Ask Me Anything 2

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It's a very good question because the Foolscap Method applies to anything. ..... me, it's that the publishing houses don't support the book and don't really have a  ...
Ask Me Anything 2 Steven Pressfield & Shawn Coyne

Steve: It’s Shawn and Steve here with Jeff monitoring things, and we’re just going to do a half hour of questions from the original round of questions that we got after the Authentic Swing, and we’ll all kind of jump in as we go along and here we go. I’ll just start. Shawn, okay with you? I have a question here that I… Shawn: Yea, sure. Steve: Jump in here. This is from two people, actually more than two wrote the same question. One is Jim Woods, and the other is Roberto Miarti, and the gist of it is about the Foolscap Method. How do you apply the Foolscap Method to non-fiction or to a business? In other words, it’s something other than fiction. Can you give an example? It’s a very good question because the Foolscap Method applies to anything. You could use it if your goal is how do I get my daughter into Harvard, my 2-year old daughter into Harvard or I’ll give you an example since it’s Halloween about carving a jack-o-lantern. The great thing about the Foolscap Method is that the concept is to see the project from start to finish in one glimpse. And then boil it down to its essentials; part 1, part 2, part 3 so that you don’t get lost in the minutiae of over-research, over-thinking, over-everything. So we were going to carve a pumpkin, which I was just doing the other night with a couple of kids, you would start with kind of ‘what are we trying to do here? What’s the goal?’ This is the Foolscap Concept. And you would say something like, you would start with the finish. You would say ‘the finish is we want to have a pumpkin hollowed out with a candle in the middle of it so we can put it on our front porch and it’ll glow and it’ll be wonderful and it’ll be fun’. So that’s where we’re aiming towards. Now that would be the equivalent of our finished PhD dissertation or our finished novel. So then you sort of would work backwards from that and say ‘okay, well the first thing we have to do is we have to scoop out the middle, get all of the pulp out of the middle of the pumpkin. Then we have to carve little eyes and a little nose and a little mouth, and then we put a little candle in the middle and there we have it’. Now we can track backwards and grasp the entire concept in one nutshell, which is again to create a little work of art that glows in the dark and is fun to look at outside our door. So again, I don’t know if I’m being too clear about this, but it’s just trying to boil something down to its absolute constituent elements so that we can grasp the whole thing at once. Let’s say we have a 2 year old daughter and our goal is to get her into Harvard. Now I’m not saying that that’s an admirable goal, but let’s say it is. We could start, we would break it down, and Shawn’s laughing because he’s from Harvard. We could break it down into act 1, act 2, act 3 and we know the

finish; it’s our daughter gets into Harvard. So act 3 would be the actual submissions at the final end of high school. That would be high school. Act 2 would be through middle school and junior high school, and act 1 would be starting at kindergarten and taking it through there. And so we would try to start when we go back to the beginning. We say “Okay, we’ve got to get her into the best kindergarten. Either the kindergarten that all the kids go on to Stanford and Ivy League schools”. So now we know we start with that. We find out where they are. We start kissing up to the people in it. We save our money. We get her in. and then we kind of brainwash her act 2 through the middle of her youth to join every extracurricular activity she can, be it cheerleader, be it the soccer team; whatever it takes. And then act 3, she gets good grades in high school, all the way through the end of applying, etc., etc. so there is kind of a way of grasping the overall concept from 30,000 foot view from A to Z and boiling it down to its constituent elements, and from there you just kind of fill in the blanks. The Foolscap Method can be used to organize yourself mentally for any enterprise-- building a bridge, painting a picture, starting your own business; anything. Okay, that’s my first question and first answer. Shawn: Let me just add to that quickly and let me speak to narrative non-fiction which is driven nonfiction which something like In the Heart of the Sea would be narrative non-fiction or The Perfect Storm or Lone Survivor. Those kinds of stories where… Steve: Black Hawk Down. Shawn: Black Hawk Down, exactly. And Foolscap Method, I was talking to Robert McKee a couple of weeks ago and he had this great phrase for the three elements of Foolscap, and he said it’s the beginning hook, the middle build and the ending payoff. Steve: Oh, I like that. Shawn: And I think if you look at the Foolscap Method in those very specific terms, you know you have to start your story with a hook, you know you have to build that hook to a point where it climaxes in a very large payoff. So the hook and the payoff are intricately connected. So when you begin your story, you are making a promise to the reader that you are going to settle the initial inciting incident if you will, which is the thing that throws everything off balance, and the way you do that is in the ending payoff. So in narrative non-fiction what I’ve found with some clients who are journalists is they are incredible journalists. They get stuck thinking of how to take all of these pages and all of these interviews that they have and convert that into a story. 3 parts; the beginning "hook," the middle "build" and the ending "payoff." The way you do that is to look globally at everything that you have and say “If I had to boil this down to one thing, what would that be?” Steve: This is another question that got asked two or three times. This one is from Petra Miersch and she says “Do you always know exactly how the story will end? What do you do when you don’t know the end?” This feeds into the question that we’re talking about, about doing the Foolscap beginning, middle and end. And beginning writers or aspiring writers have this problem where they’ll come up with some great scene that they love or a great first act, but then they are stuck and they don’t know “How do I finish this thing? What’s the end?” The answer is that the ending is embedded in that great scene that you have at the start, whether you realize it or not.

