Street protests in Athens. Solon would have approved.

And yet artists have always run in schools. Paris in the 20s, Rome in the late 50s and early 60s, New York any time. I wish I had been part of a school. I once went to Paris and did nothing but ride the metro to the places Hemingway had mentioned in his short stories and in A Moveable Feast. I would’ve loved to have hung out with kindred spirits anywhere. It would’ve made me feel less alone.

Here’s what I found out about Hemingway by the way. In the short stories like “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” you felt like he was in some workingman’s café writing fiction with a half-inch stub of a pencil because he couldn’t afford even a crayon. Turns out the Closerie des Lilas and many of the other watering holes he mentioned are high-toned, high-cotton joints. Zinc bars, walnut-paneled walls. I was kinda depressed to discover this. I thought, “Hem was a swell!” I was disappointed.

Bottom line: I never could find a school. I never managed to hang out with anybody. Wherever the school was, I always got there twenty years after it had packed up and split.

But we need schools. We need the tribe. It’s too lonely being a one-man band all the time. Maybe the web is our school today. Maybe it’s Facebook, I don’t know. I’m missing that school too.

But to get a little more serious, the point of this post is that we need both sides of the dime. Each of us as individual writers, artists and entrepreneurs needs to be able to flip the switch and become the Incredible Hulk of self-discipline and self-sustenance. But we gotta be human beings too. The free agent mindset is too hard to sustain. In my own life I’ve probably arced way too far into that end of the pendulum swing. It’s not healthy. It’s not good for you.

But to be too mush-brained and other-directed is bad news too. Even worse news, because then we’re no good to anybody, including ourselves.

I admire the old-school philosophies of guys like Marcus Aurelius and Baltasar Gracian, who were able to be deeply in the real, warm-blooded world but at the same time remained true to their own stars.

The ancient Greeks invented the concept of the citizen. The autonomous individual who was capable of making up his own mind, unswayed by emotion or the mob, but who was also deeply involved in the affairs of his polis, his city. Solon, the great Athenian who saved the democracy when it was teetering on the brink of chaos, enacted the following law:

Any citizen who fails to take sides during a revolution will be fined a thousand drachmas (or some such hefty amount) by whichever side comes out on top, as soon as order is restored.

Solon didn’t want fence-sitters. He believed it was bad for the democracy. Jump in and join the riot. At least you’ll be a citizen. You’ll be making your voice heard.

Before the invention of the citizen, there were tribesmen, there were subjects, there were slaves, there were savages. None of these possessed free will. All were either possessed by others or bound by rigid, unbreakable codes of honor, conquest, or revenge.

You and I are citizens. We’re artist-citizens, who follow our calling, no matter what internal or external forces stand in our way, but at the same time we participate in the life of our times—of our family, our community, our nation, and our world.

We’re free agents but with warm blood.

Shaq of Orlando, L.A., Miami, Phoenix, Cleveland, Boston. We're all free agents now.

I think there is, and here’s how I’d define it:

We—meaning anybody now living in the globalized/digital/satellite-linked/worldwide-web world—are faced with the challenge and obligation to make a primal shift in consciousness. This shift is as cosmic, I believe, as the transition from illiteracy to literacy in the Gutenberg era, from farm to factory in the days of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and all the post-Industrial Age changeovers since.

I’m not talking about external changes. Those are obvious. What’s perilous and critical and what we all need to become conscious of is the stuff inside. How have we had to change our minds and our ways of thinking about the world and about ourselves?

Shawn has a concept he calls 3PV. Third Party Validation. What he means is the mind-set in which one’s sense of emotional security and self-worth is dependent upon the opinions of others. In other words, we don’t go forward with any action unless we think other people will approve.

Seth Godin talks about this a lot too. Seth decries the internal paralysis that stops people from acting until they have been “picked,” i.e. taken note of by Higher Authority and given permission to go forward.

“Pick” yourself, Seth urges. Give yourself permission to act. Don’t wait for some Third Party to tell you it’s okay or to provide a structure of incentive, punishment, and reward.

There’s a key insight here into the Macro Change we’re all going through.

We’re all having to adopt the Free-Agent mentality.

The Macro Change is a switch from being part of an organization (I hesitate to say “community,” though that’s probably the effective emotional term)—General Motors, Apple, the army, Harvard or State U.—to being Just Ourselves. But it’s not just being part of, it’s thinking like a part of.

