Steven Pressfield on Writing Historical Fiction

It’s August, and so David and Sarah are taking a break from court coverage and ...

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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:

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  1. Avatar photo
    Bill Dyer (aka Beldar)

    Mr. Pressfield sold three more books (Kindle versions) during this podcast, and they've been added to my queue with relish. This was a good frolicsome detour from AO's usual fare, duly appropriate for August.

    Regarding mules, I give you: Muleshoe, Texas, population 5555 which serves as the county seat of Bailey County on the prairies of west Texas. Its star attraction is "Ol' Pete," a mule statute in the town square, which has from time to time been an irresistible target for rival high school football teams' supporters, and therefore is guarded fiercely and continuously by the town's law enforcement personnel and, indeed, its residents generally. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/muleshoe-tx%20 and https://www.city-of-muleshoe.com/GeneralInformation

    My historical novel, which exists entirely in my head and has been bouncing around without a single bit of progress for more than a decade now, will be set in and around Galveston Island during the American Civil War. Its protagonist is a lawyer from Houston who'd been sent home to recover after losing both lost an arm and a leg serving under John Bell Hood in Virginia. He's summoned to serve as counsel for a civilian defendant in a military court martial — an alleged spy who'd been captured on January 1, 1863, during "Prince John" MacGruder's amphibious assault, via "the cotton-clad navy," that had reclaimed Texas' largest and most important port city from the Yankees. His client, on trial for her life for her alleged spying for the Yankees during the city's occupation, is the estranged daughter of Confederate AG, SecWar & SecState Judah P. Benjamin, raised in Paris and New Orleans. I'm definitely thinking Matthew McConaughey for the lead in the movie version.

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    Ben Connelly

    I thought of Leetigators!

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    Ben Connelly

    “I’m a writer because I just can’t do anything else.” That about sums it up for me too!

    I need to go ahead and actually read The War of Art.

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    Ben Connelly

    Talk about someone I never expected to be a guest on Advisory Opinions.

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    Mike Podhaizer

    In case anyone is wondering, the originator of the stirrup thesis was Lynn White Jr. in his classic work Medieval Technology and Social Change in which he argued that the introduction of the stirrup was the key event that led to the rise of feudalism under Charles Martel. Pretty sure his thesis has been superceded/invalidated due to new archaeological evidence etc. but important and interesting nonetheless.

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  6. Bret Devereaux

    I'm sorry but I feel that, as an actual ancient military historian (credentials: https://history.unc.edu/adjunct/bret-devereaux/), I have to express some considerable frustration with the choice of guests, at least from the historical perspective. Steven Pressfield's books, I am afraid, are not held in high esteem among actual ancient historians. This is especially true among ancient military historians. Engaging as they are, they have worst combination of seeming to be well researched while actually being poorly researched; seeming to be accurate but not actually being accurate.

    I have not yet read 'A Man At Arms,' but I have read Gates of Fire. As David French says, the promise of books like these is not just the entertainment but 'the details' that one walks away having 'learned something' which is why it is dreadfully unfortunate that Pressfield's details are frequently wrong and his grasp of ancient history is frequently poor. The presentation of the Spartan rearing system (the agoge) as a military training program is wrong (see Stephen Hodkinson's work on this, but this has been known since at least Paul Cartledge's writings in the 1980s), the suggestion that Thermopylae was an intentional 'forlorn hope' delaying action is wrong (it was an attempted and failed decisive battle, Herodotus, our best source, is explicit on this point) and Pressfield conveniently omits much of the cruelty of Spartan society, both the most enslaved society in ancient Greece (for the helots far outnumbered the spartiates) and also one in which, according to our sources, the slaves were treated uniquely poorly - a system of slavery which shocked the conscience of Athenian slaveholders in its cruelty. Even the 'shields on the backs of the men in front of you pushing' was a modern conjecture now generally regarded as wrong by specialists.

    I cannot say Pressfield's description of the plot of 'A Man at Arms' (a phrase, I feel the need to note, which has no Latin equivalent and doesn't really make sense in a Roman context; men at arms are a medieval thing, from the French homme d'armes) fills me with confidence that he is any better on the details here. Christians were a convenient scapegoat in the mid-60s AD, but a Roman governor in Judaea who was worried about a mass uprising of Christians when there would be a mass uprising of Jews in the province in 66 would have been profoundly missing the point, hardly the "real threat to the Roman Empire." As a Christian myself, I certainly understand many Christians putting Christianity and Christ at the center of the Roman narrative (and indeed, the human narrative), but for the Romans of the first or even second century AD, Christianity was a small, isolated and unimportant religion with few adherents: Pliny the Younger is still being surprised to find Christians in his province (Bithynia et Pontus, modern day northern Turkey) in 110 AD; the emperor's response (Trajan) at that time was essentially 'ignore if you can, crack down if you can't." I am also, I have to admit, profoundly baffled as to why a letter from Paul to Corinth would ever pass through the Sinai peninsula, which is in the exact wrong direction from every place we know Paul to have ever been. If that's the basis of the story, I'm afraid that Pressfield might benefit from a good introductory course on Roman imperial history.

