Tag: writing

To Read Is to Write

to read

I met a girl who’d subjected herself to an impressive schedule. A fiction and a non-fiction every week, no matter what.

It seemed a vigorous routine. Like school homework. Do it, finish it, and move on to the next. Reading is learning yes, but to me it seemed like she forced herself to read, read, and read even more.

Which is not a wrong thing. Except it felt so wrong that someone who’d read so much wouldn’t want as much to do with writing. She had an aversion to writing, and I couldn’t understand that.

When I first got bored with my school routine, I took to reading. I wasn’t as aggressive as I’d like to claim, but I read a lot.

And I realised I loved reading. From Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Sherlock Holmes to Harry Potter, and Narnia, it was a crescendo of curiosity. And I believe that was a good thing.

I used to sit under a not-so-bright lamp, all night, peering at the fine print. It was fascination beyond anything I had felt. I loved the way reading made me feel. I longed for the lure of the sentences, the way a story moved from one word to another, how every letter and every comma only enriched the narrative, and how every single dash or stroke on paper added so much value.

I loved absorbing more than the story — the size of the print, the blackness of it, and the tiny strokes that sharpened every curve. I began to see the beauty in a full stop, the potential in ellipsis, the continuity in a comma, and the definite uncertainty in a question mark.

And that’s when I understood I want to write like that.

I had, for years, admired the way writers played with words, the way Shakespeare shattered grammar rules and yet made it sound so right. And I wanted to do the same, in such a way so as to make another young reader stare swell in love with words — just as I had.

And that’s why I never comprehend when someone says they love reading, but can’t write. What do they see while reading, I wonder?

Writing When you Can’t

I’m in the middle of a dry spell. I can’t write. I’m stuck.

But I’m guilty too. I know the block is real but I also know that it can break — if you hit hard enough. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do.

I’ve been writing random stuff, both long form and short, trying to get through to that point where words would just flow like a melted candle. Not happening though. I spent about four hours writing one of my recent posts. It was less than 400 words. And there was a time when I wrote an average of 1600 words in three hours.

It is real. I am blocked.

But I’m trying, and that’s what matters. After all, what am I if I don’t write? It’s the only thing I can do, the only I want to do, and the only thing that pays for my lunch. So what would become of me if I don’t write?

And that thought terrifies me more than anything. It chills my bones to the core that I can’t sleep without the guilt gnawing at my chest. I can’t sleep without writing something. Even if it’s not worth a reader’s time, I wrote.

After all, having something to work on is better than not having anything at all. Don’t you think?

Life Cycle

I get paid to write. But there’s a price to it too: I write not for myself. I write for a business that sells to other businesses. And because I make it my business to deal with all this business on a day-to-day basis, I have opinions about the way people do business.

And I realised this only last evening when I was busy being busy. After three years, I realised it on a Friday the 13th. I was writing a blog about the various businesses that people do nowadays, about how the nature of money-making has evolved from traditional ways, and how people find creative methods most of us haven’t even heard of.

Like that common saying — “there’s an app for that,” — it’s amazing that every “app” is a business in itself. If you can imagine it, you can earn out of it. It’s a part of human evolution, and now we’ve begun to see the monetary value in every thing around us.

Whether it’s a tree with roots extending to the pavement, a sloppy drinker who couldn’t contain his wine to the glass, or a woman too lazy to clean her own nails, there’s a business for that.

But the weirdest thing of them all is that these businesses aren’t monopolies. They have competition, and heavy ones too.

As we grow lazier, and long for an extra beanbag to prop our feet up while binge-watching the latest in House of Cards, there’s always a businessman (or a few) caressing fresh bills. The more we choose comfort, the more businesses opportunities pop up. We once managed with one pair of shoes. Now we need one for running, another for weight training, and yet another for indoor sports. After all, we earn it, and we can afford it.

The more we earn, the more we want. The more we want, the more choices and business opportunities come up. And that just means businesses fighting more to outperform competition.

And here I am, writing for one business, against another business, so I can earn more and want more.

A vicious cycle, if there ever was one.

Over the Block

One day, I woke up, got ready for work, walked all the way, and switched on my computer to realise I couldn’t write a word.

the office

And that depressed me more than anything else.

Because I was stuck. It wasn’t a new feeling, of course. But when you’re getting paid to write, you can’t complain of bad days. I couldn’t bear the creeping guilt that gripped my throat forcing me to stare at the page that refused to fill up by itself.

