Alright, I’ve waited long enough. There’s a
book I’ve been wanting to talk about on this show for the better part of a year now, but I wasn’t
sure if anyone would care about it the way I do. I mean, everyone loves the movie, but the book is… strange. It’s something else. A kind of story
I feel I haven’t seen almost anywhere else.
I’m talking about the book The
Princess Bride, by William Goldman.
This thing is so under-appreciated,
it really feels good to finally…
What, you don’t think that’s a good idea?
Ohhh, not enough dragons and aliens, huh? You think one’s gonna be boring?
Well how about this: I’ll put the movie on for you, and then you can tell
me I was wrong afterward. Deal?
Yep. That’s exactly what I was worried
about. People hear the name “The Princess Bride” and assume it going to be
some played-out fairytale fantasy. I mean, I guess it is that, but there’s something
really special about it too. Something that goes way beyond the fantasy creatures, the
memorable characters, the insanely-quotable dialogue. The movie gives you a taste of it,
but there’s nothing like the book itself.
This isn’t a story about a princess.
It’s not even really a fantasy story.
It’s a story about imagination. It’s about
the value of your personal fantasies, your personal adventures, and your love for them.
Which is why I think anyone who read or writes or enjoys fiction at all should give it a try! Even
you high-fantasy and hard-SF nerds. Trust me.
Actually, you don’t have to trust
me. Let me tell you about it!
...right after I get them started with
their movie. Be back in a sec!
Did you know that we make more
than Youtube videos? It’s true! Like this video about an epic fantasy where the
world itself basically has genitalia, or this dive into the weird… pseudo… sci-fi fantasy magic of
Dune. We even made a video about the little-known sequel to The Princess Bride: Buttercup’s Baby!
It’s already up, waiting to be watched. You can see them all over on Nebula by signing up
for the Curiosity Stream/Nebula bundle deal for just $14.79 a year—that’s less than $1.25
a month! Visit CuriosityStream.com/TaleFoundry and use the code TaleFoundry.
A lot of people out there would probably say that The Princess Bride is their favorite story in all
the world… even though they don’t really know it at all. I mean, they know what’s in it. They love
it for the fencing. The fighting. The torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters.
Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all nature and descriptions.
Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles.
That’s all part of the story. The fun stuff.
But there’s so much more in the book,
and it means so much to me as a creative. It’s a story that says my imagination and my
experiences matter. Yes I love the fencing and fighting and true love and all that, but
this is more than an exciting fantasy story…
It’s also a true story.
I’m not being poetic when I say that The Princess Bride is also about
the writing of The Princess Bride. Seriously. Like one-third of the book is just the author
telling the tale of how the book came to be. He put that stuff in the actual book. It’s… really
jarring at first. But it’s also probably among my favorite things I’ve ever seen an author do.
If you’ve seen the movie, you’ve seen a glimpse of this. It begins with a grandfather
reading the book to his grandson. But that’s not just cinematic framing; it’s
actually a part of the true story of the author, William Goldman. This actually happened to him!
Which is why, although Goldman wrote the story we all know now, he starts this book by telling us
that it’s his favorite story in all the world, too… even though he’s never read it. You may, very
reasonably, wonder how such a thing is possible. Well, I’ll tell you: the book and the movie as
we know them are actually only abridgements of another book entirely. An original, much older,
much longer novel also called The Princess Bride. A book that Goldman was first introduced to
long before he was author William Goldman, and he was still just ten-year-old Billy.
Which is where our story begins.
Billy was not a particularly well-read child. He
loved games of every variety, loved to go out and have fun, as all boys do, but his grades were
a mess. And books. You could forget books. He hated them. You couldn’t get him to look
at one, much less read it for pleasure. So, almost illiterate and resistant to
most species of education, inventing things to do and ways to have fun in his own little
world, life seemed to be slipping right on by. “What are we going to do about Billy?” was
a very common expression in his house.
That was until the Autumn of 1941, when Billy got
sick. He may have been resistant to education, but he was not so lucky against pneumonia.
He spent about 10 days in the hospital, and then another few weeks in bed
afterward, bored out of his mind, almost too weak to utter a sound. It was in
this hostage state that his father, an older man from the distant country of Florin, barely
able to speak a lick of English himself, took the opportunity to introduce his son to a book. A
book written by someone called S. Morgenstern.
