How to Tell a Good Story, as Explained by George Saunders, Ira Glass, Ken Burns, Scott Simon, Catherine Burns & Others

in Radio, Writing | March 21st, 2017

All of us instinc­tive­ly respond to sto­ries. This has both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive effects, but if we don’t under­stand it about our­selves, we’ve won’t ful­ly under­stand why peo­ple believe what they believe and do what they do. Even giv­en the deep human attach­ment to nar­ra­tive, can we clear­ly explain what a sto­ry is, or how to tell one? Acclaimed author George Saun­ders has giv­en the sub­ject a great deal of thought, some of which he lets us in on in the short film above, which Josh Jones pre­vi­ous­ly wrote about here on Open Cul­ture. “A good sto­ry,” he tells us, says “at many dif­fer­ent lev­els, ‘We’re both human beings. We’re in this crazy sit­u­a­tion called life that we don’t real­ly under­stand. Can we put our heads togeth­er and con­fer about it at a very high, non-bull­shit­ty lev­el?’ ”

At this point in his career, Saun­ders has tried out that approach to sto­ry using numer­ous dif­fer­ent tech­niques and in a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent con­texts, most recent­ly in his new nov­el Lin­coln in the Bar­do, which takes place in the after­math of the assas­si­na­tion of the tit­u­lar six­teenth Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. Few liv­ing cre­ators under­stand the appeal of Amer­i­can his­to­ry as a trove of sto­ry mate­r­i­al bet­ter than Ken Burns, author of long-form doc­u­men­taries like Jazz, Base­ball, and The Civ­il War, who finds that its “good guys have seri­ous flaws and the vil­lains are very com­pelling.”

And though he osten­si­bly works with only the facts, he acknowl­edges that “all sto­ry is manip­u­la­tion,” some of it desir­able manip­u­la­tion and some of it not so much, with the chal­lenge of telling the dif­fer­ence falling to the sto­ry­teller him­self.

“The com­mon sto­ry,” Burns says, “is ‘one plus one equals two.’ We get it. But all sto­ries — the real, gen­uine sto­ries — are about one and one equal­ing three.” Where his math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­la for sto­ry­telling empha­sizes the impor­tance of the unex­pect­ed, the one offered by Andrew Stan­ton, direc­tor of Pixar films like Find­ing Nemo, WALL‑E, and John Carter, empha­sizes the impor­tance of a “well-orga­nized absence of infor­ma­tion.” In the TED Talk just above  (which opens with a poten­tial­ly NSFW joke), he sug­gests always giv­ing the audi­ence “two plus two” instead of four, encour­ag­ing the audi­ence to do the sat­is­fy­ing work of putting the details of the sto­ry togeth­er them­selves while nev­er let­ting them real­ize they’re doing any work at all.

“Dra­ma is antic­i­pa­tion min­gled with uncer­tain­ty,” said the play­wright William Archer. Stan­ton quotes it in his talk, and the notion also seems to under­lie the views on sto­ry­telling held by This Amer­i­can Life cre­ator Ira Glass. In the inter­view above, he describes the process of telling a sto­ry as recount­ing a sequence of actions, of course, but also con­tin­u­al­ly throw­ing out ques­tions and answer­ing them all along the way, oscil­lat­ing between actions in the sto­ry and moments of reflec­tion on those actions which cast a lit­tle light on their mean­ing — a form sure­ly famil­iar to any­one who’s heard so much as a seg­ment of his radio show. And how do you become as skilled as he and his team at telling sto­ries? Do what he did: tell a huge num­ber of them, telling and telling and telling until you devel­op the killer instinct to mer­ci­less­ly sep­a­rate the tru­ly com­pelling ones from the rest.

Glass illus­trates the ben­e­fits of his lessons by play­ing some tape of a news report he pro­duced ear­ly in his career, high­light­ing all the ways in which he failed to tell its sto­ry prop­er­ly. He turned out to be cut out for some­thing slight­ly dif­fer­ent than straight-up report­ing, a job of which reporters like Scott Simon of Nation­al Pub­lic Radio’s Week­end Edi­tion have made an art. Simon takes his sto­ry­telling process apart in three and a half min­utes in the video just above: beyond pro­vid­ing such essen­tials as a strong begin­ning, vivid details, and a point lis­ten­ers can take away, he says, you’ve also got to con­sid­er the way you deliv­er the whole pack­age. Ide­al­ly, you’ll tell your sto­ry in “short, breath­able sec­tions,” which cre­ates an over­all rhythm for the audi­ence to fol­low, whether they’re sit­ting on the barstool beside you or tuned in on the oth­er side of the world.