Is it necessary to have an actual “job?” A salary? A boss? I’m speaking emotionally, not financially. Is our mental setup such that we are dependent for our inner well-being upon an externally-imposed structure? Are we capable of acting without external motivation or validation or reinforcement?

I was watching a documentary the other night about the old Brooklyn Dodgers. Talk about a vanished era. The players actually lived in Brooklyn. You would run into Gil Hodges or Carl Furillo in the produce section at Gristedes. A ball player in those days signed with a team and expected to play for them his entire career.

Sandy Koufax played his entire career for the Dodgers, in Brooklyn and Los Angeles.

Today you’re a free agent and so am I. Even in long-term jobs, we must think like entrepreneurs. Our 401-Ks are gone with the wind, along with Tower Records, Borders, and the steel industry.

The consciousness expansion and self-empowerment brought about (and required) by the digital revolution and its second- and third-generation follow-ons including globalization of manufacturing and the offshoring of Ozzie-and-Harriet-era jobs has compelled each of us, whether we want to or not, or realize it or not, to become our own one-person General Motors, IBM, U.S. Army, Harvard.

The web these days is chockablock with sites promising to teach “self-empowerment,” “self-motivation,” “self-branding.” Ninety percent of this may be hogwash and Amateur Hour, but the underlying imperative to learn these skills remains drop-dead valid.

In many ways that’s what this blog is all about—and has been from the start, though I myself am only starting to realize it now.

The switch we’re all having to make is from taking our identity and self-worth from being part of a Greater External Identity to being our own Identity.

The concept of Resistance is central to this alteration of consciousness, because the reason we fail to be self-motivating, self-validating, self-reinforcing is that we’re being defeated by our own Resistance.

This is a deep subject, worthy of far more examination than this space can handle in one day.

One closing thought: I suspect that much of the groupiness that upcoming generations display is a necessary and healthy counterpoise to this imperative of self-definition. People need community. Facebook, social networks, running in packs. I hate to say it but nativism, sectarianism, religious extremism, reversion to tribalism (whether in Baluchistan or the U.S. House of Representatives) are all part of the reaction to this Macro Change that the whole world is going through.

These are the prevailing winds.

This is the sea we’re swimming in.

This is the new stuff we have to teach ourselves.

It’s hard. It’s not natural. It’s scary, it’s uncharted, it’s lonely. And the dark side is never far away. (See the Boston Marathon bombings.)

But this is our brave new world.

We are all free agents now.

I never talk about a project I’m working on. It’s bad luck. But something happened a few nights ago that made me think I should make an exception, both for the sake of my own thinking and for sharing an insight or two. So I’ll keep depiction of the project vague but the wisdom as clear as I can make it.

Never listen to what they tell you in rooms like this

I was at a professional event with a friend who, each time he introduced me to a new acquaintance, described and made a pitch for the project I’m working on. (Don’t ask why.) He did this a number of times despite my excruciating embarrassment.

Bottom line: everyone he told the idea to went catatonic with boredom. Their eyes glazed over. They began edging toward the exit. Though they were too polite to say anything overtly negative, it was clear that they regarded me and my enterprise the way one might a Comic-Con trekkie describing his plans for solar self-levitation or, perhaps, Newt Gingrich flogging tickets for his colony on the moon.

I went home pretty depressed.

The people at the event were by no means imagination-challenged “suits.” They were bold, savvy artists and entrepreneurs. Almost every one had multiple success stories across all spectrums of art, tech, and business.

And their reaction to my project was universal snooze-o-rama.

I thought about it and thought about it and I came to a conclusion:

They’re wrong.

They can’t see what I see.

They have a superficial conception of what I’m planning to do, but they have no idea of how I’m going to do it.

Then I asked myself a second question: Does negative response make you consider giving up?

Answer: not for a nanosecond. I don’t care what anybody thinks. I’m seized by this project and that’s it.

I thought about books of mine from the past. From Bagger Vance to Gates of Fire to The War of Art, practically no one has believed in them at the concept stage. (With the exception of Shawn—which is why he and I are partners today). Most people thought I was crazy. “That idea? It’s been done a hundred times, nobody cares about that any more, what can you possibly say that hasn’t been said already?”

There’s an axiom among artists and entrepreneurs: to succeed, you have to be arrogant or ignorant or both. What that means is you have to blow off every response that says it’ll-never-work. Be arrogant. The nay-sayers are idiots. Or ignorant. Stay stupid and plunge ahead.