“Chapter One. The Bride,” his father read,
and little Billy was too weak to protest.
In that room, between his illness-induced
fatigue and his father’s immigration-induced struggle to share the story, something
happened to Billy. He began to change. For the first time ever, he was hooked on a book.
He wanted to know what would happen to beautiful Princess Buttercup and poor, heroic Westley.
He wanted to know what would happen to Inigo, the greatest swordsman in the history of the
world. He wanted to know, was Fezzik the Giant really as strong as he seemed? And were there
limits to the cruelty of Vizzini, the schemer? He wanted to know what came next. And that desire
followed him through the rest of his life.
From that point on, he was obsessed with adventure
stories. Anything he could get his hands on. Stevenson, Scott, Dumas, D’artagnan, even Victor
Hugo, which I can tell you from experience is not easy reading. That obsession never diminished.
In fact it only increased as he got older, to the point that he wound up writing over a dozen
novels of his own, and nearly twenty screenplays.
And this was how little Billy
became the author William Goldman.
But it’s not how The Princess
Bride became The Princess Bride.
Decades pass before that happens. In that time,
Goldman manages to get himself pretty well set-up, making a living through the work he loves,
traveling around to work on screenplays, selling his novels, all that glamorous stuff most
writers dream about doing but rarely enjoy writing enough to actually do. He even has a family,
although he rarely sees them, and they’re… not exactly the people he imagined they would
be. His son Jason is aloof and disinterested, a little like he was as a boy,
and his wife is much the same.
Nevertheless, while working on a screenplay
for The Stepford Wives in California, it strikes him that Jason is about to turn 10;
the exact age he was when his father read him The Princess Bride for the first time. Unfortunately,
he can’t be there to read the book to his son, but he pulls some strings, dredges up
one of the last copies anyone can find, and has it delivered for Jason to read.
Jason knows it’s a big deal to his dad, so when he sees Goldman again, he pretends he really
loved the book! But his father can see through it. When pressed, it becomes apparent that Jason
didn’t even manage to get past the first chapter. The book is just too boring. It drones on
and on about nothing for ages, he says.
Shocked, heartbroken, Goldman snatches up the
book and thumbs through the pages in disbelief. And it’s true! The book is as dry as can be, full of Florinese history and customs and
rambling author notes. Even though it does have the things he remembers in it, most of the book
is clearly an academic satire of actual history, not an adventure story at all. Only then does he
realize that he’s never actually read the thing himself. Although all other adventure stories
in the world were his to read, explore, write, The Princess Bride had belonged to his father. It
was a story he’d only ever heard in his father’s voice, his father’s way of telling it. That’s
simply how it was to him, and he’d never dared challenge it by touching the book himself.
What he didn’t know was that his father, perhaps knowing his son, had left out everything but The
Good Parts. With his own voice and interpretation, his father had shaped the rest of Goldman’s life.
And that book is the one he wants his son to read. That book deserves to exist. So Goldman decides
then and there to put everything else on hold–including The Stepford Wives, which does him
no great favors with the Hollywood brass–in order to write it. It’ll be abridged the way his father
had done it for him; The Good Parts Only version.
And that’s how we got this book I’m holding in
my hand now, the story we all know and love!
…Sort of.
Actually, it’s not really the version his father told him. It has Goldman all over and
throughout it, cutting things at his discretion, making his own comments, leaving his own
footnotes. There are some occasions where he leaves comments from the original author in the
text, only to provide his own commentary on those comments. Sometimes he gets rid of a block of
text from Morgenstern, and then replaces it with his own block of text explaining why there
shouldn’t be a block of text in that part of the story at all. There’s even a part of the
story he’s annoyed Morgenstern skipped over, and he says in the text that he would have
written his own version into the abridgement, but the editor thought it was unethical
and wouldn’t let him put it in the book. Instead, they agreed that if anyone wants
to read Goldman’s take on the omitted scene, they could write in and ask the publisher to mail
it to them. They really followed through on that, by the way. Goldman actually put that in the
book itself, and people actually sent in for it. What they got instead was an explanation of the
13 lawsuits put forward the Morgenstern Estate preventing his sending out his version
of the scene. But that’s… another story.
The whole thing is honestly a bit
messy and… a little hypocritical.
