Literary Nostalgia

I literally miss those days.

And when I look at the vast amount of information published at the largest free publishing house on the globe (and that would be Internet…), I again miss those days, only with a little stronger nostalgia.

Being a thinker primarily and then a writer, I think a lot about random stuff. And this topic is dearest to me —

How I used to write, then how writers started writing and then how people started looking at writing and then, how I write now.

Years back, when I wrote for the joy of it, the way I connected with people was at a beautiful level.

‘Your words can spell magic!’ they would say.

And I wrote a lot of things back then — poems, quotes, thoughts, random letters to random people, random letter to absolutely no one, compositions, essays, opinions, a lot of other things.

Most of them used my imagination in the best possible way.

I imagine a lot….that’s what females do….imagine a lot.

Imagine about places, people, events, a tweaked past, a bright future, falling in love with someone who they know would never love them back, being the damsel in distress, being ally to Xena in her wars….being this…being that…

The point is, I used these imaginations to craft beautiful pieces of literature….They came out to be soul-touching.

Today, when I read what people write, I feel the need to search for soul in their writing. Today when I write, I have to put efforts into bringing the soul back in my writing.

Now how do I put this?

The way writing has evolved in the last decade, seems to have strangulated the art that writing was meant to be, originally. There came in a business perspective.

A pen is mightier than a sword, so use it as a sword to slay your competition. Be the emperor, let content be your king, and you can enslave a market! You can hypnotise people into buying stuff that was not selling well enough to set your pockets blooming!

Rope in people who can write! Rope in people who can write for Search Engines! Rope them in!

Suddenly, content writers were famous…suddenly, before I knew, content constituted an industry!

Where was writing in the industry?

Do you hear people saying, “I need a writer to write for me”?

No, I hear them say, “I need a content writer to write content for my website or blog or this or that or whatever.”

They need content writers. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, writing became content. It got mechanical.

“Churn out words.

Come on

5 blogs a day

2 articles a day

500 words each

We pay according to industry standards.

We need content developers

We want SEO content”

This scares the shit out of me.

It’s almost like there are hundreds of people now, playing musical chairs with 10 chairs to become that content developer in demand.

And then there are offerers who would come forth with shining knives to rip out this inner kindle of literary joy from people like us.

They would say,

‘We write at the most affordable rates!’

‘We have made good content affordable’

‘We help you communicate better with your audience’

And how do we do that? Google has the answer perhaps.

It seems, every Tom Dick and Harry suddenly became laureates in language! Suddenly they sucked in all the creative beauty from the Universe and now, they are showering that creativity on businesses in pints, quints and peanuts.

Duh! With this rate of massacre, soon the Universe would run out of people who write just because they want to.

In all the dazzle about content being king, and millions of people aspiring to be enslaved by the content industry, where did the essence of literature go?

It receded in the hearts of people like me, who were really attached to the core beauty of language. It’s no more the sophistication of the language that people care for. It is more about the number of words and the amount of information.

It is content all around….

Content on social media, content on websites, content for blogs, strategic content planning, content re-purposing, content promotion, content here, content there, content this, content that! Content in the most overwhelming proportions, but communication almost nowhere.

I sometimes sit in my solitude and try to figure out the level of frustration that content writers must be undergoing. Talk about me, today, when I work for my clients, it is almost ritualistic for me to run to Google as the first course of action.

What is the competition doing? How is the industry growing? What do visitors like? What would be the best way to put forth my message?

In all this hullabaloo, I seem to forget that I am a real person, wishing to talk to real people through my words. It is so bright out there, that I feel blinded….so cluttered, that I feel deafened.

The natural escape route is trying to sneak into the brain of others like me, or what my friend says, ‘taking inspiration’.

But back then, when I was younger and more imaginative, I seldom needed inspiration. I was my own inspiration! Where did that go? I guess I drifted with the flow. Or may be tried to morph myself according to the little space that the whole content world has to provide to my beaming dreamy mind.

Honestly, I pity myself….I pity others like me, I pity yet others who think they are like me and yet yet others who aspire to be like me….I pity every creative person who places his creativity on the altar so that a few awesome businesses hire them to use this gift to poop out mechanical sentences.

Language, still, till this date, is awesome.

Because it has the capacity to do the most unimaginable deeds. A thought, put in a touching manner, has the capacity to move the stoniest of hearts.

I miss that at some point in time, years ago, people realised this fact and wrote for other people. I miss the vibrancy of communication. I am still red in love with those days. I am smitten by words that speak with a sweet squeaky voice directly into the ears of readers.

And I know there are people like me.

I know you are like me.

I know that for sure, even if you are handling a million dollar worth of business. You know this for sure….that it is you whom your customers want to talk to…it is your voice that they want to hear, it is your thoughts that they want to reflect on.

Do you miss this? Like I do?

The linguistic nostalgia, the sweet essence of a few words that might touch more lives than you ever thought?

I want to do it again. It’s like getting enveloped and reaching a trans state where you know what to say so that people hear you and then listen to you.

I am literally still in the literary nostalgia that so much seems lost but is so much important!