Writing my First Novel

The idea for my novel was conceived about one and a half years ago. Prior to that, I took Creative Writing class and the professor sometimes chose students to come up with writing exercises. It was Shawn's turn and his idea was to write about a tarot card with a picture of a toppling tower and to write about what it could mean. I came with the idea that a toppling tower signifies drastic change. I picture a drastic change as something that is sudden, unpleasant, or a blow and which can change a life path or destiny.

Then for a class assignment, I wrote a short story about a character going through a drastic change in her relationship and identity. She travels abroad with her husband and encounters several events that change the relationship.

Sharing a story in a class takes courage and I felt reserved at first because you feel that you are exposing yourself in a way - even though the writing has nothing to do with you. At the same time I really wanted feedback. Otherwise, how else do I improve my writing. Through writing that short story and receiving encouraging feedback, I discovered my "writing voice" and style. Every writer in the class has their own unique writing voice. My voice came out to be sophisticated, dark, exotic and intriguing and the settings are always in distant, exotic places.

The story was successful and it was published in my university literary journal, which encouraged me to further pursue the story. One thing led to another and I thought of using the same characters, settings, themes and expanding the short story into a novel.

The novel follows the life of the main character, an Indian girl who immigrated to the USA with her cosmopolitan, urbanite family from Bangalore. It starts out as a story about being stuck in two worlds - American and Indian. But the main focus of the novel is her college and young adult years. The story is about an Indian-American promiscuous college girl finding wholeness and healing in relational areas and in her spirit and soul. This story will discuss cultural values pertaining to relationships, marriage and sexuality. Even though there are serious issues surrounding the topic, there are satirical elements mocking our cultural attitudes towards love.

Love is a beautiful, magnificent thing but fallen human nature is too stupid to understand the sacred nature of love. It is because the human soul is born evil, carnal, dark, and devoid of all meaning until an outside source ignites and fills the dark soul with light. And in order to experience wholeness in love and sexuality, something drastic needs to happen. The first step would be to deny yourself and seek out truth and meaning.

I like to set my characters in urban big cities. Growing up in Dubai, I have always been a city girl at heart.

My stories always have protagonists who are angry, young Indian woman in her 20s. She is usually a fallen, Byronic hero type and a tragic-comedy. She's headed towards destruction and tragic ending, unless something happens.

I have lots of interesting ideas for the novel but the most difficult part is portraying it clearly through my words. Some ideas are very hard to express. It's going to be a journey but we'll see what happens.

Secondly, the hard part is becoming disciplined, finding uninterrupted time and balancing time in-between work, college classes and other things. If I'm writing, I need a long stretch of time to dream, ponder and pour the thoughts on paper. That can get challenging because writing takes a lot of mental focus. This is why I've been working on this piece for a long time. Setting deadlines works well for me.

I realized that only I can write the way I do. Each person has their own unique writing style and writing voice that is hard to imitate. There may be similarities but no writers ever sound alike like carbon copies. Even if you assign a group of writers the same characters, ideas and plot no one can ever write the exact same story. This gives me encouragement. I hold on to that thought as I decide to pen down that novel.

At the moment, I have 4 completed chapters but I am not happy with how 2 of them turned out and editing them.