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No story ideas yet, and what ideas are coming to my mind do not have an appeal that might make me want to explore them further. Trying to write fiction, at least for the first time can be nerve wracking, because you are not familiar with the process. You are not sure which instinct to pursue further.

In fact from what I have researched about the “process of writing” is that you need to write a certain number of words every day. So I have been blogging furiously for the past 3 days, but I don’t know if it serves any purpose. May be it is and I don’t know it.

It almost seems like a waste of time, this writing a blog when I should be thinking of a story and carving our characters and make them talk and think and act. It sounds exciting but when I sit down to write, it just falls flat and in 15 minutes you know that something’s not clicking and you are back to blogging. Hell, this is not why I left by job. To blog!

I tell you, trying to write fiction is your subconscious mind’s cunning attempt to gently prod you towards bankruptcy and eventually suicide. Don’t do it.

But there’s that allure that self-destruction has, especially what in the writer’s mind is a higher cause, a finer purpose. It’s a completely different story that no one gives a fuck; least of all the friends who share your excitement and never warn you. Yet, those are the very friends you need to talk often, oftener than you did when you are a full time job to feel that you are doing is somehow worthy of giving up you day job for. I am sure, soon they’d be all avoiding meeting me and taking my calls and have funny nicknames for me, which will be like an inside joke in inner circles.

If I have detected a problem that I need to fix, if I am to go anywhere with my writing, then it is this. I have always been a report writer, even as a journalist or a blogger. You write a certain number of words to tell a story (700-1000) and then it’s over, you move on, to the next story. So you can be very finicky with what you write, how chiseled your sentences are, how self-indulgent your selection of words are. In other words, like a sprinter, you focus hard and put all your energy and imagination in the 700 words report that you are writing and it sounds good, if you have the talent for it.

But writing a novel is something else. It’s an open field and you can go anywhere, you can run very fast or you can choose to hobble and amble and no one’s watching. Unlike a report that will come out the very next day, no one will be reading this immediately. And even if you manage to finish the novel, and then some publisher decides to print a first time novelist, and then you foist it on some unsuspecting reader who has money, you end up feeling really hollow.

So a person writing fiction must have an insatiable appetite to interminably delay gratification. Write it. Forget it. That’s hard. You just have to believe that what you are writing, someone somewhere will find interesting, even if no one’s writing back to say how much they loved reading it. So write when you are feeling inspired, write when you are down, write when there’s nothing to say. Just write it. Most of it will be rewritten anyway by you, when you revisit the manuscript and groan at what you see, if you haven’t decided to dunk it in the nearest ocean already.

Then there is the whole issue of whether you should go with the flow or you should write haltingly, carefully, measuring each word, picking one over the other. But that I guess will depend on how well you know that character you have devised. Do you know him or her as a person and what oddities you plan to infuse that character with. The process can be magical and also very, very misleading. Imagine being deceived by your own self for a good 4-5 months. How can you trust yourself again after this?