Category: Writing Advice

Writing advice, secrets of penning down books and experiences of authors. Come here for free intensive writing workshops.

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Want an academic paper? Head to pirate site Sci-Hub

There’s something quite weird happening in the academic community. Scientists and professors write papers which are meant for other scientists to read and expand their own knowledge as well as add to it.  They send these papers to journals where they get published. Most scientists and researchers would get promotions, cushy jobs or academic positions on the basis of the number of their publications. Which is great.

Except most of the scientific community sends these papers to journals for FREE. The journals belong to big-fat private publishers, mostly based in the USA.  For this free content, the publishers ask for copyright in exchange for publishing. Then the publishers put up all this knowledge for sale. They charge a bomb for access to these journals. The richer Western universities can afford to pay these costs, but scientists in poorer countries don’t have access. Many of them can’t even pay for it even with money as the IP address of their countries can’t cross  the journal’s copyright firewalls.  What’s stinkier is that it’s not like these publishers are paying the original authors (the scientists) any royalties for earning out of their work. They pocket everything. And if the author shares her paper with someone else, they might face a lawsuit from the publisher. Stupid, right?

Which is why I wholeheartedly approve of what Kazakhstan citizen Alexandra Elbakyan did when she faced the problem of access to papers in her field. Instead of heading to Twitter and asking for academic papers with #IcanhazPDF:

She became a pirate.

Alexandra used her computer skills and put all papers from all publishers online, for free, for anyone to access. And that’s how Sci-Hub was born. You can head there now, search for something and see what kind of papers you find.

Continue reading “Want an academic paper? Head to pirate site Sci-Hub”

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Neil Gaiman’s handwritten notes

Call me old fashioned, but there’s something in notes that are handwritten. So I salivate after notes of my favourite authors, trying to find bits and pieces of handwritten marvels from them, when they were constructing my favourite books. So imagine my sheer bliss at having discovered Neil Gaiman’s notes on his book American Gods. of that’s been handwritten. Glee.

Initial thoughts about the book

Continue reading “Neil Gaiman’s handwritten notes”

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Author Ursula Le Guin on how to start a story

There’s a germ of an idea in your head which craves to be built up into a novel. It urges you to fill copious amounts of empty pages with plot lines, character sketches, scenes and more. All this while, you’ve not written even a single piece of your book. Where do you start? How do you start writing, just like that, start it and continue page after page after page for atleast 150 odd pages? How does the idea, the plot line, the character, the scene come together? I’ve always wondered and pondered and thought about it. It’s a question that doesn’t end even though I’ve started and finished a few novels now. Finally I came across author Ursula K Le Guin’s brilliant advice on how to start a story and had to include it in  Witchery of Writing series.

My own experience of starting is different for every story and every book. In my teens and twenties, I made endless enthusiastic starts to dead ends. Gradually I learned that if I got thinking about a place or a situation that felt like there was a story in it, and if I hung on to that place and that situation, put my mind on it, then people and what they’d do (their behavior, the events, the plot) might begin growing out of it. Sometimes quite rapidly, as if the story was actually all there already and just needed to be written. Sometimes only with a long time of pondering, brooding, working it out, making notes, rethinking. Occasionally, as I got more experience, my first glimpse of a story was like seeing a trailhead. What I had to do was start following that trail (in the person of a character) and discover as we went where we were going. (“I learn by going where I have to go.”—Roethke.) I call this “writing the way through the forest,” the same metaphor Karla uses — and I honestly do not recommend it to an inexperienced writer. Continue reading “Author Ursula Le Guin on how to start a story”

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Why SEO is bad for your writing

I was writing the piece on Shantala, the Hoysala queen, a lyrical post which talks about her life, what she achieved and how she did it through the art she knew, dancing. I was about to post it on my WordPress when my Yoast SEO plugin suggested this:

The copy scores 56.8 in the Flesch Reading Ease test, which is considered fairly difficult to read. Try to make shorter sentences to improve readability.

