pat loughery

I’ve just finished reading “The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, by Steven Pressfield“.

For the past several months I’ve been unemployed – laid off at the end of a project, and unable to pick up new work. It’s frustrating, worrisome and not the best feeling.

Meanwhile, I’ve got to finish up reading two books and writing a paper for my last class in the doctoral program, the one I enjoyed the most. It’s just been hard to concentrate, to process what I’m reading, to stay motivated. I’ve been stuck.

So when my friend John Chandler wrote this beginning to a series of posts over at his blog Creativityist on this book, the first quote by Pressfield nailed me to the wall:

“There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.

What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.”

Well, ain’t that the truth. The real difficulty with creating, Pressfield claims, is Resistance. Resistance takes many forms, but when you’ve wanted to be a writer, painter, musician, doctor, more fit, well-read, … whatever you’ve wanted to be that you haven’t become, what’s stopped you is Resistance.

The War of Art is a swift kick in the pants, as well as a very encouraging lesson. Resistance takes many forms (procrastination, self-doubt, fear, sex), but it can be named and overcome. The first third of the book is about defining the enemy of Resistance; in this portion of the book I have lots of highlights and asterisks and questions to myself about the state that I find myself in. I have encouragment that I have some names to place on my own issues.

The second portion of the book is the counterattack on Resistance: Combating the enemy by turning pro. In Pressfield’s worldview, we take what we are most passionate about creating, and we get serious about it, treating that object just as we do a 9-to-5 job, whether we get money from it or not. We treat our craft seriously, for the same reasons that we treat our jobs seriously if only to get the paycheck which allows us to live our lives. We learn to handle rejection, failure, adversity and strife, so that we can continue to create. We separate ourselves from our craft, to allow us to dive into it more deeply, even in failure.

The final portion of the book introduces us to the Muse, the higher power that sparks creativity. Pressfield thinks of the Muse as a spiritual thing, but alternates between the classic Muse understanding, God as Spirit, and other images. The specific name isn’t as important as recognizing that the creative spark comes from without us, and our role is to relate and listen.

As a follower of the Trinity, I have a specific name for that inspiration; for the spark of life that the Godhead produces within me. I have a specific understanding of my calling. And while I may quibble with him in his understanding of identity and failure, 99.9% of his thesis is fantastic and lights that creative fire within me that I desperately need.