The best compliment I got from my writing right before this year started was from someone who didn’t even like what I wrote.
“I will never follow you,” a reader said, in the comment section of an article I wrote, “because you never get to the point. But I will give it to you that you are thought provoking,” he also said, and made me feel like I received a compliment.
You see, writing is many things – it is a form of communication, an art, a propaganda tool, a method of self-expression, a means of self-actualisation, a calling, a craft, a discipline, a vanity, a technique of of self-refinement, a job, an ego booster, a grind, a filler that fills the day, an outlet to lash out, a paycheck – and half the time, as a writer, I don’t even know why I write anything at all.
This job doesn’t exactly pay well. There are at least a dozen other things that I can do that will pay twice with half the trouble.
I don’t wake up every day knowing what I will be writing about either. All I know is that every day, in the course of the day, I will check out the news as a matter of habit, and sometimes when I read the news, I will find something that will trigger me to write.
Anyway, that was how it was in the beginning at least. These days, the more that writing has become a job, I don’t even wait for something to trigger me to write. Not infrequently, I will just force myself to write something, just to fill up my quota for the day.
I can’t say that I appreciate most of the things I write either. I don’t regret any of the things I write, mind you – whether it is right or wrong, everything I write was indigenous to my mind – but not regretting something is not the same as appreciating something. As long as I was genuine, I don't regret anything I wrote, even if what I said was harsh or turned out to be wrong. But as for appreciation, this is a hard state to be in. To put it simply, I only appreciate the things that I write, if on some future date, I were to read back what I wrote, and marvel at it as if it was someone else other than me that wrote it. I was just the person whose fingers that was on the keyboard, but the thoughts and words came from somewhere else.
This state however, is not something that I encounter frequently in my writing. I suppose when you have written over 500 articles in a span of less than 2 years just for Newswav alone, naturally, appreciation is not what I have for most of the things that I write.
It doesn't help that most of the things that I write is about politics and politicians either, which honestly speaking, is not something that I think amounts to a hill of bean in this crazy world we live in. I actually would prefer to write about philosophy or psychology, but unfortunately, it is only my writing about politics that manages to find an audience. Everything else I write about is buried in oblivion.
A reader, unfortunately, matters for a writer. You know how they say how you should dance like no one is watching - well, to be honest, while I also believe the best writing is probably done by those who write with only themselves as their audience, but other than Marcus Aurelius, or Eric Hoffer as he waited at the waterfront, and perhaps also J.D Salinger who reputedly chucked most of his writing in a safe without ever publishing any of it till the day he died, I have never heard of a writer who wrote without caring whether they are read or not. If they did, I imagine they would be like Vincent Van Gogh. They would have produced some inspiringly beautiful work, but they probably would have also ended up mad as hatter, depressed as hell and dead before their time.
Although writing to be read, is admittedly, a form of prostitution, what can you do if the truth is that that is who you are. If I have any consolation about this fact at all, it is that although I see my shortcomings, everywhere I turn, I don't feel like I am amongst giants at all.
But although every writer will to a degree, sell themselves to a crowd, for the pathetic desire to have their attention and get paid in the process, if you take away everything else, at its core, a writer is also someone who feels compelled to write simply for the sake of writing itself.
You see, there is always something pregnant in a writer’s mind, and you feel that you have to give birth to what you have in your mind, for the same reason that a pregnant women feels compelled to give birth to a child – you do it because just can’t keep what you have inside you anymore – unless you let it out in to the world, you feel that something inside you will burst out.
Once we give birth to a thought, like every parent, a writer also has hopes that the product of his mind will have its day under the sun.
A parent of a child might hope that their child will become a doctor or an engineer, raise a family and become someone that society will be proud of to call its own. A writer on the other hand, will hope that the thought that he has given birth to, will find at least one other mind to touch, and provoke at least a murmur of thought in it.
Upon that standard, to be told that what I have written has touched at least one mind, even if it is a mind that didn't sound too pleased by how my writing had touched it, was a compliment indeed.
I am not going to lie and say that it doesn’t matter whether anyone likes what I write or appreciates how I have written it. You will also never find me saying that I don’t care if anyone reads what I write or thinks that I have no idea about what I am talking about.
But even if all else is lost, and nothing comes of it, as a writer, if just one person, even with disdain, will bear witness to the fact that the words I have composed have genuinely reverberated in their mind, I will deem myself a success.
With that, I wish to congratulate you, dear readers, for making it through 2024! Here comes 2025! Break a leg!
TheRealNehruism is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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