Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 80

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

[Join www.storygrid.com to read more of Shawn’s Stuff]
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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Files I Work With, Part 2

We were talking a couple of weeks ago about my own idiosyncratic way of using the principles detailed in Shawn’s new book, THE STORY GRID. Specifically I mentioned five files that keep on my screen from Draft #2 onward.
1. The actual working file.
2. Conventions of the Genre.
3. Scene by Scene.
4. MissingMissingMissing.
5. Culls.
The post from two
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Deep Sixing Permission

How much time do you spend at the beach?
a)    Five Minutes
b)   One Hour
c)    One Day
The question above was on a test my first grader took last week. She came home, saying that she would have picked “one hour” because she doesn’t like the beach, but that her teacher had “gone over this one a bunch
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A Day or Two in the Life

(The Story Grid deal ends at Midnight tonight!)
[Join www.storygrid.com to read more of Shawn’s Stuff]
Years ago I was in a slump.  The big “R” of Resistance had gotten the best of me and I just didn’t have the energy to dive into another editing or writing project.  The thing that got me out of it
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Making It Publishable

What makes a book ready for Prime Time? What takes our manuscript from “almost but not quite” to “Wow, get this one under contract TODAY!”

In one word: editing.
It’s the editor, not the writer, who whips the book into shape. It’s the editor who identifies what’s working and what’s not working—and helps the writer bring it
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Protect Yourself: The Contract

Working without a contract is like walking a tightrope without a net. Doable, but risky—with the potential to do real harm if you slip (depending on the height at which you’re walking and the conditions awaiting below).
Working with a contract you don’t understand is just as risky. There’s an ever-growing list of bankrupt artists with
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Files I Work With

A week from now is the official launch of Shawn’s terrific and much-anticipated new book, The Story Grid. I’m gonna use today’s post to describe one way that I employ Shawn’s principles when I work.
Right now I’m on the sixth draft of a fiction project. (In other words, NOT the first draft, which goes by
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Readers First

[Join www.storygrid.com to read more of Shawn’s Stuff]
Here’s something I think is true.
It’s a riff on my 10,000-reader rule, which I think is the magic number of readers per title a publisher must reach before she can be satisfied that she’d done all that she could.  After exposing 10,000 interested people to a book, she’ll
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