The Desire to Write

I’ve been having trouble writing. I don’t usually find it hard. Doing philosophy: that’s hard. Having good ideas, if and when I do, a miracle. But writing these short essays should be simple. I don’t need to have much to say, only to sluice the stream of consciousness into words, mopping up the spills. But my stream has been white water.

So I decided to write about that. An axiom attributed to Albert Camus: “Whatever prevents you from doing your work becomes your work.”

It’s axiomatic, too, that frustration and failure are endemic to writing and to creative life in general. John McNally’s The Promise of Failure is a very good book about writing, not about failure as such. More recently, Stephen Marche published a lovely essay, On Writing and Failure, in the Field Notes series of pamphlets from Biblioasis. Like Camus, Marche is an aphorist:

Failure is the body of a writer’s life. Success is only ever an attire.

Rejection is the river in which we swim.

As the second quote suggests, Marche is…