a lot of time where the villain is not. Many times, in the all his lost moment or in the final climax, the hero will give his or her life or will give up his hopes of happiness or something like that for the greater good. Whereas for a villain, it's always kind of a zero sum game of if I'm meaning the villain, if I'm going to gain anything, I have to take it from you. Yeah. So like one of the classic cases of a hero giving up something is in Casablanca, where the Bogart character at the end of the movie gives up the love of his life, Ingrid Bergman, puts her on the plane to Lisbon. With her husband, she's going to escape and then he goes off to fight with a free French. And what the decision he has made is better to spend yourself for the common good. In other words, fighting for the allies, fighting against the Nazis, than to grab your own selfish good in meaning running away with the girl you love. So he's sacked up and of course there are many, many stories where the hero literally sacrifices his or her life. So that's one of the big differences between a hero and a villain. Another difference between a hero and a villain is that the hero is capable of change. And in fact, that's kind of what a hero is. The story in almost any book or movie is the hero changing, right? Starts at point A ends at point Z, right? A different person, whereas the villain never changes. That's another question that we do have to ask ourselves as writers. Is our character our hero changing from beginning to end like in the Bogart character in Casablanca? He starts out, he's the owner of this, uh, uh, this, uh, this, uh, I'll call it a restaurant or kind of a in Casablanca where a lot of ex-patriots gather and the Nazis are there and blah, blah, blah. And when he starts out, he's completely in it for himself, like he has a couple of great quotes. I'm the only cause I'm fighting for. He does, he does a couple of things in the beginning of the movie that shows he's only looking out for himself. He doesn't give a damn about anybody else. And by the end of the movie, he's completely changed to the point where he's giving, giving utterly out of himself. And that's why the movie is so satisfying. And as many times pick, there's the greatest movie of all time. As you're thinking about genre and conventions and these principles, like implied here is lean into these things, learn from them. And then the fear that I have is then, oh my goodness, if I'm going to do this, I'm just going to write, try cliche. How do you work through that tension? That's another great question because you sort of think, and I did too when I first heard some of these principles, I thought, well, I'm not going to write this formula shit, you know, ABC, but you realize that these moments work, you know, you know, that if you have a hero who doesn't change, and you read the book over, people go, whatever, you know, so you have to say, this is a true principle. I look back at the Iliad or the Odyssey or Shakespeare, anything legends, you know, the hero does change. It has to change. And so the trick is, can you do it? Do these timeless principles in a new way? You know, can you put a spin on it or do it some way that's just slightly different? Like and here's another classic example of things like that, the big Lebowski. Yeah, you know, familiar with that one, right? The dude Jeff Bridges. If you think about the big Lebowski, the genre of the big Lebowski is a detective story. Okay. Right? The dude is kind of given an assignment at the start by a rich guy. Here's the million dollars. I want you to give it to save my wife who's been kidnapped. The dude is kind of like a detective. He's kind of solving what happened to the to bunny, et cetera, et cetera. There's even a femme fatal played by Julianne Moore that becomes kind of a love interest a little bit for the dude, just like in every detective story. But the spin that the Cohen brothers who wrote it and directed it put on this thing is normally in a detective story, the hero is a hard-bitten detective like, you know, a bogey or something like that. But to do it with the dude, you know, a stoner that's, you know, but you know, that's the spin. So that makes every scene, every genre scene that we've seen, another one of the it like in detective stories, the detective always gets beaten up a bunch of times. And if you think about the big Lebowski, the dude gets beaten up over and over and over, right? Yeah. And but it's always new because he's not the hard bit and detective. He's, you know, he's the dude. So if we can follow these principles, but put a spin on them each time, make them just a little bit different, then everything is, is okay. Tell me about the femme fait ta. Ah, well, there always is a femme feta. And I would talk with her. I know you can talk about another principle, which is the female carries the mystery. And if you think about detective stories, almost always, there will be the detective. It's almost always a male. And usually when he's hired to do the job at whatever is, there's always a kind of a beautiful, mysterious woman. You know, if there's always a femme feta, and a femme feta, or she might be less more of a vulnerable character, carries the mystery, I say, for instance, in Chinatown, when Jack Nicholson, the detective first meets Faye Dunnoay, she's the one who knows all the answers, right? What he's trying to find, you know, he's trying to get dig up what's behind the murders of this and that and the other. And she knows already. And she's trying to hide those because if it