Scott Berkun

Book review: The War of Art

I didn’t like this book. It was just too unintentionally silly to like. Now I know silly books can be meaningful or moving, or just plain fun, but this one is hard to recommend. It’s particularly hard to suggest it to anyone in serious pursuit of writing or making of any kind. It’s too weird, dramatic, and fanciful, and the good advice and thinking it does contain is often buried in indulgence. You can find equivalently good inspiration without these flaws.  The book you should read instead is Art & Fear (more on that shortly). It’s cruel to say, but it’s the book Pressfield should have read first.

There is a fantasy among people who want to write that inspiration is the challenge. If only they had sufficient inspiration, all other problems would fade away. They imagine writers as people who are inspired all the time, which is nonsense.

But it’s a convenient fantasy, and those who buy into it tend to believe two things: a) obtaining passion is the hard part and b) it can be found in a book.  It’s these people who buy books like the War of Art. They prefer mystical, romantic and even supernatural explanations for what writing or art making is. A narrative of WAR is what they want, as it shapes the universe as a battle, with forces of good and evil, and you, the reader, get to imagine yourself as the hero in this epic conflict.

As an exercise, this is fine. As a metaphor, it’s useful. But as a literal way to think about the daily practice of making things it’s absurd. Worse, I think it’s destructive for learning how to write, especially for new writers. There are much better ways to explore why writing is hard, particularly the notion of blocks.

The first half of the War of Art is a reasonable attack on the psychology required to make things, and this much of the book I’d recommend. He writes just a paragraph on most pages. Short notes on the fight and how he fights it, plus anecdotes from famous figures, and his pet theories on psychology. Some of it is good and moving. Other bits are cliche, cheezy or overly dramatic. As a light read for getting psyched, I was often moved and entertained. But the annoyances and wanderings increase as you read. After two of my favorite sections ( How to be miserable, We’re all pros already), which came mid-way through the book, I had an increasingly hard time continuing. It was hard to finish the book’s 165 sparse pages.

The problem is Pressfield (Author of the Legend of Bagger Vance) likes his fantasies. It’s clear he depends on them to work. This may work for for him, but as a model for others? With no offering of alternatives? He gets lost in them in this book and will lose inexperienced writers in them too. As the book progresses his central arguments shift to mystic forces, with the task of creative work scrambling into literal notions of angels and gods and their pivotal role in writers and their work. If you like books like The Secret and find the Law of Attraction useful in your life, and you want to write, you’ll like this book, as it bets on similiar faith in the universe and forces beyond our control as its central, or at least concluding, theme.

Otherwise please go read Art and Fear instead. It achieves all of the aims of The War of Art with more grace, honesty, concision and power than any other book on making there is. Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of writing is also excellent, without any self-indulgence or dependence on mystical metaphors.

Meanwhile, read my post on How to write a book: the short honest truth.

Book Review: Moby Dick

Years ago, when I decided to be a writer, I figured I should go back and read the classics I’d managed to dodge in school. And along the way reread the ones I’d enjoyed. While Heraclitus said it’s impossible to step into the same river twice, as a river is always changing. with books, they stay the same and we change. Reading (old) books helps me sort out how I’ve changed and why.

I’ve discovered some classics do not age well (I found Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe impenetrable), but others are more potent than ever (Catcher in the Rye). It’s easy to forget there are both bad and good reasons for a classic to remain a classic.

6 years ago I picked up a copy a Moby Dick in a used book store, read the first page and thought it quite inviting, as I’d never read the book before. Since then I’ve traveled with Moby Dick a dozen times, never finding the courage to crack it open. I’d see it on my bookshelf, or on my desk, and it would gnaw at me: the book had become, all on it’s own, my private little white whale.

And so last week, on vacation in Mexico it came along yet again. And I finally read the whole damn thing.

I did enjoy it, but not in a way I’d recommend to most people I know. I was reading it more as a writer than a reader, if that makes any sense. Writers do this. We want to understand how books work.

(Actual review starts here) – The problem with the book (or its brilliance if you are patient enough) is that Melville is a tease. The first 80 pages presents itself as a charming, funny, intriguing tale of life in whaling. He writes very well, and has some brilliant prose and pacing. But he slowly unwinds the book into wider and wider circles of pedantry, indulgence, and esoteric ramblings that more than try your patience. Ahab, the most well known character from the book, can’t be mentioned on more than 80 of the 480 pages of the edition I read. The majority of the book is a whaling manual of sorts, with encyclopedia-like entries and opinion essays on various aspects of whales, whaling, and seafaring culture. Melville also shifts narrative form wildly in the book, sometimes he’s Ishmael, sometimes he’s Melville, sometimes he’s a sort of movie-style narrator (approximating Shakespearean stage direction). And Melville loves his references: my edition had 300 endnotes, half of which are sailing terms, the rest are biblical or literary references critical to understanding his sentences.

I suspect the movie version with Gregory Peck (screenplay by Ray Bradbury) provides the experience many people would expect in the book. I haven’t seen the movie, but plan to, just to compare.

I diligently read every page, resisting the urge to skim and skip, exploring if I could resisting the temptations of my attention. And in so doing I learned how much wider the idea of a novel is than I’d thought it could be.  He successfully (at least in terms of posthumous readership, the book didn’t sell that well in his lifetime) manages to twist the concept of a novel into various odd shapes, with strange and unwieldy corners – it made me rethink the notion of what a book, fiction or non-fiction, can be like. As a writer I’m glad I read the whole thing.

The best possible take on the book is that Melville desired to give the reader a similiar obsession about the white whale to the one Ahab has. The longer the book went on, the stronger the sense of craving, and then obsession, I had for the core narrative to continue. As Ahab hunts the whale, so does the reader hunt the story of Ahab and the whale in the book. A minority of the non-narrative chapters are exceptional essays (The Hyena (49), The Monkey Rope (72), Fast-Fish & Loose Fish, and the chapter on the concept of white) that I marked well and might reread. A dozen or so passages in the book, often about Ahab or philosophy, are exceptional. But for a book of this length I had a fairly low number of passages marked to return to and reread.

My edition (Wordsworth 2001) included a 15 page introduction by David Herd that bordered on worship. Thankfully I read it after I finished the book, as it would have ruined the reading. He grants every possible benefit of the doubt to Melville, often without much real evidence of Melville’s intentions. Apparently Melville had reservations, stating “It will be a strange sort of book, tho’, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho’ you might get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree”.

And I’m compelled to say for no particular reason, Melville’s Bartleyby the Scribner remains one of my favorite short stories. It’s quite the opposite reading experience from reading Moby Dick.