Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 13

Children in the Wilderness

We’ve been talking about Wilderness Passages in our individual lives. Today let’s consider a collective passage. 

Let’s look at the forty years that the children of Israel spent after fleeing bondage in Egypt.  

Charlton Heston as Moses in “The Ten Commandments”

Do any of these “beats” from their story resonate with your individual passage and mine?

1. The dream of a Promised Land. For the children of Israel, there was a hopeful future, the prospect of a “land of milk and honey”—a new home that was the people’s true home, once the passage was over.

The most painful part of any wilderness passage is the fear that it will never end. We feel that our suffering is meaningless, that we’re going nowhere. The tale of the Exodus promises otherwise, even though the Israelites doubted it time and time again during their ordeal.

2. Depth of suffering. The passage through the wilderness was so long and so hard—forty years—that its privation culled all but two (Joshua and Caleb) of the original generation that set forth from Egypt.

The metaphor, I think, is that the part of us that completes our individual passage has changed mightily from the part that originally set out—and that that original part must fall away before the newly-minted part can achieve completion. 

3. Many times, the people chickened out. Despite receiving heaven’s promise, the Israelites’ nerve failed them on numerous occasions. Starving in the wilderness, the children rebelled against Moses and Aaron. The people wanted to go back to Pharoah, to the safety of their chains.

4. Divine intervention saved them, also multiple times. The parting of the Red Sea, manna from heaven, etc.

Like Odysseus protected by the goddess Athena, heavenly grace many times saved the day.

5. In the end, Moses—who had started it all and whom the Lord of Hosts honored beyond all others—was forbidden to enter the Promised Land. The conventional explanation for this (Moses’ pride in striking the rock with his staff to bring forth water for the people) has never completely rung true to me. Yet, on some ironic level, the Almighty’s proscription rings a bell. Like Martin Luther King’s, “I might not get there with you …”, this seems to be a tragic but necessary element to the story.

What could this mean for us as individuals on our passage? That our inner “leader,” our King archetype, must step aside at the moment of triumph? That he or she may open the gate for another part of ourselves but not, himself or herself, pass through?

It’s fascinating to me the way such collective passages mirror the stages and stations of our individual journeys in myth, legend, and fiction … and in our real lives.

There’s always an Ejection, an Ordeal, a falling-away of one part and the birth of another. And there’s a Promised Land at the end, where the entity—collective or individual—at last achieves an authenticity and a self-identity that was there all along but that had never, until then, been able to bring itself forth.

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The Child Carries the Divine

Here’s a storytelling principle I use sometimes when I’m trying to evaluate an idea or a story I’m working on.

The Child carries the Divine.

If I have a character who’s a child (this applies as well to animals, both wild or domesticated), I ask myself, “Is there some mystical or transcendent aspect to this character?”

I find it’s almost always true.

This guy may be the exception

I’m not sure what this means, or even how to apply this idea to the story. I’ve just found that it seems to hold water more times than not.

The Divine Child is an archetype. Joseph Campbell tells us that. And certainly we can rattle off a raft of examples, from Jesus to Krishna to the child Apollo, who slew the Python.

The same principle seems to apply to animals. The Black Stallion, Bambi, Elsa the Lion, Two Socks and Cisco, Toto in The Wizard of Oz, and every dog and cat and critter from Lassie to Free Willy to Tom and Felix, with the possible exceptions of Garfield and Rocket Raccoon.

The power element (I’m guessing as I’m writing this) seems to be innocence.

The Child and the Animal inhabit the present moment. The wild wolf or eagle seem to carry what my friend Christy calls “God energy.” They act from instinct. Their actions are uncontaminated by rational thought or hesitation or second-guessing, or even guilt or shame.

When we have a child or an animal as a central character in our story, that story often has its crisis and climax built around them. Addie Loggins in Paper Moon, Mattie Ross in True Grit, not to mention Secretariat and Seabiscuit, and even the shark in Jaws.

The adult human characters must make a moral decision in the climax and somehow that choice revolves around the Child or the Animal, who always, it seems, represents the Good and the True.

Again, I don’t know what any of this means. But it’s interesting to think about, isn’t it?

