Where you compare yourself to somebody else and feel disappointment, a pang of envy, that is where you should focus your curiosity.
I’m currently enrolled in a fiction writing course. There are eleven other students on the course and we all have very different backgrounds. A couple of the students are already published authors. We have an editor in the group, along with a person who works for a non-for-profit and a lawyer. And as different as we all are, we all share a desperate need to be good at writing so that we can create work that is meaningful and that speaks to a reader.
But it also goes deeper than that. When I look into the eyes of all the people in the class, the teachers included, I have come to realise that through our writing we hope to help people. We all want to make a contribution to the writing canon so that we might, in some way, explain to complete strangers, people we’ll never meet how bewildering, beautiful and ghastly life can be.
I think we all secretly just want to show the world that everything is going to be okay.
And I nearly dropped out
We had an assignment the first week. We had to describe a place we went to as children. A place where we went to escape, where we felt safe. I have included my submission at the end of this piece as reference.
That’s a lie. I include it below because I hope someone will tell me they liked it. That said, if you hate it, don’t hold back. I realise the only way to thicken one’s skin is through scarring. And scars come from wounds, the more gruesome the thicker the scar tissue. So, if you feel so inclined – wound away.
I digress.
I read another person’s description about where they went as a child and it was breathtakingly good. It was poignant, the writing and imagery was punch-you-in-the-guts-and-rip-your-heart-out beautiful. I must have read their 500 words 40 times in the space of an hour. I couldn’t get over how good it was. And the more I read their work, the more I felt my piece was pedestrian, tired, slightly pretentious.
Ugh.
I spent the 24 hours after reading the other students’ entries telling myself how shit my writing is. I convinced myself that I’m wasting my evenings and weekends writing. Writing a novel that nobody would ever read, writing articles for this site that nobody finds remotely interesting, and posting poetry to an Instagram account that is redundant… at best.
And I almost withdrew from the class and gave up on writing in order to dedicate my evenings to nurturing a Netflix addiction and a week-night drinking habit.
It was my wife who eventually told me to get the fuck out of the house because it was tedious being around me. I went to the gym and swam in water so chlorinated you could preserve bodies in it if you tied them down to the bottom of the pool.
(I just spent 20 minutes reading this thesis on: Aquatic Decomposition in Chlorinated and Freshwater Environments just to be sure the chlorinated pool water analogy was accurate. It’s fascinating.)
I digress.
I could never have written what the other students had presented – the ‘learn don’t envy’ bit
As I turned from one milky blue lap to the next I started to realise that I could never, not in a billion years, have written what the other students in my class had presented. They have all had lived lives that I would never be able to inhabit, or understand. They have seen, heard and done things that I never will. And similarly, I have experienced and learnt from events they’ll never encounter.
So, despite this one person’s writing being brilliant, I realised I could never have written what they’d submitted 2 weeks ago. And I don’t think I would want to. Because it’s not me, it’s not who I am. Those words that I read aren’t and can’t be mine, and it is my voice I want to find with all the writing I do. So, I decided to see the situation in a different light. I analysed what everyone else had written and then looked at my own writing, and asked myself, ‘why and how was their writing better than mine, what could I take from their approach and integrate it into what I had put down on the page?’
And as soon as I stopped comparing and started looking for what I could steal, learn and understand, I didn’t feel so shit about my writing anymore. I felt invigorated, inspired. I had joined the class to learn to be a better writer. To learn from the teacher and from the other students. The idea wasn’t ever to be better than them, or to compare their progress in mastering this craft to my own. But rather to have people around me who could make me better. And I recognised this is how I was going to do it, by seeing what it was about their work that I loved and then introducing my interpretation of that into my own writing.
So, what could have improved my piece?
I could have been more vulnerable. I could have shared the things I’d witnessed as a kid happen next to that barn. Recounted the nightmares and the violent images that visited me in my bunkbed in the middle of the night as I kept my bedside candle burning. And how that fickle candle held at bay whatever it was that waited for me in the darkness that filled the furthest corners of my room.
I could have explained how I cried on that ridge when I first saw that plaque dedicated to my grandfather. And of how wonderous the view is from up there, so-much-so that you want to spend the rest of your days consuming the sight of the flamboyant clouds meandering over a landscape that makes you think, ‘maybe there is a God.’
Or, I could have described the joy and peace I felt as I played next to that river. How the days were perfect adventures and the nights were filled with family who sat around a too-small kitchen table, covered with a plastic table cloth, eating meals that tasted like blessings while listening to conversations about events that have become legend in our family. Stories that I now tell my children.
And next time I will write about all these things because I’ve done this course, and it’s taught me to learn from others instead of envying what they have.
My submission:
There’s a sign as you arrive. The Horn’s Bucklands. It’s stamped on a green number plate that hangs from a pole that someone, probably my grandfather, painted white many years ago. He’s dead now, my grandfather. His ashes were scattered over there, along that pale ridge that you can see just in front of the mountains that are, probably in vain, trying to block out the sky. We put a plaque up there for him that reads, ‘Rest here, in creation’s foreverness.’
From this pebbled road, all the way to the horizon, this land, this is where I come. My grandfather would bring me as a child. With my cousin I would spend days walking, swimming, and fishing for eels in that river that dries out so easily and then fills again with such great difficulty. When I was nine, we made a fire next to that river and cooked and ate a pigeon that flew blindly into a wire fence and decapitated itself right in-front of us.
I have killed animals here. Over there, next to the barn I learnt what it is to die. And inside that barn I helped sheep give birth, pulling lambs out of the warm wetness of fertility with my hands. I then fed them with two litre coke bottles, giant rubber nipples and fresh milk that came from a cow that wandered in that paddock over there. It wasn’t just one cow. It felt like one cow, but I know each time I came back it was a different cow. Cows die.
I made butter from the cream of the milk of one of those cows when I was eight years old. It took me shaking a jar for the better part of a day. My grandfather’s sister baked bread for us that afternoon. At dinner time I remember seeing my butter surrender to the warm bread. It tasted like wisdom, like I had learnt something important that day.
And then there’s the smell. That muddy, mushroomy smell. That’s what I imagine mother nature’s skin smells like. I know the smell is mostly sheep and goat droppings, mixed with dry earth that’s seen every sunrise since the beginning of time. But when I breathe that smell in, a part of me that doesn’t know language recognises something here that’s essential.
These trees are camelthorns. Vachellia karroo. See the white thorns with the dark tips? We put them on the tips of arrows as kids and with bows tried to shoot sparrows that ate the figs in my grandfather’s orchard. I stepped on one of those thorns when I was six. I was wearing boat moccasins and the thorn went through the sole and into that soft white flesh just under the ball of my foot. Be careful.
Do you feel that? That feeling of being watched? This land will welcome you, but it won’t trust you. So, the trees will keep an eye on us, those baboons on that rocky outcrop up there, that dassie over there and the stars at night, they all keep watch. While the black and brown snakes track us by the vibrations of our steps, and the bat-eared foxes listen to our words and our breaths.