Tag: writing

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The right app(roach) for writing

Do you find it hard to actually get down to writing? Some of these apps and websites may be of help

 

There’s help at hand for everything—from creative ideas to a nudge, even the company of others. Illustration: Raajan/Mint

Got the feeling that you too could write a book if you had the time? If you harbour a secret wish to become a writer, we have a solution for you—technology aids which can help you overcome writer’s block, keep you motivated or help you spur your imagination.

I procrastinate/I am not motivated enough

Fear is a primal emotion. It makes you react in unexpected, emotional ways. Destroy the block in your mind which is not letting you write with Write or Die, a Web app which pushes you to write more, with gentle and harsh penalties if you don’t start typing. “The app encourages writing by punishing the tendency to avoid writing,” says the website. Write or Die gives you an online textbox to write in and comes with an auto-save feature. You can use the app in three modes—Gentle Mode, where a box pops up if you stop writing for a certain amount of time; Normal Mode, which plays an unpleasant sound if you don’t continue to write; and the desperate Kamikaze Mode, which will delete what you have already written if you don’t write more.

If you don’t want negative reinforcement, try out Written? Kitten! instead, which rewards you for getting work done. The app rewards you with a cutesy kitten photograph for every 100 (or 200 or 500 or 1,000) words that you write. The kitten photographs are selected randomly from Flickr’s “most interesting” photos matching the tags “kitten” and “cute”. You get the picture? If you haven’t, then write some more.

Write or Die is available online for Mac, PC and Linux ($10, or around Rs.525) and on iTunes for iPad ($9.99).

Written? Kitten! is available online for free.

I am overwhelmed by ideas

Whether you’re writing or filing a report for work or college, your text needs to be linear and logical, but that’s not how your brain functions. Your brain tends to send spurts of ideas, connections, links and visuals all together on the topic you have been thinking about. And collating all of it into an ordered linear progression can be an uphill task.

According to The Mind Map Book created by Tony and Barry Buzan (2010), the solution is to create a mind map of the idea. A mind map starts with a basic idea and helps you radiate outwards and develop it by putting in associated ideas, words, concepts and links, closely resembling the brain’s neuronal structure with its infinite connections and its multilateral thinking, write the Buzans in their book.

Mind-mapping is easier now with smartphones. SimpleMind offers a basic freeflowing mind-map layout with options to add in colours and icons to bubbles which you connect in your flow chart. If you want something more comprehensive, opt for iThoughtsHD, which gives you the option of attacking all the niggles in your writing not only with a free-flowing mind map but also with other corporate tools like Six Thinking Hats and SWOT analysis. The app is even used by pastors to plan sermons, developer Craig Scott tells us in an email.

SimpleMind is available on Google Play and iTunes (free).

iThoughts is available on iTunes for iPhone ($7.99) and iThoughtsHD for iPad ($9.99).

I can’t think of a good idea

Sometimes a spark is all you need to ignite your creative juices. Get phrases and words which will get you on a thinking binge for creative work by installing Fiction Idea Generator. FIG, as it is called, creates random plots with elements like tense (past, present, future), narrator type (first, second, third), period, situation, protagonist, tritagonist and their relationship.

If you don’t like a structured plot suggestion and would rather go for just a few random prompts, opt for Writing Prompts, an app by the popular writing help website Writing.com. You can opt for suggestions through sketches, current news headlines and articles or, simply, a group of jumbled words. All you have to do is shake your phone and something new will crop up on your screen.

Fiction Idea Generator is available on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and Samsung Apps (free).

Writing Prompts is available on iTunes, Google Play, Kindle Fire ($1.99).

I can’t find the time

It’s all about managing it right. The Pomodoro Technique helps people manage their 24 hours better by breaking them down into 25-minute periods of work called “pomodoros” (which means tomatoes in Italian), interspersed with 5-minute breaks. Created by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980s, the technique sounds the alarm for you to take a break and get back to work.

“I use the Pomodoro Technique myself,” says Baris Sarer, owner of the newly launched app on iTunes,It’s Pomodoro Time!, “especially when writing. It helps focus without exhausting and overworking your brain.” He loves the technique enough to launch an app that uses all its features well. With It’s Pomodoro Time! you can set daily targets of how much you want to write, set your pomodoros and use alarms to give yourself the much deserving break (and more importantly, to send you back to your desk).

It’s Pomodoro Time! is available on iTunes ($0.99).

