Art Of Clear Writing

A few years back while driving I just felt plane bored of FM radio and realized that Podcast could be a form of entertainment. After searching for the known devils like Cyrus Broacha and his profanities, I started looking for better longer serious podcasts, maybe scriptures, spiritual discourses, cricket and politics. Out of nowhere I came across Amit Varma and his podcast "The Seen and the Unseen". As the name suggests, this podcast seemed to try and go beyond the obvious, to try and discover what was not seen.  

Guests galore and of all kinds; known or unknown, celebrities or ordinary folk all had a story to tell. The stories were unique and revealed more about public personalities than the known image. Slowly terms like multitudes, narrative, rabbit holes became familiar. The show notes and book recommendations resulted in widening my reading habits and increasing my engagement with the world of the authors.

However, this blog which I started with enthusiasm lost steam after 2020 and stopped on account of Covid. I have to confess my laziness and need for instant appreciation were additional reasons for the absence of post for three years. In this situation I came across this course called "The art of clear writing" and it's 4 webinars over 4 weekends. After a lot of hesitation, I finally paid up and joined the class. Today at the end of the course I am exercising what Amit calls my writing muscle and writing feedback on this course. In this very piece I will be trying to use the learnings derived from this course.  

After quite a few months of hesitation I decided to enroll for this course with a lot of expectations. I suppose most of the students have heard Amit and his podcast and had some basic expectations from him. The fact that accomplished authors who were guests on his podcast had taken the course further raised my expectations.  

While most of us expect very basic stuff and a kind of spoon feeding, I thought Amit did a fine job by becoming a facilitator who simply set some ground rules. The idea was to help all his students to start or progress from whatever stage of writing skill they possessed.

The concepts of trying to work on clarity and keeping the reader in mind, though self-evident were clearly missing in my writing style. I quickly realized that I wrote to impress and show off my vocabulary. Use of cliched idioms, flowery words, multiple adjectives was as though addressed to an audience and was an exercise in self-gratification. (Was almost tempted to use the idiom “playing to the gallery”). The sound of writing along with the creation of imagery was also something new and awareness of the same will certainly help me as I progress on the path of clear writing. I am still not convinced about 231 rules but will spend time looking for this in what I read. Reading mindfully and ensuring people read till the end what I write will be a way to judge quality of writing.  

Commenting on the 4 exercises, I did feel a bit intimidated and hesitant to participate. I was thinking of writing my obituary in third person, instead I chose to project retirement. Probably a safer option since I want to live for may years. Keeping in mind my Parsi genes and the sheer difficulty in imagining life 4-5 decades later this was a safer and easier topic to write about. The other pieces of writing a random story and 3 year lock down were certainly enjoyable.

Last and most importantly, the inspiration to work on this skill without assuming that writing is easy is probably one of the key takeaways from this course. Read a lot to write better, write daily to exercise your writing muscle. Write from your heart on anything, if nothing seems to appeal to you, simply start journaling. All these seem to be advises worth following.

 

For me the key thing that I learnt was that writing slowly with consciousness can only come with clarity of thought. Paradoxically, the very act of writing promotes a deeper understanding of subject, which in turn leads to greater clarity.  I hope and pray that I can progress on my new journey and keep my readers engaged.