Musings From the Edge of a Blank Page

The cursor always blinks. It always does. Annoyingly so.

It is an eyesore, especially on days like today.

It doesn’t care how you slept the previous night or whether you had breakfast when you woke up. Full disclosure, you didn’t sleep well because sleep decided not to visit that night.

Oh, and breakfast!

Since there wasn’t any leftover food, you went to buy bread. You don’t like bread one bit. The shape, the design, the taste, the colour - whether white or brown, and even the brand. Everything about it is off. The only thing it has going for it is its convenience.

When you get back, you realise you are out of margarine and eggs. Now you can’t even make bread better. Of course, you are grateful you had breakfast, but it was a bad breakfast.

The empty page is still staring at you, asking questions.

Sometimes, these questions are caring, like, ‘How are you doing today?’You want to respond with brute honesty, but you leave that for your journal. A journal you haven’t touched in ten days. But who’s counting? Other times, the questions have a mocking tone - ‘nothing in your head to put down today, ey?’ You want to smash the computer on the floor like they do in movies when they’re frustrated, but your account is not set up that way.

But even if your account was set up like that, would you? This question troubles you a bit.

You walk away from the computer and into the kitchen, hoping the change in scenery will come with inspiration

There, the pan, because you only have one, reminds you of how badly you butchered a recipe. Now it needs to be soaked in soapy water for two days. This is guesswork, by the way. It has been a couple of hours, and the smoke has just cleared out. Earlier, you’d have thought the fog in Nyandarua had settled in your kitchen.

The kitchen doesn’t judge. There is no blinking cursor to remind you of the limited range of your vocabulary. Here, you are a free being. A being worthy of love despite not knowing how to follow a recipe. Despite not having enough words to fill a page. Here, matches respect you and light up immediately when they sense friction. Respect is a two-way street, so you promise never to waterboard them. Here, the smell of garlic on your fingernails and the tears in your eyes, because of the onions, define you. No one needs to know the real reason for the tears, at least not yet.

Since none of this makes sense, you think about the next sensible thing - heaven...It’s supposed to be peaceful there, right?

But that’s not what they told you. Whoever ‘they’ are, really undersold that whole idea. They said how bad the other place was and how you needed to work hard to avoid it. Without fear of the other place, heaven might not be all that interesting. You know, the other place where there’s fire, apparently. And there’s someone with (red) horns on their head at the door to welcome you, allocate you space and orient you.

Maybe it’s not as simple as I’m trying to put it, but then - maybe it is. Perhaps we need to ask more questions about not only where heaven is, but also why it’s there. While at it, we need to ask how we can get there, if, indeed, that’s the goal. Then come back to why we are here, on Earth. Hopefully, if we manage to get here, and we’re honest and raw with all the questions, we sit back and wonder why we are here for a finite amount of time (because, you know, death), yet either reward or punishment is forever.

You go back to your blinking cursor, but you don’t look at it directly; you look at the keyboard as if to win a staring contest. You know, that chicken game. For some reason, the letters look strange.

You punch in the keys on your keyboard furiously before the few words that have come to mind escape. Your objective is to communicate how writing has been difficult lately.

Stories come from interaction with people, and you haven’t been doing that. Inspiration comes from keen observation of the surroundings. You haven't been doing that. When you have described your room from three different perspectives: as someone entering it for the first time, as someone looking in from the window, and as someone who moved the bed a couple of inches just so the description is different, it’s probably time to give it a rest.

The paragraph you wrote yesterday doesn’t connect with your line of thought today.

You want to start again, but the number of drafts you have discourages you from adding one more. What’s the use of one more draft, really? No, it doesn't matter how many times people have told you that the first few drafts are meant to be bad.

You read the words you typed again and notice a pattern. Your last three stories all mention hell. Then you remember someone once asked you if you were sad because your stories have undertones of sadness. Yet when you wrote them, you were laughing. It didn’t matter what kind of clothing it was; that was material for a joke. Too much?

What are these masks? You wonder. Why does sadness show up in a rather seemingly happy story? What about the repetitive phrases in your writing that probably mean something deeper?

