Issue #31: These Words Are Mine And True

The most mentally challenging task I set myself last year was to write as many articles as I could. It could be two, a hundred, a thousand. I cared little about the amount, so I refrained from putting down a concrete number. All I asked of myself was to show up and give my best to every article I decided to write. The mission was simple: Write! 

See, writing doesn’t come easy to me. Unlike the many activities I excel at, writing strains me, stretches me. It forces me to untangle my thoughts, to make my ideas plain, and the truth is that I’d rather not. My preferred state is inertia, a state of rest, of being unperturbed. Yet I understand clearly that writing is thinking in practice, and that the only way to improve as a writer, apart from reading others’ writings, is to write. Writing is like a muscle, for which to be strengthened must be exercised. So I write. 

I set out and penned my first article of 2022 fourteen days into the new year. Unsurprisingly, my writing was, at first, hesitant, diffident, and unsteady, like a baby’s first steps. I wasn’t greatly troubled, however. I trusted that I’d get better the more I wrote. So I wrote. 

As time went by, writing became less arduous for me. I’d write a few hundred words without breaking much sweat. It felt good. I ended 2022 with thirty articles to my name. If someone had told me at the start of the year that out of my pen would flow such a vast body of words, I would have sniggered.

As we celebrated Earth completing another revolution around the sun, ushering 2023 in with pyrotechnics, I set out, as is my customary behaviour, my plans and goals for the new year. High on the list was writing. I intended to build on the gains from 2022, working my writing muscle, further strengthening it. A cocktail of unfortunate reasons had thus far precluded me from writing. At first, I wasn’t bothered. I told myself I would be able to write when I needed to. And that was perhaps true in January and February, but as the clock ticked, I started to doubt my ability. My pen, before lithe and assured, became rigid and tentative. I recall opening my writing editor several times and being unnerved by the plain white screen. I didn’t know how to begin. “You have forgotten how to write,” my inner sceptic whispered, and I half-believed him. So I stopped writing.

Yes, the tap within me from which words flowed in the past was blocked, but my proclivity for reading remained intact. Books have been reliable boon companions since I was a child. In their pages, I find comfort. I get lost in the streets, alleys, and woods of the worlds imagined by authors. So as I felt pangs of pain from my inability to write, reading provided succour. 

Not too long ago, I started dissecting the works of famous American writer Ernest Hemingway. The much-celebrated writer published seven novels and six short story collections and is said to have influenced 20th-century fiction. So influential was the man that he was bestowed with the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. All are writers, but some are gods, and Hemingway could be said to be a writing god. His writing was determined and confident, and it betrayed his undoubted ability in himself. Such a man couldn’t doubt himself, could he? Yet, as I started reading the man’s memoir, A Moveable Feast, I stumbled upon a most shocking passage:

“But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.”

The man had doubts! The man whose work influenced and continues to influence many writers sometimes struggled with starting a new story. That passage was like oxygen to the dying embers of my writing fire. Even the gods aren’t spared being suffocated by the oppressive weight of doubt. But my fire was fanned more, not by my new-found understanding that gods and mere mortals suffer alike, but by the potent formula used to break his dry spell: remembrance. “Do not worry.” he said, “You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence”. How beautiful remembrance it; to bring back to your consciousness that which you used to do before and to wield the power of that memory to make accomplishable that which you’ve now found almost unattainable. So I took that in, and I started writing again.

See, I have learnt that doubt is like thin films of grease that accumulate over time and solidify. But it is grease, after all, so easily melted away with searing heat, and within you is a fire that can be made to burn hot and bright by remembering. The words of Ernest Hemingway taught me that. So, I decided to write this, a reminder to myself that I am a writer, that I have written in the past, that I am writing now, and that I will continue to write in the future. These words are mine, and they are true.