In many ways, Steven Pressfield is trying to tell us the title of his precious book. “The War of Art” In his view, the process of artistic creation involves a constant battle with a tireless and cunning enemy: resistance.
You will face resistance as you find yet another reason not to follow your instinctual urge to sit down and write.
For Newlove, drinking was an escape into delusion, into a destructive yet pleasurable haze that was inimical to true artistic creation.
One of the main weapons of resistance is fear, and Pressfield addresses this with candid honesty: “The artist who dedicates himself to his mission has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will suffer a permanent diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, scorn and humiliation.”
Pressfield, a successful novelist and screenwriter, has dedicated much of his life to giving other writers the tools and courage they need to meet this challenge head on.
Many a novelist has said with false humility that writing a book is not quite the same as digging a ditch, and that is certainly true, but an undigged ditch rarely causes the same psychological and emotional pain as a blank page.
Like many authors, Donald Newlove Died in 2021 The author John F. Kennedy, who has died aged 93, tried to drink to dull the pain of writing, but his extraordinary efforts left him with several unpublishable manuscripts (the work of a “drunkard” alter-ego) and years of severe alcoholism.
Having finally gotten sober in his late 30s, Newlove realized he had a lot to say about the effect of alcohol on his own writing and the writing of other writers. In 1981 he “Those Drinking Days: Me and Other Writers” It was re-released in 2022 by Tough Poets Press.
“Those Drinking Days” empathetically and mercilessly deconstructs the persistently romanticized notion that links artistic inspiration to addiction. For Newlove, drinking was an escape into delusion, a destructive yet pleasurable haze that was inimical to true artistic creation.
In a line that will be soberingly familiar to any sad young literary nerd killing time in a bar, Newlove diagnoses the same problem in many of his protagonists.
“[T]These writers are so resistant and so consistently unable to recognise the truth about themselves… False loyalties abound: to culture and birth, to so-called social politeness, to male bonds in war and sport and the hunt, to the companionship of “literature” and drunkenness, and to the living companionship of manly self-sacrifice to the giants of the aging ego.
