Quetzalcoatl. Believe it or not, we've all got a lot in common with this dude.

What are myths? They’re the ancient, collective legends of the human race. The Odyssey, the epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf; the sagas of the Buddha or Prometheus or Quetzalcoatl.

The hero’s journey, as Joseph Campbell famously observed, appears again and again in these myths. The specifics vary, but the overall contours remain remarkably consistent.

1. The hero starts as “stuck” and unconscious.

Like Luke Skywalker toiling on Uncle Owen and Aunt Varoo’s evaporator farm, he’s a slug. A peon. And he knows it.

LUKE SKYWALKER

If there’s a bright center to the universe,

you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.

2. The hero receives “the call”—which he often resists.

When the messenger Palamedes came to summon Odysseus to join the Greeks in the war against Troy, Odysseus pretended to be insane so he wouldn’t have to go. He sowed his fields with salt. Palamedes cleverly placed the hero’s infant son Telemachus in the path of the plow. When Odysseus turned the blade aside, his ruse was revealed. He was drafted into the journey.

3. The hero wanders far from home—often for a long, long time.

Odysseus was gone ten years. The children of Israel wandered for forty. The hero’s journey lasts for such a length of time that the hero fears that it will never end.

Though the hero may strive on his journey to achieve a specific goal (reach the Spice Islands, find and capture the Golden Fleece), his primary object is simply to get back home.

4. The hero endures trials.

The hero encounters obstacles. He faces ordeals; he experiences adventures. He suffers, he is lost; he despairs.

5. The hero experiences wonders and encounters outlandish characters.

Theseus fought the Minotaur. Ravens spoke to White Buffalo Calf Woman. Conan slept with a witch who turned into a crone and tried to murder him. For the hero on his journey, the sun stops in place, planets reverse their courses. All kinds of crazy shit happens.

6. The hero receives aid from unexpected sources—often divine or semi-divine.

Ariadne showed Theseus to follow a thread back out of the Labyrinth. Yoda taught Luke how to use the Force. Most of what the hero learns (including the skills and stratagems by which he overcomes his adversaries) derives from sources he never knew existed.

7. The hero at last returns home—but in a form unrecognizable to those he left behind, as those left behind appear (at first) unknowable to him.

Washed ashore in rags, Odysseus was not recognized even by Penelope, his wife. Only the hero’s loyal hound Argus knew the returning king as himself.

8. The hero brings a gift for the people.

Moses comes down from Sinai with the Ten Commandments, Arthur returns to found the Round Table. T.E. Lawrence has the brainstorm to attack Aqaba from the landward side.

Why are these myths universal? Why does the hero’s journey appear within them again and again? According to Joseph Campbell, it’s because the arc of evolution of the human heart is the same in all cultures and across all millennia. Myths are the race’s way of describing that constant, universal heart and its unchanging, primal passage.

My own belief (and I got this from Joseph Campbell) is that you and I are born with the hero’s journey tattooed on our psyches. It’s the software we were hatched with. Our souls did not enter this world as blank slates, like hard-drives upon which no data had been written. They came with templates—and the primary template is the hero’s journey. This pre-programmed script is engraved on my heart and yours as a fill-in-the-blanks, yet-to-be-lived-out drama.

We will be stuck and frustrated on Planet ___________.

Our call will come in the form of _______________.

On our journey we will endure _______________, confront  _____________, have sex with ___________ and _____________.

All the way through to the end.

I can’t prove it, but I would bet that a school of psychology could be founded (maybe it already exists), based on the hero’s journey and nothing else. The therapist’s role in such a school would be simply to determine at what point the client stands on his or her saga—and to make the client see his or her life in those mythic terms.

In other words, Merlin or Mentor (both mythic beings themselves) would supply meaning and significance to that pulp of experience which, perceived by the one it’s happening to, seems random and without cause or consequence.

Our forebears didn’t have shrinks back in the cave or on the steppe. They had myths. In ancient Sparta, the only “book” the young boys were permitted or required to know (the tradition was oral of course) was Homer’s Iliad. The Spartans thought that was enough. I agree with them.

More on this subject next week.

Experience is a factor.

At baseball games, my four-year-old sings “Take me out to the ball game . . . buy me some peanuts and Apple Jacks . . . ” She’s had the cereal more often than the snack, so her understanding of the lyrics is infused with personal experience.

What to do?

Misunderstandings are impossible to avoid. When sharing Steve’s work, we’ve tried to remain clear and straightforward. We know readers bring their own experiences to everything they read/do—and we know we can’t control that piece.

Trying too hard is a factor.

