Take What the Defense Will Give You

The work always resists us.

Some days it REALLY resists us.

On those days, there’s no shame in doing what football offenses do: Take what the defense will give you.

If our novel/screenplay/dance/comedy sketch won’t let us throw the deep ball that day, that’s okay.

Take the short pass. Take the dinks-and-dunks of three yards and four yards. 

In other words, if we can only scratch out two or three paragraphs of not-so-great stuff … take it. It’s progress. It’s a day’s work. It counts.

The important thing is to keep up our momentum day-to-day.

Tomorrow maybe the defense will give us more. For today, let’s take what we can get.

The safety in Two-Deep coverage. Kyle Hamilton of the Baltimore Ravens.

DO THE WORK

Steve shows you the predictable Resistance points that every writer hits in a work-in-progress and then shows you how to deal with each one of these sticking points. This book shows you how to keep going with your work.

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THE AUTHENTIC SWING

A short book about the writing of a first novel: for Steve, The Legend of Bagger Vance. Having failed with three earlier attempts at novels, here's how Steve finally succeeded.

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NOBODY WANTS TO READ YOUR SH*T

Steve shares his "lessons learned" from the trenches of the five different writing careers—advertising, screenwriting, fiction, nonfiction, and self-help. This is tradecraft. An MFA in Writing in 197 pages.

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TURNING PRO

Amateurs have amateur habits. Pros have pro habits. When we turn pro, we give up the comfortable life but we find our power. Steve answers the question, "How do we overcome Resistance?"

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5 Comments

  1. Tolis on April 1, 2026 at 2:51 am

    Thank you very much for the parallelism dear Steve.

    Yes, everything counts. Remember how earth was made? With cosmic dust. Every dust made earth possible. ANd then real.

    Continuing writing every day. And the Judge is dead.

  2. Jackie on April 1, 2026 at 2:56 am

    No matter how bad a player or team was beaten, I’ve never watched them leave the field and quit before the game ended.

  3. Randall Bassin on April 1, 2026 at 4:00 am

    During the mid-1970s, the Rolling Stones began a tour by performing on the back of a flatbed truck in downtown NYC. Responding to a Rolling Stone magazine interviewer’s query as to whether this would be the Stones’ last tour, Mick Jagger scoffed: “What the hell ELSE are we going to do?” (The band got their start in 1962-63, and they’re STILL making records and touring today.)

    I think about writing pretty much the same way: Regardless how much work we may produce at the end of any given day, we recognize that we have the gift (or is it a curse?), the ability, and the calling to do this kind of work. What the hell ELSE are we going to do? 😉 🤣

  4. Anne Kmetyko on April 1, 2026 at 4:53 am

    That is the truth, every little piece and moment has value it is part of the bigger picture, some pieces are just deeper requiring more excavation and exaction it is only that, and that in itself is relative so it’s really progress even if tiny or small it moves the story forward, amen

  5. Muriel Palmer-Rhea on April 1, 2026 at 5:17 am

    For some curious reason, I seem to rise up to the challenge of a Prompt. Yesterday morning, a prompt appeared in my inbox with 3 days to reply. I thought about it for 12 hours and created a reply, sent it back. It will be judged and commented on, and I will forget about it for the 3 weeks it will take for the judgement to get back to me.It cost a fee, which I gladly paid. One of my best songs came together as the result of a prompt. So what is the psychological mechanism here? Am I just showing off, that throw me a one word title and I’ll give you something back? It’s a mystery that I will go dry for ages, until a prompt appears, and I’m off like a Greyhound chasing a mechanical bunny to bring it down.

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