Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 11

Before I Go Public…

For my loyal friends of Writing Wednesdays, I have an announcement and a special offer…

My newest book, THE DAILY PRESSFIELD, goes live for preorder today. But—only for you—I want to offer a 10% discount… and the first shot at signed copies.

This offer is available only through my online store at www.sassmediallc.com.

Here’s the coupon code: TDP-WW-2023

No one else will get this.

THE DAILY PRESSFIELD is 365 days of motivation, encouragement, and inspiration. It’s a fantastic gift for anyone who’s struggling to write a book, launch a startup, or commit to any long-term project where Resistance is kicking their butt. Please order early to be sure to get the book in time for the holidays. Books will start shipping on November 21.

There are two ways to get signed copies:

1. We’ve put together 750 numbered, Limited Edition Gift Boxes.

The Special Signed Gift Edition comes with a Companion Journal and other goodies

This is a gorgeous premium package that will pop the eyes of that special person who’s fighting “the war of art” and can use a little help. It comes with a hardcover first edition signed by me and Vic Juhasz, the great illustrator who contributed 52 fantastic drawings to the book, one for each week.

The package also comes with a companion journal to use with THE DAILY PRESSFIELD, a boxed set of ten notecards and envelopes with ten different illustrations from the books … and other goodies.

2. The Pressfield-signed first edition (by itself, without the Gift Box and extras) is also available at www.sassmediallc.com. We have 750 copies in stock.

“The Daily Pressfield” is BIG… 537 pages, 1.7 pounds.

Think of it as THE WAR OF ART squared.

Again, this offer is only available through www.sassmediallc.com. You can’t get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any brick-and-mortar store.

(P.S. An apology in advance: the unsigned hardback of THE DAILY PRESSFIELD is not yet up on Amazon. Should be there “at any moment” but isn’t yet. Sorry! The eBook is there but the hardback is still to come as of 11/10/23.)

Let me say thanks once again to all my friends—many who may have never written into the Comments section, but whose attention and community I feel keenly—who have stuck with me and my crazy philosophy of creativity over all these years.

Happy Holidays!

I hope THE DAILY PRESSFIELD helps make the next 365 days everything you dream them to be!

The post Before I Go Public… first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

Publishing “as if”

Publishing “as if”—meaning, for an independent writer like me, to bring out a book AS IF it were from Random House, as if it were from Simon & Schuster—is a dream and a philosophy that my partner Diana and I have been trying to put into practice for the past two years.

We published PUT YOUR ASS WHERE YOUR HEART WANTS TO BE that way, and we did the same with GOVT CHEESE: A MEMOIR. The idea is to bring out a book that, on every level—literary merit, originality, creativity… and the quality of the actual physical production—is as good or better than anything from a Big Five publisher.

Further, the aim is to promote the work and get it into readers’ hands with the same or better reach and presence as a Big Five publisher. (If you’re a writer who has relied on a mainstream publisher for such support, you know that, as Stevie Nicks once sang, “It all comes down to you.”)

Beyond that, publishing “as if” aims to follow Seth Godin’s concept of the Smallest Viable Audience, i.e. know who reads you and give them what they want… even if (especially if) they don’t know what that is until you put it before them.

Does this work? Is it fun? Is it a business model that can succeed for a broad span of writers and other artists?

One thing I can testify to: it ain’t for the faint of heart. The learning curve is ferocious. The tech tools have definitely not been perfected. (Try making WordPress work with ShipStation.) And, if you’re an introvert (like me), you’d better get over it fast.

But it can be done and the payoff is not just in dollars, which are hard to come by in any universe, or creative freedom (which can be pretty hollow if your stuff can’t find an audience), but in independence and the sense of betting on yourself and your own Muse—win or lose.

Let me recommend a blog and podcast to any who might be thinking of venturing into this uncharted wilderness. Do you know Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn? Her books, blogs, and podcasts are the cutting edge of this new indie world. Most of what she and her colleagues across the pond (she’s English and a lot of her mates are too) are beyond my ken or capability. That’s why I love it and her … and why I’m so impressed by it.

