Warriors and Mothers
What are the virtues of an entrepreneur?
What qualities of mind do you and I need if we are going to succeed as artist/entrepreneurs?
One answer (the one I usually use) is to say we need the virtues of warriors:
Courage, patience, self-reliance, the ability to endure adversity …
Another way (which is even better) is to say we need the virtues of mothers.
I had a dream once. I was living in New York, driving a cab at night, trying to write in the daytime. A friend came to visit. (This is the real-life setup, not the dream.)
My friend was one of these wildly extroverted guys, who immediately went out on the town and came back with fabulous stories of all the fun he was having. I found myself thinking,
I should be like Peter. Why am I denying myself everything, busting my butt day and night? Have fun, Steve! Stop being such a monk!
Then I had the dream.
Another friend’s wife, who happened to be pregnant at the time, came to me and sat down at my kitchen table. “Steve, you are pregnant too,” she said, “with that book you’re writing. You can’t go out partying. Your responsibility is to the new life growing inside you.”
I woke up and immediately stopped worrying.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
nice one Steve, one of your best yet!
I love the idea of the writer/entrepreneur being subordinate to the book/business rather than the main character
Too often these days people write a book or start a business to get rich and famous or build their “personal brand” 🤮 (narcissistic marketing)
A true creator, like a mother, puts the idea first, it is their contribution to the world, not a footnote to their ego
Novelty seeking and hedonism turns into a prison. Discipline, structure, responsibility, and commitment are the path to freedom.
Thank you!
This really hits home. Powerful dream and the set up to it seems familiar across a number of distractions. Nurturing what truly matters, what only matters. .I wish I didn’t need reminders, but sometimes I do. This was a great reminder!
Way cool story. Thanks, deeper thought equals growth as an artist.
My dear Steve, with tears in my eyes I proudly tell you that I wrote THE END on the book (ΤΕΛΟΣ in Greece).
I ended it 3 days ago in the morning. The first minutes were silent, I could hear myself (footsteps, body) returning from the bench by the sea where I wrote its last dozens of pages. The rest of the day was somewhat hard for me and usual routines and situations. Only the next day, when I wrote about the fact that I ended it, I cried and I saw how big that thing was.
Only after 30 years of struggling, and 22 years of believing and diving into self development but always failing, I fulfilled a big dream.
I was about 15 when I desired to write my first book. I remembered this the day before yesterday: I wrote back then a modification of The Flight of Dragons with James Earl Jones lending his voice to the villain. There was magic and awe and a princess in that film, and I liked a girl in my english class, and since I was the introvert completely chaotic energy-driven creature, I thought that writing in English that story in my own terms, instead of writing english essay for the class, I would at least make her admire me for that. But of course I stopped after I wrote a few pages, maybe more than a dozen.
It is the first great dream I fulfilled. I had two more such dreams in life, the one collapsed and the other I guess is a lifelong process that can’t be defined by a time-frame.
Concerning writing, I instinctively wrote my first “many-pages” book in 2000. Then I managed to make myself write a few hundred pages. But I never finished it. It was a story of my grandfather from Crete, whom I never met, who had gone to the war of the Asia Minor Catastrophe, but I had zero knowledge about the era so I turned it to fiction. A lord of the rings-like fiction, which was a bit more grounded but of the same inner grounds as the trilogy. My only relics to rely on were his dusty black bayonete they had in our village, and two or three very short stories about him. I never ended it.
Later in life I tried writing a few more times but the most I could do was a few pages. I even bought the most expensive notebooks to write in, but although the pages were wonderful I failed crashingly.
As for this book, you saw the story in the past years. Hoping and stressing, and always going nowhere. Struggling, but also feeling that I was actually doing NOTHING. NOTHING. As if I was mocking the world and my perception.
But now I ended it. We ended it.
I am so proud to be able to announce this to you. I gave birth to it as a father. We would be great birth-givers as fathers.
My love to you, Diana, the friends, the team.
P.s. When I gave my english teacher, Andrea, my essay back then in 1995, Andrea applauded me. The other students in our private class, I remember well, were jealous and on the next class they had also brought essays well written, sharing them with cocky tones in their eyes and mouths. But of course they never wrote what I wrote now 😛
And they never will.
Tolis! Congratuations, Ο φίλος μου ο συγγραφέας ! A great achievement! Now on to revisions and next drafts!
Thank you Joe! Off we go now to gathering all the scattered pieces and revising. Not one day should be wasted. Same routine, different work, I also let a very small window to write a few minutes before going for the other stuff.
Congratulations Tolis! High five!
High five Jackie! We made it. Thank you so much.
A sincere congrats, Tolis. You did it!
Thank you so much Brad. At last… the end. Lets go, we have a world to conquer or fail.
Instant classic. A story pregnant with a metaphor.
Thanks, Steve.
My morning sickness makes more sense now. 🙂
Plus, it’s a good excuse to go for ice cream.
Ha!
As an aging male writer, I love being pregnant. Great dream, Steve.
This one really hit me in the gut….(so to speak).
Right you are!! There is a balance, but it must be tilted toward the reward/goal of completing the process we started. Sometimes the grind is hard, sometimes less so, but one must keep moving, or die.
Love you Steve
Brilliant!
Pregnant pause, eh? 😆
“Your responsibility is to the new life growing inside you.”
That’s how it is, isn’t it?!
And it’s like that new life has a mind/will of it’s own.
It changes as it develops, and eventually will show you what it wants to become.
It exists through us, depends upon us as it develops, and then becomes it own thing . . .