First Preface – The True Writer (I)

In his literary essay Why I Write, published in 1946, George Orwell says:” All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.” I have constantly attempted to determine which ones of these attributes describe me, but with no success, not yet. Indeed, whenever I am introduced as a writer, I always carefully correct that the title does not accurately define what I do. I reiterate that I am an illusionist; otherwise, I am a storyteller. To be described as a writer seems so inadequate, I do a lot more. Nevertheless, the fact that I write says I am a writer and leaves me in continuous contention with that mystery which Orwell considers the foundation of the writer's motives.

Of course, there isn’t only one kind of writing, as everyone knows. There are the professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature, those that are regular fodder for formal education and then there are those which do not fall in the former description, and which is loosely called creative writing. Regardless though, mutual exclusivity cannot be guaranteed as I shall shortly illustrate. I guess academic book authors have their motives predefined: it is either about the promise of money, promise of professional advancement, promise of knowledge, or more. I am sure many creative writers have similar motives at least at the initial stage of their journey. I am convinced one of the biggest contemporary lures of creative writing has been fame and fortune. You can see how the eyes of a gathered audience light up when an author is publicly introduced; they see before their very eyes another Stephen King, with his books being measured out for sale off the bookshop shelves with a tape rule and raking in millions of dollars every year from his "glamorous" occupation. Nevertheless, the poor sod, an average relatively unknown creative writer is more accurately a miserable entity, struggling fiercely to pay his bills. He, however, doggedly works at creating a new book time after time, though he is unsure he would receive a penny for his work, even if it takes him a thousand days to finish. Why do these mysterious entities, who I lovingly call the true writers, actually sit down, time after time, to write a book and then another and another?

Orwell believes sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose might have been the motives which influenced his own work and possibly what drives the work of most writers. It does show in his writings and especially in his memorable political satires. I think however that his theory is a bit dry and there is a lot missing from it. I would, personally, at a timeline in the past, have added sadomasochism, not as a motive but as a primary affliction of the true writer. However, each of us may only see from our own different points of view. A softer and more benevolent look, with a desire to be more objective, should reveal that there may be more reasons to create a new book as there are true writers.

William Faulkner, author of "The Sound and the Fury", thinks success is rarely the aim of the true writer, the pragmatic creature who understands so well that he has a short span of life and that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion and all success will become worthless. Faulkner believes that the primary desire of the true writer is to leave a scratch on that wall, the world around him for all to read after he is gone, saying, "Kilroy was here"; a declaration to inspire somebody, a sojourner at that same point in perhaps a hundred or a thousand years later. Kathryn Harrison, author of "The Mother Knot", says she writes because it’s the only thing she knows that offers the hope of proving herself worthy of love. She recalls a childhood spent in a perpetual attempt to remake herself into a girl her mother would love; the same effort which she has translated into the process of writing- always looking to make her next book worthy of love. James Frey author of "A Million Little Pieces" didn't receive the grand commission to become a writer until he turned twenty-one, and he was done in by the book "Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller. He is sure few things in his life have spoken to him the way that book did, and he had never encountered something that spoke to him so purely and so directly and so profoundly and which so eloquently expressed how he personally felt about the world - rage and joy constantly running along together. Six months later he moved to the Paris of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, searching and looking and living, trying to become a writer and trying to figure out what that meant, trying to see if it was even possible ‚” to live so boldly, recklessly, stupidly and beautifully!‚”

I also read Henry Miller in the eighties and at about the same age as James Frey, but the same book certainly did not drive me into writing in the same way as James Frey. Even if my thoughts had been so reckless, I certainly couldn’t afford the money to run away to Paris. I distress however that I am unable to find a single African author who has positively and similarly influenced my writing. In retrospection, I have ever been able to see creative writing of African origin like a chimera still stuck in an awkward phase of gradual evolution and therefore yet deserving a special genre by itself. The first crop of creative writing from African writers was destined for school use, the motive of which would then be roughly the same as for academic books destined as compulsory purchase from the school curriculum reading list. They were conceived to fetch quick, regular and recurrent income for the publisher and the author, to get on the school curriculum and to permanently stay there. These books have been quite beneficial to the career of their authors, most of who still keep day jobs as university lecturers and professors, writing not because of any mysterious or inspiring motive but more usually because they must publish in order to earn or keep their jobs. The dominant effect of their work has remained to hinder the development of creative writing and to create academic cults and groupies which play fierce roles as a defender of outdated reading lists on school curricula.

I was ashamed to read the caustic review of a Nigerian lecturer, of the anthology "Daughters of Eve and Other New Short Stories from Nigeria”, compiled by Emma Dawson and to which I contributed a story. His main complaint appears to be that the book did not contain any names he is familiar with, meaning the authors whose books he read in school were not in the compilation. He concluded his review by declaring that most of the stories were not African, meaning they were not the sort of themes that he could associate with African writings when he was in school forty years ago. I am sure "Road Rage", my contribution, which has a mildly science-fiction theme arising from my Engineering background, would have particularly given him a painful case of indigestion.

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