Creating Accurate Road Maps

I'm writing a story. It's a novel based on a screenplay based on a legend based on a ream of historical documents and letters. It's rich. It's about Early America and includes events like the New Orleans fire in 1788 and the Ratification of the U.S. Constitution that same year.

There's a sea voyage from New Orleans, to Philadelphia, and a covered wagon journey from York, PA to Charlestown, VA (now WV) and there is a dangerous ferry crossing at Harpers Ferry, MD when John Harper actually operated the ferry. The story is filled with political giants (Washington, Jefferson, Franklyn and the Carroll clan) and there are bigoted immigrants, religious zealots, and an unconventional slavery abolitionist.

This week I'm trying to write about the segment of the journey that takes place along 100 miles of frontier road from York to Charlestown. There's a covered farm wagon pulled by two huge conestoga horses named (Calvin and Luther), and two conestoga freight wagons pulled by two teams of four mules driven by teamsters (the predecessors of today's Teamsters).  Tied to the back of the various wagons are four smaller horses and a dairy cow.

There was research about covered wagons, farming, and money. Did you know the conestoga freight wagons were built to ford rivers and streams so the stuff inside stayed dry? This was four years before the 1792 U.S. Coinage Act, so there were some 12 different coinages in circulation all minted in different countries? The Spanish 2-escudo gold doubloon was the most popular.  And a Spanish piece-of-eight (of pirate lore) was used in trade. Very confusing when you wanted to buy something. I had to build am Excel conversion table to keep it all straight.

But what was the trip like from York to Charlestown like in early October 1788? There there many creeks to ford in early October. Did you know few traveled long distances in the spring because the roads were too muddy, and the summer was too hot. So most travel was done in the fall and winter.

I needed to construct a map for the journey, so I could name the towns (if they were around back then). And what about water crossings, and mountains? Was there a road that avoided the mountains, like through a pass?

I tired using Google Maps, which you see below. The problem with Google Maps is that the route you want to trace will only follow existing roads today. And it's hard to see elevations on Google. So, I looked up the cities and towns along the way. Most had elevations listed...but they weren't for the roads, but for hill peaks and airports. This was useful, but there was no real contour information that covered wagons might encounter.

I then found two free resources that were much better than Google Maps. The first was TopoQuest.com. It provided a lot of information and I was able to see where the common roads found their way around hills and between mountain peaks.  See below for Harpers Ferry You can easily read the topographical lines and elevations and where the roads (today) are. There are also labels and the location of actual buildings (at the time of the map's creation).

But the cleanest is at https://viewer.nationalmap.gov/advanced-viewer/
This is the United States Geological Survey site for the Advanced Map Viewer. The ease of zooming in and moving around, and other tools here, is amazing.

There are numerous tools, too, for measuring things, like distances, where you can make your own path. You're not forced to use the existing streets, but you can with little effort. Here's an example.

There are a host of tools at the top that allow you to measure square miles (BTW 1 sq. mile = 640 Acres.) the tool bar allows you to create layers, legends, add data, see elevation profiles, and paint on the map to print out or download.

There are dozens of other features at USGS.gov including historical maps of cities. It's all worth checking out and bookmarking in your browser.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD

• Writer-Director: Quentin Tarantino
• Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and many others in minor roles.

No spoilers.

A friend of The Moral Premise blog wrote and asked:

“I watched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood the other day. I found it to be an interesting sermon on fame, relevance, meaning in life, and identity. However, I am troubled to pinpoint a specific moral premise. Any thought on this title? It felt like it was the work of a brilliant director who couldn’t quite articulate what he was trying to say.”

I wrote back:

“Why can’t I just enjoy a movie? Must I work? Geez! I have no idea what the MP is. I guess I’ll have to think about it.”

So, I did…think about it.

I enjoyed Quintin’s “Untitled 9th" as it was originally flagged. (Sounds like the title of a Symphony by a  classical composer). Production notes claim the first cut was over four hours. Someone finally got down to 161 minutes, which is 61 pages longer than you want to write your first feature. But when you're Tarantino, so the saying goes, you can get a budget for the Yellow Pages.

