They make me tell, they make me show

Naima Minhas

Creative Writing Course with Naveed Alam

Latest Draft: Practicing Short Story Writing

Title: Teller!

I and Eye have a complex relation!

The sides of a magnet ever joining

If separated thus nothing,

I and Eye like rain drop and river

The self always connected to the other,

A quest of knowing

A brawl of asserting,

Never separating

Never accepting,

I and Eye have a complex relation!

Again it was Back space and Delete that had worn-out. They always got to overwork whenever Neha had to do her Creative home works.

‘Let’s begin once again,’ she told herself.  She had written a poem after much effort, as the teacher had demanded there be some lyrics incorporated in the story. She had bought a tire and had to make a car now, some how fitting the tire in, ‘reverse engineering,’ Neha would have said.

 ‘Dive deep into yourself, find thy self, write about it, it’s as easy as smiling,’ Neha imitated the lyrical voice of the mentor.

But she started to doubt it after the seventh attempt on the dive.

She took out her check list. ‘Should be character oriented, the character be rounded, story holds uniqueness, a bit of plot, PLOT IS SECONDARY, lots of psychoanalysis, emotions bla bla bla . . .’ she repeated.

What goes first?

Profile does,

What goes FIRST?

Profile does,

She sang as she did in her childhood games.

She revisited the profiles she had typed. There were five. Some evil, some saintly, ‘Round the characters,’ the helpful voice ordered and frowningly she started mixing up the character traits. This was easy to do. Working with Excel came handy. Cut Copy Paste Delete.

‘Now, tell me people, who would like to be the protagonist?’ she asked in a generous yet masterly voice.

‘Characters talk back to the writer,’ Neha was told so many times from the Online Creative courses, from novelists’ interviews and their voice was so increasingly convincing she had to believe.

Minutes passed and then the answer came as if from her heart. She selected the name who was the first in her life to select her. She was bicycling to her tutor’s house many many years ago when he had emerged out of nowhere and had said. ‘Hi, I am Aasim,’

She prefixed the name with Muhammad; she was preached to like it that way.

After an hour she had him in front of her. She touched him, reading his features. But there was something gravely wrong.

‘What is it?’ She questioned the self, ‘The self knows it all,’ Dadee says. In search of the answer she scanned him again from top to bottom, no answers. ‘Go closer,’ someone whispered, and she obeyed.

‘So many details being repeated,’ the answer came out finally.

Again a lot of Deletes It had been painful for her as she thought how painful it might have been for Aasim robbing him of his brown trousers.