Fable Weavings

Music Magic: I'll Be Good

noreply@blogger.com (Pratima) — Tue, 19 May 2015 12:33:00 +0000

"I'll be good, I'll be good. For all of the times that I never could." I think it's trying to send me a message. Like how lazy I've been with my writing. Ugh.

So, I recently came across the song I'll Be Good by Jaymes Young. The melancholy feel combined with brilliant lyrics explains why I have it on repeat (also, it's great writing music). All I can say is this guy is exceptionally good. Enjoy :)

If you haven't heard of him yet (somehow), go check him out! NOW. What are you still doing here? Go go go. Shoo.

What I Learned From NaNoWriMo

noreply@blogger.com (Pratima) — Fri, 15 May 2015 18:54:00 +0000

Dear NaNo,

When I gave you (and later your more flexible incarnation CampNaNo) a chance, I thought as you and I would race down toward that haloed goal of 50K words, we would cross the finish line and ride into the sunset hand in hand together. Well, that’s before counting on the engine breakdown and innumerable flats after we’d barely begun our soon-to-be disastrous journey of doom.

Sadly NaNo, you and I were never meant to be. It’s you, it’s not me. And yes, this is my break-up notice.

Yours untruly etc. etc.

Remember that last time I said I was doing NaNoWriMo in an effort to finish my novel? Guess what? It didn't go well.

I'm not saying that NaNo is useless. In fact, it's a pretty neat tool for writers. For people who struggle to write without a deadline or some kind of do-or-die motivation, NaNo supplies that missing fuel to power them through an ugly first draft by pushing their dreaded inner editor off the bus and running them over. That's right, NaNo is like a freakin' coach ride where pesky things like inner editors, laundry and showering get shamelessly left behind.

The pros:

The word count stats are awesome. Especially when your word count is progressing and you get an estimate date of when you could finish that novel.
The writing community. You're not alone or writing in a vacuum. There are hundreds of thousands of writers across the world struggling as hard as you to pour 50K words out of them by the end of the month. You can add writing buddies to accompany you on this journey and offer some much needed support to each other and also keep track of others' word counts.
The endless writing resources. Throughout the entire experience, NaNo's superhero staff sends you links to various online resources to help you finish your novel or often, a much needed word of encouragement (otherwise known as sanity-saving moral support).
The weekly pep talks by pubbed writers sharing their experiences and advice (the BEST PART in my opinion!)

The cons:

The stress, man so much stress. (That's what broke NaNo for me after a few days of trying.)
The purpose of NaNo is to write a substantial word count really hard and really fast. Whether those words are actually usable or not is another kettle of fish.

From day one, I never met the daily word quota required to reach 50K by month end. And seeing my droopy stats made me well a tad depressed. Also, I feel that NaNo, while being a great tool for many writers, was rather counter-intuitive for me. The deadline didn't motivate me, it froze me. The faster the deadline approached, the more I would neglect my writing. As if I wanted to miss that deadline on purpose. So. In truth, it's me, it's not you NaNo. Or rather it's my lazy-ass brain.

I failed NaNo miserably but here’s my takeaway from the whole experience:

Get into the habit of writing on a regular basis. The keyword here is regular. It doesn't matter what you write or how much you write as long as you write. So, write. Exercise that damn writing muscle every single day if you can. Don't let it atrophy. It's damn hard to revive.
Stop editing your first draft so much. In other words, stop fighting your draft and trying to wrestle it into perfection from the start itself. You've got bigger issues at hand. Like finishing the story. Think of it this way: what if you reach the 75% point of a painstakingly edited first draft just to realize how much you hate it and decide to ditch it? In short, finish first and edit later. That way if you decide to ditch it, it will save you a ton of work and time by not editing the thing.
Keep track of your word count and how often you are writing. That's where my killer Excel sheet skills come in. I love word count stats. I do. I find this so motivating to see my overall word count ever-increasing. It means that I'm writing more and improving my craft at the same time. Because here's a secret guys, you get better with each word you write. The more you write, the more you learn about the craft. I know I'm a much better writer than I was say...three years back.
Don't say that you will attempt to write X number of words today. If you're anything like me, you'll try your damnedest to fall short of it and then feel like crap that you didn't meet your goal. Just start writing a scene. For fun. Get inside the scene and stop worrying about word count while you're writing. Even if I write X words, if it's X words of drivel, I get no sense of satisfaction or productivity from it.

Really, I cannot say it better than this awesome post by Erika D. Price.

Anyway, I've noticed that once NaNo was over, the draft of my novel saw a dramatic surge. I wrote so much more than I thought I could since a long time. Maybe right now, NaNo is not the tool for me and I just need to work at my own pace. Maybe, I'll try it again a few years down the road. When, I've learned to stick to deadlines. *evil laugh*

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." – Douglas Adams

And oh, isn't this quote just delightful?

It's Been Awhile...

noreply@blogger.com (Pratima) — Sat, 01 Nov 2014 19:31:00 +0000

I feel like I've abandoned this blog. I should be charged with gross blog neglect. So, where was I?

Right. I've been in a huge writing slump since the beginning of the year (since last year actually). And I've tried to motivate myself. Tried is the keyword here.

To start with, I created a "Working" notebook for my current novel (yes, it's the same one since I started this blog back in the mid-2012, so...gulp?) to generally organize my ideas about the novel and jot down new ideas as they occur to me, including bits and pieces of conversations between characters. It's helpful, it is. It helps me figure out the story little by little. But I still don't have a complete novel. So, my guess is it only works partially?

Then, I created a "Writing Journal" on my laptop to track my progress on said current novel . And I gave myself pep talks in each entry before each writing session. The pep talks didn't last very long and weren't very effective.

Next, I created a "Story Ideas" notebook, which works great for generating ideas, but not for THIS novel because it hates me (more on the aforementioned notebook in a future post - Sidenote: Dear Future Me, if you don't write that post, I will kick your ass.)

Finally, I created an "On Writing" notebook, which contains the greatest writing quotes EVER by authors I love, to motivate me to write. I know, I do love my notebooks (I know what you're thinking right now because I can read your mind). But again, maybe this isn't enough.

So, I have to ask myself: what in this world is enough?!

The answer may be simpler than all the stuff I've tried. It's simply sitting down and writing the damn book. I know this works. I know this works dammit.

And now, I'm actually doing NaNoWriMo in an effort to FINISH this godforsaken novel (I chickened out at the last minute and instead of starting something fresh and new, I decided to give said current novel a go because dammit).

I actually kind of know what happens next now that almost all the major characters (almost all) have made their spectacular (or not-so-spectacular) entry and I'm getting a handle on their motivation and stuff. So, onward (I actually typed "onword" before editing, so maybe that's a sign?).

It's just occurred to me that maybe what I've been trying to do with my notebooks is simply searching for inspiration and I know for a fact that inspiration lies in actually just doing the work (because it likes to find us working when it comes).

That's all for now, folks! I'll go and try to slightly raise my pathetic word count so far.

Music Magic: I See Fire

noreply@blogger.com (Pratima) — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 19:15:00 +0000

Last year in April (wow! it's been a year already), I wrote this post about listening to music while writing. Around that time I'd decided to stop doing both things at the same time because I felt the music was artificially influencing the stuff I was writing, and I wasn't comfortable with it.

But SO MUCH has changed since I wrote that post, including me as a person as well as my taste in music. And recently I've started listening to music again while writing. Without feeling that it's leading my story away from the path I'm hoping it will take.

In the past year, I discovered that my "writing music" needs to be the kind that makes me want to conjure worlds into being. That makes me dream relentlessly. And most importantly that suits the mood of the story I want to create.

And that is the kind of music I've been listening to lately. I hear that wordless writing music helps too (it actually does). I might be posting links to some of them from time to time.

Lately, the song I See Fire by Ed Sheeran won't leave me alone.

