Writer’s Gambit

 

It isn’t easy giving expressions to your thoughts. When you do, it gives you immense joy. Reining in your racing mind to give proper shape to your thought flow is as challenging and skilful as a game of chess. Chess is a mind game. So is writing. Both involve deep analysis, sound reasoning and logical sequence.

Analysing and visualizing atmosphere, events, situations, experiences and crafting them together to create a world of words is the essence of writing.

How do writers manage to write voluminous novels? How long do they take to write such big novels? Which is more difficult – writing a novel or a column for a news paper or a magazine? While a novel has no restrictions on number of words, a column confines your writing to a specified length – ranging from 400 to 800 words. Confining your writing to the word count is a serious challenge because you are faced with twin challenges: not missing on important details and not crossing the word limit. Timely submission is again a challenging task. In a magazine or a newspaper, space is premium. This is where your skill as a writer is put to severe test. Economy and choice of words are of essence. Also, you will notice how skilfully the freelancers, columnists delight you with their articles, saying everything they want to say and yet not crossing the writer’s line of control! An enviable lot, surely.

Novelists have no such compulsions. It is in fact the opposite. If it is a 100-metre dash for columnists, it is marathon for novelists. Some authors use long, loopy sentences, sometimes running to almost half page. Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is a classic example where she casts such a mesmerizing web of words that will leave you spellbound. She has the uncanny knack of alluding to and mixing several things in between, the beginning of a sentence and its end sometimes consuming 6-8 lines! A daunting task for an infant reader because by the time he reaches the end of the long paragraph, he will be compelled to re-read the beginning and connect the dots in between to finally get a sense of the author’s mind. Imagine if it is 500-pager, the number of times he ends up reading and re-reading.

From a writer’s viewpoint, playing with words is sheer joy. You have so many options to choose from and select those that will best express your thoughts. A successful writer is able to make the reader visualize and feel the sequences, scenes, characters in exactly the same way as a visual display, like watching a television. Such is the power of writing. Pain and pleasure, joy and grief, hope and despair, writer’s job is to create all these emotions that run through the lifecycle.  

The flow of thoughts and their sequence to hold the reader’s attention are yet another set of challenges for a writer. Readers are of different mindsets. Some enjoy the choice of words. Some look at the content. Capturing the reader’s attention throughout is the acid test for a writer. ‘Give me a piece, I will turn it into a masterpiece’ is a writer’s gambit – a la ‘queen’s gambit’ in Chess. Accepted? Or declined?