Patrick E. McLean

Neither Beowulf nor I slept that night. On his order, I found and woke the Blacksmith and brought him to where the King waited by the forge. Beowulf explained what he wanted. The Blacksmith understood, for it was simple enough, but he protested that the result would be too heavy for a man to lift. In response to this, Beowulf picked up the anvil with one hand and tossed it into the corner. The Blacksmith, his 'prentice and I stared at this with our mouths open. Beowulf said to the Blacksmith, "by dawn" and to me, "stay and help."

After the three of us had wrestled the anvil back to its place. The Blacksmith relit the forge. His ‘prentice and I worked the bellows. There was no time for steel and no time to cast, so the Smith worked it in iron and bronze. The iron formed a frame, slightly curved and taller than any man. As he wrought, he hammered like a man possessed, yelling at us any time we faltered on the bellows. Drops of sweat fell from his brow onto the hot metal, but still he hammered.

By the clock of my aching arms and back, the work seemed to take forever. But every time I looked outside, the night was still dark.

When the frame was done, he granted me a respite — I was not used to such labors — and sent his apprentice for the bronze. He brought it in ingots and hunks, and I was put to the bellows once again. And in no time at all they had heated, hammered, and drawn it into long strips. They wove the strips into the frame and formed a towering shield made entirely of metal.

As rosy-fingered dawn clawed its way through the dark, the blacksmith fixed a strap of leather to the back of the shield and tried to lift it. Using both hands, He was just able to get it off the ground. He held it for a moment and then it crashed into the earthen floor of his shop.

Beowulf came and shouldered the shield as if it weighed nothing. “Good,” was all he said.

* * *

As we loaded the stout, shaggy ponies, I saw one of Handclaf's men bring him the charred hand of the dead slave, still admixed with the gold of the cup. With a furtive glance. he stowed it in his saddlebag. When he saw that I was looking at him, he glared at me. I did not look away.

Many of the men had sought courage in their cups. Whatever temporary valor they had found had deserted them by mid-morning. From our column, I heard a men vomiting and moans from all around. The party was a score and ten, each mounted, plus the shield, mounted on a pony of its own.

The first night, we dug our camp in the snow and used some evergreen trees as a windbreak. The men drank and were brave again. I crawled underneath one of the fir trees and wrapped myself in sheepskin. I fell asleep to the sounds of their boasting and their laughter. I woke just before dawn and saw Beowulf standing in the smoke of a freshly rekindled fire.

He turned when he heard me coming out through the branches. Seeing it was me, he nodded and turned back to his contemplation of the flames.

That day, he drove the Thanes mercilessly. He taunted them. Saying that they were not even fit to carry my spear, let alone his. He all but begged them to challenge me to a contest of strength or skill. I was certain I would be getting a beating one way or another. I didn’t much care, as long as it left me capable of exacting my revenge. I had, as Beowulf had pointed out, nowhere to go and nothing to live for. My one hope of a good death lay in him.

But the beating never came. On the second day, we came to The March, Handclaf’s domain. What we saw there was filled us with awe and terror. From the high pass we could see the valley beyond, and to the sea. Large swaths of the forest were burning.  Many of the open fields had been plowed by fire and the scorched earth was open to the sky. It was the heart of Winter, but by the light of a burning village, this destruction seemed to us like a Spring in hell.

As we drew closer to the barrow, the men became more sullen and fearful. Yet, Beowulf’s spirits rose. He jibed at Handclaf even more, but the Thane would not answer his challenges. My spirits rose with my King. Of our company, only he and I did not put any of our hopes in survival.

We did not see the Dragon that day, although a burned farmer and his wife shared their tale of woe with us. They told us that there had been children and livestock. It was a halting tale, punctuated by fearful glances towards the sky. Beowulf offered our protection and invited them to spend the night with the company. The farmer declined. His wife, mad from grief, laughed at us and fled. The farmer made apology and hurried to catch up with her.

Our progress was halted by the inferno of a forest fire. We made camp some distance away in a muddy field and needed to clear no snow nor build no fire for warmth. By dawn the fire had subsided enough for us to pick our way through the ashes. The ponies shied and grew wild, biting at us and each other. So we spread out and each man made his own way through the desolation.

At the end of the day, we broke out into a large pasture of scorched grass and melting snow that led up to the headland and the sea beyond. Handclaf, the first to speak in hours said, “The Barrow is there, facing the waters.”

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If you’ve jumped in the middle, here’s Chapter One.

After I killed the wolves, Beowulf took a liking to me, as much of a liking as he took to anyone. It became my job to pour Beowulf’s mead. That first night, very drunk, he said to me, “I would make you my squire, were there any more battles to fight.” I remember thinking he was silly for saying this. A foolish old drunk with his glory days behind him. Still, it was with trepidation that I answered, “Does my Lord mean to say that I am no longer a slave?”

Beowulf asked me, “Do you have any place else to go?”

“No,” I told him.

“Nor do I,” he said, lifting his cup. 

For a while, I thought poison would be the way. But I knew nothing of poisons or herbs. I didn’t even know who to ask. Even young, and foolish as I was, I knew it would not do for the King’s cupbearer to be heard asking questions about poisons.

I wonder if Beowulf thought me a coward. It's not a bad guess. Most men are, after all. Or maybe he wanted me to try to kill him. He was old, and tired and perhaps all he wanted was one last fight so he could take his place in that mead hall in the sky. He had outlived all his enemies, and all around him were cowed. The Thanes and Jarls jockeyed for position, politick’d among their meat and mead, and prepared for that day when their ring-giver would give no more. They would fight amongst themselves, as dogs do for scraps, but even though Beowulf was old, they were all afraid to contest with him.

I decided I would slit his throat in the middle of the great feast for the visit of Hanclaf, Beowulf’s most powerful Thane. Hanclaf lived three days' ride to the East. He was a Lord of the March, that strip of land that lay between the territory of the Sea-Geats and the unruly tribes beyond. In the absence of Beowulf, Hanclaf would have been a king in own right. But he had seen what had happened to the others, and sworn fealty. Now I can see that was just good sense, but the younger version of myself thought that we would be supping with a coward and his men.

My plan, such as I had formulated one, was to wait until late in the night. When Beowulf was well and truly drunk, then I would slit his throat where all could see.

But there was no feast.

When Hanclaf’s men came, they entered carrying a dying man and presented him as if he was a gift. From underneath the sheepskins came moans and the stench of burned flesh. There were no long speeches. No gifts, no ritual greetings. Hanclaf stopped in the doorway, blocking most of it with his great size and said but one word. “Dragon.”

They had greased the burned man with chunks of melted animal fat. I have not seen, before or since, a man so harmed yet still living. When the cover slipped from his legs, I could see that  flesh of them was charcoal. The warmth of the hall melted the fat they had slathered his wounds with and it ran down his legs and dripped thick blackness onto the stone floor.

With some tenderness Beowulf went to the man and knelt beside him.

In pained whispers the man told his tale to Beowulf. He had been taken as a slave by Hanclaf. Then he escaped and had fled to the coast. There, while searching for a place to hide from pursuers, he had found he an ancient barrow that containing the riches of a people who had been forgotten long ago.

But that was not all he found. There also was a burning one, an old harrower of the dark, the worm of fire called by men a Dragon. So the slave had run, taking with him, only a cup of the finest gold.

“How do you know this wretch he tells the truth?” one of Beowulf’s worthless, drunken Thanes had demanded.

