Dr. William J. Carl, Greek Scholar-Novelist-Playwright-Episode #304

Jul 16, 2024 | 0 comments

“Just try new things. I mean, my whole life has been fun because I was willing to try writing screenplays, try writing a novel, try lecturing on the brain. Don’t be timid about it. Go for it. You can do it…also, you will want to give up many times. And I will say, never, ever give up. It was 30 years writing Assassin’s Manuscript and now it’s on sale in 42 countries and at the Harvard bookstore, of all places.”
~Dr. William J. Carl

Dr. William J. Carl is a Greek scholar, screenwriter, playwright, and lyricist. He’s also a former professor, seminary president, and pastor, who’s been a U.S. Senate Guest Chaplain. He’s been a speaker at Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Cornell, Boston University, Carnegie Mellon, as well as in Russia, South Africa, India, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Rwanda, and Canada.  Further, he’s also the former President of the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

William has authored eight nonfiction books (including lectures he gave at Princeton, two of which have been translated into Korean) and one novel, Assassin’s Manuscript, which is a “Dan Brown meets Daniel Silva”-style thriller. No less than Alex Haley, the author of Roots, encouraged him to write it.  I’ve read Assassin’s Manuscript and can tell you it’s an action-packed international page-turner in which politics, religion, and history play essential roles. I highly urge you to check it out.

William’s screenplay, Maggie’s Perfect Match, won the Telluride Indiefest Screenwriting Contest and the Dallas Screenwriting Contest, and it was a Quarter finalist in the Nicholl and the Austin Screenwriting contests. Not only did William turn Maggie’s Perfect Match into a play, but he’s also adapted it into a musical.

Since 2000, William has also lectured on the brain at medical schools and medical conferences.

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Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat:

Dr. William J. Carl: Just try new things. I mean, my whole Life has been fun because I was willing to try writing screenplays, try writing a novel, try lecturing on the brain. Don’t be timid about it. Go for it. You can do it. And I want to say, also, you will want to give up many times. And I will say, never, ever give up. I was 30 years writing a Assassin’s Manuscript and now it’s on sale in 42 countries and at the Harvard bookstore, of all places.

Announcer: This is StoryBeat with Steve Cuden. A podcast for the creative mind. StoryBeat explores how masters of creativity develop. And produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire. So join us as we discover how. Talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and Entertainment. Here now is your host, Steve Cuden.

Steve Cuden: Thanks for joining us on StoryBeat We’re coming to you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My guest today, Dr. William J. Carl, is a greek scholar, screenwriter, playwright, and lyricist. He’s also a former professor, seminary president, and pastor who’s been a US Senate guest chaplain. He’s been a speaker at Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Cornell, Boston University, Carnegie Mellon, as well as in Russia, South Africa, India, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Rwanda, and Canada. Further, he’s also the former president of the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. William has authored eight nonfiction books, including lectures he gave at Princeton, two of which have been translated into Korean, and one novel, Assassin’s Manuscript, which is a, Dan Brown meets Daniel Silva style thriller. No less than Alex Haley, the author of Roots encouraged him to write it. Ive read Assassins Manuscript and can tell you its an action packed international page turner in which politics, religion, and history play essential roles. I highly urge you to check it out. Williams screenplay, Maggie’s Perfect Match, won the Telluride indie Fest screenwriting contest and the Dallas screenwriting contest, and it was a quarter finalist in the Nickel and the Austin screenwriting contests. Not only did William turn Maggie’s perfect match into a play, but he’s also adapted it into a musical. Since 2000, William has also lectured on the brain at medical schools and medical conferences. So for all those reasons and many more, it’s my great honor and privilege to welcome the brilliant teacher, administrator, pastor, scholar, and author doctor William J. Karl to StoryBeat today. William, welcome to the show.

Dr. William J. Carl: Great to be on with you, Steve. And it’s great to talk to a fellow pittsburgher indeed. I loved living there.

Steve Cuden: I love living here, too. So I get it. It’s a really wonderful little city. It’s not a huge city. But it’s a wonderful little city.

Dr. William J. Carl: It is.

Steve Cuden: So let’s go back in time in your life a little bit. Where did all of this interest in words and writing and theology, where did all this begin?

Dr. William J. Carl: Well, I’d like to say as a kid now, I’m in my mid seventies. and by the way, the new middle age is six to 90. I don’t know if you knew that. And I got that from speaking at Chautauqua. You know, where Chautauqua is sometimes other podcast interviews. I have to explain it. You can’t get the senior citizen discount at Chautauqua until you’re 90. So the new middle age is 60 to 90, so I’m halfway through, so. But in my, when I was ten, maybe, or in the fifties, I watched, you know, all the Lone Ranger and all those fun tv shows and then lots of great movies, and I started writing short stories that long ago just for fun. And I had this wild imagination. I never really thought of myself as writing screenplays or novels. It was just fun to write and create. And that started a long time ago.

Steve Cuden: And this was fiction, not nonfiction.

Dr. William J. Carl: Yeah, those were fiction. Now, when I became a professor, and as I was finishing up my PhD at Pittsburgh, I became a professor at a seminary in Richmond, Virginia. And this was a world class school, union theological seminary. And no one said publish or perish, which is what they say to all professors. I just went into the bookstore and I saw my colleagues names over all the books, and I thought, I better get to work. So my first book was published in 1979, and then one in 81, 84. These were all nonfiction, though. No, idea of writing any fiction at that point.

Steve Cuden: They were more studious works.

Dr. William J. Carl: Yeah, until I met Alex Haley. and that’s what turned my life and kind of sent me like Lucy into the wardrobe, you know, or Alice down the rabbit hole, and I tumbled into a wonderland that has just changed my life completely.

Steve Cuden: Well, am I correct that theology and biblical work and being a pastor and so on is all very much based on studying a specific kind of storytelling? I mean, we call them Bible stories, aren’t they?

Dr. William J. Carl: Yes. And of course, most of the great writers got their start from reading biblical stories, whether they were Old Testament or New Testament, the Hebrew Bible or not. Terrific narratives parables great stories in the scripture. So, yeah, that’s kind of the root of a lot. And then, of course, it’s Aristotle’s poetics and a lot of the great greek tragedies. That, for me, is helpful because I have been and am a greek scholar and, like, reading some of them in Greek. Even so, it’s a biblical and old ancient Greek.

Steve Cuden: How many languages do you speak?

Dr. William J. Carl: Oh, I’d get around on Duolingo in about. Which is based in Pittsburgh, by the way.

Steve Cuden: Indeed.

Dr. William J. Carl: Near Carnegie Mellon. Near Pittsburgh seminary. Actually, I think it’s in, east liberty, which there we call slibberty, right? That’s correct. Anyway, on Duolingo, I bump around in about eleven different languages, but I’m not fluent in any of them. I just enjoy, because I lecture on the brain at medical schools and medical conferences. And I like to say in my. One of my lectures, you can’t prevent dementia and Alzheimer’s, but you can delay both of them a long time by working your brain. And languages are a great way to work your brain.

