Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 139

Joe Galloway

Joe Galloway set the standard for today's journalists. Whether he was reporting from Vietnam with General Hal Moore or the Persian Gulf with General Norman Schwarzkopf, or writing about the battles of today,  his work has been steeped in honesty and integrity. He remains the only civilian to be awarded the Bronze Star Medal with
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Loving A Writer

Are you in love with a writer? Are you sure about this? Sure you don't want to try someone easier on your heart, like a bull rider, a Black Ops commando or a motorcycle stuntman?
Herewith, from painful experience, a few guidelines for those who have given their hearts to servants of the literary Muse. (The
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General Hal Moore

I met General Hal Moore a few years ago, at a dinner in his honor in Los Angeles, around the time the movie We Were Soldiers was released. Both Joe Galloway and General Moore signed a copy of their book We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young for me. General Moore added a
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Start At The End

Last week we were talking about first drafts (Cover the Canvas, 6/9/10). The idea was to get Draft #1 done from beginning to end, no matter what, even if it wasn't perfect. The reason? Because once we've got a first draft, we're re-writing, not writing. Writing is too freakin' hard.
The obvious next question (or maybe
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Sunni Brown

I was introduced to Sunni Brown via the visual book summaries she did of The War of Art. I've read different things people have written about the book in the past, but this was the first visual. And it blew my mind. I've talked about doing a "2.0″ version of The War of Art in
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Karzai's Counterinsurgency Strategy

Marc Ambinder, politics editor of The Atlantic, explains that there exists a general perception among theorists and policy planners in the Pentagon's policy shop that General McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy has failed to sustain Hamid Karzai's government in critical areas and is therefore destined to ultimately fail.
"This is not how the war is supposed to be
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Cover the Canvas

Is the first draft the hardest? Is it different from a third draft, or a twelfth? Does a first draft possess unique challenges that we have to attack in a one-of-a-kind way?
Yes, yes and yes.
First drafts are killers
A first draft is different from (and more difficult than) all subsequent drafts because in a first draft
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Mark Safranski

I met Mark Safranski last year, just after launching "It's the Tribes, Stupid." Soon after the videos launched, he wrote a post for his blog "Zenpundit."  Though he didn't agree with everything I said, he showed respect for the effort. That's one sign of a professional. He might not always agree with you, but he'll
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Second Act Problems

I'm reading a terrific book by David Mamet called Three Uses of the Knife. It's not a play or a novel, it's a treatise on the subject of drama. There's some great stuff in it, particularly in the section Mamet calls "Second Act Problems," that we as writers, artists, entrepreneurs (and just plain human beings)
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Little Governors

Two recent articles in the Washington Post and Time magazine describe the political realities faced by the U.S. military, when participating in local politics in Nangahar province, in eastern Afghanistan. Both articles go to great length to describe what many would perceive to be another example of a failed local engagement strategy—and both articles fail
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