Matt Damon as Jason Bourne. The "amnesiac story" is a classic "hero's journey"

The neophyte writer, when he arrives in Tinseltown, very soon gets wised up to the lingo—“inciting incident,” “Act Two curtain,” “All Is Lost moment” and so forth. It’s not so much that there’s a “formula.” But there’s definitely a “vocabulary.”

The reason there’s a vocabulary is that certain structural concepts work in stories, and others don’t. How do moviemakers know this (forgetting for a moment William Goldman’s famous axiom, “Nobody knows anything”)? They know by the box office. The Monday morning ticket figures. Audiences line up for some movies and run away from others.

William Goldman said another very smart thing. He said “Screenplays are structure.” What he meant was that the building blocks of the story and how they are arranged are the most important elements in the success of a screen drama or comedy. What comes first, what comes second, what’s left in, what’s left out. If the architecture works emotionally, the movie will work, even if the casting is less than inspired and the dialogue fails to rise to Academy Award level.

What’s interesting to me is that these building blocks often parallel, beat by beat, Joseph Campbell’s throughline of the “hero’s journey.”

Herewith those beats in myth: the hero starts out unconscious, the hero receives a “call,” the hero ventures forth, meets outlandish characters, receives aid from unexpected sources (often divine or semi-divine), suffers, is lost, despairs, and finally returns home—often in a guise unrecognizable to others.

That’s a movie. That’s a screenplay.

In the prototypical screen story, the protagonist starts out in “normal” life. Think about Taken, The Hangover, Bridesmaids. But something is out-of-kilter or potentially out-of-kilter. Suddenly: a shock! The inciting incident propels the hero out of normal life and into movie life.

We have launched ourselves upon the “hero’s journey.”

From here to the end of the movie (as Robert McKee has astutely observed), the protagonist wants only to restore order. He wants to get his daughter back, find Doug, return to sanity. In screenwriter’s argot, this is Act One.

Act Two is the trial of the actual journey. Stephen Cannell (one of the masters of storytelling) said something very wise. “Act Two is about the villain.” He meant that the hero is now encountering resistance to everything he tries. If he’s Matt Damon in a Bourne movie, the poor guy can’t even stop to hit the men’s room without the toilet exploding. Thank goodness he’s got Franka Potente—i.e. “aid from unexpected sources.”

Act Two in a movie is the guts of the “hero’s journey.” In this section, the protagonist encounters not just random resistance or evil, but Bad Stuff that’s specific to him. The theme of the hero’s ordeal arises from unacknowledged elements of his own internal disequilibrium. The hero is becoming conscious of his own shit. Bourne is trying to unravel his forgotten past; Stu in The Hangover is wrestling with issues of standing up to his bully girlfriend.

But at the same time as the hero’s struggle is specific to him or her alone, it is also universal. It’s your story and mine. It’s myth.

In myth and in movies, Act Two ends with the All Is Lost moment. At this point, the hero is facing maximum resistance. He is as far from his goal as he can possibly be. Paradoxically, he is also on the threshold of the breakthrough he has been seeking. What he must do is change, and the change is of consciousness as much as of action.

In Act Three, the hero returns home. The hero brings a gift. The hero restores equilibrium to his life. He is no longer the person he was, but the person he has become.

In other words, movies have been using the “hero’s journey” since long before Joseph Campbell introduced the concept into the popular vernacular.

Why? Because it works. The dazed and confused human being (i.e., you and I standing in line to buy our tickets) responds to the on-screen projection of the story that’s already engraved upon our hearts—and has been for tens of millions of years. That story never gets old. We want to hear it again and again. We never get tired of it.

Life is hard. Life is bewildering. Worst of all, life—as most of us experience it—is devoid of significance. That’s why we need stories. Movies, which are structured deliberately to follow the timeless beats of the hero’s journey (with a creative deviation here and there), make life seem like it has significance. The story may end sadly, even tragically. But, as the filmmakers have shaped it and mounted it, it has meaning. It is not random. It is not without significance.

