Edited by: Tejaswini Vondivillu
I’m prone to dramatics. It’s probably why I hesitate to call myself a ‘writer’. What if the self-proclaimed title is just a by-product of my unwarranted aggrandization? I’m not a Creative Writing major, I don’t have a ‘no punctuation’ poetry blog on WordPress nor did I self-publish a children’s novel in the 8th grade. But I do enjoy the idea of putting pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) and creating something that is presentable in the public sphere. So now, that puts me in an oscillating limbo of, ‘Am I? Am I not?’ I’ve tried the plucking flower petals approach. Unfortunately, results were inconclusive.
I like to think that I’ve done away with my self-disparagement in general, but it inevitably crawls out of the wood works every time I consider the possibility of another person reading what I’ve written. Which then gives way to one of those god awful slumps where I would rather clean my dog’s eye muck than write. But there’s only so many eyes I can clean and so many trips I can make to the refrigerator before I’m forced to confront the blinking text cursor at the very top of the page. I’d be lying if I said I’ve never considered taking the Rupi Kaur route of cannibalising the script of an old Hugh Grant movie, editing it into four unpunctuated lines and slapping a drawing of preferably flowers, or a heart, or flowers growing out of a heart, off to the side. But that takes a kind of flagrant abandon that I do not possess.
On one of the several afternoons I spent swirling in tepid waters, trying to formulate my shower thoughts into something respectable, I had a break through: the only way to surpass the need to make something ‘perfect’ is to embrace the suck. Once you’ve managed to get past the funk you’re thrown into, curtsy of perfunctory paradigms of what a real writer is, the whole act of writing becomes less daunting. Suddenly I find that my stream-of-consciousness shower thoughts are also permissible transcripts for submission as evidence of my ability to write. That being said, I’ve written some things back in the day that I wouldn’t dare touch with a barrage pole now.
I can’t promise a ready to consume panacea to propel you into the realm of ‘good writers’ but steering clear of aspiring to an ideal, proved to be the first step to easing the constraints of ‘perfection’ on my writing muscle. Speaking of ideals, my left eye twitches every time I see another regurgitated version of Carrie Bradshaw as the quirky writing figure. Maybe she would stop irking me so much if she explained how she afforded a brownstone on the Upper East Side on a columnist’s salary.
The writing community as a whole is to blame for romanticising the image of the struggling writer who’s simultaneously living a glamorous life. What with Bukowski saying, “Bad writers tend to have self-confidence, while the good ones tend to have self-doubt.” It’s rather unfair to say that to be a writer you have to live with the constant niggling feeling at the back of your neck of being a wannabe. I would probably never write again if I gave into that kind of counterproductive thought-quicksand.
If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say most people write to quell that deep rooted seed of ego in all of us that urges the need to be heard or in this case read. George Orwell certainly agrees, or rather my thoughts echo those of Orwell’s. So if in theory, we only write as an act of catharsis, why wait for external recognition? Why wait to be instituted under the banner of an ‘author’ or a ‘writer’ to legitimize your work? Writing for some could look like sending in your second manuscript to your publisher while for others it could entail logging in the events of their day in their weathered personal journal. One doesn’t diminish the credibility of the other.
I guess what I’m getting at is don’t let the closeted-ness of self-imposed standards keep you from unleashing the (questionable) brilliance of your page-margin scribbled one-liners on Instagram, or changing your Twitter bio to writer, or performing your piece at that slam poetry event.