Transcript: The Culture of Liberty and the Power of Fiction

 

Date of recording: September 30, 2024, The Savvy Street Show

Host: Roger Bissell. Guest: Vinay Kolhatkar.

 

For those who prefer to watch the video, it is here.

Editor’s Note: The Savvy Street Show’s AI-generated transcripts are edited for removal of repetitions and pause terms, and for grammar and clarity. Explanatory references are added in parentheses. Material edits are advised to the reader as edits [in square brackets].

 

 

Summary

In this conversation, Roger Bissell interviews Vinay Kolhatkar about the intersection of fiction, culture, and freedom.

In this conversation, Roger Bissell interviews Vinay Kolhatkar about the intersection of fiction, culture, and freedom. They explore how fiction shapes societal values, the cognitive science behind storytelling, and the aesthetic theories of Ayn Rand. Kolhatkar shares personal anecdotes about how literature has impacted lives and discusses the importance of maintaining objective standards in narrative art. The conversation concludes with Kolhatkar’s insights on his literary journey and the themes of his upcoming works.

 

Takeaways

1. Fiction reflects and shapes culture significantly.
2. Storytelling is a powerful tool for empathy and understanding.
3. Ayn Rand’s aesthetic theories provide a foundation for evaluating art.
4. The balance of showing and telling is crucial in effective storytelling.
5. Objective standards exist in narrative art, contrary to postmodern views.
6. Fiction can inspire courage and provoke thought on serious issues.
7. Cognitive science reveals how narratives affect our worldview.
8. Literary thrillers can address profound societal issues.
9. The current literary landscape is influenced by neo-Marxist ideologies.
10. Engagement with fiction is essential for preserving liberty and culture.

 

Roger Bissell

Good evening and welcome to The Savvy Street Show, where we try to show our viewers what it means to be savvy. My name is Roger Bissell, and my special guest for this program is novelist, op-ed writer, and podcaster Vinay Kolhatkar. Vinay is the editor and founder of The Savvy Street, and I am often his co-host here on The Savvy Street Show. This time Vinay is on the witness stand, and I will pose a few questions to him on fiction and freedom—more specifically, on the culture of liberty and the power of fiction. Welcome to The Savvy Street Show, Vinay.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you for having me and doing this role reversal and thank you for the subpoena that [means] I have to appear on this witness stand. Here I am, in chains, on the witness stand.

 

Roger Bissell

All right, raise your right hand and swear after me. Here we go.

Fiction, like other forms of art, reflects the culture that it’s part of, but is it just an epiphenomenon? Is it just like smoke from the chimney, or can you give us some examples of how it also has the power to have a significant effect on the culture?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you, Roger. First let me start with a couple of abstractions—three actually. One is from Jonathan Gottschall. He’s a distinguished research fellow at Washington & Jefferson College, and he specializes in literature and evolution. He contends that we are genetically wired for stories, so let me quote him. He says, “Like a flight simulator, fiction projects us into intense simulations of problems that run parallel to those we face in reality. Therefore, fiction is a powerful and ancient virtual reality technology that simulates the big dilemmas of human life.” So, we are in a flight simulator, and you can transport yourself to faraway worlds which may be dangerous or historical worlds that you cannot visit. On the other hand, Ayn Rand says the value of art is it gives the person an experience of living in a world which doesn’t exist, but it can be, might be; she quotes Aristotle [in this regard]. Aristotle himself expressed the view in his Poetics that if you have the right climax, you get a catharsis. So, there are several advantages of fiction.

But I want to dig in now into the cognitive science of fiction.

