Of Writing, Strangers and Stories

Every morning begins the same way. A blank page. A blinking cursor, and the silence of the world outside my window. It’s a ritual, this sitting down to write. But the struggle isn’t in sitting. It’s always in the waiting for words.

There are days when they don’t come. Days when the mind holds no water to draw from. Like an empty well. I sit, hands poised over the keys, hoping for some surge of creativity to wash over me, but it doesn’t.

Instead, the silence hangs thick in the room, punctuated only by the occasional sigh escaping my lips. I long for the words to flow, to dance on the page as they sometimes do and effortlessly arrange themselves into a story. But not today. Today they are stubborn and refuse to be shaped.

I find myself staring out the window, watching people pass by — each one carries at least a small bundle of stories I may never know. I wonder about them — the lives they lead, the secrets they carry and the days they survive.

Watching them from a mile away isn’t enough. Sometimes, I stop, I ask, and strangers, with their histories tucked away, begin to open up. These unexpected encounters lead to stories that take shape.

There’s something about a conversation with a stranger and the way their words unfurl without expectation. It keeps my curiosity intact. With each question, I am drawn to their world and the depths of their shallow smiles.

These people — the man selling chai at the corner stall, the woman with her groceries hurrying home before the rains, the old man waiting for his train with worn shoes, and the girl quietly sitting on a bench by the park. I listen to them, and in their words, I find pieces of the stories I long to tell. Sometimes it’s just a look, a gesture, a pause in conversation that opens a door to their world.

But even then, when I sit back at my desk, the challenge remains. Translating these moments, these fragments of lives, into words that feel true. There’s a balance between what is observed and what is imagined, and the tension between the two is where the story lies.

And so, each day, I write. Some days, it feels like the words are fighting me. They seem reluctant to surrender. But I write anyway. Because that is what writers do — we capture the fleeting, the ordinary, and try to make sense of it. One word, one sentence at a time, until the story reveals itself.