The wrongness with Writing

The most awkward part of writing is the beginning. If you have a topic in mind, and you know where you want to conclude, you are good to go. But if you want to do some free-form writing, there are limitless possibilities, both for the beginning and the ending. Out of the innumerable possible pathways, you have to choose the single most suitable path, which will hopefully lead you to somewhere sensible.

Even after you have started, you still have innumerable choices. It does not matter if you talked in the first paragraph about the situation of human rights in the Russian gulags during Stalin’s regime or analyzed the factors affecting the viscosity of snot when you are sick; you can still end the piece by talking about the effect of pH of water on Japanese Trout in Nuwakot district. The only single thing you need to know when writing is the tone the writing will have.

If you are feeling specially rant-y, you could compare a local leader in Nuwakot to Stalin. The piece could conclude by pointing that just as Japanese Trout thrive only in specific pH and will die on other, the area will figuratively die under the leadership of that certain leader, thus arguing the need for new leadership.

My point is, for non-fiction, coherence is important only between sentences and paragraphs. The two ends of a writing could be as different as they could be, and yet the writing as a whole would still make perfect sense. The same is not very true for short fiction writing, where the piece as a whole must be coherent, and every paragraph must related to every other paragraph in some way. That is the reason why my stories (or what I like to call stories, but which are actually lazy pieces of bored writing) totally suck. I do not pay enough attention to what I have already written, and do not bother too much with where the story is going. At one moment, a character is drowning in the river, shouting for help, and in the next he has been saved by a mysterious stranger, lived with him for four years, fallen in love with his sister, and is planning to marry her the following week. The story is not at all linear, so it’s not a good read.