Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Narrating a story


I do start pontificating at times but, by and large, it has been safely in the area of philosophy where anyone may speak anything and cannot be proved outright wrong. This once I have stuck my neck out into an area where I cannot claim any expertise and can be ridiculed for how wrong I have got my ideas!
The Fool and I stared this workshop for Indian Fiction writers. Please do not get me wrong – it is not like we thought we had something to teach people about writing fiction. It is just that we thought we would learn from each other in a structured attempt.
The exercise was to write your own narrative of a plot line given to all - this time by The Fool. We were lucky to get sixteen entries for this exercise – including a few from some of the best fiction bloggers - and had a glimpse into various ways in which a plot could be handled. The plot given can be read here and all the entries are also hosted on the same blog.
To round off the writing part of the exercise, I put up my own ideas on what we expected by seeking people to narrate the same plot in their own voices. Those ideas are there in this piece – Narrating a Story – at http://www.indifictionworkshop.blogspot.in/2012/10/narrating-story.html.

4 comments:

  1. Again! Great initiative Suresh, commendable! Rest on the Indifiction blog!

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  2. This was a good initiative! And the post on narration was extremely informative. After spending the last few months writing, I have come to realize that having a good plot will work well only if you have a good narrative in place. On the other hand you will be able to make a bad plot look good if you have a strong narrative in place. It all banks on that- narration.

    P.S- leaving the comment here as I am not sure if the fiction workshop blog is still active :)

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    1. We thought it was too - Karthik and I - but enthusiasm fizzled out after a few episodes. So, you are right, the blog is inactive.

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