Finally.... I'm back.

Spring here in the Carmel Valley of California, the redwing blackbirds are back in the fields and marshes. The grass in the old hay field near our community is almost shoulder high. We had a wet winter and the fields are beautiful and green right now.

Dot is doing well but I suspect she wishes I would walk her further on our twice a day walks. Jan works on her whale data at her computer most days and I have been working on a draft of my next book. The title is Big Breath In and it involves the life of a scientist who is returning to her investigative roots as she is being treated for cancer. When I started this project all I wanted was to write a fascinating female character and by the time I got to the end I had written a book about Jan Straley.(and no, Jan does NOT have cancer) I will drop a little more of Big Breath in here later.

Jan and John the summer after we were married.

I’ve also been reading a lot lately. Here are some of the books I particularly enjoyed since Christmas:

Burn Book by Kara Swisher (How one tough, funny and well connected writer fell out of love with big tech)

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. (a southern woman’s take on modern life below the Mason Dixon line by re-imagining Dicken’s David Copperfield, Funny, moving, tragic and unapologetically political) She is one of the few best selling novelists whose success makes me happy.

And the big book: Moby Dick … again. Herman Mellville. This was perhaps the fourth time I’ve read it. Each time I go through it I both learn something new about the world I thought I knew and am in awe of a book that confounds both teacher’s and student’s urges to explain it.

I also read the first three Harry Potter Books, because… well, because there is something Christmasy about these books, and I chugged them down at Christmas time. Maybe too because I went to an English style boarding school for one semester and came home by Christmas. It was also filled with Trolls and Goblins.

What I’m reading now is Storylines: How Words Shape our World, which is a terrific, scholarly but readable book by a writer whose influences include, but is nowhere near limited to, Native storytellers, Cowboys of the Canadian West and Bob Marley.

Next week I will write a full review of Storylines, because it needs to be better known.

I hope you are all well and I look forward to getting back in touch with you all.

Walking with Dot sniffing behind me.

Taking A Blog Break.

Holidays happening. Including Arthur’s second birthday plus I got the notes back on my next novel. So I have too much to do, to do anything well.

So, you won’t be seeing a new blog from me until January sometime. I will let you know.

The Prostitutes of Ketchikan

Between 1903 and 1953 the city of Ketchikan, Alaska was virtually funded by prostitution. There were women who owned some twenty two houses in a small area on a estuary called Creek Street. The lore is that these women controlled their own business. They paid off the police and the city officials to be able to stay in business for themselves. Several of the women owned big houses with six to ten “employees” that sold sex, drugs and bootleg whiskey. They were said to have boyfriends and bouncers in their employ in order to keep the peace and act as security. Most of the small houses had one or two women who would sometimes have sex with strangers passing through: salesmen or sailors, or itinerant tramp loggers. But many of the women on the creek had a relatively small clientele of some twenty or so local professionals, doctors, lawyers and bankers who kept the women in work on a year round basis. Again the lore was that there were no pimps, perhaps to keep the story of their exploitation by men to a minimum. This was the romantic version of the sex trade that at least pretended to be of a feminist nature… women of limited means and a certain temperament, pulling themselves into the upper classes by trading in sex, booze and drugs. These proto capitalists women were said to be genuine multi ethnic, multiracial badassses.

The Staircase of Dolly’s house.

The famous artist of Ketchikan has been researching the women of Creek Street for years and for almost as long he has been pestering me to write about them. Now he has enlisted a whole team. Our son Finn met us in Ketchikan last week to research this scene for a writing project we have been working on for more than a year, we spoke to people who knew the women and people who knew their customers and we toured the village that sheltered the whore houses of Ketchikan.

Ketchikan has always held its arms out wide to commerce of all kinds enthusiastically. Whether it was cutting trees, trapping fish, tourism or sex trade the cultural attitude has always been summed up by the expression, “Bring It On”. Sitka talks about limiting numbers of criuse ship passengers while K. Town says, “Bring it. No matter what we’ll handle it..”

What could have been the crib of an independent sole operator.

