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“The soul has a universal structure of narrative receptors."
That's the thrust of this conversation with Steven Pressfield. He's written more than 25 books and spent decades reverse-engineering what makes great stories great.
We went principle-by-principle by focusing on movies like Rocky, Chinatown, Huck Finn, The Godfather, and Mean Girls.
These stories resonate because they're true. Not true because the events actually happened, but because they speak to these universal narrative receptors which are lodged deep inside the human heart.
Transcript
00:01:50 #1 The 3-Act Structure
00:03:06 #2 The Inciting Incident
00:05:03 #3 The Recurring Mystery
00:06:38 #4 Innocence Carries the Divine
00:10:57 #5 The Act 2 Midpoint
00:15:35 #6 The All-Is-Lost Moment
00:18:39 #7 The Epiphany Moment
00:23:28 #8 Act 2 Belongs to the Villain
00:24:31 #9 Hero vs Villain Worldview
00:27:41 #10 Spinning genre stereotypes
00:30:26 #11 The Female Carries the Mystery
00:33:51 #12 The Male Solves the Mystery
00:37:38 #13 Gifts and Curses
00:43:07 #14 The Generational Curse
00:48:58 #15 Ordinary vs Extraordinary Worlds
00:51:58 #16 The True Identity
00:55:30 #17 The Quiet Solo Moment
00:58:24 #18 The Hero at the Mercy of the Villain Scene
01:00:40 #19 Start at the End
01:03:12 #20 Small but Meaningful Stakes
01:05:07 #21 Make It Beautiful
David (00:00-01:50):
Let’s just zoom out into the three-act structure. What is it about the three-act structure that you’ve embraced after initially being like, ah, I don’t want some formula over here?
Steven (02:00-03:02):
I just think it’s so true. I forget who said this, but some wonderful writer was saying, here’s the key to any story that you’re working on: break it into three parts—beginning, middle, and end. And I remember thinking at the time, there’s a lot to that.
There can be more than three acts, but mostly if you can do three acts, it really makes a lot of sense. The first act is supposed to hook the audience and get them involved in the story. The second act is kind of progressive. Things get more complicated. Like the midpoint of Act Two, that’s where things get more interesting and the stakes get higher.
Then Act Three is where you kind of put the accelerator down and go to the climax. It is a sort of a natural kind of rhythm for storytelling. A joke is like that, you know, you’re sort of a rabbi and an alligator walk into a bar, right? And then the punchline is Act Three.
David (03:03-03:06):
Tell me about the inciting incident.
Steven (03:06-04:54):
The inciting incident is the moment, usually at the end or the middle of Act One, when the story really starts. What had come before that you could kind of call the first Rocky.
If we remember that, it’s kind of a long buildup of introducing Rocky in Philadelphia. He’s kind of a crumb bum fighter. He goes into the gym. He finds that Mick, the trainer, has kicked him out of his locker. He gets no respect.
Parallel to that, Apollo Creed, the heavyweight champion, has scheduled a fight because it’s the centennial year of America, right? He says, schedule a fight in Philadelphia, and his opponent breaks his hand or something. So Apollo has to kind of go, how am I going to save this? He says, okay, I’m going to change it, and I’m going to give some local fighter a shot at the title.
He looks through the book of the local fighters and he comes to the Italian Stallion page, and that’s Rocky. He says, this is the guy I want to fight. He’s an Italian immigrant. Columbus was an Italian. He discovered America, blah, blah, blah.
The word comes down to Rocky: you’ve been chosen to fight the champ. That’s the inciting incident. All of a sudden, the story, the rubber hits the road.
Another thing about the inciting incident is when we, in the audience or as readers, hit that moment, we can kind of see the climax. We sort of flash forward. It’s like, ah, he’s been chosen to fight the champ. Well, the climax is going to be him fighting the champ in the ring. And we’re excited by that. The inciting incident gets the story rolling.
David (04:54-05:02):
Now, you were talking about how the inciting incident can basically foreshadow the climax.
Steven (05:03-05:03):
Yeah.
David (05:03-05:37):
Is there a way where the inciting incident can basically show a sense of mystery that’s going to be a recurrent thread throughout the entire movie or the entire book—the entire story?
Remember in The Truman Show, really early on, the light falls on the street, and it’s like, what is this light? Then basically the whole movie is like, what is the light? He realizes that he’s living in this manufactured reality. I think that maybe that is a kind of inciting incident, but a different kind.
Steven (05:38-06:37):
Let me go back and talk for a second about the inciting incident in my newest book, about a recurring character of mine who lives lifetime after lifetime as a doomed, cursed figure, a warrior from the ancient world that is pulled farther and farther into the modern world.
In this story, a horse appears kind of mysteriously following him. He’s serving as a mercenary in some unknown conflict, and he recognizes the horse as his horse from 1500 years earlier when he served in the Roman legions, complete with a brand, the X for the 10th Legion that he served in.
Now we see, talking about a mystery, we wonder, what the hell is this? Where are we? How did this horse suddenly come out of... But also it’s the inciting incident that starts the story. Now we see, ah, some crazy stuff is going to happen that’s going to pull him through to a resolution.
David (06:38-06:47):
Tell me about animals, the symbolism of animals. Why did you choose a horse? There’s a mystery about them, sensitivity about them.
Steven (06:48-08:50):
I know you’re getting at a storytelling principle of mine, which is that the child carries the divine. Children or animals who are innocent almost always carry the divine element of the story. In the case of this horse I’m talking about, the horse is sent by heaven, by God, to restore justice to the world.
