How I write Blog posts

Sometimes people ask me how I am able post daily on my Blog. Many writers do a minimum of 500 words a day. I suppose for most of them it is easy. But not for me. After breakfast and a glance at the newspaper headlines (detailed reading comes later) I sit before the computer. My mind is as blank as the monitor screen.

The position is something like this:

"Night's heaviness is unlessened still, the hour
of Mind and Spirit's ransom has not struck
Let's go on, our goal is not reached yet"

That is a quote from Faiz Ahmed Faiz which my good friend NAT (also known as CRN, short for CR Natarajan) sent me. He is one of the legends of the Indian tire industry. Originally from Mysore, he now lives in San Diego, USA.

I look at the list subjects for the Blog in my notebook. They are in different stages of research. I select one, or, occasionally, something from the newspapers that caught my attention, or a topic off the cuff (like this one).

I key in the title and then get stuck often. I don’t have the gift of flowing words. The position at that juncture is: "The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible." (Vladimir Nabakov) And the words do come, along with another problem. I type with two fingers. The thoughts run ahead of the keying in process.

A more sensible method would be to build a ‘posts’ bank whenever one gets the time, and select the day’s post from it. But that does not give the thrill of struggling to meet the self-imposed deadline. In the bargain, sometimes the quality suffers though, particularly in editing. It is not my forte. And even with ‘spellcheck’ typos remain. The moral here is, do not overly depend on automatic grammar and spelling check.

According to the writing pundits one should let an article cool overnight; when you look at it the next day, the mistakes stick out. That is true. Perhaps I should shift to the ‘posts’ bank practice.

They say hope springs eternally in the human heart. I expect to become a better writer someday. So I keep typing away.

Ends.

Also see: Blogday thoughts