This week, I’m rounding out my exploration of Steven Pressfield by exploring The Artist’s Journey: The Wake of the Hero’s Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning.
The Artist’s Journey, not to be confused with The Artist’s Way, is all about what happens after the artist endures the Hero’s Journey; I was surprised to hear a take about that because for the longest time I thought the Artist’s Journey and the Hero’s Journey were one and the same.
But Pressfield doesn’t think so.
He offers insight into how both journeys are different (but overlap in various ways).
Below I’m sharing key takeaways with and without my commentary.
The Hero’s Journey and The Artist’s Journey
“I have a theory about the Hero’s Journey. We all have one. We have many, in fact. But our primary hero’s journey as artists is the passage we live out, before we find our calling.
The hero’s journey is the search for that calling.
It’s preparation.
It’s initiation (or, more precisely, self-initiation).
On our hero’s journey, we see, we experience, we suffer. We learn…
…The passage that comes next is the Artist’s Journey.
The artist’s journey comes after the hero’s journey.”
My thoughts: Here’s why I found it surprising that the Artist’s Journey is different from the Hero’s Journey. In Hollywood, the Hero’s Journey undergirds most of its major motion pictures; that’s why all major films feel like they’re different variations of the same subject. There also seems to be, at least in the Screenwriting Industrial Complex, a notion that the writer should also be going through (or have gone through) a similar Hero’s Journey (or else why are they writing this story?).
But it makes sense that this concept – the Artist’s Journey – comes after the Hero’s Journey. It’s always a good idea to live through an ordeal first and then write about it; distance begets perspective. As he later notes, “the gifts you bring is the works you produce.” Those can only occur afterwards.
A Gift for the People
“You, the seeker, have at least returned home.
You are an artist now, as you have always wished to be.
What gifts do you bring the people?
You will learn that, now, on your artist’s journey.”
The Artist’s Journey is Dangerous
“The artist, like the mystic and the rununciant, does her work within an altered space of consciousness.
Seeking herself, her voice, her source, she enters the dark forest. She is alone. No friend or lover knows where her path is taken her.
Rules are different within the wilderness. Hatters are mad and principles inverted.
The artist has entered this sphere of her own free will. She has deliberately unmoored herself from conventional consciousness. This is her calling. This is what she was born to do.
Will she come out safely?”
My thoughts: This, I feel, is the core of The Artist’s Journey. That we mere mortals inhabit a conscious world, and artists have portals (and are regular journeymen) to the unconscious. That’s partially why great art can be so profound; it hits us in different ways, ones that we consciously would never have been able to fathom.
The Artist’s Journey is a Journey of Dreams
“I never wrote anything good until I stopped trying to write the truth. I never had any real fun either.
Truth is not the truth.
Fiction is the truth.
The artist’s medium is not reality, but dreams. I don’t mean “dreams” in the sense of made-up bullshit. I mean dreams as in the X-ray of truth–truth seen through and seen for what it really is, truth boiled down to its essence.
The conventional truism is “Write what you know.”
But something mysterious and wonderful happens when we write what we don’t know. The Muse enters the arena. Stuff comes out of us from a source we can neither name nor locate. Where is this coming from? The “unconscious”? The “field of potentiality”?
I don’t know.”
A Body of Work
“Everything we produce as artists comes from a source beyond our conscious awareness.
The second and third these of these books are:
- “You,” meaning the writer of your books, is not you. Not the “you” you think of as yourself.
- This “second you” is smarter than you are. A lot smarter. This second “you” is the real you.”
The World the Artist Lives In
“Here’s my model of the universe in a nutshell (we’ll get into this more deeply in Part Three):
The universe exists on at least two levels. The first is the material world, the visible physical sphere in which you and I dwell.
Then there’s the second level.
The higher level.
The second level exists “above” the first but permeates the latter at all times and in all instances. This second level is the invisible world, the plane of the as-yet unmanifested, the sphere of pure potentiality.
Upon this level dwells that which will be, but is not yet.
Call this level Unconscious, the Soul, the Self, the Superconscious.”
My thoughts: I love this so much because it divorces art from the realm of the ego and goes a bit deeper. Creating art, according to Pressfield, has nothing to do with gaining prestige, winning awards, or making names for oneself. It’s all about the internal journey, going within, to find a new level of understanding and meaning.
Each Trip from Level #1 to Level #2 is a Hero’s Journey
“We said a few chapters ago that the artist’s skill is to shuttle from the material sphere to the sphere of potentiality and back again.
Each one of these trips is a hero’s journey.
Jay-Z in his studio may complete ten thousand hero’s journeys in a day.
You do too.
