The Joy of Writing

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What happens when writing ceases to be enjoyable? Over at Beyond the Margins, Dell Smith discusses how the joy of writing must eventually yield to the joy of a finished draft because while writing first drafts might be pleasurable, the work leading to a final draft rarely is:

The only way to finish something is to revise it. Revising for me was anathema. As joyous and euphoric as I found writing the first draft, revising dropped me to a new level of drudgery. Revising my writing was impossible for me to do well for an extended time. I had no patience for it and I usually gave up and simply moved on to the next first draft.


Ian MacAllen is the author of Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American (Rowman & Littlefield, April 2022). His writing has appeared in Chicago Review of Books, Southern Review of Books, The Offing, 45th Parallel Magazine, Little Fiction, Vol 1. Brooklyn, and elsewhere. He tweets @IanMacAllen and is online at IanMacAllen.com. More from this author →