Log onto Joanna’s stuff and see what you think. Meanwhile, Diana and I will continue reporting from our own rarefied cosmos of publishing “as if.”

P.S. We’ve got a new book, THE DAILY PRESSFIELD, coming in a week or so. We’re pushing the envelope a little on this one, too. Full reports to follow!

The post Publishing “as if” first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

Sabotage and Self-Sabotage

One thing you learn though, if you’re a writer, is that nobody gives a damn. My friend Jake will ask me, “How’s the book going?” and it’s all over his face that he couldn’t give less of a shit. If anything, he’s hoping I’ll fail. When I report any setback, I can see him fighting to keep from grinning.

My uncle Charlie’s the same, even though he loves me like a son. “Still writing those books?” he’ll ask, in the same tone he’d use to say, “Still squeegee-ing windshields at the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel?”

from “The Knowledge” (2016)

Self-sabotage, as we all know, is a real thing. It’s called Resistance.

But there’s such a thing as sabotage by others.

We might think that those closest to us—our parents, our spouse, our best buds and BFFs—would be proud of us for embarking on our artistic journeys and rooting us on to succeed. But more often than not, the opposite is true.

Our friends will slip subtle digs at us. They’ll ridicule or make fun of our work. They’ll minimize it. Refer to it as a “hobby.” Or they’ll warn us “for our own good” not to become too invested emotionally in the creative dream we’re pursuing.

When I first really committed wholeheartedly to writing fiction, a person very close to me remarked (to me and to other friends), “Steve escapes into typing.”

Jennifer Lawrence in “Silver Linings Playbook”

It’s not that these friends and family members are bad people. What’s happening is they are dealing (unconsciously) with their own Resistance. Deep inside, they know that they have an artistic dream—and they know they’re doing nothing to pursue it. When they see you and me sitting down at our desks or heading into the studio day after day, the act becomes a reproach to them. They think, “If Janie can do it, why can’t I?”

So they sabotage us… or try to.

The writer and director David O. Russell has made this a theme of his movies. Have you seen “The Fighter,” starring Mark Wahlberg? Or “Silver Linings Playbook” with Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence? Or “Joy,” starring Jennifer Lawrence?

They’re all about families sabotaging the one member who steps out of the comfort of mediocrity and takes action to live out their dream.

Be careful when you venture out of the shadows. Not everyone will turn out to be your friend.

The post Sabotage and Self-Sabotage first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

My Head in the Morning

When I wake up in the morning, I’m almost always in a bad mood. I’m irritable, I’m short-tempered, I’m grumpy.

Coffee doesn’t help. I can’t watch Joe Scarborough. If I have to drive anywhere (and I do), I’m always pissed off at the other cars. Road rage is only a moment away. 

It’s all Resistance.

Maybe you’re not like me. Maybe you wake up peppy and cheerful. Maybe I’m demented. But this is what my day feels like out of the box.

I have to counteract it right away. The worst thing I can do is lie in bed. If I let myself remain horizontal, my head starts spiraling off into dangerously dark places. The day can get out of control in a hurry.

It took me years to understand that the voice in my head is not me.

It’s Resistance.

Hovering before me as I wake is the work I know I need to do that day. Inevitably, that labor is daunting. Inescapably, it brings up fear. I don’t want to do it. This fear and this avoidance combine to create the witch’s brew that boils and bubbles in the cauldron of my brain.

I must take action to counter it.

Two things work for me. They might not work for you, but they do for me. One is exercise, the other is getting out of the house.

I’m a gym person. That’s my medicine. You’ll see my car pulling into Gold’s before dawn and me trashing what’s left of my body on the treadmill or under the bar in the squat rack.

The gym isn’t about exercise for me. It’s about beating Resistance. The purpose of working out, for me, is to give me a “little victory” (my friend Randy Wallace’s phrase). Momentum. Something I can build on.

