On paper and on screens. …Duh!
To leave this blog at this point would be hilarious but the grades wouldn’t be so here is my attempt to break it down.
What type of genre does my writing fall under?
I was raised with Indian mythology, which was often served to me with food, in return Indian mythology ended up serving as a major source of inspiration for most of my short stories and poetry. Typically, the story’s female protagonist provides the perspective for these pieces.
According to Ritu Menon, in a Robert Fraser interview, the traditional understanding of feminist writing in the West differs slightly from what feminist writing is. It is the location of the majority of creative pieces’ genres. (Fraser, October 2007)
‘It’s been around for the last twenty years or so. By ‘feminist’ I mean something distinctively so — with a feminist gender perspective, not just a focus on gender studies or women’s studies, which is often the case with mainstream publishing.’[1]
(Menon R. 2007, pg. 11)
To find my audience I ended up doing some research:
Types of Publishing Houses and Which one is the best for me?
Perr Henningsgaard {Hennningsgaard, 2020} proposes three models for surveying the many types of publishing firms and determining which mix of houses will allow your writing to flourish. Based on the explanations of each type of publishing firm, I concluded that the ‘Traditional type of publishing house’ was the best fit for my writing and for me to reach t
he intended audience. This requires the least amount of financial input from the author, and there are already several well-known authors who have published in the same genre as my writing, but in the form of a novel, which is exactly what I aim to achieve. Authors like Amish with his Shiva Trilogy, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Palace of Illusions, Forest of Enchantments, and the Last Queen.
The best place for me to begin with the form of an engagement is to submit my work to some competitions and anthologies, either in a physical book or in digital form. For example, The Flight of the Dragonflies accepts submissions for their bi-monthly e-journal, but only for poet
ry, flash, and short fiction, and Short Fiction Journal accepts short fiction. Aside from these and many other competition sources.
My writing with challenges and solutions:
Since a lot of my work is emotionally charged, I had to learn to show rather than explain. My creative piece was far less interesting than I had anticipated because of this problem. Even while the plot and the story piqued the interest of my readers, it wasn’t sufficient. That’s when my professor saved the day! They lent me a book called How to Write: How to Write and What to Write if You Don’t Have Any Ideas, which helped
me with my telling and showing problems (Tondeur, 2017). This provides a step-by-step writing tutorial whether you are just starting, stuck at a certain point, or just need an outline since everything seems overwhelming. It was helpful to me in dealing with the latter.
The characters I created for my work also presented a challenge. In addition,, a lot of writers wind up making their characters two-dimensional due to an abundance of ideas or a lack of ideas for character development. Writing Passport: Characters was the piece that saved my bacon in this situation (Heard, 2018). One of the clearest ideas for developing your characters that I have ever seen was included in this essay.
“It’s important to remember that no one is all good or all bad. When planning a character, we have to keep them complex.”[2]
(Heard, 2018)
To Assess the Assessment:
Speaking of highly emotive content, I grew up seeing both Bollywood and Hollywood productions; the latter had a significant impact on me. By influence, I mean that I began to look for the kind of closeness that they displayed, whether it was between a teenage boy and girl or a mother and her daughter. Its one flaw was that it was implausible to ever exist at that level, not to mention that I lived in a place where depictions of closeness and love like that were never found on the gloomiest street or around the corner. In Ziyad Marar’s book, Intimacy:
Ordinary people (at least in Western cultures) do seem to hold a
common prototype of what creates intimacy, and we can recognize common themes in researchers’ definitions that are not unlike laypersons’ understandings. Yet, we do not by any means have a common definition.[3] (Mashek & Aron 2004: 417)[i]
As I got older, my idea of intimacy shifted, and I began to see intimacy in the tiniest, most ordinary things. My publishing module’s final work serves as an example of the same. the items I associate with my hometown. Something that will always bring me back to my hometown is the unique connection I have with even the slightest things. The uniqueness and the emotions I have associated with the objects, rather than the objects themselves, are what make my creative piece relatable, even though the objects I have chosen to use aren’t particularly common or even found in every household. Despite this, the piece is still powerful and emotionally moving.
‘… close-up scrutiny (with perhaps a voyeuristic edge), connection, privacy, depth of knowledge, the smallest scale of daily life, heightened emotion, something personal or customized (rather than standardized), friendship and ambivalence, as well as, of course, eroticism and sexuality.’ [4]
(Marar, 2014, pg.24)
And to leave on the note of…
Three published novels that are either related to my writing style or sometimes serve as sources of inspiration are On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, 40 Rules of Love, and Five Feet Apart. These are the books I turn to when I’m lacking creative inspiration, even though they don’t resemble the article I submitted for my assessment. Creating a poetic rendition of a commonplace idea is where it most benefits me, as I have mentioned in my work. As a reader, these works have succeeded in evoking strong emotions in me regarding everything that is connected to the characters, even when the authors have written about the most unrelatable topics.
[1] FRASER, R. October 2007. ‘Half the World is Not so Narrow’: Feminist Publishing in India. Wasafiri, 22, 7.
[2] HEARD, W. 2018. Writing Passport: Characters, Scribbler.
[3] MASHEK, D. J., ARON, ARTHUR 20004. Handbook of Closeness and Intimacy.
[4] MARAR, Z. 2014. Intimacy, Routledge.
FRASER, R. October 2007. ‘Half the World is Not so Narrow’: Feminist Publishing in India. Wasafiri, 22, 7.
HEARD, W. 2018. Writing Passport: Characters, Scribbler.
HENNNINGSGAARD, P. 2020. Types of Publishing Houses. In: ALISON BAVERSTOCK, R. B., MADELENA GONZALEZ (ed.) Contemporary Publishing and the Culture of Books. London, UK: Routledge.
MARAR, Z. 2014. Intimacy, Routledge.
MASHEK, D. J., ARON, ARTHUR 20004. Handbook of Closeness and Intimacy.
PHILLIPS, A. 2020. The Modern Literary Agent. Contemporary Publishing and the Culture of Books. st Edition ed.: Routledge.
TONDEUR, L. 2017. How to Write: How to write and what to write if you don’t have any ideas, Self-published.
DIVAKARUNI, CHITRA BANERJEE. 2008. Palace of Illusions (Pan Macmillan: India).
DIVAKARUNI, CHITRA BANERJEE. 2019. Forest of Enchantments (Pan Macmillan: India).
TRIPATHI, AMISH. 2013. The Immortals of Meluha (HarperCollins India).
Lippincott, Rachael. 2018. Five Feet Apart (Simon and Schuster).
Shafak, Elif. 2010. 40 Rules of Love (Penguin Press).
VUONG, OCEAN. 2019. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press).
