“To write is to pour one’s innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper,” French feminist writer Colette once wrote, “and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that boomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower.”
Creating something from nothing is both devastating heartbreak and a ravishing love affair. At first, there’s the giddy infatuation with an idea. Writing at your desk is an ecstatic, almost religious experience. You reach a state of energized focus, of complete and total absorption with the present moment, an exhilarating place where you both lose yourself and find yourself, what Taoists called “wu wei” or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, father of the optimal psychology movement, officially named “flow”—what we more colloquially know as “being in the zone.”
At this stage, writing has the dizzying delirium of first love. The idea of getting to the page ignites the same dopamine-dazed euphoria of potentially seeing your crush. Writing feels like an all-consuming affair.
But infatuation—in art as in love—is often only a prelude to disenchantment. After the exultation of the first draft, there’s the torture of returning to what you wrote the next day and realizing you absolutely despise it. The feverish feeling of being transported by your work is replaced by mind-numbing hours staring at your computer screen and maddening line edits (as master of witticisms Oscar Wilde once comically observed about his own agonizingly slow writing process, “I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out”). Pondering whether you should take up a less punishing profession, you toss your once beloved pages into the trash.
Writing—to paraphrase Zadie Smith—means “resign[ing] yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.”
If creation requires equal parts devotion and disillusionment, why create at all?
In her lyrical Having and Being Had, poet Eula Biss ponders the ecstasy and agony of chiseling meaning from marble. In “Art,” she reads an essay from one of her students, a composer who describes the often dispiriting process of making music. Biss follows him through the drama of the creative process—its deranged self-doubt, its spiraling self-loathing, its obsessive compulsive tweaking and retweaking, its crumpled papers, its endless cups of coffee.
Much like legendary journalist Joan Didion who asserted writing was a voyage of discovery (“I write,” she confessed, “to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear”) or Agnes De Mille who claimed creating was a daring act of faith (“The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark”), Biss suggests the creative life isn’t a straight line but a wandering path—filled with dark, difficult-to-navigate roads, wrong turns, and aggravating detours:
“It [the essay] begins with him arriving in a practice room with a thermos of coffee and sitting down at the piano. First, he asks himself what feeling he wants to convey and what relationship his music should have to the great music of the past. The question of the past is bottomless, so he retreats. He’s back now to the question of what this music should feel like. Paradise, he decides, but he doesn’t know what paradise sounds like. Does this feeling need a new melody, different from the ten measures he wrote yesterday? Yes, he decides. But how many sections should the melody have? At this point, he needs to go to the bathroom. On return, he’s aggravated to find that the notes he jotted down before he left have not progressed in his absence. The music has not become better without him. He needs to answer some questions about how this melody will relate to the melody has already written. He puts down some notes, changes one, then changes the rhythm and changes it back. He takes the fragment he has written and repeats it with some minor variations. He’s getting somewhere now! But where is this going? And what is the point of all this? He feels defeated, so he leaves the practice room where he has been all day, having written two measures, a few seconds of music.”
So why create at all?
When another student poses this question, Biss suggests the beauty of making lies not in mastering the work but in submitting to the mysterious tutelage of the making itself. To create is to enter an exacting apprenticeship to the questions the work asks of us:
“I tell him that it precisely captured my moment-to-moment experience of writing—the unending interrogation, the missteps, the slowness, the frustration. He and I are talking about the agonies of our work now while another student listens.
If that’s how it feels, she says, then why do you do it? Because there’s no other choice, I’m tempted to answer, if you’re compelled to make art. But I think she’s asking where the pleasure is in this work. It’s in the making, I know that much, though the process itself isn’t exactly pleasurable. It is, as the composer chronicled, a series of difficult questions. Attending to those questions demands both work and labor.
Maybe I need another word. Casting about, I come up with service. We’re in service to the art, I tell my student, bent to it. There’s pleasure in this posture, in being bettered by the work. It isn’t the pleasure of mastery, but the pleasure of being mastered.”
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