The Writing Journal

Excerpt from a writer's head

I know we’ve said this before, but writing is hard work. We started this circus when we were sixteen. Back then people used to say two things. You write if you are in love, or if you are going crazy. At sixteen, being accused of falling in love was sacrilegious, so not being in the right mind was the better option. Now that we are going through this crisis of being unable to write, I think we should revisit that conversation

I think to be able to write something of a polished nature, one needs to be at peace with whatever he/she is writing. A personal essay requires you to be at peace with your past, and have surrendered a degree of emotions towards it. One cannot write an essay if he/she is rocked by feelings of what has happened. A person can get out paragraphs of whatever s/he is feeling, but eventually, it will become a heap of something not meant for public consumption. To make it fit for consumption one has to go back to these haphazard paragraphs when s/he is at peace with whatever has been written and make it into something worth reading. This does not mean a sick person cannot write about illness, but rather that s/he must have come to terms with the illness. This might be more possible when someone is suffering from a chronic illness, perhaps a patient on palliative chemotherapy.

What we had on blogger was exactly this, it was words strung together in times of emotional turmoil, in an attempt to reach out and stand out from the crowd. This is one reason we didn’t get anywhere with the blog. Beyond a point, people don’t want to hear just emotions. Remember when everyone used to say it was powerful, but how it just fizzled out after the first read? I think people don’t come back to these. For people to come back, there needs to be clarity, a story, and other things you can’t formulate when you are unable to think right. Writing takes time, and you need to be able to stick with the idea long enough for it to develop into something worth writing. Perhaps not meant for the reel generation we are now. 

This is one reason we deleted everything we had on Blogger. We were 17 years old in a rather hostile environment back then. So it made sense then. Not anymore. We may not be at peace, but we are in a better place now. 

I think this applies to fiction as well, simply because everything you write, is dependent on what you have lived through. Nothing comes out of a vacuum. Setting a scene, and a character requires being at peace with whatever you have relied on for this fiction to come into existence. That is one reason I think we are unable to write about Dawapuram or Salim nowadays. We aren’t at peace with the characters, and the characters around Salim. We are yet to be able to accept what Salim has to go through and the role Dawapuram will play in his experience.

Writing is hard work. It takes time. It isn’t something we can fit into time blocks and finish up before we move on to the next task. Yes, we need to have some schedule. But perhaps writing can be the cheat day from scheduling all over life. 

Insha Allah