BUDDY WILL YOU WRITE WITH ME?

BUDDY, WILL YOU WRITE WITH ME?

Writing is a skill and creative writing is not only an individual need but it is also a collective desire: there are writers who want to write together and readers who want to read together. We therefore, have writers’ workshops, collaboration among writers, and readers’ clubs.

However, there is another aspect of this exercise that I explored and gained immensely from, during a particularly stressful period of my writing journey.

While I was pursuing my studies in Durham, I was required to write a lot of content, of different variety. The demand to produce good content with narrow deadlines, was a stressful period for me. I am a person who likes to take her time to be ready to write and to write what I feel like writing, writing to a brief was new and difficult, initially at least.

The practice that came to my rescue at this time was, developing a schedule with a friend who happened to take to writing around that time. Navjot had landed in a situation where she had to write a book, much to her discomfort. We were in constant touch with each other despite the distance and the difference of the time zones that separated us. So when she took up writing, she would sometimes ask a few things about how to write a certain portion of her book in a better manner. I remember that more than the technique, we would discuss the suitability of a particular content for her target readers.

I too began brainstorming with her about the ideas and themes that I would want to or have to write about, in my creative compositions at that time. We would discuss and debate for hours about our pieces, and before we knew it, we would have settled on something very different from where we had initially decided in the beginning. However, this was not the case every time.

I am fortunate to have my sister and my father to review my work. Their inputs have helped me immensely, always. I believe my sister who is an intelligent reader with a refined taste, truly understands my sentiments in my writings. I attribute a lot of my transformation in my writings lately, to her review of my work. Despite this, I felt that my interactions with Navjot aided my writing process to a great extent.

While my sister reviewed the drafts of my work, Navjot helped me to crystallise my thoughts on a theme before I began writing. Navjot, also gave inputs from the situation of a writer who is not a stickler for technique, my peers in the writing course are, and thank God for that. Navjot’s circumstance of being in a challenging position of beginning to write was similar in a way to my situation of writing under duress, this helped us become each other’s buddy in writing. We planned our writing schedules together and ensured that we adhered to them. We pulled each other out of procrastination or the fabled writer’s block (we never had the luxury to experience one, in fact not even now). We kept each other in an environment of writing, in order to elicit the best writing from both of us. We became each other’s writing buddy much like ‘gym buddies’. In fact Eli Roth, an American media personality who is also a writer has said, ‘Creative writing and shooting are muscles that atrophy. But when you work them, you become a self-generator who can branch out.’  

So, we need to workout our creative writing muscles and who better than a buddy to workout with?