Last summer, a college student came to my door to sell me on the services of the company for which she worked. She told me all about what the other companies in my area didn’t do. Something about her being nice and stumbling over her message, trying to keep things straight, and me remembering when I was in that position years ago, kept me from shutting the door. I stuck around until Silence visited. I asked her a little about what she was doing that day, going door to door and then thanked her and turned down the company.

What to do?

What the college student didn’t know was that I had been unhappy with my current company and was looking for a new one. Her personality had won me over. Had she spent less time talking about why all the other companies were bad, and more time stating what was right about her company, I would have jumped ship. She was trying too hard, and it back-fired. As Steve would say, she wasn’t “sitting chilly.”

I can’t tell you how many phone calls Steve, Shawn, Jeff, and I have had about how we share with others. At some point, we’ve all been that young college student. And while our hearts go out to her, we don’t want to be her again. We want to share what makes the most sense, in the way that we’d want to receive it ourselves.

Audio interference is a factor.

This week I decided to ditch my fax machine and separate phone line and save some money by using an online fax service for those rare instances when a fax is the only way to get things done.

I called a few companies. The one with the best pricing and program had a problem with audio interference. As I spoke with the salesman, I heard Impatience and Condescension answer my questions. Online, the company came through loud and clear. Via one of its reps, it was garbled, corrupted. I tuned out.

What to do?

Steve can’t do all of the sharing. It eats into the time he needs to write his books. Shawn, Jeff and I work with Steve to share his work. Do I feel like I’ve always gotten it right? No.

Every now and then Petty and Anger stop by for a visit. They like to debate Sanity and Calm. I hate to admit that there’s a battle, but one happens from time to time—usually when Nasty visits the comments section. And sometimes, I’m just tired. It’s easier to be short—which just brings on the audio interference. In the end, tuning into the “Do Right” frequency allows for the greatest, most-well-received broadcast.

***

There are other factors, but the three above are the ones that seem to pop up the most often.

In the end, we’re trying to remain clear and straight-forward, sit chilly, and do right.

You meet all kinds of people on the hero's journey

What I realized, re-watching Joseph Campbell (tragically he died a couple of years after the series aired) was what a powerful influence his books and thought have had on me. The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Follow Your Bliss, The Power of Myth. I decided I would dedicate the next few Writing Wednesdays to exploring those subjects. I don’t know exactly what I think about them, but writing is a very efficient way to find out.

What exactly is “the hero’s journey?” What is it in myth? What is it in our psyches? Is it the software we live by? We know George Lucas built Star Wars (and Luke Skywalker’s inner journey) around the concepts in Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces. But how does that stuff impact you and me? As artists, do we have hero’s journeys? What are they? What do they mean? Is the hero’s journey the same for women as for men?

What is the hero’s journey in story terms? Novelists and screenwriters use bits and pieces all the time, often unconsciously. The hero’s journey in one form or another is the template for almost every screen story from Conan the Barbarian to The Hangover. Concepts like the inciting incident and the All Is Lost moment come straight from Joseph Campbell’s studies of myth and legend. Is the hero’s journey still alive today? Can you have one in a cubicle or on Facebook?

I have my own theory about the hero’s journey as it relates to an artist’s evolution. I’m not sure exactly what that theory is, but I’ll try to hammer it out a bit over the next few weeks.

What I do think is critically important about thinking in mythic and metaphorical terms is it keeps you from going crazy. When we look at our lives, particularly when we’re young and trying to figure out who we are and what our purpose is in this lifetime (if indeed we even have a purpose), it’s easy to see the landscape of our days as constituted of chaos and disorder and ruled (if they’re ruled at all) by randomness and happenstance, animal appetites, fear, risk aversion, habit, even plain old evil.

When we think in terms like that, the world becomes a form of hell and we experience ours lives as careening in circles, heading nowhere except down the tubes.

A concept like the hero’s journey changes all that. If you’ve ever had a terrible dream—one you woke up from in a sweat, shaken to the core—and then analyzed that dream later, you may have come to see it as a breakthrough, as overwhelmingly positive. The dream may have been a warning. It might have opened your eyes or kicked you in the ass. In the end, terrible wasn’t terrible after all. You were better off having had that terrible dream.

In the hero’s journey in myth, the hero suffers terribly. He’s lost, he’s drowning, he’s thrashing around in darkness and terror. But here’s the point. The suffering isn’t random. It’s isn’t chaos, and it isn’t without meaning. In fact it’s loaded with meaning.

What makes our suffering seem random and hellish is that we perceive it without context. The idea of the hero’s journey supplies that context. If we believe it, it puts our trials into a framework that stretches back across thousands of  generations. Our ordeal is nothing new. We’re not unique; we’re not the first trolley to ever trundle down this track. Others have traveled the same path and, fortunately for us, left clues along the trackside. Guys like Joseph Campbell have helped decode those clues. Thank you, Joe!

