Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 8

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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Just Write the Damn Thing #3

There’s another reason why plunging in can help us more than outlining or doing a treatment or engaging in some other prep action.

Happy surprises.

I’m sure you’ve found, like me, that sometimes great stuff pops out in the middle (and particularly at the very end) of a scene, when we actually write it.

Stuff that never would have materialized if we were just blocking out the scene in outline or rough draft form.

There’s a big difference between the first hour of work and the third hour.

My theory is that we get tired by Hour Three. The goddess likes that. Our ego starts to poop out. Doors open in our mind. 

The Muse likes to slip through those doors.

But we don’t get to that place ten minutes or a hundred minutes after we dive into the pool. It takes a bunch of laps back and forth before the left brain wears out and the right brain kicks in.

Just write the damn thing!

Kristof Milak of Hungary in the 200-meter butterfly at the 2020 Summer OlympicsThe post Just Write the Damn Thing #3 first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

The Writer’s Voice

How do you find your writer’s voice? A lot of humbug has been written on this subject. The myth is that in finding that voice, the writer achieves a kind of personal enlightenment. She discovers “who she really is.”

Not in my experience.

This is not to say that voice is unimportant. It’s crucial, make-or-break. Without it, we’ve got nothing. Let’s examine this.

Movies versus books

The reason why books are often hard to translate into movies is that the very act of moviemaking destroys the writer’s voice. Maybe what was great about the book, what you loved about it, was that voice. Hemingway’s voice. Philip Roth’s voice. Joyce Carol Oates’ voice.

By definition, when you make a movie of a book, you lose the writer’s voice. We’re no longer reading the writer’s words on paper and hearing them in our head, we’re looking at images on film. It’s a whole different vocabulary. The filmmaker can try using a voiceover, but that rarely succeeds. The one act that does work is when the director’s voice is as strong as the writer’s, as Richard Mulligan’s was with To Kill a Mockingbird, in which his filmic voice equaled or even surpassed Harper Lee’s voice as the novelist.

But usually what happens is you lose the writer’s voice.

The role of voice

The writer’s voice casts a spell. The right voice makes the work accessible; it gives us the tone and point of view that best illuminate the material and make it shine. The magic of Hemingway’s prose is that it describes events the way the human eye sees them. He taught himself this technique as a journalist and he used it very consciously and deliberately.

[I] went to the door. It was Brett. Behind her was the count.

Hemingway’s technique creates the illusion of seeing. He designed it that way. The way the human eye works. That voice also carries an undertone of despair, of willfully fabricated detachment and objectivity. It gives us Jake Barnes, the narrator, and through his specific pain, the Lost Generation’s desolation. The genius of that voice is that it creates its effect using only words on paper. As soon as we make a movie of Hemingway’s stuff, the camera destroys that. It can’t help it. What was brilliant when it was painted using only words becomes ordinary when it’s filmed by a camera.

That’s why Hemingway’s books rarely work as films. What’s left is characters and story. Excellent as those may be, what made them great was the voice.

What is the writer’s voice?

The critical fact to remember is that the writer’s voice is artificial. It’s an act of artifice, crafted by the professional to achieve a specific effect in a work of the imagination. It’s not the “real” writer’s voice and if you try to find your own, you’ll drive yourself crazy. Because “you” don’t really exist. I don’t either, no matter how convincingly anybody tells us that we do or how much we choose to believe it. But that’s a subject for another chapter.

The writer’s voice (or director’s, choreographer’s, photographer’s, entrepreneur’s) arises from the material itself and acts in service to that material. It can, and often does, change from book to book, dance to dance, album to album, business venture to business venture.

This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come for lunch. I know what this means. Since I go there every Sunday for dinner and today is Wednesday, it can only mean one thing: she wants to have one of her serious talks.

That’s Walker Percy, the opening lines of The Moviegoer.

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.

Hemingway again, from The Sun Also Rises. To me, both are pitch-perfect: character, vocabulary, tone of voice. And, perhaps not coincidentally, both are unfilmable.

How do you find your writer’s voice?

Alas, the finding is a mystery. Sometimes the voice pops into your head without effort, a gift of the Muse. Other times you have to pound your skull into the wall for months. Sometimes it never comes at all.

My great old friend Robert Bidner once showed me his painter’s studio in his brownstone in Brooklyn. It was huge room with canvases in progress all over the place. Then he took me to a corner in back. A sheaf of paintings stood propped against the wall, one in front of the other. “These are my clinkers.” Some were half done, others 90%. Bob just couldn’t lick ’em. Couldn’t find the voice. I asked him how he felt about these. Was there hope of resurrecting them someday, making them work thanks to some future inspiration?

