Like everyone else, I love a great “origin story.” Especially since I’m in the middle of one myself (Black Irish Books).

These kinds of stories focus on the creation of something . . . be it a company (The Social Network), a pop star (The Idolmaker), an investigation that leads to a President’s resignation (All the President’s Men) or even the act of not creating something (The Shining).

So for fun, I thought I’d give you two book publishing creation stories.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I represent both of the writers in these stories. I believe in their work and I am biased.

In October of 2009 (that’s right . . . almost three years ago), my friend Trena Keating emailed me.  Like me, she’s a former publisher/editor in chief turned literary agent (check out www.keatingliterary.com).

She wrote to tell me about a friend of hers who worked at The Atlantic. He recommended she read a novel written by one of his colleagues. She read a chunk of it and realized it wasn’t her thing. But she thought that the writer had a certain something and she thought his book was in my arena.

She suggested I take a look and referred the writer, Matthew Quirk, to me. (This happens all the time in the business and is one of the reasons why I love publishing so much).

I read twenty pages of Matt’s book and quit. It was a mess. It was trying to do far too many things with far too many plot devices with far too little specificity of purpose. It was a dog’s breakfast. For me, it was a pass, a rejection, a “hit the bricks, Kid” kind of e-mail chore.

99% of the time, the story ends here.

*

In March 2011, my client, seasoned Wall Street Journal reporter Scott Patterson, was in a pickle.  After doing a painstaking amount of research and over a hundred interviews using the good old-fashioned wearing down of shoe leather method—like literally meeting his sources—he had a mountain of material on his hands.

He couldn’t seem to get his arms around it.

His first book was no walk in the park either. The Quants was a New York Times bestseller. Quite an achievement considering it concerned difficult to understand stock market manipulations by a new breed of Wall Street traders who use science and quantitative reasoning to make their bets instead of the old gut-instinct model. Whew, that wasn’t easy to summarize.

But what The Quants is really about is the age-old “cool kids versus the nerds” drama—Wall Street’s shift from the Ivy League good old boy network, to the Caltech, MIT, we’re smarter than you, set.

Today, because of the work Scott did on The Quants and scores of follow-up stories, he’s widely acknowledged as the go-to guy for high tech Wall Street journalism. It’s his territory and well earned.

I sold his new book to the publisher of The Quants (Crown Publishing) in the spring of 2010 and Scott was required to deliver the manuscript to them in July 2011.

But he had a big problem.  He had just too many storylines . . . He’d literally turned over every rock he could find concerning a very controversial and exponentially expanding form of Wall Street trading—high frequency trades placed in milliseconds by artificially intelligent computer generated algorithms dumped into secret exchanges called DARK POOLS.

He got the idea for Dark Pools while being interviewed by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Stewart is very well versed in the Wall Street world. His brother, Larry Leibowitz, is Chief Operating Officer of The New York Stock Exchange.

Stewart was fascinated by these mysterious and virtual mini-NYSEs where trades are made blindly.  That is, the identity of the trader and the firm he works for is not made public until the trade has gone actually gone through. The buyer doesn’t know the seller and the seller doesn’t know the buyer until the transaction has been completed.

He grilled Scott about how DARK POOLS worked on the show and gave Scott the idea for his next book.  Thank you Jon Stewart!

But how could Scott humanize something that by its very definition is artificial and anonymous?

He understands that if you are not writing about people (or anthropomorphized beings) you have no story. It’s hard to have any feelings for an algorithm.

How was he going to solve this problem, especially since he was sitting on a 175,000 words of seriously rough draft and only had four months to deliver not more than a 95,000-word manuscript?

*

Like my friend Trena, I could tell The Atlantic guy, Matthew Quirk, could write.  Between Trena and me, we must have read close to 10,000 submissions over the course of our careers.  After you’ve read that many, you become a pro at identifying fresh talent. It’s all about original narration, which only comes from hard work. But talent is just the beginning . . .

Until he switched gears and flip flopped between too many plots in that original manuscript submission, Quirk’s line-by-line writing was breezy and smart. Addictive.

I’ve long since decided not to mince words with prospective clients. Why hold back? So I e-mailed him and told him he should put this book in a drawer and start over.

Even if an agent picked it up and even if the agent sold it, it wouldn’t perform. He’d then have a bad sales track record, which would hurt his chances of selling another novel to a publisher, and even if a publisher gave him a second chance, he’d be in the “throw it on the wall” category.

That is, the publisher would print a few thousand copies and wait and see if anyone cared out in the wilderness. Thousands of books are published like that every year and very few break out from the pack. Maybe ten.  Not very good odds.

I then explained that after his second novel didn’t work, he’d have to change his name and write under a pseudonym if he wanted to publish another.

After I gave him this horrible news, I told him that I thought he had the skills to write a very compelling and commercially appealing thriller. I told him to email me the next time he was in New York and I’d buy him a coffee.