The reason I picked a horse is because horses are magical creatures. Their heart is four times bigger than a human heart. Because they’re flight animals, they’re sensitive to moods and emotions and everything in the environment. So a horse can bring the element of the divine, the element of the supernatural, like Pegasus.
It applies with children, too, in stories where they’re often the ones that see truth and will open their mouth and say, “But the emperor’s not wearing any clothes.” When I’m writing a story, and I feel like I need an animal in there, I switch over to my left brain and ask myself what’s going on. A lot of times, that child or that animal will carry some kind of element of the divine in the story. I’m not sure exactly what that means, but it seems to be a principle that is true in everybody’s stuff.
David (08:50-09:16):
How does this show up in biblical stories? The story of Moses, the story of Jesus? I pulled this from the book of Luke: “And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you should call his name, Jesus. He will be great and will be called the son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever. And of this kingdom there will be no end.”
Steven (09:16-09:41):
I hadn’t even thought about that, but that’s probably the classic instance of the child Jesus bringing the divine into the world. Think about Moses. He was floating in the bulrushes in a little basket. Almost all the great heroes, Theseus, Heracles, whatever, have a miraculous birth.
David (09:41-09:48):
There’s a sense of hope and possibility. Whenever you pick up a baby, you’re just like, “Wow.”
Steven (09:48-10:08):
Their eyes are seeing everything for the first time. They haven’t been screwed up by life yet, just like you and I when we were babies. Here’s another movie that your readers will never know because it’s too far in the past: “Shane.” Do you know that one?
David (10:08-10:09):
I’ve never even heard of it.
Steven (10:09-10:43):
It’s a great Western starring Alan Ladd as a gunslinger that comes into this threatened environment of sodbusters in a range war against cattlemen. Brandon De Wilde, who was six years old at the time, was the innocent child. At the end of the movie, in the famous last beat, Shane has to leave the valley after killing Jack Palance, the bad guy, and the child calls after him, “Shane, come back!”
David (10:57-10:59):
What is the Michael moment?
Steven (10:59-11:01):
What is the Michael Corleone?
David (11:01-11:03):
I think it’s from the Godfather.
David (11:03-11:19):
There’s a long quote where, in these stories, something happens, and the stakes are bigger. The story’s really taken on a new form, a new meaning. Tell me about that.
Steven (11:19-12:34):
There’s a moment, usually in Act 2, midpoint in movies and books, where, like in the Godfather, Marlon Brando’s character has been shot. He’s in the hospital, and the bad guy, Virgil Sollozzo, has reached out to the Corleone family to have a meeting. The scene takes place in the Godfather’s office, and Michael Al Pacino is sitting in a chair in the center of the room. At this point in the story, he’s not a member of the crime family. He’s a decorated Marine officer from World War II. He’s married to an all-American girl. He’s not part of the Italian crime family future. It looks like he’s going to be a professor or something. Sonny Corleone, James Caan, and Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen, treat him as outside the family. They’re trying to protect him.
In this scene, he has this moment where he says, “Let’s set the meeting.”
C (12:37-13:13):
“Get our informers to find out where it’s going to be held. Now, we insist it’s a public place, a bar, a restaurant, someplace where there’s people so I feel safe. They’re gonna search me when I first meet them, right? So I can’t have a weapon on me then. But if Clemenza can figure a way to have a weapon planted there for me, then I’ll kill them both.”
Steven (13:16-14:31):
That is the moment everybody realizes that Michael is serious. He’s going to go right up and blow their brains all over his nice Ivy League suit. This is the turning point where the hero takes sides. The stakes rise, and Michael Corleone goes from being outside the family to inside the family. He has decided that he’s not with Kay, his fiance; he’s with the family, and he’s going to stay with the family for the whole thing.
Everybody is chilled by this, but it’s also a thrilling moment. When I’m writing, I ask myself if I have an Act 2 midpoint like that, when my hero chooses sides. It’s a thrilling moment for the audience because you really feel like the movie or the book is gaining another gear. That’s the Michael Corleone moment.
David (14:31-14:35):
Have you seen The Talented Mr. Ripley?
Steven (14:35-14:38):
Yes. Remember the Matt Damon killing in the boat?
David (14:39-15:14):
I don’t know if it’s the same, but that’s sort of what happens in a movie like “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” where you have Matt Damon who’s jealous, and then there’s the killing.
My sense is that in the first third of the movie, a story has been set up, and we see what’s going on, we understand the social dynamics, but now there’s the murder, and the entire story gets bigger and deeper, and the stakes get higher. It’s almost like a new beat comes into the song, giving it a whole new tempo and rhythm. Dynamite.
Steven (15:14-15:34):
Yeah, that may be it, exactly. We’re always looking for that moment where the story hits another gear. From the reader or viewer’s point of view, they realize, “Oh, I thought this was going to be about this, but it’s really about this, and this is even better. I’m even more on board with finding this.”
David (15:35-15:37):
Tell me about the “all is lost” moment.
Steven (15:39-17:26):
This is a staple of Hollywood storytelling. I remember as a young screenwriter being in a meeting, and somebody would be looking at a piece that I had submitted, and they’d say, “Well, what’s the ‘all is lost’ moment?” I didn’t know what it was.
Somebody had to take me aside and explain it. The “all is lost” moment comes about three-quarters of the way through the movie or the book. It is a moment when the hero has been trying all through the story to overcome certain obstacles. If it’s a detective, they’ve been trying to solve the case. At this point, they reach a point where everything falls apart.