My own view is that such stories are not nonsense. They may be formula, they may be pulp; they may be venal and they may be escapist. But they’re not just Hollywood flimflam. The hero’s journey, in myth or in movies, reflects a primal template of the human heart. It describes how life really works.

The protagonist in a movie or the hero in a book (or you and I living from day to day) must, over and over, come to see what he has refused to see. He must acknowledge what he has fled from acknowledging. He must face what he has refused to face. Whether the final wrap-up is “Trust the Force, Luke” or “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown,” that transformation invariably comes at the end of a journey that looks and feels a lot like myth.

Next week we’ll start exploring how all this fits for you and me as artists and entrepreneurs.

Quetzalcoatl. Believe it or not, we've all got a lot in common with this dude.

What are myths? They’re the ancient, collective legends of the human race. The Odyssey, the epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf; the sagas of the Buddha or Prometheus or Quetzalcoatl.

The hero’s journey, as Joseph Campbell famously observed, appears again and again in these myths. The specifics vary, but the overall contours remain remarkably consistent.

1. The hero starts as “stuck” and unconscious.

Like Luke Skywalker toiling on Uncle Owen and Aunt Varoo’s evaporator farm, he’s a slug. A peon. And he knows it.

LUKE SKYWALKER

If there’s a bright center to the universe,

you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.

2. The hero receives “the call”—which he often resists.

When the messenger Palamedes came to summon Odysseus to join the Greeks in the war against Troy, Odysseus pretended to be insane so he wouldn’t have to go. He sowed his fields with salt. Palamedes cleverly placed the hero’s infant son Telemachus in the path of the plow. When Odysseus turned the blade aside, his ruse was revealed. He was drafted into the journey.

3. The hero wanders far from home—often for a long, long time.

Odysseus was gone ten years. The children of Israel wandered for forty. The hero’s journey lasts for such a length of time that the hero fears that it will never end.

Though the hero may strive on his journey to achieve a specific goal (reach the Spice Islands, find and capture the Golden Fleece), his primary object is simply to get back home.

4. The hero endures trials.

The hero encounters obstacles. He faces ordeals; he experiences adventures. He suffers, he is lost; he despairs.

5. The hero experiences wonders and encounters outlandish characters.

Theseus fought the Minotaur. Ravens spoke to White Buffalo Calf Woman. Conan slept with a witch who turned into a crone and tried to murder him. For the hero on his journey, the sun stops in place, planets reverse their courses. All kinds of crazy shit happens.

6. The hero receives aid from unexpected sources—often divine or semi-divine.

Ariadne showed Theseus to follow a thread back out of the Labyrinth. Yoda taught Luke how to use the Force. Most of what the hero learns (including the skills and stratagems by which he overcomes his adversaries) derives from sources he never knew existed.

7. The hero at last returns home—but in a form unrecognizable to those he left behind, as those left behind appear (at first) unknowable to him.

Washed ashore in rags, Odysseus was not recognized even by Penelope, his wife. Only the hero’s loyal hound Argus knew the returning king as himself.

8. The hero brings a gift for the people.

Moses comes down from Sinai with the Ten Commandments, Arthur returns to found the Round Table. T.E. Lawrence has the brainstorm to attack Aqaba from the landward side.

Why are these myths universal? Why does the hero’s journey appear within them again and again? According to Joseph Campbell, it’s because the arc of evolution of the human heart is the same in all cultures and across all millennia. Myths are the race’s way of describing that constant, universal heart and its unchanging, primal passage.

My own belief (and I got this from Joseph Campbell) is that you and I are born with the hero’s journey tattooed on our psyches. It’s the software we were hatched with. Our souls did not enter this world as blank slates, like hard-drives upon which no data had been written. They came with templates—and the primary template is the hero’s journey. This pre-programmed script is engraved on my heart and yours as a fill-in-the-blanks, yet-to-be-lived-out drama.

We will be stuck and frustrated on Planet ___________.

Our call will come in the form of _______________.

On our journey we will endure _______________, confront  _____________, have sex with ___________ and _____________.

All the way through to the end.

I can’t prove it, but I would bet that a school of psychology could be founded (maybe it already exists), based on the hero’s journey and nothing else. The therapist’s role in such a school would be simply to determine at what point the client stands on his or her saga—and to make the client see his or her life in those mythic terms.

