Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 95

Going Long-View, Angel’s Share Bourbon Instead of Magic-Bullet Plastic

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.

—The Graduate

Magic-Bullet Plastic

For The Graduate’s Mr. McGuire, “plastics” was it—that sure-fire, magic-bullet road to riches. A couple of decades later, he might have said “home health care”—and today’s young Benjamin
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How I Get Ideas

Herewith, ten idiosyncratic observations on the subject of generating ideas.
1. Ideas seem to come by themselves, unbidden.
In certain careers that I’ve spent time in—advertising and the movie business, for example—I’ve labored under conditions where you have to produce on demand. It’s hard. It’s do-able, but it’s never really worked for me. I can’t press. It’s
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Telling Friends You Don’t Work for Free

Cindy Lou asks a question that we’ve all had to figure out over the years.
How do you get your friends to understand you don’t work for free. Especially during the Holiday’s, friends seem to forget I work for a living.
Listen to our podcast and then read I Will Not Read Your Fucking Screenplay. It’s great.


TRANSCRIPT:
Steve:
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Boiling Frogs

Here’s another chunk from my slowly evolving book, THE STORY GRID: What Good Editors Know, soon to be published by Black Irish Books.
How does one know when a story isn’t working?
That is, if you decided to become a literary agent tomorrow, how could you figure out if a story has a chance to be acquired
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“Give Me One Redeeming Moment”

Did you ever see the movie Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman, directed by Spike Jonze, and starring Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper? If there has ever been a truer or more devastating depiction of the writer’s self-induced hell (including those by Proust or Stephen King), I haven’t seen it.
In the film there is
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Service or Self?

This week on Ask Me Anything we take a question from Sheri Kleintop. She asks …
In your book, The War of Art, the focus is recognizing and facing Resistance head on. Throughout the ages, women such as Gorgo, Jackie Kennedy and women in every household across the globe have (had) an obligation to nurture, serve
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Olympic Character

Jean-Dominique Bauby, Stephen Hawking, Francis Tsai—a journalist,  a theoretical physicist and an artist.
The similarities? Olympic character.
Olympic Character
In his column DNA of Champions, Joel Stein wrote about having his DNA compared with Olympic Gold Medalist Sergei Bubka’s DNA. It wasn’t surprising to read that there are certain genes that are common within Olympic athletes.
However . .
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My First Three Novels

The first one took about two years full-time. I started when I was twenty-four and gave up when I was twenty-six. The price of that one was my bank account, my sanity, my marriage.

The next one, six years later, took about eighteen months full-time. That one I actually finished. Couldn’t find a publisher for it
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Manipulation Versus Inspiration

George Packer delivered his version of the ever-popular “Amazon is destroying book publishing” theme in a recent long form piece in The New Yorker.
A consummate journalist and skilled writer, Packer’s points are compelling and consistent with Brad Stone’s reporting in his book The Everything Store, a book I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.
Here
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How Resistance Proves the Existence of God

Consider James Rhodes, whose April 26, 2013 article in the Guardian UK I stole for last week’s post:
I didn’t play the piano for 10 years. A decade of slow death by greed working in the City, chasing something that never existed in the first place (security, self-worth, Don Draper albeit a few inches shorter and a
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