What else does a good sto­ry need? Con­flict. Ten­sion. The feel­ing of “see­ing two oppos­ing forces col­lide.” Hon­esty. Grace. The ring of truth. All these qual­i­ties and more come up in the Atlantic’s “Big Ques­tion” video above, which asks a vari­ety of nota­bles to name the most impor­tant ele­ment of a good sto­ry. Respon­ders include House of Cards writer and pro­duc­er Beau Willimon, The Moth artis­tic direc­tor Cather­ine Burns, PBS pres­i­dent Paula Kerg­er, and for­mer Dis­ney CEO Michael Eis­ner. Since humans have told sto­ries since we first began, as Saun­ders put it, con­fer­ring about this crazy sit­u­a­tion called life, all man­ner of sto­ry­telling rules, tips, and tricks have come and gone, but the core prin­ci­ples have remained the same. As to whether we now under­stand life any bet­ter… well, isn’t that one of those unan­swered ques­tions that keeps us on the edge of our seats?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Saun­ders Demys­ti­fies the Art of Sto­ry­telling in a Short Ani­mat­ed Doc­u­men­tary

Ira Glass, the Host of This Amer­i­can Life, Breaks Down the Fine Art of Sto­ry­telling

Ken Burns on the Art of Sto­ry­telling: “It’s Lying Twen­ty-Four Times a Sec­ond”

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Sto­ry

Kurt Von­negut Dia­grams the Shape of All Sto­ries in a Master’s The­sis Reject­ed by U. Chica­go

Pixar & Khan Acad­e­my Offer a Free Online Course on Sto­ry­telling

John Berg­er (RIP) and Susan Son­tag Take Us Inside the Art of Sto­ry­telling (1983)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How Cormac McCarthy Became a Copy-Editor for Scientific Books and One of the Most Influential Articles in Economics

in Economics, Literature, Writing | March 1st, 2017

Cre­ative Com­mons image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

I first came to know the work of Cor­mac McCarthy through the 1973 nov­el Child of God, a por­trait of a ter­ri­fy­ing­ly alien­at­ed lon­er who becomes a ser­i­al killer. The book so immers­es read­ers in the dank, claus­tro­pho­bic world of its pro­tag­o­nist, Lester Bal­lard, that one can almost smell the dirt and rot­ting flesh. Next, I read Blood Merid­i­an, McCarthy’s psy­che­del­i­cal­ly bru­tal epic about a mer­ce­nary band of scalp hunters who mas­sa­cred Native Amer­i­cans in the mid-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry South­west. In McCarthy’s avalanche of prose—which lacks com­mas, apos­tro­phes, quo­ta­tion marks, and most every oth­er mark of punctuation—long pas­sages of grim death and car­nage become hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry trance-induc­ing incan­ta­tions.

It’s nev­er a good idea to iden­ti­fy an author too close­ly with their fic­tion; the most dis­turbing­ly effec­tive works of hor­ror and mad­ness have very often been designed by writ­ers of the high­est emo­tion­al sen­si­tiv­i­ty and crit­i­cal intel­li­gence. This is cer­tain­ly the case with McCarthy, whose work plumbs the deep­est exis­ten­tial abysses. Nev­er­the­less, I har­bored cer­tain anx­ious expec­ta­tions of him, unsure if he was a writer I’d ever actu­al­ly want to meet. So like many oth­ers, I was more than a lit­tle puz­zled by McCarthy’s deci­sion to give his first and only TV inter­view in 2007 on Oprah Win­frey’s wild­ly pop­u­lar plat­form.

But among the many things we learned from their pleas­ant con­ver­sa­tion is that McCarthy doesn’t care much for lit­er­ary soci­ety. He doesn’t like writ­ers so much as he loves writ­ing and think­ing, of all kinds. He spends most of his time with sci­en­tists, keeping—as we not­ed in a post last week—an office at a think tank called the San­ta Fe Insti­tute and doing most of his writ­ing there on a noisy old type­writer. While devel­op­ing rela­tion­ships with physi­cists, McCarthy took an inter­est in their writ­ing, and vol­un­teered to copy-edit sev­er­al sci­en­tif­ic books. He over­hauled the prose in physi­cist Lawrence Krauss’s Quan­tum Man, a biog­ra­phy of Richard Feyn­man, promis­ing, says Krauss, that he “could excise all the excla­ma­tion points and semi­colons, both of which he said have no place in lit­er­a­ture.”

In 2005, McCarthy read the man­u­script of the Har­vard physi­cist Lisa Randall’s first book, Warped Pas­sages: Unrav­el­ing the Mys­ter­ies of the Universe’s Hid­den Dimen­sions. He “gave it a good copy-edit,” Ran­dall said, and “real­ly smoothed the prose.” Lat­er he did the same for her sec­ond book, Knock­ing on Heaven’s Door. Dur­ing that expe­ri­ence, she notes, “we had some nice con­ver­sa­tions about the mate­r­i­al. In fact, I saw a quote where he used a physics exam­ple I had giv­en in response to a ques­tion about truth and beau­ty.”

