Eda Gunaydin: the (academic) writer

Eda Gunaydin is a Turkish-Australian critic and researcher. Her key research interests are in Middle Eastern politics, security, and gender. She is also an award-winning creative non-fiction writer, and her debut collection of essays, Root & Branch: Essays on Inheritance, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction in 2023.

I’m pretty confident that the only thing I know how to do, or at least do more than the average person, is write. Writing is the only apprenticeship I’ve ever undertaken, starting with when I began writing 1,000 words a day. I was sixteen and anxious and depressed and bored, and it gave me something to focus on, so I did it until I lost steam after a couple of years. I have also journalled prolifically from a young age, and between these two things, the sum total of my unpublished writing – my practice-for-the-real-thing writing – amounts to hundreds of thousands of words.

I have never applied myself to cultivating any other skill with half that much dedication: when I was a child, I used to wake up every Saturday morning hours before my mother, staring at the clock in my bedroom, unwilling to make a sound, hoping that this was the morning she finally slept in and that I wouldn’t have to attend another karate lesson (and was over the moon when I finally broke my arm at the dojo and was permitted to quit, having proven that I was too clumsy to continue); likewise, I quit trying to learn to play the piano after less than a year, figuring I was too old.

I can’t sing, I can’t draw, I can’t dance, I have little in the way of hand-eye coordination. I drive over kerbs constantly when I’m behind the wheel, and I can’t rotate a cube in my mind. In other words, I think that I might in fact be bad at everything except writing. And when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail: my professional life spans creative non-fiction and academia, two careers that are linked in the sense that they both involve writing. I call myself a writer because I can’t call myself anything else, and I am nothing else.  

Writing can be challenging in earthly, practical ways: it gives me a backache to sit hunched at my desk for too long, so I sometimes like to lie down on the floor under my desk. Effective writing, like any other kind of deep work, is best done with few interruptions, and I almost never have a day where my calendar is clear of the tens of tiny tasks, like emails or meetings, that make it feel impossible to sink into it, because I know that it’s not long until I have to switch to something else, and the looming spectre of distraction makes me anxious.

Writing is ideally done in a flow state, something that is unpredictable and difficult to self-induce, meanwhile that, in reality, writing usually needs to be done, reliably, every day. But these aren’t the hardest parts of writing for me. In fact, the bulk of the factors I just listed are about not-writing: the barriers and impediments that block the path to its consummation. I’d like to offer a reflection on something that I find difficult that is about writing itself, and is more phenomenological than the things I’ve already listed. What I find impossible about writing is that it is one of the most significant tools we possess for communication, and yet, after I have done it, I almost never feel like I’ve successfully communicated.

Jacques Lacan captures this well when he writes in his Écrits that it is impossible to speak the whole truth: ‘Saying it all is impossible: words fail.’ The distances between the self and one’s subconscious, the writer and the reader, the word and the world, are too large, and mean not only that writing can yield misinterpretations – due errors or other defects that could be eliminated, by using a better phrase or implementing some thoughtful editing – but that words are barely fit for the enormity of their purpose. I can easily spend hours editing an essay or a journal article, and emerge at the end of the day with two lines from TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock running through my head: ‘That is not it at all / That is not what I meant, at all.’

Sometimes this feeling is just the feeling of exhaustion, the kind of malaise that crops up in the aftermath of any large physical or mental exertion, and my bad mood lifts after I eat something greasy or go for a walk. Other times, I find writing desperately frustrating, an exercise in trying to express myself perfectly and realising it is impossible, and would continue to be so, even if I were perfect: that distance between what I want to say, and what I can say, is implacable, in the same way that it is impossible to meld one’s consciousness with another’s, or even, in Lacanian terms, to overcome the fragmentation of one’s own consciousness. I feel a childlike sadness when I contemplate that I can’t simply meld minds with other people: that there is a permanent distance between myself and others, which writing cannot cross.

The best strategy I have encountered for releasing this frustration is letting go of this goal, and of goal-orientation in general. Rather than looking toward the end – when the essay or the article comes out, and I realise I haven’t accomplished my objective at all – I try to instead focus on the process. It’s in this that I find pleasure, and feel excitement that I might get to spend a few hours of my day just noodling, shifting words around, finding satisfying arrangements that sound nice when you read them out loud.

As you may have been able to guess by now, I have always been a fairly serious person, starting from a young age: when I was four, I asked my mother to put on the 1978 Turkish drama film Sultan, about a destitute widow with four children, every morning. My psychologist points my seriousness out one session, after I tell her this anecdote, before recommending that I introduce more play into my life. I resist this advice at first, remarking that I don’t have many hobbies, and I don’t like video games or – as indicated above – drawing or craft or much else. But I do like writing, and it is best approached, I think, as a form of play. On days when I’m feeling mopey and bleak, on the verge of poisoning my mind with French philosophy, I try instead to think about writing, joy, and delight.