Shoba Narayan is an award-winning author and columnist. In the past, she has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Newsweek, Knowledge@Wharton, and other publications. She was awarded the Pulitzer Fellowship at the Columbia Journalism School. She is the author of two memoirs: Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes and Return to India.
Booksoarus caught up with the sprightly Shoba and chatted with her about her columns her memoir, “Return to India” and her writer-ly life.
Month: July 2013
Infusing newspaper style drama into your writing
Drama is derived from the Greek word drao and it means action. In order to sustain readers’ interest and to keep them constantly engaged, a writer has to keep the drama going. Fiction imitates life and society. When it comes to taking lessons on drama, our beloved media zooms into focus. Making news out a mundane activity like Sanjay Dutt weaving baskets in Yerwada jail is drama! While, we do not endorse the overt dramatization of trivialities, we look for lessons that might help.
How to show the passage of time while writing novels
In two of our earlier posts we briefly spoke about the element of time in writing. While working on the plot of a story, for instance, it is important to consider when things are happening.
While writing about the setting of a novel too, we’d mentioned how it is important to demonstrate to readers when the book is set.
In this post we bring to you how you can demonstrate the passage of time effectively.
7 tips to increase your author blog traffic
I’ve been managing 3 different websites. The one that gets the maximum traffic is in the area of international MBA admissions. It’s a very niche topic, compared to the sites that focus on mainstream topics such as technology, business, sports, movies. But over time the traffic has grown steadily making it quite popular in its sphere. Here are a few lessons that I’ve learnt from my experiences. Experiment with them and let me know what worked for you and what didn’t.
Dealing with too many characters in novels
At some point during the writing process you might feel that you’ve bitten off more than you can chew (cliché?); okay – eaten more than you can digest.
You review the situation and realize that one problem could be that there are too many paper-people: characters created by you. Your novel is set in a college and the entire cafeteria crowd feature in your novel. So what do you do?
Book writing consultants: How a coach and mentor can help
In the western world, writing consultants, coaches or mentors are common. [Read the note at the bottom of this post on the nomenclature]. Not so much in India, where most writers and aspiring authors prefer a do-it-yourself approach. This is less out of over-confidence and more out of a lack of awareness (about the concept itself and the availability of good writing mentors).
At Booksoarus, apart from the blog posts that we write, we have also been formally mentoring writers (who’ve approached us proactively for coaching and consulting) and thought it was a good time we write an article on it so more aspiring authors can polish their work before they approach literary agents and publishers in India and abroad.