Beowulf stepped to the side, and revealed the burned man’s hand. It too was charred, and melted into the very bones of it was thick layer of gold that had once been a cup.

The burned man shivered uncontrollably and Beowulf commanded that he be moved closer to the fire. The slave started screaming before the pallet was even lifted. Beowulf steadied the man with a gentleness that I had never seen in him before.

Hanclaf watched all of this moment and then asked, “My King?”

Beowulf waved him off and continued whispering to the slave. The sounds of the burned man’s misery grew quieter. And all of us searched each other’s faces, for some sign of what should be done next.

Finally, Hanclaf said “When we rode here, three farms had been burned and a small village. The gods alone know how many have been ruined since. I have come for men, men brave enough to face this Dragon. Such men will I lead back in the morning. I will gather the Thanes, and destroy this monster.”

It wasn't much of a speech, but the Thanes cheered it anyway. When the cheering died out, then everyone heard the low, phlegmy chuckling, that sounded more volcanic than human. Laughing, Beowulf rose from beside the slave.

“What jest is this my King?” Hanclaf asked.

But Beowulf's laughter grew and grew. I saw that the slave was dead and that Beowulf held in his hand a freshly-blooded dagger. He asked, “How can you face a Dragon when you don’t even have the stomach to spare a dying man his misery? There is your slave, Hanclaf. There is your cup. Why not take them and go? Better yet, why bring them at all, if you are such a hero? Why not face your dragon alone?”

Hanclaf had no reply.

Into the silence, Beowulf said, "Not one of you is even fit to be my squire. You have warred with men, but none of you have the strength, the tempered hate in your heart to do what is required." Then he pointed the bloody dagger at me and said, "Except for you.”

That was the happiest moment of my life. That was the moment I knew I would have my revenge. Many things happen in the heat of battle which can not be remembered or explained afterwards. This battle with the Dragon would be the perfect concealment for my bloody and most deserved revenge.

“Bring your spear,” he told me. As he said it, he smiled.

“What about us?” one of the Thanes asked.

Beowulf said, “Yes. Bring spears. When you drop them and flee it will give Wiglaf something to pick up.”

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit patrickemclean.substack.com

This is Chapter Two of Beowulf and the Dragon. If you missed it, here’s Chapter One.

After I was captured, it was ten years before Beowulf spoke to me again. I would hear him, singing in the mead hall, berating his Thanes even as he showered them with rings. His cries were louder even than the mighty horns that blew when he rode to battle, and he would wake everyone yelling for the gate to open when he came back from a raid. In those days, they would straggle in for hours behind him. I remember, as I collected what was left of the horses, thinking maybe those who didn’t come back had been the lucky ones.

And understand, this would be from a fight they had won. Beowulf, it seemed, never lost. But I don’t ever remember seeing him enjoy a victory. He was never nervous before a fight, but he was never sated after. If anything, he returned more ill at ease. He paced the length of his great hall like a trapped animal, only settling when he had managed to drink himself into a stupor.

The night he broke his silence with me, I was clearing the wreckage of a victory feast. The few men who were left had gathered by the fire. Vulfgar had thrown one of the benches onto the blaze, and all the men cheered as it burned. They told each other stories about how brave and strong they were, and cheered in acclaim of each other’s untested mettle.

At the center of it all , sat the mighty Beowulf. He ignored the foolish boasting, drank his mead and stared into the fire.

These were not the men who had done deeds and fought in the battles, you see. These were the younger men. The ones who enjoyed the spoils without paying the price. The sons of warriors. The warriors were almost all dead and gone. Few on either side of a battle fared well when Beowulf was involved. Yet, he was thought a good King for the numbers of brave men he led to their place in Valhalla.

The door to the meadhall was thrown open and a man in a blood-covered sheepskin burst in. The cold wind sucked the warmth out of the hall in an instant. The men cried out to complain, but when they saw the blood-soaked man, they fell silent. The man knelt before the King and said but one word. ‘Monster.'

Beowulf smiled.

He rose from his seat and the years seemed to fall away from him. He glanced around the hall to see who would sally forth with him. But none would meet his eye. Their boasts were hollow and their manhoods cheap.

But I did not look away. At the time I thought he mistook the murderous gleam in my eye for bravery. I was on fire with the hope that this was the night that the mighty Beowulf would be murdered by a horrible thing in the cold dark.

You may not believe me when I tell you that the dark was darker and the cold was colder back then. And those things lurked in those long winter nights. The open oceans were ruled by monsters, as were the deeps of the earth and the forests. Men stamped a less confident tread across the skin of the Earth. Many sneer at such tales now, but that is a luxury. In that day there were still those alive who had lost loved ones to the things that gnashed their teeth beyond the the feeble torchlight of man.

Beowulf told me to fetch a spear. But he would not take it when I brought it to him. We rode upland, to what was then the farthest pasture. He made his Thanes bring torches, but he would not allow them to carry weapons. He said, ‘One is enough. One spear for each monster.’ And then he laughed like thunder in the falling snow.

The frightened shepherd took us to where his animal lay, torn apart. The entrails had been dragged off towards the glacier. The smell was terrible. I still don’t understand how something that ate only sweet hay could smell so foul. I think all of us believed that the man's sheep had been the victim of some creature from the wrong side of the night.

Beowulf, barely gave the mess in the snow a glance, and said, "It is a wolf. No more."

The Thanes, both hungry for glory and fearing for their lives, disagreed. How could he be certain? There were, it was widely known, all manner of monsters.

Beowulf silenced them with a look.

The Shepherd came forward and beseeched Beowulf, son of Ecgtheow, Lord of the Meadhall. "You take my mutton your table, my Lord. I ask you to protect my home from the monsters of the night."

Beowulf nodded to the man and patted him on the shoulder. Then he looked to us and said, "There are no more monsters. Which of you will stay?”

The Thanes turned away and babbled excuses. Beowulf laughed and said, "I will leave Wiglaf and his spear.” This shocked me. Not the least because, I didn’t know he knew my name. Beowulf added, “If the creature comes back and eats another sheep, it is a wolf. If the creature comes back and eats Wiglaf, it is a monster.”

“So they left me with a spear to wait out the cold night. The shepherd was kind enough to give me sheepskins, uncured and smelly, but warm enough. I piled them on and sat. I must have slept, but I do not remember it. When the dawn came I was still alive, but something had come and drug the carcass away without me seeing it.

I became afraid for what might happen to me for failing in my duty. I know now that Beowulf was just using me to shame the others. In his heart, he probably hoped that a monster would take me, just so another monster would exist for him to conquer.

At dawn, I ranged along the base of the glacier, until I found wolves living in a cave. They were pathetic creatures, and winter had driven them to the edge of starvation. There were no pups among them.

But the biggest one, would not retreat into the back of the cave with the others. He would not even growl. He looked at me as Beowulf had looked at me when he had captured me. No rage, no foolishness. Just empty and ready for whatever might come. An endlessness in his eyes.

For that look, I killed the old wolf. Out of pity, I killed the rest. Starved as they were, they would not have lasted another week. Weakness is a tragedy in savage things.

When I returned to the hall I threw the wolf’s head on the table, leaving it to bounce and splatter amid the Thanes’ breakfast. Then I had no troops, no crown, no holdfast, no ring hoard. I had nothing to lose, so I was fearless. Now I have much to lose and I fear almost everything.