Matthew Quirk came to New York the following Wednesday.  He brought fifteen ideas for thrillers that he’d been tinkering with for years. He had medical thrillers, action adventure stories, mysteries, science fiction, horror . . . the gamut. It was obvious he was serious about being a professional novelist. And not a novelist intent on plumbing the depths of his innermost thoughts, one that people actually read and enjoyed.

I nixed every single one of his ideas.

I could tell he was deflated. He told me that he’d promised his fiancé that he’d only take two years off before they got married to see if he could be a novelist. He’d left The Atlantic and they were living in a studio apartment in Washington (both working from home) and their nest egg was eroding faster than they’d anticipated.

Matt figured out that if he picked up a freelance piece here and there, he could give it one more year. His fiancé gave him the thumbs up to do it too. She told him they could get married at City Hall.  No big deal. This is the kind of relationship you just know is going to last.

I’d heard variations of all of Matt’s ideas before and I’d seen scores of books just like the ones he described bomb. I wasn’t going to bullshit him. This guy was a writer.  He needed a career, not just a sale. And a career requires singularity.

I asked him to tell me about the work he’d done at The Atlantic and what it was like in Washington.

He told me about “opposition researchers.” These are young College grads who work for private consulting firms whose sole job is to find out the deepest dirt they can about their clients’ political opposition. Once they find the dirt or even just someone willing to claim there is dirt and go public with the information, they leak it to media sources like Drudge Report or Politico and soon we have organizations form like “the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.”

He told me about the way influence is peddled at big Washington consulting firms—how the men behind these firms are the real power players in the country . . . even the world.

“These guys control the 500.”

“Who are the 500?” I ask.

“Oh, you know, there’s a saying in Washington that there are really just 500 people who matter in the world.  These are the people who really hold power and it doesn’t matter what political party is represented in Congress or the White House.  These are the people who maintain the status quo.”

“You mean a consulting firm like Kissinger Associates wields more power than John Boehner?”

He laughed like it was one of the stupidest questions he’d ever heard.

“Think about it.  If you can’t get elected if you don’t have the right political strategist handling your campaign . . . which of the two of you in that relationship is indispensible?”

Now I was the neophyte.

“This is what your thriller should be about, Matt.”

He didn’t get what I was saying exactly. So I blathered on.

“You know this territory in a way that few do. What you just told me is an explanation of our world that the average Joe—like me—suspects is the truth.

How do you explain Timothy Geithner or Lawrence Summers or Secretary’s of the Treasury who used to run big investment banks? All these guys seem to be able to work for both sides of the political sea saw. They never seem to lose their status. It’s like they’re part of some secret group that is always in control.

But it’s also difficult to buy into the innumerable ‘global conspiracy theories.’ Are the Freemasons behind everything? Is there some Crypt at Yale that holds the answers? Hard to believe that New Haven is the center of the Universe . . .

What you just explained to me, Matt is that Washington and every other seat of global power just run on Realpolitik. Doing what’s necessary to keep power . . . Today . . . who gives a shit about tomorrow. There’s no big long-term plan. No core ideology. What you just described is how government sausage is made day after day.

There is no grand design. It’s just a bunch of jackals clawing at each other to maintain their place in the 500.

People love thrillers because they make sense of the world.  In these kinds of stories, there is logic and justice and they alleviate a modicum of the reader’s anxiety about the real world. A thriller that explains how our political world works, in the most entertaining way, would be awesome.” I say.

“Ok, I hear you.” He was silent for a minute or so, then . . . “I think I can do this . . . It’s a Faustian story kind of like The Devil and Daniel Webster . . . ”

It took Matthew Quirk fifteen months to finish the book, not the twelve he had budgeted.

In that time, he and his fiancé were living off of macaroni and cheese.  He’d even torn his ACL in one of his knees and was hobbling around Washington with only bus fare and the prospect of having to find a job in one of the worst economies of the past century. But he finished the book.

I read The 500 in one sitting.

This time, I got on a train and met Matt in Washington to go over my plan to sell his book.

“Matt, I think it’s fantastic, but this is the kind of book that everyone will want or no one will. I can’t guarantee anything.”

“I’m just glad I finished it. It was a lot of fun, but it beat me up too. Whatever happens . . . happens.” He said.

We finished our ham and cheese sandwiches, shook hands and said goodbye.

Whatever you may read or hear about Matthew Quirk or his first novel The 500 (and I think you’ll hear a lot about it), you should know just how hard he worked to get it published. He had the guts to throw away a book he toiled on for a year and a half. He started another one from scratch and pulled his hair out trying to find a way to reinvent the Washington thriller.

The day after I sold The 500 to Reagan Arthur Books, an imprint of Little Brown, which is a division of the multinational publishing corporation Hachette, and my book-to-film colleague Justin Manask, sold the film rights directly to 20^th Century Fox, Matthew Quirk woke up, kissed his new bride, took a shower, got a cup of coffee and sat in front of his computer to map out his next novel.

It took Matt more than five years (probably his whole life) to become an “overnight success,” but it is the work itself that sustains him.

As I expected, he’s a writer. A pro.

