But if I’m being fair, that’s not to say it doesn’t have ANY good ideas. Let’s get into the best bits.

Part 1: Resistance

The subhead of this section is “Defining the Enemy.” Making art is framed as a war — hence the book title — against Resistance (i.e. fear, self-doubt, distraction). I mean, okay, sure. I fundamentally reject the premise (what Pressfield calls Resistance is just our own vulnerabilities in a trench coat so I find it more productive to approach with gentle compassion) but fine.

The parts I found valuable were about navigating by discomfort:

• “Resistance will unfailingly point to true North — meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others.” The thing that feels too big, too real, too scary is exactly the thing we should be aiming for.

• How do you convince yourself to move toward the thing that scares you the most? “What finally convinced me to go ahead was simply that I was so unhappy not going ahead.” When it’s hard to find a path that feels pleasurable, finding a path that feels less painful can be just as useful.

• I also appreciated this idea that was fully stolen from Dwight D Eisenhower without credit: “(a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and (b) you must do what’s important first.” In the case of making art, what is important is often what feels most ripe.

Part 2: Professionalism

The second section of the book is devoted to describing a “professional” versus an “amateur” — which in Pressfield’s mind are not distinguished by whether or not they’re paid but by their mindset. This whole section is self-aggrandizing and contradictory, but most of the worthy gems I found were about the importance of separating yourself from your work.

• “The seeming detachment of the professional … is a compensating device to keep him from loving the game so much that he freezes in action. Playing for money, or adopting the attitude of one who plays for money, lowers the fever.” I love any mental trick that helps us create distance from the work. Sometimes I Pretend by Naomi Shihab Nye has a similar message.

• Pressfield is of the belief (as am I) that there are elements of creative work we can control — how often we work on it, how much we learn about the craft — and a much larger mystical or spiritual element that we can’t. He says of the “professional,” “She understands that all creative endeavor is holy, but she doesn’t dwell on it. She knows if she thinks about that too much, it will paralyze her. So she concentrates on technique. The professional masters how, and leaves what and why to the gods.” I like this idea that we can treat our work as sacred without worshipping it — instead pouring our focus into the mundane, concrete elements.

• Similarly, he says, “[The professional] is prepared, each day, to confront his own self-sabotage. … His aim is to take what the day gives him. … He understands that the field alters every day. His goal is not victory (success will come by itself when it wants to) but to handle himself, his insides, as sturdily and steadily as he can.” Such a huge percentage of creative work is the emotional and psychological work of getting out of our own way. I think it’s important, too, to remember that that emotional work changes every day. I like this framing of the goal of handling our insides as sturdily and steadily as we can.

• “The years have taught me one skill: how to be miserable.” There is so much ink spilled about the tortured artist, but developing a tolerance for discomfort is an important part of handling our insides sturdily and steadily. Not because one must be full of pain to make good art — I vehemently believe that’s not true — but because making good art touches our most vulnerable parts, which is often painful. The more we can notice that pain, breathe through it, and keep working anyway (and then healthily address the pain later), the farther we will get in our work.

Part 3: The higher realm

The third section focuses on the mystical and spiritual element of creative work that I alluded to above. Here is a brief poem he includes from the perspective of the Lord of Discipline (🙄) that I thought was a nice pairing with the importance of being miserable:

“Give the act to me.
Purged of hope and ego,
Fix your attention on the soul.
Act and do for me.”

Do the work for the sake of the work, not any larger goal or outcome. I like the idea of this effort as a sacred offering in and of itself. For me, that gives it a new layer of inherent value that takes the pressure off what comes next.

My takeaway: one star, do not recommend

There you have it — no need to read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield because you’ve already read all the good bits. Instead, I recommend:

• Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert (I’m working on my review of this now!)

• The yogic philosophy of tapas

• “Sometimes I Pretend” by Naomi Shihab Nye

• The Eisenhower Matrix

Leave a comment

Bonus: The Worst Bits

You may be wondering, is the rest of the book really that bad? Listen, it has clearly resonated with a lot of people, and I am in favor of whatever feels helpful in navigating the trials and tribulations of creative work. But here are some of the quotes that put this book firmly in my personal Hall of Shame:

• “Ill health is a form of trouble, as are alcoholism and drug addiction, proneness to accidents, all neurosis including compulsive screwing-up, and such seemingly benign foibles as jealousy, chronic lateness, and the blasting of rap music at 110 dB from your smoked-glass ’95 Supra. Anything that draws attention to ourselves through pain-free or artificial means is a manifestation of Resistance.”

