The Lion’s Gate has been out for about a week now. The book represents, for me, three years of 24/7 work and an untold tonnage of emotion. Now it’s out there in the real world, on its own. Nothing I think or say or do will have more than the most negligible influence on the way the book is received. The question for me now becomes, “How do I manage my own expectations?” For what it’s worth, here is how I think about it: First, I have been trained in the Tinseltown School of Having Your Heart Broken. It’s a…

Continuing from last week’s post: How did my friend Paul change via the process of writing and completing his first novel? I offer the following thoughts to Paul as well as to our readers, not as “lessons learned” of “the right way” or “the wrong way.” What follows are only observations. They’re subjective. I may be wrong. This is just what I saw, or what I think I saw. Let’s start with BEFORE: 1) Paul and the External World. Before the novel, Paul’s sense of well-being and self-satisfaction was tied almost exclusively to externals. He doesn’t have kids, but he…

My friend Paul just finished his first novel. He has no publisher yet. He’s still got a long way to go. But he finished that sucker. He’s done. He did it. It’s been really interesting for me to watch Paul walk through the fire. Because it is true that, for a grizzled old vet like me, the ordeal of writing does get easier over time. You forget what hell it is in the beginning. Now here’s Paul struggling through sieges of despair and self-loathing; enduring bouts of mental and emotional paralysis; undergoing his seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth nervous breakdowns, not…

There was an article on this subject in the New York Times a few weeks back. The question posed was, as I understand it: If your son or daughter came to you and declared, “I want to be a writer,” what advice would you give him or her on how to pursue this dream? Would you suggest an academic program, the Times asked. An MFA in Creative Writing? Or would it be more productive for your aspiring artist to enroll in the College of Hard Knocks, out on the street, gaining experience in the real world? Questions like these make…

I never talk about a book while I’m working on it. It’s bad luck. The Muse doesn’t like it. That’s why, although I’ve been working for the past three years on a project that’s been all-consuming for me, I haven’t offered a peep on this blog. But now the book is done. It’s in production; the first finished copies are coming off the presses now. The Lion’s Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War will be published by Penguin/Sentinel on May 6. Now that the book is finished, I’m gonna become a blabbermouth. I’m going to write…

I’m reading a really interesting book by three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Thomas Friedman called From Beirut to Jerusalem. It’s not a recent book; it’s from 1989 (it won the National Book Award that year). It’s about Mr. Friedman’s early years as a correspondent in the Middle East. Beirut in the 80s was the Hobbesian Wild West. There was a war going on with Israel; artillery shells were raining down at all hours. At the same time a Lebanese civil war was raging; local militias, criminal gangs, extremist-religious armies and kidnapping rings ran rife. Death came out of nowhere and at all…

People sometimes ask me, “Don’t you feel guilty encouraging individuals to pursue their artistic dreams when the odds against success are so overwhelming?”

There are concepts that are so obvious that it’s almost impossible for us to grasp them. This is one of them. What I mean by “so obvious” is, someone says something to us and we think, “Of course. Sure. I know that.” Then the concept blows right past us. It’s out the window and gone, and we’re no better off than we were before we heard it. Here’s the concept (focus hard): Resistance is not us. That voice we hear in our head? That’s not us. Those thoughts we think are our own? They’re not our thoughts. They’re Resistance. “You…

The #1 question that writers ask: “I’ve got a million ideas. How do I know which one to write?” Answer: Write your White Whale. Which idea, of all those swimming inside your brain, are you compelled to pursue the way Ahab was driven to hunt Moby Dick? Here’s how you know: you’re scared to death of it. That’s good. You should be scared. Mediocre ideas never elevate your heart rate. The great ones make you break out in a sweat. The final image of Moby Dick is one of the greatest ever, not just as the climax to a saga,…

Herewith, ten idiosyncratic observations on the subject of generating ideas. 1. Ideas seem to come by themselves, unbidden. In certain careers that I’ve spent time in—advertising and the movie business, for example—I’ve labored under conditions where you have to produce on demand. It’s hard. It’s do-able, but it’s never really worked for me. I can’t press. It’s hard for me to grind ’em out. 2. Ideas seem to come in off-moments. They appear when the brain is turned off. For me that’s when I’m half asleep, pre-dawn or tossing in the middle of the night; when I’m in the shower…