Out of the Rabbit Hole

👉 Scene Writing Workshop 👈

For those of you playing the Storygridding the Tipping Point home game…at long last…we’ve reached the beginning of the ending payoff of the journey.

Let’s pick up from the “Staring Down the First Draft” post from August 18, 2015.

It’s now June 1998, just about eighteen months after Malcolm Gladwell signed his Little Brown contract to deliver a 60,000 to 80,000-word manuscript called The Tipping Point.  After being granted an extension, he’s got six months to turn in the manuscript.

Gladwell has a huge pile of stuff covering his desk. He has reams of printout with hours and hours of transcribed interviews. He has coffee stained Moleskin notebooks packed with his chicken scrawl from the scores of research papers and books he’s read. He’s got post-it notes, backs of envelopes, tear sheets, and scraps of newspaper…all with some intellectual fragment that he’ll need to assemble his first draft.

He’s had his morning coffee and today is marked on his calendar as “Outline Day One.”

What does he do now?

Robert McKee tells a great story about the screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky. Once Chayefsky understood the theme/controlling idea for each of his works (Marty and Network among many others) he’d type it on a piece of paper, pull the single sheet out of the roller, cut out the sentence and tape it to the faceplate of his Smith Corona. So every day he began work, he’d read that global intention and remind himself of where the finish line was.

Here’s another little story to ground you when you feel overwhelmed by the mountains of research material. Just before the Israeli military’s blitzkrieg offensive against the allied Arab nations massed at its borders in 1967, the word repeated over and over again on Air Force bases and on the sands of the Sinai was “Kavanah.”

Kavanah means grand intention. The Sabras were instructed to remember just one thing when the chaos of combat overwhelmed them. Remember the Kavanah.

For the pilots their global mission was to wipe out Arab airstrips while defending Israeli airspace. If they took care of the airstrips, defending the air space would be a hell of a lot easier….  For the ground troops, it was to keep moving forward…to reach and seize the Suez Canal. Taking the Suez Canal would inevitably lead to international intervention…  The United States and the U.S.S.R. would jump into the fray if the canal were at stake. Together, those two missions would add up to Israel’s security…at least until the next mobilization of Arab forces.

Kavanahs are not Matarahs, which are building block objectives. (For us writers Matarahs are daily word counts or scene objectives or outlines).

Kavanahs are the global intention. So when pilots lost course on their way to destroy Arab air bases, they did not panic. They realized that while they would not accomplish the immediate Matarah objective, bombing the specific base they’d been assigned, they could still chip away at the Kavanah by bombing another airstrip in their path.

So as we stand in Malcolm Gladwell’s shoes trying to deconstruct how he could have put his book together, we first need to remind ourselves…as often as necessary but at least at the beginning of each work session…his Kavanah.

What’s that Big Idea again?

The name given to the one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point. His book is about how Tipping Points happen and the steps we can take to promote or prevent their occurrences.

That’s his Big Idea Kavanah.

That’s nice but how did Gladwell organize all of the stuff he collected to back up this Big Idea? Not just how did he put it into neat piles, but how did he sort it into a series of building block tasks (Matarahs) that created fifty or so elemental Story units?

The simple answer is that he used fundamental Story structure to make sense of his brain dump.

Now a lot of nonfiction writers like to describe themselves as Storytellers. But if their work does not have a beginning hook, a middle build and an ending payoff that takes the reader from one place to an inevitable other place in a uniquely surprising way, then they’re just blowing smoke. They’re talking the talk but not walking the walk.  You’ll know as much because their prose will put you right to sleep.

Convincing the reader of their Big Idea with lots of data and reason is all well and good. Those are the Ethos and logos elements that Plato laid out thousands of years ago.

But there is no way that the reader will metabolize the idea in a way that makes them change the way the see the world without being mesmerized by a Storyteller’s craft. This is the Pathos element…the emotional appeal, the sticky stuff that lodges into our brains and stays there…as Gladwell might say.

So what is the Storyteller’s craft when he’s writing a work of Big Idea nonfiction? How is it different from writing fiction?

I’ll go out on a limb here and say that the difference is negligible.

Like a novelist, a Big Idea nonfiction writer like Gladwell (and all aspiring narrative nonfiction writers who’d love to have a career like his or Laura Hillenbrand’s) must translate his keen eye for the real life telling detail to the page. And those details need to incite the reader’s curiosity, which progressively complicates to a crisis of understanding, climaxing in an “aha I get it” moment and then resolve with a concrete and repeatable recitation of the idea. (Inciting Incident, Progressive Complications, Crisis, Climax, Resolution)

From beginning hook, to middle build through ending payoff.

How Gladwell chose to create that translation was the innovation that makes his work so extraordinarily appealing.

So what was his innovation?

