Spinning plates vs. eating ashes: the joy and the anguish

Ah, the rollercoaster world of The Writer; perilous, torturous, and (hopefully) gifted with the occasional smattering of giddy, sentence-spinning glee.

Being a hideously lazy waste of space, I'm not, nor ever will be, a 'writer'. At best, I'm 'someone who sometimes writes things that I don't have to'. Every now and then I'll wonder how I managed to spend all of Saturday's glorious daylight hours in front of my computer, churning out what only amounts to a couple of pages worth of shite, but most of the time I'm engaged in far less noble endeavours, like, I dunno, reading the paper, or the back of a cereal packet (good god, that’s a lotta sugar).

Today I stumbled across yet another fascinating Guardian piece (they should probably start paying me for all this unsolicited promo): 'Writing for a living: a joy or a chore?' and thought it might be nice to share it with you all, just in case anyone else out there might feel vaguely heartened that it's okay not be overwhelmed with frantic ecstasy with every word they type.

Here's someone else saying what I was trying to say, only with a lot more eloquence and authority:

"I get great pleasure from writing, but not always, or even usually. Writing a novel is largely an exercise in psychological discipline – trying to balance your project on your chin while negotiating a minefield of depression and freak-out. Beginning is daunting; being in the middle makes you feel like Sisyphus; ending sometimes comes with the disappointment that this finite collection of words is all that remains of your infinitely rich idea. Along the way, there are the pitfalls of self-disgust, boredom, disorientation and a lingering sense of inadequacy, occasionally alternating with episodes of hysterical self-congratulation as you fleetingly believe you've nailed that particular sentence and are surely destined to join the ranks of the immortals, only to be confronted the next morning with an appalling farrago of clichés that no sane human could read without vomiting. But when you're in the zone, spinning words like plates, there's a deep sense of satisfaction and, yes, enjoyment…" (Hari Kunzru)