About Writing II

Read & Reap asks: You may not be a journalist or a professional writer, but don’t you think that everyone can write? What does writing mean to you?

I believe there is a writer in everyone - each life is a novel in itself. What is good or bad is after all subjective - even the best novelist has his or her bad day. Of course, reading more does help, so does writing more.

Writing, to me from as far back as I remember, was about releasing, or expressing one’s thoughts or emotions, or “sketching” an image or a scene - from primary school?

At one point, it was about the actualisation of the language - Gao Xingjian said this - where one obsessively, constantly struggle to find the right word, the right structure and order, till the words seem to lead you on, instead of your emotions or thoughts, or so it seems to me. That’s why some good novels without a proper plot will never make a good movie script, for example Cormac Mccarthy’s The Road.

Then I began to enjoy the process, this tug-of-war between the words and the heart (emotions, that is). Next, I began to appreciate this world in words, to see the beauty of nature and life described in words.

That was when I realised when one falls in love with writing, one in turn falls in love with life.

Or should I say, writing is living itself.

I first wrote about writing here

P.S.: All thanks to Read & Reap.