“When asked how [the illiterate Sixth Patriarch of Zen] could understand the truth of the Buddhist texts if he couldn’t read the words, the Sixth Patriarch raised his arm and pointed to the moon. Truth is like the moon in the sky. Words are like a finger. A finger can point to the moon’s location, but it is not the moon. To see the moon, you must look past the finger. To look for the truth in books, the Sixth Patriarch was saying, is like mistaking the finger for the moon.”

This little Zen koan I came across in Ruth Ozeki’s wonderful novel ‘A Tale for the Time Being’ reminded me of a classic issue in screenwriting. Let’s think of the moon in this Zen koan as an analogy for a good story and the finger as the methods that supposedly point to how to write one. There are a great many people, including myself, who study screenwriting methods to find more effective ways to write better-resonating stories, just like there are many people who study the Buddhist texts to understand and practice Buddhism and attain enlightenment. I wonder though, if someone who is illiterate in the methodology of screenwriting couldn’t look past the methods to directly experience and deliver the essence of a good story. If a ‘good story’ is the truth we all are striving to arrive at in screenwriting, can we be mistaking the ideas on screenwriting for the truth in it?

While I am a true believer in studying, analyzing, reflection, comparison, methodology and so on, I also feel that theory in general may create grounds for a trap where our writing minds and our written words are suffocated with all the knowledge, ideas and limitations that come from over-preparation. We should be careful not to let the theory get in the way of the creative power of the practice of writing. A free mind is a lively imagination’s best friend. It’s surely important to furnish that free mind with a great big library of inspiring inhabitants, but it’s equally important not to restrict it with preconceived notions of what it should eventually produce.

Methodology can also become a trap as it encourages procrastination. Long after a writing project is ripened with enough ideas and enthusiasm, we can be inclined to come up with endless material to read and more interesting methods to apply that we may be risking losing the passion required to dive into it. Sometimes, the more we dwell the more we lose focus and drive.

Having read quite a few screenplays, I feel that there is a drought of creative juice and courageous daring in scripts. There is also a huge lacking in form and method – the essentials for the craft. Whether it be your ‘practice’ or your ‘theory’, be sure to nourish them just the right amount and avoid being limited by either of them. Take care to always look for the ‘truth’ of a good story within the madhouse of your imagination and make sure not to get bogged down by the finger while searching for the moon.

I wish you the moon in the New Year!

If you’re in the dangerous habit of reading tips for screenwriters, you will see that the most common advice for screenwriters (and writers in general) is to write, write, write… Keep writing! Don’t ever give up! The more you write the better a writer you will be! This message must have resonated with many, since I see an awful lot of screenwriters (mostly beginning writers, in my experience) churning out new scripts incessantly, seemingly a dozen a year, or may be more. Well, my humble advice is: STOP WRITING!

For one, there is a fine line between when is a good time to quit trying to become a screenwriter altogether and when you should be fuelled with a stronger desire to keep going. I think the writers who succeed as screenwriters are not the ones who don’t give up, but those who CANNOT give up. If there is nothing else that makes sense for you to do, then you don’t have to worry about whether you should go on or not; you just have to keep doing what you gotta do. For those who can think of other things that they would like to do and are good at, may be it’s better to move on sooner rather than later. Most important thing to do is be intelligent about how you look at your work and listen to your gut feeling.

Second, I will bet for every million people who are writers or wannabe writers, there are about a thousand who are good writers. Out of that thousand, I would guess only a hundred would be consistently producing good material fast. Talented and prolific writers like Stephen King would be on that list of rare species. For the rest of us, simply writing a lot doesn’t make us better writers but only gives us more examples of bad-to-mediocre writing. Writing a lot will no doubt make a good writer a brilliant one, but writing LESS may be a much better remedy for bad writing. You may be one of the thousand good writers out of those million die-hards, but I am writing this letter to the 999,000 of us out there.

I have taken up the strange profession of spotting and solving screenwriting problems. I think I have done this partly because I have an academic background in filmmaking and consider myself more academic than creative, and partly as a way to avoid my own bad writing. I have been fortunate to read more scripts than usual recently and it led me to wonder why so many people write so much. Every script does have some interesting aspects that could be developed, reformed and evolved into good stories, this is true. However, I often notice how quickly and carelessly stories are (or feel like they are) put together. How easy it is for most to transform half-baked ideas into less than half-baked stories. Why? Why keep on writing when you have never seen anything like what you’ve written on the big screen; when your script doesn’t resemble any movie that you love?

