One step forward, ten steps back

When a writer puts his heart and soul into his work, it is not just a figurative statement. With every word they write, they expose a little bit of themselves; their heartbreaks, their grief, struggles, and happiness for the entire world to witness. And if failure comes crashing in, it feels as if that part of you — that you so willingly shared — wasn’t good enough.

Writers belong to their pieces and each one kills them a little. So it’s not surprising that at some point in their lives, they loathe their own pieces; despise their occupation and the resulting self-inflicted pain of failure it usually brings to them.

When engineers, marketers, or lawyers fail, they can always start all over again because their work and the success or failure it brings to them does not entirely define them. They are engaged from their occupations; their identities may or may not be separate from their work.

The writing process in itself is extremely tedious. Most of the times, writers write not even knowing if someone will ever take the time to pick up what they’ve written and give it a read. And the money it brings, well, it’s barely a motivation to keep one waking up early in the morning and doing the daily grunt work of writing.


Most people like to think that writers have an easy job. An epiphany lands from a world unknown and within seconds they have a piece reflecting sheer creativity. For most writers, clearly not as gifted, it is as time-consuming as a nine-to-five job, minus the fun of having lunch with your friends and sharing gossip over tea breaks.

Although inspiration does come out of nowhere, putting that inspiration into a coherent concept takes hours of sitting in front of a computers screen. Every now and then, success does come. For a writer, even the slightest bit is uplifting. But mostly, when it doesn’t, it’s the most gut-wrenching, soul-twisting and vomit-inducing feeling in the world.

While penning her memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert decided more than a few times to dump the project altogether — failing to believe that there was any potential in it. Even after finishing the novel, it took years before she became freakishly successful. Even after Eat, Pray, Love was published, she still lived in deplorable conditions in South east Asia with her husband as it was the only place she could afford during the time the couple battled with the legal authorities to grant her husband a resident status in the US. Not knowing the slightest bit about the fate of her last memoir, she still decided to write another memoir.

Even J. K Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series was an epic failure — at least a long time ago. Struggling with the grief of her mother passing away from multiple sclerosis, her marriage imploding, parenting a toddler by herself while living on welfare would drive anyone to the point of slitting their wrists. And Rowling wasn’t far from it. In her darkest days, she found escape in weaving magical tales about a boy named Harry Potter while sitting in a small café ordering only an espresso and water — the only two things she could afford at that time.

Do writers experience sadness and agony in order to write better? Or do they write better when they’ve experienced sadness and agony? That’s a question no writer can really answer. The only thing that keeps them going on most days is that it provides them the most affordable therapy. To create a world in which you can hide and hibernate, is the only way for an oft-sensitive writer to survive.

And on days when they’re on the brink of breakdown, they keep going because that’s the only thing they know how to do. These are the days, every now and then, when a masterpiece is born.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 14^th, 2011.