"Agony-writing"

byjiran777

1.7K followers

Updated 10 years ago

I just love it when my fingers dance around my netbook's keyboard as if I was playing the piano and paying more attention to how the ivory keys feel instead of whether they gave me the right note or not. Which happens, like, 90 percent of the time I try to write. I often misspell words and often I have to prod the Backspace key many times before I could start over with remembering the poor sentence that just flew out of my head midway in the process. When people come into my room, they complain either of two things, or of two things at the same time: either music in silence playing silently loud, or my typing’s trying to do a loud, clicking karaoke improved gangnam style.

It’s crazy, and I’m thinking maybe this is the only reason I got myself into the whole writing process. Maybe I’m just giving myself a reason to tap the keyboards more often. Either its a medical abstract or any random abstracts without a definite ending.

I’m a frustrated pianist/musician. In my brother’s miniature studio apartment I tried joining his band’s sessions by jumping at the percussionist’s gracious offer to take his place in the African drums.(LOL) The song, more than half of the time, would mercilessly get butchered by my off timing and my half-hearted tap (which is caused more by my self-consciousness to the other people in the room than anything else). And most of the time, I’ll just try finishing the song doing a controlled beat that sounds so labored, calculated and mathematical that I’m often better off clapping my palms red and counting the chocolate bars i binged during the entire session.

But that’s not the point. Sometimes I’m just wondering whether I should just drop this whole writing shctick altogether. Just this evening, I tried to try finishing a work on a commissioned article for WHO on alternative chemotherapy. It took me three hours to finish the article. And an hour to do the mathematical equations in structural components. Pretty cool for a newbie like me in the industry(really?). That i suppose. I was given 30 days prior about this duty and i just started it 3 days before the deadline! And newbie is just a dream after all. I used to be a writer in my Primary School organ and got pretty grades in liberal writing. And here i am dumbfounded and getting wreckless with a task i almost get to sleep with almost half of my lifetime.

The outline came in easily enough, but the gap between writing the outline, the transcription, note-skimming (I love transcribing taped interviews as much as I love doing History-taking and Physical exams.), and the actual writing itself (I call that the writing lump. Not exactly a lump in my case, more like a goiter) was so wide and far in between that it’s often torture alone to watch me do it, much more to experience. This has happened before, many many times before. And even if I know I can do everything in an hour if someone stuck a knife to my throat, still. It still takes a knife to my throat for me to make any form of clockwork headway.

Although I often attribute this to what Anne Quidlen calls her “agony writing” , I often wonder whether I’ve taken it too far. I always had to have the right music. I always had to drink some pure concentrated caffeine. I always had to watch at least three hours of trash TV beforehand. I always had to write really late at night, when it’s quiet and everybody’s asleep or less prone to making irritating sounds and moves to disturb me. And I always had to reverse my body clock (Read: I have to sleep through the day), judging my output to how much I call my mom to ask her momly approvals before I junk myself off to sleep. I had to go these pretentious lengths – under the imaginary assurance that these will help me yank out a good story – that it just sucks. And in those times of frustration, I dance around the idea of giving up. Sometimes I do; I just default altogether.

It’s so frustrating, that sometimes I’m wondering if I’m just a poser in the midst of all this. Amidst all my ordeals, my consultants, friends and groupmmates still trust my whole writing idea. Not to mention, their motive of getting out of the responsiblity, i assume is a very good excuse! (haha).

Years back, I’ve consulted some of my best critiques (“really really close friends” in MUTTspiks5lang, my blog of five years which i lost hold of during medschoo) about this. Some say I’m holding back, that maybe, I’m not really letting go when I write. Another holds that, maybe, the process of organized writing could hold meaning to my mind as what a saddle could mean to a wild horse. That I’m so caught up in giving my pieces cadence that I end up depriving it of any. Still, another possibility could be that maybe, I’m just born this way. I just don’t write fast enough. Deal with it. But maybe, it could be that I’m having such unreasonable expectations of how my final drafts should look and sound like that I tend to see the entire writing experience as daunting instead of exciting. Like constipation to diarrhea, I suppose.

It’s not like I suddenly slowed down. I’ve personally taken pride in myself giving every story I write much thought before anyone else sees it, sometimes to the point of risking a butchered deadline. But the chronic-ness of the whole situation makes me question the normalcy of it. Do I really have the heart for this? When I do art direction, when I style myself , it’s always adrenaline rush. When I do staccato-structured scripts for Psychiatry wad visits, the whole process just slides right through me. It’s a different story with writing. Sometimes I have to yank myself, turn myself inside out, or spearhead a vendetta against myself for something good (or acceptable, at the very least) to come out of it. Moreso, does my medically inclined world shifted my brains direction which explains my Global Amnesia of my previous habitus as a writer?

In case you’re wondering, when i write, these didnt take half a day to make, or three mugs of coffee. I am writing this while I took a self-declared break off writing my commissioned story. I gave myself one hour for this, and I didn’t fall behind schedule. Maybe because I won’t get scolded for having the outline of wayward pick-up sticks in this one? i just love to write when i am IN THE RIGHT EMOTIONS. Without emotions, im just one of the crowd, literally. Like the crowd of kids just wanting to ride a bicycle and lick lollipops.

Right now, it’s really my family, my convictions and everyone I care about who’s making me push myself a little more, allow myself those little vendettas and the occasional knives to the throat. I want to create my own, I want to give justice to everyone who believes in me like you don’t want to fail anybody who believes in you, I want to give several directions that just lead into one road, I will have to work with what. I have to do that. Not that I can’t do anything about it. I’m thinking right now, of course I’ll work on my productivity. I’ll have to feed myself on my own eventually. There’s really no excuse out of it. But maybe, I’ve been craving the feeling all this time, it’s just that I’ve been keeping it as a secret from myself for so long. Maybe the feeling’s great after all, especially the climax, everytime I write my last sentence before hitting Ctrl+S.