Feeling demotivated? Lame? Procrastinating? Don't want to be an artist anymore?
Read this book. Now.
It helps readers channel their creative energy, unlock potential and overcome the fears that stop them from reaching their fullest potential.
By following the theme of resistance (a universal force that never rests from attacking awakening artists from creating) it makes us aware of what we're up against in any meaningful, creative endeavor.
Resistance tells you to forsake the noble for the easy. Quit your writing projects and get a normal job, settle down with that person you aren't madly in love with, put off that project just one more day. Resistance does anything it can to stop you. It shows up in all kinds of forms - and not always like the green ugly monster in your closet - it sometimes uses even the most reasonable arguments to get you off track.
It's one thing to know it in theory, but in practice, we have to keep in mind that art is war. It's not always fun and redeeming and fulfilling to create beautiful things that captivate people's hearts and attention. There cannot be victory without bloodshed.
The best way to battle resistance is to get up each morning and do the hard work of creating, regardless of how we feel. This is the difference between the amateur and the professional. The amateur creates for the high of creating, the professional refines his/her craft until near perfection - and this can only happen by simply waking up every day and doing it.
So today, if it feels like all of the universe is battling against you in your attempts to do something great, be encouraged. It means that what you're doing is worthwhile, and if you keep putting the work in, you're on your way to it.
And if you don't feel that way--what are you doing?
2 comments:
Leah,
This is something that really hits Home with me. Michael Shaara was a prof. at FSU who would go home, go to bed with his wife, wake up at 12, go to the attic till four, and then go back to bed so he could wake up with his wife. Those four hours a night for a decade he wrote a book that would hardly go noticed while he was alive. He died from the stress of this lifestyle of not sleeping and smoking but, in the end, his book "Killer Angels" won the Pulitzer prize. Like war, art can take lives.
But I disagree with this in two ways:
1. I don't think it's limited to art. But any achievement of success.I believe the failure of an athlete, accountant, or anyone else, is a failure to foresee the monotony of success. I don't think that your conclusion--or the books-- is wrong per se--merely narrow.
2. I don't think it's so much like a war than it is struggle. War implies--forgive me if I'm killing artistic license--two oppositions, an object of conflict, a state of conflict, and a conclusion. Art is not the war itself, but the object which you, the individual, want to win from the said "Resistance." I just believe the analogy could be better. :)
Appreciate your thoughts friend!
I agree with 1. The book writes for an audience of creatives (specifically writers). But you're right, anything glorious is hard.
As for 2, it's a word thing, like you said. Art itself is not war. I think being an artist is war. The war is more in yourself than in anything you're creating--the creation itself is impersonal and indifferent.
love ya:)
Post a Comment