Always Refreshing!

Now this is a very good strategy to rid you of repetitive paperwork/accounting/office management. But it can be the death knell for creative work. Forcing yourself into making a decision about a particular project just to get it off your desk will bite you in the ass later on. I can’t tell you how often I’m haunted by the consequences of my hurry up and move on decisions. If you see me walking down the street cringing, you’ll know I just remembered one.

And don’t forget business decisions are creative work too.

Whether or not you should make that call and press for better terms with that vendor may seem like a run of the mill decision, but it’s not. You need to creatively think about what it is that decision will do for you. You may win a marginal short term victory, but your vendor may hate you for being such a penny pincher that she does the least amount possible to keep you happy. Your inventory is mishandled so your customers return more goods and are dissatisfied etc.

Making the call and pressing for a reduced fee may be the right choice. But until you sit with the problem for a little while and map out the pros and cons of a decision, you’re running on “first draft-itis.” And no one should see your first draft of anything.

Why do we do this?

We do it to avoid confrontation. It deflates our anxiety, gives us “thank God I got that over with” relief.

It’s important to remember though that life is conflict. It just is. These are why stories, things built on the bedrock of conflict, are so important to us.

That doesn’t mean that it is all about screaming or passive aggressively getting your way. It means that in any human interaction, there is a clash of one kind or another. We communicate in order to figure out where we differ (where should we go to eat?) and then we confront the controversy and make it go away (how about a Mexican restaurant?). If you both love Mexican food, problem solved. If one of you wants Sushi, then there’s stress.

The courage to do nothing is all about remembering that you don’t know everything. You are capable of changing your ideas about things. You can hold two opposing thoughts in your head without jumping off a cliff. Really you can. You can hate taxes and also believe that the government should raise them to help people incapable of taking care of themselves.

When I went away to college, I’d never eaten Japanese food, Chinese food, Indian food, and on and on. I was a Mook who’d only eaten meat, potatoes and canned green beans. Food was fuel where I grew up, not entertainment.

Was I an idiot because I’d never tasted Baked Alaska? Of course not.

But if I’d refused to have the courage back then to do nothing when new friends who’d traveled outside of their area code before insisted we get some Pad Thai, I’d never have eaten anything more exotic than a cheeseburger.

It’s the same thing with your novel or your screenplay or your plumbing supply business. You are going to confront major and minor problems creating these works of art (and if you don’t think running a plumbing supply business requires art, you’ve never tried to manage more than one thing at a time). The perfect answers will not come to you off the top of your head.

Take a minute, an hour, an evening, to let your ideas stew.

It’s a lot harder to do nothing than you may think…

Big Guy goes after Little Guy.

Little Guy finds inner strength.

Little Guy taps into inner strength.

Little Guy fights Big Guy.

Big Guy falters.

Little Guy knocks Big Guy’s lights out.

The David and Goliath story is the story of the “win.” Think Luke against Darth Vader, Daniel Larusso against the entire Cobra Kai dojo, and pretty much any Disney classic (insert any princess or talking animal against any evil witch or demented talking animal here.).

The opposite—the story of the lose—plays out in two forms: Little Guy goes after Big Guy and is squashed by Big Guy (think of all the companies Gordon Gekko crushed before being sent to jail) and Little Guy hides from Big Guy, only delaying Big Guy’s deathblow (think George McFly and Biff Tannen before Marty went back to the future).

Then there’s a third option—when David ignores Goliath and Goliath moves on. And it comes with the realization that David and Goliath don’t always have to face off in order for someone to “win”—and that the definitions of “win” and “lose” aren’t so clear cut.

***

There are a million great lines in the movie Bull Durham. One of my favorites:

This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains. Think about that for a while.

Think about it. There’s always a third option.

From time to time someone will write a nasty e-mail or comment on Steve’s site. When it first launched, there was one individual who kept me up at night, made me sick to my stomach. His nastiness knew no end—or so I thought.

As part of the group on the crap end of the stick, I felt like we were David and he was Goliath.  He caused such pain to my thin skin that he became a Goliath in my mind—the bully. I was ready to throw stones, but a friend offered a bit of advice: Ignore him.

Easier said than done. If I didn’t shut this guy down, he’d win, right? And, I didn’t want to see him win.

But . . . We gave the friend’s advice a chance and Goliath went away. Every now and then a Doppelganger shows up and says something equally mean and insensitive, too. Whenever that happens, we insert a rain day and move on.

This third option is always available, but its so easy to look for the polar opposites—one vs the other, good vs evil, David vs Goliath.

From time to time I run into an author who wants to faceoff against Goliath. That’s his strategy for coming out on top as a winner.

The author wants to get into a debate with the talking head du jour and shut that talking head down.

And there’s a bit of danger to that. The danger is that the author, who sees himself as David, actually turns into a nasty Goliath himself.

For that author, a rain day is the best day.

