I hate writing!!

Todd Solondz calls it “not a particularly fun thing to do”, Philip
Roth said “Writing is frustration — it’s daily frustration, not to mention
humiliation… I can’t face any more days when I write five pages and throw them
away. I can’t do that anymore.” Salman Rushdie says the moments of inspiration
are too infrequent. Anne Lamott, Marc Maron, George Saunders, Zadie Smith, William
Gass, William Goldman, and on and on and on.

Sometimes writers don’t hate writing, though. Will Self, Ray
Bradbury… other people. But not without a complaint here and there. (Have a look at
the linked article and see the plethora of different and contradictory opinions
on writing- important for what I’m about to say.)

I’ve been writing for a while and learning how to write in
tandem with producing books. This is acceptable: no one goes to a (fulfilling)
job everyday knowing exactly what will happen and how to deal with it. No one
enters a relationship with someone knowing exactly what they’re doing, and like
relationships, each story is a puzzle unto itself, and you learn something
different from each one, and in so leaving it behind, become surer of what you
don’t want next time (and yet are not completely bound never to repeat old
mistakes!)

I remember writing Findesferas patchily over a whole year
during my Masters, and always enjoying finding new connections in the story to
technical concepts, digging into research and summarising what I found out,
walking along the leafy street by the National Gallery in London and pulling
out a notepad, scribbling notes for some scene or other. Writing seemed more
like a joyous process of discovery than a chore. Although I was happy then as I
am now not to do it as a living, because some days it feels like you only have
one page left in you (most days, that page out of you is all that’s needed though!)
Findesferas is starting to get more reviews now, for which I’m very thankful,
and people seem to be enjoying it, so I had a glance over it again: I still think
it’s great fun and original, and I suspect the reason for this is that I had
fun writing it and finding out new things and sharing them.

But then when you hear all the time that writers don’t like their
job- writers that you love and respect- you start to think you should hate it
or you’re not doing it properly, that you’ll never produce work of their quality
unless you hate it. And hating to write is an infectious thing.

But then, what was it about writing fiction that had to be
such an unknowable feeling, or one for which I  needed to take cues from other people, when I’d
spent years writing theses and reading technical papers and studying for exams
and pushing myself and finding new knowledge? And wasn’t it true that everyone other
than the three or four students I talked to spoke about what a chore it was and
how much they hated it when it was completely their choice to be there studying
for exams, and I distanced myself from them because to do such a thing made absolutely
no sense to me and brought me down? That I spent weeks in the library, loving
the silence, in awe at the cleverness and ingenuity of what I was reading, daring
myself to stay longer and take fewer breaks and look at the clock fewer times,
until my head ached with use, and I felt completely spent on snowy wintry walks
back to my flat again? What exactly was the difference between “I like having
written, not writing” and “I like having studied, not studying”, and why was I
so desperate to agree with the former when I didn’t with the latter?

There’s this great TED talk called “Depression: the secret
we share”, and in it, the speaker, Andrew Solomon, says the following:

“If you have brain cancer, and you say that standing on your
head for 20 minutes every morning makes you feel better, it may make you feel
better, but you still have brain cancer, and you’ll still probably die from it.
But if you say that you have depression, and standing on your head for 20
minutes every day makes you feel better, then it’s worked, because depression
is an illness of how you feel, and if you feel better, then you are effectively
not depressed anymore.”

What I surmise from this is that nonsensical trickery has
application when it comes to influencing our moods; that self-delusion can be
used for good; that attitude, irrespective of circumstance, is a choice, a
hugely arbitrary but necessary choice.

The truth I will convince myself of, and hopefully you as
well, is this: if you think you hate writing, you will hate writing. If you
think you love writing, you will love writing. (Although, also of note is that
if you pretend to love writing and you don’t, people can tell, and they don’t
like it.) Of course this principle has further application than just writing. I’ve
known friends to think their relationships to failure, to think themselves into
a state of inactive paralysis, or to think themselves into unexpected success,
unexpected happiness, unexpected achievement.

There are movements of “listen to your body”, and “acknowledge
your emotions”, but we’re aware of the placebo effect, and in this case it can
be used to your advantage. If ever anyone asks me about writing, I say ‘Writing
is a joyous process of discovery’, and that’s what it becomes.  If I knew what I was going to write before I
wrote it, it wouldn’t be a process of discovery. If I sat down to write
thinking “I better bloody discover something!” it wouldn’t be a joy. If I said
it wasn’t a particularly fun thing to do, that’s what it would be.

But then I should address why I think writers might hate
writing.

I mention all this joy I had from studying. The only reason
it was joyful was because no one told me to do it. No one was checking up on
me, no one told me how much to study or what to study or when: I had complete
control over it. I am and remain a stubborn bastart (the “t” at the end makes
it Scottish and friendly.) Were that not the case, were the consequences of
studying or lack thereof on anyone but myself, were there anyone or anything
else relying on me studying, would it have been enjoyable? Those who write for
a living have paycheques pending their output, have fans waiting. For some people,
this is motivating. If you’re a relatively unknown writer, you can embrace the
freedom to pace yourself, to control completely what you write, the ease and
confidence of sending it out into the world and even the solitary, paradoxical pleasure
of considering that maybe no one will read it, of knowing that writing it was
enough of an achievement for you anyway.

Continuing my studying analogy: no one can know what you
know. No one else has to care. You may never use what you learned ever again. Does
that mean you shouldn’t have enjoyed it? Does that mean that what you did was
completely meaningless? Not at all. You can be proud of what you have
demonstrated you can achieve; you can love knowing what you know just for how
cool what you think you know is, you can know that there forever exists the possibility
to use what you have learned, unknown tests of your ability in the future; and
you can know that not only do few people think like this, no one has to if they
don’t want to. It only really matters to you if you’re happy with yourself, if
you appreciate yourself, because you can still be a perfectly functional person
without these things being the case.

Even if you spend days writing total horseshit, it begets
the inevitable good writing in the same way that if every 1 in 20 job
applications in your field are successful, having 19 rejections makes you
really close to your goal of getting a job. If you choose to think about it
that way. Which you don’t have to if you don’t want to.

A desire to hate writing stuck with me for a while, but it
won’t anymore. It doesn’t make sense. However, as an engineer I’ve always said
you aren’t engineering hard enough unless you have an annual freakout where you
want to give it all up and own a baked potato shop in Fife, or [insert pipe
dream.] This is par for ANY course of life, perceivably enjoyable or not.

If you’re going to write, love writing: it could be as
simple as telling yourself you do.

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