We all have a favorite Quentin Tarantino scene, but the director of Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, The Hateful Eight, and other movies that can seem made out of nothing but memorable scenes also has one of his own. “My favorite thing I think I’ve ever written is the scene at the French farmhouse at the beginning of Inglourious Basterds,” Business Insider quotes him as saying in a panel at San Diego Comic-Con. “The scene Tarantino refers to is the very first one of his brutal World War II epic” wherein “SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) arrives at a remote dairy farm in France that is suspected of hiding Jewish people. Landa sits down with the farmer (Denis Menochet) and questions him about the whereabouts of the Dreyfus family.” A “tense and sneaky psychological mind game” ensues.
You can learn exactly what makes those opening twenty minutes such a miniature masterpiece in the Lessons from the Screenplay video above. Drawing from psychological research on the nature of tension and suspense, series creator Michael Tucker highlights certain “key components of tension experiences,” including uncertainty, instability, and a lack of control, and shows how Tarantino uses them to heighten the tension as much as possible throughout these seventeen minutes.
“It’s like the suspense is a rubber band,” Tarantino says in a Charlie Rose interview clip included in the video, “and I’m just stretching it and stretching it and stretching it to see how far it can stretch.”
Tarantino also uses a suite of techniques that moviegoers have come to associate specifically with him, such as long stretches of dialogue that go off on extended tangents (“Part of my plan,” he says in another interview clip, “is to bury it in so much minutia about nothing that you don’t realize you’re being told an important plot point until it becomes important”), the charged consumption of food and drink, and the potential for carnage at any moment. “The fact that the audience is aware they’re watching a Tarantino film adds to the suspense,” says Tucker. “We know there will be consequences, and that Tarantino has no qualms about showing violence.” And after the tour de force of its opening, the movie still has well over two hours of pure Tarantinian cinema to go.
Last year we alerted you to a short doc about authors and their relationship with writer’s block. Many were philosophical. Others like Philipp Meyer dismissed it: ““I don’t think writer’s block actually exists,” he said. “It’s basically insecurity.”
How seriously you take it or how terribly it affects you, we have a Spotify playlist created by Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame called “Write Your Way Out.”
He revealed the playlist on his Twitter feed on March 20 with an apology that the mix took longer to make than expected. It is a mix, he said, “about writing, songs that feature great writing, and everything in between.” Like his other mixes, he’s thinking about us, that kindly Mr. Miranda.
The eclectic mix begins with “Happy Birthday Darling” from Bright Lights Big City (“Now when you write my son, make the choice, find your voice, look down deep in your heart”), then features English-language hip hop from the Hamilton Mixtape (Nas’ “Wrote My Way Out”) and Spanish-language hip hop from Calle 13 (“Adentro”), folk classics (Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning”, Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages”), even some jaunty pop from Vampire Weekend (“Oxford Comma”) and Sara Bareilles (“Love Song”). He ends with Raúl Esparza’s ballad “Why” from the musical Tick, Tick, BOOM!, which closes the mix with a paean to the healthy addiction of creativity. (“I make a vow, right here and now / I’m gonna spend my time this way,” he sings.)
It’s nice to know that Miranda fussed over this selection like one used to do back in the days of cassette tapes. Does that mean he has a crush on all of us?
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
All of us instinctively respond to stories. This has both positive and negative effects, but if we don’t understand it about ourselves, we’ve won’t fully understand why people believe what they believe and do what they do. Even given the deep human attachment to narrative, can we clearly explain what a story is, or how to tell one? Acclaimed author George Saunders has given the subject a great deal of thought, some of which he lets us in on in the short film above, which Josh Jones previously wrote about here on Open Culture. “A good story,” he tells us, says “at many different levels, ‘We’re both human beings. We’re in this crazy situation called life that we don’t really understand. Can we put our heads together and confer about it at a very high, non-bullshitty level?’ ”
At this point in his career, Saunders has tried out that approach to story using numerous different techniques and in a variety of different contexts, most recently in his new novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which takes place in the aftermath of the assassination of the titular sixteenth President of the United States. Few living creators understand the appeal of American history as a trove of story material better than Ken Burns, author of long-form documentaries like Jazz, Baseball, and The Civil War, who finds that its “good guys have serious flaws and the villains are very compelling.”
