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

by Steven Pressfield

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.

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. 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. I knew I had to figure out how to become one of the good writers.

the solution is embedded within 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.

We discover who we are by what we say and what we do. We uncover our nature through action.

was using the act of writing (I should say the sham or simulacrum of writing) as a pretense to plant my own ego on the planet so that I could believe I really existed.

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.

Each sequence is like a movie within a movie, and each sequence sets the stage for the sequences that follow.

(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.)