Writing is Ritual

There Can Be Method in the Madness

We come to writing with the same air we come to devotion. Supplicant. Anxious. Hopeful. And then we surrender. Believing in the cause, we proceed. Knowing, or perhaps only half-committed to the creed, that if we sit still and summon words they might come. And when they do come, if they come, they will carry us to our purpose. That purpose is truth— the truths we seek. With truth, we tell ourselves, we will be armed to negotiate the minefield that is this life.

To be devoted to writing is to be committed to a life of self-doubt but, irregardless, to use that self-doubt. Use it, not as a deterrent but, as muse. You think to yourself, I should write.

And then another voice, a louder one, says, No, you can’t. Where would you even start? It’s too complicated, it’s too difficult.

The doubts creep in. If you let them, they take over. If you look them in the eye, pick the pen anyway or open a blank page on the laptop, they pause. As your hands begin to move, the doubts start to recede, moving back, back to the recesses of whichever overactive corner of your mind they sprung from.

When you doubt yourself, you dare yourself. I can’t becomes I will; becomes, I am doing it. Given some air, the bravado of I am doing it becomes a balloon, rising, as if to ask: What’s the worst that can happen?

Once you surrender— not to perfection but to exploration— the dam fills up, the floodgates open. One word becomes 25, becomes 200, becomes 2,700.

But I only wanted 1,400 words, you think. There you go again. That is pride swelling you up, like a mandazi that has been in hot oil for just the right amount of time. It’s time to scoop it out. It’s time to stop, take stock, start to chop. Start to doubt. What is this muddled rubbish? Who wrote this?

Writing comes from a place of anxiety, not being sure, not fully knowing. It is an exercise in seeking clarity. In thinking. In summoning words, bending them, begging them to fill up the vagueness, to sharpen outlines, to give way to what is fully-formed, what is loud instead of that which whispers, inaudible.

Ways and Means

Whether you think of writing as a mysterious gift— something other-worldly, out of body, something you submit to that carries your bodily— or you think of writing as work, as heavy lifting labour that you force yourself to do, it has to get done. And to get done, you must, at the very least, sit down and prepare to write. One of my PhD supervisors loved to say, It doesn’t matter how many books you borrow from the library, how many people you talk to on your way there and back, PhDs are about bums on seats.

And so it is with all writers, whatever their form or genre; we learn to sit down. For hours on end. Some writers even learn how to use footnotes. It takes years to master that skill and just when you have nailed it, a new MLA format rears its head daring you to be left out of the latest fashion in academia. Back to the drawing board. Unlearning and relearning the new art of the footnote.

One day you wake up and think: What if I wrote another way? So you start learning how to write without annotations. Writing with footnotes is an exercise in shutting the door. It’s like speaking to a cult, a select few, opting to ignore the very people you write about. It has its uses; it also has its drawbacks.

When you sit staring at a blank page, you might visualize your audience waiting. Hopefully, on bated breath. But who needs the pressure of visualizing a hungry crowd? The tyranny of the blank page is enough to keep your bum firmly on that seat and your fingers curled in readiness.

This mountain I must climb. Some words have arrived to drive you. But they are not exactly the ones you were looking for on this day when you set out to write about “Missing Bodies”. They are the words of a song you know well. You sing them out loud trying to get to the title of the song. The artist’s name comes first: “Foreigner”. Ah, yes, the song is called I Want To Know What Love Is.

Now why am I singing instead of writing?

Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain still remains
Within the sound of silence

This is not darkness, it’s distraction. It’s the writers best friend. Travelling down rabbit holes that may have no value to day, but some day, some year, why wouldn’t I write about “Foreigner” and Simon and Garfunkel singing The Sound of Silence?

Let me stand up and …

NO. Sit still.

Clear your head.

Write.

You have done this before.

You can do it again.

Even if you are one of those anointed ones that the muse visits at 3 a.m. with words, nay, paragraphs in hand, willing you to get out of bed, daring you to find paper and pen, or phone and the Notes App, writing is still something you talk yourself into completing. But you don’t need to talk to yourself harshly. With disapproval. You can coax yourself. Play something soft to ease you in. Soften the tone of your internal monologue. Profess faith in the process, in the poet that you are (trying to become).

