Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 130

How Screenwriters Pitch

Today, the 20th, is publication day for "Do The Work" in all three versions—hardback, electronic and audio—so please forgive me if I do a little marketing pitch for a sentence or two. Here's how I described the book to a friend:

Do The Work isn't so much a "follow-up" to The War of Art as
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Coming Home

Chapter 23   Coming Home
But what about us? What about the soldier or Marine who steps off the plane from overseas and finds himself in the scariest place he's seen in years:
Home.
Has everything he knows suddenly become useless? What skill set can he employ in the civilian world? The returning warrior faces a dilemma not
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What It Takes: In Three Acts

I thought I'd get back "on message" this week with an inside baseball piece on traditional book publishing. Then I discovered something interesting.
I re-read Steve's description of the "What It Takes" series from December 2010: "What It Takes" will bring you in on the meetings, the marketing and publicity, what works and doesn't work—everything. Expect
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Three Act Structure

Last week's post, this week's and next's all come from Do The Work, our new book that comes out, on amazon.com only, a week from today. The e-version is available for free right now, though it won't go "live" till pub day.
At that time, a hardback and an audio version will go on sale, along
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Inner Wars

PART THREE
INNER WARS
Chapter 21   Casualties of War
All of us know brothers and sisters who have fought with incredible courage on the battlefield, only to fall apart when they came home.



Why? Is it easier to be a soldier than to be a civilian?
For the warrior, all choices have consequences. His decisions
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East Russell Street Feed and Seed

East Russell Street Feed and Seed sold everything from hanging plants and corn seed to dog pedicures and Easter chicks.
I was 16 when I worked there—my first non-babysitting-or-lawnmowing-and-comes-with-a-paycheck job.
A few things I learned:
Poodles who have pedicures more often than you do know when your heart's not into the job. They can't paint their own nails,
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The Warrior Sense of Humor

Chapter 20  Die Laughing
The warrior sense of humor is terse, dry—and dark. Its purpose is to deflect fear and to reinforce unity and cohesion.
The Warrior Ethos dictates that the soldier make a joke of pain and laugh at adversity. Here is Leonidas on the final morning at Thermopylae:
"Now eat a good breakfast, men. For we'll
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The Foolscap Method

Here's a trick I use on every project. I learned it from my friend and mentor, the novelist and documentarian Norm Stahl. Norm and I were having lunch one day at Joe Allen's in Manhattan and I was complaining about how hard it was to get a novel started. Norm happened to have a pad of
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3PV Part Deux

Here's another joke:
A powerful Hollywood Lit agent calls a studio executive. After the perfunctory chit chat:
"How's it going?"
"Can't complain."
"And if you could, who'd listen, right?"
The agent asks the exec what he thinks of his hottest spec script, the one adapted from the graphic novel based on a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story as envisioned by his
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Watching Paul Anka

I went to a Paul Anka concert a couple of years ago and I learned something that I use now, every day, in my writing. Do you remember Paul Anka?
He was a teen idol back in the days of Fabian and Frankie Avalon. He's still an extremely popular performer, who sells out shows around the
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