Write Like No One is Watching

I use a fountain pen to write in my paper diary. I've come to appreciate the life cycle of each ink cartridge as a metric of progress and a vital chance to pause

Writing my diary on the balcony in Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi, in January 2023

A few weeks ago I wrote about my ritual of keeping a diary. Since I started writing my daily thoughts down on paper when I was 19, initially to combat poor mental health at university, my paper pages have become a sanctuary to retreat to. What started as an experimental coping mechanism steadily crystallised into my career as an author. Now I bring my diary everywhere with me, like a handyman carries his toolkit.

I was recently sitting on a balcony in the Hauz Khas village neighbourhood of South Delhi, a historic, trendy part of India’s majestic, chaotic capital. I’d rented an apartment for a few days as a base to write and visit friends. I chose my small, characterful Airbnb partially because of its promised sunset view over the famed Mughal ruins — a mosque, school and tomb dating back to the 14th century — and my romantic vision of working on a small desk overlooking them.

Between walks to get cups of chai, complete laps of the lake and navigate the shadowy paths of the deer park, where I stopped every so often to make notes in my A6 brown leather journal and work out on the pull up bars, I settled to make the most of my balcony perch.

My elbows rested on the stone slab which extended inward from the white railing. I gazed into the thick, smoggy sky as birds squawked between the trees. My main diary — a dark green Italian leather-bound journal of thick, lined, replaceable A4 pages — lay open beneath my chin as I scribbled in green ink with a fountain pen.

Back home in London I generally set a target of writing at least one page-per-day — sizeable enough to lose myself in the challenge of finding rhythm and mining unconscious ideas, yet manageable enough to avoid tedium. I rarely go over.

But in Delhi I wrote pages and pages of continuous prose — by far the most ever in one sitting. Analog triumphed; my laptop stayed closed. I mostly reflected upon the events of the previous 10 days, during which I’d traveled with my Dad across East Punjab, including a short stop in Ludhiana to find the house where he was born.

At some point during this writing marathon, which made my right hand ache as if I were writing essays in a timed school examination, the flow of green ink started to thin from my pen’s nib, as it always does when the cartridge is nearly empty. As I always do in response, I made it last as long as possible.

In doing so, every word becomes marginally more precious, then every letter, then every stroke. Soon there is too little to give. The inability to carry on smoothly outweighs the temptation to cling on to the past. So I stopped half-way down the page and sat back in my seat.

It was only then — the first time in five years of using a fountain pen — that I realised this moment’s cyclical significance in my writing practice.

Exercising and writing in Hauz Khas Deer Park, New Delhi, January 2023

When I’m in full flow, which is a state that I’ve had to train for, and work up towards, like a basketball player with hot hands, I stop thinking about the next word. It just happens. This is where creative magic is conjured, in an intuitive realm free of self-consciousness or fear-of-audience. I often think about advice I once heard spoken by the great author and journalist Gary Younge: you should write like you should dance — as if no one is watching.

But no matter how fluidly a piece of writing is developing, when an ink cartridge runs out mid-flow, there is no choice but to pause, remove hands from the page and zoom out from streams-of-consciousness towards the practicalities of carrying on.

The end of a cartridge is a sensory affair. I notice the unravelling visually, first: what might have been an attractive and full-bodied piece of handwriting gasps and splutters into a starving inscription, the dehydrated scrapes of nib on paper. Then I feel it in my hand physically, too, because each word becomes more difficult to press into existence.

On the balcony, I paused to stare down at my drying green-tinged half-page. I reached into my pen case and rummaged around to find the spare cartridge I knew I’d packed for the trip and hoped was still there. I removed the empty one and replaced it with a new one — this time dark blue.

Then as I started writing again, the negligible green lines of the previous words started thickening with new life and colour before flowing more wholly. For barely a sentence, my pen produced an alchemised dark turquoise colour. A meeting point of old and new. A transition from weak green to strong blue.

I was off again.

Now I often turn back to the pages I wrote that day, a sprawling collection of thoughts about my life back in London, and ideas for my next book about family and belonging and rich Punjabi food and memory.

Not only does its two-tone body look visually interesting and indulgent, like a freshly painted souped-up car, so that it becomes an artistic depiction, in itself. It has also taught me to lean on such milestones to take stock of my progress.

It’s a simple logic: the more colour transitions I produce in my diary, the more cartridges I’ve disposed of and started again with, the more I must have been writing without distraction — like no one is watching.

A handful of other pages from across the last few years of my diaries that faced the same fate are decorated with their own blend of colour — black to brown, green to black, dark blue to light blue. They help me to remember where I was, what I could see, and the state of creativity I’d achieved, before and after the momentary refuel.

The green-blue page I wrote in Delhi that day is a reminder of what pure writing looks and feels like — what’s possible with enough peace, momentum and focus.

It’s vital to invest in time and space away from normal life to make surer sense of it.

By Ciaran Thapar

The view from the balcony in Hauz Khas village, New Delhi, January 2023