When we pull back the pretensive cover of appearance, writing and art-making—and all the reading, planning, editing, and contemplating that both precedes and accompanies such activities—we find thievery, struggle, and dissimulation. We writers and artists steal time from our relationships and lives to invest in fantasies, aesthetic objects, and intellectual curiosities. We struggle with the words, the explanations, the descriptions, the materials, the processes, and—chief of all—we struggle with why. And we dissimulate with style: behold this poem, this essay, this painting, this film, this text whatsoever… Its birth had a cost that you will never understand, and we, or at least I, do not fully comprehend the expense either. You see only what we have abandoned, not the life and troubles that bore it out.

I’ve heard some say they had no choice, they simply had to go to the studio, they were compelled to the study, drawn to…