Before you even begin to compare your work with others, ask: Why do you love the movies that you love? What is it about those stories and characters that touch your core? Study those stories that are so great, find out why they are good, and then find out how they got to be good. After that, you can look back at your script and compare your findings in both. Why oh why yours is not as good as ‘that’ and how you can make it that good. Spot the differences; write down those differences, and again, figure out what in your writing and life experience may be missing that you weren’t able to write that good.

Do you really think the difference between the two comes from writing like a maniac without stopping to question whether it is any good? May be, but not necessarily. Do you think it’s because those great writers were born with the good writing gene? May be, but not necessarily. I think the most obvious difference is that good writers are first and foremost better at living than writing. Living and observing the act of living is the main resource for any writer. Writers can be socially awkward and dysfunctional in real life, but it is in the observing of it all that makes the difference. It doesn’t matter what you and your life are like, it matters how you understand and process it.

A gift for imagination probably comes next and I don’t think that’s necessarily God-given either. I think the gift of imagination is bestowed due to having gathered so much observation and emotional experience that you are able to empathize with a door handle. You can empathize with people and things so much and so well that you can make anything up and still feel your way into the veins of the story that is living in it. For your imagination to grow, don’t just watch movies because the process of watching a feature-length movie is so quick; you follow the plot but you hardly notice the details. In addition to watching movies, read books. When you read, places, people, settings, objects, feelings, moments germinate and flourish in your imagination. The more of those you digest in your mind and heart the bigger a library of stuff you will have to draw from in your own writing. This is how you grow imagination: by imagining more stuff, slowly and thoughtfully.

Probably only the third trick to good writing would be the actual practice of writing. NOT the practice of writing for the sake of writing, but the practice of intelligent writing that comes from intelligent living and observing. I think there is a secret for the practice of writing and it’s hidden in the sacred times in between writing spurts, meaning when you DON’T write, meaning when you live and breathe and do your laundry and wash the dishes and walk your kid to school. It is in these ordinary moments that you are a potential protagonist rather than a writer who orchestrates uninteresting characters that don’t feel real. YOU are real when you’re doing your laundry and thinking about the fight you had with your wife last night and fearing that she might bring it up again or sulk all day and how you should compose yourself so you can survive this last storm. Watch yourself while you pour the detergent and purse your lips at the thought of last night’s quarrel and how your heart skips a beat when you momentarily reminisce a time when you never had fights.

There is a story emerging, developing and ending in your act of living every day. You can project the same sensibility that is required for watching that story unfold inside you onto any character you might think up and what you will end up with is a story with conflict, motivation, goals and desires, risks, tension, obstacles, stakes, lessons and resolution. YOU ARE SKIPPING THE ONGOING STORY YOU’RE LIVING AS YOU CONTINUE TO WRITE STUFF THAT DON’T REALLY HAPPEN QUITE THAT WAY, STUFF THAT DON’T MATTER, STUFF THAT ISN’T MEANINGFUL OR IMPORTANT. So, stop the writing and concentrate on the living, and observing that living. Pay attention to the intricacies of your thoughts and emotions for there is no screenwriting book or advice column that could be more useful to you than what you already have going on in you and around you.

Of course, don’t stop writing altogether and spend your time staring at walls playing with your hair. Be aware of your act of living first. Then be aware of your writing and what’s not working with it. Figure out why. Don’t fool yourself. Write less and read more. Do less and notice more. Look less and see more. Worry less and feel more. Try less and listen more. Write less and live more. Live more and pay attention more. Then… write what you know and feel about life and how that life works. How people in that life work. How you, as the unique representative of all of mankind, live and function in this life that is nothing but a story. See that story and write that story.

In any case, this is what I tell myself as I tumble through my own ordinary life and my advice doesn’t really matter. Susan Sontag says “a novel worth reading [or, a story worth telling] is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.” My question to you is: how would you create inwardness without stopping to go inward?

— Excerpt from The Paris Review interview with Susan Sontag, The Art of Fiction No. 143. Read full interview by Edward Hirsch here.

“…how strange it is to risk yourself for a mountain, but how central to the experience is that risk and the fear it brings with it… Life, it frequently seems in the mountains, is more intensely lived the closer one gets to its extinction: we never feel so alive as when we have nearly died.” – Robert MacFarlane, Mountains of the Mind

I had the fortune of attending Telluride Mountainfilm Festival this year. I have been to many film festivals before and although I love documentaries, I thought a festival that primarily concerns itself with mountains might be too limited in scope. I quickly found out that in addition to climbing movies, the film program encompasses all sorts of adventures in nature, manifestations of human effort in any walk of life, environmental and political issues, better yet, ruminations on the future of our Earth and humanity. Still, I thought for a non-climbing, non-skiing indoor creature like myself, it might be too sporty, or too factual, or too dark… I didn’t know a thing.

