I could write my Magnum Opus but I simply go to bed

Or, my struggles with choosing my creative self.

From Down-Adown-Derry by Walter De La Mare (Illustration by Dorothy P. Lathrop)

I will soon turn 30 and one thought keeps crossing my mind: Fitzgerald published Great Gatsby when he was 29 and Donna Tartt published Secret History when she was 29 so what the heck am I doing with my life?

Let’s rewind. 2…5…10-ish years. In high school—class 12—I tried writing my first novel. I wrote roughly 2 chapters before abandoning it for another potential masterpiece, two chapters in and I scrapped that as well. The next few years, I spent writing poetry—bad poetry I would be embarrassed to show anyone now—mostly as a way to cope with my life. It was a period of my life with some major life events that turned life upside down several times over. It was poetry as journaling. I liked expressing my feelings and the screams in my head as short stanzas. Rhyming words, finding metaphors and similes and alliterations, made emotional expression bearable. The turbulence in my head and heart made sense as a sonnet.

During all those years, I never thought of becoming a writer. To me, a writer was not a real thing. It was not something one could become. Books merely existed it seemed. No, I was the kid that wanted to go make movies. Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight was my obsession for years and I still watch it now and then. I wanted to make movies like him. That dream stayed with me for several years, until like most dreams, it got stashed in the dark soggy basement storage somewhere in the back.

Still, I wrote all those years. I wrote poetry, I wrote articles—online and in my notebooks. I wrote about technology, about movies, about machine learning, about books, about my feelings. This, I did for most of my twenties. No one read, of course. Just me.

I wrote because I truly enjoyed it. I wrote because it brought me comfort. There was something in my brain, my DNA perhaps, that loved words and expressing myself in them. Words. Sentences. Paragraphs. Punctuations as ornaments. I just found them beautiful—written words. 

It was not until 2020—the year of the pandemic, the global blip in our collective memories—around my birthday that something stashed deep within me revealed itself to me. Stuck inside the house for months, looking at the world merely through windows and digital screens, it happened. A sudden insight, a revelation. I proclaimed to the empty room, “Of course! I want to be a writer. That’s what I want to do with my life!”

A few years have passed since that day. I didn’t act on that proclamation for almost a year. I was in a foreign country on a student visa and student debt which when combined is a great motivator to find a real job. And so I did find one, an engineer, of course. It took another year for me to take writing more seriously and to act on it.

Since then, I have read many books on writing, I have taken almost all writerly classes on Masterclass. Many times I have considered going for an MFA program but never did. I think I’m a much better writer today than I was ten years ago yet nowhere near the skill level I want to reach. It has taken me ten years to get close to finding my true self, my own voice, yet I’m as far from it as I have traveled so far.

In the summer of 2021, wandering aimlessly through the city, I got the idea for my first novel. It took me 1.5 years to actually start writing it, to write the first sentence. I have been working on it for the past 1.5 years, on and off, never quite happy with my words. I have removed as many words, even more, as I have currently sitting in my draft. Tens of thousands of darlings killed.

I started this Substack about 2 months ago on a whim. I might have been on the verge of giving up writing completely, discouraged by the fact that no one read anything I wrote, but memory can seldom be trusted. I posted an essay I had been working on since 2022—almost two years—sporadically. It was about failure, about Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces. I had spent a solid 50 hours on it—reading, researching, writing, editing. 

Then, for the first time in my life, someone wanted to pay me for my writing. On my Substack, I don’t have the paid option enabled but I do have the pledge option enabled. Someone read my essay, pledging $150 to me after reading it. Out of respect for their privacy, I won’t mention their name but if you are reading this, once again, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

After ten years of writing, finally, someone had considered my writing worthy enough to be willing to pay for it. Writers write for themselves but writers also write to be read. There is no writer without a reader. 

(Journal entry from June 13, 2024.)

Your writing is worthy.

After writing on different platforms and in my notebooks for the past ten years, this is the first time someone has wanted to pay for my writing.

This is the first time I have felt that there is value in my writing and that my writing is worth paying for.

I feel exhilarated. Excited. I also, for the first time, feel a sense of responsibility toward my writing and my reader(s).

I must give everything I have to my writing and nothing less.

