Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 7

How the Artist Finds Herself

The artist and entrepreneur find their authentic selves not by whom they love or hate, or what they believe, or what feats they perform.

“The Persistence of Memory” by Salvador Dali

The artist and the entrepreneur discover themselves by what they create.  They don’t know before they create it.

When they see their work on the page or the screen or rising before them forty stories high in concrete and steel, they say, “That’s me.”

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Learning and Unlearning

The process of finding our own voice is not one of learning, but of unlearning. Not of acquiring baggage but of jettisoning it.

To find our true voice, we de-program ourselves of every convention, identity and belief that has been hammered into our skulls by well-meaning parents, teachers, coaches and counselors; by our families, our religions, our ethnic and regional origins. We hollow ourselves out and refill from scratch.

The appeal of cults or extremist organizations is to this (honorable and sacred) seeking of one’s true self. The cult offers to take away the pain of not-knowing-who-we-are by proffering a ready-to-wear, off-the-shelf alternative.

“Il Duce” Benito Mussolini

This cult-self comes to us complete with new friends (other cult members, possibly even lovers), as well as an entire world-view and cosmology, an approved diet, attire, schedule for the day, month and year. In the cult, we are told whom to love, whom to hate, how to eat, sleep, breathe and even how to die.

The problem is that the self we are being presented with is not our own.

The artist’s journey is the opposite of cultist’s. That’s why when cults like the Nazis or the Fascists take power, among the first groups they exterminate are artists and innovators.

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Story and Understory

One of my favorite scenes in movies of the past few years is the Frozen Park Bench scene in the first of the Jason Bourne movies—The Bourne Identity.

Matt Damon as Jason Bourne in “The Bourne Identity”

To refresh your memory:

It’s early in the story. We’ve met Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) and learned that he is a young man who has lost his memory. He doesn’t know who he is. He’s an American on his own in Europe, specifically Zurich (where Swiss bank accounts are) in the depths of winter.

Jason’s recall may be void at the moment, but he has been able in the film’s early scenes to deduce a few things about who he might be.

First, he knows he is somebody specific. He does have an identity. He just doesn’t know what it is.

He knows something mysterious (and almost certainly nefarious) has happened to him to blot out his memory.

He knows he is part of some ongoing plot or scheme that involves other individuals, possibly allies, more likely enemies. But he doesn’t know who they are or how he fits in with their designs.

Here’s the Park Bench Scene:

It’s night. Outdoors in Zurich. Freezing cold. Jason is in jeans and a threadbare sweater. He stops in a park and lies down on a bench, just trying to survive till morning.

Two Swiss patrol officers appear. They roust Jason roughly, start to handcuff him. Suddenly …

Jason turns into a kung fu master. Chop chop bam bam he hammers both officers with Bruce Lee-like skill, using only his bare hands. He knocks the cops cold.

For a moment Jason stands over his victims, staring at his own hands, amazed at what he has done. Then he dashes away into the night.

This scene, or something like it, is a staple of action novels and movies. It always works. It always plays great.

It hooks the reader/viewer.

It propels the story forward.

Why?

Because implicit in it is a mysterious and exciting understory.

The reader/viewer wants to learn that understory. She can’t help asking of the Jason Bourne character: 

Who is he?How did he acquire these skills? Did somebody train him? Who? For what purpose?Why is he now “rogue?” What happened to him? Why?Are other people after him? Is he being hunted? By whom? For what purpose?Was he on some kind of assignment? Did something go wrong? What?Is he a good guy or a bad guy?

Two of the last four books I’ve worked on have had understories. In both cases the reader enters the narrative (that is, the story begins) at a point when the understories are well advanced. “Something” is going on. The protagonist becomes aware of this, and involved emotionally and dramatically in it, at the same time as the reader. 

Both reader and protagonist are asking, “What’s going on beneath the surface? Hidden forces, secret characters are at work here. Who are they? What do they want? How will their machinations affect our hero? Is he/she in jeopardy from them? Will he/she prevail?”

Ask yourself of the material you’re working on, “Is my story happening in real time only? Or does it have an understory?”

If it does, you’ve got a powerful tool at your disposal to make your novel or screenplay really hum.

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YAEL DAYAN 1939-2024

At 0815 hours on 5 June [1967] we gambled all we had. What for other countries would have been defeat, for us would mean extermination. It was not possible for us to lose the war and survive and each man carried this knowledge in his heart when we moved west.

