Advisory Opinions - Steven Pressfield on Writing Historical Fiction

Episode Date: August 2, 2022

It’s August, and so David and Sarah are taking a break from court coverage and legal issues. Steven Pressfield, author of A Man at Arms, joins Sarah and David to kick off the month with a deep dive into what it’s like to write historical fiction set in the ancient world. Pressfield explains his mechanisms for creating fascinating stories and three-dimensional characters. What is the key to bringing history back to life? Plus: Steven gives some tried-and-true advice to aspiring writers.   Show Notes: -A Man at Arms -Steven Pressfield’s books Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I was born ready. Welcome to the Advisory Opinions Podcast. This is David French with Sarah Isker, and we have great news. Well, it's mixed news. The mixed news is it's August, which is the worst month of the year for weather and sports. But the great news is it's August because that's probably the best month of the year for Advisory Opinions, Sarah. Certainly the most fun for us. Oh yeah, absolutely. And we're kicking off August in style this year. So we have with us Steven Pressfield, author of a lot of books you know that you've read, that you've heard of, Legend of Bagger Vance, Gates of Fire, Tides of War, The Afghan Campaign, and most recently, a book that I loved called A

Man at Arms. A bunch of nonfiction books as well, including a book, Do the Work, about how you kind of become the kind of writer that Steven Pressfield is. So, Steve, thank you so much for joining us. Hey, thanks, David. Thanks for having me. Sarah, thanks a lot. It's like I say, I'm a fan of you guys. It's a real pleasure to be here. Let's just go ahead and start. Well, here's kind of what we want to talk about. I want to talk about your new book. I want to talk about the process of writing historical fiction because the thing that I love about your books is in addition to the story is captivating, it's the detail. I walk away reading the book where I feel like I just

learned something about first century Palestine, for example. So I want to talk about that. I want to talk about your most recent book. And then also some of the stuff that you've written about how to write and how to do what you do. So let's just start. I've read A Man at Arms, and I don't want to give away too many spoilers. So if you could kind of set up for the audience what your most recent book is about. It's set a little bit after, a few years after the crucifixion in Judea under the Romans. And it's really a Western. It's kind of like a Clint Eastwood gunslinger movie, only instead of a guy with six guns, it's a man at arms. That's the title of the book. A solitary mercenary who is like a one-man killing machine who gets involved in some

of the spiritual, some of the deep spiritual stuff that's going on at that time. I could talk for a longer, but that's probably a good, you know, quick elevator. It's centered around the delivery of the Apostle Paul's letter to the Corinthian church. Yes. Which is a fascinating setup for a book. So what made you want to think about, okay, putting yourself in the position of this letter to the Corinthian church, one of the most famous documents ever written, to center a novel around it. I don't know if you guys or the audience is familiar with the term the MacGuffin. Have you

ever heard of that? Yeah. Yeah. The MacGuffin comes from Alfred Hitchcock and the MacGuffin in any kind of story is what the villain wants. For instance, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's the Ark of the Covenant that the Nazis are going after. is what the Romans, the bad guys, they are after this letter because it is a letter that really sort of propagated the early Christian church, which was the real threat to the Roman Empire at that time and afterwards. And for people who aren't familiar with Paul's letter to the Corinthians, it's the one that has the great things of faith, hope, and charity, love, suffereth all things, believeth all things, endureth all things, through a glass darkly. It has like one, and how I sort of came to this, I'll give you kind of the long version here, is my niece got married a couple of years ago, and she asked me to be the

officiant. So I went straight to my, actually my brother had already married them, but I was going to do it in public. And so I went straight to the book of common prayer, just sort of searching for some great things that I could pull out. And I pulled out like four or five things and realized they were all from first Corinthians, which is now a book in the Bible, in the New Testament, the actual letter that Paul wrote to the Christian community, the underground Christian community at Corinth in Greece. And so then that just sort of sat in my mind for a couple of years. And then I

thought, I know I'm probably blathering on too long, but bear with me here. No. I thought to myself, you know what? This was a real letter. This was really sent. And the Romans, if they knew this was happening, would want to stop this letter. You know, this would be a big, this was like the equivalent of the nuclear bomb in that era, right? Could overturn the empire. So then I thought, well, there's the basis of a story. All I got to do is, and I also had a character, my man at arms character, that was a previous character from other books, a recurring character that I've been trying to do

a book about him alone. And I thought, let's get him involved. And that's kind of the, the genesis of that story, little separate pieces coming together. Okay. So you have this epiphany of sorts. Now you know you want to write a book. Not to sound too silly about this whole thing, what's next? You must have to do an enormous amount of historical research. Do you fly over there? Do you walk around? Do you just sit in the library? Well, that's a great question, Sarah, and I'll probably answer in too many words, but the first thing you do when you have kind of a story like that is you ask yourself, what genre is this? Is this a love story? Is this science fiction? Is this a detective story? And I realized that it was a Western

