Review of Steven Pressfield's The War of Art

Two nights ago, as I contemplated beginning the first of four essays I intend to write in the next six months, I was feeling pretty panicked.

Fight-or-flight hormones were coursing through my veins. Of course, I knew it was no use fighting (with what, my computer keyboard?) or fleeing (aaaaagh, this essay's gonna kill me!), so I just sat there, frozen, while my uncooperative instincts duked it out in the pit of my stomach.

I've been clear with myself that these essays don't actually have to be any good, that my goal is merely to complete them, but my limbic system has apparently decided that this essay-writing business is serious threat to my survival. 

I finally managed to work for about an hour and a half, during which time I wrote a grand total of eleven sentences. Only the first six were any good. Even so, it was a relief to have begun.

It makes sense that, having just gone through this harrowing experience, I would want to reward myself yesterday with a field trip to Powell's bookstore, and that, while there, I would be immediately attracted to Steven Pressfield's The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles.

I read the whole thing yesterday in the time it took my daughter to watch Mulan (which also happens to be a story about a girl who must fight a battle).

Here are a few of my favorite (and, for me, most apropos) bits:

“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.”

“Are you paralyzed by fear? That's a good sign....Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or a calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”

“The Bagavad-Gita tells us we have a right only to our labor, not the fruits of our labor.”

“[T]he most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”

“Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got.”

And I'll quote in full Pressfield's companion piece to my last post, “No More Excuses” (his sub-heading is “A Professional Accepts No Excuses”):

The amateur, underestimating Resistance's cunning, permits the flu to keep him from his chapters; he believes the serpent's voice in his head that says mailing off that manuscript is more important than doing the day's work. 

 

The professional has learned better. He respects Resistance. He knows if he caves in today, no matter how plausible the pretext, he'll be twice as likely to cave in tomorrow. 

 

The professional knows that Resistance is like a telemarketer; if you so much as say hello, you're finished. The pro doesn't even pick up the phone. He stays at work.

I have only two bones to pick with Pressfield.

1. He's flagrantly guilty of conflating biological evolution with spiritual progress. Ironically, the dissertation I never wrote was going to be about this particular logical fallacy, a pernicious meme I dubbed Evolution teleologica. There was a time in my life when Pressfield would have made it into my rogue's gallery. But hey, I never did the work it would have taken to get this idea of mine out there, so who am I to criticize him for screwing up in this way?
2. In the middle section of the book, which is devoted to delineating the difference between the amateur and the professional, he advocates a single-mindedness of purpose, a focus on one's work, that can only be achieved at great cost to one's relationships. This is no skin off his nose; he's apparently divorced and childless. As an example of Resistance's clever but bankrupt rationalizations, he gives the following: “Our wife may really be in her eighth month of pregnancy; she may in truth need us at home....What Resistance leaves out, of course, is that all this means diddly. Tolstoy had thirteen kids and wrote War and Peace.” Well, Tolstoy may have been able to stick to his work schedule, but I'm guessing his wife wasn't able to do a damn thing other than pop out his progeny, especially with the kind of crappy support he was giving her.

On the whole, however, I felt like this book was just what I needed to read at this point in my process. Feeling inspired by his pep talk, I even managed to get in two hours of essay writing last night – after putting away the leftovers and washing the dishes and vacuuming the carpet and going through the whole bedtime routine with my daughter and negotiating with my son about his evening whereabouts....

So thank you, Steven Pressfield, for writing The War of Art – and thank you for not listening to your Resistance when it told you shouldn't write something literal and overt about the concept of Resistance -- that, as a fiction writer, you would do better to write a novel “in which the principles of Resistance were expressed as the fear a warrior feels.” Had you written that book, I would never have read it. I wouldn't have had the time.