Per­haps McCarthy sees this avo­ca­tion as a chal­lenge and an oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn. Per­haps he’s also doing research for his own work. His lat­est project, The Pas­sen­ger, includes a char­ac­ter who is a Los Alam­os physi­cist. But what about anoth­er, sur­pris­ing­ly out-of-the-blue edi­to­r­i­al job he took on in 1996? Before he applied his aus­ter­i­ties to Krauss and Randall’s work, he received an arti­cle from the­o­ret­i­cal econ­o­mist and friend W. Bri­an Arthur. The piece, sched­uled to be pub­lished in the Har­vard Busi­ness Review, was titled “Increas­ing Returns and the New World of Busi­ness.”

After mail­ing McCarthy the arti­cle, Arthur called and asked him how he liked it. “There was a silence on the line,” he tells Rick Tet­zeli in an inter­view for Fast Com­pa­ny, “and then he said, ‘Would you be inter­est­ed in some edi­to­r­i­al help on that?’” The two spent four hours going over the writ­ing. “Let’s say the piece was bet­ter for all the hours Cor­mac and I spent por­ing over every sen­tence,” Arthur says, not­ing that his edi­tor called in a “slight pan­ic” after hear­ing about the col­lab­o­ra­tion. You can read the full arti­cle here. It’s “a lot punchi­er and more sharply word­ed than you might expect, giv­en its sub­ject mat­ter,” writes The Onion’s A.V. Club. It also con­tains a lot more punc­tu­a­tion than we might expect, giv­en its copy-edi­tor’s phi­los­o­phy.

“Increas­ing Returns and the New World of Busi­ness” became one of Har­vard Busi­ness Review’s “most influ­en­tial arti­cles” Tet­zeli writes. “Even now, the the­o­ry of increas­ing returns is as impor­tant as ever: it’s at the heart of the suc­cess of com­pa­nies such as Google, Face­book, Uber, Ama­zon, and Airbnb.” Did McCarthy’s encounter with Arthur’s the­o­ry appear in his lat­er fic­tion? Who knows. Per­haps where Arthur’s vision of eco­nom­ic growth pre­dict­ed the mas­sive tech giants to come, McCarthy’s keen mind saw the ever-increas­ing prof­its of busi­ness savvy drug car­tels like those in No Coun­try for Old Men and his Rid­ley Scott col­lab­o­ra­tion The Coun­selor.

via The A.V. Club

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cor­mac McCarthy Explains Why He Worked Hard at Not Work­ing: How 9‑to‑5 Jobs Lim­it Your Cre­ative Poten­tial      

Cor­mac McCarthy’s Three Punc­tu­a­tion Rules, and How They All Go Back to James Joyce

Wern­er Her­zog and Cor­mac McCarthy Talk Sci­ence and Cul­ture

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Cormac McCarthy Explains Why He Worked Hard at Not Working: How 9‑to‑5 Jobs Limit Your Creative Potential

in Creativity, Literature, Writing | February 27th, 2017

Last sum­mer, a rumor cir­cu­lat­ed that Cor­mac McCarthy, one of America’s most beloved liv­ing writ­ers, had passed away. In the midst of a dev­as­tat­ing year for famous artists and their fans, the announce­ment appeared on Twit­ter, but it “was, in fact, a hoax.” As McCarthy’s publisher—recently merged jug­ger­naut Pen­guin Ran­dom House—con­firmed, the author of such mod­ern clas­sics as Blood Merid­i­an, All the Pret­ty Hors­es, and No Coun­try for Old Men “is alive and well and still doesn’t care about Twit­ter.” The lit­er­ary com­mu­ni­ty is bet­ter off not only for McCarthy’s good health, but for his dis­re­gard of what may be the most fiendish­ly dis­tract­ing social media plat­form of them all. He is still hard at work, on a nov­el called The Pas­sen­ger, ten­ta­tive­ly slat­ed for release this year.

You can hear excerpts of The Pas­sen­ger read in the dim, shaky video below, from an event in 2015 at the San­ta Fe Insti­tute, an inde­pen­dent sci­en­tif­ic think tank where McCarthy keeps an office and where he has plied a sec­ondary trade as a copy-edi­tor for sci­ence-themed books, includ­ing Quan­tum Man, physi­cist Lawrence Krauss’s biog­ra­phy of Richard Feyn­man. (McCarthy’s “knowl­edge of physics and maths,” writes Ali­son Flood at The Guardian, is said to exceed “that of many pro­fes­sion­als in the field.”) McCarthy’s lat­est work seems like a depar­ture for him.


His ear­li­er nov­els mined the rich­ness of South­ern Goth­ic and West­ern tra­di­tions, and “have sub­tly woven in sci­ence,” writes Babak Dowlat­shahi at Newsweek. But The Pas­sen­ger “will place sci­ence in the fore­ground.” San­ta Fe Insti­tute pres­i­dent David Krakauer calls it “full-blown Cor­mac 3.0—a math­e­mat­i­cal [and] ana­lyt­i­cal nov­el.”