There are five things that an artist wants to do. Firstly, sometimes we just want to persuade people to a point of view, so it is advocacy even though it’s fiction. Secondly, it can be a situational empathy to incite an empathy for, or an understanding of, a faraway situation, people, or problem, in a risk-free and low-cost environment. You may be visiting a genocide in Rwanda where people are getting slaughtered right, left, and center. It’s gruesome, it’s bloody, we feel the fear, but we’re sitting in an air-conditioned theater eating popcorn in a very comfortable seat. So, that’s what we mean by a situational empathy. You can also, as Aristotle said, assuage negative feelings such as grief, fear, helplessness. The protagonist experiences similar emotions. We identify with the protagonist. That immersion experience can have a cathartic effect, according to Aristotle. [Fourthly,] you may want to inspire people to do courageous things that they otherwise may not attempt. Certain specific literature may be very inspirational. Last but not the least, the Randian thing: you can have the experience of a positive sense of life as with laughter and a sense of wonder and joy, or a very negative sense of life like despair and helplessness that can come from a disorderly, nihilist universe that is expressed.

By entertained we mean our emotions are aroused and they stay aroused.

If we get entertained, and by entertained we mean our emotions are aroused and they stay aroused, then if the emotional states vary we stay better immersed in that experience[i]. You forget you’re in a theater . . . the popcorn is forgotten, you’re so immersed in the story. You experience the story as being typical of humanity even though the sample of key characters is way too few for that to be a statistical sample. The heightened emotional state numbs the brain’s critical and reflective faculty, so you’re likely to imbibe the messages of the narrative more readily. You’re likely to retain the messages when the emotional high ends. You’re likely to integrate the messages with your existing worldview, so if your existing worldview is yellow and you’re seeing a little bit of red, then you’re slightly orange the next time around and that stays. It’s called the “absolute sleeper effect.” It actually reinforces and strengthens the integration because from then on you’re looking at the world with an orange lens. Last but not the least, you’re likely to perceive the real world to be a just world if you often immerse in fiction, because in fiction the world is much more just.

So, with all that in mind, it’s the individuals who get affected; but if enough individuals get affected, the culture gets affected.

 

Roger Bissell

Okay, I see how there would be the cumulative effect spreading across the culture if enough people go see a particular movie. And you weren’t kidding that there is a lot to chew on, a lot of abstractions. But I did hear a specific takeaway. If you’re going to go to Rwanda, be sure to have some popcorn. Right?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

[Both laugh] Indeed. That will protect me from the bullets.

 

Roger Bissell

What about individuals’ lives? Sometimes we hear people say, “Wow, when I read this book or when I saw this movie, it really changed my life.” Do you have some examples, like a hero who’s fighting for freedom, or they’re just trying to get their life straightened out? Do you have any personal examples or examples of other people that you know about?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

I do. I have a bunch of examples of movies and books, so let me just start with the movies.

There’s a 1954 movie called On the Waterfront starring Marlon Brando, and he experiences quite a character change, which I personally found very inspiring even late in life.

There’s a 1954 movie called On the Waterfront starring Marlon Brando, and he experiences quite a character change, which I personally found very inspiring even late in life. Then there was a movie called Gandhi, 1984, starring Ben Kingsley, and that was a beautiful example of what we call an empathy for a situation, because you can’t visit the past, you can’t go to India in the 1930s. There’s a movie called Network, 1976, starring Peter Finch that I think was really forward looking.

Let me go through a few book examples. I read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged when I was 14, and it massively changed my worldview. I’ve since met many, many people who either read Atlas Shrugged first or The Fountainhead [first] sometime between the ages of 14 and 24, and it had a profound impact on their lives. George Orwell’s 1984 probably did change some people’s views. Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird back in those times when people would assume that the black person’s more likely to be guilty than the white person automatically; she may have changed the culture a little bit. Abraham Lincoln said that of Harriet Beecher Stowe, that “… that’s the little old lady who changed history,” because she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin when slavery was rife, and then all of a sudden, lots of people began to look at black people as being humans and not slaves.

Let me just go to a few bad examples of movies. In 2017, there was Dunkirk, and it had no hero. It had no name for a hero. It was as nihilistic as you can get. In 2022, there was Everything, Everywhere All at Once. It was so pathetic. It had no coherence at all. Those two are the worst movies ever made. Same with the Oscar winner in 2019, Parasite. Disgrace in 2008, I found it awful. It conveyed a very nihilistic view of the world. Even Citizen Kane, the movie that critics lauded as the best of all time for 50 years in a row before The Dark Knight appeared, was just awful. Again, it doesn’t have a proper plot other than saying that all rich people have too much angst.

