The slim, dark boy comes to me after a lecture. He greets and I answer. Slowly, tactfully he pulls me away from the hall. “I want to be a writer.”
I am nice so I don’t laugh. It is not that I doubt his capabilities. What makes me want to laugh though is his willingness to drive all the way to a cliff, park, walk to the edge, and jump off. It is folly. I want to shout at him and, like that scene in Lord of the Rings, I want to tell him to take his dream of being Shakespeare, wrap it up in a nice parcel and cast it into the fire. Destroy it! Save yourself!!
I see that his eyes have agreed with his heart; they are aglow with a longing to do this thing, to write. I nod but in my mind, I am Auguste Rodin’s creation. I am sitting, thinking, envisioning the hundred and one ways writing can break this brittle boy.
He looks at me as I run my fingers across the staircase railing. I want to disappear.
“You can help, abi?”
I nod again, slowly this time. “What do you want to write about?”
“Anything.”
“Anything?”
He shrugs.
Anything. That, reader, is when I know that slim boy is already free falling from the cliff. You cannot write about anything. I see writing as a beautiful form of expression, as communication even. It is like saying a painter can just saunter into a studio, put up a canvas and paint anything—though there are many who revel in this frenzied art form. The point then is this: If nothing is being said or if one ventures into the realms of pen and pad without something definite to say or share, he can expect to end up, just like the frenzied painter, with a smudged canvass, which will fill the air with question marks.
If anything, I only pity him. Writing is a jealous thing. It wants all of you and its rewards come sporadically, sometimes without promise or structure. Creative writing is subjective and that is what makes one’s beautiful creation seem like a can of maggots to another.
Writing is sleepless nights, it’s falling under the weight of another empty page. It is being weird sometimes.
I think slim boy can wear that ring and feel pretty for a while. He can enjoy the sorrow if he’s meant for it.
***
To be a writer is to peel off your bulletproof vest. You don’t rip it off; you peel, like an onion. You discard a layer of security with every word you put down.
Writing is to slip out of your skin and stand bare. It is to allow your reader to slink about the most intimate parts of your psyche. Being a writer is hard—only for those who have shame.
Shamelessness is an essential element of writing, I believe. One has to be shameless about his beliefs, about saying what no one else wants to, about interpreting the concerns around them in coherent language.
Even more relatable, a writer has to be unashamed—unafraid if you would put it that way—of the deep sorrows that come with the journey of writing
***
Writing is sometimes an addiction. A heavy dependency on other people’s “yes”. It is sometimes a desperate search for validation, for agreement, for a genuine reader who won’t skim through the brilliant dashes and metaphors. It leads one into the realms of sniffing; sniffing through their favorite writer’s timeline, sniffing through literary magazines, sniffing for inspiration.
It is why we get stuck up on writer’s block.
Writer’s block isn’t as ugly as they paint it to be. For all I know, WB—let’s call it that— is alluring, not in its physicality, but in its reason and persuasion. WB most times doesn’t make you pull your hair out in search of a story that slaps. It sinks its claws through your skull and makes noodles out of your brain. It drives you into emptiness. You sit and stare at the wall for minutes and only realize how much time you’ve lost when your breathing gets loud enough.
***
Writing, despite its dreary valleys, has captured my heart and the hearts of a million more wordsmiths out there. That’s why we wake up at 2am after a rejection mail, scramble for a pen and whisper, “that’s a great idea!”
Moses Eduek is a Christian, aspiring cat dad and occasional shutterbug. He likes to think of himself as a part-time contrarian. He has words in Erato Magazine, Fiction Niche Magazine, and The Dusty Roads Anthology. He is a Communication Arts undergraduate as well. He is @eduek_moses on X and @moseseduek on Medium.
