How to Win as a Writer Like Spartacus Did in the Arena

Rules to dominate the Empire of words and dreams

We’ll kill them all

This phrase as been chasing me over the years. It has a power in itself beyond the imaginable.

In life, as in writing, we’ll fight a lot of battles. Endless struggles to reach the peak of success, whatever that might be.

And Startacus story, magnificently produced by Starz and now presented by Netflix, made me thinking about how brutal life was more than 2,000 years ago.

Not so bloody but also brutal is our struggle to gain the respect and authority of our followers. We have to produce internal power and drive to keep the pace. We have to be better every day. Write better and clearer. Read more and more to condense the content in ways everybody can learn a little more.

We must have the willpower that the Thracian slave had, making him one of the most famous gladiators in history. Our arena is different, but the fighting skills must be at the top of our priorities.

Spartacus was made a slave by the Roman Republic, by trying to escape. He was bought by a lanista called Batiatus and send to his gladiators' school in Cápua.

In the hands of Batiatus, Spartacus was put to the test and managed to survive the extreme violence against the most experienced gladiators. Proving to be an intelligent and deadly warrior.

Don’t you think that Medium is going to offer you an easy ride. Medium is fair and democrat. But it will push you to the limit of your strengths. You’ll always have a sword pointed at your head. So keep the shield high and ready to strike.

Batiatus and his wife, to prove their value to Rome, used their best weapons to impress the republic, by offering their gladiators to serve as sexual slaves to senators and their wives.

Those exotic baths surrounded by all kinds of sex orgies made the House of Batiatus a pilgrimage place. In Starz production of Spartacus, these scenes were very often common, with beautiful corps seducing each other in a mix of pleasure and rage.

In your writing journey, the seduction game has to be everywhere. You gotta be smart. Everyone in Medium wants to be seduced by words.

The House of Batiatus has this dichotomy of pleasure and pain, like in our writing journey. The political schemes, the betrayals, the envy, the ambitions, made Batiatus’s place a timing bomb.

But don’t you think you’ll be successful in Medium if you can’t manage to provoke your audience. You must shake your readers' minds. Confront them. Make them keep thinking for a while about what you just wrote about.

Writing is an endless road to walk. An endless war to fight. Like Rome was 2,000 years ago. A place where people could lose themselves in endless pleasures, with wine, women, and gladiators. As you can lose yourself in dead-ends. In places where nobody wants to be (and to read).

However, Spartacus, Crixus, and Oenomeus had another agenda. They were slaves with the hope of getting their freedom back. Like you and me on Medium, searching the best way to transform writing in a way of living. In conquering the freedom and financial independence.

As Spartacus, we do also want our freedom. We also want to fight this war. And as Spartacus and his brothers, we also will shout out loud:

We’ll kill them all

Revenge Against Procrastination

There is something that really irritates me as I try to write my ass on Medium.

It’s so hard to make my writing useful. Trying the best I can to transform my words in some form of the transformational formula to my followers.

Yet, procrastination is the art of doing tomorrow what we should have been done today. And somehow it always comes to torment our minds and launching small seductions for us to do not advance in our purposes.

Our minds are very good in this area. If we are tired, if we want to sleep, if we want to go to the couch, there is always something in our head trying to convince us to stop working and go to rest.

And that is the perfect moment when I call Spartacus. That’s when I hear him screaming at my ear: We’ll kill them all.

I instantaneously feel that endless power that made him a legend. That power of rage that made him win battle after battle against the gigantic Roman Empire.

As writers, we have to manage procrastination, or we lose the battle. It’s very easy to stop. It’s very easy to hear other voices inside our heads telling us to do something else. Something more pleasurable.

Writing as Giving Birth to a New Idea

We also feel the contractions in our belly. It’s painfully, I know. It hurts a lot. Giving birth to a new story, or a new idea, it’s very hard.

Maybe it’s another Spartacus battle. But don’t forget that this gladiator is hurt, tired, and worn out.

However, look at his eyes. Do you see what they are looking at? They are looking at another Roman death. Another man down. Another hall that was destroyed.

So do you think it’s hard to write? Try to take a bloody sword and move on to another battle. Just try to do that. Don’t look back. You finished one article, it’s one more battle. Just move on to the next. But don’t forget that you have a bloody sword in your hands. You’re a fu%$ing warrior.

You’re a gladiator

You Have to Give First

Spartacus lost the love of his life by the hands of the Roman Empire. A wound never healed. The kindness and the giving pleasure he shared with his lover was endless. But somehow it slipped through his fingers.

Somehow he could find love in the arms of another woman, a roman woman, ironically.

But the capability of finding love in the middle of a brutal war made me believe that love is everywhere.

And if our hearts are full of love, we always have a lot to give.

As writers, like Spartacus, we must embrace love. Because it warms our soul and makes everything easier.

You earn the power of contemplation. You see beauty everywhere. Even in pain, brutality, or death. And as a writer, if you embraced contemplation and love, you’ll always gonna see new things to share. New things to give away with your kind words.

And after you give, and give, and give, something wonderful starts to happen. Somehow, the universe starts to give away. You start to receive it all back again.

“Whatever happens, it happens because we choose for it. We decide our fates.”

Spartacus received an honorable death like he always wanted to. In the battlefield, with his brothers and sisters, fighting for freedom. That was what he wanted. And guess what? That was what he earned.

As a writer, we also want our freedom. And we also have to give a lot. That’s the rule of the game.

And sometime, in the future, we will get our freedom.

We’ll Kill Them All

Don’t miss anything in this life.

If a friend invites you for a concert. Your brother or sister invites you for dinner with friends. Your father or mother calls you home to invite you for a walk in the park.

Don’t miss it. Don’t miss any of it.

Maybe it will be a ceremony with the priest’s sermon that somehow will make you reflect on something you never had time to think about. Something that it’s gonna changes your life forever.

Maybe at that dinner, you’ll meet someone who’s going to be your best friend. Or your soul mate.

You are a writer. And writing is transforming words in magical frames. It’s making words dancing in front of our reader's eyes like butterflies.

So we have this responsibility to filter our experiences into beauty.

And that is so much beauty in our world. We just have to embrace it.

Yet, somehow, some of us just forget it. We forget to live, to absorb, to contemplate, to be passionate about. But we can do it every single day.

We can listen to a new story from someone older. We can spend some time hearing another person. Just stopping and listening, with care and admiration. With humility and curiosity. Listen to their dreams, their pains, their experiments, their passions.

As writers, we can learn so much by listening. But we lose so many opportunities to do so.

“A man must accept his fate, or be destroyed by it.”

If there is any advice I can give you in this article, is to stop and listen.

Hear what others have to say. And make your magical formula work in a peace of paper. Write about it. Share. And don’t lose another chance to miss another moment. Because you are a writer.

You are a magician of words. People need you. People need to read your words. Your unique words.

And if there is some kind of procrastination in your mind. Some kind of bad thoughts, making you slow down your pace, you have Spartacus.

And you know exactly what he as to say to you because you know what we will do to the excuses?

We’ll kill them all