The week of construction
Writing a novel is like building a house…
Firstly, to all my dearest friends who joined this week, I’m very grateful to be sharing this journey with you. This project is the most rewarding and exciting project I’ve worked on in my life and I thank you for being my earliest cheerleaders.
A quick intro Arismiti and the Golden Pyramid is a fantasy novel I’m working on. It blends in elements of Ancient Indian legends and forgotten locations. This book will be the first in a series of 5 and that’s why it will take me until next year to publish it. But in the meantime, there will be plenty of sneak peeks.
This week’s writing journey Writing a novel is like building a house. I finished my first draft, which is the equivalent of laying a foundation for the house but now comes the tricky parts of flooring, laying pipes, building walls etc and making it into a house.
This week was all about story construction where I laid out each scene I had written and figured out what was missing and what was too much. Each genre has unwritten rules which state that specific obligatory scenes must be in the work. For example, you can’t write a murder mystery without having a murder scene in it. The problem is that these rules are largely unwritten and as a writer you have to figure them out yourself based on previous books in similar categories and research from editor gurus.
Interesting tidbit: Opalina - can you believe this name comes from ancient Sanskrit? Opals are gemstones in English and Opalina is a girls name in Sanskrit.
One of my rules I had early on when I started this book, was that I’d go to the earliest versions of Sanskrit, right where you can see glimmers of Latin, when picking names for the characters. I believe the oldest languages of our world, Latin and Sanskrit share a lot of similarities, partly because I learnt German using Telugu grammar.
It’s not just me who has this theory…
The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source which perhaps no longer exists - Sir William Jones, Philologist
Books/Shows of the week: This week Michelle Obama came to Germany for a conference and dropped her book as a freebie, The light we carry into my lap. Who am I to say no to that?
Once in a while, you get to see great talent on TV who spellbinds you and that was Meryl Streep for me in the show, Only murders in the building on Disney.