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22 Steven Pressfield
Start playing from power. We can always dial it back later. If we
don’t swing for the seats from the start, we’ll never be able to
drive a fastball into the upper deck.
Lunch with My Mentor
Some years ago I had lunch at Joe Allen’s in Manhattan with my
mentor (though he would cringe at that word), the writer and
documentary maker Norm Stahl. He was making some notes on
a pad of yellow, legal-size foolscap paper. He told me something
that has saved my bacon more times than I can count:
Steve, God made a single sheet of
yellow foolscap exactly the right
length to hold the outline of an
entire novel.
What did Norm mean by that?
He meant don’t overthink. Don’t overprepare. Don’t let re-
search become Resistance. Don’t spend six months compiling a
thousand-page tome detailing the emotional matrix and family
history of every character in your book.
Outline it fast. Now. On instinct.
