Review

My writing has become a habit now. Whether it is good or not I do not know, since I have no idea if the ‘followers’ are reading my articles.

I have requested all of them to read. But actual reading has to be done by them! I can drag a horse to water, but to make it drink, the horse has to be thirty or my ‘article food’ must be tasty enough!

Why this question came into my mind today? It is because my non-fiction pages are getting filled; but the fiction is really limping. It is not that I do not have the ideas. I have it in plenty. I have to whole story in my mind. Only I am groping to get the right words to be put in the right place.

The time frame is removed from my novel. That means I can write anything I want (and get away with it!). A reader is supposed to be more intelligent than the writer. Or at least the writer should feel that way. Then the story would go in the right manner.

I remember my Jeevanmukhi novel, which I still consider as my best till now. The plot, the style, the characterisation … all looked perfect.

I also had this suspense element which gets open only in the last few lines of the novel, is something a reader cherishes. I have given clues in the novel in such a way that the reader feels ‘ha-ha, I have caught the author on the wrong foot. He thinks that he has written a suspense point. Unfortunately I have already guessed what he has tried to hide’

I am my own first reader. If I feel I can’t understand or can’t correlate with what has been written by me, I will immediately change the idea. If I can’t change the idea, then the story is gone.

I have a few plots developed up to almost 40 pages and left unfinished. The punch is missing in those novels. You may call them ha-baked. I wish they were like the base of a pizza which you can bring home, add the ingredients and convert it into a mouth slurping pizza.

But come to think of it…. We can’t please the whole fraternity. There are people who are never satisfied with whatever been served to them.

I remember the reviews which came for my novel Jeevamukhi in the weekly magazine Sudha. They had published almost 20 reviews. Most the reviews were very inspiring. They made me feel happy. Most of them had identified the theme; they had understood what I had tried to tell in the novel. They had expressed their happiness for giving them such a good novel.

But there were two reviews which I relish. One of them had written that ‘the author has given stuff of novels in one novel’. I remember I had written the same review to another magazine when my favourite authoress had written a novel! To get the same review for my novel made me feel as if this was a poetic justiceJ

But the other one takes the cake.  The reader had written like this: A very ordinary subject with very ordinary characters. The novelist has written this in a very ordinary way for 22 weeks. This was a boring novel.

Wow, a good review at last, I thought. I only wondered how the reader could have gone through the novel week after week cursing and finally decided to share the feelings by writing  a candid review.

See, this is what I said about we can’t please them all.

Importantly, a novel or any writing should have a very good character – readability.