Why I Write What I Write? The Inspiration Behind My Pen: A Journey of Words

 

A good friend after reading my novel asked me why I hadn’t written a typical romance novel, instead choosing a psychological drama/thriller with flawed protagonists, tormented people obsessed with vengeance and their traumas.

Over the years she has heard me comment (and gripe) about romance novels doing extremely well (even the badly, very badly, horribly badly written ones).

“What’s with all the sad and damaged people in your novel? What happened to the billionaire playboys and the beautiful, perfect heroines who breeze through their lives with nary a problem?”

I shrugged. “They deserted me, I told her and never came back.”

I wanted to write about real people, characters who are flawed just like I am.

I recovered from depression and anxiety in my early 40s to become a publisher and writer. Oh, I was damaged. So damaged, it has left its mark on my family and of course, me.

When I started writing my novel, it became me. The characters wore my grief. I had managed to step out of the suffocating embrace of depression and anxiety but I hadn’t really faced my fears and challenged them.

 

I was still a vessel of pain, my spirit scarred by the trials that life and I (a brief bout of alcoholism) had bestowed upon my family and me.

As a writer, I lived with the story of my first novel for many years before I started writing it. And once I began, there was no stopping the words that were dying to leap out of my mind and onto the pages.

It was a whisper of hope that dared to challenge the darkness. I found myself again in my characters as they opened up to the world and shed their burdens with each word I wrote.

The words made friends with sentences, and then paragraphs which then partnered with chapters — they skipped, vaulted, and bounded eagerly — from each cell of my heart (my mind a zealous assistant) — onward they progressed till they took the shape of a novel — not resting, not content till they met readers — readers who could befriend them.

It was never my intention to write a thriller when I began writing but as I kept writing, my characters took over — their conflicts, their fears, the demons living inside them — they wrested control from me, dictating the story to me.

The characters wanted to do the talking, they wanted to reveal the darkness they had buried inside them. They didn’t want to hide anymore.

So, I let them be, and thus CONSUMED BY OBSESSION was born.

My novel became an intricately woven mosaic of my past and present. The narratives of my characters echoed the depth of my struggles and the indomitable strength it took to rise above them.

As one reader writes:

“I love the various shades of grey of the human personality that have been shown through the characters. Their reactions to tragedy, their ways of coping with it, their mental state, their emotional trauma…this book has probed the depths of the mind using the story.”

In my fight for mental well-being I discovered the magic of turning pain into a book, and in doing so, I not only reclaimed my voice but found solace in my characters and their fight against their demons.

My journey as an author has just begun.

I will leave the Black and White for my next novel (maybe a juicy love story with the usual tropes).

For now, it’s the greys that stole the show.