Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 101

Stories Are About Change

In his wonderful book The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz tells the story of Marissa Panigrosso, who worked on the 98th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. She recalled that when the first plane hit the North Tower on September 11, 2001, a wave of
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Why (And How) Creative People Say No

[I never do this---pull a post from another site---but this one is so good (and I am in such passionate agreement with it) that I couldn't resist.
[Thank you, Tim Ferriss, from whose blog this came, and thank you, Kevin Ashton, for writing it. Kevin is the co-founder of the MIT Auto-ID Center, which created a
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Pitching Like A Cy Young Award-Winner

Before your read this post, watch the video below (and then stick with me as I circle back around to why it is being shared).

Early in my career I was rooted to the mound, on the throwing end of the pitch.
Some appreciated the pitches and replied with thanks when I followed-up, while others said the
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Suing Neil Young

Do you remember the infamous incident from the 80s when David Geffen sued Neil Young for recording music that was “not representative” of Neil Young?
I’m thinking of this in connection with recent posts by me and Shawn about commercial-versus-artistic, publishable-versus-unpublishable. Specifically this comment sent in by Susanna Plotnick:
If we are working on our own, creating
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Genre Management

Like you, I look forward to Steve’s “Writing Wednesday” posts. I don’t ask to see anything early or cheat and read his stuff before it goes live.  I like to read them at the same time as the rest of the tribe. The truth is that if I didn’t know Steve, I’d still be on
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“This Might Not Work”

The phrase above is one of Seth Godin’s trademarks. I love it because, like all of Seth’s stuff, it crams a ton of wisdom into very few words.
What does Seth mean by “This might not work”?
Here’s what I think:
There’s a concept in marketing called “the Avatar.” Are you familiar with this? An avatar is the
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Beyond the Blockbuster

A couple of weeks back, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas caught the film world’s attention by pointing to a trend within the industry.
From Spielberg:
“You’re at the point right now, where a studio would rather invest $250 million in one film for a shot at the brass ring than make a whole bunch of really interesting,
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Art is Artifice, Part Two

Continuing our discussion about the difference between publishable and unpublishable:
I said last week that real = unpublishable, and artifical = publishable. Let me qualify that a bit.
“Artificial,” in the sense I intend it, does not mean fake, phony, made up. It means crafted with deliberate artistic intent.
“Artificial” means employing artifice to achieve the expression of
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The Editor’s Editor

When I was a futzing wannabe actor back in the…gulp…late 1980s, I spent a summer at Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts.
Not only did I meet my wife there, I was smitten by the presence of another figure. One of the actresses on the main stage (I was strictly apprentice showcase material and free “strike the
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Art is Artifice

We’ve been talking for the past couple of weeks about making the leap from unpublishable to publishable. [More on "the Foolscap Method" in another week or so.] Some factors we’ve cited are artistic distance, thematic organization, the process of evolution from amateur to professional. Today let’s address the difference between real and artificial.
In a nutshell:
Real
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