How strange, this demented feeling gives me when I realize that I have spent agonizing days before a pen and a notebook, with nothing better to do but jot down notes at random. I rap out sentences and it does not help me think, but only eases my crabbed heart. I wish a notebook could laugh.
Every writer scrounges for inspiration in different places when the gods of creativity aren’t there. I poached from current events and embellished to suit my reportage. I felt no shame in raiding the headlines.
Like in the last two weeks when the whole world was young, strong and fearless, sporting the peaceful and clean. It was the Olympic myth and the well spring of the games’ enduring appeal. The games are like a patriotic day for the globe, a day when flags wave and people march. Grim realities are forgotten on a worldwide surge of pride and unity – Olympic dreams that really did come true.
You move on and try writing humor. It is necessary, I’ve been taught, when attempting contemporary satire, sharp-eyed humor relies on topical reference points. True enough, some facts cannot be improved on, and cannot be delicately twisted and surreal, or too tame to be good.
So you try fictional writing, but you’ll need a sanctuary where you can escape, create!
Writing fiction is a weird procedure of telling artful lies, this peculiar habit of inventing imaginary people who talk and sleep, dream and make up, kick and kiss another; which is bizarre itself. That is why writers find ways to make it possible, from lent literary to variations on the hypothesis that a writer’s style may resemble her person as well as her nature.
What of the possibility that a writer’s style reflects her preoccupation as well? What is learning how to write as naturally as could be?
How do you make out something publishable or worthy of your editor’s respect? Charged with dreams and glory, artists tend to be more cheerful than writers and somewhat more eccentric, the prose is inexhaustible. You try to cobble out riveting portraits of these eccentrics on rage, repose and off guard, and amply supplied with dimples and warts.
How far can you broaden the boundary that is permissible in terms of language for we are always puritanical on that; once we have the idea.
In my efforts to give a clean copy, I become complicated, as I stubbornly pay small heed to my faults and vulnerability, because they are stronger than I am — they are me.
The deadline flashes and the pressure is wicked. Susceptible and confusing sometimes when it threatens my sanity, I wished I had listened to my mother and did something practical by becoming a doctor or lawyer, or a simple housewife.
It is said that to come up with a copy during a writer’s block is like pushing the waves. One needs a cool, calm credible intelligence and unending lesson in tenacity and perseverance and a lot of vision and imagination.
The strangeness of life and the world are stories worth recounting. You’re watching a circus of human behavior, marvelous movements and curious minds, passing your village.
Sometimes, what they call creative breakthrough, especially when worked out metaphors have been milked to the limits, as you work on more tales than the Arabian Nights, is just a pipe dream.
Sometimes and with reason, writing can be a prolonged and disenchanting misery: imprisoned in that darkness of the unconscious, no matter how much you scream for the muses, it is only a sound above the groan, so you just keep on going, amassing thousands of words and find credence.
But as a contented inmate of this singular institution of pen pushers, that makes you congenitally unemployable.
I will try to cram the paragraphs full of facts and give them weight and shape, even if they are no greater than that of blue butterflies, then I’ll worry about my editor who has a marvelous sensitivity to verbal phrasing and structure — and patience.
