I’ve written somewhere else about what I call the ‘Critical Decision of the Hero’. This decision is the one that will be at the center of the whole story. Some would say that the main decision by the hero of the story happens at the climax and establishes the point where the victory is won, where the solution is achieved, where the conflict is resolved. I don’t believe so. I think the Critical Decision is another one.  It happens typically at the end of the First Act and Joseph Campbell would call it The Acceptance of the Call. I think this Critical Decision shows up in basically every story, by the hero or the protagonist: there is a conflict and a main challenge and the decision by the protagonist to accept the challenge and face the odds becomes the propeller for the whole story. Every time there are doubts and obstacles, the protagonist will return to this decision and decide whether to keep going or give up. Until the very end.

The Critical Decision is a very important moment in a story and I like it when the authors pay due attention to it. Who can forget, for instance, THE SONG OF ICE AND FIRE’s Daenerys’ decision in A CLASH OF KINGS of stepping into the fire with her dragon eggs? Or Frodo deciding to go to Mordor (the first book’s Critical Decision is for Frodo to leave the Shire, but the whole saga’s Critical Decision is to go to Mordor)? If the decision is properly prepared, it can become a source of inspiration to us all. Preparation, however, is far from easy. Skill is needed.

Think of THE MATRIX for a second. We all know that when the time comes, Neo will choose to learn the truth, to accept the red pill and go through the looking glass. Still, it’s important to support that decision and so the protagonist is tested several times. He has to make successive decisions before he even meets Morpheus and makes the Critical Decision. At the beginning, his computer says «Follow the White Rabbit» and a couple knocks on Neo’s door, inviting him to a club. He declines, but then he sees the tattoo of the white rabbit and changes his mind. In the club, he meets Trinity and she asks him what is the question he wants to have answered – he responds: «What is the Matrix?» The next day, he is reprimanded by his boss, who tells him that if he wants to keep his job he has to obey the rules. And then Morpheus calls him and tells him he has to decide if he wants to escape the police or go with them. That’s the only time Neo’s strength fails and his doubts overcome him. He lets himself be caught by the police. In the interrogation, Agent Smith tells him he has to choose between Anderson and Neo – Neo gives him the finger and asks for a phone call. He wakes up in his bed and Trinity picks him up. With a gun to his head he has to decide «their way or the highway», he decides to stay. Only after all these decisions, when the question is so well established in all our minds, Neo is finally faced with the Critical Decision: the blue pill or the red pill.

This decision is the basis of the whole story and the build up to this moment is crucial. Even Cypher plays with it later: «Oh why, oh why didn’t I take the blue pill?»

In THE MATRIX the buildup is so well done that the Critical Decision itself becomes a Watercooler Moment (a moment to remember – we’ll speak more about this in other posts). No-one who watched the movie ever forgets the moment Neo chose the red pill.

Another Critical Decision. In TAKEN, Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson’s character) in on the phone with his daughter who is away in Paris, and she’s frantic, telling him some men are in the apartment, kidnapping her friend. Bryan immediately decides that she must hide under a bed and tells her she would be taken. He had foreseen this event and his Critical Decision was the one to allow his daughter to go to Paris in spite of all his instincts. The Watercooler Moment comes next, when the kidnapper comes to the phone and Bryan tells him he has a «particular set of skills» he will use to find him and kill him. And the kidnapper tells him «Good luck.»

In THE SOUND OF MUSIC the Critical Decision comes when Maria sings «My Favorite Things» and we know she decided to stay with the Von Trapp. In JAWS, I believe it’s the moment Sheriff Brody decides to hire Quint, the fisherman, and take the matter into his own hands, even though this comes later in the story.