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Reference Points #3: Goals and Dreams

Here’s a short section from my new memoir, Govt Cheese:

I wake up in my van. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know who I am. The reality of my existence is that my identity, if I ever had one, has dissolved. Goals. Do I have any? I can’t even conceive of the possibility. A purpose? To survive until tomorrow. I open the van’s side doors. It’s warm. I’m in a dirt turnout at the edge of a farmer’s field. Corn. Oh yeah, I’m in Iowa. Where, I have no clue. It takes me a moment to remember where I’m going. East? West? Where am I coming from? 

Mine was actually light blue.

Goals and a purpose are reference points too. (As distinguished from material reference points like Where I Work, Whom I’m Married To, What Time Is It?) Goals and purposes ground us. “Oh yeah, I’m doing this so I can get into Harvard!” “I’m working out so I can compete in the Ironman in nine months.”

But in the wilderness, we don’t have those reference points. We are free-floating. We’re unmoored, unhinged, untethered.

In a way, this is good.

What it means at the soul level is that we have left behind our old goals and dreams and are seeking new ones—ones that are more in alignment with our Real Self.

For me, on my Wilderness Passage, the goals and purpose I was seeking (though I had no idea of this at the time) were the ones I was running from in the first place. I wanted to write. I wanted to find my voice. I had ambition. I wanted to act upon it. But I had been devastated emotionally by the failure that was my first attempt at achieving this.

For me, the new reference points I was seeking were the same as the ones I had left behind. What I needed was the courage (or in my case, the desperation) to face those fears again and, this time, do it right.

We said earlier in this series that every Wilderness Passage, like Odysseus’s across the Aegean, was about Coming Home. That’s what it was for me. I had to go through my own version of hell to get back to what my goals and purpose were from the very start.

P.S. We still have 75 signed first editions of GOVT CHEESE: A Memoir. available here. It ain’t too late!

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Amnesia Stories

We spoke in an earlier post about “reference points” and their centrality to the experience of a Wilderness Passage.

A period “in the wilderness”… is by definition a passage without reference points. 

Do you remember the 2002 Matt Damon movie, The Bourne Identity? It’s an amnesia story. The film starts with Damon, as Jason Bourne, being rescued from the sea (where he is floating unconscious in some kind of bulletproof Kevlar wetsuit) by the crew of a fishing boat. The kindly seamen revive Matt. “Who are you?” they ask.

He answers, “I don’t know.”

Matt Damon on the run in “The Bourne Identity”

Amnesia stories are Wilderness Passages par excellence. Why? Because the man or woman with no memory has lost all reference points. 

For Matt at this point in the movie, life has been pared down to one question: “Who am I?” And its secondary queries—“How did I get here? Who tried to kill me? What the hell do I do now?”

A case could be made (and I would definitely not go against it) that life as we live it is an Amnesia Story. In other words, a passage through the wilderness.

We all surface into this world asking the same question Matt asks: “Who am I?”

We know we’re someone. We just don’t know who. Like Matt, we begin seeking reference points.

In one early scene in The Bourne Identity, Matt lies down to rest on a park bench. Two police officers roust him and begin to rough him up. Suddenly Matt’s fists and elbows erupt into violent action. In five seconds, he kayoes both cops. The scene ends with Matt staring at his hands in bewildered astonishment. “Who am I? How do I know how to do this?”

A reference point.

Matt next tracks down a safe deposit box in his name. When he opens it, he finds stacks of cash in half a dozen currencies, a sheaf of passports with his photo but all under different names … he finds a gun and ammo. “Who am I? How do I come to have all this stuff?”

Another reference point.

When you and I find ourselves in a Wilderness Passage, we instinctively seek reference points. But there are none. Or if they exist, they’ve lost their meaning for us. They may even mock us, not alone for their absence of meaning but by producing the opposite effect from what we had hoped—disorientation instead of orientation, deception instead of certainty. 

What is happening to us on a Wilderness Passage, whether we realize it or not, is we have come unmoored from the constellation of reference points we had relied on to tell us who we are. We have come unmoored for a reason, again whether we realize it or not, whether we believe it or not. And that reason is that our old identity has not only lost its meaning for us but has become an active antagonist.

An antagonist to what? To the new, real person we are seeking to become—again, whether we know it or not, whether we believe it or not.

Like Matt/Jason in The Bourne Identity, we are on a life-and-death quest to find that New Self that was our Real Self all along but we either didn’t know it or were afraid to acknowledge and become it. 

