One of the reasons I’m so drawn to James Joyce is that he is the perfect embodiment of a writer’s ego. He held himself in high regard and yet continually believed he was a failure. He explores this conflict throughout his writing career, dotted with characters with lofty hopes and crushing dreams. Gabriel, in “The Dead,” is consumed by the feeling of coming up short, agonizing over how he is perceived by the party guests–whom he mentions are less educated than himself. And in the end he feels alien even beside his own wife, after she tears up over a former love.

This is the best way I can sum up the mental activity involved in the writing process, to view ones writing as genius one minute and then utter garbage the next. I have often mused over a scenario where a serious and intensely dedicated stint at writing would make me mad, and even my mild projects feel close to inducing a nervous breakdown. Trying to finish a first draft feels like walking across a field of broken glass. You might as well run across or your stuck bleeding to death in the middle.

I read this same torture in some of John Keats’s works which are filled with the burning passion popularized during the romantic period. Keats goes on and on about literary subjects that are so beautiful that he may die. And dying is supposed to be a good thing. He writes in a letter to his beloved Fanny, “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.”

The romantics were obsessed with the concept of the Sublime. They fawned over it so much that today it is mainly used as a positive term, but it once meant something a bit more sinister. If a thing was sublime, it was a terrible thing, but something so terrible that it was beautiful. It was a thing that moved the viewer to great emotional heights. Yes it all sounds a bit emo. The sublime darkness of a storm, swirling in a violent wind of torment, swallowing up the earth.

The current version of this is what I’ve heard called the beautiful ugly moment. Contemporary writers insert these instances of sublime to play with expectations, making a bleak scene more compelling by finding beauty within it. It amazes me how many times Cormac McCarthy can describe the grey wasteland of “The Road” and have it convey something different every time, and have some of those times be quite aesthetically striking. McCarthy likens the world to a charcoal sketch, swirls of grey, sheets of grey. The dead, ashen landscape seem to be very much alive for the downtrodden narrator.

Postmodern writers have a tendency to both subscribe to and throw away conventions. Good things happen at funerals and Christmas is filled with trauma. They comment on old standards by turning them on their head and they make these contradictions live in the same moment. Something as simple as imagery turns into a conceptual conflict.

There are two sides to every story, so the phrase goes. A writer’s mind is filled with contrary thoughts that seem to find a chaotic harmony on the page. If one thinks about something as long as an author does then one starts to see all the angles–and you start to second guess everything. This behavior breeds conflict, the perfect method for plot production with a byproduct of egotistical turmoil.