But the whores of Ketchikan today appear to be a sad and exploited lot. I’m sure there are top end whores in Ketchikan at any given time but I suspect they are flown in for special occasions. But today’s resident women who trade sex for money appear to me found in the homeless community of drug addicts. Recently the city took out all the benches in the downtown near the shelters in an aattempt to keep men and women vertical. Tweakers used to be the term for people who use methamphetamine but from my looking around, I suspect the desparately poor people of Ketchikan are users of the drugs classified under the term painkillers or downers: oxycontin, or heroin laced with fentanyl. This is the problem they have staying vertical. They are drugged and snoozy, crouched anywhere they can to stay out of the rain. Women will do anything to get another hit. This is not the romantic optimisim of the proto typical capitalist that has been immortalized on the historical placcards around the old red light district. We talked to someone who ran an old house of an independent whore who claimed in the fifty’s and sixties that she earned seven to ten thousand dollars a month in adjusted wages. Her house is open to the public on Creek Street during the summer cruise ship season. Dolly’s house is a monument to the garrish taste of the romantic sex worker.

The wicked side of Creek Street

The tweakers of today have no such luck. They suck dick only enough to feed their addiction. The old whores of Ketchikan are said to provide genuine comfort to the working men of the region. It was wet and cold when Finn and I visited Dolly’s House. The current owner had drained the pipes just the week before and the power was sketchy at best. The wet and cold of Ketchikan makes a financial opportunity just to get warm for the evening. Men brought Dolly felt pennants from their army base or their home city. Dolly herself was said to have enough vigor to promise young boys a good time when “they got old enough".

The old whores of Ketchikan are all gone now, they are only remembered by the decendents of their customers and what ever contemporanious statements they made in their old age. But what ever you may think of their oldest profession it should be said that their lives were primal. They sold much needed comforts no matter how you looked at it. But were they in the end victims of their own circumstances? I’m still not certain. But I’m sure their stories are worth uncovering.

Home?

Another trip back to Sitka. This time for a friends memorial at the Whalefest celebration. Jan made both boat trips out on the water to watch Humpback whales and sea Otters lazing around on the surface of a calm rainy sea. We ate fabulous dinners with old friends and saw lots more just walking around town. We stayed in a lovely apartment downtown right across the street from the Whalefest gathering. Everything is so familiar in my old home town.

The first day there I gave some remarks at a memorial for Craig George who died in a river rafting accident this past summer. I had practiced the remarks for almost a week, but when time came to give them on stage infront of almost a thousand people I felt almost overwhelmed by emotion. It caught me by surprise and it was not a good feeling. I reallly hate to lose control of my emotions in those circumstances. I feel that my job in those situations is to give comfort to the grieving family and the community of friends and to break down in tears is just to draw attention to myself and my own grief, which sets the whole wrong tone for the event. But… it basically went fine, I wes just a little dissapointed.

But why the tears? Certainly I was sad about the death of our friend Craig who truly was a one of a kind person: a prominent scientists, a good musician, a funny gental man. But too there was something about being in this placre that most of my life I have thought of as home. A town full of friends where I have also lost so many friends. Alaska, it can be a dangerous place, and given enough time you will inevitably lose good people: Nels, Terrence, Molly, Bill, Dave many others. I suppose the truth of it is also that I’m growing fond of my new life in California, with Jan and Arthur, Finn and Emily and the smattering of new friends I’m starting to make. But why would this make me sad? Why the tears?

Up on the stage I felt haunted by my missing friends, and I felt that perhaps I was slipping through the cracks in my life. Not really at home here in Alaska nor fully belonging to California. For the truth is I am becoming more at home in California and that’s a good thing but when I’m back here I’m flooded with complex feeliing, as if I’m caught observing my life.

Last night I had a dream that I was wrapped in a sheet of plastic explosives. I was warm and cosy and very happy to be wrapped up. There was no blood or explosions no death or drama just curled and comfy in me blanket of high explosives .

I told a friend about the dream and she thought about it for a moment and said… “Well, that’s life. Isn’t it?”

I suppose so.

Today Jan and I head to Ketchikan to meet with Ray Troll and Finn will be meeting us there as well. More on this laater.

Here is an old poem of mine.

Where Did All The Gonzo Go?

More sun, a bit of a chill in the morning to remind us that in fact we are approaching autumn.

I watched a documentary about Hunter Thompson and it made me think of my Alaskan friends who loved him so much. Hunter Thompson gave name to Gonzo Journalism. Gonzo combined straight reporting with fantasy, screed, and straight up fiction and rolled it all into a hallucinatory satire of world events. Hunter Thompson started with a book about the Hell’s Angels who taught him an important life lesson which was before all else one must “freak out the squares.”

