Saturday 14 October 2017
The Unpleasantries of Writing
According to some guy called
Hemingway, ‘there is nothing to writing.
All you have to do is sit at a typewriter and bleed.’
Correct me if I’m wrong, but
clearly our Ernest never suffered with a little old friend called Writer’s
Block. Writing is that simple,
apparently. All I should do is bust open
a vein and pour myself out onto a blank page.
Lol. Ok. Sit down, Ernie.
What really annoys me about this quote is that it supports
the myth that certain kinds of self-regarding writers like to perpetuate: that
real, serious, grown-up writing is full of pain and misery and that a writer is
a kind of soothsayer/martyr/prophet who accesses this terrible personal
darkness to bring back deeper understandings for the rest of us mortals.
Immediately I’m calling out bullshit. Writing can be difficult, of course. Anybody who has tried to string together
a sentence at some point knows that. But
then, anything worthwhile or interesting can be difficult. Playing piano can be difficult. Trigonometry can be difficult. Skateboarding can be difficult. Playing piano whilst skateboarding and doing trigonometry
is, I hear, exceedingly difficult. But
difficulty is not something we should shun.
The world is full of difficult things.
Yet people continue to conquer them (I’m yet to conquer trig, but hey,
nobody’s perfect!)
Sometimes people must do difficult things out of
necessity but very often, people do difficult things
because difficulty can be fun. Some
form of pleasure is gained from beating the odds. It seems to me that writers find themselves
in this scenario. Sure, writing is
difficult. But it is also pleasurably
difficult. Contrastingly, opening your
veins over your typewriter is certainly not pleasurable (particularly
if you are the one to mop up afterwards!)
Writers, I suspect, don’t like to admit this, because it makes them
shallow. Much better to look like a
martyr; much better to look like The Sufferer than to admit that this whole
writing business might actually be fun.
But there is nothing shallow about pleasure or happiness. Pleasure is about
engagement with the world, it is about richness and about depth.
Very often, when writers talk about pleasure, they like
to give it a tinge of bloody, excessive darkness because that seems so much
more grown-up and serious and all that jazz.
Since when did it become a bad thing to find pleasure in the lighter
things in life?
As somebody who not only writes, but who also studies the
art of writing, it seems to me that this stuff about typewriters, suicide and
the notion of the suffering writer is counter-productive and, to be quite
honest, rather depressing. Sure, it’s
time-consuming. Yes, at times it is not
a constant pleasure. However, writing is
definitely not devoid of all pleasure entirely.
And when you find yourself ‘in the zone,’ when the sentences string
seamlessly together and the words just flow, these are the moments when writing
is addictive.