 

Roger Bissell

I think my favorite movie, and this may seem like a strange one, is a Robin Williams movie. I’m not a huge Robin Williams fan, but this deeply affected me. It’s called Bicentennial Man, and it’s based on a novel about an android household servant who becomes self-aware and wants to be human. It’s a gripping movie, set in the near future and then the not-so-near future.

But to back to your example about Atlas Shrugged. Like many of our viewers, I’ve been influenced by Rand’s fiction writing or her essays or both. Talking about Rand specifically, what do you think of her as a novelist? Pro and con, what are the things you appreciate or notice most about her and her aesthetic theories in The Romantic Manifesto?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

I think The Romantic Manifesto is probably Rand’s most insightful and original work.

Let me just take on the aesthetic theory first. I personally found the theory amazing. I read The Romantic Manifesto in my teens first, and I didn’t appreciate it enough. I was then in my 30s or 40s when I reread it. I probably read it three or four times overall, and it was astoundingly original. I want to caveat that remark by saying I’m not a scholar of aesthetics, so if something similar was published before or after, I’m not aware of it. But it is a fantastic foundation for more insights. [In the book], Rand does go outside of literature into other forms of art. We just spoke about the cognitive science of narrative, and that’s throwing up more and more new things. There’s also another discipline called neurocinematics, which is the influence of cinema on our cognitive makeup. There is more that can be built on it, but I do believe the foundation is outstanding. I think The Romantic Manifesto is probably Rand’s most insightful and original work, even more than [Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology] or Atlas Shrugged or certainly any non-fiction book. She probably needs to acknowledge Aristotle more than she does. She does do one quote. The Poetics does cover plot almost as well as she does, but she improves on it as well. So, I think she’s amazing as an aesthetic theoretician, not necessarily the last word on everything, but it can be built upon.

As a novelist, I think Rand is sui generis. She is in a genre of her own, completely.

As a novelist, I think Rand is sui generis. She is in a genre of her own, completely. One thing she’s completely outstanding at is prose. Her prose is nothing short of spectacular. But she does do things in the way that the old literature was done. Let me give you an example. If you were writing today, especially a thriller, you would be told to keep moving and stay in the present moment.

Now, I’ve got a little passage here from The Fountainhead, just a random, middle of the book.

Dominique is saying, “Put your hands on my back, Roark.” Funny, she calls him Roark, not Howard, and they’re intimate by this time. “Just hold it there, like that. She lay still, her face buried against his knees, her arm hanging down over the side of the bed, not moving, as if nothing were alive but the skin between her shoulder blades under his hand.” That’s a great present moment, great prose. Then immediately afterwards, [the prose] says, “In the drawing rooms she visited, in the restaurants, in the offices of the AGA, people talked about the dislike of Miss Dominique Francon of The Banner for Howard Roark,” and it goes on. So, what [Rand] has done is just moved off into expositional text to tell us what Dominique is like, what else she was doing with her life, because if you have something covering a span of several years, and if you just stay in the current moment all the time, it will become, I don’t know, 5,000 pages. I mean, as is, The Fountainhead is longer than 300,000 words.

One problem I had with Rand was that she makes her books awfully long.

One problem I had with Rand was that she makes her books awfully long. I mean, Leo Tolstoy’s epic, War and Peace, I have the number here, 561,304 words. Atlas Shrugged is 561,996 words. Fortunately, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy is a few words longer than Atlas Shrugged. But personally, I don’t think those books have to be that long. When I revisited The Fountainhead recently, I found that Ayn Rand’s greatest strength became a weakness of sorts, because she writes—[you may recall the] first two pages of The Fountainhead—because she writes prose so well. She tends to do those [long] descriptive passages again and again at the expense of story in the sense that the momentum of the story is lost. So, that’s my one little quibble. One more quibble is that her dialogue tends to be very preachy and on the nose. On-the-nose dialogue means you just say exactly what is in your mind rather than imply it through a subtextual dialogue. It’s like you’re in the office of your boss and you’re asking for a promotion and the boss, instead of saying no, ignores you and plays putt-putt golf in his office. That’s subtextual. Like he’s not gonna give you the promotion rather than saying no you don’t deserve it because blah blah blah. So, there’s a lack of subtextual dialogue. There’s way too much exposition in the dialogue. She herself said, “show, don’t tell,” and she certainly shows in all the novels the consequences of actions, but she’s more a show-and-tell writer than a show-don’t-tell writer. But she’s the very, very best in prose.