and that I had a character that was the gunslinger that was like a Clint Eastwood gunslinger. I had the MacGuffin. I had the thing the bad guys were after. I had the bad guys who were the Romans and I had the good guys who were the Christian church, you know, at Corinth. And so, and I also had, you know, every Western takes place in a wasteland beyond the law, if you think about it, right? Whether it's Mad Max or, you know, or Unforgiven or whatever. So in this book, I knew that I had the Sinai wilderness, that this was going to be a chase where our good guys were going across the wilderness, chased by bad bandits and Romans and everything like that. And so that's sort of how you kind of basically structure

something. Like you guys might structure a political speech or something like that, or a brief before a court or something like that, kind of a way to do it. Now, as far as research there, I had just finished a book a couple of years earlier that was about the Six-Day War, the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. And I'd been in Israel for nine weeks. So I sort of was immersed in what the old temple was and what the landscape was of where Gaza was, that kind of thing. So I kind of had that sort of already in my head. And the rest of it, as they say in fiction, you just make up.

Well, a lot of it seems to be made up with a lot of precision. Right? Yeah, that's why I was sort of curious if you flew over there, what sort of on-the-ground research one might do. But you have so many of these books, you would spend all of your time in foreign locations. I mean, the desert in this book almost is its own character.

Well, it definitely, I certainly meant that to be just like it is in any Western. Right now, if you think of any, the desert is a character, unforgiving, a land beyond the law, that sort of thing. So and I knew it from being over there, over there, from being there on the ground. So I did have a sense of what it was. Now, I'll give you one other little sidebar thing. Probably the most well-known of my books is a book called Gates of Fire. That's about the Battle of Thermopylae, the 300 Spartans versus the Persians. Not that the movie 300 did not come from this. It's another

one. But in any event, when I was researching that book, I went to Greece after I'd already written the book. And I drove around to kind of see if the mountain that I said was there was actually there, and if I had to move that mountain or something, but, uh, so a lot of times you can do research without actually being in the place. So one, one thing that is fascinating to me about all of your books, uh, you know, especially the, the, the books that are set back in, you know, pre-medieval eras, from A Man at Arms to Gates of Fire, is the way in which you describe everything from the weaponry to the tactics, it really feels as if you're there.

And it feels as if, okay, wait a minute, this is how that, not just this is how that would work, oh, this is how that, not just this is how that would work, but this is how those tactics would impact like human, human, how that, how those tactics would impact people in the real world, from the rage and the fear to the courage, to the cowardice, all of it. And, you know, I, you have, you have experience, you were in the Marine Corps. How much do you meld the knowledge of the way military weapons and tactics worked 2,000 years ago with the psyche of, for lack of a better term, men at arms now? And sort of this thought that there's going to be a continuity there. Yeah, I think that's exactly what it's about, David. It's all, I mean, for me at least, it's the imagination. You know,

you just try to imagine yourself back into that. Like, for instance, Gates of Fire is really about what they call hoplite warfare, phalanx warfare, where like the way the ancient Spartans fought was in a phalanx with lapped shields, overlapped shields in a front rank, eight ranks deep where this one, two, three, four,

five, six, seven, put their shield into the back of number one in front and push. Yeah. And you come, you know, while striking overhand with an eight foot spear.

So I just had to, knowing that, Sarah research, you do every bit of research you can, you read everything you possibly can. But the only way to do it is just sort of to imagine what that must be like. And also I did take a little trip to a friend of mine named Chip Armstrong, who is what they call an edge weapons specialist, a guy that knows swords. an edge weapons specialist, a guy that knows swords. And I spent two days with him in Arizona, and we just kind of went outside and tried to imagine what that was all about, taking his expertise in how, you know, swords and everything like that actually would operate. But it's really just sort of imagination and beaming yourself back into that time.

Your first novel was The Legend of Bagger Vance. Right. I mean, I'm having some trouble even imagining, like, you write a first novel and it gets turned into a movie with Will Smith, Matt Damon, and Charlize Theron. I don't know where to start. Okay, how long did it take you to write The Legend of Bagger Vance? Well, it took me like 30 years to write a novel that was published. I'd been trying to do that basically for 30 years with no success.

And that book, The Legend of Baggerger vance just sort of came to me whole cloth and uh came out very fast and to my amazement somebody actually wanted it now how it became a movie that's beyond me i don't know what was going on i mean i was as soon as i made the deal i was fired like it all like as always as I made the deal, I was fired, as always happens. The original writer is always fired. And so the movie kind of went on without me. What did you think of the movie? And I would think it would be frustrating.

Because the book is detailed, it's long, it's beautiful. In order to put that in a movie, there's things they're going to have to cut. There's things they're going to have to simplify. And on the one hand, you must understand that. But this is also like your baby. And to see your baby sort of changed and to watch it in the theater, I don't know. That would be a weird feeling for me. Yeah, it's a weird feeling, I think, for every writer of an original material.

But I feel like once you cash the check, you got to shut up, you know? You can't complain. And you hope, you know... All I could hope for in a case like that was that the filmmakers were really good, and Robert Redford directed it. You can't ask for anything better than that.

