The Unbearable Lightness Of Being A Writer

Writing is easy. All you have to do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

The pundit who said that must have known whereof he spoke. To many, writing is an abstract undertaking that doesn’t require any real work. It entails nothing more than furring the eyebrows, rubbing the chin, tapping the fingers, pacing the aisles, muttering incoherent words, fidgeting on a chair, sitting immobile for hours on end, staring at the ceiling or blankly into space.

It is a hazy profession that offers few tangible rewards, if at all; a choice not often taken as it barely puts food on the table or a shirt on one’s back. It is a constant wrestling with thought that sucks strength and dissipates the intellect; an incessant grappling with words that emaciates the spirit and takes one’s breath away.

Yet, “of all the arts in which the wise excel, Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well,” a poet of yore intoned. It is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money, another learned man said. And, “Achilles exists only through Homer,” a French author riposted. “Take away the art of writing from the world, and you will probably take away its glory.”

In essence, good writing starts as a lump in the throat or a glint in the eye, a jerk in the knee or a spark in the belly, a wrench in the gut or a pinch in the heart. It is invariably referred to as a germ or a lead, a brainstorm that wouldn’t leave; a Muse, or an inspiration, a writer’s sole excuse for being.

It begins “as a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness… a moment here and a moment there,“ Robert Frost said. “It finds the thought and the thought finds the words. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life.”

It can be a poem or a song, an essay or a play, a short story or a novel, a news item or a commentary, an ad copy or a press release, a film script or a TV spiel, a corporate report or a promotional collateral, a speech or an editorial, an office memo or a court pleading, a marketing plan or a feasibility study. The writer’s flights of fancy are limitless and manifold --- chronicled in ways that are prosaic or metaphorical, wistful or analytical, mundane or ethereal.

Thus, if writing makes an exact man as Francis Bacon opined, what exactly makes a writer?

“(A writer is) a complicated soul who lives only for words in ink”…“(a person) who says farewell to the secrets of his mind and gives them to the world.” He ignores gender biases - “I am neither a man nor a woman but an author,” Charlotte Bronte stressed. He is single-minded in his purpose, according to William Faulkner – “The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.”

He is a prodigious thinker who makes other people think and look inside themselves; who, in the words of Jane Austen, produces gems “in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”

He is a profound romantic who celebrates beauty in equable odes, joyfully ever after spewing forth a cornucopia of rhythmic tours de force; who stirs passions and dares the Fates in reckless abandon, bestrewing an iridescent glow across a rarefied firmament; who sees the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower, reciting mantras only his ilk can understand.

He is a restless warrior fighting the demons forever bedeviling his mind’s eye; an intrepid hunter eternally trying to figure out life’s meaning; a plumed denizen of a charmed fiefdom constantly divining intellectual awakenings; a paradoxical entity, happily or sadly, often lost in his own thoughts and rapt in his own philosophical musings. He not only sees the stars in the heavens, says a young American poet named Lane Edwinsol, but brings them to earth one by one and keeps them in a museum of text.

He has the luxury of time to smell the roses, watch the sunset, hear the music, feel the pain…

Czech author Milan Kundera, in his bestselling novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, asks the reader this compelling question: “What then would you choose – weight or lightness?” In the context of everyday life, the choice would depend on one’s priorities, values, goals, limitations, inhibitions or aspirations. Each has a purpose in the scheme of things, with one choice not necessarily better than the other.

The writer, however, doesn’t have much of a decision to make. As it is, a heavy baggage weighs him down from one journey to another, with numerous forks to hurdle along the road; Atlas lugged and shrugged, as it were; the Sword of Damocles hanging over his head like a curse; his chest bursting at the seams in suspended animation.

On the other hand, he soars in weightlessness like a bird in unimpeded flight – no limits, no fears, no worries, no tears. He carries an aura of giddy invincibility borne of self-gratification; a daring proclivity to venture into the unknown; a lightness of mind, body and spirit that can be so incredibly unbearable.