I told the room that they need not be afraid anymore, for I had killed their monster. Beowulf laughed and laughed.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit patrickemclean.substack.com

Author’s Note: This is the first in a seven-episode podcast/serialization of Patrick E. McLean’s new novella. It will be available on Amazon and where ever audiobooks are sold shortly. But in the meantime, if you want the whole thing, you can subscribe and get it all right now.

Beowulf and the Dragon

CHAPTER ONE

Cold. No wind. No hope.

The men stood on the walls of the Ringfort, staring down at the fires of the enemy encampments. The smoke rose in unbroken columns, rising and rising and rising until it dissipated among the cold, indifferent stars.

As the King walked the wall, he knew better than to try and count the fires on the plain. Too many, too many and one, too many and two.

The King stopped and warmed himself by one of the watch fires. He felt the men’s secret, sidelong gazes. They looked to him for signs of fear and for reasons to hope, but they dared not speak. After a time, the King said, “If we went down there, we would find that most of those fires are empty.”

“I will follow where you lead, my liege,” Heathgan said, and was rewarded by grim laughter.

“Don’t be so eager,” the King said, clapping Heathgan on the back, “They’ll be in your lap the morning. Who knows? After climbing the hill, they may even be too tired to fight.”

The men laughed because it made them feel better to act brave. But when the laughter died away they all stood as equals before death.

When he was no longer able to hide his fear, the King descended from the walls. In this desperate hour showing weakness, even in front of his most loyal me  n, could be fatal. He felt twice-prisoned in his strong place upon the hill. So it was that the Thane, Lord and Ring-giver of this strong house of Geats, sought to hide himself away in the stable.

In the stable, a small coal fire had been set in a brazier. And this place, at least, had the smell of warm, contented animals. He almost knew a moment of peace, but from the darkness, came the sound of steel scraping across stone. He put a hand to his sword and turned.

There, clad in little more than rags and filth, was the stable boy, sharpening a long knife. The King laughed, but like all of his laughter this night, it rang hollow. He was troubled by the eyes that peered out from beneath the mop of unkempt black hair. All this long night the King had wandered through his fort, cheering and comforting his men. His scarred and tested men had done their best to put on a brave face for their commander, but they were no fools. Everyone knew what the dawn would bring. And in every man’s eye he had found fear. But not in the stable boy’s. The boy did not flinch beneath his King’s gaze. Instead, it was the King who looked away.

The King asked the stable boy, “You are thinking of battle?”

The only answer the boy gave was the rasp of edge across stone.

The King laughed at this and said, “At least you've got the good sense to sit inside by a fire instead of standing on a cold wall looking down at your doom.” He pulled a wooden stool close to the warmth of the brazier, drew his sword and sat with the flat of the blade across his thighs.

The boy sharpened.

The King threw a few more hunks of charcoal in the brazier and said, “We are both sleepless on the eve of battle. But which of us has the most excitement, and which most dread?"

The boy sharpened.

"Has anyone told you stories of Beowulf, who was King before me?” the King asked.

"You are my King, and I have no other before you,” he said, grinding the metal.

"No, no, not me. I am just what was left over. A small man who managed to survive from an age of heroes. I am not one of those men who warred with giants and the monsters they bred. It is of Ecgtheow's son, Beowulf whom I would speak. A true Geat and a true King. I am…” the King faltered, not wanting to give voice to the full depth of his failings.

“But you,” the King continued with a wry smile, “You are not a Geat. You were brought here. A Scyllan collected on a raid? Scyllan like those who camp outside our walls?“

This earned the King one sharp nod.

“Did you know that I was also taken? I am by birth a Scythian. Only my people never came to rescue me.”

“You mock me.”

“A little. I mock myself more. None in that horde at the bottom of the hill will recognize you, nor will claim you if they do. Not in the heat of battle which is to come. It is well you sharpen that knife. You will need a blade, ere the morrow is finished with us. And just as you will need that blade, I will need every man and boy if any of us are to survive.”

"As my Liege says.”

“I can see the murder in your eye. You would kill me with that knife of yours, drop over the wall into the snow, and take your chances with the Scyllans.” The blade stopped grinding against the stone.

“Who told you?”

“No one told me, boy. Do you imagine you are the only slave who has ever had hate in his heart? But you fear for your skin, if not for your soul, and that makes a coward of you, as it did of me.

"Are you a Christian, then? Like those at the bottom of my hill? One true God, eh? I can see a God with one eye, but one God? Only one!?!” He paused trying to make sense of it. “It’s too bleak. What if he doesn’t pick your side in the battle? That's it, eh? What happens when there are two armies of your own kind? Is your God torn then? How does he decide?”

“The Lord, my God, protects the meek.”

“Haven't you heard the songs they sing around their campfires? Far from meek. They believe victory is in their grasp. They are no heroes. They are small men like the rest of us. They are not on the scale of the ones who came before, of Beowulf.

“When the Geats took me they came out of the mist, like a nightmare. They had drawn their long ships up upon our shores in the dead of night. It takes a brave man to sail by the light of the moon. The kind of a man who is not afraid of swimming alone in the open ocean even among monsters.

"They rode our village down on short ponies, stubby little animals, not like these noble steeds,” He gestured to the drowsing horses around him. “I thought it was funny when I saw those warriors coming through the morning fog on ponies. But I stopped laughing  when I heard my mother scream.

“When she was pierced by a spear. I could only stand there, unable to believe that she was dead. As I tried to get her to rise, I was knocked down. I rolled under a cart. For a time I hid my face as battle rang out around me. I thought that if I did not open my eyes again until my mother called me, she would not be dead.

“It was when I heard my father cry out that I opened them. The battle was all but over. The village was ablaze. But even so, my father called out for their leader, for him to fight, in the old way, man to man, to settle the battle.

“They cut him down?" asked the lad, warming to the tale.

"That's what you or I would have done, because you and I are small men of good sense and low cunning, but it is not what Beowulf did. My father was a blacksmith, a huge man. I still remember how he fought with his sword in one hand and his hammer in the other. He kept five men at bay as he yelled his challenge.

“Then a voice called ‘Halt!’ A   man in a battered shirt of chainmail dismounted and removed his helmet. Those eyes. Such a gaze Beowulf had. And why not? He had seen wonders and terrors as have now been banished from our gentled earth. Even before I knew his tale, I could see the memories of those things reflected in his eyes. In a few generations, they will just be stories, only good for scaring children. But to see those eyes for yourself, lad, was to know that those things were not tales. That once they had been real.

"Beowulf, was not even a King then. He was just a mighty captain, deep in the bloody work of carving out a domain from the world of men. He drew his sword and cast it aside, just threw it away as you might a discard a chicken bone you had just gnawed clean. Even I knew you shouldn't treat a weapon like that, but swords had failed him in the past, and he no longer trusted them.

“He walked right up to my father, wit…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit patrickemclean.substack.com

There is a lot of advice about how to outline a story on the internet, and almost all of it was it was useless, so I stopped trying to wade through it. Like it's just bad content marketing run amok. So I'm going to give you the most useful ways I know to understand stories. The keys to the kingdom as I understand them. And trust me, not a single one of them is "Use mind mapping software."

