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

by Steven Pressfield

Every trade has its tricks. Here’s one you learn as a writer in Movieland: Start at the end. Begin with the climax, then work backward to the beginning.

I’m a huge fan of this back-to-front method. It works for anything—novels, plays, new-business pitches, music albums, choreography. First figure out where you want to finish. Then work backward to set up everything you need to get you there.

What’s the genre? What’s the theme? What’s the climax? Who’s the hero? Who’s the villain? What are the stakes? What is the jeopardy? Exactly as with writing a screenplay, I started at the end and worked backward. Are you a CEO preparing a speech for your stockholders? Write it like a novel or a movie. Use the principles of storytelling.

Stories work. Tell it to me as a story.

Get your characters in danger as quickly as possible and keep ratcheting up that jeopardy throughout the story.

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).

Russian movies plumb far greater depths. America is adolescent; Russia is ancient. The Russian people have suffered famines and pestilence; they have endured defeat in war, violent revolution and more violent counterrevolution and all the personal and collective calamities that go with political and social upheavals on a monumental scale. The Muppet Show did not evolve in the U.S.S.R. There’s no Russian Mickey Mouse.

“Thou shalt not take the climax out of the hands of the protagonist.”

1) His or her issues drive the story. Theirs and nobody else’s. Every character in the story revolves around him or her. 2) His desire/issue/objective is (to him, in the context of his world) monumental. The stakes for him are life and death. 3) His passion for this desire/issue/objective is unquenchable. He will pursue it to, as Joe Biden might say, the gates of hell. 4) At the critical points in the story, his actions or needs (and nobody else’s) dictate the way the story turns. 5) The story ends when his issues are resolved and no sooner.

Matthew McConaughey: Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club, Mud in Mud, Rust Cohle in True Detective. Each character’s issues drive the story. Each character’s passion is unquenchable. Each character is a star. Put that kind of role at the center of your story and everything else will fall into place.

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.

Continuing on the subject of heroes, let’s turn for a moment to our protagonist’s darkest hour. The All Is Lost Moment comes toward the end of Act Two in any movie. Look for it. Minute 72 to Minute 78. It’ll be there.

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.

A 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—but we have to admit, he/she’s got a good point.”

You don’t really learn an art or a craft in school. In the real world, the process is more like an apprenticeship, multiple apprenticeships under multiple masters. It happens on the street and it happens in the studio. It happens in bed. It happens sober and it happens stoned. It happens getting up early and it happens staying up late.

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?”

We learn by increments. One word, one image, one piece of code at a time.

My friend David Leddick says you can never plan your life because too many imponderables come into play. “You meet someone and you wind up living in another country, speaking a different language.” And yet … And yet the arc of a career is not entirely random or shaped in the end by factors beyond our comprehension or control. I have felt my whole life that I’ve been on a course and being guided, even though I didn’t know by what.

Would I fall apart again, as I had every other time I’d tried to write something beyond 120 pages? What was different this time? Had I learned anything?

1) Every work must be about something. It must have a theme. 2) Every work must have a concept, that is, a unique twist or slant or framing device. 3) Every work must start with an Inciting Incident. 4) Every work must be divided into three acts (or seven or eight or nine David Lean sequences). 5) Every character must represent something greater than himself/herself. 6) The protagonist embodies the theme. 7) The antagonist personifies the counter-theme. 8) The protagonist and antagonist clash in the climax around the issue of the theme. 9) The climax resolves the clash between the theme and the counter-theme.

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. 1) How to start a project. 2) How to keep going through the horrible middle. 3) How to finish. 4) How to handle rejection. 5) How to handle success. 6) How to receive editorial notes. 7) How to fail and keep going. 8) How to fail again and keep going. 9) How to self-motivate, self-validate, self-reinforce. 10) How to believe in yourself when no one else on the planet shares that belief.

I’ve had the same experience over and over. When I write something that really happened, people read it and say, “Sounds like bullshit.” When I pull something completely out of thin air, I hear, “Wow, that was so real!”

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.

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 voice from beyond the grave? 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 Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen in Out of Africa? 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 the judge who’s about to sentence him to the electric chair?

