Ink Pot – Page 13 – Blue Pen Strokes

Nurturing a Young Blogger and Reader

My son and I have much in common – from our introvert temperament to love for reading and writing. Last summer during a long Covid19 lockdown in India, which was labelled by some media houses as one of the toughest, my son asked me about blogging. I explained it was an online journal, diary, or a place to share thoughts and stories and engage with like-minded followers.

I told him I used to blog and can set up a blog for him. That is how I restarted blogging in an all-new blog space, which is this, and he got a brand new blog – www.blackpenstrokes.wordpress.com. What I find endearing is that he still writes his “private journal” by hand. Though, I know it’s more to do with his love for stationery; again something he has acquired from me!

Book Review: Inventing Ourselves

Mid-morning, I got into bed ready to embark on a long and unproductive journey of browsing through my phone. Luckily, for me, the charger was not plugged in properly and I saw a mere 24% battery life smirking at it me. Well, I plugged it back in and picked up a book from my bedside pile. This was one I had read before but it is such a storehouse of knowledge that you can read it again, and again.

I bought Inventing Ourselves by Sarah-Jayne Blackmore to prepare as a parent for the crucial stages of my 10-year old son’s adolescent development. But, its more than a parenting book – it’s a scientific book and even a self-help book for it helps to understand your own life when you were a teenager. Inner child therapy is an important part of healing and I think this book provides information that can help in that exercise. The most important lesson is that teenage is the life phase of developing self-worth and obviously family has an impact on this milestone.

Scientifically, it gives significant information that all parents should know, example: schizophrenia is a genetic, developmental disorder that manifests between ages of 18-25; or the psychology of risk-taking; or that the mean age for substance abuse is around 25 years. I am reading this book a second time and marking stuff. It’s insightful and educative, a reference book and yet a story of the teenage brain

This is one of those books you need both as an ebook and a bedside copy. If you are interested in the functioning of the brain and the social influences on our mental growth and well-being, I recommend this as a great weekend read. It is lucid, succinct, and informational.

Social Media and the Problem of Plenty

Social media is exhausting, specially if you are intending to garner an audience or self-promote. There are myriad channels of communication and showcasing; all are craving your attention and content. If you are a writer, artist, or pursuing any creative channel, you are immediately in the snare of the social media octopus. There is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and I am ignorant of so many other channels.

All demand that you place your content in the most presentable way, on each one of them. There is information and design overload – the same content flooding the data stream with tags and hashtags. More than the creative pursuit, it is the pressure of pushing your content into these channels to grab the maximum eyeballs. Social media feeds on your deep FOMO – fear of missing out – in showcasing your content and following the trends.

The Art and the Anguished

When a piece of art is made with utmost dedication and love, it becomes breathtakingly and painfully beautiful. It lingers like a fragrance, an enchantment of the senses, a spell dominating the spirit, leaving the soul craving for more. I recently saw such a tribute of utmost adoration and I cannot get over the loveliness and the depth of what I witnessed.

Loving Vincent, the 2017 movie is an ambitious and brilliant depiction of the life, hope, struggle, and penultimate despair of the great painter, Vincent van Gogh. The motion picture illustrates the story of the painter in animated oil paintings – 853 paintings rendered in a modern artistic style by a team of 125 artists from around the globe.

Writing Prompt-ly

“Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” – Sylvia Plath

Flashback! Go back to your school days – Recall the essay writing classes and competitions. The first step of these activities was the “topic.” Cut back to the present day. As a writer, you must be aware of the concept of writing prompts. Simply stated, writing prompts are topics on which you focus to create various forms of literary output – blogs, stories, nano-tales, poems, essays, novellas – the list is endless.

Writing prompts occur in many forms – a single word, a phrase, a situation, a foreign word, an image, an opening sentence, a first and/or last word or phrase, three terms that must be used somewhere in the passage, words that should be used for inspiration but not actually used in the piece of writing, a popular song, a word whose antonym or synonym should be used, or a character/situation sketch. Prompts may be genre-specific, example, horror, fantasy, romance, science-fiction, and so on.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: