According to this author, mental illness is just a marketing ploy meant to distract you from your Real Work. Ugh,no. This book perpetuates the myth that you can do it all if you just push yourself hard enough. Oh, and there's a heavy dose of proselytizing dumped over the top of it. Maybe some people will find this kind of internal war rhetoric motivating, but not me. It's toxic and shits on anyone who's tried to produce any kind of art while working through mental illness.

I don't know why I'd had this book on my hard drive for 2 years before I finally decided to read it, but the moment couldn't have been more perfect. Actually, I'd started it before, but I think back then I just didn't get it, so it didn't hold my interest. Now, however...
It's a short book. I won't go on and on about why everyone whose work is remotely creative should read it. Just do it. Stephen King's On Writing has moved to #2 on my list of 'writer's must reads' - the War of Art is #1 now.

I don't get all the bad reviews, and why anyone might be so pissed at a harmless book like this one. But I was amazed to find out that someone might feel exactly as I do about writing, not writing, struggling to write, stuggling to sit the fuck down and just focus. And that's how I know it's true, everything the author shared with us in this short, but life-saving book.

As some of you may have noticed, there's a book called The Midnight Disease listed as something I'm currently reading. I don't remember when I added it anymore, but I know it was a while ago.

There was a period of time this summer where I simply could not write *at all.* I tried everything--I tried to read book about writers block like The Midnight Disease. Nothing in them helped me. I went to different places to try and write. Nothing. I made myself sit down with only my AlphaSmart and refused to get up for three hours or until I'd at least written something. The hours would pass, and I would write nothing.

And then I'd cry.

I was slowly but surely becoming convinced I'd never write again, and it broke my heart. (All of me felt broken, actually)

And then I saw this book in my local bookstore and took a look at it. And what I read blew me away. Pressfield doesn't talk about specifically about writer's block but about Resistance, and the thing he said that made me buy the book, take it home and read the first two sections over and over again (the third one is about muses and things and I'm not into that) was this:

"Resistance has no strength of its own. Every ounce of juice it possesses comes from us. We feed it by our very fear of it."

All those things I'd done to try and make myself write and I'd never once stopped to think about WHY I wasn't writing. But Pressfield got me to do that, and he got me to realize that it was my fears that were stopping me, and that writing can't be about overcoming everything that's got you trapped in a corner or scared. It has to--and must be--simply about the writing.

It's not easy to overcome those fears, and I keep a copy of The War of Art next to what I'm currently working on, and turn to it when I need a reminder that it's okay to be afraid, and that the important thing is to keep going.

If my mother was alive, and if she was an artist, she would have written this book. Facing facts bravely about creative process. This is a no nonsense, ground level approach to the work. There is only the work and the doing of it. There is ego, and there is everything else, and if you connect to ego, you'll be missing the everything else. The ego's job is to stop you from doing anything you're born to do: any artistic endeavor that is sent to you from the ether to be completed. Like viruses are born to spread, ego is born to thwart your every creative move. Every writer/artist knows this in the back of our monkey brain, but we do not know this in our frontal lobes. The concept of an ego out to nail your creative hide to a door is a little creepy, but it makes sense in the part of my brain that doesn't have a headache. The tyranny of a blank page, a blank canvas is where ego goes about starting to undo you. I have written many times about my creative process, and as it turns out, it may be a universal process. I sit down to write. But before I do I have to sharpen my pencil, find another pen, get a different notebook (the one with the shoes on the front), dust my desk, sort the bins from which I got the notebook and the pen, rearrange the talismen, do the dishes, paint the bathroom, clean the garage. The point is to duct tape yourself to the work station and just do it. I like Pressfield's approach because I am an obedient person, and he tells us what to do and then what to do again. This is an artist's practicum, a required course. Sit down, and before you start the work, read this book.