95 Piccadilly
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I’ve called myself a jack of all trades and master of none, and there’s some truth in that. I tend to be arrogant enough to believe I can learn most things with enough time and effort. Writing, though, doesn’t quite follow those rules. It isn’t something you conquer so much as something you travel with.
For years now, I’ve been gathering pieces of my own work – autobiographical fragments, I tend to find, of my own life. Unfinished essays. Short stories without direction. Poems that feel like experiments. Others that feel too much like reality. A novel that started as a high school assignment and has since drifted so far from its origin that it feels like that trip when GPS takes you places you don’t expect – I’ve been there too many times. More like a long, winding road that may or may not get there. People say to me all the time, “You should write a book.” I find that, much as we want, time doesn’t just politely step aside to let it happen. Time is a straight shooter, when writing is not. It’s much more a journey. It can reverse time. It takes you backward into memory – or forward into imagined tomorrows. One day you’re thirteen again, standing in a school hallway you haven’t thought about in years; the next, you’re hunting tigers in Colonial India and listening to voices that feel as real as your own. That’s the draw of it – partly anyway – that with a well-thought out sentence, you can take a reader anywhere, or consequently drop like a thud.
It’s just not always easy to get there. Starting is the easy part. Starting is a rush. That’s when everything feels open and possible, when momentum carries you and you half-believe you’re onto something useful. Hemingway once said, “The first draft of anything is sh*t,” and there’s a strange comfort in that – permission from one of the greats to begin imperfectly. But finishing? Finishing is different. Finishing asks for my patience, to return even after the excitement wears off, and if you choose it, the work continues, even when you’re not up to par. Lines surface in the middle of a drive. Dialogue interrupts quiet moments. Entire scenes play out before you can catch them. There’s no certainty there. Not for most of us. No control. On some level, it’s about staying open to wherever it leads. At the end of the day, maybe that’s enough. Just to keep moving, even without a clear end in sight. As Fitzgerald wrote so eloquently, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” We go where the current leads us.