*

So Scott Patterson has four months to figure out a way to narrate a beginning, middle, and end to a story that doesn’t seem to have any characters . . . just ones and zeros.

How he did it was to step away from the research mountain and ask himself one question, which led to another, and another.

Who started all of this DARK POOLS stuff?

Without Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak or Mark Zuckerberg there would be no Microsoft, Apple, or Facebook.

Electronic markets didn’t just appear one day. Someone had to have had the idea to digitize the stock market. What precipitated the idea? Who wrote the code to the first electronic network?  What was the first electronic network? Why did he do it?

Why isn’t he as big a household name as these other guys? Is he a Gazillionaire?

I can tell you this. Scott found the man responsible for electronic markets. This man wrote the code for an exchange called ISLAND because he believed the trading markets was disingenuous and exclusionary.

This man believed that information should be free and that everyone should be able to buy a stock or bond without having to know someone who went to Harvard or Dartmouth to do it for them.

He believed that everyone should have the same information as Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan Chase.

The very forces he opposed then corrupted this man’s egalitarian electronic dream.  ISLAND became what we now call NASDAQ and NYSE EURONEXT and scores of DARK POOLS mimic what this man created over twenty years ago.

In a ratty office littered with take-out boxes, empty Coke cans, servers stacked inside bakers’ racks, and a pet lizard he kept in a kiddy swimming pool, Josh Levine created the modern financial system.  Large swathes of his code, like primordial DNA, remain in those exchanges.

Josh Levine is the ghost in the machine.

Scott Patterson figured out that Dark Pools, at its core, had to be an “origin story.” It has to feature the work of Josh Levine.

While he continued to regularly file pieces for The Wall Street Journal as his deadline approached, Scott also spent hours every day mapping out the narrative of his book.  It’s just what he does. He’s a pro.

DARK POOLS is a jaw dropping achievement.  It should result in SEC investigations and Congressional hearings. Seriously. If you have money in the market, you really need to read this book and then find some way to talk to one of “the 500″ to do something about it.

Whether it changes the status quo or not, the pure storytelling of DARK POOLS is remarkable. Scott Patterson has reduced one of the most complex systems on the planet into a story about a human being trying to change the world for the better. He almost succeeds if not for the dark forces that preyed upon his magnanimity.
It ain’t hard for anyone to relate to that . . .

Congratulations to Matthew Quirk and Scott Patterson . . . two writers I’m privileged to work with.

Ari Gold in action. Working for him can be a "hero's journey"

Navy SEAL training is a hero’s journey. So is Marine Corps boot camp or spring football camp at ‘Bama or a season dancing with the Joffrey Ballet. A Jenny Craig diet is a hero’s journey. For that matter, so is being a contestant on Dancing With The Stars.

Did you just take a job as a photographer’s assistant? You’re on the hero’s journey. Are you an intern for a law firm, a P.A. on a movie set? You’re on the path too.

Recall the broad strokes of the hero’s passage:

He begins unconscious and “stuck.” He experiences a “call.” He is cast out of the world he knows. He enters upon an ordeal; he becomes lost. He pursues an objective (sometimes simply his own survival) in the face of monumental resistance. He experiences adventures, encounters outlandish characters, receives aid from unexpected sources. At the climax of his passage, the hero hits bottom. Then: a breakthrough! The hero overcomes! He completes his dark passage and returns home, a different person than when he set forth.

This mythic journey is exactly what you and I experience in real life in Army Ranger training, in the mail room at William Morris, or doing research for Alan Dershowitz. The difference between the hero’s journey as undergone spontaneously in real life and the hero’s journey experienced in boot camp or athletic/artistic/commercial training is that the latter has been deliberately designed to produce a specific transformation in the individual undergoing the passage.

Military training is designed to produce soldiers. Taking class with the Joffrey is meant to produce dancers. Either way, the transformation sticks. Why? Because it follows beat-by-beat the software (the hero’s journey) that already exists in our hearts.

Like the hero’s journey in myth, training tests us. It pushes us beyond our limits (or what we believe are our limits.) Such passages provide mentors. They supply role models. They reward specified success and they punish specified failure.

Training courses are dramas. They start slowly. They adhere to a theme. And they build to a climax (Hell Week, the Final Four, the Boston Marathon) within which we hit the wall and yet somehow survive. And these programs provide a built-in “return home”—commencement, Bonus Day, the finish line.

If you and I aim to transform ourselves, we can employ the hero’s journey artificially. We can create our own ordeal. Or we can sign up for one that already exists. Commit to the Iditarod, apply to Cordon Bleu, enlist in the Foreign Legion. The hero’s journey will be imposed upon us from outside. Our only decision will come up front: what do we want to learn, whom do we wish to become?

This is the hero’s journey, packaged and domesticated. It’s still real. It still works. We still experience all the passage’s beats, and in a measure (not too much, not too little) that has been proved to work without overloading and possibly destroying us. We will be pushed beyond our limits, rewarded and punished, and finally, with luck, we’ll emerge as different people. And to some extent we’ll retain control. We will at least have embarked upon the passage by choice.

Then there’s the real hero’s journey.

