It has been a long time since I posted here. I have been busy with things that are not worth mentioning though. Had a great birthday, did some good things and had some thrills. Two best things happened to me recently. One is a dear friend added me to a group where we share one short story per month. I will come to what it means to me as a writer or story teller but let me first share what it means to me as a reader. I get to read quality short stories month after month. I know I would read 12 or more high quality short stories which will reach out to the intricate crevices of my mind and heart and make me feel things that I never knew existed. I get to read the stories which will be published in wonderful literary magazines which would be priced more than what I could afford. It is definitely a win for the reader in me.
As a writer.. hmm.. I have to think about it. I am not sure if I am in the same league of my colleagues in the group. They work so hard, they choose their words carefully. They spend at least a week every month to get their story perfect. I wish I am conscious like them. But we will come to that later anyway. This blog post is not about that.
We receive the short stories in a word document. The writers take time to write and then edit their story. I strongly suspect most of them has their editor and proof reading team employed. Because you have to read to believe the quality of stories they create. This post is not about that either. It is about the missing spaces in between the words. Yes! You read it right. At first I didn’t think of it much. We started doing this exercise by January. In January, I just inserted the space and moved on. In February, it got annoying. By March, I was openly complaining. What kind of writers wouldn’t care about the space between the words? It took me April to understand what it meant. It meant they had edited. They had removed the words in between, which they felt unnecessary or repetitive. I don’t depend on mouse. But lot of people use mouse to delete things from their document.
What if words had feelings? How would have they felt when a writer mercilessly chuck them out. I know that words are one of the ways to convey the emotion. There is music. But let us stick to words for now. Aren’t they subtracting the emotion that flew from their fingers on to a computer screen when they delete it? Where do words stem from? It is from the writer’s mind for sure. What constitutes the writer’s mind? Something he/she saw, heard? Sometimes may be memories. We, Writers delete words just because we think it is not adding any value to the draft. But to think of it the origin of the words are the ones that made us. That gave us motivation to sit down and pen it down. I feel sorry for the words which got deleted to make a work perfect for the readers.
I also realized that we do it in real life too. We suppress our craziness and think we really want to do to fit in a template. To bring the story to a form which is acceptable and enjoyable for the spectators. Most of the time the story goes unnoticed or it is used only for criticism. But is it really worth it to discard what we are just because to fit in a template? I can only wonder.
To me, the deleted words will have more weight than the written ones. They had sacrificed themselves to show the writer’s mind indeed created a magic and is better than average human being. Deleted words are always better than the words that are in paper.
I love deleted words.
P.S. I have made modifications. But I didn’t delete a single word. 🙂