 

Roger Bissell

I can’t argue with that. I’m glad you brought up that point about the show versus tell. In one of her essays in The Romantic Manifesto, she talked about those two approaches, which can be used together, or you can do one to the detriment or exclusion of the other. She called showing the “objective” method and she called telling the “subjective”—like if you tell, “he felt a deep longing inside his soul,” or you just give some description of his body language and his facial expression and you let the reader infer the mental state. Is there a conflict between these two approaches? Like you’re trying to persuade people by telling them and giving an exposition like Galt’s speech that goes on for four hours—it’s very, very long—or just giving those kinds of cues from which the reader can use their own intelligence to follow along and understand what’s happening. Do these two approaches clash with each other, or can you use them in a complementary way?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

That is a fantastic question. They don’t clash provided both of them are done well. I mean, you see any of those how-to public speaking courses, and they often tell you: start with a little narrative at the beginning or a joke or something, get people loosened up. Use illustrations rather than just abstractions, because people relate to concretes as well as abstractions. That’s all very nice and good, but when you are in fiction, as we just saw from the cognitive science of narrative, we should not ignore that it’s a very powerful tool, provided it’s used well, provided you entertain people. And to entertain people, you shouldn’t start by telling or even tell in the middle or the back of the story. You have to keep them in the story and demonstrate, keep them in the present moment, things like, “he clutched the arms of his chair tightly,” rather than, “he was feeling angst,” that sort of a show-don’t-tell.

But it’s much more show-don’t-tell and the entire series of events unravels as though that is the only thing that can happen; if these characters have opposing worldviews and they clash, this is the resolution you get. And those messages are imbibed. For instance, when I took a screenwriting course, the teacher said our favorite villain is the “Big Bad Corporation.” I’m not going to argue that some corporations haven’t been bad. Obviously, some are very big. Their gross revenue or even net revenue is bigger than the gross national product of many small countries. But that gets stuck in people and from a very young age. The other examples we took, the Parasite (the Korean movie that won best film at the Oscars 2019), was like, [the] rich are always bad, and Citizen Kane was similar, rich are always bad, it’s kind of a meandering story. I fear that the younger generation is increasingly affected now because they haven’t grown up in the 40s, 50s, 60s Hollywood where there were happy endings, good climax resolution. [They] had a plot, a correct, ordered plot that ended rather than ended in a sort of meandering way, which is a “no ending.”

So, as long as you write the story well, it is very powerful, and it is complementary. But what we are faced with is the literati, who are very neo-Marxist; they dominate the literary agencies and book publishing houses, and their view is that if it is literary, it must contain thousands of pages and be long and be sort of ponderous. I don’t have that view. I think literary means it should have gravitas. It should be about issues like the Gottschall quote we had at the beginning, issues of importance, not just always a serial murderer who’s getting caught or a murder mystery.

 

Roger Bissell

We’re talking right now about the manner of presentation, and Rand talked about showing as being objective and telling as being subjective. Be that as it may, she also really looked deeply at evaluating fiction or other art. A lot of people’s approach to telling whether it’s good or bad is to go by their feelings or by authority. But she claimed that standards of right and wrong and good and bad can be based upon facts. Do you agree with that? I assume that you don’t think it’s all just a matter of taste and arbitrary assertion or belief. Is there a defensible standard for good and bad, particularly in narrative art, in fiction, in drama?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

The inciting incident starts the story because it incites a purpose, a goal in the protagonist.