Let's say you want to understand a story. A book, a movie, graphic novel, TV show, play, series of tweets, radio drama... could be anything? How do you do it? You read it, of course, but that's not enough. Because stories have a kind of magic. They transport us to another place. And, if they are well constructed, we get swept along by them in a way that makes it difficult to analyze how they work while they are working on us. In fact, if you're watching a movie and you notice something like the beginning of the third act, chances are it's not a very good movie. Because when it's good, you're so engaged, you don't even think about that kind of stuff.

So, I think, to really understand a story, you have to outline it. And that means, reading or watching it again, and writing down the bare bones of what happens. There is simply no wrong way to do this. Should you use a spreadsheet, or a notepad or index cards or mindmapping software? The answer is yes. Whatever makes it easy for you, because, whatever tool you use, you will learn something. And that's the point.

So everything I have to say from this point forward is just to make it more profitable for you to do. See there are two reasons to do this.

* You want to write something of your own.

* You want to enjoy every story you encounter more.

And, for me, #2 is by far the better reason. You're increasing the value of every story you're going to encounter for the rest of your life. That's what I call leverage.

Stories can be tricky and the process can be confusing -- especially if you've had one too many English classes recently -- So I'm going to arm you with some of the conceptual tools I use to make things clear.

Principle #1 -- Any story is a system of systems.

So think of the elements of a novel. Dialog, character, symbolism, description, narration, plot, chaptering, paragraphing, setting -- it could go on and on and on. There are many, many ways to combine those elements to create a good novel. And no two authors do it the same way and no two authors should.

So, in your outline, only pay attention to the systems that are interesting to you. If you don't see any great symbols, don't go looking for them. It's not a box you have to check off. What you want to understand is one level up from that. How all these systems work together.

Plot

Outlining a plot is as simple as writing down what happens in the beats of the story.

* Luke wants to join the rebellion

* The droids run off

* Luke chases the droids

* Luke is attacked by Sandmen and rescued by Obi-Wan Kenobi

And from that list, you can begin to understand the story.

If you get stuck on what's important in a scene or why it matters, you can always ask, what happens if you don't have that scene in the story? There's a lot of other ways you can [[analyze a scene]], that's going to have to be a video of its own, but most of the time if you just get the basic beats of the story down, many new things about the story will become clear and that's what you want.

Here are the questions to start asking of the plot?

* What started the story rolling? How did the character get into this mess?

* What does the character want?

* What happens if the character doesn't get it?

From this list of beats, you want to get THREE things. External Story, Internal Story, and Theme.

First, what's the external story. For Star Wars, the external story is blowing up the Death Star/defeating the Empire.

The second thing you want to understand is the internal story. What does the character need psychologically, inside themselves, to be whole? Luke has to learn to trust himself and his abilities to reach his full potential. To use the Force Luke.

And the third thing is the theme? What's the value that every scene or almost every scene turns on? That ties the whole thing together. The theme of Star Wars, loosely, is believing in something bigger than yourself. And while Luke's story resolves powerfully on this theme when uses the Force to blow up the Death Star, so too does Han Solo's story. He doesn't believe in the Force, or the Rebellion or anything. He bails out of the fight with the Death Star because he has a price on his head. He's looking out for himself. But he changes and we see this in action when he comes back in the end to save Luke so he can blow up the Death Star. So you might say, the theme is "Only when we believe in something bigger than ourselves can evil be defeated."

Genre

I think the most important thing you can know about any story is what genre it is in. People interested in literary fiction have looked down on genre fiction, but that prejudice certainly doesn't stop literary fiction from being its own genre. And what a genre does is set the reader's expectation of how things should be in the story. It's a set of conventions that the writer must deal with.

Genre conventions are conventions about the way the systems of story interlock. Some of these conventions are obligatory scenes. Every thriller needs a daring escape scene. And a hero at the mercy of the villain scene. But these conventions extend to everything. Certain symbols or lines. A Bond movie isn't a Bond movie without spy gadgets, and a cool car, a scene with tuxedoes and evening gowns and the lines, "Shaken not Stirred" and "Bond, James Bond."

Genre even extends to permissible themes. A romance novel cannot have a theme that denies that love is possible and still be a romance novel.

Form

Closely related to Genre is the form a story takes.

Stories only have a limited number of forms. You could say there are five or seven or ten basic plots, and still be right. It's all in how you slice them. But if you think there are 50 basic plots, you are wrong. It may be an indefinable number, but it's finite and it's small.

So it's also very useful to try to fit the story you outline to one of these structures.

Dostoyevsky said there are only two plots

* Person goes on a journey

* Stranger comes to town

Christopher Booker worked on his book Seven Basic Plots for 34 years and came up with these.

* Overcoming the Monster

* Rags to Riches

* The Quest

* Voyage and Return

* Comedy

* Tragedy

* Rebirth

Blake Snyder, in his book, Save the Cat identified these 10 plots for film.

* Monster in the House

* Golden Fleece

* Out of the Bottle

* Dude with a Problem

* Rites of Passage

* Buddy Love

* Whydunit

* The Fool Triumphant

* Institutionalized

* Superhero

So Cowboy Movie is a genre that includes many forms of story Unforgiven is a Voyage and Return story. And you could say it was a kind of Buddy Love. The Searchers is a Quest or Golden Fleece.

Sci-Fi Movie is a genre that also includes a wide range of story forms. Alien is Overcoming the Monster or Monster in the House.

You don't have to use either of these schemas for story form. Just have a good sense of what other stories the story you want to understand is like. If you say it's unlike any other story -- you haven't understood the form.

Character

The last very easy thing to do when outlining is to make a list of major characters and look at how they stack up against each other. What's their function in the story and what would happen if they weren't there? What stance do they take on the theme? In Star Wars, Han Solo rejects the theme, then comes around in the end, enabling Luke to blow up the Death Star. He's the skeptic.

And that kind of character is very powerful in fantasy novels. Because that character grants us permission to enter the reality. If it's all zealots and true believers in a fantasy world, it's harder for us to suspend disbelief. So Han Solo isn't just there to be cool, and he isn't just transportation for Luke, you lose a lot of meaning if you take his character out.

And…

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Explaining how Batman works written is a huge task. There is simply so much Batman. Since the character's creation in 1939 every conceivable tone has been struck with these stories. And if every twist or variation hasn't been tried, well, almost all of them had. You can read a Batman story in an alternate D.C. Universe where Bruce Wayne marries Selena Kyle and has a kid. That's not fanfic, that's a D.C. imprint from the 80's I think.

This field has been PLOWED, in comics, film, television, action figures, t-shirts -- Batman. It would take a lifetime to do a comprehensive survey. And I think it would be a life -- well, wasted. Because the fact is most of everything isn't very good. Most Batman comics or movies, while they are fun and they are fine, they certainly aren't sublime.

The reason I’m doing this is that I’m currently writing a "Batman" story, of a kind. And to do that well, I want to understand the character better. I’m writing a series called How to Succeed in Evil, available on Amazon, about an Evil Efficiency Consultant for Supervillains. It uses superhero tropes in the same way Douglas Adams uses Science Fiction and Terry Pratchett uses Fantasy. In the latest series of books, the long-term antagonist for my consultant is a superhero called The Lynx.

This current run of the story started as I tried to answer the question, what would I do with Batman? What's the Batman story that hasn't been told. What happens if Batman was real like really, real? What's a consequence of this that nobody has ever considered.

How to Succeed in Evil works like this. You put a superhero trope next to real people and it's funny or creates instant satire.

