My girlfriend Diana and I were shooting a video for the “Warrior Archetype” series when we came upon this charming country cottage.

There are certain books that we all should have on our Writer’s Bookshelf. Here’s one that I can’t recommend highly enough:

Readers ask me sometimes if there’s any individual character among all those I’ve written with whom I identify most. 

The following is from an interview with the writer and director Paul Schrader (“Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” “Light Sleeper,” “First Reformed”) from the L.A. Times, September 13, 2020.

I felt at home in Egypt. I could happily have been a priest. In truth I am a warrior-priest, who marches where God directs him, in the service of Necessity and Fate. Nor is such a notion vain or self-infatuated. Consider: Persia’s time has passed. In the Invisible World, Darius’ empire has already fallen. Who am I, except the agent of that end, which already exists in the Other World and at whose birth I assist in this one?  

I was in the middle of writing Eat, Pray, Love, and I fell into one of those sort of pits of despair … [and] I started to think I should just dump this project. But then I remembered Tom [Waits] talking to the open air [when inspiration for a song hit him while he was driving on the freeway and had no way to record it] and I tried it. So I just lifted my face up from the manuscript and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room. And I said aloud, “Listen you, thing, you and I both know that if this book isn’t…

I started The War of Art with this thought:

You could join the Foreign Legion. You could cross Antarctica on foot.

I have a friend who runs a literary agency in Hollywood. She represents screenwriters. I was having lunch with her a few weeks ago and I asked her, “Is there any one mistake you find your writers making over and over?”

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.”