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

by Steven Pressfield

we’ve delineated a number of qualities that a star-worthy role requires. Here’s another: The character must undergo a radical change from the start of the film to the finish. She has to have an arc. She must evolve.

Don’t be afraid to make your hero suffer.

Give the star an inner and an outer journey.

It’s an empowering exercise for us as writers to assess our protagonists by the criteria a star would apply when contemplating the role.

Does our protagonist have a star arc? Have we given her star scenes? Does she suffer like a star? Evolve like a star? Is she one of kind? Is she unforgettable?

Everything that is true for heroes in movies is true for protagonists in novels.

let’s turn for a moment to our protagonist’s darkest hour. The All Is Lost Moment comes toward the end of Act Two in any movie. Look for it. Minute 72 to Minute 78. It’ll be there.

Life is like that, isn’t it? That’s why we in the audience can relate. How many All Is Lost Moments have we ourselves had?

Your job as a writer is to give your hero the deepest, darkest, most hellacious All Is Lost Moment possible—and then find a way out for her.

70. THE EPIPHANAL MOMENT The All Is Lost Moment is followed almost immediately by a breakthrough insight or epiphany, an awakening for the hero, an “Aha!” moment. From this point, the pedal-to-the-metal rush into Act Three and the story’s climax begins. This epiphanal moment fuels and defines that rush.

This is one of the most satisfying and insightful epiphanies in movie history. Because:

1) It’s totally organic; it comes out of Rocky alone, with no input from any external source. 2) It offers no magic bullet to Rocky’s predicament. Instead it indicates that he, our hero, recognizes that no conventional positive resolution is possible within his dilemma.

3) It delivers a truth that the hero has been in denial of. The hero faces this truth squarely. He ceases to be in denial of it. 4) That truth is painful, and at first it seems to set the hero back. But it is also tremendously empowering because the hero is now standing on solid ground. When he accepts that and moves forward, he is acting from truth.

A great epiphanal moment not only defines the stakes and the jeopardy for the protagonist and for the audience, but it restates the theme and answers the question, “What is this story about?”

GIVE YOUR VILLAIN A BRILLIANT SPEECH

A classic Villain Speech must accomplish at least two objects: 1) It must allow the antagonist to state his or her point of view as clearly and powerfully as possible. 2) It must be so rationally stated and so compelling in its logic that we in the audience (or at least a part of us) find ourselves thinking, “Hmm, this villain is evil as hell—but we have to admit, he/she’s got a good point.”

Why is a brilliant Villain Speech so important? Because the greater and more interesting the villain, the greater and more interesting the hero—and the more satisfying his or her triumph over the foe.

But to make the villain a pure monster is a cheat. He must be recognizably and relatably human. If our story is to achieve its maximum power, we the writers must deliver to the audience the blood-freezing realization that a part of them, too, believes that greed is good, and that they too, under a certain set of circumstances, would be capable of performing the unspeakable.

Then there’s the way you really learn: Alone at your keyboard. Alone in the dance studio. Alone in the darkroom.

Trying to answer the Eternal Question: “Why is this fucking thing not working?” Creative work can be hell, but it can be heaven too. What could be better than beating your brains out on a problem that’s exactly the problem you need to solve to get better? We learn by increments.

One word, one image, one piece of co...

1) Every work must be about something. It must have a theme. 2) Every work must have a concept, that is, a unique twist or slant or framing device. 3) Every work must start with an Inciting Incident. 4) Every work must be divided into three acts (or seven or eight or nine David Lean sequences). 5) Every character must represent something greater than himself/herself. 6) The protagonist embodies the theme. 7) The antagonist personifies the counter-theme. 8) The protagonist and antagonist clash in the climax around the issue of the theme. 9) The climax resolves the clash between the theme and the counter-theme.

These were the skills necessary to conduct oneself as a professional—the inner capacities for managing your emotions, your expectations (of yourself and of the world), and your time. 1) How to start a project. 2) How to keep going through the horrible middle. 3) How to finish. 4) How to handle rejection. 5) How to handle success. 6) How to receive editorial notes. 7) How to fail and keep going. 8) How to fail again and keep going. 9) How to self-motivate, self-validate, self-reinforce. 10) How to believe in yourself when no one else on the planet shares that belief.

never wrote anything good until I stopped trying to write the truth. I never had any real fun either. Truth is not the truth. Fiction is the truth. The conventional truism is “Write what you know.” But something mysterious and wonderful happens when we write what we don’t know. The Muse enters the arena. Stuff comes out of us from a very deep source. Where is it coming from? The “unconscious”? The “field of potentiality”? I don’t know. But I’ve had the same experience over and over. When I write something that really happened, people read it and say, “Sounds like bullshit.”

Narrative device asks four questions: 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? 4) To whom is the story told? Directly to us, the readers? To another character? Should our serial killer address himself to the detective who has just arrested him? To his sainted mother who believes he’s innocent? To the judge who’s about to sentence him to the electric chair? These questions are make-or-break. If we get our narrative device right, the story will tell itself.

