Tag: writing

The beauty of a blank page

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

For a writer, a blank page can be one of the most intimidating things. If he spends 10,000 hours in becoming an expert writer, then a big chunk of it tends to be spent staring at a blank page (on the screen or otherwise).

Likewise, the first sentence of an article may be the sentence that gets rewritten the most. After all, that first sentence marks the birth of a piece of writing and the end of the frustrating existence of a blank page.

But underneath all this annoyance, there lies beauty. The blank page is a world of possibilities. Some may find that overwhelming, but I find it exhilarating.

To me a blank page is like giving a sculptor the perfect chunk of stone: What is to become of it he does not know but he surely is looking forward to the end product. He knows that the hours in the middle will be spent sweating over each stroke of his hammer on the chisel, but that is the process that makes him feel alive. When the masterpiece is complete, the world will shower him with praises (or criticisms). The sculptor may find some pleasure in that, but he will have already begun looking for the next piece of stone to sculpt.

And there lies the trick: Sometimes we forget that the blank page is not just the means to an end.

A better writer and a better thinker

Akshat Rathi7 Comments

This week I started my internship at The Economist. I had been looking forward to this since the day I got the offer, and it was one my strongest motivations to submit my DPhil thesis. A number of reasons made it so. But mainly it was because I knew that the few months at The Economist are going to be an exercise in becoming a better writer and a better thinker.

Becoming a better writer may be obvious. The Economist is a very well-written newspaper, and, if I am to write for it every week, I have to better my game. But a better thinker?

Yes and here’s an analogy to explain it: When I first came to Oxford, I had just finished four years in the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai. Coming to Oxford was a shock to my system in many ways. I was in a foreign country, surrounded by people from all over the world, I was moving from a taught course into research, I was going to live in a house with three girls rather than a hostel full of boys, etc. But one of things that most stood out in all those new things was that all the students at Oxford did not study chemical engineering. Actually, they studied more subjects than I could keep a count.

Exeter college, which is a very welcoming place, made sure that in the first week we had as many social engagements as were physically possible. It forced me, pleasantly so, to mix with students from many subject areas. Over the next four years, a lot of my thinking was shaped by interacting with these students.

I expect my time at The Economist to do the same for me all over again, and do it better. Even though it is only a few months, because the paper (as it is referred to in-house) writes with a single voice (if you aren’t aware, The Economist has no byline), it will force me to confront my views a lot more than I had to at Oxford. When I say ‘single voice’, I do not mean that all the writers have the same opinion, but that they arrive at one through a lot of debate. If I am to write about something, I need to be prepared to defend my stance or find something that I can defend.

Here’s what I learnt:

The start of a new week at the paper is on a Friday because that week’s paper goes to print on a Thursday afternoon. The first Friday-morning meeting is one where people float ideas for the next week to their section editors (Business, Finance, Britain, etc.), but mainly the aim that day is to think about leaders (opinion pieces) for next week. The section editors then take those ideas to the next meeting, which happens in the Editor-in-chief’s office.

Both these meetings go on for quite sometime. Especially, the second one. Leader ideas are thrown on the table and then dissected. Although most of the talking happens in between the section editors, the deputy editor and the editor-in-chief, many other people contribute. I got told on the very first day, “If you have an opinion, at The Economist you will have plenty of opportunity to air it.” It’s true. Even those writing for the science section question a finance leader and those writing for the Britain section question a leader about the Libyan election.

After a quiet weekend, Monday starts with longer versions of the Friday meetings. More discussions follow but this time they are more concrete. After all, the deadline to wrap-up the paper is only two days away i.e. Wednesday night. People use Monday afternoon and Tuesday to do the research, interviews, reporting, and on Wednesday there is a lot of back and forth between writers and editors as they polish their stories.

The working hours are very flexible, the people are very warm and the 12th floor office has a great view of the city. I got told more than once that The Economist is a weekly newspaper, which means that the stories have to have more than just ‘news value’. Not just well-written, but it also needs to be a well-analysed and entertaining story.

The week

For me, it was an unusual week. Monday through Wednesday, the science and technology team was working from home, in what was an experiment. And as it happened, I ended up being at a conference on Thursday and Friday. So although I didn’t get to interact very much with the team I am going to be working in, I got to meet a lot of other writers.

