The End of the War of Art

Well, after all this booga-booga stuff about how powerful Resistance is and how scary it is and me having nightmares about it and all that psychodrama, I thought that for my last post on Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art I’d end on a more positive note. (Not that it would be hard to strike a more positive note than all of the preceding; but I digress.)

As much as Pressfield talks about the formidable strength of Resistance, he also talks about what it looks like when you’re beating Resistance and getting your work done. He calls people who beat Resistance “professionals,” whereas those who can’t seem to get their work done are “amateurs.” He makes clear that the difference between a professional and an amateur is not whether you’re making money; it’s your attitude. Do you have an amateur attitude, or a professional one?

If you’re not sure which applies to you, you can get clues from chapter titles in the book, like “A Professional Acts in the Face of Fear,” “A Professional Is Patient,” “A Professional Does Not Take Success (or Failure) Personally,” and the title of one of my favorite chapters in the book, “A Professional Demystifies.” Here’s how it starts:

A pro views her work as craft, not art. Not because she believes art is devoid of a mystical dimension. On the contrary. She understands that all creative endeavor is holy, but she doesn’t dwell on it. She knows if she thinks about that too much, it will paralyze her. So she concentrates on technique.

I love this attitude because it’s so humble. It reminds me of Flannery O’Connor’s pronouncements along the same lines: “The materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you. Now when the fiction writer finally gets this idea through his head and into his habits, he begins to realize what a job of heavy labor the writing of fiction is.”

So we focus on craft, secure in the knowledge that art can only arise from craft. We pitch our gaze lower, at the level of the sentence, the brushstroke, the key signature, the breath, knowing that the greatest cathedrals were made not of “cathedral” but of stones; knowing that poems are made not of poetry but of words. We humbly submit to the rigors of craft; we get dusty. We are low-flown, not high-flown. Here’s how Pressfield puts it, in words that provide a fitting conclusion to my series on The War of Art:

The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery.

The professional shuts up. She doesn’t talk about it. She does her work.

We Have Nothing to Fear but Resistance Itself

If you read my “Dream: Demon at the Threshold” post, you know that I had a late-night encounter with Resistance that was pretty scary. Nobody wants a nocturnal visit from an adult version of the demon-possessed Linda Blair, am I right? In fact, I think the most important thing about the whole experience is how frightening it was. My Resistance was trying to scare me away from the work—the professional, creative, psychological, and spiritual work—that I need to do. Resistance was using fear as its weapon, as it had been doing for a long time before that night. Every time I sit down to work on my screenplay, I feel fear. I feel fear just from thinking about working on my screenplay; which, of course, is part of the reason why I haven’t gotten more done on it. In other words, Resistance.

This Resistance-induced fear thing has apparently been going around. “We experience Resistance as fear,” Steven Pressfield says in The War of Art. He proceeds to give a long list of the kinds of fears we can experience when Resistance is toying with us: fear of poverty, fear of failure, fear of being selfish, etc. (Although for some reason he left out coulrophobia.) He continues:

These are serious fears.

But they’re not the real fear. Not the Master Fear, the Mother of all Fears that’s so close to us that even when we verbalize it we don’t believe it.

Fear That We Will Succeed.

That we can access the powers we secretly know we possess.

That we can become the person we sense in our hears we truly are.

This is the most terrifying prospect a human being can face, because it ejects him at one go (he imagines) from all the tribal inclusions his psyche is wired for and has been for fifty million years.

When I read this passage, I felt the thrill of recognition, mixed with a healthy dose of the sour chagrin that comes with being well and truly busted. I am definitely afraid of success, and I have been at least since I flunked out of college. You would think that flunking out of school would make one afraid of failure, and of course it did. But it also caused me to engage in a complicated form of self-loathing, wherein I thoroughly bought into the university’s rejection of me (as I saw it) and then built on it and extended it. Or it might be more accurate to say I introjected it; I directed that rejection against myself far more savagely and broadly than the University of Alabama cared to do. I came to see myself as someone who, on some deep, essential level of his being, just wasn’t “good enough” to do well in life or have a good job or have interesting friends or be happy. I accepted my mediocre, substandard lot in life.

