The Explorers

A friend of mine conducted a survey on about 60 school kids to find if any particular factors controlled their choice of fiction books they read, and he recorded very queer observations. Mind you, these readers ranged from casual to very experienced readers; some had the history of reading only what the syllabus had to offer, while others ranged from Rowling to Martin to Tolkien to Archer and a lot others. The casual readers, had queer factors that controlled their choice of fiction. Length of story- The most common factor the casual readers looked for was the length of the story. Any story more than 6000-7000 words was sure to be straight-forwardly rejected by them. Some preferred to get a short summary of the long story rather read it from start to end. Author's fame- 'Don't judge a book by its cover', they say; but in the sample space, almost all judged a story by fame of its author. This effect went to the extent that genuine likeness for specific genres was ...

So you are all set to write a story. But a question pops up in your mind- where do I start from? If such is the case, you may find the following things useful. The Three Divisions: One of the basic moves will be to divide your story into portions. There may be as many portions as you like; I personally like them to be a minimum of three. They are: Setup, Confrontation, and Resolution. Let's discuss them one by one. Setup:  In the setup, we provide the introduction. We must provide the introduction to our world where the story is set, our characters, and their relationship. You may also provide details like weather, economic conditions, political conditions, and other such things. You can approach it on two ways: Author explanation: Here the author explains the surroundings. Below is an example:      " In those times when the world was colonized, there was a small island off the coast of Peru, where the warm Peru current always kept the climate humid. In t...

The Hindi language - offshoot of the Devanagari script - has for long been sidelined in India with primary importance being given to the English Language. This decision, had not been taken by our founding fathers, nor by any of our Presidents or Prime Ministers, but by a British historian - Thomas Macaulay  - in the past days of 1835. The point he proposed was that Indian languages had "neither literary nor scientific information" and were "so poor and rude that, until they are ( were ) enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them." Since I know neither Sanskrit nor Arabic (the two options he rejected), I am not a person who can comment upon the validity of his statement, but having a mother-tongue knowledge of Hindi, I feel that if the Indian education system reverts to making Hindi as the primary language and English as secondary, I feel the Indians will be done greater good and will produce more advanced works o...