Yael Dayan wrote Israel Journal: June 1967 in two weeks, in the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War. She wrote it in English. To this day, I would put it in the top fifty books ever written on war.

Yael Dayan

Ms. Dayan was the daughter of Moshe Dayan, who as Army chief of staff and later Minister of Defense, saved the fledgling nation of Israel twice (in the ’56 Sinai Campaign against Egypt and the Six Day War of 1967 against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan), as well as nearly losing everything in the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

Yael’s father, Moshe Dayan

Yael had become something of a celebrity herself, at age twenty-eight, as a novelist and journalist. She was in Athens in June ’67 when Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdul Nasser, sent a thousand tanks and 100,000 men to Israel’s southern border, vowing to wipe out the Jewish state. Ms. Dayan was then a segen mishne, a second lieutenant, in the Israel Defense Forces. She returned at once and was assigned as a correspondent to the armored division under General Arik Sharon (later Prime Minister) on the Egyptian frontier.

Whatever side you may find yourself on in the current Gaza War, I highly recommend Ms. Dayan’s account of her experiences over those fatal next few days. Israel Journal: June 1967 provides the deep context—historical and political—that seems missing in so much of today’s press coverage. It’s a short read, packed with vivid characters and insights. 

I should add that, whatever literary style I myself may possess, I stole wholesale from Yael Dayan.   

Ms. Dayan was a lifelong and passionate supporter of the idea of a Palestinian state. She was the first member of the Knesset to meet with Yasser Arafat. She was much criticized, even vilified, for these acts, which she stood by all her life. Neither stopped her from being a fierce patriot for the state of Israel.

Yael Dayan

I interviewed her in 2012 in her office at the City of Tel Aviv for my own book, The Lion’s Gate. I had read all her stuff and was wildly psyched to get her first-person takes on certain incidents and personalities. But to every one of my questions, she answered, “It’s in my book.” I couldn’t get anything more out of her. Finally I said, “Do I have your permission then to paraphrase from your books as if you had answered in-person in this interview?”

“Go ahead,” she said. “I hope you’ll make the stories better.”

I tried, but I couldn’t top her. She was a great one. Yael Dayan. “We will not see her like again.”

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Missing Missing Missing

I had a boss when I worked in advertising who used to call together the Creative Group (four two-person teams of copywriter and art director) just before he would submit a pitch or proposal to a client.

He would pin the ads and TV storyboards to the wall and ask the group, “What’s missing, missing, missing?”

(I’m not sure why he repeated the word three times. Maybe it was an ad slogan from an earlier era.)

What was interesting was there always WAS something missing. Often, a lot of somethings.

Maybe we’d forgotten a “call to action” in a TV commercial … or we’d failed to justify a claim in a print ad.

But always there was something. When we got it fixed, we’d all go, “Whew! Glad we didn’t send this stuff out the way it was.”

I perform this same drill now … for fiction or nonfiction. 

As I write this, I’m finishing a first draft of a novel. It’s still raw as hell but the basic elements are there (I think.)

Just this week I read it all over, asking myself, “What’s missing, missing, missing?”

Sure enough, there was a lot.

What I’ve found with fiction is what’s usually missing is the Deep Stuff. “What does this all mean?” “What’s the metaphor?” “What’s the theme?”

I ask myself, “What scenes am I missing?” “Am I missing an entire sequence?” “An entire act?”

One exercise that helps every time is I’ll draw a diagram of all the major characters and ask myself, “Does each character have at least one scene with every other character?” Or “Am I missing moments with three or four characters together?”

Maisie Williams as Arya Stark in “Game of Thrones”

One of my favorite scenes (actually four or five together) in Game of Thrones was when Tywin Lannister, the big bad patriarch, took on thirteen-year-old Arya, one of the daughters of his arch-rival family, the Starks, as his personal servant and wine-pourer. Tywin had no idea who Arya was (he thought she was the child of a stonemason) but she knew him … and more than once had a knife in her hand, waiting for the chance to have a go.

This was a great pairing of wildly disparate characters that could easily have never even been thought of by the writers. Did somebody ask, “What’s missing, missing, missing?”

It helps!