I've been humming it over and over (and currently have it on repeat). There's just something about it. It moves me, tugs at something inside of me. And indeed, I see fire.

It turns out that my alter ego* was right all along. She suggested that on the contrary the fact that music might influence my writing could be a good thing. And it is. I just had to start listening to the right kind of music.

* Last year, I met someone on the wilds of the Internet and tend to think of her as my alter ego because we sometimes get into each other's heads (that is not creepy at all). She's totally real and not a figment of my imagination. I just haven't met her in person, 'kay?

P.S. Sara, if you're reading this, please don't shoot me.

How To Not Plot A Novel

noreply@blogger.com (Pratima) — Sun, 30 Mar 2014 16:45:00 +0000

I’m basically writing a novel where I don’t know what happens next as I write each scene. For anyone writing seriously, this is terrifying. I touched on this before in this rambling post about finding the story.

Why don’t I just plot beforehand, you ask? Plotting just doesn’t work for me. I attempted it painstakingly before (on a very different version of the current novel) and the storyline in question became so contrived and ARTIFICIAL that I just lost interest in it and chucked it. I don't regret the wasted words though, because they taught me how not to write this story.

As hard as I try to plot my current novel from start to finish or even the next few chapters, it just WON’T HAPPEN. But wait. Stop. Do I need to plot at all?

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” – E.L. Doctorow

Here’s the thing. I find that plot germinates from scene to scene. This means that with each decision I make on the page concerning my characters and important story elements, this impacts how the story will unfold later on.

Though I don’t outline my chapters before writing them, I do outline them afterwards so I can keep track of what has happened so far in the story. An outline is just life-saving when you temporarily stop working on a story to focus on something else and then decide to come back to it months later.

Also, when I’m in the middle of writing a scene, I tend to get ideas of things that may happen in future scenes and I make a point to jot them down so I can explore them later. And Mr. Picasso makes a very important point here:

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” – Pablo Picasso

When I’m working on a story, I’m always thinking about it even during the time when I’m not actually writing the story. And this is when I tend to get revelations about so-and-so character and discover plot holes.

Sometimes, I find that there are several possible pathways down which my story could develop. In that case, I try out a couple of experimental versions (even if there is a chance that I might not keep it) until I find one that works for the story. And I never know where each version could lead me, but all I know is that it could lead me to someplace I never expected to find (Sparta! Or you know. Someplace cool).

Even discarded scenes are not a complete waste of words (and time) because maybe there are elements, bits of descriptions or even entire characters that might be worth keeping. In fact, an important character from my current novel emerged that way (from an experimental storyline that I’m not keeping).

At some point, it occurred to me that the only way to finish writing this book is to keep writing it until it's done.

Recently, I came across invaluable writing advice by the brilliant Timothy Hallinan and apparently, he doesn't outline.

Also, here's a hilarious post about writing a novel: The Nine Stages of Dating a Novel by Tahereh Mafi (a guest post on Nathan Bransford's blog).

P.S. I'm in the grovelling stage right now. Hundred more Word pages to go, before I finish some semblance of a first draft (or should I say "experimental" draft? O_o).

A Touch Of Southern India

noreply@blogger.com (Pratima) — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 11:09:00 +0000

So, I recently went to India for the first time. Finally! Because I'd been wanting to visit for a while now. This time round, I toured just the southern part of the country because India is just so huge that you can't explore it all in one go, especially in just 10 days!

When you are a writer, traveling is a good way to resource yourself and recharge your batteries. And of course, it's really just an excuse to wander around cluelessly and run into countless surprises. But I survived!

Surprises are part of the deal and sometimes, you just have to take it in stride (as long as you don't die, it's all good, right?). The food and the cultural experience were amazing for one. Some of the people I met were kind beyond my wildest expectations. And all in all, I had a good time.

Unexpectedly, I even learned how to ride a canoe!! Since my friend and I had zero navigation skills, I'll attribute the feat of getting the thing to move without overturning to our irrational fear of taking a dip in the filthy waterway and drowning in muck. See, fear is the ultimate motivator in situations like this. Anyway.

If there is one thing you can't accuse the south of India of, it's blandness. It is filled to the brim with strange and wondrous things...and colors! Here are a few glimpses...

The Right Word

noreply@blogger.com (Pratima) — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 20:55:00 +0000

We, as writers, sometimes lose so much time looking for the right word. Most of the time, it is right under our unsuspecting noses. Sometimes, we look down on it because it looks too simple and we are ashamed to use it because we think "we can do better". But that's because we forget that there is beauty in the humblest of words. I just wanted to share a couple of quotes to begin this new year.

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." – Mark Twain

"Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful. If you hesitate and cogitate, you will come up with another word – of course you will, there’s always another word – but it probably won’t be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean." – Stephen King (On Writing)

So, on this day, let us make the solemn promise to leave our shame behind and dare to use the right word. And speaking of lightning bugs, here's a short story by Sara Seay.

An Ordinary Black Cat (Short Story)

noreply@blogger.com (Pratima) — Sat, 19 Oct 2013 19:30:00 +0000

As promised, I'm posting a short story to battle my fear.

I saw a black cat one day and this short story sprouted from my overactive mind.

The first time I saw the cat, I was walking back home from work. I wouldn't have paid any particular attention to it, if not for its black velvet fur and bright yellow eyes. It was not often I saw a cat like that. The kind of cat featured in folktales about witches or the devil. The kind of cat that people believed brought bad luck if it crossed the street in front of them. That kind of cat.

But truth to tell, I thought it was probably just an ordinary black cat.

It sat still on the lawn of someone’s front yard with its head turned the other way, ignoring the people who walked by, just a few feet away. After that one time, I never expected to see it again.

However, when I stepped out of the house to get the mail on the very next day, there it was. Almost as if waiting for me to notice it. It crossed the front yard and paused to look at me for the briefest second, before it was on its way.

And then I started seeing it at the most unexpected times. I would gaze out of the kitchen window in the middle of doing the dishes and it would return my gaze from the backyard, before jumping the wooden fence to the other side. I would randomly look out of my bedroom window and see it perched on the charcoal-tiled roof of my neighbor’s house and it would turn its head to look at me at that exact moment.

The days stumbled after each other. It became a little game of sorts. I would spot it and it would pause to acknowledge me, before running along. Not a day passed without our unspoken exchange.

Until one day, a full fortnight after I’d first seen it, it came treading along as I stepped out on the front porch on my way out. This time it stopped and sat a couple of yards away from me, waiting like it wanted to tell me something. Unfortunately, I didn’t speak cat.

It turned out, I wouldn’t need to. I’d barely locked the front door when I accidentally dropped my keys. I cursed, bending to retrieve them. But the cat swooped over them and scooted away in a flash.

“What the–?” I turned around to find the cat standing several yards away, with my keys firmly held in its maw. I cursed again.

This was new. I tucked long wisps of my golden brown hair behind my ear, muttering to myself, “Today is not your day, Blake.” They hadn’t called me Calamity Blake back in college for nothing, I decided.

Holding out my fingers, I eased toward it carefully and crooned. “Here Kitty Kitty, gimme my keys. I’ll give you a bowl of milk when I get back. Promise.”

To my growing alarm, it treaded a few steps further away and threw me this look over its shoulder. “Come and get them,” its yellow eyes seemed to say. A challenge.

I groaned. The last thing I needed was for the cat to make off with my keys for whatever reason. I wondered what I would tell my boss. “Sorry, I’m late. A black cat ran away with my keys.” Oh, man.

The more I tried to get closer to it, the further away it ran from me and soon I found myself jogging along behind it, feeling more than a little silly. I noticed that it would stop ever so slightly to check on me from time to time as if to make sure I was still following.

I chased the black cat all the way through the suburban neighborhood where I lived until we reached a memorial park, some fifteen minutes' walk away from my house. At that point, I was out of breath and patience.