So I had a little talk with myself. Literally. I dictated my thoughts into a tape recorder and played them back. I reminded myself that what makes a good idea good is the fact that it hasn’t been done before—and that most people can’t imagine what hasn’t been done before. What they imagine instead is a crappy version of what has been done before. Then they reject that.

I kinda like the idea of a colony on the moon. And I’m not so sure there’s no future in solar self-levitation.

In other words: self-reinforcement.

One of the hallmarks of the true professional is her ability to be her own best friend. Sometimes when I’m driving, I’ll phone home and leave a message for myself.

Steve, we’re behind you, brother. Don’t let anybody tell you you can’t do it. Keep the faith, partner. You are on course and on target!

I always laugh when I get home (because invariably I forget that I’ve left myself the message). But the point is serious.

Almost no one recognizes a good idea. And the bolder the idea, the more people will be blind to it. If you’re seeking reinforcement from outside yourself, you’re in for a long, lonely haul. The answer to self-doubt is self-reinforcement.

Lindbergh made it to Paris, and you and I can too.

It ain't so easy, navigating in the boonies

One, my friend was completely confident of our whereabouts at all times.

Two, we were lost at least half the time.

A phrase kept re-appearing in my friend’s conversation: “In the end, we’ll succeed.”

At first I didn’t pick up on this theme, but after the twentieth time or so, I started saying it myself. It was a great mantra, and I think it applies equally well to such diverse enterprises as writing a novel or starting a business or undertaking any long-term, high-aspiration project.

What is a “Recon commander” anyway? As my friend explained it, recon teams or platoons (among many other assignments) guide larger formations across unfamiliar territory. Their job is to go into the unknown and make it known to those who follow. My friend’s vintage is the era before the invention of the GPS or other satellite-based navigational technology. He’s old school. A map. A compass. The sun.

I know from unimpeachable history that my friend is a superb land navigator. But, trust me, when you’re out in the deep boonies with no highways or man-made landmarks within miles, everything starts looking like everything else. My friend taught me about “blind maps”—a map with no place names on it, just topographical features. It’s amazing how hard it is to scan the horizon and say, “Ah, that peak over there is this peak on the map.”

One evening as the sun was setting we couldn’t find our way out of a box canyon. I was starting to freak. My friend was calmly collecting firewood. “In the end we’ll succeed.”

Another day we hiked all morning toward a road that had ceased to exist since the map’s publication. No problem. “In the end we’ll succeed.”

And we did.

There seemed to be two components to my friend’s principle:

1. Commitment to the ultimate object.

“In the end” meant to him the final goal. What happened along the way was purely anecdotal. There was a goal. That was where we were headed. Nothing would stop us from getting there.

2. Indifference to setbacks along the way.

My friend claimed to know exactly where he was at all times but, as I observed more than once, “If you know where we are, why do you keep checking the map?” “I’m checking the map,” he said, “so I know where we are.”

He was advancing, I began to understand, from being “slightly lost” to being “slightly lost” to being ultimately found.

“In the end we’ll succeed” is the ideal attitude for a long-term project because it helps you take incremental setbacks in stride. We progress not from success to success but from defeat to defeat. We screw up. We miscalculate. The unexpected confounds us. The trick is to remember that the sun will rise in the morning, we’ll be able to see the rocks and the handholds; we’ll climb out of the canyon. We’ll get back on track.

The amateur often fails because he mistakes an incremental setback for ultimate defeat. He gives up halfway to the finish. Trekking through a maze of canyons behind my friend, I could feel panic bubbling up in my brain at certain points. But always my friend’s footsteps continued confidently forward.

I was telling him, over the campfire one night, about John Keats’ concept of “negative capability.” What Keats meant by that phrase was the ability to keep functioning with confidence, even when you don’t know where you are or what you’re doing. Keats of course was talking about writing poetry. How do you progress through the composition of a monumental work like, say, Endymion when at point after point you find yourself lost and dazed and confused?

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing

A flowery band to bind us to the earth,

Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth

Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,

Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways

Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall

From our dark spirits.

In a way Keats was talking about Recon, only he identified his fixed and guiding principle (as a poet should) as Beauty.

Over the campfire, my friend agreed. “In the end, we’ll succeed.”

When you write, are you coming from your gut/heart, or from a merchandising view? Both?

When you're the Boss, love is money

It got me thinking about the old Hollywood axiom, “One for love, one for money.” This is the wisdom proffered in good faith to writers, actors and directors by their agents. It means, “Alternate the projects you work on. Do one that’s commercial, then do the next ‘for art.’”