In baseball, a rain day can be the difference between an injured player missing another game or making a comeback, and it plays into the pitching line-up too—one more day of rain equals one more day of rest for that starting pitcher.

For authors, it’s a day of rest, too.  Yes, you should fight, be an advocate for yourself, but there’s a lot that goes into fighting. Step back and take a long-view of the battle. Is this one you really need to win? And what does a “win” mean? Or, can you accomplish your goals by taking a rain day? You won’t be running away. Just recouping, thinking about what’s important, picking your battles, thinking about different strategies.

That guy who had me reaching for Prilosec? From what I’ve heard, he’s a wanna-be author. While I always thought of him as Goliath, I’ve realized that he probably thought of himself as David, and looked at Steve as Goliath—an already published author who he wanted to take down. Ego wanted to fight him, but we said no. Let’s walk away. Let’s take a rain day.

We rested. He left. Our game continued with a refreshed lineup.

So sometime you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes you take a rain day (and realize there’s a solid amount of winning to be done within those days, too).

Snidely Whiplash working on laptop

Someone reaches out to one of us and we like the Chutzpah and ideas presented so we pull the other one into the hare-brained scheme. Now one of the principles that Black Irish Books was founded on, I think the only one, is that we will dissolve the whole kit and caboodle the second one of us isn’t having any fun. I don’t me “whoohoo” fun. I mean “you know this is pretty cool coming up with an idea, having the other guy tweak it, creating something inspired by it, and then sharing it at a reasonable price with others” kind of fun. Once it becomes a chore or we find ourselves trying to maximize our return on investment by doing a deep dive into our online analytics, we’re going to run for the hills.

So because we’re susceptible to enthusiasms (we started this whole thing out of enthusiasm), sometimes we embrace an “opportunity” that comes in over the transom. Something happens, our partner/s fail to live up to their promises, we ask them to explain, they give us a reasonably good excuse, we give them another chance, the same thing happens, and then before you know it we’re out some money.

Now we’re not patsies. As Stanley Kowalski would say, we both have lawyer acquaintances who know how to intervene and work out settlements. But it still stings when you feel like you’ve been used.

I used to really get bummed out about this, especially when it was my idea to get into business with the disappointing party in the first place. And then the last time I was in LA bitching about getting screwed by those so and sos to Steve, he said something simple.

“Hey, we should be thrilled that we’re getting enough traction to get screwed. If nobody cared or supported what we were doing, we’d never make a bad business decision. Because we wouldn’t have a business. If we’re not open to new ideas from people who probably have the best of intentions if not all the skills to make them happen, then we might as well sell Black Irish to Acme Incorporated. No question it sucks when things go south, but look at all the other things that have gone north! Forget about it!”

I haven’t forgotten, but I have forgiven myself for going out on a limb. Sometimes you fall out of the tree, but like my four year old does, you cry, dust yourself off and climb back up again. The view’s better up there.

Louis C.K. replied with a question: “So why do I have the platform and the recognition?”

Itzkoff answered, “At this point you’ve put in the time.”

Pause after you read Louis C.K.’s follow-up:

There you go. There’s no way around that. There’s people that say: “It’s not fair. You have all that stuff.” I wasn’t born with it. It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you’re new at this — and by “new at it,” I mean 15 years in, or even 20 — you’re just starting to get traction. Young musicians believe they should be able to throw a band together and be famous, and anything that’s in their way is unfair and evil. What are you, in your 20s, you picked up a guitar? Give it a minute.

Put in the Time

Almost every author I’ve met has mentioned a desire to be interviewed by Oprah, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and/or Charlie Rose.

I get it. Being interviewed by any of those individuals will garner the authors attention and book sales.

But the reality is that most authors don’t land those interviews right out of the gate. And, while those interviews can spike initial sales, they don’t keep things going on their own. They’re a short-term fix.

In an interview with The Paris Review William Faulkner spoke about what writers need to write. The same applies to doing outreach for your projects, sharing/marketing them:

The writer doesn’t need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper. I’ve never known anything good in writing to come from having accepted any free gift of money. The good writer never applies to a foundation. He’s too busy writing something. If he isn’t first rate he fools himself by saying he hasn’t got time or economic freedom. Good art can come out of thieves, bootleggers, or horse swipes. People really are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand.

Outreach is Hard Work

Doing outreach/marketing our art is hard work. It’s painful. Reviewers can be nasty and comments left by today’s online community are about as pleasant as a rabid Pit Bull.

It’s hard to look for the good and keep pushing through the crap, piling up faster than ants at a Fourth of July picnic.

But you do it. You don’t say you’re “too busy” that you haven’t “got time or economic freedom.” You figure it out and keep pushing, even if it takes you 50 years.

I Don’t Do Outreach. I Create for Myself.

