If you are a writer, there are many reasons for you to suffer. Your writing might not go as expected. You might not be able to put as much time as you want into your manuscript. You discover that the story is not moving in the direction you planned. You do not get the reaction you hoped for. You might even face outright rejection, or a thousand other setbacks.
In previous posts, and in many still to come, I suggest strategies and tools to help with the creative process and the mechanics of your material.
Today, however, I want to address the issue of suffering.
Steven Pressfield is a screenwriter and novelist with a blog worth reading at Steven Pressfield’s Blog.
He also maintains an Instagram profile where he shares short video recommendations. In one of those clips, he reflects on his mentor, Paul Rink:
When I was trying to finish my first novel I rented a little house in Northern California.
I met a friend there who became a real mentor to me – Paul Rink. One day over a cup of coffee, I asked Paul how someone could endure unimaginable suffering and still end up doing great.
Paul set his coffee down on the Formica table, looked me in the eye, and said something I’ll never forget.
“Suffering has never hurt any writer that I know of.”
The first distinction to make here is essential: the kind of suffering Steven, Paul, and I are talking about has a clear, definable cause. The source of friction is identifiable.
What we are not talking about is unexplained suffering, sudden depressive episodes, or the sensation of a permanent dark cloud overhead. In those cases, one may be dealing with clinical depression and should seek professional help.
With that distinction clear, let us look at creative suffering. In my view, suffering springs from the exact same reservoir as happiness, bliss, love, and empathy. That place is commonly known as the soul. Experiencing suffering is direct evidence that your inner life is intact. Suffering is an authentic emotion, an integral component of our emotional architecture. Emotions, both light and dark, rarely surface on command. They do not bend to sheer willpower. Sometimes they break through unexpectedly, and that is completely natural.
Second, suffering—how human beings confront it, what lengths we go to in order to avoid it, and why we often miss the exit route right before our eyes—forms the bedrock of great drama.
Kurt Vonnegut once gave a masterclass breaking down the core structural shapes of stories.
To demonstrate these curves, he drew a coordinate plane on a chalkboard. He termed the vertical axis the “G-I axis,” running from “G” for good fortune at the summit down to “I” for “ill fortune, terrible disease, poverty” at the bottom.
Across all classic story shapes, suffering acts as the primary dramatic engine. In “Man in a Hole,” the curve drops sharply: “a man gets into trouble and then gets out of trouble.” Audiences never grow tired of it. Another archetype is “Boy Meets Girl.” The arc begins in the middle of the G-I axis—”a day just like any other day.” The curve spikes upward when boy meets girl. It could just as easily mark the moment Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) lands the coveted job at Runway in The Devil Wears Prada. From that peak, the trajectory collapses, slicing past the baseline straight into “I”—the exact moment Andy realizes she has mortgaged her soul to Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep).
Happiness is fragile; dramatic gravity pulls downward. Misery and misfortune, however, are just as unstable. Life is motion. Compelling characters never stay passive. If they wrestle and struggle hard enough, they generate the leverage needed to turn the trajectory back toward the light. If you want to analyze how your own protagonist navigates these dramatic shifts, you can map their trajectory directly using our character and premise frameworks in The Toolbox.
Life does not always follow narrative curves. Stories are not strict blueprints for living; often they are dreams we share to make sense of our trials. Yet one structural truth holds firm: nothing remains static. That applies to our periods of triumph, but it applies equally to seasons of creative friction and doubt.
If you are struggling with a draft, stay in the chair. Keep writing, and that obstacle will recede into the rearview mirror. Over time, you may find the real craft lies in staying centered around that baseline as much as possible. It is the most objective vantage point for an author, giving you the clarity to capture ecstasy and agony without being consumed by them.
Finally, everyday creative friction should never be confused with genuine tragedy. Real suffering—the loss of loved ones, terminal illness, state violence, systemic injustice, bearing witness to horrors—is speechless. Its gaze is hollow. It isolates. It carries a chilling silence that resists easy comfort. Real grief operates outside of neat timelines; it is non-linear and indifferent to our plans. Recognizing that gulf keeps our creative hurdles in perspective, while grounding the empathy we bring to the page.
