Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 81

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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An Ask Too Far

[The blog is hors de combat this week, as we prep for the launch of Shawn's wonderful new book, THE STORY GRID, coming in a couple of weeks. Here's one of my fave posts from a couple of years ago:]
In the past year or so I’ve become aware of the verb “ask” used as a
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Exile Revisted

Two weeks ago I wrote about Dave Danelo’s book The Return and “Exile,” which is to The Return what “Resistance” is to The War of Art.
Last week, Shawn wrote about the “Groucho Marx Syndrome,” of an author spooked by the possibility of success, of actually achieving what he wanted.
This past week, a friend e-mailed about
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When Truth Doesn’t Work

I’ve been working on a project that has a strong autobiographical component. One thing I’ve discovered is that you can’t tell the literal truth. The truth doesn’t work.
Instead I’ve had to fictionalize wildly. And the weird part is, the more extravagantly I fictionalize, the more like the truth it sounds.
I was born in a crossfire
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