What is a journey except the setting of a course outside oneself, beyond the confines of here and now and everything familiar? I had no idea I was starting a life long journey of writing when I first learnt about the malleable nature of words. I was amused, to say the least. I was a grade three pupil when I was assigned to write about my family as homework. During class, the teacher read old essays from other students about their families to try to give us a picture of what was expected of us. Almost all the essays sounded generic as if cut from the same cloth but their experiences were unlike mine. Most students had a normal family with both parents present while for me, my father’s chair at the dinner table had been unoccupied as far back as I could remember. I fiddled with my hair as I wondered just how cringe-worthy my essay was going to be. My story had always been a supposed-to-be three-legged pot with only two legs, constantly needing to be balanced with rocks, itself, borrowed money or borrowed affection. In my little head, my story was already falling over, out of the interest of anyone who would hear about it. When I got home, I did the most independent thing a nine-year-old could do, I started my essay on my own hoping to ask for help once I got stuck. I wrote about this family I was part of with a father that had enough time to spare for his daughters and a mother who was a nurse. No one would know my little white lie and besides, my teacher would never care to find out if it was true. By the time I was finished, my sister did not even need to come to my help. I stood outside myself to read the story, marvelled at how the facts yielded, easily bending into submission. Myimagination and fantasy on paper glinted against the afternoon sun and boy did I feel like a god, a creator of things that were not there before. Little did I know that I’d grow up to be a little Alice in Wonderland of creative writing. I started documenting my experiences in a little journal like most teenagers do when I got to high school. Before long, I was turning those experiences into short stories with details of what could have happened. I shifted variables of facts around and watched as the stories changed their form, growing eyes to look back at me and feet to travel away from what they first were. Every time I come to writing, I return to my little nine-year-old self recreating her world into what she wants it to be.
As time went on I desired to reach a wider audience outside of my family and friends. There is the question of what one must do with their stories once they have been told on paper. I too asked myself that question until I came across internet submission calls. All of a sudden there was this possible world that was interested in what I had to say and I could reach a wider audience once the editors found my work acceptable. Month after month I poured my heart into stories inspired by my own life and sent them out only to receive rejections leaving me forever disappointed. I wondered why different editors rejected my writing based on authentic experiences I had lived. This went on until I learnt that laying down facts and creative writing are two different things. I needed to learn of the many literary devises and writing tools that could transform my stories into reader-worthy pieces. Easy to think I had now cracked it, that I could now read a few requirements and tailor-make my creative pieces to suit them but not at all. I was back to square onewith learning, sitting at the desk and waiting for inspiration to come, a little wafting of an urge like smoke, catch it if you can otherwise try tomorrow. The creative process for me most times is a lonely path pursuing inspiration, creating, recreating and questioning; a constant shifting. It is days or sometimes months of battling with a thing on the inside of you that wants to come out but does not know how to. A thing you don’t know how to sit with and set it free. What often jumps off from the page or performance as brilliant art is what many times has evolved through several versions of itself. Even after living to a ‘finished state,” it often keeps changing over time. They do not lie when they say, “art is never finished.”
To keep going on the writing journey, inspiration must be abundant. This is because of the domino effect that inspiration brings right from the inception of an idea to an almost finished work of art. So many ideas come up around what this inspiration must be translated as, what language of art it must come out in, what voice it must own and how loud it must speak. There is no definite time to say, “this is how long the thing will take before it is birthed into a recognizable shape.” You will sit with it, ask of it a name, something to tell whoever asks, ‘So what are you working on?’ Sometimes what you want to create will answer back, sometimes it will play hide and go seek in your mind and the frustration will come. Then if you are like the many of us that often feel like even our little achievements as writers are a lie, you will feel like a fraud, “Why am I unable to recreate the magic if I won that writing award or am said to have risen to international acclaim?” Self-doubt creeps in. The temptation to createalong the lines of your most embraced or celebrated art will also invite itself to the party. Since most times creating is not a clear beat path and one must find their style and voice, when you almost get it, it feels safe to want to stick as much as possible to ‘the light’. While this may occasionally yield results, it is the standing water of creativity inhibiting new ideas from flowing. So somewhere in the middle of all that creating it might all feel like it was a bad idea, especially when your creativity battery feels drained out. But like Julia Cameron once said, “The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.” So if the pieces do not come together and inspiration in the mind does not hold to the page, I have come to learn that it is ok to walk away from my computer for a while, to make a cup of coffee or take a good shower. A kind of distraction to the thought process, which might take a few minutes or days but it is ok because the creative process needs one to be given completely to it.
As Louise Brooks said, “Writing is 1% inspiration and 99% elimination,” there is also the labor of editing, the sometimes undesirable work of deciding which part of what’s created does not belong with the piece. This too is a necessary step in bringing the best out of what is already there. It is holding the piece against the mirror of its best self and seeing if it holds, if it bows to creativity and if all the details in it are necessary. Sometimes a different set of eyes would come in handy walking through the piece and clarifying the bumpy areas that need ironing out.
To create with words has been both a blessing and a curse for me. A lonesome journey with little reward beyond feeling good about completed work. We mostly only feel heard when we are heard, so there comes the question of,‘Who am I writing all these words for, who will follow their trail to find me, a twenty-seven-year-old dreamer with no qualification under her belt and nothing else but all these words?’ But there is the blessing of having a voice and the privilege to use it, to own your opinion and share it, to bring about social change by initiating a conversation about many different things that affect everyone. To have it resonate with many and make itself relevant in every audience it reaches. I think of the work I put out there as dandelion seeds floating around, unafraid of being read wrong or being mistaken for something else. This is because when work is out of your hands it is out of your hands, and all you can do is trust it, trust that the process was worth it and that in the end, it will speak for itself.
So if I could, I would say to my younger writer self, that its ok to feel like this too, writing might be a dream too lofty for one person, that the nights will be long and someday inspiration will be a stray cat that forgets home. It will be gone for days and not even the milk of reading will lure it back home, but when it does come back, it will all have been worth the wait, worth the sleepless nights and the extra books read in waiting. Like a trickster, inspiration seems to enjoy hiding out more than it enjoys coming in. I know now to wait for it while busy experiencing life a little differently, trying out new things, breaking from my daily routine and striking conversations I do not normally have with strangers. It is a search I embark on gently and when I have forgotten that I was searching for inspiration, I find it, or it finds me. Then I am back to writing again.