From the moment my soles first touch the floor in the morning, I am seeking to manage my emotions for that day.

If you’re like me, you work by projects. For me, it’s books. My life isn’t a one-day-one-thing-the-next-day-another affair. I’m almost always working on some long-term enterprise. I’ll have six months put in and eighteen to go.

Resistance loves long-term projects. They’re so easy to sabotage. Resistance can derail them at the start, at any point in the middle, or at its favorite ambush site—the end.

Maybe that’s why I wake up so grumpy.

Resistance has seen me coming. It knows right where I’m going to be. It can take up a hidden position beside the road and wallop me broadside as I go past.

What I’ve found is that if I can get past my bad-tempered, pissed-off self early, I can make the rest of the day go my way.

The post My Head in the Morning first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

“We Are Jews, We Cannot Commit Such Acts”

This is going to be a long post. I want to tell you a story from the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. It’s about a clash between my friend Lou Lenart and Yitzhak Rabin, who would go on to become prime minister of Israel and a great champion of peace—before he was assassinated by another Israeli on November 4, 1995.

U.S. Marine captain Lou Lenart on Okinawa, 1945

First, a little about Lou. He was a Jew (he died a few years ago in Israel at age 93), born in Hungary in 1921; the family emigrated to the States when he was a boy. Lou enlisted in the Marine Corps at the start of WWII, eventually becoming a fighter pilot in the Pacific.

When Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, the country was immediately invaded by the armed forces of three Arab states—Egypt, Syria, and Jordan—whose intention was to destroy the Jewish state before it could be born.

Lou got himself to Israel, volunteering as a pilot. He led the four-plane mission (the Israel Air Force only had four planes, total, at the time) that stopped an armored Egyptian column eleven miles south of Tel Aviv, literally saving the infant state of Israel.

Not long after, Lou was made Operations Officer for the Israel Air Force. The IAF had upped its complement by then to about a dozen planes. Lou’s post was basically him, a driver, a radio, and a jeep. Rabin, a rising young captain, was the Operations Officer for the Army.

Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of Israel, 1974-77 and 1992-1995.

Fighting the Egyptian army in the Negev, the air force’s only bomber (with a crew of three) was shot down.

Here’s the story of what happened then, as Lou told it to me for my book, The Lion’s Gate. What follows is in Lou’s voice (my condensed version):

The ground fight was just starting. Days passed before we could assemble a force and search for the aircraft. 

The plane had crashed on the shore alongside the Arab village of Ishdud. We went in with six or seven trucks and jeeps, lots of guns.

Yitzhak Rabin was ops officer for the army, as I said. I was the same for the air force. The wreckage of the plane was on the beach, burned to a cinder. Our guys rousted out the whole village, including the mukhtar, the mayor. We gathered them in the central square, with the trucks and guns around. A Haganah intelligence officer was interrogating the mukhtar in Arabic.  

The plane had been on fire when it crashed, the mayor was saying. The villagers had tried to save the crew but the flames had kept them back. The Haganah officer asked what had happened to the bodies. The jackals got them, said the mukhtar. He and the villagers had tried to keep the beasts back but they couldn’t. The parts of the fliers’ flesh that hadn’t been burned in the crash were devoured by wild animals.

While the mukhtar was reciting this bullshit, my eyes were fixed on his left wrist. He was wearing the watch that had belonged to the pilot of the [bomber].

I got Rabin aside and told him to burn down the village. Put a bullet in the mukhtar’s head and drive all the villagers out. I pointed across the plain. The Egyptian lines are only a few hundred meters away. Let the villagers take their belongings and get out.

“I can’t do that,” said Rabin.

“Why not?”

“Lou, collective punishment is against the Geneva Convention.”

“The hell with the Geneva Convention! You think these Arabs are following the Geneva Convention? They burned our guys to death, then cut ’em up and fed ’em to their dogs—if they didn’t carve ’em up first while they were still alive!”

Already I was thinking that I would have to tell the fathers and mothers of these airmen what had happened to their sons. I would lie like hell, I knew that. I would never tell them the truth of how their sons had died.

