I know it sounds dramatic but its true. Now-a-days i am afraid to write.
I am afraid to write to my heart's content in fear that people will find it too long and from what i have been seeing these last few days, they don't like to read anything that they can't finish in 5 minutes, that doesn't strike their brains instantly, that takes its time to evolve and mature, that makes them think and work to get the true gist. I was never good in writing jokes, my frustrations( why would i like to bore people with them, I used to think but apparently people like to know what's happening in other peoples' lives. In short we are all big soap-opera junkies!) or the subtle art of poetry. I am trying to rhyme recently, but its just not me. I like to construct. i like to make these big top heavy plots, to make characters, to write their lives and make them do awesome things.
But its a curse of social media, I guess. With time you start to like the attention when anybody polls you or tells you how awesome you are or points out some little error you missed out. And then like an addiction you start craving it. You feel hurt when you spend a few days writing something awesome and a bare few people read it while at the same time someone copy-pastes a joke or balantly palgiarises something and gets all the attention. It confuses you. You thought this was not a social media platform like facebook or twitter or dozens of others scattered out there. You thought this was a platform to write, to be creative, to improve yourself.
This unknowingly changes you. You start thinking how can you make your writing catchy. Should you write on love? Break-up? They are in vogue now a days. You try it but you realise that you can't. There are no words, there are no feelings, just a simple pretend, a task. But writing was never a task for you. It was something special, something religious. It was never so... so... lowly. You feel wronged, you feel guilty like somehow you have stabbed a part of you. But more than anything else you feel ashamed. For sinking so low. For objectifying something you used to love. For betraying yourself.
You then realise that this is not you. Lets stop pretending. Pretending to think that you have found kindred spirits. Pretending to think that this really matters for it never did before. Now there is one path before you. The clouds are clearing. You are finally ready to accept what has been staring at you for quite some time now. Let go. Admit that while it lasted it was heart-warming but it was not for you. This is not what you had been looking for, searching for a long time, knowingly or unknowingly. It was similar and gave you a good respite but now its time to go. Time to let go.
And begin a new journey...
Comments (16 so far )
btw do ppl copypaste? honestly i thot all i read here on wb is original!
It was not my intention to garner sympathy or any thing from these meaningless rumblings of my mind. But this actually proves my point!
Writing this... thing, has given me more polls than all of my previous posts here and compared to them this was not writing, this was just a means to relieve some of my frustrations, written in a few minutes and posted with a catchy title. For God's sake even the title and the majority of the content of this... thing doesn't match!
And yet we are interested in it. This begs the question- Are we here for writing as a social community or a literary community? And please don't say both, because we know that's not the case.
I am in no way pointing this out to criticize anyone. I just wanted to point out this question we have been avoiding for sometime now.
And just one other important thing. Everyone who writes, travels, reads or even breathes is learning something from the world out there. Every time you write you give people something out of your own experience to others. You might have 10 readers or may be 10 lakh. But ultimately i dont believe the number matters to any writer. Its a temporary filling of success which lasts not very long. What matters is to be able to keep that writing up. Dont tell me every time you write something andby the time you end writing it. You dont feel that surge of satisfaction a sort of "inner peace". Thats whats matters the most. Thats what pushes us to write. At the end of the day we all our a bit selfish. We might not be aware of the fact. But for us that peace is all that matters at the end of the day. Which comes only by writing the next post after thisone. Not the hits or notifications that keep popping up now and then for something that we wrote a long time back ;)
writing's so satisfying..
and i think ppl here are so busy..i dont think they get enuf time to write loooong posts..leave alone read em
Don't tell me that-
... a mother may raise her child with all her love and then when it grows up she doesn't expect it back. She may nurture it with her all spending half her life doing it and when the child grows up she thinks, 'Oh well! I have done my job. this has been the happiest period of my life, watching my child grow and it doesn't matter if he/she doesn't love me back or indeed just forget about me.' No sir. It might break her heart and still it might not lessen her love for her child but it'll definitely hurt her. HURT. We are humans after all. Not saints.
.... An artist may spend all his life painting in isolation, devoting his entire life for his love but if a traveler comes by and say,'Wow! Can't believe man that you spent all your life doing this and still you can't paint worth crap!' and all he would feel is indifference for the man's remark and not even a bit of doubt. He might not at first but if ten men come for ten days and all say the same thing, it doesn't matter how much you love it, how much you are devoted to it, you will start to question it. DOUBT. 'Cause however much we like to pretend we are social animals and other people's opinion will always affect us. It might not shake our belief or make us change our ways but however for a moment, it'll make us doubt. We are afterall humans.
.... However much you love a woman but she doesn't reciprocate your feelings, even if just for a moment of your life, your are going to feel frustrated about it. FRUSTRATION. Because in the end we are just humans not some movie hero for whom, 'Loving is enough'!
HURT, DOUBT, FRUSTRATION. We are allowed to feel them, even if we are Writers. Especially if we are all writers. Because some of the greatest works of writings have come out of these feelings not 'inner peace', pardon me saying.
And if still you feel I am missing something then how about an experiment?!
Lets abolish the polling system! Lets just keep on posting and not know how many people thought what you wrote was good or not. But isn't the whole point of the polling system is to provide the writers the INCENTIVE, the encouragement to write more? Then saying that we should write for ourselves and not for hits or notifications kinda defeats the purpose?! ;-)
P.s.:- By your logic then as my above comment already passed hundred words mark, nobody's going to read it. Wonder why did I post it then?! :D
by writing better n better each day..maybe dey r jealous of u..but pls dont quit..
but look at me..i said i ll quit hundreds of times..
but am still here:)
It is not about whether people are giving me negative feedback( as they are not. In all my posts here not a single comment says,'Mate, you write crap. you should quit writing.' Nope. Quite the opposite really. In fact this is part of the problem. We have almost no constructive critism here. Nothing that points out our mistakes and gives suggestions. And believe me,'Awesome!', 'You write so well' doesn't help. at. all.)
No its just that this is not what I had come here expecting. Its like when you suddenly fall in love and after some time you realise that it was just a crush, a passing phase and not the thing you were searching for. That the time you spent here was awesome but now its time to move on and continue the search....
even we don't believe in judging a piece of literature, but polling and comments are for improvements, and every artist needs to improve, no matter how good is he/she... and we have diary system to express thoughts freely, the public diary system is read only so that the author can best be himself or herself and don't have to add stuffs that he don't believe in to get good polls.