Building a Writing Practice by Sona Grover

Building a Writing Practice is the second book in the writing series by Sona Grover. It’s a book on writing exercises. The exercises prescribed in the book are those that the author liked, used, & found interesting.

Writing is a craft that gets better when you do it again & again and focus on things you must improve.

This statement talks about three things:

1. Writing as a craft;
2. Practice of that craft; and
3. Goal-setting for improvement.

Writing as a Craft

For composing music, we don’t simply sit down with a harmonium & start composing. We learn the craft first & then start composing music. But, in the case of writing, most of us simply open our pen & start writing without learning the craft. This is what Sona is trying to say with this line:

You love to express yourself through words but you don’t have any formal training nor much experience.

Writing is about expressing ourselves, and for that, we need a formal training of craft and experience that would benefit others in some way.

No doubt we are inborn storytellers. We think in stories & perceive our world in terms of stories. But there’s a difference between simply telling a story and making someone ponder & move emotionally with your story. For later, the knowledge of craft is a must. Talent without craft is just like fuel without an engine, which burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.

Craft is the orchestration of techniques by which a skilled writer draws the attention of the readers and invites them to immerse in it for a moving & meaningful experience. For providing someone else a meaningful experience, we must experience it first. Experience comes from travelling, meeting different kinds of persons, understanding various cultures, etc.

About the Author

The author, in her blog, reveals that she has been moving from one place to another very frequently since her childhood & what she is today is because of her memories & influences of those places. She says that people measure their life in terms of ages and she does it in terms of places she has lived. The broad spectrum of people she has met transforms her understanding of being the center of the universe to the experience of universality. Instead of belonging to a particular place, she realizes that she belongs to the world. She now knows the meaning of letting go & finding peace.

Sona Grover is the author of four books: two fiction & two non-fiction. She writes collaborative-fiction & talks about her writing-experiences in her non-fiction books. She is enthusiastic about books, nature, & long walks and loves to experiment with different cuisines. She’s fascinated by various folk forms & the stories shaped by different cultures.

Practice of Craft

Writing is a form of expression—an expression of experience. The author suggests reading extensively, as with time the knowledge from books may become experience if we would be able to differentiate effective writing from average, ineffectual writing. She also talks about research & experimentation.

For regular practice, discipline is essential. She emphasizes that for better results, we should practice for at least 20 minutes daily at the same time & the same place. This is to set the mood for writing so that words flow out of us easily. She beautifully describes it in Finding Your Writing Flow, the first book of her writing series.

It helps to tell the Muse when you are going to be creative so that she can turn up and look over your shoulder as you write.

Sometimes the Muse comes to us on its own, but when she doesn’t come, we can’t wait for her forever. We have to do something to please her. This is what Sona is indicating through the epigraph of the present book, Building a Writing Practice.

There are times to stay put, and what you want will come to you, and there are times to go out into the world and find such a thing for yourself.

The author believes that if we are passionate about writing, we’ll find the time.

Passion is indeed a great driving force. It’s said that Tulsidas’s passion for his wife led him to cross a river using a floating corpse and to climb to his wife’s room using a snake, mistaken for a rope. Though her wife was not happy with his actions and said that the kind of passion he showed for her body, if he had shown that kind of passion for Lord Ram, he’d have been free from fears & would have attained the state of everlasting bliss. This changed Tulsidas’s life, and he started writing Ramcharitmanas.

Goal-setting for Improvement

The author not only asks us to set our goals by focusing on the things that we must improve & by defining our measure of success, but also asks us to give ourselves a little reward to keep us motivated. This external reward is the cue to release our biological reward—the dopamine.

It is dopamine that makes us a goal-oriented species with a bias for progress. The feeling of progress or accomplishment is primarily because of dopamine. It is the reason for the good feeling we get when we find something we’re looking for or do something that needs to get done. It is released to incentivize us to stay focused on the task. With each sign of progress, we would get a little hit of dopamine, and we get a big hit when we finally reach the goal.

Well, we don’t need to feel the pressure of performance. The author says to take time off without guilt when we have a burnout. The idea is to find joy in writing and to discover our creative impulses. It is possible to carve out a state of mind where creative thinking can flourish.

This state is not when we are ticking off things on a list but when we are in communion with our deeper selves and are open to new thoughts, perceptions, & ideas. To keep inspiration close to us, it is important to be in the right state of mind. The ideas are always there. Half formed. Half baked. Waiting to be picked and polished.

As Kabir says, “In anguish everybody prays, in joy none. Why does sorrow come to those who pray in happiness?” The same is true with practice. Why would writer’s block come to those who practice daily?

Exercises in the Book

There are a total of 22 exercises in the book, beginning from the generic to a little specific. It includes exercises on being creative, writing metaphors, selecting events from character’s life to plot his story, executing dialogues, exciting senses of readers, vivid description, point of views, describing actions, writing blurbs, rhythm of written words, experimenting with beginning & ending, creating character, development of plot, editing, etc.

Out of 22, 5 exercises are dedicated to direct, concise, & to the point writing. And this is what the author sincerely practices & also reflects in the present book, Building a Writing Practice.

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Story Vs Plot

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Conclusion

The writing exercises prescribed in the book can help in warming up for a marathon writing session, beating the dreaded writer’s block, & being in touch with the Muse. The approach is scientific & presented systematically to maximize the benefits of the exercises.

I’d also like to recommend my book The Story of STORY along with Building a Writing Practice for better grip on the craft. My book will tell you why people read stories and how to leverage it to write impactful stories for providing a powerful aesthetic experience, and Sona’s book will show you the way to consistency in writing & betterment of writing skills with creative writing exercises.

You can download both the books from the How-to category of Blogchatter Library.

Note: Ravish Mani is a story consultant & offers the service of manuscript analysis. You can refer this as a sample of his fiction analysis.