Patrick Sean Barry's Blog: Rewarding Reads and Lessons Learned As a Writer

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by Sherwin B. Nuland, 234 pages

In my readings through history, I’ve come across Maimonides’ name numerous times. He is acknowledged the foremost rabbinical arbiters and philosophers in Jewish history. His copious work comprises a cornerstone of Jewish scholarship. But exactly who was he, what was his history, and when did he live? That's what I wanted to know.

So when I came across Sherwin Nuland’s highly accessible book on this historic figure, I grabbed it, and put it on my reading pile; and because of its short length, it made a great weekend read for me.

Before his death, Nuland was a professor of clinical surgery at Yale and widely known as the author of How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter which won the National Book Award and spent thirty-four weeks on the New York Times best seller list.

Nuland’s Maimonides explores the man’s life, influences and works, and provides an insight into the context of this historic figures impact on his world during his life and in the centuries following. Born in Córdoba during the end of the golden age of Jewish culture in the Iberian Peninsula, which was under Moorish rule, Moses Maimonides developed an early interest in sciences and philosophy. He read Greek philosophers accessible in Arabic translations and immersed himself in the sciences and learning of Islamic culture. Ultimately forced to leave Spain because of the harsh Islamic climate, he moved to Morocco and Palestine, and finally settled in Egypt, where he continued his work as a renowned physician, treating members of the ruling family in Cairo. He also eventually became the leader of the Egyptian Jewish community and its principal teacher. His writings as the Jewish culture’s foremost legal authority and scholarly philosopher brought him to ultimately be described as the Architect of Judaism.

Moses Maimonides was a Renaissance man before the Renaissance: a great physician who served a sultan, a peerless scholar of the Torah, a community leader, a groundbreaking philosopher whose greatest work — The Guide for the Perplexed — strove to reconcile scientific knowledge with faith in God. He was a Jew living in a Muslim world and a rationalist living in a time of superstition. Eight hundred years after his death, his works continue to inspire and stir debate. Nuland’s book, a comparatively quick read, is an insightful introduction to the greatest of Jewish thinkers.

Robert Stone taught at Amherst College when I was there. Unfortunately, having just transferred there as a junior and not being in the English department, and instead the Drama department, with a concentration on playwriting, I was not able to take any courses with him. Too little time at the college, and too much competition for enrollment in his small classes.

Robert Stone passed away at the beginning of this year, and since I read Damascus Gate shortly after his death, I thought it would be a suitable time to reflect on one of his more recent works, since he had an influence on me as a younger writer in the following years after moving to California. This effect on me related to his novels Dog Soldiers (winner of the National Book Award) and A Flag for Sunrise (set in Central America). I read both while developing my book Brother’s Keeper, set in Guatemala in the late 1980’s, and which I have re-written extensively and will be forthcoming in the near future… It was a project I began over twenty years ago which involved visiting Central America during the peak of the troubled and tragic times down there.

Damascus Gate takes place in mainly in Jerusalem, where Stone explores the contemporary theme involving the strange effect of religion in this timeless city. The novel’s hero, Christopher Lucas, is an American journalist writing a book on the ‘Jerusalem Syndrome’ and how particular people here are compelled to become religious lunatics—from a messiah to an Elvis—and in turn use the city as their theater. Half Jewish and raised as a Catholic, on his quest to write his story, Lucas finds encounters spies, prophets, conspiracies and fanatics which leads to a climactic scene under the Temple Mount, where a plot is afoot to blow up the sacred site and instigate a holy war (and to my observation the recent mini-series Dig on the USA Network borrows extensively from this novel.)

The cast of characters Lucas encounters range from singer Sonia Barnes, daughter of an interracial couple who is involved with a religious sect headed by Adam De Kuff, wealthy heir to a New Orleans fortune, and his ‘handler’ Raziel Melker, son of a politically powerful Michigan family, a musician and a heroin addict. The novel’s sub-plots explore gun and drug deals with Palestinian and Mossad involvement, characters with ruthless and lethal hidden agendas as the story world also ranges from the Tel Aviv, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the southern desert, and more. All the time Stone shares with the reader an underpinning of the different layers of history in this land along with a range of discussions with the characters on history, philosophy, morality and more. His command of obscure and esoteric religious history is impressive and remains a detail I appreciated.

