Tag: writing

The Power of the Pause in Creative Processes

For me the power of the pause is the most important part of any activity, whether it is a creative one or a simple thing like planning my Menu for the day.

I have known people who say that “why do you need to plan a menu? You just go and make something. After so many years of running a house, you should be able to do it with your eyes closed!”

Well it’s never been that simple for me. For me any activity is creative activity- whether it’s writing a book or a poem or even a small haiku for an Instagram post, I need to pause, imagine, toy with words, reflect and then put on paper my thoughts.

The white space that is believed to be a negative space is a very vital and positive area of activity. If I were to plan my white space consciously ( I am, let me be honest, a very impromptu creator so I do not actually construct or build a white space consciously) but yes there is a method to my madness and in retrospect I realise that I have unconsciously structured the pause that is the hidden depth of my foundation of any planned or unplanned activity.

When we were students, we were urged to write our answers or essays with a beginning, middle and an end. A simplistic attitude maybe, but that grid has stood true for so many centuries that all those years of training has deeply ingrained my psyche and I follow it in a nonlinear way.

Before I start any project, I need to have that seed in my mind – it could be just a line “The safe door was just that bit open” and this would usually pop into my mind just before I fall asleep. The next day, amidst the busyness of everyday life it would keep popping up and in the moments that intersperse my day I would play around with it. This then is my beginning.

My middle would be that part where my logical brain would argue with my heart; that it is an idiotic sentence. How can you create a story from something as inane as that? The brain would argue! Then my heart would smile that very secretive smile and say “wait and see! Give me some width!” there would be conversations like this yo-yoing within me while on the outside I would be calm and either indulging in another creative outlet (sketching or stitching…) this is the most difficult part. It has sometimes taken me months before I could formulate my thoughts into coherent action. It is filled with self-doubts, uncomfortable clarity, and restlessness. It is here that I need to push at the resistance that engulfs me overwhelmingly.

The end is where the beginning was. I have at this point decluttered myself and have taken positive steps towards planting that seed. It is here that I do a lot of research on my topic. Frame and reframe my story in a million different ways. Here I use myself and others as a sounding board and then question and requestion my intents. If it’s a story it is straightforward, I begin writing each chapter with the whole picture in front of me (again to be honest there have been many a times that I have erased whole chapters or rewritten whole conversations due to my indulgent emotions during this period). If it is a poem, I have questioned the veracity of what I want to portray or a short story where I have changed the passage of time.

This final moment is my incubation period; the time when my story is born with all its limbs intact.

According to me ‘scheduling’ goes against the grain of any creative venture but white space is necessary for clarity of thought and expression. If you were to think of creativity as an impressionist’s painting as opposed to a portrait that photography mimics now, then white space would definitely be an inherent part of the plan to create.

….For the love of a book

It’s been a hectic month so far! Lots have been happening…. I had been sitting on my third book for the last (which I must say has been topsy turvy!) year. I don’t want to go into details but safe to say that I have not stayed at home for a month at a stretch. Either I have been traveling to other cities or the hospital!

Well, I decided enough is enough and proceeded with my publisher to publish the book. “Weave Some More” my latest novel, has literally woven webs of confusion, distractions, and plenty of new learnings.

I learned how important it was to advertise the book, I also learned that I need to join like-minded groups, and also to keep my ear to the ground to hear the rumblings about the book.

Though I have used Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn to let the world know about the birth of my books, I have not used it methodically (So my publisher says). So I put myself into their expert hands to do the serious work and continued my amateur bumbling on Social Media!

I was soon flooded with a lot of requests from many groups who wanted to follow me or talk about my book or my writing process. It was flattering, to say the least, but it was a lot of work, nevertheless. One more pleasant surprise was how many of them wrote their own interpretations of the book and posted them on different platforms. I am grateful.

Facebook was filled with congratulatory messages from many of my friends and relatives. But I wonder how many of them did read the book. The best compliment a writer ever gets is when he realizes that his book has been read and critiqued (even if it is a bad one!) I am extremely grateful to the handful who made it a point to message me with their thoughts or wrote reviews on various platforms.

I do realize that in this day of the internet and video world, very few have the interest or the inclination to actually read a three-hundred-page book. Being a book lover I do not understand this trend, but then each to his own.

A book is like a living creature. Every time you read it, it throws out new ideas, nuances, and visions. A couple of people argue that what do we need with them? After all the internet is teeming with ideas and entertainment; why go through the pain of reading, exploring, and using your “noodle” to wallow in the pleasure of reading, processing, and creating your own world?

I have no arguments for or against the above theories. Only a book lover can really ‘feel’ the pleasure that seeps through him when he uses a writer’s words to create and travel through a world. The underlined word is ‘create’. It is true that the writer has created a world with his words but your vision of it is your own creation and thus you own it.

Whoever has the time to read this, please do answer the question, “which other entertainment path allows you to create and find fulfillment and gives you ownership of your reactions and emotions?

Conceptual Writing- Storytelling


Sometimes profound words come from the mouth of babies! Yesterday I was whiling away my time watching an award show for movies (trying to have a chilled out weekend). The young actress who won the award said a few words that made me think. I cannot reproduce her exact speech but the gist was “I am a good actress not only because I work hard at my art but because I have a team of directors, producers and writers who frame my character in the movie” she ended by saying, “I give the highest honour to the writer, as it is he who is the creator of everything. Everyone else does whatever they do  to give life to his creation, but it is his thought and imagination which is the seed of a brave new world”.