I’ve had my own hero’s journey, and you have too. We’re both still on those journeys. Concepts like “the call” or “the wise crone” or “the chance encounter” don’t apply only to Luke or Yoda or Obi Wan Kenobi. They’re hard-wired into our psyches, I believe, like the “take me home” feature on your Mini Cooper’s navigation screen.

More to come in the next few weeks.

How Mulally got Ford out of its tailspin reminded me of pages 147 through 159 in The War of Art. In just these twelve pages, Steve Pressfield puts his finger on exactly how our world view directs our actions.

Mulally’s turnaround of Ford is a brilliant case study to support Pressfield’s ideas. He switched Ford’s orientation from hierarchy to territory. The book reveals:

We no longer live in isolated analog hierarchies.

Ford can’t rely on consistent F-150 sales just because it has enough market share, solid distribution, some economies of scale, and capacity. Rather they needed to strip down the bureaucratic hierarchies and all work toward a common goal…producing the right number of cars to meet demand with impeccable quality. No one buys a Ford just because it’s a Ford anymore.

Our world is just too connected to rely on BS.

Too many other car options…too easy to find influential tribal voices that debunk cynical marketing. Too many people online writing their truth…“don’t believe the hype, the Honda Ridgeline kicks the F-150’s butt.” (Just FYI, I don’t know anything about trucks, so please don’t take the above statement seriously. Find someone who does know trucks to give you the real scoop.)

We live in a global digital territory now.

The pursuit of “We’re Number One!” by concentrating on beating your competition is now absurd. Especially when your competition is as screwed up as you are. Create something great within your chosen territory that people don’t even know they want. Like a Ford Flex or a Pebble watch. Or a book about gardening in raised beds. Make it better. Then do it again.

Analog hierarchies use the pursuit of the fruits of labor—money, status, Big Kahuna-ship—to “incentivize” individuals. Do this and we’ll pay you more and get you into the Country Club… Daniel Pink writes a lot about this and he’s found that it is not the best way to motivate a human being.

What digital territories demand is much more difficult. They demand honesty, integrity, and connecting with other people to explore common interests. The fruits of our labor in a territory aren’t about being named one of People magazine’s 100 most beautiful people. The reward is simply to continue doing your work. If your work is professional and meaningful, there’s a tribe of like-minded people on the planet who will find and support you. If it isn’t, work on something else.

Alan Mulally’s big triumph was not making billions of dollars for Ford.  It was getting the people who spend eight hours a day at Ford to love their work.

So what does this have to do with Book Publishing?

These two books, American Icon and The War of Art, got me to think about where the book business stands today and where it’ll be tomorrow. Don’t cringe.  It’s good news. Very good news.

For fun, I made a couple of visuals to explain.

The first I’m calling “The Analog Hierarchy Ladder.”

This is the old Big Six scarcity model . . . writers getting picked by established experts who in turn present readers with officially sanctioned publications. The message is that these books are the “true gen.” The rest are vanity.

The second I’m calling “The Digital Territory Wheel.”

With the dawn of the Internet, the ladder began to lose its rigidity. And today, simply by connecting its bottom to its top, it has morphed into a wheel. The writer and the reader can now talk to each other without permission from the other four traditional players. Revolutionary.

Big traditional publishing will continue.  In order to remain profitable, though it will have to change in much the same way that Ford had to change. But we all crave third party validation. Being published by Knopf or Little Brown or St. Martin’s Press means that your work is professional and valid.

If you are offered a contract by one of the Bigs, it’s an honor. Pat yourself on the back and then start your next book. Plus, these big companies can finance projects that are extremely daunting.  They will remain the Medicis for great artists like Robert Caro and Steven Pressfield (whose next project requires a dizzying amount of work and expense). We need them to get those blockbuster works funded.

The new Territorial publishing will thrive. Brave professional souls willing to forgo the advance check and spec it, now have the ability to build their own long tail businesses. I think that these “little engines that can” will not only increase the number of book readers and writers, but will be the industry leaders that truly globalize book publishing.

The wheel is turning and it ain’t gonna stop.

"Tropic of Cancer" was banned in the U.S. for almost thirty years, yet Henry Miller wrote it while living like a monk.

(What I love about these notes is that they’re aimed by Miller only for himself—without a glimmer of self-consciousness, nor even for a moment intended for public dissemination. Here is a writer lashing himself to the mast, though not too tightly, as he bears down on what would become his first published novel, Tropic of Cancer.)

COMMANDMENTS

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.

2. Start no more new books, add no new material to Black Spring.

3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.

4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!

