Just finished reading Steven Pressfield’s “The War of Art,” a short, engaging exploration of  (and call to arms against) what Pressfield calls “Resistance.”  For Pressfield, Resistance is an actively malevolent force that interferes with any creative work.  It’s what you feel when you’re surfing the web, doing the dishes, chatting on the phone–whatever you’re doing except sitting down to create.  It’s the “enemy within,” and it will “perjure, fabricate, falsify, seduce, bully, and cajole” to stop you; it is “always lying and always full of shit.” Its weapons range from procrastination to sex to the desire for emotional healing–not all bad things, of course, but insidious when they become excuses and rationalizations for not doing the work you dream of doing.

It’s not a perfect book.  Pressfield (as you can probably gather) can be grandiose, and this sometimes gets him into trouble; an early line about Hitler finding it easier to start WWII than to face a blank canvas threatened to derail the entire thing.

But that same grandiosity is the book’s greatest strength.  Because Pressfield is right: when we write (or paint, or sculpt, or build, or play), we do all face an internal enemy.  That enemy does play for keeps, it does mean to kill by stealing life away one moment at a time.  And to fight that enemy–that constant voice saying can’t, won’t, not now, not good enough–you have to start by admitting to yourself that the stakes really are that high.  Pressfield gets that, and I’m grateful to him for laying it out in such plain and convincing language.

So: he got me.  I took a lot away from this book, and I think other writers and artists (and really, anyone who wants to create) will too.  You might roll your eyes at some of the language, but at the same time you’ll recognize a whole hell of a lot of what he’s talking about.  And if you’re like me, the next morning it’ll be that much easier to sit down and get to work.