Dipika Kohli
By Dipika Kohli
A long time ago, there was a quote I had copied over by hand into a bright pink neon notebook, one of those 70-page ‘college ruled’ ones. Quotes are so popular, aren’t they? Someone puts something cute into a clipartlike frame and instagrams it and there it is, instawisdom. I’ve got nothing against quotes, I’ll even leave you with one, today, but in this era of very short attention spans I noticed they can get overly clipped, and you lose the nuances of their meanings. Have you noticed that, like when sometimes you happen to come across the full text of something you had read a snippet of before, and therein discover a whole lot of variances in how it could be interpreted? That is what I’m talking about.
Dressed-up, clipped quotes about success are especially trendy where I am, in Southeast Asia. Sometimes the people running book clubs will specify, ‘No business books, please,’ which really tells you something. There were some literary artsy books that hosts chose at two book clubs I went to recently in Bangkok; I was glad to be part of these discussions as they spanned the grays in what things were being communicated, and we had a highly textured conversation with people from different age groups and life experiences. I forgot how much I like that. I’ve since started my own circle here, where I am. It’s a mix of people, quite cool and fun.
Maybe a part of committing to our creative work is learning how to keep negative attitudes of others at bay. If that’s the case, then what’s the rest? Actually doing. Actually making. For writers this means putting down the words, line by line, day after day. After a decade – or two? – you may surprise yourself by being able to see how far you’ve come by simply practicing and reading and conversing with others, too.
Ten years ago, I was in India and Thailand and Nepal before landing in Cambodia. But even within those many days of movement from place to place, I found stillness. I set aside time to write, over breakfast once a week. This would be for roughly two hours and I typed away on a wireless keyboard into a cracked iPad to write columns, for this magazine, and bunches of other things. Like diary entries that today I can chuckle over or feel emotional about and then delete. Processed. I’m glad I did all that travel and moving around. At that time, it was highly imperative to keep moving and learning. It mattered, and despite the friction and the inevitable losses that come with such a long trip that accidentally turned into, ah, exile, I guess, I had to see it through.
The news is I have a new pink folder now. I’m quite happy having it under my arm as it reminds me of the old days of the pink Mead. This one is translucent, sized A4 with the two-ring binding we have in this part of the world. I got a white two-ring puncher, and I use it to file A6-size index cards in a loose, mix and match way, each card containing an exercise in how to reflect or write something in a way that may generate surprising compositions. I’ll pull a few cards from this file now, when I go meet people who ask me for help on how to make time to find their own creative voice and write new poems or short stories. What a privilege to get to do this. I suppose there is a lot to share with some who trust me to help them earmark time to reflect with me as a guide along their discovering their own way towards doing for them what my Saturday morning writing time did for me.
I’ll now share the quote I mentioned that has been with me all this time, having been transferred to digital archives and reconsidered often, added to one of those index cards in the file and in the ‘keep?’ pile at the moment. I left this one alone for the most part but fished it out from time to time to give it another bout of attentive reflection. Is it really this simple, I wonder, as I read it, today. The idea of making things by simply prioritizing that act of setting aside time? You decide. Here it is.
‘The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.’
― Chuck Close
Dipika Kohli is an author who is based in Phnom Penh. Discover her books at kismuth.com and other projects at dipikakohli.com.
