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Olmo's avatar

"The practicing writer, the writer at work, the writer immersed in his or her project, is not an entity at all, let alone a person, but a curious mélange of wildly varying states of mind, clustered toward what might be called the darker end of the spectrum: indecision, frustration, pain, dismay, despair, remorse, impatience, outright failure. To be honored in midstream for one’s labor would be ideal, but impossible; to be honored after the fact is always too late, for by then another project has been begun, another concentration of indefinable states. Perhaps one must contend with vaguely wearing personalities, in some sort of sequential arrangement? – perhaps premonitions of failure are but the soul’s wise economy, in not risking hubris? – it cannot matter, for, in any case, the writer, no matter how battered a veteran, can’t have any real faith, any absolute faith, in his stamina (let alone his theoretical “gift”) to get him through the ordeal of creation. One is frequently asked whether the process becomes easier, with the passage of time, and the reply is obvious. Nothing gets easier with the passage of time, not even the passing of time. The artist, perhaps more than most people, inhabits failure, degrees of failure and accommodation and compromise; but the terms of his failure are generally secret. It seems reasonable to assume that failure may be a truth, or at any rate a negotiable fact, while success is a temporary illusion of some intoxicating sort, a bubble soon to be pricked, a flower whose petals will quickly drop. If despair is – as I believe it to be – as absurd a state as euphoria, who can protest that it feels more substantial, more reliable, less out of scale with the human environment? Yet it is perhaps not failure the writer loves, so much as the addictive nature of incompletion and risk."

- Joyce Carol Oates, "Notes on failure"

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Gwynevere Kipling's avatar

This was a genuine breath of fresh air to be signposted to and to read. I've often done the vast bulk of my creative writing in a spontaneous manner, that I tend to refer to as 'instinctive writing', otherwise loosely articulated as having been 'sucker-punched' by an idea or put into a stranglehold until what is desiring to be written is. I now have a whole domain of articulation to embrace that makes a delightful amount of sense.

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