Steve Cuden: My whole life, I’ve been terrible with finding myself able to work in other languages, though I can speak, you know, two sentences of one or another, mostly French or Spanish or something like that. But you can somehow get your way around in eleven of them. That’s huge.

Dr. William J. Carl: Well, I don’t get very far. You know, I get a little ways. And I like to learn, like you mentioned some of the countries, where I’ve spoken. I like to learn how to say a few things there in a different country, like Hello, goodbye, where’s the restroom? Where’s the toilet, you know, and thank you, and you’re welcome. And had, a funny thing happen in, India, in this southern state of Kerala, which is down to the bottom tip of India. Thank you is n a n I. But you pronounce it Nani, and I was mispronouncing it when I was trying to say thank you. I was saying nanny, Nani, and people were laughing. I said to my host, why are they laughing? Because you’re saying grandmother, grandmother, nanny, nanny. Sort of true in all languages, you know. So.

Steve Cuden: So at what age were you when you then became very fascinated by theology, the Bible, etcetera, where you thought, this is perhaps a life’s course for you?

Dr. William J. Carl: Well, I was never going to do it because I was a preacher’s kid and, you know, that was the last thing I was going to do. but I went to the University of Tulsa, and it started as a music major. Sang opera, you know, I was Antonio, the drunken gardener, and, Mozart’s marriage of figure, a great future pastor. But I quickly switched to theology when I fell in love with Greek. I just thought it was so interesting. And, you know, Greek and Latin are great for having a sort of mathematical background. They’re connected because they’re like building block languages, like math. And so I guess as the second semester of my freshman year, I switched majors and took the deep dive into philosophy and religion and had three and a half years of Greek before I even went to seminary.

Steve Cuden: That’s a very unusual study for most people today to be deep diving into, is it not?

Dr. William J. Carl: Yes, but we should have more people studying because it helps you think logically.

Steve Cuden: Why is that? Explain why it helps you think logically.

Dr. William J. Carl: In England for centuries, they had all their elementary school kids, whether they were in private schools or more public, and, they call them public. Whatever reverse, they had them learn Greek and Latin. And the reason is there is a direct connection between Greek and Latin and math, so that they’ve done tests on this, with the gre and the sat type tests, that students who have Greek and Latin do better on math, way better than students who do English only.

Steve Cuden: Why is that?

Dr. William J. Carl: Because the way you think when you learn a Greek and Latin is the same way you think when you learn math. They’re building block languages. They’re like pyramids, and you can’t pull the bricks out. You’ve got to learn them from the foundation. And so for centuries, they. It didn’t matter whether you can be a doctor, a lawyer, a merchant, a minister. You took Greek and Latin, so you understood the king’s English or the queen’s English, whenever, period it was, and you could think logically. That’s the reason to learn Greek and Latin.

Steve Cuden: So how important do you think that your greek study and your theological studies then, influence the way that you think about writing fiction?

Dr. William J. Carl: Well, especially in the one I wrote, assassin’s manuscript. I don’t think of it as a theological treatise. I know you, because I was just rereading. You think a book, a story of any kind of play, a screenplay, a musical, should have a premise and a theme. I just reread that in your book beating Broadway. Here I have it. Nobody can see.

Steve Cuden: And thank you for reading it.

Dr. William J. Carl: No, no, it’s fabulous. And I strongly recommend to anyone who’s working on whether it’s screenplays or plays or novels. It made me think about Assassin’s manuscript because to me, it’s just a story It’s not a theological treatise. however, knowing Greek really helped, because, as you said earlier, this is a Dan Brown meets Daniel Silva thriller. Those two themes come together. It’s kind of like Indiana Jones and Jason Bourne, you know, and one story well, to be able to do the part about the old manuscripts. I had to know Greek. And, you know, there is something hidden in code that my main character has to figure out how to crack and this and that. But yes, knowing Greek really helped more than knowing theology. Although if I were to just say a premise for Assassin’s manuscript would be that there is good in every evil person and evil in every good one.

Steve Cuden: Excellent.

Dr. William J. Carl: Which is different from all Tom Clancy novels, because in Tom Clancy novels there are good guys and bad guys. And it’s really clear that the Americans are the good guys. And usually it’s the Arabs or the bad guys, but in mine everyone is broken and flawed. The characters are all nuanced in some way or another because there is good in every evil person and evil in every good one. And if we were to think in terms of a theme, it would be that a violent humanity is out of control in search of peace. That would be a theme that undergirds this story Because Adam Hunter, we were talking earlier before we started, about Joseph Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces and Christopher Vogler’s the writer’s journey. Adam in Hebrew means humanity. And the hunter part is he’s in search of peace, but he represents a violent humanity out of control. And like Luke Skywalker, he has to leave ordinary world and go to extraordinary world. And there’s a mentor which is stump Stevens. In Star Thrower wars, it’s Yoda. So there are all these deep literary themes going on. But in this also the main female character, Rennie Ellis, who’s fiance, he killed by accident and something that happened before the novel started. And she doesn’t know that and she’s falling in love with him. Well, Rennie comes from the greek word Irene, which means peace. So she’s the only one who can complete his mythic story And all the way through the reader is wondering, is she going to. Because is she going to find out he killed her fiance?

Steve Cuden: So you’ve gone down this rabbit hole, which is good. Tell the listeners the basic story of assassin’s manuscript.

Dr. William J. Carl: So it’s a former CIA assassin who becomes a minister in Tennessee, and he then is pulled back to his old world of espionage and murder. And he has to crack a code in an ancient manuscript to uncover a terrorist plot and prevent, ah, an international disaster. That’s the very short logline. And it’s very unlikely romance because this woman who falls in love with him doesn’t know that he killed her fiance, and she gets caught up in his intrigue all over the Middle east.

Steve Cuden: Well, he’s a very interesting character because he’s a former CIA operative who, winds up as a minister.

Dr. William J. Carl: That’s right.

Steve Cuden: That’s unexpected.

Dr. William J. Carl: Yes. However, if you look at the COVID of the book, and we’re on audio, so people will have to look on Amazon or look at a cover, ah, that they have bought. there is a greek text there. Yeah. That I typed to make it look like the old Codex Sinaiticus, which gets stolen from the British Museum in London. And the greek text there is acts, chapter nine, from the New Testament, which is the beginning of Saul’s conversion on the Damascus road. Former assassin becomes a minister. So hidden in code in the COVID is a real example. it’s a metaphor for my main character. And I actually met real live assassins. I met and interviewed, and they’re all former assassins, I should say, not still active.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s a good thing.

Dr. William J. Carl: And the son of one, three Americans, one Israeli and one Russian. And the Russian is a former mafia chief up in the Ural mountains who now is a pastor in a church up there. So, yes, it is unlikely to go from a hit man to a minister. But it’s real. I mean, it happens.

