Yashas Mahajan's Blog, page 3

Word of the Week #412:

Resurge

In continuation to what I was talking about last week, one thing worth noting is that when I started writing ten years ago (yes, it’s been that long), writing felt like a need. I needed to start writing and create art and explore and cultivate the artistic and creative aspects of my psyche.

Now, as a 30-year-old guy with a lot more strings on me, I want to write. I want to keep writing.

I certainly no longer feel that insane urge I used to that if I don’t write, I will either go insane and explode or just wither away and die.

I have a life now—or at least some semblance of one—that I have built with my own choices and in my own way. I want to keep living it.

At 20, there were no strings. I could jump and fly and not care about what happened beneath my lofty imaginings. The years past have grounded me, and I have somehow come to appreciate the world around me. Not fully, perhaps, but by inches, at least.

I want to write. I still believe it is a big part of who I am—and more importantly of who I could be. But it is certainly not all I am. Not anymore.

Maybe I’m not going to be The Writer Guy. Maybe I’ll just be a guy who writes.

Let’s see how things go.

Word of the Week #411:

Resurge

Over the past few weeks, an old but still too familiar feeling has been rising through my body.

I didn’t expect to feel this way. I thought I had seen the futility in my desire and had outgrown my childhood—and decidedly childish—dream, but apparently not. I guess we are who we are and want what we want, right?

Over time, I have grown hesitant to say these four words. There were days—or months or even years—when it no longer felt true, as life kept taking me further and further away from that truth.

But that’s what it is, after all—the truth. And I like when it is thrown into my face as the unmissable reminder that I do tend to need.

Let me say it once again.

I am a writer.

I want to write again.

What’s the worst that could happen, right?

Let’s go!

Word of the Week #410:

Mask

One of the odder things about me—which I have only recently realised—is that I have somehow gotten pretty good at things that do not come naturally to me.

Things like communication (especially with people I don’t already love) or managing an array of interrelated tasks has never been easy for me. I would love to just talk to that one person all day every day. I would love to just do that one thing all day every day.

Repetition is easy for me. Consistency is easy. Regulation and moderation, not so much.

But what needs to be done needs to be done, right? As adults, we don’t always have a choice regarding what is needed of us, right?

Does that mean I really should learn how to drive a car already? Yeesh…

And, yes, I have gotten better at some of these things, but they still do feel uncomfortable and unnatural. I do feel like I am having to go out of my way to get these things done at times.

I wonder when that will change for me. I wonder if it will.

For now, we just keep moving forward.

Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade

Word of the Week #409:

Eudaimonia

You know, I hate utilitarianism. Always have, always will.

Every time in the past I’ve had a discussion with someone about utilitarianism, I have just had a strangely distasteful feeling in my head, but I hadn’t fully unraveled it till I read something while working on an anthropology project: Human behaviour is DEFINED BY non-utilitarian behaviour!

Art, symbolism, rituals, aesthetics, personal adornments—these are the things that define humans and have contributed immensely to the continuation of human evolution and the establishment of human civilisation.

We are defined by our ability to be driven by complex feelings, beyond the fundament utilitarian instincts of “survive and breed”.

Utilitarian behaviour may work well for amoebae… They don’t need to fall in love or create art or seek individual attainment…

For humans, feelings are good.

Keep doing what make you feel good about yourself. You will probably be fine.

Word of the Week #408:

Cudgel

When I was younger—perhaps sometime in my teens—I would often be surprised and confused when my truthful and accurate words seemed to upset and offend the people around me.

It did not make sense to me.

“I am right! How can you be mad at me when I am right?” Apparently, saying that tends to make things worse.

My eventual response then was to just avoid the truth and tell people exactly what I thought they wanted to hear, regardless of what I actually felt or believed. Of course, that did not work the way I would have hoped.

In hindsight, it makes sense that I always seemed distant to people. Nobody seemed to understand me. Nobody knew who I really was or what I really wanted.

Lately, I have been trying to get back to what I used to be, trying to vocalise only what—and ideally all that—I think and feel. And again, I have had trouble with upsetting people with my words.

Now, of course, I am not one to yield the truth as a weapon on people… at least not the ones I actually care about.

I am going to keep speaking what I think and feel. Hiding behind cleverly worded sentences that may lead people to infer something that I don’t mean at all, that has been a defence mechanism I’ve used for a while, but whom am I trying to defend myself from? The world—or at least my world—is not that bad a place.

