One of my favorite passages from books about the artist’s life is this one from Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit:   I begin each day of my life with a ritual: I wake up at 5:30 A.M., put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st Street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each…

I was thinking about Marco Rubio. I’m writing this a few days before the election, so I don’t know if he won his Senate race or not, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that he did. I’ll bet Marco and his family are breathing a major sigh of relief. A Senate term runs six years. The Rubios are now set up till 2023. No worries about fading from the public scene. No shiling for work in the private sector. Marco now, and for the next six years, possesses a position of high status and influence, a guaranteed income,…

  I wouldn’t blame anyone who read last week’s post if they thought, “Man, that’s a bit airy-fairy, ain’t it?” Lemme answer by getting even more airy-fairy. Consider this artist’s body of work:   Goodbye, Columbus Portnoy’s Complaint My Life as a Man The Professor of Desire The Ghost Writer Zuckerman Unbound The Counterlife Sabbath’s Theater American Pastoral The Human Stain The Plot Against America Indignation The Humbling             Clearly there’s a theme here. Without doubt Philip Roth is dealing with a unified, ongoing issue. He’s examining this theme from every angle, playing games with it, turning it inside-out and…

  We were talking last week about “what works and what doesn’t,” i.e. what activities produce (for me) peace of mind at the end of the day. I listed a number that didn’t work—money, attention, family life, etc. Let’s talk today about what does work. If you asked me at this time of my life to define my identity—after cycling through many, many over the years—I would say I am a servant of the Muse. That’s what I do. That’s how I live my life. [Remember, this post is Why I Write, Part 6.] Consider this (incomplete and possibly out-of-order)…

  I declared in the second Why I Write post that I would have to kill myself if I couldn’t write. That wasn’t hyperbole. Here in no particular order are the activities and aspirations that don’t work for me (and I’ve tried them all extensively, as I imagine you may have too if you’re reading this blog): Money doesn’t work. Success. Family life, domestic bliss, service to country, dedication to a cause however selfless or noble. None of these works for me. Identity-association of every kind (religious, political, cultural, national) is meaningless to me. Sex provides no lasting relief. Nor do…

  The hippie version of behavioral therapy (I remember it well) was “acting as if.” Are you scared? Are you anxious? Act as if you’re not. Shawn has a principle for Black Irish Books: publish as if. In other words, bring out a book/promote it etc. as if we were Knopf, as if we were Random House. What about writing as if? (Remember, the theme of this series is “Why I Write.” It’s my own admittedly personal, idiosyncratic, possibly demented view of why I do what I do.) I definitely write as if. I write as if I’m being published…

I had been working in Hollywood for five or six years and had a semi-respectable B-level screenwriting career going, when I got a new agent. My new agent was a go-getter. He decided to mount a campaign where he would “re-introduce me to the town.” That sounded good to me. I said, “Let’s do it.” My new agent started setting me up with meetings. The campaign would last six weeks, he said. He would send me out to two or three places a week—studios, production companies, the individual development entities of actors, directors, etc. The meetings would usually last between…

  If you’re a writer struggling to get published (or published again) or wrestling with the utility or non-utility of self-publishing, you may log onto this blog and think, Oh, Pressfield’s got it made; he’s had real-world success; he’s a brand. Trust me, it ain’t necessarily so. I don’t expect to be reviewed by the New York Times. Ever. The last time was 1998 for Gates of Fire. That’s eighteen years ago. The War of Art was never reviewed, The Lion’s Gate never. My other seven novels? Never. I’ve got a new one, The Knowledge, coming in a month or two.…

  I stumbled onto the website of a novelist I had never heard of. (He’s probably never heard of me either.) What I saw there got me thinking. The site was excellent. It displayed all fourteen of the novelist’s books in “cover flow” format. They looked great. A couple had been published by HarperCollins, several others by Random House. The author was the real deal, a thoroughgoing pro with a body of work produced over decades. Somehow I found myself thinking, What if this excellent writer had never been published? Would we still think of him as a success? (In…

  Why do we even have inciting incidents? Who says there has to be one? Can’t we just plunge in with Word One? Why are we worrying so much about “starting” the story? Doesn’t the story start all by itself? Answer: the inciting incident is indispensable because the inciting incident is the Hook. When Shawn talks about Hook, Build, Payoff (Act One, Act Two, Act Three), he’s talking about the unshakeable structure of a screenplay, a novel (some of ’em anyway), a play, a joke, a seduction, a plot to overthrow a despot, not to mention your secret 18-year-plan to…