The written word

Here’s something I never told you. I decided on the 29th of November that I should write a blog post everyday for a month, or to make it more dramatic, until the end of the year. I really want to take this writing thing seriously and I figured that if I can’t even write a couple of paragraphs everyday then there’s no hope. I may even have already written the best stuff I’ll ever write. If you paid enough attention you’ll notice that I missed posting something yesterday. I thought about it yesterday and I didn’t have anything to write. I thought I could post a few nice pictures I took or a song I wrote or just something I wrote in the past. Although that would defeat the purpose since this exercise is for me to write something new everyday. It would be okay if I posted something old as long I could add something new to go with that. Yesterday, I didn’t.

Apart from improving my writing skill, I realised that writing something everyday does more. It makes thoughts concrete. For example, look back at this post about appreciating and agreeing with people . I was talking to someone today and I made it a point to agree with him whole-heartedly where I felt it necessary and not do the things I usually do because this was always at the back of my head. I had thought these things quite a while before I ever wrote them down in a blog post, but writing them down made them more permanent, more defined and more real . That’s the added value of writing something down. When you think of something for long enough to be able to explain it to someone else you know that it’s not something that makes sense only to you. When you’ve condensed your thought and put it down in words it becomes immutable. Even if you later come to disagree with yourself, you’ll know for sure that you once thought differently. And I think there’s much to be learnt from passing thoughts and opinions that we used to have which we now think are wrong in the future.

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