Steven Pressfield Blog
Are You Too Scared to Sell Yourself?
I am. The illustration below is by the renowned and redoubtable Victor Juhasz. It expresses exactly the way I feel when a book is done and it’s time to get out and sell it.
The Power of a Private Moment
Why is a Private Moment so powerful in a book or movie?
Thank You, Tom Guinzburg
My original manuscript for Gates of Fire, back in 1996, was 802 pages long.
The Girl in the Moon
When you and I as writers are looking to deliver a Big Moment, we often think it has to come in a rock-em-sock-em, five-star, dyn-o-mite scene in which characters are passionately declaiming at one another, if not firing guns, crashing cars, and blowing up the planet.
Episode Fifty: The Warrior Going Forward
In today’s episode, we’ll attempt to bring all the threads of this series together — Spartans and Athenians, Alexander the Great, Arjuna and Krishna, the concept of the Inner War, and evolution of the Archetypes.
Robert DeNiro sits in a chair
I was working on a screenplay with director Andy Davis (The Fugitive, Under Siege, Above the Law) when he got an odd, dissatisfied look on his face.
Episode Forty-Nine: Who Is the Enemy?
If the human being was born for adversity … and if the Warrior Archetype was implanted within our psyche (or evolved on its own) to assist us in fighting wars … what war should we fight?
Episode Forty-Eight: Beyond the Warrior Archetype
The Warrior Archetype is tremendously empowering.
Inciting Incident #8
We were talking last week about one of the qualities of the Inciting Incident, the moment in Act One when the story actually STARTS. We said that
Episode Forty-Seven: Are You a Western Hero?
Why has the genre of the American Western retained such power generation to generation?
A Man At Arms is now available for preorder!
Don't miss out on exclusive bonuses available to early buyers!
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.
