Month: March 2022

Get Good At Writing In Three Simple Steps

Neera

I’ve written every day for three years now.

  • In my journals.
  • On social media.
  • On my website.
  • On Medium.
  • In books.

Even when I was a novice writer, I put my words out there.

  • Sometimes, people loved it.
  • Sometimes, people hated it.
  • Most of the time, people ignored it.

You know what? It didn’t matter.

Writing is my key to personal growth.

If you want to get good at writing, here are three things that worked for me:

  1. Build something. Anything. A website. A course. An eBook. An art project. Write about the ups and downs of building that. Then, share it on social media, preferably on LinkedIn if it is addressed to entrepreneurs and on Instagram if it is an artwork.
  2. Journal for 15 minutes at the end of each day. Ask yourself, what did I learn today? The mistakes you made and how you can correct them. Post your learnings on social media.
  3. Turn the whole experience into a course. Make it easy for others to succeed. Offer it for free first. Then, learn from your initial students how to teach.

Now you have something to write about and something to teach.

Repeat the process.

There is no magic to online writing or teaching.

Subscribe to my newsletter at A Whimsical Writer for more tips and motivation.

Photo by Hugues de BUYER-MIMEURE on Unsplash

I Am Writing A Cookbook

Neera

When I was young, my father forbade my mother from teaching me cooking.

He didn’t want me to get sucked into housework and become what every girl in my time was expected to become— a housewife.

My mother respected his wishes and toiled alone in the kitchen while I concentrated on my studies. I was a bright student. I went through my teen years and early twenties without knowing how to cook.

When I finished my master’s degree and had a few free months before starting my Ph.D. degree, my mother, in her infinite wisdom, decided that I should join a cooking course. It was every mother’s duty to prepare her daughter for married life.

Word was sent around to my mother’s school (she was a teacher) and one of her colleagues suggested Mrs. Singh, who ran cooking classes from her home. So I was enrolled in the course without my knowledge.

Mrs. Singh was a celebrity chef in my town. An elegant woman, living in a modish home, in a posh colony. When I was dropped on her doorstep, I was shaking in my boots. Distressed because I didn’t know anything about cooking, and worried about the possibility of being thrown in with experienced ladies who have been cooking for years.

I was right. Most of the other participants were experienced cooks and high-class ladies who threw dinner parties and wanted to learn new recipes to impress their guests. I tried to hide behind books, spending most of my time copying recipes while they chatted, exchanged tips, and did the actual cooking.

At the end of the course, they enhanced their skills while I filled in an old notebook with recipes that I was never going to try.

Eight months later, I got married (of course arranged marriage). My husband lived in Australia and came on a four-week vacation to get married. His parents had done the homework for him and shortlisted three potential brides. He didn’t get the chance to meet the other two because my father decided to arrive first so that if in case the boy and the girl agree, there is at least some time to do the wedding preparation.

The boy and the girl did agree. A marriage was set in two weeks’ time, and a week after, my husband flew back to Australia, leaving me with his parents while waiting for the visa.

Lo-and-behold! My mother-in-law fell sick on the way back from the airport (5 hours’ journey). On my first day in my in-law’s home and it was assumed that I would cook lunch for the family. We were five in the household: my mother-in-law, father-in-law, my husband’s younger brother, and his youngest sister. The brother went to his work, the sister to the university, and I towards the kitchen.

I did the dishes and checked the fridge. All I could find were two eggplants. My luck! Eggplants are the hardest to cook. According to Indian cuisine, there is only one way to cook them, which is to make Bhurtha.

I didn’t know how to cook eggplants. Checking the notebook where I had copied Mrs. Singh’s recipes was futile because I knew it didn’t have the recipe. I was in tears. I sat down and wrote a letter to my mother, telling her about my predicament and blaming her for not teaching me how to cook basic dishes.