Steve Cuden: Well, so when I say it’s unusual, it’s unusual to see it in a story in a modern story And yes, I’m certain, in the history of the world, that’s happened more than once where they. Where someone is an assassin, and then they figure that they can’t do this anymore. and they go off to do their penance, or whatever you want to call it, and they go off and become deeply involved in philosophy, religion and so on. So describe your process for us of the development of the novel. Where did the idea come from? Is Adam you? Is Adam largely you in some way? I know you’re not an assassin. but how did you develop this character and how did you develop the StoryBeat?

Dr. William J. Carl: Yeah, so that’s a great question, Steve. it is funny. On other interviews, people go, wait a minute. Is this autobiographical? And I pause and smile and say, well, you know, all writing is autobiographical.

Steve Cuden: To a certain extent, it is true.

Dr. William J. Carl: Then I pause a little longer and I say, and I did have an extracurricular course in seminary of taekwondo training to handle rough parishioners. So that’s how I knew how to write the action scenes, because I could describe, you know, the karate.

Steve Cuden: What kind of church are you involved in that? You’ve got these kind of parishioners.

Dr. William J. Carl: Some of them can be pretty rough, you know. No, I think that this was not something I thought about doing. I mentioned Alex Haley earlier. I had him speak in my church in Dallas in a program called town hall forum. And he was sitting in my office, and he said, have you written anything? And I said, yeah, I’ve written a bunch of non fiction books. He said, let me see one of them. So I pulled one off the shelf, which was a set of lectures I’d given at Princeton. And he’s sitting there thumbing and reading and thumbing, and finally he stops and he says, you need to write a novel. And I go, Alex, what makes you say that? He said two things. One, you know how to write, and you write really well. This is the author of Roots telling me I write well, sure. And then he says, and you know how to tell a story and that’s all a novel is, a good story and you would agree with that from beating Broadway?

Steve Cuden: I couldn’t agree with it more. That’s what a good novel is.

Dr. William J. Carl: And so he. And I said, what would I write about? And he said, what do you like? And I said, oh, Tom Clancy, you know, Frederick, Forsyth, Robert Ludlum, you know, this international espionage. And he goes, write one like that. I said, alec, I don’t. This is not my world. I don’t know anything about that. He said, well, you’re a greek scholar. Put old manuscripts with international espionage and see what comes out. And that’s what I did. And, I just began thinking. I mean, I was writing these things in the middle of the night while I was in Dallas, and, went through twelve revisions, you know? Twelve. Think about that.

Steve Cuden: That’s actually par for the course. I think that’s a good thing.

Dr. William J. Carl: Yeah, but, you know, Charles Frazier rewrote Cole Mountain 20 times, so who’s counting, right?

Steve Cuden: Exactly. I think of ten to 15 drafts or revisions becomes my first draft.

Dr. William J. Carl: Oh, I didn’t go through it quite that way. But my, editor, Charles Cornwell, professor of English at Davidson College, and the former husband, Patricia Cornwell. And her editor was my editor through all twelve revisions.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Dr. William J. Carl: And he’s the one who said, after the 12th, when you’ve got it, get it out there. It’s masterful. Go ahead. But I like. And I appreciate this in your book, beating Broadway, I like thinking in terms of structure and outlining and. But not too much, because you can stultify a story by 100% over outlining it.

Steve Cuden: You’re creating a blueprint. That’s all you’re doing.

Dr. William J. Carl: You are. And it has to have room to breathe, you know, it has to have room to maneuver. Right. and that, for me, the creative process involves, I will say to writers, I will say to speakers different, you know, even preachers, you’ve got this idea, and you, you’ve figured out what you want to do. You think you figured out what you want to do, but you want to get creative. And so instead of, let’s think of this idea you have as a cat, and you’re trying to figure out what makes the cat tick. And instead of being creative with the cat, what a lot of speakers do is they kill the cat, then they dissect it, and then they carry the limp parts into the story or into wherever they are going. Instead, what you do is you should put a mouse in front of the cat and see where the cat goes. You know, so let it flow, let have some freedom, have some fun.

Steve Cuden: I think if you can figure out how a cat ticks, would you let me know?

Dr. William J. Carl: I’ve never figured it out. I don’t have one. My mother’s had cats, and they. They rule the house. Dogs are lovable, but cats just. They rule the house. I think that’s what I’ve heard, anyway.

Steve Cuden: So what did you spend most of your time on in the beginning of the development of the book? Was it plot? Was it character? Was it the action? What did you think of early on?

Dr. William J. Carl: A mix. And it was all colliding in at the same time. Just a mix. However, I am smart enough to know that if your characters aren’t, the kind that people will care about, it doesn’t matter how great the plot is. So I think I spent more time making sure these were characters that people would care about. And then, as you know, we were all trained this by Robert McKee and others in the screenwriting training that each character needs to have a want that that character is trying to get correct. The classic example, of course, is in the first rocky movie. if everybody listens closely, Rocky doesn’t say, I want to win the title. The line he says is, I want to go the distance. And he says it a couple of times, and that’s his want. And then he’s in all the obstacles, and then he’s training and whatever, and he gets in the big fight, and he does go all the way to the end, and then he loses, and you’re like, oh, no, we lost the bet. But no, he got what he wanted. So for me, it was creating characters that have a want, and they’re trying to get there. And then I’m just going to throw a lot of obstacles in their way. Getting the, to that want.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s exactly what you should be doing. And that want must, by the time you get to your climax and resolution must turn into a need.

Dr. William J. Carl: Yes.

Steve Cuden: And the want, we all need to know what the want is. The audience needs to know. But the resolution does not need to be expressed. Can be, but it does not need to be expressed.

Dr. William J. Carl: That’s true. I agree with that. And so, of course, what Adam wants is peace. he wants some redemption, some resolution. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever get it. Because in something that happened before the novel starts, he, he, has killed the Bedouin terrorist girlfriend in a bomb that goes off. And he’s killed his own wife by accident because she was walking down the same street in New York. And he’s killed the young man who becomes is the fiancee of the woman who falls in love with him. By the way, in terms of writing, rewriting, you really do want to listen to your editors. I love, I think it’s Steven King. I’m not a. I don’t read a lot of his novels, but he’s got a great book on writing called on writing. You know it.

Steve Cuden: Indeed, on writing by Steven King is outstanding.