You have to work to dig it out. But it's there. This is sort of what you were talking about, Shawn. Like here’s an example; the movie Gravity. Let’s say that you’re the writer of the movie, you know the one with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney where they’re up in space. Let’s say that you’re a writer and you come up with this brilliant scene, and the scene is an orbiting spacecraft, there’s a man and a woman astronaut, they’re doing an EVA, they’re outside the spacecraft in their ship, fixing something. Suddenly the radio message comes in, the Russians have shot down one of their own satellites and space debris is coming at us at 20,000 mph. All of a sudden, here it comes, it blows the hell out of the space station, kills everybody on it except these two. You say, “WOW! What an incredible scene. There they are floating in space!” But then you say “But I’m stuck. I don’t know what to do”. This is where I say the ending is embedded in this opening scene. You say to yourself “Well, what has to happen if we go forward?” And again, this is global thinking like a Foolscap thing. And you say “Well, they’re going to have to save themselves”. Here they are floating in space. What the hell is going to happen to them? And you know, flash forward to the end, one way or another one or both of these astronauts is going to have to get back to earth. That’s the only way it can end. It can’t be another ending because nobody’s going to watch a movie if they both die and go drifting out into space. So that’s the ending. So now you’ve got the opening, which is the space debris blowing up the station. The ending is one or both of them survive. Now you turn to the middle and you say “What is the middle? What is act 2?” Well, it has to be obstacle after obstacle for how they’re going to get back to earth. So what will happen is, they’ll come up with plan A and it won’t work. They’ll have to move to plan B, plan C, plan D. So your job as a writer now is to use your imagination and come up with whatever crazy crap you can put in between the middle there. Another analogy, Robert McKee’s thing of act 1, act 2, act 3 works, what was it, Billy Wilder I think said “Act 1, get your hero up a tree. Act 2, throw stones at him. Act 3, get him down from the tree”. In the example of the movie Gravity, the ending is embedded in the beginning or in any scene that you have, and your task as the writer is to do the detective work. The answers are all there, you just have to follow the leads and track it out. And when you don’t do that, it’s because you’re lazy. You just have to do it. It’s hard work. In many ways, I think of it like anybody that reads this blog knows that I’m a big believer in the Muse, and I think that when you get an idea for a specific scene that you fall in love with but you don’t have anything else, it’s the goddess leaving you a little clue. And she knows the whole story, but she’s just giving you one little clue like you’re a detective. And it’s your job to follow the leads and track it all the way through. The story is embedded in that one scene that you love, I promise you. Shawn: I think your analogy with Gravity was a really great one, Steve, because what I really enjoyed about Gravity is it’s one of those straightforward bullet kind of plots. There is some character development. It’s not really that deep, and what really drives that story are the events and the actions of Sandra Bullock, who I thought was great at it. Steve: Yea, let me add one more thing on the subject of Gravity, and this again is an example of how a writer thinks and how you start with say one scene that you fall in love with and how you build a story out of it.

