waging a war

a few weeks ago the boy's karate instructor sent a book home w/ the boy for me to read...the war of art, by stephen pressfield. it laid on the kitchen counter for a few days because i was skeptical. the book is thin. there is nothing outwardly exceptional about it. and frankly i have lost any good feeling/mojo i have toward his instructor and therefore didn't think his book recommendation could amount to much. (re: the instructor--i don't doubt that he knows karate, but...his business/people skills are non-existent and i feel like most of the time he's just coming up w/ new shit to hawk because business is so bad. kinda like a snake oil salesman.)

the book is short. sometimes chapters are a paragraph long. the book talks about how to win your inner creative battles--whether you're a writer or musician or artist or whatever. it talks about honoring the muse. it talks about the difference between writing because you have to and writing because you have to. in other words--writing because the words are jumping out of you and the story has a mind of its own and the muse is driving the work out of your vs. looking around to see what the market wants and selling out, not following your heart, being a hack. he talks about how resistance is the enemy.

you could read the book in 30 minutes. really. but you'll probably want to read it more than once to let everything soak in. my dilemma is getting from reading it to putting it into action. i was encouraged by the fact that the author struggled for years before he was officially published. even w/ that...he wrote something he was interested in that he didn't think had any chance of being published, that his agent didn't think would get published...such a tiny niche...the book? the legend of bagger vance.