Critically acclaimed by many, Stone is a notable writer, there is no doubt, and his writing is rich and vivid in its descriptions, providing the small details that help bring a moment to life. I would make one observation after finishing the book. While I liked it, and might read it again in a few years, I found the characters themselves almost entirely ‘in their heads’; there was virtually not heart to these characters. Themes of compassion and empathy were missing for me. Granted, the characters were driven, the action intense and compelling, as the novel seemed to maintain an objective of exploring themes of moral ambiguity, which John le Carré' so deftly explores in his novels. But without the heart and compassion, the characters seemed focused mainly on an intellectual level, and Stone seems to miss (for me) the soul of the matter within the human condition.

I was on the phone recently, giving comments on a friend’s screenplay treatment, and I found myself referring to the information below at a number of points in the discussion, so I thought it only appropriate to share it on a wider scale and to let it add to the critical mass of this blog.

Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces is readily acknowledged by George Lucas as being a critical source of inspiration for the Star Wars movies. Back in my Hollywood years all the writers in my circle of friends would nod in dutiful respect at Campbell’s work as a mythologist who had studied the myths of mankind and distilled eternal patterns in the storytelling of mankind through the eons, going all the way back to the most ancient times. Bill Moyers also did a PBS series of interviews with Campbell entitled “The Power of Myth,” and produced a coffee table book on the interviews. I watched the series, bought the book, and of course have Hero with a Thousand Faces along with a number of other books by Campbell.

So, when I saw that Christopher Vogler, a Disney story analyst, was giving a two-day weekend course on The Hero’s Journey based on distilling Joseph Campbell’s work and tailoring it for the screenwriting craft, I was immediately all in and registered for the seminar. I was not disappointed. This was easily over twenty years ago, and I had taken numerous other screenwriting seminars, and classes at UCLA extension, but this was information that went straight into my brain shelf and stayed there.

His system of framing the story telling process began when Christopher wrote a seminal internal memo at Disney, and you can go to his webpage to get the deeper details of his work. Here I will recount at the highest level the framework of storytelling he extracted from Campbell’s work (which is also found on Vogler’s website), and which remains a helpful and reliable framework review tool when considering the elements of a writer’s story structure and how these elements sync with the eternal and global schema of the hero’s mythical journey. In this blog they are also referenced within the three act structure traditionally used in screenplay writing. Christopher provides more insightful and scholarly explanations on his website, and I encourage you to check it out. Keep in mind some elements might fall in a different order in some stories. Here are the steps of the hero’s journey:

1. THE ORDINARY WORLD – Here the main character’s known world is established in the status quo along with the hero’s limited awareness of things to come.
2. THE CALL TO ADVENTURE – This is also referred to as the inciting action and the spark or catalyst that gets the story started. A challenge or problem which must be addressed is established here.
3. REFUSAL OF THE CALL – Realizing this situation is bigger than the main character (hero) ever anticipated, he at first says this is not his problem, it’s not for him. There’s a reluctance to go forward and a debate of the merits or importance of the journey is staged. Returning to the old ordinary world looks appealing now.
4. MEETING WITH THE MENTOR – Sometimes combined with the refusal of the call, this entails the encounter with an individual who has more knowledge of what is beyond, and what’s needed to be successful there. This is a guide of sorts who may or may not accompany the hero on the journey.
5. CROSSING THE THRESHOLD – The point of no return which includes a committing to the goal, whether prepared or not. This might include a sense of awakening. It may also involve the hero’s first confrontation with the powers that have created the problem or challenge.
[This story point concludes ACT ONE.]
6. TESTS, ALLIES AND ENEMIES – Here the hero faces trials that may be both physically and emotionally challenging. Allies to the hero’s cause appear, as do enemies, which are part of the testing cycle for the hero. At least one of these enemies will likely appear in the climax of the story. These elements bring the story to its mid-point where the story shifts dramatically based on new information, and enlightenment, that raises the stakes for the hero’s journey and requires renewed commitment to facing the challenges ahead.
7. APPROACHING THE INNERMOST CAVE – As the hero approaches the ultimate goal, preparation, learning and training are often part of this stage. This stage too can entail succumbing to temptations, or a fall from grace, where complications rise and the stakes get higher as unexpected obstacles are discovered.
8. THE ORDEAL – This is the dark night of the soul where the hero hits rock bottom, where the hero faces his inner demons, fears, weaknesses, etc. A symbolic death of the ego of sorts may be part of this stage, which ultimately brings about a rebirth. The hero is newly endowed to face the challenge or problem with a quantum leap of empowerment. This may include an epiphany or discovery of a hidden secret that releases the hero from a constricting bond, or intensifies the motivation and determination.
[This point concludes ACT TWO.]
9. SEIZING THE SWORD, REWARD – Empowered with new knowledge or strength, the hero commits to the attack the challenge, the final push with a new dynamic. This often entails a new or revised plan to achieve the goal based on new strengths acquired, or new knowledge discovered. This is presents a charging toward and into the climax of the story.
10. THE ROAD BACK – The twists and turns before the hero prevails, the enemy to the quest may show new strengths that have not been anticipated, which must be met with conviction and strength, and possibly bringing the hero to the very brink of survival.
11. THE RESURRECTION – At the climax, the hero is severely tested once more on the threshold of survival and is purified by a last sacrifice, another moment of death and rebirth, but on a higher and more complete level. By the hero’s action, the polarities that were in conflict at the beginning are finally resolved.
12. RETURN WITH THE ELIXIR – This is the denouement where a new life for the hero is confirmed, and a new status quo has been established. The hero returns to the ordinary world and brings the prize that be shared by all for the greater good.
[The conclusion of ACT THREE and the story.]