5. When you can’t create you can work.

6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.

7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.

8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.

9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.

10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.

11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

[Maria's Brain Pickings post continues:]

A boy from Brooklyn

Under a part titled Daily Program, his routine also featured the following wonderful blueprint for productivity, inspiration, and mental health:

MORNINGS: 
If groggy, type notes and allocate, as stimulus.

If in fine fettle, write.

AFTERNOONS:

Work on section in hand, following plan of section scrupulously. No intrusions, no diversions. Write to finish one section at a time, for good and all.

EVENINGS:

See friends. Read in cafés.

Explore unfamiliar sections — on foot if wet, on bicycle if dry.

Write, if in mood, but only on Minor program.

Paint if empty or tired.

Make Notes. Make Charts, Plans. Make corrections of MS.

Note: Allow sufficient time during daylight to make an occasional visit to museums or an occasional sketch or an occasional bike ride. Sketch in cafés and trains and streets. Cut the movies! Library for references once a week.

Three things leap out at me from these Notes To Himself:

One, Henry Miller was a pure pro. His commandments would work equally well for a diet, training for a triathlon, starting a new business or planning to invade (or decamp from) Afghanistan.

Two, how different the product of this regime is from the regime itself! Tropic of Cancer is gloriously obscene, mad, chaotic, hilarious. Reading it, you might imagine the author pounding in out in the backroom of a Place Clichy brothel, or dictating it into whatever recording devices they had in 1932 while weaving through the lanes of Montmarte, plastered on absinthe and retsina. Instead Miller is living the life of a monk (or a grad student).

Three, I love the balance of his Program. Henry Miller cuts himself abundant slack. “See friends, drink if you feel like it.” “Stop at the appointed time!”

And the deepest wisdom of all: “Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.”

Where was book publishing going? How could he stay in the ring? How was I going to help him?

For quite a while, Steve Pressfield and I have been kicking around ideas for future Black Irish Books. We want to come up with projects that would be embraced by an audience wide enough to financially support writers we admire. The byproduct of that goal will keep the BIB bank balance in the black too. The way we’ve structured the company is that we won’t make any money if our writers don’t. In fact if a big enough audience doesn’t come to the party, we’ll be out all of the capital we invested to produce the project from idea to finished book. We’re willing to take that risk. We’re betting on ourselves.

We’re not picking books from submissions, so please don’t send us your Uncle Ralph’s unpublished fantasy series. Tell Uncle Ralph to get it out there himself.

Rather we’re thinking up the books we want to read and the ones we think you guys will want to read. Then we’ll look for Pros we think would enjoy working with us. If the alchemy works, a cool book will result and we’ll all put a few shekels in the bank. If it doesn’t at least we’ll learn something.

In caveman-speak the proposition is pretty simple: We like this kind book. You great writer. We help you write book so we can share with friends. Friends buy book and fund next project. That kind of thing.

I have a mongo pet project/s that I’ve been trying to put together for three years…it requires a writer with mucho cojones to pull it off.  Sort of someone like Steve back when he was living in a van down by the river—a man or woman who is a Pro with like 7,000 hours knocked off their 10,000 hour craft polish. I think I could help him/her slice that last 3,000 down into a fraction, but he/she will have to put their ego in check to get the time warp. A lot harder to do than you might think.

I wear a lot of hats—agent, editor, writer and publisher—and I’ve learned a few things over my twenty years in the business. I want to pass those lessons on. That’s why I’m here.

I thought this client would get what Steve and I are trying to do. He’s a very successful journalist—Columbia School of Journalism Masters after Sarah Lawrence B.A. and every byline scalp a MJ would want hanging from his belt.  He just delivered his first book to a very big deal publishing house. It’s the house that everyone wants on the spine on his/her book. Lots of validation to be published there.

I sold that book for him when I was at the Endeavor Agency (now William Morris Endeavor). Despite his owning the story lock, stock and barrel, the book put him on his ass a number of times.  It took three times as long to wrap his arms around it. And he wasn’t given a King’s ransom of an advance to write it either. In the end he had to cut 48,000 words of hard work to get it where it needed to be.

He told me that he’d made peace with it, no matter the response from his Big Six editor. He was emailing him the manuscript after our meeting.

Why did I think this guy would “get” my pitch?

1. He didn’t quit on his book. Even when he probably should have. For the pragmatist, quitting and returning the advance would have been the right financial decision.  He could have maintained his ego as a full time breadwinning journalist and write the blowup off as a lesson learned.

But this guy is an artist, not a pragmatist. He made the hard choice. Because he needed to stay focused on the story in his book, he didn’t take any high paying freelance job offers that came his way. Doing that journalism would distract him. Instead, he moonlighted doing odd jobs to bring in the necessary cash to keep his family in Cheerios. He laughed off the struggle, too. Didn’t bitch about it.

