THE WRITERS' BLOCK - Mbonisi P. Ncube
What drives the so called writer to want to write? To create that grandiose masterpiece that everyone ends up wanting to lay their hands on? Is he driven by a pure inspirational thought? Or a crazed notion that he needs to change the world through his art? Or simply, is it a sudden urge to pen down his emotions, to well down, so perfect, his entire heart on paper? Or maybe is it a calling, heavenly or otherwise, that impels him to create a work of art, to push pen against rustling paper, amid the noises of the street below him? What drives him to create a work of art so mesmerising that whoever reads it begins to ponder on the level, or state of thought that the writer was in, during that demure second, during that brilliant spark of creativity...
For writing is a tool to manifest one's feelings, it emancipates the mind from its over-the-top thoughts, to the surreal world that the writer lives in, and he can put word to paper; scribble vigorously, and manage to live out his dream as he begins to write...
What drove Tolkien to be so unique? To create a Middle-Earth so real, so real that when you read the adventure, your heart twanged with joy and wonder at the creativity of the world he so envisaged? Was it a dream that droned upon him in the stark midst of the night? Or did his mind dwell on an inspiration that locked him inside a box? Was the adventure of Frodo Baggins a result of stumbling upon a rock? Did good have to triumph over evil? And hope over disaster? How did Homer envisage the Trojan Horse when he wrote The Iliad?
Now enters master writer Dickens, and all the other literary creators of these characters; Oliver Twist. Pip. Will Loman. Julius Caesar, Okonkwo. The protagonists all had their fair share of trials, thrills and tribulations. The protagonists are numerous. They span a millennia of creativity. They are all creations, from the mind, from history, from the everyday happenings in the world. That is the writer. He mines his creative minerals from the world around him, and then tells the story how he wants it to be told. We leave Dickens for now, and the elusive pen wrangler, Mr. Shakespeare, comes to mind; the wordsmith who penned down plays that still 'breathe' even up to this day. How he saw the tragic Othello, how the evil Iago lulled him off his path. Writing is that path. Chinua Achebe, Dambudzo Marechera, Arthur Miller, William Blake, Wole Sonyika, Shimmer Chinodya, William Blake, Chaucer, Caryl Churchil, Tsitsi Dangarembga, they all now come to my mind... the list is endless, for prose and poetry has an endless pit of creativity as well. It spans all modes of life, all aspects, all roads we travel on, our reactions and actions to tragedy, comedy, history.. just about everything that this world has to offer...
As a writer, I have also penned down many things, some which are very close to the sinews of my heart, some pure fiction, a resultant swoon of a spark of my creativity; and some which merely bend the rules of this world. But, that is the marvel of it all; for when you write, you cannot have any boundaries; for there are no boundaries in the creative space. You cannot have censorship, for that too is non-existent. There are no demarcations into the writers' lane of life... he must cruise along with his emotions, climb and trudge along high walls; be swallowed by huge water bodies, in his sole quest to achieve his main purpose in life; and that is to merely write, write, and write....to feed that insatiable thirst that he has within his trembling pen... For the writer, the pen and ink are his sword, and the paper becomes the world he must live in, and the brain, his strategy on how he must wield his sword...
The gates are now swung open, the deep end has been made shallow... This is me. This is the way. This is who I AM.
Enter my world... and enter now..