Dr. William J. Carl: Yes. And so it’s this wonderful line he has in it. To write is human, to edit is divine. And you really have to listen to your editors. And, you know. And so Charles Cornwell, the last tip he gave me before it was, it was published was I had the, the accident that occurred that set everything in motion before he went to seminary. I had it as a prologue. And Charles said, get that out of there and handle it in flashbacks. And I go, man, that’s an exciting scene. I got it right there. And I know we’ll have to do different time periods. And he said, no, no, no. You need to get it out of there and handle it. And trust me, start with the Bedouin looking down on the infidel Americans and Cairo. That’s a much better place to start your novel. So I, man, that’s going to take so much work to redo and this and that. So I was talking to a, another author friend of mine in, in Texas, and I said, what do you think I should do? He said, I listen. I want you to listen to me very carefully, William. If an editor who helped another author sell a hundred million dollars worth of books told me to do something, I might freaking do it. So I pulled that scene out. I will say one more thing. About the process. And that is, I like to know where I’m going. And I think you actually talk about this also in beating Broadway. I think it’s important to know where you’re going. And if I can do get a little theological and biblical for a moment. A lot of people don’t realize that the four gospels were written backwards in the sense that you have the crucifixion and resurrection. They wrote that first. Then they said, well, no, wait a minute, let’s put some stories in about what this guy did. And well, one of them said, well, I’ve got him up on a mountaintop and I’m going down by the sea, and I’ve got him doing these healings and I got him feeding the 5000. They put all that in, and then last come the infancy narratives. So I always say to people who are speakers, know where you’re going and write to that place, and then you’ll know how to introduce it, which is the beginning. And Mark didn’t think bark, that the world was coming to an end. So he didn’t care about all that baby stuff. In Bethlehem. He doesn’t even have any and John doesn’t either. It’s just Matthew and Luke. So it’s important to know how to write to a place, I think.

Steve Cuden: Well, it’s also very good to understand Aristotle and the poetics and that he very clearly says it, though he says it in a rather almost airy way where he gives you almost no real detail to it at all. And it sounds simplistic, but it’s much more difficult to do than you think or the way it sounds. But there is a beginning, middle and end. You don’t want to start before the actual story starts and you don’t want to end after the story ends. And what does that mean? I mean, that’s very simplistic to say, but the challenge is, where do you start? Now, you’re saying that right here to us today that you had what you thought was the start of your story but your editor said, no, this is where your story starts. And his instinct won out.

Dr. William J. Carl: Right? It did. And I said, but that doesn’t start with my main character. He said, don’t worry about a lot of great writers don’t start with the main character. They just need to start where the story needs to start.

Steve Cuden: This is absolutely true, though you will find most movies do start with your principal character. Not all talk about Joseph Campbell and the great mythologies that he taught and his influence on George Lucas. If you go watch the original Star Thrower Wars, a new Hope, Star Thrower Wars Episode four. We, don’t see our protagonist, our hero Luke, for 20 minutes into the movie. That’s very unusual.

Dr. William J. Carl: Yeah, it is. And related to Assassin’s manuscript, because I’m now on story rocket with Assassin’s manuscript, the screenplay and the musical. And. Ah, because that’s a place. It’s a wonderful website, by the way, for people to look up if they’re writers. It’s a place for Hollywood producers and directors to look at different projects. And in this one, I’m recommending it not be a movie, but series, like Netflix or it could be. Well, it’s too complex for one two hour movie.

Steve Cuden: I think if you did it as a six or eight part series.

Dr. William J. Carl: Yes.

Steve Cuden: You would find that you would probably have to expand certain things.

Dr. William J. Carl: Yes.

Steve Cuden: But that’s okay, because you’ve left enough room in there for us to expand out one way or another.

Dr. William J. Carl: Absolutely. And in that, you could start with Adam Hunter. You know, you could.

Steve Cuden: Although you could still start with the Bedouin.

Dr. William J. Carl: That’s true.

Steve Cuden: You could, Those are really tricky to get right. They’re really tricky to get.

Dr. William J. Carl: Well, they are, because you have to.

Steve Cuden: Hook that audience in right away. And if you lose them in that first five minutes, you’re done.

Dr. William J. Carl: The pilot has to be like, boom. You know, I’ve got to get you really fast. I agree.

Steve Cuden: What do you think that you did right in the story that got you to an editor, that got you to an actual published book? What is it that authors should think about in terms of selling their work?

Steve Cuden: So that it gets published?

Dr. William J. Carl: Well, you know, there are obvious things that it has to be really well written in the sense that it flows and, it’s not disjointed, it fits. You’ve got to have characters people care about.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Dr. William J. Carl: I like to write, whether I’m speaking or lecturing, or writing a nonfiction book, even. I like to write in such a way that I grab you from the first line.

Steve Cuden: That’s a smart way to play it.

Dr. William J. Carl: And I want to keep you with me. I’ll tell you why. You know, Pitt’s got one of the top programs in rhetoric and communication, and that’s part of the reason I went there. I mean, none of the Ivy League schools have graduate programs in rhetoric and communication, so Pitt and northwestern are the two top. And so there I am at University of Pittsburgh, which was a fabulous experience for me. And Theodore went, who was a world authority on presidential rhetoric. He passed away just before I went to be president of Pittsburgh Seminary. And I’m really sorry he’s gone. But his work on presidential rhetoric was incredible. And he greeted us in our rhetorical criticism class with, the first day with, you will write 425 page papers in this class. An a paper is a publishable paper. And when I say publishable, I don’t mean the drivel you read in most journals. I want your sentences to crackle. I want you to write like Walter Lippmann. Anything late is an f. Any questions? I mean, it was like, whoa. And he said, after we wrote our first paper, and he brought them in, and he grabbed one of them, and he looked at me and he said, carl, he said, read the first line or two of this. And I go, okay. And so I read the first line. He says, if you pick that up, in, you know, Harper’s magazine in the bookstore, would you buy the magazine? Well, I don’t know. And he goes, well, that’s the issue here. You got to sell this stuff. And it was like, you need to grab them from the very first line. And I knew I was going to write my dissertation under Theodore went because I was going to learn how to write. He did the blue pencil on everything. But it was such a fabulous experience. We studied Billy Graham and Adolf Hitler side by side as examples of mass persuasion because m the movements were similar. The content was obviously very different. We studied the rhetoric of the sciences, social sciences, structure of scientific discovery by Thomas J. Kuhn, and the, rhetoric of radical movements. It was mind blowing. I loved going to Pitt. It was great.

Steve Cuden: I think the listeners should pay close attention to what you just said, which is two things. Not only that, the. It has to crackle. It has to crackle all the way through for it to be accepted as something that many people will want to read and enjoy. But I also want to talk about Professor Wendt and that he was going to take you by the lapel and pull you into his face and say to you, this is how you have to do it. And if you aren’t willing to listen to someone like that, who’s that passionate, then maybe that’s not for you.

Dr. William J. Carl: Yep. Totally agree. I think two or three of the papers were late, so they all got f’s, right off. Nobody gives f’s in graduate school. And there was one other woman and I who got b’s on our first paper, and the other three grades were C’s, D’s, and f’s. And he did the blue pencil on all of us. I finally ended up with an a in the course. And I knew I was going to write my dissertation under him. and I’ve actually written op ed pieces for the Dallas Morning news on, convention speeches.

Steve Cuden: So you learned how to write in that class? Really? How to write?

Dr. William J. Carl: I did. It wasn’t just went, Robert Newman and several of Trevor Mealy, but several of the professors were really good critics on writing, but went especially.

Steve Cuden: So let’s take that into your other skill sets, which is you’ve written a play, Maggie’s perfect match. You wrote that as a screenplay and then you translated that into a play. And that, that is now being adapted into a musical. So let’s talk about that. That is a slightly different form than writing a novel. a screenplay should be very visual. A play is going to be very verbal, and a musical is going to be sung. That’s one kind of storytelling, but three different ways to go at it. So tell us, first of all, tell us, what is Maggie’s perfect match about?

Dr. William J. Carl: Yeah, so it’s totally different from Assassin’s manuscript. It’s a romantic comedy. Busy body matchmaker Maggie Binder finds out she’s dying of cancer and tries to match her husband Herb with someone before she’s gone. And she does match him with her hospice nurse. Now in the screenplay version, she’s just this plain spoken, very simple woman. In the musical and play version, she’s Herb’s former lover from college that the audience knows, but she doesn’t know. And so she shoves them out on dates and the whole town is gossiping about it and it’s embarrassing, but she wants them. I’ve known actual women like this who say they’re dying and they just say to their husbands, you marry that floozy down the street, I will rise up and haunt you. This is the one you could marry. That one will be good and bad, but this one will be a better wife for you. And she’s like, hyacinth bouquet in keeping up appearances, you know, just drives the story just in control. And so they do fall in love again, deeply. And she finds out she’s going to live. And that’s the, big second major plot point.

Steve Cuden: The wife finds out she’s gonna live.

Dr. William J. Carl: Yes, and that’s the second major plot boy in the movie. Because now how do we, unlike, you know, it happens at page 90. How do we unravel this dilemma? And who will her been up with? Because he really is in love with both of them.

Steve Cuden: Now had you ever written a screenplay prior to that?

Dr. William J. Carl: Nope. I tried one on the novel, but it was not coming out very well. And so I just thought, I’m going to do something different. the first version was way too big. And so someone said, well, learn how to write screenplays that’ll help tighten your story And that’s what I did. And, this, I don’t even remember where I got this idea, but I remember going over it with our actor son in New York, who’s in Brooklyn, who’s been in George Clooney’s the Tinder bar in a scene with Ben Affleck. He was in the final season. The marvelous misses Maisel last summer. He’s Teddy the cue card guy. He has a one man show called Gary Busey’s one man Hamlet. It’s all of Hamlet as Gary Busey. He’s got one man, won big awards from the New York Times, big reviews. And he won the New York, fringe solo festival, you know, the big award. And he’s got a show called Trump Lear. He’s been on Blue Bloods. Anyway, he was getting ready to start his theater training at University of Evansville. And by the way, one of his buddies at Evansville is Rami Malek, who won the Oscar for Bohemian Rhapsody. Anyway, David then went on to do Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers. But I would remember talking to David about, what do you think about the story idea? And we bat it back and forth, but I don’t know where the idea came from originally. And we had, I made sure I talked to a lot of women, who are good at screenwriting.

Steve Cuden: Why women?

Dr. William J. Carl: Well, because the. I’m writing a major, two major female characters.

Steve Cuden: I see. Got it.

Dr. William J. Carl: And I kept changing and kept editing, and finally I gave it to one of them, and. And she goes, you got it. Now, you have definitely gotten in touch with your feminine side. It’s coming through now in the, in the screenplay.

Steve Cuden: So where did you learn the mechanics of screenwriting? Writing a novel is prose. And most people have an understanding of how to write prose, even if they may not be good at it. But most people have no idea how to write a screenplay. It’s a different mechanical form right now.

Dr. William J. Carl: I did have one class in playwriting at Pitt when I was doing that PhD in rhetoric and communication. So I had a little idea about character and plot and make sure you have conflict and those basic things. But of course, the screenplay is different from a play.

Steve Cuden: Totally.

Dr. William J. Carl: And so Dallas Screenwriting association is huge. And so I just signed up and I started taking classes and they brought in, you know, I mentioned earlier Robert McKee, who wrote the famous story and they brought in a lot of great screenwriting experts from LA. And I just started taking lots of notes. I’m, a, I’m a quick study. And, and I started writing and rewriting and getting people to edit and make suggestions. And to my great shock and surprise, I won the Telluride indie Fest screenwriting contest I wasn’t expecting. And I do have a, I have an agent, I have a manager in LA that’s helping me shop it and whatever. But you really have to be out there. I think.

Steve Cuden: I think it’s helpful to be out there, or maybe even requisite to be out there in the beginning of a career. It’s not so much if you’ve been around a while. And I think that even though you’re not in that business or haven’t been in that business, I think the fact that you have been around as a writer for a while, that is. It’s okay if you have somebody out there representing you properly.

Dr. William J. Carl: Right? Right. And this story Rocket, I want to do another shout out to this. And it helps writers begin to be recognized by Hollywood directors and producers and such. So I kept hammering away at it. And then I was surprised. I was a quarterfinalist in the nickel, which is huge.

Steve Cuden: Huge.

Dr. William J. Carl: And Austin Film Festival. And then I won two others, one’s writers network or something like that. And then the Dallas Screenwriting association. And that gave me some confidence, and it did help me tighten the novel. I’ll just give an example. You’ve read it, so you remember there’s a scene where the beta one is at St. Catherine’s monastery, which is the oldest, most continuous monastery in, in the world. Goes, back to the 6th, century, in, in the common era. And he’s with a monk and he calls Conrad Docherty. And, he’s had the monk create a page, two pages of the manuscript. And he’s looked at it. And this is all in the novel described. And in an earlier version of the novel, I had him get on the phone with Conrad Docherty, who is the CIA rogue character. And this is what I had him say. Now, I have the manuscript. The monk has created it. I’ve had the monk killed, and I’m going to send it to you. And you’ve got to get Adam Hunter to deliver, it to the Vatican. I had all that written in there. And the person coaching me said, no, he wouldn’t say any of that. All he would do is get on the phone and say, it’s done. That’s all he would say.

Steve Cuden: That’s exactly it. So, you know, brevity is the soul of wit. But the truth is, in screenwriting, the tighter you can make it, the better it is. Sometimes in a novel, it’s great, too, but you can be more expansive in a novel.

Dr. William J. Carl: You can. And yet, in this scene, and this is what made the novel fly faster. You know, it’s. It’s like a beet read. It goes fast because short chapters like James Patterson and such. But the, the dialogue is crisp because of my screenwriting change. And it really was fun to go back and start tightening everything. But that’s a one cameo spot example of how I had to learn to tighten everything.

