The waitress took pity on me when I rolled my bags in at two am and ordered a short stack of pancakes. I told her the guest house where I’d booked a room wouldn’t admit me because I had arrived too late due to a delayed flight. So, I spent my first night in San Francisco in a booth in the back of a 24-hour diner called The Lucky Penny.
After a week in a hostel, I convinced a stranger to rent me a room on the ground floor of an old Victorian. He waited until I handed over the dough to tell me there was a rat problem.
I worked as a science instructor at a summer camp and commuted two hours each way on buses. My pay-as-you-go phone ran out of minutes, and the room I rented didn’t have Wi-Fi, so I sat on the library steps with my laptop, where homeless people shot up, and stayed in touch via email.
My bank account had 18 cents before my first paycheck came through.
When the summer ended, I worked as an Age of Sail instructor on Hyde Street Pier. School groups stayed onboard overnight and learned how to row a long boat, rig a bosun’s chair, and cook on a cast iron stove from the early 1900s. I took ziplock bags of the leftover vegetable stew they made home to eat.
Somewhere, there are pictures of me dressed up as a tall ship sailor from 1906, but alas, I could not find any. Here is a pic of me prepping for Camp Galileo, San Francisco, 2012.
After my six-month sublet was up in the rat pad, I got another six-month sublet in a house on Treasure Island. One night, I stood on the shore, listened to the waves crash, and asked myself what the hell I was doing torturing myself in San Francisco. I had moved there in response to a burning inside me, a desire to become whatever I was meant to be. That night, I finally named it: “I am a writer!” I shouted as the salt spray whipped my face. Then I went home, fell asleep, and did not write again for a decade.
I had fallen prey to what Steven Pressfield in The War of Art terms Resistance. His rule of thumb is: “The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.”
The book is split into three parts. The first two apply to any endeavor to better oneself, while the third focuses on creative endeavors.
Book One — Resistance: Defining the Enemy
Pressfield takes a no-nonsense, straightforward tack in this section, which he likely learned from serving in the Marine Corps. He describes Resistance as invisible, insidious, and universal, and, worst of all, he says it plays for keeps. His style is so blunt and spot-on that it stings when he writes about how victimhood, self-medication, isolation, and fear are used by Resistance to prevent us from doing the work that we were put on this earth to do.
Pressfield describes how the “immediate and powerful gratification” of sex is often used by Resistance to distract us from doing our work. It is worth quoting this section at length.
“Of course not all sex is a manifestation of Resitance. In my experience, you can tell by the measure of hollowness you feel afterward. The more empty you feel, the more certain you can be that your true motivation was not love or even lust but Resistance.
“It goes without saying that this principle applies to drugs, shopping, masturbation, TV, gossip, alcohol, and the consumption of all products containing fat, sugar, salt, and chocolate.”
Book Two, Combating Resistance: Turning Pro
Pressfield wrote for seventeen years before getting his first professional writing job on a movie called King Kong Lives. It turned out to be a total flop. It wasn’t until he wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance in his early fifties that he achieved commercial success as a writer. But he says that the defining moment for him came long before that, one night when he decided to stop making excuses and start writing, what he calls turning pro.
He points out that we are already pros in one area of our lives: our jobs. We know how to show up every day, grind away, even when we don’t feel like it, and stay committed over the long haul. Why not apply that same discipline to developing your craft in other areas of your life?
Once again, it is worth quoting Pressfield when he outlines principles that separate a professional from an amateur.
“7) We do not overidentify with our jobs. We may take pride in our work, we may stay late and come in on weekends, but we recognize that we are not our job descriptions. The amateur, on the other hand, overidentifies with his avocation, his artistic aspiration. He defines himself by it. He is a musician, a painter, and a playwright. Resistance loves this. Resistance knows that the amateur composer will never write his symphony because he is overly invested in its success and overtererrified of its failure. The amateur takes it so seriously it paralyzes him.”
The war of art is not won through declarations but through dedication. Shouting “I’m a writer” at San Francisco Bay paralyzed me, but I claim another inch of the battlefield every time I send these words.
Write, don’t hype.
Book Three, Beyond Resistance: The Higher Realm
Pressfield argues in Books One and Two that we have control over recognizing and overcoming Resistance, putting in the work, developing technique, and seeking to complete the work rather than receive recognition for it.
Inspiration, on the other hand, he argues, is divine.
Pressfield details muses and angels in a way that makes me uncomfortable. Tell me more about how I must lace up my boots because “Resistance is always lying and always full of shit” rather than “There is magic to effacing our human arrogance and humbly entreating help from a source we cannot see, hear, touch, or smell.”
It seems everything imbued with meaning is shrouded in mystery, especially when the stakes are this high.
The War of Art is compact as a snubnosed revolver and packs a similar punch. Rereading it was cause for self-examination.
Will you stand on the shore and declare your identity and aspirations instead of the divine words given to you? Or will you stop running and, like Jonah, allow yourself to be cast into the sea? Are you ready to sink into the depths? Let the bars of the earth close over you and sojourn through hell until a part of you dies. The part of you that wants to do the work for the recognition that wants to do it for the money is the part you must leave in hell. Once that happens, you will be vomited upon the shore of your enemies, and it is there that you must labor.
You will suffer — as a camp counselor in San Francisco or under the fluorescent lights of an office in Seattle, or at your pottery wheel, canvas, or keyboard.
As Hemingway said, “Being a writer is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Anyway, that’s a long way of saying, be careful where you point this book; it’s loaded.
The title is a play on Sun Tzu’s classic The Art of War. The photo was taken in my mom’s office, where I wrote this post when I was home for Independence Day.
Great review! I’m realizing I’ve been resisting reading this book, so thanks for the push.
Good stuff, Nate. Enjoyed your reflections. I forgot about this book. I read it in seminary on recommendation from an artist friend as we recognized our mutual crafts required fighting resistance. Reminds me, too, of this Kierkegaard quote: “ What is a poet? A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music… and men crowd about the poet and say to him: “Sing for us soon again”; that is as much to say: May new sufferings torment your soul.”