Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 82

“You Broke My Heart, Fredo”

One of my favorite books on writing is Writing the Blockbuster Novel by Albert Zuckerman. Zuckerman is an agent, a writer, a teacher of writing. He has represented Ken Follett, Stephen Hawking, many others.
Zuckerman advocates a principle that I’ve used myself many times because it always works.
When one character kills another, and they are strangers
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David Carr, Neil Young and the 7 Year Old

This afternoon I drove through the Santa Cruz Mountains with David Carr and Neil Young, on the way to Neil’s Broken Arrow ranch.
I’ve been mining David’s columns and this one is a favorite. I like how he molded words to animate stories and convey thoughts — and have felt them tugging at me these past
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Killer Scenes and Self-Doubt

We’ve been talking for the past few weeks about Killer Scenes—and how a writer can start with a single scene, or even a couple of lines of text, and build out from that the entire global work.
Specifically I’ve been talking about my own book, The Virtues of War, and how it evolved from two sentences
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Too Old For Heroes

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Like you, every Wednesday morning, with my first cup of coffee in hand, I sit down and read Steve’s WRITING WEDNESDAY posts.
His recent series on “killer scenes” and the ways in which he constructs his work have been off the charts for me.  Here’s what I love about
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Killer Scenes, Part Four

In last week’s post we were examining the idea that from a single modest fragment—a scene, or even a couple of lines of text—we as writers can extrapolate a big bite of the global work. Let’s keep biting.
Here, to refresh our memories, are the two lines that popped into my head one day about ten
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iCrazy Interrupted

(This first ran August 10, 2012. It’s making a repeat appearance this week as a reminder to unplug and clear the head while clearing the snow on the ground.)
The headline stared out from the magazine rack in the check-out line. Beyond the guess-which-celebrity-has-the-worst-beach-body headlines was:
iCrazy
Panic. Depression. Psychosis.
How Connection Addiction Is Rewiring Our Brains
It was splashed
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Killer Scenes, Part Three

I start this post with an apology. In it I’m gonna cite something from my own work. I hate it when writers do that. “Use Tolstoy, man, or Shakespeare! We want something good.”
But I gotta do it because in this instance I don’t have to speculate as to what the writer was thinking: I actually
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The Story Bell Curve

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If you were to somehow plot all of the Stories that have ever been told, what would it look like?
Here’s what I think:
It would look a lot like other natural phenomena such as the distribution of height in human beings, or blood type or women’s shoe sizes. The
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Killer Scenes, Part Two

Have you ever come up with a killer scene—and nothing else? You find yourself with two or three minutes of incredible action, conflict, dialogue, but you have no idea where it goes or what the rest of book or movie might be. Arrrrgggh. Whaddaya do in a case like that?

I’m a believer that scenes are
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Do It

This past week, the Crazy Train rolled through, packed with reports about Harper Lee and another book.
Had the media storm that followed been an actual snow storm, it would have been the first this season to have been predicted with 100% accuracy.
As Winston Churchill put it, “A lie gets halfway around the world before Truth
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