Thoughts on Madiba's Death

I wish I could call this a tribute, but I don't think I have the words to do this great man justice. Instead, I'll share my thoughts today (random as they may be) and hope they add up to something worth reading.

See I'm South African, born at the tail-end of the Apartheid regime. In fact, the reason why my birthday is on December 28 is that my mom had me born by c-section so my dad could see me before being posted to border patrol.

Those were war years. I wasn't even two when he was released. Oddly though, I remember seeing on the t.v. as this man left prison. I noted how everyone on t.v. was happy to see him free, but no one in my family was. So I asked what was going on and the answer I got was something like: "My child, it's the end of our nation."

Of course, it meant nothing to me then, because I was too small to understand what a country was. But I remembered thinking he had a nice smile, so I noticed when he was on t.v.

Every time he came on, my family (as I now imagine many Afrikaans families did) greeted his words with distrust. See, that war had set white people in general and the Afrikaners in particular on opposite ends of conflict. Madiba and his contemporaries were fighting for freedom. We... I honestly am very careful to say what we fought for. It's not really discussed.

The sense I have (and I could be wrong) is that the government was fighting for continued suppression, since complete freedom for all races would (and did) mean loss of power. But the white people on the ground level were fighting for survival.

Why this is is another history lesson in itself. But in short, our ancestors had fought for a place in Africa. If we'd failed, we would have been annihilated. In fact, some of us did fail through history, and most of those did die. It was a fact so long-standing that no white person could imagine that the war could end peacefully for us unless we won.

The day Nelson Mandela was released, we'd lost for all intents and purposes.

People expected "The Night of the Long Knives", like another Kristallnacht. We'd suppressed and the government had institutionalized so many wrongs that almost all white South Africans expected bloody reprisals, and for South Africa to be turned into something similar to the rest of Africa.

What we didn't hold reckoning with was that Nelson Mandela was a much better man than any of us had thought. Instead of revenge, he preached reunification. Instead of reprisals, he preached unity. And that coming from someone who'd been sent to jail for fighting for something that was, in retrospect, the right thing.

He won our trust, starting with that day he walked out onto the rugby field before the World Cup Finals in 1995, wearing a beloved Springbok jersey.

And in many ways, he'd steered this country free of disaster so that we could recover and move on. "Us" became something inclusive, something the whole country could belong to.

For that, I am immensely thankful.

Madiba, your strength, forgiving nature and love for humanity inspired more than just a nation. It changed the world. Rest now, Tata Madiba. Your life was and will be a standard the rest of us should and will try to emulate. You deserve it more than anyone else I know of.

Puzzled musings of a writing rebel

I wonder what it is about NaNo that makes people think that drafts have to be 50 000 words long. I mean, I announced my completing a story draft, wanting to share my joy with others who would understand. 

... Uhm... seems I made a slight wrong assumption on that count. Although you ladies and gents who read my blogs are overwhelmingly supportive, twitter and NaNo wasn't as much. 

It's odd. 

Not that the people there were mean or anything, but they keep commenting on my 18k shortfall. Or saying I should do whatever I can to pad the story and win. 

All I want to know is why? NaNo is about writing a rough draft that can be worked into something more. So if I got to that point at 10k, I would have made the same announcement. Or any other number. If I hadn't found the right formula, I would have kept going to 50k. But no. My lucky number for this story was 32k. It's done. 

Why will I mess around with backstory and all sorts of nonsense in search of 18k I don't need? It's a waste of time, if I'm honest. 

It just puzzles me in the same way the issue's cousin has me scratching my head. Why do some writers thing their way is the only way to write? 

It's the best way for them, yes. But why would that give them a reason to look down their noses at every single other method out there. And trust me. There are as many methods as there are writers. 

Why must everyone conform to a single way of doing things? Doesn't that defeat the object of artistic expression? 

Thoughts? 

Let's talk about the dark side

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. 

Vita Sackville-West

 

I've been thinking about this for the past few days, but I'm wondering what you all think of it. I wonder if you even think about it at all.  

I'm talking about the dark side. You know, that bit about writing that's there, but that doesn't get mentioned all that often.

Like the fact that it's more of an addiction than a passion. Or else it's a damn near all-consuming passion. One that makes me euphoric when I'm doing it, but leaves me suffering from withdrawal when I'm not. The more we write, the more we want to write. This is good in that few people are lucky enough to find something as constructive to be addicted to. Still, we're stuck in our minds half of the time. The other half is spent with at least a small part of us wishing that we were stuck in our minds and writing. This can (and has) led to some aggravation, embarrassment and tension in the past. Fact is, it's really difficult to maintain a balance when it comes to writing. If I stop paying attention for a few weeks, I spend most of my time bashing out words. And when I say most, I mean at least three quarters of my available time. And it's not like I don't have other things to do. I'm not saying that I just lie down and forget to live my life. I'm saying that part of me is always fighting the urge to write at the expense at some badly neglected part of my life.

