Author Q&A

Q&A with Author Steven Pressfield

Steven Pressfield is the author of four historical novels set in ancient Greece—Gates of Fire , Tides of War, Last of the Amazons and The Virtues of War—as well as The War of Art and The Legend of Bagger Vance. He has also written or co-written 34 screenplays.

The books have enjoyed respectable success in the States, but have become monsters in their native land. Gates of Fire , Tides of War, Last of the Amazons and The Virtues of War have all had long runs on bestseller lists in Greece. In September 2003, the city of Sparta made Mr. Pressfield an honorary citizen.

Gates of Fire has also been included in the curriculum of the U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Naval Academy and is on the Commandant's Reading List for the Marine Corps.  

What is your writing schedule?
I write in a home office on a Dell laptop, with a second laptop that I copy everything to at the end of the day. I also keep disks of everything in the glove compartment of my car, to be sure I don't lose anything. But to be more exact, here's the first chapter from The War of Art :

1. WHAT I DO

I get up, take a shower, have breakfast. I read the paper, brush my teeth. If I have phone calls to make, I make them. I've got my coffee now. I put on my lucky work boots and stitch up the lucky laces that my niece Meredith gave me. I head back to my office, crank up the computer. My lucky hooded sweatshirt is draped over the chair, with the lucky charm I got from a gypsy in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer for only eight bucks in francs, and my lucky LARGO name tag that came from a dream I once had. I put it on. On my thesaurus is my lucky cannon that my friend Bob Versandi gave me from Morro Castle, Cuba. I point it toward my chair, so it can fire inspiration into me. I say my prayer, which is the Invocation of the Muse from Homer's Odyssey , translation by T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, that my deal mate Paul Rink gave me and which sits near my shelf with the cuff links that belonged to my father and my lucky acorn from the battlefield at Thermopylae. It's about ten-thirty now. I sit down and plunge in. When I start making typos, I know I'm getting tired. That's four hours or so. I've hit the point of diminishing returns. I wrap for the day. Copy whatever I've done to disk and stash the disk in the glove compartment of my truck in case there's a fire and I have to run for it. I power down. It's three, three-thirty. The office is closed. How many pages have I produced? I don't care. Are they any good? I don't even think about it. All that matters is I've put in my time and hit it with all I've got. All that counts is that, for this day, for this session, I have overcome Resistance.

Are you a classically-trained scholar or professor?
I'm a psych major from Duke; while I was there, I took one course on the Iliad and the Odyssey and got a D. So ... no.

I'm an amateur classicist in the Latin-root sense of "ama" (love), someone who does it just because he loves it. I'm just like the people who read my books. I love that ancient stuff.

I was visiting a friend in Vermont about twenty years ago and we were rained-out for a week, with nothing to do but stay indoors and read. My friend had Will and Ariel Durant's a The Life of Greece on his shelf. It is a compendium of Plato, Xenophon, Sophocles, you name it. It grabbed me. I couldn't put it down. Over the next twenty years, I found myself buying various Penguin Classics paperbacks, again just for fun, with no concept that I would ever even talk about them with anyone else and certainly with no notion of WRITING about them.

When I started on Gates of Fire of course everything changed. I had to turn pro and start seriously researching. I've probably turned myself into an unofficial triple Ph.D. by now, but, to answer the question ... No, I'm not classically trained and not a professor.

What is your process for writing historical fiction?
Here's how it goes for me: first something grabs me. A quote. A true historical incident. Something captures my imagination. Usually I don't know why. Sometimes I write the whole book before I figure out why. But that's the toehold, that's the beachhead.

Then I try to "master the material." I assimilate the true historical events, the true historical characters. I go over them and over them and over them until I feel comfortable, like I really know them. By now a sort of rough story is shaping up. I've got a general idea where it starts, what happens in the middle, and how it ends. Now comes the important part: the theme.

What is the story about? What is its subject? In Tides of War , for example, it took me the whole period of writing it before I realized that the theme was jealousy. The pernicious envy that arises in a democracy when one of its members rises too far above the others—and the way that envy causes the democracy to tear down, with gusto, the leaders it has just set up.

