Hello everyone,
As most of you know, my short story, ‘The Descent,’ has been published in the Fall 2021 issue of Jaggery Lit Journal. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration if I said that I consider this to be the greatest accomplishment in my short writing career. I feel like I have come a long way from setting up a blank WordPress blog just to ‘like’ my wife’s posts on her website. (www.namysaysso.com. Check it out, she’s a wonderful poet).
I have been coming up with stories from when I was ten years old. My first story was a crime saga, one involving the police and bank thieves. I wrote the story (mostly in dialogue form) on paper (computers were not that common in 1992) and once I finished writing, I realized that it was crap. I started thinking about why my story was so inferior compared to the stories I was reading and relishing then. How could Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, and Jules Verne be able to write such captivating stories? The answer was simple, I had to read more and analyze each story in terms of not just the content but the way they were written as well. No, no! I’m not saying that I started trying to understand the story and plot devices, narrative structures etc right away. That happened over time, a little over two and a half decades to be exact.
I wrote my first decent short story when I was thirty-five. Yes, it was on that empty blog I had created. Fortunately for me, a few of my friends read the story and said that they liked it. That was the beginning. I started writing more, exploring all sorts of genres, PoV’s and narrative styles. I’m thankful to all my friends and well-wishers who have read my stories and continue to read them.
Coming to ‘The Descent,’ the seeds for this story germinated inside me when I was seventeen. I was on a class trip to Kodaikkanal where I met a couple of people in a tea shop. These guys lifted bodies of people who fell off the mountains for a living. Imagine that! Not in my wildest dreams did I expect such a profession existed. The stories those men told me stayed with me. Nearly twenty years after that trip, I was going through stock images on the web to think up some plots for writing. One image, that of a rock, brought that chance meeting all those years ago back into my memory. The Descent took shape after that.
I hope you enjoyed reading The Descent. If you haven’t yet, please click the link below to read. Do share your thoughts about the story here as a comment.
Best,
Varad
Link to the story: The Descent | Jaggery Lit Journal