On Writing

Sat, 20 Aug 2022 12:43:06 +0000

When I was in 5th grade, my school had three different exams for the languages we were taught. We had the grammar exam, a literature exam and a creative writing exam. You would get prompts or pictures in the creative writing exam and you could write whatever in the two hours we were given. I remember chewing on my pen, trying to write up stories that mirrored my favorite authors. Which was basically Enid Blyton. I was in awe. How could someone write characters I could read again and again. Children who went swimming in creeks and ate pot pie for breakfast. And so I would sit in these exams, and try to write to life those same characters that I was moved by. If someone had been able to run my stories through turnitin then, I would definitely have failed for plagiarism. But I did not know that at that point, there was such a thing as a logical flow, or a workable plot. I mean one of the stories I wrote for my Hindi creative writing exam was about a friendship between a horse and girl.