Category: Writing

I once got caught cheating in a final examination.

In the year nine maths exam, our examiner from the goodness of her heart gave us five minutes to help each other. The whole room burst into talking. Girls helped each other by giving hints or showing how they had solved certain sums.

I was stuck on an equation. I asked the girl ahead of me who had already solved it. She was one of the brightest students in the class and was tipped to top. She told me the answer in a roundabout way which didn’t make sense. Watching me struggle and five minutes coming to an end the examiner quickly held out her paper for me to have a quick glance. That was enough for me to solve the equation.

The next day, I was summoned to the principal’s room. The other girl had reported what had happened. I received a slap on the face and a warning, the humiliation of which stayed with me for the rest of my life.

Even topping the school and district the next two consecutive years and beating the girl who was tipped to top twice by a vast margin didn’t wash away the shame I felt.

When I first wrote about the incident in a writing class, I felt I was exposing my soul. Yet this is exactly what I had signed up for by choosing to become a writer.

Many aspiring writers do not understand the price they need to pay for the vocation they had chosen. They think writing is an art of putting words on paper. A craft of creating stories by putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. But writing is a commitment to one’s soul.

You need to make three commitments to yourself before you embark on the journey to becoming a writer: Commitment to show:

• Courage
• Honesty
• Perspective

Writing takes courage

Neil Gaiman, one of the most revered writer of our times, was not prepared to reveal anything about himself when he started writing. He didn’t want to be judged. He didn’t want people reading any of his stories to know who he was. If you haven’t read any of his work, many of his books could be described as weird. Then one day he realized,

“…as a writer, you had to be willing to do the equivalent of walking down a street naked. You had to be able to show too much of yourself. You had to be just a little bit more honest than you were comfortable with.”

Neil Gaiman in Masterclass

This is what the readers want to see. They want to see your soul. They want you to spill your authentic self onto the page. And that takes courage. A lot many people want to tell their stories but lack the courage to bring them forth.

So the first pact you make with yourself – As a writer, I shall nurture my courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within me.

Writing demands honesty

Telling a story is one thing, telling an authentic story is another. A fake story is dispelled like fake news even if it is fiction. In fact, fiction needs to be as truthful as non-fiction. Just like a patient needs to be honest with his doctor, a writer needs to be honest with its readers. Writing that titillates because of its shock value breaks readers’ trust and comes to haunt its writer as it did to James Frey who fell from grace for fabricating certain details in his memoir A Million Little Pieces.

At the same time, honesty is not tell-all and reveal-everything and washing your dirty laundry in public. Rather it is a combination of accuracy, sincerity, compassion and truth. Every story contains a snapshot of its creator. You need to give your honest one to your readers.

Your second pact with yourself is – My stories will be a reflection of my honesty.

Writing requires a perspective

If you don’t have a viewpoint, if you are too scared to upset people, if you rather walk in the middle of the road, you should not take up writing a vocation. People want to read your writing because they want to hear your perspective. As a writer, you need to provide a voice to what you are thinking, and by default what others are thinking.

Most people can’t articulate their thoughts and look up to the writers to put words to their feeling. Writers have the responsibility of setting the tone and mood of a generation. That can be done without ruffling some feathers and upsetting a few people. Give your readers what they want: a story with personality and authenticity.

Your third pact with yourself – I shall use my writing as a platform to share my perspective and opinions truthfully and boldly.

Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash

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A plane went down. The only survivors were some British schoolboys, who couldn’t believe their good fortune. Nothing but beach, shells and water for miles. And better yet: no grownups.

On the very first day, the boys instituted a democracy of sorts. One boy, Ralph, was elected the group’s leader. Athletic, charismatic and handsome, his game plan is simple: 1) Have fun. 2) Survive. 3) Make smoke signals for passing ships. Number one was a success. The other two? Not so much. The boys were more interested in feasting and frolicking than in tending the fire. Before long, they began painting their faces, casting off their clothes and developing overpowering urges – to pinch, to kick, to bite.

By the time a British naval officer comes ashore, the island was a smouldering wasteland. Three of the children were dead. “I should have thought,” the officer said, “that a pack of British boys would have been able to put up a better show than that.” At this, Ralph burst into tears. “Ralph wept for the end of innocence,” we read, and for “the darkness of man’s heart”.

This story never happened. An English schoolmaster, William Golding, made up this story in 1951. His novel Lord of the Flies sold tens of millions of copies, got translated into more than 30 languages, and was hailed as one of the classics of the 20th century.

In hindsight, the secret to the book’s success is clear. Golding had a masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind. And he used lies to communicate that.

Stories are a vehicle to communicate truth.

Imagine for a moment that instead of writing a fictional story William Golding had written an essay on the darkness of the human heart. How many people would have read it? Would it be as memorable as the novel? Would it communicate the truth about human nature that effectively?

