Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 48

#1 Find the Shortest Path

Dad installed odometers on our bikes when my sisters and I were kids.

He was into being healthy and wanted us to ride at least three miles a day

My first life hack was born from Dad’s focus on health and my need to play:

Odometer Fixing

I discovered that 1) the clear plastic top popped off the odometer and 2) the tip of a pine needle—that dark sappy part that holds a few needles together—was just strong enough to push the numbers forward. After that, it was a short ride to Jackie’s house, where I’d ditch my bike in her back yard, and play with her for a while.

In a rare moment of pity for my older sister, who was 12 miles behind one week, I shared my hack.

Rather than thanking me for being amazing, she turned tattletail and ratted me out. In a prodigal son turn of events, Dad didn’t reprimand me. Instead, he laughed, my sister stomped off, and I dodged a bullet. I was eight years old.

In Tim Grahl’s new book Running Down A Dream (to be released July 11th), he has “tools” noted throughout the book, and then an appendix at the end, with all of the tools listed.

Tool #1 is “Find the Shortest Path.”

I’m betting odometer fixing wasn’t what he had in mind when he identified Tool #1.

To play, the deal was that I had to do my chores and ride my bike. I found the shortest path to get what I wanted, but my role on that path was more grasshopper than ant. This continued into my twenties.

I would do work, but not THE work.

Throughout college I held two jobs at a time and internships, with a side gig of upselling products bought with employee discounts to my younger sister and roommates. Working at a clothing store and a music store made this possible, since CDs and trendy threads were in high demand by high school and college students. During a semester in London, I sold most of my clothes to a consignment shop wanting U.S. brands, and then bought up UK brands to bring back and sell to the consignment shop in Fayetteville, N.C., where my parents lived. In both Boston and London I sorted out how ride the T and Tube for free, so transportation was taken care of, and then a receptionist job at a Newbury St. salon took care of haircuts and highlights, and at least looking like I had my shit together.

I had figured out the shortest path to get what I wanted (and to look like I had what I wanted).

But want doesn’t equal need.

In The Artist’s Journey (also being released July 11), Steve has a section titled “The Epiphanal Moment.”

In Hollywood parlance, the All Is Lost moment is succeeded, often immediately, by the Epiphanal Moment.

In this moment, the hero experiences a breakthrough.

This breakthrough is almost always internal. The hero changes her attitude. She regroups. She sees her dilemma from a new perspective—one that she had never considered before (or, if she had considered it, had rejected)—a point of view that offers either hope or desperation amounting to hope.

My epiphanal moment came when I realized that if I spent the same amount of time doing what I enjoyed, as I did on sorting out side gigs and busy work to avoid doing the hard work, I could likely achieve my dreams and have time to spare.

What does that look like now?

It looks like a puppy on a short leash.

I have a tight schedule. I do certain things at certain times every day. Staying on that schedule keeps me on the shortest path and wards off drama.

Example: I was up late earlier this week and slept in the next morning. In the period of an hour, I needed to get the dog fed and walked, my daughter up, showered, fed, and to camp, and needed to fit a shower in for myself. On the way out the door with the dog, I put on the “stay” alarm since the kids were home alone, and in my rush forgot to close the garage door. The alarm went off, but my daughter was in the shower and my son, who could outsleep Rip Van Winkle, slept through it. By the time I got home, the police were at my home, their cars blocking the driveway, and policemen themselves peering into windows. I got a warning. My daughter was late for camp. I never got around to showering. The day fell apart.

With work, it is about going directly to the person I need to speak with—or going to the direct source. With Black Irish Books, that’s always been about the direct connection with customers instead of mucking around with press and book stores and other middle men. It’s been about cutting through the center instead of circling the perimeter wasting time.

When you read The Artist’s Journey and Running Down A Dream (special bundle of both), you’ll notice that both Steve and Tim traveled long and winding roads. Once they cut the clutter and got on the straight and narrow things started happening.

There’s a reason the shortest path (sans the odometer fixing) is #1 on Tim’s list.

The Artist’s Journey, #21

We’re down now to the next-to-last installment of The Artist’s Journey. It’s getting heavy, I know. Stick with me.

To catch up on any missed chapters, click here:  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8. Part 9. Part 10.Part 11. Part 12. Part 13. Part 14. Part 15. Part 16.Part 17. Part 18. Part 19. Part 20.

P.S. Happy Fourth of July!

99. THE FALL OF MAN

The following is from Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy:

In the Hebrew-Christian tradition the Fall is subsequent to creation and is due exclusively to the egocentric use of a free will, which ought to have remained centred in the divine Ground and not in the separate selfhood. The myth of Genesis … to be adequate to our experience … would have to be modified … it would have to make clear that creation, the incomprehensible passage from the unmanifested One into the manifest multiplicity of nature, from eternity into time, is not merely the prelude and necessary condition of the Fall; to some extent it is the Fall.

That the passage from the unity of spiritual to the manifoldness of temporal being is an essential part of the Fall is clearly stated in the Buddhist and Hindu renderings of the Perennial Philosophy. Pain and evil are inseparable from human existence in a world of time; and, for human beings, there is an intensification of this inevitable pain and evil when the desire is turned towards the self and the many, rather than toward the divine Ground.

And this from Beyond Psyche: Symbol and Transcendence in C.G. Jung by Mark R. Gundry:

… I find two fundamental movements that pull conscious awareness beyond its normal horizon. The first movement begins with the suspension of directed thinking and the consequent activation of the symbol-producing function. The symbol mysteriously arises through the play of dreaming and active imagination, mediates unconscious depth to our awareness, and infuses life with differentiated affect. This process creates an opportunity to recognize that a whole range of psychic activity is at work apart from the ego’s normal functioning. Such recognition pulls us beyond our usual horizon of awareness. We know ourselves not simply as the “I” of intentional acts, but as a psyche whose reality extends far beyond the “I.”

This is some deep shit, isn’t it? I confess I don’t understand half of it.

100. THE FALL OF MAN, PART TWO

Here’s my shot at grasping the stuff from the preceding chapter, from the point of view of the artist:

Garden of Eden. The serpent tempts Adam and Eve to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. They do.