I was attracted to these characters and enjoyed their stories. Thus, OUATIH proves again to me that depth of characters and their relationship to the audience is directly related to length. Not any length, but a good length, and one typically longer than 100 or even 120 pages.

Let’s look at a few bullet points of the characters for a clue about what the Moral Premise might be.

Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) wants to resurrect his flagging career.

• Why is his career flagging? Probably due to neglect and alcohol.
• His very loyal friend and stunt-double, Cliff Booth, is honest and encouraging, “You’re fucking Rick Dalton.”
• But Rick is not disciplined and lets this less-than-stellar-name take its toll.
• MOMENT OF GRACE: On the set of his latest job, as the Heavy who will be killed at the end of the story (it seems this is his characters' reoccurring fate) he twice forgets his lines. That upsets him. He knows a professional is expected to show up early and know his lines.
• He turns his life around, and the next day he nails a performance in one take. He’s rewarded by the director fawning over him (but he doesn’t take the director’s praise seriously). Yet when his co-start, 8-year old Trudi Fraser tells him, “That was the best acting I’ve ever seen,” Rick tears up, realizing that integrity wins the day—not only his integrity for knowing his lines, but Trudi's for her honesty. This scene also diminishes the director's integrity, whom we think would fawn over any actor, even if the lines were screwed up. 
• As the story continues, Rick perseveres and accepts who he is and doesn't worry about who he isn't.
• And at the end of the movie Rick gets his long-hoped for opportunity.

Cliff Booth (Pitt) takes a backseat to his friend, Rick as his double and stuntman.

• Cliff is comfortable in his supporting role.
• He seeks to be a loyal friend to all he meets, if they have an ounce of integrity.
• He is not anxious for his career. He doesn’t want to be a star. He likes to work and he’s good at it.
• Rick goes to bat for Cliff and gets him a job as his stunt double on his latest gig. Cliff is happy about it, he's humble, and appreciative of the opportunity.
• Cliff has little respect for bravado that often comes with stardom. Bruce Lee is portrayed as a man who is prideful and arrogant. With humility Cliff destroys Lee, but also gets fired off the set. He is disappointed but accepts his fate and happily goes back to his fall-back job as a handyman.
• MOMENT OF GRACE: A curb-side hippie girl who he’s flirted with on occasion hitches a ride with him to where she’s living with a bunch of other girls at the Spahn ranch. On the way she offers Cliff a blow job. He makes no effort to take her up on the offer (which probably involved some latent effort at blackmail). But he is interested in what’s going on at Spahn ranch and with his old friend (from 8 years ago) George Spahn, where Cliff had worked as a stuntman.
• At the Spahn ranch he risks his life and Rick’s beautiful Cadillac by checking in on George who has gone blind and has clearly been manipulated by the Manson Family. He demands integrity of the head young woman in charge of the girls, and of one of the hippie men.
• This sense of being himself, not trying to be someone he’s not, and sacrificing his safety for his past friend (George), expecting nothing in return, in the end, saves the life of Rick and his new wife. Cliff's character in this regard further catapults Rick’s career and thus Cliff’s on-going work as Rick’s double.
• Cliff's last name "booth" implies he's running the projector in the booth, and not on the screen out in front. Yet, he's absolutely necessary for the star to been seen and known. 

Sharon Tate is portrayed as a young actress who innocently wants to enjoy her new career.

• She is innocent and faithful.
• She even questions the “dirty pictures” theater down the street from a legit theater, an optional career that she has rejected for it has little integrity.
• She humbly enjoys a private moment watching herself on screen at a local theater in a bit part with Dean Martin. She quietly enjoys the audience’s laughter at her prat fall. She’s not proud or haughty. There's an innocent integrity about her.
• Her generosity to Rick at end of movie reinforces her integrity and we believe she will be successful for something other than her good looks.

Arrogance and haughtiness are consistently discredited in the story. Earlier we saw how Bruce Lee is treated for his swagger. But the “nail in the coffin” occurs when Tex Watson shows up in Act 3 with his Manson Family accomplices, and we witness how:

• Undeserved arrogance is met with swift justice.

