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

by Steven Pressfield

Give the star an inner and an outer journey.

A star wants to be unforgettable.

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?

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.

The All Is Lost Moment is followed almost immediately by a breakthrough insight or epiphany, an awakening for the hero, an “Aha!” moment.

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?”

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—...

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.

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?”

When you work with fact, treat it as fiction. Write your nonfiction book as if it were a novel. I don’t mean make stuff up. That’s a no-no. I mean give it an Act One, an Act Two, an Act Three. Make it cohere around a theme.

Give it a hero, and make that hero embody the theme. Give it a villain, and make that villain stand for the counter-theme.

Make the narrative build to a climax, and have that climax resolve the conflict of the narra...

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 voi...

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 Ka...

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 t...

Narrative device must work on-theme.

gratification. You have to break the trek down in your mind into mini-treks whose distance and demands your sanity can handle.

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. We break down that overwhelming transcontinental trek into...

The reader is hooked in this case not by a story, e.g., a murder mystery or a spy thriller, but by her shared experience (with me, the writer of the book) of an internal monster that has wreaked havoc on her artistic life but that until now she could never quite put her finger on.

A self-help book needs a narrative device too.

How do I know which one to work on?”

Here’s how you know—you’re scared to death of it. It’s good to be scared. You should be scared. Mediocre ideas never elevate the heart rate. Great ones make you break out in a sweat.