The whole set-up, the inciting incident, the debate, the doubts of the first 10%-20% of the story are the preparation for the Critical Decision. And even if the decision seems obvious and easy at the moment it is taken, our job as authors is to make it difficult until that very moment. In ancient secret Portuguese maps, un-sailed seas were marked with the expression: «From here on there are only Dragons.» The English version of the phrase states: «Here there be monsters». These were the borders of the known Universe. Those who crossed it must be bold and determined. Not all protagonists are overall bold and determined. Maybe some are forced to take the Critical Decisions, or don’t even realize the gravity of their choices. Still, the strength of our stories depends on these moments when the characters decide to cross the border into the unknown and we all say: «Here there be monsters.»

I was impressed with the first episode of Starz’ new series COUNTERPART. With a good premise and an interesting set-up, this sounds like a winner. Let’s just see what happens as the series launches on January 21^st, i.e. tomorrow. The plot revolves around a UN civil servant that suddenly finds out he is involved in a secret project of guarding a portal between two dimensions. This civil servant, played by the very solid J.K. Simmons, finally meets his counterpart from the other dimension: a copy of himself in every way, except he took different decisions in life. A killer has also crossed from the other side, so the story is promising.

The main question posed by Simmons’ characters is one that can make us think for a long time: do we make decisions according to what we are, or do the decisions we make actually define us? This is not a merely philosophic or idle question. China, I’ve read the other day, is preparing a system that computes every decision one makes. Every book we buy, the restaurants we eat in, the people we socialize with, all of this is to be organized in a single system that gives us points and evaluates us, punishing us or rewarding us for each decision we make. Many in the US are also limited by their credit ratings that tie their future possibilities to their record of decisions made. If we ignore our recollections of Orwell’s 1984 or SNOWDEN, and all the abuse that might come from a centralized system that tracks our decisions, we could even admit that all decisions have consequences and so it’s fair to evaluate us by what we have decided in the past, however minute those decisions might have seemed to us at the time. Isn’t the whole Justice System based on that principle?

Still, raw decisions, and even wrong decisions, sometimes happen in a context that will need to be evaluated through different perspectives. That’s why, for example, murder is a crime, but a legitimate self-defense killing is not. The context qualifies the result. And that’s why we have trials, judges and juries. A fair system must allow us to make mistakes. The whole Human Experience balances between a dimension of Security, where we are safe, and a dimension of Freedom, where we can do what we want. We could only have 100% Security if we stopped Time entirely. Pascal said: all movement leads potentially to pain. All movement has a degree of danger. So to be 100% safe, all movement, all freedom, would have to be eliminated. On the other hand, if we had 100% freedom, chaos would be the result. There’s a Goldilocks level, a balanced level, where we can basically be free and safe. A fair system strives for that balance.

In a fair and modern system, we should be able to make the freest decisions we can, preserving the most security we can. But that means the system must allow us to make mistakes and learn and recover from our errors. This is not only crucial for us as individuals and to have meaning in our lives, but also crucial for future societies, where progress is so fast. Successful societies will be more and more dependent on creativity. And creativity depends on freedom, on risk-taking and on learning from our errors.

We could almost say, because fiction is the realm of the complicated, that just as we do, all our Main Characters are always dwelling on this crucial balance: more Freedom or more Security. That goes for the MC’s in COUNTERPART. As the story evolves, we learn that one of the J.K. Simmons character seems to have made decisions prioritizing Security, and the other seems to have made decisions prioritizing Freedom.

That apparently determined two different personalities. The one prioritizing Security seems more humble, rigorous, timid, tamed, less successful. The one prioritizing Freedom seems more confident, strong, successful. But we can see that something is evolving in the background and that other reasons and other contexts are looming in darkness. So I’ll be waiting to find out where it is all going.

Maybe fiction is the way to experiment with difficult and Life and Death decisions without going through them ourselves. Maybe watching movies, TV and reading books is our simplistic way to choose Security. To be safe while we travel in our own minds. Or maybe it is the way to free ourselves, to free our thoughts, to help us decide. Either way, we must use our power to decide and demand a fair system. Because it is in our hands. It is each and every one of us who has to fight to have fairness and freedom and security in our lives. We can’t leave that power to others. Or we will never be truly free and secure.