• “Doctors estimate that seventy to eighty percent of their business is non-health-related. People aren’t sick, they’re self-dramatizing. Sometimes the hardest part of a medical job is keeping a straight face. As Jerry Seinfeld observed of his twenty years of dating: ‘That’s a lot of acting fascinated.’ The acquisition of a condition lends significance to one’s existence. An illness, a cross to bear. Some people go from condition to condition; they cure one, and another pops up to take its place. The condition becomes a work of art in itself, a shadow version of the real creative act the victim is avoiding by expending so much care cultivating his condition. A victim act is a form of passive aggression. It seeks to achieve gratification not by honest work or a contribution made out of one’s experience or insight or love, but by the manipulation of others through silent (and not-so-silent) threat. The victim compels others to come to his rescue or to behave as he wishes by holding them hostage to the prospect of his own further illness/meltdown/mental dissolution, or simply by threatening to make their lives so miserable that they do what he wants.”

• “Any support we get from persons of flesh and blood is like Monopoly money; it’s not legal tender in that sphere where we have to do our work. In fact, the more energy we spend stoking up on support from colleagues and loved ones, the weaker we become and the less capable of handling our business.”

• “What’s particularly insidious about the rationalizations that Resistance presents to us is that a lot of them are true. They’re legitimate. Our wife may really be in her eighth month of pregnancy; she may in truth need us at home. Our department may really be instituting a changeover that will eat up hours of our time. Indeed it may make sense to put off finishing our dissertation, at least till after the baby’s born. What Resistance leaves out, of course, is that all this means diddly. Tolstoy had thirteen kids and wrote War and Peace. Lance Armstrong had cancer and won the Tour de France three years and counting.” Editor’s note: But support from persons of flesh and blood to, for example, take care of your kids or provide you with medical care and steroids is meaningless and weakening?

• “Defeating Resistance is like giving birth. It seems absolutely impossible until you remember that women have been pulling it off successfully, with support and without, for fifty million years.” Editor’s note: This comes immediately after the paragraph saying your creative endeavor is more important than supporting your pregnant wife.

• “Goldie Hawn once observed that there are only three ages for an actress in Hollywood: ‘Babe, D.A., and Driving Miss Daisy.’ She was making a different point, but the truth remains: As artists we serve the Muse, and the Muse may have more than one job for us over our lifetime. The professional does not permit himself to become hidebound within one incarnation, however comfortable or successful. Like a transmigrating soul, he shucks his outworn body and dons a new one. He continues his journey.” Editor’s note: “She was making a different point” does some astronomically heavy lifting here.

I wrote three drafts in quick succession with two more planned. I decided I would launch in the next week or two, once I had all five written.

That was, as you may recall, one calendar year ago.

My first big mistake was not writing what was ripe; the two reviews I had knocking around in my head stayed stuck there and then eventually withered on the vine. But why were they stuck? Why didn’t I launch the newsletter without them? I was so close to starting, why didn’t I just press send?

I spent almost a year asking myself these questions, and finally had to recognize that I was blocked. I wasn’t just procrastinating, I wasn’t being lazy, I wasn’t just nervous about public attention. There was something fundamental about this newsletter that was keeping me from publishing.

Leave a comment

I felt just as silly as my clients often do: this is such a small, simple thing, and I should be able to do it! I had to show myself the same compassion, openness, and curiosity that I show my clients. Things are almost never small and simple when it comes to creative work. Anything we create touches on something vulnerable within us, and when we avoid progress, it is almost always a piece of us slamming on the brakes to protect us from perceived danger or discomfort.

Unfortunately, knowing this did not make it any easier for me to take my block seriously and identify what it was guarding against.

I knew I needed help. So when a virtual weekend retreat about opening your creative channel to write a newsletter landed in my inbox, I rolled my eyes at the precision of divine timing and pulled out my credit card.

I could write at least three newsletters about that one weekend workshop (let me know in the comments if you want to hear more!) but the most important moment for me was when I found the piece of me that had been obstinately standing in my way. When I was finally ready to listen, it spoke clearly and undeniably.

I didn’t want to limit myself to book reviews. I needed space to write other kinds of essays.

Was that really it? Was that the whole thing? Could something this trivial have kept me stuck for an entire year?

Buddha says that just as you can tell ocean water by the taste of salt, you will always know truth because it tastes of freedom. As petty as this blocker felt, I immediately knew I had struck truth because of the way my body relaxed and opened.

