I need to write 3 discussion(like 3 piece of small writing,each need 200 words) in my writing class, each need around 220 words it's a discussion part of my writing class. The professor will not grade about it but he would check if I finished this assign

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Nick Rowlands Follow just wondering around Jul 17, 2013 · 13 min read

The Walls We Build Around Us On writer’s block, obsession, and the Egyptian revolution

Some time back in 2011, amidst the chaos and confusion of the

Egyptian revolution, I forgot how to write — constructed a barrier in my

mind and hammered home the instruction, “WRITER’S BLOCK, DO

NOT PASS!” Two years later, and I’m only just learning to peek over to

the other side and see there is life beyond.

The hows and the whys form a story I’ve been needing to tell for a long

time.

. . .

From 2006 to 2010 I lived in Egypt, working as a tour leader and then a

travel writer. Mine was the Egypt of felucca captains and donkey boys,

boisterous games of backgammon and cafes thick with scented tobacco

and laughter, old magic locked in stones and the echoing solitude of the

desert.

Photo by Rennett stowe

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But by 2010 it was time to move on. The exotic had �nally become

mundane, and the delicious chaos of life in Cairo was taking its toll; my

writing felt lifeless and formulaic; I missed my family. I needed to quit

while ahead, before I morphed into that species of resentful and

twisted expat who forgets how privileged he is, who allows his fear of

leaving the familiarity of the foreign to poison his relationship with the

host country.

So in November 2010 I said a bitter-sweet goodbye to friends that had

become family, and who refused to believe I was really leaving. I

traveled to the US, and spent my �rst Christmas in years at home with

my actual family in England. Along the way, having received a job o�er

too good to refuse, I decided to prove my friends correct by returning to

Egypt “for one last year”. I was set to �y back some time in February

2011, after giving a talk at a travel writing workshop in London.

Which is why I was stuck in England at the end of January 2011,

watching the beginnings of the Egyptian revolution through the �at

glare of my computer screen. Like many people following along from

afar — especially all those with a deep and personal connection to

Egypt — I was overcome with con�icting emotions: exhilaration,

admiration, fear, impotence, guilt. Frustration, too, because I felt I was

meant to be there. I knew I had to go back.

. . .

I consider myself fortunate that I’ve always found it easy to express

myself, although I’m more comfortable doing so verbally than through

writing. It’s only recently that I have come to understand why.

There’s a �exibility and a �uidity to the spoken word — thoughts don’t

need to be complete, and the ebb and �ow of conversation means there

is a participatory shape to the expression of ideas. By contrast, writing

is a more deliberate, more linear, and more solitary act; there is a sense

of something solid, something permanent, in the act of committing our

thoughts to paper. To write necessitates standing beside our words,

owning them. But to speak — to speak requires conviction only at the

point of utterance, as our sounds dissipate into the ether to live on as

memory alone.

. . .

Egyptians are fond of saying that if you drink from the Nile, you are

fated to return to their country. But the Nile is as �ckle as it is timeless,

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and the Egypt to which I returned in March 2011 was not the country I

had left four months earlier.

This was around the time that the euphoria following Mubarak’s ouster

was decaying into the disillusionment, fragmentation, paranoia, and

confusion of an epic, country-wide comedown. While it is true that the

street was invigorated and there was an almost tangible excitement and

hope for the future, there were also palpable and thickening tendrils of

tension; the atmosphere in Cairo was both explosive and brittle. The

cycle of broken promises, demonstrations, violence, and politicking

that has subsequently come to de�ne Egypt’s ongoing revolution was

just beginning.

I had hoped being in Egypt would illuminate the realities on the

ground, o�er some much-needed clarity on an undeniably complex

situation. But I found that proximity to the unfurling revolution made

events seem even more opaque and confusing than they had been from

the comfortable tumult of Twitter, back in England. To appropriate a

common expression — it was impossible to see the desert for all the

swirling grains of sand.

And I could never get over my concerns with a di�erent sort of

appropriation — the sense that perhaps, having missed the initial

“Eighteen Days”, I had returned to Egypt to stake a claim over

something I did not really own. I became obsessed with the idea that

there was an invisible but unbreachable crevasse between me and all

my friends who had been present for, and participated in, Mubarak’s

downfall. A dark and insecure part of me felt like an uninvited guest at

someone else’s party. I realize now that I never spoke to anyone about

these fears — and I know that my friends would have laughed me out of

my hauntings — but I was unable to let these feelings go.

Where some people saw opportunity (and indeed, many careers were

launched o� the back of the “Arab Spring”), I saw opportunism, and

what I came to think of as revolutionary voyeurism. I felt that many

people, conditioned by a lifetime of news-as-entertainment, were

treating the revolution as their chance for interactive ring-side seats at

the hottest new drama in town. I knew these thoughts were beneath

me, and my sentiments were by no means set in stone; but by opening

myself to the shadows of my own motivations, I tainted my perceptions

of others’.