It’s also wonderful, and genuine, and hilarious.
It’s where the movie gets its sly sense of humor, its odd, surreptitious self-awareness. The
book might not be in his father’s voice, but it’s in that tradition, carrying Goldman’s
verbal quirks, his attitudes and ideals, opinions and perspectives, his desire for a story
he personally feels is worth telling. That’s the first lesson he ever learned about stories, after
all, taught to him by his father in broken English back when he was still little Billy, sick in bed:
The story you tell is the one that matters to you. You tell The Good Parts. That’s how you change
lives. Or at least that’s how his life changed.
I’m not sure it’s absolutely true for every
author and every story ever, but I still love the message. Tell the parts that matter… to you.
The Princess Bride has brought me a lot of joy, but Goldman’s personal journey in
writing it has touched my soul; made me feel as though I’m not wrong to
prioritize my own desires as an artist. And it’s strange, because the message gets
even more powerful when you realize that…
None of this is real.
That’s right. This is all a made-up story about writing the story that Goldman had the audacity
to put into the actual text itself. The lawsuits, the relationship with his son, his old Florinese
father, Florin the country itself, S. Morgenstern and his satiric old original. It’s a fictional
version of Goldman’s life, written for the book.
The question is: why? Why do this, instead of just
writing the core story itself? Why build all this lore about the author into the novel? Well, taken
as a whole, my guess is that The Princess Bride is not actually about kissing and sword fighting
and coming back from the dead; it’s about Romance. True romance, not just the kind you see between
lovers; the romance that makes the world vibrant and worth living in, even though in reality
it can be a very stark, very cruel place.
The real Goldman has a saying that I love.
Something that made this whole story click for me, and made me think about some of the attitudes of
writers and artists I’ve seen, including myself. He says that “cynics are thwarted romantics”.
And I think The Princess Bride says it as well.
Despite all its whimsy and humor, let’s not forget
that this is a story where the protagonist dies twice, where the wrong people get married, where
the bad guys win over and over and over. Although in the movie the story ends with the characters
riding off into a happily ever after, in the book it ends with them realizing they’re still being
chased by the evil prince Humperdinck and his men, the sounds of pursuit crescendoing around them in
the night. And yet, despite all these signals from fate that it’s time to surrender, the characters
hold on. They try. Inigo climbs back from his drunken stupor and does avenge his father–even
if he’s mortally wounded in the process. Fezzik gets past his self-doubt and manages to use
his own wits to save the day–even if he does end up leading the group into certain death not long
after. Westley and Buttercup find eachother and true love in the end—even if there’s an army
at their backs trying to take it from them. For each of them, their ideals far outstrip
their reality. They are romantics.
And so is this fictional version of Goldman.
By putting himself into the story this way, he shows us that romance isn’t just reserved
for faerie stories. Here is a man whose entire life—from the time when he was a child
being told a story, to his later life as an author telling stories of his own—has pursued
the ideal that his stories are worth telling. That what he sees as “the good parts” matter
more than what’s accurate, or expected.
I don’t know a huge amount about the life of
the actual William Goldman, but I do know that he wrote a lot of novels and screenplays, and that
I’ve hardly heard of any. The Princess Bride was a strange thing, nearly as magical in reality as
it was to little made-up Billy. He did really come to it after a bout of pneumonia. He was
riding a strange, delirious high of inspiration. And whenever he felt stuck, he would just write
something in his own voice as the fictional version of himself, and come un-stuck. He said
he’d never experienced a flow quite like that, and I believe it. And later, after massive
success, a film adaptation, merchandise, rampant quotation, and fame the world over for The
Princess Bride, when he tried to write a sequel… it just wouldn’t come together. He
didn’t have the same attachment, the same passion for the project he’s
had with the Princess Bride. Despite the obvious appeal of its inevitable reception
and what it could do for him financially… he didn’t care about it the same way.
So he didn’t write it.
He wrote other things.
And again, you’ve probably never heard them.
And I think that’s okay.
The last words of the book are: “Life isn’t fair. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.”
This is true.
Life is not an adventure story. True love does not
always win the day. Heroes are not always rewarded for their efforts. Villains are not always
defeated. People who don’t deserve to suffer will. Stories that deserve to be told might never
be. These things happen every day, and the ones who dare to dream are the most vulnerable of all.