Holy shit! Suddenly the primeval pair realize they are individuals, human beings, separate from nature. They are not like the eagle or the lion, who are always and at all times in perfect union with their essence, the Divine Ground, i.e. the all-inclusive consciousness they possessed before they bit into that fruit.

[Trivia note: nowhere does Genesis say it was an apple.]

This is the Fall.

God kicks Adam and Eve out of the garden. He banishes them from union with the Divine Ground.

If indeed you and I are descended from this First Couple, then our human state of mind, the intuitive sense that we all share of being fallen from Paradise, is the natural result of their, Adam and Eve’s, original crime.

Since that day we’ve all been trying to get back to Eden.

The mystic does it by altering his consciousness, through meditation, prayer, asceticism, renunciation of the senses, the ingestion of mind-altering substances.

The lover does it by seeking sublime union with another.

The mother does it in her way, the warrior in his, the philosopher in a third manner. Even the suicide bomber treads this same path.

What about the artist?

What about you and me?

We trek this same highway. We too are seeking to get back to the Garden, to reconnect to the Divine Ground. How do we do it?

Through our work.

Or, more accurately, through the act by which we pursue our work.

When Bob Dylan writes a song, when Twyla Tharp choreographs a dance, when Parker and Stone write a new episode of South Park, they shift their consciousness out of N for Normal and into S for Superconscious, that is:

… the suspension of directed thinking and the consequent activation of the symbol-producing function. The symbol mysteriously arises through the play of dreaming and active imagination, [producing] a whole range of psychic activity … apart from the ego’s normal functioning. Such recognition [enables us to] know ourselves not simply as the “I” of intentional acts, but as a psyche whose reality extends far beyond the “I.”

This is the Times Square to Grand Central shuttle we spoke of earlier. The artist toggles her platform of effort between the conscious and the unconscious, between the rational mind and the Divine Ground.

(This is also the rush of working as an artist. This is what makes the process addictive.)

101. PAIN AND THE ARTIST

It’s a commonplace that artists work to free themselves from pain. The irritation of the grain of sand compels the oyster to produce a pearl.

But what is the real pain beneath any personal anguish that you or I may have suffered?

It is the pain of being mortal and being aware of our mortality, of being an isolated individual in a world seemingly devoid of meaning. In other words, the pain of getting kicked out of the Garden.

Pain and evil are inseparable from human existence in a world of time; and, for human beings, there is an intensification of this inevitable pain and evil when the desire is turned towards the self and the many, rather than toward the divine Ground.

To access the Divine Ground—in other words, to write, to compose, to shoot film—plugs us in, for this hour at least, to the garden we were expelled from. For a few moments we get to breathe again that Edenic air, to experience that primal fragrance.

And better than that, we get to point our brothers and sisters toward it.

A great song.

An unforgettable image.

A sublime story.

We need it.

It stops the pain.

102. ART IS WORK

“And unto Adam He said, Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I have commanded you, saying Thou shalt not eat of it; cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth for thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.”

The artist’s role, whether she understands it or not, is to point the way back to the Garden, to that state of consciousness that the human race enjoyed before the Fall. In other words, to direct contact with, and experience of, the Divine Ground.

But note the Almighty’s curse, as He kicked the Mom and Dad of our race out of paradise.

The way back, if indeed it is through art, comes via a ticket paid for in sweat.

Art is work.

 

The Hero’s Journey Feels A Lot Like The Loser’s Journey

No one starts as Superman. Not even Superman started as Superman. He was a toddler lifting cars and a teenager racing against trains before he turned to nerdy glasses and clumsy behavior to hide his superhuman strength and then use that strength to oppose the forces of evil.

Luke was just a teenager with a knack for repairing robots before he met up with Old Ben—and Dorothy was just a young girl in Kansas, worried Mrs. Gooch would take her dog Toto from her.

They didn’t know it, but they were smack dab in the middle of the hero’s journey. Every experience prepared them for the artist’s journey. Fighting Mrs. Gooch was prologue to fighting the wicked witch.

In The Artist’s Journey (to be released in July), Steve wrote:

“Our primary hero’s journey as artists is the passage we live out, in real life, before we find our calling.

“The hero’s journey is the search for that calling.

“It’s preparation.

“It’s initiation (or, more precisely, self-initiation).

“On our hero’s journey, we see, we experience, we suffer. We learn.”

Looks good on paper, but what about in real life?

Steve also wrote,

“The hero’s journey ends when, like Odysseus, we return home to Ithaca, to the place from which we started. We wash up on shore. We have survived. We have come home.”

I don’t know anyone who has washed up on the shore, then disguised himself to hide from his wive’s suitors, and then fought them to the death, before being reunited with Penelope.

I do have a dear friend who struggled with alcohol and drugs, and with being a wife, and who is now the most extraordinary mother of three, on the verge of acquiring a dream job. But before? She looked a lot like someone on a loser’s journey instead of a hero’s journey. But then something changed. Something clicked. She evolved. She became the hero of her story.

And, I know she’d say the same of me. She’s seen me at my best and worst—and those times have never been accompanied by trumpeting angels, welcome home parades, or any other glory. More often, it looks like me biting my nails, skipping sleep in favor of caffeine, gaining weight, crying, wondering why “this” is all happening, and then . . . And then each time I emerge I’m a little stronger. I wash up on my own personal shores, without Ithaca anywhere in site. I’ve found that I’ve washed up fewer times, because Calm has started visiting more often than Crazy. Experience brought that. I know how to battle Crazy because I know his ways, his plays. I know his next move and I know the one after that and the one after that. But . . . when I’m going through Crazy, the hero’s journey feels like the loser’s journey.

But once on the other side . . . Once washed ashore . . . That’s when the artist’s journey begins.

Think about Erin Brockovich. She was a single mom in need of a job. She didn’t set out as a crusader and consumer advocate. She just needed a paycheck. But, then the opportunity presented itself to her.

