#GuestPost : Rubina Ramesh Speaking

 
 

Hello friends,

Today I’m hosting Ms. Rubina Ramesh, Author of

First a short intro. to the lady herself:

A voracious reader, writer, blogger, book reviewer and marketer, Rubina Ramesh is the founder of The Book Club, an online book publicity group. Her first literary work was published in her school magazine at the age of eight.

Rubina is at present settled in the desert state of USA, Arizona and is active on twitter

Rubina blogs at www.rubinaramesh.com/

Just click on Knitted Tales and Finding The Angel to know about her writings, readers opinion and buying links.

My query: “What makes or mars a piece of writing?

Rubina:

Hi Geeta,

A tough question indeed. 🙂 As a storyteller, my mind functions in a different way but as a reviewer, my eyes searches for different quotients in a story. Sadly, my two alter egos are not friends. 😛 I envy those whose inner editors stay awake while they write. I, for one, need to kill it.

Before I answer your question, I have one for you. Would you love a story with a beautiful language and no soul or a soulful story with grammatical errors? As far as I know you, neither. They are like two sides of the same coin that makes the coin useful. But strangely, for many, difficult to achieve. (This is where one always needs a good editor.)

Many of us concentrate so much on the ‘artistic language’ or on the ‘show and tell’ syndrome that they forget one important thing – the journey of the protagonist who actually carries the soul of the writer along with her or him. For me, that is very important. That instant connection I should have with a character – whether as a writer or as a reader, I need that connection or reading a story is very tough for me. You should either love a character or hate a character – but never let a reader ignore your character. If you do that, you’ve lost a reader. So for me before language, before construction of the story- the soul of the author should be present in the story. Stories anyone can write while the soul only a few can share with the readers.

“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” — Ayn Rand

When I had read this line in during my school days, it stayed with me for a long time. I started noting little incidents in life. I thought if I had honesty in my writing, I will be half a decent writer if not a famous one. But then one stranger wrote to me after reading my article in a local publication. According to him, I wrote well but there was no drama or the word he used was ‘punch’ in my stories. I was just 8 years old. I didn’t know what punch was. But I understood one thing – writing about your life is a diary but when you fictionalize those incidents and make them larger than life – they become a fiction. And Geeta, that is not wrong. A person who is spending $2.99 for my books- they would want to forget their problems for a few hours and walk in a make belief world a writer has created. I have created. Even the biographies need to be larger than life projections. Or why would I want to know about anyone’s daily life – I have one of my own, thank you 🙂 And this is the very reason why we need a soul in every story.

And I wind up :

Rubina you are spot on. A story without a soul is as good as deadwood. Looking forward to reading more from your desk.

Thanks a lot.

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