I’m deviating a bit with regards to Bloganuary today – instead of today’s prompt, I’m picking up an older one that I could relate to, but missed – Why do you write?

Why do I write? Well, I consider writing to be at the core of my creative process. Ask me a question on my hobbies, and I will most probably share that writing is one among them. I have been writing professionally for nearly a decade and a half now, but my writing is more than that.

My writing is at the core of my soul, it is something that I deeply enjoy doing.

In other words, my writing defines me.

I don’t know when I started taking it seriously though. Back in school, at least in primary and middle school it was far from being one of my strengths. In fact, I was a bad writer – my bad handwriting did not give any brownie points either. I used to scribble random things in Malayalam (my native language) though; even the other day, my maternal aunt joked about my ramblings in Malayalam that she uncovered in a dilapidated diary – one of my hobbies during vacation as a ten year old was to pen my thoughts in Malayalam. I think my maternal grandfather also encouraged me to write, he had a habit of writing diaries, and he egged me on to give it a try, and I did – only to stop when I realized that my diary entries were being snooped-on by my parents.

I have a vague memory of being commended for an English essay that I wrote in seventh grade, I think that was when I started taking writing seriously. A couple of years before that, I started reading seriously too – poring over the tonnes of books that lay around at home and the ‘India Today‘s that I got my parents to subscribe. Kind words from my teacher gave me the push I needed. I started writing more; it began as ramblings, random scribbles, and being a little more serious when asked to write essays for school exams. When we bought a computer at home, I picked up touch typing and started moving my ramblings to word documents. By the time I had graduated from school, I stumbled upon the magical world of blogging. If you’ve read this blog, you know what happened thereafter – I saw myself grow and blossom into professional blogging and writing, even journalism, which led me to where I am today.

To be a tad more direct, I am here doing what I do because I discovered writing.

Coming back to the why I write question – the answer is simple: I write for myself, that’s it. Of course, a bulk of my writing is work related, but even when I write for work, I find a certain joy in converting my thoughts into written words, it ends up being something I write for myself. In the past few years, I had not ‘truly’ written for myself a lot though, but that has changed in the past couple of years, as I rediscovered the joy of writing – and started writing more. I owe a lot of that to Bloganuary, and the habit of journaling that I picked up last year.

I can’t wait to keep writing more!