Every day of life prepared her for that moment. She grew up struggling with Dyslexia, given a hard time by peers and by teachers who asked if she was stupid. She also relied a lot on her memory, which is classic coping for people with Dyslexia. She relied on information stored, rather than constantly having to find it. That means, that when she was confronted with “The Call,” she had already been fighting most her life, had already been memorizing names and numbers and other information, had already dealt with her fair share of jerks and naysayers, and knew how to bounce back against hardship. When “the Call” came, she tore down the walls in front of her.

In this week’s “Writing Wednesdays” post, Steve wrote about “the Call.”

“When we speak of ‘the Call’ that initiates the hero’s journey, it’s often an opportunity that suddenly appears, an imposed expulsion, an emergency that demands action.”

For Brockovich, the people of Hinkley, California needed her help.

But . . . What does that look like for you and me? What does it look like for the rest of us?

This past week, Steve also shared more information about Tim Grahl’s new book Running Down a Dream.

Running Down a Dream is what the hero’s journey and then the artist’s journey looks like for most of us.

It is being distracted by video games and coffee breaks with friends instead of being distracted by Sirens.

It is fighting against our own demons instead of the Cyclops.

It is also little things, like telling the HOA to go to Hell over it’s “no clover in the yard policy” instead of surviving Charybdis.

Black Irish Books is publishing Tim’s Running Down A Dream and Steve’s The Artist’s Journey at the same time.

Yeah . . . I’m on the Black Irish team, but I know I’d say this anyway: Check out both when they are released in July (more info to come).

Steve’s book explains the journey and Tim’s book offers a look at what that journey looks like for the majority of us. It’s not easy and I imagine Tim’s book was as painful to write as the experiences he chronicles were painful to live.

Both books helped me.

It’s easy to forget what the drama swirling around is about. It is about forging our tools and then emerging from the drama with what we need to fight during the artist’s journey.

And, it’s also easy to forget that there’s always more than one journey going on at a time. I look at my own life and there are areas in which I have it 100% together and other areas in which I’m 100% a mess.

I thank Tim for being honest with his journey in a way few people are these days. This isn’t a look-at-me-and-how-wonderful-I-am Facebook story. It is real life and how so many of us exist.

I thank Steve for breaking apart the journey and explaining it.

I’m better off for both of these books. Hope you’ll check them out, too.

The Artist’s Journey, #20

Only three more posts (including today’s) and this serialization of The Artist’s Journey will be complete. Thanks, everybody, for hanging in. I promise to get back to “regular” posts right away.

One last peep re Tim Grahl of www.booklaunch.com, whom I’ve been telling you about for the past couple of weeks. Tim, remember, reached out to Shawn out of the blue, saying, “If you’ll help me organize and shape my novel (that I haven’t written yet), I’ll help you with your marketing.” What happened to that novel? It’s proceeding furiously apace under Shawn’s guidance. In the meantime Tim wrote a different book, a super-personal account of his own agonizing hand-to-hand combat, not only with the blank page, but with being a responsible, loving husband and father. Does any of this sound familiar? As ethereal and airy-fairy as The Artist’s Journey can get, that’s how real-world, down-and-dirty Tim’s excruciatingly honest tale can be. The book is called Running Down a Dream. I can’t recommend it highly enough for all of us who live in the real world of trying to make the dream of becoming a writer come true. We’ll have Tim’s book available here and at www.blackirishbooks.com in the next couple of weeks.

Now back to the ethereal world—the final three installments of The Artist’s Journey. To catch up on any missed chapters, click here:  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8. Part 9. Part 10.Part 11. Part 12. Part 13. Part 14. Part 15. Part 16.Part 17. Part 18. Part 19.

 

95. BECAUSE THE ARTIST SHUTTLES BETWEEN WORLDS

The artist’s skill, we have said, is to shuttle between the conscious mind and the higher mind, the Divine Ground.

That’s her job.

It’s what she does every day.

For “conscious mind” read the alienation and exile of the human condition.

For “divine ground” read lost paradise, the Garden of Eden.

It is not an overstatement to declare that the artist’s role is to lead the human race back to Eden.

True, artists don’t know this. They don’t get up each morning with this enterprise in mind. In fact if you articulated this to them, they’d probably laugh in your face.

But they are the heralds and mentors of mankind’s hero’s journey nonetheless. Their charge is, as James Joyce phrased it in Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man

… to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of the race.

How do artists perform this service? By producing works whose fruit, for the reader or viewer, is empathy and compassion for the Other and, ultimately, identification with the Other.

The track that artists shuttle upon each day between the conventional world and the world of the higher mind is the same trolley line that the human race as a whole is seeking to board—the track from the narrow, fearful, divisive ego to the open, loving, inclusive Self.

96. WHO R U, PART TWO

The terminal thesis of this book is that the artist discovers who she is (and reveals this to the world) by the works she produces.

Our true “you” reveals itself over time by the fruits of our passages back and forth between World #1 and World #2.

The real “you” was always there, behind that door.

It was just waiting for you to knock and enter.

97. THE ARTIST AND THE GARDEN

The artist’s role is to complete the circle that started with Adam and Eve. Her charge is to lead us back to Eden, not in the state of unconsciousness and dependence in which we stood before the Fall, but in full awareness of ourselves and our station, our mortality, and of the greater world around and within us.

The artist’s role is to make the unconscious conscious.

She may not realize this. She may be blind to it. She may perform this task by instinct, not design. But she performs it just the same.

She is compelled by her nature.

She may work her entire life and never even realize she is doing this. But she is.

The Fall created the “multiplicity of forms” and dissevered the race from unity with the Divine Ground. The artist’s role is to shatter the illusion of separation and isolation and to blaze the trail back to the condition of Oneness, which state has always been mankind’s true condition but which we as individuals have been blinded to, immured as we are within the prison of our separate egos.

98. AN ORIGINAL CRIME (BUT A GREAT AND NOBLE ONE)

Christians believe in Original Sin. Jews cite in Genesis 6:5 and 8:21, the appearance within the human heart of the yetzer hara, “a turning toward evil” The ancient Greeks as well believed in a primal crime, which prompted the hero’s journey, as Homer declares of Odysseus …

… who, after he had plundered the innermost citadel of hallowed Troy, was made to stray grievously about the coasts of men …

When we speak of “the Call” that initiates the hero’s journey, it’s often an opportunity that suddenly appears, an imposed expulsion, an emergency that demands action. But not infrequently it’s a crime—a wrong committed, usually in ignorance or unconsciousness, by the hero. In the case above, Odysseus violates the sacred precinct of the goddess. In the Garden, Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

A crime causes both protagonists to be “cast out.”

