I thought people might be interested in reading the speech I gave at the 2021 Life the Universe and Everything conference. So I’m going to post it here. Please excuse any odd phrasing or formatting, it was to add me in the delivery. Very strange to give a speech on Discord where you have no feedback from the listeners. Life in the Time of Covid has made us all very adaptive. Anyway, here it is. (I attempted to center the title, the work from which it was derived and the author of said work, but I have no idea if I did the .html correctly. Fingers crossed.)

“Words that weep and tears that speak.”

The Prophet

Abraham Cowley

The ancient Greek lyric poet, Pindar wrote — “Words have a longer life than deeds.”

Which is an interesting take on writing especially in modern western culture where the action hero, the superhero, the western “strong, silent man with a gun” or the “willing to bend the rules” cop with a gun (actually anyone with a gun) is a trope that has captured the zeitgeist of our era.

But Pindar was probably right. How many of us remember details of great battles of the Peloponnesian War, but Pindar is remembered, and what we know about the fall of Troy has come down to us because of Homer.

It was words that carried the memories.

So what is behind this human drive and desire to tell stories? Probably some of it was the human need for just simple entertainment. For ancient people the nights were long, the work was backbreaking, and as Thomas Hobbs said in his Leviathan nasty, brutish, and short.” The only way to fill those hours to fend off that fear of impending death were words; stories, poems and songs carried by a human voice.

But there were other reasons for what would someday become the troubadours and Trouvères (Though one hopes they were less charmingly annoying than the bard in Witcher. Because I was a singer I think the world would be vastly improved if people periodically just burst into song, so I’m torn between wanting more Jaskier, and also wanting to see him get thumped.)

But I digress —

The first and obvious one is to preserve historical memory. While we acknowledge that human beings bring their own perceptions and biases to whatever is told or written, and that “history is written by the winners” these stories give a rendering of events — this is what happened, “just the facts ma’am”.

Stories then build on those bare recitation of facts (as best the facts can be determined) by adding context — this is how things were, how that reality led to an actions that changed that status quo which has brought us to where we are now.

Stories can also take the facts and context and turn them into a cautionary tale. A way to pass on lessons learned through painful experience, that might save someone else from enduring the pain.

Going back to our Greeks the most obvious example of this is the story of King Midas who asked Dionysus to grant him the golden touch. Midas soon learns the downside to this gift when the food he attempts to eat turns into gold, and Midas realizes he is facing starvation. In other versions he turns his beloved daughter into gold as well.

I prefer the version where it is the transformation of his daughter that leads him to beg the god to remove what is now a curse and not a gift. That is much more emotional and impactful than his inability to eat dinner. In the latter case he still seems like the same greedy, selfish man who asked for this power in the first place.

And that brings us to another step in how we develop and then experience stories. The emotional impact. I think there is a reason that the romance genre is the most popular form of fiction. It outsells everything else by a mile. The endorphins released when a person falls in love can be triggered while reading or watching because a writer has given us that shadow memory of how it felt when we met that special person.

Now we’re into the heart, if you will, of the matter. Using words to allow people to feel something. Love stories are the obvious ones, but there are also stories that inspire — even when the outcome is not the expected one — Casablanca for example where the boy doesn’t get the girl. Or even a happy one, Rogue One exemplifies that — there are some causes worth dying for, and that act of sacrifice was an inspiration to a nascent rebellion.

Sometimes a story can serve as an outlet for grief. Someone else has endured what I am feeling, and I’m able to process that grief along with the character, and perhaps be comforted and helped by how that individual survived, found strength to go on, and came through the valley of shadows. One of the most beautiful examples of that is near the end of the musical Hamilton. The lyrics for Who Lives Who Dies Who Tells Your Story is all about finding purpose after loss and finding strength from the memory of your loved one.

A lot of people dream of writing. There are certain steps necessary to make that happen — foremost among them placing butt in chair and hands on a keyboard, but there is another essential component, and this one can scare a writer nearly witless —

It is the requirement that the author commit to being seen. That can be a terrifying thing for a writer, but it is absolutely essential.

