For The Reader- 16 April Blog Readers’ appreciation day

“If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.”
Kingsley Amis

I think the above quote suits me fine. I have annoyed you enough, at times more than enough, and this is my chance to say thank you for to all my annoyed readers. You may have found me unacceptable and this is the beauty of virtual world I don’t have to face any frowns literally (safe and secure).

Not that we had any dearth of ‘wannabe-without-any-reason-celebration-days’, but this one came without any charge or taxes. Archies gallery isn’t sponsoring it and no one will be offended in its grand celebration. Lastly, this gives me a reason to thank every person on this earth who has ‘willingly’ or ‘unwillingly’ tolerated my lowly writing.

For there won’t be any writers, without any readers. The feeling of being read is really encouraging and inspiring. Surprisingly in India writing still is not a profession. My parents are trying to come to terms with the fact that I will make a living by writing. But, they still do not whole heatedly accept it. I always get the “what will you do?”; “What have you done?”; “How does it matter?” and I don’t actually bother explaining people, no matter how bad I am at it, I love doing this. My sadistic abilities to torment people with my writing are so strong that I just won’t leave them as long as they decide otherwise.

Writing predominantly is considered a ‘hobby’. It is still not a field of specialisation. This is in a way true, when you go out and hunt every third person is a writer, but not every 5th person is a reader. So, perhaps the imbalance says it all. we don’t need recession statistics to explain the crisis here.

Here are a few What Not to Write tips that I gathered from my own sensibilities and a few (inspired) by the World Wide Web.

7 deadly sins

1. Do not write “feelings that you cannot express”. Avoid quoting too many people.

1. Do not use Capital letters for emphasis it is ANNOYING.

1. Do not trust the spell check alone. You need not always be a human to err.

1. Do not change fonts in the middle of a write up.

1. Do not cut-copy-paste from wikipedia, readers are smarter than writers.

1. Do not get carried away, like me, you should must stick to the grammar rules.

1. Do not over do hyperboles and metaphors. Not everybody is Shakespeare

Statutory Warning: Do not risk seven deadly writing sins from a struggling writer.

So, here is a site that encourages budding writers and is a great way to explore (and not plagiarize) what the rest of the world is writing.

http://www.readthismagazine.co.uk/onenightstanzas/

To end with Alexander Pope ‘But those who cannot write, and those who can, All rhyme, and scrawl, and scribble, to a man.’

Oops I just committed the first sin- Too many quotes!