Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 79

Contracts and the Art Driveway Grading

I’m married to a numbers guy who taught me the art involved with math and business. Before him, I ran from numbers.
This afternoon, I spoke with a guy who said there’s an art to grading a driveway. Thinking back to what my husband taught me about numbers, I don’t doubt the art of the driveway
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Atticus Finch 2.0

One of the hardest things for a writer to do is to take criticism. Notes. That dreaded memo from your editor that says, “Back to Square One, baby.”
So I must give major, major plaudits to Harper Lee for what she did (according to the stories we’re all reading in the Times and elsewhere) after turning
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A One Page Story Bible

[Join www.storygrid.com to read more of Shawn’s Stuff]
The subject of today’s post comes from dedicated SP.com commenter and Story Nerd, David Kaufmann.
For those of you who’d like to suggest topics for my posts for What it Takes, feel free to email me at Shawn at Storygrid.com.  I can’t promise that I’ll be able to answer
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Making A Scene Cut Two Ways

I once did a rewrite on a porn flick. The producer wanted to impart a couple of guidelines before I began. We met for breakfast at a coffee shop in Santa Monica. What he told me has proved incredibly useful over the years—in all kinds of writing, including the most literary.
“Every skin flick makes the
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What Kind of Pitcher Are You?

I’ve spent the past week thinking about a comment Steve made in an interview and a comment my son’s baseball coach made during a practice.
At the 20 minute mark in the interview, August Cole asked Steve what happens when he doesn’t do the work. Steve replied:
“I get symptoms . . . I’ll start to get in
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The Writer’s Skill

The artist’s world is mental.
The sculptor may manipulate clay, the software writer may work with code, but, like the filmmaker and the mystic, their real tools are Shadows and Light.
The sphere of the artist is the mind.
Her currency is imagination.
She asks (how can she not?), “Where do ideas come from?”
Did Rhapsody in Blue come to
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How NOT to Tell a Story

[Join www.storygrid.com to read more of Shawn’s Stuff]
A full page advertisement on Page 7 of the Sunday June 21, 2015 edition of The New York Times—in the main news section a full page requires 126 column inches at a retail price of $1,230 per inch ($154,980)—ran as follows:
Dear Food Leaders,
I’ve had lots of successful folks
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When Resistance Pays You a Compliment

My friend Roda is on the cusp of finishing her second novel. We were having breakfast the other day and she was telling me she was absolutely overwhelmed by Resistance. “I know the dragon gets stronger the closer you are to the finish line … but wow, this is really more than I can handle.
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The Lion’s Gate Book Giveaways After-Action Report

Over the past month we’ve run a few giveaways. The following is some of what we’ve observed along the way.
200 Copy Giveaway
June 3, Steve announced a 200 copy giveaway of The Lion’s Gate, just as the paperback edition was being released.
The announcement ran at the top of his post “A Tale of Two Covers.”
A link
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Files I Work With, #5

I did some posts a few weeks ago about the five files I keep on my screen while I’m writing. I posted four but somehow spaced out doing the fifth. My apologies (and thanks to Peter Brockwell for reminding me). Here it is now:

I call this fifth file CULLS.
Have you ever seen an inspection station
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