Items by Jacque
wamathai.blogspot.com
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WriteThinking: 21, still counting!
Posted: June 21, 2011, 10:30 am by Jacque
Today marks the 21st week since I started writing the #writethinking series. When Wamathai approached me to run something here every Tuesday, he said I could write anything that I wanted, attend events and critic them, observe the online community and type a word or two. It was simply an open space for commentary posts to break the monotony of the fiction in it and to allow for discussion on issues affecting us. As someone mentioned yesterday on twitter, in the blog orb, it is never good to be diverse in content. There is always need to identify that thing that you think you are good at and focus on it. It is good to have some specificity in your content in order to cull the following that you want and keep it constant. It is actually easier for you as a writer. So we settled on a writers’ pot kind of content.
Allow me to be narcissistic and blow some air into my balloon this week. Writethinking makes me feel alive. It reminds me that I still have inks in me. It gives me the pressure that I need to deliver every Tuesday. I run a blog yes, but my blog is diverse. It is random. Again, without the pressure, I cannot write. If there isn’t pressure, there has to be a supplement to nudge me…like stress. Mostly stress. But I digress.
To post weekly is a demanding task. Tuesdays come too quickly. In between lazing around, tweeting, and looking for rent, there isn’t much time to observe the world around and come up with something ‘blogworth’. My main reason for writing here was to test how unswerving I can be in writing to be able to run a column if ever I get one at some point in my life. My basket however has come out of this series with more than just one fruit. I have grown as a writer. I have tentacles. I have learnt
I have learnt that having someone read your work to a point where they remember it months later, even just one person per year, is a big deal. I cannot explain the feeling I got when I met someone who had actually mastered the name of this column. The overwhelming feeling I get when someone randomly wishes me luck on Monday night as I struggle to put something together.
I have learnt that with it comes a responsibility to deliver. I have for two Tuesday been unable to post anything. In those two weeks, I felt like a failure. I don’t usually just write it because someone is going to read. I write it because I need to. I have to. I felt like my blood supply was suddenly cut off and the veins filled up with cold air. I felt inadequate that I couldn’t write for those few people that have managed to follow this series from week to week. Thus, I have come to realise that you can never tell the reader that this week you are slightly contented and because lack of depression is not a nudge enough, there is no post. There are never explanations. Here, in a non-evil kind of way, no one cares about that finger that can’t type or a mind that is too clogged to construct good sentences.
I have also learnt that as a writer, you will fail miserably in writing and deliver posts that are as interesting as sticking a needle through the eyeball. Sometimes you will write and feel that you have written something fleshy, well cushioned. Other times you write highly malnourished posts where the only warmth in them is the use of heavier synonyms. It is ok. These things happen. Write anyway.
I have learnt that not every reader will agree with you. Yours are simply thoughts from your mind, no matter how well researched, or well versed. It is an opinion. Your opinion and that is where it ends. You must therefore appreciate all the comments and allow everyone a space to agree or disagree. In all these cases, be dignified in receiving. If you cannot allow someone to disagree with your writing, then you have no business writing for people.
This is just a dot of sand in the sea of what I have amassed, but for those 21 weeks, I am very grateful for the readers who constantly read these easy words, and for the host who has given me this space.
21 weeks of WriteThinking, still counting!
© Jacque Ndinda | blog | Twitter|
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WriteThinking: BlogWars
Posted: June 14, 2011, 10:30 am by Jacque
This is where I do me. It is where I hide to be seen. It is my private public space. It is where I walk around crack-naked without worry, where I eat my pasta from a glass of water and not worry what the walls will think. In an article that has been published before in this column, I touched lightly on some of the reasons why a good number of us run blogs, why we write. Some of us do so because we are vain and writing offers us a chance to converse with our vanity. It is the only way we know how to hone morality and immorality. It cures our madness, our depression; it fills spaces where sleep has deserted by connecting a day to another. It is “a desire to seem clever or not, for fame, to be remembered after death”. We do because we have pens and muted voices. With our incapacities and our knacks, we asked you to let us be. We waged a war with the Journalists, a war that eventually seems to have taken a road down the ego way.
