When I first moved to Los Angeles and made the acquaintance of working screenwriters, I learned that many had their own corporations. They provided their writing services not as themselves but as “loan-outs” from their one-man businesses. Their writing contracts were f/s/o —“for services of ”— themselves. I had never seen this before. I thought it was pretty cool. 

For a writer to incorporate himself or herself has certain tax and financial advantages. But what I love about it is the metaphor. I like the idea of being Myself, Inc. That way I can wear two hats. I can hire myself and fire myself. I can even, as Robin Williams once remarked of writer-producers, blow smoke up my own ass. 

Making yourself a corporation (or just thinking of yourself in that way) reinforces the idea of professionalism because it separates the artist-doing-the-work from the will-and-consciousness-running-the-show. No matter how much abuse is heaped on the head of the former, the latter takes it in stride and keeps on trucking. Conversely with success: You-the-writer may get a swelled head, but you-the- boss remember how to take yourself down a peg. 

If we think of ourselves as a corporation, it gives us a healthy distance on ourselves. We don’t take blows as personally. We’re more cold-blooded; we can price our wares more realistically. Sometimes, as Joe Blow himself, I’m too mild-mannered to go out and sell. But as Joe Blow, Inc., I can pimp the hell out of myself. I’m not me anymore. I’m Me, Inc. 

I’m a pro.

She must move from imposed discipline to self-discipline; from external validation to self-validation; from external reinforcement to self-reinforcement.

In a way, she is like a nation that declares its independence. She has sued for the right to self-determination and she has won. Now what?

What is self-determination?

Ask yourself, of the new, free world you’re about to enter:

What time will I get up in the morning?

What will I eat for breakfast?

What thoughts will I permit myself to indulge in over breakfast?

Where do I go when I finish my meal?

What will I do once I get there?

What will I do when I encounter my own internal Resistance?

How do I answer the voice in my head that tells me I’m worthless, that my dreams are folly, that I’ve made a terrible mistake leaving that job at Ford?

How do I respond to true external adversity? Real-world competition? My own flawed business judgment? The bottom dropping out of the marketplace?

What happens when my rent doubles?

When my permits expire?

How do I placate my worried spouse, my anxious children? What do I tell them when I myself am more freaked out than they are?

How do I handle adversity?

How do I handle failure?

How do I keep going?

How do I keep from losing my mind?

The entrepreneurial mindset is not taught in high school and it’s not taught in college. They don’t school you in it at Harvard and they don’t teach it at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

Our education begins, unfortunately, the day we’re discharged from the army. Or when our career ends as an athlete. We enter this new world when we’re fired, or we quit, or the plant closes or the business moves to Mexico.

It’s scary.

It’s like one of those survivor shows on TV. They drop you out of a plane into the Amazon jungle. Good luck, sucker! 

You’re on your own.

That novel.

That album.

That new business.

The virtues you and I need to develop are the virtues of mothers.

A mother puts her own needs second (or third or fourth or fifth.) The needs of her child come first.
A mother will kill to protect her baby.
She will sacrifice her own life.
She’ll run into a burning building to save her child.
She’ll lift a Buick off her infant with her bare hands.
A mother knows how to say no.
No, she won’t go to the club. No, she won’t drink those mojitos. No, she won’t ingest that banned substance.
A mother eats right. A mother gets her sleep.
A mother weans herself off Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram (at least most of the time.)
A mother is the definition of tough-minded.
A mother is the consummate professional.
She is in it for keeps.
She is in it for the long haul.
She is in it 24/7/365.

Nothing under the sun can shake a mother from her object, which is to nurture and protect and defend and prepare her baby to grow into its fullest possible potential.  

A warrior is nothing compared to a mother.

Wanna be an artist or an entrepreneur?

Be a mother.

What qualities of mind do you and I need if we are going to succeed as artist/entrepreneurs?

One answer (the one I usually use) is to say we need the virtues of warriors:

Courage, patience, self-reliance, the ability to endure adversity …

Another way (which is even better) is to say we need the virtues of mothers.

I had a dream once. I was living in New York, driving a cab at night, trying to write in the daytime. A friend came to visit. (This is the real-life setup, not the dream.)

My friend was one of these wildly extroverted guys, who immediately went out on the town and came back with fabulous stories of all the fun he was having. I found myself thinking, 

I should be like Peter. Why am I denying myself everything, busting my butt day and night? Have fun, Steve! Stop being such a monk!

Then I had the dream. 

Another friend’s wife, who happened to be pregnant at the time, came to me and sat down at my kitchen table. “Steve, you are pregnant too,” she said, “with that book you’re writing. You can’t go out partying. Your responsibility is to the new life growing inside you.”

I woke up and immediately stopped worrying.

Someone put a bullet through his eye. No one knows who gave the order. When I heard it, I wasn’t angry; I knew Moe, I knew he was head-strong, talking loud, saying stupid things. So when he turned up dead, I let it go. And I said to myself, this is the business we’ve chosen.

If you recognize this speech from The Godfather II, you know it was spoken by Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) to Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino. Roth delivers it with barely restrained fury, sensing that he is about to be betrayed by Michael and aiming to deliver a hardball point to his rival, who is a generation younger and who, as Roth clearly knows (though he doesn’t say it), is the man “who gave the order.”