The human race’s crime is identifying with the ego. It’s Adam and Eve’s original sin and Odysseus’s and yours and mine.

But give our forebears some credit. Their crime was a great and noble one, a step toward divinity, a reaching for the stars.

A Bronx Tale

When Dom was in first grade, he told his teacher he wanted to play center field for the New York Yankees.

In a deadpan voice that  didn’t entertain dreamers or laughter, she asked, “What’s your back-up plan?”

Dom paused a beat and asked, “What do you think about right field?”

I love that story.

When Dom shared it with me, we were eating pizza with our families, following a Little League game. Dom laughed and laughed. He could still remember the teacher eyeballing him.

The way Dom told the story . . . First you have to imagine his words drenched in a New York accent, with breaks from laughter interrupting the flow. Second, you have to imagine the teacher, one of those old school, hard core teachers, with those now-retro black framed glasses with thick Coca-Cola bottle lenses, a long skirt, and thick-soled orthopaedic shoes.

That night at pizza, he laughed at himself and how naive he was as a kid. I admired him for his laughter. He loves baseball and I know that no matter how much he laughs at that 1st grader, he would have done anything to play Major League Baseball. I admired him for being honest, too. Sure, it was a story of a first grader, but it was a 50 year old story that he’s continued to tell. It means something to him.

I recently read something by Tim Grahl, which reminded me of Dom’s honesty and reflection.

Have you read Steve’s last two “Writing Wednesdays” posts (The Artist’s Journey, #18 and The Artist’s Journey, #19)? If yes, you’ll have seen his mentions of Tim.

I was first introduced to Tim’s name when he and Shawn started working together on Shawn’s Story Grid site. It was interesting to read what was and wasn’t working as they worked together on Tim’s novel.

Just a few months ago, I found myself reading something different from Tim — his personal story of what has and hasn’t worked within his own life. He wasn’t laughing at himself as Dom had, but his message was just as effective. He was raw and honest — two things I admire just as I do the ability to laugh. As I finished reading the last page, I thought, “He’s not the only one.” I knew his story would resonate with other writers and entrepreneurs because it is a classic tale. I admired him for putting himself out there—for not painting an all-is-beautiful Facebook image.

In the coming weeks, as Steve finishes his serialization of The Artist’s Journey, we’ll start sharing some of Tim’s new project. I hope you’ll join us.

The Artist’s Journey, #19

Last week I introduced Tim Grahl, the founder of booklaunch.com, who reached out to Shawn (whom he had never met) and asked for Shawn’s help as an editor, to mentor Tim in writing his first novel. If we look at this moment through the prism of the past eighteen weeks’ posts, we would say that Tim had reached the end of his Hero’s Journey. The act of reaching out to Shawn was the start of his Artist’s Journey. Tim was declaring, whether he thought of it in these terms or not, “I am a writer. I don’t care if I’ve never written a novel or a screenplay or published anything at all. I am launching myself now, officially, on this new journey. I will seek and find my voice, my subject, my medium of expression. I have wasted enough time in my life. I am ready to be the artist I was born to be.”

I take my hat off to Tim, and to every man and woman who makes this commitment. I’ll tell you more about Tim’s journey in the next couple of weeks, but now … we’re closing in on the climax of The Artist’s Journey. Let’s keep going. To access any missed chapters, click here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8. Part 9. Part 10.Part 11. Part 12. Part 13. Part 14. Part 15. Part 16.Part 17. Part 18.

 

B  O  O  K    S  E  V   E   N
T H E   D I V I N E   G R O U N D

 

91. THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE DIVINE GROUND

In The War of Art, I related a story about a seminar I attended once, taught by Tom Laughlin (“Billy Jack”), who in his non-cinematic life was a well-known, and quite controversial, Jungian teacher and counselor. Tom Laughlin drew a schematic of the human psyche. It was a circle shaped a little like an egg. The full interior of the circle he labeled

SELF

In one corner of this circle he tucked a tiny black dot, called

EGO

Outside the circle, with three arrows pointing in and penetrating the interior, he wrote

DIVINE GROUND.

I had no idea what Tom meant by “the Divine Ground” but the phrase struck me like a two-by-four to the forehead, particularly the notion that our own limited minds lay psychologically adjacent to it and in fact touching it.

I believed it at once.

Why not?

Mystics of all cultures have subscribed to this notion. They’ve in fact based their whole lives and philosophies upon it. To them, consciousness is not only not limited to the individual’s physical body, it’s not limited to the individual’s lifetime.

Hey, I’m with them!

I can’t prove it (who can?) but I swear there’s a part of our psyche that butts up against Something that’s infinitely greater, wiser, and more powerful, and that that Something is conscious, universal, intelligent, active, collective, possibly infinite.

I’ll go further. I believe that that Something transcends time and space. It knows past and future, up and down, in and out, backhand and forehand.

 

92. THE CONSCIOUS MIND AND THE DIVINE GROUND

Two more ideas that can’t be proven:

This greater mind can be accessed by our lesser minds.

(Of course this is true; artists do it every day. So do you and I in our dreams.)

The artist’s stock-in-trade, as we said, is the ability to shuttle back and forth between the conscious mind and the Divine Ground.

This greater mind wants to be accessed. It is actively reaching out to us, seeking our attention and participation.

… the mystics, the gnostics, adherents of the grail and alchemists [writes John P. Dourley in “Jung and his Mystics”] All these traditions share the sense that mind is natively imbued with the latent awareness of its universal connectedness. The development of this awareness intensifies the sense of the divine. This reconnection of the mind with its divine ground happens pre-eminently through the work of the dream and its symbols, expressing the energy of the divine.

All art arises from this divine ground, whether the artist is aware of it or not (or even actively denies it).

But why, you ask.