The authentic hero’s journey.

This passage occurs spontaneously. We don’t choose it; it chooses us. We can’t control it. We don’t know where it will take us. And we have no idea how it will end.

The real hero’s journey arises from the unconscious imperative of our own hearts, which is by definition unknown to us.

For the artist, this passage is critical because it sets her on the path to authenticity—to becoming who she really is, and to speaking, for the first time, in her own voice.

Further thoughts next week.

Our big night out is our annual splurge. My son marks off the days.  Our weekend hours of playing catch, me hitting him grounders and pitching him batting practice revolve around the state of Derek Jeter’s batting average or whether or not C.C. Sabathia might pitch the night we’re scheduled for the Bronx.

This year, I promised to teach him how to keep score.

We’re going to track every pitch and mark the game just like the official scorekeepers do.  He’s learned that a sharply hit grounder to shortstop with a man on first is probably going to end up on paper as a 6-4-3 double play, that a player who looks at a third strike gets the ignominy of a backwards “K,” and the fun of knowing he’ll be able to conjure the game in his mind just by looking at a piece of paper.

I tell him about when I was a kid and of how I got to the ballpark three hours before the first pitch so that I could watch my hero, Pittsburgh Pirate Roberto Clemente, take batting practice and basket catch deep fly balls in Right Field. I tell him how Clemente was able to effortlessly catch a ball on the warning track, turn and throw a frozen rope all the way, chest high, to home plate. How Clemente was an even greater man than player.

How he shamed a huge chunk of racism out of a big city just by being who he was. When sportscasters nicknamed him “Bobby” to make his name easier to remember for white fans, he refused to answer their questions. His name was Roberto. He was a man, not a boy. How he chartered a plane, loaded it with relief supplies for victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua and gave his life trying to help complete strangers.

He asks if we can go see batting practice too.  I say sure and then find out that the stadium opens two hours before game times, not three like in my day. As the Yankees take batting practice first, there is no way we’ll be able to see A-Rod or Mark Teixeira work out their kinks, but we’ll be able to see the Tampa Bay Rays hit.

Better than nothing, but I can see the disappointment in my guy’s eyes. He perks up again, though, when I tell him that CC is pitching against Tampa Bay’s ace David Price.

The day arrives and I pick up my son from school at 4 o’clock.  We head down the street and split a pizza before getting the subway.  I’ve paid a King’s ransom for the tickets and I’m as excited as he is.  We’ll be about twenty rows back from the first base dugout and will have a perfect wide angle of the entire field.  The subway ride seems to take forever, but we make it out and onto the Yankee grounds at 5:05, exactly two hours before the first pitch.

I’ve got my messenger bag packed with sweaters for both of us, my wallet, keys…all that kind of stuff.  You’re not allowed to bring your own food and water into the stadium, unless it is wrapped in the manner prescribed at the official Yankee website, and I didn’t have the time to sort through all of that. I guess the team isn’t really making any money on the high priced tickets, so they have to move a lot of popcorn and stuff to make up for it. Plus the new Yankee Stadium cost over one and a half billion dollars to build, even though the team was given innumerable tax breaks etc. from the city and state of New York to help with the cost. George Steinbrenner had threatened to take the team to New Jersey if the Yankees were not incentivized to stay in the Bronx. They were.

The first experience we have at the ballpark is the “pat down” and search of my bag. I’ll never get used to the indignities of our brave new “homeland security” world, but I grimace through it and chalk it up to the cost of living in a free country.

Now we give our tickets to the ticket taker. Except he doesn’t take them.  He tells me to hold the bar code under a computer and wait for the beep.  My son’s ticket beeps, but he doesn’t understand the protocol and walks past the “turnstile.”  The ticket taker yells for him to come back and asks him if he’s had his “Wheaties” that morning.  My son is confused and a little bit scared as he has no idea what this man is asking him.  He doesn’t eat cereal.

I explain to my son that he needs to push the handle of the turnstile down and walk through that way.  He does so. I do the same thing and we’re inside the “Great Hall.”  It’s some kind of cheap plastic cup promotion night that Premio Foods—makers of the official Yankee sausage—is sponsoring for the first 25,000 fans.

A large woman jams the cup in my son’s face and he’s not sure what he’s supposed to do.

“It’s a free cup! Take it!”

I tell the lady, “Thank you, but we’d rather not have it.” She gives me a dirty look.

Now I begin to register the aural assault.  Innumerable speakers blaring inane advertising and “special Yankee experience” opportunities as 30 db serve as the white noise behind the live hawkers selling hats, bobble heads, Carvel Ice cream in plastic Yankee helmets, and reminders that entry into the Mohegan Sun Sports Bar located above Monument Park in Center Field and the Yankee Audi Club in Left Field are only open to season ticket licensees. I can’t help but regret that I’m not a season ticket licensee.

I finally locate the small podium dedicated to the sale of game day programs.  They are $10.00 and all of the articles have been written and printed months before so that they can use the same program for every home game.  Two thirds of the magazine is advertising but it does have the scorecard inside. They even give me a little pencil.