A long time ago, here in Portugal, the French bookshop chain FNAC opened its first stores and that’s when I came in touch with manga comics for the first time. They appeared on the shelves in French, so you might say that my original manga experience was in French. And one of my first loves in this experience was the story of a little cyborg called Gally, in a series called GUNNM by Yukito Kishiro. This series is known in the anglo-saxon world as BATTLE ANGEL ALITA, and will soon be brought to the screen by producer James Cameron and director Robert Rodriguez.

Alita is a small feminine cyborg of immense power and skill, that comes to life in a dystopian world divided in two: the slump-like world of Earth vs. the luxurious space-stations in orbit. On Earth, practically everyone is a cyborg, brains with mostly mechanic bodies. I will not tell you the surprising and satisfying ending to the saga, but (as usual) I rather talk to you about what’s behind these dystopian worlds we see more and more in our fictional universes.

Technological Singularity, that Von Neumann expression referring to the point where technology overcomes humans, is approaching rapidly.  It’s not just in movies like ALITA, the MATRIX, A.I., Westworld, and many more: it’s actually almost here. For real. Every day I see videos in my Facebook feed showing me the latest human-looking robot, or driveless cars or drones, or news articles on Big Data developments or chatbots and Artificial Intelligence. So, scary or not, here it is.

It’s not the first time that the rise of machines threatens Humans.  Centuries ago, almost all in the Human Race farmed the land or lived of the land. There were other professions, as warriors or smiths or priests or traders, but these were minorities. Agriculture reigned. Until the machines arrived and made everything both easier and more difficult. From the 18^th century on, society was convulsed with technological revolutions one after the other that changed life as known until then. First, the steam-machines in farming and ships and elsewhere, then the railroads, then electricity, then the combustion engine, then other things including flying and computing. These led to many disturbances, including our worst wars, and massacres beyond imagination. But they also brought the (almost) end of slavery, the explosion of education, the development of modern medicine, the tourist and travel revolution, television and movies, the Space frontier, etc.

While these transformations were taking place, the role of Man in the Universe was changing dramatically. If we were no longer needed to farm the land, what should we do? We went into industry. In the beginning of the 18^th century, most things owned by people, like tables, pens, swords, plates, hats, were made by one or a few people. Nowadays, after the revolutions, we look around and mostly all we own implies the work of thousands. Our tables, pens, knifes, hats, cars, computers, were made by designers that designed them; miners that got the materials off the Earth; professionals that made the paint, the plastic, the pieces, the assembling; maintenance workers that oiled the machines that made them; salespeople that sold each of these components; marketing people that made the adds where we saw these products for the first time; drivers that got the products to the shops; shopkeepers and managers; etc, etc, etc.

On the other hand we didn’t have to work so many hours, roles in society didn’t have to be as strict as before, and we didn’t have to be prisoners of the land, unable to make our own decisions. And so we now work 7 or 8 hours a day instead of 12 or more, for 5 days a week instead of 7. That’s why we have paid vacations, unions, unemployment benefits and health insurance, public education and public health systems.

At the same time, documents as the US Constitution, and many other constitutions, were hailing that ‘All men are created equal’, that we have the freedom to speak and to intervene in public life. And even women could be as valuable as men and even vote, God help us!

That’s why we now perceive the Industrial Revolution as a positive step in Human Evolution. For many, when it was happening, it seemed like the end of the world. So maybe the Singularity could also be an opportunity. It could mean we have to work fewer hours and could dedicate ourselves to creative jobs or others we can’t even imagine at this point.

But it’s not a stretch to imagine a world like Alita’s. Desperate and unjust. We already have a world divided between the rich and powerful vs. a mass of powerless living in sometimes appalling conditions. Two worlds separated by what seems an insurmountable distance. It’s possible, I don’t know how, that the Singularity could bring us the opportunity to face these injustices once more. To challenge again the inequality that still plagues us, and to launch another call-it-what-you-may Revolution.

