Steven Pressfield, a dear friend, wrote a short manifesto, Do The Work. The title of the book actually answers so many questions. It is Do The Work, not Read About The Work, or Tell Your Cat About The Work, or Think About The Work.
I asked Mr. Steve only three questions, following the example of my typist who has interviewed Steven Pressfield before about his books, The War of Art, and Turning Pro. Both excellent books.
Oscar winners have a minute to discuss anything AND to have millions of people listen. Many use the opportunity to highlight their passions. We writers often hear about the importance of building a platform, but what would you say if you had one as ridiculously large as the Oscars?
What is beautiful writing? What kind of sentence (or paragraph, or page), makes us pull out a pencil and underline? When we see a quote on Pinterest or Twitter, what makes us pin or retweet it? There are many different kinds of writing styles, and we all have different tastes. But I think there are four things in particular that makes us all read a passage over and over again.
The smell of incense is thick and heady, mingling with the hours-old scent of burnt toast. Outside, it’s quiet except for the shrill yap of a dog or the rogue shriek of a child’s laugh. Inside, it’s cold – numb fingers tapping away at smooth, overused keys. The aftertaste of coffee lingers in my mouth, simultaneously bitter and sweet.
What did you notice about this paragraph?
I bumped into writer friend at the library and immediately saw something was wrong with him. He looked ghostly white and on the verge of tears, though he was usually quite stoic.
“What happened?” I asked.
He shook his head, looked away, then whispered, “I just asked her—tell me what you think.”
That’s when I noticed the pages clutched in his hands. His manuscript. It was just a few pages, but they were clearly bleeding red.
After coaxing the story from him, I learned he’d given the first chapter of his first-ever novel to an experienced writer with no instructions. She gave him back a line-by-line edit, listing everything wrong with his story.
He quit writing, which is a shame because he has talent. Although the experienced writer should have had more mercy on this newbie, he should’ve been clearer in his critique needs to avoid miscommunication.
Don’t make the same mistake.
Many of the earliest forms of written literature that exist are religious texts, and most of us at some point in our schooling will study at least one type of ancient mythology, be it Greco-Roman, Egyptian, or Norse. I happened to be fascinated with all three at the age of ten. More than once in these stories do you run into a human mortal being raised to the status of a god. There is a name for this phenomenon, and it’s called apotheosis.