The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle

Pressfield explores the forces that he feels help creative people find inspiration and finish projects. He claims that one can think of these forces as objective and impersonal, or as embodied beings such as “angels” or “muses” (106). If this concept makes the reader uncomfortable, Pressfield encourages them to consider this force as a “talent” that humans have evolved as part of cognition (106). However the reader chooses to view these forces, Pressfield considers them an “ally” to creative people, and therefore the opposite of Resistance (108). He claims that artists’ allies of angels, muses, or raw talent are most likely to help the creative person if they dedicate themselves to working each day. The artist should remain humble and consider themselves a servant to creativity, rather than operate from the Ego.

Pressfield reminisces about trying to finish his first novel in his late twenties. Living in a small, rented house in northern California, he worked fulltime on his writing, shutting out all other distractions such as TV and newspapers. His neighbor, Paul Rink, gave him a typed copy of Homer’s prayer, “The Invocation of the Muse” from the Odyssey. Pressfield still has that copy, which he continues to say aloud each day before he writes.