As the months passed, and the counter-revolutionary rhetoric about

invisible hands and foreign interference clamped ever tighter around

the national psyche, I began to worry that foreigners attending

demonstrations might even be harmful to the cause. Yet many of us

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were deeply invested in the country, and strongly believed in the goals

of the revolution. And besides, wasn’t this a universal struggle? I

discovered I was no longer sure of anything, and a sense of unease and

disorientation permeated my existence throughout the year.

Everywhere I looked, everything I considered, was swathed in shades

of violent gray.

All of which is a rather long-winded way of explaining how and why I

forgot how to write. More accurately, of course, I simply lost my ability

to do so — lost my con�dence, my inky mojo. My day job as a video

news producer still involved writing, but with the exception of one

piece published soon after my arrival, I was unable to sort through my

personal thoughts and emotions e�ectively enough to nail them to

paper. Being unsure of what I felt, I lost con�dence in my ability to

express myself in writing.

There was certainly no lack of material. This may, in fact, have been

part of the problem: there was just so much going on, and it was so

overwhelming, so complicated, so nuanced; where to begin? Every

time I grabbed hold of my �eeting impressions long enough to begin

the process of solidifying them in writing, I froze up. Even attempting a

straightforward account of what I had seen and done left me paralyzed.

I was terri�ed, either that I would write something which I could not

later stand behind — that I would be judged and found wanting — or

that in trying to describe my personal relationship to the revolution I

would come o� as self-centered.

Eventually, unable to do justice — in my mind, at least — to the

complexity of events or to what I was feeling, I clammed up and started

to withdraw. I began looking for excuses to avoid my more engaged

friends, and I took solace in drink and in poker. I let my thoughts and

emotions run wild, but I allowed my words to shrivel and die inside of

me.

. . .

I came to writing relatively late in life, at the age of thirty. It was 2008,

and after two years on the road in Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia as a tour

leader, I was ready to settle in one spot and attempt to assemble the

trappings of “normality” — a bed, real friends that didn’t disappear after

two weeks, a space to make my own tea. Yet I wasn’t ready to leave

Egypt, a country that somehow felt more like “home” than England

ever had.

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I was lucky to �nd work writing and maintaining an online travel guide

to Cairo, and freelancing for a local print city guide. I soon took over as

managing editor of the city guide, started a blog about daily life in

Egypt, found additional work as editor at an online travel media

network, and picked up an extra freelance gig here and there.

Writing, for me, was therefore a public act, and the words came into

existence only so they could be released into the wild. I knew my mum

kept a diary, but the idea of writing solely for myself had never crossed

my mind. I had no real concept of the transformative power that the

process of writing itself holds. Looking back now, this seems laughable:

I have always been an avid reader, and if reading the words of others

can be so moving as to elicit a strong emotional and intellectual

response, it stands to reason that producing such words yourself could

have a similar e�ect.

But I viewed writing as something you threw out there, for money or

for approbation, or ideally for both. If I had truly understood that you

should write �rst and foremost for yourself — if I knew how cathartic

and illuminating and liberating an act it can be to abandon yourself to

the act of writing, with no thought to potential publication — then

perhaps this whole issue of a revolution-inspired writer’s block could

have been avoided.

Moreover, this does all suggest another question: How could I have

“forgotten” how to write, if, as it seems, I never really knew how to

write in the �rst place?

. . .

My �rst glimpse of salvation came in the latter half of 2012. I had left

Egypt in May and was now living in San Francisco, happily married to

the woman who’d stolen my heart when I visited the US in 2010. I had

hoped that the novelty of pastures new and the excitement of

beginning the rest of my life would unlock my creativity; that the words

would begin to �ow again. But not writing had become a habit, and I

still believed that writing = publishing.

I was complaining to my wife, who is also a writer, about my continued

inability to put pen to paper. She pointed out that I had, in fact, written

almost continually during my time in Egypt.

We had remained in nearly constant contact since the day we �rst met,

before we even realized that our futures lay together. While we had

used a bunch of communication tools — SMS, chat, Twitter, Facebook,

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Skype — email was our primary and preferred means of staying in

touch. Multiple emails every day — the mundane, the epic, and the

intimate. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of words; a digital

archive of our shared blossoming, the trajectory of convergence.

Many of these emails stretched to over 1,000 words. Many of mine

were, by de�nition, about my life in Egypt — about what was

happening, and how I felt about it. I had never before thought of these

emails as “writing”. It helped, a little.

Yet still I remained �xated on Egypt, convinced I needed to write the

proverbial line under that chapter of my life. I felt that if I could only

write something, anything, about my time there, my writer’s block

would be banished and I would be free to move forward. That without

some form of written closure, my words would be left forever hanging

over the abyss between past and future.

But along with the same conceptual insecurities I had struggled with in

Egypt, I now had what I considered to be an additional problem. I felt

so far away from Egypt, both in time and in space, that my desire to

write about it seemed entirely decontextualized, almost a non-sequitur.

