KENNETH ATCHITY:
THE STORY THAT COUNTS
KENNETH ATCHITY:
THE STORY THAT COUNTS
He may be Earth’s only multi-millennial Renaissance man: The only guy in L.A. who can discourse at length on the works of Aeschylus (likely the only man in Hollywood who can pronounce the name) and simultaneously close a deal with Angelina Jolie.
On face, Kenneth J. Atchity seems to embody many contradictions: The Louisiana-born, Jesuit-schooled scholar of Classics speaks four languages and can read in seven. He holds degrees from Georgetown University and Yale. He has been an instructor at Occidental College and a Fulbright Professor at the University of Bologna. Atchity has edited several literary journals and he has enjoyed successful stints as a print and broadcast journalist. He has published books ranging from collections of his poetry to Classical collections of Greek and Roman literature to highly-praised guides for aspiring authors and screenwriters.
Atchity has also authored librettos performed by the New York Philharmonic, and he has carved out a career as a successful Hollywood producer.
Atchity’s time is now chiefly preoccupied by his management agency, AEI, and its companion organization "The Writer’s Lifeline," a training ground for aspiring authors and screenwriters.
Under the auspices of AEI, Atchity recently served as producer/executive producer for two films scripted by his client, John Scott Shepherd: Joe Somebody, starring Tim Allen, and Life, or Something Like It starring the aforementioned Angelina Jolie. AEI also manages numerous novelists and nonfiction authors. Atchity’s recent success stories on the book front include thriller writer Steve Alten, whose first novel Meg — a page-turner about a Jurassic-age shark swimming present day waters— cracked the New York Times bestseller list and netted a seven figure film deal from Disney, as well as the world’s most improbable political figure, Jesse Ventura, who AEI shepherded onto the bestseller lists twice in four years.
Some might argue the distance between Anaximander and a prehistoric shark comprises a bewildering career arc.
The man who wrote Yale’s longest-thesis-in-the-shortest-time would disabuse them of that notion: It is, he would likely argue, all about telling a great story.
Interviewer C.M. McDonald spoke with Ken Atchity on Aug. 19, 2002.
McDonald: How did you become interested in Classical studies?
Atchity: I went to a Catholic grade school and it started there. When I was about 10, in fifth grade, I met a Jesuit priest who started teaching me Latin every day, in the afternoons. He took a walk every day and walked by our house, and he’d stop and teach me Latin and other languages. Then I went to a Jesuit high school and studied Latin and Greek, as well as a little French. Then I went to Georgetown, a Jesuit college, continued my Latin and Greek studies and got enrolled in what was called the Virgilian Academy where I won the Silver Medal for my knowledge of Virgil’s Aeneid. When I went to Yale, I continued Latin and Greek studies, but at a lesser level, because I was expanding my studies to other languages.
McDonald: How many languages do you speak?
Atchity: Speak? Three or four. But I studied seven languages, altogether. I can read in seven languages.
McDonald: Do you scout for material in other languages?
Atchity: We look at a lot of Spanish things, although we don’t really love to do that. We love to do it in English, because it’s expensive for us to take the time to read it in other languages. We don’t often do that. But we represent a Mexican publisher whose work we look at in English and Spanish. Italian is probably my best modern language, so we look at things in that, but we don’t want the word out that we want to look at things in those languages, because, unfortunately, time is limited.
McDonald: When did you make your first serious attempt at writing prose?
Atchity: When I was a kid, very young. By the time I finished high school, I had already edited two newspapers and also was involved in writing for the Kansas City Star regularly. I worked on short stories when I was a kid.
McDonald: In A Writer’s Time, you lay out a step-by-step plan for creative writers — strategies, approaches, routines. Regarding your own early attempts at writing prose — how close did you intuitively come to the formalized structure you set forth in your book?
Atchity: I probably really got a lot of that (structure) put forth in A Writer’s Time when I was editing Dreamworks Magazine. That magazine was based on lots and lots of correspondence and interviews with writers of all kinds. The favorite thing we talked about was their process. How they did it, when they did and how much time they did it. I noticed long ago there were two groups of writers, of productive writers — I’ve never been too interested in non-productive writers, other than to help them become productive — but there were two kinds of productive writers. There were the ones who understood their process and who were, as a result, happy and adjusted, and then the ones who were unhappy and depressed all the time and I realized it was because they didn’t understand their process. People like Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury can write on trains, upside down, or sitting in the Today Show window.