Even if there is such a thing as the Divine Ground, why would it care about the fate or affairs of humankind? Are we suggesting that it actively participates in human affairs?

Really?

Toward what end?

 

93. THE ARTIST’S VOCATION

All art—dance, drama, architecture, literature, music, etc.—is about the recognition of beauty and the articulation of empathy and compassion for the Other.

The artist is a force for unity. Her role is to bring together, upon the common ground of the imagination, the disparate (and often warring) factions of the human psyche and the human race.

The artist does this not in mass but one-on-one, individual by individual. She performs this alchemy within the human heart, which she enters by the medium of the imagination.

A documentary about sable hunters in Siberia or a film about a family in Tehran dealing with Alzheimer’s transports the foreign viewer, like you and me, into a universe whose existence we had never known and makes that world and those who inhabit it immediate and vivid and human. No longer can we say or think, “These people are not like me.”

We see that they are.

The gulf of separation has been bridged, at least for the moment, by one tiny increment. What has replaced it is the power of empathy, of compassion, of identification with another.

The artist does that.

A work of art is a unifying force. Great art transcends divisions of culture, race, nationality, history. It vanquishes time itself. The cave paintings at Lascaux are as powerful today as they were seventeen thousand years ago, just as the grace and symmetry of the Golden Gate Bridge could be appreciated by the most “primitive” hunter-gatherer.

94. THE HERO’S JOURNEY OF THE HUMAN RACE

If the individual has a hero’s journey, does the race collectively possess one as well?

If it does, what is our “call?”

What “threshold” do we seek to cross?

What “home” will we return to?

What “gift” shall we bring?

Here’s what I think:

I think the race’s journey began in the Garden of Eden (which is of course a myth, but a myth common in one form or another to all humanity.)

Our inciting incident was a crime, the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

Act One ended with the Almighty casting us out of the garden.

We entered the Inverted World then, humankind’s collective Act Two, and we’ve been there ever since, suffering trials, undergoing initiations, encountering creatures of wonder, while our hearts, as Homer wrote of Odysseus

 

through all the seafaring, ached with an agony to redeem [ourselves] and bring [our] company safe home.

 

Safe home to the Garden, that’s the return we seek. That alone will complete the circle and make mankind whole.

The artist is the herald and the medium of this passage.

 

 

 

 

Bringing It All together

(From the Archives: How did Writing Wednesdays start? About ten years ago, Steve had an idea to launch a vlog. It was launched in 2009 and the vlog quickly became more blog tha vlog—fewer videos, more long-form posts. The first Writing Wednesdays post ran on July 22 of that year. That’s when we started looking at transitioning the site, which turned into the site many of you remember, which stood its ground until earlier this year, when the current version was launched. Below is the post I wrote about the evolution of Steve’s previous site, including the launch of Writing Wednesdays. It was my third post for the What It Takes column, dated January 12, 2011.) 

 

Do a Wayback Machine search for www.stevenpressfield.com and check out the late 2002 version of Steve’s first author site—and then check out the 2008 version.

Not much of a difference . . .

Steve’s first site was a traditional early 2000’s author site—a stylized resume, offering readers information about authors and their work. Steve’s site was static, so readers visiting once a year could catch up on the previous year’s additions within a few minutes—and then wait another year before returning. Information flowed one way—from Steve to his readers—void of interaction/engagement.

In 2008, Steve launched a micro-site for his World War II novel Killing Rommel. Readers visiting www.stevenpressfield.com were redirected to the Killing Rommel site. The page had some cool stuff on it—including a Killing Rommel video produced by, and featuring, Steve—but it was still a one-way, static site. The new page provided information about Killing Rommel, but that was it. There was no reason to stay or return. Content didn’t leave the page.

In 2009, Steve launched a blog for his video series “It’s the Tribes, Stupid.” As mentioned in “On Sharing,” this wasn’t a project Steve launched for financial gain and it wasn’t related to his books, so he wanted to keep it separate from the author site.

Mistake. Looking back, we should have kept everything together.

What We Learned

After launching the blog, Steve’s readers started chiming in and conversations went to books at times. Steve was engaging with readers and they weren’t interested in sticking to one project.

Enter “Writing Wednesdays.”

Enter awkward organization.

When “Writing Wednesdays” was launched, the blog was oriented toward the “Tribes” readers, with “Writing Wednesdays” being something that popped up once a week.

We all knew the blog needed a facelift, to better feature the different strands. That’s when we started talking about redoing the old site and bringing it and the blog together.

It was the interview with Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds that really got us moving, though.

The interview is titled “The Warrior Ethos of Steven Pressfield.” Steve and Glenn start out talking about the battle of Thermopylae and the Greeks. At about the 6:10 mark, Glenn brings up Steve’s blog:

Glenn: “You’ve branched out now into blogging and your blog’s kind of an interesting blog. You’re sort of interspersing things about writing and writing advice. I saw how you talked about how you did a rewrite on a porn flick and what you learned from that, which I thought was pretty cool. And that’s kind of fun. And then in between that, you’ve got interviews with Afghan tribal leaders and Special Forces people fighting there and things like that and . . . How do you manage that mix? How’s that working out for you?”

Steve and Glenn fade off and are replaced by a screen shot of the blog.

Just below the blog header, which features the title “It’s The Tribes, Stupid” and a picture of a tribe in Afghanistan, is the title “Writing Wednesdays #10: Sex Scenes.”

Not exactly dance partners . . .

The Challenge

It was clear from readers that some people were interested in “Writing Wednesdays” and The War of Art. Others were interested in Steve’s novels and military-related projects. Others were interested in everything.

Some authors create sites for their books, rather than for themselves. This means the next time they have another book or other project, they need to recreate the wheel—another site design, another URL, another push toward growing readership.

All of that takes time.

We knew the site design would be an ongoing project, as updates were needed, but we didn’t want to start at zero each time we approached a launch. We needed a site that would represent Steve, not a string of individual sites for his different projects.

Bringing It Home

I’ll leave the design talk of the new site—which pulled the 2002 site and the blog together—to Jeff Simon of Little Box Creations.