Followed quickly by frustration and fear, which of course was why I had hidden this truth from myself for so long. Best Bits was SUCH A GOOD IDEA! It was a perfect niche! It delivered a valuable service! It was specific enough to be interesting while also holding wide appeal! And now my inner truth was telling me to generalize??? What was I going to do, just blather on like every other newsletter-writer on the internet? How would I distinguish myself? What would I even call it??

Leave a comment

And then an entirely different loose end in my life slotted neatly into place: Belly Spark.

Before I decided to simply use my own name as my brand, I spent a lot of time thinking about a title for my business. The first one I found that felt right but also wrong was Gut Compass. I still laugh when I write it down. It feels fun to say out loud, and it exactly captures my purpose as a coach, but the tone and imagery are not at all my vibe. I played with synonyms for a while and “belly” felt great. I’ve always loved the word belly, how soft and sweet it feels to say, and soon I found what I wanted: Belly Spark.

I was sad to leave it by the wayside, so when it floated up as the name of this new, expanded newsletter, things clarified quickly. Belly Spark would still have book reviews. It would still provide a service for stuck creatives. Some of that service would be stories from my clients or my own creative process. Some of it would be lists of things that delight and inspire me. At its core, it would be about the hot sparkly feeling I get in my stomach when I know I’m onto something good.

And despite the fear of going against all received newsletter wisdom, I do know I’m onto something good.

Subscribe now

I have a client who is deeply invested in verisimilitude. When she reads a book, she gets distracted and annoyed by details that make no sense — things she knows are wrong. As a result, she takes details seriously in her own writing, and research is paramount to her.

Recently she started to write a chapter she was excited about, and after the first scene she paused to read more about the setting and the time period to make sure she was getting the details right. A few weeks later, with no new scenes written, she said, “I think I’ve lost interest in this chapter and need to move on. Here’s what’s pulling my focus.” She went on to describe a story about a tree and interrupted herself to say, “Of course, I don’t know much about trees, so I’ll need to do some research to make sure I get the details right.”

I could see this cycle about to play out again and it dawned on me that there’s more than one kind of verisimilitude. Texture and details matter, but so do energy and emotion. If the research is perfect but the energy is missing, not only will it fall flat to the reader, it will fall flat to the writer.

This client is an accomplished gardener and an incredible cook. I wish I had said: when you find a perfectly ripe tomato, richly colored and warm in the summer sun, you know it’s not the time to focus on the store-bought kale you have in the refrigerator. You can’t spend hours or days looking for the perfect tomato recipe, considering gazpachos and tarts and caprese salads. Because when finally you finish off the kale and find the dish that sounds the most delicious, you’ll walk back out to your garden only to discover that beautiful shining fist of a tomato split open in the dirt, spilling its juicy abundance to the worms.

Nothing will taste as good as a thick slice of that tomato, on the day you notice it, between two pieces of toasty sourdough slathered with mayo or salty butter, eaten directly over the sink to let the juices run wantonly down your chin and arms.

Eat what’s ripe. Make what sparkles. When you have the luxury of no deadlines, follow the energy and worry about details later. The research will always be waiting, the errands will always be waiting, the things you “should” work on instead will always be waiting, but the energy will grow stale or rotten if you don’t tend it immediately.

With other clients I’ve noticed an interesting second layer to this. It’s not just the assumption that the sparkly thing will stay sparkly even if you turn away from it; it’s an active guilt at following the sparkly thing. For many of us, we’ve been taught our whole lives that we can’t do the fun thing until we do the boring thing first. Now, suddenly, there is no inherent value in that. But doing something just for fun, when there are other things you could be doing that are less fun, feels dangerous and wrong.

There are a couple ways to look at this. One is: what is the point of making art if it doesn’t feel good? (Or feel bad in a good way?) If it’s not making your belly warm and your fingers tingle? What is living, if not following that tingle? The message of that one wild and precious life quote is about how to be “idle and blessed,” not productive and bored.

Another is way to look at this is: it feels dangerous and wrong? Be dangerous and wrong! An artist’s life has always been dangerous and wrong. Don’t try to convince yourself that you’re being virtuous by doing what you want; embrace the lazy devil inside and try things their way for a while. It is a distinctly American virtue to deny yourself pleasure in favor of a dull and practical life. And in this day and age, what artist wants to be distinctly American?

