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Each month, we give you a line from a book by an iconic female writer. Write your own story based on the cue. Get published and win goodies!
Muse of the month
Each month this year, we’ll be hosting a writing theme, with a ‘writing cue’ from an iconic female author. The 5 best entries get published here!
What you need to do:
Step 1. Read the writing cue and get inspired.
Step 2. Write your own story/narrative based on the cue. You could use it as the opening line, the closing sentence, or somewhere in between! You could choose not to use it anywhere in your story too – just write a story using the cue as a prompt. (And ‘story’ can be fictional – or not – as you wish).
Step 3. Send your story to us.
Where to send:
Send in your story to [email protected] with ‘Muse of the month’ in the subject line, and your story as a word/txt attachment. Please avoid typing the story as inline text. Do include the name we should use if we publish it, and a brief introduction to yourself (2-3 lines) in the mail.
Deadlines:
Please send in your stories by January 24th 2014. The 5 best stories will be published on Women’s Web the following week, i.e. January 27th onwards.
Rules:
– The material should be previously unpublished elsewhere. (Copyright stays with you and you’re free to subsequently publish it elsewhere).
– Keep it between 250 and 800 words.
GOODIES!
The 5 best entries will each win a Flipkart voucher worth Rs. 250.
Joan Didion
Joan Didion is known for her incisive, intimate novels on loss and transition, as well as for her literary journalism. She believes that writing is a process where one person (the writer) convinces another (the reader) to listen to her dream!
Didion counts Ernest Hemingway, Henry James and George Eliot among her influences. She is the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction.
And now for the writing cue!
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live”.
– from The White Album, Joan Didion
Get started with that as your inspiration, and we hope to hear from you on or before Jan 24th!
Here are the published entries, each taking off from that cue.
Shades of Orange: Deboshree writes a poignant story – of a story a young mother tells herself.
The Connoisseur: Shruthi has a funny story of the stories we make up when we need to.
Returning Home: Rajlakshmi tells a tale in which stories are all that are left, when everything else vanishes.
Stories: Deepthi narrates a story in which some forgotten stories need to remembered, and then put away
The Last Goodbye: Prasanna tells a story in which stories act as consolation – and inspiration
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UP Boards Topper Prachi Nigam was trolled on social media for her facial hair; our obsession with appearance is harsh on young minds.
Prachi Nigam’s photo has been doing the rounds on social media for the right reasons. Well, scratch that- I wish the above statement were true. This 15-year-old girl should ideally be revelling in her spectacular achievement of scoring a whopping 98.05% and topping her tenth-grade boards. But oddly enough, along with her marks, it’s something else that garners more attention – her facial hair.
While the trolls are driving themselves giddy by mocking this girl who hasn’t even completed her school yet, the ones who are taking her side are going one step ahead – they are sharing her photoshopped pictures, sans the facial hair, looking nothing less than a celebrity with captions saying – “Prachi Nigam, ten years later”.
Doctors have already diagnosed her with PCOD in their comments, based on photographic evidence. While we have names for people shamed for their weight – body shaming, for their skin colour- racism, for their age- age shaming, for being a female- sexism, this category of shaming where one faces criticism for their appearance has no name. With that, it also has zero shame attached to it.
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