When you grow older, when the inspiration is dismissed, you depend more on technique. If you don’t have that then everything collapses.There is no question that you write much more slowly, with much more care, and perhaps with less inspiration. This is the great problem of the professional author.

—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
From 1985, interview with The New York Times

On Technique and the Quiet Ritual of Writing

Gabriel García Márquez once said that as a writer grows older, they must depend on technique—because if they don’t, everything collapses. For me, this truth doesn’t sound like a warning. It feels like a whisper from the craft itself—a reminder that even when fire flickers low, there remains the quiet ritual of writing.
Technique, in my world, is not structured in the commercial sense. It is how silence is placed between fragments, how a pause breaks open the truth of a moment, how a sentence chooses to shatter rather than flow—because sometimes, flow is a lie.
It is my way of protecting the rawness, not polishing it.
As I continue, I see that the wildness of youth—the fevered, involuntary flood of words—now leans on something quieter, more precise. Not colder. Just more aware. I no longer chase coherence for its own sake. I trace emotion. I trust the fracture. I allow detachment when illusion is gone. This is my technique—not born from manuals, but from listening inward.
Where logic ends, I let the mystic begin.
And so, with every chapter, every note, every incomplete prayer on the page—I write not from habit, but from the strange discipline of surrender.

—Pragya