The day before we arrived in Telluride, my husband, who lived the life of a climbing bum for a decade himself, announced that Dean Potter had just died. “Who’s that?” I asked. That’s how clueless I was. Dean happened to be one of the most innovative and influential climbers of his generation, a long-time friend to Mountainfilm, and simply a truly luminous soul. He died flying into his favorite place on Earth, the Yosemite Valley. My husband had just taken me to Yosemite a few weeks before the festival and now those incredible peaks had a new meaning for me – death.

As it is my nature, I blamed those rocks for alluring so many wonderful people to engage in such deadly love affairs with them. I don’t know what it was about Dean Potter’s death that so captivated me, but the whole festival weekend felt like a mental and emotional investigation into the reasons why humans go to such great lengths to experience being in nature.

Meru was one of the first films I saw at Mountainfilm. I have to say, at first, it confirmed my hesitation to put climbers on a pedestal for their courage and strength. In Meru a very talented and experienced climbing trio ventures to climb a peak that was considered an impossible ascent at the time. Despite a serious head injury and an alarming avalanche incident for two members of the team only months before the expedition, they go ahead with their plan. Their determination to climb Meru would have been crazy even in perfect health, so you can imagine a mortal ground-dweller like myself would grow uneasy with these guys’ insane obsession with a summit. I was yet to see why this was…

Later in the weekend I watched Valley Uprising – a chronicle of 60 years of climbing in Yosemite National Park. Not only do we get to see notorious world-class climbers pushing the boundaries of the sport, but we are also introduced to (or reminded of) how a sport (or any act of passion) can be a rebellion against the presumed limits of human potential. Absorbing image after image and story after story of men and women watching El Capitan in total awe and evident yearning gave me a clearer perspective on what’s up with these people. Climbing, or being at one with a rock or a mountain, must be about freedom. Freedom to be by oneself in one’s most receptive and vulnerable state of being – in one’s purest form. I’m just guessing…

There were more relatable films that helped me delve ever deeper into our diverse experience as humans. I particularly enjoyed a selection of shorts that offered little glimpses of life that sparkled beyond their confines:

Denali might be the most touching tale of friendship between a man and his dog.

The Fisherman’s Son is an inspiring story of how a Chilean surfer’s passion for riding the Ocean waves in his little fishing town grew into making history as one of the best big-wave riders in the world, and as an advocate for the protection of the Chilean coast.

The Reinvention of Normal redefines the meaning of the ‘think outside the box’ adage, brimming with odd originality and playful persistence to transform what’s considered normal.

The Important Places is a father and son’s 28-day journey down the Colorado River where they find beauty, wonder and a deep connection with nature and each other.

We are Fire is a look at the Gulabi Gang of India through a radiant woman’s search for justice and equality.

Among the wonderful selection of feature-length documentaries were Frame by Frame. It tells the story of four Afghan photojournalists who strive to depict the truth about the Afghan people under post-Taliban regime, suggesting change can happen one frame at a time.

How to Change the World is another story of how a small group of people can make a big difference. It recounts how Greenpeace ignited the unstoppable power of direct environmental action to inform and mobilize masses and engender social movements. Personal conflicts among the team members juxtapose the diversity of human perspectives with the uniting power of a great cause.

Entertaining a different angle, The Yes Men are Revolting demonstrates the power of humor in revolutionizing our minds about the biggest danger we face today – climate change. It feels less like a series of environmental protests, and more like a comedy show made even more hilarious because of its truth and effectiveness. Personal sacrifices, disappointments and relentless perseverance are skillfully woven into the quirky fabric of this gem of a movie.

Two of my favorite films were beautiful manifestations of human ingenuity. Landfill Harmonic is one of the most uplifting stories you will see, where anything feels possible. A group of under-privileged children who live near a landfill in Paraguay begin learning classical music under the guidance of their teacher. A crafty landfill worker supplies the children with classical instruments made out of scrap. And off they go to win the hearts of people around the world. The film is a testimony that great things can emerge from the direst circumstances.

On the other hand, in Very Semi-Serious we find relatively privileged people working very hard to live their dream – to be published cartoonists in the New Yorker. The film is not only a most entertaining compilation of cartoons in the history of the magazine, but also an inspiring look at the world of accomplished and beginning cartoonists, daily conquering their egos to keep learning and growing. The New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff’s story beautifully frames a picture of the value of passion, hard work and humor.

Needless to say, it was impossible to fit all the movies on my long wish-list into a short weekend. Among the titles I will make every effort to watch are: Being Evel, Cerro Torre, The Diplomat, Drawn, The Last Patrol, The Man vs. the Machine, No Cameras Allowed, Racing Extinction, Unbranded and Les Voyageurs Sans Trace.

