Here I am, sitting again, staring
at a blank sheet of paper. A writer is not scared of dark; he does not wake up
with a start after seeing a dark figure, most of the time it is the white
colour which is a nightmare for him. You may want to test this by showing a
white sheet of paper to a writer and demand a ransom out of him, though I do
not advise this for the risk of him having a heart attack.
The question also is whether a
writer should write about a memory from my past, a dream for the future or just
pull out a feather from his imagination. Sometimes I feel that after writing a
paragraph or two, all three of them gets mixed up to an extent that it becomes
new reality for me, a new memory and a new dream. I feel if I could play a
recap of my life, it would be very different from how I remember it now.
Another challenge is how writers keep
coming up with innovative and interesting plots and characters. I have been
told that writers keep observing people around them to get inspired for writing
new stories. Well, I am not so sure about it. After all who live around pirates,
secret service agents, conniving politicians, arm dealers, ghosts, wand
wielding kids, dragons, parallel universes, aliens, talking dogs and cats,
vampires and other such plots and characters I have never seen in my ordinary
life.
You must be thinking that if it
is such a scary job then why writers keep coming back and face their worst
fears almost every day. Till the time I did not start writing, I could never
understand the logic for so many people to vent out their thoughts,
imaginations, standpoints on relatively lesser avenues of writing – fiction and
non-fiction further categorised into horror, politics, suspense, thriller,
love, sex, travel, cookery, religion, philosophy, business, education etc. For determining
a definite answer to the question, I advise you to try writing a paragraph on
any subject that first comes to your mind. You will have to establish a line of
thought, one or more characters, an opening and a closing. After writing a couple of lines, I am sure
that you would get your answer.
It is your chance to play God, to
create people out of nowhere, to write and control their destiny, and to feel a
power beyond your comprehension. It will also bring you closer to understanding
the decision God takes while writing stories for your life i.e. if you think
there actually is a God who holds strings to our lives. You would understand
that sometimes there is no logic; sometimes you twist life of one of your
characters just for fun, just because he was not doing anything interesting
enough to be kept alive till the end of novel.
Having said that, since God is in
this business for a long time, I believe God has figured out of a way of having
a logic to almost everything which happens to your life – no loose ends.
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