Writer's Fortnight- What was it all about?

Writing and other creative arts have always been disregarded as secondary and unimportant tasks. In a community when a teenager like me says, “I want to be a writer” Everyone reacts to that as “Please, get a real job.” Or “Aren’t you afraid you won’t be publish and your dreams will shatter?” Why don’t they ever ask that when one wants to become doctors and lawyers?

Creativity is in fact the basis of all sciences, if scientist didn’t think out of the box and say something completely different what people had earlier known and believed, we wouldn’t be living in a developed world like we do.

Thus, our school held a Writer’s Fortnight, to nurture one’s creative side too.It had various writers come over and mentor us in our writing. There were three main speakers: Neil Humphreys, Mukul Deva and Steve Dawson from ESPN, and a number of freelance writers holding workshops. It was really fascinating listening to their stories and how writing could be ‘sexy’ if you make it and see a different perspective to it.

We also had a trip to the airport, which was supposed to stimulate our imaginations to guess various stories of the people there with different background. Personally I felt that it was not as effective as it was supposed to be but it was not disappointing either. If we could have been given more of a purpose then it could have been much better. We needed more of an inspiration, or an idea what we are looking for, example some historical aspect of the airport that no one has noticed before, with hints to find it like in the amazing race or a whether we are trying to guess the craziest deepest secret of a person in the airport just for the sake of it. Nonetheless, we had an incentive to use our imaginations consciously and think out of the box.

Since it is also hard to for us to rightly communicate what brilliant ideas we have in our minds, the individual mentors helped us channel our thoughts and gave the basics of writing and how we can improve it. The writing process plays a major role in writing and we learned the right way to do it.

All in all it was a great experience and made writing easier and more fun than it has ever been.