I told Rabin again: Shoot the mukhtar and burn the village.

He refused. “We are Jews. We cannot commit such acts.”

Rabin was an idealist. The founding generations of Israel had suffered pogroms and persecution for so many centuries in Russia and Eastern Europe, not to mention the Holocaust only three years earlier, that it had become a point of honor with them that if they ever got their own country, they would not treat others with the same cruelty that they’d been treated with. You have to admire that. It’s honorable. It’s noble. But in war it’s bullshit.

“Would Alexander hesitate to burn this village? Would Caesar?”

“Would Stalin?” said Rabin. “Would Hitler?”

He put his hand on my shoulder.

“We cannot do it, Lou. If we take such actions, we abandon every principle we are fighting for.”

What could I say? Israel was Rabin’s country. I was a foreigner. I couldn’t force my way.

But if you ask me today whether I have any regrets in my life, I will say only one: that I didn’t shoot that mukhtar right then and there—and let Rabin and the Haganah do whatever they wanted with me.

Who was “right” in this case—Lou or Rabin? Whose point of view, if enacted across the board as policy, had the best chance of producing, over time, peace and harmony for both peoples?

Rabin’s position is clearly the most high-minded and moral. Would it have “worked,” in the sense of inspiring in the minds of Israel’s enemies the motivation to negotiate in good faith, seeking a political solution that was equitable for all? We’ll never know because Rabin’s championing of peace over the following nearly fifty years resulted in his assassination by forces within his own nation opposed to such a posture.

What about Lou’s point of view? Certainly, the actions he urged, assuming what he accused the mukhtar of was true, would have produced “justice.” But wouldn’t they, as Rabin stated, betray the ideals of the fledgling Jewish state… and in fact create such hatred among any Arab who learned of them that they would, over time, produce generations who would grow to embrace the ultra-barbaric terrorism we’ve seen from Hamas over the past few days?

Would Rabin’s open-handed policies have produced the same result for different reasons?

I don’t know. My own instinct is that neither point of view would have produced an outcome of peace, or even embittered co-existence, then or now. I put this story of 1948 forward mainly to provide a bit of historical context for the moral and political nightmare that Israel finds itself in today.

Is there some third solution? Is there some policy or course of action somewhere between Rabin’s reaching out and Lou’s Old Testament eye-for-an-eye vengeance?

The post “We Are Jews, We Cannot Commit Such Acts” first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

My Religion: Part 2

We talked in last week’s post about being at the depths of one’s Wilderness Passage and how, in that hyper-conscious psychic condition, one becomes sensitized to what is true and what is false in any writing or art that we might read or view or listen to.

I noted that for me, in such a period, the only works I could read were Homer, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible. 

Thinking more about this, I realize I’ve got far more questions than answers.

Why, when we’re in that raw, exposed-nerve place, do certain works (of books, music, movies, even food) seem so false and superficial, while others pour powerfully into our psyches and bring us comfort? 

What does “comfort” mean in a state like that? Myself, I certainly was not “healed” in any sense. My downward spiral kept rolling along for years. Did the relief and reassurance I felt reading the Iliad or Sonnet 64 “help” somehow on some deeper level? Did it pay off at some future interval?

And what about “content?” It seemed to me then that the actual subject matter of the piece that I read with such emotion meant very little. It wasn’t that Aphrodite had rescued Paris from the battlefield of Troy by enveloping him in a fog or that the breasts of King David’s beloved were like unto ripe pomegranates. It was something else. What? Beauty? Truth? The indefinable magic of verse and meter and rhythm?

Was it soul? Did the books and music my heart rejected at that time lack soul, while the ones that I embraced possessed it? What is soul anyway?

Do you remember the movie Network? There’s a scene where the actor Peter Finch, as the wigged-out news anchor Howard Beale, gets asked what it was that sent him over the edge. He answers, “I just ran out of bullshit.”