After venting out, I calmed down and got on with the job. Turning the gas stove on, I roasted them till the skin was thoroughly charred. I then started peeling the skin. Eggplants were too hot. I remembered my mother doing it under running water. So I did the same. Images of my mother cooking the dish over the years started coming to me. One by one, the next step became apparent.

I remembered her saying you need lots of onions and tomatoes to cook eggplant because after roasting eggplant dries down and reduces in size. Besides, onions and tomatoes give the dish its taste. So I chopped the onions and fried them till they turned brown and then added the meshed eggplants and spices and fried them together. The last step was to add chopped tomatoes, cover them with a lid, and steam cook them.

My father-in-law loved it. To date, I am not sure whether he really liked it or just said it to make me feel good.

Five months later, when I joined my husband in Australia. I was no better than before. My husband was a better cook than me because he lived by himself and I had no choice but to learn to cook.

So cooking became my challenge. I borrowed as many cookbooks on Indian cooking as I could find in the local library and started trying them. I learned to make veggie curries, meat curries, kababs, and even Indian sweets.

Each time I perfected one, my husband threw another challenge my way. I learned to make Gulab Jamun and did a decent job with them and my husband said I bet you can’t make Jalebi. So off I went to learn to make jalebis. After multiple failed attempts, I perfected the recipe, and my husband said I bet you can’t make Rasmalai. So off I went, trying making Rasmalai.

You get the picture.

But cooking is not my forte. Cooking was a challenge for me, something to excel at but not a passion.

Then why the hell do I want to write a cookbook?
Because my daughters want me to.

Like me, they were never into cooking. But now that they are both married and running their household, suddenly they want to inherit my knowledge. And I don’t want to repeat my mother’s mistake.

They want me to write down their favorite recipes in book form. And I want to embellish that book with stories associated with them and my own childhood memories.

So this book is virsa (inheritance) from a mother to her daughters. For a moment, I thought I might take this project into a bigger sense and write a book for all Punjabi daughters. But then I chicken out. I am keeping the project small at this stage. I have no experience in writing cookbooks, and hell, I am not even a passionate cook. But I love to write. And I love to tell stories.

More than the recipes I want to pass down stories to my daughters. They can get recipes from the internet. And they will make their own recipes, I am sure, just like I did. But only I can tell them the stories associated with the food they ate while growing up.

So here I am, starting another book, but this time for a specific audience.

Subscribe to my newsletter at A Whimsical Writer for more tips and motivation.

Photo by Yubraj Timsina on Unsplash

Want To Write? Then Don’t Start A Blog

Neera

Most people, when they think of online writing, they think of starting a blog.

It would have been a great thing if it was 1999.

Today it is very hard to drive traffic to a blog or a website.

You can do that if:

  • you have lots of advertising dollars and
  • you can write long, educational, SEO-infused articles that are also interesting to read.

The truth is, blogging, website, and online writing are three completely different things.

A blog is where people sequentially document and publish their thoughts, rants, and musings. In other words, a blog is your online journal that other people can read.

A website is where people find out who you are and what you do. In other words, a website is your business card.

Online writing is sharing your thoughts, stories, opinions, and insights on a platform that already has an active audience. In other words, online writing is about building an audience.

If you don’t have an audience, there is no point in having a business card or an online journal.

Go against the conventional wisdom and write on social media.

Build an audience.

Then go and build a website and write a blog.

Subscribe to my newsletter at A Whimsical Writer for more tips and motivation.

Photo by Maria Lupan on Unsplash

Story Of “Failed Abortion”

Neera

“My mother tried to kill me when I was in her womb.” revealed the red-haired woman in checkered multi-colored fleece jacket.

The year was 2005. I had joined the life-story writing group run by a local writer. Each week we were writing a story from our life. This week’s topic was “a most striking memory from your childhood.”

Aida (not her real name) wrote that her mother wanted to get rid of her even before she was born.

She was made to feel unwanted in lots of little ways. She never had new clothes, only the hand-me-downs from her siblings.

She was not allowed have bath first, only in the used water after her siblings had theirs. 

She was not sent to the private school like her siblings did, only to the public school.

