The violence of writing

From Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan by Mari Ruti and Amy Allen, loc 3213:

Julia Kristeva said something related during one of her lectures that I’ve never forgotten because it helped me to break my writing block. She claimed that the most difficult thing about writing is the violence that you have to inflict in order to carve a path through your knowledge: you have more material in your mind than you can possibly put on the written page, so that you need to make the cut—this has obvious Lacanian resonances—that gives you the path you need; being able to sever the necessary bits of material from all the material that you have is essential for creativity. Many people find this task difficult because it’s uncomfortably violent. The implication is that your inability to be aggressive—your fear of your own aggression—can paralyze you. From this perspective, perfectionism, thinking that you need to fit everything you know into your book, is the Achilles’ heel of writers.

Fwiw the phenomenology of writing is completely different for me. The path emerges in an eerily reliable way if I give myself time and space. The violence comes at the editing stage. There’s a point I have to reach of feeling almost… hostile towards my own meandering, baggy, needlessly elaborate prose at which point I can begin to kill my darlings. Until then I find editing almost impossible. I suspect one of the reasons I find it hard is that I fail to make the cut which Kristeva speaks of here. But one of the reasons I enjoy it so much is that there’s little check on it. There’s a smoothness to the experience which is pretty much endlessly rewarding for me.