Steven Pressfield Blog
Putting “The Pivot” Into Play
I spent a few hours this week going over interview strategies with a friend. My favorite play is “the pivot.” It goes into play when the interviewer asks his or her guest a question that the guest isn’t interested in answering. That’s an interesting question, but there’s another question that I’ve been thinking about . . . Why not answer it? Could be a few different things. The guest might have something to hide. Though it didn’t come in the form of an interview, interviewers asked Lance Armstrong the “What are you on?” question for years. His pivot came via…
The Understory
I was laid up in bed with the flu this week and wound up watching the first two Bourne movies, starring Matt Damon, back-to-back. The experience got me thinking about the Understory. When I start a new book, I open a file and title it UNDERSTORY. The understory is the architecture that undergirds and supports the surface story. In the first Bourne movie, The Bourne Identity, the surface story starts like this: Jason Bourne is floating unconscious at sea, with two bullets in his back. A fishing boat rescues him. When he comes to, JB has no memory of who…
Opportunities are Bullshit, Part Two
I’ve been feeling a little bad about the first Opportunities Are Bullshit post a few weeks ago. Particularly after Callie’s wonderful “Nella from France” follow-on. My post was a bit of a rant, I confess. Ventilation of a pet peeve. I probably overstated the case. So lemme try again. We all want our stuff to be seen. If we’re singers or actors or website designers, we want our work to find its hour in the sun. So we’re vulnerable to “opportunities.” What is an “opportunity?” It’s what a producing entity–a website, a seminar, a movie or music producer, a publisher,…
A New Model for an Old Classic
“As the nation’s largest physical bookseller, Barnes & Noble supports publishers who support our bookstores.” —B&N spokesman, as reported this week in Publishers Weekly What does that mean? We support publishers who support us? Remember the scene in the movie You’ve Got Mail, when Indie bookstore owner Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) sells books at full price to Joe Fox (Tom Hanks), whose newest mega-chain Fox Books store is opening around the corner? Fox is surprised by the cost of the few children’s books he buys from Kelly, for his young relatives. The books in his store are sold at a…
All Breakthroughs come with a Fever
I first came upon this concept in the writings of Laurens van der Post, the great South African. Are you familiar with him? He wrote one of my favorite books, The Seed and the Sower. The following comes from The Lost World of the Kalahari: It has sometimes appeared to me that fever is designed, in part, to magnify reality, so that the imponderable contribution of the spirit to the malaise which produces fever, can become visible. There seems to be deep within it a rounding-up process of time which brings past, present, and future all lucidly together in the…
“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
We were talking last week about stakes and jeopardy. It is critical in any story, I was saying, that the stakes for all characters be as high as possible—preferably life and death. There’s a further aspect to stakes/jeopardy that might be worth exploring this week. The stakes in a story should always be on-theme. Lemme digress for a minute. As I’m writing this, I’m wondering, “Is this subject of interest?” It is to me, but I’m wondering if getting into such nuts-and-bolts detail about storytelling is only tedious to readers who log onto this blog. Am I boring you with…
It’s Nella From France
I was upset when I read the title of Steve’s Writing Wednesday column the week before last: “Opportunities Are Bullshit.” My thought process ran this route: Really, Steve? There have been tons of great opportunities. What about that interview with Mark McGuinness that just went up? Wasn’t it an opportunity? Or not? When you have an interview with someone you’ve gotten to know as a friend, is it less an opportunity and more a chill session with friends, something above commercialism? No. Not it. Hanging with friends is an opportunity. I rarely get to chill with mine. Hanging with Mark…
“Have a Body Hit the Floor”
A few weeks back, we were talking about this tidbit of wisdom from screenwriter Jack Epps: “You can’t do everything in one draft.” The corollary, we said, is to focus on only one aspect of your manuscript/screenplay/videogame at a time. One aspect per draft. Today let’s talk about stakes. (Ideally you and I should have thought deeply about this before we even started Draft #1. But let’s be real. Most of us plunge in and swim like hell for the far shore. So maybe we need to regroup for Drafts #2 through #15 and revisit certain essentials.) What are “stakes”…
Opportunities Are Bullshit
Have you seen this clip from Harlan Ellison, the screenwriter? I rank it up there with Josh Olson’s all-time great rant, “No, I Won’t Read Your F*#king Screenplay.” What Ellison says is that anytime he has done anything for “exposure,” he has totally wasted his time. I couldn’t agree more. Sometimes “opportunities” are presented to us. A chance to get our work exposed. People will see. It’ll make a difference. We’ll advance the brand. Bullshit. Almost every opportunity I’ve been exposed to (not all, be it said) is an opportunity for the promoter, not for me. I’m expendable. I’m interchangeable….
This Isn’t About Rita Hayworth
Screenwriter and director Frank Darabont “received solicitations from several actresses about playing the lead” in the film Shawshank Redemption, an adaptation of the Stephen King story Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. They read the title of the story and thought it featured Rita Hayworth as the lead. A publicist’s book package ended up in the hands of Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten—ten years ago. A decade later, I still remember reading the column he wrote about it. Following the death of Kenneth Lay, Businessweek received a press release that used Lay’s death as a pitching platform.
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.