In other words, Merlin or Mentor (both mythic beings themselves) would supply meaning and significance to that pulp of experience which, perceived by the one it’s happening to, seems random and without cause or consequence.

Our forebears didn’t have shrinks back in the cave or on the steppe. They had myths. In ancient Sparta, the only “book” the young boys were permitted or required to know (the tradition was oral of course) was Homer’s Iliad. The Spartans thought that was enough. I agree with them.

More on this subject next week.

You meet all kinds of people on the hero's journey

What I realized, re-watching Joseph Campbell (tragically he died a couple of years after the series aired) was what a powerful influence his books and thought have had on me. The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Follow Your Bliss, The Power of Myth. I decided I would dedicate the next few Writing Wednesdays to exploring those subjects. I don’t know exactly what I think about them, but writing is a very efficient way to find out.

What exactly is “the hero’s journey?” What is it in myth? What is it in our psyches? Is it the software we live by? We know George Lucas built Star Wars (and Luke Skywalker’s inner journey) around the concepts in Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces. But how does that stuff impact you and me? As artists, do we have hero’s journeys? What are they? What do they mean? Is the hero’s journey the same for women as for men?

What is the hero’s journey in story terms? Novelists and screenwriters use bits and pieces all the time, often unconsciously. The hero’s journey in one form or another is the template for almost every screen story from Conan the Barbarian to The Hangover. Concepts like the inciting incident and the All Is Lost moment come straight from Joseph Campbell’s studies of myth and legend. Is the hero’s journey still alive today? Can you have one in a cubicle or on Facebook?

I have my own theory about the hero’s journey as it relates to an artist’s evolution. I’m not sure exactly what that theory is, but I’ll try to hammer it out a bit over the next few weeks.

What I do think is critically important about thinking in mythic and metaphorical terms is it keeps you from going crazy. When we look at our lives, particularly when we’re young and trying to figure out who we are and what our purpose is in this lifetime (if indeed we even have a purpose), it’s easy to see the landscape of our days as constituted of chaos and disorder and ruled (if they’re ruled at all) by randomness and happenstance, animal appetites, fear, risk aversion, habit, even plain old evil.

When we think in terms like that, the world becomes a form of hell and we experience ours lives as careening in circles, heading nowhere except down the tubes.

A concept like the hero’s journey changes all that. If you’ve ever had a terrible dream—one you woke up from in a sweat, shaken to the core—and then analyzed that dream later, you may have come to see it as a breakthrough, as overwhelmingly positive. The dream may have been a warning. It might have opened your eyes or kicked you in the ass. In the end, terrible wasn’t terrible after all. You were better off having had that terrible dream.

In the hero’s journey in myth, the hero suffers terribly. He’s lost, he’s drowning, he’s thrashing around in darkness and terror. But here’s the point. The suffering isn’t random. It’s isn’t chaos, and it isn’t without meaning. In fact it’s loaded with meaning.

What makes our suffering seem random and hellish is that we perceive it without context. The idea of the hero’s journey supplies that context. If we believe it, it puts our trials into a framework that stretches back across thousands of  generations. Our ordeal is nothing new. We’re not unique; we’re not the first trolley to ever trundle down this track. Others have traveled the same path and, fortunately for us, left clues along the trackside. Guys like Joseph Campbell have helped decode those clues. Thank you, Joe!

I’ve had my own hero’s journey, and you have too. We’re both still on those journeys. Concepts like “the call” or “the wise crone” or “the chance encounter” don’t apply only to Luke or Yoda or Obi Wan Kenobi. They’re hard-wired into our psyches, I believe, like the “take me home” feature on your Mini Cooper’s navigation screen.

More to come in the next few weeks.

"Tropic of Cancer" was banned in the U.S. for almost thirty years, yet Henry Miller wrote it while living like a monk.

(What I love about these notes is that they’re aimed by Miller only for himself—without a glimmer of self-consciousness, nor even for a moment intended for public dissemination. Here is a writer lashing himself to the mast, though not too tightly, as he bears down on what would become his first published novel, Tropic of Cancer.)

