W.B.’s Book Report: Steven Pressfield’s latest

Every so often Steven Pressfield puts together a little pep talk for creative folks. The first was The War of Art, which if you’ve never read then you can’t say you’re serious about the creative life. Sounds harsh, but there it is.

When the new one arrives, I sit down and read the pep talk almost or literally in one sitting. It usually drives me crazy wanting to go out and do the creative thing I’m working on and not stop until it’s out there in the world kicking and screaming.

Then I settle down, put the book away, and go on living my life. WTF is wrong with me?

Put Your Ass (where you heart wants to be) is an expansion of Somerset Maugham’s well-worn thought: “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

It’s interesting that we treat the day job as an obligation and on a schedule but most of us allow creative work to come and go as it pleases. The successful creatives are the ones who practice, man, practice. They make sure they plant their tail where their heart wants to be on a regular schedule, and sit there until they produce the words or the music or whatever else it is that they create.

I blogged for 15 years on a “whenever I feel like it” basis, and then I decided to treat it like a daily obligation, and here we are two years later with my ass and my heart in the same place. It is sometimes a struggle, but there’s some comfort in knowing I’m here because I decided I had to be, so here I am.

When I reached Chapter 41, I stopped cold. I sat down and copied it word for word in my journal. It’s didn’t take long; When there are 81 chapters in a 138-page book, the chapters are short. It’s nine sentences. Two of the sentences are “This is the day.”

The meat is:

“This is the day. There is no other day. This is the day.”

That’s the whole point of the book in a nutshell. (The Maugham quote is also the whole point in a nutshell.)

Want to be creative? You have now, and nothing more or less.

So put your ass where your heart wants to be, keep moving, finish the work, and ship it. Thousands of books say this very thing, and so many of us still struggle anyway. (Including me — I did say “us,” didn’t I?)

It’s comforting and challenging to know we’re not alone — but the struggle continues anyway. It’s downright silly.

Maugham said it so beautifully. Listen to what he said. Hear what he said.

Set your own 9 a.m., whenever and wherever that may be.

And sit your ass down in that seat.

252/24,265

The cups and the compasses

When we first bought our land, six or seven years before we built the house on it, I envisioned filling our field with native wildflowers. Red has more conventional tastes, but she knows how to encourage both “proper” flower gardens and prairies of wildflowers, so we have developed both.

We visited a nursery that specializes in native plants. I fell in love with cup plants — tall flowers whose leaves are shaped to capture rain water for insects and animals to drink — and bought six small plants, which I planted all in a row near the south driveway into our big field. That was how this all started.

Fifteen-ish years later, they have seeded and spread to create a forest of yellow blossoms at the side of the road every midsummer.

Then there are the compass plants — so called because their leaves supposedly all point north. They gave me a delightful surprise. I bought two and waited for them to do something. For the first two or three years, they just grew their leafy green leaves and were kind of plain, but then one summer one sent a shoot spiraling 10 feet into the air and burst forth with yellow flowers of its own — an amazing slow-motion fireworks show.

The next year the other one did the same, and we bought a couple more. But again, after a few years we have more than four compass plants making their fireworks way over my head.

I’m sure they serve their purpose for the insects and pollinators that depend on their July-August blooms, but for me their purpose is to add to the beauty and provide a small explosion of joy every summer. What better purpose could there be?

Addicts to addicts, dust to dust

The formula for making “bingeworthy” TV is very similar to what they used to get kids coming back to the Saturday afternoon serials in the 1930s or ’40s. Back then Commander Cody, or whoever the star was, would be wrestling for control of a small plane, say. The episode would end with the plane crashing into the side of a mountain. Heavens! We must see what happens next!!

Next week, the episode would resume with the struggle on the plane. But this time, before the plane crashed, we would see the hero win his fight, grab a parachute and jump off the plane.

The same concept is at work in modern day stories, perhaps with a little more sophistication. One episode ends with a dramatic reveal or our heroes in jeopardy; we look across the room at our partner and say, “Heavens! Shall we go to the next one and see what happens?” A nod, another episode begins, and the binge is on.

In a recent article called “Are You Not Entertained?” Mark Manson writes about how our dramas, our music and even our politics are being designed to be as addictive as possible, based on what will get the most likes and what will keep you watching, listening or otherwise paying attention.

I have always been attracted to the new and unusual and weird, not the standard fare. Back in eighth grade I went nuts over “Yellow Submarine” and “Good Vibrations” precisely because they didn’t sound like anything I had ever heard before.

I don’t know if experimentation in the arts is rewarded anymore, unless it’s an experiment in coaxing people to come back again and again. Where have you gone, Lennon-McCartney, Brian Wilson, Joe DiMaggio and the like? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.