Christopher Volger also has a book which he wrote sometime after I took the course with him: The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers.

I enjoyed this book on a number of levels. I had traveled to the rain forest jungles of Latin America some years ago on my own quest for experience while researching a novel. I also felt some kinship with the author, David Grann, who felt compelled to research this first hand. His story is also of the story of The Lost City of Z. The subject of the quest to find this elusive place, and the story of the man who made it his life’s quest, however, resonated as well for me in other ways.

Based on his study of document in the National Library of Rio de Janeiro, British surveyor Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett named this mysterious city which had been described by a Portuguese explorer in his writings from 1753. The account described an advanced city seen from one of the many rivers in the Amazonian forest. While others dismissed the account, Fawcett became obsessed with discovering the city, and engaged in seven expeditions to the Amazon between 1906 and 1924, only to disappear on the last one, in the company of his son. The story captured the imagination of the world, while Fawcett’s wife maintained the home front, striving to mount rescue missions to find her lost family. Fawcett was never found, but the quest for finding him became passion for numerous people, all the way up to the recent past. And it was this obsession that Gann needed to explore for himself, tracing Fawcett’s exploration as best as possible, since he had maintained a secretive habit of hiding his maps to guard against competing explorers who might try to steal his glory.

A staff writer for The New Yorker, Grann’s book chronicles Fawcett’s, how he became an explorer, as well as his many journeys to the Amazon. As well, he also documents some of the explorers who went to find Fawcett, some of whom also never returned. Grann’s own experience in the jungle gave more of a vivid and intimate feeling for the reader to experience this fascinating, and wildly untamed world where the slightest misjudgment of where to step, or what to touch, could mean the different between life or death. The theme of a European’s obsession Amazonia also made me think of the documentary Burden of Dreams, the documentary of the director Werner Herzog’s filming of his obsession in the Amazon: Fitzcarraldo… and of course Herzog’s other epic of Amazonian obsession, Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The ending of the book also had a satisfying conclusion which included a visit to an archaeologist living native style among the indigenous tribes there, and his insight into the elusive lost city which Fawcett staked his and his son’s life on discovering.

I bought The Good German and Los Alamos at the same time (at the Agoura Hills, CA, Book Cellar, hardbacks for $1.00 each!), having seen the movie The Good German, with George Clooney, Cate Blanchet and Toby Maguire. Since Los Alamos was Joseph Kanon’s debut novel, I read it first, and with great interest. I like to study first novels of authors, to see what I insights I can gain on how they define themselves and their style and to learn from the exercise if possible.