becomes revealed, bad things will happen. She thinks. And so the climax in a lot of these stories is the female suddenly reveals what, like the famous scene of where Jack Nicholson slaps Faye Dunnoay, and she says of her, of her, the young girl that she's trying to save. I said I want the truth! Leave my sister and my daughter! Come on, please, go back. Oh God, say, keep her up, say, is go back. My father and I. understand. It's very too tough for you. All of a sudden the whole mystery comes forward at that time. So that I find when I'm writing something, I ask myself, who's the female in this story? And does she carry the mystery? It doesn't have to be literally a woman. For instance, we were talking about this earlier, David, in Moby Dick, which has no female characters at all. The C is the female. And if you think about the C carrying the mystery, the C is into the depths which Moby Dick dives. The whale can go sound incredible depths. And the C is the place that A-hab searches all over the whole world for the C. And when we, in the end of the story, when we sort of look out over the surface of the ocean, it's a complete mystery. It's like, you know, what is this thing? It stands for, who knows what? The unconscious or whatever. And but it is a mystery. And the mystery are always things like birth, death, creativity, the things that we can't answer, life itself, being, you know. Every story sort of comes down to that. A question we can't answer, we just can only stand in awe of it. And the great works always do that. And tell me about the inverse of this, which I would guess is the male solves. The mystery? Yeah. So the male, you know, in the idea that the hero has to overcome obstacles to reach his or her objective will say male because like a detective to solve a mystery, the military guy to carry off the raid, whatever it is, they're trying to solve a mystery. Like you were saying before the sort of inciting incident kind of plants and idea of who, who's the murderer? Are we going to, you know, kill Hitler when we get to the bunk, that kind of thing? And so it's sort of the male, and I think this is really a sort of a primal, seminal aspect of male versus female or male as Yin Yang with female. It's the male energy that's sort of trying to seek the answer to this mystery. And usually in the end, the mystery is unsolvable. And the character, the male character just at least comes face to face with it. Now I'm presuming something, but would it make sense that if there's a detective or something and say that they're working on a case? Would it make sense that in a lot of these stories, they solve the case, but then there's something bigger behind it that remains the mystery. That's really good. That's exactly right. There's something, but then that's a theme that's shown up over and over. There's, there's the story. And then at some point in the story, we realize that there's a story that's bigger than the original story that's been presented. Yeah, that's really a very insightful. There's like a mega story behind it. Yeah. Like at the end of Chinatown, Jake Gittys, Jack Nicholson, he kind of solved the case. You know, he figures the old man, the bad guy played by John Houston is the father. He raped his daughter, bump it, bump it, bump. But the case is not solved. He's not arrested. There's going to be no accountability. It's going to, and the greater scheme that John Houston character have of bringing water to Los Angeles and making himself millions and millions of dollars, that kind of continues on. The detective has solved the story, but he's come to face to face with an even bigger thing. And that's what a great story works. That's how it works. It opens up to something even bigger and leaves you the audience or the reader with a little, you know, sadder but wiser. Okay, so we're talking about how do you get your writing done? And if you're thinking about work and how you can be more productive there, well, I recommend a tool called Basecamp. Basecamp is a project management tool and it's different from the other ones, which are loud and noisy and cluttered. They feature bloat. Basecamp says no, no, no, no, no. We're going to keep things simple so that you can focus on what actually matters, which is just getting the work done, you know. Now for us, Basecamp is a place where we can track what we're doing with how I write. When episodes are being recorded, where we're recording them, to publishing day, all those sorts of things in one place for an entire team to look at. And I had the founder, Basecamp, Jason Fried, he came on the show and I noticed that he really cares about writing. He cares about Manifesto, he cares about great copy, he cares about telling a great story. And him and his co-founder, they've written five books. And I can tell you that they bring the same care and attention to detail to their books as they do their software. So if you're thinking about work and you're asking, hey, how can I be more productive? How can I make my team more cohesive? Well, then I recommend Basecamp. All right. Back to the episode. In the Arcadian, you have a cursed character that's central to the story. How do gifts and curses work together? Oh, that's another great question. Seems like a lot of gifts. They have a curse. In fact, you know, the character in the Arcadian, my new book, has been doomed for crimes he's committed in the deep past to live lifetime after lifetime after lifetime, always as a soldier to kill and be killed. And he wants desperately to end this cycle of lifetime after