Like Bruce Wayne. He's got billions. So if he really wants to help people, he should do it at scale, not by pounding muggers in an alley. He should devote his time to the Wayne Foundation. And if he really believes in what he's doing, he'll want to turn Wayne Enterprises into an engine that will generate so much money that he can use it to fund the foundation.

So, in my idea, Batman is inherently irresponsible. He's a trust fund kid, who's defrauding his shareholders so he can play vigilante. He's a dilettante. And, from that you can know, he's probably not very good at business OR fighting crime. He wants to do the right thing, he just doesn't know how. And that's funny. And/or sad, depending on how you play it.

So, for me, the questions to ask are three-fold.

1. Why has Batman lasted? What makes this character have such staying power? Is it luck? Created at the right time? Certainly some of that is true, but there are things about this story and character that would be useful to understand if you want to make new stories that you hope will last. (and I do)

2. How does this engine of story work? I mean there are so many Batman stories. So many great characters. What is it about this particular wellspring that makes it so productive. And, is there anything I can steal to become more productive myself.

3. What is a Batman story at it's absolute best? How/and why does it work?

So here's my plan of attack, I'm going to place Batman in the pulp tradition. I'm going to talk about the major kinds of Batman stories. And why, when they are great they are great. And then I'm going to analyze about the film the Dark Knight and the comics that lead up to it.

Do you want Batmen? Because that's how you get Batmen!

So where does Batman come from? One of the most important insights I have for anyone about story or even art in general is that everything was influenced by something. "There is no new thing under the sun," as the saying goes, which logically can't be correct. But new ideas are very, very, very, very rare. So if you see something that you think is without precedent, turns out there's a part you missed.

And the part you might miss about Batman is that he is straight-up a pulp character. The pulp era in which he was created was this vast roiling machine that turned out story after story after story, almost all of them repackaged and produced with a speed that modern writers can't seem to match. Even though they had mechanical typewriters and we have computers. And these Pulp Characters are the guys who people like Bob Kane and Bill Finger used as inspiration.

The number one inspiration for Batman is Zorro. Bob Kane said so himself. In the classic origin story, young Bruce Wayne and his parents are coming out a screening of The Mask of Zorro, when his parents are killed in a mugging.

For me, Batman also has elements of The Shadow, Lamont Cranston, rich playboy by day, turns into the Shadow, who turns invisible and scares the crap out of criminals while solving mysteries and righting wrongs.

There are of course others, it's all a melange. But from the word go, Batman comes right out of this world of ridiculous characters. Well, ridiculous now, if you go back to read them. But the other interesting thing to note is, Zorro's greatest influence is Robin Hood. I mean Zorro basically is Robin Hood. Which makes it interesting to think about Batman as an echo of Robin Hood.

The interesting thing to note is that Batman is not ridiculous. Not at the start. Not funny, either. From the word go, Batman is a tragedy. And the Joker is a horrific monster.

That panel of recently orphaned Bruce Wayne crying and dedicating his life to fighting crime in the earliest origin story is harrowing. Sure, I didn't get this the first time I read it, but when you go back and look at it, it's all there.

And this is the primary difference. Batman has internal stakes. All of these other pulp adventurers, they're doing something because it's fun. Gentlemen Adventurers. Or because it's right abstract sense. Bruce Wayne dons cape and cowl not only for justice but to fix what is broken inside him. Batman is, first and foremost, a response to trauma.

So how do Batman stories work?

Batman never changes. Oh I know, Robin got killed and then he wasn't and Robin changed out and Nightwing, blah, blah, blah. But in terms of real interior character change, it seems to me that only two Batman stories involve the character changing in a significant way. The origin story and the death story.

Everything else, is about the villains, in a deeply fascinating way.

For me, in every good Batman story, the villain is a manifestation of Batman's internal struggle. And maybe every good action story is like this.

Maybe a hero's struggle is always his or her consciousness against inner forces, those elements of psychology and neurology and instinct that we aren't consciously aware of, that we must overcome to become what we want, or need to be.

Take, for example, an alcoholic. In one sense, there is nothing easier than not being an alcoholic. It's literally the cessation of an activity. It would seem to require no effort. But we are not in charge of ourselves. And the struggles to overcome addiction -- or anything else -- are titanic. But they are internal. And it is very difficult to understand anything in abstract terms -- especially the deep interior life of a human being. We make them concrete in character and action.

So to understand and reason about these psychological struggles, the ancestors developed myths. I believe they used the oldest and most eternal categories known to them (Mother, Night, Father, Ocean, Light, Darkness, Dragon, Fire, Ice) not as things as themselves, but to try to understand what was going on inside them and how people should act in the world.

In a real sense, the battle against any monster is smaller and secondary to the battle against the instinct for self-preservation within. But since we can't symbolize the inner battle very well, in stories, heroes slay dragons.

Batman doesn't have Dragons, Batman has characters that are his externalized personality traits or other competing possible responses to trauma.

So, many versions of the Joker is are a valid and understandable response to tragedy. We live in a cruel, nihilistic world. Nothing matte…

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Today I'm going to take you through Shadow Over Innsmouth. To reveal the techniques that make this story, and cosmic horror, work. It's one of Lovecraft's finest, and the unique way all the elements come together at the end is amazing. It's a thing that you feel when you read it, but I'm not going to settle for feelings. I'm going to show you how it works.

Written in 1931, The Shadow over Innsmouth is tied with At the Mountains of Madness for my Favorite Lovecraft story. I think you read those two and you get the man at his best. This story is more conventionally structured than Call of Cthulhu, which I’ve done a previous video on and it, involves real jeopardy for the protagonist’s body and soul. It’s a tale in five unnamed chapters.

The external story here is a young man traveling to a decaying seaport town in New England, finding that it is populated by people who have been mating with fish creatures in the deep, and barely escapes with his life. It’s thrilling. But the internal story is the truly terrifying thing. The first part, which I’m calling sucked in, sets up Innsmouth, and we see the unnamed main character drawn to the place.

SUCKED IN

in the beginning, the character tells us this

I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumoured and evilly shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not simply the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination. It helps me, too, in making up my mind regarding a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me.

And upon first reading, you think this certain terrible step is committing suicide. It’s Lovecraft, after all. But it’s not suicide. It’s worse than that. What can be worse than suicide? Well, if you haven’t read it — or you don’t remember, just hang in there with me.

If you've watched my earlier, Call of Cthulhu video, you will recognize this weird, geeky, 40-year-old virgin setup. An antiquarian and sightseeing tour is not what I would call a rite of passage. But this, in itself, is foreshadowing, as we will see.

The main character is trying to take the train to Arkham, but he's broke, so the station-keeper says:

“You could take that old bus, I suppose,” he said with a certain hesitation, “but it ain’t thought much of hereabouts. It goes through Innsmouth—you may have heard about that—and so the people don’t like it. Run by an Innsmouth fellow—Joe Sargent—but never gets any custom from here, or Arkham either, I guess. Wonder it keeps running at all. I s’pose it’s cheap enough, but I never see more’n two or three people in it—nobody but those Innsmouth folks."

Don't, don't take the old bus. Trust me on this one, ya never take the old bus.

But the ticket agent gives him a bunch of scoop on the town. Including on the founder of the town, Captain Obed Marsh,

The old Captain Obed Marsh ben dead these sixty years, and there ain’t ben a good-sized ship out of the place since the Civil War; but just the same the Marshes still keep on buying a few of those native trade things—mostly glass and rubber gewgaws, they tell me. Maybe the Innsmouth folks like ’em to look at themselves—Gawd knows they’ve gotten to be about as bad as South Sea cannibals and Guinea savages.

