Cams Campbell

Steven Pressfield has spent decades studying the art of storytelling. "The female carries the mystery" has become one of his core principles, and once you see it, you'll see it everywhere. Here's how he explains it: "In Moby Dick, the sea is the female, and the sea carries the mystery. The whale dives down into the sea. In Lawrence of Arabia, the desert is the female and the movie is shot to make the desert absolutely gorgeous. Then there's The Magnificent Seven in Japan by Akira Kurosawa. It's the same story of a village that hires gun-slinger samurai to defend it, and the female in that story are the rice fields that produce the rice that the bandits want. At the very end of Seven Samurai, The final thing, when the samurai have won and the bandits have been killed, is the villagers planting rice. So that's a principle that I will have: The female carries the mystery. I'll ask myself, for any idea that I have, what's the female in this story? Is there a mystery? And why, what is it? What is, what is the mystery? And the mystery is almost always something that cannot be solved. It's like... What is life? What is the sea? What is the ocean? It gets back to God. It gets back to creation. It gets back to life."