“And what is this writing, anyway, as a human activity or as a vocation, or as a profession, or as a hack job, or perhaps even as an art, and why do so many people feel compelled to do it?” Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002).
Unless you are being paid to write, there is really no sense being locked up in your room, alone, stressed and grumpy, working assiduously to come up with words and phrases that may draw somehow the attention of a reader who is as elusive as spotting Mercury in the night sky. Everything can be meaningless sometimes. That is the rub.
Writing has the makeup of a Sisyphean experience. For being crafty and deceitful, Sisyphus, a well-known Greek mythology, gets punished by rolling a huge boulder up a steep hill forever. The story is used as a metaphor for laborious and futile task. Here is the thing, though, a book once considered unreadable, absurd or dated can become famous or pull a comeback with the right circumstance. For example, The Plague by Albert Camus; this book was published in 1947 and tells the story of an epidemic enveloping the city of Oran in French Algeria. Apparently, because of COVID-19, the novel has become the most sought-after book in Amazon. Readers are piqued by its title, perhaps to find out how is it like to be in that situation. But the plot of the story is more than the epidemic. It is also a philosophical metaphor of fascism that gripped Europe and culminated in the vast destruction of the continent during WWII. Incidentally, Camus is also the author of the book, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), a non-fiction about the philosophy of the absurd.
So writing can make you rich, but it is never been my goal. Here, instead, are my two reasons. First, whenever something is bothering me either emotionally or psychologically, I take solace just writing my thoughts in my journal. In a sense, writing is my form of therapy. To put it in another but similar perspective, I resonate well with Joni Mitchell’s reasoning when she said: “I think I started writing to develop my own private world.”
The second reason is to form my opinion about subject matters that seem interesting at least to my negligible intelligence. By thinking through them in writing, I am developing my understanding of issues. As Newton beautifully puts it, “The marvel index of a mind, forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.”
In Messiah by Gore Vidal, I quote the following conversation. “There is so much of interest to read that it seems a waste of time and energy to write anything…especially if it’s to be only a reflection of reflections/Then why do it?/Something to say, I suppose. Or at least the desire to define and illuminate, from one’s own point of view, of course.”
That is precisely what I am doing – having an open discussion with myself. So I scribble anything I can think of. This is easier done with journal writing. The subject matter is ready-made – what have you done, seen, read, and observed during the day. What is important is the process. It does not matter if the writing is bad. I just keep on writing to keep the mood going. There is no reader, anyway, so there is no fear of being criticized.
My approach to writing is similar to Julia Cameron’s advice to a promising writer she calls X in her book, Letters to a Young Artist: Building a Life in Art (2005). In one of her letters, she writes: “Over time I learned I had to just put in days at the page and sort it out later. I had to learn to be willing to write ‘badly’ some days and to write anyhow.”
If a writer aims at perfection, he or she is going nowhere. A blank page will be the usual outcome – hours wasted by dilly-dallying. And granted that after months and months of effort, the manuscript is completed. Now it has to be submitted to the critical eye of a publisher. What if it is rejected, what then? What one sees a well-crafted work of art, others may find flaws in the structure, style or content. Failure is a constant in writing. Matt Haig wrote in his book, The Humans (2013), “Don’t aim for perfection. Evolution and life only happen through mistakes.”
Of course, that is hardly the reason why one will stop writing. Would-be writers have more vanities than they are willing to accept. Aside from money, they can say they write to change the world. That’s what Mary Pipher is arguing for in her book, Writing to Change the World (2006). At the very beginning of the book, she quoted James Baldwin: “You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world…The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way…people look at reality, then you can change it.” Then to make her own point, she wrote: “Our writing comes from our being. The deeper we explore our souls, the deeper and therefore richer will be our writing.”
Other writers are gifted with a talent for words at the very beginning. They still need to hone their skill, but the flow of words comes naturally in their writings. These are the ones who get published, are read and have a following. A writer, like me, such situation will just be a mere pipe dream in spite of years and years of scribbling. As Margaret Atwood says, “You can work away for years, but – alas, and to return to the metaphor of the magician – you’ve either got the hands or you don’t, and if you don’t have the hands, you’ll never rise above the level of the merely competent. Sometimes it’s just one uncooked omelette after another.” Ugh, that hurts. I feel envious of these writers.
The subject matter of any writing piece is just very elusive. The advice always is to write what you know. It is a sensible advice but is limited depending on the amount of details stored in your brain. So where do ideas come from? Robertson Davies in Happy Alchemy (1997) wrote: “I do not get ideas; ideas get me. I do not invent plots; they arise in my mind, beginning usually with some mental picture that will not go away. It demands to be examined and thought about. And as I think about something like a plot emerges. It is not always a plot that I particularly like, but it likes me and won’t go away.”
Russell Banks, in his article “Research”, thinks “the best fiction writers seem to be great extrapolators; they start with a cue, clue, an iceberg tip, and are able to extrapolate from the hero’s entire soliloquy, the motive for the crime, the entire iceberg.”
These two don’t believe in doing research at all. That’s too bad because all narratives are interconnected, or what is referred to as intertextuality. Somehow, somewhere, one has already written the argument. It is just expressed in a different way. And it is good to discover it to affirm and expand one’s point of view in the matter. Creativity is best when shared.
Writing can be very isolating; time spent away from family and friends. There is too much at stake – like hunger and poverty – and it would really be awesome if you could be paid for the work. That is precisely the best measure of being called a published writer.
As much as I want to be in that category, I have no expectation at all of that being realized. I remain just a scribbler. But I will continue writing simply because it’s hard to be content when you have not achieved. Getting paid is nice but will not bother me that much. Following the thinking of Alex Trebek in his book, The Answer is…Reflections of my Life, he wrote: “My life has been a quest for knowledge and understanding, and I’m nowhere near having achieved that. And it doesn’t bother me in the least. I will die without having come up with the answer to many things in life.”
But negativity is difficult to ignore. So I further seek solace from the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates in his book, We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy (2017): “No one was going to read me. My reasons for writing had to be my own, divorced from expectation. There would be no reward.”
As I was about to end my discourse, I accidently came across a better line which sums up the reason why I write. Again, from Margaret Atwood who beautifully writes: “It wasn’t the result but the experience that had hooked me: it was the electricity.”
7 October 2021