“It almost never happens,” he said. “They’re just clinkers.”

How Johnny Depp did it

The coolest instance I’ve heard of an artist finding a voice (it’s so good, I pray it’s not apocryphal) is of Johnny Depp preparing for Pirates of the Caribbean. He tried this, he tried that; nothing worked; he couldn’t find his way into his character. Then one day he had a flash of Keith Richard. Presto: Captain Jack Sparrow!

To me the trick is getting your own ego out of the way. What voice does the material want? Find that. You the writer are not there to impose “your” voice on the material. Your job is to surrender to the material–and allow it to tell you what voice it wants in order to tell itself.

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Finishing

Yesterday I finished a book I’ve been working on for two and a half years—a sequel to A Man at Arms (2021). I sent the manuscript off to my agent and to some friends who have a movie option on the previous book.

At the same time, I’m watching the Masters golf championship on TV (it’s Sunday about noon as I’m writing this.)

Magnolia Lane at the Masters

When the Masters finishes a few hours from now, there’ll be a hard number on the leaderboard. Someone will have shot the lowest score. That player will have “won.” There’ll be applause and emotion and a big, big check. The victory will change the player’s life.

That’s not how it works for you and me as writers and artists. Our work doesn’t produce a number. It can’t be judged objectively.

Our leaderboard is inside our own head. We and we alone determine how we played the game.

Was the project worthy of us? Was it ours alone, in the sense that we were writing from our own gift … and in the face of our own fears? Did we live up to the goddess’s expectations of us? Did we live up to our own? Did we give it all we had?

There are no spotlights in the writer’s life. There’s no moment of acclamation as we tap in a putt on the 72nd green. Our moment is private. When I wrap a book, a lot of times I won’t even tell anybody.

This is self-evaluation. Self-reinforcement. Self-validation. 

Some of the players at Augusta didn’t make the cut. Others performed below their expectations of themselves. They will do, tonight and tomorrow, exactly what you and I do. In the private precincts of their own hearts, they’ll ask themselves the same questions we ask ourselves. 

Did I give it my all? Did I play my own game? Was I true to my love of the sport?

They will self-evaluate. They will self-reinforce. They will self-validate. 

Then they’ll get ready for next week. They’ll re-set their intentions, knowing that this is the life they have chosen and they would not have it any other way. They’ll reinforce their own gratitude that they get the chance to play the game. “Start the next one today,” my old friend and mentor Paul Rink once told me.

I have. I’m about sixty pages into the next book. I won’t judge this latest one any longer. I release it.

“Start the next one today.”

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“SIT CHILLY”

Before 1972, women were not allowed to compete in U.S. Polo Assn. games. Sue Sally Hale didn’t go for that.

She played fearlessly and brilliantly for twenty years—disguised as a man. Sue Sally died in 2003 at age 65. Her obituary in the L.A. Times told how she “passed as a boy…”

… by tucking her ash-colored hair under a helmet, flattening her breasts with tape and wearing loose-fitting men’s shirts. She also wore a mustache, concocted with the help of makeup artists who were friends of her stepfather. She entered under the name A. Jones.

In her later years, Sue Sally taught riding and dressage at her Carmel Valley Polo Club in Northern California. 

Sue Sally sitting chilly

Sue Sally instructed her jumping students, particularly when they found themselves in such scary moments as hurtling toward a six-foot fence at the full gallop:

“Sit chilly.”

The “sit” part was particularly important (I pass this on from my friend Daphne Raitt who trained for years with Sue Sally) because the horse reads everything from the rider’s “seat.” If the man or woman in the saddle is scared, the horse knows it just from the feel of the rider on its back. The animal may balk at the jump if it feels fear from its rider.

“Chilly” speaks for itself.

Sue Sally’s axiom applies to you and me as writers or artists or athletes or entrepreneurs.

Resistance, remember, is experienced by us as fear. We’re afraid to start, afraid to keep going, afraid to finish, afraid to excel, afraid to expose ourselves to judgment.

Even in our practice, we’re afraid.

So, Sue Sally would tell us, “Sit” … meaning don’t let the horse beneath us, i.e. ourselves, feel our fear. 

And “sit chilly,” that is, remain cool and composed, despite our fear.

And don’t forget to tuck our hair up under our helmet.

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