Nemo Dat Quod Non Habet: I Cannot Give What I Do Not Have.
In law this maxim expresses the (fairly common sense) fact that a property right cannot be transferred from a person who does not hold that property right. Quite literally, you cannot give anyone what you do not own yourself.
Example: when you are in Paris some scammer sells you the Eiffel Tower for 20 Euros and a couple of wheels of brie. Does this mean that you now own the Eiffel Tower? And do you have the right to sell it to someone else once you realise it's kind of a dumb investment?
So it is with writing. Even if you are basing time or location or context only on research, or indeed setting your work in a completely fictional universe, the emotional core of the work can only come from your own experience.
So what to make of "writers" who say that they don't know what to write, or how to to motivate themselves to write?
My advice would be: if you don't have a story in you, or you need group motivation or endless twee exercises to bring words out of you, it may be time to quit writing for the time being and just go out and live. After a few years, if you really get down into life, you might find that you suddenly have something meaningful to say.
Bukowski puts the same point in his poem So You Want To Be A Writer. His point is that unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don’t do it. The poem is brutal but it does offer a relatively happy ending:
when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was.
Going back to Nemo Dat. It's a harsh possibility but it has to be faced: perhaps your writers block comes from the fact that you don't (yet) have anything to give.
P. Julian
16 July 2018
Comments