It’s like, “We’re never going to get out of this. We’re all going to die.” Everything I believed in so far... and this is a crucial moment that the hero has to overcome.
I’ll give you an example from “Rocky.” If you remember, he’s going to fight the champ, Apollo Creed. In the middle part of the movie, with the theme from “Rocky,” he’s training. Then, three-quarters of the way through the movie, there’s a moment where he’s home in bed with his girlfriend Adrian, and the fight is the next night. He gets up and goes down by himself to the arena in the middle of the night. He goes in and sees all the seats and the big poster of Apollo Creed.
The moment hits him: “Oh, my God, what have I gotten myself into?” He goes back home to Adrian, gets back in bed, and he has his “all is lost” moment.
C (17:27-17:28):
I can’t do it.
Steven (17:31-17:31):
What?
C (17:33-18:09):
I can’t beat him, Apollo. I’ve been out there walking around thinking, “Who am I kidding? I ain’t even in the guy’s league. What are we gonna do? I don’t know.”
Steven (18:11-18:39):
That’s his “all is lost” moment. At that moment, the hero usually has to switch gears and switch from an ego orientation to a greater orientation. Then it’s a question of whether the hero can rise above whatever it takes to proceed to the climax. If you look at almost any story, myth, or legend, that moment is really important.
David (18:39-18:43):
You were talking about how we get out of it. Did you have more to say about that?
Steven (18:44-23:28):
Because what usually immediately follows the “all is lost” moment is what I call the epiphany moment. The hero has a breakthrough.
Go back to Rocky. It’s the moment I was just talking about where Rocky’s lying in bed with Adrian, and he says, “Who was I kidding getting into this fight? This guy’s the champion of the world. He’s going to kill me in the ring.”
Then he makes a shift in his head. He says, “If I can just go the distance with him, if I can just last to the 15th, I don’t care if he beats the hell out of me. If I’m standing at the end of 15 rounds, then I’m going to know for the first time in my life that I weren’t just another bum from the neighborhood.”
He makes a shift from, “Oh, I thought I might win” to “If I can just be standing at the end.” In other words, a lot of times in this epiphanal moment, the hero faces reality and accepts it. It’s usually a bit of a downer in the sense that he had some dream or she had some fantasy, and they realize, “This is not it.” So there always is that moment afterward.
It’s really a writer’s challenge to make the worst possible “all is lost” moment for the character, and then figure out how to get him out of that moment.
I’ll give you another “all is lost” moment from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Jack Nicholson is this live wire, high-energy guy who gets sentenced to an insane asylum, where all the people are really down. He energizes everybody, but he runs afoul of Nurse Ratched. His “all is lost” moment is when they take him into the operating room and lobotomize him.
He is brought back into the ward with his other guys who had believed in him, his hero. They see the two scars, and it’s like he’s basically dead. What comes out of that is another character, the Chief, a big strong guy who doesn’t believe in his strength. When he sees McMurphy in this terrible state, he takes a pillow, smothers him, puts him out of his misery.
Then the Chief gets a hold of his belief in his own strength, and he throws this giant heavy thing through the wall or through the window and escapes. The switch was that the Chief, who had not believed in himself, suddenly does believe in himself through this moment.
There’s another thing that’s like this: the “turn in your badge and your gun” scene. This is another principle that I think about that’s like an “all is lost” moment. In a lot of cop movies or detective stories, there’s a moment when the boss says to the detective, “Turn in your badge and your gun. You’re off the case.” This is usually three-quarters of the way through the movie, like the “all is lost” moment.
In Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling gets stripped of her badge and her gun to pursue the case. In The French Connection, Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider have to turn in their badge and their gun. Even in Blade Runner 2049, Ryan Gosling’s character, K, is told, “Turn in your badge and your gun. You’re off the case.”
This is a bit like the “all is lost” moment for these characters. The stakes rise again. Are they going to keep going, or are they going to crap out? Of course, they always keep going. At that moment, they go from being a character to being a hero.
If you were trying to attract a big-named actor in a screenplay, you have to have a great moment like that because the actor is going to want to play that moment. They’re going to want to be the hero. They’re going to want to be up against it and then rise above that.
David (23:28-23:34):
What about the second act belonging to the villain?
Steven (23:34-24:31):
That’s a principle that my friend Randy Wallace, who wrote Braveheart, taught me. The first act introduces the hero, but in the second act, the villain has to come forward. In other words, the obstacles that the hero has to overcome.
As a writer, you need to ask yourself, “When I look at my second act, is the bad guy big in here?” If you think about The Godfather, in the second act, you have Sollozzo, the villain. He guns down Don Corleone outside, then everybody has to go to the mattresses. There’s a big warfare through the whole thing. The villain really comes to the fore as the obstacles that the hero has to overcome. So it is true: the second act does belong to the villain.
David (24:31-24:45):
How is the relationship with the world different for a hero versus a villain? What are they trying to accomplish? How do heroes generally see the world versus villains? How are their worldviews opposed?
Steven (24:45-27:41):
That’s a great question. What we’re talking about here are the principles of storytelling. If we’re writing a story, we want to ask ourselves if it adheres to these principles.
One of the differences between a hero and a villain is that the hero is capable of self-sacrifice. A lot of times in the all-is-lost moment or in the final climax, the hero will give his or her life, or will give up his hopes of happiness, for the greater good. For a villain, it’s always a zero-sum game. If the villain gains anything, they have to take it from someone else.
