The war of art

The Book In One Sentence

Steven Pressfield wrote *The War of Art* in 2002, and the book is essentially a confession dressed up as a battle plan. For seventeen years he tried to be a writer and failed. He drove tractor-trailers in Durham, North Carolina. He picked fruit in Washington State. He slept in a Chevy van in Northern California with a cat named Mo and an antique Smith-Corona. He was forty-two and broke when his first screenplay credit finally landed, and the credit was for *King Kong Lives*, which Variety reviewed by suggesting the writers had used fake names for their parents' sake. He had given everything to writing, and writing had given him almost nothing back.

Then a friend named Tony Keppelman told him to stop complaining. You're where you wanted to be, Tony said. That's the price of being in the arena.

Pressfield realized something on that day. He had not yet had a success. But he had finally had a real failure, the kind of failure only a professional gets to have. Everything that came afterward — *The Legend of Bagger Vance*, *Gates of Fire*, the historical novels that Oxford history dons now assign to their students — flowed out of that one quiet shift in self-conception.

*The War of Art* is the field manual he wished he'd had at twenty-four. It names the enemy. It names what we become when we fight that enemy well. And in its strangest, most divisive final act, it names the forces it claims come to help us once we have earned their attention. The book is fragmented on purpose, sometimes preachy, sometimes mystical to a fault. But it does something almost no other book on creative work does. It tells you, in two hundred pages of barked sentences, that the thing stopping you is not your circumstances. It is you. And then it gives that thing a name, so you can finally see it clearly enough to fight it.