The War of Art

The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield, is one of those epiphany books. It advertises itself as a guide to getting past the blocks that keep you from expressing yourself creatively, but it’s much, much more than that: it’s a manifesto on the importance of overcoming your fear and letting your soul speak through your art.

That sounds a little mushy and groan-inducing, and if I were someone else reading this I’d probably have stopped reading by now. But trust me: this book isn’t a new-agey treatise on discovering your inner light through the medium of magic crystals, or hug therapy, or kitten worship. It’s an absolutely no-bullshit kick in the ass, a shout from the ramparts. It tells you why you need to get your act together, and then it tells you how.

Here’s a passage:

When we conceive an enterprise and commit to it in the face of our fears, something wonderful happens. A crack appears in the membrane. Like the first craze when a chick pecks at the inside of a shell. Angel midwives congregate around us; they assist as we give birth to ourselves, to that person we were born to be, to the one whose destiny was encoded in our soul, our daimon, our genius.

When we make a beginning, we get out of our own way and allow the angels to come in and do their job. They can speak to us now and it makes them happy. It makes God happy. Eternity, as Blake might have told us, has opened a portal into time.

And we’re it.

I’d admit to shedding a tear on reading that last line, but that would be a clear violation of several Articles of Guyhood, so I’ll just say this: I might have misted up, a little bit, in an intensely masculine way. And this book is littered with gems like that.

But it isn’t a panacea, or a therapy, or a ten-step program on how to defeat your blocks. It doesn’t prescribe medication, or offer canned solutions. It won’t give you any answers. But it will give something a lot better: the wherewithal to identify the real problems, and the weapons to combat them.

So read this book, if you want to be a writer or a painter or a dancer or a bottle drummer or a trampoline expressionist or anything at all that requires you to draw stuff out from the core of yourself and show it to the world. We all have lifelong ambitions that we simultaneously define ourselves by and dismiss as silly or impractical or unattainable. The War of Art tells us how to dispel those doubts, and do the things we want to do, and become the people we want to be.