Skip to main content

Story Writing



Half of my stories come from history or mythology and the other half from my imagination. Whatever the origin, each story has something to do with me; each one is an expression of some conflict within my being. “I knew you would come to deliver me from my stony existence,” Ahalya said touching Rama’s feet. That’s how my story Ahalya begins. Ahalya of that story is as much a character from mythology as an expression of my own longing for deliverance. Something similar can be said about each story of mine.

I think for all good writers each story is originally an agony within. It is an agony that seeks deliverance. In the words of Maya Angelou, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” The inner agony is metamorphosed into characters created by the writer. The characters may be from history, mythology, the writer’s imagination, or just anywhere like the house next to yours. Whatever the origin, the characters you create in your stories have something to do with you: they are manifestations of yourself in some way.

Writing fiction is a kind of self-discovery. It is also a discovery of life. That’s what Anais Nin means when she says that “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in the retrospect”. Every story you write is your attempt to savour life doubly. Or maybe it is an attempt to make life more bearable. The latter is the case when it comes to me. Every story of mine is an attempt on my part to make sense of life that is ostensibly absurd if not excruciating. That is why Ahalya’s deliverance can make Rama, her deliverer, ponder on the “endless human delusions.” Ultimately Ahalya and Rama are all expressions of their creator’s inner conflicts.

PS. Written for In(di)spire Edition 252:



Comments

  1. Arvind PasseyDecember 14, 2018 at 9:26 PM

    Every story you write is an attempt to savour it doubly... loved this, and the rest of your post.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Neeraj KumarDecember 15, 2018 at 6:53 PM

    Yes... through our stories we try to create the world that should be as per our wishes.

    Nice take on the subject and 'Ahalya' is also a reflection of question boiling in mind.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
48 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 2

Fort Kochi’s water metro service welcomes you in many languages. Surprisingly, Sanskrit is one of the first. The above photo I took shows only just a few of the many languages which are there on a series of boards. Kochi welcomes everyone. It welcomed the Arabs long before Prophet Muhammad received his divine inspiration and gave the people a single God in the place of the many they worshipped. Those Arabs made their journey to Kerala for trade. There are plenty of Muslims now in Fort Kochi. Trade brought the Chinese too later in the 14 th -15 th centuries. The Chinese fishing nets that welcome you gloriously to Fort Kochi are the lingering signs of the island’s Chinese links. The reason that brought the Portuguese another century later was no different. Then came the Dutch followed by the British. All for trade. It is interesting that when the northern parts of India were overrun by marauders, Kerala was embracing ‘globalisation’ through trades with many countries. Babu...
10 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
11 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The...
62 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 3

Street leading to St Francis Church, Fort Kochi There were Christians in Kerala long before the Brahmins, who came to be known as Namboothiris, landed in the state from North India some time after 6 th century CE. Tradition has it that Thomas, disciple of Jesus, brought Christianity to Kerala in the first century. That is quite possible, given the trade relationships that Kerala had with the Roman Empire in those days. Pliny the Elder, Roman author, wrote in his encyclopaedic work, Natural History (published around 77 CE), chastised the Romans’ greed for pepper from India. He was displeased with his country spending “no less than fifty million sesterces” on a commodity which had no value other than its “certain pungency.” Did Thomas sail on one of the many ships that came to Kerala to purchase “pungency”? Possible.   Even if Thomas did not come, the advent of Christianity in Kerala precedes the arrival of the Namboothiris. The Persians established trade links with Kerala in 4...
9 comments
Read more