One of the things that I have often wondered is whether it is necessary to finish everything that I start. There is this quintessential image of a writer with heaps of torn paper next to him as he isn’t quite able to finish what he started satisfactorily. I have come around to the thinking that … Read more
I spent most of my first two and a half decades of working life in a corporate job. It is a fairly stable career that assures a reasonably good life. After years on the grind, one might feel there is limited upside, but there is also limited downside. A creative life is different. The upside … Read more
50 isn’t very different from 49, I discovered the day after my 50th birthday. Did the above line catch your attention? I just wrote it as an experiment. When I started writing, a lot of courses told me that the first line of a story is very important. So, I cultivated this habit of noting … Read more
I have been in situations where I have asked the question and then sought the answer. I have never found a satisfactory one. Do you know someone to…. take care of my social media? Someone who will manage my author Instagram account? Someone to run great ads on Amazon and Facebook? Someone who is a … Read more
I used to submit stories to magazines a few years back. Most of them had rules for submission. It had to be in a particular format. Word or PDF. It had to be in a particular genre. The title should be in this font and the body should be in the other. Spacing should be … Read more
When I started writing, I wrote because I loved writing. The simple act of creating something – a story, an article, a character, a novel – gave me pleasure, and, whether it was good or bad, pushed me to create writing. It was a good enough reason. It was a privilege to be able to … Read more
My friend who climbed Everest last month told me about the dangers of Khumbu Icefall. It is a treacherous section from base camp to Camp 1. What makes it dangerous is not just the technical difficulties of negotiating it but the fact that it is on a moving glacier. What that means is that it … Read more
As a writer, I met a lot of editors and some publishers, especially a few years back in the early days. Most of them asked me what genre do I write in? I had to actually go through a pre-defined list to choose as I didn’t know what to answer. But I settled on realistic … Read more
While writing a story idea, I generally do not know the exact end. But it is important to broadly know what happens next. At the idea level, I start the story with a particular character and the conflict that the character is facing, and a general sense of the setting. For example, it may sound … Read more