Writer's Block: Hop, Skip, Explore

Sándor Márai once said, "An artist should push towards the easiest path." Though the Hungarian writer and journalist meant it more generally and didn't necessarily use these exact words, it has been my secret to remaining unblocked. When poetry deserts me, I delve into prose.

I began writing poems in high school and published the first one at age 20 in Népszabadság, Hungary's biggest daily at the time. Like most young poets, my initial volumes, The Pure Reason and White Songbook, published in 2005 and 2007 respectively, are personal –built on confessions of a sensitive self.

Then I entered a new phase, where I wanted to move away from the personal. Taking the easy way, I didn't hold back, which resulted in the not-so-personal Back in London (2008) dedicated to artworks at London's Tate Modern and National Gallery, and an equally removed-from-my-life novella in 2010, Our Daily Today. The plot focused on a Roman Catholic saint, who performs a miracle, raising a noble boy from death in an hour.

At that point, writing prose gave me this immense sense of freedom – I could find stories and use historic references. Storytelling began to give me a high, and so in subsequent years, I zigzagged between prose and poetry.

Under a pseudonym, David Barna, I wrote A Hungarian Novel on the great, early 20th century Hungarian writer Zsigmond Móricz. The peasant girl he adopted became his lover and after his death saved Jews in Budapest during the Holocaust.

Reflection and introspection, resulting from exploring the world, pushed my writing back to subjects close to the heart and took the form of my 2014 novel River God that's got a complex plot with four story lines. Birth with Daddy has a lot of my personal experiences and yet a lot of what's in the book has never happened to me.

My three-year-old daughter inspired my venture into yet another realm – children's books. In 2016, I did a series on a baby owl called Goophow. The first part's now being published in Turkey and the third part will be out this summer.

But at present, I'm in this strong, creative, poetry writing phase with themes about the world. While the recently published collection Sound Odyssey revolves around Indo-Hungarian painter Amrita Sher-Gil, I've also written one on Amir Khusro, an allegory about Columbus in India, and a political poem with the motif of a huge tree rooted in the sky, growing upside down.

Following Marai's wise words I've been able to avoid a block by dabbling in different forms and feel free in swinging from writing that's personal to subjects that explore the world. Most importantly, in the process I've managed to remain true to myself.

—As told to Pooja Bhula