Steve Cuden: Well, there’s no question that you want to get as much fat off of your screenplay as you can. And there’s lots of various adjectives, get in late, get out early, and so on. And you want to reduce everything down to its most essential parts. but it has to be, here’s the problem. You can’t just take away everything. It still has to be terse, but it has to be colorful and entertaining. And those three things don’t always work so well if you’re just terse. So you have to have it be very, very tight.

Dr. William J. Carl: Yes.

Steve Cuden: No fat.

Dr. William J. Carl: And as you say in being Broadway, you want to have, even in a scene, a beginning, middle, and end.

Steve Cuden: 100%. There’s a beginning and middle and end to every sentence, to every line of dialogue. That’s the microcosm of the macrocosm.

Dr. William J. Carl: Right.

Steve Cuden: The macrocosm is, you know, you’ve got to get in late and get out early in the whole piece. Every scene is in late, out early. Everything is in late, out early. And the more that you can do that, the tighter your piece will get. So you’ve got to remove everything that doesn’t move the story forward, the plot, or expand our understanding of character. If it doesn’t do that, it needs to go.

Dr. William J. Carl: Totally agree. And when I made the move, interesting about going from the screenplay to the play, our actor son had come down and done his Gary Busey one man Hamlet at the Virginia Sanford Theater. And the director said, yeah, it’s a.

Steve Cuden: I would pay money to see that. I would pay good money to see that.

Dr. William J. Carl: Yeah, he’s not doing anymore, but you may find a little bit of it on YouTube at some point, but it’s. It’s really like watching somebody burn up on stage. You just cannot not watch it. It is so funny. And made up songs and this and that for it, but he had done that. And the, the director of the, Kathy Gilmore, the director of Virginia Stanford Theater, said, have you written anything? I said, yeah, I’ve got this screenplay. And she goes, oh, well, let me see it. So she, she brought in some actresses, and she goes, you need to turn this into a play. And I go, I haven’t written a play. And she goes, here’s what you do. You know, the, the movie, it’s with Julia Roberts. I’ll think of it in just a minute. But it’s in a beauty parlor. And it was started as steel magnolias. That’s it, steel magnolias. And, she said, I want you to rent the movie, but I want you to order a copy of the Broadway play, and I want you to watch the movie while you’re looking at the play, the script, and I want you to see how they made the jump from stage to screen. And then I want you to reverse the process. That’s what she told me. Now it sounds easier than it is that, you know.

Steve Cuden: Oh, no, it’s really easy to say.

Dr. William J. Carl: And really hard to do, but I did it. And, in three or four days, I was able to do it. And then this director of the theater, program at Samford University in Birmingham, who was going to direct it, gave me a lot of tips and some suggestions on how to tighten it even more and do some things to it. So we did it as a play, and it raised $30,000 opening night on, for the Bruno cancer fund.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Dr. William J. Carl: Because it was about a woman who’s dying of cancer. You know, that’s an interesting idea, is you’ve got this. If I hadn’t been a pastor dealing with a lot of people who’ve died and knew how, when I’m writing with a funeral director, the funeral director and the pastor can tell jokes. You know, there, there is humor around death in a way a lot of people don’t realize. And even people who are terminal know how to. It lightens the load a little just to be able to have humor.

Steve Cuden: Well, it’s called gallows humor.

Dr. William J. Carl: There you go. And so here’s this woman, I mean, whoever, whatever actress plays this part in a movie or. Well, we had a wonderful one for the play, but in a musical, has to be able to sing, obviously. But this is a complex character because she’s larger than Life. She’s in control, everything. And, and the moment she finds out she’s going to live, she loses total control. I mean, it’s this o. Henry esque twist. That’s why it’s the second major plot point. And actually, it’s the end of the first act in the play, but I have it later into the second act in the musical version.

Steve Cuden: So the beauty part about what you’re talking about is the emotions of laughing and crying are very close.

Dr. William J. Carl: Absolutely.

Steve Cuden: And you frequently hear, And you see actors perform it where they’re crying and then they start to laugh or they’re laughing and they start to cry. And the two are connected emotionally in some bizarre way in our brains. So when you do that, you’re going to naturally draw a huge emotion out of the audience.

Dr. William J. Carl: Oh, absolutely. And it did in the play version that we did, we got rousing applause, standing ovations, yada, yada, yada. But I just feel like this will be. And I’ve written the book. It’s all done, the script’s done, and I’ve written the lyrics for all the songs. We’ve got music for half of them. I’m, kind of in search of. My composer kind of has slowed down on. He’s gotten involved with some other stuff. So I’m in search of a good composer to, finish it out or even write some new songs.

Steve Cuden: Well, pay attention, all you composers out there.

Dr. William J. Carl: That’s right. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: I’m curious how one goes from doing what you’ve done to becoming the guest chaplain in the us senate. How does that work?

Dr. William J. Carl: Yeah. So, chaplain of the us senate, and it’s a wonderful one, now named Barry Black, who is african American himself, and he takes a break every once in a while. And they’ll bring in pastors to serve for a day as guest chaplain. And our senator, at the time, Senator K. Bailey Hutchinson, knew me and she said, I think we need to have you get up and be guest. Chaplin, our older son, worked at the White House and during the George W. Bush era, so. And I played tennis on the White House tennis court. So that’s how I know how to describe that scene in the novel. And I’ve also been in the Oval office meeting with the president, so I know how to describe where Victoria Sanchez, the first female president of the United States and the first Hispanic, is president in the. In the Oval Office.

Steve Cuden: Wait a minute, back up.

Dr. William J. Carl: What? Yeah, yeah, in the novel, the president.

Steve Cuden: Oh, in the novel. All of a sudden, I completely drew a blank on the novel for a moment and thought, what?

Dr. William J. Carl: How did that happen? Yeah. Victoria Sanchez. And all the way through. You’re not sure? Is she a good guy or a bad guy? You know, the way I wrote it.

Steve Cuden: Well, for sure you’ve got her set up where you really aren’t sure which end she’s on.

Dr. William J. Carl: That’s the way I wrote it. And I wrote a lot of them that way. In fact, I was thinking about more of the Joseph Campbell’s, you know, themes of major character in the shadow self. And the mentor is Stump Stevens, who’s the first CIA, african american CIA director. He’s kind of a fun figure. But the shape shifter is moshe. If you think about it for a moment, that’s, I don’t want to give away too much. I’ll let people read it and see.

Steve Cuden: Yeah. Really don’t give away too much is for sure.

Dr. William J. Carl: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Because you’ve got a big mystery to solve in there. A big puzzle.

Dr. William J. Carl: Yeah, it’s a puzzle and you think you understand it. And this is why, again, back to we’re all broken and flawed. There aren’t real good guys and real bad guys. It’s just everybody’s a mix. And in a lot of ways he’s a little bit, my main character is a little bit like John Wayne’s character in the quiet man. Do you remember that movie where he’s a boxer who goes to Ireland and Maureen O’Hara is there and he’s come to his homeland where his family was and he won’t box and we finally find out because he killed somebody in the ring. And my main character is a lot like that because he killed his own wife by accident. He killed Rennie’s fiance.

