Having just finished Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, I really wish I hadn’t bothered.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t a terrible book, it just that, much like Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, it isn’t a particularly good one either. And I had such high hopes for it, as well. Everything I’ve ever read about this book has been overwhelmingly positive. Also, I found Sun Tzu’s Art of War to be incredibly thought provoking and valuable and logically, and a book whose title is a play on that books title should be chock-full of wisdom. Right?

Well, there are some good ideas in The War of Art, but they are, all of them, other people’s ideas collected and presented by Mr. Pressfield. There are no original ideas, no world changing revelations, no fresh ways of seeing the world that are staggering in both their power and simplicity. Hmm, maybe I was expecting too much. Most of the ideas are useful, after a fashion. I will list them here to save you the time and trouble of reading the thing (which isn’t much, as it’s effectively a long blog post worth of text).

  • everything that pushes you away from doing a creative thing is called “resistance”
  • the more resistance you feel, the more important the thing is to do
  • focus on the work, not the result
  • show up every day and do the work
  • angels are real
  • all of the creative things exist already (in potentia) and we don’t actually create them but rather discover them
  • Do or do not, there is no try

And that’s the book in a nutshell.

I mean, maybe the thing that bothered me the most about it was the way he spent the final third of the book raw-dogging a sort of watered-down new age mysticism. Maybe it was the relative lack of substance in the other things he was saying. Overall it’s a fairly well-written and at times amusing rehash of standard writing advice, I suppose. I just resented the loss of the time I spent reading it. I was hoping to learn something new.

Next up for writing books to review is Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody. The subtitle says it’s the last book on novel writing I’ll ever need. Hope so.