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

by Steven Pressfield

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.

I said to myself, “It’s okay to be the kind of person I am.” It’s okay to be anxious. It’s okay to be unable to sleep. It’s okay to lack self-esteem. It’s okay to be an introvert, to seek out the quiet corners at a cocktail party, to care about quality, to have your mood be affected by your surroundings.

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but paralyzed by guilt about my ambition, horny, obsessive, compulsive, obsessive-compulsive, not to mention shy, withdrawn, and dandruff-ridden.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!

What the ad person understands that the client does not is that nobody gives a damn about the client or his product.

I learned that good writers and good art directors had good ideas over and over. And bad writers and bad art directors had bad ideas over and over.

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.

Calling 7Up “the Uncola” positioned the drink not as a poor second-best to Coke or Pepsi, but as an equal alternative. Just as good, only different.

Define the problem and you’re halfway to 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.

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.

If you don’t ask for the sale, how are you gonna get it?

Art is artifice.

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 had no conception of Resistance in those days. I did not know that there existed inside my head an invisible, insidious, intractable, indefatigable force whose sole object was to keep me from doing my work, i.e., finishing the book I had been trying to write for seven years—and ultimately to destroy me, physically, psychologically, and spiritually. All I knew was that I couldn’t finish anything. My pattern was to quit. To fold. To flake. I’d get the ball all the way to the one-yard line. Then I’d bail. That was my pattern. That was what I always did.

That was the demon I was fighting in that little house behind the slightly bigger house. Either I would slay that dragon or it would slay me.

What was the hump? One way to define it would be to say it was the watershed between the amateur and the professional. But that doesn’t go deep enough. 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.

The process is about pain.

The lessons come the hard way.

In the screenwriting trade, there’s a concept called the All Is Lost moment. This moment usually comes about three-quarters of the way through the movie. It’s the point in the story when the protagonist is farthest away from his or her goal. In the celluloid world, the All Is Lost moment is always followed by a breakthrough, a turnaround beat when despair becomes hope (or desperation that’s the equivalent of hope) that propels the protagonist into action in Act Three.

Break the piece into three parts—beginning, middle, and end.

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.

THE BOSS DEMONSTRATES THREE-ACT STRUCTURE ACT ONE I met her in a Kingstown bar. We fell in love. I knew it had to end. ACT TWO We took what we had and we ripped it apart. ACT THREE Now here I am, down in Kingstown again.

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

Here’s the nutshell version: 1) Hero starts in Ordinary World. 2) Hero receives Call to Adventure. 3) Hero rejects Call. 4) Hero meets Mentor. Mentor gives hero courage to accept Call. (If you’re following along, this is Luke on the evaporator farm. Luke finds R2D2, Luke uncorks distress hologram from Princess Leia, Luke takes R2 to Obi-Wan Kenobi.) 5) Hero crosses Threshold, enters Special World. 6) Hero encounters enemies and allies, undergoes ordeal that will serve as his Initiation. 7) Hero confronts Villain, acquires Treasure. 8) The Road Back. Hero escapes Special World, trying to “get home.” 9) Villains pursue Hero. Hero must fight/escape again. 10) Hero returns home with Treasure, reintegrates into Ordinary World, but now as a changed person, thanks to his ordeal and experiences on his journey. Cue up any movie from Casablanca to The Martian, including films with seemingly rulebook-defying structures like Pulp Fiction or Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation. At the heart of each, in one form or another, you will find the hero’s journey.

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