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Steven Pressfield

Erik Proulx

By Callie Oettinger
Published: August 20, 2010

Erik Proulx: film maker, writer, speaker, change-maker extraordinaire

Erik Proulx: Filmmaker, Writer, Speaker, Change-Maker Extraordinaire. Photo Credit: Courtney Perkins.

The film “Lemonade” was my introduction to Erik Proulx. It is inspiring, uplifting, motivating—all the good stuff—and is a strong reminder of our abilities to reinvent ourselves—hard-charge our dreams, at any moment. A 15-year veteran of the advertising industry, Erik created commercials for brands like Volvo, Fidelity Investments, GMC Trucks, and Perdue Chicken. Then, two days after being offered a raise and a promotion, his agency laid him off without ceremony. He responded by creating “Lemonade” and the blog Please Feed The Animals. His experience, combined with the collective experience of the hundreds of people he’s interviewed for Lemonade (the book), has made him an insightful speaker, author, and advocate for personal and professional reinvention. He has appeared on CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, NPR’s On Point, ABC News with Tory Johnson, and several other national print and broadcast media to discuss his front-line exposure to the shifting attitude around work and careers. Erik has been a contributing writer to Advertising Age, Adweek, and Creativity Magazine, and his “Dads Without Dads” column is a regular feature in The Good Men Project Magazine. Erik is currently filming “Lemonade: Detroit” about the reinvention of a city trying to redefine itself after the collapse of the auto industry.
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Posted in Featured Posts, The Creative Process
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WRITING WEDNESDAYS

Writing Wednesdays

Writing Characters Who Are Smarter Than We Are

By Steven Pressfield | Published: September 8, 2010

There’s a great moment in the movie Tootsie, when Dustin Hoffman—in costume as “Dorothy Michaels” but speaking as himself, “Michael Dorsey”—says, out of respect for Dorothy, “I wish I was prettier.” In other words, the character he was portraying was better than he was. That’s an amazing thing if you think about it.

Dustin Hoffman as "Tootsie": He wanted to be prettier

Working above our game

As writers, can we write characters who are beyond us emotionally and intellectually? Can we work above and past our own personal limits?  I’ve heard the opposite. I don’t believe it. How does Thomas Harris (who I’m sure is a very nice guy) conjure Hannibal Lecter? How did Arthur Golden pull off so brilliantly Memoirs of a Geisha? How did Dickens get inside the skin of any of his characters—or Shakespeare or Tolstoy or Sophocles?

The answer is that we as writers (and painters and filmmakers and every other kind of artist) work from a part of our beings that is far deeper and wiser than our mundane everyday selves.

There’s no great mystery to this. As kids we could pretend anything, couldn’t we? Be Flash Gordon, be Catwoman; we could walk like an Egyptian or mock our assistant principal’s accent; we could mimic flawlessly the way Sister Mary Catherine screwed up her nose when she whacked us over the knuckles with her yardstick.

Being brave in our work

When we are told to be brave in our work, what that means is “trust the source.” When I was working on The Legend of Bagger Vance, it became clear to me very early that my narrator—in whose voice I was speaking—was a much deeper character than I am. Was I daunted? Hell, yes. But it also became clear very fast that this character (a Southern physician in his seventies) was speaking in a true and authentic voice. How does this happen? I don’t know. It just does.
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Posted in Writing Wednesdays
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AGORA

Agora

COIN Strategy vs. COIN Tactics

By Andrew Lubin
Published: August 26, 2010

The photo in Laura King’s Los Angeles Times article ‘Three cups of tea’ a byword for U.S. effort to win Afghan hearts and minds” shows why the war in Afghanistan is not going well for the United States.

As Ms. King so aptly explains, the phrase “three cups of tea” has been adapted from the Greg Mortenson best-seller of the same name by the American military as the basis of how to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign.
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Posted in Agora, Uncategorized
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THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Journal

Chris Guillebeau

By Callie Oettinger
Published: September 3, 2010

Chris Guillebeau travels and writes for a small army of remarkable people at chrisguillebeau.com and twitter.com/chrisguillebeau. When you visit his blog, check out his 279 Days to Overnight Success and his Brief Guide to World Domination. Good stuff! His book, The Art of Non-Conformity, will be available online and in bookstores starting Sept. 7, 2010.

In The Art of Non-Conformity you talk about your one-time job “slinging boxes” at FedEx at 3 AM in the morning. How did you go from there to developing a business and then being a volunteer working with refugees, warlords and presidents in West Africa?
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Posted in The Creative Process, Uncategorized
2 Comments
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