Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 8

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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Sit Without Hope

I had a meditation teacher once who instructed us, her students, to

“Sit without hope, sit without fear.”

At the time, I couldn’t understand what she meant. But today, remembering, I think she was trying to get us to embrace meditation as a practice.

In other words, she wanted us to see meditation as an enterprise that we engaged in without attachment—positive or negative—to an outcome.

Don’t sit because you’re hoping to achieve enlightenment.

Don’t sit because you’re trying to get past your personal pain or grief or remorse.

Don’t sit to heal your emotional wounds.

Don’t sit for peace or love or Cosmic Consciousness.

Just sit.

Likewise, don’t be afraid to go deep. 

Don’t be afraid to let go. 

Don’t be afraid that you’ll go too far or turn a corner into some weird space that you can’t get out of.

Just sit.

This is the goal of a practice in anything. 

“Sit without hope, sit without fear.”

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A Practice Is Not a Means to an End

The idea of a practice is not a particularly Western one.

We Yanks and Euros always want a payoff. If we’re gonna bust our butts writing the next Game of Thrones or inventing the next iPhone, our mantra is “Show me the money!” Or at least the recognition, the fame, the accolades.

Cuba Gooding, Jr. won an Oscar for his performance in “Jerry Maguire”

A practice is not like that.

A practice exists for its own sake. 

A practice is like you and I climbing trees when we were kids. It was play. It was fun. We expected nothing “in return.” If we fell out of that oak or maple and broke our arm, we might have cried because of the pain, but we didn’t complain, did we? We didn’t feel “cheated.” The thought never even occurred to us. 

Can we do that now? Can we enter the studio to dance as well as we possibly can, aiming for the stars … and let that be the reward, with no hopes or expectations beyond that? 

I confess I’ve never fully achieved that mindset. I do want to “succeed.” I do want readers to enjoy and be moved by what I write. But I recognize that impulse as arising from a part of me that’s not the best part, not the part I played from when I was a kid … and not the part I want to work from now. 

A practice is a discipline. It’s not just the work or the art, it’s the state of mind we occupy when we pursue the work or the art.

That’s what makes the idea of a practice great. That’s what makes it worth doing from now till our final breath.

Can we aspire without ego? Can we work like hell and let the work be its own reward? Can we detach our emotions from the outcome of our enterprise … and still pursue that enterprise with all our heart?

This is not an idle question.

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Report From the Trenches, #20

A further update from the front …

I reported a few weeks ago about the experience of massive self-doubt on a new fiction piece I’m just starting. This has been superseded in the past week or two by a period that I’m sure we’re all depressingly familiar with:

When you work hard hard hard every day and see absolutely no progress.

I don’t know if there’s even a name for this. The closest I can think of is John Keats’ “negative capability.”

Whatever it is, it’s a trial that definitely separates the pros from the amateurs. Can we take it? Can we keep slogging?

The place I’ve read most about this phenomenon is in accounts of athletes. The pole vaulter who hits height X but just can’t get past it. The miler whose times refuse to get better, no matter how hard she trains, recuperates, etc.

I’ve read about it in football or basketball, like the famous time when Phil Jackson installed the “triangle offense” with Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls. The team “buys in.” It works and works … and just keeps losing. They can’t get over the hump no matter how many times the coach implores them to “trust the process.”

In other words, this shit is normal.

It IS the process.

What’s weird for me is that I’ve gone through this fifty times on previous projects, but I always FORGET how hard it was. Looking back, I remember struggling a bit … but not like what I’m going through THIS time.

Bottom line: Resistance takes many pernicious and diabolical forms—and this is one of them.

Are we pros? Can we “play hurt?” Alas, there’s no hack or trick for this (or for any of Resistance’s schemes) except to keep muddling through.

Did you ever see the PBS pic, “The Gathering Storm,” starring Albert Finney and Vanessa Redgrave, about Winston Churchill’s wilderness years in the late ’30s before he was called back to His Majesty’s government as First Lord of the Admiralty?

Albert Finney won an Emmy for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in 2002’s “The Gathering Storm.”

Churchill had a motto during those years (at least in the TV pic) he called “K.B.O.”

CHURCHILL
Remember our motto: K.B.O. Keep Buggering On!

If it was good enough for Winston, it’s good enough for me.

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The Opposite of a Practice

Getting back to our series on Having a Practice …

… it may be useful to define several ways of working that are NOT a practice.

