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

by Steven Pressfield

Nobody wants to read your shit. What’s the answer? 1) Streamline your message. Focus it and pare it down to its simplest, clearest, easiest-to-understand form. 2) Make its expression fun. Or sexy or interesting or scary or informative. Make it so compelling that a person would have to be crazy NOT to read it. 3) Apply that to all forms of writing or art or commerce.

writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer must give him something worthy of his gift to you.

Finally one morning I said to myself, “Steve, just start. Don’t wait for Stan.”

“If you want real credit, you have to write a script on your own and have a hit on your own.”

the first question you ask yourself at the start of any project is, “What’s the concept?”

Watching this, I vowed that if I ever found myself in the position of being a client—even if it was something as mundane as hiring a designer to remodel my kitchen—I would shut up and let the professional do her work. I’ve been true to that pledge, and it has never failed.

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.

Define the problem and you’re halfway to the solution.

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?

If you don’t ask for the sale, how are you gonna get it? The call to action is also, in storytelling terms, the “payoff.”

Either I would slay that dragon or it would slay me.

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.

“Good for you,” he said without looking up. “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.

How do you do that? By hooking them (Act One), building the tension and complications (Act Two), and paying it all off (Act Three).

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.

(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.)

The Inciting Incident is the event that makes the story start. It may come anywhere between Minute One and Minute Twenty-Five. But it must happen somewhere within Act One.

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

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

The scarier the monster, the deeper the jeopardy, and the deeper the jeopardy, the more emotion will be produced in the hearts of the audience.

First figure out where you want to finish. Then work backward to set up everything you need to get you there.

The power of the performance comes from the contrast between the two levels of expression: what is being said (text) and what is being communicated by non-verbal means (subtext).

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.

Remember, the protagonist embodies the theme.

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.

But other capacities that I had also acquired over the preceding twenty-seven years were even more important. 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.

Narrative device must work on-theme.

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.

no day-to-day structure except that which you impose yourself.

You, the pioneer, must master the art of delayed 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.

I‘ll do between ten and fifteen drafts of every book I write. Most writers do.

I did nothing but write all day and read all night.

There were two living beings in that house—me and the material. It was a closed cage match to the death. But at the same time it was a love affair.

It’s a living thing, with its own power and its own destiny. It “wants” to be something.

Why not? Because nobody wants to read your sh*t. We cannot give our readers ore. We must give them gold.

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

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.

From the first day I start to think about an idea for a novel, I ask myself, “What is this damn thing about?”

(for fun)

Although extraordinary valor was displayed by the entire corps of Spartans and Thespians, yet bravest of all was declared the Spartan Dienekes. It is said that on the eve of battle, he was told by a native of Trachis that the Persian archers were so numerous that, when they fired their volleys, the mass of arrows blocked out the sun. Dienekes however, quite undaunted by this prospect, remarked with a laugh, “Good. Then we’ll have our battle in the shade.”

Narrative device is supremely important in self-help. You, the writer, are the reader. The reader will hear you and listen to you only to the extent that she knows you know what you’re talking about and that you are there only to help.

Like the monk and the mystic, the artist enters a mental space. He becomes a child. She becomes a vessel. They tune in to the Cosmic Radio Station and listen to whatever song is being broadcast specifically to them.

The artist enters the Void with nothing and comes back with something. Her skill is to turn off the self-censor. Her skill is to jump off the cliff. Her skill is to believe.

I wanted it and, for good or ill, I have made it come true.

The #1 question that writers ask themselves: “I’ve got a million ideas. How do I know which one to work on?” Answer: Write your White Whale. Which idea, of all those swimming inside your brain, are you compelled to pursue the way Ahab was driven to hunt Moby Dick? 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.

But I would invert Melville’s concept. I don’t think you hate the whale. I think you love it. The whale is your unwritten book, your unsung song, your calling as an artist. You die grappling with this thing, lashed to it, battling it even as it takes you under. But your death is not a mortal death. You die instead the artist’s death, which leads to resurrection in a higher, nobler form and recruits you to the next hunt, the next chase, the pursuit of the next Thing You Love. Is there a White Whale out there for you? There is or you wouldn’t be reading this book.