What Gladwell did was to create a doppelganger character also named Malcolm Gladwell.

He tells the Story of this curious guy name Gladwell who ventures out from his little apartment in Manhattan on a quest. What’s so appealing is that he’s a character/personality that we all recognize within ourselves. As for the quest…isn’t that the DNA of Story?

He’s that little boy we once were who takes apart the vacuum cleaner to see how it works or the little girl who makes a playhouse out of the various junk her dad threw out of the attic.

Gladwell takes us back to the wonder of childhood discovery. Not the strict didacticism of the “I teach, you take notes and then you must drill it into your head through repetition” adult way of learning something. But the “check out this weird thing that happened” kid way of learning.

The simple curiosity driven adventure of setting out to find out why something happens.

That seems simple doesn’t it? Kind of not that big of a deal, right?

But it is a big deal. Huge.

Gladwell threw away a convention that has been with us for millennia. That convention is the nonfiction writer playing the role of “lecturer” and us readers as “knowledge consumers.”

This in the nonfiction starting point whereby on the hierarchy of knowledge, the writer places himself at the top of the ladder and speaks down to us idiots beneath him. The all-knowing sage casting pearls to his followers…like every high school Chemistry class or college Economics textbook.

Instead of speaking down to his audience, as traditional nonfiction writers do, what Gladwell decided instead was to “be himself.” Now whether he consciously made this choice or whether he was in such a panic to get the damn thing written that he didn’t go out and read a whole slew of Big Idea nonfiction books in order to imitate the professorial point of view…matters little.

The result is that the reader gets pulled in to the Story of how Tipping Points are created and/or prevented by the exited voice of someone who found out a cool new thing. How he stumbled upon it and of how he picked it apart to reveal how it works is just like the kid who discovers a broken lawnmower.

We’ve all done this exploration at one time in our life and we can’t help but be enraptured by reliving the experience through the eyes of another.

At the very beginning of The Tipping Point, “Malcolm Gladwell” promises to walk us through the steps he took to discover what Tipping Points are. He’s going to do that by introducing us to a whole slew of sidekick characters, some everyday Joes just like us, some smart Professor types, and some historical figures. Meeting these figures will help us understand how things come to tip in real life…

In situ not in vitro.

That’s an important distinction. This isn’t just evidence concocted in a laboratory…it’s stuff that happens in everyday life.

We aren’t going to get a whole bunch of theory with no real life back up. When he introduces an idea, he’s going to show us how it came to him. He’ll introduce us to the people he thinks best represent his idea so we can put a face to a concept. That’s a huge innovation too.

Cool.

But how will he use the 54 piles of research on his desk to make his case for Tipping Points?

Here is the mess on his desk that he’ll have to shuffle and organize into a coherent beginning, middle and end.  In alphabetical order:

1. Airwalk
2. Baltimore Syphilis Epidemic
3. Basketball players in lit and darker gyms
4. Bernard Goetze
5. Birth order phenomenon
6. Blue’s Clues origin Story
7. Brain teaser to demonstrate importance of context
8. Cellular phone adoption
9. Charismatic people in room study
10. Cheating study
11. Colorado Springs gonorrhea epidemic
12. Columbia Record Club Story
13. Rapid decline in crime in New York City
14. Decoding 4.5 seconds of film
15. East St. Louis Teenage HIV
16. Episode Editing study
17. Folding a piece of paper to demonstrate exponential growth
18. Gaetan Dugas as Patient Zero of AIDS
19. Good Neighborhood/Troubled Family better than Good Family/Troubled Neighborhood
20. Gore Associates Story
21. Headphone research
22. High Scorers and Low Scorers in Same room
23. High-Tech Company in Delaware
24. HUG segment on Sesame Street
25. Hush Puppies Story
26. Hutterites
27. Peer’s more important than family
28. Lois Weisberg Story
29. Mark Alpert Story
30. Methodists and John Wesley
31. Music tone differentiation
32. Narratives from the Crib
33. Sesame Street’s Oscar CAT segment
34. Paul Revere
35. Peter Jennings Bias for Reagan
36. Word of Mouth Phenomenon
37. Possible early AIDS in Netherlands
38. Rise of Teenage Smaoking
39. Roger Horchow
40. Role Models in a community
41. Rule of 150
42. Seminarian good Samaritan experiment
43. Sesame Street origin Story
44. Sharp Fax Machine Story
45. Spread of Hybrid Seed Corn
46. Stanford prison Experiment
47. Subways in New York City
48. Tetanus Fear Experiments at Yale
49. The Sesame Street episode “Roy”
50. Toys and TV Study
51. Transactive Memory
52. Ya Ya Sisterhood
53. White flight
54. Yawning

Next up is how he put all of this stuff into a three part structure.

🗣️ "Worth evey penny!"

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