I will not tell you how Alita’s saga ends. I don’t even know if the movie will be faithful to the books. But I assume there’s hope, my friends, there’s hope. The movie is scheduled to come out in mid-2018. I’ll be anxiously waiting.

At the time I write to you I just discovered Amazon’s MARVELOUS MRS.MAISEL. It’s 5 a.m., I’ve just watched a couple of episodes and I’m hooked. This kind of writing makes me green with envy, but I can’t stop watching. This is what good writing is all about: building a wonderful life, ripping it apart and then re-constructing it in a liberating way. I’ve been writing all my life but it took a real act of Faith to accept this life as a serious option. It’s not an easy life and, at the time I write to you, not a certain life either. Still, the ones that make it have to accept it on Faith, have to put their heads down, work like crazy and believe in the impossible. Many times that requires a shock of some kind. The Universe paving the way.

Amazon’s Original THE MARVELOUS MRS.MAISEL stars Golden Globe nominee Rachel Brosnahan in a well-deserved major role as a Jewish perfect housewife in 1950’s New York who’s trying to support her husband’s failing comedic hobby until… he leaves her. And that’s all I have to say about that. Featuring that Sorkin-eske kind of dialogue to which Amy Sherman-Palladino already accustomed us, this series’ intensity is much higher and the narrative sense is sharper than it ever was in GILMORE GIRLS.

J.K.Rowling made a speech, I believe in 2011, at the Commencement ceremony at Harvard that is now quite famous. She basically made a eulogy of failure. And what a speech! You can find it online, as it became viral. She spoke about her life after graduating from Harvard and how it went from bad to worse until she found herself, in her words, ‘as poor as you can be without being homeless’. For her, failure seems a necessary step to true success. A step to really find out your potential and become closer to what you can do. Rowling’s failure made her open to her writing and propelled her to create HARRY POTTER, a series that was turned down by multiple publishers before becoming almost the very definition of success. I recommend you listen to the speech. I’ve listened to it many times and will listen to it several more. The main message is, as Alex Borstein’s character Susie, in MARVELOUS MRS. MAISEL, tells Midge: ‘Everybody bombs’. Mrs.Maisel will find out: life is not perfect and being perfect isn’t even the best thing at all.

For some time in the past I used to make a living training executives in multinational companies. Sometimes I would ask the basic question: where do you see yourselves in 3 to 5 years? Little by little I discovered one thing: most of the people I asked this question became instantly depressed. Many people had never thought about this, about the direction of their lives. And those who did simply didn’t like the answer. Individuals accommodated to the paths their lives had taken without questioning much, accepting that it was ‘what had to be’. Few people took real risks with their lives and most tried their best not to think a lot about it. They had buried their dreams and found excuses for the holes in their souls. This will be more and more difficult to manage, though, as society is developing into a completely different animal than it was before, preparing to devour all traces of the world we know today. And most people will be surprised that their plans of comfort and their perfect paths through time will not be there where they thought they would be. Predictability is an endangered species. So they will have to adapt, think differently, wake up to the demands of change.

Failure will be inevitable for many or most in the next few years, as the world and the History of Mankind will surprise us all. But that does not have to be a disaster. Maybe some failure and some risk is exactly what the “Doctor” is ordering. Maybe failure is a true requisite for success as paradoxical as it may sound.

Both Ms.Rowling’s speech and Mrs.Maisel’s tale are inspirational in a time like this. They remind us that many things we think as dangerous or impossible are actually quite achievable. Psychologists in war areas will often speak about children that lost everything and witnessed traumatic events, and that even then were able to find a way to make sense and to become healthy, to be resilient. Resilience is our ability to adapt to change and still persevere. Navy Seals, in turn, have their 40% rule: they figure that when your mind is saying you reached your limit, you’re actually only 40% done – you still have 60% to give. So go, Mrs. Maisel, be all that you can be! You made my day already.