We make it deeper into the stadium.  The next thing we see, before even making out the field, is the massive 100 foot by 60 foot television screen in center field. More marketing and commercials about how to “experience” Yankee stadium, locations of the best spots for buying memorabilia, how to apply for Yankee credit cards, with “live” correspondents inside the stadium giving remote reports about how fans are loving their food or “experience” and asking them how many games they come to each year.

I try and ignore it, but my little guy can barely walk.  He’s so overwhelmed with stimulation that he can’t help keeping his eyes glued to that TV.  It’s hard for me not to stare at it too.  And I’m getting these strange urges to buy buy buy.  Like I’m a nasty, cheap miser. If I don’t buy something material, my kid will never remember the “experience.”  I resist.

We make it to our seats.  It’s still a good hour and a half away from the opening pitch.  We sit down. While the seats have a great view, they also have two speakers from a higher balcony deck pointed directly at the back of our skulls. It’s difficult to talk over the sales pitches. We’re watching Tampa Bay’s assistant coaches hitting fungo ground balls to the infielders, fly balls to the outfielders, etc.

Everything I promised my son is actually happening on the field and these pros are as remarkable doing what they do as I’ve told him.

“See how he attacks the ground ball, gloves it, sets himself, and then throws? How his front foot points directly at first base after his follow through?”

But former Yankee David Wells is on the TV talking about something else entirely (Yankee Fantasy camp for the Ladies) and my son can’t peel his eyes away from the screen.

Now our waiter comes up to us and blocks our view of the field. He introduces himself and pitches all of the remarkable food and drink we can buy from him.  I buy popcorn, a bottle of water and a beer just to get him to go away.  He can’t betray his disappointment with my lame order.

Right before the popcorn comes, a nicely dressed young man comes walking down our aisle.  He holds his hand out toward me and out of common courtesy, I stupidly shake it.

“Hi, I’m Nick Matthews from the Yankees. How are you enjoying the game?”

“Great, just trying to have a nice night out with my son.”

“Ah yes, I remember how my dad used to take me to games….Can I ask you a question?”

I don’t answer him.  Pretend I didn’t hear.  It’s not out of the question considering the speaker volume.

“How many games do you go to each year?” he asks.

“Just the one,” I say.

He’s perplexed. “Can I ask you why just one?”

“It’s extremely expensive” I say.

He looks shocked. “Hmm.” Then he holds out a card and asks me to fill it out.  He obviously is trolling the crowd to get marketing information. The card is asking a load of personal information, email address, date of birth, how many kids I have, how much money I make, who my favorite Yankee is…

I decline to fill out the card and thankfully he vanishes.  Now our waiter is back to see if we’re enjoying our popcorn.

After he leaves, a photographer comes up and takes our picture without asking.  He hands me a card. It’s pitching me to “Get your keepsake photo Today!” at a kiosk at the New Era Team Store, but to allow 30 minutes for processing.

This goes on and on the entire evening.

We persevere though and dutifully follow every pitch and mark up our scorecard with aplomb. When we have to go to the bathroom, I come back and the guy behind us gives me the full scope of what I missed.

“Ball, ball, strike, strike…F8”

When Curtis Granderson hits a home run, we cheer wildly. He catches the last out of the game in deep center field too. Jeter doesn’t get one hit, but he doesn’t dog it running out his ground balls either.  CC goes 8 innings and gets the win.

On the subway home, my son sits with the scorecard, thinking back on every pitch, hit, stolen base, error, fly out and strike out of the evening.

It occurs to me that keeping detailed score is what writers and artists do.

They take in the stories around them and dutifully burn the memories into a scorecard of sorts in their minds. They disregard the BS and experience what is real, even in the most artificial circumstances.  They record the fact that most human players contend with failure after failure (the essence of baseball and of a rich and full life) and still commit to keep putting everything they have into each action.

Like life, some guys cheat in baseball and get away with it. But my gut is that most of them don’t.

They laugh off the hype machinery that forces them to “Welcome you to Yankee Stadium” ad nauseum on the big screen as the cost of playing. And as the service they provide to justify their massive paychecks. They aren’t really being paid to play.  They’d still be humping it in the minor leagues, living off of per diem money, if they didn’t have the stuff for the Bigs.

They’re being paid to entice people to buy their official Major League Jersey, their autographed baseball, all the while buying mementoes of all of the other wonders of the 27 Time World Series Champs.

I feel better about the night, and tell myself to let all of the nonsense go. The core appeal of the game is still there and there are admirable guys still playing it.

The next day, my son has little league.  I pick him up and we walk to his field in Central Park.  He tells me about how he let all of his friends know about the game last night and that they sat spellbound as he was able to do a running play by play.

The game starts and my little guy comes up to hit. My phone rings. I mute it and watch my son take his swings.

When the half of that inning ends, I check my phone and listen to the message.

“Hi Shawn, it’s Nick Matthews from the New York Yankees…”

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.