    Now normally I would not care very much: fiction is fiction; written and read for fun. But Pressfield is a special case: his work regularly finds itself on military reading lists (especially Gates of Fire) in place of actual sources (Herodotus, Thucyidides, Arrian, etc.) or actual scholarly accounts of these conflicts and periods. Pressfield remains extremely popular in military circles; I am not at all surprised that David has read his books. But this is despite the fact that a soldier who reads Pressfield thinking they are learning history has, to be frank, learned less than nothing. He or she has learned things that, in a classroom, I would have to UNteach them.

    I find it striking here that when Sarah asks him what sort of research he had done his answer is that well he's been to Israel and that was essentially it; and he 'made up' the rest of it. That is an answer that should be said with sheepish embarrassment; modern Israel is not first century Judaea. You both marvel at the 'precision' but all of the precision is false.

    I understand this is not a history podcast, but imagine for me for just a moment how both of you would feel if a history podcast had a crime thriller author come on to explain how to 'Bring the law to life' and he talked about his exciting story where none of the rules of evidence applied and a capital charge was judged in a civil court with a last minute intervention when new evidence comes out in witness testimony before the SCOTUS, just how frustrated you would be with the misrepresentation of how your field and discipline actually work - and you have roughly my sense of this. Pressfield is a great, engaging author, but a poor historian.

    I am sorry, I really like AO, I've listened from the beginning...but this was a hard listen.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Dave T

      P.S. I am now listening to your awesome Siege of Gondor write-up.

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      Dave T

      Haters gonna hate, man.

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      Bill Dyer (aka Beldar)

      Dr. Devereaux, thank you for this comment and your others below, which collectively comprise a temperate and useful dissenting opinion that I'm glad to have read. I have adjusted my expectations of the three of Mr. Pressfield's books that I've just ordered, to add a few more grains of salt. But I always salt my historical fiction, and I expect I'll enjoy these books accordingly. Your well-informed comments encourage me to complement my reading of historical fiction with even more reading of nonfiction histories and biographies. Each enhances my appetite for the other. Best regards.

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        Bill Dyer (aka Beldar)

        I post a reply to my own dated comment to note that I've just finished "Gates of Fire." Then I came back here to re-read Dr. Devereaux' comments here about it.

        I don't pretend to have the chops to second-guess Dr. Deveraux on matters of history, and I therefore accept his criticisms of Mr. Pressfield's factual errors as accurate.

        But I nevertheless enjoyed the book, and found it very worthwhile as a work of historically-inspired fiction. Were I a professional military historian, grading this book as a work of history, I probably would have had the same reaction as Dr. Deveraux, and would have perceived all of his criticisms as gigantic beams; since I'm not, and was reading it for fun first with no particular expectations that it would be scrupulously resourced and accurate, they struck me as pretty small motes.

        I also have enjoyed a great deal of science fiction, including military-related science fiction (e.g., David Weber's Honor Harrington series, which is aptly called Horatio Hornblower in space), even though a physicist would surely find much more of its "science" distractingly and disturbingly implausible. I'm not a physicist either, though. I've read some other interviews of Pressfield in which he was quite forthcoming about the extent to which he's relied entirely on his own imagination, or drawn parallels from other history that can't be shown to be valid, and I don't think he can be faulted for overselling his book's accuracy.

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      Sarah Isgur vertical-nib Author

      I hear you, but also I love law&order and John Grisham novels. It’s true that there are laughable plot devices if you’re a “real lawyer” but that’s ok bc as you say these things are meant to be entertaining and maybe it pushes a few people to explore more. Ditto with historical fiction. While watching the Tudors or Last Kingdom, I must have gone down more wikipedia rabbit holes than anyone on the planet. People discover your little piece of nerdom in all sorts of ways!

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      1. Alan

        You guys really need to take advantage of having Bret as a listener and get him to come on the podcast. Not to discuss Steven Pressfield. To discuss all the amazing stuff Bret writes.

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          Sarah Isgur vertical-nib Author

          Ok ok you’re clearly right. And you’re not alone in thinking so.

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      2. Bret Devereaux

        This would comfort me more if Gates of Fire didn't regularly sneak into officer training reading lists. There are times for Law and Order and there are times for law school.

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          Sarah Isgur vertical-nib Author

          Except they’re not training historians. They’re trying to find vivid examples for military tactics and strategies. The underlying accuracy isn’t all that important. (And law schools absolutely use pop culture legal references like legally blonde in first year classes when you’re trying to find a common language so to speak. Just like I use the west wing in my poli sci classes!)

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          1. Bret Devereaux

            I am not asking them to train historians, but the goal here is as you say to provide vivid examples of tactics and strategies that actually happened and, if I may add, also to provide models of how soldiers interact with civilian society ('civ-mil relations').