Still, I guess I do hold some responsibility regarding the effectiveness of my attempts at human communication. After all, no matter what I think or say or do, no matter how right I think I am, if the people I love feel unhappy or uncomfortable or unpleasant because of it, then I’m probably going wrong on some level.

I’m going to use that belief as a yardstick as I keep figuring out many other things in my life.

It’s a nice yardstick, people tell me. Let’s see how well it works.

Word of the Week #407:

Pretext

It is strange how none of my original reasons for starting this blog are applicable anymore, and yet, I don’t want to stop.

Well, yes, sometimes, on the laziest of Tuesday nights, after I’ve already had a long day and I’m debating with myself about whether I should keep writing these posts, I do want to stop, but I tend to find reasons not to.

Yes, none of my original reasons are applicable anymore, but at the same time, none of the benefits I have gained from writing this were within my expectation. One cannot distinguish correlation and causation in these scenarios, but if I like the person I am becoming, then that is all the more reason to just keep doing what I’m doing, right?

Word of the Week #406:

Benignity

So, I don’t always understand humans, right?

One of the things I tend to struggle with during my interactions is that I cannot seem to predict human behaviour. What do people want? What do people really mean by what they say? If I can’t predict that, I wouldn’t know what to do and how to prepare, right?

Yes, I tend to not know what to do and therefore need to prepare to interact with humans. Why am I like this? I suppose that’s a discussion for another time.

More importantly, in situations of such unpredictability, there can sometimes be a temptation to expect the worst from everything and everyone around us. I’m sure we have all felt that way now and then and have also seen others feel that way. But that would be a folly, would it not?

As often as I may have been surprised by random unkindness or indifference, I have also seen kindness that was just as random. And while I cannot comment on the frequencies, as that would be fraught with biases, I will say that kindness has always felt more impactful to me.

Just yesterday, I went into my physiotherapy clinic for a new injury to my forearm. Just showed up without an appointment or anything, and everyone there was so happy to see me! I was a little taken aback, to be honest.

The physical exam… hurt like nothing ever before. Like, damn! Even the physio was surprised, since I tend to not react much to pain. Turns out, it was a muscle strain, probably grade 2.

They then treated me for like an hour. That hurt too, but I was feeling a little better at the end of it all. After that, they showed me a few exercises that should help me rehab the injury, and we discussed the expected timeline and precautions to be taken.

As I was leaving, I asked them about the bill, and they said, “Eh, don’t worry about it.”

What?

Why?

I was confused.

They just talked to me for another couple minutes before leaving for their lunch.

And as I walked away, I was trying to process the entire session. In some ways, I still am.

What should we expect from the people around us?

We can’t leave our lives assuming everyone would be kind to us. Nor can we assume everyone to be unkind.

“To believe all men honest is folly. To believe none is something worse.”

— John Adams

What, then, would be the right way to live our lives?

The only person of whom I need to know what to expect is myself. I expect myself to be kind and considerate. Gracious in others’ kindness and their unkindness.

A tall ask, perhaps, but I like having high expectations of myself.

Word of the Week #405:

Calibration

Over the past week, I got a chance to take some time off work. After a few heavy months, it had been quite well deserved.

However, what had at the time felt like a LONG break upon later observation turned out to have been just three days.

That is odd, right?

I mean, yeah, it had been forever since I’d had three days off in a single week, let alone three consecutive days. Still, it is not a long time, is it?

And yet, midway through the second day, I was already feeling like I’d been off forever. And by the third evening, I had become restless to resume work.

It is weird how our definitions of “normal” keep getting rewritten over and over again.

Now that I’m back to work, I’m feeling “normal” again, which cannot be normal in the long run, can it?

Also, I suppose many people here might not know what I do, right?

Among many other things, I am an editor. So if you or any of your friends write and are looking for an editor, feel free to let me know.

Word of the Week #404:

Dereliction

Am I spiritual?

Before I answer that, another question comes to mind. What does it mean to be spiritual?

I do try to live my life based on a certain self-defined set of beliefs. Basic stuff, really. Kindness and hope and all that goody-goody stuff. But is that the same as spirituality?

