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Choking on Words (Writing, A Dangerous Obsession)

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So, you thought writing was to be your salvation, that it would save you from obscurity. But what if instead the opposite is true? What if your obsession has got you ‘entrapped’ (as the novelist, Amit Chaudhuri, puts it) and it’s stifling your life?

Such were my thoughts yesterday.

Picture the scene: I’m wheezing at my desk, suffering from a sudden attack of hay-fever. As I search for my asthma spray, a colleague jokes about shoving a pen down my throat to open the airway.

The wheezing soon went – the spray worked its magic – but the image of me choking on a pen stayed on.

Writing has been caught in my throat for a long, long while. Perhaps it’s time I swallowed my pride and gave the game away or coughed the thing up, took a deep breath and got on with the job.

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I Write Therefore I Am (Not Necessarily Read)

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Frustrated. It’s one of those rare things: a song by The Knack that isn’t ‘My Sharona’. It’s also what I’ve been feeling for months. For decades, even, if I count the rest.

I’m no different, I know, to all the other unfulfilled lucky white guys who ever lived – in Maslow we trust – and yet knowing this doesn’t make my frustration any less, er, frustrating.

Or bearable. For a day doesn’t go by without me dreaming up some half-baked solution.

What is it, then, that I so badly need to let out? Energy? Emotion? Spermatozoa? I think not. Words, most likely: those little whizzbangs that build up in people like me, people who know they’re not being noticed.

The antidote? Writing, of course. A daily twelve-dozen (d12d) words on any trope, topic or theme.

I write therefore I am. Half-baked if ever I heard it.

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