Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 143

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...

The Creative Process #1: An Interview with Seth Godin

This post will launch a new series we're calling "The Creative Process." Don't worry, Writing Wednesday fans, it will not replace WW. We're going to run "Creative Process" in a different space on the new site as soon as we get it up. The plan is to ask all kinds of interesting people "how they work." What is their process? How do they get ideas–and what do they do with them once they've got 'em? We'll be grilling writers and artists, military people, entrepreneurs, maybe even an Afghan...

Tribal Engagement Tutorial: Introducing a New Series

As the debate over what to do in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond continues, United States soldiers and Marines are on the ground fighting and sacrificing.

While this blog will continue focusing on that debate, the greater focus will be on providing soldiers and Marines practical, battle-tested information, which can help them on the ground. 

A few weeks ago, Newsweek reported:

Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, coauthored a refreshingly candid and very public report that said, among other things, that...

Writing Wednesdays #24: Wrestling an Alligator

A friend asked me the other day how I experienced Resistance. What did the phenomenon feel like to me? I told him it was like wrestling an alligator.

That's not always bad. Sometimes the beast is a cute little cayman. I can clamp his jaws shut with my left...

Gifts of Honor: A Tale of Two Captains

Mangwel and the Konar River Valley

[Friends, with apologies, a stomach virus has laid the blog low.  Here's a re-run of a post that has been a reader favorite. We'll be back on Wednesday!:]

June 22nd, the Washington Post ran an excellent article by Greg Jaffe, titled "A Personal Touch in Taliban Fight." The piece is about a young Army captain, Michael Harrison, and his up-close-and-personal work as a company commander in the remote tribal villages of the Konar River valley in Afghanistan.

Flashba...

Return to "One Tribe at A Time"

It has been a few weeks since we've run a post in the "One Tribe At A Time" Series, with Maj. Jim Gant.

We want to share an update with you, about a photo gallery in the Washington Post, featuring narration from Maj. Gant.

Gant: Disciple of an Afghan tribe

U.S. Army Maj. Jim Gant points to his 2003 mission in Afghanistan as proof that the U.S. military can—and should—work alongside tribes in the fight against the insurgency. Here's a look at the tribe that led him to urge the U.S. military to...