The counselor offering that advice is trying to steer her client’s career between Scylla and Charybdis. Don’t be too precious and work only on artsy-fartsy stuff. But at the same time, don’t be so mercenary that you stick only to surefire commercial trash. Glide back and forth. Keep your hand in both worlds. The “one for money” will pay the rent, the “one for love” will feed your soul.

Of course most of us aren’t lucky enough to even get this choice. We don’t have the luxury of turning down paying gigs. But let’s set that hardball reality aside for the moment. The question on the table is: “Do you work from your gut/heart or from a merchandising point of view?”

Here’s how this issue has played out in my career:

I’ve been trying to sell out for years. My problem is I can’t find anyone to sell out to. I’ve tried to go commercial. I’ve tried to pick surefire winners. Every time I do, I crash and burn.

Now I may be an exception. My case may not apply to others. I’m a spec writer, not a writer-for-hire. Meaning what I like to do is invent my own stuff, then roll the dice on whether or not I can sell it. Someone in that boat doesn’t have the luxury of fielding offers. I might have a different opinion if I did.

The question remains: what criteria do I apply to a spec project of my own? Do I choose the one that feels commercial? Or do I go with the one I love?

Answer #1: I try to do both. I try to pick a subject that I have passion for—but one that I also think will be of interest to people in the real world. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. As William Goldman famously said, “No one knows anything.” If I could pick winners, I’d be pointing to one hit after another. So Answer #1 is dicey from the get-go.

Answer #2: I pick the one I love.

I can only say, this has worked for me. When I’ve gone for a “sure thing,” I’ve bombed. But when I’ve picked projects that seemed like commercial lunacy–i.e., a mystical golf novel (The Legend of Bagger Vance) or a war story set 2500 years in the past in a place that no one can spell or pronounce (Gates of Fire)–those projects have found an audience. They’ve been hits. Even this blog, which started out as utter insanity—a site consisting of nothing but videos of me ranting about tribalism in Afghanistan (!)—has worked out fine (as long as you don’t ask it to produce any income.)

What the issue comes down to for me is this:

I believe that life happens on two levels. The body-level tells us to go commercial. The soul-level tells us to follow our hearts.

If you’re lucky, you’re like Bruce Springsteen. You live on the heart level and you never have to leave it. You ignore every concept of “what will sell.” Instead you dive deep into your own world and your own passions. You go from Born to Run to Darkness on the Edge of Town to The River to Born in the USA and you keep going.

If you’re the Boss, you don’t have to sell out. You don’t have to pander to your audience. Instead you lead them. They want you to. You tell your story, follow your obsessions–and, holy Asbury Park, your secret, inner, crazy life turns out to be their secret inner crazy life too.

A project that for you is “one for love” turns out to be “one for money” as well.

I love filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, I love songwriters like Jackson Browne and Neil Young. I love actors like Ryan Gosling and George Clooney and Edie Falco because they seem to always pick projects based on love. I will even give a shout-out to Tom Cruise. He has rolled the dice more than once.

Sometimes readers will write in to this blog (or to me personally) and take me to task for this point of view. “How dare you suggest to people that they follow their hearts? Life is tough! I’ve got a family to feed!”

I can only answer for myself. Chasing a payday has never worked for me. When I go for a sure thing, I wind up with nothing.

So I vote for the heart side.

One for love and one for money?

Why not do ‘em all for love?

How to get to Carnegie Hall

If you wanna get fast, go to the track.

If you wanna get rich, go to (I’ve never figured that one out).

The point is: where the body goes, the spirit follows.

Therefore, move thy butt.

Put your ass where your heart wants to be.

If you want to paint, don’t agonize, don’t ikonize, don’t self-hypnotize. Shut up and get into the studio. Once your physical envelope is standing before the easel, your heart and mind will follow.

If you want to write, plant your backside in front of the typewriter. Don’t get up from the chair, no matter how many brilliantly-plausible reasons your Resistance-churning brain presents to you. Sooner or later your fingers will settle onto the keys. Not long after that, I promise, the goddess will slip invisibly but powerfully into the room.

That’s the trick. There’s nothing more to it.

Enter Shawn.

This is when it’s great to have a friend/editor/literary Kahuna who really knows his stuff. Shawn flew out to L.A. from New York and we beat our brains out for a couple of days. I remember vividly what he finally said:

“You know what this book is about? It’s about stories. We all have stories that we tell ourselves about what our lives are—and those stories are always wrong.”

Diane Keaton and Al Pacino in The Godfather. Story "B" was waiting inside Story "A" from the very start.

