Author: Neera

Why simple words are the best?

Neera

Everyday stories should be written in the simple everyday language that we all use. As Philip Berry Osborne puts it:

“Among most writers, there’s a natural tendency to get too exquisite and ornamental in their prose. Such writers spend all their time trying to pound the pig iron of language into the bright toys and gleaming blades of literature. They ignore the fact that the best stories deal with the small corners and verities of life—and you don’t need fancy words for that.”

Think more in terms of creating a small, delicate watercolor, rather than a giant oil painting.

You want sentiments that stop short of sentimentality—simple words and simple construction for what should basically be a simple theme.

You want the reader to taste, touch, smell, and feel the very experience you’re sharing.”

Ernest Hemingway, once replying to criticism by William Faulkner that his word choice was limited, wrote,:

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”

Everyday Stories

Neera

In the last few posts, I have been sharing everyday stories with you. Ordinary stories from ordinary lives.

Yet they are compelling and stay with us forever.

Some of the best writing—the kind that the readers readily identify with—comes out of all the little happenings in our daily lives.

How little snippets from our daily lives get stored in our memories, percolate there, and then turn into stories, have fascinated me.

A few weeks ago, when I sat down to write my father’s eulogy, the first thing that came to my mind was his hands.

My father had big, soft, and caring hands. The kind of hands a father should have. I started writing about them and out came to a story that I didn’t know existed in my memory vaults.

When I was a little girl, on one hot summer day while playing in a park, I got thirsty. My father led me to a water tap where I tried to drink water with my hand. My tiny hands couldn’t hold much water. Watching me struggle, he cupped his hands, filled them with water, and let me drink from it. My thirst was quenched with just one handful.

Out of millions of such snippets, I was surprised that this one surfaced.

I wondered why. Why didn’t I recall so many other things we did together? Why was nostalgia didn’t take me to the jokes he cracked or the poetry he recited?

Following that, another snippet of memory surfaced. This time he was putting five-years-old-me to sleep by patting my forehead.

Then another one. A photo from my wedding day. He had his hand over my head in the form of a blessing.

It made sense. My father was the symbolic protective hand over me all my life.

But that was not the reason for these memories to come flooding on the morning of his cremation.

It was because he held my hand briefly when he took his last breath, as if reassuring me one last time that everything was fine. He was fine. I will be fine.

The memory of his touch conjured other similar memories.

That is perhaps how everyday stories are formed. One memory recalls another one until they all get interconnected.

Stories are all around us. The trick is developing an active curiosity about them – the way a child does.

“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”- Eudora Welty in One Writer’s Beginning.

Better than anything else, that probably summarizes what these personal stories are all about and what they tell us about the diversity and story worthiness of ordinary people.

They speak to our sense of closeness.

Columnist George Will once put it so succinctly:

“It is extraordinary how extraordinary an ordinary person is.”

And even more extraordinary is the number of stories they’re carrying around—waiting to be written.

10 Tips on Blogging

Neera

So you want to blog.

So do I. In fact, I wanted it for a long time and I did start. Twice. But both times my passion couldn’t withstand the commitment and planning a successful and sustainable blog needs.

Following two failed attempts (and lessons learned, research, and a lot of soul-searching) I am better prepared this time to make it work. I am more structured, more organized, and much more determined to succeed.

This time, I also promised myself that I am going to share what I learn with my readers. Both my successes and failures, as they happen.

I am going to do it through this weekly newsletter. If you choose to subscribe to it, it will come to your mailbox once a week with useful links along with my comments, recommendation, and spectacular failures.

Through this newsletter, I will share my journey with you not only as a blogger but also as a reader, writer, and student of creativity hoping it might help you with your journey.

Here are my ten tips for this week.

  1. Business plan for your blog. You need one. Believe me on this one. But you don’t need a very elaborate one. It took me just a couple of days to write mine and it brought a lot of clarity in my mind about what I wanted to achieve with my blog and where I want to go with it.

You can read a number of blog posts on the topic by experienced bloggers but here are four I recommend Blogging Business Plans 101 – ProBlogger,  Business Plan: How to Create a Business Plan for Your Blog, How To Write A Blog Business Plan (Free Template!), How to Create a Bangin’ Blog Business Plan (Workbook Included …

Check them out and use whatever you find is relevant to your blogging goals. Keep it simple. My business plan has only 5 sections.