On the content front, a few things happened. Steve had a few columns going on the blog and was writing his new book—The Profession—when a health issue, requiring surgery, came up. He blogged about this in a few “Writing Wednesdays” columns. He reposted a favorite WW column here and there, and pulled back some, but through it all, he kept engaging.  His readers kept responding, he valued their input, and wanted to respond.

However, it was clear that something had to give, so Steve took a look at what he could commit to moving forward, and pulled back on the rest.

I just read the Tech Crunch article “How Space Jam’s Website Went Viral. Space Jam’s 1996 Website, That Is.” The entire article reminded me of the evolution of Steve’s site, but the last paragraph brought everything home:

“You could just chalk up this week’s explosion of the Space Jam site to an extremely slow holiday news cycle, but it’s much more than that. We’re now in the very last hours of the most fast-paced decade ever technology-wise, and that is a little scary. In this era of Word Lens and Self-Driving Cars, perhaps some of us are more than a little nostalgic for simpler times when ‘having a website, no matter how bad, was an achievement in itself.‘”

Goals for Tomorrow

It takes time to stay on top of everything. It’s impossible to do everything, but important to do what makes the most sense. “Having a website, no matter how bad” is no longer an achievement—and that goes for everything else related to publishing and outreach, too.

I’ve spent my first three “What It Takes” articles talking about how we got here.

Next Up: Outreach plans for The Profession.

The Artist’s Journey, #18

There’s a guy named Tim Grahl. A real guy. A really good guy. He has a site called booklaunch.com, which is one of the best, if not the best, instructional site for writers at all levels who want to get their stuff out there in the most effective and high-exposure way. I’m a subscriber. The site is great. But Tim didn’t want to just help writers. He wanted to be a writer. He wanted to tell stories. He phoned Shawn and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: “If you’ll work with me as an editor and help me write my novel, I’ll help you organize your site, storygrid.com, and your blog and your marketing.” Shawn said yes. He said hell yes.

Why am I telling you this? Because now all of us (not just Shawn) have a resource in Tim and in www.booklaunch.com that can make a real difference in our evolution as professionals and as marketers of our own material. More on this next week. For now … back to the serialization of The Artist’s Journey. We’re past three-quarters of the way through. Pub date: about a month away.

To catch up on any missed posts, click here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11. Part 12. Part 13. Part 14. Part 15. Part 16. Part 17.

 

86. DO WE HAVE A PERSONAL IDENTITY?

Buddhists don’t think so.

The concept of the individual personality (and thus a voice that you and I could call “ours”) is in Buddhist thought an illusion.

True mind, the Buddha taught, is empty. Clear as glass. Pellucid as the air through which sunlight passes.

A Samurai warrior, guided by this Buddhist precept, does not prepare for battle by rehearsing mentally, by planning, or by filling his mind with schemes and intentions.

Instead he empties his mind.

His belief is that this “no-mind” knows more than his conscious ego-mind and will respond perfectly every time in the moment.

I believe this too.

This is the voice you and I are seeking as artists.

The voice of no-voice.

 

87. THE VOICE SERVES THE WORK

Consider the roles Meryl Streep has played.

Each voice is unmistakably “hers.” Yet she has had to find each one—Karen Silkwood in Silkwood or Karen Blixen in Out of Africa or Francesca in The Bridges of Madison County—individually.

Where does she find it?

Within the imagined reality of the subject.

The first time I wrote in my “real” voice was in The War of Art. But that voice wasn’t really “me.” It was a “me” set at the service of the material.

Consider the popular story (true, I hope) that Johnny Depp found the voice of Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean by imagining himself playing the role as if he were Keith Richards. That voice is clearly not the universal Johnny Depp voice. In fact his voice changes radically from Edward Scissorhands to Gilbert Grape to Whitey Bulger. To create the illusion for the audience that the material demands, the artist seeks and employs a different voice each time.

And yet each voice is his own. Each one is a facet of himself.

 

88. THE SURPRISE OF FINDING OUR VOICE

I have a recurring dream.

A good dream.

In the dream I’m in my house (or some place that I recognize as my house even though technically it doesn’t look exactly like my actual house) when I realize that I’m occupying a room that I had never realized was part of the edifice. An additional room. An expanded room.

Sometimes it’s an entire floor. I’ll be standing there, looking at crystal chandeliers and rows of pool tables extending for half a block, with music playing and people partying, and I’ll think to myself, “Wow, I had no idea this part of the house even existed. How could I have missed it all this time?”

That house is my psyche. The new rooms are parts of me I have never, till I dreamt them, been aware of.

We find our voice that same way. Project by project. Subject by subject. Observing in happy amazement as a new “us” pops out each time.

 

89. THE SURPRISE OF FINDING OUR SUBJECT

I wonder if Stephen King knew when he was a kid that horror, the supernatural, and speculative fiction would be his metier.

I can testify for myself that I had no clue whatsoever that I would be writing about the things I wound up writing about.

It’s as though some Cosmic Assignment Desk, with access to our test scores and aptitude charts (that we ourselves have never seen) is suddenly calling us forward and with absolute authority handing us our orders packet.

The artist’s journey is nothing if not full of surprises.

 

90. WHAT THESE SURPRISES MEAN

The artist on her journey opens the pipeline to the unconscious, the Muse, the superconscious.

With this, every prior assumption flies out the window—who our parents told us we were, what our teachers imagined we’d become, even what we ourselves believe we are or will turn out to be.

The Muse tells us who we really are and what our subject really is.

No wonder these feel like surprises. They are voices that we never knew we had, rooms and wings in our house that we never knew existed.

When we say the artist’s journey is a process of self-discovery, this is what we mean.

 

 

 

Wisdom from Mentors

From www.storygrid.com, agents have mentors too.  And the great ones listen to the ones who’ve been in the foxhole longer than they have…

It’s a Friday morning in the summer of 1996, around 10:15.

Tina Bennett’s bosses at the Janklow & Nesbit Literary Agency have had their coffee and have read through the Times, the Journal and the Post. There are about forty-five minutes to kill before their car services ring reception to let them know that their town cars are idling on Park between 56th and 57th. Beating traffic to the country house in Sagaponack (beach) or Stockbridge (mountains) during summer publishing hours (Publishers shut down at noon on Fridays from Memorial Day through Labor Day) is critical for the apex players in the business.