Another thing: We're more sensitive than people think. In fact, I'd say we're more sensitive than we'd like to believe. Think about it. If something happens, normal people gloss over it and move on, or store it away to look at once in a while. We don't do that. We put everything away for later. And then when we go poking at those things so that we can get the right words and emotions onto the page. So not only do we feel everything, but we feel them for a long time. Writing is a good way to get those feelings out, but I know from own experience how much it hurts to call up certain memories, but I can't just avoid them, because they'll crop up in my writing whether I want them to or not. So if I don't willingly face something, writing will eventually force me to.

We go digging in the darkest corners of our psyche to find what we need when we're writing. Think about it... those thoughts and emotions that you're giving to the most evil villain that you can imagine? It comes from you. Your own fears. Your own prejudices. All of that comes from the dark places of your own soul. At the same time, all that is good in the story comes from you too. But the fact is, writing puts all of it out there. And most of us hope that our writing will be publicly consumed. I think that if we really think about how much of us goes into what we write, a lot of us would consider giving up. (Except for the fact that our writing addictions would run us ragged.) It opens us to a new and very special world of pain. Especially when it comes to rejection.  

The last point I want to mention is one that got me thinking on these lines in the first place: We're self-aware - sometimes painfully so. When we dig about in our psyches, we discover things that take most people forever to even become aware of. We explore those things, so we get know ourselves better than most people. Think I'm kidding? Find someone you trust and if your conversation turns serious, start talking about who you are. You'll find you're far more aware of what's going on inside of you than your friend about him/herself. Good? Most of the time. Until you find out something that you might not have wanted to know. I recently figured out a big motivation in my life, and it wasn't what I thought. It's actually quite twisted and after I discovered this part of myself, I took weeks to settle into this new awareness. Hell, I'm still not really comfortable and I know that I was doing just fine until I made this discovery. I can't help thinking that I wouldn't even have thought along the lines that lead to my discovery if I hadn't been a writer. 

So was Vita Sackville-West right? Does writing help me "score above my fellows"? I'd say yes, but sometimes there's a cost involved. A high cost? Possibly, but then nothing that's worthwhile comes for free. And right now, there's nothing that feels as worth while as creating and if used correctly and constructively, even the dark side to writing can be to our benefit...

What say you? Thoughts?

Any other dark aspects to add? What gets to you sometimes?



I Survived My Own Stupidity...

So... remember that I blogged yesterday because I had so much time?

Turns out that it didn't occur to my that getting the data into written form (economics again) in 650 words was a bit of a problem. Actually, it was a big bit of a problem.

See I wrote the entire analysis, knowing that it was going over the limit, but thinking that I could pare away at my words. Riiiight... When was the last time this worked for me? Uhm... Never. I ended up spending another six hours re-shaping the data into a more manageable form before deleting every single word of the analysis I had already written before starting again.

I did finish early enough to get six hours worth of sleep. So I'm pretty happy. This essay will very probably not do as well as the previous one, but that's OK. To me, there are more important things in life to worry about than one essay that I don't need.

Things like: A course on Spiritual Warfare. Finding time to broaden my mind. Finding time to write.

I'm not really going to go into the first, due to the fact that some people might not agree with me, but it just felt like I would be lying if I did not give it a mention. I just feel that as a Christian, I should do everything in my power to strengthen my defenses with knowledge.

A lot of things can broaden my mind. Watching movies, reading, reading blogs, talking to people, going to new places... and (the scary and most difficult one for me to do) to just be quiet in my own company.

My mind is a strange thing, tangling with at least three intense problems or musings at a given time. Most of the time, it's more likely to be running five. Add in three novels, two of which are extending into series and around twenty characters all talking at the same time. Then there's also the run of the mill things like: REMEMBER TO BUY EGGS FOR YOUR FLAT MATE! and: YOUR MOTHER MUST BE AT THE AIRPORT AT 07h20. The hundreds of little reminders that float around in my head. Sorry for the all-caps, but I'm doing everything I can to remember those two. You see... with all my stuff milling around in my head, it's the every day stuff that falls through the cracks. 

Point is. My mind comes to a point where it sounds like a full restaurant where I can hear every single person talking. For me to just be quiet by myself, I have to spend quite a few hours shutting out most of the noise. It's fiendishly difficult and - if I succeed - quite scary. It feels incredibly alien to be in silence, but it's beautiful when it happens. Everything feels clear. And I get so much done when I get to this stage, since I can take one thought at a time and concentrate on only that. I keep focusing on these thoughts until I finally feel I've solved something. At which stage the noise usually floods back and hits me again.

Finally, writing. I write even when I don't have a pen and paper with me. Only when I stop thinking about what I want to write, have I stopped writing. At this time, I'm toning down on my physical writing so that I can find my characters' voices again. I'm almost there and I'm starting to become very excited about continuing the story. I might not be able to write as much as I'd like though, since I'm approaching my final exams. But whenever I feel like I can squeeze in a little bit of time, you can guess what I'll be doing...

Do you also struggle with the white noise in your mind? Do you write, even if you're not technically writing?