Steve Cuden: And we get all that near the top of the book. So you’re not really spoiling too much here.

Dr. William J. Carl: No no no. That’s, that’s kind of handled in flashbacks early. And because of that and you see him wrestling and because I was clergy, I’m retired now. I know how to write the mix, the honest mix that all clergy go through. I think one line there, I have something like, when we’re really honest, all clergy are closet agnostics at heart. I have that line in there. But, you know, for a moment or two, not necessarily all the time, because it’s your job and you do have faith and everything. But if you’re really honest, there are days when you’re a closet agnostic.

Steve Cuden: Well, isn’t it true that most people that go into deeply into a religion of one kind or another, especially clergy, that they’re questioning all that? And that’s what faith means, is that, you take faith that whether you have evidence of it or not.

Dr. William J. Carl: Yeah. And it’s important for that person, whether it’s male or female clergy, to model that it’s all right to have doubts. I think it’s important.

Steve Cuden: You wouldn’t be very human if you didn’t have those doubts.

Dr. William J. Carl: Right. And if you have everything all figured out and you have all the answers, I’m not sure I want to listen to you.

Steve Cuden: So I have to ask you, you are an expert on finding common ground. That’s something that you’ve done, yes.

Dr. William J. Carl: Yep.

Steve Cuden: So in a world that’s all topsy turvy like it is right now, we’re in a really difficult situation in the world at large. Not just our own country, but all over the world. How does one find common ground? Is there a way to go at it? I’m asking a really huge question.

Dr. William J. Carl: Yeah. Ah, yeah, it’s a huge one. especially with what’s going on in Israel and Gaza and such. There’s some wonderful programs going on around the country. Here in Tennessee, I can’t remember the name of it, but a group that gets gun owners, big time NRA gun owners, together with pacifists. They have to eat together. That’s really important. Not just meat together, but actually break bread together. And they’ll have, a conference with them. There may be 20. You don’t want too many, but ten on each side. And they have to get to know each other. They have to. It breaks down the barriers as they begin to listen to each other.

Steve Cuden: That’s the biggest thing that’s missing in our discourse today, is people don’t listen to each other.

Dr. William J. Carl: No question. I talk about this in my brain, lecturing that the real culprit is the amygdala, which is the fight flight part of our brain. It’s a tiny little almond shape piece in our brain that causes us to react quickly to things. And the amygdala is there because I say this in all the brain lectures, because, we had pythons or saber toothed tigers in our face. Our ancestors did, and they had to react quickly. But today, we don’t have those, unless you’re on a safari or something somewhere. What we have today are different colors of skin or different ideologies or different political views. And we go, and we just can’t imagine that other person has anything right to say. I’ll give you an example. I was lecturing several years ago at new college, Oxford. It was called new college because it was new in 1379. And dinner was like a scene from Harry Potter or chariots of fire. You know, we put on the gowns and. And we went in and we would march in. And dinner, food was good. I mean, a lot of food in England’s not that great, but at the Oxford Cambridge schools, great. They have wonderful chefs. And breakfast, was okay. Lunch, this and that. But at breakfast one day, and this was back when the Iraq war was going on. And, this is not a political statement. I’m just telling what happened. This is a story of what actually happened. So at breakfast, here I am sitting around with these Oxford dons, which, are called the professors, and one of them says, Bush. Just said Bush. And the whole room just erupted. And, you know, I could take some far right republicans and say, obama or Hillary, everyone would just erupt.

Steve Cuden: Yes, they would.

Dr. William J. Carl: And the problem, I think, today is that we have in our world overactive amygdalas that we react to. This is what causes breaks up in marriages, work situations, cause it starts wars. It’s creating what’s going on in Israel, Gaza. And we can’t stop and just say, we need to listen to each other. And if we could ever over. If I could ever come up with a solution to overcome overactive amygdalas, I could win the Nobel Peace Prize. You know, really, it’s a huge problem in our world right now.

Steve Cuden: People do not take a breath and think about what’s being said, and their response has no breath behind it. And so it’s all reactionary and it’s all emotional. Ah, is that where your brain lectures go? Is it about the amygdala? How are you an expert on brains as well?

Dr. William J. Carl: Well, in 1999, a physician appeared in my office in Texas and said, I’m in charge of the program next year for the International Society of advancement, humanities, in medicine. And, we have big lectures every year. We meet at a ski resort. Next year, in 2000, we’ll be at Aspen. We’ve been to Banff and Zurich, but we’ll be in Aspen. And next year, the subject’s the brain. And we have Michael Gozzaniga, the top cognitive neuroscientist in the world from. From, Dartmouth. Now, he’s from Santa Barbara or whatever. And we have so and so from Mayo clinic and someone from NIH. And they said, we’d like for you to lecture on the brain. And I said, henry, I know absolutely nothing about the brain, except I know I have one. And I went home and told my wife. She said, well, that’s never stopped you before. And so I took the challenge. Steve and I read 50 books on, native neuroscience. And University of Texas Southwestern Medical School is the only medical school in the country with five Nobel laureates. And I knew a couple of them and I knew a bunch of neurosurgeons. So I went over and interviewed them and I began creating this lecture and I put it together and Gazanica, and I think about 2000, we were the only ones using PowerPoint. I mean, everybody, everybody else had trays of slides or flip chart. And so I gave my lecture. And by the way, what it is, is it’s a philosophical, ethical perspective on the mind body equation that contrasts a more hellenistic cartesian dualip that separates mind and body and has physicians looking at patients as very uninteresting appendages to very interesting diseases over against a more hebraic, holistic approach. Because the hebrew word for soul, nephesh, means all of who you are, mind, body, spirit, essence, your whole being. And it’s been proven, even at Duke University Medical center where I’ve done some consulting, that if a physician will think about you as a whole person, it actually helps the healing process. So I am a one man show to change medical education.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Dr. William J. Carl: And, and I didn’t realize till I got back to Dallas, but the head of continuing education for the whole AMA was there and he sent me the readout on the CE unit evaluations. He said, doctor Carl, you scored way above these medical school professors. And that’s because I know how to talk and make things interesting, right? With my PhD from Pitt in rhetoric and communication. And I’m on tv in Dallas, half a million people every Sunday that I speak, all over Texas on the major ABC network. So because he was there, I started getting invited all over the country. Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, big medical schools. And when I was at Pittsburgh Seminary, I get an email one day from the head of the hematology oncology department of the Hillman Cancer center there. And he said, I heard about this lecture. It’s called brains, bodies, beliefs and behavior. I want you to do grand rounds for my hematology oncology department on brains, cancer and hope. So I wrote back and I said, I know a lot about brains now. I know a lot about hope. I don’t know that much about cancer. And he wrote back and said, you have six months to learn everything you can about cancer. So again, I took another deep dive. And then the head of the Pitt, bioethics, department, had a big pain management conference and they asked me to come and do something on brains and the pain. and so it’s just taken off. I mean, like, Alex Haley told me to write a novel that led to screenplays and now brains, you know, I just. I’m easily bored. So, you know, I think you need.

Steve Cuden: To try a few new things. My goodness, you. You have one of the most expansive experiences and careers I’ve ever met heard of. I mean, it’s all over the place, which is really wonderful.

Dr. William J. Carl: Well, it’s just fun. I love learning something new. You know, I think it’s important to keep learning new things. You know, that’s the way you keep your brain active. And you do delay dementia and Alzheimer’s bike exercise, your body and keep your brain active.

Steve Cuden: I agree. Well, I have been having just the most entertaining and fascinating conversation with William Carl about, writing and theology and the brain and all kinds of things. We’re going to wind the show down a little bit. And also all of your experiences. I’m wondering if you can share with us a story that’s either weird, quirky, offbeat, strange, or just plain funny.

Dr. William J. Carl: Well, I’ve got a couple of them. I mean, one of them is. The first version of the novel was 740 pages, and I brought it in. This is why I had to go learn how to do screenplays. I brought it into a literary agent in Dallas and dropped it on his desk. He said, you nearly broke my damn desk with that thing. Go take 200 pages out and then I’ll look at it. Ah, another funny thing that happened to me is when we were first getting ready to, have Maggie’s perfect match performed, the guy was going to play Herb. The husband had to drop out. And we were like, we’re scrambling. What are we going to do? And the, director said, well, you wrote the whole thing. You know, herb’s part, just won’t you? And I was a nervous wreck. I was like, no, I mean, I have played a major role in a, in a musical, but it was shorter than this. And you know, the thing called line learner where you can help learn lines and.

Steve Cuden: Yes.

Dr. William J. Carl: And my wife said, I’m moving out while you’re trying to do this. This is great. And because I did, you know, Antonio, the drunken gardener, and I’d been on stage, but I told David, I said, david, I get up and give monologues, which is speeches or lectures or sermons. This where you’re having to hear somebody else and go back and forth. This will drive me crazy. And fortunately, we found somebody else, which was great. And then one other weird thing and this is kind of related to make sure you do your research before you say anything or write anything. Make sure you’ve done your. And I did travel to seven foreign countries and interviewed all these former assassins, but this is the example I’ll give. As I was. I was, It was when I was given a sermon one Sunday in Dallas, and this went all over Texas and such. And I was talking about parables and how they have surprise endings. And I had heard about this movie, but I hadn’t seen it, called the Crying Game, which, as you know, has a surprise ending.

Steve Cuden: It does.

Dr. William J. Carl: And so I said, well, you know, parables are like the crying game. I haven’t seen this movie, but I heard it has a surprise to me. So the next Sunday, the woman who was the matriarch of this congregation, like 100 years old, came through, shaking my hand with a little frown, and she said, doctor Carl, did you mean to recommend? She actually used the verb recommend the crying game. I haven’t seen a movie since Gone with the wind first came out, but I watched the crying game the other night. Did you really mean to recommend? So that’s my example of, do research before.

Steve Cuden: Yes, that would have surprised her greatly, poor lady. And I’m not going to spoil it for the listeners that have never seen the crying game, but just know that it is a little bit shocking if you don’t know what you’re looking for until it happens.

Dr. William J. Carl: That’s right.

Steve Cuden: And I’m not suggesting that you see it unless you think, okay, I’m going to take this with a little bit of caution. and you might want to do a little research before you see the movie.

Dr. William J. Carl: And just know that, William, Carl is not recommending that you go see.

Steve Cuden: Duly noted. Last question for you today, William. You’ve already given us a huge amount of advice along the way here, but I’m wondering if you have a single solid piece of advice or a tip that you like to give to those who are starting out in any of your businesses that you’re involved in, or maybe they’re in a little bit and trying to get to that next level.

Dr. William J. Carl: Yeah. So whether it’s you’re, trying to build a company or you’re trying to write a novel or a screenplay or a musical or a play, I’d say a couple things. One is you will want to give up many times. And I will say, never, ever give up. Now, you may get to a point where you just don’t think you can do any more with this. And that’s fine, give up on that one. But then start again as a writer. Don’t ever give up completely. I was 30 years writing a Sanson manuscript, and now it’s on sale in 42 countries and at the Harvard bookstore, of all places, because I never gave up. And I want to say, also, just try, new things. You know, I mean, my whole Life has been fun because I was willing to try writing screenplays, try writing a novel, try lecturing on the brain. Don’t be timid about it. Go for it. You can do it. And the final thing I will say is, you’re going to run into moments where you’re going to get criticism, you’re going to get critiques, and you’re going to get in theater, our actor son, David, who, by the way, does an amazing narration of my novel on audible, and he’s an expert on international accents. Just go listen to the five minute free sample on Amazon. I mean, he’s incredible, but I remember him talking to me about notes and how important they are. And the point I would make is, don’t take this criticism personally. Don’t take it personally. Critiques are about your work. They’re not about you as a person. And if you will, just listen to know they are there to help you be a better writer. That would be my final tip of advice.

Steve Cuden: I think that’s, all really marvelous and excellent advice. And those notes in particular, we’ve been talking about notes on this show for a very long time with many different guests. And I’ve always said, and I teach, teach, if you’re going to be in a note situation where you’re in a note session, take the notes. You don’t have to agree with them. Take them, think about them. Because sometimes a note will trigger other solutions that you hadn’t thought about, no one had thought about. So don’t deny the notes. Accept them all. That doesn’t mean you have to agree with them all.

Dr. William J. Carl: Absolutely, totally agree with you, Steve.

Steve Cuden: Well, William, Carl, this has been so much fun for me, and you’re a very well versed human on a lot of different subjects, and so it’s very interesting to chat with you, and I can’t thank you enough for your time, your wisdom, and all of your very interesting life’s work.

Dr. William J. Carl: Well, I thank you for doing what you do with the podcast and probably very interesting people that you have every time you’re on. And thanks again for writing an incredibly wonderful book called beating Broadway, because it’s a big help to me as I move from play, screenplay and play to musical now.

Steve Cuden: Well, I’m blushing. I can’t thank you enough. Thank you.

Dr. William J. Carl: Great.

Steve Cuden: And so we’ve come to the end of today’s StoryBeat If you liked this episode, won’t you please take a moment to give us a comment, rating, or review on whatever app or platform you’re listening to? Your support helps us bring more great story beat episodes episodes to you. story is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Tunein, and many others. Until next time, I’m Steve Cuden, and may all your stories be unforgettable.

Executive Producer: Steve Cuden, Producer: Casey Georgi, Announcer: Javier Grajeda
Social Media: Mina Hoffman, Design & Marketing: Holly Reed, Reed Creative Group

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