“That plague of ’46 must have taken off the best blood in the place. Anyway, they’re a doubtful lot now, and the Marshes and the other rich folks are as bad as any. As I told you, there probably ain’t more’n 400 people in the whole town in spite of all the streets they say there are. I guess they’re what they call ‘white trash’ down South—lawless and sly, and full of secret doings. They get a lot of fish and lobsters and do exporting by truck. Queer how the fish swarm right there and nowhere else.

None of this scares our hero off. In fact, it draws him in. Antiquarian that he is, he starts researching. At the end of Act II he learns about the Esoteric Order of Dagon - which has taken over the town's churches and sees this strange bit of jewelry that has come from Innsmouth. It is intense.

It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at the strange, unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that rested there on a purple velvet cushion. Even now I can hardly describe what I saw, though it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the description had said. It was tall in front, and with a very large and curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a head of almost freakishly elliptical outline.

It clearly belonged to some settled technique of infinite maturity and perfection, yet that technique was utterly remote from any—Eastern or Western, ancient or modern—which I had ever heard of or seen exemplified. It was as if the workmanship were that of another planet.

Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity—half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion

At times I fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was overflowing with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.

And as we break into Act II he can’t even sleep, he’s so excited to go to this creepy weird town.

The Road to Innsmouth

I’m not going to lie. The first part feels slow and wordy by modern standards. It’s not an error, this is the style that was in use. But the amount of tremendous stuff that is set up skillfully in the start is amazing.

And what I’ve noticed the most re-reading Lovecraft is how he manages the ambiguity of the way he conveys information. The first act is a lot of exposition. And we think we have been well-armed with the facts. But, by the end of the story, all of what we think we know about this character is going to shift underneath us and make us feel queasy and... horrified.

I think this is a key to the effect that Lovecraft creates. If you know anything about this story, you know we’re walking into a town of people interbreeding with frog-like creatures from the sea. And, that’s disgusting and creepy, but, you know, it could edge over into absurd real quick. Like the Disney treatment of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, but they somehow rope Lin Manuel Miranda into doing a hip-hop mash up of an old pop song, and we wind up with an Escape from Innsmouth chase sequence powered by "Who let the Frogs Out"

This is not to mock the tale. I love the story, but just point out that, to pull off horror like this, you have to be masterful with your tone — and he is.

So we meet the bus driver. And he’s nasty.

He had a narrow head, bulging, watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears.

The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his peculiarly shambling gait and saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied them the more I wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them.

A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was evidently given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried with him much of their characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could not even guess. His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine or Negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would have thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage.

Note how specific this description is. We can see this guy. And this is where Lovecraft really shines. He gives us images so powerful and precise, they stay with you and you often remember them years later. Here’s another example.

At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlantic on our left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply, and I felt a singular sense of disquiet in looking at the lonely crest ahead where the rutted road-way met the sky. It was as if the bus were about to keep on in …

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Today I'm going to talk about H.P. Lovecraft, an author who is one of the great well-springs of the horror genre. And if you want tl/dr on the horror -- there's Poe then Lovecraft and then everybody else.

I'm going to dive deep into two stories, Call of Cthulhu and Shadow Over Innsmouth. Shadow over Innsmouth is one of my favorites, but Cthulhu is really worth thinking about because it sparked the entire Mythos.

In a nutshell here is how a Lovecraft story works.

* An Investigator seeks out secret knowledge.

* He finds truth

* Which drives him mad.

Someone is looking for trouble. Intellectual trouble, in fact. And they find truth, as much as they can understand, anyway. Which drives them mad in the end.

Madness turns out to be the correct understanding of things. Because the Lovecraftian truth is a universe in which humanity is utterly insignificant. This is a very modern anxiety. We live in a time, the last 150-200 years or so when old belief systems have collapsed or are collapsing and nothing has replaced them. We don't have a good story of why we are here and what we are supposed to do. And every expansion of our knowledge in the physical sciences has pointed to our greater and greater irrelevance.

The threat, the menace the thing that drives men mad -- the thing that dangles the thread that the investigators must follow deep into the maze of their own insanity -- is always one of the Great Old Ones. They are a pantheon of unpronouncables. Yog Sothoth, N'ylarlathotep, Azathoth, Shub-Niggurath, Ithaqua, Tsathoggua, Hastur (the Unspeakable) who, paradoxically, is the most speakable of all.

Now, screenwriters like to talk about how important story is -- and it is -- if the story is broken in film, it doesn't work. That's because screenplays are blueprints. And if a blueprint doesn't work the house falls down. But a story or a novel is NOT a blueprint. It's the actual thing. It's a habitable structure constructed, not from light and sound, but from words and the creative response of the reader.

So just outlining the story doesn't explain why Lovecraft is great. And that's why you should stick around for the rest of this video. Lovecraft is actually something like a prophet. He's not writing a saga. He's no poet. He's writing revelation -- wild and disturbing visions of how things really are, or could be. And it's at the level of the image that he succeeds. And why he's worth reading.

And the thing that I get with Lovecraft, that I don't get anywhere else, is this lingering sense that madness is the correct understanding. Lovecraft doesn't scare me when I read him, not really. But Lovecraft scares me years later, when I see or hear something I don't understand and it suggests to me the hidden depths of chaos in which we all unwittingly dwell. And whatever other criticism you might level at the man and his writing -- lots of them are justified -- I don't know of anything else like that in literature.

Lovecraft echoes through everybody who comes after him. And, as we will see, much of what came before him echoed through him. As the saying goes, "Good artists copy. Great artists steal."

And, for me, it's tremendously worthwhile to go back to read the things that have inspired generations of people. I gain power as writer by going to the source of the river.

But before we dive into the story we have to deal with two things. The Mythos and the Racism. They are tightly linked, and maybe not in the way that you think.

The Mythos

So, Lovecraft created what is known as the Cthulhu Mythos. It includes a pantheon of unpronouncables. Yog Sothoth, N'ylarlathotep, Azathoth, Shub-Niggurath, Ithaqua, Tsathoggua, Hastur (the Unspeakable) who, paradoxically, is the most speakable of these great old ones.

The writers who wrote in this mythos after him started to take if very seriously, but Lovecraft didn't. He referred to it as "Yog Sothothery" (Jesus, Yog Sothothery! - it's like he made this whole thing up to troll dyslexics and people with speech impediments)

The point is he didn't engage in obsessive "world-building". A term which I've always found to be a bit much, because if you scratch the surface of any fantasy "world" you will find an actual historical time/place/personage with dash of fresh paint and costume jewelry. At best you're mushing a few of those together.

For example, Captain Kirk = Horatio Hornblower. And that's straight from the original pitch for Star Trek. And, in turn, Hornblower is based on Thomas Cochrane, the 10th Earl of Dundonald.

Game of Thrones is the War of the Roses. Westeros is England.

To become obsessed with the world or the mythos. Is to become distracted from the point of the stories. Nobody enjoys backstory, unless the backstory is also a great story. Don't believe me? I defy you to read The Silmarillion. In fact, I defy you to even skim the Wikipedia page without your eyes glossing over.

But especially with Lovecraft, the Mythos isn't the point. It's how he conveys his point.

