Damage Assessment (EWP)

Note: This article is part of the EWP

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Creative spark

The escalation of commitment can be quite a dreadful thing. Just a little more than a week ago, I set out to write a short story simply because I felt like writing fiction. Drawing inspiration from Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Against The Day’ and the names of particles in the Standard Model of particle physics (along with a working knowledge of the LHC at CERN), I first set out a simple header-plot (which is what I call the template from which I work upward). Once that was done, I checked it to see if it read well. It did.

Great! The next step was to define the characters’ personas, which, for me, doesn’t take much time because I ‘wing’ it (yes, you read that right), as I do the plot itself. The only things I decide beforehand are the only things I really enjoy deciding in the short-run: the names of the characters and the locales. Anyway, on the 7th of March, I began to write my story. (Download: session I)

Incomplete inspiration – hallucinating an abundance of opportunities – willingness to experiment – hesitation to lay out full plot

Reality hits

After two days or so, I realized to my horror that my narrative was going full speed ahead while the dialogue and character and plot developments were going nowhere. Back then, I had recently been criticized for indulging myself with too much prose at the risk of turning the whole endeavour pedantic and droll-like. In order to set it right, I scrolled back to the top of the page and began to edit what I’d written.

You see, I don’t edit my works much. I understand how an article or a story can be polished again and again and how there are so many techniques for that, but I’m a hesitating pacifist – and that means I get angry first and then calm down. So, if I gave myself time to calm down, I’d probably come up with something extremely blunt and literarily non-penetrating. Now, since I was editing this story, I began to have a bad feeling about it. My ideas and my intentions change so much within the same ideological bounds that there was a chance for a paragraph to turn out like a semantic singsong. (Download: session II)

Celebratory indulgence – brakes applied suddenly – improper attitude towards editing – thinking faster than writing

Battle for revival

The third challenge, and also the last one, I was left to confront now was the scripture of dialogues. I’d sucked at it in the past and had always strived to keep it at a minimum. Now, however, since the story seemed to be going good even though an indication of sunk costs was beginning to present itself, I decided to go for it.

Now, there are two kinds of dialogues that I’ve observed in stories. The first is between two people who are both active participators in the contents of the talk. This is the easiest to write because all you have to do is a conversation with yourself (which writers and philosophers do a lot) and then break it into two halves, one for each interlocutor. The second type is when two people are talking but only one of them is actually paying any heed to what’s being discussed, a type that is very important in most books written because if everyone listened to what was being spoken, there wouldn’t be a plot worth expounding for reams on. If you read the draft, you’ll be able to easily deduce that I struggled at writing the lines. (Download: session III)

Over-analysis – struggling to generate "flow" – very systematic approach

Desperate experimentation

The two ensuing sections of the story were actually written in the neighbourhood of 00:00, March 13, and opened up my eyes to the mistake I was doing: it seemed that if I started to script the dialogues, I was reluctant to take up the narrative, and if I started to script the narrative, I was reluctant to take up the dialogues. This resulted in conspicuous fault lines appearing all over the text – discernible easily to the reader to the point of him being able to read my mind, to the point of my work of “fiction” becoming transparent to his eyes. Also, in order to mask my own logical proclivities – which are strong enough as it is – I took the trouble to NOT be aware of the whole plot myself. This, in turn, awarded me with the liberty to experiment with what the two characters were saying to each other. This is a risky way to go about writing anything since, with the sunk cost fallacy being a real possibility, it could drain you of your creative faculties. (Download: session IV)

Retaining the option of "killing" a project as need be – consumed by occasionally trivial fears

Surrender

The last few paragraphs are what speak truly and openly of my defeat: the sentences are too long, the choice of words defer to a subconscious lack of precision, the uneven amount of attention paid to different parts of the same setting hint at the absence of decisiveness. Game over. (Download: session V)

Sunk costs – fractional kill – diminishing returns

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Fog index: 16.72

The Death Of A Blogger

More so than using WP's Plinky to find something to write these days, I go through the archives of my oldest blog, more often than not finding not just badly written posts but also lots of good ideas that I find hidden between the lines but, back then, was digressing too much to focus on them. While I can safely say that I have matured as a writer, I know the difference between the earlier "me" and the present "me": I used to write because I felt like writing something. Now, I write because I have something to write about.

That's not a desirable part of the maturation process, nor is it undesirable.

That feeling of "wanting" to do something because you like doing it and not because it has become a medium to express something is what I miss, though not too much because I could only have written so much meaningful or contributory pieces before starting all over again. Writing for writing's sake has an expiry limit. We're all humans and our mastery over something is automatically succeeded with our employment of that same thing.

What prompted me to write this post was that, when I was sifting through some old notes on the blog, I found a particular WP user who had left comments on almost every post for a period of about four months. Whensoever I used to put up an article on anything, he had the habit of finding something wrong with it, and we would get into a lengthy discussion. I would comment on his blog, he would respond on mine, it was such a good experience, of finding a friend out of nowhere.

I found a link lying around to his blog and decided to pay him a visit, but this is what I saw.

[caption id="attachment_509" align="aligncenter" width="520" caption="Interrupted."][/caption]

One blogger has disappeared. In his place is an emptiness that cannot be filled because it is still so full of memories. Another blogger has died. In his place is a man who wants to write something only because he has something to write about and not for writing's sake. 'Ars gratia artis' is not impractical nor is it unreasonable as an expectation, but it has its purpose, a time and purpose to practice it. Being an artiste non gratis is not condemnable. What is is the idea that art is what it is and cannot be anything more.

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No Candy For Right. Lesser Candy For Wrong.