“Just give me my goddamn keys,” I hissed, when the cat finally stopped next to an old fountain in the middle of a cedar grove. It settled back on its haunches, dropped the keys and fixed me with innocent golden eyes.

Breathing a sigh of relief, I snatched my keys back, before it could change its mind. “What is up with you?”

It simply gave a meow in response. I sighed. Silly old me. What had I expected? For it to grant me three wishes like some sort of magic cat from the fairy tales of days long forgotten?

Part of me was disappointed. But the other part of me was also giddy. This entire crazy episode had brought me back to the carefree days of my childhood when I didn’t feel afraid to wander under bushes to see what hid under there or climb a chain-link fence just to see if I could.

Glancing around, I wasn’t sure where exactly in the park we were, for having never wandered in this area before. My gaze stopped on the fountain. Green slime coated its gray stone and the trickle of running water was clearly missing. It was obvious that the fountain had known neglect for quite some time now.

I noticed the cat’s gaze was now fixed on the fountain and this was when I saw the inscription that was carefully engraved in the rim of the fountain’s lower tier.

Kneeling down, I crawled forward to get a closer look at the inscription, which turned out to be written in French – I knew all that French I'd learned in college would pay off one day.

“La Fontaine des Souhaits,” it read. The Wishing Fountain. And below in smaller letters, “Quel est le desir de votre coeur?” What is your heart’s desire?

A wistful smile tugged at my lips. Such a silly whimsical question. What was it that I wished for more than anything else? I’d always dreamed of travel and as yet unlived adventures, of going wherever it pleased me to without a care for the world.

I ran a finger over the question and sighed. It wasn’t as if I could leave everything and just go off to wander around the world to my heart’s content. My hand dropped to my side and just at that moment a third line appeared.

I blinked and suddenly my temple began to pound. I was pretty sure the third line hadn’t been there a second ago. I raised a hand to my throbbing temple and made out the bonus words.

“Que le desir du coeur soit le votre pour le prix d’une larme et d’un sourire,” it read. Your heart’s desire shall be yours for the price of a tear and a smile.

I frowned. What did it mean? I had a bad feeling about this. I turned to the cat then and saw a single tear roll down its furry face. That was the last thing I saw before I blacked out.

###
When I came to again, I found my surroundings blurred. It took me a moment to get my bearings. My vision cleared somewhat and I raised my head to find the fountain looming above me. I must have fallen down, I realized.

“I owe you one.” It was my voice, except I hadn’t spoken.

I turned my head in the direction of the voice – my voice – to find…myself, dressed as I’d been this morning in a white-cotton shirt, skinny jeans and ankle boots. The image of me stared back at me, dark eyes dancing with mischief and rose-colored lips stretched in a mocking smile.

I tried to speak, but all that came out of my throat was a strangled wail. An inhuman one. I tried to get up and crawl toward her, struggling to control shaky muscles and legs that were not mine to begin with. I felt the hairs on my body rise. Not human hairs. Fur. Black fur.

And paws. And a tail. And whiskers.

The young woman that had been me gave a full-throated laugh then, the sound rich with joy born from newfound freedom.

“Thanks Caitlin Blake…wait, no that’s not right…I meant, thanks Kitty,” she purred and then turned my own back on myself, tossing my long golden brown hair over my shoulder.

Horror bloomed in me as I watched her – through the golden eyes of a black cat – walk away in my body, dressed in my clothes, wearing my face and my smile. And off she was to live my life, bearing my name. Caitlin Blake. All for the price of a smile and a tear.

###
As for me, I’d gotten my wish to wander freely without a care for the world. And ever since, I may or may not have escaped the cages of my heart’s desire. Maybe I’ll even tell you one day.

If you ever come across a black cat with golden eyes, don’t be afraid. Chances are it’s just an ordinary black cat. But take care, for the heart is a fickle thing and the path to its most secret desire is winding and filled with wishes you might live to regret.

Now tell me, what is your heart’s desire?

The name Caitlin supposedly means "pure" and Blake means being "dark haired/complexioned". I originally mistakenly thought Blake meant "black". I wanted the name of the main character to mean something along the lines of "pure black", but oh well, you can't always get what you want, right?

And the name Blake is also a reference to the English poet William Blake. I was never into poetry, but for some reason, I connected with some of his poems in the Songs of Innocence and Experience.

Oh and I just love this quote from one of William Blake's poems:

For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

My Fear Of Failure

noreply@blogger.com (Pratima) — Sat, 19 Oct 2013 17:50:00 +0000

I'm an idiot. I just had this sudden realization around an hour and a half back. Today I've had this big uneasy feeling. Last night (or rather very early this morning) I went to sleep uneasy. I woke up uneasy. I spent the day uneasy.

I went for a run after I woke up today morning (something I NEVER do), because I felt I needed it. I thought maybe it would clear my mind. I woke up one hour before my alarm clock, despite clocking in less than six hours of sleep.

I couldn't put my finger on what was up with me the whole day until that light bulb moment. I know I've been avoiding writing for the past few days. Always making excuses. My resolution to write everyday if only for ten minutes hasn't lasted more than a few days. I've been ignoring it. Pretending it doesn't exist because I told myself I have more pressing matters at hand. Then I stopped and asked myself: what the hell am I doing?

Then, more questions. What is my passion? The written word - writing and reading! But why am I doing everything I can to avoid those two things? Am I lying to myself? Maybe my true passion is something else. Then, I thought: no. These two things have always brought me joy. What changed then?

My perspective, I think. Before last year, I never thought of these two things as anything less than an active hobby and they were nothing but pure pleasure. Writing was something that I was doing for myself. From the minute I started to consider writing as a possible career, it increasingly became a chore. Why?

Because there was this new pressure to succeed (pressure that wasn't there before - pressure I put on myself, I have to add). However, the pressure kept rising and rising. It rose so much in fact that writing became so stressful at one point last year that I had to stop for more than two months before I gathered myself again.

I think this whole situation originates from this: my fear of failure. As difficult as it is to admit to myself, I'm afraid to fail at writing, so I constantly delay writing and even when I do write, I feel that it's not good enough. But by losing so much time being scared, I'm losing the opportunity to follow my dreams and my heart. The thing is, I realize I'm the only person holding myself back. And by doing so, I'm whittling my life away little by little. I'm sabotaging myself, like someone I know likes to say.

I watched a great movie today. It basically had this one line that I find so liberating: "Don't run after success. Run after excellence. Then, success will come running after you on its own."

So, I've decided I'm going to be afraid no more. Even if I fail at writing, at least I will still have the satisfaction of knowing that I gave it my everything. And I'm determined to make writing stories fun again. Even if no one wants to read them.

And as Robin Sharma says in this blog post, the antidote to fear is action. I'm going to post my next short story. It's not perfect. It's not even pretty (and I'm pretty sure it's badly written). But it is what it is. And by posting this short story, I will be battling my fear actively.

Story Magic

noreply@blogger.com (Pratima) — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 20:01:00 +0000

When you’ve been writing a particular story for a very long time, sometimes it’s hard to continue. So hard in fact, that even before you sit down to type, you want to drop it and do anything else. ANYTHING ELSE. In short, it becomes an absolute chore to continue.

I think writing is so hard because we pour so much of ourselves into it and sometimes, a story will only take you so far before the only thing left to do is to set it aside and carry on to the next story. But eventually there comes a story that won’t leave you alone no matter what. It keeps nagging at you to write it, to finish it. But you’re terrified to write it because you’re afraid you’ll botch it up (and when I say "you", I mean me). And it lies lingering there like that ghost you pretend you don't see.

So, how do you find your way back to the magic that drew you to this story again? Is it even possible, you ask?

You daydream. You let your mind wander about the story ideas and its characters. You imagine the scenes that you were once beyond excited to write. And you keep feeding your imagination with stories of all kinds by reading as much as you can.

But most importantly, I think spending regular time with the story becomes crucial. Stories, like relationships, are high-maintenance because when you neglect them, you start to lose them, their threads and what made them special to you in the first place.