So we know Cor­mac McCarthy is a genius, but how is it that he found the time to become a Pulitzer Prize, Nation­al Book Award, and Guggen­heim and MacArthur Fel­low­ship-win­ning nov­el­ist and, on the side, a stu­dent of the­o­ret­i­cal physics and math? His secret involves more than stay­ing off Twit­ter. As McCarthy tells Oprah Win­frey in the video at the top of the post, excerpt­ed from his first tele­vi­sion inter­view ever in 2007, he has made his work the cen­tral focus of his life, to the exclu­sion of every­thing else, includ­ing mon­ey and pub­lic adu­la­tion from fans and admir­ers. For exam­ple, he answers a ques­tion about why he turned down lucra­tive speak­ing engage­ments with, “I was busy. I had oth­er things to do.”

It’s not that I don’t like things, I mean some things are very nice, but they cer­tain­ly take a dis­tant sec­ond place to being able to live your life and being able to do what you want to do. I always knew that I didn’t want to work.

How did he pull off not work­ing? “You have to be ded­i­cat­ed… I thought, ‘you’re just here once, life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what some­body else wants you to do is not the way to live it.’” McCarthy doesn’t “have any advice for any­body” about how to avoid the dai­ly grind, except, he says, “if you’re real­ly ded­i­cat­ed, you can prob­a­bly do it.” As Oprah puts it, “you have worked at not work­ing?” To which he replies, “absolute­ly, it’s the num­ber one pri­or­i­ty.”

Lest we imme­di­ate­ly dis­miss McCarthy’s phi­los­o­phy as clue­less­ness or priv­i­lege, we should bear in mind that he will­ing­ly endured extreme and “tru­ly, tru­ly bleak” pover­ty to keep work­ing at not working—or work­ing, rather, on the work he want­ed to do. There’s a bit more to becom­ing a mul­ti­ple award-win­ning nov­el­ist and MacArthur “Genius” than sim­ply avoid­ing the 9‑to‑5. But McCarthy sug­gests that unless artists make their own work their first pri­or­i­ty, and mate­r­i­al com­fort and eco­nom­ic secu­ri­ty a “dis­tant sec­ond,” they may nev­er tru­ly find out what they’re capa­ble of.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Charles Bukows­ki Rails Against 9‑to‑5 Jobs in a Bru­tal­ly Hon­est Let­ter (1986)

The Employ­ment: A Prize-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion About Why We’re So Dis­en­chant­ed with Work Today

Cor­mac McCarthy’s Three Punc­tu­a­tion Rules, and How They All Go Back to James Joyce

Wern­er Her­zog and Cor­mac McCarthy Talk Sci­ence and Cul­ture

Wern­er Her­zog Reads From Cor­mac McCarthy’s All the Pret­ty Hors­es

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Carrie Fisher’s Long Career as a Writer, Screenwriter, and Hollywood Fixer: “I’m a Writer” First and Foremost

in Film, Writing | December 28th, 2016

By now the news of Car­rie Fisher’s death has hit hard all over the world. It’s true that for an entire gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple, her break­out role at 19 as Princess Leia in the orig­i­nal Star Wars tril­o­gy has made her a sci-fi icon and a child­hood crush—both roles she longed to escape. Trib­ute after trib­ute on social media and else­where remind­ed us almost imme­di­ate­ly after Tuesday’s announce­ment that her life and work have had a much wider impact, even on peo­ple who have nev­er even seen a Star Wars film.

Fisher’s unabashed­ly can­did pub­lic con­ver­sa­tions about her per­son­al strug­gles with sub­stance abuse and bipo­lar dis­or­der made her a pow­er­ful advo­cate for oth­ers who felt ashamed to talk about these too-often-taboo sub­jects and often too ashamed to seek help. Much like George Michael, anoth­er celebri­ty mourned by mil­lions this hol­i­day sea­son, Fish­er refused to be shamed into silence or to capit­u­late to bul­lies and big­ots. Instead she prac­ti­cal­ly bloomed with earthy charm and wit as she co-opt­ed tabloid char­ac­ter assas­si­na­tion and turned it into her own form of auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal art and ther­a­peu­tic out­reach.

Her return to the reboot­ed Star Wars fran­chise last year as the wise, aging Gen­er­al Leia Organa ele­vat­ed the con­ver­sa­tion about old­er women in Hol­ly­wood, after her response to some vicious com­ments about her looks made her haters look small, mean, and stunt­ed. Fish­er’s tal­ent for Oscar Wilde-wor­thy apho­risms that sliced right through lay­ers of insuf­fer­able bull­shit also led to one of her most suc­cess­ful career stints, as a writer, script doc­tor, and Hol­ly­wood fix­er dur­ing a “long, very lucra­tive episode,” as she told Newsweek in a 2008 inter­view. (In true Car­rie Fish­er fash­ion, she brought these life expe­ri­ences to an Emmy-nom­i­nat­ed guest turn on an episode of 30 Rock as her fun­ni­est char­ac­ter, Rose­mary Howard.)