Last month, the New York Times ran a few articles about artist Arthur Pinajian, “a reclusive artist whom the art world had not known much about. Now, 14 years after his death, he has fans who mention him in the same sentence as Gauguin and Cézanne.”

When Pinajian died, his sister, in whose home “Pinajian had an 8-foot-by-8-foot studio” and who “supported him for much of his life” told a cousin, Peter Najarian, “Oh, just put it all in the garbage. . . . He said himself to just leave it all for the garbagemen.”

Najarian kept the paintings instead.

Read the article for the full story. Bottom line: Though Pinajian had networked earlier in his life, he became a “hermit.” After a point, it seems neither he nor his art left his studio.

If this was his goal, fine.

But the selfish side of me asks, But what about us? We would have loved to have known about your work earlier.

While you didn’t create for money, money it seems is being made off you work—by those who didn’t create it. Do you care?

Perhaps he’d answer that he didn’t care. That money wasn’t the point—and that he doesn’t care if others profit.

Money aside, what about the art? Isn’t the creation itself something that is meant to be shared?

In the same Paris Review interview, Faulkner said:

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn’t have needed anyone since.

The art came for a reason.

And perhaps something inspired Pinajian’s cousin to keep it for the same reason: It wasn’t meant for the trash, but for a wider audience.

The same might be said of John Kennedy Toole’s mother, who held her son’s manuscript tight after he committed suicide, and then pushed until she found a publisher for his book, A Confederacy of Dunces.

At the end of a second New York Times article about Pinajian appears,:

“He thought he was going to be the next Picasso,” Mr. Aramian said. “They believed he would become famous and this would all pay off for them one day, but it just never happened. So he became frustrated and withdrew from everything and just painted.”

I wonder about what he was or wasn’t doing to share his work earlier. And I wonder why the art community of that time didn’t recognize his talent. And whether the best came after he closed himself off.

One thing I know: His work was meant to be shared. I wish it had happened while he was alive. And, I wish I knew why it is easier for some and harder for others—why the one-hit wonders break out and the long-term artists are recognized after they’ve died—if at all.

For writers, the Internet has opened opportunities that don’t translate into other mediums. Viewing a wall-sized Monet isn’t the same on a laptop as it is in person. I’m not living in that world, but I imagine it a harder place to build a following, to break into. But, the benefits of an established platform remain the same.

Back to the Platform and Louis C.K.

What about those artists who do make it big, yet stay out of the spotlight? They don’t do interviews. They don’t muck around with press tours. They write. That’s it.

How did they do it?

Good writing and at some point either they—or someone else—built a platform. And now? That platform is on auto-pilot; it hit a point of self-sustainability.

And that brings us back to Louis C.K.

You have to put in the time. In addition to creating/building, you have to build the platform.

Some people win the lottery, but most of us hammer away for decades. That’s not a bad thing. It takes patience. It takes commitment.

As Faulkner said, “People really are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand.”

Follow Louis C.K.’s advice and “Give it a minute.”

At least a minute…

Welcome to Publishing!

Even though I stupidly claimed that Beowulf was my favorite book at my interview, I’d been hired as editorial assistant to the editor in chief of a big mass market paperback publisher. As luck would have it, my first Monday was also “editorial meeting day” at this house. If you want to know what a publishing company is like, go to the editorial meeting. Everything you need to know will happen there. No matter what is discussed, you’ll be able to tell whether the company is doing well or not, who is riding high, who is in trouble, who is a toady, who has the chip on the shoulder, and every other important dynamic. It’s like a mandatory weekly Thanksgiving dinner with a multi-generational dysfunctional family.

As the assistants were en route to the big conference room overlooking Central Park, I made a very big mistake.

I walked into the room first.

As the fresh faced Newbie, I had no understanding of the professional culture or social faux pas. I barely knew where the bathrooms were. But I was playing it cool. Even with damp hands, an arrhythmic heartbeat and a stomach three quarters full of acid contending with an egg and cheese on a roll I’d eaten off the Halal cart on 52^nd Street, I acted like Fonzie.

Rule number one for a person entering an alien environment? Don’t call attention to yourself!

The assistant to a senior editor (two steps down from an editor in chief) was tasked with showing the new guy the ropes. She was very nice.  After I found a seat, she excused herself to get a cup of water down the hall.

Then the other assistants came in.  They casually sidled up to the three quarter length windows above the waist high heating/air-conditioning built-ins along the north wall. It really was a spectacular view. I felt like Melanie Griffith in Working Girl.

A 9:29:30 a.m., all four of the double doors were breached and an army of tweeded big shots marched through. They dumped dog-eared manuscripts and personalized coffee cups and pulled up pleather knock off Eames chairs to the twenty foot table. It was very exciting.

My assistant friend appeared across the room, empty handed but still had a very sweet smile on her face.

“Hey Kid!”

I swiveled around and looked up at someone who would have been called “a brassy broad” in the 1960s, but in the 1990s she was simply referred to as “The Publisher.”