It saddens me however that the war has moved from Journalists versus Bloggers and has taken a different route. It actually is sad that there was a war in the first place. Blogs are slowly becoming a weapon for the heart of the enemy. Missiles are flying from the hearts of a blog to another. Irresponsible blogging is what I would call it. A few months ago, a certain blog published pictures of students from USIU with very unsettling information on the said students just because the blogger did not like them. The epitome of idleness. The very peak of babyhood. Weeks later, sites were rolling with repulsive pictures of naked people, some in the very minute of coitus; from Nyeri to Muliro garden. You can say that I am suffocating in my moral uprightness, which I probably am not, but I am not in support of this kind of blogging that has lost its due diligence. You, of course, are entitled to think otherwise of the whole matter at hand.
I understand that traffic in blogging is as important as acing an exam or nailing that presentation. However, the depths to which bloggers are going to fetch that traffic is highly distressing. People are slowly becoming scavengers of dirt, burying their beaks deep under to fish out the best of filth.
I believe anyone old enough to open a blog is someone of a measurable degree of sanity and intellect if not all. To use that platform for slander, whether your claims are true or false speaks volumes about the kind of person you are. As Mukoma wa Ngugi once said, we all must know that if people like Steve Biko died so that we could write all that we liked, then our pens cannot and should not become the weapon that justifies the torture and murder of others. What is the purpose of owning a blog if all you do is bring down others or destroy their career by the shutter of a camera of the publish button? How unfeeling can a writer be!
In every word that is put up in a blog, in every sentence, there is supposed to be a purpose, a reason for it. When we say that blogging is a free field, we forget that we are accountable to our readers, and our words are responsibilities we carry on our shoulders even after we write them. So how much dirt do you have saddled on your back? These words that you carry, what do they speak about you? Can you take responsibility ? How many people have lost their jobs because of your words? How many have been wounded because of your staggering words?
A blog is not a weapon. It is not a place where I am supposed to run every time someone gets me worked up to unearth the grime on them. There has to be other ways to vent. I believe this kind of defamation can even result in a lawsuit against a blogger. No?
Let us learn how to be diligent with our words.
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WriteThinking:Go to School!
Posted: June 8, 2011, 11:00 am by Jacque
To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education.
Thomas JeffersonI have looked for the most inimitable and fascinatingly witty way to start this in vain so I will just hit it in the head: GO TO SCHOOL!
I know a girl. She is young, talented. To every song, no beat is left unattended. The first time I watched her dance during an audition for a club in Campus, my lips hang loosely for minutes! A girl can boogie like a leaf in the wind! I know another. Her acting skills are unmatched. She swallows scripts into her mind; each and every line is mastered. I have seen her on stage; I have watched her on screen. In her is the ability to be herself and seventeen other people, all at a go. These two have taken their art seriously, and have decided to make money out of it. However, the story becomes a tragedy when these two drop out of campus to take their art as a fulltime career. I weep! This is where they die
I write this post out of an observation of a trend rampant in the entertainment industry in Kenya. This is not about writing but art in general. There is talent, then there is school. The assumption seems to be that as long as you have one, then you are good and ripe to go. Radio presenters are quitting campus in their third year, musicians, actors, writers…all are doing the same.
In a country that does not have much reverence for art, even with the little reverence that might be budding, one cannot afford not to go to school. Unfortunately, fame and money gets into our heads. I asked one of my friends who quit school in his second year to go into fulltime acting and he said “I go to school to learn how to make money. If money comes before I finish school, what will I be doing continuing?’. How superficial!
My lecturer the late Dr. Ezekiel Alembi always told me to ‘iron my craft’ with a good education. I might sound like old auntie Redempta talking about school, education and all, but tell me…have you met a musician whose talent is so ironed…sharp like a knife, but what lies beyond there is a clutter of brainlessness? The one who can only hold a conversation about his upcoming album and the age of his dreadlocks only? For what use is the sharp flair of photography on your plate if you cannot hold a straight and civilised conversation to at least sell your work? What use is my writing if I am not informed about the world around me? The write I’m writing about and for?