As a Harvard educated veteran of the New York publishing world, I expected Kanon to be an author of the highest caliber, and I was not disappointed. Smart, literate, with a vivid eye for period detail, as well as mood and nuance, he captured the hermetic world of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos during its super-secret days during World War II when the atom bomb was in its final days of preparation. Place surreptitious love affairs and a mysterious murder in the middle of this top secret facility, blend it with the landscape of New Mexico and mid-forties Santa Fe life style, throw a fish out of water a former police reporter turned Army Intelligence agent named Mike Connolly from Washington DC to investigate the murder, which has immediate security implications for the Manhattan Project, and you’ve got a tense, well-constructed story - a blend of a murder mystery and a spy thriller woven into one.

I’d also read Martin Cruz Smith’s Stallion Gate—a separate novel from his Arkady Renko stories (like Gorky Park)—set in the exact same time and place, yet with a completely different story and cast of characters. I was curious to see how the two might weave together in my mind’s eye, an interesting tandem set. Los Alamos is a well-constructed story, with vivid descriptions, complex characters with their own moral failings, set in a story that did not give anything away till the last page. A winner debut in my view. I’ve went on to read the next three of his novels following this high-quality, richly textured read.

D.C. Fontana is a legendary writer, known best for her work on many of the Star Trek television series, including the original series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, as well as Babylon 5, Dallas, Streets of San Francisco, The Waltons, Kung Fu, and so much more. She is also a senior lecturer at the American Film Institute. Like I said: a legend. I met Dorothy Fontana – professionally known as D.C. Fontana – while working on the first season of Star Trek: TNG, and our friendship has endured ever since. I’ve been thankful for her intelligent insight, ready support and unconditional love, a rare combination in Hollywood. And when asked what’s the most important element in her writing and her stories – as she did in a recent Writers Guild of America online interview – she’ll quickly reply “Love.”

Through the years Dorothy and I have spoken about this theme on numerous occasions and her perspective is: “If it doesn’t have some element of love, then why are we watching or reading the piece?” I can’t disagree. And I think having a common reference on what that word means in different settings of the human experience is critical. The ancient Greeks provided a description of four categories of love.

Agápe – An unconditional love that accepts the person for who they are regardless of their flaws, the pure and idealized love for fellow human beings. While one may not like someone, yet they choose to love the person as a fellow human being. Agápe manifests itself as sacrifice and giving while expecting nothing in return. It includes the concepts of brotherly love, charity, as well as the love of God for man and of man for God.

Phileo – An affectionate, warm and tender platonic love, it is a more targeted, specific and elective love. It manifests itself as loyalty to friends, family, and community, and reflects virtue, equality, and familiarity. It embraces the desire of friendship with someone. While one may have Agápe for your enemies, Phileo love is more personal and individual. Phileo also encompasses love of an activity, for example of music, art or sports.

Storgē – It's the common or natural empathy, like parents feel for off their offspring. It almost exclusively refers to organic relationships within the family. Storgē is an unconditional love which accepts flaws or faults and ultimately compels the one experiencing this love to forgive without condition or reservation. It’s committed, sacrificial and makes the recipient feel secure, comfortable and safe.

Éros – Is the passionate and intense love, an intimate, emotional and sexual love that arouses romantic feelings, and sometimes accompanies a phenomenon of drive, obsession and individual transformation. Although this romantic love delivers a powerful commencement to the beginning of a relationship, to survive, it must evolve. Ultimately this love must mature to focus more on the needs of the other person, and vice versa. Sometimes, if the person “in love” does not feel original exciting passions, they will stop loving their partner.

So at the very core – the very heart of any of my writing – I find see the need for love to be woven into the stories I write. It’s the glue that binds people together and drives them forward and commits them to action that will have consequence for all.

Incidentally, as I write this, I’m reading a novel by a popular author, who specializes in blends historical mysteries with fast-paced action. I’m naturally attracted to the genre. However, I picked up one of this author’s books before, and stopped it in the first fifty pages due to story gaffes and dramaturgy I quibbled with. In the current novel those problems don’t exist, yet the story focus remains all about the mystery and the action. There’s no love. Nothing of the four categories above. Sure there’s a bit of sex, but it’s without the Eros, more of a mercenary feel to it. I’ll probably finish the book, because of the interesting historical subject matter, but I don’t feel compelled to seek out more writing by this author. That’s a lesson for me, and Dorothy provides insight into why I’m not compelled to reach out for more of this author, or will I ever become a fan. There’s no love.

