A Glimpse of “Entrepreneurship Bootcamp” at IMIB.

Why I found writing ‘hard’?

  -Himanshu Ghongade

I guess, it’s almost been two months now, that my colleague Nimisha asked me to write some content for her blog. She used to give me deadlines and I’d always end-up asking for some more time. In fact, later she freed me from writing on any topic and asked me to write on whatever interests me, but I still found it hard to write on something.

 I find it hard for many people to write on anything, even during their exam-time. But what exactly makes writing so difficult? Just jotting-down some random words on a piece of paper is easy. What makes it difficult is trying to convey the essence of your thoughts through those words. When I find writing to be tough, there is this one thought that runs at the back of my mind- “these words are not the best expression of my views.” And then I remove those words because they don’t sound the way, I want them to. At the end, I get back to square-one, staring at the blinking cursor of the Microsoft Word on a blank white-page.

People follow different approaches of writing. For me, writing is a process that has two-stages:

•      Acknowledge, which exactly is the idea that I want to convey out of the million thoughts that always pop-up in my mind, some of them not even having a life-cycle of a few seconds.
•         Communicate those ideas in a clear manner and making it interesting to stimulate the emotions of the readers.

These points may sound obvious. But why do people find it tedious to follow these steps? One reason, I feel responsible for it, is the lack of clarity of thought. If the writer himself is not clear with the idea that he intends to convey, how will he communicate that idea with the folks?

I think many people directly jump to the process of expressing their ideas to others without structuring them and then try hard to present them in an engaging fashion. Instead of that, they should try to clarify their own ideas and put them on paper in whatever way it turns out to be, without bothering about how they look. So, if you spend more time thinking about the presentation of the content, you will find that much less time is left thinking about the actual content. Thus, the idea behind paying more attention towards the ideas that run through your consciousness is that you forget about presentation for the time being, so that more focus can be laid on the ideas that have to be expressed.

Finally, I feel that the toughest part of the entire writing process is to get those initial words on a blank page. Once you surf through the scribbling process, it becomes easy to convert that messy write-up into an expressive and engaging content. It is also vital to accept that the first draft will unlikely be perfect.

At this point of time, I’m reminded of the following words of Sidney Sheldon-

            "A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God."