Go ahead and get those thoughts down in writing

IF MY readers (both of them) imagine that it’s fun churning out a weekly column, allow me to readjust their assumptions. It is very gratifying to have an official dais from which to launch opinions. But expressing an opinion is only part of it. Expressing an opinion that is relevant and cogent and worth the time you ask of your readers is where the agony lies. It is exactly at this point that one remembers the sober exhortation: Writing is 5% inspiration. The other 95% is pure perspiration.

A really great writer was asked: How hard is it to write? He thought for a short while and responded: Well, this morning I put a comma in, and this evening I took it out.

I encourage every child and adult, every friend and caregiver, everyone who relates to other people during the day, to try their hand at writing.

It does not have to be profound or earth-shattering stuff.

It will just be a way to break the malaise in communication we are suffering in the form of canned information – and by pathetic extension, canned sentiment.

Start a diary. Or a journal. Or a goal-setting page-a-day entry. Write it at the start of a new day. Or at the end of a long and trying day. Start a conversation with yourself. Say the things that good breeding or decorum would prevent you from saying in public.

We were misguided into believing that great writing sprang into our consciousness as whole globs of glory for us to drool over. We were told how great novels were born from one star-jangling notion.

We have been schooled that the flutter of a moth’s wing in an Amazonian jungle can start an avalanche in Switzerland. These myths make us drool to take up our pens so that we can also contrive our own

or Not so fast. Writing is recording life. The best writing is not necessarily that which already exists. The best writing is that which is yet to come.

And we must learn that books start with words, then sentences, then paragraphs, pages, chapters, sections and all the other complexities that make them such desirable objects.

We discover that some stories are epistolary (based on discovered letters), biographical (based on lived experience) or historical (telling our own version of true lived experience.)

Then we make the greatest discovery of all.

We do not have to contrive new narratives. We can rework the old ones.

We need not be calcified into other peoples’ opinions of what is worth reading.

We can even tweak Noam Chomsky’s thirteen essential elements for a fairytale.

The main thing is, you have something to say. So go ahead and say it.