Book Review: The War of Art

A couple of posts ago I mentioned that I was reading a book by Steven Pressfield called The War of Art. In this post, I want to briefly review and reflect on the book, but, just enough to “free the prisoners” of my thoughts on the book; this is not the definitive review/interpretation of the book. I am very interested in hearing what other readers think, so please comment on this post.

The book’s title is obviously a play on the title of Wesley Snipes’s movie, er...Sun Tzu’s book, The Art of War and it is a particularly fitting title for a book on writing by a man whose body of work consists mostly of historical war novels set in ancient times. Like Sun Tzu’s book, The War of Art presents very practical, very solid, straightforward advice about its subject; like the Wesley Snipes movie, the appeal wears off rapidly and the last third is barely coherent.

In the first part of the book Pressfield introduces a concept he calls “Resistance”, which is broadly defined as anything that keeps us from our work. Our work, Pressfield says, is what we were meant to do on this planet. Don’t read that wrong. He’s not saying that we’re called to be ants in a hive, he’s saying that each us has a particular job to do, a special vocation. For some, it could be writing; for others it could be painting or starting a business or being a mom. Our work is the thing that we are uniquely suited for and that we must do for our own sake and the sake of the universe. We avoid this work at our peril. Resistance is anything and everything that we put in the way of doing our work. It’s all the excuses, neuroses, diseases, relationships, and rationalizations that we give in to instead of doing what we’re supposed to.

His litany of the many ways Resistance manifests itself was easily the best part of the book. It was, if you’ll forgive the expression, shock and awe. I was had like Bagdad. He named every one of my evasions and left me with nowhere to run. He kicked my ass. And his recommendation for overcoming Resistance is tough love at its finest. Basically, his advice is “Man up, Nancy. Get over yourself and do your work.” So far, so good, but then the book starts to go wonky.

Pressfield is dead on target about what’s wrong with most writers, artists, and people: we are afraid of our own potential greatness so we sabotage ourselves. Everything he says about Resistance rings true, even if the term itself is inexact. What he has to say about muses and the gods (they’re real…kinda), the evolution of man (we are inexorably getting better), and God (a.k.a. the Universe), does not ring true. It rings inconsistent and potlucky. The world view he proposes as response to Resistance is a syncretistic, new-agey mess.

For Pressfield, art comes from resisting Resistance and doing one’s work. The manly advice he gives at the beginning of the book seems to be heavily influenced by his study of ancient Sparta and stoics. That’s fine as far as it goes, but what is glaringly absent (at least from this Catholic’s point of view) is a sense of grace. His notion of cooperating with the muses is profound, but not as profound as Tolkien’s idea of man as sub-creator. His notion of work is noble, but not as noble as Josemaria Escriva’s.

To sum it all up, I recommend this book, especially the first two thirds, but with reservations. For anyone who is used to exact terms and a consistent worldview, this might be a bit tiring—it was for me. But for anyone who needs a good kick in the pants to start writing, working, starting a photography business and getting out of the corporate world, this is a great motivator.