Schedule regular alone time with the story if only to stare off into blank space and daydream about it like it’s some long-lost crush. Hopefully, you will be flooded with a rain of ideas (to self: that's a horrible metaphor) or you know just think of a couple of things that can help move it forward.

My Imagination Is A Hungry Beast

noreply@blogger.com (Pratima) — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 20:26:00 +0000

Signs of summer have been popping up where I live.

Peach Blossoms

Lately, I've been in a bit of a reading and writing slump. I'm having trouble focusing on the things I most love to do. And it’s not even because of lack of time. I just don’t seem to get much done because of…laziness, I guess? More accurately, I feel like a puddle of inertia and don’t know how to get myself out of this state.

But with the beginning of summer here, I feel like I really need to get a certain story (the one I've been writing since forever) done because I've got just about three months before the end of the year (which is kind of my self-imposed deadline).

I don’t know why this is so hard, because I've done it before when I really needed to get something done. I think I'm overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work that needs to be done before it becomes the story it’s meant to be.

I really need to start looking at it in smaller pieces rather than one big daunting piece of work. I need to take it one page at a time, one day at a time and not stress myself with whether I’ll be able to finish or not.

Above all, I think that at the crux of my problem lies one specific thing: I’m not reading enough. Anyway, not like I used to in the past. I find that when I don’t make time to read regularly, my creative inspiration starts to dwindle super fast and I can’t get any decent writing done.

Stories are fodder for a writer’s imagination really (at least, that’s my take on it). And my imagination is a hungry beast (and right now, it's about to pass out of hunger - I'm trying to revive it). If I don’t feed it regularly with stories, I find that it refuses to carry me anywhere. Is your imagination a hungry beast?

So, the plan for this summer is to set aside reading and writing time every day. I’m going to try this and see how it works out.

Finding The Story

noreply@blogger.com (Pratima) — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 19:48:00 +0000

Stories are found things...relics...

Once upon a time, I started a novel, dumped it after sometime and started all over again...only to dump the second version (pretty much permanently) and rewind to the original version. Why? Because the original story elements wouldn't leave me alone. Why again? Because there is a reason behind this (which I didn't realize only until recently).

After returning to the original version of said novel, I've been struggling A LOT with it from Chapter 4 onward. Let me decrypt that. By "struggling", I mean that I wrote scenes that did practically nothing to move the story forward, only to chop them off, backtrack and then do it all over again.

It's like doing a step dance from writer-hell (wait, a céilidh dance?), where I go two steps forward but one and a half steps backward. Then after a while of doing that dance, I took a step back from the novel and asked myself: what the hell* are you trying to do? And this was when I had something of a light bulb moment: I'm trying to find the story.

More specifically, I'm trying to find the true form of the story, not just a phantom of that story. And for that, I have to be willing to explore uncertain avenues and dig in unlikely places.

As of now, I don't know the whole story. I know what kind of story I want to tell (or at least I think I know) and I know some of its core elements. But I don't know all of its core elements. And this is what I'm really trying to do: find the missing elements so that I can connect the dots and draw the whole picture.

And lo and behold, the brilliant Laini Taylor just did a fantastic post about her writing process, which she likens to a dance between the known and the unknown. This woman. She must be divine or something. In her post, she talks about how she doesn't outline her stories before writing them simply because she doesn't know what's going to happen beforehand and she also mentions the terror that accompanies her process.

And her post speaks to me, because that thing about the outline, it's the same thing for me. Like her, I'm unable to outline future chapters in my current novel, because I don't know what's going to happen before I write them. That said, in Story Idea No. 2, I do know what's going to happen in general, but I don't know how most of it is going to happen (until I write it). Kind of the same thing really. I find it absolutely, mind-numbingly terrifying. I believe "scared to death" is the right expression for this.

For my current novel, I have a beginning, I have an idea of what happens in the end, but the thing is, I have no clear idea of how to get from that beginning till the end (again, like Laini). I wish the path from the beginning to the end was straightforward and effortless like standing on the moving passenger walkway at the airport and letting it carry you to the end. But, it's not. Instead, it's a winding cobblestone path filled with potholes and brambles (I imagine tentacles rising from those holes and trying to grab my legs).

But the thing is, I'm not sure I need a predefined chapter outline anymore, because I've started doing something else. I'm working through the story. Granted, at a snail's pace, but I'm working it out. I've kept a notebook, where I write bits and pieces from other characters' point of views, where I play with lots of ideas and generally ask myself a lot of questions, many of them of the "what-if" variety. And it helps. It. Really. Helps.

Another thing is, Stephen King mentions in his writing memoir that he believes stories are "found things, like fossils in the ground" or "relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world" and that the job of the writer is just to uncover them as entirely as possible. And I think I'm starting to get what he means. Through experience.

By experience, I mean short stories (which I recently started to write again). When I get a short story idea, I usually know the beginning and have an idea about the end but never know what happens in the middle. And when I write a short story, I usually get stuck in the middle until I remind myself of two things: (a) there are no defined rules and (b) anything can happen. And then I just walk through it and surprise myself with how the story resolves itself to finally bring me to the blissful (oh, so blissful) end.

Which brings me back to Stephen King. In his memoir, he says to just let the story unfold in an organic way and let the characters do their thing and trust that the story will end up somewhere because plotting is just us writers being control freaks. I sure don't plot short stories and they end up just fine by my standards (hey as long as I'm happy with them, I think that's all that counts). So why not trust the story in my novel to...unfold?

I think writing the first draft is about finding the story. It's about getting down everything that you "see" through your mind's eye. I may not keep all of it in the final draft and that is perfectly okay. Perfecting the story and fleshing it out and taking out the bits that don't make sense (and doing the million different things that you need to do to get it in shape) can be done in rewrites. That's what rewrites are for. I'm basically telling myself: stop being such a bloody control freak and just write the damn thing. Because I believe that stories reveal themselves during the writing itself and not before.

One more thing I've learnt is that when you tell a story (however long or short), listen to your gut**. Especially when it's screaming at you that this is the WRONG way, because your gut is always right (well, nearly always) and it probably is the wrong way.

Above all, I've come to realize that storytelling should always be about FUN. Always. You know this thing where you like telling stories because it's fun. And not a chore you have to slog through. The stories that excite me the most are the ones where I'm writing them because I'm dying to know what happens in them as a reader. And as Stephen King points out in his memoir (because he's badass like that), as a story's writer, we are also it's first reader***.

So, I think I should be writing those stories. The ones where I just want to know what happens next. And the novel I'm currently writing ranks number one in that imaginary list. Though sometimes, I feel like I'm soldiering my way through a battlefield, amidst explosions and gunfire and billowing smoke and war cries.

I will leave you with this quote by some wise guy (okay, Mark goddamn Twain) and it's in short what I'm trying to do:

"There are some books which refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written - it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself." – Mark Twain

* where the term "hell" is a substitute for unpalatable profanity
** when I say listen to your gut, I don't mean listen to your doubts because while your gut may be divine, your doubts are not
*** this is not a verbatim quote

The Corridor Of Broken Dreams (Short Story)

noreply@blogger.com (Pratima) — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 21:53:00 +0000

Following The Burden of Expectations post, here's a short story that's sort of inspired by it and other things. Life is too short to waste it away in a miserable cubicle job. I needed a well-deserved kick in the butt from the universe to remind me of that. Also, this is my first short story after a very long time. I'd forgotten how much fun they can be.

Credit: The Corridor by Adikko (from deviantART)

I push the bar-handles of the double doors open and enter the school building. A long hallway stretches out ahead of me endlessly. There is no one in sight. But I can see them. I can hear their voices in my head. Voices that belong to the past. I start walking down the hallway. Its lockers are full of memories of countless events involving the countless teenagers who used them.

Locker 137. This is where my first boyfriend asked me out. This is also where I had my first kiss.

