How I Write, Well, Anything

It was very tempting for me to just write - "With a pen." - and be done with it, but even I'm not entirely comfortable being that lame. That said, I've gotten this question a few times before, so why not write an entire blog post on it.

As anyone who knows me will testify, I am very, very lazy. Physically, at least. Mentally is a different story. At any given time, my mind wrestles with quite a few simultaneous thoughts. Now, a large number of these thoughts are unproductive, depressive, unwanted, sad, *fill in as many synonyms as you can think of*. A few, though, are productive. I see an event, and I think - "Huh, that would make a good short story." - or I'm on a bus (I love being on a bus), and a sudden thought strikes me about how something might make a good story. That's how most of the ideas for my short stories come to me.

Birth of a Duo was a different matter. First, there was a 16-page short story. Aditya Gokhale wasn't even a character, a lot of the elements were different, mental health wasn't a focus. For some reason I wanted to expand on it, so I wrote a 60-something page novella, but I still wasn't satisfied. It grew to 80-something pages, then over a 100 pages, and finally to what it is now. I'm a perfectionist, in that everything I do, I try to make it as good as I can possibly manage. No easy way, no shortcuts. So every writing project takes more time than it should, but the finished product is as good as I can make it. If it can still be better, I don't have the ability to make it so.

The stories that are longer than 50 pages are more challenging to me. My energy comes in great, focused bursts, but only for a limited time. Within that time, say a week, I'll only be writing maniacally and doing almost nothing else, because a nagging voice in my head will always bug me to go back to my laptop and continue writing. When those bursts end, though, I don't even feel like writing a word. That's it. Over. The feeling I have towards writing then is something akin to detestation, or even repugnance. So right now, the one I'm currently writing, I've been writing non-stop for, say, 5 days at a stretch, then taking a break for 2 or 3 days, then writing again, and so on. I'm at the end of a break right now, actually. This entire post is an attempt to delay going back to writing. I'll love it when I do, but right now, I just want to play a video game or watch a television show or something (Just started the second season of Justified; it's a great show). But that voice is back. Even if I don't write much, or well, I have to be in front of my laptop, staring at the word processor.

So yeah, that's basically how I write things. A sudden moment of inspiration, a few short spurts of feverish writing, and a ton of revisions. I'm never at peace unless I'm working on a writing project (and even then I'm not at peace most of the time), but when the projects are too long, I start facing problems.

Have a great day, and see you next time.

Note - This ultimately not-too-important article that the author shouldn't take too much time with, has gone through 3 long revisions.