CHAPTER 7
Miss Iceland, the Gangster, and the Cat: What Happens When You Burn the First Draft
IMAGINE YOU ARE on the television game show Let’s Make a Deal.
The host offers you a choice: Would you like the prize behind door Number 1, door Number 2, or door Number 3? Behind two of the doors is a joke prize, like a goat. Behind one door is the grand prize, a new car.
You choose door Number 1. To make things more interesting, the host then opens door Number 3 and reveals a goat standing behind it. Now, he says, would you like to switch your pick to door Number 2, or stay with your first choice, door Number 1?
Our instinct, here and in so many other ways, is to stick with our first answer. We think of that first answer as the best answer. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have given it in the first place.
Nevertheless, switching to door Number 2 would double your odds of winning.
It doesn’t sound right. Shouldn’t our chances be the same, at least? Our chances aren’t the same, however, because the door that was opened wasn’t chosen at random. It is never the door you picked and always a door with a goat that is opened.
This means that when you first chose a door, you had a one-third chance of being right. If you keep your original answer, your odds stay at one-third. But now, if you switch, with one of the goat doors eliminated for you, you raise that chance of winning to two-thirds. Your odds double because there was a two-thirds chance you chose a goat in the first place. Since the door for the car is never opened, switching now flips you from a two-thirds chance of a goat to a two-thirds chance of a car.
We have a first-answer bias. They are faster and easier, and it is intuitively pleasing to think that our first answer is our best answer. But it isn’t.
How do we move problems out of the center of our thoughts? The first step is pushing past our first draft.
Pushing past a first draft lets you put the problem down. Pushing past the first draft is where you’ll find the answer. The first draft of the Jaws script was obvious. Get yourself a giant shark. Have it eat people. It was the second draft—the one where Spielberg decided to make a shark movie without a shark—that didn’t come from the pile of first available thoughts, and that made the movie a classic.
* * *
MOST PEOPLE THINK their jobs might be a little repetitious sometimes. But imagine coming in at the same time each day to say the very same words, and hear the very same responses.
That’s been Catherine Russell’s workday since Ronald Reagan was president, as she has played the same part in the same play for more than twenty-five years. The play flies so low under the radar that many theatergoers consider its existence an urban legend, according to the New York Times, which largely credits Russell (who also serves as general manager of the theater company) for its longevity. With eight performances a week, having never called in sick or taken a vacation, Catherine Russell has appeared in Perfect Crime more than 10,000 times. During a New York City transit strike, she drove around town picking up actors and crew members. During snowstorms and hurricanes she’s found a way to the theater. The show must go on, after all. Russell’s understudy surely has the least fulfilling job in the history of show business.
Russell has certainly made some history during her stint, including being officially recognized by The Guinness Book of World Records for having appeared in the same play more than anyone else has ever done. She’s earned the nickname “the Cal Ripken of off-Broadway” and even had the chance to meet Cal Ripken himself. She takes a certain comfort in the belief that her record will never be broken—she figures there’s no one who would be crazy enough to try.
If ever there was a person tempted to make do with first-draft thinking, it would be Catherine Russell. She hasn’t even had to so much as learn a new line in more than twenty years since the playwright stopped tinkering with his creation and rewriting dialogue on the fly in the early years of its run. Nevertheless, she challenges herself to bring something new to every performance as she constantly reinvents the part.
Perfect Crime is a murder mystery centered on Russell’s character, Margaret, a psychiatrist who may have murdered her husband. Toward the end of the play, Margaret is interrogated by a police detective who hopes he might elicit a confession. Eager to disrupt the flow of the conversation, at one point Margaret blurts out “I love you” to the detective. The line could be taken for humor, for depravity, or even as a serious plot point. Should the audience laugh, gasp, or hang on the detective’s response? Russell has explored all three possibilities. Indeed, she says, there are hundreds of ways to say “I love you,” and “I’ve tried them all.”
Initially the play was set to run for a month. The production had a good month and the run was extended. A few months later, the show committed to staying open for a year. Twenty-five years later, it is the longest-running play in New York theater history.