One day at school, a frienemy teased her about having had a play date with another girl in their class. My daughter had not been included. Nah…Nah…Nah Nah Nah.

I discovered this while helping her put on her tights. It was the day she’d planned her revenge.

I’m pleased that my children were born in an age of abundance. I grew up in the era of scarcity.  In my day, there were only so many jobs at the steel mill, there were only so many football scholarships available…there were only a few opportunities to “make it.”

If someone won, someone else lost. The sum of the positive and the negative equaled zero. That made a lot of sense back then when our worlds were provincial and closed.

But this competition for scarce resources (jobs, education, status) created a “give as good as you get” culture. If another person was kind and generous to you, you owed them something in return. If they attacked, you hit back with equal ferocity. Accepting a kindness as a gift or turning the other cheek upset the social balance.

“Can you believe Bridget never sent me a Thank You card after I watched her kids all afternoon?”

“Everyone loses a fight sometimes, son, but you can’t let another boy intimidate you. Get back in there and get your licks in.”

This was a world that ran on fear, mistrust, and isolation. To open oneself up in search of an authentic connection with another human being—and all the joy and sorrow that entails—was lunacy. The naïve who showed any vulnerability quickly learned about the necessity of building walls around themselves. How to be one way with one person and another way with the next… Insert your own remembrances of fat jokes, fat lips, and fat chances here… We’ve all got ‘em.

But seeing the world today through the lens of scarcity is a mistake.  We no longer live in tiny little kindergarten communities where everyone knows our name and knows where we rank on the big scoreboard of life.  In fact, some of us don’t even speak to our next door neighbors.  We’re too busy keeping track of our hundreds of Facebook friends who live thousands of miles away. We live in a global village today, with abundant opportunities to authentically connect with likeminded people.

In the world of scarcity, our actions were for the most part, automatic. My father did it that way, as his father did before him, who am I to do something differently?

But in an abundant world, that old model is ridiculous. The old way is not just becoming more and more ineffectual (see American Icon by Bryce Hoffman ); clinging to it distracts us from our real work.

The big scarcity scoreboard just doesn’t make sense anymore.  There are just too many people who believe too many different things and care about too many other things to tally. Who is the best microbiologist today? Who is the best book publisher? Who is the best CEO?

There isn’t any one answer because it depends on who or what group you ask. . . . And each day more and more little groups are formed online joining the conversation. They have different skin colors, different religions, and different places of birth, but they value the same passions.

It makes perfect sense that the digital disintegration of the scoreboard causes a lot of anxiety.

How do you rank yourself in a world where the pseudonymous “Tyler Durden” at www.ZeroHedge.com is as respected and as vilified as the head of JP Morgan Chase?

You can’t.

Those still trying to find their place on the scoreboard end up on Reality TV, or on the Forbes 400 or are gaming The New York Times bestseller list. To what end? To what purpose do these hierarchies serve us?

The pursuit of titles (Shift Foreman or Head of the Homeowners Association) used to keep us all on an even keel—in control. The payoff for keeping in line was security. I put in my 25 years, and then I get my pension. That was the mantra of men in my youth. It was life led like the lead character in Jackson Browne’s classic song The Pretender.

We can no longer rely on the pre-programmed “take care of number one” scarcity decision-making strategies of our fathers. In his terrific new book How Will You Measure Your Life? Clayton Christensen writes about the failures of “marginal thinking.” Is it so shocking that a monomaniacal pursuit of a life at the top, even just wanting to make it to the middle, is the source of so much sadness and alienation in the world?

So if a global abundant village means that we can’t live in the winners and losers world of our past, how do we navigate this new paradigm?

The first thing we need to do is remember that every action we take is a choice. Just like in the old scarcity model, each choice in an abundant universe has a positive and a negative option. But the similarity ends there. The positive option in the scarcity model just moves us one step closer to our goal of being the employee of the month or head coach.  The negative simply sets us back a step from that goal.  That’s it. There’s no higher purpose in the scarcity model other than to attain a material objective—your name on a plaque, or a David Mamet-ian second place set of steak knives (check out Glengarry Glen Ross).

Ever watch an interview with a Super Bowl winning player? Words like “it’s unbelievable” inevitably come out of their mouths. It’s not that they can’t believe how wonderful and fulfilling their victory is, it’s how empty they feel after attaining it. They come to understand that old Peggy Lee refrain “Is that all there is?”

But in the abundant model, the positive option is the one that expresses our authentic selves . . . the action that we know is “the right thing to do.” Not the one that will get us up the ladder. In fact, the negative option in the abundant model is continuing to blindly behave as if resources are scarce. “If I fudge this one little piece of data, it will move me ahead of the PhD pack and I will get closer to my ‘dream’ of being the youngest Nobel Prize winner in history!” And then what?

Yes, we can cynically manipulate the abundant digital landscape for our own “gain,” be it for money, power, fame, or whatever makes us feel like a big shot.  We can create fake email addresses and bogus news stories and take advantage of the insatiable 24/7 news cycle all in pursuit of page views that we can parlay into higher advertising rates.

