Favourite Writing Spots: Amidst A Gushing Stream
Our Himalayan Writing Fellow Percy Bharucha writes on writing in the hills.
It is easier to not write, than it is to.
It is easier to keep your stories to yourself and not share them. Revel in their glory by one’s own self, feed your own ego about how smart and snappy they are. How beautiful the prose sounds to thine own ear. It is easier to be your own audience. It is easier to lock one’s self in his/her own head and enjoy our own brilliance. It is much harder to hammer away at the keys or pick up the pen, than it is to have story outlines stored away in the brain attic.
It is much easier to be a pond than to be a stream.
In many ways writing is like flowing. There is a rhythm and beat to it. There are words that cause ripples. Words like waterfalls made to disturb the steady pace, that add pathos and drama. Words that like trout glisten through the prose in the sunlight of a reader’s eyes. Words that are like broken branches carried away by the stream added only due to the indulgence of a writer. Words like falling leaves added only for effect. Words that are the foam and froth of the gushing tide. And yet there are boulders of doubt around which the stream must carve a path. Boulders made smooth by the sheer force of constant, consistent effort. The stream carves its path out, where there is none much like a story unfolds, it does so because it has no choice in the matter.
A stream flows, like a story simply because it has to.
There is no holding it back. Much as the writer tries not to write, he knows he has to. He is the stream. There is little else to do but flow.
There is a therapeutic feeling in writing near a stream, a certain sense of calm in watching its uninhibited flow. A sense of confidence that permeates the act of writing itself. If the stream can go on, not knowing where it’ll end up so can the writer. So can he write, not knowing how good it will be. The stream offers a momentum, a waltzing march to pen your words to.
The act of flowing without a destination like the stream offered a full measure of courage to me as a writer.
Courage that I hope to instil in more than just my writing.
Courage that I hope will grace the fictional lives I write of.
The author is part of the YourQuote Himalayan Writing Fellowship 1.0. Here’s more about it:
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