But now the internet has turned us all into hipsters, insiders and proto revolutionaries. Even the “squarest “ of us all.

I had one friend in Alaska who used to call me late at night mostly to rant about the local politicians in our dear little town. He sometimes called me simply to read long passages of “Fear and Loathing In Los Vegas.” My friend didn’t sleep well in fact he didn’t own a bed. He fell asleep every night in a broken down lounge chair. My friend, like any good admirer of Dr. Thompson, loved and owned plenty of guns. He loved to shoot large bore rifles at plastic jugs out at the firing range and used to scream epithets at the exploding jugs. “You don’t deserve to live you scum sucker,” was one I remember. His name was Ron, and Ron lived in a single wide trailer. Ron didn’t want to own a garbage can. Ron was careful to recycle almost all of his household waste and the rest he could easily put in a down town receptacle . It used to fry his ass to pay for garbage pick up on his utility bill every month and he made it his personal crusade.

Ron would call me and he loved to talk about the Wagnerian opera of his personal gripes with the city. He also waxed philisophical about the greatness of Hunter S. Thompson. He wanted to write like the good Doctor, imagining his fulsome and fiery letters to the editor and the great stir they would cause in the letters section of our local paper. It seemed that only Hunter S’s style could contain Ron’s spleen as far as the written word went. I would always advise him to be sure not to write any actual threats in his letters, for several of the messages he left on various city answering machines had already drawn the attention of the police.

After Dr T. blew his own brains out in Woody Creek, Ron took this action as kind of a taunt. He himself had often talked about going out in a blaze of glory but the truth was besides a few mental kinks Ron was in good health and he enjoyed his late night talks with this friends which included many of the towns beautiful, and patient women. He was mostly too shy to speak in person to women outside a bar, but he had a whole circle of friends who would talk with him for hours on the phone, for he was smart and well read and generally funny. He had actual wit, besides his ranting spleen. He was made to order for a Hunter Thompson fan.

As I have traveled around I’ve seen many people who essentially ask the same question, “Where is Hunter S. Thompson when we need him most?” Ron used to say he wished Hunter T. was still around so he could read him… just one more time… “lay it too the bastards.”

I was thinking about this tonight as Dot and I were on our walk. Where is Hunter, or at least where are his successors who carries his mantle? Late night comedians are too tame, too jokey and too predictable. The internet is too wild and full of pretenders: full of rant but no wit.

I think the problem is that the reason we don’t have any real Gonzo journalists is that the times themselves are too crazy. We don’t have Gonzo journalist because now we have Gonzo politicians. Here me out. The new breed of politicians don’t have any interest in governing or doing the real work of making things happen. They don’t want to set chairs up and take them down in small halls in Manchester New Hampshire. They simply want to be outrageous and draw attention to themselves.

Sadly this could be said of Dr. Thompson towards the end of his life. He had imploded on himself… Now hear me out… he was a genius but he was also a drug addict, an alcoholic and as he himself said, a “connoisseur of mind altering substances.” He became obsessed with himself. He became the story and truth didn’t matter. Old time ethics didn’t matter. Only he and his romantic figure center stage in the story mattered. Again, even at his worst he was a genius with the ability to carry our ire on to the next level. But in the end he was a narcissist.

Remind you of anyone? I believe now we have no new Hunter S. Thompson because they would be crowded out by the politicians. Now, instead of sophisticated satirists we have comedians and finger wagging scolds and I honestly believe its the finger wagging scolds who provide the targets and the spleen to the political debate. No one so much loves Donald Trump but genuinely hates the arrogance of the finger wagging Liberals.

But what to do? Should we liberals stop our finger wagging. moralizing? Not much chance of that. But we need fewer self righteous gags and more wit… the kind of wit that Dr. T had in his earlier work. I too would love to see him reappear in his white whale of a car and rip into everyone. He would have to rip into the moralizers and he was so good at that. That would suck some of the oxegen out of the far right hatred of the left, but then of course today Thompson would be drown out by the outrageous politicians who will say anything… believe anything so long as it gets their names in their favorite partizan outlets.

