Hail to the writers

As I child I used to read a lot of books. Each one opened up a world where characters didn’t just exist on page. They used to come alive literally with words that were spun together so elegantly. My fascination for the written word exploded when I studied literature in college. Here was the whole unexplored world of authors I revered and some names I never ever heard of waiting for me to read and learn. Each of the books not only showed the authors’ flair with words but also revealed how well they understood human behavior and psyche. 

To take an idea and display it across pages without losing your way is a task I find extremely difficult to perform. What I lack in flair, I have to make with the doggedness. All my life, I’ve marveled at people’s ability to write beautifully. It’s not just the images they evoke; it’s the sentiments they arouse. All good writers possess this ability to express everything that the human emotion range has to offer in words that fit perfectly. Most of the times, this admiration turns into a rage of jealousy. Why can’t I manage to hold one coherent thought for more than a fleeting second? Ideas and words run away from me like people shunning the diseased. I sit to write but no thoughts beyond the first line come. Imaginative writing is not for me. Give me a piece of research where I have to quote or work on an interview and I can do a fairly decent job.

Writers are inspired by the world around us. Ordinary things get transformed into something new and brilliant, a vague feeling becomes an awe-inspiring emotion, a shifty, shapeless entity transforms into a character to be loved or reviled. It amazes me, this endless capability to be able to exactly and correctly capture the subtleties, the nuances, the theatrics that an action or incident can invoke. How do writers manage to explore thoughts and actions and investigate what drives people? How do they manage to bring out the darkest desires, and scrape the skin off our hidden emotions and expose the raw, unprotected aspects of human behavior? Across genres, words that touch the heart and evoke happiness, tears, joy, pain, guilt, release, confidence are the handiwork of people blessed by the ability to put down in words exactly what you and I feel.

When I sit to write, my thoughts are contained and restricted; I sit and stare most often, frustrated by this impotency. At times, the words just flow and spew out like a rabid disease that needs to be fed. There is this urge to write down every single little thought that pops in the head. Nothing exists beyond the words. As long as the fever lasts, I can only breathe words. Nothing exists beyond them. And when the frenzy ends, there is this sense of loss, like a piece of me was taken away.