The War of Art

I forget why I bought this book. I bought it long ago, either 2017 or 2018. It is unfortunate since The War of Art is not good. The book is an exemplar of why I never read self-help books. Its advice amounts to not much more than toughen up and work everyday out of the love for the craft. The War of Art is motivational literature. There’s no scientific evidence to support any of Pressfield’s advice, just possibly apocryphal stories from the lives of other successful artists. The advice is wrapped in war, hunter, and mythic metaphors that obscure rather than clarify. There are tangents about fundamentalism, muses, and Platonic realms which don’t help the reader make art. The final part—the third “book”—is Pressfield’s own pet theory of the creation process. The War of Art could have been an essay.

The book only does 2 things correctly. The first is that its advice around professionalism IS accurate. The key to making great art is to make stuff. Quantity leads to quality. The second is that framing procrastination not as external distraction but internal resistance is uncommon but valuable. It explains why, when you start working on a difficult project, distractions appear like moles in a whack-a-mole arcade game. You uninstall video games only to find yourself on your phone. You put your phone in another room only to find yourself checking email. Your mind is looking for anything to do other than the difficult w