I reread Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art recently, all in one sitting, over a cup of coffee on a slow afternoon. It had been years since I’d read it, and I remembered it being just full of motivational gems. Sure enough, it was. It also made me feel guilty for the fact that I was reading and not writing on that slow afternoon.
Pressfield’s book is a powerhouse, for sure, and I’ve had several authors tell me lately that they like it chiefly because they can open it up to just about any page to get the push they need back into their creative work.
If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend it. It won’t take you more than a couple hours from cover to cover, and then as others have said, it’ll be there on your shelf anytime you need a nudge in the right direction.
Until then—or if you could use a little refresher—here are my four key takeaways (with one gentle adjustment thrown in for good measure).
Resistance Is Internal
Pressfield introduces the concept of "resistance" as the primary obstacle to creativity and productivity. But here’s the thing: resistance is internal. It’s not the laundry list of external obstacles we often cite as the forces that keep us from writing. Those are excuses—they’re the external manifestation, if you will, of the real enemy, which is…us.
“Resistance,” he says, “has no strength of its own. Every ounce of juice it possesses comes from us.”
(In other words, “It’s me, hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.)
If we were talking about our characters, we would refer to resistance as their limiting beliefs. It’s the inner force that prevents us from doing the work we know we should be doing, and identifying and overcoming that force is crucial to achieving our creative goals.
So next time you find yourself avoiding your writing and making externally focused excuses, stop a minute to reframe your thinking. Yes, of course, there are always going to be external things that make it challenging to sit down and write. But those things rarely make it impossible to ever write. So, is there some internal resistance that’s really behind your reluctance?
Resistance Is a Compass
So, resistance is our creativity’s number-one enemy. And yet, says Pressfield, resistance can actually be a big help in one way: it can point us toward what’s most important. “The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution,” he says, “the more resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.”
Think about it: nothing inconsequential comes with much resistance, does it? But the big things—the things that feel capital-I Important to us—those are the ones we come up with reason after reason to put off. Because what if we can’t do it? What if other people don’t understand? What if we fail? That’s resistance, and it’s telling us exactly where we should be putting our focus.
So, once you’ve identified that internal resistance that’s stopping you from putting your seat in your seat and getting to work, lean into it a little bit. What is it telling you about the value of your work in progress — or, if you haven’t gotten started yet, the value of your vision? In this way, your resistance is worth listening to.
Discipline Leads to Inspiration
So, how do you overcome resistance? By “going pro,” says Pressfield. “The professional knows that fear can never be overcome,” he says. “He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist.”
But the professional writes anyway.
Pressfield encourages authors to "turn pro,” making a commitment to their work, setting clear goals, and taking the necessary steps to achieve them. A pro, he says, shows up every day, regardless of inspiration, and treats writing as a job. Only with consistency and discipline, says Pressfield, can we overcome resistance.
And here is where I’d like to make my gentle adjustment to Pressfield’s take.
He preaches a pretty rigorous version of discipline, including showing up to write every single day “come hell or high water,” staying on the job all day, and getting comfortable in misery.
“The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.”
Now, I do agree that committing to being a writer means developing discipline and accountability around your practice, carving out and protecting time for it just like you would anything else you needed or wanted to prioritize.
And yet, for many authors, I think Pressfield takes it a little far.
If writing books is your full-time job, your means of supporting yourself and your family, then all of this applies. (Except, I hope, the extent of the misery he describes.)
But if you’re an author who writes around a day job (not to mention a slate full of family responsibilities and maybe even a social life) then that discipline has to come with grace and flexibility. Because if you’re that kind of author (the kind of author I am, and the kind of author many of my clients are), then writing is something you do for yourself. Maybe it brings in some income, but at its heart, it’s a passion and a self-care avenue. So we do our best to create a sustainable practice and keep to it, but when our day jobs are particularly hectic and our kiddos are sick and our in-laws are coming to visit (yes, all at once), sometimes our writing has to slide for a few days or more.
That doesn’t make you less of a writer. It just makes you a human.
When I was in middle school, the priest at my church was talking about Lent and the challenge of giving up something for that forty-day season. If you mess up, he told us, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed and it’s all a loss. It means you have the opportunity to start again. That really stuck with me, and it applies to our writing lives, too. If you missed a week or a month or six of writing, that doesn’t mean you have to hang up your pen forever. It just means you have the opportunity to pick it up again and start fresh.
Distance Makes Creativity Sustainable
Finally, Pressfield discusses the inevitability of receiving criticism for our writing—and the temptation to let fear of that criticism stop us from writing altogether. To succeed, he says, we must learn to distance ourselves from our writing:
“We may take pride in our work, we may stay late and come in on weekends, but we recognize that we are not our job descriptions. The amateur, on the other hand, overidentifies with his avocation, his artistic expression. He defines himself by it…Resistance loves this. Resistance knows that the amateur composer will never write his symphony because he is overly invested in its success and overterrified of its failure. The amateur takes it so seriously it paralyzes him.”
We are so much more than any one thing we do, and it’s easy to forget that. Pressfield’s reminder is, to me, liberating. “The professional loves her work. She is invested in it wholeheartedly. But she does not forget that the work is not her.” I can love being a writer—or any of my other roles, for that matter—wholeheartedly without letting it define me, without letting my successes or failures dictate my self-worth.
This is a “professional” tactic that is so valuable, and so hard to embody. But, says Pressfield, “Remember, resistance wants us to cede sovereignty to others. It wants us to stake our self-worth, our identity, our reason for being, on the response of others to our work.”
Have you read The War of Art? What takeaways did you find particularly powerful? And would you make any adjustments of your own? Tell me in the comments!
If you’re a busy author looking to develop a sustainable writing practice that balances discipline with grace and flexibility, you might enjoy my free mini-journal, 10 Practical Tips to Build a Sustainable Writing Practice.