COMMANDMENTS

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.

2. Start no more new books, add no new material to Black Spring.

3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.

4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!

5. When you can’t create you can work.

6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.

7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.

8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.

9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.

10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.

11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

[Maria's Brain Pickings post continues:]

A boy from Brooklyn

Under a part titled Daily Program, his routine also featured the following wonderful blueprint for productivity, inspiration, and mental health:

MORNINGS: 
If groggy, type notes and allocate, as stimulus.

If in fine fettle, write.

AFTERNOONS:

Work on section in hand, following plan of section scrupulously. No intrusions, no diversions. Write to finish one section at a time, for good and all.

EVENINGS:

See friends. Read in cafés.

Explore unfamiliar sections — on foot if wet, on bicycle if dry.

Write, if in mood, but only on Minor program.

Paint if empty or tired.

Make Notes. Make Charts, Plans. Make corrections of MS.

Note: Allow sufficient time during daylight to make an occasional visit to museums or an occasional sketch or an occasional bike ride. Sketch in cafés and trains and streets. Cut the movies! Library for references once a week.

Three things leap out at me from these Notes To Himself:

One, Henry Miller was a pure pro. His commandments would work equally well for a diet, training for a triathlon, starting a new business or planning to invade (or decamp from) Afghanistan.

Two, how different the product of this regime is from the regime itself! Tropic of Cancer is gloriously obscene, mad, chaotic, hilarious. Reading it, you might imagine the author pounding in out in the backroom of a Place Clichy brothel, or dictating it into whatever recording devices they had in 1932 while weaving through the lanes of Montmarte, plastered on absinthe and retsina. Instead Miller is living the life of a monk (or a grad student).

Three, I love the balance of his Program. Henry Miller cuts himself abundant slack. “See friends, drink if you feel like it.” “Stop at the appointed time!”

And the deepest wisdom of all: “Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.”

Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves in "Speed," a classic High-Concept premise

The High Concept era was the exact time I started finding work in Tinseltown. High Concept was what I cut my teeth on. I used to beat my brains out, trying to come up with high concepts.

What exactly is High Concept?

Let’s start with its opposite, low concept. Low concept stories are personal, idiosyncratic, ambiguous, often European.  “Well, it’s a sensitive fable about a Swedish sardine fisherman whose wife and daughter find themselves conflicted over … ”

ZZZZZZZZ.

Low concept can be great. Personally I go to a lot of low concept movies. But low concept is low. High Concept is high.

1. A high concept story can be pitched in 30 seconds or less.

2. A high concept notion doesn’t depend on stars.

3. It’s almost impossible to screw up high concept (though plenty of us did.)

Here are three classic high concept premises:

“Speed.” A criminal rigs a bus full of passengers to explode if the vehicle’s speed drops below 55 mph.  Cop and innocent gal must save bus and passengers.

“Basic Instinct.” Homicide detective finds himself in a torrid love affair with a sexy female suspect who may be the ice-pick murderess he is trying to capture.

“Die-Hard.” Terrorist gang takes hostages in office high-rise after dark, seeking millions from the company’s vault. What the criminals don’t know is that one resourceful cop (whose estranged wife is one of the hostages) is in the building, aiming to stop them (and save his wife.)

Bruce Willis in "Die-Hard"

The original Terminator was high concept, Jurassic Park was high concept, Rocky was high concept.

In pitching high concept, we don’t have to describe the climax. The climax is obvious. And it’s juicy.

Nor do we need to specify the action set-pieces along the way. They write themselves.

In high concept, premise is everything.

Subtlety? Who needs it?

Depth? R U kidding?

Irony? Fuggedaboutit!

All that being said, I don’t knock high concept. I love high concept.

When high concept ruled, the writer was king. Star scripters raked in big-time dinero. Spec pitches went for six figures.

But what I like about high concept (or, more exactly, thinking in high concept terms) goes deeper than the monetary payoff. It’s that HC thinking forces you, the writer, to boil your idea down to its absolute essence. What is this story about? What’s the beginning, what’s the middle, what’s the end?

