Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 136

Getting to the Flow

The lady plans to seduce her lover. Her object is to create a night of magic. How does she do it?
First the setting, the lighting, the music. The mood, the wine … the lady orchestrates every detail. Her skin, her hair, her scent. She alters her voice, her walk, she paints on those witchy-woman eyes.
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The "All Is Lost" Moment

I've never posted an interview in this Writing Wednesdays slot (see "The Creative Process" series below on this page), but the following confab with story expert Jen Grisanti seemed to fit so perfectly that I thought I'd feature it up here "above the fold." Today is Part One of a two-part interview.
Jen Grisanti is a
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Michael Bungay Stanier

Michael Bungay Stanier does Great—Important—Work. His bio says that he's the Senior Partner of Box of Crayons, a company that helps organizations and the people in them do less Good Work and more Great Work. It should also say that he's one of those wonderful people with a gift for telling it how it is,
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The Crazier The Better

My friend Paul is writing a cop novel. The characters have seized him; he's into it totally. "But it's coming to me very dark," he says. "I mean twisted, weird-dark. So dark it's scaring me."
Paul wants to know if he should throttle back. He's worried that the book will come out so evil, no one
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Writing Characters Who Are Smarter Than We Are

There's a great moment in the movie Tootsie, when Dustin Hoffman—in costume as "Dorothy Michaels" but speaking as himself, "Michael Dorsey"—says, out of respect for Dorothy, "I wish I was prettier." In other words, the character he was portraying was better than he was. That's an amazing thing if you think about it.
Working above our
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Chris Guillebeau

Chris Guillebeau travels and writes for a small army of remarkable people at chrisguillebeau.com and twitter.com/chrisguillebeau. When you visit his blog, check out his 279 Days to Overnight Success and his Brief Guide to World Domination. Good stuff! His book, The Art of Non-Conformity, will be available online and in bookstores starting Sept. 7, 2010.
In
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Looking for the Overlap

[While the blog takes a short vacation, here's a post from a few months ago that I've always been partial to. See you in two weeks!:]
Writers and artists get asked all the time, "How do you decide which book to write, which painting to paint?" The person asking the question usually has a million ideas
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COIN Strategy vs. COIN Tactics

The photo in Laura King's Los Angeles Times article "'Three cups of tea' a byword for U.S. effort to win Afghan hearts and minds" shows why the war in Afghanistan is not going well for the United States.
As Ms. King so aptly explains, the phrase "three cups of tea" has been adapted from the
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Sticking Points

[In keeping with last week's "Writer's Journal" and the idea that the Last Push on a project is always the hardest (with the possible exception of the First Push ... or is it the Middle Push?), I thought it might make sense to bring back this earlier post entitled "Sticking Points."
[Two facts that all artists
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A Writer's Journal, Day #1061

Day Six: this will be a very short post. I'm giving myself the next two days off—and giving you, dear friends, the same. Yesterday I got through the final sticking point in the draft, and now all is right with the world.
I'll wrap with this one thought:
From age twenty-two till almost thirty, Resistance had me
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