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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

Writing: How It Actually Works by Pramodh Anand Iyer

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Photo Credit:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/92329419@N00/2465577583
Writing: How It Actually Works
by Pramodh Anand Iyer 

12 years of actually writing goes into this post and I don’t really need  degree  in creative writing or English literature to learn any of this. All I had to do was...

What works:

  1. Writing: Cliche, but touche! If you don’t write, you can’t aspire or claim to be a writer. Write something every day other than what you do for social media. And remember that Mark Zuckerberg and the rest don’t pay or applaud you for ‘sharing’.
  2. Ignore your critics when they say that writing doesn’t work or pay you: It does and you’ll at least feel better than a slave of the 9-5 IT department, even if you don’t get paid as much initially.
  3. Read a fellow aspirant: A lot of fellow aspirants would want a beta reader and they may not be very sincere with their quality of work. It’s actually an opportunity to know how far you’ve come, what could go wrong if you don’t pay enough attention, and to encourage them to be a part of a writer’s cult (if you really aren’t judging their consistent abuse of slang and typos).
  1. Read a book: Our generation, especially in my country, India, find reading books repulsive, especially because we’re used to being forced to read atrocious academic textbooks which never really mattered or made sense to us. Reading a book, especially if it’s light and brief, could help break the inertia of not reading as well as the developed allergies. They have good samples for ideas you could steal… I mean, improvise on or S.C.A.M.P.E.R. [Ed note: SCAMPER]
  2. Blog: Blogging doesn’t always fetch you sufficient readership unless you write well AND get a hang of SEO technicalities. But, it’s a free platform to regularly express yourself. Wattpad and Wordpress are ways to find readers who you never thought would actually do even if your friends are busy being a bunch of dicks.
  3. Don’t stick to linearity: Go Christopher Nolan and mess around with the timeline. Start from the middle of the article/story/novel/poem and resume from any other point in the same if you don’t know how else to keep going. But KEEP GOING, FOR TOLKIEN’S SAKE!!!

What doesn’t seem to work (for me):

  1. Excessive swearing/political biases/gender biases/nihilism: I don’t get it but I don’t get much from any of this kind of writing. It’s probably a cultural issue with my geography, but it hasn’t fetched me much reaction.
  2. Expecting a considerable number of readership to motivate you into writing: If you’re going to write for cookies, please don’t. Write because it’s fun to express yourself and not because you want to impress your favorite dickheads. (The cookies have been stolen by the girl-scouts and eaten by your professors.)
  3. Writing for free: Are you nuts? I must ask myself this every time I offer to assist a pretty girl for content and deny that I require payment. Writers write and if they don’t pay us, they can go write for their-pretty-selves!
  4. Planning: If you were to be so organized and routine with your work, you’d be an effing Engineer or Doctor doing the boring but well-paid work.

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Photo Credit:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/7146974@N02/33152254404

“Just write like your life depends on it, for someday it will!” - I probably stole this from the Doctor Strange Movie, or probably not.

“Write like nobody is reading. Because they’re actually busy commenting on your crush’s last few Facebook updates.” - I stole a part of this too from some Facebook post about dancing.

Yeah, well sue me. But at least I’ll write about that too.


Freelance Writer at Mentoria
Editorial Intern at Indians 4 Social Change Forum
A Chief Editor of The Symphony of Insanity Magazine
Poet at The Equilibrium of Life
The Panda Publishing House

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