Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 143

Writing Wednesdays #30: Write For a Star

"Write for a star" is one of the primal axioms of screenwriting, but it has applications across many other fields as well.

What does it mean to write for a star? Writing for a star means create a role that a star wants to play. Your story may be dynamite, your structure may be sound, your theme profound and involving. But the first question a producer is going to ask is, "Who can I cast in this thing?"

Moviemakers want scripts that attract stars. Because stars make movies happen.  If we've got ...

Writing Wednesdays #29: Depth of Work, Part Two

You have to be a little crazy to be a writer or an artist or an entrepreneur. A certain breed of insanity is required to chase a dream or to seek to bring into manifestation something that only you see or hear. I've gotten to know, over the years, a few genuine warriors  (I mean real fighting men, multi-tour Special Forces guys and Marines, Rangers and Airborne and Navy SEALS and plain old hardcore Army foot-sloggers) and you've gotta be crazy to do that too.

How do you know how crazy you...

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The Creative Process #2: An Interview with Tim O'Brien

I read Tim O'Brien's book The Things They Carried right after it was published, and it blew me away. It is powerful—capturing the emotions, internal conflicts, and bravery of not just the Vietnam generation, but today's soldiers and Marines, too.

Writing Wednesdays #28: Depth of Work

This is a topic I plan to address in a series of posts over the next few weeks. But first I want to thank every correspondent who took the time to write in response to last week's "Help!" post. As I type this, we've had 69 Comments. This is absolutely amazing, and I thank everybody. Particularly for the detail of the responses. It really helps me. I'm traveling this week and the next so I won't be able to send out signed "War of Arts" yet in gratitude, but I will as soon as I can. Gracias...

Writing Wednesdays #27: "Help!"

Friends of Writing Wednesdays, I'd like to ask for your wisdom and feedback. I'm taking a little survey, and you can be of real assistance to me if you'd answer, in the Comments section below, some of the questions I'd like to pose to you. (It'll be my pleasure to send a signed copy of The War of Art to the half dozen commentators whose advice is most helpful.)

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Writing Wednesdays #26: "You Gotta Be Great!"

There's a theme to all of these Writing Wednesdays posts, and the theme is Resistance: what it is, how it attacks us, how we can beat it. Here's an insight that struck me with blamm-o impact last week:

I was in Washington, D.C., on a speaking tour with Maj. Jim Gant of the U.S. Army Special Forces and Chief Ajmal Khan Zazai, a tribal chief from Paktia province in Afghanistan. We were speaking on the subject of "tribal engagement"—a new military/cultural strategy for Afghanistan—at the Naval A...

Writing Wednesdays #25: Looking for the Overlap

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 in her head; she's struggling to determine which one(s) to pursue. Here's an answer from my experience.

A few years ago, in Hollywood, I got a new agent. He was a good agent and he did what a good agent should do: he immediately sent me out on a round of meetings. I met with producers and studio execs, actors' and directors'...

Tribal Engagement Tutorial: Mental Models

Having your head in the game requires accepting that your perception of reality might not be correct.

Sun Tzu wrote:

Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be defeated.

How do you know if you have the correct understanding of your opponents and allies, as well as an understanding of how your own world plays into your understanding of others?

We put this question to Major Jim Gant and William "MAC" McCallister.

 Mental Models

MM: Mental models are assumptions about...

Robert McKee's "StoryLogue": A New Resource for Writers

Full disclosure: Bob McKee and I are good friends (and his video interview with me is part of the package I'm about to tell you about.) So be aware please, the following does NOT pretend to be impartial or objective.

StoryLogue's Robert McKee

Who is McKee? Robert McKee is the preeminent teacher of screenwriting and story structure in the world. His four-day intensive seminars have played to packed auditoriums around the planet for twenty-five years. His book Story is gospel for thousands of...