A novel is too long to be organized efficiently like a screenplay. There aren’t enough 3X5 cards in the world. Too much shit happens. New characters appear. New ideas show up. The whole story can get hijacked by the apparition of Mr. Micawber or Hamlet’s ghost or Winnie the Pooh. A novel is like an acid trip. For the first forty-five minutes you’re thinking, “Hmm, this isn’t so intense. I can handle this.” Then you look down at your hands and flames are coming out of them.

you haven’t seen it). You have entered a realm whose depths and dimensions are known to you alone. You can try to involve your spouse, yeah, but that glassy, semi-panicky look in his/her eyes is real. He/she has just realized that they’re linked for life with a person they do not know. One of the weirdest things in the world is to look in the mirror (I mean really look) when you’re in the throes of writing a novel. You don’t even recognize yourself. You are dealing with the Muse now. You are on her turf. She owns you. You have ceded your psychic autonomy to forces based in a different dimension of reality. This is the Foreign Legion, baby, and I don’t mean France. It’s a rush. It’s the rush. But it also can scare the shit out of you.

days? Remember, the enemy in an endurance enterprise is not time. The enemy is Resistance. Resistance will use time against you. It will try to overawe you with the magnitude of the task and the mass of days, weeks, and months necessary to complete it. But when we think in blocks of time, we acquire patience.

Thinking in multiple drafts takes the pressure off. We’re not trying to build Rome in one day. Thinking in multiple drafts is a corollary of thinking in blocks of time. If we know we’re going to do fifteen drafts before we’re done, we don’t panic when Draft #6 is still a mess. “Relax, we’ve got nine more tries to make it work.”

You have to tame your story and domesticate it. You have to render it fit for human consumption. Writerly self-indulgence ends here. Now we must serve the reader.

Screenwriters think in structure because it’s one of the few tools they have. Screenwriters start at the end. They solve the story’s climax first. Then they work backward. They layer in all the foundational material that the climax needs to deliver its emotional and thematic wallop.

Remember, a concept is a spin or a twist, a unique and original framing of material.

A great concept gives every word and every scene an interesting, illuminating spin. It takes ordinary and much-used material and makes it fresh.

Theme is what the story is about. Theme is not the same as concept. A concept is external. It frames the material and makes us look at every element of that material from a specific point of view. A theme is internal. When we strip away all elements of plot, character and dialogue, what remains is theme.

It’s possible for you and me to write a 1,000-page novel and have no idea what its theme is. I’ve done it more than once. But if we can’t articulate it, we have to have an ironclad unconscious instinct for what it is.

Dienekes however, quite undaunted by this prospect, remarked with a laugh, “Good. Then we’ll have our battle in the shade.” That was the genesis of Gates of Fire. I knew instantly that I had found my hero and that, from him and this brief passage, would flow concept, theme, point of view, narrative device, villain, three-act structure, and crisis/ climax/resolution.

To make the protagonist a star, make the theme and concept a star.

In other words, the power of the protagonist derives directly from the power of the theme and the concept.

That’s what I mean by nonfiction is fiction. If you want your factual history or memoir, your grant proposal or dissertation or TED talk to be powerful and engaging and to hold the reader and audience’s attention, you must organize your material (even though it’s technically not a story and not fiction) as if it were a story and as if it were fiction.

Every story must have a concept. It must put a unique and original spin, twist or framing device upon the material. 2) Every story must be about something. It must have a theme. 3) Every story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Act One, Act Two, Act Three. 4) Every story must have a hero. 5) Every story must have a villain. 6) Every story must start with an Inciting Incident, embedded within which is the story’s climax.

7) Every story must escalate through Act Two in terms of energy, stakes, complication and significance/meaning as it progresses. 8) Every story must build to a climax centered around a clash between the hero and the villain that pays off everything that came before and that pays it off on-theme.

Hook. Build. Payoff. This is the shape any story must take. A beginning that grabs the listener. A middle that escalates in tension, suspense, stakes, and excitement. And an ending that brings it all home with a bang.

Start with theme. Before we do anything else, let’s decide what the story is about.

This is the toughest and most important part of the whole project. Why do we want to write about this subject? What grabs us about Grandma Julia’s story? Do we just want to brag about our family? Or is there some issue buried here that we believe is powerful, compelling, significant? Find that issue. Break it down into a single sentence.

Cut everything that’s not on-theme. And what you keep, make all of it work on-theme.

There’s a story about an embassy that was sent once to the ancient Spartans. The foreign envoys spoke for hours before the assembled citizens, seeking their aid. When they had finished, the Spartans declared, “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.”

How can a voice establish authority? 1) It can come pre-loaded by reputation in the field, like Stephen King’s in On Writing or Twyla Tharp’s in The Creative Habit. 2) It can speak with the backing of extensive academic research, as Susan Cain did in Quiet. 3) It can cite its own professional or academic credentials, like Dr. Phil or Dr. Oz or Dr. Gupta. 4) Or its record of sales and success, like Tony Robbins or Eckhart Tolle. 5) The voice in self-help can establish credibility via its TV or web show, its podcast, its blog, its YouTube channel, its number of followers on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, or by its dominating presence in social media. Look how much credibility a gal named K got from a single sex tape. I’m serious. In that specific field, a flash of homemade porn established authority. It set the bar. 6) The hardest and maybe the best way to establish authority is through the quality and integrity of the voice itself. Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.

Concept. Theme. Narrative device.

First, he spread the chapters out on his floor. Then he organized them into three sections. Hook. Build. Payoff. Act One, Act Two, Act Three.

“Where did this negative force of Resistance come from? What is its nature? How can I fight it and overcome it?”