So you just hope for the best. You liked it. You sat in the movie theater and you had a good time. Not really. See, that's how I would feel. I could not possibly have a good time. Let me not say anything anymore. Once I've cashed the check, I can't say it.

Except I would say to anybody listening, read the book. Another question, though, on The Legend of Bagger Vance, because in some ways it's very different than Gates of Fire or A Man at Arms, where it is set in the history that it comes from. The Legend of Bagger Vance is historical in a sense. It takes place less than 100 years ago, but still not in your time, not in my time. But it was based on the Bhagavad Gita, and you then put that into that time period in American history and in golf. Well, again, Sarah, this is sort of like, how does a story take shape, right, from a writer's point of view, from nothing, again, Sarah, this is sort of like, how does a story take shape, right? From a writer's point of view, from nothing, right?

From a germ of an idea. Now, the Bhagavad Gita, again, I'm going to talk longer than probably your audience wants to hear, but I'm going to keep going. No, please. The Bhagavad Gita is a scripture. It's been called the Hindu Bible. It's a wonderful, very short piece that they say Gandhi used its principles to free India. And it's the story I'll give it to you. It's a mentor protege story. And it's about the great

warrior Arjuna back in the day when they fought with chariots and stuff like that. And his mentor is his charioteer, who happens to be Krishna. In other words, God in human form. So that's a great start right to begin with. And basically what the Bhagavad Gita is, is on the eve of a great battle, when the armies are lined up across from each other, chariots and swords and spears and bows and arrows and everything, the great warrior Arjuna says, I don't want to fight. This is bad news and I don't want to kill these people. And so Krishna, i.e. God, reads him the riot act and says, your role as a warrior, you must fight. And the rest of the thing is about Krishna giving spiritual instruction to Arjuna.

And the subjects that he talks about are duality and non-duality, karma, previous lives, and there's a whole great section in there called The Field and the Knower, capital F, capital N. That's basically quantum physics from 3,000 years ago. That's basically quantum physics from 3,000 years ago. So I just thought, instead of a troubled warrior and a charioteer, how about a troubled golf champion and his caddy? And to go a little bit deeper in this, if you think about Jesus, when the divinity, when God appears on earth in human form,

he never appears as a king or a great powerful figure. He always appears, whether it's Krishna or Jesus or the Buddha, as a servant or as a man of sorrows or something like that. Someone that's in a very humble position, like a caddy or like a charioteer. And he also is usually despised by the powers that be, but yet he is the divinity. So I just thought there was a lot of cool stuff there, Sarah, you know, and I could mess around with it and make a story. You know, what's interesting about your work is, you know, Gates of Fire has been on military reading lists now for a long time. That's how I first read it when I was on my reading list when I was in Officer Basic. Oh, is that right?

Were you in the Marine Corps then? No, I was an Army JAG officer. Yeah. So they forced you to read Corps? No, I was an Army JAG officer. Yeah. So they forced you to read it. No, I happily read it. It's one of these reading lists that's not mandatory, but here we recommend these books. And I read them and I loved it. And I was listening to you on another podcast.

Listening to you on another podcast, and I remember you saying something to the effect that you've now had this, there's been this interesting bond that has developed between you and a lot of, and I think the host was describing this, that there's a generation's worth of kind of bond between you and a lot of America's warriors. A lot of the people who've been out there. And you served as well. And just kind of what has that been like? I'm sure you're encountering a lot of officers, a lot of men who've served, who've shared with you what reading your books meant to them. And I thought that was just fascinating. Which is, it's really an odd feeling because by no means am I any kind of warrior or war here. I'm just a nerd that sits at a typewriter, you know? So it's been really kind of mind-blowing to me to meet some of these men and women who are amazing personalities in terms of being like characters out of a book, stone killers, but also really, really smart and deep guys

because they face so much stuff and have to ask themselves, what am I doing? Why did I feel the way I felt? Am I doomed to hell for what I've that kind of stuff? You know, one point I will make for what, for those in our audience that are writers or aspiring writers, um, for me, this whole military thing and the books gates of fire, and there was like five others had followed it were a complete surprise to me. This was no, I had no plan for this. They just, you know, I'm a believer in the muse and I believe that, you know, ideas come to you and you have no control over them. And so I say that to anybody that's a writer, things will come to you that you never expected and will reveal yourself in a strange and really

interesting way. I never thought that I would have those friends. I never thought that I would write those books, but I did, so it must be me. There's something very profound in that statement. Okay. Nitty- gritty of publishing industry. So you write Bagger Vance. It's a huge hit. It gets turned into a major movie. That's 1995. Or 95.

