Adventures of a Writer

    By Jaideep Sen Last evening as I  was watching Indian Idol, I realised it was  a Mothers ’  Special episode which was obviously a tearjerker . Considering how emotional it was I was  instinctively reminded that perhaps after Mother India,  the most memorable Mother written in contemporary Hindi cinema is Sumitra Devi of Deewar . The character of Sumitra Devi was created with   immense   e motional depth by Salim Saab and   his erstwhile partner, Javed Saab . Indian Idol's Mothers' Special Episode Another slightly lesser remembered but equally impactful character is Janki   in Naam.   P enned independently and  individually by Salim Saab with h is back to the wall when h e wrote his first solo script  after a forced four year break following his parting with Javed Saab . But you need to be made of a different mettle of resilience to hit the ball out of the park against all odds and that’s what Salim Saab did with N aam . When after seeing the I ndian Idol  episode I  spoke

  Elizabeth Gilbert is famously known for Eat, Pray, Love , a book that I frankly did not enjoy and couldn't bring myself to finish. When I picked up City of Girls , I was intrigued more by the fact that it was set in New York, a city that I had visited a couple of years ago. Watching a Broadway show was the major highlight of my trip. Given that City of Girls is also set in the world of 'showgirls', I was hooked. New York of the 1940s comes alive on the pages as we meet the rich and entitled Vivian Morris who arrives in the City to live with her slightly wild and eccentric aunt Peg. Peg runs a theatre where Vivian befriends an interesting cast of characters including a sexy showgirl, Peg's female secretary and lover and their actress friend. Vivian teams up with her showgirl friend and finds ample ways to exercise her two skills -- "sewing and sex" -- until the inevitable happens. Scandal ensues and upends Vivian's life. Vivian returns to her

 Sudesna Ghosh is a prolific Kolkata based romance author who shares her thoughts on Valentine's Day. Don't forget to check out her new release on Juggernaut, My First Love ... I love reading and writing romance. It wasn’t something that I planned to do when I started my writing career with short stories for children. But then I became friends with so many romance authors that I had no choice – I was talking about writing romance and reading more romance books than ever before because all my friends were writing them.  While a few people dared to comment that I was too serious and smart to write in the genre, my author friends encouraged me to try something new. I’m so glad I went ahead with it. No matter how much I tried to brush off Valentine’s Day as a commercial, superficial event, I started writing stories especially for the big day. Even if I didn’t get any Valentine’s Day cards or gifts, I started celebrating the occasion buying nice things for myself and the people I

Photo by Maddi Bazzocco on Unsplash The new year is already a month old. It seems a little odd to talk about 'new year resolutions' when things are still kind of out of whack in the world. The long shadow of 2020 continues to chase us into the new year and one is still a bit wary of hoping that things will ultimately fall into place. After all, you don't wanna put any kind of hex on it, right? So, January passed by in a swirl of activity. Some planned, others unplanned. And still others totally unexpected.  On the planned front, I took out time to listen to the three-part Robert McKee webinar series on longform TV writing. McKee's insights into the growth of binge-TV and their evolution from the soaps and serials of yore are incisive. It's a masterclass for anyone who is interested in writing - and has many lessons for all fiction writers including novelists. My own writing has been going slow for the past couple of months; so I have spent whatever spare time I ha

It's the first month of a spanking new year and what better way to welcome it than have the very lovely author Reet Singh talk about her reading and writing preferences. Better still, she decodes the difference between short stories, novellas and novels. Over to Reet... I love reading fiction, all genres (except horror) and all lengths, but of them I’m happiest reading shorter stories or novellas rather than novels. The real reason for my choice is not complicated to understand - it's because I am keen to move on to the next author and the next book so that I can sample a wider variety of fiction than if I were to read one long novel. As they say, there're so many authors and so little time. When it comes to writing fiction, however, I find that even if I plan out a short story, it tends to grow and grow, threatening to expand until it becomes at least a novella, if not a novel. Is the difference only in the word count?   Actually, no. Sure, a short story is usually less th