That was it. That was the stroke that split the diamond. It solved The Profession. But, though I didn’t realize it at the time, it was also a template not only for the hero’s journey in most of the novels or screenplays that you and I write, but for many of the struggles we face in our real lives.

Last week’s post was called “Good Guy Speeches.” Good Guy speeches are the soliloquies (however brief) in which the hero of a book or a movie lets go of Story “A” and prepares himself to move on to Story “B.”

Here’s Crash Davis’s (Kevin Costner) Good Guy speech from Bull Durham:

CRASH DAVIS

Know what the difference between hitting .250 and .300 is? It’s 25 hits. 25 hits in 500 at bats is 50 points, okay? There’s 6 months in a season, that’s about 25 weeks. That means if you get just one extra flare a week – just one – a gork … you get a groundball, you get a groundball with eyes… you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a week… and you’re in Yankee Stadium.

All his life, Crash has dreamed of playing in the majors. That’s his Story “A”: “I’m going to make it to the big leagues.”

Crash has bet all his chips on that story.

Now, in the moment of his Good Guy speech, he finally accepts that this story is bankrupt. He’s not going to make it to “the Show.” Crash’s speech is a gorgeous lament for the non-appearance of that stroke of fortune, that run of good luck that is sometimes the entire difference between a winner and an also-ran. Crash acknowledges with this speech that that streak has not come for him—and, even if it had, it wouldn’t have been enough. He tells Nuke Laloosh (Tim Robbins), who is on his way to the majors, “You’ve got a million-dollar arm. All my body parts put together don’t add up to seven cents.”

Another all-time great Good Guy speech comes from a different sports movie, the first Rocky.

In this Oscar winner for Best Picture, a ham-and-egg boxer named Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) has through freak luck gotten a shot at the heavyweight championship. He’s going to fight Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) tomorrow night. But tonight, the eve of the title fight, Rocky can’t sleep. He leaves his g.f. Adrian at home and goes alone to the empty arena. What he experiences there changes him profoundly.

Rocky looks around at the brand-new ring, the thousands of seats, the huge posters of himself and Apollo, the giant American flags. Until that moment Rocky’s Story “A” had been that he could win. He could knock off the champ. That was the story Rocky was telling himself.

He comes home to Adrian, who sees at once that something bad has happened. “What’s wrong, Rocky?”

ROCKY

Who am I kiddin’ [believing I can beat the champ]? I ain’t even in the guy’s league…It don’t matter, ’cause I was nobody before…I was nobody. That don’t matter either, ya know…It really don’t matter if I lose this fight. It really don’t matter if this guy opens my head, either. ‘Cause all I wanna do is go the distance. Nobody’s ever gone the distance with Creed. And if I can go that distance, ya see, and that bell rings, ya know, and I’m still standin’, I’m gonna know for the first time in my life, ya see, that I weren’t just another bum from the neighborhood.

When Rocky says, “‘Cause all I wanna do is go the distance,” he has switched from Story “A” to Story “B.” This is monumental. It is his true victory, hours before the fight itself. Because he has moved from delusion to reality.

He has acquired wisdom.

In the final scene of Bull Durham, Crash Davis returns to the woman he has always loved but never yet really connected with, Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon). He tells Annie he has quit playing ball. “I hit my dinger and hung ‘em up.”

(In other words, Crash has relinquished Story “A.”)

Then he tells Annie that he’s heard there’s an opening for a manager at a minor league club in Visalia, California.

CRASH

What do you think, Annie? Think I can get to the Show as a manager?

ANNIE

You’d be great!

Crash, like Rocky, has moved on to Story “B.”

We all tell ourselves stories, like Shawn said. And those stories, as he observed, are almost always wrong.

The nutshell plot of many movies and books is simply this:

ACT ONE. Hero starts off desperately believing and living Story “A.”

ACT TWO. Hero tries like hell to achieve Story “A.” Events intervene. Hero cannot achieve Story “A.”

ACT THREE. Against his will, hero releases Story “A,” moves to Story “B.”

In more complex stories like The Godfather or Shane, the hero’s passage from Story “A” to Story “B” may be a dark elevation—i.e. Michael Corleone’s evolution from Marine Corps captain to Mafia don—or a noble but tragic fall: Shane’s transition from the dream of hanging up his guns to his recognition of the necessity of strapping them back on forever.

In really good writing, the seeds of Story “B” have been planted from the very start. When we, the reader/moviegoer, flash back in our minds to the story’s beginning, we see the clues that we had missed the first time through.

