The joys of writing fiction
Writing a story must be the closest you can get to playing God. You get to create completely new people, give them characters, bind them in relationships, build their worlds and create situations for them. And then, like God, watch them live out their destinies…
But the vital difference lies in that while the Almighty creates them out of nothing but his power, a writer has nothing but the power of words to achieve all this. It is an awesome thought: words, created out of just twenty six letters of the English Alphabet, can weave so much magic. It can create people who become flesh and blood in our minds, it can create vivid images of a village,. a scenery, a bustling city road, a home. It can show even the subtlest of emotions and the most complex of thoughts.
Yes, fiction writing is a heady experience. I have been writing fiction for over a decade now… first short stories, then my first novel, and then my other three novels.
Many people ask me how I get the inspiration for the story. How do I think of the plot, the storyline? Is it out of my own experiences or is it all completely imaginary? Is there any autobiographical touch or is it plain simple fiction?
Well, I would say, it’s a little of all these. Because your idea for a story is inevitably fired by some real-life happening. Maybe a little news item one has read in the papers, maybe an incident you overheard being narrated on a bus journey. Maybe a childhood experience you often relive. But if one were to write a story purely based on this real episode, it would be nothing more than another news story! It has to form nothing more than the germ of the plot. And then, from your rich and colourful imagination, you as the author, have to create characters, situations, settings and work your original thinking through them all.
A tall order? Believe me, it is! It is all too easy to fall into predictable patterns…drawing on hackneyed story lines,characters that say and do what the reader would expect them to do and the climax (if any) moving to an obvious denouement.
A famous adman once said of creativity, that the first person who said a woman’s cheek was like a rose petal was a genius. Everyone else who said after that it was a fool!
At the risk of being called a fool, I say, Think Out of the Box. Build characters, storyline and dialogues like they have never been created before. Make it interesting for the reader. Create pen pictures, let your characters jump out of the page like real people and write dialogues that don’t sound like cliches.
After all, it’s not so easy playing God!