And though he ostensibly works with only the facts, he acknowledges that “all story is manipulation,” some of it desirable manipulation and some of it not so much, with the challenge of telling the difference falling to the storyteller himself.
“The common story,” Burns says, “is ‘one plus one equals two.’ We get it. But all stories — the real, genuine stories — are about one and one equaling three.” Where his mathematical formula for storytelling emphasizes the importance of the unexpected, the one offered by Andrew Stanton, director of Pixar films like Finding Nemo, WALL‑E, and John Carter, emphasizes the importance of a “well-organized absence of information.” In the TED Talk just above (which opens with a potentially NSFW joke), he suggests always giving the audience “two plus two” instead of four, encouraging the audience to do the satisfying work of putting the details of the story together themselves while never letting them realize they’re doing any work at all.
“Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty,” said the playwright William Archer. Stanton quotes it in his talk, and the notion also seems to underlie the views on storytelling held by This American Life creator Ira Glass. In the interview above, he describes the process of telling a story as recounting a sequence of actions, of course, but also continually throwing out questions and answering them all along the way, oscillating between actions in the story and moments of reflection on those actions which cast a little light on their meaning — a form surely familiar to anyone who’s heard so much as a segment of his radio show. And how do you become as skilled as he and his team at telling stories? Do what he did: tell a huge number of them, telling and telling and telling until you develop the killer instinct to mercilessly separate the truly compelling ones from the rest.
Glass illustrates the benefits of his lessons by playing some tape of a news report he produced early in his career, highlighting all the ways in which he failed to tell its story properly. He turned out to be cut out for something slightly different than straight-up reporting, a job of which reporters like Scott Simon of National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition have made an art. Simon takes his storytelling process apart in three and a half minutes in the video just above: beyond providing such essentials as a strong beginning, vivid details, and a point listeners can take away, he says, you’ve also got to consider the way you deliver the whole package. Ideally, you’ll tell your story in “short, breathable sections,” which creates an overall rhythm for the audience to follow, whether they’re sitting on the barstool beside you or tuned in on the other side of the world.
What else does a good story need? Conflict. Tension. The feeling of “seeing two opposing forces collide.” Honesty. Grace. The ring of truth. All these qualities and more come up in the Atlantic’s “Big Question” video above, which asks a variety of notables to name the most important element of a good story. Responders include House of Cards writer and producer Beau Willimon, The Moth artistic director Catherine Burns, PBS president Paula Kerger, and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner. Since humans have told stories since we first began, as Saunders put it, conferring about this crazy situation called life, all manner of storytelling rules, tips, and tricks have come and gone, but the core principles have remained the same. As to whether we now understand life any better… well, isn’t that one of those unanswered questions that keeps us on the edge of our seats?
I first came to know the work of Cormac McCarthy through the 1973 novel Child of God, a portrait of a terrifyingly alienated loner who becomes a serial killer. The book so immerses readers in the dank, claustrophobic world of its protagonist, Lester Ballard, that one can almost smell the dirt and rotting flesh. Next, I read Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s psychedelically brutal epic about a mercenary band of scalp hunters who massacred Native Americans in the mid-nineteenth century Southwest. In McCarthy’s avalanche of prose—which lacks commas, apostrophes, quotation marks, and most every other mark of punctuation—long passages of grim death and carnage become hallucinatory trance-inducing incantations.
It’s never a good idea to identify an author too closely with their fiction; the most disturbingly effective works of horror and madness have very often been designed by writers of the highest emotional sensitivity and critical intelligence. This is certainly the case with McCarthy, whose work plumbs the deepest existential abysses. Nevertheless, I harbored certain anxious expectations of him, unsure if he was a writer I’d ever actually want to meet. So like many others, I was more than a little puzzled by McCarthy’s decision to give his first and only TV interview in 2007 on Oprah Winfrey’s wildly popular platform.
But among the many things we learned from their pleasant conversation is that McCarthy doesn’t care much for literary society. He doesn’t like writers so much as he loves writing and thinking, of all kinds. He spends most of his time with scientists, keeping—as we noted in a post last week—an office at a think tank called the Santa Fe Institute and doing most of his writing there on a noisy old typewriter. While developing relationships with physicists, McCarthy took an interest in their writing, and volunteered to copy-edit several scientific books. He overhauled the prose in physicist Lawrence Krauss’s Quantum Man, a biography of Richard Feynman, promising, says Krauss, that he “could excise all the exclamation points and semicolons, both of which he said have no place in literature.”
