Why I quit trying to be a writer...

A New Year, a reminder to us all that time is slipping away and that our futures are contracting at a rate that no amount of pleading can change. Around the world people have been spurred on by this reminder to redouble their efforts to bring new meaning and substance to their lives. This year will be different, a year of new starts to put all other years of new starts in the shade. Gym memberships burgeon, web logs are updated with new fervour and purpose, cigarettes are discarded, booze locked away (made seemingly obsolete by the sudden arrival of fruit juices), high-fat foods are rejected as being so much part of a former life, a life of indulgence and low aspirations, now left firmly behind in 2007. And aspirant writers commit themselves once more to the mantra to “write, write, write”. Success will surely come.

Yet we all know from experience that by February, maybe March, things will have slipped a bit, compromises will have been made, excuses given. Our true nature will come through and wipe away the excrescences of our good intentions, intentions that never sat well with who we truly were. The trouble with making these resolutions of self-improvement, you see, is that they tend to be inspired by a picture of how we would like to be, and most particularly how we would like others to see us, rather than pay heed to the quiddity of who we are.

I have a professed wish to be a writer. I tell myself, regularly, that to be a writer is simple all you need to do is write. If you are habitually writing, then you are a writer. If you are not, then you will never be one – it was never part your nascent potential. I am, of course, not making any distinction here between a good writer and a bad one. These are quality judgements that are largely irrelevant in distinguishing the writer from the non-writer. But, as I say, I know what it takes to be a writer and I have this stated aim to be one. What could be simpler, how could I possibly fail?

Well I think the answer to this one lies in the fact that I don’t, by my nature, find writing easy or, if I am to be truthful, very enjoyable. I’m never racing to the keyboard or notebook desperate to get an idea down; I never drag myself unwillingly from my computer realising that, in my artistic fervour, hours have flown by and I’ve forgotten to eat or drink to a degree that borders on the life-threatening. In fact I will do almost anything that will get me out of writing, however banal and vacuous it is (with perhaps the exception of watching television). Even when I can coax my unwilling self into opening the word processor I will spend hours rereading and tweaking old unfinished stories rather than finishing any of them or writing anything fresh. I do not find the process of writing habit-forming and this is why I gave up on the aspiration to become a writer.

To go back to the theme with which I started, for a moment, the theme of resolutions to change and why they commonly flounder. Many of the problems seem to stem from the fact that unless the change results in habit-forming behaviour, we will quickly revert back to our old ways, our old habits – because, to paraphrase Aristotle to make an existential point, we are what we habitually do. The gym may seem to promise increased health (and the annual subscription fee adequate encouragement to keep going) but unless we can reconfigure our subconscious mind (not the conscious mind where we formulate our plans and good intentions) to desire gym attendance in and of itself, we will find ourselves missing sessions with greater regularity and for more trivial reasons, we will write off the sunk expense of the membership fee as yesterday’s pecuniary problem. We never do get any fitter. We give up trying until another year swings round and makes us think about what we would like to be.

Of course we can all think of examples of people (perhaps, god forbid, even ourselves) who have made real changes to their lives, made steps towards being more like the person that they aspire to be (non-smoking, healthy, athletic, intelligent, witty and creative or whatever). I think the point I’m trying to make, in my usual long-winded way, is that those who succeed in this are tapping into something that is part of their nascent potential and it is often founded on something more solid than the whimsical fact that another year has crept up on them. If all your intentions are founded merely on the fact that it is a new year then they will fail. A new year is not, in itself, a compelling enough reason to change – there will, after all, be another one along shortly. There needs to be something more. If someone you have loved dies of lung cancer you may find that to be compelling enough to give up smoking in a way that no New Year will ever be, and you will most likely not give up through fear (you always knew the risks and consequences) but out of the pain of lost love and respect for the departed. Perhaps.

So for me to be a writer I need, it would seem, two things to allow me to “write, write, write”. The first is some way of making the act of writing more habit forming and the second is to have some compelling reason to write rather than do anything else. The former, I theorise, is something that is more a product of my psychological makeup and not something that I can really influence directly. The latter is something that has eluded me from almost the very moment the aspiration to write grabbed me. There is always something different to do. Not something better to do, in fact it is invariably worse, just something that is more me than I care to recognise.

So I decide to concern myself less with the theoretical question of how to become a writer and look to the more practical one which is, why did I think I wanted to be a writer in the first place?

The dank, caliginous corridors of Tartarus Central echo once more to the sound of my footsteps as I try to find some way forward. I begin to question whether there really is anywhere out of here at all. A step in one direction could represent progress or retreat or it could be entirely neutral in that there really is no way forward and there really is no way back, just circles and cycles like the Earth around the Sun.