With each passing month, year, I recognize how unique each individual writer is and how specific their problems are. Since I don’t know how to guide each of you adequately regarding writing and besides, my colleagues will douse you in enough suggestions and probably set you on fire too, I mean metaphorically, I am going to do something harmless and share with you 39 excuses that should justify avoiding writing and even giving it up altogether.
Among all the innocent faces here, I am the devil’s advocate for tonight and want to explore everything that interferes with our writing. Plus, I have more to say beyond the excuses but I am leaving that for later.
Okay, here I go.
You don’t have to write because you’re young, struggling with undergrad studies, finances, and relationships. You don’t have to write because you’re suffering from depression, which at pivotal moments turn to anxiety and all you want to do is lie in your bed alone for two days and not talk to anyone. You don’t have to write because the world at home and abroad is falling apart, genocides, wars, stupid bullying politicians, and global warming: each of these making sure that you don’t feel safe or grounded ever in a way where you feel writing is of any consequence.
Okay, this is going to take too much time if I write long sentences about why you shouldn’t write and I’ve barely covered 7 excuses so far. So I’m just going to change gears and list them very fast. Please pay attention!
Excuses against writing
1. Living in Pakistan
2. Patriarchy
3. Childhood trauma, and the fact that you'll never be able to convince your parents that they could have done better because they always feel like the bigger victims of life and want to compare their wounds with yours and you keep saying, but that's not the point and they will not get it
4. Scary teachers on university campus who don’t care about you or the lectures and deliver from the slides they prepared half a century ago
5. Your relatives
6. Your relatives who remind your parents about your marriage even when your parents forget
7. Your 09-05 corporate job where you’re considered a family member and maltreated just like a family member
8. Instagram Reels, and how they bring up content which matches your worst instincts and terrible fears
9. Friendship, relationship, situationship, texting, sexting, yoga, meditation, spirituality, astrology, chakras, mudras, homeopathy, psychopathy
10. Writing is difficult and all the great and good books have been written anyway
11. AI and the fact that you're going to worry almost every month about what new advancement happens in AI and how it can write better prose than you and even if you believe that AI can never replace humans, you'll soon see that people are writing books faster than Stephen King through AI and publishing them too.
12. Skincare routine, moisturizers, sunblock, acne cleanser, Korean glass skin, anti-wrinkle collagen collected from jellyfish
13. The fact that almost no one reads in Pakistan and even if they do, mostly they stop at Paulo Coelho and Nimra Ahmad and though you don't judge but you can't come down to those levels either
14. The fact that you’ve to become practical at some point and besides the only hope you could have had for potential readers was from the English departments across the country but those kids don’t read books anymore and write their assignments with AI
15. Money
16. Dollars and yes, there is a difference and you know it when you have been paid in dollars
17. Money to pay bills, buy clothes, do skincare routine, join pilates classes, learn Kathak, buy tickets to Atif Aslam concert, visit Thailand once before marriage and visit Turkey once after marriage in your life
18. Money to pay for hair transplant, braces, fat removal, nose job, other kinds of jobs
19. Deal with periods each month, pregnancies, money to rent a house and eventually build or buy one, make kids and raise kids, send them to school, deal with their difficult emotions when you’ve difficulty with your own deprivations from three decades ago, more and more periods.
20. Dating apps and the way you lose whatever self esteem you'd left anyway
21. In the corporate sector, no one cares that you write good poems and in the academia, they are writing research papers by dozens and getting promotions
22. Fear of God, fear of hell, fear of earthquakes, meteors, storms, Elon Musk becoming more evil than he already is, the Netanyahus and all other yahoos living with us for another century of horror
23. Signs of aging that you see on your face each morning, fear of getting old, wrinkles, double chin, belly fat, performance anxiety, sexual rigidity & impotence
24. The fear that you might never really feel loved the way you imagined in your twenties while listening to Jagjit Singh’s Hothon Se Chulo Tum, Mera Geet Amar Kar Do or Fly me to the moon by Frank Sinatra
25. Your parents still arguing every other day, unable to move past the resentments they have been accumulating all their lives as if they have been swimming through a river of mud and the stench has stuck to their bodies, nested in their bones
26. Dostoevsky, Elena ferrante, Arundhati Roy, Annie Arneux, Rachel Cusk, James Baldwin, Ursula Le Guin, Tolstoy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Why even write when they are available?
27. Washing clothes, cleaning kitchen, making meals, washing your own room, washroom, earning enough money to get someone else to do it for you, being unable to inherit enough wealth to never worry about such things, and people who inherit enough wealth, are they writing either?
