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A Writer's Life | Podcast #10 by Neha's Notebook

Every day I sit at the typewriter. With the keys of the typewriter, I spin galaxies and labyrinths. I paint colours and create memory books.

 

I split into fragments, disappear and reappear in a new form. I carve castles and fortresses and loose myself in their dingy explorations. I evoke fairies and demons and dinosaurs from the pandora’s box, and pack them in my bag once they have uttered their spells.

 

With every piece I write, I delve into a journey of treasure hunt. Sometimes I end up discovering mines of gemstones while sometimes I have to make peace with a trunk full of crystal baubles.

 

As the typewriter scroll rolls and pulsates, I paint new landscapes with watercolours, I draw crayon portraits and sketch ink doodles.

 

With every description I write, I open the cupboard consisting of jewellery boxes of words, and like wearing an ornament, I decorate my pieces with the rhinestones and sequins and pearls of aesthetic words.

 

While other people have two eyes, I have infinite. I hop from one eye to the other, seeing things that most others miss and discovering worlds that no one had heard of.

 

Sometimes I write because I am falling in love, and I have a desire to paint the picture of my lovable sweetheart with the words. Whereas at other times, I write to talk to my shadows and bring them to the light of my sun.

 

My notebooks are filled with jottings of moments and descriptions of monuments, quotes from books and notes from everywhere. I write down anything and everything. I make wordbooks for vocabulary, ideabooks for ideas and flashcards for thoughts. My notebooks are decorated with sticky notes, washi tapes and stickers for inspiration.

 

Talk of a writer’s notebooks, and you’ll find chronicles that relate to everything from mundane concepts of physics, mathematics and chemistry to expository worlds of fantasy, magic realism, vintage vibes, hot advertising and science fiction. Look at a writer’s search history and you will be puzzled and surprised at the same time.

 

Writers spend their days filling notebooks and curating documents of their researches, story ideas, descriptions and swipe files. They keep an eye and an ear open and dedicated to nibbling the tidbits of everyday life and secretly slipping away to scribble down their thoughts that arise in their mind like wavelets and ripples from their subconscious storehouse.

 

Writers carry ghosts on their shoulders, and they let these ghosts dictate their pains and sorrows and concerns which they, quite sincerely scribble down in their notebooks, just like a curious child writing an essay on their first school picnic, writing about the school bus and the sandwiches packed in the tiffin box by their mother.

 

A writer’s life is full of medleys of glitz and glamour and oodles of whims and fantasies and dreamlike worlds. Here they create constellations with words and spark fire with the words too. With poetry I direct an orchestra and with a prose I create a new world. With a description I paint layers on a canvas and with expositions I open my third eye to let my mind wander into enchanted magical forests.

 

A writer is a toddler who uses pen and paper to cry and laugh. A writer is a child who imagines new worlds and takes others to tour these worlds. A writer is an adult too, who inspires and educates and shares their greatest inspirations, and trigger joys and ecstasies into people’s hearts.

 

Every day is a new day. Each moment is a fresh moment. A writer’s life, though, is not free of sorrow and grief, but it is also full of wonder and marvel and playfulness and gusto.

 

A writer’s life is uncertain and unpredictable. One moment there is stillness and in the very next moment, there is a gushing storm. But a writer keeps on recording every transformation, every resurrection in their log of words and notebooks of worlds. It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that a writer’s life encompasses the infinity, from stillness to storm and everything in between.

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