Category Archives: Uncategorized

Recent Writing, Uncategorized

Does writing advice really help?

September 14, 2014 bottledworder 37 Comments

from pixabay

People vary vastly in their approach to work or play. So when I see a lot of writing advice doing the rounds (including my own), I’m rather skeptical. Unless the advice is really specific, regarding tone, structure, syntax or something else, it serves little purpose for me beyond motivation, which, admittedly, is a huge part of success in any endeavour.

Some of the advice comes from writers themselves, when a dry spell probably compels them to write about something and what better a topic than the one they know most about—writing?

A lot of the impetus for writing about writing comes from a high demand amongst readers, who would be writers, and are looking for some magic recipe that will tell them how write. They expect such instructions to be clear and bulleted, exactly like the ones on how to put a bookshelf together or how to identify nasty weeds in your garden.

Again, such lists serve a purpose, to an extent, if you’re looking to churn out writing that will fulfill a purpose, and in theory, will help the next person write a similar thing should s/he be able to get to the instructions just like you did. Catch the reader’s attention with the intro, use a quote or an anecdote and end with a question or comment. Or, make sure the characters develop and edit out the parts that don’t fit.

But really, if someone has not recognized that they need to catch the reader’s attention or to make the characters come alive like real people from his or her reading of good authors, and is spending valuable reading time on reading a list of five points with clear headings and sub-headings on how to write, is this a person who should be thinking about writing for an audience at this stage?

That is not to say writing about writing serves no purpose. In a discussion or workshop based setting, whether face-to-face or online, talking about craft in a specific manner really helps. Where is this piece not working? Am I failing to connect here? Am I too verbose? But without a specific piece to start from, is it possible to discuss writing? Continue reading Does writing advice really help? →

Tales by The Boy

September 9, 2014 bottledworder 13 Comments

Thanks to the exploits of The Boy on the word processor, the nascent blog post I wrote has been deleted.

Mischief by H. Brückner. Print showing a boy and a girl pouring ink and water on papers they removed from a desk and placed in a wastebasket.

Various experiments were performed by The Boy on a solitary sentence I had churned out after almost half an hour’s worth of staring at the screen when said boy decided to alter words here and there to check the various colours in which a spelling and grammar check was going to underline words.

Several minutes were spent finding words that were not words so that the underlining could happen effectively until we discovered that it isn’t easy to misspell words when you badly want to. Then fonts were changed and clip art inserted and magnified to fill the entire screen until the sentence was edited beyond recognition.

Hence, on the palimpsest of my poor, solitary sentence, having run out of ideas, I had no option but to regale you with stories by The Boy himself. Continue reading Tales by The Boy →

Freshly Pressed! Times 5

August 28, 2014 bottledworder 35 Comments

I was pleasantly surprised when I opened my email! I’m going to be Freshly Pressed for Writing Memoir on Social Media.

Freshly Pressed

I must acknowledge my debt to two people for the post: Cheri Lucas Rowlands (who also happens to be the editor who chose the piece) whose recent post brought to my attention The New Yorker article by Dani Shapiro I talk about and The Boy who blew the bubbles that turned into Writing Memoir.

Please like me on my Facebook page because, well, there’s stuff that I can do on Facebook that I can’t do here on the blog. Continue reading Freshly Pressed! Times 5 →

From eleven-year-old Bottledworder

August 21, 2014 bottledworder 14 Comments

You all have been reading Bottledworder for the past two years. Thought you might enjoy something I chanced upon covered in brown paper tied with a jute string this week.

They were old exercise books. Peeking out of one of them was an old, yellowed exam sheet with the words Better English, Class V-A on top.

Not ashamed to say the word “good” was written in red with my English teacher’s signature on the front. However, I seemed to have scored only 26.5 out of a possible 30 in the whole test.

Here’s where I lost a point-and-a-half of those missing 3.5! Not ashamed to admit, again, that I’m wondering, even after all these decades, what I was supposed to write for a full 5.