A fun footnote: As a touching gesture of her love in our friendship, Dorothy named one of her characters in her Star Trek novel Vulcan’s Glory after my daughter who had just been born at the time: Enterprise Chief Engineer Caitlin Barry.

This is definitely my kind of book: a story with roots deep in the past, an original and enlightening contemporary narrative, all intertwined in a compelling structure that mystifies and compels. All the better when some the central story element of the past involve medieval times.

Andrew Davidson’s debut novel, The Gargoyle involves an unnamed narrator who is a burn victim from an automobile accident, leaving him little more than a husk of a living man. His past as a porn star, which led to him becoming a producer of that content, serves as a haunting memory of the pleasures of the flesh he will never know again. He's also a drug addict. Yet in the midst of this depressing state of affairs a beautiful, eccentric woman comes to him, insisting that they were lovers centuries before, which he dismisses out of hand. This is Maryanne Engle.

Maryanne Engle’s devotion to him cannot be ignored. Her dedication to him becomes the engine and pathway to his many months of painstaking healing in the hospital, and later in her home, an edifice evoking the feeling of a medieval castle. Her commitment to him, however, is challenged by her enduring passion which is fueled by a religious sense of duty and destiny: her sculpting of stone gargoyles. Between her days-long obsessive creativity cycles, she shares different stories with him, one of which is the serialized account of their story together. He was a mercenary in medieval Germany, and she was a nun at convent whose fame for mystics was widely known, and their scriptorium renowned for producing great works. When he becomes wounded in battle, his life expectancy nil, he is brought to the convent as a last effort at healing, and she becomes his caretaker. Their story in the book intertwines in the present and the past, as each takes care of the other in some measure, while the narrator of the present day story continues to cast doubt on the entire narrative. Yet with his history in the present of being a user of people and situations he finds himself when all other hope is lost, that a heart grows inside him with profound and resonating feelings for her.

I hesitate to give more details, because the journey is the thing in this read. It’s not formulaic in any way. It’s a story that refuses to follow traditional routes, yet ends with a satisfying and resonant closure. A rich, entertaining, insightful and enlightening read.

I clearly remember the first time I heard mention of Professor Joseph Needham’s name. I was taking a summer class in World History at Boston University where I learned that Chinese explorers came by ship to Eastern Africa long before Columbus got credit for discovering the New World. The existence of this British professor who shared rich insights into China’s inner secrets immediately intrigued me. It was not until many years later, however, that I came across this book in a Daedalus catalog, and as soon as I saw it, I knew I’d want to read it. Joseph Needham was the man who opened a window on China’s history to the world, and Simon Winchester tells the story of this unique man in a page-turning story filled with vivid and rich experiences depicting a man and a time with rare, entertaining and informative insight.

In 1937, while working as a biochemist at Cambridge University in England, Joseph Needham met a visiting scientist from China with whom he ultimately had a life-long affair, a relationship that would impact the course of his life, and by extension mankind’s understanding of China. Through her, he became acquainted with elements of the hidden story of China, its ancient technological and scientific past. Needham became deeply intrigued by the country, the culture, the people and the rich tradition of their inventiveness. As a result, Needham was determined to explore that blind spot in Western understanding of China, and after studying the Chinese language, accepted an invitation to visit China. That visit was the beginning of a decades-long relationship with the country, with a series of expeditions, which culminated in his writing a seventeen volume encyclopedia – Science and Civilization of China – documenting the comprehensive story of China’s history and their long list of technical innovations that the Western world has benefited from, but has up to that point little or no awareness or appreciation of their origins.

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom reads much like an epic fast moving novel at times, with cinematic moments where Needham is visiting the most remote regions of China in search of rare books, or a escaping a city under attack from Japanese, which is doomed to fall two days later. Balancing intimate personal stories with accounts engaged with the struggle for international political advantage, Simon Winchester paints an informative and engaging picture of Needham’s life and work. Learning about Needham is indeed an important chapter of history to understand the world from a more informed perspective. I read this book after my own visit to China. I enjoyed it immensely, and felt richer after finishing it, and it provided added context to places I had visited. I highly recommend this informative and entertaining read. I would not be surprised if we see a movie of his life sometime in the near future.