There is a long list of famous writers who have various versions of this quote but I’m going to go with Hemingway who is reported to have said

“It is easy to write. Just sit in front of your typewriter and bleed.”

Comic book writer Mark Waid added an edition to that bleeding on the keyboard thing with the admonishment, in all caps, MAKE. ME. FEEL.

And that really is the key. You have to allow — no make — your characters feel deeply, and for that to happen you have to breath life into them by sharing with those characters and the shadowy nebulous readers and viewers out there in book, movie and TV Land a part of yourself. And god it can hurt. It’s reported that when Dumas killed Porthos in The Man in the Iron Mask he laid down his pen and wept, then walked the streets of Paris crying “I killed Porthos!” I’m no Dumas, but I confess I have teared up when I’ve put some character through a particularly painful experience, or knew they had to die. As my late friend Victor Milan once said regarding our characters and our treatment of them — “God, I hope they never form a union.”

Those of us who work in film have it easier than our fellow prose writers — we have actors to personify those emotions, a director’s use of a camera, sound and music and set design to help sell the mood and the moment. Not everything is riding on the words — just ninety percent. Because if our words aren’t true and evocative we give that actor, director, composer, DP nothing to work with.

There is a reason why often times a novelist has difficulty making the transition to writing screenplays. When writing novels all we have are the words; to describe the scene, a character’s inner turmoil, the dialogue exchange between characters. A novelist does have some advantages of the screenwriter. We can do internal dialogue (which by the way, I hate), and we also have all five senses at our disposal. In film we are limited to only two — sight and sound.

However for a screenwriter we soon learn that silence really can be golden. I had a boss who once said “Words are the enemy.” I think that’s going a bit too far, but he was speaking to a fundamental truth. The best moments I have is when I know I have an actor who can save me writing a page of dialogue because I can rely on them to play it with just a look.

A great example of this is in Casablanca in the scene between Rick and the young Bulgarian bride as she talks in code about what she’s about to do in order to get the exit visas from the charmingly corrupt Captain Renault. Watch Bogart’s face. You see him suddenly begin to understand why Ilsa left him in Paris. There is another example I’m hesitant to mention because of one of the actors in question is a very problematic individual, but it’s the Rollo Tomasi scene in L.A. Confidential.

This requirement to be seen is why it never works out well for an author to “chase the market”. Just because romance or urban fantasy or space opera is selling well you should never make the decision to write in one of those genres if you don’t love them. If you’re doing it just for the money. If you try you will come across as inauthentic, and readers will pick that up in a heartbeat. Write what you love. Write about something for which you are passionate. If you’ve got to bleed you may as well be bleeding for a story you actually care about.

So let’s get a bit into the nuts and bolts of writing: Miriam Quick in an article for the BBC wrote about a 1995 lecture in which Kurt Vonnegut — quoting from the article now —

“chalked out various story arcs on a blackboard, plotting how the protagonist’s fortunes change over the course of the narrative on an axis stretching from ‘good’ to ‘ill’. The arcs include ‘man in hole’, in which the main character gets into trouble then gets out again (“people love that story, they never get sick of it!”) and ‘boy gets girl’, in which the protagonist finds something wonderful, loses it, then gets it back again at the end.

Vonnegut concluded by saying, “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers”, he remarked. “They are beautiful shapes.”

And lo, that has now been done. “Using text mining techniques Professor Matthew Jockers at Washington State University, and later researchers at the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab, analysed data from thousands of novels to reveal six basic story types – you could call them archetypes – that form the building blocks for more complex stories. The Vermont researchers describe the six story shapes behind more than 1700 English novels as:

1. Rags to riches – a steady rise from bad to good fortune
2. Riches to rags – a fall from good to bad, a tragedy
3. Icarus – a rise then a fall in fortune
4. Oedipus – a fall, a rise then a fall again
5. Cinderella – rise, fall, rise
6. Man in a hole – fall, rise”
These are obviously simple platforms upon which a writer crafts a more complex narrative. Tragedy is the obvious example of that because it’s not just that bad things happen — they happen because of a fatal flaw in the character of the protagonist.

