Writing with Pleasure

Writing with Pleasure is a pleasure to read. I whizzed through it on the train down to facilitate a writing retreat. I was travelling to a pleasurable writing experience, with people I had written with before as individuals, though not in the same group. But I also knew the experience would be a pain. I had to make corrections to a text I’d started months ago, and I expeted it to be hard work. Could this book help?

It did.

Helen Sword writes beautifully, using metaphor to get complex ideas across in a memorable way. From Air and Light and Time and Space I knew I would enjoy her latest book too. But part of me worried it would be a bit Pollyannaish – is it possible to ignore the dark side of writing, the difficulties it causes?

Sword sees a research gap “you could drive a bus through” here. Plenty of books address the problems and inequalities that make writing a pain. Productive and creative writers must enjoy it on some level: but few books say why, and how. As in Air and Light, Sword asked over 500 academics what made writing a pleasure for them, and the book is peppered with their stories. Interspersed with these are pictures and poems by Selina Tusitala Marsh. Instead of traditional endnotes, there is a delightful reading notes section. This was scholarly and organized too, but the only piece missing from the book is an index of exercises.

SPACE is the core concept that structures Writing with Pleasure. What makes writing socially and solo, physically engaging, aesthetic, a creative and cognitive challenge, that gives you an emotional uplift? How can you do this in practice? What tools, processes, and identities help? The book closes with a road map for making that bit of your writing you hate, a bit more loveable (for Helen Sword, it’s email).

You don’t have to read the book from one end to the other and take notes. You can start at any point that interests you, pop out, and dip back in.

But you do have to do the exercises.

Exercise one is to find yourself a new notebook. You then use it to free write and reflect on what can make writing a pleasure for you. On retreat, I did the first exercises in my brand-new notebook from the Glass Mountain (the Latvian National Library). I talked through them too with my fellow writers. We remembered when we had enjoyed writing, such as in the early hours before anyone else was up. We shared what else we enjoy doing that could feed into our writing SPACE. One said that ballet is like research – there is a strict framework, rules within which you can create. We got ideas from each other.

Starting to work through this book, I realized – again! – that I love starting writing, but hate finishing. The bit I dislike doing for myself is something I love doing for others; the final edit. The details of that last text need to be right, but by then I already have one foot, one hand, and one brain lobe in the next. Once I’ve finished the exercises, I should have found a way to make that last self-edit more of a pleasure.

If you’d like to write the exercises together and talk about them, let me know. But first, get Writing with Pleasure from Princeton University Press. Here it is in situ during that retreat…

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