Yeah, 95. So three years later, you're publishing Gates of Fire, which to me feels like no amount of time at all. By the time you literally breathe and pick up a computer again, how does your publisher approach you about that? what's next? What are you working on? I need chapters by next week. Like what is that gap of only three years? And is it the pressure to publish, to strike while the iron's hot because you just published a great novel? Or was that internal to yourself feeling like,

I can't wait to turn out the next thing? You said it took 30 years for the first one, three for the second. I'm so curious how that works. Well, three is a long time, Sarah. If you think about it, if you're sitting there beating your brains out for three years, that's a long time. But it's not three years to think of the book. It was three years it was out. I could buy it in 1998. That's true. That's true. But where sort of the impetus came from was really from my agent. I have a great agent. His name is Sterling Lord. He's now 101 years old. Wow. And he was the guy who made the deal for On The Road, Jack Kerouac's

On The Road. And he's a great mentor to me and everything. And one of the things, he was the guy who said, what's next? Give me something else I can sell. And I had been, again, I'll give you a longer answer than you asked for, Sarah, but I had been a screenwriter, like a B-list or C-list screenwriter for the previous 10 years. And when I wrote Vag or Vance, that pretty much ended my career as a screenwriter because you can't walk away even for a little while, you know? So I really knew that I had to come up with something and I had no idea what it was.

And there's, well, how do you follow up a golf book? You know? So I had no clue. And I just had a germ of an idea about doing a book about the Battle of Thermopylae. So I just sort of it was and it's again, it seized me kind of like Bagger Vanstead. So it was inner driven, Sarah, you know, where I felt like I just I really thought it was a bad idea. I thought nobody's going to be interested in this. It's a battle from a million years ago. It doesn't involve

Americans. You know, Americans don't care about anything except other Americans. It's at a place that nobody can spell or pronounce. So I thought nobody's going to be interested in this except me, but I was seized by it. So I just did it. And actually only one person wanted it. And that was Sean Coyne, who was an editor or up-and-coming editor at Doubleday then, who then became my business partner. But he championed it. He found it. He championed it.

Nobody else wanted it. Really? So that kind of got it rolling from there, from book number two. So even after Legend of Bger vance and its success only one person wanted the next book yeah and in fact that's pretty much been my career david nobody i find like the one person that wants it nobody else wants things so the first 30 years before you publish, at some point, this sounds like a silly question, but were there points where you just said, nope, this novelist thing is just not happening? Did you leave it behind in your mind and then come back to it periodically? Or was it always something there? There was always something you were diligently pursuing. That's a great question, David. And after I wrote three novels that never came close

to being published. And, and finally I just gave up. I said, I can't do this. You know, this is, you know, I, I don't have the wherewithal to put in another two or three years on another one, but then I sort of stumbled onto a career in screenwriting. Yeah. So, uh, you know, starting at the very, very bottom. And, um, so that kind of was, uh, kept me going and kept me learning about what a story was. Um, and, uh, so I just kept trying and trying. And finally the idea for the legend of Bagger Vance just sort of came to me as a book, not as a movie.

I knew right away I didn't want to do a screenplay. So there is, you know, like I say, I believe in the muse. I believe there's another level of, of, of, uh, another dimension above us. And, uh, when the time is right, that dimension will kick in. and when the time is right, that dimension will kick in. For the novels that you wrote that didn't get published, Prebagger, Vance, Odyssey that you were on, do you ever look back and think,

actually, these were really good and those people were wrong? No, I've read them over again. They're no good. They have to stay in the drawer. Fascinating. Yeah, that was going to be my question is, do you, after you've been published and now you have a name and now people are going to seek out your next book,

regardless of topic, because they follow the author, you think, hey, I've caught these three authors. No, these were just too bad. I want to give a shout out to another person. When I came out to Hollywood to try to write for the movies, after a little while, my agent teamed me up with an older established writer. And I want to tip my hat to him now. His name is Ron Shusett.

He's the guy who did the original Alien, along with his partner, Dan O'Bannon, as well as Total Recall and Minority Report. He was the force, kind of a big force behind both of them. And I was kind of his junior partner for about five or six years. And the reason why the three novels I'm telling you about were not good enough was because I really didn't know what a story was. I really didn't know what Act one, act two, act three, that kind of thing was all about. And working with Ron and being in the, in the flow of, you know, trying to sell something in Tinseltown,

I did sort of learn what a story was so that when it came time to do Bagger Vance and the other things, I knew what a story was. Here come the carrots making their way upfield, followed by the whole wheat bread, over to the two dozen eggs. Sir, do you do this every time? Sorry, I've been a little excited ever since I got this BMO Toronto FC cashback MasterCard.

Oh, and the broccoli boots are over the line. What a goal! How would you like to pay, sir? Credit, please. Make every purchase a win with the BMO Toronto FC Cashback MasterCard with up to 5% cashback on your purchases in your first three months. Terms and conditions apply. I want to go back to a man at arms for a bit.

You know, I'm really struck by the choice of 1 Corinthians as the MacGuffin. And I thought it might be worth pulling apart a little bit more, and this is obviously part of the book, but why was 1 Corinthians so incompatible with Roman imperialism? Why was this a threat to Rome? That's a great question, and of course, I'm not really sure. By the way, you guys are asking great questions. This is a terrific interview.

