Category: Newsletter

Two things happened this week. One, I got up at 3:45 AM on Thursday to listen to Jane Friedman’s seminar on blogging, and second, I got into a very interesting discussion with a group of friends on Whatsapp.

More than two years of blogging, and I am still learning about the craft. Blogging has changed so much in the past five to seven years. No longer it is a web diary to write about one’s hobbies and passions but a strategic tool to develop a brand and build a following.

“Blogging is not critical for every author and you don’t have to do it,” said Jane, “so if you’re eager to be let off the hook, you have permission to ignore blogging altogether.”

But then she goes on to add:

But blogging does remain one of the most straightforward paths to build and engage a readership over the long term, at least for writers. Blogging, at its core, is a special genre of writing and can be a wonderful creative outlet that doubles as one of your marketing superpowers.

But for blogging to have a real payoff for your career or author business, it has to be done with a particular strategy in mind and executed with some discipline.

In the two years, I have spent thousands of dollars, attended countless courses, and invested an insane number of hours to build my little turf on the internet. Yet I am nowhere near the nirvana.

As I was contemplating the countless mistakes I have made in my short blogging career, a friend of mine, Sean D’Souza, posted a list of products (mostly ebooks and courses) he had created and sold through his website in the past twenty years. It was an impressive list.

I probably would have delivered a similar number of projects in twenty years of my corporate and public career but they are nowhere to be seen. They certainly are not generating income the way Sean’s products still are. I could have written twenty books in twenty years and they would have amounted much more than the work I did working for others.

We have a tendency to look at things that didn’t work in our lives.

But “things that didn’t work” are the stepping stones to “things that did work.”

Sean told a story about going through his cartoon diaries because people kept telling him that he needed to make a book out of those. He was having a hard time finding what to include and what not.

Then he remembered, once, one of his clients was so happy looking at the blank and unfinished pages in his diary. He couldn’t figure out why. But he does now. It is that kind of stuff we don’t see. All the unfinished work, the sketches, the crumpled paper. They are the stepping stones to the finished work.

If we don’t have a decent amount of bad work, we’ll never have good work. If we don’t attend bad webinars and courses and workshops, we don’t know what good ones are like. If we don’t make mistakes we will never achieve anything.

Our passions become obsessions. We spend an insane amount of energy doing things we love to do. We may never get the rewards for our labor but we do get the satisfaction of action. Then Kinky Friedman’s words say it all.

My dear,
Find what you love and let it kill you.
Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.
Let it kill you and let it devour your remains.
For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.

Falsely yours

Kinky Friedman

This week I wrote two articles, How to make your writing memorable, poetic, and persuasive, and How to Structure Your Novel both I have been wanting to write for some times. Hope they are helpful.

That is it from me this week.

Talk to you next week.

Take care.

Photo by Reza Hasannia on Unsplash

The world has been in various phases of lockdown from the past seven months. No one has any idea of how long we will be living in this manner. It is not just weeks or months; we are talking years. Working from home is going to become a norm pretty soon if it hasn’t already.

While there are plenty of reports saying that productivity has gone up with lockdown, but what about creativity. Are we feeling more creative working from the confinement of our homes? Are we coming up with more ideas in isolation?

Isolation is beginning to get on people’s nerves. Office workers are missing their workplace (which not so long ago was they hated the most). Lack of socializing is driving people crazy. The common complaint is boredom.

But there is one thing that blossom in boredom- creativity.

How can one be creative when one is bored?

Agatha Christie made an explicit link between her writing and childhood boredom:

People often ask me what made me take up writing. Many of them, I fancy, wonder whether to take my answer seriously, although it’s a strictly truthful one. You see, I put it all down to the fact that I never had any education. Perhaps I’d better qualify that — by admitting that I did eventually go to school in Paris when I was 16 or thereabouts. But until then, apart from being taught a little arithmetic, I’d had no lessons to speak of at all. Although I was gloriously idle, in those days children had to do a good many things for themselves. They made their own doll’s furniture, and they made Christmas presents to give to their friends. (Nowadays, they’re just given money and told to buy their presents in a big store.) I found myself making up stories and acting the different parts and there’s nothing like boredom to make you write. So by the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I’d written quite a number of short stories and one long dreary novel.