That was what evolved for me out of the material of the Peloponnesian War. Twenty other writers would have evolved twenty different themes. But that was my theme. That was what was interesting to me. I saw how the Athenian democracy repeatedly elevated its most talented politicians and generals—Themistocles, Aristides, Miltiades, Cimon, Pericles, Alcibiades—and then tore them all down (exiling them or condemning them to death, or both), and in the process destroyed itself by stripping itself of its most capable leaders. At the height of the war, when Athens was hanging on by its fingernails and needed every able leader it could find, it became caught up in an irrational frenzy and, contrary to law, tried, convicted and sentenced to death its ten leading generals. Can we see something like that in our own democracy? There seems to be something (I began to grasp as my theme) about a society in which everyone is "created equal" that doesn't like to see one guy become a big shot. There is a dark element, an unconscious perversity in the soul of a democracy that loves to set heroes up and loves even more to tear them down.

What happens after you have the theme?
Next: character and structure. Both evolve out of the theme. The central character embodies the theme. The protagonist. Around him are constellated supporting characters, each of whom embodies one aspect of the theme. Against him stands an antagonist, who embodies the counter-theme. Here is where the book characters start to diverge from the true historical figures. Now the writer alters them to serve the theme. He takes liberties. That's part of the game. I remind myself, when I get twinges of guilt, that when Shakespeare wrote "Julius Caesar," he was not trying to produce a bio of the big guy. He was writing a play that had a theme and had characters. Hopefully the theme arises organically from the material and is true to it. But if it doesn't, that's okay too.

Robert McKee, the great writing teacher (and a friend of mine) tells a story about meeting Paddy Chayefsky. Chayefsky told him that as soon as he figures out what the theme of a play he's writing is, he types it out in one short phrase or sentence and tapes it to the front of his typewriter. After that, he said, nothing goes into that play that doesn't arise directly out of that theme.

Historical fiction, as I see it, isn't some kind of fun-park excursion back into a period in the past. It's just like pure fiction; only it uses either true historical characters or fictional historical characters. At its best, the era and the characters work to illuminate not only a theme that's true to their time, but to our contemporary era as well.

Then the past truly does illuminate the present.

What is "mastering the material?"
It's the first job for a writer of historical fiction (or nonfiction) or any period piece. He has to get a handle on the era he's going to tackle, the characters, the events, the chronology, the technology, everything that goes into "what it was like back then." Sometimes this can take years.

There's no way to avoid it. A writer can't do anything until he knows the material.

If you're writing contemporary fiction, you're cool. You already know what a Chevy is and what a cheeseburger is. You know your characters because you're making them up. But in historical fiction, you have to find out how a certain cannon fired, or what a love letter looked like in the court of Louis XIV. And you have to get a sense of the true historical characters. You can't just make them up. You have to be true, within reason, to who they were. But that itself is a monstrous undertaking. Who was Napoleon? Who was Mata Hari? In the end of course you're gonna make it up, because no one knows. In the end you're gonna project your own prejudices onto the characters and make them your own for your own purposes. But first you have to know, as much as it is possible to know, who they really were.

How much research do you do on your novels—in order to "master the material"—and how do you do it?
I don't use the Internet. Probably I'm an idiot but I've never been able to figure it out. I go to the library (the Young Research Library at UCLA) and go back in the stacks. I take out five books at a time (the limit) and bring them home and read them. I copy passages over by hand. I read books three, four and five times. If I can, I buy them. The Loeb Library series from Harvard University Press is my bible.

I make files. The book I'm working on now is about Alexander the Great. I have seventy-six files, some one paragraph, some forty pages long. I have files on Macedonian geography, the Macedonian army, Names of Commanders, Wounds Suffered by Alexander, Months of the Year in the Macedonian Calendar, Tribes of Thrace, Royal Roads of the Persian Empire, etc. Sometimes you can lift passages that you've written to yourself for your files and use them in the finished book with a little tinkering.

I love maps. I have a bazillion of them. I make my own.

I travel. I go to the places. It's often disappointing because the landscape has changed so much (since I'm usually researching stuff that's 2500 years old) but you can still get something from it. I like to go to places at night. I believe in ghosts. You can get a feeling from a place. At Delphi I was absolutely convinced that Apollo was still there. Jesus hadn't even made a dent.