In 2005, McCarthy read the manuscript of the Harvard physicist Lisa Randall’s first book, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions. He “gave it a good copy-edit,” Randall said, and “really smoothed the prose.” Later he did the same for her second book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door. During that experience, she notes, “we had some nice conversations about the material. In fact, I saw a quote where he used a physics example I had given in response to a question about truth and beauty.”
Perhaps McCarthy sees this avocation as a challenge and an opportunity to learn. Perhaps he’s also doing research for his own work. His latest project, The Passenger, includes a character who is a Los Alamos physicist. But what about another, surprisingly out-of-the-blue editorial job he took on in 1996? Before he applied his austerities to Krauss and Randall’s work, he received an article from theoretical economist and friend W. Brian Arthur. The piece, scheduled to be published in the Harvard Business Review, was titled “Increasing Returns and the New World of Business.”
After mailing McCarthy the article, Arthur called and asked him how he liked it. “There was a silence on the line,” he tells Rick Tetzeli in an interview for Fast Company, “and then he said, ‘Would you be interested in some editorial help on that?’” The two spent four hours going over the writing. “Let’s say the piece was better for all the hours Cormac and I spent poring over every sentence,” Arthur says, noting that his editor called in a “slight panic” after hearing about the collaboration. You can read the full article here. It’s “a lot punchier and more sharply worded than you might expect, given its subject matter,” writes The Onion’s A.V. Club. It also contains a lot more punctuation than we might expect, given its copy-editor’s philosophy.
“Increasing Returns and the New World of Business” became one of Harvard Business Review’s “most influential articles” Tetzeli writes. “Even now, the theory of increasing returns is as important as ever: it’s at the heart of the success of companies such as Google, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, and Airbnb.” Did McCarthy’s encounter with Arthur’s theory appear in his later fiction? Who knows. Perhaps where Arthur’s vision of economic growth predicted the massive tech giants to come, McCarthy’s keen mind saw the ever-increasing profits of business savvy drug cartels like those in No Country for Old Men and his Ridley Scott collaboration The Counselor.
Last summer, a rumor circulated that Cormac McCarthy, one of America’s most beloved living writers, had passed away. In the midst of a devastating year for famous artists and their fans, the announcement appeared on Twitter, but it “was, in fact, a hoax.” As McCarthy’s publisher—recently merged juggernaut Penguin Random House—confirmed, the author of such modern classics as Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, and No Country for Old Men “is alive and well and still doesn’t care about Twitter.” The literary community is better off not only for McCarthy’s good health, but for his disregard of what may be the most fiendishly distracting social media platform of them all. He is still hard at work, on a novel called The Passenger, tentatively slated for release this year.
You can hear excerpts of The Passenger read in the dim, shaky video below, from an event in 2015 at the Santa Fe Institute, an independent scientific think tank where McCarthy keeps an office and where he has plied a secondary trade as a copy-editor for science-themed books, including Quantum Man, physicist Lawrence Krauss’s biography of Richard Feynman. (McCarthy’s “knowledge of physics and maths,” writes Alison Flood at The Guardian, is said to exceed “that of many professionals in the field.”) McCarthy’s latest work seems like a departure for him.
His earlier novels mined the richness of Southern Gothic and Western traditions, and “have subtly woven in science,” writes Babak Dowlatshahi at Newsweek. But The Passenger “will place science in the foreground.” Santa Fe Institute president David Krakauer calls it “full-blown Cormac 3.0—a mathematical [and] analytical novel.”
So we know Cormac McCarthy is a genius, but how is it that he found the time to become a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowship-winning novelist and, on the side, a student of theoretical physics and math? His secret involves more than staying off Twitter. As McCarthy tells Oprah Winfrey in the video at the top of the post, excerpted from his first television interview ever in 2007, he has made his work the central focus of his life, to the exclusion of everything else, including money and public adulation from fans and admirers. For example, he answers a question about why he turned down lucrative speaking engagements with, “I was busy. I had other things to do.”
It’s not that I don’t like things, I mean some things are very nice, but they certainly take a distant second place to being able to live your life and being able to do what you want to do. I always knew that I didn’t want to work.
How did he pull off not working? “You have to be dedicated… I thought, ‘you’re just here once, life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.’” McCarthy doesn’t “have any advice for anybody” about how to avoid the daily grind, except, he says, “if you’re really dedicated, you can probably do it.” As Oprah puts it, “you have worked at not working?” To which he replies, “absolutely, it’s the number one priority.”
Lest we immediately dismiss McCarthy’s philosophy as cluelessness or privilege, we should bear in mind that he willingly endured extreme and “truly, truly bleak” poverty to keep working at not working—or working, rather, on the work he wanted to do. There’s a bit more to becoming a multiple award-winning novelist and MacArthur “Genius” than simply avoiding the 9‑to‑5. But McCarthy suggests that unless artists make their own work their first priority, and material comfort and economic security a “distant second,” they may never truly find out what they’re capable of.
By now the news of Carrie Fisher’s death has hit hard all over the world. It’s true that for an entire generation of people, her breakout role at 19 as Princess Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy has made her a sci-fi icon and a childhood crush—both roles she longed to escape. Tribute after tribute on social media and elsewhere reminded us almost immediately after Tuesday’s announcement that her life and work have had a much wider impact, even on people who have never even seen a Star Wars film.
Fisher’s unabashedly candid public conversations about her personal struggles with substance abuse and bipolar disorder made her a powerful advocate for others who felt ashamed to talk about these too-often-taboo subjects and often too ashamed to seek help. Much like George Michael, another celebrity mourned by millions this holiday season, Fisher refused to be shamed into silence or to capitulate to bullies and bigots. Instead she practically bloomed with earthy charm and wit as she co-opted tabloid character assassination and turned it into her own form of autobiographical art and therapeutic outreach.
Her return to the rebooted Star Wars franchise last year as the wise, aging General Leia Organa elevated the conversation about older women in Hollywood, after her response to some vicious comments about her looks made her haters look small, mean, and stunted. Fisher’s talent for Oscar Wilde-worthy aphorisms that sliced right through layers of insufferable bullshit also led to one of her most successful career stints, as a writer, script doctor, and Hollywood fixer during a “long, very lucrative episode,” as she told Newsweek in a 2008 interview. (In true Carrie Fisher fashion, she brought these life experiences to an Emmy-nominated guest turn on an episode of 30 Rock as her funniest character, Rosemary Howard.)
It’s rumored that Fisher revised her lines in George Lucas’ notoriously wordy Star Wars scripts. (Although one image of Empire Strikes Back edits purported to be in her hand actually contains revisions by the film’s director Irvin Kershner.) But her formal screenwriting career began in 1990, when she adapted her bestselling 1987 autobiographical novel, Postcards from the Edge, into the screenplay for a Meryl Streep-starring film. The project led to rewriting work on high-profile comedies throughout the next decade. In addition to a credit for one of those unwieldy Lucas scripts for The Phantom Menace in 1999, Fisher helped rework films like Hook, Sister Act, Made in America, So I Married an Axe Murderer, The Wedding Singer, and several more.
Always a fiercely outspoken critic of the way Hollywood treats women, Fisher fought to make female characters more three-dimensional. In a WebMD interview, she was asked, “What does it take to heal bad dialogue?” Her pithy answer: “Make the women smarter and the love scenes better.” As a peacemaker for troubled productions, however, she often advised women actors to use diplomacy—with her own spin on the concept. When Whoopi Goldberg feuded with Disney’s Jeffrey Katzenberg, for example, Fisher advised, “Send Jeffrey a hatchet and say, ‘Please bury this on both our behalfs.’” Goldberg thought it over, and “the next day Katzenberg received his hatchet. Within a few days a token of Katzenberg’s respect arrived at her front door: two enormous brass balls.”
Stories like this one, and many more uproarious and often personally self-destructive episodes, formed the basis for Fisher’s autobiographical bestsellers, including her memoir Wishful Drinking, which also became a one-woman Broadway show, then an HBO special (see an excerpt at the top). She has always won over critics as an actress, and she made a wry kind of peace with her eternal fame as Princess Leia, imbuing the character with renewed gravitas and sensitivity in the year before her death. But she did not see herself principally as an actress. “I’m a writer,” she told WebMD. Asked whom she’d choose to share “confined quarters” with from history, she answered—with her winning combination of disarming sincerity and winking self-awareness—“Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was manic-depressive, too.”
