What Doesn’t Kill You? (On Writing)
30 Jan 2024
What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger comes from an aphorism of the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It has been translated into English and quoted in several variations, but is generally used as an affirmation of resilience. — Dictionary.com
It is natural for every person who practices art or any form of creative endeavour to question — why am I doing this? I think in almost all aspects of life, this existential question looms over everyone every now and then and it must. It is a good one at times because it makes us think, and that question lets us create more art out of the confusion and our inability to have no answer or meaning to it. I know how it manifests and materializes in writing, like I’m writing this piece, and surely for other forms of art, it is pretty different and also different for different people.
I’m currently reading The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri and quite liking the book so far. What I am admiring the most in the book is the style of writing. Every sentence is progressing into the story, and every paragraph has got beautiful metaphors as well as descriptions of the surroundings and the life that’s happening around the book. In fact, I read about 100 pages in the last 24 hours as I am writing this piece.
There’s a character in the book who during his childhood loves his name and later hates it. He’s named after the last name of a Russian writer, Nikolai Gogol. Why, you ask? I won’t answer that as it is revealed midway very beautifully in the book, and I don’t want to spoil that, but you can surely guess that Bengalis love their Russians (not my words, Jhumpa says this in the book).
Now, let’s see the description of our fellow Nikolai Gogol in the book:
“Not your ordinary guy, Nikolai Gogol,” Mr. Lawson says. “He is celebrated today as one of Russia’s most brilliant writers. But during his life he was understood by no one, least of all himself. One might say he typified the phrase ‘eccentric ge- nius.’ Gogol’s life, in a nutshell, was a steady decline into mad- ness. The writer Ivan Turgenev described him as an intelligent, queer, and sickly creature. He was reputed to be a hypochon- driac and a deeply paranoid, frustrated man. He was, in addi- tion, by all accounts, morbidly melancholic, given to fits of se- vere depression. He had trouble making friends. He never married, fathered no children. It’s commonly believed he died a virgin.”
That’s not just the plight of our beloved writer Mr. Gogol, but folks like Nietzsche, Proust, Hemingway, and many others also faced lots of suffering in their lives. So can we conclude that greatness, at least in the art of writing, emerges from a deep internal struggle, sufferings and the miseries of life? I wonder if these people had not faced these problems combined with their ability and inability to deal with them, would they have been able to create their wonderful works? Maybe not. How I see it is — they took their problems, felt them, and maybe tried to solve them through their writing — writing therapy much?
Every new year, there’s a fresh trend that does the rounds of new year resolutions for many people — for 2024, the trend seems to be sensitivity and depth (or this could just be me and survivorship bias at work). I say this because I’ve seen multiple posts talking about the depth at which people understand you, converse with you, and meet you.
There’s one more post I saw went like “people write because others fail to understand them, their depth and perhaps also because others don’t listen to them”. Surely, one potential answer to the existential question with which we start this piece.
As Proust says — an artist when engaged with his art is looking at himself when he’s creating that art. I find it true. It is a representation of what and how one felt when they made their art at that point of time in their life. It is beautiful.
I also saw an interview of Jhumpa Lahiri in which she says she doesn’t know from where her writing originates. If one were to ask her ‘how to write?’ she won’t have a clear answer and perhaps that’s the answer to the question and must also be an acceptable answer to the question. Stephen King somewhat says the same thing in his book on writing, he adds that one must also equally read a lot when wanting to write and write for life.
There are times when I’ve written my pieces that started with a simple central idea and it only took its shape and form when I actually started to write things down and things just happened along the way. I didn’t exactly know how it would start and I didn’t know how it would end but it just happened; same will be true for this piece, I know, because it’s taking shape as am writing it.
Naval Ravikant says ‘Inspiration is perishable’ and there are moments that hit me with a piece and I can write that whole piece in a single sitting session without losing my focus. This is one such instance, this piece wasn’t planned or was in the pipeline, it just happened due to my musings — my hunger, sleep (it’s almost 1 AM as I write this), phone calls, plans for tomorrow, literally nothing disturbs me as I choose to write and finish this piece this night. Somehow at the end I feel more energetic, like I just woke up after an afternoon nap, mind you the clock is hitting 12:37 AM and I had a pretty hectic day at work and also spent a few hours outside.
In his book, Stephen King explores “how to be great at any form of art” by observing his son learning the violin. His son joins a class for it, and Stephen says he knew his son wouldn’t be the greatest violin player because as soon as the class would be over, the violin would go back in the case and that his son wouldn’t bleed his fingers or spend sleepless nights playing the instrument. In most cases, this struggle for such endeavours is entirely internally motivated and doesn’t need any exterior push. I’m sure we all know how much Candy Crush, Angry Birds, Tetris, Super Mario, or Pac-Man we all played at some point in our lives. Being great at one of those games wasn’t planned; we didn’t need to read any books by James Clear, track our senses and time, or hire an accountability partner to make sure we reached our highest scores or the next level. We simply did it effortlessly with practice, endless repetition, and made our own workarounds (like adjusting phone’s date and time to get more lives to play Candy Crush) so that we did our best in the game.
