My friend Paul had a writing breakthrough last week. I mean a serious one, where his game elevated two or three levels in one shot. It’s tremendously encouraging to witness something like that because for most of us, most of the time, the experience of artistic enterprise is like toiling in the muck, slinging shovel after shovel of ooze and wondering if we’re advancing by so much as a centimeter, or—our direst fear—falling back. That’s where Paul has been for as long as I’ve known him. Now, all of a sudden, POW!  His breakthrough was like a touring golf pro…

I never talk about a project I’m working on. It’s bad luck. But something happened a few nights ago that made me think I should make an exception, both for the sake of my own thinking and for sharing an insight or two. So I’ll keep depiction of the project vague but the wisdom as clear as I can make it. I was at a professional event with a friend who, each time he introduced me to a new acquaintance, described and made a pitch for the project I’m working on. (Don’t ask why.) He did this a number of…

We’ve talked over the past weeks about the hero’s journey as myth, as movie or literature, as a blueprint in our psyches. But what is it in real life? What is the spontaneous hero’s journey? One of our readers (and my friend) is a journalist named Andy Lubin. Andy has written in to our Comments section taking issue with the term “hero.” He feels such an exalted term should apply only to soldiers or Marines who save their comrades’ lives in combat, or firemen who run into burning buildings. The truth is, Andy himself is a hero in the sense…

Last Wednesday I posted in this space the first two chapters from Turning Pro. This week I want to include the following four. Mainly because I think they work nicely as a unit—and because together they give a real flavor for what the book is and what it’s about. Next week: back to our regular Writing Wednesdays. Now, chapters three through six from Turning Pro: 3.  MY LIFE AS AN AMATEUR When I was in my twenties, I lived for a winter in a boarding house in Durham, North Carolina that served as a halfway station for patients emerging from state mental…

Finally, after more than a month of technical tweaking and re-jiggering, it is my great pleasure to announce that my follow-up to The War of Art—titled Turning Pro—is now available. Major thanks to our webmaster, Jeff Simon, for flying back from a movie set in London to pull all the loose ends together. And thanks to the friends of this site for their patience. Shawn and I are publishing Turning Pro ourselves, under our new banner, Black Irish Books. The first press run is modest but until we run out, you can get a top-quality “first print” paperback from our new store by…

With apologies to readers who are getting tired of these “hero’s journey” posts (this is the fourth in as many weeks), I can say only, “Hang in there, baby!” The last one is coming next week. Today’s is about using the hero’s journey intentionally, as a way to achieve a species of self-transformation. Navy SEAL training is a hero’s journey. So is Marine Corps boot camp or spring football camp at ‘Bama or a season dancing with the Joffrey Ballet. A Jenny Craig diet is a hero’s journey. For that matter, so is being a contestant on Dancing With The…

Last week we were talking about the “hero’s journey” in myth. This week let’s talk about movies. The neophyte writer, when he arrives in Tinseltown, very soon gets wised up to the lingo—“inciting incident,” “Act Two curtain,” “All Is Lost moment” and so forth. It’s not so much that there’s a “formula.” But there’s definitely a “vocabulary.” The reason there’s a vocabulary is that certain structural concepts work in stories, and others don’t. How do moviemakers know this (forgetting for a moment William Goldman’s famous axiom, “Nobody knows anything”)? They know by the box office. The Monday morning ticket figures.…

“The hero’s journey” sounds a bit melodramatic, I admit. But hey, it’s real. If the phrase rings mythic, it’s because its origins (at least in expression) lie in myth. What are myths? They’re the ancient, collective legends of the human race. The Odyssey, the epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf; the sagas of the Buddha or Prometheus or Quetzalcoatl. The hero’s journey, as Joseph Campbell famously observed, appears again and again in these myths. The specifics vary, but the overall contours remain remarkably consistent. 1. The hero starts as “stuck” and unconscious. Like Luke Skywalker toiling on Uncle Owen and Aunt Varoo’s…

I netflixed The Power of Myth last week and watched it over a couple of nights. Have you ever seen it? It’s the PBS series that Bill Moyers did in 1988, interviewing Joseph Campbell. The program was great then and it’s great now. What I realized, re-watching Joseph Campbell (tragically he died a couple of years after the series aired) was what a powerful influence his books and thought have had on me. The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Follow Your Bliss, The Power of Myth. I decided I would dedicate the next few Writing Wednesdays to exploring those subjects.…

With gratitude to Maria Popova, from whose February 22 article on Brain Pickings I pilfered the following (and to George Spencer, who turned me on to the wonderful Brain Pickings), here is some priceless wisdom from one of my literary heroes, Henry Miller. (What I love about these notes is that they’re aimed by Miller only for himself—without a glimmer of self-consciousness, nor even for a moment intended for public dissemination. Here is a writer lashing himself to the mast, though not too tightly, as he bears down on what would become his first published novel, Tropic of Cancer.) COMMANDMENTS…