Steven Pressfield Blog
My Resistance Dream Diary
I’m gonna take a break this week from our series on Theme (we’ll be back) to address an issue that’s happening with me right now. Dreams. I’m just starting a new fiction project that’s overwhelming me with Resistance, and my dreams have been really interesting. I’d like to share a few of them—and the whole interactive process between waking, working life and nocturnal who-knows-what—over the next couple of weeks. Maybe this will ring a bell with your own psychic adventures. Here’s the backstory: About two months ago I had an idea for a story. Immediately I was swamped with Resistance….
The Why of Pitching — and the Five Constants
There’s an important piece I should have hit when I started this series of articles about pitching: Why you have to pitch — or market — yourself. A scientist I spoke with this week said her peers go out of their way to avoid media exposure. To them, scientists who do a lot of press aren’t taken seriously. That perspective is why important work dies in academia and why certain sectors are plagued by consistent wheel-recreation. The messaging gets lost or forgotten. Unfortunately, the scientists aren’t the only ones doing it. If you want to make an impact, doing the work…
How to Make Your Novel Universal
My answer will not surprise you. Theme. Theme is what makes the specific universal. Remember the first post in this series? I was relating a conversation with a friend who’s a literary agent in Hollywood. She represents screenwriters. She told me that she had read 500 screenplays in one year and couldn’t find a single one she wanted to represent. Why? “Because so many of them were not about anything.” What she meant, in crassly commercial terms, was this: I can’t sell a script unless the reader (studio, director, production company, actor) can either identify with it or…
Analyze Your Novel Like a Dream
“Help, I can’t find my theme!” We talked about this a couple of weeks ago. What if you discover yourself in this situation: You’re three-quarters of the way through your novel (or maybe you finished it three weeks ago) and somebody asks you, “What’s it about? What’s the theme?” — and you find yourself staring blankly. How do you identify your theme if you still don’t know it even after you’ve finished the book? (Trust me, I’ve been there too. More than once.) Here’s one way: think of your book as a dream. I mean really. Imagine it’s…
How To Pitch, Part II
I left a few pieces out of my last post, “How to Pitch.” What follows is a round-up of items that should have made a showing in that first round. Research the Individual You’re Pitching Check the individual’s status. A few years ago I managed a history web site. Three years after the gig ended, publicists were still sending me books — and I’m still receiving e-mail pitches. When you research that individual, make sure they’re still doing what you think they’re doing. Don’t rely on the Internet. Pick up the phone. The receptionists at news outlets won’t always put…
The Hero Embodies the Theme
We’re now eight posts into our series on Theme. I confess I have the queasy feeling that our concept remains slippery and elusive. So let’s attack it from a different angle—from the idea that the protagonist embodies the theme. Rocky. The theme is “A bum can become a champ if he’s just given the chance.” See how the character of Rocky embodies that? Casablanca. Theme: “It’s better to act for the greater good than for our own selfish ends.” Bogie’s character, Rick Blaine, embodies the clash between self-interest and self-sacrifice. When he acts in the climax, his actions become…
Is Theme Important in Nonfiction too?
[This is the seventh post in our series on Theme. Special thanks to Joe Fontenot, who asked the question above.] Answer: Absolutely. Maybe even more so. Lemme offer an answer based on my own process in structuring and writing The Lion’s Gate. The Lion’s Gate was published by Sentinel/Penguin in 2014. It’s a narrative nonfiction book about the Arab-Israeli war of 1967—the Six Day War. Theme was everything in my process, not just in researching and writing the book but also in writing the Book Proposal. A book proposal is that essential 50-page document that agent and writer…
“Help! I Can’t Find My Theme!”
Don’t worry, it happens to me all the time. It took me ten years to figure out the theme of The Legend of Bagger Vance, and five before I could articulate what Gates of Fire was about. It’s a running joke between me and Shawn, in his role as my editor, that he’s the one who has to explain my stuff to me. “Oh!” I inevitably exclaim, “so that’s what it’s about.” Then he gives me eight more pages of things I’ve got to fix because I was flying blind and operating entirely on instinct. That’s what great editors do….
Tell Us What Your Story is About
[Continuing our series on Theme in fiction, nonfiction, and movies … ] I’m a big fan of Blake Snyder. If you haven’t read Save the Cat! and Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies, please rectify that oversight at once. One of Blake’s lasting legacies (he died tragically in 2009 at age fifty-one) is what he called BS2, the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet. The beat sheet is an all-purpose template for writing a screenplay. It breaks down a movie story into fifteen structural beats, e.g. Catalyst, Debate, Break Into Two, Midpoint, All Is Lost, etc. Number Three, following…
The Magic of Snow (and Emerging Stories)
This piece hit about this time two years ago. Bringing it back today as the days grow longer and the snow days (hopefully) shorter. Ezra Jack Keats clipped a strip of four images from Life magazine in 1940. One child. Four endearing expressions and poses. As the next two decades passed, the little boy in the images remained the same age, with the pursed lips and ballooned cheeks so often worn by children no more than three years old. Bundled up in a long puffy jacket and pants, he lived on Keats’ wall as the artist illustrated one children’s book after…
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.