On Writing, and Having Written
An Ode to Pleasure and Joy
Today’s Writing Music: “The Outdoor Type” by The Lemonheads
Today’s Reading: “The Ambiguous Loss of (Probably) Not Selling My Novel” by Danielle Lazarin (a fantastic essay @Lithub, and a perfect companion piece to my last post)
“I hate writing, I love having written.”
That’s a quote often attributed to Queen of the bon mot, Dorothy Parker, although it turns out that it likely has a much longer history than that, at least according to QuoteInvestigator.com (I do at least try to check my facts here.)
But, regardless of who said it first or last, the feeling is often expressed by writers, famous and not so famous. So often, we write with that shining fantasy of victory squarely in mind: typing THE END at the bottom of the final page, hitting send, and then just sitting back to let the praise and accolades rush in.
Hey, I said it was a fantasy, OK?
The trouble with this approach runs deeper than just the very long odds that our finished product will be universally adored. It also creates a situation where we’re white-knuckling our way through the process, thinking mainly about crossing the finish line.
Writer Zadie Smith, in her talk “That Craft Feeling,” quite beautifully describes that moment we spend so long yearning for:
Who can find anything bad to say about the last day of a novel? It’s a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word. The last time it happened to me, I uncorked a good Sancerre I’d been keeping and drank it standing up with the bottle in my hand, and then lay down in my backyard on the paving stones and stayed there for a long time, crying. It was sunny, late autumn, and there were apples everywhere, overripe and stinky.
If that sounds pretty great, it’s because, well, it is. So good that you really can work unhappily for years just to reach that point. Which is a problem.
In smaller ways, of course, we may seek this feeling on a shorter-term basis. A professor of mine once told me that, if he completed a good day’s work on the page, he allowed himself a single glass of red wine after dinner to celebrate. I personally like to celebrate the completion of a writing project by buying myself something a little impractical (and usually inexpensive) like a vinyl record for my collection or something to decorate my office walls.
And there’s nothing wrong with indulging in small pleasures: popping a cork sometimes, or racking up a little credit card debt in celebration of a job well done. We should all find ways to reward ourselves for reaching a goal. But unless we also find ways to take pleasure in the difficult struggle that comes beforehand—the writing and not just the having written, I fear that it not only affects our mental health but also the quality of what we’re writing.
Too often I read joyless books, full of dead language, dead-inside characters, that make life feel smaller instead of larger. Life is constantly painful, so books should be constantly painful, the argument seems to go. Miserable people being miserable in a miserable world full of misery. It makes for a lot of drama and even projects a kind of philosophical psuedo-depth, so I get why it's a popular style. The literary award lists are filled each year with books that boil down to “Life's short and shitty and then you die.” Whatever.
If I’m not having any fun reading a book, I suspect it means that nobody had any fun writing it either.
We’ve talked already about the myth of the tortured writer—that angst and hair-tearing and garment-rending is sometimes purported to be some kind of healthy sign, and that great art is birthed in some kind of alcoholic depressive misery. In the Romantic era it was believed that profound truth in art stemmed from some kind of madness, and that artists were those bold enough to walk beyond the edges of sanity and deliver back to us what they found there. I don’t think this is at all accurate—if great artists sometimes also drink themselves to death, or commit suicide, or cut off their own ears, then remember: correlation is not causation. Think of all the great art out there that’s made by people who don’t end up doing these things, or even of the great art these artists were making long before these tortured ends.
Getting back to the point, I suspect that one big step towards better writing is focusing on having fun while doing the writing. Striving to make the writing more fun than the having written part.
One thing I prefer about the former is that, while you’re writing, the piece is yours and yours alone—it is, to varying degrees along the way, still full of potential energy and possibilities. Once it’s done, doubts begin to creep in. Finishing usually is swiftly followed by sharing, and sharing is followed by criticism, or even just quite a lot less praise than your fantasy. That’s fine—that’s how it goes. But it doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes enjoy the first part a lot more than the second.