“Get out of my chair!”

I was once terrified to play in a football game against a man named Bill Fralic, a monster lineman who became a four time NFL All Pro Offensive tackle for the Atlanta Falcons and outweighed me by a hundred pounds. Fralic would have crumbled facing this powerhouse.

Now I’m a guy who enjoys a good laugh. But even as I write this, I’m having difficulty not hyperventilating. Twenty two years after the experience, I still remember standing up amidst a din of duped Charlie Brown like laughter. I then saw fifteen editorial assistants sitting on the raised built-in heating/AC units having the time of their lives. Not one of them told me that the conference table and chairs were only for editors…that assistants were supposed to sit on the side and keep their mouths shut until they brought money into the house instead of sucking it out of it.

So what was the timeless dilemma?

The insiders had hazed the outsider. Happens all the time.

But after being the butt of a joke, the outsider can do one of two things. He can define himself right then and there as a rogue, swallow the humiliation and use it to fuel an “I’ll show them!” ambition. He’ll take everything personally.

Or he can retreat into himself, learn the “rules” of rising in that world, and then do what’s necessary politically to become a member of the tribe. He’ll not make waves, he’ll ride them.

I wish I could tell you that I saw clearly enough back then to know that those two choices and that way of looking at the world are complete bullshit.

The truth is that the whole insider/outsider myopic view is just another form of Resistance. The fact that the assistants set me up back then didn’t mean they didn’t like me. In fact, they probably did. I must have given them the impression that I could handle a little ribbing. I wasn’t some fragile wackadoo…and there are plenty of those in book publishing who spend years without uttering a word.

I didn’t freak out on anyone after the joke either. I laughed right along with the publisher and the rest of the company. And guess what, she always said “hello” to me after that. Even though she always called me “Kid,” she learned my name. She asked me questions. One I never did answer well was “Whaddya know?” But she listened to my opinions about projects when we rode the same elevator and when a job opened and I sought it out even though I’d only been there a year, she promoted me. Take that, suckers!

I used to debate in my mind whether she gave me the job because I wasn’t afraid to stand out or because she’d brought me into her inner circle. It took me two decades to understand that she didn’t give me anything. I earned that job.

She didn’t give me a chance because I was an “insider” or because I had the fire of an “outsider.” She gave me a chance because I did the work. When she was in on the weekends, she saw me there too. When she asked me to read something, she got a report on her desk the next day. If she took the time to solicit ideas from the window seats, I spoke up. I made an ass out of myself more times than I’d like to admit but I watched, read, and learned.

While I thought I was doing it back then to “show them!” I really wasn’t. “Showing them!” doesn’t put your ass in a midtown office chair on a Sunday morning reading slush and writing flap copy. I didn’t do that out of spite. I did that because I love book publishing.

It’s Show Business, Not Show Art.

A freelance producer offered me this advice while I was a summer college intern at Mattel’s headquarters in El Segundo, CA.

I thought he was another bitter USC film grad who couldn’t hack it in Hollywood . . . so he sold out to “the man” and made toy commercials for a living.

Looking back,  he was right and I was judgmental and naïve.

A junior editor/publicist position met me out of college, for a small indy publishing house. Within three months, the senior editor was fired and I was promoted . I edited, answered the phones, managed the design and printing outsourcing and production, prepared contracts, launched publicity campaigns, tracked sales and distribution, and pretty much everything else outside of signing the checks.

I learned a lot in a short period of time, but thought the art missing within the work was an abnormality—related to that boss and that publishing house. I was in the first stage of grieving for art. Behind the curtain of post-college job #2 were the remaining four stages: Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.

Publishing is a business. If you want to make a living as a writer, first step is accept that the industry built up around it is about making money. Yes, there are those publishers and editors and indy bookstores that are all about the craft, but end of day, the bills have to be paid and if there’s no money, there’s no publishing house or bookstore. Same rule if you are doing it on your own, via self publishing. Your writing might be your craft, your art, but when you turn it into a book, treat it as a business.

Business Law and Accounting Are As Important As Shakespeare

First piece of advice for young writers headed to college: Take a few business law and accounting classes.

Expecting someone else to read every contract and go through every royalty statements is like asking someone to be available to tie your shoes for you the rest of your life. Get a lawyer and an accountant to run by questions when you move up to big boy shoes, but at least know the basics—know enough to know what questions should be asked.

Learn what’s in a standard contract, how you can negotiate, what you can negotiate, what belongs to you, what you are giving away, how you are being paid, the difference between “net” and “gross.”

Educate yourself on the laws and accounting just as you would on Shakespeare. They’re all valuable and will be of great help in different ways.

If You Can’t Do Every Job—Understand the Talk of Every Job

For every premature grey hair that first post-college job gave me, I learned a valuable skill.

