For many writers, frustration and exhilaration are both part of the process

[T]he words frustrating, frustrated, and frustration so often accompanied narratives of accomplishment and even ecstasy—exhilaration, happiness, contentment—that I began to wonder whether, at least for some writers, frustration is a prerequisite for elation. Perhaps the pleasure of the breakthrough, the intensity of the flow, would lose some of its emotional force if writing were easy all the time.

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 162