What does it mean to be a ‘natural’ writer

I still possess many notebooks from my late teens and early twenties, in which are scribbled long pages that attest to the effort I put (and felt) in honing my scribal craft. (Writing is and always has been a craft, since the age of the first cities of Sumer, and the empire of Pharaonic Egypt.)

I was always very imaginative. A compulsive day dreamer. I would conjure visions , create mental landscapes and so on, but I was very hard to express what I saw in my mind in words.

I used to dream of the invention of technologies that would allow me to bring my mental worlds to life. (Maybe they are not so far away now.)

I struggled to write as perfectly as I wanted, but I kept trying. I kept honing the craft.

At some point in my mid to late twenties I first experienced a shift. Instead of imagining scenes and images, I began to think in words, and gradually in (decently well formed sentences). Now it is often clusters of sentence sequences that emerge in my mind and have to be let out, or, as George Orwell too noted of this phenomenon, these word-thoughts haunt you like ghosts.

Essentially, I think at this stage I am a ‘natural’ writer. My mind produces ‘writing’ as naturally as image thought, or even, any other ‘bodily’ product.

Words are in fact not very different from exhalations, even secretions, of different kinds. Sometimes writing is akin to ‘masturbation’, and at others (let us admit it) defecation.

I would like all my writing to be beautiful, like a honed pranayaamic breath. But it is not. What is to be written, or rather what demands to be written, merely ‘emerges’ and curiously as I said, as well formed sentences.

There is a remnant of an older psychic personality in me, now embedded as a relic of a decade ago state of being which persists under layers which have grown in me, as me, ‘on’ me, since then. That me would say, these words are revealed.

I wish I could stil believe it.

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