Writing Wednesdays

Thinking in Blocks of Time

By Steven Pressfield |

I’m just home from two weeks’ vacation—and gearing up to get back to work. The first thing I’ll do is stop myself from thinking in terms of immediate gratification. I will make myself think, instead, in blocks of time. I will not put pressure on the first day, or even the first week. Resistance would love me to do that. Resistance knows that if I try to do too much too soon, I’ll fail. Resistance would love to see that happen. So I will remind myself that the enemy is not time. The enemy is Resistance. The wide receiver returning…

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Personal Anguish

By Steven Pressfield |

[The blog is on vacation this week. Here’s a favorite post from 2009. Back soon!] What happens to us as artists when our personal lives crash and burn? When we’ve lost our spouses or our homes or our minds; when we’ve been betrayed or, worse, betrayed someone else; when it’s three in the morning and sunrise feels like it’s never going to come? Here’s my experience: some of my best work has been done when my personal life was in chaos. This seems to make no sense. How can we do good work when it’s all we can do to…

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The Big Payoff

By Steven Pressfield |

We had a birth in the family recently—my nephew Justin and his wife Lissa had a healthy baby boy, whom they named Bryce. It got me to thinking about the concept of the Big Payoff. The Big Payoff is central to the American dream. In Westerns, it’s claiming that ten-thousand-acre spread where Ma and Pa can raise the young-uns. In gangster flicks, it’s the last big job that the criminal pulls, when he takes down the U.S. Mint. For the Vegas gambler, the big payoff is the jackpot. For you and me, it might be the dream job, the fantasy…

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Admiral Nelson’s Advice to Artists

By Steven Pressfield |

I heard this from Gen. James Mattis a couple of years ago when he was speaking at Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia. It has proved invaluable to me as a writer. Gen. Mattis was talking to a roomful of young officers. The subject was command and control in combat. If we’re the senior officer, how can we, in the heat and confusion of action, control the men and units beneath us? And if we’re the junior officer, how can we get help and advice from our seniors above? Mattis cited Admiral Horatio Nelson, England’s greatest naval hero. On the…

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Something Unique To Say

By Steven Pressfield |

If you’re a writer or artist or entrepreneur and you sometimes think to yourself, “I have nothing unique to say,” you’re wrong and I’ll tell you why. First, that voice in your head is 100-proof Resistance. It’s bullshit. I get a lot of e-mails from the trenches and, trust me, Resistance is spamming you with the same boilerplate it uses on everyone, including me. So that’s Reason #1 not to listen to that voice. Reason #2 is a lot deeper and more subtle. When we think to ourselves, “I have nothing unique to say,” we are thinking with our surface…

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The Girl from WAZE

By Steven Pressfield |

I’ve been traveling overseas for the past few weeks, and one of things I’ve encountered is a vehicle navigation system called WAZE. WAZE has a couple of cool features that I’d never seen before. (Forgive me if this kind of system is old-hat to you; it was blockbuster, earth-shaking news to me.) First, WAZE takes traffic into account in real time. Accidents, speed traps, construction delays; WAZE is on the case, suggesting alternative routes and automatically recalculating your ETA. It presents you with three choices of route, including the estimated time-to-destination of each. “Ah, it’s 21.6 minutes by Route A…

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Thinking A Career

By Steven Pressfield |

Once we turn pro (and even before we do), our Muse has plans for us. Those plans are our career-in-potential. They exist, whether we choose to believe in them or not. And they’re operating upon us, influencing us like the gravitational pull of an enormous invisible star. If you’re a writer, your career-in-potential is a shelf of books. Your books. Books you’ve written. They exist now, even if you haven’t started Book #1. Just as your family exists, even if you haven’t yet met the mother of your children. It helps, I believe, to think in these terms. Seventeen years…

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Finding “Real”

By Steven Pressfield |

To say that a voice (or a look or a sound) is “real” in art requires quotation marks. We will never speak in our “real” voice because the very act of speaking in a compelling and interesting manner requires, first, a point of view—and every point of view implies a voice that is dictated, and thus made “true,” by the context in which that point of view is taken. Was Churchill’s voice “real?” Was Homer’s? Our “real” voice, when we’re lucky enough to find it, becomes the voice of that point of view. The more closely the voice coincides with…

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The “A” Story and the “B” Story

By Steven Pressfield |

In screenplay lingo, writers and directors refer to the “A” story and the “B” story. (There can be a “C,” “D,” and “E” story, but let’s leave those alone for the moment.) The “A” story is the dramatic core of the movie. It’s the foreground—the primary throughline that the protagonist follows. The “B” story is a supporting saga, running on a parallel (and often seemingly-unrelated) track. In The Hangover, the “A” story is the guys’ efforts to find their friend Doug. The “B” story is Stu’s (Ed Helms) struggle to break out of thrall to his shrew girlfriend back in…

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Inside the All Is Lost Moment

By Steven Pressfield |

We were talking last week about an All Is Lost Moment coming immediately before a Turning Pro moment. We cited Rocky, The Hangover and Big Night as examples. Sounds arcane, I know. Hang in with me. In a movie, the All Is Lost moment is that crisis (usually two-thirds to four-fifths of the way through the story) where the hero hits the wall. He has failed in all his efforts to attain his objective; he’s completely stuck. There’s no way out and no way forward. In The Descendants, for example [screenplay by Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash],…

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