In later years, I came to see that this attitude was partly an unconscious mimicking of my mother, who glumly accepted a far worse lot in life than I ever have. But even when I began to crawl out of my pit of despair and started trying to do something with my life again, I remained distrustful of success because I had a hard time convincing myself that I merited it. Since then I’ve been climbing a sort of ladder of success, incrementally achieving various successes while simultaneously working to convince myself that I really do deserve them and it really is okay to have them. But success as a writer is the rung that eludes me yet. And I’m still not sure I deserve it.

Dream: Demon at the Threshold

This dream was very brief. I was in a generic house (not my real house), at night, looking down a lighted hallway toward an open door and the room beyond it. Then a woman suddenly pivoted into view in the doorway. She was wearing a simple blue A-line dress, but the skin of her face was pasty and cracked, and her stained teeth were bared in a hideous grin. Her elbows were cocked at her sides; she held her hands at waist level, fingers curled into claws. The woman looked like a grown-up version of Regan, the demon-possessed girl played by Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Her bright yellow eyes were fixed directly on me.

I awoke, heart pounding wildly. As soon as I realized I’d been dreaming, I felt relieved, but only slightly; I was still alone and scared in the dark.

You have to understand that The Exorcist has always been something of a baleful touchstone for me. I was seven years old when the film came out, and although I was far too young to see it, images and excerpts permeated the media for months. You could not get away from the delicately moody theme song on the radio. Making matters worse, I lived in Birmingham, Alabama—the very buckle of the Bible Belt—where even nonreligious people like my mother found themselves steeped in a culture that believed that the devil was very real. The film held a dark fascination for me; I dreaded it, dreamed about it, and wished I could see it, even though I was glad I couldn’t.

When I finally did see The Exorcist, about ten years ago, I was surprised by just how much I liked it. The Exorcist was the first horror film to be nominated for Best Picture, and I think it belongs in the tradition of really good character-oriented dramas from the 1970s (e.g., Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, American Graffiti, Chinatown). However, the act of seeing the film did nothing to deprive it of its power over me. The sight of Linda Blair’s demon-possessed face still makes my heart speed up no matter where or when I see it. I think images have a power that has nothing to do with logic or rationality; they can communicate information beyond the scope of words to convey (which, incidentally, is why The Ring is so effective: pure imagery).

So when I woke up from this particular nightmare of all nightmares, I was too scared to get back to sleep right away. I knew it was silly; I knew I was a forty-three-year-old man, and this was stupid; but there I was, lying still in the silent dark, threatened by imagined phantoms: a demon-possessed Linda Blair looming over me, wearing the flowered cotton nightgown she wore in the movie; the dress-wearing Linda Blair of my dream appearing in the doorway at the end of my hall, which I could see just by turning my head; a shadowy female shape coming to stand next to my bed.

I writhed on these mental hooks for a good five minutes before I decided to try to reset my status by getting up, using the bathroom, taking a drink of water, and coming back to bed.

I got up and walked to the bathroom, but before I passed through the door, I risked a glance at the doorway at the end of my hall. The door was still shut, as I knew it would be; but I could see a mental image of the dream Linda Blair standing there, as a sort of imaginary overlay. I went on in the bathroom and peed. As I stood at the sink washing my hands, I became obsessed with the thought that if I looked up, I might see something behind me in the medicine-cabinet mirror. So I made myself look up, just to force myself to face my fear; and also, I admit, to settle the question. Nothing was there, of course, not in reality. But again I saw an imaginary overlay of a dark female figure standing behind me, hair hanging down.

I made myself walk out of the bathroom at an unhurried, deliberate pace. And then an interesting thing happened: as soon as I stepped through the doorway, I got chills all over my body, as if I had walked into a draft of cold air. I’m not saying I actually felt cold air, because I don’t think I did; that’s just how my body was acting. I walked, covered in gooseflesh, a few more steps to my bedroom, and when I walked through the bedroom doorway, the same thing happened again: I experienced a fresh round of chills, contracting my flesh even more tightly.