28. Meeting people whom you don’t like among your relatives, coworkers, colleagues, but still smiling at them and pretending as if you don’t want them to slip on a banana peel and get them out of your life for a few months, even worse God forbid if you marry a person whom you don’t like and then, end up having kids with them
29. Giving desires, fears, and believable personalities to characters who are unlike you is so difficult
30. Neurosis, narcissism, irritability, entitlement, inferiority, arrogance, sensitivity, indifference, and mood swings that you all and I carry in different doses by virtue of being humans
31. Learning about plot, characterization, showing vs telling, but being unable to employ them. Writing block, denying writing block exists, writing terrible paragraphs and hating yourself for it, suspecting you never had the talent anyway but somehow manipulated people into believing that you had it but you knew all along you were too arrogant and self-important to admit that you loved reading good books but didn’t have the talent to write one yourself.
32. God knows how long any of us will live anyway.
Enough reasons to not only avoid writing but to give up all hope of ever smiling and being happy again.
But what about my novel and why do I keep writing if I have enough excuses to stop it and focus on better things?
In the spirit of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I want to tell you that you can’t imagine the lengths I went to just so that I could avoid writing my first novel over the last five years and delay it as much as possible. I worked at Zameen.com as a copywriter, writing about the forever mushrooming housing societies in Pakistan. I also did midnight shifts at MindBridge, calculating the discounts for Uber Eats customers in Europe. But the novel stalked me like those judgemental comments made by a mean aunt about your skin or height or attitude at the age of 13. Then, I went to Florida, seemingly giving in to the ghost of writing and returned to Lahore with the first ten chapters. Then, I stopped again. I knew the guilt of not writing would sap me out of all the joy I could see possible within my miserable self, so I got a job at UCP to pacify the raging demons of writing inside and another at Akhuwat to delay my novel. I also got into two relationships, tried to get married twice, with separate women... not at the same time but alternatively. I also wanted to have kids as a permanent solution to my writing career. I even committed to the LUMS Young Writers Workshop just so that I could avoid writing the book that I felt mercilessly called upon to finish. This is probably true of all the mentors here.
Except wandering in the desert and claiming sainthood as a part-time crypto bro, there is not an excuse, a problem, or an opportunity that I didn’t bring on myself just so I could procrastinate and sabotage the chances of me finishing this novel. Over the last five years, this novel of mine which first appeared to me pathetic and weak like a limping dog has turned out to be a John Wick and it has been coming for me and there is no stopping anymore.
All the jokes and fun aside, why could I not finish my novel sooner? And the reason I want to explore this is that so much of writing talk is about the technique but I feel the real obstacles to writing come from your own life. Let me show through examples.
A few years ago, when I was studying Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida, I had a fiction writing course with a professor named James Poissant. I used to go for my classes on a university bus each week. However, that particular semester, his classes were ending at 1020pm but the buses would stop running at 10. I sent him an email asking if he could request any of the students who could give me a ride. He asked me about my apartment location and then told me that he would drop me himself. Such a good professor and a kind person. That semester, we left for our homes after each class in his car. We talked about music, movies, food and so on. When the time came for my thesis viva for which I had submitted the first ten chapters of my novel, he made a very interesting point, which I assumed he had figured out by talking to me while he dropped me at my place. He said, Noor, your novel has episodic events happening to the little boy, the main character. The world building, the descriptions are poetic and lively. The events and conflicts among your characters are consequential and well chosen but the little boy seems to lack interiority. He is part of every major event in these chapters but we don't get to see what he feels, how he reacts outside or within, and how it shapes his personality across the novel. I confessed, I'm going to therapy for the same reason and there I'm feeling the same difficulty. I can't imagine myself as a child with feelings, thoughts and reactions. I'm just there. What do I mean by that? Let me share a memory from my childhood that I tried to make part of my novel.
I must have been seven or eight years old at the time. My father, my younger sister of four and I drove our cow, a goat, probably a sheep or two for grazing outside of the village near the broken houses where Afghan Muhajirs had settled two decades ago. Once we had tethered the animals to the stakes in the ground, our father left us with the animals alone. After a while, all of a sudden clouds gathered in the sky and very soon it started lightening and then a terrible rain followed. The animals got scared and started pulling their ropes. In this chaos, while we were drenched, the cow started running away and my sister began to cry. I ran after the cow barely able to catch up, on the verge of tears myself. I held the rope twice but slipped and fell after the cow in the mud, and got my clothes dirty. I feared terribly the cow would get lost and I'd be beaten up at home for not bringing it back. Eventually I did catch up with the cow and it stopped running. The rain softened, and my sister and I gathered the animals and drove them home. When I brought the animals inside home, my mother rebuked me for getting all my clothes dirty. Then, she said, she was busy with animals and asked me to sit in the courtyard and not go inside the room and get it dirty too. I sat outside, wet, covered in mud, feeling cold, and waited for her.
