Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 82

The Groucho Marx Syndrome

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A friend of mine is the best literary agent in the business.
She is extremely conscientious, knows her chosen genres better than anyone else, and does that rare thing most agents choose to avoid at all costs.  She not only tells her clients what’s wrong with their stuff, she
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Love in the Time of Resistance

There’s a certain kind of relationship that often seeks out and torments writers and artists. Maybe you’ve had one. Maybe you’ve had more than one.
In this type of love, one of the partners has become aware of her Resistance and is taking active, courageous steps to counter it. She’s writing her novel, she’s initiating her
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The Return

Ernest Hemingway opened his introduction to the anthology Men At War (which he also edited) with:
This book will not tell you how to die. Some cheer-leaders of war can always get out a pamphlet telling the best way to go through that small but necessary business at the end. PM may have published it already
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Second Draft Thoughts

I’m writing this on Friday, March 23, having just read Shawn’s post from today, “The Second Draft (Is Not A Draft),” which I love and which I agree with 100%. I never see what Shawn or Callie write until it appears on the blog. I don’t show ‘em my stuff early either.
Anyway I gotta chip
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The Second Draft (Is Not a Draft)

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Congratulations, you now have a first draft, the raw materials for your Story.
The first draft is what Steve Pressfield calls “covering the canvass.”  It has nothing to do with anyone else but you.  Refrain from talking about your first draft or any particular section or sentence you recall
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The #1 Amateur Mistake

My friend Kate used to work for Bob Dylan. Kate told me that every morning the guard out front would find demo tapes from wannabe folk singers and aspiring rockers affixed to Bob’s gate.
I can understand this. I can visualize the solo dude with a Gibson twelve-string on his back, or the young hard-working band
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The First Draft

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When you are writing a first draft of anything…a novel, a play, a manual, a grocery store list, take the advice of Satchel Paige.
“Don’t look back.”
Don’t read over what you’ve written before when you begin your day’s work.  Don’t fix any sentences.  Don’t stop and go research to
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“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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