lifetime of this thing. But the reason why I think a character that's under a curse is interesting. And this is another sort of principle that I haven't really thought about as deeply as I should, but I think it's really true that we're all kind of under a curse. If you think about the idea of original sin, I was about to say that, that we were, now this is a very Christian idea that we were born with the sin or think of the Garden of Eden. Like when God casts Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, he curses them. And he says, "Henceforth shall thou eat thy bread in the sweat of thy face, thorns and thistels, I shall set before you, for dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return." And so, and I think the women are cursed to pain and childbirth and the men are cursed to labor, right? Yes, I think that's exactly right. But even beyond that, don't we all sort of feel like in a way we're incomplete or we haven't reached what it is, we can never write really, we're always sort of searching for something. So we all, I feel, are looking for some kind of redemption. You know, people who are young people, particularly who are looking for their calling in life, they sort of feel like, I have no meaning, there's no meaning in my life, you know, I've got to, if I can only find what I was put here to do, et cetera, et cetera. So I do think, I love cursed characters. And I think that a lot of great heroes bring that sort of curse with them. And you sort of ask yourself, well, what is like in a tragedy, the hero brings some flaw. right? Like back to Achilles in the Iliad, his flaw is that although he can never be defeated in battle, he's the greatest at whatever it is, but he has an ego, he has pride. And he won't give in when he needs to give in. And the result, he loses his dear friend, Patroclus, and practically and destroys Troy, blah, blah, blah. So that is a kind of a form of a curse. To go back to Shane, then I know you haven't seen, but this was, this was really, I think, one of the great American versions of a tragedy. We never sort of have tragedies, but in this version, Shane is his gun slinger. And he comes into this peaceful sort of valley and his intention is to lay down his guns. He wants to just live and be just a normal person. That is his curse, that he has a past of being a gunfighter and of killing people. And what happens, sure enough, through the time that he's there is he's, he's the only guy in the valley that can save the day because he's the only guy that can use a gun. And so his past follows him. And in the end, it catches up with him. And in the final, there's a great moment at the end. I wish you had seen this, David. Yeah, hope anybody that sees this, this interview will watch Shane. I have a one of the 60 films to watch for for our next interview, but there's a great moment at the very end. No, he's finally killed the bad guy, Jack Palinz, but he realizes that he has to, has to leave the valley. And he says to the little boy who carries the divine, Brandon DeWilda, he says, man has to be what he is, Jimmy. Can't break the knife. I tried it, it didn't work for me. We want you, Shane. Joey, there's no living with, for the killing. There's no going back for me. Right, we're on, it's a brand. A brand of sticks. There's no going back. So in other words, he brought in his history as a gunman, and he couldn't get away from it. That was his curse. Is there a surrender in that? Like, he can't break away. It's the reason for the surrendering to your nature. It's like, well, let's put it this way. I think he, but what his surrender is at the end is he gives up the dream of, I'm going to live and be a normal person. He's going to have to find, as he rides out of the valley, some other way. I don't think it means for him. So it's again, kind of a sadder but wiser thing, kind of like the Jack Nicholson character at the end of Chinatown. You know, it's like he's now seen this corruption that he can never unsee. So in a way, he's better off than he was, and then he's now living in the real world. He's not deluding himself or anything, but at the same time, it's a sad world that he has to face now. You know, as you were telling that story, I was thinking about what people gossip about, and gossip as a window into the kinds of receptors that the human mind already has, and the sort of highways that people travel on in conversation as they try to analyze the world. And I was thinking about the trope of the kid from a wealthy family who has some sort of curse. Maybe they have some sort of crazy learning disability. Maybe they haven't really tortured relationship with their parents. And as I was thinking of just gossip over the last 20 years of my life, this has been a common form of gossip. Brendan, yeah, he's from a rich family, but he's got this problem with his parents. Sarah, yeah, you know, it looks like she's got everything. She's got that beautiful house on the beach and nandtucket, but you'll never believe what happened in the kitchen one night. You know what I mean? Yeah. And it then seems to just show up all over the place, which just gets me thinking that a lot of these tropes, the reason that they work, the reason why they feel true is because they're so easy to pattern match onto our own lives and what we see. I mean, really literature, books, movies or whatever. Where does it come from? Comes from real life, right? So, yeah, I mean, as you were saying that, I was thinking about JFK Jr. Right? If he was cursed with anything, it was that he was so good looking