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The Evaluative Midterm Essay: What is writing and who is the writer?

“Writing produces anxiety. Looking inside myself and my experience, looking at my conflicts, engenders anxiety in me. Being a writer feels very much like … being queer – a lot of squirming, coming up against all sorts of walls. Or its opposite: nothing defined or definite, a boundless, floating state of limbo where I kick my heels, brood, percolate, hibernate, and wait for something to happen… To write, to be a writer, I have to trust and believe in myself as a speaker – as a voice for the images… I cannot separate my writing from any part of my life, it is all one.” -- Gloria Anzaldua

How does one answer a question that wants to define something one has always shirked from defining? Just as I have never wanted to set parameters on ideas such as love, or life, or dreams, so have I tried never to contain what writing (and consequently who the writer) may or may not be.

But the desire for a Masteral degree is strong. I shall try.

First of all, let me say that writing is not an easy task. It shouldn’t be. If it were easy I probably wouldn’t have liked it so much, and it wouldn’t be as beautiful as it sometimes is. Of course, I’m not talking about casual writing – journal writing, or even essays and features. Those kinds of writing are straightforward: merely the touch of pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and a voice that flows.

The kind of writing I find hard is the kind of writing that translates into “art”. It’s the kind of writing that I feel must be a synthesis of inner voice (soul), inspiration (luck, really), and experience (the world).

How do I explain?

Writing is as moody as the artist that takes it upon herself. It’s a fever that rises and drops unpredictably. It’s creating a bend in time and space to house a writer’s own reality. Realities. It is re-shaping dreams to fit configurations the rest of the world can understand.

It’s a portal to a hundred emotions that you must hold in the palms of your hands, relentlessly. It’s living on a precipice, walking on a tightrope, dangling on a string. It’s not just merely words on paper. It’s a slow revelation of the soul. A baring of who the writer is, stripped of the tangibles. It’s collecting truths from the oddest places, and harvesting it where it is least likely to grow.

Writing is never just a string of words arranged in a beautiful pattern. Writing must be alive. Writing must invite, nay, suck a person in. And to do that, a writer must juggle being in a constant quest, a constant wait, and a constant shifting of the ground.

It’s being master and slave, creator and created, in heaven and hell all at once. It’s a constant going inside one’s self – to the core. It’s staring at your reflection in God’s mirror, staring at things about you that you may or may not want to see.

It’s clutching inspiration and experience, fearfully -- but only with the fear of those who aren’t afraid of fear. Because the writer knows that they’ve melded into a single bomb, just on the verge of explosion. And the writer knows that she will have to tease and probe it. She is already mentally and emotionally steeling herself for the blast.

Writing is a “selfish” occupation. I don’t think a writer ever writes of “another”. At least not totally. I think that’s virtually impossible. A writer writes from within, from the interior, behind the masks. There are experiences that set if off – a metaphor, a little girl’s story, the way a dog sits by the rug -- but a writer always needs to revert back to what’s inside.

Because the writer writes from what she knows, what she can touch and feel, what is real to her self. I don’t mean memoirs or autobiographies. I mean a self that is more fundamental than that. I can write about prostitutes without having sold my body, I can write from the perspective of a man without being a man. And they can all still be valid, still be written from within, still be honest, still be of “myself”.

If the experience that inspires me is outside of my reality, then I must ingest that experience and bring it inside. I must match every fiber of that experience with my own, sorrow for sorrow, tear for tear, smile for smile. Until the experience becomes part of who I am. And this is where the difficulty sets in. Writers must look at themselves from inside constantly. They must dive into secret thoughts and fears and all those things their minds would rather hide in folds and folds of dark unconscious. It’s like swimming in your own insanity (that has drunk from other insanities) on a regular basis -- imagination.

And the writer is not afraid of being wrong. Of being mistaken. She’s not afraid of filling the gaps with dreams, and making pillars out of thoughts. She knows that reality doesn’t have a monopoly on truth.

She knows she must cross the un-crossable lines. She knows she must be adept at switching from one world to the next, because every writer inadvertently straddles multiple worlds: the one we all live in, and the ones that live in us. A writer is essentially schizophrenic. A writer is a god navigating through her own creation/s, while being a slave in someone else’s.

Writing is a sanctuary. Oftentimes it’s a costly sanctuary to keep (we have heard writers paying with the loss of freedom, loss of sanity, loss of everything they hold dear), but I think most writers will agree that it’s usually worth the price.

Personally, I enjoy this creativity of writing. I like creating my own “realities”, I like having the power to conjure alternate universes. It’s an expression of who I am, true, but it is also infinitely more than that, because it’s also an expression of every other person that I can be. It’s a me divided and multiplied into all these other worlds.

And I find irresistible how other people can discover themselves traversing these other worlds as well. It is an affirmation of my humanity, of humanity in general, and that we are, in fact, “spawned from similar souls” (Anzaldua, p. 85).

It’s amazing how universality can be anchored on the specific. How so many other people’s thoughts can be a reflection of my own – without invalidating my uniqueness.

In the end, writing is defined by the writer. If it is honest, then it is an inimitable experience, different as the writers themselves are different, resulting in works that are necessarily diverse.

In the end, the writer is the keeper of another world, where she is a maker of even more worlds.

In the end these definitions are only mine, from only my mind, from only my universe, and though I’ve been honest, I can always be wrong.