What reference points have meaning for us now? Those are the clues that Matt and Jason (and you and I) have no choice but to follow.

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Resistance Thrives in Darkness

[The following is a post from a couple of years ago that just stuck in my head, Let’s bring it back today as a “blast from the past” … ]

Resistance kicked my butt for almost a decade in my twenties. I’ve written about this in The War of Art. I crossed the country thirteen times in that era, driving my ’65 Chevy van, for no reason whatsoever except that I was running away from myself and my obligation to do my own work and follow my own calling.

But here’s the key point:

The reason Resistance won was that I had no idea it existed.

We all have our private images of Resistance. This is mine. “Ming the Merciless” from the old FLASH GORDON serials.

Resistance thrives in darkness.

Resistance loves secrecy.

Resistance’s most diabolical trick is that it masquerades so convincingly as our own voice.

 When we hear ourselves thinking, 

 “You’re a bum, you’re a loser, you’ve got no talent … “

Or

“Who do you think you are, dreaming of making a movie, starting a business, writing a book? You? Don’t make me laugh!”

We think that voice is us. We believe that these thoughts are ours, that they are an objective self-assessment offered up by our own selves. They’re not.

They’re Resistance.

If you don’t believe me, let me show you the thousands of e-mails and letters I’ve gotten in which totally disparate, unknown-to-one-another individuals report the chatter they hear in their heads.

The voice is identical in every case.

Everyone hears the exact same thing.

The genius of Resistance (and why it’s so powerful) is it convinces each of us that that’s our voice.

If it’s our voice, we’ve gotta believe it, right?

If I could implant one solitary thought in the brains of every struggling soul on the planet, it would be this:

That negative, self-sabotaging voice you hear in your head is not you.

Those thoughts are not yours.

They are Resistance.

Everyone hears that same voice.

Ignore it.

Resistance thrives in darkness.

Bring Resistance into the light and you defeat it.

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Badge+Gun #2

David Baldacci is the mega-million bestselling author of Absolute Power, The 6:20 Man, Simply Lies, and many more. Here is his All Is Lost Moment and Epiphanal Moment (my interpretation, not his) derived extremely loosely from his MasterClass on Mystery and Thriller Writing (which I highly recommend.)

David Baldacci

Mr. Baldacci was a successful lawyer, but his dream was to be a writer of fiction. The short version is after many tries and near-misses, he arrived at one final disappointment that convinced him his dream was never going to come true. In other words, an All Is Lost Moment.

For days, David Baldacci struggled with despair. Was he doomed forever to be a lawyer and nothing more? Then he had an epiphany.

He decided not to fight what he considered the verdict of the marketplace. Heartbreaking as it was, he yielded to what the Big Publishing Suits told him. 

But, he said to himself, “I don’t care.”

“Okay,” David Baldacci declared to himself, “I might never see a novel of mine in print. Hollywood may never make a movie based on one of my yarns. But that will not stop me. I’m a writer,” he said, “and I’m going to keep writing. I don’t care if Random House or Simon & Schuster never publish my stuff. Life is unbearable for me if I can’t write. So I’m going to keep writing, success or no”

Why is this a Badge+Gun moment?

Remember, in the classic Cop Story idiom, when your boss takes your shield and your Smith & Wesson, he is yanking your mainstream credibility. You no longer have the full force (or any force at all) of the law behind you. But he, your supervising honcho, cannot take your moral credibility. Only you control that.

In The French Connection or The Silence of the Lambs or any of a thousand other Good Guys versus Bad Guys epics, the shorn detective keeps on going. He or she stays on the case, even at peril to his or her own freedom or worse.

That’s what David Baldacci did.

He dismissed what he believed at the time to be the verdict of the mainstream marketplace. He decided to pursue the case on his own.

There’s a happy ending to this story. David Baldacci kept writing. And it turned out that his All Is Lost Moment was a false alarm. He was a good writer. Readers did clamor for his books. He did realize his dream.

But the critical moment, for his own soul (and for the goddess), was when he turned in his badge and his gun and kept on writing anyway.

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“Turn in your badge and your gun.”

