Writing prompts and ideas

Why am I listing out all these prompts? Because I am very bad at them. If given a prompt, my mind will shut itself out and refuse to think on the topic. This also reminds me of the popular exam question from the school days, on making a sentence to include the given word. This is one of my main hurdles to overcome in the process of becoming a better writer. If you are a lyricist, you should be able to write to a given tune. And if you are a writer, you should be able to write on a specific theme, or a prompt, right?

Another improvement I wish to bring in is to include photos in the posts. For every travelogue I have written in this blog, I should have uploaded some photos, to say the least. But I am that lazy to copy, crop or resize, edit and upload for just a single post. A picture do say a thousand words, and being the photo lover that I am, I should be including more pictures from Google even if its not a photo post. Also, most of the posts in this blog are unedited and written on the go. I feel I have a lot way to go if I really need to hone my writing skills on that aspect. The post can be more structured, planned and organized into sections, or points, edited for proper English, you get the idea? But what if my post then seem artificial and not straight from the heart. That would be my worst fear becoming true.

I remember reading about Blogathon among personal blogs from the blog of the famous author, Preeti Shenoy.  There are innumerous blogs, which make money, by providing tech content, news, reblogging other posts, posting daily and making it more professional. They did had a reason to blog daily. They needed to bring traffic to their site to gain money. But here she was blogging away for happiness because she loved to write. And each of the posts, were straight out of the heart, as if a virtual friend is talking to you about some topic, or how did the day went etc. On reading such posts, it made me happy. Every day I would look forward to her posts, so that it brings in some cheer or some positive thought to my lonely mind. And the guest posts by her husband, Satish Shenoy was sprinkled with lots of humour, that you end up having a lingering smile on your face.

Then I read a similar Blogathon on Subha’s blog, which again was another personal blog. And I was really surprised at the huge lengths of the blog post, that I could not finish reading them. Most of them were a potpourri of thoughts, travelogues, day to day happenings, or pieces of life which passed its vibes onto me, watering the seed in me to write more and more. The new year rang at the right time when the iron rod was indeed hot. And here I am, trying to write a blog post, for the tenth consecutive day!

For me, writing such heartfelt posts gives me immense satisfaction rather than writing with keywords and SEO in mind. And that’s why I failed in the last attempt to write actively. Do you feel the same?