One classic case of a hero giving something up is in Casablanca, where Bogart’s character gives up the love of his life, Ingrid Bergman. He puts her on the plane to Lisbon with her husband, so she can escape, and then he goes off to fight with the Free French.
The decision he has made is that it’s better to spend yourself for the common good, fighting for the Allies against the Nazis, than to grab your own selfish good, running away with the girl you love. He sacrificed. Of course, there are many stories where the hero literally sacrifices his or her life.
That’s one of the big differences between a hero and a villain. Another difference is that the hero is capable of change. The story in almost any book or movie is the hero changing, starting at point A and ending at point Z, a different person.
The villain never changes. That’s another question we have to ask ourselves as writers: Is our hero changing from beginning to end?
In Casablanca, Bogart’s character starts as the owner of a restaurant where a lot of expatriates gather, including Nazis. He’s completely in it for himself. He has a couple of great quotes; for example, “I’m the only cause I’m fighting for.” He does a couple of things in the beginning of the movie that show he’s only looking out for himself and doesn’t give a damn about anybody else. By the end of the movie, he’s completely changed to the point where he’s giving utterly of himself. That’s why the movie is so satisfying and is many times picked as the greatest movie of all time.
David (27:41-28:03):
As you’re thinking about genre and conventions and these principles, it’s implied that you should lean into these things and learn from them. My fear is that if I do this, I’m just going to write trite, cliche stories. How do you work through that tension?
Steven (28:03-29:07):
That’s another great question, because you might think, as I did when I first heard some of these principles, that you don’t want to write formulaic stuff.
But you realize that these moments work. If you have a hero who doesn’t change and you read the book over, people will go, “eh, whatever.” So you have to accept that this is a true principle. If I look back at the Iliad, the Odyssey, or Shakespeare, the hero does change. They have to change.
The trick is: Can you apply these timeless principles in a new way? Can you put a spin on it or do it some way that’s just slightly different?
Here’s another classic example: The Big Lebowski. If you think about The Big Lebowski, the genre is a detective story.
David (29:07-29:08):
Okay?
Steven (29:08-30:25):
The Dude is given an assignment at the start by a rich guy. He says, “Here’s the million dollars I want you to give it to save my wife who’s been kidnapped.” The Dude is kind of like a detective. He’s solving what happened to Bunny. There’s even a femme fatale played by Julianne Moore that becomes a love interest, just like in every detective story.
The spin that the Coen brothers put on this is that, normally, in a detective story, the hero is a hard-bitten detective, like Bogart. But they used the Dude, a stoner. That’s the spin.
That makes every scene new. In detective stories, the detective always gets beaten up a bunch of times. The Dude gets beaten up over and over. But it’s always new because he’s not the hard-bitten detective. He’s the Dude. So if we can follow these principles but put a spin on them each time, make them just a little bit different, then everything is okay.
David (30:26-30:27):
Tell me about the femme fatale.
Steven (30:28-31:49):
There always is a femme fatale. I know you’re going to ask about another principle, which is that the female carries the mystery.
If you think about detective stories, almost always, the detective is male. Usually, when he’s hired to do the job, there’s always a beautiful, mysterious woman. There’s always a femme fatale, or she might be more of a vulnerable character, who carries the mystery.
For instance, in Chinatown, when Jack Nicholson first meets Faye Dunaway, she’s the one who knows all the answers. He’s trying to dig up what’s behind the murders. She knows already, and she’s trying to hide those answers because she thinks bad things will happen if they’re revealed.
The climax in a lot of these stories is when the female suddenly reveals what’s happening, like the famous scene where Jack Nicholson slaps Faye Dunaway. She says of the young girl that she’s trying to save...
C (31:49-32:05):
I said, I wanted the treat. She’s my sister and my daughter. God, please go back. For God’s sake, keep her upstairs.
Steven (32:05-32:06):
Go back.
C (32:14-32:24):
My father and I... understand? Or is it too tough for you?
Steven (32:25-33:50):
All of a sudden, the whole mystery comes forward. So when I’m writing something, I ask myself, who’s the female in this story, and does she carry the mystery? It doesn’t have to be literally a woman. For instance, we were talking about this earlier. In Moby Dick, which has no female characters at all, the sea is the female.
If you think about the sea carrying the mystery, the sea is the depths to which Moby Dick dives. A whale can go to incredible depths, and the sea is the place that Ahab searches all over the world. At the end of the story, when we look out over the surface of the ocean, it’s a complete mystery. It stands for the unconscious.
It is a mystery, and the mysteries are always things like birth, death, and creativity—things that we can’t answer. Life itself, being. Every story comes down to a question we can’t answer; we can only stand in awe of it. The great works always do that.
David (33:51-33:59):
Tell me about the inverse of this, which I would guess is the male solves the mystery.
Steven (34:00-35:02):
The male, the idea that the hero has to overcome obstacles to reach his or her objective—we’ll say male because, like a detective to solve a mystery, or the military guy to carry off the raid, whatever it is—they’re trying to solve a mystery.
Like you were saying before, this inciting incident plants an idea of who’s the murderer or whether we’re going to kill Hitler. It’s the male energy that’s trying to seek the answer to this mystery. Usually, in the end, the mystery is unsolvable, and the male character just comes face to face with it.
David (35:02-35:21):
Now, I’m presuming something, but would it make sense that if there’s a detective working on a case, that in a lot of these stories they solve the case, but then there’s something bigger behind it that remains the mystery?
Steven (35:21-35:22):
That’s exactly right.