Ms. R, if you ever chance upon my blog, could you please explain? 🙂 Continue reading From eleven-year-old Bottledworder →

The room of my own

August 19, 2014 bottledworder 29 Comments

When my brother and I were little, we used to play this game in the afternoons sometimes. My brother would sit on one side of the bed and I would sit on the other and we would imagine that the bed was a boat and that we were floating away on the ocean. We would imagine that the space in the middle was one where we would keep all our prized possessions. My brother would keep his tools and I would pat the bed and say, “This is where I’ll store all my boiled eggs.” Continue reading The room of my own →

Simple Word Love

August 5, 2014 bottledworder 20 Comments

Words, like birds, have wings. Pin them down and they die.

I can remember the precise moment when I realized this. Continue reading Simple Word Love →

Them in the City

July 22, 2014 bottledworder 14 Comments

Something or the other is always happening in Calcutta.

Many of these events would be quite outside the scope of my experiences in the US and yet here they seem to fit in so seamlessly with the daily course of things. The events I’m talking about could be as simple as an altercation with an autorickshaw-wallah regarding the lack of change while paying the fare or hearing of a hanuman (big monkey) sighted on my street in the early morning sitting and eating kachori at a popular roadside stall with other customers (even while in many ways city life here is in no way different from anywhere else in the world as people use smartphones and laptops and commute to work on buses and cars and the underground metro).

Here’s a really unexpected event that occurred this week which reinforces my belief that if you’re looking for stories, there’s no better place in the world to come to than our very own Calcutta!

On Monday evening, my parents are about to leave for the market. I am ready to see them off when we open the door to an unexpected sight.

Our very long term domestic help P’s saree is strewn all over the landing between the main doors of the two apartments that face each other. A bunch of black hair, clearly cut with a pair of scissors, is strewn on the floor next to it.

The hair looks dark and glossy and freshly cut. Continue reading Them in the City →

Recent Reflection, Uncategorized

Home on the Interweb

July 8, 2014 bottledworder 31 Comments

At the end of play or at the end of work, when the sun is rising in the wee hours of the day or when the sun is going down, when you pull the curtains on prying eyes at last or when you display your exploits in their splendour on the wall to envious eyes, you want to return home.

Home is where work gets done, or no work gets done at all, where a thousand voices descend on you the moment you enter the door or where you sit still in solitude deep in thought. It is where you are thankful for today or you wait for a hopeful tomorrow or you sit and wonder if this is all there is where one day fades into the next quite silently with indistinguishable footsteps where not even a mouse clicks in the dark.

When you stare into the distance of a blue river or a blank screen from your window or when you spot a poster on the wall (of paper or pixel) next door, you float up and down memory lane or look into the crystal ball of time from your couch at home.

Home has the old and the familiar box from where you shake out a dusty album or it houses the kaleidoscope of friends and relatives, living or dead, floating down a timeline at the click of a mouse, as though they were all there in your living room sipping tea and munching sugary biscuits this afternoon. [Such as when a pop-up floats about a sidebar and says “Say Happy Birthday to S today” when you know that that smiling S left both the world of humans and Netpeople three years ago and left her profile active to haunt us forever every year on this very day.]

Thoughts of homelessness spring to mind as you get away from home for home in another part of the world on a huge airplane. You look down from the window at the familiar skyscrapers and trees and river fading into the billowing clouds.

When you’ve moved many times, between home here and home there, so many homes are scattered in different places that there is no getting away from home although there is no living at home without all those other homes knocking at your door always to come home.

Continue reading Home on the Interweb →

The Calcutta Cricket

July 1, 2014 bottledworder 24 Comments

One of the new experiences you have to adjust to when you visit your home in Calcutta from your home in New Jersey, travel from the temperate zone to the tropics, is that of living with the constant presence of insects in the summer. Even in city apartments, these companions make their presence known in various obscure or aggressive ways.

The glow worms are beautiful when they float in during a power cut. The ants and the spiders are a silent lot. If you leave a box of sandesh on the table, in no time will you see a group of industrious ants pushing globules of sweet, white balls away. You might have to keep an eye out for the spider doing the silent dance around the toilet seat or the lizard suddenly bursting into a loud tick-tick-tick on the wall. The millipede could climb on your arm while you’re asleep or a winged cockroach might decide to spend its last few hours with you. Then of course the mosquitoes will sing to you and keep you company through the night until dawn. Those who are wise know that a single one inside the mosquito net could treat you to its serenade all night long.