Her mother made it clear since she was a child she was an unwanted child and called her “a failed abortion.”

Aida was born in Scotland to an alcoholic father and a stern mother. To date, she didn’t know why her mother didn’t want her. If her mother was a loving lady, one could assume that she wanted to spare her the beatings from her father. But she wasn’t. So Aida had to bear both — her father’s beating and her mother’s hatred.

All through her childhood, she tried to stay out of the house as much as possible, often eating at neighbors’ places. 

She learned to stay content with whatever little affection she got from her maternal grandmother, who was a much nicer human being than her mother. 

Since she didn’t have any toys of her own, from a very early age, Aida learned to amuse herself with the things other people discarded. The habit continued all through her life. She would often pick up discarded grocery lists from supermarkets and bring them to the writing sessions. “Have a look at this; why would you need three types of shampoos.” She would chuckle. 

After the Life Story Writing course, we all kept meeting in my home for the next 15 years, writing stories from our lives. It was then I had the opportunity to learn a lot more about her.

She was a teacher in her early life. Later she went to nursing college and became a nurse. The kind of nurse you would want on duty if you happen to be a patient. She did what was right by the patient, not what the book said or the young inexperienced doctors told her. 

God has given Aida more empathy than any other human being. Maybe that’s why she picked the kind of husbands she did. You know the ones who need “fixing.” Her first husband was a psychopath; she though she could change him with her love.

She couldn’t. He threatened to kill her and their three children. Aida migrated to Australia to escape from him. He followed her even though they were divorced. Her children were so traumatized that they all died in their fifties.

Aida lost all three of them within five years. She endured the pain of burying a child three times over. 

She married the second time and picked a man who has Asperger Syndrome. He is a seventy-year old child who can’t feel any emotions. 

Yet she keeps going. “I have decided to let life take its course,” she told me the other day on the phone. 

Each Monday, I ring her to check on her and send her food. We play a little word game where I ask her, “How are you?” 

And she responds, “Parts of me are okay.”

“Which part?” I would ask.

“Oh, my eyelashes and my toenails.” 

And I would laugh. Aida has advanced arthritis. He can’t even lie on the bed and sleeps sitting on a special chair. 

“How are you today, Aida.”

“Still present.”

“What’s special?” I asked her yesterday.

“Well, today is my birthday. I am 85 years old.”

“Happy birthday, dear friend.”

So much for a failed abortion, I thought. Both her mother and father diedd a long time ago, her psychopath husband long gone, even her traumatized children relieved from their ongoing suffering, Aida is still present.

Here is one of her poems which she wrote in one of the writing sessions in my home:

Her life was not her own since when 
She kitted fine but catty then. 
Next, she became his own wee hen 
A foxy lady by some men. 
A bitch as well as least by ten 
Hang on, my story you can’t tell,
I need to set things straight & yell
‘I’m too hot to handle!
Hot as hell!’
I set men on fire, might as well.

Life seems pleasant for a time,
Fair, fat and forty well 39′
Children grew up, the world sublime
And then all hell makes a paradigm
Shift, and I hear the new dictate.
‘Change, change, change you can’t escape.’

And I’m now a slave to this new estate.
I’ve become a dragon that men hate.
A dragon of a brilliant red,
Of fiery breath, it has been said.
I flash my tongue
‘You are so lazy,’ ‘Get out of bed’
Dragons don’t tolerate
Lids off toothpaste, and they hate
Toilet seat up, wet marks on floor
Near the toilet, they abhor
Hair in the bathroom sink for sure
And underpants left on 
you know where you lazy sod
Don’t sit in your chair like an ancient God

I’ve grown and changed, and now I’m done
Mother Nature you have had your fun
Leave me and my poor body alone.
Leave me at peace in my own wee home.

©Aida June 2014

Image by the author

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Empty-Nesters And Online Friendships

Neera

For the last five days, my house was a whirlwind of excitement. My older daughter was visiting the UK after two whole years of lockdowns and travel bans. Younger daughter came too, from Melbourne, along with her husband, and for five days, I became the mother I used to be before they left home.

