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

by Steven Pressfield

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.

Genre may be the most important single factor, from a writer’s point of view, both in crafting the work and in attempting to find a market for it.

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

Inciting Incident // Climax

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).

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.”

What Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit means is that none of us wants to hear your self-centered, ego-driven, unrefined demands for attention.

What Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit means is that you/we/all of us as writers must learn to leave space for the reader, to work our offerings like a miner refines ore, until what comes out on the page is solid, glistening gold.

“Make the screwing scene advance the story,” the producer said. “Wherever the story stands when the actors start to jump each other’s bones, I want it to have moved to the next level by the time they finish.”