You were born for adversity. It’s in your DNA as much as it’s in the DNA of a shark or an eagle or a lion. You were made for hard times. The species of Homo sapiens has survived and prevailed not because we are faster or stronger than all the competing creatures. Every one of them is better equipped by nature with fangs and claws and wings and fur. Every one is better adapted to hunt, to kill, to survive drought and heat and cold. Yeah, our race has a better brain. And yes, we figured out the advantages…

  A few years ago I wrote a book called Killing Rommel. Killing Rommel is a novel set during WWII in the North Africa campaign. Its heroes are the men of the Long Range Desert Group, a true historical British commando unit that fought behind the lines against Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and the German Afrika Korps. The first time I heard the name Long Range Desert Group, I fell in love with it. I said to myself, “I don’t know what this is, but I gotta write a book about it.” “Long Range.” Way cooler that Short Range. Even…

  My first agent was a gentleman named Barthold Fles. He was seventy years old. When I fictionalized him in The Knowledge, I made him ninety-six. But he was really seventy. I was twenty-nine at the time, so Bart had me by forty-one years. He was Swiss. He had represented Bertolt Brecht and even Carl Jung. He had seen and done everything. One day Bart said to me, “How much is 427 minus one?” I gave the obvious answer: 426.   “No,” said Bart. “It’s zero.”   He was speaking about pages in a novel. If the full book is…

[This is Post #3 in our new series, “The Professional Mindset.”]   I had a friend named Victoria when I was working in Hollywood. Victoria was a successful screenwriter, very much a role model for me. One day Victoria took me out to lunch and gave me some insight into how she handled herself as a professional in “this town.”   Steve, you and I are going up every day against Twentieth-Century Fox and Warner Bros. and Paramount. They’re our competition. We’ve got to be just as organized as they are, just as tough, and just as smart.   Victoria…

  Are you a writer? A filmmaker? A dancer? Then you’re an entrepreneur. You have more in common with the young Steve Jobs and the early Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg than you do with your dad who worked all his life for AT+T or your aunt who’s five months away from collecting her pension from the Post Office. [Today’s post, by the way, is the kick-off for a new extended series that I’m calling, until someone comes up with a catchier title, “The Professional Mindset.” Over the succeeding weeks we’re going to examine the inner world of the writer…

(Tune in to Writing Wednesdays this Friday and Monday for the continuation of the series “Using Your Real Life in Fiction” — and for more of The Knowledge‘s backstory.) When we as writers use our real life in fiction, we tend to use real-life personalities too. One of the big ones in The Knowledge is my cat, Teaspoon. My real-life cat was named Mo. I changed the name for a reason, which I’ll get into below. But first let’s flash back [see Chapter 52 in Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t] to one of the seminal principles of story-telling: Every character must…

Today my newest novel, The Knowledge, goes on sale. (Yeah, that’s me in the photo, taken in the same era in which The Knowledge is set.) You can order The Knowledge right here in a premium “French flap” trade paperback edition not available anywhere else. Also in eBook or an eBook-plus-paperback bundle. There’s a special Holiday Bonus available too. The Knowledge is my (real-life) writer’s coming-of-age story. I’m the protagonist. The internal story is all true. The Knowledge takes place in New York City in 1974, when I was driving a cab and struggling to get my first novel published.…

  One of my favorite passages from books about the artist’s life is this one from Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit:   I begin each day of my life with a ritual: I wake up at 5:30 A.M., put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st Street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each…

  We were talking last week about “what works and what doesn’t,” i.e. what activities produce (for me) peace of mind at the end of the day. I listed a number that didn’t work—money, attention, family life, etc. Let’s talk today about what does work. If you asked me at this time of my life to define my identity—after cycling through many, many over the years—I would say I am a servant of the Muse. That’s what I do. That’s how I live my life. [Remember, this post is Why I Write, Part 6.] Consider this (incomplete and possibly out-of-order)…