Ink

Transcribed below.

Writing as Pleasure

It is not difficult at all to sell the notion of physical pleasure to a modern audience. We have been trained by marketers to seek pleasure in every form, and to pay good money for the pleasures we seek. In fact, our intrepid marketers have found that they can sell us anything if they can persuade us that it is some kind of new physical pleasure we have not experienced before. Would you like to have hot stones piled up on your naked skin? Just hand over a major credit card. It is true that Torquemada used to do it for free, but he was an amateur. We are professionals.

Now, it is well known to lovers of good pens that writing is a physical pleasure. To feel the pen glide along with just enough friction against the paper is a physical sensation that encourages us to write more merely for the pleasure of prolonging the activity. Perhaps the secret behind the prodigious output of some of history’s most prolific writers is nothing more arcane than this: that they enjoyed the sensation of writing and wanted to experience it hour after hour.

Here is an observation that might be profitable, both in the sense of being useful to us and in the more limited American sense of making a buck for somebody. All over the Internet we see hordes of schemes for inspiring writers to get writing. Dr. Boli has long been of the opinion that nothing is so inspiring as a good deadline, but he recognizes that most of these attempts at inspiration are aimed, not at professional writers, but at aspiring writers who do not have the luxury of looming deadlines to goad them into a productive state. These are the people who might be reached by an appeal to the sensual pleasure of writing as an activity. Perhaps a chain of writing studios would be a smart investment. They would be located in high-toned business districts and shopping arcades, and they would offer, by the hour, a small individual booth with a good desk, a comfortable chair, a stack of excellent paper, and an assortment of pens and inks. And if our clients need more inspiration than that, they can pay the Gold Level session fee, and an attendant will pile hot rocks on them while they write.