and brought so much charisma from his father and from the whole family. And I think in some way, you know, then he dies in that plane crash. I don't know. If I don't know if there's a direct causality there, but you're right that there is people bring some sort of a curse like as we'll get a deeper into the weeds, you know, if we go back into ancient Greece, the, I'm going to do this even if it's going to bore people to death. The great trilogy of the Aurestia is where at the start of the Trojan War, the first place called Agamemnon, Agamemnon is the King going to Troy and they are be calmed by adverse winds. And so he has to sacrifice his daughter, if a genia, to gain the wind. So this is the initial crime of that generation. Then he fights the war, he wins the war, but his wife at home, Clytemnestra knows he killed my daughter. He killed my beloved daughter. When Agamemnon comes home, the second play of the story, she, his wife, Clytemnestra's waiting for him, murders him and then lose him into the bathtub. There was a net over him, kills him, right? Now we go to the Jek's generation after that. His son Aurestis now feels like my mother has killed my father. I must avenge my father. He kills his mother. It's a story, I guess, of generational a curse going from generation to generation to generation. You know, you killed my father. I got to kill you. Well, this is, remember that band avenge sevenfold? I think that comes from in like Genesis five or Genesis six, Cain kills Abel. And then from the retribution of that, it's always multiplied by seven. And seven is sort of the number of completion and totality. And then I think it's like if you follow through with this murder, because it always, the violence always escalates. And then basically, it always does. It's a threat from God or something that basically is like cut it out right now so that it doesn't you'll get the avenge sevenfold in the murder and retribution. Interesting. Everything comes back to the Bible eventually. Well, my life. Yeah. But you know, let me go back to the Arcadian for a second. There's a, and the idea of a cursed person here. This is a quote that originally God me started on this book. And I'm going to talk about curses here. And this is from impetically speaking of going back to the ancient world where he says, there is a, and I carried this quote with me for like 40 years because I just knew there was a story in here somewhere. And impetically says there is a law of stern necessity, the immemorial ordinance of the gods made fast forever. And here's the law. He says, should any spirit, any, any person born to enduring life be fouled with sin of slaughter and I was killing somebody, three times 10,000 years, that soul shall wander and outcast from felicity condemned to mortal being. So in the story of the Arcadian arc, our hero, Telemann has been cursed, but it to live this lifetime lifetime. But he comes into this last lifetime when the Christian era has come. And there is a moment in the story where priest says somebody quotes this and says, this guy is doomed and he's got to live this out. And the priest says, no, he says because our savior has, has taken this eye for an eye, idea, and moved it to another level. Blessed are the poor and spirit for they shall see God, blessed are the merciful, the be attitudes for they shall receive mercy. And so he makes the case that this cursed character is now, we've moved beyond that ancient eye for an eye thing. So that's again, a way of dealing with a cursed character. How do we get them out of an all his lost moment and into some way that can move to a higher level? Yeah. Tell me about new self as a result of an extraordinary world. Ah, you've done your research, great. In sort of the classic hero's journey model of a story, the, if we think of let's say Wizard of Oz, the story starts out act one is the ordinary world. So it's Dorothy and Kansas got it at eye with their dog, Toto and bump it, a bump and then when the inciting incident happens, which is the tornado, the cyclone that comes and carries her away, that's the end of act one. And Dorothy is swept into the extraordinary world or Oz. Is this one that goes from black and white to technical? Yeah. or another one we could say like Rocky we were talking about first Rockies in the The ordinary world is as crumbum and Philadelphia. He gets the call to fight Apollo Creed and all of a sudden he's another, a whole other rocky right now. He's training, pump it up, pump it up, pump it up, pump it up. And what's interesting is, and this is, we can say this in our own lives, if you and I, if we moved from New York to California or if we met somebody in fell in love, we go from the ordinary world to the extraordinary world, right? And what happens is we become a different person when we cross that threshold, right? Like if someone were to say, let's say they were working as a copyrighter and advertising somewhere and they said, "I'm quitting my job and I'm going to become a novelist." They go from the ordinary world to this whole other world, right? But interestingly enough, they change. They really go from being a character to being a hero and not only do they see themselves differently, but the world sees them differently. They sort of sense that, you know, we've all had those moments in our life where we've kind of turned a page and to our amazement, people saw us differently and we see ourselves differently as well. And so that's, it's like without that moment, we don't have a story. That's really what a story is about. Otherwise