Someday My Writing Will Be Good

I write because it calms me. I write to get my thoughts in order. I write so that I can look back on my past. I write to practice my communication. But when I read what I have written, even a few days later, I cringe at the immaturity of my thoughts and writing. I wonder how I could be so silly. I worry that my writing is a reflection of my shallowness, and depth is what I aspire to.

Words have always been my friends. While I was studying, I loved writing essays and stories as part of my curriculum. My teachers thought I was good. It gave me a quiet confidence in the ability to use the written word to express my feelings, beliefs and arguments. I even made money thanks to this love for writing. It wasn’t big money, but enough to support my dreams for an ambitious future.

Yet, today I feel inadequate. I mock my ability to express myself through writing. I feel insecure about having forgotten how to. The fear of sounding stupid has gripped me for close to four years now. It takes gargantuan effort to fire up the laptop, and even after it’s on, I find something else to do rather than write.

In school grammar, reading and writing as a way to answer specific questions was taught to me. I loved poetry, but I failed to understand most of it. Growing up, I dabbled in music, art and sports but reading was my one constant hobby. Enid Blyton was the voice in my head. Wordsworth was the rhythm in my heart. Agatha Christie was my guide to the human psyche and I was in awe of Fredrick Forsyth’s mind.

Shakespeare was a familiar name, yet I never had access to him. My school libraries never gave much thought to educating our minds with the classics. A standard diet of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew was what they thought we needed.

I was fortunate to have a father who could rarely be found without a book in his hand. My grandmother once told me that he would ask her to save the newspaper pieces that the groceries came wrapped in. He’d come back from school and smooth out each crumpled piece, devouring the printed wisdom or bit of news. He was poor, and couldn’t buy books, so he would read anything he could lay his hands on.

Baba once took me to the public library in Pen, a sleepy town in Konkan where he was tasked to build a factory. He issued the Wizard of Oz for me and said, “I think you’ll like this one.” I loved it! It took my eight year old self many days to finish the story, but once I was done, I couldn’t stop talking about it. It had blown my mind open. (In that same town, I had once spotted a local woman smoking the local brand of rolled up tobacco. When I recounted this to Baba with a shocked and disapproving expression, he calmly said, “women smoke all the time.”)

A few years later, we moved to Mumbai and Baba finally had a job where he didn’t have to travel all week. When my summer vacation came around, he walked me to the community library in our neighbourhood and handed me a faded pink membership card. He promised to give me the monthly fee of Rs. 30 as long as I promised to keep returning the books on time. And of the three books I was allowed to borrow, one had to be for my little sister. I was probably the only teenager who was walking in and out of that library every couple of days, a smile plastered on my face.

So, reading was a legacy passed on from my father. Writing, not so much. I once tried to write a crime fiction short story for a competition in the Reader’s Digest. I had only jotted down a loose plotline and a couple of introductory pages. When I asked my father what he thought of my writing, he smiled his deep dimpled smile and said it needed more work. I gave up, thinking I could never be as good as Christie anyway.

As the decades flew by, I read so many more books. I wanted to have a well-paying job so that I could buy books, and an inexplicable amount of clothing from Mango. I never got around to owing a shred from the high fashion store, but books, I bought some every month. The more I read, the more inadequate I felt – here were prize winning authors writing legendary fiction and non-fiction, what gave me the idea that I could ever be even close?

But the burning desire to write and be good at it has persisted. My blog was a small flight born out of boredom and surplus time. The subjects interested me, and still do, but I never deemed my ramblings to be of much value. Over the past two years I have signed up for writing courses online. I thought learning the craft, having someone break down the method will boost my abilities. I now have my doubts about that line of thinking.

On some days I read poignant writing that moves me to tears. It is usually about people, relationships, failures and triumphs. I think more than I speak, or write. It makes me believe that when I do share my thoughts someday, they will be just as refined as some of these authors’ are. Until then, I’m practicing every day. And perhaps because of that I may be getting better bit by bit. I hope I am.