At some point of time, writers have and will be led to believe that writing is the most miserable job. The reasons are not one but many. One, the writer falls prey to the guilty pleasure of watching too many movies that have less or zero IQ attached to them. Given the current predicament of movies and their respective never-ending sequels where the viewers are forced, against their god given will, to watch the rest of the franchise in 3D, it should be of no surprise that quality of the said medium has taken a backseat. Two, the writer has been exposed to bad writing. While bad movies can distance you from the realm of intelligence for a temporary period of time, exposure to bad writing can scar your intellectual capacity for the rest of life. There is, of course, a third reason why writers loathe themselves; The Writer’s Block.
It becomes my rightful duty to let you know this particular piece of writing was devised as a mechanism to escape the writer’s block. I call it a ‘piece of writing’ because I am not sure if this is an article or a post. Laziness has stopped me from researching. With vindictive pleasure, I sincerely hope the same happens to my counterparts.
When Twitter took over the microblogging platform, all ideas and updates were made to look attractive within a meager amount of 140 characters. Considerable changes have happened on this particular social media platform but the founders have taken the ‘micro’ in microblogging far too seriously. For avid readers, elaborateness is oddly satisfying. It is unfair to take that away from them. It makes me wonder if Samuel Taylor Coleridge volunteered to have his first and middle names changed to ‘S.T’ so he could fit into tweets disguised as quotes. Otherwise, it would have been too demotivating for Coleridge’s ghost when it realized that quotes and extracts from the convoluted poem about mariners and albatross were tweeted without crediting the actual source.
The usual defense mechanism for the writer’s block is attempting to make the writing look sophisticated. When vocabulary hinges on esoteric words, the ruse is evident. It is as evident as the fact that I learnt the word ‘esoteric’ two minutes before typing this sentence. There are times when your own writing questions its purpose of being written. When one fails to answer, everything else spirals down. You are reluctantly pulled back into a world where hashtags have replaced sentences. If you have a flippant disregard for incessant hashtags, we need to hang out more often.
Ever since I came across a quote by Fitzgerald on exclamation marks and how he seemed to think their usage was obnoxious, I have been earnestly avoiding them. Paraphrasing Fitzgerald, exclamation marks are like laughing at your own jokes.
Another aspect of the writer’s block is the topic. What you will be writing about is equally important as how you will be writing it. One often finds himself at the dead end of the topic when he realizes there are no further thoughts prodding him to go on. When the failure of words begins to thwart, a closed and raging fist points out the index finger, pressing upon the backspace button so hard that it reminisces the tearing up of what you thought would be the manuscript of a masterpiece.
While I reinstate that writing is sometimes miserable, writing (verb) about writing (noun) is, as a stand-up comedian once said, eternal damnation without relief. You forget where you started and never know when to stop.