            But that's exactly where Pressfield fails! He gets Leonidas' intended strategy when marching to the titular 'gates of fire' wrong, presenting it as a delaying action when in fact Leonidas (perhaps foolishly) expected to block the Persian army indefinitely at Thermopylae and just...failed. He gets Spartan tactics - the 'rugby scrum' shoving match - wrong too (though here he may be pardoned for merely being out of date. We used to think that, we don't now; the reasons are complicated).

            And he's a disaster in terms of how Spartan soldiers related to Spartan (Laconian) society. He represents this as a free 'warrior' society both in Gates of Fire and also in his warrior archetype video series (https://stevenpressfield.com/category/the-warrior-archetype/) where everyone is taught to be tough, grade school is actually like boot camp and as a result the Spartans are superior warriors. Every part of which is wrong.

            Sparta was in fact a society where the tiny landholding aristocracy (c. 4% of the population) had managed to strip the citizenship of everyone else, reducing most people to a form of slavery (helotage) which was widely considered the most brutal and demeaning in the entire ancient Mediterranean world; the helots made up between 60-80% of the population (by contrast even in Roman Italy enslaved people were only c. 25%). And then these social classes were made hereditary and all social mobility was removed. Sparta was a uniquely unfree place - probably the least free place in the ancient world, a brutal totalitarian society.

            The agoge (training for Spartan citizen children) which Pressfield imagines to have been like boot camp wasn't either - it was more like how 10-year-olds are indoctrinated into the Lord's Resistance Army; there was no training in arms or tactics, but quite a lot of beatings, where the boys were intentionally underfed to enforce conformity and obedience. Pressfield supposes this produced superior warriors; we actually have a lot of evidence that it produced incompetent leaders, who only knew how to solve problems with their fists; the Spartans themselves lost as often as they won.

            In short, Pressfield's glorified version of Sparta is a really bad model to hand to officers and say, "this is a good form of a military interacting with a society, this is a good form of military training, these guys are the best" because he's whitewashed the consequences of this system. And 'modern soldiers should be like Spartans' is an explicit part of his messaging - if you go back to the 'Warrior Archetype' video series, he says this that the warrior is this universal archetype which transcends time and is morally superior to the civilian archetype, which is dangerous nonsense.

            So there is a pattern to Pressfield's distortions: representing the 'cool warrior stuff' while whitewashing its consequences while quietly (and at some points loudly) implying that there is a unique virtue to 'warriors' which entitles them to leadership. Which is why his history being wrong matters - it leads him into these other, more severe errors. There is a reason that when military historians *who train officers* (I have a lot of colleagues in PME/service academies) hear that 'Pressfield is writing a book in your time/place' their response is "oh, no."

            Anyway, I am sure you don't want to be debating this in the comments with me forever. Thank you for reading along. I see the next AO has already dropped so I will go listen to that and doubtless be much happier.

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  7. Garrett Heckman

    This was great. I picked up "A Man at Arms" at my local library, and I'll buy it if it's as good as it sounds. Apparently he was in his 50s when he got his first novel published, so that gives me some hope as someone who once tried to write some historical fiction (it was bad).

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    Tom Meyer

    A fantastic interview with an excellent guest! Thank you for this, David and Sarah.

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  9. Matt Humphrey

    This was a terrific episode and just a fantastic interview. Pressfield is an incredibly engaging guy (and I’ll echo his comment that Sarah and David asked great questions to make it such a great interview), and it always shocked me that the guy who wrote Gates of Fire also brought us The Legend of Bagger Vance. I say that having only seen the movie version of Bagger Vance, but it sounds like the book might be fairly different in some ways, so maybe I ought to give it a read.

    Now for the real reason I’m commenting here - I was late to listen to the episode that ended with Sarah explaining that her hoarse voice was from being at the Toad the Wet Sprocket/Gin Blossoms/Bare Naked Ladies concert the night before, and I was like Leo DiCaprio pointing at the tv screen in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, losing my mind with excitement. I saw that show in Boston a few weeks ago and I had made the same exact observation about the outfit the Gin Blossoms’ guitarist was wearing and wanted the Soul Asylum t shirt their singer was wearing (only I’d need mine to have sleeves).

    I don’t know how many of us are in the overlapping part of the Venn Diagram of “90’s Alt Rock Fans” and “Center Right Trump Skeptics”, but it was great finding out that at the very least, I’m not the only one.

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    1. Avatar photocircle-angle-nib
      Sarah Isgur vertical-nib Author

      Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Now I just want a toad show in which toad the wet sprocket and toadies team up.

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      1. Matt Humphrey

        Haha quite frankly it’s disappointing that hasn’t already happened - it just writes itself.

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    Taylor

    Oh wow I never thought I'd hear a Mule Day reference on AO. All the Maury and surrounding county listeners feel seen. It is a huge deal around these parts.

    This was such a great interview. Thank y'all for having guests like this.

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