[I just read a bound galley of a jaw-dropping book about this phenomenon called, Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, by Ryan Holiday…someone I met through Steve’s website.]

We can trick people we don’t really know into debasing themselves for our entertainment and profit. We can start up companies with complex exit strategies for the sole purpose of being bought out by Google.

But these kinds of choices serve the negative old ‘dog eat dog’ scarcity model. We know this because we feel like Hell after we’ve dumped our toxic psychic sludge into the world just for some extra digits in our bank account. No matter how much we “win” when we behave abiding the zero sum mentality, it’s never enough. Ask Charlie Sheen.

How many impossibly rich people and celebrities do you think are content…sure that their contributions to the world are the best expressions of themselves? Are they living the dream or are they trapped in a nightmare?

“Most people in showbiz are either bitter that they aren’t huge stars or unhappy that they are. From the Starbucks barista to Oscar winners, almost everyone thinks that they’re getting a raw deal. Here’s my advice to them and to all of you: Quit.”

—Bobcat Goldthwait )

The alternative to holding on to the old “I’m Number 1!” world is to consciously think about every action you choose. Is this action a positive expression of who I am or is it a negative one? Do I want to send positive mojo into the world or negative?

Taking the positive route is hard. There is no “atta boy!” slap on the back. There is no limousine or Gulfstream Jet waiting for you at the end of the day. The food is lousy and the portions are small. There is only the opportunity to do the work you were put on earth to do. Seize that opportunity. Thousands of years of civilization had to happen before it could emerge. It’s here.

Find the labor that will give your life meaning.  You may never have a million dollar beach house, but you won’t have a hard time looking in a mirror and you’ll certainly sleep better. And who knows that beach house may be in the offing too. Just don’t work for the beach house.  Work to contribute that thing you were put on this earth to leave behind.

Yes, the digital world of abundance, scale, and infinity can create a 100 Billion dollar IPO. Whoo Hoo! But what is more remarkable is that it can also provide for people who want to explore an idiosyncratic territory without slavishly climbing a hierarchy.  They can share their work and build digital communities of compadres who appreciate their True Gen…with no advertising revenue streams, no twenty five page “privacy policies,” and no Bullshit.

Authenticity and hard work are valued in this abundant world in a way we are only beginning to understand. There will always be disingenuous hustlers and scammers and cynics to prey on us, but what is amazing is that the abundant digital world gives us the chance to shame them into becoming their better selves. Not by literally “shaming” them with scarlet letters, but by just not playing that game anymore. The more who don’t, the better the world will be.

There is no reason why the positives can’t outnumber the negatives.

All of this scarcity and abundance soup I’ve spilled above is just the result of listening to a hurt little girl and wanting to teach her how to metabolize her pain.

To see the world as a child does is a gift.

She told me that she couldn’t wait to get to school and stick it to that friend of hers who made her feel bad about not being invited on the play date. She had a play date herself that day and her nasty friend wasn’t included in this one. She was going to give it to her as good as she got.

Children are our best and worst selves.  You’ll find no better representation of joy and unrestrained fury than watching a child play whiffle ball on a warm summer evening or putting on a puppet show on a rainy afternoon. A child has both light and dark impulses and indulges them in equal measure. They aren’t yet wired to make rational choices.

They do eventually learn to choose. And the way they learn is by watching us. Not listening to us. Watching what we do…day by day, year by year until their brains process the information. Mom always holds the door for old people…that’s what I should do too.

I explained to my daughter that I thought it would be better for her not to taunt her friend about the play date. Don’t add more hurt to the world to get even. She listened and really seemed to get it.

That night I came home from work and asked her what she had decided to do.

“I told her about my play date and made her feel bad,” she said.

I gave her a hug and remembered a passage that still sticks with me from my days living in scarcity, sitting alone in the back of a Sunday school classroom over forty years ago…

Paul the apostle’s first epistle to the Corinthians…

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

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.

Experience is a factor.

At baseball games, my four-year-old sings “Take me out to the ball game . . . buy me some peanuts and Apple Jacks . . . ” She’s had the cereal more often than the snack, so her understanding of the lyrics is infused with personal experience.

What to do?

Misunderstandings are impossible to avoid. When sharing Steve’s work, we’ve tried to remain clear and straightforward. We know readers bring their own experiences to everything they read/do—and we know we can’t control that piece.

Trying too hard is a factor.

Last summer, a college student came to my door to sell me on the services of the company for which she worked. She told me all about what the other companies in my area didn’t do. Something about her being nice and stumbling over her message, trying to keep things straight, and me remembering when I was in that position years ago, kept me from shutting the door. I stuck around until Silence visited. I asked her a little about what she was doing that day, going door to door and then thanked her and turned down the company.

What to do?

What the college student didn’t know was that I had been unhappy with my current company and was looking for a new one. Her personality had won me over. Had she spent less time talking about why all the other companies were bad, and more time stating what was right about her company, I would have jumped ship. She was trying too hard, and it back-fired. As Steve would say, she wasn’t “sitting chilly.”

