Writing Professionally, is a Personal Affair
I identify myself as a writer, one who writes to express. Quite a times, I get asked, Are you a professional writer? And I dont have an answer to that.
What is a profession for a writer or an artist. They do what they love to do and they chase their happiness in their work. Not every painter is a Piccasso or MF hussain but maybe deep inside, the internal satisfaction of Hussain and that of a not so very successful obscure painter would stil be the same, without much of a difference.
Is writing my profession! My mother is a homemaker, and she never worked outside the home. She raised us, took care of the family.
Is she a professional mother?
There are things in life, we do out of love. Writing to me is a mix of love and addiction. I am used to expressing and in a lonely world, writing is the pure form of talking to yourself, with the beats of keystrokes in the background. The keyboard is like your spouse, who nods with a takatakataka, to every single character you have to say. When you are done with writing, it feels like a post-coital session, where you are at peace with yourself, feeling less lonely, much loved and listened to.
I write everyday but if you google my name, you would not find many works of mine out there. Well, I havent dared to put them out in the volume I write, they are in cloud, saved and backed up properly but the form they will come out is yet to be decided. With great difficulty I could manage to compile around a hundred of my poems, to be produced as a book soon. Once in a blue moon I get phone calls from people looking for scripts or screenplays. They know that I have a bank of stories and I work on my scripts time to time but what they dont know is that I write for my pleasure, to drown myself in my own thoughts rather than reading someone else’s book. In writing I have found intellectual masturbation and verbal orgasm and the freedom to wander. I wander from story to story, from one work to another, hopping branches like a monkey, never fixed on a tree for long but very much inside the jungle. For people who know me, this is perhaps my biggest problem. One even told me that Dhirubhai Ambani had said that if you start something, finish it off anyhow, and that should be a life rule. I looked for the number of books written by Dhirubhai Ambani and could find none. Dhirubhai never wrote a book, and what he said could hold true for everything else in the world but not for writing. In my primary school, one of my literature teacher had told us the writing styles of great poets, who would have scores of incomplete work, which they would revisit later to finish it up. Writing is a luxurious job, and my paper is my kingdom, that kingdom I have the freedom to burn, even if that would mean burning myself.
I write what I feel, I feel what I think. To think I need that zone where I can focus on a particular script or subject. To do that, I need to stop bothering about the bills I have to pay, and to have that I have to be paid. No one offered me money, or even a contract assuring me of giving me money to write. No one stopped me from wandering in my own kingdom, but everyone did have a knowledge on how to be a disciplined writer. Writing aint a fucking job, its a commitment stronger than marriage. And when a writer chooses to keep his work incomplete, the sole choice is that he has already achieved what he wanted to, from that piece. Writing if at all a profession, is intensely personal.
Pay me to buy my disipline, the only discipline I know is to write. I might write as per someone else’s requirements, I might not.
