Steven Pressfield’s Overnight Success Only Took 28 Years of Abject Failure
His 3 most valuable lessons from working in advertising for any writer.
If you read any of my work on the writer’s journey, you know, I often quote Steven Pressfield’s book, The War of Art. His realistic perspective on the writing process, finding success, staring down resistance, and writing in the face of it, benefits every writer of every experience level. He explains resistance well, the many forms it takes to stop creativity, what he calls our soul’s seat.
He believes everyone has something uniquely creative to share.
A writer writes with her genius: an artist paints with his; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center. It is our soul’s seat, the vessel that holds our being-in-potential, our star’s beacon and Polaris. — Steven Pressfield
Every struggling writer — every writer — should read The War of Art.
All of Pressfield’s experience has made him the writer he is today.
Steven Pressfield has had many jobs: truck driver, copywriter, novelist, and screenwriter.
Pressfield was 53 when he finally found financial success from writing the novel The Legend of Bagger Vance after 28 years of trying. He really tried. He wrote three novels that took two years each to write, that were never published, and spent several years in a not-very-lucrative-screenwriting career in Los Angeles, where he still resides.
What drove him to keep going when he wasn’t getting paid?
- Persistence. Every writer needs it.
- Failure. It kept motivating him. He wanted to make writing work. So, he stuck to it.
One. Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t.
One of Pressfield’s many jobs was copywriter at an ad firm.
Here, he learned his most valuable lessons on writing, nobody wants to read your sh*t. Every person reading a magazine or watching TV skips over the ads. We click right by them. They are mostly terrible and manipulative, selling us stuff we don’t need.
Any writer or artist should know this lesson before we learn anything else, “don’t write shit.”
Pressfield learned this in advertising, “as you are trying to write an ad or TV commercial, keep in mind that nobody wants to see it. In fact, they hate it, sight unseen. If it’s a TV commercial, whoever has the remote in their hands will click right through it, if it’s an ad in a newspaper or magazine, they are going to turn the page as fast as they can because they hate it. Readers don’t want to read the upsides to Preparation H.”
The lesson for the writer, knowing that you’re facing resistance from the reader or viewer, is that whatever you’re going to put on the page or TV screen, it’s got to be so good, so compelling, and so interesting that people have no choice but to watch it or read it.
That is the job of the writer. Make the sentence so interesting, the reader is compelled to read the next sentence, and the next after that, and so on.
Don’t beg people to read your work.
You can’t force people to read your work. You can ask them to on Facebook as many new writers do, but that won’t bring you writing success. Maybe you’ll get one or two reads with this approach. But to have success — long-term and financial — you need to write something so good, so compelling, so interesting that they can’t help but read it.
Be so original that can’t look away.
Knowing this makes you work harder.
Knowing this makes you project yourself into the reader’s mind: in an empathic way and ask yourself, what would be compelling to the reader, what would catch their attention, what would hold their interest?
Writing and reading are transactional.
When you write, maybe not at first, but eventually, you realize that writing and reading are transactional. Keep this in mind.
The reader is giving you a precious commodity — their time and attention. You, as the writer, have got to provide them with something worthwhile. That’s the job. You can’t just put crap out there and expect the reader is obligated to read it. They aren’t, and they won’t. That’s where the work and the creativity come in.
Make it so good they can’t look away.
Two. Don’t use more words that absolutely necessary.
Pressfield’s second valuable lesson is if you can say something in 250 words, you can say it in 50 or 25. A 30-second commercial cannot have more than 60 words in it, two words per second. In the ad world, there is pressure to keep every piece of copy you write short. This can be said of any writing worth reading.
Every time you write a piece of copy — cut it down.
Keep in mind the same reasons in lesson one apply to lesson two.
Nobody wants to see it in the first place. Nobody wants to read terrible writing or bad ads because people hate being advertised to and when their time is wasted. Again, keep the reader in mind. Knowing that you’re once again facing resistance from the reader, keep it short. Omit unnecessary words for a clear and concise message.
Don’t waste the reader’s time.
There are thousands of other things they could be reading or doing.
Three. A Hero’s journey to the Artist’s journey.
Pressfield often speaks of the Hero’s journey, first imagined by Joseph Campbell, which is different from the Artist’s journey. Your life is divided life into two halves — the Hero’s journey is the first, the Artist’s journey is the second.
The Hero’s journey starts in the ordinary world — your everyday life at the beginning.
Most of us start out believing what our parents tell us about who and what we are and what society tells us about who and what we are. We eventually get to who we really are on our own terms. We find out who we are during the Hero’s journey to the Artist’s journey by shedding what we imbibe from our early caregivers and the culture we grow up in.
The Hero comes home to who he really is, what he was meant to be. It’s at that point when a new stage of your life takes over — the second half.
Pressfield spent 28 years on his Hero’s journey. At that point, he considered himself a writer. His next question came in the second part of his life, the Artist’s journey.
The second half of life — the Artist’s journey — prompts the next big life question, what am I going to give to the world creatively?
What is the Artist’s gift to the larger world? What are we here to give?
It can be any creative endeavor to the wider world.
Richard Rohr describes another way to look at this: The first half of your life is when you find your identity and establish your presence on the planet. Rohr writes “you’re creating the vessel that is your life.”
In the second half, you’re filling that vessel. What are you going to do with it? What are you going to give back to the world in the form of a creative gift unique to you?
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering type-A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats