The Artist’s Way & The War of Art

Treating writer’s block is like untangling a really, really long, old rope. As you pull one loop through another, attempting a small liberation, you unwittingly add another knot. This knot and that kink reveal themselves as symptoms of some giant tangle that’s been there decades, and you’re just finding out about it. 

For better or worse, writing about the blockage seems to provide some headway, although I fear I’m perpetuating a self-fulfilling prophecy. In any case, as I gather up guidance, I consult the moon and sun of writer’s block: Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way and Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art.  

To unblock, Cameron recommends waiting for inspiration to strike while I maintain daily morning pages (check) and weekly artist’s dates (check, if you count steady reading and quality films*). Pressfield charges me to forge ahead, keep working, not let Resistance distract me no matter “How charged with punishments the scroll…” Be a professional, he says, and buck up. It’s work, not summer camp. 

Okay, he doesn’t say it quite like that, but he comes close. If you’re considering whether to read Artist’s Way or War of Art, you’re choosing between tones. Do you want a gentle yoga teacher or a stern football coach? Hand-holding or tough love? Dare I venture further: maternal guidance, or paternal? 

As I’ve previously written, Cameron leans hard into inner-child stuff, advice to nurture and indulge, even coddle and spoil the child within. Her vision of the productive artist is a doting self-parent: lavishly generous, attentive, and playful. For many, that’s code for narcissistic, ridiculous, and inefficient. I myself, huge into therapy etc., also balked at Cameron’s insistence on obsequious self-soothing.  

Pressfield is not so cheery, with his constant metaphors about war, sports, and manual labor. Keep grinding, he repeats. All blockage, in his book’s language, is Resistance, and Resistance is a little goblin out to distract you by any means necessary. Resistance is fear wresting control from the unruly artistic process. 

Resist the Resistance, he advises, and work. Harder. Feel the burn. Get miserable. Keep working.

I’m not necessarily pitting these books against each other, but there is something remarkable about their differences, especially when you consider their many similarities. 

Both writers agree that this work, our Art, calls you from within, beckoning you toward a transcendence you can’t find any other way. They agree that fear, devious and wily, threatens to overthrow you, and often succeeds. Keep vigilant for artistic interlopers, they write, and forge your own destiny with the tools of your craft. Your very soul hangs in the balance. 

But the question remains: what is the call? Are we fighting a war or spoiling a child? O which one? is it each one? 

In my previous post, I brought up one of my favorite quotes from War of Art: “… what better way of healing than to find our center of self-sovereignty?” I love this sentiment in isolation, but in context it’s a thornier issue, and essential to understanding the differences between these two books and the legions of creators they represent. 

In the same chapter where the above quote appears, Pressfield roasts any artist who would pursue healing before doing the noble, hard, spiritually fulfilling work of creation. He makes a weird distinction, too: “The part that needs healing is our personal life. Personal life has nothing to do with work.”

I’ll spare you the full rant, but I will offer this link to a definition of lyric poetry (take a look at the top paragraph). The lyric would not exist without the personal lives from which it springs. Which isn’t to say that all lyrics are strictly autobiographical, rather that the ecstatic truths they contain can’t come from anywhere but the poet’s heart. It’s like Pressfield telling the folks at Kellogg that Corn Flakes have nothing to do with corn. 

He’s indirectly recommending compartmentalization, which I consider dangerous on the one hand and deliriously aspirational on the other. I would love to pretend as if my anxieties, regrets, dreams, and joys had nothing to do with my creativity (or any other part of my life). I’d probably work a lot faster, but would the work be any good? 

Incorporating soul into work can be as messy, inefficient, and, yes, indulgent as it sounds, but isn’t “soulless” the worst insult for a work of art? 

Maybe I’m not playing fair, since I’m taking Pressfield’s argument farther than he himself does. He denounces the idea that healing must precede creativity, arguing that in fact the artist transcends her wounds through creating. 

For her part, Cameron argues that you can’t create—freely and joyously, that is—without transcending your wounds. She refers to the “scar tissue” on our souls that accumulates not only from pain in our “personal lives,” but pain in our artistic lives. 

Here’s Cameron, in Week 8 of The Artist’s Way: “Because artistic losses are seldom openly acknowledged or mourned, they become artistic scar tissue that blocks artistic growth. Deemed too painful, too silly, too humiliating to share and so to heal, they become, instead, secret losses.”

Cameron doesn’t advocate for an epic wallowing session with pints of Hӓagen-Dazs and a To All the Boys marathon. I mean, the book was published in 1992; she’d recommend a John Hughes marathon if anything. But she encourages you to acknowledge the loss and its effect on you, then take a new creative step, however small. 

To Pressfield, “healing” (his quotes) is often an excuse. To Cameron, it is a gateway. 

Whether or not you detour at a silent retreat in Taos, you will face the blank page and your blockage. It’s here, in that new creative step, that Pressfield and Cameron’s ideas merge again. If you’re like me, you’ll attempt a withdrawal from your old idea bank and find it basically empty. I expected morning pages to yield some inspiration, but… eh. 

At the end of The Artist’s Way, Cameron offers a passage called “Mystery,” in which she compares artistic ideas to babies in utero, stalactites, plants, and loaves of bread. To mix metaphors further, we might as well throw in cheese and wine. Which is to say, ideas take time. The artist must show some patience, restrain herself enough to let a gestating work of art mature on its own schedule. 

Cameron explains that “we must learn to not pull our ideas up by the roots to see if they are growing.” To stifle our commitment to productivity (which can ruin a half-baked idea), she instead recommends “mulling on the page.” Which is another way to describe morning pages.

Pressfield, productivity hype man that he is, offers a similar recommendation in the very chapter in The War of Art with which I take issue (“Resistance and Healing”). He describes a very low point in his life, et up with Resistance, and a night when he suddenly sat at his typewriter and did the very writing he’d avoided. He says that although he threw his pages out immediately, he entered a new, productive phase of his artistic career. 

Pressfield: “Do you understand? I hadn’t written anything good. It might be years before I would, if I ever did at all. That didn’t matter. What counted was that I had, after years of running from it, actually sat down and done my work.”  

This business of middle-ground creating, the writing you immediately throw out, has some dark magic to it. What Pressfield recommends is—or can be—morning pages. Something that lies between art and trash. Some prelude to art. 

My prelude, in this season at least, has been sawing away at the violin for quite awhile. Resistance remains, that little goblin who looks just like my twelve-year-old self. 

But I’ve had a very good time considering this and making something out of it. I really, really like writing, even when it’s about not writing. 

*Now as your gift for getting through this very unsatisfying post, please watch this essential piece of filmmaking from Powell and Pressburger about art-making. 

Post-vax party-goer: Do you know at parties, everybody’s supposed to be very happy?

Me [post-vax, newly redheaded]: *Withering stare*