Helen, do I have to?
I’ve always loved making things that weren’t there before.
In my previous life, which ended when I left Johannesburg to settle in Cape Town in 96, I was a relatively successful painter. In my heart I still paint, and I process the world largely through my eyes. I fantasize about making art again with paint, paper, textures, colour, light and shadow, but I have two novelish works-in-progress which I dare not abandon. If I don’t continue to nurture them, I fear they may shrivel up and die. I wish I could be a painter and a writer at the same time. So far, I haven’t managed to juggle the two.
I’m a creature of extremes. I used to be a furiously fast painter, now I’m a sickeningly slow writer. Perhaps because my first medium, watercolour, demanded speed – take too long and you end up with mud – I’d finish a large painting in a few hours. But I felt vaguely fraudulent. What would it be like, I wondered, to spend years creating a single work of art?
Huh. It’s harrowing. I agonize over the precise position of a word. I lie awake at night rearranging and recrafting and rehearsing the rhythm of a sentence. All this painstaking perfectionism is quite perverse, I’ve graduated from fraudulent to masochistic. I used to suspect that no other writers on the planet shared my tragic flaw – they all seem to spew out finely crafted prose at an obscenely rapid rate – until I read an interview with an author in The Paris Review (I can’t remember who) and learnt that she, thankfully, suffered from the same miserable condition. Every fifteen years or so, she produces a book. A good one. I’m so relieved to know that I’m not alone.
So now you know. I find the writing process excruciating. Yet I continue, doggedly dragging word after word out of my tortured self.
Why are you such a masochist? This from my running partner, after listening to my latest whinge as we coax our tired legs up our favourite hill. Dunno, I mumble, maybe it has something to do with making myself concrete on the page.
Maybe its because when the words finally begin to sing, I’m in heaven.
And now, after so many years of struggling to carve chunks of unruly sentences into the shape of a novel (I refuse to say how many years) my beloved editor prizes the manuscript out of my fingers, then insists that I start blogging about it!
Helen, do I have to? Can’t I just sit back and watch? Or better still, run away and hide