I was working on the screenplay for the Steven Seagal movie, Above the Law. I forget who first said this—maybe Steve, maybe the director Andy Davis—but someone piped up, “We need a ‘Turn in your badge and gun’ scene.”

I remember thinking, “Oh no, what a terrible cliche! It’s in every cop movie. We can’t be that lame!”

Even Clarice Starling got yanked off the case.

But of course Steve (or Andy) was right. It was not a cliche. It was a critical All is Lost Moment, in fact it was the All is Lost Moment.

Why is this moment so important? Because it calls forth from the story’s hero an Epiphanal Moment, i.e. his or her response to a make-or-break, life-and-death crisis. It reveals the hero’s true character.

It took me a while to grasp this, but when I finally did, I recalled to myself that even classic films and books are not too proud to have this exact moment. In The French Connection, Popeye and Cloudy are pulled off the case. In The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling gets her credentials yanked. Even in Top Gun: Maverick, there’s an equivalent scene—when Jon Hamm fires Tom Cruise and takes his flying stripes “permanently.”

In the latter two cases (and in Above the Law), the heroes totally blow off their dismissals. They keep going on their own. And this shows us in the audience that they are driven, committed, all-in. They are real heroes. (In The French Connection, it’s an outside event—the bad guys trying to kill Popeye by ambushing him outside his apartment building—that gets our heroes put back on the case.)

What’s happening in a badge-and-gun moment is the hero, who had heretofore been pursuing his or her objective with the full backing of society or the institution in which he or she serves, suddenly gets her papers pulled. She’s now on her own, a totally free agent. Worse, she’s now been forbidden, under severe penalty, to pursue her object. Will she do it anyway? If she’s a hero in the best movie/novel/legend/myth sense, we already know the answer.

When I’m working on a new story now (thanks, Steve and Andy, for teaching me this), I always ask myself, “Do I have the equivalent of a Badge-and-Gun Moment?” And if I don’t, I’d better have a damn good reason for not having it. 

An All is Lost Moment (of any kind, not just the badge-and-gun variety) should always ask the hero, “How much do you want what you want?” (Love, redemption, saving the world, etc.) Most of us in real life would answer, “Not enough to risk my life/family/career/soul.” But a hero will always come out at, “I want it so much I’ll do ANYTHING.”

More on this next week.

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A Thank-you for “Govt Cheese: A Memoir”

Let me take a break from our Wilderness Passage posts to say a quick thank-you to everyone who ordered a signed copy of Govt Cheese: A Memoir. We’ve sent out twelve hundred so far, all packed by hand and trundled to the UPS store (actually a bunch of stores), in the VIP pack pictured below.

The VIP pack with a signed first edition

(We just got a fresh 250 in, all first editions, still available for order here.)

For all of us who are indie authors or are thinking of becoming one, this VIP pack is a really interesting idea.

I first saw one from my friend, the thriller writer Jack Carr. For his fourth book, Savage Son, Jack put together a gift box—not for promotion but just for friends who had helped him on his journey. He mailed about a hundred of them. The outside of the box was designed colorfully, with FIRST EDITION on the spine. Inside Jack put a bunch of fun-type premiums—a cocktail coaster, a refrigerator magnet, a note of thanks from him (there was even a little utility knife), and a few promotional items from his sponsors. And of course the first edition itself, signed.

I got one. It was a real giggle. I wound up doing a video “unboxing” on Instagram, as did many others who received the package.

I’m not sure how much this helped Jack’s sales, but it certainly didn’t hurt.

When we—my better half, Diana, and I—were considering how to bring out Govt Cheese so that it might get a little attention, we thought, “Let’s do a VIP pack. We won’t tell anyone it’s coming. It’ll be a surprise when it arrives via UPS.”

A VIP pack can be a big hit, particularly when the recipient doesn’t know it’s coming.

 We hoped to get a few unboxings ourselves.

 Two bottom lines from this:

One, if you’re an indie author like I am, consider doing this—if not on your next book (or album or announcement of any kind), then on the proper item when it comes up down the line. It’s not cheap and it’s a lot of work. But it’s fun. And it’s definitely appreciated by those who receive it, particularly if they don’t know it’s coming and are expecting only a box with a signed book inside.

And two, if you’d like a VIP pack of Govt Cheese yourself, we’ve still got 250 of them. Click here and we’ll get one out to you right away.

