The Spirit of Writing

How people find euphoria through writing.

By: John Oakes

Illustration by Sam Fozard

It’s exhilarating to fill up a page and watch the emptiness disappear, replaced by looping lines of text. It is hard to pin the feeling down, but even in this article, when I discovered its opening sentence, it was something like unclogging a drain. You get that initial release of pressure, and then watch as the water flows away — just as your thoughts flow from your mind — leaving you with something fresh. Maybe it’s a new idea, a confession of emotion or a reflection of events, but whatever it is, it came from you.

It’s this image, this beginning of something, that first got me thinking about how the physical act of writing elicits emotions, especially cheerful, happy responses.

The Writing

To explore this question, I spoke with an author. That’s the most obvious place to start when talking about writing. Outside of journalistic writing, I write fiction, but this topic was one that I wanted to explore in more depth. I wasn’t satisfied with reflection on my own, so I reached out to Elizabeth Vignali.

Vignali is an award-winning author and poet, as well as the poetry editor for Sweet Tree Review, a biannual online literary and arts publication based out of Bellingham, Washington. Vignali is the author of several chapbooks — small books of collected poetry — and poetry collections, including “Endangered [Animal],” “House of the Silverfish,” and she co-wrote “Your Body a Bullet” with Kami Westhoff, a poetry collection detailing the macabre yet beautiful relationships between parasite and host. She has an impressive catalog of other publications that is frankly too long to fully list here.

Vignali said the strongest joy of writing comes “when you tap into something that’s outside of yourself.” Writing is more than telling stories. While the written word is a fantastic medium to weave a suspenseful or lighthearted tale, Vignali said that “at their best, both reading and writing are a conversation. I write as the reader and read as the writer.”

It might sound like an assignment for your high school English class, but when you pick up a piece of writing, work to put yourself in the author’s head. What draws an emotional reaction from us is such a personal aspect of our character. Putting yourself in the same headspace as an author helps you explore what makes their brain tick.

We’re social creatures by nature. That’s one of the superpowers of writing. It’s a way to create discussion among so many people. It does not matter the time nor place.

But not all writing is happy. Loss, depression abuse — these are just a few common themes that I notice showing up in literature. So where is the happiness in these pieces of writing? How do writers find joy when exploring these ideas?

Again, Vignali had thoughts on these questions. Vignali’s website says, “Your Body a Bullet lifts the veil between the ghastly and beautiful relationships of parasites and their hosts.” I say that “Your Body a Bullet” is disgustingly gruesome in the most beautiful way possible. 

“I think we’re wired to find beauty and happiness. Even in the most horrific circumstances, we look for a way to get through it,” Vignali said. Literature is no stranger to the macabre.

Ai Jiang is the Chinese-Canadian author of “I am AI,” “Linghung,” and more. Her work has won her the Ignyte Award, and she is a Bram Stoker, Nebula, Locus and Hugo finalist, plus more. “Linghun” is a novella “set in the mysterious town of HOME, a place where the deceased come back to life and the residents refuse to let go.”

Similarly to Vignali, Jiang’s “Linghun” explores grim themes such as loss and grief, but there is still a warmth permeating Jiang’s pages. Her characters constantly wade through trauma but they are human. This humanity nurtures a bliss inside readers.

“Nothing is binary, and there is a bit of a crossroad in every situation,” Jiang said. “I suppose it isn’t so much that I am intentionally incorporating hope amidst bleakness in my stories but more so that I believe there is in fact hope no matter how grim things might be, and it somehow finds its way into my stories and characters.”

You can explore the darker parts of life with beautiful language and people. You can chip away and dig through the grime to find the positive aspects of life. “Joy is so important for us as ambassadors of art,” Vignali said.

The Language

Let’s take a step away from the artistic aspect of language for a moment and focus on the actual linguistics of it all. It’s interesting how language registers in our minds. Take a look at the words glimmer, glow, glitter and gleam.

“What’s in common between all these words?” asked Kaden Holladay, a visiting linguistics professor at Western Washington University, as they stood before a white board with those five words scribbled in green ink. “They all start with gl, and they all have to do with light.”

This is an example of phonestheme, which is a pattern of sounds that occurs throughout several words with similar aesthetics. Holladay described it as “a unit of sound aesthetic.”

“If you show an English speaker a nonce word — a word that’s made up but could be an English word — beginning with ‘gl,’ they’re more likely to say it has to do with light than anything else. Without telling them the meaning, they’ll guess at that.”

So our brains naturally find patterns in language and apply those patterns to our literary perception. To tie that back into the art of writing, Vignali described language by saying “when you’re reading, you get to just feel it.”

Because of phonaesthesia, which is any similarity between the sound of a word and its meaning, certain words create certain feelings through how we associate them. Aren’t luminescent words like glimmer, glow, glitter and gleam much more pleasing than the nasally words sniffle, snort and snot? I’d much rather feel brilliant sunlight caress my skin than dig through a pile of viscous mucus, so it makes sense that glimmer is more appealing than the word snot.

The Reading

When everything is put together, you’re left with perfectly chiseled sentences that build on each other to create something beautiful, but then what? All this writing encapsulates the author’s emotions, but there’s another side to the coin: the reader.

“Even when talking about the mundane, authors make beauty in the way they can creatively describe something,” Katherine Mellander, a student at Gonzaga University and an avid reader, said. “There’s a difference between flowery language and an author genuinely creating a description that comes from their own experiences and emotions.”

Authors plant seeds from their hearts, and if those seeds are genuine, the reader waters them when they interact with the text. Jiang molds these seeds with pure emotion. “I absolutely think the best lines are ones that seem to just come to me, singing in my ears like muses, compared to ones crafted through editing,” Jiang said.

However, that does not diminish the value of crafting a description through tireless revision. “I do think there is merit to sentences that have been revised, in that when revisiting drafts, perhaps you might get that feeling of sudden inspiration when you’re looking at a particular sentence,” Jiang said.

Whatever form inspiration takes, the result of an author’s authentic description and a reader’s interaction with it is a plant sprouting with emotion. It can be a similar emotion as the one the author wrote with or it could be completely different. Whatever a piece of writing makes the reader feel is valid. Like Vignali said, reading is a conversation.

Writing is as limitless and mysterious as our world, but it also produces a medium for us to explore the abstract questions of our lives.

“Our brains are so much more creative than anything you could ever put on a screen,” Mellander said. “If you’re reading a book, there are literally no limitations as to what the author can write or put on the page. You can interpret it in any way possible.”

Authors possess the unique skill of being able to answer abstract questions with written language. They use evocative descriptions to bind our world together. What do the disgusting word snot and the gorgeous word glimmer have in common? I have thought about it, but I have no clue. However, through creatively weaving words together, an author might be able to create one.

We glimpsed her green dress for just a moment before she turned the corner, like the little gleam of snot sneaking from a nostril before it is snorted back up.

Now, this once-empty page is full of letters, words and paragraphs. It’s pleasing to have all these thoughts represented and solidified by the words written down, but hold the page far enough from your eyes, and you’re left with meaningless marks. It’s up to the author and reader to decide what a piece of writing really means. They are the ones who cultivate emotion in writing.