Re: Writing

For someone who spends most of their time writing, preparing for the process of writing, reading in order to write, or simply thinking about writing for the best part of their days, it is easy to forget that writing is a struggle.

It is, first and foremost, the fight with one's laziness (as is the case with any other tedious activity - and writing is tedious!). I believe every one of us is lazy at heart, only some of us can overcome the laziness to actually produce something. I have my own methods of fighting laziness ('tricking' laziness would be a good way to put it), but this post is not about them. Laziness is by far the greatest foe of good writing, because even when you overcome it initially and finish the first draft, it might kick in at later stages (editing, for example) and ensure that you don't put enough effort to finish the work well. Our real selves are our ideal selves minus the laziness. Laziness reduces us to mere mortals and those who can overcome are the ones who can achieve true greatness.

Secondly, writing is a struggle against the endless distractions of the modern age. These distractions - the internet with its Facebook, Twitter, Skype and other networks, as well as the more traditional distractions of sunny weather outside or a crying baby in the room - have actually succeeded in turning us into uneasy beings. We have become unable to sit still without checking Facebook. Our minds wander away after only a few minutes of work. Our attention spans are shortening rapidly. If it continues like this, we will probably become unable to sit down for even two minutes, unable to concentrate, to achieve calm and lucidity of mind so important for thinkers and writers.

Writing is also a fight with one's alter ego. There is no easy way to explain this, but there is another person in each of us that influences the way we think and write. The voice inside us questions the validity of our thoughts, the choice of words, the logic in our argument. Every writer has to negotiate his writing with this inner voice; whatever ends up on the page is an outcome of this consensus.

Re: Coetzee and Auster

JM Coetzee and Paul Auster are the two of my favourite writers. They are also quite alike in style: both explore the vicissitudes of life, the hardships of being a middle-aged man in the modern world. They write about relationships within families. They document their protagonists' fall from grace (and into disgrace, Coetzee's eponymous novel). They are both very important writers of the Anglophone world, masters of the immaculate, perfectly edited prose.

Yet reading Coetzee, I feel that his writing is more powerful, with more sense of purpose. He is perhaps the only writer I have read who knows the insides of our heads and souls so much better than anyone else and, more importantly, can express them with only a few words. He is a sage, in this respect; it is difficult to baffle him. His prose is not flowery and articulate, but through this disciplined style he holds the reader's heart in his hand.

Auster is more romantic, more mercurial, more prone to digress into sentimental and often not very relevant details - this makes him so similar to Murakami Haruki. His prose is also very well-constructed; I am sure he spends three times as much time editing his texts as writing them. The result is impressive - you can't remove a single word from his texts, so well-organised they are.

Yet I find Coetzee's work more powerful, more gripping and, hence, more important and influential.