Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 126

Worthy Thoughts and Unworthy Thoughts

I've been on the road for the past three weeks. That's never good for me. Though I've seen a bunch of friends I wanted to see and done a lot of stuff that needed to be done, I find myself (right now in the United lounge at JFK) flagging and faltering. I can't work when
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"With The Old Breed"

E.B. Sledge was a Marine mortarman on Peleliu and Okinawa in WWII. His first-person memoir, With The Old Breed (that he reconstructed from notes scribbled in a New Testament he carried with him throughout the fighting), stands with the very best combat narratives not just from World War II, but from any war in history.
Ken
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The Change Up #1: Six Months and Three Books

Steve finished The Profession.
Seth Godin contacted Steve about the The Domino Project.
Steve wrote Do The Work.
Steve wrote The Warrior Ethos.
The Domino Project published Do The Work.
Steve and Shawn created Black Irish books and packaged and printed a special run of Warrior Ethos for friends in the military, and released the book for print on demand
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Hemingway on Fiction, Part Two

Again with thanks to Jonathan Fields, here's the continuation of George Plimpton's famous interview of Ernest Hemingway from the Paris Review, Summer 1958. (To read Part One, click here. And here for the full interview).
INTERVIEWER
Would you admit to there being symbolism in your novels?
HEMINGWAY
I suppose there are symbols since critics keep finding them. If you
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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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