On Writing | Steven Pressfield Online

Paul’s All Is Lost Moment

By Steven Pressfield
Published: February 8, 2012

My friend Paul is writing a pilot. He’s never done a piece of writing this serious before. The work is totally on spec.

Paul's All Is Lost Moment was a lot like Rocky's

Paul has a full-time business and has to do his writing at odd hours. A couple of weeks ago he had a crisis that made him almost suicidal. When I describe it to you, you’ll say, “Man, have I been there!”

A script for a TV pilot is about fifty-five pages long. Paul was on Page 52. He went home after work, sat down at his laptop and opened up the script to (blank) page 53. But first he decided, just for fun, to skim over pages 1 to 52.

By the time he was done, he was in despair. I saw him the next morning.

“What a blistering, unconscionable piece of crap! Who am I kidding giving birth to this abortion, or even deluding myself that I am, or might someday become, a writer? This worthless, steaming turd that I’ve been busting my ass over for … “

Paul was distraught. Inconsolable. I had to walk him home just to make sure he didn’t do something desperate.

Seventy-two hours later, I saw Paul again.

“I’m on page 62,” he said. His aspect and demeanor had totally changed. He was a new man. “I finished the f*@ker,” he said.

“And did the pages miraculously get better when you looked at them again?”

“Hey, I know I’m an idiot … “

We started talking about the scene in the first Rocky, where Sylvester Stallone, on the night before the big fight, gets up out of bed and goes down, alone, to the arena. He sees the giant billboards with pictures of the champ, Apollo Creed—and one huge placard with his own image. His face falls. His shoulders slump. The promoter is the only person in the auditorium. “What are you doing here, Rocky? Go home and get some sleep.”
More >>

Posted in Writing Wednesdays
29 Comments

ADDITIONAL READING » ON WRITING

Bambi versus Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose and Practice of the Movie Business

by Mamet, David

Technically this isn’t a book about writing. It’s about Tinseltown and David Mamet’s love-hate relationship with it. But, along with Mamet’s witty and cantankerous evisceration of show biz, Bambi vs. Godzilla delivers masterly and extremely useful insights on getting movies made, surviving criticism, paying the rent and in general surviving Hollywood while retaining some scrap of sanity and integrity. Mamet is not just any writer. When he takes on a subject, you get it in context succeeding context—commercial, aesthetic, moral, ethical, legal, Talmudic, Tantric and Vedic. It’s like reading Thucydides if he’d loaded his stuff into a ‘65 Mustang and split for the Coast.

Ernest Hemingway on Writing

by Phillips, Larry W.

Papa never actually sat down and wrote a book about writing. Rather, editor Larry Phillips has compiled 140 pages of hard-core Hemingwayisms from the author’s books, stories, and letters. Great material, particularly the fragments of correspondence to Scott Fitzgerald.

First Five Pages, The

by Lukeman, Noah

As an agent and editor, Noah Lukeman read thousands of manuscripts from aspiring writers. He got to where he could tell in the first five pages if a submission was worth his time. In this gem of a book, he tells you the most common mistakes writers make—and how to eradicate them from your manuscript.

How To Be Inspired

by Williams, Nick

A no-nonsense how-to manual and psych-yourself-up kit, for those of us who sometimes need a swift kick in the butt to get us going.

Journal of a Novel

by Steinbeck, John

When he was writing East of Eden, Steinbeck kept a journal—just a few pages each morning, which he’d scribble as a kind of warm-up before turning to the actual manuscript. Fascinating insights into the writer’s life, inside and outside the covers of a book.

Robert McKee’s Story Seminar

by McKee, Robert

I always say that McKee is not only the best teacher of writing I’ve ever seen, but the best teacher of anything. I’ve taken this three-day intensive course twice—and I’ll take it again. Yes, McKee has been spoofed (in the movie Adaptation) and lionized (in a New Yorker profile.) But that’s because he’s the best. Full disclosure: McKee and I are friends. McKee wrote the foreword for The War of Art. McKee teaches this class in cities all over the U.S. and Europe, even as far away as Israel and Singapore.

Story

by McKee, Robert

This is the book that goes with Robert McKee’s Story Seminar. Terrific for writers in all media, but take the “live” McKee first. You’ll get more out of the book if you’ve heard the man deliver his stuff in-person.