Shane, which is a tragedy worthy of the Attic stage, can be HC-ized to this:

Gunfighter seeks to free himself from his past, only to discover that his skill with a six-shooter draws him inexorably back into the world of violence he is trying to escape.

When we as writers think in high concept terms (or simply use HC as a tool in our kit), we construct a story the way an engineer builds a bridge. We plant a powerful foundation on the near shore (the inciting incident), then an equally strong base on the far shore (the climax.) We structure the pair so that the near-shore foundation inexorably propels the story toward the far-shore payoff. Then we erect an exciting, beautiful, well-supported span in between.

What’s wrong with that?

Shakespeare did it. So did Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Dante did it, Milton did it, Trey Parker and Matt Stone do it.

There is nothing cheap or “commercial” or formulaic about a solid premise that propels a story via a powerful throughline to an inevitable, thrilling and satisfying climax.

The trick is to enlist the principles of HC in the service of material that actually has something to say. If you can do that, you’ve got Hamlet, you’ve got The Godfather, you’ve got Louis CK Live at the Beacon.

[P.S. Thanks, friends, for being patient with the slo-o-o-w arrival of Turning Pro. We've run into a few production glitches. We'll have it soon, very soon, I promise!]

It’s all Resistance.

The perennially pissed-off Yosemite Sam. This is how my brain feels in the AM.

Why Resistance takes this form, I don’t know. Maybe you’re not like me. Maybe you wake up peppy and cheerful. Maybe I’m demented. But this is what my day feels like out of the box.

I have to counteract it right away. The worst thing I can do is lie in bed. If I let myself remain horizontal, my head starts spiraling off into dangerously dark places. The day can get out of control in a hurry.

It took me years to understand that that voice in my head is not me. It’s Resistance.

Hovering before me as I wake up is the work I know I need to do that day. Inevitably that work is daunting and inescapably it brings up fear. Ineluctably I don’t want to do it. This fear and this avoidance combine to create the witch’s brew that boils and bubbles in the cauldron of my brain.

I must take action to counter it.

Two things work for me. They might not work for you, but they do for me. One is exercise, the other is getting out of the house.

I’m a gym person. That’s my medicine. You’ll see my car pulling in before dawn and me trashing what’s left of my body on the treadmill or under the bar in the squat machine.

The gym isn’t about exercise for me. It’s about beating Resistance. The purpose of working out, for me, is to give me a “little victory” (my friend Randy Wallace’s phrase). Momentum. Something I can build on.

From the moment my soles touch the floor in the morning, I am seeking to manage my emotions for that day.

There’s an analogy you see a lot in ancient texts like Plutarch or Plato. The analogy is to the driver of a chariot. The charioteer has four horses. Each one is strong and willful and each one wants to gallop in a different direction. The horseman has to channel that powerful, unruly energy and make it go where he wants it to—without reining it in so much that he stifles his chargers’ fiery spirits.

The chariot race from "Ben-Hur." We want that horsepower.

We want that spirit. We want that horsepower. We just don’t want it dragging us all over the arena and eventually crashing head-on into the wall.

If you’re like me, you work by projects. For me it’s books. My life isn’t a one-day-one-thing, the-next-day-another affair. I’m almost always working on some long-term enterprise. Resistance loves long-term enterprises. They’re so easy to sabotage. Resistance can derail them at the start, at any point in the middle, or at its favorite ambush site—the end.

Maybe that’s why I wake up so grumpy.

Resistance has seen me coming. It knows exactly where I’m going to be. It can take up a concealed position beside the road and wallop me broadside as I trot past.

What I’ve found is that if I can get past my bad-tempered, pissed-off self early, I can make the day go my way.

Once I’m working, I’m fine. In the groove, all moodiness vanishes. I’m cheerful, I’m upbeat, I’m ready to contribute and primed to help.

I have two friends, women, each of whom has confided to me recently that they wake up with severe anxiety.

I wonder if this is Resistance.

I wonder if my friends are like me, only their Resistance takes a slightly different form. Both women are artists. Both have high aspirations and both care deeply about their work. Both define themselves, to some extent, by their art and their enterprise.