The Body of Writing, The Writing Body

How do you organize your body to sustain writing?

Some people say that finding a physical exercise where you exert your body for fitness and/or relaxation creates a valuable parallel for stretching your mind to write. You run 5k in the evening and write 5,000 words through the night. You swim 40 laps and write for 8 hours non-stop. You sit still for 6 hours, writing, because you did Pilates; stretched for a long quiet hour.

You do need to do this because, as you grow older writing can be rough on your back, your shoulders, your wrists. Ask me about it! Massaging a sore shoulder is now done in tandem with placing a comma, or with starting a new sentence. Posture needs as much nurturing as paragraphing.

How else do writers train for their marathons? Intellectually. Writers are readers. We read as much as we write. We read to do research, to find answers or clues. We read what others have written to find courage, to learn the craft, to draw inspiration.

Where else do we find inspiration; or fuel to power an idea? In regulating our emotions. Some find that cooking prepares them well for writing. Some need a soundtrack of jazz music, or rhumba rhythms. Others work in absolute silence, so they must always find that quiet spot, or wait for the still of the night.

Perhaps it is a particular kind of T-shirt and track-suit bottom that you wear to write— university merchandise from wherever it was you last gave a lecture, or it’s the hoodie from the last Book Festival you attended. You work with this kit as some kind of uniform that assures you that you do belong to the community of dream-chasers called writers. Or maybe you write in pyjamas, so that no-one walk into your writing and convince you to leave the house to attend Nani’s wedding.

There are those who find clarity of thought in water. Words come, words get clearer, only when they are with or in water. Washing dishes, taking a shower, swimming. Where is the App that allows you to swim and write? The anxiety of wondering whether the words will hang onto wet swimming googles once you leave the pool! Do I count my laps, or should I just focus on reciting that impeccable phrasing that my hand swept up as I completed the backstroke lap? Oh!

Call it a ritual cleansing of words. And to this ritual, those who fish words in water likely add the superstition of never hitting “Send” on a piece of writing until they step out of the shower. Dripping, gripping towel and slippery edits in hand they go to the desktop. Edits that were carried to them by the fresh-smelling soapsuds whose scent still hangs in the air are quickly thrown in. How fresh! New words that were illuminated by the shard of water hitting the tiles now sit in their place, on the page.

For others, words hang on trees. They pluck them outside in nature, walking amongst the birds and stepping over roots and rocks.

The Practice of Writing

The words have come; you are writing. You jot down an outline in your notebook. Once it is crystal clear you move to the desktop, never a laptop, to flesh out the paragraphs. That’s what works for you. For someone else the notebook is not a friend. They are straight to laptop kinda writers. They sit at their favourite restaurant, body doubling with their Bestie and start typing away, the steaming hot mugs of dawa blowing words straight into their faces.

There is a word missing. Do you stop to hunt it down in a dictionary or from the pool of steaming tea in the mug at your desk? What if you stop and the train of thought leaves the station, evaporates?

There is a hack. You know there is a particular word you need but its hiding in plain sight, on the tip of your tongue. Throw in XXXXXX highlight it in yellow, write on. That missing word will come to you, like the witch that it is, at 3 a.m. Or at dawn, in the shower. Through the water, that sacred carrier of worlds from beyond.

Maybe that word won’t come until you are back at your desk reading through yesterday’s marathon as a warm-up for today’s stretch of 2,000 words or the stretch of 4 hours of writing per day. That’s the target you gave yourself. 2,000 words a day. Or maybe you chose 4 uninterrupted hours of writing, every day. Whether you write them at 6 a.m. or start at 2 p.m. or only approach your desk at 11 p.m. when the whole household is asleep: 2,000 words a day. Or 4 straight hours of writing. You are learning to keep promises to yourself. Only you can account for what you does.

It’s a marathon so pace matters. Knowing when to jog, when to slow down, when to stop. Stopping on a downward slope makes sense. Stopping when there is momentum, when ideas for where to start tomorrow are flowing freely, as if they are running downhill.