I respect talent. I do. I respect those that have discovered theirs. I hysterically wail for those who do not know what they are good in yet. I also respect the idea of honing your craft, backing it up with something stronger. Even more respected is that person who discovers what they are good at and takes that talent to school to sharpen it there by studying a related course.
People, let’s go to school. Knowledge my friend. Knowledge and schooling!
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WriteThinking: A Penny for my Words
Posted: May 31, 2011, 12:14 pm by Jacque
He lives on the second floor of a cheap apartment in the low-priced side of the town. Rejected manuscripts mountain at the corner of his sitting room, close to the door. Unfinished ones are amassed in a bin that he never seems to empty. Crumpled papers of pieces he wrote with nowhere to take. This is his life; hoards of rejected manuscripts: others that he is not confident about and thus has been unable to finish. Like an old lonely spinster, his 35 cats are his crumpled pieces of penned paper that he has nowhere to take. That is the life of a writer who does nothing else but write in a country where people are busy not buying books. How unfortunate. How insanely tenuous a profession.
When I grow up, I do not want to be a writer. I wish I could say that for I have already grown up, and writing is part of me. Also, when I grow up, I want to be able to introduce myself as a writer, without a falter of indignity in it. Because I realise now that people introduce themselves as ‘ Ndinda, a model….(then a muffled up writer is swallowed somewhere in at the end). If it is going to be said loudly, then it is ‘a freelance writer’. Why? You ask. Because someone is going to ask ‘oh so you are a writer? Who do you write for?”.’ Who’ here has to be a topflight media house. If not, a book with your name on it has to be a bestseller on the counters of a bookshop. If none of these are ‘whom’ you write for, then you aren’t a writer. The picture thus being that writers are a failed profession. Those that do not make it to these topflight media houses cannot make money good enough to buy them a car. They live by the rare pennies that some writing drops in on their beggar’s bowl.
If you ask me, I think we are a little too lenient with our writing… we do not value it as much. There is writing for fun, but that is not all there is in writing. I believe writing is supposed to bring someone money. These are days when people of other artistic professions: photographers and painters are making millions of shillings. These arts are no longer being taken as hobbies; gap fillers to certain voids after the white collar 9-5pm. It is no longer a thing to be done for fun. I have a friend who was approached by a big corporate to help them compose their mission and vision statement. She never charged them a penny. We teach people that it is ok to ask for poems and pieces from us for free. The first time I asked a friend for money for a piece I had written for her, she said ‘Si you love writing? It is not like you are spending money to buy raw materials or anything. I’ll buy you lunch next week’. The second time I did a piece for a friend who had to have a feature published in the paper as part of his exams, he too bought me lunch. Well, I was ok with it until it hit me; I should be making money out of all that writing.
Do not get me wrong here. I am just being realistic. Writing uses up brain cells. Or maybe not. It really does not matter. It takes up a writer’s time. If I decide to do it for fun, well and good. However, people need to appreciate this art not just by reading it but also by considering that someone somewhere took time to piece it all together. I know there is a danger of watering down your writing once the money issue comes in. There is also a danger of watering down the writing and eventually not writing at all if there is no reward that comes after just an individual’s satisfaction of having written.
I will give you a good example of poets who have taken writing and performing as part of a lifetime’s career. One is Wanjiku Mwaurah, the other one is Kevin Waithaka. You are a doctor. You will make money out of it. They are writers and poets; they should make money out of it. Writing is not as ‘hobbily’ as lying on the sand at the beach waiting for the sun to set. It should not be a poor man’s profession either. Sometimes I do think that it can stand on its own without a back up profession.
Well…I do hope that I am not the only one who hopes to make good money out of writing…
© Jacque ndinda ( her Blog)
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Blah blah blah
Fish cakes
Alas a fish cake.
Yet more fish cakes
Guess what ... yeah ... fish cakes.
The end of the fish cakes
