SELF-HELP YOURSELF THROUGH SUCCESS THIS NEW YEAR

If you are the proverbial blocked writer, the mentally blocked type, and not the one people block on social media for unsolicited rampant posts, read on below. If you are the latter, then you are doing good already; please share your tips in my comments section.

To Write, or Not To Write

In the end, all you have to do is, do it yourself.

You can bang your head, yeah, you can do that too, but it doesn’t generate any writing prompts. You can attempt ambushing your friends on social media too, but the most well-meaning ones may appear to do a Jim Mattis on you. No one, and nothing, can help you, really.

Dear writer, the only way to start writing, is to start writing.

So, here I am, starting to write.

I got two intensely intricately human interest stories — like the ones no one has ever written, like the ones that the Bookers are made for, like the ones the moment they come out, would be snatched up by the critics and the populace alike. I got two completely fabulous crime thrillers waiting in me to lurk out. I got a set of short stories tucked in somewhere as well.

I got everything but the will to pen them down.

Life is too peaceful without the need to rake my brains to tie the loose ends of a story that mustn’t unravel prematurely. It’s too good to just wallow in sun and soothe the sweet buzzing in the head that comes with reading an entire book in one go. No, not the one about the Girl in Room 105.

Who wants to plow through a plot so that the characters can be sown and grow as the story progresses? After all, it’s not like merely running a country that you can do by writing 280-character tweets and trumping it.

Writing is just too much work.

And it’s all that I ever wanted to do. That is before this writers’ block showed up.

It’s not a block on my imagination though. I have snippets of dialogue, scenes, people, all swarming around my head, but just out of reach. How can I help it, this gift of vision, when I live in a land fertile with imagination, where time, space, and logic never prevent the spinning of magnificent sagas? It is in our combined DNA, this charismatic ability to fuel the wings of imagination as Mr. Bukkal’s Muslim Hanuman aptly displayed.

I see settings and whole sequences of events materializing before me in a zap at odd times — like when I am getting stuck in the building’s lift for the nth time or feeding the overenthusiastic monkey family downstairs. It’s just that I can’t throw out an arm and catch any of those snippets. I just don’t seem to want to catch them, tame them and trap them on paper. It’s, as I said, just too much effort.

Learned people have diagnosed this condition as writers’ block and I think they were misinformed. It’s better suited to be called writers’ laziness. A strike of the mind, that unlike the strike of our numerous public services has no other aim than to not work.

While all, simply all humans are cognitive misers — us humans, we love to take mental shortcuts and rely on stereotypes and biases — we writers, are overly so. When it comes to writing, true, there is inherent inertia as the task requires churning the wheels of the screen-addled brain machinery, oiling the grey cells, and putting those neurons back in firing mode. But, there are external barriers too.

We writers have to walk on eggshells to avoid doing slip-ups on taboo subjects like expectations of humility from our batting gods. We strive to give a much wider berth to other gods and god-men (of saffron, green and other chromes). To not write is the easier, safer choice.

But that hasn’t prevented the best of us from versing Satan or threading bare the ministries of utmost happiness. So, it’s not the fear of deportation or shaming that barricades our writing, though I may have misled you on to think that for a bit there.

We writers just believe we are not ‘workers’ — those 9 to 5 people who sweat and kill themselves just to have some fun at the end of the day at a bar. We, the writers, are people who can just have fun at any time of the day at a bar minus the sweat and slime of hard work. We are not ‘them.’ We, do not work, we create. We are supposed to sail through our creations. It comes to us, naturally.

Well, here’s the flash — this instinct and this natural inclination, indeed comes to a favored few of us writers — but, even then, only those of us who do the ‘work’ end up with their work product. Like any other honest Wo/man under the sun.

Dear writer, the only way to start writing, is to start writing. So, here I am, starting to write

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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.