I keep walking. Locker 156. This is where we broke up. My first ex-boyfriend's locker.

Locker 301. This is where I poured my eyes out to my then best friend and told her I was so done with boys. It was stupid to fawn over them anyway. They were selfish beings who put themselves first.

Two months later, I had no memory of saying that, as I kissed my next boyfriend at Locker 307.

The so-called significant events in the life of an ordinary teenager.

It’s not just the lockers, but the hallway itself. I remember thinking about being a vet or sometimes a lawyer or a fighter pilot amidst the whirlwind of crazy activity that was my life.

Once I had dreams here, big dreams. I was always making plans, imagining what my life would be like when I finally grew up. I would get a college degree in law or maybe veterinary science and then open my own practice. Or I would enroll in the armed forces and train as a fighter pilot, before going off to save the world. At the time, I couldn’t wait to grow up and get a “real” life.

Now, as I walk through these very hallways, I wonder what happened to those dreams. Here I am, several years down the line, struggling through adulthood with a miserable cubicle job. I am so far from the romanticized idea of adulthood that I dreamed of so long ago.

Now, I wish I could go back to that time and maybe take another turn along the way and end up in a completely different life.

Maybe it was a mistake to come back here and see whether the good ole school was still the way I remembered it. I thought it would bring only memories and a little nostalgia of a happier time, but it brought back so much more than I expected. It brought back the dreams that never were.

As I stand in the corridor of broken dreams, a sense of absolute hopelessness engulfs me and I feel like breaking down and crying and giving up. My steps start to falter and my breaths come in shorter spurts. I stop and stand there in the middle of the hallway.

“Will you catch me if I fall?” a clear voice says then. I take a deep breath and catch hold of myself before I fall. I know who it is. It’s dreamy sixteen-year-old me. I’d once asked my then boyfriend that. And he’d just laughed. That was when I said that if I did fall, he’d better catch me because I would get back up and punch him in the face if he didn’t.

Now, I realize that there was no question about whether he caught me or not if I fell. It didn’t matter because even if I fell, I knew with absolute certainty that I would get back up on my own anyway. Whatever happened to getting back up and trying over and over again, until I made it?

And maybe that’s what it takes. A trip down the corridor of broken dreams to remind myself that it’s not too late, that I can still get back up. I did it over and over again in high school, didn’t I? When a boyfriend dumped me, I mended my heart back from the broken pieces and tried again. When I almost flunked Spanish class, I studied hard for a month and got a better grade. Then, why is it any different this time round?

As long as my heart is still beating, I can turn my life around and end up in the place I want. And this sudden realization gives me a glimmer of hope. Hope that everything is going to be just fine. I just have to get back up.

Hope...(and My First Dear Author Critique)

noreply@blogger.com (Pratima) — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 20:40:00 +0000

Hope is what fuels my writing. Aside from writing because I just plain love writing, I write because I hope to write my stories the way they deserve to be written. I write because I hope that this was what I was put on this earth to do. And I write because I hope that someone somewhere in the world will like what I write.

So. I wrote a chunk of a novel last year (with the rather unimpressive title of "Death Wish") and decided to submit its first page to Dear Author's First Page critique feature in February to see if there was any hope in my writing. I totally forgot about it until I got an email yesterday saying that my first page was up for critique! The community over at Dear Author have taken me to task (wonderfully, might I say) here: http://dearauthor.com/features/first-page-features/first-page-death-wish/

I am truly grateful to Dear Author and its community for giving me hope. I couldn't ask for more.

Oh, and here's my first page for the Dear Author submission (and it's not the most brilliant thing):

I rolled my shoulders and assessed the wraith in front of me. The thing howled like an enraged gust of wind. It was trapped within the circle of containment I’d just cast. There were only two ways it could go now. Back from wherever it came from or through my Rifter.

The Rifter’s blade was a fine curved one, similar to that of a Japanese Tachi, except that it was made of tempered glass, shorter and über light. If I were to whack a human being with it they’d probably sucker-punch me after snapping it like a twig. But on a wraith? It was lethal. If I so much as touched the essence of the wraith with its blade, it would turn into a pile of ash-gray powder. Literally.

The wraith was floating too high up, six feet off the ground. Mind you, at five-feet-six, even if I jumped, I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of attaining its glowing essence, which was around where its top would be if it were tangible. From afar, the wraith looked like a ball of shiny with a spider’s web thrown on it. Up close and personal, the wraith’s body – if I could call it that – had a quietly smoldering quality to it, undulating like a cape made of fine silvery smoke from burning incense. Deadly smoke.

Some unlucky people confused them with benign spirits and as a result their souls now belonged to the dark prince of the Down & Under, good old Luc himself. A wraith literally sucked the soul out of you, given half a chance.

I blew at my bangs. Okay, let’s do this. Focus. That was the first step, Wes had taught me – that’s my godfather, but more on him later, after I made non-sniffable cocaine out of my spirit friend here. I took a deep breath, shut my eyes and started counting. One. Two. Three. And so on. I could feel the wraith drifting downward, closer to me. I paid it no mind. Now, imagine. Thin tendrils of airy white smoke escaped from my finger tips in my mind’s eye. I waited for the smoke to condense into the thicker texture of morning mist in a forest. I was ready. My eyes snapped open. Finally, channel.

My fingers sent a blast of cold air toward the wraith. The eerie air surrounded the thing and drew it closer to me, like a mini-tornado would. That’s what I loved about Aero. Closer. My other hand held the Rifter’s cloth-bound wooden grip, neither too tight nor too loose. Still closer. The coarse black cloth was good for clammy palms, I’d been told – not that my hands were clammy. Okay, maybe just a tiny bit. Now. I went at the wraith with all I had, running the Rifter’s blade through it.

I missed, barely grazing its intangible mid-section. Dammit. Timing was everything in spellcasting. As the Aero effect faded, the wraith went up and howled, as if the blade had singed it. It had. Then the wraith came back at me with a vengeance. I dodged past it and pivoted to face it. My gaze glued on it, I retreated, adopting a defensive stance.

I closed my eyes for a few, held out my fingers and sent another blast of cold air – this one more powerful. The air began to take shape, slowly etching into a distinct form. A falcon.

The Burden Of Expectations

noreply@blogger.com (Pratima) — Mon, 27 May 2013 18:07:00 +0000

So, I've been listening to Disparate Youth by Santigold on and off for quite some time now.

And obsessing over a few lyrics. The ones that go like:
“Another roadblock in our way.”
“They wanna sit and watch you wither.”
“A life worth fighting for.”

Note: What I’m about to say is just my personal opinion. And probably unwanted advice of sorts. Take it or leave it.

The thing is that song has brought back something I realized fully in a single moment of clarity a few years ago and it’s something I've been wanting to get off my chest for quite some time now.

It’s about expectations and the burden that comes with them. People (your parents, your acquaintances and society in general) expect you to make something out of your life, from the day you are born. Even if no one tells you about it straightaway, it’s there – you can feel it and you can see it in the eyes of the people around you. Unless you are a child prodigy or a pop star who makes it big in your teens or simply have incredibly open-minded parents, the commonly approved standard for meeting those expectations or alternately “success” generally involves studying hard enough, getting decent grades, going to college, graduating and finally getting a job. Not any job at that, a “real” job that pays the bills and gets you a decent place to live in.

But what if you don’t want to get a “real” job? What if your dream is to make something else out of your life? To become someone else who’s not a robot doing that miserable cubicle job? What if you don’t want to go down the beaten path but make up your own? And oh horrors of horrors, what happens if you don’t conform to the expectations that others have of you?

So, my question is: Do expectations really matter?

Right now, general society has evolved in a state that’s clearly performance-obsessed. Everything is about performance. Performance metrics have been developed to measure practically anything. Productivity percentage. Grades. Performance ratings. How high can you jump? How fast can you run? How high are your IQ test scores?

