THE STORY OF MY FIRST STORY

On a hot and sweaty Friday evening , in the confines of our air conditioned office me and my friend were searching for a suitable book to order of a minimum particular price (one was already selected) in order to save on delivery charges as above a certain minimum order value these e-commercial stores forego delivery charges.

While searching for a suitable book and going through the brief descriptions they put on the website it suddenly crossed my mind that I too could become a writer. Alas! I said it aloud and was immediately caught on my words and handed the task of writing a story by Monday.

Whoever said that think before you speak has rightly said so, but no one has ever warned about the repercussions of thinking aloud, so aloud that the person sitting next to you can hear it.

Any way the challenge was up in the air for taking and I took it upon myself to prove my worth as a writer.

As the technology has armed us with various resources one of them being internet where you can Google out any information you need, I searched “how to write a story?” The first thing that was listed as essential for writing a story was to get a great ‘idea’. After brain storming for several minutes the ‘idea’ was hard to come by, forget the great one. I could always write a short story about a king , king & queen, jungle etc but the challenge was to write a four page story.

Then the second point was to develop the idea in to a story by explaining the minute details about your characters , weather etc. after reading this point I felt that ok I can do this.

Then there was a point to include an unusual character in the story to make it interesting and there were some other points which seemed irrelevant to me.

Now armed with the above information on how to write a story I decided to take a chance on story writing. But the most critical part, the heart of any story, I believe, the ‘idea’ was still missing. I thought of starting my story with “once up on a time there was a king….” And elaborate every minute detail in so much detail that it may cover four pages. But somehow I rejected the idea myself as I felt that numerous stories on these lines have already been written. I should write something different and original.

On a second thought I came up with, to take an incident from my past life and develop it in to a story as many successful writers have done this and it will definitely be different and original. But my brainstorming session could not throw an incident from my past life that could be converted to a story.

Then I thought of writing something about a famous personality, their rags to riches story but I realized that I don’t know any personality on whom the story has not been written. Actually these became famous after their success stories were read out to the world.

After going all through this I realized that writing a story is not my cup of tea and I should try something else. But on the Saturday evening, which was also very hot as the temperature has soared up to 43 degrees in the afternoon, I was reminded again to write a story by Monday while walking through the vegetable market. The vegetable vendors were selling fresh vegetables. I thought of writing a story on these vendors. I had noticed in the past that they came daily at around four o clock in the evening, set up the market on the road side on the ground and most of them were able to sell off all their produce they came up with, to earn their lively hood by 9:30 pm, the time at which they started packing to leave. It also reminded me of the gone by monsoon season when heavy rain lashed this region for continuous five days but these vegetable vendors had come to sell off their produce without fail and made a killing during the monsoon season due to soaring prices. But I needed more information than this to come up with a meaningful story and therefore, could not develop the idea further.

I had also came across mangos, the king of fruits, in the vegetable market that reminded me that the mango season has just started and I will have plenty of this delicious, juicy fruit of various varieties like alphonso, badami, dasherri, langra etc. during the next three months. Mangoes are also a rich source of vitamins & minerals. I decided to write a story on mangoes but again, moments later I realized that many seasoned writers have already written thousands of pages on this wonderful fruit that the nature has gifted to the mankind and my amateur writing will not be able to justify the greatness of the king of fruits.

Meanwhile I was also enlightened about the Black Swan Theory which is a Metaphor for a very hard to predict or a surprise event. I wondered what it was all about but in the context it meant that it was highly unlikely for me to come up with a story by Monday. This made my resolve to write a story, in all probability by Monday, stronger.

 However, the big questions were: How could I possibly write a story? What should I do to unleash the hidden writer in myself? I thought a course on creative writing may prove to be helpful but it will take months, may be years to complete that course and all that I wanted is to write a story before the Monday deadline.

Another thing that I learned from the internet was to always keep a pen and paper in your pocket so that you are able to start writing whenever an idea crosses your mind. But for the unlucky me this sudden streak of creativity had not stroked me in the last two days and it is very likely that it will not strike me over the next two years.

Any way I was committed to write a story by Monday so I kept on brain storming for ideas, before sleeping, while taking a stroll in the park, while observing people, while doing any and every activity in hope of getting that elusive idea to enable me to write a story but it seemed that either all ideas were already converted in to stories or they were not worthy of being converted in to a story. Also, as I had said earlier, that I wanted to come up with something different and original.

Nevertheless as the Monday dead line was approaching fast, faster than anything that I could imagine, I finally took pen and paper on the hot summer Sunday morning and started to write whatever that came to my mind. Then I turned to lap top for writing as it automatically weeds out the spelling and grammatical errors, it made my task easier. All of the above is what I came up with and that’s the story of my first story which is still to see the light of the day. But I hope someday, may be it will …….