There’s a reason why Homer is Homer and Shakespeare is Shakespeare and Solomon of Ecclesiastes is Solomon of Ecclesiastes. There’s a reason why we’re still reading them thirty centuries after some of them were written.

I wish I could put my finger on it, but I can’t. A gift? Inspiration? Genius? 

And what exactly do they give us, except some once-in-ten-centuries elixir that enters our bloodstream like honey and, for a moment (or maybe more), gives us hope?

P.S. Here’s Sonnet 64:

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d

The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;

When sometime lofty towers I see down-ras’d

And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain

Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,

And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main,

Increasing store with loss and loss with store;

When I have seen such interchange of state,

Or state itself confounded to decay;

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,

That Time will come and take my love away.

This thought is as a death, which cannot choose

But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

The post My Religion: Part 2 first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

My Religion

When I reached the depths of my own journey, living in an abandoned cinder-block house with no doors or windows, no electricity, no bathroom, and no running water, I found that my requirements for reading material had altered dramatically.

I couldn’t read even good books from outstanding authors—books I had read and loved in the past. They didn’t work for me anymore. They felt shallow. They didn’t give me what I needed.

The only things I could read were Homer, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible.

I loved these. I would crack the Old or New Testaments at random, not for anything “religious,” just for the poetry.  Within three verses, I’d be weeping.

And Ruth said to Naomi, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to refrain from following after thee. 

For whither thou goest, I will go; where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, I will die, and there shall I be buried.

The Lord do all this to me and more, if aught but death part thee and me.

That was when I became a believer in art. I was deep in my own myth. I needed help. Only real myth could sustain me. But once I found it, I recognized it—and it did sustain me when nothing else could.

It was clear to me, then, that my heart and my journey were no different from those of every soul throughout history, male and female, who had made the passage before me.

A few of these artists, inspired by who knows what, had managed to leave a sign for us who followed, a blaze on a tree, three stones piled up beside the trail. God bless them. They saved my life.

No one can ever tell me that art is trivial, or mere diversion, or entertainment. The real stuff is mother’s milk. We can’t live without it. It guides us and sustains us.

It’s my religion.

The post My Religion first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

A Second (Bad) Self

“There is a second self inside you, an inner, shadow Self. This self doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t love you. It has its own agenda, and it will kill you. It will kill you like cancer. It will kill you to achieve its agenda, which is to prevent you from actualizing your Self, from becoming who you really are. This shadow self is called, in the Kabbalistic lexicon, the ‘yetzer hara.’ The yetzer hara, Steve, is what you would call Resistance.”

Rabbi Mordecai Finley, in conversation, July 4, 2010

Rabbi Finley

Rabbi Mordecai Finley of Ohr HaTorah congregation in Los Angeles (one of the few rabbis who was a U.S. Marine) is a mentor and friend to me. When I was working on Turning Pro I invited him to breakfast and turned on the tape recorder. The quote above is one of the things that popped out. I came upon it again recently and it struck me with even greater power than it did the first time.

My own conception of Resistance has always been (probably mistakenly) that this force of self-sabotage is “out there” somewhere. I experience it as radiating off the blank page or invading my brain from some other, extra-dimensional location.

Rabbi Finley sees it the other way.

He sees it as a “second self” that lives inside us.

Somehow, to me, that makes it even scarier.

It’s like a sci-fi movie. Like the first Alien.

The first thing I say to myself when I think of Resistance this way (and I do think Rabbi Finley is right) is, Why would our Creator pull such a trick on us?

(Or, if you prefer, Why would Nature/Evolution have evolved us this way?)

Whatever our answer (and I’ve got one for myself), the subjective reality of a “second self” seems undeniable.

This second self seduces us with distractions and excuses. It terrorizes us with visions of our own defeat and humiliation. It whispers to us in the night (and in broad daylight), convincing us that we are without worth, talent, dignity, resolve, courage.

It runs us down.

It sells us short.

It sabotages our best efforts.

It will kill us, as Rabbi Finley says, if we let it.