As much as she throws away the first draft in her acting, it was in her behind-the-scenes role that Catherine Russell ditched all initial impulses. Over its first seventeen years, the show had moved to various stages as leases expired and new venues were secured. In 2005, it appeared that the show would have to close. The company needed a new theater, and there was nothing available that fit the show’s budget and needs. Staring straight at the problem would have meant the end of the line for the show and for Catherine Russell’s role in it.
Hoping to keep a good thing going, Russell took charge. Understanding that there were no “theaters” available, she expanded the search. Was there a space available that they could turn into a theater? She found one in the form of a bankrupt beauty school. She formed a theater company to convert the beauty school into two theaters and a separate rehearsal space.
In keeping with her longevity theme, in the other theater Russell is running a new production of The Fantasticks. The original version ran for forty-two years and holds the record for the longest-running off-Broadway musical.
Meanwhile, the rehearsal space has been used by an array of acting luminaries, including Al Pacino.
As the general manager of the theater company, Catherine does more than star in the show every night. She oversees ticket sales and keeps an eye on the theater company’s budget, and she’s even had to fix a leaking toilet in the women’s room. Most nights she solves problems until 7:50. Then she has ten minutes to get in character.
To keep the seats filled, she is constantly expanding the way the company sells tickets, using daily deals, social media, outreach to school groups, and other efforts. She takes great pride in the fact that her play’s relatively low ticket prices mean that many first-time theatergoers come through the door.
For Russell, Perfect Crime has given her a career, and it’s been a career of burning the first draft. Whose first draft would be to stay with a play, year after year after year? Whose first draft would be to continue redefining the role she played, and then to redefine it again? Whose first-draft response to learning there were no theaters available would be to create one on her own? In fact, it has been a life of second drafts, even as she’s been reading from the same page the whole time.
In the end, there’s a joy to the work and a surprising degree of variation for Catherine Russell. Every time the curtain rises, she’s seen far past the problems right in front of her and found joy. As she tells acting students, loving your work is a triumph that must not be underestimated. “I say to them, ‘When you’re riding the subway in the morning, look around and see who looks happy to go to work. How many look happy?’ They say, ‘Not that many.’ I say, ‘If you want to be happy, you have to find work that you love to do.’”
* * *
A GOOD MAGAZINE article is like a chance encounter on a plane. For a brief moment it is at the center of your thoughts, but then it fades completely away.
Among the remarkable aspects of “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” Gay Talese’s 1966 Esquire magazine profile of Frank Sinatra, is that it is to this day remembered, discussed—revered, even. The story, with scenes, dialogue, action, and vivid descriptions, served as a clarion call to those who believed nonfiction could be as rich and gripping as fiction. It remains one of the original pillars of the New Journalism movement.
More than all that, it is still read because it is just plain interesting. With Sinatra dodging Talese’s requests for an interview, Talese captures the man merely by circling in his orbit. Reading the profile, you genuinely feel that you have gained a glimpse into Sinatra’s world, including those who enter and depart it in a flash.
Harlan Ellison was one such flash.
Ellison was just standing in the far corner of a club, watching some people playing pool.
Sinatra was there that night, sitting at the bar surrounded by his team of yes-men and hangers-on. Sinatra noticed Ellison’s boots. And he didn’t like them.
From across the room, Sinatra starts in with Ellison about the boots. He tells him flatly, “I don’t like the way you’re dressed.”
Then he asks Ellison what he does for a living. Ellison tells Sinatra that he is a plumber; another man in the club tells Sinatra that Ellison wrote a screenplay. With disdain, Sinatra dismisses it as a terrible movie. Ellison says it’s not out yet.
It was just a banal distraction for Sinatra, who, as the title of the piece noted, was glumly fighting a cold. Talese aptly describes it as a moment that Sinatra probably forgot about three minutes later but that Harlan Ellison would remember for the rest of his life. But to the reader, Talese conveys the intensity of this ridiculously tiny moment and makes it come alive.
Like Catherine Russell’s record-breaking run, the first great triumph of the Sinatra profile is merely that it exists. After giving Talese a noncommittal response, Sinatra’s press agent ultimately refused to set up an interview for Talese. Anyone else would have been stymied by the thought of writing a profile of Frank Sinatra without Frank Sinatra. Talese himself at first thought that without an interview he wouldn’t have much of a profile. But on second thought, he wondered if he could find something deeper and more interesting without the standard celebrity interview quotes.