When we embark on a single, one-shot enterprise, hoping that the endeavor will succeed so brilliantly that we can cash in and say we’ve “made it” … that’s NOT a practice.When we finish our album or launch our startup and wait breathlessly to see if we’ve got a hit, that’s NOT a practice.When we invest ourselves emotionally in the outcome of any project, from a Spartan race to a one-act play to the launch of our new high-protein, low-fat, non-GMO energy beverage, that is NOT a practice.

In other words, when our motivation is grounded in our ego, we do not have a practice. 

Or to flip that statement on its head, the aim of a practice is effacement of the ego.

When Miss Craske told my friend David and his fellow Metropolitan Opera ballet students (see Writing Wednesdays, January 24 of this year) “Leave your problems outside,” she was saying:

This class is a practice. When you step inside this studio to dance, leave behind your fear, your competitiveness with others, your anger, your worry, your grudges, your complaints, your dissatisfaction with your lot, your greed for glory, your avarice for attention.

You are here to dance as well as you can. Leave your ego and your problems outside. 

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“THE DAILY PRESSFIELD” RIDES AGAIN!

The next (and last) 1000 First Editions finally arrived from the printers.

If you missed the first batch two months ago, please click below for 

Signed First Edition in mailer pack, or…Special Edition Gift Pack with companion journal, Vic Juhasz illustration note cards, fridge magnets and other goodies. A great gift for any writer or artist.

And thanks again to everyone who made the first batch a sell-out!

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Report from the Trenches, #19

Following up on our Poll and its responses from the past two weeks, I’m thinking it might be helpful for me to share my own process and the craziness inside my head right now. Here goes:

The Daily Pressfield is out now, but that was completed (for the writing part, not the promotion) almost two years ago. Since then I’ve been working on—and just finished—a follow-up to A Man at Arms that came out in 2021. I’m really happy with this new one, but as far as my mental health is concerned, that job is over. 

What’s next?

I’ve got two others, both nonfiction, that are at various half-assed points of completion. I have faith in both, but neither one is really catching fire for me right now.

So I’ve started another fiction piece. I’m racked with self-doubt over it. Big, big Resistance. The voice in my head is telling me the idea is really dumb (which it may be) and for sure not commercial. The voice is telling me the idea is totally out of the areas I’ve been writing in (which it is) so that no reader who likes my stuff is going to want to follow me into this totally new area.

And the idea is lightweight. It’s not big or bold or ambitious (though already it’s really hard). The voice is telling me I’ve run out of big ideas. I’m over the hill. It’s time to move to the farm. 

Worse, I think, of this new idea, “How could I possibly sell or promote this?” I have no answer for that either.

Notice please that I’m not offering even the tiniest clue in this post as to what this idea is about. That’s because I’m superstitious. It’s been my practice for years when I start a new project to give the file a name that’s NOT the name of the real book. Why? Because the devil might be watching and I don’t want him to be able to find the file and screw it up.

Ming the Merciless. If only our adversaries were this clear and obvious.

Why am I offering this report from the trenches? I’m not sure myself. I think maybe to encourage all of us reading this with the notion that the process of writing is nuts … and we all go through these ordeals of massive self-doubt and self-sabotage.

Bottom line for me: I’m not stopping. I take the voice in my head as pure Resistance and I draw strength from it, reckoning that Big Resistance = Big Dream. And even though I don’t see how this new project is going to work or possibly appeal to anybody, I know I have to keep going AS IF I WERE CERTAIN that it will or that, even if it doesn’t, it’s important FOR ME in whatever journey I’m on, even though I have no idea what that journey might be or where it’s headed, if it’s headed anywhere at all.

Shit like this is why writers and artists flame out or fall off the path. These are the crazy (and I DO mean crazy) obstacles and shape-shifting fake-outs our work makes us face. There’s not even a name for them. They’re the totally glamourless, quotidian, uncinematic, pain-in-the-ass, solitary-to-us ordeals that nobody but us knows about and even we think we’re crazy when we find ourselves coming up against them.

The pro, I’m telling myself, keeps going even when no progress is visible. Even when her time in the hundred is going up and not down, even when there’s not a part of her body that isn’t hurt and aching. The amateur lets these dark patches discourage her and break her will. The pro shuts up and keeps going.

That’s what I’m telling myself now.

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