What is Flesch score anyway?

Now Flesch score  measures textual difficulty of a reading passage in English. The lower the score, the more difficult the text is. The Flesch readability score uses the sentence length (number of words per sentence) and the number of syllables per word in an equation to calculate the reading ease. Texts with a very high Flesch reading Ease score (about 100) are very easy to read, have short sentences and no words of more than two syllables. Usually, a reading ease of 60-70 is believed to be acceptable/ normal for web texts.

source: Wikipedia.com
Score Notes
90 – 100 easily understood by an average 11-year old student
60 – 70 easily understood by 13-15 year old students
0 – 30 best understood by university graduates

So for a higher SEO, the text should be simple, easily understood by an average 11-year old. Now there’s nothing wrong with 11-year-olds. They’re fabulously inquisitive and love to delve into twisted logics. But as I child, your vocabulary is limited. The aim of constant reading and writing and reading and understanding is to add in a few more words into it. Writers should aim at not simplifying but expressing, as poetically in sentences long and short. In words that’re made of more syllables.

The algorithms, the bots and the search index, making writing in English (and increasingly any language), a matter of logic. When it should be a matter of heart. Of art. Of love and labour. Of things you want to say. Things which are difficult to express. Things you feel, but can’t think of simpler ways to see. Simplicity has its own charm. Ask Hemingway. But sometimes, language and search should not be measured by simplicity and tag words alone. Sometimes, you need to new words, or a string of phrases that haven’t been used together before. Like ‘chocolate’ and ‘index’. (Versus ‘chocolate sex’). As a writer, you would want to be discovered, but think on it. Do you want to discover the inarticulate in yourself, or write for SEO Engines so a few more readers come your way?

(Yoast informs me that this blog scores 70.2 in the Flesch Reading Ease test, which is considered fairly easy to read. Good for the 11-year-olds reading it.)

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Poem: Home by Warsan Shire

It was at the time when the dead Syrian baby splashed across the web and media that I found this poem by poetess Warsan Shire (Twitter). It not only touched me, but crushed my heart and squeezed tears out of my rather cynical eyes. So here it is in all its glory. Hope to see more of her in future.

HOME by Warsan Shire

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbours running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6t78c_5aR4

(Listen to it here)

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here.

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Poem: In tolerant India

Yes, I’m a racist.
I look at you and see
The percentage of melanin
In your skin
The angle your eyes slant
The colour of the iris
The length of your hair
It’s texture
It’s shape
It’s smell
The way it shines
Or not.

Yes, I’m a casteist.
I look at your surname and your name
Your tilak and your birth fame
The clothes you wear
The accent you talk
The scrawls on your certificate
What’s on your plate
The smells
The shape
Of the food you just ate
Or didn’t.

racism, caste in India

Yes, I’m tolerant
I tolerate you
Smile at you
Accept you
Hiding disgust
That rises inside.
You’re my responsibility
Part of my culture
My country
My people to empower
And I will
I promise I will
Even though the percentage
And the texture and shape
Remind me of rape.

Is it my fault?
Your hands are so dark
And dirty
They’ve touched the filth
My ancestors did
.

Your birth certificate
It’s barely there
Torn and soiled
Like a drain.

You speak weird
Unpolished and poor
Your dark skin
Reminds me of
Monsters and their kin

Is it my fault?

I’m trying hard
To power you up
To empower you
But the skin
It’s so dark
So dark.

Can I help but judge?

Is it my fault
If your skin is so dull?
Can I help but judge you?

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Guest post: Is Vanity Publishing Author Exploitation?

Rasana Atreya is the author of Tell A Thousand Lies (shortlisted for the 2012 Tibor Jones South Asia prize), The Temple Is Not My Father and 28 Years a Bachelor.  UK’s Glam magazine calls Tell A Thousand Lies one of their ‘five favourite tales from India.’ Valley Isle Secrets is her first foray into fan fiction set in the USA. Website.

