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Posts tagged ‘Literature’

Jan 24

old gentleman
24 Comments

The Stories Around Us

Everywhere I look there is a story. They are everywhere. These people, their stories. Sometimes they come looking for you. Most times you stumble upon them. Every person I meet has something to tell. They all have been part of their own stories, characters that were born and grew with age. Some lead remarkable lives. Others an ordinary existence. They have made compromises, choices. Now they live their stories every day. I see it in their faces, the way they talk, their walk, their clothes. They are the characters of my life as I am in someone else’s. Not all characters are human.

The tree in front my window has a story of its own…

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Jan 16

Office Worker with Mountain of Paperwork
22 Comments

Learning from Rejection

A writer’s life is one of rejection. In 2002, on a whim and an afterthought, I started writing Where the Rain Falls. It was a tedious process, full of self-doubts much like the peace that was never final in Assam. I finished WTRF in 2006 and spent another year editing and rewriting. At the end of it, the book was shining like a beacon in the literary world. So I thought. How wrong I was.

I started querying. In batches of five or six I sent out queries and to only those agents accepting electronic submissions. Can you imagine the cost of couriering a letter to London or New York? And the normal post? I was better off throwing my query in a bottle into the Brahmaputra. The first agency I queried requested a partial, and a week later, the full manuscript. There were more requests…

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Dec 31

a_readers_advice_to_writers-460x3072
41 Comments

Read to Write

Books are the spice of my life, as it is for many. I read everything. Newspapers are daily fodder. Nothing escape my clutches; old magazines at the barber’s, paper bags made from old newspapers and magazines from the grocers’, wrap-around old newspapers from the vegetable vendor, old books with the pavement seller. To read is to breathe.

I took to writing. What I wrote was influenced one way or the other by what I was reading. Books gave me knowledge. Life experience. I had my opinions. It all showed in my writing. I had stories to tell. Because I was reading, I was learning how to tell them. I was no longer racing through the pages…

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