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 and suffering be quite so easily dismissed?
The more I have thought about this, the more it seems to me that what makes suffering compelling, if you are a writer, is that writing presents you with a question. Or, more often than not, with a whole host of questions. These may be questions that you would rather not have to ask, questions that, had life been otherwise, you could have ignored. But now they are there, you have to do something about them. So writing can be a way of unpicking, exploring, interrogating, deepening — and sometimes (although rarely, and probably only provisionally) resolving these questions.
If this is true, then it is also true that questions about suffering are neither the only questions that exist, nor are they even always the most important ones. The questions that preoccupy us may arise out of suffering. But they may arise out of joy, or curiosity, or puzzlement. This becomes obvious if you look at the diversity of writing — this great store of human testimony — that is out there in the world. Some of this writing, much of it, perhaps, addresses itself to suffering. But by no means all of it. There is more than one kind of question in the world. Sometimes you may want to read writing that asks what seem like more obviously existential questions provoked by suffering: “What do we do with all this suffering? How do we respond? How can we make sense of it?” But sometimes you may want to read writing that asks less obviously existential questions, questions like: “What do ants get up to all day?”, or “Can cats tell jokes?” Because, after all, these questions are part of life too.
In January, I had a series of medical tests that turned out not to be serious, but that could have been. I was just about to go on a writing residency up at the Taiwan Literature Base in Taipei when I was taken into the Tainan city hospital for a barrage of tests and biopsies. Once all the tests and consultations were over, I caught the train to Taipei for the two-week residency, along with my partner and Wind&Bones collaborator, Hannah Stevens. The doctor told me they would have my results with me by the time I was back.
Unsurprisingly, the residency was pretty rough. I slept badly, and found it hard for focus. And for the two weeks, much of what I wrote was in response to my uneasy existential situation. As I wrote, I tussled with these questions about what was happening, about how to manage uncertainty, about how human bodies break down, and about what this all meant for my future.
When I got home from Taipei, I went back to the hospital, where the doctor gave me the all clear. Over the days that followed, normality started to reassert itself. I started to sleep better again. Life returned to its usual rhythms. But, when I now look back over the writing I did on that difficult retreat in Taipei, something interesting strikes me: of all the things I wrote during those two painful weeks, my favourite piece — that one that seems to say the most about this weird business of being alive, even about what I was going through — was a short story about a woman whose cat made a pretty good joke.
I wrote the story on a whim, one day when I was fed up with writing about the darkness and the fear and the personal existential crisis I was having. And even when writing it, this little story felt like a kind of liberation. It was a liberation from the nagging sense I had that somehow, in the middle of all this difficulty, there was a moral obligation to fixate only on those bigger existential questions about sickness and health and what all this meant. It was a liberation because it gave me a different and unexpected way of thinking and feeling about life. And it was a liberation, because there is something freeing about the knowledge that the question “Can cats make jokes?” is worthwhile, even when you also are simultaneously facing the question of your own mortality.
In other words, there is a connection between writing and suffering, but the connection is there not because there is anything particularly special about suffering, but because suffering is one of the things that presents us with compelling questions. Suffering has no special relationship with creativity. And if suffering presents us with questions that may provoke us to invent, to imagine or to create, there are other questions too, equally compelling, with their sources elsewhere. Being human is not reducible to suffering. Human questions are not reducible to questions about suffering. And while suffering matters, other things matter as well. Things like the question, “What do ants get up to all day?”, or the question, “Can cats make jokes?”
Image: Ask me no questions, 1917. Sheet music score cover. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