In Rocky’s case, even though he was at the start an untrained, going-nowhere brawler, it was plain to us in the audience that he had plenty of heart, he could take a beating, and he had thunder in his fists.

In Crash’s case, even though he was way past the age when minor leaguers get called up to the Bigs, we could see that he possessed the savvy, the grit, and the leadership to whip a team into shape and to turn boys into men.

Story “B” was there all along, if only we had had eyes to see it.

I’ve been asking myself lately, What Story “A” am I believing about myself right now? Is there a Story “B” lurking somewhere? If so, what is it?

Tim Robbins and Kevin Costner clash in Ron Shelton's "Bull Durham"

In the story, Nuke Laloosh (Tim Robbins), the clueless but athletically gifted pitcher, has just been called up to the major leagues, “the Show.” Crash Davis (Kevin Costner), who has been mentoring Nuke in the minors, has just heard the news. Crash knows that he himself is never going to get that life-changing phone call, even though he’s ten times smarter than Nuke and has worked ten times harder. The scene takes place in a pool hall. Crash is a little drunk. He launches into a soliloquy about how slender the margin is between making the Big Time and being stuck in the sticks.

CRASH DAVIS

Know what the difference between hitting .250 and .300 is? It’s 25 hits. 25 hits in 500 at bats is 50 points, okay? There’s 6 months in a season, that’s about 25 weeks. That means if you get just one extra flare a week – just one – a gork … you get a groundball, you get a groundball with eyes… you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a week… and you’re in Yankee Stadium.

“You’ve got a million-dollar arm,” Crash tells Nuke. “All my body parts put together don’t add up to seven cents.”

What would you call this speech? A lament? No. It’s an epiphany. It’s Crash facing a terrible truth, one that he has avoided his whole life.

Ed Helms on the way to becoming a new man in "The Hangover"

Here’s another Good Guy Speech, from The Hangover. It’s Stu the dentist (Ed Helms) confronting his superbitch g.f. in the final scene.

MELISSA

Why would you go to Las Vegas?

STU

‘Cause my best friend was getting married, and that’s what guys do.

MELISSA

It’s not what you do.

STU

Really? Well, then why did I do it? Huh? ‘Cause I did it! Riddle me that! Why’d I do it? You know, sometimes I think all you want me to do is what you want me to do. Well, I’m sick of doing what you want me to do all the time! I think in a healthy relationship, sometimes a guy should be able to do what he wants to do.

MELISSA

That is not how this works!

STU

Oh, good! Because whatever this is ain’t workin’ for me!

In both these scenes, the hero (reluctantly) accepts reality. Before the scene, he had been passionately pursuing X. After the scene, he realizes he’s never going to get X.

Crash in Bull Durham recognizes that he’s not going to get to the majors as a player. His protege Nuke is, but Crash is not. In this scene, Crash accepts this. This is a monumental breakthrough for him because it frees him to move on—if not immediately, then perhaps in the future—to “X minus.”

This is Stu’s epiphany too. In this clash, Stu realizes that he’s not going to marry Melissa and live happily ever after, i.e. what he believed he wanted at the start of the movie. And he realizes something about himself that he never knew. He recognizes not just that Melissa is wrong for him, but that he has the strength to stand up to her. “Why did I do it?  Because I did it!” His new strength, meaning the crazy stuff he did in Vegas, really is him. He never knew that before.

What both speeches have in common is they show the hero redefining success. Success for himself. Success on his own terms.

Here’s another Good Guy Speech from the final scene of a film that’s a genuine tragedy (in the best literary sense), Shane.

Shane (Alan Ladd) has just shot it out with the Bad Gunslinger, Wilson (Jack Palance.) Shane has killed Wilson, thus freeing the homesteaders from the tyranny of the cattlemen. In the process, he has also saved the family he has come to care for, Joey’s (Brandon de Wilde)—and the woman he has secretly and silently begun to love, Joey’s Mom (Jean Arthur). For the young boy Joey, who has just witnessed Shane’s triumphant gunfight, the moment looks primed for a happy ending.

Brandon de Wilde and Alan Ladd in "Shane"

JOEY

Can I ride home behind you?

SHANE

Afraid not, Joey.

JOEY

Please, why not?

SHANE

I gotta be goin’ on.

JOEY

Why, Shane?

SHANE

A man has to be what he is, Joey. You can’t break the mold. I tried it and it didn’t work for me.

JOEY

We want you! Mom wants you!