From day one, parents push their kids to try harder, faster and better. They want their kids to perform, to be the very best version of themselves. And that’s not a bad thing. Parents want their kids to succeed because they love their kids, they care about them. But what they don’t realize is that they are setting the burden of expectations on the breakable shoulders of their kids. Exactly how much can those shoulders take, before they cave under the burden? My guess is that it varies because each one person is different.

In the long run that kind of burden can take its toll on you and make you utterly miserable, especially when you find yourself struggling to fulfill them, simply for the reason that you are doing something else rather than what you really want to be doing because you want to meet the expectations of other people (mostly people you care about) and you’re scared to death of disappointing them. And this causes you to stifle your dreams and part of yourself in the process.

And the pressure, the agonizing pressure that comes with those expectations can get suffocating and at times, pretty damn close to unbearable. I don’t know if you’ve felt it, but I’ve definitely felt it.

The reality of today’s performance-obsessed society is that it puts enormous pressure on you to perform and ultimately to succeed. You can’t perform? You’re a failure.

It’s tragic really. The same society that wants us to succeed is stifling our dreams and personal aspirations in its drive for us to meet its crushing expectations. This is a damaged society that we’ve built for ourselves and sometimes, I just wish it would give us the space we need to just…breathe and really be ourselves instead of who it wants us to be.

It’s really where a particular line in that song hit home to me: “They wanna sit and watch you wither.” In some ways, it’s true and as unintentional as it may be or not, that’s what other people really do.

Let’s face it: this is a society with practically zero tolerance for failure. There are people who condemn you the minute you show a hint of failure in whatever you do. And it’s because of this, that people who have dreams of a different life are told repeatedly to face the “realities of life” and get a “real” job and a “real” life.

Well, here’s a reality check people and I’m going to be really really mean here. Someday, you are going to DIE and though you don’t know when it might happen, be sure of one thing: it will happen (that is unless you’re immortal and you glitter in sunlight). It could be tomorrow, it could be in eighty years. Point is you don’t know how much time you have left. Do you want to spend that time living up to the ridiculous expectations of a damaged society or do you want to spend that time doing something that actually makes you happy?

I’m not telling you to screw getting a job and live on dreams and dewdrops. By all means, go get a “real” job if it pays the bills and puts a roof over your head – after all, most of us have responsibilities to fulfill towards someone or the other. But make sure that you can find enough time to fulfill your dreams and that this “real” job doesn’t drive you miserable at the end of the day.

Or even better, find a “real” job that you love. You dream of becoming a veterinarian? Quit law school or that miserable law practice and become a veterinarian because you don’t absolutely need to follow in the footsteps of that high-flier judge daddy of yours. Trust me, you have nothing to prove to the world. Because the world doesn't care.

Dreams matter and they are extremely important. But let me get something straight first. If you want to realize your dream, don’t just sit around doing nothing and wait for destiny to strike. To fulfill your dreams, you have to errr, you know…maybe do something about it (duh). You are an accountant who secretly wants to be a painter? Get out that paintbrush and slap some color on that canvas after you get home from work. You want to be a writer? Don’t wait for that non-existent and completely overrated muse to land on your shoulder (you’re going to be waiting a LONG time) and start scribbling away.

Ultimately, you are responsible for your own happiness and success and above all, you are responsible for making your own destiny. No one else can make your dreams come true, except you. So, go get it, whatever it is you want to do and SCREW EXPECTATIONS. Because ask yourself this: if you end up completely miserable trying to live up to the expectations of others (including your loved ones), are those people responsible for this? No, of course not. Because it's your life after all. So, own it and make all the hard decisions.

And believe me, there are people out there who expect you to fail, when you’re trying to do something different. But no matter that people tell you that you can’t do it, don’t you quit. Don’t. You. Dare. Quit. Because there’s nothing worse you can do than giving up on your dreams. That’s true failure and not the inability to meet other people’s expectations.

And what about your own expectations? Expectations are going to screw you ten ways to Sunday if you let them get to you, especially your own. So, keep your head down, work quietly and steadily toward realizing your dreams, do the best you can and expect nothing. Shoot for the moon, by all means, but EXPECT NOTHING and you might be surprised at what the universe conspires to send your way.

From my own personal experience, whenever I expected something, I fell short of my own expectations and it crushed me. But whenever I gave up expecting something and just did what I had to do to get there, I went so much further than I could have ever dreamed of.

So, what if you fail? I think it is okay to fail sometimes. And I wish someone would have told me that when I was just starting out in this world as a kid. It’s okay to fail and get back up and try again and again until you make it. Remember learning to ride a bicycle? Failure is after all, a very essential part of learning.

"Ever try. Ever fail. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." – Samuel Beckett

And, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” – Albert Einstein

If the tried-and-tested path doesn’t work for you, dare to do things differently. Dare to be different. Just because everyone you know is following the beaten path doesn’t mean you absolutely have to follow it too. You can make up your own path.

Somebody once told me that swimming with the flow is so much easier than swimming against the current, but then again swimming with the flow might eventually lead you toward the rapids where you can so easily drown.

If there’s something that I want you take away from this post, it’s this: don’t live the life that others expect you to live, instead live the life that you want to live. After all, isn’t it “a life worth fighting for”? At the end of the day, it’s about not having any major regrets when the day comes for you to die, as it inevitably will (well, that’s what they say about death and taxes, dontchaknow?).

Also this video, where badass author Maggie Stiefvater shares her insight about writing life and stuff including how being a bad teen helped her get where she is now).

And if you have more time to kill, here is Maggie’s TEDxNASA talk (it really got to me especially when she talks about a visit to an “alternative” school where “different” teens were sidelined by the system as “high-risk-for-drop-out” cases.

And finally, Neil Gaiman's University of the Arts 2012 commencement speech, where he speaks about his experience taking the road less travelled to get where he wanted to be.

Life is short. Unexpectedly short.

noreply@blogger.com (Pratima) — Sat, 04 May 2013 19:05:00 +0000

As I sat on the bus earlier today, I looked down the street where I live and felt like this might be the last time I was going to see it. At that moment, I chalked it down to paranoia. And I was wrong.

Today a car lost control and crashed against the side of another car. This happened less than one meter from me as I was walking back home. When I turned back and realized what had happened, my first reflex was to thank God (or the Universe or whatever else you believe in) for sparing my life. I'd just crossed in front of the car that had been smashed against the wall and FELT the whoosh of the cars as they crashed and skidded right behind me.

As I think about it right now, I can still feel my legs shaking and my heart pounding. Standing right next to me, a guy was whining about his totaled motorcycle. I looked at him like he'd lost his mind. He could have lost his life and instead of thanking God or whatever else he believes in, he chose to whine about losing his motorcycle?

People swarmed around and tried to help and get those people out of the cars. I tried calling the emergency services several times and it was ringing, but nobody picked up. Nobody fucking picked up. I realize that this is a developing country. But that's just no excuse.

Dear Emergency Services, what good are you if you're not here when the people who pay the taxes to run your services need you? Fuck you very much Emergency Services. (Someone must have deigned to pick up someone else's call later though, because I could hear the sound of sirens from my home some time later...)

Right now, I can only pray that the people who were inside those cars can make it. Thankfully, the people from the car that lost control were still conscious, though shell-shocked and injured. I pray that they'll be okay. But the guy in the other car was unconscious…and I hope that he makes it. I remember glancing at him for all of a second before crossing in front of his car - he'd been waiting to get on the main road...

Yesterday, a bus of around 60 people turned over, killing 10 people and injuring many more. Today this. The difference is, today I was there. Until it happens right in front of your eyes, this doesn't really really affect you. You can feel sympathy and sadness true, but you cannot really understand the horror of it until you live it.

The car crash happened just a hair’s breadth from me and just a 5 mins walk away from my home. I could have never walked down the street where I live again.

Before the car crash, I thought I'd used up all my luck. I was wrong.

