Month: June 2017
Have you ever experienced a lightning strike when reading a book, listening to a song, or staring at a painting? That thing that’s been hanging in the background emerges with a clear path ahead of it. You know what to do—how to paint that portrait, how to sing that song, how to frame that book. It’s as if all the ideas in the universe came together at that moment to clear the way for one big idea—an idea that relied on you being in that exact place and time. This line from F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon fueled a…
Read MoreDarth Vader. The Gorgon. Medusa. They and every other villain in myth and literature (and real life) are metaphors for Resistance. Resistance is the universal and ultimate villain. Consider how this monster was described in The War of Art. 1. Resistance is Internal. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. Resistance is Insidious. Resistance has no conscience. [It] is always lying and always full of shit. Resistance is Implacable. It cannot be reasoned with. It is an engine of destruction … implacable, intractable, indefatigable. Reduce it to a single cell and that cell will continue…
Read MoreThe shark in Jaws first surfaced in Peter Benchley’s novel in 1974. It’s still scaring the crap out of swimmers from Jones Beach to the Banzai Pipeline. The Alien first burst from John Hurt’s chest in 1979. The Terminator landed in 1984. And how about the Furies (Part Three of Aeschylus’s Oresteia) from 458 BCE? What qualities do these Hall of Fame antagonists have in common? They cannot be reasoned with (Okay, the Furies did have a bit of a soft spot). They cannot be appealed to on the basis of justice, fair play, or the idea of right and wrong.…
Read More(In 2010 we ran the interview below with General Samuel Vaughan Wilson. In the years that followed, I found myself sitting on General Sam’s front porch, listening to his stories and wandering through the fields and woods surrounding his home. His obituary in the Washington Post this past week shared highlights of his military and intel career. While I spent days listening to stories from those periods of his life, to me he will always be more teacher than soldier or “spymaster.” He believed in, and devoted his life to, his country, and then gave every lesson he learned to the generations that followed. I…
Read MoreYou and I as writers, when we want to create a really dastardly Bad Guy, may find ourselves conjuring a mustache-twirling, Simon Legree-esque, Filthy McNasty ogre, tying an innocent damsel to a railroad track. But remember, the villain doesn’t see himself as the villain. From his point of view, he’s the good guy. To him, the real villain in the story is the hero. Consider this all-time-great Villain Speech, written by Aaron Sorkin and delivered to such memorable effect by Jack Nicholson as Marine colonel Nathan R. Jessup in A Few Good Men. When you read these lines (which…
Read MoreActors will admit it, if you ask: the first time they read a script, some part of them is scanning it for a great speech they can deliver. A star speech. A speech that says, “This is my movie (or my book).” It’s our job as writers, yours and mine, to give that star a star speech. A star speech can be long. I believe in the small of a woman’s back, the hanging curveball, high fiber, good Scotch … I believe that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.…
Read MoreNumbers are concrete. Unless they’re being manipulated by a slug, I don’t look at “2” and wonder if it is really “4.” I know that the absolute value of 2—whether it has a negative sign in front of it or not—is still 2, because numbers are ultimately about distance. Both 2 and -2 take up two spaces on the number line, whether I’m moving forward or backward.
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Start with this War of Art [27-minute] mini-course. It's free. The course's five audio lessons will ground you in the principles and characteristics of the artist's inner battle.