It’s just not enough to sustain you through writing an entire book. Show me a writer who was in it purely for the fun, and I’ll show you twenty pages of an unfinished manuscript. ![]() Pun intended.īesides, the jollies you can get from wordplay are limited. Then, boom: you’ve pleasured yourself all out. (In fact, according to Authentic Happiness, one study on pleasure-seeking taught researchers more about addiction than pleasure.) In other words, when you spend your time obsessively rereading the passage you’re so proud of, it may start to feel more like literary masturbation than authorial pride. After all, the more you indulge, the less pleasure that indulgence will bring-even the most ardent pun-makers have to annoy themselves after a while. There’s not a thing wrong with indulging our pleasures, Seligman asserts, as long as we don’t go hog-wild with them. In “ReflexLOLogy: Inside the Groan-Inducing World of Pun Competitions,” Peter Rubin-the author of the essay and a contestant in one such competition-writes of his fondness for puns: “Polysyllabic rhymes aren’t strictly puns, but they’re made of the same marrow when Chance the Rapper rhymes ‘link in my bio’ with ‘Cinco de Mayo’ in the song ‘Mixtape,’ I get an actual endorphin hit.” This can become for the writer a kind of game. I believe we write in a code that’s understood by readers, even when they’re unaware of what they comprehend. (I’m a sucker for mash-ups of the intellectual and pop cultural.) In “The Fun We Can Have (an Essay about an Essay),” Randy Osborne writes:Īs writers, I believe, we’re often conveying (sometimes deliberately, sometimes not) more than the words on the page seem to mean. Half the reason I write is to make inside jokes with myself, which I know damn well are the darlings I’ll later have to kill. We’ve probably all had some moments of delight-that’s a higher pleasure, too-while writing. Think of all the beautiful things described in River Teeth’s “Beautiful Things” column. Think of the chilled bottles of white wine in Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story. This category would also include the kind of pleasurable experience writers seek to evoke by using just the right detail to put readers in a scene. ![]() He was left with a variety of categories of higher pleasures that can be intense, like kick and excitement less intense, like fun or glee or the emotional equivalent of a cuddly blanket, like comfort or relaxation. He arrived at the definition of this more elevated class of pleasure, he tells us, by checking out the thesaurus for synonyms of joy (and then the synonyms of those synonyms) and then crossing off all the body stuff, like orgasmic. Unless you get some weirdo kick out of the feel of your fingers on a keyboard, there’s not much bodily pleasure to be found in the act of writing.Ī notch up from bodily pleasures, according to Seligman, are “higher” pleasures. Pleasures, as Seligman describes them, are “evanescent, and they involve little, if any, thinking.” Bodily pleasures, for example, are just that-physical pleasures. Writers get to reap rewards in both categories. Taking inspiration from the Greeks, Seligman divvies up these feelings into two basic classes: pleasures and gratifications. ![]() In his book Authentic Happiness, Seligman points to Aristotle and the ancient Greeks, who had two distinct words for what we English-speakers tend to lump together in one big glob of generally positive feelings: happiness, joy, pleasure, gratification, and so on. Seligman, PhD, who’s credited with being the grandfather of positive psychology, the problem with describing joy lies within our very language. It would be nice if it did who doesn’t want to spend their days in joy? But, according to research in positive psychology, a relatively new branch of psychology that homes in on positive emotions, it’s probably for the best that it doesn’t. I don’t yet subscribe to the old chestnut attributed to Dorothy Parker-“I hate writing, I love having written”-but, for the most part, the act of writing doesn’t bring me joy. “I’m writing,” I’ll say, as my features rearrange themselves from Ominous Writing Face into the familiar Natural Resting Bitch Face of their loving family member. I work at the kitchen table, and sometimes my husband or son will wander in, take one look at me, and ask, “Are you OK?” Using positive psychology to identify the pleasures of putting words on the page
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