Though he never did get to speak to Sinatra, Talese did speak to Harlan Ellison and a number of Sinatra’s friends and acquaintances. More than that, he watched. He soaked in the atmosphere around a man who was once one of the biggest stars in the world but on the eve of his fiftieth birthday was facing a new reality. Neither he nor any singer of his day would ever again be the center of the music universe. That place had been assumed by Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and all the other new singer-songwriters who had taken over the industry. Not yet old enough to be a source of nostalgia, not young enough anymore to stake a new claim on success, Sinatra was, for the time, stuck. And Talese conveyed that feeling perfectly in confrontations over boots and other small moments.
Talese credits the depth and perspective of his writing to a process that is built to wring first-draft thinking out of his work. The elaborate steps he goes through offer him round after round after round of opportunity to reimagine his pieces and quash easy initial impulses.
He begins with elaborate notes. Oddly enough, for note taking he uses cardboard shirt inserts from his dry cleaners. From the material on his shirt inserts, he begins writing by hand on yellow legal pads. From the pads, he types his work out on a typewriter.
At each stage he is refining, reshaping, and recrafting his work.
When he has a first draft, he hardly imagines it as a finished or near-finished product. In fact, he takes his pages and pins them to the wall. Why? He is so committed to not assuming that the first draft should stand that he wants to “look at it fresh, as if somebody else wrote it.”
At times he’s even gone to the trouble of reading his pages at some distance—using binoculars and standing across the room—to maximize the feeling of looking at it new.
Even when he’s reading his pages on a desk in front of him, he likes to make two copies. One copy is regular size. He shrinks the second copy to make it one-third smaller. He likes the effect of feeling like he is reading two different versions and giving each an independent read. “It helps me get a different perspective,” Talese explained.
To Talese, a first draft of a story is just another set of notes. It has no standing to him. It is not nearly finished. It is just a step.
“I write and rewrite and rewrite and write,” he said. And in throwing out first-draft thinking and pinning up the first draft itself for skeptical viewing, Talese transformed a forgettable Sinatra interview into an unforgettable piece that helped set a new standard for what nonfiction writing could be.
* * *
HERE’S A QUESTION you don’t get asked every day. Imagine a distant planet. It’s very different from Earth. Now, what do the creatures there look like? Think of one.
Take a moment. See it in your mind. Get something to write with. Draw one of these creatures. Right here in the margins. Draw it right now.
Okay, put your pencil down.
We have a very romantic notion of imagination. We think of imagination as both remarkably complex and inherently unique. We can’t predict it, model it, contain it. The imagination is our own laboratory of infinite possibilities. Or so we hope.
But take a look at your creature. Did you give it eyes? How many? Two? Does it use those eyes for sight? Where did you put the eyes—are they above the mouth, or below? Are they placed symmetrically, or are they wildly uneven?
More likely than not, you gave your space alien eyes that work and look just like the eyes you know from humans and mammals and other familiar creatures. That’s what the subjects in psychologist Thomas Ward’s experiment did.1 He asked them to dream up space creatures with any kind of shape, form, or function they chose, and they produced traditional Earth-like beings with familiar shapes, forms, and functions.
Ward’s participants didn’t sketch out creatures with wheels for feet or mouths on their legs. Their creatures generally did have legs, but they were just used for walking. Overall, 89 percent imagined a space being with no more than one major difference from Earth creatures.
Ward found that despite our capacity to access a virtually infinite imagination, our first take on an imaginative task is a product of tapping preestablished categories. Much the same way we know, reflexively, how to sort stacks of books or blocks into categories and subcategories, we tap existing categories as our first step in using our imagination—even when the task is to think of a creature that doesn’t exist.
The category effect is so strong that when Ward conducted a second experiment—this time suggesting a category to his subjects—the results were as if his subjects had no imagination at all. In that second study, Ward again asked subjects to imagine a distant planet and a creature who lived there. This time, he told participants that the space creature had feathers. The alien creatures people drew came with wings, and beaks, and no ears—because the word feathers triggered the category birds, the subjects went no further in considering the question.
