Steven Pressfield Blog
Episode Ten: Then We’ll Have Our Battle In The Shade
A writer’s story about how “Gates of Fire” came to be.
Killer Instinct, Part One
I’ve been doing a video series on social media called “The Warrior Archetype.” One of the points I’m trying to make is that exterior virtues that we often associate with soldiers and physical combatants can also be called upon by you and me as we fight the interior “war of art.”
Episode Nine: Why Study the Warrior Archetype?
Do we study the Warrior Archetype so we can strap on a sword and march off to battle?
Episode Eight: The Warrior Archetype
You turn fifteen and (if you’re a guy) you suddenly want to put on a helmet and beat your buddies’ brains out on the football field, drive fast, hang with your homies, and blow things up.
Historical Fiction, #1
I was watching Shakespeare’s Henry V the other night (the Kenneth Branagh film version from 1989) and it got me thinking about historical fiction and why I write it. At least one of the reasons.
Episode Seven: What Is an Archetype?
We’re getting deep today, exploring the great psychologist Carl Jung’s concept of the Collective Unconscious and the archaic “super-personalities” that dwell there — the Archetypes.
Episode Six: “Come And Take Them”
2500 years ago, the Persian king Xerxes, while invading Greece with an army of two million men (according to Herodotus), confronted the defending Greeks, led by 300 Spartan warriors, at a narrow pass called Thermopylae.
Episode Five: A Society of Virtue
Lycurgus was the founder of Sparta. The first thing he did was outlaw money. He wanted his people to pursue virtue instead.
The Warrior Archetype
A New Video Series from Steven Pressfield
Subscribe here for the full series.
FREE MINI COURSE
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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.