5. Pleasure

The eminent writer Joyce Carol Oates writes in The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft and Art(2004), forty years after she published the first of her many novels. The practicing writer, the writer-at-work, the writer immersed in his or her project, is not an entity at all, let alone a person, but a curious mélange of wildly varying states of mind, clustered toward what might be called the darker end of the spectrum: indecision, frustration, pain, dismay, despair, remorse, impatience, outright complete failure. (Oates, 2004: 51–52)