To be really honest, I don’t like most interpretations of spirituality. They just feel like an abandonment of the real world that is right in front of us. While we may have a consciousness beyond the material world, we cannot disregard the responsibilities we feel towards the institutions that sustain life here on earth and towards our peers who are trying to live their lives by our side.

It just feels convenient to be able to overlook everything that we can do to make things better right here if we remain overly convinced that a better existence awaits us that is unrelated to the one we experience right now. How is that any different than the standard garden-variety escapism, which is another of my areas of expertise?

Life has to be more than an entrance exam, right?

Then again, I have always been great at handling entrance exams without any kind of preparation, so… bring it on, I guess.

Word of the Week #403:

Exposition

There are so many things that I struggled to figure out as a writer that are now so much clearer to me having worked as an editor for so many years and having editing perhaps a couple hundred books by now.

One of those things is just the answer to this question: How much of your setting do you need to explain to the reader, and how can you do it effectively?

While this is most relevant in sci-fi and fantasy books, it is a factor in most fiction and narrative non-fiction.

For instance, if a guy from the Florida Keys writes an autobiography, he might want to tell the reader a little about life around the swamps. He might also want to tell the reader why “Keys” are named that. What he tells you is directly dependent on what he thinks is relevant.

But what is relevant? That’s easy to judge when you’re writing your own life story. Whatever you think isn’t relevant probably wasn’t, and all else is.

In a fantasy story, though? Difficult to tell, at time. In a sci-fi story? All the more difficult.

I have worked on so many stories where the writer is trying too hard to explain the sci-fi things happening in their worlds, but for most normal people, science is not that easy to understand. Not everyone is Isaac Asimov, and that’s okay. Don’t try to create the fundamentals of robotics. Focus on what you bring to the story and what makes it yours.

Fun Fact: Asimov coined the term “robotics”. Legend.

One way I like to think of it is this. Think about the Fast & Furious movies. They’re all about cars, right? Well, okay, cars and family, but let’s focus on the cars, for now. In any of those movies, did they explain how an internal combustion engine works?

That’s actually not a rhetorical question. I’m really asking. I haven’t watched the movies.

However, I’m going to make a reasonable guess and say that they haven’t, right? Nor would they explain how a differential drive works, right? They take the assumption that you know what a car is, and they then talk about any modifications or specialisations that you need to know.

The same principle applies in most situations. Focus on what is relevant. Make some reasonable assumptions and use them as a foundation.

The biggest mistake most writers—especially the young and the inexperienced ones—make is that they start telling the reader everything that the reader doesn’t already know. That is generally a bad idea, and for more reasons than one.

First and most important, the narrative style suffers a lot when you do that. The only time this is acceptable is if you’re writing a bedtime story for someone 6 or younger. Beyond that, remember, show, not tell.

Secondly, that is the perfect recipe for a snoozefest. Nothing slows down storytelling quite as much as a few consecutive paragraphs of poorly written theory. I’ve read chemistry textbooks that were more engaging.

And lastly, if the story is set in the year 2200, why is the writer addressing you, the reader, who has (presumable, but we never know) been dead for decades already? That’s unrealistic, right? If you were writing about your life today, would you address it to kids who died during World War 1 and explain to them how a plasma TV works?

The easiest way to introduce the reader to your world is to introduce a character to that world. This character should generally have very little understanding of what is going on in the world. When Harry Potter enters the wizarding world, he has no understanding of anything. The characters around him help him enter the world, and by extension us. The Twilight books start with the protagonist just moving to a new place, where the locals introduce her to the mythos of the area.

This is a pretty common trope, overall, and it might explain why most long stories tend to have at least one character who is always clueless about everything. The “new kid in town” style is pretty easy to use.

And of course, a good alternative is to have multiple characters, each of whom is clueless about something. That has the benefit of introducing the reader to a broader cast of diverse characters, which is always fun, right?

But, as I mentioned, if you’re writing a book set in 2200, how do you set up the story? How do you bring the reader into your world? Well, there are a bunch of ways.

You could just have the young protagonist be sitting in a history class, with the teacher explaining what went down in a particular era that created the reality of 2200.

You could have the protagonist find something closer to the reader’s era, perhaps some of their ancestors’ possessions, which sparks a conversation about how much the world has changed since then.

You could also use an epistolary narrative style, using letters or news reports, things like that.

As long as it is relevant and interesting and effective, it can be done in really any way you like.

Writing is so much fun, isn’t it?