A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish. —W. H Auden
AT A GLANCE
The writer is cursed, yes he is. He has been sentenced to a life of daydreaming in a world, where “Gising(wake up)!” translates to “Get off your lazy ass and do something.”
But as a writer you cannot help it. You have to do it. It is in daydreams that your stories originate and then percolate and that’s also where you initially string the words needed to express them. In fact, you can write an entire article or flash fiction in your head. Meanwhile, even your own mother will snap her fingers in your face because “Hey, don’t you want to go out there and make friends? Play basketball or patintero or something.” Either that or you’re jolted out of your reveries and told to make your bed or wash the dishes or sweep the floor or do any chore because you just can’t stare out of the window all day.
Sometimes, you walk down the street from school and mouth words you invent out of imagined conversations. And someone catches you doing it as you cross their path and they either give you a puzzled look or they flat out tell you you’re a lunatic, talking to yourself like that.
It’s not far out for others to decide for you who you are. It’s not hard to believe their accusations that you are lazy when you know you can spend hours just looking up at the sky. It’s not hard to believe their accusations that you are crazy when you spend the weekend reading the medical encyclopedia and then the following week feeling all the symptoms. Yikes, I went through that myself and maybe I should thank my lucky stars that, just as I was halfway through the volume on mental disorders, my grandmother decided to keep the encyclopedia away from me, under lock and key.
Writing is hard enough, but it’s even harder that so few understand it, not even those who generously praise you for your gift of words. Yes, maybe they do consider it an art form to write well, but not as much as they value paintings or sculpture or even fashion. They think it’s easy because you don’t really need that much to write—just pen and paper and, well, a whole lifetime spent to fill the paper with something magical or extraordinary or well done.
As a young person growing up with dreams of writing, it is almost an instinct to keenly observe the world around you and chances are you will come off weird. “He gives me the creeps,” whisper your classmates. “When he looks at you, it’s like he stares.” What they do not know is that you might be checking them out in case one of them will figure in a future novel. Not really. In the eye of a writer, everything is a potential story and you do not want to miss out on the details.
If you are gregarious, instead of shy, which many writers are before they find their voices or come to terms with the passion pre-ordained for them, it’s likely you will be quite the storyteller, inventing encounters or experiences and exaggerating everything for maximum impact. In prep school, I regaled my classmates with a movie I didn’t see, a movie that didn’t exist, about a science experiment gone wrong that made itself to the oceans and made giants of squids and shrimp and octopi, as well as a sperm whale that threatened to be bigger than earth. I don’t know why I lied. I guess it was more believable as a movie than as a figment of my imagination. But I was so terrified when a classmate said his father couldn’t find the movie.
It’s not easy growing up to be a writer, unless maybe your parents were fictionists or National Artists for Literature. Or even then, it’s not impossible you will simply stay in their shadows. Otherwise, you might just worry them when you move your writing desk to the top of the stairs so you can write with the steep stairs behind you and you can imagine something ghastly creeping up on you as you write. I did that a couple of times, convinced that I wrote better when I was scared.
So you live your life like that, much of it in your head, up in the clouds, among the stars, and of course between the covers of a thousand and one books. And then, at last, you become a writer and in order to do what you love to do, which is writing, you realize you have to be everything you did not practice to be—you have to be socially charming, you have to be marketing-savvy, you have to wean yourself off your dependence on inspiration because the deadline trumps it, you have to keep your ears on the ground rather than in tune with the song of the muses. Alas, writing isn’t only about pounding on the keys of your writing instrument. Imagination isn’t the only world you ought to inhabit; real life, too, especially real life.
Yet, you still need some kind of schizophrenia, some kind of madness, especially if you are a fictionist or a portraitist or a journalist. Imagine all the shoes you ought to put yourself in to write your stories. Imagine how much time you need to cover, from past to present to the future, near or distant, imminent or improbable.
It does take a little madness to be a writer.
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