Wait, it can’t be that deep. Surely.

There is something about words and writing that reveals what we hide within us. We find security in the insecurities we pour onto pages. Sometimes we can see it. Most times we can’t. But slowly, words and sentences massage our subconscious. Words, and just for this sentence, good music, invite us to scratch to reveal. So if words are this important, maybe we need a recipe, and hopefully, people can follow it without burning the house down.

Maybe that’s why they say every story needs an introduction - to ease the reader in and to set the stage for what is to come.

He wasn’t aware of the consequences of what he had done. Or maybe he was, but didn’t want to think about it. Many people, if they found out, would have been disappointed in him. His reputation was on the line, and his family was in danger. The elders in the village wouldn’t have failed to remind him about his place in society as a man…

And maybe, a body to take you through the character's journeys and how they mature through the plot. Or not. Their emotions and feelings. The reasons they make the decisions they do. The plot twists in the story and the reactions of the people around. Their personalities and physical descriptions (always make sure your story has someone without hair) play a part.

“So what are you going to do now?” the wife asks.

“I am going to tell them the truth.”

“They will punish you.”

“I can’t live like this. It’s better if people found it from me than from somewhere else.”

“What if they never find out? They don’t have to.”

“How do you know? Nothing stays hidden forever.”

“You said no one saw you when you left, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“It’s not like I can control worry.”

He regretted telling his wife about it, but was glad at the same time that someone understood him. Part of him, a small part, albeit, thought that she might have been right. There was no need to offer explanations where explanations hadn’t been sought yet.

And a conclusion. People love closure. Closure is when we can exhale because it’s over. People don’t want to read a story and get emotional side effects in the last paragraph. People want to know what happened next. They will fight you if you leave them on a cliffhanger. Suspense is only appreciated by the writer, not the reader. Even if the story had nothing going on, they would demand to know what happened. Did he tell people what he saw? If not, how did they maintain the secret, and what kind of people did they become as a result? What did they have to do? If someone was close to uncovering the truth, would they kill?

But now, you don’t have a conclusion. So you walk back to the kitchen, just to look at your dirty utensils. This is the equivalent of the ceiling when you are in an exam room, and you don’t know the answers to any of the questions staring at you. The way the eyes search the emptiness of a ceiling is always admirable. This being the third time, someone brighter would have carried the laptop to the kitchen. Maybe the ideas wouldn’t have disappeared on your way back to the screen.

It irks you as you grab a glass of water, as if it were the thirst standing between you and the end of that story. You wonder if it would’ve helped to begin with the end in mind. You remember reading that somewhere. Somewhere else, they said you need to let the story take its course. People need to make up their minds. Which is it?

Writing is mostly a lonely affair. For the most part, you don’t have the luxury of consultation. You agonise with your words by yourself. You can tell them to line up in a straight line facing forward, from shortest to the longest, but if they refuse, that’s it.

You stand there, lean on the kitchen counter, with your now-empty glass of water in hand and wonder if you can use chicken curry in beef stew.

Yes. You conclude. Because there do not seem to be any rules in this place.

Since you’re in the kitchen and all of these don’t make sense, you think of a story the same way you'd think of a meal. The ingredients involved, what is to be prepared beforehand, and how long it’ll take to be ready. A story has all these as well. Vocabulary so that people know that you know words, vivid descriptions and comparisons to bring the image closer to the reader’s eyes and flow of thought through the story that will keep them looking forward to the conclusion you don’t have. Beyond the introduction, body, and conclusion of a story, there are other ingredients to be added to the recipe to make it not so bland, like bread. Everything has to be in line.

But maybe it’s not about the words lining up. Maybe writing demands that we express ourselves fully without hiding behind cute grammar, unnecessarily big vocabulary, repeated adjectives and long sentences. Writing calls us to tell the story and leave it there, without the need to interpret and explain it. Or to justify the inclusion of some sentences. It demands that we leave the words to communicate with each other in the sentences, and the sentences to the paragraphs. A symbiotic relationship of some sort.