Each skill has a language attached to it. There are the “pixels” and “gutters” in design, “smyth” and “saddle” in production, the hieroglyphic-like editor’s marks, “end-caps” and “co-op” in bookstores . . . The list goes on . . .

The language of publishing is valuable. If you don’t have the experience, start with the language. Understanding the talk is more than half the battle.

Don’t forget that you as creator have to make value judgments well in advance of beginning a project.  There is no wishy-washy spiritual cloak you can wear that will allow you to visit both sides of a conflict without choosing a side. Life may be shades of gray, but art is definitive. That’s why it’s The War of Art, not The Peace of Art.

Art is not about distraction. It’s not about consuming. No matter what the infotainment industrial complex tells you, it’s not about filling up the uncomfortable moments in your life with surges of Angry Bird video game dopamine.

Art is about taking an audience to the limits of human experience. To the extreme places they cannot go in their own lives (they’d die or go crazy), and leading them to catharsis…that indescribable emotional purge that connects us to the human primordial soup or collective unconscious or whatever you want to call it as it gives us clues to answer those impossible existential questions Who am I and Why am I here?

We live for cathartic experiences. They remind us that we are not alone that others have gone through the same shit we have and have lived to tell about it. Rothko, Arbus, Chopin, Austen, Plath, Lennon, Piaf delivered catharsis. That App that helps you find your lost cell phone—while really cool and I’m sure the result of a lot of hard work—doesn’t.

So how does a writer create catharsis? Paying attention to reality helps.

Men in uniforms take a woman’s two children. She pleads for their release. One of the men tells her he’ll let her take one of them back. She refuses to save one and not the other. She knows that both her children will die, but they won’t die alone. She will.

I don’t know if William Styron heard this horrifying testimony during the Adolph Eichmann trial in 1961. But I do know that his novel Sophie’s Choice reminded a friend of Steve and mine about hearing a holocaust survivor tell this story on the radio as a seventeen year old in Israel. This is what is meant by the limits of human experience in real life and in fiction. In the face of the most evil event any of us can imagine; the real mother chose to love her children universally.

Would we have had the courage to do the same? I suspect William Styron asked himself that question before he began writing.

Now the Yang to the “best bad choice” Yin is choosing between “Irreconcilable Goods.” I’ve stolen the phrase from Robert McKee, who has forgotten more about Story form than I will ever hope to know.

Making a choice between two “good” things sounds pretty great right?  No matter what you pick, a positive will come to the world.  It’s a no lose situation, isn’t it? But don’t Stories require conflict? How can a choice between two good things, not just drive a Story forward but actually create a catharsis?

The key word, of course, is “irreconcilable.” Choosing one good precludes the other.  What’s good for someone else is a different kind of good for you and what’s good for you is a different kind of good for someone else.

But any good is just as good as another good, right?

No, it isn’t.

Dustin Hoffman and Justin Henry in Kramer vs. Kramer.

One of my favorite movies, Kramer vs. Kramer, starts with a double “best bad choice” scenario but then is all about irreconcilable goods.

Wife Kramer (an impossible part played brilliantly by Meryl Streep) is at a crisis point with Husband Kramer (played by Dustin Hoffman). Only problem is that they have a four year old little boy.

Is staying with her husband—a narcissist of the highest order who cares little for her and barely registers the existence of their son—until her boy is grown worse than denying her inner self? Wife Kramer thinks staying is worse. She’s gotta go. That’s best bad choice number one.

Now should she take the little boy with her? She’s an emotional wreck and has no idea of what she’s going to do with her life or how. So wouldn’t it be better to leave the boy with the father until she gets squared away? Wife Kramer thinks leaving the boy is the best bad choice. That’s number two.

This movie is so brilliantly written that everything I’ve just described happens in the first sixty seconds…

Now left to care for the little guy after his hysterical wife flies the coop, Hoffman’s character has to make a series of irreconcilably good choices.

He can hire a full time nanny and stay on his career track as an up and coming advertising exec. Or he can take the kid to school, pick him up, make his dinner, clean up after him, discipline him, read him stories, and answer endless ridiculous and often impossible questions from his maddening four year old point of view.

Hiring a third party care giver would be good for Kramer personally and it would be good for his kid too. All of his hard work making something of himself will most likely lead to professional recognition, more money, etc.  And because of the money etc. his son will have privileges and opportunities in life that the older Kramer didn’t have when he was a boy.

He’ll be a great role model for his son…hard work pays off, stay focused!

But does his son really need that kind of role model when he’s four years old?

Doesn’t he just want his mom and dad there when he bangs his head on the coffee table?

So the other good choice would be to put the brakes on his career, take a lesser paying job, and make it to every school play. He’ll teach his son how to draw like his old man does for a living. He’ll get angry at his son for bullying the next door neighbor and then he’ll stand behind his boy when he knocks on the door to apologize… That would be a good choice too.

