Discovering the Joy of Writing and Self-Discovery

What is writing to me?

It is rare to come across a path that aligns with hobby, money, and passion. Nothing matches the comfort of being able to do something that brings you money, especially when it is what you love doing. Not to say I do not have any other hobby. About half of my acquaintance knows that I love to use fountain pens.

How do I define writing?

Writing is the antidote of its own poison. It is only after you get addicted to writing that you resort to writing as the cure. The cause, symptoms, consequence, and sometimes aftereffects gradually show up. When you begin living in hyper-slow motion, where the world is running past you to their respective—sometimes aimless—destinations that you begin to slowly grasp the funny design in which life took you to this detour called writing. And, in this tranquility and quietude, the tirelessly long and languid afterthoughts of thoughts pause for a moment before they step aside for you to look back and forth in the timeline to choose which ones continue to stay in your memory for long. That is when you truly begin to write for yourself.

Writing also happens when you begin to see in yourself a trough that is filled with an equation of thoughts and thoughtlessness. The equation where acid and base don’t balance out. It is that out-worldly experience where the matter meets the anti-matter. Only, when you witness this explosion, you implode with words that float in the nothingness. The thoughtlessness that is filled with countless words sometimes passes by you amazingly fast. Sometimes, it comes at you with all the time in this eternity. It is funny how even though dreams can completely justify your boundless imagination, you aren’t diligent enough to catch the insights that dreams share. Dreams also, in one way, share this antidote that writing supplies to your conscious mind. But you are either untrained toward or unaware of the importance of either in your life. A larger part of writing, therefore, remains a residue of what was originally sent in the form of ‘you’.

Writing is like meditation. It opens you up to the possibility of looking into your mental faculties. You begin to knock those mental doors that you had either kept locked on purpose or had never bothered to tap on to. Such is the beauty of life that we are constantly oscillating between the convincing state of lack of conviction and the state of unconvincing conviction. We cannot decide what to do, where to go, or when to arrive. But, writing helped me way-find myself.

Who are writers?

Writers are adept at and committed toward defining and communicating the heartfelt pains in a manner that is both effortlessly applicable and universally relatable. It is also true that writers are good conductors of thoughts. They are ductile to all human emotions and situations. And their range of words and adjectives is, if not wide, at least witty, wise, or workable. Oftentimes I am asked, “why do you write?” I write for peace. I write for content. Not the content that you think of when you hear the word. The feeling of being content, satisfied with what you have and what you gave. The interesting thing is that you must like to keep your word once you have given it. And you don’t have to be a writer to realize the play in words.

Can writing be taught?

The impact of good writing lies in its effect on dear readers. We often wish to experience the joy of composing a good writing piece by equating it with the feeling that readers get the intended message when they get to that piece. The sense of revelation exemplifies if it outweighs the simplistic combination of words. And the awe engulfs our readers with imaginary spirals that connect numerous dots of events in the readers’ timelines. If they find it relating, they find it worth reading. An often-ignored by-product of writing is learning. We learn more when we are not conscious of the learning process. A powerful thought has the power to disguise its learning under the wraps of a vibrant fabric of words. I’m often asked how I learned writing. And the reverse of it, too: can you teach how to write?

To some extent, writing cannot be taught. I can lay down the rules for you to think. But I cannot make you think. I can guide you to channelize your thoughts. But I cannot transform your thoughts for you. You must do your own thinking. There are methods for you to structure your thoughts, but there aren’t any rules or prerequisites on how you must transform your thoughts. Much like cooking, everyone has their own recipe. In application, there are only methods, and not rules. And that’s what makes the whole process exciting. That is why, writing must only be learned. The funny thing is we still learn what cannot otherwise be taught. Self-introspection, observation, learning by failure, and learning by experimentation are underrated techniques on how we often learn something even when it is not taught.

Thinking and overthinking

A large part of writing, actually, is thinking and rethinking. You get a thought. And then you give that thought a thought. As you keep thinking over it, you begin to compose a mental way in which you explain yourself what it is and why is it the way it is. Much like a mathematical, stepped derivation. What most writers define as, “Oh! It merely comes to me” is often an unregistered act of repeated, progressive iterations of introspection. Of course, it is a superpower to know when to stop right before stepping into the overthinking zone.