Sunday, October 21, 2012

What Do Writers Do?


When you pick up your pen to write, what thoughts dance to the edge of your mind? When you sit to think on paper, what ideas drive your muse? What devils you?

In writing, a ransacking of the faculty is set in motion like the turning out of pockets of a school kid would reveal what s/he’s been up to. It’s an adventure into the still small things that run deep. Because a writer is the freak who would not let sleeping dogs lie.

Sometimes, a writer may present answers to nagging issues. But, much of the time, writers raise dusts that are impossible to still. They are literary mischief-makers with a knack for exhuming best forgotten matters. It is the writer’s business to guarantee the dust does not settle on a matter.

Writers seemingly crave for knowledge that’s never theirs to attain. Desecrating history’s sarcophagus like Time’s own tomb raiders yet, trying their very best to be quiet about the whole subject (as if that was possible). As time goes by, they become fairly successful at keeping the peace like woodpeckers in a forest of silence boring deep circlets into the trunk of century old trees. And in a manner similar to these species of avian activities, always taking quick peeks between pecks, glances that were they words could mean, ‘Am I disturbing the peace, now?’ or ‘Am I prodding a raw nerve, yet?’

I don’t need to draw you a picture, do I? Writing is a gift. A blessing as well as a curse. Not if you’re Sylvia Plath who predicted her own demise in her poetry and effectively closed that chapter. Taking her own life.

Writing is also savage pleasure. A trespassing if you like that word better. A mending of broken links and a crossing of boundaries, unlocking of painful memories, stripping it right down to its birth suit and taking heart-wrenching moments to nibble at minutiae.

This obsessive streak has a way of turning on the writer. Stephen King said he wrote his novel, The Shining out of a personal simple phobia that he might harm his own kids. (Owing to his state of mind at that time.) Just because writers ain’t marching up and down blowing their own whistle doesn’t make their job any less quiet than the last minutes of new year’s eve.

The pen is louder than the boom of a nuke on impact. What’s more, the scenes are reenacted through all generations every time a reader cuts into the meat of the words. The power at the fingertips of a writer pushes the lip of eternity. Chew on that for a minute. And you might come to grasps with what could possibly be the greatest power available to wo/men on earth.

Keep your pen bleeding.


Akpan




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