11 - 17 January 2001
Issue No.516
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 11 - 17 January 2001 Issue No.516 |
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Story of a notebook
It began a long time ago, this habit of keeping a notebook in which to jot down ideas as they came to me before they could be made into novels. It was a time of intellectual congestion, as it were. Ideas would begin to crowd into my head, and I was afraid that I might not find them once I started writing.
Still, the real drive behind writing, as I have always known, does not comprise ideas but something else. That happens or does not happen, regardless of whether or not there are ideas. And it comes with all that is necessary for creating a novel: characters, plots, ideas. Some call it inspiration or the muse: maybe it should be called lucidity.
So the notebook was not that much use, after all. I stopped writing for many years after completing the Trilogy; I even thought I might never return to writing again. And at that time the notebook was, of course, of no use.
When I did return, finally, it was a different kind of writing altogether. What I had written in the notebook was utterly different in conception and tone, and it seemed pointless to resort to it again. The respected writer, Abdel-Rahman Al-Sharqawi, did like one of the stories jotted down in the notebook -- "Al-Ataba Al-Khadra," it was called -- and spoke to me about turning into a play. I gave my permission but nothing came out of it in the end. And that, you could say, was the end of the notebook. A useless notebook, it turns out.
Based on an interview by Mohamed Salmawy.
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