It’s rumored that Fish­er revised her lines in George Lucas’ noto­ri­ous­ly wordy Star Wars scripts. (Although one image of Empire Strikes Back edits pur­port­ed to be in her hand actu­al­ly con­tains revi­sions by the film’s direc­tor Irvin Ker­sh­n­er.) But her for­mal screen­writ­ing career began in 1990, when she adapt­ed her best­selling 1987 auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal nov­el, Post­cards from the Edge, into the screen­play for a Meryl Streep-star­ring film. The project led to rewrit­ing work on high-pro­file come­dies through­out the next decade. In addi­tion to a cred­it for one of those unwieldy Lucas scripts for The Phan­tom Men­ace in 1999, Fish­er helped rework films like Hook, Sis­ter Act, Made in Amer­i­ca, So I Mar­ried an Axe Mur­der­er, The Wed­ding Singer, and sev­er­al more.

Always a fierce­ly out­spo­ken crit­ic of the way Hol­ly­wood treats women, Fish­er fought to make female char­ac­ters more three-dimen­sion­al. In a Web­MD inter­view, she was asked, “What does it take to heal bad dia­logue?” Her pithy answer: “Make the women smarter and the love scenes bet­ter.” As a peace­mak­er for trou­bled pro­duc­tions, how­ev­er, she often advised women actors to use diplomacy—with her own spin on the con­cept. When Whoopi Gold­berg feud­ed with Disney’s Jef­frey Katzen­berg, for exam­ple, Fish­er advised, “Send Jef­frey a hatch­et and say, ‘Please bury this on both our behalfs.’” Gold­berg thought it over, and “the next day Katzen­berg received his hatch­et. With­in a few days a token of Katzenberg’s respect arrived at her front door: two enor­mous brass balls.”

Sto­ries like this one, and many more uproar­i­ous and often per­son­al­ly self-destruc­tive episodes, formed the basis for Fisher’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal best­sellers, includ­ing her mem­oir Wish­ful Drink­ing, which also became a one-woman Broad­way show, then an HBO spe­cial (see an excerpt at the top). She has always won over crit­ics as an actress, and she made a wry kind of peace with her eter­nal fame as Princess Leia, imbu­ing the char­ac­ter with renewed grav­i­tas and sen­si­tiv­i­ty in the year before her death. But she did not see her­self prin­ci­pal­ly as an actress. “I’m a writer,” she told Web­MD. Asked whom she’d choose to share “con­fined quar­ters” with from his­to­ry, she answered—with her win­ning com­bi­na­tion of dis­arm­ing sin­cer­i­ty and wink­ing self-aware­ness—“Samuel Tay­lor Coleridge. He was man­ic-depres­sive, too.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch a Young Car­rie Fish­er (RIP) Audi­tion for Star Wars (1975)      

Watch the Very First Trail­ers for Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back & Return of the Jedi (1976–83)

The Com­plete Star Wars “Fil­mu­men­tary”: A 6‑Hour, Fan-Made Star Wars Doc­u­men­tary, with Behind-the-Scenes Footage & Com­men­tary

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Stephen King Explains the Key to His Creativity: Not Losing the Dream-State Thinking All Children Are Born With

in Psychology, Writing | December 27th, 2016

While noth­ing could make me per­son­al­ly want to return to child­hood, chil­dren do, for bet­ter or for worse, per­ceive the world more vivid­ly than adults. The best writ­ing for kids makes rich nar­ra­tive use of that fact, as do sto­ries about but not for kids by writ­ers who haven’t for­got­ten their pre-grown-up selves’ expe­ri­ence of real­i­ty. Stephen King, for instance, hard­ly writes chil­dren’s lit­er­a­ture, but his nov­els about the fear that seeps into every cor­ner of work­ing-class Amer­i­ca often include very young char­ac­ters. Not only does King write plau­si­bly from their psy­cho­log­i­cal point of view, he uses that point of view as an engine of his entire project.

King, in a 1989 inter­view on WAM­C’s Pub­lic Radio Book Show, elab­o­rat­ed on “the two things that inter­est me about child­hood,” the first being that “it’s a secret world that exists by its own rules and lives in its own cul­ture, and the sec­ond that “we for­get what it is to be a child and we for­get that life, which is kind of exot­ic and strange.” Though read­ers often ask him what ago­nies his child­hood must have vis­it­ed upon him that spurred him to write such vivid­ly hor­rif­ic fic­tion, King does­n’t remem­ber any­thing wrong with his for­ma­tive years. But he does remem­ber “that we think in a dif­fer­ent way as chil­dren. We tend to think around cor­ners instead of in straight lines.”

We see these dif­fer­ences ani­mat­ed in the Blank on Blank video at the top of the post, which envi­sions the adult King in the world of imag­i­na­tion that kids instinc­tive­ly inhab­it and out of which they even­tu­al­ly grow, but to which he reg­u­lar­ly returns to write his sto­ries. “Some­times for a kid, the short­est dis­tance between two points is not a straight line and that’s the way that we think and dream,” he says. “As chil­dren we tend to live in this kind of dream state [ … ] and because I equate that sort of dream state with a height­ened sort of men­tal state, I make this easy cross-con­nec­tion between child­hood and strange pow­ers, para­nor­mal pow­ers or what­ev­er, and it has been suc­cess­ful as a fic­tion­al device.”

