Book Review: Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield

Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield 

Steven Pressfield has a new nonfiction book and a new publishing company and both are vehicles for the same message.

[Full disclosure: I consider Steve a friend and this early review was made possible by his sending me a review copy and the “lunch pail manifesto” Black Irish lunchbox pictured above. OTOH, I get many review copies from publishers and PR folks and if the book they send is terrible, or just not well suited for ZP readers, I won’t review it]

First, Turning Pro is the latest sequence of a series of books that explore the mindset of the authentic creator or artist, following The War of Art and Do the Work and their struggle with what Steve terms “Resistance”, the internal psychological force that insidiously undermines our will to complete creative works (or…start them) and fulfill our life’s dreams. In the War of Art, one turned “pro” when one acquired for the first time, the mindset required to successfully battle resistance instead of supinely giving in. Turning Pro naturally expands on that aspect of Pressfield’s creative philosophy.

I say “philosophy” because that is what it is. Many of Steve’s novels are set in the ancient world of classical civilization and I know that  he has done a great deal of reading in ancient history, philosophy and literature. Before the moderns and post-moderns, philosophy asked fundamental questions and students of most schools of philosophy were seeking how to live a good life, with “good” usually meaning “virtuous” in the sense of a life that is authentic, noble or honorable. We see this in particular with Socrates, the Stoics and those influenced by them such as Xenophon, Epictetus,  Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, all of whom were concerned with philosophy as a practical way of life and not as an abstract exercise. My impression is that this has left a mark on Pressfield’s view of life.  This is not to say that Steve is writing advice from the perspective of book-learning – far from it; he makes clear his long education in the school of hard knocks, but I think the books and the knocks have been mutually reinforcing.

For example, here is Epictetus from the  The Enchiridion:

….Aiming therefore at such great things, remember that you must not allow yourself to be carried, even with a slight tendency, towards the attainment of lesser things. Instead, you must entirely quit some things and for the present postpone the rest. But if you would both have these great things, along with power and riches, then you will not gain even the latter, because you aim at the former too: but you will absolutely fail of the former, by which alone happiness and freedom are achieved. 

And here is Steve from Turning Pro:

My shadow career (I’ve had more than one) was driving tractor-trailers.

In my late twenties and early thirties, I drove trucks for a living….What I was really doing was running away from writing. Driving trucks was for me a shadow version of writing, because being a truck driver was, in my imagination, powerful and manly (just as I imagined being a writer would be). It was interesting: it was never boring. It was a career I could take pride in, an occupation that felt right to me….

….Of course this was all self-delusion.

The road was taking me nowhere.

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