Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 83

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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The First Page

There’s a terrific book that I often recommend to young writers—The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman. Mr. Lukeman is a long-time agent, editor, and publisher. The thrust of his counsel is this:
Most agents and editors make up their minds about submissions within the first five pages. If they spot a single amateur mistake (excess
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Art and Polarity

[I’ve been with Steve and Jeff all week working on a whole bunch of stuff for our upcoming release of THE STORY GRID.  So here’s a post I wrote back in 2013 that speaks to a crucial role of the Artist—Judge.  To read more of Shawn’s stuff subscribe to www.storygrid.com]
The other day I overhead this
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Killer Scenes

Paul Schrader is the much-honored director and screenwriter (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, many others) and, for me, a major role model for many years. Here’s what he said in an interview once on the subject of pitching a film idea:
Have a strong early scene, preferably the opening, a clear but simple spine to the story,
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