tales of Suchita

I had a short story written for today. It was clever but I found I couldn’t abide my own writing. It may have been clever but it definitely wasn’t coherent. I tried rewriting it, I tried to salvage it, I tried to completely write another tale where I could use the phrase veni vidi vici and make it mean something but none of my attempts were successful.

This exercise taught me something I didn’t know I needed taught and that is to understand when to let go of a piece of writing because it just isn’t working. In the beginning I had assumed it was just my self-critic being over critical but the more I read the story, the more it refused to come together. It was like I was trying to hold water in my bare hands. It kept slipping.

Then I thought of going through my numerous WIPs to see if I could salvage something from there for today’s post but I was too irritated to really have this work.

Google was the obvious next choice in my mission to “save the V post” as I searched for the origins of the phrase veni vidi vici. Maybe that would spark a thought? Though I learnt that this phrase was used by Julius Caesar to inform his friends back home of his decisive triumph in battle – veni (I came) vidi (I saw) vici (I conquered), it did not spark any thoughts.

Suchita came, she saw but whether or not she has managed to conquer this post is still up in the air.

Incidentally, Julius Caesar – JC as we called it in school – was a Shakespearean play we read in ninth and tenth. It was our first introduction to Elizabethan English and all the good stuff of metaphors, similes, personifications, alliteration, etc. It was also the time when my friends and I mass fell in love with the character of Marc Anthony. Especially after we read his speech of friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. And the clever way he used language and words like calling Brutus honourable to turn the mob that had until then firmly been in Brutus’ court, to his side.

Words are magical but sometimes, they don’t make sense. It’s hard then to let go of stories that come from somewhere inside your being but no matter how you try to hash them, they don’t work. I have had quite a few plots that have gone kaput on me in the past one year. It’s a great reminder that art like life doesn’t always walk a straight and narrow path. I love that these broken plot threads randomly meander into something else I’m writing and there, they find a home and peace, held within the arms of another story, character or detail.

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Connecting this post to #BlogchatterA2Z. To read other posts, check Theme Reveal 2022: Without Prearrangement.

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PS: If you like how I write and would like to read more, I have 2 ebooks on Kindle – both free if you’re on Kindle Unlimited. You can read more about the ebooks here.

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Photo by Teddy Yang