Austin Kleon has been saying for a while that to be creative you need to be boring. You are more creative working in a mundane routine than from exciting, socially-active days.

Neil Gaiman’s advice for writers is, “Get bored.”

[Ideas] come from daydreaming, from drifting, that moment when you’re just sitting there… The trouble with these days is that it’s really hard to get bored. I have 2.4 million people on Twitter who will entertain me at any moment…it’s really hard to get bored. I’m much better at putting my phone away, going for boring walks, actually trying to find the space to get bored in. That’s what I’ve started saying to people who say ‘I want to be a writer,” I say ‘great, get bored.’

Even Einstein was in favor of idleness: “Creativity is the residue of time wasted.”

So if isolation is getting to your nerves, find something creative to do. You can – start a veggie patch, learn to draw, write a book, make a collage, do some embroidery.

I do not know about others, but I am taking more ideas to completion. I am sticking with them longer, exploring them more, and finishing more articles and sketches than before. Not being able to go out means I can plan my days better and get more work done.

This week I wrote two articles, Seven Tips To Write With Style and Kindness Starts At Home.

I was really heartened by the fact that Seven Tips To Write With Style was picked up by the Medium curators (team of people at Medium who look for good articles and recommend them to subscribers). This is my second article in three months that got curated, which means the article will go to a wider audience.

In my cartoon drawing course, I have commenced drawing cartoons for Ms. Jolly’s Rule Book For Writers that will be published at the end of the course. Those of you who don’t know, Ms. Jolly is the cartoon character I have created who is more or less my alter ego.

That’s it from me this week.

Take care.

I am reading a book on Kurt Vonnegut, a great American storyteller, and teacher. Known for his satirical style of writing, he was one of the most popular writers of the 1960s. 

His career spanned over 50 years, in which he published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of nonfiction, with further collections being published after his death.

In spite of his scathing satire and willingness to scoff at received wisdom, he was an exceptional and generous teacher. His students at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop gained a great deal of wisdom from him as a writer, teacher, and human being.

In 1980, he wrote an article “How to Write with Style” which was published in the Times. In that article, he made seven suggestions on the literary style.

1. Find a subject to care about
2. Do not rumble
3. Keep it simple
4. Have the guts to cut
5. Sound like yourself
6. Say what you mean to say
7. Pity the readers

Although all the suggestions are gold, the last one caught my attention. We writers are so focused on ourselves that we forget the readers. 

He wrote:

Readers have to identify thousands of little marks on paper and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high-school — twelve long years.

Kurt called reading an “art.” You are not born with it. You must learn how to do it, and as with any art, you can keep gaining skills and pleasure in it for the rest of your life.

Those “marks on paper” i.e. words are symbols. They require deciphering. If they are not easy and clear, the readers give up. Rahter than encouraging them to read, we turn them off. They give up. We lose the opportunity to get our message across.

Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient teachers, ever willing to simplify and clarify.

From next week I am starting a new column in the online magazine The Innovation from. A column for writer on how to write from readers’ point of view. And it is titled… you guessed it Pity The Reader.

I have been writing on Medium, an online publishing platform. Launched in August 2012, it is the place to be for writers and bloggers because it has an audience of 100 million. I have published about 47 articles there and steadily building a readership. It is very satisfying to know that your work is going to such a vast amount of people and is not going waste.

This week I wrote one article on the blog The Four Cs of Writing, and two on Medium – Why is it easy to tell personal stories but so hard to write them and Failing To Build A Habit To Write Every Day? Try A System Instead. Have a read.

It is wet and windy today in Canberra and I am going to take a leave and from you. I will write again next Friday.

Until then take care.

Photo by Marcos Gabarda on Unsplash

This week I celebrated my last birthday in my fifties. Rather than feeling old, dejected, and “under-the-age”, I felt as if I am back in my teen years.

Once again I am exploring myself. Who am I? What do I want to do? What can I learn? What can I give back to the universe?

Once again I am seeing the world around me with fresh eyes. I am finding the world is not as frightening and enigmatic as used to be in my teen years and all through the twenties and thirties when I was struggling. It is magnificent and diverse. It has so much to offer no matter at what level you are and which place you come from. You just need to open your arms to receive.

Once again I have a child-like fascination towards life and the gifts it has to
offer. I am discovering new passions literary each day. Each morning I can’t
wait to get out of the bed to try new things.

