The Joy and Turmoil of Writing

Writing is Opium

Like any creative endeavour, writing stems from an intimacy with life. Intimacy inherently seeks expression, manifestation and ultimately satisfaction. It is a beautiful, never-ending journey. Although the process might at times feel less romantic than this.

“There is nothing to writing.

All you do is to sit down at a typewriter and bleed”.

-Ernest Hemingway

Nevertheless, the suffering involved must satisfy a yearning otherwise we would have seen an end to the craft long ago.

And yes, it is a yearning. It is addictive. Once you do it, there is always more to write. Ideas won’t leave you be. Half-written pieces keep haunting you. Correlations between your ideas show up in the outside world and your hair keeps being pulled until you sit down to write.

As well as the incessant inspiration of the outside world as an ever-ready muse, you also have your world within that constantly fuels your writing. All that has happened to you and all that you have ever felt in your life matters when you sit down to write. A writer is the student of the outside world and a guru of the inner world. These are the tools you need for writing. The world outside and the universe inside, are at your disposal, for free!

And there is more. Above and beyond the opportunity to cultivate skills in expressing your imagination, writing also works as the most adept personal therapy system. Writing is the magic wand in clarifying and compartmentalizing the debris hidden in the deepest recesses of your mind and soul.

Yes, writing is bleeding your soul out at times, and it is very difficult at times. But living as a writer has its immense perks that only an old-time writer can vouch for.

Therefore writers write. Interestingly, a writer writes even when he or she is not actually writing. I’ll expand more….

Wri.ter/raiter

-noun

1. A peculiar organism capable of transforming caffeine into stories

Writing Is An Affliction

Life is a story with myriad of plots and sub-plots, arcs , twists, bridges, comedies, tragedies, villains and heroes  - all intrinsically interwoven with serendipity.

Everyone can write every now and then. But a writer can’t stop being a writer; even if he or she is not writing, because writing is an affliction, a condition that never lets the writer be anything else.

Unlike most people, the writer becomes a an obsessive witness to the events of life, intensely feeling the tragedies, the comedies and even the boring bits. Experiencing the world willingly yet more intensely than the normal people. A writer will try to see the same event from different angles and from different points of views. People see with their eyes and taste with their tongue and smell with their nose and hear with their ears and touch with their skin. The writer does all that with language and expands the sensory observations beyond what he himself perceives.

A writer has an insatiable hunger to witness every scene in the story of life using all senses ravenously; their own story and everyone else’s. The stimuli might be in a casual conversation with a friend or overhearing someone else’s conversation, or in how a stranger walks or the tones in a family feud or it might be from intended academic research. Impetus is a halo around the writer’s mind and like a sponge it absorbs all that is going on and this urges the pen to move or the keyboard to click.

People ought to be aware that whatever they say or do might be immortalized by their writer friend. After all, half the ideas come from what life offers the writer. Therefore a writer must always carry a ‘think book’ and be ever ready to jot things down. This cannot be emphasised enough. Taking notes is vital! And as soon as an idea or inspiration knocks, a writer must write it down there and then. Without fail that prominent idea proves its transience within minutes.

To a writer, life is a playground of perception and manipulation. A writer creates worlds, destroys lives, experiences romance or erotica to the extreme and weeps and weeps when the heroes die or when a child is left unloved. The writer wriggles in bed at night to the torture of alternate endings confusing his mind and forgets to eat when the flow takes over. At times, he freezes, the mind gets blocked and when this happens, life seems futile, a grey cloud of helpless failure takes over all aspects of his life and he wonders whether he can ever write again. His self-worth plummets and all the enticement of absorbing life is replaced with doom and gloom. Yet, he writes again. Because the condition makes him itch and he must scratch it and keep on witnessing, researching, analysing and creating more and more worlds.

“Be careful, or you’ll end up in my novel”.

Slaughterhouse

To put together a structured piece of work with a good message and a beginning, middle and end with a decent arc and juicy impact makes putting that final full stop such a delicious moment of achievement. Whether one is brilliant at it or not is best left to the readers to decide; otherwise that very ego might be the downfall of the writer. The ego closes the gates of learning and stops the aura working like a sponge. I know many fantastic writers who when asked if they think they are brilliant, would answer: “I know I can write”. How succulent!

When ego is tamed it can work as a huge motivational companion especially for the drier seasons of one’s pen.

 I have seen many statues of writers.

But I have never seen a statue of a critic!

One thing the world is good at is judgement. I personally find this incredibly interesting. Irrelevant to rightness or wrongness, justified or unjustified, fair or unjust; every individual out there bases most of their perception upon judgement. What Buddha and Eckhart and Osho and Gibran and the like say seem to be a new way (although they are really talking of the ancient and a natural state of being). People of the world are perfectly programmed to do more than just witness. They judge. Whether it be the cake they are tasting, the hotel they are staying at, their sister’s outfit, or your writing…the first thing they do is to judge. The ideology of ‘First Impression counts’ is part of this programming.

The readiest victims for this slaughterhouse are people who dare to present their passion to the world. Artists, writers, actors, dancers, musicians. They, who are courageous enough to attain a skill in exposing their souls, will be judged. Of the masses in the world some will adore them, most will not. Rarely will they appreciate their victim’s journey. Or show mercy to not kill off their enthusiasm.

I am not talking about constructive criticism. The world is a cruel slaughterhouse for artists. Especially for writers whose work can be kept for the private scrutiny of any Tom Dick & Harry.

The world is a court case for the writer in which he is the convict, the jury, the witness and the judge. And before any of us slay his reputation, he is already convinced that he is the worst writer in the world.

And then we have the editors; bless their hearts as they have a ‘job’ to do.

In early 90’s I did a comprehensive 19 month research on fifteen different cultures, religions and cults to portray the unifying denominator among them; the connection between their feasts and celebrations. This included cultures from Mithras’s and Aztec to Shinto, Pagans, Christians and Moslems and everything in-between. I submitted my 400 pages book 105 times until one publisher in the United States accepted it and assigned an editor to me. She edited out 320 pages in the first week! In every email she reiterated: “Pagan topics sell nowadays”. So, she just wanted a small book about paganism that sells and not a comprehensive and researched study of fifteen different cultures!

Of course, I understood her position and was grateful for her time. But as the writer of the work, I had to withdraw my submission as what she wanted to sell defied the purpose of my hard work. I self-published it eventually. In those times books were only sold as hard copies. The burden of the cost of production nearly finished me. And I only could afford printing 40 copies. So that was the end of that adventure.

You can only imagine how deflated I felt. But I continued writing. The adventure was a separate entity to my writing. I have since written 42 plays and many articles. And along the way the judgement has continued brutally. At the end of the day, the hurt one feels from hearing the condemnation of one’s work is one cruel minute compared to the ruthless attack a writer applies to himself on an on-going basis. Only if we could receive the knocking of our work on the same level that we take the praise. Both these judgements from the outside world ought to be taken as if you are watching news on a screen. Easier said than done – I know!

They are ‘out there’, but the magic happens ‘in here’. We get hurt, of course. If wise enough, we take what can be taken as useful criticism and try to modify and enhance our style.

Mind you, praise can be as damaging - as a false inflation of ego can be detrimental to the future quality of work.

Best to remember that our writing is an entity separate to the judgement we receive and to keep on writing…keep on writing….keep on writing.

“Write what should not be forgotten”.

- Isabel Allende