How should an author write? Or, in some cases, perhaps how should a poet write?
A writer has a duty to his art, and it speaks of ruthless love and dedication as if he was a warrior – a matter of life or death. Someone told me once and I didn’t’ respond, I stayed quiet and went about my days after he told me what he told me, which was, “It’s not possible to write longer than three hours a day.” And he was an author, well kind of an author, not a writer of philosophy, but a writer of romance that did sell, but will be thrown off the shelves next year, perhaps never make it to the archives.
I call it abstract made like a series of hamburgers. He belonged to the new school, “get it out”. It takes me three hours to warm up, get centred, get my breathing right, and get on a roll. I ask my lady, so I would not lie to you guys reading this, how much do I read and write a day, seven days a week, give or take a day for rest, once every three or four months – she said, “Around eight to ten hours a day.” I sleep at the laptop or browse through my writings. I write around 4000 to 7500 words a day, depending on my reading and research, which eventually put me to sleep. I might be ruthless as I said, but I do believe in one respite to this hard life: God, and then my lady next. For me, that is where it ends, I’m somewhere in-between God and Wife, I think after God and wife.
The artist or writer has a purpose, and it punches him, anguishes him, abuses him, haunts him in his sleep and while he eats. So, I carry two pens in case I lose one and napkins to write on, so I don’t drop an idea. The name of the game is to get relieved from the throne in the side – the pain, write it down, edit it later. It is like penning a book, without worrying about this or that – write it down and edit it, before you lose it all and have nothing to edit later. The conclusion is quite simple to understand.
It all boils down to how you are going to pen a plot, produce a theme, carry a journey to its end – you can’t start a poem in one style and say in the middle “I think I’ll convert this to another form”. It doesn’t work that way. The same applies to a story – if you update the plot in your account in the middle, you change the verse for the reader, and you owe the reader something more than a bumpy road.
You see, when you write, you get no rest until you write down what is taking that peace away from you.
Life needs to be experienced, expressed and remembered. Some prefer photographs to walk down memory lane – I enjoy remembering life through the words I write, through recording the moments I experience and through penning the thoughts I have on a random Wednesday.