1. Cutting your work is excruciating and 48,000 words is the equivalent of half a book. He did it because the story required him to do it. Every single one of those dead words hurt him, but precious sentences that don’t serve a story need to go. So they went.
2. He’s not afraid of his big bad editor sitting in a wood paneled office. What the editor thinks of his final work is not something he can control. It has nothing to do with his true triumph—beating Resistance.
3. He set up a morning coffee meeting with me for the very day he would turn in his book. He chose to start something new just as he completed his last project. No celebratory drinks date with his cronies. No hiding in a hole waiting for judgment from on high. He has more work to do. He wants to get to it.
4. This guy is a Pro.

I pitched him three intricately entwined projects. To do one…requires that he do them all. And they would all be on spec. There is no way that any of the Big Six would get near the ambitious nature of this endeavor. It’s daunting.

The difference is that I’ll work with him from the very start. On spec too. I’ll chip in my intellectual capital along with him.

Believe it or not, this is a major innovation. An editor helping a writer before the writer has written one word is crazy. But I’ve done it before…quietly…and it’s a blast. I confess. I love this work. And now the publishing world has opened a portal for me to do it more and more. I explain this to him, but I don’t really have to.  He knows how hard it was to do his first book with zero help along the way. A Pro offering help to another Pro? Don’t think twice…take it.

Innovation requires a lot of spec work and often the goals you set at the outset fail, but the residual lessons you learn while putting in the effort are priceless. He’ll have someone in his foxhole this time. And I’ll give him the benefit of everything I know.

I could tell by the excitement in his eyes that he was “in” after five minutes. In eighteen months (at the very least) we’ll see if my pet project was everything I thought it would be… The beautiful part is that whatever happens, it won’t be mine anymore.  It will be ours.

Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves in "Speed," a classic High-Concept premise

The High Concept era was the exact time I started finding work in Tinseltown. High Concept was what I cut my teeth on. I used to beat my brains out, trying to come up with high concepts.

What exactly is High Concept?

Let’s start with its opposite, low concept. Low concept stories are personal, idiosyncratic, ambiguous, often European.  “Well, it’s a sensitive fable about a Swedish sardine fisherman whose wife and daughter find themselves conflicted over … ”

ZZZZZZZZ.

Low concept can be great. Personally I go to a lot of low concept movies. But low concept is low. High Concept is high.

1. A high concept story can be pitched in 30 seconds or less.

2. A high concept notion doesn’t depend on stars.

3. It’s almost impossible to screw up high concept (though plenty of us did.)

Here are three classic high concept premises:

“Speed.” A criminal rigs a bus full of passengers to explode if the vehicle’s speed drops below 55 mph.  Cop and innocent gal must save bus and passengers.

“Basic Instinct.” Homicide detective finds himself in a torrid love affair with a sexy female suspect who may be the ice-pick murderess he is trying to capture.

“Die-Hard.” Terrorist gang takes hostages in office high-rise after dark, seeking millions from the company’s vault. What the criminals don’t know is that one resourceful cop (whose estranged wife is one of the hostages) is in the building, aiming to stop them (and save his wife.)

Bruce Willis in "Die-Hard"

The original Terminator was high concept, Jurassic Park was high concept, Rocky was high concept.

In pitching high concept, we don’t have to describe the climax. The climax is obvious. And it’s juicy.

Nor do we need to specify the action set-pieces along the way. They write themselves.

In high concept, premise is everything.

Subtlety? Who needs it?

Depth? R U kidding?

Irony? Fuggedaboutit!

All that being said, I don’t knock high concept. I love high concept.

When high concept ruled, the writer was king. Star scripters raked in big-time dinero. Spec pitches went for six figures.

But what I like about high concept (or, more exactly, thinking in high concept terms) goes deeper than the monetary payoff. It’s that HC thinking forces you, the writer, to boil your idea down to its absolute essence. What is this story about? What’s the beginning, what’s the middle, what’s the end?

Shane, which is a tragedy worthy of the Attic stage, can be HC-ized to this:

Gunfighter seeks to free himself from his past, only to discover that his skill with a six-shooter draws him inexorably back into the world of violence he is trying to escape.

When we as writers think in high concept terms (or simply use HC as a tool in our kit), we construct a story the way an engineer builds a bridge. We plant a powerful foundation on the near shore (the inciting incident), then an equally strong base on the far shore (the climax.) We structure the pair so that the near-shore foundation inexorably propels the story toward the far-shore payoff. Then we erect an exciting, beautiful, well-supported span in between.