All this time my children and my nephews and nieces are hailing me. Encouraging me to keep going. To keep trying. Keep discovering. They are taking the role of my parents who used to boast my childhood successes. It feels so good to explore new talents in me. The fire is on. The passion unbound.

If there is one insight I can give to those who feel trapped in jobs or life, as I used to just a couple of years ago, just hang on to your dream. One day you too will make your dream a reality.

This week I wrote four articles. They are small and easy reads full of actionable advice.

I am reading The Lightkeeper’s Wife, a novel by a Canberra author Karen Viggers. A gripping story, beautifully written. I am reading it slowly, savoring every bit of it. But the problem is that the book belongs to the public library and is due back this week. I can’t even renew it because eleven people have reserved it after me. I could have easily finished the book in four weeks had it not for the countless other distractions.

This week I came to the realisation that I am doing everything else except what I want to do. I am reading everything else except what I want to read. I am writing everything else except what I want to write.

Neil Gaiman writes in Make Good Art:

“There was a day when I looked up and realised that I had become someone who professionally replied to an email, and who wrote as a hobby. I started answering fewer emails, and was relieved to find I was writing much more.”

I can either be on top of social media or read good books. I can either write long well-researched articles or finish my novel. I can’t do both, that is for sure. For a long time, I foolishly believed that I was that superwoman who can do both. But my energy doesn’t come from kryptonite. I am a mere mortal whose eyes get extremely tired after a few hours on the computer. I need to make sure I invest those hours wisely into things that matter most.

We writers need to protect our writing time fiercely. Unless we are living alone in country property, we will struggle to find time to write.

On Monday, I spent two hours editing the first five chapters of the non-fiction book I am writing. It felt terrific. I set myself a goal of finishing the edit by Friday and sending it to a professional editor and proofreader. I am on target to do that.

Also, this week I spent “15 Radical Minutes” with another Medium writer, Matt Inman. It is great to know other writers and what is driving them. I have invited two other authors and waiting for their response.

His week, I managed to write two articles – How new writers should use Quora, and Goal Setting With WOOP. I also managed to published Three Principles of Personal Storytelling in Medium. I have been invited by two more magazines in Medium to write for them.

That is it from me this week folks.

I will write to you again next Friday.

Until then take care.

Hi Friends,

Today I have something personal to share with you.

Last month I avoided a near burnout. I didn’t think burnout can happen to me. I am not going to work, don’t have young children to look after, isn’t providing care to sick parents. Most of my time is my own and I am doing things I love to do. How could I burnout?

But I was wrong.

So were many other people whose candid accounts I read when I started researching the subject.

Luckily I paid attention to early signs and rather than getting consumed by it and letting it cause long term damage I put strategies in place.

We have all been working from lockdown situations for months now. There haven’t been many breaks and people are working longer hours from confined spaces. No holidays are in sight. That can cause burnout.

I am a big fan of routines. Routines get the work done. But routines itself can cause burnout.

If you haven’t experienced burnout before, it can destroy you big time. It is pretty scary in itself.

I have written a long and well-researched article Burnout Is A Real Deal, Watch Out For It. I urge you to read it to know what it can do to you, what are the warning signs and what strategies to put in place to cope with it.

Now on the good news side of things.

Last week I told you about an interesting conversation I had with a Medium writer Cody McGraw. He wrote a post about our conversation too. Have a read of it here: Writing Process | Supporting Fellow Writers.

Kal who runs a blog Kulture Kween about food and culture interviewed me. We talked about food, festivals, and writing. Have a read of it here: Neera Mahajan The Inspiring Indian Australian Story Teller.

This week I submitted two chapters of my novel for critique to the novel-writing group I am a member of since 2015. Thankfully, it took me back into the novel. I am planning to spend one hour a day on the book.

One of the biggest reasons we struggle to finish their novels is we write sporadically. We write for a few days and then we leave for a while and then get back into it when we get time. Getting in and out of a book kills it. We lose touch with the characters and their world. I am hoping my strategy to stay in the world of my characters at least an hour a day will work and help get the first draft done by the end of the year.

How are you enjoying my sketches by the way? I decided to use them in the newsletter instead of the stock pictures. I am getting better with them, am I not?

That is it from me this week folks.

I will write to you again next Friday.

Until then take care.