Not to mention that in an enthusiasm of “new beginnings” I had long

since killed my personal, Egypt-focused blog (which had in any case

been chronically neglected for years). I needed to begin again with a

new platform… but what form would that take and would I design it

myself and what was I going to write and how would I attract readers

and what could I write and how was I going to ensure everything I

wrote was just perfect and besides what did I want to write…?

I knew I was digging myself a deep hole, and using the excavated debris

to fortify the wall of a writer’s block built from nothing but shadows

which only I could see. I eventually began to admit that I might just be

making excuses, and to consider that perhaps I didn’t really want to

write anyway — to wonder if that stage of my life was truly over, and if

the only line I needed beneath it was a mental one.

. . .

I �nd it interesting how the choice to view writing as a public act comes

with such a weight of associated baggage. The concept of the individual

as brand is both aggrandizing and dehumanizing.

I have always been the toughest critic of my own writing, willing to

share only that of which I am proud and can stand beside. But for me,

at least, this issue of quality was only one facet of the larger and more

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complex problem of presentation. How, exactly, do you organize your

online presence? Where does your writing live; how is it

compartmentalized; to what extent should you strive for an

overarching coherence?

I have started, and deleted, numerous blogs on Tumblr. I insisted on

building my latest self-hosted WordPress blog from scratch; I already

dislike the design, as well as most of the (still sparse) content. If not

careful, I can spend all my time tinkering with the triviality of

cosmetics, the design equivalent of the Oscar Wilde comment on

commas. Seduced by the honeyed promises of “personal branding”,

disoriented by the range and sophistication of all those publishing tools

available to us, it’s easy to lose focus on what actually matters.

I see now that my problems with writing were more akin to being lost

in a maze, or perhaps a hall of mirrors, than to being stuck behind a

wall. The con�uence of confusion, indecision, fear, stubbornness,

arrogance, and egotism manifested a situation in which every direction

became a dead end before I could even start down it.

. . .

Like most mazes, the way out was deceptively simple once I �nally

recognized it. You already know what it is. I already knew it too.

Towards the start of this year I discovered in my wife’s library the book

Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg. The subtitle, “Freeing the

Writer Within”, tells you all you need to know. My main takeaway was

this: We all have a boundless and energizing wellspring of creativity

within us. One of the ways to tap into and release this energy is to get

out of the way, and to write. That’s it — you just write.

By removing ourselves from the writing process — removing all our

hopes and fears, our desires, any thoughts of topic or appropriateness

or purpose, the entirety of our ego and all the accumulated sludge of

the self — we create a space for the words within us to pour out.

The mechanics of the practice, and it is a practice, could not be easier:

you sit down at your desk with pen and paper or your computer, and

you start writing the �rst thing that comes into your head. You do not

plan or edit, you do not correct typos or misspellings, you keep your

hand or �ngers continuously moving and allow that which is within

you to manifest without, and you do not stop. You are done only once

your predetermined number of minutes or pages has been reached, or

once you have (temporarily) bled yourself dry.

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It seems stupid to admit it, but the purity of this approach to writing

came as a revelation to me. I already knew that the sole thing I actually

needed to do was to write; the �rst piece of advice given to anybody

who wants to write is that you sit on your ass and you write. And yet

somehow along the way I had got tangled up and trapped in the maze,

fallen for the deceit — magni�ed by our hyper-connected and

increasingly digital lives — that writing is primarily for public

consumption, for sharing, and that it must therefore possess a certain

quality.

This is not true — it is blindingly obvious that this is not true — but it

seems I had to hear it from someone else. My wife had been telling me

so all along, but I didn’t listen. I needed it laid out in the solidity of

black and white.

The reason Goldberg got through to me where all others, myself

included, had failed, is that she showed how the act of writing can be

an end in and of itself; she elucidated its purpose. By writing without

ego, without thought, without intention, you are skimming o� the

quotidian froth from your brain and setting it aside; this allows you to

access a self that is deeper and more authentic than the one you

present to the world, and to yourself, on a daily basis. There is a sense

that it’s you who is being written.

Coming to understand that my writing does not have to be “about”

anything, that it does not have to be published or judged, that it does

not even have to be “good”, was the liberation I was searching for and

that I so desperately needed. The shadows remained, but I was no

longer in thrall to them. I was at last able to give myself permission to

write again.

. . .

One of the greatest bene�ts of this free-writing practice is that you

deposit and nurture and explore a kind of creative mulch of thoughts

and feelings, all expressed without passing through the potentially

limiting �lter of your brain. And from this fecund inner space a more

considered and sculpted and polished piece of writing can begin to

emerge at any time; something still written primarily for yourself, but

with which you may be comfortable enough to share in the world.

A story, perhaps, that needs to be told.

. . .

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Note: The feature photo was taken from Flickr Creative Commons, and is

by Rennett Stowe.