The Hindu Lit Fest 2024 | Not just smartphones, streaming and social media: How to write a story

Learn how to critically examine what you read and channel those learnings into your own creative outputs.

How do you critically examine what you read? Put yourself in the writer’s shoes? And then, how do you channel those learnings into your own creative outputs? Author and advertising consultant Vibha Batra explained this to students at a workshop, ‘Not Just Smartphones, Streaming and Social Media’, held as part of The Hindu Lit Fest 2024, on January 26.

Most of the students at the workshop were interested in the written word, but life had gotten in the way: academic constraints, exams and smartphone use being some of the reasons. Ms. Batra started the workshop by asking the students to write any favourite/popular story that came to mind in three sentences, and then explained how a story was deconstructed: what happens in it; why does that happen and how does the story end. “For a story to be a story,” she said, “there has to be a reason.”

The students were then given an exercise: write, in three sentences, about stabbing a best friend in the back -- what happened, why and how it ended. As the students read out their work, Ms. Batra delved into the craft -how to give heft to a story, how to raise the stakes by digging deep for the motives of your characters’ actions and how to invest the reader/audience in your story.

She asked the students to consider: what is the author’s purpose? Are they angry? Disconnected from the world? Have a lot going on and writing may serve as catharsis? Whatever the reason, she emphasised, “Be true to your own story, your own self and it will make sense to you.”