Write Concepts #5

Imagination is one of the greatest gift of nature or, if you believe in him, God. A man with unbridled imagination has everything he needs. I grew up in the golden time of children's magazine and comics in India and I got to read and imagine a lot for which I consider myself lucky. My imagination deteriorated during my college days, when I got more theoretical and methodical than imaginative, but I suppose people in imaginative fields such as art and animation retain their imagination. I have had a novel in my head since the early 2010s which I decided not to write after seeing the redundancy of literature in India. Finally, when I got another idea for a novel, I decided to write the novels for personal pleasure and not for publishing as publishing something in India is futile because the golden age of reading which were the 90s have passed. When I started writing the novels I realised that I am not as imaginative as I was back in the day. My imagination had deteriorated. The good thing was that I had the scheme and plot of novel in my head which I had imagined earlier and so, I write when I feel like it for personal pleasure. I do regular exercises, like writing projects, for improving my writing. I think the most important quality of any sort of fiction is to pull you inside its world. A good example of it would be Bram Stoker's Dracula. When the main character visits Eastern Europe in the novel, you actually feel the cultural shift and you feel that you are actually inside Eastern Europe. Writing is futile until you are able to create that sort of magic in your writings. I remember from my childhood that each and every comicbook had a distinct vibe about it. You saw the comic book and the vibe of that particular comic book would overcome you. People who have read comic books in their childhood would relate to this phenomenon. What other book did this, Harry Potter surely did this to countless kids around the world. People who haven't and don't read books and comic books would never understand this. When I imagined my novel, I had the vibe in my writing, which unfortunately died down as daily grind of life deteriorated my imagination. I have the stories, but even if I write it, I find myself unable to get pulled into the world that I have created, to feel it distinctly and this is because my incapacity to imagine. In my writing projects, however, which contain mostly short form writings like vignettes and flash fiction and short stories, I'm able to pull people in the world that I create. My creative life has gotten darker, which is a reflection of the experiences that I have had with the world. I had quite a bright childhood with stories, magazines, comic books and books like Harry Potter, but my youth was composed of Chekhov, Kafka and Conan Doyle, which later came to include Chuck Palahniuk and Kurt Vonnegut. I love noir and hardboiled since my youth, and I like writing in the noir style, at a point of time I wanted to delve in transgressive fiction, but later I realised that my writing should be weaved out of light and dark both and that it should either comfort or educate or do both. I retain the element of my inclination towards transgressive fiction at one point of time and I don't hesitate to use transgressive elements in my writings where I deem necessary, and it is justified when you grow up and realise that a considerable amount of people in India live a life that's transgressive and there are well oiled and functioning worlds at the margins of society which are in fact facilitated and supported by, well, powers. I still try to write my novel whenever I get time and feel like it, the goal here is to get the story out of my head, and if I fail to pull readers into the world I create, I would work on it later.