Sam Clemens worked as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River from 1857-1860. It was there:
I got personally and familiarly acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history…When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before – met him on the river.
The children and I have been watching American Idol together and I have pointed out to them how it is not just the song that sells the singer, but the story. That is, there are thousands of contestants across the country who can hit a wide range of notes, stay in tune and choose a good song for their voice. But Fox distinguishes their contestants by the back stories they feature. They are trying to sell us “likability”. And so it is, we have stories of what people have suffered and the challenges they face: “In our next episode, we’ll meet a divorced father of fifteen who had to get a tracheotomy after ingesting a chicken bone while performing CPR for a fellow diner at a Chinese buffet. You won’t want to miss this.”
This is not unexpected, of course. The advertising industry has been doing this for years. Alan Schwartz says in The Paradox of Choice:
The point of advertising is to sell brands. According to James Twitchell, the key insight that has shaped modern advertising came to cigarette manufacturers in the 1930s. In the course of market research, they discovered that smokers who taste-tested various cigarette brands without knowing which was which couldn’t tell them apart. So, if the manufacturer wanted to sell more of his particular brand, he was either going to have to make it distinctive or make consumers think it was distinctive, which was considerably easier. With that was born the practice of selling a product by associating with a glamorous lifestyle.”
In the movie Reservoir Dogs, Holdaway (played by Randy Brooks who is pictured below) gives advice to Mr. Orange (played by Tim Roth) on how to go undercover as a cop and gain the trust of an organized crime cell. What follows is Quentin Tarantino’s tribute to the art of storytelling. Warning: explicit language follows. Though necessary to the character depictions and the plot of the movie, it contains offensive language.
In recent years, I have enjoyed reading Thomas Cahill’s Hinges of History series. Here is how he describes his task of researching and retelling the stories of the ancients:
My methods of approaching the past have scarcely changed since
childhood and adolescence. I assemble what piece there are, contrast and compare, and try to remain in their presence till I can begin to see and hear and love what living men and women once saw and heard and loved, till from these scraps and fragments living men and women begin to emerge and move and live again – and then I try to communicate these sensations to my reader. So you will find in this book no breakthrough discoveries, no cutting-edge scholarship, just, if I have succeeded, the feelings and perceptions of another age and insofar as possible, real and rounded men and women. For me, the historian’s principal task should be to raise the dead to life.
Thomas Cahill, Why the Greeks Matter, 8
I watched Invictus over the weekend, a story about Nelson Mandela’s inspirational leadership in uniting South Africa after apartheid. Having spent some time in Joburg and Pretoria and Cape Town, I saw some familiar landscapes in the movie. Shortly after Mandela’s book, Long Walk to Freedom, came out, he was asked who he would want to play him, if the book ever became a movie. He said, “Morgan Freeman.”
One reviewer has noted that Freeman doesn’t just impersonate Mandela, but his acting is so good that he incarnates him. In the interview, Freeman commented:
‘I told him that if I was going to play him, I was going to have to have access to him,’ the actor said. ‘That I would have to hold his hand and watch him up close and personal.’
As an actor, ‘you’re looking for the physical: how he stands, how he walks, how he talks,’ he said. ‘Nuances he has in terms of tics or movements. Things that sort of define him. The inner life has to come off the page. Whatever he’s thinking, I don’t know. You have a script, and you stick to that script, and the script is going to inform you of everything.
The article goes on to talk about the screenwriter’s challenge in depicting a revered figure, such as a Mandela:
Mr. Peckham’s main difficulty in writing a script, he found, was to do justice to such a familiar and beloved figure without tipping into idolatry.
‘It was extremely difficult, because in the period I write about he was in many respects at his most saintly — leading the country the way he did,’ Mr. Peckham said. The danger of hagiography ‘was something we all knew was an issue and that I struggled with every day while I was writing it. With the additional complication that we didn’t want to be offensive and disrespectful either. It’s easy enough to kind of show someone’s feet of clay if you’re prepared to be brutal about it, but it’s not so easy when you want to be respectful without hero-worshiping.’
Last night on Larry King Live, the host asked Daniel Day Lewis if he liked the character he plays in the upcoming musical Nine, which opens around the country on Christmas Day. Here’s the exchange with emphasis added:
KING: Daniel, did you like Guido?
DAY-LEWIS: I don’t think I — I — I didn’t like or dislike him. I didn’t really — I didn’t look at him in that way. I didn’t — I didn’t relate to him as a separate being, I suppose.
KING: You became him?
DAY-LEWIS: Well, I — I kidded myself I did, yes.
When I was at graduate school at Regent College, I was lucky enough to have an independent study with Eugene Peterson. I suggested to him what I wanted to 
study – the narrative shape of pastoral life – and he asked me what books I would include in such a study. I asked him to pick the books out, interested in what he would suggest. Out of that meeting came a semester long research project entitled, “A Storied Life: Pastors, Novels and Novelists”. One of the books he assigned for me was The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination by Robert Coles.
Coles describes being raised in a home with stories were savored and the spoken word cherished. His parents would sit together and read out loud until deep in the night and young Robert could tell that his parents were entranced by the sorcery of Dickens and Eliot and Tolstoy. It was as if these long dead authors were somehow mysteriously alive and had dropped in for a visit.
