Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 31

Episode Twelve: The Citizen-Soldier

The Minutemen of Lexington and Concord, the sharpshooters on both sides at Gettysburg, the “Greatest Generation” of WWII.

These were citizen-soldiers, a concept we take for granted now but that was revolutionary when it first appeared.

Who invented it?

The farmer-warriors of ancient Greece, who took down their spears and shields from over the fireplace and went off to fight.

If you and I value democracy and individual freedom, we can thank them.

They answered the call when it came … and returned home to their families when the emergency was over.

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Killer Instinct, Part Two

I have a friend who runs a literary agency in Hollywood. She represents screenwriters. I was having lunch with her a few weeks ago and I asked her, “Is there any one mistake you find your writers making over and over?”

My friend didn’t hesitate.

“They chicken out when they come to the Big Scene.”

I could feel my blood freezing when she said this. I was thinking, “OMG, I do that too.”

“It’s an issue that comes up on script after script. I’m not kidding. Writers seem to be so intent on not overplaying a scene or not writing it ‘on the nose’ that they wind up pulling their punches. The scene comes out underwritten and weak. I’ve had to literally sit side-by-side with some of my writers at their keyboards and make them attack the scene over and over until they finally face it and write it Big.”

I asked my friend for examples.

“Think about the final bloodbath in The Wild Bunch or the moment in The Godfather when Michael Corleone says, ‘If Clemenza can figure out a way to plant a weapon for me … then I’ll kill them both.’” Those are big moments. Big scenes. And the writers play them full-tilt. Even the Godfather scene, though it’s quiet, no action, just an actor saying a line … it’s killer.”

I asked my friend why writers pull back at these big moments.

“Fear of failure? Fear of going over the top and falling on their faces? I don’t know. But it’s definitely fear of SOMETHING.” 

When your character confronts this dude, you have to GO BIG.

“Every book or movie comes down to one Big Moment. Luke Skywalker faces Darth Vader. The young Chasidic wife in Unorthodox confronts her husband. Charlotte Rampling stands up to Tom Courtenay in 45 Years. It’s a moment when all the cards are slapped onto the table. The writer has to have the guts to go big. The moment in 45 Years was so subtle, if you sneezed you missed it. But it was BIG. The writer and the filmmakers did their job. They crafted a moment that said everything, and they played it flat out.”

I admit it, I’m guilty of this too. It’s Resistance. We KNOW the Big Scene is coming, we recognize the Big Moment as we’re writing it. But we lack the killer instinct to take out the Big Hammer and hit it with all we’ve got.

Killer Instinct, Part Two. It’s not just finishing a project (as we talked about in last week’s post), it’s nailing the Big Moment and holding nothing back.

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Episode Eleven: Be Brave My Heart

Combat for the ancient Greeks was an up-close-and-personal affair. Either you killed the man across from you or he killed you.

The decisive, pitched battle was everything.

Amazingly, that method (and the warrior codes that derive from it) is still the way we in the West fight today.

The “quagmires” we have found ourselves in in recent decades stem from facing enemies who understood these rules and refused to play by them.

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Episode Ten: Then We’ll Have Our Battle In The Shade

A writer’s story about how “Gates of Fire” came to be.

It all came from reading this true historical quote — “Then we’ll have our battle in the shade” — from the Spartan warrior Dienekes before the battle of Thermopylae.

I thought, Not only is that one of the all-time coolest quips on the eve of destruction … but it is spot-on to break the fear that each man was no doubt feeling, knowing he would not survive beyond the next two or three days.

I thought, “I can tell this story, through this man.”

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Killer Instinct, Part One

I’ve been doing a video series on social media called “The Warrior Archetype.” One of the points I’m trying to make is that exterior virtues that we often associate with soldiers and physical combatants can also be called upon by you and me as we fight the interior “war of art.”

One of these virtues is Killer Instinct.

I know, I know. Immediate pushback says, “Kill kill = bad bad.”

From Episode Four, “Add a Step to It”

Is it?

I tried to write my first book in New York when I was twenty-three. I spent two years and got 99.9% of the way through. I choked. I couldn’t finish. I wound up blowing up my marriage and what remained of my sane life, rather than cover that last few feet to the finish line.

Why? 

No killer instinct.

One of the laws of Resistance is that

Resistance is always strongest at the finish.

The example I cited in The War of Art was of Odysseus at the end of his voyage home from the Trojan War.

Ithaca was in sight. The ship was so close to shore that Odysseus’ men could see the cookfires on the hillsides. Their skipper, alas, had chosen this moment to lie down for a snooze. The men knew he had a hide-covered sack that he would let no one touch. They decided to plunder it. 

What the sailors didn’t know was that the sack contained the Adverse Winds, gifted to Odysseus by King Aeolus. When the men opened the bag, the winds rushed out in one furious blow, driving the ship back across every league she had traversed on her long voyage home.

It took me years to learn to finish a project.

