Star Tech

Many Thoughts, But No Confusion

Not everyone has had to wait a fortnight for a review of their blog, but Confused Sam waited patiently while I spent most of last week with a family member in hospital. Thank you, Sam, for your patience. Your strength is the ability to write posts in a completely colloquial manner. You write just as I imagine you would tell a story to a group of friends. It is spontaneous prose and therefore it is genuine in its nature. There is no artifice, there are no gimmicks. That is a great strength for any writer.

As you know, when we first started exchanging comments about your blog, I told you the single most common thing I have told most bloggers. Your site was in danger of being perceived as one-dimensional. It was flat and featureless to the casual reader - because it was simply one slab of text after another. The danger of this approach is that readers might lose interest, just as they would while reading a newspaper with no photographs or captions or headlines or breakout quotes.

To your eternal credit, you took the advice in the right spirit and on 10 June your post `Looking Back at my Inspiration' ran with a photograph. Immediately, your blog took on a different dimension. The artwork that illustrated your poem `But Forever' on 20 June was well chosen and really complemented a poem that spoke with broad appeal. I'm guessing you copied the illustration off Google Images or some image bank - if so, always check copyright implications. Even if there are no restrictions on the publication of such an image, it is good practice to run a caption crediting the source material.

My favourite post was `Time Stops at Shamli' on 26 June, not just because Ruskin Bond and I share the same publisher, Penguin, but because this was a book I had not read. Your interpretation of the story was simple and powerful and you drew us into your view of two lives in the hill station. Your latest post, `Shall we Dance', on 26 June just reinforces my impression that you are a bit like the gears on a mountain bike - you move very efficiently in a variety of conditions and at many different speeds, across a variety of terrains. I look forward to watching your blog as it progresses.

And if you'll permit me to deviate from your blog for a second, it's interesting that you hail from Pune, for two reasons. First, my mother was educated there, at St Mary's Convent. And second, some years ago, a young student from Pune sent me a news report for publication. I could not publish it, but I edited it and sent it back to him with a letter explaining certain things he needed to do when writing. He took the advice on board, brushed up his writing skills and his byline began to appear in my magazine fairly regularly while he was still a university student. Today, his name is well known in journalism and he never fails to acknowledge what a great help it was to get those two pages of unsolicited - and unexpected - advice from a total stranger.

Why is this relevant to you, Sam? Because a kid you help one day may turn out to be a famous writer too. It's all about passing on the knowledge - which is why I review other writers' blogs.