Georges Simenon was of the opinion that “writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don’t think an artist can ever be happy.”¹⁹ Anthony Burgess was asked if he thought that Simenon was right, and he answered:

My eight-year-old son said the other day: “Dad, why don’t you write for fun?” Even he divined that the process as I practise it is prone to irritability and despair … The anxiety involved is intolerable … 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.²⁰

Here’s Abe Kobo on the subject: “The most enjoyable time is when I suddenly get the idea for my work. But when I start writing it is very, very painful … To write or commit suicide. Which will it be?”²¹ Joan Acocella: “Writing is a nerve-flaying job … Clichés come to mind much more than anything fresh or exact. To hack one’s way past them requires a huge, bleeding effort.”²² Norman Mailer: “I think nobody knows how much damage a book does to you except another writer. It’s hell writing a novel; you really poison your body doing it … it is self-destruction, it’s quiet self-destruction, civilized self-destruction.”²³

Malcolm Cowley referred to the writing-is-hell whiners as “bleeders,” and thought that their suffering stemmed from their slow, overly self-critical method: “[They] write one sentence at a time, and can’t write it until the sentence before has been revised.”²⁴ This is an attractive hypothesis, but it rather breaks down in the case of writers like Wolfe, who “habitually wrote for long hours, wrote rapidly, and turned huge manuscripts over to his publishers.”²⁵

I’m a slow writer, but I’m quite content to leave sentences unrevised until the second or third draft, and I know quite well that my first draft will lack architectural coherence and shapeliness. And yet as I write, something grates and scrapes in my chest. I’m never quite in hell, but in a low-level purgatory that I’ve put myself in.

There is the effort of shaping the words, of fighting through the thickets of cliché, as Joan Acocella noted. And there is often that self-doubt alluded to by Cowley. Effort and self-doubt are certainly present in other areas of my life — programming, for instance — but I am never ever in this particular agony except when I write.

“It must be lonely being a writer,” people have said to me. But I like being alone, at least for a goodly sized portion of every day. And working by myself on other things — programming, for instance — is never painful. There is something else altogether that is peculiar to the process of fiction writing, a grinding discomfort that emerges from the act itself: it feels, to me, like a split in the self, a fracture that leaves raw edges exposed.

The premodern Indian tradition investigates the reception of literature thoroughly but remains strangely silent about the actual workings of the creative process. Abhinavagupta, for example, writes that “The poet’s genius [pratibhā] is not inferred by the audience, but shines forth with immediacy because of his inspiration with rasa … Genius is an intelligence capable of creating new things.”²⁶ Pratibha is imagination, insight, and seems to be spontaneously creative, playful, an overflow of the interaction between self-luminosity and self-awareness; it flows forth, aided by craft and learning. The Indian aesthetic theorists were “philosophers who dealt with the philosophy of awareness and the philosophy of language,” but they seem to have not been very interested in biographies of literary effort and failure.²⁷ The only reference to the costs of poetic effort I’ve come across is from Rajashekara, who insists that “When the poet after the intense activity of poetic composition wishes for relaxation, the inmates of his family and his followers should not speak without his desire.”²⁸ Which makes me believe that Rajashekhara and Avantisundari got a bit cranky by the end of the poetry-writing quarter of their day.

But the Indian phenomenology of literary pleasure perhaps provides a way to think about literary effort: making a narrative come to life within you requires that you bring alive your own samskaras and vasanas, make active all those latent impressions that lie submerged within the layers of your consciousness. This is why stories are not only constructed, but formed, found. They emerge through an alchemical process that requires significant concentration, samadhi. The writer experiences these stories as events happening within himself.

“The poet is, indeed, comparable to the spectator,” Abhinavagupta says. “The origin of the rasa that emerges within the reader is the generalized consciousness of the poet … the rasa which lies within the poet.”²⁹ The implication here is that in the moment of creation, the poet must be both creator (the one who is producing or constructing the aestheticized object) and the audience (the subject that is experiencing the generalized consciousness thus produced). That is, you must simultaneously be in multiple cognitive modes: to produce any semblance of rasa you must remove your ego-self or I-self from the narrative that is forming within yourself, you must allow sadharanikarana or generalization to occur. And yet, the ego-self cannot be allowed to slip effortlessly into the continuous dream of the narrative, it must stay alert and conscious of the very language it is deploying to construct the story — the story, that living, moving thing which is a part of itself, is another aspect of the self. Experientially, this results in a hypersensitive self-awareness, the very opposite of flow; the writer’s ego-self knows at every moment the abrading of generalization and the terror of its own ephemerality. It is a slow, continuous suicide, a “civilized self-destruction.”

So the experience of the writer during samadhi is more akin to the mental state “(laboriously) milked by yogin” than it is to the effortlessly achieved rasa of the sahrdaya. The yogin know well these beautiful, bleak landscapes of our inner worlds. I once heard the scholar, Tantric practitioner and teacher Paul Muller-Ortega speak about the terrors the yogi faces on the path toward self-realization. Yogic practices didn’t just bring bliss or pleasure, he said. The “yogic ordeal” also made you feel that “you are dying.” And this was true, Muller-Ortega said. “You are dying.” That is, the ego-self that most of us believe to be our true self must die if the identification with the larger, undivided self is to occur. The yogi must confront the mysterium tremendum and pass through it. The path of the yogi is not for the faint-hearted.

The sahrdaya, on the other hand, is granted the spontaneous, temporary suspension of the ego-self through the encounter with art, while tasting — in a concentrated, wondrous manner — consciousness itself, the larger self of the world. The Natyashastra tells us that theater was created by Brahma as a fifth Veda, available to people of all castes and conditions; art is thus a democratic meditation through which the ordinary person can taste bliss.

In a sustained act of attention, the sahrdaya absorbs the foreign substance of another’s language into her body, mind, and spirit; the form of the language and the sphota, the explosion of its meaning, take shape within her single-pointed concentration and the heat of her imagination; the dhvani or reverberation of this encounter causes an instantaneous, infinite cognition of memory-elements that dissolve into the story or poem, bringing it to life. This melting of the heart is a transfiguration which deploys the body and desire and mind: both the sahrydaya and the Tantric cry out, camatkara, camatkara! And both, if they practice enough, risk enough, will experience an expansion of the imagination and thus be transformed by this praxis of pleasure.