I can’t tell you how many phone calls Steve, Shawn, Jeff, and I have had about how we share with others. At some point, we’ve all been that young college student. And while our hearts go out to her, we don’t want to be her again. We want to share what makes the most sense, in the way that we’d want to receive it ourselves.

Audio interference is a factor.

This week I decided to ditch my fax machine and separate phone line and save some money by using an online fax service for those rare instances when a fax is the only way to get things done.

I called a few companies. The one with the best pricing and program had a problem with audio interference. As I spoke with the salesman, I heard Impatience and Condescension answer my questions. Online, the company came through loud and clear. Via one of its reps, it was garbled, corrupted. I tuned out.

What to do?

Steve can’t do all of the sharing. It eats into the time he needs to write his books. Shawn, Jeff and I work with Steve to share his work. Do I feel like I’ve always gotten it right? No.

Every now and then Petty and Anger stop by for a visit. They like to debate Sanity and Calm. I hate to admit that there’s a battle, but one happens from time to time—usually when Nasty visits the comments section. And sometimes, I’m just tired. It’s easier to be short—which just brings on the audio interference. In the end, tuning into the “Do Right” frequency allows for the greatest, most-well-received broadcast.

***

There are other factors, but the three above are the ones that seem to pop up the most often.

In the end, we’re trying to remain clear and straight-forward, sit chilly, and do right.

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.

How Mulally got Ford out of its tailspin reminded me of pages 147 through 159 in The War of Art. In just these twelve pages, Steve Pressfield puts his finger on exactly how our world view directs our actions.

Mulally’s turnaround of Ford is a brilliant case study to support Pressfield’s ideas. He switched Ford’s orientation from hierarchy to territory. The book reveals:

We no longer live in isolated analog hierarchies.

Ford can’t rely on consistent F-150 sales just because it has enough market share, solid distribution, some economies of scale, and capacity. Rather they needed to strip down the bureaucratic hierarchies and all work toward a common goal…producing the right number of cars to meet demand with impeccable quality. No one buys a Ford just because it’s a Ford anymore.

Our world is just too connected to rely on BS.

Too many other car options…too easy to find influential tribal voices that debunk cynical marketing. Too many people online writing their truth…“don’t believe the hype, the Honda Ridgeline kicks the F-150’s butt.” (Just FYI, I don’t know anything about trucks, so please don’t take the above statement seriously. Find someone who does know trucks to give you the real scoop.)

We live in a global digital territory now.

The pursuit of “We’re Number One!” by concentrating on beating your competition is now absurd. Especially when your competition is as screwed up as you are. Create something great within your chosen territory that people don’t even know they want. Like a Ford Flex or a Pebble watch. Or a book about gardening in raised beds. Make it better. Then do it again.

Analog hierarchies use the pursuit of the fruits of labor—money, status, Big Kahuna-ship—to “incentivize” individuals. Do this and we’ll pay you more and get you into the Country Club… Daniel Pink writes a lot about this and he’s found that it is not the best way to motivate a human being.

What digital territories demand is much more difficult. They demand honesty, integrity, and connecting with other people to explore common interests. The fruits of our labor in a territory aren’t about being named one of People magazine’s 100 most beautiful people. The reward is simply to continue doing your work. If your work is professional and meaningful, there’s a tribe of like-minded people on the planet who will find and support you. If it isn’t, work on something else.

Alan Mulally’s big triumph was not making billions of dollars for Ford.  It was getting the people who spend eight hours a day at Ford to love their work.

So what does this have to do with Book Publishing?

These two books, American Icon and The War of Art, got me to think about where the book business stands today and where it’ll be tomorrow. Don’t cringe.  It’s good news. Very good news.

For fun, I made a couple of visuals to explain.

The first I’m calling “The Analog Hierarchy Ladder.”

This is the old Big Six scarcity model . . . writers getting picked by established experts who in turn present readers with officially sanctioned publications. The message is that these books are the “true gen.” The rest are vanity.

The second I’m calling “The Digital Territory Wheel.”

With the dawn of the Internet, the ladder began to lose its rigidity. And today, simply by connecting its bottom to its top, it has morphed into a wheel. The writer and the reader can now talk to each other without permission from the other four traditional players. Revolutionary.

Big traditional publishing will continue.  In order to remain profitable, though it will have to change in much the same way that Ford had to change. But we all crave third party validation. Being published by Knopf or Little Brown or St. Martin’s Press means that your work is professional and valid.

If you are offered a contract by one of the Bigs, it’s an honor. Pat yourself on the back and then start your next book. Plus, these big companies can finance projects that are extremely daunting.  They will remain the Medicis for great artists like Robert Caro and Steven Pressfield (whose next project requires a dizzying amount of work and expense). We need them to get those blockbuster works funded.

The new Territorial publishing will thrive. Brave professional souls willing to forgo the advance check and spec it, now have the ability to build their own long tail businesses. I think that these “little engines that can” will not only increase the number of book readers and writers, but will be the industry leaders that truly globalize book publishing.

The wheel is turning and it ain’t gonna stop.

"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.”