Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t: Why That Is And What You Can Do About It

by Steven Pressfield

In the real world, no one is waiting to read what you’ve written. Sight unseen, they hate what you’ve written. Why? Because they might have to actually read it.

The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer must give him something worthy of his gift to you.

1) Nobody wants to read your shit. 2) If you want to write and be recognized, you have to do it yourself.

Like being a lawyer or a journalist or a prostitute, being an ad person teaches you a very specific way of thinking.

All of a sudden I understood why I was so moody, neurotic, simultaneously paranoid and megalomaniac, mistrustful, uneasy, driven by ambition but paralyzed by guilt about my ambition, horny, obsessive, compulsive, obsessive-compulsive, not to mention shy, withdrawn, and dandruff-ridden. I was creative.

“Kid, it ain’t stealing if you put a spin on it.”

I was in the paper bag of my own insanity and I was trying to write my way out.

A real writer (or artist or entrepreneur) has something to give. She has lived enough and suffered enough and thought deeply enough about her experience to be able to process it into something that is of value to others, even if only as entertainment.

If your Climax is not embedded in your Inciting Incident, you don’t have an Inciting Incident.

You take jobs because you’re broke that you would never take if you had any pride or self-respect or cash. I did a rewrite once on an all-time sleazeball porn flick. I lost a girlfriend over it. But I learned more in four days than in a semester at the Yale Drama School.

“We can’t remember what you said at the beginning, we were confused by what you said in the middle, and by the end we were all sound asleep.”

I have paid my dues. I have earned my wings. Maybe I’m not a great writer or even a good one, but I am a writer.