What’s wrong with that?

Shakespeare did it. So did Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Dante did it, Milton did it, Trey Parker and Matt Stone do it.

There is nothing cheap or “commercial” or formulaic about a solid premise that propels a story via a powerful throughline to an inevitable, thrilling and satisfying climax.

The trick is to enlist the principles of HC in the service of material that actually has something to say. If you can do that, you’ve got Hamlet, you’ve got The Godfather, you’ve got Louis CK Live at the Beacon.

[P.S. Thanks, friends, for being patient with the slo-o-o-w arrival of Turning Pro. We've run into a few production glitches. We'll have it soon, very soon, I promise!]

***
April 20, 2011, The Domino Project released Steve’s book Do the Work and we were gearing up for the releases of The Warrior Ethos and The Profession.

I look at April 20 this year, like my friend looking at the moon, hundreds of miles away. Trees and clouds change up her view. Hindsight changes up mine.

I woke up April 20, 2011, thinking I was a pro.

I went to bed April 20, 2011, knowing that I was an amateur.

***

End of day, April 20, 2011, news about the deaths of photojournalists Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington started breaking.

By that evening, I made the connection between Chris and a high school friend.

Brothers.

***
I grew up in an Army family and for as long as I can remember, have known others visited by Death. Family. Friends.

April 20, 2011, was the first time Death stopped me in my tracks.

***

Steve talks about doing what you love—that thing you would do if you were the only one on the planet.

Last year I admitted that I wasn’t doing it.

And almost every day since, I’ve thought about Chris, doing what he loved.

And I’ve asked, “Why him?”

I’ve known veterans and their families who have experienced the same loss, but Chris’ stayed with me in a different way.

***

In an interview Steve did almost two years ago with Sunni Brown he quoted Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk:

“I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who’s now in her 90s, but she’s been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, “run like hell.” And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she’d be running and running and running, and she wouldn’t get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it “for another poet.”

I know that train. It visits me when I’m reading Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner. Their voices call out to the ones circling about, and chase them into my head. And if I’m lucky, I capture them in the margins of what I’m reading, grabbing that pen, writing as fast as I can because I know they’ll be gone by the time I hit my computer.

Until April 20th, I wasn’t racing as hard. Those voices ride the express train and I’d set myself up as a local station, not even on its route.

***
I know a few things about Chris.

I know his brother was the subject of his experiments, that he asked him to run, to jump, so that he could practice capturing motion, and that his photographs wallpapered the room they shared through high school.

I know “he found his life’s calling once he had his first camera.” “I got a cheap point and shoot camera and was taking pictures and showed him,” said long-time friend and journalist Greg Campbell. “And then he went out and bought the same camera. He was 16 and he came barging in when I was a busboy at the Lobster House. He burned through that camera and bought a Yashika from a pawn shop. He had found his life’s calling once he had his first camera. He’d have it 24/7.”

I know he figured out how to be where he needed to go. “The first story we worked on, for his college newspaper, was Bill Clinton’s inauguration,” said Greg. “We didn’t have press credentials. We talked our way into the inaugural balls and got super close pics of Bill and Hillary. My aunt had an apartment at the Watergate and he broke into my dead uncle’s closet, and was wearing dusty clothes and had this drive —this grab-life-by-the-shoulders approach.”

I know he cut his teeth in Kosovo and, from Greg, I know that when some were pulling back from the dangerous work “Chris took the opposite approach and was in every war and natural disaster in the last 10 years.”

I know that he had fire. It was translated into his work.

***

There’s a quote from GEN George C. Patton that I keep going back to:

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died.
Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

I wish Chris was still here. I wish this for his family and for his friends, and for all those yet-to-be-taken images, still riding that express train.

He lived out loud.

April 20, 2012, I am thankful for this connection I’ve felt to him. I never met him, but when I think about wanting to quit, thinking about him reminds me to be a pro. To feed my passion. To do what I love. To translate fire into my work.

***
The Chris Hondros Fund was set up after Chris’ death, “supporting and advancing the work of photojournalists and raising understanding of the issues facing those reporting from conflict zones.” Please visit the fund’s site to learn more about Chris and to view some of his work.

It’s all Resistance.

The perennially pissed-off Yosemite Sam. This is how my brain feels in the AM.

Why Resistance takes this form, I don’t know. Maybe you’re not like me. Maybe you wake up peppy and cheerful. Maybe I’m demented. But this is what my day feels like out of the box.

I have to counteract it right away. The worst thing I can do is lie in bed. If I let myself remain horizontal, my head starts spiraling off into dangerously dark places. The day can get out of control in a hurry.

It took me years to understand that that voice in my head is not me. It’s Resistance.

