How I discovered my love for writing

The first things first, you need NOT be Stephen King or JK Rowling to get going with writing. It’s not a mere prerogative reserved for the pro writers alone. The truth is everyone writes, just everyone, yes! And interestingly, it’s been indispensably ingrained in us since the time we’re introduced to the alphabets: right from writing text messages on our phones or updating our status or leaving a comment on Facebook or other social networking sites. It’s been very much a part of us all along, you see. 

And it hasn’t been any different for me either. I’m the first generation in my family when it comes to writing as my parents never had any schooling. So writing never came naturally to me as it does to the second or third generation folks and for that matter, even the English natives. 

I think the seed of writing is sown in schools for the first generation lots like me. That’s where we’re first introduced to the art of writing. It’s schools that endow us with the tools for writing, but we never find their exhaustive utility until we become teens and begin to draft the first love letters on our friends’ biddings. I’m glad that I’m a part of the ‘letter’ generation and not ‘later’ generations, for the latter does not write as much at the personal level as the former did. I also wrote volumes of letters to my friends all over, and when I was overexcited, I even wrote pen letters although I’d never received a single reply. I believe it was around this time that my love for writing developed gradually and I’d enjoyed every bit of it. And it also was around this time that I’d occasionally tried writing poems. I was always surrounded by teachers and seniors who wrote at great ease and I look up to them to this day. 

And once I’d started college, I’d always received a lot of encouragement from my tutors. Their positive feedbacks reinforced and concretised my love for writing. So during the college and university days, I also happened to attend language and literature classes including writing (both creative and academic). It’s quite funny that when you learn grammar more and more, your confidence in writing hits the all-time low. I’d struggled to write even a single sentence without being self-conscious thence. I guess this often happens to everyone who comes from the non-native English background. Worse, the academic writing had been quite hard for me. I couldn’t even imagine how the doctorate students managed to write an eighty-thousand-word thesis. But, after my master’s degree, I can breathe a fair bit of confidence now. Things I’d dreaded before seemed manageable when I’d learnt some tricks and hacks from various sources and fetched some pointers from my friends about the trade in hand. 

Long before that, there were platforms like kuzuzangpo.com, Nopkin, and Writers Association of Bhutan where the Bhutanese lots wrote at length. I’d been fascinated by their write-ups and I’d also gone to the extent of signing up there. However, I’d never managed to write anything for want of some nerves. And much later, the era of weblogs dawned. In congruence with the trend, I’d created my first weblog in October 2010 and another one later on blogger. I also created one on wix.com in 2018. None of them exists today, however. Perhaps, I’d never found my niche there or the perseverance to stick there longer. 

I write here in this blog today, but I’m not sure how long I can keep it although I intend to keep it until the end of time. Nevertheless, I’m certain that I’ll take my love for writing to my grave regardless. Besides writing, I’ve also discovered my love for editing (content and copy) and proofreading lately. This is one of the most underrated phases of writing, neglected by many beginner writers. And on hindsight, I’ve also noticed that the importance of reading is also never adequately acknowledged. I feel you can’t become a good writer if you aren’t a reader first.