So how, then, do you nurture the writer in you, or in someone around you – child, partner, friend? Someone may well ask: why nurture the writer at all, if it is such a painful process, the fruits of which may not see the light of day, or translate into mega dollar advances, or garner awards, contracts, book-signing sessions?
To answer that question, you have to first erase the ‘other-oriented’ view that so many of us have about writing. Well before we begin writing; we make mind-pictures of the ‘other’ (reader, fan, publisher, jury, fellow-writer) enjoying or disliking, rewarding or rejecting our writing. Get rid of these mind-pictures. Ironically, and circularly, the best way to erase them is to start writing!
Another answer to the question of why we should write is that writing is a superb way of ‘framing’ feelings and experiences - to savour them, understand them better, resolve them, and perhaps ultimately to share them.
Before even putting pen to paper, observe and absorb the world around you through your five senses and more. Empathize and feel connected to a range of happenings in and around yourself – good, bad, ugly, sublime, absurd…the entire gamut.
Start with scribbling down or making mental notes of what ‘gets you going’ – is it nature, your child, your past, someone’s situation, your pet, food, music, perceptions, relationships, conversations, disasters, places…anything…identify when you most often have felt: ‘ah I should write this down’. These are called ‘Minerva moments’ - made up of just one or two beats. When the whole world and its babble recedes, and there’s just you, and a fleeting but absolute understanding, leached and bleached of all doubts and questions.
Once you’ve found a subject/area, your favourite theme, go through the exercise of ‘clearing your throat’ or ‘net practice’. This is a kind of limbering up, a preparation. It involves writing down (not planning to write, or talking about doing it, but actually writing down!) random thoughts and feelings that are set off on the subject. These are completely your own, subjective, first-off ideas and feelings. Don’t look for a form/format at all at this stage, not even a decision about whether the piece is going to be fiction or non-fiction, in whose voice, what tense, and all those nitty-gritty choices that are for later. Remember to gently (or not so gently) shove out ‘the other’ that you may conjure up, reading over your shoulder. Don’t discuss anything with anyone at this stage – it is an intensely private (some call it lonely) process right now, and keep it that way.
When you’ve freely scribbled these early core thoughts and feelings, you have before you rich raw material. It is pure, powerful and potent, but in need of being worked on - distilled, or reshaped, fashioned, fleshed out, flavoured (choose/supply your own metaphor for the process here!) and ultimately transformed into something which stands alone, in its own right, without needing you to provide footnotes (like: “this is what I felt on my first day of school”; or “this is about how mothers can push our buttons”; or “this is a conversation between two people I overheard who I thought were breaking up but so strange you know the guy was actually proposing”.)
So how do you go about transforming, synthesizing this core material into ‘writing’? Firstly, leave the core material alone for a few hours/days (not more, because then it gets frozen solid; all the charge kind of leaks out of it). Re-read it, and see if a format suggests itself. Best not to straight jump to the conclusion that it is novel/saga material. Look at small formats – the essay, the short story, a poem, a conversation. Play around with genres if you like. It is terrific fun.
For instance, in a writing workshop, I once wrote a longish, first-person, detailed, loving description of discovering that a tiny bird had made a nest in my garden. And then, just-for-fun, I tried my hand at turning the long piece into a haiku – the entire experience condensed and universalized into a few syllables that brought out the engaging contrasts:
Fiery, thorny bougainvillaea
Keeping Warbler’s soft secret- a nest
This is when you begin to really enjoy your writing, taking out your ideas-palette, selecting the right word-colours and choosing the right genre-brush.
The next important stage is to find ways to go beyond the autobiographical. Writers are asked so often: that poem/short story/novel you wrote… is it autobiographical? The honest answer to that is always yes-and-no. Because everything you have written - even if it is about someone else’s life, or a fictional character doing and saying and thinking things that are not necessarily what you as a person have lived – is stuff that you have absorbed, and has then emerged from the writer-prism of your mind, refracted and re-cast.
For this to happen, your imagination needs to be given full rein. You simply have to let your character and events run along any which way, while you are thinking up what happens next. Even if you are inspired to write by an incident from your own life; or perhaps an intriguing fragment of someone’s life is lodged in your mind, and you want to grow it into a full-blown story, you’ll be pleasantly surprised how it takes on a life of its own, if you ‘allow’ extra writing to happen around it. Magically, you will find that other stray fragments that you have in mind come right out and work their way into the character/story that you are writing. Don’t, don’t edit out stuff at this stage.
Avoid being ‘efficient’, and wanting to deliver just the right amount of clay to the right parts so that you get a stunning piece of sculpture straightaway. Let your story swell, even get flabby, stump along…you can work on that later, at the next stage.
This next stage - time to review, rewrite, tweak, fine-tune - comes only when you are all written out, ‘delivered’ of the incident, idea, feeling or character that has been waiting to be written about inside of you. At this reviewing stage, you need to find that fine balance between being ruthless with cutting out the flab, and yet not falling into the trap of being so exacting that you end up with a malnourished, anorexic narrative or character. Much as the first-rush of unpremeditated writing has its own worth, you’ll be surprised how much it can benefit from a re-read – embellishments, cuts, facets, nuances, a changed word here and there, entire new angles…all sorts of things can come up and take your piece forward at this stage.
One last thing: many of us imagine that being able to write can happen only if we are assured what we imagine is ‘the writerly life’: being left alone to ideate; not having salesmen, bill collectors or the wolf at your door; never having your thought-process hijacked by the mundane/absurd demands of life. In two words: ‘won’t happen’. Or at least: ‘not likely’.
And even if you did manage to cajole, bully, wrest this kind of calm-time in which to write, there is no guarantee that you will use it fruitfully at all. It is not unknown for some of us to use such time gifted to us to get intimate with that bag of chips and the TV remote.
So the best thing is to try to develop a parallel universe of thoughts and feelings that runs along with your daily life, and to write something form that universe everyday. Virtually every well-known as well as prolific writer has been householder, parent, jobholder (overworked, underpaid, unwell) and has written through it all. And this he or she has managed by saving mind-space for the writing process, and simply going ahead and writing whenever possible.
My wordcounter tells me that I have written more than I should for this piece. This means that I need to quickly find an elegant closing sentence. I’m working on it.
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