One of the outcomes that has always surprised the hell out of me about my own work is that, until I did it, I had no idea I was going to do it. Do you know what I mean? I wrote Book X and looked at it and said, “Where in the world did that come from?” Then I wrote Book X+1 and said the exact same thing. We discover who we are by the works we produce. Did you know who you were when you were twenty? But who-you-were was already there. And a compulsion was on you, even…

In many ways this blog is me talking to myself. What makes the thing work, if indeed it does, is that there are a lot of people like me and they are dealing with the same issues I’m dealing with. So talking to myself in this public forum is, in its way, a meditation for those individuals as well. So I don’t ask myself, “What do I imagine others want to read in this space?” I ask, “What do I want? What issues are bothering me? What questions am I exploring?” Why write a book? Why make a movie? For…

We were talking last week about the purpose of this blog, both from my point of view in writing it and from the POV of those who read it. What are we doing here? What is this collective enterprise about? I cited a phrase from Pericles’ Funeral Oration in which he praised his fellow citizens of Athens, describing each as: … the rightful lord and owner of his own person. In other words, individual autonomy. Pericles was talking about the ideal of the citizen in the political sense, as opposed to less independent forms of individual identity—the slave, the subject,…

Why am I writing this blog? Why are you reading it? It’s not a bad idea to pause once in a while and ask questions like these. The blog started about five years ago. It has evolved through a number of iterations. I’ve written in this space about what interests me, but I’ve also taken cues from comments and responses from readers and tried to dig deeper into issues that seemed to strike a chord. What are we talking about on this blog? What’s our theme? What are we trying to get at, you and I? I’m going to take…

A few changes coming to this blog in the next couple of months: 1. Jeff Simon, our version of Steve Jobs, has been reconfiguring the site to make it more video-friendly. We’ll have a new look soon (or as soon as Jeff can whip it together.) The plan is to do a lot more video posts and even video series. Jeff is also redesigning the look of the site to work better on mobile devices. I hate the term “content.” But, what the hell, here is some of the (I can’t say the word) we’ve got coming up: 1. I’m…

Black Irish Books is the little publishing company that Shawn and I operate, alongside our various day jobs. When I say little, I mean little. So far we’ve only brought out stuff written by me. That started to change, though, about two and a half years ago. If you’ve been reading the Monday and Friday posts in this space (the ones about my researching The Lion’s Gate in Israel), you know that I had met and become friends with Giora Romm, the Israel Air Force’s first fighter-pilot ace. One day when Giora and I were driving somewhere he casually said…

About six weeks ago, Seth Godin (Tribes, Linchpin, Squidoo, The Icarus Deception, HugDug.com) ran an announcement on his blog. He invited 15 people to apply to spend a week with him this summer in a seminar for young artists and entrepreneurs. Tuition free. My first thought when I read this was, “Wow, what a generous offer! Is Seth a great guy or what?” My second thought was, “What a life-changer this could be for a young person who was ready to profit from the experience.” A few days later I was talking to my young friend Liam Bowler. “Did you…

There are very few books on creativity that I would take with me to a desert island. One for sure is Patricia Ryan Madson’s Improv Wisdom, first published in 2005. Patricia taught improvisation at Stanford to SRO classes for twenty-eight years. Her slender, highly concentrated book (shorter than The War of Art) cites thirteen maxims for aspiring comics and actors who dare to get up onstage without a net and wing it. What is fascinating to me is that every one of these principles applies with equal power to writing, particularly fiction writing. 1. “Say yes.” I had never heard…

This week for me is packed with interviews, getting the word out for The Lion’s Gate. Looking at my calendar I see block after block of twenty minutes, thirty minutes marked down for appointments. How will I get any work done? 1. I’m gonna work in the cracks. I’ll have to find intervals. There won’t be many because what time isn’t taken up with book promotion will be devoured by personal stuff, family obligations, etc. But still there will be cracks. I tell myself, “Steve, by all rights, you should accomplish absolutely NOTHING this week. So even one page, even…

One of the questions I get asked all the time is “Why do you write about war?” It’s a good question, and for years I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t start out writing about war. For almost thirty years I wrote screenplays and novels and none of them were war-themed. In 1996, Gates of Fire (about the battle of Thermopylae) came out of me for some reason I could not (and still cannot) fathom. Six more novels about war followed. A non-fiction book about the Six Day War of 1967, The Lion’s Gate, just came out two weeks ago.…