What makes me write?

My today’s post would be focused on writing and what prompts a seemingly normal and happy man like me to take this path.

Let me start off by saying that writing is for you only if you are willing to punish yourself for days on end, pick fights with your immediate companions, and be in a generally gloomy mood to put something on paper while at the same time aware that probably, not a single person is going to read the stuff.  Whew, that’s dark I suppose.

So you might be wondering as to what prompted me to write.  Well, the answer is simple and yet, surprising.  I write because somehow the words trying to push their way out of my brain inflict more pain as compared to the pain mentioned above.  It can possibly be compared to an ailment where for some reason, you can’t stop the ideas from popping into your head and begging to be heard and reacted upon.  Each writer may have his/her own motivation but for me, this is the most important thing.

Satisfaction at seeing the idea take shape on paper and slowly grow, evolve, and ultimately out-reach your own limitations is a wonderful feeling.  It is like looking into another parallel world and finding things that only you know about.  But that’s called imagination or day-dreaming depending on whom you ask.  What makes fiction writers different is their motivation to bring that imagination or day-dreams out of that hypothetical parallel world into this world and write about it. 

And this feeling of bringing and sharing something unknown with the world (even though no one might be interested) outweighs the cons of writing.  When I start on a new story, the feeling is a little shy and hesitates to find its voice.  But as I prod it gently and give it the right attention, it grows until all my waking time is filled with the voice of this feeling. 

Normally, it only stops when everything is put on paper and there is no more to be done but some-times there is a monster that overcomes the feeling.  A monster that goes by the name of Writer’s Block.  More on that in later posts.

Hope you enjoyed this post. In my next post, I will talk about my debut-novel Starship Samudram and how it came to exist.