Over the last six months, I’ve been relearning how to write. It’s mostly because I now teach writing, and seeing writing through the eyes of fresh recruits is refreshing. I had five batches of students last term, and with each, I walked around a neighbourhood, asking them to look around and feel the outdoors.
It’s a simple and effective ‘fly on the wall’ assignment. Show up to a public place and spend as much time observing the surroundings: the sights, the smells, the taste, and the words will come. Guaranteed! Then, sit down at your desk and write 1,000 words.
Nearly all my students hated the assignment initially. They probably thought their teacher had no life, which is an accurate guess, and they didn’t see the point of the whole exercise. But slowly, weeks later, I received messages telling me how much the simple act of sitting quietly in one place, not interacting with the surroundings, and just watching people helped them focus. Suddenly, they couldn’t unsee their surroundings. One student wrote to me that she was made to switch her phone off and sit quietly inside the Aurobindo Ashram, but she had never enjoyed the experience of sitting quietly this much before.
I can’t be sure when exactly I became a writer. I wrote unabashedly in my early 20s, the same age my students are now. I wrote about my feelings; I had a food blog with a comical name, ‘Moksha Through Food’ – or maybe it was ‘Moksha Thru Food’ – but it has since been scrubbed off the internet. I wrote about running and listening to podcasts. I wrote long emails to family and friends that I am wholly embarrassed to read now. I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.
Then, I got recruited into a newspaper and became a writer of news reports confined to a specific word count. But I wrote the same long emails to friends and family. I don’t know why I thought anyone would be interested in what I was up to in this much detail. Somehow, I always started the paragraph with an indent which, thinking about it now, makes me want to dig a hole and live in it with my embarrassment.
For years, I wrote freely alongside my journalistic pieces. I even wrote columns for the newspaper I worked for about loss, dating and learning new languages. But it all came to an abrupt halt for a few years. I started wondering if the world needed my useless thoughts on random subjects.
In 2020, during the pandemic, I started writing again. I wrote a nostalgic piece about my father, about running again, and how I felt being locked up in a quarantine facility in Taiwan where I had gone to study Mandarin.
For a few years now, I haven’t been able to write. Of course, I’ve written my book, the apple of my tired eyes, over the last two years. I’ve written, trashed, rewritten, trashed, edited, trashed, rewritten, to the point of ruining a nerve on my left hand and greying at great speed. But I haven’t written-written. I had forgotten the freedom of writing for fun. Writing became complicated in my head. I was reading and writing heavy material and felt tired of sitting down and making sense in a lighter way of my life and surroundings.
All this changed mid-last year when a group of young and enthusiastic writers watched my every move in a classroom, hanging on to every word I said. They even wrote me notes on my mannerisms. Apparently, I overuse the phrase “fair enough” and wear dhoti pants to class. I frankly don’t even know what that is. Suddenly, I was the object of my own ‘fly on the wall’ assignment.
I spent four weeks with five batches of students, getting them to unlearn the “I” in their writing. Making sure they are trained as journalists and not as observers of the world from their point of view. After four weeks of “don’t use I, nobody cares what you think”, I sprang a surprise on their last day with me. I asked them to write a first-person essay.
It came naturally to some; they clanked at their keyboards at speeds I hadn’t seen for weeks. Others found it difficult. They said they didn’t want to write about themselves; it was unnecessary.
I hear you, I replied, but let’s give it a shot.
Our last class together became a group therapy session. We shared, through our writing, thoughts we sometimes had never openly told anyone. My students wrote wonderfully charming, poignant, often hilarious pieces in a way that I felt a little bad denying them the “I” all these weeks. They wrote about swallowing coins, falling off bikes, and about friendships and loss. I laughed and teared up along with them. Seeing where their thoughts went and how they made sense of the world was exciting. It was simple and sweet.
Today, I am writing again after years. Well, I am writing about writing, but that’s still something. I sat at my desk this morning to start work, and suddenly, words flowed. My mind swam with thoughts of all the words I had encountered over the last many months – my words, their words, words of great authors. I felt happy that I was doing my bit in keeping words afloat in our increasingly difficult world.
Sowmiya Ashok is a journalist. She teaches long form writing at ACJ. Her debut non-fiction book will be out in 2025.
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