Writing Wednesdays
Todd Henry is a friend. He started in the creative/entrepreneurial field in 1995 with a tour of duty in the music biz, working as a marketer, writer and creative director. By 2005 he had launched his own company, Accidental Creative, working independently with creative people and teams. By then he had evolved his own unique philosophy (several of whose precepts I borrowed and use myself), which he pulled together last year into his first book, The Accidental Creative: How To Be Brilliant At a Moment’s Notice, which is terrific and which will be published tomorrow. Todd and I sat down a…
Read MorePosted from the road, Jacksonville NC: I’m reading Shawn’s Friday posts about book proposals in our “What It Takes” series. I love ‘em. They’re educational for me too. Until I read Shawn’s first post, I didn’t know what a book proposal was. Until he showed me one a couple of months ago, I had never seen one. Reading this, you may think, “How can that be? How can Pressfield have a 15-year book career and not know what a book proposal looks like?” The answer is simple: You don’t need a book proposal for fiction. That’s good news and bad…
Read MoreI got an e-mail a few weeks ago from Jeff Wills, who is writing an historical novel and was curious about how I did research. I promised I would answer in this space as soon as the launch of The Profession was over. So … here goes: JW: My question is about your method of research and writing. I know your position is do “as little research as possible” and jump in, but I guess I’m interested in some of the details of how YOU jump in. SP: First, Jeff, though I do advocate plunging in on the work even…
Read MoreI have a recurring dream. In the dream I’m invited to climb into the back seat of a limo that’s about to drive off to someplace fabulous (sometimes the dream is about a fancy home or a fantastic restaurant). The dream always ends badly. It’s trying to tell me something. Publication day—which was yesterday for The Profession—is like getting into the back seat of that dream limo. Publication day gets our hopes up. We’re human. We’re prey to the folly of anticipating rave reviews; we’re itching to check sales on Amazon. I’ve been up and down with these expectations through…
Read MoreIn one world, he’s the celebrated author of The War of Art—a book that has quickly become the field manual for anyone engaged in creative or artistic work of any kind, especially entrepreneurs and writers. In the other world he’s the king of all military epics and historical sagas — a thinking man’s Tom Clancy whose novels about The Battle of Thermopylae, Alexander the Great, and The Peloponnessian War are favorites among grunts, generals, and literary critics alike. Unfortunately, there’s not nearly enough cross pollination between the two worlds. Few of Steven’s fiction fans have read his non-fiction, and even…
Read MoreFirst things first: our Kindle and Nook winners from last week’s un-Contest. Congrats to Lou Sancio and Rachel Hope, who will get their new eReaders ASAP—and to the six other lucky devils listed below, who will each get a signed first edition of The Profession. Winners, I’ll e-mail you all personally and we can confer on personalized inscriptions, addresses etc. Here’s how I picked the winners. We had a big long list on Excel; I scrolled down with my eyes closed, then stopped when I felt the vibes and opened my eyes. Whatever name was beneath the cursor … you…
Read MoreTwo weeks from today, The Profession goes on sale. We were thinking about having a contest with prizes to celebrate, but we decided that was much too complicated. So instead we’re giving away stuff without a contest. The two grand prizes—attorneys, take note: they’re not really “prizes”—are a Nook (WiFi) and a Kindle (WiFi), both to be loaded with the Random House Pressfield library: The Profession, Gates of Fire, Tides of War, Last of the Amazons, The Virtues of War, The Afghan Campaign and Killing Rommel. Then we’ll throw in six signed first editions of The Profession to a lucky half dozen plucked from those who…
Read MoreThe Gnostics believed that exile was the psychological condition of the human being. It certainly feels that way to me. We’ve been talking about artists and addicts for the past couple of weeks. Not every artist is an addict, and certainly not every addict is an artist. But it seems to me that both share an acute, even excruciating sensitivity to the pain of being human—and both actively seek ways to overcome it, transcend it, or at least make it go away. What is the pain of being human? To me, it’s the condition of being suspended between two worlds…
Read MoreThe artist and the addict are not very far apart, are they? Often they’re one and the same. A blues musician or a painter can be an addict one minute and an artist the next. He can be an artist and an addict at the same time. On Tuesday you’re rocking the casbah; on Wednesday you’re checking in to Betty Ford. Why is that? “It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.” If Bob Dylan is right in Gotta Serve Somebody (and I think he is), we all do have to…
Read MoreHave 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 himself is often a colorful and compelling person. His story reads like a novel, packed with drama, intrigue, conflict and heartbreak. If the addict’s drug of choice is alcohol, the narrative is frequently one of job loss, domestic abuse, divorce, abandonment of children, bankruptcy. If Class One narcotics are the culprit, the tale often includes crime, the law, violence, even death. Of course we fallible mortals can…
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