I crawled into bed, luxuriating in the feel of warm sheets against my nubbly, shivering skin, and wondered what the hell was causing these goosebumps. Why did I get chills when I hadn’t seen anything, hadn’t heard or tasted or felt or smelled anything, wasn’t even properly cold on this warm August night? The Linda Blair images still pressed in upon me, but I held them at bay while I considered this new development.

Then I realized that both times I’d gotten chills, it had happened at the moment of passing through a doorway. Something about doorways was the common denominator or the key. I thought again of the dream that had awoken me, which consisted almost entirely of a single image: demon-possessed Linda Blair standing in a doorway. Swiveling into that doorway as if to bar my passage through it.

And that’s when I realized what the demon-possessed Linda Blair of my dream represented: Resistance. Yes, this all comes back to Steven Pressfield and The War of Art. In my dream, Resistance was personified in what is, to me, one of the most frightening forms possible. How did I arrive at this interpretation? Because the demon woman was standing in a doorway—which is also to say a threshold—and I had just crossed a significant threshold in my writing, that very morning.

When I was blogging about Twyla Tharp’s book The Creative Habit, I told how Tharp extolled the virtue of starting your day with a ritual that would stimulate your creativity. I wrote that I would start my own ritual by doing timed prompt writing in the morning on days when I had nothing to do but write, but I felt that the ritual might be wasted on days when I was doing a bunch of freelance work, so I decided to blow it off on those days.

Which turned out to be most days, silly rabbit! Meaning my hopeful little ritual never really got off the ground. So after a while I picked a given Monday to start writing in the morning no matter what I was doing later on. I decided I would write as a way of committing to writing as a way of life, as author bell hooks has put it, and not just as an activity meant to jump-start more writing.

So the designated Monday came, and I did my new ritual, and then I swung into a full day of freelance editing, and guess what? I had an awesome day, the best workday I’d had in months. I was Mr. Productive, Mr. Cheerful, Mr. Wordsmith Guy Enjoying Himself. That ten minutes of prompt writing made me feel energized and creative and smart and connected and grounded and fruitful, all day long. And I became a convert; I resolved to write ten minutes in the morning no matter what I was going to do that day, no matter how tired or lazy or hung over I was, because it was a way to feed the secret tree within me. I felt I had discovered a key that unlocked a door and allowed me to pass into a new realm.

And that very night I dreamed about a demon-possessed woman—a grown-up version of the scariest figure from my childhood—who was blocking my way.

Ah, Resistance. Now I understood why Steven Pressfield capitalized your R. Now I knew what I was up against. Yet still, as I lay in bed, I felt the threatening presence, the sense of lurking menace. So I thought, “What would Steven Pressfield do?” (I should start a little CafePress shop selling WWSPD bracelets and lanyards and temporary tattoos. Then again, perhaps not. You can have that one if you want it. Along with my fabulous High Seas idea from Monday. I give you people everything!)

Then I remembered that every day before Steven Pressfield sits down to write, he says—“out loud, in absolute earnest,” as he asserts—the Invocation of the Muse from Homer’s Odyssey. He says it makes sense to seek out the Muses, the gods, the eternal, and “invoke their aid,” to “show respect to this unseen Power who can make or break me.” When I had read this part of the book, I was attracted to this idea, so I took a close look at Pressfield’s Invocation (he includes it in the book). I liked it, but it didn’t really call out to me as something I could say out loud in absolute earnest.

So then I had done some rooting around to find my own invocation, and I ran across something suitable in the old Norse poem Hávamál, which, among other things, tells how the god Odin discovered the runic alphabet used by various Germanic peoples during the first millenium A.D. The part I adapted for my own use is addressed to the reader of the poem:

Hidden runes you will find,
And signs full of meaning.
Full strong the signs,
Full stout the signs,
Made by the high powers,
Carved by the great seer,
Stained by the mighty singer.