You're making it really easy for me. Again, if you beamed us three back to the year 55, the world might be completely different from what I wrote in A Man at Arms. But for the purposes of this story, I had to say, okay, this is a big threat. It's the letter. And if you think about it, Rome at that time had no rival in terms of military. Nobody was going to, you know, as it says in the book, the emperor's sleep is not disturbed by any other, but what he is disturbed by is a spiritual force, But what he is disturbed by is a spiritual force, something, you know, the kingdom of God is within you. And all of the people that were oppressed by the Roman Empire were looking for some way to express that.

And in fact, if you think about it, it wasn't very long after that before Rome did fall. And in fact, it became where the Pope is right now, the Vatican. Rome is now the center of that religion. And there were underground communities in Rome at that time. So, you know, at least for story purposes, it made sense for me to kind of make the case that this letter, because I figured that it wouldn't just be going to one little place in Corinth. They would copy it and it would go out everywhere, you know? Right. And people would be, you know, oppressed people would be ravenous for this good news, quote-unquote. Should I read anything into the fact that two of your major books are taken from spiritual stories?

That's a good question. You know, it's certainly nothing that I planned, but I do think that anytime you write a story, it starts with the physical level, right? The action. If we're talking about a Western, it starts with gunfights and horses and stuff like that, right? But it also has to have deeper levels. You know, it has to go down into the psychological level, the metaphorical level, and eventually it has to go to the spiritual level, if it's going to work. I mean, the Godfather, you can take that to the spiritual level. Chinatown, you can take it. The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, pick any Moby Dick. And all of them, when you get really down to it, are really about spiritual

questions. And usually, again, I know I'm talking too long, but I'll keep... No, you're not. If you think about Westerns and the genre and the obligatory scenes of Westerns, they usually have a gunslinger is the hero, right? A man of violence, usually a man with a past, usually an embittered person. The samurai movies, I would say, are right in here. A man with a code, but a man who lives is a law unto himself, right? He's divorced himself from society. And invariably, there is a vulnerable character in the story. Might be a woman, might be a child, like in Shane. It's the little boy played by Brandon DeWilda in Unforgiven.

Or it's Baby Yoda. Yeah. And detective stories are like that, too. Or in Unforgiven, it's the prostitutes of that town. The woman, Bill Gallagher's face got scarred up by these cowboys. And eventually the climax of any Western is this one man killing machine taking the side of the vulnerable person and taking a big risk and really opening his heart. And so that's the spiritual level.

That's love, right? That's capital L love. And sometimes the hero dies. Sometimes it's a tragic ending and sometimes it's a happy ending, but it always gets to the spiritual level. So it does make sense, I think, Sarah, if you're going to steal from an underlying material, steal from something that's got a real spiritual dimension to it. Maybe that's more the through line, David. Maybe his books are more about that transcendent love because Gates of Fire is in a way love.

What causes 300 men to stand there knowing that it'll be to their death, it's love. And it's been taught that way, certainly in military schools, that this is overly simplistic, but this idea of people defending their own land and their own families and all of that and that type of love. Yes. In fact, you could say that the Thermopylae story is the Christ story only enacted by 300 people, enacted by a group,ally collectively rather than one man but both is similar they both know they're going to their death and they willingly do that you know so

that's pretty spiritual so yeah you hit the nail on the head sarah and i think one thing that's connected with a lot of men and women who serve is in Gates of Fire, that phalanx warfare, the absolute dependence that you have on the shield beside you and then shield on the other side of you. Exactly. We don't fight like that in that close proximity anymore, but there is still that sense of absolute dependence that exists, whether it's on, you know, when I was in Iraq and when you called for fires, you had to, your life depended on whether or not

somebody was going to answer that call, you know, for example. Yeah. And so there were that sort of absolute dependence on the, you know, the brothers and sisters around you, I think is something that so connects. It's one of those things that really connects with people who've served. Yes. And that's an indelible bond that I think men and women that have served and come out,

they miss it for the rest of their lives. They can't find it again. You know, and I think actually athletes the same way, you know, you see people that retire from the NFL or anything like that, you know, they miss that camaraderie, the locker room, you know, that's what they miss more than the money or the adulation or anything like that. I mean, that's the way we're we evolved in the tribal hunting band, right? We evolved that way with bonds, you know, male, female, and we don't really have it so much in the modern world. Okay. What do you read in your free time? Yeah, that's a great question. You talked about you need a muse. Are other books your muse? Is nature, is it a woman, a dog? I don't know. And when you do need to unwind and take a break, you want to be free from a muse, what do you read?