The Racism

And with Lovecraft, the racism isn't the point either. Oh, he was very racist. And I don't want to downplay it and disguise how very racist both he and the past were. I don't think it's good to downplay the colossal moral errors that things like slavery, racism, prejudice, tribalism, and bigotry really are.

But, for Lovecraft, I don't see that racism is even a secondary concern in his stories. He uses the Other and the Unknown to display his primary concerns. And, whatever he felt personally, he's playing on the contemporary fears and stereotypes of his day to get the effect he wants. This isn't a justification, it's an explanation.

And I can only observe, if you demand ideological purity and essential good hearteness from the artists you engage with, well, you are not going to get it. I mean, after you're done watching Mr. Rodgers and reading Neil Gaiman, who’s left? Saints are very rare. Good writers are also rare. And the intersection of the two is vanishingly small.

For me, what Lovecraft seems to be worried about is two-fold:

1) The universe is immensely vast and complicated and we don't matter in it at all.

2) The only thing that even somewhat protects us from this chaos is culture -- which is decaying and becoming corrupted.

These two fears are quintessentially modern. Insignificance and lack of a grand narrative -- a structure of meaning - a myth to inhabit -- is our condition. And we're one of only a very few generations of humans that have lived like this. And I have to think it has something to do with the fact that 1 in 5 Americans are on antidepressants. And the CDC reports that 42.4% of Americans are obese. One way, or another, it seems an awful lot of anxiety is getting swallowed.

And while I don’t thing the way Lovecraft uses race and the Other to symbolize degeneration and disintegration is appropriate, I have take #2 seriously. As Jung said, "Something we cannot see protects us from something we do not understand."

And Lovecraft keenly felt the decay and collapse of that something we cannot see. You can partially track this as a collapse of the Church in the west. Tolkien felt this too in response to WWI. The old ways were shattered. In fact, the shock of this cultural change has created and inspired some of the greatest writers and thinkers of the 20th century. And whole philosophical movements, most notably existentialism.

It's a valid concern. And it powers Lovecraft’s horror. To play cheap racist gotcha games with this, might signal virtue, and it is certainly right in places, but don't let it get in your way of understanding. Because all story uses one thing to symbolize another. And the question is: Do you use your symbols well or do you use them poorly?

But still it's tough. Because yeah, you can read racism all over the place in his work. But Lovecraft is hugely influential and you can't pretend he doesn't exist.

Lovecraft Country

I think author Mike Ruff did a great job of handling all of this, without slighting any of it, in his book Love…

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This week, I'm trying something a little different. In addition to this essay and podcast, I made a video.

It’s part of my ongoing series, “How It’s Written” I’m explaining, in detail, why I think the TV show the Mandalorian is so well-written. And to do that, I delve into the world of the internal story. I think this essay it's more fun as a video, but it totally works as a podcast or an essay. So consume in the form that you find most palatable. 

Introduction

Today on "How It's Written" we're going to dig into the immensely popular Mandalorian, I've seen lots of people commenting on this story, good and bad, but I don't think any of them have really nailed what makes the show so great.

But that's not surprising, because that's what a well-crafted story does. It hides its workings so that you are drawn into and through the story, without fully realizing what's being done to you.

But I'm going to lay it all out for you. Obviously, if you haven’t seen the whole show, here’s your spoiler alert. Go binge it and come back.  

The most important thing to realize is that for all it's wonderful action sequences, The Mandalorian is driven by its internal story. And if you don't know what I mean by that, or that all great stories are driven by the internal conflict, stick around. 

Internal v. External Story

So, quick primer. One way to think about an internal story is that it is the story that matters most to the main character. I think this is what William Faulkner meant when he said, “The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.”

Take Rocky, for example. On the outside, Rocky is a movie about a hopeless loser who tries his best who gets a shot, tries his best, and loses. In fact, he gets beat up and loses in front of his girlfriend. But on the inside, it's a triumph. And we triumph with him. Which is why we love Rocky. 

Could you tell the story of Rocky without the boxing scenes? On one hand, the idea is silly. The boxing is how you show the conflict on the screen. It’s how Rocky demonstrates his passion and sacrifice. When you write a book you can put the reader directly into the mind of your character, but with film or television, you can't. So you have to have some way to symbolize what’s going on in your character’s head. 

But it can be anything that’s fun to film, boxing, wrestling, bobsledding, hunting a giant shark, a chess game, performing a difficult piano concerto, lightsaber duels, or a gunfight. 

So here's how the show works

Every episode has the same structure. Mando gets a job, Mando does a job. He wants someone from someone, in exchange, they give him a quest, and he completes it in exciting and unexpected action sequences. 

That's it. That’s pretty much all there is to the external story. It's a formula and I love it. And, unless you're over-intellectualizing it, or trying to score clicks in pointlessly snarky YouTube commentary, you love it too. Because it’s amazingly well done. 

Because as fans and viewers don't want our expectations subverted. We don't want genre conventions broken. We want all of those things honored and given back to us in a way that makes them fresh and new. We want our expectations fulfilled in a way that we don't see coming, or with such a high emotional charge we just don't care. 

And I think that is one reason the Mandalorian is so refreshing. It doesn't have any pretensions to being important to the culture. They're just trying to tell an entertaining story. And that’s all that George Lucas was doing when he made the original films. And it’s not a thriller. The whole world isn’t a risk. The Galaxy is not in jeopardy. The kid is. And for me, that makes the stakes more real.

Is anything in the universe going to change if Baby Yoda gets snuffed? Probably not. But, to the Mandalorian, it would be Armageddon. And that’s the internal story. Or part of it at least. 

So we’ve got sixteen chapters across two seasons. And across the loom of these episodes the internal story of the Mandalorian is woven.

It’s the story of a traumatized orphan raised to be a violent killing machine who rediscovers his humanity by caring for an orphaned child. And his real change, I think, is from cold indifference - that detachment of the professional not just to love, but something beyond love. I call it selfless love.

I’m going to go through this in detail, but my first thought is that it is kind of a small story. It doesn’t feel like two seasons worth of television. So I think any flaws in this show are because they were shucking and jiving, filling episodes. Or what you might see as a flaw or a misstep is the writers intentionally sacrificing the external story to make the internal story stronger.

The most glaring one in my mind is in Episode 14 — titled the Tragedy, but what I think of as the Return of Boba Fett. In the standoff, Boba Fett demands that the Mandalorian takes off the jet pack. This means that he doesn’t have it on when the Child is taken by the Dark Troopers. 

Honestly, this is very, very dumb. Why wouldn’t he have put his jet pack back on? Seems very valuable, not the kind of thing you’d leave lying around? Because, if he had it, he’d just fly up to save the Child either, saving him or dying in the process. And it’s very important for the internal story to have the child taken from him. Because it is in recapturing the child — because the big fight that is to come, is how he will show that he loves the child.

These “missteps” sets up a bigger, more satisfying story beats in the end. 

Find me anything you love and I will find you a misstep. This show isn’t perfect. But nothing is. Work doesn't succeed because it's flawless. It succeeds because its strengths overcome its flaws. And that’s worth knowing if you want to be a maker instead of a critic. 

This why hatchet job reviews and commentary bother me. Everything has flaws. And it takes no real skill or insight to them. What's harder to explain is why anything is good. In other words, how its strength’s overcome its flaws. 