I lay in bed and whispered those words (so as not to awake my sleeping wife), and as soon as the last word left my lips, a blissful peace swam all over me, and the phantoms faded away, and my eyes closed, and within five minutes I was fast asleep.

Writer 1, Resistance 0.

I’m the Guy Who Put the “Pro” in “Procrastination”

Hello again, my pretties! Sorry for the long absence. After a memorable trip to the rain-soaked northeastern United States—in which the malevolent I-95 once again exerted its evil powers of gelatinous slowness—I came home just in time to have oral surgery. You know how, when you’re getting an oral injection of anesthesia, you avert your eyes so you don’t have to see how long the needle is? (If you’ve never had this experience, just make a silent avowal of gratitude before reading on.) Well, I’ve now learned that when you’re getting a dental implant installed, you should avert your eyes so you don’t see the fearsome circumference of the drill bit. And as for the experience itself, one word:

VVVIIIBBBRRRAAATTTIIIOOONNN.

So I’ve been recuperating, which involved lots and lots of sofa-sitting and reading. And so now I can tell you that if you want a good, long, absorbing read, pick up The Passage by Justin Cronin. Where else can you get well-written sentences, three-dimensional characters with complex motivations, an epic quest, a postapocalyptic scenario, and vampires? I devoured it, figuratively speaking; in literal terms, I couldn’t devour anything more substantive than pudding.

But enough of my interminable whining. And back to my interminable blogging. We were talking about Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. In the Foreword, the inimitable Robert McKee (author of Story, the bible of screenwriting) describes his own Resistance this way:

Steven Pressfield wrote The War of Art for me. He undoubtedly wrote it for you too, but I know he did it expressly for me because I hold Olympic records for procrastination. I can procrastinate thinking about my procrastination problem. I can procrastinate dealing with my problem of procrastinating thinking about my procrastination problem.

I’m a little embarassed to admit just how happy it made me to read those few lines. Robert McKee, my screenwriting hero, procrastinates? Maybe I don’t completely suck after all. Or if I do, at least I’m not alone, as Pressfield helpfully observes in “Resistance and Procrastination”:

Procrastination is the most common manifestation of Resistance because it’s the easiest to rationalize. We don’t tell ourselves, “I’m never going to write my symphony.” Instead we say, “I am going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.”

Procrastination is by far the most common manifestation of my own Resistance. I’ve cut out videogames and news and Facebook and Hulu because those are ways for me to procrastinate. Yet I think Pressfield is incorrect when he says procrastination is so common because it’s so easy to rationalize. Think about it: a rationalization is a conceptual construct, right? The thought “I’m going to start tomorrow”—dysfunctional and incorrect though it is—is the act of a rational being who is trying to use rationality to solve a problem (even if the “solution” doesn’t actually solve anything).

But a true procrastinator (*raises hand*) doesn’t think about the symphony or screenplay at all, even for the few seconds it takes to rationalize the procrastination. A true procrastinator will instead dive into a videogame or a movie or any other deeply absorbing activity that literally prevents you from thinking about your situation. There’s no need to rationalize a problem that you can’t even think about, and you can’t think about your screenplay if you’re too busy trying to arrange the blocks in Tetris.

No, I think procrastination is the most common form of Resistance because procrastination is vastly easier than being creative. Here, in a nutshell, is how procrastination works for creative people: Rather than doing a difficult thing that scares or intimidates you, you do an easier, more pleasant thing instead. That’s all. No rational thought required.

I think the fundamental defining attribute of procrastination is its immaturity. Procrastination opts for the easy over the difficult, short-term gratification over long-term benefit. That’s a natural—or at least understandable—way to want to handle things. It’s what children do. Part of the difficult work of growing up is to learn how to postpone short-term gratification in favor of long-term benefit, to do things you don’t necessarily want to do; ultimately, to learn the difference between pleasure and happiness. So, for me, my personal war of art involves a struggle to outgrow my immaturities.

