Yet we must resist glamorizing torment. Mahfouz’s insight describes a necessity, not a prescription to cultivate pain. Anne Lamott’s "Bird by Bird" (1994) normalizes messy first drafts, implying that progress arises from practice, community, and humane expectations—not from courting despair. Writing can aid mental health, but it is no substitute for care, rest, or therapy when needed.
Thus the ethic is balance: honor the pressure that demands speech, while refusing the myth that only woundedness makes art. The demons may knock, but craft decides whether and how they enter. In that decision lies the writer’s freedom—the steady, daily choice to translate turbulence into meaning, and in so doing, to keep the darkness from taking the pen. [...]