As the source of such best­sellers as Car­rie, The Stand, Chris­tine, It, the Dark Tow­er series, and count­less oth­er works, it’s been suc­cess­ful to say the least. If con­nect­ing one thing to anoth­er in new ways — be those things peo­ple, places, events, ideas, feel­ings, or what­ev­er else — con­sti­tutes the cen­tral act of cre­ation, then it makes sense that the nat­u­ral­ly asso­cia­tive nature of a child’s imag­i­na­tion, har­nessed to an adult’s expe­ri­ence and dis­ci­pline, can pro­duce such abun­dant and wide­ly res­o­nant results. No coin­ci­dence, sure­ly, that young­sters unable to pay atten­tion to the lin­ear pro­gres­sion of the class­room get labeled “dream­ers,” a ten­den­cy that King has used to his advan­tage — though he seems to have got most of his tex­tu­al mileage out of the night­mares.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writ­ers

Stephen King Writes A Let­ter to His 16-Year-Old Self: “Stay Away from Recre­ation­al Drugs”

Stephen King on the Mag­ic Moment When a Young Writer Reads a Pub­lished Book and Says: “This Sucks. I Can Do Bet­ter.”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Nietzsche’s 10 Rules for Writing with Style (1882)

in Philosophy, Psychology, Writing | December 19th, 2016

The life of Russ­ian-born poet, nov­el­ist, crit­ic, and first female psy­chol­o­gist Lou Andreas-Salomé has pro­vid­ed fod­der for both sala­cious spec­u­la­tion and intel­lec­tu­al dra­ma in film and on the page for the amount of roman­tic atten­tion she attract­ed from Euro­pean intel­lec­tu­als like philoso­pher Paul Rée, poet Rain­er Maria Rilke, and Friedrich Niet­zsche. Emo­tion­al­ly intense Niet­zsche became infat­u­at­ed with Salomé, pro­posed mar­riage, and, when she declined, broke off their rela­tion­ship in abrupt Niet­zschean fash­ion.

For her part, Salomé so val­ued these friend­ships she made a pro­pos­al of her own: that she, Niet­zsche and Rée, writes D.A. Bar­ry at 3:AM Mag­a­zine, “live togeth­er in a celi­bate house­hold where they might dis­cuss phi­los­o­phy, lit­er­a­ture and art.” The idea scan­dal­ized Nietzsche’s sis­ter and his social cir­cle and may have con­tributed to the “pas­sion­ate crit­i­cism” Salomé’s 1894 bio­graph­i­cal study, Friedrich Niet­zsche: The Man and His Works, received. The “much maligned” work deserves a reap­praisal, Bar­ry argues, as “a psy­cho­log­i­cal por­trait.”

In Niet­zsche, Salomé wrote, we see “sor­row­ful ail­ing and tri­umphal recov­ery, incan­des­cent intox­i­ca­tion and cool con­scious­ness. One sens­es here the close entwin­ing of mutu­al con­tra­dic­tions; one sens­es the over­flow­ing and vol­un­tary plunge of over-stim­u­lat­ed and tensed ener­gies into chaos, dark­ness and ter­ror, and then an ascend­ing urge toward the light and most ten­der moments.” We might see this pas­sage as charged by the remem­brance of a friend, with whom she once “climbed Monte Sacro,” she claimed, in 1882, “where he told her of the con­cept of the Eter­nal Recur­rence ‘in a qui­et voice with all the signs of deep­est hor­ror.’”

We should also, per­haps pri­mar­i­ly, see Salomé’s impres­sions as an effect of Nietzsche’s tur­bu­lent prose, reach­ing its apoth­e­o­sis in his exper­i­men­tal­ly philo­soph­i­cal nov­el, Thus Spake Zarathus­tra. As a the­o­rist of the embod­i­ment of ideas, of their inex­tri­ca­ble rela­tion to the phys­i­cal and the social, Niet­zsche had some very spe­cif­ic ideas about lit­er­ary style, which he com­mu­ni­cat­ed to Salomé in an 1882 note titled “Toward the Teach­ing of Style.” Well before writ­ers began issu­ing “sim­i­lar sets of com­mand­ments,” writes Maria Popo­va at Brain Pick­ings, Niet­zsche “set down ten styl­is­tic rules of writ­ing,” which you can find, in their orig­i­nal list form, below.

1. Of prime neces­si­ty is life: a style should live.

2. Style should be suit­ed to the spe­cif­ic per­son with whom you wish to com­mu­ni­cate. (The law of mutu­al rela­tion.)

3. First, one must deter­mine pre­cise­ly “what-and-what do I wish to say and present,” before you may write. Writ­ing must be mim­ic­ry.

4. Since the writer lacks many of the speaker’s means, he must in gen­er­al have for his mod­el a very expres­sive kind of pre­sen­ta­tion of neces­si­ty, the writ­ten copy will appear much paler.