But here’s my experience this summer with a harmless insect I’d never thought I’d have to battle with so vehemently in a city apartment. Continue reading The Calcutta Cricket →

The Old and the Young

June 24, 2014 bottledworder 26 Comments

For expatriates, visiting home after long periods of time reveals slow changes imperceptible to those who live close by. The changes most noticeable are those in the old and the young.

The Old Man sits on the same seat on the couch everyday lost in his own thoughts. There’s a din around him consisting of the cook’s angry exclamations on the dearth of red-pepper powder (the lack of which jars against her professional perfectionism), the washer-woman’s insistent tramplings carrying heavy wet clothes to the balcony to hang, the all-purpose domestic’s comings and goings looking for mosquito nets to fold or to look out the verandah to see who has been pressing the “calling” bell for the thousandth time.

Despite all the din, The Old Man’s world is quite silent. He sits with the unfurled newspaper most days or just with his thoughts. He has grown a little frailer, lost a little weight, grown a white beard to complement his white hair. Yet, when there’s a soft discussion in the background between the domestic and The Old Lady that there’s no fish in the house for The Boy, he stirs from his seat as though to go to the market in the burning heat. When I pull up my huge American suitcase up the stairs, quite out of scale in this Calcutta apartment, he gets a grip on it pulling it up (looking as though he shouldn’t be), while all us ladies look on with concern trying to persuade him with words to let go but not daring to touch the handle to take it away from him. Continue reading The Old and the Young →

Hello

June 22, 2014 bottledworder 16 Comments

Dear Friends:

Hope all of you are well and keeping up with your blogs. Thanks for your concern on my Facebook page regarding what on earth may have happened to me. It’s true that when a nameless, faceless person disappears from the interweb, it’s as if the person never was. Only the blog remains like the smile of the Cheshire cat.

But I am indeed alive and somewhat kicking!

It is perhaps a cliché to say that life is a journey. But would it be such a cliché to say that a blog is a journey too? My blog has accompanied my life in its travels through hills and valleys, nooks and corners, the bright sides and the dark sides like a little murmuring brook on the roadside that has spoken to me as well as you. A blog like this isn’t exactly true in that it hardly ever records facts and yet it isn’t exactly false in that it does hold up a very distant and distorted mirror to the lights and shades of life.

This blog has been a tiny home for me in a changing world that I’ve been able to come back to from time to time. It houses the mirrors that reflect the flame that lights this tiny space but must also show the darkness below the lamplight when it’s time to say nothing. Both sound and silence are necessary to meaningful speech and the last couple of weeks were just that here–silent.

Why? Just because.

Hope to meet you old and new readers more frequently here on this platform soon.

BW

The self in writing

March 31, 2014 bottledworder 21 Comments

When man looks into a mirror he sees himself. When man looks into a book, what does he see?
When man writes a book, who is he speaking to–to others or to himself?
Why do most people write anyway, when it isn’t a school curriculum, a job requirement or something that provides a living?
Is writing entirely an act of speaking to others? Is there any part of writing that involves listening as well?

I don’t suffer from hubris large enough to claim to have an answer to all of these questions as big and complex as they are. Speculation will only prove my amateurish ignorance within the writing community and so I’d better maintain a discreet silence here.

Writing and I

However, one thing I do know is that a lot of inexperienced writers, myself included, view their own writing as self-expression and self-exposure of one kind or the other.

The simplest of these authors view writing as a way to gain recognition for themselves, be it to millions of readers (as a sort of alternate career dream), or to be valued by friends and family (to gain social stature) or to find value in themselves (as a means to find meaning in their lives). All worthy goals with a single underlying thread.

The self. The me. The I. Continue reading The self in writing →

Hope

March 27, 2014 bottledworder 23 Comments

I step into the tub for a shower.

Ahh. A greyish black speck against the perfectly smooth, white surface of the tub.

I was bound to notice. Everything else was bleached clean, sparkling, sleek, shiny and fragrant. The slender faucets glinted in the recessed lighting, complexly designed yet pretty in the light that came in through the spotless, transparent shower curtains. Everything in this space was designed for perfect control from the temperature of the water to the force of the jet from the showerhead. A smell of heavy, synthetic fruit from green plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner overwhelmed the senses with promise divorcing existence from the brutal wintry day outside in its sweet entrapment.

A speck it was indeed, quite out of place in this dazzling white cube of perfection. For the person who occupied the tub, the roof was perfectly angular in the corners, the tiles sparkled white, the tub was cleverly contoured and the plastic shower curtain sparkled.

Just like the city outside with its perfectly clean river and its hard, glittering skyline full of metallic jagged angles and spikes on a sparkling clear day brutally cold like this one.

There was no wind here in the tub. Yet the speck moved. Continue reading Hope →

Six ways to become a more productive writer

February 27, 2014 bottledworder

I’ve been thinking about how to become a more productive writer. Here’s six ways I came up with that could get the creative juices flowing:

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Email and the Parents

February 25, 2014 bottledworder 1 Comment

An old post revisited for readers old and new.

It was probably the year 2001 and I was checking my email in a computer lab in a school in Florida trying to concentrate amidst the loud noise that the dot matrix printers were making on the aisle (which were the only printers completely free for students then although laser ones did exist).

I was checking an email that had the following subject line:

INFORMATION RECEIVED. ACTION TAKEN.

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Of cool writer dudes

February 21, 2014 bottledworder 17 Comments

So you go to a party and are introduced to a stranger for the first time as a writer. Said stranger moves his chair up to you and decides to be nice. “So how’s the writing coming along?” he asks. Or even better, “What’s your novel about?”

It seems to me that only writers are graced with such pleasant conversation starters. Imagine someone wanting to make small talk at a party with a person from a different profession. “So how’s the coding coming along? “And how’s the plumbing going?” (unless you are personally invested in the results of said work) or “So how are the surgeries keeping you occupied?”or “What’s your criminal case about this week”?
Continue reading Of cool writer dudes →

Recent Reflection, Uncategorized

Thrift Stores: Memories and Things

February 18, 2014 bottledworder 21 Comments

I have this gigantic beige coat that has been lying unused a long time in my closet. It’s humongous with a gigantic aura of fake fur trimmings. It is certainly at least a size too big for me. It makes me look very well equipped for a trip to Antarctica whenever I get into it.

Because of the recent snow storms slamming the North East, I took the coat out at last a couple of times this season. I noticed that a tag under its collar says L.L. Bean. Yet, I vividly remember the day I bought it at a store in Florida which is as far as it could be from a nice outerwear clothing store such as L.L. Bean or Burlington Coat Factory.

Having always lived in tropical climates, I was stumped a few years ago when I was due to visit Philly at the height of winter from Florida, where I lived then, for some interviews at a conference. I realized that nothing I possessed could match the kind of cold I might have to face up North. Knowing I’d never use the coat beyond the day or two, I visited the town thrift store to look for something suitable.

Image by brina_head on flickr

It was a biggish store with vast spaces full of clothes on hangers hung on rails with bright natural light coming in through the windows. Almost all the clothes there were either cotton or made of artificial silky material that hung on the hangers with slumped shoulders looking like they could be crumpled into little balls if needed. Continue reading Thrift Stores: Memories and Things →

Home and the Blog

February 10, 2014 bottledworder 13 Comments

What does my blog mean to me?

Many a time, as I’ve sat by myself at night when the sounds of the day have quietened down and noises of the night have become louder, such as that of the whooshing of the AC, or thud of the softly falling snow or rain, the zzzzzing of the ups and downs of voltage brightening or dimming the tubelight or the buzzzzz of a single mosquito trapped in the mosquito net, or the dulled sounds of boats in the fog or the frogs croaking outside with the glow worms, depending on which part of the world I am in, I’ve wondered what the blog means when the writing has or hasn’t come. Continue reading Home and the Blog →

easy reading is damn hard writing

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