it's just a status quo all the way through. I would say even in psychotherapy or something like that where we're trying to peel a wound or something like that, we start as kind of ourselves with our old bullshit story and somehow our therapist or our drink does something that makes us see. Or if we're, let's say we have an alcohol problem and we hit the moon, we say, "I'm quitting. This is it." You know, I'm going to A or wherever is, we become a different person. And in real life, in other words, not just in movies or books. So in that, the core idea that I was thinking about was identity. And it seems like something that you see in a lot of stories is there's a moment where we see the true identity. Strange enough, I was to give mean girls. Ridiculous example, I admit. But I was thinking of these stories like mean girls follow the same principles. Yeah. As Shakespeare and Homer. There's a reason it resonates. And basically what you have is you have the plastics. So the plastics are fake. And we know that Katie, when she gets to this high school in Chicago, she's sort of been this good girl from this good family, just moved from Africa and now she enters this high school. And now she becomes a fake plastic person so that she can be part of the plastics. And then there's that scene where she's at the, she's she's she's wearing a crown. Maybe it's like prom or something like that. And she basically rips apart the crown after she's basically ascended to the top of the fake game. She rips it apart. She says, I'm not that person. So why is everybody stressing over this thing? I mean, it's just plastic. It's really just. Sure. We've been watching this devolution of this high school girl and now we're like, wait, wow, the goodness, the righteousness that was inside of her. It actually is now being revealed. And that signals a big shift in the movie. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the end of of Shane if I go back to that where it reveals his, the world is revealed to him, the reality of his life is revealed to him at the end. And he finds a different identity that he had at the start. And it's always an identity in both the stories that they didn't expect. Huh. Right? You realize, oh, I'm really this person, you know, and I have to live with it. But yeah, it is about identity and names. Yeah. What do you really stand for? Yeah. I mean, isn't that what we're sort of, what are all of our journey is through life? We're looking for what's our calling? What are, who are we really? It's like the questions that Stenosolowski asked an actor and a, who am I? Why am I here? And what do I want? Hmm. Tell me about those. Yeah. Well, those are the questions that an actor playing a role is supposed to ask himself or herself as they enter any scene or as they prepare, you know, to act a scene. Who am I in this scene? Like Michael Corleone, the scene we were talking about. Who am I? I thought I was a marine officer that was going to marry my all American girlfriend, Kay. But now I realize, oh my God, I'm the son of Vito Corleone and my per places here with the family, with Sonny, with Tom, with Frado. And one of the things that came to mind is in that moment of showing true identity, there's a sacrifice that comes back to the ridiculous Mean Girls examples. It then means that she can't be. It means that she's not going to be the top girl in the top little click or whatever. She now has to say, okay, I'm this person. I have to renounce that. I have to rescind that. But I have these values and I'm going to go pursue those to help be the consequences. You know, I'm happy to accept them. Yeah. Which is a great ending. Yeah. In, in a lot of these stories, before that big moment, there's like, we sort of danced around this, but there's a quiet solo moment. That you think of the person who's in the bathroom at a party or something before they have to go out. They look in the mirror. They're like, you can do this, Steve. You can do this, David. You know, I got this. I got this. And they have this, this private moment. Now, in movies, we can see them kind of thinking and reflecting once again, back to the Bible, sort of Jesus in the Garden of Augustinem, sort of praying, basically saying, I mean, I think he's weeping then. And he's basically saying, oh, Lord, oh, Lord. You know, he's praying for every ounce of strength from the Father. And what are, how do those private moments show up? Where people retreat, they go solo, maybe they go inward. And it's there that they muster the courage and then step out to the public eye and to act with boldness and integrity. I mean, I think you're fit on something, David. I haven't really thought about this. But it is true that there does need to be that quiet moment, you know, and, um, I guess it is a moment when we leave the plane of the ego and we go to the higher plane, the plane of the illumine self or whatever it is before you step into the ring and actually, you know, before the third act starts, you know, there is a moment in the Godfather just before Michael kills the police chief and kills Salato. Where he's in the bathroom there and he finds the gun that's been placed for him behind the toilet tank. He stops and actually the soundtrack is of a subway car going by that goes louder, louder, louder, louder, louder. And he just comes his hair a little back a little bit and you see he's like, he's now about to cross the threshold to become Michael Corleone. Right. The God, the future Godfather that he was not before. Listen to this from Tolkien. Okay. It was