Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 104

Louis C.K.: Give It A Minute

In a recent New York Time interview with Louis C.K., Dave Itzkoff commented, “You have the platform. You have the level of recognition.”
Louis C.K. replied with a question: “So why do I have the platform and the recognition?”
Itzkoff answered, “At this point you’ve put in the time.”
Pause after you read Louis C.K.’s follow-up:
There you go.
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“One for Love, One for Money”

A friend who’s a painter sent me this in an e-mail:
When you write, are you coming from your gut/heart, or from a merchandising view? Both?

It got me thinking about the old Hollywood axiom, “One for love, one for money.” This is the wisdom proffered in good faith to writers, actors and directors by their agents.
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Inside/Outside

On my very first day in book publishing (way back in the typewriter days), I was forced to confront an age old dilemma.
Even though I stupidly claimed that Beowulf was my favorite book at my interview, I’d been hired as editorial assistant to the editor in chief of a big mass market paperback publisher. As
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Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be

If you wanna get strong, go to the gym.
If you wanna get fast, go to the track.
If you wanna get rich, go to (I’ve never figured that one out).
The point is: where the body goes, the spirit follows.
Therefore, move thy butt.
Put your ass where your heart wants to be.
If you want to paint, don’t agonize,
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Things I Wish I’d Known Before Turning Pro

Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s “10 Things I Wish I’d Known Before Turning Pro” had me shaking my head in agreement last week. A few from the publishing side:

It’s Show Business, Not Show Art.
A freelance producer offered me this advice while I was a summer college intern at Mattel’s headquarters in El Segundo, CA.
I thought he
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Stories We Tell Ourselves

A couple of years ago I was struggling to finish a novel called The Profession. I was lost. The book was dying. It was a Bad Moment.
Enter Shawn.
This is when it’s great to have a friend/editor/literary Kahuna who really knows his stuff. Shawn flew out to L.A. from New York and we beat our brains
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Irreconcilable Goods

My last post was about “best bad choice” moments. That’s the picking the lesser of two evils side of life that defines character through action. Having characters make choices and then act on them is what’s meant by “showing” (My mother spilled coffee on the subway car floor. She dug into her purse for a
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Good Guy Speeches

We were talking last week about Villain Speeches. But there are some great Good Guy speeches too. I’m not even sure what to call these. Here’s one from Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham.
In the story, Nuke Laloosh (Tim Robbins), the clueless but athletically gifted pitcher, has just been called up to the major leagues, “the Show.”
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Play Like a 15 Seed

Anything can happen during March Madness, and we root for the underdog, but how many go so far as to put the underdogs within their final brackets?
How many had 15 seed Florida Gulf Coast University going this far? Doesn’t make sense. There’s never been a 15 seed to make the Sweet Sixteen . . .
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Start With the Villain

I’m a huge fan of Villain Speeches. There’s nothing better in a movie or a book than the moment when the stage is cleared and Satan gets to say his piece.
The villain in Gunga Din, played by the great Italian actor Eduardo Ciannelli, is called simply “the Guru.” He’s like Gandhi, if Gandhi had traded non-violence
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