SHANE

Joey, there’s no living with a killing. There’s no going back from it. Right or wrong, it’s a brand, a brand that sticks. There’s no going back. Now you run on home to your mother and tell her, tell her everything’s alright, and there aren’t any more guns in the valley.

Shane’s dream, when he rode into the valley at the start of the movie, was to hang up his guns. He wanted a normal life. He thought he could leave his past as a gunfighter behind. He believed the world would let him. Now he knows better. His past has caught up with him, and, more painful, he knows it will stick with him forever.

In all three Good Guy Speeches, the same thing has happened:

The hero has acknowledged a truth he has been in desperate denial of.

In all three, a passionately-sought dream has been replaced by cold, painful reality. This hurts. But these scenes (and the realizations articulated within them) liberate their heroes and set them on fresh courses. Stu is free to find a new girlfriend. Crash is free to move on to the next dream.

Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon in "Bull Durham"

CRASH

There might be an opening for a minor league manager at Visalia this spring. Think I could make it to the Show as a manager?

ANNIE

You’d be great!

Of these three Good Guys, Shane’s lot is by far the darkest. But at least Shane now recognizes and accepts his fate. He has become the archetypal Western Hero Who Rides Off Alone Into The Sunset.

I love these Good Guy Speeches because they embody the process by which all of us acquire wisdom. What is wisdom but the passage from denial of reality to acceptance? The ultimate statement of denied reality is, “I’m gonna live forever.” And the highest wisdom is accepting that none of us will.

If you’re a writer working on a book or a movie, ask yourself if your hero needs a Good Guy Speech. If he does, have you given it to him?

Remember that stars look for these speeches. They read scripts and novels searching for them. Actors are not stupid. They know that scenes like these and the speeches within them, if they’re written well enough, are unforgettable.

Jeremy Irons in "Margin Call." My favorite villain of 2012.

The villain in Gunga Din, played by the great Italian actor Eduardo Ciannelli, is called simply “the Guru.” He’s like Gandhi, if Gandhi had traded non-violence for mega-violence. This speech is kicked off by Cary Grant, as British sergeant Archibald Cutter, confronting the Guru in outrage over his extremely clever plan to lure Cutter’s regiment into a trap and massacre it to the last man.

CARY GRANT

You’re mad!

THE GURU

Mad? Mad. Hannibal was mad, Caesar was mad, and Napoleon surely was the maddest of the lot. Ever since time began they have called mad all the great soldiers of this world. Great generals are not made of jeweled swords and mustache wax. They are made of what is here [points to his heart] and here [his head.] Mad? We shall see what wisdom lies within my madness.

A great villain speech possesses three attributes.

First, it displays no repentance. The devil makes his case with full slash and swagger. His cause is just and he knows it.

Second, eloquence. A great villain speech possesses wit and style. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards knew this when they wrote, “Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste.”

Third, impeccable logic. A villain speech must be convincing and compelling. Its foundation in rationality must be unimpeachable. When we hear a great villain speech, we should think, despite ourselves, “I gotta say: the dude makes sense.”

Here’s the speech that won Michael Douglas an Oscar:

GORDON GEKKO

I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.

My favorite villain speech from a recent film is this one from Margin Call. Jeremy Irons plays John Tuld, the CEO of a giant Wall Street firm that has spent the previous eight hours ensuring its own survival by deliberately unloading massive quantities of worthless mortgage-backed securities on every customer it can find, thus producing a worldwide stock market crash. Now, at day’s end, Jeremy Irons sits at a linen tablecloth in the executive dining room, savoring a tasty filet. Eighty floors below, the devastated metropolis recedes into twilight.

Kevin Spacey plays sales chief Sam Rogers, the only character in the movie who possesses a glimmer of conscience. He enters and tells Jeremy he’s had enough, he wants out. Jeremy won’t let him go. “When did you start feeling so sorry for yourself, Sam? It’s unbearable.”

JEREMY IRONS

So you think we might have put a few people out of business today? That it’s all for naught? You’ve been doing that everyday for almost forty years, Sam. And if this is all for naught, then so is everything out there. It’s just money; it’s made up. Pieces of paper with pictures on them, so we don’t have to kill each other just to get something to eat. It’s not wrong. And it’s certainly no different today than it’s ever been. 1637, 1797, 1819, ‘37, ‘57, ‘84, 1901, ‘07, ‘29, 1937, 1974, 1987—Jesus, didn’t that one fuck me up good—’92, ‘97, 2000, and whatever we want to call this. It’s all just the same thing over and over; we can’t help ourselves. And you and I can’t control it, or stop it, or even slow it. Or even ever-so-slightly alter it. We just react. And we make a lot money if we get it right. And we get left by the side of the road if we get it wrong. And there have always been and there always will be the same percentage of winners and losers, happy foxes and sad sacks, fat cats and starving dogs in this world. Yeah, there may be more of us today than there’s ever been. But the percentages, they stay exactly the same.