Similarly, why on earth would someone spend time alone with a blank piece of paper and a pen, lost in their thoughts? Are they mad to do this and do they not have a social life? (The answer is no / very selective in some rare cases). What’s something so complex that they choose to spend their time in this monstrous and lonely activity, putting down their thoughts at a place that will lose its relevance the next day and the few people who’ll read it will hardly remember their names and will get back to their lives a minute after reading their words, and most will not even bother to read it in the first place. The chances of them becoming the next hit writer are meagre but they still do it and for an ideal writer being a best-seller is not the incentive to write and I also wonder how they will handle fame. As Jean-Paul Sartre rejected the Nobel and Legion of Honor, saying as a writer he doesn’t want to be institutionalized, and he is writing for a deeper reason and not to win any honors and prizes, that’s one way to go about it.
My mind has been running with the words of Aanchal Malhotra who I heard live at a literature festival I attended in the city last weekend. She said that she spends her time writing for hours and hours almost every day and when she’s not writing she’s reading or sleeping. Totally sounds like a zombie routine to me.
She has written a book on the India-Pakistan partition that’s woven through the oral history of objects from back in the days. Her hour-long interview at the literature festival was pretty awesome, I loved every second of it and the moderator also did a great job by asking the right questions and he had done his homework going through Aanchal’s social feed and her books.
She talked how writing has changed her over the years. She said how much ‘inward’ she has become because of all the writing and the work that she has to do for writing. Like a connection she feels with herself and her soul and thoughts that is special and emerged only because of writing.
Her work for the book involved interviewing people who witnessed the partition first hand and now they all are quite old. Some people straight up declined to speak (a form of PTSD) with her about the partition — a lady from the audience asked her how she deals with the trauma she gets through the stories she listened and the trauma she ripples again in the minds and souls of these aged folks.
Aanchal said how she has spent time with these thoughts and doesn’t quite have an answer to it and if it has caused her so much trauma since she has to soak in such vibes from the people. Dealing with something like that can be very tough as often there are scenarios of rapes, murders, life-threatening situations and hardly any happy stories. Before one goes to rationalize and write about these stories, one needs to process these stories for themselves first. She said how there a story from 2013 that she only got around to write in the year 2022 as it took her so much time to process it.
It later clicked for me that talking about traumatic incidents is one way of dealing with the traumas and the process of healing. So maybe Aanchal shouldn’t feel guilty about making people feel and experience those traumatic events. All of it resonated with me in many ways and unconsciously or consciously (since I heard what writing did to Aanchal) I feel the same is happening to me due to all the time I spend writing and looking at the world through the lens of my words.
Talking about lenses, like a photographer is always seeing everything around them with the intention of how they’d capture the moment through their camera. Similarly, someone who writes keeps viewing the world around them in terms of how they would express what they see through their words. This applies to an architect, a dentist, a chemist, a capitalist, a conman, or even a philosopher (we’re all philosophers). There’s even a book on this topic called “On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes” by Alexandra Horowitz.
It goes to the extent that one deliberately plans and optimizes situations and social gatherings for the randomness that might inspire writing. And one might also have a muse in their life who’s slightly toxic and causes the protagonist to experience troubled times. If you listen to the dynamics here, even a layman would urge them to break free from such companionship.
‘How would Jane Austen see them? How would Proust see them? How would Shakespeare see them?’ In other words, I’m not just going to look at the world of Shakespeare or Jane Austen through my eyes, I’m going to look at my world through their eyes. — Alain de Botton
This turned out to be one of the posts in which I explored the existential question — why one writes and connected my musings and looming questions with what I had read, heard, or watched. Here’s what I was listening to while writing this piece. As I’ve mentioned, the ~2000 words for this piece were not quite planned; it just happened as I started writing things down. There’s a lot more to write but I need to stop somewhere and end this piece.
How much will this kill me or let me live?
People and works mentioned in this piece:
- The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
- Alain de Botton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jane Austen, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marcel Proust, Naval Ravikant, Nikolai Gogol, Stephen King, William Shakespeare
- Remnants Of A Separation by Aanchal Malhotra
- On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz
Would love to know your thoughts on this piece and thanks for reading. Feel free to comment here or reach out on LinkedIn or Twitter. Stay updated with my new pieces by following on Medium or subscribe via email. A donation will go a long way and will make my day (& life if its significant enough?); always happy to talk about writing and life.
