March 2, 2006

And off we go …

I have actually started work on another short story 🙂 I am not getting all that much done what with work, too many people in the house, a really bad heat wave going around and so on but I did manage to write almost one page yesterday :p

Yeah, I know. That’s not much. But the good thing is that the story does seem as if it will start to move once I get out of this lethargy :p The thing is, in the old days, when I actually wanted to write short stories, I would come up with a surprise ending or some grand idea and then then try to write a story around it. What used to happen was that I’d fizzle out since I wouldn’t have anything to support the grand idea – no action, no character interaction, no nothing.

What I’ve discovered this time around is that I write better when I come up with a believable world or a society first. Then you plop a few characters in this world and give them a history and after that, all you need to do is sit back and let the characters do what they do and the story will take care of itself 🙂 Not sure if this method will work for everybody but for me, it works fine. I don’t really write the story – the characters do. All I do is sit back and enjoy the story as it develops and put it down on paper. Weird? Yeah, I guess it is :p

The last short story I wrote came out rather well because I came up with a science fiction world which had fantasy elements in it. The fantasy elements were not real (or rather unreal :p) but were explained in scientific terms. Coupled with the humorous bits that I like to throw in, the story kind of came together and I thought it was pretty good, even if it is only me thinking that :p I want to try something similar with this new story. I again have a (different) world where science fiction and fantasy elements come together and I have some (sort of) logical reasons for the world being the way it is. Of course, since I have only begun the story, I have no idea what will happen next or how it will go but guess the only way to find out is to keep writing :p

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Posted by Fahim at 7:52 am  |  1 Comment