Ordinary World to The Call to the Refusal of the Call to Threshold to Extraordinary World and back again. Watch yourself today as you bang out your five hundred words. You’ll see the hero’s journey over and over.”
My thoughts: It’s interesting to note that, even though the Artist’s Journey seems to occur after the Hero’s Journey, the Hero’s Journey reprises its role during the creation of any piece.
The Artist’s Skill
“What exactly does an artist do? The writer, the dancer, the filmmaker…what precisely, does their work consist of?
They shuttle from Level #1 to Level #2 and back again.
That’s it.
That’s their skill.
Twyla Tharp in her dance studio. Quentin Tarantino at his keyboard. Bob Dylan when he picks up a guitar or sits down at the piano. They perform this simple but miraculous act a thousand, ten thousand times a day.
They enter the Second World and come back to the First with something that had never existed in the First World before.”
My thoughts: No wonder I’m tired all the time.
“A machine can’t do that. A supercomputer packed with the most powerful AI system can’t do that.
In all of creation, only two creatures can do that.
Gods.
And you and I.”
My thoughts: No, AI can’t do that (although tech bros may try). Even though it feels like AI is taking over, I still find refuge in the belief (or the experience) that writing is about the experience of writing, of going deep. I’m slowly learning how to divorce myself from any outcome and just enjoy the process more.
Another Way of Looking at Resistance
“Resistance is a mini-Refusal of the Call.”
The Artist Learns How to be Alone
“She trains herself to find emotional and spiritual sustenance in the work. Her need for third-party validation attenuates. She may still ask of her work, “What do you think?” But she evaluates her response within the framework of her own self-grounded assessment of her gifts and aspirations–of how well or poorly she believes she has used the one in the service of the other.”
The Artist Learns How to Work with Others
“She lets go of the need to plaster her name over everything.
It’s fun to jam, she decides. And even more fun when she the finished product is better than any of the constituents could have produced on their own. She sees the beauty now in “Rodgers & Hammerstein” and “Jagger & Richards.”
Note please, as we delineate these skills, that their absence is the sign of the amateur.
An amateur can’t start, can’t keep going, can’t finish, can’t work alone, can’t work with others.
We ourselves were amateurs before our hero’s journey. That ordeal has chastened us. We have peered into the abyss and it has slapped us back into reality. We might not, now, want to start, want to keep going, want to finish, want to work alone, want to collaborate–but we have confronted the alternative and it has scared us straight.”
The Artist Learns Emotional Distance
“…The artist learns to detach from his material expectations. He learns to separate his personal identity from his response to his work.
J.D. Salinger learns that he is not Holden Caulfield. George Lucas is not Luke Skywalker.
The artist is not the book. Or the movie. Or the startup.
The artist learns that she is not to be held accountable to her first “you,” but to her second.
This second self, her real self, is the true audience and the true judge of her work.
The artist learns to serve this second self, not the box office tallies in The Hollywood Reporter or the bestseller lists in the New York Times.”
My thoughts: Yes.The artist develops the skill that she is not her characters and that there is some distance between her and the characters. When you’re not “in the pool” with them – just merely observing them, you’re seeing what works and what doesn’t. It gives a certain emotional remove that lends itself to freedom.
The Artist Learns How to Handle Rejection
Can you see the theme running through these chapters?
The theme is maturity. The theme is professionalism. The theme is mental toughness.
Every one of these skills (and the ones in the chapters to follow) requires of the artist a profound shift in perspective and a quantum in emotional self-possession. This work is hard. It hurts. We are beating our heads into a wall, hoping to teach ourselves to stop.
You may scoff at what I’m about to say, but we are becoming Zen masters.
We’re training ourselves to be Jedi knights.
I know, I know. “Every writer and artist I know,” you say, “is a lush, a sex addict, an emotional infant, simultaneously a tyrant and a coward, en egomaniac, a depressive and flaming, incurable asshole.”
That may indeed be true.
But that’s not us.
That’s not you and me.
We’re not going to be beaten by a pile of rejection slips (or even that excruciating close call that put us within inches of our material and artistic dream but then was snatched away at a fatal instant for reasons that were inane, arbitrary, or nonexistent altogether).
No one said the artist’s journey was easy or without pain.
The ordeal of her real-life hero’s journey, however, has taught her humility. “Yeah, yeah,” she thinks as she assesses the critic’s over-the-moon adulation. “And what’ll you write next time?”
She accepts the plaudits with gratitude and goes back to work.”
My thoughts: No, we’re not going to be beaten by a pile of rejection slips. As I had heard a world-famous photographer mention on YouTube, he loved getting rejection slips early in his career because it was evidence that he was putting himself out there (as opposed to sitting back and just thinking he did something – there is a difference).