My butt hurts.

Okay, metaphorically. But it still got a pretty good kick.

If you’re a writer, an artist, a person with creative goals of any kind, or an aspiring any-one-of-those, read on. I won’t kick you, promise.

But this other author might.

I’ve finished Steven Pressfield’s phenomenal book The War of Art, and the most difficult part of writing about it will be to NOT quote most of the book. It’s that good.

It’s also intense. Scary intense. Hardcore in the way that taking a good honest look at yourself—and then doing something real about it—is hardcore. This isn’t feel-good self-help, folks. This is gut-wrenchingly honest stuff. And that’s why it’s so fantastic.

The title is a clever reversal of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, the classic military treatise. The book itself is about the enemy every creative person (which, yes, really means every person) faces on the battlefield of life—resistance. Pressfield considers it important enough to capitalize.

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? . . . Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

Got your number there? Mine, too.

I will now give you a micro-synopsis of the book, which, if you are human and breathing and have aspirations toward a better life in any way at all, I urge you to read as soon as possible. It’s fairly short and (hallelujah!) well-designed, but every page is pithy. Many statements are epigrammatic enough to crochet into samplers or emblazon across shields.

Book One defines Resistance, and discusses its many manifestations. (You’ll recognize most if not all of them.) Book Two talks about “turning pro”—the conscious, willful decision to give something your all regardless of the outcome. Book Three discusses the muse, life and death, the ego and the larger self, and other equally daunting yet relevant subjects.

The novel for which Steven Pressfield is probably best known (yep, because of the movie) is The Legend of Bagger Vance, which is a modern reimagining of the Hindu Bhagavad Gita. There are many parallels between those and The War of Art as well, but this post is long enough already. More on that if you want it . . . let me know in the comments!

I came away from The War of Art inspired—and also scared. Pressfield says this is good.

If you find yourself asking yourself (or your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.

The book feels like a clarion call to me—a clear ringing of trumpets urging me to rise to my highest potential. Very compelling.

But that’s what scares me. I recognize those trumpets. They tend to bring on countless iterations of the “passionately inspired – giving 110% – burning out” cycle, and now that I’ve become aware of my perfectionistic tendencies, I’m careful about anything that might send me spiraling recklessly down that path again.

So I skimmed through the book once more. And I found this:

Resistance outwits the amateur with the oldest trick in the book. It uses his own enthusiasm against him. Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion.

(Sound familiar, anyone?)

The professional, on the other hand, understands delayed gratification. He . . . steels himself at the start of a project, reminding himself he is in the Iditarod, not the sixty-yard dash. He conserves his energy. He prepares his mind for the long haul. He sustains himself with the knowledge that if he can just keep those huskies mushing, sooner or later the sled will pull into Nome.

From one perspective, how depressing! I want to read that success is possible by this time next month, dammit! Don’t talk to me about the long slog through the ice and snow. I’ve been slogging long enough already.

But there it is again. Wanting the magic bullet, the quick fix. Often combined with clever marketers trying to sell me on the latest weight-dropping, muscle-toning, productivity-boosting, time-managing, power-focusing product, service, or package, which is “the last thing you’ll ever need to buy to solve this problem!!!” until the next one comes along to weight down my bookshelf, clutter up my living room, or fill up my hard drive.

But.

There’s another perspective we can take.

What if we all simply started implementing the knowledge and systems we already have? What if we quietly, steadily, without fanfare, just started doing The Work (whatever that means for each of us)?

Difficult, yes. Every day we will face our own stuckness. But Pressfield (rightly, I think) tells us that

Resistance will unfailingly point to true North—meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing. . . . We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others.

If we can calmly face down Resistance every day (or at least keep showing up and giving it our best), how freeing! To not have to care about how good something is . . . to let it just pour out of us, trusting that it will gradually, naturally perfect itself over time?

That’s a mighty soft pillow for a sore butt to rest on.

I can’t resist one more plug for National Novel Writing Month, which starts at MIDNIGHT TOMORROW! (Yep, somehow midnight on Halloween night seems very fitting.)

Even though I’m very sad about not doing it this year myself, NaNoWriMo was one of the key things that taught me how to start fighting back against my perfectionism when I first participated in November of 2005.

I’ve done it three times since then, and successfully completed a horribly raw and unedited 50,000-word novel twice. And I don’t think I’ve ever found a better—or more fun—crash course in how to throw your inner critic out the window (or at least lock her/him in a closet for a while).

So it’s worth stating again how heartily I endorse this program. If you’ve never heard of it and you’re intrigued, or if you have and you’re on the fence about participating, NOW is the time . . . because it won’t come around again for another year!

If you have specific questions I can answer about NaNoWriMo for you, feel free to post them in the comments below or send me a private e-mail at the address in the very bottom line of my “About Me” page. I’ll make a point of checking that at least a few times today and tomorrow.