In a nutshell, what I learned in my week in Telluride at the Mountainfilm Festival is this: the way to achieving anything that is worthfilming (and, literally or figuratively, worth dying for) is to do something unimaginably courageous. And the good news is you don’t need to climb mountains for it. Whether it’s getting published in the New Yorker or becoming an international musician playing your recycled instrument, there is a personal summit to reach for everyone and it’s worth it.

No matter what you think you will get out of it, make plans to attend the next Mountainfilm Festival to taste a potent slice of inspiration, which will no doubt give you the boost you need to make the leap into your version of greatness. May the Mountainfilm be with you!

I’ve been wanting to apply the Snyder Beat Sheet to a movie for some time. ‘Birdman’ is a great one for the task, and a challenging one too. Let me know your thoughts at selin@magicofstory.com
Caution: Please continue to read if you’ve already seen the movie!

Opening Image
Hero in meditation. His voice-over says, ‘How did we end up here? … We don’t belong in this shithole.’ Perfect opening for a character who will soon begin questioning his self-worth, the meaning of his existence and above all the reality of all that is. As he is levitated during meditation, we are led to think Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) may be talking about the notion that all that we see, feel and think are perceptions of a grand illusion (maya), and in fact ‘this’ is not our true nature – we do not belong ‘here’ in the world of maya.

Theme Stated
Riggan is haunted by the superhero character that he played many years ago: Birdman. Birdman, the alter ego, tells Riggan that he will fail at his comeback in the theatre. He should give it up already and embrace his superhero persona instead. Riggan, either in reality or in his personal reality, does have supernatural abilities. We are left to doubt until the very end whether he is an extraordinary person doubting his extraordinariness, or a perfectly ordinary person doubting his ordinariness. Is he a potential winner or a loser?

Set-up
Riggan at a rehearsal for his comeback play. We observe him publicly exercise his superpowers, about which we remain doubtful. We meet his alter-ego, producer, daughter, fellow actors, lover, ex-wife. We get the sense that things are going badly for this guy. When all he wants is to prove that he is something, he grows more and more fearful of firmly establishing himself as a nothing. He is desperate for acknowledgment and success, but also strangely aware that ‘this’ is not ‘it’.

Catalyst
The catalyst is an amalgam of Riggan’s external and internal conflicts. On the one hand there is the question of whether he will really take on this crazy challenge of making it in the theatre and whether the incredible risk he is taking will pay off. On the other, his internal conflict is with his own ego. Will he be able to overcome it, silence it, stop battling with it? He also has a hyper-conflict: Are his superpowers real? Is he and everybody and everything else real? All of this is set up from the first instant we see and hear Riggan. His catalyst lies within himself. But if I had to pick a scene that is cataclysmic for his journey, I would pick the scene where he supernaturally ‘kills’ his co-star and takes charge of his destiny by changing it for the better against all odds.

Debate
The hiring of Mike (Edward Norton) and the previews that follow. The one-on-one rehearsal with Mike reveals Riggan’s weakness and self-doubt. In the first preview Mike messes up the whole show by insulting Riggan and the audience in the middle of the run. Riggan has to decide whether he should keep Mike, who will clearly be instrumental to his success, despite the risk of damaging his ego along the way. Right after the preview, Riggan and Mike have a conversation where we get to know who they are and what they are in this for. The stakes are high for Riggan: this play is a make-or-break for his career and seemingly for his entire existence.

Break into Two
This is a tough one, because almost the entire film seems to be a debate about all the explicit and implicit questions raised at Fade in. A prominent Break, if not the Act I Break, is the scene where Riggan’s daughter, Sam (Emma Stone), pummels Riggan’s ego by telling him he is unimportant and he better get used to it. Riggan is clearly devastated. But after she leaves, despite his apparent ‘loser’ outlook, he uses his magic to give the ashtray a gentle spin, as if to say, ‘Yes, I know, but there is something else…’ Meaningfully, in the scene that follows, his stage character says, ‘I spend every fucking minute praying to be someone else. Someone I’m not. … I don’t exist. I’m not even here. I don’t exist. None of this matters,’ and then shoots himself. The Riggan-Sam scene tips Riggan over to the throes of an even grander battle with himself.

B Story
The only love story credit would be traditionally given to Mike and Sam’s developing romance. But I feel Riggan’s relationship with his daughter has the only B story quality. At the Act I Break scene I mentioned above, Riggan is sympathetic toward Sam for the first time, and their relationship flourishes throughout the rest of the film. Sam will also become the first to find out about Riggan’s ‘true’ identity. Theirs is the true romance of the film.