Let me be clear, I’m your worst case of a liberal and probably a finger wagger But I need real wit in the discourse if I’m to be motivated to write letters, give money or get excited. And we need that wit today. Wit, not gags, not clever insults but insight the way that Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hunter Thompson had. True intelligent critics who did more than draw attention to themselves but craftspeople who can can make you laugh as they cut through the bloated buffoonery of our times..

Dr. Thompson is dead and gone. He burned himself out slowly and painfully before our eyes until he blew up his skull like a water jug meeting a fat bore slug. But surely there are others out there who don’t want to pay their garbage bill and willing to tell you why.

Here is an old poem:

Two Years Old And The Power Of "No"

Being around a toddler has taught me a lot about being human. The first thing I’ve noticed is how difficult it is to grow your own brain to be able to do the things you want. Arthur will be two years old next month I can almost see his neurons slamming together trying to get his body to do what he wants. He has been working on trying to jump… just a simple hop so that both feet come up off the ground. At this stage of development it is a difficult thing to do, but yesterday he did it. We were listening to a recording of “Clap Your Hands” by the band They Might Be Giants. The song is from their kids album and is very rhythmic,. Suddenly after a lot of attempts he was jumping and a big smile broke over his face. Suddenly he had shed the restrictive suit of his taut muscles and everything just seemed to fit and he could jump. I think that moment must have seemed like a miracle to him. At first he couldn’t hop and then he could. This is the beginning of independence.

So it seems obvious but with independence of this sort comes a little obstinance. He is begining to do the things he wants and that is almost intoxicating. So when big people make suggestions, like, “Arthur would you like to give Dot a treat?” he says loudly, “No!” No, he wants to do the things he wants to do. After all he can hop why shouldn’t he do the next thing he wants to do? Like get all the books down off the shelf? Where just a few weeks ago he agreed with everything his parentss suggest now some neurological door has been open and he wants to walk through it every single time…. all on his own. No. No. No and no. I want to do what I want to do.

Of course there have to be limits. He can’t run out in the street and somewhere deep in his brain he recognizes this, because there is a tone that his parents carry with them that communicates their own sense of “No.” Don’t run into the street because it is very dangerous and you could get hurt. Or even perhaps. “We could get hurt,” and Arthur listens to this and obeys. Finding the acceptable limits is the thing that makes a good parent child relationship work.

Of course I think of this while both Jan and I get older. Our bodies neurological development are going the other direction. Neither of us can hop the way we used to be able to hop, nor can we run or climb the way we used to and our reaction to this change is not the same as Arthur’s. We are less independent and less obstinate than we were just a few short months ago, what we have that Arthur does not is experience and memory. Some times I can’t help thinking that we are ships passing in the night, an overused metaphor to be sure but one that serves my purpose today.

Consider an actual ship traveling at night the most necessary quality needed is the ability to know where you are. While a two year old is right smack in the middle of where he is, he is unaware of where that is exactly. An older adult who is losing their capability while also, right smack in the middle of their experience the difference between the adult in decline and a toddler is that the adult knows…. at least for a while… where they are and how this new state fits in with human experience. We know that death and decline is ahead and we slow ourselves down where Arthur bounds forward towards his unlimited potential for growth.

So we are ships feeling our way in the dark, while a toddler races around in this new mysterious night.

Jan and I are home now, back to our steady routines but I have to say that our trip to the south shore of Big Sur was a wonderful adventure. It’s a long drive up and around the coastal range to go in the south end. We have to do this because the road is still closed from the north because of last years big winter storm. We stayed at a lodge called Treebones which was wonderful. We stayed in a beautiful structure called an autonomous tent which sat perched on a bluff above the sea. The view toook in about 180 degrees of rough ocean sea scape. At night we could hear sealions hauled out on a beach somewhere three hundred feet below us. While the structure did have a fabric skin it was not any type of temporary immovable structure. It was a comfortable cabin with a gas fireplace and a bathroom but the sound of the wind and the waves breaking on the shore surrounded us at night. It was a perfect place to sleep.

The other thing to recommend the south shore is its relative emptiness. There are very few visitors right now. For a time last winter there were two slides and the people caught between them found themselves trapped on an island on the coast. They were trapped there for four months. With emergency helicopter service and living on their stores of food they had put up. I spoke with young people who all seemed to love it. The beaches were literly empty and the big waves were theirs and theirs alone. Other’s reported beach combing on empty beaches and potluck with neighbors. Then once the southern slide was repaired they found themselves at the end of a very long and remote road, which is the way we found it. The weather was perfecct while we were there but the big rains which will probably bring more slides are surely on their way. The locals aren’t especcting the northern slide to be fixed for another year and the young adventurous seemed happy about that.