In these and many smaller ways the following moral premise(s) are illustrated, although it helps to know that Charles Manson (from whom Tex Watson took orders) was an undeserving, wannabe musician who was rejected by Hollywood.

A swaggering hip leads to destruction; but

Pursuit of excellence leads to possibilities.

or

Arrogance undeserved leads to swift justice; but

Humble integrity leads to eventual opportunity.

Borders and Quarantines, the Essence of Successful Stories

EVERY SUCCESSFUL STORY IS ABOUT BORDERS AND QUARANTINES

Stories we love are about the reoccurring cosmic battle between order and chaos. They are about how (1) we fall off the serpentine border between the two extremes, how (2) we quarantine ourselves in one or the other, and then (3) how we get back our balance and live on the edge between them.

Thus, stories that engage us are about:

A Conflict of Values

A Life out of Balance

The Dragon and Its Gold

The Decent and Indecent

An Elephant in the Room

The Threshold into Act Two

Obstacles that Escalate Tension

A Protagonist's Impossible Dream

Our Greatest Desire and Greatest Fear.

As storytellers our current state of quarantine over fears of COVID-19 is wonderfully illustrative of the crux of all good storytelling—the Moral Premise, where characters are motivated by vice and virtue to tear down (or build up) borders or establish (or break down) quarantines. 

Storytellers should be aware that the internal conflict of values (i.e. borders & quarantines) between characters is made external through the physical conflict seen and heard on screen. What the story is really about is the internal conflict of what external borders to erect or tear down, and what quarantines to enforce or break out of.

Likewise, COVID-19, while essentially invisible, creates visible effects upon our body's normal biology. And that effective conflict extends to our homes, our communities, and our countries.

WHAT WAS SUBTEXT IS NOW ON THE NOSE

Remember when Trump was demanding walls, borders, and travel bans? Many citizens objected. They believed America was a country of immigrants and great diversity. (For the sake of illustration, I'm sidestepping the "legal" vs. "illegal" equivocation). America had values that didn't discriminate. There was a way we should do things, and we needed to stay true to the practices that made us a great nation. etc. etc. At the same time there were political battles about socialism, the organizational principle of subsidiarity, and government handouts. Notice that both sides in that conflict of values had barriers going both ways. Both sides wanted to quarantine the others.

Then, suddenly, COVID-19 changed everything, on both sides. What Trump tried unilaterally (walls, and travel bans) now governors and mayors are demanding. What Trump fought against (socialism and government handouts) now he champions.  (Why write fiction when real life is more dramatic?)

In those real-life stories there are internal and external conflicts, and there are character arcs and situation outcomes that resulted. Both sides were involved in a fight for (or against) borders and for (or against) quarantines.

A DISTANT BUT RELATABLE ILLUSTRATION

Some years ago, just after the Sundance Film Festival, I was with a few other writers and story gurus as the guest of an actor-producer at one of those large vacation rentals in the mountains above Park City, Utah.  We spent days breaking a story down on colorful four-by-six index cards taped to a glass door wall around which we sat trying to figure out how to tell the story in subtext. We were stumped about how we should show the story and not just tell it. We had worked all day and it was now 10:30 at night with no apparent solution. We gave up and went to our respective rooms for the night. The next morning, our host (the actor-producer) came down to breakfast beaming ear-to-ear. He had figured out a solution. Referring to the protagonist, our host said, "He gives a speech!"  And then he proceeded to act out the speech, which explained explicitly (presumably to the audience) what subtext couldn't. Of course! It was perfect! It worked! We had crossed a threshold, a barrier, we were no longer "quarantined" in our little subtext rooms. What we had fought against, we were suddenly for. 

ALL STORIES ARE THIS WAY...even stories about creating stories.

In Once Up a Time in Hollywood, washed-up actor Rick Dalton feels quarantined. He's always playing the heavy who gets killed in Act 3. His career is fading. One day he realizes he's living next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. But there's a wall and a big iron gate that keeps him out. Then tragedy strikes (through the kindness of producer, Tarantino's, revisionist history) and Rick finds the wall/iron gate opening for him (music cue) as if by magic, and he's released from his "quarantine."