Maybe I’m projecting my own stuff onto my friends, but if I were either of them, the first thing I’d tell myself is that that anxiety is not you … it’s Resistance. It springs from your fear of the day’s work and your passion to make of it something great.

Don’t dwell on that anxiety. Don’t overthink it.

Get up. Get moving. Do whatever you have to do to seize the reins of that chariot and to take command of those four unruly horses.

Fiery chargers are good. Horsepower is what we want. We just have to learn how to gain control of those magnificent, passionate beasts and to get them to take us where we want to go.

Michael Jordan on the links. Even His Airness has fallen under the spell of the game.

(With apologies to everyone who lives along the banks of the Cuyahoga, here is Tom Wolfe’s definition of a white belt and white shoes worn as part of the same outfit. Mr. Wolfe calls it a “full Cleveland.”)

But back to golf.

The reason high-performance professionals are often smitten with golf is that golf, more than almost any other sport, requires the player to perform over and over the following mental/emotional action:

To focus exclusively on the shot in front of him, no matter how horrifically he has just screwed up the previous shot(s).

This exercise is identical to what the World Bank President or the NBA champ have to perform in their day jobs.

Golf makes performance of this action particularly difficult because unlike full-speed sports like basketball, football, tennis or hockey (where the player is in motion), golf makes the competitor execute each stroke from a standing start. As anyone who has ever tried to sink a three-foot putt under pressure knows, this is where the mental game (aka psyching yourself out or “choking”) rears its ugly head.

All this is a long wind-up to the concept of the professional mindset.

Mental toughness.

What exactly is mental toughness for the artist and the entrepreneur?

Let me offer a definition based on our previous discussions about Track #1 and Track #2, i.e. our pure-soul trajectory versus our commercial trajectory.

The professional mindset means being able to maintain your focus on Track #1, no matter what is happening on Track #2.

Or, expressed a different way:

The professional does not react emotionally to success or failure.

The professional maintains, as her touchstone, the trajectory of her lifetime practice as a pure artist or entrepreneur. She follows her bliss. She serves her own Muse.

The pro may have to work on Track #2 to put food on the table (or she may sell her Track #1 work to those who are buying it for Track #2 purposes). But she never loses sight of her Track #1 trajectory, the path of her artist’s heart.

Consider Bruce Springsteen. Or Neil Young or Martin Scorsese or Toni Morrison. These artists’ careers have been blessed in that, almost from the get-go, their Track #1 work—i.e., what they were doing from the heart, pursuing their own Muse—has paid off on Track #2 as well.

The Boss's work is so strong it pulls Track #2 over to Track #1

These artists’ voices have been so authentic and their points of view so powerful that they have pulled Track #2 (the commercial world) over to their Track #1.

They are lucky—and they are good.

You and I may not be able to travel that same happy highway. I can tell you, I’ve sold out so many times I’ve lost count. My railroad car has bounced along Track #2 for many a mile. At the same time, I have had my Track #1 work flamed and flogged and given up for dead. And occasionally the opposite has happened: Track #1 has paid off big-time on Track #2.

Which brings us back to the Pro Mindset.

No matter what happens, up or down, in the world of the marketplace or the sphere of “what other people think of our stuff,” we as professionals must keep our eyes on the prize—and that prize is what WE OURSELVES think of our best stuff and what trajectory our true-heart work is propelling us upon.

A career like Springsteen’s or Neil Young’s unfolds organically from album to album, each one different and yet each one hewing to its distinctive Springsteen-ness or Young-ness. Their Muse is leading them. They are not following the market, the market is following them.

You and I must keep our eye on the same ball. Our own ball. No one said this was easy. All of us have fallen on our faces again and again trying to do it. But the objective remains the same:

To permit ourselves neither to be cast down by failure nor over-elated by success, but to judge by our own standards and no one else’s how true we have been to our heart’s calling—and to never take our eyes off that star.

To quote the Old Philosopher:

“As you travel through life

Let this be your goal:

Keep your eye on the doughnut

And not on the hole.”

