ONE of the best gifts an artist — in this case, a visual artist — gave me was to show me what she called her ‘rejection folder’. I had only begun to write, and I had been doing what writers are in the habit of doing — complaining about all the places that had rejected my writing. “Look at this folder,” she told me, “and I have several more.” She added, “If you want to be a writer, the hardest thing you must learn to endure is rejection. You have got to develop a thick skin and you have to conquer your ego, and keep trying and trying and trying.” She was, and is, a very successful artist, and I took her words seriously.

Many eminent authors have said the same thing. Stephen King, one of the most prolific authors writing today, tells the story of how he became an author. As a teenager, this famous author of books like Misery and The Shining had begun to write short stories. According to King, he began to type out these stories and send them to magazines to be published. Inevitably, the stories would be returned to him with rejection letters. The teenaged King, at this point, stuck a nail in the wall and hung his rejection letters on it. By the time he was 14, King had so many rejection letters on the nail that there was no room for more. At this point, he went and got a much bigger nail and fixed that to the wall. The key to becoming a writer, if you really want to be one, according to him, is simply to put a bigger nail in the wall. If you can be accepting of rejection — and indeed, writing for publishing is an exercise in just that; ie, a submerging of one’s ego — then you can be a writer.

Of course, this is not the only way to become an author. In terms of skill, the most important exercise is to read good writing. The easy and wide availability of the internet means that increasingly good writing is widely and freely available. Websites such as The Guardian, for instance, are still accessible without a subscription, regardless of where one is in the world; other aggregators such as Arts & Letters Daily collect the best writing from around the internet — again much of it for free. These are not ‘easy’ but edifying reads, in the sense that they encourage both thought and effort towards improving one’s language and one’s intellectual capacity.

Writing is a monologue with the self; there is nothing between the person and the page.

The consequence of all this is still not good writing. As another author, Ira Glass (of the show This American Life), once said, the consequence of reading a lot of good writing is that one becomes aware of just how not good your own writing is. This, ironically, is an important step in the process; ie, knowing that one’s writing is not good and, despite this somewhat dispiriting knowledge, continuing to write.

Discernment then — knowing what writing is good, what can transport you into another world or into another thought without you remembering that you are reading another person’s words — is crucial. Good writers can do this effortlessly; their words are amorphous on the page and merge with your subjectivity, your thoughts, and your individual experience in a manner that you are no longer aware of the boundary between them and yourself.

In learning discernment, the young writer — and I do not mean young in years, but a writer who has just begun to write — learns that the effort is not to become a writer like some other writer but to hone your own craft; to engage in the process of constantly becoming better such that the boundaries between your words and the readers’ thoughts become ever more blurred.

All this is the story of published writing. Writing does not have to be published to be valuable or to benefit. One of the most curious and inexplicable magic that writing can confer is that, while sitting before the blank page or screen, it allows our minds to distil what is true and most essential to us. When we speak, it is to engage others, and in so doing, we can slip into inauthenticity and artifice. We can start to say what they wish to hear or say, what we wish were true about ourselves rather than what is.

Writing is a monologue with the self; there is nothing between the person and the page. For this reason, the likelihood of the truth emerging from within oneself and into the world, from the subconscious into the conscious, is great. The value of this writing is arguably far greater than writing for the sake of being published, because as Carl Jung, the famous psychoanalyst, once said, the subconscious will continue to control you until it is brought into the realm of the conscious. We only become aware of our patterns when we are able to understand what lies deep in our psyche and generate them.

Writing of this last kind is powerful also because it allows a person to create their own narrative. Joan Didion, the American author, titled her book We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, but the truth is that when we tell our own stories, we can live with greater ease and a sense of control that is not mere perception or illusion.

The most powerful gift that writing has to offer anyone who wishes to avail it is to free that person from a slavish submission to the opinions and evaluations of others; it can transform tragedy into trials that can be overcome, disability into challenges met, lack of privilege into hardship endured. There is no ceremony or ritual that marks any person as a writer except the simple yet unimaginably significant act of starting to write.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, July 17th, 2024