Game On: Clan of the Cave Writers

Today begins a two-month novel-writing challenge with a writer friend, part of my endless quest for motivators that actually work. This latest offensive is prompted in part by reading Steven Pressfield's "The War of Art," a tough-love homage to creativity that sweeps away all our "yeah, but..." detractors and tells us to just sit down and do this thing.

Pressfield contends that we're programmed, genetically, against creative action. As cave folk, we either worked with the group, hunting and gathering, or died. Well, writing is an act of self that doesn't necessarily generate prehistoric berries, leg of pterodactyl or wooly mammoth fur -- and if you're not pulling your weight, you might get voted off the island. And then what? Writing also physically separates us from The Group. In cave times, being on your own meant imminent death. (I mean, what if you had the flu and a sabertooth tiger stumbled across you? Could you run fast enough? No, you could not.)

So our deep-down self resists, with all its got, anything that could separate us from the safety of the group, because apparently our genes can't tell time. (Don't be mad at yourself--you're just trying to stay alive.) And because we're so evolved, that resistance can get extremely sophisticated.

Beating our own self-immobilization is a matter of getting up every day and disabling resistance before it figures out what's going on. How? Just sit down and do this thing. Write. Rituals help ritualize this, and habituating writing lets your autopilot fight resistance so you don't have to (at least not as much). This is an unending battle, and you're going to need allies to cover your back, especially on weak days. If you don't take the offensive, every day, resistance will begin making its case. You'll want to spring clean, analyze your childhood, question your work, suffer incurable maladies, create relationship dramas and fiscal crises, all to prevent yourself from working. Sound familiar?

Yes! It does! Because I only know two writers who actually sit down and write their novels without a deadline, without kicking and screaming and having their lives fall to pieces. Two, god love 'em, out of scores and scores. That's all. (Maybe they need their own diarama?)

Thanks for the insight, Mr. Pressfield.I'm going to take a stab at sitting down every day with fiction for the next two months, and see if I can mud-wrestle my inner mini cave-me to the forest floor.

Check out "The War of Art" here.