[image error]

(Note: This is the script of the talk I delivered on Feb 5th, 2017, to the students of Lady Sri Ram college during Tarang 2017, LSR’s annual cultural festival. Thanks, LSR Tarang, for having me!)

So what is creative writing?

Well, if you ask this question to a hundred people, you will perhaps get hundred different answers. Each writer has his or her own reality—formed by the things that have worked for him or her over the years.

In my reality, there are aspects directly related to the process of creative writing, and then there are factors that influence these aspects. I have bundled them together under Fundamentals of Creative Writing. For the most effective use of the time, I am not going to talk about certain obvious aspects, like existence of a conflict, etc.

So here they are–my 21 fundamental of creative writing:

1. Be a good reader first, if you wish to become a good writer.

Be surrounded by books everywhere. Plant books of all kinds at every place in your house–like bed-side tables, bathrooms, kitchen, drawing room couch, and what not.

A writer can do without food for several hours, but not without a sight of books.

2. If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be.

Doesn’t life work that way in general? There are tons of things happening around us every day that claim our time. Some of these deserve our time while others need our ability to manage time. Break your typical day and typical week in chunks and plan all the necessary things you would want to achieve in a week and how you would slot them. Assess how you did at the end of every week. Be rest assured, you would suddenly see that there is so much more time in a day and a week. 

3. Develop the ability to create something from nothing.

One of the pillars of creative writing is choosing a subject that hasn’t been dealt in such manner before. One of the ways to achieve this, imagine a novel situation, which is completely out of the ordinary and make a story out of it. Write a story that even if some readers hate, they remember it as they have read nothing like it before.

Few minutes before this session, I thought of two novel situations as examples:

As you enter your house one day, you find no one home. You start calling them, the phones ring, but no one answers. Then you start calling relatives, and none of them pick up too.
The souls get swapped between you and your favorite pet

4. Look for ideas that have deep roots in your heart

An idea doesn’t have to be big, how you develop it needs to. Who knew that the story about a man turning into an insect as he wakes up one morning will one day become one of the most acclaimed work of literature. Find that one idea that has deep roots in your heart. Remember the times you have felt so bad that you still remember it. Remember how you felt when someone ditched you bad. Remember when you were taken for granted. Remember when you were not cared for. Remember when you felt the world was at your feet.

Turn those deep obsessions of your heart into lovely pieces of literature.

5. Ideas either age like fine wine or rot like potatoes over time.

Give your ideas some time to show their worth. Keep them in your notebook and let them come to your mind to remind that you need to develop them. You will notice that with time, some of them would start rotting soon while others will only become more and more promising.

Is two to three years’ time too long to keep them that way? Absolutely not, especially when you are thinking of a novel. There is no hard and fast rule to apply this to each idea, though. You may have an idea flash in your mind that’s like the idea of the decade – then why wait?

Allowing enough time will ensure that the ideas you picked for development didn’t just have a momentary appeal, but could largely appeal you over a long period of time, spanning several moods of yours and you thinking about them through several ups and down of your life. This allows an idea to hang in your head for long enough time – so that time will test if the subject is durable. So does that mean you are out of writing about anything, because you have to wait for that long? No. The key is, keep adding to a pool if ideas, and take them up as they age nicely.

6. Don’t suffocate your heart.

Do you remember how you felt during your childhood when your parents said no to a pay date with your favorite friend? Or when they said no to something similar you’d have given up anything to engage you in at that moment? Artists feel that way all the times when they can’t find time to devote to their craft.

If you are a singer, you must sing. If you are a dancer, you must dance. If you are a writer, you must write. Your passion as an artist is a magnate that draws you at all times, but if you can’t follow it, it will suffocate your heart. Writing is no different. So don’t suppress your longings to write – because when you address that longing timely, the chances of creative flows are higher.

7. Help your readers see exactly what’s in your mind.

Think about it – why do you want to write a story? Perhaps because your heart feels very strongly about it. You have very intimate and tangible feelings about every detail involved. If you describe a story in matter-of-fact and non-tactile language, your reader will understand what happened but not feel it like you do or your characters do. They will just be reading, will not be in the journey together with your characters.

You need to transmit the images in your mind and the feelings to your readers as it is. This can’t happen without involving reader’s senses in the way you or your characters are involved: taste, smell, touch, hearing, sight, and sense of motion.

Use of tactile imagery will help stimulates the reader’s Imagination.

For example, instead of saying that it was a rainy night, you can say, “At night, she could see from her window that the postcard perfect sky from an hour ago had changed to a dark abyss filled with tar-black clouds that had just begun to weep heavily, as though devoid of any hope.”

8. Don’t interrupt when your characters take a flight of their own.

Don’t worry if it’s not going in the original direction. Let your characters run to the incredible destinations you had no knowledge about until they reached there. If your characters pleasantly surprise you, your readers will get pleasantly surprised too. Allow them to go to weird places. Don’t forget, you are the one deciding in the end, after all their travel, as to what you want to keep.

