The idea of writing my own fiction crept up my cranky brain when I was in 8th standard i.e about 5 years ago, when all of a sudden our English teacher came to the class and asked us to write a short fiction in forty minutes. We were given to choose the genre but at the same time we were confined to the opening line given by her.

I was so confused and unprepared. WHAT TO WRITE ?????????? Time was running out and I just wrote something. And yes, it was disastrous. Now when I read it, I realise. It seems to have popped out of typical Bollywood melodrama (an effect of watching too many movies 😀 ). That’s why the teacher remarked “DON’T WRITE SUCH THINGS IN THE EXAM”. So you can guess how pathetic it was.

Then one fine day (that was I think about six months after this episode) one of my close friends suggested, ” Why don’t you try writing a thriller ? I would love to read it”.

Like a daredevil I took the challenge and with a determined mind I sat down to write. O God !!!!! writing a thriller is so tough !!! Creating mystery, suspense, drama, action through words is a pretty challenging job and at that time I was still reading Enid  Blyton’s ” Secret Seven ” and ” Famous Five ” and Satyajit Ray’s “Feluda” series as detective novels. I hadn’t tried authors like Sidney Sheldon, Dan Brown or Jeffrey Archer. I had not even read Sherlock Holmes at that time. I was still clinging to kids’ books. So naturally I had limited idea. But still I tried. And it took me about a year and a half to complete – that’s the maximum time I have ever spent on a single short fiction.

I got a lot of help from my classmates, actually almost our whole class loved reading novels be it any genre so almost everyone had some idea or the other and they readily helped me. At last when the story had its ending and I had done the first round of editing, I went to our class teacher who happens to be an English teacher for proof-reading. And I got a nice rebuke from her for jumbling up my tenses like using past tense in one sentence and then present continuous or present perfect in the next.

Then I made my second round of editing and went back to the teacher. This time she was satisfied and said that it was worthy enough to be printed in the 50th anniversary edition of our school magazine. But for some reason it didn’t get printed. Anyways I am happy I could write that and discover a talent in me.

I would like to thank all the English teachers of my school who trained me throughout my school life. Its because of you people that today I can speak and write grammatically correct English. I sincerely thank my 8th standard English teacher Mrs. Amrita Basu for forcing me to write fiction and  also one of my close friends Ms. Prakriti Sarker for challenging me to try writing thriller as it is because of her I am more confident in taking up challenges in writing.