Zadie Smith helped me to put my finger on the real difference between the feeling she described earlier and the fun of the actual writing.
In an essay simply titled, “Joy,” Smith examines the feeling of joy as being a completely distinct from happiness or pleasure—in part because as much as joy is pleasurable, it is so often also terrifying.
She writes, “A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road—you just have to go a little farther down the track. That has not been my experience.”
Often I’ve imagined joy in just this way, as being just a magnification of ordinary pleasure. More reckless, perhaps, and much grander. Joy, then, in writing, might come only at the end of a long process of pleasurable work, as a kind of orgasmic capstone to the pleasure and labor along the way. The same road, just a little farther down. But Smith doesn’t see joy and pleasure as being necessarily on the same spectrum at all. And she goes even further than that, adding,
“And if you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did.”
To set up her contrast, she lists some things she takes pleasure in on a daily basis: an egg sandwich, the faces of other people, a pineapple popsicle, and how she and her husband sometimes imitate the antics of their dog.
When it comes to their three-year-old child, however, she feels differently.
“Occasionally,” she says, “the child too is a pleasure, though mostly she is a joy, which means in fact she gives us not much pleasure at all but rather that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight that I have come to recognize as joy and now must find some way to live with daily.”
This, I will say, as the parent of two children, makes all the sense in the world to me. Being with my two children is often pleasurable, but it is also constantly a vast ocean of fear, regret, worry, nausea, frustration, and panic. (I love my kids very much, which, as I’ll explain, is exactly why it’s so scary.)
Without getting too far off the subject, I think this is because, for one thing, my children are wholly autonomous beings and yet all of their actions are also my responsibility. When they’re acting a certain way—whether good or bad—it is to a large degree because of how I’ve parented them, or failed to parent them. Sometimes I am able to write their antics up as just genetics (still my fault) or some reincarnation of the behavior of another family member (“Oh he gets that from your mother,” or “She’s acting just like my sister,” etc.) but that’s not much better than it being my own doing.
The fact is, they exist (in part) because of me, and fairly often it seems like their actions are likely going to lead to catastrophe and perhaps even death: “Please stop teasing him/her!” or “Why would you put that in your mouth?” or “You can’t just run out into a parking lot!” Even in the pre-COVID world, by the end of a Saturday morning I often consider that I’ve saved my children from about thirty injuries apiece. Now it's even harder then ever, and it’s become normal, but it's still terrifying.
Terrifying, as Smith gets, but also marvelous. Even at my most frustrated moments as a parent, I realize that my love for them is actually, truly condition-free and bottomless—which is also a little scary, isn’t it?
Getting back to writing, for a moment—the parallels are pretty clear, I hope. In many ways it goes back to my first post on this blog, and the analogy of Don DeLillo’s that David Foster Wallace analyzes in his essay “The Nature of the Fun”—the work-in-progress, and even the work-in-completion, is, in their view, a needy infant that needs your love and attention all the time, and which you’re terrified of how the world will treat.
(Actually they compare the novel-in-progress to a “hideously deformed infant”, which I’ve never been thrilled about for obvious reasons. It occurs to me now that I don’t think DeLillo ever had children, and Wallace didn’t have young ones of his own—in any case, perhaps they couldn’t understand as Zadie Smith clearly does, how a perfectly healthy infant or toddler is a source of incredible anxiety and pain.)
Anyway.
Aside from her child, Zadie Smith says she thinks she has had only five or six real experiences with joy in her lifetime. “Once I was in water, once on a train, once sitting on a high wall, once on a high hill, once in a nightclub, and once in a hospital bed.” Twice, she recounts, she was on drugs at the time of the joyful experience, and goes on to recount the nightclub experience in some detail, and asks if anyone else might have been there to help her figure out if the feeling was real or just (the drug) ecstasy.
