As a tenderfoot writer, I have been advised by many in the past on how to write. The best one that I have learnt is to ignore them and start writing. That little piece of realization helped me glide through my first book which is set to see the light of the day soon. I was also told the hardest part of the exercise was putting one word after another but in another brilliant stroke of enlightenment I found a book writes itself. You are just the hand that puts everything on paper.
As a youngster I often dreamt and yearned to write a book but never followed the passion with the perseverance it called for. I had any number of subjects to choose from. The only hitch was how to lend substantivity and depth to the pledge that I had taken with a commitment that I never failed to flaunt at my friends. They never took me seriously and thought I was speaking through my hat which was justified given my habitual laidback attitude. So it was nothing short of a battle won when I steeled myself to write one although I was overtaken with a series of self-doubts. To make matters worse I chose to write the biography of a man considered a legend in his lifetime.
I was warned by naysayers and cynics. If they felt I was incompetent to handle a personality as titanic as the late Mohammed Rafi given his four-decade career, they weren't off mark. But in the end, like all well meaning friends they kept egging me. I soon found out that writing a book is at once tough and easy. Tough because you need to be assiduous in putting together what are accepted as genuine facts and minute details with no margin for error. Easy because you can visualize it in black and white once they are at your disposal.
There are many biographies on Rafi, all eminently forgettable. That was a rallying point. It propelled me to write faster and piece together a book in three months -- something my friends well conversant with my procrastination were hugely surprised with. More than them I surprised myself. Finding a good publisher to me was more of a fluke than judgment. Talk of dame luck! Since the last month, I am trying to grapple with the idea of having turned an author. So are my friends.
The royalty cheque paid to me by the publisher was more than a lottery to my gloating mind. It spurred my pen with a compelling sense of urgency. The making of the book went through its usual list of travails but finally it was a story of all-is-well-that-ends-well.
More than the sense of achievement what it has done to my limited writing abilities is to plan more books. Why not ride on your luck when kismet is more than willing to take you the distance? So there I am planning two more projects one of which is ready to take off in a few days from now. I hope the same sense of urgency will manifest when I pen down those.
In the early stages of my career, some of my colleagues, better writers than me, never made secret of their ambition to write a book. It is just that my frittering has turned out to be better than theirs. To all those who want to write a book, I have an unsolicited piece of advice.
People are afraid to write books because they fear people will read them and find them worthless. Write as if nobody is going to read and throw your work into the public dustbin. Somebody may find it and consider it a treasure.
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