Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 83

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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Video Didn’t Kill the Radio Star

In the March 1914 edition of Vanity Fair, James L. Ford discussed movies as a menace to stage.
A hundred years later, in the March 2014 edition of Vanity Fair, James Wolcott called “Everyone Back to the Cineplex” (after two years before writing, in the May 2012 issue of Vanity Fair, that “cinema has lost
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Make It Beautiful

My first exposure to contemporary writing and art came in eighth and ninth grade. I can’t remember what books we were assigned in English class (I don’t think we read Catcher in the Rye till tenth grade) but whatever they were, they were dark. The point of view was bleak and despairing.
That’s what I and
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The Power of Negative Thinking

[Join www.storygrid.com to read more of Shawn’s Stuff]
So just how do you take your story to the end of the line…to the limits of human experience?
The storyteller needs a tool to not only understand this concept, but to evaluate whether or not they have successfully done so. And if you’re writing a big story, you
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The David Lean Rule

Today’s post is a follow-up (and closely related) to last week’s “The Clothesline Method.”
David Lean was the two-time Oscar-winning director of Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Doctor Zhivago, among many others. He was a Brit. He died in 1991. I don’t know about you, but if David Lean has something to
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Broken Isn’t The End

This past Wednesday, artist Lucille Clerc tweeted the image below.
It shows three images of a pencil, in three stages of existence: full, broken in half, and resharpened into two pencils of varying lengths, but both with equally powerful points.
A fourth image might have both ends of a previously-broken pencil sharpened — or if the pencil
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The Clothesline Method

I’m just starting a new novel, trying to figure out the shape of the damn thing. Here’s a trick I use that might help you too. I call it the Clothesline Method.
I think of the story as an old-fashioned clothesline, like people used to string up in their back yards to hang the laundry on.
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Willful Ignorance

There’s a wonderful little village that my wife, kids and I visit often.
It has an old wooden windmill at the end of Main Street, right by the water, just above a little beach area.  There’s a perfectly dilapidated but eminently functional Municipal Building in the heart of town that enforces a strict zoning code that
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