This afternoon when they left, once again I was left with the empty house, a lot of mess, and the sound of their laughter still echoing in my ears.

Where have the thirty years of my life have gone? I still remember when we brought the first one home from the hospital. Overnight our life changed. My husband and I left the country of our birth and have been living in Australia for more than five years. All this time we have been saying, we will go back to India. Even after five years, (ten years in my husband’s case) we didn’t feel connected to the country we were calling our home.

It changed within months. 

Suddenly we had so many memories attached to the place. The hospital where our first daughter was born. The two-bedroom apartment we brought her in. Our first owned home, where we moved two months later. The child-care and kindergarten she went to.

The second daughter arrived three years later, and we developed roots in our adopted country. 

I stopped talking about going back; instead, our family migrated to Australia. First, my husband’s parents came, followed by his brother and family. Then came my parents and my brother and his family.

No longer we felt alone in a country where we couldn’t even get Indian groceries in the eighties. Our children gave us the reason to settle down and enjoy life.

For the past thirty years, I have been a busy mother, a devoted daughter-in-law, and a patient wife. My husband and I have built a home that always has an open door for family and friends. 

I didn’t cry; when my daughters left this afternoon. Neither did I try to clean the mess they had left behind. Instead, I had a nap to allow my sixty-year-old body to recuperate from all the excitement it had in the last five days. Then slowly, I went from room to room to inhale the scent my kids left behind.

My home is empty again. Not only my home but most of our friends’ homes too. Houses that were once bustling with young children, their friends, birthday parties, sleep-overs, and video games and music have just two or three people living in them.

The house has gone quiet again. My husband has gone back to his computer and my father-in-law to the TV. I came to the kitchen to prepare dinner but realized that the fridge was full of leftovers that would last us for at least a couple of days. So there is nothing else to do but catch up with emails, Whatsapp messages, LinkedIn posts, and Medium articles.

An hour later, I realized what excellent role technology is playing in the lives of empty-nesters. Was it not for writing on Medium, I would have gone mad during the 24 grueling months of lockdowns and isolations?

And now, when the children are exploring the world and living their own lives, I am leaning more towards my online friends for social connection.

It was nice to know that my online friends on the other end of the world are patiently waiting for me to embrace me back into their circle as soon as I was ready.

The first article I read on Medium was from Niharikaa Kaur Sodhi where she told a story to illustrate that we can have meaningful connections online.

A friend, who I don’t know in real life and lives on the opposite side of the globe, checked in with me every week post my surgery. He didn’t have to. There was nothing he got out of it. He didn’t upsell me into buying anything.

He just did because he wanted to.

At the time of typing this, his son is in the hospital and I’m unable to reach him for three days. I don’t even have his number, because we’ve only communicated via DMs.

I don’t have to worry. I’ll probably never even meet him.

But I’m human, and I do. And that’s the connection you should strive to achieve.

People who I call ‘friends’ didn’t check up on me. Gym buddies who live 5 minutes away didn’t text me, leave alone meet me. But this person did. And for that, I’ll always hold him highly in my heart. — Niharikaa Kaur Sodhi

“We are humans,” she wrote, “and human stories get us together.”

“See, humans connect with each other on the simple things in life.” she wrote. 

It was as if she was talking to me directly. Never before had I shared my family life on the internet, and she was urging me to do exactly that.

I know there are many empty-nesters in the Medium community. They can understand what I am going through. I already feel better, having written what I am going through. 

With the help of technology, I am connected to countless people all across the world. Without them and my writing, I might have drowned in self-pity and loneliness.

Subscribe to my newsletter at A Whimsical Writer for more tips and motivation.

No one reads books, why even bother writing them?

Neera

“I just spent the past year researching book publishing, and I can sum up my findings in one sentence: No one reads books.” wrote Elle Griffin in her Substack newsletter.