This is not to say that I did not work. Apart from attending the conference, I attended the ‘Welcome to The Economist‘ talk, ‘How to be a journalist’ talk, got trained on the necessary software, made new friends and wrote two articles, which depending on what the editors think may or may not get published (PS: I will be posting what gets published here).

Finally, I won’t be boring you with what happened at The Economist every week (for that you should read the paper). But, as always, I will write whenever I have something worthy to share. Like the ad below:

On Speaking

Akshat Rathi1 Comment

I have a fear of public speaking. It is not a debilitating phobia, but when I have to speak to an audience I prefer to have time for preparation (not just for practicing but also to gather some courage). Even with that preparation, it turns out, I say “um” a lot and get a little thrown off by unintended pauses.

As a writer, I decided that I need to get better at speaking. Any effort put into bettering my speaking abilities will only help me improve my writing skills, I thought. After reading Paul Graham’s essay on Writing and Speaking, I have changed my mind. I still want to get better at speaking but not as much as I want to get better at writing. Here’s why:

Having good ideas is most of writing well. If you know what you’re talking about, you can say it in the plainest words and you’ll be perceived as having a good style. With speaking it’s the opposite: having good ideas is an alarmingly small component of being a good speaker.

Getting better at speaking needs improving your showman skills more than your thinking skills. It is true that remarkably good speakers don’t memorise their speeches. They have few points, written down or mentally noted, on which they expand while speaking. To do that the speaker relies on ideas that he has previously thought of in some depth. A certain amount of clarity in thought is needed to be able to speak well, but it would be rare to refine ideas and rarer to think of new ones while giving a speech.

It is more important for a good speaker to engage the audience which can be done through not just good ideas but also anecdotes and jokes. The speaker can tap into mob psychology which make jokes seem funnier in an audience than alone. Graham hasn’t taken it too far when he says:

As you decrease the intelligence of the audience, being a good speaker is increasingly a matter of being a good bullshitter. That’s true in writing too of course, but the descent is steeper with talks.

So are talks useless? Graham says:

They’re certainly inferior to the written word as a source of ideas. But that’s not all that talks are good for. When I go to a talk, it’s usually because I’m interested in the speaker. Listening to a talk is the closest most of us can get to having a conversation with someone like the president, who doesn’t have time to meet individually with all the people who want to meet him.

Talks are also good at motivating me to do things. It’s probably no coincidence that so many famous speakers are described as motivational speakers. That may be what public speaking is really for. It’s probably what it was originally for.

This lamentation has been about public speaking, of course. One man talking others listening without much engagement from the audience. I’m a fan of another form of speaking which involves engagement – conversations, that is. Many of which have led to the most fascinating learning experiences. With the right set of people, conversations can go to bizarre places and still feel familiar.

Some of the best conversations are those without structure. They tend to flow with an aim to seek the truth, but remain content in not reaching the end. They can sometimes feel like a mental dance involving two or more. Rhythm is set by the pace of thoughts, music by the ideas and notes by the words.

Conversing, like public speaking, requires the ability to communicate with clarity, but beyond that it also needs additional skills such as engaging conversational partners without being overbearing, redirecting the flow of ideas but allowing others to do the same, and creating an atmosphere that encourages new ideas.

Good conversations leave me with the feeling that I get after enjoying a fantastic meal. Instead of a good aftertaste, I am left with some very satisfying thoughts. They also come with a bag of goodies that contain new ideas and new perspectives.

Even with all that love for conversations, I don’t treat them as my way out of a difficult problem. Sometimes two or more brains with the same amount of motivation are able to solve problems that either brain alone would find unsolvable, but synchronisation of that kind leading to synergistic effects rarely happens in conversations.

So when a friend of mine said, “I think by talking about things”, I had my eyebrows raised. She tends to use another person as a mental stage to begin the thought process. Speaking to her, it seems, is thinking. I find that odd and limiting, but that might be an extreme case.

Therapists ask patients to ‘speak’ their mind. Talk therapy is powerful and is known to release chemicals in the brain altering, very literally, the state of a person’s mind. Therapists enable a conversation with oneself by removing mental blocks and/or directing the flow of thoughts in the right direction.

Speaking may be a good way out of difficult emotional problems but it isn’t the best tool for problem solving. Speaking can be uplifting to the depressed and invigorating to the dull. It can be a motivational tool or a way to admire heroes. It can also be a thinking tool in difficult scenarios, but for problem-solving and a daily dose of new ideas writing is a better option.