Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 84

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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Write For A Star

Today’s post will be the last in our series featuring lessons learned from a 20-year look-back at The Legend of Bagger Vance. Today is also the final day of our Black Irish Christmas Special. I will stop blabbing about it forever!
Write for a star. That had been a mantra of mine for at least ten
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My Overnight Success

There’s a story about the Oscar-winning actor Walter Matthau. A younger thespian is bemoaning his own struggle in show biz. “Mr. Matthau, I’m just looking for that one big break!”
In the story Matthau laughs. “Kid,” he says. “It’s not the one big break. It’s the fifty big breaks.”
Here’s what I wrote a few weeks ago,
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The Authentic Swing, Part Two

Continuing our examination of the idea that certain stories have conceptual premises. What is a conceptual premise? And how does it work in a dramatic narrative?
[P.S. Don't forget this year's Black Irish Christmas Special, featuring the brand-new, leather-bound, signed and numbered (only 2500 available) 20th Anniversary edition of The Legend of Bagger Vance.]
One fascinating aspect
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