I never unwind. What does a novelist do for fun? Well, one of the things I do is I don't read novels. Really? It's very hard for me because, except like old ones, like I'll read The Sun Also Rises or novels that know, or novels that I used to, you know, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or something like that. But if I read a contemporary novel and it's good

and it has a really strong voice, then that screws me up. Because I start, you know, I start writing in that voice too, you know. I think, you know, artists are very suggestible and I'm certainly suggestible as hell so a lot of the books that i'll read sarah are like research for what i'm doing um like i'm reading a book now about previous lives which is a big thing with me you know about a hypnotherapist who's took people back to past life regressions and stuff like that because i'm

trying to get some stuff like that. And I don't know, I've also been fascinated in the last, you know, couple of months about Hemingway in Paris in that era. And I've been reading a few books, you know, one book leads you to another, but always nonfiction. And I'll tell you what- Have you thought about writing non-fiction yourself uh i have written i mean i i have written a little bit about of it the lion's gate which was a book about the six-day war was non-fiction where i interviewed you know about 75 israeli fighter pilots and so on and so forth so that's fun that's fun. What was I going to say? Oh, just on the subject of what do I read? Like, here's a book that is the most obscure, nerdy book possible. And I loved it

completely. Oh, we're here for that. We're here for that. I wrote a couple of books about Alexander the Great. And I found this book that was called, it was called Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army by, I forget his first name, his last name is Engels. And it's basically about mules. And if you're going to cross the desert in Iraq, this is for you, David, you know, without trucks and, you know, how much can a mule carry? If the mule were carrying only its own water and its own fodder, how far could it go? And the author just breaks it down completely of how Alexander, how did he get 50,000 men and all kinds of stuff across this totally inhospitable place and how he moved from harvest to harvest, stealing the harvest at this place,

buying it at another place, crossing fast when he had to. And so that I love just reading about mules and how they did it and how they rented mules. You know, they didn't have their own mules. They had to rent them and now they paid for them. Did the guys come along with their mules who own the mules? And so that's the sort of stuff I read, Sarah. And it's fascinating. Speaking of mules, I have to do digression. You brought up mules. So I just, my family, my mom's family is from the mule,

what we call the mule capital of the world. Wow. A little town called Columbia, Tennessee, which celebrates its mule prowess through an annual mule day. Wow. But we actually have some grounds for claiming our mule prowess. Our mules helped win the Cold War. How did they do that?

They transported Stinger missiles to the Mujahideen over the mountain passes because the donkeys that the Afghan fighters had weren't strong enough to carry these missiles. Oh, well, that's fantastic. So that's, now that's like, you talk about details, you know, and how do you bring something to life from, you know, an ancient, that's it. You know, you talk, you'd really get into that detail and say, you know,

why these mules as opposed to those other mules, you know? And in fact, in, in a Man at Arms, there's a period, there's a thing where the young apprentice in the story asks the man at arms, how come we're not, don't have horses? Why do we have these stupid mules that go so slow? And there's a real reason that horses will break their legs in mountainous terrain and mules won't, and so on and so forth. A lot of other, and those are the details I think that when you're reading something like that, you go, oh, this is real. You know, I accept this.

This is somebody who knows what they're talking about. Are you ever tempted to bend some chronological order to fit your narrative? I'm thinking y'all are talking about mules. I love donkeys. I'm not a particular mule expert, but I have been reading about the history of the stirrup and how that changed really the face of the world as the stirrup spread as a chief military technology roughly 1,600, 1,700 years ago. What got you into that, Sarah? Why did you start? I know, Sarah, I'm fascinated.

Y'all, who knows? As you said, one thing leads to another, right? And all of a sudden you're doing a deep dive on stirrups. But if I were writing a novel and I might be inclined to talk about the fascinating history of the stirrup, but I might be 50 years off. Maybe the stirrup didn't make it to the specific location that I'm talking about right then. I think that would probably keep me up at night knowing that it was wrong. And I might have to change then the whole novel to fit the history of the stirrup.

But when you have so many pieces coming together and so much research and history that you've done, how do you mesh that together in a way that allows you to sleep at night, that you're being true to the history, but also that you're including amazing historical nuggets, like whatever the stirrup is to you? Well, you're a more honorable person than I am. I would not be troubled by that at all. But in fact, I'm working on a book right now that is kind of a follow-up to A Man in Arms, and I'm inverting time by about 50 years, and I don't care. It's like Alfred Hitchcock said, if they get home from the movie and they're having a snack

and they're opening the refrigerator door, and they say to themselves, wait a minute, those birds didn't really attack Tippy. That's okay. As long as it doesn't happen in the, in the movie. So I think that's pretty fair. So here's the thing. This is actually from a good friend of mine, Randy Wallace, who wrote Braveheart and has directed a bunch of other things, historical things. And he says, I asked him, you know, how do you do research? What do you do? And he says, I always do it last. He says, get the story first, get a story that's working and then bring in the history to back it up. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. Get the climax, get, you know, make the story work first. So do you ever, when you're working on it, do you ever sit there and think, okay, the vast majority of my audience

is going to be reading this, and they're going to be taking it in and loving the story, and they're going to be deeply immersed in the book. But somewhere there's a Yale PhD in this topic who's going to find something wrong and then tweet at me or whatever incessantly. And do you ever think about that?