David (35:22-35:25):
There’s something, and that’s a theme that’s shown
Steven (35:25-35:26):
up over and over.
David (35:26-35:35):
There’s the story, and then at some point in the story, we realize that there’s a story that’s bigger than the original story that’s been presented?
Steven (35:35-36:32):
There’s a mega story behind it. At the end of Chinatown, Jake Giddies, played by Jack Nicholson, has kind of solved the case. He figures the bad guy, played by John Houston, is the father. He raped his daughter.
But the case is not solved; he’s not arrested. There’s going to be no accountability. The greater scheme that John Houston carried out, of bringing water to Los Angeles and making himself millions of dollars, continues on. The detective has solved the story, but he’s come face to face with an even bigger thing.
That’s how a great story works. It opens up to something even bigger and leaves the audience or the reader a little sadder but wiser.
David (36:32-37:47):
Okay, so we’re talking about how do you get your writing done and if you’re thinking about work and how you can be more productive there? Well, I recommend a tool called Basecamp. Basecamp is a project management tool.
It’s different from the other ones, which are loud, noisy, and cluttered with feature bloat. Basecamp keeps things simple so that you can focus on what actually matters, which is just getting the work done. For us, Basecamp is a place where we can track what we’re doing with How I Write: when episodes are being recorded, where we’re recording them, the publishing day—all those sorts of things in one place for our entire team to look at.
I had the founder of Basecamp, Jason Freed, come on the show, and I noticed that he really cares about writing. He cares about manifestos, great copy, and telling a great story. He and his co-founder have written five books, and they bring the same care and attention to detail to their books as they do their software.
So if you’re thinking about work and you’re asking, “Hey, how can I be more productive? How can I make my team more cohesive?” Well, then I recommend Basecamp. All right, back to the episode.
In the Arcadian, you have a cursed character that’s central to the story. How do gifts and curses work together?
Steven (37:47-37:49):
Oh, that’s another great question.
David (37:49-37:51):
Seems like a lot of gifts, they have a curse.
Steven (37:52-39:00):
The character in the Arcadian, my new book, has been doomed for crimes he’s committed in the deep past. He must live lifetime after lifetime after lifetime, always as a soldier to kill and be killed. And he wants desperately to end this cycle.
The reason why a character under a curse is interesting is that we’re all kind of under a curse. Think about the idea of original sin. We were born with sin.
Or think of the Garden of Eden. When God cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, he curses them and says, “Henceforth shalt thou eat thy bread in the sweat of thy face. Thorns and thistles I shall set before you. For dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.”
David (39:01-39:07):
And I think the women are cursed to pain in childbirth and the men are cursed to labor, right?
Steven (39:07-41:21):
Yes, I think that’s exactly right. Beyond that, don’t we all feel incomplete, like we haven’t reached our full potential? We’re always searching for something, some kind of redemption. Young people, in particular, are looking for their calling in life. They feel like they have no meaning. If they could only find what they were put here to do.
I love cursed characters, and a lot of great heroes bring that curse with them. In a tragedy, the hero has some flaw. Achilles in the Iliad, for example. He can never be defeated in battle, but he has an ego, pride, and he won’t give in when he needs to. As a result, he loses his dearest friend Patroclus and destroys Troy.
Shane, a film I know you haven’t seen, is one of the great American versions of a tragedy. Shane is a gunslinger who comes into a peaceful valley wanting to lay down his guns and live a normal life. His curse is his past as a gunfighter who has killed people. He’s the only one who can save the day because he’s the only one who can use a gun. His past follows him, and in the end, it catches up with him.
There’s a great moment at the end after he’s killed the bad guy, Jack Palance. He realizes that he has to leave the valley.
David (41:21-41:25):
I have one of the Great 60 Films to Watch before our next interview.
Steven (41:25-41:38):
There’s a great moment at the very end, he’s finally killed the bad guy, Jack Palance. But he realizes that he has to leave the valley. And he says to the little boy who carries the divine Brandon DeWilder, he
C (41:38-41:41):
says, man has to be what he is.
Steven (41:41-41:41):
Joan.
C (41:43-42:07):
Can’t break the nose. I tried it and it didn’t work for me. We want you, Shane. Joey. There’s no living with a killing. There’s no going back from one. Right or wrong, it’s a brand. A brand sticks. There’s no going back.
Steven (42:08-42:15):
He brought his history as a gunman, and he couldn’t get away from it. That was his curse.
David (42:15-42:23):
Is there a surrender in that? He can’t break away? Is there a surrendering to your nature?
Steven (42:23-43:06):
His surrender is that he gives up the dream of living and being a normal person. He’s going to have to find some other way. It’s a sadder but wiser thing, like Jack Nicholson’s character at the end of Chinatown. He’s now seeing corruption that he can never unsee. In a way, he’s better off because he’s now living in the real world. He’s not deluding himself, but it’s a sad world that he has to face now.
David (43:07-44:07):
As you were telling that story, I was thinking about gossip and how it’s a window into the kinds of receptors that the human mind already has. It shows the highways that people travel on in conversation as they try to analyze the world.
I was thinking about the trope of the kid from a wealthy family who has some sort of curse, maybe a learning disability or a tortured relationship with their parents. Over the last 20 years, this has been a common form of gossip. “Brendan? Yeah, he’s from a rich family, but he’s got this problem with his parents.” Or, “Sarah? Yeah, you know, it looks like she’s got everything. She’s got that beautiful house on the beach in Nantucket. But you’ll never believe what happened in the kitchen one night.”
Steven (44:07-44:07):
Yeah.
