I love the mighty pen. I love the words it struggles to bring to life, the beautiful composition it creates. Since a kid, writing has always appealed to me. I have dreamt of becoming the next Toni Morrison, the next Jane Austen or even the next Alice Walker. Writing is in my blood. I could feel it; I could taste it. There's never a moment, a day that passes that I don't get the urge to write whether I'm in class, at home or doing the most mundane of activities like cleaning plates, washing clothes and dusting furniture. Everywhere in me itches to speak, to cry, to laugh in print-my hand instinctively snatches the closest piece of paper; my body almost involuntarily heads to the nearest computer keyboard eager to punch away. In writing, I have found an ally, a lover and a friend.
Yet, despite my avowed devotion to it, I find myself tangled in its web of paradox. I’m not sure if other writers experience it. May be it’s just me and my, tormented, schizophrenic, conflicted approach to writing. I know not. But one thing I am certain of is that writing for me is a magnet that at once repels and attracts. There is no hint of a doubt that I am drawn to it like a moth is to the light but beneath there lies the trepidation, the hesitation that only true love inspires. This is the paradox of writing. It summons to create only to paralyze those who come arduously, amorously at its door.
Writing guarantees no easy passage. Anyone wanting to take part in it has to suffer and fight through the paradox. There is no other way. It draws blood and love at the same time; in its embrace lingers both tension and release. Writing, I’ve come to realize and come to terms with, is all a sheet of mended paradox from beginning till end. If one wants to escape it, to survive, one has to fully submit to it -absorbing the pains of a blank paper; the scanty, bumpy flow of words; the fears of mediocrity and indignity and; the joys of producing, of finding oneness in writing, and of stringing ideas into a single perfect whole.
This is the reality of writing-at least to me. It may not be a tour in the countryside or a walk in the park but it is and will always be the most gratifying of all experiences simply because it is what it is.
In writing, I am myself. In it, I find no need to be someone else or to be burdened by anything except my connection to the text and audience-nothing more. Though it is a landscape of paradoxes, it is the most honest and forgiving-no pretensions, no sins unpardoned. Writing creates a climate that just suits me and my temperament. So no matter how I struggle in its paradox, I raise no complaint. How can I when it has taken me as its own, kept me diligently in its silence and tumultuous splendor?
Writing and life are two inseparable values in an equation. Without one, the other is useless. Life is intended to be written down, to be expressed, to be interpreted, to be shaped, to be given order and to be understood. Writing does all these to life and life submits like a pliant bamboo. There is paradox in writing because its subject and context-life-is one that thrives in contradictions. A mimic and mirror of life, writing, is left with no option but to behave in a full spectrum of paradoxes bringing into the act the faithful writer.
Although life in general feeds the paradox in writing, the mother, the source of its paradox is the love, the passion that drives one to write. It is both the culprit and the inspiration. I have learned that to worship writing, to be crazy about it is to struggle and to suffer. This is the ultimate paradox of writing. A writer fumbles, retreats, pauses at the outset, midway and even near the end of the writing process all for the love, the desire to piece together a wonderful creation. He refuses to offer in the altar of writing a work that is below par and doesn’t meet, pass his lofty expectations and standards.
There is no remedying this paradox, one simply guards against being overwhelmed and eaten alive by it.
To be a writer, I know I need to take courage not in dodging worries, fears and doubts that come along with the paradoxes but in confronting them. A heart of a lion is what writing demands and wants me to have. And this I will possess. In time.
