Why Does the Labor of Writing Hurt?

by Lucy S.

I have almost ten different pieces going right now for this blog, and for some reason, I keep setting them aside and moving on to yet another idea that excites me on a given morning. For years now, I have been wondering why it hurts so much sometimes to push on through an essay.  But “hurt” is such a non-specific word. What is the pain, exactly?  It is not the pain of not doing well enough for a good grade, because these are not written for grades and even with my university essays, I do not tend to worry about grades very much. 

Sometimes I have thought that it is the pain in confronting the inadequacy of our own minds. When the words leave my head and form on the page in front of me, I can see them at least to a partial extent as I would if someone else had written them.  But I judge them far more harshly than I would if someone else had written them. I see mediocrity.  Sometimes it manifests as self-pity or as sweeping generalizations or as a moralizing insistence on something readers already know, an insistence that may not give them the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes I see an inability to make the right connections or to draw the right conclusions from them or to move from stating the obvious to actually contributing something significant to the human ‘conversation.’

The confusing seeming contradiction is that at the same time that we try to say something new, we seek commonality. I am trying to understand how to navigate the seemingly different goals of discovering what we have in common and using words in fresh enough ways that they are even worth the time it takes to write or read them.  There was a Russian writer whose heyday was in the first half of the 20^th century, and what he wrote has some bearing on this, I think. His name was Viktor Shklovsky. In his essay, "Art as Technique," he wrote:

 If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic....

And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war.  'If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.' [Here he includes an excerpt from Leo Tolstoy’s Diary.] And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.  The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.  The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.  Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.

This is very difficult. I always feel that my words are everyday tool type of words. Likewise, the ideas which they express feel like regular workaday ideas. I think that I am a proficient writer, rather than a great one. Moreover, I often want to bring about some aspect of social justice more than I want to linger in the artfulness of the words. But the lingering is itself the justice we seek, isn't it? We cannot always be on our way to something else or the stone will always only be a stone. And this utilitarianism is itself part of what drives destruction.

Yet I do not think this is the main cause of my writing pain. There is something about the creation of this kind of art that threatens to disentangle us from the flow of life. When we speak in a conversation, our words flow, and sometimes we express ourselves brilliantly and surprisingly – sometimes we do not know how a particular phrase landed just at that moment in our mind to come out as speech. Other times, we speak well enough, and we feel ourselves grow closer to those we converse with, yet the words or content are not particularly astounding. Then there are the times when we cannot seem to express ourselves well at all.  But in all of this, our words flow. 

Trying to write at the level of artfulness which Shklovsky describes requires painstaking effort yet simultaneously the burst of creativity. And it requires going back over something repeatedly. Maybe that is the part which most of all hurts. The erasures.  But I don’t mean that they hurt only in the sense of being inadequate or of taking time or even in the fear that others will find them inadequate. For me, they hurt also in that they somehow seem to unravel something about the nature of life itself, some wholeness.  It is almost as if I were sitting talking with a friend and he asked me to keep repeating something I had said, to replay the scene until it contained a maximum amount of insight expressed in as aesthetically pleasing a manner as possible, when what I most wanted was to somehow bind myself to that other human through communicating. Can you imagine if a loved one had you keep backing up and starting over?  Would it not threaten to loosen your hold on sanity or the nature of reality at least a little?  This may be it. But I am still thinking about it.

I know all of the arguments against this feeling. We would not have great books or films if people merely sped along on the energy and joy of their flow without alterations. And if what we write is more than simply our feelings and ideas – if we need to follow some logical sequence of history or ideas in our care for our readers – if our writing is more than self-indulgence – if we want to use words profoundly – then we have to craft it very carefully.  I believe this. But knowing this does not make it hurt less.

The irony is that I am writing this quickly and without any serious revisions because I cannot psychologically bear to do that careful writing right now. I am still shaken in some strange way by the paper-writing of the previous semester.  At least I think that is it. I’m not sure.  

I am also going to include a poem which for me connects to this. I wrote it sometime between late 2009 to early 2010. I rarely try to write poetry, though as a kid I did, so I find myself wanting to set up some defensive barricades by saying that I know it may not be very good, and so on. At any rate, here it is.

So What

For those of us who failed to phrase our pain beautifully 

Whose words were too threadbare and dull 

Our run-down sorrows were not taken seriously by anyone, except maybe one another.

We did not haul elegant, astounding metaphors from our coarse, slack minds to depict our pain refreshingly

So that others might derive aesthetic pleasure from it.

We used the same old hackneyed metaphors

And so our misery, and we ourselves, became hackneyed.

No eloquent requiems for our losses – we had only our clumsy conversations.

Floundering to find words for our amorphous despair,

Those who translated their feelings into rich, nuanced, evocative language were more human.
They crafted their sentiments into opulent masterpieces

To be examined from a multitude of angles with fascination.

Was there anything worthy in our discounted, bare-boned language?

We stuttered and hemmed and hawed.

Our intimidated breaths dammed up in our nervous lungs
Until they burst out as desolate sighs.

Our voices wavered when we looked away to avoid inflicting our unbeautiful mix of resentment, pleading, and resignation.

We, also, used many forms of speech – our sounds and words, our bodies and faces,
Whatever we had to communicate with – but they were lightly mocked, or tastefully ignored

Because they lacked – something.
They lacked the sophistication and intelligence of their pain.

Not exotic –  just that same old pain anybody can find anywhere.

We folded in on ourselves –
Those of us just smart enough to perceive how stupid we were to them,
But not smart enough to make our suffering more intellectually delightful.

We ripped into ourselves in an effort to beat them to it,

And cauterized the wounds with our acid self-disdain.

In a time and place in which only the exceptional were valued,

We – it followed – had little value.

We did not pass the so-what test.