Any thoughts from the wide world out there? What forms does your Resistance take? Do you think immaturity is what stands in the way of your creativity, or would you characterize it differently?

And in This Corner, Weighing Absolutely Nothing: Resistance!

Sorry for the longish absence, mes petits; I’ve been stone-cold editing. I’m still in the maelstrom, perhaps spiraling back up toward daylight, but surrounded by churning, shark-infested, angrily frothing water. (I kind of like that. Makes me want to write a nautical adventure. How’s this: Two pot dealers find themselves forced to flee by boat from Key West to Cuba, dodging cops, the Coast Guard, pirates, rival pot dealers, and the Cuban navy. Title: High Seas.) Anyway, I’m about to go on a brief work hiatus so I can take a long-planned trip, which means a break in the freelancing action, allowing me to make a blog post. I’ve missed you so! Mwah!

So back to our ongoing topic, already in progress: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. The main foe of creativity, according to Pressfield, is Resistance (and yes, he spells Resistance with a capital R, which I found a bit precious at first). And the kicker is that all of us, every single snack-eating one of us, faces Resistance.

Here’s how it works: At birth, we’re all endowed with genius, somewhat in the sense of the original etymology of the Latin word, meaning a “tutelary spirit” or a “natural inclination.” We all have the potential, the ingredients, to be creative. The creative genius is a light that shines within each of us—and, like every light, genius casts a shadow. The shadow of genius is Resistance, the force that stands between our creative impulses and the act of creation. Resistance is what keeps your fingers off the keyboard, your hand off the paintbrush, your feet off the treadmill.

So the good news is that we all have genius. The bad news is that, by the same token, we all have Resistance. You cannot get rid of your Resistance, just as you cannot get rid of your genius; or, more precisely, you cannot get rid of your Resistance without getting rid of your genius. I guess a lobotomy would take them both out, as it did for ***OLD MOVIE SPOILER ALERT*** Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

So if you can’t get rid of Resistance without losing the ability to tie your shoes and wipe your own ass–two things I do every day, whether I need to or not–what can you do about Resistance? You fight it. More than that; you defeat it. Here’s what Pressfield says in a chapter titled “Resistance Can Be Beaten,” which I will reproduce here in its very brief entirety:

If Resistance couldn’t be beaten, there would be no Fifth Symphony, no Romeo and Juliet, no Golden Gate Bridge. Defeating Resistance is like giving birth. It seems absolutely impossible until you remember that women have been pulling it off successfully, with support and without, for fifty million years.

Up next: photos of my natural childbirth! Kidding. But I will tell you what I’m learning about how to defeat Resistance. (And, ahem, how not to.)

The Unlived Life and the War of Art

Reading Twyla Tharp’s book The Creative Habit felt like getting slapped upside the head fifteen or twenty times by a perfectionist kung fu master who saw right through my b.s. After I finished the book, I put it down and shook my head and made this sound until my eyes refocused.

Then, glutton for punishment that I am, I immediately dove into another ass-kicker of a book about how to live creatively: The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield. And when I call this book an ass-kicker, I’m just quoting the cover blurb: “A vital gem . . . a kick in the ass.” (That was Esquire.) You could also call it a series of precise strikes with a Zen stick: not hard enough to really hurt, but sharp enough to wake you up. I’ve already finished this book, and I recommend it. The War of Art is composed of brief, focused chapters, some only a few lines long, others running to three or four pages. The sentences are punchy and direct, the points clear, the statements direct and uncompromising, yet leavened with compassion. I think this book would be particularly good for people who feel blocked creatively, as your faithful blogger here so often has.

Here’s what Pressfield has to say in his chapter “The Unlived Life”:

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? . . . Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

Oh, yes. Yes, I know what Resistance is. I surely do. I’m sure many of you do too. Fortunately, so does Steven Pressfield. And he’s gonna help us out. I’ll be exploring this book in posts to come, but I’ll just say right now that this book has already helped me so much, even more than the Tharp book. So buy his book, or just read my blog posts about it, or better yet, do both. Your creative urges will thank you.