It took me seven years to finish my first book. (I wrote about this in The War of Art.) I couldn’t sell it. Couldn’t find a buyer. In fact it would be twenty-one more years before a novel of mine actually saw the light of publication.

We left General Slim last week contemplating the string of catastrophic defeats his Allied forces had suffered at the hands of their enemy in Burma and India.

I’m reading a book I love but that I would not recommend to anyone unless they’re as crazy as I am. The book is dense. Reading it is like hacking a trail through elephant grass.  But every page has some powerful insight for us writers and artists if we’ve got the patience to stick with it.

You would think that I as a writer should know this and use it. But it took two friends—Joe Byerly and Ryan Holiday—to open my mind to this practice.

I know I promised last week to continue our examination of Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels, but instead I must interrupt this message with a word from our sponsor …

Forgive me, every once in a while I can’t stop myself from delivering a post purely about narrative technique.

We were talking last week about the writer or artist’s need for training.

We were talking a couple of weeks ago about the artist’s or warrior’s “willing embrace of chaos.”

We’ve talked often in these posts about the Warrior Mindset as a template for the writer or artist or entrepreneur’s inner world. Treat the struggle as a war. Fight it like a warrior.

I gave a talk a few weeks ago at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. The title of the talk was “The Warrior Mindset.”