For many people, writing is a difficult and exhausting activity. As with so many other aspects of modern academic life, the normality of this sense of difficulty disturbs me. Everyone seems to accept that writing should be a struggle, and that it should be a struggle on the frontier of their knowledge, the extreme limits of their intellectual abilities, where they only barely understand what they are saying. The act of writing, and even the prospect of writing, therefore quite understandably makes them uncomfortable. Indeed, people don't often enough even try to write about what they know comfortably, the subjects that they've gotten their minds all the way around, the knowledge claims they have mastered. Let's remember that the root of comfort (-fort) is strength (fortis, i.e., "strong"), while the prefix (com-) suggests a bringing together. Our writing should, at least sometimes—scratch that—it should often be a gathering of our intelligence. We should be able to write comfortably, that is. We should write from the center of our strength.
2 comments:
Ambition and ignorance are the two reasons that people write on the frontier of their knowledge. Often both reasons are operative at once... And this something I know from my own writing.
By themselves ambition and ignorance are not vices, but when they come together, trouble begins...
My sense is that a lot of this is driven by vanity. If you tell yourself that you are working at the edge of your knowledge, perhaps even at the edge of the known, then you won't be very invested in whether or not you write well. Vanity, as Connolly tells us, is our discomfort with doing something badly, which "inhibits us from facing any fact which might teach us something".
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