I haven't written for a good amount of time. And if I have, it has been at the behest of others - friends and family who insisted I not lose touch.
I have resisted writing. There was a time when what I wrote was pure fiction - the characters, places, situtations were unrelated to my own experiences. Now, I find myself unable to do so. Rather, the act of conjuring a character from thin air seems very fake. I do not wish to try too hard to bring a character alive.
To write, I believe, you need to have a very strong sense of yourself. In a sense, I have been in a transition period for the past few years, unsure about the stillness of my thoughts and ideas. Many an idea has drifted in and out, before being dismissed as unworthy. And even the process of thinking of an idea has been forced, knowing that I can write if I really want to, that I will be able to force a story out of myself if I sit down and stare at a Word document long enough.
I started off by enjoying the process of writing. It wasn't a chore. Slowly the thought of unravelling the layers of a character seemed like a tiresome job, one that was just solely for the reader's pleasure.
I also got really self-conscious of my writing. Nothing I wrote pleased me. It was felt childish, plotless or plain uninteresting. I got harshly critical.
I wanted to escape from writing so badly, that I never publicised or gave myself credit for having written a few Junior Amar Chitra Kathas. Some were mythological stories that I retold and some were fiction. Nope, it wasn't that big a deal either, but precious few of my friends have even heard about it. It was the first time I saw my name next to the words, "Written by". Yet, it all seemed too less, and not the Pulitzer prize winner that I hoped to write, in my own head.
To sum it up, I lost the ability to write honestly.
Perhaps, I am ready to write again.