Do I want to be a Writer?

Finding truth in writing.

I have been asking this question since I was 20.

It is an existential question that has three questions in one. What stories did I carry from my past, who I am in the moment, and a version of me in the future?

“I think I want to own a bookstore. I want to be surrounded by books.” 25 years ago, I shared an innocent dream with my father. I didn’t dare share the ‘hope’ that I would be a writer someday and that my books would stand on the shelves. In fact, I couldn’t articulate if I even wanted that. At 20, you know you could be many things.

Baba looked up from his book and asked me, “How would you ensure people read?”

25 years ago, he knew we were headed towards a future where ‘reading’ would question its existence. It wasn’t enough to open a space that made books available. It was important to find people who would buy them to keep the space open.

I ask myself this question again.

Do I want to be a writer?

I can hear Baba in my ear. “How would you ensure people read?”

With 4 picture books coming out later this year, maybe it’s too late to ask this question already.

Baba left knowing that I would write for children. Not one day or someday. Soon. ‘Now’. He read the contract and made me add a clause, corrected the terms of payment and asked me when I’d begin writing. He was in the hospital at the time.

Baba left a month after I signed my first book contract. Leaving me with a blank page that I couldn’t write on. This is how I began my ‘writer’s’ journey.

“How would you ensure people read?” I heard him again.

Never the one to lose focus on the BIG question. In those moments, I was grateful I could still hear him. I picked up the pen and wrote, piecing together the stories circling in my mind. The stories came in bursts, surrounding me with words that I scribbled across papers of different shapes, colours and sizes.

Outside the paper, my world was falling apart.

Between April and May 2024, I struggled to step onto the stage with all my heart. I was carrying grief like a large and open wound. I couldn’t cancel my prior school bookings. Maybe I felt that it would be unprofessional to say that I was grieving my father’s loss. I wanted to get back to work to fix my broken heart. I believed that storytelling would heal me. I soon realised how tough it was. My stories lacked the flow I was used to. I couldn’t smile, sing, move or tell with joy. I faked all my emotions, pushing hard to feel the truth in my words. I didn’t have the words then, but I was carrying the signs of an imperfect grief.

I waded through grief on paper too. I was writing children’s stories. I was dappling in emotions like wonder, courage, joy, resilience, and curiosity. My stories didn’t feature fear, anger, disgust, or pathos. My mind kept swinging towards those.

I stitched the stories together at a frantic pace, questioning every word I put on paper. My first steps towards being a writer were flawed. I expected a lot from my writing. Or the process behind it. Particularly, how I felt about being a writer.

I was deeply troubled by the identity of being a children’s writer. “When will you write?” I had navigated this question for a decade.

Why write when you can tell a story and share the joy in an instant?

Instant gratification in live, oral storytelling was both my excuse and escape. Honestly, I didn’t want to put the effort behind writing. Unlike my practice through the spoken word, my first steps into writing were forged in duplicity.

I was afraid I was writing to be a ‘wannabe’!

Isn’t that why some want to write? To be a published author? To own the prestige behind it?

Why hadn’t I hadn’t written before? Why now?

Why am I writing for children? Will I always write for children? Or only for children?

What was I asking for? What was I working towards?

Who am I as a writer? What stories do I have to tell?

How does the writer side of me combine with the oral storyteller side of me? Is it an extension, a sum of all my parts, or a new identity?

Would I find the discipline to serve writing? To write long hours even when no one was waiting for my words?

Would I have the courage to send my words into the world? To be critiqued, overlooked, rejected and discarded?

Would I find joy in writing? The practice of becoming ‘me’ as I write?

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