Alternate History

There is huge excitement in the air for many of us writers as November fast approaches. I have successfully completed NaNoWriMo for four consecutive years, from 2009 to 2012 and am very keen to make it 5 in 5 by successfully completing a NaNo novel in November 2013 too. This involves writing 50,000 words of a novel during the calendar month of November. The novel can be in any literary genre.

The First Line

How does your novel start? Is the first line memorable? Does it grab the attention of the reader? In my debut novel, a psychological thriller, “It Can’t Be You” I wanted to start by telling the reader about an important event that had taken place in as concise and impactful manner as I could. The result:” The man was dead.”

The flux of time: An Author’s Challenge

When as an author you write a story, you place events in a particular time frame. It is difficult, if not impossible for you to predict all that will happen in the future. Let me explain with an example to make my point clear. In my latest thriller, “Lucky For Some, 13” a terrorist group orchestrates attacks in Goa and Bangalore in India in January and September 2010 respectively. It is a work of fiction and you and I know the attacks as described in the book, did not take place.

Judging A Contest For WriteUp Cafe

I had an interesting experience recently. I was invited to judge a contest organised by WriteUp Cafe. The topic given to the participants was ” A Letter to Yourselves”. There were 23 participants and I had a tough time judging the three winners.

What’s good writing for you?

What I will start this post with could very well scandalize some of you. There are some so called masterpieces in literature which have left me stone cold. May be the choice of the book at that age was all wrong. Whatever be the reason, for example, when I was in my late teens, I really struggled through  Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” which is considered a historic epic. I don’t think I completed it either, even after several false starts. Call it bias or what you will, but I am not inclined to give it another shot more than 40 odd years later.

My 5 Rules for Writing Thrillers

““The way to write a thriller is to ask a question at the beginning, and answer it at the end.” This quote is attributed to the well-known writer of thrillers Lee Child, in this article in Writers Digest.

First Person or Third Person?

Are you more comfortable writing in the first person? Do you use the more conventional third person? I deliberately chose to use the first person narrative in my debut novel, “It Cant Be You”.  In this psychological thriller, the head of the family is found dead at the very start of the story. His wife, son and daughter do not know whether he was killed or he killed himself.

The Way I Write

I have been full-time into writing for about two years now. I thought it made sense to capture how I go about writing. This could be use to me and not just for others who might be interested. These points are not in chronological order as I write them as they come to  mind:-

Lines from “It Can’t Be You”

Yesterday, at the Pan South India Alumni Meet of XLRI at the grand ITC Gardenia

Year End Stock Take As A Writer

I began as a writer of fiction. Like many others, I started with short stories and it was in 2009 that I took the plunge and dived in deep into fiction with a full-fledged 80,000 + words novel called ” It Can’t Be You.” ‘This was a psychological thriller, first published in November 2010. Most people who knew me were initially surprised that with a background and experience in management, I had opted to write fiction. They expected I would write a treatise on people management or even some kind of  collection of my experiences as a human resources professional for over three and a half decades.