While nothing could make me personally want to return to childhood, children do, for better or for worse, perceive the world more vividly than adults. The best writing for kids makes rich narrative use of that fact, as do stories about but not for kids by writers who haven’t forgotten their pre-grown-up selves’ experience of reality. Stephen King, for instance, hardly writes children’s literature, but his novels about the fear that seeps into every corner of working-class America often include very young characters. Not only does King write plausibly from their psychological point of view, he uses that point of view as an engine of his entire project.
King, in a 1989 interview on WAMC’s Public Radio Book Show, elaborated on “the two things that interest me about childhood,” the first being that “it’s a secret world that exists by its own rules and lives in its own culture, and the second that “we forget what it is to be a child and we forget that life, which is kind of exotic and strange.” Though readers often ask him what agonies his childhood must have visited upon him that spurred him to write such vividly horrific fiction, King doesn’t remember anything wrong with his formative years. But he does remember “that we think in a different way as children. We tend to think around corners instead of in straight lines.”
We see these differences animated in the Blank on Blank video at the top of the post, which envisions the adult King in the world of imagination that kids instinctively inhabit and out of which they eventually grow, but to which he regularly returns to write his stories. “Sometimes for a kid, the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line and that’s the way that we think and dream,” he says. “As children we tend to live in this kind of dream state [ … ] and because I equate that sort of dream state with a heightened sort of mental state, I make this easy cross-connection between childhood and strange powers, paranormal powers or whatever, and it has been successful as a fictional device.”
As the source of such bestsellers as Carrie, The Stand, Christine, It, the Dark Tower series, and countless other works, it’s been successful to say the least. If connecting one thing to another in new ways — be those things people, places, events, ideas, feelings, or whatever else — constitutes the central act of creation, then it makes sense that the naturally associative nature of a child’s imagination, harnessed to an adult’s experience and discipline, can produce such abundant and widely resonant results. No coincidence, surely, that youngsters unable to pay attention to the linear progression of the classroom get labeled “dreamers,” a tendency that King has used to his advantage — though he seems to have got most of his textual mileage out of the nightmares.
Martin Amis once criticized his fellow novelist J.M. Coetzee for writing in a style “predicated on transmitting absolutely no pleasure.” This confused those of us readers who enjoy both men’s books, but then British tradition, of which Amis has been an inheritor as well as a critic, says that if someone gets put on a pedestal, you must at least try to knock them down. The South African Coetzee, winner of one Nobel Prize and two Bookers, doesn’t exactly want for acclaim, but his stark prose and ascetic, ultra-serious images hardly make him seem like an author drunk on his own literary power.
In a controversial profile, Coetzee’s countryman Rian Malan wrote that “a colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once.” We might expect the author of books like Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace, and Elizabeth Costello to declare what he declares in the interview clip above: “Writing, in itself, as an activity, is neither beautiful nor consoling. It’s industry.” Yet he does credit it with certain pleasures, “the pleasures of total engagement, hard thought, verifiable activity, verifiable results. Productiveness.”
“Having written the book, being able to look back on having completed the book, may or may not be consoling, but writing a book is quite different.” Work, asks the interviewer? “Yes. It’s good work.” And why do this work in the first place? Coetzee would advise against the mission of “transforming the world into the world as it should be. That would be too much of a task if one undertook it every time.” He finds “grasping the world as it is, putting it within a certain frame, taming it to a certain extent” — taming “its wildness, its disorder, its chaos” — “quite enough of an ambition.”
These words come from an episode of the Dutch documentary series Of Beauty and Consolation on Coetzee which aired in 2000, after the publication of Boyhood but before that of Youth and Summertime, the books of his trilogy of partially fictionalized “autrebiography” in which he grasps frames, and tames the events of his own experience. “I haven’t forgotten the miseries of my childhood,” he says, going on to insist that misery has no beauty in itself. “I have plenty of happy moments in my childhood, many of which are in the book. The richness of those moments depends very heavily on their being embedded in a certain life. A book is a way to bring that life to life,” in its pleasures and sorrows alike.
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