3 enduring lessons from the writer of The Princess Bride
When I was a young film student, the most universally recommended books on Hollywood were William Goldman’s memoirs: Adventures in the Screen Trade, and his follow-up, Which Lie Did I Tell?. Goldman was the screenwriter of the beloved Princess Bride, as well as classics like All the President’s Men and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He was revered as an acerbic truth-teller.
I devoured both books. Like his films, Goldman is razor sharp and magnificently entertaining. The pages are chock-full of wonderful Hollywood anecdotes and astute professional advice.
Almost twenty years later, there’s wisdom from those pages that’s not only stuck with me, but has only felt more true with my own age and experience. Three things in particular.
Good art is both surprising and inevitable
In a pithy section about writing original screenplays, Goldman articulates an idea that I remember hitting my young mind like a ton of bricks:
An original screenplay? Nothing to it, really. Just come up with a new and fresh and different story that builds logically to a satisfying and surprising conclusion (because Art, as we all know, needs to be both surprising and inevitable).
I’d never heard storytelling, or art, described in exactly this way before: as needing to be both “surprising” and “inevitable”.
On the last page of Which Lie Did I Tell?, he repeats this idea:
A good story is something with an interesting premise that builds logically to a satisfying and surprising conclusion.
He claims that these are “Kubrick’s words — he denied them, so who knows, but somebody wise said it, maybe it was me”.
In the intervening years, I’ve seen this phrase about good stories as “surprising and inevitable” come up over and over.
Some people attribute it to the novelist Flannery O’Connor, who wrote that “what makes a story work” is “an action or gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected”.
Other people source it all the way back to Aristotle who, writing in Poetics about “the ideal plot”, observes that tragedy is:
[B]est produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design.
I’d imagine that Aristotle, in Goldman’s view, qualifies as “somebody wise”—and Aristotle was specifically taking umbrage with dramas of his time that resolved their endings with the convention of deus ex machina, whereby actors playing gods would literally be lowered onto the stage “by a machine” and tidily wrap up all the loose ends of the plot.
“Surprising and inevitable” also, interestingly, maps well to how the makers of South Park describe their writing process, which is to avoid having scenes where you could say “and then” between them; instead, they try to have story beats connected either by “but” (i.e. a surprise happens) or “therefore” (i.e. a cause-and-effect happens). Otherwise you end up with what some writers call “a stack of scenes”.
Anyway, the description of good art as “surprising and inevitable” is one that I’d argue applies equally well to games, music, or any media.
It’s possible Goldman didn’t invent the phrase, but he was certainly where I first encountered it. And it’s stuck with me, especially, through the last couple decades of “mystery box” shows and “twist ending” stories that have become increasingly fixated on the sheer surprise of their reveals outweighing any need for causality. These reveals, I’d argue, can feel like perverse inversions of deus ex machina—rickety “twists” that are illogically hoisted on screen to foil the characters. Diabolus ex machina.
Surprise is a powerful element. “In a sense,” Goldman says, a story is “a series of surprises… But for a surprise to be valid, we must first set the ground rules”. He compares it to a magician’s trick: just as critical as the illusion is the preparation. Or, as he puts it: “screenplays are structure”.
How you order words reveals information
Goldman writes about a fascinating story during the production of Marathon Man in which Sir Laurence Olivier came into conflict with the director, John Schlesinger. Olivier kept pausing before delivering a line, and the director didn’t want him to. The director wanted Olivier to interrupt the previous line being delivered by Roy Scheider.
Scheider’s line was: “I know that sooner or later you’re going to go to the bank”, and Olivier is supposed to interrupt him by saying “Perhaps I have already been”.
But Olivier kept pausing after Scheider says the word “bank”.
Olivier’s explanation is revelatory:
I’m trying to find out information… Roy says, “I know…” And I’m listening. Then he says, “I know that sooner or later…” And I’m still listening. Now he says, “I know that sooner or later you’re going to go…” And I’m still listening. Finally he says, “I know that sooner or later you’re going to go to the bank.” That pause I’m taking is to give me time to register the information about the bank.
Olivier’s solution is simple, but elegant:
Would it be all right if I changed it so that [Roy’s] line went, “I know that you’re going to go to the bank sooner or later?” You see, then I could register the word bank while he was saying “sooner or later” and I wouldn’t need the pause.
Goldman’s response:
Obviously it was fine with me and the line was altered and we went on without the pause. And probably this two minutes of rehearsal explained at length doesn’t seem like much put down in black and white.
But that moment — when the actor of the century asked me would I mind if he switched six words around — is the most memorable incident of my movie career.
I agree, the story “doesn’t seem like much”—but like Goldman, I was floored. It genuinely exploded how I thought about speaking and writing. How I order words, basically.
In all my years of “subject, predicate, object” grammar lessons, or “thesis, body, conclusion” high school essay writing, I’d never thought deeply about the way I arrange my words.
I’d never actively put myself in the position of the person receiving my words, and the understanding that they have from word to word. Every word reveals new information, and the order matters. Often times, you might want to put the most important information last—like a punchline. (As Strunk & White say: “Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.”) But not always. Like the Marathon Man line.
It’s such a trivial anecdote, but Goldman called it the most memorable incident of his movie career. I’ll never forget it, either.
“Nobody knows anything”
Goldman’s most legendary phrase, and the phrase for which he’ll likely be remembered forever.
[T]he single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry:
NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.
If there is a Roman numeral I to this book, that’s it…
Again, for emphasis —
NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.
Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess — and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.
Goldman had a particularly dim view of Hollywood studio executives, but the principle is true of every industry, and every person.
[D]id you know that Raiders of the Lost Ark was offered to every single studio in town —
—and they all turned it down?
All except Paramount.
Why did Paramount say yes? Because nobody knows anything. And why did all the other studios say no? Because nobody knows anything. And why did Universal, the mightiest studio of all, pass on Star Wars, a decision that just may cost them, when all the sequels and spinoffs and toy money and book money and video-game money are totaled, over a billion dollars? [Editor’s note: lol] Because nobody, nobody — not now, not ever — knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.
Timeless.
Rest in peace, Bill.