Here was an opportunity for a wild act of imagination—the subject’s mind on a distant planet with who knows what kind of atmosphere and other conditions. Before them a blank sheet of paper and total freedom to conjure up something unique. And with just the mere hint of a category, we all wind up imagining a distant planet inhabited by giant ducks.
As Ward watched subjects give in to this categorization impulse, he wondered what would happen if you pushed people past their first category.
In his third experiment, Ward provided some background about his distant planet. The planet, he said, was almost entirely covered in molten lava. Between the vast oceans of lava, there were only a few islands of solid, inhabitable land. To survive, creatures on the planet needed to have the ability to travel from island to island in search of food.
To this he added one more detail. He told one group that the creatures of this planet had feathers. He told another group that the creatures of this planet had fur.
The feather group—given a terrain that demands flight and a creature with feathers—went about drawing up an array of pedestrian-looking birds.
But the fur group’s instincts to immediately place this imaginative task within a simple categorization were thwarted. In effect, they were asked to think of something both birdlike and not birdlike. And the result was dramatic.
Instead of copying something familiar, people in this group created creatures that were entirely unique. Gone was the impulse that any creature with one bird feature should have every bird feature—thus the need to fly didn’t mean the need for a beak or being without visible ears.
Lined up side by side, the work of the feather group is instantly recognizable as some variation on a common bird you could see in your backyard, while the work of the fur group looks like nothing you have ever seen.
The numbers show how profound a difference this made. In the feather group, even though they were imagining these birdlike beings living on a planet of molten lava, only 30 percent of the subjects gave their creature a novel, non-Earth feature to help them thrive in that environment. In the fur group, not only were they mixing features in a way not found here, but 57 percent gave their creature a unique adaptive ability not found on Earth.
The fur group had to push past their first-draft impulse to rely on what they already knew. Simply drawing a bird wouldn’t work, because birds don’t fit in the fur category. Pushing past that first draft doubled the fur group’s core measure of creativity and eliminated the reflexive categorization that dictated the terms of the feather group’s work.
As Ward’s results illustrate, our first draft taps our first available category. Whatever problem we are trying to solve, our response is limited to things we already know, things that come to mind easily. Far from being impossible to predict, model, or contain, first-draft ideas are a reflex no more unique to you than the impulse to straighten your leg if you are hit right below the knee.
These first impulses block us from assembling unique combinations of knowledge or accessing truly original ideas. Instead, our first draft is a product of structured imagination. First drafts treat imagination challenges like a mathematics problem: We simply work from existing information, and we try to add it up.
Could Ward’s subjects have come up with more creative aliens? To Ward it is obvious: “The answer is yes. Subjects could have decided to pattern their creations after any of an infinite variety of visual forms, including recently encountered clouds, rocks, sand dunes, plates of spaghetti, or other entities.” But they didn’t if they stopped with their first draft.
Ward calls it “the path of least resistance and the tyranny of the particular.” The fastest, easiest answer will be something you already know that comes to mind immediately and will not add anything new.
There is a better way. “Experiencing difficulty in developing a satisfactory product from a known exemplar can increase the possibility of creative outcomes,” Ward notes. In plain English, if you are willing to throw away your first draft, you will create a better one—one that is vastly more innovative and useful.
* * *
ONE HUNDRED YEARS ago, the masters of the universe bought American railroads. “It was an institution, an image of man, a tradition, a code of honor, a source of poetry,” Jacques Barzun wrote, but more than that, Wall Street tycoons and European barons were drawn to the industry by the promise of eternal wealth.
Fifty years later, the business was neither eternal nor profitable. Blue-chip railroads—the New York Central, the Pennsylvania Railroad—vanished under a mountain of debt. Others desperately sought mergers or bailouts or some kind of lifeline.
In 1960, when the Harvard Business Review took up the subject of the fall of the mighty American railroad, it said that the cause was myopia—that is, nearsightedness, lack of imagination, and absence of foresight. In other words, first-draft thinking.