Here’s the passage in full (written by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola): 

There was this kid I grew up with; he was younger than me. Sorta looked up to me, you know? We did our first work together, worked our way out of the street. Things were good, we made the most of it. During Prohibition, we ran molasses into Canada… made a fortune, your father, too. As much as anyone, I loved him and trusted him. Later on he had an idea to build a city out of a desert stop-over for GI’s on the way to the West Coast. That kid’s name was Moe Greene, and the city he invented was Las Vegas. This was a great man, a man of vision and guts. And there isn’t even a plaque, or a signpost or a statue of him in that town! Someone put a bullet through his eye. No one knows who gave the order. When I heard it, I wasn’t angry; I knew Moe, I knew he was head-strong, talking loud, saying stupid things. So when he turned up dead, I let it go. And I said to myself, this is the business we’ve chosen; I didn’t ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business!

When you and I set out to follow our artistic or entrepreneurial dreams, we embark on an enterprise whose outcome is unknowable and whose passage is dangerous, cruel, capricious, massively difficult and almost totally without justice in terms of reward-for-risk-and-sacrifice. This racket of ours is life and death, take no prisoners. 

But always remember: Nobody dragooned us. No one put a gun to our head. We entered the arena of our own free will, and we must deal with every aspect of it—the parts we hate as well as the parts we love. 

This is the business we’ve chosen.

I once joined Fear of Success Anonymous, aka FOSA. This was in Los Angeles, so almost all the group members were actors or screenwriters.

The group got so popular it had to disband.

I remember driving home from the final meeting, thinking, “I’ve gotta solve this issue on my own. Fear of Success by definition can never succeed!”

I gave the obvious answer: 426.

“No,” said Bart. “It’s zero.”

He was speaking about pages in a novel.

If the completed book is 427 and you’ve written 426, you haven’t got 426/427ths. You’ve got nothing.

Bart didn’t need to say any more. I went home and got back to work.

I couldn’t sell it. Couldn’t find a buyer. In fact, it would be twenty-one more years before a novel of mine actually saw the light of publication.

But finishing that first manuscript meant everything. 

We talked in an earlier chapter about Resistance being the strongest at the finish line. It is. Resistance knows we’re about to defeat it. It summons all its genius and all its power to stop us. 

How do we break through? 

There’s a legend about Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, many more) that as he got close to the end on a novel, he would start getting up earlier and earlier to work on it. First it was six o’clock, then five, then four. Finally, he’d have to move out of the house, check into a hotel, just to keep from driving his wife crazy.

Michael Crichton was smart. He knew that as he approached the finish line, his inner Resistance would ramp up its intensity, trying to keep him from reaching THE END.

So Michael Crichton upped his own intensity. 

Finish it. Don’t chicken out! FINISH THE DAMN THING!

That was how it worked for me in that first book, the one I could never sell, but that changed everything for me. And here’s the even better news, which I pass on to all of us struggling to get a make-or-break project across the finish line:

Once you finish—even one time, even on a project that ultimately fails—you will never have trouble finishing again.

He’s the author of the mega-best-seller THE CREATIVE ACT … and also “the Godfather of Hip-Hop” and facilitator of many, many hits, working out of his Shangri-la Studios in Southern California.

He has also become a great friend (both of us lost houses … Rick lost two … in the SoCal fires), who has been very kind to Diana and me through the post-apocalypse ups-and-downs.

But I’m burying the lead, which is that Rick and I had an hour-and-a quarter audio conversation a couple of weeks ago for his podcast, Tetragrammaton. It’s live on his YouTube channel now, but you can also listen to it at the link below.

I normally would not mention a podcast, but I’m making an exception just because this one came out so good. It’s loaded with stuff that (I hope) will be helpful to all us writers and artists. The podcast turned out to be more of a conversation than an interview. I wound up asking Rick as many questions as he asked me.

The interview is audio only. 

It’s an hour and fifteen minutes long.

Two guys talking about creativity and the creative process.

I think you’ll like it.

This is when we sit down quietly with a cup of tea and explain to ourselves that our lizard-brain fears are not rational.

Our husband will not abandon us if we begin writing poetry. The process of self-publishing is not beyond our intellectual capacity. The comet will not strike Brooklyn obliterating our apartment (and if it does, we’ve got insurance.) 

Rationality, however, can only carry us so far.

My book Gates of Fire has sold over a million copies and is still going strong. Yet when I began it—and all through the writing—I had zero confidence in its commercial prospects. I had no deal in place, no editor, no publisher. I had never attempted a work even remotely like it (it was only my second book) nor were there any books like it on the market.

How did I self-reinforce in this case? I told myself,

All those negatives may be absolutely true. I don’t care. I know this idea is miles out of the mainstream. I know it’s a hundred-to-one shot to find a publisher. I don’t care. I LOVE this story. I believe in it. I’m going forward and even if nobody buys it but my mother and my cat, I don’t care.

This second type of self-reinforcement is not as irrational as it sounds. Because what was really going on with Gates of Fire was that, on the level of the zeitgeist it did make sense. There was an audience, even if I—and conventional thinking—couldn’t see it.

Self-belief is a crazy thing. It can come from an appreciation of reality-as-it-exists (in which case objective self-reinforcement is the answer to our fears). Or it can come from reality-as-it-will-exist, even if we ourselves can’t yet perceive it. 

Sometimes you have to be a little crazy to believe in yourself and your dream.