David (44:08-44:23):
It just seems to show up all over the place. The reason these tropes work, the reason why they feel true, is because they’re so easy to pattern match onto our own lives and what we see.
Steven (44:23-46:16):
Literature, books, movies, they all come from real life. I was thinking about JFK Jr. He was so good-looking and brought so much charisma from his father and from the whole family. Then he died in that plane crash. I don’t know if there’s a direct causality there, but people bring some sort of a curse.
Going back to ancient Greece, the great trilogy of the Oresteia starts with Agamemnon. Agamemnon is the king going to Troy, and they are becalmed by adverse winds. He has to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to gain the wind. This is the initial crime of that generation.
He fights the war and wins, but his wife at home, Clytemnestra, knows he killed her daughter. When Agamemnon comes home, Clytemnestra murders him. She lures him into the bathtub, throws a net over him, and kills him.
Then, in the next generation, his son Orestes feels like he must avenge his father. He kills his mother. It’s a story of a generational curse going from generation to generation. You killed my father, so I have to kill you.
David (46:16-46:56):
Remember that band Avenged Sevenfold? I think that comes from Genesis 5 or 6. Cain kills Abel, and then the retribution is multiplied by seven. Seven is the number of completion and totality. If you follow through with the murder, the violence escalates. Then there’s a threat from God to cut it out so you don’t get the avenge sevenfold in the murder and retribution.
Steven (46:56-46:59):
Interesting. Everything comes back to the Bible eventually.
David (46:59-47:00):
Well, my life, yeah.
Steven (47:01-48:58):
Let me go back to the Arcadian for a second. There’s an idea of a cursed person here. This is a quote that originally got me started on this book, and I’m going to talk about curses. This is from Empedocles, speaking of going back to the ancient world.
I carried this quote with me for 40 years because I just knew there was a story in here somewhere. Empedocles says, “There is a law of stern necessity, the immemorial ordinance of the gods made fast forever.” Here’s the law, he says, “Should any spirit, meaning any person born to enduring life, be fouled with sin of slaughter, in other words, killing somebody, three times 10,000 years, that soul shall wander, an outcast from felicity, condemned to mortal being.”
So, in the story of the Arcadian, our hero Telamon has been cursed to live this lifetime. He comes into this last lifetime when the Christian era has come, and there is a moment in the story where a priest quotes this and says, “This guy is doomed. He’s got to live this out.” The priest says, “No, because our savior has taken this eye for an eye idea and moved it to another level. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God. Blessed are the merciful, the beatitudes, for they shall receive mercy.”
So, he makes the case that this cursed character has now moved beyond that ancient eye-for-an-eye thing. That’s again a way of dealing with a cursed character. How do we get him out of an all-is-lost moment and into some way that can move to a higher level?
David (48:58-49:02):
Tell me about the new self as a result of an extraordinary world.
Steven (49:03-49:14):
You’ve done your research. Great. It’s sort of the classic hero’s journey model of a story.
David (49:15-49:15):
The.
Steven (49:15-49:40):
If we think of, let’s say, Wizard of Oz, the story starts out, Act 1, is the ordinary world. So, it’s Dorothy in Kansas with her dog Toto. Then the inciting incident happens, which is the tornado, the cyclone that comes and carries her away. That’s the end of Act 1, and Dorothy is swept into the extraordinary world, or Oz.
David (49:40-49:42):
Is this when it goes from black and white to Technicolor?
Steven (49:42-49:43):
It goes from black and white to Technicolor.
David (49:43-49:44):
Yeah.
Steven (49:55-51:58):
Or another one we could say, like Rocky. The first Rocky is in the ordinary world. He’s this crumb bum in Philadelphia. He gets the call to fight Apollo Creed, and all of a sudden, he’s another Rocky. Now he’s training.
What’s interesting is, and this is...we can say this in our own lives. If you and I moved from New York to California, or if we met somebody and fell in love, we go from the ordinary world to the extraordinary world. What happens is we become a different person when we cross that threshold.
If someone were to say they were working as a copywriter in advertising somewhere, and they said, “I’m quitting my job, and I’m going to become a novelist,” they go from the ordinary world to this whole other world. They change. They really go from being a character to being a hero.
Not only do they see themselves differently, but the world sees them differently. They sort of sense that. I’m sure we’ve all had those moments in our lives where we’ve kind of turned a page, and to our amazement, people saw us differently, and we see ourselves differently as well.
It’s like, without that moment, we don’t have a story. That’s really what a story is about. Otherwise, it’s just a status quo all the way through. I would say even in psychotherapy, where we’re trying to heal a wound, we start as ourselves with our old story, and somehow our therapist, or a drink, does something that makes us see, or we hit the moon with an alcohol problem and say, “I’m quitting. This is it. I’m going to AA,” we become a different person. It happens in real life, not just in movies or books.
David (51:58-52:15):
So, the core idea that I was thinking about was identity. It seems like something that you see in a lot of stories is there’s a moment where we see the true identity. Strangely enough, I was thinking of Mean Girls. Ridiculous example, I admit, but I was
Steven (52:15-52:22):
These stories, like Mean Girls, follow the same principles as Shakespeare and Homer.
David (52:22-53:03):
There’s a reason it resonates. Basically, you have the Plastics. The Plastics are fake. We know that Katie, when she gets to this high school in Chicago, she’s sort of been this good girl from this good family, just moved from Africa, and now she enters this high school. Now she becomes a fake plastic person so that she can be part of the Plastics. Then there’s that scene where she’s wearing a crown. Maybe it’s like prom or something. She basically rips apart the crown. After she’s ascended to the top of the fake game, she rips it apart. She says, “I’m not that person.”
