no, writing isn't all that fun...

Apparently Colm Toibin made a snarky comment about how he didn't take pleasure writing. The KR blog puts this in context I suppose I have to agree somewhat with Tobin... only he gets paid for his 'suffering.' So it can't be all that bad. But let me clarify... it's not that I "hate" writing. No, hardly. But it's certainly not "fun" (like, say, playing shuffleboard or going iceskating). At the least, the pleasure of writing isn't in the process but in the afterglow. A friend said that I "write like I sweat." On the surface, that's a pretty good metaphor; it implies that in order to write, I have to work myself up, work out, get through something and along the way, some writing will be sweated out. But that metaphor only gets to the initial moment of productivity, forgetting that once you've "sweated out" some images, ideas and phrases, you have to work them into actual art.

Even so, in terms of when it offers pleasure, I could say that writing a bit like going for a very long run, at least for me. (Now, I want to say first of all that the following is a completely over-used and abused metaphor... but I use it again, not under the impression that it's novel, but because it, like many cliches, has a bit of truth) The actual picking up my feet and putting them down, the getting in shape to go more than a mile or two... none of that is fun (at least for me). Likewise, actually suffering through revisions and worrying over word choice, that's not fun either. Most of the time it's nerve wracking! But the endorphins after the run and the endorphins after finishing a poem do feel pretty good. The place where this metaphor breaks down -- if it hasn't already -- is that it's not quite clear when one "finishes" a poem nor when or if the endorphins are certain. I enjoy running in and of itself; I don't need to win a race to feel good about running. (In fact, I kind of abhor races!) But with writing... I do kind of want the secondary satisfaction of publication. I do get a certain pleasure out of just finishing a poem: wow, it's there! look how pretty it is when I change the font to garamond! But often there's a secondary moment when that pleasure is taken away from me. I go back to the "finished" poem and find it's not at all complete. Or, that it's "complete" but awful. Or, that it's complete and half-way decent but no one will ever read it. It would be like believing you'd finished a 6 mile run -- and feeling as tired as if you had -- and then discovering that you'd only gone a 1.5 miles. Or finishing a race but forgetting a chip and finding that your score doesn't count.