Are you ever sort of thinking about there is a subject matter expert out there somewhere who's reading this and are you writing to satisfy them or are you just going to let them stew if they need to? Yeah, I don't worry about them because it's like haters are going to hate, you know? But going back just for a second to why the stirrup is so important, because it's a great thing. It's like before the stirrup, a man in armor couldn't really ride a horse because it was too heavy. If you think about Alexander the Great and those guys,

they were basically riding bareback, you know? Not quite. They had saddles, but they didn't have stirrups. And also a charging, a cavalryman with a lance really had no way to brace himself. You know, when you hit the foe with that lance, you went bowling, you know, off the back of your horse. So stirrups really did make a huge difference, didn't they? And the Huns introduced them to Europe. And it even looks like perhaps they weren't, they didn't quite know the technology

they had at the beginning. They thought it might be a way to get on the horse because we have some evidence of one side having a stirrup, but not two sides of stirrup. That's interesting. Yeah. And so it's an example almost of the money we spend on NASA. Sometimes you spend money on technology not knowing it's military application right away, and that'll come in later. But yeah, I mean, when we think of military advancements, we think of spears and arrows and guns, and sometimes it's the stirrup, man. Yeah, yeah. Well, can you get, you said you're working, you've got other stuff in motion. Can you give us a sneak preview of what might be coming

or should, do we just need to wait? Yeah, I prefer not to. All right. We thought we might break some news here on this podcast. Thank you though. What's the advice that you give to young writers? And I mean, young, young, not, not they've been doing this for 30 years and they have three novels that are no good. Uh, and they're working in screenwriting. I mean,

you're so far along at that point, you know, good advice when you see it. I mean, you're heading off to college and you're just, um, you know, you're not a great writer yet because you're 19 years old. I mean, I guess I would say it does take kind of a lifetime or half a lifetime, I think. It's sort of the question I would ask a young writer is, why do you want to do this? You know, do you think you're going to make money? You think you're going to get the girls or the guys? You think you're going to make money? You think you're going to get the girls or the guys? You think you're going to be famous, quote unquote? Because if that's your thinking, stop and become an investment banker or something right now.

Because the price you're going to have to pay is way too much. And one of the things that really helped my years of failure were really good in a way for me, because they forced me to ask myself, why am I doing this? Because I'm not making any money. Nobody knows who the hell I am. My family thinks I'm an idiot. And every time I tell anybody I'm a writer, they just sort of choke back laughter. So I had to tell myself that, or I had to answer, ask and answer and said that I just can't do anything else. You know, this is, this is my calling for whatever it is and I'm

going to do it, you know, without success or with success. And, and I think that's the answer for anything in the arts or anything in entrepreneurship, I think, or, you know, you have to do it for love. Otherwise, you know, it's not going to be good for you. Okay. But now that you've got the fame, the riches, the girl, all the things that a novelist could ever have dreamed of wanting, the affirmation, really, what's the best part? What's the worst part? First of all, I don't have any of that. But even if I did, I think it's meaningless. The part, it's all about the work. You know, that's all I, I don't know.

Did you ever see a movie called Save the Tiger with Jack Lemmon? I don't think so. He won an Oscar for this movie. Oh gosh, now I feel bad. And he played a guy who had a garment company. You know, and it was going under. And he does all these things to survive.

He arson, you know, prostitutes. He gets everything. And at one point, somebody says to him, what do you want, man? I mean, what do you want? And he says, another season. And that's what I want. I just want another season. I want another book.

I want the muse to come to me one more time and give me something to work on. And as long as I can pay the rent, then I'm happy. Well, that's a great note to end on. And we really appreciate you coming on. You guys have been great. Thank you, David. Thank you, Sarah. It's really been a lot of fun doing this. Well, this has been fun. And one of the great things about this podcast is with Sarah, you don't know what you're going to learn. And we've had a stir up moment that was just fantastic. It's fantastic.

So thank you so much. And the book, A Man at Arms, we're going to have a link to it in the show notes. Highly, highly recommend. Just a wonderful book and just a really creative and I've never read anything

like sort of the setup. I mean, as somebody who's read First Corinthians a million times, I really appreciated it in a new light after this book. So thank you and thank you for joining us. All right. Thank you very much for having me, you guys. It's great. I'll come back anytime on your nerd month, you know, whenever you want to do it. This is why I love August. I now look forward to August so much. Yeah, this is the best kickoff. Thank you.

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Terms and conditions apply. So that was fun, Sarah. That was certainly fun. It's why I love August. Can I tell you though what kind of surprised me, shocked me? Yeah, go for it. He's like super cool. And I don't mean like cool like a cucumber.

That word like sort of has a thousand different meanings. I mean like cool like the way kids in high school are cool. Like we are nerds and he's like as smart as a nerd, can clearly hang intellectually with every nerd and beat them, but is also cool and that's odd and it's jarring. And I'm not totally sure I'm comfortable with it. Well, I would put it like this. I think he'd be a great hang. Yeah.

Just a person you'd just like to hang out with and just talk to for a while. I mean, he's got Hollywood stories. He's got historical stories. He's clearly comfy in his own skin. Wow. I don't know what I was expecting, but that wasn't it.