His son would learn that money and titles aren’t really that important if it means that a man can’t eat dinner with his family. Having someone to cry with about losing their mommy or wife trumps a key to the executive washroom.

Of this stuff are “irreconcilable goods” conflicts made.

If you don’t have a serious personal catharsis by the end of watching Kramer vs. Kramer, I feel sorry for you.

How many had 15 seed Florida Gulf Coast University going this far? Doesn’t make sense. There’s never been a 15 seed to make the Sweet Sixteen . . . Until now. . .

* * *

Imagine this: You have a new book and you’re sitting around, talking about marketing and PR with your publisher. Everyone’s cheering. They’re in your corner. Rah. Rah. Rah. But when you leave, the next author comes in and it’s the same thing. In the end, the publishers don’t have all of their authors ranked number one. They have a bracket  system. They’re rooting for everyone, but when they really sit down and have to put it in writing, there are tiers. They expect one book and author to do X and another to do Y. If X doesn’t go that far, fine, it met expectations. If Y exceeds, everyone is surprised and revisits the brackets.

And for those that are ranked on top? There’s no guarantee that your publisher’s efforts will turn your next project into a bestseller.

So what do you do? Do you hope the publisher will pull out all the stops and win the game for you? No. You fight like a 15 seed that no one expects to win.

You fight to get in the game.

Figure out what your publisher will or won’t do. If you don’t have a publisher or your publisher doesn’t even have you in the tournament, you come up with your own game plan. Take the truths—be persistent, find your crossover audience, pay attention to the signs, aim for passion within your work, remain open to change, stay in it for the long haul (but mind moderation), do something every day, say thank you—and figure out how you can use them. Learn what others have done to get into the game, but take those elements and match them to your style, your play.

You fight to stay in the game.

Whatever your publisher won’t do? You do. And you do a little bit every day.

You fight to obliterate the brackets.

You stay in the game for the long haul. If you don’t rank this year, you go for it next year. Then the year you land a 15 seed spot, you take it one game at a time. You can only go higher.

You fight to make it to the championship game.

Yes, your team mates matter.

Yes, your skill matters.

Yes, playing hard matters.

But how you play—what you do with what you have—matters the most.

And next year, when the prez and everyone else is tending to their brackets, you don’t pay any mind to where they place you. You play on as your own advocate and advance anyway.

Accomplished novelists/storytellers have a deep understanding of how to move their fictional characters to these two types of crossroads. It’s the same skill narrative nonfiction writers must have in their arsenal. Instead of creating events, the nonfiction storyteller must discern when real human beings have faced these choices, what decisions they made and how those decisions changed their lives permanently.

We do not live in an evil/good, joy/misery, satiated/starving kind of world. Never have. Never will.  Because we don’t—we always fall on a spectrum within the confines of each of these values—we rely on stories to help us figure out how to choose between two bad decisions or two irreconcilably good decisions (a phrase that my client Robert McKee uses and I love).

We model what kind of people we would like to be based upon our knowledge of epic stories. Stories are essential to negotiate a very complex world. They are what make us human. Neither horses nor papayas can tell stories, can they? If you want to become immortal, learn how to tell a story. Homer, Muhammad, Matthew, Luke, Mark and John anyone?

What do I mean by “The Best Bad Choice?” Here are two examples, one from the made up world and one from real life.

You’ve seen the movie Rocky? If you haven’t it’s a very simple set up.  The lead character of the movie is a Philadelphia Lunk named Rocky Balboa, a boxer with heart and a rapidly fading twinkle of talent. At the beginning of Sylvester Stallone’s screenplay, Rocky’s at that place we can all appreciate.  He’s accepted his station in life. He makes enough scratch from the local black hand as an enforcer to live the way he sees himself deserving to live . . . in a flop house with a sweat and bloodstained mattress propped on cinderblocks, two cans left of a six pack and half eaten slab of processed meat in the fridge.

Rocky still gets in the ring and even sometimes wins, but he’s really just . . . as my father used to say “getting Monday into Tuesday . . . Tuesday into Wednesday . . . and so on.” Stallone lets us soak up this mook’s life for a good chunk of pages before he gives us all what we know is coming.  Opportunity . . . THE BIG FIGHT . . . the inciting incident of every boxing novel/movie/story.

Rocky gets picked to fight the heavyweight champion of the world. Not because he earned it, but because of his silly pugilistic moniker . . . THE ITALIAN STALLION (do you think that choice of stage name had anything to do with his Stallone’s own scratching out a living in the adult film world?).

The chance to fight the big fight is what we all say we want, isn’t it?

If Random House just took my novel on as a lark . . . they wouldn’t even have to give me an advance . . . I’d bust my butt, promote it like Hell and make it a success . . . I’d show them how wrong they are to dismiss my work . . .

