Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 137

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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A Writer's Journal, Day #1060

Day Five of "Journal of Finishing a Novel." I'm in the "revisit" stage, meaning going back to finish a sequence that I bypassed in the march to THE END. We're only a few hundred feet below the summit now; the idea of faltering has become unthinkable. Whatever it takes, we'll do it.
As for this journal,
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A Writer's Journal, Day #1059

Day Four of "Journal of Finishing a Novel" and we're done! Yesterday's work took us all the way to THE END. I think it works. I hope so. But I will not drive myself crazy, chewing it over. Instead I will start today, as soon as I finish writing this post, revisiting and reworking a
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A Writer's Journal, Day #1058

Okay, Day Three. Momentum is strong and I will hit it hard again today. (If you're just tuning in, please scroll back to the prior two posts—yesterday and the day before—to see what this is all about.)
Though Resistance is monumental, at least for me, when I get close to the end of a project, there
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Erik Proulx

The film "Lemonade" was my introduction to Erik Proulx. It is inspiring, uplifting, motivating—all the good stuff—and is a strong reminder of our abilities to reinvent ourselves—hard-charge our dreams, at any moment. A 15-year veteran of the advertising industry, Erik created commercials for brands like Volvo, Fidelity Investments, GMC Trucks, and Perdue Chicken. Then, two
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A Writer's Journal, Day #1057

This is Day Two of our week-long, one-post-every-day "Journal of Finishing A Novel." (See yesterday's post for Day One.)

Today's work will be a lot scarier than yesterday's because today I'll really get into the meat of the climax–a long scene that has to work or the whole book fails. My method for dealing with this
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A Writer's Journal, Day #1056

I'm going to try something different this week. Instead of one full-length post that stays up for seven days, I'm gonna do short, one-a-day "journal entries." A new one will go up Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, all week. The reason I'm trying this this week is that, in my real writing life, I'm just now plunging
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The Ego and the Self

Where does Resistance come from?  Seth Godin says it arises from the "lizard brain," i.e. the primitive reptilian stem that knows only fight-or-flight and thus resists all attempts by the organism—you and me—to ascend to higher realms. There's something to this, I think, but not, in my opinion, the way Seth sees it.
The source of
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Geoffrey C. Ward

Geoffrey C. Ward is an historian, screenwriter, author and former editor of American Heritage magazine. He has collaborated with Ken Burns and other film-makers, on numerous documentaries, including The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, and The War, and is the winner of six Emmy Awards, seven Christopher Awards, and two Writers Guild of America awards for his
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Humility

We were talking last week about ambition. Judging from the response, the subject struck a chord. Apparently no few of us, if we're honest, have to admit that, however egotistical or un-PC it may sound, we really do want to excel, to succeed, to make a mark. We want to do something great, and we're
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