Blog of Week: Steven Pressfield

Steven Pressfield is an ex-Marine who approaches writing as if he were a warrior. See his 2002 book The War of Art for the fullest account of this philosophy and the story of how it took him 17 years to get his first paycheck as a writer.

Pressfield long ago hit the big time, though, as a novelist and screenwriter. His historical novel Gates of Fire, about the 300 Spartans holding that pass at Thermopylae, has become a classic, taught in military colleges everywhere. His 1995 novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, turned into a hit Hollywood movie.

Pressfield’s blog is mainly about Afghanistan, but the part we really like is “Writing Wednesdays.” Once a week Pressfield brings to bear all his experience on a writing problem. As a blogger, he’s savvy, clear, and, as you might expect, forceful. His latest post on “Writing for a Star” exemplifies his virtues.

And here’s vintage Pressfield on that vital quality he calls “Depth of Work”:

“You have to be a little crazy to be a writer or an artist or an entrepreneur. A certain breed of insanity is required to chase a dream or to seek to bring into manifestation something that only you see or hear. …

“How do you know how crazy you are? By how genuinely nuts you get when you’re NOT doing (or not being allowed to do) what being crazy makes you want to do in the first place.

“But this state of mind isn’t really crazy. It comes from the gods. It’s a species of divine madness. Socrates called the poetic variety of this condition ‘possession by the Muses’ (and rated it superior to technical mastery), though he could have referred with equal accuracy to seizure by any Olympian deity. When this kind of nuttiness grabs us, we are possessed by forces we can’t name and can’t see, can’t measure or quantify, and whose very existence is doubted by much of the conventional world.

“But this state of possession is real, as anyone who has experienced it will testify–and so are the forces that inflict it on us. What do these forces demand? First and foremost, they want depth. They require of us passion, authenticity, courage, stubbornness and commitment over time. They want us. They want everything we’ve got.”