There's a reason why the company always picks up the check

When you and I sell our novel or cookbook to Simon & Schuster (or our screenplay to Warner Bros. or our album to Interscope or our videogame to Electronic Arts), we willingly and consciously take ourselves out of the sphere of risk.

The company cuts us a check and we cruise to the bank. The publisher or studio has taken on the Big Boy assignment: they have assumed the risk. It’s their role, now, to finance everything, distribute everything, market everything. If the project bombs, they eat it. You and I get off scot-free. We’ve got our check and nobody can take it away from us.

But there’s a price to be paid for evading that risk. The price is that we become the child, and the studio/label/publisher becomes the adult.

There’s a reason why editors and producers (and even agents) pick up the check when they take the writer or musician to lunch. They’re the grownups. We’re the kids.

Now it’s true that certain projects require the deep pockets of a Major Kahuna. You and I can’t finance our $50 million sword-and-sandal epic. We’re getting nosebleeds just thinking about bankrolling our $10K digital, shoot-it-in-three-days biopic of Johnny Rotten. And (full disclosure) I confess that my own next project is a big book with a big publisher. So by no means have I totally moved away from my day job.

But in other areas of publishing/music/movies, the barriers to entry have fallen so far (thanks, Seth Godin, for teaching us this and a lot more) that it has become feasible to actually roll the dice and bet on yourself all the way. I can do it. You can too.

In fact, Shawn and I are about to plunge into that very pool ourselves, in association with our crack pards Jeff and Callie. My next book, coming in a few weeks, is a follow-up to The War of Art called Turning Pro. It’s something I’ve been trying to do for three years and finally (we hope) have put together.

Coming soon from a publisher (very) near you

We’re going to bring the book out ourselves. Are we nuts? Why walk away from a six-figure advance and the prestige of being published by a major house? Why take on the hassles of design and copy-editing, printing, marketing, administration, fulfillment? The writer is already risking his time, his work and his future. Why put his bank account at hazard too? The answer for Shawn and me is it’s fun. And it’s empowering. If the web and other tech breakthroughs make it possible to be active instead of passive … let’s do it.

Besides, we’re tired of being in the role of the child. The writer who signs a contract and cashes the check forfeits all right to complain. Whatever evils may befall him or his book, he has enabled those evils himself. It’s not the publisher’s fault. The writer has no one to blame but himself.

Shawn and I have more books in the pipeline after Turning Pro, including a videobook that discusses this very business model—what we call a “Long Tail Business,” after the seminal book by Chris Anderson. We’re putting it out in the hope that it might inspire other artists and entrepreneurs to bet on themselves in the same or similar ways.

The trick to a long-tail business (we hope) is that, if you can keep your expenses and your expectations low, the rewards of autonomy and control will make up for the smaller upfront payday. That’s the theory anyway.

Stand by for updates. We’ll be sending dispatches from the trenches in the weeks to come!

No, we're not "swinging to the sweet sounds of Risk Management"

(I’m not referring, by the way, to the Seinfeld episode featuring George Costanza and his protégée.)

My theory is to bet on yourself.

If I have $10,000, should I put it in the stock market? Or should I use that cash to back my own dream?

My stuff has crashed and burned 90% of the time. But always when I find myself with money, I use it to buy time—time for me to work.

I bet on myself.

Why does the chef who has opened three restaurants, all of which have gone belly-up … why does he leave his safe, lucrative, prestigious job running someone else’s four-star kitchen to take another flyer on another new eatery? Is he crazy? Yes. But he knows his own heart. Is he driven by a dream of fame, money, recognition? No doubt. But in his deepest soul he is impelled by his own vision. At night after work, snuggled up with his sweetie, our chef sees new menus scrolling before his eyes; he sketches designs for stunning entryways and scribbles rosters of all-star staffs; he envisions the entirely new cuisine he will invent and elevate to perfection. He can’t help himself. Should he splurge his bankroll to take his squeeze to St. Bart’s? Okay. But the lion’s share must go to a seed account for the Next Big Try. It has to. His only alternative is to hang himself.

When I worked in advertising in New York, I would sock away my paychecks, then quit and move someplace cheap where I would write a novel. When I couldn’t sell that novel, I crawled back to NY, got out the knee pads, then did the same drill over again. When I made money in Hollywood, I used it to buy more time and did the same thing.