I must earn it. Cherish it. Respect it. Be grateful for it.

I am a writer.

(Forgive the cheesiness of the journal entry; it was an emotional day.)

Looking back at it all, I feel this was the first phase of my journey; the first act, if you will—going from bad poetry and pithy listicles to long-form essays and first drafts of fiction novels. It only took a decade of my life and a lot of self-doubt, aching heart, and tearful eyes. What comes next? Act 2, perhaps. But with it—

Crippling anxiety. Fear of failure. Imposter syndrome. Feelings of complete incompetency and inadequacy as I read brilliant words of those much more skilled than me in this craft. All of which leads me to creative impotence, manifesting as procrastination. Wasted time: days, months, years. Suffering within.

At this point, I feel a responsibility to make something clear. Truthfully clear. I have been very fortunate in my life. I am aware that it is very easy to lose sight of the many privileges life has granted me. The mere ability to express my thoughts and push them out on this platform is a luxury in itself. One has to simply take a look around to see how bad things can get in life. As I sit here in my air-conditioned apartment writing this on an $1800 computer, bombs, disease, and famine ravage other parts of the same world—true suffering.

Yet, maybe it is okay to acknowledge ones individual suffering while also acknowledging the societal suffering, even if doing so feels utterly selfish. 

In this selfish reflection, I ask myself what is it that stops me? Why do I go to bed without having written, without having put down words that are waiting eagerly—excitedly—to be born, to be borne out of me? 

Let’s be done with the easy targets first: the distractions of the modern world. Social media. Technology. Phones. Instant access to everything and round-the-clock connectivity. We live in a world where everyone has a megaphone in their pocket and we’re all hooked directly into the Matrix. Is it any wonder that in a world filled with so much distraction, so much noise, I find it almost impossible to listen to my own voice? So much input, so much to process constantly, that there is no time to find my thoughts circling in my own head. There is no time to be bored and to think—damn this technological age. Damn the Anthropocene!

(Journal entry from May 12, 2024.)

The world doesn’t care about your dreams.

It only cares about conformity. About whether or not you live your life according to the societal norms. Constantly, it tells you what you should and shouldn’t do, and by when you’re supposed to do it.

It’s even more difficult if you don’t know yourself what you want. Everyone in the world—friends, family, strangers—keeps pulling you in different directions. Conformity is order and individuality is chaos—something the world neither likes nor accepts. If you’re not careful, you might end up a pariah. If you don’t know what you want and are on your journey to find what you want, all the noise and distractions around you make it even more difficult to find your own voice. If you can’t find your own voice, you can’t listen to it. And if you can’t listen to it, you can’t find yourself. If you can’t find yourself, the world will keep making more noise telling you what you should do which means, again, you can’t find yourself. And so, you should just do what the world tells you to do? That’s a Catch-22, isn’t it? The best kind of catch there is, Doc Daneeka would say.

How do you get quiet enough to listen to your own heartbeat?

Next, fear; fear of being judged by people I know—friends, family, coworkers—and people I don’t know. There is a certain vulnerability that comes with writing for an audience, even if the audience consists of just one person—me. Good writing is honest writing. Honesty leads to vulnerability; vulnerability to fear of getting hurt. This fear—of being judged—stopped me from sharing my writing with the people I had known for a long time. It took me a better part of my twenties to be honest enough, vulnerable enough, brave enough, to share it with my family and friends. And life has been better since. My writing is not a secret anymore; it is not something to be hidden from people I love. It is a part of me, a huge part. I know now that there is no me without writing. 

And that is an entirely another level of vulnerability. If my self-worth and my being are tied to my writing—this craft that I love—then what happens if my writing is only good in my head? What if the words, the sentences, that I’m cobbling together are actually shit? What if I’m overestimating myself? There is a statistically non-zero chance that I have no writing talent whatsoever. That I’m simply living in my head. What if? Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe it is true that I have no talent. How then do I survive? One mindset shift I had to make was to start thinking of writing as a craft, not art. Art is elusive, more connected to inherent talent, something you either have or not, but craft can be learned and improved, like learning any skill. Is this true? I don’t know. But I do know that if I could simply chisel away at my sentences then maybe someday I could write a good sentence. And if I could write one good sentence, then I could write more. In the end, maybe I could write the truest sentence I know, as Hemingway put it. 