Fun and Games
All the previews up to the first time Riggan reads a review of the play.

Midpoint
Riggan receives a review where Mike comes across as the star of the play and he, ‘the aging action hero who grasps for his youth.’ Riggan experiences a false defeat. He is once again pushed to the edge to choose between his ego and his dignity (which also stems from ego – there is no way out of the ego trap!).

Bad Guys Close in
Ego wins! Mike stays on as a threat, but he is no more of a threat to Riggan than his play’s failure. Riggan continues to take more risks for his ultimate goal of making his great comeback. But the pressure builds. Mike becomes more and more of a problem on so many levels, including as a love interest to Sam. Birdman insults and dares Riggan more than ever and drives him to the edge of sanity.

All is Lost
Tabitha, the critic who will give the life-or-death verdict on Riggan’s play, makes her decision before she even sees it: ‘I’m going to kill your play.’

Dark Night of the Soul
After hearing his fate Riggan truly gives up the fight for the first time. The whole world is against him. There is no chance that he will survive this and he has not a drop of hope left. He wakes up on a bench and peels his face off a garbage bag, appearing more like a homeless drunk than a superhero. Birdman brings in the big guns to take advantage of Riggan’s weakest moment  and lure him back to his side. Riggan falls for it. But, does he fall into Birdman’s trap, or is he building up the courage to step into his power. He ends up on top of a building, seemingly about to commit suicide. When a neighbor helps Riggan step down from the edge and asks ‘Do you know where to go?’ Riggan responds, ‘Yes. I know where to go,’ and jumps off the rooftop without hesitation. Riggan soars high over Manhattan, just like Birdman.

Break into Three
Riggan is a superhero now, and he knows exactly what to do. He has the solution but we don’t yet know what it is. He plans his ‘real’ suicide at the end of his opening show. Why? Because he knows he will fail, so he might as well make the most majestic exit he can? Or, now that he discovered his superpowers, he simply knows nothing can beat him, whatever happens will only serve him? We don’t know why exactly, but we know something is up when he prepares to pull the trigger.

Finale
Third act is set in the hospital room where Riggan lies with a bandage on his face that is practically the same as the Birdman mask. He not only survived, but also gained enormous sympathy from audiences and family alike, picked up great reviews and got himself a brand new nose!

Final Image
Riggan takes flight! From the opening image of a levitating man in meditation to a closing image of a man in flight from the POV of his daughter… What did Riggan figure out: that he doesn’t belong in this shithole. And he proved it.

Richard Hamilton wrote about the effects of live storytelling in his article, ‘Tell me a story’ for Aeon.co. I quote here a few lines from his findings about our connection to stories and storytelling: ‘A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens,’ wrote the American novelist Reynolds Price in the essay ‘A Single Meaning’ (1978). ‘[It is] second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence.’

We all know how much we love and need stories. And to hear that it is our second basic need after food, before love and shelter, is mindboggling. But, it is especially the last sentence of this little quote that urged me to write: the suggestion that there can be almost no human life where there is no more story to be heard. I agree with this statement, but I would like to take it a little further and discuss the nature of silence.

There is a section in the book, ‘Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists’, where John Cage conducts an interesting research on sound and the Zen idea of ‘nothingness’. Since Cage works with sound, he wants to experience ‘soundlessness’. He goes to Harvard University, where there is an anechoic chamber, a soundproof box that offers ‘the most perfect silence on earth’. As he sits in the womb-like chamber, something unexpected happens: he hears ‘a dull roar and a high whine!’ Where there is no sound from no-thing, Cage hears earfuls of sound. When he speaks to the engineer about what he heard, the engineer says: ‘The high whine is the firing of his neurons. The dull roar is the blood flowing through Cage’s veins.’

Even where there is total silence, by our sheer existence we create sound. And that sound, if stripped from every other sound, is the story of our body: the sound of our biology sustaining itself, narrating its story.

‘Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence.’ If silence is an absence of story, Cage’s experiment is proof that even in silence, as long as a human being exists, there will never be silence, and therefore never an absence of stories. Thus, millions can survive in silence too, as they will always have the story of their existence to listen to.

Stories are the lifeblood of our mental and emotional life. Richard Hamilton’s article differentiates live storytelling from other means of perceiving stories. As a lover of movies, the article raised my curiosity about perceiving stories through watching/listening to the teller of the story, as opposed to passive absorption in somebody else’s product of imagination projected onto a screen. Could live storytelling be a more direct and simple way of making sense of life through stories?

