A Novel Madness!!!

So what next? That is the question i have been asking myself with regards everything...the future, the blog, the career, et al. Having written that story I was tempted to begin writing another one. The story was the second one I have written in my life, the first was in malayalam...its either inside one of my ias history texts i left back in india or lost. I will have to wait another 3 months when my sis visits India, to find out if I still have it. Anyways the National Novel Writing Month is here and I have decided I am going to write a novel in the next 30 days. Now you guys must be wondering why I would shoot off my hip and let everyone know before I have even penned a single word to it. The reason is purely psychological - it is to put pressure on myself so that I actually sit down every day from this moment on and write one chapter a day and post it on this blog. I wonder how decently it would turn out and hurried the novel would look if I manage to finish in 30 days but for now thats the least of my concerns. I will be disabling comments until its all over.

Actually about 15 years back my childhood buddy, kichlu and i began writing a book on the lines of The Hardy Boys, we called them "The Fidswilliam Boys"(lol!) but after 6-7 chapters we realized the story was developing "quite" similar to a Nancy Drew one we read then, if i remember right called the "Mystery of the Missing Mannequin" or something similar and we gave up. The funny thing with writing stories, i wonder how other people do it, like they fix the story outline and then proceed but for me the story develops as i write it...even I have no idea what should happen next. I have spent the last 2 weeks scratching my head, wondering what theme to take up. A few ideas came up but got nowhere. I even searched on google for "How to Write a Novel". I read The Alchemist just a few months back and was surprised the book couldnt inspire me as much as i expected maybe coz of the fact that I had set course on a journey akin to the young shepherd a year back. But one line in the book fascinated me, If you dont listen to your heart, soon the heart stops listening to you. I have this gut feeling that if I dont try this novel thing out now, my life will soon go on the same track of moneyed madness that I had so much difficulty in coming out of last year.

What to write? I had this story idea of an American who travels to India for a vacation, fumbling into a lot of intrigues, finally falling in love with it, taking his family there and their struggles with assimiliating into the culture but I got scared at the thought of it falling into cliches. Maybe I will take it up later. And then I had this idea of a family story, set across generations from tales I heard of my grandma speak and from the biographical descriptions of some ancestors in the Kattakayam Kudumbacharitram book that was recently published but I have decided anything I write in fiction about Kerala has to be in Malayalam first. Though I havent written anything I have this belief that I can write better in Malayalam than English. As of now I am focussed on a story about schooldays. School is something I still relate with, blessed with a huge repertoire of memories from then, and an interesting array of characters who are still an integral part of my life to some extent. I am wary if the final product will mimic Tom Browns Schooldays, a masterpeice I last read 12 years back. What amazed me most about that novel is the timeless quality and universal appeal of that book. Even 150 years hence, the story of Tom Brown and Jimmy East, the two main characters of the book is one, every child identifies with and lives through, every day in school.

As far as life goes, i am in hiding. Only my closest friends have my number, i hate speaking to my parents coz I feel like a total loser as I go about bashing all their hopes of me finding a steady career, and thankfully all the nagging my sister does is insisting i wash my dishes and watch movies with her. Anyways the next 30 days of November promises to be an interesting time if i manage to keep the novel afloat. If by any chance I loose steam midway and give up please dont hold it against me...that certainly would be embarassing after this loud declaration of intent here. As I wrote the last line i couldnt help remarking here that except for writing on this blog every other challenge I have taken up over the last 2 years I lost. Discipline. The one thing I lack and what I need most now. Coz if I can pull this off I think I will gather the guts to write a script. And the magic that newcomers can do to films these days. Looks what James Albert did with Classmates!