writing

The Iqra Writes Update # 1

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Welcome to the Iqra Writes update where you can catch me in my natural habitat, that is, talking about writing and everything else that I’ve been up to. It’s finally fall season and that makes another season I’ve been working on The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings. The thing about this story is that it grows with every turn in the plot. I recently plotted the latest turn so now the story is all set to go down that path and show us what happens to the characters as they struggle with the pre-marital phase and everything involved in it. It took awhile for me to find the critical element that would tie the story together in the middle. I had started the story a long time ago with the intent that it would show conflict between the main character and her two friends. When the story changed to reflect points of disagreement between the main character and her mother, I had to look for the connecting element that would carry the story forward beyond its beginning stages. Thankfully, I found it. What is this element, you ask? I found a question that would take the rest of the book to find an answer. Questions are a good way to connect the plot to the theme of the story. When I want to explore the chosen theme of the story, coming up with some questions to answer is a good way to do that.

Hackschool Project Audiobook

In other news, I have a surprise for readers of Hackschool Project, my first novel. I am working on the audiobook version of the novel. It is a slow start as I learn the ins and outs of the process and develop my rhythm. I hope to record the entirety of the novel in due time and bring the audiobook out as soon as possible.

Book recommendation

It’s time for a book recommendation. The book is The Joy Diet by Martha Beck. I read this as part of the Book Hero book club by DiscoverU. It is a practical book full of easily applicable wisdom for how to live your life. It is simple to understand and well written. I highly recommend it. The diet recommended in this book is a diet of action steps to take to improve your own quality of life and achieve joy. It does not relate to any actual food consumption tips.

What I am playing

I can’t give an update about what I’m up to without talking about what games I’m playing. I got back into playing Animal Crossing New Horizons recently. It’s a cute game about living on an island and building and decorating it as you please. A new update is coming out for the game which includes new features like a coffee shop and an island resort that you can decorate for visitors. I’m so excited to try out these new features and have fun with this game all over again. I also started playing New Pokemon Snap. It’s another cute game but this time it’s about taking pictures of Pokemon in the wild to use for Pokemon research. I’m glad I got it, even though it’s pretty simple but it’s nice to play a game that doesn’t have a lot of demands for once. You just see a Pokemon and wait for it to make a fun pose that you can take a picture of. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

Recommendation for writers

 If you’re looking for writing advice, I want to point you in the direction of Lauren Sapala. She is a writer who blogs and teaches courses about how intuitive personalities can use their imaginative personality traits to write better. I want to point you in the direction of her blog laurensapala.com where you can find her blog posts containing advice to writers on any topic about writing that you can think of. It’s worth it to read her blog and if you want to go further you can get her book The INFJ Writer or take her Intuitive Writing course. INFJ is a personality type according to Myers Briggs personality types and in her book Lauren talks about the common challenges and solutions for writers who have this personality type. If you don’t know what your personality type is, you can find out by taking the quiz at 16personalities.com and if you’re an INFP or INFJ who likes to write, I highly recommend getting her book.

I will close out this update with the reminder that you can find my first novel, Hackschool Project at meraqissa.com/book/1668 and whenever I am done with The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings you will find it there too. This is Iqra, signing out.

Listen to this episode as a podcast on:

Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/iqra-writes-update-1/id1591131524?i=1000539116728

SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/iqrawrites/iqra-writes-update-1?si=9ef59614ae6246e485944487de7d4f3f

Shifting Gears from Hackschool Project to The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings

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When I finished writing Hackschool Project, I knew the story of the three Moin siblings remained yet to be told. I could see clearly them continuing along the lines where I had left them. With Leena in college, Inaya just having finished her O Levels and Jasir starting Matric, I see many tales of their educational years yet before us. I decided, however, to put the Hackschool Project sequel on hold to make way for a new story to come through. An older story with more mature characters and a different theme from Hackschool Project, exploring the world of young people once they are past their educational years. I decided to explore the topic of choosing someone to marry through the eyes of three friends, two who are already engaged when the story starts, and the main character, Hina, whose process of getting married is the focus of the story. Hina’s experiences of getting engaged and everything that comes with an engagement unfold in a backdrop of commentary from her friends, who have opinions about every step of the process and do not hesitate to share them.

