If you’re a writer who is struggling or could use some inspiration, you could do a lot worse than making Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art your soundtrack for the next two weeks, or longer.

Whether you listen to the audiobook (2.5 hours) or read it (170 pages), engaging this book might be the most important thing you do for your writing career.

What’s It About?

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles is author Steven Pressfield’s manifesto (my term, not his) to artists of all types, and its message is especially applicable to writers. Fiction or nonfiction (Pressfield writes both), experienced or inexperienced, published or not, well-known or unknown, this book is for all writers. It’s sold over a million copies because of how widespread its utility is.

Organized in three “books” (“Resistance: Defining the Enemy,” “Combating Resistance: Turning Pro,” and “Beyond Resistance: Higher Realm”), The War of Art is composed of brief, punchy chapters.

“Punchy” is the right word, I think. As you read, it feels like the book is boxing, which is apt, because the whole thing is about our tangle with the enemy, namely, “Resistance.”

Resistance is what foreword writer Robert McKee calls “that destructive force inside human nature that rises whenever we consider a tough, long-term course of action that might do for us or others something that’s actually good.”

Pressfield says of Resistance, “We experience it as an energy field radiating from a work-in-potential. It’s a repelling force. It’s negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.”

The first part of the book describes Resistance—how it operates, what its tactics are, and so on. The second part covers what it means be a professional and beat Resistance. And the final section does indeed seem to enter a “higher realm,” per this part’s subtitle, covering concepts like the muse, dreams, miracles, the Self, and territory vs. hierarchy.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Why I Love *The War of Art* So Much

I think it was Michael Hyatt who said, “You can’t lose if you don’t quit.” That’s always stuck with me. If you can muster within yourself the energy to keep going, you’ll never lose.

That’s a remarkable promise, and I think it’s true.

For my money, the best resource out there to keep you going is Pressfield’s little book. That’s why I love it so much. Steven Pressfield wrote a guide to the art of keep going.

As a writing coach, I can teach you how to write better. I can teach you how to grow an audience, find an agent, choose which form of publishing is best for you.

It’s much more difficult for me to teach you tenacity, and tenacity is perhaps the most important quality for a writer to succeed. Pressfield’s provocative powerhouse of a book kicks you in the pants and tells you, “You can do this. Keep going.” Pure gold.

Conclusion

If you were to push me into a corner and demand that I tell you which book I wish I could give to every writer on the planet, honestly it wouldn’t be that difficult a choice. There are a lot of amazing books for writers out there, but as far as I’m concerned Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art gets the blue ribbon.

Postscript

Another thing I love about this book is its unexpected success.

The book was a practical solution to a problem Pressfield had. He was tired of having the same conversation over and over again with writers. He recounts, “I said to myself, Steve, why don’t you just write this stuff out in book form. Then when somebody tells you that they know they can be a writer and they want your advice, you can just hand them the book and say, ‘Here, read this.’”

So he sits down, the book flows out of him in two months (because he’d spoken its message multiple times before), and it has sold over a million copies.

The book may have been an effort to get aspiring writers off his back, but make no mistake: The War of Art is an act of generosity, as all the best writing is.

It was the solution to Pressfield’s problem, but it also addressed a problem many readers have. Here’s the takeaway: Note how successful books can be when they solve real problems real people really have. Such books tend to market themselves by word of mouth. That certainly has been the case for The War of Art.

Question: Have you read The War of Art? If so, what did you think? And what’s one of your favorite books for writers? You can leave a comment by clicking here.