Can you maintain your motivation over that length of time? Your self-belief? Your sanity? If necessary, can you scrap your first eighteen months’ work and start over from scratch?

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 doable daily or weekly transits.

You can’t fix everything in one draft. Thinking in multiple drafts takes the pressure off. We’re not trying to build Rome in one day. Thinking in multiple drafts is a corollary of thinking in blocks of time. If we know we’re going to do fifteen drafts before we’re done, we don’t panic when Draft #6 is still a mess.

The great thing about writing (as opposed to climbing Mt. Everest or raising children or going to war) is the work sits still. What we did yesterday stays intact on the page, where we can rethink it, revise it, rework it tomorrow.

It’s a living thing, with its own power and its own destiny. It “wants” to be something. Our job is to discover what that something is—and to help it become that.

Screenwriters start at the end. They solve the story’s climax first. Then they work backward. They layer in all the foundational material that the climax needs to deliver its emotional and thematic wallop. This is a powerful skill to have when you move from starting your stuff with FADE IN and instead begin with CHAPTER ONE.

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.

If you want your factual history or memoir, your grant proposal or dissertation or TED talk to be powerful and engaging and to hold the reader and audience’s attention, you must organize your material (even though it’s technically not a story and not fiction) as if it were a story and as if it were fiction.

1) Every story must have a concept. It must put a unique and original spin, twist or framing device upon the material. 2) Every story must be about something. It must have a theme. 3) Every story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Act One, Act Two, Act Three. 4) Every story must have a hero. 5) Every story must have a villain. 6) Every story must start with an Inciting Incident, embedded within which is the story’s climax. 7) Every story must escalate through Act Two in terms of energy, stakes, complication and significance/meaning as it progresses. 8) Every story must build to a climax centered around a clash between the hero and the villain that pays off everything that came before and that pays it off on-theme.

Start with theme. Before we do anything else, let’s decide what the story is about. What does Grandma Julia’s life mean? Is her story about female empowerment? Is it about the white man’s arch-crime of wiping out Native America and Native American culture? Is it something specific to Grandma Julia’s family? A male-female struggle, perhaps, with a father or a husband? A great love? Is it something religious? Personal? Political? We have to work hard here. This is the toughest and most important part of the whole project.

Or is there some issue buried here that we believe is powerful, compelling, significant? Find that issue. Break it down into a single sentence.

Cut everything that’s not on-theme. And what you keep, make all of it work on-theme.

What scene or sequence does the entire saga build to? (Remember, it doesn’t have to be the latest chronologically.)

The moment is too important to skip over or to hold off. We’ll have to locate it in the chronological flow, probably three-quarters of the way through the memoir. But we can use other structural techniques to bring it back at the end. We can “play” the scene like a teaser or a flashback recurrently in Julia’s memory. It can haunt her, torment her. The entire last forty years of her life can be framed as a search for self-forgiveness, for self-understanding.

The hardest and maybe the best way to establish authority is through the quality and integrity of the voice itself.

The concept in The War of Art is “Forget Time Management and Motivational Pep Talks and tips about How to Aim High, Persevere, and Succeed. Instead let’s dig beneath everything and state straight-out what all of us know but have never dared say: There is an Evil Force that is constantly defeating us as artists and bringing to naught all of our dreams. Let’s name that force, accept it as our enemy, and figure out how to overcome it.

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.

We know what a carpenter does. We can understand the work of a surgeon. But what does an artist do? Of what does her skill consist? It’s this: 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.

We’re believing in a mental reality that is active, creative, self-organizing, self-perpetuating, infinitely diverse and yet cohesive, governed by laws that are not beyond the grasp and ken of human understanding.

We’re believing that the universe has a gift that it is holding specifically for us and that, if we can learn to make ourselves available to it, it will deliver this gift into our hands.

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.

Its accomplishment will seem beyond your resources. Your pursuit of it will bear you into waters where no one before you has sailed. To hunt this beast will require everything you’ve got.

What you learn in Wrong Career #1 will serve you in Off-Key Career #2 and in Out-of-Kilter Career #3, and the wisdom you acquire in #1, #2, and #3 will form the foundation of Real Calling #4 (or #5 or #6 or however long it takes.)

Flashbacks. Every digression must bring in something new that propels the narrative forward.