I need human stimulus to work

To write, you have to eschew the social world. But if you want sympathy, empathy or company, become a part of the National Novel Writing Month . NaNoWriMo is a monthly online writing forum which begins every year in November. The goal is to write 50,000 words in November, with forums and groups of participants to help you all the way. The app NaNo Saga lets you compare your progress with your buddies’ and shows your novel details and current word count as well as the number of days left. Trust us, with more than 200,000 participants from across the world writing with you (last year, a whopping 256,618 participants wrote together), you will never feel lonely again.

NaNo Saga is available on iTunes ($0.99)

To read the complete article, head on to the HT Mint website. 

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Vague stats of my new novel

Vague stats of my new novel, originally uploaded by Shwetawrites.

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My hidden masochist

I have a wee bit of masochism when it comes to writing. Writing doesn’t come naturally (like talking does) to me. It needs to be done in a secluded environment and I mostly hate not being around people. It makes me think, makes me sweat, it makes me run around without any results. It pays badly. Still, I love to do it. I love to write for the simple fact that it’s mostly one of the hardest thing for me to do. It’s the most challenging, the most painful thing I will ever do.

I cannot explain to you dear readers, the excitement and the fears that a blank word document page fills in me. Every time I see a blank page, my heartbeat starts drumming into a frenzy. Will I be able to fill it today? With something that might make sense to someone else? Or will I just be staring at the empty white space?

Why I am struck with these questions is because I have begun on my new book, a fantasy book I was too scared to write two years ago (which is why I wrote Mystery of the Iyer Bungalow first). Now I am finally penning this book down. The story that’s coming alive is not really mine. It’s hers. My heroine’s out and out. What will happen now? I ask myself as I read and re-read things I have already written. I don’t know. I don’t know so many things about her and the book I am writing. I am not in control, it’s painful, but still I prod on. Something impels me to write and continue to write, even though my back aches, my head aches and my emotions are in rollercoaster all the time.

In this writing, I am a medium who is telling a story, almost a shaman who connects you to the ghost. Is the heroine of this book in my head or is she from an alternate world from where, for some reason, she wants to tell her story? Am I completely making her up? Am I lying to you when I tell you that she speaks to me? She’s a person, from an alternate universe. I am a curious bystander. I dread to know what will happen to her in this. She lives in a much more scarier world than I do. She’s more exciting than I can ever be. I am comfortably sitting in my room, typing away to glory. She on the other hand, thrives on action, on the hunt. I am secretly in love with her (don’t tell her that please).

She’s an itch in my head which refuses to go away. Writing about her is not only painful, it’s also some kind of treatment. It’s an obsession. I talk about her with my family with friends. I tell them how she’s feeling today. I don’t know why I am writing about her. Why her? Why her world? Why did I choose all this to begin with? I wonder what a psychiatrist will call my obsession about writing, even though it pains me. I bet modern psychologists have a name for every obsession human beings feel. The only ones normal according to them are the ones who don’t live, don’t have a crazy passion, haven’t fallen in love and haven’t squandered money away. Also, haven’t lived to regret their choices in life. What a sorry state to be in.

So yes dear readers, I can tell you that I am a masochist. My only fear right now is that the world will end (isn’t it supposed to in Dec 2012?) and I wouldn’t have finished this story about her.

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I wanted to blog about an author, but I don’t remember his name

My memory. It was stolen. Just a few seconds ago. Just when I opened a new window to write this blog. I wanted to tell you about this author, a popular guy, a Nobel prize winner, whose work I have never read. His few written words inspired me, ignited me, made me smile, helped me move. This was all yesterday. I don’t remember his name now. My memory just went out, like lights going off in Indian summer heat.

These are a few residual sparks that I gather, urgently, before those also plunge into the no-memory black hole. I wanted to tell you all about it.

  • When I write, I should write for one, not for all. For you.
  • When I write, I should not go back to edit, because that’s just laziness.
  • When I write, I should not depend on my logic but delve into my heart and my unconsicous. I should ponder on things that float there.
  • When I write, I should try to tell the story as honestly as I can.
  • When I write, I should not stop to worry.
  • When I write, I should not remember all this.

 

Just write.

This is all that’s left of him in my heart. I don’t know his name now. I don’t even know what he actually said. All I remember is that he said something, something that hung onto my body like passive smoking. Something that I don’t want to remove with a shower.

I miss my memory about him. All the missing facts and links I could have told you about. But does any of that matter? Does my memory matter when I die? Does it float around in the universe, dropping by various other humans, telling them about this author? Do you hear his name?