We say to ourselves that given a lock, an opportunity, we’d be our best selves and kick some serious ass.  Would we though? Stallone knew that giving his fictional character the chance that we all want to get would seriously invest us in Rocky’s life.  Even a ballet dancer or billionaire would relate to this guy.

So where does the BEST BAD CHOICE come in here?  Rocky has no bad choice right? The Gods have intervened and given him something he always dreamed of . . . what could be bad about that?

In a brilliant scene that still sends chills down my spine, Stallone lets’ Rocky explain his situation to the arthritic, pockmarked old Irish trainer played by Burgess Meredith. There ain’t nothing wrong with archetypes/stereotypes if you do them right (specificity please) . . . and who doesn’t love the old battle-scared sensei? Even though Meredith’s “Mick” shamed Rocky by taking away his locker at the gym, it’s because he always expected more of Rocky . . . who he says had “moxie” before he became a bum.

When Mick comes to Rocky’s dump to offer his services as trainer, Rocky takes a long look at his situation.  He knows he’s being played for the patsy.  He has two bad choices.

The first choice is to fight the champ and get the crap kicked out of him.  The champ is the greatest fighter of all time and could very likely kill him with one accidental blow to his head. Not only could he die, at the very least he will be humiliated . . . he’ll become a barroom joke . . . not just in Philadelphia, but all over the world. That’s his first choice.

The second choice is seemingly not so bad.  He could beg off, tell the champ he appreciates the shot, but he’s just not at his level.  There would be no shame in that would there?  He’d be able to keep threatening welshers for his mafia boss and he could stay in his flop for the rest of his life. No one would blame him for that choice. Really only one person, two actually, would find that choice cowardly.

Rocky knows that choice, the second one, is death.  And he knows that Mick knows that too. Because even though Stallone never literally states it, Mick made that choice decades before . . . this is why Rocky and Mick are a perfect match to take on a power as great as the champ.

The best bad choice for Rocky is to fight. He can take a physical beating, but he won’t be able to live with himself with a psychological one. He’ll always be a bum, but at least he’ll be an honorable one. Mick knows this . . . this is why he dragged his ass to Rocky’s row house.

What about nonfiction?

(Stallone was inspired to write Rocky by the life of the Bayonne Bleeder, Chuck Wepner, and his 1975 fight with champ Muhammad Ali by the way . . . )

A while back, two men in powerful positions in the U.S., one a member of Congress and one a Governor were faced with the same BEST BAD CHOICE situation.  Both men, as men seem to do over and over again, lost themselves in their intoxicating positions of being highly respected members of government.

A great number of people relied on these men, sacrificed for these men and believed in them. But if you had to boil down to the single other human being on the planet who believed in them the most, you’d have to say their life partners—their wives—sacrificed the most for them.

I’m sure their wives were not and still aren’t saints and that the relationships had all of the deeply serious challenges that any committed one does. But the fact is that there’s just one rule in a committed relationship that is unassailable.

You must remain faithful. You cannot cheat.

Both men were weak. They cheated on their wives.  They both made a terrible choice, one that they most likely continued to make over and over again until they got caught.  (I’m no psychologist, but it’s pretty obvious that everyday people, not sociopaths, do stupid things more out of self-sabotage than animus).

Both were caught cheating. One chose to call a press conference, admitted that he did so and eventually resigned as the Governor, probably destroying his political career for the rest of his life in the process.

The other said his computer had been hacked and denied that he did anything inappropriate. Eventually after overwhelming evidence that he was lying, the second man finally admitted that he not only did what he said what he didn’t do, but that he lied about it twice…once to his wife and then to the world.

Both men had to face THE BEST BAD CHOICE . . . admit a character defect and take the consequences or lie and maybe get away with it. One man’s bad choice was truly better than the other wasn’t it? The guy who came clean right off the bat? You have more sympathy for that guy don’t you? You’re more likely to give that guy a break than the other one wouldn’t you?

This is the stuff of humanity and by association art.  You must understand the concept of the best bad choice and artfully place your characters is these kinds of situations and have them choose.  The choices they make will tell the reader/viewer/listener what kind of person they are.

If you’re afraid of doing this, read this: “Art and Polarity.”

The flip side to the best bad choice is the concept of irreconcilable goods.  I’ll explain what that means in my next post.

Quite a bit has been written about David’s article.

Instead, it’s the responses I want to hit.

Snark First, Verify Later.

It’s easier to be snarky than it is to be informative, but it’s more effective to be informative than snarky any day.

For all the information available to us today, the Internet Age is drowning in misinformation.

It’s easier to perpetuate misinformation than it is to check and share the facts. The former is simple, appeals to the lazy side, while the latter requires a bit of work, even if that work is just a quick visit to Snopes.com and a polite e-mail to the person we feel got it wrong.

What follows are a few things I hope ALL readers will consider—whether you support and/or follow news related to the military community or not—as well as comments about David and his work.

If you have to ask “Who the Hell…?” someone is, do your homework before replying to him or her.