[Hats off to the writers of these gems: J.C. Chandor for Margin Call, Joel Sayre and Fred Guiol for Gunga Din, Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone for Wall Street.]

On any project, I ask myself, “Who’s the villain?” “What does he want?” “Have I given him at least one juicy scene where he really gets to say his piece?”

As writers, if we know who our Bad Guy is and what he wants, we’ve got the whole piece licked. The villain represents and articulates the counter-theme. If we know what he wants, we know what our hero wants: the opposite. If we know the issue or value that our Good Guy and Bad Guy are clashing over, we know our theme. And when we know our theme, we know everything.

I wrote in Do The Work that an excellent way for a writer to proceed is to start at the finish and work backward. That’s really just another way of saying start with the villain and work backward from there.

Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell and Dorris Bowdon in "The Grapes of Wrath"

What is a “natural life” anyway? Is it living in alignment with evolution? Is it the nomadic life, the hunter’s life, the farmer’s life? If we live in the city, have we cut ourselves off from the organic voyages, migrations, and rhythms of the human soul?

The life of the artist is artificial. Art by definition is artificial.

What exactly is the artist’s life? What shape does it take, day-to-day?

What you and I do as artists and entrepreneurs is we impose an order and a structure upon the day. We do this by an act of the will. We don’t let the day take us wherever it wants to. We resist. We refuse to live reactively. We view the vagaries, crises, and emotions that the day presents to us as distractions. We dismiss them.

Does that mean we’re not living naturally? How do you define “natural?” Some might declare that the human being in a natural state will maximize pleasure and minimize pain, respond to emergencies and physical and emotional needs, chase money or love/fame/sex/power, hang with his homies, have fun, get wasted, do what he believes he’s expected to do and seek to be what he believes he’s expected to be. He will live, as George Harrison might have said, “in the material world.”

Is the writer’s or the artist’s life more natural? It’s certainly not “natural” to do what a writer does or to live the way a writer lives. It’s not natural to think the way a writer thinks. It’s not natural to be a surgeon either, or a ballerina or a pianist. To work at the barre? To practice scales?

What you and I do does not come naturally. It’s a cultural response to the experience of life. It’s a response to the human condition.

Here is where the argument takes an interesting and significant turn. What is the human condition? It’s the state of being suspended between two worlds and finding it impossible to fully enter into either. If you’ll forgive me for quoting from Turning Pro:

As mortal flesh, you and I cannot ascend to the upper realm. That sphere belongs to the gods … Our lot, instead, is to dwell here in the lower realm, the sphere of the temporal and the material—the time-bound dimension of instincts and animal passions, of hate and desire, aspiration and fear.

We’re stuck in the lower world but we yearn for the higher. We remember it, though we don’t know from where. We miss it. We feel pulled toward it. We aspire to it.

The artist has a device by which she tries to touch this upper realm. That device is inspiration. Which brings us back to the unnatural natural life of the artist.

By imposing a structure of work and dedication onto the day, the painter and the dancer and the filmmaker may be living an unnatural life in the temporal dimension, but they’re living the most natural life of all in the dimension of the spirit.

You and I impose order onto our days not to make ourselves stiff or rigid or wooden but in order render impotent the pull of the superficial and the random and the current. We fix our attention not on the petty opportunities and emergencies of the day but on our inner Polaris, even if it’s something as humble as a kiosk business we’re trying to launch or a free app we’re aiming to design. We banish distraction so that we can address our call, our Unconscious, the summons of our Muse.

Is that natural?

To me, that’s as natural as it gets.

There’s a chapter in Turning Pro that talks about migrant labor, about following the harvest from season to season.

You and I … migrate too.  We follow the Muse instead of the sun.  When one crop is picked, we hit the road and move on to the next.

The river of our lives flows on two levels. We can’t ignore the first one, the material dimension. It’s important. It demands, justly, our attention. But our real life, our natural life, is unfolding within a different sphere. That dimension is the one that the artist and the entrepreneur call home, and they will bend the first dimension into any shape they have to, to find their way to the second.