Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 137

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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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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