A number of the comments directed at David asked “who the hell he is…” and then launched into personal attacks—attacks that indicate the commenters followed the “snark first” approach,  which isn’t always followed by “verify later.” Had they done some work, I wonder if those who questioned David’s character would have done so.

So who the hell is David?

I had the honor of being introduced to him in early 2001, before 9/11, before Iraq and Afghanistan. At that point, he’d been covering the military community for DECADES—when there were just a handful of pro’s on that “beat”— long before today’s many “experts” jumped on board, chasing stories for career advancement, instead of a passion for, and caring about, the military community.

In 2007, between his travels and articles, he wrote a review of Brandon Friedman’s book The War I Always Wanted. Within the review, he wrote about Brandon’s meeting with a young boy, who pointed out where two children had been killed.

“’You should not kill children,’ the boy solemnly told Friedman. ‘I didn’t know what to say,’ Friedman thought. ‘Sorry?’ Does that cut it? I was skeptical but I decided to give it a try. ‘Sorry.’

“Old beyond his years, the boy said, ‘But you will understand, this is very hard for us.’

“I know, Friedman responded. ‘At the time that was more or less a lie, since I didn’t know. I couldn’t have known. Americans cannot comprehend what the Iraqi people have been through for the last five, 15 or 35 years.’

“Nor can most Americans comprehend the indelible stamp war is putting on the young generations we are sending into battle, 12 or 15 months at a time, over and over. It’s not easy to understand, and we often don’t know how to ask or take the time to listen to them. This book is a good place to start.”

In late 2011, his series “Beyond the Battlefield,” for which he was honored with a Pulitzer Prize, painted a portrait of that “indelible stamp” put on the “young generations” he’d written about years earlier in that review. He hadn’t stopped thinking about them.

So who is David Wood? Someone who has cared about the military community—for a long time.

Learn how to analyze the information.

Comments on a blog run like a kid’s game of telephone. One person starts the message, but by the time it reaches the tenth person, the original message is distorted. What was intended wasn’t what was received.

You have to figure out the true intention of the article.

Forget all the rumors. Read the article with a clear mind, analyze all the information—not just the article itself, but all the surrounding information.

There’s a reason outlets and individuals continue to be fooled by the Duffel Blog, as one example. Readers read, but don’t analyze, don’t look at the bigger picture.

An eye for an eye begets a tooth for a tooth and larger battles.

My son swats his sister, I reprimand him, he replies: “Well… she hit me first.”

My kids are nine and five, yet their actions are owned by adults of all ages.

You don’t agree with what someone said or did? Find out why he or she said it—or did it. Don’t offend them because you feel they’ve offended you first. Put away your emotions and ego—and whatever else makes you want to give back worse than you’ve felt you got.

Analyze what was written, look at what has been said in the past. What’s the big picture?

And then, if you still want to reply, keep it to the facts. Expand the conversation.

Of all the responses I’ve read to David’s article, “The Luxury of Being Wrong” is among the more even-handed. The author made his case without nasty personal attacks. And, when you read the comments following that post, they aren’t dripping in snark—perhaps because the author didn’t rely on personal attacks and hate to make his points.

I question why, if David didn’t support specific language within the article, it stayed up so long. But, knowing the rest of his work, I’m inclined to ask questions first, not attack him.

Question & Verify

Don’t discount someone’s work because you question the outlet with which he or she works. Base your judgement on the individual and his or her history of work first.

And, if you are going to question the outlet, question ALL the outlets.

A few comments about David’s piece have referenced the Huffington Post as an outlet that isn’t accurate—as in, he works for the HuffPost, guess he doesn’t have to be accurate…

While mistakes aren’t acceptable, the many who don’t know—or accept—that mistakes live EVERYWHERE is problematic, too. None of the news outlets get it 100% right all the time. NONE OF THEM.

AND . . . If you don’t know there was an error in what you read, or heard, or saw, you don’t know to look for it/to ask questions. In print editions of newspapers, you might run across a corrections section as you flip the pages, noting errors in an article the previous day. How often do news outlets broadcast corrections on air, noting all they got wrong? I’ve received a few phone calls and e-mails from mortified producers in the past, but an announcement on air? Or a note on the channel’s site? Yet to happen.

The Takeaway

Find out more about the individuals whose articles you are reading.

Use what you learn of their background and other work to analyze new information about them. Does it make sense? Is it off?

Think for yourself. Don’t believe what others are saying. Until you can verify them, treat comments from others as gossip.

Look at the big picture.

Be nice. Battles are started over individuals feeling offended and wanting nothing more than to make others feel their pain.

Don’t give someone a free pass when they make a mistake, but do give them the information they need to correct, clarify, improve, and/or expand it.

If you do decide to write something in response, do it with an even hand.

Last—or perhaps first—encase snark in a cement block and deep six it for eternity.