All forms of art indulge in the process of creation. Whether it is cinema, painting, sculptor or any media form, they all strive to put before us a reality that may or may not mimic the world as we know it. While most of them have their limitations: Cinema by its budget and practicality; painting by the physical use of canvas or paints; sculptor with the medium it uses, but writing, it lets your imagination take wings and soar into the wild unknown, beyond the plausibility of facts and data; sometimes even beyond the edge of the world.

I think God himself is a writer, he takes the trouble to chart out a plot for each of us and then lets us bumble our way through life. Sometimes he erases all that he had written and rewrites our progress!

Of course writing per se was preceded by the oral tradition of storytelling, so what I am actually trying to say is, more than writing, it is giving birth to a story with its myriad colours of thought and action is the point of relevance. Some writers painstakingly go through the correct procedure of creation. First the plot is imagined-the foundation is laid; then the main character is conceived-preferably a round character with its strengths and weaknesses, after which the narrative goes from introduction to weaving words and creating a new world and the final denouement which will unveil a new chronicle of events. There is also another set of writers who just sit down and decide to unleash their creativity in words, on the spur of the moment. They write a story and then go into the nitty gritty of polishing and sharpening their offerings. You could belong to either group but what is important here is that both group use their skill and art to form an immortal saga which will touch many, if not all hearts that have the perused it.

Why are stories so important to us? The modern world which is steeped in scientific theory has the audacity to lay down a data grid and expect us to understand every nuance of existence via this. Obviously, this fails time and again! This is when we go back to the art of storytelling to explain the shades that exist. Two plus two is four is the universal truth as long as the parameters are physical objects. What happens when there is a fluid expression of dissent to the universal truth? Can your data grid succeed in explaining the anomalies that is always a part of life? Here is when tales, fables and stories come into the fray. They are those fluid expressions which adapt and encompass all our existential woes in such a way that they are the universal truth without vindication and validation.

How easy it is to teach a child through a story rather than putting facts and figures on a platter before him. Every talk show, everything connected with education and every form of entertainment refers to some story or the other. In order to understand or empathise a situation, we need to identify and relive the circumstances. Stories play a stellar role in infusing healthy mental growth and development within and without the confines of society.

As an erstwhile teacher I have always resorted to the unlimited bag of stories to teach, motivate and create s group of individuals who are independent, unique and outstanding in their own rights.

Does this answer the question of why ‘stories’ and connected to  it ‘writing’ is important to this world? Does this give the responsibility of moulding and building a character out of nothing a greater stress? Does this also fill each and every writer with questions of their ability to turn around someone’s life from nothing to a path filled with excitement and happiness?

Non Linear Freedom


Time and space do matter when we are bound by the limits of science and imagination. Whether your writing is in the linear mode or in the non linear mode, it is important to have the logistics of time and space right. I cannot weave a narrative in the eighteenth century and then push it into another dimension (Space?) even if the time is the same or vice versa. Of course the genre of Fantasy fiction does let us travel to parallel worlds in another time and dimension, but we still stick to that graph to be able to formulate a logical and comprehensible story.

The human mind is born with certain pre set ideas. We know that if I am born on the first of January 1992, I cannot be alive on 4th January 1991. If I am in the jungles of Peru, I cannot be on the Himalayas at the same precise moment. The problem of twin identities stops the writer from exploring this facet.

We are also limited by data- “ A man cannot be alive if he is three hundred years old”. But our epics and religious texts do tell us that at a certain point of time, people lived to be more than five hundred years old. There are a lot of explanations to that. Some say a year was calculated as equal to a lunar month not a solar orbit, others say the figures were symbolic numbers to stress other aspects of life. We also have various people the world over claiming to be hundred and fifty and so on, but they normally have no proof, so it is relegated into fantasy.

So what do I do? I want to weave a story where I need the same character to be at two places at the same time. “Impossible”, says the modern millennial. This is when I need to break the sound barrier (in this case the time and space barrier) and delve into a world that is not bound by any restriction. Before I discuss this in detail, I would like to remind you that the first airplane flew early in the twentieth century but the Ramayana, written sometime in the fifth century BC, talks about the ‘Pushpaka Vimana’  or the mythological flying Chariot used by Ravana to kidnap Sita. So was it just a figment of Valmiki’s imagination or was there something like that already existing? So what seems impossible now maybe possible in the future.

Fantasy fiction already delves into impossible circumstances and we accept it. It could be Harry Potter flying on his broom and playing Quidditch or Superman coming from the planet Krypton. But what if I want to create a normal world with ordinary people that the reader can identify with? What if I want some extraordinary happenings to be a part of my narrative in the most natural and believable way?

This is when we can explore the unknown world of paranormal or supernatural events. It has been proven time and again that this world of spirits; world unrelated to physical dynamics and a world where logic is not the king, exists. Here (specially because it is not data dependent) we have the freedom to throw away the shackles of logic, time, space and to some extent scientific theory and push it down the black hole of superstition and ignorance.

Wikipedia defines superstition as ‘a pejorative term for any belief or practice that is considered irrational or supernatural: for example, if it arises from ignorance, a misunderstanding of science or causality, a positive belief in fate or magic, or fear of that which is unknown.’

So we have this negative (?) tool to create a dark world to suit our needs. There are questions that pop into my mind; does it need to be a “dark world”, cannot it be a world full of sunlight where good is rewarded and bad is punished and not the other way around? But again I am limiting myself by moral values of Good and Bad.

Whatever be the outcome of this argument, I believe that it is important to let the mind free from the tortuous limitation of science, facts and data!