Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 113

The Turning Pro Moment

Since the publication of Turning Pro a month ago, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about certain concepts in the book. One that keeps sticking in my head—and demanding deeper inspection—is the moment of turning pro.
I’m going to dedicate the next few weeks on Writing Wednesdays to further thoughts on this subject. I want
More >>

Dropping a Bomb, Laying an Egg, and Doing the Work

Are there any words of encouragement that you can give to a beginning comedien?
Bob Hope: Yeah. Forget it. We’ve got enough. And stay out of our racquet.
I can’t get enough of old classic radio—especially comedy. I laugh at Bob Hope’s jokes about as hard as his Pepsodent and Swann audiences did over 50
More >>

Dropping a Bomb, Laying and Egg, and Doing the Work

Are there any words of encouragement that you can give to a beginning comedien?
Bob Hope: Yeah. Forget it. We’ve got enough. And stay out of our racquet.
I can’t get enough of old classic radio—especially comedy. I laugh at Bob Hope’s jokes about as hard as his Pepsodent and Swann audiences did over 50
More >>

How We Get Better, Part Two

On the artist’s journey, we don’t get better by increments, we get better by fits and starts.
The trajectory is not a smoothly-ascending curve, but a herky-jerky spasm-fest marked by seeming dead-ends, plateaus, dark nights of the soul, intervals of boredom and stasis, not to mention bouts of terror, despair and self-doubt, which are followed, if
More >>

Blood on the Tracks

Like you, I have no idea what Steve Pressfield is going to write in his “Writing Wednesdays” columns. We e-mail about twenty times a day and talk two or three times a week, and he’d tell me generally what he’s going to do for a particular week if I were to ask. But I don’t
More >>

How We Get Better

My friend Paul had a writing breakthrough last week. I mean a serious one, where his game elevated two or three levels in one shot.
It’s tremendously encouraging to witness something like that because for most of us, most of the time, the experience of artistic enterprise is like toiling in the muck, slinging shovel after
More >>

The Why I Don’t Do Interviews Interview, Plus

Wednesday, Steve did an interview with Chris Brogan. When we scheduled the time with Chris, the idea was that this would be an interview on why Steve isn’t doing Turning Pro-related interviews.


Chris asked some great questions, but while watching it, I thought back to how we’d gotten there, as well as my two-cents on
More >>

Self-Doubt and Self-Reinforcement

I never talk about a project I’m working on. It’s bad luck.
But something happened a few nights ago that made me think I should make an exception, both for the sake of my own thinking and for sharing an insight or two. So I’ll keep depiction of the project vague but the wisdom as clear
More >>

The Necessity of Discomfort

I do it all the time. I take on just enough projects and personal commitments to periodically induce a panic attack. It occurs every three months. Like clockwork.
I’m working with writers on three novels, three works of nonfiction and lending a hand promoting two of their books. Each of these projects requires me to write
More >>

The Hero’s Journey in Real Life

We’ve talked over the past weeks about the hero’s journey as myth, as movie or literature, as a blueprint in our psyches. But what is it in real life? What is the spontaneous hero’s journey?
One of our readers (and my friend) is a journalist named Andy Lubin. Andy has written in to our Comments section
More >>