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Fellini’s Screenplay

Forgive me if I get this story wrong; it’s probably apocryphal anyway. It’s about the great director Federico Fellini and his screenplay for La Dolce Vita (1960).

The original producer/financier was Dino de Laurentiis. Apparently, Dino put up the money based entirely on Fellini’s genius. He had no idea what the movie was going to be about.

Pre-production began. Dino started getting nervous. Charges were mounting up, the budget was escalating. He asked Fellini if he could see the screenplay, just to get an idea of how expensive the project was going to be. Fellini kept putting him off with one excuse or another. Finally, Dino (I can’t remember how, maybe through a friend other than Fellini) got his hands on the screenplay.

A normal movie script is between 90 and 120 pages. Fellini’s was eight. And it had no words. It was just a collection of sketches and doodles, comprehensible to Fellini and nobody else.

Dino bailed. Fellini had to find other ways of financing the production.

Federico Fellini 1920-1993

A couple of weeks ago, I chanced upon a video interview with Fellini. He wasn’t talking about La Dolce Vita specifically, just his “creative process” as a filmmaker. If you’ve never seen video of Fellini, he’s incredibly charming and funny. But there’s no way to pin him down. He’s like liquid mercury. And he speaks good English with a delightful Italian accent. 

“Why should I know in advance,” he said, “where I am going? If I travel from New York to San Francisco by car, do I want to know that I will meet so-and-so in Topeka and we will do such-and-such? No! That is not life! It is not fun! Yes, I want to know I am going to San Francisco … and maybe that I will stop in St. Louis or Omaha. But I don’t want to know who I will meet or what I will do.”

I just watched La Dolce Vita (for probably the twentieth time) a few nights ago. It is GREAT. From start to finish, it’s deep and charming and visual and poignant, with unforgettable scene after unforgettable scene. The film holds up completely, even after sixty-four years.

So if you’re working on a screenplay and all you’ve got are eight pages of doodles, don’t worry. You may be sitting on a work of genius.

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How Alone Are We?

One of the reasons a community of writers and artists is important, even a virtual one like our Writing Wednesdays, is because each of us is, in our work, essentially ALONE.

Compare the writer/artist to an auto mechanic (or even a brain surgeon). If they get stuck on a problem, they can always call over a master mechanic or a senior surgeon and get advice and counsel.

Jung could always ring up Freud. Einstein could look to Niels Bohr. Even Steven Spielberg could always reach out to George Lucas.

But you and me? We’re orbiting in space with no other stations within a thousand miles.

Nobody’s gonna solve that second-act nightmare but you and me. Is Scene 22B working? How the hell do we get out of the corner we’ve painted ourselves into in the final thirty pages?

There’s a famous (no doubt apocryphal) story about James Joyce and Ezra Pound. Or maybe it was Joyce and Hemingway. Joyce had finished a near-final draft of Finnegan’s Wake. He gave this monster to Hemingway to read and offer advice. The stack of pages was so big that the only place Hemingway could find to hold it was on his staircase. He stacked part of the manuscript on one step and the next two on the next steps. 

He never got around to actually reading it.

Suddenly Joyce phoned. He needed the manuscript back. Hemingway was too embarrassed to admit he hadn’t read it. He grabbed the stacks off the steps but when he put them together into one, he mixed up the sequence.

A week later he ran into Joyce at the cafe. “Thanks so much, Hem! I love the new order you’ve set the chapters in.”

In other words, brothers and sisters, you and I are on our own.

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My Favorite Prompt

First, a quick note re: the June 8 Class/Retreat I wrote about last week. It’s been pushed back to September. Permit issues for the site. Ugh. 

In a couple of ways, this is much better, though. First, it’s a longer run-up for scheduling plane flights and hotels, etc. June 8 was a tight window. But better than that is the weather. “June gloom” is a real thing in Southern California. For an outdoor event, September should be much sunnier and warmer. So …

My apologies for the mistake. I got a little ahead of myself.

A website with full details will be up very soon. I’ll announce it and give the link here.

On a slightly tangential subject, working on the event got me thinking about writing prompts, i.e. the “assignment” you and I might be given if we attended a writing workshop.

Here’s the one I would hope someone gave me:

Write a piece (of any length) about something you know absolutely nothing about.

If you’re a Mom who graduated from Harvard and has never lived anywhere except in an affluent gated community, write a prison story. Write it in the first person as someone of the opposite gender. Make it brutal. When a scene occurs to you that you’re afraid is too “over the top,” take it further.

