That Tuesday Thingy - Writer-speak

This was an interesting project proposed @IndiBlogeshwaris where one would be reviewing a members blog and this was to be executed in a  round-robin fashion. It also had  perfect end-of-year stock-taking perspective mingled with a festive-spread-the-cheer timing. So despite other end-of-the year commitments I was in.

I had to review this blog - http://soniaraowrites.wordpress.com/. There are some 175 odd members in the group and I had never interacted with Sonia or checked out her blog earlier. So it was interesting as I did not know anything of the person behind the blog.

I enjoyed reading Sonia’s blog, certainly different  from most personal cum mommy blogs I tend to frequent. I found it difficult to categorize the blog into a particular niche. It is not out and out literary cum writers blog. In my opinion, it is a blog focussed on creating a repository for tips, techniques and advice on writing. And likely  a corroboration of Sonia’s role as the Municipal Liasionist, India Region,  for the very popular NaNoWriMo – the National Novel Writing Month, which takes place  in November.

In Sonia's own words, she motivates, goads participants to write the mandatory 50k words towards the draft of their novel. And she herself has four such drafts under her belt,  and not to forget she has been a winner in 3 of them NaNoWriMo events – no small feat that!

I am always curious about the first few posts a blogger writes but when I discovered posts under the tags WriMoIndia – NaNoWriMo  I was hooked. Great set of posts to advise a first-time writer on how to tackle so many nuances in writing their novel drafts. Writing good dialogues, use of conflict in a story, guest posts from NaNoWriMo writers sharing their personal experiences, a post on even handling Failure in this exercise and many other interesting pointers in creating and narrating your story. I am surprised why there are few comments on these posts but I think Sonia engages with other participants on the NaNoWriMo FB group more actively than on the blog. 

Writing is a craft, and like all crafts requires skills, technique, thought, style. In case you thought you just had to sit in front of your comp and randomly type, Sonia erases this mis-conception and spells out the nuances of this craft with her posts in well-written, easy-to-digest bites. Even her posts for the A to Z Blog Challenge revolve around writing, or media and popular culture, which made for interesting reading. Ying and Yang deserves mention, as does Are you word-weary? and here where she talks about her experience with NaNoWriMo.

I do think that I'm going to visit here again, savour a post or two, think about how I can use this advice for improving my writing skills. And revisit. For writers serious about the craft there are many gems here worth a dekko. The blog has a serious tone to it, even the design spells business. After all writing is a serious business for most, isn't it?