Enough has been said over the last 10 years about the deluge of information on the web, and on the TV, the radio and the papers. All of it has contributed – one way or another – to change the way we look at the world around us; significant bits of it have even gone on to dictate newer with which we can interact with it. Unsurprisingly, however, there is also in place a different protocol, an upgraded one, that includes a new set of mistakes we could commit, a new set of implications and an altogether new rewards program, speaking as such, for not committing those mistakes in the first place.

Amongst them, there is a certain “mistake profile” that strategically underlies a lot of mistakes committed by unifying them with one principle: “doing it right makes no difference, doing it wrong makes a world of it”, and this kind of mistake has become more common; so common, in fact, that in some institutions, of investigations and reportage to be specific, they have attained the critical pedestal of being called systematic simply because they are not corrected even if exposed glaringly.

[caption id="attachment_317" align="aligncenter" width="386" caption="The Indian division of CNN"][/caption]

Commas once held the privileged position of inducing the most of such mistakes in writing. Using the commas in the right place leaves the reader with a smooth flow of thought, although he or she would ultimately take away the point being made at the end of the reading session. However, once the writer uses a comma in the wrong place, that sudden jerk in the flow of thought leaves the reader only with a dissonance that lasts the whole time – and he or she is bound to leave without giving a damn about your ideas. So also in reportage: just today, I was watching CNN-IBN cover the story of the Indian Navy capturing a pirate vessel off the coast of “Lakshwadeep”. If the presenter had pronounced it right, it would have gone a very short distance, if at all, in corroborating the care taken by the presenter to pronounce it correct. However, the moment she pronounced it wrong, it gave away a sense of journalistic nonchalance - especially when there is no hurry associated with covering the piece.

As long as the media is under the scanner, there is a critical difference between “showing” and “telling” that needs to be discussed. In order to understand this, consider the genre of creative writing: when such a piece is being constructed, the author needs to state something to the reader, not declare it. Similarly, facts need to be presented separately wherever possible, and not as cause and effect. This ensures the utmost neutrality even when an extremely suggestive event is unfolding. Such is the difference between statement and declaration. I principally address the contexts of writing and reporting first because they address a larger audience and quickly. However, there are other industries that face significant challenges in the long run because they didn’t look before they leapt.

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The writer, at this point, was struck by a writers’ block arrow and regrets announcing that the article is done.

Clean Writing For... Geniuses

There are enough articles out there that tell you how to write. Today, I'm going to tell you how NOT to write, especially how NOT to write something that is bound to frustrate the shit out of the reader.

[caption id="attachment_106" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="That definitely doesn't read right."][/caption]

We'll go through this in a series of points because I don't have the patience (for obvious reasons) to give you an introduction on bad writing, you have enough examples - and if you're around 20 years of age, you probably creating an example in an SMS message or a chat-window right now.

1. Periods (".") are important because they end sentences. They provide an invaluable break in the flow of thought in what you're writing. If you don't use this particular little dot, what you're writing looks like you've thrown it up - literally. Words don't deserve that.


2. An ellipsis is three dots in a row, one after another, without a space in between, like this: "...". That wasn't so hard, was it? Dot. Dot. Dot! It stands for either "to be continued" or "some text has been left out here because I think it's unimportant". Whenever you want to put that thought into the reader's head, you use the ellipsis. You shouldn't use it if the BOTH of us know what's coming next NOR in the middle of a sentence.


3. I'm not too particular about this one, but try capitalizing the first letters of your sentences and any names. The world's not going to end if you don't, but try it out, it could give what you're writing a classy look, like you're particular about things. I know, you're going to be put down as an intellectual dweeb for that, but when it comes to writing, things work differently.


4. I am QUITE sure none of you use Notepad or Wordpad to write these days. You either use MS WORD, that application that Mac users have or inside your browser, and I am QUITE sure that none of you still use IE6 - it's either Firefox, Chrome or that browser Mac users have. All three of them, note, have an add-on for checking the spelling of what you're putting down. In fact, they come with it when you install them. This is just to tell you that writing like that doesn't make you... "cool".


5. Stop using the word "like". Seriously. Use it only when you know what a simile is. A simile is like a metaphor.


6. Commas are beyond this world in their purpose. Please feel free to use them abundantly. You know, when you're writing to someone and you have no way of telling them when you're pausing and when you're not, a comma comes to the rescue, bold as it is. People will invoke a pause in what they're reading when they come across a comma. It's on my list of top 10 inventions of all time.


7. When you've learned how to use a period, you might be interested in the return button on the keyboard. When you press it, you get a paragraph, just like that, right out of nowhere, and a paragraph represents a more significant break in the flow of what you're reading. It's like this: you're organizing an event, and there are the lighting, sound and carpentry teams. It makes sense to have all the electricians in the lighting team and all the audio engineers in the sound team - all of them are humans like all of them are sentences, but the segregation is necessary to get the work done. It's a hard life, but it's better that way.


8. Hyphens bring words together to create hyphenation. An en-dash, which is the width of the capitalized "N", signifies a range (e.g., 6-10 horses); note: no spaces before or after. On modern keyboards, like the QWERTY and the Dvorak, the figure dash and en-dash are actuated by the same button, which is an outright tragedy, but let's move on. The em-dash is as wide as the capitalized "M" and demarcates parenthetical thought ("... I'm sure you know - like everyone else does - that you're a genius..."). It's also used to signify interruption: "So, as I was saying, you need to- BAM! Oh my god, you killed him!"

There you have it: 8 simple rules to make your writing look good, at least better than it already is. Please use them and write like a normal person - and by normal, I mean what it represented in a time as recent as 1981. I don't like the new definition.