Note: I do not mean to envy the youngsters who can write more novels and poems during their school years than me in my life time. Well, given all the opportunities and support young writers receive, I envy them at all.
I believe I never have any true blue writer’s blood in my veins. If I have so, they do not do up to my head. I’m struggling to write and to form a serious thought from my sentences. Serious because I want to write stuff which help people think and decide on things.
Because I cannot get a license to own a wide range of legally and illegally made AK-47s, I turn to writing. I never intend to impress. I was only trying to express using what little skills I have. I want to be serious with what I write or with what I can write.
I am not ashamed to admit that I am never blessed with true talent. You can laugh at me. I never know how to sing. I never know how to dance, paint, and play musical instruments or sports, whatsoever. But I can rap a little. Aside from that, I am utterly talentless.
Writing is my hobby and my livelihood. I earn my living through writing, employed and part-time. At times I feel little sense of achievement in what I write. Anyway, I am proud of my work as a web content writer. Without me, my SEO workmates would have noting to submit to article submission sites.
Despite what writing capability I have, I cannot seem to keep up with one kind of writing form – creative writing. If I am not creative enough in how I handle things, how much more with my writing? Writing “literarily” is indeed hard work.
Poems and prose make up literary writing. Yeah, I wrote a few poems, some in haiku, tanaka and rubai forms. Prose? I cannot write short stories, I can write essays with ease. Still, I consider myself literarily incapable, and I feel sorry for myself.
I stopped writing song lyrics more than two years ago. I ran out of ammunition. Writer’s block, you say it. Until now, I have no fresh ideas or inspirations to write lyrics. This writer’s block is killing me. Because of that, I feel sorry for myself. I feel wasted. I feel like a bum.
It’s not that I want to get recognition for my literary pieces. I just want to write a good piece that can make many people think and discuss about it. Let the people decide for its literary value. I only want to express myself through writing and through it that I can get any form of advice, help or mentorship from the more established writers.
I wonder if the 2007 Virginia Tech Massacre gunman Cho Seung-Hui ever felt writer’s block. I believe he is a much better writer than me. Do his writings ever get recognized?
The lack of recognition in one’s artistic pursuits can do oneself no good. Karl Marx’s poems and drama received no recognition because they possess no literary value. Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister of Nazi Germany, lacked success in drama. Afred Rosenberg, the philosopher of German racism, was unlucky in his philosophical endeavors; Adolf Hitler saw no success in painting, poetry and architecture. You know what had happened to them.
Like them I also started with artistic ambitions (though I started late). I feel frustrated because I cannot write artistically. I cannot easily spew words and make sense out of it. I have a few creations which are just nonsense jumble of words. When I peruse through some of my past creations, I feel ashamed not having to create something that has more sense and thought, something that has value. You cannot write if you are not going to put value in it.
I am already more than two decades old, and I have yet to write great stuff. I want to write things that evoke emotions and provoke thought.
But how can I write if I am literally incapable and artistically inept?
Saint Paul, William Shakespeare, Christina Rossetti, Karl Marx, G.K Chesterton, J.R.R Tolkien, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Paul, C.S Lewis, Rabindrath Tagore – some of mankind’s great literary figures. Their names will ever be remembered. In their lifetime, they wrote veraciously in thousands of papers, in many bottles of inks.
I hope to bear fruit in continuing to I will continue to immerse myself in writing. I got to keep on reading. I got to understand things in wider perspectives. I need to go out and learn as much as I can in every way. That’s the only way. It is.
“What makes good writing is not what you put in, but what you take out.” – Being A Writer by Peter Elbow
P.S. Yesterday a applicant came at work to apply as a web content writer. If he is accepted into work, he can help me take the writing load off my back.
