This Writing Addiction
Rohini Gupta
19 November 2007, 15:47Why do we do this? Are we all insane? To put ourselves through this pain, day in and out, year after year with little more than a coffee break?
Writing is like housework, its never done. Friends who don’t know anything about the creative process ask kindly, so, now you can take a break? Tell that to the creative brain already roiling with ideas, to dreams full of the next project, or to the bottled up excitement of the next story.
Writers work the longest hours I know. I can call up my writing friends at 3 am, and they will say, just let me finish this sentence. They don’t think it strange that I called that late; they ask if I am taking a break.
I think we are just obsessive. It’s an addiction, this simple act of showing up before the laptop or notebook, that obsessive routine. The daily trudge, the daily commute over the white pages, the daily battle which you must win again and again. And if you miss a few days, you have to re-climb the mountain. You get no medals for what you did in the past, you have to do it all over again, every word, every dot of ink.
There is nothing quite as unforgiving as the hard eyes of a blank page. You have to look away, there is no way you can break that stare. It makes you nervous, gives you butterflies, and wakes you sweating in a nightmare. Sometimes it overwhelms you and then you opt out, go blank and procrastinate.
Other times you conquer, but the war continues every day, every year, and every decade. You create your strategies to conquer, tell yourself, it’s too much to do, let’s just do one para now and the rest later, knowing all the while that once you begin, you will not look up for five hours, having finished two thousand words. The beginning is always the steepest climb. Some people never start, and never write, just dream the dream.
It is a dream. Most non writers imagine writing is like a little light exercise, a warm up, wave the pen a bit, make a few neat lines on a page, and earn a lot of money and bask when people remember your name. I can hear the writers laughing, wishing it were all sun bathing and fresh air.
It’s lonely. Others are out there partying. The writers just looked edgy when the party was mentioned and slid out of the back door, hurrying home as fast as they could to battle the blank page again. For that we will make excuses to friends and relatives and savour that guilty, secret time, alone with the laptop, in a world of words, far beyond all practical understanding.
Its miles of work. Olympic athletes must run or swim, or throw a punch a million times to hone their skills. So do writers. We write from here to the end of the galaxy, and throw it all away, and begin again. We lift heavier weights than the power lifters. Emotions are the heaviest of all.
It’s endless. A book takes years; thousands of hours of work, and may never get published at all. But you have to show up day after day at the keyboard, no vacations allowed, nor opting out, or giving up. Dark days or bright days, you must make your music with the keys.
It takes guts. The white screen is a mirror that shows you your own face, scars and all, and often you don’t like what you see. Sometimes you just lose the courage. You ask, why, what is the point? You don’t want to get out of bed or you want to go see a movie instead, see someone else’s work instead of making your own. Sometimes you are just too worn out, and the only thing you want is not to get up, not to fight, not to think.
If you are a writer one good night’s sleep takes care of that. You wake in the morning and your brain is in gear again, in fifth, already racing down to a destination too far to see.
It’s full of tears. If you write fiction, you plunge into a despair you never knew you had, exult in a way that life will not allow you, love, rage, fume or weep. It’s your own grief, and your own despair. All stories are built from the depth of your own emotions. If you do not feel deeply, your readers will put down your book and willingly give themselves over to the TV advertisers. You must pull out the depths of your pain and do terrible fictional things. You tear lovers apart, you hurt children, you blow up cities, and kill a few hundred people. Then you go for lunch. It’s all a day’s work. A good job done.
But the rewards are just as great.
When you are in the flow, the world is sweet. The words carry you on ecstatic wings; take you soaring to the stars. The walls disappear. The world disappears. The writing consumes you. You forget yourself, you forget your life, and the universe opens its doors. It’s when you surface from those depths again; then you know why you write.
You never know if you will be published, if your words will ever become that great prize, a book. You might have ninety thousand words that will never see the sun. It might devastate someone else, but any writer worth the name has a solution for that. Write something else. Keep writing.
Anyway, books are leftovers. Once you have finished, put in the last missing comma, typed out ‘the end’ and shut the cover, then it is done. To most writers it is finished. There is no pleasure left in it. We have wrung it dry, drunk the last sweetness as we dreamed it, sang and sobbed with it, wrote and re -wrote it. We have drunk the nectar from it. We don’t want to see it again; we want someone else to take care of it so that we can begin the next one as soon as possible. We are feeling the withdrawal already. Now our words may bloom in someone else’s eyes, but for us another sun is rising.
The high is in the writing. For that we will shed sweat and blood, fill our pen with pain and weep into the keyboard. What else can we do ? We want to fight our mythic war with the blank page, we want to swim the deepest seas known to man, and write at top speed down a highway whose end is never in sight.
There is no why. We must write. We must wake and pick up the pen and go to war. Its our obsession. We were made with this weird desire, this addiction to the word. Others drink, take drugs, or over eat. They don’t know the ultimate highs of writing. They don’t have the key to this door that leads to the universe.
When we are in sync we fly with words. Language takes us to the heart of all things, back to the very beginning. It is that ecstasy of flight we want, and want it so badly we will go to battle every day of our lives for it and wring ourselves dry in the mirror of the white page, all for the moment when the world falls away and we fly free into an endless sky of stars.
There, the despair and the struggle seems like small change, too minor to count. We will shed our blood in ink again and again.
What else can we do?
We are writers.
We must write.
Rohini,
Once again, you’ve written what I suspect is going to become one of my favourite pieces of writing on Epic India. Perhaps even, one of my favourite pieces of writing about writing. This is a beautiful piece, heartfelt, simple and powerfully eloquent.
If I may quote a favourite line from another favourite piece of writing (a poem) about writing, by Erica Jong:
We write
as leaves breathe;
to live.
Ashok
— Ashok Banker · Nov 20, 07:58 · #
Rohini! This is excellent, absolute and so complete. mina
— mina laksh ( minakshi) · Nov 20, 10:23 · #
Rohini, you’ve spoken for us all!
Vinod
— Vinod Joseph · Nov 20, 19:10 · #
The best thing about this article is that although it focuses on the art of writing, it is applicable to all arts, rather all vocations where the person involved doesn’t look at the job only as source of earning, but it is one’s yearning for a new way of looking at the world, a new expression, a new discovery, a new journey, that propels one forward.
Being a scientist I can vouch that it applies equally for science, if not more.
Kudos again for a very well expressed writing.
— M Choudhury · Nov 21, 12:01 · #