Pitfall Writing
Do You Have to Feel Like a Writer to Be A Writer?
The answer is pretty unconventional
Writing is a form of communication.
I suggest you work in sales or the corporate sector to understand the consequences of a misplaced word.
Oral stories used to amaze our ancestors when sitting around a campfire, just like well-crafted written stories amaze readers. This difference in setting may have been the reason writing is viewed as a skill different from speaking. But how will we feel about it if we start viewing it as another tool through which we communicate?
The charisma of storytellers
The digital age has turned writing into a skill available to many.
Not everyone will be able to write a novel, but all of us are capable of sharing our thoughts. This may have been the reason we stopped regarding long-cherished art as an art anymore.
What intrigued our ancestors is a click away for us. They had to wait for a traveller to visit their town and immerse themselves in their imagination. But with the advent of the internet, our imagination is not caged, and for this very reason, largely unexplored.
If we wish to know the details of a remote village in Africa, we can type the location on Google, and you will have many facts, true and untrue, about the place on your screen. For some, this is a cheap way to soothe their curiosity, while others have taken the availability of information for granted.
The wait no longer excites
The wait, which used to excite our ancestors, has turned into frustration for many.
Google has made it easy for most of us to access proper information at the click of a thumb, yet many have begun to regard writing as a side hustle or a hobby.
Is it bad? I don’t think so. But has it made us a slave of our feelings? Very much so.
You can sense the desperation to be in the limelight in many articles.
Stories are weaved to gain attention, sell an unreal outcome, and rally behind a person based on likes and dislikes.
Everything that was once the domain of speaking has seeped its way into the written word. The dark we were exposed to through broadcasts and other minute-long propaganda schemes is now a guest of every writer’s abode.
The need to write
We no longer write to express. When you visit the “write for us” page of good publications, you will read a version of this statement, “We do not consider ranting as information”.
Does this make ranting bad? Not really. But the camouflage of rants as information hurts the “grade level understanding” of individuals.
It was the year 2010 when I created my first social media account. I had been writing stories since grade 3, but our teacher never encouraged us to call ourselves writers. It was in the last few years that individuals took “success without a degree” into an “I can be whatever I feel” version of waking up to the crap.
The writing dilemma
Writing is thinking in action.
Before a speaker delivers a speech or a presentation, he or she works on it tirelessly for days or even months before coming out to express it to the world. They have the authority to be named a subject matter expert.
Working for a year or a few months can never give someone an edge over that person. No matter how much of a rare talent they claim to have.
The online rhetoric is about “I have lived”, so I can express it such that it takes away the lessons inherent in stories we used to listen to or read.
It is a human longing to know about another individual, so we love to read about their experience, yet we often miss that experiences are subjective. Unless the narrator has taken the time to explore them in detail, they lack substance for me to even put myself in their shoes.
How do you convert a subjective topic into value for the reader?
Reflecting on your thought process
No great writer in any century was talking or sharing endlessly. The good work they have produced has been in the incubator longer than most of us wish.
They were hardly following the “sharing my thoughts/feelings” mode of expression to improve their craft. Almost all of them observed more than they produced because you can write anything of significance only after observing a pattern/phenomenon/behaviour for a long enough time to write about it in detail.
So, do you feel like a writer when writing?
No. You feel more like an observer. As if someone else is doing the typing while you are sitting in a secluded chamber in your brain, observing and gauging every word, sentence, and paragraph for its significance.
For those who don’t understand because they haven’t read a word — you become a writer by producing work that “wow” your reader even when you don’t feel or consider yourself one.
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