I am especially interested to hear from anyone who happened to be in the Fabric club, near the old Spitalfields meat market, on a night sometime in the year 1999 (sorry I can’t be more specific) when the DJ mixed “Can I Kick It?” and then “Smells Like Teen Spirit” into the deep house track he had been seeming to play exclusively for the previous four hours.
Later she compares the dangerous, rushing feeling of that wild night to the experience of a wild romantic crush (this turns out to be the one on the high wall) that felt like the realest kind of love in that moment, only to completely fizzle out within a few months, with “horror and disappointment” not far behind—perhaps, and I’m speculating here, not unlike the devastating hangover that usually follows an epic night at the Fabric club near the old Spitalfields meat market.
Joy, in this case, is yes, incredibly pleasurable, but also terrifying, and eventually fleeting.
Can we link this back to creating Art? I think so. Even Smith, in her other essay, is careful to describe that amazing afternoon of having written—drinking the Sancerre and weeping on the ground among the stinky apples—as lasting four and a half hours.
What next?
The header of her next bit of advice for young writers is: “8. STEP AWAY FROM THE VEHICLE”.
She advises (while admitting she’s never been able to do this herself) that a writer should ideally now set a finished work aside and not look at it again for weeks or months, so that the editing process can begin with fresh eyes.
In other words, after all that joy… comes even more work. Horror and disappointment. (Section 9 is called The Intolerable Cruelty of Proofs and the final section, 10, is called Years Later: Nausea, Surprise and Feeling Okay.) In other words, those four and a half hours are, and should be, incredible—but they won’t last long. They’re incredible because they won’t last.
So again, we’d better be able to take lots and lots of pleasure in the rest of the job too—yes, even the cruel proofs and the ten-years of post-publication nausea.
“The thing no one tells you about joy,” Smith writes, back in the other essay, “is that it has very little real pleasure in it. And yet if it hadn’t happened at all, at least once, how would we live?”
This thought, as brilliant as it may be, is thankfully not her final one in the essay.
She ends by considering again, the joys of parenthood, as a really different thing from those other joys. Remember, she claimed to have had only 5 or 6 joyful experiences outside of parenthood—but to find that her child (for better or worse) has made joy a constant, daily experience.
“A final thought: sometimes joy multiplies itself dangerously. Children are the infamous example.” She describes the pain a parent feels in knowing that someday we will be lost to them. The reverse, thinking that you may lose them, “would mean nothing less than your total annihilation […] You hope to leave this world before your child […] Joy is such a human madness.”
In the conclusion to the essay, Smith reflects on mourning the loss of a loved one, and how the writer Julian Barnes once told her that “It hurts just as much as it is worth.” If we were sane, she ruminates, we’d pick pleasure over joy every time, because it can always be easily replicated again. A joy is singular, and always also contains the grief of its impending loss. That’s why it’s something we can’t bear very often, if at all.
Taking pleasure in the writing, as opposed to banking hard on the joy of having written, is definitely the saner path, and I again I think also it is the path most likely to bestow pleasure upon those eventually reading what you’re writing. Maybe it’s inevitable that we want to chase that ultimate joy—and maybe that’s OK, so long as we're aware of what pain is also attached to it. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have my own bottle of Sancerre sitting in my cellar, waiting to be drunk among the stinky apples on some future date. Why not? I’ll gladly take those four and a half hours, plus the hangover after.
But in the meantime, I’ve got lots to do—we’ve got lots to do—and we should have a drink at the end of the day, or buy a record, to celebrate not just meeting a daily word count… but to celebrate having enjoyed the day's work already. Hold onto that part just a little longer. And tomorrow we'll do it again.
Writing Towards the Fun #11: Over the course of a few hours (or a whole day if you can) keep track of your pleasurable experiences. This might be a conversation with a friend, a nice breeze while walking, something cute your kid did, a pineapple popsicle, whatever! Then sit down for 15 minutes and write about one of these pleasures. No need to get hyperbolic or overwrought… just describe, as best you can, what happened and what was enjoyable about it.
Have fun!