In other words, to develop killer instinct.

Seth Godin prefers the verb “ship.” He means if we’ve spent the past eight years designing the latest iPhone and it’s now ready … don’t hesitate. Ship it!

That’s killer instinct.

Plunge a stake through the heart of that project you’ve got 99.9% done. Force yourself. Close your eyes and polish it off.

What are we “killing” anyway?

We’re killing Resistance.

We’re sinking our dagger into the insidious, pernicious, rotten, sneaky, evil force of our own self-sabotage. Our own hesitation. Our own fear of success (or failure).

Another story I told in The War of Art was of a friend who had written his magnum opus. It was done. He had the typed pages in their shipping box, ready to be sent to his agent.

But my friend couldn’t make himself pull the trigger.

That horrible, strongest-at-the-finish-line Resistance got to him.

The tragic ending to this story is my friend died.

His book never got sent off.

Killer instinct is not negative when we use it to finish off a book, a screenplay, any creative project that is fighting us and resisting us to the bitter end.

Steel yourself and put that sucker out of its misery. 

Ship it.

Kill kill = good good.

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Episode Nine: Why Study the Warrior Archetype?

Do we study the Warrior Archetype so we can strap on a sword and march off to battle?

My reason is different.

For me, it’s about the inner war—the battle inside my head to become who I was born to be, to live in the world with integrity and empathy and love, to face down my demons, and do my work.

In today’s video, we’ll dip into the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita, and explore the notion that the outer war and the inner war are one and the same thing.

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Episode Eight: The Warrior Archetype

You turn fifteen and (if you’re a guy) you suddenly want to put on a helmet and beat your buddies’ brains out on the football field, drive fast, hang with your homies, and blow things up.

Are you crazy? No, you have been seized by your Warrior Archetype. It has “kicked in” from the Collective Unconscious and emboldened and empowered you.

The Spartans knew this. So did the Romans. They built entire cultures around it. We’ll dig into it more deeply today.

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Historical Fiction, #1

I was watching Shakespeare’s Henry V the other night (the Kenneth Branagh film version from 1989) and it got me thinking about historical fiction and why I write it. At least one of the reasons.

In debased eras like today’s you can’t speak with a straight face of such notions as honor or integrity (or just about any other quality of character that rises above the basest and most self-serving of human instincts). You have to express yourself ironically or with a certain bitter and self-distancing knowingness and despair. You certainly can’t put words into a contemporary character’s mouth that take seriously such notions as nobility or rectitude. 

And yet we all crave such qualities. The need doesn’t go away just because the times have fallen.

Alec Guiness as Obi-wan Kenobi in the first “Star Wars”

How, today, can you and I write about such things? How do we even bring them up?

The only way I’ve found is to travel into the past (or into some speculative future.) Obi-wan Kenobi can offer certain wisdom or express lofty aspirations … or Yoda or Gandalf or Aragorn or Dumbeldore. I don’t know The Assassin’s Creed or games like it; perhaps there are characters in there who can offer such sentiments.

But no contemporary President or Prime Minister or head of state can.

When I wrote Gates of Fire and other books set in the ancient past, I adopted an archaic idiom. I did it deliberately because anything smacking of the contemporary vernacular, no matter how well executed, would fall flat or, worse, be howled at.

Shakespeare’s verses of course sound archaic to our modern ears. For all I know, they sounded archaic even in his times. But the great dramatist was reaching into the past too. Henry V’s Battle of Agincourt happened in 1415. Shakespeare’s play was produced (no one knows exactly) around 1600.

I wonder if Shakespeare was dealing with the same issue. Terrible crimes have been committed in our time against the English language. Idioms and rhythms of speech that can express notions of honor and fidelity have been debased and rendered impotent.

So … fiction.

Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars. For me, Xenophon, Plato, Thucydides. And this bard, giving speech to Harry, from almost two hundred years later than his true hour of fame:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition. And gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whilst any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

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Episode Seven: What Is an Archetype?

We’re getting deep today, exploring the great psychologist Carl Jung’s concept of the Collective Unconscious and the archaic “super-personalities” that dwell there — the Archetypes.

The Divine Child, the Virgin, the Wanderer, the Lover, the Mother, the Warrior … on up to the King, the Queen, the Sage, and the Mystic.

Yes, you and I are governed by these (and empowered by them), even though they reside in a precinct of the psyche that we can only access through dreams and visions, intuition and insight.

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Episode Six: “Come And Take Them”

2500 years ago, the Persian king Xerxes, while invading Greece with an army of two million men (according to Herodotus), confronted the defending Greeks, led by 300 Spartan warriors, at a narrow pass called Thermopylae.

Xerxes demanded that the Spartans lay down their arms.

If you travel to Thermopylae today, you’ll see a great statue of the Spartan king Leonidas, who commanded the defenders on that day.

On the statue are only two words:

Molon Labe—”Come and take them”—Leonidas’ answer to the Persian invader’s demand.

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