The Way I Write

Following on the resolve to blog regularly, I next have to resolve on the style that I will use in the writing of my blogs (as also my general writing style) . This is an important aspect for me as content alone cannot suffice: I have promised myself to learn to use language; as I feel language is as much a process as it is a medium. What I write is important but the way I write it is not much less so: a good deal of time is wasted in writing and reading interesting stuff in an unilluminating manner.

In the course of my writing career, I am bound to explore diverse vistas and I know I oughtn't to prescribe to a uniform style for all occassions. This blog, and the one before it, being in the main reminders and pointers to myself, I have chosen to write in a didactic style, heavy, stilted and reeking of a Milton or a Carlyle ever so often. This style is odious to most but useful in situations where the ordered cadence of a sequence of sentences provides inspiration to the ordering of thoughts in the mind. Where I write about an incident or an amusing anecdote, I will assume a more bantering note designed to evoke participation in the merriment from the reader. Each occassion has as its prime concern a particular emotion or state of mind and my writing should reflect it in the highest degree possible; but in this blog I intend to provide general pointers to myself on the way I will carry my subject through.

I have to write spontaneously and extemporaneously often, as long thought may modify the pregnant impression an incident leaves in my mind - pregnant, for the impression achieves fruition only in expression. The style has to reflect the nature of the impression and convey much of my mood when I felt it. Words, malleable and suggestive in their import, and providing insight by means of their connection to certain phrases and occassions, will afford the reader burrowing into the warren of sentences I write, a certain pleasure, both on account of the industry and achievement of the reader and the use of language to suggest beyond the mere surface of things. Every now and then, even a slip is advisable, and, in hindsight, I will declare my errors to be volitional, and pass on as the brook that babbles on leaving stones unturned on its way to the ocean.

Flowery language has been my besetting sin and I will work on scrupulously avoiding the style that I have used in these last two blog, viz., embellishing little content with much adornment. I will paint on the canvas the virgin impression as I felt it and let the reader make of it what he will, myself paring my fingernails in the background and asserting every now and then an unvoiced assent or dissent at an independent interpretation. I will foist on the reader the burden of drawing conclusions as often as I can, and, even in the conclusions I seem to draw myself, often hide another possibilty. I will use the parchment I write on as a palimpsest, overlaying one idea over another and obscuring in the brightness of a conclusion a hidden and more luminous flame. I will portray but never caricature; illuminate but never delineate; assert but never to justify; and learn more than I venture to illustrate.

In all, I will learn to write so I may write to learn more than I know and achieve a synthesis in my writing of the thoughts, the perceptions and the acts that define my relation to the external world.