Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 93

The Victim, the Perpetrator and the Rescuer

As we all know, there is no story without conflict. There is no beat to a scene, no scene, no sequence, no act and no global story without a dump truck full of conflict.
But diving into our vast personal experiences of conflict is not exactly the first pool of creative energy any of us wants
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The Book I’ve Been Avoiding My Whole Life

I never talk about a book while I’m working on it. It’s bad luck. The Muse doesn’t like it.
That’s why, although I’ve been working for the past three years on a project that’s been all-consuming for me, I haven’t offered a peep on this blog.
But now the book is done. It’s in production; the first
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Did You Like It Or So Many Other Things’d It?

I didn’t like Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them when I first read it, yet some five years later, his short stories still drift into my head.
They arrive with Sadness and Inspiration and, in their wake, leave me struggling with the reality of the fiction.
I didn’t like Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of
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Living in Beirut

I’m reading a really interesting book by three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Thomas Friedman called From Beirut to Jerusalem. It’s not a recent book; it’s from 1989 (it won the National Book Award that year). It’s about Mr. Friedman’s early years as a correspondent in the Middle East.
Beirut in the 80s was the Hobbesian Wild West. There
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Home/Work

I face this conundrum a lot and I’ve had the good fortune to work with the expert on Resistance to ask for help. Here it is:
“How do you know when the voice in your head has been hijacked by Resistance? That you’re essentially acting on advice from a force out to distract and keep you
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Keep gnawing

People sometimes ask me, “Don’t you feel guilty encouraging individuals to pursue their artistic dreams when the odds against success are so overwhelming?”

My answer is that that’s the wrong question to ask.
Yes, the odds-against are formidable. You and I are probably not going to win an Oscar or a Pulitzer. Our start-up is not going
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Our Morning Routines

This Mondays’s Ask Me Anything concludes our “How to Organize a Day, How to Organize a Year” podcast. Thanks to our First Look Access friends for the questions.
Cate Emond asks …
I recently quit my boring office job in order to pursue my writing and other creative projects full-time. I’ve been reading a lot of blogs
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Focus on the Experience

Films aren’t created to keep theaters in business any more than books are written to keep brick-and-mortar stores operating. However . . . Past practices of some theaters and stores run in the opposite direction.
A recent example comes via the release of the film Veronica Mars, which was released in theaters and via video on demand
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Resistance is not us

There are concepts that are so obvious that it’s almost impossible for us to grasp them. This is one of them.
What I mean by “so obvious” is, someone says something to us and we think, “Of course. Sure. I know that.”
Then the concept blows right past us. It’s out the window and gone, and we’re
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It’s Not Always Fun

This week on Ask Me Anything we take a question from Scott Culley.
Not related to this week’s question, but this is on my mind a lot lately. What do you do when you’re not “having fun” anymore? What do you do when a project has just become so overwhelmingly frustrating that showing up everyday becomes
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