ESSAY: Pick up a pen & start writing

[Riaz Ahmed Alizai]

BACK in 1922, there was a writer named Sydney Schiff who suffered from what’s known as writer’s block. His friend T.S. Eliot wrote him a letter with this advice: “I am very sorry that you are finding it difficult to get on with your work; I have been through the same ordeal often and know how agonising it is. But a moment comes when the thing comes out almost automatically; I think that it is partly the anxiety and the desire to express it exactly that form the obstacle; then a moment of self-forgetfulness arrives and releases the inspiration. I imagine that all writers who have arrived at a degree of consciousness in their mental activity suffer in this way.”

Elizabeth Bishop, writing in a letter to Marianne Moore that “it is really because I want to do something well that I don’t do it at all”, expresses the anxiety of some writers who want their next work to be so superior that they can’t put a word down for fear that what gets written will be of inferior quality. When teaching fiction writing, I used to tell my students who complained that they suffered from writer’s block: your problem is that you think you need a great idea before you start your story, so first of all disabuse yourself of the fallacy that stories are based on writers having ideas. What you need is some event, basically an image that engages the senses, and the story will follow. Just put down a sentence in which there is some action that can be presented as an image, point as it were the lens of a moving camera at the image and then follow the action that is bound to generate itself, keep going until the action completes itself, and you will have a story.

Or simply make up a random sentence, such as this clichéd example: “Mary saw the shining brass door handle turn, the door burst open and John staggered in holding a bloodied handkerchief to his mouth.” Or a variation: “John quietly opened the door to the bedroom and seeing Mary sitting on the edge of the bed removing her stockings whistled a happy tune.” Whatever the first sentence, there is always a sentence that has to come next, which, of course, will be determined by what’s contained in the first sentence. There is absolutely no reason why the writer should be stuck.

After the sentence about John holding the bloodied handkerchief to his mouth, you could write: “What happened,” Mary asked, “did you fall off the bicycle?” Or she might have said, “John, I’ve always told you, boxing is not your sport!” Or, “So, the dentist decided to take your teeth out?” If John had fallen off the bicycle, then perhaps he is a ten-year-old and Mary is his older sister. If he has been boxing, then she might be his mother and he a teenager. And if he’s had his teeth out, he could be middle-aged and Mary his wife.

In each case, a particular character would take shape and trigger off a variety of stories.

Or if the writer’s first sentence had been the one about John whistling a happy tune on seeing Mary removing her stockings, then what follows that provocative scene ought to be quite interesting. The writer can set up a titillating erotic expectation, add teasing hints with further suggestive images and instead of leading to the expected action in the bed make something else happen, like a burglar breaking in, that first frustrates the reader and then has him utterly absorbed in some new drama.

The alternatives of what happens next are infinite once one has that first sentence. Given the same first sentence, a hundred writers will come up with a hundred different stories. Each imagination is filled with a store of images that have accumulated as a unique body of personal associations in the individual’s brain as a sum of all the experiences that person has had until that moment. And what is remarkable is that even when the first sentence is entirely arbitrary, or just a silly joke like Mary removing her stockings, there is an unconscious impulse which then develops the story and, extracting ideas from the individual writer’s associations and background, gives the work its unique quality.

The succession of sentences that will emerge will depend on the quality of one’s brain, and each brain has a built-in predilection that favours a particular way of writing. A writer like Graham Greene could only work with formula fiction while Beckett felt driven to subvert common forms. If your interest is in the traditional, formulaic story, then you will create a story that fulfils that predetermined pattern; if your obsession is with creating something original, you will take one of those clichéd opening sentences and follow them with sentences that pervert the formulaic expectation.

You can start with Jack and Jill going up the hill to fetch a pail of water, but instead of their coming tumbling down, you can make them linger by the well and have the first intimations of sexual attraction, or give them a fright by making them see a dead body in the well, or surprise them with a view of the other side of the hill which appears so enchanting that they throw away their pail and go running hand-in-hand to the magical new world.

But whatever your approach, something has to follow even an arbitrary opening, and once begun you will be surprised how absorbed you become in the writing and don’t even realise you’re doing it and suddenly the thing is complete. Either you will have fun making up fantastic situations or, more likely, you will be pulled into some buried memory and, without even a conscious awareness, find your imagination giving that personal association a new objective reality.

