Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 126

The Gulag Archipelago

Special thanks to Tina McCann for sending in this piece on the great Russian writer, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Gulag Archipelago, Cancer Ward and The First Circle.
The post is in two sections. The first (short) one is from Solzhenitsyn's autobiographical The Oak and The Calf. In
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Hemingway on the Art of Fiction

Many thanks to Jonathan Fields for forwarding this interview from the Paris Review, Spring 1958 issue, between Ernest Hemingway and (referring to himself only as "Interviewer") George Plimpton, the magazine's founder and editor. This is quite a famous conversation; I've read it myself a number of times over the years. If you haven't been exposed
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The War I Always Wanted

Of all the excellent non-fiction accounts written by participants in America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of the most underappreciated is Brandon Friedman's The War I Always Wanted. That's a great title, isn't it? I suspect that was part of the problem. Mr. Friedman, an infantry lieutenant in the 101st Airborne, takes a point
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Wintertime in Nashville

After a compelling prologue, the next section of the narrative nonfiction proposal that I recommend is an overview.  While the prologue is the SHOW—a representation of how the final manuscript will read—the overview is the TELL. This is the section in which the writer explains to the readers of the proposal (an editor, a marketing
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A Tale from the Trenches

Todd Henry is a friend. He started in the creative/entrepreneurial field in 1995 with a tour of duty in the music biz, working as a marketer, writer and creative director. By 2005 he had launched his own company, Accidental Creative, working independently with creative people and teams.
By then he had evolved his own unique philosophy
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Sinai 1956

The following is from The Sinai Campaign by Moshe Dayan. Dayan had been Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces and in overall military command during this campaign of 1956—fifty-five years ago and only eight years after the founding of the state of Israel.
The Sinai clash became inevitable after Egypt's president Gamal Abdul Nasser nationalized
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Prologue To A Proposal

A couple of years ago, I read the perfect explanation to give aspiring writers about the importance of putting in their 10,000 hours perfecting their craft before calling in every favor they can exploit to get their manuscript/screenplay/proposal into the hands of an agent/editor/publisher/studio executive etc.  It was written by a professional screenwriter, Josh Olson
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To Propose or Not to Propose

Posted from the road, Jacksonville NC:
I'm reading Shawn's Friday posts about book proposals in our "What It Takes" series. I love 'em. They're educational for me too. Until I read Shawn's first post, I didn't know what a book proposal was. Until he showed me one a couple of months ago, I had never seen
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Death in the Afternoon

The following doesn't really fit under the heading of War Stories, but it's so great I'm compelled to make it today's post anyway. I'm copying this piece now from a yellowing, typewriter-pecked page I've kept with me for years. If technically it isn't about war, it's certainly from a man who wrote masterfully about that subject
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Where to Start

So, you have an incredible idea.  You are a devotee of a particular slice of history, be it in music, politics, the Civil War, psychology, business, sports, or any other wedge of potentially popular nonfiction. You want to write a book about it, but you have no idea of how to write the proposal that
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