We spent a day eexploreing the beaches and campgrounds. We kept our eyes open for California Condors but were denied. We had a lovely time in this new culture of end of the roaders, there was a lot of talk about Alaska and their desire to go there. Somehow we felt right smack in the middle of our lives in this beautiful spot and we were happy. It was almost like learning to jump again.

Here is a new poem.

Not Much Of a Blog

This weekend is Jan Straley’s 70th birthday celebration. The blog is closed for celebration.

Today we made Pizza with her new food processor which we had never done before and was really quite fun. My sister Martha is here because her daughter lives in Monterey and we were able to buy her a mileage ticket to come down here to take care of Dot while Jan and I drive down to Passo Robles and up to a Glamping tent resort south of Big Sur tomorrow. (circuitous route because Highway One is still blocked from the big storm last winter) We will come back on Wednesday. But today is Jan’s actual birthday so we all went to a spa and Jan had a massage then we all soaked in the various tubs and sweated in the various rooms and even dipped in freezing water. Then finished the celebration with a wonderful dinner at joint called Rustica which was phenomenal.

Now we are home and getting ready for our road trip to Big Sur.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about all these doings for next weeks blog.

Take care of yourselves and I’ll see you next week.

John S.

The Mountain Goats Again

Finn, Jan and I drove up to San Francisco to see our favorite Band: The Mountain Goats. It was a terrific show with a good crowd who really loved the band. People danced and sang along with the lyrics. It was in August Hall which is near Union Square. The people who worked in the venue were very helpful. Jan had run out of steam from the drive up and sitting so long, her mobility was weak right at the moment we came in, but no one in the long line was rude or pushy they just got us a wheel chair and got us right to the ADA section near the right hand side of stage. Jan was able to see the band and even though we clearly skewed the median age, everyone smiled and was happy to be there. I know I was.

The band has a long and interesting history, (their Wikipieda page is quite detailed… as befits it’s cult like following) In 1991 John Darnniell was a solo act that called himself “The Mountain Goats.” He used to make albums on his boom box and sell tapes at his gigs. These tapes are now very much prized. Jan and I got in on listening to the band around 2005 they had started putting out studio albums by then with Peter Hughes on bass and John Wurster (from Superchunk) on drums. These two form the most solid rhythm sections I’ve ever heard live.

For Jan’s sixtieth birthday we flew to Paris to go to the top of the tower and to see the Mountain Goats. We went to one art museum but it was closed. Mostly we wandered around town until we were quite lost then we would get something to eat in a cafe and then find our way back to the houseboat on the Sein where we were staying. wandering around lost seems the best thing to do before a Mountain Goats show.

John Darnielle writes all the songs and fronts the band. He is also a novelist and is a solid smart writer. I think he writes about people with troubled lives beautifully. (full dissclosure: he once wrote me a very nice blurb for one of my books) He is funny and ironic without losing his urgent sense of honesty. His songs are not to everyone’s taste but they clearly are to mine.

Here is an example: Friday night in San Fransisco the crowed had called out for one of his most popular and blunt break-up songs called. “No Children” and a young woman brought her summons to her divorce proceeding to the show and threw the papers up on and said, He read some of the papers aloud to introduce the final song Then he said “Anyone who carries around papers like these clearly needs a song in her heart to go with them.” and they ripped into No Children..

Although the song is perhaps the most bitter of songs about a breakup you have ever heard but the crowd was estatic and sang it like an anthem to all their different generations. Dance Music for the heartbroken who have survived the worst. He is a terrific songwriter with a great band backing him up.

Its ninety- five degrees in Carmel today. It was cool and damp earlier in the week when I met a woman on my walk who asked me if I had seen the sunflower in our communal garden. She said that I really should go see it because it was, “A monument to Glory,” and she said this as if she had been quiet moved. No I hadn’t seen it and I couldn’t find it on Tuesday when I went to look. Today Jan and I walked down to find it and Jan found it in the far corner. It was a massive plant but after well over ten feet high. Days of intense heat the blossoms drooped down and the tips of the petals on their smiling faces were turning black. The monument to glory appeared wilted and spooky. I was glad for my neighbor who saw it at it’s peak. Beauty exists not only in a particular place but almost always at an exact time and time is fleeting. Much like how I was lucky to catch a great rock and roll show, she was lucky for her sunflowers.