Stopping when the well of ideas has dried up makes sitting down tomorrow, or after dinner, harder. Feeling stuck, searching past a cul de sac is not the best reason to come back. In that pencil-chewing moment you don’t stand up and go to the mall. You stay. You stare at the page. You stay until the path opens up, and you only stop when it bends and starts to go downhill.

And then there are moments when you must refuse to stop. When you write about trauma, confronting it, and write through blinding tears, tight chest, the mucus running down your nose and past your mouth. You write anyway because only writing will ease the pain of whatever violence you are (re)visiting.

Draft 1.0 is done.

Now what?

Rest?

Submit at once? No. Never.

All writing is rewriting. Draft 1.0 might eventually become Draft 8.0 and then, Final Draft. And maybe it won’t even get to Final Draft until you have parceled out parts of that writing, or all of it in its entirety, to a trusted friend or a professional editor.

In this calling called writing, practice never makes perfect, it only builds consistency. Practice makes writing a habit in the same way that showering daily is a habit.

So you step out of the shower, throw in five final edits while still standing in your towel, un-moisturised. You will hit “Send” only after you are dressed. Or maybe you just let the towel drop. You are now down to your barest self, your soul poured out on paper. Your puff your chest out slightly to cushion your heart against the reception of critics, hacks, haters and even those admirers who flatter you into complacency. Your bare chest is also your shield. This way, with nothing on and with nothing more to give to this effort, you hit “Send.”

Out loud you tell yourself: the only good book is a finished book.

Do you feel triumphant? No. You entertain some relief because a monkey that has sat on your back, visiting your dreams and haunting your daily walk, has finally flown away. And then you start to overthink, to unravel, to fret. You call a friend. You get dressed. You walk with your head held high because, whatever happens now, you did it!

Coming Back

You have been detached, you have been in a liminal space, now you must perform the final aspect of ritual: re-entering society wearing your new status on your shoulder: Writer. Completed manuscript; published essay. So now what?

Rest is important. How you take your mind completely off the writing you have just done is part of the ritual of writing. For it is in this season of lying fallow that “new ideas marinate”, as one of my daughters likes to say. So be still, you are not lazy. Take a walk. Go to a party. Sit alone at a café. Knit your niece a scarf. Watch mindless TV at 9 a.m. Binge on a compelling Netflix series, all 8 seasons of it. Play football. Watch football.

Promote your work, attend interviews, engage your readers, read the reviews. Or not. Didn’t Roland Barthes pronounce “The Death of the Author” ? You have said all you had to say. Your job wasn’t to finish a debate; it was to introduce it. Who gave me this wisdom? Ah yes, my other Ph.D supervisor. Such liberating words. There are consequences to your writing but arguing with people all day about what you meant or didn’t mean need not be the work that detains you.

Move on. Read. Unrelated things. Just read. Drown in the words of others to forget the imperfection of your own. If it turns out you were dead wrong about some argument, some phrasing, you can correct it in the second edition of your book. Or in a later essay.

The things that we writers do every day, that we writers should do every day to fuel our writing, are crucial to our wholeness. They are the rituals that initiate, bind, and make us. When we observe these rituals, perfect them, honour them, we don’t ever need to talk about having the discipline to write.

The word ‘discipline’ is painful for many people. It is a trigger of the homes they grew up in where too often they were called lazy. Where harsh words and canes were the order of the day and writing was made to feel like nonsensical indulgence rather than honourable work that can illuminate the world, even if it doesn’t pay to keep the lights on at home.

And for those of us who are postcolonials the word ‘discipline’ and all other words of command, control, and enforcement raise the rebellious spirit of our ancestors. As postcolonials, and/or as children of trauma, we find the very idea of discipline, the word itself, too stiff, too colonial. Writing isn’t confinement. Writing is an act of unencumbered exploration. Dreams. Designs. Pursuits. Freedom.

So no, ‘discipline’ will not do. What we must seek, and celebrate, is our respective rituals of writing. Our rituals invite us into the work. They ready us, they steady us, they usher us in, to communion with words— into communion with words.

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