Steven (53:04-53:08):
So, why is everybody stressing over this thing?
David (53:08-53:11):
It’s just plastic.
Steven (53:11-53:17):
It’s just. Share it.
David (53:17-53:33):
We’ve been watching this devolution of this high school girl, and now we’re like, wow, the goodness, the righteousness that was inside of her, it’s actually now being revealed. That signals a big shift in the movie.
Steven (53:33-53:53):
It’s like the end of Shane, if I go back to that, where it reveals his... the world is revealed to him. The reality of his life is revealed to him at the end, and he finds a different identity than he had at the start. It’s always an identity in both stories that they didn’t expect.
David (53:53-53:54):
Huh?
Steven (53:54-54:02):
You realize, oh, I’m really this person, and I have to live with it. It is about identity and names.
David (54:02-54:03):
What do you really stand for?
Steven (54:04-54:11):
Isn’t that what all of our journey is through life? We’re looking for what’s our calling?
David (54:11-54:11):
Right.
Steven (54:12-54:21):
Who are we really? It’s like the questions that Stanislavski asks an actor: Who am I? Why am I here, and what do I want?
David (54:22-54:23):
Tell me about those.
Steven (54:23-54:57):
Those are the questions an actor playing a role should ask as they enter any scene or prepare to act a scene. Who am I in this scene?
Michael Corleone, in the scene we were talking about, thinks, “Who am I?” He thought he was a Marine officer who was going to marry his all-American girlfriend, Kay. But now he realizes he’s the son of Vito Corleone, and his place is with the family, with Sonny, with Tom, with Fredo.
David (54:57-55:26):
In that moment of showing true identity, there’s a sacrifice. Thinking back to the “Mean Girls” example, it means she can’t be the top girl in the top clique anymore. She has to say, “I’m this person. I have to renounce that. I have to rescind that. I have these values, and I’m going to pursue those, consequences be damned. I’m happy to accept them.”
Steven (55:26-55:29):
Which is a great ending.
David (55:30-56:24):
In a lot of these stories, before that big moment, there’s a quiet solo moment. Think of the person in the bathroom at a party before they have to go out. They look in the mirror and think, “You can do this.” They have this private moment.
In movies, we see them thinking and reflecting. Going back to the Bible, think of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying and asking for every ounce of strength from the Father.
How do those private moments show up, where people retreat and go solo? Maybe they go inward, and it’s there that they muster the courage to step out into the public eye and act with boldness and integrity.
Steven (56:24-57:25):
That’s a great point. I haven’t really thought about this, but it’s true that there needs to be that quiet moment. I guess it’s a moment when we leave the plane of the ego and go to the higher plane before you step into the ring.
Before the third act starts in “The Godfather,” Michael is in the bathroom before he kills the police chief and Sollozzo. He finds the gun that’s been placed for him behind the toilet tank. The soundtrack is of a subway car going by, louder and louder. He combs his hair back. He’s about to cross the threshold to become Michael Corleone, the future Godfather that he wasn’t before.
David (57:25-57:46):
Listen to this from Tolkien: “It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterward were nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait.”
Steven (57:46-57:51):
That’s a great one from Tolkien with Bilbo.
David (57:51-58:10):
It happens privately, secretly. Then you step out. It’s the juxtaposition between the vulnerable, scared solo and the bold, confident public person, and how those come together.
Steven (58:10-58:24):
It’s really about fear, isn’t it? It’s about overcoming, facing whatever that fear is, and saying, “Okay, I’m going to die,” or whatever, “but I’ve got to do it. The alternative is unthinkable.”
David (58:25-58:31):
Something you’d written about was this idea of beating up the hero in detective stories.
Steven (58:31-60:36):
It’s a convention of the detective story, for sure. If you watch any of those stories, the hero always gets beaten up in various innovative, colorful ways.
There’s another convention that’s similar that my partner, Sean Coyne, turned me on to, called the “hero at the mercy of the villain” scene. A James Bond movie always has that. There’s always a scene where James Bond is captured by the villain, lying flat on his back on a table with his legs spread and a laser beam coming down. That’s the “hero at the mercy of the villain” scene. It’s a staple of the thriller genre, where the hero has to be captured by the villain.
I’ve applied that myself. If I don’t have that scene, I better have it in. In “A Man at Arms,” the precursor to “Arcadian,” the hero gets crucified, and they also take a bag of scorpions and tie them over his head.
Aside from the torment, there’s also an element in that scene where the hero and the villain come face to face and confront each other. They each express themselves. The villain gives his speech, and the hero has his response.
In many ways, that’s an “all is lost” moment. If it’s done well, you say to yourself that the hero is in some enclosed chamber, and the water is rising, rising, rising. In “Star Wars,” they were in a crushed garbage shoot. You wonder how they’re ever going to get out of this. As the writer, you have to figure out a way to get them out of it.
David (60:36-60:54):
Now, when you’re thinking about the timeline of your story, and we’ve talked about all these things, how, as the writer, as the shaper of the story, are you placing these? How deliberate are you about that?
Steven (60:54-63:12):
I think you’re very deliberate about it. I bet other writers would say this too. If we think of maybe 20 or 30 key scenes after the first draft, I’ll move them around. I’ll say, “Oh, I thought this one should be here, but it really should be later,” that type of thing.