So a few favorite moments. Yeah. Favorite moment number one. So what'd you think of Legend of Bagger Vance, the movie? Normally, if somebody is gonna not love the movie that's based on their book,

they're gonna say something like, or they'll, they'll just stop with saying, you know, once you, once you, you know, cash the check, like I trust the process and I, you know, you have a, they have a, their own artistic vision that I respect. And so normally you just do all of that. And he was having none of that. But David, you make, I don't know, I've never written a novel, but I would think that you agonize over every decision from your characters to your scenery to everything, and you play it out probably different ways and change things.

No, she's wearing a red dress. Actually, she's wearing a blue dress. And now I have it perfect. She is wearing a purple, yellow polka dot dress. But then to have done all of that agonizing work and then in movie form they change things that you put thought into that's not what that character would have done and i really knew that because i lived that character yeah it'd be awful how could you possibly even watch it but i liked your your child analogy because i mean i even think about like, I have this possessive feeling about essays that I write.

I mean, you know, it's like not even a book. I mean, I, Hey, this is that, you know, when you write something and especially if you write something that involves any level of creativity, um, you really have a sort of sense of ownership about it. And I liked your child analogy. And I was just thinking about maybe it's like when you send your child off to college and they come back with like a nose ring and a facial tattoo or something like that you're saying wait hold on this is this is not what I wanted not how I thought this was going to go you hear that Nate no no sleeve tats so that was uh favorite moment number one. And then the other one was, haters gonna hate. That's what I mean.

He's cool, David. He's cool. Yeah, I know. I know. I know. So that was a great kickoff for August. I mean, does anything stand out to you aside from the overall coolness of Steven Pressfield?

I just find the process fascinating. I find it fascinating you spend 30 years wandering around in the desert and then hit after hit after hit. Yeah. I find it fascinating his first one was such a hit. And that he is willing to be cool, if you will, play it cool with the historical process.

That you write the story first. It actually isn't about the history. The history is what is the vehicle for this great story that he wants to tell you. All of that is fascinating to me because it's not necessarily what I would have guessed. Yeah, no, I thought that was really interesting was the way he approached the process. I thought that was absolutely fascinating. And then, you know, this idea of just keeping at it, you know, and it was interesting. He had the number three novels that he wrote that he didn't sell. That's not that's a number that I've heard from other novelists.

Oh, interesting. that's not that's a number that i've heard from other novelists oh interesting like two or three that just they're just in the dustbin they're just not good and it was and how fascinating that he thinks they're not good because david i gotta tell you if i had three novels that i had spent that much time on i would go back and read them and think they were fantastic and that these people simply didn't appreciate my work at the time. And the other interesting thing to me, and I wonder if this is still the case, Sarah, because and maybe it's more the nonfiction arena than the fiction arena, but in the nonfiction world, my impression is that once you have a name, once you have a book that sells, name, once you have a book that sells, you're publishing your next book. I mean,

there's no struggle there. Right. Tom Clancy can have monkeys bang on his keyboard, and they'll publish that book. Yeah. That was fascinating to me that the very next book, Gates of Fire, only had really one person who believed in it. That was surprising to me. That was surprising. That's why August is fun because we get to enter these other professions, these other worlds, ask dumb questions. And I feel like we learned so much in such a short period of time. Yep, absolutely. So, all right. Well, I think that's it. Oh, David, we did get many responses on what Judge Lee Rudofsky should name his clerk family. Yes.

And I just want to give my top three. There were lots of Rudolph the Reindeer iterations, but the Rudabakers, I think that could even be number one. It's hard to say. That's a very good one. But the Corpus Linguistics was to say. That's a very good one. But the corpus linguistics was pretty good. That's my favorite.

Corpus linguistics. That's pretty good. And then this was kind of a pull, but if you're into Jamaican street slang, Rude Boys actually might be the best. Have you remember the Rihanna song? I do not. Okay.

Well, I'm not going to sing it for you. Come here, rude boy. Yeah, I'm not even going to sing the rest of the lyrics, but it's like. When has that ever inhibited you before? Why is it stopping me? I don't know, David. I don't know. But here we are. It's because Steve Pressfield is listening to this podcast. He's so cool. And he's so cool. And you don't want to hear him. You don't want him to hear you sing. That's what it is.

Yeah. But Rude Boys kind of fits nicely, but for the fact that it's a little gendered and there's not really a way around that. And most people wouldn't get it. Like if you don't know what the term Rude Boy is, then yeah, sort of like a street roughneck. Okay.

Well, and you know how I am such a master of pop culture and if even- Exactly. So if you don't know it, that's a problem. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess, I think Rudebakers is the winner. And I thought it was important to tell- Rudebakers is good. I'm still holding a flag for corpus linguistics. A little hard to, like it doesn't roll off the tongue. Like, I mean, you could just do litigators. Yeah. yeah, it's true. That's true. But thank you for everyone who participated.

Yes, and that was a great podcast. I really enjoyed that podcast. I was glad he came on board. So, all right. August, first episode of August Special Advisory Opinions is in the can. And it was, if I don't say so myself, Sarah, that was a good podcast.

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