Surprise!

Sartre seeing against himself.

     Sartre says (among other things) "I think against myself." By this he attempts to avoid falling into patterns, stasis, sterility. He is trying to outthink himself, to be larger than himself, or to be alive in himself.
     If you apply the same approach to writing, you get "I write against myself." If you are suspicious of that which comes easily, too easily, you might arrive at something outside yourself, larger than yourself. You might. You might not, but you might.
     It's recognizable at readings when a poet/writer is comfortable writing in some certain way. The poems are difficult to distinguish from each other, difficult to distinguish from the poems he/she read at their last reading, or perhaps they've been reading the same poems at successive readings, for successive (gulp) years even. Not only is this a creative bog for the writer, but it's also a wriggling morass for an audience, who can't possibly be expected to be surprised by the same thing again and again and again ad nauseum.
    Or, as Frost says: "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader."