On Writing

Raj Ajay Pandya
2 min readJul 3, 2020

A while back, I finally finished reading Stephen King’s On Writing. Yes! Late to the party. One quote that stuck with me is this – “So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You’ve blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.” As much as I loved the book, I also loved what all one can do with writing, personally and professionally.

To get things straightened out at the beginning itself, I’d like to affirm that this blog is not at all to please my intellectual fetishes or to get the fact around that I enjoy writing non-fiction. This is surely not about giving out a message (nor that I have any) or to prove anything to anyone. This is all about that old school dream of having your own website blog/publishing avenue/cribbing portal where you can share ideas, creatively. Poetically, I look at it as a house window. You just sit there and observe the world from inside. This makes much more sense while we’re all quarantined because there’s an invisible enemy outside. This ample amount of time will surely increase the radius of my thoughts and hopefully, it will better my writing. As from the power of the internet, I understand that one gets better at writing by writing.

I have been unapologetically opinionated throughout my school and college life (Now that I think of it, maybe this is another minor subconscious reason why I chose a career in writing). This made me enter debate competitions. Some were formal in front of the jury and some were informal over drinks. Although, in the overtly expressive nature of social media and our constant need for bite-sized information, everyone is opinionated now. Not saying that it is a terrible thing. But what it does is, it takes away the opportunity to be creative and aesthetic in your opinions, ideas and thoughts. In the world of Inshorts, there’s very little left of ‘The New Yorkeresque’ way of communication. There’s only a little one can do in a 10-second snap or on a scroll down timeline of 280 characters.

So here, Let’s start this medium.

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Raj Ajay Pandya

Writer | Journalist Instagram: @rajajaypandya Twitter: @RajAjayPandya