Fighting Writing

By Tara Saldanha

Writing and I have had a love-hate relationship from the beginning. My earliest attempts at authorship saw me squirrel away several half-used school notebooks and use them for my random jottings. They were not all random, however. There were a few overambitious attempts at novel writing. I’m sure I have the first draft of a novel about a time travelling pair of twins hidden in the back of my underwear drawer; I can’t quite place where the one about the seed bunkers that were built to tide the human race through a famine in some dystopic future went.

What I do remember, though, is never completing any of these. I always got bored, ran out of ideas or my scribbles got discovered by someone who laughed so hard I sheepishly gave up. From then on, I saved my poems in a secret file on our family computer under some innocuous name. Over the years I even managed to make a small compilation of my Nana’s stories. I entered poetry competitions, got roped into school essay events, and was always the scapegoat who wrote those tiresome national day speeches.

After a while though, writing no longer held the same fascination. It became a chore.  Maybe I just got lazy. I dreaded those essay-like questions in examination papers. Even though I knew what to write, it took extra mental effort to get it down on paper. Creative writing assignments became and still remain a thing of dread.

Ironically though, once it’s done, I love what I’ve written. I read back through the sentences, going over phrases in my head, making them come to life over and over, wondering how I had ever come up with them. I face a barrage of people telling me I should write more. In an effort to explore my hidden writer more completely I started up a blog which quickly ran dry. I realized, however, that I work best under pressure, when work is presented to me and I’m told, “Write!”

I hope, one day, to author a book. I have the perfect phrases coined. I regularly stare open mouthed at people on public buses while trying to decide how I’d describe them in my book. I’ve even expressed my book writing dreams to people besides myself. I just hope I’m not too lazy to follow through.