Life is short. Unexpectedly short. This could have happened to anyone anywhere. There's no guarantee of when you'll die. So, cherish each day that you live. Don't neglect the people who matter most to you, because you might never see them again. Do the things that you most want to do, because you might lose the chance of ever doing those things. Whatever it is you dream of doing, do it now. Don't wait for the conditions to be ideal. Because it might be too late by then.

Musings about Music and Writing

noreply@blogger.com (Pratima) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:35:00 +0000

Ever since I heard this piece in the Game of Thrones Season 3 trailer, I haven't been able to stop listening to it. It's called Bones by MS MR and pretty much won't leave me alone.

My favorite bits are: "Midnight hours, cobble street passages, forgotten savages...forgotten savages.." and
"These are hard times, these are hard times..for dreamers.."

I swear, it gets better every time I listen to it. There's a mix of dreaminess, bitterness and darkness in it that ~~makes me obsess over it~~ appeals to me on a very visceral level. Sometimes, music triggers powerful emotions that I can't quite explain and this song is one of those.

To me as a writer, music is powerful and beautiful and inspiring and a very essential part of the creative process. It is a muse of sorts, if you will. I generally tend to associate songs (some quite strongly so) with a particular story or a particular character or one character's relationship with another character. So, music helps to inspire me while I think about the story, the characters as well as the mood I'm trying to create. But when I'm actually writing and listening to music at the same time, that's a different kettle of fish.

I know that many writers listen to music while they write to put themselves in the desired mood or in the right mindset or just to block out external (or even internal?) noise during the writing. And last year, I tried that. But it didn't quite work out for me...I mean sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. So, I stopped listening to music while I write.

The reason for that? I tend to absorb music that I listen to on a subconscious level and when I write while listening to music, sometimes things that I don't expect creep into my writing - it might be a mood or the way I phrased the words in a scene or sub-scene. For example, suppose I'm writing a funny scene and a melancholy song comes on, then some of that melancholy might bleed into that scene. And that is kind of unwanted because in that case, I feel like the music is artificially influencing what I'm writing and that I'm not telling the story truthfully (especially in terms of mood or whatever else crept in). This might be weird, but this is the way I currently feel about it. Who knows? Maybe that will change someday...or not.

So, my solution was to set time apart where I just listen to particular songs and think about the story or the characters I'm focusing on and then jot down things that occur to me about them in my notes. Some writers recommend putting together a playlist of songs that suit a particular story and then listening to this playlist over and over again while writing that story. But again this doesn't work for me because most songs tend to lose their original appeal to me if I listen to them too many times over, so I'm a bit leery of trying that. What I could try is to listen to music that I associate with particular scenes or characters while I'm editing. I'll see how that works out.

After all, creative work involves a fair bit of trying out new and different approaches to see what works and what doesn't.

Writing Update

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 09:42:00 +0000

It's been ten months since I took a big risk and decided to quit my day job to take some time off to write. Recently, I've taken the decision to get a day job for a few reasons. First, I found that not only am I not productive as a writer for more than five hours a day (because apparently my writer-brain switches off after said five hours and I start writing crap). So, what do I do with myself for the rest of the day?

I get my life back together and go get a job, that's what I do. So, I've been poking here and there about jobs that really interest me and at which I think I'd be great at because during the past ten months, I also discovered something else: that I need to be doing something else apart from writing and that I'm not prepared to drop it all off just to try and get published. Fact is, maybe I'm not ready to get published. It will happen when it has to happen. Maybe that will take five years time or maybe ten. In the meantime, I not only have to support myself financially but I also want to do something that really engages me. So here goes, I'll be putting those fancy degrees I got to further use after all. I'm not saying it's going to be easy - it's not. But I'm looking forward to the challenge because if there's one thing that I love, it's a good challenge.

That doesn't mean I'm going to stop writing altogether. I'm not. Because I think writing helps me process things at a subconscious level and helps me grow as a person - it's not only therapeutic, it actually makes me happy. The main reason I'm going to continue writing is because I will first and foremost write for my own pleasure and not with the stupid idea in mind that I absolutely HAVE to get published. Because in the end, I'm going to drive myself miserable if I continue down that path.

For the past ten months, I've written more than I have ever written in my life. Ever. It made me realize that I'd just been dabbling in writing since my teenage years, not actually really writing. Now, I am really writing. And I'm proud and happy that I've achieved at least part of the thing that I set out to do, when I decided to take my writing break. Now, I know that I'm capable of writing regularly. I just need to learn how to finish. And I think I'm well on my way there. I just have to keep at it.

Okay, now that I've said my piece and it's time to make my peace. To new challenges.

Writing Blues

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 11:38:00 +0000

Okay, so three months are nearly up (that's the length of time I originally gave myself to find out if I could really write or not) and its evaluation-time for me. So far, I've written around 21K for an aborted version of Harper and another 23K for Harper Reloaded. The thing is, after my so-called epiphany, I rushed blindly into the story again and though I came up with much more action and originality than I thought I was capable of, things sort of started to fizzle out about the end of Chapter 4...meaning I started running out of ideas - sounds familiar to me because that's exactly what happened with Harper version 1 before I decided to drop it and start over.

Somehow I seem to hit a standstill as soon as I hit 20K words, like my well of ideas suddenly dries up. But that doesn't mean that I'm dropping this version like the previous one because the thing is...I think it has potential. I want to make this work. Badly. I know that my plot isn't developed enough. This time round, I've got a rough sketch of a plot and though it's not brilliant or even particularly clever, there are ideas floating around there that need to be explored. So I'm not going to give up on this one just yet.

Meanwhile, I've stumbled on ideas that are not related to the current story that I'm writing - they are usually related to other stories I'll be working on as soon as I finish Harper Reloaded, so I just file away those ideas in their relevant folders as they occur to me. It's just one of those weird things that happen when you write - a line from a character in another story just strolls around in your head and you just have to write it down, irrespective of whether you'll use it in the actual story or not.

I'm trying to take it one story at a time - though sometimes its tempting, very tempting to switch to another story and put what you're currently working on, on hold - for the simple reason that I don't want to mix up the voices of my main characters from different stories, especially since I tend to write in first person. From experience, I know that's very easy to do if I give in to the urge of hopping between stories.

For the record, I've been kind of slow on the writing front with Harper Reloaded - I haven't written more than three thousand words this past month and I feel very guilty. But maybe, just maybe if I can push past the 20K roadblock and stick with the story like glue, I can make it to 30K, then 40K and so on, till I make it to the finish line.

On Lucid Dreaming and Story Writing

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 12:43:00 +0000

I'm one of those people who often remember their dreams, sometimes vividly and sometimes even years after. I'm not sure if I know that I'm dreaming while you know, I'm in the dream. But all I know is that, in some of those dreams, somewhere in the back of my mind I know that anything is possible and I actually attempt to control the situation. I'm not sure if I can call myself a lucid dreamer (think Inception, but not on that scale).

Wait, let me Wiki that - lucid dreaming seems to be all about control or manipulation of imaginary experiences in a dream. Yep, that sounds about right - I seem to be a lucid dreamer, at least part of the time.

Lucid dreaming is very much like writing a story. Sometimes you can control the events and their outcome and sometimes, not. I call these "adventure dreams" and I enjoy them immensely, because it feels like a live story, only that I'm the protag (sometimes I even head-hop). I know it sounds weird...everyone does that, right? Right? Okay no, I can live with that. Anyway...

Have you ever had a lucid dream? No, not the one where you're trying to outrun an unknown and unseen monster. The one where you've been dropped in the middle of a world of intrigue, excitement and darkness, where you can actually enhance the dream experience by participating in it. Well sometimes such dreams end unsatisfactorily (e.g. I haven't managed to escape from the commandos hot on my trail or found that Holy Grail I was looking for) and if I happen to have the same dream again, I try to influence the situation by doing things differently, which very often results in a different outcome. Sometimes my dream even goes on rewind during the same "dream session", so I can restart. Wait, am I secretly a control freak? Probably.