So we were saying that the two astronauts were up there floating in space and somehow they have to get back safely to earth. There’s going to be obstacle after obstacle after obstacle. But here’s the second level of that. It’s not just external obstacles that they’re going to have to deal with if we’re thinking as a writer. And we’re thinking that Sandra Bullock is the hero of the piece. So we’re going to have to give her internal obstacles as well. She’s going to have to have something in her character that she is going to have to overcome in addition of bouncing off space stations in the middle of outer space. So the filmmakers gave her this thing where I’ve even forgotten what it was. I think it was her daughter died when she was young or something, and she’s dealing with some guilt about that. You know they just pulled that off the shelf. It was like they tried a few generic bogus things and they came up with that one. And it was bogus if you ask me. But nonetheless, it kind of worked. And we had how George Clooney’s character filtered into that and made it work somehow. But that’s how a writer thinks. So if you’re thinking “Okay, we’ve got them in space at the beginning. We’ve got to get them on earth at the end. We’ve got external obstacles, now let’s come up with internal obstacles”. And pretty soon, in like 20 minutes you’ve got the whole story. You just have to kind of fill in the blanks. So I hate to make this sound formulated, but that’s kind of how it works a lot of the time. Shawn, I have a question for you. This is coming from Adrienne Press. I’d really like to hear the answer to this too. She says “What’s the biggest mistake you see unpublished writers making?” Shawn: I hate to hit the same point over and over again, but it’s really when you begin reading a novel or even a proposal, there’s no promise. There’s no inciting incident, there’s nothing that grabs your attention. If you do not have something at the very beginning of your story that is so compelling that you just can’t help yourself continuing to read, you’ve got a very big problem. The beginning hook, again if you don’t hook somebody, nobody’s going to want to continue reading the book. And this isn’t about line by line writing either. Some of the best hooks are written by people who aren’t the best pro stylists in the world, but they have an ability to set something up that is just so incredibly fascinating or scary, that you can’t help continuing to read. And I say this all the time when I’m working with writers on book proposals. A lot of people who want to write non-fiction or a book proposal, there’s this recipe that I have to complete, I’ve got to do the marketing section; but the reality of the proposal today is if you can’t write a great introduction, a great forward preface, maybe 1500, and again this isn’t a long piece of work. It’s 1500 words. You need to put together 1500 words that are just so stunning that by the end of that 1500 words, the editor really wants to start photocopying it and giving it to other colleagues to read because he wants to acquire the book. So the biggest, the very biggest mistake and the one that you can never, ever write yourself out of is the beginning hook. Steve: Ahh. Now that’s great. Let me kind of add a little bit to that to define kind of what the hook is or to what Robert McKee calls the inciting incident. Let’s go back to the movie Gravity for a minute because it’s a great opening hook. You’ve got the two astronauts in space, suddenly the space station is blown up by this debris, and there they are floating in space. There’s the hook. If you’re watching that, you’ve got to say “How are they going to get out of it?” So that kind of brilliant propels the story.

