Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 107

“Have a Body Hit the Floor”

A few weeks back, we were talking about this tidbit of wisdom from screenwriter Jack Epps: “You can’t do everything in one draft.”
The corollary, we said, is to focus on only one aspect of your manuscript/screenplay/videogame at a time. One aspect per draft.
Today let’s talk about stakes.
(Ideally you and I should have thought deeply about
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“Eternity is in Love with the Creations of Time”

I only know Richard Ben Cramer from his work. But is there any better way?
Yes, he was a highly regarded journalist and had that newspaperman countenance of one perfectly suited to live behind the mask of a byline. Pretty people just can’t write like the crooked toothed and wild haired.
But what made him a one
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Opportunities Are Bullshit

Have you seen this clip from Harlan Ellison, the screenwriter? I rank it up there with Josh Olson’s all-time great rant, “No, I Won’t Read Your F*#king Screenplay.”
What Ellison says is that anytime he has done anything for “exposure,” he has totally wasted his time. I couldn’t agree more.
Sometimes “opportunities” are presented to us. A
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This Isn’t About Rita Hayworth

Screenwriter and director Frank Darabont “received solicitations from several actresses about playing the lead” in the film Shawshank Redemption, an adaptation of the Stephen King story Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. They read the title of the story and thought it featured Rita Hayworth as the lead.
A publicist’s book package ended up in the hands
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Committed to What?

We’ve been talking about depth of commitment for three weeks now. But one question has not yet been asked:
What exactly are we committed to?
Is it our art, our career, our family, our nation? Lemme take the long way around by flashing back to an earlier era in my own life.
For years I was committed to
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What About Foreign Translation Rights?

Steve and I have received a number of offers from foreign publishers to translate and publish Black Irish Books in other countries. We’ve—I hope tactfully—declined all of them.
It’s not that we don’t want our books to be available in every language around the globe. It’s that the old way (and still current way) of selling
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A Pro Recognizes Another Pro

If you’ll forgive me for quoting myself, here is a (very short) chapter from The War of Art:
A PROFESSIONAL IS RECOGNIZED BY OTHER PROFESSIONALS
The professional senses who has served his time and who hasn’t. Like Alan Ladd and Jack Palance circling each other in Shane, a gun recognizes another gun.
I’ve been thinking about this in
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The Right Thing

I’ve reread Bob Garfields article “Suffer in Silence” a few times since it was posted.
Short version: Garfield’s piece is a call to brands, cautioning them to restrain from inserting themselves into news stories about the tragedy at Sandy Hook elementary school.
Within the piece, he offers examples of a few brands that have hijacked other tragedies, to
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Depth of Commitment, Part Two

We were talking last week about depth of commitment. I was saying that the main difference between an amateur and a pro is their depth of commitment. The amateur’s commitment is shallow. The professional’s is deep.
The question then becomes: Can depth of commitment be increased? Can we move from shallow to deep?
My answer is an
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The Story Behind The “Random House Gives $5,000 Bonuses” Story

For those of us who came of age in the analog universe, the phrase “follow the money” reminds us of a movie that inspired thousands of people to get graduate degrees in Journalism. It comes from William Goldman’s brilliant screenplay adaptation of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s seminal narrative nonfiction book All the President’s Men,
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