Written by: Asmi Aggarwal
I wanted to be a writer. When I was a kid, I used to write all kinds of odd stories. A plane crash where a sister died but she never actually died. A mental asylum where two people fall in love. An afterworld story where two people find their murderers only to find out it’s all connected. I might actually finish that last one someday. I looked at all the YouTube videos in the world with a thousand writers telling me how to publish a New York Times bestseller.Â
I wrote because I wanted to be famous: wanted to be a teen writer who sold a million copies. I wrote stories because I wanted the world to read them. That was when I wrote purely fiction. All the YouTube videos told me to draw from my personal life but my own life was never interesting enough to me. No prince was whisking me off into the sunset in 9th grade, neither was I meeting any ghosts or Hagrids. This always vexed me. Sometimes, I almost wanted a tragedy in my painfully boring life so I could have something to write about. I wanted to experience love only so I could know about heartbreak. I had no drive to write, just a drive to be famous. So, I never wrote well. Sure, I came up with some good fictional stories but I wrote too much about the table and the garden and the setting and too little about the characters. I never gave them depth because I didn’t have any. I never invested myself in my stories. I posted a few chapters here and there. Had my friends read some. Never panned out, and my main motivation for writing died slowly. I didn’t write much after 10th standard.
As they say, life got in the way. PCB, then college then the 100s of clubs I planned on joining. Relatives who had read my writing would ask every now and then, “Do you write any more?” And I would just laugh, “Who has the time?”
It was hard imagining myself in stories before: all about characters as white as snow, with blue eyes (“Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”). I was, still am, a dark complexioned person with brown eyes (hazel, I say to other people.). These books created in my head a glorification of the West, their culture, their waking up to eat soggy cornflakes and milk, going to school and doing everything except for studying. The main character of all my stories were always white, with an Indian character thrown in as a side one, to “preserve my culture”. I saw myself as a side character, never someone whose story would matter. If I write a book now, the main character will be Indian. Maybe, I will throw in a white person for diversity.Â
The truth is, I finally have enough depth to let myself trickle into my characters. I don’t want to write for fame anymore. If anything, I might prefer anonymity in my own narration. It’s almost funny. When I had time, I didn’t have the characters or the story. Now that I have the latter, the former is gone. I still write. Short stories, or these snippets for HerCampus. But they are mostly a small glimpse into the world. I write about my life, but mostly I write about the version of me that is constructed by everyone around me. The version that won’t offend anyone, or that won’t lead to people knowing much about what goes on in my head.
 Maybe, I’m lying about the time thing. I do have the time to tell the stories where I lay myself bare, every thought for you to read out loud. Maybe you will relate to it. But the real reason I have never finished my story? It’s because I’m afraid you won’t relate to it. You will judge me for what I think, and how I am. As a kid, I couldn’t wait to have enough thoughts in my head to tell a story. But now? I’m too afraid of the very same thoughts. That you still won’t find them interesting enough, or you will find them too messy for your taste. I don’t crave fame, but I still cater to an expected audience.
Fin.