One frozen February Friday in New York, I caught a ride up to the country with my ad boss (who was a superstar creative director and a good guy, who had taken me off the street when my “portfolio” was literally scribbled on the backs of cocktail napkins). As his BMW was cruising north on the Saw Mill River Parkway we happened to pass what was probably the dirtiest, scurviest freakazoid hippie no-hoper, shivering in the frozen slush along the roadside. “Yeah, Steve,” my boss said, indicating the gentleman in question, “that’ll  be you in a couple of months.” I gulped. Of course I was thinking the exact same thing. My boss knew my history. He had once described me as “the man who has written more words for less money than anyone in literary history.” But he knew, and I knew, that I was going to roll the dice again—and probably in the aforementioned two months.

In Hollywood, writers and directors have an axiom: “One for love and one for money.” What they mean is that the crafting of a career in the real world sometimes requires a canny to-and-fro-ing between art and commerce. Take one job on Track #2, the commercial track, but make sure the next one is on Track #1, the track from your heart.

Bet on yourself.

One of these sat on the director's mantel

The director and I used to work at his house in the Hollywood hills. We’d sit side by side at a huge oak table in his kitchen for eight or ten hours at a crack. I’d drive home exhausted, but I was having fun. The director and I started becoming friends. One day during a break he asked me what else I was doing, when I wasn’t working for him.

I told him I had written three novels that never got published—and I was constantly hammering out spec screenplays that also didn’t sell. He regarded me thoughtfully for a long few seconds. “Keep working,” he said.

I could tell this was a piece of serious wisdom from a veteran who had been through the wars, but I wasn’t really sure what he meant.

The next day I asked him if he wouldn’t mind elaborating. Again he said, “Just keep working.”

Then his fiftieth birthday came around. His wife threw a big party and I helped out. The director had a few more Margaritas than he intended. He had also recently been diagnosed with cancer. When the party was over, he and I wound up in the kitchen together, doing the dishes and putting them away.

“Keep working,” he said. “Don’t turn anything down. Porn flicks, slasher movies, free stuff for friends. Don’t get precious. You’re young, you’re learning. Keep working.”

He cited three reasons:

“One, working means you’re getting paid. I know I’m giving you bupkus on this job. But it’s money, it’s validation. Every buck means you’re a working pro, you’re toiling in your chosen field.

“Two, when you work, you learn. Everybody has something to teach you. A grip will show you something about lighting, an editor will drop some pearl about what to keep and what to cut. Even actors know something.

“Three, you’re making friends. Some kid who’s schlepping coffee today may be a producer tomorrow. An actress you run lines with may hire you for a rewrite five years from now. Who knows, you might even get laid.”

My friend was making a case for Track #2, the commercial track. But implicit in his advice was to never take your eye off Track #1, the artistic track.

“This crap story that we’re working on now can teach you plenty. Because it’s working. The principles of story-telling are in this piece, just like in Shakespeare. I’m making sure they’re in there. Watch me. Do what I tell you. Porn works, splatter works, horror works; if they didn’t, nobody’d finance ‘em and nobody’d go to see ‘em. You can learn from all of them.”

We said goodnight outside by my car. I wished my friend happy birthday. He turned and walked back up the steps. He and his wife had a great house with a view over the whole city.  At the top step he stopped and turned back.

“But don’t forget, the same principle that’s healthy at one stage of your career can be fatal at another. You have kids, a mortgage, you find yourself caught up in a life that you can’t let go of. Now you’re doing work because you have to.”

Inside, on my friend’s mantel sat an Academy Award. But he had been doing episodic TV and worse for a lot of years. He didn’t say anything now, but I got the message.

“Take any job now. Learn. Make friends. Don’t turn your nose up at anything. But keep your eyes on the prize.”

There’s a sad ending to this story. My friend died a few years later. Our little action movie never got made. But I took a lot of jobs because of what my friend told me, and I never regretted any of them. And I didn’t forget what he said about Track #1 and Track #2, even if he didn’t use those terms.

“Keep working.”