at this point that Bilbo stopped going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards was nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in way. That's a great one. That's from Tolkien, huh? Yeah. Huh. With Bilbo. Yeah. Happens privately, secretly. And then you step out and I just, it's like the juxtaposition between the vulnerable, third, solo and the bold, confident, public person and the way those come together or something. And it's really about fears, isn't it? Yeah. It's about overcoming, facing whatever that fear is saying, okay, I'm going to die or whatever, but I've got to do it. The alternative is, you know, unthinkable. Well, something that you'd written about was this idea of beating up the hero. Hmm. Detective stories. Yeah. It's a convention of the detective story for sure. I'm not sure why, but if you watch any of those stories, you know, the hero always gets beaten up in various innovative, colorful ways. But there's another convention that's sort of like that that my partner Sean Coyne turned me on to called the hero at the mercy of the villain scene. Now, in James Bond movie, always has that. If you remember, there's one scene where James Bond is captured by the villain and they've got him flat on his back on some table with his leg spread and this laser beam is coming down, you know, that's the hero at the mercy of the villain scene. That is always a staple of a kind of a thriller genre, you know, where the hero's got to be captured by the villain. And I've applied that myself, right, where I will say, if I don't have that scene, I better have it. In a man and arm, it's the precursor to the Arcadian, the hero, the same guy, same guy gets crucified and they also take a bag of scorpions and tie them over his head through the whole thing. But aside from the torment of it, there's also an element in that scene where the hero and the villain really come face to face and kind of confront each other and they each express what the villains that gives his speech or whatever it is. And the hero says his response to that. And in many ways that's an all his loss moment too, 'cause we feel like, oh, if it's really done well, you say to yourself, like the hero is in some enclosed chamber and the water is rising, rising, rising. It can star wars, they were in the first one, they were this crushed garbage shoot, and you say to yourself, oh, they're ever gonna get out of this and somehow if you're the writer, you have to figure out a way to get them out of it. - Radio, come in, radio, radio. Radio, come on top. - Oh, where could it be? Radio, radio, will you come in? - Now, when you're thinking about, I don't know, the timeline of your story, we've talked about all these things, how as the writer, as the shaper of the story, are you placing these? How deliberate are you about that? - I think you're very deliberate about it. And a lot of times, I'll find, I bet other writers would say this too, if we think of like, it makes me, we have 20 or 30 kind of key scenes, I'll, after the first draft, I'll move them around. You know, I'll say, oh, I thought this one should be here, it really should be later, you know, that type of thing. But I think most writers, I would think, start at the end, you look at it, at least I do. - Yeah. - Or I'll say, where's the story going to? You know, like if it's, if it's Huckleberry Finn, it's gotta be the moment where he's supposed to write the letter that turns Jim the slave in, and he says, fuck this, I'm not gonna do it, right? Which was a great ending of a story, right? So then, if you would work backwards, you have to say, you have to establish that Huck, it's 1840 or 1830, Missouri, he's a complete believer in the cracker white versus black thing. So that we really have to establish that, so that this change at the end is really radical for him. It's gotta feel like he's going against everything he's been told this whole life, you know? And then we also have to have, through the middle of the story, a bunch of scenes where Jim, the runaway slave, proves to be a noble, honorable, great friend to Huck, wonderful guy, right? So that the choice of Huck at the end, am I gonna turn him in? You say, you can't turn him in, he's, I mean, if he was a prick, it'd be another story, but he's not. He's a, so the sort of structure of the story is, this is the end that we're gonna get to. And then, how do we, what do we need to set up for this? And then at the very beginning, we have like the most basic set up, like we'd introduce Huck, Finn, and his life, and so on. And then, and by the way, when we talked about the female carries the mystery, the female and Huck, Finn is the Mississippi, the great river that flows through America, right? And these guys are on the raft going down the Mississippi. And in the end, again, like I said, if you and I were standing on the shore looking out at the Mississippi, we would just be, it's a mystery, we'd just be at all, you know what, it's a river, it's, you know, God may understand who we don't. And as you're thinking about the through line of your story, setting the stakes, I mean, it's, I see how you can set stakes that are really big. But then, what does it look like to set, I don't know, more realistic stakes, 'cause actually the stakes in our lives are actually a lot more mundane. Yeah. I think actually when you do, and I'm guilty of this, you do an end of the world scenario, it's kind of a cheap shot, you know? It's like easy, sure. But it's much harder to do something like what you're talking about. But certainly, if