Vanity publishing has arrived at publishing conferences and literary festivals, and this should be of great concern because vanity publishing is less about emulating trade (also called traditional) publishers, and more about convincing gullible authors to pay for services they do not need. Aspiring authors attend these conferences and festivals. The more they hear about these publishers, the more it gets legitimized in their minds.

You, as an author, owe it to yourself to be well informed. There is plenty of good information available on the Internet. Plenty of bad information, too. Learn to tell the difference. If you want to be a published author and have your book available for sale – either submit to trade publishers, or self-publish. If all you want is print copies of your book, go to your local printer. It works out much cheaper, and you also retain rights to your books. Stay away from anyone who wants money to publish you.

I cringe when vanity publishers call themselves ‘self-publishing’ companies. When you take the ‘self’ out of self-publishing, i.e. you – the author – do not upload the book yourself, it is no longer self-publishing. All that remains is vanity publishing.
I was a panelist on the nuts and bolts of self-publishing on Sept 12, 2015 in PublishingNext, Goa. This post is a combination of my take-away from there (a fabulous conference, btw), my comments as a panelist, and also my own impressions.

It getting harder for UK- and US-based vanity publishers to get naïve authors to fall for their ‘publishing packages’ – which can run into tens of thousands of dollars. This is thanks to activism on behalf of authors by platforms like Writers Beware and Preditors & Editors. As a result, vanity publishers have moved operations to Asia and Africa. That includes India, of course.

Continue reading “Guest post: Is Vanity Publishing Author Exploitation?”

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Why speculative fiction may be the best way to depict reality

In 2001, while receiving the Carnegie Medal for his children’s bookThe Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, author Terry Pratchett said, ‘We categorize too much on the basis of unreliable assumption. A literary novel written by Brian Aldiss must be science fiction, because he is a known science fiction writer; a science fiction novel by Margaret Attwood is literature because she is a literary novelist. Recent Discworld books have spun on such concerns as the nature of belief, politics and even of journalistic freedom, but put in one lousy dragon and they call you a fantasy writer.’ Pratchett was England’s most popular author in the 1990s (before yet another fantasy author, JK Rowling took over), having sold over 85 million books worldwide in 37 languages. The Amazing Maurice is a tale of a cat and a group of rats fighting monsters and two-legged humans in a quest for their survival and deifes any categories really, be it a metaphor, a children’s book or even a fantasy fiction.

For most of us, it’s the dragons who breathe fire, immortal vampires with icy smooches and marble-skin and werewolves and robots and faeries and artificial intelligence who want to take over the world—these are the things that take us back again and again to the speculative genre. We live in these make-believe worlds, we see them through the dragon’s eyes, through the wizard’s adventure, through the superhero’s flight in the sky. For those few hours a day, swashbucklers we, slay with our Valyrian swords, dashing away from the Nazgul, and facing worst dementors by becoming Jedi masters. For fantasy, be it in gaming or books or movies, is perceived by the majority as escapism and a desire to live in alternate realities.

Continue reading “Why speculative fiction may be the best way to depict reality”

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Guest fiction: The Last Answer by Isaac Asimov

Thought should start the new year with something smashing. Here’s a short story by my ever favourite author Isaac Asimov to inspire you (and me) to write some good science fiction this year.

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The Last Answer by Isaac Asimov — © 1980

Murray Templeton was forty-five years old, in the prime of life, and with all parts of his body in perfect working order except for certain key portions of his coronary arteries, but that was enough.

The pain had come suddenly, had mounted to an unbearable peak, and had then ebbed steadily.  He could feel his breath slowing and a kind of gathering peace washing over him.

There is no pleasure like the absence of pain – immediately after pain.  Murray felt an almost giddy lightness as though he were lifting in the air and hovering.

He opened his eyes and noted with distant amusement that the others in the room were still agitated.  He had been in the laboratory when the pain had struck, quite without warning, and when he had staggered, he had heard surprised outcries from the others before everything vanished into overwhelming agony.

