On Writing Honestly

I read so many blog posts.
I like some and then I don’t like some.

I recently realized what the difference between the two was.
Which ones I liked and which ones I didn’t.
Reading any piece of writing is simply looking into the innermost heart of heart of the author.
And that’s when I figured out the difference.

If you look at it completely objectively, some of them were so well written really, highlighting all the key points relating to a topic and whatnot.
But they didn’t end up touching my heart. Some of them felt like they were literally a page torn out from a thesaurus, it felt like the author was trying too hard to impress.
Like he was trying to put up a front and wanted us to fall for it.
But like I said, they didn’t appeal to me at all- and this was probably the reason why.

I’m a pretty honest person (I’m in fact Divergent with my second faction being Candor- apparently. A test I took surely thought so. And yes, of course the first was Erudite).
And especially in case of writing I believe you have to be extremely honest.
It should all come from the heart.
All technicalities and thoughts of the implications of your next sentence should be ignored.

Sure, you need to do your homework; learning correct phrasing and grammar, honing your vocabulary skills, and reading about the proper structures and formats of writing essays or letters: all that stuff should be done when you’re learning to write.
But when you’re actually doing the writing you shouldn’t do all of that, it should simply flow.

Write drunk, edit sober, Ernest Hemingway said.

And lately I’ve started realizing how important it is to do exactly that. 

You can’t think about the kind of traffic your blog will get because of this post or whether or not people will admire it. If you do that, it reflects in your writing, it is subtle but yes it does.
And that’s when people don’t respond the way you want them to.

I, for one, always want to read about a person’s thoughts or feelings on different topics. Their very own thoughts and feelings, and then I don’t even care if they’re rambling about something that isn’t even all that interesting.
I still love reading it.
I love reading something when people have loved writing it.
I’ll enjoy an article when the author himself had fun while forming it all inside his head.

And while all of the above is just my own opinion, I’ve noticed during what little I’ve blogged that quite a lot of people feel the same.
It is appparent in the stats part of my blog.

Two of my posts especially come to my mind while talking about this whole process of writing.

So my Petites Potterheads and I were randomly creating an Organic Chemistry/Harry Potter crossover and we were having so much fun that I decided I had to write it all down, because I wanted to preserve this- and it was something really amazing- and one of these days all of us were gonna look back at it and get nostalgic about it- and I wanted that.
That’s why I wrote a post about it.
And the response from around the internet was amazing.
So many people read it and that was the first time my blog got such brilliant views and yes, that made me very happy but it also surprised me because I hadn’t even written with an intention of making people on WordPress read it!
I’d written it because it was a fun activity, I’d written it for my Petites Potterheads.

The second post is pretty recent.
It is actually a short story I wrote.
The idea came to me and I felt that these 3 (yes, only 3) friends of mine would laugh a lot when they read it (it’s full of inside jokes which only those 3 would understand- for the others it’s simply a story) , and others who read it would probably find it lame but I didn’t really care, I had to write it.
And so I did.

One of the 3 friends even commented that all my readers will think I’ve suddenly become a lame-ass storyteller because even she felt that if you didn’t get the inside jokes, the story wasn’t much really.
And she said “What will your readers think?”
And I said, “Hahaha! I was thinking the same but you won’t believe the response it got! A lot of people actually liked it. I can’t believe it either”

That’s another thing in fact, about making gifts for people.

The John Green video is here.

You should never create something because you wanna be rich or famous, he said, but you should create stuff for people, as a gift.

I’ll admit that back when I first watched the video, parts of it didn’t make sense and I thought, ‘What do you mean, gifts for people? That’s so vague- and I don’t even quite understand how it helps.’

But slowly I realized that John Green was right (as usual).

You should watch the video itself actually, I’m not going to elaborate on it. He is so much better at explaining stuff anyway.

I guess that’s all I wanted to say.
All of this actually came to me when I was encouraging a friend to start a blog and she asked me for some tips…
I was like, ‘Tips? I don’t have any tips.
But yes, just remember one thing.
Always be honest in your writing. Rest you shall figure out by yourself.’