I also want to make two offers for anyone who’d like to get involved . . .

If you do NaNoWriMo this November and would like a personal cheerleader, I’d be happy to be your NaNoBuddy via e-mail. You can send me your word counts if you want to keep yourself gently . . . ac-count-able (heh). Or you can just check in with me and tell me how it’s going, and I can reply with hearty cheering-you-on messages and any advice I can offer.

If you’d like to be part of this adventure of literary and creative abandon, but don’t want to actually, you know, write a novel, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Office of Letters and Light, the parent non-profit which runs NaNoWriMo and other beneficial programs—many for children.

There’s something in it for you if you do, hopefully. A very good friend of mine is doing NaNo (again!) and she’s personally raising funds to get into a special Write-a-Thon here in San Francisco on November 22. If she makes her stated goal, she will not only get in herself, but she’ll be able to bring one guest.

That will be me.

If she raises enough to qualify us both to attend the third annual “Night of Writing Dangerously,” I promise to blog from there and give you an insider’s view of the unbridled thrills and excitement. Maybe I can even take a little videocam, record a few brief interviews with other writers, and post them here. (I haven’t included a video in a blog post yet! Hmmm . . .)

Oh, if you’d like to donate, you might want the link:

Donate to my writerly friend’s NaNoWriMo fundraising page here! Just click the link and then the “Sponsor Me” button (after reading her lovely page, of course).

So there you have it, ladies and gents.

A fantastic month-long chance to play with imperfection begins tomorrow.

You can join in if you’re inspired to.

If you do, you can take me up on my offer to be your NaNoBuddy.

And/or you can donate to the cause and hopefully get me in the door to blog from the Write-a-Thon itself.

Or none of the above. Of course it’s up to you. But I couldn’t resist one more reminder that NaNoWriMo 2009 starts at MIDNIGHT TOMORROW! )

I was going to write about something else today, but Chris Zydel’s wonderful post changed my mind. Check it out—she talks about why reframing the whole concept of making mistakes is a very good idea. I love her weed analogy. And her allusion to the doctrine of the Church of Mistakes. I know I’m a member of that congregation.

Chris reminds us how important it is to remember to be kind to yourself when you make mistakes and things don’t turn out the way your judgmental mind hoped they would. It’s also helpful to remember the good that can come out of your mistakes (or the things you think are mistakes). Like learning. New insights.

And sometimes, the Happy Accident.

One of my favorite Winnie-the-Pooh stories (I almost typed “when I was a kid,” then I realized it’s still one of my favorite Pooh stories) is the one about Eeyore’s birthday. Eeyore, as you may remember, is a rather gloomy and depressed donkey. He doesn’t expect much from life, so “not much” is usually what he gets. One year on his birthday, Pooh and Piglet each bring him a birthday present. Pooh’s gift is a jar of honey, which he (being a Bear of Very Little Impulse Control When it Comes to Hunny) unthinkingly eats along the way. Piglet’s gift is a big red balloon, which he falls upon and bursts while running to Eeyore’s place.

Each presents his gift rather shamefacedly, but Eeyore is entranced by the way the burst balloon fits into the pot perfectly. Pooh and Piglet leave him happily dropping the balloon into the honey pot, then pulling it out again, then dropping it in again . . .

Quite by accident, they had given Eeyore the best birthday present ever.

I remember a happy accident of my own. One year during college, I stayed in town for the summer semester. I’d been working hard on my honors thesis and other very cerebral matters of (*cough*) lofty import (*cough*), so I decided to get my hands into some soothing, 100% physical clay. I took a wheel-thrown pottery class and had a blast—so much that I frequently went to the studio after hours to practice on my own.

One day I decided to use the big, heavy kick wheel (where you kick a very heavy round stone attached by a vertical axle to the potter’s wheel, making them rotate together) rather than one of the electric ones (where you step on a pedal to make the wheel spin, and the speed varies with your foot pressure). I’d never used the kick wheel before, so I intended to make a simple bowl.

As I worked the clay, it collapsed too far inward. At first I was upset, but then wondered what else the clay might want to become. It turned (pun absolutely intended) out to be the best mug I ever made, and I still drink out of it today. It’s not perfect—I didn’t know much about making handles, so my mug handle is sort of fragile and irregular-looking.

But because of its beginnings as a proto-bowl, my mug has a very thick bottom. Coupled with the inward-curving sides, it holds heat like no other mug I’ve owned. And there’s nothing like the pleasure of sipping hot tea or coffee from a piece of pottery you’ve thrown, glazed, and fired yourself. It means more to me than any “perfect” commercially produced mug I could buy from a store.

What kinds of happy accidents have you had? I’d love to hear about them!