The War of Art

cowards we are for not doing our work.
     
     
    MICHAEL
     
    Don’t knock rationalization. Where would we be without it? I don’t know anyone who can get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They’re more important than sex.
     
    SAM
     
    Aw, come on! Nothing’s more important than sex.
     
    MICHAEL
     
    Oh yeah? Have you ever gone a week without a rationalization?
     
    —Jeff Goldblum and Tom Berenger,
    in Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill
     
     
    But rationalization has its own sidekick. It’s that part of our psyche that actually believes what rationalization tells us.
     
    It’s one thing to lie to ourselves. It’s another thing to believe it.

 
    RESISTANCE AND
    RATIONALIZATION,
    PART TWO
    ----
     
    Resistance is fear. But Resistance is too cunning to show itself naked in this form. Why? Because if Resistance lets us see clearly that our own fear is preventing us from doing our work, we may feel shame at this. And shame may drive us to act in the face of fear.
     
    Resistance doesn’t want us to do this. So it brings in Rationalization. Rationalization is Resistance’s spin doctor. It’s Resistance’s way of hiding the Big Stick behind its back. Instead of showing us our fear (which might shame us and impel us to do our work), Resistance presents us with a series of plausible, rational justifications for why we shouldn’t do our work.
     
    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.

 
    RESISTANCE CAN BE BEATEN
    ----
     
    If Resistance couldn’t be beaten, there would be no Fifth Symphony, no Romeo and Juliet , no Golden Gate Bridge. 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.

 
    BOOK TWO
    ___________
     
    COMBATING RESISTANCE
     
    Turning Pro

 
    It is one thing to study war
    and another to live the warrior’s life.
     
    —Telamon of Arcadia,
    mercenary of the fifth century B.C.

 
    PROFESSIONALS AND AMATEURS
    ----
     
    Aspiring artists defeated by Resistance share one trait. They all think like amateurs. They have not yet turned pro.
     
    The moment an artist turns pro is as epochal as the birth of his first child. With one stroke, everything changes. I can state absolutely that the term of my life can be divided into two parts: before turning pro, and after.
     
    To be clear: When I say professional, I don’t mean doctors and lawyers, those of “the professions.” I mean the Professional as an ideal. The professional in contrast to the amateur. Consider the differences.
     
    The amateur plays for fun. The professional plays for keeps.
     
    To the amateur, the game is his avocation. To the pro it’s his vocation.
     
    The amateur plays part-time, the professional full-time.
     
    The amateur is a weekend warrior. The professional is there seven days a week.
     
    The word amateur comes from the Latin root meaning “to love.” The conventional interpretation is that the amateur pursues his calling out of love, while the pro does it for money. Not the way I see it. In my view, the amateur does not love the game enough. If he did, he would not pursue it as a sideline, distinct from his “real” vocation.
     
    The professional loves it so much he dedicates his life to it. He commits full-time.
     
    That’s what I mean when I say turning pro.
     
    Resistance hates it when we turn pro.

 
    A PROFESSIONAL
    ----
     
    Someone once asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. “I write only when inspiration strikes,” he replied. “Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”
     
    That’s a pro.
     
    In terms of Resistance, Maugham was saying, “I despise Resistance; I will not let it faze me; I will sit down and do my work.”
     
    Maugham reckoned another, deeper truth: