Chapter 1

A Chapter by Abraham George

Sunitha. She is an identity. No matter what religion she belongs to or what she believes. Whether she believes in Hinduism, Christianity or Islamism, or any other, it didn’t change what happened to her. She represents womanhood. Discriminated by gender. The only thing that matters here is that she is a Woman.

Being a woman is so important? Or being a woman is a curse?

Everyone will think that why we gave more importance to the word woman. Do we have to give stress to the word Woman? Because a woman is not just gender. We have already given different perspectives to the word woman like the mother, most tolerable, divine, etc...

Women are not just a toy in the hands of masculine, they have their own identity and individuality. They are also human beings with bones and flesh. They have feelings and emotions. What made them different? They have breasts, the symbol of motherhood, we all came into the world to start feeding on such breasts. Then why are you staring at them? Or they’re week? Or do they have soft skin?

The whole world is behind protecting women from harassment by way of Woman Protection Acts, Woman empowerment, concessions, and so many others. That is not the reason why here mentioning the word Woman. Here the word woman represents being abused, tortured, flesh, raped, and sexually harassed. This is her story. A victim of harassment, Ms. Sunitha.

Childhood- is the best and most beautiful time and the most memorable for everyone. Colorful dresses, fresh smell of the new books, beautiful dreams, friends, love & care, playing games, nothing to worry about, no responsibilities. But for Sunitha, it was not. Her childhood was full of haunting memories. Freighted hours of sleepless nights. Blood and tears were her friends. Torn and shaggy dresses, inhuman relatives, even her own shadow made her frightened.

She was born as the fourth child of Mr. Mohit and Mrs. Rima. Having three elder brothers means that the little sister is safe and secure. But in her case, from childhood onwards, she started to think that boys and girls are different. Different in all means. Her parents treat them like that. Giving more importance to the boys while she got less care and love. That’s what she thought. That was the truth. In everything, they show that difference, and that hurts her. She wishes she was a boy. Not only did the partiality hurt her but the words that pierced her heart made her living dead.

One day she overheard her grandmother talking to her mother about her.

“I have told you to abort this child when we know it’s a girl,” Granny said

“We were also thinking about that, but when we consult the doctor they said that it will affect my health. That’s why we decided to have her. Otherwise, would you think Mohit will agree to have a girl? He still fighting with me for having her.” Rima replied.

“What’s your plan for her then?” granny asked and continued “Are you sending her to school also?”

“Till getting old enough to work, let her also study. Schooling is free so it’s okay. After that, we have to send her for household work. That’s our plan” Rima answered.

“Good, there is no use for educating girls. Anyway, they are going to live in some homes as a housekeeper only. So what is the use? “Granny makes her point strong.

Little Sunitha understands that she was an unwanted child. The nights she spent in tears and fear of getting old. She started to wake up in the middle of the night having haunting dreams. She doesn’t have anyone on whom she can lay and cry.

She thought that her mother is also a woman. Did granny think about aborting her too? Why my mother is not thinking that? These were the doubts that she knows that it never see the lights and will stay in her only forever. How can she ask her mother? Even now they hate her so if she asks maybe they will kill her. The only thing she knows is that there is no one in the world to love her. She thinks that it was her mistake that she was born a girl. Later she starts to hate herself.

Schooling- Only memories she wanted to remember. New friends, the smell of those new books, uniform. It was great. But moving forward, she started to hate her school life also. All students are happy while little Sunitha pretends that she is happy. Other students’ parents are loving their children very much. When she saw them she felt jealous. She prayed for being that lucky student in her next life. Innocent little Sunitha, even their love makes her cry. Whenever she felts to cry, she went to the toilet and cries. That little heart was breaking into pieces day by day.

One day the teacher was talking about family and how divine the mothers are. Their sacrifice and pain they have, to bring us to the world. The care and love they poured over their children.

Little Sunitha started to think about her mother and that will only end in fear. “Why everyone is telling mothers are superhuman and they can excuse all our mistakes. I can’t see any kind of divinity in my mother” Little Sunitha imagined how great it will be to have a divine mother.

After the class, she got another doubt.

“If the real mother is what the teacher taught, then how can I call my mother “Mother”?”

© 2022 Abraham George

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JayG

Well, you did ask...

• Sunitha. She is an identity. No matter what religion she belongs to or what she believes.

This is you, talking TO the reader, who cannot hear the emotion you would place in the voice, or, know how you expect them to read it. Nor, do they have context for where we are in time and space, what's going on, or, whose skin we wear.

SO…when you say, “Sunitha” What can it mean to a reader who just arrived, and has no context? Sunitha could be the name of a person, an animal, a boat, a place, a project, or even a planet. You know. The people in the story know. Shouldn’t the reader? We need context AS we read, not after. Remember, we cannot retroactively remove confusion.

But of greater importance, in the first seven paragraphs, 420 words, or more than the first two standard manuscript pages, nothing happens. There is no story. Instead, it's the narrator giving a philosophical dissertation on their personal view of what being female means. Why does the reader care? They’re here for an entertaining story, not your personal views. You’re not in this, or, on the scene, so your views and viewpoint are irrelevant.

• One day she overheard her grandmother talking to her mother about her.

Change this line to, “One day six-year-old Sunitha overheard her grandmother talking to her mother about her,” And there’s more story in that line than in the entirety of what you have before it.

But forget that, because there's something of far greater importance. We're about to "listen" to that conversation. Won't we know it's about her by what they say? Won't we know who's speaking as we read it? Of course. So, what reason is there for you to tell the reader what they're about to learn by reading? In short: Get-off-the-stage. You're blocking the reader's view of what's going on, and killing any sense of reality. Were someone appear in the room where you are, and begin talking to invisible people about you, wouldn't you ask them who they are, and what's going on? Of course you would. Given that, how can the people in the story seem real if they don't ask you?

Here’s the problem: You’re thinking of story as being akin to events in the the history of an individual—something to be studied and learned. But that’s a report, not a story, because it’s 100% fact-based and author-centric, as is all nonfiction.

Story has immediacy for the reader. Not as a list of, “This happened…then that happened…here’s some background you might want to know…and after that…” Instead, story happens, as viewed through the perceptions and personality of the one experiencing it. Story places the reader into the viewpoint of the protagonist in all respects, from within the fleeting moment of time the protagonist calls “now.”

As E. L. Doctorow put it: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”

How to do that—or even the need to do it—is something not even mentioned in our school-days, because there, we learn a set of general skills that will be useful on the job, NOT the elements of a profession. Professional skills are acquired in addition to those. Remember, they offer degree programs in Commercial Fiction-Writing. And without knowledge of even the approach to creating fiction, using the report-writing skills we learned in our school years will produce fiction that reads like a report.

So, it’s not a matter of talent, or how well you write. It’s that, like any new writer, you’re missing critical information on how fiction on the page is presented.

For example: Sunitha is young—not yet of school age. In her mind and viewpoint, would she truly understand the term abortion, as it refers to her? No. And before attending, does she truly understand what school is, and what it means to her? Again no. Would a child of that age understand that she’s an unwanted child, and respond to that? Not if her mother has treated her with love. And if she wasn’t, it doesn’t take this conversation to make her know her position in the family.

Because you’re approaching the act of fiction-writing as an adult, with adult views, you give them to her, and have her react as you WANT her to, as against the way a child in-her-situation really would. And that can’t work. Like poetry, fiction has its own methodology, that’s very different from the “let me explain,” methodology of nonfiction—the only writing skill-set we’re taught in our school days. So acquiring the tricks the pros take for granted is a necessary step.

It would be wonderful if, by reading fiction, we learned how to write it. But does viewing paintings tall us the tricks of perspective? Will a visit to a sculpture garden tell us how to work with marble as against granite, or clay? Of course not. When we read, we have no idea of why the author decided to do “B” instead of “A” in a given situation. But we do see the result of that decision, and expect it.

Likewise, your reader expects to see those skills used in YOUR work. So…does that mean stop working? No. It means you need to dig into the tricks, yourself, which, if you’re meant to write, will be a lot like going backstage at a professional theater, filled with, “So THAT’S how they do it." And, "How can I have missed something so simple?”

The library’s fiction-writing section has lots of books on the subject. Personally? I’d suggest starting with Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer, which recently came out of copyright protection. It's the best I've found, to date, at imparting and clarifying the "nuts-and-bolts" issues of creating a scene that will sing to the reader. The address of an archive site where you can read or download it free is just below. Copy/paste the address into the URL window of any Internet page and hit Return to get there.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

For a kind of overview of the differences between fiction and nonfiction technique, you might check a few of the articles in my WordPress writing blog. But, whatever you do, keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/

Posted 2 Years Ago

Well, you did ask...

• Sunitha. She is an identity. No matter what religion she belongs to or what she believes.

This is you, talking TO the reader, who cannot hear the emotion you would place in the voice, or, know how you expect them to read it. Nor, do they have context for where we are in time and space, what's going on, or, whose skin we wear.

SO…when you say, “Sunitha” What can it mean to a reader who just arrived, and has no context? Sunitha could be the name of a person, an animal, a boat, a place, a project, or even a planet. You know. The people in the story know. Shouldn’t the reader? We need context AS we read, not after. Remember, we cannot retroactively remove confusion.

But of greater importance, in the first seven paragraphs, 420 words, or more than the first two standard manuscript pages, nothing happens. There is no story. Instead, it's the narrator giving a philosophical dissertation on their personal view of what being female means. Why does the reader care? They’re here for an entertaining story, not your personal views. You’re not in this, or, on the scene, so your views and viewpoint are irrelevant.

• One day she overheard her grandmother talking to her mother about her.

Change this line to, “One day six-year-old Sunitha overheard her grandmother talking to her mother about her,” And there’s more story in that line than in the entirety of what you have before it.

But forget that, because there's something of far greater importance. We're about to "listen" to that conversation. Won't we know it's about her by what they say? Won't we know who's speaking as we read it? Of course. So, what reason is there for you to tell the reader what they're about to learn by reading? In short: Get-off-the-stage. You're blocking the reader's view of what's going on, and killing any sense of reality. Were someone appear in the room where you are, and begin talking to invisible people about you, wouldn't you ask them who they are, and what's going on? Of course you would. Given that, how can the people in the story seem real if they don't ask you?

Here’s the problem: You’re thinking of story as being akin to events in the the history of an individual—something to be studied and learned. But that’s a report, not a story, because it’s 100% fact-based and author-centric, as is all nonfiction.

Story has immediacy for the reader. Not as a list of, “This happened…then that happened…here’s some background you might want to know…and after that…” Instead, story happens, as viewed through the perceptions and personality of the one experiencing it. Story places the reader into the viewpoint of the protagonist in all respects, from within the fleeting moment of time the protagonist calls “now.”

As E. L. Doctorow put it: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”

How to do that—or even the need to do it—is something not even mentioned in our school-days, because there, we learn a set of general skills that will be useful on the job, NOT the elements of a profession. Professional skills are acquired in addition to those. Remember, they offer degree programs in Commercial Fiction-Writing. And without knowledge of even the approach to creating fiction, using the report-writing skills we learned in our school years will produce fiction that reads like a report.

So, it’s not a matter of talent, or how well you write. It’s that, like any new writer, you’re missing critical information on how fiction on the page is presented.

For example: Sunitha is young—not yet of school age. In her mind and viewpoint, would she truly understand the term abortion, as it refers to her? No. And before attending, does she truly understand what school is, and what it means to her? Again no. Would a child of that age understand that she’s an unwanted child, and respond to that? Not if her mother has treated her with love. And if she wasn’t, it doesn’t take this conversation to make her know her position in the family.

Because you’re approaching the act of fiction-writing as an adult, with adult views, you give them to her, and have her react as you WANT her to, as against the way a child in-her-situation really would. And that can’t work. Like poetry, fiction has its own methodology, that’s very different from the “let me explain,” methodology of nonfiction—the only writing skill-set we’re taught in our school days. So acquiring the tricks the pros take for granted is a necessary step.

It would be wonderful if, by reading fiction, we learned how to write it. But does viewing paintings tall us the tricks of perspective?  Will a visit to a sculpture garden tell us how to work with marble as against granite, or clay?  Of course not. When we read, we have no idea of why the author decided to do “B” instead of “A” in a given situation. But we do see the result of that decision, and expect it.

Likewise, your reader expects to see those skills used in YOUR work. So…does that mean stop working? No. It means you need to dig into the tricks, yourself, which, if you’re meant to write, will be a lot like going backstage at a professional theater, filled with, “So THAT’S how they do it." And, "How can I have missed something so simple?”

The library’s fiction-writing section has lots of books on the subject. Personally? I’d suggest starting with Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer, which recently came out of copyright protection. It's the best I've found, to date, at imparting and clarifying the "nuts-and-bolts" issues of creating a scene that will sing to the reader. The address of an archive site where you can read or download it free is just below. Copy/paste the address into the URL window of any Internet page and hit Return to get there.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

For a kind of overview of the differences between fiction and nonfiction technique, you might check a few of the articles in my WordPress writing blog. But, whatever you do, keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/

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