Stories have always been a primal form of communication. They are timeless links to ancient wisdom, legends, archetypes, myths and symbols. They connect us to universal truths.

All religions communicate with their disciples in the form of stories. Ramayana and Mahabharata are prime examples. Although their authenticity still hasn’t been validated, the message is clear.

Storytelling is an art, and like any other art, it is a vehicle to communicate. Picasso said, “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”

Stories make the message personal.

When I was in primary school, once in a while, our headmistress used to read us a story during the morning prayer. One particular one stayed with me forever. It was the story of a mighty tree and humble grass. On one stormy night, the tree was uprooted by the ferocious wind but the grass remained as it was, in fact it was more lush green due to all the rain. The wind could bend its blades but couldn’t uproot it, while the tree with all its might, couldn’t stand the storm.

That lesson with humility stayed with me because I could relate to grass. We all can relate to something in the stories. Stories are how we think. They are how we make meaning of life. Call them schemas, scripts, cognitive maps, mental models, metaphors, or narratives. Stories help us understand how things work, how we make decisions, how we persuade others, how we understand our place in the world, how we create our identities and define and teach social values.

It is easy to remember stories than the facts.

Do you know how many people have died this month with the Coronavirus pandemic? If you are anything like me, you will be making a guess to come up with a number. Even though seventy percent of the news these days is about the pandemic and havoc it is causing in the world we can’t keep the facts in our heads.

Yet all of us know what happened to George Floyd. We will never forget his story or what followed after he was pinned under the knee of the very force which should be protecting the citizen of its country. Just like the story of Rosa Parks of Alabama, who was jailed for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man, started the Civil Rights Movement, the story of George Floyd started the Black Lives Matter Movement.

Fictional stories have the same kind of power. They are one of the most interesting tools that human beings have. Since our brain cannot tell the difference between the real and imagined, we can create imagined characters and imagined events to bring home the message. All parables and fairy tales are invented. For thousands of years, through all civilizations, humans have been using stories to teach children.

As a fiction writer, you are licensed to create lies, you are licensed to create people who do not exist and licensed to make things up that didn’t happen to communicate truth.

Because you are not just creating lies you are creating memorable lies.

Happy fiction writing!

Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash

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Last night I was going through an old notebook when the following words jumped at me.

The very activity which gives me the greatest pleasure makes me suffer beyond anything. Writing doesn’t come to me in sentences or paragraphs. It comes in words or phrases, the disjointed blurb which makes sense only to my muddled mind with lots of blank spaces where a keyword is missing. I am forever looking for the right word to complete that thought, word that exists in my mind, the word that I have read so many times before but I cannot seems to recall it. Sometimes I find its closest companion. Then begins the task of compiling the incoherent rambling in some sort of order so that it makes some sense at all. Why do I torture myself with all this day in and day out? Why do I bother? Why can’t I be like other girls? Looking for new cosmetics instead and having a facelift at the new parlour of which they have taken membership all paid for by their lovers or husbands.

I don’t even know who the original writer of these words is, I failed to record it. But I recorded these words because they describe my state of mind and perhaps of every writer’s state of mind working on their craft.

Writing is hard but it bears a lot of gifts. Over time I am beginning to understand that writing itself is a gift given to only a select few. It gives you an opportunity to live life with an intensity not available to everyone.

Writing motivates you to look closely at life as it lurches by and tramps around, says Anne Lamott. She finds in writing what Carl Sagan found in science — profound awe, deep reverence, a source of spiritual elevation.

She writes in Bird by Bird:

In order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? … Think of reverence as awe, as a presence in and openness to the world. Think of those times when you’ve read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone’s soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of — please forgive me — wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. When this happens, everything feels more spacious.

[…]

There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.

If you give freely, there will always be more. … It is one of the greatest feelings known to humans, the feeling of being the host, of hosting people, of being the person to whom they come for food and drink and company. This is what the writer has to offer.

Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird

She goes on to say:

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

Bird by Bird is a must read for writers, a gift by a writer to the writers to understand gift of writing given to them by god.

Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash

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One of my writing buddies had a rant last week when she was due to submit an assignment. Why the hell am I putting myself through this? She lamented. Who cares about my story? What difference does it make if I write this story? Or any story for that matter? I am such a crappy writer anyway.

I could feel her pain. I have asked myself the same questions a number of times. So many times I wanted to give writing up. Writing is an ordeal even for experienced and bestselling writers. New writers have very little chance of making a name for themselves, let alone earn an income from it.

What if we give up writing.

Sure the world will not come to standstill. No one will miss us because we haven’t been ‘discovered’ yet. Hardly anyone reads our blog articles and our short stories and novels are still buried in our computers. If we stop writing now the world will be spared of the rubbish we create and we will be spared the daily agony and can get on with our lives just like ‘normal’ people.