McDonald: I’ve heard of Harlan Ellison actually writing in bookstore windows.
Atchity: He did it in the Today Show window. He wrote a short story, as a challenge, in the window of the Today Show just to prove he could write anywhere and that it wasn’t about external inspiration. In A Writer’s Time I talked about the fact that one of the arts of learning how to be a productive and adjusted writer is to realize the muse is inside you and has to be summonable at will. You can’t sit around waiting for her to come. Otherwise, you’re letting someone else control your life. You will never be that productive. I learned it by talking to all of these artists who all had different versions of their process. I started realizing there was a pattern to all of this — it wasn’t a magical thing, it was, "here are the different steps of creativity and the order." In that book I started distilling it. I had been teaching creative writing students for years, too, and I just immediately started applying what I was learning from very productive writers and from my own writing, too. I was always puzzled when people had a hard time getting certain things done.
When I was at Yale, I wrote my thesis on Homer’s Iliad. It was called Homer’s Iliad — The Shield of Memory, it was the longest thesis ever submitted to Yale University, it was 853 pages. Bart Giamatti, who was my mentor at the time, talked me into making it only about Homer. It was originally going to be about Homer, Dante and Joyce. But it was 853 pages, and I did it in about six months, while I was working fulltime and had a family and finishing up at Yale. I saw other people who took seven years to do their thesis and I just realized there was obviously a difference in the way they were using time and their process. One of the basic rules if you want to avoid wasted time and writer’s block, is simply never to sit down to write until you know what you’re going to write before you sit down.
McDonald: Rather than staring at the wall or out the window.
Atchity: Yes, do all of the other things that life needs you to do while you’re thinking about what you have to write. But when you’re actually sitting down you should never be staring at a blank page. You should be sitting down dying to get your fingers on the keyboard and writing down what you’ve already figured out in your head.
McDonald: In that book, you state, "Once you have survived your education (essential as far as it goes)…" Is it your sense that creative writing classes or workshops can potentially threaten a writer’s voice?
Atchity: It really is. When I gave classes, which I did for years before I became a producer and formed The Writer’s Lifeline to formally help writers, I always focused the entire class around productivity. In other words, we slashed and dealt with the style and structure as we went, but there’s no point in talking about those things if you’re not producing. I used to have a course at UCLA which I offered for 17 years, called "Write your screenplay" or "Write your novel" — two different offerings — "in 10 Weeks or Less." It was really more time than I needed, but that was the term structure of the academic world. In fact, one of the reasons I left the academic world is because I realized that so much of the academic world is based on term structure. If you want to study Homer, you get 10 weeks to do it in, or 12 weeks or 16 weeks depending on the term structure.
McDonald: Arbitrary units of time.
Atchity: It’s all arbitrary. You end up making decisions, I noticed, when you plan a course that are based on arbitrary things like how long a term is. When it came to writing in this course I taught, I said "The only rule is you can’t start writing until I tell you you’re ready to start. So I would make people come in and pitch their stories to me every day — every time the class met. When I thought each story was ready to pitch, then they could start writing. Most people I would not start until the last four weeks of the course. Having too much time to write is much more dangerous to getting the story out in an exciting way — much more dangerous — than having too little time to write. Most people don’t realize that. They think, "I’ll do this, it will take me a while." But the more you type into your computer the longer it’s going to take you if you’re typing the wrong thing.
McDonald: "Endless visions and revisions?"
Atchity: Yeah, you’re writing stuff in that is not part of the story — it’s just words. There is a chapter in my book about the relationship between words and story and myth and words. The whole idea is that it’s the story that counts. A great story, by a great storyteller — he could tell it, and has often told it, completely over again, with different words. Shakespeare is a perfect example of somebody who could easily have rewritten Hamlet into a comedy, and using an entirely different set of words, told the same story, but differently because he realized words are not what the story is about. It’s about character and structure, the structure of storytelling. That’s what I realized among all of the writers I talked to, whether it was García Márquez, or Paul Bowles, Ursula K. LeGuin or John Fowles. All of them understood that storytelling was the focus of their project. They kept going until they were ready to tell the story.
McDonald: You’re into film production and literary management and so forth now, but deep down, do you still have a self-identification as an educator?
Atchity: I guess I do. I feel that is part of my life’s mission. Every time I get a chance to speak at a writer’s conference I do my best to go.
McDonald: When you do that does your college classroom lecturer mode come to the fore, or some other persona?
