As you know (see this post), UD has begun a project – at the request of an entity which will for the moment remain anonymous – of writing about writing.

One initial point she’s already made, via George Orwell, about serious writing, is that it’s very difficult, its actual process often acutely unpleasant. Here’s more data along these lines, testimony from some very good writers:

Colm Toibin: “I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult.”

John Banville: “The struggle of writing is fraught with a specialised form of anguish, the anguish of knowing one will never get it right, that one will always fail, and that all one can hope to do is ‘fail better’, as Beckett recommends.”

Robert Greacen: Writing poetry is like “trying to catch a black cat in a dark room.”

Most university creative writing courses make it fun, because they make it about you. But Orwell, you recall, also said, “One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality.”

T.S. Eliot said something similar. “What happens is a continual surrender of [the writer] himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality… Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”

James Joyce, in the character of Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist, writes: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

Let’s put these two things together:

1.) Writing is hell.

2.) Writing extinguishes the personality.

and suggest the following. Writing is hell because in order to get at and express the truth of some aspect of existence you have to get over yourself — an excruciating task. You have to be riveted to the world outside yourself — both the physical world of objects and other people, and the metaphysical world of history and, in particular, the world that is the history of the literature preceding you.

If you remain riveted on yourself, you produce, at best, sincere feeling.

And “All bad poetry,” Oscar Wilde notes, “is sincere.”

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Update: Wow. These are really easy to find.

Joan Acocella in The New Yorker:

Writing is a nerve-flaying job. First of all, what the Symbolists said is true: clichés come to the mind much more readily than anything fresh or exact. To hack one’s way past them requires a huge, bleeding effort. (For anyone who wonders why seasoned writers tend to write for only about three or four hours a day, that’s the answer.) … Anthony Burgess [says] a writer can never be happy: “The anxiety involved is intolerable. And . . . the financial rewards just don’t make up for the expenditure of energy, the damage to health caused by stimulants and narcotics, the fear that one’s work isn’t good enough. I think, if I had enough money, I’d give up writing tomorrow.”

Acocella also quotes Elizabeth Hardwick: “I don’t think getting older is good for the creative process. Writing is so hard. It’s the only time in your life when you have to think.”

… has died. Here’s a memorable poem of his.

April Inventory

The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherry blooms once more.
In one whole year I haven’t learned
A blessed thing they pay you for.
The blossoms snow down in my hair;
The trees and I will soon be bare.

The trees have more than I to spare.
The sleek, expensive girls I teach,
Younger and pinker every year,
Bloom gradually out of reach.
The pear tree lets its petals drop
Like dandruff on a tabletop.

The girls have grown so young by now
I have to nudge myself to stare.
This year they smile and mind me how
My teeth are falling with my hair.
In thirty years I may not get
Younger, shrewder, or out of debt.

The tenth time, just a year ago,
I made myself a little list
Of all the things I’d ought to know,
Then told my parents, analyst,
And everyone who’s trusted me
I’d be substantial, presently.

I haven’t read one book about
A book or memorized one plot.
Or found a mind I did not doubt.
I learned one date. And then forgot.
And one by one the solid scholars
Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.

And smile above their starchy collars.
I taught my classes Whitehead’s notions;
One lovely girl, a song of Mahler’s.
Lacking a source-book or promotions,
I showed one child the colors of
A luna moth and how to love.

I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.
I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, but choose to die.

I have not learned there is a lie
Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger;
That my equivocating eye
Loves only by my body’s hunger;
That I have forces, true to feel,
Or that the lovely world is real.

While scholars speak authority
And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,
My eyes in spectacles shall see
These trees procure and spend their leaves.
There is a value underneath
The gold and silver in my teeth.

Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,
We shall afford our costly seasons;
There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons.
There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.