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How
to Write and Why Bother
There is a novel in everyone – not to mention the short stories, poems, limericks, essays, haikus and a host of other genres that can emerge from anyone’s life and observations. But unfortunately, there is also a terribly critical and rigid ‘editor’ inside most of us.
text: Gouri
Dange
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 Many of us grow up in homes and schools where original writing expected from us is restricted to templatized ‘essays’ and ‘compositions’ on my vacation, my pet, and suchlike. A whole generation later, our kids are possibly doing the same thing. Some of them manage to enjoy themselves as best as they can within the template; others simply ‘get it over with’ when they have to write.
It is at this stage that we make unnecessary decisions and self-fulfilling prophecies about ourselves: ‘I am no writer’ or ‘X writes so well, I could never do that.’ If we’ve been fortunate to have teachers with imagination, she or he is able to not just pick and reward the best writing, but is able to pick up on potential, and/or flashes of good writing in an otherwise lifeless essay, and teach you how to take that streak further.
There is a novel in everyone – not to mention the short stories, poems, limericks, essays, haikus and a host of other genres that can emerge from anyone’s life and observations. But unfortunately, there is also a terribly critical and rigid ‘editor’ inside most of us.
Far too quickly, before your writerly impulse can even begin to unfurl its wings, you tend to stand in your own way with a fat blue pencil, ready with labels like: ‘too childish, too personal, vocabulary is not good enough, others express themselves so much better’. On top of it there is, nowadays, a publisher and marketing person inside us too, active and rampant well before we begin writing: “Who will publish my stuff? Who will buy/read my writing?” this person asks us, and we put down our pens, snap off the computer, and go watch some TV instead.
Off and on, we have twinges of regret that we’re not writing, a few flashes of inspired thought, some half-baked resolutions, and then its back to the TV. For some of us, the twinges come up often enough to kind of gain critical mass and finally prompt us into writing something.
Two things could happen at this stage, both rather neurotic! Either you love and adore every word that issues forth, and want to be instantly read and even published without a word being changed here and there; or you read your stuff, dislike and disown it intensely, and bury it without ceremony. read
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