SATURDAY, 6 AUGUST 2022
Writing is prayer/To write is to pray.
(When I write, I believe someone will read it. When millions of people pray, they believe someone will hear it.)
MONDAY, 3 OCTOBER 2022
I am translating the last of the Personal Agenda pieces that I didn’t translate ten years ago. It brought me in close contact again with questions I wrestled with twenty years ago: What should I do with my life? What type of adult life do I want, or need, to develop for myself? And: Should I leave Taiwan on Thursday, 4 March 2004?
Being able to spend hours every day on writing projects was an important consideration in my decision-making process. It was an important factor in 2001 when I was developing ideas about what type of adult life I wanted to lead, and it was an important consideration when I had to decide in the last months of 2003 and the first two months of 2004 whether I was going to go back to South Africa with all my earthly possessions in tow.
As I’ve worked on publishing my writing over the last decade, I often wondered why I never wrote more. One sometimes hears of so-called prolific writers who’ve produced dozens of novels, several collections of short stories, articles, poems, and a few plays to boot. My average for the last ten to fifteen years has been about 20,000 words per year (not counting pieces that I consider unpublishable).
However, if I look at months like September 2003 and February 2004, I see that I wrote as much in those months as I would later write over the course of a whole year. How does that work?! And why couldn’t I keep it up?
Fact is, I only write when I have something to say. If I don’t want to say something specifically, there’s no inspiration.
I also wrote in the February 2004 piece, “Slave to the word”, “I believe I’ll slide into a bottomless depression if I write less.” I have also mentioned many times over the years that I am at my happiest when I’m working on some piece of writing. As the months of September 2003 and February 2004 made clear, writing is a mechanism that helps me to survive. That’s why I’ve never put much effort into marketing my writing, and why I’ve never put much effort into trying to monetize it.
Writing helps me make sense of things. And it has always been a good way to work out solutions to dilemmas in the absence of people with whom I could talk about certain matters, or with whom I could discuss things as much as I deemed necessary.
To summarise: I only write when I need to write. I write to survive.
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