Here is a poem I wrote last weeks after listening to the news.

California Rain

One of the things I find peculiar about living down on the Monterey Peninsula is the warm early fall. In Sitka we often had more than thirty inches of rain in October. Here, September and October are almost indistinguishable from summer. Days are warm enough to leave the doors open to cool off the inside of the house.

The weather this week was clear and sunny. Arthur came over and we played outside putting on the putting green, knocking balls around end to end and sometimes simply picking the balls up in his hand and plunking them into the hole. Arthur has developed an interesting wrinkle in his golf game, where he hits the ball around for a few minutes and then he will put his putter down and stand on his head on the green. Then he stretches out in a downward facing dog and looks at his grandparents between his legs. Then he gets up and attempts to hop over his putter backwards and forwards. I’m not sure how these manuver’s are scored but he is devoted to them: putting, head standing, the upside down peek-a-boo and hopping.

Tiger in in training.

I would like to see these techniques added to the PGA roster. I’m sure it would make the sport more enjoyable to watch.

After more than a month of sunny afternoons with some drippy fog in the morning today we woke up to actual rain. Not a Sitka rain but a real puddle making, droplets on tree branches, verifiable water kind of rain. The first thing that strikes me down here is the interesting fragrance that comes along with a periodic rain fall. Something in the dust activates a rich smell. Cottonwood, and live oak trees bloom with a dusty sharp smell. The old hay fields surrounding our community have gone to thistle’s now, and even they have a fresh acid flower smell.

We lived on the ocean in Sitka. The tide flats were almost always fragrent with eel grass and clam squirt. But when the hard rains came in the fall just the huge bulk of water seemed to smother the fragrances of spruce trees covered in pitch. In Carmel wet grass still smells like grass. In the rainforest wet grass smells like water.

Dot and I coming back from our morning walk.

Dot and I enjoyed our morning walk a great deal today, though it was slow because Dot had to stop every to or three feet to smell the ground. All the news left by the dogs of the neighborhood seemed to be rising up like ghosts every inch of the way.

Because of the rain tody we plan to go to our in-laws house to play board games. Even though it’s hardly wet at all by Sitka standards, it is perfectly suited for a game day with fresh cookies and perhaps a baseball game on the TV. Today is their fall the kids are back in school and farms in the valley are stockpiling truck loads of pumpkins for Halloween. Even though it may be seventy degrees and sunny next week, we can enjoy the first cosy weekend of the year.

Corn stalks dried and stacked

pumpkins piled in painted bins.

“Seasons change,” you say.

Here is a moving poem… that is it’s about moving…I wrote it for my friend Yi Fu Twan.

Save The Cat and Other Advice

I spent much of the week considering revisions to my books and to the film script. Finn lent me a book on structuring a story intended for a screen play. It is called SAVE THE CAT! (the last book on screen writing you will ever need) It is by Blake Snyder. If you have ever suspected that there is a formula for writing a popular movie then this is the book to send you on your way.

Mr. Snyder is very specific on how to organize a film script and he is supremely self confident that he has cracked the code. I find the book to be one of the most interesting and most distressing books I have ever read on the subject. Interesting because it makes so much sense and once I got past my prejudice against these type of books I found it very helpful. I have gone by the maxim in writing that “Nothing Hard is Ever Easy” for most of my life. But here I am thinking, that if I saw storytelling in Mr. Snyder’s way I might find starting a novel easer and less of a crap shoot.. When I looked carefully at his advice I began to see that it does clarify some of the most difficult challenges a person has in creating a story, without compromising the substance.

The first thing I discovered is you have to have a succinct answer for “What is it?” Can you say what your story is in a way that makes it attractive. Does it “bloom with possibility in your mind’. This is not just for pitching the book for a buyer but, as a creator, it helps you find firm footing right from the beginning. He calls these sentences “Loglines” I don’t really know why but let me try and show you.