you can establish that a certain small thing is super important to this character for whatever reason. And then put them in a crisis at the end, where they have to somehow choose something, then it can really work. Like, did you ever see a movie called "45 Years" with Tom Courtney? And I forget who, but it's about a marriage of a stayed English couple for 45 years. And the ending of the story was just, the husband reached to take her hand, and she pulls her hand away. That's the end of the story. And it's tremendously powerful, because she's the lead character, and she comes, they've been together for 45 years, and she realizes at the end of this thing that it was all false. It was all based on something that wasn't real. And she sort of frees herself from that by pulling her hand away. So it worked great, you know? But it's not a blockbuster. It's not going to be George Lucas film or anything like that. But yeah, you're right. But stakes sometimes very small things are life and death to you and me if we place meaning on certain things. One way to summarize everything we've talked about is that there's five aims of a writer to heighten the drama, make the internal external, give the story meaning, so like a theme, make it universal, and make it beautiful. And you wrote that when we pick a genre and work within its conventions, we automatically accomplish all five points above, assuming that we do a good job. Yeah, it's the way we do a good job. Ah, well that's true. But let me just hit on one point, which I've been thinking a little bit lately. The idea of making it beautiful. Even the most horrific scenes in written word or in movies are have to be beautiful in one way or another. If you think about Schindler's list, yeah. What could be more horrific than that? But it's a beautiful movie. Yeah. And you know that Spielberg and the cameraman and the lighting, they went to incredible pains to make up every frame work. I mean, 'cause if it's not beautiful, we are in a world of anxiety these days, right? With the politics and everything that's going on, ice and all this bullshit, you look at, you know, read the news that you're gonna kill yourself. But I think an antidote to anxiety is beauty. If we can a song, a piece of music, it's not unfortunately only lasts for the moment, but there is something about, and this must God must have built this into the world in some crazy way that it's gotta be beautiful. Pro's has to be beautiful, the rhythm has to be beautiful, the framing of the shot has to be beautiful, no matter how horrible it is. And somehow that beauty saves us in some crazy way. I don't know why. Okay, I get that. Make it beautiful, make it beautiful. But then as you're writing a book, you're writing the Arcadian and you're thinking, okay, how am I gonna write this? How am I gonna tell this story in a beautiful way? What do you tactically do in order to make that happen? Oh, that is a great question. I think that a lot of it has to do with the pros since you're working with words on paper. If it was a movie, it would be a different thing. You know, if we were doing Lawrence of Arabia, we would send our location scouts out to find spectacular shots in the desert or whatever. But in this story like the Arcadian is set in 15th century Spain because our former Roman legionary, the 10th legion of Rome in the year of the crucifixion was recruited from Spain. Spain was a province of Rome at that time of the Roman Empire was called Hispaniacetaria, Neurospane. And so they'll, I mentioned the horse earlier, the magical creature that draws him back to Spain. It's like if he's gonna be released from this curse, it must be released where it originally started where he originally enlisted and signed up. So now as I'm trying to write Spain, I'm trying to make it really beautiful. And the first few chapters of the story are really about the geography of this particular valley that it was a place where horses were revered where the great landowners raised cavalry horses and show horses and how everybody in the area worshiped the sangre, the blood lines of horses. And even the poorest farmer would have like one mare that he hoped with someday, you know. And so I'm trying to create a kind of a magical world. I'm not trying to create Spain as it maybe really was, but a kind of a Spain of the mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In which magical things can happen. And so I'm using, in this case, sort of old-fashioned prose. I'm not, I'm writing sort of like Don Quixote, like Servantes would have written in those days. So it's kind of formal. And hopefully if it works, it creates a little bit of a spell like rhythm and music or something like that. And hopefully it brings the reader under that spell and into this world where magical things can happen. So that's the beauty that I'm trying to produce. Make there, beautiful. - Right. - Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. - Here we go, David. Thank you very much for the great questions. And for really doing such in-depth research. You know, when we were talking about. about that show Bookworm and the great interviewer for that show Bookworm on KCRW who would read a writer's entire works before he would interview them. So I think you did a great job of getting under my skin and that stuff. And thanks a lot. This helped me. I told you I was thinking about doing a book that's kind of about this stuff. And I'm encouraged. I think I will. I didn't realize there was enough material there. Rock on. So yeah. Thanks a lot. [BLANK_AUDIO]