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

by Steven Pressfield

And writing self-help took me into a whole other arena that to my non-surprise was at least as much about narrative as it was about content. But of everything I learned, the most important lesson came at the beginning, on the very first day of my very first job. The lesson was, “Nobody wants to read your shit.”

It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy. 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.

You begin to understand that 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. When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, you develop empathy.

You learn to ask yourself with every sentence and every phrase: Is this interesting? Is it fun or challenging or inventive? Am I giving the reader enough? Is she bored? Is she following where I want to lead her?

If you want to write and be recognized, you have to do it yourself.

DON’T THINK IN ADS, THINK IN CAMPAIGNS

A concept takes a conventional claim and puts a spin on it. A concept establishes a frame of reference that is greater than the product itself. A concept sets the product in a context that makes the viewer behold the product with fresh eyes—and perceive it in a positive, compelling light. A concept frames (or, more frequently, re-frames) the issue entirely.

Concepts work in politics too. “Death panels” is a concept. “Job creators” is a concept. “Pro-life” is a concept. So is “pro-choice.” A concept can be complete balderdash. It can be evil. “The master race.” “Manifest destiny.” “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” When you as a writer carry over and apply this mode of thinking to other fields, say the writing of novels or movies or nonfiction, the first question you ask yourself at the start of any project is, “What’s the concept?”

At the inception of any project I ask myself, “What is the concept?” I won’t tackle anything until I know the concept. Concept works for the loftiest literary stuff there is.

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.

If you’ve ever been in business, you’ve serviced clients. Maybe you’ve even been a client. All clients have one thing in common: They’re in love with their product/company/service. In the ad biz, this is called Client’s Disease. I have seen a thousand clients be presented with brilliant campaigns for their products or services and have them ruin these campaigns by loading them up with their own lame bullshit.

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

“Kid, it ain’t stealing if you put a spin on it.”

Advertising is great training for the movie industry and for writing novels and nonfiction because all you do all day is think. That’s your job. Sit there and come up with ideas. Sometimes people who have worked in other professions will attempt to make the switch to writing. They struggle at first because they’ve never spent all day living entirely inside their heads.

It’s easy to get a lousy idea on demand. It’s not that hard to come up with a mediocre idea. But a good idea? I worked in advertising off and on for seven to ten years. I don’t know if I ever had a really good idea. I learned a lot about having bad ideas, though. When you try too hard, you have bad ideas. When you work mechanically, you have bad ideas. When you follow formula, you have bad ideas. When you’re desperate or panicky, you have bad ideas.

In advertising, you think of assignments as “problems.” Your job is to come up with a solution.

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.

In the ad biz, 20 percent of your time is taken up pursuing New Business.

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? What’s the theme of our book, our play, our movie script? What’s the theme of our new restaurant, our start-up, our video game? When we don’t know the theme, we don’t know the Problem.

WALTER WHITE 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.

Every ad or commercial (or direct-mail piece or political flyer or FREE post in the PennySaver) ends with a “call to action.”

twenty-nine when I quit advertising for the second time and, for the second time, set out to write a novel. 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.

There was a tiny branch library in Carmel Valley. I started taking out books. I took out every book that I should have read in college but didn’t because I was too busy shooting pool and playing poker.

I’d finish writing each day and pick up another timeless classic and submerge myself in it. What did I learn? Not a fucking thing. I didn’t even know there was anything to learn. And yet… And yet.

Why was I trying to find a voice? I had no clue. If you had asked me, I couldn’t even have articulated the idea that there was such a thing as “voice.” I was excruciatingly aware, however, not just that my writing was inauthentic, but that I myself was inauthentic. Every word I wrote screamed of effort and fakery. I was self-conscious. I was full of shit. I didn’t know what I was talking about.

I used to sit down at the typewriter with Tropic of Capricorn or The Sun Also Rises open beside me. I would literally copy the books, word for word, paragraph by paragraph. I was trying to experience a real voice, even if it wasn’t my own.

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.

Beyond “voice” I was focused on one thinf: Finishing. Because I had crapped out 99.9 percent of the way through my first attempt at writing a novel (and because of the price in personal shame and the hurt my failure had inflicted on people I loved), I was obsessed with finishing Book #2 at all costs, come hell or high water, do it or hang myself.

Next morning, I went over to my writer friend Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. “Good for you,” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.”

I had to get over this hump or kill myself. 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.

A couple of years ago I re-read two of these first three manuscripts. I still have them. They’re not terrible. But they are excruciating. Scanning a paragraph, I want to put myself up against a wall and slap the hell out of myself, and I would if I didn’t have compassion for all of us who are compelled by the nature of life and the structure of the internal universe to go through this ordeal and initiation. There seems to be no way to make the passage easier, nor any method to eliminate the pain. The lessons can’t be taught. The agony cannot be inoculated against. The process is about pain. The lessons come the hard way.

And yet you’re learning. You don’t know what. You can’t say how. But the months and years, the millions of keystrokes and erasures go into the bank somehow. The cells remember. Something changes.

In Los Angeles I starved for about five years. I wrote nine screenplays on spec. Each one took about six months. I couldn’t sell any of them. But I learned what a screenplay is. I learned the principles of screenplay structure.

A movie script is composed of three acts. Act One: page 1 to about page 25. Act Two: page 25 to about page 75-85. Act Three: to the finish, page 105-120.

If there is a single principle that is indispensable to structuring any kind of narrative, it is this: Break the piece into three parts—beginning, middle, and end.

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.

Lean said, “Every work can be divided into between eight and twelve major sequences.” This is an alternative to the idea of Three-Act Structure. Three-Act Structure works great in movies and plays, i.e., works that are experienced by the audience in one ninety- to 120-minute gulp. But novels aren’t like that. Long-form TV isn’t like that. These forms are taken in by the reader or viewer at intervals, over periods of days, weeks, months. The rhythm of consumption is slower, with less need for pace or momentum.

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. (For the definitive discussion on this subject, read Shawn Coyne’s The Story Grid.)

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.

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.

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

EVERY GENRE IS A VERSION OF THE HERO’S JOURNEY

The principles of storytelling are sometimes so obvious that we can’t see them. Of course, you say, a story has to be about something. But I challenge you. Read a thousand screenplays penned by aspiring writers. Nine hundred and ninety-nine will be about nothing (and I don’t mean in a good way like Seinfeld, which by the way was never about nothing.)

Beneath the car chases and the sex scenes and the special effects, a book or movie that works is undergirded by a theme. A single idea holds the work together and makes it cohere.

EVERY FIRST ACT MUST HAVE AN INCITING INCIDENT

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. It had never occurred to me that a story needed to start. I thought it started all by itself. And I certainly had never realized that the writer had to consciously craft that specific moment when the story starts.

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

THE SECOND ACT BELONGS TO THE VILLAIN

EVERY CHARACTER MUST REPRESENT SOMETHING GREATER THAN HIMSELF