Atchity: I keep alluding to Homer and to Aristotle’s Poetics. I think that is why people like my keynote addresses — they are filled with allusions to how the great writers and minds of the past dealt with these issues. You can’t get that out of me. (Chuckling) You can take the professor out of the classroom… I love doing it, and someday I may end up retiring back to a sleepy little campus in Louisiana and do that again fulltime. What I wasn’t thrilled with was the academic world’s lack of contact with the real world. Especially when it came to storytelling. One of the things that taught me that, early, when I was Erich Segal’s assistant when I was a graduate student at Yale and Erich had just written Love Story — he had written The Yellow Submarine the first year I was there — then he wrote Love Story. He was also fighting for tenure at the same time, and he was denied tenure over the Love Story controversy. The controversy was simply that he had written a commerical novel.
McDonald: A case of "how dare he do something viably popular in the market place?"
Atchity: At the same time he had written a book on Plautus, a book on Euripides, a book on Roman laughter. What killed him there and they denied him tenure was that he had made a lot of money writing a commercial story. I just didn’t understand that, especially since he then went off and worked at Harvard.
McDonald: We’re on the topic of Classics and commercial products: Although recent aspects of her life might be likened to a Greek Tragedy, the distance between Angelina Jolie and Aristotle seems…considerable —
Atchity: Well, not really. The connection is that Aristotle wrote about comedy and tragedy, which meant that he went to the theater, every time there was a play and he studied the patterns of theater. And he realized what made the people love something is that it followed certain patterns.
McDonald: What I was attempting to get at is that you have this background in Classical studies, and instruction, and now you’re making your living in this popular milieu — mass entertainment. It’s an interesting career evolution.
Atchity: I realize that. I still love the Classical thing. One of my desires is to find writers who are adapting the Classics into contemporary stories or retelling them in great scripts. That’s really hard to find. I haven’t really found anybody like that yet, but I will. That would make me really happy — to bring my past into my present in that way. To do something of Shakespeare’s, or Homer’s or one of great Greek tragedians. I studied Elizabethan drama and taught that for years. There are 40 great dramatists who were contemporaries of Shakespeare and many many of their plays have never been made into movies. It’s a rich field for somebody out there to be mining.
McDonald: Could you summarize the respective missions of AEI and The Writer’s Lifeline?
Atchity: AEI is a management and production company. What it does is to represent writers who are ready for representation, writers of all kinds that are commercial, basically fiction and nonfiction book writers and screenwriters. Our clients are pretty evenly spread among those three categories. Our favorite client is one who is able to write books and scripts. Probably half of our clients we have taken in that direction, helping them make the bridge to the other thing they weren’t doing before. When somebody’s work comes in and we’re excited by it and it looks professional and it looks ready to go, we’ll give them some notes and if they can perfect the notes on one pass or two, we’ll sign them up and represent them and go out and sell their work and produce it if it is filmmable. That’s what the management company does.
McDonald: And The Writer’s Lifeline?
Atchity: When we started the management company, I began to see that we got so many projects in that were great ideas but were simply not ready in any way, shape or form to be sold. In the beginning, we took our time and tried to help those people get their pieces together and we succeeded. But you have a limited amount of time and you can use all your time doing that. I looked around, and I didn’t see anybody in the marketplace who was actually just helping writers make the commercial bridge. What I did see were a lot of editorial companies who would say "We will help you fix your novel, or give you a course, but we can’t sell it for you — don’t expect that of us, because that is a conflict of interest." As someone educated by Jesuits, I always immediately attack rhetorical terms, because almost always rhetoric is used to cloud something else. I started looking at what the conflict of interest was between developing work and getting paid to develop it, and then selling it. I just couldn’t figure it out. I realized it was just a mask — in my opinion — for the fact that these companies just didn’t have a way to sell anything. They didn’t want to take responsibility for saying they would refer it to an agency. All they wanted to do was to collect the editorial money. When I saw some of the people who had gone there — victims of these companies — I realized that a lot of times these companies weren’t even good editorially. The Writer’s Lifeline evolved as an extension of my consulting. I've developed a system of getting personally involved in every single client's project, to make sure it's being shaped for the market.
We have two missions through The Writer’s Lifeline. They are both about helping writers get their stories into the commercial market place. We have two kinds of clients. One is a client who has a story to tell, but who is not interested in being a writer.
McDonald: They just have a concept?