I think most writers start at the end, or at least I do. I’ll say, “Where’s the story going?” If it’s Huckleberry Finn, it’s got to be the moment where he’s supposed to write the letter that turns Jim the slave in, and he says, “Forget this, I’m not going to do it.” It’s a great ending to the story.
If you work backwards, you have to establish that Huck, in 1840 or 1830 Missouri, is a complete believer in the white versus black thing. We really have to establish that so that this change at the end is radical for him. It’s got to feel like he’s going against everything he’s been told his whole life. Then we also have to have, through the middle of the story, a bunch of scenes where Jim, the runaway slave, proves to be a noble, honorable, great friend to Huck.
So the choice of Huck at the end—am I going to turn him in? You say, you can’t turn him in. If he was a prick, it’d be another story, but he’s not. The structure of the story is this is the end that we’re going to get to, and then what do we need to set up for this? At the very beginning, we have the most basic setup. We introduce Huck Finn and his life and so on.
When we talk about the female carrying the mystery, the female in Huck Finn is the Mississippi, the great river that flows through America. These guys are on the raft going down the Mississippi. If you and I were standing on the shore looking out at the Mississippi, we would be in awe. It’s a mystery. God may understand; we don’t.
David (63:12-63:33):
As you’re thinking about the throughline of your story, setting the stakes... I see how you can set stakes that are really big, but what does it look like to set more realistic stakes? The stakes in our lives are actually a lot more mundane.
Steven (63:33-65:06):
When you do an end-of-the-world scenario, it’s kind of a cheap shot. It’s easy, but it’s much harder to do something like what you’re talking about. If you can establish that a certain small thing is super important to this character for whatever reason, and then put them in a crisis at the end where they have to choose something, then it can really work.
Did you ever see a movie called 45 Years with Tom Courtney? It’s about the marriage of a staid English couple for 45 years. The ending of the story was just the husband reached, takes her hand, and she pulls her hand away. That’s the end of the story. It’s tremendously powerful because she’s the lead character, and she realizes that it was all false. It was all based on something that wasn’t real, and she frees herself from that by pulling her hand away. It worked great, but it’s not a blockbuster. It’s not going to be a George Lucas film or anything like that.
You’re right that sometimes very small things are life and death to you and me if we place meaning on certain things.
David (65:07-65:31):
One way to summarize everything we’ve talked about is that there are five aims of a writer: to heighten the drama, make the internal external, give the story meaning—like a theme—make it universal, and make it beautiful. You wrote that when we pick a genre and work within its conventions, we automatically accomplish all five points above, assuming that we do a good job.
Steven (65:31-67:03):
Yeah, assuming we do a good job. Let me just hit on one point, which I’ve been thinking about a little bit lately: the idea of making it beautiful.
Even the most horrific scenes in a written word or in movies have to be beautiful in one way or another. If you think about Schindler’s List, what could be more horrific than that? But it’s a beautiful movie. Spielberg and the cameraman and the lighting, they went to incredible pains to make every frame work, because if it’s not beautiful...
We are in a world of anxiety these days, with the politics and everything that’s going on. You look at the news, and you want to kill yourself. I think an antidote to anxiety is beauty. A song, a piece of music... Unfortunately, it only lasts for the moment. But there is something about it.
God must have built this into the world in some crazy way: it’s got to be beautiful. The prose has to be beautiful, the rhythm has to be beautiful, the framing of the shot has to be beautiful, no matter how horrible it is. Somehow that beauty saves us in some crazy way. I don’t know why.
David (67:04-67:19):
Okay, I get that. Make it beautiful, make it beautiful. As you’re writing a book, you’re writing The Arcadian, how do you tactically tell this story in a beautiful way?
Steven (67:19-70:26):
That is a great question. I think a lot of it has to do with the prose, since you’re working with words on paper. If it was a movie, it would be different. If we were doing Lawrence of Arabia, we would send location scouts out to find spectacular shots.
But a story like the Arcadian is set in 15th century Spain because our former Roman legionary, from the 10th Legion of Rome in the era of the Crucifixion, was recruited from Spain. Spain was a province of Rome at that time, called Hispania. I mentioned the horse earlier, the magical creature that draws him back to Spain. It’s like if he’s going to be released from this curse, it must be released where it originally started, or where he originally enlisted and signed up.
Now, as I’m trying to write about Spain, I’m trying to make it really beautiful. The first few chapters of the story are really about the geography of this particular valley, that it was a place where horses were revered, where the great landowners raised cavalry horses and show horses, and how everybody in the area worshiped the sangre, the bloodlines of horses. Even the poorest farmer would have one mare that he hoped would someday produce a great horse.
I’m trying to create a kind of magical world. I’m not trying to create Spain as it maybe really was, but a kind of Spain of the mind in which magical things can happen. So I’m using old-fashioned prose, writing like Cervantes would have written in those days. It’s kind of formal and hopefully, if it works, it creates a little bit of a spell, like rhythm in music or something like that. Hopefully it brings the reader under that spell and into this world where magical things can happen.
That’s the beauty that I’m trying to produce: make it beautiful.
David, thank you very much for the great questions and for doing such in-depth research. We were talking about that show Bookworm and the great interviewer who would read a writer’s entire works before he would interview them. I think you did a great job of getting under my skin. Thanks a lot. This helped me. I told you I was thinking about doing a book that’s kind of about this stuff, and I’m encouraged. I think I will. I didn’t realize there was enough material there.
David (70:26-70:27):
Rock on.
Steven (70:27-70:29):
Thanks a lot. Thank you. Till next time.
