I don’t talk much about writing for I genuinely feel I don’t have much to say about it. However, the one thought that has reverberated for the past half-year or so is of legacy. I’ve thought a lot of the greats. The one thing I’ve learnt is that the act’s truth is in recording an experience as honestly and deliberately as you can.
You must carefully select to leave some details out and exaggerate some others to make your point. That is true, however, if and only if what it made you feel was good. If it were something otherwise, your first instinct would almost always be to share your pain with the world, but that is the easy way out. It takes strength to carve out beauty out of something that devastates you.
When an event akin to a knife twists in your gut, you must also look at the carvings on it, and wonder about the hands that could’ve made such intricate etchings, and to find joy that this particular knife was the one that was used. It takes real character and an insane effort to see that smidge of sunlight when all you can see is the gloom and darkness. That was the job.
It is your job as an artist, any art that may be, to make sure you see past the terrible, and somehow, manage to share what you need to. It is the easiest thing to bellow in pain. Since the human experience expects you to share it, your job is to make it better. If you don’t find light, make it. Make others feel the honesty of your hurt, but also the hope that you’ll make it out.
I’ve thought a lot about the greats, and I know that I’m not going to be a sad drunk or die blowing my last verse into a shotgun. Art, especially if you honestly pursue your own, can engulf you into what you feel. In my understanding, I’ve realised where most artists erred.
My writing was going to be about the every day. I didn’t want to change the world. I wanted to tell you that I, too, feel the same things as you. I wanted to tell you that if I can make it out, every day, so can you. It would be about this odd thing we called life. But, I would go a step further. I was going to find beauty and joy in everything, even the worst of them all, and I was going to write about it: one word at a time.