Well, there absolutely is. The standard that Rand laid down, I do accept. It actually came through first, probably, in Aristotle’s Poetics, that you should have a sequence of events that are not random, that are caused by the events prior. And in Aristotle’s Poetics, the story begins not at the beginning of the story, that’s like a backstory for the first five or 10 minutes, 15 minutes of a [stage play] movie. Then there is a catalyst or what we call an inciting incident. The inciting incident starts the story because it incites a purpose, a goal in the protagonist. Then the whole story is about, ideally, rising jeopardy and difficulty in managing and accomplishing the goal. Then there is a climax and [before that a] pre-climax, there is this [what’s called in screenwriting as] “in-the-cave” moment. Do I really want to risk my life to do this? And they do most often, and they succeed. Good movies follow that structure. So, having a plotless narrative is saying, in effect, there is no ordering in this universe. It’s all a bunch of random things, and it’s just luck. So, having a well-ordered plot, which Aristotle brought out and Rand did expand upon, is extremely critical. That’s not to say you ignore these other things about the dialogue and the structure and the good prose, but we do see in the movies now a lot that assume that there is no objectivity. If you like it, you like it. Whereas even in the screenwriting classes, they used to teach Aristotle saying that’s the objective.

Another illustration came to my mind. Our colleague at Savvy Street, Walter Donway, wrote an essay about the murder of poetry. And he quotes in that [essay] that coherence and clarity of meaning are the minimal requirements of a poem. “… Free verse is not poetry. Robert Frost said so, T. S. Eliot said so; and logic, including the nature of definition, also says so. The essential—that is, defining—characteristic of poetry as an art form is meter. The poet establishes an underlying pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, then varies it to achieve poetic effects …” So, meter and rhythm are critical almost like in a song. What we’ve got now is, free verse is regarded as poetry. Poetry isn’t a bunch of random sentence fragments. “I do. I walked. When I walked, there were dark clouds. And I was reminded of my childhood. But I kept walking and the dark clouds, they disappeared. I keep walking.” You know, these bunches of sentence fragments could be written by anybody, even a seven-year-old, [and] that doesn’t a poem make. So yes, we have absolutely objective standards. Just like what is happening in modern art, postmodern art is a random bunch of things thrown [at us], anyone could have done it, and that’s disfiguring the true form of visual art. The same thing is happening to poetry, the same thing is happening to screenwriting, probably not as much in novel writing, But there is an element of this postmodern left of wrecking standards, whereas there are objective standards.

 

Roger Bissell

I agree with you, and I would say that it has infected my own professional area as well. There’s a good reason for that, which underlies all of them. These are all art forms that unfold through a span of time. In the 19th century and a good part of the early 20th, music used to have organized structure that was very similar to plot. Then of course we had the modern composers who threw away a lot of that organizing structure, and instead of events happening along a progression and sometimes building to a peak of tension and a climax and subsiding, it would be just like things are happening and there seemed to be no reason for them to happen when they did, they just happened then, or they happened some other time. So, I think postmodernism really is kind of a continuation of modernism, what they called modern music, which started around World War I. I think that there is this commonality among all of the temporal arts.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Yes, music is under attack as well, unfortunately.

 

Roger Bissell

Absolutely. And yet, we do have some refuge, some popular music, some musical Broadway plays, some movie soundtracks, and so on. You actually do hear lovely music or tragic music or heroic music, et cetera, like John Williams writing for the Star Wars movies and so on. Good stuff. So, it is out there, and you have to wade through the other stuff to get to it.

You kind of answered my next question. although I will ask you: there seems to be not only this push against the objective standards in the arts, but also some of the same people are pushing against political freedom. It seems like everything that is important and valuable to Western civilization is under attack. So, do you have any prescription or suggestions for what libertarians or objectivists might do to save the culture of liberty and to save narrative art from these attacks?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Just a one-liner from me on this, which is: understand the power of fiction. It should not be ignored. Get involved. If you don’t have the time, support the right artists. If you have the time, do it yourself. That’s it.

 

Roger Bissell

That’s good advice. I would say that, too. For music, I’d say go out and haunt YouTube and look for stuff from 40, 50 years ago. There are some wonderful things there.