Like me, she wanted to write fiction. She even wrote a Gothic novel and published it on Substack. She tried to focus on her job and writing on the side – nothing else. Then she was chosen by Substack for a fellowship program. She was one of the ten writers selected for the fellowship, and it would have been silly to let the opportunity pass by her.

So rather than spending a year writing her next Utopian novel, she hunkered down on Substack, and according to her, it paid off.

After only one year of starting her newsletter, Novelist, she attracted 4,000 free subscribers and made $10,000 in revenue.

But then she dropped a bombshell. She wrote the article; No one reads books.No one will read your bookAfter I completed my first novel, I had dreams of a beautiful black book, its ivory pages sewn into the binding, the…ellegriffin.substack.com

Her article caused quite a furor. People wrote so many comments. In the Substack writers’ discussion group, people gave their views about her article.

“I think when every word you write is tied to the possible money you need to earn to keep writing works (whether fiction or non-fiction) it can influence choices positively and negatively.” wrote Erica Drayton, The Storyteller.

Most writers indeed want to get compensated for the amount of time and energy they devote to writing. When that doesn’t happen, frustration is inevitable, especially when other ventures are far more lucrative and rewarding.

But that is not the reason we write books. We write books because there is something in us so compelling and urgent that we have to share with the world, whether it is an idea or a story.

“For over half a century, books were considered the ultimate form of writing, wrote Mark Starlin in the discussion forum, “When they were simply a means of communication. The story or information is the important part. The book is just a (much loved) container. Perhaps we need to shift our mindset for current time and technology.”

Now writers have other mediums — blogs, social media, podcasts, videos. Even ebooks and audiobooks have become competitors to physical books.

“The medium doesn’t matter as much as the story, “wrote Mark Starlin, and he is right. In the end, we all are after stories, and we are ready to consume them in any form that is handy. If we are mobile, then through the digital medium, if we are doing chores, driving, or exercising, then through voice, if we are relaxing, then through a physical book.

It is true that we haven’t read 40% of the books we own.

The percentage might be more for some people, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that those who love books can’t resist buying them, thinking they will read them one day.

Our reading habits might have changed too. I like to binge-read books rather than read them cover to cover. It could be because of being time-poor or due to a low-attention span. But I don’t see myself stop buying books anytime soon.

Instead, I now buy books in the middle of the night, at the spur of the moment.

Most writers don’t write books to make money.

We don’t need to do everything to make money. Writing a book is one of them.

Writers write books for themselves.

Ask any writer who wrote their first book why they wrote it, and none of them would say that to make millions. Or even to make a living. Instead, they wrote it because they wanted to tell the story. Or share the idea.

They wanted to see whether they could write a book. It is as if writing a book is like climbing Everest, and you do it not for any reason other than you want to see whether you can do it or not.

I like Mark Starlin’s (another Substack writer) comments in Substack’s discussion group:

“Do we need to be massively popular and earn a lot of money at everything we do? Is that the only gauge of success? I hope not? If you want to write a novel, write one. If ten people love it, then ten people loved something you wrote! That is a good thing.

Sure we would all over to have millions of readers. But if you told a story in a pub to seven people and they all loved it, wouldn’t you feel good about it?

So my thinking is to be a storyteller. The medium doesn’t matter as much as the story. A novel (or a non-fiction book) isn’t the only option. Be creative! And if you can make money writing non-fiction at the same time (and enjoy it) then you have the best of both worlds.” — Mark Starlin

In David Weinberger’s book Too Big To Know, he talks about how knowledge used to be shaped like a book; now it is shaped like the Web.

There is truth in this. Who uses a set of encyclopedias anymore. For most people, information is online.

We have a better medium now than before, that shouldn’t mean we stop writing books.

But poetry, songs, and drama have all survived multiple changes of medium. So can novels and books. They might eventually diminish like any technology and invention. But the hunger for stories will never diminish.

Subscribe to my newsletter at A Whimsical Writer for more tips and motivation.