Except for one thing.

We will never find out what would have happened had we stuck with it.

The problem with giving up is that it is such a knee-jerk response. It is our first instinct when things get difficult. Our physiological mechanism to protect us from danger and undue hardship.

We tend to forget that, even at a time of grave danger, our inbuilt physiology gives us three choices — freeze, flee, or fight. Most of the time we choose to freeze (inaction) or flee (run away).

We rarely opt for the fight. It is because we tend to think the enemy is too big and too strong and the best chance we have of survival is to flee from it.

What happens when people stick it out.

Have a read of these three stories.

1. Carl Friedrich Gauss was born in Germany to poor, working-class parents. He didn’t know his birthday. His mother was illiterate and never recorded the date of his birth, remembering only that he had been born on a Wednesday, eight days before the Feast of the Ascension (which occurs 39 days after Easter). 

So strong was his obsession with finding his birthdate that it led young Gauss to derive methods to compute the date of Easter, both past and future years. He eventually was able to figure out that he was born on 30 April 1977. His obsession led Carl Friedrich Gauss to become one of the most outstanding mathematicians of all time.

2. James Hutton got interested in meteorology and geology many years after successfully taking a degree as Doctor of Medicine and working as a physician, introducing experimental agriculture in his own farmland and establishing profitable chemical manufacturing business. He devoted 25 years of his later life “studying the surface of the earth, and was looking with anxious curiosity into every pit or ditch or bed of a river that fell in his way,” developing the theory that geological features were not static but underwent a perpetual transformation over long periods of time. James Hutton is now known as the father of geology.

3. When Claude Hopkins came into advertising, the advertising was a haphazard way of creating awareness for products and depended more on chance and exposure to sell rather than proven and scientific methods. He took disorganized marketing and added core principles to it.

What do all these men have in common?

They followed their obsession. 

One of the common themes that most smart people have is “sticking with it”.

When you stick with a problem, you learn to solve it. Slowly and slowly you start getting better at it. Your learning accumulates and you start gaining confidence.

When I started my blog two years ago I couldn’t write even a few paragraphs. I agonized over them for hours. I wrote, and rewrote, and rewrote. It was taking me 7–8 hours to write 700–800 words articles. I would work till midnight to write while fully aware no one was reading what I was writing.

I thought it will get easier in three months, or six months or even a year. But it didn’t.

Then at some point late last year, I realized I am writing 1200 to 1500 words articles and I am doing them in much less time than before.

I had devised several little ways to improve my productivity.

I had discovered to break the writing process into small steps and to spread them over several days. I learned to do my research beforehand and save it in such a way so that I could easily retrieve it. I became regular, writing two articles each week.

At some point, the penny always drops.

t’s almost like one of those slot machines. It seems like you’re not getting anywhere in a hurry and then suddenly you have this gush of coins. But unlike a slot machine that mostly works against you, ‘sticking it out’ is almost predictable in its reward system. Stay with something for about a couple of hours every day, find a system to learn, and suddenly you will nail it.

Rather than stop writing why not do the opposite and “write a lot”.

You will be pretty hopeless in the first six months. And you’ll be just about average for at least a few years. Which isn’t to say that you will not get better. It’s just to say that you’re quite far away from where you want to be.

However, you are getting better in a small incremental way. So small that you don’t even notice it. Then one day, someone raves about the article you wrote, or poem you composed or the story you published.

And voila! your confidence soars. You realize you are not that bad after all.

Photo by Corinne Kutz on Unsplash

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I shouldn’t have left article writing to the last hour of the day. Every time I do that I regret it. I was tired, struggling to concentrate and writing was the last thing my brain wanted to do. I waited all day for this peace and quiet, finished all the household chores, to write this article, and here I was, just wanting to curl up in the bed with a book.

I was not sleepy. In fact, I stayed up for another two hours watching a movie.

I am a night owl. I am supposed to work best at nights.

Yet my brain was categorically saying no to writing.

Why was it so?

I can do editing, diary, and journal writing at night but when it comes to writing fresh content I struggle.

Is there another factor in play other than the time of the day?

Apparently there is and it is called energy.

In psychology, energy is defined as an ability or willingness to engage in cognitive work. Just like physical work needs an optimum energy level, so does mental work. Our Brain needs a lot of fuel (oxygen and glucose) to carry out the mental work. And when these fuel levels get depleted we experience mental fatigue.

The most common symptoms of mental fatigue include mental block, lack of motivation, irritability, and stress eating.

For many people the energy levels are at their peak in the mornings. As they go through the day they steadily burn energy stores as they tackle various tasks. Even mindless tasks consume energy.

Others might experience peaks at mid-mornings, afternoons, evenings, or even at midnight.

Night owl might be able to stay awake late at night but they will only be able to tackle high energy tasks only if their energy is also at the peak at the night time.

