The seven lamps of writing

I write because I am.

I love letting stories bubble up and the characters emerge and develop through action. It is as though I am living the lives of others, inhabiting their bodies, their lived experience as they are driven to their conclusions. I am only wholly alive when I am writing.

Paradoxically, after a while, gradually I disappear and am no longer the author, merely the scribe.

The physical act of writing is the thing, ideas will come once I have begun. But there does need to be a nucleus around which the crystal forms. I cannot just start randomly, hoping for shamanic connection.

There is the excitement of not really knowing what might happen next. I am not a crime writer; the ‘plot’ in my stories is like the vision of a clairvoyant, it rises in riddles and smoke. Emotional truth is the only constant.

I write to get back.

Insofar as art derives from pain, the rage of dislocation is a prerequisite, yet is insufficient. The happy and contented might find it hard to create, yet the obverse – that the unhappy find it easy or even possible – does not apply. There is a necessary sublimation, the necessity to jettison the strangulations of trauma, and there must be, above all, the willingness to invest the time, effort and self-criticism – the sheer bloody-minded drive – required to develop a mercilessly technical craft.

I write because I cannot sing.

Had I been able to play an instrument, I might not have picked up the pen. Music needs no translation. Once I have the germ of an idea and a vision of what might be, I seek out the key, which is a combination of person, place, period, theme, mood.

I write because I am of this earth.

The five senses render awareness unto the emperor (‘remember, you are mortal…’). Deprived of sensory input, a person will begin to hallucinate. Fiction is a shared hallucination, a shared memory of earth.

I write because it is magic.

There is an element of the conjuror in every writer. Each word is part of a series of subtle performative moves placing the reader in a constant state of anticipation, and yet what they find in the next paragraph cannot be completely expected.

Above all, it gives me a high – it is fun! Although it is blood and sweat, it is not labour. My work emerges like the Cheshire Cat; the grin comes first.

I write because I love.

Language can be many things. To me, it is what reifies hope. It is a sensuous avatar, something that can be caressed, smashed, reconstituted. It constantly morphs and evolves as other tongues destabilise and energise what it does. Yet, once entranced, one cannot escape its embrace. Language is an unrequited love.

I write because I am not.

Writing is a recent and strange technology. It may have grown sacred in various traditions, but it was invented for reasons of commerce, of accounting, for the purposes of human communication. Our egos are huge, while our reality is a blip of spacetime. Before long, there will remain only a few, scattered fragments, and then nothing. There will be no words. And yet, once written down, it is out there…

Suhayl Saadi

Suhayl Saadi lives in Glasgow, Scotland. His books include The Snake (1997), The Burning Mirror (2001), Psychoraag (2004), The White Cliffs (2005) and Joseph’s Box (2009).