5. The rich­ness of life reveals itself through a rich­ness of ges­tures. One must learn to feel every­thing — the length and retard­ing of sen­tences, inter­punc­tu­a­tions, the choice of words, the paus­ing, the sequence of argu­ments — like ges­tures.

6. Be care­ful with peri­ods! Only those peo­ple who also have long dura­tion of breath while speak­ing are enti­tled to peri­ods. With most peo­ple, the peri­od is a mat­ter of affec­ta­tion.

7. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.

8. The more abstract a truth which one wish­es to teach, the more one must first entice the sens­es.

9. Strat­e­gy on the part of the good writer of prose con­sists of choos­ing his means for step­ping close to poet­ry but nev­er step­ping into it.

10. It is not good man­ners or clever to deprive one’s read­er of the most obvi­ous objec­tions. It is very good man­ners and very clever to leave it to one’s read­er alone to pro­nounce the ulti­mate quin­tes­sence of our wis­dom.

As with all such pre­scrip­tions, we are free to take or leave these rules as we see fit. But we should not ignore them. While Nietzsche’s per­spec­tivism has been (mis)interpreted as wan­ton sub­jec­tiv­i­ty, his ven­er­a­tion for antiq­ui­ty places a high val­ue on for­mal con­straints. His prose, we might say, resides in that ten­sion between Dionysian aban­don and Apol­lon­ian cool, and his rules address what lib­er­al arts pro­fes­sors once called the Triv­i­um: gram­mar, rhetoric, and log­ic: the three sup­ports of mov­ing, expres­sive, per­sua­sive writ­ing.

Salomé was so impressed with these apho­ris­tic rules that she includ­ed them in her biog­ra­phy, remark­ing, “to exam­ine Nietzsche’s style for caus­es and con­di­tions means far more than exam­in­ing the mere form in which his ideas are expressed; rather, it means that we can lis­ten to his inner sound­ings.” Isn’t this what great writ­ing should feel like?

Salomé wrote in her study that “Niet­zsche not only mas­tered lan­guage but also tran­scend­ed its inad­e­qua­cies.” (As Niet­zsche him­self com­ment­ed in 1886, notes Hugo Dro­chon, he need­ed to invent “a lan­guage of my very own.”) Nietzsche’s bold-yet-dis­ci­plined writ­ing found a com­ple­ment in Salomé’s bold­ly keen analy­sis. From her we can also per­haps glean anoth­er prin­ci­ple: “No mat­ter how calum­nious the pub­lic attacks on her,” writes Bar­ry, “par­tic­u­lar­ly from [his sis­ter] Elis­a­beth Förster-Niet­zsche dur­ing the Nazi peri­od in Ger­many, Salomé did not respond to them.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dai­ly Habits of High­ly Pro­duc­tive Philoso­phers: Niet­zsche, Marx & Immanuel Kant

Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Clas­sic Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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J.M. Coetzee on the Pleasures of Writing: Total Engagement, Hard Thought & Productiveness

in Books, Literature, Writing | November 24th, 2016

Mar­tin Amis once crit­i­cized his fel­low nov­el­ist J.M. Coet­zee for writ­ing in a style “pred­i­cat­ed on trans­mit­ting absolute­ly no plea­sure.” This con­fused those of us read­ers who enjoy both men’s books, but then British tra­di­tion, of which Amis has been an inher­i­tor as well as a crit­ic, says that if some­one gets put on a pedestal, you must at least try to knock them down. The South African Coet­zee, win­ner of one Nobel Prize and two Book­ers, does­n’t exact­ly want for acclaim, but his stark prose and ascetic, ultra-seri­ous images hard­ly make him seem like an author drunk on his own lit­er­ary pow­er.

In a con­tro­ver­sial pro­file, Coet­zee’s coun­try­man Rian Malan wrote that “a col­league who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once.” We might expect the author of books like Wait­ing for the Bar­bar­ians, Dis­grace, and Eliz­a­beth Costel­lo to declare what he declares in the inter­view clip above: “Writ­ing, in itself, as an activ­i­ty, is nei­ther beau­ti­ful nor con­sol­ing. It’s indus­try.” Yet he does cred­it it with cer­tain plea­sures, “the plea­sures of total engage­ment, hard thought, ver­i­fi­able activ­i­ty, ver­i­fi­able results. Pro­duc­tive­ness.”

“Hav­ing writ­ten the book, being able to look back on hav­ing com­plet­ed the book, may or may not be con­sol­ing, but writ­ing a book is quite dif­fer­ent.” Work, asks the inter­view­er? “Yes. It’s good work.” And why do this work in the first place? Coet­zee would advise against the mis­sion of “trans­form­ing the world into the world as it should be. That would be too much of a task if one under­took it every time.” He finds “grasp­ing the world as it is, putting it with­in a cer­tain frame, tam­ing it to a cer­tain extent” — tam­ing “its wild­ness, its dis­or­der, its chaos” — “quite enough of an ambi­tion.”

