A Creative Retreat With Steve

I was fifty-two years old when my first book was published. That’s after thirty years of trying, when I supported myself driving taxis and tractor-trailers, working in the oilfields and as a migrant laborer. I get asked now all the time, “How did you keep going all those years? Why didn’t you quit?”

The answer is in a new three-hour video course called the Silent Writing Retreat. The course went on sale this Wednesday, May 28, and will be available till Thursday, June 5 at 6:00 PM EST.

Here’s the link to learn more and to sign up:

https://silentwritingretreat.com/steven-pressfield/

The actual event took place in Malibu, California on September 7, 2024. It lasted all day with breaks for writing in silence. Every second was recorded on video. It was a day like no other. Everyone had to check their phones at the door, nobody could talk except me. It was all business. No chit-chat.

The substance of the event was simply me alone onstage all day, delivering a distillation of my thirty-year battle with my own Resistance—my compulsion to self-sabotage, my susceptibility to procrastination, perfectionism, self-doubt, fear, etc.

I talk about my mentors—my boss Hugh Reaves at the trucking company in North Carolina, my writer friend Paul Rink in California, and a migrant-fruit picker/former-Marine named John whose last name I never knew—who taught me the lessons you only learn in the University of Hard Knocks. I talk about my C-level career in Hollywood, with its many humiliations but also its manifold lessons in storytelling. And I talk about the lone female who has guided me and stood by me through everything. I’m talking about the goddess, the Muse, who may not be flesh and blood but who is realer than real and without whom none of us could get a single decent word down on paper.

I’ve never done an event like this before, and I’ll probably never do it again. I hope you’ll jump on this opportunity to see and hear me share my fifty years in the trenches, in the hope that it will encourage and inspire all of us to DO OUR WORK and become the person and the artist we were born to be.

[P.S. A VIP feature of this course is the option to book a half-hour one-on-one ZOOM coaching with me. Click this link for more details.]

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