It would be easier to snuff those thoughts out, put them away, embrace the cynicism. Make only
the art you think is guaranteed to be recognized, do only things you think are guaranteed to make a
difference. That way you can feel safe. It doesn’t matter what you want or believe; reality will
eat your heart if you reveal where it truly lies. So instead of doing what you love, you’d
better do the right thing. The best thing.
But I agree with Goldman: although tempting, these
are just the thoughts of a thwarted romantic. Life is unfair. All the more reason to hope, and
to strive, and to snatch up each meaningful moment that you can, because they are so very precious.
Instead of hiding your own voice because you think no one will care, speak, and be eager just to hear
what you sound like. Instead of writing the story you think will be a bestseller, write the one
that matters to you–that you think should be told. Instead of allowing the romantic within you to die
just because life is full of fluff and nonsense, remember to focus on what matters most to you:
Only The Good Parts.
Speaking of good parts, I mentioned that Goldman
was entertaining the idea of a sequel to The Princess Bride for a while there? Well, we don’t
actually have that book, but we do have its first chapter… and a whole new leg of the journey of
Goldman’s fictional author-self in writing it. It’s… a wild story. Stephen King even makes an
appearance, if you can believe it. Unfortunately, that’s not what this video is about…
So… we went and made an entirely different video about it. Not a part two, not an
extension–a whole separate video on this topic. And you can watch it over on our
creator-owned streaming platform, Nebula. Actually, there’s a bunch of stuff there
we haven’t released on youtube. Like this video about a fantasy world that basically has its
own gigantic, geographic genitalia, or this one about the morphology of angels and why artists
are always giving them wings, even though they didn’t really have them in the source material.
You can find all our videos there, a week earlier than they upload on youtube, plus all of these
exclusive videos we only upload to Nebula!
And we’re not the only ones who’ve been
posting there. The same is true for so… many… other… amazing creators. Youtube
is kind of a crazy place to make content. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to have this
platform, but you have to be so, so careful about your topic choices, your packaging,
what you include in your videos… you just start to feel like you’re walking on eggshells.
Nebula… doesn’t have any of those concerns. All of the videos there are high-quality
and trustworthy, which means there are next to no restrictions, which gives us a lot more
freedom to do the things we really want to do. Which is really nice, because sometimes… you
just want to make the video you want to make, without worrying about all the other stuff.
Aaand here’s the really fun part: you can get Nebula for cheaper than almost any other
streaming platform on the internet. Like, less than $1.25 per month. That cheap. We want
you to have access to our Nebula content, so we teamed up with another streaming platform called
Curiosity Stream, who will give you a whole year of Nebula for free when you sign up with them.
So basically… two streaming services for less than $1.25 a month.
And I… cannot say enough about how much I love Curiosity Stream as its own
platform. Quality documentaries are hard to find. But quality documentaries about the things I
care about? Myths and Monsters, Literature, The Madness of Creative Minds? Yes. Yes, this
is where I want to be. Curiosity stream has documentaries about everything. I actually just
finished this one about where creativity comes from called Unraveling the Creative Mind,
which… ugh, as an artist myself, it’s just really good to get a feel for how my own head
sort of works. Definitely a worthwhile watch.
So, here’s how to get access to our other video
about crafting-based magic systems, ALL our other exclusive content, ALL of nebula, and ALL of
curiosity stream for less than $1.25 per month: All you have to do is click
the link the description or go to CuriosityStream.com/talefoundry and
sign up for one year using the code TaleFoundry. That’s it. And that first year is only going to be
$14.79, which again comes out to less than $1.25 per month. Frankly, I’m not quite sure how they
can afford to do this for us, but I’m definitely not complaining. Seriously, take advantage of this
offer while it’s still going–I don’t think any better one exists in the world of streaming.
And once you’ve seen our other video on this topic, come back here and tell us what you
think! We read almost every comment.
Oh? Did you just finish the
movie? What’d you think?
Well, I’m glad it left an impression!
It tends to do that. And now that you’ve heard a little about where it came from, maybe
you understand why. It’s often these writers and artists who aren’t afraid to speak with their
true voice that have the greatest impact.
I hope next time you think about what your inner
romantic wants from your art and your life, you’ll feel emboldened not to argue quite so much; to look your ambition in the
eyes and say As You Wish.
