From Mari Ruti’s The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism, loc 1781:
Its intensity is such that I cannot exactly call it pleasurable. The sheer volume of sentences pouring out, and the rapidity with which they form, can feel overwhelming. This is an experience of jouissance in as pure a form as I am able to experience it, which is why it is the kind of pleasure that borders on pain. I know that others experience it differently, sometimes even as an erotic event.118 But for me it is mostly agonizing. Fortunately, things shift when I reach the editorial stage which, by comparison, is calm and calming. That is when the process slows down and writing becomes a more straightforward pleasure.
Nothing is more entertaining
Than fuckin’ with words and their arrangement
I really identify with what Ruti is describing here, even if in my case it’s unambiguously pleasurable. There is nonetheless an excess to the pleasure which means it needs to be described as jouissance. It feels to me like there’s a continuous stream of reactions and associations forming just beneath the surface of my awareness which I tune into when I’m writing. The writing process is little more than just deliberately tuning in so that stream starts flowing out of me and onto the page, until either it feels exhausted or I do at which point I stop.
It’s a process which I’ve learned to steer by being vaguely purposeful with what I read, who I talk to, what I think about. I suspect if I stopped reading, stopped having interesting conversations, the stream wouldn’t exactly dry up but it would lose force and momentum in a way that would make writing far more difficult. At present it’s just a case of finding time to tune into that inner process, which at the moment is proving extremely difficulty. But it’s still relatively easy to write every day in at least one small burst.
The problem I experience is editing. Firstly, it’s something I struggle with cognitively. I know how to write over my own words in a way that gradually refines them. I know how to reach a point where I’m able and willing to hack away at the manuscript. There’s a certain pleasure in killing your darlings once you reach a vivid sense of the finished work underlying them. But I can only restructure in an intuitive way. I find it hard to cognitively map a text which is why I increasingly rely on LLMs to help me plan this process.
Perhaps more importantly I get bored at this stage. It’s not that I don’t care about the finished work but the jouissance described above has largely gone. Ruti has a lovely image about jouissance and words on loc 1225:
Sometimes I even picture tiny morsels of jouissance latching themselves onto the underbellies of select signifiers so as to give them the kind of boost that enables them to resuscitate the domain of signification
When I’m editing I can still stumble across these little barnacles of jouissance attached to my words. But they’ve washed up on the beach and the jouissance has now died. I can see they were there, but the energy is gone. It means I find editing a slightly depressing process as well as a boring one. It’s the mirror image of the liveness and lightness which characterises writing for me. A sort of turgid death march because I know I have to engage in before anyone will be willing or interesting in the outgrowths of this strangely energetic and ultimately slightly solipsistic process of how I write.
Mark Carrigan 