The Inciting Action of an Author’s Inspiration

Many years ago I met Martin Cruz Smith at a party. His wife was sisters with a good friend and work colleague at the time. As the author of Gorky Park, and the popular Arkady Renko series of novels, he had just begun to enjoy some celebrity as an author, but in this family and friend setting he was an open and engaged, supportive gentleman. He was interested in and curious about the people he spoke with and we had a brief dialog. I recall his speaking style reminded me of Dick Cavett.

Martin knew I was on the early path of pursuing a writing career, and he shared some of his thoughts on the creative experience, and some of the work behind the scenes. He spoke about the concept generation of how he developed one of his books. He shared how on one occasion during the seventies, he was alone, traveling through southern New Mexico, when he came upon a dirt road off the main route. On a whim, decided to drive down it and check it out. The road led to an old rusted gate, part of a chained link fence perimeter, with weathered government-issued signs forbidding entry. The place had something of a ghost town feeling. He got out of his care and climbed up onto the fence to get a better view inside, and before he knew it, two military MP’s had arrived out of nowhere in a Jeep. They demanded to know who he was and what his business was. And because he had Latino blood as part of his appearance, their manner was brusque and intimidating.

Martin was finally released from that encounter and left with a feeling a need to know what the heck that place was, and why these military guys were around guarding something that appeared to be de-commissioned and decades old. That encounter generated the unquenchable spark of curiosity that led to him ultimately writing a novel that included this setting. It was this project he was working on at the time we chatted. Martin later came to learn this location was one of the entrances to the detonation testing site for the atomic bomb during World War II—a little over an hour south of Los Alamos, where the Manhattan Project was centered. And from this encounter, Martin’s mind’s eye opened into a world he felt compelled to portray. The result was his novel Stallion Gate. In the years following my meeting Martin, I had read a number of his Arkady Renko books through the years, and enjoyed them. However, when I came across this title and read story description, I came to realize this is the book he was working on when I spoke him. By his asking himself that one question - "What's down that road?" - and by taking the answer to the ultimate destination, he created a process that resulted in a serious literary piece. Martin Cruz Smith driving curiosity from a simple and singular incident was an inspiration for me on the path to developing as a writer.

What a fascinating read which grew on me the more I entered the worlds the author created. People of the Book is like a detective story, a collection of short stories of the Jewish people’s plight through the centuries, and story of a young woman who labors to find herself as she struggles against the iron will of her judgmental mother an immensely successful surgeon. In her follow-on novel after her Pulitzer Prize winning March, Geraldine Brooks delivers a collection of stories within the framework of another story which binds them all together. Some have compared this to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, yet I don’t get that at all, except for the convention of looking into the past to gain some sense of revelation in the present. The themes and genre were distinctly different in my view.

A fictional account of the actual historical Sarajevo Haggadah, an antique Jewish prayer book, it places Hanna Heath, and Australian book conservator on the job to restore the tome before it goes on museum display. During her work, she finds small articles and unique details within the book - a butterfly wing, a stain on a page, a hair, and more – and they provide the device for the narrative to span the imagined history of the book, going back in time with each episode, all of which are woven into Hanna’s story in the present (set in 1996).

Each story has a poignancy of the human condition, portraying times in Europe’s history many of which are on the more obscure side of traditional Western readership awareness: the plight of Muslim and Jewish refugees during the tumultuous years of the Communist resistance against the Nazis in Yugoslavia during World War II; the challenges of Jewish life in Vienna in 1894 where undercurrents of anti-Semitism are growing more pronounced with each day; Venice 1609 where the Jewish Ghetto struggles for survival under the iron supervision of the ruling Catholic hierarchy; Tarragona, Spain 1492, where labors for survival under the lethal dictates of the Inquisition are always on the razor’s edge; Seville, Spain 1408 where Muslim rulers treat their Jewish slaves with fatal disregard. As Hanna commits herself to risking both her professional reputation and her relationship with her mother on the line, the reader delves continually deeper on a voyage of discovery of all the book’s mysteries. It was a rewarding, well-paced and educational read, and I recommend it highly.