However these archetypes are foundational, and more importantly they set expectations. And expectations are really important to readers and to viewers.

Over the years formula had gotten a bad rap, but formula is not a dirty word. Formula creates excitement and expectation in the audience, and believe me, you do not want to disappoint them. When I sit down to write I am making an explicit promise to my reader or my viewer that I will not disappoint them. Now that isn’t a promise I will give them a happy ending (though Connie Willis and I absolutely agree that there is nothing wrong with a happy ending). What I’m promising is that I will give them an earned ending.

This is my reminder that if your story is based on one of these archetypes you best not complicate the story so much that you fail to meet those expectations by trying to be too clever by half, or trying to “redefine fiction or television” or whatever other grandiose notion one might have.

Which brings me to what for me is the most essential rule: Endings matter. In other words you have to “stick the landing”. This is a debate I’ve had with a certain famous fantasy author over many years. He claims that if you have a great journey you will be forgiven for punting the ending. I couldn’t disagree more. If you blow the ending it doesn’t matter how great the journey might have been. A bad ending will taint the entire work whether book or film.

I have my own personal example of this. The video game Mass Effect. It would probably go down as one if the not the greatest game in the history of the industry… but they blew the ending. I loved that game and the ride was amazing, but I cannot bring myself to replay it because I know that dreadful ending is waiting for me. And believe me, if I love a game I will replay it — numerous times — like Dragon Age: Origins.

It’s because of this importance of endings that I won’t start a novel or a screenplay until I know how it ends.

I do Hollywood style outlining or “breaking a story” on my novels as well as my screenplays so I plot backwards from that ending. But before I start actually laying out the important scenes in each act, and figuring out the teaser — that hook that is going to get a reader or a viewer to take the ride with me, I sit down and I ask myself — What is this story actually about? What is the theme?

I have a shorthand for that that depending upon the audience I phrase in slightly different ways. This is the cleaned up version.

Plot is the stuff that happens. Theme is why it matters

What is this story going to say about the human condition? Can it elucidate or at least attempt to elucidate the secretes of the human heart? Can it offer people a place to explore difficult topics?

When I teach I use the first Thor movie as my example of theme. When I ask students to tell me what that movie is about it runs the gamut from it’s about a big robot shooting fire out of its face — lame. Thor becoming king — surface, Thor learning humility and self-sacrifice — better, but then I point out this is really a story about fathers and sons. How an abusive father ends up destroying his his sons and by extension his family by pitting them against each other. Everything in this movie is about trying to earn the love of a distant father figure, particularly on the part of Loki. How toxic is it that he lures his actual father into a trap so he can kill him to try to earn the love and respect of Odin?

And that’s always been the strength of our beloved genre. Science fiction and fantasy allows an author to bring up issues of racism, imperialism, fascism, misogyny, bigotry in all its forms, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, but at arms length and in a relatively safe space. It’s easier to exam the mote or the beam in our own eye if we are seeing it through the lens of aliens on a distant planet or elves in a fantasy world. Perhaps by reading that story a person can begin to question their own biases and assumptions.

For myself I write because I can’t not write. Stories and characters jostle about in my head like rudderless boats all looking to me to take the tiller and send them on a journey.

Deciding to write is in some ways an act of sublime arrogance. Thinking my words and thoughts are important enough to be shared.

But it’s an arrogance outweighed by fear. Each time I approach a new project, that first blank page I’m shaken by doubt — Who am I to think my words have relevance? That they should be read by thousands or heard by millions?

There’s a lot of responsibility riding on that decision. As Abraham Cowley wrote in The Prophet, that provided the title for this talk “Words that weep and tears that speak”. Words can comfort a grieving heart, inspire us to get into good trouble, instruct the next generation, speak tenderly to those we love. They can also brutalize and incite, degrade and demean.

Words have power. So let us choose our words wisely. And let’s make them good ones.

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