Pointless Pace Killers

On stories and the regularness of life

In season 1, episode 8 of “The Sopranos,” Tony Soprano’s nephew Christopher Moltisanti says, “I don’t know, Tony. It’s like just the regularness of life is too fuckin’ hard for me or something.”

At this point in the series, Christopher is working on a screenplay about the mafia.

---

Christopher has been trying to write an “arc” for his characters. Then he says his own life has no arc. He is depressed because his life seems so mundane compared to characters in stories.

This is like browsing someone’s Instagram profile and wondering why your life isn’t as great as what other people choose to show you.

---

I’ve been reflecting on the process of writing a memoir. Throughout the past few years, several authors and memoirists have shared tips. Recurring themes: Don’t tell your whole life story. Just describe the most vivid and memorable parts. Write everything that seems relevant and then whittle it down to the most gripping stories. One memoirist said the question to keep in mind isn’t “Who am I?” but “Who am I in this story?” This unlocked the writer’s block I was experiencing, leading me to realize I wasn’t writing a detached retrospective account but the unsparing firsthand observations of a kid mired in disorder. A biographer suggested I write as if I’m sharing my story with someone over a beer (no one tells dull stories in a bar—they tell their most interesting ones).

In On Writing, Stephen King gives similar advice. He recommends to first “write with the door closed,” meaning your first draft is for you only. Write everything that comes to mind. Don’t edit or backtrack. You can’t turn an ice cube into a sculpture. If you want a sculpture, you need to create a massive block of ice to chip away at later. This is also known as the “vomit draft.”

Don’t get feedback until you have a draft ready. Editing and getting feedback along the way before you have a rough draft is a recipe for paralysis.

“You find yourself constantly questioning your prose and your purpose when what you should probably be doing is writing as fast as the Ginger-bread Man runs, getting that first draft down on paper while the shape of the fossil is still bright and clear in your mind.”

King continues:

“The first draft—the All-Story Draft—should be written with no help (or interference) from anyone else. There may come a point when you want to show what you’re doing to a close friend (very often the close friend you think of first is the one who shares your bed), either because you’re proud of what you’re doing or because you’re doubtful about it. My best advice is to resist this impulse. Keep the pressure on; don’t lower it by exposing what you’ve written to the doubt, the praise, or even the well-meaning questions of someone from the Outside World. Let your hope of success (and your fear of failure) carry you on, difficult as that can be…you must be cautious and give yourself a chance to think while the story is still like a field of freshly fallen snow, absent of any tracks but your own.”

Finally:

“Here’s something else—if no one says to you… ‘This is wonderful!,’ you are a lot less apt to slack off or to start concentrating on the wrong thing…being wonderful, for instance, instead of telling the goddam story.”

Then, once finished, King says to wait a minimum of six weeks. Then read your whole manuscript in one sitting, if possible.

This is when you “write with the door open,” meaning to shape the story in a way that will be maximally compelling to the reader. Waiting six weeks or more makes it easier to kill your darlings. It’s almost like you’re editing someone else’s work. Your stuff starts out being just for you. But once you get it right, or as right as you can, it belongs to everyone who wants to read it or criticize it.

After this process of reading and editing your own work, have people read it, get feedback, and make changes. How do you know which changes to incorporate?

There’s an idea from psychology called “inter-rater reliability.” It measures how much independent observers agree on something. Suppose you show a bunch of people a video of a person delivering a speech. You then ask viewers, independently (so they aren’t aware of other people’s ratings) to rate the person’s public speaking skills. If they each generally agree the person is a good speaker, then you have high inter-rater reliability.

I showed my book manuscript to a bunch of different authors and writers. I got a bunch of different comments, some of which were contradictory. What do you do if one writer you respect says they really liked a certain passage, and another one says you should remove it? It’s a tough call. There are no right answers. But if two or more writers made the same suggestion, I usually tried to incorporate it.

---

I was watching a re-run of House a while back. The episode was from season one, and House is actually shown typing on his computer in his office, presumably entering patient information. You never see him do this in later seasons. Seeing a character sit at his desk using a computer is too boring.

