Writing can be both an exhilarating experience as well as a tiring one.
As a writer you have the ability to literally play God with your
characters. After all, it is you who
decides who they are, what they look like, what should their lives be and all
the other nitty gritties of their existence. You have the power to decide what
their reactions and actions are and what are the repercussions of these actions
and reactions. As the God of the world you create in that work of fiction, you
decide what the problems and complications are… it is your universe and your
world.. you run it!
In essence you give birth to a new life, like God; nurture it like a
parent and sometimes kill it like the angel of death.
It is tiring because most often at least one aspect or element if not
all of what you write reflects your actual life. Your reality you put under the
thin veil of fiction and try to pass it off as imagination.
The reason a critic can hurt you and hurt you beyond what most people
can imagine, is that when he criticises your writing, he criticises you and
your life, the choice you never had or the choices you made! He questions your
reality and your being.
The most tiring and exhausting aspect of writing is how to end a story.
When you are at the end of the story you are once again in a precarious
position of playing God. You could be the giver or life or a murderer for you
shall end the very life you created!
Ending the story on a happy note creates a false hope that all shall be
fine; but ending it with certain finality gives birth to hopelessness!
What if you leave it open ended! That is always an option. But that is
something that is always unfair to the world of your creation. It is unfair to
those who are alive within that story you created... it is ambiguous and life
is never completely ambiguous.
How can you be unfair to the life born from within your mind! And then
you start to think… Should you kill the life you have nurtured every waking
hour and while you have slept or should you let them have a utopic ending and
be happy or maybe let them final decide to take their life in their hands.
This choice is the toughest of them all according to me! Because for me
I never know how to end a story. How to complete the cycle of life I created.
How can I be fair to everyone – myself, my characters, my story and the person
who reads my work!
Happy ending make me unhappy, because unfortunately they are far away
from reality; and sad endings I am unable to give as these characters are a
labour of my love. Open ended is not my life then how can it be of my
characters!
So this time, I attempt to start with the death of a character and how
that death saves not only the life of those in her world but in many ways my
life.
With this attempt that I like the way the story is shaping up but yet I
still feel may be I could save the whole world I create, may be no life has to
end and all can be saved!
And, then it strikes me, for one to live another has to die. That is the
balance of life; the way the world works. That is barefaced reality of the
world and so has to be the reality of my fiction.
