Just write

“I used to write about almost anything that came to my mind,” I said to an old friend. He doesn’t blog, but we go way back. There are days when I use him as a sound board; bounce thoughts, ideas, and even my frustrations off him. And vice versa, of course.

And he said. 'So, just write.'

And I told this to him because after a decade of blogging about almost anything that came to my mind, I suddenly found myself at cross-roads. I felt I didn’t have anything to write about. General stuff. Check. Random stuff. Check. Silly stuff. Check. Hell, even fiction. Check. Now I’m sure the human mind is a bottomless pit. You can keep forking stuff out of it an entire lifetime and you won’t even be done a quarter of it, let alone completely. So then why the mental block?

A television channel reruns shows because of the short memory that the viewers have. They like to cash in on that. Refresh their memories. Make them go down memory lane and say ‘awww, they’re showing my favorite old show again. How nice.’

But a blog? Most bloggers blog for themselves, right? There are exceptions too, I know – I was one of them. I started writing fiction because I got tired writing for myself. I turned the ‘weblog’ (diary) into a ‘web-book’, filled it with stories everyone else could read and comment on. So then, does it really make sense to ‘rerun’ your own thoughts for yourself? I mean all I have to do is just dig the archives and read my own stuff. Right? Even visitors to my blog would do that.

‘Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong,’ my friend countered. And he had a point. ‘You know you’ve written random stuff, and you go back to the archives and read it. But there are visitors who don’t know you’ve written random stuff. So why’ll they go there? You’ve been writing fiction for a long time now. So everybody comes to your blog to read precisely that. Stories. And a blog is all about today and now. You write, they read, they move on. The stress being on the word ‘move’.’

Hmmm, makes sense.

I’ve always done things differently, written differently. And it’s not because I want to be different. It’s just how I’m wired. I started writing stuff on the blog because I wanted to vent, I guess. It soon gave way to observations of life. Of happenings around me. And then some. Fiction happened because I could share my stories here without having to worry about word count or deadlines. And then I got hooked on to it. I will surely continue to write fiction, but I guess I’ll also try and go back to being the earlier Phatichar. Just write stuff. Whatever.

I guess finally, I did take my friend’s advice after all. I just came here and ‘wrote’. It doesn’t make sense completely, but at least it got me started.

And I’ve written worse, believe me.

Another era of blogging begins.

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