The issue was that the railroad companies defined themselves around their product. They had the trains, the cars, the track. They were in the railroad business, and that had always been a great business to be in. But a customer who needs to move freight has no inherent need for trains. The ascendency of planes and trucks gave shippers an array of more flexible options—and they took advantage of them. In the process, railroad shipments declined despite a booming American economy and an explosion in the total quantity of goods shipped.
The Harvard Business Review describes the railroad tycoons of 1900 as “imperturbably self-confident.” If you had told them then that in sixty years they would be “on their backs, broke, pleading for government subsidies, they would have thought you totally demented”—it was not possible, “not even a discussable subject or an askable question … the very thought was insane.” Of course, they would have thought the jet airplane an insane proposition, too. By that measure, a lot of seemingly insane things come to be.
The railroads loved their first draft. The rail companies had built something great, and they intended to keep it just the way they had first imagined it. But as the Harvard Business Review warned, unless they shifted their focus from their product to their customer, they weren’t going to be shipping anything at all.
Fifty years after the Harvard Business Review gave the railroad industry last rites, investment guru Warren Buffett made the single biggest acquisition of his career. It was what he called “an all-in bet.” And what he went all-in on was an American railroad.
It was a stunning turn for an investor known for making big bets on the best-run companies. Some skeptics wondered if Buffett, known to have played with trains as a child, had finally slipped and let sentimentality instead of cold, hard numbers guide his decision making. Weren’t there one hundred years of reasons not to buy railroads?
In announcing his purchase of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation, Buffett called it the kind of company that will be around for “two hundred years.” He clearly enjoyed the fact that others had missed this opportunity because they didn’t know what was happening in the railroad industry today.
No longer huddled together hoping to stall the passage of time, American railroads were now thriving, twenty-first-century companies. Railroads had, finally and decisively, thrown away the first draft.
Instead of assuming the value of rail, companies began integrating rail to best serve their customers’ needs. Instead of ignoring other modes of transportation, railroads led the way on intermodal shipping, in which products can be seamlessly transferred from planes, trains, ships, and trucks all at one facility. Today, a portable cargo container might be snapped onto the back of a train car and moved within a few miles of its destination before being shifted to the back of a truck trailer for the final customer delivery.
Railroad companies also invested in better engines and more efficient designs, including double-stacking train cars. The result is that rail today is the unquestioned leader in moving freight at the lowest possible fuel cost. In terms of volume, one train can move the same amount of freight as 280 trucks.
Buffett pounced because he saw that the new American railroad company had figured out how to serve its customer. Like drawing truly original aliens after the right prompting, the railroads had finally thrown out the old categories, opened their minds, and moved on to the second draft. From the depths of 30 percent market share a half-century earlier, railroads today move more than half of all the freight in this country.
“It will be here,” Buffett said without reservation. “A good railroad will be here as long as there is an American economy.” That is, as long as they keep looking past the first draft.
* * *
AMERICA’S MOST WANTED aired sixteen segments focused on him. The FBI had a task force whose mission consisted entirely of finding him. Officials estimate that it was the most expensive manhunt in American law enforcement history. And yet, for eighteen years, convicted mob boss and murderer James “Whitey” Bulger eluded capture. No ordinary gangster, working in an industry not exactly known for its deportment, Bulger nevertheless stood out for being uniquely vicious and duplicitous.
Charlie Gasko had little in common with any infamous crime figure. Far from throwing money around, he seemed to have barely enough to live on. His clothes were plain. He didn’t own a car or anything of value. His furniture was worn through. Charlie was known as a model tenant in his apartment complex. He was a man who never complained about anything or anyone, and of whom not an unkind word was uttered. Charlie was quiet, reclusive, quick to pet neighborhood strays, but otherwise entirely unremarkable.
Charlie liked to spend his time inside watching television. One show he never missed was America’s Most Wanted. He probably saw all sixteen of those Whitey Bulger segments.
Despite their obvious differences, Charlie and Whitey did have one important thing in common—they were the same person. But the character Whitey had created was so unassuming that no one connected the two during thirteen years living in the same rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica.
The FBI—unimaginatively using first-draft thinking—had sought Bulger by looking for a mob boss. “We were looking for a gangster and that was part of the problem,” said Charles Fleming, a Boston police detective assigned to the FBI’s Bulger task force. “He wasn’t a gangster anymore.”