In Knives Out, the Thrombey family is quarantined in deceased Harlan Thrombey's mansion until Benoit Blanc can knock down enough walls and barriers to find the murderer. Meanwhile Marta Cabrera, Harlan's personal assistant and nurse, is psychologically quarantined thinking she killed the novelist as she hides behind a "porous wall" of deceit (and vomit).

In Elizabeth (the Shekhar Kapur directed Cate Blanchett's vehicles), the Queen is continually quarantined by her throne and responsibilities, as multiple figures of court and France attempt to tear down her walls or the walls around England.

In Midway, U.S. military characters battle the walls erected by Japan's Imperial Navy in the Pacific by self-quarantining their lives in doomed dive bombers and ships to build a wall around their country and keep the Imperial Army out of America.

In a sense, EVERYTHING is about walls, barriers and quarantines.

DAO's YING/YANG

The Dao Ying/Yang symbol illustrates several things about the conflict in stories and arcs of characters. Ironically, the ancient symbol visually represents one of the 2001: A Space Odyssey themes from Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra—that of eternal reoccurrence. To the Daoist it is a symbol of the oneness of the cosmos. In a simple way the Ying/Yang symbolizes the eternally rotating day and night, and how the earth (and our lives) forever rotates between light and dark, good and evil. That is true not just physically, but psychologically.

Therefore, a good story, as explained by The Moral Premise principle, is a conflict between the light (a particular virtue, or strength) and the dark (a particular vice, or weakness). And if you're watching a successful television series, which is eternally caught in Act 2, the conflict between that vice and virtue continues every week for years. The Ying/Yang rotates as the light chases the dark's tail, and the dark chases the light's tail, all the while the dark has some goodness to it (the white dot), and the light contains some imperfection (the black dot). This is life. This is the cosmos. There is constantly this internal and external conflict that keeps life interesting.

But there's something significant about walls and quarantine in this symbol of the cosmos. Jordan Peterson suggests that our best life is lived in the border between the light and the dark or to use his terms: between "perfect order" and "abysmal chaos."  To be quarantined inside perfect order (the white) there would be no innovation or human progress. Why? Because innovation and progress demand we take risks and step into the unknown, the chaos. And by experimenting with things unknown in the world of chaos we discover ways to enhance the order in our lives. Likewise, if we were to keep our lives absolutely pure, we risk getting a disease for which we have no antibodies....and we die. In that case our bodies have not built up knowledge of how to deal with chaos, which is dangerous. Vaccines introduce small amounts of the disease in our healthy bodies and teach our ordered lives to develop anti-bodies. 

Stories are like that. In Act 1 our protagonist lives in the ordered-balanced-lighted world. Everything is supposedly fine. But something alien enters his life and throws it into chaos. To solve the chaos and rebalance this life, he has to enter the world of chaos, the unknown, the dark, Act 2, the Special World. While in Act 2 he learns about the problem firsthand. In Act 2 he returns to his village with the elixir in hand to solve the problem for the rest of humanity. In this way, our protagonist lives on the border between order and chaos. He straddles the wall. An effective protagonist is not quarantined on either side—although in the early pages of Act 1 he may be quarantined—and by entering Act 2 he breaks out and crosses the threshold. Recall the Moment of Grace in LIAR! LIAR! when cashless Fletcher Reede stands on the fence line between the car pound and his ex-wife, Audrey, who holds the check book, and he suddenly realizes (music cue), "I'm a bad father. I'm a bad father."  And Audrey says, "You're not a bad father when you stop 'quarantining' yourself with your lies and show up." (Okay so she didn't say that exactly.)  But you get the point.

So, go quarantine yourself away and write that story. That's what I should be doing, but I'm writing this instead. I'm not sure which is the quarantine...writing or finding an excuse not to write.

Blessings,

stan

Jordan Peterson and the Moral Premise

I do not think Jordan Peterson has read or is even aware of the Moral Premise as a book. But of the concept and how application of the moral premise applies to life and to stories that connect with people he is an expert. In this interview (from 2018) he speaks to the connection of life and stories and the moral premise for about 2 minutes from about 24:00 to 26:40.