Another I thought fantastic inciting incident was in the first movie The Hangover. We have these guys that go to Las Vegas, you know that they’re going to be partying this one night and then so they start on their partying, they toast each other on the roof, they’re about to go out on the town and then cut to the next morning; they’re waking up, there’s a tiger in the room, there’s a little baby in the room, they’ve lost their friend Doug and they can’t remember a thing. Now that is an incredible hook. If you’re watching that, you just go “I’ve got to find out what happened. How did the baby get there? How did the tiger get there?” So those are sort of examples of great inciting incidents that propel the story forward. I agree with you, Shawn. You’ve got to have that. Shawn: Even the classics of literature. Look at the opening hook of Moby Dick. You’ve got a guy who needs to get a job, and he goes into this famous whaling town and all the people that he meets are talking about this obsessive captain and just how crazy this guy is. And he goes to bunk and there’s this very strange Native American beneath him that has all these weird spears and things. So it’s a very alien world, so you’ve got the outsider entering an alien world, and then you just can’t wait until he gets on that ship. And he gets into the hands of Captain Ahab. It’s just the beginning of that novel just sucks you right in. I’ve got a question here Steve. It’s from Jason Krause. “What is the most challenging part of with the publishing industry besides actually getting published? So what is the thing that is most frustrating for you as a professional writer who gets published by the major houses book after book after book? Is there one thing that you just say ‘oh my gosh, I just can’t handle this’?” Steve: I have an answer to that. It goes back to the famous meeting you and I had at Crown. I think for me, it’s that the publishing houses don’t support the book and don’t really have a marketing plan or any way of kind of beating the bushes. It’s like in the old time model from maybe 15 or 20 years ago was based on book reviews. Back in the days when the NY Times and every paper in the country had book reviews. And that was how you got the word out that your book even existed. I was reading an article by Michael Connelly, the novelist. He wrote an op-ed piece and he listed all of the newspapers across the country that have stopped having book reviews, and it made your blood run cold because it was like a list of every big newspaper in the country; the Boston Globe, the Dallas Morning-Herald, the Atlanta Journal Constitution. And it just went down the list; boom, boom, boom. There are none of those anymore. And the publishing industry has just not picked up the slack. Part of the reason why we started this blog was just as a way of kind of an attempt at least of getting the word out about stuff that we’re trying to do. So it is very frustrating. My most recent book The Profession, they spent a lot of money getting that book, and when it was released it just went out and sank without a trace. The only tour of use it got from the Washington Post and the LA Times came out three months after the book was out, and the publisher didn’t really do anything about it. In fact, I was on a book tour for that. I had to pay for it. I had to book the whole tour myself. So that’s the big frustrating thing. What would you say, Shawn? What’s your… Shawn: Yea, that’s. I think it’s a lack, I don’t think this is just in publishing industries, and I think Seth Godin speaks about this a lot. When you get so large and you’re such a being of mass and the big five publishers have so many imprints, they have so many editors, they have so many production people, the higher levels that you get, the more difficult it is to spin on a dime.

To think of something new and to try something new is much, much more difficult than it is for Steve and Shawn to throw something at the wall and see what happens because they’re turning this huge ship and there’s ramifications like for instance, say I’m the CEO of Random House, and one of my publishers comes to me and says “Look, I want to try this thing where I’m going to do my own blog and I’m going to collect as many people who are interested in book publishing as I can and answer their questions. What do you think about that?” well the CEO is going to be like “I’m not really sure if that’s a good idea because you are representing not only your imprint, but you’re representing all the other imprints in my organization, so I really don’t think that’s a good idea”. So innovations and things that are, I hate to say outside the box, but these are the things that the big organizations have a really difficult time with, and it’s the David and Goliath element that Malcolm Gladwell writes about. Everybody thinks it’s really terrible to be on your own, and if I only had that really great middle manager job at Exxon, everything would be okay. But the truth is, is that you’re so free to be so creative when you are as you say, betting on yourself, Steve. Steve: Yea, and here’s an example that we went through, Shawn, which was we have a little book called the Warrior Ethos that I wrote and we brought out maybe two years ago or something like that. And we originally, well it’s kind of a long story, but sort of the bottom line of it was, was we printed up 18,000 copies of this book at our own expense and we gave them away for free to the troops and Marines and Special Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and here in the states. And that’s the kind of a thing that a mainstream publisher would never, never in a million years do. We tried with one particular publisher to give away eBooks that don’t even cost any money, just as a way of getting the word out that a book exists, and they wouldn’t do that because they have this sort of scarcity model in their mind which is that every book that we give away is a book that we don’t sell. So they won’t let you do that. So the nimbleness of being a small independent or just being your own self-publisher is that you can do things like that. You can give away. And we wound up, it cost us I think about $14,000 all in, including shipping and all that sort of stuff. And I think it took us maybe two years to break even, but we finally did break even and finally did get into the black on this, and it worked. Shawn: It did work. Steve: Giving something away is something that a mainstream publisher will never do, but if you’re on your own, you can do that. And there are a million other examples like that. Okay, let me seque off of that into a question from Jason Kay. And Shawn, I actually have another question to follow up on this, and I want to ask you. Jason Kay says “Dear Steve, 20 years ago, if you had access to the current generation of self-publishing options, how would you have used them?” I think it’s a great question and sort of my answer is probably wrong or crazy or idiosyncratic. But when I thought about it, and also Jeff, I want to ask you about this too. I would not have used the selfpublishing options at all, but my reason is kind of crazy. My reason is because, let me back up a second and say that the self-publishing options, the benefits of that is that you get to bypass the so-called gatekeepers. You get to bypass the editors and the publishers and the agents who sort of screen out bad work or who define what is good, what is worthy of publication.

