Confessions of A Writer

Originally written for Metropolis Hyderabad Magazine under the section of confession box and it is here! I have written this article along with another blogger, Sugumar and you can see his blog here: The World Around Me!

Click on Metropolis and explore the site. :D

I am a writer and I live by my pen. In my fraternity, there are my fellow friends who work in the morning and write by evening. A very tedious job, I tell you. As a writer, I have faced my problems but I derive joy from writing. I write when I am happy, I write when I am sad, I write when I am bored, I write when I am stressed out. Writing is the only way I can escape from my daily chores. Not that I am bunking them, but I need to write. At least, a thousand words a day. But I have my own plights too. Yes, I have some confessions. While I cannot pour out the gory ones, I can definitely tell the common ones.

After I took writing seriously, I mean very seriously, I have turned into a grave person. My friends complain that I do not have much time for them, which is quite not true. I do have time, but it is just that…..Anyway, the first confession is I do not like it when people contact me and ask me to write for them for free. I mean, I do have expenses, right? Any writer would feel the same. We have bills to pay, we have things to buy, we are taking time and writing and of course, it is not a social service. Like Joker in Batman said ‘If you are good at something, never do it for free’, and I believe every word that he says. With so many writers getting their books published, the writers have lost their cult-like following. Isn’t it? I do not see a single writer who has a magnificent following after Chetan Bhagat.

And then, there are people who think writers are unemployed. It is so in-appropriate. What about the writers who live by pen? Jane Austen did; did we regard her as unemployed? No, we did not. There are many such brilliant writers. And you know what the toughest part is? It is the naming of characters. The story gets completed in ten minutes but the naming part takes ages. Writing and the time limits are bitter enemies. But what can we do? They go hand-in-hand and deadlines are to be met. It is highly impossible to convince ourselves that we cannot be Jeffrey Archer in a single book. The things we write might be good, and readers might go gaga over it, but we are never satisfied with what we write. We always find it clichéd. How typical!

“I have gone overboard to promote myself on social media, being a first time author. It has made people come back and question my sense of modesty, but in an age where the publishing industry is at the boom I have no qualms of making the most out of social media”, confesses Sagarika Chakraborty, a famous writer and the author of ‘A calendar too crowded’. And I agree with her. Any good product reaches the market only with good promotion. Similarly, even writers need to promote their books. One cannot expect a book to be a massive hit by just putting it in the shelves of a book-store.

“Basically, writing is something that has kept me from the gloomiest moments in my life. It's nice to know that many envy the way you write and your work is being praised. But, writing is something only few adore, and only few bother to read.

Working against the deadlines, slogging off late in the night, typing stuff, writing doesn't seem that wonderful at those times”, confesses another writer, Aditya Kasibhatla.

So yes, we all have our major and minor glitches, complications, confessions and we, writers, pen them down, make fun out of it and laugh at our own expense. That is us!

-Sunaina and Sugumar