While the FBI looked for mob boss Bulger living in luxury in Europe, the Charlie Gasko version barely left the house.
While the FBI tried to track Bulger’s piles of money, Charlie Gasko lived like a senior citizen on a fixed income.
But with Osama bin Laden having recently been eliminated, Whitey Bulger became the FBI’s most wanted man. Prompted by years of frustration and their target’s newfound status, the FBI finally changed its approach to the search. As with the railroads, circumstances had finally shaken the FBI out of its commitment to the first draft and opened the path to the answer.
Instead of thinking about places a mob boss might live, they targeted places that might be agreeable for an eighty-year-old man. And instead of focusing on Bulger—not easily recognizable on the street, as years of experience and sixteen America’s Most Wanted profiles proved—they focused on Catherine Greig, Bulger’s companion. Greig was more than twenty years younger than Bulger, and the FBI thought that at this stage she might leave a more distinctive and memorable impression with people.
With Greig as the focus, the FBI created a new television ad asking the public for help. It aired it in markets in California and elsewhere.
The ad hit the airwaves on a Monday. CNN did a story on the ads later that day. The CNN story was seen in Reykjavik, Iceland, by a former Miss Iceland who liked to spend her winters in Santa Monica.
She instantly recognized Catherine Greig because she had regularly seen Greig and Bulger feeding a stray cat on a nearby street corner and had sometimes stopped to chat with them.
Tuesday, the FBI received a call from Iceland.
Wednesday, with surveillance in place, the FBI confirmed that they had located Bulger and Greig. Bulger was duped into coming down to the apartment building’s basement and arrested without incident. Greig then gave herself up.
Thus ended life on the run for one of the nation’s most notorious crime figures. In the end he was undone not by violence or a flashy lifestyle but by the mundane habits of an ordinary old man who liked to pet stray cats. How did the FBI catch the gangster Whitey Bulger? They finally stopped focusing on the problem of the missing gangster and started looking for an old man.
THE TAKEAWAY
The first draft is the most obvious response to the problem at hand. It is the best way to define the situation on the problem’s terms.
In the first draft, railroads didn’t need to think about customers, the FBI looked for a gangster in gangster places, Catherine Russell gave up on the play that gave her a career, and Gay Talese canceled his profile of Frank Sinatra because Sinatra wouldn’t talk to him.
But when you get past the first draft, you can see past the problem. The railroads redefined their business and again became the object of tycoon’s dreams. The FBI redefined their search and got their man. Catherine Russell redefined her role and literally created her own stage. And Gay Talese redefined the forgettable celebrity profile and built a legacy on Sinatra not talking to him.
First drafts are unimaginative, built on the narrow categories provided by our problem. They are the first thing we can grab. As Thomas Ward found, we are twice as creative when the first impulse doesn’t work.
A first draft is a magnifying glass, useful for taking a close look at what’s right in front of you. Keep going past the first draft and you’ll find a telescope, something that will help you see beyond what’s closest and easiest to grab, and let you see what you’ve never seen before.
TWO FOR THE ROAD: WORKING ON THE SECOND DRAFT
Fail with joy. Try something that probably won’t work. Try something that definitely won’t work. We want to be right so much that we desperately try to cut out failing, but there’s exploration and discovery to be found in failing. The cofounder of animation giant Pixar, Ed Catmull, describes their process as “going from suck to nonsuck.” What they do is supposed to be bad in the beginning, and from the bad they create the magic. Andrew Stanton, director of Pixar hits Finding Nemo and WALL-E, says in filmmaking “my strategy has always been: Be wrong as fast as we can.” Pixar’s leaders understand that there is so much freedom and possibility in not being afraid to fail that failing first actually makes their movies better than if they had never failed at all.
Do something out of order. Whatever your routine is, mix it up. Do things out of order. It can be as minor as putting your sandwich together backwards—put the jelly on first today and then the peanut butter. When researchers had people do mundane things out of order, they produced an 18 percent jump in cognitive flexibility scores that measure the capacity to build ideas from multiple concepts.2