I do have one more question, and I might have a wild card question if we have time. Your previous novels—I’ve read the first one, and I’ve just started reading the second one. Tell us briefly about them. Also, I think you’re working on a new project. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Yes, thank you. What I set out to create is a new genre—not necessarily new, but it hasn’t been acknowledged by the literati as a genre. I call that a literary thriller. If you go back to the Gottschall definition of why we have fiction, it’s to ponder, without being exposed to the actual elements, the big issues of life.

It hasn’t been acknowledged by the literati as a genre. I call that a literary thriller.

Now, I spoke about Rwanda in the beginning. In 2004, there was a movie called Hotel Rwanda. There was a hotel, there was a manager in the hotel, and there was genocide going on outside between two tribes. He decided that he was going to hide the people being massacred in his hotel. It’s a very brave and courageous decision, of course, because if they find out, not only those guys with you but your family, a wife and two children as well, would also be massacred. I wanted to bring that in because that has enormous gravitas. If faced with that situation, what would we do? It’s not like just a serial killer or a murder mystery.

In literature, you’ve got to classify your novel as suspense, mystery and thriller, or literary. And literary has to be like 200,000 or 300,000 words. Ayn Rand obviously was very well classified as literary fiction because she left the present moment constantly to do expositional text. What I tried to do is not leave the present moment at all, if possible, or have very little expositional text, be always in the event, always in the present moment, which makes it harder, but I think it makes it more engrossing for the reader.

I’m going to start with the latest manuscript. I find I have to look for something that has really happened and perhaps is still happening almost to the same degree, so that I can write about oppression, which is what the literati want. But I’m not exaggerating; this is real. The theme for my new manuscript is human trafficking, but it also has thematically a self-actualization and nepotism theme in it. So, if you use Rand’s plot-theme concept, it’s about two teenagers who are abducted as infants and sold to a circus—that’s your human trafficking theme—but they escape captivity to find a new life, so they self-actualize themselves.

The theme for the one that you’ve just started, A Sharia London, is religious extremism. The plot-theme is: A lecturer of history falls in love with a student, and then when his love is threatened with a fatwa by extremists, he throws caution to the wind. The whole story is about that. It has to have a goal; you’re going toward something.

In 2011, I wrote The Frankenstein Candidate [published 2012], which I call a literary thriller, about a billionaire who disrupts a US presidential election by running as an independent. So, the theme is presidential campaigns rather than politics, but it allowed me to have a lot of expositional text because I was at that time more influenced by Rand than I am now. I like having a character transformation, and in that the character transformation isn’t of the protagonist, it’s about another character called Olivia Allen, who is a conscientious Democratic senator. That might seem like a strange thing today, but in the book she discovers the true state of politics. So, I’m still on that journey. I think it may never happen in my lifetime, getting recognized as a separate genre, but as long as the books are done and do well, I’m happy about it.

 

Roger Bissell

Well, I was hoping you might do a sequel to The Frankenstein Candidate, and that brings me back around to Ayn Rand. Some of her novels don’t really allow for a sequel. We, the Living doesn’t end well. We have talked about how a better ending for it might have been written, but that’s the way Rand wanted it. As far as sequels are concerned, what about Atlas Shrugged, where it all kind of collapses, and then they say, okay, now we’re going to go back and rebuild. Well, wouldn’t you like to think about how the rebuilding took place?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Aristotle in his Poetics says when the story ends, it should end with the finality that there can be nothing more to say.

No, a couple of reasons. One, if you recall Aristotle in his Poetics says when the story ends, it should end with the finality that there can be nothing more to say. If you look at We, the Living, its message is—sorry to give a spoiler—Kira dies and it’s the end. You cannot take that story forward. If you were to do a TV series, you would have Kira escape successfully and then show her struggles, the Russian in America not knowing much English [and so on]. It becomes a completely different story. But the climax of Atlas Shrugged is resolved at the end. They won the world. Now, the rebuilding could be boring, because a story is only a story if there is serious conflict between two opposing forces that are equal, and the bad guys seem to be winning at first, and then the good guys, and then the bad guys again, and eventually the good guys win. We won’t have that in the rebuilding. That could be more like a documentary unless someone comes up with a very weird, strange, different plot.