If you’re a Navy SEAL freshly home from six consecutive combat tours, write a story (also in the first person) as a nine-year-old girl in Victorian England who steps through a magic portal in her grandfather’s garden and enters of world of elves and fairies.

You’re not allowed to do any research, not even ten seconds on Google. Make everything up. When in doubt on anything—say, what a conversation between a butterfly and a worm might be like—write the first thing that pops into your mind … and keep writing that way.

No ruminating. No self-censoring. No correcting of spelling or grammar. 

Write fast. Don’t stop. Don’t think.

Why is this my favorite prompt?

Because when you’re pulling everything out of thin air, you have no time to get bogged down in the ego. You go straight to the Muse.

A truth from my own writing: when I would write actual facts from my real life, readers would say, “Sounds phony to me.” When I completely MADE IT UP—especially about characters and universes I knew nothing about—people would read it and say, “Wow, that was so REAL!”

Don’t write what you know. Write what you DON’T know.

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MY FAVORITE PROMPT

First, a quick note re: the June 8 Class/Retreat I wrote about last week. It’s been pushed back to September. Permit issues for the site. Ugh. 

In a couple of ways, this is much better, though. First, it’s a longer run-up for scheduling plane flights and hotels, etc. June 8 was a tight window. But better than that is the weather. “June gloom” is a real thing in Southern California. For an outdoor event, September should be much sunnier and warmer. So …

My apologies for the mistake. I got a little ahead of myself.

A website with full details will be up very soon. I’ll announce it and give the link here.

On a slightly tangential subject, working on the event got me thinking about writing prompts, i.e. the “assignment” you and I might be given if we attended a writing workshop.

Here’s the one I would hope someone gave me:

Write a piece (of any length) about something you know absolutely nothing about.

If you’re a Mom who graduated from Harvard and has never lived anywhere except in an affluent gated community, write a prison story. Write it in the first person as someone of the opposite gender. Make it brutal. When a scene occurs to you that you’re afraid is too “over the top,” take it further.

If you’re a Navy SEAL freshly home from six consecutive combat tours, write a story (also in the first person) as a nine-year-old girl in Victorian England who steps through a magic portal in her grandfather’s garden and enters of world of elves and fairies.

You’re not allowed to do any research, not even ten seconds on Google. Make everything up. When in doubt on anything—say, what a conversation between a butterfly and a worm might be like—write the first thing that pops into your mind … and keep writing that way.

No ruminating. No self-censoring. No correcting of spelling or grammar. 

Write fast. Don’t stop. Don’t think.

Why is this my favorite prompt?

Because when you’re pulling everything out of thin air, you have no time to get bogged down in the ego. You go straight to the Muse.

A truth from my own writing: when I would write actual facts from my real life, readers would say, “Sounds phony to me.” When I completely MADE IT UP—especially about characters and universes I knew nothing about—people would read it and say, “Wow, that was so REAL!”

Don’t write what you know. Write what you DON’T know.

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A Class With Me

Except one time—in Nashville in 2019—I’ve never taught a live class.

I’m going to now. This post is an “early alert.” We’ll have a website and registration site with all the info up in a few days. For now, here’s the gist:

The event will be a one-day class/retreat, with me and my friend Roda Ahmed.It’ll be on June 8, a Saturday, at the Zuma Orchid Ranch in Malibu, California.It’ll be outdoors in a beautiful location.I’m not sure yet what the cost will be. That’ll be in the website.The event is for writers, artists, and entrepreneurs of all kinds. Roda Ahmed and I will be hosting the event on June 8

The subject matter will NOT be the craft of writing. I won’t be talking about structure or characterization or anything like that. 

The day will be about the mindset that the writer/artist needs to start and finish a project like a novel, a long-form TV script, or a book/album/game/startup … that may take a year or two years … and that will have to be accomplished essentially ALONE, i.e. without an external supporting structure like a school, a corporation, or a community.

In other words: How do you go into a room all by yourself, with just a laptop, and keep working positively and creatively despite all the hell that life and your own fevered brain is going to throw at you?

This will be a serious, hard-core, tough-love day. Don’t sign up if you’re just fiddling around. You’ll be wasting your money. 

Come for real.

More details in the next few days.

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