I love footnotes. Stuff that you find between the lines is always the most interesting. There are some tremendous scholars out there, and their footnotes are a gold mine.

Bibliographies. I use one book to lead me to another. It works.

I do something I call "parallel research." There's practically nothing on ancient Amazons. But I knew that they were a horse culture (or I was going to depict them that way) so I researched horse cultures. I read everything on the Sioux and the Comanche and the Cheyenne—and as much about the ancient Scythians as I could find.

I believe in stealing. I steal everything I can find. Lawrence Olivier once said,

"Mediocre artists borrow. Great artists steal—and make better." Of course if you steal, you have to remember to give credit to whom you stole it from.


How long does it take you to write a book?
About two years for the historical novels. Bagger Vance took four months. War of Art came gushing out in two months.

You are a screenwriter as well as a novelist. Which do you prefer and why?
In movies, the saying goes, the writer is the bottom of the totem pole. In books, the writer IS the totem pole.

That's not to say that screenwriting isn't fun—at least the writing part (as opposed to the revising to satisfy the studio's notes part). Screenwriting is a much more severe discipline. A screenwriter doesn't have the tools that a book writer has. He can't go inside his characters' heads. He can't explain. He can't get off on Dennis Miller-type rants. And he can't rely on the brilliance of the prose. Words count in movies, but movies really aren't about words. They're about pictures. The screenwriter writes in pictures. Or, more exactly, in pictures juxtaposed with words.

Movies are subtext. Meaning it's not what the character says (text), it's what his face and body language communicate as he's saying it (subtext.) The greater the contrast between text and sub-text, the better the writing. There can be no subtext in book writing because we can't see the character's faces. As the detective says, "Sure, I trust ya, doll," we can't see his hand reaching for his .357.

Movies are structure, as William Goldman famously declared. Because they're experienced by the audience in one continuous ninety-minute or two-hour glump, movies have to have a rhythm that builds and backs off, builds and backs off and builds again. Movies mount to a climax. They have to, or we'd fall asleep in our seats. Movies are not like books that you can pick up and put down. They're like prizefights or bouts of sex. They start with a "hook," then they "turn" the hook; they build, they have themes and variations on themes, they twist and turn and then they hit the climax at the very end. The writer's challenge in structuring a movie is not what information to give the audience; it's what information NOT to give them. How long does he withhold Fact A? When does he reveal Twist B? And that's not even talking about character or motive or point of view. It's really hard. Very few can do it, and I don't include myself in their number.

Do you read manuscripts from aspiring writers?
No. Absolutely not. Three reasons.

One, I don't have the time. Who does?

Two, my lawyer won't let me. (Here's why: suppose I'm working on a new book about Alexander the Great. One day a manuscript shows up in my mailbox. I'm a nice guy, I open it: it's about Alexander. Now the person who sent me the manuscript can sue me for plagiarism. This actually almost happened to me.)

Reason three is that it's harmful to the writer of the manuscript. To send off a manuscript to an established writer is a form of Resistance. In essence the sender is saying: "I'm an amateur. I have no concept of professionalism. I have no respect for you, Mr. Writer, or your valuable time. I'm selfish. I'm lazy. I surrender my personal power to you, who I don't even know (and in truth don't give a damn about) because I haven't got the guts to pursue this work through legitimate channels."

Think about it. What kind of crappy, selfish stunt is it anyway? Do you really imagine that Stephen King is going to stop what he's doing with his work, his family, his life, and sit down for ten hours to read your stuff? Then what? He's gonna phone you up and say how much he loves it and how he wants to take it to his agent and sponsor it personally and make you famous?

If you want to send a manuscript, send it to an agent. And send a letter first, asking permission. Launch it into the real world of cold-blooded commercial response, not into the fantasyland of wishful thinking, cowardice and surrender to Resistance.

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers and novelists?
Three steps.

First, take Robert McKee's three-day course "Story." He gives it in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Dallas, London, everywhere. Check his Web site, www.mckeestory.com.

Second, read my book, The War of Art .

Third, sit down and do it and don't quit no matter what.

P.S. If you do Step Three, you can skip One and Two.