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Muses are like opportunities

Muses are like opportunities. They come knocking on your door at unexpected times. Sometimes you have been waiting impatiently, looking at your cellphone screen’s right hand side corner for that precise moment to strike, tapping your fingers on the side board. At times like those, you open the door without waiting or wondering who it might be in the middle of the night.

Sometimes you go out looking for muses, your hair spread wide, like a cuckoo’s nest (BTW, has anyone wondered why cuckoos keep their nests so haphazard? Maybe it’s avant garde style yet to be recognised as such). You ask stray cats, sleepy dogs and curious ravens if they have seen any muses (or opportunities can also do, please). They all shrug, look back at you like you have lost a bolt or two.

Then there are times when muses fall into your email box. There they lie, along with emails from the banks you don’t have accounts with, enthusiastic group emails of astronomy you don’t remember subscribing to and emails from sellers who are convinced you cannot do without such-and-such baby oil or book. But even when the said muses have been served to you in a platter (or in this case, your inbox), there are chances you might miss them.

You might just delete that email without opening, like you have done to other emails from this website you had subscribed to long back ago, but don’t remember why. You might open it, with cynical curiosity, scanning the email because you don’t want to go back to that synopsis you have to prepare. Even if you open it, you might fail to click the link of a short translated story of a Spanish author whose name you cannot pronounce. After all, writers and writings are out there on the internet paisa a pandrah. Then you might open the link but forget to read it as it lies waiting amongst the other tabs opened for later reads.

So that’s why if you do end up reading that story at all and realise with surprise that it was at all this time a muse, waiting to spring up and surprise you, to fire your rockers into writing,  like a virus hidden in an attachment, it’s nothing short of a miracle. The muse is an unexpected best friend that landed at your doorstep, just when you were standing in the balcony, wondering what it will feel like to jump.

All this while, all you had to do is click one email link. A simple click which would have saved you from those empty days when you look in the space and no thought welcomes you. Just a simple click. Was it meant to be? Is this how destiny works? Or is it just a web, an intricate spider web of unexpected choices you constantly make every moment of your existence? Is it free will or do you have no choice in the matter? How can you ever be sure of either?

All you can do is bow to it. Smile, thank the skies, or if you believe in chaos, thank chaos. Write a blog, write a poem and scribble down the thoughts that strike you for your novel. After all, you have been granted the gift of a muse today. It doesn’t happen every day.

This post is dedicated to a muse who came unexpectedly and resulted in this blog. Thank you Juan Villoro and Word Without Borders for the unexpected muse called Holding Pattern.

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Time to pitch is now!

 

Finally the day has come. And what can be better than the start of the new year to do something that you have cringed from all of last year? I am going to close Mystery of the Iyer Bungalow (yes, dear readers, it’s still not published. The reason is that it’s still being edited and has not been even shown to a publisher yet). I have begun the process of pitching its manuscript to publishers starting January. I was afraid all of end of last months of 2011. I cringed, stalled, questioned, panicked, and analysed. Basically did everything in the WHAT IFS category and didn’t pitch the book.

Now I am geared myself for rejections, criticisms, rotten tomatoes and jeers. Basically anything and everything that anyone who wants to throw can throw at me.

Maybe it’s the new year. But I am determined. I am determined that I will follow my dream and write and write some more.

 

MY NEW YEAR NO-RESOLUTIONS

Here are things I am NOT going to do this new year:

  • I will not be afraid of reactions to my writing.
  • I will not think on writing and not write.
  • I will not compare.
  • I will not worry about what my life would have been with different choices
  • I will not be afraid out trying new things.
  • I will not worry about how bad I write
  • I will not equate success with the money I could have been earning.
  • I will not feel lonely and boring.
  • I will not feel envious of books I enjoy reading.
  • I will not stick to my comfort zone.

With so many things I had been doing, it’s a wonder I still write. Stubborn I think 🙂

 

A sentimental note for Mystery of the Iyer bungalow: As I put in the finishing touches to the my first manuscript of the Mystery of the Iyer Bungalow, I feel a sense of anti-climax. While editing the book, I realised that it could have become so many other books with the same characters, with the same settings.  I would like to change it a bit, tweak it from here, add things to that side, but I cannot. Not anymore. I know it’s not perfect still, I don’t think it ever will become perfect. Like a mother, I feel I am over-fretting on my child rather than setting it free. So many emotions. When did I become so attached to just words? I hope someone else becomes attached to this imperfect book, reads it and enjoys it. That’s after all, the most important thing.

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Of writing, language and search for muses

I have just finished the fourth story of The Skull Rosary, a graphic novel which if all goes well, would be out in mid 2013 in the market. This particular story was about a blind demon , but ironically it was I who was blind to him. I couldn’t see what he wanted to tell me, what he wanted me to discover, who he really was. For days I wandered alone in deserts (that’s what I name my panicked mind). Nothing came out on the paper. This was a particularly difficult one to exorcise out of me. I hope I have done you some justice, my blind demon. I know I haven’t completely written down what you could have become and what you are, but this was all I could do. I am after all a mortal and have my limits.

Now I have moved on to the fifth and final story of the graphic novel. This is about a mad woman. I think I know her but I don’t know how to write of her. How does madness speak in a logical human language? So I search for answers in various muses I know will tell me which path to start. I read the lines that Neil Gaiman scribed in The Sandman series. I scrounge the delicate, heart wrenching poetry of Kahlil Gibran who wrote The Madman which I downloaded from Gutenberg. And I reread my two favourites which talk about this particular madness: Shakespeare’s Macbeth and The Eumenides by Aeschylus. Shakespeare was inspired by Aeschylus’s lines to create his crazy three weird witches. I hope I can recreate the mad witches in some form.

I knew I wanted to read these to remember what I would have liked to write for the final story. Did the muse in me speak or did she show the way? I don’t know.

Some days writing comes to me like my neighbour’s Labrador. It laps it’s salivating tongue and wags its furry tail, desperate to be touched and loved and hugged. That day I write straight for an hour or many hours, without a break. That day I continue to write in my head, even when I am walking, drinking a coffee with my husband or watching the sky. Those are the happy days. The days when the sun shines brightly on me and my smile is for all to see.

Most of the days though, writing is a demon I need to exorcise from my mind and heart. It haunts spaces in my head I didn’t know existed. But I cannot see it or touch it, at least through logic and human language. It shows itself to me in smoky silhouettes, in corners just out of my eye’s view. It plays hide and seek with me but not to make me smile. I don’t know why it plays and why I constantly search for it. I keep looking and looking and looking and never really see it. At the end what I write, is a part of the demon that in me resides.

Not the whole, never the whole.

For the whole is but a myth, much like a rainbow’s end. You can stare at the ocean for millions of years, but at the end, you will but see just the part your eyes can.

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Bye, Bye my 1st baby!

It’s a rather pretty day today, have you noticed? I did, after a long, long time!

If any of you avid readers of my blog wondered what I have been up for almost a month of my absence from the online world, it’s editing. Two of my biggest projects which I had set out to do in the last eight months, have finally come to an end. I suddenly feel kind of empty. Nice empty Smile

The first mammoth one was the Digital Natives project. I edited two books for the NGO Centre for Internet and Society which were a culmination of three years of research. The books are out now in the world and fending for themselves now. I send them hugs. You can view the research book for free online or order one for yourself. Hear more about them on the dedicated page.

My second project was much tougher. I had decided to write a complete book while editing the Digital Natives books. Madness, now that I look back at it, but somehow the decision helped me bring out my first book and overcome my lack of confidence. It worked! Yes dear readers and the online universe, the first draft of my book is over!

It’s tentatively called Mystery of the Iyer Bungalow and is a children detective fiction. I thought writing it would be the biggest challenge for me, it wasn’t. It was editing that proved to be the main hurdle. It took much longer in time and was an emotional, depressing experience. Questions I didn’t have answer to hit me. Does the book work? asked the Editor in me. The Writer cringed and said she didn’t know. I had to take decisions of chopping down characters I had created with a lot of love and enjoyment. They didn’t fit into the narrative Sad smile

Finally, the first level of editing is finished. I feel a strange calm sadness. I have sent the book out (it’s going for the first time!) to some of my industry friends to read and for feedback. My heart beats fast and wonders how it will feel about it. I still don’t know if anyone would like to read this book. I don’t know how she will be treated (yes my book has feelings!) and if she will ever be published. I have lost every sense of objectivity for her. I am her mother and she’s my baby. I can’t be objective about her. As an decently good Editor, it’s a scary experience! And since it’s just a first draft and I don’t even have a publisher, I bet this is just a start to a long, long journey of my book. I wish Mystery of the Iyer Bungalow best of luck and hope that someday, a kid would read you and it would make her smile, just as it did me.

And that is the challenge that creative writing poses for me. It makes me experience the best and the worse of my talent and creative self. The highest and the lowest, both come one and again, in cycles. I had always wondered why suddenly one day, I decided to quit my journalism career and walk the thorny and painful path of fiction and fantasy writing. Now I know.

