A Short Note on Writing & Suffering

Writing does not necessarily entail suffering. But it does entail questioning.

Some time ago (quite some time ago), I wrote about my scepticism towards the idea that writing necessarily entails suffering. This is an idea that has a pretty wide currency — either the idea that the best writing arises out of suffering, or the idea that the process of writing well is one where the writer is necessarily undergoing some kind of torment. But as I wrote in that earlier piece, this is simply untrue. Writing often involves difficulty, but difficulty is not the same as suffering — and difficulty often comes with pleasures of its own (I always liked that line from W. B. Yeats about the fascination of what’s difficult even if I don’t buy the argument of the poem that takes this as its title). So writing, even if it involves difficulty, doesn’t require suffering. And getting rid of the idea that we need to suffer to write or to create, or that worthwhile creativity only arises out of suffering, is helpful to us both as writers and as human beings.

And yet… for all this, ever since I wrote that last piece, something about the connection between writing and suffering has been nagging at me. Because it’s also abundantly clear that a lot of writing — and sometimes very good writing — can and sometimes does arise out of suffering. If this is true, can the link between writing…