The agony of writing

A story less told

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I write a lot. And by that self-aggrandising claim, I’m not only referring to the body of work on here but also to the copious amount of words and printer ink spilt across reports, journal articles, books and rant-filled missives penned over the past decade. As prolific as this may sound, there is an unspoken agony in writing and I’m here to unveil this rather unglamorous literary dystopia that remains relevant to my experience as a writer. This essay is meant to be a well-intentioned but sobering and perhaps slightly mischievous love note to the craft of writing - or at least I hope it will appear that way.

There is an almost methodical pain involved in squeezing the world (or our vision of it) out into coherent sentences, limited by expression, linguistic patterns and social conventions amongst other things. This sensation inconspicuously burbles within the deepest recesses of every writer; the underlying but fleeting torment that bears its fangs each time a blank page is ready for its literary baptism.

First, lets get something fundamental out of the way.

The mundane is the worst enemy to any task and that includes meeting one’s writing commitments, self-imposed or otherwise; the constant battles against distraction, the vertigo of a blank page and the looming weight of others’ expectations. Tedium has a tendency to plague one’s conviction and self-belief. It eats away at your resolve until at some point, you become rather immune to it, for better or worse.

But breaking through this metaphorical barrier results in an unexplainable high that is, rather ironically, difficult to put into words. Perhaps this jubilation, as transient as it is, mimics a sense of literary martyrdom, a sacrifice of a part of your self, for the greater good and enjoyment of others. The romance is however fleeting.

Far from the idea of a genius struck by sudden inspiration, incessantly scribbling away in otherworldly vision and transforming it into polished paragraphs, the writer has to undergo a ritualistic ‘pain’ to put down a handful of fragmented sentences per day. There will be constant revisions, animated internal disagreements and other forms of psychological self-flagellation as the search continues for that perfect phrase, expression or prose. This is necessary labour. Necessary if one desires for beauty and eloquence to co-exist on the same page.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Annie Dillard once compared being a writer to being a stunt pilot. Stunt pilots write poetry in the sky with their loops and spins. The audience is amazed by this beauty and imagines how wonderful it must feel. In the cockpit, however, the pilot is experiencing bursting headaches and extreme pain from the pull-and-tug of gravity. To top it off, he can’t even see the art he’s creating. Whilst Dillard has taken a few creative liberties and richly dramatized the discomfort of writing, there is some truth to how a finished book or article often obscures the sweat, blood and tears that remain infused in every word. The reader remains ignorant to this sleight-of-hand because if a writer does his job well, then the disguise is never blown.

As writers, we’re constantly faced with the soul-crushing reality that originality is somewhat dead. Everything that requires saying, at least at a superficial level, has been said and in some cases the only differences are stylistic inflections. This is an agony that one comes to begrudgingly accept in a world saturated with thinkers, agenda-setters and dare I say it, influencers.

But remember this. There is no blank slate upon which works of true originality are wondrously composed, no void out of which total novelty is created. And if you think about it, despite a dearth of ‘mainstream-originality’, a writer’s influence on the page is almost always and unavoidably transmuted by his imagination. As such, all works of writing are discretely imbued with a unique creative thumbprint; a literary dactylogram that, if decoded carefully, reveals everything a writer has lived and loved and tessellated into the mosaic of his being.

Which is why, I have a natural aversion towards writing workshops that advertise a tono-bungay like elixir to originality. Worse are the circle of people who fervently nod their heads in affirmation at the unoriginal claptrap churned out at each session such as “10 steps to craft mind-blowingly original ideas” - a topic headline I’ve quoted verbatim from an internationally renowned writing workshop that will remain unnamed for obvious reasons. My not-so-thinly-veiled annoyance with these workshops is an overreaction at best but it stems from a personal dismay at the lack of attention paid to the fact that every idea in this world carries an influence of some kind. Discounting it is sacrilegious to the very craft of writing! Besides, the lofty ambition of authoring something of sheer ingenuity is a distraction more than anything else. It stops us from being fully awake to the totality of life as we encounter it.

Going back to the notion of agony: every book, idea or thought has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. He writes it in spite of that. He finds ways to minimise the difficulty; carefully navigating each barrier and strengthening other virtues. And if it can be done, then he is the only one who can do it. He alone is aware of the possibilities for meaning and feeling in his writing. The syrupy-sweet moral here, my good friends, is to cobble together what you can through good old-fashioned dogged persistence.

Before I leave you to ruminate over this rather unforgivingly brutal and moody (but truthful) reality of a writer’s life, I’d like to assert that the agony in writing is what whisky is to Christmas pudding. Alcohol (for me) will always be an incongruent fit to any dessert but its inclusion releases a specific flavour and gastronomical vibe. Writing is much the same.

Navigate through the unease and discomfort and what you say will linger on and surround your readers like a mental landscape. Your sentences will be highlighted, written down in tethered notebooks for future reference and your metaphors will stretch ones understanding of reality. Your work will be a little shadow that lingers behind your readers’ shoulder as they toil away on the page, devouring each haunting line. Ultimately, it is the pain of the craft that makes writing as alive, elemental and necessary as it can be. It is through the agony of writing that we come to see the opaque parts of ourselves from a new angle, in a new light.

So my dear readers (and writers), these splotches of agony and pain as I’ve quite plainly narrated above, renders the writing life a life of intrinsic meaning. Writing has after all a kind of spiritual fervour and like all things sublime, one has to earn the right to experience it.