I declare on the Home Page of this site

Trust me: you will NEVER, NEVER achieve your dreams until you learn to recognize, confront and overcome that voice in your head that is your own Resistance.

The key word here is recognize.

Paradoxically (and aligning perfectly with Rabbi Finley’s statement above) as soon as we recognize this “second self,” fully acknowledge its existence, and grasp the fact that its intentions toward us are diabolically negative, we have found the strategy and the weapon that will help us overcome it.

Awareness first.

Respect for this foe second.

Then: determination and resolution to overcome it.

Our first self is our real self. It is in a battle to the death with our second self.

Which will win?

The post A Second (Bad) Self first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

“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.

Does anyone lead from the front more than Seth?

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 archetype of Your Customer.

The idea, if you’re a marketer, is to keep this avatar in the front of your mind, particularly when you’re developing a new product, writing a new book, organizing a new enterprise. You want to ask yourself questions like, “Am I serving my avatar properly? Am I giving her what she needs? Is there something more I can do for her?”

Apple, for example, knows its avatars down to the minutest detail. You can bet that BMW does too, as do McDonald’s, the NRA, and the Democratic and Republican parties.

Focus groups and customer surveys are tools used by marketers to communicate with their avatars and to learn from them. Questions can be asked. “Do you want cup holders in the backseat? Which is more important to you in a baby stroller—comfort for your child or ease of packing and unpacking? Should Catwoman return in The Dark Knight Takes a Vacation?”

The avatar concept makes a lot of sense. I see how it works. I would even implement it myself in certain cases.

But a writer can’t work like this. An artist can’t. If you do, you’re a hack.

Did Picasso ask his buyers if they were ready for Cubism? Did Quention Tarantino focus-group Reservoir Dogs?  Did Springsteen workshop Darkness at the Edge of Town?

Sometimes you gotta lead.

You gotta get out front.

George Lucas was working on Star Wars for five years before it hit the big screen. How long did Herman Melville toil over Moby Dick before the book was published in 1851? Did either of them have a clue, during those long lonely years, whether their babies would fly or crash?

The audience doesn’t know what it wants. It’s the artist’s job to tell them. Or more accurately show them.

The audience will know it when they see it.

Even in the world of tech/marketing, I don’t think the avatar concept works. How did Steve Jobs evolve the Macintosh or the iPhone or the iPad? He did them for himself. Because he thought they were cool.

Apple customers don’t know what the next cool Apple product will be. If you ask them, they can’t tell you.

They’re waiting to be surprised.

They’re waiting to be thrilled.

I don’t know what Steve Jobs was thinking throughout his years of great product development, but I’ll wager it was no more complicated than this:

“I’m betting that what I myself love, my customers will love too. So let me ask myself only, ‘What do I love?'”

Then there’s the Muse factor.

Our Muse is always ahead of us.

The audience is always behind.

I’ve said before, of my own projects that have been hits, that at the time I started them I thought I was out of my mind. I thought no one would be interested but me. But I was seized. I had to do them. I had no choice.

(Again, I’m not knocking the avatar concept in totality. In the proper context, it’s absolutely appropriate. Nothing works better. I have used it myself and I would use it again.)

But not for any enterprise that aspires to or touches upon art.

Which brings us back to Seth’s phrase, “This might not work.”

These four words are what every artist and entrepreneur should be saying as he or she launches their new novel/zombie flick/videogame/Andalusian restaurant.

It might not work. Really. It might bomb big-time.

That’s the chance you and I have to take, if we want to get ahead of the curve. Ahead of the curve is where hits happen.

Ahead of the curve is where the Muse lives.

If we call ourselves artists or entrepreneurs, that’s where you and I have to live too.

The post “This Might Not Work” first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

Alone in a Room, Wearing a Mask

The following is from an interview with the writer and director Paul Schrader (“Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” “Light Sleeper,” “First Reformed,” and his newest, “Master Gardener”) from the L.A. Times, September 13, 2020.

