Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 80

The Editorial Macro and Micro

[Join www.storygrid.com to read more of Shawn’s Stuff]
You’ve heard this story before.
A group of concerned citizens from a small town in Eastern India travel far and wide to meet with Siddhartha Gautama, the supreme Capo di tutti capi Buddha of them all.
The Buddha graciously grants them an audience.
The spokesman for the group explains to
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Truth, Truth, Truth, Fiction

Almost any story, if it’s gonna have real power in the climax, needs a blockbuster bang or invention—something that nobody’s seen before or, if they have seen it, something they’ve never seen done in this unique way. Often this bang is contrived and pushes the bounds of believability. Can a sperm whale really ram and
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Avoid the Most Obvious

About ten years ago I worked on a documentary that was screened at military bases and indie theaters in non-military base markets.
The film followed a group of soldiers in Iraq and the thinking at the time was that the military market would come out in hordes to see it.
Not the case.
The film did best at
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A Tale of Two Covers

[We and Penguin Books will be giving away 200 free copies of The Lion's Gate paperback, ahead of a Google Hangout with me and August Cole, co-author of Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War and director of the Atlantic Council’s Art of Future Warfare project. On June 25 at 3pm ET we
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Patience and Faith

[Join www.storygrid.com to read more of Shawn’s Stuff]
The other day, Loren Kleinman at IndieReader sent me a bunch of questions about The Story Grid and about Steve and my publishing philosophy at Black Irish Books.What’s surprising about doing interviews is that the most fundamental and well-worded questions can make you reconsider exactly
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Hardbacks vs. Paperbacks

Paperbacks and hardbacks: this is an area, I confess, that I’ve been absolutely clueless about.
You write a book. It gets published. The hardcover comes out. Then a year later comes the paperback. The paperback always has a different cover. If the hardback had a classy cover, the paperback usually has a slightly-less-classy cover. But maybe
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Ranger Up Leads the Way

[This post ran last November. This week, Ranger Up helped share a special giveaway of The Return, a Black Irish Books title by David Danelo.  We just wanted to thank the Ranger Up team for sharing The Return — and Nick Palmisciano for sharing Ranger Up's backstory. Working with Ranger Up is always a reminder of what can be
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Files I Work With, #4

Writers are always obsessing about “narrative drive.” We know what it means. It’s the propulsive, page-turning momentum that we all hope to generate in our readers.
But how do we create narrative drive?
A priest, a rabbi, and an alligator walk into a bar …
That’s narrative drive.
There’s no way you and I are not gonna stick around
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Files I Work With, #3

We’ve been talking over the past couple of weeks about the five files I have on-screen when I’m working on any project—fiction or non-fiction—and how the use of these files dovetails with the principles Shawn puts forward in his new book, The Story Grid. The files are my idiosyncratic way of applying Shawn’s universal principles.
To
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A Black Irish Satsanga

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A brief post today to follow up on Steve and my Hamlet-esque Seminar contemplations…
For those of you who took the time to fill out our survey, we are eternally grateful.  It’s no small thing today to actually think through and constructively ask yourself… What exactly is it that
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