A whaling captain goes to sea and loses his leg to a white whale and becomes obsessed with going out on another voyage to seek his revenge on the whale…. Moby Dick

An old man in Cuba goes out to catch fish and hooks on to a huge one that eventually kills him. The Old Man And The Sea

An African American girl has been raped by her father and she begins writing letters to God to cope with her suffering. She eventually learns to form bonds with other women who have suffered under opression and she becomes stronger. The Color Purple.

Arthur stops by for a drink.

See what I mean? Frustrating. These read like old TV Guide descriptions. We see instantly that these stories are much more than their loglines. There is no depth, no magic in these loglines, no themes, no poetry is mentioned. It’s as if you are meant to squeeze the soul out of your story before you even start.

All three of the books mentioned above have been made into films. And I have to say that all of them suffered in the translation into film. But that is understandable for the experience of reading a book has to be different than watching a two hour film.

But I still want to say that though Mr. Snyder explains in detail how to structure every film into fifteen “beats” that must hit precisely on their page marks, I still ask myself how to make the magic that we love in films: the gesture that silently tells the story of the conflict, or just the right line of dialogue which reveals a character’s deepest feelings without having to troop out to center stage and explain it to us. Here is where again we have to cut him some slack. Making magic is hard…. and it’s true that nothing hard is ever easy.

But when thinking about making stories, particularly when trying to tell a rich and emotionally resonant story, a lot of what he says, in fact, turns out to be true. Take for instance his advice to understand your hero/heroine. The heroine has a desire and that desire has to be primal. That’s what is at stake in a story. If all she wants is five dollars back you are going to have a hard time getting your audience deeply involved with her struggle. Captain Ahab’s desire is primal. Celie’s desire to heal herself is a deep primal urge. The Old Man’s urge to hold on to his fish even when it is being eaten by sharks is, yes, deeper than just an easy wish to have something. The primal desire often defines a life.

I knew a man who was a serial killer. He was in jail. His psychiatrist said that he killed his victims not out of some primal rage but “out of a simple whim, like how you might eat another doughnut even though you are watching your weight.” This could make a good story simply because the primal urge is highlighted by its absence. He might make a good character but not a hero because we don’t really care what happenss to him and, according to Mr. Snyder, every story must have a hero/heroine that we care about, and the hero must be dealing with a primal (or life defining) urge.

He tears down the movie, Miss Congeniality, which apparently was very successful. (Again, box office receipts are the “coin of the realm” for Mr. Snyder, which can be bothersome for the pretentious English Majors… like myself.) But he seems spot on for how the writer sticks to the formula. There are three acts and each act has five “Beats” - that is things that must happen by this point in the story. It goes from “OPENING IMAGE to THE FINAL IMAGE and include.. 11. ALL IS LOST and, 12. THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL. at the end of the second act then on to the finale at the end of the third act.

What is irritating is, you might ask, “Does it have to be that way?” Mr. Snyder answers, “Yes… absolutely, these beats have to happen at the exact prescribed moment..” And I suspect he is right if you want to sell a popular movie. But there are all different things to write and different ways to write them. One can write a villanelle by following the strict rules, or one can write in free verse. One can write a swashbuckler or one can write an experimental piece about squashing a bug on the wall. I find this refreshing…that there are so many choices. But also I like that someone like Snyder and his ilk have taken such a deep dive into the popular film story. For like it or not film stories in the current moment shape much of how we think about all the other types of stories.

Oh, and what is this about Save The Cat? Well, he says that in the early part of the first act the hero/heroine must do something that will cause you to root for them. He calls this the Save the Cat moment of the film. The heroine must be likable and sympathetic so that you will care about her journey. She must save a cat, or something plausibly sympathetic, so that when she is meeting her greatest challenge in the “dark night of the soul,” moment towards the end of the second act you will want her to prevail: no Saving the Cat… no dark night of the soul.

Dot still recovering.

Can it really be that simple and prescribed? I hate to say it but I’ve been watching movies and I’ve been trying to identify the beats he describes and I have to say that if he isn’t absolutely right about these fifteen beats and where they land then a lot of other people are getting it wrong in the exact same way he describes.

If you are any type of writer I suggest you take a look at Save The Cat and then think about it while watching a movie. The experience is both disheartening, in the way of learning the tricks in a magic act, and thrilling in the sense of seeing how magic is made.

Here is an old poem I wrote for a friend.