Negatively Reinforcing [Writing]

My writing kit.

About 10 Mondays ago, Hning and I decided to enter a competition between the two of us – to write something and submit it to each other every second Monday. Failure to do so would result in a payment of 100 Saudi Riyal to the other, an amount we agreed was enough to cause pain to our broke-ass persons. This literary experiment has caused me to learn a few things about the way I work.

AN EXERCISE OF THE MIND
Just like working out, writing takes a lot of effort – and makes a lot of room for excuses. Imagine the excuses not to work out given by someone who physically exerts themselves for long hours in their day job. Would those excuses not seem justified and reasonable?

As someone who works in the publishing industry, I felt that mine were concrete. Copious amounts of reading and writing copy during the day (and well into the evening most times) is enough to make me want to veg out and away from words the rest of the time. "If I don't get paid for it, I won't do it," is logical when you know you can and will get paid to write.

The result is that I never do writing that I like, which is not nearly as bad as the other result: forgetting the kind of writing that I like to do. I hadn't done creative writing in so long that it had become a strange and pointless activity.

In the past year alone, I've only ever done writing for work – business magazine features and advertorials – and my daily journaling, which is basically just a record of things happening to me and me happening to things. They are all automatic, with no true connection to the art of stringing words into something relevant and almost no attempt to game-change or touch lives or any of those things that moved mountains and so on. None of the grandness that comes with wielding words. I don't even try anymore.

WHO THE HECK IS ALIA?
Hning, also known as Alia in the Jeddah circuit, is one of the people that I well and truly met online. We know each other in person, but we have shared I would say 75% of our experiences through words – blog posts, emails, social media, text messages. We became friends through this medium, and continue to sustain the connection via smatterings of anecdotes and essays and stories.

Through the years, as I've gotten to know her, I developed a literal sisterly feeling towards her, one that I share with my real sister – a competition the kind of which we reserve for an adored sibling who has the same skill set. (My own sister herself is a skilled writer.) I enjoy reading her work, and want nothing more than to be a better writer than she is.

It is only natural that I started (and continue) this writing project with her.

THE COST OF CONTENT
So far, Hning and I have shared 4 different stories each with each other that we presumably labored over for 2 weeks before submission. I say presumably because I am a flip-flopper: one week I have the discipline of a samurai, waking up at 7am to write for an hour before I get ready for work, and the next week I don't even get to it until a few hours before the deadline. Predictable.

I've been tempted to cheat and submit pieces that I've written in the past but never shared in public, just to avoid paying a hundred bucks. In fact, it has crossed my mind every single Monday.

This past Monday – our 5th – was no different. I wrote not a single word, out of sheer laziness. When I finally received the email from Hning with an attached story, I knew there was no running from it.

I lost 100 Saudi Riyal.

I have to pay the price. It must hurt me, for me to understand the value of writing, for me to learn.

The cost of content is failure.

This blog post is my apology to the writing gods. Take my money. It's all I have.



** Hning and I still haven't decided on whether we will share the work we produced during this experiment. They are made of raw, sensitive material, and coming from an intensely complicated Jeddawi background (plus the fact that we are writers), we are both a little hesitant about making them public. I do, however, invite anyone who would like to join this project/experiment to hop on and throw written pieces at me. I promise to make you pay.