The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings flows differently from Hackschool Project in terms of how story points connect to each other. The story builds over time as events progress and one thing leads to another. Wedding-level excitement cannot be present in the beginning chapters of the story, where the engagement is still in the planning stages. In this way, The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings builds from stage to stage: the pre-engagement stage, the engagement ceremony stage, the immediate post-engagement stage, and so on. At every stage, we see the friends’ commentary of it. The friends’ commentary is a recurring occurrence and its regularity in the story is the bar by which each stage is measured. Is it acceptable? Is it fashionable? Is it current? Hina’s friends run her ongoing engagement experiences past their personal standards. Their most strict standard is comparing Hina’s experiences to their own engagements. Hina’s engagement might fail one friend’s standards of being fashionable, or the other friend’s standards of being authentic, but in the end what comes to light is Hina’s development of her own standard. As Hina determines what she wants, she runs her engagement past her friends’ standards and finds it severely lacking. This, combined with her own wishes to get more out of the situation, ultimately leads her to prioritize what is important to herself first. Will she remain bound to her friends’ standards? Will she find what she is looking for in her engagement? Will she fall in love with her fiance? We will find this out together, as I am still writing The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings at the time of writing this post. If you’re interested in my published work, you may get Hackschool Project, my story about students using the power of family, fun and friendship to survive school life, here at the Mera Qissa bookstore.

Preparing to write and actually writing: a comparison

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The single most useful piece of writing advice I have gathered from reading books, blog posts and articles on the subject is: use bum glue. To be specific, that means glue yourself to your seat and stay there. You can fiddle about with fancy word processing software, gimmicky grammar tools, and writing websites, but in the end, it’s just you and your willpower.

I don’t mean to say that you can force words out of your brain from sheer force of will. What I mean is that once you sit down and commit to sitting there for a specified period of time, you will eventually put fingers to keyboard (or pen to paper) and get work done. Maybe you need a cup of your caffeinated beverage of choice to activate your mind. Maybe you need an arrangement of cushions and footstools to get comfortable enough for the words to flow. Once your writing environment is in place, all that is left is to stop messing with it and just write.

I spent a long time in this space where I would just read about writing and not actually write. Sure, I picked up on the finer points of putting together a manuscript, but the writing process itself was quite neglected. The fact of the matter is that you learn by doing. You can choose to spend all your life making one piece of art or spend your time making different things and improving along the way.

Most things worth knowing are simple. It is when our natural resistance to making effort comes into play that things get complicated. You can choose either to “keep it simple, stupid” or make life unnecessarily tangled for yourself. It’s your choice.

Finding my way back home

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“Home” for me is writing. I have never suffered as much as I do when, for whatever reason, I give it up for a period of time. Whenever I turn back to it, it welcomes me back with open arms. I lose myself in it. It is my personal process of healing. If I don’t write, my unspent creative energy builds up into a big block of worry, and that is unhealthy.

In my autograph diary in which I got autographs from my teachers and schoolmates back in high school, one of my teachers told me to keep a hold onto writing, as she herself regretted letting go of it. Whenever I experience the peaceful bubble I can cocoon myself into when I write after a break from it, I recall this piece of advice from her and doubly appreciate it. I would be a fool to give up writing permanently. It is just hard-wired into my brain.

My brother is my personal cheerleader as far as writing goes. He is responsible for getting me to set up a “writing tracker”, which is basically a notebook in which I chart my writing progress. As usual, I either have several works in progress at one time, or none at all. I suppose it’s “all or nothing” for me.

My latest return to writing has been a happy one. I finally started writing my book, for real this time. I started a serial story for one of the magazines I write for. Both projects are enough to keep me on my toes. I aim to see both projects through to completion. That would be a serious achievement for me as a writer.

So, here goes nothing. I’m all set to continue my writing journey. I’ll keep you posted as to how it goes!

 

Readwrites: your procrastination is my “novel research”

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That’s basically what the name of this site means. Iqra=”read”, so “readwrites”. “Iqra” is my name so of course what I really mean is “I write”.

The funny thing is that I’m moving between reading and writing like a ping pong ball being bounced on a table between two players who definitely don’t want the ball to fall on their side. Writing a novel seems easy enough, just sit down and start writing until you stop. That is, unless you get sidetracked by, let’s say, a book on writing. Then you want to read a well written book, you know, just to see an example of good work. Of course, what actually happens is that you get discouraged by reading excellent writing. “I can never pull that off”, you say, tossing everything aside and opening the black hole of the Internet: Facebook.

Once you travel through the black hole and get thrown out on the other side, you realize that you have some non-novel writing to do. So you do it. After which you have no more energy to write, so you start watching a video instead.

The good thing is that nowadays I’m listening to the Leadership workshop by Nouman Ali Khan. It’s relevant. Come to think of it, everything is relevant. Like the author Bob Mayer says, living life gives you material for your novel. That means all procrastination is actually novel research work.

