As it is
Words, not writing, fill up my pages
I think of Kafka and the grim life he led. I think of the idea of a non-writing writer: 'a monster courting insanity.' To save myself from being a monster, I write.Bibek Adhikari
It all began with my writing professor’s categorical remark: “You have the words, but not the writing.” Having squandered nearly a decade trying to learn the craft, that unequivocal statement came as a death blow to my feeble hopes of writing better works of fiction—my sloppy career seemed to come a full circle. I began ruminating about the hours wasted in reading the great works of literature, wishing that magical formula of craftsmanship would materialise out of the yellowing pages. I began contemplating the endless drafts, the countless visions, and revisions. The bouts of nihilistic moods of depression transported me back in time to the moment of impulse, the epiphanic impetus of scribbling.
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed unreal. I had begun writing out of loneliness. Two-hundred-eighty kilometres away from home, in a crumbling house in Patan, I wrote the first sentence of my first short story in a cheap spiral notepad, the one soon to be lost while shifting houses. No matter how much I rack my brain, I can’t think of that very first sentence I wrote in euphoria. It was about a young woman—no doubt about that because it always used to be about young women—walking at four in the morning by the riverside and vanishing at the place where the river meandered. It was a derivative sentence, knocked off from one of the stories of Murakami, chiselled out to look different, patched with several other sentences shamefacedly stolen from the writers I was beginning to read and emulate. When I sent the ragged work to a literary friend of mine on Facebook, he was exhilarated. He confessed that he had never read anything that ‘unique’ in his life. He even added—in a patronising tone—that I’d be the next big thing in Nepal if I kept writing like that.
The momentary elation was followed by pangs of level-headedness, and the deep plunge into an epidemic of misery. Until then I hadn’t harboured any serious intentions to become a writer; I was only trying to impress a handful of people online. Or let's say, I was pretending to be serious, to be someone who knew the nuances of literature and yammered in alien tongues. Unable to find real friends, I succumbed to the desolation of social media and wanted to influence a bunch of people who looked cool in their virtual profiles. To satiate the swell of painful solitude in my heart, I took up pen and paper, bought a dozen ‘serious’ books, and began scrawling—with unaccustomed energy and vitality.
To write a great (and this time unplagiarised) work of fiction, I needed words: high-flown and grandiloquent. I took refuge in thick volumes of dictionaries and thesauruses. I had this crazy notion of memorising every word that was ever coined. I even drafted an outline, a brain-map of sorts, to meet the coveted goal. First, I started chewing on the letter ‘A’—I highlighted the dictionary, marked its pages furiously, and crammed the words and their meanings into my head. Since I needed a platform to show my arsenal of new-found words, I started posting a status a day—absurd narratives in long-winding words. Alliteration and onomatopoeia became my fortes. With every like and comment, I was levitating with immense joy and purposefulness. I was moving ahead. I was becoming a writer of some sorts.
Apart from the preposterous idea of memorising a dictionary, there lay a deep desire: finding someone who would listen to, or read, my rambling. Since there was no one around in the real world, I had to search for people in the virtual one. I began to pour my emotions and notions onto the bluish screen and hit the ‘share’ button so that the virtual public in the world would find out and relate to them. Even an innocuous ‘like’ would result in endless exaltation. The feeling of being attended with respect and attention, the sense of being connected to another human soul was a marvellous one. Why? Because I was lonely.
Wasn't it Flaubert who said that if he had been loved (and happy) at the age of 17, what an idiot he would be? Being an idiot at late teens would result in not being a serious writer. The first time I got introduced to the works of Flaubert I was already 19, and I was more of an idiot compared to the French writer. So, to hide the groundswell of idiocy, I began to pretend that I was a writer. Pretending always comes easy to me.
After flipping through countless books (again pretending to have read them all) on writing, grammar, punctuation, and after giving many novels and short stories cursory glances, I’m still at the crossroads of writing—it never comes easily, effortlessly. There’s always some degree of resistance. I have to close my eyes, picture absurdities, think in images, and transcribe my thoughts into words, into a language that is not inherently mine, only amassed consciously and painfully after I graduated from high school. The lack of understanding of subtle nuances, the rhythm, the cadence of English sentences always makes the process a jittery one.
Nonetheless, I still write—or at least, I pretend to do so. Even after years of vain jottings, failed attempts at publishing stories in literary magazines, the burst of melancholy fueled by bottles after bottles of local hooch, I dare to pick up the pen, and write. I think of Kafka and the grim life he led. I think of the idea of a non-writing writer: “a monster courting insanity.” To save myself from being a monster or going insane, I have this desire of writing even though I know that writing is barely therapeutic and cannot heal the soul’s severe affliction.
Coming back to the writing professor’s remark—like Ouroboros eating its tail—and keeping all my waves of anger and frustrations at bay, I cannot help but say that he’s so very true. Even after years of practice, following that blasted 10,000-hours-rule, I am still in the middle of nowhere. To realise this is such a dreadful feeling—you go to sleep hoping for the unfolding of a better day and wake up in the middle of the night, scared out of your wits. Then again, how many people can supremely excel in their fields? Not everyone can be or should be Dickens or Woolf. Otherwise, the world would end up being an ugly place.
What I have are words, not writing. As a logophile, I’m obsessively interested in words. I can never be the next Joan Didion or the next George Saunders; however, I will keep writing, pushing myself through the overwhelming wilderness of the literary landscape. After decades of cumbersome work, in retrospect, I might find out that I have accidentally written something useful—if not for the public—at least for me.
Was it Bukowski who said that “writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all”? I am doing pretty much the same: writing about my inability to write fiction. My narrative has turned to mush, my muse is dry and demented and decaying, and all I want to do is throw in the sponge. But for now, the hour ends the day; and as the Romans used to say the (disgruntled) author ends his whining work: terminant author opus.
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