Writer’s write

then what am I?

“Listen: there is no this or that.

Just mere survival, the base struggle to make it from day to day. This is a reality every artist faces; confronting and overcoming it is its own art form, a work-in-progress always in need of revision and recalibration.”

In one of my favorite blogs, Remy Ngamije talks about what writers really want to say to the question “What are you working on.”

So, surely he will understand my struggle of not writing. Sitting in one of my favorite spots in Windhoek, I’m nervous to finally meet Doek’s editor and one of my favorite storytellers.

I’m nervous like someone who hasn’t done any homework and they’re about to be caught out. He’s the only published writer in the world that’s ever edited my poetry and so yes I am very nervous to meet him because what do I say to the inevitable question that writers ask each other when they meet:

“So, how’s the writing been going?”

I’m nervous because the real answer is that it just hasn’t.

Charles Bukowski famously lamented about the struggles of writing in Bukowski on Writing, Art, and the Courage to Create Outside Society’s Forms of Approval

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems but let them go at first sitting, because if I have lied originally there’s no use driving the spikes home, and if I haven’t lied, well hell, there’s nothing to worry about.

Well, Charles, at least you were writing.

Just Write

I wish I could be writing, even if it were all lies. You’d find the truth eventually.

But it’s not so easy — at least for me, to lie when I write. Because, with writing, there is no looking away. The page becomes a mirror that says ‘anyone but you is the fairest of them all’. It shows me all my ugly bits, the sides I try to hide, even from myself.

But write I must. This is how things have always been with me.

There is only ruin in the surrender of writing. And I cannot live without it

So I ask Remy the best advice that he ever got about writing - “JUST WRITE”, he says. “Just write”.

So here I am, just writing and trying to make peace with not writing well.

Making peace and my ritualistic offers to the Muse. Whatever I need to do to just write.

But even if you succeed, you lose, because you’ve sold out your Muse, and your Muse is you, the best part of yourself, where your finest and only true work comes from. The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell.

Steven Prestfield, The War of Art: break through the blocks and win your inner creative battles.

I have been wanting to start a blog for the last 4 years. Perhaps longer. It was like that not-so-secret secret I’d been carrying around for a long time. That more-lint-than-mint sweet at the bottom of a handbag that’s been there forever. And every time my fingers graze over it in search of something else, something seemingly more important, it takes me back to what I should be doing — what I need to be doing.