When push comes to shove, what I really need is to stop addressing the intangible “you” and talk about myself. While living life instead of actually writing and posting #amwriting tweets is all fine and dandy, that novel isn’t going to write itself. So why am I writing this blog post instead? I put this into the “exercising my writing muscles” category.

After I’ve exercised my writing muscles, read about writing, and listened about leadership, it’s time to…live life. Yup, actual novel writing time is not here yet. Hey, I do have 1800 words down (unedited), which I really should stop bragging about on the Women Writers, Women’s Books Facebook group, and not just because there are published authors there.

How about a goal to write at least 1000 words until next Friday’s blog post? Let’s see.

A writerly milestone

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I won third place in my age category in the first Commonwealth Essay Competition I participated in. I was 14. I won 120 pounds, and my parents made me buy a gold necklace with it. (I would have splurged on random stuff if left to my own devices). It was a great milestone for me and after that, since 2006, I started writing for local magazines. Now, I’ve sent in an entry for the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Let’s see what happens. The results will be announced at the end of May 2015.

Here’s what the judges had to say about my 2004 essay:

Nearly all the essays in the book review category were complimentary. This splendid diatribe made one think that we have a future critic in the making–authors beware! There is nothing to recommend, it seems, in this unfortunate book and we are told of its failings in well-chosen words. Even the description of the plot is used to demonstrate shortcomings. It is hard not to become convinced by the essay writer’s scorn and disappointment. That said, Iqra has a lightness of touch and an underlying wit which allow her to write such a devastating critique and get away with it!

Here’s my winning essay:

Topic: “What book have you either liked or disliked? Why did you like or dislike it?”

It was the summer vacation and monotony was driving me mad. So, I hit the bookstores, scouring the shelves for some series new to me, or the works of any writer which I had not read. Good fiction is soothing for a mind lethargic with boredom. A friend who was passionate about the “Goosebumps” series recommended a book to me. It was “Let’s Get Invisible!” by R. L. Stine.

After reading the book this became apparent: I did not see eye to eye with the friend who had recommended the novel to me. It was not according to my taste; too bland and frivolous to be delightful. It did not possess the charisma which many books had; the charm which made me read them repeatedly.

The plot revolves around Max, the protagonist and narrator of the story. He and his friends discover a magic mirror in the attic, and they soon find out that there is more to it than meets the eye. It is capable of granting temporary invisibility to whoever uses it correctly. The children play with it, but whoever stays invisible for a long period of time is drawn into the mirror and held captive there, and his reflection replaces him in the corporeal world. In the end, the imprisoned children are released when the mirror is broken, and the reflections go with it.

Now you might be wondering that what was so disagreeable about the book that it served as an impetus for me to write this essay. There are many reasons why I do not rate it amongst the treasured books of my collection.

The first thing I must point out about the novel is that it is supposed to be frightening. I singled it out from the other “Goosebumps” books because I wanted to see if there were other ways to scare people other than with monsters, devilry, carnage and the suchlike. The storyline is far from bloodcurdling. I read the book expecting to be scared afresh with every turn of the page. Instead, I was left waiting for something to happen. The plot tends to abate rather than arouse interest. It is the kind of book one can gladly stash under the

bed and forget. There is nothing horrifying or alarming in “Let’s Get Invisible!”, unless one tries to count the innumerable false alarms that mark the end of almost every chapter. As an example, say: a boy crosses a room enveloped in absolute darkness, and something howls…and it turns out to be his idiotic kid brother. The first false alarm gives the reader a satisfactory jolt; the second is easy to predict, and at the third one it becomes a monotony; another aspect of the continuous ennui that inhibits every last line of the story. It might terrify a five-year-old when told as a bedtime chronicle, but to me there is no element of terror whatsoever. If one selects a book because it is categorized under “horror”, then what is the use if it fails to instill any sort of fear at all?

It is not worth wandering in the bleak world of Stine’s magic mirror, because it is composed of nothing truly new. Invisibility and magic mirrors are among the trademarks of fiction. Creativity is extremely valuable.

Some writers are so good at writing stories that along with making their plots strong, they express, portray and elaborate very well. Such authors compose books with such dexterity and ingenuity that the reader is spellbound from the beginning to the end. All of us have read such masterpieces: stories with narrators so charming one cannot desire to quiet them or worlds so richly painted one does not want to leave. I am afraid that “Let’s Get Invisible!” cannot be rated so highly. It is simply too mediocre and insipid to be pleasurable; it takes only a moment’s contemplation to tell whether you like it or not. If one seeks literary bliss, it is better not to read this book.