A writer’s block, in layman’s terms is when your brain is covered with an absolute insulator, with little or no scope for any sort of formulation of brilliant ideas that can be put into paper. Well God save you if you happen to be a famous writer trying to churn out a creation of genius, but possibly even the devil cannot when you enter an examination hall, relying solely on your imagination, intuition, expertise and common sense, expecting things to fall into place on their own accord, hoping years of experience of giving exams will help you to come up tops and voila, before you know it, you are struggling to frame out straight sentences that make any sort of sense (or nonsense for that matter).
Its in sleepless nights like these that I turn to the solace of churning out meaningless nonsensical pieces because I have always idolized the writers of the modern soap, be it Richard Castle or Hank Moody. A writer has the intellectual acumen of a scientist (coming out with an invention or discovery must be as difficult as coming out with a literary work), the glamour of a movie star
Well, I believe the art of writing is a lot like Mathematics-the key here is practice. Hours of learning complicated and tongue twisting words preparing for some hi-profile exams like CAT/GRE/TOEFL will never help you be a good writer if you just gonna stack it in some corner of your head without actually ever using them. You will be like a billionaire in the middle of a zombie apocalypse (My influence is “The Walking Dead”)-plenty of green without a place to spend. It’s also the matter of overuse of high sounding words in lieu of relatively mundane ones. It looks impressive at first glance, but eventually you will get tired of turning to the dictionary after every single line. You would never want to deviate the attention of the reader from the content of the matter to your impressive use of unwarranted words. Although enrichment of a prose piece with meaningful, relevant words is good, over doing it is an eyesore.
I will take my literary liberty to quote a overused movie dialogue:
Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called “The Pledge”. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course… it probably isn’t. The second act is called “The Turn”. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call “The Prestige”.
So, you may ask, with full justification, what the hell does a magic trick have to do with writing? Hmm…read on.
The Pledge: Come up with the basis of a plot for a book or a write up that is derivable from some thing or someone in real life.
The Turn: Embellish it with vivid details that will make even the commonplace seem extraordinary. Because sometimes, something that you can relate to, that you have experienced, that you can understand, within the covers of a book or in plain writing can give it an entire new dimension-its human psychology (probably).
The Prestige: What’s extraordinary in a book? The climax of course. Thus we have, a relatively boy wizard surviving and vanquishing possibly the greatest evil wizard of all time (3 cheers for the potter maniacs), a bloody vampire battle turning out to be just a mental projection (I never actually read any of book of the twilight series, but I did watch the movies just to see what the fuss was all about), the rhetorical fable of a young boy and a tiger and its revelation and of course the recent use of a nuclear fusion bomb to avenge the death of his wife (No, I am not revealing the source, especially for those who have been waiting patiently for the trilogy to come to its grand gala finale).
If you find joy in reading, you will find joy in writing as well. If not, it is a good way to blow off some steam. But don’t take your literary freedom of expression for granted.
“With great powers come great responsibilities”–Spiderman (Or was it Peter Parker)(Did I use this phrase before?)
P.S: Any criticism of my grammar is unwelcome, because although I do seem to have spell-check, there is nothing here that verifies the tenets of grammar.