The VIP pack won’t be a surprise but, trust me, it’ll still be fun.

Thanks again to all who ordered!

P.S. Govt Cheese: A Memoir is my story of my own “wilderness passage”—in gory detail, all twenty-seven years of it.

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Escaping the Wilderness

Does escape from our personal Wilderness always entail a gruesome All Is Lost Moment? Must we hit bottom before we can come back up?

I don’t think so. But the answer, it seems, always involves deep and serious introspection.

It could be psychoanalysis (of the talking kind, not the pharmaceutical) or its equivalent. Meditation perhaps. A mentor. A spouse. A friend. An ally who can provide the perspective (and the psychic safety) for us to face the demons we’ve been in denial of our whole life.

Or, if we’re really exceptional, we can do it on our own, looking deeply within.

Sylvester Stallone and Talia Shire in “Rocky”

There’s an axiom in screenwriting that the All Is Lost Moment is embedded in the Setup.

Another way to put this is, “Your shrink gets your craziness in the first session. He or she could spell it out for you right then, but they won’t because they know you’ll only reject it. You need to come to it on your own.”

Consider Sylvester Stallone’s script for Rocky. We see in the opening scenes (the Setup) that Rocky’s issue is that the world sees him as “a bum”—and, worse, he agrees. Everything in Rocky’s life, from his horrible apartment to his job as a bone-breaker to his locker at the gym reinforces the psychic reality of his bum-hood. In the audience, we sense that Rocky, if he’s going to save himself, is going to have to come to a crisis point where he must confront this—and make the decision to overcome it.

Here’s that moment, the Epiphanal Moment, from just before Act Three:

                        ROCKY
…it’s true, Adrian. I was nobody. But that don’t matter either, you know? ’Cause I was thinkin’, it really don’t matter if I lose this fight. It really don’t matter if this guy opens my head either. ’Cause all I wanna do is go the distance. Nobody’s ever gone the distance with Creed, and if I can go that distance, you see, and that bell rings and I’m still standin’, I’m gonna know for the first time in my life, see, that I weren’t just another bum from the neighborhood.

In Rocky’s case, he needed an All Is Lost Moment. He needed that Big Crash to give him the desperation to reach an Epiphany. But theoretically he could have come to that realization on his own or with assistance—as we said, a shrink, a mentor, a spouse, a friend—and, little by little, self-revelation by self-revelation, peeled back the onion till he came to its core.

There’s a word for this capacity.

Wisdom.

I didn’t have it in my own life, that’s for sure. I needed to hit bottom.

But that moment is not inevitable. I salute anyone who can get there on his or her own. God bless you. That’s guts. That’s insight.

That’s wisdom.

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The feeling that it will never end

One of the primary characteristics of any “passage through the wilderness” is the excruciating belief/certainty, while we’re in it, that it will never end. We have been given a life sentence, we believe, without possibility of parole.

Are we addicted to alcohol or drugs? We can’t conceive of ever being able to stop. Are we in bondage to some toxic, soul-devouring relationship, profession, or conception of life? We believe we have no power to escape. PTSD? Anxiety? Compulsive self-sabotage? We’re powerless to break free, we believe.

We’re in denial when we’re in the wilderness. At least that’s how we respond when someone calls us on our bullshit. “I’m fine, man.” “I’m all right.” “Worry about yourself, brother!”

Tom Hanks in “Cast Away”

How dangerous is our Wilderness Passage? It’s life-and-death dangerous. In the movies, heroes “make it out alive.” In real life, you can go down and never come back up. How many casualties can each of us count among friends and family? Remember Hemingway’s famous quote from A Farewell to Arms:

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

I’m not a believer that just because Ernest Hemingway said something, it’s necessarily true. But he certainly was onto something in this case, at least in the sense of how this passage feels.

The feeling that this agony, this exile will never end, excruciating as it is, is critical in a good sense because it reinforces for us the fact that the stakes are life and death. Which they are. There’s no guarantee that you or I—or anybody—will survive their ordeal in the Wilderness.

And yet people do survive. If you thought it was only a “passage,” while you were in it, it wouldn’t scare the crap out of you like it’s supposed to. In order for our ordeal to do its work, we have to believe completely (and we do, because it’s true) that our soul is in mortal danger and we must rally every resource to survive.

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