In the second last year of my school life, I worked on coming up with my own humble novel. It was around the same time that I started this blog. A little appreciation for my writing worked wonders and I was very encouraged to work on a plot. I developed characters from my observations of people on the train to and from Mumbai. It all went well for about a month and a half until I reached a deadlock where it was too complicated to proceed. I don't know if that happens to a lot of people, but I was frustrated and I deleted the MS word file that contained the story. I think that is perhaps the reason why professional writers use a typewriter. No matter how frustrated you are, the volume of your effort is always visible and so you never want to destroy and waste it.
After that failure, I have not had the motivation to attempt another novel and as the frequency of the posts on my blog would show, haven't been into writing much. I shifted to academic writing for a while, wrote a few short stories here and there, continued my "poets and pancakes" debate with those who could write poetry, never conceding that prose was for the less creative people, and mostly reading other people's works. Now that my time allows me to turn my thoughts into words, I feel like writing again and keep the scope open for both - academic as well as creative writing (if this is what this freestyle of writing could be called). In my experience so far, I have found academic writing to be much easier than the creative form. With a little training and experience, analysing data and forming hypotheses is a lot easier than designing characters and their environment. Most of all, academic writing allows you to be objective about the data, whereas you cannot be objective about a character that you create in a story.
Coming back to the point of this post, as I looked through the dashboard of my blog, I found a good number of drafts that I could never finish. I admit to having a weakness in terms of writing conclusions. I never know how to end things - in writing as in life. However, on reflection, I have found that I focus more on the characters than the plot. Once I have a fair idea of the character and I begin to like them, it becomes very painful for me to see them in a mediocre plot. And controlling the plot is not very easy unless you are thinking of something really bizarre and you want to confuse those who chance upon reading the thing. So I eventually have to give up the story and that's how they remain incomplete. I find it kind of hypocritical that we let our stories in real life fade with time without conclusions but are hesitant to accept a piece of writing without a proper conclusion. To think about it that way, I feel that it ultimately boils down to what Alvy Singer, Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall, says towards the end, "You’re always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it’s real difficult in life." I guess that's the way we work.
