Writing & Identity

This essay is a form self reflection, a writing which explores and tables my personal experience which connects my ability to write, when a reader feels satisfied to offer positive comments for improvising. It is a writer's subjective experience in writing. An interaction with another or other’s way of belief or practices in life is not the purpose of this essay. This self reflective writing would be of use in performance studies. The approaches results in self observation and reflexive analysis in terms of field work and writing. Such writing adopts personal thoughts, feelings, stories and observations as a way of having understood social context. Then the reader is able to involve in the vision and emotion of the writer. Writing also has the ability to establish an identity which anyone longs for from appreciations.

The interest and passion to write started from the exposure to read books in the childhood days. Till the teens, the reading habits passed through young mind stimulating books on school day’s adventures by Enid Blyton, a prolific author of children’s books who wrote an estimated 800 books, passing on to next progressing state of reading Agatha Christie, moving on to James Hadley Chase, Arthur Conan Doyle, and J.K. Rowling . All these authors have inspired by their writing so much to an extent I self evaluated my inspirations to understand the value of writing and its abilities to establish an identity for a person.

I started to think before starting to write by comparing myself with those exemplary writers and feel “I don’t have a lot of experience with this, how can I make my writing worthwhile if I use personal stories? Then Roald Dhal’s life and how his life through growing pains turned him to be a reputed writer of famous books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, among other famous works, pumped in enthusiasm to think about writing in simple ways. Roald Dhal had miserable times at school and once said that the main highlight of his day was his trip to the sweetshop on the way home. He used to stop and gaze into the window, mesmerized by the giant glass jars of sweets. The early seeds of ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ were clearly being sown as experiences of day to day life to become all time best sellers of his writing.

The same way reading story books when I was young, had helped me to think and shape a way of life which started prompting me to write my experiences in life. It has volumes of stories to narrate and persuade the inspirations in me to write. Many writers draw upon their childhood inspiration to write. I have read many articles which stimulated to start writing. Anything I have experienced, I found that if I narrated in an interesting way that could make others also get an experience or it would also be a stimulant to the brain to experience on their own inspiring aspects of life.

Recalling the stories narrated by grandparents when I was young, made me understand we can activate our brains better if we have the habit of listening to stories. We think about anything in life which happened, whether it is the day in the office, people whom we meet, and our family at home or even simple facts of buying groceries which could turn out, are a narrative. Whenever we hear a story, our thoughts always have tendency to co-relate to our own life or personal experiences we have encountered in life.

The simple story is more successful than the complicated one when we start writing. It is not necessary to feel complex when we start to write by looking reputed writers. It would be more interesting if the story is simple enough to provoke the reader to find it interesting to be engrossed. The writing is a communication which should motivate the readers mind. Sometimes some of the most difficult things we face in life, when it gets narrated in a story form can connect our thought through writing to the heart of others.

A friend of mine who did a Master’s thesis once told me story narrating in teaching science was found to stimulate creative approaches in science and that approach applied on students was extremely effective. While chatting with a person recently on a concept which I was working on, he told me “tell me good story and it will pay good attention to what you are trying to convey”. This made me understand that by putting the concept into the context of a situation, I can make a person easily grasp and make him remember about it even later. First I started enjoying, by scribbling and later on writing putting it together.

So writing is turning out to be more of joy and gives me happiness when others are inspired by reading it. This sense of feeling to write my personal experiences is today my greatest asset, though not as professional writer or author of books. I am strong believer in an old adage “write what you know” and, also believe in using simple language as well as a low complexity based my current abilities to write. It should be able to relate the readers mind to my experience, situations and happenings with which I have written this essay. Somehow early childhood memories remain vivid and turn out to become useful when I sit down to jot, scribble, and write. It is not always easy to relate our own experience, because some may be joyful, celebratory, delicate or painful. As I started writing I found each emotion has a co-relation to a reader in the life, so started writing anything which I felt would be an experience to others too.

May be when I gain experience to write over the years, my maturity would be seen in the content and writing styles which would become a crucial part of the writing process. The longing to recreate my experiences in writing would become mature to portray emotions or character or event or scene better. In the work place where we spend the time more meeting diversity of characters, thoughts can pick up and store lot of encounters, which can help us as writers. I try jotting down all the different jobs I have done, including those few weeks during school summer holidays or holidays I get while I am in work today or times when I had no job. Those jottings are pretty long and when I pick them up, it inspires me to write stories.

As I write it helps me visualize environment in which various characters passed through giving me various types of exposures to experience and remember. I use memories of places as a basis of location to write, thought it not far flung or exotic. To me all locations are interesting to write because the incidences are more unusual or exciting. For reward or to earn, writing is fun and fulfilling more than commercial aspects of it. I found while writing this essay, that writing status or subject is an ocean, where one be writing articles for magazines or news papers, or blog content writer, or advertisement copy writer or doing writing assignments for various disciplines for others, writing is constant learning process. By writing this essay, it has helped me in exposing to various disciplines in writing inspiring me to be passionately involved in the process of writing to keep learning forever to feel content. I feel it is best to keep gathering always in the life’s journey filled with experiences, as a memento to use it to useful writing tomorrow to inspire many a readers to write.