Sometimes, what looks complete turns out to be flawed and needs revision before it’s presentable. T. S. Eliot’s great poem, The Waste Land, was originally a series of poems given the awful title, “He Do the Police in Different Voices”. As such, it would have ended up in the rubbish dump of literary history, but, with Ezra Pound’s help, Eliot transformed those fragments into one of the most memorable works of literature. In fact, literature has many examples of some of the greatest writers converting very poor early drafts to masterpieces. As a writer, you never actually finish a work, you simply reach a point where you decide to stop making any more changes to it. A great writer perseveres longer before coming to that decision. It is not the ideas in a work or its relevance to its time that makes a work great; it is always the quality of its language. A good writer is one who remains in a state of dissatisfaction with the shape of the words first suggested by his brain and stubbornly keeps altering them until they fall into an unexpected shape which, once found, is seen to possess a peculiarly gratifying inevitability.

I’m talking of literary work, which involves aesthetic questions that are perhaps irrelevant to, say, the writing of a scientific paper. However, I do think that the cause of a writer’s block is common to all writers. It is mainly the fear that what one is about to write is going to turn out bad, and not at all worthy of one’s brilliantly original mind and the undisputed talent of a great genius which one secretly attributes to oneself; it is the terror of being found out to be a fraud and an utter mediocrity, a terror so strong that one becomes frozen and can’t write a word. When this mood strikes a writer, an enormous depression sets in, and there is a reluctance to write anything at all unless there is some certainty that what will emerge will be so extraordinary the whole world will give one a standing ovation. Which, of course, will never happen. With the exception perhaps of some remarkable freaks of nature, such as Mozart and Shakespeare, most of us mortals are condemned to endless chipping away before we can create anything resembling a monument — and are lucky if the figure that gets created is not that of a dwarf.

This anxiety, this fear that generates the writer’s block is associated with vanity. One wants to be seen as beautiful, talented, learned, original, etc., and not just another worthless hack. That surely is true of most of us, we would not be human else. It requires a tremendous discipline to quieten the noisy tormented self and to accept the reality that I, as one more individual, am not that important, certainly not as important as the art in which I’m trying to shape a new form or express an idea in an original style. But people have a general resentment against life and often think, indeed are convinced, that life has treated them unfairly, that if they could only change the conditions of their existence, they would be more productive, happier, etc. It is the illusion of paradise as that elsewhere from where it has been our misfortune to be excluded.

In the end, of course, there is a certain quirk in one’s brain, which determines our outlook on life as well as much of our behaviour, about which there is absolutely nothing that we can do. But what does help is a degree of self-knowledge. If one understands those aspects of the agitated self that are rooted in vanity then it should be possible to release oneself from that troubling anxiety and discover the liberation (what Eliot called “a moment of self-forgetfulness”) in which the mind creates for the sheer pleasure of doing so. The best liberation from one’s enslavement to the atrocious imposition of vanity, which, demanding that we write only if we can produce a masterpiece, impedes one’s creativity, can be achieved by reading a work of undisputed greatness concurrently with one’s work in progress. When I was writing The Murder of Aziz Khan, I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and on days when I thought I was stuck I’d say to myself, “If Tolstoy could write nearly 1,500 pages with such apparent fluency, then I can at least squeeze out half a page before I go to sleep.”

Wallace Stevens wrote in a letter: “I sit down every evening after dinner and, after a little music, put my forefinger in the middle of my forehead and struggle with my imagination.” That is one way to avoid writer’s block, to form a habit of regular work, to create a daily ritual for oneself. Another is to remember that with persistence any poor work can be transformed into a masterpiece. In his book Resistance and Persistence, Sean Scully, one of the finest painters in the international art scene today, described such a transformation: “I went to the studio in Barcelona. I was tired and I was getting ill, and I didn’t want to work at all. I had no energy and I had a headache. I started working on the painting I had abandoned a couple of weeks before because it was my least favourite — it was the ‘abandoned one’ left standing up against the wall. So I reluctantly put it on the painting wall and started working. Then something happened, and I painted as if I couldn’t make a mistake. Three hours later it was finished, and it was the most beautiful painting in the room. That’s painting. You never know. You never know what you will get when you start.”

Scully’s kind of disciplined persistence is what Eliot was recommending to Sydney Schiff to overcome writer’s block. One suggestion I used to make to my similarly afflicted writing students was to work on a translation: take another author’s work and re-make it as your own; this will concentrate your mind, forcing it to look for the right words and doing so restore your confidence as a writer. One of the finest translations in modern literature is C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s rendering of Proust’s great novel, titled Remembrance of Things Past. However, Moncrieff died before he could tackle the final volume of the long French novel, and it was Schiff, writing under the pseudonym of Stephen Hudson, who completed the work.


http://dawn.com/2012/08/26/essay-pic...start-writing/

[Ahmed Faisal]

Sir nice share... sir can you please help me out in CSS preparation... i mean, can i meet you somewhere in quetta. i want to have your notes, guidance or anything which could be useful in CSS...???

[naeem abbas bhatti]

a ray of inspiration... really.