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

by Steven Pressfield

What it means is that from a single campaign concept, if it’s strong enough, can come dozens of individual ads and commercials (also known as “executions.”) Each one works as part of the broader concept and each one reinforces the overall theme. How big is your concept?

A concept establishes a frame of reference that is greater than the product itself.

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but paralyzed by guilt about my ambition, horny, obsessive, compulsive, obsessive-compulsive, not to mention shy, withdrawn, and dandruff-ridden.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. All creative people were like that!

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

That’s your job. Sit there and come up with ideas. Sometimes people who have worked in other professions will attempt to make the switch to writing. They struggle at first because they’ve never spent all day living entirely inside their heads.

I learned a lot about having bad ideas, though. When you try too hard, you have bad ideas. When you work mechanically, you have bad ideas. When you follow formula, you have bad ideas. When you’re desperate or panicky, you have bad ideas.

Problems seeking solutions. This is a very powerful way of thinking about the creative process. Implicit in this point of view is the idea that the answer already exists within the question, that the solution is embedded within the problem. If your job is to find that solution, the first step is to define the problem.

Ask not, “What is the solution?” Ask, “What is the problem?” The problem in fiction, from the thrashing writer’s point of view, is almost always, “What is this damn thing about?” In other words, what’s the theme?

When we don’t know the theme, we don’t know the Problem.

WALTER WHITE Change. Chemistry is the study of change. Elements combine and change into compounds. That’s all of life, right? Solution, dissolution. Growth. Decay. Transformation. It’s fascinating, really.

Problem: What is this show about? Solution: Transformation.

“Make this moment be about transformation.”

Here’s what I did not know and had never heard of: Genre. Narrative device. Theme. Inciting incident. Three-act (or multiple-act) structure. Crisis, climax, resolution. And everything else.

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

How do we form ourselves? By what means do we discover who we are? The answer for us is the same as it is for characters in fiction. We discover who we are by what we say and what we do. We uncover our nature through action.

Nobody knew what I had done. Nobody cared. But I knew. I felt like a dragon I’d been fighting all my life had just dropped dead at my feet and gasped out its last sulfuric breath. Rest in peace, motherfucker.

“Start the next one today.”

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.” That was the hump. To get over it, the candidate must grow up. A change has to happen at the cellular level.

There seems to be no way to make the passage easier, nor any method to eliminate the pain. The lessons can’t be taught. The agony cannot be inoculated against. The process is about pain. The lessons come the hard way.

time. How do you do that? By hooking them (Act One), building the tension and complications (Act Two), and paying it all off (Act Three). That’s how a joke is told. Setup, progression, punch line. It’s how any story is told. Have you ever tried to seduce somebody? The hook, the build, the payoff.

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

Why is genre so important for the writer? Because every film (and novel and play) falls into a genre, and every genre has its own ironclad, unbreakable rules.

What is the hero’s journey anyway? The hero’s journey is the Ur-Story of every individual from Adam and Eve to Ziggy Stardust. It’s the primal myth of the human race, the cosmic pattern that each of our lives (and a thousand increments thereof) follows, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not.

Three-Act Structure + Hero’s Journey = Story.

According to C.G. Jung, the hero’s journey is a component of the collective unconscious. Joseph Campbell identified it in the myths and legends of virtually every culture on earth. Jung found it arising spontaneously in the dreams and neuroses of his psychiatric patients.

(Required reading: Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with A Thousand Faces, C.G. Jung’s Two Essays on Analytical Psychology and Symbols of Transformation, and, for the real Movieland nitty-gritty, Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey.)

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What I meant was that the hero’s journey template is percolating inside all of our psyches 24/7 (whether we’re aware of it or not) and that unconsciously we set every other story—every book we read, every movie we see—alongside it and ask ourselves, also unconsciously, “Does this tale ring true?” The hero’s journey is our touchstone. When the book or movie we’re reading or watching jibes with this Ur-Story, we say it “works.” We know it works not with our heads but with our guts....

Be groundbreaking, be experimental if you want. But remember, the human psyche is deeply conservative and rigid as a rock.

Beneath the car chases and the sex scenes and the special effects, a book or movie that works is undergirded by a theme.

A single idea holds the work together and makes it cohere.

How can you tell when you’ve got a good Inciting Incident? When the movie’s climax is embedded within it.

Keep the villain up front throughout the Second Act.

What made characters like Jake Gittes or William Munny or Rick Blaine so indelible? 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.

To say, “Keep it primal,” is to say, “Tell the story in pictures.”

Start at the end. Begin with the climax, then work backward to the beginning.

The ending dictates the beginning. I’m a huge fan of this back-to-front method. It works for anything—novels, plays, new-business pitches, music albums, choreography. First figure out where you want to finish. Then work backward to set up everything you need to get you there.

What’s the genre? What’s the theme? What’s the climax? Who’s the hero? Who’s the villain? What are the stakes? What is the jeopardy?

How high should the stakes be in your story? As high as possible. High stakes = high emotional involvement by the audience.

Make the stakes life and death for your hero or for someone he/she loves. Or take it beyond life and death to damnation. Extinction of the soul. A fate worse than death.

sounds, works. Get your characters in danger as quickly as possible and keep ratcheting up that jeopardy throughout the story. The more jeopardy to your characters, the more the audience will care and the more involved they will become.

Jeopardy doesn’t have to mean bullets and bombs.

Jeopardy and Stakes are twin sides of the same coin. Our characters must, with life-and-death desperation, want or need some Thing or Outcome (stakes). Then their hold on, or hope for acquiring that Thing or Outcome must be thrust into grave-and-getting-graver peril (jeopardy).

We must keep this in mind when we turn to the novel form and seek to move beyond three acts and beyond cause and effect.

“Thou shalt not take the climax out of the hands of the protagonist.”

It adheres to and celebrates the American Dream. French movies frequently violate McKee’s commandment, as do films from Scandinavia or Africa or Russia or Iran or Pakistan, or any Middle Eastern country.

What makes a role for a star? 1) His or her issues drive the story. Theirs and nobody else’s. Every character in the story revolves around him or her. 2) His desire/issue/objective is (to him, in the context of his world) monumental. The stakes for him are life and death. 3) His passion for this desire/issue/objective is unquenchable. He will pursue it to, as Joe Biden might say, the gates of hell. 4) At the critical points in the story, his actions or needs (and nobody else’s) dictate the way the story turns. 5) The story ends when his issues are resolved and no sooner.

Detective. Each character’s issues drive the story. Each character’s passion is unquenchable. Each character is a star. Put that kind of role at the center of your story and everything else will fall into place.