Writing

Many people told me to write.  They include mentors, friends, colleagues and acquaintances.  And I want to write.  Write, but on what?  What should I write about?  All possible topics I can phantom have been written about.  Equipped with a pen and a paper does not make one a writer, I realised.  I am a voracious reader and I read anything that comes my way, including the classified ads and matrimonial columns in the newspapers.  Reading makes you feel that writing can be an easy job, but when you try to pen down your thoughts you realise that it is easier said than done.  It is the ability of a writer that makes you feel so; the magic is created by the writer.  Hats off to those writers who make the readers feel so.

          How I wish I could write, and write like all those writers who make me keep reading non-stop.  But that’s only a wishful thinking.  If only wishes were horses…

          In my school days I contributed, or at least tried to contribute a few articles for the annual school magazine.  None of my articles got published.  So much for my writing skills!  We also used to have wall magazines, which was a monthly affair.  One of my articles, rather one of the articles that I contributed, was adjudged the best article for the month.  But the laurel truly did not belong to me.  Instead of being proud I was ashamed of myself.  After that I stopped writing.  That article was actually not mine.  I copied it from some other school magazine of a reputed school in the hills of a neighboring country.  Verbatim!  That was the end of my short writing career in school.

          I know a blogger, whose blogs I love to read and enjoy doing it.  She says she finds inspiration in the most simple of things in our everyday lives.  May be a writer also needs an eye for inspirations.  Wearing an extra pair of eyes, I mean eye glasses, does not improve your sight for inspirations, I suppose.  So a writer should also, on top of good writing skills, have an eye for inspirations.  But where do I go looking for inspirations now? 

          How do you go about becoming a good writer?  Not by day dreaming of how it will feel to be a good writer, like I am doing now, I am sure.  I vaguely remember reading somewhere about how good writers should be great dreamers, or something similar.  If that’s the case then I am a dreamer and I should be a good one.  But my dreams are mostly the type you see when you are asleep.  By dreaming, here it means your ability to imagine.  Basically one should have a fertile imagination, which I lack.  So my chances of becoming a writer are slim, if not nil.  Writing is not my forte, after all.  May be I should stop here and for once and all.  I do not want to be the cause of misery for those poor readers.

The sight of an ant struggling to carry forward a giant hind leg of a grasshopper, dismembered by my pet kitten, reminds me of Martin Luther King, Junior, who was inspired by a struggling spider.  He went on to achieve his goal.  I am inspired too, now.  May be I should not give up so easily.  I should give it a try once.  Except for an injured ego, I will lose nothing, even if I am rejected.  After all, the taste of the pudding is in the eating and you never know.  People may like my writings.  So here I am, giving it a try.

02 May, 2012