Atchity: They may just have a dream. They want to get a book done, or a script. We have an architect who we just signed the other day who has an incredible story about finding out what happened to his father in World War II. He wants to make it into a movie and he wants a script written, but he doesn’t want to write the script. He doesn’t have time to do that. He doesn’t want to learn how to write it, either — that’s what we explored with him. Gov. (Jesse) Ventura is another example of that. He’s a client of ours. He wanted to have books published, and actually tried to get a book published, but he had nothing focused that a publisher could relate to.
McDonald: I was going to ask if he sought you out, or if you found him.
Atchity: He sought us out through his sports agent. He’s a good friend of ours and we’ve done two books for the Governor and we’re talking about a third one. What we did there, was we helped him shape the book, then we found an editor/writer among our group who went to Minneapolis and sat with him for 40 hours of tapes and then shaped the draft of the book. Then the Governor got really involved in adding anecdotes and rewriting it and putting it in his voice. Both books were New York Times bestsellers. Another client like that is Ripley’s Believe it or Not, for whom we’ve developed a couple of book lines.
McDonald: So these represent one type of client of The Writer’s Lifeline. And the other?
Atchity: The other kind — probably 70% of our clients — are writers or would-be writers who have a vision, a dream, an ambition, and, most often, talent, but they don’t have knowledge, or they have very little knowledge or not enough knowledge, of the craft or technique required to succeed in the commercial world. There is no place I know of that really teaches that which is connected with a sales organization. Although Writer’s Lifeline is a separate company, statistically, 70% of AEI sales come from people who have gone through The Writer’s Lifeline.
McDonald: It is, then, almost a feeder system into AEI?
Atchity: My business people all look at The Writer’s Lifeline as the farm team for AEI. However, once a book is completed, now we often refer it to some other representation organization, either because it is too small for AEI to handle, or because somebody is more specialized in that area, or, more and more often, because somebody was referred to us in the first place by another organization. About a third of our referrals come to us now by agencies, as well as studios and production companies. They have a product they can’t sell because of the shape that it is in. The concept, however, they’re getting huge response on.
One example: A producer gave us a book that he had tried to sell everywhere in Hollywood — an unpublished manuscript — and failed. There was something about it that people liked, but it just wasn’t in good shape. We spent nine months with the writer and ended up selling it for $750,000. Meanwhile, it really started teaching the writer the art of putting together a novel. He’s now gotten involved in two other deals that have spun out of that. Our mission with the writer is to prepare him for the commercial marketplace. We say on our Web site that we want to be your bridge with the commercial marketplace. When I go to conferences, I see that huge need out there for somebody who will say, "Not only will we help you do it, but we’ll help you do it with the marketplace in mind." We’re not going to help you do it just from an artistic point of view. We’re not going to say, "We’re pure artists and we’re going to help you write the perfect novel, but don’t look to us to help you sell it because we don’t want market considerations to enter into it." I always think that is complete nonsense.
McDonald: Well, the aim is to be read.
Atchity: This is the education thing I’m always railing against that does a lot of damage and you do have to outgrow it: When you’re younger and you have creative writing classes in high school, people say, "Forget about everything else, just write from your heart." To me, the more you are aware of the world that we live in, that is utter nonsense. You can do that and be starving to death on the street corner somewhere, using Crack and Thunderbird and not being a very happy camper. What I say in A Writer’s Time is "write from your heart about things that matter to all of us." That’s the difference in our formula. When we start consulting with The Writer’s Lifeline Client, we start with the marketplace. We say, "Who are you writing this for?" If we can’t answer that question, we help them shift the project to find the market for it, then start the writing, then we start the editing process — the style, the concept and structural shaping process. Otherwise, we think we’re wasting your time. We’re very commercially oriented. I learned that from teaching Shakespeare and teaching Greek Tragedy. As high and mighty as they all seem to be from such a distance today, the truth is that all of the people involved in the greatest periods of drama were completely driven by the market. They didn’t call it that, maybe, but they had to please the market. Shakespeare got the Globe Theatre built, not because he was sitting in a garret somewhere, writing plays and wouldn’t talk about audience.
McDonald: The works had to have popular appeal?
Atchity: Yes. Sophocles and Aeschylus staged their great dramas by raising the money to do it. A playwright had to get a patron every time the great festival was held. The rich Athenians were available for that, but the playwright had to go around constructing a business plan, basically. And the one whose plays succeeded through the years, probably, are not only the ones who had great plays, but great business plans which brought people into the theaters and proved that they were effective business plans. Storytelling is the most serious of all human activity, and of course people should be paid for it. Both of our companies are in the business of finding literary assets and perfecting them so they can be exploited for the benefit of the storyteller.
