Writing Wednesdays
How We Get Better, Part Two
By Steven Pressfield | Published: July 11, 2012
On the artist’s journey, we don’t get better by increments, we get better by fits and starts.
Everest's Khumbu Icefall. As Alexander Pope once said, "Alps on Alps Arise!"
The trajectory is not a smoothly-ascending curve, but a herky-jerky spasm-fest marked by seeming dead-ends, plateaus, dark nights of the soul, intervals of boredom and stasis, not to mention bouts of terror, despair and self-doubt, which are followed, if we’re lucky, by quantum leaps to the next level.
In other words, we advance by breakthroughs.
In last week’s post I talked about my friend Paul, who overnight leap-frogged two or three levels in his writing. What I didn’t say was that that leap was preceded by months and years of toil that had built up to an explosive bursting point.
Have you ever read Laurens van der Post, the South African writer? Among his books are two of my all-time faves, The Lost World of the Kalahari and The Seed and the Sower, which was made into the movie Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, starring David Bowie.
One of Mr. Van der Post’s theories is that every true change we experience in our lives is accompanied by a fever. A literal fever. Temperature over a hundred.
Van der Post’s idea is that something in us needs to be transformed at the cellular level if we are to permanently evolve aesthetically, emotionally, morally or spiritually.
I believe it.
My own theory is that we progress as artists by mini-”hero’s journeys,” one after the other. Each graduation takes us to the next level, where we find ourselves enrolled again as freshmen—and we start the process all over again.
Like climbing Mt. Everest, we claw ourselves up a brutal vertical ascent, only to realize that we stand at the threshold of a plateau of ice that we must now traverse, one harrowing crevasse at a time, to get to the next ascent.
When we improve as artists, what is happening is less a process of adding layers of skill or technical expertise (though certainly that is happening, and it’s very important) but more an evolution that is characterized by the shedding of false self-conceptions and the jettisoning of self-limiting ideas.
We are finding our voice.
We’re becoming who we really are.
What happened with Paul was that he hit the wall, fell into a bout of fever, his head exploded—and when he sat down again, he started writing for the first time in his real voice.
It’s really hard to write (or paint or dance or shoot film) in your true voice. It takes tremendous courage. That’s why most of us only get there, if we do at all, after an ordeal that pushes us to our limits until, in despair, we give up on the self we have been clinging to so desperately. When we let go of that false self (which is constituted of others’ expectations of us and our own conventional expectations), a breakthrough happens. The fever breaks, and we wake up new.
The catch is that this new self has not achieved nirvana. We’re just one level higher, faced now with the challenges of this new plane.
That’s how the game works, at least in my experience.
We get better one hero’s journey at a time, one breakthrough at a time, one fever at a time.
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great read !
thanks.
Again, exactly what I needed to hear. Thanks Steve.
just Excellent!…thnx.
Steve,
The part about the fever is SO true! Until this day, I always thought that was just particular to me. Actually mine is like a case of the flu without the body aches. I get wozzy in the head and am in and out of it for a few days. I can always feel it coming. Every major shift in my life has been proceeded by “the sickness” as I’ve come to call it. I’ve been feeling it coming on lately. I’m bracing myself.
Thanks for the reminder that my break down is actually a set up for my break through.
Call it intuition, but I think that one day when these heady days of neuroscience have faded man will begin to comprehend that not all emotional/personal growth occurs in the firing and changes of neurons but that we absorb and radiate from others and our environment as we are ready to do so. And that given just a crack in a heaved open door, required ‘nutrients’ will flood in. Growth in everything occurs like this – what looks to be regulated season by season, age by age consistent growth is, if you look closely at growing children and plants, a calm (even barren) season followed by a bursting forth of growth. It is built into the nature of things this drinking from both the dregs at the bottom and the bubbles on top. Would that we have the wisdom, the perseverance and the gratitude for the larger symmetry within that chaos.
It’s very strange to me how I happen upon these espresso shots of truth right at the exact moment I need them! Thank you, sir.
Wow. Every “Writing Wednesdays” installment is exceptional. This one is among the best ever. It should be a chapter in “Turning Pro,” “The War of Art,” “Do The Work,” or even “The Warrior Ethos.”
Somewhere, Joseph Campbell is proud that you have further illustrated how the Hero’s Journey impacts our lives.
Steven,
Just picked up Tides Of War again to read the section where you introduce Gylippus. I found myself reading the rest of the book for the second time. I always enjoy Telemon’s quotes. You really did a great job of story telling within the historical context of the Sicily invasion. Not only did I read my marked passages of Telemon’s speaches but that of Lysander when comparing Sparta and Athens. Thanks!
Thanks, Wiz. I confess some of those parts are my secret favorites too. And that Telamon is my secret alter ego. Thanks for the Comment!
Thank you for another awesome post.
Makes me wonder about my writing style. I am writing a personal development book. People who have read some of what I write accuse me that it is too poetic/verse in style.
I try and adapt my writing, but eventually that is how I think and that is how I write.
That confuses me a lot.
Brahm, one should never give advice from afar, I know. But if your style is coming out “poetic/verse,” go with it. (But of course take this with a big grain of salt. Do what YOU think, not what anybody else tells you.)
Thank you Steven, much appreciated.
good good, steve. Thanks bro.