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

by Steven Pressfield

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

used to sit down at the typewriter with Tropic of Capricorn or The Sun Also Rises open beside me. I would literally copy the books, word for word, paragraph by paragraph. I was trying to experience a real voice, even if it wasn’t my own.

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. A fake writer (or artist or entrepreneur) is just trying to draw attention to himself. The word “fake” may be too unkind. Let’s say “young” or “evolving.”

“Every work can be divided into between eight and twelve major sequences.”

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

Answer (or at least partial answer): each stands for some quality, some aspect of the story’s theme that transcends his narrow significance as an individual.

Indian movies don’t (at least the mainstream ones) but then the Indian Dream is more American even than the American Dream.

1) Who tells the story? Through whose eyes (or from what point of view) do we see the characters and the action? 2) How does he/she tell it? In real time? In memory? In a series of letters? As a voice from beyond the grave? 3) What tone does the narrator employ? Loopy like Mark Watney in The Martian? Wry and knowing like Binx Boiling in The Moviegoer? Elegiac like Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen in Out of Africa?

Does your novel have a concept?

Here we fallback on the lessons of advertising, movies, fiction, and nonfiction. Concept. Theme. Narrative device.

Of all the people you will know in a lifetime, you are the only one you will never leave or lose. To the question of your life, you are the only answer.