Shakespeare, Milton and Dante all understood villains. They loved villains. Their villains are their greatest creations. Directors savor villains because villains light up the screen. Actors love to play bad guys. What could be more memorable onscreen than crushing a half-grapefruit into your wife’s face, as James Cagney did to Mae Clarke in Public Enemy, or, as Richard Widmark did in Kiss of Death, push an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs? But what every bad guy needs most of all is a great Villain Speech. From our own era, it’s tough to top the “Greed…

I was in Israel for most of the past month, doing research for a book. That’s why I haven’t been able to deliver a new Writing Wednesday each week. My apologies! The sojourn in the Holy Land produced mucho grist for future WWs, however. But we can bang one post out immediately: Product Recommendations. Stuff I took with me that actually worked. I offer the following consumer report (with NO connections, financial or otherwise, to any product recommended or reviled below) for my fellow aspiring journalist/novelist globetrotters … 1. SwissGear IBEX laptop backpack. I had noticed, doing book signings at…

“Gravitational Fields” ran November of 2009 for the first time. It’s visiting again for the long Thanksgiving weekend. How do you get a project started? Sometimes the thoughts in our head are so scattered, we don’t know where to begin. Here’s a trick that my friend Paul Abbott taught me: Just start. Even if you don’t know where you’re going. Begin anyway. If it’s a story, a painting, an idea for a business venture … just dive in. Open a folder on your laptop. Give it a name. Open a file in that folder. Give it a name. Now start.…

March 31, 2010, “Habit” first appeared on the site—and is revisiting the home page today as I’m on the road. Konrad Lorenz, the Nobel Prize-winning zoologist, had a pet goose that he allowed the run of the house. The first day when the goose waddled in the door, there happened to be a mirror near floor height; the goose mistook his own reflection for some rival bird and flew into attack mode.

I’ve been out of the country for the past two weeks, in England and in Israel. (In fact I’m still overseas—and will be for two more weeks.) That’s why I haven’t put up any current posts. I’ve been so far out of my comfort zone, I couldn’t make myself sit down and write. How far out? Panic out. Serious freak-out out, just because I couldn’t figure out how to get online, or make my phone work, or read street signs, or even, for one memorable twenty-minute stretch, get my Hertz car out of an underground parking garage. It got me…

Earlier this year, the “Writing Wednesdays” name was switched to “Do the Work Wednesdays” for the release of the book Do the Work. This post went up May 11, 2011, soon after the book’s release. The comments that followed inspired other posts about addiction—and this reposting today. Have you ever noticed that addicts are often extremely interesting people? Addiction itself is excruciatingly boring, in that it’s so predictable. The lies, the evasions, the transparent self-justification and self-exoneration. But the addict is himself often a colorful and engrossing person. If he has been a substance abuser for any length of time, his story…

When I was living out of the back of my ’65 Chevy van, there was a kind of dude I used to run into from time to time. A hard-core road character, burnt brown by the sun, unbathed in months, living on dimes a day. I probably met and spent time with a dozen guys like this in places like Texas and Louisiana, northern California, Washington state—giving them rides, working day-labor jobs, staying up all night talking. They carried guitars and no-hope dreams. I used to ask myself, listening to their tunes in a stoned haze some place that I…

One of the great joys of being a writer is that, through your books, you get to meet some pretty amazing people. One of those in my world is Hermes (Ioannis) Melissanidis from Greece. Hermes won a gold medal in gymnastics at the Atlanta Olympics. Here’s the video if you’ve never seen it. I met Hermes because of Gates of Fire. He wrote to me, telling me that he once had to perform in a gymnastics final when he had a broken rib. He was going to withdraw, but he happened to have Gates in his gym bag and he…

Some of the most popular posts in this space have been those in the “Artist and Addict” series. One point those posts made was that there’s not that big a difference between an artist and an addict. Many artists are addicts, and vice versa. Many are artists in one breath and addicts in another. They’re in the studio on Monday and in Betty Ford on Friday. What’s the difference? The addict is the amateur; the artist is the professional. Both addict and artist are dealing with the same material, which is the pain of being human and the struggle against…

If you’re an artist or entrepreneur, you should know Jonathan Fields. Next to Seth Godin (sorry, Mr. F., nobody ranks with Seth), Jonathan’s insights–creative and commercial—are in my opinion the most original and far-ranging. He has a new book called Uncertainty, which just came out a couple of days ago. Jonathan was kind enough to sit still for a quick interrogation: SP: The subject of learning to operate effectively, despite finding oneself in a position of uncertainty is a fascinating one. What I’m curious about is why you chose it? It’s actually quite esoteric (which I love) and unexpected (which I…