Mort Janklow and Lynn Nesbit learned this fundamental truth of summers in the city decades’ prior. One must be over the bridge or through the tunnel by noon. Or you may as well stay in Manhattan. It takes just one bumper to bumper six hour car trip for the usual two hour ride to embed that fact into the cerebral cortex forevermore.

The only potential thing worse is a six hour drive…on the way back.

But all things considered, making weekend small talk handicapping the Sunday evening state of the Sunrise Highway or Taconic Parkway isn’t so bad. Especially when cocktailing with the very same people one lunched with during the week. How much can one really talk about the dire nature of book publishing? Fewer people reading, fewer buying books, fewer, fewer, fewer…the song remains the same.

In that transitional lull between working leisurely to leisurely working, Janklow and Nesbit meet with the almost ridiculously well educated junior agent (Stanford undergrad, Oxford Marshall Scholarship, Yale post grad) Tina Bennett.  She’s poked her head into the doorway and asked for help polishing a pitch for a new project.

She’s been at the agency for two years and while a wonderful presence in the office, she hasn’t really hit anything out of the park yet. Perhaps her decision to abandon the ivory tower tenure track in philosophy or English literature wasn’t exceptionally prudent?

Bennett sees Nesbit first.

An elegant presence with impeccable taste, Lynn Nesbit is book publishing royalty. Her bona fides include her founding of the book department for legend Marvin Josephson in what would become International Creative Management (ICM) as well as baby agenting at Sterling Lord Literistic. Her client list is the equivalent of the roster for 1927 New York Yankees—

Ann Beattie
A. Scott Berg
Thomas Cahill
Robert A. Caro
Jimmy Carter
Joan Didion
Jeffrey Eugenides
Robert Goolrick
Andrew Sean Greer
Shirley Hazzard
Robert Hughes
Michael Korda
Jonathan Kozol
Jayne Anne Phillips
Richard Price
Felix Rohatyn
Anne Rice
Amartya Sen
Gay Talese
Tom Wolfe

Nesbit listens to Bennett’s description of her new project, Malcolm Gladwell’s expansion of his Tipping Point piece in The New Yorker into book form.

The Tipping Point is about how ideas and products and behaviors spread. While citing extensive academic research, the book length treatment will build the case that compelling messages are adopted when numerous influential connections occur at just the right time and place. When these small events reach critical mass, an idea or a product or a behavior “tips” into ubiquity, just as one gets the flu. It’s about how little things make a big difference.

Bennett tells Nesbit about Gladwell’s credentials and that he has a very strong on-the-page proposal to counter any arguments that the magazine article exhausted The Tipping Point Story.

What does she think?

It’s a terrific project and Nesbit encourages Bennett. She asks about the five publishers and editors that Bennett has targeted for her first round of submissions. She suggests a few changes to the roster based on her past experiences and leaves Bennett with one takeaway piece of advice.

It’s this: Listen.

When making the calls to pitch the editors, don’t be so concerned with getting the pitch out perfectly and quickly. Don’t think about your next call when you’re in the middle of the present one.

Instead have a conversation. Listen to what the editor says and hit the conversational ball back to them without hard-pushing your agenda. Editors want nothing more than to fall in love with a book project. If you come off as one of those late night sales pitchers on cable television, they’ll be disinclined to fall in love.

Instead, talk about the work. Talk about how you and Gladwell have picked at this idea. How the two of you approached the best way to expand it into book form. Talk about the process.

An editor will love that. Because it’s why she chose book publishing in the first place…to explore interesting ideas and to help writers do their best work. To be a part of a book that lasts longer than a fortnight on a bestseller list is what drives the best in the business.

It may sound corny, but Nesbit advises Bennett to try and enjoy her pitch calls.

The goal isn’t to get the editor to “buy” the book on a pitch. That just isn’t going to happen. This isn’t Hollywood. The goal is to get them to feel like you feel about this project, passionate to help cultivate it into a book.

Bennett’s next stop is Mort Janklow’s corner office.

The sting to Nesbit’s honey, Mort Janklow is the archetype of the attorney turned literary agent. Back in the 1970s, Janklow disrupted the profession, made it newsworthy, aggressive, a place where one could unabashedly and publicly follow the money. Before Janklow, agents were genteel and anonymous and under the thumb of publishers. After Janklow came headline makers like Andrew “the Jackal” Wylie.

Janklow famously won arbitration for his first client William Safire, a win that seized crucial ground for author’s rights. Safire’s first book, a behind the scenes look at the Nixon administration…before Watergate…was originally under contract to William Morrow. After Watergate, Morrow chose to cancel the book (who’d want to read about a corrupt administration?) and demanded Safire return his advance. Janklow sued Morrow of Safire’s behalf, and not only won the case, which gave Safire the right to keep the advance, but he then resold the book to Doubleday for an even larger advance. The book went on to become the bestseller Before the Fall.

Going through Mort Janklow’s client list is like charting the evolution of modern book publishing, the rise of the sizzle that compliments commercial steak. Go to Google and search for the February 2, 1987 New York Magazine profile (two years before Janklow convinced Lynn Nesbit to leave ICM and partner with him) by Patricia Morrisroe called MEGA-MORT. Ahh…the 1980s when success equated with how many dinner parties and fundraisers you attended and where you spent Thanksgiving holidays…the scoreboard was so precise then.

Bennett gives Janklow the same pitch she gave Nesbit.

“Kid, sounds great. But don’t forget to feed the editors sales hooks.”

Janklow goes on to explain.

“When you pitch an editor or publisher these days…it’s not like the old days when I could call up Joni Evans and lock in a deal before she rolled over in bed to clear it with Dick Snyder…remember that they have to sell it in-house before they can be authorized to make you an offer.

Agents don’t get to talk and convince the head of marketing or the cranky sales rep from Santa Monica let alone the CEO of the corporation to back the acquisition.

Editors and publishers do that.

