Thursday, August 5, 2010

Love to write

The world of writing is so peaceful, so colorful, so enticing and exhilarating. It almost makes you lose yourself in the mystical labyrinths of words and phrases, dialogues and metaphors. Sometimes the ideas are so strong that you wake up from your sleep to write and once you finish...ah!! A perfect breath of delight comes out. Everything bad and ugly goes away from your view, and you see the words you wrote--like gems on a beach, clear and pearly white. It is such a wonderful feeling to be a writer and not whine about it. People take up professions that are financially remunerative, mine is intellectually wild, statistically indefinable, morally insane, yet it is so much a part of my little life that if I stay away from my diary for one day I start to think what if I can't write anymore. I guess this feeling is the same for all writers. We are all insecure and scared. We love our art so much that the fear of losing it is almost equivalent to death. There is no way art can embrace us; it simply doesn’t care. It is we who persevere, who wake up everyday and spent all the waking hours laboring over books and treatises, fiction titles and a blank page staring at us artlessly to see what we are able to scribble on its chest. But ultimately there is no greater reward than seeing your name in print, seeing your ideas transformed to words, painting portraits and landscapes with colors that were once part of the humid darkness of your brain. The brain is a jorum of ideas, allow it to blossom.

After you have started loving your art of writing you will encounter a deep satisfaction in your mind, you will automatically leave the mortal social-networking world and enter your library and read the masters. I have been doing this for a few months now, and I assure you that every bit of this precious time helps. Doubtless, you will lose your friends, but real ones are meant to stay, they won't leave you, and you can do without whatz-up buddies. I may not be a great writer, but I feel that you don’t have to be big to appreciate what you do. Several writers say that they are nothing, just mindless blokes not knowing what they are doing. I feel if you don't take pride in your art, you will never learn it. Your mistakes will leave you if you force them to, but if you undermine yourself you can never be a writer. Take pride and love your art. Love it like you love your spouse, and it will come to you slowly and steadily. Never hate what you write. You can never silence your critics, but stop turning into one.  Treat your work as gently as you would treat your child. Be gentle and strict at the same time.  But most importantly love it and enrich it with new experiences, new books and new ideas. Reading newspapers and taking part in discussions always help. I am but a novice when writing professionally is concerned, but I tell you that my life would be worthless if there weren't a new fiction to write, a new article to think about. The expectancy of completing my new fiction project is as exhilarating as getting a new gift.  I am willing to spend the rest of my life pursuing the insane ritual of waking up every morning and sitting with my laptop, the blank page waiting to be impregnated with my ideas. It is me that ultimately matters, not the world and what it thinks about me. May be my ideas will bear fruit and I may write something worth reading, but then there is also the possibility of me being imaginatively barren. There is no set map, no ideal writing life, it is just what I write and how I write it. Idealizing doesn’t help; love it or hate it there is no ideal writer's life. It is all a mirage which might be clear on a cloudy day and blur on a sunny morrow, you don't know what to expect; you just hope it works for you. 

Fiction at Work Publication