These words come from an episode of the Dutch doc­u­men­tary series Of Beau­ty and Con­so­la­tion on Coet­zee which aired in 2000, after the pub­li­ca­tion of Boy­hood but before that of Youth and Sum­mer­time, the books of his tril­o­gy of par­tial­ly fic­tion­al­ized “autre­bi­og­ra­phy” in which he grasps frames, and tames the events of his own expe­ri­ence. “I haven’t for­got­ten the mis­eries of my child­hood,” he says, going on to insist that mis­ery has no beau­ty in itself. “I have plen­ty of hap­py moments in my child­hood, many of which are in the book. The rich­ness of those moments depends very heav­i­ly on their being embed­ded in a cer­tain life. A book is a way to bring that life to life,” in its plea­sures and sor­rows alike.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read and Hear Famous Writ­ers (and Arm­chair Sports­men) J.M. Coet­zee and Paul Auster’s Cor­re­spon­dence

Lists of the Best Sen­tences — Open­ing, Clos­ing, and Oth­er­wise — in Eng­lish-Lan­guage Nov­els

The Read­er: A Touch­ing South African TV Com­mer­cial Cel­e­brates Lit­er­a­cy and Scotch

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Decoding the Screenplays of The Shining, Moonrise Kingdom & The Dark Knight: Watch Lessons from the Screenplay

in Film, Writing | November 3rd, 2016

“A screen­play isn’t meant to be read,” said no less a direct­ing-screen­writ­ing auteur than Stan­ley Kubrick. “It’s to be real­ized on film.” The quote comes up in “The Shin­ing — Qui­et­ly Going Insane Togeth­er,” an episode of the video essay series Lessons from the Screen­play. Cre­ator Michael Tuck­er uses it to explain his lack of access to the actu­al “shoot­ing script” of the film, mean­ing the sort of script typ­i­cal­ly writ­ten before pro­duc­tion and then more or less adhered to on set. But Kubrick worked dif­fer­ent­ly. On his projects “the words of the script and the design of the film were cre­at­ed togeth­er.” (Or as star Jack Nichol­son says in a bit of archival footage, “I quit usin’ my script. I just take the ones they type up each day.”)

Tuck­er goes on to break down The Shin­ing’s writ­ing process in a way that will fas­ci­nate not just screen­writ­ers but any­one with an inter­est in artis­tic struc­ture, begin­ning with the seg­men­ta­tion implied by the film’s mem­o­rably stark title cards: “THE INTERVIEW,” “THURSDAY,” “8am,” and so on. He does this in ser­vice of one impor­tant over­ar­ch­ing ques­tion: “What, exact­ly is so creepy about The Shin­ing?” (I’ve been ask­ing it myself ever since watch­ing it at a Hal­loween par­ty near­ly twen­ty years ago.) In “Moon­rise King­dom: Where Sto­ry Meets Style” he gets into the ques­tion of what sto­ry­telling func­tions Ander­son­’s sig­na­ture abun­dance of vivid, whim­si­cal, or askew details per­form, and how they do it effec­tive­ly.

As far as what makes Christo­pher Nolan’s sec­ond Bat­man movie The Dark Knight work so well, Tuck­er has the answer in two words: the Jok­er. Dif­fer­ent actors have por­trayed Bat­man’s most famous rival with dif­fer­ent lev­els of effec­tive­ness, with Heath Ledger’s Jok­er gen­er­al­ly acknowl­edged as the Jok­er, or at least one of the Jok­ers, to beat. But like any char­ac­ter, this Jok­er began on the page, and in “The Dark Knight — Cre­at­ing the Ulti­mate Antag­o­nist,” we learn which screen­writ­ing guru-approved qual­i­ties instilled there give him so much pow­er: his excep­tion­al skill at attack­ing Bat­man’s weak­ness­es, how he pres­sures Bat­man into dif­fi­cult choic­es, and how he and Bat­man ulti­mate­ly com­pete for the same goal, the soul of Gotham, and become two sides of the same coin.

You can learn oth­er lessons that Tuck­er draws from the screen­plays of movies like Night­crawler, Gone Girl, Inde­pen­dence Day, Ghost­busters, and a two-parter on Amer­i­can Beau­ty. While ele­ments of cin­e­ma like the direct­ing, the act­ing, the edit­ing, and even the music might cap­ture our atten­tion more aggres­sive­ly, we should­n’t for­get that every nar­ra­tive film, large or small, tra­di­tion­al or uncon­ven­tion­al, grows from words some­one wrote down. “It’s not what a movie is about,” declared Roger Ebert, “it’s how it is about it” — and the deci­sions of how to be about it hap­pen in the screen­play.

via The Over­look Hotel

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s Advice to Aspir­ing Film­mak­ers: Write, Write, Write and Read

10 Tips From Bil­ly Wilder on How to Write a Good Screen­play

Woody Allen’s Type­writer, Scis­sors and Sta­pler: The Great Film­mak­er Shows Us How He Writes

How Ray Brad­bury Wrote the Script for John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956)

Ray­mond Chan­dler: There’s No Art of the Screen­play in Hol­ly­wood

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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