Later, when Coles grew up and became a student of medicine, there were two advisers working with him. The one doctor treated every patient like a sickness to be cured. This adviser spoke of diseases and case files and medical charts. The other adviser was the alter ego. He told Robert to go in the room and listen to the stories of these men and women. Find out who they are. Remember they are persons. The latter advice would lead Coles to eventually require his own medical students to take a literature course as part of their degree program.
I have returned to that book often and have given away copies of it to people working in the helping professions. Imagine my delight on Tuesday when I caught NPRs “All Things Considered” and heard them interviewing two medical doctors on the importance of stories.
Here’s an excerpt from the broadcast with the important parts highlighted:
Terrence Holt comes from a family of doctors, but he was a writer and a teacher long before he decided to go to medical school. His new book of stories, "In the Valley of the Kings," reflects his fascination with language rather than his life as a physician. Being comfortable in the world of literature, Holt says, is enormously helpful in the practice of medicine.
Dr. TERRENCE HOLT (Author, "In the Valley of the Kings"): You are used to dealing with ambiguities if you are familiar with literature, and a lot of medicine is ambiguous. But I think maybe the most important thing is that you get, vicariously, but I think in a very useful way, experience with other people that you couldn’t get any other way, with seeing the world as other people see it.
(Soundbite of elevator bell)
NEARY: Now a specialist in geriatrics, Holt is on the faculty in the school of medicine at the University of North Carolina. One recent morning, he went on rounds with a group of residents and interns.
Unidentified Woman: Mr. S. He’s our 50-year-old guy, history of alcohol and marijuana abuse, presenting from (unintelligible), found to have an MRI finding suggestive of (unintelligible), and…
Dr. HOLT: Patients bring us stories. We drop into the middle of patients’ stories and try to change the plot for the better. First we have to try to understand it, however. I mean, the first thing that happens when a patient comes in is they start telling a story, and you try to figure out what it means.
Unidentified Man: He was a little bit more spastic this morning than I’ve seen him. He was having some pretty significant (unintelligible) in his upper extremities, and I hadn’t seen that before. And I asked him if that was usual for him, and he says that happens fairly frequently. He says it particularly happens when he’s around women. He says he gets a little nervous and starts shaking when he’s around women, so…
NEARY: Abraham Verghese also says a patient’s history is like a story. If you listen carefully, he says, you will hear the clues needed to make a diagnosis.
Dr. VERGHESE: I’m always struck that when I’m called in as a consultant, it’s very rare that some extra piece of knowledge tucked away in my brain solves the puzzle. Much more often, it’s the fact that the story I am hearing resonates with my collection of stories, and – or there is an element in that story that reminds of something in my catalog of stories, and I go seek out the other elements. So I think narrative is huge in medicine.
Ahead of The Road’s November 25 film release, The Wall Street Journal has a wide-ranging interview with the author Cormac McCarthy. In the interview he discusses the creative process, the back story to some of his books, his thoughts on the human future, the presence of beauty and goodness in a world out of sorts and the question of God.
Here are some excerpts from the article, Hollywood’s Favorite Cowboy.
WSJ: What kind of things make you worry?
CM: If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won’t even be recognizable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It’s more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it’s just a matter of figuring out the wiring. Now there’s a problem you can take to bed
WSJ: Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much?
…the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you’re going to write something like “The Brothers Karamazov” or “Moby-Dick,” go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don’t care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.
WSJ: How does the notion of aging and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent?
…I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.
….I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
Is there a line between art and science, and where does it start to blur?
CM: There’s certainly an aesthetic to mathematics and science. It was one of the ways Paul Dirac got in trouble. He was one of the great physicists of the 20th century. But he really believed, as other physicists did, that given the choice between something which was logical and something which was beautiful, they would opt for the aesthetic as being more likely to be true.
Do you think people start as innately good?
CM: I don’t think goodness is something that you learn. If you’re left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble. But people tell me from time to time that my son John is just a wonderful kid. I tell people that he is so morally superior to me that I feel foolish correcting him about things, but I’ve got to do something–I’m his father. There’s not much you can do to try to make a child into something that he’s not. But whatever he is, you can sure destroy it. Just be mean and cruel and you can destroy the best person.
WSJ: Do you feel like you’re trying to address the same big questions in all your work, but just in different ways?
CM: Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don’t have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It’s not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn’t have done it that way. Things I’ve written about are no longer of any interest to me, but they were certainly of interest before I wrote about them. So there’s something about writing about it that flattens them. You’ve used them up. I tell people I’ve never read one of my books, and that’s true. They think I’m pulling their leg.
I found this on the web while doing some research on paradigms and cosmologies last year. It comes from a speech given back in 1994 at The First World Congress on Fluency Disorders. John Harrison notes:
As Eastern philosophers will tell you, one can arrive at major truths
simply by observing. I’m reminded of something that Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, wrote some years ago…and I’m paraphrasing now. She said–there’s a tendency among people in her field to be too quick to relate what they see to what they already know. But to really make the creative breakthroughs, you can’t work this way. You need to observe with a blank mind. Without expectations.
You need to sit in the native village and simply observe…and watch…and observe. At some point you notice that these behaviors over here have something to do with those behaviors over there. Hmmm. What is that relationship? I’m not sure. I think I’ll watch some more. And so you watch some more. Now, it may be that you are watching the expected mores and rituals. But maybe not. Maybe it’s something completely new.
That’s the kind of observing that can lead to a new paradigm.
A journal of reflections on things seen and unseen, wimsical and wise, ordinary and odd, magical and mundane
