On the threshold of history

How a writer chooses what to write about

Greetings from the Picos de Europa, Asturias — July 2025

There’s the writer I am, and there’s the writer that sometimes I wish I was.

Take John Reed, whose epic life Warren Beatty adapted into my favorite movie of all time, Reds.¹ Reed and his wife, Louise Bryant, were among the only journalists in Russia during the revolution in 1917. When Reed returned to the U.S., he wrote an influential book called Ten Days That Shook the World.

It was urgent and vivid—a page-turner, as they say. To read it is to feel as if one is in the room with workers and revolutionaries: “Always the methodical muffled boom of cannon through the windows, and the delegates screaming at each other… So, with the crash of artillery, in the dark, with hatred, and fear, and reckless daring, new Russia was being born.”

In the movie, one of the characters says of Reed: “He knew he was on the threshold of history, and wrote it that way.”

Those words have always lingered.

To be on the threshold of history and to write it that way.

I. Interesting times

May you live in interesting times.

I’d always thought that was an ancient Chinese curse, though Perplexity reports that no equivalent Chinese phrase has ever been located. Nevertheless, it’s a useful reminder that “interesting times” doesn’t necessarily mean peaceful or tranquil times—usually, quite the opposite.

It seems as clear as any time in my life that we are at a threshold of history, but thresholds are rarely peaceful affairs. More often, they’re a time of troubles.

My prediction for the near future is that violence will proliferate, and chaos and disinformation will rule. The world will grow more dangerous, and there will be more war. Already, it is reasonable to say that you should not trust video or photo evidence that you see with your own eyes. And what was true a hundred years ago is even more true today: “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.”²

I liken this moment to the period after the invention of the printing press, which spread new ideas and gave us important and fun Summer books but also caused a religious schism that led to the 30 Years’ War. For the history buffs, I offer this unsettling statistic: the 30 Years’ War killed a larger percentage of Europeans than either of the two world wars.

I expect that, barring outright nuclear catastrophe, we will get through this. Humanity always seems to find a way. Maybe we are even headed toward the bright future of eradicated disease and unfettered personal fulfillment that the techno-utopians promise.

But I suggest keeping your loved ones close until it arrives.

II. What one person can do

So, we are standing on a threshold. Shouldn’t I then write about that? Shouldn’t everyone with a pen and a publishing platform be talking about this, the world-historical moment we’re in?

Why write a silly little memoiry newsletter about my Spanish home renovation and painting the new apartment when there are people dying, when the singularity may be near, the world is burning, dictators roam the earth, and a neo-fascist gangster police state is emerging in the land of my birth?

I’ve already answered this question a few times, most recently in Dance harder, dance more (read it if you’re despairing). I quote from Reds and reference several films on the same theme: Dr. Zhivago, The Shawshank Redemption, Jo Jo Rabbit—all movies in which protecting and nurturing the personal is the way to fight a fascist regime:

I can and should write about personal matters in these dark times because to protect the personal is to protect what is most human and individual in each of us. The personal is political—but it is important to insist with our writing and poetry, our music and movies, our painting, sculpture, plays, our stand-up comedy—it is important to insist with all of our heart and souls that it is we individuals who determine the course of politics, and not the other way around.

But how exactly do we resist? What are the concrete actions we should take? I was recently asked: What can one person do in the face of all that is going wrong in the world?

Viktor Frankl writes about this in Man’s Search for Meaning:

We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly… Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way. Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements. 'Life' does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life's tasks are also very real and concrete. They form man's destiny, which is different and unique for each individual. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny.

I.e., each of us must answer this question for ourselves, in our way.

For one it may be attending a protest; another, painting a mural; a third, starting a business. I can’t say which is the most efficacious, but I do know that, for me, the answer is to write.

When life questions me, I answer with this newsletter.

III. All my discarded writing projects

And yet my writing life is littered with discarded writing projects. It can be surprisingly hard to find motivation on the threshold of history.

Drafts for this newsletter, written, re-written, eventually deleted. Screenplays half-finished. And the books—oh, the books. I believe I’ve finally decided to scrap 70,000 words of my latest and rewrite the story as fiction.

An aside:

When I think about all my romantic notions about being a writer, and how wrong they all are, I think about the typewriter sitting broken on my bookshelf in New Hampshire.

I originally wanted a typewriter because of some notion that I would write my book-length memoir on it, undistracted by internet, email, Instagram, YouTube, porn, politics, drinking—anything else my endorphin-riddle brain might desire.

The romantic notion goes: I would sit alone in my study or in the studio I built for myself on the hillside behind my house and just WRITE.

Except that I haven’t yet built the studio. And in fact, the typewriter is broken. It needs repair. I need to order parts. But also mow the lawn. And fix the stairs. And cook dinner.

Deadlines help. I have recently been working on a new screenplay project, my first in more than six years. The producer gave me a deadline; I met it. A full rewrite of a 60+ page pilot for a new show in about a week.

It’s been nice to flex that creative muscle again. Plus, doing fiction has reminded me that sometimes it’s the better choice for difficult Truths. Maybe the only choice.

IV. Embracing your particular answer to life’s questions

In the opening scene of Reds, Reed is running furiously through what looks like the Sonoran Desert in Mexico, chasing a horse-drawn wagon and trying to outrun gunfire and shelling all around him. Another of the witnesses provides voiceover: “Jack Reed’s life, short as it was, happened at a time—and all of us after all are the victims of our time and place—when he had the opportunity as a reporter to be in some very exciting and dramatic places.”

Alongside Reed, I think of Hemingway or Lee Miller going to cover World War II. Or Michael Herr going to Vietnam. Chris Hedges going to every war zone he could manage in the 1990s. The reporters in the recent movie Civil War.

Of course, it doesn’t always have to be war, but life’s most difficult moral questions are so often revealed by war that it is a time-honored choice among writers.³

I so admire those who recognize they are on a threshold, put themselves into danger, and write it down so that the rest of us may encounter a Truth we might otherwise not. But does this mean I must go to Gaza, or Ukraine? Travel by train or bus, cross the border, see the front lines, and use whatever talents as a journalist and writer to say my version of what is happening there?

In a crucial scene early in Reds, Reed chastises Bryant for writing about an armory show from three years ago, just as Woodrow Wilson seems intent on bringing the U.S. into World War I—she’s feeling sorry for herself, and doesn’t think that his artist friends take her seriously; Reed responds that if she wants to be taken seriously, she should write about serious things.

It’s a scene I’ve pondered a lot over the years.

But Frankl’s dictate that we must all find our own answer to life’s problems applies to writers as well—we must all write about that which we are most called to write. In the manner, on the platform, in the genre that feels appropriate in response to life’s questions.

Just so long as we take that work seriously.

If we do, others will as well.

1. I’ve already shared some inspiration from Reds in an earlier post, It is now vitally important to protect the personal life.

2. Often attributed to Mark Twin, though other sources say it was Winston Churchill, with an earlier sentiment attributed to Jonathan Swift.

3. Others answer their moment in history in some other way: communing with grizzly bears in Alaska; free soloing the most iconic big wall climb in the world; studying the life-saving potential of some ignored molecule; building a high-rise; writing a novel.