My yogi husband doesn’t enjoy movies like I do. But he can sit or move in meditation for hours in the dark of the night, when he is exposed to as little sound or image as possible. Whether we are in our chamber of silence, or exposed to a multitude of tales made up of infinite sounds and images, we are secretly striving to hear the narrative of our lives. May we find it, whichever way we choose.

— Read Hamilton’s article here. View image source here.

I recently discovered a very good example for an Act I Break that is worth sharing and discussing in a little detail. In the 50s, US director John Huston asked French writer-philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to write a screenplay about the founding father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Sartre’s first draft didn’t fully make it to the big screen, but the screenplay is published for us to enjoy as a piece of literature. ‘The Freud Scenario’ not only tells us an account of the birth of psychoanalysis, but also gives us a very relatable portrait of a human being mastering his own demons before bringing forth his contribution to the science of the psyche.

Sartre’s 380-something-page screenplay is by no means traditional in terms of its generosity with time and space for the characters and events to take shape. But, it certainly hits the right structural notes, which are delivered with meticulous care.

Following an unusually spread-out sequence where ‘The Call to Adventure’ (coined by Joseph Campbell) is established and an agonizing debate over taking on or refusing the challenge has ensued, Freud is faced with the antagonist of the story: Meynert. Meynert, the man who initially condemned Freud for following his inner voice, now prompts him to go ahead with his original plan: treating hysterical patients using hypnosis. Finally at page 138, off Freud goes on his quest to develop the ‘talking cure’.

The scene with Meynert is meaningful to me for several reasons. For one, I like the idea of a hero who gets a good kick in the butt from none other than the antagonist before going on his journey. The fact that the hero is dependent on antagonistic authority/father figures to make his decisions is important for establishing the hero’s pathology, the root from which his desires and ambitions stem in the first place and the reason for his eventual success. Who could be a better person to show one’s weakness -and his hidden strength- if not the bad guy! It is Meynert who obstructs Freud’s path, but it is also him who gives Freud the blessing to get back on it.

The scene also clarifies the goal of the hero: to know oneself. Meynert himself has failed in his lifetime to fight his own demons and is now dying in devastating ignorance. Thus this scene also shows us very clearly what would happen to the hero if he fails in his quest. The stakes are high: a life lived or a life lost.

Another interesting way in which the writer uses this scene is that the Shadow archetype turns into a Mentor archetype and sets up the new ‘bad guy’, which in this case is neurosis – the disease of the mind and the spirit. Meynert, as the Mentor, gives us the rules of the game: Freud has to delve into the muddy corners of his psyche and make a pact with the Devil if he wants to unearth and demolish what keeps him in darkness. This organic shift in archetype energies brings fresh momentum to Act II.

The importance of achieving the hero’s goal, the hero’s and the enemy’s characteristics that will make it a tough ride, the intensity of experience along the path to success and what it would mean to lose this battle are all settled in one stroke. Now we are ready to experience the Journey; we are aware of the stakes; we know the enemy and we have expectations about how the hero must now act. That’s what I call a good Act I Break.

Excerpt from ‘The Freud Scenario’:

Freud pulls his chair up close to Meynert.

MEYNERT Are you still searching for male hysterical patients?

At this reminder of the 1887 lecture and their quarrel, Freud frowns and shakes his head almost imperceptibly as a sign of denial. Meynert understands the sign.

MEYNERT Pity. I could have presented you with a fine specimen.

Freud dumbfounded and mistrustful, guesses beforehand the reply to the question he puts.

FREUD Who?

Meynert has recovered his bitter, ironical smile. He says with simplicity and almost with pride:

MEYNERT Me.

Freud does not reply. He looks at Meynert: on his face astonishment is mingled with a sudden, deep understanding – and, less clearly, with a certain satisfaction.

Meynert continues, with a kind of somber pride:

MEYNERT I knew the symptoms before Charcot; I learned about them the hard way – I had them all.

Still more proudly:

MEYNERT All. No one knew anything.

Freud speaks harshly: his resentment has not abated.

FREUD When you threw me out of your laboratory, you already knew that?

MEYNERT I’d known it for twenty years.

FREUD You called me a buffoon and a charlatan.

MEYNERT You know the story of Noah: a son mustn’t see his father’s nakedness.

He looks at him without tenderness and without regret. In a factual tone of voice:

MEYNERT You were my spiritual son.

 

Freud, in the same tone of voice, with an additional touch of sadness:

FREUD Yes. And you cursed me. You ruined my life. I was a scientist, not a doctor. Medicine disgusts me: I don’t like torturing people on the pretext that they’re ill. (A pause.) For six years I’ve carried out no research. I torture neurotic people I can’t cure.

Meynert laughs feebly.