And guess what, those marketing, sales and bean counters aren’t going to read your client’s excellent proposal. They’re just going to hear the editor and publisher talk. So give them something to say that their colleagues are going to understand.

For example, your Tipping Point thing sounds like one of those books that business people will buy. That’s a huge market. And it’s also something that smarty-pants New Yorker readers will like too. So burn a quickie cheat sheet into the editor’s brain in your pitch call. Something they can spit back at anyone standing in their way.

Something like “if Napoleon Hill, David Ogilvy and Richard Feynman were locked in a bunker together for a month, they’d come out with the The Tipping Point.”

Bennett looks confused.

“Look, between those three names, you’ve got three major markets right? 1. business strivers 2. marketers and advertisers, and 3. popular science readers… And you also have easy to identify comparable titles.”

More confused looks.

“Here is how a book gets acquired. Say you nail the call and the editor wants to do the book. The editor pitches the book in an edit meeting or to the publisher. If the editor’s pitch is good, the suits in accounting ask for comparable titles that they can use to gauge how popular the thing could be.   Then they come up with an estimated profit/loss report based on the success of those comparable titles. That P and L will tell them how much they can afford to spend on acquiring the book…the guaranteed advance.

So you want to put huge bestsellers into the mind of the editor so that when they’re asked what books are comparable, they spit out the big titles that you’ve already planted in their heads.

What you’re saying by using Hill, Ogilvy and Feynman without having to actually say it is that your project is going to be huge and that they better be prepared to write a big check to get the privilege to publish it.

All they have to do is look at the sales figures of Think and Grow Rich, Confessions of an Advertising Man and Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman and they’ll understand how big your book could be. What’s great about using these names is that you’ll be able to position the book as a bestseller without having to actually say something stupid like “this is going to be a huge bestseller!”

Don’t be a huckster. No need. Just be prepared to feed them what they’ll need to do your job for you.

If challenged by the powers that be in-house, your editors will be able to throw out that one pithy “three geniuses locked in a bunker” sentence and get their bosses to understand your project’s potential.

Get it?

Bennett does.

Just as she’s about to leave Janklow’s office, though, she brings up that one last thing that Gladwell told her about at the end of the previous evening’s Tipping Point strategy phone call.

“Bill Phillips at Little Brown called Malcolm Gladwell after he read The Tipping Point in The New Yorker and said he loved it. I’m going to add him to the submission list, but I’m curious about how to handle it.”

Janklow smiles.

“Simple. An agent grooms editors who register unsolicited interest in her clients as stalking horses. Bill Phillips is editor-in-chief of Little Brown, with scores of bestsellers in his career. It would be a good idea to make him your first call…”

Bennett is confused again.

“Sit back down Kid.”

The Artist’s Journey, #17

The first stages of my own artist’s journey were lived out in a town called Carmel Valley, California. Carmel Valley is not far from Big Sur. The presence of Henry Miller was vivid there. I had friends who knew him (I never did myself). People told stories about him. He was in the air in that part of the state, as was John Steinbeck a few miles north, who came from and wrote often about Salinas and Monterey and Cannery Row. I’ve quoted Henry Miller three or four times in The Artist’s Journey because nobody I’ve ever read articulates so well that crazy passage from the real-life “hero’s journey” to the inside-your-own-head “artist’s journey.” I used to copy passages out of Tropic of Capricorn by hand, just to brand Henry Miller’s stuff into my brain. His books are not as popular today. They should be. They’re bibles for all of us on that same journey. Here are links to previous posts in this serialization, in case you missed them and want to go back: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11. Part 12. Part 13. Part 14.  And Part 15. And Part 16.

83. THE ARTIST BELIEVES IN A DIFFERENT REALITY

Did you ever see the Meg Ryan-Nicholas Cage movie, City of Angels?

In City of Angels (screenplay by Dana Stevens based on the film Wings of Desire, screenplay by Wim Wenders and Peter Handke), human characters go about their lives, oblivious of the cohort of angels—all handsome, male and female, dressed in stylish, duster-length coats—who attend upon them and are present about them at all times, often standing invisibly directly at their shoulders.

That’s my world.

That’s what I see.

Everything I do is based upon that reality.

84. THE ARTIST GROUNDS HERSELF IN A DIFFERENT REALITY

When an individual “gets saved” (or when an alcoholic or addict makes the decision to get sober), the ground of her being shifts.

Her psychic core relocates.

Her identity no longer centers itself in her ego. It packs up and moves to a different quadrant of her psyche.

For the artist, that level is the unconscious, the Jungian “Self,” the Muse, the superconscious. Henry Miller again:

I didn’t dare to think of anything then except the “facts.” To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn’t become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual. You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self. You have to get beyond pity in order to feel from the very roots of your being.

 

85. THE ARTIST SHUTTLES BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN REALITIES

Have you ever observed your mind as you write or paint or compose?

I’ve watched mine. Here’s what I see:

I see my awareness (another phrase might be “platform of effort”) shuttle back and forth, like the subway between Times Square and Grand Central Terminal, from my conscious mind to my unconscious, my superconscious.

The Stargate image is very close to what it feels like. Sometimes I stick just my hand through, sometimes my whole arm. Most of the time my whole body goes through.

The process is to me one of those everyday miracles, simultaneously mindbending in its implications and common as dirt. Like the act of giving birth, it is at the same time miraculous and everyday.

Another image I like is of a child sitting beside a shallow stream. You, the artist, are the child. The words you will write, the pictures you will paint, the photos you will take … those are the bright, pretty pebbles sitting right there before you at the bottom of the stream. You reach down, through the surface of the water (you can’t see exactly what the pebbles look like because of the refraction of the light), and you pull up a handful.

The stream bottom is one reality.

Sunlight and air is the other.

One is mysterious, the other matter of fact.

One requires faith, the other reason.

We plunge our hand through the surface, not sure what we’ll find.

We pull our hand back and examine what we’ve got. Good? Bad? Worth keeping? To be put where? Utilized how?

In a four-hour working day, the writer shuttles between realities a thousand times, two thousand, ten thousand. So does the choreographer, the editor, the software writer.

This shuttling is her primary skill.

It’s her bread and butter.

It’s what she does.