31/6 The Writer's Life

 Before leaving the school yesterday evening, some of my students followed me into the teacher's room. While I asked my colleagues to translate a Korean word, one of my students discovered the small pocket in my khaki backpack and pulled out some bright orange business cards. A melee of grabbing ensued, which I didn't try to stop. I have at least 900 more. The cards describe me as a Writer (first and foremost), Teacher, and Triathlete. That's intended more as a definition of identity than anything else. Am I likely to find work as a professional triathlete?

I turned down an invitation to a birthday party last night in favor of writing a business concept for a contact closely linked to the billionaire, Mark Shuttleworth, the South African entrepreneur who became the world's second space tourist. I inserted a logo at the top of the page, and then blew up and embedded the logo as a watermark on the document I was producing.
Research, to back up ideas and insights, can add hours to a work in progress. Google facilitates quicker and easier access to useful material than writer's have ever had before.
In the early hours of the morning I received an email from a magazine editor asking me to look at his edits to an article I wrote. By 12am I was still awake, and still working.
Outside the sun was sparkling, the morning seemed unusually crisp. After two phone calls I found a pillow, until the bleating phone dislodged me at 5pm. A friend of mine was in town and wanted to know what I was doing.
"Sleeping," I said.
I offered to meet him for dinner in a few more hours, but a few more hours was too late for him, so we arranged to meet again later in the month.
So my last 24 hours has been one person in one room, tapping keys on a keyboard and sleeping. It's a lonely life, but I choose it because the ideas are compelling, the visions are exciting, the conversation, above all, meaningful.

There is a payoff for all this suffering. It's at the end of a very long road, but a good writer can work anywhere in the world, and most countries are happy to provide VISAS for writer's an artists. Writing and art, you see, when it's original, is an act of creation. It brings value and resources to the community it serves, and sometimes the greatest legacy of art is that it inspires our imaginations. The best art, whether written or painted, allows us to focus not only on our memories but on our dreams, and on the dreamweaving magic in the universe that exists around us right now.

The implications of the Writer's life are not always appreciated by people aspiring to be writers. In my experience, a number of people who see themselves as writers or even call themselves 'journalists', should not. You either are or you aren't. A real artist spends a terrific quantity of time fiddling with his craft, and achieving little. It is only after enduring an age of experiments at various forms of expression, that the writer finds his voice, the artist finds his palette. What separates the real artist from the pretenders is, I believe, the willingness to devote all those hours to lonely investigation and earnest searching. To do so again and again, throughout one's life.
It is a rare condition, or even an affliction, to be the real thing. Writing is about suffering; expulcating the writer from his own existence and explicating what's left. That's the craft of writing. Anything else is fanciful and without value.

This means that the writer has to endure dark corridors and loneliness, and hours and hours spent hunched over a key board, running after ideas or straining to reach a slipping-away-thought. If there's an on the job injury writer's suffer from most, I'd guess it's backache. Stiff necks and eyestrain, and headaches, are the runner ups.

For me the simplest reason for writing is to avoid the dull banter of real life, especially in some circles. If talk is cheap, writing is perhaps a little more expensive. And once it's written, as Virginia Woolf herself pointed out, it exists.
From the point of view of the Reader, writing represents an act of kindness, outreach and forgiveness, but also a gentle call for the restoration of respect, meaning and sensibility to our lives and to our world. When it does not, the writing condemns itself, because it will be filled with errors and lack logic and cohesiveness; it will be filled with the writer's own vanity and all of her or his weaknesses.

Conversations with drunk, half drunk, or soon to be drunk people, are an awful waste of time, unless we're in need of lighthearted distraction, or being flippant.
I think it is also the lot of the writer's life to be more intellectually curious and serious than the average person, because the writer perceives the world in details, with distinctive sensitivity, and in high definition, that others do not. This is both blessing and curse: it's being offered a treasure, but no map, and then having to draw one up to a crowded room full of drunks. The gift of writing is a blessing, but the process of imparting it may not be.

Even famous writers have to revert to their lonely windows to draw on the light that reaches into the darkness. They have to turn their backs on warm and cozy company and invitations in order to reflect what is genuine in them.
Writers are like lovers who leave the warm sheets and stirring S in their beds, and plunge themselves into a frigid and dangerous landscape. Except their world is indoors, and the best writers risk death or madness if they expose themselves to these torments for too long.

"The image of the writer as a doomed and sometimes tragic figure, bound to die young, can be backed up by research," Mr. Kaufman wrote in his study, "The Cost of the Muse: Poets Die Young," published in the journal Death Studies in November 2003.

The writers of nonfiction live longer, perhaps because their dedication to what is real (as opposed to writing dreams about what is real, or dreams about dreams)can bring about a more practical and affirming existence.

I have consciously dedicated myself to writing this year, and I have sacrificed the high levels of fitness that carried me through the Ironman. That is lost, but it can be recovered.
At the end of the year I will have two articles published in a tangible magazine. One is a travel piece (on Thailand) and the other bears the important implications of Peak Oil. That is more valuable to me than a hangover, or the empty echo of a drunk voice in a dark alley.