MEYNERT Electrotherapy, baths and massage?

FREUD Massage, baths, electrotherapy.

Meynert laughs a little louder.

MEYNERT One might just as well put a poultice on a wooden leg.

Harshly, with sparkling eyes:

MEYNERT It’s quite useless.

FREUD I know. And yet I prescribe nothing else.

Meynert, with a still more ironical smile:

MEYNERT At all events, it can’t do any harm.

FREUD Not even that. (A pause.) Who would you call the charlatan? The young man who sincerely believed in the virtues of hypnotism or the man of today, who prescribes a treatment he doesn’t believe in?

Meynert has closed his eyes and does not reply. Freud looks at him with growing anxiety. After a moment, he rises noiselessly to his feet and is about to go over to the patient. Meynert hears him and speaks without opening his eyes.

MEYNERT Sit down. I’m not asleep, I’m gathering my thoughts. I’m very weak. I have to talk to you. Don’t interrupt me.

He speaks at first with his eyes closed; in a moment, he will open them.

MEYNERT Sufferers from neurosis form a fraternity. They rarely know each other, yet they recognize each other. At first sight. Just one rule: silence. Normal people, that’s who our enemies are. I’ve kept the secret… All my life – even from myself; I’ve refused to know myself; I’ve refused to know myself.

He opens his eyes and looks intently at Freud.

MEYNERT You belong to the fraternity, Freud. Or very nearly… I hated you, because you wanted to betray… I was wrong. (A pause.) My life has been nothing but play-acting. I’ve wasted my time hiding the truth. I was keeping quiet. Result: I’m dying with pride, but in ignorance.

Bitter smile.

MEYNERT A disciple of knowledge must know, mustn’t he? I don’t know who I am. It’s not I who has lived my life: it’s an Other.

He once more closes his eyes. Freud seems overwhelmed. He leans forward and timidly lays his hand upon the sick man’s pale hand, which is lying on the arm of his chair. Meynert reopens his eyes. He looks exhausted. But for the first time since the beginning of the film, he looks at Freud almost with affection. In a quicker, weaker voice:

MEYNERT Break the silence. Betray us. Find the secret. Expose it to the light of day, even if it means revealing your own. It’s necessary to dig deep down. Into the mud.

At these last words, Freud withdraws his hand and recoils somewhat.

MEYNERT Didn’t you know that?

FREUD (slowly) Into the mud? Yes, I know.

MEYNERT Does that frighten you?

FREUD Yes. I… I’m not an angel.

MEYNERT So much the better. Angels don’t understand men.

Freud’s face has altered: he is still somber but his eyes are shining.

FREUD What if I weren’t capable…

MEYNERT If you’re not, no one will be.

A silence. He raises his voice slightly.

MEYNERT For six years you’ve been champing at the bit… Now charge: it’s in your character. Retreat before nothing. If your strength fails you, make a pact with the Devil.

More quietly, but with burning conviction:

MEYNERT It would be splendid to risk Hell so that everyone could live under the light of the Heaven.

He has half raised himself, his pillow slips down behind him. Freud rises and repositions the pillow. Meynert lets himself sink back.

MEYNERT For my part, I lost – through lack of courage. Your turn to play. Farewell.

He is breathing through his mouth. Very slight rattle. Weary, painful expression. His eyes are open and staring. He repeats very softly, as if to himself:

MEYNERT Lost.

Freud looks at him for a moment, impassively. Meynert no longer seems aware of his presence. Freud stretches out his hand timidly. Touches the dying man’s pale hand with his fingertips, turns on his heel and leaves noiselessly.

“… the story of time’s arrow begins with the quantum mechanical idea that, deep down, nature is inherently uncertain.”

I read a very interesting article on quantum physics at Wired.com today. I believe it can be applied to the nature of stories and help explain our minds’ tendency and need to create and enjoy them.

Nature is inherently uncertain! What a beautiful statement! It has a ring of truth, acceptance, surrender and freedom. This sounds like a point that urgently asks to be further explored and its connections to the minute details of our lives thoroughly studied.

When I think about this statement in relation to storytelling, I feel more comfortable with the fact that stories too are inherently uncertain, just as their creators and audiences are. For one thing, they reflect an uncertain image of life. Secondly, they generate even more uncertainty as soon as they meet an audience. As many uncertainties as there are audiences.

It also explains why human beings and the characters they create and love are constantly striving for certainty and equilibrium. In fact, isn’t striving for certainty at the heart of all human conflict?