Every new mail was torture. Every new chat message, every request added to the burden. I hated myself for being at work and not working. For not being able to work.

Some people played carrom in a corner. Their “boss” had taken the day off, so they had a field day too. They triggered my already-short temper; they laughed in high spirits while I tapped away on my Mac trying to make something sensible.

Yet some others packed their stuff, calling it a day. They had worked for eight hours straight scrutinising their code, evaluating, and reviewing their program. And here I sat too guilty to even open Buzzfeed.

Then there were the others who always had too much to do than they could ever manage. They had their eyes glued to their screens, shoulders hunched towards the black (square) hole that seems to vacuum them into its depths.

And here I was, wondering if I should add an extra tablespoon of peanut butter in my toast every morning. Even after four cups of coffee, my page was still blank. One of my friends understood. Or at least thought he did.

“Shit happens, dude.” he said, ruffling my hair and winking at me as if that should reassure me. That never reassures me. Not being able to do the only thing (I pride) I can do is not a case of shit happening. It’s more like the case of my entire life becoming a pile of shit.

Still, nothing. I looked through the window. We were high up on the twelfth floor, and the minuscule world below me seemed immaterial. Hundreds of vehicles, carrying thousands of people, trudged their way through jammed streets. Each honking as if the world blow up unless they had their way. But I slumped like a blob of pudding without the inspiration to write even a rhyming couplet.

I turned to the heavens for a hint. For a flash of enlightenment, something to help me unstuck myself, and restart my work. I saw what I see everyday: The sun giving away all her glory to anyone who cared to appreciate. It was cloudy like any other day. Yet the sun shone through all that clouded her vision.

And I wondered: Why couldn’t I write a piece that would shine through the same cloud that protects it?

I wondered. Still, nothing more than this.

I Fell in Love with Writing. Again.

I love my life. Because I write for a living, and writing is my passion. Sometimes I write good stuff, and sometimes crap I’m not proud of.

I fell in love with writing.jpg

Whatever I write though, I edit. People say crisp sentences are strong, and have a stronger impact in the reader. And that’s why I taught myself to “kill my darlings.”

And during one of my self-editing sessions, I fell in love with the language all over again. Because I learnt an important lesson: Longer sentences can be strong too.

I had this sentence.

Writing is one thing technology can’t conquer, because writing is human.

My internal editor went berserk, and we ended up with this.

Writing is human, and technology can never conquer it.

At first, both sentences made perfect sense to me. And then I read and re-read them aloud. And that’s when it hit me.

Everything about these statements was different.

Writing is one thing technology can’t conquer, because writing is human.

The sentence starts with “writing”. That says writing is important. And then it says why writing is important. Because it’s the ‘one thing technology can’t conquer.’

It’s ‘the one thing.’ That’s to say, writing is beyond all things technology can conquer. We acknowledge the power of technology, but declare writing is more powerful. And why is writing so powerful? Because, ‘writing is human’.

When you connect writing with being human, it’s clear that technology isn’t. It’s emphasising the obvious. But at the end, writing seems in the better light, because we can relate to it as human — that it’s the one thing unhuman technology will never conquer.

There’s emotion in this sentence. There’s human.

And then there’s this.

Writing is human, and technology can never conquer it.

The sentence, again, starts with writing. But, instead of a period there’s a comma — a pause as if we’re waiting for something important — and then comes the phrase, ‘and technology can never conquer it.’

I read this line, and realised: I had combined writing and human in one phrase, and added technology in the immediate next. It had deteriorated the power of writing which was evident in the previous version. The emphasis, now, had shifted to the word “technology.” But as a reader, I’d be reading out ‘technology can never conquer it,’ in just one breath — not a breath-taking line.

I had confined the most important part of the sentence to the first line, and made it sound bland. With the comma, I had brushed aside the human element in writing, and focussed on technology instead. And that had made the whole sentence more of an observation than an emotion.

Sometimes, we say things in an impulse, in an emotion. And sometimes, this spontaneity needs much editing before anyone sees it. But in some odd cases, we just over-edit. That’s what happened to me.

I wrote, I rewrote, I read, and re-read my words. And when I saw the difference, I felt a rushing love towards the English language. How can a language be so beautiful, and so complicated at the same time?