I wanted to write about what I felt there and then as a child but despite the detailed memory, I couldn't for the life of me feel what I must have felt then. It felt like I was there but not there. Inside the novel, this memory stayed like thick oil, refusing to mix with the rest of water.
There is another memory from two years later which I failed to incorporate into my novel. Our family was going through financial hardships. My father signed a lease with a neighbour to grow wheat on their land in addition to our own. The problem was that the water well associated with that land hadn't run for a decade. My father impulsively called a tractor and plowed the whole field and then we tried to put a water machine in the well, but there was no water. Worried about potential loss on the lease, he rented the ground drilling machine but then decided that it would cost a lot more so we had to dig up the 10 foot well even further with bare hands. He said we have to do it ourselves to save the costs. There was one night before the drilling machine would arrive. There was no electricity in the evening so we waited. At midnight, the power was restored. We went to the well together. First, we suspended a bulb attached to a wire into the well and then he went down into the well. He dug up a bit, put it in a bucket, and asked me to pull up the rope. The soil was wet and thus heavy. I could hardly pull up the bucket so he climbed up and said I'd have to go down into the well and do the digging and he will pull up the soil. I was scared of ditches, wells, and heights. I still don't get close to tall platforms because we had heard as kids that jin sometimes do mischievous things and could push you down. My father didn't ask me anything, made me sit in a big bucket and suspended me into the well. There, with a spade, I dug the soil, filled it into the bucket and he pulled it up. I tried hard to remember but I couldn’t see how I felt and couldn't imagine it either. My mother didn't ask or know where I had gone in the middle of the night. She got to know about it only a few years ago when I complained to her that she didn’t care what I have been through.
Since my novel deals with family, with parents and children, with love among blood relatives, with identity, and relevant themes, the novel pushed me into the darkest corners of my own past and made me confront things even when I didn’t want to. At times, I couldn’t navigate the emotional situations in my novel and other times, I felt repulsed by the story itself and looked down upon it as being terrible. There were times where the boundary wasn’t clear. I didn’t know if I hated my own novel or the emotional situations I wanted to explore. There was so much shame, guilt, and numbness associated with the conflicts in the novel that I couldn’t be the medium to experience them creatively and then write them down in fine prose.
In addition to the internal problems of the novel, I also faced a range of issues that proved as obstacles to my writing and sometimes were severe enough to make writing impossible. My father stopped supporting my mother, two brothers, and two sisters financially, so as the eldest son I had to do two jobs to provide for them. I picked up all the part-time gigs that were offered to me and taught online courses too. Thanks to Bilal, I got the opportunity to teach here too. The family financial and creative pressure kept on overwhelming me and I worried many times if I could even handle any of them anymore on my own.
But did I give up on writing? No. I kept writing whenever it was possible, as little or as much as possible. And the struggle did bear its fruit.
Only in the last six months, I developed the capacity to deal with the emotional conflicts inside the novel without being threatened and torn apart by them. The fear that I might not be able to finish my novel and the hate I felt at desperate moments for my own writing, my stories dwindled and made space for more self-compassion than I was ever capable of before. Finally, it looks like 2025 is going to be the year in which I will finish my novel.
By sharing all these personal memories and struggles, I want to confess that writing is the hardest in your 20s and even early 30s because you have to figure out so many issues, while the world tries to overwhelm you and make you surrender. Everybody wants something from you. Your parents want marriage and maybe more kids. Your friends want you to listen to their problems and become someone like them. Instagram wants you to watch endless reels and AI wants you to stop using your brain. The religious clerics want you to worry about life after death. The fruit vendor wants you to buy chemically ripened fruits without doubting his intentions while he swears on his faith. The random uber drivers want to tell you their woes with petrol pumps and want to give you advice on family planning. Amid all this, a thin whisper in your heart wants you to write your stories and live your life like it belonged to you.
Majority of the people cut themselves, minimize parts of themselves that don’t fit into the family picture, discount their desires, push aside their questions, censor their feelings, and prune whatever hurts or annoys them and thus occupy barely small corners within the vastness and depth of themselves. When we were kids, they used to say, what does a human need at the end of the day but a few feet long and wide coffin? What’s tragic is that people occupy as little space as possible even when they are alive, though the world is so large and yours to explore. Don't become small though you might have done it so far to protect yourself. And write because writing allows us to engage with the whole of ourselves, the entirety of our lives, even the parts which are not allowed existence by our families, our society’s morality and so on.
Writing, and for that matter practicing any art, is a matter of practicing one's freedom. It is nothing short of the will to live and thereby synonymous with breathing. So keep breathing and keep writing.