And now we know why! The article suggests that the moment a particle interacts with another (which, as I understand, happens as soon as the particle originates) it can no longer be described by its own ‘pure state.’ Professor Seth Lloyd who realized the relationship between quantum uncertainty and human uncertainty found that “When particles become increasingly entangled with one another, the information that originally described them would shift to describe the system of entangled particles as a whole. It was as though the particles gradually lost their individual autonomy and became pawns of the collective state. Eventually, the correlations contained all the information, and the individual particles contained none. At that point, Lloyd discovered, particles arrived at a state of equilibrium, and their states stopped changing…”

Bear with me as I try to make sense of this with my very basic level of comprehension. Is this how the story goes: We leave our ‘pure state’ of certainty as soon as we begin our lives and immediately turn into uncertain beings. By way of getting inevitably entangled with everyone and everything else in the universe and therefore becoming even more uncertain, we eventually reach a point of saturation with our entangledness. At this point we have sufficiently emptied ourselves out and become one with the collective ‘system’ that we stop changing/striving and finally become equilibriated, balanced, satisfied and happy?

Let’s try to apply it to the mythological structure of stories. A is confused, but doesn’t know it. A meets B. A gets even more confused and now knows it. B gets more confused too. Together A and B become more and more confused together until they have to change so so so much that A and B individually and collectively achieve a state of steadiness in a different and –in the case of stories– better way.

Lloyd says, “The universe as a whole is in a pure state. But individual pieces of it, because they are entangled with the rest of the universe, are in mixtures.” By living the story of our lives and all the little stories we generate and consume within it, we also become mixtures and eventually, hopefully, go back to that ‘pure state’.

Along the way, it sure feels good to know that uncertainty and certainty are natural and common in all of humanity, nature and the universe. Perhaps this is the reason why we tell stories and why we love stories. To entertain our uncertainties, to try to make sense of the inherent qualities in all of us, to move toward certainty…

Not surprisingly I am not certain about any of this. Have a read of the full article and send me your thoughts. Here’s the link: http://www.wired.com/2014/04/quantum-theory-flow-time/

‘To be a screenwriter is to deal with an ongoing tug of war between breathtaking megalomania and insecurity so deep it takes years of therapy just to be able to say “I’m a writer” out loud.’ – Blake Snyder

In Blake Snyder’s ‘Save the Cat’, you get a strong sense of what a writing life is or should be like. But the screenwriter’s dilemma he mentions above truly reveals what it feels like to be a writer, regardless of whether you are an established or a beginning one. In fact, it makes you wonder, without this very conflict would one be compelled to write in the first place.

Stephen Cope in ‘The Great Work of Your Life’ names the problem of doubt as the central affliction to realizing one’s dharma, aka true calling, sacred duty, vocation. Unless you live and work aligned with your dharma, there is only self-destruction. Only when you find, name, celebrate and nourish your path, your Gift, your dharma, Cope says, you will be truly happy and fulfilled in your life.

And guess what, ‘[Dharma] is only born out of our wrestling matches with doubt, with conflict, and with despair.’ As it turns out, all the torment involved in writing or simply having a desire to write is for a reason. And that reason is at the heart of humanity’s eternal pursuit of happiness. This makes it all a bit more bearable, doesn’t it?

As I wrestle with the particulars of my own dharma, I realized a few weeks ago why I consider Milos Forman’s ‘Amadeus’ one of my favourite movies of all time. Because, to me, ‘Amadeus’ is about dharma and how life can be a long soul destroying suffering if you are not living your dharma.

You may remember Salieri’s meaningful outcry, paralyzed by doubt: ‘All I wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing… and then made me mute. Why? Tell me that. If He didn’t want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire? Like a lust in my body! And then deny me the talent?’ The ingenious screenplay by Peter Shaffer gives us the answer: because music was never meant to be Salieri’s dharma. It’s only his confusion that’s causing him all this agony.

Salieri’s true passion and dharma is hidden in the story. Do you remember those few short moments in the movie where Salieri talks about desserts? The most touching and dramatic thing about ‘Amadeus’ is Salieri’s passion for dessert! He is not only a man with a sweet tooth, he knows dessert and in a sense lives for it! These are the only moments in the movie where Salieri lights up and shines with joy and delight. Salieri’s character, as written by Shaffer, is a poignant portrait of dharma, or I should say, dharma-gone-wrong.

There is so much doubt and despair in store especially for people following artistic vocations. But, if writing is in ‘the subtle interior blueprint of your soul,’ then, Cope quotes Krishna’s lesson to Arjuna from the ancient story on dharma – Bhagavad Gita: ‘It is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at the dharma of someone else.’

I wish for all of us courage and perseverance in ‘looking more and more deeply into our doubts’ as a way to get to the certitude we need to take a leap of faith into our personal and unique dharma.