We don’t need to practice time management, we need to learn energy management.

Not every hour of the day is same in terms of energy level. Basically we have three energy levels – peak, middle and low.

All those tasks that require high energy input should be done when our energy levels are at their peak. So some of us it first thing in the morning for others it is in the middle of the afternoon.

Writing is high energy-consuming activity. Leaving it for the time when my energy levels were low was the reason I was feeling blocked. The next morning I was able to finish the article within half an hour.

When is our energy level at its peak?

Scientist says it is it’s roughly 2-4 hours after we wake up. Our brain has gone through all the previous day’s information and filed it appropriately. It has plenty of fuel (oxygen and glucose )and it is ready to do the work that requires lots of concentration.

That is the reason most of the writers write in the morning. Maria Popova of Brain Pickings created an interesting visualization depicting the correlation between wake-up times, literary productivity and major awards of 37 writers whose wake-up times were available.

Mason Curry studied the daily rituals of writers for years and wrote about it in his blog. Eventually, he published a book Daily Rituals, in which he has presented the routines and working habits of 161 creative minds, among them – novelists, poets, playwrights, composers, painters, philosophers, and scientists. It is packed with anecdotes about getting up super early, staying up super late, drinking heroic amounts of coffee, taking precisely timed naps and long daily walks, and much more.

So what time of the day is best for writing?

When your energy levels are at their peak. And it is different for different people. Usually, it is 2-4 hours after you wake up.

Create a schedule to maximize those hours and make sure not to waste them on the tasks that can be done when middle or low energy levels.

Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash

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When Steve Jobs said, ‘Don’t do something better, do it differently,’ he changed the corporate world forever. He not only said that but he demonstrated too. When everyone was coming up with several models of personal computers, he brought just one. When everyone was competing on price, he concentrated on design. People queued for miles at every iPhone release even when they were and are the most expensive phone in the market.

He changed the rules.

He didn’t try to be better than his competition; instead, he concentrated on being different by focusing on different things.

I wondered if the same rule can be used in the ‘creative sector.’ Can a writer write differently? Can a painter paint in a different way? Can a singer sing in a completely different way.

As soon as I started asking these questions the answer stared at my face.

Of course, they can.

That is the only way the creative people thrive, by doing things differently.

The creativity doesn’t come with competition, but with imagination.

There is always going to be someone smarter than you, but there may not be someone who is more imaginative.” -Byron Wien

Yet we spend our lives in order to become better than others. We berate ourselves for not being able to write like the writers we admire. We scold our efforts, criticize our own work, and give up in desperation because we think we are not good enough.

Frank Kafka was an exceptional writer, his work expressed the absurdity of modern society in a unique way, yet plagued by self-doubt he asked his friend, Max Brod, to destroy all of his manuscripts after his death. Thanks to his friend’s foresight, who preserved his work by publishing it, there is a whole cult of admirers appropriately named “Kafkaesque.”

Kafka didn’t realize in his life that he had the advantage of being different. Something he instinctively had by being himself. He was a physically week child of a dominating father. He suffered the impersonal nature of bureaucracy and capitalism first hand to win the admiration of his father but ended up mocking the world devoid of meaning or purpose. There lied his uniqueness.

What Kafka had defiantly, Malcolm Gladwell cultivated. He wrote sociology, psychology, and social psychology books like thrillers. No doubt he is a great writer but he knows the advantage of being different.

Now the question is how to be different.

The answer is not what you expect.

Here is a story that illustrates it best.

Mohamed Ali, was a great athlete. A heavyweight champion, holder of several records for close to four decades and topper of many rankings by Sports Illustrated and the BBC. But the real reason Ali occupies such a unique place in people’s hearts and minds is that he created his own category — he was the original social-activist athlete.

Ali wasn’t afraid to use his voice at a time when others in his position usually deferred to their managers.

Ali was the first athlete to take a very public stand for civil rights and social justice — refusing to be drafted into the U.S. military in the mid-1960s, citing both his religion (he converted to Islam) and his objection to the Vietnam War.

Ali’s status as champion kept him — and these issues — in the spotlight during the five years he fought his draft conviction, eventually winning an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971.

Even though he was stripped of his titles and banned from the sport he loved during the prolonged legal battle, Ali was often dead center in the ring of public opinion, for good and for bad. His return to the ring was relatively seamless as a result. That’s why Ali transcended boxing and became a category king, the person to whom all other “combat athletes” are compared.

by Christopher Lochhead and Heather Clancy

Ali was not only different but a whole league in himself.

And he was able to achieve that status because he was always himself. He never had a shred of doubt of his own talent or believes.

And that is the essence of being different.

Each one is already unique, yet we strive to be like someone else.

All we need is to have the courage to be ourselves and we will discover we stand out anyway.

Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash

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