Stephen Pressfield wrote in his book The War of Art that “it’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is resistance.”
He is not wrong.
There is nothing quite as difficult as writing that first word. Nothing is as difficult as starting: a project, a chapter, a sentence, an idea. Every day we face the same struggle—to get our butts in the chair and begin.
This resistance makes little sense. Writers want to write. We want to tell our stories. We want to reach our audience. The desire is clearly there, so why is it so hard to get on with it? What holds us back from accomplishing what we want to do?
The short answer is nothing. Nothing is wrong with us. We’re human, and humans are prone to resistance.
Rainer Marie Rilke said in his book Letters to a Young Poet (a book every writer should read) that “most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition.”
We have to fight against our natural inclination to do what is easy, to avoid situations that are difficult. Putting words on a page is difficult. It always will be difficult. But you need to realize that all the resistance you are feeling is just that…a feeling. It is not real. It lives in your head and it uses lies and subterfuge to undermine your will. Resistance is your brain’s way of finding an escape from work the same way a child will expend enormous energy trying to get out of cleaning his room, far more than cleaning the room would take.
Whether you call this phenomenon resistance or procrastination (which is the most common symptom of resistance, but not the total of resistance), it is the same: a way to avoid that which is hard or onerous in some manner.
When resistance stands in the way of your dreams and desires, it is nothing more than an obstacle that must be demolished, skirted around, or tricked. You must find ways to break through so you can write, so you can finish your draft and edit it and polish it and make it whole. Winning that struggle is up to you.
The first step toward breaking though resistance is to understand it in all its forms. It is not just procrastination. It also appears as outlandish dreams that cannot hope to come true without hard work. It comes to us as dreams of being a bestselling author who travels the world greeting readers. It’s thinking that you can write better than successful authors who are published and established. It’s thinking you can be successful without finishing a project.
These are signs of an amateur writer and should be squashed if you want to succeed.
Everyone has dreams and hopes, but a professional acknowledges these fantasies for what they are: fantasies. Only work will lead to success. Only dedication and pushing through the blocks will result in finished works. Accolades will come to those who finish what they start and who earn them. (And those who get lucky to hit upon a trend at the right moment. But even that can only happen with finished works.)
You must figure out how to break through the resistance to writing, if that’s what you truly want. If you’re not sure, I urge you to read Letters to a Young Poet where Rilke talks about the urge to write and what it means.
In the next blog, we’ll explore specific ways to break through resistance.