Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 119

"Beware the Saboteur!"

My friend Kate tells this story:
I was visiting my friend Bob Gilbert, who among many other talents was a fabulous boat builder. This was at Harvey Swindall's boatyard in Ventura [California], where Bob was building a 92-foot yacht based on the plans for the famous ocean racer Bloodhound, which had been built originally in the
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SOB

S+O+B=Three letters that appear in almost every war story, in the same order, but with dozens of different meanings.
SOB=Love and Respect
From, Clare Boothe Luce's foreword to GEN Victor H. Krulak's First to Fight:
My only brother enlisted in the Marine Corps at the age of eighteen when the United States entered World War I. . .
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George Peper, Bill Murray and Broderick Crawford

For quite a while now (almost two years), Steve Pressfield and I have been tossing drafts of one of his manuscripts back and forth.  It's just about ready to share. I think we're on draft nine or ten, not sure. I bet Steve knows how many we've burned through, but he doesn't bitch about it.
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Work Over Your Head

Writers of fiction learn early that they can write characters who are smarter than they are.
How can that be? It doesn't seem possible.
The answer lies in the Mystery.
The place that we write from (or paint from or compose from or innovate from) is far deeper than our petty personal ego. That place is beyond intellect.
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The Bubble Men

This blog is taking a few days off at the end of the year. Here's a favorite post from 2011.
The most beautiful woman in the world called me yesterday to tell me a story.
Every day she walks her three children through Central Park, drops off her eldest at school, and then walks her two youngest
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Take What the Defense Will Give You

Everybody loves the vertical game. We all thrill to the deep ball, the long completion, the 55-yard bomb that breaks the game open. (Yes, I've been watching a lot of football over the Holidays.)
The problem is that, a lot of the time, the guys we're playing against are as good or better than we are.
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Crackpot, Problem Child, Great Fighting Leader Revisited

War Stories is taking the day off and will be back next week. For now, here's a re-run of a post that ran August 29th.
One of these things is not like the others:
Crackpot. Problem Child. Great Fighting Leader.
Or is it?
What does a leader look like?
Eisenhower called Patton a "crackpot" and a "problem child" and a
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Getting in the Ring

At the end of the year 2000, I had it all figured out. I left my job as senior editor at Doubleday to start up a new kind of publishing house called Rugged Land Books. Rugged Land would publish a very small list of titles, twelve original books a year (one per month), and would
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The Professional and the Primitive

A couple of years ago when I was in Africa, I got a chance to visit a Masai village. The place was so far out in the boonies that we had to fly to it. There were no roads. We had two city Masai with us, a young man and a young woman, who did
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What Would Will Durant Write Today?

They tried to sift out the best from the mass of existing manuscripts, and to guide the reading of the people; they made lists of "best books," the "four heroic poets," the "nine historians," the "ten lyric poets" the "ten orators," etc.
Every time I open Will Durant's The Life of Greece, a smile yanks at
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