There is a problem though in chasing this one true sentence. A hurdle in my journey: the search for perfection. The want, the need, the yearning to make perfect things and to only share things with the world that have been perfected. Perfect doesn’t exist—not in this world. We are all humans and all art is a human creation. One thing we humans are not is perfect. How then can imperfect beings create perfect things? It is not possible. It is our imperfections, our flaws that make us shine. And so it goes for our art as well. There is perfection in the imperfection itself. It took me a long time to make peace with this reality. 

What gives me the right to write? I ask myself. There are others out there who are much better than I am at the art and the craft of writing, better than me in their words and their philosophies. They have better, more important, things to say about the world and human nature, and they can say those things in beautiful language, in a language full of grace, language as beautiful as a summer valley full of blooming flowers. How do I compete with them? Therein lies the problem in my thinking. Writing is not a zero-sum game. Others don’t have to lose for me to win. There is no winning. There is only writing and sharing what’s written. There is no need to tear down someone else’s building, someone else’s work. Writers can help others build—be happy in another writer’s success, for now, we have another great book to relish. And writing, literature especially, is better with intertextuality—writers carrying other writers forward in time with them. 

How else would Homer and Shakespeare survive if not for other writers willing to carry their works with them through the centuries? 

There are times when someone calls my writing a hobby. A hobby? My writing is not a hobby. It is the plasma in my blood, the oxygen in my lungs. That’s what writing is to me even though it is relegated to evenings and weekends after my real job that actually pays the bills. Trying to sail in two boats at once is not easy, not for me and not for anyone, and anyone who has tried knows—there are sharks below, deep dark waters, frothy water ready to swallow me whole the moment I fall.

Here’s an axiom for writers: Writing—creativity in general—is simply hard. It is a difficult, almost insane, thing to be doing with ones time. People who write do it because they must else they will perish, maybe not physically but intellectually and spiritually. People who write do it because they absolutely love doing it—building kaleidoscopes out of words. They love turning thoughts into written words, creating collages and mirages in the minds of the readers. 

When E. B. White would sit down to write the few hundred words he needed to write for the “Notes and Comment” page for The New Yorker, he would write in “hesitant bursts” with long silences in between. Hours would go by. Even after he mailed the final draft, after hours of excruciating editing, he would find himself unsatisfied. “It isn’t good enough,” he said sometimes as Roger Angell describes in the foreword to the 4^th edition of The Elements of Style, “I wish it were better.” Angell writes, “Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time.” That is the axiom of writing.

Through the years, I have struggled with justifying my need to write to myself. Does the world need another writer? In a world already inundated with hot takes and pithy opinions of anyone with access to the internet, do I need to throw my hat in the ring? Am I providing value to the world? Or simply adding more noise to an already noisy world merely for my need to feel validated? Am I a net positive to the world, to this civilization, to this enduring project of humanity? Or am I taking something away from it? 

What do I have that needs telling? I ask myself over and over. What can I contribute? Should I write merely for the sake of writing? Or should I only write if I have something important to tell the world? We’re all in search of meaning as if the mere act of birth must have imbued us all with an inherent purpose—a life’s task. 

To some extent, writing gives my life a sense of purpose and meaning. And I have tried giving it up. There have been periods in my life when I have tried to give it up and do the practical thing but those periods have been the unhappiest periods of my life. Without writing, without my words, I have felt lost in this big mad world. 

I want my words to make people feel. I want to make you feel happy and sad, angry and calm, hopeful and sorrowful. I want to write great works with beautiful language. I want to make you feel the way Dickens and Murakami make me feel. I want to write something that stands the test of time. Something good. I know there is a huge gap between where my writing is and where I want it to be but if I could just keep going then someday I can get there, or at least closer to it. But in the meantime, throughout that journey, I also just want to write—for myself—selfishly. 

I will soon turn 30 and one thought keeps crossing my mind: Fitzgerald published Great Gatsby when he was 29 and Donna Tartt published Secret History when she was 29 so what the heck am I doing with my life?

I… I am just trying to write.

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(Writer’s Note: The title of this essay is inspired by this brilliant YouTube video by Savannah Brown. Go check it out. It’s wonderful!)