DO we seriously think writing is all joy? It is also half pain. Sometimes, it is pain that makes us write.
Think about the atrocious solitude of a room that gradually becomes a prison, like a torture chamber.
The fear of the blank page that stares at you mockingly, the torment of the word you didn’t find — and if you did, it rhymes with the adjacent word.
It is the martyrdom of a sentence that limps, of the metrics that fall apart, the structure that struggles of the page that bores and paragraphs that you must dismantle and rewrite, rewrite, rewrite — until the words seem like food that recedes from the famished mouth of Tantalus.
Being cooped inside and giving up the outside world, with the blues, the greens and the pleasure of watching the sky turn into an abyss of an invention, is expressed through words and committed to a papery essence. A creative work is polluted by human inconsistencies and duplicities, whether written with a smile on the lips or a tear in the eyes.
It is a monkish discipline, a hero’s sacrifice. Colette was right when she said it is also a form of masochism — a crime against ourselves, a felony, that should be punished by law, like other felonies. Because of writing, there are people who end up in psychiatric clinics, if not a cemetery; people who turn into alcoholics, drug addicts and lunatics, or suicidal — that is when writing destroys, when it kills more than bombs.
But to live and survive, we must think. And to think, we must produce ideas.
Is there anyone better to produce ideas than writers? Away with the phony humility, however. The writer is a sponge that absorbs life, spitting it out again in the form of ideas — the metaphor of the dowser who finds water in any desert, like the allegory of the eternally pregnant cow, who deliver calves in the form of ideas, and the gift of wizard Merlin who has the ability to see things others cannot see, to hear things that others cannot hear, to imagine things that others cannot imagine nor anticipate.
Today, I wish to transfer my thoughts on paper. I navigate through the treacherous water of the longed-for novel and only the good Lord knows where it will lead me.
I’m aware that a novel doesn’t yield its many secrets immediately — it locks within itself a mine of hypotheses; a myriad of good and bad surprises, so everything is possible, including the worst.
The characters are imaginary, even when they are inspired by some model or alleged models.
I listen, spy and steal from reality, then I correct it to such a degree that often, I no longer remember what the original was.
However, they represent only a part of the human samples the novel will offer. It will be full of life — not a silent, nor a black and white show, but an inexhaustible rainbow of colors, an unending concerto of noises, a phantasmagorical chaos of voices and faces, and creatures whose actions intertwine to weave the charms of events that determine the individual’s destinies.
Am I exaggerating? Or am I just succumbing to the rhetoric of enthusiasm, to the utopia of the neophyte?
The novel has always attracted me because it is a vessel in which one can simultaneously pour reality and fantasy, dialectics and poetry, ideas and feelings that provides a truth truer than the real truth. Call it reinvented, universalized truth in which everybody can identify and recognize himself because, whatever story it recounts and what time or space a story unfolds, it’s about men — human beings.
And no matter how a story (lived or invented) concludes, whether or not we’ve divined how it will conclude, there’s something disquieting in the curtain that recalls the precariousness of life — its unrepeatability, its inevitable and ineluctable goal.
And let’s not forget that the writer is always entitled to a certain amount of wrong.
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