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Rituals of death and dead cultures

Being pissed off at something makes me write. I am pissed off at many things right now. Mostly, I can direct all my anger, frustration and irritation at one word: RITUALS.

Rituals are like flies in India. They are everywhere, they survive, they hop around your food, your mouth, your eyes, sitting, peeing, pooping on your face. They are mostly irritating and sometimes make you feel like you might want to swat your own face to get rid of them. But you can’t really. You might swat, stand up, shrug, dance, frit, fly, run, walk all you want, the flies will come back and sit on you everywhere to poop and pee.

If you have lived in India long enough (and I have since I was born) chances are you have met Mr Ritual. Indians love him (and I am using gender-specific pronoun here). That is why, everytime there is a festival, someone is born (is it a boy! oh, no it’s a girl), someone reaches a certain age (puberty, let’s celebrate blood), someone gets married, someone gets kids, someone celebrates, someone conducts a pooja (5gm cloves, 3 pieces of beetle nuts and two tilaks please), on vrats, on days you eat, on days you fast, on special days, or on when you die. There’s a ritual for everything. There are rules you have to follow to appease gods, ancestors, deities, families, husband’s families, and innumerable other people (and some gods) who you don’t really want to even know.

Since these rituals have been made by prissy, patriarchally-oriented granddaddies of our culture (Manu, some of the rishis and oodles of other brahmins, dads and granddads after them) and are delicately conserved by the female part of the family, they are usually regressive in nature, especially for the women of the family. They want to keep women of the family in purdah, busy in either making food or cleaning, or making food, or bathing themselves, or did I mention making food? These rituals also demand that the daughters-in-law and wives in a household of traditional loving Indian family, demand money/gifts/stuff from their own families of before marriage. And these rituals demand from the men of the family to do vague things like mantra, poojas—actions which are robotic and laid down in the holy books – through which they can appease gods, ancestors and family members and make their stand in society.

In other words, all these little rituals keep everyone busy and safely away from questioning. Safely away to ask why is everyone so busy in rituals? Why are these fly-like rituals everywhere, surrounding us in a flurry of things-to-do lists? Why don’t people in India look behind these rituals and see what they are trying to tell their gods through them? Why does no one see the suffering, the stuffiness, the prissiness of it all?

So I reached a conclusion. And I learnt it from flies. Flies who are wiser than us, and everywhere. They don’t change their lifestyle. You can swat them all you want, hunt them down with spears, guns, bombs or even hatchets. There will be simply more in number than you can attack. India’s too hot (and too stuck up) a country to not have flies and rituals.

The question is, have flies become so much a part of you that you would not even notice their existence? Have you become immune to the fact that they are nothing but flies?

I always thought that emotions cannot be told in mere prose. Here’s a poem I wrote for the occasion.

 

 

Continue reading “Rituals of death and dead cultures”

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The beta of becoming

Blame it on a sleepy mood in the morning. Or the fact that I am doing too many tech stories for Mint (here, here and even here). Or a beautifully grey-blue morning in Bangalore. Or just the bellboys, who I love putting blame on anyways. Today morning, I woke up convinced that I am a program in its beta stage. Do I hear you laugh? Let me convince you.

TNAlphabet-Letter-B-shadowI am continuously changing, evolving, becoming something else.  Everything about me is in a flux–physical, mental, emotional, intellectual and all the other lulls. My source code is constantly being tampered with. By me, the things I read everything, by a man on the streets I don’t even know, by the potent combination of conversations and caffeine, by media, the movies I see, the videos I flick through on youtube, even innocent tweets. All of these are constantly tweaking my self, my insides, fusing, fastening, gripping, loosening, doing the salsa with my minds.

It’s interesting times, yes. It’s also revolutionary times inside me. I am becoming something else. I don’t even know what yet. What will I eventually turn into? If I look one step ahead, I am scared. There’s nothing but darkness there. A big, black hole of missing code, yet to be written.

Sometimes I am a developer of this conundrum of minds, senses, thoughts, ideas. Sometimes, I am an observer, one of them, helplessly watching from the sidelines as someone tampers, hacks into the deepest core of me, damaging, changing me forever. Sometimes I feel like binary numbers which have stopped making logical sense. Sometimes I feel like god, comfortable and enjoying the organic growth, celebrating the way the beta is shaping up. The way me is becoming, constantly changing, adjusting, tweaking to the demands of users, observers, critics, editors, friends, writers, developers, and opinionators.

I am an immortal beta who will never really become.