  1. Choose a portal from where you are going to speak. Without a portal, you are soon going to be lost. You can’t write your blog as you write in your diary or journal. In your diary, you can write whatever comes to your mind, but in blogs, you write what you want to share with others. For me, it is reading, writing, and creativity.
  2. Decide whether you are going to be a hobby blogger or a professional blogger. A professional blogger is someone who is making her living from blogging. If you like, you can read non-stop, for the next ten days, on how to make money from blogging or you can do what I did. Just settle for hobby blogging while you learn the ropes. Besides, every professional blogger was a hobby blogger first.
  3. Decide what you are going to register as your domain name. Your name or a name that applies to what your blog is going to be about. You can read How To Choose a Blog Name You Won’t Regret to help you decide. How to Choose the Best Domain Name will give you tips and tools to construct one. Having both my previous blogs named relevant to the contents of the blog, this time I registered my name as the domain name.
  4. Decide which blogging platform you are going to choose. Although there are several free and paid platforms and How to Choose the Best Blogging Platform in 2018 compares several of them the choice for free platforms is really between WordPress and Blogger. Having tried both of them for my previous blogs I had no hesitation to choose WordPress again.
  5. Decide which hosting service you are going to choose to register your domain name. 10 Best Domain Hosting and Registration Services (2018) compares the main ones. BlueHost won hands down for me.
  6. Learn to host your blog on your hosting service. This is relatively simple. You log in through your hosting service and click on the link. And Voila! You are on the blogging platform. If you want to learn more, read 15 FAQs on Starting a Self-hosted Blog.
  7. Construct your blog. This is a fun time. Frustrating and rewarding at the same time. You first need to choose which (WordPress or Blogger) theme you want. Learning about the themes can take up a lot of your time, so be kind to yourself if you don’t pick the right one in the first instance. Choose one of the popular ones to start with and you can change it later. There are thousands of YouTube videos to guide you through the process.
  8. Write your bio. This could be a separate “About” page in your blog or just a few lines on your blog page to start with. You can build it up later.
  9. Write your first post. Keep it simple, even experimental. You can delete it later if you are not happy with it.

All of the above is a lot of work, even though various blogs and podcasts let you believe you can start your blog in half an hour. You can, provided you have done all the background reading and planning beforehand.

But let me not dissuade you from starting. Every hour I have spent learning all of this has been most rewarding. I do not mind that I have been staying awake past midnight and thinking through things while doing mundane work around the house (washing dishes and vacuuming have never been so enjoyable).

I can bet you too will find the experience equally gratifying. Your journey might differ from mine, and you will learn different things during the process. Share them here and we all can benefit from it.

Happy Blogging!

PS: Next week I will share how to write and plan blog posts.

Photo by Kaboompics.com from Pexels

Aunt Grace’s Philosophy

Neera

Many years ago I read a story that impacted me so much that I wrote it down in my journal. Recently, while going through old notebooks, I read it and it hit the cord in me again. I have to share it with you.

It originally appeared in Reader’s Digest.

The writer Nardi Reeder Campion describes a time in her life when she was down in the dumps and discovered a diary that had been kept more than forty years before by a maiden aunt who had gone through some bad times herself.

Aunt Grace had been poor, frail, and forced to live with relatives. “I know I must be cheerful,” she wrote, “living in this large family upon whom I am dependent. Yet gloom haunts me. Clearly, my situation will not change; therefore, I shall have to change.”

To help her hold her fragile world together, Aunt Grace resolved to do six things every day:

  • Something for someone else
  • Something for herself
  • Something she didn’t want to do that needed doing
  • A physical exercise
  • A mental exercise
  • An original prayer that always included counting her blessings

These six things help change Nardi’s life as they had helped change Aunt Grace’s life many years before

“Can life be lived by a formula?” Nardi asks herself in the article. “All I know is that since I started to live by those six precepts, I’ve become more involved with others and hence less ‘buried’ in myself.”

Ever since I read this story, Aunt Grace’s motto, ‘Bloom where you are planted’ has become my motto too.

Publishing a book doesn’t make you a writer

Neera

There is a misconception that all aspiring writers have. They are not willing to accept themselves as writers till they have published a book or an article or a short story. They are over the moon if their story wins an award because now they can call themselves a writer. There is proof now. Someone has published their story and given them an award.

But it is a fallacy.

You were a writer before your story got published. Weren’t you? You wrote the story first, then you sent it for publication.

And chances are you wrote a lot many stories before you sent one in a competition. I can bet my last dollar that you had written much more before you wrote those stories. A diary. A journal too maybe. Some poems. Occasional letters. You have written them and that makes you a writer. Then why don’t you call yourself a writer?

It comes down to acceptance. You are not willing to accept the value of your own work. You are looking for authentication from someone else. To give you permission to add the title of ‘writer’ in front of your name.

I have been writing for at least sixteen years now. It took me at least ten to call myself a writer in front of others. Like many aspiring writers, I failed to see that publishing a book doesn’t make you a writer. It makes you an author. And the two are separate terms. The writer is the one who writes, and the author is the one who publishes her writing. You become a writer first and then you become an author. So start calling yourself a writer. And when you publish your book, you can call yourself an author.

Use this philosophy to bury the critic inside you.

Focus on the ‘verb’ of writing and ‘noun’ will follow.

Write, and if you are writing, you are a writer.

A sketch a day

Neera

In primary school, we had a teacher who taught us drawing. In his eighties, he wore a white kurta-pajama, a white turban, and a white open beard. A gentle soul, he taught us how to draw basic shapes, use a ruler properly and draw still-life and landscapes.

Children didn’t take his class seriously. For them, it was a fun period, a time to talk, laugh, and throw paper planes at each other. To get us interested in drawing, he once told us a story that I still remember.

One of his students migrated to Canada, where he couldn’t find a job for months. A career counselor asked him what he can do. After thinking for a long time, he threw his hands in the air and said, “I can write my name in different ways.” He then showed the counselor the little calligraphy he learned in this drawing teacher’s class. Soon he was hired as a signboard writer.

It took me years to realize that, that humble man had instilled in me the love of drawing. I enjoyed illustrations so much that it became the reason that I chose biology for further studies. This passion lay dormant until a few years ago when I took a drawing class and had time of my life doing life drawing.

Recently I found a sketch a day challenge and got sucked in.