In 2026 I read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.
My sister bought me this book a few years back when I told her I wanted to take my fiction writing more seriously. I held off on reading it because, quite frankly, I loathe anything that feels remotely like self-help.
And yes, it is incumbent on this review to state that this bears all the hallmarks of a self-help book: a loosely defined problem, anecdotes and broad strokes about their implications, and the distinct sense that it could have been a 4,000 word essay instead of a +160 page book. Even worse, the book was clearly written to be addressed to writers, artists, and musicians, but Pressfield (or his editor) felt it would have broader appeal if he randomly mentions that his advice also applies to anyone “starting a new business venture.” Call me a cynic but these are different categories. Every time he tried to graph that twig onto a branch of his argument, I resented its presence.
All that being said. I thought it was a fun gimmick to give the book a punny name and then write it in a similar aphoristic style to Sun Tzu’s original treatise. Despite my prejudices, I did find the opening section where he defines and catalogues symptoms of internal resistance to creative work particularly sharp. He calls out several things that I had stumbled into haphazardly as I began committing more of my time to writing. There’s undeniable power in recognizing common pitfalls and neuroses.
Unfortunately the final third of the book leaned far too heavily into his own sense of the spiritual and metaphysical justifications for taking creative work seriously. It felt, to my mind, clichéd and fairly uninspiring. I think the book could have done without it and been just fine.