McDonald: Steve Alten, bestselling author of the thrillers Meg, The Trench and Domain is one of your clients. It’s my understanding that you went a considerable distance in shaping the manuscript of his first novel. What was it in that first draft of Steve Alten’s eventual book that hooked you and spurred you on to take the extra effort in helping to shape his novel? I’ve gathered through things that I’ve read and that he has said that it was substantially reworked.
Atchity: It was substantially reworked. Meg wasn’t originally called Meg, it was called The White Devil or White Scream or something like that. It had four or five different plot lines. It had five heroes, all working at cross-purposes to each other, and at the end of the story you weren’t clear what the story was. What I saw in it was The Old Man and the Sea. I saw Moby Dick. What I saw in it, was Jonah and the Whale. What we needed to do was to make one hero and one storyline and one huge fish and then let’s go nuts and actually put him inside the fish at the end. Then it could resonate through the great fish stories.
McDonald: Focus.
Atchity: We really worked with Steve for nine months or so, before we made the Disney sale. He was not in good shape as a writer, but what he was very good at was writing action scenes and a sense of story. I have to say now that Steve’s new book, Goliath, that is out now, is just a wonderful book. His previous book, Domain, is just as good, and he has just become a very strong writer. He still uses The Writer’s Lifeline’s services, though much less than he used to. Our favorite client, and Steve is definitely one of them, is one who comes to us and says, "All I want is to be the best I can be." You can only really take them from one level to another when they are ready to go to that level. Steve is moving up the charts. He’s not satisfied with himself. He’ll rewrite things 10 times, and to me, that is the ideal storyteller, someone who just wants to be better and better. That’s why I love my oldest uncles in Louisiana so much, because their jokes just got better as they got older. They just kept making them better.
McDonald: It would be depressing if you didn’t evolve.
Atchity: There were uncles whose jokes did not get better, who you didn’t want to sit by on the porch.
McDonald: A few months ago, I interviewed Steve Alten, and he consistently referred to you as his "manager." Based on his background in athletics, I mistakenly thought he viewed you as a "manager" in a metaphorical, sports sense. In preparing for our discussion, I saw that you identify yourself and your agency as "literary managers" as opposed to "literary agents." What’s the distinction in your own mind?
Atchity: The legal distinction is that managers, until recently, could produce movies and agents couldn’t. There is some talk now that agents can produce, but we haven’t seen examples of it happening. That’s the legal distinction. In reality, the big distinction is that managers have a much wider business scope. The few I know are much more dedicated to developing materials than agents are. Agents tend to look at something and say, "Is this ready for representation, or not?" If it is, they’ll take it on. If it’s not… In the old days, the best agents would spend years to developing things. Nobody has time to do that anymore. Certainly, the editors in New York don’t have time. Studio execs don’t have time. They either buy things, or they don’t. Oddly enough, interestingly, most of our referrals come from those people now. We end up doing joint ventures with them. We probably have ventures with 20 different agencies and companies right now who referred material to us because they recognized their own inability to do it. They just don’t have the time. It’s not the business they’re in — they are in the sales business. We are in the story business. We love stories and we fall in love with them. We want to be there for the duration. Our favorite client is one who comes to us with a concept and I want you to guide me through the process, step-by-step, so I can maximize its marketing potential. Then we’ll be there through the distribution of the film. We will be there at the beginning, the middle and the end. An agent is going to be there for two weeks — during the time that he acquires it and goes out and sells it, and if he doesn’t sell it on the first round, he’s out of it. Eighty-percent of our sales have been ones that we have sold on round 10, because we just never gave up.
McDonald: How many "rounds" have you gone?
Atchity: We just sold a book six months ago that I had had for three years. The writer, when I called him up to say I have a publisher for you, almost had a heart attack. He had almost forgotten about his book. He had no idea I was still trying to sell it. I’m thinking, "Well, why wouldn’t I?" Long after our agreement ran out and everything else, I called him up and said, "What ever happened to your book?" And he said, "Nothing, it’s still sitting there." I asked, "Are you represented?" And he said, "No." And I said, "Well, I just sold it." To me, that’s the difference between managers and agents. We keep developing and redeveloping something until you meet the market you want to go to.