This morning I had a weird dream. I was running through a maze of manor-like corridors and then a wooden staircase (for some reason wooden staircases you'd imagine in Hogwarts tend to populate my dreams, go figure), when I finally ended up in this really cool marketplace. The thing is I wanted to buy some of those goodies (potions in cans and sweet goodies) from a Chinese lady (O_o...never seen her before) and all I know is that I didn't have enough money. However, I wanted the goodies so bad (though I can't imagine why, since I was running after someone) that the next thing I knew, my mind actually turned lesser coins into coins of higher value to allow me to buy the stuff.

I'm sure you're asking yourself where all this is going (if you're still reading that is). Right, back to story writing. Very often you try to influence or control the course of events that lead to the outcome of the story and sometimes your characters shoot you in the face for trying to do that and you end up in a completely different place - sometimes that place is better than what you originally imagined and sometimes it's a stinking pile of horseshit.

What I find all the more fascinating is that sometimes elements of a story or even the seed for an entire story can actually germinate from a dream. After all, story writing involves a heavy dose of dreaming (most of the time with your eyes wide open). You visualize scenes and characters that no one else can imagine until you put them all down on paper.

But oh well, stories and dreams are all about living an adventure, even if it takes place only in your mind :) Through your dreams or your written characters, you get to do things that you probably wouldn't be able to do in real life, like ever. Imagine being this badass assassin who kicks some serious butt, even if only for a minute. How cool is that?

Does this mean I write for the thrills? You betcha!

Four Weeks Into It - Writing Issues

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 25 May 2012 11:44:00 +0000

~~Dear Diary,~~

~~I'm drowning. It's been four weeks since I've been laboring over a YA that I started ages back. And I want to throw something or someone from a bridge. Okay, not literally. Not a diary person.~~

~~Bye Diary~~

Anyway, I've been working on my first novel for the last month and I'm neck deep in a boat of trouble. All I've got so far is a prologue and four chapters (about 21K words) of a fantasy YA. And I'm stuck. Because I don't have a plan. That's right, I don't and I'm reading up on stuff and doing some research so I can save the damn story.

Because the idea of dumping it and moving on to Story Idea No. 2 (not a YA, but still fantasy with an element of mystery) is sounding more and more tempting, according to my shoulder demon. Of course, the shoulder angel is telling me to give it a go and finish it even if it's crap because at least it's good practice. So, before dumping a month's worth of work, let me look at the issues:

Problem No.1: I don't have a plot outline. Yet. This can be both good and bad, depending on the writer. Some writers write by the seat of their pants (or alternately "pantsers") and prefer little or no planning, making things up as they go along, and then go back to correct inconsistencies after they're done. Then we've got the middlemen, those who prefer to have some kind of plot skeleton to guide them throughout the writing. Finally we've got the hardcore plotters, who prefer to have a detailed plot to prevent them from getting stuck during the writing.

This is highly subjective and there's no right way to do this. For some people, plotting works, for others it doesn't. I'm trying to find a balance and I'm thinking I might try being a middleman and not a pantser because believe me I've read stories which have great ideas and great dialogue (and are even NYT bestsellers), but read like a bad dream.

Problem No.2: A story that's moving at a snail's pace (a by-product of not having a plot outline of some kind). I think some parts of it, though coherent with the story, are extraneous. I'm thinking I'll need to take a knife to it and cut all the unnecessary fat after I'm finished. That is, provided I even make it to the finish line.

Problem No.3: Dialogue that's on the run - literally. This is where I want to bang my head on the wall or something. When I start writing dialogue, I don't know where to stop. It just keeps dragging on. But then, I realize I have a limited word count and that it might be a good idea to keep it short and to the point. As long as the dialogue is helping the story move, it's on. But if it's not really helping, then I'm afraid it has to go, no matter how sparkly it seems to me...(gulp).

Problem No.4: Characterization issues. I cannot get a proper handle on some of my secondary characters, but I think if I keep writing, then maybe I'll get a better handle on them, so I can go back and breathe some more life into them in the beginning scenes.

Problem No. 5: My writing is clunky in some places. When you know your writing is clunky, you rewrite. It sounds simple, but it's not. However with practice, you get there.

When I look at the big picture, because I don't have a fixed plot outline in my head, I'm not sure I like where my story is currently heading. Does this mean my story's screwed? Maybe, maybe not.

The day you realize your story sucks, you do some research and some thinking and you go ahead and fix it. Easy, isn't it? Maybe not so much. You have to think deep and hard about it - if the story premise doesn't engage your attention enough, then maybe it's time to chuck it to the bin. But, you see it's not so easy to throw it because you've spent time with it, getting to know the characters and you have an emotional investment in it. It's a hard decision to make.

I guess it's time for me to take a good hard look at my story and decide whether to carry on with it or not. Anyway, since I've never finished a novel before, maybe I should follow the advice of my shoulder angel :)

A Little Something I Wrote

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 22 May 2012 08:36:00 +0000

This is a little something I wrote a while back. Sometimes I write scenes that I just know will never make their way into my stories. This is one of them. (Note: It's supposed to be a flashback moment into a character's childhood, so I've kept the language as simple as possible.)

I’d met Hallow and Megan in kindergarten. My mind traveled back to that day. I’d been sitting quietly in a corner of the yard, playing all by myself with a rag doll.

Two girls headed near to where I was. One had chin-length wheat-colored blond hair and the other, long wavy chocolate brown hair. They stopped a few yards short of me. From what I could hear, they wanted to play a game that involved holding hands and going round in circles. I kept stealing glances at them but didn’t dare go over and ask if they would let me play with them too. They looked like they were having so much fun.

As I stole yet one more wishful glance at them, the blond girl caught me looking. I quickly averted my gaze, pretending to be very busy with my rag doll. From the corner of my eye, I could see that the two girls had stopped playing and that I had become the center of their attention. They stood whispering for half a minute and then to my surprise, came over to where I was sitting, hand in hand.

The blond girl held out a hand at me. “D’you wanna play with us?”
Shocked, I stared at her outheld hand and then looked up into her huge smiling blue eyes.

“Yeah, we’d really like it, if you’d come play with us.” My gaze switched to warm inviting dark brown eyes. The other girl with the chocolate brown hair sounded shy, just like me. She pushed her glasses up on her nose and held out a hand to me.

“I’d be glad to,” I said finally. I got up, took their hands in mine and since then, we’d never let go of each other.

The Risky Business Of Writing

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 21 May 2012 10:56:00 +0000

About three weeks ago, I ditched my cubicle job in a global company to try and write full-time. Probably suicidal career-wise, I'll give you that. But, I have to know if I can do right by my obsessive need to write those stories that keep running around on their overactive little feet in my head.

The key to writing is hard work and discipline - you sit your ass down on that chair and you write every single day. It's simple. One word after the other, day after day, on that blank white space - not really rocket science, is it? I've been trying to do just that for the past three weeks and I've succeeded...somewhat moderately. I'm down to Chapter 4.5 (I'm not quite sure whether to leave that scene to Chapter 4 or 5, so it's 4.5 for the time being).

Three weeks into the experience, all I have to say is that being a writer absolutely sucks. Because writing is ~~a b*tch~~ hard. Some days not a word comes to my mind and what I've written so far feels like crap. Plus, I don't know a thing about plotting a good story - I have some good ideas but weaving it into a good storyline? Uh-uh. A whole different kettle of fish. So right about then, I ask myself if I took the right decision. And you know what? Though writing is sometimes akin to torture and gives me horrible headaches, there's nothing else I'd rather be doing.

So, if you're about to go copycat on my move and give the boot to the job to go into full-time writing, think about it. Not once. Not twice. A million times. I know I did - it took me three months to take the BIG LEAP. If you think you want to write, make sure there's nothing else you'd rather be doing than writing :)