Steven Pressfield Blog

The All Is Lost Moment in Nonfiction

Can there be an All Is Lost Moment in nonfiction?

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My All is Lost Moment

The year was 1980. I was living in New York and driving a taxicab. The short version is I finished Novel #3 and couldn’t sell it (much like Novels #1 and #2.)

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Ego and Self in the All is Lost Moment

Why do we (so often) need an All Is Lost Moment in our own lives to break through to another level? Can’t we just do it at a happy time? Do we have to push ourselves to the absolute abyss in order for real change to sink in?

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Einstein and the Epiphanal Moment

Albert Einstein famously said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” 

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The Epiphanal Moment

We started to talk last week about the All is Lost Moment, both in stories and our real lives. (I’m going to spend the next few weeks examining this, particularly as it relates to our own Wildernesss Passages).

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The All is Lost Moment

Almost every Wilderness Passage reaches its crisis in what screenwriters call an “All Is Lost Moment.”

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Is Life itself a Wilderness Passage?

We’ve talked in these posts about various intervals or periods of our lives being Wilderness Passages. Can it be that life itself, start to finish, is a Wilderness Passage?

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Creating our own Wilderness

My friend Charlie is training now for sea-kayaking solo around Ireland. The passage will take weeks. Charlie will paddle 10-15 hours a day, camp ashore each night, then set off again the next morning. This will be no modest or risk-free enterprise. Seas, even in summer, can be monstrous off the rugged Irish coast. As Charlie himself admits, you have to be a little nuts to conceive of, and then live out, this kind of wild-and-woolly adventure. 

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Wilderness = Metaphor

The psychic geography of a wilderness passage goes something like this:

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The Wilderness Story is all stories

You and I may think, in the depths of our Wilderness Passage, that the ordeal we’re undergoing is unique. And it is, in the sense that our passage is ours alone; no one else has ever, or will ever, go through the same initiation.

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do the work book banner 1

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.

noboybookcover

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.

The-War-of-Art

THE WAR OF ART

Read this one first.
It identifies the enemy—what I call Resistance with a capital “R,” i.e. fear, self-doubt, procrastination, perfectionism, all the forms of self-sabotage—that stop us from doing our work and realizing our dreams.
Start here.
Everything else proceeds from this.

Turning-Pro

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?"

The-Authentic-Swing

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.

do the work book banner 1

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.