And so the concept of self-publishing is “Well we won’t even go to these people. We’ll just do an end run around them and get our stuff out to the market directly.” But for me as a writer who had worked for like 30 years, struggling in the trenches, I wanted the validation of the gatekeepers. That was really important to me. I wanted to put my stuff out there with really A-level editors and publishers and have them validate it and say “Yes, it’s good. We’ll publish it”. That was the most important thing to me. So I would not have gone through the self-publishing options. Now I want to ask Jeff, Jeff Simon here who is our tech wizard and our young guy around here. Now Jeff, I know that you’re working on, among many things, screenplays and stuff like that. Jeff is 27. We’re here in Silver Lake, which is kind of a hip neighborhood in L.A. and at Jeff’s place where in his back room, he’s got his keyboards and three huge computer screens and every possible tech thing. And what Jeff is working on among other things, among screenplays with partners and stuff, is a web series. So you are using the tools that are available in many ways. And can you talk a little bit about that? Is that the right thing to do? And why are you doing it? Jeff: I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do. I think you have a lot of hurdles with web series. As you said, there’s a lot of junk out there, so you’re competing with cat videos and you’re competing with funnier die, people riding skateboards and breaking their heads and their helmets. But there’s also a sort of a new level of the market that’s coming out, which is people that are making their own projects that are professionally done that just want to use the free open market, the same way the music industry did it. Now you don’t really need a publisher. You just need to get your music on iTunes, and the publisher’s main purpose is advertising. And if as you’re saying, the publishers are worse at advertising, why go to the publishers in the first place? Steve: Yea, let me ask you this, Jeff. What is the ultimate goal here of your web shows? Is it to get picked up by a mainstream outlet like a cable channel, or is it to get your work out there for screenplay work? What is the goal? Jeff: For me, it would be great if somebody like Netflix picked it up. It’s hard to imagine that they will. This is just a first project I’ll be directing. But I think like what you said last time, the purpose of me making a web series is that hopefully when I’m done with this, I’ll have enough money and credit to do another one or to do a film and maybe that one will go somewhere. And so it’s really just about, I was working on a big budget, working for the ‘man’ if you will, and… Steve: To butt in here, Jeff spent like 18 months in London working on Doug Liman’s new movie as a production designer. Jeff: As an assistant to the production designer. And nothing wrong with Doug or his film, it’s amazing. I think the work that they’re doing is great. I just wanted to take a bigger responsibility that you would never be able to work up to being a director within the studio system because… Steve: So that is your ultimate goal here, to be a director or a screenwriter or a writer/director, something of that nature to control your own projects. Right? Jeff:

Something like that.

Steve: That’s great. So in this case, I’ll invalidate what I said earlier. For me, I wouldn’t have done it, to take the self-publishing options, but Jeff, it seems to be a really smart thing for you to do.

Jeff: I think it might be a media difference for books. There’s the solo thing, and when you’re working in films, and everybody wants to be the writer and the director. So it’s just a different situation. Steve: Okay, good one. Let’s wrap this up for today, and thanks everybody for listening to this. I want to tell you a couple of things we’re thinking about doing for the future that involve participation of everybody that’s listening to this. We were thinking about doing a podcast or one of these Q&A’s to go for the New Year that would go along the lines of a New Year’s resolution of getting set for the New Year, and we were thinking about doing it about how to organize a day for work, or how to organize a year. How to organize this coming year, 2014. So I’m going to put this on the blog in Writing Wednesdays, but we’d like anybody that has any questions, write in those questions. Do it on the First Look Access. We’ll get that up when it’s ready to go, and I’ll let you know. Then we’d like to do an entire half hour on just structuring. How do you structure a day? How do you organize a year to get the most out of it? And another subject that we want to talk about, and again, we’ll put this out on Writing Wednesdays when the time comes. It’s about mentors and mentorship. So any questions about that would be great. So those are a couple of things coming up in the future and thanks a lot.