“ … over the years I’ve developed my own little genre of films. And they usually involve a man alone in a room, wearing a mask, and the mask is his occupation. So it could be a taxi driver, a drug dealer, a gigolo, a reverend, whatever. And I take that character and run it alongside a larger problem, personal or social. It could be debilitating loneliness like in ‘Taxi Driver.’ It could be an environmental crisis like in ‘First Reformed.’

            “I’m looking for deep-seated problems, either personal or societal, and some kind of oddball metaphor. The more you get closer, you run these two wires next to each other, the more sparks you see flying across. And it’s in the sparks that the viewer comes alive.  If the wires ever touch, there’s nothing left for the viewer to do. But if you keep these two wires really close to each other, the viewer will start to spark from one wire to the other. And that’s the greatest thing you can give a viewer or a reader, an opportunity to be part of the creation.”

            I love analogies like this because they really help me as a writer.

            When Mr. Schrader says “a man alone in a room with a mask on,” that strikes me as a different way of saying “get to true identity.”

            “Man” of course means man or woman.

            “In a room” means a circumscribed environment.

            “Mask” is false identity.

            The story’s job is to get the mask off and reveal the hero’s true identity.

            But I love the second part of Mr. Schrader’s construct even more—the idea of the “two wires”—the character’s story running side-by-side with a greater story but never quite touching.

            I started thinking about Dr. Zhivago.

            The man in the mask is Yuri—Dr. Zhivago (Omar Sharif). 

            The room is Russia in the time of the revolution.

            Yuri’s true identity (mask off) is a great poet, whose works and depth of sensibility transcend temporal upheavals, however monumental or Earth-altering.

            The parallel societal story is the White-Red clash that ended with the victory of the Communists and their idealistic, well-intentioned but in the end soul-destroying totalitarian worldview.

            The central scene to me, if you recall it, is when Zhivago, seeking to flee with his family to their dacha in the countryside, is snatched up and dragooned by Red Army partisans under their ruthless commander Strelnikov (Tom Courtenay), whom Zhivago had known briefly in pre-revolutionary days as the unhappy student radical Pasha Antipov (who was also the husband of Lara [Julie Christie], whom Zhivago would come to love as well and for whom his greatest poetry would be written.)

            The scene between Zhivago and Strelnikov takes place on Strelnikov’s armored high-speed train. It’s an interview, face to face, in Strelnikov’s office/cabin. The two men speak briefly of Zhivago’s poetry, which Strelnikov dismisses, not with contempt or ill will but simply as out of phase with the times.

                        STRELNIKOV

            I should find it absurdly personal.

Zhivago is stung and even unnerved by this appraisal. To him, the personal is everything. Love. Depth of emotion. The imperatives of the heart.

                        STRELNIKOV

            The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it.

            See the sparks?

            Paul Schrader is right. When you set a greater issue in parallel with a unique personal one, particularly one that involves the hero seeking his or her true identity, you get drama and magic and insight.

            Zhivago’s whole life-odyssey (and his poetry) is a testament to the permanence of the personal … of love and of feeling … over the transience of “greater” political events, even if these produce massive societal transformation that could not have been brought about in any other way.

            Zhivago collapses and dies at the end of the story, post-revolution, of a heart attack, dismounting from a streetcar in a moment of frantic passion, after spotting his great love, Lara, on the street and pursuing her as she walks past without seeing him.

                        ZHIVAGO’S BROTHER YEVGRAV (ALEC GUINNESS)

            The walls of his heart were like paper.

            The story ends with the triumph of Communism and the (justifiably true) point of view that such a mass movement was necessary to awaken Russia and bring her into the modern, industrialized world. The final scene takes place at a massive dam—a feat of engineering and construction that pre-revolutionary Russia could never have even dreamt of.

            But who “won?”

            In the end it is Zhivago’s poetry, speaking to the timeless Russian soul, that remains vivid and ineradicable, ever-alive in the hearts of the people.

            Paul Schrader’s concept is true.

            Sparks did fly between these two parallels, didn’t they?

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