9. Don’t try to break the rules when you haven’t fully learnt them yet.

We experience right from our early childhood days how much fun it is to break the rules is. But you also learn to break them in a way that only makes things better for you. Writing is no different. First know the rules, then understand what breaking a rule means, and if that’s really necessary in the grand scheme of your work, and if it still makes sense, do it.

10. It’s okay if what you just wrote sucks.

Re-write it until it’s to your satisfaction or throw it outside the window. Writing is re-writing, it’s a process that takes time and at times one sentence can take days to refine to a point where it communicates exactly what you want to show or tell. A paragraph can take weeks. The best you can do is to write iteratively. That is, instead of trying to finalize every sentence, do the best you can do every time and come back to it in the next iteration. And if a particular part, or the entire story seems hopeless after several iterations, maybe the subject doesn’t have the required appeal, it’s time to throw it outside the window and focus on the next.

11. Pay attention to your dreams.

You waking thoughts very often collaborate in otherwise unimaginable way. You must listen to your unconscious mind. Note them in the morning before they disappear from your memory. The unique collaboration of the thoughts during your dreams results in tremendous avenues that weren’t visible before.

Many acclaimed books have been inspired by the vivid scenes in the dreams including the likes of Dreamcatcher by Stephen King, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Stevenson.

12. Tell a story in lesser and simpler words.

Your goal should never think of filling more pages when you can do less without losing anything. Quality of a writing is never assessed by the thickness of the book. A thicker book wouldn’t lead to a better acknowledgment of your work. It may be quite the other way. Your book may not get noticed at all if your story runs into more pages than it needs to effectively tell the story. Kill the sentences that don’t help advancing the subject in necessary manner—like revealing the character, surroundings, or advance the overall action.

As you become a better writer, the writing becomes more difficult. That’s because you become even more strict with this rule.

13. Let your writing convince you about holding your attention as a reader.

That it would hold your attention at every word as reading it for the first time. That would most likely ensure you would hold your potential readers’ attention too. Imagine that reading this for the first time, if it was someone else’s book, you wouldn’t have called it a waste of time, or dropped midway. Don’t try to write for everyone. You would not get anywhere. Forget the readers—all kinds of them, but remember yourself as an honest reader. Write for people like you. If you like it, and it’s well done, you will find audience. Don’t suppress your most intense longings. Break loose nicely.

14. Observe everything, and love everything you observe, love life blooming around you in whatever form it does, without getting biased by your own beliefs.

Learn to accept the lack of control we have on life as it lives through us. A writer is an observer first, then thinker, and never biased.

15. Don’t let the literary devices, grammar, syntax, come in the way of storytelling.

Writers are storytellers before anything else. Many of the all-time great books were written in other languages but majority of readers have read them in English or other languages. Why would that be the case if the other factors were more important than the storytelling?

Don’t let other factors take the focus away from the actual story. I know this may not be the right thing to say for an audience that comprises of students of English, but if you ever want to tell the stories, you must understand that forming story is more important than at the beginning than using the language to the best.

16. Cliches are the viruses in your writing.

If you let them in, they may leave your writing dead. They are the phrases or expressions that are overused so much in day-to-day life that their effects have n died. In writing, they sound bland and easily disengage, even irritate, your audience.

Here are the two examples: Every dog has its day, The quiet before the storm

17. Money or fame shouldn’t be your objective when writing.

A writer gets a new life every time he or she creates a story that was never told before. Think of story-writing as a privileged adventure you are embarking on, and the happiness when your readers experience it the way you have intended. Think of the writing as a date—you would only spoil it if your focus is on future benefits from the relationship and not on living the moment to the best.

18. Seek feedback before releasing to prime-time, respect the feedback, but don’t take it to heart

Rarely are your relatives and friends the right people to provide feedback—because they may not already be biased one way or the other about your capabilities, and the story, but also they may not have right exposures with similar genre to assess your work. Find the readers who love the books similar to yours and ask them for their feedback. Once you have feedback, take it very seriously to see if it could make your work better. Feedback is a gift but often people find it hard to take it that way—and in beginning, lot of writers struggle with it.

19. The readers would like to root for one or more characters – give them at least one.

This is someone your reader cares about what would happen to as the story unfolds. This could be the main character or someone else, a character with negative traits or positive, a villain or a hero.

20. Ensure rigorous consistency in settings, actions, behaviors, events across the pages of the book

Every word, every sentence, every paragraph, every chapter in your novel must fit together without any logical flaws. If a reader finds even one or two things that are not consistent with everything else in the book, the book would leave them with a sort of bad after taste. If plot or setting demands for inconsistency, it must be in line with holistic picture. In other words, if a character is inconsistent, she should be consistently inconsistent.

21. Follow the interviews of the authors you admire.

Listening to your favorite authors helps you discover interesting aspects by getting visibility into their thinking process. It also inspires you at times when you perfectly identify with the feelings they describe, pertaining to their hunger for the art, how it rules their life and helps them create those masterpieces. You get immense encouragement to continue as you tell yourself, “This is exactly how I feel.”