Now, with the pain gone, the others were still hovering, still anxious, still gathered about his fallen body –– Which, he suddenly realised, he was looking down on.

He was down there, sprawled, face contorted.  He was up here, at peace and watching.

He thought: Miracle of miracles!  The life-after-life nuts were right.

And although that was a humiliating way for an atheistic physicist to die, he felt only the mildest surprise, and no alteration of the peace in which he was immersed.

He thought: There should be some angel – or something – coming for me.

The Earthly scene was fading.  Darkness was invading his consciousness and off in a distance, as a last glimmer of sight, there was a figure of light, vaguely human in form, and radiating warmth.

Murray thought: What a joke on me.  I’m going to Heaven.

Even as he thought that, the light faded, but the warmth remained.  There was no lessening of the peace even though in all the Universe only he remained – and the Voice.

The Voice said, “I have done this so often and yet I still have the capacity to be pleased at success.”

It was in Murray’s mind to say something, but he was not conscious of possessing a mouth, tongue, or vocal chords.  Nevertheless, tried to make a sound.  He tried, mouthlessly, to hum words or breathe them or just push them out by a contraction of – something.

And they came out.  He heard his own voice, quite recognisable, and his own words, infinitely clear.

Murray said, “Is this Heaven?”

The Voice said, “This is no place as you understand place.”

Murray was embarrassed, but the next question had to be asked.  “Pardon me if I sound like a jackass.  Are you God?”

Without changing intonation or in any way marring the perfection of the sound, the Voice managed to sound amused.  “It is strange that I am always asked that in, of course, an infinite number of ways.  There is no answer I can give that you would comprehend.  I am – which is all that I can say significantly and you may cover that with any word or concept you please.”

Murray said, “And what am I?  A soul?  Or am I only personified existence too?”  He tried not to sound sarcastic, but it seemed to him that he had failed.  He thought then, fleetingly, of adding a ‘Your Grace’ or ‘Holy One’ or something to counteract the sarcasm, and could not bring himself to do so even though for the first time in his existence he speculated on the possibility of being punished for his insolence – or sin? – with Hell, and what that might be like. Continue reading “Guest fiction: The Last Answer by Isaac Asimov”

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How to write an application for a writing fellowship

Am so thrilled to share with all of you that I’ve just received the Charles Wallace India Trust writing fellowship for speculative fiction. Yup, speculative fiction. You know the one which has monsters and aliens and spaceships and rakshasas and cool things that stay away from the so called ‘serious’ writing? Which means I get to write science fiction stories (the new book I’m planning post Anantya Tantrist’s third book is finished) and get to attend creative writing classes and meet faculty and students and gorge through the folklore library at Chichester University, all at the same time. Ain’t life fun?

Though I applied for the fellowship, I’d never really thought I would get it. And I’m still surprised, since I’d applied for a science fiction writing gig. There are a few friends who helped me shape the application (thank you Samit, Ajitha, Seema, Ranjita, Uthara) which got the thumbs up from the kind faculty at Chichester  (that’s a shout out for you, Stavroula!). And there are a few things I learnt while writing the application. Which is why this blog. I hope readers who’re applying for fellowships/scholarships and don’t know where to start, find some guidance here.

1) Have a project in mind

Don’t start with ‘I want to go for this fellowship’, start with ‘I want to write this book, this story, or work on this project.’ Have a clear vision on what exactly you want to do. I don’t mean know what you want to write or create, for there will never be so much clarity on that, but have a strong idea on what kind of story you want to create, what project, so you can express it as clearly in the proposal. I waited for four years to apply for any fellowship, for I wanted to be sure the project I wanted to work on needed it. The science fiction project I mentioned, needs me as a writer to learn more on the overall Sci-fi genre, to read more, to be exposed to well-read faculty, facilities and ideas.

2) Do your research Continue reading “How to write an application for a writing fellowship”