The Madness of Writing, Once More Time

 There is much to interest an old white man aspiring to be a writer in The Rumpus' interview, Very Little of This Book Is Made-up: Talking with R.F. Kuang about her Novel, but this post I am sticking to this passage:

The Rumpus: You write that the urge to write is a craving, and the act of writing can be more pleasurable than sex. What felt easier and more pleasurable, and what felt more difficult?

R.F. Kuang: To be clear, I don’t know if writing is more pleasurable than sex. I think they’re pleasures of different kinds, but like June, I write compulsively. It’s inevitable that I use narrative to make sense of the world. I was in a psychoanalysis seminar last semester and one of the big takeaways was that you need constant narrative-making, a myth to cling to, an ideology, or you literally can’t constitute yourself as a subject. I think we’re all telling stories about ourselves in order to exist, and I just happened to want to document what those stories are.

Which maybe explains why last night I again revised "Colonel Tom" long after I thought there was no place to change, revise, improve. Could be, too, this explains why keeping my journals has been therapeutic.

sch 5/18