I am not lazy; I am just a bit more thoughtful!

Mohammed Ammar Bin Yaser

The day she brutally grilled Rehan, Ma’am Sadia said that writing a blog post shouldn’t take us much time, it’s nothing: ‘Just sit and think of anything you come across in KU’ she  said, ‘and jot down a few paragraphs on it, that’s it!’

Maybe it is that easy for others, but for me, it is not so. I can’t usually sit and write about a subject I don’t feel. I know it is a very un-journalistic thing to say, but this is how I am. I find it difficult to scrawl mindlessly on a subject I don’t care about, and then patiently dissect and dress it to make it readable. It’s pure torture.

But I must confess one thing: this blog-a-week exercise is kicking me on the butt. It’s pricking me to change my stubborn writing habits. I can feel the change.  Added to the pressure of writing something interesting every week is the anxiety that the moment it flies out of my hand, my writing will be read and commented on. Unlike scribbling my fleeting ideas in a private diary that I can hide in a closet, it’s going out, being read and talked about. It’s crazy.

I feel like a bathroom singer being dragged by his collar to the stage amidst thousands of people and being forced to sing. And this very thought gives me creeps. So it’s no wonder while writing my weekly blog post I become over-conscious and my mind goes blank. I struggle to put down words in an intelligible sequence but with little success - I hate the feeling. It is not that I can’t write a number of technically error-free paragraphs and post it, I can; but I fear exposing my shabbiness that stem from urgency, the ‘quickness’ of it all.

I’ve read pieces in other blogs being run by my classmates who are following the same regiment. I often find sentences and passages in their posts, which in my opinion require complete re-writing. But they are fine with it. They are not only fine but excited about it. Some of them often plead me through text messages to comment on their blogs.

To tell the truth, their breezing confidence about their work made me uncomfortable, I was pricked by envy until the great German author Thomas Mann, who won the 1929 Nobel prize for Literature, came to my rescue. The moment I came across this quote from the master I knew I was in a different league: “A writer", says Mann, " is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." Now I know why people call me lazy!