When you write

Whoever said writing is easy, has got the plot all wrong. Writing isn’t easy, not even to those who do it for a living. Writing to be an aspiring writer matches up to if not equals to an amateur wanting to run a marathon. Running, still, is just the legs and the brain. Writing, is the hands, the brain and the heart. Somedays, it flows through you like hot blood, pulsating, eager to be poured out onto a page. Other days, it’s a slow, painful, tearing-pages-into-thousand-pieces kind of painful. On the most difficult days, writing is like a problem child, you have to coax it (with coffee, tea,  alcohol, cigarettes or any other stimulant), plead with your thoughts to crawl out of your head and onto the paper. And on these days the whole process of writing could be like waiting for freshly laid tar to solidify on a particularly hot day, with the sun blazing right overhead.

Wanting to be a writer is telling yourself you’re a liar, a few hundred times every month. The lies varying from, “I will write everyday”, “this is just a block” and of course, “this, in no way will affect what I’m writing.” But above all writing is breathing life, breathing life into words when your hopes have been knocked out of you. Writing is that optimistic belief that a sip of water will keep the vomit down, and the truth is if you believe it enough, it does. Writing is making things up but believing it is true, down to the last cell. Writing is disconnecting from yourself, looking at yourself sitting atop the moon, yet also being one with the paper and letting the words swim in your head and spill on to the paper. Writing is the scratch-scratch of the pen on the paper, it is the tap-tap of the keyboard, the smell of ink, the sound of rustling paper. Writing is the emergence of someone, something you never knew was there all along.

Writing is like being in a sado-masochistic relationship with yourself. You probe wounds even when you know they hurt and scrape them further, giving them a semi-permanent form and structure, letting them leave permanent scars on your being only to realize you’ve begun to heal. You then realize, the heaviness in your head and chest has begun fading. The warmth is returning to your face, you look at words and your lips move, as if reading something, and at that last full-stop or the clever-sounding thing you wrote, you realize there’s art you’ve put out there and that makes you smile. Then you’re ready to conquer the world, only till you have to go through it all over again. But that conquering the world feeling, is the drug that keeps you at it.