Hovering before me as I wake up is the work I know I need to do that day. Inevitably that work is daunting and inescapably it brings up fear. Ineluctably I don’t want to do it. This fear and this avoidance combine to create the witch’s brew that boils and bubbles in the cauldron of my brain.

I must take action to counter it.

Two things work for me. They might not work for you, but they do for me. One is exercise, the other is getting out of the house.

I’m a gym person. That’s my medicine. You’ll see my car pulling in before dawn and me trashing what’s left of my body on the treadmill or under the bar in the squat machine.

The gym isn’t about exercise for me. It’s about beating Resistance. The purpose of working out, for me, is to give me a “little victory” (my friend Randy Wallace’s phrase). Momentum. Something I can build on.

From the moment my soles touch the floor in the morning, I am seeking to manage my emotions for that day.

There’s an analogy you see a lot in ancient texts like Plutarch or Plato. The analogy is to the driver of a chariot. The charioteer has four horses. Each one is strong and willful and each one wants to gallop in a different direction. The horseman has to channel that powerful, unruly energy and make it go where he wants it to—without reining it in so much that he stifles his chargers’ fiery spirits.

The chariot race from "Ben-Hur." We want that horsepower.

We want that spirit. We want that horsepower. We just don’t want it dragging us all over the arena and eventually crashing head-on into the wall.

If you’re like me, you work by projects. For me it’s books. My life isn’t a one-day-one-thing, the-next-day-another affair. I’m almost always working on some long-term enterprise. Resistance loves long-term enterprises. They’re so easy to sabotage. Resistance can derail them at the start, at any point in the middle, or at its favorite ambush site—the end.

Maybe that’s why I wake up so grumpy.

Resistance has seen me coming. It knows exactly where I’m going to be. It can take up a concealed position beside the road and wallop me broadside as I trot past.

What I’ve found is that if I can get past my bad-tempered, pissed-off self early, I can make the day go my way.

Once I’m working, I’m fine. In the groove, all moodiness vanishes. I’m cheerful, I’m upbeat, I’m ready to contribute and primed to help.

I have two friends, women, each of whom has confided to me recently that they wake up with severe anxiety.

I wonder if this is Resistance.

I wonder if my friends are like me, only their Resistance takes a slightly different form. Both women are artists. Both have high aspirations and both care deeply about their work. Both define themselves, to some extent, by their art and their enterprise.

Maybe I’m projecting my own stuff onto my friends, but if I were either of them, the first thing I’d tell myself is that that anxiety is not you … it’s Resistance. It springs from your fear of the day’s work and your passion to make of it something great.

Don’t dwell on that anxiety. Don’t overthink it.

Get up. Get moving. Do whatever you have to do to seize the reins of that chariot and to take command of those four unruly horses.

Fiery chargers are good. Horsepower is what we want. We just have to learn how to gain control of those magnificent, passionate beasts and to get them to take us where we want to go.

He had the courage to pre-emptively send an email (read it here) to hundreds of industry insiders this past Wednesday. In that email, Sargent did something that gives me great hope about the future of publishing.

He used the word “I.”

Macmillan CEO John Sargent

“I am Macmillan’s CEO and I made the decision to move Macmillan to the agency model. After days of thought and worry, I made the decision on January 22nd, 2010 a little after 4:00 AM, on an exercise bike in my basement. It remains the loneliest decision I have ever made, and I see no reason to go back on it now.”

We live in an era when the big publishers choose to refer to themselves with the sterile and unspecific “we.” We regret to inform you… After careful consideration, we came to the conclusion… That kind of thing.

But book publishing has been the bastion of a High School-esque collective of dysfunctional, often weird—but always passionate—book nerds from time immemorial. They work crazy hours for something other than overtime or stock options. Some have accidentally made a very good living, but no one enters traditional book publishing to get rich.

At their core, publishing people care about words. They live to facilitate the magical communion between writers and readers. Is there anything nobler?

But over the years, corporate overseers have reengineered publishing’s idiosyncratic DNA. Books are now acquired by committees. There are a lot of meetings. Like a crazy number of meetings. And finding books that every department can get behind are the order of the day. There is now a very long process to get a book from acquisition through publication. It’s a gauntlet that only a master of business administration could love—form filings lead to PowerPoint presentations which lead to catalogs and sales calls with more PowerPoint…

Publishing has been a business-to-business concern for decades now. But passion is rarely found in a purchase order.

Rest assured, book nerds are still in-house. They just get shot down trying to acquire the odd books that the category buyers at the retail chains “wouldn’t get.” So those strange book phenomena like the Fifty Shade of Grey trilogy are only published by the Bigs after they’ve emerged from the primordial self-publishing soup.