I was a member of a psychology lab a while back and the head of the lab won an award. A film crew planned to visit and record his daily activities at the lab. So the head of the lab called an impromptu meeting. He explained that the crew would have been bored seeing what he actually did most days, which was sit at his desk writing and editing papers and responding to emails. So we sat at a big round table and talked about exciting psychology research and wrote things down on a big white board while the crew filmed us. This kind of thing does happen in psychology labs, but usually once a week or so at most.

The stories and images we see on screen probably have a perverse effect on how we view our own lives. What we see is carefully designed to skip over the boring details — “the regularness of life” — and depict only the most captivating scenes.

Carrie Kerpen has written, “The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we are comparing our behind-the-scenes with everyone’s highlight reel.”

In his fascinating book Story — which The Last Psychiatrist has called a “textbook of psychoanalysis” — Robert McKee writes:

“If you write a beat in which a character steps up to a door, knocks, and waits, and in reaction the door is politely opened to invite him in, and the director is foolish enough to shoot this, in all probability it will never see the light of the screen. Any editor worthy of the title would instantly scrap it, explaining to the director: ‘Jack, these are eight dead seconds. He knocks on the door and it’s actually opened for him? No, we’ll cut to the sofa. That’s the first real beat. Sorry you squandered fifty thousand dollars walking your star through a door, but it’s a pace killer and pointless.’ A ‘pointless pace killer’ is any scene in which reactions lack insight and imagination…You write so that when someone else reads your pages he will, beat by beat, gap by gap, live through the roller coaster of life that you lived through at your desk.”

McKee is saying that each “beat” of a story should contain only information relevant to the story. And to cut out any extraneous details.

This is why you never see Dr. House typing on his computer after season one, despite real doctors doing a lot of this. For an exciting story, it’s a pointless pace killer.

But I don’t think it could be any other way. Most people don’t enjoy stories with lots of tedious details. Joseph Campbell and others have observed that over time, stories become compressed and simplified to convey important themes and lessons. Only the useful or interesting stuff survives the test of time.

Recently I read Mike Tyson’s autobiography Undisputed Truth. I wouldn’t care to read about, say, a boring afternoon visit to the dentist, unless there was some kind of revelation from Tyson, or a lesson to be learned, or some kind of emotional payoff. Stories rarely describe the day-to-day trivialities of life unless there is meaning associated that is relevant to the reader.

Several months ago I was at a museum with some friends. We looked at exhibitions of inventions from the 17th and 18th centuries. Telescopes, power looms, old printing presses. We briefly thought, wow people back then were so smart. Then we realized, no, this museum is a monument for successful inventions. Museums do not display inventions that didn’t matter. Museums do not display the day-to-day failures of great inventors.

Daniel Kahneman has coined the phrase “What You See Is All There Is” (WYSIATI). We often form our judgments and impressions based only on “Known Knowns.” We don’t consider Known Unknowns or Unknown Unknowns. We jump to conclusions based on limited evidence without considering what we’re not seeing.

So I have some misgivings that stories warp our perceptions and lead us to think — like envious Instagram users or Christopher Moltisanti from “The Sopranos” — that our own lives are too regular. But few people would read or watch a story that contained lots of ordinary details. There are those who enjoy those kinds of stories that cover intricacies of everyday life. Not many, though.

My life has been highly unusual. Still, even at its most tumultuous, 90 percent of it has been pretty standard or uninteresting. I am sharing the 10 percent most dramatic and emotionally charged moments. Though when I got some early feedback, I learned that much what I thought of as “standard” where I grew up raised some eyebrows. Smoking clove cigarettes at age nine and setting a house on fire, for example. So I shared those stories too. It’s a highlight — and lowlight — reel.

Conflict drives stories—that's why the final act in a story is usually the shortest. And why after the resolution, people dislike when movies don't end relatively soon thereafter. This is one reason among others why I ended Troubled shortly after graduating from Yale. I could have belabored the story with additional chapters. And potentially bored the reader by describing the challenges of applying for top PhD programs, the differences between the genteel poverty of a graduate student and actual poverty, observations about class in Britain and how it differs from the US, and so on.