Recently, guest editor and all-around awesome chica, Gillian Neff, wrote the following:
I know writing is pretty much always a painful process, so I suppose my point in this little public blood-letting is tell those of you who DO have ideas to go with it, despite the pain.

It struck me as funny when I read it; not because the pain of creation is a funny thing (although some times it can be), but because when I was thinking about what to write here this week, pain was also on my mind. Perhaps the creative process is not unlike menstrual cycles; we all sync up if we spend too much time together. (Yes, Bitter boys; that means you too.)
I recently re-read something I wrote…indeed something that I wrote not that long ago, a month at most…and I found I had little-to-no emotional connection to it.

Well..that’s not entirely true. I want people to enjoy it or to be moved or inspired by it, to be upset or troubled or angered or even disgusted by it; anything but bored or disinterested. But that’s not emotion, that’s just ego. What it is I don’t feel, what is suddenly missing, is the passion I had while I was in the midst of it. Gone is my concern for the characters, vanished my empathy for the challenges they face, my familiarity with the landscape in which they exist entirely dissipated. I suffered with them, suffered through them - battling not only their own demons but my own fears of the dreaded white space, writerly inadequacy and easy distraction just to get their story told. And now that it’s told, I shrug my shoulder in their direction and move on to something else. I know that I did write it, but I remember very little of the actual process. In some cases, I’m hard pressed to believe the words on the page are my words - so far removed are they from my current frame of mind.

It’s not just this recent piece, either. In the end, I’m like this with everything I write. In the most extreme cases, I’ll take something up to read it immediately after writing it down, and find myself surprised by the content on the page. However, the mighty afflatus is rarely this strong, and I more often than not I struggle with the mere putting down of words - wrestling with willful protagonists and unwilling syllables until I’m clutching at my head and pressing my eyes as though the mounting tension in my brain could be translated into the right words, the key to the great, unfolding mystery, if only I could massage them out. When in this state, even when I’m not actively writing, I’m continually considering and composing. (I’m useless to talk to during these times; all social (and oftimes professioanl) functions go on autopilot so that the story can work itself out.) In the thick of it, I am all afire. And yet, even after all this, I will later find my the fruits of my labor surprising, sometimes alien to me. How is it that these things can consume me so completely one moment - then have no meaning to me the next?

Let’s leave the obvious answer of “madness” out of it for a moment. My working theory (and the one I’m sticking to) is that this process is the necessary stretching, sweating, swearing & tearing of creation (whole lives - indeed, whole realities - don’t come into being simply, but sanguinary). And, like the more standard sort of births, that we are eventually permitted to be aware that there was pain, but not to remember the pain itself so that we’ll keep on going - willing to bear it again.

Which, I suppose, is a kind of madness in itself.

I don’t believe I could stand to be in that heightened state perpetually; although I do believe there are people who can and do. Whethere they’re the geniuses or the burnouts I don’t rightly know. Does this separation happen to anyone else - or is it just my own brand of crazy?