And the third way of looking at it, which is perhaps the only honest way to look at anything, is: we’re all going to die. Probably sooner than we want. Eat the ripe tomato.

What feels ripe for you?

Next time: how I missed the ripeness of this newsletter, how I found it again, and the story behind the name Belly Spark.

Every time I hear someone say, “Wow, I didn’t know that was a job,” I always feel a little bit like, *record scratch* freeze frame I bet you’re wondering how I got here.

Creative project coaching is a job in the sense that people pay me for it and I spend roughly half my waking hours thinking about it, but it is not a job in the Richard Scarry sense. No worm driving an apple through Busytown would recognize my job title. As a friend1 so aptly put it, “we are taught to view careerpathing as going from A to B to C, when in reality it’s a total shitshow most of the time.” Here is my personal shitshow.

I’ve never had a Busytown-approved job, but in the modern tech equivalent “real jobs” I struggled. In my first job out of college I remember thinking, “Am I just inherently bad at being an employee?” and feeling a deep dread of what the rest of my working life might look like.

This fear — am I simply not made for capitalism? — lingered for the next decade and a half, even as I found my way into User Experience Research and started to enjoy my work for the first time. UX Research gave me a chance to untangle complex problems by interviewing the people directly affected. I learned to listen deeply, pick apart where they were getting stuck, and brainstorm solutions to make their lives easier. This was fun and fulfilling for me, but it was also about 20% of the job. The other 80% spent writing reports and convincing executives that my job mattered did not thrill me.

Roughly every six months I had a new job idea, often wildly out of left field. For a while I set my sights on romance novelist as my new career, and worked on a manuscript for two years. I loved the process, but I desperately wished I had just one other person in the muck of it with me, as committed to my success as I was. Support from family and friends was wonderful, but I always worried that I was boring them with how much I talked about the book. I wished I had one relationship where I knew I could talk it out for as long as I needed and get helpful feedback in response.

Novel writing showed me just how hard I can work when I am engaged and excited about the work I’m doing. But over the course of six jobs, most of which ended in firing or layoffs, the fears I felt at 22 seemed more and more real. Whether because of my gemini sun and taurus moon, or my ADHD and obstinate disregard for authority, I do not dream of labor.

When I was most recently laid off, my dear friend Kate offered me pro-bono career coaching. I explained to her in our first session that I had a number of harebrained schemes kicking around in the back of my head; could she help me with that?

I told her about my zillion job ideas, the things I loved about UX Research and novel writing, and my fear that I’m just no good at working for other people. We sifted through all of these pieces, pulling them apart and regrouping them differently, guided by the stepping stones of Kate’s thoughtful, incisive questions. How do you want to feel in your work? Which of these feels exciting, and why? What’s making you hesitate? Where does this feel incomplete?

One of the job ideas I came back to many times was book coaching. After my own experience with my novel, I spent a lot of time talking to my dad about his novel (my family is heavily ink-stained, going back generations). I loved brainstorming with him, and after our conversations he would always tell me how much better he felt and how much writing he got done after we talked. It felt good to be the person I had wished for myself, and I could tell from his reactions that I was great at it.

I told all this to Kate, but something about the idea felt stale to me. I was badly burned by the process of trying to find an agent, and I didn’t want to work that close to the publishing industry. Something about it felt too narrow. I wanted to work with all kinds of artists and creatives on all kinds of creative projects. “Is that the job?” Kate said. “Creative project coaching?” It was a mouthful, and certainly wasn’t a job I had heard of before. But with that one shift in scope I felt my chest expand and my lungs fill with sparkling anticipation.

They say life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.2 Looking back on all I had learned from UX Research, novel writing, and dad coaching, the path to my newly formed and wholly made-up career started to seem obvious (if circuitous).

Each of these steps came from different parts of my life, engaging different parts of my personhood, and seemed entirely unrelated to one another. But when joined together Captain Planet-style, I discovered a foundation for a career I didn’t know I wanted. This, too, is what makes creative project coaching perfect for me — it engages my whole self in a way that no other job I’ve had does.

Since that first conversation with Kate, I’ve coached a children’s book author, a science writer, two novelists, and a comedy writer. I’ve had fascinating interviews with musicians, a climate activist, a youtuber, a memoirist, and a playwright. I love getting to dig into what folks are working on; my job consistently leaves me in awe at the vast creativity of humankind.

Busytown might not have a place for me, but I’m glad our own weird messy made-up world does.

What is your winding path?