I’ve spent the last week struggling to finish a book chapter which I had assumed I could sit down and complete in an afternoon’s work. I’d forgotten how frustrating writing can be. In fact I can’t remember the last time I found something this difficult to write. I’d forgotten how weirdly gruelling it can feel, as each paragraph feels like a battle with the page:
The pen is stubborn, sputters – hell!
Am I condemned to scrawl?
Boldly I dip it in the well,
My writing flows, and all
I try succeeds. Of course, the spatter
Of this tormented night
Is quite illegible. No matter:
Who reads the stuff I write?– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Prelude: 59
I think Nietzsche is talking about pushing through this frustration, simply getting words down on the page and refusing to obsess about their quality. This is what I’m doing now simply because it feels rude to do anything else for a chapter that’s five days late. But I really don’t like writing like this.
Writing can often be an enormously energising activity for me. It can sometimes feel like something that balances me, in the sense that it gets ideas out of my mind into the world, leaving me with more mental space to think about the world rather than the ideas. However writing past a deadline just feels mechanical. I also write so much more slowly under these circumstances. This is remarkably frustrating to me at the moment.
Mark Carrigan 