To be able to convey your thoughts in a string of words, such that even the most unintelligent, simple, and crudest of ideas are decorated with beauty which makes the content of such ideas shine with a brilliance that even undermines their obvious flaws.
This is the kind of writing that fascinates me, the kind of ability I yearn to possess, but as always when I extend my hands to try to grasp at such a skill, I always end up questioning my own capabilities - whether I even have what it takes to possess or develop such prowess.
It’s been quite a while since I have been yearning to be in possession of this prowess, however, the attainment of such prowess, to people with such little talent as me, does not come naturally. Still, I believe in my capacity to learn - and yet this capacity - more frequently than what I’d like to admit - is defeated by its nemesis the unwavering monstrosity named “Procrastination”.
This case and several others could easily attest to my capacity as an elite procrastinator. The earliest signs of this particular journey of procrastination could be traced back to March of 2020 - Yeah, it was when the lockdown started. I have been meaning to start writing since way before that, and believe me I did try, but was always disheartened by what I wrote.
However, lockdown had just started, and we were trying to accommodate ourselves to this new, and luckily, temporary life of self-imprisonment. It was the second semester of my undergrad and we had a course on Language and Communication Skills, for which we received an assignment, which was to write a paragraph on any of the topics we were provided. I chose the topic - “Nature in the Absence of Humans”. Well, I wrote freely letting my imagination off its reigns, my keystrokes trying to keep up with it.
Aaand… I liked what I wrote. It was crude, not refined enough, and it didn’t have the glimmer and flair of the kind of writing I sought to achieve. Yet, it still left me brimming with hope. Well, I did seriously consider at that point in time that I needed to give this a proper try.
Fast forward 3 years and 9 months, I am yet to make that proper attempt. I thought about it numerous times but never actually got to the doing part. One of the core reasons for creating this website was to have created another reason/opportunity to make this attempt, but here we are, it’s been almost 5 months since I created this website, and barely anything to show for it.
In my defense, I did write a mini-dissertation for my previous semester. Sigh, I have been rethinking a lot of things about my life (I need to do this every few months, though a few of these phases are especially serious, including this one). Let’s skip over the details of that process.
The Plan!
So one of the outcomes that I am trying to get out of this process is to systematically do things that I have been procrastinating for whatever reasons, and writing is right now one of the top 3 on that list. Thus, it’s time to plan this out properly, and then sincerely and consistently carry out that planning.
For this very purpose I thought of planning out a daily writing challenge, I was initially going to make it a 100 day long challenge, but after much discussion with some very practically thinking people, this number came down to the range of 30-60. The plan is to write something and post it on a specially made page for that very challenge, every day.
The content would be anything which I would be learning about on that day, or anything which would come to my mind - The only goal of this challenge is to make sure I write something every day, everything else is just icing on the cake.
The idea is still the planning phase, which will hopefully be wraped up in the next couple of days - I still have to decide the exact number of days, the topics which would be the general focus of my writings (I am trying to merge my learning with this challenge), and other minor details. I will also be creating a separate website and setting up a subdomain for this challenge.
I’m quite excited and looking forward to it. Hopefully this helps me get rid of this years long curse of procrastination I’ve had on myself.