In the first episode, there are only two beats in the internal story. 1. Mythrol tries to bribe him to not take him in. And the Mandalorian doesn’t accept. Because, even though he’s not exactly a good guy, he’s a man with a code. Which the show will beat us over the head with for a couple of episodes. 

This is the way.

This is the way.

This is the way.

Yup, he’s got a way. Because this is a Western and Samurai movie. And Westerns and Samurai movies are the same thing. Because even if you swap out the pistols for swords a showdown is a showdown is a showdown. Yojimbo is a Fistful of Dollars. The Seven Samurai is The Magnificent Seven.

And Kurosawa, the guy who made these Samurai epics, was in turn influenced by earlier Westerns. The cycles of influence never end. 

Until in 1970, Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima produce a Japanese comic called Kozure Okami. Which literally translates as "Wolf Taking Along his Child" but which you probably know as Lone Wolf and Cub.

It’s a monster manga epic. This is the first volume and there are twelve of these books in the series. As you can see from the fabulous cover art by Frank Miller, we’ve got the cute kid in the baby carriage and everything. So it seems like it’s the same as the Mandalorian, but it’s not. Because of, you guessed it, the internal story. 

Now I love Lone Wolf and Cub, so don’t take this as a real criticism, but compared to the Mandalorian, The Wolf — Ogami Itto — is kind of an a*****e. Or a real hardass. At the beginning of the story, he has been ordered to commit suicide — his wife is dead and his clan has been betrayed. He is setting off on a path of revenge, but he’s got this little boy. So he lays out a sword and a ball and lets the kid choose. If the kid chooses the ball, he’s going to “send him off to be with his mother.” In other words, kill him. But the kid goes for the sword. So he takes him with him in one of the most satisfying stories of reckless child endangerment I’ve ever read. 

Bu…

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I really like Martin Luther King day as a holiday. It certainly makes more sense to me than President's Day. Washington and Lincoln were tremendous figures in our history, worthy of study and reflection -- but the world that they were part of seems very distant from the times we live in. But Dr. King, he was a man who dealt with problems we face and the forces that must be confronted to change them.

Organizational challenges. The staggering inertia of both the Government and the People. The omnipresent temptation to acts of violence.

I believe that violence in always backfires. It either hurts the cause or the person who perpetrates it or both. And I believe that a politics that appeals to one group or faction can seem powerful in the moment, but will prove to be catastrophic. And often sooner than one thinks.

This bodes not well for us at the moment, because all our politics currently seems to be predicated on identity and personality. I find that vile and stupid on all sides. But the key problem with identity politics is that it splinters into fragments. It's impossible to unify. Which makes it impossible to, well, lead.

When faced with a problem, I first, ask myself: what solutions have worked in the past? And will they work again? I don't think there's a single person who think that things are great right now. Or that one way or another, we don't face turbulent times and colossal change. But how do we actually go about changing things and not make them worse?

The last, biggest positive change I can think of was the Civil Rights Movement. And that was non-violent. And it inspired basically everyone.

There are many people who think that anybody who voted for Trump is an irredeemable racist. The problem with that thought is there are 70 million people who voted for Trump. And if you can't reason or negotiate or come to terms with them -- if argument is no use and they're just demons -- then the only thing left is violence. By no means is this kind rhetoric limited to one party or faction. But every time I hear someone espousing this brand of 'the other side is horrible and can't be reasoned with' rhetoric' it bothers me.

Because in it violence is implicit. And it always makes me wonder, is the person doing the yapping, going to get out there and fight themselves, or do they expect that someone else is going to take the hits for them?

And even if you think it acceptable to use violence in the pursuit of your ends, political and otherwise, I just can't see how it could be a way out of our difficulties.

And that's one of the things that is powerful about the "I Have A Dream" speech. Its fundamental rhetorical appeal is for people to answer the call of their own moral greatness. To recognize that we are, that we can, all of us, better than we give our selves credit for. And it works. Given the events of the summer and the recent events in the capitol, the speech shines brighter than ever for me this year. And seems all the more remarkable.

The commentary I wrote on it 2006 is still among the finest things I've ever written. And before I share it again, I have but one observation to add:

When you're serious about changing things you show up in a suit.

Martin Luther King wore a suit. Malcom X wore a suit. The men who sat in at Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, NC, wore suits. And maybe my point here isn't the clothes or the cause, but the attitude. When you really set out to create change in the world, it's serious. It's beyond rage. It's patient.

Recently, we have seen a lot of angry people with a lot of opinions. But what I haven't seen is organized and patient group of people working towards a unified goal. What I see, at worst, are sideshows in a vandalism carnival. Poor deluded people, hurting themselves and others, throwing their lives away for causes that they believe in, but that do not believe in them in return. And, in the end, all of them having very little to no effect at all.

What I see, at best, is protest without a plan. And protest with out a plan is performance art.

Dr. King didn't engage in performance art. He didn't bring a sword to divide people. And he appealed to the best in the enemies of his cause. And, I think, many of them were surprised to find the best in themselves answering, perhaps not entirely with their consent. But it worked.

Oh not perfectly. But it worked. And in this moment when things don't seem to be working very well at. Man, this speech. This approach to persuasion and change. It gives me hope. It makes me proud to be an American. A feeling that I find in dwindling supply.

Because I too, refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.

MLK speech commentary

"I am happy to John with you today in what will go down in history. As the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation."

This is a speech I thought I knew by a man I thought I knew. If the beginning is not familiar, then surely this line and will make it clear.

I have a dream that one day...

Dr. Martin Luther King, civic Saint of the civil rights movement, tragically murdered, and now remembered with a federal holiday that is in many people's mind, nothing more than another day off. In mine too, I suppose. But the other day, an interesting thing happened. Set to random, my MP3 player singled out this historic speech for my listening pleasure.

Dr. King was the farthest thing from my mind. I was trying to beat a deadline, drowning out background noise with pop music. I almost skipped past it, but as I was about to press the fast forward button, my hand froze and it was this line that did it,

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.

It's easy, looking back from the great height of 2006 to say, of course his cause was just, but in 1963, amid, the heat of a nation in turmoil, was it so obvious to everyone? Listening to this speech with fresh ears I was astonished not at the rhetoric, which is excellent. Now I was astonished by the fundamental nature of Dr. King's appeal. He's standing with an army in the middle of our nation's capital. It's crowded, it's hot and people are angry because they have a legitimate grievance, How easy it would have been to tap into that anger.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community.

But his persuasive appeal is not anger. It is faith, a patriotic faith in this country, which I'm not sure I have. The strength of his appeal is that he cries out to what is best in each of us. He's not really asking us to change. Not fundamentally. He's asking us to live up to what is best and we respond.

As proof I submit that only once during the entire speech, is he drowned out by the crowd,

Many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

And what is the Dream of the I have a dream speech? Everyone has their own view of utopia and the word dream in this speech encapsulates many visions. But when Dr. King first defined the dream in this speech, he did so in a way that surprised me.

It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream. That one day, this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

For me, this line is the heart of the whole speech. He's counting on us to make good on a check written by our forefathers. Not by force of arms, does he expect overcome, but by the inherent goodness in the hearts of men. Simply put, he expects people to do what is right. All of the social reformers I've heard in my lifetime have based their appeal on anger.

But to me, this speech is so different it might well have come from another planet. If Dr. King's appeal works, and clearly it did, It is because we are a good deal better than we usually give ourselves credit for. So on January 16th, I wi…

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