Like other corporations, big publishing today announces its decisions in well-vetted press releases written by anonymous publicity department professionals. Rather than any one person willing to be the face of a company and saying something meaningful, we get headlines like this: Hachette Admits No Liability, and Asks Government to Ensure “We don’t return to the days of monopoly”; Harper “Made A Business Decision.” Without a human to come out from behind the curtain, it’s hard to click through that kind of link. That’s probably why they make statements anonymously. Less clicking, less caring. But when no living person comments, we forget that there are real live people who work at those companies. Remind us and we will care.

In the context of this murk, Macmillan CEO John Sargent’s decision to put himself forward is all the more heartening. We’ve all been on that bike in the basement sweating out a tough decision at least one time in our lives—if we’re really in the heat of our work we’ve been there multiple times. We have to choose whether to do what everyone else is doing, or to fight for what we think is right.

John Sargent chose to fight in 2010. Not only that, he put the decision squarely on his own shoulders. He publicly battled Amazon in a throw down public confrontation. And his insistence on the agency model not only helped Macmillan, it brought considerable financial stability to the supply side of the business—publishers. It seemingly made the old school model viable again. And the book business went back to normal. He’s choosing to fight now too.

But the Justice Department thinks that this stability came at the expense of the demand side of the business—book buyers. This is the crux of the contretemps.

Are you still awake? Is it hard to really care about the fall of the agency model? It is for me and I love this kind of stuff.

I don’t know John Sargent well. We’ve met a handful of times close to a decade ago when my small publishing company, Rugged Land Books, was distributed by the Macmillan sales force. This was back in 2002 when he was new to the job. I was at sales conference and I expected to be ushered into a corner of a ballroom and introduced to the new CEO. He’d be in a suit holding court, nodding a lot…looking implacable.

Instead Sargent could have been the sales rep from (ironically) the Pacific Northwest. He was wearing khakis and a flannel shirt and we bumped into each other in the salad bar line. I didn’t know he was the CEO until he went on stage to give the company’s state of the union address.

I got the feeling that he purposefully didn’t wear the CEO costume because he didn’t think the company was all about him. He was there to do his best for Macmillan’s books just as everyone else was. So the fact that he has put himself forward in the way that he has now speaks to his commitment to his tribe. After all, character is revealed by action. While others hid behind “we,” Sargent went with “I.”

Today, John Sargent believes that nothing less than the entire book publishing business is at risk of being overrun by a sinister force. He’s not alone. With the agency model gone, the thinking is that Amazon will go back to slashing eBook prices and the now inevitable race to the eBook price bottom will resume. With its deep pockets and rapidly expanding global distribution, Amazon will slowly lure the big bestselling writers from the big publishing companies over to its side.

Revenue at the big houses will continue to fall—only now exponentially—forcing the Big Six to downsize and/or merge. If someone doesn’t do something, Amazon will become a book publishing monopoly and once it does, intellectual content and discourse will be dominated by a single uber-company. Not good.

John Sargent has the guts to do something about this doomsday scenario. It means that much to him. He will stand up for, and with his colleagues, prove that the agency model was not the result of collusion. In fact, it was the best practice to ensure competition.

Book publishing needs an army of men and women like John Sargent—passionate about what they believe and willing to withstand the slings and arrows of powers much greater than they are. His is a very compelling story. Much better than “Harper Made a Business Decision.”

The only problem is that John Sargent chose the wrong fight. He’s on the eastern front when he should be shoring up the western.

He’s going to defend his company against the oxymoronic Justice Department? To what end? An apology? Less onerous terms for Macmillan’s ultimate settlement?

I love impossible odds. I started an independent publishing company in 2001. But geez, even a black Irishman like me can see the endgame here.

The fact is that the agency model is dead. And the reality is that it was only a stop gap anyway.

I think John Sargent should swallow his anger and good old-fashioned American stubbornness about this footnote in publishing history and redirect his passion. He and his fellow publishers—separately of course—should focus their energies and resources on innovation. Not strategies to manipulate “terms of sale,” but real innovation.

Let’s face it; the future of book publishing is B2C—business directly to the consumer. If you can talk to the consumer and the consumer trusts you, you’ll survive. If you rely on other people to talk to customers for you, you’re in deep trouble.

So make publishing personal again.

Come up with business models that allow the strange creatures within your citadels that dedicate their lives to books shine. You know who they are—editors, artists, sales people, publicists, marketers. Introduce these people to readers. Let them be weird. Let the conversations begin…and make sure to have your own store. Sell direct.

Rather than “stopping Amazon!” from taking over book publishing, I think John Sargent and all of the incredible people who work at Macmillan should focus on “out Amazoning, Amazon.”