I would caution against doing a sequel to any of Rand’s novels.

But I would caution against doing a sequel to any of Rand’s novels because I have never read anyone who could write prose like she did. The expectations of her fans would be just too high, and you wouldn’t be able to meet them. The best way to be an artist is to be you, do what you’re good at, and carve out your own thing, rather than write sequels to somebody else’s novels. I would stay away from that. There was one Sidney Sheldon novel which was half complete when he passed away, and then his estate did ask someone else who they knew was a good writer to complete it, and I think she did a very good job. But that’s if somebody passes away halfway through their manuscript.

 

Roger Bissell

Yes. One of the biggies from the mid-20th century was Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. At least one sequel was written named Scarlet. I think it had a mixed reception, actually, partly because of the difficulty of capturing the particular flavor of the world that Mitchell put into her novel. That’s above my pay grade. I really don’t know.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Yes, if you want to write a sequel, you have to write a climax in which maybe there were eight issues to resolve and six or seven are resolved, but there’s one thread left, which you know how you’re going to pull it into another big story. You wouldn’t resolve everything. That’s what TV series are doing. Very often at the end of the season, there’s something still left over.

 

Roger Bissell

Another thing they do in TV series based on an author who’s written a lot of novels is to do a whole season based on one of the novels. Then they’re ready to do novel number two for the second season. That could go on until the 22^nd century!

You have admirably survived my intense cross examination, and I hope that you enjoyed it and our viewers enjoyed it like I did.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

I did.

 

Roger Bissell

And to those of you who are watching out there, we invite you to share your thoughts and questions in the comment section and tune in again to The Savvy Street Show. As Edward R Murrow used to say many decades ago, good luck and good night.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you.

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References:

1) Jonathan Gottschall. 2012. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

2) Ayn Rand. 1971. The Romantic Manifesto. Centennial ed. Penguin Group.

3) Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. “Impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Slavery, and the Civil War.” Harriet Beecher Stowe Center website. https://www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/utc/impact.shtml.

4) Rick Busselle and Helena Bilandzic. 2009. “Measuring Narrative Engagement.” Media Psychology 12 (4): 321–47.

5) Melanie Green. 2008. “Research Challenges in Narrative Persuasion.” Information Design Journal 16 (1): 47.

6) Robin L. Nabi and Melanie C. Green. 2015. “The Role of a Narrative’s Emotional Flow in Promoting Persuasive Outcomes.” Media Psychology 18 (2): 137–62.

7) Jeffery Strange and Cynthia Leung. 1999. “How Anecdotal Accounts in News and in Fiction Can Influence Judgments of a Social Problem’s Urgency, Causes, and Cures.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25 (4): 436–49.

8) Michael Dahlstrom. 2012. “The Persuasive Influence of Narrative Causality: Psychological Mechanism, Strength in Overcoming Resistance, and Persistence Over Time.” Media Psychology 15 (3): 303–26.

9) Markus Appel and Tobias Richter. 2007. “Persuasive Effects of Fictional Narratives Increase Over Time.” Media Psychology 10 (1): 113–34.

10) Markus Appel. 2008. “Fictional Narratives Cultivate Just‐World Beliefs.” Journal of Communication 58 (1): 62–83.

11) Melanie Green. 2004. “Transportation into Narrative Worlds: The Role of Prior Knowledge and Perceived Realism.” Discourse Processes 38 (2): 247–66.

12) Norman N. Holland. “Stories and the Mirror Inside You.” Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/is-your-brain-culture/201108/stories-and-the-mirror-inside-you

13) Aristotle. 1996. Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath. Penguin Books.

14) Australian Film, Television, and Radio School website. “The Biometrics Lab Project: AFTRS at the Cutting Edge of the Biometric Measurement of Audience Engagement.” https://filmink.com.au/public-notice/biometrics-lab-project-aftrs-cutting-edge-biometric-measurement-audience-engagement/.

15) Uri Hasson et al. “Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film.” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind (2008). http://www.cns.nyu.edu/~nava/MyPubs/Hassonetal_NeuroCinematics2008.pdf